Author: erraticerrata
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A Practical Guide To Evil
By erraticerrata

Source
examples/practicalall.json
Started
2022-05-04
Updated
2022-05-04
Downloaded on
2022-05-04

Prologue

In the beginning, there were only the Gods .
Aeons untold passed as they drifted aimlessly through the Void, until they grew bored with this state of affairs. In their infinite wisdom they brought into existence Creation, but with Creation came discord. The Gods disagreed on the nature of things: some believed t heir children should be guided to greater things, while others believed that t hey must rule over the creatures they had made.

So, we are told, were born Good and Evil.

Ages passed in fruitless argument between them until finally a wager was agreed on: it would be the mortals that settled the matter, for strife between the gods would only result in the destruction of all. We know this wager as Fate, and thus Creation came to know war. Through the passing of the years grooves appeared in the workings of Fate, patterns repeated until they came into existence easier than not, and those grooves came to be called Roles. The Gods gifted these Roles with Names, and with those came power. We are all born free, but for every man and woman comes a time where a Choice must be made.

It is, we are told, the only choice that ever really matters.”

– First page of the Book of All Things

The sun was setting on a field of corpses.

Black passed by a group of orcs building a pyre, nodding absently when they stopped piling up logs to salute – green eyes swept over the bloodied plains, taking in the devastation the Legions of Terror had wrought. Camp fires were already burning in the distance, sprawled across the hills, and by the sound of it the officers had already distributed the night’s ale rations. He would join them in time, but for a little longer he felt the need to stay here. To stand in the middle of what a decade of planning had brought forth. Callow’s standing army had been annihilated today, over two thirds of their number slaughtered before they broke ranks. The Wizard of the West had fled, his power broken. Good King Edward’s head had been popped off like a bottlecap by an ogre and the Shining Prince had been mobbed by a company of goblins until one drew a red smile across his throat. The Kingdom of Callow’s strength had been crushed in the span of an afternoon, and Black would see to it that it never recovered.

“It’s getting dark out, Black,” the voice came from behind. “You should return to camp.”

It never ceased to amuse him how a woman the size of Captain could be so eerily quiet. Even decked out in full plate, the olive-skinned woman had been noiseless in her approach. If not for the other senses that his Role afforded him, he would never have sensed her closing in. Turning to have a look at his right hand, Black raised an eyebrow when he was presented with the sight of Scribe standing next to the woman in question. Unusual of her to wander onto a battlefield, even one where the fighting was long over.

“Soon,” he agreed. “Scribe, you have a report?”

The plain-faced woman fished out a scroll from the bandolier hanging across her shoulder and handed it to him without a word. Breaking the seal absently, Black unfurled the parchment and scanned the lines. A moment passed until the barest hint of a smile quirked his lips.

“That should keep the Procer occupied for the time being,” he murmured. “By the time the fighting dies down we’ll have the border secure.”

Handing back the scroll to Scribe, he returned his attention to the battlefield. The companies assigned to the thankless work of burning the bodies would have to work through the night, at this rate. He’d have to see about arranging a rotation when he returned to camp, if sufficiently sober soldiers could be produced. A tall silhouette striding forward purposefully caught his attention as the dark-skinned man it belonged to deftly sidestepped a pair of orcs carrying a log twice the size of a grown man.

“You could have told me we were having an after-battle get together,” Warlock teased as soon as he was close enough to be heard. “I’d have brought a few bottles, though admittedly the scenery’s a little morbid for my tastes.”

Black rolled his eyes, though he caught Captain discreetly suppressing a smile. Scribe eyed Warlock with the same mild bemusement as always, as if she couldn’t believe the charmingly smiling man standing in front of them had been the one to call down a rain of hellfire on the enemy barely an hour earlier. Not an unusual reaction: sorcerers with that kind of power were rarely so jovial.

“Happenstance,” he replied. “We’ll be heading back to camp soon enough.”

Warlock cast a look around, looking for the fifth member of their little band and coming up empty.

“Ranger’s already gone?” he asked.

“As soon as the battle was done,” Captain informed him.

The dark-skinned man grimaced.

“I didn’t think she would actually...” he said, trailing off after a sideways look at Black’s face.

“What’s done is done,” the Black Knight cut through, and that was the end of that.

The four stood in silence for a long moment, watching the night slowly crawl over the fields of Streges.

“Ten years,” Black finally said.

“Six, for the earliest ones,” Scribe disagreed quietly.

With a last look at the battlefield, the Black Knight turned away without a word and started for camp. Warlock slung a friendly arm over Captain’s shoulder, murmuring something that drew a smile from the much larger woman as Scribe methodically adjusted her bandolier before following. The Dread Empire of Praes may have won the war, but the clock was already ticking. The Legions of Terrors had made a lot of angry orphans through the afternoon’s bloody work, and in time that would mean one thing –

Heroes.

Chapter 1: Knife

“ How many Praesi does it take to change a lantern’s wick?
A legion to conquer all the candlemakers, a High Lord to sell the wicks down south and then we’re taxed for being in the dark.”
– Overheard in a Laure tavern

The punch landed right in my eye, rocking me back.

I cursed and took a few steps back, ignoring the smug smile on my opponent’s face as the crowd went wild. Shit. That’s turning into a black eye for sure. I’d need to shell out some of my winnings to get it fixed if I didn’t want to spend a few hours lectured by the Matron again. And that was assuming I won – if I lost, I was going to be short on funds for a while. The man started circling me like a murder of crows around a rotting carcass, unhurried but intent, and I brought up my fists. The bandages wrapped around my fingers were still flecked with blood from the few hits I’d landed earlier in the fight, but the ridiculously large fighter going by “Fenn” had shrugged those off too easily for comfort. If this turned into an endurance slugging match, I wasn’t going to win: the man had at least fifty pounds on me and he looked like he’d been carved out of a slab of solid muscle. I was faster than him, but he knew that – it was the reason he stayed on the defensive, letting me land hits in exchange for getting in one of his own. And his hurt me a lot more than mine hurt him. “Come on, Foundling,” a woman in the back yelled. “Wreck the bastard!”

I spat out a mouthful of the blood pooling in my mouth and moved forward: the longer this went on, the larger his advantage got. I needed to end it quick if I was going to have even a slight shot at winning. Added a little spring to my step to see if it would make him flinch, but the big bastard was serene as a pond. It was a shame groin shots were illegal, since one of those would have gotten him moving for sure. I flicked a jab at his jaw but Fenn let it pass, pivoting to get a little closer. Got you. My fist buried itself in his stomach viciously, drawing a strangled grasp as I danced away back out of his reach. The part of the crowd that had put money on my victory cheered while from the rest came a cacophony of jeers: I let the sounds wash over me, refusing to pay attention. I’d been too aware of my surroundings when starting out at this and it had cost me some easy victories, but I’d learned from my mistakes. “Saw your last fight, Foundling,” Fenn grunted as he tried to close the distance. “You sure you don’t wanna throw this one too?”

If that was his idea of trash talk, then he was swinging a stick at steel. I feinted a jab to his ribs to keep him on his feet and circled to get a better angle. I had thrown the last fight, as it happened. I’d been winning too much lately, which made for bad odds when betting on myself. After taking a beating from a no-name newcomer, though, the balance had swung the other way: I was going to make a killing if I managed to beat Fenn today. Enough to pay tuition at the College, even after the organizers got their cut and another lump sum was set aside to keep the city guard looking away.

“You afraid of a girl half your size, Fenn?” I smiled back, pushing a sweat-drenched lock of hair out of my field of vision. “You should slip the healers a few coppers so they can fix up your manhood.”

Now that got a reaction. The stocky man’s eyes narrowed and he grit his teeth. It was funny, the way most of the fighters who tried to bait me were so easy to bait themselves. He wasn’t stupid enough to up and charge me – he wouldn’t have the reputation he did if he lost his head this easily – but he went on the offensive the moment I have him an opening. I guess it didn’t matter how predictable you were when you hit like a horse’s kick. Apparently my little comment had gotten a fire going in Fenn, because when he swung at me it was the fastest he’d been so far: I barely managed to slap away his fist at the last moment and he still grazed my jaw. If that had landed, I’d be out cold on the ground. I got in close enough that I could smell the sweat of him and threw a haymaker, but it didn’t even faze him: not enough force behind it. He took the hit and tried to wrestle me down, much to my panic. Getting into a grapple with a man that size would be... bad. Shit shit shit. I landed a desperate uppercut right in his chin and felt a few teeth come loose, which bought me a moment. I got in a kick on the side of his knee and it gave. He dropped into a half-kneel and that was my in.

I’d done this before and it would be brutal but Radiant Heavens I was not going to lose – I rammed my knee into his gut and Fenn dropped. Another kick sent him sprawling to the ground, and now the fight was as good as won: I stomped down on his ankle and it broke with a sickening crack. Fenn let out a hoarse scream and I felt a twinge of guilt but mercy was the kind of thing the Pit beat out of you. I was about to cave in a few ribs with another stomp when he raised his hand and panted out his surrender. For a moment all I heard was the sound of blood pounding in my ears but it passed and the numbness turned into the clamor of the masses going wild. I wiped the blood dripping off the corner of my mouth with the bandages around my hand and made my way out of the earthen pit where I’d just broken a man’s bones for gold. Well, gold in a manner of speaking: they usually paid me in Imperial silver denarii, which somehow made the whole thing feel even more wretched. The fatigue settling into my bones left me disinclined to mingle with the gamblers who’d struck good betting on me, though I forced a smile anyway.

A tall orc pushed his way through the crowd to slap me on the back, the double row of pristine fangs inside his mouth turning what was supposed to be a grin into a horrifying display. It was rare to see orcs at fights like these: the only greenskins in Laure were part of the Legions and they tended to steer clear of the illegal stuff. Not to mention that even two decades after the Conquest legionaries were far from popular in the city – the kind of people that the Pit attracted was the kind that wouldn’t think twice about slipping a knife in a legionary’s back in a dark alley. Good luck with that , I thought as I extricated myself from the greenskin’s enthusiastic congratulations. The orcs were taller and more broadly built than humans, generally speaking, and their thick greenish skin made them damnably hard to put down. Anybody stupid enough to tangle with three hundred pounds of trained killer deserved whatever was coming to them.

Booker was in the back of the warehouse, set up at her usual table. There were no windows in the Pit – glass had gotten even more expensive since the latest tax hitch – and the handful of oil lamps spread over the place cast more shadows than light over the corner of the place she’d claimed as her own. People gave her a wide berth, in part because she had a thoroughly nasty reputation and in part because of the pair of grim-looking bodyguards standing behind her. I’d thought Booker was a Name when I’d first heard it, but it was just an affectation: she couldn’t even do magic, as far as I knew. Her only power was having a large amount of thugs on payroll, which in her line of business was admittedly more useful. She smiled when she saw me coming, light catching on her handful of gold teeth. “Good show today, Foundling,” she said. “Way to make the old country proud.”

I snorted at that. Booker’s skin and hair were as dark as mine: we both had Deoraithe blood running through our veins. Still, I was an orphan and she was Laure born and raised – neither of us had ever set foot in the northern duchy or spoke even a word of the old tongue. Not that I was complaining about the misplaced sense of kinship: fifteen year old girls like me didn’t usually get to compete in the Pit. I’d gotten my foot in by playing on the Deoraithe reputation of being solid in a fight. They held the Wall for five hundred years, before the Conquest. Even now the duchy most of them lived in was the only part of Callow without Imperial governors. I’d read about some kind of deal being cut with the Empress, though I couldn’t remember specifics.

“ I try,” I grunted. “You got my winnings?”

Booker chuckled and slid the denarii across the table. I counted them – the only time I’d made the mistake not to she’d short-changed me – and frowned when I realized there were only twenty-one.

“ We’re missing four,” I told her flatly. “I’m not going to fall for that twice, Booker.”

Her bodyguards pushed off the wall and started looming in response to the hostility in tone, but the dark-skinned woman grimaced and flicked a hand to dismiss them.

“ Mazus upped the prices again,” she explained. “Everybody’s cut is smaller, even mine.”

While I didn’t believe for a moment that Booker’s profits had seen any change, I had no problem at all believing that the Governor had decided to squeeze out a little more gold from the Pit. The Imperial Governor for Laure had begun his third term of service by announcing that all the temporary taxes of his last terms were now permanent, after all, and there wasn’t a single pie in the city where he wasn’t shoving in his fingers. I nodded, disgruntled, and slipped the silvers in the leather bag where I kept my change of clothes. “Zacharis is in the back, if you want to get your eye fixed,” Booker told me. “You know the drill.”

She’d already stopped paying me attention before she finished speaking the sentence, not that I was going to complain. Booker wasn’t exactly the kind of company I cared to keep, not that I kept much to start with. I slipped past the bodyguards without bothering to glance at them, heading through the threshold into the dingy little backroom where the Pit’s mage plied his trade. Zacharis was a man in his twenties, his skin pale and constantly flushed. The half-empty bottle of wine next to the armchair where he was snoring was the reason the man was associated with an illegal fighting ring at all: he was a drinker, and in exchange for the better part of the money he made fixing up fighters Booker let him go through as many bottles as he wanted. He reeked of wine again, I noted as I got close enough to shake him awake, but at least this time there was no stench of vomit lurking behind it. Zacharis blearily opened his eyes, running a fat red tongue against his lips.

“ Catherine?” he croaked out. “I thought your fight was tomorrow.”

I resented the fact that he insisted on calling me by my first name instead of Foundling, but not enough to make a scene. I could have gone to the House of Light for healing – and gotten it for free, too – if I had the stomach to wait through the lines but the priests there had this unfortunate tendency to ask questions . Better to suffer through a few minutes of the drunk’s company and his sloppier healing than have a sister showing up at the orphanage to tell the Matron I was getting into fights again. “Tomorrow’s now,” I told him with a sigh. “Are you sober enough to cast?”

He muttered a reply I couldn’t quite hear and rolled up his sleeves, which I took as agreement. His eyes flicked to the bottle but when he risked a glance at me whatever he must have seen on my face was enough to convince him to put the idea aside. He gestured for me to sit down on a wooden stool and pushed himself up. From the way he grimaced at that, he must have had the beginning of a pounding headache on his hands.

“ So why is it that priests heal better than mages, anyway?” I asked him, trying to force him to focus on the here and now.

The look he shot me was fairly condescending. Zacharis uttered a few strange syllables and his hand was wreathed in yellow light – he kept it hovering an inch over my black eye, letting the spell sink in.

“ Priests cheat, Catherine,” he informed me. “They just pray to the Heavens and power goes through them, fixes whatever’s broke. No real cleverness needed. Mages have to understand what they’re doing – throw magic around someone’s body without a plan and healing’s the last thing you’ll get.”

That was... not as reassuring as I’d thought it would be. Trusting that Zacharis knew what he was doing became something of an uphill battle, after actually meeting the man. Still, if he was a complete screwup Booker wouldn’t keep him around. Gods knew he had to cost her a fortune in liquor, however cheap the swill he drank was.

“ There,” he said after a moment, taking away his hand. “As pretty as I can make it. Don’t get punched again, the flesh is more fragile than usual.”

I nodded my thanks, picking out seven coppers from my bag and dropping them into his open palm. He hesitated, then fished out a pair and handed them back to me. I shot him a surprised look.

“ You’re getting close to sixteen, right?” Zacharis said. “Can’t have much more than a few months left before the orphanage puts you out. Keep those, every coin will count when you’re on your own.”

That was oddly touching, coming from a man I could barely stomach on the best of days.

“ Thanks,” I muttered, abashed at the sudden generosity.

The pale mage smiled bitterly. “Go home, Catherine. Pick up a trade instead of getting mixed up in messes like this. There’s a reason they call it the Pit , you know.”

He reached for the bottle and popped the cork, taking a swallow as he turned his back to me. I fled the room and then the warehouse itself: the less time I spent here the better. Besides, we were getting close to the evening bell and I had a real job to get to.

I was already Lakeside so it was a short walk to the Rat’s Nest.

The quarter looked worse by daylight than it did at night: no darkness to hide the dirt and the misery, I supposed. The streets down here were tight and cramped, unlike the wide paved avenues of Fairway where all the richer sort lived. Even when Laure had been the capital of the Kingdom of Callow instead of just another governorship the Lakeside Quarter had been a dump. Or so I’d been told – the Conquest had happened over two decades ago, a few years before I’d been born, so I had to take it on faith. Still, I had a feeling it was worse than it used to be. The Guilds might have been raking in gold since they’d fallen into Governor Mazus’ pocket but everybody else was feeling the weight of the ever-increasing taxes: once-abandoned warehouses were now filled with people who’d had their homes and shops seized because they couldn’t pay on time, little more than refugees in their own city of birth. If he keeps strangling trade the whole city might end up scrabbling in the dirt down here , I reflected as I tiptoed around a small pool of mud. My boots were old enough as it was, they might not survive being another cleaning in one piece.

Besides, Harrion wouldn’t let me barmaid if I was going to track dirt all over his floor. He already disapproved of my fighting in the Pit, not that he’d ever said anything: he just had a way of sending me home early whenever I showed up with bruises that were too obvious. Hopefully I’d have time to rinse off in the back before he could see the blood still on my lip: the end of the month was never busy at the Rat’s Nest, so he might be napping in the rooms upstairs instead of keeping an eye on the common room. Which means I might have Leyran for only company tonight , I frowned. Harrion’s son was a few years older than me and convinced he was the most charming man since the Shining Prince. Bit of a layabout, and he had a way of spending more time talking with the patrons than actually getting them their drinks – especially whenever by some miracle an attractive woman ended up at the Nest. He was harmless, as far as idiots went, but if he ended up inheriting the tavern he’d likely run it into the ground. I took a shortcut through Tanner Tom’s backyard to shave a few minutes off of my walk, if only so the sweat I was still drenched in didn’t have too much time to settle.

I didn’t have a key to the back door, but it was unlocked. I wiped my boots on the already dirty rug I was pretty sure had been stolen from a merchant down by the harbour and dropped my bag on the dirt floor and headed for the bowl of water by the table in the corner. The background noise filtering in from the door to the common room made it clear there were already a handful of patrons, though the song the minstrel was playing was even louder. I winced when she bawled out a particularly off-key couplet, picking up the rag inside the bowl and wiping my face clean. I used the polished copper plate hung up on the wall to make sure there was no blood showing on my face, cursing under my breath when I realized that the blood clot on my lip wasn’t going anywhere. The dark-skinned girl looking back at me from the surface looked like she’d seen better days, I had to admit.

I’d never been what you would call pretty – chin too strong, cheekbones too angular – but the way my dark locks stuck to the top of my head had me looking like a drenched urchin girl. A few strands of hair had come loose from the ponytail I kept them in so I shook loose the wooden clip that kept it together and shoved it in my pocket. The water had the rag cool and pleasant, so I rubbed it along my neck and collarbones just for the refreshing feeling. The woollen shirt I’d worn in the pit was flecked with blood so I took it off and shoved it back in the bag, slipping on my only good clothes: the dyed cotton blouse was a pleasant blue, the symbol of the Laure House for Tragically Orphaned Girls sown over the heart. I’d have to be careful not to spill any beer on it: laundry day at the orphanage wasn’t for a few days yet and the Matron checked out clothes every morning. Nudging my bag into the corner, I pushed the door and entered the Rat’s Nest proper.

The tavern’s common room was exactly as pretty as the place’s name implied: rickety wooden walls salvaged from wrecked ships and a dirt floor that turned into mud wherever drinks got spilled too often. There was a wide fire pit circled by stones in the middle of it, surrounded by a ring of tables where half a dozen patrons were chatting quietly over drinks. Only two humans, I saw. Three orcs still in legionary armour were sharing a table with a yellow-eyed goblin sporting officer’s stripes on her shoulders. Or at least I thought it was a her: it was hard to tell the gender under all that green wrinkled skin. The sight of the three big orcs standing at least three feet taller than the scrawny goblin yet hanging on her every word drew a small smile out of me, though my attention shifted as soon as our minstrel began a new song.

“ Boot goes up and boot goes down:

There goes their callow crown

And no matter how high the walls

We’re all gonna make them fall-”

There was a small cheer from the table full of soldiers. Ellerna had decided to pander to her audience tonight, it seemed. The Legionary Song wasn’t exactly a popular ditty in Callow. Not that it was surprising, considering it referred heavily to the Conquest. There was no sign of Harrion anywhere but Leyran was lounging in one of the corner tables, smirking at Ellerna whenever she glanced in his direction. Ugh. He’d been trying to talk her into sharing one of the upstairs beds since Harrion had first hired her, and while she’d been lukewarm at the prospect at first these days she seemed inclined to give in. Bad call, Ellerna. He’s not looking to marry, no matter what his father wants. The man in question noticed I’d come in a moment after and gestured for me to come closer. I crossed the room, throwing a smile at the pair of women I passed by on my way through. Leyran offered me the closest thing to a roguish smile he could manage, passing a hand through his short-cropped hair as I claimed the seat across from him.

“ Catherine,” he greeted me. “Punctual as always.”

How you manage to come in late for work when you live in the same building is beyond me , I refrained from saying.

“ Leyran,” I replied instead. “My apron’s still under the counter?”

He shrugged. “Right next to the cudgel. Dad wants to talk to you first, though. He’s in his room upstairs.”

Huh. I grunted in acknowledgement and pushed myself up. It was still a few days early for Harrion to need my help with the accounts, so it couldn’t be that. Might just be he needed me to work some numbers for him – half the reason I’d been hired at the Nest was that I knew my letters and numbers. The benefits of being raised in an Imperial-funded institution, I supposed. The stairs creaked under my feet and led me right to the corridor where four doors stood closed: two for the family, two up for renting. Harrion’s own room was where he kept all of his papers, so I’d been there before. Rapping my knuckles against the door, I waited for a moment before pushing it open. A pair of candles was the only source of light in the cramped room: a bed and dresser were wedged in the left corner, with the bare skeleton of a wooden desk facing them. Harrion himself was seated on a stool at the desk and the old man gestured for me to come in without turning.

“ Catherine,” he grunted. “I need you to read something for me.”

The owner of the Rat’s Nest was a skinny man with a balding crown of hair, dressed in plain brown wool – he was looking at a piece of parchment I couldn’t quite make out, glaring at the letters like they’d personally offended him. I’m not sure he’d have been able to make them out even if he could read: his eyes weren’t what they used to be, and he’d always balked at the cost of getting a pair of spectacles made. Used to Harrion’s gruff manners by now, I leaned over his shoulder and took a closer look at the parchment. It was an official document, I saw quickly enough: there was a golden wax seal on it that bore Laure’s coat of arms. I skimmed the first few lines, since they were mostly ceremonial claptrap, and got to the meat of the matter: the Governor’s office was sending an official notice by that the end of next month all establishments serving liquor would need to be affiliated with the proper guild or face additional taxes.

“ They want to fold you into the Brewer’s Guild,” I voiced. “Otherwise you get another tax hitch – though they don’t say how large.”

“ Fucking Mazus,” Harrion cursed. “Fucking Praesi and fucking Empire,” he added after a moment.

I’d heard a lot worse – and more inventive – serving drinks downstairs, so the language hardly fazed me. I could see where he was coming from, too. I’d been told the Guilds had once been a boon, when Callow had still existed, but since Laure had gotten an Imperial governor they’d become little more than a polite protection racket. They collected membership fees every month and required a certain amount of product to be delivered at the guildhall for “quality control” – in exchange for which they were supposed to protect the interests of their members and regulate the trade. The Governor had flipped the situation around by buying out the Guildmasters he could and arranging accidents for those he couldn’t, making them just another finger in the Imperial hand that was choking out Laure.

“ The tax might end less costly than a membership,” I said after a moment, at loss for what else to say.

Harrion let out a derisive snort. “They’re greedy, not dumb,” he replied. “The taxes are going to be savage, girl, you can count on it.”

I threaded my fingers through my hair, letting out a sigh. “You won’t be able to afford keeping me on, will you?”

The balding man had the grace to look embarrassed. “Maybe on the busy nights, but not as often as now,” he admitted.

I would have liked to blame him, but it wouldn’t have been right. It wasn’t his fault, was it? He wasn’t any happier about the situation than I was, and it wasn’t like there was anyone to appeal to. Governors answered directly to the Dread Empress, and I doubted that Malicia gave a shit about the fact that her buddy Mazus was being a robber lord all the way out here. As long as the tributes came on time, what did she care? It’s not fair, but you don’t get fair when you lose wars , I thought. I felt my fist clench, though I forced it to loosen after a moment. Things like this were exactly why I needed to go to the College. If I got high enough in the ranks of the Legion, if I amassed enough power and influence, one day I’d be in a position to fix this. To send fuckers like Mazus to the gallows instead of watching them throw banquet after banquet up in the palace.

“ Should I stay until the end of the month, at least?” I asked.

Harrion nodded tiredly. “I’ll try figure something out, Catherine,” he said. “I know you’ve been saving up for something.”

I smiled but we were both aware the words were an empty gesture. I’d been running the Nest’s numbers for a year now, and there was only so much gold flowing through the place. I went back down the stairs, trying to figure out a way out of this mess. I might be able to scrape enough together if I started fighting in the Pits more often, but that carried risks of its own: losing was always a possibility, and the more I won the harder it would get to make good betting on myself. Booker had implied once or twice that she’d be willing to take me on as an enforcer, but that was a slippery slope. I’ll sleep on it , I decided, putting on my apron. I still had a job, for now, and I wasn’t one to shirk honest work when I could get it.

On calm nights like this one I spent as much time cleaning as I did actually getting patrons their drinks. The larder had remained more or less in order since the last time I’d taken the time to arrange it, though, and none of the beer barrels were leaking. I found myself idly passing a rag on the counter for at least a quarter bell before something caught my interest. There were a handful of regulars I was on friendly terms with but my clear favourite among them was Sergeant Ebele – I couldn’t help but smile when she came in. She was tall, taller than most orcs even, and her skin was even darker than mine. In the hotter parts of summer I could almost pass as just particularly tanned, but she was black as charcoal in that way only northern Praesi could be. There was a little scar by the side of her mouth that kept her lips in a perpetual half-smile, which turned into a broad grin when she saw me. I’d already filled her tankard by the time she’d claimed a table, and I wasted no time in bringing it to her.

“ You, my sweet,” Ebele said after taking a long pull from her beer, “are a true delight. This place would go to the dogs without you to keep it going.”

A shadow passed on my face at the thought that soon enough that would be the case, but I pushed through.

“ Just finished your watch, then?” I asked eagerly.

The sergeant had a friendly disposition that I rather liked, but what I enjoyed the most about her was that after a few drinks she took little prodding to start telling stories about her service with the Legion. She was a veteran of the Conquest, one who’d been on the front lines at the Fields of Streges and the Siege of Summerholm – as well as part of the quick but brutal civil war inside the Empire that had preceded their invasion of Callow. She talked about that part less, though. I got the impression it had been a pretty brutal affair. And if someone who was at the Fields thinks of something as brutal, I’m inclined to take her word for it.

“ Oh yes,” Ebele muttered. “Hence why I’m here drinking away my sorrows. If I have to hear Goren snicker one more time, I’ll have to strangle the idiot. Be a dear and get me a pitcher, will you? I don’t intend to be able to walk out of here on my own.”

I snorted and disappeared into the larder, filling a clay pitcher to the brim at the tap. One of the few things that redeemed the Rat’s Nest from all the other hole-in-the-ground taverns was that the Harrion didn’t water the beer. It tasted like dead vermin, sure, but at least it didn’t taste like dead vermin marinated in water. Half of Ebele’s tankard was already gone by the time I returned, which boded well for getting stories out of her – though hopefully she wouldn’t keep going at this rate, because her sing-song accent got harder to decipher when she slurred her words.

“ Come sit with me, lovely Catherine,” the sergeant grinned when I set the pitcher down. “This place is as dead as can be.”

A quick glance around confirmed as much. Besides the patrons who’d already been there when I came in – and who were already topped off – there was no one else. Including, I noted wearily, Leyran and Ellerna. I tried not to think too much about that. “It’s still pretty early,” I agreed.

The Nest would get busier the closer we got to the midnight bell, but that wouldn’t be for a while yet. Ebele suddenly leaned forward, taking a closer look at my face.

“ You were mage-touched, and recently at that,” she observed, tone surprised.

I blinked. Had Zacharis messed up his spell? There shouldn’t be any visible marks.

“ I got into a fight,” I admitted. “How can you tell?”

The dark-haired sergeant’s smile turned rueful. “When you see enough mage-healing you learn to pick up on the signs. Whoever did yours was a little rough around the edges, but it’s good work.”

Huh. Point for Zacharis, I supposed. If he could cast that well hungover, he must have been a fairly good sorcerer when sober. If he was ever sober. Ebele paused, appearing to consider her next words, and I prepared to swallow a sigh. People really needed to stop telling me not to get into fights – now more than ever, considering I wasn’t going to be making much of anything from the Rat’s Nest.

“ Did you win?” the scarred woman asked.

I grinned. “Beat his ass into the ground,” I replied.

“ Good girl,” Ebele chuckled approvingly. “You should consider the Legions, if you want to get into real scraps.”

“ I’m saving up for the College,” I admitted. “Hoping to make it there by next summer.”

The sergeant’s hairless brows rose. “The War College? Ambitious of you, though I suppose it’s less expensive since Lord Black pushed the reforms through.”

I’d been born before the reforms – they preceded the Conquest – so I only had a vague sense of what she was talking about. I’d never gotten any real details out of someone about what the reforms actually were, though everyone agreed that they’d radically changed the Legions of Terror. The name she’d dropped caught my attention, though. Well the Name if you wanted to be accurate: Black Knight . The man who’d led the Calamities in the destruction of the Kingdom of Callow, over twenty years ago. I knew he was still alive and up to no good somewhere in the Empire, but the existence of people with Names had never felt quite real to me. Heroes and their darker counterparts were the kind of people that lived in legends, not in my reality of pit fights and serving drinks.

“ You ever meet any of them?” I asked. “The Calamities, I mean.”

Ebele’s half-smile twitched in amusement.

“ In person? Only the one,” she said. “Before the Conquest I was part of the Second, when it moved to kick in High Lord Duma’s door.”

The sergeant took a long pull from her tankard.

“ My company ran into some of his personal household troops during our push to his demesne – nasty fuckers, with mages and a dug-in position. Could have wasted three hundred people easily to crack that nut, and we couldn’t just leave them sitting on top of our supply lines.”

I leaned forward. Which one of them had it been? Probably not the Black Knight, or she would have mentioned it earlier, and since Captain was famously never far behind him she was probably out too. I doubted Assassin would have stopped for a chat, but maybe Ranger? I hoped it had been Ranger. I’d always liked the stories about her best.

“ So we’re starting to set up a palisade around them,” Ebele continued. “Waiting for reinforcements and all that – then out of nowhere, this man strolls up to us. Claps our captain on the back, tells her to get the company ready because they’ll be moving again soon.”

A man? That meant...

“ So the captain asks him who the Gods Below he thinks he is, and he gives her this shit-eating grin. ‘Call me Warlock. That scheming bastard sent me to clear you a way,’ and off he goes.”

Warlock. They called him the ‘Sovereign of the Red Skies’, whatever that was supposed to mean – Praesi liked to tack on fancy titles to everything, it was like a cultural compulsion. Came from the centuries of unrepentant villainy, probably.

Ebele’s tone suddenly turned serious, the mirth in her eyes snuffed out and replaced by awe and just the tiniest smidgeon of fear. “We never got close enough to see exactly what he did,” she murmured. “But not even a quarter bell after he disappeared the whole enemy garrison went up in a column of red flames. When we marched through later that night, the whole place was intact. Not a stone or tent out of place, but all the armours were empty. Like the people had just... disappeared.”

I felt a shiver go up my spine. It was one thing for a mage to make fire – it was one of the easiest spells to manage – but what she’d described? That was a different matter entirely. You don’t get a Name like Warlock by learning the nice sort of spells, I guess.

“ I’ll say this about the Legions, sweet girl,” the sergeant murmured. “The constant drills are a bitch, but at least you know whenever you step on a battlefield that all the scariest fuckers are on your side.”

I nodded slowly, but before I could say anything a group of patrons walked in. I gave Ebele an apologetic shrug and got back to work.

The walk back to the orphanage was always the worst part of the night.

There were risks to bar tending in the bad part of Laure, I knew, but it wasn’t like taverns in the Merchant Quarter were lining up to hire sixteen year old orphans. I’d tried my luck more than once and been shown the door before deciding that the Rat’s Nest my golden chance. Besides, eavesdropping on drunken veterans reminiscing was more interesting than doing the same on pretentious guild members. Once in a while a patron would get grabby, true enough, but that was why we had a cudgel under the counter. They rarely needed to be told to lay off twice, and those that did limped home with a few broken fingers for their trouble. The matron back at the Laure House for Tragically Orphaned Girls was deeply offended I’d do anything as uncouth as serving drinks to ruffians, but I only had to suffer her lectures for another year before I was free. I was perfectly willing to spend half a bell in the old woman’s office getting upbraided for “consorting with unsavoury elements” if it meant that by the time I was sixteen I’d have enough to cover my tuition. Not that I’d told her that was what I was saving for: if her feathers were ruffled by my serving drinks Lakeside, she’d have a fit at learning I wanted to enrol in the officer’s school for the Legions of Terror. It wasn’t too far past the midnight bell when I finally headed out home, and making my way back to the House after dark wasn’t as dangerous as one would think, anyway: the city guard was hopelessly corrupt and in the Governor’s pocket to boot, but they were well aware that if they failed to keep order in the city then the Legions would step in.

There were a lot of people who wanted that to happen, funnily enough: the Legions were a little heavy on the hangings, they said, but at least when Laure had been under martial law everything ran smoothly. Still, as long as Mazus remained in bed with the Guilds and kept the guards on his payroll there was nothing anyone could do about any of this. Rioting would just mean a lot of spiked heads over the city gates when the legionaries were done clearing the crowd: the Dread Empire of Praes did not brook dissent, much less open one.

That said, there was a reason the Lakeside was known as the rough part of town and I had no intention of lingering in the darkened streets. I wished I had a knife on me, honestly, but the only time I’d tried that the matron had confiscated it when one of the girls in my dormitory ratted me out. I’d never been popular with the others, and they weren’t above getting back at me in petty ways when they could. I was about halfway back when a shriek followed by the sound of struggling drew me out of my thoughts – it was coming from a side-alley, one of the myriad of dead-ends that filled this part of town.

I peeked around the corner and felt my blood rise when I saw the silhouette of a guard pushing a girl down. Her blouse was already ripped open, but she seemed more intent on begging the man to leave her alone than fighting back. Shit. This was the kind of thing a reasonable girl would walk away from, ugly as that reality was.

Why couldn’t I have been born a reasonable girl?

I had no intention of scrapping with a man in armour at least a foot taller than me, but I might be able to get the other girl and run if I played this right. Unlike the guard I didn’t carry a weapon, but if I hit him hard and fast I might knock him out before it ever turned into a struggle. Reckless, maybe, but what was I supposed to do – just cover my ears and go on my merry way? I stepped into the alley as silently as I could, catching sight of a ramshackle crate full of rotting cabbage as I did. My fingers closed against the edge of it and I closed the remaining distance separating me from the guard in a handful of steps, swinging the crate into the back of his head. It broke with a satisfying crunch, putting him down as the girl he’d been pushing himself onto let out a fresh new shriek of terror. I kicked the guard in the chin to make sure he wouldn’t get back up. The girl in the ripped-up blouse was backing away from me, apparently as scared of me as she was of her tormentor. A pointless gesture, that: the alley ended in a wooden wall, there was nowhere to go but through me.

“ I’m here to help,” I told her soothingly. “Come with me, we need to get out of here before-”

I never got to finish the sentence, as a vicious hit to the temple sending me tumbling to the ground. The world spun but I tried to push myself up only to come face to face with a bared blade. I looked up into the eyes of a second guard, this one wearing sergeant stripes on his shoulders. His face was grim as he kept the tip of his short sword less than an inch away from my throat.

“ Joseph,” he said calmly, “are you all right?”

The man I’d hit with the crate rolled over with a groan, getting back on his feet gingerly.

“ The bitch did a number on me,” he spat. “That’s going to leave a bruise for sure.”

“ Be glad she wasn’t carrying a knife, you idiot,” he retorted.

“ He was trying to rape the girl,” I wheezed. “Why the Hells am I the one getting hit?”

A flash of disgust went through the sergeant’s face, but he refused to meet my eyes.

“ You said you’d stop doing shit like this,” he spoke, ignoring me in favour of staring down his colleague. “You promised, Joseph.”

‘Joseph’ waved him off.

“ No one would have cared if she hadn’t run into me, Allen,” he replied. “We can just break a few fingers to teach them manners and go home, our patrol is almost done.”

The sergeant – Allen, apparently – sighed.

“ Look at her blouse, Joseph. That’s the heraldry for the Imperial orphanage sewed up over her chest. She shows up home with broken fingers and people are going to ask questions,” he said.

The would-be rapist’s eyes widened in fear.

“ Fuck,” he cursed again. “What do we do? I can’t go to jail, who’s going to feed my kids? Bessie doesn’t even have a job.”

I snuck a glance towards the girl. She was huddled in a corner, shaking life a leaf and trying to hold her ripped clothes together. There was an absent look in her eyes, like she was there but not really there . No help coming from that direction, then. This... wasn’t looking too good.

“ We’ll have to kill them,” the sergeant said flatly. “No blades, that would lead to too many questions. We came across their bodies during patrol, no witnesses and no suspects.”

And the Hells with that. I moved fast, slapping away the hand that held the sword as I tried to hoist myself back up to my feet. It loosened his grip but he rammed the cross guard of the sword into my shoulder – I was already halfway up by then so it staggered me back a step, screwing up my footing. I tried to push down the panic welling up in my chest, but the awareness that I was stuck in a dead-end alley with two armed men larger and stronger than me wasn’t exactly helping. I scratched the sergeant’s face as he tried to wrestle me down, my nails drawing blood on his face and a hiss of pain from his lips. It wasn’t enough: he’d dropped his sword at some point and he slammed me against the wall, forcing down my struggling hands and moving his legs so that I couldn’t get a decent angle to kick him.

“ Joseph,” the man said in strained voice. “Get the other one. But first promise me this is the last time. We can’t keep on doing this.”

Joseph licked his lips, nodding nervously.

“ Yeah, it’s the last time,” he muttered. “I mean, I didn’t want anyone to get killed over this.”

A moment later the sergeant’s hand settled on my throat and started to squeeze. I tried to punch him and wrestle away his hand, but he was stronger than me and I was trying to breathe but-

“ Should never have stepped into the alley, girl,” Allen said. “These aren’t days for playing hero.”

“ Always a mistake, gloating before the business is done,” a voice commented mildly.

There was a streak of movement and an enormous silhouette moved out of the dark, slapping down Allen effortlessly and picking up the other man by the scruff of the neck. I gulped in a mouthful of air greedily, coughing a handful of times before I was finally self-possessed enough to look around me. The girl was still cowering in a corner, looking catatonic, and a man was kneeling next to her. He wrapped a thick dark cloak around her shoulders before rising back to his feet, eerie pale green eyes meeting my own. He was pale-skinned and decked in plain steel plate, though he’d moved as if the pounds of metal he was wearing were light as a silk shirt. My eyes flicked to the sword at his side before turning to the other new presence in the alley. It was a woman, or at least vaguely shaped like one: she stood at least three feet taller than I and twice as wide, keeping the struggling Joseph up in their air by the scruff of the neck without any visible strain. I couldn’t see whether she was armed: her cloak covered her body up to her neck. I pushed myself up, forcing down a cough and uncomfortably aware that the green-eyed man was staring at me. Allen looked like he was about to crawl back to his knees, so I kicked him in the chin with a twinge of vicious satisfaction.

“ Staying down would be the wiser choice, sergeant” the man said. “You might find the consequences of further resistance unpleasant.”

“ Thank you,” I croaked out at the strangers. “I thought I was done for.”

The man dipped his head in acknowledgment.

“ Captain,” he spoke up without even looking at the gargantuan woman, “if you would silence our other friend?”

She drove her fist in Joseph’s stomach faster than my eye could follow, getting a gasp out of him that was almost a retch, and then knocked him hard enough on the temple that he slumped. She’d never stopped holding him up during any of this, and still didn’t seem particularly inconvenienced when she slung his unconscious body over her shoulder. Allen let out a strangled noise.

“ I know who you are,” he wheezed out. “You’re the Black Knight. Sir, we’re on your side !”

I took half a step back, feeling my stomach twist up in unashamed fear. Hitting a guard from behind had been something, but if the sergeant was right then I was less than ten feet away from the godsdamned boogeyman. Shit, of all the people who could have walked into the alley. The green-eyed man had a body count that would make most butchers retch – there wasn’t a man or woman in Callow that didn’t know the Name. And if that was really the Captain holding up the other guard, then I was all sorts of screwed: the stories said she’d once killed an ogre with a single hammer stroke. Gods, looking at her now she had to be at least eight feet tall.

“ No,” the Knight murmured. “You really aren’t.”

An armoured foot whipped out and the sergeant joined his accomplice in the realm of dreams.

“ If memory serves we have a safe house a few blocks down, Sabah,” he added after a moment. “Let’s keep them there for the moment.”

Captain raised an eyebrow.

“ We’re not taking them to the guard?”

“ Mazus would hear of it before the hour was done,” the Knight replied. “No need to give him any advance warning.”

“ And the girl?”

They both glanced at the victim, still huddled in her corner and shaking like a leaf under the Black Knight’s cloak.

“ Have one of the men bring her home,” he decided. “She’s had quite enough excitement for the night, I think.”

The behemoth of a woman saluted, the would-be rapist still slung over her shoulder, and picked up the sergeant’s foot. She dragged him across the ground none too gently and crossed the corner.

“ Are you-” I croaked out, throat still sore from the choking, “are you really him?”

The dark-haired man smiled, though it did not reach his eyes. They were cold as ice, their eerie shade of green sending a shiver down my spine – I knew people with green eyes, but none quite as pale as his. They looked the way I imagined a fey’s would, and there was no denying the touch of strangeness there was to him. He hadn’t even replied but just the weight of his attention made me feel like a rabbit in front of a wolf, like my life could be snatched right out of me in the blink of an eye. I guess some people would be cowed by that, but I’ve always hated feeling afraid. The other girls at the orphanage had never understood why I kept going up to the roof and standing on the edge when everybody knew I was afraid of heights, but they were missing the point. I’d kept going because I was afraid, and I’d refused to stop even when they’d started whispering to each other about how I was going to turn into a gargoyle if I kept standing there glaring at the ground. I wasn’t fool enough to think that fighting through a childish fear of heights and staring down the smiling monster in front of me was the same, but the principle was the same. My fear did not own me – I owned it. I met the Black Knight’s eyes, refusing to flinch even as his smile stretched wider. You might be a wolf, but I am no rabbit.

“ Am I the Black Knight?” he murmured. “Yes, among other things.”

The weight I’d been feeling disappeared as swiftly as it had come into existence and I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. Had he been doing it on purpose, or had all of that just been in my head? The fear hadn’t felt natural, even less now that it wasn’t choking me up. I was wary of giving the man many name but it would have been rude not to, after the way he’d just saved my hide.

“ I’m-”

“ Catherine Foundling, of the Imperial orphanage,” he finished, and my blood ran cold.

How did he know my name? Had I been marked for death for some inscrutable reason? I hadn’t done anything illegal, as far as I knew, or associated with anyone stupid enough to go against Imperial authority. No, I reassured myself, if he wanted me dead he wouldn’t have intervened when the sergeant was choking me. Then how-

“ Haven’t you heard, my dear?” he spoke with a sardonic twist of the lips, “I know everything.”

I knew on an intellectual level that what he said was impossible but right now, standing in the dark alley by the unconscious bodies of two men who’d been slapped down effortlessly, I could almost believe it. “You’re not in any trouble, regardless.”

“ Gotta say, you’re not selling that impression very well,” I replied before I could help myself.

I winced as soon as I processed the words that had come out of my mouth. Splendid notion, Catherine, let’s mouth off to the guy who could run you through and not even be questioned about it. I need to get punched in the head less often. To my relief, he chuckled.

“ You’ll have to take my word for it, I suppose,” he replied.

I wasn’t sure exactly what that was worth, but I wasn’t in a position to argue.

“ I’ll require your company for a little while still, I’m afraid,” he continued.

I frowned.

“ What for? You told... her ,” I said, hesitant to actually use Captain’s Name, “that you weren’t handing them to the city guard yet.”

I couldn’t imagine what use he could have for me aside from a witness, and even then he hardly needed that. If the Empress’ right hand thought some people needed killing, they died. It was as simple as that, and anybody fool enough to protest was likely headed in the same direction. Black smiled, and not for the first time that night a shiver went up my spine.

“ I’ve come to believe, over the years, that those who are wronged should have a say in how that wrong is redressed.”

With a last glance towards the girl whose name I had never even learned, who was already being helped up by a silent silhouette in a dark cloak, I followed him out of the alley.

The place was as close as he’d said, not even long enough of a walk for me to start thinking about anything but how nervous I was feeling.There was nothing distinguishing the safe house from any actual house in the neighbourhood, except of course for the dozen of armoured soldiers in heavy plate standing in front of it silently. So much for subtlety, then. Not that I was complaining: not even a full patrol of the city guard would feel up to tangling with those guys. Or girls, maybe? It was hard to tell with the way the helmet’s visor covered their faces and the plate obscured their body shape. I knew who they were, anyway.

They were called the Blackguards, because Praesi had this strange fixation with shoving the word black into everything. They were the Knight’s elite bodyguards and the veterans from the Fields of Streges I’d eavesdropped on said every one was supposed to be the match of ten fighting men. They said that about a lot of people, though. The Conquest had been so overwhelmingly one-sided of a war that I thought one of the ways Callowans dealt with the trauma was by putting the conquerors on a pedestal. He went through the door after affording them a nod and I followed him without a word.

Captain – who was nowhere in sight – or one of the faceless soldiers I’d seen standing outside must have lit the candles inside, because there was a handful of them dispersed around the room. There was a ratty bed in the corner and a table flanked by a pair of chairs, but besides that the furniture was sparse. Nothing worth robbing unless you were truly desperate. The guards had been tied up and gagged, propped up against the wall in the back. Both were awake now, and neither of them was doing all that good of a job at hiding their terror.

The Black Knight ignored them and I followed suit, taking the other chair after he seated himself. The candlelight allowed me my first clear look at the man and I took the opportunity shamelessly. How many occasions to see the man up close was I going to get? He had one of those ageless faces that could put him anywhere from his mid-twenties to his mid-thirties, which was a pretty spry look for him considering word had it he was nearing sixty. Roles did that sometimes, slowed aging or kept you looking the same. I still wasn’t all that clear on what he wanted, but if he wasn’t going to say anything then I had a few questions of my own.

“ So, what will happen to them?”

Black drummed his fingers on the table, the shadows cast by the candles on his face twisting about as if they’d come to life.

“ They’ll be handed to the city guard for trial and punishment. Since Laure is no longer under the authority of the Legions, Imperial law takes precedence. Attempted rape should fetch them a minimum of five years in a cell – less for the good sergeant, given that he was only an accomplice.”

Five years. That was... They’d tried to rape her, and when I’d stopped them they’d tried to kill me so they’d get away with it.

“ That’s it?” I said. “After all they did, they spend five years in a prison eating badly and then they’re back on the streets?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“ You underestimate the unpleasantness of Laure’s penitentiaries, but in essence you are correct.”

“ It’s not enough, for what they tried to do – for what they would have done, if we hadn’t been lucky enough for you to show up,” I growled.

The pale-skinned man I’d heard so much about growing up eyed me in silence, his face unreadable. The stories simmered in the back of my head, each less believable than the last. He once rode a dragon. His sword feeds on the souls of the innocent and that’s why he never lost a duel. He sees the future and reads the minds of his enemies. He conquered Callow in a month by turning his entire army into werewolves. The orcs worship him like a god and he’s king of the goblins. There’d been a story about how he had the blood of giants running in his veins, but given that he fell way short of six feet tall I felt safe dismissing that one. Hopefully the mind-reading was the same kind of deal, because as far as I was concerned no one belonged inside my head but me.

“ There’s another way,” he finally said.

Slowly, carefully, he unsheathed the knife hanging at his belt and put it down on the table. I eyed the blade warily, the edge of it looking wicked sharp even from where I was sitting.

“ Do you know what separates people who have a Role from people who don’t, Catherine?” Black asked.

I shook my head.

“ Will,” he said. “The belief, deep down, that they know what is right and that they’ll see it done.”

My throat caught. Was he implying what I thought he was?

“ So tell me, Catherine Foundling,” he murmured, his voice smooth as velvet. “What do you think is right?”

He spun the knife so that the handle faced me, the touch of his fingertips deft and light.

“ How far are you willing to go, to see it done?”

I could feel the eyes of the two gagged guards on me, but I ignored them. I met the Knight’s stare squarely, my heart thundering in my chest. The lives of those two men had just been dropped in the palm of my hand, and if I wanted to snuff out the light in their eyes all I had to do was squeeze. Could I really do that? Did I have the right to take justice into my own hands? It would be murder to kill them, every moment I’d ever spent in the House of Light told me as much. Five years , I remembered. Five years, and then they’ll be out there again .

My fingers closed around the knife.

I rose to my feet and Joseph’s eyes widened in fear when I knelt in front of him. There was nothing in the room, nothing in the world besides the two of us. My palm felt clammy against the knife’s leather wrap, but I tightened my hand and pushed down his gag. If I did this, if I was really going to do this, I had to know. I could feel the Knight’s gaze on me but this wasn’t about him. It was about me, about the decision I had to make. All my life I’d told myself I would somehow manage to get power and that I’d used it to fix things. To make it all better. And now here I was, gifted the power of life and death over two men in the form of a few inches of cold steel.

“ You’ve done this before,” I half-asked, half-stated.

He looked ashamed for a moment, but there was something in his eyes that caused disgust to well up in me. Like he didn’t understand how foul what he’d wanted to do was.

“ Look,” he said, “I didn’t meant to. It was just, the way she was dressed... I mean, what kind of a decent woman goes about at night-”

I slit his throat.

It wasn’t a conscious decision. For what he said and what he’d done, I’d decided he deserved to die – my hand had done the rest without any need for prompting. Edge parallel to the ground, slicing across the major arteries just like the butcher did it to pigs in the marketplace. Maybe if I’d gone at the House of Light more often I would have let him go to prison, but all I could think was – what would happen, when he got out? The next time he cornered a girl in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t be there. I watched as the blood gurgled out out of his throat and he looked at me like I’d somehow betrayed him. I wondered if I should be feeling anything. Sadness, regret, maybe just nausea at the sight of death unfolding. He probably wouldn’t have made it as quick for her , I thought. The sergeant looked resigned when I turned towards him. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

My cut was cleaner the second time.

I stayed there kneeling for a while, blood dripping off the blade. Funny thing, killing someone. You’d expect there to be more of a fanfare to it, thunder in the distance or the weight of the disapproving Heavens pushing down on your shoulders. All I felt was a little numb. The palm of my hand was a little bruised from the way the knife’s handle had pushed back when slicing through, and there was blood spray on my blouse. So I’m a murderer now. Not how I saw my evening going, I’ll admit. The jest was tasteless but I smiled anyway, because feeling like a heartless bitch was still better than this... apathy that had taken me.

“ Is this how it always is?” I asked, eyes still on the cooling corpse of the sergeant and the red smile I’d etched across his throat.

“ When you make the decision cold?” I heard the Knight speak from just behind me. “Yes.”

I nodded and a moment later didn’t resist when he helped me get up to my feet.

“ They deserved it,” I told the man, looking into his eyes.

He did not disagree.

“ They deserved it,” I whispered to myself.

He steered me towards the door and I could have cared less about our destination as long as it got me away from that house. The night air felt cool against my face and I heard one of the Blackguards enter into the house but I refused to pay any attention to it.

“ I have a question for you, Lord,” I said after a moment, my voice feeling like it was a stranger’s, coming out of a stranger’s body.

“ Call me Black.”

“ I have a question for you, Black.”

“ I’m listening.”

“ You’re a monster, aren’t you?” I spoke softly into the night, looking at him from the corner of my eye.

He smiled. “The very worst kind,” he replied.

I don’t know what it says about me, but for the first time since I’d walked into the alley I felt safe.

Chapter 2: Invitation

“Before embarking on a journey of revenge, dig two graves. One for the fool and one for all those pesky relatives.”
– Dread Emperor Vindictive the First

I took me a moment to remember where I was when I woke up.

They’d taken me to the inn they were staying at when I’d said I didn’t want to go back to orphanage, though I couldn’t remember actually saying the words. I was alone in the room, so allowed myself to luxuriate in the feeling of a soft bed twice the size of the one I had in my dormitory. The Praesi hadn’t picked one of the really expensive places to stay in, but they hadn’t picked a bad one either. The sun filtering in through the shutters told me it was late in the afternoon, so I’d slept through most of the day. Who knew that slitting a pair of throats would take that much out of you, I thought. I’d meant for the sentence to be a form of self-reproach but when trying to summon up regret for what I’d done last night, the well came up empty. I sat up in the bed and ran a somehow still-tired hand through my hair. It was a mess, the dark locks having gotten all tangled up overnight.

Now that I had a little bit of distance from the whole affair I was starting to think I’d been steered in the direction of taking those lives. For what reason, though, I couldn’t even begin to imagine. Who knew why villains did what they did? Not that it changes anything. I made the decision, and made it for my own reasons. I wasn’t sure if my actions had been just, but even under the light of day I didn’t think my decision had been wrong. I used the large bowl of water by the bed to splash my face and wiped it off with the towel next to it, the last dregs of sleepiness driven off by the lukewarm water. There was a sheathed knife next to it, one I had no trouble remembering the last time I’d seen. Distantly I recalled trying to give it back the night before and being told it was now mine. Not too sure how I should feel about that.

So. What now?

I was starving, so I might as well see if I could get a meal of this. I didn’t get the feeling that this whole business was done, but what more could the Knight want from me? No, that’s the wrong way to think about this. If he wanted something, he’d get it: I didn’t have the power to stop him. What I needed to think about was what I could manage to get out of this mess. It wasn’t like I was going to run into anyone that high up the Empire’s ranks again anytime soon, so I had to find an angle. I’d bought this opportunity with blood, so I’d be damned if I didn’t make it count. The Black Knight had a lot of pull in War College, I remembered hearing – which made sense, since he more or less commanded the Legions the cadets were being formed to join. Maybe if I played my cards right I could talk him into getting me a place in this year’s classes. At the moment I had almost enough to cover my tuition, but the trip to the Wasteland was another expense, and not a cheap one. I was pretty sure a word from the Empress’ right hand would take care of that swiftly, though. The only other obstacle I could think of was that anyone wanting to go into Praes proper from Callow would need papers, but for once being an orphan would be an advantage: the orphanages were an Imperial institution, so every one of us had been registered at the Governor’s office.

Most Callowans still weren’t registered, since forcing it after the Conquest would have caused the kind of civil unrest that the Empire had aimed to avoid, but it was becoming more common as time passed- there were all kinds of restriction on the kind of offices you could hold if you weren’t. A lot of the older generation muttered under their breath that having your name on Imperial record couldn’t possibly end well, and to be honest I wasn’t sure if they were wrong. I’d served drinks and talked to enough legionaries that I no longer believed that they were always one moment away from malevolently setting fire to the city and dancing in the ashes – they had a better reputation than the city guard, these days – but those records were made for people back in Ater, the Empire’s capital. From what I’d heard of the nobles that dwelled in the City of Black Gates they were not the kind of people you ever wanted to have your name. Even other Praesi spoke of them with distrust.

My blouse was still bloodstained from last night, I saw as I inspected my reflection in the mirror hung up on the wall. There were flecks of dried red on the blue in the shape of the blood spray that had been two men’s lives and I didn’t feel like walking through the streets with that damning mark on my clothes. It looked like they’d thought of everything: there was a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of trousers neatly folded on the dresser. I changed unhurriedly and slipped on my boots before leaving the room, procrastinating out of apprehension. Bad habit, I knew, but given the circumstances I was willing to let it slide.

A short flight of stairs down brought me to the inn’s common room. It was deserted, which was unusual at this time of the day: there should have been travellers from outside the city trickling in and regulars huddled around their usual tables. Laure had been the capital of the Kingdom of Callow, before the Conquest, and even under the Empire it remained one of the wealthiest cities around. Whose pockets that wealth ended up in was another story, but given that we were a major trade centre the good inns should be packed around this time of the year. No trace of the innkeep either, just a lone woman sitting at one of the tables by the hearth. She had a stack of paper around her and was writing on a sheet of parchment, dipping her quill with clockwork regularity. She hadn’t raised her head from her work as I made my way down the stairs, so she must not have heard me.

“ Take a seat,” she spoke calmly, eyes still intent on the parchment.

... Or maybe she had. I claimed the chair across from her, not sure where I was supposed to go from here.

“ The innkeeper will be along momentarily with breakfast,” the stranger said.

I nodded, then felt foolish when I realized she hadn’t so much as looked at me yet.

“ I’m-” I started.

“ I know who you are, Catherine Foundling,” she cut in indifferently.

I raised an eyebrow.

“ This is starting to be a pattern,” I said. “What should I call you?”

“ Scribe.”

Oh. That wasn’t a name, it was a Name. And that’s you shouldn’t mouth off to strangers. Again. The Conquest was laid at the feet of the five Calamities, in the stories: the Black Knight, Warlock, Captain, Ranger and Assassin. The woman in front of me wasn’t one of them, and she didn’t make it to the fore of the legends the way Ranger and Warlock did. I supposed her Role didn’t exactly lend itself to flashy gestures – but she wasn’t an unknown either. It was said that she followed Black around like a second shadow, tidying up everything behind the victories so that it would run smoothly. Thinking about it, I was a little surprised not to have seen her last night. Her actual level of authority in the Empire was subject to debate, but there were few people stupid enough to disagree that getting on her bad side would be a very bad idea. The innkeeper broken the awkward silence – well awkward on my part anyway, she didn’t seem to notice – that settled between us by striding into the room with a plate full of eggs and sausage, sliding it in front of me with a practiced smile.

“ Ma’am,” he greeted me. “Lady Scribe, are you sure I can’t offer you tea or wine?”

“ That won’t be necessary,” she replied.

It was reassuring to see I wasn’t the only one she wouldn’t raise her head for. The man slunk back to his kitchen after a respectful bow, leaving me to dig into my first meal of the day. It wasn’t the fanciest of fares, but it was fresh and I was starving: I’d never eaten a better meal in my life. By the time I was polishing off the last of the sausage Scribe finished whatever it was she was doing, signing at the bottom of the parchment with a flourish before resting the tip of her quill against her inkwell.

“ Black should be back before the evening bell,” she told me. “He’ll be wanting to speak to you.”

I didn’t reply immediately, partially because I wasn’t sure how I felt about the most famous villain of our age wanting to speak to me again but also because I was studying the woman sitting across from me. She was rather plain-faced in appearance, with ink-stained fingers and a diminutive stature. Though given we’re about the same height, maybe I should have used more flattering phrasing. She lacked the presence Black and Captain had shown yesterday, the way they could fill up a room just by standing in it. I would have been skeptical she even had a Name, if not for the way she’d effortlessly picked out my presence earlier. There was something tightly contained about Scribe, and I reminded myself that a Name didn’t have to involve fighting to be dangerous.

“ Any idea what he wants to talk about?” I asked.

“ The matron at your orphanage has been notified you’re still alive,” she replied, ignoring the question entirely. “She was getting worried.”

I let out a vaguely thankful noise. I didn’t dislike Matron Nelter, even if her lecturing sometimes got on my nerves. She didn’t approve of my working at the Rat’s Nest, sure – and would have thrown a fit of epic proportions if she’d been aware I fought in the Pit – but then the Laure House for Tragically Orphaned Girls had a history of setting up its wards for work more glamorous than serving drinks. Girls usually left the orphanage with enough education to pick up a trade or serve as tutors for noble children. That she took the time to get on my case meant that she cared, in her own way. Scribe seemed to have decided our conversation was over, because she pulled out a fresh sheet a parchment from the pile and dipped her quill. As it turned out, she was right about the Knight being back soon: I’d finished the sausage and I was halfway through a mug of tea when he strolled into the common room.

“ Good evening, Catherine,” he greeted me cheerfully. “Scribe.”

“ Black,” the plain-faced woman replied, and I had to give her points for the amount of guts it took to snub the godsdamned Black Knight in favour of a sheet of parchment.

“ The numbers confirm it?” he asked, apparently used to her cool indifference.

“ Yes. Not that it matters, given the confession. Captain?”

“ Having a talk with Orim as of this moment.”

Some of that had gone over my head, but the last name was one I recognized. General Orim – Orim the Grim, his legionnaires called him with a fond smile – was the head of the Fifth Legion, which served as Laure’s garrison. I finished the last of my tea, waiting for my turn.

“ Catherine,” Black said after a heartbeat, turning to face me, “you...”

He paused.

“ Look like you have a question?” he finished.

“ This is going to sound a little strange,” I prefaced myself. “But I mean, I’ve heard stories and I think it needs to be asked. Could save a lot of trouble down the road and all.”

He raised an eyebrow, remaining silent.

“ So, uh, just to be sure,” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to be my long-lost father who put me in an orphanage so I’d be safe from his enemies and is coming to get me now that I’m old enough to take care of myself?”

To my mild horror, I drew a laugh out of the monster sitting across from me. He seemed genuinely amused by the question, so I guessed I was still an orphan. Thank the Heavens for that , I thought. Still, that meant I was now drawing a blank as to why he’d taken an interest in me.

“ No,” he replied, “I’m afraid I had no hand in your conception. Besides, one is never quite old enough to deal with the kind of enemies I have.”

“ I can imagine,” I said, though I really couldn’t.

Couldn’t think of a lot of people who’d worry the man sitting across from me, truth be told. There was only one Duchess left in Callow and the woman in question was Deoraithe, who didn’t really want anything to do with the rest of the country. The idea of her leading a rebellion against the Empire was pretty laughable, and there were no other nobles left with enough pull. The First Prince of the Principate, maybe? Rumours had it she’d finally put an end to their civil war, so they were probably going to start looking at their neighbours again.

“ Speaking of questionable individuals,” he said, “I was hoping we might have a word on the subject of the Governor.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“ I’m told most of the words I’d use for him aren’t supposed to be spoken by proper ladies.”

“ Are you?” he smiled. “A proper lady, that is?”

I snorted. So he wanted to talk about Governor Mazus, huh. I could do that. He might not like what I had to say, but I could do that.

“ He’s probably the most hated man in the Empire,” I told him honestly. “Nobody speaks up because if you do the guards come knocking at your door, but I don’t think there’s a lot of people in Laure who wouldn’t shank him of they thought they could get away with it.”

Black let out a thoughtful noise, sipping at his cup.

“ I was under the impression he was on good terms with the Guilds, at least,” he said.

I shrugged.

“ With the amount of gold he’s been throwing at the guild masters, that’s kind of a given,” I replied. “The few that didn’t want anything to do with him met unfortunate accidents and their replacements were a lot more cooperative.”

“ Unfortunate accidents?” he probed.

“ He’s not even being subtle about it,” I scowled. “Tara Goldeneye – she was in charge of the Spicer’s Guild and told him she’s rather go broke than take his bribes – drowned in a bathtub that barely had a inch of water in it. And don’t even get me started on the city guard.”

“ I take it incidents like yesterday aren’t unheard of?”

“ They do what they’re supposed to, mostly,” I conceded. “But it’s an open secret they’re his thugs and they tend to get rough when they collect the extraordinary taxes.”

His lips thinned.

“ Ah yes, the famous taxes. He’s been making quite a stir back in Ater with those.”

“ Funny the way they’re all temporary but somehow never go away,” I grunted.

The taxes were the main reason Mazus was so hated. Everyone expected whatever Praesi the Empress appointed Governor to try to turn Laure into his personal fiefdom, but after a decade of the Legions running the city people had become used to the people in charge being even-handed. As long as you didn’t make a mess or commit a crime, the legionnaires didn’t really care what Callowans did. Mazus poked his nose in everything, and the nose was usually followed by a hand that grabbing for more gold.

Food prices had been steadily hiking up for the last few years, and I’d heard people complain that merchandise that wasn’t guild-approved was tariffed heavily. And since the guilds took a take of anything they approved – which Mazus got part of, of course – just the cost of joining could put smaller merchants out of business. More than being unfair, the whole thing infuriated me because it was stupid. Laure saw nowhere as much business as it had a decade ago, and these days at least half of the people at the Summer Fair were locals. The man was so focused on squeezing everything he could out of the city that he didn’t realize he was strangling it.

“ It’s sheer idiocy,” Black agreed, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

Could he actually read minds, of had I said any of that out loud?

“ Your face said it all,” the green-eyed man told me with an amused smile.

My pulse quickened. I wasn’t entirely sure he was telling me the truth. But he was agreeing with me. Why? Wouldn’t more gold for the Empire be good from his point of view, regardless of how Mazus got it? Even if the situation ended up blowing up in the Governor’s face, the Legion garrison would be enough to put down the riots. I had a dozen questions on the tip of my tongue, but I wasn’t so sure I should ask them. He’d been reasonable so far, almost affable actually, but it wouldn’t do to forget that the man across from me had brought an entire kingdom to its knees.

Maybe another girl would have thought that the way he kept smiling meant he was my friend, but I didn’t have any of those to confuse him with. And yet, I could feel that same old itch under my skin. The need to know why instead of stopping at “this is how it is”, the compulsion to understand the way everything around me worked. And he’d been the one to make this a dialogue, hadn’t he? He could have made it an interrogation – Hells, he could have asked someone better informed than a sixteen year old orphan girl – but for some reason he’d taken pains to prevent this from being one-sided.

“ If he’s an idiot,” I spoke up against my better judgement, “then why is he Governor?”

Nothing about the Knight’s face visibly changed, but there was a distinct feeling of... satisfaction to him. The kind people got when they were proved right about something.

“ Mazus wasn’t actually expected to make anything of himself here,” he said. “It was a purely political appointment.”

“ The Empress wanted to reward him for something,” I guessed, “so she gave him the richest city in Callow to rule.”

“ It wasn’t a reward,” Black replied, “it was a bribe. His father is a High Lord and after the Conquest we needed to appease them.”

I blinked in surprise.

“ Appease them?” I burst out. “She’s the Empress, why would she need to appease anyone?”

The green-eyed man finished the last of his wine and put the goblet aside.

“ You’re thinking of power as an absolute, but that’s a false perception. If the matron of your orphanage put on a crown and proclaimed herself Governess of Laure, would that somehow grant her authority over the city?”

“ I’m guessing that’s a rhetorical question,” I replied drily.

He hummed in agreement, warming up to his subject.

“ It’s the same with Malicia. Sitting on the throne doesn’t mean all of Praes obeys her every whim. She needs the backing of other people with power or her authority remains little more than a polite fiction.”

His tone of voice wasn’t all that different from the one the better tutors the orphanage hired used when they spoke about their favourite subject, which was just... odd. The image of the middle-aged scholar in charge of our lessons didn’t interpose all that well with that of the villain in front of me.

“ So she needs all the High Lords on her side?” I asked.

A sardonic smile quirked his lips.

“ That would be quite the achievement, given the way they hate each other almost as much as they hate her,” he murmured. “No, she simply needs enough of them under her thumb that the others think rebellion isn’t feasible.”

“ And the best way to get the people she needs on her side is to give them a nice Callowan city to get taxes from,” I frowned. “Even if that means the people who live in it get stuck with a bastard like Mazus.”

“ More or less,” he agreed. “The crown receives a certain part of the taxes he collects, which has been a much larger amount of gold than anticipated for the last few years. Questions have been raised, as a consequence.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“ The Empress isn’t pleased she’s getting more than she thought she would?”

Black’s eyes turned cold.

“ Gold doesn’t grow on trees, Catherine. Concerns have been raised about how well Laure is doing under that kind of a burden.”

I let out a thoughtful noise.

“ You’re worried you’re strangling the golden goose,” I mused.

His hand waved dismissively.

“ That’s part of it, of course, but ultimately it’s a minor issue. The real problem is that he’s been causing unrest.”

“ Not that the idea of the Legion putting down a riot isn’t all kinds of horrifying,” I said, “but aren’t they there exactly to deal with that kind of thing?”

I grimaced at myself, a little worried by how easy it had been to slip into the Imperial mindset. I planned to go into the Legions myself, sure, but I’d made that choice with the idea in mind that when I rose up high enough in the ranks I’d be able to prevent the very kind of thing I was talking about. Black poured himself a fresh cup of wine, silently offering to do the same for me. I shook my head. I wasn’t that I disliked wine – I’d tried it a few times at the Rat’s Nest and found I enjoyed some kinds – but I’d just eaten breakfast and it couldn’t be that late anyway. Praesi started drinking early, though, so I wasn’t exactly surprised he was on his second cup.

“ They could suppress riots easily enough,” Black conceded. “But there would be consequences.”

Should I, or shouldn’t I? Hells, wouldn’t even the most insolent thing I’ve said to him yet.

“ I didn’t think dead Callowans was something you’d worry about all that much, sir.”

I took pains to keep my tone polite. It was one thing to tug the dragon’s tail, another to stick out your tongue at him at the same time.

“ I abhor waste,” the Knight replied, apparently nonplussed I’d just implied he was an unrepentant mass-murderer. I supposed I wasn’t the first to do so. “And all killing the rioters would accomplish is driving the resentment underground.”

He put aside his cup.

“ The problem is broader in scope, Catherine. Take two nations, of roughly the same population. One annexes the other, but has no real legitimacy in doing so other than force of arms. How does one keep the annexed nation from rebelling?”

I wasn’t sure why he was keeping the names of Praes and Callow out of his hypothetical exercise given how glaringly obvious it was what we were talking about. Detachment, maybe? I guess it was easier to talk about... unpleasant measures if I wasn’t outright talking about my countrymen. Still, that was a mighty thing fig leaf.

“ Use the Legions – I mean, the conquering nation’s armies – to turn the screws on anybody who steps out of line. Hang enough people and nobody’s going to pick a fight with you,” I said after a moment.

In some ways it was a lot easier to rule when you were Evil. Pesky little concepts like justice or not murdering your way out of situations weren’t something you had to worry about.

“ Ah, rule through fear,” he mused. “That works, to an extent. It’s a delicate balance to maintain between having people fear you enough they won’t revolt and them being so terrified they think they have nothing to lose. Which is why, when someone does drive the people to that level of terror, it is necessary to step in.”

It clicked into place, like one of those fancy metal puzzles they sold in the marketplace.

“ Mazus,” I realized.

“ The policy of the Empire is to use Callow, not abuse,” Black said. “The Governor is doing more damage than he knows.”

I kept the mild sense of disgust that caused in me away from my face. Who even says something like that? Yet even of that was still fairly evil, as far as policies went, at least it wasn’t stupid. I’d pick having in charge a competent monster over a vicious idiot any day.

“ You really think riots in Laure could spread all over?” I asked.

“ The key to the Empire maintaining control over the lands it conquered isn’t fear, my dear, it’s apathy. As long as the common people can go about their business and live their lives mostly untroubled, what do they care who their taxes go to? The Governor is making people care about who rules them again, and that is a very dangerous thing.”

“ Huh. That explains a lot, actually,” I admitted.

For one, it finally shed light on why the Legions of Terror – who took their cues from the Black Knight – had been so hands off compared to Mazus’ tenure as ruler of Laure. That the Governor wasn’t exactly an ally of the Empress also accounted for why the legionnaires never let an occasion to stick it to Mazus’ cronies go by. I’d put it down to a mixture of disliking the man as much as we did and basic decency but it made sense there were also politics at work behind the scenes.

“ There’s also a subtler danger, and that one is the reason I came here personally,” Black added after a moment.

I raised an eyebrow, curious but deciding I’d pushed enough for the day. I didn’t know how much rope he was willing to give me, but I had a feeling I’d already drawn enough to hang myself with.

“ Think of it as a story, if you will,” the green-eyed man murmured. “A city, once the capital of a thriving kingdom, now ruined and oppressed. Its people are crushed under an ever-increasing burden and there is no hope in sight. Enter...”

“ The hero,” I finished just as quietly.

Shit. That did have the potential of becoming a nasty situation. Just like if you left dry firewood piled up long enough eventually there’d be a spark that set it on fire, if a city like what he’d just described was left unattended too long eventually a Role would emerge to fill the void. Would the hero beat the Black Knight? I doubted it. The last seven to try hadn’t, after all, and I’d heard the one from five years ago hadn’t even been about for a week before Assassin got him. If he riled up the people in the city enough, though, he could do a lot of damage before being put down. This was on another level, though – the Knight wasn’t even fighting a hero, he was making sure the situation where a hero would be created never came to be.

“ Heavens wept,” I said softly. “No wonder you kill them every time. The arrow’s nocked long before you let the sparrow fly.”

Black’s smile turned sharp as a knife.

“ Just because I’m winning doesn’t mean I won’t cheat.”

“ So why are you telling me all this?” I asked, waving my hand to encompass the whole conversation. “Wouldn’t that make me a liability? You don’t seem like the kind of person that leaves loose ends behind.”

He picked up his cup and sipped.

“ Because you remind me of someone,” he replied. “And because after you accompany me to the banquet, I will have an offer for you.”

I scowled at the presumption I’d just go with him. It wasn’t like he wasn’t right – even if he didn’t have the authority to force the matter, I was already curious enough to agree – but rubbing it in my face that I didn’t have much of a choice just made him an ass.

“ A banquet?” I grunted. “Sounds fancy. Should I be bringing anything?”

“ It’ll be the Governor’s banquet,” he mused. “So if nothing else, I’d bring the knife.”

Chapter 3: Party

“ I see I’ll have to take drastic measures to ensure intelligent conversation around here.”
– Dread Empress Maledicta II, before having the tongues of the entire Imperial court ripped out

“So, aren’t we a little underdressed for a palace visit?” I asked.

I was still wearing the shirt and trousers they’d had laid out for me in my room – and I was uncomfortably aware of exactly how well it fit. Did I want to know how they’d gotten my size? Probably not , I grimaced. I’d had enough shocks over the last few days as it was. Still, the dark grey cotton was more comfortable than anything I’d worn in a while. Hopefully I’d get to keep it after tonight, regardless of what the man’s “proposition” was.

“Armour goes with everything,” Black replied dryly.

He was still wearing the same plate set as last night. Now that I could get a good look in sunlight I was sure it was, well, regular steel plate. It could have been enchanted, of course – probably was – but it wasn’t the dark obsidian or whatnot you’d have expected a man in his position to wear. His belt buckle didn’t even have a skull on it! That had to break some kind of Imperial regulation.

“ I guess it does, if you’re out to stab people,” I muttered, eyes watching his face closely to see if that got a reaction out of him.

Nothing. Not all that surprising: I was pretty good at picking up on tells in fights – I’d had to learn, to make it as far in the Pit as I had – but the social stuff had never been my strong suit. A regrettable lack of awareness and natural predisposition for insolence, our etiquette tutor had called it. I’d called him quite a few less polite things behind his back after that lesson, not that it made what he’d said any less true. We were drawing attention, I saw from the corner of my eye. People ducked into their houses and locked their doors when they saw two dozen soldiers escorting a pair of strangers – Scribe had stayed behind – if you were Lakeside or even Marketside, but we’d left both of those behind a while back for the sprawling avenues of Whitestone. This whole part of Laure was noble properties and guildhalls, all built in the pale sandstone that was the place’s signature.

It hadn’t expanded in the last few hundred years, mostly because nobles had passed a tricky little bit of law to keep everyone else out: every addition to the quarter had to be built with the stone from the original quarry that had made up the other buildings and, what did you know, that quarry had gone dry over a century back. Whoever had come up with that probably thought they were clever – I mostly thought they were an asshole. Wasn’t that always the way with nobles, though? You got a title and a little land, then all these funny ideas started creeping in. Ideas like having a separate watch just for the Whitestone, and these were the very men and women staring at us right now. They kept their distance, of course, but there were more and more of them gathering every time we passed by a cluster of chainmail-decked cronies.

“ They gonna give us trouble?” I grunted as we passed what must have been at least twenty nervous-looking watchmen.

Black cocked his head to the side.

“ That seems unlikely,” he murmured. “At best they’ll try to send warning to their owners in the palace, but as it happens the entrance to it has already been secured.”

I felt my brows raise.

“ There’s gotta be at least one of those with a sweetheart that works as a cook or a chambermaid,” I told him flatly. “They’ll know where the servant entrances are.”

The pale-skinned man granted me an amused look.

“ And legionaries should be barring those gates as well, Catherine.”

Ah. Of course he’d have thought of that. Renowned evil strategist and all. I looked away so he couldn’t see my cheeks flush.

“ And here’s Sabah,” he mused out loud. “Everything is going as planned, it seems.”

The latter sentence he said with an odd tone, like he was making a joke. I didn’t quite get what the humorous part was so I just shot him a quizzical glance. I didn’t think I’d met a Sabah before, but the silhouette that popped around the corner of Peony boulevard was easily recognizable. The olive-skinned woman better known as Captain still disdained wearing a helmet, but today she wasn’t sporting a cloak – it was painfully easy to see exactly how tall and broad she was. Definitely over eight feet, and with more muscles to her frame than any orc I’d seen, and orcs were built big . Just the sight of her was enough to scatter the few watchmen still sticking around, though she ignored them and headed straight for us.

“ Black,” she greeted him. “Miss Foundling.”

Her voice was deep, though the sing-song Praesi accent was still recognizable under it. I nodded back, taking the occasion to get a closer look at her. Strong nose and deep-set blue eyes with delicate eyelashes that seemed almost out of place on a face that, well, brutish. She looked more like an overgrown caricature of a person than someone real, and the enormous hammer hanging off her back did little to dispel that appearance.

“ Orim has his legionaries in place?” the Knight asked mildly.

She nodded.

“ He was unusually eager to lock down the palace,” she noted. “Mazus managed to get on his bad side.”

That certainly explained why the legionaries I served drinks too rarely had anything good to say about the Governor. That kind of dislike tended to trickle down the ranks, and I’d gotten the impression that General Orim was a fairly popular leader. So they covered all the ways in and out of the palace. Now the real question was, what for? That strange little talk I’d had with the Black Knight back at the inn had left me with the impression that Mazus was on the outs with the Empress. She was bound to have other means to discipline the man than sending her right hand to do the job, though. A pointed letter with the Imperial seal on it would have done it just as well, and without involving all the cloak-and-dagger business that was going on right now. Is he getting his governorship revoked? That would be pretty ideal, as far as I was concerned. Laure would go back under martial law until the next Praesi bookend from the Wasteland arrived, and with a little luck the next idiot up in the palace would be more competent than this one. They wouldn’t have gone through all that trouble if that was all they’d planned, though, I decided. Not unless they expected trouble.

“ Now don’t you just look like you’re planning murder,” a voice mused, breaking me out of my thoughts.

Both Black and Captain were looking at me, split somewhere between curious and entertained.

“ That’s a bit rich coming from you, sir,” I replied, my mouth forming the words before my mind could intervene. Captain snorted, and hopefully that meant I wouldn’t get murdered in broad daylight.

“ The girl’s not wrong,” she gravelled. “I’ve never seen you looking like you’re not up to something sinister.”

The Knight wrinkles his nose in distaste. “’Sinister’? Wekesa’s a bad influence on you. And to think you were so respectful when we first met.”

The gargantuan woman rolled her eyes and I clenched my jaw so my disbelief wouldn’t show. I’d never seriously imagined I’d end up meeting any of the Calamities, but the few times I’d thought about it there’d been a lot less... ribbing involved. Banter was something people did, not whatever they were. Besides, weren’t heroes supposed to be the witty ones? The best villains got was monologues, in the stories, or maybe a disbelieving line about how absorbing power from the eldritch abomination bound in stone couldn’t possibly have gone wrong. I pinched myself discreetly, just in case Zacharis had messed up my healing big time and I was having a particularly realistic fever dream. Captain took a look at the sky and frowned.

“ We need to get a move on, to get here before the little shit’s guests are drunk,” she grunted.

Had she just called the Imperial Governor of Laure a little shit?

“ I think you might be my favourite villain,” I told the woman very honestly.

The Praesi’s lips twitched.

“ We should keep her,” she gravelled at Black. “Everybody’s been too afraid of you to mouth off since the Fields.”

“ Someone forgot to inform Warlock, clearly” the Knight muttered. “But you’re right – we might have to kill a few to get them in the proper state of mind if they’re too sloshed.”

And just like that, it felt like someone had poured cold water down my back. The casual way the green-eyed man had just referred to murder had jarred me back into reality. Villains. Funny and almost likeable, but still villains. I’d seen beggar cripples Lakeside with missing limbs or a body entirely covered in burns gotten during the Conquest, through the handiwork of those two nonchalant people standing next to me. Just because they hate the same people as me doesn’t mean we’re on the same side. It wouldn’t do to forget that. I was joining the Legions to exploit the system the Empire had built, not became another component of it. I kept my discomfort away from my face and followed the two of them when they started strolling towards the palace, the Blackguards doing the same without a word.

It was a little eerie how silent they were, actually. I couldn’t recall a single one of them saying anything, or seeing one of their faces under the helmets.

There were rumours that all servants and bodyguards to the Imperial nobility had their tongues ripped out, but I had a hard time believing that. People peddling those stories were the same kind that said the reason the Dread Empress was so beautiful was that she bathed in the blood of the innocent. Which is all kinds of stupid. First off, there was bound to be a limited supply of innocents in Ater. Second, a bathtub-full of blood was a lot . Unless they had some sort of special spell to drain blood from people – which I wouldn’t put past Praesi, on second thought – that meant killing at least three adults every time, and unless the Empress wanted to go through the rest of her day caked in dry blood she’d have to take another bath after. Seemed like a lot of trouble for a dubious reason, especially since beauty wasn’t exactly a requirement for ruling. Emperor Nefarious, who’d been on the throne before Malicia, was said to have been a particularly ugly old man with a hook nose.

“ I hear you fight in one of the rings,” Captain gravelled suddenly.

I eyed the tall warrior in surprise. Hadn’t expected the woman to try to get a conversation going again, but I supposed that even after my unpleasant realization from earlier chit chat was still better than walking all the way to the palace in silence.

“ I, er, do,” I agreed. “Though I wasn’t aware you guys knew about those.”

Captain frowned.

“ Why wouldn’t we?” she asked, glancing at Black.

“ Fighting rings are illegal under Callowan law,” he told her.

“ Huh,” the warrior grunted. “Barbaric.”

I held back a scowl. Not sure I want to hear that from a woman whose homeland practices human sacrifice. Still, it had come out of the blue that the Imps were aware of the Pit. The reason the fighting rings were underground was because they were illegal , after all. Booker wouldn’t have bothered to pay off the guards otherwise. Clearly Mazus must have known there were some, since he got a cut, but there was a difference between knowing about the Pit and knowing about the fight lineup.

“ So Booker pays you off too?” I asked.

“ In a manner of speaking,” Black replied. “You could say we own her.”

“ Wait, if you guys run her then why is she paying off Mazus? Wouldn’t that cut into your profits?”

“ You’re assuming that our people and the Governor’s are the same.”

Huh. I was reluctantly amused that Booker was getting fucked over by the Praesi on two fronts, truth be told. She’d always seemed so in control: it was a pleasant surprise she was being handled the way she handled just about everyone else.

“ Anything else you guys are running on the down low?” I asked.

The Knight smiled but kept silent. I frowned.

“ You wouldn’t bother with small-time stuff like a fighting ring if you didn’t have the bigger dogs on a leash,” I realized. “Shit. How much of the underworld do you actually own?”

Black’s smile broadened and he turned to Captain. “Told you she was sharp,” he said.

The armoured woman nodded, studying me with a strange look on her face, but the compliment did little to stymie my curiosity.

“ The Thieve’s Guild, for sure,” I muttered. “The Smugglers too?”

The green-eyed villain shrugged. “We have a working relationship with all of the so-called “Dark Guilds”,” he admitted. “Though I could do without the melodramatic titles they grant themselves.”

That was more than a little ironic, coming from a man who’d named his personal bodyguards the Blackguards and dressed them up according to a colour theme.

“ That doesn’t really make sense to me,” I grunted after a moment. “The Empire’s the law , why would they work with you?”

“ You’re thinking in terms of legal and illegal,” Black simply replied. “You should be thinking in terms of Good and Evil.”

Oh. Put like that it made a little more sense. I supposed the kind of people who ran Laure’s less savoury parts would see people like the Calamities as natural allies. And yet, this was still Imperial territory. Why would they allow anyone to run thieves and thugs on their ground, even if they got a cut? “Merchants they rob still have that much less to pay taxes with,” I pointed out.

Captain seemed to have lost interest in the conversation, eyes wandering as she surveyed the streets. Couldn’t really blame her: we’d kind of wandered away from me fighting in the Pit.

“ When Laure was ruled by King Robert,” Black said, “the Thieve’s Guild still existed. Correct?”

I nodded. That was common enough knowledge – word had it the Thieves had been in business since the the first house in Laure had been built. Likely that was just a band of criminals giving themselves a mystique, but there was no denying they’d been around for ages.

“ And yet, like all his predecessors, he aggressively pursued it’s dismantlement,” the Knight continued. “The reality of it is that there is no city in the world where such activities don’t take place. Trying to eradicate them would simply drive a band of individuals highly proficient at sneaking about in the arms of the first hero to show up.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. The way the man thought was starting to give me a headache.

“ So you make a deal with them,” I guessed. “They don’t steal from the Empire and you look the other way?”

“ There are quotas,” Black replied. “And all killings of public figures had to be vetted beforehand.”

There was a sort of pragmatic sense to it, but it still raised my hackles. The Empire wasn’t even observing it’s own laws. The Praesi weren’t so much keeping order as they were making what already existed more orderly. What’s the point of having all that power if you don’t use it to fix the parts of the world that need fixing? Thankfully, I was spared any more small talk by the fact that we’d finally arrived at the palace.

The Royal Palace was all arcs and windows, built in dark grey granite instead of the sandstone that infested the rest of this part of the city. There was no stone of that kind in Callow itself – word had it it had been built from the remnants of the flying fortress of a Dread Empress when it had crashed over the old palace. It was an impressive mass, and I couldn’t help but stare as we passed by the large ponds that dotted the front of it in arcane patterns. There was a low wall circling the entire thing with a large gate in the middle, but the people keeping watch at the entrance were not city guard: a dozen legionnaires were standing at attention in front, decked out in full kit.

“ I guess now’s as good a time as any to ask why you brought me along,” I said as our group headed towards them.

Black hummed. “We’re going to ask a few pointed questions to the Governor,” he replied.

I raised an eyebrow. “So I just stand there in silence and observe?”

“ On the contrary,” the Knight murmured. “You’re welcome to interrupt as much as you like.”

Well, wasn’t that ominous. “You’re testing me,” I grunted,

“ Life is a test,” the green-eyed man replied easily.

I rolled my eyes. “I hope you didn’t have to meditate under a waterfall to come up with that one.”

Captain snorted, though the conversation was cut short as we passed the legionaries. They saluted in silence as we strolled by, taking a paved avenue to the palace proper. The entire place was deserted: I’d have expected servants to be milling about every which way while the Governor was receiving guests, but we were entirely alone. There was light and the sound of chatter trickling out through the open windows, gone as soon as we entered the torch-lit corridors of the inside. Black had come to the head of the party, taking one turn after another without hesitation: this wasn’t his first time here, I guessed. Spent most of my time eyeing the painting and sculptures that covered every open space, noting that more than a few of them were in the Free Cities style – painted marble, usually of naked people in twisted-up poses.

“ Ah, here we are,” the Knight mused out loud as we arrived to a pair of closed wooden doors.

The noise of chatter and laughter coming from behind it made it clear we’d arrived at the banquet hall. Yet another staple of the Kingdom that was now just another trophy in the Governor’s hands. “Captain, if you would do the honours?”

The gargantuan woman stepped forward, laying the palms of her hands against the wood and pushing. The massive doors swung open briskly, hitting the walls with a booming crack. There must have been at least fifty people inside, servants aside. Men and women dressed in colourful imported silks, drowning in jewel-incrusted gold: most of them over forty, though I could see a handful of younger ones. There were three long tables forming a U, the man of the hour having taken residence at the head of the crowd: his dark-skinned stood out starkly across the pale Callowans in attendance. Idly I rubbed my thumb on the pommel of the knife strapped at my side – I wasn’t sure whether Black’s mention of bringing it had been a joke or not, but I certainly felt safer standing this close to the pack of cronies with a weapon at my hip.

The noise was snuffed out of the room the moment we walked in, the eyes of every single guest in attendance glued to the Knight’s face. A few glanced at Captain and fewer at me – it was a little irritating to be dismissed so blatantly, but I had a feeling I’d be the one getting the last laugh tonight.

“ Out,” Black simply said. “All of you.”

I’d never seen a room clear so quickly before. I could feel the same strange weight I’d felt last night when he’d stared me down in the alley, but this time it wasn’t directed at me. It was like swimming just outside of a current: the pull was there, but it wasn’t dragging me in. All those peacocks dressed in silk and carrying enough gold in rings and necklaces to feed a family for a decade were hurrying out without even bothering to pretend they weren’t terrified. There was something darkly satisfying about seeing the rich and powerful of Laure jostling each other in their haste to get out the door as fast as they physically could. I didn’t hide my smile. I’m not here to make friends, and even if I was there’s no one here I’d want to count as one.

“ So it’s a Name thing, the way you mess with people’s heads,” I mused. “Seems like a useful trick.”

The green-eyed man shot me an amused look.

“ A fairly basic use of my power,” he replied, looking over the fleeing throng, “but I won’t deny it can be entertaining on occasion.”

It couldn’t have been more than thirty heartbeats when the only people left in the once-crowded banquet hall were Black, Captain, the Governor and myself. I took the occasion to have a closer look at the ruler of Laure, now that I was actually in the same room as the damned man. Governor Mazus was a tall man in his late thirties, dark-skinned like so many of the Praesi were. His hair was cut short and his beard cropped close, framed by the long gold earrings dangling from his ears. His robes were a riot of green and gold silk, and I was willing to bet diamonds to piglets that some of the stitches on them were actual gold thread. There was polished quality to the Governor, like every detail of his outfit and appearance had been attended to carefully. He can certainly afford the servants to do it.

“ Amadeus,” the Governor said, outwardly unaffected by the interruption as he leaned back on his chair while loosely holding a sculpted silver goblet. “An unexpected pleasure. I would have prepared a more fitting reception, if you’d sent word ahead of your visit.”

The ice in Black’s eyes could have frozen boiling water.

“ There are very few people who get to call me by that name, Mazus,” he replied very quietly, “and you were never one of them.”

There was no hiding the flinch that went through him at that, though the aristocrat’s face went blank immediately after as if to pretend it had never happened. I took notes: one of these days I was going to manage to get a flinch out of assholes without raising my voice too.

“ Ah, of course,” the Governor said. “I’ve had a little too much wine, it seems. To what do I owe the privilege of your presence, Lord Black?”

“ The taxes you owe the Tower are late, Governor.”

Mazus let out a regretful sigh.

“ As I already informed Her Most Dreadful Majesty, the convoy was waylaid by bandits. I’ve already drafted extraordinary taxes to remedy to that, but the burned Callowans are being obstructive. Borders on treason, really.”

Not that it matters, given the confession , Scribe had said back at the inn. The pieces were starting to come together, and what I was beginning to think was going to happen to Mazus was enough to smother the cold rage that flared up when he called it treasonous that the people of Laure didn’t want their children to starve. I could have let the smarminess go, but really why bother? Black had already as good as said he wanted me to interrupt whenever I felt like it.

“ Really?” I said. “Bandits attacking an Imperial tax convoy? He’s supposed to buy that ? They’re outlaws, not idiots. They’d be swimming neck-deep in legionnaires before the month was done.”

The aristocrat narrowed his eyes at me, apparently unused at that kind of insolence coming from one of the people he ruled over.

“ I care little if you pick up stray dogs off the streets, Lord Black, but perhaps you should muzzle this one before she gets her tongue ripped out.”

Oh, he did not just say that.

“ Call me a dog again and I’m going to strangle you with your own intestines, you filthy Praesi prick,” I promised, meaning every word of it.

Mazus sputtered.

“ You’re-”

“ Callowan?” I interrupted. “A girl? Nobody important? All true. But if I were you, the thing I’d worry about is carrying a knife .”

“ I’d take that warning seriously if I were you, Mazus,” Black mused from my side. “I’ve known her for a day and she already has a body count.”

He sneered.

“ Raising a hand to an Imperial Governor will get you drawn and quartered, girl. Your bravado does you little credit.”

“ Unless, of course,” Black murmured, “said Governor has committed high treason.”

Mazus paled.

“ That’s a serious accusation,” he replied after a moment. “Making it without proof would have consequences.”

“ Oh, we’re still talking in hypotheticals,” the Knight demurred. “But if say, a hypothetical governor were to report his due to the Tower had been robbed, it would be possible that the Empress would get curious and send people to look into the matter.”

“ Sounds like she’d be a little ticked off,” I contributed with a hard smile. “Hypothetically.”

“ The Empress has little patience for those who cross her, much less those doing it so gauchely,” the green-eyed man agreed. “Now, imagine that these bandits were found, and that when... properly motivated, they had a story to tell. Would you care to guess what that story is, Catherine?”

“ Someone paid them to rob the convoy,” I grunted, the words flowing out easily. “Someone who’d then get a cut of the gold and buy their silence with the rest of it.”

Black smiled, lean and mean.

“ A little too clever to be a dog, don’t you think?”

I stepped closer to the tables, grabbing an empty goblet and a pitcher of wine before pouring myself drink. I wasn’t going to lie to myself and pretend I wasn’t enjoying every moment of this – it was payback for every time we’d had half-portions at the orphanage because food prices had hiked up, retribution for every time I’d seen the city guard rough up a shopkeeper late paying his taxes.

“ People will say anything under torture,” Mazus finally said. “I look forward to your trying to convince a court it’s enough to have me put away.”

I frowned, but took a sip of wine – fruity and strong, probably not from Callow. Figured the bastard would be drinking imported stuff. Black wasn’t an idiot: he wouldn’t have strolled in here so confidently if Mazus was going to get away with it all, and I was more than willing to wait another few moments to see that veneer of confidence stripped away from the man’s face.

“ The Empress had taken a personal interest,” the Knight said coldly. “There is no need for a trial when the sentence has already been determined.”

The Governor sneered. “This will be the ruin of her, you imbecile. My father will whip up the Truebloods in a frenzy when word gets out.”

“ Really?” I choked out with a laugh. “That’s your defence – wait ’til my dad hears about this?”

“ He has something of a point, Catherine,” Black said. “Or he would, if High Lord Igwe wasn’t already under arrest himself.”

It was the second time that night I saw Mazus blanch, and it was every bit as delightful as the first.

“ You’re mad,” the Governor whispered.

“ Ever a subject of debate, I’m assured,” the dark-haired man replied with a bland smile. “Truthfully, Mazus, I’m suprised. You’ve always been a little slow but this? How did you think it was going to end?”

“ With me Chancellor,” the other Praesi snarled. “It’s just a matter of time until one of us claims the Role, you filthy upstart. You can’t destroy a Name.”

“ You can’t buy one either,” the Knight replied. “Though that hardly matters now. Tell me, Catherine, how should a ruler deal with treason?”

I shrugged, feeling the weight of the Governor’s gaze on me.

“ I’m told Imperial policy about that involves heads and pikes,” I mused. “Though that always struck me as a little tacky. It’s not like you can tell whose head it was, a few weeks in. The crows tend to take care of that.”

Mazus slowly forced his spine to straighten and his hands to stop shaking.

“ Fine,” he sneered. “I was caught. So be it. Unlike peasants, my breed knows how to go when the game is up. Have the mahogany chest in my rooms fetched, I’ll drink the deathleaf extract with my wine.”

Black laughed and unlike the few laughs I’d heard from him before this one was a wintry, sharp thing.

“ You don’t seem to understand your situation, Mazus,” he smiled. “You belong to us, now. Your life, your death – all ours. And you’re not dying a dignified death sitting on your throne. It’s the gallows for you, Governor of Laure.”

The Blackguards fanned into the room at Captain’s order. Mazus tried to get up, eyes white and wild, but by the time he’d pushed back his chair there was a pair of plate-wearing soldiers grabbing his shoulders.

“ No,” he screamed. “Black, you can’t – you wouldn’t dare-”

They dragged him out of the room, his screams of protests echoing even as he disappeared into the corridor. I put down my goblet of wine, leaving it half-full. I felt a little guilty at the waste, but considering the banquet tables were full of food I was hardly the worst offender tonight.

“ So,” I said calmly. “Now is when you make your pitch, I’m guessing?”

Chapter 4: Name

“ Power is mostly a matter of making the right corpses at the right time.”
– Dread Empress Malicia the First

My words echoed in the now-emptied hall, and I had to hold back a wince when I realized how confrontational I’d sounded. Matter-of-fact, maybe, but there’d been a distinctly accusatory undertone to my voice I wished I could take back – not because I hadn’t meant it, but because pressing the green-eyed man standing in front of me seemed.... ill-advised. Too late to put the pot back together, though. Might as well go all out.

“ So first you talk me into killing the guards,” I noted. “They had it coming, sure, but would I have made that call if you weren’t egging me on? Not so sure. So now here I am, hands bloodied and not quite sure where to go from there.”

I paused, expecting a falsely-offended denial. Black remained silent, though, and his face was still as a pond on a windless night: anything I’d see on there would be nothing more than a reflection of my own expectations. The Knight glanced at Captain, who was looming by the door, and offered her a half-nod. She left the room without a word, closing the massive doors behind her. The sound of the wooden gates closing shut in her wake was oddly sinister.

“ You were getting to a point, I believe,” Black prompted me, reaching for a glass and pouring himself a drink.

I steeled my spine and pushed on. “You might have done all that for the shits and giggles – I mean, I’ve heard weirder about villains – but you took me here tonight. Had me front and centre the whole time you were playing with a man I’d cheerfully stab given half a chance. You’ve got an angle at play, and it involves me agreeing to something.”

The pale-skinned man pulled back a bench and sat astride it with cool elegance, gesturing for me to do the same. I could have circled the room and sat across from him, but that would have been playing his game and I’d done quite enough of that tonight. I kicked back the Governor’s padded seat and plopped myself onto it with the closest thing to nonchalance I could muster with my heart beating in my ears like it currently was. I was all too aware I was playing with fire at the moment, but what else could I do? Some part of me felt backed into a corner, and I’d ever only reacted one way to that: come out swinging, sometimes yelling as loud as I could.

“ You’re right, to an extent,” Black acknowledged, shooting me an amused look at my choice of seat. “But also wrong. What you so quaintly call my “pitch” started the moment I came across you in that alley.”

I frowned. Now that I thought of it, what were the odds that he’d run into me just when I was stuck in a losing fight? The guards hadn’t seemed like they’d been sent there on purpose, but how hard could it be to –

“ I did not, in fact, arrange your little scuffle,” he interrupted my thoughts, tone flat.

I kept my face blank. “You could be lying.”

“ I am a splendid liar,” he agreed pleasantly. “But I don’t bother when the truth serves my purposes just as well. As for happening upon you in that particular moment – well, coincidences are hardly unusual when one has a Role like mine.”

“ To take the mantle of a Name is to embrace the strands of Fate,” I quoted quietly. It was rare for the House of Light preachers to have a sermon on the subject of Roles, but compared to their usual fare it was interesting enough that the sentence stuck out easily in my memory. Black’s eyes turned cold.

“ Fate is the coward’s way out, Catherine,” he spat out. “It is the denial of personal responsibility. Every decision I have made was my own choice, and all consequences that come from it are on my head.”

“ Considering the kind of things you’ve done,” I quietly said, “I’m not sure that’s a selling point.”

The flash of anger I’d seen in him was gone as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by the usual indifferent facade. Did I just see what he actually looks like under the mask, or did I just happen to find a delicate subject? Neither option was particularly comforting.

“ I don’t expect you to love the Empire,” he said. “You’ve lived your entire life under its boot, and that is not a comfortable place to be.”

“ You don’t get fair when you lose the war,” I replied, echoing my thoughts from yesterday.

He took a sip of wine, making a face at the taste. “I had an interesting conversation with Scribe, on our way to Laure. She believes that the denarii you have stashed at the orphanage are so you can leave the city and start over elsewhere.”

I wish I could say I was surprised he knew about the money, but given that he’d addressed me by my name the first time we’d ever come to face I really wasn’t. He must have had someone in the orphanage – it wouldn’t even be hard to accomplish, the Laure House for Tragically Orphaned Girls was an Imperial institution to start with. Why, though, was a better question. Why would the Black Knight pay any attention to the goings-on in one the city’s orphanages?

“ And what was your guess?” I asked instead.

“ Scribe’s one of the most intelligent women I’ve ever met,” he mused, “but she’s never had a home, you see. She doesn’t understand what it’s like, to see a place falling to pieces and need to fix it.”

I met his eyes, green to brown, and he smiled.

“ You’re saving up for tuition at the War College,” Black spoke into the empty room, his quiet voice somehow managing to fill the emptiness. “You’re nearly done, too – a few more months and you’ll have enough put aside for both the semester and the trip there.”

A shiver went up my spine, and this time there were no Name tricks to blame for it. Two days I’d known the man, and already he’d already pegged what I wanted perfectly. My hand fell down to the dagger at my hip, thumb rubbing the pommel almost without realizing it. The feeling of the wrapped leather against my finger grounded me, a physical sensation to chase the almost eerie atmosphere the scene had taken.

“ That’s the plan,” I agreed, managing to keep my voice steady by the grace of the Heavens. “I was under the impression that the Legions take Callowans too, now – or was I wrong?”

“ You are correct,” he replied. “Though few ever take the opportunity. So why would you?”

I shrugged. “I have a talent for scrapping. Seems like I’d be a good fit.”

I wasn’t good enough of a liar to get away with an outright lie, but a half-truth might manage to pull through. There were other ways to get higher up in the ranks of the Empire, after all, even for Callowans. I’d chosen the Legions as my path up because, at the end of the day, fighting was my talent I was most confident in. The green-eyed man sighed.

“ Catherine, I’ve done you the courtesy of not taking you for an imbecile,” he murmured. “This conversation will go much more smoothly if you afford me the same.”

Ah. So much for that, then. He seemed more irritated than angry at my attempt – I supposed lying wasn’t much of a sin, by Praesi standards.

“ Fine,” I grunted. “You want to hear the truth? I think the way the Empire rules over Callow is fucked. At best you’re brutally fair, at worst you get types like Mazus who think it’s their gods-given right to do as much damage as possible. I don’t give a shit whether we pay our taxes to the Tower or not, but someone has to rein in the idiots when they get vicious and the Legion is my best bet to get into that place.”

The man’s lips stretched into that mean little number he’d pulled out on the Governor earlier. Well, I had a good run. I’ll try to give him a scar to remember me by before my body gets dumped in the lake , I decided, fingers tightening around the knife.

“ Most people sharing your opinion would try to become a hero,” he said instead of unsheathing his sword.

I snorted. “And what, try to restore the Kingdom? We’re fresh out of royals and even if I managed to dig up some claimant getting him on the throne would be a bloody mess. How many thousands would die, fighting the Empire? More than it’s worth. And let’s not pretend you wouldn’t burn everything to the ground on your way out.” I offered a grim smile to the monster. “I’d just be good sense, for you lot: make us a weaker target from when you invade again, a few years down the line. Since you’re not doing us the favour of crumbling by yourselves, I’d better make peace with the fact that the Empress is in charge – she’s not going anywhere.”

The black-haired killer set down his cup and let out a low, almost lazy laugh. I scowled at the sound: I hadn’t been joking, and this wasn’t exactly a laughing matter.

“ I was wrong,” Black said, though he didn’t sound like he was admitting an error. “You never could have become a hero. You lack the mindset for it.”

I bared my teeth. “And to think you gave me all that sweet talk about ‘what separates people who have a Name from people who don’t.’ Way to break my heart.”

“ Allow me to make up for it, then,” he replied. “I’d like to offer you a job.”

Ah, and there it was. The end game he’d been driving his cart to all this time.

“ I’m a little curious as to what you’re actually going to offer,” I admitted. “Training with the Blackguard? You’re bound to have potential recruits with less baggage.”

“ I am,” the Knight murmured, “looking for a Squire.”

He didn’t have to raise his voice to make the capitalized letter clear. A Name. Shit. He was offering me a Name? Could he even do that?

“ I thought people with Names picked themselves,” I croaked out, mouth suddenly gone dry.

“ They do, to an extent,” he agreed amiably. “But you have the potential, and given the... intertwined natures of that Role and mine, I have a degree of influence over the nomination.”

I didn’t think he was lying, not that I really believed I would have been able to tell if he was. Well, at least it looks like I’m not getting my throat slit. Not immediately, anyway. The evening’s already looking up.

“ And what do you want in exchange?” I asked, trying to keep the suspicion out of my voice.

The green-eyed man sighed. “I’m not a trader hawking over merchandise, Catherine,” he replied. “As Squire you would be my apprentice, in a way. My responsibility. I wouldn’t have made the offer if I didn’t believe you would be an asset.”

My mind spun and I closed my eyes, overwhelmed by the possibilities he’d just opened. If I had a Name... I’d bypass the Imperial hierarchy entirely, just by saying yes. Squire wasn’t exactly the most powerful of the Names out there but it would lead to something else and until then I’d be at the side of the second most powerful person in the Empire, learning all I could. All the ins and outs of the court, all the war tricks and connections that I wouldn’t get from books or even the instructors at the War College. I might be in a place to do some good in a decade instead of three. Less, if I somehow distinguish myself.

“ You want the answer now,” I said, the tone half-question and half-statement.

“ One way or another, I’ll need your decision before you leave this room,” he acknowledged.

Heavens forgive me, but I wanted this. Wanted it so very badly. That was the part that was making me balk, though: I wasn’t this lucky, never had been. There must have been something in it for him I couldn’t see yet, some clause or trap I’d only grasp when it was too late.

“ And if I say no?”

One girl found floating by the docks, missing a throat. Wouldn’t be the first time someone dumped a body in the Silver Lake, wouldn’t be the last.

He shrugged. “You return to the orphanage. I’ll see to it that you’re put on the rolls at the College, with the first season’s tuition paid. I’ll look forward to your service in the Legions.”

“ And that’s it? After all this, I’d still get to walk away clean?”

The Knight peered at his cup, swirling the dark wine inside with a negligent flick of the wrist.

“ Some of my predecessors would have thrown a threat in there to motivate you,” he admitted easily. “Something along the lines of ‘should you refuse me, I will burn alive everyone in the orphanage and make you watch’.” He smiled ruefully. “Most of them were killed by their Squire, as it happens. I will not repeat their mistake: I will not deceive you, Catherine, or force your hand. What would be the point? I already have followers and equals – as well as a superior, if only the one. What I want is an apprentice, and an unwilling one would be nothing more than a burden.”

There’d been a sermon in the House of Light, once, about devils. The sister preaching had told us that the real ones, the dangerous ones, didn’t bluster about stealing innocent souls and breaking their word. They gave you exactly what you wanted and let you find your own way to the Hells with it.

“ You realize,” I rasped out, “that it wouldn’t change anything. Even with a Name I’ll still want to change things.”

I hated the way it sounded like I wanted to accept his offer, true as it was.

“ Mine is not the side that concerns itself with how people that gain power use it,” Black replied. “By all means, reform the Empire as much as you want – as much as you’re able to, anyway. If you have the ability to accomplish something, it is your right to do so.”

Damn me, damn him, damn this whole night and the one that came before it. It all sounded so reasonable to me, but that was how they always got you wasn’t it? Was it arrogance, to think that if I didn’t step up to fix Callow no one else would do it? Maybe I was just a self-deluded little girl, playing a game whose rule I didn’t yet understand and pretending I knew what it was doing . But it doesn’t matter, does it? The only question was whether I wanted this badly enough to make a deal with the monster sipping at his wine, and I’d known the answer to that before I ever set foot in the palace. This is how it starts, isn’t it? How villains are born. When you decide that something is worth more than being Good. My fingers clenched and unclenched. I took a deep breath and let it out.

“ So how does this work? Do I sign a contract in blood and summon a demon?”

Black did not smile, and I was almost grateful about that – if he’d been smug about this, treated it like he’d beaten me, I didn’t know what I would have done.

“ Normally,” he said, “a conscious decision is enough to begin the process. By wanting to be the Squire, you reach for the Role and make yourself closer to it.”

“ Normally?” I repeated.

“ There’s a shortcut, for those so inclined,” he told me.

I met his eyes for the second time that night, unflinching. Even if this was a mistake, I would own it. I owed myself that much.

“ What do I need to do?”

He smiled. “Try not to die.”

In the blink of an eye he was on his feet, moving quickly – much too quickly for someone wearing plate – with his sword was in hand. I felt the tip of it punch through my lung before I could so much as scream, and the last thing I saw before the darkness took me was those eerie green eyes looking down on me.

I opened my eyes under water.

My hands scrabbled for something solid to hang on to and sank into thick mud, still managing to push up my torso enough that I wasn’t swallowing what looked murky swamp water. I spat out something green and vaguely leafy, retching at the taste of scum water in my mouth. Before I could try to get on my feet I was compelled to notice that there was still a sword jutting out of my chest .

“ He stabbed me,” I wheezed out in disbelief, my breath coming out panicked. “He just fucking stabbed me, out of nowhere. Who even does that? ”

“ Well,” a woman’s voice drawled lazily. “You know. Villains.”

My eyes spun towards the source of the noise, skimming over a darkened panorama of tall thin trees and greenery-covered waters – it was hard to tell, in the gloom, but I was fairly sure that the girl looking down on me from jutting stump was... well, me. Older, maybe, bearing a long pink scar across the nose and wearing legionary armour but there was no mistaking the face.

“ Ugh,” I groaned. “This is going to be some kind of symbolic soul-searching quest, isn’t?”

“ That implies your soul is a swamp,” the girl pointed out mildly. “Maybe you should get out more. You know, make some friends. Laugh once every few moons.”

I scowled. “I’m not taking advice about my social life from a dubious Name vision.”

I tried to push myself up to a sitting position – my fingers were sinking deeper into the mud, and the rest of my body slowly following – but the sharp pain I immediately felt served as a reminder that there was still a sword jutting out of my chest.

“ Oh, right,” the smug brat mused. “Let me get that for you.”

She jumped down from the stump, wading into ankle-high water to get to me. I was about to ask her to pull it out gently when I saw her look me over and pensively raise a foot.

“ Don’t you dare,” I warned her. “Don’t you godsdamned-”

She put down her boot on my breasts and closed her fingers around the hilt of the sword, giving a brutal push with her knee that dunked my head back into the scum water. I pushed myself out into a sitting position a heartbeat later, retching out more of the disgusting green stuff and really wishing I hadn’t been opening my mouth to cuss her out when she’d pushed me under.

“ This is a pretty good sword,” she observed. “Goblin steel, better than the standard issue stuff.”

“ And that makes getting stabbed with it better why ?” I heaved.

“ If it were rusty you could have gotten lockjaw,” the doppelganger commented.

Not even a bell into joining up with the Empire and I was sitting half-drowned in a metaphorical swamp, getting sassed by some sort of – probably evil – magical double. I’ll note Black didn’t mention this part in the recruitment speech , I thought, trying to force my soaked hair into some semblance of order.

“ Might be wise to get onto the stump,” the other me said. “I’m pretty sure there’s snakes in the water.”

“ That just burning figures,” I cursed, hastily getting on my feet and slogging my way out of the danger – the doppelganger offered a hand to help me up, and I warily took it. I couldn’t see a weapon on her, but I didn’t know what the rules of this place were yet. If there are any. Closing my eyes, I tried to think hard about a sunny meadow and waited a moment.

“ What are you doing, exactly?” my voice interrupted me.

“ Are we still in a swamp?” I asked, keeping my eyes closed.

“ Nah, it’s some sort forest now.”

Hope welled up in my chest and I opened my eyes to the smirking rictus of the doppelganger. Did I really look like that when I smirked? Huh. No wonder people in the Pit went for my face so often.

“ You lied,” I acknowledged wearily, glaring at the smelly wetlands still surrounding me.

“ Shocker,” the double replied dryly.

“ Did I draw the short straw when they were assigning spirit guides?” I muttered.

The doppelganger looked kind of offended.

“ I’m a great spirit guide,” she contested. “Ask me a question.”

I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “What can I do to end this quickly?”

Her perfectly plucked eyebrows rose. “Ask better questions.”

I snatched the sword back out of her hands with a glower – I didn’t have a scabbard to put it in, so I just rested the point on the stump and awkwardly leaned on it.

“ Right, not a guide then,” I grunted. “Are we going to have to fight? Because I’m not really feeling in the mood for anything but a bath right now.”

“ I’m just here to point you to the next part, really,” the doppelganger said. “See that hill in the distance?”

I took a look where she was pointing, vaguely making out an upwards slope on what seemed to be solid ground. There was some sort of structure I could glimpse, and I squinted to see it better. That was when she socked me in the jaw. Back into the water I went, landing with a splash and an aching mouth.

“ Lied again,” the double told me cheerfully when I resurfaced. “We’re gonna fight.”

“ I don’t know what part of me you’re supposed to represent,” I spat out, bringing up the sword I’d somehow managed to remain clutching, “but I’m going to drown you.”

“ That’s the spirit,” she grinned, rolling her shoulders. “See what I did there? Spirit. It’s funny because I’m a-”

I took a swipe at her ankles, hoping she’d give me the satisfaction of being a bleeder, but she leapt onto another stump.

“ In the interest of full disclosure,” the double continued, “I was also lying about the snakes. I know, I have a problem. You have one too, though, right behind you.”

My first instinct was to snarl that I wasn’t going to fall for that twice, but after a heartbeat instead I stabbed blindly behind me – the blade hacked into flesh and I spun to push more weight into it, eyes widening in surprise. The decomposing corpse that had been about to lay a hand on my shoulder fell into the water still twitching, leathery skin pulled taut around rotting teeth.

“ I have a zombie in my soul,” I forced myself to acknowledge, voice sounding faint to my own ears. “Gods, maybe I do need to make some friends.”

“ So,” the doppelganger called out from the tall branch she’d managed to hoist herself onto while I wasn’t looking. “Three guesses as to whether that’s the last one and the first two don’t count.”

I glared at her. “The only upside to this is that if you rise from the dead after I’m done with you I’ll get to off you twice,” I replied through gritted teeth.

“ Meh,” she shrugged. “You’re all talk. If you weren’t, you would have stabbed Mazus in his wretched throat – we both know the Knight wouldn’t have stopped you.”

“ Well,” I mused as I cast a wary eye out for anything else coming out of the waters, “at least now I’m sure you’re not the Good twin.”

“ Nah, prissy bitch doesn’t come down here,” the girl replied. “Says she doesn’t like the smell.”

Gods Above, there really were two of them. This just keeps on getting better. Nothing else seemed to be crawling out from under the surface, so I moved back towards the stump to get better footing. I didn’t like the idea of staying in the mulch either: it seemed right up her alley to have been lying about having lied about the snakes. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to follow her into the branches – I wasn’t sure what path up she’d taken, and I’d never been great at climbing. Not like there were a lot of trees in Laure.

“ So that’s your trouble with me?” I prompted. “Not enough murdering people at the dinner table?”

She crouched on the branch, grinning down with pearly white teeth.

“ My issue is that you’re a bleeding heart, Cathy,” she drawled. “You’ve got all those pretty notions about how things should be, but when the hard choices are gonna come you’ll flinch . You have a chance to get some real change going but you’re going to end up choking on that self-righteousness.” She waved her hand theatrically. “That’s gonna end up with us actually bleeding from the heart, and I just can’t have that.”

“ So I should just go around stabbing everyone who does things I don’t agree with?” I replied. “That sounds like a winning plan.”

“ If you had a winning plan, I wouldn’t mind,” the doppelganger smiled mirthlessly. “But you’re not trying to win. You’re trying to be right.”

In a single, smooth movement she leapt from the branch and barrelled right into me. I was taken by surprised enough that I couldn’t bring up the sword in time. Shit. We both splashed into the water – which had happened since the beginning of this little jaunt too often for my tastes already – while clawing at each other, trying to make sure we ended up on top. She managed to edge me out, but she left her face open so I knocked her teeth it with the sword’s pommel – she pushed me away, crawling up to her feet as I did the same.

“ Now that’s more like it,” she laughed, spitting out a fat gob of blood from the corner of her lip. “Swing that thing like you mean it.”

“ You’re insane,” I growled. “There’s no point to this.”

“ There’s no point to any of it,” she smiled. She flicked her wrist elegantly, producing a knife from somewhere in her sleeve. I know that knife. I’d owned it for less than two days, and already I would have recognized it anywhere: the first time I’d used it wasn’t something I’d ever forget.

“ There’s only one choice in life, Squire,” my doppelganger said with a flash of teeth. “You can be someone who makes things happen, or someone things happen to. Let’s find out which you are, shall we?”

She came at me swinging. There was nothing practiced or elegant about – she was just a girl with a sharp edge trying to claw out my throat. I stepped around her, letting her momentum carry her through as I swiped at her leg with the side of the blade. Too awkwardly placed: it bounced off the steel greaves. I’d never been taught how to use a sword, and it showed.

“ Put your back into it, would you?” the double chided me. “Otherwise we’ll be at this all night.”

I ground my teeth, keeping a lid on my temper. I’d taunted people into making stupid mistakes often enough to recognize when someone was trying to do the same to me. The doppelganger leaned it with a quick half-step, blade headed straight from my throat, but the strike was too wild. Too much strength into it, not enough control: she was wasting movements. My fist impacted with her chin and she rocked back, but she slapped away the side of my sword when I tried to bring it to bear. The sharp edge bit into the leather gloves she wore, drawing a thin trickle of blood as she stepped back and started circling around me. “First blood to me,” I spoke quietly.

She laughed. “Last blood’s the only one that matters,” she replied, and rushed forward again.

I was ready for her, this time: I caught her wrist as it came down for my neck, fingers digging painfully into the cold wet mail as I struggled to hold it back. She tried to headbutt me but I lowered my face in time and she rammed her forehead into the top of my head instead. The double was the one who recoiled in pain, and that was the opening I needed – awkwardly, using the sword more like an oversized needle than a weapon, I rammed the point into her jugular. Blood sprayed out and she fell to her knees, gasping. I looked down into her eyes coldly.

“ My turn with the speeches,” I ground out. “You lack focus. You lack discipline. You’re just lashing out at everything: all you can do is break things until you end up broken too.”

She gurgled out a laugh, a bloody smile stretching out her lips.

“ What are you laughing at?” I asked.

“ You didn’t flinch,” she rasped.

She dropped all the way into the water, face-first, and I had to flip her over to wrench out the blade. Threads of red were already appearing in the murk but I took a moment to catch my breath, clutching the sword. My free hand came up to wipe the sweat off my brow, though there was no salvaging the shirt and trousers that had been through the muck thrice. I was not looking forward to the walk to the hill, but at least I wouldn’t be hounded all the way there. The sound of parted waters was heard from up ahead as a silhouette emerged from the water, shambling upright. Then another. Then another.

“ Come on ,” I complained. “I didn’t even say it out loud!”

Chapter 5: Role

“ Where have all the good men gone? Graveyards, mostly.”
– Dread Emperor Malevolent III, the Pithy

Running struck me as the better part of valour in this one.

The first undead I’d put down had been a bit of a pushover, sure, but there were more coming out of the water every moment and fighting in the muck was going to get exhausting. I wasn’t sure what would actually happen if I died here, but Black’s last words were probably as much a real warning as sarcasm. One of the shamblers got close enough to reach for my arm but it was ridiculously slow – small favours – so I hacked away at the head with a two-handed swing. The flesh and bone split like an overripe fig and the thing went back down to wherever the Hells is had crawled out of, sinking into the water. I flicked a glance at my back, grimacing when I saw that even those few moments had been enough for the rest of the bastards to gain on me. There’s gotta be fifty, at least? And the swamp seemed intent on continuing to hemorrhage undead every time I blinked, so I definitely couldn’t afford to get bogged down. My mouth still tasted like scum water so I spat to the side as I pulled my way up onto the stump, looking for a way out of this mess – somehow I had a feeling that climbing up a tree and closing my eyes wasn’t going to cut it.

The structure in the distance still stood in the same place as earlier. It was shaped like a tower, I thought, though I couldn’t see how high up it went. What I could see was that the hill it stood on was outside the swamp and currently lacking my zombie friends. It was probably a trap, I reflected, but still better than getting pulled apart by a horde of moaning imbeciles. There was a flicker at the edge of my sight and I almost flinched: something was trying to catch my foot. The edge of my sword caught the wrist halfway there, though, and I blinked in surprise at the undead recoiled with a shriek. I... shouldn’t have been able to do that. I was quick, but I knew exactly how quick I was – I’d learned it anew with every fresh set of bruises in the Pit. I was familiar with the hateful little moment when you saw a hit coming but knew you wouldn’t be fast enough to block it, and this was one of those. But instead my body had reacted immediately, with no heartbeat between the realization of the need to move and the movement itself.

“ Name,” I whispered, a little awed.

I wasn’t even the Squire yet, wouldn’t be for a while if I’d understood the gist of what Black had said, and already I could do things like this? No wonder heroes were said to take on entire fortresses filled with soldiers without a second thought. No wonder villains take on entire groups of heroes. Silhouettes were already rising up ahead, littering the way to the hill in an attempt to keep me surrounded, so I jumped back down into the swamp and got moving. The zombie who’d almost caught me had been entirely silent: it had emerged from the waters without a sound and given no warning before striking. Adding to that the fact that it had tried to slow me down instead of kill me? It meant that they were getting smarter about this. The longer I stayed here, the harder it would get. It also means my soul is being kind of a bitch about this , I grunted to myself.

I pushed through the muck as fast as I could. Even here was only ankle-deep, so I was a little quicker than my pursuers – though not by wide enough a margin to get comfortable. Another one rose from the mud to my right so I ducked around a tree to make a little space. I would have looked rather ridiculous, I imagined, if anybody had been around to see me. Even pushing myself I was barely as quick as someone taking a walk on solid ground and the slow-witted undead were only a threat because of their number. Not exactly the kind of struggle you wrote epic poems about. I managed for what seemed like an eternity to avoid any of them before realizing that I was playing into their hands: I was going through more effort going around them than I would actually getting into a fight, as the rivulets of sweat running down my neck were already proving. Spitting out one of the grittier curses I’d overheard down at the Docks, I squared my shoulders and rammed myself straight into the knot of shamblers barring the way ahead.

I rammed the tip of the short sword into the throat of the closest one and it came free as I wrenched the blade out, but the other two were already on me. What looked like it might have been a woman at some point sank her teeth into my arm and I hissed in pain – I knocked her loose by hitting her temple with the pommel of the sword, struggling to keep the last one away with my free hand. The zombie gave, though several of her teeth remained stuck into my flesh. Could you get an infection from a Name vision? Gods, I hoped not. Cutting away the reaching arm of the last undead was the work of a pair of measured swings as I ducked around the woman trying to bite me a second time, and then the way was clear enough for me to push through. There was a fallen tree a little up a head that allowed me to put more distance between us when I climbed up on it, though the wood was wet and the footing tricky.

A glance at the hill up ahead told me I was maybe halfway there, so I gritted my teeth and got back to work without taking a moment to catch my breath.

The bite wound on my arm throbbed, and that clinched my decision of not getting into any more fights with knots of them. I wasn’t used to fighting with multiple opponents, and I couldn’t afford to take a wound every time I ran into a pack. I stuck to hacking down lone undead as I ducked and weaved through the trees, always keeping an eye on the hill: the last thing I needed was to get lost in this godsdamned swamp. I took a scrape on the face when one of them jumped out from behind a tree, fingernails clawing as I rammed the sword into its chest. It was light, but I’d been very lucky it hadn’t been higher up: I’d fought with blood in my eyes before, and that was always a messy business. The closer I got to the hill the thinner in the ground the undead became. Less and less knots, and then they stopped rising entirely. By the time the water had turned into mossy wet earth, there were none in sight. Dropping to my knees, I leaned up against a tree and took the chance of closing my eyes for a moment.

Gods, I was exhausted.

The Pits hadn’t been like that at all. I’d only ever done one fight a day, and they’d never gone on this long. The opponents had been more dangerous, but they’d never ground me down by sheer force of numbers. If I’d slipped up even once, down in the waters, it would have been over.

“ Fuck me,” I whispered. “Weeping Heavens, I hope the Good twin isn’t going to make this a fight.”

I pushed myself up and waited another few moments to catch my breath. I was close enough to get a good look at the hill now, and the tower on it. White stone, though not a kind I recognized, and it kept going up higher than I could see through the top of the trees. Hopefully my soul wasn’t enough of a jackass to make it so I had to walk up sets of stairs covering that height, though considering the kind of shit it had been putting me through so far I wasn’t exactly counting on it. The way out of the outskirts of the swamp was quicker now that the ground was mostly solid: I took the long way around a handful of ponds just in case there was anything lurking in there, but to be honest I was too happy I wasn’t being dogged by the burning undead horde to really complain about the tediousness of getting out of the bog.

My first surprise came when I finally got out of the trees: the tower kept going up. All the way into the sky, and then it connected to some sort of sprawling city that covered the gloom for miles. The whole thing was upside down, with the tallest stone spires looking to me like they should be falling down any moment now. Just looking at the thing was putting back the itch under my feet that I’d associated with my old fear of heights. Even as I continued closing the distance I could barely see where the stones making the tower started and the next one began: it would have appeared to be made of a single block of rock to anyone not taking too close a look. There was a yawning doorway squat in the middle and a pair of armoured knights stood by it, perfectly still. The suits of armour were empty, I saw as I got closer, made of what looked like silver. I raised a brow at that. Silver? That was the stupidest thing I could think of to forge armour with, except maybe gold – it was soft metal, any halfway decent blade would cut through. The halberds they were holding were steel, though, and that was another story entirely. Warily, sword still in hand, I kept an eye on their weapons and hazarded a step between them. Immediately the halberds came down, barring my way in.

“ Well,” I mused, “so much for the easy way. There’d better not be an endless flood of you fellows inside, because I’d like to believe my godsdamned soul is a little more original than that.”

“ You don’t need to fight them,” a voice interrupted me. “You just need to leave that... thing outside.”

There was a woman standing just past the doorway, and for the second time I got to have a look at an older version of myself. No scar on her this time, and she wore pristine white robes instead of armour. Her hair was cut short in a way that had never suited me but looked fitting on her: her face was more mature, the cheeks thinner and her nose not as prominent. She was also currently glaring at my sword like it had been used in the murder of her extended family.

“ Yeah,” I informed her flatly. “I’m not handing that over. Not when you’ve got your little friends there with the halberds.”

My new doppelganger frowned. “I have no weapons, and they’ll stay outside,” she replied.

“ And I’m supposed to take your word on that?”

“ If you want to enter the tower,” she told me, and I recognized the tone she was using.

I’d used it quite a few times myself, when I was letting a potential threat know I wasn’t going to budge on something. Was it worth the risk? I didn’t know how hard to put down the knights would be, and I wasn’t exactly at my best right now – the throbbing on my arm where I’d gotten bitten was a constant reminder of that, never mind the weariness in my bones. The bog-bitch had called this one the “Good” twin, though, so maybe taking a chance was the way to go. Still... Moving quicker than I’d ever thought I could, I impaled the closest knight through the breast plate, pinning it to the surprisingly soft stone behind it. I stepped away, hands raised in peace, as the other one raised its halberd.

“ Weaponless, see?” I told the other woman with a smile.

The older double frowned but conceded the point with a nod, stepping aside as I entered. The inside of the tower was empty except for a single seat in the middle of the room: old gnarled wood, light brown and well-polished. Not that it felt that way: the walls were covered in colourful mosaics. They depicted daily scenes from what I recognized to be my life – lessons at the orphanage, evenings at the Nest, even fights in the Pit. The tower walls went all the way into the distance, ending in a breath-taking view of the city I’d glimpsed earlier from above. The itch came back, but I pushed it down with the ease of practice: that particular fear was one I’d already mastered, and I had no intention of allowing it to crawl back into my life. Past a certain point the walls were still blank, I assumed to make room for the rest of my life. I squinted as I tried to make up one of the scenes higher up I couldn’t recognize, but the lighting inside wasn’t good enough. I did have a guide, though.

“ That one,” I asked pointing at the object of my curiosity. “What does it show?”

The other girl shot me an unimpressed look.

“ That time you peeked at Duncan Brech through the cracks while he was changing,” she said.

I chuckled. “And that warrants an entire scene? He’s not that good-looking.”

Good Twin didn’t seem to share in my amusement: she ignored me and headed for the chair, claiming the seat gingerly and leaving me to stand around like a supplicant. I sighed. And here’d I gone, foolishly hoping that she wouldn’t be as much of a pain as the other one.

“ So,” I grunted, “out with it. Before I stabbed the other one she took issue with how ‘soft-hearted’ I was. What’s the axe you’ve got to grind?”

“ The axe we have to grind,” the double corrected calmly. “All that you see here, all that you’ve been through so far – it comes from you. We’re voicing your doubts, nothing more.”

“ That makes me responsible for the bloody zombies, then?” I muttered. “That’s a whole new level of self-loathing.”

The white-robed girl smiled mirthlessly. “You have this belief that nothing worth having can be had easily. Your adventure in the swamp is a reflection of that.”

Interesting, but not what I’d come here for. If I’d wanted to be lectured, I’d have taken a seat in the Matron’s office and told her I’d been fighting in the Pit.

“ Fascinating insight,” I told her flatly. “Changes everything. I don’t suppose that’s enough to knock off this part of the dream?”

A flash of anger went through her eyes, and I was almost satisfied I’d gotten anything but condescension out of her.

“ One would hope you’d take the fate of your soul a little more seriously, Catherine Foundling,” she thundered, her voice echoing in the empty tower.

“ I would take this seriously if I thought what I learned here meant anything,” I replied, taking delight in remaining calm in the face of her anger. “But it doesn’t. It’s just a chore I have to get done before I return to consciousness and move on with my life.”

“ Yes,” she spoke, forcing herself back into a semblance of serenity. “Your life. As a villain in service to the Dread Empire of Praes.”

I frowned. “That was always the plan,” I reminded her. “Now I just get to skip a few steps by having a Name instead of slowly climbing the ranks in the Legions.”

“ If you don’t understand how taking up a Role changes everything,” she said, “then you are a fool. You are binding yourself to Evil. To uphold its laws, champion its cause.”

“ Not to put too fine a point on it,” I grunted, “but the Empire’s laws are the only laws, at the moment. And let’s not pretend I’m going to champion anything I don’t want to champion, because if you’re really part of my soul you should know better than that.”

The doppelganger leaned forward, a fervent light in her eyes. “There is another law. The one you were taught at the House of Light. Do good. Uphold right. Protect the innocent, fight for a righteous cause.”

“ You want me to be a hero,” I realized. “That’s... I don’t think I even have the words to tell you how stupid of an idea that is. Let’s forget for a moment that my body’s in near proximity to at least two of the Calamities, though that should be enough in and of itself. Heroes try to “liberate” Callow all the time, Idiot Twin. It doesn’t work .”

I took a step forward.

“ They try, maybe stir up a town in the south, and then they die . Assassin gets them, or the Legions, or Hells I’ve even heard Black put down a few himself. Some don’t even make it into Callow itself before they get caught .”

“ You’re already here,” she replied. “You know Laure, know your people. All they need is someone to raise the standard, and they will rally.”

“ They’ll riot,” I corrected. “And they’ll be dispersed. Then I imagine my head will look mighty righteous, spiked alongside theirs over the city gates.”

“ That’s your answer?” she growled. “It’d be too hard ? Too hard, not to become another tool of the Empire instead of doing the right thing?”

“ I’m all for doing the right thing,” I replied flatly. “As long as it’s not also the dumb thing. This isn’t a story, you twit. We’re living this. If we fuck up, real people are going to die and we’ll die with them having accomplished nothing .”

“ Better to accomplish nothing than to accomplish bad things,” she told me.

And that was where we split apart, I realized. The other one down in the swamp had thought that just killing everyone who deserved killing was going to be enough, but that was a child’s way of thinking. There were always going to be more people like Mazus, more petty tyrants drunk on power and greed. Just removing them wasn’t enough: you had to change the system behind them, the machinery that let them rise so high in the first place. This one, she thought that just being Good was enough. That because you were doing the right thing you’d win, in the end, and the villains would be sent packing and everyone would rejoice. That wasn’t what happened, in real life. Sometimes you couldn’t beat Evil, and the only way to change things was to be patient and clever.

“ Doing nothing is worse than being Evil,” I told her, striding forward. “Getting people killed because you won’t compromise is worse than being Evil. I’m going to change things – maybe not all of them, but enough. And if that means getting my hands dirty, I can live with that. I don’t have to be a good person to make a better world.”

She opened her mouth but I was already upon her and my fingers closed around her throat.

“ No,” I growled. “You’ve said enough, and we are done here .”

–

For the second time in two days, I woke up in a room I was unfamiliar with.

Hopefully the passing out wasn’t going to be a staple of my tenure with the Empire, because it was already starting to get old. The bed I was in was more fit for a family of four than my own meagre frame, and by the feel of it I’d been tucked in under actual silk sheets. Well now. Long way from the orphanage aren’t we, Catherine Foundling? I sighed and allowed myself to luxuriate in the feeling of them for a moment, laying back my head on the pillows and refusing to open my eyes. I felt... surprisingly good, actually, except for the dull throbbing where I’d gotten bit during the dream. My senses felt sharper, like I’d just gotten a really good night’s sleep instead of gone through a Name vision of dubious symbolism. After a few breaths the novelty of it faded away and I pushed myself up, startling the servant tidying up by the window where the sun was filtering in. A young man, Callowan if the skin tone was any indication and wearing the palace livery.

“ Lady Foundling,” he bowed, looking like he’d gotten caught with his hand in a jar full of honey. “A thousand apologies, I did not mean to wake you.”

“ Lady Foundling,” I repeated, somewhat bemused. “Fancy that. If I’d known all I needed to become a noble was stab someone in a dream, I’d have done it a while back.”

The servant looked rather alarmed at that, though he took pains not to let it show too obviously. “Lord Black left orders that he be informed as soon as you woke, my lady,” the man said, keeping his eyes fixed to the floor. “I beg your leave to do so. Clothes have been laid out for you by the bath.”

A bath? Didn’t expect to sink into the lap of luxury this soon after going bad, but I’m not complaining.

“ You,” I gestured vaguely, “go and do that, I guess.”

The servant excused himself again and left the room after a bow, closing the door behind him.

“ Lady Foundling,” I repeated, chuckling to myself.

The title seemed more like a bad joke than anything else. Foundling wasn’t a real name: it was what they slapped next to an orphan’s name on the ledger when they got dropped off. Like putting a coat on a pig. The siren call that was the mention of a bath got me on my feet, sliding off the bed with another small sigh of pleasure. I really needed to look into getting sheets like those, if I ended up settling down anywhere while I was the Squire. I padded to the window on bare feet, shedding the now sweat-soaked shirt I’d been put to bed wearing and dropping it on the floor. I’d never taken to wearing breast bindings: wasn’t curvy enough to need them, since whichever of my parents had been Deoraithe had cursed me with their typically slender frame. My parents, huh. It’d been a while since I’d thought about them. I had no idea who they’d been – were, for all I knew – since the House for Tragically Orphaned Girls didn’t keep records for me to break into. I’d been dropped off a little after the Conquest, though, so probably not a dead soldier’s child.

The view out of the window was lovely, looking down straight on a well-tended garden of sculpted hedges and exotic flowers. There were a few gardeners already at work, but I didn’t really care if one of them got a look through the window: there’d been little enough privacy in the dormitories that I’d gotten over that sort of shyness long ago. I ran pensive fingers against the window panes, enjoying the way the coloured glass turned my fingers green and red. Imported, has to be. The Glassblower’s Guild didn’t do work like this, so it was likely from the Principate. The servant had mentioned my freshly acquired teacher’s instructions that he be told when I woke, so after a moment I moved towards the doorway facing the bed. I’d never had a chance to use a real bathtub before, so I wanted to make the most of it. The other room was all panelled wood and white marble, with a large pool in the middle that appeared to be a Miezan bath. Huh. Didn’t think those got popular here before the Praesi came. I dipped a toe in the water and found it just short of boiling. I raised an eyebrow: hopefully there was a spell involved in keeping it at that temperature, because otherwise it would have been an outrageous waste of wood.

I slipped out of the trousers and threw them out the doorway. There were marble benches under the water so I slid in on one and rested my back against the edge of the bath – it must have been built for people taller than me, because it came up to my neck. The warm water felt like the best thing in the world, after the last few days, and I dunked myself in just to feel it wrapping up around all of me. I emerged a little ways off and came to face with a handful of small glass vials.

They were clear so I could see they were full of salts and oils: I grabbed the closest one and took of the cap, bringing it up close for a whiff. Something herbal. Lavender, maybe? I’d never really taken an interest in herbalism. I shrugged and poured a little over my back, rubbing it in and spilling some in the water for good measure. A few moments later I was positively reeking of the stuff, so I’d likely been a little heavy-handed. I dunked myself back under the water to rinse it off before deciding that was quite enough indulgence for the day: the promised clothes were on the other side of the bath, neatly folded, so I paddled in that direction. I hoisted myself out and grabbed the cleaning linen laid out next to them, eyeing what I’d been provided curiously. Thick leather breeches, made from the skin of an animal I wasn’t familiar with, and a white woollen shirt. The new addition was the thick padded jacket that looked like it would reach to my knees: I’d seen Sergeant Ebele come in wearing one, a few times. She’d called it an aketon – legionaries wore them under chain mail to prevent chafing. Looks like I’m going to be getting armour soon.

It was surprisingly easy to put on, designed to I could tighten the laces in the front without anyone’s help. I supposed it would have been a little absurd for the Squire to require a squire of her own, I reflected with a snort. When I came back to the bedroom it was to find there was another occupant: Black was lounging on an ornate chair by a Proceran bureau I hadn’t even noticed, idly flipping through a book. He raised an eyebrow when he saw me.

“ It suits you,” he commented.

“ It’s summer,” I grunted back. “I’m going to cook alive.” A moment later the memory I had of him resurfaced and I pointed an accusatory finger. “You – you jackass. You stabbed me.”

He seemed to ponder that for a moment before shrugging.

“ Only a little bit,” he replied.

I’d never wanted to deck someone in the face more than I did that man in that moment. “That’s what you’re going with?” I growled. “ Only a little bit? ”

“ If the fact that you’re not screaming and bleeding out of your eyes is any indication,” he mentioned, “then it was a complete success.”

“ That was an option?” I asked faintly. “You could have mentioned that before.”

“ Yes,” he admitted frankly. “I could have.”

Fucking villains. Even if I was technically one now, fucking villains .

“ Just to make sure – the swamp and horde of undead, that’s normal right?” I asked, seating myself at the edge of the bed.

His eyebrow rose even higher. “Swamp? Unusual. I went through a labyrinth myself, though I’m told the experience tailors itself to the person going through it.”

Gods, it was kind of depressing that the best my soul could come up with was scum water and zombies when it came to Name visions.

“ I’d consider it a good thing that your experience was rather martial in nature,” he told me. “Your Name’s abilities are likely to be related.”

“ Well, that’s something at least,” I grunted. “I’m not feeling all that different, so I’m guessing that means I’m not the Squire yet?”

“ About halfway there, as much as these things can be measured,” the green-eyed man said. “There’s other contenders, but none of them should be quite so far along.”

“ Other contenders?” I repeated.

“ Close your eyes,” the Knight instructed. “Focus. You should feel something in the back of your mind, like someone watching you.”

I obeyed. For the first few moments there was nothing, but after a while there was... a sensation. It wasn’t like he’d said, more like an itch that wasn’t quite on my skin but still belonged to me. I frowned and tried to push the feeling, and suddenly it unfolded on me.

“ Three others,” I said, opening my eyes. “And some fourth thing that’s not quite the same.”

He hummed in agreement. “Try to keep your finger on the pulse of that feeling as much as possible, from now on.”

I frowned. “Why?”

He smiled. “Because as of this moment, they all want to kill you.”

Chapter 6: Aspect

Funny, isn’t it? No matter what language they speak, everyone sounds the same when you pull out their fingernails.”
– Dread Emperor Foul III, “the Linguist”

The pile of books slammed on the table.

“ The Most Illustrious Histories of the Inimitable Dread Empire of Praes”, volume I to III, made up up the top layer and I lost interest after checking that ones right under were a study of the Licerian Wars. Gods, those bred like lice. I’d had to read seven treatises about the fall of the Miezan Empire already – every two-bit scholar seemed to think that their own take on why the Baalites had won was unique and unprecedented, all while shamelessly stealing from each other’s work.

“ I’m assuming you want me those read those and not, say, bludgeon someone to death with the pile?” I asked dryly.

“ Very perceptive of you,” Black noted. “We’ll be leaving for Summerholm this afternoon, but before we do we’ll go over the shape of your days for the foreseeable future.”

“ And apparently that shape involves...” I peered a little closer at one of the books close to the bottom, “A close look at Praesi agricultural practices? Are you sure I can’t get you to reconsider the bludgeoning thing?”

The Knight frowned. “Dry reading, I will concede, but a necessary one.”

Considering I’d never even seen a farm in my life and I doubted he’d ever done more than ride past one, that was one statement I wasn’t willing to swallow without a fight. I raised an eyebrow.

“ Are we going to be doing a lot of farming in the next months, then? Have you ever been on a farm?”

He shot me an amused look. “I was raised on one, as a matter of fact. My father was a freeholder on the Green Stretch.”

It took me a moment to place the name, digging back to the handful of geography lessons I’d breezed through. It was what they called the crescent of fertile land in the Wasteland, right next to the Blessed Isle. I’d heard that it was the only part of Praes where people intermarried with Callowans, which made sense given my teacher’s distinctly pale skin tone. Still, the idea of the leader of the Calamities plowing a field was all sorts of hilarious for many reasons. I’m sure those fields were oppressed like no field before them, I chuckled to myself.

“ Freeholder?” I repeated after a moment, mangling the unknown word. “That’s different from a regular sort of farmer, then?”

Black claimed a space on the bench across from the table. The banquet hall was just as deserted as it had been two nights ago – I’d apparently slept through a whole day, and managed to miss Mazus’ hanging for my trouble – though the polished wood had long been cleared of food and plates. I’d already set aside the hearty breakfast the palace kitchens had provided me after wolfing down two servings and half a pot of tea: Name visions apparently worked up quite an appetite. I took the high road and decided not to comment on the fact that the green-eyed man already had a cup of wine in hand before noon bell had even rung.

“ Land in Praes is usually owned by the nobility,” he explained, “Namely, the High Lords or their lower counterparts. People who work the land rent it from them, and have no real say over what happens to it. The Green Stretch has no noble domains on it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That seems unusually enlightened, for the Empire,” I commented.

He snorted. “The Stretch is the breadbasket of Praes – the north of the Wasteland barely produces enough grain to feed itself, much less sell a surplus, and the south is a literal desert. Any noble with significant holdings in the Stretch would be able to starve the Empire at will.”

Ah. That made a little more sense, in a depressing sort of way. “I’m guessing freeholders rent their land directly from the Empress?”

He nodded. “In a sense. There’s a single fee when taking possession that lasts for the lifetime of the freeholder. It has to be paid again if the land is inherited, but the Tower is typically hands-off with the entire region.”

I’d always thought of Praes a single unified entity, but the more I learned of it the more it became apparent it was anything but. How many of the blunders in the way Callow was being run came not from stupidity but the need to appease High Lords, I wondered? And how could a woman with Empress Malicia’s reputation tolerate her hand being forced by idiots?

“ Why are there even High Lords anymore?” I finally asked. “I mean, they’re the obvious contenders for the throne – so why hasn’t the Empress killed them all and turned the entire Empire into freeholds? I mean, if the way your conversation with Mazus went is any indication you’d be all for riding that horse.”

Black’s fingers drummed against the table thoughtfully. “After we won the civil war, I advised Malicia as much. If I’d had my way, we’d have nailed the lot of them alive to the gates of their little kingdoms and broken the aristocracy so thoroughly there wouldn’t be a noble in Praes for another thousand years.”

“ And yet here they are,” I pointed out quietly.

“ She disagreed,” he told me. “Argued that the ensuing chaos would destabilize the Empire for decades. And that since there would always be opposition to her reign, it was better to know who her enemies were – and that she could beat them, if she needed to.”

The way he spoke the words was strange. He wasn’t espousing the position himself, merely parroting someone else’s opinion. The lack of conviction showed.

“ You still think it should have been done,” I half-guessed, half-stated.

“ Yes,” he agreed. “But she’s always seen more clearly through the politics than I have, so I’m trusting her judgement. I do have a certain tendency to try to... simplify problems.”

Meaning nail said problems alive to the gates of their “little kingdoms”. Weeping Heavens, the very image... He’d mentioned a superior, during his recruitment speech, and the conversation was making it very clear who that person was. Not that there’d ever been any doubt. Legionaries at the Nest spoke of the Black Knight with admiration, but they spoke of the Empress with awe.

“ There will be other times to discuss the inner workings of the Empire,” Black said, changing the subject. “Preferably after your readings have acquainted you with the basics of its cultures. Your priority will be these three books.”

He gently tapped the spine of three particularly beat-up looking manuscripts in the middle of the pile. One of them bore script I didn’t recognize – they looked more like those magical glyphs mages sometimes used than letters – but the other two were in something I could read. Two words: the first one read Taghrebi , the other one Mthethwa . Languages, the both of them.

“ I thought people in the Empire spoke Lower Miezan?” I asked.

It was the tongue we were using for this conversation, and the only one I spoke. It was the only one I’d ever needed, frankly: I’d had some lessons on Old Miezan, but that was a purely written language now. The Deoraithe in the north still spoke the same tongue they’d spoken since before the birth of the Kingdom and some of the lands in southern Callow still spoke tribal dialects, but everyone understood Lower Miezan. Even people from the Principate, who’d never even traded with the Miezans, usually understood it. Though that was most likely because the tongue they spoke was so hellishly complicated no one else wanted to learn it.

“ They do,” Black agreed. “It became the most commonly spoken tongue when we were still a province. But if you are to ever command Praesi soldiers, you’ll have to understand the languages they were raised to – if only so you know what they’re saying when they’re not using Lower Miezan.”

I grunted in irritation. He had a point, not that it made the prospect of learning two entirely new languages any more inviting. It didn’t help that I had a feeling I’d be learning both at the same time.

“ What’s the third one?” I asked instead of continuing to bask in my disgruntlement. “Are those glyphs?”

“ They’re written Kharsum, though I’d have been surprised if you could recognize them.”

“ Kharsum,” I repeated in disbelief. “You want me to learn orcish ?”

“ Kharsum ,” he corrected me sharply. “Remember the proper name. And it is not the only orc tongue, only the most common dialect.”

“ Am I learning goblin too, while I’m at it?” I complained.

Black smiled mirthlessly. “I’ve worked with goblins for over fifty years now, and I still don’t know enough of it to hold a conversation. They don’t teach it to outsiders.”

Curiosity pushed aside my indignation for a moment, though it was a close thing.

“ So they all what, speak other people’s tongues?”

“ Even goblins from the most backwards tribes are bilingual by the time they can walk,” the Knight informed me. “On average, they speak four languages – most Matrons speak seven, including a few who can speak Proceran.”

“ That’s insane,” I grunted. “The amount of time that must take...”

“ Is less than you’d think, if you start young enough,” he cut in. “Besides, you have an advantage none of them have.”

Huh. That was new. “If you say “a talented teacher” I won’t be held responsible for my actions,” I warned him.

He chuckled. “No, though that is an advantage. Unless I’m mistaken, at least one of your three aspects will make this easier on you.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“You mean that whole “Three Sins” thing is actually true?” I asked.

He blinked in surprise.

“Three Sins?” he repeated, sounding somewhere between puzzled and curious.
“And on all those who take up the banner of Evil, the Heavens will bestow three sins, planting the seed of their downfall in the name of Justice,” I quoted from memory.

Sermons at the House of Light were usually on the boring side, but that one had caught my attention: it was always more fun to hear about what the villains were up to than getting edified on the importance of the seventeen cardinal virtues.

“Your priests always did have a way with words,” he noted amusedly. “Though I notice they don’t mention heroic Roles have their own aspects.”

“So aspects instead of sins,” I mused. “I can buy that. What are they for?”

“They define your Role,” he told me, tone serious now. “They’ll change from one incarnation to the next, to some extent, but some aspects are as good as set in stone. Conquer is a staple of the Role of Black Knight, for example.”

“That means what, exactly?” I replied with a healthy dose of scepticism. “That you’re good at conquering things?”

“The more closely attuned you are to your aspects, the larger the portion of your Role’s power you can access,” he smiled. “So when “conquering things”, as you so aptly put, I become... more of what I am.”

“So why aren’t you always conquering something, then?” I asked. “Wouldn’t you be pretty much invincible?”

“That particular brand of logic has been popular with some of my predecessors,” he agreed. “But in the end there’s only so much power to access, and staying too close to your aspects tends to lead to tunnel vision. Not to mention the other side of the equation.”

“Heroes,” I murmured. “Why do I have a feeling that for every Evil role with Conquer in it, there’s a Good one with Protect ?”

“Because I rarely suffer the company of imbeciles?” he suggested.
I gave him a flat look.

“Please, sir, there’s no need to gush – I’ll get embarrassed,” I deadpanned.

He didn’t manage to take a sip quite quickly enough to hide his smile.

“So what are my aspects, then?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“ Only you can answer that. It will come to you in due time. Learn is a typical one, which is why I believe that throwing off the proverbial cliff when learning languages will yield the best results,” he said.

So he wasn’t being entirely unreasonable about this. Still, orcish . “I didn’t even know orcs had a written language,” I admitted, eyeing the not-glyphs inscribed on the book’s spine.

“ It actually predates all other written tongues on this continent,” he commented. “The arrival of the Miezans set them back centuries, in that regard.”

That had always been the problem with the Miezans, as far as I could tell. They’d built amazing structures and done wonders with magic that no one had managed since, but they’d had this nasty tendency to stomp down on subdued cultures to make sure they didn’t rebel. Orc slaves had been a prized commodity of the later Empire, with the way they could handle larger amounts of hard labour – and clans that didn’t like their children being taken away had the screws turned on them, sometimes all the way to extinction. It was a lucky thing the First Licerian War had sparked before they could venture into the maze of petty kingdoms that later became Callow, because otherwise I wasn’t sure what my homeland would look like today.

“ At least tell me I’m going to be learning something that’s actually interesting ,” I pleaded.

He snorted. “Readings will be done on your own time,” he informed me. “As of tomorrow, you’ll be waking up at dawn for sword lessons with either myself or Captain.”

I grinned. Now that was a little more up my alley. “Much softer sell, this one.”

He shot me an amused look. “I expected as much. After your midday meal you’ll have until the afternoon bell to yourself. Between that and evening bell I’ll be handling the aspects of your education that can’t be learned from books.”

That was also sounding promising. “And that means?”

He hummed. “We’ll be travelling this afternoon, so I suppose now would be the best time to have today’s lesson. Grab your knife, we’ll see about getting you a proper mount.”

Walking around in an aketon was an unusual experience.

The heat I’d gotten used to quick enough – though the accompanying sweat I could have done without – but the sensation of having a thick layer of additional protection covering me from my neck to my knees was a little surreal. Some part of me wanted to throw myself at a wall just to see if I’d bounce, though rationally I knew I wouldn’t. It was my second time making my way through the halls of power of my native city, so I made a point of taking in the scenery as I followed Black through the maze-like corridors. Tapestries of hunts and battles dotted the scenery wherever paintings did not, and I noted with quiet amusement that no one had seen fit to take down the ones depicting victories of Callowan royals over the Empire. There was even one particularly glorious one that depicted Dread Emperor Nefarious getting his ass whipped by the Wizard of the West during his failed invasion, on the very Fields of Streges where Black had inflicted a crushing defeat twenty years later. I somehow doubted Nefarious had actually dropped his crown while fleeing the battle, but the sight of the woven scene warmed my heart anyway. There were warmly-coloured wood panels covering most of the walls, elaborately carved around the edges, though they came less and less often as the Knight led me towards the western wing of the palace.

“ So we’re headed to the stables?” I asked.

He didn’t seem particularly inclined towards conversation at the moment, but when had that ever stopped me with anyone?

“ We are,” he replied absently. “The Royal Stables no longer provide for the king’s personal retinue of knights so they’re not as well stocked as they used to be, but we should find what we need regardless.”

“ I feel like I should point out I’ve never ridden a horse,” I provided helpfully. “I don’t think I’ve even gotten closer than a stone’s throw to one.”

He glanced at me sideways as we passed a threshold through what seemed to be an annex to the kitchens – though a ridiculously spacious one.

“ That’s a suspiciously specific unit of measurement,” he said after a moment.

“ Wanted it to kick a guard,” I admitted shamelessly. “Poor sap.”

He raised an eyebrow. “The guard?”

“ The horse, of course,” I grunted back. “The guard was asking for it.”

A shadow of a smile flitted across his face as we entered a paved courtyard – the sudden transition into sunlight blinded me for a moment. But not , I noted, as long as it would have a week ago. Two heartbeats hadn’t even passed before I’d gotten used to the change of scenery, and the oddity of it sent a shiver up my spine that had nothing to do with sweat. And I’m not even the Squire yet.

“ You’ll also see better in the dark,” Black murmured from my side. “Though nowhere as well as goblins do.”

“ My quota of creepy realizations for the day is reaching full load,” I informed him.

He hummed. “Perhaps you won’t enjoy the lesson very much, then.”

“ Well that’s not ominous at all,” I deadpanned. “Are you going to leave this unaddressed like the funny line about everyone wanting to kill me? Because I’m still waiting for an explanation on that one.”

“ All things in due time,” he replied with a serene smile I really wanted to take a hammer to.

I smelled the Royal Stables before I saw them: manure and animals had a distinct stench to them, especially in large concentrations. You’d think that by now a mage would have figured out a spell to get rid of the smell of shit. The stables themselves were made of the same grey granite as the rest of the palace, a long row of stalls where upwards of fifty horses were barred in. There was a groom feeding a stallion some hay in the distance, but he took a single look in our direction and made himself scarce as quickly as humanly possible.

“ So, a gelding?” I prompted as we got close enough for me to have a look at the mounts. “I hear they’re easier to ride for beginners.”

The horses I saw in the stalls had little to do with the ones I’d seen in the streets pulling carts: they were bigger and taller, warhorses instead of workhorses. Some of them had distinct enough appearances I was pretty sure they were specific breeds, though for the life of me I couldn’t name one. The Procerans had some kind of mount called destriers, maybe? I knew Callow’s cavalry had been famous, once upon a time, but given how the knights had largely gotten wiped out during the Conquest they weren’t something you saw much anymore.

“ The horse’s temperament shouldn’t be much of an issue,” Black replied. “I was informed that one of the Bedlam chargers had taken sick, but – ah, there he is.”

The horse had a dark chestnut coat, though it was matted with sweat. I guessed it must have stood over five feet tall when standing up: it was hard to tell with it lying down. It’s eyes were closed and it was breathing unevenly.

“ I’m not going to have to nurse it back to health, am I?” I asked warily. It was a beautiful animal, but I knew nothing about horses and I’d rather not end up killing my first mount through a stupid mistake that someone better acquainted with the species wouldn’t have made.

“ The stablemaster gives him one chance in three to last the month,” he told me. “It has a bad case of pigeon fever – abscesses under the skin. Painful way to die.”

I grimaced. Now that I was taking a closer look, I could see it was getting a little thin: I could glimpse the rib bones through its coat, and if I wasn’t mistaken its chest was swelling.

“ You want me to heal it?”

I knew some Roles could do that. Bring back people on the brink of death, or even a little beyond the line, but I’d been under the impression that those were the heroic ones like Healer or Priestess. Black shook his head.

“ We’re going to kill it.”

I blinked in surprise as the words took a moment to sink in. “We’re going to what ?”

“ You did not mishear me,” the green-eyed man said calmly.

“ Look, if this is some kind of test... I already offed two people this week and seriously considered a third, so I really don’t see the point in-”

“ We will then raise it from the dead,” Black continued evenly, as if I hadn’t interrupted.

I was too taken aback to muster a proper glare. “This is seriously fucked,” I finally managed to grit out. “Necromancy? That’s capital E...” I trailed off.

“ Evil,” he finished quietly. “Yes, Catherine. That is the side you’re standing on, now. That is the choice you’ve made.”

I tried to muster up a response to that, but my thoughts were too scattered. I wasn’t sure why killing a horse I’d never seen before somehow struck me as more morally dubious than slitting the throat of two actual human beings, but it did. They’d been horrible people, sure, but they’d still been people . The House of Light’s official stance was that animals didn’t have a soul in any meaningful way so killing one wasn’t exactly a sin either, but...

“ Fuck. You could have given me a softer learning curve than jumping straight into raising the dead ,” I spoke through gritted teeth, hesitant and hating that I was feeling that way. “You know, let me dip my toes in with cackling and monologues before taking the metaphorical leap.”

“ Monologues are for amateurs,” Black informed me. “If you have the time to make a speech, you have the time to kill the hero. That said, this is a soft learning curve. You’re not meddling with the horse’s soul, merely animating its body with necromantic energy. Morally speaking, it’s no different from felling a tree to make a cart – you’re making a means of transportation out of something that used to be alive.”

“ You’re skipping the part where I’m killing it first,” I grunted.

The dark-haired man shrugged indifferently. “It would die anyhow. If anything you’re saving it from weeks of unnecessary pain by putting it out of its misery now.”

“ So why didn’t you just have the Blackguards bring in some dead horse, if any corpse will do?” I asked.

I wasn’t sure whether that would be better or worse, actually. It’d be easier to distance myself from the whole thing if I’d never seen the animal alive, but I’d also feel like an actual necromancer. You know, some sorcerer creep in a run-down tower having his minions bring him bodies to make unholy abominations out of.

“ You wouldn’t be able to raise it,” Black said. “You’re too fresh into your Role to manage something of the sort – you’ll need a connection to the corpse. Besides, better quality of corpse will make a better undead.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, my fingers closing around the handle of the knife at my hip. I’d always known I’d need to cross some lines, to get ahead in the Empire. Gods, I’d as good as renounced any chance of getting into the Heavens after I died just by claiming a Name on the wrong side of the fence so this was positively trifling in comparison. Like felling a tree to make a cart, I told myself, the words coming as cold comfort.

“ Will it be painful?” I asked, opening my eyes. “For the horse, I mean.”

“ It won’t even wake,” Black replied.

I knew people who hadn’t died half that peacefully. “So what do I need to do?” I grunted, letting go of the knife.

“ Lay your hand on its coat,” the Knight instructed quietly. “I’ll do most of the work, you just have to get a feel for what’s happening.”

I knelt in front of the horse, awkwardly reaching for the side of its neck. It didn’t even stir. Black crouched next to me and laid a single finger on its forehead, narrowing his eyes almost imperceptibly. There was no crackling of energy or flash of light – this wasn’t magic, I thought, not the way mages used it anyway – but suddenly there was a weight pushing down on my shoulders. The horse went cold, the sensation of it against my fingers giving me goosebumps. The way it felt was... hard to describe. I’d gone swimming in the Silver Lake, last summer, from one of the shallower beaches. The sun had been pounding down all afternoon so the waters close to the surface had been pleasantly warm, but the depths my feet reached to had still been cool. It felt a little like that, if the warm waters were the rest of Creation and all of my body was in the depths. The power didn’t feel twisted or unnatural, the way I would have expected Evil at work to. It was just other , in some fundamental way.

The horse took a last breath, then stilled.

Black’s brows furrowed. “And now for the tricky part.”

The power inside the horse tightened like a rope in response to the Knight’s will and the corpse twitched: my fingers dug into the corpse’s flank as I focused all my attention on what was happening, willing myself to miss not a single moment. There was a sharp pricking sensation on my palm, like I’d been jabbed by a needle, and my awareness of the corpse unfolded like a sixth sense. I could feel the chords that animated the horse and they were mine as much as any of my fingers: I willed it and the charger rose to its feet. I didn’t know how horses were supposed to move, how their limbs were supposed to work, but the corpse did and I drew on what it had been while still alive.

“ Well done,” the dark-haired man murmured as he rose to his feet.

I realized with a start I was already up – when had that happened?

“ It will need a name,” Black prompted me.

I pondered that for a moment. I could name it something heroic or inspiring but that would have been something of lie of sorts, a denial of what I’d just done. Call a spade a spade.

“ His name,” I announced, “is Zombie.”

Chapter 7: Sword

“A single strike parts a champion from a corpse.”
– Praesi proverb

Dawn had come much, much too early.

I put on my aketon and fastened my bootstraps regardless. I’d been told the ache in my everywhere would die down when I settled into my “riding legs”, whatever the Hells that was supposed to be, and apparently Zombie was making it much easier on me than an actual horse would. Not that it felt like it. I dragged my ass down to the common room of the inn we’d ended up in and picked at my porridge half-heartedly, forcing myself to swallow mouthfuls of the increasingly lukewarm slop. I wasn’t that hungry at the moment, but a I knew that if I didn’t fill my stomach now I’d feel ravenous in a matter of hours. Captain was the only other person sitting at the table, methodically tearing through her second bowl without a word. Even while eating her eyes were never restful, always moving and scanning the corners of the inn’s dining room – the habits of a lifetime spent serving as my teacher’s bodyguard. With a grimace I put down my spoon and admitted that this was about as much food as I could force myself to swallow at the moment. Besides, I had questions to ask and this was as good a time as any: Black was nowhere in sight but I was due to begin my first sword lesson soon.

“So,” I spoke up, “the Sixth Legion.”

Captain eyed me curiously but didn’t reply. I hadn’t expected her to, really: even after only two days of travelling with the gargantuan warrior I’d gotten a decent read on her personality. She wasn’t the type to talk unless asked a direct question, not unless she was with an old friend.

“I know their cognomen is Ironsides ,” I continued, “but besides a mention of how they held the left flank at Streges, the books don’t say more about how they got it.”

A cognomen was what we mere Callowans would call a nickname, thought the books had given me the impression that there was a little more to it than that. I’d taken the time to look up the legions that served as Summerholm’s garrison, after being told it was where we headed. The Sixth and the Ninth – Ironsides and Regicides . The second was fairly straightforward, but the first not so much. Captain put down her wooden spoon, resting it against the rim of the bowl.

“They broke a charge of the knights of Callow,” she gravelled out, her tone making it clear she expected this to be a tell-all explanation.

“That’s, uh,” I said, “good on them I guess? You’re saying like that’s a really impressive thing.”

The tall woman mulled over this a moment before speaking.

“You were born after the Conquest,” she finally said, “so you don’t understand the way wars used to go. You only heard of the Legions after we started winning.”

“I know the Empire tried to invade a few times before,” I defended myself. “I was taught about how Emperor Nefarious got his ass handed to him by King Robert before Black and the Empress got put in charge.”

“Don’t take it as a criticism,” Captain grunted. “The Legions went through reforms decades before you were born. Things were different back then. It used to be that the Empire didn’t fight Callowan armies on an open field unless we had them four to one.”

I couldn’t help but let out a whistle at that.

“That seems a little excessive,” I told her.

“We still lost about half of the time,” she gravelled. “Before the Fields, the only way a legion ever held against a charge by Callowan knights was by packing the ranks so tight they got bogged down.”

I winced. You didn’t need to be a master tactician to understand that that particular tactic was going to involve a lot of dead legionaries.

“So the Sixth are badasses who spit in the face of enemy charges,” I said. “The name’s already starting to make more sense.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Captain gravelled. “Istrid – the Sixth’s general – is an orc. So is most of her legion.”

“And that changes things because?” I asked.

“Greenskins weren’t allowed to be legionaries until the reforms,” the large warrior grunted. “Just auxiliaries that the Black Knights used as meatshields to take the heat off Praesi soldiers. And when the knights charged them ...”

“They broke, and they broke hard,” I finished quietly.

It was easy enough to imagine the greenskin legionaries I remembered patrolling the streets in Laure, only without the armour and the large shields. I’d seen enough frescoes of Callow knights in the House of Light to know they were large men and women in full plate riding war horses decked in the same: it would have been like running a sharp knife through butter.

“And so there was Istrid and her legion of orcs, after a thousand years of her people being run down like animals,” Captain spoke quietly. “Standing down those knights from behind a line of shields, and this time they were not the ones to break .”

“Ironsides,” I murmured, trying out the word with a new kind of wonder.

I’d probably met cripples in the streets of Laure who’d been part of that ill-fated charge, I told myself. It was a sobering thought, but it didn’t quite manage to take away the mystique of the tale Captain had just spun with her curt sentences. That was the thing I hated – loved – the most of these villains I was travelling with: when you listened to them talk, they didn’t seem so much like the villains anymore. There was a twisted sort of justice to the Sixth Legion managing to be on the other side of slaughter, for once. We’re raised on stories of Praesi monsters, but I wonder what kind of stories they heard while growing up?

“Don’t focus too much on Istrid,” Captain spoke quietly. “Sacker’s the more dangerous one between the two.”

“Ninth Legion – cognomen Regicides ,” I recited from memory. “One of their companies killed the Shining Prince, right?”

“They all wear red war paint on their throat to show how the idiot got his throat slit,” she chuckled. “It’s what she’s remembered for, but it’s not why she’s dangerous. She’s slated to take Ranker’s place when she retires, and you need more brains than brawn to make it to Marshall.”

“So she’s smart?” I guessed.

“Cleverer than a snake and twice as mean,” Captain grunted. “She’s a patient one, too – balances the way Istrid can get a little too eager for blood. It’s why they’ve been paired together.”

I grimaced. Coming from a woman who was on first name basis with the Dread Empress and the Black Knight, ‘twice as mean’ was a statement to take seriously. So let’s add General Sacker to the list of people I’ll need be very, very careful around .

“Speaking of Summerholm,” I segued in the most casual tone I could muster. “D’you have any idea why we’re headed there?”

Captain shot me an unimpressed look, so apparently not as casual as I’d hoped.

“Some kind of Name thing for you,” she gravelled. “Squires are so bleeding dramatic. Getting Amadeus settled into his Role was a pain too, though, no reason you’d be different.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Your Name was easier?”

“I was born into mine, back when I was the Cursed,” she grunted. “By the time I became the Captain, no one was dumb enough to challenge me for it.”

I eyed the gargantuan warrior frankly – she was already wearing her armour, and even without her hammer peeking over her shoulder she looked like a one-woman battering ram. “I find that pretty easy to believe,” I admitted.

She snorted and returned to her gruel, making it pretty clear she considered the conversation over. I tried to do the same, but nearly spat out the stuff when I realized how cold it had gotten during our little chat. Shoving the spoon back in, I pushed myself up and nodded my goodbye to Captain before heading for the door. The inn we were at – the Soldier’s Rest – wasn’t big or rich enough to have a real stable, so the horses had been tied to a row of posts right outside. Zombie stood perfectly still next to Black’s mount, his chestnut coat lacking the subtle rise and fall that the horses of the Blackguard showed every time they breathed. Just by coming close to it the eerie awareness I’d come to have of the necromantic construct unfolded in the back of my mind again: it felt like he was a puppet whose every individual string I could pull on at any time. That wasn’t the eerie part, though: I knew , somehow, how all those strings interacted. How pulling on the part that animated the left forward leg would affect the rest of the body, what parts I needed to tug on to set him to a trot or a full run.

It wasn’t like I’d ever studied horse anatomy, either. I had no real explanation for how I knew any of that except that my Name itself knew – and wasn’t that just enough to send a shiver up my spine?

“You’ll get used to it,” the voice came from behind me.

I tamped down the urge to jump out of my skin. Black’s idea of a sense of humour apparently involved sneaking behind me at every occasion. How the man managed that in a full suit of armour was beyond me. Probably involves some kind of Name bullshit.

“To raising things from the dead?” I replied, turning to look at him. “Gods, I hope not. That strikes me as a bad habit to form.”

The dark-haired man stood alone. No sign of any of his bodyguards, or even Scribe. Not that she’d say much of anything even if she was around. The plain-faced scrivener made Captain look positively chatty in comparison.

“I’m referring to the things you don’t know how you know,” he replied. “Names provide what you could call a... second set of instincts. Part of growing into yours is learning which parts to use and which parts to ignore.”

My eyes fell to the scabbarded sword he held in his hands. A short sword, much like the one strapped at his hip. Not quite Legion-issue – the pommel was inlaid with silver, though from this far I couldn’t see what it depicted – but close enough for training purposes. Without any warning, he tossed it at me. My hand came up before I’d even processed the sight, snatching it out of the air like we’d choreographed the whole thing.

“The reflexes are useful, so I think I’ll be keeping those,” I acknowledged. “I take it that’s going to be mine?”

He nodded. “Goblin steel, straight from the Imperial forges of Foramen. You won’t find anything of better make on the continent.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Not even dwarven stuff?”

The Knight snorted. “As if they’d ever sell anything but the mass-produced stuff to surfacers. Dwarven weapons are common because they’re cheap, Catherine, not because they’re quality material.”

I raised a hand in a gesture of appeasement. “Alright, alright. No need to go all Praesi pride on me.”

The silver inlays made up a grinning goblin’s head, as it happened. The smaller greenskins might not have the kind of fangs you could see in an orc’s mouth, but the leering goblin was showing an impressive set of canines. I shoved the scabbard into the leather straps made for it on my belt, wriggling it a little to make sure it fit properly.

“No shield?” I asked.

There was one hanging off his back, fastened by a clever metal contraption I’d taken a look at the other day. A large rectangular piece of plain steel, unadorned by any heraldry: it was similar to what legionaries used, the kind Sergeant Ebele had called a scutum .

“It’s waiting for you where we’ll practice,” he replied. “You’ll go without armour for today, but as soon as the armour Scribe requisitioned arrives you’ll be doing this in full plate.”

Joy. The aketon already made me feel like I’d gained twenty pounds, actual armour was going to turn me into Creation’s clumsiest upright turtle. I followed Black when he led the way around the inn – didn’t see what was so different between the ground in front and in the back, but it was too early to ask questions. Besides, the whole place was identical in every direction as far as I could tell. The two hundred miles between Laure and Summerholm were flat farmland with no city to speak of in between. The main road was good paved stone, at least: it’d been built by the Praesi after the Conquest, in case they ever needed to move troops quickly between the cities. People called it the Imperial highway, since from Summerholm it connected through Streges and its infamous fields to the Blessed Isle – and from there, across the Wasaliti River to the Wasteland itself. There was a field of beaten earth behind the inn’s wooden walls, and there was my shield: an actual legionary’s scutum, painted dark red, though I noticed it lacked a legion number. I picked it up and tested the weight: twenty pounds, maybe a little more? It’d get tiring to hold up until I built up my arm strength. The horizontal grip was good cedar wood and I tied up the leather straps hanging off of it to my wrist – put there to make sure it wasn’t easy to knock out of my fingers, I figured. Black was standing at ease on the field when I finally turned to face him, shield held up to cover his side and sword already in hand.

“So,” I said. “Teach me swordsmanship.”

He smiled. “I’m not going to teach you anything of the sort.”

“That seems a little counterproductive,” I commented.

“Swordsmanship,” he continued, “is the tame sport they teach noble children. It’s a matter of forms and rules, as useful on the battlefield as a blunted blade.”

The tip of his sword rose to face me.

“I’m going to teach you to kill , Catherine,” he said. “Kill well and quickly, while giving as few openings as possible.”

“Hurray,” I replied flatly. “Long live the Dread Empire, other assorted patriotic slogans. Can we start now?”

Still, even as I gave him the flippancy that little bout of melodrama had deserved, I straightened my spine and brought up my shield in a rough approximation of the way he held it. This was the sort of lessons I’d actually been looking forward to – even more now that I’d started learning the blinding headache that was spoken Kharsum. Only one night in and I was already much more amenable to the Miezan point of view of stomping that whole “other cultures” business into the ground. He actually looked a little offended I’d been largely unaffected by his impromptu spot of theatre, though he got over it quickly enough.

“The two most important parts of any kind of fighting,” he said, “are distance and footwork. Your fighting in the Pit should already have taught you the basics of distance, though you’ll need to adjust to the range of your sword.”

I frowned but nodded. Girls my height who got into fights either learned to deal with the fact that most opponents would have more reach and upper body strength than them, or they learned to enjoy the taste of blood in the mouth. The short sword wasn’t much of an upgrade, in that regard. Most people I’d end up fighting would have a sword too – and outside Praes, longswords and two-handers were the most popular weapons. Except for the Free Cities, I guess. That whole lot had a fixation with pikes and spears, though to give praise where it was due their phalanxes were supposed to be fearsome on the field.

“Shield up,” Black barked, and my arm rose immediately – mostly out of surprise.

I’d never heard him raise his voice before. The suddenness of it had my blood rushing through my veins while he advanced towards me, eyeing my stance critically.

“You’re right-handed,” he said, “so your left hip and leg should be braced against the back of the shield. Otherwise, you’re open .”

His sword whipped out faster than my eye could follow, swatting aside my hastily-placed scutum. The tip of his blade came to rest on my throat for the blink of an eye before he took a step back. I swallowed. That wasn’t a practice blade he was using: if he’d pushed it an inch further in, I’d be dying on the ground. Squaring my shoulders, I put the godsdamned shield up the way it was supposed to go. The upper edge came all the way up to my chin and the sides covered my entire body – it was reassuring, to have that length of steel between me and his blade. The position felt awkward, to be honest. The foot in front pointed towards Black but the one in the back had to be horizontal if I wanted to have any stability: swinging my sword would be tricky.

“Better,” the green-eyed man conceded grudgingly. “Now for the sword. Grasp the grip and press forward as you lift it out.”

It ran against my instincts to do it that way, but I could see the sense in it: it kept everything but my upper arm under the cover of the shield. I rotated my elbow down and brought the sword up, letting it rest to the side of the scutum. Ah , I understood suddenly. Of course swinging would be difficult: the sword wasn’t supposed to be swung. It was meant to stab forward in short thrusts.

“Legionaries fight on three lines,” Black said. “Low line goes like this.”

He crouched behind his shield, letting it cover him all the way up to right under his eyes. The tip of his sword was knee-height.

“Mid line goes like this,” he continued, rising up and bringing the sword up to his hip.

He took a short step forward and I eyed him warily. My newly-acquired Name reflexes had been of no help whatsoever last time he’d attacked.

“And high line like this,” he finished calmly.

His arm went back and the tip of the sword came to breast-height like a serpent poised to strike. I nodded sharply.

“Good,” he smiled. “First we’ll spend some time having you go through those motions.”

He stepped back.

“ Low line ,” he barked out.

I flinched at the sudden sound but crouched. I would learn this, and learn it well.

Several eternities later – or, more realistically, about two hours – I found myself pulling the cork out of a waterksin and gulping down the contents greedily. We’d acquired an audience somewhere between the stabbing drills and the footwork ones. If I had to hear steady timing, maintain the distance one more time, someone was going to get stabbed. And I had a sword now, so I meant business. Captain, who’d been the one to hand me the skin in the first place, patted me comfortingly on the shoulder. Gods, even her hands are huge. She must have ogre blood or something, humans don’t usually get that big.

“The first few weeks are always the hardest,” she told me. “You’re not doing bad at all.”

I took her word for it, though I couldn’t find it in me to agree out loud. I’d been in enough fights to know that I was good in a scrap – very good, even, for my age – and it had been a while since I’d felt as clumsy and slow as I had today. I was aware that comparing my own movements to the effortless way Black moved even in plate wasn’t a reasonable comparison, but it wasn’t stopping that nagging voice in the back of my head from making it anyway. And I’ll be worse when I get my own armour. I felt my fist clench and took another swallow to hide my grimace. I was definitely doing another set of drills tonight, preferably somewhere no one would be able to see me making a bumbling fool of myself. When I passed the skin back to Captain I found her scrutinizing me with those too-perceptive eyes of hers, and without saying a word she patted me on the back a last time before heading towards Black. The Knight was talking in low voices with Scribe, reading a folded parchment she’d handed him after he’d announced we were taking a break.

“Black,” she called out as she strode across the field. “Anything urgent come up?”

Green eyes flicked towards me before he replied. “Nothing new.”

Captain grinned, tossing the waterskin towards the wall and rolling her shoulders.

“Let’s have a bout, then. You’ve been putting the girl through the mangle, so at least show her what she’s headed to.” The gargantuan woman pulled the war hammer hanging off of her back, twirling it one-handed like she was holding a twig instead of a massive wrought steel bar. “Been a while since we had one, anyway.”

Well now. That sounded like it had potential. Seeing the Knight getting smashed by that hammer a few times would do wonders for my mood. The green-eyed man snorted.

“Fair enough. Terms?”

“Let’s keep Names out of it,” Captain replied. “Would defeat the point to go all-out.”

“Would also wreck most of the countryside,” someone muttered from my side.

I glanced and saw one of the Blackguards had come up to me. There were a handful of them milling about the place, though together they didn’t make up more than a dozen people. Where the rest had gone to, I had no idea. The man who’d spoken pushed up his visor to show his face: couldn’t have been older than thirty, with brown wide-set eyes and the dark skin tone typical of northern Praesi. Soninke , I corrected myself. They call themselves the Soninke.

“They get messy, I take it?” I prompted him.

It was the first time one of the Blackguards had struck up a conversation with me, so I fully intended to keep it going. Hells, it was the first time I’d seen one of their faces: they kept to themselves to the extent I’d started to wonder if they were avoiding me.

“The last time they had a spar without holding back, Captain knocked down a tower and Lord Black threw a whole statue at her,” he informed me cheerfully. “Hilarious at the time, of course, but the local baron was less than pleased.”

I chuckled. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” I said. “I’m-”

“Catherine Foundling.”

I scowled. “I really wish people would stop doing that.”

He grinned, showing off pearly white teeth. “I’m Lieutenant Abase,” he introduced himself, offering his hand. I went to shake it but he made some sort of strange clicking sound with his tongue and moved my hand up to his forearm.

“You’re not a civilian,” Abase told me. “Use the warrior’s salute.”

I raised an eyebrow but clasped his arm like he’d showed me. Praesi and their rituals. I’m surprised they can use a chamber pot without doing a special dance first.

“So,” I mused. “Any particular reason this is the first time I actually speak with one of you?”

“We’re quiet types,” the lieutenant replied drily. “And wary of strangers. Lord Black has several men’s worth of enemies.”

Wary of me, huh. Not sure whether I was offended or flattered. Still, I must have done something right, to finally rank words today. I was about to ask exactly what that was when movement at the edge of my field of vision interrupted me: Captain and Black were putting distance between them, striding to the edges of the dirt field. Scribe stood in the middle, looking superbly bored with the whole affair.

“Try not to blink,” Lieutenant Abase said. “You’ll miss it.”

Miss what? I wanted to ask, but Scribe was already speaking.

“On my mark,” she announced. A heartbeat passed, then she brought down her hand.

I blinked – probably because the lieutenant had brought it up in the first place – and in the fragment of a moment where my eyes closed, Captain crossed half the field. She left behind foot tracks and a spray of dirt where’d she been standing an instant before, barreling through the distance almost faster than I could see. Black had not yet moved, standing still with his shield up and his sword in mid-line, but the moment Captain got close enough to bring her hammer down he calmly sidestepped around the strike and pivoted so he’d be facing her back. The armoured woman’s weight and momentum carried her forward even after she landed on the ground, carrying her a few feet further down the field as she turned to face the Knight.

“Shit,” I whispered. “Did she really just jump thirty feet forward in heavy plate?”

“Quick on the offensive, today,” Abase noted, unruffled by what we’d just witnessed. “She must have been getting bored.”

“Weren’t they supposed to not use their Names?” I asked him. “What she just did is, like, physically impossible for a normal person. Just seeing it would give my numbers teacher a headache.”

“They’re not using them actively ,” the lieutenant clarified. “Lord Black’s shadow isn’t moving and Captain is, well, still using her hammer.”

He didn’t elaborate further on either of those interesting tidbits, and I decided not to press him any further – not because I wasn’t curious, but because what the people in question were getting up to had claimed my full attention. Captain was attacking relentlessly, swinging the two-handed war hammer like she couldn’t feel the weight of it at all. And yet, she wasn’t the one controlling the flow of the fight. Black moved little and carefully, rarely more than a step at a time: he stepped barely out of the arc of her strikes and then swung around so he was facing her back. He’d yet to attack, but just the threat of him doing so was forcing Captain to keep moving. The sight of them was almost comical, from where I stood: the two of them were dressed in similar-looking plate, sure, but the olive-skinned woman stood at least three feet taller than him and had broader shoulders to boot. Neither of them wore helmets, so I could see that while a faint smile tugged at Captain’s lips my teacher’s face was expressionless. His pale skin made it creepy: he looked like he was wearing a mask made of marble. After another miss, Captain took a step back and raised her hammer high.

“That should do for the warm up,” she grunted before striking the ground.

There was a dull boom and the ground shook like it had been hit by a catapult stone: dirt sprayed everywhere, clouding my sight of the battlefield for a moment. When they came into sight again, Black was ducking under a vicious-looking swing. He ventured a kick to her knee but Captain danced back, the hammer coming back to swat him on the backswing. His shield came up to take the hit but the metal crumpled under the force and the impact was enough to throw him back a few feet.

“You’re getting slow in your old age,” she told him.

The dark-haired man shrugged and discarded the now-useless scutum. “You’re getting mouthy in yours,” he noted amusedly.

And then he went on the attack.

I’d seen him move like that once back in Laure, when he’d decided that stabbing me in the chest was an acceptable way to end a conversation, but seeing it from a distance was an entirely different matter. When Captain was at her quickest I could still make out a blur, but with him it was like he just... appeared in another place. Stepping inside the warrior woman’s guard almost absent-mindedly, he swept his blade across the space where her throat had been a moment earlier: if she hadn’t taken a step back at the last moment, her blood would have been spilling in the dirt. She brought down her hammer’s handle on his shoulder, but he spun around and smashed the pommel of his sword into her elbow. She grunted and the impact loosened her grip, but Black was already moving again. He spun again and stomped down on the back of her knee, forcing it down as his blade went for the side of her neck. Captain managed to bring up the hammer’s handle at the last moment and block it, but hers was not a weapon made for defence and it showed. Not that it mattered, given their difference in strength – the instant she got her footing back, Captain pushed him off without any visible effort.

It was what he’d been waiting for, unfortunately for her.

He drew away as she pushed, letting her pass through and steadying his arm in the high-line guard he’d spent half an hour showing me earlier: he thrust straight into the back of her neck. It was a killing blow, or it would have been if he’d pushed it all the way through. Instead he stopped after pricking the skin, stepping back and sheathing his sword with a flourish as Captain cursed in Taghrebi. I recognized the plural of goats somewhere in there, and to be honest I was kind of glad I had no idea what the rest of it meant.

“And that’s a kill,” Black spoke, the lack of smugness in his tone so flamboyant it looped around back to smug.

Captain grunted and let her hammer rest against the ground, fingers coming up to touch the minute wound on her neck. “That makes what, two hundred for you?”

“And still one twenty-one for you,” he agreed. “The gap is widening, it seems. Are you sure I’m the one getting slower?”

“You’ll need to beat Ranger at least once before you get to gloat,” she growled back.

I let out the breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding as the two of them continued to bicker amiably. So that was what it looked like, when legends fought. And not even a serious fight, I reminded myself.

“Triple drills,” I muttered to myself. “Triple drills, even if my limbs fall off.”

Chapter 8: Introduction

“ Note: orc buoyancy is limited. Avoid fighting the damnable rebels near shoddily-built dams in the future.”
– Extract from the journal of Dread Emperor Malignant II

They called Summerholm the Gate of the East.
Should the Legions manage to bypass the Blessed Isle – as they had a handful of times in the past – it was the only walled city between the Empire and the heartlands of Callow. It was the one city the Praesi had to take, since it commanded the only bridge across the Hwaerte River. As far as I knew, the Wastelanders had only managed to conquer it twice: once during the Conquest and once over seven hundred years ago, under Dread Empress Triumphant. While my teacher had managed to reduce its walls through clever use of goblin engineering, Triumphant had simply made them obsolete by sailing her flying fortress right over them. I could see why she would have gone to such an extreme, now that I was in sight of those very fortifications. The side of the city we were facing was the least fortified, but even here the walls ran two concentric circles of stark granite over fifty feet tall. Crenelated bastions ran the length of them, most showing the silhouette of a siege engine, and even as close to sundown as we were there were soldiers manning them. Legionaries instead of the Royal Guard, though. Not that they’re any less well-trained – the opposite, if anything.
“They look like they’re expecting an army any moment,” I commented as I guided Zombie towards Black with a tug of the reins.
His own horse was also a necromantic construct, I was sure of it – there was a certain... smell to that kind of power that I was beginning to pick up on – but it was hard to tell what it actually looked like under all the steel it was covered in. With all the weight that meant I was pretty sure his mount could double as a battering ram in a pinch, though that would do to the horse under it did not bear imagining.
“Summerholm has always been the keystone to warding off invasions,” he replied. “It continues to serve that purpose, if under a different banner.”
I snorted. “And who’d be doing the invading, exactly?”
For better or worse, the Empire’s hold on Callow was unchallenged. There’d been no major uprising since the Conquest, and with Procer embroiled in that particularly nasty civil war of theirs they’d had other things on their mind. That left the Free Cities to the south, who’d only ever managed to stop attacking each other when they were being invaded, and the fanatically isolationist elves to the north hiding in their forest.
“There’s always someone plotting nefarious designs around here,” Black replied drily. “It’s something of an occupational hazard.”
I rolled my eyes. I had a feeling there was more to it than that but my teacher declined to elaborate any further on the subject though, so I elected to let the matter go. I’d bring it up again when I’d acquired a better education on all things Praesi, of course, but until then there was no real point to it. Besides, we’d gotten close enough tot he city that I could see the Legion camps sprawled all around it. The official roster of soldiers for a legion was four thousand fighting men, I dredged up from my most recent readings, though the Praecepta Militaria had stated there were usually about as many camp followers, merchants and servants trailing in their wake. It would have been impossible for a city the size of Summerholm to lodge two legions comfortably, so a pair of semi-permanents camps had been established outside the walls.
“Weeping Heavens,” I muttered, “It’s like a second city.”
However many civilians the Sixth and Ninth legions had started out followed by, the number had swelled out of control since. The central areas where legionaries slept were cleanly outlined according to regulations, overlooked by earthen walls and watchtowers, but around them small towns had sprouted into existence. Dingy huts made of wood and baked clay from the river banks made up up some of it, but there were twice as many pitched tents of all colours. Some avenues large enough for troops to go through had been established, but the rest of it was a messy labyrinth of small lanes. We were maybe an hour away from sundown but the place was teeming with activity, from the small courts were merchants were selling their wares in improvised market stands to the clumps of families making their evening meals in massive iron cooking pots. There was even a man trying to guide a herd of goats into a pen, though one of the does kept getting away to bleat plaintively at a very amused legionary.
“Summerholm is where Praesi and Callowans mingle the most,” Black spoke as our party started down the slope towards the camps. “All trade goes through it, so it’s fast becoming one of the richest cities in the Empire.”
“And there haven’t been any tensions?” I asked. “I heard the siege got pretty rough, towards the end.”
Summerholm hadn’t been sacked, not exactly – Legion regulations stated that rapists were hanged and looters lost a hand if caught with stolen property – but the final assault on the walls had been costly enough that no one on the Empire’s side had been particularly inclined to mercy when the surrender had been given.
“Rebuilding the city accrued some good will,” Black murmured. “And leaving eight thousand men and women in the prime of their life as garrison means that mixed race marriages were an inevitability.”
He paused for a moment.
“You’re not wrong, however. Summerholm is the pulse of Callowan sentiment towards the occupation: any rebellion with a chance of success will have its seeds planted here. Our agents have been keeping a close eye on things.”
Our agents. I’d avoided questioning Black on where he was learning all these things he wasn’t supposed to know so far, but since he was bringing up the subject...
“The Eyes of the Empire,” I said. “That’s what your spies are called, aren’t they?”
They were famous among Callowans, a shadowy threat to match the very visible one posed by the Legions. Everybody had a story about how one of their cousins or a friend of a friend had been snatched in the dark of night by the ruthless men and women who bore the lidless eye tattoo. I was pretty sure I’d seen one in the Nest, once. Well, either that or a man with a deplorable fondness for hooded cloaks. Black’s lips stretched into a sardonic smile.
“Ah, the Eyes,” he mused. “One of Scribe’s better ideas, that.”
I frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I have a great deal of spies in Callow, true,” he acknowledged. “So do Malicia and quite a few of the High Lords. But I assure you none of them go around hiding their face or bearing an incriminating mark.”
“But there are people like that going around,” I pointed out. “If they’re not yours, whose are they?”
“Oh, they’re mine,” Black replied. “But they’re not meant to actually gather information.”
I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose. The way the man thought gave me headaches, but there was a twisted sort of sense in what he was saying.
“So while everyone is paying attention to the shady people looming in the corners...”
“No one thinks twice about the waitress serving drinks just close enough to eavesdrop,” he finished amusedly. “Every resistance movement in Callow worth the name checks prospective members for the eye before letting them in. Letting them catch a few ‘attempted infiltrators’ every year lets us slip in agents when we really need them.”
My teacher was kind of a bastard, I reflected, but I couldn’t deny that he was a clever bastard.
“And nobody’s ever seen through that?” I asked.
“Once you give people what they expect to see,” he shrugged, “they rarely bother to dig any deeper.”
I grunted, chewing over that particular tidbit in silence. He’d offered it almost off-handedly, but it seemed to be the way he approached a lot of things – playing on the assumptions of his enemies, making them think they had it right while preparing the knife in the back. Everything surrounding Names had a pattern to it, almost formulaic steps that every child learned from the cradle through stories of heroes and villains: people who adhered to those steps, whether consciously or not, became predictable in a way. It was something I could use to my own advantage, if I paid attention closely enough. Putting the thoughts aside, I returned to more immediate matters.
“So your agents in Summerholm,” I probed, “have they mentioned anything interesting?”
I already knew I’d have a welcoming committee waiting for me in the city: the three bundles of pressure in the back of my mind felt too close to be anywhere else. The fourth bundle, the weird one, was still a little ways off. It got stronger every day, though, which I took to mean it was headed in our direction. Black had avoided telling me too much about what awaited me in Summerholm, so far, but I had no idea whether that was because he was a cryptic jackass by nature or because there would be.... consequences if he did. Still, stumbling blind into the situation blind was a decent way to head for an early grave: I’d be much more comfortable going in with an edge, any edge. The dark-haired man graced me with a steady look.
“There are two major resistance movements in the city, at the moment,” he finally said. “The Sons of Streges – disaffected veterans, mostly – and a splinter group of the former Thieves’ Guild. My agents in both of them have stopped reporting.”
The tone was flat, a stark contrast to the way he usually seemed to take everything half-seriously.
“You think they got caught,” I said.
“They are either dead or held captive,” he stated. “There are ways through which they would have contacted the network, otherwise.”
I frowned. If a single agent had been caught it could have been a simple blunder on the person’s part, but every single one of them?
“Magic?” I questioned. “Truth spells are rare, but they’re not exactly unheard of.”
He shook his head. “There is no such thing as a reliable truth spell,” he informed me. “At best they can increase the odds of catching someone in a lie – and given how esoteric that branch of magic is, very few mages ever bother to study them. There are, as far as I am aware, none who have in Callow.”
It went unsaid that his awareness was as far and wide as it was feasible for someone with the resources he had at his disposal to manage.
“I’m having a hard time believing every single one of your spies screwed up at the same time,” I told him.
“So am I,” he said quietly. “Which means we may have a hero on our hands.”
Well, fuck . “That’s bad, right?” I asked. “Because it sounds bad. I thought you caught these types before they ever got in a position to do stuff like this?”
“Once in a while, one slips the net,” Black admitted. “Normally they out themselves shortly after by taking a stand for justice in some backwater village, but this one has made no ripples at all.” He frowned. “Or, more likely, made them somewhere they went unnoticed.”
I grimaced. “Careful or lucky?”
“I’ve found the more dangerous heroes are a little of both,” the Knight replied. “The infestation is still limited to a single Role, I believe – if they’d assembled a whole party it would have been noticed – so we’re dealing with a very specific type of hero.”
“That already sounds more manageable,” I said. I didn’t know if I had it in me to stab a Bard, honestly. The were always charmingly ineffective in the stories, it would have been like kicking a puppy. “So, some lone wolf kind of deal?”
“A gritty avenging type, I’d wager,” Black replied. “They crop up with unfortunate regularity.”
So, three strangers who wanted my head on a pike, Role shenanigans and a hero on the loose. Evidently, my first visit of Summerholm was shaping up to be a memorable one. I let silence fall down and our party headed for the camps, riding off the main road into the countryside.
People came to greet us before we got into the camp proper.
A dozen legionaries in heavy plate were escorting a orc woman going without a helmet. On foot, all of them – the Legions didn’t really have cavalry to speak of, except for the Thirteenth. Captain pulled up at my side and I shot her a quizzical glance.
“Istrid,” she simply gravelled as the legionaries got closer.
Black dismounted and I followed suit after a heartbeat, standing a back as my teacher strode towards General Istrid. The general’s skin was almost more brown than green, I noticed: she looked like she’d been carved out of rough old leather, though that was common enough in the older orcs. There was a wide scar on her cheek that pulled at her eye, fixing her face in a mocking rictus that looked impressively firece on someone in full legion gear. She was one of taller greenskins I’d seen, though not quite as broad-shouldered as most orcs her size would be: still, she towered at least two feet above me. And above Black too , I noted with amusement.
“Warlord,” she growled in Kharsum, offering up her arm the same way Lieutenant Abase had shown me a few days back. The word she’d used wasn’t the one I’d read in the books I’d been given, but the pronunciations was fairly similar – I suppose it might have changed since the manuscript had been written, or she could have been using a slightly different dialect. Black clasped her arm without hesitation.
“Istrid,” he greeted her in the same language, tone fond. “Couldn’t wait for us to make it to your tent?”
“I got bored,” she replied unashamedly. “You took your sweet time coming.”
“There was a situation Laure that needed seeing to,” the Knight spoke mildly.
The orc officer barked out a harsh laugh. “Heard about that. Finally hanged the fucker, huh? Been a long time coming.”
Ha! I was already feeling rather better disposed towards General Istrid – anyone who wanted to see Mazus swinging from a noose couldn’t be all bad.
“Good things come to those who wait,” Black told her.
“Now you’re sounding like Sacker,” Istrid growled. “You two will be the death of me. Never mind that – Captain, that you hanging around in the back?”
The woman in question patted my shoulder and moved to join them, leaving me to stand with the ever-silent Blackguards and Scribe. Black’s band of bodyguards was no longer as silent as it had once been around me, but they’d reverted to silent statues as soon as we’d come in sight of Summerholm. I glance towards Scribe who had, I saw, also dismounted. She was standing closest to me, and since it didn’t seem like my presence would be noticed any time soon I ambled in her direction.
“They seem pretty friendly,” I said.
She wasn’t a very talkative woman, Scribe. The most I’d ever heard her say was that handful of sentences the first time we’d met, and since then she’d always seemed so busy I’d hesitated to try and strike up a conversation. No parchments in her hands now, though, and it wasn’t like I had anything better to do.
“They’ve known each other for a long time,” she replied, to my surprise. “Istrid’s clan was the second to side with Black, when he was still the Squire.”
Huh. That certainly explained why they were still catching up like old friends sharing drinks instead of heading to the general’s tent.
“Known her for long too, then?” I asked.
I knew precious little about Scribe, except that she’d been around Black since before the Conquest. None of the stories I’d heard mentioned her except in passing, and it wasn’t like she’d surrendered any information about herself since we’d met. I knew disappeared for a few hours everyday and came back with fresh new correspondence, but where and how she got the letters remained a mystery. The plain-faced woman shook her head. “I came later.”
Like squeezing blood out of a stone , I thought. I shuffled awkwardly on my feet and tried to think of something to say, but was saved at the last moment by an outside interruption.
“Catherine,” Black called out. “Introductions are in order.”
I shot Scribe a mildly relieved look and headed for the cluster of old friends. General Istrid sized me up as I walked without even the pretence of subtlety and I straightened my spine out of habit. She wouldn’t take a stick to my fingers every time I slouched to make sure I had proper posture the way the House matron had, but then again I had a feeling that making a bad impression on the commander of the Sixth Legion would have more dire consequences than throbbing knuckles.
“Istrid,” the Knight said, “Meet Catherine Foundling.”
The tall orc frowned, then turned to look at him. “She looks like Wallerspawn,” she said in Kharsum.
I scowled, partly at her blatant dismissal and partly at the word she’d used – Waller was a term orcs used to mean Deoraithe but it wasn’t exactly a polite one. “Half,” I replied in the same tongue, painfully aware that my pronunciation was tetchy. “That a problem?”
That certainly got her attention. “Well,” she drawled, showing a row of sharp teeth, “at least you’re not shy. You sound Callowan, girl – where’d he dig you up?”
“Laure,” I replied. “You end up meeting all sorts of interesting types, when stabbing people.”
The general barked a laugh. “Ain’t that the truth. Well met, Catherine Foundling.”
She offered her arm to clasp and I reciprocated, somehow managing to keep my nerves off of my face. The general seemed a lot taller now that I stood in front of her and that rictus on her face hadn’t gone anywhere: she made for a rather intimidating sight, and the story of her staring down a charge of Callowan knights was still fresh in mind. Possibly she scowled at them and they decided they had better things to do somewhere on the other side of the Tyrian sea. Gods know I kind of wish I did.
“Let’s not make Sacker wait too long,” Captain spoke up as I stepped back. “Odds are she already has eyes on us.”
“Sucker’s bet,” Istrid grunted before turning to address her legionaries. “Stable the horses and find somewhere for the Warlord’s retinue to stash their gear.”
A chorus of salutes was her only reply and I handed off Zombie’s reins to an olive-skinned woman with sergeant’s stripes when prompted. General Istrid led the way to one of the avenues I’d glimpsed earlier, followed by Black and Captain – I glanced back to see if Scribe was following us, but she’d disappeared into thin air when I wasn’t looking. Wait, wouldn’t have had to pass next to us to g et into the camp? A large hand settled on my shoulder, gently steering me forward. “She does that,” Captain gravelled. “It’s part of her Role to stay in the background. She’ll pop up again when she’s needed.”
How much of my not noticing Scribe had come from her being quiet and how much had come from the effects of her Role, I wondered? I muttered something that could pass as agreement and let the matter drop. Sundown was almost on us, and as a result activity in the wider camp had died down: the improvised markets were closing and people were trailing out of the camp and heading towards the gates of Summerholm.
I suppose it makes sense that not all of them stay here after nightfall. For another group getting through the crowds quickly might have been an issue, but everyone was giving us a wide berth. Nobody was quite so bold as to point fingers in our direction, but quite a few people seemed to recognize Black and Captain – whispers bloomed in our wake wherever we went. The weight of the attention made me uncomfortable: the feeling of the three other potential Squires hadn’t gotten any closer, but I had more than them to worry about now. There might very well be a hero somewhere in the masses, and if they were looking for a target I was painfully aware that I was the easiest one available. I was not, after all, so deluded as to think that half a Name and a week’s worth of training with a sword and board would make me a match for a veteran of the Conquest like General Istrid. The grip on the short sword at her hip was well-worn, and she walked like someone who thought of their weapon like an extension of their limbs.
We encountered two patrols as we delved deeper into the impromptu town, both of them stopping to salute as we passed by. More and more legionaries stood watch as we got closer to the actual Legion camp – well, one of them anyway. The standards spread out everywhere all bore the Sixth Legion’s number in Miezan numerals, so it was pretty obvious this was theirs and not the Ninth’s. By the time we made it to the large pavilion that apparently served as General Istrid’s council room, night had fallen. Torches were already burning, though they were hardly needed considering how many cooking fires there were out there: the trail of smoke in the sky must have been visible for miles. The inside of the pavilion was empty except for a large table of polished wood surrounded by comfortable-looking chairs. There was only one person inside: a small goblin woman, under five feet tall and so heavily wrinkled her face looked like a mask. General Sacker, I assumed. She looked almost half-sleep, her yellow eyes were half-lidded even as she gave me an once-over before turning towards my teacher.
“Lord Black,” she murmured from her seat, bowing her head ever so slightly.
She was so quiet I almost missed the words, but the green-eyed man nodded back without missing a beat.
“General Sacker,” he replied, “It’s been too long.”
She inclined her head again.
“Gods Below,” General Istrid interrupted with disgust, “the both of you sound like you’re attending a feast at the Tower. I’m going to need a drink, if we’re doing the fucking Praesi rituals.”
“Finally,” I muttered, “someone’s willing to say it out loud.”
Istrid shot me an amused look as she poured herself a cup some sort of amber liquor from one of the carafes on the table. When I returned my attention to the others, I found that General Sacker was looking at me – and there was no longer anything half-asleep about her demeanour as she studied me. I’d always heard calculating eyes referred to as cold and cool, but if anything the yellow gaze pinning me seemed to burn with focused intensity. Clever as a snake and twice as mean , Captain had told me.
“You’re from Laure,” General Sacker spoke in the same whisper-thin voice. “Interesting. Orphan?”
I wasn’t sure who the question was addressed to so I glanced at Black, but he’d already claimed a seat and was pouring himself a drink from the same carafe as Istrid, paying no attention to the conversation. Worst mentor ever.
“I am,” I confirmed warily.
Sacker nodded to herself. “Calloused hands, mhm. Fighting rings? Illegal in Callow, I do believe.”
Her tone didn’t make it clear whether she approved or disapproved.
“So I’ve heard,” I simply replied.
I had no idea what her game was, but it felt like she was toying with me and I very much disliked the feeling of it. My first instinct was to bite back, but I pushed it down. There was the fact that Captain had specifically warned me about her, of course, but there was more to it than that. General Sacker was old . By far the oldest goblin I’d ever met and that made her very, very dangerous – most of their kind never made it past thirty five, and looking at the general I guessed she was pushing forty. Older goblins were notoriously frail and sick but Sacker was still not only in command of a legion, but of a legion holding one of the most important fortresses in the Empire. She was, in short, not someone I wanted to fuck with .
“You can mess with her head later, you vicious old bat,” Istrid broke in cheerfully, apparently not caring about any of that in the slightest. “We’ve got fresher corpses to eat, like our little hero problem.”
General Sacker pursed her lips.
“There’s not definitive proof that we have a-”
That was when the pavilion exploded.

Chapter 9: Claimant

“ Gaining power’s a lot like scaling a tower, Chancellor. The longer you do, the more likely you are to fall.”
– Dread Empress Regalia the First, before ordering her Chancellor thrown out the window

I was swatted down by the hand of an angry god, fire licking at my face.

The world went silent and dark until I realized I’d closed my eyes: when I opened them I still saw spots of colour but the fear of having gone blind that had taken me for an instant left my frame. Everything around me was smoking or on fire: the top of the pavilion had been outright blown away and the rest of the cloth was twenty feet away, cheerfully burning. I pushed myself up, noticing with a grimace that the elbow joint of my armour had been partly melted by the heat. The damned ringing in my ears made it hard to focus on anything, but when I passed my hand over my face I felt with dismay that part of my eyebrows was missing. My fingers came away covered in soot but I pushed concern over my appearance way down the priority list: whoever had just attempted to kill every one of us might still be around, and the second shot might be a little more accurate.

Black was already up and about, helping up a prone and shaky-legged Istrid as Captain hovered around him protectively. I reached for my sword, checking wearily wether the heat had damaged the scabbard – no, it still came out just fine. Good. Now, time to disembowel whoever was responsible for that. My eyebrows are like, my one good feature. Someone kicked my ankle and I felt it through the aketon, only now noticing that my left greaves had somehow been blown away during the impact. I snarled and look down only to find General Sacker staring back up at me peevishly. I gaped at the sight of her: half of her face was gone, a wasteland of blackened flesh with hints of meat peeking through. One of her eyes had popped out of its socket, not that she seemed to care in the slightest. She snapped her fingers in front of my face several times and –

“ -can’t hear me at all, can you? Typical Callowan, all bark and no-”

“ Now let’s not make this a cultural thing,” I rasped out. “Do you hear me talking about how goblins always look like they’re up to something shady?”

She slapped me. I snarled at her and reached for my sword before common sense could kick in. T hat little-

“ Just making sure you’re not in shock,” she grinned malevolently at me, baring a mere handful of broken yellow molars.

“ Maybe I should make sure of the same,” I told her through gritted teeth. “You know, just in case.”

She swaggered away towards Black without replying, though how someone who’d lost half their armour – and face – in the blast could manage a swagger was beyond me. Don’t kick the Praesi general, Catherine. It’ll be very gratifying, but there’ll be Hells to pay afterwards. I followed Sacker, making a point of getting ahead of her through use of my Heaven-gifted longer legs.

“ – put the camp under lockdown. I don’t want anyone getting out,” Black instructed Captain.

“ They’ll be long gone,” the gargantuan woman replied. “But there might be a-”

“ I’ll survive without you dogging my shadow for an hour,” he spoke, tone flat and emotionless. “ Go .”

She went without further protest, stopping to look me over as she passed me by before moving on with a silent nod.

“ Fuck,” I heard Istrid gasp as she leaned on Black’s arm. “Been a while since I’ve been on the receiving end of one of those.”

I looked around and found that, strangely enough, a single chair had been left untouched by the carnage except for being knocked over. I strolled away to pick it up and place it next to General Istrid, acknowledging her grateful glance with an inclination of the head.

“ So, out of curiosity,” I rasped out. “Did someone just drop a godsdamned comet on us? Because that’s a bold opening move, not gonna lie.”

“ No. Goblin munitions,” Black replied.

“ Sharpers,” Istrid specified in a growl. “They always mess with my hearing.”

“ A bad batch,” General Sacker murmured. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be standing right now.”

The tall orc seemed to notice that half of her colleague’s face had been kissed by fire just then, a flicker of surprise and dismay going through her eyes.

“ Well,” she gravelled after a moment. “How many eyes do you really need, anyway? You can get an eyepatch that matches Grem’s.”

Sacker palmed what remained of her face, looking pained for the first time that night. I ignored the byplay, mind already spinning. Goblin munitions, huh. I knew a few things about those, though not as much as I’d like. Sharpers blow, if you’re too slow. Smokers choke, and then you croak. Brightsticks blind, and none too kind. Children in the Laure had a whole game made up around the rhyme, a sort of morbid take on what Imperial sappers had done to the enemy during the Conquest.

“ Sharpers wouldn’t kill a Name without a good spot of luck, would they?” I suddenly asked, looking at Black.

A heartbeat passed as the cogs between those unsettling green eyes turned and arrived at the same conclusion I had.

“ We weren’t the target,” the Knight stated. He glanced at the two generals thoughtfully.

“ If I wanted to create a right mess in Summerholm,” I spoke up, “first I’d off the people commanding the garrison and then-”

He grimaced. “The Governess.”

Legionaries had finally arrived on the scene and immediately my teacher pulled one of them aside, sending him to check on Governess Kansoleh with a few curt sentences. Only after that did he return the full weight of his attention to me.

“ There will be no lesson tonight,” he said. “I trust you’ll manage an evening by yourself?”

“ I’ll find a way to keep myself busy,” I replied neutrally.

It suited me just fine, as it happened: lately I’d been going with the current a little too much for my tastes. While I didn’t doubt that at some point I’d be introduced to the three bundles of murder in the back of my head in a formal capacity, I had no intention of waiting that long to get a closer look at people who were supposedly out for my blood. Surrendering the initiative was starting the fight on the defensive, and I’d always been an attack-minded kind of girl. The Knight paused to meet my eyes, a long moment passing before he snorted.

“ Talk with Scribe,” he said. “She’ll see to it you have what you need.”

I really need to find a book on Names , I decided. If he can’t read minds, I think that would actually make it creepier.

Displaying his usual level of helpfulness, my teacher had not deigned it necessary to tell me where Scribe was.

Thankfully, I lucked out when I asked a legionary to direct me to wherever the Blackguards had been settled. None of them were actually in the temporary barracks – if I’d had to guess, I would have said they would have started running towards Black as fast as they could the moment they heard the explosion – but the woman in question was kneeling on the ground in front of a low table already covered in parchments. I tried to get a glimpse, but none of it made sense to me: it was gibberish in a mix of Kharsum and Mthethwa, as far as I could tell. Cyphered, most likely. The flat indifference she was displaying in her own quiet way was at odds with how close to Black I’d thought she was – wasn’t she worried even a little bit? A sharper wouldn’t kill a bloody Calamity, but it could have wounded him pretty badly.

“ No one died,” I told her. “Black’s not even wounded – General Sacker got the worst of it.”

“ I know,” Scribe replied, adroitly dipping her quill in the inkwell.

I might as well have tried to empathize with a statue. A particularly unconcerned statue, even. Pushing down a sight, I knelt across the table from her.

“ I’m going to be heading out into Summerholm,” I said. “I need a few things before I do.”

I wanted a quiet look, not a melee in the streets of a city that had just gone into high alert, and that meant no armour and no Praesi clothes. I was keeping the sword, inconspicuous as it would be, because screw going unarmed in a city with a hero loose in it – especially a hero that considered blowing up people a valid tactic. Scribe pointed to my left and I followed the finger to a bundle of clothes resting on a shelf.

“ Bullshit,” I replied flatly. “How could you possibly have known I would need those before I even did?”

Scribe glanced up. “I’ve had those set aside since we left Laure,” she simply said.

I was starting to hate that I was playing a game where everybody seemed to know the next ten moves except for me, I thought with a scowl. It came in useful more often than not, sure, but it also left me with the sensation that I was being herded towards a finish they’d already planned out for me. What was I going to do, though, complain my needs were being seen to too well? Yeah, I’m overdue something reckless. Been walking down roads they paved for me a little too much. Without a word I shed my armour and the still-singed aketon underneath, slipping on the woollen trousers and short-sleeved blouse that came with it. Good make, both of them, but not so expensive as to warrant a second look.

My old boots had been preserved and it was a glorious feeling to wiggle my toes inside the used leather instead of the steel-capped stuff I’d been given before we moved out of Laure. I already felt a little more like me and a little less like a doll dressed up in Evil clothes. With the goblin-steel sword and my knife on either sides of my hips I was fully equipped for murder if it came down to it, which if Black’s line about the intention of the other Squire claimants was accurate it very well might. There was also a leather purse with some coins in it, which might come in useful: about twenty silver coins, with the Marchford crest on them. They wouldn’t be as widely accepted as Praesi denarii – Countess Marchford was well-known to short the precious metals in her currency – but they’d certainly attract less attention than a Deoraithe girl running around with a purse full of Imperial silver.

“ I’m heading out,” I told Scribe. “Have fun doing... whatever it is you’re doing?”

The plain-faced woman hummed in response, which seemed to be the sum of the attention she was willing to grant me. I walked out of the barracks, already focusing on the other claimants as I did: one of them had gotten a little closer, as it turned out.

I smiled grimly: time to check out the competition.

Outside of the Sixth’s military camp, the tent city was a lot like a hornet’s nest that had just received a good kick. Legionaries had pulled back to their fortifications and now refused to allow anyone through – at least coming in, I had no problem getting out except for a few suspicious looks – which had not gone unnoticed by the civilians. The explosion itself had not been a cause for panic, since any halfway decent mage could manage something just as loud, but the way the legions had reacted in the aftermath made people nervous. Yet not, I saw, nervous enough to shut down all activity for the night. The sea of torches and camp fires shed light in a way that made the labyrinth of tents look like actual streets instead of empty spaces, and while people went about their business quietly they were still very much out and about. I kept to the shadows as I tried to narrow down where the closest claimant actually was, something made increasingly difficult by the way he or she kept moving away when I got closer. It occurred to me for the first time that the... sensation might go both ways – if I could tell when they were close, could they do the same?

That could make this whole spying business unfortunately difficult, if it were true.

I might as well assume it was, given how my luck tended to run. Which meant his was no longer about sneaking around: it was about cornering a quarry. I found myself wishing I’d paid closer attention to the layout of the camp, but what little I remembered from earlier would have to do: I was somewhere to the left of the legion fortifications, I knew that much, so now I just needed to drive the stranger into a place where there was no crowd to hide behind. Ignoring the huddled families casting curious looks in my direction, I closed my eyes and tried to sink deeper into my Name like I had when I’d helped Black raise Zombie. It was harder without his own power to act as an anchor for mine, but this was also less... complex to accomplish. It was like my Name wanted me to know, and it required focus more than direction. The other claimant was a little north of me, moving towards the larger avenues, and I would have none of that: the less people around for this, the easier it would be to pick out my quarry. I moved in between and the presence backed off.

Yeah, they can definitely feel me too.

I ducked around a tent, moving as fast as I could without outright running, and the sensation kept giving ground. Twice it tried to circle around me, but I was quicker: as soon as I got in the way the presence back-pedalled, staying out of my sight if not out of my mind. How long we played this game of cat and mouse I wasn’t sure: night had fallen a while back, and the smoke from the fires made it hard to get a good look at the moon. It was a tedious business, but I grit my teeth and did it anyways – it was a long, methodical grind to force the claimant somewhere I’d be able to look at them, but as long as I remained calm and methodical it was just a matter of time. Eventually, we ended up close to the edge of the camp. There were fewer fires out here but Black’s earlier prediction had come true: I saw better in the dark than any human should. I felt the presence pause as it neared the open ground and a feral smile stretched my lips. Where are you going to run now, my pretty? I put a spring to my step and moved towards the now-still claimant, slipping between tents as quick as I could to make sure they wouldn’t have time to try and circle around again.

The presence in my mind was suddenly snuffed out.

The surprise nearly made me stumble, but I caught myself at the last moment. My hand drifted to my sword, and with a sinking feeling I struck me that I hadn’t been the only one playing a game tonight. Here I was, far away from any witnesses and alone in the dark with only my sword for company. I wasn’t running the bastard down, I realized , I was being baited. And I’d fallen for it like a farmer buying magic beans, which added insult to the very real risk of injury.

“ Well,” I muttered to myself, “no need to be coy about this.”

I drew my sword and wished I’d taken my shield with me, even if it would have made me stick out like a sore thumb. The tents surrounding me had seemed like nothing more than irritants getting in my way, earlier, but now every one of them could be cover for someone wanting to slit my throat. My nice little moonlit walk was taking a sinister turn, but I forced myself to take a deep breath. Fear is sloppiness. Fear is the fault line in solid stone. Fear is the enemy’s mind, drawing blood before his sword. The words stilled my heartbeat and I let anger flood my veins instead. I might have fallen for my enemy’s trick, but I was not without fangs of my own.

“ So,” I called out into the silence. “Are you going to make me wait all night?”

There was no warning except for a flicker of movement at the edge of my sight – the shape moved fast, faster than I’d seen anyone without a Name ever move, but I’d been waiting for it. In a flutter of robes my enemy struck, scimitar coming low for my leg. I managed to bring up my sword down in time, the angle awkward but good enough to stop the blade from scything into my flesh. I only got a quick look at whoever was attacking me before they leapt back before a tent, ducking out of sight: long dark robes that hid the body shape and some sort of clay mask over the face. Taller than me, but not real way to tell if it was a man or a woman. The claimant did not attack again, silence falling in their wake. I tightened my grip around the handle of my short sword taking a careful step back as I considered my options. Did I want to turn this into a death match?

I was reluctant at the prospect of killing three strangers, even if it got me a Name, but this particular stranger did not seem to be overly burdened by the same moral objections. Taking out one of the contenders early appealed to the fighter in me – one less person to worry about – but I’d been given to understand that I was already ahead of the curve when it came to claiming my Name. Killing one of the claimants on my first night in Summerholm might drive the remaining two to work together against me. And I don’t know if I could handle that. If this bastard’s disappearing trick is any indication, they have a few cards up their sleeves I didn’t even know were in the deck. They came from behind, this time. Thank the Heavens for those robes, otherwise I wouldn’t have heard it coming: I turned around and struck blindly, hitting nothing but air but forcing the claimant to move around my swing. The clay mask and its creepy leering rictus looked back at me silently as my opponent tried to slice up my wrist. I got the pommel in the way but the masked claimant’s scimitar slid down and bit into my fingers – I drew back with a curse, trying to kick them in the crotch as they melted back into the dark.

“ Fuck,” I swore again, taking a look at my hand.

It stung like a bitch but the cut wasn’t deep: I wasn’t at any risk of losing the finger. It was bleeding a lot, though, and that was dangerous if left unattended – worse, it was making my grip slippery. And that’s why we wear gauntlets, Catherine .

“ First blood to you, you creepily silent masked ambusher,” I conceded out loud. “Still, to quote-”

I felt someone moving behind me again and bared my teeth. This time the blade came for my throat and I ducked under it, burrowing my fist in my opponent’s abdomen with great relish. The pained groan I heard even through the mask was sweeter than any hymn and before they could step back I slammed the pommel of my sword right in their mask. A chip fell off of the cheek and they rocked back – after a moment of hesitation the stranger ducked out again before I could press my advantage, dodging the point of my blade by less than an inch.

“ -to quote a really unpleasant acquaintance of mine, last blood is the only one that matters,” I finished, falling back into a low guard.

I’d wondered why someone who was so intent on surprise would have first struck after I’d invited a hit. It was after they attacked the second time I’d understood why: the robes made noise when they moved too fast, so they’d taken advantage of the sound of my voice to cover it. It had made the third strike easy to predict, though I doubted it would work again. I checked my hand again, grimacing when I saw the blood was soaking my grip and dripping to the ground. I couldn’t let this go on for too long, the more it dragged out the larger my opponent’s advantage got. All right, the time for subtle is done. It’s never been my specialty anyway. If my enemy was using the environment we were in to their advantage, then there was an obvious solution: break the godsdamned environment. I kicked the stakes keeping together the tent closest to me, ignoring the angry yells that came from inside as it fell and I cut through the rope holding up the one next to it.

To my opponent’s credit, they were on me before I could bring down a third. I slapped aside the scimitar coming for my kidney with the flat of my sword, moving in close. The masked claimant tried to push me back, but to my delight I discovered I was stronger than them: when I shoved back they stumbled, immediately giving ground as I pursued. From the corner of my eye I saw people coming out of the tents, faces turning from angry to fearful the moment they saw people with swords in hand. An older man grabbed his daughter by the hand and legged it, which brought a hard smile to my face. They were getting legionaries, most likely, and chances were good those would side with me over my opponent. The stranger must have thought the same, because they stopped backing away and returned on the offensive.

I knew how to handle them now, though. I own close range, you quiet bastard. We’re dancing to my song now. I kept pushing forward, watching for the blade and driving my opponents into tents as they tried to put a little distance between us. The masked ambushed was in the tricky position of having to keep an eye on me as they stepped back, though, and after a moment they stumbled over a stake. That was the opening I’d been waiting for – the point of my blade missed the throat but slid into their shoulder. I was forced to step back by a wild swing of the scimitar, but I laughed: now the both of us were bleeding, and that wound was a lot worse than mine.

“ Cow,” the stranger hissed through the mask in Taghrebi, the voice distinctly male.

He hadn’t said cow, exactly – the actual word he’d used meant bull’s daughter , though the meaning was the same. Very roundabout language, Taghrebi.

“ Goat-husband,” I replied cheerfully in the same tongue, drawing on the extensive repertoire of insults Captain and Lieutenant Abase had been teaching me when Black wasn’t paying attention. His fingers touched the wound and came back red: I raised an eyebrow when he used the blood to trace a line across the clay mask.

“ Would it be culturally insensitive to ask what in the Hells you just did?” I mused out loud.

“ This isn’t over,” the boy hissed again, and Weeping Heavens why did villains always say shit like that before trying to run away? He might as well have sent me a written warning he was about to flee. He turned to make his escape but screw that: my schedule was tricky enough without having to watch over my shoulder for a vengeful masked jackass waiting to pounce at any moment. Our very dramatic confrontation turned to a very ridiculous foot race in the dark. Now and then he tried to duck around a tent and do the melting-in-shadows trick he’d pulled on me during the fight, but it seemed to fail if I had an eye on him while he was doing it.

He was trying to get back towards the crowd where he could hide among the crowd, but that kind of thing was harder to manage when I knew exactly what he was trying to do. He must not have known the layout of the tent city much better than I did, because our little race took an unexpected turn when he took a left into an alley that ended into a stone wall – a legion supply house, by the looks of it. He slowed when he realized he’d run into a dead end, turning to face me. I could see him pant through his robes, the red stain on his shoulder soaking the dark fabric further every moment. I was in slightly better shape, though not by much: fight in the Pit tended to be on the short side, and they rarely required much running.

“ Well,” I gasped out, catching my breath. “I was aiming for a talk, but I suppose shanking you in a dark alley will have to do. In all fairness, you started it.”

I brought up my sword into the middle line and slowly strode forward. People were at their most dangerous when cornered, I knew, and so I stepped lightly. Barely three feet in front of me, a small clay cylinder landed in the dirt – there was a fuse on tip of it, nearly done burning. The children’s rhyme drifted to the surface of my thoughts almost mockingly: brightsicks blind, and none too kind. “Shit,” I cursed feelingly, closing my eyes just before it blew.

Looking straight into the flash was a good way never to see anything again, and even through my closed pupils the explosion light was horribly painful. Colours swam in my eyes and all I could think of was that I hadn’t seen the masked bastard throwing anything but I knew of at least one person with access to goblin munitions with a vested interest in seeing the both of us dead – I turned so that I’d have a tent at my back, refusing to give my ambusher a clear shot at me even as I half-faced the new threat. I heard two sets of steps coming down the alley, and when my vision cleared there were two people looking back at me. One was a goblin, the strangest-looking I’d ever seen: there was not a speck of green on her skin, all of the flesh bared by her chain mail a shade or red nearly orange. Next to her a tall Soninke girl with a white veil over her face was eyeing me curiously, a long spear propped up against her shoulder. It looked like a bridal veil to me, but she was no Callowan: to the Soninke, white was the colour of death. I felt the masked jackass move behind me and my eyes flicked back to him, my sword rising back to middle-line immediately.

“ Now that we have your attention,” the goblin jeered. “Why don’t we all have a nice little talk?”

I didn’t need to reach for my name to know who those two were. Well , I thought to myself. I did want to check out the competition.

Chapter 10: Menace

“ Threats are useless unless you have previously committed the level of violence your are threatening to use. Make examples of the enemies you cannot control so those that you can will be cowed. This is the foundation of ruling.”
– Extract from the personal memoirs of Dread Emperor Terribilis II

“Do not get between me and my prey, fools,” the masked man growled.
“Are you trying to talk trash after running away from me for, like, half an hour?” I gaped. “I only hit your head the once, your brains can’t possibly be that scrambled.”
The tall girl with the spear smirked. “Now now, it’s not his fault – desert vagrants are born with only half a mind,” she contributed.
I tried not to look too obviously amused. Apparently the Miezan occupation hadn’t done as much to curb the age-old distaste between Soninke and Taghreb as some of my books had implied.
“ Humans ,” the red goblin sneered. It was an impressive sneer, even compared to the unmourned Governor Mazus’. I bet she’d practiced it in front of a mirror. “You cant get back to your games after we’re done talking.”
“Let’s not be hasty, Chider,” the Soninke replied. “It’s not really murder if she’s doing it to a sand rat.”
Well, that had gone downhill fast. I could sympathize with wanting to mock some of your fellow countrymen – I did know an uncanny amount of jokes about southern Callowans – but she seemed to genuinely believed what she’d just said. Right, Praesi. Not the most morality-oriented people, generally speaking. With a sigh I sheathed my sword, keeping a wary eye on the masked wonder.
“Considering you just threw a brightstick at us – which was pretty rude, for the record – it might be a good idea to move before legionaries come have a look,” I suggested.
Someone using goblin munitions after the same had been used in an attempt to off two generals would lead to all kinds of unpleasant questions, and I was beginning to get curious about what it was the two fresh additions to this little party wanted.
“Assuming jackass over there is willing to talk at all,” I added as an afterthought, noting my ambusher still had his scimitar in hand.
“We claimed a fire pit not far from here,” the goblin – Chider, apparently – mentioned, turning red-rimmed eyes to my now-silent opponent. “I offer you the shelter of my fire, stranger.”
The last words she’d spoken in Taghrebi instead of Lower Miezan, using a phrasing I wasn’t familiar with. My Mthethwa was a lot better, mostly because I’d practiced it more. My ambusher’s mask dipped by a fraction and he slipped his scimitar back in its scabbard.
“Speak the words,” the still-nameless Soninke said sharply. “Guest right goes both ways.”
The man hissed at her, though he went still when the spear left her shoulder to point in his direction. I would have taken a step back to get out of the way even further if I could – I was definitely up for a spot of masked bastard stabbing, but the goblin was still a wild card. She had a haversack slung over her shoulder, and I’d bet piglets to diamonds that there was nastier stuff than brightsticks waiting under the leather.
“Fine,” he spat. “I take shelter in your fire, hearth-keeper.”
“That’s better,” the veiled girl smiled, her teeth barely visible through the sheer fabric.
“Is Praesi cultural fun times over yet?” I asked politely. “Because we really need to get the Hells out of here, if we don’t want to spend the rest of the night in Legion custody.”
“A Callowan that speaks sense,” Chider commented. “Now I’ve seen everything.”
What was it with goblins and insulting me? Did I smell in a way that pissed them off?
“Wow,” I retorted with a hard smile, “a mouthy goblin. Never seen one of those before.”
The Soninke unconvincingly tried to turn her snicker into a cough. Chider shot her a disgusted look and strode away. Not friends, then, just allies of circumstance. Good, it would have been tricky to deal with them if they were intent on sticking together. I had, after all, already stabbed my only other prospective ally. I made to follow the goblin, carefully keeping my distance from the man in question. The tall girl waited for me, offering her arm to clasp when I got close enough.
“Tamika,” she introduced herself as I grasped it.
“Catherine,” I replied. “So what’s all this about, anyway? I thought this whole thing involved a lot more fights to the death and a lot less talking.”
Tamika shrugged. “The goblin wants to have a meeting before we dance the dance, and I see no reason to refuse her.”
She was pretty cordial, for someone who’d just casually mentioned she wanted to kill me. Chider’s fire was easy enough to find, not far around the corner. She was already sitting on a stone besides it, prodding the burning wood with a long branch – our arrival was welcomed by a fresh new rendition of her earlier sneer, though this time she’d didn’t bother to insult me. This was, I guessed, as close to friendly as she was going to get. I claimed a log for myself, taking a moment to have a look at my hand while everybody was settling down. The bleeding had stopped, though I had a feeling that flexing my hand would tear the cut right back open. I’d need to have it looked at, if I didn’t want it to go bad. Unless Names mean you can’t take sick anymore , I mused. I’ve certainly never heard of a hero laid low by fever, not unless the wound was cursed.
“So I hear you’re the one who arranged a get-together,” I addressed Chider when the silence got too heavy. “Why?”
The red-skinned goblin prodded the fire one last time before throwing the branch in.
“There’s a hero in Summerholm,” she said, to the surprise of no one around the pit. “That means we have another way of solving our dispute than killing each other.”
Tamika made the same weird clicking sound with her tongue that Lieutenant Abase sometimes did.
“Hunting a hero is not something undertaken lightly, goblin,” she said. “Besides, there are people in the city with better claim to that life than us.”
“If you mean Black,” I grunted, “then I’m pretty sure he’d approve of us taking care of the problem.”
There was a moment of perfect silence as all three of them turned to stare at me.
“Then it is true,” the masked man said. “You came here with the Carrion Lord.”
Another title? Weeping Heavens, like he doesn’t have enough already. I straightened my back, meeting them stare for stare.
“Rumours move fast around here,” I replied, declining to actually confirm the assumption.
From the way Chider’s eyes narrowed at the words, that particular fact had not escaped her notice.
“Spilling each other’s blood will only weaken the Empire,” the goblin said. “This is a better way.”
“Spilling the blood of the weak can only strengthen the Tower,” the masked man retorted immediately, tone contemptuous.
“That’s a funny thing to say, considering you’re the one who’s bled the most,” I smiled at him.
His hand drifted towards his scimitar, but before he could reach it Tamika cleared her throat.
“Take that out and you won’t live to see morning, Taghreb,” she told him in a very friendly tone.
The man scoffed, but after a moment he backed down. Proud, then, but not completely stupid. Just mostly.
“What’s your name, anyway?” I asked. “The things I want to call you won’t cut it in polite company.”
“Rashid,” he told us, as grudgingly as if I’d asked for his firstborn. “Remember it, for when the devils ask you who sent you to the Other Place.”
“I’m Catherine, in case you hadn’t overheard,” I told Chider, ignoring the man. “So you want us to make a pact, then. A truce until one of us manages to get the hero?”
“Precisely,” the goblin replied. “I do not ask for your cooperation, merely that you stay out of my way.”
“I could agree to that,” I mused. “Seems pointless to have a go at each other when there’s someone out there who wants all of us dead. Tamika?”
The Soninke rolled her spear between the palms of her hands, face expressionless.
“It would be a worthy test of my skills, to measure myself against a hero rather than one of you,” she finally said. “This truce would extend no further than the death of our common enemy, yes?”
I wasn’t exactly happy that the dark-skinned girl was looking for an escape clause before she’d even agreed to the terms, but it was still better than nothing. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been intending to keep a close watch on my back the whole time, anyway.
“Is that a yes, human?” Chider probed her.
Tamika shrugged. “I accept those terms. May the Gods devour whoever breaks them.”
Everyone’s eyes turned to Rashid. It was irritating that the mask prevented me from reading his expression, but I supposed that was rather the point of wearing it in the first place.
“This was a waste of my time,” the man replied with undisguised scorn. “I will hunt this hero, but you are all my enemy.”
He rose to his feet, robes stained red.
“We have unfinished business, Callow girl,” he said in a tone that he probably thought passed for sinister. “We will see each other again, I promise you that.”
I sighed as I watched him stalk away into the night. My fingers clenched around the hilt of my sword as I considered whether or not I should follow him: we were more or less done here and the idea of just letting the bastard go didn’t sit right with me. I’d already killed people for lesser reasons than the one he’d given me, after all, and his wound had to have weakened him. I might not get an occasion like this again. I was about to politely take my leave when I saw the two others were staring me down.
“I know what you’re thinking about,” Tamika smiled pleasantly. “Don’t.”
“You’re not the one he wants to stab in the back,” I replied. “You don’t get a voice in this.”
“He’s still protected by guest-right until dawn comes,” Chider murmured. “Let’s not make this any messier than it has to be.”
The implied consequence of breaking said guest-right was clear, though if they thought whispered threats would be enough to cow me they had another thing coming. What did I care about whatever Praesi thought was honourable? I’d work with the Empire, with every monster and murderer who’d slaughtered their way to power, but that sure as Hells didn’t mean I’d do it following their every custom. What was the point of playing a game by the rules, when it was rigged for you to lose? That said, is getting another shot at the bastard worth alienating these two? I weighed my options carefully. Chider I thought I could handle, if I managed to get up close fast enough. She’d think twice about using munitions if the both of us were in their range. The Soninke was the one who gave me pause – spears weren’t a weapon that saw much use outside of the Free Cities, but the comfortable way Tamika carried hers suggested a degree of familiarity with the weapon that was very, very dangerous. In contrast, I had barely a week of sword lessons under my belt. Pick your fights, Catherine. Letting Rashid go was a pain, but getting into it with the other claimants on ground I hadn’t picked while still wounded was a good way to get myself killed – especially if they worked together, which they very well might.
“Until dawn, then,” I conceded, making a mental note of looking into Taghreb guest-right and all it entailed.
I couldn’t afford to get trapped into situations like this often, and I had a feeling it would only get worse when we got to the Wasteland. With a somber nod I took my leave of the other claimants and begun the long walk back to the Sixth Legion’s camp. I might as well grab some sleep before I got back to work.

By the time I got to the now-closed gates I’d realized I hadn’t thought this whole thing all the way through. Getting out had been easy enough, which not that I took the time to think about it was rather surprising: he’d ordered a lockdown of the camp. Then again, he would have had the time to send a messenger to make sure I’d go through unmolested while I spoke with Scribe. It seemed ungrateful to complain that my teacher had anticipated my needs, but there was something about the whole set up that rankled me. Every move I’d made so far, the Black Knight had anticipated – approved of, even. And that’s the part that bothers me. I didn’t trust the green-eyed man, when it came down to it. I was beginning to like him, much as that thought would have horrified me a month ago, but not enough to forget who and what he was. I was still unclear on what he wanted from me, and the more time passed the more I was beginning to understand how much of a liability that was. There’s no place for a man like him in the kind of Callow I want to make, and he’s too smart not to be aware of that. Which begged the question of why he’d taken me as an apprentice, and why he was still backing me when I’d as good as admitted I wanted to take an axe to Imperial authority in Callow.
There was an angle at play I wasn’t seeing, and until I caught it I had to assume that every action I took he approved of furthered his plans as well as mine.Building a power base of my own would have to be my first step. I’d always known how I would go about that, fortunately: I needed a command in the Legions of Terror, the larger the better. Ideally I’d need to be assigned to one of those garrisoning Callow, where I’d be able to use my soldiers to quietly remove the more troublesome elements of Imperial occupation in my sphere of influence. That plan was why I’d been so interested in claiming a Role in the first place: Names tended to make age issues irrelevant when it came to accumulating authority. History was full of young Named leading armies and ruling cities. Instead of spending two decades steadily climbing through the ranks while accumulating experience, I might be able to get a real command in just a few years. There were two bumps in the road, though.
First, I couldn’t do any of this with Black looking over my shoulder the whole time. The idea that the man who’d masterminded the Conquest would allow me to quietly turn Callow into a semi-independent vassal state was absurd. I’d effectively be undoing half of what he’d accomplished by annexing the Kingdom in the first place. Which means that at some point I’ll either have to kill him or become trusted enough to be given an independent command. I was more inclined to the second, as it happened: the Black Knight was the most famous monster of our age, but he was also a thoroughly rational creature. There was no guarantee that whoever replaced him would be as... even-minded. Besides, managing to kill him in the first place would be tricky. I certainly had a better shot at managing the deed now that I was headed towards a Name of my own, but the heroes he hunted down with alarming regularity had Names too. How did one get the trust of a man like Black, though? I needed to figure that out, and quickly.
My second problem was that the Empire was at peace. Officers still got promoted when their predecessors retired or died of mundane causes, but my best chance at a position of real power was being granted soldiers to deal with a problem. None seemed in the cards right now, which meant that even if I inherited a legion it was unlikely to be loyal to me personally – my authority would flow from Black or the Empress, and if I ever went against them the legionaries would balk. What I need is for Praes to raise a new legion, one that will look to me for orders instead of anyone else. A legion made up mostly of Callowans would be ideal, but the odds of that actually happening were so low as to be insignificant. I needed to learn Praesi ways then, enough that the soldiers would see me as one of their own. A nd that’s exactly what Black is having me do, which is worrisome in its own right. Was that his angle? Making me swallow Imperial customs one mouthful at a time until I was nothing more than a Praesi with Deoraithe colouring? What better tool to keep Callow in the fold than one of their own, with the power of a Name backing her . It sent a shiver up my spine, the idea that the man could have thought that far ahead.
I put aside the train of thought when the legionaries keeping watch at the gates hailed me. It was clear they’d been told to expect me just from the way they recognized me when they got close enough for their torches to shed light on my features. I was allowed in without any trouble and the sergeant in charge informed me that I had a bed waiting for me in a pavilion next to the barracks where the Blackguards had been settled. It was a quick walk, and now that I wasn’t stuck in a tense stand-off with people who might or might not want to kill me I was beginning to feel tired from the night’s events. Not exhausted – my body moved just as surely as it had when the sun was up – but I could feel my focus wane. The pavilion the sergeant had mentioned stood out from the surrounding tents by sheer size – no cloth for this one, though, only heavy flaps made of leather. There was a light lit inside, and I was about to enter when I felt something pulse in the back of my head. The fourth feeling, the strange one. How had I not noticed earlier? I must have been more tired than I’d thought.
“Thank you for seeing me at this hour, Lord Black,” I heard a girl’s voice say.
“Your request garnered enough curiosity to earn you an audience, Heiress,” I heard my teacher reply.
I peeked through an opening in the leather. Black was leaning back in a chair, the usual glass of wine in hand as he sat across a Soninke girl. She was, I noticed, strikingly beautiful. She couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than me, but her skin was smooth and flawless. I couldn’t see her eyes from where I stood, but I could make out high aristocratic cheekbones and elegantly style eyebrows. The riding leathers she wore were dyed in red and gold, perfectly tailored to fit an hourglass figure I could only envy. With those long legs and eye-catching curves, she was a serious contender for the most stunning girl I’d ever seen. It took a moment for what the green-eyed man had called her to sink in. Heiress. I could feel the capitalized letter on the tip of my tongue, bearing that strange weight spoken Names always did. There was simply no way I was going to interrupt this, not if they hadn’t noticed me. I was in no way above eavesdropping on a potential enemy, which I was pretty sure this Heiress was. The girl in question lounged in her seat with all the elegant laziness of a large predatory cat, her sipping at her own goblet doing little to hide the way she was studying Black.
“I’ve looked into her, this... student of yours,” Heiress said. “She does have potential, true, but you cannot deny I have more.”
Black was smiling, the same always did when at his most dangerous. From the sudden wariness in the Soninke’s body language, she seemed to be just as aware of that as I was.
“Can’t I?” he murmured, tone sardonic.
“I have looked into her, Lord. She’s a nobody. A Laure orphan with a reputation as a brawler and nothing else to her name. There are thousands like her all over Callow,” she replied, a hint a frustration creeping into her voice.
Rude. I was under no delusion that I was unique, but there was a little more to me than a reputation as a brawler .
“I am, inarguably, smarter than her,” Heiress continued. “I know how the Empire works, and I have real combat experience. I led the troops that suppressed -”
“That group of bandits at the edge of your mother’s lands, I’m well aware,” Black interrupted her. “You show promise as a commander, though I note you never attended the College.”
“Neither did you,” Heiress retorted flatly.
She met his eyes squarely and I had to give her points for guts, if nothing else. Now would be a good time to tell her that she’s not actually smarter than me , I silently urged him on, not bothering to repress my scowl. Any moment now.
“Catherine shows promise in other ways,” he said instead, and I made a mental note to take some kind of petty vengeance on him at some point.
Seriously, he could have put a little more enthusiasm in that. I didn’t think it likely he’d give me the boot and take the Heiress under his wing instead – he’d already invested too much in me, whatever his reasons – but this was turning out to be a remarkably one-sided debate.
“Enough to justify passing over all the things I can bring to the table that she cannot?” Heiress challenged.
Black’s smile widened ever so slightly as he leaned forward, the atmosphere in the room shifting instantly.
“They have trained you well,” he murmured, voice smooth as silk. “Just enough insolence to pique my interest, self-confident without stretching into the arrogance I so dislike in you nobles.”
Heiress’ eyes widened for a heartbeat and then her face went perfectly blank.
“Lord, I-”
“Am not nearly as good at this game as you seem to think you are,” Black broke in sharply, and the words rang of steel. “Did you think it was the first time the Truebloods tried this? That they had never before sent one of theirs with a little talent my way?”
The dark-skinned girl went still and my teacher’s smile turned ugly. I let out a shaky breath, feeling the weight of his Role suffocating the tent even from where I stood. Heavens Ascendant. I am never going to get used to that.
“No one rules forever, Lord Black,” Heiress managed through gritted teeth, the white of her eyes showing as she pushed through the terror permeating the room. “And you may have beaten the Heir back when you were the Squire, but she is not you. And I am not him .”
He laughed.
“Go home, girl,” he said. “Weave your plots, marshal your soldiers. And when you do, remind your mother of the last time we crossed paths – that pike over the gates of Ater is still missing a head, and I am ever a patient man.”
She stood, back ramrod straight, and strode away with barely veiled fury. I hurried away from the flaps as quietly as I could, stepping into the shadows a moment before she crossed. Heiress paused just outside the tent, casting a cold look around her. Her gaze passed over the spot where I’d hid without pausing, though, which I took to mean it was too dark for her to see me. A heartbeat later she was on the move again and I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. I waited for her to be entirely out of sight before entering. Black was still in his chair, looking irritatingly unsurprised to see me enter.
“Let’s skip the part where you reveal you knew I was eavesdropping the whole time,” I grunted. “I’m not in the mood for smugness.”
“As you wish,” he mused. “Clever of you to listen in – very talented girl, Heiress. You’ll need all the advantages you can get.”
“So if you really think she’s all that, why did you pick me to be your Squire?” I asked, claiming the same seat she’d been in.
He poured himself another cup of wine, raising an eyebrow to silently ask if I wanted the same. I shrugged in agreement – the taste was growing on me, thoughtI doubted I’d ever drink it by the barrel the way so many Praesi did. If anyone had told me a month ago I’d have the Black Knight pouring me wine, though, I would have directed them to a healer. After stepping away slowly.
“You’re taking this as a criticism of your abilities,” he noted. “You shouldn’t. Heiress has been tutored in everything from politics to war from the time she could first speak. That she is more competent than you is a reflection of her privilege, not of your own faculties.”
I took a sip from the cup he handed me, wondering whether or not I should press the subject. What the Hells, why not? What do I have to lose?
“It would be easier for you to train someone who’s already been taught those things, though,” I pointed out. “I’ll be playing catch up for a while yet.”
“That she has already been taught is not a point in her favor,” Black replied.
That seemed like a good thing until I put another moment’s thought into it.
“So you’re sticking with me because I’m what – more malleable?” I scowled. “Easier to manipulate?”
He sighed.
“I will address this once, because I doubt you would have brought it up if you had not already been thinking it,” he said. “I will not lie to you, Catherine, or deceive you.”
I was about to butt in but he raised his hand and I paused, frowning at the fact that I had actually paused.
“Not out of a sense of honor or altruism,” he continued, “but simply because it would be foolish in the long term. It’s the way these things go, you see – if I deceived to you, you would inevitably find out I did at the worst possible moment and then avenge yourself in a way that would lead to my downfall. The amount of my predecessors that died because they failed to learn that simple, easy lesson is staggering.”
If he’d tried to sell me that he would never steep so low or that the teacher-student bond was something sacred I wouldn’t have trusted a word of it, but this sort of... enlightened self-interest? Yeah, I could buy that. The more I spoke to Black the more I was beginning to understand that everything he did he thought of in terms of costs and benefits – like a bookkeeper, if bookkeepers invaded neighbouring kingdoms and put people’s heads on pikes. And wore plate. And rode undead horses. Gods, I really hope there aren’t any bookkeepers like that out there. Creation is a scary enough place as it is.
“I’m glad you recognize I’m smart enough for that , at least,” I muttered peevishly, still not willing to let that particular gripe go anytime soon.
He drummed his fingers on the table in response to that, and from the look on his face it looked like I’d actually managed to irritate him. Huh, I’d never managed that before. In a twisted way, it almost felt like a victory.
“Petulance is bad habit,” he said. “She’s had to be smarter than you to survive. The Imperial Court is the most lethal environment on the continent short of an actual battlefield. Last year the High Lordship of Okoro changed hands eight times in the span of three days, all of them through assassination. Her mother is a brilliant woman in her own right, one who managed to survive Malicia’s ascension to power without loss of influence while openly supporting the opposing faction . Her every move, her every word is measured – underestimate her even for a moment and she will have your throat slit without batting an eyelash.”
I would have liked to dispute that, but I couldn’t help but remember the cold look in Heiress’ eyes when she’d left the tent. I’d won enough fights by being underestimated that it wouldn’t do to forget how costly a mistake that could be. Alright, then. Tread carefully around her. People don’t get Names by picking out flower arrangements and hers does have an ominous ring to it. I responded to Black’s sharp gaze by a nod and he seemed satisfied I’d been properly cautioned.
“You still haven’t told me why you picked me,” I finally said.
The dark-haired man gazed at his cup, swirling the wine in it with a slow flick of the wrist.
“I’m told you never made friends with anyone at the orphanage,” he replied. “Why is that?”
“I, uh- what?” I blurted out.
Well, he wasn’t wrong, but to hear it put like that was a little mortifying. It wasn’t like everyone at the orphanage had hated me or anything, though I guess a few of them had, but I’d never made a close friend the way some of the other girls did. I’d always figured I was just a loner, and while that made me a little odd there were others like that in the orphanage so it wasn’t that odd.
“I guess I never really had anything in common with them,” I admitted. “I don’t think they were wrong to want the things they wanted, but I just... didn’t. It was frustrating, the way they didn’t understand why I was like I am, so after a while I stopped trying.”
“And that angered you, didn’t it?” he murmured, “That they just wouldn’t get it , no matter how many times you tried to explain.”
I shrugged with affected nonchalance, trying not to show how close to home he’d hit. And he was right, Gods help me. It still stung, the way they’d looked at me like I was insane when I’d said I wanted to change things. That I wanted to become someone who could make sure no one like Mazus ever got as powerful as the Governor had been. I used to think that I just wasn’t articulate enough, that if I’d found the right words maybe I could have bridged the gap I could feel I had created between us, but as I got older I stopped believing it. Even I knew there were some walls out there I couldn’t ram my way through.
“They never understand,” he murmured. “Even if they love you, they never quite understand.”
He looked almost sad, and for the first time since I’d met him I could believe he was as old as he was supposed to be.
“I chose you,” he mused, “because I remember what it’s like, that feeling in your stomach when you look at the world around you and you know you could do better . That if you had the authority and the power, you wouldn’t make the mistakes you see the people who have it make.”
He took a long drink of wine.
“Is it madness, to get frustrated when they don’t see the things that seem so obvious to you? I truly don’t know. Gods know I’ve been called mad often enough, and I’m sure in time you will be called the same.”
He met my eyes with a sardonic smile.
“The things Heiress knows, you can learn. You will learn. But that indignation you’ve got boiling under your skin? That’s not something that can be taught. And it’s exactly why you’ll beat her, when the time comes.”
He set down his cup.
“Go to sleep, Catherine,” he said, rising to his feet. “Tomorrow promises to be eventful.”

Chapter 11: Sucker Punch

“ Ha! And I bet you didn’t even see it coming!”
– Dread Emperor Traitorous the First

I took a sip from my tankard, forcing myself not to grimace at the taste.

The ale here was worse than the Nest’s, which I wouldn’t have believed possible until actually drinking this stuff. Finding an inn that was low-brow enough for someone of my means but still saw enough traffic to be worth my time had taken most of yesterday’s afternoon, but I believed the effort to have been worth it: the Lost Crown was a breeding ground for discontent if I’d ever seen one. The evening bell hadn’t rung yet but the common room was more than half full – and not a single man or woman in it had come without a weapon. Every single one was Callowan, most of them were over forty and quite a few had scars. Not the kind you got in the back alley fights I was familiar with, but the kind you got when someone had done their level best to kill you and barely come up short. I’d bet apples to rubies that nine of ten were Royal Guard during the Conquest. It was a good thing that the purse Scribe had provided me had been full of Marchford silver, because if I’d used denarii here I would have gotten my throat slit before the night was out.

I drew mistrustful glares, of course, though not as many as I would have expected. My sword’s grip had been covered in a weathered leather wrap that hid the damning silver goblin’s head, but the sight of a girl my age with a weapon of that quality had been enough to warrant cautious looks. My one advantage, the thing I’d been banking on, was that I was of Deoraithe colouring. And when have any of the People made truce with the Enemy? Callowan children were raised on stories about the unflinching brown-cloaked wardens and the way they hunted orcs all the way back to the steppes when they dared to come in sight of the Wall. That the Duchess of Daoine had bent the knee in the wake of the Conquest had not been enough to ruin that reputation: people remembered that the northern duchy was the only part of Callow where no Imperial Governors ruled. Daoine was as good as a kingdom of its own, these days, and though it paid tribute to the Tower even the Legions tread lightly that far up north. The last of free Callow, whispers called it.

“ You want me to top that off?” the innkeeper suddenly spoke up, jarring me out of my thoughts.

Toothless Thom was a balding, gregarious man. His name was a bit of an exaggeration: he still had most of his molars, though admittedly some of them were chipped. He’d taken an ogre’s war hammer to the face at the Fields, as he’d been eager to tell me. Lucky I had my shield up, he’d confided. Otherwise I’d be called Headless Thomas and my idiot brother would have gotten the inn. The place had been called the Guard’s Rest, once, but Thom had changed the name when he’d come from the war. That a man who’d been at the battle where Callow’s royal line had been ended had called his inn the Lost Crown made it perfectly clear where his sympathies still lay.

“ No,” I told him. “Want to keep my head clear. I have a question for you, though.”

The older man raised an eyebrow. “That so,” he said, tone neutral.

“ I’m looking for work,” I said. “Purse is getting a bit empty.”

He shrugged. “I ain’t hiring, though some of the taverns by the fortress are.”

“ Not that kind of work. I’m looking for a ring.”

He shot me a considering look. “There’s one under the Lucky Pilgrim. It ain’t that hard to find.”

“ I’ve already been,” I admitted.

I’d gone for a look earlier in the day. Bigger place than the Pit had ever managed to become, with a court under the tavern itself where people went at each other with fists and weapons. It wasn’t, however, the kind of place I needed.

“ Lots of greenskins in the crowd,” I murmured after a moment.

Now that got his attention. I drank a mouthful of ale to hide how nervous I felt – I’d never been the best of liars, so I’d decided to stick to the truth as much as possible. If I got caught, though... There were a lot of former soldiers in the crowd around me, and if they decided I was a Praesi spy then my odds of getting out with all my innards on the inside weren’t looking too good.

“ What’d you do in Laure, Cat?” Thom asked.

“ Served drinks when I could,” I replied. “Fought in a ring when I couldn’t.”

“ You’re a little young for that,” he noted.

“ I was ranked third in the Pit,” I retorted, and I didn’t have to fake my pride in that. “Would have been first by now, if I’d stuck around.”

“ Your parents must have been proud,” the balding man snorted.

“ Orphan.”

“ Raised in an Imperial orphanage, then,” he spoke, tone turning sharp.

“ Didn’t stop the fucking Governor from taxing us,” I replied just as sharply.

I met his glare with one of my own, refusing to back down, and after a moment his gaze softened.

“ No offence meant, kid,” he said.

“ None taken,” I grunted back.

“ So why’d you leave, if you were doing so well?” Thom probed, changing tracks.

“ Mazus’ cut kept getting bigger and mine kept shrinking,” I groused. “Heard things were better here.”

“ Lot more greenskins here than in the capital,” the innkeeper pointed out.

“ Lot more veterans too,” I answered the unspoken question.

The balding man chewed on that for some time, eyeing me all the while.

“ I might know of a place,” he admitted. “Ain’t exactly a ring, but close enough.”

I raised an eyebrow. “It pays?”

The innkeep offered me a toothless smile. “In more ways than one. You’ll need to strip first, though. With my daughter in the room.”

I kept my face straight but inside I was grinning like a fool. It had been a gamble to try to get my foot in the door on the second day, but it looked like it had paid off. And a good thing too – I couldn’t have kept this game up for more than another day before moving on. I could still feel the other claimants in the city, and the longer I waited the further ahead they got in their own hunts. More than that, I had a liability to worry about that neither Chider nor Tamika did. The masked imbecile hadn’t made a repeat appearance yet, but how long could that possibly last? Getting into a fight with someone so obviously Praesi would shut down this avenue of investigation, and at the moment I was coming up empty on other ways. Thom called over his daughter, a slender blonde girl in a conservative blouse who split her time between the kitchen and serving drinks. She had rather striking grey eyes, I noticed. Rare, for a Callowan: blue and brown were much more common.

“ Elise,” the innkeeper spoke, leaning in close. “Keep an eye on our little friend while she changes, eh? She’s going to be joining our cousins for drinks.”

The girl nodded, steering me towards one of the rooms in the back.

“ Lucky you,” Elise said, closing the door behind me. “This is the first meeting since the Governess died.”

I made a noncommittal noise, hiding my excitement. Meeting. That sounds promising. I took off my woollen shirt before opening my belt and slipped out of my trousers, dropping them next to me on the ground. I was about to take off my socks when she raised a hand.

“ That’s enough,” she said, taking a step to look at my bare back.

Those pretty eyes of hers, I noted, lingered on my arse longer than was strictly necessary. Or proper. I wouldn’t have minded the attention in other circumstances – she was a comely one, if not exactly my type – but this wasn’t really the time or the place. I dressed again as soon as she gave me a nod of approval, shifting my scabbard so it rested comfortably against my hip.

“ Nice sword,” Elise mused. “Where’d you get it?”

“ It was a gift,” I replied.

She wiggled her eyebrows. “Generous lover?”

I choked. “Oh, Gods no . A teacher, I suppose.”

“ He must have liked you. I’ve been meaning to learn how to use one – maybe you should show me how good you’re at handling yours, one of these days,” she said, smiling wickedly.

Ah, Callowan girls. So much more straightforward about our interests than coy Proceran ladies or haughty Free Cities maids. I doubted Elise would be as eager to get me into a dark corner if she knew I intended to ram a sword into the local hero’s belly, but there was no need to draw suspicion by turning her down. Besides, it had been a while for me. Between the Pit and my evenings at the Nest, I hadn’t had much time to pursue the softer things in life – and I doubted that would change anytime soon, given how Black loved to pile ever more work on my shoulders.

“ I’m sure that would be quite the evening,” I replied, a smile tugging at my lips.

“ Only one way to find out,” Elise smirked, opening the door and striding away into the common room.

I closed the door behind me, pretending not to notice the amused look Thom shot me. There was a man sitting on the stool I’d occupied, studying me without even pretending not to. Late forties, I’d guess, and his thick salt and pepper beard didn’t quite manage to cover the handful of scars adorning his face. His hair was thinning, though there was enough left that it lent him a dignified look.

“ You’re Cat, I take it,” he ground out when I walked up to them.

“ That’s me,” I agreed. “And you are?”

“ Remaining nameless, even if you don’t have the fecking eye,” the man growled. “This is shite, Thom. Nobody can vouch for her.”

“ We need new blood,” the innkeeper spoke in a low voice. “You know they Imps have been keeping an eye on veterans since the Governess got offed. Besides, the boy can have a look at her.”

The boy , I repeated silently. Now, isn’t that interesting? Even if I learned nothing else of worth tonight, that particular tidbit had made my gambit worth it.

“ I asked for work,” I told both of them. “Not the keys to your secret clubhouse.”

The grizzled man spat in his empty mug. “On your head, Toothless,” he finally said. “Come on, girl, we’re going for a walk.”

I smiled at him pleasantly. “Well, since you ask so charmingly.”

We left through the back, after the still-nameless grump slapped a younger woman on the shoulder and she joined us. She didn’t introduce herself either, cautiously eyeing me through her bangs as she kept a hand on the hilt of the bastard sword at her hip. The sky was beginning to darken, so we kept a steady pace: since the assassination of Governess Lindiwe the city had been put under martial law and curfew was strictly enforced. Anyone out after sundown without authorization papers would be arrested, and anyone resisting arrest would be put to the sword without hesitation. The city guard was no longer the only force policing the streets, either: the Sixth Legion sent regular patrols and the Ninth had occupied all gates.

“ So where are we headed?” I asked when the silence became more tedious than tense.

“ The Royal Foundry,” the woman informed me, rolling her eyes when the man glared at her.

“ I thought the Empire owned that now,” I frowned.

“ They occupied the main one, the one that provided for the Royal Guard,” the swordswoman explained. “The Legions never bothered with the ones that provided for the local troops, since they make their own weapons.”

Ah, that made a certain amount of sense. The Legions of Terror were armed with equipment forged in the south of the Wasteland, in Foramen. Exceptions could be made in time of war when there was a pressing need for resupply, but usually they preferred waiting for the armaments and armour coming straight from the Imperial Forges. There’d have been no real point in taking the smaller foundries, after the war: the main one would serve just fine for the maintenance work required by the occupying legions.

“ Enough with the history lesson,” the jackass growled. “Quiet until we get there.”

The younger woman offered me an apologetic shrug, but she complied. The outer city of Summerholm was different from Laure. Unlike Callow’s old capital, which had grown over the years as the wealth and people flowed in from the rest of the Kingdom, Summerholm had clearly been designed. The streets were of the same width everywhere, wide enough that bowmen on the walls circling the inner city could have a clear shot at anybody down here. Watchtowers, now occupied by legionaries, loomed over every choke point. More than once we passed by dead-end streets full of arrow slits, killing fields in the making for anyone taking a wrong turn. The Gate of the East had not been made with commerce or industry in mind: it was more castle than city, built so that it could be turned into a death trap for invading Praesi armies. The knowledge that even after twenty years of occupation the people born in the city likely knew the ins and outs of it better than the Legions did nothing for my peace of mind.

“ We’re here,” the grizzled veteran announced abruptly. “Get in before we’re seen.”

The Royal Foundry was nothing spectacular to look at, which I supposed was rather the point. The building was solid old wood, with a metal spike above the door where a sign must have hung at some point – there was none now, though. The door was unlocked and the swordswoman pushed it open without knocking while our cheerful companion cast mistrustful looks around the empty street. I followed her in, squinting as my eyesight got used to the poor lighting inside. The large cast iron furnace that took up the better part of the left wall was lit, glowing even though the forge on the other side of the room was dead and cold. Expensive way to light the place. I followed the more pleasant of my guides as she headed for a room in the back, already hearing the low murmur of conversation from where I stood.

The area we entered must have served as a stockroom, back when this place was still active: there were empty weapon racks for weapons and armour all over the place, some tipped down to serve as impromptu seats for the two dozen people occupying the room. I drew a few curious looks when I came in, but nothing like the degree of cautious hostility I’d been expecting. They only bring people they trust here, then, I mused. But if that’s the case, why bring me? I didn’t think this was a trap, but I was definitely missing something . Like back in the Lost Crown, everybody but me was far past thirty: there was an even enough spread between men and women, and though none of them wore armour they all had a blade of some kind. And they look like they know how to use them . If I wasn’t mistaken, I’d just been brought to a meeting of the Sons of Streges – Black had mentioned they were largely made up of disaffected veterans. The Sons were always the only resistance group I had a real chance of getting in touch with: the other one was made up of former members of the Thieves” Guild, and I had a feeling they’d be both much more secretive and much harder to find. The bearded man came in, scowling at me as he stopped by the door.

“ Take a seat, girl,” he grunted. “We’ll start when the Swordsman gets here.”

“ It’s true, then,” I murmured, trying to sound surprised. “There’s a hero in Summerholm.”

“ You’ll get to meet him soon enough,” the veteran replied. “He’s a perceptive lad, the Lone Swordsman. Caught five spies already. If he says you ain’t one, you ain’t.”

I nodded, keeping my face unconcerned Shit. Shitshitshit. Lone Swordsman didn’t sound like the kind of Name that would lend itself to truth-telling, but if he’d already outed agents placed by Black then he must have a trick of some kind. I took a deep breath, sitting down on a sideways rack. If the trick was just that he could tell when someone was lying, then I might be able to talk my way out of this mess. I hadn’t been sent by Black or any Imperial authority, technically. I wasn’t loyal to the Empire either, so it might be possible to work with that. But if he asks me whether I intend to kill him I’m fucked. I closed my eyes and slowly got a grip on my panic, taking steady breaths. I wasn’t out of options yet.

My first instinct was to position myself close to the door so that I could turn this into a running battle if blades came out, but I discarded the option. I was being watched, and making that sort of move would be as good as outing myself. Would I be able to take the hero in a fight? Maybe. His Name seemed centred around swordsmanship, though, which did not bode well for me considering I had a grand total of eight days of sword lessons under my belt. And I definitely can’t take both him and the Sons at the same time.

Stupid of me to expect that if they had a trick to find out spies they wouldn’t use it on every possible occasion instead of only when they thought they had a leak. On the bright side, that meant the process was unlikely to be painful or particularly powerful: it wouldn’t be used as often if it were. Could heroes tell when they were in the presence of a villain? I couldn’t find this Lone Swordsman the way I could my rival claimants, but I wasn’t the Squire yet. There was no real way to tell what kind of abilities his Role would allow him to access, even now that I knew his Name. My private debate was cut short when the man in question entered the room through a back door, not that it had been going anywhere productive.

Even if the room hadn’t gone respectfully silent the moment he’d entered, I would have known I was looking at a hero. He couldn’t have been much older than seventeen, darkly handsome with messy black hair and vivid green eyes. His face was one made for brooding, all angles and windswept locks, and his long brown leather coat did nothing to detract from that impression. A leather coat. Gods. Why wasn’t he clapped in chains the moment he passed through the city gates? If he was any more obviously a hero he’d have his Name tattooed on his forehead. The longsword at his hip did not glint in the light, the metal pommel swallowing the ambient light whole and giving nothing back. Enchanted? That could be trouble . He moved with the certainty of an older man, and all the other people in the room straightened their spines unconsciously when they saw him.

“ No need to get up on my account,” the Swordsman said, raising a warding hand at the few people who’d gotten to their feet. “We’re all equals here, my friends.”

“ Some more equal than some,” a woman in the back called out, but it was said fondly.

“ We all have our burdens to bear,” the hero replied easily. “But we’ve shared in one victory already, and I promise you that more are to come. The Black Knight himself is in the city, and that is an occasion we won’t be getting again anytime soon.”

I let myself fade into the background as the Lone Swordsman strode into the middle of the room, commanding everyone’s attention with a kind of effortlessness I could only envy. Was it natural charisma on his part, or a side-effect of his Name? Whatever it was, veterans twice his age were hanging on to his every word.

“ We still have half of the munitions from the raid on the Sixth Legion’s armoury,” he said. “And with those backed by a little cleverness, I propose to put down the monster who brought ruin to the Kingdom.”

Murmurs of approval went through the room at the declaration.

“ It’ll take more than goblin alchemies to kill that man,” a voice cut through the noise, cold as ice.

Leaning against the wall on the far side of the room, an older man built like an ox was frowning. His head was shaved but auburn whiskers covered the side of his face, leading into a thick beard of the same colouring.

“ I was there when he killed the White Wizard with Warlock’s help,” the man spoke flatly. “Half a bridge he dropped on those two, and they walked out of the wreckage like it was light drizzle.”

“ We already know munitions can kill Named,” the Swordsman replied. “The Empire proved as much during the Conquest.”

“ They can kill run-of-the-mill Named, maybe,” the man grunted. “You’re dealing with the bleedin’ Calamities, boy.”

“ I am not a run-of-the-mill hero, my friend,” the green-eyed boy said very softly. “I swore I would see the Kingdom restored, and I will see that oath through to the bitter end.”

Oh, gag me. Did he think that making some kind of dramatic promise over someone’s grave would actually help him kill the likes of Black? I stopped and thought about it for a moment. Hells, it actually might. Roles take to that kind of theatre like a duck to water. Whether the doubter was actually convinced or just cowed by the uncomfortably emotional display on the Swordsman’s part was up in the air, bur regardless he objected no further. The crowd was against him, anyway: they were eager for blood, and their success with the Governess had only whet the appetite.

“ Before we get to the planning,” another man spoke up, and with a start I recognized my earlier guide’s voice, “we have new blood for you to look over.”

Everybody’s eyes turned to me and I fought down the urge to shrink on myself. It was time for my moment of truth, though hopefully not a literal one – that could get messy.

“ So,” I said as I pushed myself up, wiping dust off of my trousers. “How’s this going to work? Do I need to strike a pose? Word of warning – if poetry is involved, I’m definitely not your girl.”

The Lone Swordsman smiled, which made him look like someone was pulling up his lips forcefully. Not a great smiler, this one.

“ Just come a little closer,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“ I’m going by Cat,” I told him, watching his face to see if it registered as a lie.

If it did, this was going to go downhill very quickly. The hero frowned.

“ What colour is the sky, Cat?” he asked.

“ Depends on the time of the day,” I pointed out.

Someone snorted, though they hastily turned it into a coughing fit. The Swordsman sighed and patiently waited for me to give an actual answer.

“ Blue,” I said.

The hero’s frown deepened.

“ That’s strange,” he said.

“ People usually wait to know me a few days before making that comment,” I replied.

“ I can’t read you at all,” the Lone Swordsman murmured. “That’s never happened before.”

“ If I had a silver for every time I heard that line-”

I didn’t see the strike coming, but I felt it. There was a blur of movement and my body reacted on its own, my sword swinging out of its scabbard and ringing against his own before it could come any closer to my head. There was a moment of painful realization where it struck me that I had moved much, much too quickly for mundane human.

“ Well,” I mused, pushing back his blade. “This is awkward.”

“ Traitor,” someone hissed.

“ Technically,” I corrected the voice, “I’m the only person in this room not committing treason.”

Two dozen blades coming out of scabbards were my only response. Tough crowd.

“ Now,” I spoke, voice calm and steady as I backed away. “I know what all of you are asking yourselves right now. Is that girl a spy?”

Two of the rebels were blocking the door, I saw from the corner of my eye.

“ The answer to that question may surprise you,” I continued.

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“ Is it yes?” someone called out from the back. “Is the answer to the question yes?”

It was not, I reminded myself, appropriate to start cracking up before your desperate final stand.

“ Shut up, Beric,” someone growled. “Obviously the answer is yes.”

“ You guys never let me win anything,” Beric complained.

Beric, I decided, was going to die last. He’d earned it. The Lone Swordsman brought up his sword and fell into a stance I didn’t recognize.

“ You’re surrounded, villain,” the hero said. “There’s no one around to hear you if you call for help. Surrender and you might yet live.”

I felt safe in assuming that diplomacy was not one of his aspects.

“ Ah, but you have it the other way around,” I replied haughtily, trying to stand as tall as my diminutive stature allowed for. Why was everyone always so tall? “It is, in fact, all of you who have fallen in my trap. Surrender now and will spare you most of the torture, unless one of you gives me lip.”

The Swordsman scowled. “You’re full of shit,” he growled.

Given that there were two Named in the room, it seemed fair that that was the precise moment where the back of the room exploded. Most of the Sons of Streges were thrown to the ground by the impact and I had to take a knee. Smoke and dust had been blown everywhere, I might as well have been standing in the middle of a sandstorm as far as visibility was concerned. I could make out a silhouette in the smoke, too tall to be a goblin and not broad enough to be an orc.

“ Rashid,” I called out. “If that’s you, then for the first time in your life I think you actually need to be commended on your entrance.”

Tamika came out of the smoke instead, black-veiled and grim-eyed. Her spear was nowhere in sight but she held a crossbow in her arms, pointed at the Lone Swordsman.

“ I’m guessing Chider’s somewhere in this mess?” overhearing the sound of fighting out of sight as I asked the Soninke girl.

The hero sneered and half-turned so he’d be facing both of us.

“ She’s coming,” Tamika agreed calmly, speaking in Mthethwa. “I feel like I should apologize, Catherine.”

That was the part where I was supposed to ask what for , I assumed. Instead I threw myself to the side and the bolt sunk into the wall. The Lone Swordsman eyed the both of us warily.

“ What in the Burning Heavens is going on?” he asked.

“ My plan is working,” I lied.

Chapter 12: Squire

“ Now kneel, fools, and witness my ascension to GODHOOD!”
– Last words of Dread Empress Sinistra IV, the Erroneous

There was a heartbeat of silence before Tamika cocked her head to the side.

“ Your plan?” she asked.

“ Don’t encourage her,” the Lone Swordsman cursed.

I smiled condescendingly, casting an eye around me to find a more defensible position. If a monologue was going to buy the time I needed, then I was more than willing to chew the scenery for a while.

“ I’m glad you asked, Tamika,” I announced. “You see, while it may appear that this is sheer bloody chaos, the whole situation was in fact-”

The scimitar came within an inch of my throat and I back-pedalled in panic, swinging my sword at the now-visible silhouette of Rashid. Right. There’s a reason long-lived villains don’t make speeches. The bastard was still wearing his mask and without a word he stepped back into the smoke, disappearing in the blink of an eye. Ah, wasn’t that going to be fun? With this kind of visibility, he had no practical limit on how many times he could pull his stealth trick. While I’d been busy trying not to get my throat cut, the veiled Soninke and the hero had apparently had a breakdown in negotiations: Tamika’s crossbow was on the ground, abandoned as she tried to fend off the black-haired man with her long dagger. She was, I noted with a degree of satisfaction, failing pretty badly. The strange sword scored a long gash across her face, ripping away the black veil. It sung when it drew blood, letting out a loud keen as the edge of the metal flashed red. I flinched at the sound, at how wrong it sounded. That thing was definitely enchanted, and not in a nice way. The crossbow wielder wasn’t going to fight her way out of this one, I assessed. The long-haired Soninke girl wasn’t half bad with her dagger – no doubt better with it than I’d be – but the Lone Swordsman was in another league entirely. He moved more like a machine than a man, calmly and methodically powering through Tamika’s defence to inflict increasingly dire wounds.

I considered joining the dance, but that seemed like a recipe for death by Rashid. Bringing up my sword, I wiped the sweat off my brow and moved towards the foundry in the front. For all that I’d been villaining my way through this encounter with blatant lies and poor misdirection, I had no intention of letting this devolve into some sort of climactic melee involving all my enemies. I would, for one, probably lose. I was pretty sure I was already tapping in the Learning aspect of my Name – the fact that I’d never needed to read a page twice to remember it flawlessly indicated as much – but it hadn’t helped me much when it came to my swordsmanship. All I had to see me through a fight was those unusually quick reflexes and a history of knowing the taste of blood in my mouth. Not, I decided, the stuff victories were made of. There was another way to deal with this mess, though: I stood less than thirty feet away from a lit furnace and most of my enemies had helpfully bunched up inside a flammable building. So let’s set the place on fire and hide by the exit to stab anyone coming out in the back. Not the most honourable of plans, but honour was for people powerful enough to afford that kind of luxury.

I somehow managed to leave the room without a masked interruption, losing sight of Tamika and her heroic opponent – I had to step over the corpse of my female guide from earlier in the process. Her neck had been hacked halfway through, I saw with mild horror. Rashid’s work, no doubt. That was when my cunning plan hit an obstacle: standing by the furnace, Chider was looking back at me with an unreadable expression on her face.

“ So,” I spoke up, moving so that a table occupied my back, “I don’t suppose you’ll be willing to hold to the truce?”

Chider shrugged, her leathery face pulling taut.

“ It’s nothing personal, Callow-girl,” she replied in Lower Miezan. “The money was just too good to pass on.”

Money? Who would have-

“ Heiress,” I realized. “Heiress bribed you three to take me out.”

“ I don’t know if she got to Rashid,” Chider noted, “Though I don’t think she would need to. But she found Tamika and me, yes. Not sure what you did to tick her off, but she’s willing to sink a small fortune into seeing you dead.”

I scowled. I’d yet to meet the girl face to face and I was already starting to hate her guts.

“ You understand she’s playing all of you, right?” I said. “She’s going to be rivals with whoever ends up being the Squire, so she’s trying to meddle in the claiming.”

“ She probably thinks she is,” Chider agreed, “For some reason she seems to think you’re the most dangerous of the four of us and who knows? She might even be right. But I don’t mind her getting what she wants, as long as I also get what I want.”

“ And that’s my corpse?” I grunted, already preparing to duck for cover when the munitions started flying.

“ I want to be the Squire,” Chider corrected sharply. “I don’t really care how I get there. There’s never been a goblin Squire, Callow-girl. Or a Black Knight, or an Empress. The tribes have done more for Praes than all of the High Lords put together, but even now all we can aspire to is being followers . If I have to kill a few humans to remedy that situation, so be it.”

I could sympathize with that, I really could. I knew what it was like, being part of a system where the best you could ever manage was being slightly above the bottom of the barrel. But her way apparently involved my being a corpse, and that wasn’t really a point I could compromise on.

“ We don’t have to fight, you know,” I told her. “I’m still willing to make truce until the Lone Swordsman is dead.”

Chider grinned, all teeth and malice. “Silly girl, I’m not going to fight you.”

She reached inside the satchel at her hip and brought out a clay ball the size of her fist. I ducked behind an anvil, but the expected sharper never came. I blinked and the glimpse I’d had of the munition drifted to the surface of my mind, clear as spring water. Creepy, that – my memory had never been that good, and there was no way I should have been able to see as many details as I had. Sharpers were clay balls, yes, but usually they had a stick protruding out. This one hadn’t had anything of the sort. It wasn’t a brightstick either. A smoker? I’d never seen a diagram of those, so I wasn’t sure what they looked like. My answer came in the form of a roaring furnace: there was a deafening blast and a burst of green light. I snuck out a look from behind the anvil and saw the whole front of the foundry was burning. Eerie green flames were spreading further with every passing moment, and of Chider there was no sign. The furnace was on fire, I noticed. The metal furnace was on fire. Green flames, burning metal? Oh fuck me.

“ Goblinfire,” I gasped into the empty room, backing away with haste.

That clay ball hadn’t been a smoker, it had been godsdamned goblinfire. The most heavily restricted substance in Imperial territory – just possessing some was enough to earn you a hanging – and Chider had just casually tossed a ball of it into an open flame. Nobody except the goblins knew exactly what goblinfire was, but the Conquest had taught Callowans to fear the sight of the green flames: it burned everything , including water and even magic. Seven days and seven nights it would keep burning, impossible to put out until it stopped on its own. There were still parts of Laure where the ground was nothing more than blackened glass, where the substance had been used when the Legions took the city. If any of it touched me, the best I could expect was to be turned into a blackened husk for the rest of my miserable existence. Well, I guess I’m not leaving by the front door , I grimaced. Which meant going back into the very melee I’d tried avoiding. New plan, then: get the Hells out of here before the Royal Foundry got turned into the closest thing to the actual Hells that could be managed on Creation. Possibly stab someone if I got an opening, but no need to take stupid risks. Appearing reckless was useful – being reckless was a death sentence for a girl in my position. Naturally, the moment I’d settled on a fresh course of action was when Rashid chose to make his appearance. Stepping out of the doorway, the masked boy’s robes fluttered as he strode forwards me. His scimitar was coated in blood and chunks of bone, though it looked no less sharp for it.

“ I told you we had unfinished business, Callowan,” he hissed in Taghrebi. “I’ve been looking forward to this.”

“ Really, Rashid?” I complained. “We’re going to have a duel to the death in the middle of a foundry full of goblinfire ? Couldn’t we at least move to the other room?”

“ And risk one of the veiled wretches stealing my kill?” he chuckled. “I think not.”

Apparently that was enough banter for him, because he struck without warning. No tricks this time, no attempt to take me by surprise: the curved sword came for my neck, though I slapped it away with my own blade before it could come anywhere close to drawing blood. He’d apparently found a healer in the last two days, because the wound I’d inflicted on the night we first met didn’t seem to be slowing him down.

“ Fine,” I ground out through gritted teeth as I pushed back his scimitar. “The hard way it is.”

I made to sweep his leg but he spun around me fluidly, blade flashing out to swipe across my unprotected back. I hissed at the pain and swung my sword to force him away, already feeling the blood welling up in the wound. Shit. I really hope that wasn’t poisoned. He darted away, carefully choosing his distance and stalking around me like a crow circling a corpse. From the corner of my eye I could see the green flames continue to spread, swallowing everything in their way. I brought up my sword in middle-line, flattening my profile so he’d find me harder to hit. All of this would have been much easier with a shield, and I once more cursed that it would have been a dead giveaway to the Sons if I’d come bearing one. His footing shifted minutely, but I had no intention of letting him go on the offensive again: I struck first, point aimed at his sternum.

Not fast enough, though. Half a step back brought him just out of my range, and when my blade retracted he followed it in a single fluid movement. The scimitar flashed again, coming for my sword-arm much faster than I’d believed him to be capable of. Angling my pommel up took the better part of the hit, but the edge still ripped through a chunk of my forearm before he darted away. I swallowed a sob of pain, tightening my lips. What was happening? He hadn’t been anywhere this good last time we fought, and as far as I could tell his technique hadn’t gotten any better. He was just better . Something about this fight is empowering one of his aspects. That wasn’t something I could match, damn me. The only one of mine I’d figured out was Learn, and it appeared my Name didn’t consider duels to the death to be learning opportunities.

“ There’s the look I was waiting for,” Rashid purred. “The moment where you finally understand your place in the world.”

For once my life, I was in too much pain to think of a proper response. I struck instead, aiming for the same shoulder I’d wounded last time, but he slapped my point away with contemptuous ease. My hand was shaking, and after being struck twice I’d hesitated too much to properly commit to the strike.

“ Maybe I should just leave you in here,” the boy mused through his mask. “Bar the door and let you burn alive. I’m told the green flames are even more excruciatingly painful than regular ones.”

I tried to take a deep breath but ended up inhaling some of the smoke that was growing to permeate the room and started coughing instead. Rashid didn’t even deign to take that opening, preferring to just stand there radiating amusement. I was losing. I was losing, and I was going to die.

The truth of that sunk in and it was like the all the colours in the world where whisked out.

I didn’t have any tricks up my sleeves, and this wasn’t the kind of opponent I could talk my way out of fighting. Rashid had come here tonight to spill my life’s blood on the ground, and would not leave until he’d gotten what he wanted. He was faster than me, more experienced in this kind of fight, and every one of my heartbeats spilled more out my blood on the floor while he remained unwounded. The gap between us could only widen one way, now. I am going to die here , I realized. This was as far as I’d managed to go, for all my grand ambitions – killed in an abandoned foundry by some idiot wearing a mask who just happened to be better with a blade. What a stupid, stupid death. Gods, I was tired. Barely two weeks since I’d left Laure, and it seemed like it had been years. The heat of the spreading flames licked my skin and a part of me wondered if I should just let him run me through. It would be quicker death than letting him take me apart wound by wound as he so clearly wanted.

“ I had all these plans, you know,” I spoke into the silence. “To make a different world, a better world.”

“ The delusions of a weakling,” Rashid replied with naked contempt. “Cockroaches are for stepping on, that’s all there is to it.”

The sheer scorn in those words felt like a slap in the face.

“ You don’t get to say that, you little shit,” I said in a low voice. “Even if you beat me here, you don’t get to say that.”

Something in my belly stirred like old embers, a heat under the surface that needed only the right fuel to burn. It didn’t care if he killed me – more than anything, right now, I wanted that dismissive prick to be wrong. It didn’t matter if I was outclassed, it didn’t matter if he had every advantage and I had less than none. I was going to make him choke on those words, choke until his face turned blue and his eyes popped out.

Even if I bled.

Even if I burned.

Even if the flesh was flayed off my bones.

I would Struggle.

Power flowed through my veins, the beat of it drowning out even the roar of the flames. I raised my sword and stepped forward.

“ Oh?” Rashid chuckled. “Are we-”

I rammed my fist into his mask, shattering the clay like the cheap affectation it was. The scimitar came up but I grabbed him by throat and threw him against a table. My Name pulsed under my skin like a living thing, feeding on the fight. The Taghreb snarled and got back on his feet as I continued striding forward, striking almost too fast for the eye to follow. Slow. So slow. How could I ever have thought of him as fast? My sword came down on his wrist and blood sprayed out. His hand fell, fingers still clutching the handle of the blade. I could see his face now, see the fear appearing in those dark eyes.

“ I-” he snarled, but I shut him up by punching the tip of my blade through his throat.

Fear turned to disbelief and with a flick of the wrist I tore out my sword. He dropped to the ground.

“ Got stepped on,” I finished in a whisper. “ Cockroach .”

I watched the life bleed out of the boy, standing above him with my bloodied blade in hand as the flames cast their hellish green light. The moment he took his last gasping breath I felt something click inside of me, like another piece of a puzzle I couldn’t see had snapped into place. The power inside my veins dimmed, then disappeared . The pain I’d stopped noticing slammed back into my senses and I grit my teeth as I swayed on my feet . Tapping into the Name’s power had worn me down, and not just because it’d taken away my tiredness for a moment. And I don’t think that little burst is going to happen again. Not tonight, anyway. With a last look at the boy I’d just murdered, I stepped into the smoke.

My eyes wanted to close and my body wanted to curl up into a ball and sleep until all of this mess had gone away and become someone else’s problem. I allowed myself the luxury of thinking about how much more pleasant my life would be, were I the kind of person who was willing to do that. Then I took a deep breath and walked towards the sound of fighting, sword raised. No rest for the wicked.

The Lone Swordsman had two opponents, but Chider was not one of them. Tamika, blood dripping down her chin where the enchanted sword had sliced her earlier, was reloading her crossbow while she fought the hero with her spear. She was also white-veiled again, and unwounded. I blinked, making sure that my little Name episode earlier hadn’t knocked something loose in my head: there were, in fact, two Tamikas. The one who’d shot at me earlier still bore the wounds I’d seen the Swordsman inflict her, but the other one was still untouched. Rashid had mentioned wretches , earlier, I recalled. I’d thought it was a mistake, at the time, but apparently not.

Whatever Name trickery this involved, they were actually managing to drive the hero back: whenever the dark-haired man managed to get the drop on the one fighting him with the spear, the other one loosed a crossbow bolt at him. Whenever he tried to take out the one with the crossbow, the spear-wielder started pressing him furiously. The tactics they used weren’t particularly sophisticated and the Lone Swordsman didn’t seem to bear any wounds besides a rip in his leather coat revealing the chain mail that covered his forearms, but... Neither was he making progress. Their synchronization was too good, each attack flowing into the next with neither ever missing a single beat. None of the three had noticed me yet. Quietly, I stepped behind the one I was now naming Crossbow Tamika. She wore hardened leather but no helmet – her neck was bare, and I was done playing around with my fellow claimants. I got within three feet of her before Spear Tamika saw me. Her eyes widened, but it was too late: I was already striking and... and now I was ducking when the other one swivelled to face me and shot her bolt into the space where I’d been a heartbeat earlier.

There was no way she could have known, much less taken aim so quickly. Were they sharing each other’s field of vision? Gods, that would be a ridiculously useful trick. Spear Tamika stepped away from the hero before I could close the distance separating me from the other one, coming just close enough to be able to come to her rescue if I tried to intervene as she reloaded her crossbow. Well, that was a problem.

“ Lone Swordsman,” I called out. “I have a question for you.”

“ No,” he replied instantly.

“ You don’t even know what I’m asking,” I complained. “I could have been offering my surrender.”

He squinted at me. “Are you?”

“ We can get to that later,” I dismissed. “Evidently you’re the gritty type, but how far up the antihero scale are you?”

“ As far as I need to be,” he responded gravely.

I pushed down my urge to make something out of that. Crossbow Tamika had already finished reloading, and the pair of them seemed to be considering their next target. I really wasn’t liking the way Spear Tamika was beginning to angle towards me.

“ Are you the kind of gritty that works with enemies?” I probed. “You know, for the greater good and such.”

I’d been paying too much attention to the spear-wielder: meanwhile Crossbow Tamika had calmly lined up her shot and pulled the trigger. I’d been lucky with the bolts so far, but with the last remnants of my Name’s power fading away I didn’t have the kind of speed that let me dodge those at will anymore: she missed my chest but the projectile punched into the flesh of my shoulder with a wet thunk. I let out a cry of pain, nearly dropping my sword in shock.

“ Fuck,” I cursed.

I hacked away the shaft of the missile with a trembling hand, but actually taking it out would have to wait: I was pretty sure that kind of bleeding would kill me, after how much of Rashid had already gotten out of me. The Lone Swordsman’s face was inscrutable, but if he didn’t reply in the next few moments I would have to-

“ You’re Callowan, aren’t you?” he asked.

“ Laure born and raised,” I confirmed.

“ ... only until they’re dead,” he spoke, distaste clear in his voice. “Not a moment longer.”

“ You’re such a charmer,” I gasped, resisting the strange urge I was getting to roll my wounded shoulder.

The bolt was painful enough without wriggling it around in my flesh.

“ She came here to kill you,” Crossbow Tamika said suddenly, her voice sounding strangely distant as she addressed the hero.

“ He’s your enemy,” the other one told me in the same tone.

“ So are you,” I grunted, pushing myself into action.

The spear-wielder was the closest to me, so it was towards her I moved. Without a word she burst into motion, the tip of her spear thrusting forward in the blink of an eye. I sidestepped the strike, though it was a close thing: both my exhaustion and blood loss were beginning to take their toll, Name or not. I forced a spring to my tired limbs and passed the tip of her spear but without missing a beat Tamika whipped the shaft straight into my wounded shoulder. I dropped down on one knee, trying to turn my scream into a curse and only half-succeeding. I grit my teeth and pushed myself up, but the shaft struck me across the face and threw me down sideways. I felt my sword fall out of my grip, handle slick with blood, and as I scrambled desperately to reach it Tamika’s boot came down on my fingers. I felt the phalanges break with a sickening crack. I whimpered and watched as the spear rose, tip headed for my throat, when it suddenly stopped. Without so much as a word of warning, my opponent threw her weapon in the direction of the other duel.

I was weaponless, shit, and – and I wasn’t.

My left hand reached for the knife I’d won by slitting two throats, the sheath hidden in the small of my back. Tamika raised her hand and dark smoke coalesced in it, forming into a spear again, but it wasn’t quite done. With a heaving cry I rose again, feeling the burn of skin getting ripped as I pulled out my hand from under her boot. She stumbled at the sudden pushback and my hand arced, the small knife a silvery blur as I drove it right under her chin. Tamika blinked wordlessly, blood gurgling as she tried to breathe. I twisted the knife and tore it out, blood spraying all over my upper body from the severed artery. The Soninke took a hesitant step back, then another, and her hand came to touch the wound as the now-materialized spear clattered against the ground. From the other side of the room a horrible scream came until it was suddenly snuffed out. I glanced and saw the other Tamika’s head rolling on the floor, the cut so perfect it took a few heartbeats before blood started coming out. I’d fallen back on my knees at some point, I realized, but my sword was within reach. I tried to pick it up with my hand but the broken fingers refused to move.

No pain, though. Was I already beyond that? I dropped the knife and took the sword with my left hand as the Lone Swordsman calmly walked towards me. Behind me I could feel the goblinfire beginning to spread into this room, and with a wet laugh I saw green light beginning to filter out of the other exit. Chider set fire to both ends. Of course she did. The hero seemed unconcerned as he came to stand before me – I stabbed the tip of my sword into the ground to push myself back to my feet. So much for avoiding the climactic melee. The Lone Swordsman frowned, his face still irritatingly handsome despite it. “Not a moment longer,” he reminded me.

The sword blurred and let out that horrifying keen as it spilled my blood on the floor. I could feel a trail of fire across my chest and something hard hit me in the stomach. I stumbled to the ground. My limbs felt cold. Someone was walking away and I knew who, but I couldn’t quite remember the name. Smoke was snaking its way across the ceiling in whimsical patterns and I lay there.

Dying.

I’m not sure how long I lay there. I could still hear things, but events came disjointed. A flash of blinding light and the sound of wood breaking. Three claps of thunder – or was it five? Beyond the cold that was spreading through me I could feel the most maddening itch, but I didn’t do anything about. It was like a painting almost done, but not quite. Like all it would need was a last brushstroke, and finally everything would fit . I lay there, listening to the green flames devouring the world, and itched.

And then it clicked.

Awareness flooded back into me. I was Catherine Foundling, daughter of no one and nothing. I’d fought people for gold once, but earned only silver. I’d taken lives, and justice had come for me with a sword that cried like a grieving man. I was apprenticed to a monster but dreamed of making a world without them. A traitor to all causes but my own, and my path had brought me to this moment: bleeding out on the floor, surrounded by fire.

The other claimants were all dead, and I was the Squire.

My mind was getting clearer with every breath. It brought no comfort. The Name was roiling under my skin, finally mine, but it brought no healing with it. Evil never does. I wanted to get up, needed to if I didn’t want to celebrate my victory by merrily burning alive, but my body refused to cooperate. I was more than half a corpse, and the endurance I’d always prided myself on was finally failing me. More than half a corpse, huh. The idea took shape in my mind, absurd in all the best ways.

“ I’ve seen a corpse raised before,” I cackled to myself, hacking out a horrible laugh.

I reached for the depths of my Name, sinking as deep as I could without a second thought. It was still there, that cool feeling I remembered from the sunny afternoon where I’d made my mount. Like water so deep it’s never seen the sun. I grasped the power, spun it into threads. Slowly, carefully, I tied knots around my limbs. It occurred to me that I was making a puppet of myself and I let out another cackle. Well, better me than someone else. Opening my eyes, I looked at the ceiling and pulled. My left leg yanked itself up – the muscles pulled taut but held, and the right leg came to join it. Mustering the full weight of my concentration, I tugged at the largest string: my abdomen was harshly brought up, and I stood on my feet again.

“ And now,” I announced to the empty room, “for my next trick...”

One, two, three, four, five. One after another, my broken fingers snapped back into place. I didn’t feel so much as a twinge of pain from the act, which wasn’t very likely to be a good sign. I balled up my hand and formed a fist before letting the strings go loose: the fingers loosened, still unresponsive to my attempts to get them moving. It would have to do. Like Creation’s most demented puppeteer, I tugged and pulled until I managed to get my sword back at my side and my knife back in its sheath. There was a hole in the wall, I noted. Apparently the Lone Swordsman had solved the dilemma of both ways out being on fire by making his own. Whatever he’d used to break through reeked of magic, but it didn’t seem harmful to me: I walked out into the alley with an indifferent shrug. The street was deserted, though close to the mouth of it I found black goblin’s blood splashed on the pavement stones. Chider’s satchel laid there unattended, spilled open by a sword strike. There were still munitions in it, I saw. Absent-mindedly I picked up a sharper, but the longer I looked at it the more my mind began to wander: I looked ahead instead, leaving the street and heading into a larger avenue.

I was near a stairway leading up to the outer walls, and up there on the ramparts I caught sight of a coat fluttering dramatically.

The Lone Swordsman stood there, brooding away into the night as the wind tousled his dark locks teasingly. I was halfway up before I realized what I was doing, and by then it was too late. Manipulating your own near-corpse apparently didn’t lend itself to stealth very well, because he turned towards me long before I was within stabbing distance. Shame, it would have been kind of a treat to just ram my sword in his back and push him off the wall.

“ You,” he scowled before turning pale as he took a closer look. “ What have you done to yourself? ”

I tried to reply but all that came out was an insolent gurgle. Right, still dying. That was unfortunate. I wasn’t in much of a bantering state, so I chucked the sharper at him instead. I missed and hit behind him, but the blast still knocked him off his feet. Small favours, I supposed. It took me two tries to get my sword out of its sheath – the angle was hard to visualize – but by the time he recovered from the shockwave I was on him. I tugged the strings and my arm came down, blade slamming down into his awkwardly angled parry. Too rough , I noted as I felt the arm’s muscles tear like cheap cloth. The strength behind the strike was monstrous, though I noted with mild surprise that the edge of his blade actually cut into mine. Ultimately that came in useful: when I drew back my arm with another tug, his sword was ripped out of his hand and came away with mine. I shook it off by tugging my arm back and forth, kicking it down into the street when it clanged against the floor. I tried to speak up again but ended up spitting out a fat gob of blood as he looked upon me with horror, backing away. Still, it had the benefit of clearing my throat.

“ Told you my plan was working,” I rasped.

“ You planned to become a necromantic abomination?” he said, aghast and still stepping away warily.

Not really, but it wasn’t like he could prove that. I circled around him with my sword brought up, forcing him to stand against the edge of the wall. The Hwaerte River’s dark waters ran down below, yet another defence in the arsenal of the Gate of the East.

“ You’re Callowan,” he said when the silence got awkward. “We should be fighting side by side, not against each other. Why do you work for them? How can you possibly justify working for these tyrants?”

He hadn’t seemed as eager to make common cause when he’d been the one with the sword, I noted.

“ Who else is there to work for?” I managed to get out, my voice so rough I could barely recognize it as my own.

He waved his arm passionately.

“ Callow!” he replied. “For the Kingdom and all the people who live in it.”

“ There is no Callow,” I rasped. “The Kingdom died twenty years ago. Before either of us were born.”

“ If even one person fights under the banner, the Kingdom still lives,” he said, sounding like he’d just imparted some kind of great truth on me. Heroes.

“ A kingdom of one,” I spoke into a hacking cough. “All hail King Swordsman, lord of stupid causes.”

Those green eyes turned to steel and I tugged the strings to shift my footing, half-sure he was about to attack.

“ There’s nothing stupid about freedom ,” he hissed.

“ Going to free us, are you?” I laughed. “How? By killing Imperial Governors? Nobody here’s any more free than when you started.”

“ So I should kneel and lick the Enemy’s boot, like you do?” he snarled. “Never. I’d rather die.”

I could kill him. Right now, right here, I knew deep in my bones that I could kill him. I might not be able to the next time we met, but this once the story’s flow was in my favour. It was tempting, but at the edge of my mind I could make out a path. It was a dark one, strewn with ruin and the death of innocents, but hadn’t I stopped pretending to be on the side of the Heavens the moment I’d taken the knife?

“ Prove it,” I rasped. “If you want your way to beat mine, then come at me again. Properly. Earn your Name, hero. Run and hide and muster your armies in the dark. Make deals you’ll regret until you have nothing left to bargain with. I’ll be waiting for you, on the other side of that battlefield.”

The Swordsman’s face went blank as I let my sword come down.

“ But remember this,” I said. “Tonight? I won .”

Faster than the eye could follow, I pushed him off the wall. He yelled something I couldn’t make out and as he fell into the dark waters and I took a step back from the brink. I let what I’d just done sink in, closing my eyes. With a life spared, I’d just killed thousands. I’d just promised cities to fire and ruin, sown the seeds of a rebellion that would rip the land of my birth – the very same land I wanted to save – apart. But I’d also bought the war I needed. Damn me, but I’d bought the war I needed. One after another, the strings holding me up gave. I flopped bonelessly to the ground, at the edge of unconsciousness. It was nice out. Cool and soothing, after all that time in the fire. I heard steps against the stone, calm and unhurried.

“ Busy night?” someone murmured.

I opened my eyes and came face to face with eerie green ones.

“ I got stabbed,” I mumbled. “A lot.”

“ Happens to the best of us, Squire,” the dark-haired man murmured, and I felt his hand on my shoulder before darkness took me.

Chapter 13: Order

“ Mercy might be the mark of a great man, but then so’s a tombstone.”
– Extract from the personal memoirs of Dread Emperor Terribilis II

It was dark inside the Commander’s quarters, the only light coming from the candle on the woman’s desk. He stepped behind her quietly, his Name’s power silencing the sounds of his armour as he raised his blade. The dark-haired woman stilled for the barest fraction of a moment, and Squire knew then that his chances of taking care of her quickly had evaporated into thin air.
“ Quiet or not,” the Commander spoke with a voice that bore the soft accent of the Deoraithe,“you reek of blood.”
Squire’s blade came down but the woman spun, hand grasping for the longknife on her desk and batting the killing blow aside at the last moment. The green-eyed man sighed and shifted his footing as she rose to her feet.
“ I do hope that was a figure of speech,” he said mildly. “I bathe every few days.”
The Commander bared her teeth in mockery.
“ Some things don’t wash off with water, Praesi,” she replied.
His blade flicked forward, tasting the edge of her defence and finding it unfortunately steady. No less than he’d expected, of course – the woman’s Name was one that could only be earned through years of hard fighting, and not even Ranger’s tutelage was enough to overcome the disparity between their levels of experience. Even nurtured, talent could only bring you so far.
“ So tell me, assassin,” Commander jeered, “what was it that finally pushed the Chancellor to send a killer after me?”
The longknife was a blur of sharpened steel in her hand and she stepped forward, turning a thrust into a vicious flick of the wrist when he stepped around it, dancing away before he could strike back and leaving behind a shallow cut on his cheek.
“ Was it the punitive expedition on the Red Boars?” she asked.
Squire have ground fluidly, trying to find an angle where his sword’s longer reach would be able to come into play. It was unfortunate that his way into the quarters had meant travelling light, because fighting an opponent this dangerous without his shield was quickly becoming more than he’d bargained for.
“ No,” Commander mused, “it’s not like we’ve never done that before. Which means someone opened their damned mouth about my plan for the Lesser Steppes.”
Squire smiled.
“ I might have heard a thing or two,” he agreed. “But you seem to operate under a misconception, Commander.”
“ Illuminate me, then, assassin,” she replied coldly.
“ Not Assassin,” he corrected her. “Squire.”
That was when the bells started ringing. Three rings, a pause and then three rings again: the signal for a fire in the fortress. Apprentice had already started his work, then, which meant it was time to wrap this up: Grem’s clansmen would be in position soon. His opponent spat a few words in the Old Tongue. From the intonation, he would venture a guess they were nothing particularly polite.
“ So you’re one of the pups who wants to be the next Black Knight,” she growled. “You made an error in coming here tonight, boy – it’ll be my pleasure to nip you in the bud before you become a real problem.”
Which was, he was forced to concede, a very real possibility. When she moved forward again, it was with the weight of cold anger behind her attacks – again and again he was forced to give ground, pushed out of her quarters until he was at the head of the stairs. Commander slipped under his guard when he overextended, ignoring the deep cut he carved right above her ear to close the distance and slam her palm into his chest. Had anyone but a Named done that on full plate they would have broken their wrist for their trouble, but instead her blow sent him tumbling down the stairs. About halfway down he managed to roll back to his feet, but before he could bring up his sword she nearly sliced through his jugular, forcing him to scramble back desperately. In a matter of moments she’d driven him all the way out to the inner courtyard, and now they both knew the game was up.
“ If you kneel,” she said flatly, “I’ll make it quick.”
“ If this were a story,” Squire told her, “this would be the moment where I revealed I was left-handed all along.”
“ Are you?” the dark-haired woman asked gruffly.
“ No,” he replied, sheathing his sword. “I’m a practical man at heart, you see.”
The first arrow took Commander in the side of the throat, punching straight through and coming out the other side. Ranger’s work. The short bow volley from Grem’s clansmen followed a heartbeat later, filling her with so many arrows he could no longer make out her face.
That’s the thing with practical sorts, Commander,” Squire told her gently. “We cheat.”

I woke up in a room I didn’t recognize.
I could still feel the cold of the northern night on my skin, cheek still stinging where the Commander’s longknife had drawn blood. That particular sensation paled in comparison to the rest of my pains: my entire body was a raw wound, the worst of it centred around the long gash that snaked across my entire torso. I pushed myself up against the cushions, wincing as a flash of agony went through me. Tossing the blanket covering me aside, I took a closer look at the bandage-covered cut the Lone Swordsman had gifted me with: it was an angry red and would scar rather gruesomely, but at least it wasn’t bleeding. The rest of my body bore no marks, which sent a shiver of unease down my spine: I’d been healed by Zacharias enough to know that magic couldn’t heal this well without dipping a toe in unsavoury waters. I was alone in the room, I saw as I took a look around: sparsely furnished in the Callowan style, no windows and I couldn’t hear so much as a hint of noise from the outside. Everything in here smelled of blood, I noticed with a jolt of surprise. I hadn’t noticed because I’d smelled the same thing in the dream, and wasn’t that a creepy thought?

I forced myself into a sitting position at the edge of the bed, pushing down a pained groan. The identity of the Squire in my dream wasn’t exactly hard to deduce: Black still looked more or less the same, if a little older, and there was no way I could confuse those eerie green eyes with anyone else’s. There’d been too many details to the vision for it to be just a fantasy cooked up by my mind while I slept, though: even now, closing my eyes, I could still hear the low voice of the Commander and the shriek of those arrows as they fell form above. A Name dream, then. My mind still felt too fuzzy to puzzle out exactly what was going on here, but I knew that there was bound to be a reason for it. When Black had shoved a sword through my chest, I’d ended up confronting two versions of me that could have been. So the dream shows me the previous Squire killing a hero when I just let one go. A little heavy-handed, as far as hints went, but I was not a subtle girl by nature: it made sense that my Name would be equally as blunt. I passed a hand through my tangled locks with a grimace. Gods, I smelled awful. I needed a bath, or at least a change a clothes.

The door creaked open and Captain came in, ducking her head under the threshold. The sight drew a smile out of me: very few things must be Captain-sized, outside of wherever the Hells ogres lived.

Good,” the warrior grunted. “You’re awake.”

Barely,” I agreed. “How long was I out?”

It’s been two days since your little stunt,” she said. “You came damned close to never waking up.”

I’d suspected as much, but it still sent a shiver down my spine to hear it said out loud.

Should I sent a thank you note to the Legion healers, then?”

Captain snorted.

You tore your body up way past what they can handle,” she informed me. “Luckily we had a blood mage from the Swiftfoot tribe in camp – still took three bleedings to get you back to something manageable.”

Bleedings. Gods Above, I hoped she wasn’t saying what I thought she did.

You mean they bled me , right?”

The olive-skinned woman graced me with a quelling look.

Don’t be obtuse, girl,” she grunted. “You had little enough of the stuff left in your veins. Black had them spill the lifeblood of three. Rough stuff, but it usually works.”

I felt my stomach sink and let out a ragged breath. Three people dead just to heal me, and Captain didn’t even seem to think of it as particularly notable.

Who were they?” I croaked out. “The people that died to save me.”

She shrugged. “Death row prisoners,” she told me. “Never learned their names, but Scribe would probably know. Had to file some papers to requisition them.”

Requisition them, like a resource. Same as if they’d asked for a new set of armour or some sewing equipment. Like they were things, not people. Oh, they weren’t likely to have been very nice sorts – they wouldn’t have gotten a death sentence otherwise – but at the end of the day what I saw was a Praesi spending Callowan lives like currency. Three stranger’s lives spent to preserve mine, without a second thought. Would I have agreed to it if I’d been awake, I wondered? It disgusted me that I was no longer as certain of my answer as I would have been a month ago. Captain’s presence suddenly felt intolerable, a blight to everything I was trying to accomplish. Just another cog in the Empire’s machine, grinding down the lives of the people they’d conquered.

And yet, what could I do? For all that I itched to lash out, I was all too aware that even at my best I’d never manage to do more than scratch her armour. She was a woman who’d faced entire battalions of knights and slaughtered them effortlessly. They’d been kind, Captain and Black, so easy-going and helpful I’d ended up forgetting I was dealing with monsters. Calamities, the monsters even other monsters fear. And the worst of it was that we were on the same side. I’d chosen, willingly, to align myself with people who saw human sacrifice as just another tool in their arsenal. The taste of bile in my mouth drowned out the smell of blood, and I suddenly felt like throwing up. It was one thing to make the decision to sacrifice lives in the abstract, but now that I was faced with the reality of it... How could I have ever thought good would come of this? Look upon the foundations of your better world, Catherine Foundling. Another three corpses for the pile, and they will not be the last. I retched, vomiting all over the bed. The concern on Captain’s face was the most hateful sort of kindness I’d ever seen. My stomach settled after a moment and I wiped my mouth against the blanket.

I’ll talk to Scribe, then,” I muttered, shivering.

I’d remember the names, carve them deep enough I could never forget. Find out if they had families, people who’d depended on them: an insipid way of repaying a debt that ran so deep, but what else could I do? I still had my savings from the Pit and would not use so much as single speck of Imperial gold for this. My debt, my penance. Gods have mercy on my soul.

You can do that later,” Captain grunted. “Put a tunic on, Black wants you outside.”

I felt too drained to tell her that all of them could go fuck themselves, as far as I was concerned.There was no dresser, but someone had neatly folded some clothes on top of the chair in the corner. I forced myself to my feet, rebuffing Captain’s helping hand when I swayed. I was in no mood to take help from Praesi. Changing my underclothes with someone else in the room was almost nostalgic, a reminder of the days where’d I shared a dormitory with the other orphanage girls. Nobody set out clothes for me then, though. It bothered me that I’d stopped noticing luxuries like that: they crept up on you, the trappings of power. One inch at a time, until you forgot you’d ever lived without them. My lips twisted in distaste when I saw the woollen tunic I was expected to wear was dyed black. It felt like a claim was being made on me, and I’d always balked at those . I buttoned up the collar anyway and smoothed my face out of emotions. I’d get clothes of my own as soon as I got the occasion.

What does he need me for?” I asked Captain as I finished slipping on my boots.

Just needs you to be seen out and about,” the gargantuan Taghreb replied. “Rumours are you’re dead, and people want a face to put to the fire.”

I blinked. Shit, the goblinfire.

That’s still burning?” I asked.

They managed to cordon it off,” Captain said, “but almost half the quarter went up in flames. Istrid had her legionaries evacuate the people in time, at least.”

A small relief, that I wouldn’t have to add more lives to my tally so soon after the last ones. I tightened my belt and made sure my knife’s sheath was properly placed. No sword, but that was to be expected after the Lone Swordsman’s blade cut into it.

Let’s go and get this over with,” I muttered, more exhausted than even my wounds warranted.

The inn we were apparently in was deserted except for a handful of Blackguards covering the entrance. I ignored them and followed the brown-eyed warrior into the streets. I heard the crowd way before we got to the Court of Swords. The large paved plaza had once been where the counts of Summerholm held justice, though the Imperial governess had preferred the fortress for that purpose. The name came from the way Count Harlay the Grim had taken the arms of a slaughtered Praesi army and piled them up to offer the king of the time instead of the taxes owed that year. What must have been the better part of Summerholm’s population had gathered in the Court and the sound of all those thousands whispering among themselves was almost deafening. Gallows had been erected in the centre, surrounded by a square of legionaries six men deep. Black sat astride his mount in front of the structure, Scribe standing next to him still as a statue. For once, she didn’t seem to be paying attention to anything but what was happening in front of her.

The people parted in front of Captain like a receding tide, falling silent at the sight of the tall Named striding across the stone. From the corner of my eye I could see people pointing at me when they thought I couldn’t see. Squire , I heard whispered. Traitor came up nearly as often, and the epithet wouldn’t have stung as much had there not been a grain of truth to it. I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead and matched Captain’s stride as best I could. Black was in full armour, I noticed as soon as we drew close – he wore a helmet, for once, a heavy piece ornamented to look like a grinning devil.

Squire,” he greeted me, still looking towards the gallows.

Black,” I replied. “What the Hells is this?”

The restoration of order,” he said.

The gallows were no more than thirty feet away, so I could see who was on them now. There must have been fifty people standing in two lines behind the nooses, and I recognized every single one of them. Patrons from the Lost Crown, a handful I’d glimpsed in the Royal Foundry who must have survived the night.

You can’t do this,” I said urgently. “Not all of them were members of the Sons. Some just had sympathies and -”

And so were party to the assassination of an Imperial governess,” he interrupted me flatly. “High treason, which fetches the noose.”

You already knew who the members were,” I spoke pleadingly. “You could have hung them then, no need to do it now.”

Green eyes stared me down through the holes in his helmet.

They were tolerable, so long as they were harmless,” he stated. “They are no longer harmless.”

This is butchery,” I hissed. “You’ll be hated for this.”

I am already hated in this city,” he noted. “An acceptable loss, if I am also feared.”

I reached for the power of my Name but there was nothing . Not a drop of the power I’d used to crush my enemies, even as I reached as I deep as I could.

You bound my Name,” I accused him.

Your powerlessness is of your own doing,” Black replied. “You took action that ran against your Name’s nature, and so damaged your access to it. Something related to your confrontation with the hero, I assume. No body was found.”

So you’re punishing me by killing Callowans?” I snarled.

I am hanging traitors who took up arms against the Tower,” he corrected sharply. “I am not in the habit of wasting lives over petty lessons.”

I’d never hated anybody more than I hated the man in that moment. Sitting there on his horse, looking down on me from above. He stood for every fucking sneering Praesi I’d come across, eyeing me like I was just cattle in their herd. Pretending the laws he upheld were anything else than rules the Wasteland used to fix the game so they’d win every time.

I will have no part in this,” I spoke, voice so cold and furious I could hardly believe it was my own.

My fingers closed against the handle of my knife. His stare never wavered and I realized how absurd I must have seemed to him, the girl who couldn’t even use her Name and was still threatening to pull a knife on the Black Knight. There were two Calamities standing within ten feet of me, and even through the haze of rage that fact managed to sink in. I loosened my fingers.

I will have no part in this,” I repeated, more calmly.

I might not be able to stop this, but I didn’t have to pretend I endorsed it in any way. I turned to leave, to go anywhere but here-

Stop .”

I thought I knew fear. I’d felt it the night we first met, when the Knight’s power had choked the very air of the alleyway. I was wrong. Oh so very wrong. My limbs froze and my heart spasmed. Dark things lurked just out of my sight, thirsting for my death.

Turn around .”

I did. I couldn’t even think about not obeying. The monster studied me without a speck of emotion in his eyes, the almost indolent amusement he always displayed sliding off his face like water off a clay mask. There was no humanity in the thing I was facing, and finally I could say I’d met the Black Knight. The real one.

Did you think this was a game, Catherine? That actions would not have consequences?” the green-eyed man murmured. “Power cuts both ways. Authority comes with responsibility. Ambitions such as your demand sacrifice, so stand here and watch .”

My body did. Even as I screamed inside, my body did. A hush went over the crowd as General Sacker scuttled up onto the gallows, giving her legionaries a sharp gesture to get on with it. Levers were pulled, the ground opened beneath the prisoners and twenty-five Callowans died of a broken neck. Thousands stood in the Court, and you could have heard a pin drop. Legionaries untied the corpses as soon as the last one stopped twitching, letting them fall down the hatches as they pushed the second row of prisoners forward. I read their faces one after another, too dazed to be properly horrified. In the middle of the line stood a slender blond girl with grey eyes. Elise. Our eyes met and recognition flickered across her face, followed by pleading. Gods, forgive me. I didn’t know. You have to believe me, I didn’t know. A heartbeat passed and the beautiful face turned to disgust. She spat on the ground as the noose was settled around her neck.

General Sacker gestured again and she died.

The crowd let out a long breath, and just like that it was over. Tens of thousands stood in the Court of Swords, surrounding less than two hundred legionaries, but as the last corpse dropped under the gallows they started to disperse. Cowed, just like me.

We leave with the noon bell,” Black spoke calmly. “Get back to the barracks by then.”

Without another word he rode away, his steel-clad horse obeying the unspoken commands of his Name. I staggered away numbly, my legs taking me away from the Court. It didn’t matter where, as long as it wasn’t here. Anywhere but here. How long I wandered I couldn’t say, but I ended up at the bottom of a dead-end alley. No one else was in sight. I leaned against a wall, forehead coming to rest against the roughly hewn stone. Slowly I fell to my knees, welcoming the burn of my wound as my body stretched. I was so very, very tired. Over two hundred miles stood between me and home, and suddenly I was aware of how alone I really was. Surrounded by people who hated me, people I’d willingly set aside for the company the monsters killing them. And now here I was, without even the protection of the Name I’d bartered my soul away for.

A dry sob wracked my throat and I rocked myself slowly, closing my eyes. I’d done this to myself, feeling clever and in control every step of the way. It had felt like a dream, really. One colourful absurdity after another, Names and visions and claims. The stuff legends were made of. Maybe that was why it had come so easily to me – I couldn’t quite believe it was real, so I treated it like a story. I’d bantered with villains who’d soaked the pages of history books in blood like I was an equal instead of an ant they could step on without a second thought. Just the memory of the way I’d mouthed off on the first night was enough to chill my blood now, now that I knew I’d been speaking to the green-eyed creature I’d met in the Court instead of the lackadaisical villain I’d thought I was facing. There was no believing this was dream now. Not when I can still hear the sound of Callowan necks snapping under the rope. Tear fell down my cheeks and I let them.

If this wasn’t worth crying about, what was?

Chapter 14: Villain

“ All lessons worth learning are drenched in blood.”
-Dread Empress Triumphant, First and Only of Her Name

We rode for Ater.

I forced myself awake for my sword lessons and kept up my readings, but I hadn’t spoken a word to Black since Summerholm. The Fields stretched in every direction around us, farms and grasslands as far as the eye could see: empty, most of them. The farmer seemed aware an Imperial party was coming through and they avoided the sight of us. I spent my evenings in silence, staring at closed books and thinking about the city I’d just left. I’d made a mistake. There were things about the way I’d reacted on the day of the hangings that bothered me, and I had no real explanation for them. Oh, I was still more disgusted than I could properly put into words. I’d taken lives before, but learning about the sacrifices had been a different matter. I’d killed for justice, when no one else was willing to give it. I’d killed in battle, when my enemies left me no other choice. That three prisoners, no matter how they’d ended up on death row, had been slaughtered like cattle to keep me alive still made me nauseous. They hadn’t died for a greater purpose, they’d died for my sake. Used up for their blood like animals. Their deaths had been unasked for, and they were not my fault, but the were my responsibility nonetheless.

As for the hangings... I could see, now that the heat of the moment had passed, that they’d been doomed to die. The Knight wasn’t wrong that they’d committed treason. Sparing them would have weakened Imperial authority and let a pack of conspirators who’d already been part of the murder of a Governor on the loose. That thought did not, however, extend to the sympathizers who’d died like the rest. How many in the Lost Crown had actually been part of the Sons of Streges? The group had been a small one, and ineffective before the Lone Swordsman had gotten involved. There certainly weren’t fifty of them, and that’s how many got the noose. Were they innocent? No, perhaps not. But they were mainly guilty of hating the Empire, and how could they be blamed for that? If Black hung every sympathizer in Summerholm, there’d be nobody left in the city but the Legions.

It wasn’t enough, though. There was more to it. It hadn’t helped that I’d nearly lost my life the night before and been told of death after death the moment I woke up. My hands still shook when I thought of how close I’d come to dying that night, slowly bleeding out on the floor as the hero walked away. If he’d been even a little more thorough, just a little less sure my wound would kill me... I took a deep breath a steadied my hand. The thought of going into a fight again had dread creeping up my spine, and I hated every moment of it. The whispers from the crowd had pushed me, in a way. For all that I’d pushed through as I walked, even now the memory of them stung. I’d thought I was prepared to be called a traitor by my people, I’d gone into this knowing they’d consider me one, but after actually living through it I knew I’d been anything but. Some part of me had wanted to set myself apart from what was happening, to prove I wasn’t betraying the land I wanted to save.

My conversation with the Swordsman kept plaguing my thoughts. “ How can you possibly justify working for these tyrants?” he’d asked. I’d dismissed him as yet another heroic imbecile, back then, but- I frowned. There was no but. There should be no but. Why did a single conversation with a man I held no real respect for shake me so? It wasn’t like he’d made any good arguments. Just platitudes about kingdoms and banners, the kind of sentimental logic someone with no solid reasoning would use. There was something at play here I didn’t understand. I still couldn’t feel my Name, and the last time I had was in the wake of letting the hero go – they were related, in some way. I’d failed some sort of test: my Role had found me wanting in some manner. It burned me that the only person I could have discussed this with was the Black Knight, and I just couldn’t . Putting aside that I’d knowingly tried to push a hero into starting an insurrection in Callow, just the sight of the man was enough to fill me with cold anger.

Three times, his voice had turned strange as he gave orders. Three times I had obeyed, regardless of what I wanted. That he’d casually commandeered my own body wasn’t something I ever intended to forget – and no one held grudges quite like Callowans.

The days passed one after another and I dug into the books. Most of them were history, as it turned out. Praes had been a mess before the Empire was even declared: there’d been no less than four Soninke kingdoms in the north, fighting each other over land, and in the Hungering Sands the desert tribes had slaughtered each other brutally over ever-scarce resources. They only people they’d hated more were each other: the Taghreb had frequently raided into the southernmost Soninke kingdoms, stealing everything they could get their hands on and burning the rest. Back then the goblin tribes in the Grey Eyries had been nothing more than a presence looming in the background, though they’d already been forging iron weaponry when everyone else was still using bronze. In a sense the Clans had been the force to be reckoned with, back in those days: humans tread lightly around them, fearful of the great greenskin hordes in the Steppes that descended like a flood of death every few decades.

It was a feeble distraction, though, and the tension rose with every passing day. It had become nearly intolerable by the time we got to the Blessed Isle. The barren rock in the middle of the Wasaliti River had been the furthest Miezan stronghold on the continent, meant to be the stepping stone for an invasion of ancient Callow before the Licerian Wars put an abrupt end to those prospects. It had changed hands hundreds of times since those days, but the massive stone bridge linking the island to the ground from both sides still stood unbroken as a testament to superior Miezan engineering. The ancient fort had become a massive castle in the wake of Dread Empress Triumphant’s fall, when the Kingdom of Callow had finally claimed it as its own. Before the Conquest it had been the fortress-temple of the Order of the White Hand, the steel-clad paladins who guarded the eastern border of the kingdom. For centuries they’d been a plague on the Empire, raiding beyond even the Green Stretch. There were still songs sung about the time they’d ridden up to the Nine Gates of Ater, leaving the corpse of a Praesi general in sight of the city walls as a warning against designs to the west.

It was a ruin now, the very stone blackened and burned by the largest deployment of goblinfire in Praesi history. The Order of the White Hand had been wiped out root and stem as the opening move of the Conquest, the paladins killed to the last man and woman so that they could never rise again. It had been the moment when Callow started taking the newest Black Knight seriously, though not quite enough: two weeks later the infamous massacre on the Fields of Streges had effectively broken the better part of the Kingdom’s military strength. We rode under the broken arches of the only gate in silence, the wind hurling itself at the ruins sounding eerily like a dirge. It was said that if you listened closely you could still hear the screams of the two thousand who’d burned alive.

The sun was setting and the Blackguards immediately set to making camp under one of the larger towers, putting up the tents and starting a fire. Some of them had left the party to hunt earlier and caught a handful of rabbits they were intent on turning into stew, skinning the beasts and putting them into an iron cooking pot. I left Zombie in what must have once been the outer stables, avoiding the company of Black and Captain who were sitting by the fire. I could have just retired to my tent with a book and a candle, but after a long day’s ride I felt like stretching my legs: I wandered off into the ruins, not quite sure what I expected to find. The fortress had been thoroughly ruined, I found out. Even the inside of most structures was scorched, and not a single roof had survived the taking of the Isle. Here and there skeletons peeked out from under the debris, the bones themselves blackened and warped as a grim reminder of the dangers of goblinfire.

I wasn’t sure why the Empire had never bothered to rebuild and garrison the Blessed Isle, truth be told. As the only way across the river it seemed like a key position to hold, but the Praesi seemed happy enough to leave it a wreck. A warning against defiance, maybe? Maybe even they were unsettled by what had happened here during the Conquest. I let my feet take me wherever they felt, eventually ending up by the southern wall. The view from there was striking. To the west fields swallowed the horizon, tinted red by the light of the setting sun, and to the east the Imperial road stretched beyond what the eye could see. It went all the way to Ater, I knew, one of the larger projects undertaken by the Empire. Dread Emperor Tenebrous , I dredged up. He was the one to get it done. He’d seemed like a promising ruler early in his reign, until he’d made one deal too many with the Underworld and become convinced he was a giant spider stuck in a man’s body. Things had swiftly gone downhill after that.

I got bored with the sights eventually, walking down a half-ruined set of stairs to make my way back to camp. I was getting hungry, and I still had some readings to get done before I went to bed. I crossed into an open courtyard surrounded by a quartet of smaller bastions but stopped dead in my tracks when I realized I was no longer alone. Lounging on a miraculously untouched stone bench, a strikingly beautiful Soninke girl was watching me with a pleasant smile. I reached for my my sword before realizing I’d left it back in camp – I no longer wore it outside of my lessons. All I had was my knife, and even in the dying light I could see that the Heiress had a bared blade resting across her lap.

“ Catherine Foundling,” the dark-skinned girl spoke amiably, her sing-song Mthethwa accent caressing the words. “It was past time we met properly.”

“ Heiress,” I replied. “Didn’t think you’d be inclined to talk, after what you did in Summerholm.”

The aristocrat shrugged elegantly.

“ It was nothing personal, Catherine,” she told me. “I thought you were a threat, back then. This is how the game is played, yes?”

I grit my teeth. She’d set the other three claimants – well, maybe two, Rashid likely had gotten there on his own – on me and it was nothing personal ? After a heartbeat I frowned.

“ Back then,” I repeated carefully.

Heiress smiled, warm and friendly. “I know better, now. I wasn’t sure, after you let the hero go, but after that display in the Court of Swords there can be no doubt.”

My blood ran cold. There’d been nobody else on the walls, when I’d pushed the Lone Swordsman into the river. How could she- No. She might be guessing. No need to hand her leverage she might not have.

“ Not sure what you’re talking about,” I grunted. “The Swordsman got away on his own – heroes do that, you know.”

The beautiful girl laughed. “Of course he did. I withdraw any implication to the contrary. Still, there’s no need for us to be enemies. I’ve come with a peace offering, you see.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I was under the impression that your Role and mine were supposed to be at odds,” I pointed out.

“ We would be,” she agreed. “If you were a real Squire.”

My fingers closed against the handle of my knife.

“ Would you care to repeat that?” I whispered. “I didn’t quite catch what you said.”

She waved away the threat. “Come now, Foundling – you don’t actually want to be the Squire, do you? If you did, that deplorable scene in Summerholm wouldn’t have happened.”

“ I’ve killed for this Name,” I replied coldly. “Careful, Heiress.”

“ I’ve killed for good theatre seats, my dear,” the Soninke chuckled. “That’s the way of things, in the Wasteland. That’s why you’re so disgusted with us, isn’t it?”

“ If you’re looking for an impassioned defence of the Praesi moral fibre,” I said through gritted teeth, “I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“ Oh, I quite agree with you,” Heiress told me feelingly. “You’re different, Catherine. Trying to be one of us can only hurt you. It’s why I’m offering you a way out.”

What?

“ You’re feeling trapped, right now,” the other girl told me, “but you don’t have to be. I have a ship waiting, and I can get you back to Laure safely. Or anywhere else you want to go, for that matter. You can start over without all this mess hanging over your head. Tonight. Just say the word.”

My heartbeat stilled. She was saying the truth. I knew it in my guts, she was saying the truth. If I accepted, I’d set out on a ship tonight and leave before anyone could catch me. I couldn’t go back to Laure, obviously, but I could sail down the Wasaliti until Mercantis and make my way into the Free Cities. I’d be beyond the Empire’s reach, there. Safe.

“ And if I refuse?” I asked quietly.

“ Are you?” Heiress murmured, pleasant smile unwavering. “Refusing?”

It was such a pretty smile she had. Shame about the way it didn’t reach her eyes.

“ I think I am,” I said.

She sighed, crossing her legs.

“ I’d hoped we could do this without resorting to unpleasantness,” she spoke. “Are you quite sure we can’t come to terms?”

“ More sure by the moment,” I replied flatly.

“ Well, then,” Heiress said, all pretence of pleasantness melting away. “As we speak, I have men surrounding your orphanage in Laure. If I give the word everyone inside will be dead by morning. The matron, the girls you shared a dormitory with, even the children. Put to the sword, every last one of them, unless you abandon your Name tonight.”

For the second time, my blood ran cold. She’d spoken her threat the way other people talked of the weather – like it was nothing particularly noteworthy, just a way to make conversation. Was she bluffing? Maybe. But she had the resources to arrange this, and she didn’t seem like the kind of person afraid to use every tool at her disposal.

“ I’m not asking for your life,” Heiress told me patiently. “Merely that you get out of my way.”

“ If you give the word,” I repeated. “That assumes you’re alive to do so.”

She laughed. “I have come in the fullness of my Name, Catherine. You’re powerless and as good as unarmed. And if that’s not enough for you...”

She snapped her fingers and in near-silence four silhouettes stepped out of the spreading shadows. Thick cloaks hid their features, but there was no hiding the crossbows they were pointing at me. They were spread out in the courtyard, their lines of fire overlapping only on me.

“ Be reasonable, Catherine,” the Soninke said. “Surrender is the only rational course left to you.”

I closed my eyes. How many girls were there, in the orphanage? At least forty, and a third of them no older than ten. She’d kill them and not lose a wink of sleep over it, if she thought she had to. Gods, I was so sick of this. Not even a month and I was so very tired. I opened my eyes and exhaled, looking up into the sky. The moon was out. I laughed.

“ Thank you,” I said.

Heiress frowned.

“ I should thank Black too, I suppose,” I continued quietly. “This was a lesson I needed to learn.”

“ I don’t follow,” my rival admitted.

“ I’ve been thinking about this all wrong, you see. I was raised in Callow, and we see things differently. The shepherd boy picks up the fated sword, slays the dragon and is revealed to have been a prince all along.” I smiled at her. “This was never going to be that kind of story.”

Gods, I’d wanted it to. Deep down, I’d thought that just doing good things under an Evil Role would see me through this. That I could walk that line without every really dirtying my hands in a way I’d regret for the rest of my life.

“ Do it,” I said. “ Kill them. If I give in once, you’ll just use it against me over and over again.”

I couldn’t beat the monsters by being better than them. I’d never had that in me. Too much impatience, too much recklessness. That was all right, though. There was another way: be the bigger monster.

“ Do you think I’m bluffing?” Heiress asked, voice low and dangerous.

“ I know you’re not,” I admitted. “Which is why I’m going to say this: if a single one of them dies, I will make a monument to ruin of you . All that has ever given you joy, I will turn to ashes. Everyone you’ve ever loved, I will break so thoroughly they die cursing your name. I will undo everything you’ve ever accomplished, wipe the slate of your existence so clean there won’t be a person alive that remembers you were ever born. I will take no pleasure in it, but I will do it.”

Eyes cold as ice, I bared my teeth.

“ I will do it, so that the next time some smug Praesi prick tells me to surrender I can point to the wasteland that was once your home and watch them flinch.”

“ You don’t have it in you,” she replied, face blank.

“ Try me ,” I hissed.

There was fear lurking under the beautiful mask and I relished it. It was about time those fuckers started taking me seriously.

“ I could kill you, here and now,” Heiress said.

“ You could try,” I corrected with a breathless laugh. “Here I am, abandoned by my Name with only a knife to defend myself. You’ve got four big men with crossbows and a fancy sword in your lap. Look into my eyes, Heiress – do I look afraid to you? You’ve stacked the odds, but have you stacked them enough ?”

She hesitated. I’d never felt more alive than I did in that moment, when that clever little wretch took a look at me standing alone in her trap and faltered. I had nothing to me but my anger, but that was more than enough. I’d fought without a Name, long before I ever met the Calamities. I could do it again.

“ Kill her,” Heiress ordered, but I was already moving knife in hand.

Three strings twanged and I felt a bolt come within a hair’s breadth of my throat. Too slow. I was on the first man before he could even drop his crossbow: I slid behind him, letting the last shot bury itself in his stomach. Laying a hand on his shoulder, I slid my knife across his throat and and let him drop to the ground. By the time I was moving again, Heiress was nowhere in sight. Stupid of you, my dear. If you’d stayed you might have won. The second man had his sword out when I got to him, but after fighting real monsters every morning I could have laughed at how sloppy his stance was. He swung too wild and I slipped inside his guard, burying my blade in his eye to the hilt. I snatched his sword before it could drop to the ground, letting the third one come to me as the last henchman finished reloading. I flicked the tip of the blade in his direction and he backed off warily, though I circled to keep him between me and the man with the crossbow.

He seemed reluctant to attack and I grinned when I realized why: he was afraid of me. They both were. I’d just killed the other two like it was a stroll through the market and sent their employer running without even needing to fight her. I pushed forward, letting him catch my sword in a parry – he was too eager to keep me far away, and it cost him when I dropped the sword to catch his wrist. His eyes widened in panic but before he could say a word I punched him in the belly. No armour, only soft flesh, and I pried his fingers loose of his sword before hacking into his neck with it like I was reaping wheat. I turned my eyes to the last one, bloodied blade in hand as the tip of his crossbow shook in his unsteady hands.

“ Pray you don’t miss,” I said. “You’ll be dead before you get to reload.”

Steadying his hands, the man took aim carefully. Whether I could have dodged the quarrel or not would remain a mystery: before he could do anything, a hand of shadow slithered its way up his throat and started choking him. The minion pawed at it frantically, but the shadow stayed on his skin. A minute passed before he fell to the ground, blue in the face and eyes bloodshot. I cast an eye around the courtyard and saw Black sitting on top of the wall in the back, legs dangling off the edge. He seemed amused, the mask of indolence he liked to affect once more painted over his face. The dark-haired man remained silent, breaking off a piece of bread and popping it into his mouth. I strode towards the first man I’d killed, wrenching out my knife and wiping the blade on his cloak. I felt my Name stir deep inside of me as I sheathed the knife and smiled a hard smile. Liked that, did you? Good. We’re far from done, you and I. Slowly, I turned to face the Black Knight.

“ I’ve missed enough lessons,” I said. “Let’s get to work.”

How can you justify working for these tyrants? the Lone Swordsman had asked. I finally had my answer. Justifications only matter to the just.

Chapter 15: Company

“ I’ve found that the best way to win at shatranj is usually to turn into a giant snake and tear my opponent’s throat out.”
– Dread Empress Vindictive III

We’d stopped for a late lunch before coming in sight of Ater. Black had pushed our usual personal lesson earlier in the day, since the evening would likely be spent introducing me at the Imperial Court, and he was spending more time talking than dipping his millet bread in the broth the Blackguards had put together.

“Early Praesi Names were divided along ethnic lines,” the green-eyed man spoke as I dug into my own bowl ravenously. “The Taghreb had the likes of the Red Fox – usually a thief, always clever – and the Grey Lion, often the strongest chief of the time. Soninke Names were associated with the rulers of their kingdoms, though some Champion derivatives arose during particularly brutal wars.”

“They’re all gone now, though?” I asked, hastily swallowing my mouthful when he raised his eyebrow at me.

“None have been seen in over a millennia,” he agreed. “Roles are usually a reflection of the people they spring from, you’ll find, and it’s been a long time since humans inside the Empire have ceased any designs of independence. Why settle for ruling a fraction of a realm, when you could claim the Tower itself?”

I could see his point. That was one of the most seductive parts of the Imperial philosophy, I’d found: in Old Callow, the throne had only ever passed between the various branches of the Fairfax dynasty. It would, theoretically, have been possible for one the duchies to topple them – and some had wanted to. The Dukes of Liesse, in particular, had never quite managed to forget that they’d been kings before the unification of Callow. In practice, though, the fact that more often than not the kingship came with a Name had seen them rule unchallenged. In Praes, though, anybody could claim the Tower if they were clever and ruthless enough. The High Lords got a turn in the seat more often than commoners, certainly, but the chronicles of the Empire were full of instances where a man or a woman with strong powers or a stronger vision had butchered their way to power. There was no Imperial dynasty: the longest a family had ever managed to claim the Tower was three generations, and they’d been wiped out to the last when the third Emperor was overthrown.

“I don’t recall hearing about any greenskin names, not since the Declaration of Empire,” I noted. “Which is weird, considering some ogres got Roles and there’s a lot less of them than orcs or goblins.”

Black set aside his bowl, offering me the full weight of his attention. We weren’t reconciled, not exactly. I would not forget or forgive the day we’d left Summerholm anytime soon, and he’d smelled the rat in the way the Lone Swordsman had managed to get away. Still, he spoke and I listened. For better or worse, the Calamity was the teacher I’d been given and I intended to learn everything I could from him. His successes, while ghastly, had still been successes. More than that, I’d planted the seeds of a war so I had better be ready to fight it when the time came.

“When it comes to the Clans,” he said, “we have the Miezans to blame for that. They systematically dismantled every aspect of orc culture. They went as far as razing the holy grounds of the Broken Antler Horde, the largest city on Callernia at the time. Roles do not come to be in a void, Catherine. There needs to be a weight behind them, a cultural imperative. Had the Clans broken away from Praes after the Declaration we might have seen a rebirth of their old Names, but the first Dread Empress managed to keep them in the fold by the skin of her teeth.”

“That’s kind of sad,” I admitted.

“Their most common Name was the Warlord,” Black murmured. “Mostly known for their propensity to put entire villages to the torch and take back their inhabitants to the Steppes as thralls.”

“Not too sad, then,” I mused.

He chuckled. “As for the Tribes, it’s trickier matter. They were never outright conquered by the Miezans, as you know. They knelt after the first few defeats and so kept the majority of their holdings.”

“There’s not a lot about goblins, in the books you gave me,” I told him. “Some stuff about their alchemies and when they started getting interested in engineering, but even the explanation about the Matrons was a little vague.”

“That’s because there’s nearly no reliable literature on them,” Black replied. “They’re frustratingly secretive, not that they haven’t been given reason to be. Personally, I suspect that they do have Names.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And they just what, never stepped out of the Grey Eyries? Roles are a little flashier than that.”

“They might not be,” the Knight said, “if the culture that spawned them values secrecy above all else.”

Huh. That made a twisted sort of sense, actually. For all we knew, the Matrons themselves might have been Named and just never told anyone. Roles like Assassin had aspects that allowed them to hide from scrutiny, so it wasn’t exactly unheard of. I had another question I wanted to ask, about the Name of Chancellor and how it had come to be forbidden – just laying claim to it apparently qualified as high treason – but before I could get anything out Scribe popped out of nowhere. More damningly, she managed to do it right next to me.

“Bloody Hells, how do you keep doing that?” I blurted out. “We’re standing in the middle of an open field, Scribe. The only footing here is rocks .”

She didn’t reply, though I’m pretty sure a glimmer of amusement flashed through her eyes.

“Scribe,” the green-eyed man frowned. “You don’t usually interrupt during lessons.”

Without a word, she handed him a scroll. It was, I saw, sealed with black wax and the official Imperial seal. That looks serious. Black broke it open and scanned the contents, face turning pale when he got halfway through.

“You’re sure?” he asked her.

“I have three different witnesses. Reliable,” the plain-faced woman replied.

“ Fuck ,” the Black Knight cursed, and my eyes widened. It was the first time I’d ever heard him curse. “We have those laws for a reason , Scribe. Not even Triumphant was fool enough to break the Decree and she broke nearly every other law on record.”

Weeping Heavens, he actually sounded worried.

“What happened?”

The pale-skinned man rubbed the bridge of his nose, dropping the scroll on his lap.

“The Tower just received a Red Letter,” he said, tone grim.

I burst out laughing. “Really? The gnomes are knocking at the door? You could have at least put a little effort into the punchline.”

My mirth fell flat when neither of their expressions changed. “You’re serious,” I realized. “Are you telling me they actually exist?”

“Yes,” Black confirmed flatly. “And that’s the second Red Letter the Tower received this century. If we receive a third, the consequences would be... dire.”

“The gnomes, like the people with the huge metal armours and the flying machines that scream? We’re talking about those guys?”

“Have you ever heard of Kerguel, Catherine?” Black asked.

I shrugged. “The lost city that got sunk into the ocean by the Gods. There’s a great deal of bad poetry about it.”

“It was a real place,” the Knight told me. “One of the most powerful nations in the world at a time where the great Baalite cities were a collection of mud huts. They had an interest in natural physics and pursued it heedlessly, until one day they received a letter in a red leather sheath.”

That wasn’t the story as I’d been told it, so I listened in silence.

“The letter told them to cease their research or face extinction,” Black spoke into the quiet of the Wasteland. “The lords of Kerguel laughed and dismissed it as an esoteric joke. They laughed again, when a more strongly-worded letter came a month later.”

He paused, letting out a deep breath.

“They stopped laughing, when they lost contact with all their colonies. It was already too late by then. The Yan Tei have the only surviving records on the subject, and they say that the fleet of metal ships that came for Kerguel darkened the sky itself – it could be seen from miles away.”

“You mean they...” I trailed off.

“They sunk the island into the sea,” Black said. “Sorceries Kerguel had spent decades refining slid off the ships like water off a duck’s back. The explosions were larger than anything that’s been seen before or since. By the time the gnomes were done, there was not a living soul left on the barren rocks.”

I sat there listlessly, watching my teacher’s expression turn coldly furious.

“So you can understand how after that farming machine under Nefarious got us a Letter, I’m a little irritated that the Hearthmaker tribe was foolish enough to start playing with powders.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked quietly.

“They need to be purged,” he sighed. “Every last one of them, and the research destroyed. The Matrons will have a fit, but there’s no other way.”

“You could fight them,” I said. “If they’re threatening you, you must have found something they’re afraid of.”

Black smiled mirthlessly. “In the grander scheme of things, Catherine, I’m the petty warlord of a backwater kingdom. The only nation on our continent that can be considered something other than a regional power is the Kingdom Under. When one of the real world powers tells the Empire to do something, we do it. I will not face destruction in the name of pride.”

Well, shit. When someone with my teacher’s usual level of self-confidence told you someone was out of their league, they weren’t likely to be wrong. Would the gnomes also destroy Callow, if they came? It was part of the Empire, at the moment. Hopefully I’ll never have to find out.

“We’re going to Foramen, then?”

Black frowned. “You aren’t. It’s still too early for you to deal with the Matrons.”

I scoffed. “Can’t know if we don’t try, can we?”

“Spoken like someone who’s never been in the same room as those cunning old bats,” my teacher replied, faintly amused. “No, you’ll be going to the Academy until I’m done.”

Funny how these things went, wasn’t it? A month ago that had been the plan, and now it looked like I’d get what I’d wanted.

“Scribe,” the dark-haired man spoke. “Is there a company with a missing officer?”

The plain-faced woman replied immediately. “Rat Company. Lacking a lieutenant as of last week, still waiting on a transfer. They’re beginning war games at Spite Valley tonight.”

Black hummed thoughtfully. “Sink or swim. Fitting. Can you have a legionary’s kit brought to her on the way?”

Scribe inclined her head by an inch. “Already sent the runner.”

The Knight chuckled. “What would I do without you?”

“The same things,” Scribe replied blandly. “Just not as well.”

He turned his eyes to me and I shrugged in agreement. Wasn’t like I had anything else planned this week.

—

The War College was the only officer’s school in the Empire, meaning that every officer wanting to make a career in the Legions of Terror was expected to have graduated from those hallowed halls. There were other training camps scattered among the Empire for legionaries, of course, but anyone who wanted to enrol straight into the commissioned ranks went through the College. The institution had existed in one form or another since the founding of the Empire, though until recently admission had been restricted to the children of Imperial aristocracy – and in even earlier times, only to the boys among those. Dread Empress Terribilia the First had put a swift end to that particular brand of stupidity by using the Headmaster as ammunition for her latest catapults, much in the same way that my own teacher defenestrated the last Headmistress when she’d refused to allow “filthy greenskins” in her classrooms.

The College itself was situated on the outskirts of Ater, a large two-story stone hall made up mostly of classrooms, but the cadet barracks and training fields took up the entire city district known as the Five Swords Lanes. Towards the end of Dread Emperor Nefarious’ reign – which could more accurately be called the beginning of Dread Empress Malicia’s – the reform and rapid expansion of the Empire’s military had forced the Legions to set up a handful of semi-permanent camps outside Ater where the vast majority of the cadets actually slept. The old College barracks were reserved for students in their final year, nowadays, and the more practical classes were taught out in the Wasteland instead of in a classroom.

Within a week of joining, students were assigned to a company of a hundred other cadets that would serve as their mother unit for the rest of their time at the College. Given that there were around a thousand cadets in attendance, the student body was divided along the lines of ten companies. Each company had a name and a standard, typically an animal from the Wasteland, except for the company at the head of the monthly rankings: they were called only the First Company, and the competition to hold that title was nothing short of brutal. While individual cadet marks in the theoretical classes did affect company standing, the real way to rise in the rankings was to win the war games held every week in Spite Valley.

There was an old fort in the valley the Blackguards escorted me to, a leftover from the days where the Order of the White Hand had occasionally crusaded their way east to Ater itself. After the Conquest it had stopped being garrisoned and become the main site for the College’s war games. The most basic scenarios were favoured: typically an attack and defence simulation between to randomly drawn companies, though the Headmaster was known to occasionally pit several companies against each other in wider games. The valley itself was half a day’s march away from the capital and large enough that armies in the thousands could have gone through. The fort itself was situated on a hill guarding the way to Ater, sloping down into the deeper valley where a lone watchtower overlooked deep woods and a handful of streams. After a long walk the slope rose again, leading to a circle of hills backed by a veritable forest of rocky outcroppings: that was where Rat Company had elected to make camp, among the hills. I’d been able to see the smoke from the campfires long before the company itself.

Hiking my way through the camp with the legionary garb I’d put on hours earlier, I blessed the fact that there’d been a primer on the Legions inside the pile of books from Black – Heavens knew how confusing all the terms would have been otherwise.

The war game was being run between a pair of companies, which meant the hundred cadets on each side answered to a single captain. Under the captain there would be five lieutenants in charge of a “line” of twenty soldiers, and under each lieutenant a sergeant. Lines were expected to be able to split into two “tenths” if the battlefield required it, in which case the sergeant would end up in command of the second tenth. I felt uncomfortable in my standard-issue chain mail after having spent so long wearing a better-fitting armour, but that gear had belonged to Squire – I was ‘Lieutenant Callow’ as long as I attended the College, and she wasn’t supposed to have access to those kind of resources. I found my assigned line milling around a half-built campfire, digging into their rations gloomily. My sergeant was easy enough to spot, thankfully: a tall orc with the single red stripe of his rank sown into his shoulder pad, his skin closer to brown than green. He was talking with a particularly skinny goblin sporting the same insignia, I saw as I drew closer – they stopped as soon as they noticed me coming, the orc pushing himself up to snap a salute while the goblin merely afforded me a curious glance. “Sergeant Hakram?” I checked.

“That would be me,” the orc said in a gravelly voice. “You’re our new lieutenant, then?”

“Lieutenant Callow,” I agreed, offering my arm.

Hakram let out a pleased rumble at the gesture and clasped my forearm. “The little pipsqueak next to me is Sergeant Robber, from the Fourth line.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Lieutenant,” the goblin greeted me. “I should get back to my men before Pickler realizes I’m gone. Luck in battle, Hakram.”

“Wade in their blood, Robber,” her sergeant replied in one of the most common orc forms of farewell. The goblin scuttled away around the hill after offering me an amusingly sloppy salute.

“So which company did you transfer from, Lieutenant?” Hakram asked.

“I’m new,” I replied. “Never been in any before.”

“Gods be kind,” Hakram cursed. “The Captain’s going to have a fit. We’re already at the bottom of the rankings and now we get a greenie?” The orc paused before shooting me an almost apologetic look. “No offence meant, it’s just that a seasoned Lieutenant might have made a difference tomorrow,” he continued. “We’re up against First Company, and they get to be on defence too.” <

“None taken,” I replied, a little bemused. “First Company’s that good?”

“They haven’t lost a single game,” Hakram grimaced. “Captain Juniper’s called the Hellhound for a reason.”

“They’re pitting the best company against the worst?” I mused. “That hardly seems fair.”

“Luck of the draw,” the sergeant offered ruefully. “Ratface’s been cursing his heart out since the moment he pulled our number.”

“The Captain’s name is Ratface ?” I grinned, letting out a startled laugh. I knew that anyone who enrolled in the Legions could do it under the name of their choice, but who in the Hundred Hells would choose the name Ratface? Hakram grinned back, the sight made more than a little intimidating by his razor-sharp teeth.

“I heard the instructors assigned him to Rat Company just for the irony,” the orc said. “You should probably head out to the officer’s meeting, Lieutenant. I’ll take care of the watch rotations for the night.”

“The command tent’s on the other side of the hill, right?”

“It’s got a standard with rat skulls hanging off it,” Hakram grinned. “Can’t miss it.”

I offered the orc a salute he mirrored crisply and took the dirt trail up the hill. The legionary armour felt surprisingly light on my shoulders, after a month of traipsing around in plate, even with the thick rectangular shield strapped on my back. I missed my own sword already, but I supposed to keep a low profile while at the College and carrying around anything but standard-issue stock was a sure way to draw unwanted questions. Unlike some of the legionaries I’d read about, Rat Company didn’t seem equipped with the lever-action crossbows. They were probably meant to be an assault company, then.

Like my sergeant had said, the command tent was impossible to miss. It was twice as large as anyone else’s, for a start, and even if I’d somehow managed to miss the standard next to it the War College’s crossed silver swords were sown into the fabric on every side. There was a pair of legionaries standing guard by the entrance but after a cursory glance at the twin red stripes on my shoulder they let me through without a word. Four armoured legionaries were crouched by a crate someone had nailed a map to, most of them looking up at the sound of my coming in. I glanced through the room, noting that only half of the lieutenants attending were human. The only attending goblin was still tracing something on the edge of the map with her crooked fingers, looking almost comically small next to the thick, muscled orc at her side. A strikingly handsome boy with grey eyes and olive skin gave me a brief once-over before letting out a displeased grunt.

“You’d be Lieutenant Callow, I expect?” he asked.

“Reporting for duty, Captain...” I trailed off, wondering if I should actually call him by the name I’d been given. It had seemed amusing when talking with Hakram, but now it was turning out more along the lines of awkward.

> “Ratface,” the captain finished curtly. “You weren’t in the College rolls before being assigned to Rat Company. Would I be correct in assuming you’re a greenhorn?”

“I’ve seen combat before,” I replied. “And not with blunted swords either.”

“Have you now?” Ratface smiled, looking anything but friendly. “Good for you. Unfortunately that’s worth shit to me, Lieutenant. I don’t care if you castrated an ogre in single combat, you’re still a godsdamned greenie legionary they saddled me with on the day before an exercise with the First Company.”

I took a deep breath, wondering if punching my superior officer in his fat sneering face on the first day of my assignment would leave a black mark on my record. It probably would, so I forced my anger down for the moment. Let him whine all he wanted, I’d show what I was worth on the battlefield.

“More dead weight,” the large greenskin lieutenant cursed softly in Kharsum. “Just what we needed.”

My eyes flashed with quicksilver anger. I only had so much patience to spend. “You’re awfully mouthy for an unblooded boy,” I replied in the same language. “Looking for a fight?”

The orc barked out a laugh. “Hard words,” he grinned dangerously. “Keep a lid on it, greenie, it’d be a shame if I had to knock those pretty little human teeth out.”

The captain sighed, passing a hand through his short curls.

“Nauk, stop flirting with the rookie,” he said in Mthethwa, “we’ve got more pressing matters on our hands. Take a seat, Lieutenant. I suppose it’s not your fault you were assigned to us.”

Accepting the tacit apology, I gave a nod in response and went to crouch over the map with the others. The parchment laid out the cluster of hills Rat Company was camping in with the rocky outcroppings at our back as well as the valley separating us from the old fort I’d passed by earlier.

“Juniper will have the valley between us full of scouts,” Ratface announced, “but our best chance is still hitting them tonight. If we try a night assault tomorrow it’s a sure bet they’ll have had time to set up an ambush. Kilian, what did your men see when they got a look earlier?”

A short red-haired lieutenant cleared her throat and pointed out the watchtower in the middle of the valley. “There were at least two lines there setting up bonfires,” the girl murmured. “If we manage to take them out without too many losses we might actually have a shot at taking the fort.”

“My sappers have enough smokers to clog up a whole wall,” the goblin lieutenant said. “The melee for the rampart will be messy after we land the ladders, but if the lieutenant holding the wall panics we have a decent shot at punching through to the standard.”

“Nauk,” Ratface addressed the orc. “Your men will take the first wave of the assault. Callow, you’ll be right behind him.”

“Understood,” I replied.

“Sergeant Hakram knows his business. Frankly, I’d rather have him as lieutenant for your line but life is ever full of disappointments,” the captain continued. “If he tells you you’re doing something stupid, listen to him.” After a last lingering look at the map, Ratface spat in the dirt and raised his head to look us in the eyes. “We’ll get moving two hours before dawn,” he informed the assembled officers. “Keep your lines on half-watch, I want our soldiers as rested as they can be for the fight. I’ll see you all in a few hours.” We rose and saluted, exiting the tent one by one and leaving the captain to his map.

Chapter 16: Game

“ Those who live by the sword kill those who don’t.”
– Dread Emperor Vile the First

I woke up to the sound of fighting.
Pushing away my covers I reached for my sword-belt, hastily buckling it on as I hopped from one foot to the next. Squinting to make out the source of the noise in the camp fire’s dying light, I caught a dozen silhouettes making it down the hill towards my line. Legionaries, I saw, but the insignia on their shield wasn’t Rat Company’s. A night attack on the very first night? Reckless, but if the sounds of battle coming from the other side of the hill were any indication the enemy captain’s boldness might just have paid off.
“ON YOUR FEET, YOU LAZY BASTARDS!” I heard Hakram’s voice roar from further down, “WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!”
Grabbing my shield, I forced myself to focus and went to join my assembling soldiers. I’d thought that the assault before dawn would give me the time I needed to ease into legionary tactics, but it looked like I was going to be dropped straight into the deeper waters again. The thought brought a reluctant smile to my face as I pushed my way past the awakening soldiers to my sergeant. Business as usual, then. When had I ever gotten to learn anything the easy way?
“Sergeant Hakram,” I called out as soon as I glimpsed his face, “Report.”
“I have no idea what’s going on,” the orc rumbled. “I got woken up when the soldiers on watch went missing.”
I eyed the enemy soldiers calmly walking in our direction with a grimace. I’d miscalculated: that was a full line, not just a dozen. The shouts and ring of steel against steel coming from where Lieutenant Nauk’s line had been camping next to mine meant that they were in just as much trouble as we were. Was Captain Juniper trying to wipe out the company on the very first night?
“The standard, Sergeant,” I breathed out in understanding. “They’re going for the standard.”
Juniper didn’t need to actually knock out every soldier in Rat Company, just bring back our standard to her victory zone. Hakram let out a colourful string of curses in Kharsum, which I chose to interpret as agreement.
“Third Line!” I called out, “Double ranks, NOW!”
We couldn’t afford to get bogged down in a melee with the enemy line, not if First Company was going straight for the win. I’d have to get my soldiers on the other side of the hill and decide if this engagement could still be salvaged.
“Lieutenant?” Hakram prompted. “What are your orders?”
My line had formed up like a well-oiled machine while I was thinking. The First Company’s soldiers had stopped halfway down the hill and formed a wedge, patiently waiting for me to charge my line into their formation. Screw that. I’m not hitting a force on high ground with most my soldiers half asleep.
“Go help Lieutenant Nauk’s line, Sergeant,” I decided. “I’ll go for the standard myself.”
The orc frowned.
“Sir-” he started, but I cut him off.
“Hakram, there’s no time to argue,” I said. “Do it and I’ll catch up with you afterwards.”
The sergeant saluted, though he still looked sceptical.
“Good hunting, Lieutenant,” he replied, turning to get my soldiers moving.
The enemy was standing square atop the dirt path I’d used during the day, meaning I’d have to go around the sides: I slung my shield across my back on the leather strap reserved for that very purpose and went for the shadows. I’d have to be swift and quiet if I wanted to make it without getting caught, just like when I’d used sneak out of the orphanage to go fight in the Pit. The night was on my side, at least: the moon was covered by clouds, and while it might have helped the enemy sneak up on us earlier now it meant that away from the campfires I was as good as invisible. I circled as far away from the fighting as I could, but while skirting around a handful of abandoned blankets I got a glimpse of the melee I’d just sent my line into: Nauk’s silhouette stood out starkly against the flames. The lieutenant was half-naked and grappling with a pair of enemy legionaries, ignoring their blunted blades as he knocked their heads together and roared out a challenge. Hellgods, it was easy to forget how terrifying orcs could be when they cut loose. Two hundred pounds of pure muscle and bloodlust moved by the most vicious of instincts. No wonder the war parties from the Steppes had been such a thorn in Callow’s side, before the Wall was built. Shaking off the thought, I finished my trip around and got a high enough vantage point that I could see what was going on.
It was... less than promising. The standard still stood, but a melee was raging barely twenty feet from it and I could see Ratface’s forces were getting mauled. He’d managed to dig in his left flank with its back to the hill, but the centre was giving ground and there was no right flank to speak of: the line facing my men had probably slipped through the space to make sure Ratface wouldn’t get any reinforcements, if I had to guess. We’ve lost this , I was forced to admit. Even if my own soldiers managed to get Lieutenant Nauk’s moving, by the time they punched through the line waiting for them on the hill the battle would already be over. So think , I told myself. How can we turn this around? Moments passed, but nothing came to mind. Whoever Captain Juniper was, she’d thought this through perfectly. An enemy legionary tore his way through the centre and ran for the standard, and before I knew what I was doing I started running downhill. A handful of legionaries from the centre pulled back and managed to tackle the soldier, but that was the beginning of the end for Ratface’s men: First Company’s legionaries poured through the openings in the rank, breaking the whole formation apart in a matter of moments.
Forcing myself to go even faster, I ignored the melee and focused on the one part of this I could actually recoup: the standard. If First Company got their hands on it the game was as good as over, but if I could bring it back to my line and pull out under the cover of darkness we might just survive this disaster. Though what I could actually manage to do with so few soldiers was... No , I told myself. One thing at a time. Better to focus on the things I could do than those I couldn’t. Snatching up the standard from the socket it was in, I shot the melee an apologetic look before running off the way I’d come. The way back was quicker, since there was no point in skirting around the fighting. The melee around Nauk had gotten even messier in the last few minutes, but I could see it was turning to Rat Company’s advantage: the attacking line had tightened ranks and was slowly edging back towards the hill. A good call, if I’d actually meant to have my soldiers join the broader engagement. The company’s legionaries closed rank around me as soon as they saw I held the standard, a ragged cheer coming from their formation.
“Lieutenant,” Hakram greeted me cheerfully as he pulled back from the front line. “Nicely done. How’s the situation on the other side?”
“Done,” I replied. “First Company was flipping their line when I left – they’ll be on our asses in a few moments. Where’s Lieutenant Nauk?”
“Limping about,” the sergeant told me with a vague gesture. “They managed to break his leg, so he’s using Sergeant Nilin as a crutch. I don’t suppose you brought back any healers?”
“Didn’t even see one,” I said. “I’m pretty sure the mage line was the first to be hit.”
“Fucking Juniper,” Hakram cursed. “ Bashal like this is why they call her the Hellhound.”
“CALLOW!” the yell came from behind me in the voice I recognized from earlier. “Decided to join the fight, I see.”
I turned with a raised eyebrow to see Nauk with his arm slung over a dark-skinned boy’s shoulder. Sergeant Nilin, I assumed.
“Had to pick something up,” I replied easily, hefting up the standard resting on my shoulder. The orc lieutenant eyed me cautiously.
“Ratface?” he asked.
“Probably a prisoner by now,” I grimaced.
“We hitting that line on the hill, then?” Hakram rumbled.
I passed hand through my hair, only now noticing I’d been running around without a helmet this whole time.
“No,” I decided. “We’re pulling out. How many soldiers do we have?”
“Half my line and most of yours,” Nauk grunted. “At least half a dozen wounded.”
I eyed the enemy line gathering up on the hill – the ones who’d formed a wedge earlier seemed to be joining them, and there was no way the forces just described would hold up against forty legionaries, half of which hadn’t even seen fighting yet.
“Let’s get out of here before they have time to form up,” I said. “Wounded first, I want them out of the way if this turns into a fighting retreat.”
Hakram saluted and disappeared into the mass of soldiers without another word. Not for the first time tonight, I was glad I’d gotten the tall orc as my sergeant.
“They’ll hunt us down if we go into the rocks,” Nauk spoke up, dark eyes considering as he faced me.
“That’s why we won’t be heading there,” I replied. “There’s enough woods in the valley to hide us until we have a better idea of what’s going on.”
The large – and still half-naked, I only now noted – orc looked at me for a long, silent moment.
“Sergeant Nilin,” he suddenly spoke, still looking into my eyes. “I’m ceding command of our line to Lieutenant Callow for now. Let’s get the bastards moving before we have half of First Company breathing down our necks.”
Letting out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding, I offered the orc a gracious nod before turning my attention back to the soldiers on the hill. They were nearly done forming ranks, I saw. With an ironic salute to the enemy, I followed my troops as they made their escape.

—

We hadn’t been walking for a quarter bell when Sergeant Robber popped out of the darkness. The goblin had half a dozen sword points resting on his throat in the blink of an eye but he merely grinned, supremely unconcerned.
“You guys are by far the largest group of survivors out there,” he informed me as soon as I made my way to the front of my line. “You must have pulled out early on.”
“I can recognize a lost battle when I see one,” I replied, tone neutral. “You’re alone?”
Robber whistled softly and another three goblins came out of the dark, one of them badly bruised but all of them bearing the leather satchel I knew sappers carried their munitions in.
“We’re all that’s left of my line,” the diminutive sergeant told me. “They even got Lieutenant Pickler. Got room for a few sappers in your little exodus?”
“Make yourself at home,” I replied.
Sappers. The first pleasant surprise of the night, which I rather thought we were due after the series of disasters we’d been inflicted. The goblins might not have been of much use in a shield wall, but they served an important purpose in the Legions: engineers, demolition specialists and even scouts when there was a need for it. Whatever the goblins were carrying in those satchels of theirs was worth its weight in gold, in our current situation. The other three goblins melded into the ranks without a word, but Robber remained at my side as the column started moving again. The goblin had assumed, correctly, that I’d have questions for him.
“You said there were other groups?” I asked.
“Small bands of five or less that fled when Ratface got taken,” the goblin said. “They were fleeing without a plan, most of them headed for the rocks. Juniper’s probably spreading out her soldiers to hunt them down as we speak.”
Well, so much for linking up with another group. I’d half-hoped that another officer would have managed to save a tenth and make out in the night, but to be frank I wasn’t all that surprised no one had managed. I probably wouldn’t have either, if the lines I’d been fighting hadn’t been stuck holding a vital position.
“We’re looking for safe place to rest,” I told Robber. “I know your Lieutenant sent some of your line scouting earlier – do you know anywhere we can use?”
The goblin nodded, though he looked less than enthused.
“I know somewhere from the last time we had a game. Would take us most of the night to get there, though,” he cautioned.
“The further into the valley we go the better,” I murmured. “They’re looking in the rocks, but they’re bound to catch on we went the other way eventually.”
“I hear you,” Robber said, absent-mindedly tacking on a “sir” to the sentence after a moment. “D’you know if they saw you take the standard?”
I grimaced. I’d been wondering that herself. I would have been seen when I’d first taken it, of that there was no doubt, but would they know I was in command of the missing line? Even if First Company interrogated their prisoners, no more than a handful of people would even know what I looked like.
“I don’t think so,” I finally said, “But I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“Yeah,” Robber muttered in agreement, “people who underestimate Juniper always get fucked. There’s a reason her company hasn’t lost since she became captain.”
I passed a hand through my hair, letting out a sigh. There wouldn’t be much sleeping tonight.
“Find us a camp site first, Robber,” I ordered the sergeant. “Let’s take it one day at a time.”
Bobbing his head, the goblin deftly jumped forward and called out for the soldiers at the head of the column to follow him into the dark.
The march into the valley proved to be one the most harrowing experiences in my life. I could understand why war was conducted mostly during the day now. It had been Hells on my troops to make their way through the slippery hill paths and even worse when we’d entered the forest, without even the moonlight to show us where they were going. Robber’s goblins were already proving their worth, their peculiar eyes allowing them to pick out the best paths unerringly in the dark. Twice we’d had to huddle out of sight as the goblins picked out enemy scouts, waiting in silence until First Company moved on. Some of the legionaries had suggested lighting torches after we’d crossed into the woods, but I’d nixed that idea in the bud: if Juniper had left anyone in the watchtower that was as good as marking our camp on the First Company’s maps. By the time we finally arrived at our destination, the first stirrings of dawn could be seen in the sky.
My exhausted soldiers dropped their packs and shields to the ground as soon as they could, barely bothering to spread out across the clearing Robber had taken us to. I could see why he’d choose a place like this: there was small stream running through the clearing where the legionaries would be able to fill their canteens and a handful of berry bushes I dearly hoped were edible. I’d had Hakram ask around for how many rations had been salvaged from the camp, and the amount was dangerously low. My body was urging me to follow the legionaries’ example and curl up under a tree, but I forced myself to move. There was still work to be done before I could allow myself to rest. I saw my wounded settled as comfortably as I could, cursing that we hadn’t managed to get even one mage from the battle’s survivors. I had a word with Sergeant Nilin to arrange for him to set up a watch and was pleasantly surprised to find Hakram had already done the same without my asking. I was beginning to see why Ratface had wanted the orc in command of my line.
“Grab some sleep, Lieutenant,” my sergeant told me quietly when I insisted to be added to my line’s watch roster. “Better to have your brain well-rested than another pair of eyes to watch for the enemy. You’ll be the one making the plans tomorrow.”
I agreed on the condition that he wake me up in no more than one full bell, pretending to believe his obvious lie when he agreed because I was too exhausted to argue. Setting down my bedroll close under an old oak tree, I lay down under the blanket and told myself I’d close my eyes for just a moment. There were just too many things left to do, I murmured to myself.
Darkness came.

—

It was midmorning when Hakram woke me up, by the looks of the sun. I considered reprimanding him for having let me sleep in, but I finally decided against it: if I hadn’t woken up by myself it meant my body had probably needed the rest. I blearily tied back up my bedroll and went to wash my face in the stream. The camp was buzzing with activity, legionaries clustering in small groups to talk to each other in low voices: I got a handful of salutes on my way, which I nodded back to. The cold water finished waking me up, clearing away the last dregs of sleep. I broke a piece of the rations I’d brought with me on the flight last night and tore hungrily into them, deciding I’d go pick some berries later to finish the job. After asking Robber if they’re poisonous , I added mentally. I had no intention of spending the rest of the game moaning on the ground after managing to survive last night. I was pleasantly surprised – once again – that Hakram had roused up the other officers and was already waiting for me.
“No sign they found us” I prompted the other four as I sat on a flat stone.
“The sentries haven’t seen anything,” the dark-skinned boy I vaguely remembered being called Sergeant Nilin agreed.
“We should be safe for a day or two,” Robber told me. “I’m sure Juniper doesn’t know about this place.”
“Doesn’t mean she can’t find it, goblin,” Nauk rumbled from the ground where he’d been propped up against the tree trunk.
The goblin sergeant sneered in response but did not bother replying. I glanced at them curiously, noticing the undercurrent of hostility to the reply. From the corner of my eye I could see someone had tied a rudimentary cast around Nauk’s leg with cloth and branches, but every few moments the orc winced when he moved around too much . One less soldier to count on, I grimaced.
“How many legionaries in fighting shape do we have?” I asked the group.
“Twenty five I’d take into the field, and Robber’s three sappers,” Hakram informed me. “We’ve got a full tenth of wounded, but most are in good enough shape to serve as sentries.”
I passed a hand through my hair, sighing. That was less than I’d hoped, frankly, but still more than I’d expected.
“We’ll split the legionaries into three under strength tenths,” I said. “Sergeant Robber will keep his sappers as a separate unit.”
“That’s all well and good,” Nauk grunted, “but what are we going to be using them for? You got a plan, Callow?”
I grimaced: it was a bit of stretch to call my idea a plan, but it was the only thing I’d come up with so far.
“We need a prisoner to interrogate,” I replied. “Otherwise we’ll just keep on stumbling about blind.”
Hakram nodded, nonplussed.
“You’ve got a target in mind, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“If I remember well from yesterday’s map, there’s a watchtower in the middle of the valley,” I said. “If Captain Juniper spread out her forces to look for us, it might be undermanned.”
“There’s bound to be at least a sergeant there,” Nilin spoke quietly.
“Robber,” I asked, “how good are your sappers at scouting?”
The goblin hummed thoughtfully.
“Not as good as a real scouting line, but still better than most,” he replied. “You want us to have a look?”
“Unless anyone else has a better idea?” I prompted. No one replied. “Well then, gentlemen, let’s get moving.”

—

“My guy counted ten,” Robber croaked from my side, the both of us in cover behind a tree. “They still have no idea we’re here.”
I smiled. Twenty might have gotten messy, given how tired my men were from running all night, but ten? Ten we could take. We’d have to go in hard if we wanted to be gone by the time Juniper’s patrols heard the ruckus, but then I hadn’t expected this to be an easy fight. That’s never stopped me from winning before.
“Hakram,” I said, “take your tenth around behind the hill and wait until they’ve seen us to hit them in the back.”
The tall orc flashed me pearly-white fangs and saluted before turning towards his soldiers.
“Get your asses in gear, my pretties,” he gravelled. “We’re getting us a little payback.”
There were a few hard smiles among the troops and in a matter of moments they disappeared into the foliage, the dead leaves padding their armour keeping the metal from clanking. None of my ramshackle band of survivors had taken well to last night’s stomping, and I knew they were just itching for a chance to even the score. I decided to give it a while before I got my own tenth moving – rushing it was just as dangerous as lingering, at this point. Robber leaned closer, yellow eyes alight with the most malicious of mischief.
“I’ve got brightsticks if you want to make an impression, Callow,” the goblin wheedled, grinning at the idea of setting off the mostly harmless version of the goblin alchemy in the faces of the soldiers who’d taken his lieutenant. “Nothing like a little flash and bang to start a party.”
“How many?” I asked, keeping her voice down.
“’bout twelve, and half that many cussers,” Robber replied. “That’s plenty enough for a scrap like this.”
I closed my eyes, seriously considering it. Was it worth it to use the munitions this early in the game? I might need them later on, and the fight was already skewed in my men’s favour. But they might be just what was needed to finish the fight before the patrols got onto us, and the moment Juniper’s roaming lines found us the fight was as good as done. No. I won’t let fear do my thinking for me. We’ll use them when we can make them count. Opening my eyes, I shook my head at Robber.
“Callow –” he started.
“We’ll find a better use for them, Robber,” I interrupted him. “You have my word on that.”
The goblin fixed me with a hard stare, but after a moment he nodded.
“Aye aye, Lieutenant. Where do you want my sappers, then?”
“There’s three trails and you have three men,” I replied. “If anyone comes in uninvited, I want to know about it.”
The goblins in Robber’s heavily mauled tenth were too lightly equipped to be of real use in a melee and I had no intention of risking my last sappers in a straight up fight: I’d need every one of them when trying for the standard. Using them as sentries would have to do, even if it wasn’t the most glorious of duties. The goblin sergeant saluted in a manner so sloppy it seemed more like a mockery of the gesture before sliding his way downhill. I counted up to sixty in silence before gesturing for Sergeant Nilin to crawl up at my side.
“Lieutenant?” the dusky-skinned boy asked in a whisper.
“Get your legionaries ready, Sergeant,” I replied. “Let’s see how well they hold up when we’re the ones doing the ambushing.”
Letting him slide back down, I picked up my shield and pushed myself up. A moment later my tenth followed suit and I allowed the rank to catch up to me as Nilin’s men lined up behind us – we took a brisk pace up the hill and in an instant we were in sight of the watchtower. The sentry on top cried out in alarm but I had no intention of allowing them to form up.
“Shields up,” I roared, picking up the pace.
I unsheathed my sword and the sound of the men following suit was heard from all around me. I caught sight of Hakram’s tenth running up the other side of the hill without a sound and I laughed in delight a moment before the two sides of my ambush collided with the scattered soldiers from the First Company. A tall orc with a vivid scar running up his cheek stood before me but I slammed my shield against his, knocking him back and striking in the opening I’d made: the blunted blade hit the back of my opponent’s knee and forced him to kneel. I kicked him in the gut to make sure he wouldn’t get up, knocking him out for good with a strike to the temple. Raising my head to take a look around, I realized with a start that the skirmish was already done – most of the First Company cadets were out cold, but a handful were being held down at sword-point by my men. Hakram walked up to me grinning like a cat who’d gone through a whole birdhouse of canaries and slapped me cheerfully on the shoulder.
“That felt good, sir,” he rumbled. “Juniper’s face when she hears about this is going to be a work of art.”
I felt my own lips quirk into a savage smile.
“We’re still a long way from making up for last night, but we’ll get there,” I promised. “Do we have any wounded?”
“One of mine sprained her ankle running up the hill,” Nilin said as he walked up to us. “That’s the only one on our side – we got lucky.”
“Let’s hope our luck continues holding up,” I replied. “Grab their sergeant and let’s get out of here.”
“And the rest?” Hakram asked.
I sheathed my sword and shrugged.
“No point in interrogating them. Break an ankle on each and leave them for Juniper’s healers to fix. That should keep them out of our hair for a few days.”
Both sergeants snapped a salute and turned to bark out their orders. I grabbed a soldier by the shoulder and sent him to fetch Robber, mind already thinking on my next move. We’re not done yet, Hellhound. Not by a long shot.

Chapter 17: Set

“ I’ll be honest, Chancellor – revenge is the motivation for over half the decrees I’ve made.”
– Dread Empress Sanguinia II, best known for outlawing cats and being taller than her

Nauk was napping when we got back to camp, resting lazily under a tree. One of his legionaries kicked him in the ribs when the war party passed by the sentries. Awaking with a growl, the orc swiped at the laughing dark-haired girl but she danced away. I raised an eyebrow at the exchange but passed no comment as I eased my armour’s straps and propped up my shield against a stone.
“Humans,” the wounded lieutenant rumbled. “You always think you’re funnier than you are.”
I felt I’d gotten enough of a handle on orc humour to know that was a joke. Still, it was always hard to tell with orcs.
“Still funnier than you,” Robber sniped as he set down his leather satchel.
Nauk eyed Robber balefully.
“You’re still conscious? Only half a victory, then,” the orc replied.
I didn’t know why those two had been at each other’s throat since last night, but frankly I was far past caring.
“If the two of you have that much fight left in you, I have a fort that needs taking,” I told them flatly. “Any volunteers?”
Robber rolled his eyes and wandered away without a word, leaving me to deal with Nauk – the orc scoffed but refused to meet my gaze. Yeah, I’m definitely asking Hakram what’s up with these two. Our situation was bad enough already without two of my few remaining officers taking verbal swings at each other in front of the troops.
“We cleared the watchtower and dragged back their sergeant,” I informed Nauk. “I’m guessing you’ll want to be there for the interrogation?”
The orc grimaced.
“You’ll need to help me up,” he admitted. “My leg hasn’t gotten any better.”
I crouched next to him and slung his arm over my shoulder, knees almost buckling under the weight of him as I bore the other lieutenant’s mass.
“Heavens, what did you eat to get this big?” I wheezed, forcing myself upright.
Nauk grinned toothily.
“Whatever was lying around at the time,” he replied, “we’re not as picky about food as you lot.”
“You should consider trying salad,” I said, only half-joking. “I hear it’s very slimming.”
“Do I look like a bloody elf to you?” the orc grumbled as we crab-marched to the rocky outcropping I’d seen my men dragging the sergeant behind. “I might as well lick bark and frolic in meadows while I’m at it.”
“Elves eat meat too,” I informed him, tone thick with amusement.
“Give it a few years and Lord Black will have us eating the elves,” Nauk replied conversationally. “My grandmother got a bite during the Conquest, said it was more tender than lamb.”
Does it still count as cannibalism if it’s another species? I’d have to ask Scribe, she probably knew. That aside, this was far from the first time I’d heard an orc artlessly profess trust in Black. It was proving to be a recurring pattern.
“Hakram said something along the same lines,” I replied. “He was keen on the Black Knight too. Is it an orc thing?”
I almost stumbled when Nauk stopped moving, turning to face me with an unusual serious expression.
“I like you, Callow,” he rumbled, “So I’ll give you a piece of advice. You look like Wallerspawn and talk like a Callowan, so your folks were probably on the other side during the Conquest. You might have an axe to grind and that’s your own business, but don’t ever talk bad the Black Knight in front of a greenskin.”
The orc’s dark eyes burned with an intensity I’d only glimpsed last night when I’d seen him trashing a pair of legionaries with his bare hands, roaring challenges as he knocked their helmets together.
“He raised us up, Callow,” Nauk said fervently. “He ended the wars between the Clans and told us that we could be more . That even if we were born in a hut, we could still become generals and lords instead of being meat in the grinder. If those fucking prissy nobles in the Tower were still in charge, I wouldn’t even know how to read.”
“I was just asking,” I replied quickly, awkwardly warding him off with a raised while still balancing his weight on my shoulder. “I’ve got nothing against him!”
Nauk eyed me sceptically.
“Even met him once,” I continued, “I was around when he had Governor Mazus hung.”
The orc grinned, doubts apparently cast aside for the moment. I reflected ruefully that with every passing day I was getting better at lying while saying the truth – no doubt Black would be proud. Or at least quietly approving, which was the closest I’d ever seen him to expressing that actual emotion.
“Heard about that,” Nauk admitted. “The old families in Ater threw a fit over it.”
From the looks of it, the prospect rather delighted the lieutenant. I frowned as we crossed the last few yards separating us from our destination. That was another pattern I’d noticed: most of the cadets hated the nobility in Ater with a vengeance. I could understand the resentment, having had a lean table at the orphanage more than once because of Mazus and his cronies, but it seemed to run deeper than that. Now that I thought about it, the Legion garrison in Laure had always been a little too eager to put the city guards in their place whenever they could. I’d first stopped being scared of the large orcs in armour after seeing one run off guards harassing an old shopkeeper, back when I was seven. The legionary had even helped the old man back to his stall before leaving, I remembered. So the Legions of Terror and the nobles hate each other’s guts. Then why did Black have Mazus executed? Wouldn’t that make things worse between them? My wayward teacher must have had a plan in mind, I guessed. Or , I thought with a sudden chill, he’s decided it’s not worth trying to keep them happy anymore.
That was the stuff civil wars were made of, I knew, and the prospect of a Dread Empire at war with itself was horrifying. Wars were brutal enough between Good and Evil, but between Evil and Evil? There might not be an Empire left by the time the dust settled. Putting the line of thought aside for the moment, I focused on the matters at hand: I helped Nauk sit against a rock facing the still-unconscious sergeant from the First Company and let out a sigh of relief when I dropped off the weight. The sergeant’s hands and feet were bound with thick rope I’d seen the sappers carrying around and Hakram was looming over her body with a patient look on his face. Robber was sitting cross-legged on a flat rock, flipping a brightstick in the air lazily and catching it at the very last possible moment. Hakram turned to face me, rolling his shoulders in an unconscious gesture: I could sympathize, after a night and half a day running around in legionary armour.
“Nilin’s setting up the watches,” me sergeant informed me. “Says he’ll be along as soon as he’s done.”
I nodded absently, taking a closer look at our captive. The girl was on the short side, skin the same bronze colour as Captain’s and hair cropped close in the haircut most female legionaries seemed to favour. Her armour was dented noticeably around the ribs: it must have been a nasty hit that had put her down.
“Do we know anything about her?” I asked.
“Name’s Juwan,” Robber said, stopping to play with his stick. “She’s from Thalassina, I think.”
Thalassina was one of the three great cities of the Empire, I knew, along with Ater and Foramen down in the deep south. It was the largest port in the Empire and the main hub of trade with the Free Cities.
“Let’s wake her up,” I said. “We might have to move camp and I’d rather do it before nightfall.”
Hakram knelt by the prone sergeant and slapped her none too gently. I winced: not the way I would have done it, but then I’d never interrogated anyone before. After a moment Sergeant Juwan blearily opened her eyes, squinting to get used to light before she took a look around her.
“Well, this is unexpected,” she croaked out. “I don’t suppose any of you asshats could give me a little water?”
Hakram snorted and uncorked his canteen, carefully pouring into the captive’s open mouth – he lost patience after a moment, pulling it away and closing it with a small pop.
“I’m Lieutenant Callow,” I said. “I have a few questions to ask you.”
“Lieutenant what?” Juwan replied incredulously. “Who in the Seventy Thousand Hells are you? I’ve never heard of you before.”
Seventy Thousand Hells? I blinked in surprise, sneaking a look at Robber to make sure I hadn’t misheard that last part. The goblin shrugged.
“They believe in all sorts of weird stuff in Thalassina,” the sapper told me. “It’s all that salt in the air.”
“That’s rich coming from someone whose patron deity is called the Gobbler ,” our apparently unimpressed prisoner retorted.
“Hit her, Hakram,” Nauk opined over the goblin’s retort. “They always get mouthy unless you hit them.”
My sergeant shot me a questioning look but I shook my head. In all fairness, Robber had been asking for it.
“I’m new,” I addressed Juwan. “But that’s irrelevant –”
“Oh gods,” the prisoner muttered, “I was ambushed by a greenie. I’m never going to hear the end of this.”
“Are you quite done?” I said, a tad more sharply than before.
The sergeant shot me a condescending look.
“Look, ‘Lieutenant’,” she replied. “You’re new, so it’s understandable you might not get how fucked you are. Juniper’s out there looking for you guys right now and you’ve got what... maybe a line and handful of sappers? You can’t win this.”
My face turned blank as the sergeant continued.
“Look, you managed to ambush my tenth so you did well on your first game,” Juwan told me. “You might even get transferred to a company that actually wins once in a while. We’ve got Ratface and all your mages, just surrender the standard and we can all go home tonight.”
I could feel the anger coming from the other three officers at our prisoner’s casual dismissal and I felt the stirrings of it too, deep in my gut. I passed a hand through my hair and forced myself to calm down. Don’t make decisions angry. Angry means stupid, and if you get stupid you’ve already lost.
“Sergeant Hakram,” I said. “Hit her.”
Sergeant Hakram did.
“Now, as I was saying,” I continued icily. “I’m Lieutenant Callow. I have a few questions for you.”

—

I really wished we’d managed to keep at least one of the maps, because the vague outline Robber had traced in the dirt looked more like a Helike mural than the rendition of Spite Valley it was meant to be.
“So that rock is our position?” Nilin asked in a politely sceptical tone.
Robber rolled his eyes.
“That’s the fort,” he replied. “We’re the smaller rock.”
We let out a small noise of understanding in unison. Our captive had been blindfolded and stashed in a corner with a legionary standing guard over her, now that the questioning was over. I’d assembled the officers to hold an unofficial war council immediately after. Juwan’s interrogation had yielded enough information to make the skirmish at the watchtower more than worthwhile: the sergeant’s knowledge of troop disposition was a day old, but it allowed us to place our own position into a broader context. All of Rat Company except our motley band of survivors had been taken prisoner, we now knew, but there hadn’t been enough room in the fort to keep seventy-odd legionaries. There was a secondary prisoner camp, and that meant we’d just stumbled on a way to bring up our numbers before hitting the harder target. There was no way taking a shot at the fort with our current line and a half would be anything but suicide, but if we managed to free another tenth – or even better, a few mages – then it would be a whole other story.
“We should move to attack the prison camp as soon as possible,” Hakram said, breaking the thoughtful silence. “Juniper might post more soldiers there when she learns we already took out a tenth.”
“The men marched all night and fought not even a bell ago,” Nilin retorted, tone flat and disapproving. “There are limits to what we can ask from them.”
“The men will have to tighten their belt if they want to win this, Sergeant,” Nauk growled. “Nobody said it was going to be a walk in the park.”
“Says the guy who was napping when we came back,” Robber scoffed.
“Enough,” I intervened. “Sergeant Nilin has a point. I’d rather not attack a second time in daylight anyway, we might get followed back to camp.”
That gave everyone pause, as I’d intended it to: if even a single tenth found our camp, then that was it for the wounded and the handful of rations we’d managed to salvage. An empty stomach wasn’t the kind of enemy you could put down with a sword.
“There’ll be a least a line waiting for us there,” Hakram rumbled. “And they’ll be dug in behind fortifications, you can be sure of it.
“Juniper’s sappers are the second best in the College for building defensive positions,” Robber admitted, though it ran against his pride to do so. “They go by the book, though. If I get a look at it from a distance I could tell you what plan they’re using.”
I closed my eyes and silently weighed the risks against the benefits. Night attacks were a messy enough business without going in blind, I decided. The sapper had already proved he could get around quietly, and with the watchtower out of the equation this might very well be the best chance we’d get.
“Take half a tenth and be back before sundown,” I told the goblin. “Don’t take stupid risks, we’ll need you for the assault.”
Robber’s answering grin was malicious as ever and he saluted before pushing himself up. I turned my attention back to the “map” as he left, wondering if I was making a mistake. The prisoner camp was my best shot at getting enough soldiers to assault the fort, I knew, but that meant Juniper knew it too. Were we headed right into a trap? It doesn’t matter , I finally decided. I can’t win this without taking risks, and this is the most reasonable one.
“Put the troops on half-watch,” I said, raising my head to look at the other officers. “Everybody should try to get some sleep, we’ve got a busy night ahead of us.”
Nauk grunted his assent and Nilin helped him up. Hakram was about to follow suit but I discreetly shook my head: I still had a few questions to ask me sergeant. The orc shot me puzzled look but remained seated at my side while the other two officers crab-walked away.
“Lieutenant?” Hakram prompted, raising a hairless brow.
“Robber and Nauk,” I said, going straight to the point. “What’s their problem?”
The tall orc grinned.
“You didn’t hear this from me,” Hakram replied, leaning closer, “but it so happens they’re both more than a little fond of Lieutenant Pickler.”
“The lieutenant for the sappers?” I asked, surprised.
“That’s the one,” the orc agreed. “They’re not usually that blatant about it, but without her around to keep the peace I guess the knives are coming out.”
I frowned.
“And what does she have to say about this?”
Hakram’s grin widened, showing razor-sharp white fangs.
“She might have mentioned something about how if they kept waving their genitalia around, something was bound to get stuck in a door hinge.”
I bit my lip not to burst out laughing, sneaking a look at the retreating Nauk’s back.
“I didn’t know orcs could be attracted to goblins that way,” I admitted.
“It’s not common,” Hakram replied. “But Nauk’s an odd one, and even I have to admit Pickler has a nice set of teeth.”
“Teeth,” I replied, tone flat. “You’re having me on.”
The sergeant looked somewhat offended.
“Teeth are very important,” he defended himself. “Why do you think no one’s interested in humans? You’ve all got cow teeth.”
If someone had told me a year ago I’d be sitting in the grass with an orc discussing the importance of molars in the mating habits of his species, I thought, I would have been rather dubious. Even now it felt more than a little surreal. Hakram apparently took my silence as a sign of displeasure, because he hurried on.
“No offense meant, Callow,” he assured me. “I’m sure you’ll find a nice human to eat berries and nuts with.”
“You know we eat meat too, right?” I replied, rather bemused.
He snorted.
“It doesn’t count if you roast it first,” he told me with a friendly pat on the shoulder. “You might as well be chewing bread.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that that was rather the point. We walked back to camp in a comfortable silence and I found my bedroll, barely closing my eyes for a moment before sinking into sleep.

—

“Only four and no patrols,” Robber said.
I clenched my fingers and unclenched them, taking a closer look at the fortifications. The outer wall was made of stacked stones and about the height of a half a man, with torches every few feet and four legionaries patrolling the perimeter at regular intervals. Behind it the First Company had built a palisade of stakes, too high for my soldiers to climb over. It hid the inside of the camp. There was only one way into the camp itself, an opening in the palisade swerving to the right and wide enough to be held by half a dozen legionaries. It was open field all the way to the first wall, I saw, and I knew my soldiers would have to take out the guards if we wanted to avoid the attack turning into a disaster. If we don’t, they’ll sound the alarm and the rest of the line will hold us off in the opening until reinforcements can arrive. Eyeing the wooden palisade speculatively, I gestured for Hakram to come closer.
“Could you break through that if we needed to?” I whispered.
Her sergeant grimaced.
“Not without a battering ram,” the orc replied. “They’ll have put up buttresses on the other side to hold it up, it’s in the manual.”
It remained unsaid that we wouldn’t have enough room to use a battering ram without tearing down a chunk of the first wall first, and that even then we’d have to make the damned thing first. No, this was going to have to be about getting my men in through the front door. Sergeant Nilin gingerly made his way through the underbrush to me, looking as uncomfortable in the woods as I felt – he was as much a city boy as I was a city girl, I’d gathered.
“Lieutenant, Sergeants,” he greeted us in a murmur, snapping a parade-ground salute. “All of our soldiers are in position.”
I’d told the sergeants to put all almost-thirty of my men in half circle around the camp’s only way in, the three incomplete tenths waiting in silence for the signal to assault the enemy. Only Robber’s sappers had remained marauding about in the woods, but I could see them trickling back into the ranks one after the other from the corner of my eye.
“Hakram,” I said, “I’ll need volunteers to take care of the guards.”
The tall orc grunted his assent and made back towards his men.
“My sappers could handle that,” Robber countered in a low voice. “Less of chance we’ll caught, too.”
“Your sappers are going to be with the rest of Hakram’s tenth and my own,” I replied.
The goblin’s yellow eyes shone with malevolent light in the dark of the woods.
“We finally get to play with the fireworks then, Lieutenant?” the sergeant asked eagerly.
“Hit them with all you’ve got, Sergeant,” I told him.
We’d been hoarding the sappers’ munitions so far, but now was the time to use them up. I’d thought about keeping them for the assault on the fort itself, but been forced to conceded that if tonight’s rescue failed there would be no assault worth the name. Better to use the brightsticks to ensure that the enemy line was too stunned and deafened to form up properly.
“Back to your tenths, gentlemen,” I murmured. “Let’s get this wheel turning.”
They replied with a handful of salutes and I ducked around a tree as silently as I could, electing to stay ahead of my legionaries so I’d be in a better position to watch events unfold. Hakram’s volunteers were already moving, I saw, the closest one crawling through the grass as he made his way across the open field. The next few moments would define if my offensive failed or not, I knew, so I held my breath as I watched the volunteer slowly make his way towards the unsuspecting guard. The legionary pressed himself against the outer wall as the guard passed him by, silently pushing himself up and climbing over the fortification. For an instant it looked like the sentry might hear him, but then the volunteer unsheathed his sword and hit the guard in the back of the head with the pommel. The First Company’s sentry crumpled to the ground without a dull thump, and with a peremptory hand gesture I got my soldiers moving. Not a moment too soon, as it turned out, for a cry of alarm came from the other side of the outer wall. One of Hakram’s volunteers had failed. I cursed under my breath.
“Double time,” I called out to my legionaries, running across the empty field as quickly as I could manage in armour.
A dark shape passed me by, then a second, and with my jaw gaping I saw Robber and his sappers scuttling across the grass with the unnatural grace of a pack of spiders. The goblins pushed ahead of my men effortlessly, their thin green limbs moving fluidly as they tore through the distance separating them from the opening. Raising my shield up, I forced myself to catch up with them, my soldiers following suit behind me. By the time my line got to the opening Robber’s sappers had already spread out in a line and were watching a half-dressed tenth from the First Company form up.
“ Abacinate ,” Robber called out, his grin sharp and vicious.
All four goblins pulled out thin, elongated sticks and lit them up with the pinewood matches they carried around everywhere. They threw as one and I barely had the time to close my eyes before the brightsticks exploded, the deafening bang and bright light searing my eyelids anyways. Unlike a real brightstick those wouldn’t blind permanently, but they still stung like a bitch. I opened my eyes, already moving forward, only to see the sappers had little spheres in hand, already lit.
“ Spargere ,” the goblin sergeant ordered, and the sappers rolled the balls under the enemy’s shields with unerring aim.
A moment passed and then a series of explosions scattered the first rank of the enemy, sending shields flying and throwing the legionaries to the ground. Those cussers packed quite a punch, for a training version. I grinned at the goblins as I passed them, my soldiers close behind, and the legionaries threw themselves into the holes the sappers had just torn with savage enthusiasm. A dark-skinned girl around my age bashed her shield against mine, but I used the momentum of the charge to push her down anyway. Knocking out the enemy soldier with the pommel of the short sword I didn’t remember unsheathing, I pressed forward into the camp as my legionaries broke the enemy formation. The inside was nothing unusual, four lines of bedrolls where the last handful of legionaries were hastily putting their armour on. There was a long tent in the back where the prisoners were no doubt being held. Signalling for another handful of legionaries who’d broken through to follow me, I set to pacifying the rest of the camp. It was a grim business, but now was not the time to be gentle. We overwhelmed the first enemy before he managed to land anything more than a glancing hit on my shield and pressed on to charge the next two. One of my legionaries got a nasty hit on the shoulder, but in a matter of moments it was done. Four outside , I counted mentally. Twelve at the breach, and three we just finished. If they were a full line, that still leaves... There was a flash of flame and the legionary at my side was blown away.
“Guess I still have to work on my aim for that one,” a lone legionary in light armour mused as red-orange flames wreathed her hands for a second time. “You’d be the Lieutenant in charge of that lot, then?”
“Lieutenant Callow, third line of Rat Company,” I agreed as she raised my shield and steadied my footing. “And you’d be?”
“Lieutenant Assaye, fourth line of First Company,” the honey-skinned girl replied with a smirk. “Should have brought a mage, Callow. This is going to have to get messy.”
“I seem to have misplaced mine,” I told her flatly. “You wouldn’t happen to have some spares in that tent, would you?”
“Well look at the mouth on you,” Assaye said. “Here’s a tip, though, rookie – don’t banter with mages when they’re buying time to cast.”
The flames wreathing the other lieutenant’s hand grew in intensity and gathered into an orb that the girl sent flying right at me. I smiled. Here’s a tip for you, Lieutenant , I thought, learn to recognize when you’re being baited. Ignoring the primal part of my brain that was screaming at me to duck out of the way, I raised my shield and ran right into the fireball. The impact nearly blew me off my feet but I grit my teeth and pushed through the flames, closing the distance separating me from the gaping lieutenant. There was no way I was taking another one of those, so I struck the girl on the temple with the flat of my short sword before she could summon up something more vicious. Before Assaye ever hit the ground, I dropped my shield and blade with a curse to put out the flames on my shoulder pads, doing my best to ignore the fact that I was letting out smoke like a small chimney.
“I’m not sure whether that was very brave or very stupid,” I heard Robber mutter from behind me.
“I heard she castrated an ogre in single combat,” Hakram grunted back in a low voice. “Thought that was just Ratface making the best of things, but I’m starting to believe it.”
I turned around to shoot both sergeants a dirty look but they adopted the most innocent expressions they could – which, given that Robber was a yellow-eyed pyromaniac and Hakram had a set of teeth that would make most wolves balk, would have gotten them instantly convicted in any court of law.
“If you two have time to gossip,” I told them, “you’ve got time to go check up on the prisoners we’re rescuing.”
“Aye aye, Lieutenant,” Robber grinned, following Hakram’s example and saluting before he made a strategic retreat.

—

As it turned out the tent held only a tenth of prisoners, which would have been disappointing if not for the fact that there were two mages and a sergeant among them. Both of the mages knew how to heal, which was even better news: I fully intended put them to work as soon as my troops got back to camp. Robber had argued we should take a different way back to our clearing to shake off possible followers, meaning the trip back was twice as long as the one to the enemy camp: it was the middle of the night by the time my soldiers were finally able to put down their shields. The sergeant we’d rescued was a short brown-haired girl by the name of Kamilah with a nasty scar running across her cheek, and she was sitting in on the unofficial officer’s meeting I’d ordered as soon as watches were set up. Nauk was getting his leg looked at so he’d be missing this, but the orc lieutenant had shrugged and told me he didn’t mind being brought up to speed when he was back on his feet. I’d gotten the impression he was rather eager to start moving on his own again, and I could hardly blame him for it.
“They moved some of us earlier today,” Sergeant Kilian said. “To the fort, I think – I don’t recall hearing anything about another prisoner camp. We used to be a full line of prisoners.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” I muttered.
If there’d been another camp it might have been possible to assault it to add a few more legionaries to our forces, though I doubted Juniper would have made it as easy on us the second time.
“The fort’s next, then,” Hakram rumbled.
“We have healers now,” Nilin disagreed. “And enough soldiers to keep prisoners. We could take out some of Juniper’s patrols before risking an assault.”
“We’re dealing with the Hellhound, not a godsdamned first-year,” Robber chided him. “The moment we make a patrol disappear she’ll be able to guess what part of the woods we’re in, and it’s all downhill from there.”
Nilin shrugged.
“She’ll have at least a line getting healed and she’ll be forced to leave a garrison at the fort – I say we should take our chances,” he replied.
“We’re not meeting Captain Juniper on an open field,” I cut in. “Even if we win, we won’t be in any shape to assault the fort afterwards.”
Sergeant Kilian cleared her throat.
“No disrespect intended, sir,” she said, meeting my eyes squarely, “but why are you in command? You’ve been in the company for barely two days, if I’m not mistaken.”
My own sergeant growled, but I held up my hand.
“It’s a valid question, Hakram,” I said. “Lieutenant Nauk ceded command to me when he was wounded, but now that he’s getting healed he has seniority.”
“Balls to that,” came the voice from behind me.
I turned: the orc in question was striding towards us, leg finally out of its cast. I frowned at the other lieutenant.
“Are you sure, Nauk? I like being in charge,” I freely admitted, “but you’ve been at this a lot longer than I have.”
“I would have been in that prisoner camp if not for you, Callow,” the large orc replied. “You got the standard and you’ve bloodied First Company twice. Only idiots change generals halfway through a campaign.”
The short sergeant smiled uncomfortably.
“It wasn’t meant as a criticism of your performance, sir,” Kilian said. “I just thought it was a question that needed to be asked.”
I could appreciate that. It would have been awkward for me to bring up the issue myself, anyway.
“No offence taken, sergeant,” I replied. “Take a seat, Nauk. We’re planning our next move.”
The orc plopped himself on the log and everyone politely ignored the creaking sound that came from the wood – except for Robber, who snickered and seemed about to make a comment when Hakram spoke up.
“We should assault the fort in the morning,” he gravelled. “No point in giving them more time to prepare than necessary.”
“My sappers can have ladders done by then,” Robber offered up, looking a little irritated he’d been cut off from indulging in his feud with Nauk.
“How are you doing on munitions?” Nilin murmured.
The goblin waved his hand vaguely.
“Out of cussers and brightsticks, still got enough smokers to ruin someone’s day,” he told them. “I’ll manage.”
“We’ll have only two lines for the assault,” Nauk rumbled. “That’ll be hard fighting.”
The officers looked rather uneasy at the thought, but I shrugged.
“They won’t have a full house waiting for us in the fort either,” I replied.
“Do or die, then,” Hakram grinned. “Worse comes to worse, we go out with a bang.”
Nauk looked like he rather approved of the thought, slapping the other orc’s shoulder cheerfully. I only barely refrained from rolling my eyes.
“Let’s set up a full watch tonight,” I ordered. “That makes it twice we’ve kicked the hornet’s nest – sooner or later, something is bound to follow us home. Dismissed.”
After a round of salutes, they rose and returned to their men. I remained behind, looking up at the night sky and wondering what tomorrow’s battle would have in store for us. Only one way to find out, I suppose.

Chapter 18: Match

“ Always mistrust these three: a battle that seems won, a chancellor who smiles and a ruler calling you friend.”
– Extract from the personal journals of Dread Emperor Terribilis II

The fort at the end of the valley had stood there in one form or another since the beginnings of the Dread Empire, or so Hakram told me. Before the Dark Tower’s authority had been firmly established, it had served as a choke point to hold off roving orc clans and Taghreb raiders. In later eras it had become the last defence against armies coming from the Kingdom of Callow before they could march on Ater itself, the last stand Evil could take before Good came to knock at the front door. It had been over a century since the last Crusade, however, and in the interregnum the Legions of Terror had taken to using the fort as a defensive position in their war games.
Still, it wouldn’t do to forget that they built this for an actual war, not a fake one , I mused. Cadets were responsible for the upkeep of the fort, meaning every company knew its workings inside out: my soldiers were no exception, though only Robber and his sappers had been able to hash out a detailed plan of it in the sand. The description they’d given me was... daunting.
The fort itself was situated on the flattened top of a hill, its walls thirty feet high and a little more than half as thick, but the true terror of it came from the outside fortifications. Right in front of the walls a ditch about fourteen feet deep had been dug and filled with stagnant water. After a thin strip of land another identical ditch had been dug and filled with jutting wooden spikes. The open field leading to the ditches was dotted with the vicious traps the legionaries had nicknamed “lilies”: pits three feet deep with a sharpened stake waiting for unwary soldiers at the bottom, hidden under a layer of branches and dead grass.
All companies had assaulted the fort often enough to know the pattern of the traps by now, but it still forced the ranks of attacking companies to break. From what Robber had told me, trainees still died in accidents regularly – it was considered a good omen for a company to not lose any freshmen cadets in their first game of the year.
“You’re sure their mages won’t shoot at us while we’re going through the lily field?” I asked Hakram.
“It’s considered bad form to do it,” the sergeant gravelled. “Companies that hate each other’s guts might go ahead anyway, but we’re not feuding with the First.”
I raised an inquisitive eyebrow at the orc.
“Who are we feuding with, then?”
“No one,” Hakram replied, sounding rather chagrined. “We’re at the bottom of the company rankings, so no one’s bothering.”
I let out a vaguely empathetic noise.
“Rat Company’s been last for a while, then?” she asked.
“Since before Ratface took over as captain,” her sergeant agreed. “He’s done his best, but unless we manage a miracle today it’ll still be his twelfth defeat: he’ll lose his captainship.”
I kept my surprise away from my face – from the casual way Hakram had dropped that tidbit, it seemed like it was common knowledge among the rank and file. It certainly cast the captain’s hostility when I’d first met him in a new light: no wonder he’d been furious, being assigned an untaught lieutenant on the eve of a game that had his rank on the line. Not my fault he lost the last eleven, though, so he could have been less of an ass about it.
“So, have we got an idea how many are in there?” I asked, changing the subject.
“No way to tell,” Hakram grunted back. “Gotta be a least thirty of them, but there could easily be more.”
I grimaced. Going in blind was hardly the way I would have preferred to take a crack at the fortress, but we were running out of options fast. At least Robber’s sappers had fashioned us four ladders over the night, meaning we’d be able to manage to assault multiple walls simultaneously. How much that would really help them if the enemy was as numerous as they were was arguable, but it was still better than nothing. Speaking of the devil, the goblin sergeant was swaggering his way up the hill towards us.
“That’s Lieutenant Trapper on the wall,” he announced, his tone implying that particular fact was significant.
I raised an eyebrow.
“I’m sure you have a point,” I told the goblin, “but so far I’m missing it.”
“Trapper’s only the fourth senior-most of the First Company lieutenants,” Robber replied. “So that means...”
“They can’t have more than two lines in there,” I finished thoughtfully. “Otherwise someone else would be in charge.”
Robber hummed in agreement, palming a smoker from his satchel and twirling it through his fingers. I frowned and readjusted her plans. Forty legionaries we could manage, with a little luck. It all depended on the nerve of the officers holding the walls, of course, but Robber’s deduction was the first bit of good news I’d heard all day.
“How do you know about Trapper’s seniority?” Hakram asked, breaking me out of my train of thought.
“Oh, that’s easy,” the yellow-eyed sergeant replied nonchalantly. “We know each other from the Great Goblin Conspiracy meetings.”
My sergeant barked out a laugh but after a moment of awkward silence he shot an uneasy look at Robber.
“There’s not really a Great Goblin Conspiracy, is there?” he rumbled.
“Would I tell you if there was?” the goblin replied with a wicked smile, throwing his smoker up and snatching it out of the air.
Robber saluted lazily and swaggered off back to join the tenth I’d assigned him to. I did my level best not to snicker at my sergeant, but from the disgruntled face the orc was making I guessed some of my amusement was showing. Studying the steel-capped legionaries standing on the southern wall of the fort, I decided to make a last minute change to the assault. We still didn’t know how many crossbowmen First Company’s garrison could muster, but as far as I could figure our best shot at setting foot on the walls was splitting up the enemy with multiple assaults. Nilin’s tenth would assault from the west, Kilian’s by the east and Nauk’s would take the gate. If anyone could manage to land a ladder while getting shot at by a whole line, it was the orc lieutenant. The pair of mages I’d rescued yesterday was too exhausted to be of any use, so they were hiding in the woods with the standard: I’d given them orders to hide until the games were over if the assault failed. Better a tie than a defeat, if it came to that.
“We won’t be backing Nauk at the gate,” I told Hakram. “Our tenth will hold back until we see an opening. Give our sappers to Kilian and tell her I want the whole eastern wall turned into a cloud of smoke when she assaults.”
The greenskin sergeant cocked is head to the side and eyed me thoughtfully as he tried to puzzle out the meaning behind the corrected instructions.
“You’re banking on Trapper panicking when he loses sight of what’s going on in the east and giving us an opening,” he stated after a long moment of silence.
I blinked in surprise.
“How are you still a sergeant?” I asked.
“Failed Foreign Languages two semesters in a row,” Hakram admitted. “Fucking Old Miezan. Can’t make higher than sergeant if you’d don’t pass everything.”
“Lucky for me,” I murmured.
I shuddered to think of how much harder this whole game would have been without the tall sergeant quietly covering for all the gaps in my military education. I got a pleased grin for my comment and Hakram walked away to spread my last orders, leaving me alone to watch my plan come to life.
“Let’s see how steady your nerves are, then, Lieutenant Trapper,” I whispered to myself, watching Nilin and Kilian’s troops start moving through the lily field.
The first crossbow shot from the walls clattered uselessly against the shield of one of Nilin’s soldiers in a matter of moments, though I immediately heard a sergeant barking for First Company to hold their fire. Praesi crossbows can hit a target to up to three hundred and fifty yards, effective kill range at one hundred fifty , I recited mentally. The lessons had been a pain to learn, but I was beginning to understand why Black had put so many military treatises in the pile. The attacking tenths still had at least fifty yards to go before they would start getting shot at in earnest, but the officers were already calling up for the legionaries to form the testudo. The first rank stopped and raised their shield, the second one propping theirs up to form a roof over their heads. It would slow them down and it was nowhere as effective as if it had been full lines forming up instead of tenths, but it was still better than going in bare. Twenty yards to go, then ten and finally the order came from the enemy on the wall.
“First Company, take aim,” a sergeant bellowed.
I clenched my fingers and unclenched them, resting the palm of my hand on my short sword’s pommel.
“First Company, FIRE!” the call came.
The twang of crossbows unleashed filled the battlefield, the bolts whistling eerily as they tore through the air. From the corner of my eye, I saw one of Nilin’s legionaries get caught in the knee and fall to the ground with a yell but Nauk’s tenth was the one they were trying to take out – the orc lieutenant took a blunted bolt straight to the chest but he laughed it off and replied with an obscene gesture. Still, two of Nauk’s legionaries were hit, one dropping his shield with a yelp and the other slipping to the ground without a word, knocked out cold. The legionaries fell out of the testudo the very instant First Company was done shooting, sprinting across the lily field as fast as they could. They’d be safe for a minute or two: crossbows might be easier to wield and pack more of a punch than longbows, but their rate of fire was horrendously slow. With a little luck Kilian and Nilin would be past the ditches by the time First Company was ready for another volley.
Nauk’s tenth was already at the feet of the gates and trying to prop up their ladder but it kept getting pushed away by a pair of legionaries with forked poles. The lieutenant barked out an order and a pair of smokers spun through the air to land on top of the gate, letting out streams of thick grey smoke. Unlike real smokers it wasn’t poisonous, but it was still hard to breathe in. First Company immediately tried to throw those back but a pair of cussers followed and blew an enemy legionary straight off the rampart. Robber’s handiwork, at a guess. I winced: a fall from that high was sure to earn broken bones. Turning my attention to the west, I saw Nilin was failing at getting his own ladder up. First Company had somehow managed to set it on fire and his tenth was too busy trying to put the flames out to press their assault. Magic . Mages always made everything more complicated. Eyes flicking to the east, I saw Kilian was making good progress. In a matter of moment she would... and there they went, the smokers had landed on the wall.
“Come on, Trapper,” I murmured. “You could lose the east if you’re not careful, and we both know you’ve got too many soldiers covering Nauk.”
A minute of tense anticipation passed as I waited with baited breath until a handful of legionaries hurried through the battlements to link up with the eastern wall. I grinned.
“Gotcha,” I said.
Turning to Hakram, I saw he was milling around the tenth I’d been holding back.
“Sergeant, get our tenth ready to move. We’ll give them a minute to get entangled before we hit the wall next to Nauk.”
“Aye aye, Lieutenant,” the sergeant saluted.
The legionaries picked up the ladder and spread in two lines of five. Fastening my helmet’s leather straps, I checked my blade a last time out of habit and made my way to my soldiers.
“We go in hard and fast,” I addressed them as soon as I was close enough. “Wounded get left behind, we head straight for the standard.”
My tenth managed an awkward salute while keeping a hand on the ladder and I took the lead, my shield already brought up. It would have been shame to get this far only to be taken out by a lucky crossbow shot. I’d already decided we’d stick to the road as long as possible before veering to the right. Nauk was making enough of a mess around the gate that First Company would have more pressing problems on their hands than my tenth. I kept the pace brisk, but there was only so fast the legionaries could go while carrying a ladder – twice I had to slow down so I wouldn’t pull ahead too much. By the time they got to the first ditch the smoke on top of the wall was starting to clear and I could see a handful of Nauk’s legionaries desperately fighting on top of it to protect the ladder they’d managed to land. Good , I thought. Keep them busy for me, Lieutenant. I slid down the slope and threw my shield on the strip of ground separating the first ditch from the second, picking it up as soon as I’d made the climb.
My soldiers were following close behind, Hakram exhorting them to hurry every step of the way, and in a matter of moments they’d propped up their ladder. It was a good thing every company knew how tall the walls were, I had a feeling the sappers’ ladders would have come up short otherwise. I was second up on the ladder behind a pale-skinned girl whose name I did not know and I winced when a enemy legionary popped up at the top of the battlements and unloaded his crossbow straight in her chest – the girl managed to divert her fall off of the ladder so I didn’t fall with her, but it had been made clear enough that speed was of the essence. I jumped over the edge of the battlements to be greeted by the sight of half a dozen First Company legionaries headed my way. The boy with the crossbow had already taken out his sword but he was too slow. I punched him in the jaw and threw him off the wall while taking out my blade. Hakram suddenly appeared at my back, sword in hand, and with a shared grin we ran towards the enemy. We didn’t need to win, we both knew, just delay them long enough for my tenth to make it up the wall.
Shield impacted against shield and I was forced to take a step back, but my adversary’s defence was sloppy: I landed a hard blow against the side of the helmet and turned aside a sword stroke from another legionary. Another of my soldiers joined the fight and then another, the whole tenth trickling in before too long had passed. I might not have liked Ratface, but I had to admit that the captain had drilled his legionaries superbly. First Company’s legionaries backed off when they saw they were outnumbered, one of them running for reinforcements, but I had no intention of pursuing. The whole melee had cost us only one wounded and I offered the dark-skinned legionary a sharp nod before running off towards the stairs. Keeping the map of the fort Robber had traced in mind, I knew I’d have to take my tenth through the melee on the eastern wall before reaching a way down: time to see what Kilian had managed to accomplish. The smoke on the battlements had faded away to wisps, making it easy to see the sergeant’s men were busy giving First Company a hard fight: Kilian’s tenth had wounded and had been outnumbered from the start, but they were fighting with a ferocity that surprised me. Maybe I’d underestimated how badly Rat Company’s legionaries wanted a win. My tenth took to First Company’s flank like fire to kindling, tearing through it in a matter of moments and scattering the enemy.
“You sure know how to throw a party, Lieutenant,” Kilian herself gasped as she made her way towards me, cheek badly bruised.
“It’s all about the guest list,” I replied amusedly. “Think your men have it in them to head for the standard?”
“HEAR THAT, GIRLS AND BOYS?” Kilian roared out. “LIEUTENANT CALLOW WANTS TO KNOW IF YOU’VE STILL GOT A WIN IN YOU!”
The noise of blade slapping against shields and cheers drowned out everything else for an instant, my own legionaries joining in without hesitation.
“That good enough, sir?” Kilian asked with a cheeky smile.
“It’ll do,” I agreed. “Fall into rank, we’re moving out.”
The inside of the fort was about what Robber had described: a low stone house up against the northwestern corner to house prisoners and a series of tents surrounding the wooden palisade that made up the centre. I could see over it from my current vantage point and the enemy standard was right there in its socket, without so much as a single guard. If we hurried enough I’d be able to pull out my troops before casualties got too bad. Ordering my men to pull up the ladder that had brought Kilian’s tenth to the top of the wall, I took the lead once more and started running down the stairs. I’d have to set up a cordon of legionaries to make sure we weren’t flanked.
The gate to the inner fort wasn’t even locked, my soldiers found out to their surprise: they must not have been expecting an assault. This whole thing was going off much more smoothly than I’d thought it would, to be honest. No point in looking a gift horse in the mouth . I left the enemy standard in Hakram’s capable hands and got my legionaries moving towards the western wall: as far as I could see Nilin was making no progress on it, but we could use his ladder to escape. That was when the first hitch in my plan appeared. Yells came from the cordon I’d set up and I cursed when I saw what was going on. The survivors from the east and what seemed to be at least half the soldiers who’d been fighting Nauk were hitting my flank, the distinctive silhouette of Lieutenant Trapper haranguing them into pushing forward. The whole thing could turn into a rout in a matter of moments, I knew: all it would take was First Company breaking apart my men and then it would just be a matter of taking out scattered groups of my attackers. There was only one thing for it, I’d have to...
“Lieutenant,” I was interrupted by Kilian, “it doesn’t have to be you.”
I blinked in surprise.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I hedged.
“Someone has to hold the rearguard,” the sergeant replied flatly. “But it can’t be you.”
“You think I can’t handle it?” I challenged her.
“I think Lieutenant Nauk was right,” Kilian retorted, meeting my eyes squarely. “You’re the one holding this together. Let me handle it, Callow – there must be a reason you got me back in the first place.”
Tempting, oh so tempting, but could I really let anyone else do this? Rat Company didn’t really need me to get the standard back to camp and claim victory. I closed my eyes, furiously trying to find another solution, but all I could think of was a pair of pale green eyes looking back at me. The only clean victories are the one in stories, Catherine . I let out a string of curses that drew a raised eyebrow from Kilian. Sacrifice has never come easy to me, and sacrificing people under my command left an even worst taste in my mouth. But that’s why you sent me here, isn’t? So I’d learn that sometimes you being charge means making decisions like this.
“Fine,” I grit out. “Give them Hells, Sergeant.”
Kilian saluted grimly and unsheathed her sword, heading out for the melee.
“LEGIONARIES!” she screamed. “TO ME!”
Hakram tugged at my elbow urgently and I clenched my fingers. Without another word I ran off towards the stairs to the western wall, my tenth falling in behind me while Kilian’s delayed First Company. Time to get out of there.

—

The way out had been surprisingly easy, Nilin’s tenth managing to land their ladder within moments of my soldiers hitting the wall. I’d gotten my men through and linked up with Nauk while the orc was making his own escape, having somehow managed to unlock the front gate. We’d hurried away after getting back our own standard, well aware that if we lingered too long the rest of First Company was bound to find us. The walk back to the initial camp site had become more and more leisurely as we neared their objective, though, my soldiers laughing and teasing their way up the valley. And yet I couldn’t find it in me to join the merriment. The victory had been too easy, and the more I thought about it the more this was beginning to feel wrong – it was too much of a coincidence that so many troops from the First Company would be out on patrol at the exact moment my own cadets had hit the fort. Hakram had said that Juniper liked bold strokes and swift victories, that it was likely she’d been so frustrated by them surviving that she’d overcommitted on patrols, but I was beginning to think he’d been wrong.
The way the mage line had been hit first had been bothering me for a while: if Captain Juniper meant to take out Rat Company, why hadn’t she gone for the scouts? With them silenced she might have managed to overrun the entire camp before the alarm was rung. Unless that wasn’t what she was after , I thought. Crippling the company by taking out our healers the first night makes more sense if she was aiming to just chip at us day by day. But on that night, when the First Company’s soldiers crept around the camp, they’d found that Ratface had ordered a half-watch and realized they could do a lot more damage than just taking the mages. Juniper hadn’t bet it all on a night assault that could easily have gone wrong, she’d taken an opportunity when she saw an opening. And if that was true... then there’s no way she overcommitted on patrols. There’s something I’m missing here.
“If I couldn’t find my enemy,” I mused out loud to myself, “how would I catch them?”
What did Juniper need to win? Our standard. Just as we needed hers. But as long as Rat Company’s survivors were on the move, she might as well have been looking for a needle in a haystack: Spite Valley was full of hidey-holes, and a more defensive-minded leader than I might have elected to wait out the remaining time in one and let the game be a draw. But I showed her I wanted to go on the offensive by hitting the watchtower , I realized. So then why were there so few soldiers guarding the prisoners? ... there’d been no senior officers among the prisoners at the prison camp, now that I thought about it. And only two mages.
Enough to patch up all my wounded, sure, but we’d still been barely forty afterwards and my two healers had been too exhausted to be of any use for the assault. I’d thought it was a coincidence at the time, that the more important prisoners had been kept elsewhere. But if that was the case, why had there been any mages at all? She was giving me those. Building up my confidence so I’d attack the fort. So I’d taken my men to the fort, and at the cost of almost half of my force taken the First Company’s standard. Now I had only a little over a line left and I was headed back for the deserted Rat Company camp, where I’d put down the enemy standard and officially claim victory. If couldn’t find my enemy, how would I catch them ?
“I’d dictate where they have to go,” I whispered, a shiver of dread going down her spine.
“What’s that, Callow?” Nauk called out cheerfully, the standard still resting on his shoulder.
“RAT COMPANY,” I roared, “FORM UP!”
Hakram, bless his soul, instantly started slapping around the disbelieving soldiers around him until they formed a wobbly square. Nauk pushed through the shifting cadets to get at my side, a sceptical look on his brutish face.
“That just gave away our position to any patrol in the area,” he growled. “Care to explain?”
“They already know we’re coming, Nauk,” I breathed out. “Think about it – hasn’t it all been going too smoothly?”
“So we got lucky,” the orc grunted out. “It happens.”
“We haven’t been lucky, we’ve been played,” I retorted, eyes scanning the woods around us. We were already in sight of the cluster of hills where we’d camped on the first night. Was it too late? Were we already far enough into the trap that there was no backing out? If we managed to get away with both standards, we might still be able to turn this around.
“You’re thinking too hard, Callow,” Nauk growled. “Juniper’s good, but there’s no way she’s that-”
In an unpleasant concession to the universal laws of irony, that was the very moment that the soldiers emerged from the woods on both our sides. A line per flank, I guessed, and the garrison we’d escaped from back at the fort had probably been shadowing us during the whole trip, just out of sight.
“Hellgods,” Nauk spat out. “That’s all sorts of fucked.”
A handful of silhouettes appeared at the crest of the hill we’d been about to start scaling, first among them a large orc in legionary armour who idled her way down the dirt path. So there was another line waiting for us uphill – they’d probably caught Robber when I’d sent him scouting ahead with his sappers. Rat Company closed ranks, shields up and faces grim. They still had fight in them, I knew, but none one was expecting to win the battle anymore. The joy had gone out the company the moment the first enemy soldiers had come out.
“So which one of you would be Lieutenant Callow?” the lone orc called out in a smoky voice as soon as she got halfway down the hill, resting a hand on the pommel of her short sword.
I sighed.
“I’m guessing that’s Captain Juniper?” I said in an aside to Nauk.
“The Hellhound herself,” the orc grunted. “Think we could grab her if we charged?”
I snorted, shaking my head.
“Too obvious,” I replied. “She’s planned it all out so far, I doubt she missed a ploy that obvious. Guess it’s time to meet the woman of the hour.”
I tapped the soldier in front of me on the shoulder and the company parted to let me through. I made my way to the bottom of the hill before deciding it was far enough.
“So, you’re Captain Juniper,” I said. “I’d make a pithy comment about expecting you to be taller, but you’ve got at least two feet on me.”
“Funny,” Juniper replied with bared teeth. “I’ll get to the point, Lieutenant, we’re both busy girls. The Tactics manual says I should offer you a chance to surrender, since you’re both surrounded and outnumbered.”
There was a pregnant pause.
“This is where you refuse with a scream of defiance and I get to crush you lot while still getting full marks,” Captain Juniper prompted.
I eyed my opponent thoughtfully, letting another silence take hold. Juniper had chosen everything about the encounter so far: the terrain, the troop disposition, even the time of day. That little petulant voice in the back of my head was urging me to throw back the offer of surrender in the orc’s face and give her a fight to remember, but I knew better than that. Even before I’d spent a month getting taught by the most dreaded strategist of the age, I’d known better than that. Never give the opponent get what they want. If you let them dictate the flow of the encounter, you’ll lose every time.
“No,” I decided. “We’ll surrender. No point in dragging this out, you’re right. Give me a minute and I’ll talk Lieutenant Nauk into it. Do I just give you the standards or is there a protocol I don’t know about?”
Juniper eyed me distrustfully, clearly taken aback. It was all I could do not to smile.
“First you give us back ours, then I send someone to collect yours,” she replied. “Don’t try to be cute, the moment one of you steps out of line my legionaries are charging. I’ll be waiting up the hill.”
Dismissing the idea of such wanton treachery with a vague hand gesture, I made my way back to Rat Company’s ranks. The company’s remaining officers gathered around me.
“Lieutenant,” Hakram rumbled. “You can’t seriously be considering a surrender. I know the odds are bad, but –”
“Don’t be an idiot, Sergeant,” I whispered, “I have a plan. Pick another two men to accompany me when I give the Hellhound back her standard.”
The orc hid a grin and saluted. I turned to face Nauk and Nilin.
“So, gentlemen,” I said cheerfully. “How long do you think you can hold against the bastards?”
Nauk let out a belly laugh.
“For you, Callow? We’ll last ‘till sundown,” he grinned, looking like the world’s meanest, ugliest green cat.
“A quarter hour,” Nilin ventured more pragmatically, ignoring the dirty look the orc shot him.
I clenched and unclenched my fingers, trying to limber them up. A mostly pointless gesture, but I’d found it helped me think.
“A quarter hour will have to do,” I decided. “By then I’ll have either failed or succeeded anyway. Give them Hells, boys.”
They saluted with grim looks on their faces, but there was an energy to them that had been missing a moment earlier. Funny the way even the slightest hope could fundamentally change the mood in the worst situations. No wonder heroes kept talking armies into taking doomed last stands. Hakram and the two soldiers he’d picked – the pale dark-haired girl I’d seen kick Nauk and a female orc even taller than my sergeant – caught up with me before I left the ranks.
“So what’s the plan, Lieutenant?” Hakram whispered.
“We get close, then we charge towards the victory point,” I replied in a low voice.
“Simple,” the sergeant mused in his gravelly voice. “I like it. And when we get surrounded and stabbed?”
I shot the sergeant an amused look.
“That’s also part of the plan, I’m afraid.”
I was rewarded by a handful of snickers. I’d hoped I’d stumble upon a miraculous last-minute master plan, but it seemed my brain was fresh out of those. Well, it beat surrendering anyways. Grabbing the standard the female orc was offering me and propping it on my shoulder, I took the lead and started for the top of the hill. Juniper had deployed her line just behind the crest so I could see the tip of their helms but not what they were doing: clearly the Hellhound wasn’t out of tricks yet. I would just have to trust my suicide squad would be quick enough on their feet to get out of it. We were maybe a dozen feet away from the top when I gave my soldiers a warning look and whispered “ Now .” We broke out running. I heard Juniper scream an order but refused to pay attention, my whole focus on covering the last of the distance separating her from the enemy line.
That was when the logs started rolling down.
Every one of them a whole tree with the branches cut, thick as man and heavy enough to crush anything in their path. Well, I’d chosen right when I’d decided not to charge the company up the slope, I mused with a strange degree of detachment as the first one thundered down towards me. So this is as far as I could go, then , I thought. Beaten by a pile of dead trees after having been played like a fiddle at every turn. All the plans I’d hatched over the last three days, all of the triumphs I’d fought for – snatched away in an instant. I could already see the way it would all go in my mind: Juniper’s line would charge down the slope behind the logs and snatch the standard from my unconscious body before closing the jaws of the trap on Nauk and Nilin. They’d fight well, but in the end they’d still lose. No , the thought came. I’m not done. I can still do more. I am more than this. I did not come this far to be slapped down by a heap of firewood.
I felt thunder dance across my skin and the world spun into focus. The logs tumbling down slowed to a crawl and I grit my teeth before jumping, sailing into the air and landing behind them in a crouch. I heard Hakram’s grunt of pain and the crack of bones as a log caught him in the chest, but I kept moving. No time to look back – Juniper’s line was already charging down, but the hill had made it impossible for them to tighten their ranks. They were full of openings, and the Name I’d claimed as my own howled in my mind as I slipped behind a charging legionary, tripping him with his own standard. There was another one behind, an orc who tried to strike me down but I laughed, heady with battle-joy, and the shaft of hardened wood slapped away the short sword before whipping around to take him behind the head. I pushed forward and suddenly I’d passed the enemy line, all I needed to do was run and-
“What the Hells was that?” Juniper snarled, impacting into my side with her shield raised.
I rolled with the fall and pushed forward as soon as my feet were back under me but the captain was there again, blocking my way.
“Me,” I replied, “winning.”
I ducked under a cautious sword stroke and unsheathed my own blade. The power was already leaving me, slipping through my fingers like sand, but I would not fail when I was so close. I could hear legionaries doubling back to take me from behind, there was no time to waste – throwing the standard behind Juniper, I unslung my shield from my back and stepped forward. The orc captain was quick, I thought as Juniper tested my shield-side with a careful probe of the blade, but compared to the people I’d been getting my clock cleaned by for the last month the Hellhound was an amateur. Shield met sword and I pushed forward again, stabbing forward only to find my own sword bouncing off the orc’s armour. Undaunted, I stepped to the side and whipped my blade at Juniper’s head. The orc’s eyes widened at the speed of the strike and she stepped back, raising her shield to counter the stroke she knew was coming. That was all the opening I’d needed: dropping my shield I ran for the victory point, dropping low to snatch the standard as I did. I heard Juniper curse from behind me but the orc was slow, too slow, and with a roar I passed by the fallen command tent and rammed the First Company’s standard into the socket meant for it. There was a heartbeat of silence before Juniper rammed into my side, crushing me under her weight, but then lightning streaked across the sky once, twice.
Victory.

Chapter 19: Pivot

“Please, do keep digging your own grave. I look forward to your splendidly inevitable demise.”
– Dread Emperor Benevolent the First

“COMPANIES! SALUTE!”
Two hundred swords rose up in the air, both companies standing at attention in the plain below the hills where a bell ago my band of survivors had been making their desperate last stand. Hakram grinned at me from where he stood in the ranks and I winked back as Ratface and I walked towards Juniper. The orc in question looked like she’d been force-fed a barrel of lemons, but she was pressing on gamely. The Taghreb captain had earlier informed me be there was a ritual involved to the declaration of victory and that I should follow his lead until I learned how it went. Nauk had seemed surprised when Ratface had told the officers of Rat Company I’d be with him during the process, the lot of them exchanging meaningful looks I wasn’t quite sure what to make of.
“Hellhound,” he greeted Juniper as he clasped her arm. “Not how we expected this one to go, huh?”
First Company’s captain growled under her breath.
“Gonna be a while before I live this down,” she replied frankly. “I might have to break Morok’s nose again if he gloats. Let’s get this over with.”
She turned towards her legionaries, unsheathing her sword.
“One sin,” she called out abruptly.
“DEFEAT,” they thundered back
Ratface took out his own blade, facing our men.
“One grace,” he yelled.
“VICTORY,” they chorused back, slapping their swords against their shields with an enthusiasm that drowned out everything else.
The scowl on Juniper’s face was the stuff of nightmares as she handed her blade to Ratface, handle first. The handsome boy took it but, after a heartbeat, handed it to me. There hadn’t been any mention of this in the books but then they were about the Legions themselves, not the College. Silence fell over the crowd until Rat Company burst out in another roaring cheer. My eyes flicked to my captain, whose face was an odd mixture of resignation and amusement.
“Hand it back to her,” he whispered.
I did, and Juniper slammed it back into her scabbard before striding away. We were... done, I guessed? I turned to Ratface.
“So we just head back to Ater, now? Seems anticlimactic,” I mused.
He grinned. “Silly greenie,” he replied. “Now comes the fun part. We spend the night here, and the extra rations should have arrived.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Extra rations?”
He smirked. “Ever tried aragh , Callow? There’s a reason us Taghreb aren’t fucking miserable all the time like the Soninke.”

—

Night had fallen, and the site of Rat Company’s original defeat had turned into a giant feast. Fire pits had been dug and entire pigs put to roast while barrels of dark ale flowed freely. Legionaries from both companies mingled freely, clustering around great bonfires. Nobody seemed to be holding grudges over beating each other bloody during the game, which I supposed made sense if they were held every week. I took a sip from the cup of milky white liquor I’d been handed and immediately started coughing, much to Nauk’s amusement.
“Gods Below, what is that stuff?” I croaked out.
“We call it dragon’s milk,” the other lieutenant replied, easily polishing off the rest of his cup. “If you drink enough it’s possible to set your breath on fire.”
“Bullshit,” I decided, pulling at it again. It was easier to swallow the second time.
“I tell no lie,” the massive orc laughed. “Some mage from Vulture Company did it last year, had to spend three weeks with the healers to get her throat fixed.”
I snorted.
“People made dragon noises whenever she came into a room for the rest of the year,” Ratface grinned from his seat on the other side of the fire.
“If you think this is hard stuff, you should try orc liquor some time,” Hakram weighed in. “Some sappers use it as cleaning fluid for the catapults.”
“I haven’t been in this company for a week and my sergeant is already trying to kill me,” I mourned.
There was a round of laughter and I smiled at the warmth coursing through my veins. Unlike most of the older girls in my dormitory, I’d never gone drinking on the beach with the guys from the boy’s orphanage down the street. I’d tasted enough drinks at the Nest that the novelty had worn off, and most of the time I had better things to do. Scraping together enough gold for tuition at the College wasn’t going to happen on its own. Still, this was... nice. I wasn’t sure I’d call any of the other three friends, but for all that they were easy to like. What does it say about me that I find it easier to laugh with the Empire’s freshest batch of killers than my own people?
“Looking grim there, Callow,” Ratface noted. “Thinking heavy thoughts?”
“Remembering home,” I half-lied.
“You’re from Laure, aren’t you?” Hakram guessed. “You’ve got the accent.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I am,” I agreed. “But how would you know what a Laurean accent sounds like?”
“Our history teacher is from there,” Nauk said. “Used to be part of the Thirteenth.”
Ah, the famous Traitor Legion. Legio XIII, Auxilia. It had been raised in the wake of the Conquest, made up mostly of former bandits and mercenaries. Every Callowan with a grudge against the throne had flocked to the banner, and they’d been instrumental in making sure the south surrendered after the fall of the capital – the prospect of that band of armed malcontents sacking their way through the southern cities had been utterly horrifying to the few remaining nobles. Before I could comment on the subject, though, a band of drunken legionaries passed right behind us singing at the top of their lungs.
“- they got a wizard in the West
But no matter how he’s blessed
We got a Warlock in the Tower
Who’ll use his bones for flour

Let them keep their priestly king
Cause no matter how sweet he sings
We’ve got an Empress black as sin
Who’ll take his throne and grin

We’re the Legion and the Terror
They’re in the right but we’re meaner-”
That was perhaps the most horribly sung rendition of the Legionary’s Song I’d ever heard, and I’d heard some pretty bad ones. They continued towards the closest barrel of ale, singing the last couplet until they ended on the customarily yelled we’re gonna swallow the world whole . The old marching song had always been popular with the rank and file, penned by some unnamed legionary during the Conquest. From the unsurprised looks on everyone’s face, this was apparently a common event.
“The thing with Praesi,” I started.
Hakram rasped out an amused laugh, biting into his pork, and Ratface rolled his eyes.
“The thing with Praesi,” I pressed on bravely. “Is that you have so many godsdamned rituals. Like that thing with the grace and sin earlier. What was that even about?”
Ratface grinned, which suited him much better than his usual sour expression. He really was a handsome one, if a little delicate-looking compared to my usual tastes.
“You’ve never heard of the Speech at the Fields?” he asked. “That’s the thing with Callowans, you always leave out the best parts of history.”
I blinked. “You mean the Fields of Streges?”
Nauk flashed me a double-row of pearly whites.
“Those are the ones. The Black Knight spoke to the Legions, before the battle,” he gravelled. “Every kid knows the words.”
“Today we set aside Good and Evil,” Hakram quoted with reverence. “There is only one sin, defeat. There is only one grace, victory. Everything else is meaningless.”
I sometimes forgot that the man who’d claimed me as his student was the same one from all the legends. Back home the Calamities were the monsters under the bed but here in Wasteland it was different. All of them were treated like giants among men, the epitome of all it meant to be Praesi.
“Huh,” I mused, taking another sip of dragon’s milk. “Well, I learned something today.”
“That and I named you captain of Rat Company,” Ratface continued airily.
I sprayed out the alcohol, to the delight of all the assholes surrounding me.
“ What?! ”
“Why did you think he handed you Juniper’s sword?” Hakram asked, cocking his head to the side. “He was acknowledging it was your victory. No offence, Ratface.”
The olive-skinned boy snorted. “I spent the entire game as a prisoner, Hakram. The truth’s the truth.”
“This is stupid,” I objected vehemently. “All I know about the Legions I learned second-hand. I’ve never even set foot in the College!”
The now former captain of Rat Company shrugged.
“Twelve losses and you lose the captainship. That’s the rule. I didn’t win this, Callow. In fact I lost pretty badly. Your win, your claim. That’s what that entire scene was about, when it comes down to it.”
“You’ve got other lieutenants,” I pointed out. “Who might feel a little slighted they got passed over for the promotion.”
Ratface turned to face Nauk.
“Are you feeling particularly slighted, Lieutenant Nauk?” he asked.
“We ain’t so thin-skinned as you monkeys, taking offence at everything,” the large orc scoffed before addressing me. “Callow, the reason Ratface ended up Captain in the first place was that none of the lieutenants want to be.”
The boy in question shrugged. “Not that I particularly wanted the job either, but my marks are the highest in the company.”
I was about to muster up another denial when Hakram intervened.
“It’s only for two months, Callow,” he grunted. “We’re graduating soon, and our points are so badly in the negatives it’s not like you could do much damage anyway.”
I sighed.
“Fine,” I surrendered. “But I want my objections on the record.”
“To Captain Callow, then,” Nauk toasted, raising his cup.
“May she manage to have us graduate slightly less in the negatives,” Ratface replied cheerfully.
It was a horrible toast, but we all drank anyway.
I wasn’t sure how much time passed when I found myself wandering away from the fire to get my hands on a fresh bottle of aragh . Nauk had disappeared at least half a bell ago when he saw Lieutenant Pickler pass by, running off after her while we all jeered at him and Hakram made some very suggestive comments about his canine length. Apparently that was a thing with orcs? He was replaced almost immediately by Sergeant Nilin. The dark-skinned boy was quiet one, compared to the others, but he had a wry sense of humour that was almost Callowan. I supposed it made sense for Nauk’s sergeant to be more grounded, given the large orc’s tendency for impulsive decisions. Ratface passed out by the time we’d polished off our second bottle of dragon’s milk and I was officially mandated by the survivors to get us a new one before we did the same. It hadn’t occurred to anyone, including myself, that I had no idea where to get one. I headed for the latrines first anyway, only to find a grim-looking orc waiting for me when I came out.
“Captain Callow,” Captain Juniper said flatly. “Let’s take a walk.”

—

I followed the Hellhound to the edge of the festivities, too drunk to be nervous but sober enough to be wary. We ended up standing at the top of the tallest slope, where a few bells before Juniper had tried to bury me under an avalanche of logs – the wood in question was still at the bottom of the hill, mostly intact.
“You have a Name,” the captain of First Company spoke.
It was not a question.
“That’s quite an assumption to make,” I replied anyway. “For all you know, my family might have a long tradition of being great jumpers.”
It might even be true, though admittedly the odds weren’t that great.
“I’ve seen Roles in action before,” Juniper denied me sharply. “Don’t take me for an idiot.”
I probably should have put in a little more effort into that parry, I admitted ruefully to myself. I’d been lulled into a sense of false security by the fact that no one had called me out on the fact that I’d done something that bordered on the limits of human capabilities – part of it, I assumed, was that few people had been looking at me except for Juniper and her personal line. For something done in broad daylight, there’d been surprisingly few witnesses.
“Everything’s possible,” I finally said, deciding that vagueness was still the way to go. I’d been supposed to keep a low profile, after all. “Are you here to complain that made the fight unfair?”
The orc eyed me like I’d just sprouted wings.
“This is practice for a real war,” she said slowly. “Fair doesn’t factor in it. Anyhow, I should have seen it coming. An unknown stranger with an obviously fake name takes a rank in the lowest-ranked company on the edge of their twelfth defeat? Name bait. I should have sent two lines to bury you on the first night just in case.”
“Yeah, that would probably have worked,” I admitted.
The greenskin captain’s eyes narrowed.
“So not a Name that’s overwhelmingly strong,” she murmured in that smoky voice of hers. “Something transitional, maybe?”
Juniper, I noticed, did not smell of alcohol at all. Had she been waiting for me to get drunk before we had this conversation? I would have admired that kind of patient ruthlessness, if it hadn’t been directed at me.
“Something that’s supposed to stay quiet ,” I replied briskly.
“You’re the Squire,” the Hellhound realized after a heartbeat. “You’re the girl who set half of Summerholm on fire just to smoke out a hero.”
She eyed me up and down, like she had a hard time reconciling what was apparently my reputation with the person standing before her.
“Why do people keep blaming me for the goblinfire?” I complained, deciding that at his point the deception was so flimsy it wasn’t even worth it to keep trying. “I’m not the one who was throwing munitions around!”
“I’m sure you weren’t,” Juniper replied, clearly not believing a word of what I’d said. “So the Squire, huh. No wonder you ended up being a pivot for Rat Company.”
I really wished people would stop using words out of the blue and somehow keep expecting me to know exactly what they were talking about. It always made me feel like an idiot when I had to ask.
“A pivot,” I repeated, flavouring the words with an invitation to elaborate.
Juniper frowned, which I’d always thought looked strange on orcs – they had no hair on their brows, only thick ridges of skin.
“Your ignorance offends me on a personal level,” the other captain informed me. “How can you not know what a pivot is? It’s basic Name knowledge.”
“Hey! I’m new at this,” I defended myself. “And my teacher’s a bit of an ass. He never tells me anything outright. I think me might be physically incapable of not being cryptic.”
“Did you just call the Black Knight an ass?” Juniper replied, aghast.
“He really is,” I told her frankly.
“Lord Black is the best thing to happen to the Empire in centuries,” the Hellhound glared.
I squinted.
“Are you blushing ?” I asked. “It’s hard to tell in the dark.”
“You’re seeing things,” Juniper growled. “Fine, I’ll educate you. Names are stories.”
“I do know that much,” I said with a roll of the eyes.
I was familiar with the look she got at that – it was the face someone made whenever they were asking their deities of choice for patience.
“The stories have been around since the dawn of Creation, meaning there’s an endless variety of ways they can go. A pivot is a point in time or a decision where the Named pushes her story in a particular direction. It influences the kind of powers you develop.”
Mhm. Had I ever had one of those? My little talk with Heiress, maybe. Otherwise I couldn’t think of-
“Oh,” I spoke. “ Oh .”
Juniper frowned.
“What?”
“I fucked up,” I admitted out loud. “Today was the first time in weeks I’ve been able to tap into my Name, and I think I just realized why.”
“That ought to be illuminating,” Juniper sneered. “Do continue.”
“So a pivot is the beginning of a plot in the story, right?” I mumbled.
“Truly, your insight is an awe-inspiring thing,” the Hellhound commented.
I glared at her, but she was magnificently unconcerned.
“So take a boy and a girl, of roughly the same age. They’re on opposite sides. The boy doesn’t take a golden opportunity to finish the girl when he has it, and after she gets her shit together and beats him she also spares him.”
“The girl’s on the side of Evil?” Juniper asked, eyes much too knowing for my comfort.
“Something like that,” I grimaced.
“That’s a redemption story,” the Hellhound opined.
It was. I’d heard a dozen different tales that went that way, all with the same pattern. Spared on the first fight, an even match on the second and the climactic third meeting ended up with the conflicted evildoer changing sides after an impassioned speech by the hero or the heroine. No wonder my Name threw a shitfit. I looked back on the way I’d reacted to the hangings in Summerholm, and I could see I’d been... influenced. Not by much: most of the disgust I’d felt then I still felt, but my reaction had been too strong. I’d been nudged just a little to the side of my usual mindset, and the realization sickened me. I’d been pulled by my own mind in two different directions, and the effect had been bad enough I’d ended up weeping my eyes out in an alley.
“I’m going to smother him with his own intestines,” I spoke into the night, tone cold as ice.
The Lone Swordsman had muddled my free will. Unforgivable. Not even Mazus had tried to rob me from who I was, and he’d hanged for what he’d done. My fingers clenched and I felt hatred twist my stomach. Juniper’s face was unreadable.
“We’re done here,” she finally said. “Go to sleep, Callow. We’ve got a long march ahead of us tomorrow.”
I stumbled into my tent, my good mood evaporated into thin air. The others would have to soldier on without me, I didn’t feel like keeping company with anyone at the moment. Besides, Juniper was right. The hangover I was headed for would already make the march back to Ater a painful affair, there was no need to add to it. My bedroll was where I’d left it, blessedly unrolled. There was, however, a small bowl next it. I knelt on the ground to take a closer look. It was unadorned wood, full of water and with a small piece of granite incrusted at the bottom. Was it supposed to be symbolic of something, or had someone put it here by mistake? The answer came when the water rippled, the barely-visible reflection of my own face turning into the profile of my teacher as a subtle glow lit up the surface.
“Lieutenant Callow,” Black greeted me, his voice sounding like he was speaking from across the room.
“Black,” I replied, not as surprised as I should have been. “This is new.”
“Long-distance scrying. One of Warlock’s more useful tricks,” he acknowledged. “I hear the war game is over?”
“Pulled off a win at the last minute,” I grinned. “Though you seem to be missing a crucial piece of information.”
His brow rose. “And that would be?”
“You are addressing Captain Callow,” I informed him.
His lips twitched. “Well done. We’ll go over your campaign when I return. Which company did you happen to beat?”
“Who do you think? First Company, of course,” I replied haughtily.
“It wouldn’t happen to be headed by an orc girl by the name of Juniper, would it?” he asked.
“You’ve heard of her?” I blinked.
He laughed.
“Istrid keeps bragging about how her eldest is the next Grem One-Eye whenever she gets into her cups,” he murmured. “Well now. Finally I have a retort.”
“ General Istrid?” I said, surprised. “She never said anything about being her daughter.”
“I imagine it’s not common knowledge,” Black mused. “She’s rather independent-minded, I’ve been given to understand. Doesn’t want to trade in on the family name.”
I could respect that. The orc captain rose up a notch in my esteem.
“How are things in the south?” I asked, changing the subject. “Are the Matrons giving you trouble?”
“Much to the contrary,” he replied. “The situation’s already taken care of. They even sent an envoy to apologize for not catching on before the situation warranted a Red Letter. I should be back in Ater by tomorrow evening.”
“Good to know,” I grunted. “Am I staying in the College even after you’re back? I’d prefer not to leave Rat Company until graduation, if that’s possible.”
He inclined his head. “I’m inclined to grant that, within reason. You won’t be attending most of the classes – we’ll be continuing our lessons instead.”
I nodded. It was what I’d wanted anyway: I was sure the teachers at the College were competent sorts, but I doubted what they had to offer compared to one-on-one tutelage by the Dread Empress’ right hand.
“Did you have time to look into what I asked you to?” I asked after a breath of hesitation.
“The orphanage is untouched,” he replied. “Not a soul missing. A good thing you killed the other claimants in such spectacular manners, I doubt Heiress would have taken you seriously otherwise.”
“That would have been unfortunate,” I murmured. “Because I meant every word.”
He smiled. “You’re beginning to garner enough of a reputation that you can leverage it. Be careful in managing it. Oh, and there’s one last thing.”
“Now why did you have to say that?” I complained, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “This conversation was going so well.”
He snorted. “Keep your evening free tomorrow, you already have plans.”
“Am I allowed to know what those plans are?” I asked sardonically.
“Of course,” he agreed. “Catherine Foundling is being officially introduced to the Imperial Court.”
Well, shit.

Chapter 20: Rise

“ Who reigns up high?
A dead man’s sigh
What sleeps below?
A crown of woe
That is the Tower:
Learn and cower. ”
– Extract from ‘And So I Dreamt I Was Awake’, Sherehazad the Seer

I tugged at my cloak’s collar for the twentieth time, ignoring Black’s amused look.

I’d been politely abducted by the Blackguards within a bell of entering Ater, to the dismayed surprise of Nauk and Ratface: they’d known better than to press the matter then and there, but I had a feeling I’d be getting asked some fairly pointed questions the moment I got back to the barracks. Apparently the low profile section of my association with the College had come to an end. I’d been smuggled deeper into the city and changed into what would be my attire for the evening under Scribe’s watchful gaze. The aketon and armour I was familiar with, though it had been cleaned and polished since I’d last worn them. The thick black cloak held tight against my shoulders by a woven golden braid was new, though, and I felt like I was getting strangled every time I took a breath.

There was something odd about the cloth – every now and then, when I moved, the way it caught the light made it look like it was made of pitch black feathers. Sorcery was involved, as far as I could guess, though a purely decorative working seemed... out of character, for Black. There was probably more to it. My teacher was still wearing his usual plain steel plate, though he wore a cloak that was mine writ slightly larger. The implication of our matching clothes was less than subtle. Captain had traded her usual armour for something more ceremonial, her breastplate and greaves decorated with snarling wolf heads. Her cloak was of a brown tone that bordered on red.

“ Do you really wear armour every time you come to Court?” I asked as we strolled down a wide – and strangely deserted – avenue.

“ Praesi nobility has a regrettable propensity for stabbing,” Black replied.

“ And poisoning,” Captain grunted from behind us. “And blood magic. Calling the Tower a snake pit is doing a disservice to snakes: they don’t usually bite unless provoked. Some of the fuckers up there will have you killed for wearing robes that look too much like theirs.”

My fingers closed against the hilt of the sword sheathed at my hip. Since the wrecking of my last blade back in Summerholm, I’d been provided with another goblin-wrought short sword. The grinning goblin’s head the last pommel had been shaped as had been replaced by a stylized version of green flames. My teacher’s sense of humour was ever a twisted thing.

“ You think someone’s going to try to kill me?” I asked.

The thought didn’t leave me feeling as worried as it would have a month ago, which in and of itself was worrying. Strange, how quickly one’s standard for normality could change. Black let out a thoughtful hum as we took a right down another empty avenue. Where were all the locals? This was just eerie.

“ That depends on how quickly Heiress moved to secure her support,” he finally said. “No doubt she’ll attempt something , but it might not be as crass as outright assassination.”

Crass, of all the adjectives to use. Sometimes the Praesi seemed the same as us, but then they said something and I was struck by how differently they looked at things. Culturally speaking Ater might have been more Soninke than Taghreb, but the capital of the Dread Empire had developed into something that was entirely different from both. Ater was the touchstone of Praes and at Court murder was considered as much of an art as sculpting or painting. Lack of elegance in the death was more of a sin than the killing itself.

“ How can the Empire even function, with the nobles poisoning each other at the drop of a hat?” I wondered. “I always thought the stories about the Imperial Court were exaggerated, but if anything things seem to be worse.”

“ The Empire functions because the nobles are poisoning each other at the drop of a hat,” Black replied easily. “If they’re fighting each other, they’re not fighting the Tower. Ensuring that state of affairs used to be the province of the Chancellor, but things being what they are Malicia’s had to get her own hands dirty.”

“ The Name she had outlawed,” I murmured. “Seems like there’s a story there.”

Pale green eyes flicked to me, then away.

“ A long one,” he said. “That will have to be told another day. We’ve arrived.”

I’d thought I’d seen the Tower.

It was impossible to miss even miles away from Ater, that hulking spire of dark stone that jutted out into the perpetual storm clouds. After passing through the Gate of Bones with the other cadets I’d gotten a closer look, glimpsed the tall arches in the stone that served as windows and the hundreds of balconies that sprang from them. The stories did not do it justice. Emperors rise, Emperors fall, the Tower endures. Or so legionaries said, when they got into their cups. Twice it had been cast down – first by Dread Empress Triumphant’s infamous last act of spite and again by a Proceran army during Second Crusade – but twice it had been built back up, even taller. In Callow the symbol that bound us was the ancient bells of Laure, to the extent that even the Fairfax kings and queens had used them in their heraldry. Here in Praes, though, it was the Tower.

I stood before the beating heart of the Dread Empire and felt like an ant.

There was no comprehending how enormous the Tower really was, until you stood at its feet. You could have fit the entire ruins at the Blessed Isle inside its walls, and it was so tall I couldn’t even see the top of it. The stone stairs leading up to the gates were carved into the likeness of weeping men and women, every step taken coming squarely on their backs. Charming. Was there such a thing as an evil architect? The sight before me was an argument in favour. Twin rows of steel-clad soldiers stood in perfect silence on the sides of the steps, faces covered by masks of wrought black iron. No wonder they all go mad. How could you live in that without coming to think of yourself as a god? Black stepped forward and I followed, Captain a close behind us. There was not a sound except for the creaking of our leather boots, and a shiver went up my spine as we came before the gates. They were just as hulking as the rest of this madman’s nightmare, smooth obsidian marred by the thousands of runes and symbols carved into it. I could feel a dull thrum coming from them, age-old sorcery permeating the very air around it.

“ I come summoned by the Tyrant,” Black called out into the silence. “Gatekeeper, grant me entrance.”

There was a heartbeat and then the obsidian stirred . Like ripples in a pond the stone came alive, until a face emerged from the surface: two symbols that had me shivering just to look at them made up its eyes, and a rictus formed into a sinister parody of a mouth.

“ The prodigal knight returns,” the abomination drawled. “And with an apprentice in tow.”

“ Gods, tell me that thing isn’t going to ask us to solve a riddle,” someone said, and in a moment of horror I realized it had been me.

Black’s hand fell around my arm and I could feel it squeeze painfully even through the armour. I really needed to get a handle on the mouthing-off-in-the-face-of-fear thing. The thing in the gate laughed and I regretted every opening my mouth: it sounded like both the wail of a child and the shattering of a hundred swords.

“ Even now, you bring me the most interesting strays,” it spoke. “I grant you entrance, Black Knight.”

The face melted back into the obsidian and I heard a series of locks unlatch through the gate, until it slowly swung open. The antechamber was empty, not a soul haunting the riot of dark marble that preceded the deeper Tower. We stepped inside and my teacher turned on me as soon as the gates closed.

“ Don’t ever do that again,” he whispered furiously.

“ It let us in anyway!” I whispered back, tone defensive.

“ The Gatekeeper ate the soul of the last person who spoke out of turn to it,” he hissed. “Not even Warlock could have brought you back if it had taken offence.”

My blood ran cold. Souls couldn’t be destroyed, the House of Light said, not except by-

“ That thing was a demon?” I choked.

“ From the Twenty-Third Hell,” he said.

His face was calm again, but his eyes were still sharp as a knife.

“ Weeping Heavens,” I whispered. “Who uses a demon as a doorman?”

Making deals with devils was one thing – they were exceedingly dangerous, but bound by their nature to honour the letter of any deal they made. Demons, though? They followed no rules. Their very existence was a wound upon Creation. At best they could be contained. At worst? Entire kingdoms had been brought down by a single loose demon. And apparently one of the Dread Emperors had thought it was a splendid idea to use one as his greeter. I felt a fresh flush of panic, but got my breathing under control.

“ You’re a long way from Laure, Catherine,” Black murmured. “The evil that dwells here runs deep and old. It took two empires and a continent-wide rebellion to bring down Triumphant, when Praes was at its peak. There are still shadows of that madness lurking.”

Fuck. I took a deep breath and settled my nerves. I could still do this. Whatever horrors prowled inside the Tower didn’t matter: it was the Court I was here for, and they were just people. People I could deal with, no matter how dangerous they were.

“ Got it,” I said through gritted teeth. “Let’s move on.”

The antechamber led to a high-ceilinged room of cold black stone, bare of any tapestries. The only thing that wasn’t polished marble around was the series of mosaics on the walls, strangely patterned in a hundred subtle shades of red and grey. I frowned as we got passed one by, slowing to take a closer look. A large hand came to rest on my shoulder almost immediately, gently pushing me forward.

“ Don’t,” Captain murmured, her tanned face expressionless. “If you manage to see the eyes, you’ll be speaking in tongues for weeks.”

I jerked back.

“ Is this entire place a death trap?” I asked peevishly.

“ Yes,” Black agreed blandly.

Well, that kind of took the wind out of my sails. Shame, a good rant would have helped to settle my nerves. Two sets of spiralling stairs rose to the first level, the smooth railing guarding them shaped as the tail of a snake. Yeah, I’m not touching that. Given how the rest of my visit here had gone the thing might be some sort of animated stone snake just waiting to smother anyone touching it. Black paused as we came to the head of the stairs to the upper floor, turning to grant me a glance.

“ Steel yourself,” he spoke. “This part is always... unpleasant.”

Without giving me the time to reply, he stepped through the archway to the next room. My determination to be cool and unflappable in the face of whatever was coming lasted exactly three heartbeats. The long corridor awaiting me was filled with human heads. They hung from the ceiling by silk ropes, kept close to the walls so that they formed a curtain of mutilated flesh covering the entire span of the stone. That alone would have been enough to fill my nightmares for the next few months, but the moment we stepped in they all swivelled to face us. A thousand mouths opened and they started moaning and yelling and begging, words spoken in half a dozen different tongues drowning each other out into incoherence until all that could be heard was one deafening scream of despair and hatred. I flinched back and saw the closest ones were laughing at me now, leering and calling out sentences I couldn’t make out. One in particular stood out to me, a pale-skinned man with a a bushy red beard whose entire face was covered in pockmarks and scars. The derision I saw on that face was the last straw.

“ Enough ,” I screamed.

For the span of a single breath my Name filled the room. The power that surged through my veins winked out of existence as swiftly as it had appeared, but in its wake silence reigned. I felt the weight of a thousand stares on me, but I was too angry to care.

“ Interesting,” Black murmured, resuming his walk. “You’ve picked up Speaking after seeing me use it only the once. A decent effort, for a beginner.”

I strode ahead of him, not bothering to reply, and in a matter of moments we were making our way up another flight of stairs.

“ What the Hells was that place?” I asked after a long moment.

“ The Hall of Screams,” Captain replied. “It’s where people end up, when they try for a Dread Empress’ crown and fail.”

“ The necromancy keeping the heads alive goes back to the Declaration,” Black mused. “No one’s been able to reproduce it since, and not for lack of trying.”

“ Well isn’t this place just a nice little box full of fucking horrifying surprises,” I growled. “A more specific word of warning would have been nice. Like say ‘Hey, Catherine, there’s a hall full of humans heads just ahead. So you know, heads up!’”

“ I was interested in seeing your reaction,” Black admitted shamelessly, and if we hadn’t been in the Tower I would have shown him some of the more insulting gestures I’d learned in the Pit.

“ How high up are we going anyway?” I asked, since dwelling on the subject would just have made me angrier.

A little anger would be enough to keep me steady, but if I worked up any more than that I’d lose focus.

“ Official Imperial Court functions are held on the twenty-fourth floor,” the green-eyed man replied.

“ That doesn’t sound like a coincidence,” I muttered.

“ It’s been some time since the numerical value was used to facilitate devil summoning,” Black noted. “The Court still remembers when they came to collect with Nefarious.”

“ It doesn’t bother you at all that the godsdamned Imperial Court used to summon hellspawn?” I asked. “I mean, you know things are going downhill when the rulers of a place make literal deals with the devil.”

The dark-haired man shrugged, though the gesture was hard to make out under his cloak.

“ Borrowed power always betrays its user, in the end,” he simply said. “It might gain the one making the deal some short-term victories, but it inevitably turns into a death sentence down the line. It’s as good a way as any to weed out the more foolish elements of the aristocracy.”

“ They still have to cause a costly amount of damage when they go crazy,” I replied curiously. “Why don’t you just ban it entirely? It would save resources in the long term.”

The way the green-eyed man talked about making deal with devils implied he found the matter distasteful, and Black wasn’t the kind of man who let traditions linger when they were counterproductive. Was I missing something?

“ It already disqualifies mages from service in the Legions,” Captain replied from behind us.

The look my teacher sent me made it clear he knew I was mostly pressing the matter to keep my mind off of the coming evening, but for now he seemed inclined to indulge me.

“ There’d be no practical way to enforce the ban,” he explained. “Any half-decent warlock can summon something if they get their hands on the right manuscript. Therefore, Catherine, what would be the consequences of Malicia passing such a decree?”

It was almost reassuring to hear him slip into his teaching voice, given our surroundings.

“ An erosion of Imperial authority,” I replied after a moment. “If the Empress can’t enforce her own laws, people are going start breaking more than that single one.”

He nodded, looking satisfied.

“ The myth of Imperial omnipotence is what keeps Praes together,” he murmured. “We must manage that illusion carefully.”

We stepped foot on the second floor. After the general level of nightmarishness displayed by the last two I’d expected yet another sight I would wake up screaming about in the coming weeks but it was surprisingly mundane. The entire level, much like the one beneath us, had been carved into a single room but unlike the hallway this one occupied the entire space. There were no real walls, just some spaces between large sculpted archways that led straight into oversized circular balconies. For the first time since we’d entered the Tower there were other people around, guards wearing the same armour-and-mask as those outside standing between the archways in the same creepy silence. There were no stairs for us to go up by, I noticed, and shot the Calamities a quizzical look.

“ How are we getting to the twenty-fourth?” I asked.

“ Getting a lift,” Captain grunted.

Both of them ignored the silent guards and headed straight for one of the archways to the left – I managed to discern a twenty-four in Miezan numerals in the pattern adorning its stone when we got closer. Stepping out onto the balcony, Black whistled sharply as I stared down. No railing here, and wasn’t that just horrible architectural design? It’s like they want someone to slip and fall . I paused for a heartbeat. Hells, they actually might. Strike two for the evil architecture school theory. I was about to ask what we were doing there besides standing and looking like the village idiots when a reptilian shriek resounded from above and a dark shape flew down towards the balcony. A grey-skinned creature with bat wings the size of a small house landed on the edge of the balcony, hissing hatefully at us in a way that displayed its bloody saw-like teeth.

“ What is that?” I asked, taking a wary step back. “Some dragon’s inbred cousin?”

“ Our ride up,” Black replied amusedly, and I followed his pointed finger to the large saddle placed on the creature’s back.

“ You’re a bad man,” I accused. “A bad, bad man.”

“ Guilty,” he mused. “Though never charged.”

Against my better judgement, I snorted.

“ I’m taking the reins on this one,” Captain spoke up in a tone that brooked no argument. “We’re not having a repeat of last time.”

“ I have no idea what you could possibly mean,” Black demurred. “High Lord Nok lingered too long on the landing pad. That accident could have happened to anyone.”

“ Everybody heard you telling it to take a bite in the Dark Tongue,” the Taghreb warrior replied, thoroughly unimpressed.

“ My pronunciation’s still a little off,” the Knight smiled sardonically. “I was trying to tell it to ‘take a hike’, I assure you.”

So I’m avoiding the High Lord of Nok, then. Good to know. Captain climbed onto the beast first, followed by Black who moved much too gracefully for a man wearing plate armour. I took his offered hand to hoist myself up, keeping myself steady by clasping a pair of helpfully placed leather handles on the saddle. The gargantuan warrior-woman spat out a harsh, guttural word in a language I didn’t recognize – immediately the abomination we were riding let out another screech and jumped off the balcony. For a moment we were free falling and I bit my lip to keep myself from screaming. My old fear of heights was coming back with a vengeance. The thing’s enormous wings started beating and it rose through upwards steadily. I close my eyes and clasped the handles hard enough I was sure my knuckles turned white.

Several eternities later, the creature landed on what I felt to be solid ground. I opened my eyes again and let out a breath of relief when I saw we’d arrived on what looked like a large, gaudier version of the balcony we’d come from. Without waiting for anyone’s permission I jumped down from our ride, dancing out of the way when the creature turned to hiss and snap its teeth at me. The balcony led into a smaller chamber with a handful of wooden benches heavily encrusted with gold and jewels. I eyed a ruby the size of my fist that probably made actually sitting on the bench highly uncomfortable and sighed. There was such a thing as being too rich. Golden hooks jutted from the walls, meant for guests to hang their coats on, but I didn’t have any more time to gawk: my companions had dismounted and Black casually adjusted his cape over his shoulders.

“ Here we go,” he murmured, and without further ado pushed the doors open.

My first thought was that there was no way the throne room in display could actually fit inside the Tower. It was way too broad and the ceiling was high enough I half-expected there to be clouds trailing the ceiling. The usual theme of black marble hard returned with a vengeance, but this once there was actually a bit of colour around: drapes of red, green and gold cascaded down everywhere like strange cloth pillars. The floor was one single immense mosaic depicting a hundred different scenes – the part I was in front of showed what I was fairly certain was the latter parts of First Crusade. The large army with its myriad of banners laying siege to a stylized Ater was something of a hint. My attention almost immediately left the decor, though: there must have been at least several hundred people standing in the gallery, and all of them were looking at us.

I’d seen very little of Praesi nobility, back in Laure. Besides Mazus and a handful of his hanger-ons, there wasn’t any in the city. But now I was in their natural habitat, and though I despised them on principle I had to admit they were a stunning sight. Tunics and dresses of every colour and every pattern, every one of them more exotic than the last. Silk and brocade, velour and velvet and half a dozen other cloths I didn’t even know the name for. The hair styles for both men and woman were outrageously elaborate, from braids with emeralds woven into them to a closely-cropped head with ever-changing arcane patterns shaved into it. There were Taghreb and Soninke both, and the overwhelming majority of the people inside were humans. There were but a handful of orcs, and no goblins at all. That I could see, anyway. Given their size they might be hiding behind someone else. Black stepped to my side and his face might as well have been carved out of stone. I schooled my own expression into something more neutral as I followed behind him, hearing the music that had been gently sounding in the background trail off as we did. The crowd parted before us as we strode with purpose, until we came to stand a few dozen meters away from the dais in the back of the room where the throne stood.

I barely looked at the throne itself, though it was a thing of legend, for all my attention was commanded by the woman sitting on it. I’d seen some beautiful women in my handful of years. More than most. The Baroness Dormer had visited Laure, when I’d been a child, and I remembered thinking her hair looked like it was spun out of silver. She’d been pale as the moon and just as lovely. I’d served drinks to Yan Tei missionary once and spent most of the evening sneaking looks at her smooth honey-coloured skin and amber eyes. She’d been lean in the way all their warrior-priests were, with the muscles of a swimmer and the mysterious smile of a sage. Heiress, too, had been gorgeous in a way I could only envy: generations of good breeding culminating in a perfect figure and flawless features that not even a sneer could mar.

Compared to Dread Empress Malicia, they might as well have been pigs.

She was tall, even with her sitting I could see that much, but there was more to it than that. There were statues of ancient warrior-queens in Laure and they’d been... too perfect. Beautiful, but looking at them you knew they were art and not a living thing. The Empress was breathtaking because she was so very alive , like a bonfire compared to everyone else’s candle. It didn’t matter that I didn’t usually find sharp Soninke cheekbones like those on her face attractive, they were part of a whole that went beyond its separate parts. I couldn’t pick out a single feature that made her beautiful, she just was . Her silk dress was a stream of green and gold that suggested the curves of her body without revealing them, leaving bare her long neck and curling down to caress smooth dark calves. Black as sin , the Legionary’s Song called her, and it was impossible not to think of something sinful when looking at her. Fluidly, with the easy grace of a hunting cat, she rose to her feet.

“ All kneel for Her Most Dreadful Majesty Malicia, First of Her Name, Tyrant of Dominions High and Low, Holder of the Nine Gates, Sovereign of All She Beholds,” a harsh voice rang out.

As one, the nobles filling the throne room dropped to their knees. After a moment Captain’s armour creaked as she did the same, cloak pooling on the ground around her. Without thinking I was halfway to doing the same when a hand fell upon my shoulder.

“ We,” Black said, “do not kneel.”

He’d spoken quietly, but in the hush of the room the words reverberated like the crack of a whip. The sentence was heavy with meaning, a claim and a declaration both. We do not follow the law. We are the law. And if you want me to kneel, come and make me. There we stood, the two of us clad in steel and black like a pair of crows surrounded by birds of paradise. The only two people still on our feet among a sea of kneelers. I felt a shiver go down my spine at the sight. It felt like power. It felt like a beginning, though of what I was not sure. Dread Empress Malicia smiled as she sashayed toward us – just looking at the quirk of her lips made my heart clench.

“ Welcome home, Amadeus,” she said. “I see you brought along your Squire.”

Chapter 21: Fall

“ Victory, most fickle of friends.”
-Taghreb saying

Gods, even her voice was gorgeous. How was that fair in any way? I knew taking a Name could change your appearance, over time, but somehow I got the feeling that wasn’t the case with Malicia. I suppose once in a while someone does get born that outrageously good-looking . With an effort, I forced myself to look away – I certainly wasn’t going to get my head back in the game as long as I was gawping at the Empress like a dumbstruck fool.
“It’s good to be home, Malicia,” Black replied mildly. “If I may introduce Catherine Foundling, formerly of Laure.”
The direct mention was enough to jolt me back into a semblance of attention. I kept my face as blank as I could manage and inclined my head as the Dread Empress’ dark eyes turned to me.
“My dear Knight has long been delaying the taking of an apprentice,” she mused. “I look forward to finding out how you changed his mind. I must confess I have great hopes for you, Squire.”
Smiling in that heartbreaking manner of hers, she cast a warmly fond look at the Court.
“We all have great hopes for you,” she asserted, and the nobles effortlessly painted polite agreement over their faces.
I imagine they would have done much the same, if she’d opened me from crotch to throat with a sacrificial knife. One did not openly disagree with the ruler of Praes without consequence – and who would even want to, while she was smiling at them like that?
“I will try to live up to them, Your Majesty,” I replied, and had to force down a cringe when I heard how hesitant my voice sounded.
I might as well have been throwing a barrel of blood in a pond full of sharks. Malicia’s expression was kindly, but I was beginning to have a handle on how striking she was. I was, nominally at least, on Black’s side. That more or less meant I was on hers considering that Black was her staunchest supporter, but I’d been given to understand that there were nuances at play. My teacher had made it clear from the beginning that while he deferred to the Empress he didn’t agree with her every decision. Already I was beginning to regret I hadn’t spent more time asking questions about the current state of Imperial factions at Court – this was a battlefield like any other, but I had no idea who my enemies actually were. Malicia lightly tread around us, forcing us to turn as the kneeling nobles rose to their feet. They were still silent, though, so I got the feeling that the show wasn’t over yet.
“How go the provinces, Black Knight?” the Empress asked, voice carrying clearly across the enormous throne room.
Provinces . My face turned properly expressionless for the first time since I’d stepped into this mess. That was how they thought of Callow here, wasn’t it? Uncivilized provinces good only for shaking until gold and other useful materials came out.
“Settled,” my teacher replied calmly. “For now.”
Malicia cast a soulful look at the nobles.
“It is,” she spoke with genteel regret, “a great shame that Governor Mazus forced our hand in such a way. I do dislike ending old bloodlines.”
The Tyrant was the very picture of an aggrieved young woman. Black turned to face the crowd too, and there was no such regret on his face. A hint of the... thing I’d glimpsed in Summerholm was peering out through those unsettling green eyes, offering the aristocrats a smile that bared too many teeth to be anything of the sort.
“That is the ever the way, with those who overreach,” he told them. “It should be remembered that unsightly ambition so often lead to an unsightly end.”
He ran a pale thumb across his throat in a seemingly casual gesture and I saw several silhouettes go still as stone. The casual reminder that in the end Mazus had been robbed of the easy death all those colourfully plumaged vultures thought was their birthright was unsettling them. None of this is spontaneous, I instinctively grasped. The easy repartee between the two most powerful individuals in the Empire was too fluid to have been rehearsed, perhaps, but there was still something almost practiced about it. Like they’d been in their respective roles for so long that they no longer needed to plan out the dance, only be who they were supposed to be and let the music lead them.
So that’s how it is , I frowned. Malicia was gentle and soft and regretful, respected the importance of the old families and their place in the halls of power – and all the while my teacher stood there reminding them with a smile that if he had his way all of their heads would be in the Hall of Screams. The Empress smiled and casually laid a hand on Black’s arm, four hundred eyes following the gesture. Look at my monster , she seemed to be saying. Isn’t he dangerous? Remember, I’m the only thing standing between you and him. So why don’t you all behave, my darlings? Leashes are such slippery things.
“Now that the inevitable politics are out of the way,” Malicia announced cheerfully, “we can get back to the part of the evening you’re all actually here for.”
Chuckles and smiles ripped through the crowd, though she hadn’t been being particularly funny. The Empress idly clapped her hands, and immediately the music started playing again. In a heartbeat the court split into a hundred smaller clusters, conversing among themselves and calling over servants carrying trays full of cups. With a last smile at us, the Empress trailed away to mingle.
“You did passably well, for you first time at Court,” Black assessed quietly. “They’ll think you weaker than you are, but that can be useful.”
“I really need some etiquette classes,” I grunted back. “The stuff I learned at the orphanage is useless here.”
“I’ll work it into your schedule,” the dark-haired man murmured. “But don’t forget you have a Name, Catherine. Rudeness is one of the many privileges that affords you.”
I raised an eyebrow. “If I’m gonna be rude to one of them, I want to be on purpose,” I retorted.
He conceded the point with a mild inclination of the head. “You’ll have to mingle on your own,” he said. “Captain will be keeping an eye on you, but she’ll be remaining at a distance.”
“Got an assignment of your own, have you?” I guessed.
Black smiled thinly.
“The High Lady of Kahtan has been making noises about revising the legal number of household troops,” he replied. “She seems to need a reminder as to why she inherited her seat so young.”
“You have fun with that,” I snorted. “Anybody in particular I should talk to?”
“There might we some well-connected cadets from the College in attendance,” Black murmured. “Allies are a useful thing.”
I acknowledged the hint with a nod and turned to face the crowd as he strode away. Where to start? Gods, I’d never been all that good at the social butterfly thing. All right, let’s get a drink first. Should make the rest of this easier. I gestured for one of the drinks-carrying servants to come closer and snatched a golden goblet with wine in it. Something fruity, from the smell of it.
“Don’t drink that,” Scribe murmured.
I nearly dropped the cup, cursing under my breath. The plain-faced woman was standing at my side like she’d always been there – and for all I know she’d been. There was a ring of empty space around me for at least twenty feet, which made it all the more ridiculous I hadn’t seen or heard her coming.
“You really need to stop doing that,” I complained.
A flicker of amusement went through her eyes, gone in a heartbeat.
“Haven’t seen you since the Blackguards picked me up,” I observed after composing myself. “Where did you go?”
“I had other duties,” she replied, and didn’t elaborate even after I raised an eyebrow.
I sighed and eye the cup of wine wistfully.
“It’s poisoned, isn’t it?” I said with resignation.
“All the drinks are,” she said. “A mild poison, with embarrassing side-effects. Attendees find out what antidote they’ll need in advance: not drinking is seen as a sign of incompetence.”
“Fucking Praesi,” I grunted under my breath. “No offence, Scribe.”
“None taken. I was not born in Praes,” she replied without inflection.
That was the first bit of personal information I’d ever learned about Black’s shadow, and I filed it away for mulling over later. Very little was known about Scribe, given how rarely she made it into the stories. The Empress passed at the edge of my field of vision, laughing throatily at a richly dressed young boy’s jest. From the poleaxed look on his face, he seemed as unable to deal with her as I’d been not too long ago. The Named woman followed my gaze, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth.
“Be careful with her,” Scribe said.
I kept my surprise off of my face. She wasn’t usually one to bother with warnings, and to be honest I was a little surprised we were still talking at all: this might very well be the longest conversation the two of us had had since the first time we’d met. I’d never gotten the feeling that Scribe disliked me, per se, she just didn’t seem particularly invested in my general existence.
“I know she’d dangerous,” I replied quietly. “It’ll take more than few smiles to make me forget that.”
“You don’t understand how dangerous she is,” the plain-faced woman murmured. “Not even Black does, and he’s known her the longest.”
“They knew each other before she took the throne?” I asked, openly surprised.
I’d heard next to nothing about Dread Empress Malicia before she claimed the Tower. Even how she’d managed that was rather vague: I knew she’d been opposed and a civil war had ensued where Black had served has her general, but details were scarce in the books I’d been provided.
“They met before he claimed his first Name in full,” Scribe said. “When she was still a waitress at her father’s inn in Satus.”
I blinked. “A waitress ?” I hissed out in disbelief. “The Dread Empress of Praes used to be a waitress ?”
The other Named folded her ink-stained fingers into her sleeves.
“What do you know about Dread Emperor Nefarious?” she finally asked.
I frowned. “He ruled before Malicia. Went a little cuckoo in the head after he failed to invade Callow and got whipped by the Wizard of the West.”
Scribe’s face was unreadable. “The nature of his fall was less charming than your expression might imply. Nefarious never again left the Tower after he returned, leaving matters of ruling to the Chancellor. He spent his time expanding the ranks of his seraglio.”
Just the word made my skin crawl. I’d known that some of the Dread Emperors – and Empresses – had kept consorts, but from the way Scribe was talking about it Nefarious hadn’t been looking for volunteers.
“Her beauty has little to do with her Name,” she murmured. “The Emperor had his Sentinels scouring the breadth of Praes for beauties and word of her looks had spread beyond the town. Her father protested, so they nailed him to the floor of his own inn.”
I grimaced. I sometimes forgot that the bastards that held the Tower were just as brutal towards their own people as they were towards the other kingdoms.
“So they met when she was taken to Nefarious?” I guessed.
Scribe shook her head. “A few days beforehand. He and Wekesa were still claimants to Squire and Apprentice, back then. They met again when he became the Black Knight and Chancellor summoned him to the Tower.”
“From concubine to Empress,” I muttered. “Weeping Heavens, how did she manage that?”
“Patience,” Scribe said. “Patience, poison and making the right promises.”
That certainly got my attention. “And what did she promise him?”
“What she needed to,” Scribe replied flatly. “Not as much as she should have. They are, after all, friends.”
Her face had remained impassive, but there was no hiding the thick distaste in the way she pronounced the last word.
“You don’t sound very fond of the Empress,” I said very, very quietly.
“Amadeus is a loyal man, in his own way,” Scribe replied. “It’s why we follow him – he’d break the world, for one of us. In some ways he already has. But the blade bites from both sides.”
I cast a shifty look around us, which probably made us look twice as guilty.
“We are not being overheard,” the plain-faced woman said, and the utter certitude in her voice gave me pause. Something related to her Name? “Ranger and I disagreed on many matters, Catherine, but there was one thing we always agreed on.”
“And what’s that?”
Scribe leaned closer.
“We should have an Emperor, not an Empress,” she whispered into my ear.
Without another word, she stepped into the crowd. A drunken noble passed in front of her, tittering with a companion whose hair was shaped like a roaring dragon, and by the time they cleared my field of vision there was no sign of Scribe. She might as well have vanished into thing air, and if I hadn’t know how hilariously disproportionate the amount of magic needed for even the smallest transportation spells was I would have thought she’d teleported. Well, wasn’t that the most ominous conversation I’ve had all week. If you don’t count the fucking demon doorman, anyways. It wasn’t every day I got spoken treason to, and there was no way this was anything but treason. Coming from the Named who worked closest with my teacher, to boot.
Scribe’s mention of Ranger had come as something of a surprise, considering the woman in question had left the Empire early into the Conquest – if the stories were true, anyway. So there were Praesi who’d wanted Black to claim the Tower. That wasn’t all that surprising, considering he’d been the face of the Empire’s latest victories. But he doesn’t seem to want the Tower. And I’m not sure he could actually take it, considering he’s pale-skinned. There were three ethnicities, in the Wasteland. The two largest were the Soninke and the Taghreb, often overshadowing the less-known Duni. Most dark and olive-skinned people who lived in the Green Stretch still considered themselves of the associated culture, but the pale-skinned people who’d trickled into the Stretch from Callow as well as those who had much more ancient Miezan roots were branded with the name of Duni.
The Soninke had some kind of religious grounds for despising them, I’d read – it was associated with the same reason they thought of the Taghreb as a lesser people – but the Taghreb simply hated them for being a visible reminder of the Miezan occupation. Over a thousand years later no living Taghreb had been actually seen a Miezan and the blood of the original settlers who’d remained in Stretch was so diluted as to have nothing in common with their ancestors, but the hatred remained. There had been Black Knights of Duni blood before my teacher and a few Chancellors. But no Warlock, and no one of those roots had ever held the Tower. The very idea was anathema to the beliefs of most of the old nobility.
I wasn’t sure what Black actually wanted, when it came down to it. I’d grown to know the person he presented himself at and even looked the monster he could be in the eye, but his intentions were still a mystery to me. With every passing day I felt more like the only dancer in the ballroom who didn’t know the tune or the steps, and there was only so long I was willing to allow that. I could still hear rope creak and necks break whenever I closed my eyes: those were the consequences, when I took a swing in the dark instead of planning out my actions carefully. Gods, I really wish I could have a bloody cup of wine at the moment. There seemed to be food displayed on a table by one of the cloth pillars, and I made my way towards it. Odds were it was just as poisoned as the wine, but I figured I’d at least look whether some people helped themselves to it before writing it off. There was already someone there sniffing around pork cutlets, as it happened. I recognized the silhouette even from a distance: I didn’t know a lot of orcs as tall as Juniper, aside from Hakram.
“Hellhound,” I greeted her, pleasantly surprised. “Didn’t think you’d go for this sort of thing.”
Juniper turned to eye me and then stabbed a cutlet with a fork, dropping it on an ornate gold plate.
“Someone from the family needs to show up at the important stuff,” she grunted. “Mom’s in Summerholm and Dad is taking care of my sisters up north so I got stuck doing it.”
I eyed the cutlet enviously as she took a bite.
“I don’t suppose those are safe?” I asked hopefully.
“Bishara told me what the antidote for tonight was,” Juniper replied with a smirk, flashing her fangs. “Only brought enough for one, I’m afraid. Should have planned this one better, Squire.”
“A common failure of hers, I’ve found,” a female voice casually butted in from behind me.
“The density of smugness in this room has suddenly intensified,” I announced without turning. “I wonder why that is?”
I turned towards the source of the comment and saw a pretty dark-skinned girl smiling at me in a way that never quite reached her eyes.
“Oh, Heiress,” I added cheerfully. “Hadn’t seen you there. Did you say something?”
Juniper snorted.
“It’s rather astonishing what passes as a sense of humour in the provinces,” someone else commented.
My eyes flicked to the pair of girls and the single boy my nemesis – one of them, anyway, and Gods when had I gotten to a point in my life where I’d need to look up the plural for the word nemesis? – had decided to bring along with her. The girls were Soninke, the boy Taghreb. Richly dressed, all of them, in shades of red and gold. Heiress’ long red dress brought a pang of envy from me, if only because of the way it fit around her curves perfectly. I’d yet to grow in any of those to speak of myself, much to my dismay. At least I don’t have to bind my breasts too hard under plate. Must be Hells on her, when she does. After a heartbeat to take them in, I addressed Heiress.
“You brought bookends,” I said amusedly. “I didn’t think that was something people actually did. Did you train them to say snappy phrases whenever you signal them? Go on, tug at your earlobe. I’m hoping it’ll make one of them strike a pose.”
“I suppose allowances need to be made for poor breeding,” one of the Soninke girls sighed. “I am Barika Unonti, heiress to the Ladyship of Unonti. You may kiss my hand, Wallerspawn.”
She extended a slender dark-skinned arm, palm facing downward. I eye her dubiously and she sneered. I sighed and my hand snapped out, closing around her little finger. Her eyes widened and she had to bite down a scream when I twisted sharply, breaking the bone without much effort. Soft hands, this one. I let go and smiled pleasantly at the lot of them.
“That’s your first warning,” I said. “You say another thing about breeding of any kind, or reference the fact I’m Callowan, and I’ll take something more drastic. An eye, maybe, since you little shits don’t see to be using them to recognize I am not somebody to fuck with .”
Unonti eyed me like I’d turned into a raving madwoman and something arcane in nature flickered around the other girl’s fingers – it felt like lightning, but she did not strike out. The boy’s hand dipped to the bastard sword at his hip and I made eye contact with him, still smiling.
“Draw it,” I said softly. “See where that gets you.”
His hand returned to his side, his face flushed with anger. I returned my attention to Heiress and something I couldn’t quite identify passed through her eyes.
“Barbarity,” she spoke calmly, “is all you are good for. I’m told you couldn’t even manage a win at the College without using your Name.”
“She used all the tools at her disposal,” a gravelly voice interjected. Juniper was onto a second cutlet, eyeing us with mild amusement. “That’s the purpose of the games: training for war. She’d have been an idiot not to use it.”
Well now, an unexpected display of support from the Hellhound. Hadn’t seen that coming.
“Is defeat all it takes to cow one of the Knightsbane’s blood?” Heiress spoke softly.
Juniper’s eyes turned hard and she bared her teeth, pushing herself up to her full height.
“The likes of you don’t get to say shit about my blood, Soninke. We still remember the Night of Red Winds,” she snarled. She rounded up on me immediately afterwards. “And you, don’t you look so pleased. I’m not taking sides in your little pissing contest – I just want you both to to leave your fucking politics out of my Legions. There’s more to this Empire than humans bickering over who gets to be in charge.”
And with that she dropped her plate on the table, walking away with a growl. Heiress smiled and met my eyes. Ah, she did that on purpose. Burned the bridge for me. But that means...
“You have now slighted me twice, Catherine Foundling,” the Soninke called out, and her voice carried.
It got the attention of people around us, and they watched with interest – a loose circle of watchers formed.
“Well,” I replied blandly, “you do take things so personally.”
“You have assaulted a guest under my protection,” Heiress announced. “Do you deny this?”
Mhm, how to qualify the feeling in my bones at that moment? Like a rabbit seeing the noose tighten around its throat. I could hardly deny breaking Unonti’s finger when it was still, in fact, broken. Besides Heiress had witnesses. Had I been baited? It was starting to look like I had been. Now time to see for what.
“Sometimes I see something particularly breakable and I just can’t help myself,” I shrugged, noting the girl in question was still cradling her finger and glaring at me.
“Talk like that will cost you your tongue, uchaffe ,” the boy snarled.
It meant filth, in Mthethwa. I ignored him anyway. He was just Heiress’ mouthpiece, allowing him to distract me would just let her gain more ground.
“You comport yourself like a thug and still expect to rack up honours and commands,” my rival spoke, gracefully circling around me in a stalk. “You have not proved worthy of the promotion you are being given.”
“And what promotion would that be?” I replied flatly. “The one where my company in the College named me captain by acclaim?”
Heiress dismissed that with a contemptuous flick of the wrist.
“I speak, of course, of the request made for your commission as the head of the Fifteenth Legion,” she said.
I kept my face carefully blank. That was the first I was hearing about that. As far as I knew, there was no Fifteenth Legion existing at the moment, or even a Fourteenth. More than that, there was only one person I knew who could have made that request. I resisted the urge to scan the crowd for Black.
“Think you’re the one who deserves it, do you?” I mocked.
Heiress’ smile widened.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” she purred. “What have you done, to deserve such an appointment?”
I felt the crowd move more than I saw it, the sea of aristocrats parting for the bigger fish. Dread Empress Malicia sauntered into the scene, elegance personified.
“My, my,” she murmured. “Such spirited youths we have in attendance tonight. What seems to be the problem, my dears?”
Heiress knelt, and for a heartbeat I almost regretted I couldn’t – wouldn’t – do the same. The display of deference might have been useful, and I could only envy how my rival was turning a mark of lower status into a useful tool.
“Your Majesty,” the Soninke girl spoke before rising back to her feet. “I was merely questioning the fitness of this... Callowan to command Praesi legionaries.”
There was a murmur of approval among the nobles. She really was going to milk my origins for all they was worth, wasn’t she? I’d never been more painfully aware that I had no friends in that crowd.
“The Callowan actually attends the War College, unlike you,” I noted flatly.
“An attendance that has not been marked by successes justifying such a rise in authority,” Heiress retorted smoothly.
“The contrary, if anything,” her Taghreb from earlier contributed with a sneer.
“Captain?”
The voice came from far behind me, to my left, but even at that distance Black’s voice was pitched perfectly to carry across the room.
“Lord?” Captain replied.
“If the boy interrupts again, snap his neck.”
“With pleasure.”
The boy went pale as a ghost, taking a half-step back. Times like these were when I was glad to have the Black Knight in my corner, cryptic jackass or not. Malicia laughed, and the entire world held its breath at the sight of it – it defused the tension that had risen in the crowd easy as snapping your fingers.
“You have a solution in mind, Heiress,” the Empress smiled. “I can see it in your eyes.”
“I do,” my rival agreed. “To keep things interesting, I would propose a wager.”
The Empress cast her an interested look. “You have my attention.”
“Another war game,” Heiress announced. “The College once held grand five-way melees, in older times. Better times. If Squire is to command, I would have her prove her worth. Isn’t that the way of our Legions, Your Majesty?”
My rival’s smile turned sardonic.
“One sin, one grace,” she quoted softly.
I felt my fingers clench around the pommel of my sword.
“And should, Gods forbid,” the Empress prompted, “our Squire lose?”
“I would ask that for the slights she has given me, Catherine Foundling’s appointment be made mine,” she replied, and triumph glinted in her eyes.
Oh, that bitch. She knows Rat Company is ranked last. And if Summerholm was any indication, she wouldn’t be above bribing my opponents to make sure I failed.
“That does sound interesting,” Malicia mused, tapping her chin with a slender finger as her eyes raked the crowd.
I could see the intellect behind the beautiful face weighing the advantages and disadvantages, what the throne could gain and lose by allowing this to proceed. A moment later, she returned her attention to us.
“It will be so,” the Empress spoke, and this time there was iron in her voice. “In two days hence, with the outlined stakes.”
“I thank Your Majesty for her wisdom, as always,” my rival said with a low bow.
And just like that, it was done. Malicia drifted away and I felt the eyes of the entire wretched flock on me, mocking. A few splatters of laughter came from different corners of the room. Heiress passed me by, pausing to lean into my ear.
“And all it cost me was a broken finger,” she murmured.
The grip on my sword strengthened until my knuckles were white, my face flushed with humiliation. She’d played me like a fiddle, and everybody in the room knew it. Some of them weren’t even bothering to be subtle about it, eyeing me like I was wearing a fool’s motley. I suppose I might as well have been, falling for it so easily. I strode out of the crowd, heading for the closest door I could see. It led straight into an antechamber much like the one I’d come in through, though night had fallen in the lapse of time since I’d first come in. The beginnings of a storm were whipping at the stone with ropes of water. I tightened my cloak around my shoulders and stepped into the rain.
I stood and let the water run down my face, unsure of why I’d thought it would make me feel better. Lightning struck in the distance, streaking the night sky for the barest fraction of a moment. I didn’t feel soothed by the beat of the rain on my head: just wet and cold and still so very humiliated. Ater was sprawled out in the distance around me, the labyrinth of stone dotted by torches all the way to those enormous walls and the famous nine black gates the City of Gates had been named for. I’m not sure how I knew Black had joined me up out on the balcony, but I knew it as sure as I knew my own breath. My Name, probably – the more I learned how to use it the more it changed me, broadened my perceptions in some indescribable way. My teacher came to stand by my side on the edge, standing still and silent like he hadn’t even noticed we were in the middle of a storm.
“They’re always going to get in my way, aren’t they?” I spoke into the silence. “Because I’m from Callow, because I’m a commoner, because I’m not one of them. They’re going to fight me on everything just because they can. Because every time I win when they think I should lose, it insults them.”
Black was silent for a long time.
“Yes,” he agreed, and there was a world of weariness in that single word.
“She beat me,” I said, knowing it to be the truth. “Without lifting a finger. A handful of sentences and she managed to make my every success meaningless in less time than it takes to boil a cup of tea.”
He didn’t move and lay his hand on my shoulder the way I’d seen some fathers do with their daughters. It had never been this way with the two of us, and it never would be. He would not prop me up when I fell, but I’d never expected that from him. I was the Squire and he was the Black Knight, and so instead of comforting me he stood by my side in the pouring rain, waiting for me to rise back up on my own the way I always had. I closed my eyes and raised my head, letting the water flow against my cheeks as I let out a shaky laugh. Lightning struck again and I screamed at the night sky, screamed until my throat was sore and my stomach hurt.
“How do I do it,” I panted afterwards, “how do I beat them?”
And I didn’t mean the other companies. I meant all those dagger-eyed nobles inside, just waiting for me to step wrong so I could be buried in a shallow grave. Black turned towards me and smiled the same wicked smile he had what seemed so long ago, when he’d walked into the palace in Laure and turned a man’s death sentence into a lesson for me. Lighting struck again, casting his pale face in a madman’s light.
“How does a villain deal with enemies? It’s the simplest thing in the world, Catherine. When they get in your way... step on them .”

Chapter 22: All According To

“ Diplomacy is the art of selling a deal you don’t want to people you don’t trust for reasons you won’t admit to.”
-Prokopia Lekapene, first and only Hierarch of the League of Free Cities

“No one goes through the front gate, Callow,” Ratface told me pityingly. “Not unless you have a Name or you’re in disfavour with the Empress.”
“That just bloody figures,” I muttered. “There’s another way in?”
“Try twenty,” Hakram gravelled. “Most of them through tunnels, but the nobles have some fancy gate in the back.”
I scowled, much to the amusement of my officers. I’d missed the communal breakfast for my company, as Black had let me sleep in up to Morning Bell before sending me back. Within moments of setting foot on the grounds my officers had come to ambush me: morning classes had been dismissed because of an announcement that was the talk of the College. A five-way melee had been ordered by the Empress herself, and the participants had been informed in the middle of the meal. We commandeered one of the classrooms to serve as our meeting hall, ushering out the handful of cadets studying inside. There were advantages to Captain rank, even when it was a purely collegial title. My lieutenants clustered together on the same bench as if I was about to start a lesson while Hakram propped himself up on what was likely the teacher’s desk: he was the only sergeant in attendance, since this was theoretically a senior officers’ meeting. No one objected to his presence, not that I would have given in if they had: I’d come to value his advice too much to care if him being around ruffled a few feathers.
“So,” Kilian spoke up, “a five-way melee. Been a while since they organized one of those. I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence that the people in it are the four top companies and little old us?”
I’d paid little attention to the lieutenant of the mage line, when I’d first come across her in Ratface’s tent, and hadn’t see much of her since. Red-haired and pale-skinned, she was an unusual sight this deep in the Wasteland. Likely there’s a story to that. Setting aside my curiosity for the moment I grimaced, leaning back against the desk with my arms folded over my chest.
“There’s other forces at play here,” I told them. “My name, as you might have guessed, is not Callow.”
Pickler cocked her head to the side.
“You’re not actually the Duchess of Daoine’s secret bastard offspring, are you?” she asked flatly.
“I-” I opened my mouth, closed it and then opened it again. “I genuinely don’t know how to respond to that.”
“That’s the most popular rumour as to why the Blackguards picked you up,” Ratface informed me in an irritatingly amused tone. “Ran away to Praes so you could learn war from the best. Very romantic stuff. Until the melee everyone was talking about it.”
“I am not, in fact, the hidden heir to the Duchy of Daoine,” I replied patiently, rubbing the bridge of my nose to stem the no-doubt oncoming headache.
Ratface cursed under his breath, handing a smug-looking Kilian a handful of silver denarii.
“Told you it was Name stuff,” she crowed.
“She doesn’t do magic and there’s already a Squire and Heiress running around,” he argued. “What Name could she possibly have?”
I cleared my throat.
“Yeah, funny thing about that,” I admitted.
Surprisingly, Nauk was the first one to get it.
“You were there when Lord Black hung the Governor, huh,” he grunted. “Well, that explains that.”
A ripple of surprise went through the officers. I’d have to remember not to underestimate how sharp the orc lieutenant was just because he was muscled like a bear and liked punching people in the face. It took more than brawn to make his rank.
“Long story short,” I continued, “I got baited by Heiress and now we’re in this mess. You have my apologies for that.”
“Ah, Imperial politics,” Ratface murmured. “Someone always gets screwed, and never the one who deserves it.”
He got sympathetic looks from the others at that and I made a mental note to get the whole story about why from Hakram later. My sergeant seemed to have an inside track into every story going on in the College and displayed absolutely no reluctance in feeding me the juiciest morsels.
“Something like that,” I agreed. “If Heiress continues to make the same kind of plays she has so far, we might have a company – or more – going for us from the beginning. Girl has deep pockets, and she’s not above bribing her way to victory.”
Pickler shook her head.
“Won’t work,” she assessed. “Not here.”
I raised an eyebrow. Hopefully she wasn’t about to make a speech on the strength of Praesi moral fibre, because so far I’d found the subject less than impressive.
“She’s right,” Ratface agreed. “Anyone takes a bribe for this and their career in the Legions is over.”
I hadn’t considered that, actually. True, my teacher could just put in a quiet word with some of his followers and kill someone’s career if he wanted to. Would he? After a heartbeat I decided he would. It’d be seen as Heiress meddling in his backyard, so he’d have to make an example.
“Even then,” I finally said, “expect sabotage. She wouldn’t have put forward those terms if she didn’t think she could affect the odds.”
“Eh,” Nauk shrugged. “As long as they keep that shit off the battlefield it doesn’t matter, does it? We just need to wreck everyone else.”
“He’s right. This isn’t the kind of war game that can be easily stacked, anyhow,” Pickler murmured. “Too many people in play, too many different priorities.”
The almost adoring look Nauk sent her after the comment forced me to bite down on a smile. I’d never really gotten to see the two of them interacting before but I had no trouble at all believing what Hakram had told me about the large orc having a thing for the goblin lieutenant.
“Which brings me to the point of this little chat,” I broke in after having smoothed my face out of any amusement. “There’s four other captains participating and I’m going to need anything on them you can give me.”
“You sure you need us to tell you anything about the Hellhound?” Kilian mused, dark eyes dancing with amusement. “From what I hear you whipped her pretty bad even without us around.”
I smiled but inside I was wondering about the most polite way to nip this in the bud. I didn’t want to antagonize one of my senior officers within the three days of my getting a command, but underestimating Juniper was a sure-fire way to get spanked so hard our grandkids would still be feeling the sting.
“She actually played me like a fiddle from start to finish,” I admitted, deciding that a little self-deprecation was the way to go. It wasn’t like I’d have to lie to get my point across, or even stretch the truth. “If I hadn’t blindsided her by having a Name she would have won – and she nearly did anyway.”
Ratface cleared his throat, breaking in.
“On the bright side, she’d unlikely to hold a grudge,” he mentioned. “She’ll want to win this one too badly to focus on us: she’ll go for victory, not payback.”
“We can focus on Juniper later,” I agreed. “I think I’ve got a decent read on her anyway, it’s the other three that are unknowns. I only know the name of the guy in charge of Fox Company – Captain Snatcher, right?”
Pickler nodded.
“He’s not going to be an immediate threat,” she spoke quietly, “but we can’t afford to give him time to dig in. He’s turned his entire company into defence specialists – made it mandatory for every single one of his cadets to take the sapper classes.”
Defence, huh? Not the flashiest of specialties but it sounded like it could get troublesome. Snatcher might not meet us on an open plain – tough since I had no idea what our battlefield would look like, I had no idea whether we’d even have one of those handy – but recent history was full of stories making it very clear that giving Legion sappers the time to set up surprises always ended nastily for the attacker.
“Anyone assaulting a position he’s fortified is going to take brutal losses,” Hakram gravelled from my side. “That might be enough to lay the groundwork for cooperation with another company, at least until he’s out.”
“Something to think about,” I mused. “What are we looking at, in terms of allies?”
“Captain Aisha Bishara is our best bet,” Ratface contributed immediately, “she runs Wolf Company.”
Bishara. I’d heard the name before – hadn’t Juniper mentioned it last night? There was a wave of snickering by the others. Even Pickler cracked a smile.
“I bet you’d like to ally with her, all right,” Nauk grinned.
I raised an eyebrow and sent Hakram a quizzical look.
“They were involved,” my sergeant informed me. “She dumped him a few months back and he’s still in denial.”
“She didn’t dump me, you green arse,” Ratface scowled. “We’re just on a break until we’re less busy with things.”
“Like I said,” Hakram continued with a sagely nod. “Still in denial.”
“All right, let’s table further mockery of Lieutenant Ratface for the moment,” I replied with a wry smile. “Who’s our last contender?”
“Captain Morok,” Kilian spoke up. “Head of Lizard Company. They’re second in company rankings, so he’ll be wanting the Hellhound’s head on a pike.”
“They’ve got a feud running?” I asked my officers.
“Not really,” Ratface said. “Well, maybe him – he takes things personally. They’re nearly head to head in points, so if he wins this and Juniper loses he’ll climb up to first rank. It’s his last year before graduation, so he won’t be getting another chance.”
“That’s something I can use,” I muttered, passing a hand through my hair.
I’d braided it into a semblance of order this morning, but I might have to cut it soon. It was getting too long, and it was awkward to wear under a legionary helmet. Hakram cleared his throat, which made him sound like he was retching out half a desert.
“Have you decided how many points we’re going to be bidding, Captain?” he asked.
I frowned.
“Bidding? That’s the first I’m hearing of this.”
Kilian folded her hands together. “Instructor Bolade said we’re supposed to bid a set amount of points. If we win the melee, we’ll gain that many – and if we lose, we’ll lose that many.”
“An exercise in calculating risk, she called it,” Pickler contributed quietly.
I could see how. Company scores, as I understood, were not the affair of a single batch of cadets: they were a legacy inherited by the next one. All scores were set back to zero every decade, but considering the last reset had been two years ago a large bid that failed could haunt a company for a very long time. Nobody wanted to leave a mess like that behind and be remembered as the captain that tried to bite off more than they could chew, screwing over the next two batches of cadets. Which reminded me, I still had no idea what Rat Company’s score actually was.
“I know we’re in the negatives,” I said, “but how far down are we? Seventeen, twenty?”
Ratface closed his eyes, his face flushed.
“Forty-two,” he muttered.
I kept my face smooth, almost grateful for the refresher course in doing exactly that the Court had turned out to be. Forty-two? A win in the war games was a two point gain, a defeat a two point loss. A draw was a one point gain for the defender and a one point loss for the attacker. I knew Ratface had lost twelve in a row and that Rat Company hadn’t been doing well even before that, but I hadn’t expected them to be stuck that deep down the well. It meant that even before the Taghreb had been put in charge the company had been losing far, far more often than they won. I could see the embarrassment in the face of my officers, the shame of having let their standing fall so far, but now was not the time for self-recrimination.
“That’s a relief,” I said.
Ratface blinked. “Pardon?” he asked.
I smiled. “With that kind of a handicap, I feel a lot more comfortable in using some of my more... debatable ideas.”
Nauk laughed, apparently delighted at the prospect. Pickler was hard to read, but Kilian looked like she was wondering whether to be insulted or amused.
“Hopefully it doesn’t involve jumping logs this time,” Hakram muttered. “That hasn’t been a winner for me so far.”
I shot my sergeant an amused look.
“I’m sure I could find a drill, if you’d like,” I mused. “Always be prepared, right?”
“I seem to recall having urgent duties anywhere but here,” the tall orc replied. “I really should go see to them.”
I snorted. “All right, dismissed. Get the company ready, we don’t have a lot of time.”
They slid off the bench one by one, saluting before going through the door. Hakram shot me a questioning look, but I gestured for him to go. It was Ratface’s shoulder I clasped to hold him back.
“So you’re our supply guy,” I said, drumming my fingers against the desk, leaning back against it.
Ratface shrugged, his handsome features highlighting the absurdity of his chosen name.
“Something like that,” he agreed. “Usually it’s the captain’s job to handle this stuff, but you have enough on your plate already.”
Didn’t I just?
“I got a sealed letter from the Headmistress this morning, before I got back to the College. It specifies what quantity of stuff we’re allowed to requisition for the melee, with caps for types of goblin munitions,” I told him. “I’m considering our options, and you know your way around the College stocks a lot better than I do.”
The olive-skinned boy straightened his back, interest piqued.
“You’ve got something particular in mind?” he asked.
“We’ll get to that later,” I replied. “When we passed the stocks earlier I noticed that they have a parchment nailed down with what they have available on it. I want you to send someone to copy it. I’m guessing the other captains are doing the same.”
The grey-eyed lieutenant raised an eyebrow.
“You want to know what the others will be taking into the melee,” he said.
“It should give us an idea of the way they intend to go at it,” I acknowledged. “But what I really want to know is if there’s a way to get anything without going through the College stocks.”
Ratface paused, eyeing me very carefully.
“Not... officially,” he said. “But I might know a few people. Why? It’d be a lot of effort, and we can’t take more than allowed onto the field. More than that, the others will notice we haven’t drawn as much from the stocks as we can – they’ll know something is up.”
“They will,” I noted, “unless we draw up to our limit until the last possible moment. Then we return our surplus, and...”
“They’ll go into the match with wrong information about what we’re carrying,” Ratface finished thoughtfully. “I’ll talk with my friends. Get back to me as soon as you have hard numbers.”
I nodded.
“Another two things,” I added. “Send someone to the College archives. I want everything you have on the old melees. There’s also records of more recent games, right?”
Ratface nodded.
“I want a record of every game Juniper was a captain for,” I grunted. “As quickly as possible.”
“Anything else?” the lieutenant asked drily.
“Well, since you asked,” I mused. “I’ll need a guide for the day. I have a few people to meet.”

—

It seemed that having a vicious sense of humour might be a widespread Praesi trait instead of just my teacher’s: the guide Ratface had assigned me was Robber.
“He’ll be easy to recognize, Cap,” the goblin said. “Just look for the ugliest orc in the training yard, can’t miss him.”
The grounds we were headed to weren’t inside the College, though they were close. It was apparently possible to reserve them for a bell if you signed up with one of the instructors, and aside from First Company the Lizards were the company whose name came most often on the list.
“Is that so,” I said neutrally.
“Now, as is well known,” Robber told me in a tone implying he was about to impart a fundamental truth of life, “orcs are the ugliest creatures in Creation as well as the dumbest. But Morok is in a class in and of himself, as is only fitting for a captain. His face has been known to scare goats and make children cry.”
“Isn’t Hakram one of your friends?” I asked mildly. “And, you know, an orc.”
“He’s an honorary goblin,” the yellow-eyed sergeant replied without missing a beat. “One of these days I’ll get around to adopting him into the Rock Breaker tribe as my ugly but still-beloved son.”
I must have been a bad person, deep down, because I actually found the little shit kind of funny. Regardless, we’d arrived. A wall about a man’s height encircled the yard, though I could hear the sound of metal against metal coming from inside. A pair of human cadets flanked the main entrance, eyeing us distrustfully. Or not actually us , I noticed after a moment. They were both glaring at Robber.
“What did you do?” I asked with a sigh.
“Nothing,” the goblin sergeant protested.
“I’m sure those rats got into our dormitory all by themselves,” a dark-skinned boy said through gritted teeth.
“They must have heard you lot talking shit about Rat Company and gotten confused,” the small goblin grinned maliciously. “You know how small-brained creatures get, I’m sure.”
The other cadet, Soninke as well, let her hand drop to her sword.
“You utter prick,” she snarled. “One of them bit my-”
I cleared my throat, loudly. “Robber, go wait down the street. Cadets, I’m Captain Callow. I’d like to talk with Captain Morok.”
They exchanged looks. “He said-” the boy started.
“A visit by another Captain qualifies,” the girl grunted. “You might have to wait until he’s done, though.”
I nodded and granted Robber a steady look.
“Try not to get stabbed, Sergeant,” I ordered.
I was halfway through the doorway when I heard him call back “no promises!” I bit my cheek so I wouldn’t smile. The inside of the yard was beaten earth with weapon racks propped against the walls, though lines of ground chalk had been traced to form some patterns I vaguely recognized from my lectures on the Legions. Formation drills. There were benches between the racks and most of the hundred or so legionaries inside were sitting on them, watching two people fight in the middle of the yard.
One was a Taghreb girl, the largest I’d seen since Captain – meaty and thick-shouldered where her people were usually slight of frame. The other, who was currently hammering at her shield with his own, was the ugliest orc I’d ever seen. Godsdamnit, Robber. He wasn’t wearing his helmet so I could see from the occasional grin that his teeth were yellowish. His eyes were dark and deep-set, and I couldn’t help but notice he had a large brownish mole just above his lip that was almost fascinatingly hideous. Like most orcs Captain Morok was heavily-muscled, but where the likes of Hakram and Nauk were in perfect shape he had something a pot-belly.
Not that it seemed to be hindering him any: he was winning the fight, and pretty handily. Slower than Juniper, I assessed, and his movements were kind of sloppy. But the girl he was fighting looked like she was getting kicked by a horse every time he hit her, and he battered her defence down until she was kneeling in the dirt. There was a cheer when he helped her up afterwards, and I leaned against the wall as another legionary walked up to the pair. They talked, too far away for me to overhear, and Morok glanced in my direction. Spitting on the ground, he shoved his sword and shield in the cadet’s hands before beginning to walk towards me.
“Captain fucking Callow, is it?” he leered, passing me by to pick up a water skin off a bench.
Popping off the cork, he took a long swallow – some of the water trickled off his lips onto his chin, mixing with the sweat already there.
“That’s me,” I agreed.
“You’re a skinny thing, for the heiress to Daoine,” he snorted.
“This is going to be worse than the goblinfire, isn’t it?” I sighed.
The captain’s eyes sharpened. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” I grunted. “No relation to Duchess Kegan, it’s just a rumour.”
“Sure it is,” he smirked.
It occurred to me then that he was being rude on purpose. Pushing me to see how I’d react, like I’d once done to fighters in the Pit. The thought was comforting: I might have been a long way from home, but some things stayed the same. And I know how to deal with his type.
“So, you’re Juniper’s runner-up,” I mused. “Must sting, that she whipped your lot like children when Rat Company pulled off a win.”
Morok smiled, showing off yellow but still very sharp fangs.
“Did your little helper Ratface tell you what I did to your company last time we fought?” he asked. “Didn’t even use munitions and we still took the fort. First time it ever happened, I’m told.”
I now had no problem whatsoever understanding why Robber had flooded their dormitory with disease-carrying rodents. Pushing down the flash of anger, I raised a hand in peace.
“We could do this all day,” I acknowledged, “but we’ve got better things to do.”
“ I do, anyway,” Morok snickered. “So why the fuck are you here, greenie?”
“Because I beat Juniper,” I stated flatly. “And she’s not the kind of person that takes that lying down.”
The other captain wiggled his hairless brows in a thoroughly horrifying gesture.
“You and the Hellhound lying down, now there’s an image,” he said.
Ripping out one of his teeth and jamming it in that fat ugly mole wouldn’t help me, I told myself. Id’t be deeply satisfying, but it wouldn’t help me.
“You’re second in rankings,” I gritted out. “If anyone else wants a shot at her, it’s you.”
Morok shrugged.
“Could be,” he said. “What’s that got to do with you?”
I narrowed my eyes. He wasn’t an idiot – he wouldn’t be a close second in company scores if that was the case. But he was deliberately ignoring the offer I’d implied. Why? My mind raced, and the answer I settled on had me tightening my lips. He thinks we’ll weaken First Company just enough for him to pick them off afterwards. He’s not interested in working together, he just wants us to tear at each other so his position’s stronger regardless of the result. Hellgods, I was sick of being used as a piece in other people’s games.
“She’d beat us,” I admitted. It was the truth: in a straight fight, First Company would walk over us like we were a freshly-paved Miezan road. “But Morok, here’s the thing: if I’m going down, I’m taking everyone else with me.”
The fat orc eyed me cautiously.
“I’m not getting into a fight I can’t win,” I said. “So we’ll surrender – and before getting the Hells off that field, I’ll clap her on the back and hand her all our munitions.”
He only half-managed to suppress his wince. Fighting First Company was one thing, but fighting a First Company at full strength with twice the amount of goblin munitions? There wasn’t a force on the field that’d be able to take Juniper then, and we both knew who she’d be headed for.
“It’d take someone with no pride to flop belly-up like that,” he growled.
I shrugged.
“I’m Callowan, Morok,” I spoke in Kharsum. “I’ve spent my entire life with an Imperial boot pushing down on my throat. How proud do you really think I am?”
The captain spat again, the fat gob of saliva coming dangerously close to my boots.
“So we ream her together,” he conceded in the same tongue. “But that’s all, Callow. You’re not riding this one on my coattails. The moment we withdraw from the field, the truce is done.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” I agreed.
I offered up my arm. After a moment, he clasped it.

—

I’d learned from the last trip and left Robber at a street corner close by.
“Tea?”
Captain Aisha Bishara was taller than me, I was chagrined to notice. Was it too much to ask to meet at least one military officer that was shorter? One that wasn’t a goblin, anyway.
“Please,” I replied.
She was rather pretty, in that way some Taghreb were. With a lovely heart-shaped face, tanned skin and wide dark eyes, I could easily see how she would have caught Ratface’s eye. Her hair was cut in short bob, though strictly speaking it was still longer than Legion regulations allowed. Then again, so’s mine. Like Morok she’d been rather easy to find: it was common knowledge she had a private room set aside in the Sword and Cup for her personal use. The busy tavern wasn’t the kind of place I would have expected a girl of her apparently noble origins to adopt as her unofficial headquarters, but then I supposed that if she’d been the kind of person who cared for that stuff she would never have gone to the College in the first place. Aisha poured for both of us, elegantly setting aside the porcelain tea cup when she was done. Hospitality was a point of pride for the Taghreb, I remembered Captain telling me. An old tradition from before the days the first Miezan galley had ever reached the Wasteland’s shore, and one that was central to the southern culture in many respects.
“Captain Callow,” the dark-eyed girl mused. “So you’re Ratface’s replacement.”
I felt a flicker of unease at that, though it never reached my face. Her involvement with the boy I’d replaced as captain of Rat Company had been mostly a source of amusement so far, but it occurred to me for the first time that she might have an issue with me replacing her – former? – paramour.
“So they keep telling me,” I said prudently. “Is it going to be an issue?”
She blinked, though that was the only sign of surprise she gave. That was what I hated about dealing with Praesi: you could dump a bucket full of sheep heads on one’s table and you wouldn’t get much more than a frown out of them. Trying to get a read on the nobility of the Wasteland was like trying to dry a godsdamned lake.
“Why would – Hakram , you gossipy bitch,” she cursed in a low voice.
I hid a grin. In other circumstances I might have tried to defend my favourite minion but he really was a gossip. Aisha let out a frustrated sigh.
“Look, Callow,” she addressed me flatly. “If he was cut out for that kind of command the Rats wouldn’t have lost as much as they did. It was right for him to be replaced. One sin, one grace.”
The last four words she’d said with the fervour of a woman at prayer, which would have gotten a pained grimace out of me if I weren’t already working on keeping my expression neutral. I was as good as apprenticed to the man who’d introduced that philosophy to the Legions, and that was why I could grasp how utterly terrifying it was. Black had indoctrinated the better part of a generation into thinking that morality was irrelevant to the battlefield: the only things that mattered when the swords came out were victory and defeat. When the next war came, and I had no doubt that one was coming, there would no blundering generals at the head of the Legions. The coming generation of Evil would not fall apart on its own. They’ve been taught that winning matters more than anything else, and they’re not above breaking the world if that’s the only way to own it.
“So I’ve heard,” I muttered.
“But I doubt you came to speak about my love life, Callow,” Aisha said pleasantly. “What is it you actually want?”
Ah, and now came the tricky part. Time to get my head in the game.
“I’m more interested in talking about what you want, Aisha,” I replied with a smile. “I’ve been keeping an eye on the stocks, you see.”
“Quick learner,” the dark-eyed girl said approvingly. “If you’ve been doing that, though, you know your company isn’t the one I’m after.”
Her grabbing as many siege munitions as she could had made that plain enough, true.
“That’s what I’m here about, to tell you the truth,” I told her, sipping at my tea for the first time. Huh, that was the first time I ever tasted that blend – it wasn’t the stuff Praesi usually served. Imported from the Senrima, maybe? That had to cost a fortune. “I’m not keen on letting Snatcher build his walls while the rest of us fight it out.”
Aisha smiled.
“Well now, Captain Callow,” she purred. “It seems like we have a common interest.”
I put down my teacup and my smile broadened.
“Let us talk business, then,” I replied in Taghrebi.

—

After touching base with my officers I’d gone back to Black for my usual lesson and stayed around afterwards, electing to remain in the comfortable solar he’d appropriated in central Ater instead of returning to the College.
“I’ve read through all the reports on games Juniper commanded a company in,” I said after a few hours of silence.
“And?”
I sighed, reaching for the cup of wine he’d poured me earlier and taking a sip.
“She doesn’t make mistakes,” I informed my teacher after swallowing. “Every time she had the necessary information, the calls she made were perfect.”
Black seemed more amused by that than sympathetic.
“Maybe I should have made her my Squire then,” he spoke airily.
I scowled at the bastard.
“You know people only laugh at your jokes because they’re scared of you right?”
He snorted. “I’m assuming you have a point, apart from your apparently upcoming nuptials with Istrid’s daughter.”
I sneered at him as best I could, though compared to the nobility he so often had to deal with I was an amateur at the art. I’d never found orcs particularly attractive, which I’d been informed was a shared opinion from their side of the wall.
“How do you beat someone who always makes the right choices?” I finally asked him.
Morok I could deal with – I’d faced men like him before, fought and beat them. Aisha was trickier, but her focus on Snatcher made it possible. And Snatcher? Well, I was keeping quiet on my way to deal with him. Some cards needed to stay face down until the very last moment. But Juniper? I’d tried to come up with something to trump the Hellhound and come up empty.
In a straight-up fight she’d crush me, I knew that much. She had more command experience, a formal education in tactics and she’d shaped First Company into a heavy combat force my own legionaries would be unable to deal with. Which was fine, anyway: I’d never been all that fond of straight-up fights. I could scrap with the best of them, sure, but there was always someone who was bigger or better at taking hits. The problem was that every single dirty trick I’d manage to think of was present in one of those reports, and she had beaten every single one of them .
Her only defeat on record was the one I’d inflicted on her, and it had been a fluke. She’d led me around by the nose the whole time and if she’d suspected I had a Name she might very well have managed to beat me even if I’d somehow managed to tap in my power. A power I couldn’t even count on, anyway, since I hadn’t managed to use my Name since the last game – and not for lack of trying. Godsdamned Lone Swordsman.
“Ah,” Black hummed. “She’s that kind of an opponent, then.”
“It’s kind of hateful how good she is at this,” I admitted.
“I’ve had Grem One-Eye under my command for twenty years, Catherine,” he told me dryly. “I can certainly empathize with the feeling.”
That was a pretty jarring admission, coming from a man I’d been told had once toppled the king of one of the Free Cities using only a rowboat, a donkey and a pair of broken shovels. There were stories about Marshall One-Eye too, of course – the Wall had stood firm against the greenskin clans for centuries before he’d somehow managed to take all three of the forts the same night – but they were nothing compared to the outrageous ones they told about the Black Knight. He smiled at me, once again managing to read me like a book despite my best efforts.
“There’s always someone better,” he said. “Nonetheless, in your particular situation there’s one thing that should do the trick.”
I raised an eyebrow, not savouring the suspense as much as he clearly was.
“Are you going to do that thing where you give me cryptic advice that later comes in useful at a critical moment?” I asked, trying to convey how irritating that particular habit was through my tone.
Black took a sip from his cup, though not quickly enough to hide that he’d actually been a little offended by that. I tried not to be openly amused, though not very hard.
“Well not now , I’m not,” he muttered. “Fine, you killjoy. Here’s your advice: cheat.”
I eyed him sceptically from across the table.
“So who do I talk to, to trade you in for a better mentor?” I asked.
“There’s no attributed Imperial bureau for uppity Squires, unfortunately,” he sneered at me.
I grinned, smothering a laugh, and even the cold fish that was my teacher deigned to offer a smile to the world.
“So,” I said after a moment. “Cheating, huh. I don’t suppose you’d care to elaborate on that?”
“War games are, ultimately, still games,” he murmured over the rim of his cup. “You’re still trying to win according to the rules, when you should be trying to win despite them.”
I leaned back into my comfortable seat, letting myself enjoy the warmth of the fire and the bellyful of wine as I closed my eyes. The both of us let silence fall over the room as we descended into our own thoughts. How do you beat someone you can’t beat? I asked myself . My teacher had long left the room when I felt a savage smile stretch my lips. There was a way, maybe. It was underhanded and unfair, not to mention a little immoral around the edges, but then I was a villain wasn’t I?
I supposed it was about time I started acting like one.

Chapter 23: Morok’s Plan

“ Trust is the victory of sentiment over reason.”
-Extract from the personal memoirs of Dread Emperor Terribilis II

The High Lord of Kahtan was a skilled general, Black was willing to admit.
It was unfortunate those skills were being used against him but expecting fairness of the world was to pave a road towards bitterness. The Taghreb aristocrat had learned the correct lesson from the Burning Cliffs: he’d avoided the narrow passes west of Okoro, taking Chancellor’s army through the flat expanse of Jugomo’s Folly instead. There would be no drowning the superior forces in goblinfire this time, not that he’d expected the trick to work twice. That was fine. Another three clans had been come over to their side in the aftermath of the last victory, bringing them up to a little under four thousand soldiers. Though ‘soldiers’ was a generous term to use for the newly arrived orcs, truth be told. Unlike Grem’s Howling Wolves and Istrid’s Red Shields there was little discipline to these fresh arrivals. Grem had told him in private they’d been on the losing side of the constant raids between the Clans. By throwing their lot in with Dread Empress Malicia they thought to better their fortunes. They might just accomplish that, should this day not end in crushing defeat.

“ I have them,” Warlock laughed suddenly. “A Wolofite warding scheme, really? Nobody’s bothered to use those since the Second Crusade. All blood and no finesse.”

Wekesa had half a dozen water bowls placed in a loose circle around him, the candles in between casting shaky light on the images that had appeared over the surface of the liquid. Black allowed a sharp smile to flicker across his face. High Lord Mawasi might have been a vigilant man, but his mages were subpar. That would come back to haunt him. Istrid crouched by one of the bowls, ignoring Warlock’s warning look, and squinted at the shapes inside.

“ You were right, Grem,” she grunted. “They split in four.”

One-Eye showed no sign of surprise. Black had yet to see the orc’s tactical judgement fail and doubted he ever would.

“ Mawasi wants to be able to concentrate his forces easily when they make contact,” he gravelled. “If they manage it, we’ll lose.”

Chancellor had sent twelve thousand killers into the Steppes to end what the nobility had taken to calling the Whore’s Rebellion. Not that Malicia was actually with them: she’d gone to Thalassina to talk the ruling High Lady into supporting them.

“ None of the commanders will be willing to commit to a real fight until the others are there,” Ranker murmured, her slight shape stirring in the shadows. Even young as the goblin was, her face was already creased. “The High Lord will have forbidden it.”

Black knuckled an old denarii with Dread Empress Vindictive’s face on it, allowing the silver to spin between his fingers.

“ They will,” the green-eyed man said calmly. “Chancellor made a mistake, when he put a price on my head.”

Whoever killed the Black Knight would be granted gold enough for a dozen kings as well as a noble title, such was the word out of Ater. The kind of price men would kill for. The kind of price men would die for – and Black fully intended to see this done.

“ We start with the eastern division,” he told the others.

One-Eye frowned. “You want to bait them. With what?”

Black finished spinning the coin with a theatrical flick of the wrist, snatching away the silver.

“ What they want most, right now,” he replied. “My head.”

I woke up in Rat Company’s dormitory with a gasp.
The dream had been weaker that the last, the connection not as deep: the ghostly sensations I’d felt in the wake of the other time were missing. Was it because I’d accidentally weakened my Name, or had it always been supposed to be this way? Not for the first time, I wished Black wasn’t so tight-lipped on the subject of Roles. He’d already taught me plenty on the history of Praesi Names and even a few tricks about putting heroes down, but when it came to my own Name he remained frustratingly vague. No doubt there was a reason for it, but that didn’t make it any less irritating. The dreams were meant to teach me lessons, that much I’d divined on my own. Drawing from the experiences of my predecessor, it showed his victories so that I could emulate the ways that had worked and avoid those that hadn’t. So what was this one meant to teach me? Defeat in detail, but I’d already known that was the only way I could win the melee. That Warlock could break through scrying wards was an interesting tidbit I’d have to ask Lieutenant Kilian about, but I had a feeling it was related to his Name: it was dubious at best my own mages would be able to replicate the feat.

My head , Black had said. That was where the memory had ended. He’d used the greed of his opponents to bait them into making an ill-advised move. While I’d never gone over the battle with my teacher as we’d done for some others, it was one of the most famous engagements of the civil war: the Battle of the Four Defeats was in every history book that covered the time period, often mentioned as the point where the war started to turn in Dread Empress Malicia’s favour. So how could I apply this to my situation? I pushed my covers aside and sat up in the cot, surrounded by still-sleeping cadets. Dawn had yet to rise. My mind was still sleep-addled and slow, and as I rubbed my eyes I came to the conclusion that this was n ot something I was going to figure until I was more than half-awake.

I slipped out of the bunk and picked up the pair of trousers I’d lazily dropped next to it last night. Not folding my clothes and neatly sliding them in the exact space assigned for them was technically against Legion regulations, but who was going to report me? Every company had two dorms assigned, one for each gender. Which dorm you got changed according to your ranking, meaning that instead of beds and a nice view Rat Company got cots and a former warehouse that still smelled vaguely like olive oil. The part for women was the same size as the one for men, though it wasn’t full. A cursory look at the company’s rolls had told me that about four in ten of my soldiers were women, which was actually slightly under the average for the College. Forcing myself awake, I ran a hand along the ugly red scar that the Lone Swordsman had left me. The skin was strangely sensitive, and sometimes it felt like if I exerted myself too much it would open up again. Sighing, I picked up a roll of cloth and bound my chest. Slipping on a loose cloth shirt over it, I left the dorms before I could wake up anyone. My legionaries would need their sleep.

There was a well in the plaza just outside, easy to make out even in the half-light preceding dawn. Someone was already using it, to my surprise. A half-naked Ratface pulled up the bucket and splashed his face with water as I approached. He turned when I got close, nodding a silent greeting to me.

“ Do you mind?” I asked, pointing at the bucket and scrupulously not looking at his muscled chest.

It would be inappropriate to ogle one of my subordinates , I reminded myself. Even if it’s very easy to imagine rivulets of water running down to...

“ Go ahead,” he replied after flicking the water off his shoulders.

I sharply put the thoughts aside, rinsing my face as I got back my bearings.

“ I got word from my friends,” the lieutenant said as he sat on the edge of the well. “We’ve got the munitions ready for the swap.”

“ Good,” I grunted back. “Did Snatcher finally pick his load?”

There were two official munition templates for a company as taught in the College. The first was commonly known as “Siege”, heavy on sharpers and demolition charges. Aisha had claimed one within hours of the melee was announced. The second was called “Field” and was broader in scope, though it had a proportionally large amount of smokers. Hakram had informed me that several manoeuvres were taught in the classroom related to their use, but I hadn’t had the time to look into them. Both Juniper and Morok had gone that route.

“ Yeah. He didn’t use one of the templates, though,” Ratface replied. “Brightsticks and demolition charges, mostly, though there’s a few smokers as well. He’s up to something.”

“ He’s a goblin,” I murmured. “They’re always up to something.”

He shot me an amused look but said nothing. Silence reigned for a few moments and it was starting to get awkward when I cleared my throat.

“ I have a question,” I said. “It’s a little personal, though, so feel free to tell me to bugger off it you want.”

The Taghreb boy raised an eyebrow.

“ I’m all ears,” he said.

“ Why Ratface?” I asked. “I know you get to pick the name you enrol under, but it seems a little...”

“ Insulting?” he replied with faint smile. “That’s the point.”

The lieutenant let out a long breath.

“ It’s not like half the College doesn’t know the story already,” he finally spoke. “I”m a bastard, Callow.”

I opened my mouth, but he turned sharp eyes in my direction.

“ I’ve already heard all the jokes, so spare me,” he said.

“ No idea what you’re talking about,” I lied.

Ratface rolled his eyes, not seeming all that offended.

“ My father’s one of the lords sworn to Kahtan. Old family, one of the tribes from before the Miezans,” he continued. “He married late and slept around before he did – hence my existence.”

I grimaced. With a beginning like that it was hard to imagine the story ending well.

“ I had a pretty easy childhood, all things considered,” he mused. “Not like I ever lacked for anything. But eventually Father married and spawned a legitimate heir.”

“ And that put you in an awkward position,” I murmured.

“ My half-sister is ten. Sweet girl, spends a lot of time braiding her pet goat,” he shrugged. “I don’t blame her for any of this. Father eventually decided to simplify the line of succession and one night I woke up to a knife in my back.”

He half-turned, showing me a short crescent mark just a few inches away from his spine.

“ The soldier botched the job,” he grimaced. “And panicked when I woke up. I managed to get away, stole enough from the vault to buy my way into a caravan and pay for my first year of tuition here.”

It would have been indiscreet to ask how he’d paid for the other years, so I held my tongue.

“ Doesn’t explain why you picked Ratface, though,” I pointed out.

The Taghreb smiled coldly.

“ I’m told I’m the spitting image of my father at the same age,” he replied.

I laughed and he cracked a much warmer smile.

“ Come on, Callow,” he said. “Let’s grab something to eat. Only a few hours left until they want us ready for the game, and I’m not marching to wherever the Hells we’re going on an empty stomach.”

I stood in the middle of a rocky plain with no recollection of how I’d gotten there.

Dusk was already beginning to darken the sky. Behind me Rat Company was spread out in a marching column – I could see the tracks indicating we’d walked here, but I couldn’t remember actually doing it. To the west the rocks rose in a slope and led into a canyon I could barely make out. There was a forest of tall dragon trees and ferns to the north, getting progressively thicker. The east was closer to what I’d been told to expect of the Wasteland, badlands of silt and shale forming tall rocky outcroppings that cut my line of sight. I felt a little woozy and there was a small cut on the palm of my hand, already mostly healed: I got a strange sensation from it, like a bee buzzing in the back of my head. I took me a moment to recognize the feeling. Blood magic . I swore under my breath. So someone fucked with my memories. I strode over to my legionaries who were still standing around with blank expressions, though by the time I got close some of them were already snapping out of it. I picked out Hakram near the head of the column – he was still in a trance, so I slapped him across the face. His eyes snapped back into focus and he let out a bestial snarl, the rage only leaving his expression when he realized I was the one standing in front of him.

“ Callow?” he gravelled. “Where are we?”

“ I have no idea,” I admitted. “Do you remember how we got here?”

The tall orc frowned. “No,” he replied. “And this thing is itching like you wouldn’t believe.”

He showed me his forearm, where a small cut had also been made. Not only me, then.

“ Last thing I remember is...” he trailed off.

I forced my mind to focus. “When we shed blood on the tablet,” I finished.

The College instructors had us assemble in front of a large stone tablet, a different one for every company, and drip a few drops of blood on it. The Headmistress had mentioned it was intended to recreate the fog of war, though she hadn’t elaborated. After that it was a blank until just now.

“ They sealed our memories,” I grunted. “So we don’t know where we are or where the other companies are starting from.”

“ Not entirely true,” a voice intervened softly.

Lieutenant Pickler walked up to us, stride unhurried. In her hand she held a rolled up leather scroll with a broken seal. I picked out crossed swords that were the emblem of the College on the wax pieces, something I shouldn’t have been able to do in the gloom. Ah, getting the sight back . About time my Name started making itself useful again.

“ Map?” I asked bluntly.

Pickled nodded. “Our starting position is marked, though only ours.”

I accepted the offered scroll and took a look at the inked map. We were in the southernmost part of the area, it seemed. A few miles of flat ground behind us, with the canyon I’d glimpsed earlier snaking its way in an arc towards the northern end. The forest extended for longer than I would have guessed, though eventually it led into another wide plain. The badlands apparently covered the entire eastern half of our battlefield, a labyrinth of hills and depressions. If one of the companies isn’t setting up fortifications somewhere in there as of this moment, I’ll eat my helmet. Hakram leaned over my shoulder to take a look with almost insulting ease. Hadn’t one of the Empresses outlawed being taller than her? Maybe it was time to start looking into that.

“ We have the worst starting position,” my sergeant assessed bluntly.

He was right. No terrain to fortify unless we marched somewhere else in the dark, which would leave us exhausted tomorrow. Any company with a scout on higher ground would be able to find us within moments, and with the way goblins saw in the dark even nightfall wouldn’t be enough to cover us. This doesn’t feel like a coincidence , I grimaced. Could Heiress have meddled with the position I was assigned? I couldn’t remember the process at the moment, so it was hard to tell. Doesn’t matter. Can’t change the facts now. It was impossible for me to implement the deals I’d made where we currently were, regardless, which meant we’d have to march past nightfall. Close to the forest.

“ Lieutenant Pickler, prepare a scouting tenth,” I ordered. “We’re going north as quickly as we can.”

Surprise flickered across the smooth-skinned goblin’s face, but her amber eyes remained calm. She saluted and went to attend her troops. Hakram waited until she was gone before clearing his throat.

“ Is that wise?” he asked. “We’re carrying enough sudis to make a fortified camp here. If we carry them through a forced march we’ll be slower tomorrow.”

The pair of large wooden stakes carried by every one of my legionaries would start weighing heavy on them after a day’s march, well-drilled or not. He was correct in that. But we couldn’t afford to be where we currently were when dawn came. I took off my helmet and passed a hand through my hair, the pony tail it was kept in unpleasantly soaked with sweat.

“ We need to meet up with Morok as quickly as possible,” I told him. “Any company but Snatcher’s catches us on an open plain and we’re done for.”

“ You sure we can trust him?” my sergeant gravelled. “He’s Blackspear Clan, Callow. They’ve never made a pact they didn’t break.”

“ I wouldn’t trust him with a handful of coppers, Hakram,” I admitted. “But I’ve got a decent read on what he wants right now. Not sure I can answer for what he’ll be thinking in two days, though.”

That was my largest problem at the moment: what I’d planned was time-sensitive. Black had once told me that the great weakness of plans with several stages was the difficulty of getting the timing right. Miss the window of opportunity for one stage due to unexpected complications and the whole thing would come tumbling down. Usually on your head, with the way villain’s luck went. Better to use several small schemes to stack the odds than a single complicated one giving you a marginal chance at victory , he’d said. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to play the game that way. The odds were stacked against us too badly for a handful of quick tricks to be able to see the company through the fights. I needed to move quickly enough that the circumstances I’d made my pacts in hadn’t changed, because if they did then this was going to turn into an actual melee and Rat Company was basically fucked.

“ Get our line moving, Sergeant, we’re taking the lead,” I ordered. “Double-time. If we want to win this, we’re going to have to pay the long price for it.”

He frowned. “Long price?”

I blinked in surprise. Would have thought that one made it across the border.

“ Callowan expression,” I explained. “A long price is one you have to keep paying for. People use it to mean paying unpleasant dues.”

“ Long price, huh,” he grunted thoughtfully. “Well it’ll be a long night, I’ll give you that.”

Our pace was slower than I would have liked, and became slower still when night fell.

Hakram kept my line steady while we moved forward in the marching order I’d let him organize. He’d used what was apparently the standard for Legion expeditions in hostile territory: regulars in the front, sappers and mages in the middle, then a line of regulars in the back again. The line behind the second regulars, Nauk’s, was a little different. They were called heavies: their armour was plate rather than chain mail, and their shields much thicker. I’d taken the time yesterday to inquire what the companies we were up against had in their roster, and been left rather troubled by the answers.

Snatcher’s Fox Company was in some ways the least dangerous, as almost half of his forces were goblins. Shield wall against shield wall even my soldiers would wreck them. But he had the highest concentration of crossbowmen in the College, and his legionaries always fought from behind fortifications. Aisha and her Wolf Company had borrowed from old Taghreb tactics, putting mobility above all else. They had no heavies at all, but they’d pulled off outrageous victories by hitting the opponent out of nowhere. Lately she’d been drilling her soldiers in siege tactics, determined to take third place in the rankings from Snatcher.

If the Wolves were all about swiftness, then Lizard Company was about brutal, unrelenting might. Morok’s entire force, save for a tenth of mages, was made of heavies. He had no legionaries formally trained as sappers, which would have made assaulting fortified positions hard if not for his trump card: he had a tenth of ogres. Fifteen feet tall and clad in a small mountain of steel, they were living battering rams that used massive war hammers. First Company was an all-rounder, the traditional company composition for the College. A line of sappers, a line of mages, two of regulars and one of heavies.

The same as us, except they’d won every battle they’d been in instead of accumulate defeats like Rat Company. Ratface had outright admitted to me that he’d modelled the Rats after Juniper’s company, hoping to recapture some of her success. Doomed to failure, that. It works for Juniper because she’s at her most effective when she has a broad toolbox: she uses different lines to solve different problems. But unless you have someone like Juniper giving the orders, all you have is a company with no real strong point. No weak one, either, but that’s not enough to beat an opponent that knows what they’re doing.

It was hard to tell how long it took us to make it close to the woods. Several hours, at least but how far past midnight we were I had no idea. Robber spent most of the march scuttling about with our scouts, regularly checking in to tell me there was no sign of anyone else. Perhaps the only saving grace of our starting position was that it would be next to impossible for any of the other captains to ambush us. Plenty of ground to see them coming, and while Robber’s tenth was not meant to be a scouting one they’d been used for that purpose often enough to pick up the basics. I had us halt in sight of the canyon’s entrance, near the beginning of the forest. My legionaries dropped their packs to the ground with vocal relief. The break was a short one, though. I had my senior officers in council within moments.

“ We should back further away from the canyon,” Ratface opened bluntly. “Or else go entirely into it.”

“ Not inside,” Pickler immediately replied. “I could bring that thing down on our heads with an hour’s work, and so could most of the other companies. We should move, though. Too easy to sneak up on us here.”

“ Callow ain’t an idiot,” Nauk grunted. “You got a reason for this, Cap?”

Pickler graced him with a surprised look, apparently unused to disagreement from the large orc.

“ We’re staying here,” I spoke flatly. “This isn’t a mistake, I chose this place specifically.”

Hakram eyed me carefully.

“ We’re baiting someone,” he guessed.

I nodded. “We’re waiting on Morok before moving out, so we’ll make camp here. Half-watches for the night. That aside, Kilian, how far up can you shoot a fireball?”

The redhead blinked in surprise. Every mage cadet had to be able to cast two spells by the end of their first year: basic field healing and a standardized fireball. Those that couldn’t were forced to drop the mage curriculum and repurpose as regulars. Older years learned more advanced healing, a few different offensive spells and the most talented were even taught to scry, but those two basic spells were the bread and butter of cadet magery.

“ That depends,” she replied after a moment. “If I tweak the incantation to strengthen momentum over power I might be able to manage five hundred feet. Wouldn’t even drop a bird, though – it’d be more warm air and light than fire by that point.”

“ I’d still look like a fireball, right?” I confirmed.

She nodded.

“ Good,” I grunted. “Send up three in a row.”

There was a moment of utter silence.

“ Captain,” Ratface started slowly, “with all due respect, that...”

“ Every other company will know exactly where we are,” Pickler finished.

Nauk barked out a laugh. “Now that’s one way to start the party,” he growled. “I like it. Come at us, you fuckers. See what happens.”

“ What will happen is we’ll lose,” Pickler hissed at him. “She bid eighty-four points – we screw this up and Rat Company will be in the red for the next eight years. What do you think that will do for our careers? I’m not getting posted in Thalassina with the Thirteenth to break up bickering merchants.”

I took a deep breath, determined not to lose my temper.

“ Enough ,” I Spoke, and they went still as statues. “This isn’t the Highest Assembly, and you aren’t Proceran princes. If I give an order it will damn well be obeyed .”

I stared them down.

“ Do you understand me?”

Whatever was holding them by the throat let go and I received a handful of shaky nods. Kilian eyed me warily – she was probably the only one with enough arcane education to understand how I’d managed this.

“ I know exactly who’s coming,” I told them. “I’ve planned for it. We’re all tired and tempers are rough, but if we start arguing about everything we’re as good as done.”

“ You’re the captain,” Ratface murmured.

They saluted and all went to attend their lines except for Kilian, who stepped a few feet away and started muttering under her breath. She snapped a hand upwards and a ball of bright red flame went sailing up in the air. It was hard to judge if it had really gone up to five hundred feet, but it’d clearly be visible from everywhere in the area. Another two followed quickly. After a moment, a single ball of blue flame rose in the distance.

“ The canyon,” I muttered to myself.

So that was where Morok was. I’d yet to hear Hakram leave, so I wasn’t surprised when he cleared his throat.

“ You’re playing your cards pretty close to the chest, Callow,” he gravelled.

What little I had of it, anyway.

“ I had a dream, this morning,” I told him instead of a true reply.

The orc shot me a quizzical look.

“ So?”

“ It was trying to teach me a lesson,” I mused. “I think I might be getting it, now.”

“ Anything useful?” he asked curiously.

“ If we’re to win this,” I said, “it won’t be by playing the game. It’s the players I need to play.”

“ I take it that made sense in your head,” he snorted, flashing me his fangs in a small smile.

“ Something like that,” I agreed. “Before you get to work, I need you to tell two things to Lieutenant Pickler.”

He leaned in close.

I only managed to grab a few hours of sleep before dawn came. Rat Company had formed a square of jutting spikes around its camp, sharp end outwards. There was a large entrance facing the canyon for quick deployment and two smaller ones on the adjacent sides. I’d somehow managed to miss a rock under my bedroll and it had dug into my back the whole time, so it was with a bruised back that I put my armour back on after Robber woke me.

“ They’re here,” he told me, biting into a piece of jerky.

“ The entire company?” I asked, tightening my sword belt.

“ That’s my guess,” he replied. “They’re not deployed in a way that makes it easy to count them.”

I nodded, and to my mild irritation he lingered.

“ We’re playing with fire, aren’t we?” he grinned. “Knew you’d make this interesting.”

“ Don’t you have things to do, Sergeant?” I grunted.

“ Eh, nothing urgent,” he dismissed. “Pickler’s sorry, by the way.”

That got my attention. I glanced at him and for once his face was lacking the usual malicious grin.

“ She’s not the kind of person who apologizes,” he continued, “but she knows she stepped out of line. After you made us bury the stuff, she got the same look on her face she usually makes when she screws up a weapon design.”

I passed a hand through my hair, putting the pony tail into a semblance of order.

“ I know I’m asking the company to take a lot on faith,” I finally said. “I’m not going to hold grudges over a moment of doubt, as long as it doesn’t happen again.”

“ Must be that soft Callowan upbringing that makes you so forgiving. No wonder you lot got conquered,” the little shit grinned. “I’ll pass the message along.”

I flipped him the finger and he scuttled off after a horribly sloppy salute. Inexplicably, I was now in a better mood. In the distance I could see Lizard Company kicking up a trail of dust as they marched out from the canyon. I noted with approval that, now that Morok was less than half a mile away, all my legionaries were up. The last ones to wake were hurrying to put on their armour. I fished out some dried and salted meat from my pack, taking a bite with distaste. Goat jerky. Ugh. I left my shield with my cot, strolling towards the middle of the camp: there was slight rise there, and I claimed a flat rock for my throne. Eventually Ratface made his way to me. Without a word, he offered me a water skin: after last night’s confrontation, it felt like something a peace offering. I took it without comment and gulped down some tepid water. We let a long while pass in silence, my soldiers slowly assembling in ranks as Morok’s company marched towards us. In the light of day, it was easier to make out our surroundings. We were a little closer to the forest than I would have liked, though it was too late to do anything about it now. Ratface eyed Lizard Company’s ranks as they came closer, his face settling into a frown.

“ He’s got his ogre tenth right behind his first line,” he spoke with a frown. “That’s not standard practice.”

I handed him back his water skin.

“ No, it isn’t,” I agreed.

Two hundred feet away Lizard Company paused, its lizard skull standard coming up to the front. And then, without so much as a sound of warning, they charged forward. A stir went through my soldiers, a few of them cursing out loud.

“ The fucker’s betraying us,” Ratface bit out. “On the first day ? Who even does that?”

“ He got this look on his face, when I threatened to hand our munitions over to Juniper,” I informed the lieutenant absent-mindedly. “Tried to hide it, but I’ve been dealing with tricky sorts lately. He was thinking about what he could do if he had them.”

Kilian’s line was standing in front of the entrance about to get charged, her ten mages standing behind the ten soldiers with the oversized shield that served as their mobile cover.

“ You’re being very calm about this,” Ratface accused.

Less than a hundred yards now.

“ I’d be hypocritical of me to get angry about him betraying us,” I mused.

I tore off a chunk of jerky and swallowed it. Fifty yards. Too late for Morok to pull out.

“ After all,” I continued, “I betrayed him first.”

The moment before the vanguard of Lizard Company stepped foot into our camp, a hundred voices howling like wolves sounded from the woods. Armour shining bright in the morning sun, Wolf Company charged out of cover right into Morok’s flank.

Chapter 24: Aisha’s Plan

“ Grand designs in war are a thing of vanity. Victory goes to the general that blunders the least.”
– Theodosius the Unconquered, Tyrant of Helike

I’d known from the beginning that the ogres would be the biggest problem. No pun intended. I rather loathed puns, actually. The main two military treatises I’d sunk my teeth into were the Ars Tactica and the Praecepta Militaria , though the smaller Commentaries on the Campaigns of Dread Emperor Terribilis the Second had been a lot more interesting – and useful – to read. None of the three went into how to deal with a tenth of heavily armoured ogres, though. Good ol’ Terribilis had subdued a band of giants when dismantling the crusader kingdoms, but unlike him I couldn’t afford to put a small city to the flame and shoot anything that crawled out.

I’d asked Black to find me some of the manuals used under the Kingdom of Callow, but he’d told me that there was no equivalent to the War College in my homeland. Nobles who’d wanted their children to have a military education either had them join a chivalric order or serve in the Order of the White Hand for a few years. Given that the Order had been wiped out with remarkable thoroughness and that chivalric orders were now illegal in Callow, there would be no help coming from that front.

So I’d looked into Juniper’s old games. She’d beat Morok every time they fought, after all, and while Rat Company wouldn’t be anywhere as smooth in executing her techniques we theoretically had the right tools to use them. In short, she outmanoeuvred the tenth. She’d systematically baited Morok into grounds she’d prepared to turn the size of the ogres into a disadvantage or outright mined them with demolition charges. With the tenth dispersed or knocked down, she had her mage line concentrate fire on individuals until they were down for the count. The fact that the Hellhound had never used sharpers on the ogres indicated they probably wouldn’t be effective, something I’d taken heed of.

That was one of the two reasons that, officially speaking, Rat Company had gone with the Siege template. Morok had been until recently under the impression that his betrayal would come as a surprise to me. So he won’t be expecting the main entrance to be mined. That the other munitions we could supposedly bring to bear against him would be ineffective had just been additional bait for him to betray us. The second reason was how I’d managed to have the hundred Wolf Company legionaries running down the hill to flank Lizards. Going with Siege was as good as declaring my intention to go after Snatcher and his fortifications – which had been one of the main conditions Bishara had extracted in exchange for her help against Morok. The other condition was much more costly, but I wouldn’t have to worry about that for a while yet.

“ Ratface,” I spoke. “Go back to your line. Things are about to get interesting.”

The Taghreb lieutenant nodded and picked up his shield before leaving, rolling his shoulder to stretch it out. My eyes remained on the skirmish. I’d had Pickler bury demolition charges under the entrance Morok had his company charging through. Though I’d been worried he’s send more expendable troops in first after being burned by Juniper in a similar manner – as he was currently doing with a forward tenth of heavies – she’d told me it wouldn’t be an issue. She’d fiddled with the triggers so that they wouldn’t blow unless a large enough weight pressed down on them: unless she’d made a mistake, the charges should ignore the first ten heavies entirely. With a frown I watched the ten heavily armoured legionaries slow as they got to the entrance, sheathe their swords and reach for- I got to my feet.

“ KILIAN,” I yelled out. “FIRE, NOW!”

I saw the redheaded lieutenant glance in my direction, my voice managing to carry over even from where I stood, but by the time she started incanting it was too late. Morok’s heavies sent sharpers rolling over the mined grounds, the clay balls detonating a moment later and triggering our demolition charges. Fuck. Ten fireballs sailed right into the ensuing cloud of dust and rock in a mocking aftermath: it was impossible to tell if they’d hit anything. More importantly, the ogre tenth had a free path right into my mages. Aside from my sappers they by far my most vulnerable line. And if the healers get taken out there’s no one to get my wounded back on their feet.

“ Captain,” a voice came from behind me. “Orders?”

Hakram and the rest our line had come to stand behind me while I was distracted. The tall orc looked unworried even though our first line of defence had just disappeared into literal smoke. His calm soothed my own nerves and I took a deep breath.

“ Have Pickler drown the gap in smokers,” I ordered after a heartbeat. “Are Ratface and Nauk in position?”

Getting my legionaries in fighting order without them looking like they were in fighting order had been a tricky proposition. I had Ratface’s line to the left of the main entrance and Nauk’s to the right, hopefully read to close like a jaw on the first men of Lizard Company to pass through. Kilian and her mages were right in front of the enemy, with Pickler’s line close behind them. My own men I’d held back as a reserve to plug gaps or use a possible flanking force, should an opportunity present itself.

“ They’re ready,” my sergeant gravelled after sending off a messenger to Pickler.

In the distance I saw the forward heavies charge out of the smoke, unharmed. Godsdamnit, couldn’t Kilian have taken out at least one?

“ Have them form a wedge with the point facing us,” I ordered. “Quick.”

That should leave a broad enough kill zone that Kilian’s mages could do damage by continuously pouring flames into the melee. A dozen smokers fell into the gap just as I finished speaking, obscuring the visibility that had just begun to clear. Looking outside the boundaries of my own camp just as Morok’s heavies rammed themselves into Ratface’s line, I saw that Aisha’s men were finally about to hit Lizard Company’s left flank. Mages in the back of her company threw fireballs into the enemy a heartbeat before the lines made contact, Wolf Company’s regulars pouring into the gaps the impacts created to pry open the formation.

Morok was redeploying his company to secure his left, a line hurriedly moving to extend the flank so that Aisha couldn’t just encircle him. Come on, you ugly bastard. You know if Aisha manages to go around that you’re done. Sent the ogres in to make a dent in her troops. The ogres emerged from the smoke, hammers held high. I closed my eyes. What was his play here? He wasn’t committing enough men to do more than hold Wolf Company for a few moments. So he was pushing straight into us. Why? He was an asshole, not an idiot. He wouldn’t go for vengeance in the middle of a melee.

“ He wants the camp, Captain,” Hakram suddenly said. “He’s trying to push us out and use the fortifications to hold off Wolf Company.”

I opened my eyes.

“ Ready our line,” I grimaced. “If it goes sour for them, we’re going in.”

Already Ratface’s line was having trouble dealing with the tenth of heavies: they weren’t losing ground, but they weren’t pushing them back either. A flurry of fireballs hit the ogres as they strode forward, but it barely slowed them – Kilian hand’t though to concentrate on a single target. The flames slid off the plate and then the ogres impacted into Nauk’s heavies. Oh, Weeping Heavens. Back at the orphanage, I’d once seen a girl drop a heated plate on a block of butter. Seeing the ogres crumple the first rank of heavies with the initial swing was eerily reminiscent of that. Shields broke, legionaries fell and the only reason they were stopped was because the second rank heavies got in close. I saw Nauk take a swing straight in the shield arm and though I couldn’t actually hear the bones break from where I stood my imagination provided a vivid approximate. The lieutenant fell to the ground, dropping his shield, but that was when things got... weird. The large orc spasmed once, then twice, and I heard Hakram breathe in sharply.

“ Sergeant,” I began, “what’s-”

Nauk let out a blood curling scream and rose to his feet. I’d once seen him take on two legionaries with his bare hands but there’d been a degree of control to him back then, for all his roaring. There was no trace of that now. He jumped on the back of the ogre who’d struck him, abandoning his weapon, and started hammering into the legionary’s helmet with his bare hands. The first strike saw the hands turn into a bloodied mess and it got worse from there.

“ What the actual fuck,” I said in a faint tone.

“ You ever wonder why Nauk was never in the running for captain?” Hakram said quietly. “That’s why. He’s got the Red Rage.”

“ He’s a berserker?” I asked.

My sergeant shook his head. “Berserkers can... well, not control it but direct it at least. He can’t. He’ll keep fighting everything until he drops, friend or foe.”

As if to drive the point home Nauk’s armoured boot impacted with the face of one of his own soldiers, sending him sprawling. His line was on the verge of collapse and already more heavies were nearing the camp, aiming to reinforce the tenth locking down my left flank.

“ We performed a lot better against Juniper’s soldiers,” I frowned. “Ratface shouldn’t be doing this badly.”

“ They’re not underestimating us anymore, Captain,” Hakram gravelled. “You took the fort with even numbers, last game. People took notice. They’re taking us seriously now.”

“ Balls,” I said, feelingly. “Damage control time. We’re going to back up Nauk.”

The greenskin sergeant barked out orders and we set to a brisk walk. Pickler’s line parted for us silently and I allowed my line to pull a little ahead as I stopped for a word with the lieutenant.

“ Captain,” the goblin grimaced. “I should have taken sharpers into consideration. This is my mistake.”

“ We can do the blame game after this is done,” I grunted back. “Pull out all the stops, Pickler. I want brightsticks and sharpers in the lot of them as soon as they fill the wedge. Wait for my signal.”

She nodded. I felt Robber sneaking behind me before I saw him, turning to fix the diminutive goblin with a steady look. He threw me a sharper and I caught the clay ball with my free hand, raising an eyebrow.

“ If you get one under the armour they’ll take one of the big guys out,” he grinned. “Go do your thing, Captain. I’m looking forward to the chaos.”

Of course he was. I was half-tempted to throw the thing right at his head, but now was not the moment to be petulant. I put a spring to my step and caught up with my line just as they got to Nauk’s. I slipped my way through one of the gaps in the ranks right before my regulars filled it, heading straight for the nearest ogre. Was that lieutenant’s stripes I saw on the shoulder? As usual, luck was enjoying pissing all over my day. All right, Catherine. This is just like sparring with Captain, if she was half a dozen feet taller and intent on really beating me up. The gargantuan mountain of steel moved in my direction, face impossible to see under the close plate helm. The ogre struck with vicious speed, hammer coming for my shoulder in the blink of an eye. Calmly, carefully, I took a half-step back out of range. My opponent slowed the swing, getting closer, and that was when I pushed forward. All in the timing, the way Black had taught me. I slipped inside my enemy’s guard and slapped the flat of my blade into the ogre’s helm. It bounced off with a sharp ring.

Well, that was useless. I danced around a kick that would have sent me sprawling, trying to get a hit in on the knee joint but being forced to back away by an awkward swing of the hammer. Given the size of the thing, even a weak hit would have enough weight to it to mess me up. My fingers tightened against the sharper Robber had given me as I tried to circle around the ogre, dodging another hammer stroke by the skin of my teeth. The malevolent little sergeant hadn’t given me anything to light it with, I suddenly realized. Not that I had a free hand to use even if he had. Robber, you asshole. I snuck a look back at my line and saw they were somehow managing to hold back the enemy advance, swarming the ogres with numbers and taking hard losses as they did. Ahead of me Kilian’s mages were holding off down enemy advance with a near-continuous stream of fireballs but Morok’s heavies were forming into a shield wall and when they managed that would be the end of that. Regulars wouldn’t be able to power through a sorcery barrage, but heavies certainly would.

My inattention was rewarded by the ogre’s hammer clipping my shoulder. It was a glancing hit at best, but it still spun me about like a leaf. I managed to stay on my feet but a moment later I got kicked in the chest. I fell on my knees and absently wished I hadn’t just eaten, because that jerky was doing its level best to resurface. Did I just feel the chain mail loosen?

“ All right,” I croaked out as I pushed myself back to my feet. “That’s enough.”

The ogre huffed out a metallic laugh. Snatching up the sharper I’d dropped after the kick, I ran in my opponent’s direction. Come on, these are pretty horrible odds. Doesn’t it count as a Struggle? My Name stirred slightly, but there was no sudden influx of power. Fine, a trickle was all I needed anyway. Gritting my teeth, I watched the hammer rise and counted down. One, two, three steps and – there it went. Apparently done playing, the ogre swung down in a stroke that would have shattered my shoulders in several smaller and painful bone shards had it landed. Too slow, though. The hammer struck the ground a little to my right and I jumped onto the ogre’s chest, ramming the sharper into the joint between the neck and the shoulder. Hanging on for dear life I forcefully took hold of that small thread of power my Name had granted me, forcefully pushing it into my hand. My fingers crackled with pitch black energy and I punched the sharper as hard as I could.

This was, admittedly, not the most elegant plan I’d come up with.

The impact blew me clean off the ogre. I landed painfully in the dust, breath pushed out of my stomach and my ears ringing. I grinned when I felt the ground shake, opening my eyes to the sight of my toppled opponent. That’s going to be one nasty concussion, my friend, but that’s what healers are for. I got to my feet and coughed out a bit of dust, taking a bleary look around. It seemed I’d landed somewhere around the wedge. I glanced to my left and my blood ran cold. I had landed in the wedge, I realized. In the middle. Just before Morok’s heavies pushed in with their shield wall.

“ That’s their Captain,” I heard a girl’s voice call out from the enemy ranks. “She’s on the priority target list.”

Rat Company replied by sending a volley of fireballs right into the shield wall, though they were noticeably less bright than they’d been at the beginning of the fight. My mages were getting tired. Spitting out a bit of stone stuck in my mouth, I wiped my lips and took a look at the rest of the fight. The ogre tenth was on its last legs, overwhelmed by numbers and the lack of back-up Kilian had managed to accomplish. Two of them were still fighting but my legionaries and Nauk’s were piling up on them so much they could hardly move. I just needed to distract the enemy long enough for them to be taken out.

“ Gods, this feels unpleasantly heroic,” I muttered to myself.

I took a deep breath and limbered my fingers.

“ CAPTAIN MOROK,” I called out. “COME OUT, YOU WRETCH. YOU AND ME, OUT HERE ON THE FIELD.”

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“ She did punch a sharper,” someone mused out loud. “That’d scramble anyone’s brains.”

I shot the Soninke boy in question an offended look.There was no need to get personal about this. I snuck another look at the melee to my left – one ogre remaining now, and it was in trouble. Come on, Morok. You’re one of the proud ones. You can still salvage how this looks by taking me out.

“ LIZARD COMPANY, FORWARD,” the captain in question barked.

And the bait had failed. Godsdamnit, I hated it when my enemies were competent. It made everything so complicated. I took a moment to look suitably defiant at the enemy before praying Pickler was close enough to hear me over the sound of the fighting.

“ PICKLER, NOW,” I yelled.

For a moment nothing happened and I looked like a complete imbecile, standing in front of about thirty enemy heavies with my sword pointed forward. Then a dozen clay cylinders arced above me, coming to roll at the feet of Morok’s forward line. I closed my eyes right before the blinding light hit, turning a clean pair of heels to the enemy and getting the Hells out of there before they could run me down. By the time I’d gotten back to my line, the last ogre was down and Pickler’s sappers had tossed a round of sharpers into the enemy ranks. It made me wince to think that we’d wasted at least half of our munitions on what had been supposed to be our easiest battle, but there was no helping it. Lizard Company would not have been so high in the rankings if they were easy to deal with. I saw Hakram drag back an unconscious Nauk behind our lines and drop him none too gently, turning to salute me when he noticed my return.

“ How are we doing, sergeant?” I panted out, sheathing my sword as I took cover behind my assembling men.

“ Between the rest of the heavies and our own cadets capable of fighting, we make up most of a line,” he gravelled.

That barely qualified as good news, but I’d still take it. I pushed back a sweaty lock of hair that had slipped out from under my helmet.

“ Send a messenger to Kilian,” I told my sergeant. “I want her tenth of shields sent to back up Ratface. We need to start pushing them out of camp.”

“ I’ll see to it. But it might not even be necessary, Captain,” the tall orc grinned savagely. “Smoke’s clearing out. Look at what Bishara’s up to.”

I did. The handful of smokers I’d ordered thrown into the entrance at the beginning of the battle had finally started to disperse. Wolf Company had slipped around Morok’s extended flank with almost contemptuous ease, flipping an entire line and using the momentum to drive the other one right into the stakes surrounding my camp. Lizard Company had sent another tenth into the mess to try to salvage it, but it was already collapsing under the pressure. In a matter of moments the Wolves would be hitting the back of Morok’s heavies right as they tried pushing their way through my wedge.

“ There’s no way he can swing this,” I realized. “He needs to pull back or he’s out of the game.”

The conditions for the elimination of a company were very straightforward: either every officer in a company of lieutenant rank and above had to be incapacitated, or else eight soldiers out of ten in the company. Rat Company had, by the skin of its teeth, managed to take out a line. Aisha’s legionaries had done the same to another two lines and were getting started on a third. If Morok didn’t pull out now, the Lizards he risked elimination by numbers. Which was exactly my intention, actually. The number of prisoners and enemy wounded this skirmish would result in was so large that the manpower cost of keeping an eye on them would be crippling. We wouldn’t be able to move that many people quickly or easily, and we didn’t have a defendable stronghold where we could put them away. The Lizards needed to be broken here and now, or they’d leave a bloody mess for me to deal with.

Morok seemed to agreed with my assessment. His companu sounded the retreat, the tenth Ratface was still struggling with pulling out in good order. Immediately I ordered my own line to push forward, signalling for the former captain’s to do the same. The grounds were uneven where the demolition charges had been blown, but both lines formed in the best order they could. We held position at the mouth of the entrance as Wolf Company moved to complete their encirclement. Only a matter of time now. There was a sudden flash of lightning from Aisha’s mage line and a bolt struck in the middle of the enemy’s formation. I couldn’t see who they’d hit and the effort seemed something of a waste, but a few heartbeats later thunder rumbled in the distance. Lizard Company’s standard appeared as a giant image in the sky, a red streak across it. Eliminated. She must have aimed for Morok.

I raised my sword in victory, my company cheering behind me.

Clean up was as much work as the actual fighting.

Legionaries from both victorious companies were picking through the packs of the vanquished one, putting aside the goblin munitions in a great pile we’d distribute later. Aisha had agreed on splitting them half and half when we’d struck our deal, though it had taken a great deal of wheedling on my part. She’d given in in the end, though, since if the both of us were to assault Snatcher’s fortifications then I could hardly be expected to send my cadets into the breach with depleted stores. Mages from all companies were already at work on the wounded, the Rats and Wolves because we’d need to get moving before too long and the Lizards because they needed to be able to march to their pick up point before being escorted back to Ater. The mood was festive on the winning side, legionaries trading good-natured jibes and boasts as I finished taking casualty reports from my lieutenants.

The butcher’s bill wasn’t as bad as it could have been: Ratface had played it out conservatively and barely had a handful of wounded to his name. Nauk’s line had been the most brutally hit and the orc lieutenant was still out of it. Sergeant Nilin was handling his duties until the healers managed to drag him back to consciousness. Overall there were twenty seven wounded among my men, the majority of which would be back on their feet after a session with our healers. The four that were more severely hurt were still able to march, though they wouldn’t be fighting again in the melee. That’s fine. It could have been worse, and I can still use them for sentries. I dismissed my officers when I saw Aisha strolling down the main entrance with a handful of her own legionaries escorting her. Ratface cast a long look in her direction before saluting and returning to his line. I only barely refrained from sighing. Now was not the time for the lieutenant to start mooning over the captain of Wolf Company.

“ Captain Callow,” Aisha greeted me with a smile. “Well fought.”

I clasped the forearm she offered me.

“ You did most of the heavy lifting on this one,” I acknowledged. “All we did was hold the line.”

“ Your inspired trick with the smokers hurt him more than you think,” the Taghreb captain assured me. “It was clever of you to keep him from concentrating his force with the smoke so the fireballs would be able to keep him away.”

I’d done what now? Ordering Pickler to throw the smokers in had been a knee-jerk reaction to Morok blowing the charges, not something I’d given a lot of thought to. I’d originally meant for Lizard Company to fill the wedge I’d made so that my sapper line’s munitions would have the greatest possible effect, though in retrospective I could see how that would have ended badly. If Morok had managed to bring that many troops inside my camp he would have broken through my lines for sure, and it would have been all downhill from there.

“ I try,” I replied neutrally, doing my best to hide that my ‘tactical ingenuity’ was news to me. “How were casualties on your side?”

“ Light,” the olive-skinned girl noted. “We’ll be ready to march in a quarter bell.”

I grimaced.

“ I’ll need at least twice that,” I replied. “My mages are running out of juice and the ogres did a number on my heavies.”

“ They have a way of doing that,” Aisha said sympathetically. “Is that why I’m hearing chatter about you getting so angry you punched an ogre into unconsciousness?”

I closed my eyes and rubbed the bride of my nose, imploring the Heavens for patience.

“ That’s not what happened,” I told her, “I mean, I can understand it might have looked like that from a distance but I used a sharper.”

The other captain patted me on the shoulder, dark eyes glittering with amusement.

“ It’s all right, Callow, you don’t need to pretend with me,” she consoled me. “There were already rumours about your grudge against them, anyhow, what with you castrating one in single combat.”

“ I used to think the girls at my orphanage were the worst gossips in the world,” I sighed, “but then I came to the College.”

The dark-haired girl snorted, though after a moment her face turned serious again.

“ I became worried when you were late in giving me the signal,” she said. “What happened?”

“ We had a bad starting position,” I grunted. “Middle of the plain to the south.”

Aisha raised an eyebrow.

“ And you didn’t manage to get here before sundown? I thought Ratface drilled your cadets better than that.”

“ Before sundown?” I asked dubiously. “The sun was already setting when we snapped out of the blood magic.”

The Taghreb girl blinked in surprise.

“ That’s strange. We were all awake around Afternoon Bell,” she told me.

Oh, fuck you Heiress. Seriously?

“ Must have been a mistake with the casting,” I grunted, unwilling to give a real explanation.

The other captain looked unconvinced, but she didn’t press the subject.

“ Regardless,” Aisha spoke, “it gave me time to scout around thoroughly. First Company was on the plains on the other side of the forest yesterday, though where they are now is anyone’s guess. Morok seems to have started in the canyon, which means Fox Company is east of us.”

“ In the badlands,” I grimaced. “Burning Hells. He’ll have fortified wherever he ended up to a ridiculous extent.”

“ On one hand,” my temporary ally noted, “it means he won’t have been able to have cut many trees from the forest, if any. But he might have eschewed that entirely and built in rock instead, which would be... troublesome.”

“ We need to find him before he ends up making an actual castle, then,” I grunted. “I’ll tell my mages to hurry it up.”

“ That would be appreciated,” Aisha nodded. “I’ll have one of my lieutenants handle the distribution of the munitions.”

There was only so much magic Kilian’s minions were able to squeeze out in a day, unfortunately, and their earlier pyrotechnics had used up the lion’s share. Given how physically exhausting casting could be, I wouldn’t even be able to set a fast pace when we marched: after last night’s moonlit stroll and the morning’s fighting they would be physically incapable of moving that fast. I ended up remaining within the bounds of my original prediction of a half bell, though it was a close thing. The entire allied force took a turn towards the south east for the first leg of our journey, Wolf Company being well aware of how easy it would be to charge out of the woods into someone’s flanks after having done that exact thing. I put Ratface’s line in the lead this time and left Hakram to take care of mine, keeping a newly-awakened Nauk company instead. The large orc was sheepish about the entire Red Rage debacle and apologized at least twice before I dismissed the whole thing.

“ Hakram told me it’s why you were never in the running for captain,” I told him.

“ Can’t have the man in charge fly into rage every time he’s too badly injured,” Nauk grunted. “Been lucky enough to have Nilin with me since my first semester – he knows how to pick up the slack when I lose it.”

“ Ratface is too conservative when he commands,” I noted, “and I can see why it might be a liability to have you in charge. Kilian and Pickler, though, why did they never step up?”

It would be a lie to say I hadn’t been appalled by how abysmal Rat Company’s score was. I had a hard time reconciling that with their performance in our first war games, though after the battle we’d just gone through I could see that one of the reasons my band of survivors had been so effective was that we’d been badly underestimated by the First Company. The fact that Ratface’s line of twenty regulars hadn’t managed to drive back a single tenth of heavies was a grim indicator of how my cadets would actually perform in a straight up fight.

“ Kilian’s got some kind of condition from her creature blood,” Nauk told me. “Sometimes she draws too much magic and start speaking in tongues.”

Creature blood? Something to ask my sergeant about. Anyhow, that was already half of my senior officers who could find themselves incapacitated if things got a little too hot. No wonder they fold every time the other companies turn up the pressure..

“ Pickler?” I prompted.

The large orc looked uncomfortable, which would have been an amusing sight on his thick-skinned face if the subject wasn’t so serious.

“ She failed out of Advanced Tactics,” he admitted. “If it ain’t related to engineering she doesn’t care for it.”

Of the problems with my officers, that was the least damaging. The goblin served effectively enough as the lieutenant for my sapper line, I just had to ensure she never ended up having to make decisions too broad in scope. I clapped Nauk on the back, carefully avoiding his still-tender arm, and moved back to the head of my column as I chewed over what I’d learned. Flawed officers, but nothing I couldn’t work with. I just had to find the right way to use them.

By the time sundown came we’d gotten fairly deep into the badlands.

Wolf Company’s scouts had found a day-old trail a few hours back that led straight to the forest – and then another fresher one, with much deeper tracks. Snatcher’s men had brought back timber to wherever he was holed up. The scouts tried to follow the tracks back to his camp but after a patch of bare rock they simply disappeared. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. Robber climbed his way up a rock spire and reported that the slope in the south east went downhill: there was no sign of any camp down there, though of course it was possible Snatcher had hid away behind one of the many stone hills. After conferring with Aisha we decided to head towards the northeast regardless. The grounds got more difficult to navigate in that direction, and that was best sort of territory for Fox Company to settle in.

We made camp right before nightfall, neither of our companies putting in the effort to fortify the hollow we claimed as our spot. I wasn’t sure what Aisha’s reasons were, but I was simply reluctant to put my legionaries through more hard labour after the day they’d had. I needed them as fresh as possible for the assault on Snatcher’s fortifications, the mages especially. Still, I drew the line at ordering half-watches. There were still two other companies marauding about and while I doubted anyone would attack me while my alliance with Wolf Company was still active I wasn’t going to be taking any risks. Not with Juniper still out there. My night of sleep ended up being a short one, as Hakram woke me up while the moon was still out.

“ Callow,” he gravelled. “We have a problem.”

I cursed and reached for my sword belt, tossing away my blanket.

“ Wolf Company?” I asked immediately.

Without my Name I probably wouldn’t have been able to make out the way my sergeant grimaced.

“ I don’t know,” he admitted. “Doesn’t seem like it, but...”

I finished putting on my boots and frowned at him.

“ What happened, Hakram?”

“ Seven of our sentries have disappeared,” he told me.

The vast majority of my camp was still asleep, and casting an eye around I couldn’t see anything that qualified as unusual activity. Wolf Company wasn’t assembling, so it didn’t seem like they were planning to betray us. Not yet, anyway.

“ Our munitions are still untouched?” I asked.

“ First thing I checked,” the sergeant replied. “Nothing wrong there, Pickler inspected them herself.”

So whoever was behind this wasn’t planning an attack. Then why are they doing this? Normally taking out sentries would be a prelude to a night attack, but my opponent wasn’t pressing their advantage.

“ Juniper,” I realized suddenly.

“ Then why didn’t she raid deeper into the camp?” Hakram wondered.

“ Because she’s not after our munitions,” I cursed. “She’s just trying to lower our numbers.”

The Hellhound knew I had a Name, knew what kind of damage those could cause. So to mitigate that advantage she was going to keep grinding down my forces as much as she could before giving battle. What did it matter if I could take a tenth of heavies on my own, if I had a single line to back me up against the entire First Company?

“ Double the watch,” I ordered tiredly. “No one patrols alone and send word to Captain Bishara that First Company has men in the area.”

My sleep was uneasy after the wake-up call, but there were no more abductions that night. There was no more time to worry, anyhow: by Noon Bell the next day, we’d found Snatcher’s camp.

Chapter 25: Snatcher’s Plan

“ The patient knife always strikes true.”
– Soninke saying

I let out a soft whistle. “That doesn’t look like a Legion design.”

“ Bin hamar ,” Aisha cursed in a low voice. “He must have had his cadets working through the night.”

I glanced at her curiously. My Taghrebi was still a little iffy, though I recognized the word for donkey in there. Still, Snatcher’s fortifications did warrant quite a bit of cussing. Fox Company had made camp over a hill in the centre of a hollow, though their defences extended quite a bit further than that. The first wall wouldn’t be too hard to take, I assessed. Three feet of stone and sand packed together tightly were topped by a row of sudis, with small openings slits for crossbowmen to shoot through. Demolition charges would punch through those in a matter of moments, though my own company was running a little short on those. Morok hadn’t carried any, and though Rat Company was once more topped off on smokers and brightsticks a shortage of heavier munitions had the potential to be very costly here. From the high grounds where Captain Bishara and I stood, however, we could see that the first wall was the least of our worries.

There were about a hundred feet of open ground after the wall, and one didn’t need my Name-improved sight to see some of it had been freshly dug. Rubies to piglets that Snatcher mined the Hells out of that. Too many places had been dug into for all of them to be covering a demolition charge, but there was way to tell which of them really were mined. If any of them were, I thought with a grimace. He might have left the more obvious marks as a feint and dug in his charges less obviously. Should the Wolves and my Rats manage to breach the first wall, then we’d have to charge across the flat grounds through the traps while getting shot at by Fox Company. And then we’d get to the fucking second wall. It was more or less impossible to see the hill the sapper-built fort had been based from, with the stone ramparts ten feet high hiding away the sight of it. The depth of the ditch the Foxes had dug right in front of said ramparts was hard to estimate, but even from where I stood I could glimpse the sight of the sharp wooden stakes jutting out of it.

Some kind of wooden tower had been erected in the middle of the fort, standing above even the ramparts – it looked more like a platform, actually, though its purpose eluded me for now. At the moment most of Fox Company’s legionaries were taking cover behind the first wall, patiently waiting for our own cadets to come into range. No attempt had been made on Snatcher’s side to initiate talks after we’d arrived, and neither Aisha nor I were particularly inclined to attempt them. At this point, giving the other captain more time to dig in would be shooting ourselves in the foot.

“ I can have my company ready for the fight fairly quickly,” I grunted. “We’ll be taking the first wave, as agreed.”

That had been the second price I’d agreed to pay for Wolf Company’s assistance against the Lizards. When the time to assault Snatcher came, my soldiers would be the first into the breach – and so would be the ones running into all the nasty little surprises the goblin captain no doubt had in store. Aisha eyed me sideways.

“ Rushing our attack might prove more costly than we can afford,” she demurred. “First we set up our camps, then we’ll hash out a planned offensive.”

I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. I could see the sense in what Bishara was proposing, but it did not suit my own plans.

“ The longer we delay, the higher the chances Juniper stabs us in the back while we’re dealing with Snatcher,” I reminded her. “We know she has men in the area, and following our tracks here will be child’s play.”

Hiding away the tracks of two hundred legionaries, some of them in heavy plate, was not something any of us had been trained for. If Juniper wanted to find us, she would. The Taghreb girl’s lovely face was marred by a dubious look.

“ It’s unlikely she has more than a single line shadowing us,” she replied. “Regardless, we will not be attacking blindly: I fully intend on scouting our backs before committing to the assault. You can have your men patrol the south-east, if you’re truly worried. Should she bring her whole company to bear, we can take her together before dealing with Snatcher.”

I smiled politely at her words, not believing a word of them. I trust you to hold up your end of the bargain against the Foxes, Bishara, but against the Hellhound? That’s a whole other story. Ensuring Snatcher would be knocked out of the melee as quick as possible was a priority for the Wolves, since their company score would hitch them up to third place if the Foxes lost their bid. But everything after that got trickier. Juniper and Aisha were friends, I knew. How much that would weigh in on her decision making I couldn’t be sure, but I did not think the other captain would think twice about selling me out to First Company. She could take on on Snatcher with their help instead of mine, and there was no denying that Juniper’s soldiers would perform better than Rat Company’s in the matter. And yet I couldn’t just tell her that. I sighed.

“ We do it your way, then,” I conceded.

After a silent nod I made my way down the hill, returning to my company’s ranks. Hakram was already waiting for me, wonder of a sergeant that he was, and a few orders to him got my cadets started on making camp. I found Pickler in the midst of the flurry of sudden activity, Robber at her side. Good, I’d needed to talk with the both of them.

“ Lieutenant, Sergeant,” I greeted them as they saluted. “I have work for you.”

The yellow-eyed little bastard immediately started grinning, though his commanding officer remained more sedate.

“ What do you need, Captain?” Pickler asked.

“ I want a tenth out on patrol,” I grunted back. “Start in our south-east quadrant but swing around to the south of Snatcher’s camp afterwards. Keep an eye out for First Company.”

“ And if Snatcher makes contact?” Robber slyly inquired.

I held his gaze steadily. “Use your better judgement.”

To the sergeant’s left I saw Pickler wince.

“ Dismissed,” I spoke, ending the conversation.

—

By the time Pickler’s patrol came back, half a bell had passed.

The bare bones of Rat Company’s camp had been laid down, the regulation-spaced wall of sudis spikes rising out of the stony ground. To the west of us Wolf Company had claimed a hill for its own, with Aisha’s tent pitched at the top with the wolf skull standard close by. There was something of a commotion when Robber’s tenth came back, for they had a new addition to their ranks: an unusually large dead goat was being carried by a pair of sappers, neck bloodied where one of them had stabbed it. The corpse was dropped next to my bedroll – I’d elected not to bring a tent, preferring to travel light – as the sergeant strutted around like a victorious conqueror to the cheers of my cadets.

“ Fresh meat for the next meal, Captain,” Robber told me proudly. “Hatcher stuck a knife in its neck before it even realized she was there.”

The female goblin he’d just provided me the name for shuffled on her feet, obviously uncomfortable with the attention. I rose from where I’d been sitting going over our only map and clapped the cadet’s armoured shoulder amicably.

“ Well done, soldier,” I praised her warmly and bit back a smile when her cheeks flushed darkly.

“ Thank you, sir,” she squeaked out, managing a salute before she basically ran away.

I watch her scuttle into the rocks like she was fleeing the scene of a crime, eyebrows raised.

“ Shy type, is she?” I asked the sergeant.

“ You’re beginning to have a bit of a reputation with the troops, ‘Cap,” Robber replied cheerfully. “You know, what with all that charging into fireballs and punching out ogres.”

“ That was only the once, and you know the ogre thing is a filthy lie,” I protested.

“ That’s my favourite kind of lie,” the sergeant admitted shamelessly. “Which is probably why I’ve been spreading it every occasion I get.”

“ You’re an insubordinate wretch, Robber,” I told him.

“ Title of my report card three years running,” the sergeant replied cheerfully, and it took an effort not to be openly amused.

“ I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to report aside from your adventures in aggressive goat herding?” I prompted.

“ Funny you would say that,” he murmured. “Half the reason we put the goat in front was so that no one would notice we had eleven sappers coming back. Snatcher sent a messenger.”

“ I thought he might,” I grunted. “You keeping an eye on him?”

“ I’ve got two cadets watching his back,” the sergeant replied.

“ Go get your Lieutenant,” I ordered, “and spread the word I want a senior officer meeting immediately.”

“ You got it,” he grinned, sauntering away as he whistled the first few notes of a strangely haunting tune. I’d heard it before, I thought, though I couldn’t remember where.

They say the third step is the cruelest

Walk when the moon is at her clearest:

Love ends with the kiss of the knife,

Trust is the wager that takes your life

The words accompanying the tune came back easily enough. Not a song I’d ever heard at the Rat’s Nest, I decided. Might have overheard it in the streets of Laure, or maybe someone had sung it to me when I’d been too young to remember. I mulled over the matter until all my lieutenants were assembled, though a real answer eluded me. Nauk was the first to break the silence when everyone had arrived.

“ We hashing out a plan to suggest to Bishara?” he asked.

“ Not exactly,” I replied. “It’s time to let you all in on the second step of my plan for the melee.”

Ratface was the first to catch on.

“ Gods Below,” he cursed. “We’re betraying Wolf Company to the Foxes, aren’t we?”

“ Got it in one,” I replied amusedly. “Snatcher came to have a talk after I first met with Aisha. He had an interesting proposition for me.”

“ Is there anyone we aren’t betraying?” the Taghreb lieutenant quipped dryly.

I paused, mulling it over, and watch his face turn pale.

“ Define betray,” I equivocated.

“ This is not a question that should require this much thought to answer ,” he burst out.

Kilian cleared her throat. “Amusing as this is, I’d prefer a little more information. How will this be going down?”

“ Ideally we’d split our forces in two for the assault, each half on one of the flanks of Wolf Company,” I explained. “When the signal is given, Snatcher will make a sortie into their centre and we’ll fall on them from both sides.”

“ And we’re sure Snatcher will hold up his part of the deal?” Pickler questioned.

“ He wants Aisha out of the melee very, very badly,” I grunted. “He knows she won’t stop until one of them is done.”

“ It should be enough to keep him honest for now,” Nauk gravelled in approval.

“ Speaking of Snatcher,” I continued, “we have a messenger from the man.”

I motioned for the Fox Company sapper to come closer, dismissing his two escorts with a nod.

“ Your name, cadet?” Nauk growled.

“ Latcher, sir,” the goblin replied serenely.

Even in the heart of another company’s camp, the Fox legionary seemed unruffled. I’d noticed more than once that his eyes never stopped moving, always seeking out additional details he could report to his own captain about the state of my company. A reminder that after Aisha was down for the count we’d be enemies again. The part of his armour where the foxhead stamp revealing where his allegiances lay had been cleverly scratched out, though if anyone from Wolf Company recognized his face that would be a moot point. I’d need to keep him carefully out of sight, and with his helmet on at all times.

“ And what message does Captain Snatcher send you with, Latcher?” I prompted.

“ Our company will be ready to hit Captain Bishara’s centre the moment yours sounds the horn twice,” he replied.

I hummed thoughtfully, drumming my fingers against my knee.

“ I’m not seeing a door in the first wall, cadet,” I pointed out. “How will Fox Company be joining the battle?”

The goblin bobbed his head. “Some parts of the palisade are removable,” he informed us. “That said, most of our company will be staying at a distance to contribute through crossbows. Only our two lines of regulars will be charging into the fight.”

I’d expected about as much. Sending in goblin sappers into a sword fight would result in catastrophic losses for him and little change in the engagement’s outcome.

“ It will do,” I grunted. “I expect we’ll be beginning our assault by Afternoon Bell, so you won’t have time to sneak back into your camp. You’ll be staying with Pickler’s line until then. Don’t draw attention to yourself.”

“ By your will, Captain,” Latcher agreed softly.

—

Talking Aisha into my formation had been surprisingly easy, considering it was far from the optimal way to attack the wall. My guess was that as a new captain she’d been expecting me to blunder for some time, and that she’d decided Rat Company taking losses here would make us easier to mop up afterwards. I kept Nauk and his heavies in my half, in case there was another Red Rage episode, and put Ratface in charge of the other one. Pickler went with him and Kilian’s line was split in two, with her shields bolstering Ratface’s line while I took the mages and the lieutenant in question. I could glimpse Snatcher’s men behind the palisade, much more heavily concentrated than they had been this morning . I watched Ratface position his men just out of crossbow range and prepare his line as Hakram did the same with own with my forces. We’d be ready soon. The Wolves stood in the flat grounds of the hollow, ranks perfectly ordered and ready to move: Aisha had put her mages and sappers in the middle of a tightly-packed square, though given how quickly her company could move that meant very little. Taking the signal horn from my pack, I took a deep breath and prepared to sound the beginning of the battle. Sorry, Aisha, but this was my best option. The deep sound thundered across the badlands.

I had not been the one to blow it.

Armour shining in the sun, Wolf Company pivoted with parade-ground perfection to face my separated men and started to charge. Pushing down the urge to curse my heart out, I put my lips to the polished ram’s horn and sounded it twice. Four chunks of the palisade were immediately raised up and put aside, Snatcher’s lines starting to pour through. What the Hells was Aisha’s game here, I wondered. Had she been aware I was about to betray her? No, if she had she would have left more than a line facing the direction Fox Company was currently forming ranks in. It didn’t make sense for her to force a fight with me before we’d assaulted Snatcher’s fortifications. She’d probably beat me, but she’d still take losses and –

“ Oh fuck my life,” I spoke out loud.

I turned to look at the northwest, the part of our back Wolf Company’s patrols had been supposed to be covering. A black standard with the silver crossed swords of the War College rose over the crest of the hills, First Company’s forward lines briskly marching in our direction. Well, that explains why she wanted to wait a bell until the assault. She was giving Juniper time to catch up. The thought was oddly calm, considering I was panicking at the moment. What should I do? Take a gamble and hope we could rout Aisha before Juniper arrived? No, even then we’d be stuck facing First Company with split forces and I wasn’t sure I could count on Snatcher to stick with me through the fight. He might just withdraw behind the walls and let us fight it out. I threw my helmet on the ground and let out a cry of anger.

I couldn’t let it end here. Not with everything that was at stake.

“ Hakram,” I called out.

“ Sir?” my sergeant prompted.

He’d been about to rejoin our line to prepare it for the fight with Aisha’s men, who were less than a hundred feet from us now. I spat on the ground.

“ We withdraw,” I told him, the words feeling like ash in my mouth. “Follow Snatcher’s wall to the east, there’s bound to be another way in there.”

The goblin captain wouldn’t refuse me entrance, not when he had two other companies knocking at his gates. He needed the numbers. The real problem was that there was no way to get a message to Ratface to tell him to do the same on the other side. The tall orc saluted without a word, returning to our men to see my bidding done. Gingerly I picked up my helmet, watching as the half of my forces under the command of Rat Company’s former captain prepared to meet the charge of the Wolves. My own soldiers started retreating in their assigned direction a moment later, and I sounded the horn one last time as a warning to the rest of my cadets. It was for naught. The lines met, and over the horizon Juniper’s legionaries turned in their direction. I would have stayed to watch longer, but Wolf Company was getting close and there was a limit to how any people I could take on even with my Name. Fingers clenched, I ran to catch up with my legionaries and we fled.

—

Fox Company opened another chunk of the palisade to let us through long before Wolf Company was in a position to do anything about it, the captain himself coming to meet me almost immediately. Snatcher was tall, for a goblin: the top of his head went up to my chin. His skin was of a paler green than I was accustomed to, smooth and almost entirely without the usual wrinkles. Yellow eyes like Robber’s looked back at me, although his left one had a way of facing away from where he was looking. It made it hard to meet him eye-to-eye.

“ Captain Callow,” he rasped out in an ever-surprisingly deep voice for a goblin.

“ Captain Snatcher,” I replied tiredly, clasping the offered arm.

“ Bit of a mess today,” he sympathized. “Didn’t think Bishara had it in her.”

“ Neither did I,” I admitted. “A lesson to remember. Do you know what happened to the rest of my men?”

“ They broke and ran when they saw Juniper coming to sweep them,” he replied. “We opened a gate for them on the western side when they fled in that direction. Most of your sappers made it through, as well as a few of Ratface’s cadets. Twenty-three overall.”

With my own survivors, that brought me down to seventy-one legionaries. Not as bad of a disaster as it could have been, but still a crippling defeat. I grimaced. Black had been right, damn his Praesi hide: one step of my plan had failed and now the whole thing was useless. I’d have to start planning from scratch again, and my position was horribly weak.

“ Do they show any sign of wanting to assault?” I asked.

Snatcher shook his head. “First Company is taking over your camp. I doubt they’ll try anything until tomorrow morning.”

I frowned. “Why the wait? They still have at least a bell until sundown.”

“ Juniper’s forces aren’t all here,” the other captain grimaced. “Her sappers are still missing. Building ladders and a ram, if I had to guess.”

“ They’ll still be at a disadvantage going on the offence, even with those,” I noted. “Between your crossbows and my heavies we’ll be able to hold them off even if they attack several spots at the same time.”

“ I have a few thoughts about this, as it happens,” the goblin smiled. “Walk with me, Callow.”

For a moment I thought he’d make like a Callowan and offer me his arm to slip into mine but he simply ambled on ahead. Probably better that way , I mused. Never seen a goblin riding a horse before, so knighthood would be a stretch. I caught up with him and we strolled next to the wall like this was a Proceran garden viewing.

“ As you’ve no doubt noticed,” he started, “ the walls to my second ring of my fortifications are stone and dirt.”

I nodded, curious where he was going with this.

“ And yet,” he spoke almost casually, “there is no sign of the digging efforts that would be necessary for such an accomplishment.”

My eyes sharpened. He was right: I’d been so focused on the possible mine field I’d never thought to wonder where the materials making his rampart from had come from. Some of it must have been from the ditch in front of it, but that wasn’t enough to explain ten feet high walls.

“ You’ve been digging elsewhere,” I said.

Snatcher’s lazy eye wandered as he bared yellowing needle-like teeth in approval.

“ Goblins weren’t always surfacers, you know,” he told me. “We once lived underground, before the dwarves drove us out and into the Grey Eyries.”

I clenched my fingers and unclenched them, letting my other hand rest on the pommel of my sword.

“ Tunnels,” I realized. “You’ve been digging tunnels.”

“ And they lead right to the two most likely camp sites for a besieging force,” he chuckled. “So tell me, Captain Callow: how would you like to even your score with Bishara?”

My answering smile was a savage thing. “I think you and I will get along very well, Captain Snatcher.”

Chapter 26: Juniper’s Plan

“Never back the Praesi in a corner, son. That’s when the devil-summoning starts, and it’s all downhill from there.”
-King Jehan of Callow, addressing the future King Pater the Unheeding

Snatcher had suggested we wait until sundown for the sneak attack, and I wasn’t inclined to disagree.

I had a lot of work before me, as it happened. I needed to get a real headcount of my remaining cadets, go through our stocks to see what we had left munitions-wise and brief my remaining officers on the new plan. We were in no danger of being eliminated through officer attrition, given that my only missing lieutenant was – once again – Ratface but I’d already figured out that numbers were the way Juniper was aiming to take me out. Wise of her, considering I’d take quite a few legionaries to put me down if she cornered me badly enough. My Name was still being a temperamental bitch about coughing out power, but I had a feeling that if the opposition got too overwhelming it would trigger my Struggle aspect again. Though how much help that would be against a group is still up in the air.

Though he remained tight-lipped on more general Role lore, I’d managed to get some tips on using my own from Black. He’d told me that aspects always needed specific conditions to be tapped into, and usually had at least one flat limitation. Learn, for example, only applied when I was consciously being taught. Trying to pick up a sword trick in the middle of a duel would fail every time. As for Struggle, he’d been less helpful in puzzling it out: it had not been one of his aspects back when he’d been the Squire, and though he’d made a study of Names their powers had a way of varying wildly from one Named to another. His guess was that the aspect was meant as an equalizer: when I was outclassed, my Name would put me on even footing with my opponent for a short amount of time. There was no way to be sure whether he was right or not until it was put to the test, but his theory had felt... right. Like it fit in a wider pattern.

Names were supposed to respond with who you were, and I’d known from the moment I’d accepted the Calamity’s offer that most of my battles would be uphill ones. That my Name had responded to my desire for a way to even the playing field made perfect sense to me. I was worrying, though, that it would not react the same to multiple opponents. When I’d taken Rashid by surprise and stabbed his sorry ass we’d essentially been duelling. When I’d jumped over the log in the last war game I’d not been tapping into the Struggle, I was pretty sure. Just making use of what little power my damaged connection to my Name had made available at the time. Would the aspect trigger if I was facing multiple opponents that were, strictly speaking, weaker than I? I had my doubts.

Already I knew that it only reacted to direct threats, or it would have reacted when Heiress was outmanoeuvring me in the Tower. I was kind of hoping my third aspect would involve a loud alarm blaring in the back of my head whenever the Soninke noble was fucking me over, but I doubted it would be that easy. There was a sort of twisted duality to my Name and hers, one that brought to mind one of the first afternoon lessons with my teacher. Most of the time we went over my assigned readings and he clarified points or expanded on them, but once in a while he’d strike a debate over a subject and the afternoon was spent discussing it. I’d learn to both dread and look forward to those particular lessons: I always came out having learned something useful, but the conclusions could be... morally flexible, to put it mildly.

That time, the subject had been the nature of power. “Dread Emperor Terribilis once said that power is the ability to see your will done,” he’d begun. “Using that as a touchstone, I would classify power in two broad types: soft power and hard power.” Soft power, he’d elaborated, was the use of indirect methods and influence. Convincing and coercing others to do your bidding through persuasion or social pressure. Though I disliked her on a personal level, on an objective one I could see that Heiress excelled at that kind of work. She’d managed to turn all the other claimants against me back in Summerholm with minimum effort and no risk to herself. When we’d met face to face on the Blessed Isle the use of force had been a backup plan, not the main thrust of her effort: instead she’d offered me something she thought I wanted, in a way that would marginalize me as an obstacle to her plans.

Hard power, by contrast, was where I lived at. Direct application of force to dictate your will on others. The way Black had phrased that made me uncomfortable, but there was some truth to his words. In the end, I was not above imposing what I thought was right and wrong on others at the edge of a sword. Even what could be called my one foray into soft power, when I’d decided to use the Lone Swordsman as a way to set Callow on fire an advance my cause, had been something I’d managed to accomplish by forcefully beating the hero first. I still remembered the way every one of the claimants for Squire had gone about things differently, almost as if the Name was pitting different methods against each other to see which was the most worthy. In that light, I did not think it was a coincidence that Heiress and I used fundamentally different ways of getting what we wanted. We were in a competition, clearly, I just wasn’t sure for what .

Not that it changed anything. Heiress had been sharpening knives meant for my back before we’d ever met, and I did not think she was done interfering in the melee yet. The blood magic delay and my shitty starting position felt like her hand at work, but that could not be the only string to her bow. The two incidents I suspected she was behind had damaged my performance, yes, but so far she’d always gone for more thorough plots than that. All the moves she’d made before had the potential of taking me entirely out of the equation, which meant there was likely a third stroke coming for my neck. But from where? So far she’d interfered through the College, which made sense: it was an old institution, one where her family was likely to have pre-existing contacts. Pickler had already killed my initial guess of her bribing one of the participating captains, which left... outside interference?

That seemed unlikely, with the way Black was bound to be watching all of this like a hawk. Heiress was good, but not good enough to pull the wool over the eyes of one of the fucking Calamities. I sighed and put the matter aside. It was an unfortunate fact that I had a lot more difficulty predicting Heiress than she apparently did predicting me. One who prefers soft power is weak to direct confrontation , I remembered Black murmuring over a cup of wine, but one who uses only hard power is easy to entrap. As in all things, balance is paramount. It didn’t matter, I decided as I clenched my fingers tightly. However sharp the jaws of the trap my rival would have closing on me, I would pry them open and throw the whole bloody contraption at her head. Adjusting my sword belt – it had loosened a bit while running away from Wolf Company – I put my helmet back on and returned to my cadets.

My initial count of seventy-one legionaries had been overly optimistic. I had that many cadets present, certainly, but not all of them were in fighting shape. Damnably, most of the legionaries unfit to fight were in my heavies. Getting trampled by a tenth of ogres was not something you recovered from in a day, and though Kilian’s mages were fairly talented they were nowhere close to the kind of ability you’d need to truly heal broken bones. They could put them back into place and patch them up, but any hard impact would break them right back – and make them that much harder to heal the second time. Flesh could only soak in so much magic before it became saturated, the redheaded lieutenant explained to me. Trying to push in sorcery past that point would lead to... bad things. All in all, I had about fifty-five soldiers in fighting shape. Most of my own line, the mage half of Kilian’s and miraculously all of Pickler’s sappers. The goblin lieutenant did have a talent for ducking out of the way before trouble reached her, one probably helped along by the way her sergeant snuck around and compulsively eavesdropped on everything. “We don’t have the numbers to overwhelm Wolf Company anymore,” I told my remaining officers. “Not even a surprise attack will change that.”

“We’re going for the officers, then,” Hakram graveled.

“Finding them will be the real problem,” I grunted back. “Even if we manage to penetrate the camp quietly, which isn’t a given, we’ll only have so much time before the alarm is sounded.”

Pickler gently cleared her throat. “There shouldn’t be a problem, Captain. Aisha’s sapper line is lacking, so they largely stick to the book. Their camp layout is Legion standard.”
I frowned.

“I’m not seeing the significance of that,” I admitted.

Nauk snorted out a laugh. “It means their officer tents are in designated spots for quick assembly,” he grinned savagely. “If we move quick enough, we could have all their senior officers out before the pack wakes.”

Well now. I’d been due some good news, and this seemed to qualify.

“I’ll need four other people to sneak in with me,” I decided. “One per target officer. Any of you have recommendations?”

“Sergeant Robber,” Pickler immediately offered, not noticing the disgruntled look taking hold of Nauk’s face. “He’s good at quiet work, and you won’t find anyone better at taking out sleeping soldiers.”

Her tone seemed to imply that the last part of that sentence had been a compliment. Goblins . The Tribes had very definite ideas about the way wars should be fought, and most of them would have the knights of Old Callow sputtering in mortal outrage. Thankfully, I’d never been afflicted by that whole chivalrous ethics mess. The Fields of Streges had made it very clear which way worked better when it counted, and in the end that was all that mattered.
“That’s two,” I noted. “Anyone else?”
“I’ll give you Nilin,” Nauk grunted. “My line’s not gonna be seeing action anyway, so he shouldn’t be needed.”
I nodded.
“Hakram?” I prompted.
“I’d go myself,” my sergeant graveled, “but someone needs to attend our line. Take Nomusa – not too tall, for a Soninke, and she packs a punch.”

I turned my eyes to Kilian and found her frowning.

“I’ll come,” she finally said. “You might need a mage, and I can be quiet if I need to.”
I hesitated before accepting that. Two sergeants, a lieutenant and the company’s captain were quite a few assets to risk on a strike that might very well fail. On the other hand, if we don’t succeed we’re pretty much fucked anyways. All or nothing, huh? Should I be worried how often that ends up being my play?

“Nauk, you’ll be in command in my absence,” I ordered, tacitly accepting Kilian’s offer.
The orc in question cleared his throat. “Where do you want Rat Company deployed, then?” he asked. “Not to get too obvious, but the moment the Wolves are out Snatcher no longer needs us.”

And there lay the thorniest of the thorns in my godsdamned side. Fox Company needed us to bolster their ranks on the walls only so long as there were two companies besieging them. If there were only Juniper and I left, I couldn’t be sure Snatcher wouldn’t decide to take his chances with the Hellhound and backstab Rat Company. As things stood, with most of my troops already behind the first wall I was pretty sure I could take his fort from him. But there’d be casualties, and then I’d be stuck in the same position he’d let me in to avoid: alone on the hill with Aisha and Juniper out for my blood. Not a feasible option, especially considering there were tunnels connecting to both their camps. The plan Snatcher had proposed was that I would strike at the Wolves under the cover of night while he made his move against First Company. On the surface that seemed to be on the level, but he’d left himself a door. He’d have the option of pulling out after Aisha was done and leave me to deal with a pissed off Juniper, shutting the tunnels down behind me. Something to avoid as much as possible.

My options were either to leave my survivors inside with him and have them ready for a fight in case he betrayed me or to have Rat Company bail out the moment I headed into Aisha’s camp. I was leaning more towards the second: even if this whole thing went south, I’d still have enough troops left to find another angle to victory. And if I manage to drop Aisha while leaving the Foxes mostly intact behind their pretty little walls? I’m not sure it’s me Juniper will be pointing her blade at. That the Hellhound got to work cracking open Fox Company’s defences while I found a better position for the final confrontation was the best outcome I could hope for. Not that there was any chance of me getting there now , since just by thinking that I’d pretty much sent an engraved invitation to the Gods asking them to piss all over my plans.

Still. It was worth a try.

“Wait fifteen Hails after my team moves out and then take the company north,” I told him after chewing over my options a little longer. “Avoid fighting.”

The large lieutenant shot me a bewildered look.

“What the Hells are ‘Hails’,” he growled.

Kilian snorted. “It’s the time it takes to recite one of their fancy House of Light hymns,” she explained, eyeing me amusedly. “Wrong gods for this neck of the woods, Captain.”

“Right,” I coughed, somewhat embarrassed. “I, er, don’t know the equivalent for the Gods Below.”

“About six basic line drills,” the redheaded lieutenant said after pausing an instant to close her eyes and think. “The Hellgods don’t really go for hymns, as it happens. Probably safer to stick with Legion exercises.”

Clearly I’d need to actually learn those at some point. My lessons had been rather sparse in that regard, as it happened. After teaching me the bare essentials of fighting as a legionary, Captain and Black had focused on other kinds of swordsmanship. I’d never actually seen my teacher use a scutum outside of those first few mornings: Black usually favoured a smaller kite shield with his short sword and taught me with the same.

“Duly noted,” I grunted. “That should be it for the moment, unless anyone else has a point to raise?”

No one did, and they took heed of the implied dismissal. I motioned for Kilian to stick around as the others started leaving, not bothering to vocalize the order. The pale-skinned girl looked surprised but she sat back down without a comment. I waited for the other officers to be at a safe distance before clearing my throat.

“There’s a thing I’d like clarified before we head into combat,” I told her. “I’ve heard you can be incapacitated if you draw too much on magic – something about creature blood?”
The lieutenant sighed, fine lashes fluttering over hazel eyes.

“Hakram?” she asked in a resigned tone.

I snorted. “Surprisingly enough, no. Got it out of Nauk.”

“Like he’s one to talk, the bloody failed berserker,” she muttered.

“I don’t mean to pry into personal matters,” I said. Not strictly true, but I figured I might as well pretend not to be nosy. “I just want to know how it might affect things.”

Either she bought that or she was polite enough to pretend to. Pushing back a strand of red hair into the sides of her pixie cut, the lieutenant took a deep breath.

“My grandmother was one of the Fae,” she said.

I blinked in surprise. “Like the ones in the Waning Woods, or does that mean something different in Praes?”

She eyed me cautiously. “I keep forgetting you’re Callowan,” she admitted. “The Fae are... not popular around here, even in the Green Stretch.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I mean, they kill Callowans too whenever one’s stupid enough to go too deep into the forest but it’s not exactly a big deal. They never wander out and the path to Refuge is supposed to be safe.”

“The benefits of having a former Calamity ruling your city,” Kilian noted. “The blood’s pretty diluted, but I still got some things out of it. Mostly the unusual hair and some mage tricks that require control beyond what most humans can manage.”

“I’m not really seeing downsides, so far,” I pointed out. “Well, besides the racism. But that was kind of given already, what with you being Duni.”

“Isn’t it just?” she replied bitterly. “You’d think with the fucking Black Knight being one of us they’d start holding their tongues, but it doesn’t seem to have changed anything.” She took another deep breath, forcing herself to return to the original subject. “Anyway. You’ll note I don’t have wings, which Fae are supposed to have. Whenever I draw in too much power my body tries to make some, which fucks with my head and occasionally makes me lose control over the magic.”

“That sound bad,” I contributed helpfully.

“Pretty bad,” she agreed with the ghost of a smile.

“But you know your limits?” I probed.

“Learned them the hard way,” Kilian grimaced.

“All I needed to know,” I told her, clapping her shoulder in reassurance. “I’ll let you brief your tenth, I need to have a talk with Captain Snatcher.”

She nodded and I rose to my feet, rolling my shoulder under the chain mail. Wearing it for so long was killing my muscles, especially without a proper aketon under to soften the weight. Legionaries were issued something thinner than the padded jacket I was used to, though admittedly mine was meant to be worn with mail.

“Captain,” Kilian suddenly called out.

I half-turned to meet her eyes. “Lieutenant?”

“Thank you,” she said, looking away.

“Any time, Kilian,” I replied quietly.

I hated the part of myself that coldly noted she was more loyal to me now than ever before, but I did not ignore it. Guilt is fine. Healthy, even. But I will not let it stop me . Thumb rubbing the hilt of my sword, I went to find Snatcher. There were still details to hash out, and all of my ambitions would be for naught if I lost today.

Arranging a meeting ended up a more complicated matter than I would have thought. Snatcher was inside the fort, and that meant going across the – possibly – mined field. I asked one of the sergeants still at the wall and he informed me that my fellow captain had left instructions that I be escorted to him if I asked. I was guided across on a hilarious overcomplicated path by a cadet in what I suspected was far from the most efficient route. I did my best to commit it to memory anyway: for all I knew, I might need to use it before the melee was done. To my surprise, I came to find the goblin captain doing manual labour. The wooden platform I’d glimpsed earlier today was being linked to the ground by a minimalist ramp: Snatcher was part of a group of half a dozen goblins laying the finishing touches on it. He gestured for one of the sentries to replace him when he saw me, patting down his clothes to get some of the dust out of them.

“Captain Callow,” he greeted me. “I take it you’re done briefing your officers?”

“They’ll be read when the time comes,” I agreed. “Just one last thing to go over with you – I’ll be taking a small team through the tunnels, not the entire company. Lieutenant Nauk will be taking most of my cadets north while I’m targeting Aisha’s officers.”
I did not phrase it as a request because it was not up for debate. Snatcher studied me with a calm face.

“Fair enough,” he conceded. “I’ll notify my officers. One of my cadets has volunteered to guide you through the tunnels.” He paused. “If I may say so, Captain Callow, you’re a rather quick study. It has been a pleasure to work with you.”

“The same to you,” I replied, somewhat surprised to find I meant it.

Snatcher was a pleasant enough sort, and by far the politest goblin I’d ever come across. Talking with General Sacker had been like having a knife at my throat the whole time, I couldn’t help but think that Pickler was only ever half-listening when I spoke and the less said about Robber the better. I enjoyed the malevolent little sergeant, true, but if he ever met politeness in a dark alley he’d knife it and rob the corpse.

“All of the Deoraithe attending the College show promise,” the other captain noted. “It’s a shame so few of you actually serve in the Legions afterwards.”

I’d had no idea whatsoever that there were any of the People around, but I kept my surprise off of my face. Why the Hells would Deoraithe go through a Praesi officer school?

“You’re the first Praesi I’ve heard referring to them as anything other than Wallerspawn,” I replied instead, subtly steering the subject away from my ignorance.
Snatcher shrugged.

“The Grey Eyries are a long way from the Wall,” he replied. “Unlike the Clans, the Tribes have no bloody history with the Duchy of Daoine and no grudge to go along with it.”
I nodded slowly. That was good to know. It was hard to break the habit of thinking of the Empire as a monolithic entity: even now that I’d learned of the different forces at work inside of it I still had a tendency to assume general opinions remained the same regardless of ethnicity. I considered leaving the conversation at that, but my eyes flicked to the platform and I decided to push my luck.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” I spoke, “what is that thing for? I’ve been wondering since Rat Company first set camp.”

Snatcher smiled a tad nastily, though the nastiness did not feel like it was directed at me.
“My little surprise for Juniper,” he replied. “Did you pay attention to the stocks?”

I nodded. “Though I don’t recall anything shedding light on this.”

“It’s a common mistake to only keep track of the munitions,” the goblin said. “It leads people to miss things like my requesting a large bowstring, nails and iron plate.”
A large bowstring? What would he use that for? I frowned. Fox Company was, at its core, a sapper company. The function of the sappers in the broader Legion was the use of goblin munitions, the building of fortifications and...

“I thought siege weaponry was forbidden,” I said.

“Bringing one is forbidden,” Snatcher corrected me. “The regulations say nothing about building one.”

Another detail fell into place.

“So that’s why my scouts found tracks coming from the woods. You were bringing back materials to work with.”

“It was a gamble,” Snatcher admitted. “There was no way of telling whether or not our battlefield would have lumber on it, and I must admit the ballista we’ve cobbled together is rather crude.”

A ballista . Weeping Heavens, and to think I’d believed his company would be the easiest to deal with. And since the better part of his company was goblins, starting bombardment during night time would make no difference to him. He interpreted my silence as worry, and to be honest he wasn’t entirely wrong – I really hoped Juniper was the one who ended up having to take this fort, because I didn’t think my own men could pull it off.

“No cause for alarm,” he assured me. “We’ll only begin firing after either you’ve taken out Wolf Company or conspicuously failed in doing so.”

“Very kind of you,” I faintly replied.

Thanks all the Hells I hadn’t stuck to my original deal with Aisha: it would have been a bloody rout.

—

I already knew all of my team except for Nomusa.
I recognized her from my line when she met us at the head of the tunnel, but we’d never actually talked before. She was Soninke, like Hakram had said, and only a head taller than me – which qualified as short by the standards of her people. She was missing a finger and there was a nasty burn mark in the hollow of her cheek I decided not to ask about. Nilin I already knew, having shared drinks with him in the aftermath of the last game, and smiled at him when he arrived. Robber had already been there when I’d arrived, skulking around and managing to look suspicious without actually doing anything concrete. It was a skill he’d perfected through years of hard work, or so he’d informed me cheerfully. Kilian was the last to show up, slightly out of breath. When she fell behind me in silence our guide for the night finally opened his eyes and rose to his feet.

“My name is Hatcher,” he informed us curtly. “I see none of you brought your scutum, which is good – the tunnel is tight enough without dragging along a shield. It’ll be dark in there, so keep close to me.”

Without further ado he scuttled into the hole in the ground. I was the first to follow and a short drop later I was on solid ground again, crawling on my knees. For once in my life I was glad of my height: even Nilin would find the tunnel a tight fit, and Hakram wouldn’t have managed more than a few feet before getting stuck. We waited until everyone dropped and so began our wriggling in the dark. Progress was damnably slow and the air felt thin, but after an eternity of making like worms the tunnel broadened a bit and Hatcher told us to take a break.

“We’ve passed the first wall,” he told me. “Only a bit further now.”

“Do you know where in the camp we’ll be coming out?” I muttered back.

“The tunnel splits around there in four different directions,” he replied. “Most are close to the middle, but you’ll be going in blind.”

“Lucky us,” I grunted.

Without my Name I would not have seen him glare at me in the dark. Soon after we resumed the crawl, and around what I estimated to be the tenth Hail the tunnel broadened again, splitting in the directions as he’d mentioned. Hatcher tapped a hand against the wall of the centre one.

“That one’s the best situated,” he spoke. “You should send two people there, split the others.”

“You heard the man,” I murmured. “Nilin and Kilian, take that one.”

“The rightmost tunnel goes a bit further,” Hatcher told me. “I’ll show you the way.”

Presumptuous of him to assume I’d take that one, but I saw no point in arguing. Robber and Nomusa headed into theirs while I followed the Fox Company legionary. The tunnel tightened again, much to my dismay, and our progress slowed. I peered over Hatcher’s soldier and my blood ran cold when I saw that up ahead was a dead end. Trap. Shit.

“Just a moment,” Hatcher spoke. “Something wrong with the ceiling here, I need to have a closer look.”

His hand slowly moved towards a small hole in the wall ground under him, where I glimpsed clay balls. My hand went for my sword and slowly, silently, I unsheathed it.

“You ever been to Summerholm, Captain?” Hatcher asked.

“Only the once,” I replied, shifting around to get a better angle to strike.

“Never been, myself,” he casually spoke. “But my cousin did. She never came back, Squ-”

I rammed the pommel of my sword into the back of his head before he could finish the monologue covering his motivation. Amateur . He yelped but the angle had been awkward and he wasn’t knocked out. He dropped the sharper though, and that was what mattered. He threw himself at me but I was ready – releasing my sword I caught his hands and forced him down. Hissing furiously, he bared his teeth and tried for my throat but I head-butted him violently. His nose broke and I did it again, twice as hard. He screamed but his struggling weakened, eventually ceasing entirely.

“I’m guessing you’re talking about Chider,” I spoke quietly.

“ Murderer ,” he garbled out.

“The hero was the one to kill her, actually,” I replied. “Though I won’t deny I would have done it myself if it came down to it.”

“They’ll get you,” he sneered through the blood. “Sooner or later, someone will. Little Callowan playing the Squire. You’re a joke and everyone knows it.”

“Let me guess,” I sighed. “You got the information through an anonymous source right before the beginning of the melee?”

A flicker of doubt went through his eyes but, as desperate sorts are wont to do, he doubled down instead of folding.

“No idea what you’re talking about,” he mocked.

How many other knives had Heiress pointed at me this way, I wondered? How many other legionaries in the melee were out to kill me if they could? I’d need to watch my back very, very closely.

“The part that confuses me is how you thought you’d get away with this,” I admitted. “The College is scrying this whole thing as it happens.”

“Can’t scry underground, you ignorant sow,” he spat.

“Ah,” I said softly. “That changes things.”

There was a look in the goblin’s eyes I recognized from the Pit. The one sore losers got, the kind of opponents who knew they’d lost the fight but were already thinking of the next one. He wasn’t going to stop. He’d come for me again. Not tonight, not even tomorrow but one day he would try his luck a second time.

“You know, the first night I met him, he told me it didn’t get easier,” I told the goblin softly.

A trickle of power ran through me as my Name stirred, strengthening my grip. Hand moving with swift purpose, I broke Hatcher’s neck.

“It was,” I decided, “a very kind lie.”

Softly, I closed the cadet’s eyes and let out a l ong breath. I picked up my sword and sheathed it, turning around to crawl back the way I’d come from. I still had a game to win. And no time to think about what a stupid, meaningless way it had been for that cadet to die.

—

I surfaced after having taken the tunnel I’d sent Nilin and Kilian through, the one closest to the centre of the camp.
The exit was hidden behind a stone much too large to move easily, covered so it wouldn’t be seen at a casual glance. I pushed myself out and knelt in the dirt, holding my breath to hear there were any sentries close by. A few heartbeats later, satisfied there were none, I rose up to a half-crouch and took a better look at my surroundings. I was a little to the south of where I needed to be, if I remembered Pickler’s drawing correctly. The captain’s tent was supposed to be in the very centre of the camp, where the two main avenues crossed. Aisha had been the target I’d chosen for myself, as she was the most likely to have guards around her – I had a few trump cards at my disposal that the rest of my team didn’t if things got out of control. Admittedly the cards were fickle and still rather displeased with me at the moment, but they were still nominally in my hand.

Wolf Company seemed to be largely asleep and there shouldn’t be any sentries this deep inside the camp, but I still moved carefully. I passed by two rows of tents nestled close to each other, pausing when I saw torchlight lighting up the space ahead. I peered around the corner of a tent and grimaced when I saw that there was still light in what looked like Aisha’s tent. Worse, there was a pair of legionaries standing next to the entry flaps – orcs, and not small ones either. Would it be worth it to circle around and try my way by the back? The longer I waited the higher the chance of getting caught, of course, but it might be wiser to take a chance than go for the noisy front assault. I was late already, thanks to Hatcher’s failed assassination plot, but I shouldn’t be a problem as long as – I tensed, waiting for the alarm to ring. Silence.

Huh , I mused. This might actually go as planned .

A horn sounded a heartbeat later and I decided that if I ever came face to face with a god I was going to stab it somewhere painful. Casually I started walking in the direction of Bishara’s tent, not quite hurrying but definitely not slowly. The guards had snapped to full attention the moment the horn sounded, and fuck had one of my legionaries failed? This wouldn’t work if we didn’t get all of the senior officers. I saw the closest orc glance at me and then to something in the distance – that’s right, nothing to see here, just one of your legionaries assembling – but the gaze snapped back.

“INTRUDER!” she yelled, but I was already running. “TO THE CAPTAIN!”

She barely had the time to bring her shield up before I bodily slammed into it, knocking her back. The other guard tried to strike my neck but I angled my head and it bounced off my helmet. The hit still hurt, but I gritted my teeth and stumbled through the flaps to the tent. Aisha was inside, tightening her sword belt without having even bothered to put on a shirt.

“ Callow ?” she squawked. “What the-“

The flat of my blade, swung two-handed, struck her on the temple before she could reach for her sword. A moment later someone struck me in the back and I was thrown to the ground, rolling to get to my feet as a very angry orc tried to bash my head in with their shield. I ducked behind Aisha’s cot, sneaking a look at Wolf Company’s captain while a pair of furious orcs turned the wooden frame to kindling. She was out like a light, most likely concussed.

“This has been great,” I told the legionaries, backing away to the edge of the tent, “but this is getting a little serious for me. I’m not sure I’m ready for that kind of commitment.”

“I’m going to take this out of your hide, Rat ,” the male orc spoke in a surprisingly mellow voice.

And that was my cue to make a daring escape. I kicked the tent pole I’d managed to position myself next to. It did not fall.

“Dug into the ground, huh,” I spoke into the incredulous silence. “Bummer.”

Well, what was going to follow was not going to be pleasant. I could already hear reinforcements closing in. Actually, I could hear them screaming. In dismay.

“I don’t suppose one of you could check the sky?” I asked. “I think-“

Thunder rumbled. Sheathing my sword, I raised my hands up in surrender and carefully walked back out of the tent – one of the orcs shouldered me as I went by, but I was a magnanimous winner and so allowed it to pass without comment. The night sky was streaked with the beautiful image of Wolf Company’s standard, a red streak across it. The sweet taste of victory was a little harder to enjoy with a crowd of hostile legionaries gathering around me, but after a moment Nilin pushed his way through them and to me with a wide grin on his face.

“Captain,” he said, sounding almost disbelieving. “We did it. I mean, I thought maybe we could pull it off, but we actually pulled it off .”

His babbling was actually somewhat endearing. I clapped his shoulder with a smile of my own.

“We should have one Hell of a spectacle starting soon, sergeant,” I told him. “Captain Snatcher’s minions made a ballista, and by now they should be ready to bombard First Company.”

“So that’s what the platform was for,” he mused. “I’d been wondering.”

Kilian came around a corner and I waved her over, ignoring the multitude of glares coming in my direction. She put a spring to her step and joined us, Wolf Company parting for her as they started dispersing.

“Lieutenant Kilian,” I grinned. “Come on, we need to find a good vantage point.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Why would we-”

Thunder rumbled. What? I looked up, and next to the red-slashed wolf a fox glared back down on me. Ignoring my legionaries, I headed for the peak of the hill Wolf Company had built their camp on. First Company’s camp looked untouched, the few fires surrounded by tents in it slowly dying down. What had happened? Snatcher hadn’t so much as thrown a stone. Wait, where are the sentries? Not a single legionary was patrolling the perimeter. There should have been someone, if only because of the ruckus my team had made hitting the Wolves. Slowly I felt my stomach sinking and I turned my eyes to Fox Company’s walls. In the distance, over the fort’s ramparts, a standard bearing crossed silver swords flapped lazily in the night breeze.

“Well,” I said. “That’s going to be a problem.

Chapter 27: Callow’s Plan

“What Foundling does isn’t thinking outside the box so much as stealing the box and hitting her opponents with it until they stop moving.”
– Extract from “A Commentary on the Uncivil Wars”, by Juniper of the Red Moon Clan

I crouched down and peered into the dark.
I couldn’t see where it linked up with the tunnels dug by Snatcher’s sappers but there was no doubt that it did: there’d been no assault on the walls and I hadn’t heard any munitions being used. Most likely First Company had taken the Foxes while they were spread out and preparing an assault of their own, decapitating the leadership before they could muster up a real fight.
“Hurried work,” Pickler noted from where she was crouching next to me, “but still stable. Juniper makes up for limited sapper assets by quality.”
First Company’s camp – the one my own legionaries had built – had been empty. Tents and bedrolls were still in place and often with rocks and debris slipped in so from a distance it would look like they were full, but there was not a living soul among the rocks. I sent Robber to link up with the rest of Rat Company as soon as I saw Juniper’s banner on the walls and went to follow the tracks coming out of the back of the camp. They led to the entrance of a tunnel hidden behind a nearby hill, freshly dug. Which solves the mystery of where First Company’s sappers had been holing up. I sighed and forced myself back up. The night’s excitement was already catching up with me, though the ever-expanding list of issues I had to solve would keep me far away from my bedroll for the foreseeable future.
“Collapse the tunnels, Lieutenant,” I finally said. “That trick isn’t going to work for anyone twice.”
Unclasping the cheek flaps of my helmet, I set it down and took a moment to straighten up my ponytail. The part of the helm that covered my neck kept pushing down the leather strip keeping it together, though I usually didn’t notice until the fighting was done . I might have to get it cut soon , I thought. It kept getting in the way, and I didn’t have the time to straighten the knots with my old beaten-up comb the way I’d used to: the whole mess was so tangled up it could have been used as a rope. Or a noose.
“It’ll be done in a quarter bell,” Pickler spoke quietly. “A little more, if you want us to be thorough.”
“Thorough is good,” I grunted. “Have Robber do the same for the tunnels leading in Wolf Company’s camp, I’m not giving Juniper multiple ways out of that fortress.”
Sure, I could have used the tunnels too. But now that the element of surprise was gone she would just drop a handful of smokers in them whenever she caught sight of us and let us choke our lungs out in the dark before sweeping up whoever was still standing. Well, crawling. The point still stood. I didn’t think she’d risk an assault herself, considering we could do the same to her, but I wasn’t going to be taking chances with the Hellhound. Snatcher evidently had, and how had that ended up for him? I made my way up the hill, ducking around a stone spire that looked a little too unstable for my tastes and allowed myself to drop on the ground after checking the close-by bush for snakes.
Ratface had informed me that pretty much everything out in the Wasteland was either poisonous or out to eat your liver – and possibly your soul – before he’d been taken prisoner. Something about how everyone who took over the Tower let out the experiments of the last Tyrant into the wilds, which seemed like a horrible idea to me and therefore entirely in line with the usual Praesi way of doing things. I closed my eyes and lay back against the rock, taking comfort in the fact that I was out of sight and therefore none of my troops could see me totally at a loss for what to do. Nauk had pulled out of Fox Company’s fortifications before Juniper had taken them and been entirely unaware of their taking over when Robber had made contact with him. I’d ordered him to take our survivors in the hills beyond either of the already-made camps as soon as he finished looting Wolf Company’s supplies.
It would have been more comfortable to stay in one of the camps instead of pitching our tents out in the wilds, but by now Juniper was bound to have gotten her hands on the ballista. I wasn’t sure what the range on that thing was, but Snatcher had believed it could reach First Company’s camp and that meant we weren’t sticking around. Not that ducking out of sight was going to accomplish anything in the long term: Juniper was still holed up in that fucking fortress, with only token casualties and a godsdamned siege weapon to point at my company should it attack. There was no sign of the prisoners taken during our little betrayal reach around from earlier, though I’d found the tents where they’d been kept, so I was still down in the fifties when it came to my effective fighting force. Which nearly half of is sappers, and those are worthless in a melee.
What did I have that Juniper did not? She had more men, a better position, and considering she must have ransacked Snatcher’s stocks like I had Aisha’s we should be about even on munitions. I’d have more demolition charges, considering Wolf Company had taken a Siege inventory, but my cadets would have to get close to use those. And I’ll eat my helmet if she didn’t grab all the crossbows she could from Fox Company’s men. My plan had been an elegant thing, when we’d started out the melee. Betray Morok to Aisha, betray Aisha to Snatcher and betray Snatcher to use his fortifications against Juniper. The moment Wolf Company had turned on me, though, it had all gone up in smoke. I’d been on the back foot ever since, and the moment I’d thought I was getting a modicum of control again the Hellhound had turned the entire thing on its head by ending Fox Company in one swift blow.
Gods, I was tired. Tired and out of ideas to use against a captain who it was becoming obvious was just better at Legion tactics than I was. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, really. Juniper had trained for years in the College and she was the daughter of one of the most talented generals in the Empire. And yet, on some level, I’d still expected things to turn out to my advantage. They had back in Laure, when my murder had turned into an apprenticeship to Black, and once again in Summerholm when the cock up with the Lone Swordsman had turned into a mess I’d been the most effective at exploiting. Chaos was something I was good at dealing with: rolling with the punches was a skill I’d perfected through my years in the Pit and it served me well when things spun out of control.
The hard truth was that, right now, my bag of tricks was empty. None of the things I’d learned on my own were of any use, and what had Black taught me since I’d become the Squire? A lot of history, some generalities and the basics of swordsmanship. My Name was a recalcitrant little brat and even if it had been cooperating I barely even knew how to use it. I closed my eyes and forced myself to think about nothing, letting the cool night breeze lick at my face. This was the most restful thing I could manage short of actually napping, and I was too wired for that right now. How long passed as I drifted away I couldn’t be sure, but eventually I heard someone make their way up the hill through the same path I had. I opened my eyes but didn’t bother to get up. Hakram eventually found me, raising a hairless brow when he saw me sprawled without even the pretence of dignity.
“Taking a break?” he asked.
“This is my thinking pose,” I lied.
The tall orc snorted, then took a seat next to me.
“Anything urgent?” I murmured.
“Not right now,” he grunted. “First Company’s not moving and Pickler is finishing up with the tunnels. You should probably call an officer meeting soon.”
“And tell them what?” I scoffed. “That I have no idea how to get us how of this mess?”
It helped that we weren’t looking at each other. I wasn’t sure I would have managed to admit that if we’d been face-to-face. I liked Hakram, probably the most out of all of my officers. He had a steadiness to him that I found soothing, and even outside the games he was good company.
“Nobody’s expecting miracles out of you, Callow,” he finally said. “You already got us much farther than anyone else would have.”
“I’m also the one who got Rat Company in this mess in the first place,” I replied bitterly. “Pickler was right. If I screw this up your careers are going to suffer, all because I thought I was better at this than I actually am.”
It was oddly relieving to admit that out loud. I hadn’t quite grasped the kind of damage putting Rat Company’s score so horribly in the negatives would do to my cadet’s placement in the Legions. And yet I could be honest enough with myself to admit that even if I had, I would have made the same gamble.
“You knew the risks,” my sergeant gravelled. “And took the chance anyway. Why?”
There was nothing confrontational about the orc’s tone. He was, from looks of it, genuinely curious. Trusting implicitly that I’d had a good reason for what I’d done.
“We win this and I’ll get command of the Fifteenth Legion,” I confessed quietly.
He did not point out that there was no Fifteenth Legion currently in existence, or even a Fourteenth for that matter. I was grateful for it: I was still vague on the details myself, and did not feel like having to explain any of it.
“And if you lose?” Hakram asked instead.
“Heiress gets it,” I replied. “She played me, in the Tower. Called it a wager when it was the most one-sided deal I’ve ever heard of – and I lived under the rule of Governor fucking Mazus.”
“That’s how they do things, Callow,” the orc breathed out slowly. “They give you one out to have the pretence of fairness and then tighten the screws. Then they smile and ask how can it be their fault, when you had a way to win but failed?”
There was something bitter in the orc’s voice, an old anger that might not have ruled him but was never far from the surface. It was something I could relate to.
“You ever want to change the world, Hakram?”
He laughed quietly. “World’s always changing, Callow. We roll the boulder up the mountain until it falls down the other slope, and then we start again. If you’re lucky, it doesn’t crush anything you care for on the way down.”
“And that’s all we can hope for?” I grimaced. “Not to be crushed?”
“For people like me?” Hakram gravelled. “Yeah. It is. But you’re not like me, Callow. For some reason, you seem to think you can fix this mess. I don’t know if you really can. Hells, I don’t know if anyone can.” I could feel him smile without looking. “But I’d like to see you try.”
He pushed himself up and offered me a hand.
“So get off your ass, Callow, and start scheming again. We’re not down for the count yet, and I’ll be damned if we don’t go out making a bloody mess of it.”
I looked into the orc’s dark eyes and felt a spike of guilt through my stomach. It had been easier to think of the legionaries I wanted to command as tools before I got to know them. I took his hand and let him drag me up.
“Catherine,” I finally said. “Call me Catherine.”
We made our way back down the hill and I got my head back in the game. I called a meeting as soon as I found a runner, though I didn’t bother to limit it to senior officers this time. There were few enough of us left, and I’d had my own sergeant attend every one of them so far anyhow. Kilian’s sergeant had been taken prisoner with Ratface but the former captain’s own second-in-command was still with us, a stocky female orc named Tordis. She’d remained quiet so far, her brown-red eyes shifting from one lieutenant to the other as they finished giving their reports.
“We set up everyone on half-watches since it’s unlikely the Hellhound will move again tonight,” Nauk finished in a grunt. “Camp’s not fortified, but with our position it’ll be hard for them to sneak up on us.”
Nilin looked exhausted, I noticed. His eyelids drooped every few moments and twice now I’d seen him pinch his own wrist. Pickler and Kilian seemed in a better state, though it was admittedly hard to tell with the goblin. As for the sapper lieutenant’s main minion, he’d been chewing on something through all the reports which I took mean he was just fine.
“We won’t be doing anything until the sun is up either,” I told them. “Rest up your cadets as much as possible, we’ve got a rough patch ahead of us. That said, Robber, what the Weeping Heavens are you eating?”
The small goblin noisily swallowed.
“Goat,” he replied. “The one we hunted. First Company roasted it and left some scraps when they moved out.”
I raised an eyebrow but passed no further comment. Rations wouldn’t be a problem for us: we’d taken both Morok’s and Aisha’s, so we should have enough for at least another four days. More, actually, considering we weren’t at full strength. I’d given thought to trying to starve Juniper out of the fortifications, given that there was no time limit in this melee, but we’d come to a head long before that. Hunting for more game would be unnecessary, though fresh meat might improve morale if I had the time. Huh. Fresh meat.
“You’re a brilliant little bastard, Robber,” I told him.
“One of the fundamental truths of Creation,” he agreed without missing a beat.
I ignored his gloating. “We’ll be sending hunting parties out with dawn,” I told my officers. “As many as we can.”
Pickler eyed me like I’d grown a second head.
“May I ask why, Captain?” she said hesitantly.
I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. “I’m going to fell some trees to make some carts.”

—

By Noon Bell the next day I had laid out in front of me three goats, a pretty mangled antelope and what looked like a rabbit with horns. Wait, did it also have fangs ? Why would – no, it didn’t matter. Trying to figure out why a Dread Emperor had created a breed of carnivorous rabbits would gain me nothing except a splitting headache. The creature would be useless for my purposes anyway, though I supposed that was my own fault for not being more specific.
“I don’t know where this is going,” Robber announced cheerfully, “but the fact that step one involves slaughtering the local wildlife has filled me with great expectations. Sir.”
In an entirely predictable turn of events, my praise had gone to Robber’s head with swift efficiency. The better part of my sapper line was standing in the sun looking at the line of corpses with politely confused expressions. I’d seen Pickler open her mouth and then close it without saying a word several times from the corner of my eye.
“One of the goats first,” I muttered to myself.
I knelt next to the closest corpse and closed my eyes, reaching for my Name. It felt faraway still, but not as much as it once had – the last few weeks had begun to repair the bridge I’d damaged, one morally dubious decision at a time. This was different in nature to tapping into one of my aspects, where I let the power flow through me and harnessed it for my own purposes. I was submerging myself into my Role, reaching for those cool depths I’d touched only twice before. For a moment nothing happened, but then I felt it. That great weight pushing against me, the coldness unnatural to Creation that somehow managed not to feel wrong . I smiled and felt a sharp prick against the palm of my hand, like I’d been jabbed by a needle. The coldness spread to the goat’s corpse. I got back on my feet and, after a heartbeat, so did the goat. I tugged at a string and its head turned to look at me. Another exertion of will and it stepped forward, then back.
“Necromancy,” Pickler spoke after a blink of surprise. “I did not know you were a mage.”
“I’m not,” I admitted. “This is Name shenanigans, I’m not entirely clear on how it works.”
The goblin lieutenant was openly dubious but managed to rally valiantly. “So we now have a goat. This is... progress?”
“You’re going to carve it up,” I told her. “And put munitions in it.”
There was a moment of silence until Robber’s convulsive laughter filled it.
“Oh Gods,” he gasped. “Juniper’s got a fortress and our answer is suicide goats .”
“I’m not sure if that’s technically accurate,” I frowned. “I mean, they’re already dead.”
Another burst of laughter. “Undead suicide goats,” he corrected himself breathlessly. “Very sorry, Captain. For the record, I don’t care whether we lose this one anymore. This is already a victory in every way that matters.”
Engaging him any further would just be seen as encouragement, I decided. I turned to Pickler, who looked like she wasn’t sure whether to be appalled or impressed. I had a feeling it was not the last time in my career a subordinate was going to be looking at me this way.
“I want the first one to have enough munitions stuffed in that it can blow cleanly through the palisade,” I told the lieutenant.
Pickler cleared her throat. “Punching our way through the first wall will be pointless if the entire First Company is arrayed behind it,” she pointed out. “We’ll still be outnumbered and outclassed.”
“We’re not going to be fighting them, Lieutenant,” I grunted. “The only thing we have going for us right now is a ridiculous amount of munitions and the ability to make expendable carriers for them. I intend to abuse that as much as possible.”
She nodded, uncertain but unwilling to argue.
“We’ll still need to get a mage in range to detonate the... goats,” she reminded me.
It took a visible effort to speak the last word of that sentence.
“I’ll escort Kilian onto the field,” I replied. “I need line of sight myself for fine – Robber stop godsdamned touching it .”
I could feel the goblin’s fingers poking experimentally at the corpse’s skin, which added that layer of additional creepiness to an already eerie feeling. The sergeant grinned unrepentantly in my direction.
“Permission to name the goats, sir?” he asked.
“Denied,” I replied without so much as a speck of hesitation.
“Both Morok’s Revenge and I are very disappointed in your decision, Captain,” he told me, patting the goat’s head comfortingly.
“Morok’s Revenge?” I repeated, already regretting the quizzical intonation before I’d even finished saying the words.
“It’s the ugliest and least impressive of the three,” Robber provided cheerfully.
I really needed to have a closer look at Legion regulations. It was an Evil institution, there was bound to be a loophole that allowed you to strangle irritating minions in the bylaws.
“Well. He’s not wrong,” another of the goblins muttered.
“Oh, we can have another one referring to Bishara,” a third contributed excitedly. “Something like ‘Aisha’dnt Have Done That’.”
The meeting quickly devolved into my sappers throwing around progressively more absurd names for our secret weapons.
“Pickler,” I spoke flatly, turning to the embarrassed-looking lieutenant who was watching the madness spread through her cadets. “I expect you to find a truly vicious punishment for the one that made the pun.”
Without a single look back I walked away, massaging the bridge of my nose and ignoring the indignant cry of “we’re not naming it ‘Ratface’s Ex’, he’s not even here to hear about it” for the sake of my sanity. Sappers. Mad, every last one of them.

—

Keeping my tenth in a ramshackle testudo formation meant we could only move slowly, but it was necessary nonetheless: I didn’t want any of the soldiers on the wall to see our trump card until it was too close for them to do anything about it.
“Incoming,” Kilian hissed, a streak of fear in her voice.
I popped my head out from behind the cover of the shields, immediately seeing the stone sailing across the clear afternoon sky. First Company had overshot – it was in no danger of hitting us and landed on the hill behind my tenth. The geyser of sand and stone caused by the impact made it very clear that none of us would be getting back up if Juniper landed a shot properly, though.
“Pick up the pace, cadets,” I ordered.
From the looks of it Juniper had put two lines up on the palisade Snatcher had helpfully built for her, which wouldn’t have been as much of a problem if even from where I stood I hadn’t been able to glimpse that the cadets were armed with crossbows. I knew the Hellhound could easily have fit twice as many legionaries behind the wall, which probably meant she was trying to bait me into an assault. If I’d truly been in straits as desperate as the ones she believed, it might even have worked.
“Another thirty feet, then we disperse,” I told the legionaries in a whisper.
A few of us would probably get shot by crossbow bolts – we were already in range, actually, but limited ammunition meant Juniper had likely ordered her legionaries to hold off until they could make the bolts count – but if it was a choice between that and continuing to present a good ballista target then there was no need to think about it twice.
“Even a glancing hit will set it off,” I reminded Kilian in a murmur. “The demolition charge alone would have done the trick but they added a few sharpers just in case.”
The sappers had spent quite some time tinkering with the munitions after carving up the corpse. I’d become a little curious about what it would look like when Morok’s Revenge went out in a blaze of glory.
“Ten feet,” I warned my cadets after peeking out from behind the shields.
I counted my breaths in silence, glancing at Kilian every few moments to verify the ballista wasn’t about to make us a moot point. The redhead’s face remained outwardly calm, tough the way her fingers held the grip of her sword so tightly her knuckles were paling was something of a giveaway for her true state of mind.
“On my word, disperse,” I whispered.
My legionaries immediately scattered, leaving Kilian and I standing beside an already moving undead. The mage lost no time in chanting her incantation as I willed the goat to move more quickly, crossing the last dozen feet separating it from the palisade in moments. There was a cry of alarm from the soldiers behind it but it was late, too late, and the fireball flew from Kilian’s outstretched hand. It clipped the side of the animated creature, and that was enough. There was a flash of light and then thunder struck, the explosion outright shattering a chunk of the palisade at least ten feet wide. The redheaded lieutenant and I started legging it without missing a beat, though a part of me wanted to stop and gape. Neither of us stopped before we were well in cover behind another hill: I dropped down, catching my breath and making a quick headcount. None of my cadets had been shot, it seemed. Lucky us.
“The explosion should not have been that large,” I got out breathlessly. “Or that intense.”
“It’s because of the Name, I think,” Kilian panted. “Munitions are alchemy, they can feed on other power sources.”
I closed my eyes. So, my trump card was more effective than previously anticipated. I could work with that.
“Send Nauk a runner,” I told the lieutenant. “We start phase two immediately.”

Chapter 28: Win Condition

“Our doctrine is one of cost-efficiency. Any officer who believes extermination of the enemy is a valid path to victory should immediately be demoted back to the ranks.”
– Marshal Ranker

“What makes you think she’ll abandon the first wall?”

Kilian’s breath was steadier now that she’d had a few moments to catch it. Running in chain mail could really take it out of you, and if Captain hadn’t made a habit of drilling me in plate it might have been as hard on my lungs as the redhead’s. I cast her a sideways look.

“Having doubts, Lieutenant?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I’m trying to understand where your certainty is coming from,” she replied.

“It took me a while to get it, but Juniper’s actually somewhat predictable,” I grunted.

Now there definitely was scepticism on the pretty mage’s face.

“Predictable is, uh, not a word I’d use for the Hellhound. Sir,” she said delicately.

“She always makes the correct choice,” I pointed out, closing my eyes. “When she has the necessary information, she makes the best decision she could make.”

Kilian frowned. “So you’re saying...” she trailed off, evidently not too sure about what I was saying.

Couldn’t blame her, really. This wasn’t something I’d figured out using wits and logic – it had been instinctual. Similar to the way I’d read opponents in the Pit, only applied to warfare instead of breaking a single person’s legs.

“If I know what the best move for her to make is, I can be fairly certain it’s the one she’ll make,” I replied, opening my eyes and turning on my belly to crawl my way closer to the crest of the hill.

The redheaded lieutenant did the same, joining me in taking a peek over the dust and stone. Like I’d predicted, First Company’s lines were preparing to retreat back across the mine field. One of Juniper’s sappers casually tossed a smoker into the hole I’d blown through the palisade a moment later, preventing me from getting a look at the path they were using. Ugh. I mean, I was pretty sure they’d do that but it’s still going to be a pain to figure out the way through.

“It’s limited in scope, Kilian,” I told her as I pushed myself back into cover. “I have no reliable way of knowing what she does and doesn’t know, so it’s still very much a guessing game. But if I have the initiative, then I can predict some of her reactions.”

I waved vaguely in the direction of what had once been Fox Company’s stronghold.

“What she knows right now is that I have access to munitions that can blow through her first wall and some sort of expendable creature minions to deliver them,” I grunted. “So she’s going to pull back behind the rampart until she can figure out how I managed that. It’s not like she’s losing anything, anyway: even if we manned the first wall from the other side we don’t have the strength to hold it against her. She could just claim it back whenever she wants.”

By now the runner I’d sent to Nauk should have gotten the remnants of my company moving. Keeping out of sight as long as possible, they’d wait until the last moment to run across the ballista’s killing field until they could take shelter behind the enemy’s own palisade. Pickler had assured me that the same platform Snatcher had built to ensure the siege engine would have a clear shot at the enemy camps meant that once we got close enough Juniper wouldn’t be able to adjust the angle low enough to aim at us. There was something mildly absurd about using the enemy’s fortifications as cover against them, but the situation I was in was beyond the ability of orthodox tactics to salvage.

Pretty much the only advantage on my side at this point was that by holing up in the fortress Juniper had given up the initiative. It was, I believed, a conscious decision on her part. She could have assaulted us almost immediately after taking out Snatcher, but the Hellhound was aware of what kind of fuckery Names could pull when you put their backs up against the wall. She was doing all she could to avoid outright cornering me while still stacking the odds on her side. If I’d decided to pull out and head into the wilds, then she would have simply followed in her own time: First Company functioned at its best when on the field, so it wasn’t like she’d have been giving me much of an edge there. Regardless, after hitting the bottom of the barrel last night I’d bounced back into the semblance of a plan. My largest mistake so far was that I’d been trying to beat Juniper as a captain when the fact was that she was just better at this than I was.

She was a better tactician and her company was flatly superior to mine – which shouldn’t have come as a surprise, considering Ratface had tried to make Rat Company a knock-off version of hers. If I played this game the way it was meant to be played, I’d lose every time. Like Black had told me in his usual semi-cryptic jackass advice session, I had to win despite the rules instead of according to them. The suicide goats were a first step towards that, as a method of attack that had no real precedent in the war games. The necromantic constructs weren’t significant because of how effective they were, although it looked like they’d be pretty damned effective, but because by pulling out a new trick I’d been able to seize the initiative. As long as I had Juniper reacting instead of acting, the Heavens were on my side.

“Although I guess technically they’re on neither of our sides,” I muttered to myself. “Probably should stop calling on them period.”

Kilian shot me a curious look but passed no comment. I glanced at my tenth and was pleased to see they appeared to have recovered from the run. Whatever his flaws as a captain, Ratface had drilled his legionaries into very good shape.

“As soon as Nauk gets out of cover, we’ll be running across,” I called out, making sure all of them acknowledged the reminder before turning my attention back to more pressing matters.

Crawling my way back up the hill, I scanned the distance for the rest of my company. Couldn’t see any sign of them, which I put down as another mark in Nauk’s favour: the large lieutenant was a highly competent officer, when he wasn’t in the throes of the Red Rage. Overly aggressive in his tactics, maybe, but for a frontline commander that wasn’t always a bad thing. Captain had mentioned General Istrid was also considered a little too bloodthirsty and she was one of the most respected military commanders in the Empire. After the three Marshals, she was one of the household names forged during the Conquest. I waited in silence for Rat Company to appear, and my patience was eventually rewarded: without so much as a word of warning, sixty-odd legionaries started running downhill towards the palisade.

“That’s our cue, ladies and gentlemen,” I called out, pushing myself up.

I picked up my shield and waited a few heartbeats before starting to sprint back across the grounds I’d covered only moments ago. There was no point in having my legionaries form up: if anything, it would be a liability. A tenth moving slowly and clustered together was prime ballista bait. Feeling my lungs burn as I forced my body to move, I jumped over a low-riding bush and only barely managed not to trip as my foot got snagged into a root. Whirling on myself I steadied my footing at the last minute and continued to push through. My tenth wasn’t far behind and before I’d managed to catch my breath at the foot of the palisade the majority of them were already at my side.

“We got everyone?” I panted.

Kilian nodded, too out of breath to get any actual words out. Gods, I hated running in armour. I’d heard no impact in the distance, which meant First Company either hadn’t been ready to shoot in time or that we’d offered them no target worth the effort. Nauk’s soldiers were milling by the palisade further to the south-east, slowly spreading out, and I gestured for my own tenth to join them. We walked, taking our time – there was no need to hurry this part of the operation, and going in unprepared was likely to see us brutally spanked. The lieutenant with the still-broken arm found me easily. There was a restless way to him, like he had an itch he couldn’t quite scratch.

“Callow,” Nauk greeted me. “Divided the lot of them like you told me. We’ll be ready to move as soon as Kilian reclaims her tenth.”

From the corner of my eye I could see the redhead heading for her mages, soldiers moving out of her way as she did.

“Good,” I grunted. “Pickler managed to make all the screens?”

“They’re ready,” the orc nodded. “Shame we don’t have vinegar to soak them in, but we’ll make do.”

I’d been more than happy to delegate the whole affair to the sapper lieutenant, having no experience whatsoever in crafting the likes of it myself. To be honest, my skillset largely considered of “bashing people’s heads in” and “ordering people to bash other people’s heads in”. It was a good thing that for all their quirks my officers had a knack for their area of expertise, because what I knew about sapper’s work would fit into a thimble. And not even a very big one.

“Wish I could do more than stand around like a waste of flesh,” Nauk admitted. “I’ve been useless to you since the scrap with Morok.”

I clapped his shoulder. “I don’t need someone to break skulls right now, Nauk,” I told him honestly. “I need someone to watch over the company while I try to outmanoeuvre Juniper, and you’ve done that just fine.”

The large orc shuffled his feet uncomfortably. He looked pleased – or hungry. It could be hard to tell with orcs.

“Wade in their blood, Captain,” Nauk gravelled. “I’ve been looking forward to this part since you told us the plan.”

So had I. It was about time we got to be the ones causing trouble. I left the orc lieutenant to it and went to check on the walking absurdity that was my trump card. Unsurprisingly, Robber was the one watching over Ratface’s Ex. My legionaries insisted on calling the goat by the verbal abomination that was the other proposed name, but I refused to humour them in this. A girl had to have some principles, and I drew the line at puns.

“Everything ready, Sergeant?” I asked.

“On our part, sure,” the goblin replied, eyes still fixed on the unmoving goat. “Can’t answer for Lieutenant Kilian’s merry parade of magical minions.”

I let the dig pass without comment, since he’d at least bothered to tack on Kilian’s rank to it. Kneeling next to the corpse, I touched its forehead and with an exertion of will had it rise to its feet. To my surprise I’d manage to raise all of the carcasses provided by my men without any real trouble, though I’d yet to figure out how to manipulate more than one at a time. The corpses remained still unless I willed it otherwise, and I’d found that after leaving one alone for too long I needed physical contact to make it work properly again. There would be no zombie army for me, it seemed, and Weeping Heavens when had I reached a point in my life where I was using the words “zombie army” without a hint of irony?

“Tell Pickler to get the line in position,” I told another sapper standing close by. “We won’t have much time between the first hit and the second.”

The female goblin saluted and scuttled off without a word as I returned my attention to the zombie. My main obstacle at the moment was the mine field. Assaulting the rampart was nothing more than a daydream as long as my company hadn’t secured a way across it. That we weren’t in the ballista’s angle of fire anymore was one problem dealt with, but the fact remained that any people I sent through would be getting peppered with crossbow fire the whole time. I could more or less deal with that by putting my cadets in a testudo formation, but packing them that tightly as they made their way through a field line with demolition charges would lead to horrific casualties. My first step, then, was to be clearing a safe path for my company. Thankfully, I had expendable assets to send into the grinder.

Ratface’s Ex dutifully followed me as I passed through the gap I’d had blown into the palisade, coming to stand at the edge of the killing field and gazing at the rampart. As expected the top of it was bristling with enemy legionaries, all of them armed with Snatcher’s crossbows. I couldn’t see Juniper, but I had no doubt that she was standing somewhere she could see the whole battlefield. Behind me my sapper line trickled through the hole, the front ranks carrying large screens of leather framed by repurposed sudis. All of the components had been cannibalized from Aisha’s camp, the leather coming from her tents and the wood and nails taken from her first line of defence. In the absence of the second tenth of my mage line and their large shields this ramshackle kind of cover would have to serve – much to my displeasure, every single member of that tenth had been taken prisoner with Ratface. Kilian’s mages spread out among the sappers in groups of three, the redhead in question coming to stand by my side in silence. I cracked my fingers and took a deep breath . Time to get the stone rolling.

Before I could get so much as a word out, Robber broke formation and strolled to the edge of the field. Straightening his back, he stood as high as his four feet and a half of height allowed him and slowly unsheathed his sword. Face solemn, he brandished the blade at First Company.

“ Unleash the goat ,” he commanded, clearly relishing every word coming out of his mouth.

“Remind me to stick him with latrine duty for at least a month,” I told Kilian in an aside.

The mage snorted. With a sigh, I willed the goat to move forward. The pace I set was fast, though not enough to damage the corpse’s integrity, and I set it to a path that passed straight through the middle of the field. It was facing the only part of the ramparts that wasn’t ten feet high: instead of packed rock and dirt there was a palisade there serving as a makeshift gate. More importantly, it was the only part of the fortifications that wasn’t barred by the ditch. The goat made it about fifteen feet before the sand under it detonated. I grimaced. It was a good thing that my ability to sense through the creature’s skin numbed pretty quickly after I raised it, otherwise that would have been a bitch of a backlash. I focused on my connection to the necromantic construct and noted that while it was damaged it was still, in fact, capable of moving. Makes sense. Snatcher’s not going to use a munition grade that risks actually killing other cadets. No doubt a living creature would have been knocked unconscious or, barring that, been incapacitated by the shattered bones. Fortunately, Ratface’s Ex had no such limitations. Mustering vague memories of when I’d done the same to my own fingers, I pulled at strings and popped the goat’s bones back into place. It slowly got back to its feet and started limping forward the field. It managed to make it to fifty feet before the first fireball from the rampart struck it. Another three followed almost a heartbeat later, hitting the goat almost simultaneously.

“Gotcha,” I grinned sharply.

“NOW,” Kilian called out.

My three clusters of three mages immediately fired back fireballs of their own straight at the source of the enemy magic. All but one of the enemy casters were drowned in a storm of flame before they could get back in cover. One fireball they might have weathered without too much damage, but three? Those three mages had been knocked out of the melee for now. Unfortunate that I’d had to split my mage line in clusters of three instead of pairs, but Kilian had informed me she couldn’t promise a sure takedown if she couldn’t concentrate the magic at least that much. First Company was superbly trained: before I could count five heartbeats the rest of its mage line was returning fire at my now exposed mages. Too late, Hellhound. My sappers moved their screens forward and the mages ran to take cover behind the stretched out leather. I frowned as the flame impacted Pickler’s screens: two of them held up admirably, but the third’s frame splintered as fire spread across its surface. Kilian cursed and I followed her gaze to a lone silhouette on the rampart, where a mage’s raised hand was slowly wreathing itself in bolts of blinding energy . Shit. I hadn’t anticipated Juniper would have any mages capable of calling down lightning. If they managed to hit the screen that had already been damaged...

“No you don’t,” the Duni growled.

The redhead bit her thumb as I blinked in surprise, drawing blood and swiping a line of it across her cheek.

“I am the root and the crown, the source and the flow, the storm and the calm,” she murmured. “Power is purpose, purpose is will. Gods of my mother, take this offering and grant me the wrath of Heaven .”

The last words were an angry hiss, and she threw her hand forward in a snap. A gauntlet of lightning burst into existence around her fingers, a thick thread of it streaking forward across the air with a violent crackle and colliding with the bolt thrown by the enemy mage maybe four feet above my fleeing soldiers. The magic impacted with a deafening howl but Kilian’s spell held, both streaks of lightning flickering out of existence after the clash. My lieutenant’s cheeks were flushed and she was panting, the streak of blood on her cheek somehow turned to ash.

That had been... impressive. And, if I was to be entirely honest, just a little bit arousing. Seeing her harness that kind of power with nothing more than a handful of words and being pissed off... I coughed and turned my attention back to the now-smouldering Ratface’s Ex. Now was definitely not the time to wonder what the redhead looked like out of her armour.

Unfortunately, my zombie was no longer in a state fit for running. I willed it to crawl forward anyhow and it made it another ten feet before a last fireball destroyed it beyond even my ability to control. I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. Sixty feet out of a hundred, not bad. The question was, was there another charge buried in those last forty feet? The path I’d cleared was the easiest, quickest way to the fort’s entrance. If there was somewhere to mine, that was definitely it. On the other hand, Snatcher might have thought that no one would be stupid enough to go further in a straight line after running into a charge fifteen feet in. Out of my four undead, two were already unusable. The remaining goat and the gazelle were loaded with munitions I couldn’t afford to lose on a mine: I needed that gate blown up, and quickly.

“Well, Snatcher,” I murmured to myself. “Here’s hoping you decided to get tricky on our asses.”

Pickler had brought the next goat forward when she’d moved in her sappers, propping it up against the palisade like it was a poorly-built bookshelf. It took no more than a few moments to re-establish my connection with the undead, the animated corpse skipping back with me when I returned to Kilian’s side.

“Give the signal,” I ordered her. “We’re beginning phase three.”

“Operation Fainting Goat is a go,” she murmured, and I shot her a genuinely betrayed look.

Kilian had been one of the few strongholds of sanity left when the undead suicide goat plan had spread to the rank and file, that she would get on the wagon now was treachery of the worst sort. That Hakram had been the one to dryly suggest the name was even worse. Regardless, the mage raised her hand and with a few mangled syllables created the Miezan numeral for three out of flames. A moment later half of my sappers got moving, escorted by the surviving tenth of Ratface’s line: Sergeant Tordis led from the front, shield raised high. This would be the tricky part, when it came down to it. I should have made Juniper wary of using her mages by making it clear my own would immediately retaliate but she had other options. Risking one of my remaining tenths in fighting shape left a foul taste in the mouth yet it was necessary if the sappers were to get within range without getting put down by crossbow fire.

The first bolts hit when they’d made it twenty feet in through the path I’d cleared. Immediately my regulars tightened their ranks and the sappers crouched behind them, the lot of them still pushing forward at a glacial pace. When Juniper’s mages popped out my own were ready to pre-empt them, but she was ready for us this time: every one of First Company’s spellcasters had a pair of soldiers covering them with their shields. Not even concentration of fire managed to break through it. I grimaced when the enemy’s own fireballs impacted Sergeant Tordis’ group, knocking three cadets out of formation and immediately seeing them shot.

“Kilian,” I spoke up. “That thing you did with the lightning; could your mages do the same with enemy fireballs?”

“No,” she admitted. “The spell they teach us at the College isn’t precise enough for that.”

“Godsdamnit,” I cursed, watching as another two members of Tordis’ tenth bit the dust. “This is going to cost us.”

They were in position now, at least. The sappers wasted no time in throwing their smokers ahead, their whole position becoming obscured by the thick smoke in a matter of moments. They started backing up almost immediately, another regular getting hit by a blindly-thrown fireball but managing to shake it off since it wasn’t immediately followed by getting shot. The sappers dragged back our unconscious cadets, the entire formation managing to get back safely out of enemy range without any further trouble. From fifty feet into the path to the very bottom of the enemy rampart was now covered in smoke, but there was no time to waste. Smokers didn’t last as long when the space they filled was that broad, and though the day wasn’t particularly windy it wasn’t absent of wind either. Without so much as my looking in its direction, the goat started running forward.

“So what’s this one called, anyway?” I absently asked Kilian.

I could feel her smile through the tone, though my attention was still on my zombie.

“Snatcher’s Cousin,” she replied.

“That feels mildly racist,” I mused.

“Can it really be racist if goblins are the ones who named it?” she wondered out loud.

I didn’t answer the question, as the Cousin had finally entered the smoke. I’d ordered the obscuration of the battlefield to ensure Juniper couldn’t blow the zombie before I did, but the obvious downside was that I couldn’t see where it was going either. All my Name was giving was a vague sense of where it was standing and how its parts were moving. It would have been useful if I’d been able to see through the zombie’s own eyes but when it came down to it what my ability could create was little more than an elaborate flesh puppet. All I could do was send it in a straight line and hope for the best. With a silent tug of the strings I had the goat halt at what I estimated was about eighty feet, returning a portion of my attention to Kilian.

“I can have it at the gate in about six breaths,” I told her. “Tell me when to get it moving.”

The redhead frowned but nodded, eyes faraway as she tried to puzzle out the timing. Aiming for perfection here would be overestimating ourselves but we couldn’t let it stand in front of the gate too long either: I couldn’t take the risk Juniper had figured out a way to deal with it without blowing it up. Frankly, just sending out a legionary to pick it up and run back inside might do the trick if they were fast enough. The mage softly started chanting and I kept an eye on her as red-orange flames started forming around her hand. Suddenly she nodded and instead of replying I set my construct moving, the ball of flames shooting into the smoke a moment later. A few heartbeats later I felt the goat run into something solid. The explosion that struck a moment later was, once again, deafening. While I couldn’t see the effect of it through the smoke, I had a hard time believing it wouldn’t have wrecked the gate. There were twice as many sharpers stuck inside the goat as last time, after all. Hopefully none of Juniper’s soldiers had been standing right behind the gate, because that would have been pretty brutal to go through.

“Now what?” Kilian asked, peering into the distance.

“Now we-“

Before I could finish the sentence a flash of lightning came out of the smoke. I reacted on instinct, trying to get Kilian down, but she pushed away my hand and thrust out her arm. I felt goose bumps on my arms as she spat out a word in that strange tongue mages used, sorcery meeting sorcery once again. Whatever it was she’d done, it stopped the better part of the lightning: a shudder run through me but that was the only effect I could feel. The redhead fell on her knees and I made to help her up when I noticed her hair had turned... strange. It looked more like fire than dark red locks, and when she turned to face me her eyes had turned from hazel to an inhumanly vivid green. Her body had a spasm, her back arching like something was trying to break out of it, and I wasn’t sure whether I should try to hold her down or let it happen. Thankfully, after a moment it stopped.

“Fuck,” she cursed, the words coming thick and slow on her tongue. “I hate it when that happens.”

I helped her back to her feet. “Too much magic?” I guessed.

“Tried to abshorb – absorb – the hit to keep it from splashing,” Kilian replied.

She took a deep breath, then stood on her own.

“I’ll be fine, Captain,” she told me. “Bit of a headache, that’s all, and I’ll keep the spells simple for a while.”

I clapped her shoulder. “Take a break, Lieutenant,” I ordered. “Nothing’ll happen until the smoke clears anyway.”

I let her limp away without comment, deciding it was about time I relocated myself. Whoever had said lightning never struck the same place twice obviously had little experience with mages.

—

By the time the smoke cleared I’d returned to my old vantage point, the undead gazelle idling by my side. Robber had informed me it had been dubbed ‘Stealth Goat’ by popular acclaim at which point I’d informed him that he was going to find me a stool or I would be dragging him along for the ride as my official footrest. I took great satisfaction in the fact that he looked genuinely worried by the threat. To my surprise he reappeared later with a fold-up stool apparently looted from Aisha’s camp. I blithely pretended I hadn’t been sending him on a fool’s errand and assured him he was safe from my feet for at least the next few days. The first thing I noticed when the ramparts came into sight again was that the new batch of munitions had definitely been more powerful than the last. There was no trace of the former gate and even the tightly packed sand and stone surrounding it had been damaged.

I stood in sight of the walls for a long time, letting the lazy breeze fall on my face. Juniper must have believed I was baiting her mages, because there was no repeat of the lightning incident. I didn’t think it would have been enough to take me out anyway. I’d punched a sharper two days ago and all my fingers had gotten out of the experience was a set of bruises. Squires were a hard breed to kill, apparently. After remaining in the open long enough that there could be no doubt Juniper had seen me, I left Stealth Goat behind and casually strolled down the path I’d cleared earlier. I left my shield behind, keeping the folded stool under my arm instead. My soldiers milled uncomfortably behind me as I kept walking, stopping about halfway through without anyone from the ramparts trying anything. I was close enough to see that two full lines had crossbows pointed at me, but for now they refrained from shooting. Calmly, I unfolded the stool and placed it on the ground. I plopped myself on it and waited.

Juniper didn’t make me wait long. The tall female orc strode out of the gate-hole without a shield or a helmet, though like me she’d kept her sword at her side. I was amused to note she’d brought a stool of her own, of identical make. Must have been Legion-issue. Her face was inscrutable as she made her way towards me, setting up her own seat to face mine barely a few feet away. The wooden frame creaked under the weight of her when she sat down, still silent. A moment passed, then she turned to the side and spat in the dirt.

“So you want a draw,” she flatly stated.

I raised an eyebrow. “That obvious, huh,” I said, not denying the truth of it.

“I looked up the old rules too, Callow,” she grunted. “Two-way draw means we keep half the points we bid. Probably shouldn’t have bid twice what Rat Company has in the negatives if you wanted to keep it quiet.”

The idea had struck me when the cadets Ratface had sent to scour the College archives for old five company melees had dug up a record three-way draw. When the instructors had outlined the rules for the melee they’d said nothing about draws of any sort, meaning they hadn’t specifically denied the old ruling. It was sketchy as Hells, but I was pretty sure I could swing it. There were advantages to having the Black Knight on your side, and if Heiress wasn’t above using family connections to her advantage then I wasn’t above pulling rank through my teacher.

“Figured it was a good thing to have as a back up, if things went south,” I admitted.

“You’d lose the bet,” Juniper pointed out.

“Ah, but here’s the thing,” I smiled. “The Dread Empress specifically phrased so that Heiress only got the appointment if I lost . A draw isn’t a defeat, it’s just not a victory.”

And should, Gods forbid, our Squire lose ? Those had been her exact words. I’d wondered in the aftermath of court why a woman who was supposed to be the political patron of Black hadn’t seen fit to give me a helping hand when I was his de facto apprentice. It was only the night before the melee I’d realized that she’d subtly steered the terms of the bet to give me a better chance.

“Very clever,” Juniper smiled unpleasantly, flashing her fangs at me. “Now tell me, why exactly should I give a fuck?”

“Because it could go either way, right now,” I told her frankly. “I still have some of my little minions and I can make more.”

“You’ll run out of munitions eventually,” she growled.

“You’ll run out of soldier s eventually,” I replied. “The munitions won’t take you out of the game, sure, but then I still have fighting men left.”

“Who’ll have to cross an open field while getting shot at,” the Hellhound snarled.

“They will,” I shrugged. “Which is why I’ll put my wounded in the front to soak up the crossbow fire.”

The orc’s eyes narrowed. “Some of them could be crippled for life. It messes up mage healing if you break the bones again too quick.”

My answering smile was a cold, cold thing. “You underestimate how badly I want this, Hellhound. If you have moral qualms about crippling cadets, then don’t shoot your fucking crossbows at them.”

That was the thing with scruples: they could so very easily be thrown back at the person throwing them at you. Juniper looked at me like it was the first time we’d ever met. In a sense, it was. My little interlude at the War College had been a pleasant diversion and I’d picked up useful skills, but there was a reason I’d come here in first place. I was not so much of a hypocrite that I’d flinch in the face having people crippled when I’d signed the death warrant of thousands by letting the Lone Swordsman go. The other captain rolled a shoulder calmly, chewing it over.

“No deal,” she finally said. “Nothing in this for me, Callow. Could go either way, sure. Means I could win.”

I sighed. “You know, I wondered what company scores were for when I first heard about them,” I told her.

She’d been about to get up but when I continued speaking she stilled. If she was confused by my interjection, then she showed no sign of it.

“Get your officers to brief you,” she grunted. “It affects placement in the Legions when you graduate.”

“I know that now,” I replied. “Didn’t seem like a big deal to me at the time, but then I remembered I had a dream.”

The orc bared her teeth mockingly. “You going to tell me you have all these big plans so I should let you win? For shame, Callow. You were almost starting to be tolerable.”

“Not that kind of dream,” I said softly. “I mean the Name kind.”

That got her attention, sure enough. Her mouth closed with a snap.

“The gist of it, I think, was that sometimes you have to give to get,” I mused. “So that had me wondering: what do you want , Juniper?”

“You getting to a point would be nice,” she growled.

“See, I keep hearing all these things about you,” I continued. “The Hellhound, never lost a game. Best tactician to grace the College since the Reforms, top of the class in every class.”

I could see her mustering what was no doubt a pretty scathing retort but I interrupted her.

“The one thing I didn’t hear about you,” I spoke softly, “was that you‘re Istrid Knightsbane’s daughter.”

The orc’s meaty hand closed around the hilt of her sword.

“You threatening my mother, Callow?” she snarled.

I shook my head.

“It’s telling, that you don’t bring the family name into this,” I told her. “Means you want to make it on your own merits. Means you’re ambitious.”

“It’d be a pretty nice feather in my cap to waste you, you know,” the orc grinned nastily, “If I beat a Named on the field I’d join as a tribune, or at the very least senior captain.”

“You take your chances and try for that,” I agreed. “Or you could make a draw with me right now, and be named the highest-ranked officer in the Fifteenth Legion.”

She gaped at me and I really enjoyed the sight of it more than I should.

“You can’t promise that,” she growled.

“Sure I can,” I retorted flatly. “The whole thing with being a villain, Juniper, is that you can basically do whatever the Hells you want unless someone stops you. And who’s going to stop me in this? Black? If I know anything, he’s doing that vicious smile thing he does as he eavesdrops on us right now.”

The other captain got her bearings back after a few moments, her now calm face creasing with a frown.

“I’d be under your command,” Juniper said.

“You’ll be under someone’s command whatever happens,” I shrugged. “Do you want to serve under the shadow of someone who earned their spurs during the Conquest, or forge an entirely new legion with me?”

I could see the conflict in her eyes, and that meant I was winning.

“You’re bribing me,” she accused.

“Shamelessly so,” I admitted. “But the fact that I have to bribe you means you’re worth bribing.”

That got a snort out of her.

“All a draw means is that I’m admitting that, right here and right now, we’re equals,” I said, meeting her eyes. “I’m not too proud for that. Are you?”

I offered up my arm. After a long moment, she leaned forward and clasped it.

“Draw,” she grunted.

“Draw,” I echoed.

Thunder clapped twice and both our standards appeared in the sky, orange-red. We rose to our feet and I looked aside.

“ Despite the rules , you said. See? I do listen, sometimes,” I whispered.

Epilogue

“What say you, Empress of Praes?
Here you lie upon the blood-soaked ruins of your dominion, surrounded by the corpses of the legions that once swarmed over the world. Hundreds of thousands dead for the sake of your wretched ambition, your mad design to bring to heel the kingdoms of man. In all the history of Creation no one woman has been so wicked as you, and I will have my answer.
Why, o Empress of Ruins?”
She shrugged.
“Why not?”
– Last lines of the “The Fall of Empress Triumphant, First and Only of Her Name”

(Six Months Later) 1324 A.D., 5 th of Mawja, Marchford

A year ago, the commander would have given him trouble. Now? William tore the Penitent’s Blade out of the orc’s throat with a casual flick of the wrist. The sword keened mournfully, taking the greenskin’s life with it as it withdrew. The officer had died bravely, as bravely as one of his filthy species could, but with the orc’s blood on the floor the last of the resistance was over. It was to the Countess’ credit that she’d managed to turn a force of mercenaries and peasant levies into a coherent fighting force in less than a month – though it had certainly helped that their first battlefield had been her own fiefdom. If only all the allies he’d gathered were so competent. The Duke of Liesse had yet to set foot in the city, remaining with the baggage train under the impatient protection of the Exiled Prince.

The hero in question had been miffed he wouldn’t get to blood his men on Praesi legionaries today, but Countess Elizabeth had been correct when she’d pointed out that his troops were singularly unsuited to surprise attacks. No doubt the Duke would insist on a triumphant victory parade when the time came for him to enter, and for that the polished lancers of the Silver Spears would serve perfectly. They’d make a stirring enough image, and the story would spread: the Duke of Liesse had returned, to free the Kingdom from the yoke of the Tower.

Putting a complete imbecile on the throne of Callow was something William was going to have to live with, unfortunately. Oh, the Duke did have a sort of low cunning – he’d left Callow before Laure had even fallen, during the Conquest, and taken his treasury with him – but it was the kind of cunning a cockroach would have. He was a master of survival and little else, not to mention hopelessly self-important. That he was the First Prince’s creature walked the fine line between a virtue and a liability: this entire rebellion was being bankrolled by Proceran silver, but William was not so much of a fool as to be unaware the cold-eyed woman had designs on Callow herself. That was fine.

He was already leading a rebellion against the Empire, and he was more than willing to lead one against the Principate if it came down to it.

The Kingdom Under was a much greater worry. That two thousand hardened dwarven veterans had suddenly decided to form a mercenary company in Mercantis just when he’d been buying up every contract he could get his hands on was not a coincidence. The dwarves had a history of sending troublemakers up to the surface to die in other people’s wars, but the Sons of Stone were not your usual malcontents. If the King Under the Mountains was meddling in topside affairs William was going to have to keep a very, very close eye on it. Over two thirds of Calernia stood above dwarven tunnels and cities: no single nation had a military whose size equalled even the tenth of what the dwarves could muster if they felt like it.

It would not matter, in the end.

Only eight months had passed since his defeat at the hands of the Squire, but her words still rang whenever he closed his eyes. Run and hide and muster your armies in the dark. Make deals you’ll regret until you have nothing left to bargain with. I’ll be waiting for you, on the other side of that battlefield. The dismissal had been a lash on his back all the way to Refuge, where he’d knelt at the feet of the Lady of the Lake and asked to be taken as a pupil. She’d denied him, not unkindly. After the defeat at Summerholm, that had almost been enough to break him.

What could you say, when the great swordswoman in Creation told you you weren’t good enough to beat her old pupil? The sword was all he was good for. His Name was a paradox, in a way: heroes were supposed to galvanize others into something greater than themselves, but his Role thrived on being solitary. The Eyes of the Empire had failed to find him because he’d never been part of a band of heroes, eschewing more blatant heroics for quiet work in the dark. He’d found his answer through pure happenstance, that blessed golden luck that smiled on heroes from above.

He’d found the gates to Arcadia Resplendent, and petitioned the Lady for the right to use them. This boon she’d seen fit to grant, and so began his year in the realm of the Fae. A full year he’d spent fighting for his life against the denizens of that eldritch place, hunted for sport by the horrors of the Wild Hunt. But he’d survived, and learned. There was no comparing his power now to what it had been in Summerholm. On the last day of the year, the gates had opened to let him leave and he’d returned to Creation. Barely a month had passed outside of Arcadia: he would crush the Squire when they next met, and they would meet. The pattern had been set, there was no avoiding it. And when the time came, he would cram her words back down her sneering throat before raising the banner of a liberated Kingdom over her corpse.

Sheathing his sword, the Lone Swordsman left the room and stepped down the stairs. Countess Marchford should have set things up by now, assembling her peasantry in the city square. It was a shame the woman was so ambitious, but as far as commanders went she was by far the best the nobility had to offer. She’d stalemated a Marshal for an entire month during the Siege of Summerholm, holding out until the Legions landed a force on the other side of the Hwaerte and finished the encirclement. Had Grem One-Eye not been driving his army into the depths of the Duchy of Daoine at the same time, it would have been long enough for the Deoraithe to come relieve the siege.

And now she wants to be Queen of Callow, as she would have been had the Shining Prince not died at the Fields. Less of a bitter pill to swallow than the Duke having the best claim to the throne, all in all. She would not be any more inclined to trade a Praesi occupation for a Proceran one than William himself. The streets were full of dead legionaries, the fighting having gotten brutal in its last gaps. A full quarter of the Twelfth Legion had spat in the face of offered surrender, eerily singing that damned Legionary’s Song as they made their last stand against thrice their number. In a person that kind of courage would have been worthy of respect, but greenskins were barely more sentient than animals. Just another horror crafted by the Hellgods to plague Creation, an endless horde of foot soldiers carrying the banner of Evil.

His steps took him all the way to the central market, where the citizens of Marchford stood as an uneasy crowd in front of the gallows erected by the Legions. Fifty prisoners, goblins and orcs and humans, already stood on the wooden platform with nooses around their necks. His idea, that: William had not forgotten Summerholm, and neither would those fucking Praesi butchers. He hopped onto the gallows and with a few lazy strides he stood in front of the people, whispers of his Name spreading among the crowd when they recognized his white-gilded armour. There’d been a time where he would have avoided such glaringly heroic garments like the plague, but the time for subtlety was long past. Eyes staring down the masses, the hero took a deep breath.

“Twenty years ago, Praesi boots broke the spine of this nation,” he said, and the words carried perfectly.

Utter silence greeted him.

“They were strong, we told ourselves,” he continued. “Too strong. What could we possibly have done?”

His eyes narrowed.

“ Cowardice ,” he barked.

The crowd flinched as if he’d lashed them.

“There is no bargaining with Evil,” he thundered. “No truce with the Enemy. That we ever gave in to the Tower is a stain on the history of this Kingdom.”

Slowly, William unsheathed his sword.

“But we are not yet beyond redemption,” he told them. “Shame can be expunged. Today, for the first time in two decades, some of us rose to our feet.”

His Name burned within him, a cold flame that turned his blood to smoke and dust.

“Tell me, Callowans, do you want to spend the rest of your life kneeling?”

He could feel it swelling up. He could see it in their eyes, the light ground out by decades of occupation. His power spread through the air, thick and lingering.

“Do you want to continue licking the Empress’ boot, and let your children inherit that life?” he bellowed.

The whisper first came from the back, twisting and winding and gaining strength as it made its way to the first row and the answer came out as a NO that clapped like thunder.

“Neither do I,” he admitted when silence returned. “Take heart, citizens of Callow. Today the Kingdom is born again, and I make you this oath.”

Green eyes burned.

“CALLOW WILL BE FREE.”

Behind him the legionaries dropped, one after another, the cheer from the crowd drowning their dying struggles out. William closed his eyes, letting the sound wash over him, and smiled. There could be no defeat. The Heavens, after all, were on his side. Why else would they have granted him Triumph as an aspect?

—

9 th of Mawja, Ater, Inner City

Akua had never particularly enjoyed playing shatranj, though she was skilled at it. The only reason she was currently playing Barika was that, traditionally speaking, it was expected of her to play shatranj while discussing the demise of her enemies. The way the Unonti heiress played was too conservative, much like the girl herself. Had she not been so reliably loyal, she would never have made it as high in Akua’s council as she currently stood. That was the problem with many of the Trueblood’s children. The old nobility was too stiff, too set in its ways, and it had transmitted that disease to their inheritors. Thankfully her own mother was much more flexible in her ways, and had raised her as such. The truth was that the Empire was no longer the same as it had been in ages past. The Reforms had granted rights to the greenskins, and there would be no withdrawing those without a civil war – one the nobility might not win, given that the vast majority of the current generations of orcs and goblins were Legion-trained.

The old truth that greenskins were inferiors to the Soninke in every way was no longer valid, and so had to be discarded. The aristocrats who refused to admit this were betraying the guiding rule of all Praesi: truth was mutable, and changed according to one’s purposes. Akua was not above using orcs and goblins as tools, though she found the matter distasteful. More importantly, the old hatreds some Soninke still held against humans had to be set aside. Taghreb inferiority, while a fact, was marginal enough in nature it should be ignored. Even the Duni had proved they could have worth, by spawning the most viciously dangerous Black Knight the Empire had seen in centuries. It was a shame the man had declined to take her a pupil, and she truly regretted that she had come to be at cross-purposes with him. Removing Foundling should neuter that liability cleanly enough, and the Knight was much too pragmatic to hold a grudge over such a trifling matter.

“I do not understand why you let the goblin’s death pass without making an issue of it,” Barika said, moving a legionary forward in an unwise gambit that was going to cost her a priest in three moves.

“I tried to press the issue through Court,” Akua noted. “Before I could, a member of the Blackguard dropped a basket with the head of my proxy in it at the mansion gates.”

The warning had been clear enough, and she’d never particularly expected that particular plot to bear fruit anyway. She’d had four people out for Foundling’s blood in the melee, but the goblin had been the only one to get close enough for an attempt. The scheme had been worth making, and had cost her nothing of worth to implement – much like the entire war games affair. Blackmailing the instructor to change Squire’s beginning position and meddle with the memory magic might have been a more expensive endeavour, had the man in question not been caught trying to escape the city and been crucified for his troubles. A rather mild reaction, by the standards of the Black Knight. The last time he’d caught a noble meddling in College business, he’d had their entire family eaten alive by spiders. Malicia was tightening his leash, as she had been for several years.

“Then it was a failure,” Barika said, barely hiding a wince when she lost her priest and found her chancellor trapped in a corner.

“You’re assuming that the point of this enterprise was to deny Foundling the appointment,” Akua said. “While it would have been the optimal result, it was not my main objective.”

In the long term, there was no real way to ensure that Squire did not get to lead troops. She was, ironically enough, too well-connected for that. At best the process could be delayed, and Akua’s assessment of the cost of keeping her out of the Legions for another year had been too much to stomach. And so she’d planned with the eventuality of failure in mind. By making this a public play through the Court, she’d forced her support in the nobility to be open in their backing. The minor loss of face that ensued from Foundling’s victory had caused her fair-weather friends to immediately withdraw their support, allowing Akua to separate the wheat from the chaff. She’d immediately move on those and made examples of them, of course.

Her position in Court was now stronger than it had ever been.

And while Squire had been tearing out her hair over inconsequential collegial games, she’d prepared to place agents in the Fifteenth Legion. That plot, the one that mattered, had been a success. That one of Foundling’s senior officers had become a spy before they were even appointed to the rank had been a source of great amusement to her over the last few months. It was unfortunate that she’d been unable to find leverage on the officers of the former Rat Company, as they seemed to be Squire’s most trusted. Ratface’s familial situation had seemed promising but the boy had flatly told her intermediary that if the subject was ever broached again blades would come out. Legate Juniper’s open distaste for what she called “human squabbling” made her a lost cause in this regard, and had she not been the daughter of a general Akua would already have her had assassinated. A shame, that such talent would be put to work in her rival’s favour. Barika knocked over her empress in a concession of defeat, letting out a sigh.

“So,” she murmured. “Are you finally going to tell me what was in the letter that came this morning?”

Heiress smiled.

“Every major city in the south of Callow has risen in rebellion,” she replied.

“ What? ” the other girl replied, openly aghast.

Akua pretended she hadn’t seen the loss of composure, for her childhood companion’s sake.

“The Sixth and the Ninth Legion are to be deployed to put the unrest down,” she informed the other Soninke. “The Fifteenth will be joining them, still at half-strength.”

The purpose behind keeping the numbers of Foundling’s legion at two thousand legionaries only still eluded her, in truth. Part of it must have been the fact that Fourteenth was being raised simultaneously and the recruitment pool was limited, but that answer was too... obvious. There was always more than one angle, when one dealt with the Calamities.

“So that’s why you’ve been recruiting mercenaries,” Barika suddenly breathed.

Akua’s smile broadened, never quite reaching her eyes. Mercenaries were, technically speaking, illegal in Praes. It would have been too obvious of a way for the High Lords to get around the household troops restrictions put into place by Malicia. But the moment southern Callow had risen in rebellion, it had stopped legally being Praesi territory. The roughly four thousand troops she’d hired in Mercantis would be able to operate there without consequence.

“It won’t be enough,” a third voice rasped from the corner of the room.

Akua’s eyes flickered to the mangled goblin. Half of her face was missing, chopped off by a brutal – and lethal sword wound. Various parts of her body had been snapped by falling rubble and even now still remained at unnatural angles, barely functional. Not even the best necromancers on her payroll had been able to restore Chider to something palatable to look at.

“That would be where you come in, Commander Chider,” Heiress replied softly.

The goblin let out a horrible rasp Akua took a moment to recognize as a laugh. Raising a mere enemy of Foundling from the dead would have been a waste of gold, but Heiress had no interest in the greenskin’s skills. It was her nature that was of import. Raising a Claimant from the dead, on the other hand, had been worth every denarii. Picking up her own empress, the Soninke aristocrat felt her Name coil inside of her silently, like a snake preparing to strike. She’d wondered, when she’d first come into her Role, what exactly it meant. It was a question every Heir and Heiress had to answer on their own. Was she the inheritor of the stewardship of the Empire, the return of the forbidden Name of Chancellor? Was she the next warlord of Praes, the successor of its Black Knight? Or was hers to be the hand that cast down Dread Empress Malicia, the woman still hated behind closed doors? Wrong, all wrong. Paltry ambitions of lesser souls.

She was Akua Sahelian, and she would inherit all of Creation.

—

7 th of Mawja, Ater, the Tower

Black put down the letter, face expressionless.

The rebellion was not, all in all, unexpected. He’d moved Istrid and Sacker further south to deal with the eventuality, assigning the Eleventh to Summerholm instead. More importantly, Ranker and her Fourth were keeping an eye on the Deoraithe. Scribe’s agents had found out the Duchess had placed an observer with the rebels, but according to the rest of the network that was the only move she’d made. His personal assessment of Kegan had been accurate, then: she would not take action unless the Liesse Rebellion looked like it had decent chances of succeeding. That Afolabi had lost a full thousand at Marchford would be a black mark on the general’s record, but it was a tactical defeat and not a strategic one. No rebel force had yet to dare move north of Vale, and he’d already sent Catherine orders to mobilize her Fifteenth: by dawn tomorrow they’d be moving for the Blessed Isle to join the muster in central Callow.

“So that was your gamble, then,” the dark-haired man murmured into the silence.

He’d wondered about the exact form his Squire’s actions had taken, back in Summerholm. Obviously she’d let the Lone Swordsman go when she could have killed him – the damaged connection to her Name betrayed as much – but it seemed she’d freed the hero for a specific purpose. The boy had shown no inclination to gather large-scale strength before his encounter with the orphan, and such a sudden change in doctrine would have had to be Name-enforced. She branded instructions on his Name as the price for sparing him, then let him disappear into the wilds. Black had not even bothered to try tracking the Swordsman after his run-in with Catherine: the confrontation had initiated a pattern of three, and the hero was therefore beyond his reach. The only person who could feasibly kill him now was Squire, unfortunate as that was.

Still, none of this was beyond the parameters he’d set. The rebellion would have happened anyway, there was no denying that. The numbers did not lie: in the last decade the number of heroes appearing had shot up from once every several years to at least two a year. They were all dead now, of course, but that wasn’t the point. Sooner or later, one of his people would make a mistake. When he’d put down the Unconquered Champion last year, he’d been stuck in a pocket realm for what had ended up being three days in Creation proper. Within that lapse of time he’d been impossible to reach, and the Calamities had... not reacted well. Captain had slaughtered an entire village in a fit of blind rage and Warlock had actually mutilated the soul of an informant in his search for answers. He shuddered to think of what might have happened had Assassin or Ranger gotten involved.

No, the rebellion had always been a given. All it meant was that he had to have measures in place so that the event benefitted the Empire instead of weakened it, and he had managed that much. Barely. Catherine’s intervention had the uprising beginning ahead of schedule, and had he not spent the last twenty years preparing the Dread Empire for war it might have been taken by surprise. As things stood, the rebellion would be crushed before the next harvest and Catherine would blood her troops on real battlefield in the process. The inevitable losses would teach her some valuable lessons and temper her reckless streak as well as strengthen her emotional attachment to her soldiers – and by extension the Empire.

“Not a bad plan at all,” he decided.

Trading a weakened Name for a few months against an opportunity to advance through the ranks in wartime was bold but not overly so. She wouldn’t have known she was damaging her connection to her Role by letting the Lone Swordsman go, of course. He had, after all, carefully kept her in the dark about the way Names functioned. The results of that spoke for themselves. Not even a year into her power and she was already beginning to Speak. She had absolutely no idea how absurd that kind of progress was, no inkling that it had taken Black several years into the same Role before managing it. Ignorance on the subject of what she could and couldn’t do with her Name had allowed her to progress through leaps and bounds instead of a slow grind. It was fortunate that this approach was the best available to him, because Black had no real idea how to teach her.

He’d become the Squire when there was no Black Knight and most of what he knew was either self-taught or derived from Name dreams. He’d had two teachers in his lifetime and both tutelages had been purely related to swordsmanship: first his mother, when he’d been young, and then Ranger later in his career. Deciding how to treat Catherine had been something of a problem for him, in all honesty. He could not treat her as an equal, the way he and Ranger had been, but treating her purely as a subordinate was doomed to failure. In the end he’d settled for moulding her instead of teaching her, carefully exposing her to specific influences so that she would grow through them.

And grown she had, in the eight months he’d known her. The reports from his agent in the orphanage had indicated she had potential, but they’d underestimated how much. It was a good thing he hadn’t had her smothered in her sleep, as the local overseer’s recommendation had originally been. Morals too heroic in nature , the assessment had stated. He’d been ready to tie up that particular loose end should it prove necessary when he’d gone to deal with Mazus, but their unexpected meeting had opened a better alternative.

The dark-haired smiled, rising to his feet and coming to stand by the window. The view offered from the Tower’s one hundredth floor was breath-taking, but he’d become inured to the sight over the years. Black had been amused, when Catherine had mentioned that she felt her Name like a living, breathing beast. The way a Named felt their Role revealed much about them. Warlock said his own was akin to opening floodgates, for he rightfully feared the capricious nature of his power. Malicia compared her own to slipping on a pair of gloves, perfectly fitted to her. And him? Gears. An enormous machine made up of a hundred thousand gears, all of them turning. Slowly. Coldly. Implacably.

The moment his agents had gotten him the news he’d felt his Name react . Lead. Conquer. Destroy . All three of his aspects were awake. He hadn’t felt this alive in decades, and even as the south of the kingdom he’s conquered resumed the war he’d won he felt a strange joy welling up inside of him. Interesting years were ahead. And this once, just this once, he was willing to break a rule of his. Baring his teeth at the Heavens, Black dared them to deny him.

“Just as planned,” he said.

Prologue

“You can’t drop a pin in Procer without hitting royalty.”
-Eleusia Vokor, Nicaean ambassador to the Principate

Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer, idly glanced at her paperweight and pondered how satisfying it would feel to break Prince Amadis’ nose with it. No such thoughts, of course, appeared on her face as she continued to listen to the ruler of Iserre lay out his objections to the Principate’s current political stance. Objections was admittedly a generous term to use. One might have called the man’s tone “whiny” if one cared to pass such a judgement, but properly raised ladies like Cordelia did not venture such opinions out loud. For all that southerners were convinced that the Lycaonese were one bad harvest away from barbarism, manners had been drilled into her from an early age.

“If these Callowan paupers insist on taking Proceran gold, it is only fitting they should be led by a Proceran commander,” Amadis finished, the smugly self-satisfied smirk on his face tempting Cordelia’s hand to drift towards the paperweight.

She allowed silence to linger long enough that the cold glare levelled onto him by Uncle Klaus started to make the Iserran shift uncomfortably before replying.

“The Liesse Rebellion is a popular uprising, Prince Amadis, at least in appearance. We must not allow the shadow of foreign interests to be cast on that image,” she reminded the man patiently.

That she even had to explain this much to a ruler over twice her age was galling. For all that the Prince of Iserre had a way with intrigue, his grasp on popular opinion was... dubious. The Alamans rulers had spent so long playing the Ebb and the Flow that they were completely out of touch with the people they were supposed to rule over. That is what happens when one is the fulcrum of a nation’s political elite for nigh a thousand year , she reflected.

“With all due respect, First Princess Cordelia,”-

“Prince,” she corrected flatly. “First Prince .”

It seemed to dumbfound southerners that she still went by the Rhenian formal address rather than the more gender-accurate one she’d gained upon her election as the ruler of the Principate. While she was technically the princess of Salia, now that she’d gained the title of First Prince, she refused to allow the southlings to slight her heritage by refusing to acknowledge that she came from the northernmost principality of Procer. Rhenia was still backwards in some regards and the laws had never been officially amended to reflect the reality of women ruling, but she was proud of her origins nonetheless. Not that she would expect an Alamans to understand. Their own tribal confederation had joined with the disparate Arlesite holds to found the Principate and they’d never allowed anybody to forget it. Meanwhile the Lycaonese were made part of Procer by conquest, as they are so fond of remembering for us. Yet this particular Lycaonese was the lawfully elected ruler of the Principate and she would not allow this wretch of a man to forget it.

“Your... advice has been duly noted, Prince Amadis,” she spoke calmly. “We will explore all avenues open to us, but at this point in time direct Proceran involvement does not seem like a feasible option.”

In truth, imposing a foreign general would be utterly disastrous. For all that Liesse had bought an army’s worth of mercenaries in Mercantis, over half of the rebellion’s rank and file was peasant levies from southern Callow. Should the Countess Marchford be replaced by a prince of the Highest Assembly as Amadis so clearly desired, mass desertion would follow. Callowans were notoriously touchy about their independence and while they would fight for a restored Kingdom they would not bear arms to forge a Proceran protectorate. Amadis took the implied dismissal with ill-grace, as Cordelia had expected him to. The prince of Iserre bowed to the exact degree he was expected to and not an inch lower before leaving the room. Normally she would have taken the time to smooth over the man’s ruffled feathers, but today he’d tried her patience too much. It would not do to allow him the impression he could push her this far on a daily basis. She’d have to make that statement more pointedly, of course. The man was working trade deals in Creusens, sabotaging a lucrative but not politically relevant one should get the point across. A moment passed, then Uncle Klaus rose from his seat and poured himself a glass of mead. The grizzled prince of Hannoven eyed the silver-gilded goblet with puritan disdain before gulping down a mouthful.

“Not your most loyal subject, that one,” Klaus grunted.

Cordelia snorted. “He would sell me out for a basket of fish,” she agreed. “It would not even have to be fresh fish.”

And yet, irksome as it was, she would continue to have to play nice with the man. Amadis had made too many alliances to be dismissed out of hand. His keeping Iserre largely out of the civil war had allowed him to emerge from the two decades of warfare with an intact power base and full coffers. In the wake of Cordelia’s rise to power malcontents from the Alamans and Arlesite principalities had flocked to him like maggots to a corpse, bolstering his power and influence to a very troublesome extent.

“He’s a buffoon,” her uncle decided after a moment. “Spends more gold on throwing banquets than equipping the Iserran army.”

“He is a buffoon making inroads in Creusens and Segovia,” she reminded him with a sigh. “That makes him a particularly dangerous specimen of the breed.”

The prince of Hannoven smiled wolfishly.

“Let him try his luck, then,” he said. “We taught them to fear northern blades, at Lange and Aisne. A third time will sink in that lesson properly.”

Cordelia loved her uncle dearly. He’d been the one to command her armies during the civil war, and she would never have managed to unite the four Lycaonese principalities without his backing. He was, in truth, one of the finest military minds in the Principate. While the principalities of the centre and the south had been playing their petty games Uncle Klaus had been taking on the endless flood of warbands trickling down from the Chain of Hunger, and when the time had come for Cordelia to claim the throne he’d shattered every army that stood between her and it. But he saw things through the lens of military affairs only, and in the Highest Assembly that was the kind of flaw that got you murdered in your bed. Amadis would not trigger another civil war, if he started to really oppose her. After twenty years of the Principate bleeding itself to death none of its rulers wanted to start another fire. He’d simply start going after her support base until she became little more than a figurehead to the Principate.

“We have other preoccupations at the moment,” Cordelia murmured. “The Dominion has been shuffling around troops and Helike keeps testing Princess Francesca’s borders.”

“Helike’s just blustering, they always do when a Tyrant gets in charge,” Klaus dismissed. “They won’t take on the Principate now that the civil war’s over. The rest of the League wouldn’t have it anyway.”

“That still leaves Levant,” Cordelia spoke. “The Dominion has been itching to take a bite out of Orense for decades. They would swallow the entire principality if they thought they could get away with it.”

“If you’re that worried, lend them the gold to rebuild their army to a decent standard,” her uncle spoke flatly.

The First Prince of Procer rubbed the bridge of her nose, allowing herself the impropriety only because there was no one else in the room to see it.

“I cannot do that without removing lending restrictions for all principalities,” she told Klaus.

And that was not something she could do. Not when her position was still so weak. No power could challenge the newly-founded Hasenbach dynasty as of yet, not with the kind of backing she had, but should the south be rebuilt... There were just so man y people living down there, compared to where her power was based . Her enemies could afford to fill the ranks with fresh recruits, if they lost a battle. She could not. And for us every loss on the field is one less soldier to man the walls when the Chain of Hunger comes again, one less watcher keeping an eye on the Kingdom of the Dead. The south could not be allowed to regain its footing just yet, not before she’d secured the throne.

“You know I hate agreeing with the likes of Amadis on anything,” Klaus spoke quietly, “but he’s almost got a point. This rebellion gambit is risky. And even if they win, it won’t amount to much. Liesse is an incompetent wastrel, Cordelia. He’s got no business being in charge of a chamber pot, much less a kingdom.”

The ruler of Procer sighed and forced herself not to fiddle with her hair. It was a bad habit, and it had taken her chambermaid the better part of an hour to style the blonde locks that morning.

“Pour me a glass, would you?” she said.

Her uncle’s white brows rose in surprise. She rarely drank, mostly because she disliked the loss of control that came with being drunk. This time, though, the conversation ahead of her warranted the indulgence. Klaus wordlessly filled a cup and handed it to her. Technically speaking it was illegal for a prince to hand anything to the ruling First Prince of Procer, but when it was just the two of them she tended to ignore those little formalities. Odds were her uncle had never bothered to learn them. Regardless, she had no intention of allowing a cupbearer into her solar when they could overhear state secrets.

“We are running out of options, uncle,” Cordelia admitted. “The longer we delay, the more the Empire strengthens their grip on Callow. The reports are unanimous: outside the cities, most of the Kingdom no longer cares it is under occupation. They do not think the Legions of Terror can be beaten and the standard of living for the peasantry under Praes is better than it was under the Fairfax dynasty. They have no stomach for rebellion and if we wait a few more years I am afraid they might actually resist an attempt to liberate them.”

The prince of Hannoven looked like he was about to spit in distaste until he remembered where he was sitting.

“We’re not ready for a war with Praes,” Klaus told her, though it visibly pained him to say it. “Not when they’ve got people like Black and Grem One-Eye on the other side. If we send a host through the Red Flower Vales, they’ll savage it and set the border principalities on fire.”

Cordelia took a deeper sip, letting the sweet taste of the honey-wine linger in her mouth.

“We can no longer afford not to be at war with the Empire,” she replied. “And for all that you worry about the likes of the Black Knight, Malicia is the real danger.”

Klaus scoffed.

“Malicia’s been spending all her time keeping her nobles in line,” he scorned. “And she’s not the one the Legions are loyal to.”

“If the Knight was intending a coup he would have already made his attempt,” Cordelia noted. “Regardless, the Augur is adamant: the Pravus Bank was Malicia’s doing.”

At the beginning of the civil war most participants had expected it to be an affair of a single year, two at the most. Wars of succession in Procer were not unheard of when the Highest Assembly proved unable to elect a First Prince, but usually when one of the claimants proved to have a decisive advantage the principalities fell into line. Weaker rulers and regional power blocs stayed down after being inflicted a major defeat, treasuries too empty to make another bid. And yet, this time, principalities on the brink of defeat had always seemed to manage to find the funds and the weapons to stay in the Ebb.

Cordelia had been thirteen when she’d first seen how. She’d been on a diplomatic mission to Lyonis, as its prince had managed to carve out alliances neatly encircling the northern principalities, but by the time she arrived in the city the man’s armies had been broken on the field by the betrayal of the princess of Lange. He’d refused to meet with her for the first few days, and when they’d finally talked he did not face her with the kind of despair she would have expected of a man in his position. He’d recently come into a great deal of gold, he’d told her, and was already raising another army with the funds. He’d even managed to secure several wagons of dwarven weaponry to equip it.

Cordelia had left the city after being assured the man had no designs to open a new front to the north, mind awhirl at the sudden change in the other ruler’s fortunes. Where had the gold come from, she wondered? Year after year, news trickled in of similar reversals. Even when alliances collapsed the strongest ruler among them somehow always ended up with the just the funds and the weapons to launch a counter-offensive. This was not, she had decided, a coincidence. Someone was purposefully fanning the flames of the civil war. From there, it had only been a matter of narrowing down the suspects. The name her agents found was the same every time: the Pravus Bank.

It was based in Mercantis, but that meant nothing: the City of Bought and Sold had a long history of being used as a cat’s paw in international politics. Cordelia’s initial attempts to find out more were met with polite misinformation and the much less polite slitting of her agents’ throats. By then she’d been the ruler of Rhenia and de facto the leader of all four Lycaonese principalities but her reach that far south had been... limited. Which had been when an unexpected windfall fell into her lap. Her cousin Agnes from one of the Hasenbach branches came into the Name of Augur, overnight turning from a quiet girl overly fond of bird watching to the holder of a Role that granted indirect access to the very Heavens. And so, one augury at a time, Cordelia had narrowed down the source of the gold flowing into Procer.

Praes.

That had been... unexpected. Dread Emperors and Empresses broadly fell into two categories: the laughable and the terrifying. Thankfully for Calernia, the latter were few and far in between. For every Maleficent and Terribilis, there were ten Sinistras – whose notorious attempt to “steal Callow’s weather” had resulted in the devastation of half her realm instead. The point was that, most of the time, the Dread Empire was comically inept. They used undead plagues and flying fortresses, sentient tiger armies and invisible invasions. Those grand projects inevitably failed and most backfired spectacularly. Of the Empire’s seventy-odd attempts to conquer Callow only two had succeeded. And that first success was why people still thought of Praes as more than an international laughingstock: Dread Empress Triumphant. The only person to ever conquer all of Calernia and she’d done it in ten years . Every time some madman climbed the Tower, there was the risk he or she was cut from the same cloth.

And yet Triumphant’s conquests had collapsed within five years, while Malicia’s annexation of Callow still stood twenty years later. That made her an entirely new breed of Evil. Slower, more careful and in some ways even more dangerous. The Augur had found that the plan being implemented went much deeper than a mere escalation of the civil war, and Cordelia’s blood still ran cold whenever she remembered her cousin’s words: the Tyrant seeks to end Procer . Once she’d known what to look for, the patterns had emerged. The Pravus Bank systematically enabled regional powers to fight above their means, but not enough that they would be able to expand outside of their borders. As the years passed, the Principate had become a handful of petty kingdoms in all but name, perpetually waging war on each other. And Malicia had intended for them to stay that way, forever asunder.

And so at the age of nineteen, Cordelia had gone to war. She was not a particularly gifted warrior, she knew. Like all Rhenians she was expected to man the walls if the Chain of Hunger tried to cross the Grave again, but military training had never particularly appealed to her. Instead she’d studied history and etiquette, the ways of diplomacy and intrigue – all the arts of ruling that her father had held in contemptuous disinterest. And while her uncle killed southerners, she’d made alliances. She’d schemed and betrayed, and for once the proud Alamans princes had found that their opponent’s cunning ran just as deep as theirs. Six years of running battles and backroom deals, playing Creation’s most elaborate shatranj game against the Tyrant in the Tower.

And, Gods forgive her, but it had worked. There was enough blood on her hands for a hundred butchers, but it had worked.

“I do not expect Liesse to succeed, though the Lone Swordsman might yet surprise us,” Cordelia admitted quietly. “The rebellion is a tool crafted for a specific purpose: getting the Deoraithe into the war.”

“I know the Watch has a reputation, but not even them can beat all of Praes on their own,” her uncle said.

The First Prince of Procer took a hearty swallow of mead and closed her eyes.

“They will not have to, Uncle Klaus,” she replied. “Liesse will last a year, perhaps two. It will be enough.”

The prince of Hannoven’s vivid blue eyes narrowed.

“Enough for what?”

“For Procer to be ready to launch the Tenth Crusade,” she whispered.

All of her problems, neatly solved with a single announcement. The Dominion was at least nominally Good, and would not nibble at their borders while they were fighting the Empire. The League of Free Cities would either keep their more Evil-inclined members in line or erupt into civil war, either of which would keep Helike busy. And while the First Prince did not legally have the right to command the private armies of the principalities, all of them were by custom bound to contribute to a Crusade. The troops of her political opponents would be abroad for years, where they could not interfere while she stabilized the Principate. Tens of thousands would die. Callow would be broken for a generation, as the prize being fought over. But it would keep Procer together.

Cordelia loved the Principate, for all its flaws. At the end of the day it remained the greatest force for Good on Calernia, and though its history was full of mistakes and mishaps Procer was what kept the surface together. If it collapsed... Those twenty years of civil war had been but a taste of the bloodshed that would come if the Principate split. Like crows to carrion, all its neighbours would feast on the corpse of Procer and madness would seize the continent. So let Malicia plot her schemes and send her blood-soaked Knight to reap his harvest of lives. Let all of the traitors and the monsters come for her head. She was the First Prince of the Procer, the Warden of the West. Cordelia might be a Hasenbach by blood, but her mother had raised her to the ancestral words of the rulers of Hannoven, the old retort thrown in the teeth of the Enemy when all its grand plans came to naught.

And Yet We Stand .

Chapter 1: Supply

“I’ve been informed that the position of the King Under the Mountains is that ‘since only dwarves own property, only dwarves can be stolen from’. I’m afraid that if you insist on getting your family jewels back, my lord, we will have to buy them.”
– Official state missive from Cygnus of Liesse, ambassador to the Kingdom Under

9 th of Majwa, Ater

I strode through the doorway, black cloak trailing behind me and assorted minions following suit. I’d kept the entourage light for this one: Ratface was a must, since he was the one who knew the details, Hakram was my designated loomer and Robber rounded up the gang by somehow managing to look like he was skulking in broad daylight. Commissioner Rashid’s office was larger than should have been strictly necessary for a man of his position, though I supposed there were plenty of old grandiose buildings to go around in Ater. The olive-skinned man’s eyes immediately flicked to his guards when we entered, the lot of them casually dropping their hands towards their swords. Ater City Guard, not legionaries. While the Supply Commissioner was directly associated with the Legions, he was technically part of the Imperial bureaucracy. Good ol’ Rashid had, therefore, been given his position through the Court. That probably explained why the moment Black had left the city I’d received a missive informing me that due to “unforeseen shortages” the Commissioner’s Office would be unable to provide me with the promised supplies. Fucking Heiress. She wasn’t even in Praes anymore and she was still managing to piss me off.

“Lady Squire,” the middle-aged Taghreb greeted me with a pleasant smile. “An unexpected pleasure. What can I do for you?”

He didn’t even bother to point out that I’d shown up without an appointment. His secretary had tried to, but I’d told Hakram to show the man his teeth and suddenly the schedule had been clear for the afternoon. Funny how these things went.

“Commissioner Rashid,” I replied just as pleasantly. “I came to confirm that the Fifteenth Legion’s rations would be delivered on time. Just a formality, really.”

The commissioner let out a saddened sigh. It almost seemed genuine.

“You must not have received my missive,” he decided. “It is unfortunate, my Lady, but the supplies you were supposed to receive were lost in transit. They’re halfway to Thalassina by now.”

Mhm. Now, was he telling the truth about that or was it only his excuse for whatever petty bastardry Heiress had cooked up? If the supplies weren’t actually in the city this was going to get complicated real fast.

“Be assured that the next shipment we’ll receive has already been earmarked for the Fifteenth,” he assured me.

“And when,” I smiled, “will this shipment be arriving?”

“By the end of the month, should there be no trouble on the road,” Rashid replied.

“Ah,” I murmured. “That really is unfortunate.”

Something like relief flickered through the Taghreb’s eyes but it was short-lived. I reached for my Name and it coiled around my arm almost eagerly, strands of shadow weaving themselves into a spear that I threw at the Commissioner without missing a beat. The impact splintered the chair behind the man and sent him spinning across the room until he landed in an ungainly sprawl of official robes. I heard three swords leave their scabbards behind me and idly glanced at Rashid’s guards. The Soninke woman in charge of them had her hand raised.

“ Hold ,” she called out. “Get your hand off that fucking sword, Mubasa. We’re not fighting godsdamned legionaries.”

“Huh,” I mused. “That’s surprisingly sensible of you...”

“Sergeant Jaha,” she provided. “I’ll be frank, ma’am – I’d rather not get involved in this, if that’s a possibility.”

“Jaha, you traitorous bitch,” the Commissioner wheezed out.

The Soninke rolled her eyes.

“The bribes were nice, Rashid,” she replied, “but I’m not going to fight the girl who set half a city on fire for a measly thirty denarii. It wouldn’t even cover my funeral.”

Eyeing her carefully, I decided after a heartbeat that she wasn’t heading out to get reinforcements.

“You are excused, Sergeant,” I allowed.

Jaha let out a shaky breath, saluted and sharply smacked the back of a young boy’s head when he tried to linger and glare at Hakram. Considering that my adjutant was the tallest orc I’d met so far, the sight of a scrawny boy in cheap armour trying to intimidate him was more than a little absurd.

“You appear to be getting something of a reputation,” Hakram noted wryly.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“I keep telling people I’m not actually the one who used goblinfire but for some reason they think I’m playing coy,” I told him.

Ratface snorted. “When a villain up and tells you they’re not responsible for something, that doesn’t usually mean they didn’t do it.”

“Shut up, Tribune,” I muttered. “Don’t give me lip in front of the Commissioner, it’ll make us look unprofessional.”

As if on cue, Rashid moaned and got on his knees. He was being somewhat melodramatic about this, I felt: I’d hit him with the weakest version of that power I knew. The one Black had taught me punched through plate as well as an actual spear. Robber scuttled across the room in the blink of an eye and kicked the Taghreb back down.

“Now now, Commissioner,” the goblin captain purred. “None of that. It’s a nice clean floor, nothing wrong with it.”

I slowly took off my gloves and put them down on the man’s desk, taking a few careful steps until I stood looking down on him.

“As you may have deduced, I have some objections to the timeline you’ve given me,” I spoke calmly. “The Fifteenth is moving out tomorrow, and the rations we have at the moment will only take us as far as Summerholm.”

“You dare assault a duly appointed official of the Tower?” Rashid hissed. “I’ll see you hanged for this.”

I sighed. “Funny story, Rashid. May I call you Rashid?”

“No,” he replied immediately.

“You’re hurting my feelings, Rashid,” I told him. “You should probably be careful about that. But as I was saying, funny story. Before he left, my teacher delivered a ridiculously large pile of papers at the Fifteenth’s headquarters. Among those was a form called the Nihilis Report.”

The Commissioner paled and I smiled thinly.

“I’m honestly not sure what’s more screwed up about this,” I mused. “That the Empire has a designated form for killing off bureaucrats, or that they expect me to fill it in triplicate.”

“Killing me won’t get you the supplies,” Rashid said after a moment, managing to get back his composure – well, as much composure as man could have while lying on the ground anyway. “You’d still need the proper documentation with the Imperial seal on it.”

“We’ll get to that in a moment,” I assured him, crouching by his side. “I have a question for you first. When Heiress got to you, was it blackmail or bribery?”

I could see the denial on his face but before he could get out a word I laid a finger on his lips. He seemed deeply offended by the act, but I could have cared less. The continued patronizing slights were keeping him off balance and I needed him that way if he was going to buy what I was selling.

“Now before you say anything, Rashid,” I said. “I just want you to know something: when I met the Lone Swordsman, he had a Name trick he used. It allowed him to pick up on when people were lying. Guess what was the first thing I asked my teacher to show me?”

I did not, in fact, know the Swordsman’s trick. Black had been unable to replicate it, though he was good enough at reading people that it made no real difference. I wasn’t nearly there yet, but so far I was managing to even out by lying like a Mercantis chariot salesman.

“Bribery,” the commissioner admitted through gritted teeth.

I sighed. “You’re not making this easy on me, Rashid,” I told him. “Blackmail I could have sympathized with, at least.”

“I would have done it for free, uchaffe ,” he sneered.

“Oh you really shouldn’t have said that,” Ratface winced.

“You ever notice how it’s always the Taghreb who go for the racial slurs?” I mused. “It’s about time we got to the part about the seal, I think. Supply Tribune Ratface over there has the documents all ready for you. All they need a little melted wax and for you to make the impression.”

“And how do you think you’ll make me do that, Callowan?” the commissioner laughed, having pumped the depths of his panic and found something vaguely resembling a spine. “Torture? You don’t have that in you. Why don’t you just walk out of here and save yourself more embarrassment.”

I patted his shoulder gently.

“You’re right, I don’t do torture,” I agreed. “Even now, I think it’s barbaric.”

I got up to my feet.

“Allow me to introduce Captain Robber,” I said. “He’s a horrible green barbarian.”

The goblin grinned malevolently at me, yellow eyes filled with glee. He enjoyed theatrics like this to a thoroughly unhealthy degree.

“You say the nicest things, Boss,” he replied.

I returned my attention to Rashid, whose face had frozen.

“There’s an old story in Callow,” I told the commissioner in a casual tone. “It’s about a fisherman who catches a magic fish in his net and finds it can talk. It offers him three wishes if he lets it go. There’s a formula to it, like in all the stories: the fisherman has to close his eyes and say his wish out loud.”

I picked up my gloves and gingerly put them on.

“Here’s what I’m going to do, Commissioner Rashid. I’m going to say my wish out loud and leave you in this room with Robber.”

My eyes turned cold.

“I get the feeling that, when I come back, there’ll be seal on those papers,” I finished.

Rashid’s eyes flickered to Robber.

“He’s just a goblin,” he sneered, though I could see the fear in his eyes.

“He’s a goblin I’ve been told keeps a jar full of eyeballs in his knapsack. I’ll be honest with you, Rashid: at this point I’m a little afraid to ask whose they are.”

The goblin captain’s brows rose. “How do you even – Hakram, you gossipy bitch .”

The tall orc scratched his chin unrepentantly. “I don’t get why people keep telling me things,” he admitted.

I cleared my throat. “That aside, I think we’re done here.” I smiled at the Commissioner. “I’ll see you in a bell, Rashid. Robber, try not to make too much of a mess. I don’t know what they pay the cleaning staff around here but it’s definitely not enough to deal with that .”

I hummed the first few notes of an old Laure tavern song under my breath and turned to leave. One, two, three, four-

“Wait!”

Oh, good. I had no real intention of having anyone tortured, so if he’d called that bluff I would have had to take another angle. I turned to face the Commissioner, smile still present. He was watching Robber unroll what seemed to be a set of sapper’s tools on his desk, eyes gone white with terror.

“Do you have something to tell me, Commissioner?” I asked.

“Just give me the damn papers, Callowan,” he hissed. “I’ll seal them.”

I motioned for Ratface to bring the paperwork forward while Robber allowed the man to get back on his feet. The goblin was pouting, the sight of that arguably the most horrifying thing I’d seen in a fortnight. In a matter of moments, the melted wax was on the requisition form and the Commissioner pressed down the Imperial seal. The Fifteenth’s supplies for the march were secured.

“Now if you’d done that to begin with,” I pointed out, “there would have been no need for any of this unpleasantness.”

“Just get out, you smug Wallerspawn,” he replied tiredly. “You have what you want.”

I frowned, watching Ratface slip the papers in his scroll case from the corner of my eye.

“That’s twice, you know,” I noted.

The bureaucrat frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“Twice you’ve used a racial epithet while referring to me,” I clarified. “I like to think I’m a patient woman, Rashid-”

Ratface snorted, loudly.

“- but I only have so much tolerance for that kind of tomfoolery,” I finished, ignoring him. “Adjutant, break two of that man’s fingers.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” Hakram grunted, moving forward.

“You- you can’t,” Rashid stammered out. “You already have what you-”

“This isn’t about you, Commissioner,” I told him calmly. “It’s not personal, anyhow. What I’m doing is teaching the Imperial bureaucracy to mind its tongue around me. I don’t expect you to stop being racist, I’m not that presumptuous. But I do expect you to be polite. I think you’ll remember that, should we ever meet again.”

The black cloak swirled around me as I sharply turned and made for the doorway, ignoring the sound of someone’s thumb being broken immediately followed by a hoarse scream.

—

By the time we got back to the Fifteenth’s headquarters, Noon Bell was about to ring.

When I’d first learned that it was illegal for a legion to be posted inside the capital, I’d half-expected to end up camping in the Wasteland. Preferably with ramparts built and a constant full watch, because there was some nasty stuff out there. Thankfully, it wasn’t the first time that one of the Legions had to be headquartered close to Ater without breaking the law: there were a handful of semi-permanent encampments a mile to the north of the city. They’d been, Hakram had informed me, where the Empire usually mustered its armies for an invasion of Callow. The irony in a Laurean girl being in command of one of those felt delicious. Stone walls with overlooking watchtowers came into sight long before even my Name-sight was able to make out the legionaries manning them. The walk was a long one but I’d decline to take Zombie along, preferring to remain on foot like the rest of my companions.

“I don’t get why Treacherous was so popular,” I told Ratface as we neared the gates. “I mean, he betrayed pretty much everyone that ever dealt with him.”

“Admittedly he was quite insane,” the Taghreb tribune agreed. “But as far as Dread Emperors go he was one of the better ones.”

“I don’t recall him actually accomplishing anything,” I replied. “And after something like the War of Thirteen Tyrants and One there must have been a lot of rebuilding to do.”

“It’s the same reason westerners are fond of Bards,” Hakram gravelled. “He was hilariously ineffective.”

“He managed to betray a villain called ‘the Betrayer’, Squire,” Ratface grinned. “You have to hand it to him: he might have had only one trick but he was great at it.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’d be a little more impressed if he’d ruled longer than a decade. That kind of stupidity is why you don’t put the comic relief in charge.”

“You’ve got to respect that kind of an exit, though,” Robber mused. “I mean, poisoning himself and pinning it on over a hundred different people? Man knew how to leave the stage.”

Every nation had its folk figures, when it came down to it. In Callow the most popular was probably Elizabeth Alban, the Queen of Blades – who’d had so many storied tacked onto her name that it was chronologically impossible for her to have lived through all of them – but there were plenty of heroes with colourful legends attached to them. I just had a hard time understanding why the likes of Dread Emperor Treacherous had made the cut here in Praes.

“I would have thought rulers like Triumphant-“

I paused when all three of my companions pressed a knuckle to their forehead and murmured “may she never return”.

“All right,” I frowned. “What’s that about? This isn’t the first time I see people do this when she’s mentioned.”

Ratface grimaced. “You know how Praesi don’t really have prayers?”

I raised an eyebrow. It had taken a while for me to get used to the idea that there was no organized religion for the Gods Below, after being raised on weekly sermons at the House of Light. Relationships with the Hellgods were a deeply personal matter, rarely more widespread than a family having a common shrine. Occasionally cults popped up, but Black had told me the Tower made a point of stomping those out. Not because of religious intolerance, he’d explained, but because they had a history of breaking the Imperial restrictions on human sacrifice. It was a little distressing to consider that in any case the Imperial bureaucracy could be the lesser Evil.

“Sure,” I grunted.

“This is a prayer, Catherine. As close as we get, anyway,” Hakram gravelled. “Whenever her name is spoken, anyone who’s not a fool petitions the Gods Below to make sure she never manages to return to Creation.”

My frown deepened, though a part of me was mildly amused when I remembered that Black had never used the prayer when referring to the Empress.

“Is that considered... likely?” I finally asked.

Robber chuckled. “You tell me, Boss. When she croaked it several of her Legions went down with her. Odds are they ended up in the same place. The old girl conquered more with less.”

Huh. Well, that was definitely making it onto the list of things I was asking my teacher about next time he scryed. It wasn’t like there wasn’t a precedent for a mortal taking over one of the Hells, though “mortal” was a bit of a misnomer when it came to the Dead King. I made a mental note of bringing up the subject as soon as possible while the encampment’s gates opened in front of us. The handful of legionaries on the watchtowers flanking it saluted as we went by and I replied with a nod, face carefully blank. Even months after the Fifteenth had been raised, I was still surprised to see Callowans in Legion armour whenever I came across them. And I came across them often : nearly half of my forces came from the recruitment camps in Callow, some of them having even been transferred from other Legions when my own was officially formed.

I wouldn’t have believed it was a coincidence even if Black hadn’t outright admitted he’d arranged it.

Why my teacher had arranged that remained unclear. The Knight never did anything without half a dozen reasons, most of them known only to himself. I’d originally thought he was doing me a favour, but integrating Callowans into the Fifteenth had proved... something of a challenge. Altercations had between soldiers had been common place during the first few weeks, though Juniper had come down hard on the troublemakers and managed to put a stop to it. Racial tensions, unfortunately, still ran high. I’d expected they would come mostly from more conservative Soninke and Taghreb elements but my fellow Callowans had turned out just as bad. It made sense, in a twisted way. The more respectable sorts weren’t the kind of people who signed up for a term of service in the Legions of Terror. The core of my Callowan recruits was made up of thieves and murderers who’d avoided the noose by ‘volunteering’ for service, and few of them were actually pleased to be here.

Things had come very close to a general brawl when the goblin elements of the Fifteenth had launched into a spree of borderline vicious pranks targeting the newcomers. It was, Pickler had later told me, tradition in the Legions. A hazing ritual meant to make fresh recruits earn their membership in the ranks. The Callowans had seen them as personal attacks instead, and several legionaries – goblins and humans alike – had ended up in a healer’s tent when tempers rose. The only good thing to come out of it was that all the wounded had insisted they’d ended up with broken bones through ‘training accidents’ instead of admitting they’d been fighting, falling back on common mistrust of authority when the time to hand out sanctions had come. I’d spent more than one evening discussing the subject with my Legate, but Juniper was largely unworried. She believed that the Fifteenth would come together after its first major engagement, regardless of prior tensions.

Personally, I thought that a large part of the problem came from the fact that there were no Callowan officers higher in rank than sergeant. Unfortunately there was no quick solution to this: the only people from the Kingdom who’d gone through the War College were Deoraithe, and none of them had stuck around to serve in the Legions afterwards. I couldn’t very well appoint a legionary from the ranks to a lieutenantship just for being Callowan when I had actually qualified candidates from other backgrounds available to me. Battle casualties will allow for field promotions, unpleasant as that thought is. We’ll see if any distinguish themselves enough to warrant a rise up the ranks. Robber peeled off from the group a few moments after we entered, returning to his company, but both Hakram and Ratface followed me to the walled bastion serving as the Fifteenth’s centre of operations.

As my adjutant Hakram was, officially, serving as my liaison to the legion. Practically speaking, he’d mostly ended up getting me up to date on reports and handling the bulk of the paperwork that kept flowing in my direction. Supply Tribune Ratface, on the other hand was part of Juniper’s General Staff. He served as the head of the Fifteenth’s supply and logistics. It was apparently custom to refer to an officer in his position as the Quartermaster, though it wasn’t his official title. The pair of orcs – former Rat Company, both of them – posted at the bastion’s door saluted as we passed by, ushering us into the room where most of the Fifteenth’s senior officers were already assembled. A handful of old tapestries covered roughly-hewn walls, their colours long faded though they were kept scrupulously clean of dust. The large stone table that was the centrepiece of the room was covered by a map of southern Callow, iron figurines placed where the Sixth and Ninth legions were positioned as of the last dispatches. Four copper knights had been set in the spots where skirmishes between the Duke’s forces and the Legions had already erupted.

Legate Juniper stopped speaking the moment we entered, turning her gaze onto me. The three other people in the room did the same after a heartbeat. Commander Hune was of about average height, for an ogre, which still meant she had to hunch over uncomfortably to avoid hitting her head onto the ceiling. The patient cleverness in her eyes contrasted with the brutish cast of her face, a hint at the sharp mind that lay beneath it. Hune Egeldotir had been the captain of Tiger Company, back in the College, and she’d come highly recommended to me by both Juniper and Hakram. Next to her, tapping his fingers against the stone, stood Commander Nauk. He sent a cheerful grin my way, pushing one of the knight figures half an inch forward when Juniper wasn’t looking. Oh, that’s going to drive her crazy when she notices it. Nauk was, I reflected, a bit of a bastard. But he was my bastard, and that made all the difference.

If the orc commander was my creature, though, then there was no denying that Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara was Juniper’s. Getting the Taghreb former captain on her staff had been, so far, the only favour my Legate had asked of me. I’d made a point of seeing it done: the deeper in my debt Juniper was, the better. Besides, she was too much of a professional to make the request if she didn’t think the Fifteenth would benefit from it. I’d kicked up the request to Black, and within two bells Scribe’s bureaucratic wizardry had seen to it that Aisha was one of mine.

“Lady Squire,” Juniper gravelled. “I take it all went well?”

I repressed a twitch at the formal address she insisted on keeping using. In some ways I’d preferred it when she constantly insulted me, mostly because the interaction felt more honest. But since the very moment the Fifteenth had been officially formed, she’d turned horribly formal on me and no amount of telling her to do otherwise had managed to break her of the habit.

“Well,” I mused. “I’m not getting invited to any social occasions for the foreseeable future but we have the papers.”

Commander Nauk barked out a laugh, elbowing Aisha in the sides – she eyed him like he’d just spit on a silk dress and quietly stepped on his foot. His steel-capped boots were thick enough he didn’t even notice.

“Gave them the old Callow treatment, did you?” the orc snickered.

“Is it really the original Callow treatment if nothing explodes, though?” Ratface wondered.

“Whoever gave you the impression you’re funny has a place waiting in the worst Hell, Quartermaster,” Juniper grunted. “When are we getting the rations?”

“They’ll be in our stocks before nightfall,” Ratface replied, thoroughly unoffended. “I appear to have misremembered the actual number of soldiers in the Fifteenth, so we’ll end up with some surplus.”

There was a reason the handsome Taghreb was our Supply Tribune. He had a way of getting his hands on whatever we needed and a little more, no matter how much bureaucracy stood in his way. I’d considered asking him exactly how he managed that, but a crate of Vale summer wine had appeared in my quarters before I could. How he’d even known it was my favourite drink was a mystery, as was the way he’d gotten his hands on it when Vale itself was currently one of the main strongholds of the rebellion.

“Useful,” Hune spoke mildly, her voice surprisingly delicate for a woman her size. “We can trade with other Legions on the way to the front.”

“Discretion will be key,” Aisha murmured. “A certain amount of that is tolerated, but it’s technically against regulations.”

I’d made all of my senior officers aware of why exactly we needed to toe the line of Legion rules, at least in appearance. There was no telling where Heiress had friends just waiting to kick up a fuss.

“Oh you know me,” Ratface smiled. “Discretion is my middle name.”

Aisha rolled her eyes, not deigning to humour him further.

“We’ll be ready to march tomorrow, Legate?” Hakram gravelled, getting the conversation back on track before I needed to step in.

“There should be no further issue,” Juniper agreed. “We’ll be off with dawn.”

I hummed, rather pleased.

“This will be the last staff meeting we have in this camp, then,” I said. “It feels like something that should be celebrated with drinks. Only the one cup, though, I’ll have to get going soon.”

Juniper frowned as Hakram passed her by to pick up a carafe of wine. “You have another appointment?”

I grimaced. “I’ve received summons to the Tower. The Empress requests that we have a talk.”

A ripple of curiosity went through my officers.

“There’s no court session tonight, so I’m assuming it will be a private meeting?” the Staff Tribune probed.

“The message didn’t specify,” I replied. “Just to be sure, Aisha, would there be an issue with my wearing armour? I don’t actually own court dress.”

The Taghreb aristocrat shook her head. “If you’re summoned in your station as the Squire, military apparel is appropriate. You’re a little young for the Empress’ usual tastes, anyhow.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware Malicia was inclined towards women.”

Aisha shrugged. “She hasn’t added men to the Imperial seraglio since her ascension, so that’s the current belief.”

My eyes narrowed in distaste. “She kept the seraglio? Weeping Heavens, she used to be a concubine. She should know better.”

The Staff Tribune met my eyes unflinchingly. “With all due respect, my Lady, your Callowan is showing. The Imperial seraglio is, above all, a political institution. Of course Malicia keeps one.”

“I’m not seeing anything particularly political about keeping a stable of women to sleep with, Bishara,” I replied flatly.

“That’s because you think this is about sex,” she replied bluntly. “It isn’t. Consorts only share a bed with a Tyrant if they wish to. High Lords and Ladies send relatives into the seraglio to openly back a ruler or curry influence. Traditionally it’s a way for an Emperor or Empress to install individuals of unsuitable background at Court without going through the bureaucracy.”

“ Traditionally ,” Ratface repeated quietly. “Let’s not forget Nefarious, and he wasn’t the first.”

“Keep your personal politics out of this, Hasan,” Aisha retorted harshly. “That Emperor Nefarious turned his seraglio in some sort of... sordid sex dungeon was a sign he’d lost the ability to rule, and he paid for it with his life.”

I raised a hand. “All right, that’s enough. I wasn’t aware there were nuances to this, or I obviously wouldn’t have stuck my foot so forcefully in my mouth. I fully intend to continue this discussion at some point, Aisha, since it seems like a glaring hole in my political education. Now’s not the moment, though.”

“We’re leaving Ater behind tomorrow,” Juniper spoke, stare sweeping across all the officers. “We will be leaving politics with it.”

It wasn’t a question. We grabbed glasses and the wine was passed around, the harsh Wasteland red Hakram had fetched making the rounds. I raised my cup.

“To the Fifteenth,” I announced.

Nauk laughed.

“We march West, once more,” the tall orc quoted in Mthethwa.

“Waging that same old war,” we all echoed, cups clinking together.

It was just as well none of us had spoken the rest of the famous verse.

Onward to the fields of Callow,

Swift death and graves shallow.

Chapter 2: Demand

“The closest equivalent I’ve found to the Imperial court is the act of shoving your hand in a bag that could be full of jewels but is, most of the time, full of razor blades.”
– Extract from the personal memoirs of Dread Empress Maleficent II

The two-hundredth level of the Tower was surprisingly, well, not horrifying.

Admittedly there were more skull carvings woven into the relief than I was strictly comfortable with, but the boudoir where I’d ended up cooling my heels until Malicia was ready to see me was pretty comfortable. The armchairs had been designed to accommodate people wearing plate armour as I currently was, and a servant had helpfully put out a carafe of what looked like good Liessen wine. It broke my heart that I couldn’t pour myself a cup, but the last time I’d stepped foot in the Tower all the available refreshments had been poisoned and I wasn’t going to risk a repeat performance for a drink. I was getting more than a little restless, sitting alone in the room and waiting on one of the most powerful women in Calernia.

It wasn’t the armour that had me feeling awkward: Hells, it was my default getup these days. Besides, Hakram had seen to it that it got polished even if the thought had never crossed my mind, because my minion was a godsdamned prince among adjutants. I’d even gotten used to the cloak, though it had a way of making everything I did seem overly theatrical . And the sword... well, at least it was goblin steel. I could have done without the goblinfire-green bells my teacher had gotten the pommel sculpted as, but I’d grown familiar with the arming sword. Besides, there was no escaping the Black Knight’s dubious sense of humour.

That particular thought was a great deal fonder than it would have been a few months ago. The problem with Black, I’d found, was that he was a likeable monster. It was hard to remain as guarded as I should be around him when he constantly went out of his way to make things easier for me. The memory of that afternoon in Summerholm when I’d seen his true face remained fresh, but it battled with the evenings like when the two of us had stood out in the rain and he’d been almost... comforting. As comforting as a man like him could be, anyway.

He was manipulating me, of course, but that didn’t mean his actions weren’t genuine. He wouldn’t be half as good a manipulator if they weren’t.

The longer I spent with my teacher the more the way he did things seemed reasonable, and that terrified me more than anything else.

I can like him and still consider him my enemy , I told myself silently. I paced across the room, following the relief of some ancient battle as I did. The Praesi displayed seemed to be on the defensive, for once, but I didn’t recognize the battlefield. The twin bells of the Fairfax dynasty were among the banners of the invaders but there were half a dozen other displays of heraldry I was unfamiliar with.

“The Fourth Crusade,” a voice came from behind me.

My hand immediately dropped to my sword as I swivelled, but the woman facing me was unarmed. Not a servant – she wasn’t wearing the Tower’s livery – but I couldn’t recall seeing her the last time I’d been here. Not that that means much.

“Excuse me?” I replied after a heartbeat.

“It’s a depiction of Dread Emperor Terribilis turning back the Fourth Crusade,” the woman repeated.

Ah. The heraldry I hadn’t recognized must have been from the Crusader Kingdoms that the second Terribilis had spent his lifetime dismantling. I let a moment pass as I took a closer look at the stranger. Dark skin and short plaited hair, she had those typical Soninke high cheekbones and nearly golden eyes. Her tunic was a deep green and high-collared, a fashion I’d noticed before in the streets of Ater. Not that any of this helped me figure out who the Hells I was talking to. I cleared my throat.

“Is it time for me to go in, then?” I asked.

The woman shook her head lightly, reaching for one of the cups by the carafe and pouring herself one.

“The Liesse Rebellion has complicated tax collection in Callow for the year, Malicia will be settling the details for a little while longer,” she replied. “It’s not poisoned, by the way, if you were wondering.”

As if to lend her words credence, she took a small sip from her cup. I raised an eyebrow. My first thought had been that I might be dealing with a heavily disguised version of Malicia trying to pick my brains before we met, but that was becoming more unlikely by the moment. Was she some sort of attendant, then? Might as well play along for the moment. There’s a reason Black taught me the Name trick to burn basic poisons out of my system. I strode across the room and poured myself a cup of my own.

“And who would you be?” I asked after taking a sip and allowing the sweet, musky taste to fill my mouth.

The woman smiled, artfully sitting down in one of the armchairs.

“No one important,” she replied.

“Villain, then,” I grunted. “Only people who ever get that shifty about their job description.”

And yet I wasn’t feeling a Name coming off of her. Oh, that particular trick wasn’t perfect – I’d yet to manage to get anything off Scribe, and Black could blink out of existence for me if he focused – but it wasn’t something just anybody could fool. My level of wariness went up a notch.

“I do not have a Name, so you can stop squinting,” she replied in a drily amused tone.

I coughed to hide my embarrassment.

“Are you really going to make a guessing game out of this?” I asked. “I guess that’s one way to pass the time.”

She folded her hands primly over her lap. “You may consider me Malicia’s equivalent of what Scribe is to Amadeus,” she said.

I frowned. “Secretary?”

“Spymistress,” she corrected. “Let’s not pretend that Scribe doesn’t run one of the largest information networks on the continent.”

“I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to admit that out loud,” I grunted. “I don’t suppose you have a name? ‘No one important’ is a bit of a mouthful.”

She chuckled. “You can call me Ime,” she replied.

I raised an eyebrow. “Patience in Mthethwa,” I noted. “There’s a fake name if I ever heard one.”

“Secrets are my trade,” she said. “It would hardly be proper for me to reveal my actual name on our first meeting.”

I hummed and refused to humour that line of conversation any further. If my last evening at the Tower had taught me anything, it was that if I played courtly games I was going to lose. Badly. Better to stick to battlefields where I had a chance of carrying the day.

“Catherine Foundling,” I introduced myself, well aware that if she really was who she said she was then there was little chance she didn’t already know that.

“Interesting,” Ime murmured.

“How’s that?” I replied warily.

“Most individuals with a Role introduce themselves by their Name,” she noted. “I wonder if that disassociation is related to your origins.”

“I’m sure I’m not the first Callowan villain,” I spoke through gritted teeth.

“Hardly,” Ime acknowledged. “Yet Callowan villains were usually related to a Callowan pattern: overly ambitious uncles, warmongering commanders. For a girl born in Laure to become the Squire – a largely Praesi Name – is unprecedented. In many ways you are setting the standard for any who would follow in your path.”

“I’m sure there’s a point to this,” I replied flatly. “If you’d kindly get to it.”

Ime shrugged. “I’m trying to understand why Amadeus chose you to be his apprentice. Your marks at the orphanage’s education facilities weren’t particularly remarkable – I read your essay on the Licerian Wars and it was rather sloppy.”

Oh Gods, I couldn’t believe that a piece of homework I’d written half-drunk in the backroom of the Rat’s Nest had ended up in the hands of the fucking spymistress of the Empire . I forced my face to remain blank.

“I don’t think he picked me because of my academic record,” I said.

“Mhm, yes,” Ime hummed. “Your ranking in the Pit was more to your credit. Also a warning sign, of course. It was one of the reasons your file was flagged, along with your antisocial tendencies.”

“I’m not antisocial ,” I retorted before I could help myself. “I’m just – never mind, not worth arguing over. What does that even mean, my ‘file was flagged’?”

I didn’t even bother to address the fact that everyone and their mother seemed to know I’d been part of an illegal underground fighting ring. Hells, Booker, what kind of a show were you running?

“You were considered a potential heroine,” Ime informed me. “Your stated interest in the War College was a mitigating factor, but agents of the Tower kept an eye on you regardless.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that, but I was spared the effort of figuring it out when a small gong rang in the distance and the spymistress gracefully rose to her feet.

“Malicia seems to be done,” she said. “If you’ll follow me, Lady Squire?”

I bit down on a ‘do I have a choice?’ and fell behind her. The boudoir led to a larger antechamber covered in wood panelling, but our pace was too brisk for me to stop and take in the scenery. The door at the end of the room opened into a larger chamber, this one more classic Praesi architecture. Polished black marble everywhere, with the occasional gold inlay shining in the candlelight. Large tinted glass windows in the back allowed the fading sunlight to filter in, casting shades of red and gold on the long rectangular table that took up the middle of the room. At the head of the room, sitting in an armchair ostentatious enough to qualify as a throne, sat Dread Empress Malicia, First of Her Name. I bowed my head.

“Your Most Dreadful Majesty,” I greeted her.

Deference, but no kneeling. The urge was there but I remembered standing alone with my teacher, surrounded by our enemies. We do not kneel. The words still sent a shiver up my spine whenever I thought of them. The Empress laughed, the sound as enchanting as I remembered.

“There’s no need for any of that, Catherine,” she spoke gently. “This is a private audience.”

“Technically,” Ime pointed out, “this is a session of the Imperial council. Two members out of five is the necessary quorum.”

Malicia rolled her eyes at the spymistress. “I see you’ve been helping yourself to the wine, darling.”

I allowed the banter to pass me by without commenting, still unsure as to what exactly my position was relating to them. Or even why I was here in the first place. Would it have killed them to have put a mention of that in the summons? I studied the Tyrant in silence, trying to gauge her intentions. Pretty much all I got out of it was that the woman was gorgeous, which I’d already known. She was not, however, as attention-grabbing as she’d been in Court. Part of that must have been that she was wearing a much less flamboyant green dress the exact shade of Ime’s tunic, but that couldn’t be all. It wasn’t that she was any less striking, just that... It’s not as difficult to ignore. My fingers tightened imperceptibly. Name shenanigans, I’d put my hand to flame on it. Ime claimed the chair to the left of Malicia, immediately beginning to drum against the armrest.

“Your Majesty,” I began.

The Empress raised an eyebrow. “Malicia,” she corrected me. “You and I will be working together for a long time, Catherine. I’ve found being overly formal tends to be a hindrance in those cases.”

“Malicia,” I repeated with a grimace. Gods, that felt weird. “I hope I’m not being overly bold, but I have no idea whatsoever as to why I’m here.”

The lovely heart-shaped face remained unreadable for a moment, then she cracked a smile. Shaking her head ruefully, she turned to Ime.

“She might as well be his daughter,” the Empress said.

Ime smirked. “Little off-colour, but the resemblance is there.”

I quietly choked on my tongue.

“Excuse me?” I managed to croak out.

Malicia waved a hand lazily. “There’s nobility in the Empire that would cheerfully murder their firstborn for the opportunity to discuss the weather with me, my dear. It seems Amadeus has rubbed off on you more than I’d thought.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. “My apologies, I meant no-”

“No one’s taking offence, Lady Squire,” Ime interrupted, the intonation she gave the last words almost mocking.

I glared at her. “Forgive me for being a little nervous in the presence of the godsdamned Dread Empress of Praes , Lady Ime.”

I started wincing before the words even finished leaving my lips. My temper is going to get me killed one of these days. Hells, maybe even today. Malicia chuckled exquisitely.

“ Lady Patience ? A little on the nose, darling,” she said.

Ime looked mildly offended. “I’m the Imperial spymistress. I have a mystique to protect.”

“Save it for the unwashed masses,” the Empress replied. “They might actually be impressed. That said, Catherine, it might not be the wisest course of action to damn a ruler to her face. We do not call on the Gods as casually in Praes as they do in Callow.”

“I’ll, er, remember that,” I muttered, too relieved my outburst hadn’t gotten more of a reaction to muster anything more substantial.

The Empress smiled. “My summons was not a mere social call, as it happens. Our respective duties have kept us both rather busy of late, but I wanted us to have a face-to-face meeting before you left for Callow.”

A good thing she’d not called it ‘the provinces’ this time. My game face wasn’t good enough yet to hide the kind of resentment that would have caused.

“Did you ever wonder why your teacher took you as a pupil?” Malicia asked in a murmur.

And just like that, she had the entire weight of my attention bearing down on her. Oh, I’d wondered all right. More than once that particular question had kept me up at night, along with the worry that I was playing into whatever greater plan he had in the works.

“The question has crossed my mind once or twice,” I replied quietly.

Her expression was friendly, but her eyes were sharp as daggers. Her looks made it so very easy to forget that Dread Empress Malicia was the longest-reigning Tyrant in several hundred years. One did not get to keep the Tower that long without being very, very good at their job.

“Amadeus is, without a doubt, the most talented example of his Name to grace Praes in a dozen generations,” she said matter-of-factly. “Unfortunately, he has also made so many enemies that within twenty years he will be unable to function effectively as my Black Knight.”

My blood went cold. That was... not the conversation I’d expected to be having when I received the summons, to put it lightly. What she was saying had large implications. Empire-shaking implications.

“I was aware he had enemies in the nobility,” I replied cautiously. “I’d not been given to understand that the situation was quite that bad.”

“Part of it is our fault,” Malicia sighed.

“He’s been the hatchet man for this regime since the very beginning, and the cost is starting to show,” Ime contributed mildly.

I’d almost forgotten she was there.

“Every time we had to keep the High Lords in line,” the Empress explained, “Amadeus was the one kicking down the doors, so to speak. The only reason he hasn’t been rewarded for this by a knife in the back is that we’ve already co-opted all the hired killers worth the name.”

“That and Assassin’s been cleaning house like it’s going out of style,” Ime smiled. “Busy little bee, he’s been.”

“You think he means for me to replace him,” I forced out, almost afraid to say the words.

“A Squire must, in time, become a Knight,” Malicia replied softly.

I clenched my fingers and unclenched them.

“Then that means Heiress is another possible successor,” I finally said.

“Sweet Akua’s designs are a little grander than that, I’m afraid,” Ime snickered.

“Ambition is a good thing, in a young girl,” the Empress chided her. “Yet I fear her aspirations will be frustrated. The Age of Wonders is over, Catherine. The days where a single madwoman with a flying fortress could cow a continent are long gone. Creation is a smaller place now, one that rewards base cleverness over glorious enterprise.”

I didn’t see anything glorious in a crazy Tyrant raining down fire on their neighbours, but that was the Praesi for you. Over a millennium of being run by villains had warped their culture to the bone.

“That is the reason you were summoned to the Tower before your departure and she was not,” Malicia continued. “You represent a legacy, Catherine, a different way of doing things. And so I will ask you the same question I asked Amadeus, before he helped me claim the Tower.” The Dread Empress leaned forward. “What do you want?”

I blinked. I’d thought I understood where this conversation was going. A few words of warning, a little more putting on the charm, and then I’d be sent off with a pat on the head. This was... She was taking me seriously, and that wasn’t something I’d come to expect of the nobles of the Wasteland. Hells, what could you even say to the second most powerful woman on a continent asking you what you wanted? I want Callow to be free, in fact if not in name. I want your nobles to stop plundering the land of my birth like it’s their Gods-given right. I want peace, even if it’s under the aegis of the Tower. And the next time one of your dogs steps out of line, I want the power to put their head on a pike. All of those I could have told her, but they revealed too much to this woman I still knew little about and trusted even less.

“That’s a complicated question,” I replied instead, face blank.

“Most worth asking are,” Ime commented.

“Don’t be obnoxious, sweetling,” Malicia sighed. “I understand this is unexpected, Catherine, and I will not press you for an answer today. All I ask is that you think on it.”

The Dread Empress leaned back in her seat, every inch of her turning regal as she eyed me inscrutably.

“This is Praes, Catherine Foundling,” she said. “Our ways are harsh, but they are not without graces. Power earned is yours to do with as you wish. Remember that, when putting down the rebellion you set into motion. Sacrifices are meaningless if they do not lead to an outcome.”

For the second time since I’d stepped into the room, my blood ran cold. She knew. She knew . How could- no it didn’t matter. If she’d wanted me dead for this she wouldn’t have needed proof, and not even Black would have tried to stop her. I let out a shaky breath and bowed my head in acknowledgement of the implied dismissal. Ime pushed back her chair and rose to her feet, casually making her way to me and clapping my shoulder. I resisted the urge to push off her hand.

“I’ll see you out, Lady Squire,” the spymistress said. “The Tower can be rather dangerous, to those who are strangers to it.”

“No argument there,” I muttered, allowing her to steer me out of the chamber.

Her steps slowed as we passed through the antechamber, the door closing soundlessly behind us.

“Your legion will pass through Summerholm,” Ime suddenly said.

I eyed her cautiously. “It’s the only land route, yes.”

“Warlock will be there,” she informed me. “So will his son.”

I blinked in surprise. “His son ? I thought he...”

“Married an incubus?” she smiled. “Yes, the rumours are true. Very well-behaved creature, for a personification of lust. They adopted.”

“Huh,” I grunted. “Interesting. Why are you telling me this?”

“The boy recently came into the Name of Apprentice,” she replied. “Their presence in the city is not a coincidence.”

Ah. Power calls to power , my teacher always said. My fingers tightened. A mage with that kind of firepower at his disposal would be quite the trump card, but I’d been in Praes long enough to know that assumptions paved the path to disappointment. Or an early grave.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I replied.

“You’ll have seen all the Calamities save Ranger after that,” Ime mused. “Not many people can claim the same.”

I frowned. “I’ve never met Assassin either,” I pointed out.

She shot me a pitying look. “It would be a mistake to think that means Assassin has never met you ,” she replied.

I grimaced. “And to think I was starting to run out of nightmare material.”

Ime hesitated, then allowed me to pass through the doorway to the boudoir first.

“A word of advice, Foundling,” she murmured, leaning close. “When people pick out the most dangerous among Amadeus’ entourage, they think of Ranger or Warlock. They are wrong.”

I kept my face blank and met her eyes.

“Be very careful around Scribe,” she spoke in a whisper. “Do not ever let her believe you are a threat to him. If she does, she won’t call down Hellfire or come swinging a sword. One night, you will simply... disappear, and no body will ever be found.”

I swallowed.

“You’re being very helpful,” I replied.

I let the following and why is that? unspoken. The spymistress’ hand came to rest on her throat and her eyes went distant.

“I owe your teacher a debt,” she said. “He chose mercy once, when he had every right to do otherwise. I’ve made a habit of settling that score whenever I can.”

We made our way out of the Tower in silence after that, each lost in our own thoughts.

Chapter 3: Cost

“Sooner or later, the Tower always gets its due.”
– Praesi saying

Spices were a rarity in Callow, and before Ater I’d ever only tasted salt.

I shovelled in another mouthful of biryani, enjoying the taste of cumin and pepper. Some part of me felt vaguely guilty about enjoying the dish so much: the amount of spices used to season the rice alone would have sold for enough in Laure to buy three meals. The chicken with caramelized onion sauce that accompanied it wasn’t exactly my favourite – I’d never been one for sweets – but after a visit to the Tower I figured I could use the energy. The Sword and Cup, Aisha’s old haunt, had become the unofficial watering hole for the Fifteenth over the last few months. The Staff Tribune had managed to exact the concession that our legionaries paid less on drinks, a deal the owner had become more than happy with when the steady stream of patrons had started coming in whenever on leave.

Ratface had been the one to introduce me to biryani, mildly horrified when I’d confessed I had no idea what cumin tasted like. He’d rolled his eyes when Hakram had pointed out how the oddity of a Taghreb being so fond of Soninke cooking, pointing out that sharing a mezze with legionaries was a good way to go home with an empty stomach. Apparently Taghreb were fond of putting out large plates for communal eating, a concept utterly foreign to me. Sharing a plate with someone in Callow was a sign of deep intimacy, and done in public only by gushing young lovers. Still, it was far from the strangest custom I’d encountered in the Wasteland.

I’d never actually met the owner of the Sword and Cup, but the staff had been taught to recognize me by sight. The moment I stepped in I was ushered up into a private room, only stopping to exchange a few words with some of my off-duty legionaries. Taghreb, Soninke, orcs and even a goblin – but no Callowans. They had a preferred tavern of their own, I’d been informed, run by a retired member of the Thirteenth Legion. I could understand the urge to cling to what you knew, but that didn’t make it any less of a problem for me. Off-duty is where friendships are made.

I put down my spoon and took a long pull from my tankard, the warmth of ale washing away the last remnants of the tension my meeting with the Empress had set in my shoulders. I’d learned enough during that single hour to chew on for the better part of the coming campaign, and little of it had been good. That the Warlock and his son were in Summerholm was the most immediate danger, in my opinion. For all that the man was my teacher’s ally, I’d have to tread very carefully around him: people didn’t get a nickname like the ‘Sovereign of the Red Skies’ by cultivating pretty gardens.

My train of thought was interrupted by someone softly knocking at the door and I frowned. It was a little early for someone to come to pick up my plate, and the staff wasn’t in the habit of disturbing me without good reason.

“Come in,” I called out.

A middle-aged Soninke woman opened the door and bowed apologetically.

“An officer from the Fifteenth requests an audience, my Lady,” she informed me.

I raised an eyebrow, very much doubting that was the phrasing that had actually been used. I’d encouraged most officers I worked with to do away with the courtesies that had started flowing in after I openly admitted to being the Squire. The exaggerated servility was rather grating.

“Who?” I asked.

The few people I shared meals with on a regular basis should have been in camp at the moment, seeing to the last preparations for our departure.

“She introduced herself as Senior Mage Kilian,” the woman replied.

My brow rose even higher. A pleasant surprise then, but Kilian was definitely supposed to be in camp. As Senior Mage she didn’t have a command of her own, but she was a member of the General Staff and charged with overseeing all mage operations in the Fifteenth. She should have been coordinating with Ratface to make sure our healers had all the necessary stock for what promised to be a rather bloody affair.

“Show her in,” I replied.

The woman bowed again. “By your leave, my Lady,” she murmured.

I leaned back in my seat and drank another mouthful of ale, not even having time for a repeat performance before Kilian entered the room in full legionary armour. Well, mage’s armour anyway. The mage lines in companies were issued a kit lighter than even the regulars, since the use of magic was so physically draining. Mages had been known to pass out inside the old one, before the Legions had adjusted their kit. Still, she was a sight for sore eyes. Kilian wasn’t strikingly pretty, but she had the kind of looks that were more attractive the more you paid attention to her. Or so I told myself. It would have been a little shallow of me to develop an interest just because of the red hair and her ability to light a man on fire at twenty paces.

“Catherine,” she greeted me, saluting under my amused stare.

“Kilian,” I replied. “I’d order you a plate, but I’m getting the impressions there’s pressing news.”

The mage eyed the remains of my biryani with longing for a moment before she squared it away.

“There’s a... situation in the camp,” she grimaced.

I sighed. “They couldn’t have waited for me to finish my plate, at least?”

The redhead’s lips twitched. “Deserters are rarely so considerate.”

Deserters? That got her my full attention.

“Are you telling me we’ve lost legionaries before we even left the Wasteland?” I asked flatly.

“Only shortly,” she replied. “They were caught close to the city by one of our patrols.”

And to think I’d believed Juniper’s insistence to change the patrol schedules randomly had been pointless. I frowned, studying the Senior Mage’s expression.

“They’re Callowans, aren’t they?” I realized. “Juniper wouldn’t have sent you otherwise.”

The mage nodded slowly. “Two of them, one a sergeant.”

I resisted the urge to curse. How the fuck am I supposed to start pulling Callowans up the ranks when the few officers from home I do have are deserting? I pushed aside my plate, appetite lost.

“Where are they being held?” I asked tiredly.

“Legate Juniper had one of the fort’s cellars converted into a cell,” Kilian replied, then hesitated.

My frown deepened. We had tents set aside for disciplinary measures. There should have been no need for the Hellhound to go that far.

“There’s more,” I spoke calmly. “Kilian, what happened?”

The Senior Mage grimaced again, the expression out of place on her elfin face. “They stabbed two legionaries trying to escape when they were caught. One of them is in critical condition. The healers say he might not make it through the night.”

I was too old to start throwing tantrums, and that was the only reason I didn’t smash my fist into the table. That and the Fifteenth’s finances were tight enough already without needing to replace civilian tables.

“The bloody idiots,” I hissed.

Desertion was bad enough – unless there were some very extenuating circumstances, it was a capital offence – but that they’d employed violence in trying to escape made it that much worse. If the wounded soldier didn’t make it, the Legion’s regulations were clear . Stoned to death by the dead legionary’s line. A public spectacle like that was the last thing I needed before we marched into war: all the tensions that had gone underground would flare up again. Kilian remained silent, looking deeply uncomfortable. At least I knew why Juniper had sent for me. She’d want to avoid a stoning as much as I did. Yet my Legate couldn’t execute the deserters without assembling a court-martial, and that would take time. Time we might not have, if the wounded soldier died in the night. The only way around that was, well, me . As a Named apprenticed to the Black Knight himself, I had the legal authority to kill anyone under my command without bothering with the judicial niceties. It was a holdover from the old days that Malicia had been careful to maintain: it had allowed my teacher to clean house in Callow as much as needed without seeking the Tower’s permission every time. I passed a hand through my hair.

“Did you come by horse?” I asked Kilian.

“Requisitioned a mount from the Imperial messengers’ stable,” she nodded.

“Get a fresh one,” I ordered. “The quicker this is dealt with, the better.”

—

Night had fallen by the time we got back to camp.

The wounded man was still alive, thank the Gods. The Fifteenth’s healers had dealt with his wounds on the surface, but they could do nothing about the internal bleeding. Most of the medical jargon they’d used had gone over my head, but the gist of it seemed that one of the organs in the stomach that were too delicate to fix using magic had been torn through when the man had gotten stabbed. I felt another flare of anger at the thought of it: stomach wounds were a bad way to go. The legionary had gotten a potion for the pain, but there wasn’t much more the healers could do. Juniper was in a mood when we met, unsurprisingly.

“That kind of shit is why we spread out foreigners across multiple legions,” she growled, pacing across the room. “I don’t know what the fucking Marshals were thinking, giving us so may recruits from the same place.”

We both knew the Marshals had little to do with it, but Juniper had always been reluctant to speak ill of Black in any way.

“It’s done,” I replied wearily. “Pot’s broke, crying’s not going to get the water back in.”

“Do you see anyone crying?” she snarled. “My Lady,” she added a moment after, with visible effort.

I waved away the unspoken contrition. If she was finally starting to get stick out of her ass when it came to me, I wasn’t going to get picky about her language.

“I don’t suppose there’s still a way to keep this quiet?” I asked her.

The orc shook her head. “I ordered the legionaries who apprehended them to remain silent, but it’ll out sooner or later. Besides, the officers in charge of their lines will need a reason for why they’re not reporting for duty.”

The answer wouldn’t be pretty for either of the cases, unfortunately.

“The deserters are both from the same line?” I asked.

Juniper nodded. “Their lieutenant hadn’t even noticed they were missing,” she growled. “Our officer corps is too green, Foundling. They’ll make mistakes on the field. I wish we’d had time to run war games before being deployed.”

I smiled mirthlessly. One day, maybe I’d tell her why Callow had rebelled now and not ten years in the future. Not today, though, and I’d make sure she hit the aragh first.

“They’re sending us in the thick of it because we’re still green, Juniper,” I replied. “Black’s been tight-lipped about it, but I think there’s more to this than just a rebellion.”

The Hellhound’s dark eyes scrutinized me. “Procer?”

“The most likely suspect,” I grunted. “You’d think that after their civil war they’d leave the rest of Creation alone for a while, but that’s the Principate for you. They’re never happy unless they’re chewing at someone else’s borders.”

Juniper ran a pensive hand over the maps still adorning her table. She had surprisingly delicate fingers for an orc, I noticed. Nauk’s might as well have been sausages, but my Legate’s could almost have passed for a human’s if not for the colour.

“We’ve never fought the Principate except during the Crusades,” she said. “We’ll have to adjust tactics accordingly, if war breaks out. They don’t rely as heavily on cavalry as the Kingdom did.”

“I have a set of Theodosius’ treatises, if you want to look at it,” I told her. “I’m sure they’ve made adjustments to their doctrine since the League Wars, but the basics should remain similar.”

“Hakram has one too,” she replied absently. “I’ll borrow it.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. As my adjutant the other orc had been working closely with the Legate, but I hadn’t known they were friendly. I’d never seen Juniper spend her personal time with anyone other than Aisha, actually, though I put no stock in Robber’s constant insinuations those two were a couple. The goblin captain wasn’t exactly a credible source: he’d once spent the better part of a fortnight composing a ballad about the tragic forbidden love between Nauk and one of the oxen the Fifteenth used as beasts of burden. It had actually been a pretty catchy tune, not that I would ever admit that out loud.

“If we can’t kill the rumours, we’ll have to be straightforward about it,” I spoke, returning to our original topic. “Inform the officers as soon as it’s handled.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Juniper grunted. “It might be best if you distance yourself from the matter, Lady Squire.”

I rolled my eyes at the sudden return to formality.

“Distancing myself isn’t really an option, Juniper,” I replied. “That’s why you sent Kilian to get me in the first place.”

“I meant afterwards,” the Hellhound replied. “You’re not an officer, my Lady. Warlords don’t explain themselves to the ranks. They do what needs to be done, and the Clan falls into line.”

Like most orcs, Juniper used the Lower Miezan word ‘warlord’ regardless of the gender of the person being referred to. The Kharsum word for the same meaning had no gender attached to it, and if she was aware if the inaccuracy she didn’t seem to care.

“My Name isn’t Warlord, Juniper,” I reminded her.

“No, it’s Squire,” she acknowledged flatly. “A Callowan Squire. If you’re seen getting too heavily involved in this, our Praesi legionaries might think you’re favouring the Westerners. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous that could get.”

I grimaced, but did not dispute the point. My Legate had this nasty habit of being right, especially when I didn’t want to hear it. I was spared further discussion of the matter by Hakram returning from the errand I’d sent him on, tramping in with a bottle of wine and three cups. He saluted Juniper absent-mindedly and turned to face me.

“I’ve got what you asked,” he gravelled.

There was a look on his face, like he wanted to say more but was biting his tongue.

“Out with it, Adjutant,” I grunted.

“You sure you want to do this, Catherine?” he asked.

Ah, Hakram. I’d thought his objections would be about what would be said when word got out, but as always I underestimated him. That he was worried about me and not the consequences of my actions had me fonder of him than I probably should be.

“Needs to be done,” I finally said.

“You don’t have to be the one to do it,” he retorted.

“It’d be a dangerous habit to get in,” I murmured, “asking others to do what I’m not willing to do myself.”

That was the thing with villainy, I was starting to understand: every step downhill seemed more reasonable than the last. If hands have to be bloodied, let them be mine. And if I can’t bring myself to do it, then maybe it shouldn’t be done at all. The all orc nodded sharply and dropped the subject, handing me the bottle and cups. My eyes flicked to Juniper and I found her face inscrutable as she studied the both of us. Without another word to either of them, I made my way down the set of stairs leading to the cellar. A pair of Taghreb legionaries flanked the door and one of them fished out the key from the ring on his belt, unlocking the door without needing to be prompted. They saluted as I crossed the threshold, their gaze feeling heavy on my back.

“Well, shit,” a voice announced. “They kicked this up the ladder pretty quick.”

There were two men inside, crouched next to an empty barrel. One of them was older, a blond-haired and blue-eyed man built like a brawler and sporting a purpling black eye – he’d been the one to speak. The other was shorter and skinnier, brown-haired and dark-eyed. If the angle he was cradling his arm at was any indication, it had been broken pretty brutally. There was a small stool next to the door and I claimed it as my own, leaning my back against the wall.

“Something like that,” I agreed, the iron cups clinking as my fingers tightened.

The blond one would be Sergeant Pike, if I remembered Juniper’s briefing correctly. The other one had taken the option of adopting a new name when he’d joined the Legions and went by Alban. That he’d chosen the name of the first ruling dynasty of Callow as his own meant he’d either gone through the Imperial orphanages or that his family had been well-off – not just anyone could afford history lessons.

“So, “I mused out loud as the two of them eyes me warily. “Would either of you gentlemen care to explain how you came to hatch a plan so godsdamned stupid ?”

There was a heartbeat, then Pike laughed.

“Hells, Squire,” he replied and I had to force my face to remain friendly at the unwarranted familiarity, “if we were that smart, we wouldn’t have ended up here in the first place.”

He smiled at me, cheeks dimpling handsomely as he did. He was fairly good-looking, in a Liessen way. Fair hair like his wasn’t as common around Laure, though not exactly rare either.

“I didn’t mean to stab the orc, ma’am,” the other one blurted out suddenly. “It was just, he was growling and I panicked and-“

I raised a hand to interrupt him. Uncorking the bottle with a twist of the wrist, I poured myself a cup and took a sip. Pike’s eyes followed me carefully, belying his almost nonchalant pose.

“Wine?” I asked. “It’s from Hedges, but it’s still better than a parched throat.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” the sergeant replied.

Alban blinked nervously. “Sarge,” he spoke with watery eyes. “Should we really-“

Pike slapped him across the face, his expression never changing. “Take the nice lady’s wine, Alby,” he said flatly. “If we’re going to get out of this alive, we need to listen very closely to what she says.”

Alban whimpered but took the cup when I handed it to him. So did Pike, though I noticed he only wet his lips until I took a second pull from my own.

“Here’s the thing,” I spoke. “If you two had tried to pull a runner after we’d crossed the Wasaliti, I would have understood. You might have managed to get lost in the Fields. But here, this deep in the Wasteland? Even if you’d managed to get into Ater, you would have stuck out like a sore thumb.”

Two white boys in a city where there couldn’t be more than a few hundred expatriated Callowans? They would have been caught the very day I put out a search order. Ater was big, but it was also full of Praesi who wanted nothing more than to see a few Westerners do the quick drop and the sudden stop.

“Officers would have kept a closer watch when we got close to combat,” Pike admitted. “Didn’t want to risk it.”

I sighed. “The two of you are gallows recruits, I take it?”

“Got into a fight with the city guard in Vale,” the sergeant smiled. “Things got a little out of hand.”

I hummed and turned my eyes to Alban. The boy shuddered, remaining silent until Pike elbowed him.

“My family’s from Denier,” the boy stammered. “They were, uh, implicated in a seditious movement.”

No wonder they got caught. Denier’s garrison was the Fourth Legion, and it was an open secret in Callow that the Imperial Governor was little more than a front for Marshal Ranker: legionaries patrolled openly in the streets in lieu of the city guard. Of the three Marshals the former goblin Matron was the most cunning – planning rebellion in a city where she ruled in all but name was doomed to failure.

“Drink your wine, Alby,” Pike told him. “Maybe you’ll be able to stop pissing your pants in front of the Squire with a little liquid courage in you.”

Alban obeyed. I was becoming more and more inclined to believe the boy’s claim that he hadn’t meant to stab anyone. He didn’t have the spine for real resistance, not that it made any difference. Pike drained the rest of his cup and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his aketon.

“So how bad is it, ma’am?” he asked. “The Hellhound’s got to be asking for our heads on a silver platter.”

“That depends on whether or not the legionary with the stomach wound survives the night,” I replied. “If he doesn’t, the usual punishment is being stoned to death.”

The brown-haired boy whimpered again, and I couldn’t help but feel a surge of contempt for him. Maybe it wasn’t fair of me, but he was just so... weak. Just a minion for Pike to push around, lacking any will of his own. And his spinelessness might cost me an actual soldier, one who’d been doing his job. Some of that must have shown on my face, because the fair-haired sergeant took a long look at me and immediately began changing tracks.

“The goblin I cut up is fine though, right?” he asked.

“It was a minor wound,” I replied. “He’ll have nothing left of it but a scar come morning.”

I got what he meant loud and clear – his own actions had been relatively harmless, so he should be spared Alban’s fate. I smiled at him . I’m an actual villain, Sergeant Pike, and I’m not that quick to throw my subordinates under the chariot. If I’d had any doubts left about people being born in a Good nation being any naturally better than those who weren’t, this conversation would have buried them. The fair-haired boy coughed.

“Anyway, we learned our lesson about desertion. Stupid idea, should have just served my term. I know the fucking greenskins will be howling for a meal, but d’you think we could get away with a flogging?”

“I have the ultimate authority over all disciplinary measures in the Fifteenth,” I noted. “If tell Juniper to just send you back to your lines, there’s nothing she can do about it.”

Pike snickered. “Wouldn’t that be a sight to see. You probably shouldn’t, though,” he advised. “If we get off without any punishment the Wastelanders will kick up a fuss.” He leaned closer. “I know you have to pretend to give a shit about what they think as long as you run the show. Must be a pain, huh?”

He elbowed Alban again to nudge him into agreeing, but the boy didn’t react.

“It’s been a little complicated telling right from wrong, since I became a villain,” I agreed softly. “The lines in the sand aren’t where I left them. I’m too used to seeing anyone from Callow as the good guys and anyone from Praes as the villains.”

“That’s pretty much how it is, though,” Pike frowned. “I mean, there’s a few of them who are tolerable – Alby here had this Soninke piece who was making eyes at him, for example. What was her name again?”

Alban did not reply. His eyes were closed. Pike snorted.

“Little shit probably passed out from sheer relief,” he told me.

“I’m afraid he’s quite dead,” I replied calmly. “Make sense he’d go first, he’s smaller – the poison won’t take as long to act.”

My Name blazed through my veins, burning out the rest of the toxin running through my body.

“ You -“ Pike tried to snarl, but his tongue had gotten numb.

“I’m still soft, I know,” I replied quietly. “I asked for something painless when you don’t really deserve it. But that choice wasn’t about you, it was about me. I don’t want to be the kind of person who inflicts pain when they don’t need to.”

The sergeant tried to get up but his limbs gave out before he could do more than crawl, falling at my feet as I looked down on him.

“Here’s the thing, Sergeant,” I said. “I’m not sure what side I’m on. Not of them really fit. But I do know this: whatever side it is, you’re not on it.”

I got to my feet as the last of life left the man’s eyes, brushing off my armour. Had I been fair tonight, I wondered? I’d been within my rights, certainly, but they were rights given to me by the Empire. The laws of the Tower were supremely unconcerned by factors as trivial as morality. I eyed the two corpses for a long moment, then decided it didn’t matter. I hadn’t forgotten the lesson Heiress taught me, that night on the Blessed Isle.

Justifications only matter to the just.

Heroic Interlude: Balestra

“Seventy-three: always send the comic relief in front if you suspect there’s a trap. The Gods won’t allow you to be rid of them so easily.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, unknown author

The Wandering Bard was drunk again, and William was very much beginning to miss his days as a solitary freedom fighter. Why the Ashuran had decided that three days into Imperial-held territory was the time to start drinking again was beyond him, but if she tried to grab his ass one more time he wouldn’t be held responsible for his actions. How did she even manage to drink so much, anyway? Her knapsack was large enough for five bottles at most, and she was halfway through her twentieth. If she’d managed to find a Bottomless Bag and she was using it for booze instead of something actually useful, William was going to have a fit. An actual bloody fit, with screaming and everything.

“She’s surprisingly eloquent, for someone so deep in her cups,” the hooded woman next to him remarked.

The Deoraithe observer went by Breagach, which he had a feeling meant something scathingly ironic in the Old Tongue. Still, she was by far the most tolerable member of the band of idiots he’d managed to assemble. It was a shame the Duchess still refused to get into the fight until her conditions were met, but that Breagach had stuck around was a good sign.

“I’d be more enthused if she wasn’t using that eloquence to try to get into Hunter’s trousers,” William replied.

“To be fair,” Breagach replied drily, “he has few other clothes to get into.”

She wasn’t wrong. The Hunter had already proved his worth by helping them avoid the Ninth’s wolf riders on two occasions, but that didn’t change the fact that the man wore fewer clothes than an exotic dancer. The other Named had shown up in Marchford wearing tight pants and a leather vest that left his pectorals on prominent display, the tribal tattoos adorning his entire body only barely giving out the impressions he wasn’t mostly naked. The silver bells and faerie trinkets that were woven into his hair chimed gently whenever he wasn’t trying to sneak around, a ridiculous counterpart to the grim-faced stoicism the man tried to display at all times. Tuning out the Bard’s horrifying attempts to break into a serenade while holding a bottle of gin in one hand and her lute in the other, William cast his eye on the rest of their company.

The Bumbling Conjurer was fiddling with his belt again, fighting a losing battle in trying to make a strap meant for a man twice his size fit his narrow hips. The Thief was slowly edging in the Conjurer’s direction while he was distracted, probably to rifle through his bags again. He wished he could say it was the first time she’d be robbing an ally, but the cheeky brat had been eating her rations on what he was pretty sure was the Duke of Liesse’s personal silverware. William cleared his throat and glared at her. She flashed him an unrepentant grin, flipping back her short dark hair and strolling away with her hands in her pockets.

The Lone Swordsman pushed down a sigh for what seemed to be the hundredth time. He had a suspicion that the nature of his Role made interacting with others heroes even more irritating. In some ways he’d been lucky to manage to find four other Named for what he had planned – five was the best pattern, for heroic enterprises – but keeping them on track was like trying to herd a gang of cats, at least half of which were assholes. The only saving grace was that the sixty soldiers Countess Marchford had granted him were as professional as it got, all of them former Royal Guard she’d taken into her service after the Conquest. Like him, they were itching to get into Summerholm and strike a blow for the Kingdom. Shapes were moving about in the dark up ahead, close to the Hwaerte’s bank, and his hand drifted towards the Penitent’s Blade. Breagach shook her head.

“Our scouts are returning,” she said.

William decided not to ask how she could see so well in the dark when even his Name-vision could not. He had a feeling she was a member of the Watch, or at least had been trained by it, and everybody knew the Watchers of the March had ancient sorcerous tricks up their sleeves. The five soldiers who’d gone ahead trickled back into their makeshift camp, the officer among them heading straight for him.

“Lieutenant Hawkins,” William greeted him.

“Sir,” the man replied, obviously resisting the habit to salute. “We have a problem.”

“My life is a series of problems, Lieutenant,” the Swordsman replied, more honestly than was strictly warranted. Breagach snorted. “What’s the situation?”

The older man coughed. “There’s an Imperial patrol headed our way.”

William’s eyes sharpened. “How many?”

“Just a single line,” the man replied. “We’re close enough to Summerholm they’ve lowered the numbers.”

The hero’s fingers closed against the handle of his sword, feeling its hunger wake. To think there’d been a time where he’d thought that using a blade of legend was a privilege instead of a burden.

“Could we go around it?” he asked.

“They don’t have goblins along, so it’s possible,” Hawkins admitted. “But it’d be risky, sir.”

The soldier glanced sideways at the Bard, who was currently trying to find a rhyme for ‘butt cheeks’ and cheerfully failing.

“We’re not the most... quiet group, with all due respect,” the lieutenant finished.

“Very politely put,” Breagach murmured.

William grunted in dismay. “Get the men ready,” he told Hawkins. “We’re taking them out.”

The lieutenant nodded, his hand twitching in a repressed salute once again before he marched away.

“General Afolabi will notice that one of his patrols went missing,” the Deoraithe said after Hawkins got out of earshot. “You took him by surprise at Marchford, but he is far from incompetent.”

None of the fucking generals were incompetent, that was the worst part about fighting the Empire. Countess Elizabeth has been stalemating with General Sacker when he’d left, which was why it was so important they struck true in Summerholm. With that bitch Heiress coming out of nowhere with her mercenary army to take Dormer, the rebellion was losing momentum.

“As long as we manage to make it to the city fast enough, there shouldn’t be a problem,” he grunted. “Thief has a way in, it’s why she’s here.”

“I did wonder why you had her along,” Breagach admitted. “She’s yet to contribute much of worth to this enterprise.”

“She’ll pull her weight when we get to Summerholm,” William replied.

Hopefully. Otherwise he’d just taken on a massive pain in his ass for no valid reason. The conversation was cut short when it became obvious their soldiers were ready to move out. The Lone Swordsman wasted no time telling the other Named to get in gear, simply glaring silently at them until they were uncomfortable enough to fall in line. Their scouts were nothing if not competent and the Bumbling Conjurer somehow managed not to set himself on fire, so they managed to steal a march on the enemy. After a soft-spoken conference with Hawkins, William agreed to split their party in three to better surround the legionaries: allowing even one of them to get away could ruin this entire enterprise.

The dark-haired hero reluctantly allowed the Thief to join another group, deciding that the Bard was the liability he needed to keep an eye on. Breagach remained with him as he hid with his twenty soldiers in the tall grass, no one even bothering to try to tell her what to do. She’d already made it perfectly clear that she did not consider herself under the authority of anyone here. The moonlight had yet to reveal the orcs, but if he closed his eyes William could hear them. They were still a way off, but at the pace he estimated they were walking he wouldn’t have to wait too long on them.

“That’s a nice sword you’ve got,” the Bard crawling up to his side.

William twitched. “I’ve already told you, I’m not interested in-“

“I didn’t mean that sword, sweetcheeks,” she chuckled, then raised an eyebrow. “Unless...”

“No,” the Swordsman retorted through gritted teeth.

“Shame,” the Bard sighed. “Decent way to get the tension out before a fight. But back to that mighty sword of yours. I can feel the enchantments on it from where I’m standing. Old stuff. Powerful stuff. Does it have a name?”

He eyed the other hero carefully. “The Penitent’s Blade,” he replied, not finding a reason to deny her the information besides her general existence being an irritant.

She let out a quiet whistle. “Now that’s interesting. Subtler than I would have thought, too. Not ‘a blade that inflicts penitence’ but ‘the blade of a penitent’.”

She hummed, dark eyes set in a darker face smiling under her lazily closed pupils.

“Someone’s been a very bad boy,” she murmured. “Not as squeaky clean as you look, are you?”

“That’s got nothing to do with you,” William replied harshly.

“It’s important for a bard to know what kind of story she’s in,” the Ashuran denied with an indolent smile. “See, normally I would have pegged you for being aligned with the Choir of Judgement, but there’s never more than one of those at a time. Thought you might be with the Choir of Fortitude instead, but I read you all wrong didn’t I? No, you’re aligned with the Choir of Contrition.”

“And why would you care?” the Swordsman replied.

“I don’t usually sing songs about boys and girl who shook hands with Contrition,” the Bard told him softly. “I know half a dozen, of course, but I never liked singing tragedies.”

“This isn’t a story, Bard,” William grunted.

“It’s all a story, Lone Swordsman,” the Ashuran replied with a mirthless smile. “And I don’t know of any one where a young boy cutting up people with a piece from a Hashmallim’s wing ends well for the boy in question.”

The Swordsman stilled, blood running cold. How could she know ? There were some who knew of the Choirs, and it made sense a Name that ran so heavily on lore would know of it, but had she seen one of the angels? The green-eyed hero watched the Bard’s face carefully, then decided against it. No one who’d seen what he’d seen could ever remain so carefree. Gods, what he remembered from that night... Fire, brilliant fire. A light that sears deeper than darkness ever could. The House of Light had taught him that angels were beautiful beyond human ability to comprehend, but they had never said that beauty would be a terrible thing. It had changed him, bearing the full of a Hashmallim’s presence. Taught him the true price of atonement.

“You’re drunk,” William replied dismissively, hoping it was enough to end this conversation. “You should lay off the bottle for a while.”

The Bard chuckled “How can I, sweet thing, when there’s just so much to drink about?”

“The orcs are here,” Breagach whispered, and the Swordsman nearly jumped out of his own skin.

Shit, how long had the Deoraithe been there? He hadn’t heard her get close at all. He cast a wary look at her but the hooded woman was looking ahead, where the twenty legionaries were slowly making their way down a slope. Regulars, by the look of their armour. Heavies and sappers were only rarely sent on patrols.

“The other groups should have them surrounded by now,” William spoke.

The Hunter and the Conjurer would have the back, the Thief and Lieutenant Hawkins the side. With the Swordsman’s own group in front of them, their only way out led straight into the river. The officer in charge of the enemy line suddenly called a halt, and spat our curses in their disgusting excuse for a language.

“They saw one of us,” the Bard voiced. “Too late, though.”

William was inclined to agree. The legionaries slowly formed a square as his own soldiers emerged from cover, pulling the noose tight. The green-eyed hero got to his feet and his men followed suit, carefully moving forward. The enemy lieutenant called out something in orcish and her legionaries replied with a few scattered laughs before slamming their shields into the ground. Voice echoing as one, they started calling words out in the same tongue.

“Breagach,” William asked urgently. “What are they casting?”

The Deoraithe shook her head as the enemy slammed their shields again, the bang punctuating the end of a sentence.

“Not casting,” she murmured. “Singing. That’s the Chant of the Dead.”

Curiosity lit up the Bard’s eyes. “Never heard that one before,” she admitted “What are they saying?”

The hooded woman cocked her head to the side, then spoke in cadence.

“We,

Broken spears

Shattered shields

Come to die.”

The shields hit the ground in a thunderclap.

“We,

Remnant lost

Forlorn hope

Come to die.”

Like a hammer on the anvil, the shields rang.

“We,

Carrion-feeders

Grave-fillers

Come to die.”

The shields came down one last time and Breagach translated the last verse almost solemnly.

“We,

Ruin-children

Stand ready

Come to die.”

A shiver went up the hero’s spine. “You’re sure it’s not a spell?” he asked again.

“The Duchy has records of them doing this before,” Breagach replied. “It’s what their warriors sing when they know they’re not coming back from a battle.” The Deoraithe sighed. “Beautiful tongue, Kharsum. Well-suited to poetry.”

“Wolves howl at the moon,” William replied sharply. “That does not detract from the necessity of putting them down.”

Breagach half-turned in his direction, features hidden by the shadows of her hood. She did not reply. Indifferent to her opinion, the Lone Swordsman unsheathed his sword.

“FORWARD!” he called out.

His Name surged through his veins, singing a song of carnage. This was what he meant for, not shadow games and politics. Him and his blade against the Creation, setting it right one corpse at a time. He sped ahead of the soldiers, feet carrying him at a swiftness beyond mere mortals until he impacted with the legionary shield wall. The orc facing him grunted at the blow and stabbed low but William sneered and spun around him, slipping into the enemy’s formation. Casually, the Penitent’s Blade keened as it tore through the greenskin’s throat. Blood spilled over the ground but William had already moved on, kicking down another monster to widen the opening in their formation.

The officer moved towards him, roaring a challenge, but he spat in the creature’s face and his sword cleaved through her shield effortlessly. She cursed and tried to swing her blade but it was much, much too late. A flick of the wrist sent her head tumbling to the ground, the blood spray drenching him in crimson as he smiled. His soldiers hit the enemy line a moment later, forcing it in tight vice. The orcs were pushed back towards him like meat into a grinder, his blade scything through the screaming monsters as they fought and died like dogs. Red steam started rising from his armour as a white glow took hold of it, his movements quickening as he whirled among the Empire’s footsoldiers and claimed the lives that were the Kingdom’s due.

The orcs did not break, but it mattered little.

The last of them died to the Thief, the dark-haired woman carelessly slipping a knife in the monster’s throat in a flash of silver before stepping away to leave the body to fall. Silence reigned over the battlefield as William stood in the centre of a ring of corpses, the grisly monument to his skill unfolding like the petals of a bloody flower. The Penitent’s Blade pulsed under his grip, keeping time with his heartbeats. Yes , he thought, this will do. He could not deny it had felt viciously satisfying to take out his frustrations on targets so thoroughly deserving of it.

“See to the wounded, pack your gear,” he ordered the others. “We move out immediately.”

They had work ahead of them. To Summerholm they would go. In the enemy’s own fortress, where the Empire hid behind walls they had stolen to feel safe. And when they got there? They were going to break a legend.

They were going to kill a Calamity.

Chapter 4: Return

“Home is wherever you can order someone drowned and not get any odd looks.”
-Dread Emperor Malignant III

He’d found a spot ringed by bushes a little off the road. It must have been used by travellers: there were still ashes from the last time someone had lit a fire. Gathering wood was a little trickier than usual since he had his mother’s sword instead of a hatchet, but he’d managed without cutting off any of his limbs. No bedroll for him, though his cloak was thick enough it would serve just as well – it wouldn’t be his first time sleeping out in the wild. He wasn’t close enough to the Wasteland for the things that roamed the night out there to be an issue, thank the Gods Below. There was a rustle in the bushes ahead and the green-eyed boy’s hand dropped to his sword. Fate was ever fond of its little ironies. Still, bandits this close to Satus? Unusual. He’d heard the freeholder militia kept the land safe, or at least as safe as land could get in the Empire. After a moment a dark-skinned boy around his age emerged from the greens, looking a little harried.

“ Good evening,” the stranger said.

His voice was deep and smooth, the kind you could listen to for hours even if the conversation was boring. Amadeus’ fingers relaxed against the hilt of the sword but did not leave it entirely. No point in taking any stupid risks.

“ Evening,” he replied cautiously.

“ I ask for the shelter of your fire, traveller,” the other boy said, tone ceremonial.

“ Granted,” Amadeus answered, keeping his relief off his face.

He was familiar with the Taghreb custom: the stranger had just agreed there would be no violence between them until dawn. The other boy’s skin was too dark for him to be one of the desert-dwellers, but at the moment he wasn’t inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“ Oh thank the Gods,” the other traveler said, running a hand through his short black hair. “I was beginning to think I’d have to roll up under a tree for the night.”

Amadeus raised an eyebrow.

“ You don’t know how to make a fire?”

The other boy flashed him a grin, white teeth gleaming in the fire’s light.

“ Not the sort you use in a camp,” he replied, licks of blue flame wreathing his hand for a moment before dissipating into nothingness.

“ Useful trick,” the green-eyed boy said. “Mage?”

The stranger nodded.

“ I go by Apprentice. You?”

The dream stayed with me long after I woke.

A warning or an introduction? If I wasn’t mistaken the boy who’d come out of the bushes had been Warlock, long before he claimed his current Name. The vision had been shorter than the glimpses I usually got and, well, arguably not as important. The dreams I’d dreamt before had always been turning points in Black’s life, lessons he learned or taught. Unless this was a turning point. There was no denying that without a mage of the Warlock’s calibre on his side much of what Black had accomplished would have been beyond his reach. Ultimately, I sighed and put the whole thing aside. The meaning would become clear in due time, I imagined.

We were halfway through the month of Taj by the time the Fifteenth got to Summerholm. There’d never been any question of our being accommodated inside the city-fortress: what remained of the Twelfth took up all the available space and then some. Some citizens had apparently been forced to quarter soldiers and I could just imagine how well that had gone over. It hadn’t even been a year since the hangings, after all, and no one held grudges quite like Callowans. My legion would need to trickle through the city and settle in one of the now-abandoned camps on the western bank. I’d elected to enter Summerholm ahead of the ranks, fully expecting I’d meet with General Afolabi at some point. My weekly scrying sessions with Black had me mostly up to date on the state of the war but I’d be better to have the perspective of someone with boots on the ground. How friendly the general would actually be was still unknown, though. Afolabi Magoro was old Soninke nobility, and though I doubted anyone so high up the food chain would be affiliated with the Truebloods, being a racist asshole didn’t exactly disqualify people from command in the Legions. That he’d lost almost a quarter of the Twelfth to the rebels when they rose up in Marchford wasn’t doing much to inspire hope in that regard.

I reined up Zombie ahead of the bridge, more for show than anything else. The undead horse responded to my will, not actual physical stimulus. Squinting ahead to see who Nauk had picked for my escort yielded a pleasant surprise: Nilin was patiently waiting a little further ahead, flanked by a pair of lines from his cohort. That Nauk had sent his Senior Tribune to escort me was a little surprising given how heavily I knew the orc relied on the man’s organisational skills, but I supposed he’d decided to keep my safety in the family, so to speak. While I’d been careful not to show outright favouritism, there was no denying I was a lot closer to the officers who’d followed me into the Fifteenth from Rat Company. The calm-eyed Soninke saluted when I trotted Zombie up to him – if he was uncomfortable at standing so close to a necromantic construct, there was no trace of it on his face. Then again, Praesi don’t really get worked up about necromancy. That made sense, in a way: more often than not, if there were undead on the field they’d be on the Empire’s side.

“Lady Squire,” Nilin greeted me.

“Tribune,” I replied a tad drily.

I’d already made my opinion of formality between us perfectly clear, and though he acceded to my wishes whenever we went for drinks he defaulted to titles whenever we were in public. The dark-skinned man rolled his eyes at the unspoken dig.

“Are you ready to enter the city?” he asked.

“Juniper’s already handling the marching orders,” I shrugged. “Might as well bite the blade and get the politics over with.”

Nilin nodded and whistled sharply. The lines fell behind us in good order, the Tribune himself keeping pace with my horse’s gait with little effort. I cast a pensive look at the legionaries following us, idly rubbing a thumb against the hilt of my sword. Soon I’d need to assemble a retinue of my own, my personal equivalent to my teacher’s Blackguards. I’d been given no limit on the size of it, though given that I’d have to feed and equip them from my own pocket I’d have to keep it manageable. I was currently getting paid the equivalent of a general’s salary, an income that made the savings I’d brought from Callow with me laughable in comparison. By Laurean standards I had the means of a merchant from the upper crust, though I still fell way short of most landed nobles. I’d have to be careful who I took in, though. My retinue would serve to handle the matters I couldn’t pursue through the Fifteenth as well as my personal security, which made me reluctant to involve Praesi. Not an urgent matter yet , I decided. While I’d been lost in my own thoughts Nilin had apparently turned his attention to the bridge we were crossing, seemingly fascinated with the construction.

“I’m not seeing much here but stone,” I told him, shaking him out of his own introspection.

The dark-skinned man cleared his throat, mildly embarrassed. “I have something of an interest in architecture,” he admitted. “The way Callowans adapted Miezan engineering is completely different than ours – the style is purely local, but the underlying principles are the same.”

I cocked my head to the side. “A good bridge, then?”

“It won’t last as long as the structures on the Blessed Isle, but I’d consider it vastly superior to anything else in Callow. Or even some parts of Praes, to be honest.”

I filed that away for further reference, though I was more interested in this previously-unseen aspect of the tribune.

“I hadn’t pegged you for the scholarly type,” I informed him.

The Soninke shrugged. “I was on the Imperial ticket before the War College,” he replied. “I considered taking the sapper classes before falling in with Nauk, but the command track had better career prospects.”

I blinked in surprise. “You attended one of the Imperial schools? I think you’re the first student from there I met. I honestly still have a hard time believing the Tower funds free education.”

Nilin chuckled, the sound halfway between bitter and amused.

“Free is a bit of a stretch, Lady Squire,” he told me. “Students might not need to pay in gold, but we are bound to serve the Tower for time equivalent to the span of our education – either as public servants or soldiers.”

I grimaced. That did sound a little more like the Empire I knew. “So how’d you end up in the College from there?” I asked. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re under my command but the War College isn’t exactly a scholarly institution.”

“I placed among the first five students of my year, so I was offered a full scholarship for the College,” Nilin explained. “Not where I thought I’d end up, but it beat ending up as a tax collector in Callow.”

“I’m sure you would have been a splendidly efficient tax collector,” I replied loyally, though I couldn’t quite hide the twitch of my lips.

“No doubt,” the Soninke replied dryly. “Still, it would have been a shame to miss all this excitement. Nauk’s been rather eager to sink his teeth into a real battle and I must admit the enthusiasm is contagious.”

I raised an eyebrow: neither his face nor his tone had been in any way affected by this supposed enthusiasm, though I supposed that was kind of Nilin’s way. When the Rat Company veterans went drinking, he was the only one who never got rowdy when drunk – the most affected I’d ever seen him was when he’d spent half a bell lecturing Robber on why it was exceedingly rude to insinuate people from Wolof still practiced mass sacrifice in the Maze of Kilns. We spent the rest of the walk across the bridge in idle chit chat, a pleasant distraction from what lay ahead of me. Still, soon enough we arrived at the gates. The tall bronze-forged doors were wide open and it seemed like General Afolabi had been expecting me. A line of legionaries was waiting by the sentries, standing ramrod straight now that I’d come into view. The officer among them came forward and I was pleasantly surprised to note she was a Senior Tribune: Afolabi could have gotten away with sending me someone lower in rank as a greeter. That he’d bothered sending someone that high-ranking was a good sign.

“Ma’am,” the woman welcomed me with a sharp salute. “Welcome to Summerholm. The General sends his compliments on making such good time.”

“Very kind of him,” I replied easily. “Your name, soldier?”

“Senior Tribune Fadia,” she introduced herself. “I’m to be your escort in the city.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware the situation in Summerholm warranted an additional line to complement my own guard.”

The Senior Tribune’s lips thinned. “I’ve been instructed to answer all your questions until the general can meet you,” she replied. “But, if I may, this is not the kind of conversation that should be had in the open. Rooms have been made available to you in the Comital Palace for rest and refreshments.”

Very cagey , I decided. But not disrespectful, so there was no need to burn goodwill by pressing the matter here. What exactly was going on in Summerholm? The city was far enough away from the frontlines of the Liesse Rebellion that there shouldn’t be any risk of assault. Not to mention that attacking a place as heavily fortified as this one would be bald idiocy. Was this relating to Warlock? The Calamity was, as far as I knew, still in the city.

“Lead on, then, Senior Tribune,” I finally replied.

One of these days, I was going to manage a Summerholm visit where nobody tried to kill me. But odds are it isn’t going to be this one.

—

The Comital Palace was remarkably austere, compared to its equivalent in Laure.

It wasn’t an entirely unexpected development. The Counts of Summerholm had always been the martial sorts, even back when they’d ruled a petty kingdom of their own before the founding of Callow. The room I’d been given was smaller than the one Black had set aside for me in his own Ater estate but it was comfortable nonetheless: the furniture was expensive imported Liessen wood and freshly polished. The tapestries adorning the walls depicted hunts or battles, and if the amount of Imperial defeats showing was any indication nobody had bothered to change them since the Conquest. A carafe of cooled wine was waiting for me on the antechamber’s table when I entered, flanked by a pair of glasses. It was a little early in the day to start drinking, but the sun had been out in force and I’d worked up a thirst – I poured myself a glass and offered the same to Nilin, though my minion declined. Senior Tribune Fadia stood uncomfortably as I claimed a seat with a little sigh of pleasure, my own Senior Tribune coming to stand at my right like an unflappable gargoyle.

“The information I’m about to share is considered restricted,” Fadia spoke, too polite to outright say she’d like me to send Nilin out of the room.

Well bully for her, because he wasn’t going anywhere. I’d already made as much of a concession as I intended to make by keeping my legionaries out in the corridors.

“I wouldn’t have brought Senior Tribune Nilin at all if I didn’t trust him,” I replied flatly. “Now what exactly is going on here, soldier? My patience is running thin.”

The woman cleared her throat. “We have reason to suspect there are heroes in the city.”

I closed my eyes and leaned back in my seat, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “Of course that fucker decided to make an appearance,” I complained. “Clearly, the situation wasn’t volatile enough already – and wait, did you say heroes ?”

It’d taken me a moment to notice the plural.

“Our assessment is at least two,” Fadia said. “Likely more.”

“Whatever happened to the Lone in Lone Swordsman?” I griped. “This is unacceptable. Do you see Black prancing about in white robes? It’s called a Name, not a Suggestion.”

The woman made a noncommittal noise, face blank and eyes just a little too wide.

“The Lady Squire isn’t one to blame the messenger, Senior Tribune,” Nilin spoke calmly. “There is no need to fear for your life.”

Fadia let out a ragged breath. Huh. Had that been why she’d been so nervous around me? I supposed I could see where she was coming from. For all that my teacher and his associates were the practical sorts, they were just the latest generation in a long tradition of villainy. I’d read enough about past Tyrants to know that killing the bearers of bad news had been one of the milder vices they’d displayed. I’d have to go a long way to ever top forcing a High Lord to build an alligator pit at their own expense just to push them into it.

“Has the general been able to identify any of the heroes?” I asked.

The Senior Tribune nodded. “We know a Thief is currently active in the city. A recent theft fits the pattern she displayed when she was last in Summerholm.”

I cocked my head to the side. “What did she steal?”

“Keys,” Fadia replied. “Several sets, most of them giving access to military infrastructure.”

I frowned. “I have a hard time believing a Thief would need keys to – ah . There’s enough of them they expect to be operating at multiple places simultaneously.”

“That is General Afolabi’s conclusion as well,” she nodded. “Lord Warlock has set up defensive wards over key positions, but he’s informed us that they have counter-measures blocking his scrying.”

“Then they have either a priest or a mage of some talent,” Nilin contributed quietly. “This is not a probe, they’re here for a specific reason.”

I frowned. Had my old buddy the Swordsman come to settle our disagreement? It would be a break in pattern for him to gather other heroes just for the purpose of taking me out. How much help they’d be was debatable, anyway: in the end, it would come down to the two of us. Unless he’s trying to kill me on our second encounter. That seemed... unusually flexible of him, though. I wasn’t buying it.

“How is order in the city?” I asked the Senior Tribune.

The woman smiled thinly. “There was some rioting after the Hanging at Marchford, but things quieted down when Lord Warlock entered the city. There’s been no widespread resistance since, but we’ve been losing men for the last few fortnights.”

“Patrols are getting hit?” I asked.

“Assassinations,” Fadia corrected quietly. “Every morning we find an officer carved up in the streets.”

I hissed out a curse in Kharsum. “They’re torturing soldiers?”

“Someone’s taking a knife to their face to cut up a message,” she admitted. “It’s always the same words.”

I stared her down until she continued.
“ No truce with the Enemy ,” she quoted. She hesitated a moment before continuing. “Our healers say that the wound pattern means they’re still alive when the message is carved.”

Well, shit. That wasn’t even anti-hero behaviour, it was downright villainous. The Lone Swordsman had always had that gritty edge to him, but this was... And we know whose fault this is, don’t we Catherine? Turns out letting angry vicious heroes loose on Creation can have consequences. Who would have thought? Fuck, I might as well have wielded the knife myself. You can have a self-flagellation session later , I told myself. Business first.

“How many people know?” I asked tiredly.

“The first corpse was found in the Court of Swords,” the Senior Tribune grimaced. “The whole city knows.”

I resisted the urge to curse again. So much for keeping a lid on this.

“And you say there’s been no resistance?” I repeated in a sceptical tone.

“Nothing open, if anything that’s more worrying,” the woman said. “Ma’am, Summerholm is a boiling pot about to tip over. If things continue like this, the general thinks we’ll be facing a full-scale uprising before the end of the month.”

I grit my teeth. “And what has the Warlock been doing about this?”

“Besides the wards? Nothing. He’s been holed up in the western bastion with his son since he arrived,” Fadia replied with poorly-masked resentment. “Requests for his intervention have been systematically ignored.”

What the Hells is going on here? I wondered. The man was a Calamity, he’d been part of the crew to conquer Callow in the first place. Why wasn’t he stepping in before things got out of control? Weeping Heavens, why wasn’t Black ordering him to intervene? I knew for a fact they were in contact. Some part of me was wondering whether this was another test, but I’d gotten to know my teacher better than that – he wouldn’t allow a situation like this to fester without a damned good reason, and seeing whether or not I had it in me to put down rioting Callowans hardly qualified. It would be... wasteful, and Black was anything but.

“Nilin,” I spoke up. “Send a runner to Juniper. We’re walking into a shed full of sharpers, and someone just stole a matchbox.”

The Soninke nodded and made for the corridor to see it done. I returned my attention to the other Senior Tribune, forcing my face into a mask of equanimity.

“Is there anything else I should know?”

“General Afolabi invites you and your senior officers to sup with him tonight,” she replied. “Lord Warlock has asked that you come see him as soon as feasible.”

I smiled sharply. “That’s nice. I need to have a good, long talk with the man anyway.”

Fadia looked mildly embarrassed, then cleared her throat again. “The general has also respectfully requested that, uh, you not bring goblinfire stocks within city limits.”

I closed my eyes and let out a deep sigh, ignoring the choking noise that was Nilin trying not to laugh. “That won’t be a problem,” I replied, getting up to my feet.

Time to find Hakram: I had a few questions to ask the Sovereign of the Red Skies, and he’d better have some good godsdamned answers.

—

“Morale has hit the bottom of the barrel,” Hakram informed me as we made our way to the western bastion. “The Legions weren’t designed to suppress civilian unrest and it’s been showing.”

I grunted in agreement. There was a reason the Empire had kept most of the Kingdom’s civilian infrastructure intact after the Conquest. Putting aside how the dismantling of major Callowan institutions would have been a headache and a half to implement, the Legions of Terror were not a peacekeeping organisation. Legionaries were trained to solve their problems through efficient application of violence, but putting all malcontents to the noose would just have been adding fuel to the fire. And the Empire wants very, very badly to avoid being in a position where they have to stamp down open flames. I wondered if Black had lost credibility when the Liesse Rebellion had broken out: he had, after all, been the closest thing Callow had to a ruler in the last twenty years. Imperial Governors were ultimately answerable only to the Tower, but as Malicia’s mandated right hand my teacher had been straight above them in the pecking order. Or would this reflect badly on the Empress?

“What’s the word on General Afolabi?” I asked, deciding to table the train of thought for the moment.

I’d bring it up to Aisha later: she was the closest thing to a political adviser I had in the Fifteenth. Hakram hummed thoughtfully, gathering his thought before he answered my question. My adjutant had spent the last half-bell mingling with the rank and file of the Twelfth Legion, getting an idea of where their mind set was at. That I hadn’t even needed to ask him to do it was yet another mark in the orc’s favour: Hakram had a way of putting the finger on problems before I even noticed they existed and setting out to fix them.

“They haven’t lost faith in him, not exactly,” the orc replied. “He wasn’t in command at Marchford and nobody expects him to be able to deal with heroes on his own. But this is the second bloody nose the Twelfth has gotten in two months, and they need to blame someone .”

I grimaced. So in bad position but not yet desperate. I’d have to take care of the situation before it ever got to that part: I had no intention whatsoever of allowing legionaries to put down riots by the sword. The whole reason I’d become the Squire in the first place was to stop the likes of this, and I couldn’t quite ignore the guilty itch in the back of my head that whispered I was directly responsible for this mess in the first place. Besides, a civilian massacre would have consequences in the rest of Callow. The centre and the north were still under control but if the Empire starting killing people in the streets, unrest would flare up.

Nothing exists in a vacuum, Catherine , Black’s voice reminded me. Not Names, not thrones, not armies. Pull the thread and something will always give.

“And the Imperial Governor?” I wondered. “I’d expected to get a message from them by now.”

Hakram snorted. “That’d be quite the feat. The man’s dead – he bought it in the first batch of assassinations. Summerholm’s been under martial law since.”

“I’m starting to think the Swordsman has a fetish for killing those,” I grunted in displeasure. “That’s two he got rid of in the span of a year.”

“Different folk, different strokes,” Hakram mused and I snorted.

Before the conversation could further get off track we arrived at the bastion’s entrance, such as it was. The squat tower in front of us was one of the several that dotted the outer ring of the city, overlooking the streets under it with a wide top designed to accommodate bowmen and siege engines. Should an army manage to make it past the outer walls, Summerholm had been built to bleed them dry. A handful of legionaries stood in the alcoves flanking the gates to the bastion itself, but there was no sign of any Legion activity up above. Had the Calamity claimed an entire defensive structure for himself? I laid a hand on the wooden doors but immediately drew it back.

“Catherine?” Hakram asked.

“Magic,” I replied. “Powerful stuff.”

“Lord Warlock has been said to have put wards out in the city,” the orc noted. “It would have been stranger if there wasn’t one over his lodgings.”

“That’s not a defensive ward,” I spoke with a frown. “I know what those feel like, Black taught me to recognize them. This is... weird. Like the entire bastion is some sort of spell.”

“Is it harmful?” my adjutant questioned.

“I don’t think so,” I admitted after a heartbeat. “It feels prickly when there’s an active pattern. This is passive, if anything.”

Whatever it was, it was also kept working by a gargantuan amount of power. Maybe not as large as the old sorcery laid in the Tower’s stones, but much larger than anything else I’d seen. Taking a deep breath, I pushed the doors open and stepped through the threshold. I felt something wash over my skin, but nothing else happened. I cast a look around only to see that the ground floor was empty. It was supposed to serve as a common room, but besides benches and tables there was nothing of note. Ignoring the uneasy feeling settling in my stomach I pressed forward to the stairs in the back of the room, Hakram following suit in silence. The second floor served as guard quarters but I didn’t stick around to explore: there was a glow filtering through the stairs leading to the third floor. Would it have killed you to send someone to greet us instead of letting us wander through the creepy empty bastion?

The creepiness got pushed up a rung up the ladder when we set foot on the last floor. The stone here was completely different than anything else in the bastion, veined with blue that seemed to shift around if you looked too long at it. More than that, the floor was larger than it had any business being: the parlour where we stood alone was as wide as the bastion had looked from the outside and there were corridors leading away. Across from us a pair of large tinted glass windows allowed a glimpse into what seemed to be a workshop, and I could hear people talking through the closed door. The voices suddenly rose in volume and I stepped closer to the glass.

“- got out again!”

I barely managed to raise my shield before the glass exploded.

Chapter 5: Recognition

“The essence of sorcery is blasphemy. Through will and power, every mage usurps dominion over the laws of Creation from the gods Above and Below.”
– Extract from “The Most Noble Art of Magic”, by Dread Emperor Sorcerous

Hakram’s sword swung clear of its scabbard, joined by mine a heartbeat later.

What had the godsdamned Warlock let loose? Hopefully it was just a devil, because if the mages had managed to bring a demon through this was going to get unpleasant. Barrelling through the window a burly shape landed a few feet in front of me, shaking off shards of glass. Dark eyes glared at me balefully and the pig let out a plaintive oink, flapping its dainty little wings.

“What,” I asked, ever the soul of wit.

“Masego,” a man’s voice thundered. “Get that thing back in its cage and fireproof the locks this time.”

“ What ,” I repeated, watching in horror as the pig opened a maw filled with teeth and turned towards me.

I barely had time to curse and huddle behind my heater shield before the thing belched out a stream of flame. I heard Hakram duck away from the danger, flipping over a table as he did, but my instincts had not been so evasive. Heat and the reek of brimstone licked the edges of my shield – I wasn’t singed, but it was enough to make me think I should perhaps reconsider my habit of not wearing a helmet outside of the battlefield. The flames guttered out after a moment and I moved forward. Of all the perils I’d anticipated when making my way to the bastion, I had to admit that a fire-breathing winged pig hadn’t been one of them. What was the point of the bloody wings, anyway? They were way too small to allow the creature to actually fly.

Oh Gods, am I really at a place in my life where I’m going to actually duel a jail-breaking pig? Before I could test exactly how hard the thing’s hide was, the door to the workshop burst open and a man hissed out an incantation, throwing his hand towards the pig: a muzzle of ice formed itself around the creature’s mouth and it let out a muted squeal of panic. It tried to make a run for it but the ice spread in slender but solid lines across its body, restraining its feet in solid manacles that stopped it within moments. The little abomination wiggled impotently in front of me, its wings still beating in panic but seemingly incapable of raising its own weight. The man sighed.

“Of course the little bastard gets out just before we get company,” he complained. “You’d be Lady Squire, I take it?”

I nodded slowly, sheathing my sword after a moment. The stranger was tall, even for a Soninke, but where I’d become used to rubbing shoulders with soldiers thick with corded muscle this one was built like a scholar. His hair was long and split in a dozen braids threaded with trinkets of silver and precious stones, many reflecting light in unnatural ways. The grey robes he was decked in went all the way to his ankles, covered with a leather apron whose pockets were filled with tools I didn’t recognize. The man – boy, I corrected mentally, as for all his height he couldn’t have been more than a year older than me – was rather plain, for a Named. Thick eyebrows and dark brown eyes were half-hidden by a pair of spectacles, his lips were fleshy and from the looks of it he bit them often. Though I suppose after Malicia most everyone looks plain. I managed to get my thoughts in order before the silence became awkward.

“That’s me,” I agreed. “And you’d be...”

I let the sentence dangle, unsure as to what the protocol was here. I’d heard his father call out what I assumed what his name, but I’d been taught that it could be rude to refer to an individual with a Role by anything but their Name without being invited to do so.

“Apprentice,” the boy introduced himself with a half-smile. “But you can call me Masego.”

“Catherine,” I replied easily. “And supervising that poor table behind me is Adjutant Hakram of the Fifteenth.”

Apprentice nodded in my officer’s direction, then frowned. He pushed up his spectacles and stared at the orc for a long moment.

“Huh,” he spoke thoughtfully.

I raised an eyebrow. “Is there a problem?”

“Adjutant,” the Soninke muttered. “That’s a new one.”

I blinked. “The rank’s been around for a while, actually,” I replied slowly.

“Probably,” Apprentice shrugged. “I have, however, never heard of it turning into a Name before.”

What? I turned to glance at Hakram, who seemed just as surprised as I was.

“I’m an orc, sir,” my officer spoke carefully. “We don’t really do the Name thing.”

Masego clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth in disapproval.

“Inaccurate,” he chided Hakram. “Names were fairly common in the Steppes before the Miezan occupation.”

“That’s the better part of two thousand years ago,” I replied flatly.

The Apprentice seemed utterly indifferent to that fact, much to my irritation.

“It’s still nascent in form,” the Soninke noted. “If it makes you feel any better, you might get yourself killed before it turns into anything concrete.”

It was becoming apparent that social skills were not one of Masego’s no doubt plentiful talents. Still, this had implications . I’d never heard of an Adjutant before and that was a little worrying, but there was also the fact that for the first time in a millennia and a half a greenskin was coming into a Role. That was... shit, the political ramifications of this alone went way above my head. Black always said that Names were a reflection of the people they sprang from: was something changing with the orcs, or was this about my own burgeoning influence? This is about the Reforms, has to be. But why was the Role appearing here and now instead of forty years ago, when they’d first been implemented? Gods, this was going to be such a headache. I cast another look at Hakram and he seemed more troubled than elated at the news. Evidently I wasn’t the only realizing how much of a mess this could turn into.

“I’ll look into it,” I reassured him. “We’ll figure this out.”

The tall orc nodded, carefully. I was about to ask Masego how he even knew this when the voice from the workshop broke in again.

“Masego,” the Warlock called out. “Is the specimen secure?”

The Apprentice eyed the pig and sighed. “It’s not going anywhere, Father.”

“Then get it back in its cage,” the Warlock ordered peevishly. “And bring our guests in, we’re not savages.”

Masego muttered a few syllables under his breath, gestured peremptorily with his hand and the pig rose in the air. It managed to drift a few feet towards the corridor by beating its wings but before it could escape it was yanked towards the workshop by an unseen force, squealing in dismay all the while.

“I have to ask,” I spoke as we made our way to the back. “What the Hells is going on with that pig?”

Apprentice’s eyes lit up with enthusiasm. “We’re attempting to determine whether Demiurgian phenomena are caused by an original or a creational law. So far it seems to be original, but we’ll need to repeat the experiment with greater drift separation.”

“I see,” I lied. “So the wings and the fire?”

I left the sentence unfinished, hoping he’d take the bait and provide an explanation in less technical terms.

“The pattern woven under the skin was a levitation one,” Masego explained. “The wings were... unexpected. When we pumped more power into the specimen to see if it was just a temporary manifestation it developed the fire-breathing.”

“And that’s... normal, by your standards?” I asked, keeping my face carefully blank.

The mage looked mildly amused. “Hardly the strangest thing I’ve seen. And if this pattern is repeatable, it has interesting connotations concerning the nature of dragons. After all they’re-“

“She’s not a practitioner, Masego. Your babble is wasted on her,” the Warlock’s voice interrupted fondly as we stepped into the workshop.

I had to confess I’d been rather curious as to what the personal workshop of a man who was among the five greatest mages in Calernia would look like. If the preaching in the House of Light was any indication it’d be filled to the brim with demons and other various blasphemies, but I’d learned to take what the Brothers and Sisters of my childhood taught with a grain of salt. The sprawling piles of old manuscripts that covered half the room weren’t unexpected, but truth compelled me to admit that the tall windows were – a quick look told me that the view through them was in flat defiance of common sense: through one of them I could see Ater sprawled out in the distance, through another what seemed to be the skyline of an entirely different Praesi city. There were seven tall glass panels and every one of them overlooked a different sight, many of them separated by over a month’s worth of travelling.

Stone shelves full of glassware flanked the windows, some empty and others filled with colourful liquids or dark shapes. The entire left half of the workshop was covered in cages of various sizes, most of them empty. The wrought iron bars were covered in runes and I glimpsed the silhouette of a hound made of smoke napping quietly inside one. The cage where the errant pig had been kept was easy to find, the iron lock keeping the door closed half-melted on the ground before it. I might have spent longer taking in the sights if someone hadn’t cleared their throat – I pushed down an embarrassed blush and my eyes turned to the source of the noise.

“And so we finally meet, Catherine Foundling,” the Sovereign of the Red Skies smiled.

I had to push down another blush, much to my dismay. Where Masego was plain, the Warlock was anything but. His skin was a little darker than his son’s and they were of height, but that was where the resemblance ended. I could have compared the man to the fishermen boys I’d known in Laure and the way living in the water had granted them a swimmer’s physique, but there was nothing boyish about the Warlock. His hair was cut short and showed some streaks of silver, though not as many as his close-cropped salt and pepper beard – the combination made him look rather distinguished, in an older man sort of way. His robes were a tasteful shade of burgundy trimmed with gold, tightened at the waist by a belt of soft leather in a way that showed off the broadness of his chest and shoulders. Don’t gawk, Catherine. He’s a least thrice your age and plays for the other side anyway. That said, I could definitely see how the Calamity had managed to talk an incubus into marriage.

“Lord Warlock,” I coughed out. “Well met.”

The man in question smirked but passed no comment, Masego sighing as he passed him by and pushed the floating pig back in its cage. The distraction allowed me to get my thoughts in order and I gestured towards Hakram.

“Adjutant Hakram of the Fifteenth,” I introduced him.

The Calamity cocked his head to the side, examining the orc.

“Howling Wolves?” he asked in Kharsum.

“On my mother’s side,” Hakram acknowledged in the same. “Weeping Stone on my father’s.”

Warlock grinned, displaying a set of remarkably white teeth.

“They won’t be able to sweep you under the rug if you have kinship in Grem’s clan. Someone in Ater is going to have a fit when word spreads.”

He sounded pretty gleeful at the prospect. I kept my face pleasant but made a mental note of it. Of all the Calamities I’d met not a single one had ever spoken fondly of the Praesi nobility. Was that because they’d had so much pushback from them on their way up, or was there more to it?

“We were hoping to keep the word un-spread, for a little while,” I spoke up, meeting the man’s eyes squarely.

“Ah, youth,” the Warlock mused. “It’ll get out, Squire. It always does, and the tighter you grasp it between your fingers the more violently it will burst out.”

I squared my jaw and prepared myself for an argument with a man best known for incinerating the better part of a thousand men on the Fields of Streges. Still, there was nothing for it. I wasn’t going to allow Hakram to be a target, not before we had a better idea of what his situation involved and who would be coming after him.

“I’ll remain discreet, no need for that look on your face,” the Calamity chuckled. “That statement was meant in a broader sense.”

I frowned. “Could have made that a little clearer,” I pointed out.

Masego snorted from the other side of the room, where he was fitting in a new lock.

“This coming from a pupil of Uncle Amadeus?” he said. “The man can’t pass a dish without turning it into something ominously cryptic.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong. “I’ve been wondering whether it’s a Name thing or he just can’t help himself,” I admitted.

Warlock smirked. “He was already like that at sixteen,” the Calamity replied. “Ranger used to throw cutlery at him every time he got too dramatic.”

The image got a smile out of me. With a pair of incantations, Masego clicked the lock shut and released the spell on the pig before claiming a stool by one of the handful of work tables spread across the room. His father nodded in approval before turning his attention to us.

“To business, then,” the man spoke, and it was enough to sober the amusement right out of my system.

“I’m guessing this is about the situation in the city,” I grunted. “As it happens, I had a few questions myself about your involvement.”

Or lack thereof , I added silently. The Warlock hummed in agreement and passed a hand over a few runes carved into the table where Masego had claimed a seat. The eldritch letters shimmered and small globes of light rose out of them, spreading and taking shape until a facsimile of Summerholm seen from above had formed over the table’s length. The construct was white but some parts of it were shaded darker, mostly parts of the city that even my still-fresh military judgement understood to be key military positions. The defensive wards General Afolabi’s envoy had mentioned, if I had to guess.

“There are a least four heroes in Summerholm as we speak,” Warlock announced.

I raised an eyebrow. “The messenger from the Twelfth mentioned less.”

“The General hasn’t been informed,” Masego murmured.

My eyes flicked to the Calamity. “I’m sure there’s a good reason for that.”

Warlock smiled unpleasantly. “General Afolabi’s staff meetings are a leaking sieve.”

I’d been about to point out it was pretty unlikely any Praesi soldiers would willingly betray the Legions to locals when I realized that was rather missing the point. That was the Imperial way of thinking, and while it had its uses I’d not forgotten where I came from. Servants, merchants, anyone with business in the Comital Palace. Nobles from the Wasteland had this nasty tendency to see their attendants as moving furniture – it might not even have occurred to Afolabi that they could be eavesdropping when he met with his officers.

“You’ve been unable to locate them?” I asked instead.

“They have a Named capable of sorcery with them,” Warlock spoke, distaste thick in his tone. “Their work is singularly incompetent, but they struck gold seemingly by accident – they botched their working and instead of blocking my scrying they’ve managed to set up a pattern that redirects the divination elsewhere.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure it was an accident? It seems like a fairly clever counter.”

Masego snorted and Warlock scoffed. “It only worked because I’d tailored my spell to sketch out the edges of the zone where scrying was blocked,” the Calamity explained impatiently. “Against a more common variant of the working it would have failed miserably. That kind of triumph through incompetence is the signature of Bumbling Conjurers.”

Urgh, those. At least Bards were funny. The Bumbling types attracted failure like honey did flies, only ever managing to survive by the skin of their teeth with a heavy dose of luck. Though can it really be called luck if having it is part of your Role?

“So we have a band of heroes prowling about Summerholm with impunity,” I grunted. “It seems to me that if you’d left the bastion you might have managed to thin them out a bit.”

That was as close to outright asking the Warlock why he’d been holed up in his tower all this time while the city went to the dogs as I was willing to go, for now. Insolence could get results and I’d learned to harness my natural proclivity for it to my advantage, but when it came to Calamities it was better to start out treading lightly. The man brushed aside the implied question.

“Why do you think the heroes are in Summerholm?” he asked.

I raised an eyebrow. “If the Empire loses the city its supply lines are cut. The Legions will either have to live off the land, which brings recruits to the rebels, or set up a vulnerable backup with boats through the Hwaerte that can be targeted.”

Warlock rolled his eyes, the gesture surprisingly youthful. “You’re thinking like a general. The Lone Swordsman is a killer, not a strategist. Think like what you actually are: the Squire.”

I passed a hand through my hair, frowning. The Swordsman wasn’t really the one calling the shots in the Liesse Rebellion – Imperial intelligence had the Countess Marchford as the real power in the movement – but Warlock was correct in thinking that didn’t mean the heroes had come here on her orders. So what does Summerholm have that other Callowan cities don’t? The unrest here wasn’t anything that couldn’t be stirred up in Laure, and there were more citizens there to use as soldiers. If the target wasn’t the city itself, then what was it? After a long moment, my eyes turned to the Calamity.

“You think they’re after you,” I spoke quietly.

Warlock smiled thinly. “I’m quite sure of it. And that is why neither I nor Masego are gallivanting through the streets in a hero hunt. That would be playing right into their hands.”

I closed my eyes. “And that’s why they’re being borderline villainous in assassinating officers,” I understood. “They’re trying to draw you out by making the situation untenable.”

There was a moment of silence and I noticed Masego was staring at me in surprise.

“What?” I asked, suddenly self-conscious.

“I did not expect you to take such a dim view of the Lone Swordsman’s actions,” the Apprentice admitted.

“I’m wearing legionary armour,” I replied tiredly. “How much more obvious can I make my allegiances?”

The younger Soninke waved away the comment. “I don’t mean in that sense,” Masego replied. “The Lone Swordsman’s actions, while brutal, are not something I’d consider entirely unjustified.”

I bit my tongue on the reply that the Heavens would fall before I took a morality lesson from a Praesi, of all people.

“He’s assassinating and torturing people, Apprentice,” I retorted. “That’s not exactly classic heroics.”

“He’s targeting military personnel only,” Masego noted. “And while I suppose torture is somewhat reprehensible-” I raised an eyebrow at the ‘somewhat’ “- given that the Empire employs it as an information extraction method itself, it’s hard to throw stones on the subject. Using all means available to resist a foreign occupation isn’t something I’d call villainous.”

“A hero’s supposed to be more than a villain fighting for the opposite cause,” I replied. “If he has no moral high ground to stand on, then what the Hells are all his followers fighting for?”

The Warlock cleared his throat. “While I’m sure hearing two teenagers debating the ins and outs of morality would be a fascinating experience, there are other priorities at play.”

He seemed more amused than anything else, so I took the dismissal in stride. Masego looked like he wanted to continue the conversation, and to be honest I was rather inclined to indulge him. It would be pleasant, to have someone my age to talk about these things with. Hakram was the closest thing I had to a confidant in the Legion, but the orc take on ethics was... well, the less said about it the better. Using martial strength as your primary virtue had a way of affecting your other values. Speaking of the devil , I thought as my adjutant cleared his throat.

“Our entry into the city was the opposite of quiet,” Hakram gravelled. “They’re bound to react to another villain entering the city.”

The Calamity smiled. “Precisely,” he agreed. “And I think I know when and where they’ll strike.”

The man’s finger tapped the facsimile silhouette of the Comital Palace.

“I believe you received an invitation to dine with General Afolabi tonight,” he said.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. What did it say about me that every time I went to a dinner party it was with the intent of getting someone stabbed?

Chapter 6: Rapport

“There’s no surer sign you’re being played than being certain you’ve grasped your opponent’s intent.”
– Dread Emperor Benevolent

“It’s from the Trismegistan theory of magic,” Kilian explained.

“Well, that certainly clears things up,” I replied dryly.

The redhead frowned at me. “Don’t be a tit,” she said, adding an absent-minded ‘ma’am’ a moment later. “I won’t go into too many details – it’s fairly technical knowledge – but the basics are that when the Gods made Creation they set down laws for the way everything works. Haven’t you ever wondered why an apple falls down when you drop it?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Gravity seems the likely culprit, unless you’re telling me it was a frame up all along.”

“It’s probably for the best you never attended any of the mage classes,” the Senior Mage muttered under her breath. “Look, gravity doesn’t apply everywhere. Exposed to the classical element of void, it tends to fizzle out.”

I got the distinct impression out of that last sentence that the classical elements weren’t what I thought they were.

“So it’s not an immutable law,” I grunted. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Kilian took a sip of the wine glass I’d handed her before beginning the conversation, leaning back in her seat. I was very careful not to let my thoughts linger on the fact that she was sitting just a dozen feet away from a very nice bed that could likely fit two people in it, should said people be willing to do a bit of... creative juxtaposition.

“It means the Gods put that law into place through their own power,” Kilian informed me. “That’s what we call a creational law, a rule that came into existence when the Gods manifested their power as the physical realm we inhabit.”

I was fairly uneducated in matters of sorcery – pretty much all Black had ever bothered to teach me was that I did not have the inborn talent for it before moving on to the best ways to kill mages of different skill levels – but I wasn’t an idiot. The implications here were fairly straightforward.

“So an original law is something that predates Creation,” I guessed.

Kilian wiggled her hand in equivocation. “It’s a law that exists independently of it. Like how you can’t make something out of nothing, for example. Some argue that to qualify as an original law it has to apply to even the Gods.”

“That sounds a mite heretical,” I noted.

Implying that the Heavens were not omnipotent was a good way to get tossed out of the House of Light. Sure the priests admitted that the Gods had limits, but according to them they were self-imposed for the good of Creation.

The redhead smiled behind the rim of her glass. “Trismegistus is the Praesi name for the man who became the Dead King. A little heresy is to be expected,” she replied.

That would explain it. Anyone who’d ended up turning the entire nation they ruled over into a horde of slavering undead was bound to have a few disagreements on the nature of Creation with the clergy. Still, hard to argue with a man who invaded one of the Hells. Clearly the Dead King had done something right, for a very specific meaning of right.

“I’m curious where you encountered those terms to begin with,” Kilian half-asked, her tone implying that if it wasn’t something I could talk about she would understand.

She’d always been good about things like that. Maybe it was the way mages dealt with so many more secrets than regular people, especially in Praes.

“Ran into an experiment Apprentice and Lord Warlock were having in their tower,” I told her. “Something about determining the nature of Demiurgian phenomena.”

“Ah,” the Senior Mage mused. “That would explain that massive ward around the bastion. They’re separating the place from Creation proper.”

I leaned forward, suddenly intent. “Is that what that was? I knew it wasn’t a defensive thing, but what I can get from my trick is pretty limited. If it’s not out to disembowel me, my Name doesn’t give me much.”

“I’d need to have a look up close to be sure,” Kilian hedged, “but I can’t think of anything else that big they would set up in a city. I’m not sure if it’s a pocket dimension or if they’re reaching for Arcadia, but the end result is largely the same.”

Mhm. There were probably academic differences at play, but from a tactical point of view I could think of one reason the Warlock would set his home territory apart from Creation. It meant the man could actually cut loose if the heroes came knocking. I’d read the histories, after all. Warlock had ever only been deployed as a combat asset when my teacher was willing to write off wherever the battle was happening. If the Sovereign of the Red Skies decided to go all out in Summerholm it would make the goblinfire incident look like a tavern scuffle. It explained why he’d been sitting pretty in the bastion all this time, too. So he wasn’t just letting Summerholm spiral out of control, he was setting up his battlefield for a confrontation.

“You have that look on your face,” the redhead spoke softly. “The one that means you’ve figured out you were wrong about something.”

“That a bad thing?” I asked mildly.

Kilian cleared her throat, looking rather bashful. “I like it. Most people do. Even Juniper said that the way you don’t get stuck in your preconceptions is ‘laudable’, and getting compliments out of her is like milking a stone.”

I snorted. “Hard to get all high and mighty when you’re wrong about things as often as I am,” I admitted. “I’m lucky I found the people I did, to be honest. I’d have a lot more blind spots if I hadn’t.”

Sometimes I wondered what it said about me that all the people I trusted were Praesi, but what else could I do? If I wanted to get anything done in Callow I’d need the Fifteenth backing me and the core of my legion was from the Empire. In time that might change, but as the months passed I was beginning to think certain things might not. How could I trust a new officer more just because of the land of their birth, when the likes of Nauk and Robber had been with me since the beginning?

“I think we’re luckier to have you,” the redhead said softly. “I don’t think you realize what it means, for the Fifteenth to have someone like you at the helm.”

I hadn’t drunk nearly enough wine to justify the flush that took my cheeks at the almost-whispered words. Gods but Kilian was pretty. I still didn’t know if she had any interest in women, though. I’d thought about asking Hakram, but that would have been as good as declaring an interest and I wasn’t quite there yet. Still. Unlike with pregnancies, it wasn’t like... fraternization was against regulations, so long as the people involved weren’t in a direct chain of command.

“Someone like me,” I repeated in a murmur, wishing the redhead wasn’t sitting on the other side of the table.

Kilian bit her lip. “A woman who-“

Someone knocked at the door and I felt the sudden urge to order a round of hangings. Really . Couldn’t whoever that was have waited for another few moments? Hakram entered the antechamber a moment later and for the first time since I could remember I glared at my adjutant. The Senior Mage recoiled like she’d been burned, cheeks reddening. The tall orc eyed us both curiously, but he knew better than to ask.

“Report, Adjutant,” I ordered with ill-grace.

“Ma’am,” he saluted, raising hairless brows at my tone. “Your hunch was right. About twenty servants were indisposed at the last minute and had to be replaced by ‘relatives’. We have the replacements in custody.”

I grumbled under my breath, irked at the knowledge that the news would have kept if he’d waited a little longer.

“Were any of them armed?” I asked, setting aside my irritation for the moment.

The orc shook his head. “Several of them had scars, however. The kind you get in military service.”

I grimaced. That was suspicious, but circumstantial at best. There were plenty of veterans from the Conquest who’d had to get mundane jobs after the Empire had taken over. The legal aspect of things didn’t concern me overmuch: this would have been trickier elsewhere, but Summerholm was under martial law and regardless as the Squire I was pretty much a law unto myself. But part of me balked at ordering forceful interrogation based on barely floating evidence. We’d have to do without.

“Keep them under heavy guard,” I told Hakram. “At least two lines, one of them with munitions. If someone with a Name mounts a rescue operation they should toss sharpers in the cells before getting the Hells out of there.”

I was less than optimistic when the it came to the victory chances of my legionaries against a band of heroes, goblin munitions or not. The Fifteenth was already at half-strength, I had no intention of losing any more soldiers in a fool stand against the likes of the Lone Swordsman. A rough voice cleared their throat from the threshold to my rooms.

“Afolabi will get pissy if we move too many troops into the Comital Palace,” Legate Juniper told me, strolling into the room.

Like the rest of the people in my quarters, she was in full legion gear. From the looks of it she’d had hers cleaned and polished recently, which as much of a concession to propriety I’d been willing to order my officers to make. Attending a dinner with a general of the Empire in armour was in poor taste but with the Swordsman likely to make an appearance I wanted them ready to fight.

“The general should have taken care of this fucking mess before we arrived, if he wanted to have that right,” I grunted.

Juniper flashed ivory fangs in a hard smile at my words.

“I don’t disagree,” my Legate replied. “Just warning you we won’t be making friends in the Twelfth with your plan.”

“We’ll deal with that if we survive the night,” I mused.

Which was, truthfully, still up in the air. We had the defensive position and we knew they were coming, but four heroes weren’t something to sneeze at. Entire kingdoms had been toppled by less. I wasn’t going to risk Hakram in a fight, nascent Name or not, so my only back up for the initial phases of the battle would be Apprentice. How useful the Soninke would actually be in a life-and-death struggle remained to be seen: he hadn’t given me the impression he was someone used to the rougher side of being Named.

“Senior Mage,” Juniper spoke flatly, only now deigning to acknowledge Kilian’s existence. “Our caster lines will be needing their instructions soon.”

The redhead flushed, looking guiltily at her half-finished wineglass.

“I had a few questions for her earlier,” I told Juniper, hoping to deflect some of the attention.

“I’m sure you did,” the Legate replied serenely, not a hint of impropriety on her face.

Hakram coughed into his fist and I made a mental note to take revenge on him for this at some point.

“Lady Squire, ma’am,” Kilian saluted the both of us, pausing by a still-grinning Hakram to daintily kick his ankle.

Considering the orc’s armour was the only thing thicker than his skin it did absolutely nothing to discipline him, but I approved of the general intention. I waited until she left the quarters to return my focus to Juniper.

“We’ve reinforced the palace garrison at all choke points?” I prompted.

The orc officer nodded. “Your special orders have been given to the troops at the gates,” she said.

I’d kept those rather simple. If a lone individual in a cloak approaches the entrance, shoot them until they stop moving. And then a few more times to be sure. Don’t even bother hailing them, just unload your crossbows. If the Lone Swordsman intended on making a dramatic entrance, he was in for a rough evening. Unfortunately, the bastard had taken to irregular warfare like a fish to water. I doubted he’d be stupid enough to try getting into the palace the old-fashioned way.

“I suppose we’d better get moving then,” I grunted. “Has Apprentice showed up yet?”

Juniper cast a look at Hakram, who shook his head.

“Not yet,” the adjutant replied. “I’ve taken the liberty of providing him an escort when he leaves the bastion.”

I smiled at my officer, pleased at the initiative. I doubted the heroes would try picking off the Warlock’s own adopted son in broad daylight, but there was no sense in taking unnecessary risks.

“Ah, diplomatic dinners,” Juniper grinned unpleasantly. “Everybody’s favourites.”

“At least the food won’t be poisoned this time,” I noted. “That’s a marked improvement.”

“Does that mean you won’t be breaking anyone’s bones tonight?” the Legate asked wryly. “Shame, that was the best part of the evening.”

I pushed myself to my feet, adjusting the sword at my belt.

“I’ll see what I can do, Legate,” I replied. “I’m sure there’s at least one guest that could use the exercise.”

—

The palace’s banquet hall was the oldest part of the building and it showed in the stonework. Not that it was shoddy, but instead of imported granite from northern Callow the petty kings of old Summerholm had had to make do with local quartz deposits. Nowhere as good to hide under when trebuchets started singing, but back then siege engines had been fairly rare. I had two lines from Nauk’s command idling around the hall’s entrance, the boredom of the assignment warring with the warning their officers had given that they were likely to see fighting before the end of the night. General Afolabi had posted only a tenth of his own soldiers and they looked rather displeased to be sharing the duty with my own. As long as they don’t start fighting I couldn’t care less.

I let Juniper and Hakram stride ahead of me into the hall, slowing when I noticed a handful of people being interrogated by my soldiers. Four of them, to be exact. Three men and a woman, all of them adorned in fancy clothes and bearing musical instruments. The lieutenant in charge of security was ignoring the protests of the musicians and patting them down for weapons, at least those of them that were standing. The only woman had claimed a chair, propped her lute over her knees and seemed to be polishing off a flask of alcohol so strong I could smell it from where I was standing. I found the supreme unconcern rather amusing and out of curiosity I claimed the seat next to hers.

“Dare I ask what you’re drinking?” I said.

She grinned drunkenly, shaking the silvery flask.

“Why, the very elixir of life,” she replied theatrically. “Back home they call it the ‘water that burns’.”

“Well, anything in contact with it definitely would become flammable,” I observed.

I didn’t recognize her accent. Not Praesi or Callowan, and her colouring was a little too light to be a Taghreb’s. Her strong nose and curly dark hair were striking, if short of outright attractive, provided no real hint as to her origins.

“Ashuran,” the stranger said.

“Pardon me?” I replied.

“I’m Ashuran. You’re trying to figure out where I come from,” she told me amusedly. “The staring was a bit of a giveaway.”

The Thalassocracy of Ashur, huh. First time I’d ever met anyone from there. It wasn’t that they were isolationist, per se, but more that they rarely bothered visiting anywhere boats couldn’t reach. The Ashurans had stayed much closer to their Baalite roots than the Dominion – they were still part of the Hegemony, for one. Not that being a member of the Baalite Hegemony meant as much as they once had. The old maritime empire had been on the decline since centuries before my birth.

“So why’s an Ashuran bard trying to get drunk in a Callowan fortress?” I asked.

“I am not trying,” she informed me proudly. “I am succeeding .”

I snorted. She offered me the flask and, against my better judgement, I took a sip. I promptly started coughing.

“Gods,” I rasped out. “How are you not dead?”

“My liver is cast iron,” she admitted solemnly. “To answer your question, I drifted towards here when I heard about the rebellion. Seems to me there’s a song in there.”

I handed her the flask back and to my horror she drank from it like it was river water going down her throat.

“Are you even going to feel your fingers when you strum that lute?” I asked dubiously.

“Doesn’t make as much of a difference as you’d think,” she acknowledged cheerfully. “Besides, I am not a mere bard.”

“This will be good,” I coughed, still trying to rid my throat from the stranger’s devil-water.

She rose to her feet, teetering back and forth and reached for something above her head. Her hand came back empty.

“Right,” she muttered. “I lost the hat. No matter!”

Striking a pose with her foot resting on the seat she’d vacated, the woman swept the horizon in a generous gesture.

“Before you stands Almorava of Symra, minstrel without peer!”

She punctuated the announcement by sweeping a few strings, the resulting sound eerily similar to a cat getting stepped on. I could feel everyone else in the hallway suddenly staring at us and had to suppress a smile.

“That sounds technically true,” I mused. “Have you considered you may have a drinking problem?”

“My flask is almost empty,” Almorava agreed. “That is a problem.”

The officer in command approached us carefully, hand on his sword.

“Lady Squire,” he asked. “Is there a problem?”

I waved the question away. “None at all,” I replied. “Continue your work, Lieutenant.”

He saluted before returning to the other musicians. I felt the bard – ah, minstrel – staring at me and sighed. Well, so much for anonymity.

“Catherine Foundling,” I introduced myself.

“I had a feeling,” the Ashuran said. “Can’t think of another reason they’d allow a Deoraithe your age this deep into the palace with a sword at her hip.”

“Most people would be a little warier at the revelation they’ve been talking with a villain,” I murmured.

“Most people would have passed out before they got hallway through the flask,” Almorava grinned. “Besides, you’ve yet to set anyone on fire so at least one of the rumours is wrong.”

Godsdamnit. Was that really going to follow me everywhere? At least she hadn’t mentioned Summerholm or goblinfire. “There’s rumours?”

The minstrel chuckled. “My dear lady, you’re the Callowan apprentice of the man who conquered the Kingdom. There’s a tale in every city from Ater to Salia, each wilder than the last.”

“All of them flattering, I’m sure,” I spoke drily.

Almorava hummed. “Opinions are split, actually. Of course there’s the usual crowd in favour of removing the head of anything in contact with the Empire, but you’d be surprised how many Callowans are cautiously optimistic.”

“That...” I trailed off. “You’re right. I am surprised.”

“There are some who think having one of their own high up in Imperial ranks might solve some of the most undesirable aspects of the Praesi occupation,” the minstrel said. “They might not be a loud as the ‘stone her to death’ crowd, but they do exist.”

“You seem remarkably well informed for a wandering minstrel,” I said.

The Ashuran shrugged. “You pick up things, playing in taverns.”

I’m sure you do. I rose to my feet.

“It was a pleasure, Almorava,” I said. “But I have a reception to attend.”

“Have fun,” the minstrel waved cheerfully.

I kept my smile on my face until I’d turned, taking aside the lieutenant when I passed by him. I leaned into his ear.

“The woman I was talking to. She won’t have any weapons, but I want a pair of crossbowmen keeping an eye on her at all times,” I murmured.

The man nodded and I patted him on the shoulder, squaring my own as I entered the banquet hall. Come out and play, Lone Swordsman. I’m ready for you this time.

Chapter 7: Reception

“Always walk into traps. Evil is clever and patient and never as vulnerable as when it thinks it holds all the cards.”
– Eudokia the Oft-Abducted, Basilea of Nicae

I’d been in a few dinner halls, now that I’d actually left Laure, but the Comital Palace’s was by far the grimmest.

No tapestries or mosaics, not even a statue: naked stone everywhere, with carved large stone slabs for tables and smaller ones for benches. The only concession to the principle of decoration was the heraldry of the old Counts discreetly engraved on the seats – a lone soldier’s silhouette standing on a wall. Even back in those days Summerholm had been the city where Imperial armies came to die, and its rulers had not been above making that quiet boast. In the back, at the head of the largest table, an imposing stone-wrought armchair sat as a makeshift throne. There was something undeniably odd about seeing a middle-aged Soninke in a silken tunic installed in an ancient Callowan throne, but I had to admit that General Afolabi Magoro cut a striking figure. Tall and broad-shouldered, his sharply angled face held deep-set eyes that restlessly scanned his surroundings. On someone less powerfully built it might have leant the appearance of nervousness, but on this one it spoke of a careful awareness of his surroundings.

The guest list for the reception was blessedly short, thank the Gods. I’d brought few officers myself – Juniper, Aisha and Pickler. And Hakram, of course, but that went without saying. My adjutant dogged my steps like a second shadow, these days, a reassuring presence ever at my back. Commanders Hune and Nauk remained back in the Fifteenth’s camp, overseeing our preparations, and Ratface had made himself scarce within moments of entering the city. He’d left a message indicating he’d gone to “make like a fishmonger”, which I assumed to mean he was coordinating with Afolabi’s Supply Tribune and discreetly swapping supplies with the other man. It better be, anyway, because if he’d ducked out for a drink I was assigning him to dig the latrines for Nauk’s entire kabili. All bloody one thousand of them.

On the general’s side attendance was even lighter: two Taghreb wearing the red and gold shoulder decorations of a Legate and a middle-aged goblin that bore a tribune’s insignia. Afolabi’s own Kachera Tribune, if I had to take a guess. Of all the man’s general staff it would be the tribune in charge of scouting and information-gathering who’d have the most to contribute to the dinner conversation. Assuming we even got to dinner. I bet the Swordsman was the kind of asshole who’d launch his attack right before dessert, too. I’d been craving a good Callowan pastry for a while now and Summerholm was known for baking a sort of sweet bread with apple slices inside. If someone burst in with stirring heroics right before I got to dig in, things were going to get violent.

“Thinking deep thoughts, Catherine?”

The cheerful voice wasn’t one I was accustomed to, but I did recognize it.

“Pondering dessert,” I told Masego as he approached. “What passes for it in Praes has been something of a disappointment.”

Pudding and strange pies, mostly.

“I hear you,” the mage replied solemnly. “Father’s fondness for lemon pie borders on self-destructive.”

I snorted. “The Lord Warlock is a lemon enthusiast. Wouldn’t have guessed.”

“Wrong father,” Apprentice grinned. “He doesn’t even need to eat, you know, he just likes the taste.”

I filed away the knowledge that incubi didn’t need physical sustenance, wondering if it applied only to this particular breed or to devils in general. I had half a dozen questions on the tip of my tongue about how it had been, being raised by a couple half of which literally came from Hell, but this was neither the time nor the place. I’d already been borderline rude by delaying my meeting with the General to chat with a minstrel, no need to flagrantly snub him to make small talk with another guest.

“I suppose we should give General Afolabi our greetings,” I sighed.

“Ah, politics,” Apprentice chuckled. “I am so very glad my Role concerns itself almost entirely with sorcery.”

“Lucky you,” I grunted, making my way to the head table.

The man I’d come to greet was already seated, the only one in the hall to do so, and was talking with Juniper when I approached. Hakram stood a little behind my Legate, his face the picture of calm equanimity.

“- they field at least five hundred cavalry, from the reports.”

“Callowan knights?” Juniper asked, frowning.

“Free Cities men, equipped in the style of Proceran cataphracts,” Afolabi replied. “Make no mistake, Legate, they are deadly on flat ground. The Exiled Prince has been using them for lightning raids and they’ve caused more casualties on their own than the rest of Liesse’s army put together.”

He put aside the line of conversation when I came to stand before him.

“Lady Squire,” he greeted me, offering his arm in the warrior’s grip.

“General,” I replied, firmly clasping his forearm.

“And Apprentice,” he added after our arms withdrew. “Your presence is a rare surprise. Will your lord father be joining us?”

Masego ignored the pointed undertone and lack of offered grip without blinking an eye.

“Maybe later,” the younger Soninke shrugged. “He’s putting the finishing touches on a project better not left unattended.”

Afolabi almost winced before getting his face under control. I could sympathize: anything the Sovereign of the Red Skies deemed worthy of continued supervision was not something you wanted loose in a city that was your responsibility. Putting Summerholm under martial law meant that if any damages occurred while the city was under it the Tower would be expected to foot the bill. Explaining to the Imperial bureaucracy that a few hundred thousand aurei had to be sent west to make up the damages caused by a fully incarnated demon would be a very, very unpleasant conversation. I decided to steer this towards a relatively safer subject.

“The Duke of Liesse is fielding cavalry, then?” I asked. “I hadn’t heard.”

“The only thing the Duke fields is a banquet table,” Afolabi sneered in contempt. “The Countess Marchford is the only opposing strategist worth considering in this campaign, but it is not her forces with the horsemen. She based the mercenary company known as the Silver Spears in her demesne and it’s been harassing our flanks.”

Cavalry had always been the glaring weakness of the Legions of Terror. Horses were rare in Praes and the Empire’s neighbours had been understandably reluctant to ever sell them any. The closest the Legions could put forward was orcish wolf riders, but Black had spent an entire evening with me detailing the many limitations of those. They were harder to supply, for one. The breed of Steppe wolves that grew large enough to be ridden required a prodigious amount of meat to sate their hunger, and out on a campaign letting them hunt was rarely an option. There was also the fact that, when it came down to it, horse cavalry was almost always better. They were quicker, heavier, and much less reluctant to run straight into a line of enemy soldiers. Wolf mounts were also much harder to replace: they were raised with their rider and should the orc die they would violently refuse another one. Sometimes they even went berserk with grief and had to be put down. Worse, humans and goblins were unable to use them. The few experiments made to adapt them had led, Black implied, to well-fed mounts but no progress whatsoever. As raiders and tools to spread terror they were second to none, but it had to be kept in mind they were a very specialized kind of cavalry.

“We’ll have to root them out if we’re to move deeper south,” I noted.

“Word is that will be the Fifteenth’s assignment,” Afolabi murmured. “A decent way to blood your legion before sending it into heavy combat.”

“Finally,” Juniper grinned. “Something to sink our teeth in.”

The general looked amused. “You really are your mother’s- “

A distant explosion struck, covering the end of the older Soninke’s sentence. Everyone but Masego reached for their weapon, even Afolabi fishing out a wicked-looking dagger from his sleeve.

“Sharpers,” Juniper stated.

“At least three, no more than six,” Senior Sapper Pickler contributed, scuttling up to us with her sword out. “The detonation was inside the palace.”

“Our guests have arrived, Hakram,” I spoke. “Send word to Commander Hune – move the troops in place. I want the palace surrounded immediately.”

The general stared me down. “You knew this was coming.”

“I had a feeling,” I admitted.

“A word of warning would have allowed my legionaries to prepare,” he spoke through gritted teeth.

“Your legion has been infiltrated,” I informed him. “It would have tipped our hand early.”

He looked rather displeased at that, but he’d have to live with it. It wasn’t like it wasn’t true. My gaze swept over our guests, now including the bards from earlier, and inspiration suddenly struck.

“Masego,” I asked urgently. “That time when you picked up on a Name, can you do it again?”

The younger Soninke pushed up his spectacles. “Depends on the Name, but usually yes. Why?”

“Look at the Ashuran bard and tell me-“

And shit, she was moving. I’d known there was something strange about her.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Almorava announced, unslinging her lute. “A song I composed for you. It’s called ‘ walking into an obvious trap because William has a chip on his shoulder, godsdamnit’ .”

I brought my hand down without missing a beat and the two crossbowmen watching her immediately fired. The Ashuran twisted in a way that suggested highly unnatural degrees of limberness, both bolts coming within a hair’s breadth of her without actually drawing blood.

“Swords out,” I ordered. “She’s a hero.”

Everyone in the room save for the other bards unsheathed their blades, the other musicians hurriedly edging away from the declared heroine.

“You could have let me sing a bit, at least,” the minstrel complained. “I’ve been working on the tune for like a fortnight.”

I deftly jumped over the table, Hakram and Juniper following close behind as Pickler produced a sharper from Gods knew where. She wasn’t even carrying a satchel. I was more than a little wary of engaging a single hero when we had such an overwhelming numerical superiority – that did not usually end well for the villains, in the stories – but I couldn’t just let her be either. Reluctantly, I admitted to myself that capture wasn’t an option here. I had no idea what she was capable of, but Names like Bard and Minstrel were usually talented escape artists.

“If you surrender now I can make it painless,” I told her.

“I’m not going to die, Catherine Foundling,” she replied, apparently unmoved by the fact that she was surrounded and unarmed. “I can’t fight for the life of me and the only magic at my disposal is my glorious musical talent, but I do have one thing on you.”

“And what would that be?” I asked, against my better judgement.

Hakram groaned behind me.

“Now and then, I get to have a look at the script. Today’s not the day I bite it.”

She smiled as I crossed the last few feet between us at a run, sword in hand.

“See you soon. Wandering Bard, exit stage left.”

She took a step to the left, and before her foot could actually touch the ground she was... gone. Not a trace of her. Had she teleported? No, that was impossible. The amount of power needed for that would have been felt everywhere in the city, and I hadn’t gotten so much as a twinge from this.

“Masego, do you have a spell that checks for invisibility?” I barked.

Without bothering to reply, Apprentice murmured an incantation and waved his hand across the room. Another explosion sounded in the distance, louder. Not sharpers, this time. I recognized the noise without Pickler’s help: those had been demolition charges. Shit . None of my legionaries had brought those, which meant the heroes had gotten their hands on munitions. So that’s why the Thief wanted those keys. I should have prepared for that , I chastised myself. The Lone Swordsman had a history of using goblin munitions, it wasn’t that hard to put together.

“No one’s in here but us,” Masego spoke up.

I frowned at him. “You’re sure?”

He looked mildly offended. “Not even Assassin could hide from that spell. I’m quite sure.”

I took his word for it, turning to Juniper. “I want you and the Tribunes to stay here and protect the general, he’s bound to be a target.”

The man in question snorted. “Much appreciated.”

My Legate nodded, slowly sheathing her sword.

“Hakram, Masego,” I said without turning. “We’re going hunting.”

—

I left a full line covering Afolabi along with my officers, bolstering his own guard.

I hadn’t brought my shield or helmet into the banquet hall, but Hakram had arranged for one of the guards to be carrying them. Going against the Swordsman with anything but my best struck me as a very bad idea. I tightened my helmet’s clasps under Apprentice’s impatient gaze, noting he was rather eager to move for someone who’d never been in proper combat as far as I knew. He snorted when I pointed out as much.

“It’s a rare thing to get the chance for a magical duel between Named these days,” Masego informed me. “Uncle Amadeus and Assassin kill most heroes before they can make a nuisance of themselves.”

“With reason,” I grunted, picking up my shield.

The Soninke shrugged. “I’ve been meaning to test the limits of what I can do, and Legion mages are a laughable benchmark in this regard.”

Not exactly complimentary, but mage lines weren’t meant to be particularly versatile. Their purpose was massed firepower, and in that regard they served perfectly well. I wasted no time in explaining this, though, since now wasn’t the time for a debate. I’d placed several fast-response teams in key positions inside the Comital Palace in anticipation of the heroes’ arrival, with orders to engage at a distance only and to immediately send a runner if they came across someone with a Name. While I fully intended on engaging the heroes only with legionary support, sending them in alone against the likes of the Lone Swordsman was a recipe for slaughter. I led my small team in the direction the demolition charges had been detonated, but before we ran into the enemy we came across Robber’s line. And a little more, actually. There were a handful of orcs with the goblins, most of which were wounded. Nothing life-threating, but there would be scars.

“Boss,” the goblin greeted me, idly smothering the sharper he’d just lit. “Good to see you.”

“Report, Tribune,” I grunted. “You were watching the prisoners, what happened?”

“Some angry guy with a whiny sword and a tattooed streetwalker with spear,” he explained. “We blew up the captives and bailed, like you said, but most of the other line was slaughtered during our retreat.”

I winced. Evidently the whole ‘killing the prisoners’ backup plan had put the Swordsman in a foul mood.

“Stick with us,” I ordered. “We’re going after them.”

“Hear that boys and girls?” the tribune called out to his legionaries. “We’re having a rematch with shiny boots and his concubine, only this time we’ve got Catherine fucking Foundling. What do we say to that?”

“ Stab the kidney, loot the corpse ,” the goblins in his line called out with enthusiasm, the handful of surviving orcs echoing the sentiment with growls.

Sometimes I worried about my sappers, I really did. The legionaries fell behind in proper order and we moved out at a brisk pace, weapons at the ready. Progress was too slow for my tastes, but I’d always known I’d be on the defensive for this fight.

“So who are you, four-eyes?” I heard Robber ask behind me.

“Four-eyes, really?” Masego replied. “That’s what you’re bringing to the table? I’ve met wittier imps, and most of them aren’t sentient enough to talk.”

“Ah, the warlock’s get,” the tribune caught on. “I’ve always wondered – when your daddies do the deed, who’s the sword and who’s the sheath? Be precise, I have twenty denarii riding on this.”

“So that’s why goblin life expectancy is so short,” Apprentice mused.

Evidently, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The wing of the palace we were headed towards held the armoury as well as the palace guard quarters. Why the Swordsman had chosen to hit there as his opening move remained to be seen: it was bound to be swarming with Twelfth Legion soldiers, not to mention Kilian’s mage line had been close by. Maybe he’d been trying to take out as many legionaries as possible? That can’t be it, he’s got to know if he does a straightforward assault we’ll overwhelm him through sheer numbers. What else was there? From what I remembered of the palace plans Hakram had found for me, there were stairs leading up to the fortifications on top of the palace and one of the two side exits . I guess we’ll find out soon. We kept the same fast pace all the way to the guard quarters, where from the moment we stepped into the neighbouring hallway we were able to hear the noise of fighting ahead.

“Regulars with me and Hakram,” I ordered grimly. “Sappers, take your shots carefully and remain out of range. Masego...” I hesitated. “Do what you think is best.”

“I always do,” Apprentice replied indifferently.

I got a chorus of acknowledgements from the legionaries and we burst into the quarters at a run. A wide room with now upended tables and benches greeted me, a rack full of weapons propped up against the wall having been tipped over at some point in the fighting. The first thing I noticed was Kilian’s line headed by the woman herself, her tenth of regulars kneeling with their large shields in front of the mages like a makeshift wall. A salvo of fireballs sailed up towards a set of stairs in the back, where a dozen people armed with sword and shield were making a retreat. A man in too-large clothes standing behind them let out a startled yelp and waved his hand, detonating the spellwork from my mages in mid-air. The flash of fire was blinding but I charged forward, Hakram at my side and my orc legionaries close behind. I’d only been in the room for a heartbeat but there was no mistaking the power pulsing from the enemy mage: he had a Name, and not a meek one.

“She’s here!” the man called out. “Do it now!”

Half a dozen clay balls landed across the room, breaking easily and spreading a dark oily liquid. One of the invaders threw a torch without missing a beat and in the blink of an eye half the room was swallowed by vivid green flames. Goblinfire.

“Godsdamnit,” I cursed. “I better not be blamed for this one.”

Chapter 8: Reversal

“There’s nothing better in life than the look on your enemy’s face when they realize you’ve played them every step of the way. Why do you think I keep starting secret cabals trying to overthrow me?”
– Dread Emperor Traitorous

Who was I kidding? I was definitely getting blamed for this one.

There were a few downsides to the whole villain thing, aside from the ever-worrying moral issues. The situation had gone from pretty even to bad in a pinch: with the goblinfire splitting the room in two there was no way for me to get my legionaries across to get into melee with the enemy. I still had the advantage at range, given my line of sappers and Kilian’s mages, but that didn’t mean shit if the Swordsman’s lackeys ran away up the stairs. Well, at least no one tried to kill me yet. A refreshing change, really. Not even a heartbeat later a man dropped from the ceiling like a demented bat and chucked a javelin at me – I barely got my shield up in time, deflecting the projectile to the side and dangerously close to Hakram’s legs. The ceiling. The actual ceiling. Heroes.

“One day,” I told myself out loud, “I will learn to stop doing that. I really will.”

“I’m told Evil is habit-forming, miscreant ,” the newcomer sneered. “Don’t count on it.”

Considering the man’s outfit consisted of leather pants leaving little to the imagination and a matching vest that prominently displayed his tattooed chest, odds were this was the “streetwalker with a spear” Robber had earlier referred to. And would you look at that, besides the handful of javelins on his back he was also armed with a long spear currently pointed in my direction. The only surprise in this was that my tribune hadn’t made something out of the plethora of silver bells woven into the hero’s flowing locks.

“Miscreant,” I repeated. “That’s the best you could manage? I get harder sass than that from my officers, and they’re not even trying to hurt my feelings.”

“HUNTER,” the mage above yelled. “Stick to the plan! William told us not to fight her!”

Huh, so the Swordsman’s actual name was William. Good to know. The idiot up on the stairs made a valid point, though: now that he was on my side of the fire, the failed exotic dancer was mine. I pointed my sword towards the troops on the stairs without missing a beat.

“Spargere,” I ordered.

Scatter, in Old Miezan. The official command for the use of sharpers. Robber’s sappers obeyed like the well-oiled machine they were and I turned my eyes on the hero. That should have been enough keep the others busy for a while . Hunter stepped forward fluidly, clearly intent on a dramatic duel, but I was having none of that.

“Fireballs, Kilian,” I spoke over the roar of the flames and raised my shield as I made for the enemy.

The man’s look of horrified surprise was priceless as sharpers exploding in the background punctuated the scene. Was it villainous to delight in fucking over your enemies? Because the glee I felt at the sight of the man trying to dodge a salvo of fireballs with only five feet of space to work with felt a little unholy. He gave it a decent shot but my mages were professionals and he took one in the legs and another in the chest, sorcerous flames scorching his exposed skin like a pig on a spit.

“That’s why we wear armour, you bloody amateur,” I muttered under my breath.

The blasts had knocked him off his feet and before he could get up I was on him, kicking him in the chest like I’d done to so many Pit fighters back in the good old days. Unlike those same men, though, he rolled with it and deftly pricked at me with his spear. Maybe if I hadn’t trained with the likes of Black and Captain the speed would have surprised me, but as things stood I slapped away the pathetic effort for what it was and retaliated by scoring a vicious gash on his cheek. I’d aimed for the eye to cripple as early in the fight as I could, but the bastard somehow managed to twist away and land in a crouch. I would have been impressed by the flexibility displayed were I not currently doing my best to stab him. From the corner of my eye I saw a glowing blue projectile flying towards me but an identical one collided with it a heartbeat later, both fizzling out under the impact.

“The Magic Missile. You filthy dabbler,” Masego laughed behind me. “Please, Conjurer, allow me to school you in how a real mage fights.”

I would have taken a break from my own fight to remind Apprentice that monologues were one of the leading causes of villain deaths, but before I could open my mouth the door we’d gone through was ripped off its hinges and flew through the air in the other mage’s direction twice as fast as the blue projectile had. Clearly, Apprentice had that one under control. My momentary distraction was rewarded by Hunter flicking the tip of his spear close to my chin, but I hunkered down behind my shield and let the probe go without retaliation. The hero was trying to edge around me so he could sink his teeth into the relatively easier targets that were Robber’s line and the orc survivors, but Hakram was having none of it. His rectangular legionary’s shield up and his sword ready in the middle line, he stepped into the hero’s path. Stuck between a better fighter and an orc wall of muscle and steel the Hunter naturally fell back on the time-honoured heroic tradition of talking shit.

“Typical villain,” he mocked. “Can’t take me on-“

My heater shield impacted brutally with his face and I felt the nose shatter with feral satisfaction. He roared and dropped his spear, which I would have counted a victory had he not promptly socked me in the mouth. I reeled back and paused to spit out a mouthful of blood. Weeping Heavens, I think he dislodged a tooth.

“Gonna be that way, is it,” I growled.

“Loos’ li’ t,” he replied in a tone that tried very hard to be intense.

The effect was somewhat damaged by the fact that the broken nose made him sound like a drunken Proceran with a cold. He brought up his fists and Hakram snorted, moving to flank him. From the corner of my eye I saw Masego pick up the pieces of the now-shattered door with a spell and wedge shards into the flesh of the men surrounding the Bumbling Conjurer, resisting the urge to wince at the sight. Those would be a little more unpleasant to get out than a splinter, assuming any of them survived. As the mage hero tried to muster a counterattack I heard Robber call for a volley of crossbow bolts and to my pleased surprise one of them sank into the Conjurer’s shoulder. The mage let out a cry and spun at the impact, taking a dangerous step towards the edge of the stairs. For a moment it looked like he’d manage to get his balance back, but then he tripped on his own robes and fell. He landed below on one of the tables taken by goblinfire, his fall flipping the now-flimsy structure and sending the large wooden circle rolling straight towards me.

“Oh for Heaven’s sake,” I snarled, throwing myself out of the way.

Kilian’s mages hit it with fireballs a moment later, doing nothing to hinder the flames but the impact was enough to knock the table top back down. By the time I was back on my feet, the Hunter had made a daring tactical retreat, landing on the edge of the stairs as he swung from a rope attached to a javelin stuck in the ceiling. My mages and sappers had thinned out the enemy soldiers despite their best effort to form a shield wall, but out of the four remaining one hoisted the Conjurer back up and cleanly cut through the part of the hero’s robes that was on fire.

“ Shoot them ,” I yelled.

The burst of lightning that was Kilian’s signature hit the wall besides the heroes with a clap but it missed and before the rest of her line could follow suit the soldiers ran up the stairs and out of sight, dragging the Conjurer with then. The Hunter lingered just a moment, eyeing me stonily in the hellish green light provided by the spreading goblinfire.

“Be will mee’ agin, Squiwe, anb-“

Without missing a beat, Robber pulled his crossbow’s trigger and the bolt ran through the bastard’s calf with a glorious ripping sound. I had never loved my vicious little tribune more than I did in that moment, as the hero squealed and scampered out of sight.

“I’m putting you up for commendation,” I told the grinning goblin before turning to Masego. “Apprentice, can you get us across the room?”

“One at a time,” he replied without hesitation. “And you’ll need to clear out around me.”

“Do it,” I grunted without bothering to ask what in all the Hells he meant by that.

Now was not the time to be picky, not with the goblinfire slowly swallowing up the entire room. This was going to be a long-term problem, I knew. Even a small fire like this could swallow up the entire Palace given enough time, and I was starting to have a feeling that this wasn’t the only arson the Lone Swordsman had ordered tonight. It made sense, the more I thought about it. If he knew most of his enemies would be in the same place and not in a position to even notice the goblinfire until it was too late, why wouldn’t he put the place to the torch? Masego took a deep breath and closed his eyes, throwing a hand forward as the trinkets and stones in his braids started glowing.

“Cocytus, curse of traitors, tyrant of winter,” he spoke in Mthethwa, his voice going unnaturally deep. “By my borrowed blood I call on you. Contracts were made, debts incurred.”

Apprentice’s eyes opened, now a deeply disquieting shade of gold. Even through the smoke choking the room I could smell brimstone.

“My will is paramount, here and forever. Drown the world in ice .”

A shiver went down my spine that had little to do with the freezing cold that somehow took over a room largely on fire. If that wasn’t calling on a contract with a devil, I would shave my head and become a nun. A wind howled that all of us felt without it actually being a physical thing and from Apprentice’s hand emerged a small globe of ice-clear water. It flew through the air until it stood a few feet in front of the edge of the goblinfire, then suddenly dropped. The moment it touched the ground a stream of ice burst out of the point of contact, Masego gritting his teeth as he moulded the constant flow into a large bridge that stretched all the way to the stairs on the other side of the room. The Warlock’s son let out a grunt of effort when the bridge was finished, barking something out in the caster’s tongue before dropping to his knees, panting in exhaustion. Most of my legionaries eyed him with quiet awe and more than a little fear, so I cleared my throat.

“Good work, Apprentice,” I congratulated him. “So, now we move to the pressing issue: who’s going across the creepy frozen demon bridge first? Volunteers, please step forward.”

Hakram cussed out a laugh. I shot Kilian a smile, and the responding one split her soot-covered face.

—

Masego was looking better by the time we finally engaged in pursuit. He was still drenched in sweat but his hair was no longer doing the torch impression, which I took to be a good sign. I patted him on the back and he pushed up his glasses, looking a little bemused.

“Any reason you didn’t decide to go all mage of mass destruction during the actual fight?” I asked, taking care not to sound accusing.

He wasn’t an idiot, likely there was a good reason.

“Being interrupted while calling on a contract would be... bad,” he grimaced. “A golden opportunity for the Conjurer to bumble his way to victory. Or at least a common defeat.”

“How bad are we talking?” I questioned, morbidly curious.

“An entire wing of the Palace frozen for at least the next century,” he replied.

“That’s pretty bad,” I agreed.

Considering we had been in said wing at the time, that would have been a less than optimal result. My trust in Apprentice’s judgement grew accordingly, though the whole devil contract thing was definitely getting brought up again in the future. The heroes had been helpful enough to leave a trail of blood for us to follow so I knew we were headed in the right direction, but where they were headed was puzzling me. The roof of the palace would certainly be a dramatic place for a showdown, especially if the place was on fire, but they had to know they were putting themselves in a corner. Unless that was the point? Was the Swordsman deliberately engineering a situation where his band of heroes was up against the wall and outnumbered? That was definitely a setting where a hero could make a last-minute comeback and carry the day, but the Lone Swordsman had so far been pretty careful to always stack the odds in his favour when he could. This would be unusually risky of him, especially when Warlock had yet to take the field. He didn’t have a Bard to advise him before, though , I thought. He might have adjusted his tactics since we last met. Gods, I hoped not. My own plan had been designed with his usual behaviour in mind.

So far the situation was still relatively under control. General Afolabi was still alive and under heavy guard, Commander Hune should have the palace surrounded for when the heroes tried to escape and William’s lackeys had been driven back. I wasn’t sure how many soldiers he’d brought with him, but it couldn’t have been too many. That we’d caught two dozen early must have cost him, and the casualties they’d incurred in the earlier skirmish would only widen the gap. I’d dispersed about a company and a half inside the Comital Palace as fast response teams, which were still alive as far as I knew, and legionaries from the Twelfth should had begun to mobilize. What I’d put into place wasn’t so much a plan as it had been a palette of tools for me to use, when it came down to it. I’d taken a page from Juniper’s book and put my soldiers in key positions so I’d always have resources at my disposal to meet anything the Swordsman could dish out. I’d learned from the war games: elegant, complicated plans always collapsed before they could work properly. I had a talent for improvisation, so I might as well make use of it. Still, I had the niggling feeling I’d missed something. Why have the Bard scope out the banquet hall if he hadn’t meant to assault it? More than that, why set the Comital Palace on fire if he intended on fighting inside of it?

I’d earlier thought it made sense for him to try to take out the majority of the enemy leadership inside their own stronghold with goblinfire, but his own people were inside too. For that plan not to be imbecilic, his crew should have been outside of the palace waiting in ambush to take us out when we fled. Instead he’d very loudly assaulted the place before starting with the goblinfire, tipping his hand early and allowing to interrupt his minions.

“Hakram,” I murmured, turning towards my right hand. “I think we’re being played.”

The orc’s dark eyes met me from under the shade cast by his helmet.

“I’m getting to that conclusion myself,” my adjutant grunted. “Something’s wrong here. Robber saw the Swordsman earlier, so where the Hells is he? If he’d been with the other two heroes earlier, he might have tipped the balance.”

“The whole skirmish could have been a distraction,” I guessed. “So he’d be able to get at Afolabi without my getting in the way.”

The tall orc shook his head. “Doesn’t fit. He hasn’t targeted the general so far, and he had plenty of time before we arrived. He’s not been shy about taking out Legion leadership so far.”

“He could have held off until now to maximize the chaos,” I replied, but it felt like I was grasping at straws.

“You need to stop thinking like a general, Squire,” Masego interrupted, catching up to us. “We’ve had this conversation before, remember? The Twelfth has never been the target here. Neither was Summerholm itself.”

I started. “You think your father’s still the target,” I realized, then shook my head. “Doesn’t fit, Apprentice. We know the Swordsman was here not long ago, he was seen. He’d never attack Warlock without being the tip of the spear.”

The Soninke rolled his eyes. “Gods save me from Callowans. They have a mage , Catherine. Not a Legion barely-literate thug, someone who went through an apprenticeship. Do you really think they can’t cast an illusion that basic?”

I let out the filthiest curse I knew, absent-mindedly deciding it was a good thing Kilian and her line hadn’t been close enough to hear that.

“Robber,” I barked out. “When you ran into the heroes in the cells, did the Swordsman actually kill anyone?”

The tribune blinked.

“... No,” he said after a moment. “The streetwalker was the one who did all the heavy lifting.”

Shit. So while we’d been running around like headless chickens putting out fires and pursuing his minions, he’d been loose in the city. Where Warlock was defenceless, at least as defenceless as a Calamity could ever be. That was the thing, though. Warlock was a legend, a monster straight out of the stories that could level half a city and call on the worst denizens from Below. Exactly the kind of enemy heroes are supposed to face and kill. Finally making it up to the rooftops, we stood overlooking the city. A little further ahead a rope was swinging in the wind, making an escape route down the back of the roof, far away from the fire.

“Don’t look so worried, Squire,” Masego said. “The bastion is slightly askew from Creation, remember? If they try to break in they’re in for some very nasty surprises, heroes or not.”

I looked into the distance and felt my stomach drop.

“Goblinfire eats magic, right?” I asked.

Apprentice frowned. “Correct. Why would that matter?”

“So what would happen if someone set the bastion on fire with some?”

The mage paled. “That would... the interior is the part that’s dimensionally removed, it’s still contained by the physical structure. Oh, Merciless Gods. The power has to go somewhere , Catherine.”

Kilian’s words drifted back to the fore of my mind. Massive, she’d called the ward.

“Can he bring down the ward, Masego?” I asked quietly. “Before it turns Summerholm into a field of ashes?”

And his son along with it , I finished silently. Apprentice nodded.

“But the backlash...”

“Would weaken him,” I finished. “Enough that a group of heroes might be able to kill him, if they hurry.”

In the distance the western bastion burned green, a candle lit to announce the death of a legend.

Chapter 9: Rematch

“I never keep grudges. Not for long, anyway.”
– Dread Empress Maleficent II

We might still make it in time, if we hurried.

That was the unspoken thought ringing through our minds as we ran through dark streets, the Comital Palace cutting a dark silhouette in the distance. Our gambit was that William wouldn’t want to risk taking on a Calamity without his entire band of heroes being present, which meant that if we caught up with Hunter and Conjurer we’d hit them right before they assaulted Warlock. There were only three of us now, Hakram and I following close behind Apprentice as he guided us through unfamiliar territory. Waiting for all of my legionaries to shimmy down the rope would have taken too long, especially given the equipment some of them carried. Better to have them catch up whenever they could. Commander Hune should have set up road blocks around the palace anyway, I could grab some backup when we ran into one.

While I had no personal affection for Warlock, I could recognize it would be a very bad thing if the heroes managed to kill him – or even seriously wound him. Black hadn’t been kidding when he’d told me that order in Praes rested on the myth of Imperial invincibility. The old defeats had been washed away by the unbroken string of victories that had flowed since the first days of the Conquest, but if the Swordsman managed to kill a Calamity... Word would spread slowly at first, but it would spread. Retired soldiers all over Callow would reach for their swords and wonder if, perhaps, now was not the time to settle the old score. Maybe once that thought would have brought a smile to my face, the prospect of the land of my birth fighting tooth and nail to gain back its independence, but I knew better.

I had seen the Imperial war machine up close, learned its ways and commanded its soldiers. Any war of liberation would turn into a bloodbath and, worst of all, Callow would lose . Half the country would be turned to ashes before the last of the resistance was put down, and when the Tower’s authority finally went unchallenged then the Procerans would strike. Like they were doing now, through their puppet Liesse. The knowledge that the First Prince was funding the rebellion had not come as a surprise to me, but even now it left a foul taste in my mouth. Once again Callow was the battleground where the continent attempted to keep Praes in check, and it would be my compatriots who’d see their lands ravaged for that “holy” purpose. The awareness that I was anything but blameless in this made it even worse.

I’d let the Lone Swordsman go knowing he would set Callow aflame, knowing that thousands would die in a calculated gambit on my part to rise to prominence in the Empire. Once, when I’d had my perspective nudged by my encounter with William, I’d been disgusted at the idea of Black sacrificing my countrymen like cattle to see me healed. Every day since I’d wondered at that particular bit of hypocrisy. Was I not doing the same, by letting a hero go free for my own purposes? That I had benefitted directly from the ritual sacrifice of the death row inmates instead of in an abstract sense had seemed important, back then, but now I wondered. I’d put on a villain’s cloak for the sake of Callow, telling myself it was for a greater good, but at the first given occasion I’d pushed the same country into civil war.

I still believed, deep down, that the ends justified the means. That by bleeding away a few thousand lives now I was securing a better future for Callow, one where the Imperial yoke held the Old Kingdom without strangling it. And yet how could I not be worried, when the monsters I rubbed elbows with lived by the same ideology? Malicia, Black, Captain, even Warlock – they all seemed so reasonable . They were Evil, certainly, but in a world where Evil would always exist having such a rational form of it in charge seemed like the best possible outcome. I had arrived at that conclusion just as rationally, but on an instinctive level I found it deeply repugnant that the best outcome in anything could be the subjugation of my people to foreign nobility that openly considered Callowans little better than cattle. There were no easy solutions for me, no magical fixes that would see everything end happily ever after.

How strange, that I had turned from a girl who didn’t believe in stories into a villain living through one.

It didn’t matter, in the end. I was committed. My choices had been made. I’d sold what little soul I had to barter with for a sword and the right to use it to hack Creation into something that suited me better. The Lone Swordsman thought he was freeing Callow, but all he’d accomplished was the making of a few corpses and the waving of old banners. Change, real change, had to be carved into the very institutions that held nations together. Anything else would just crumble in the span of a lifespan, when the individual who’d managed it by sheer force of personality died. I had studied the defeats and triumphs of the Empire and learned this: to change Creation, it was not enough to simply kill the parts of it that oppose you. You could rage at the tide for your whole life, the way so many Dread Emperors and Empresses had, but no amount of flying fortresses and ancient ascension rituals were going to earn a lasting victory.

For over a millennium Praes had unsuccessfully attempted to invade the Kingdom through mad and vainglorious plans but they had all come to naught, because the reality had been that Callow’s armies were stronger than the Empire’s.

My teacher had won because he’d recognized that fact and then changed the Legions into something reflecting the outcome he’d desired. No armada of gargoyles, no child sacrifice-powered landships, just the patient labour of true reform. If I wanted Callow safe and prosperous, it was that same kind of work I needed to get done. Anything else and I’d just be William’s villainous mirror, raging at a status quo and uselessly attempting to topple it one corpse at a time. Just thinking of it was enough to send a fresh wave of rage through me. What did the Swordsman think he would accomplish by this? Holding an entire city hostage to kill a single man. Over fifty thousand lives risked on a gambit that wouldn’t even win the war, just broaden it. I’d not turned a hero loose so much as a plague.

I continued to stew in my thoughts as we turned a corner, but the sound of fighting up ahead brought me sharply back to the there and now. The street in front of us narrowed near the head and my legionaries had put up a barricade there, sharp wooden sudis and requisitioned chariots blocking it all but for a slim way in. There should have been legionaries with crossbows posted right behind it, but there was no sign of them. It was easy to see why: someone had forced their way through a chariot with brute force, splitting it in half and engaging the soldiers up close. Without a word I unsheathed my sword and brought up my shield, picking up the pace until I overtook Masego.

“Names up ahead,” Apprentice spoke, tone relieved. Understandable: if they were here, killing my men, they weren’t going after his father’s head. “Two of them. Our friends from earlier, if we’re lucky.”

Luck was for people without Roles, I thought. Our lives were signed away to coincidence the moment we claimed our power.

“Focus on the Conjurer,” I ordered. “Hakram, we’re taking out Hunter. Fast, before he can do more damage.”

“Aye,” my adjutant growled. “Let’s even the score a little further.”

We made through the destroyed barricade at a run, passing a handful of legionary corpses as we did – most of them had spear wounds, though at least one had been partly incinerated. Funny how the aftermath of combat magic was horrifying no matter whether it was a hero or a villain who’d used it. There was no good way to die, but I’d always thought that mage fire was a particularly bad way to go. What must have been two full lines had been whittled down to a little above twenty legionaries when we interrupted the melee. Hunter was whirling among them, deftly slapping down shields and puncturing throats, while the four remaining Callowan soldiers had formed a loose wedge around Conjurer to protect him while he casted. The mage hero was the closest to us, and the first to notice we’d arrived.

“ Hunter ,” he screamed, voice going up several octaves in panic. “The Squire caught up!”

Masego hissed out an incantation and stomped the ground, the street’s pavestones rippling like water until they turned into a wave that toppled the Conjurer and scattered his escort like rag dolls. Someone was done fucking around, apparently. My soldiers yelled triumphantly at the sight of my arrival, a few cries of “Fifteenth, Fifteenth!” ringing as they threw themselves at Hunter with renewed vigour. Hakram and I pushed forward, ignoring the Conjurer – my adjutant slowed to calmly plunge his sword through the eye socket of a fallen enemy soldier before catching up, the two of us impacting the hero at the same time. Taking two shields to the chest wasn’t enough to knock him down: he rolled with the force, flipping and landing on his feet as he slapped down the shaft towards my neck.

My shield forced back the spear but it didn’t slow him down. Hunter took a quick bound to the side, circling around Hakram and ramming his weapon into my adjutant’s foot. Whatever his spear’s head was made of, though, it wasn’t sharp enough to punch through steel plate: all the hero got to show for his strike was the grinding sound of metal on metal. A legionary came from behind and forced him towards us with a strike aimed at his back, failing to draw blood but succeeding in putting him off balance. Just the kind of opening I’d been hoping for. Hunter ducked under my arming sword’s swing but I came back to slam the pommel of my sword on the top of his head. He groaned in pain and for his troubles I landed an armoured kick straight onto his abdomen, feeling a rib give.

On a regular opponent that would have earned me the time to place a killing blow, but heroes were made of sterner stuff – he twirled on himself, the bottom of his spear landing a blow on my leg that knocked me off balance. With a curse I dropped to one knee, but my countless hours of training had not been wasted. When the tip of the spear came for my throat my shield was already up. Hakram growled and pushed him back, following the shield bash with a quick thrust to the exposed stomach. He scored blood but the wound was shallow and the hero’s retaliation brutal: both hands gripping the spear, he rammed the wood into my officer’s nose. Hakram rocked back with a roar and the smooth thrust that came a moment later would have passed through the roof of his mouth if I hadn’t slapped it down with my sword at the last moment. When you back a hero into a corner , Black’s voice reminded me, do not under any circumstances let the fight drag on. The more desperate the situation, the more dangerous they become.

“Steady, adjutant,” I spoke. “Steady and careful.”

“It’s like trying to strange an eel,” the orc cursed, but he backed away and moved to flank our opponent.

“Cohm a’ me, foos,” Hunter laughed, twirling his spear flashily.

There was a joke in there, but this was neither the time nor the place. Before I could get back on the offensive, Masego yelled out a warning from behind us – I ducked just in time to avoid the Conjurer floating through the air and screaming at the top of his lungs, the pale hairy legs revealed by the earlier cut robes twitching like a dying spider’s. Less amusingly, one of his eyes and the same cheek had turned into a black, shrivelled mess. Yeah, Apprentice isn’t pulling his punches anymore. He landed right in the middle of my legionaries and then whatever spell was holding him blew, a blast of transparent sorcery smacking them away with a sound like a thunderclap. Unfortunately for Hunter, the edge of that detonation caught him. He took a half-step forward, somehow managing to stay on his feet, but I was already moving.

My blade flashed as it came for his neck, and though he brought up his hand to shield it I cut straight through the bone. Blood sprayed everywhere as it flopped lifelessly to the ground, splashing my face, but through squinting eyes I adjusted my aim and prepared to finish the job. There were only so many hands he could sacrifice to save his neck, and his stock was fast running out.

The only warning I got was an itch between my shoulder blades.

I hesitated for a heartbeat, almost deciding to finish Hunter anyway, and then began to turn. It saved my life: the arrow punched through the plate less than an inch away from the spine. I bit down on a scream as a cloaked figure on a rooftop across the street calmly notched another arrow.

“APPRENTICE,” I howled. “ARCHER ON THE ROOF.”

A heartbeat later a fireball exploded just short of the newcomer but it wasn’t Masego’s work: my legionaries had finally caught up to us and Kilian’s mages deployed behind the shields of half her line with grim professionalism, the Senior Mage herself flinging a bolt of lightning that knocked the archer off the roof and into an alley. Out of sight for now, but I wouldn’t bet on that being the last I’d see of them. There was, I noted, no sign of Robber and his sappers. Had they taken another route? Weeping Heavens, Robber, now isn’t the time to get fancy on me. I pushed down the surge of relief I felt at the appearance of my reinforcements. The Swordsman wouldn’t have sent only one person to pick up his waylaid lackeys. I was proved unpleasantly right when a short-haired woman in leather armour jumped off another roof onto Hakram’s back. The tall orc managed to catch her hand before she placed a dagger into his neck, but he had to drop his sword for it.

I’d barely taken a step in their direction when two dozen soldiers armed with swords and shields of the same make as those we’d fought inside the palace charged out of cover, taking the barricade legionaries flatfooted. They were facing the other way and some of them had just gotten back on their feet from the Conjurer’s aggressively harmful brand of failure. Shit. I just needed to kill Hunter and – I swung for the hero’s head, but it was already too late. A longsword parried the blow effortlessly and vivid green eyes stared me down.

“Squire,” the Lone Swordsman smiled unpleasantly. “I was hoping I’d run into you.”

I had something properly scathing on the tip of my tongue but before I could spit it out I was interrupted by the sound of a badly-strung lute going dun-dun-DUN . Both the Swordsman and I turned towards the source of it: on the same rooftop the leather girl had jumped from, the Wayward Bard was sitting dangling her feet off the ledge. She shrugged at our incredulous looks.

“I will not apologize for art , you Callowan hicks,” she declared proudly.

“Do you even have a weapon?” I asked in a pained voice.

She fished out a bottle of a bag at her side and popped the cork off without ever taking her other hand off the lute.

“I can dish out some pretty brutal putdowns if I feel like it,” she mused. “Does that count?”

It was a deeply disquieting thing to feel sympathy for the Lone Swordsman and I did not care for it. A triumphant shout behind me shook me out of the daze, an invisible force pulling the short-haired woman off Hakram that was likely Apprentice’s work. A sliver of cold went up my spine. While I’d been bantering my people had been fighting for their lives, dying. How could I have lost sight of that for even a moment? Gods. Just because she doesn’t have a sword doesn’t mean she’s not dangerous. All the heroes were accounted for, a voice in the back of my head noted. The Lone Swordsman, the Hunter, the Conjurer, the Bard and either the woman who’d shot me or the one who’d almost killed Hakram was a Thief of some sort . Well, this whole situation has gone to the deepest Hells in a hurry . Five Names to an optimistic two and a half was going to be butchery, even if my legionaries outnumbered the enemy.

Hunter wasn’t even out of the fight, to my dismay. He’d tied some cloth around his stump and though whatever portion of his body hadn’t been burned earlier was unhealthily pale he still stood, leaning heavily on his spear. He wouldn’t be as much of a threat, crippled as he was, but handling two heroes simultaneously was bound to be a rough business. William alone would be pain, though given the brutal fighting drills Captain had put me through I was confident I could handle him. I took a deep breath, steadied my stance and brought up my shield. The arrowhead wiggled painfully in my back but I forced a straight face through the dagger-like sting. If that bastard thought outmanning me in Names meant I was going to roll over and take it, he was in for an unpleasant surprise. I just needed to keep this party going for long enough for reinforcements to start piling up: Commander Hune was bound to have noticed one of the barricades had been attacked by now, and she should be mobilizing massive amounts of legionaries to come overwhelm the heroes.

“How are we doing, Hakram?” I called out.

“All my organs are still on the inside,” my adjutant replied. “I’ve had worse. I, er, don’t know if you’ve noticed, sir, but you got shot.”

“Happens more often than you’d think,” I replied through gritted teeth. “Try not to get yourself killed, Adjutant, I’m sure as Hells not handling the paperwork for this on my own.”

“Touching,” William sneered. “You have a pet. Thief, take care of that thing.”

“If our walking disaster manages to keep their mage busy, it should be doable,” the short-haired woman replied, tone amused. “You up for another round, big guy? I’ve still got an itch to scratch.”

“I’m not really comfortable with the slant you’re putting on this fight,” Hakram admitted, tone alarmed.

Hunter put an end to the banter by lunging for me. I ducked the spear thrust and spun around him, sweeping his feet with my own in a move Black had taught me. I didn’t even try to finish him off when he was down, the memory of the Swordsman’s unnatural swiftness still fresh in my mind even the better part of a year later. William, it seemed, was not particularly concerned by the Rule of Three: when his abomination of a sword came at me, it was headed for my neck. I cautiously stepped out of the blow’s path instead of blocking with my shield. The last time that thing had kissed goblin steel, the steel had been the thing to give way. It was one of the reasons I’d made such a point out of sparring with Captain, since only an idiot would try to block the gargantuan woman’s hammer. The reach was different and William was quicker with his strikes, but the underlying principles remained the same – I cautiously gave ground when the Swordsman pushed his attack, circling around to get a better angle.

“You’ve gotten better,” the hero noted. “But not quite good enough .”

His blade lit up like a star and he swung at me, the very air shrieking as a wave of blinding power tore in my direction. Too wide to dodge, I knew, so I hunkered behind my shield and took it head on. It was like getting kicked by a horse and swallowing a brightstick at the same time. The impact sent me flying, but that wasn’t the worst of it: it felt like I was... burning alive, like in the moment the power had hit me I’d been dropped in a bonfire that was just sentient enough to despise my very existence. I rasped out a breath from where I lay on the ground and scrabbled back to my feet, still half-blind and unsure how long had passed since I’d been hit.

A flicker at the edge of my vision told me Hunter was back and at it, clipping the edge of my shoulder pad with his spear but skimming off when I adjusted my stance. I tried to bash his face in but I couldn’t aim like this and struck nothing. Another flicker, this time from my left, and my shield was the only thing that prevented me losing an arm: William’s blade cut through the metal and nearly reached my fingers under it before he flicked the blade out with a flourish of the wrist. I could see them now, the both of them, my vision slowly returning. They approached me slowly but surely, taking their time in all their cocksure assurance that this was a done deal. That I was outmatched, hopelessly out of my league. They were right, of course. But we were far, far from done.

I smiled a devil’s smile and my Name howled , raging at the Struggle ahead of me.

“You wanna go, Swordsman?” I laughed, veins flooding with power. “ Let’s go, then .”

Chapter 10: Release

“Did you really think I wouldn’t cheat just because I was already winning?”
⁃ Dread Emperor Terribilis II

“Oh? Things are about to-” the Bard started, but I interrupted.

“ Shut up ,” I Spoke, and wasn’t watching her mouth snap shut the most satisfying thing I’d seen all week?

The heroine tried to open her mouth, struggling in vain against the compulsion. That should take care of that, at least for a little while. The Hunter charged for me again but he was moving so very slowly – I stepped around the spear into his guard and opened him up from belly to throat with a single cut, letting him fall with a scream behind me as I stepped towards William without missing a beat. In the background Apprentice and the Conjurer had begun their magical duel anew, lights and shaped elements flying back and forth as the hero steadily lost ground. Things turned sour for the twit even worse when Kilian’s mages started pitching in, a staggered flow of fireballs disrupting his casting and forcing him onto the defensive. They were adapting the rate of fire Legion doctrine taught to deal with dug in targets, barely a heartbeat passing between every strike. The mages would run out of juice in time, but hopefully by then Masego would have closed the deal. There were only so many times the Conjurer could bumble his way out of defeat: no Role could stave off death indefinitely.

Hakram was keeping his opponent at bay by the skin of his teeth, collecting cuts but no wounds of any great import. His training was playing against him here: he’d never been taught to fight as a Named and legionaries were expected to kill in properly ordered ranks. Duels weren’t taught in the War College, and that was one of the reasons the remnants of the barricade legionaries were getting mauled by enemy soldiers. That they’d been caught flat-footed and dispersed didn’t help, sure, but when it came down to it Callowan swordsmen were just better at fighting out of formation. In a contest of shield walls the Empire would win nine times out of ten, but chaotic melees were a poor fit for a stabbing short sword and unwieldy tower shield. Warriors against soldiers. They won’t last much longer. Didn’t matter: ultimately, all the other fights were sideshows. Black had always stressed that the place of a Named on the battlefield was to find the fulcrum, the tipping point, and then to yank that lever as hard as you could.

For tonight’s battle, there was no denying that the fulcrum was my duel with the Lone Swordsman.

“I think this one will go a little differently. I’m not half dead this time,” I told William, casting away the wreck of my shield.

The dark-haired man smiled. “Night’s still young,” he replied.

As someone who got into pissing contests with alarming regularity, I could admire a good line like that. As the Squire in charge of a city the bastard had been busy putting to the torch, I fully intended on making him eat the words along with a mouthful of dirt while I buried him alive. I raised my now-free hand and strands of shadow wove themselves around it, forming a wicked-looking spear. I tossed it at William with a grunt, aiming for his abdomen, but the green-eyed hero raised an insultingly skeptical eyebrow. His sword came down and slapped the projectile to the side, where it dug into the pavestones with a howl. I hadn’t figured out how to make it stop doing that yet. I wasted a heartbeat in surprise, though I really shouldn’t have. The spear trick might have been the most dangerous ranged option in my arsenal, but I’d already known William’s sword was far from a normal one. The whole keening sound whenever it cut someone was a bit of a giveaway. I pushed the thoughts away: Struggle would only raise me up for so long, and if I failed to get a definitive advantage before it was done then I’d be facing a full strength Lone Swordsman while exhausted. That way lay bad things, and not the kind of bad villains worked with. I focused on the power, let out a deep breath and moved .

The stone under my feet broke as I barrelled forward towards William. He met me with calm, measured precision. His stance perfect even by the exacting standards of my teacher, he pivoted to let me pass him and struck for the back of my neck. I ducked under it, momentum carrying me in a slide on the stone, and cut at his legs. Pointless, now that he’d traded his leather duster and chainmail for actual plate, but just the force of the blow was enough to throw off his stance. He took a single step back and adjusted so he was facing me as I stood back up. He waited with his sword raised, unhurried. I was the one with a time limit, he could afford to let me go on the offensive and wait for me to make a mistake. I grimaced. For all that I’d stated that this fight would be different than the last one, I’d never had a real confrontation with the Swordsman before. Taking him by surprise when half-dead didn’t count, and before that he’d trounced me effortlessly. Both our Roles were related to combat, but there was no denying that he was a better swordsman than I was a swordswoman. It’s in his bloody Name, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

I probed his guard, hoping for him to move, but he didn’t bite. Green eyes remained trained on me, that fucking little smile never leaving his face. My Name snarled at the sight of it and I let the power guide me, following the set of instincts that weren’t my own but not someone else’s. My arming sword came high, for his eyes, but he stepped into my guard and our forearms met. Sucker punching was usually what I would have gone for in a situation like that, but with his armour there was no point: I could hit hard and my gauntlets would add that little extra twist, but it wouldn’t be enough to damage good plate. Instead I grabbed the back of his head and smashed it into mine, the top of my helmet slamming into his forehead. For once being this short had come in handy. He grunted but pushed me away, slicing at my sword hand without pause – I dropped my sword and caught the handle with the other one, ramming the pommel into his stomach. It wasn’t enough: his fist caught me in the jaw and my teeth clattered together painfully. If he’d hit a moment later I might have bitten through my own tongue, I realized with a start.

I used the fear like the fuel it was, weaving my Name into a lesser trick: the blast of dark power erupting from my hand threw him back. Finally, a solid hit. I wasted no time in weaving a few strands into a proper spear that took him right in the chest as he was trying to get up. I’d seen that working punch through plate, but aside from knocking him back again it left him unharmed. Weeping Heavens, what would it take to actually hurt him? Face still serene, William rose and went on the offensive. The flat of my blade slapped the side of his in a display of dexterity that would have been beyond me if not for my Name, carefully avoiding for either blade to bite into the other. I flowed into a cut that would have torn through his forearm if he hadn’t kept pace, blade twirling and coming down on the top of my head. I felt the metal give but I mostly managed to step out of the blow, sweat pouring down my back. That had been close. Way, way too close. Another heartbeat and that screwed up sword of his would have hacked straight into my skull.

“I see you’re beginning to realize it,” William spoke calmly.

He didn’t sound like he was gloating or dramatizing, for once. In fact, the moment blades had come out he’d turned into an entirely different man, the frills of his personality falling away to leave only naked steel intent on killing me.

“The Bard was right,” he noted. “You have an aspect that serves as an equalizer.”

“I’d be a little more worried about that, if I were you,” I replied through gritted teeth.

I’d been taught to fight by some of the most dangerous people to ever grace Praes, and they had kept me sharp over the last year. I came for his head again, and there was nothing uncertain about it this time. He needed to die. For all of this to work, he needed to die . Darting back and forth around him, I put all the swiftness my Name granted me to work. The moment I stepped out of his field of vision I stepped into his dead angle and went for a crippling blow, but the Swordsman remained unfazed. He might as well have had eyes in the back of his head, given how easily he seemed to predict my movements.

“That’s the thing with Names, Squire,” he continued in that same even tone. “An equalizer can put you on even footing with me power-wise, but...”

He took a hand off his sword and caught my wrist with it a moment before my blade went through the back of his neck. I tried to blast him away but a flare of blinding power killed the manifestation of my Name before it could get anywhere.

“... but it doesn’t account for skill ,” he finished, and his blade dug deep into my shoulder.

The kick caught me in the stomach a moment later, sending me rolling on the stone with shoulder bleeding. I came to a stop on my back, the now-broken arrow I’d been shot with earlier seeking deeper into my body. I let out a hoarse cry and force myself to get up. Keep moving, keep fighting. Hune would have reinforcements coming, I just need to stay alive a little longer.

“You’re a decent swordswoman, for someone who can’t have been at it more than a year,” William admitted casually. “You even seem better at working your Name into the fight than I am.”

“I’d blush,” I gasped, raising my sword. “But I don’t think there’s enough blood left to spare.”

Heartbeat by heartbeat, my Name’s power bled out. And with it went the burst of energy I’d felt, the wall that had prevented me from feeling the pain in my body. My acrobatics had torn something in my leg and all the jumping had wiggled the arrowhead around enough that muscles had been cut into. My shoulder was a bloody mess, and with it went my sword arm. I traded hands with my sword, but I was painfully aware I was much sloppier with my left. Against an opponent of this calibre, I might as well have been waving a stick. Gods, I felt tired. My eyes wanted to close, to let me sink into a sleep where all the pain and throbbing would go away.

“This? This is what I do. I’ve been learning the sword since I could walk,” William said, smiling mirthlessly. “I am not a general, you see. I am not a politician or a scholar. I’m self-aware enough to know I’m not even particularly clever.”

It saddened me that I was too tired and sluggish to make something out of that.

“All I’m good for is swinging a sword, Squire,” the Lone Swordsman told me, “but sometimes, that’s all that’s needed.”

The blade rose, and a bolt of lightning struck him in the face.

“Would you shut up already?” Kilian snarled, strands of energy whirling around her.

William fell to the ground, body wracked with spasms as the redhead continued to pour power into the spell.

“Hakram,” she yelled. “Take care of this, she’s badly wounded.”

My vision was swimming but I recognized my adjutant’s silhouette ambling towards the Swordsman.

“Finish him,” I croaked. “Quick, before he recovers.”

Kilian laid a hand on my shoulder and whispered a few words, frowning when the wound failed to heal.

“I can’t do much more than stop the bleeding,” she told me.

“The sword,” I said. “It’s... wrong.”

“Preaching to the choir here,” she replied as she passed a hand wreathed in a green glow over my wound. “Just looking at it gives me a headache, there’s no way that thing is made of metal.”

She helped me back to my feet. With a rush of panic, I saw William was already on his, sidestepping Hakram’s blows effortlessly. Fucking Hells, what would it take to put the man down? I knew heroes were more durable than most, but this was ridiculous. I frowned as a thought suddenly struck me.

“If Hakram’s here, where’s the Thief?” I asked.

“She disappeared after he punched her in the face,” the redhead snorted. “I guess she’s not the fighting type.”

“So to speak,” an amused voice acknowledged from behind her.

The short-haired woman appeared out of thin air, dagger in hand aimed at Kilian’s back. No. I tried to push the redhead down but I knew before moving that I’d be too slow and no .

“None of that,” Masego growled, snapping a hand in our direction.

An invisible force yanked the Thief back in the air, her eyes widening in fear and surprise as she continued to gather speed until the spell threw her through the window of a house on the other side of the street. The bespectacled boy winked in my direction before contemptuously slapping aside a fireball sent in his direction by the Conjurer who was still, against all odds, standing. The patches of darkened skin had spread over most of his face by now, though his other eye remained untouched.

“Kilian, go back to your line,” I spoke urgently.

“I hear that,” she muttered, face pale.

Coming that close to death had a way of shaking people. Well, sane people anyway. The jury was still out on whether I qualified for that. She smiled at me and opened her mouth to speak, I followed her eyes and saw William casually rip up his sword, tearing his way through Hakram’s chest and taking a hand with it.

“ No ,” I screamed, already running. “Not Hakram, you son of a bitch.”

The Swordsman spared me a glance, face expressionless.

“Let’s get this over with,” he spoke.

He should have known better by now. The chariot barrelled through the sky at breakneck speeds, the two pitch-black winged horses pulling it running the hero over with almost inappropriate enthusiasm. The wooden wheels creaked as they rolled over him, breaking bones, and Warlock put down the reins casually, pulling at his gloves.

“Well,” the Sovereign of the Red Skies said, “this is a mess. It used to be such a nice city and now there’s blood everywhere. Think of the resale value, children.”

“You’re late,” I called out, relief slumping my shoulders.

The older Soninke raised an eyebrow. “There was this-” he paused as Conjurer sent a column of fire in his direction.

With a put-on sigh he wiggled his hand and the spell redirected to his left, looping behind him and coming out as a flock of crows made of fire. They lost none of their momentum and flew to the other side of the street, where they caught Thief in the chest as she crawled out of the house’s wreckage. The explosion threw her back out of sight.

“Fire,” Warlock finished. “Just a moment, Catherine.”

Conjurer was already casting, but the Calamity lazily pointed a finger in his direction.

“Boom,” was all he said.

A perfectly symmetrical charred hole appeared in the middle of the hero’s forehead, and a heartbeat later his skull imploded. A shiver of dread went up my spine when the body dropped and I saw that the house behind the Conjurer was also a burning wreck.

“Now,” Warlock said calmly. “Who’s the rapscallion responsible for all this arson?”

The chariot flipped over, the Calamity almost losing his footing before landing on his feet and brushing away a few flecks of ash.

“That would be me,” William grunted. “Finally, villain, you crawl out of your hole.”

“Mind your manners, boy,” the dark-skinned man replied. “It will do wonders for your life expectancy.”

The Lone Swordsman smiled. “You should worry more about yours. Now! ”

He brought down his hand in a sharp gesture. I started moving towards them, but nothing happened.

“Was that a bluff?” I asked as I slowed down, a little puzzled. “Because we’re pretty much past that phase of the fight.”

A shape emerged from one of the rooftops. Not a human, I saw. One goblin, drenched in blood from head to toe.

“Boss,” Robber saluted. “Sorry for the wait, ran into some shady Thieves’ Guild folks. Lots of bows, skulking around rooftops, you know the type. I’m happy to report we stabbed everything until it stopped moving, just like you taught us!”

“I didn’t teach you that,” I replied automatically. “Don’t implicate me in your future crimes.”

William’s face dropped, as well it should. Hunter was a gory mess on the ground, and while I suspected he might not be entirely dead he was done for the night. Conjurer had just been served the Calamity special and Thief had just taken a second hit in the face. The Bard was – my eyes turned to the rooftop where she’d been, finding it empty. Oh, that could be trouble. Regardless, the enemy soldiers had killed through the rest of the barricade legionaries only to get wrecked by Kilian’s line, if the scorch marks were any indication. The amount of casualties left a foul taste in my mouth but it could have been much, much worse.

“Doesn’t matter,” the Lone Swordsman finally said. “Maybe it was always supposed to be this way. Just me and the monster.”

“You’re about forty years too early to take a crack at me, boy,” Warlock sighed. “For one, an older hero would have known not to give me all this time to cast.”

He snapped his fingers and William flipped, something dragging him up by his feet. He snarled and his sword lit up, but Warlock frowned and the glow winked out.

“A nasty piece of work,” the Calamity acknowledged as he levitated it away from the hero’s grasp “but I’ve handled nastier.”

“Permission to make a joke about your sex life, sir?” Robber called out.

“Denied,” I interrupted.

The Soninke cast an amused look at my tribune before turning his attention to me.

“You’ll have to kill him yourself, of course,” he said, “but there’s no reason we can’t put him on ice until we can arrange that in a more controlled setting.”

“Nah, that’s not gonna happen,” a voice called out.

The Wandering Bard sauntered onto the scene, undaunted by the fact that my legionaries immediately formed a circle around her. Warlock frowned.

“A Bard,” he spoke with distaste. “By far the most irritating type of Name ever inflicted upon us by Creation.” He paused. “On the other hand, I have been meaning to dissect one of those. I thank you for the sacrifice you’ve volunteered to undertake on behalf of the Empire.”

“That got personal really quickly,” Almorava announced. “But as I was saying, we’re totally going to escape. We got our asses kicked, so William needs to go all brooding for a while so he can pull his shit together before the third fight and lead our little band of misfits to a last minute victory.”

I opened my mouth but she raised a hand.

“I get it, things aren’t ideal what with Conjurer having gone all esplody and Hunter doing his best imitation of a pile of fresh pork chops. But come on, any team with a woman as outrageously beautiful as me on it is basically mandated by the Heavens to win.”

“The only thing outrageous about you is the size of that nose,” I muttered.

The Bard gasped. “That actually hurt my feelings a little,” she admitted. “Now I don’t even feel guilty for threatening you guys.”

Warlock drummed his fingers against his leg impatiently. “Do get on with it. Exactly why shouldn’t I put you in a block of ice and have Masego buy a very reliable set of gags?”

“Right,” the Bard said, shaking herself. “So when that whole tower ward went down, I took whatever power you didn’t sink into you and shoved it in a bottle. Think sharper multiplied by about a thousand.”

She fished a bottle out of her knapsack and presented it triumphantly. I squinted.

“That’s a half-empty bottle of rum,” I told her.

Apparently my waitressing days could come in useful, who knew?

“That’s embarrassing,” Almorava admitted, not looking in the least embarrassed. She took out another bottle, this one emitting an ominous blue glow.

Shit. She hadn’t been lying. Warlock cocked his head to the side.

“Are you trying to bluff me with a bottle full of common Callowan sprites?” he asked incredulously.

The Bard cursed. “All right,” she replied. “So that could have gone better. I’ll admit, the plan still has some kinks to work out. But that’s okay! I was just a distraction.”

The arrow took Warlock in the shoulder. The Calamity barely blinked before turning in the direction it had come from – before I could even see what was there, half the rooftop was on fire. A single silhouette fell off, trying to smother the flames. A handful of smokers blew around William, but by the time Masego dispersed the smoke with a gust of wind there was no trace of the Lone Swordsman. I didn’t even bother looking for the Bard: she would have disappeared the moment we’d stopped looking at her. It was my turn to curse.

“Mages, see to the wounded,” I called out. “The rest of you, secure the archer. And someone check if the Hunter’s still alive.”

They snapped to it. I headed for Hakram immediately, pleased to see Masego was already taking care of him. The orc looked paler than usual, and it was disturbing to see an orc his size looking so... frail.

“You’ll be all right, Hakram,” I spoke, kneeling next to him. “You’re in no danger of dying.”

“Well,” my adjutant replied, “I suppose my clapping days are over. Good thing I was never much of a theatre enthusiast.”

I nearly jumped out of my skin when a hand came to rest on my shoulder. It was Warlock. The touch made me uncomfortable, but after he’d pulled our asses out of the fire I suppose I should grit my teeth and take it without comment.

“We won’t be able to reattach the hand, child,” the Calamity said. “Things cut by that sword remain so, as your leader well knows.”

I absently traced the length of the long scar across my chest hidden by my armour. A good thing I’d never been particularly vain about my looks, as it was pretty disfiguring.

“That said,” Warlock spoke with an interested glint in his eye, absently ripping the arrow out of his shoulder, “some interesting discoveries have been made in the area of magical prosthesis, these last few years.”

A real grin split my adjutant’s face.

“I’m listening,” he said.

Chapter 11: Report

“Note: those meddling heroes keep surviving getting thrown off cliffs. Must build taller ones in anticipation of the next encounter.”
– Extract from the journal of Dread Emperor Malignant II

There was something morbidly fascinating about watching Hakram’s new hand move.

The naked bones were just as dextrous as when they’d been hidden under my adjutant’s flesh and muscle, though they were now animated by necromancy instead of more natural means. He got no sensation from the skeleton hand, he’d told me, though he could roughly gauge how much pressure he was putting on something when holding it. I could feel the threads of magic that kept it moving according to his will, feel how they dug into his body and used his soul as fuel to maintain the enchantment. I was fairly sure I could tie my own threads to puppet the bones if I tried, which meant any decent necromancer could likely do the same. Not a great worry considering not even antiheroes like the Swordsman would be caught dead with anyone that dealt with the dead, but somewhere down the line Heiress might get it into her head to pull something. I’d have to ask Apprentice if anything could be done about it. Hakram followed closely behind me as we strode through the main avenue of the Fifteenth’s camp, absent-mindedly returning salutes from legionaries as we did so.

“A whole company,” I finally sighed. “And that’s just the ones we caught.”

The tall orc grimaced. “A sad day when we lose more legionaries to desertion than a run-in with heroes.”

When the dust had settled, Juniper had slapped down a report on my desk that had taken the taste of victory, however slight, right out of my mouth. While the soldiers under Commander Hune had been keeping the city from exploding into revolt, almost two companies’ worth of Callowan recruits had taken advantage of the chaos to escape into the countryside. Nauk had kept a lid on the situation as best he could and his patrols had managed to corral about half of the deserters into a prisoner camp, but the aftermath of that mess was a logistical nightmare. Juniper and I had made a point out of spreading out my countrymen across as many lines as possible to avoid the formation of Praesi and Callowan cliques in the ranks, That measure had failed spectacularly and now half the lines in Nauk’s kabili were missing one or two recruits, forcing a never-ending nightmare of transfers to fill the gaps. That we were adjusting our ranks and the most basic unit level right before heading into an active theatre of war had both Juniper and I in a dark mood: we couldn’t linger in Summerholm much longer, but neither could we go tangle with the rebels half-cocked.

The last news had the Silver Spears digging deep into General Istrid’s supply line until Captain and the Blackguards drove them off. Countess Marchford had intensified skirmishes all over the front, sending packs of barely-armed peasant conscripts to burn the fields between Vale and the Legions of Terror to deny General Sacker foraging when she advanced. The Empire wasn’t losing by any stretch of the situation – if anything, that the Countess had seen fit to burn some of the best farmland in Callow proved that much – but neither was it winning . And the longer the rebels were loose, the further talk of revolt would spread. Black knew that better than I, so I had no idea why he’d yet to pull away another pair of legions from border duty to flank the enemy. There must have been angles at play I couldn’t see. Regardless, the Fifteenth needed to get into the fight yesterday and all the fucking deserters were costing me time. The only upside to this I could see was that all our Callowan recruits who intended to pull a runner likely already had. That a full fifth of my countrymen’s numbers in the Fifteenth had tried to disappear into the wilds at the first occasion was incredibly galling, but in some ways I should have expected it. The overwhelming majority of the deserters had been gallows recruits, criminals given a choice between the noose and five years of service in the Legions.

Which also meant that there were about one hundred hardened criminals with legionary training loose in western Callow, but for now that wasn’t my problem. General Afolabi was the one who’d have to keep the region together after we joined the front and I wished him luck with the task. He’d been dropping hints for the last few days that the Fifteenth’s presence in Summerholm was disruptive to civil order, and while he wasn’t wrong it still irritated me that after I’d pulled his ass out of the fire the Soninke was trying to shoo me away. Juniper warned me that by acting this high-handed I wouldn’t be making any friends. Fuck it, if he couldn’t deal with me taking charge to put an end to the mess he’d allowed to fester I would likely had ended up making an enemy out of him down the line. He was near the bottom of the pecking order when it came to the Empire’s generals, anyway: he was the most junior among them and one of the least trusted by the Tower.

“It’s a risk, Catherine,” my adjutant gravelled. “I won’t deny if it works they’ll be useful, but if it fails...”

“It’ll hurt my credibility with the ranks,” I acknowledged sourly.

My age had been surprisingly little of an issue when it came getting my authority respected: I supposed I had centuries of young heroes and villains leading armies to thank for that. Besides, according to the census I’d had taken there was not a single of my legionaries older than twenty-five. Which was troubling, in and of itself. Not so much that I had no veterans to advise me, though Juniper had expressed private misgivings about that, but that if I’d been able to arrange this as it currently was I would have. This would not be the last war I’d be involved in, and having the core of the Fifteenth following me from the beginning of my career would only encourage them to obey my own orders over those of the Tower further down the line. Once again, Black knew this. And yet he had arranged it. More than that, nearly half my soldiers were from Callow. My teacher was making this easy on me, and he wasn’t in the habit of giving me unnecessary advantages.

If anything, he was a firm believer in hobbling me so I’d learn to deal with problems from a position of weakness. So what’s your game, oh teacher of mine? No point in thinking too long about it right now. Black’s mind was a labyrinth of vicious cleverness on the best of days. Besides, for all that the deck had been stacked in my favour when it came down to it I had yet to acquire the trust of the rank and file of the Fifteenth. My age and lack of experience might not have been divisive issues but my birth certainly was. Even having a Name and the tutelage of a Calamity could only get me so far. If I screwed up, if I made an obvious mistake that could be attributed to Callowan sympathies... That concern had made deciding the fate of those one hundred imprisoned deserters a godsdamned thorn in my side. Juniper had argued for crucifying the lot of them and putting them up on the ramparts of Summerholm as a warning for the rest, but that wouldn’t solve anything.

I was also, to be frank, a lot less sanguine than my Legate at the idea of casually ordering a hundred gruesome deaths. And yet, I couldn’t just reintegrate them in the ranks. There was no guarantee they wouldn’t run again given the chance and I’d have a mutiny on my hands if they got off without punishment. Besides, there was a difference between not wanting the lot to die a brutal death spread over several days and wanting them to get off easy. I had little sympathy for the bastards: while the rest of my soldiers had been doing their jobs and dying in the line of duty they’d tried to flee . The cowardice was revolting, regardless of the circumstances of their enrolment.

I was still in a foul mood when we arrived at the open clearing where the deserters had been herded, forced to kneel and surrounded by twice their number in loyal legionaries. They’d been disarmed and divested of their armour, of course. No point in taking unnecessary risks. I strode past them towards the wooden crate my adjutant had installed in anticipation my address, the both of us ignoring the whispers of “Deadhand” that spread when Hakram was recognized. The orc had acquired something of a reputation, by surviving a fight against not one but two heroes with only a lost hand to show for it. I climbed on top of the crate, resenting the absurdity of it but painfully aware that even kneeling some of the prisoners reached up to my chin.

“Silence,” I ordered, and the whispers were snatched right out of their mouths.

I resisted the urge to clear my throat, taking a deep breath. Black’s lesson on pitching my voice so it could carry far without being a yell had seemed an affectation at the time, but I was glad of them now.

“Military tribunals were convened last night and sentences have been given,” I announced.

It felt strange, standing in front of over two hundred people decked out in plate and wreathed in the dark cloak my teacher had gifted me. I felt like a fake, like the fact that I’d been so often making it up as I went along should have been obvious to everyone, but my gaze swept over the prisoners and I saw only fear on their faces. There was something darkly satisfying about that, much as the feeling unsettled me.

“For desertion, low treason and dereliction of duty while the Empire is in a state of war, you have all been condemned to death,” I said.

There were a few cries of dismay and some prisoners tried to get up. My temper flared.

“ Sit the Hells down ,” I Spoke, and my voice rang like steel.

As if they’d been struck, the deserters fell back to the ground. So did quite a few of my legionaries, I noted, though since they’d not been the people I addressed the effect of the Speaking on them was much weaker.

“I have been urged to make examples of you,” I growled. “To put you up on a hundred crosses as a warning for the next fools tempted to run.”

I mastered my irritation and let out a deep breath.

“But that would be a waste. You owe military service to the Tower and I fully intend to collect.”

Confusion and a little hope, but most were just wary. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. As well they should. It had occurred to me, eventually, that I was trying to solve a Callowan problem through Praesi means. It was the wrong set of tools for the job. The Kingdom of Callow had its own military traditions, more than just the now-disbanded knightly orders. My girlhood hero Elizabeth Alban, the Queen of Blades, had tried to invade the Duchy of Daoine once – though back then it had been an independent kingdom. Well aware that the Watch would inevitably make a butchery of whatever troops she sent in to breach their strongholds, she’d founded a new division in the Callowan host: the Forlorn Hope. Criminals, traitors, deserters – she’d conscripted all the scum at the bottom of the barrel, armed them and sent them first into the grinder at every occasion. Using the worst of the Kingdom to do the Kingdom’s best work , she’d famously called it. And now here I was, with hard battles ahead of me and a full company of deserters. There were lessons to be learned from the past, if one was willing to look in the right places.

“As of this morning, the Forlorn Hope company has been added to the rolls of the Fifteenth. Congratulations on your reenrolment in the Legions of Terror,” I announced. I paused, eyes sweeping across the crowd. “I see some of you are rejoicing. Wipe that smile off of your faces. Make no mistake, deserters: this is not a mercy. I own you now.”

The words rolled off my tongue easily, coming unprompted now.

“Lawfully you are a dead men and women, all of you. The manner and time of your death is at my discretion, and I intend to use you sorely before letting you go.”

I allowed a hard smile to stretch my lips.

“Your officers will be Praesi, as they have refrained from disgracing themselves. Their authority over you is absolute: they’ve been granted the power to carry out your sentence at any time, for any reason they see fit.”

That had been the hardest part to implement. Obviously I couldn’t use Callowan officers, but finding volunteers to lead soldiers likely to slip a knife in your ribs if they got a chance had been... tricky. Ultimately Juniper had agreed that any officer serving in the Forlorn Hope would get a promotion out of the company after a fixed duration of service. Ambition was not a quality my legionaries lacked, especially those who’d gone through the College. There’d have to be oversight to make sure that unprecedented amount of power of their soldiers wouldn’t be abused, but mentioning as much right now would have been counter-productive to my goals. I needed them scared. But not desperate. If they thought they had nothing to lose, there’d be no telling what they’d do to get out.

“Your situation is not, however, entirely hopeless,” I continued. “Should you serve out the remaining years of your term without incident, you will be released and your record wiped clean.”

I stared the prisoners down, feeling my Name simmer in approbation under my skin.

“You want to be free? Earn it .”

I let the silence that followed my last words remain for a moment, weighing down on them, then sighed.

“Dismissed,” I finished.

The guards set to the chore of bringing back the prisoners to their separate camp as I stepped down from my crate, taking Hakram’s offered hand. The live one, because I wasn’t touching that other one without a damned good reason.

“We’ll need to hurry if we don’t want to be late,” my adjutant reminded me.

“Time to face the music, huh?” I grunted.

It’d been a while since I’d seen my teacher anyway.

—

It was utterly bizarre to stand by a Miezan-style open bath while in full armour, but not as strange as watching a Calamity putter around the cold waters while lighting candles.

Not normal ones, I noted. They were little carved figurines of obsidian covered in runes, and while I could see no wick they were nonetheless burning. I almost asked Masego but he was watching his father work quite intently: apparently he’d never attempted a scrying spell of this particular breed before. Warlock had taken the opportunity of turning our report to Black into a lesson for his son, which was rather thoughtful of him. Hakram shuffled uneasily behind me, nervousness easy to read even on his inhuman face. It was about the teeth, with the orcs: showing the lower part of their fangs without going up to the tips was a sign of agitation, apparently. Or so Captain had told me, and after all those years of working with orcs I figured she’d know. My adjutant had never met Black in person, even back in Ater. That he was now doing so after the entire Comital Palace had been turned into a smoking wreck probably wasn’t helping his nerves. The four city blocs surrounding the western bastion had gone the same way, but thankfully Hune’s legionaries had evacuated them in time. There was a little more to it than that, of course: the Black Knight was a big deal, to most orcs. A living legend, even, to those who’d been born after the Conquest and the Reforms. I supposed it wasn’t unlike if I’d been able to meet Eleonore Fairfax or Jehan the Wise, had they still alive.

“It will do,” Warlock suddenly announced, rising back to his feet and tidying up his robes.

I eyed the circle of candles surrounding the water sceptically.

“I thought the reason most two-way scrying has those little pebbles at the bottom of the bowls was so there’s a sympathetic link to ground the spell in? How does this one even work?”

The Soninke raised an eyebrow.

“Do you have a few days for me to grant you a layman’s understanding of metaphysical sympathetic effects?” he asked drily.

“Probably not,” I admitted.

“Then take my word for it,” the still ridiculously handsome older man replied. “Masego, did you commit the pattern to memory?”

“The escapement seems a little weak to me,” the bespectacled boy muttered. “I’d have to write down to formula to grasp how it actually works, but reproducing it shouldn’t be a problem.”

Warlock clicked his tongue against the top of his mouth.

“What do we say about blind imitation, Masego?” he prompted.

Apprentice rolled his eyes. “Sorcery without understanding is a sword without a handle,” he dutifully quoted. “I don’t know why you’re so fond of that saying, Father, you wouldn’t be caught dead using an actual sword.”

Warlock looked aghast at the very idea. “Only plebs kill with their own hands,” he asserted, remembering Hakram and I were still in the room only a moment latter. “No offense,” he added, not bothering to inject a great deal of credibility in the appeasement.

“Some taken,” I replied honestly.

Masego snorted. His father ignored me and waved a hand, muttering under his breath. The waters rippled, then lit up with an unearthly glow. My teacher’s silhouette appeared on the surface, seated by a table and – why wasn’t I surprised? – a cup of wine in hand. It was barely Noon Bell! Praesi drinking habits were downright unwholesome.

“I can’t believe you fell for that goblinfire trick, Wekesa,” Back spoke amusedly. “We used the exact same one to flush out the Grey Wizard.”

Warlock sneered. “If Afolabi, your general, had kept a closer eye on his stocks it wouldn’t have been an issue. Besides, I’m not the one who toppled Stygia’s government while drunk as a lord.”

Black threw up his hands in exasperation. “Are you ever going to let that one go?” he replied in irrigation. “I got a jug of wine when we traded the donkey, was else was I supposed to do with it? I swear, you’re worse with that than Sabah is with the whole dragon affair.”

“She’s right to hold it over your head,” the other Calamity replied with a twitch of the lips. “It was sizing her up for dinner while you haggled over terms.”

“It was asking for an absurd amount of goats and you know it,” the green-eyed man replied peevishly.

While in my case regular meals in the company of Black and Captain had long disabused me of the notion that living legends were above petty bickering, if the stunned look on Hakram’s face was any indication it was a fresh revelation for the orc. I cleared my throat.

“While I’d like to revisit why the Empire would be meddling in one of the Free Cities’ internal affairs at some point in the future,” I noted, “I think there might be more pressing matters at hand.”

And just like that, all traces of amusement slid off the two men’s faces. I’d seen it happen in my teacher before, but witnessing the same on a man as amiable as Warlock was a little unsettling.

“Catherine,” Black finally bothered to greet me. “I hear you’ve managed to get the Summerholm situation under control.”

“Hello to you too, Uncle Amadeus,” Apprentice interrupted, tone a little irked.

“Don’t be a brat, Masego,” the dark-haired man replied lazily. “The greeting was implied. The same goes for your adjutant, Catherine.”

Green eyes turned to Hakram, too considering to be anything close to friendly.

“Hakram Deadhand,” he murmured. “Catchy, that. If the story spreads it will accelerate your growth into your Name.”

“Sir,” the orc replied stiffly, saluting out of reflex.

I winced in embarrassment for him.

“At ease, Adjutant,” my teacher replied, kind enough not to voice the amusement I suspected he felt. “This is not an official debriefing; we’re merely sharing information. Scribe tells me the Fifteenth managed to take one of the heroes prisoner.”

The last sentence was inflected to sound like a question, though everybody in the room knew it wasn’t. It was one of Black’s more irritating habits to leave sentences hanging as an invitation to elaborate instead of actually asking a question – he did it all the times when we had our evening lessons.

“The Hunter,” I grunted. “He survived the wounds only barely, he’s been kept in enchanted sleep ever since.”

Green eyes turned to Warlock and his eyebrow arched.

“He’s from Refuge, I’ve confirmed it,” the older Soninke said and I blinked in surprise.

That was news to me . Wasn’t Refuge ruled by Ranger? It was an independent polity, sure, but the few times the subject of the other Calamity had come up she’d always been spoken of fondly. That didn’t really mesh with heroes trickling into the Empire from there, unless there was a plan in the works.

“One of Hye’s pupils,” the Knight grimaced. “That’s going to be a mess. Malicia will insist on diplomatic sanctions.”

“I’m sorry, did I miss something here?” I broke in incredulously. “Because the implication seems to be that a fairly notorious villain was a hero’s teacher.”

Warlock graced me with an amused look, Black leaned back in his seat.

“Calling Ranger a villain is something of a stretch,” my own teacher finally said. “She’s not particularly concerned with matters of Good and Evil. Mostly, she does what she feels like doing. We can discuss it more later, Catherine – it’s a somewhat complicated issue.”

The other Calamity smirked. “You can say that again.”

Black’s eyes turned cold, for a heartbeat. “Glass houses, Wekesa,” he simply said, and Warlock looked abashed for a moment before they smoothly changed the subject.

“You’ll need to bring him with you when you join us south,” the pale-skinned Named informed me.

I frowned. “That seems like a recipe for a heroic rescue,” I told him bluntly.

“The Swordsman lost,” Masego disagreed quietly. “You’ll have free hand for at least a month.”

Black nodded in approval. “By that time we’ll have gotten word back from Refuge and found out whether he’s been disavowed or not. If so, summary execution. As a matter of fact, if he somehow manages to wake up and attempt an escape you’re free to deal with him however you wish. There’s limits to our forbearance, even with old friends.”

“And if he hasn’t been disavowed?” I asked.

Black’s smile was perfectly pleasant, and all the more frightening for it.

“Then things will get interesting,” was all he said.

“We haven’t identified the other prisoner yet,” Masego contributed when it became obvious the subject was closed. “We’ve managed to heal the burns enough to ascertain she’s Deoraithe, but she’s yet to regain consciousness.”

“I might have been a little heavy-handed,” Warlock idly admitted. “I forget how fragile people without Names can be.”

Black drained the rest of his cup, then set it aside. “Is she from the Watch? Sacker says they’ve been quiet, but sometimes they slip between the cracks.”

“I was waiting on your approval for that,” the Soninke replied. “The procedure always has risks, as you well know.”

“See if you can get anything out of her when she wakes up,” Black ordered. “If not, go ahead with it. And do a bloodline ritual, just in case.”

Warlock grinned. “Not going to get on my case for summoning those nasty, nasty devils?” he teased.

“I’m enough of a general to know a lost battle when I see one,” the Knight replied sourly.

“So you can learn,” Warlock mused. “I take it you need the room for the next part of this conversation?”

“If you would,” my teacher agreed. “I’ll be in touch later this evening regardless.”

The dark-skinned nodded, putting his hand over his son’s shoulder.

“Come, Masego,” he announced carelessly. “The unwashed masses have business to discuss.”

“That’s funny,” Apprentice mused, “you know, considering we’re in a-“

The voices faded abruptly as they passed the room’s threshold, like they’d been swallowed up. A protective ward. Hadn’t even noticed it. I still couldn’t, even now that I knew it was here, and that bothered me more than a little bit. I knew there were few mages of Warlock’s calibre out there, but there were some. A liability to look into, when I next found the time. Hakram made to follow the mages but my teacher spoke up.

“Stay, Adjutant,” he ordered. “This concerns you more than Catherine.”

The sudden set of the orc’s jaw betrayed his concern, but overall he kept his face remarkably calm.

“Warlock’s professional opinion is that you’re less than a month away from coming into your Name, Hakram Deadhand,” Black announced conversationally. “Which means you need to be made aware of the broader concerns regarding it.”

“There’s going to be pushback,” the orc gravelled. “From the more conservative elements in the Empire.”

“Pushback is something of an understatement,” Black replied. “I expect that the assassination attempts will begin before the end of this campaign.”

My fingers closed into a fist at the blunt statement of fact. “They’d try assassinate a Legion officer in the middle of a war?” I spat.

“The nobility sees the outcome of the Rebellion as a foregone conclusion,” he noted. “Meanwhile, Adjutant, you personify the very trend they’ve been spending the last forty years trying to bury.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, sir,” Hakram muttered.

“You should,” Black agreed. “The last orc to have the potential for a Name was Grem One-Eye, boy. You walk in hallowed company.”

My officer swallowed loudly, and I couldn’t blame him for it.

“Isn’t there anything you can do about the assassins?” I asked. “I thought those all answered to the the Tower.”

“They’ll hire their blades through Mercantis, and short of burning that city down there’s not much we can do about that,” Black admitted. “Malicia’s already suppressing the rumours in Praes and she’s put the information under the seal of the Tower – it’s illegal to even speak of it at the moment. But those are stopgap measures, Catherine, and there’s only so long it will work.”

I gritted my teeth. “We’ve got our hands full enough without dealing with assassins on top of it,” I grunted. “There’s got to be a way to take care of it.”

“There is,” Black replied mildly. “Kill them. Brutally, publicly and repeatedly. Eventually they’ll decided that assassination isn’t a feasible way to remove him from the board and turn to other means.”

“Might be simpler to choke that off at the source,” I said.

He snorted. “While the thought of cleaning up the political scene of the Empire with a vigorous round of hangings has a certain appeal, we should deal with the open rebellion putting the south of Callow to the torch before starting a civil war.”

I recognized the change of subject for the tacit declaration that this particular discussion was over with.

“You’ve decided where the Fifteenth will be deployed, then?” I asked.

“It’s time,” he agreed. “You’ll link up with us for a few days but split off towards Marchford when we move south to force a battle. It’s time for the Silver Spears to be dealt with. Congratulations, Catherine: your first battle will be as an independent detached force.”

I grinned. “Best news I’ve had all week.”

Chapter 12: Reproval

“There’s a very important difference between a nice man and a good one.”
– King Jehan the Wise

So apparently all that was needed to change a rather nice stockroom into something sinister was clearing out the supplies, setting up a stone slab in the centre of it and shackling a prisoner to it. You learn something every day . The combination of bare stone and simply-dressed young woman was lending this whole affair a particularly villainous vibe I wasn’t really on board with, but I supposed that after getting shot by the Deoraithe once already Warlock wasn’t in a gambling mood. Still, if I got pissy every time someone put an arrow in me I’d have a permanent scowl on my face. Bad form, that.

“I take it Masego won’t be joining us?” I asked.

The handsome older man shrugged. “He has no interest in matters like these. Neither do I, frankly, but rank tends to accrue tedious duties.”

In a way it was comforting that he was more bored with the coming interrogation that being all creepy-expectant, the way villains usually were in the stories. Warlock had admittedly been nothing but polite to me so far, so I supposed I should have expected a departure from the mould in this too. The dark-skinned mage lay back against the wall and snapped his fingers nonchalantly, the prisoner stirring awake immediately. The archer had woken up a little earlier today, the eve of the furthest I could push back my departure, and promptly been put back to sleep until she could be moved to a more appropriate facility. At least the burns all over the stranger’s body had been healed, though sloppily enough that if she tried to move too much it would hurt – not a coincidence, I assumed. Her eyes blinked open, then widened when she realized where she was. There was a single spark of terror before she smothered it, schooling her face into a blank mask. She’s been trained to deal with interrogation , I noted.

“I am an Imperial citizen being held unlawfully,” she spoke up with that odd Daoine burr flavouring her Lower Miezan. “If you do not release me immediately, there will be diplomatic consequences.”

“I am shaking in my boots,” Warlock replied drily.

I sighed. “You were caught participating in the activities of a group that’s been convicted of high treason and seen attempting the murder of a member of the Dark Council,” I told her. “Both of those fetch the death penalty, and not one of those nice quick ones. You’re not going anywhere.”

She glared at Warlock before turning her stare to me, eyes lingering on my own obviously Deoraithe features. She said something in the Old Tongue, the scathing tone obvious regardless of the language barrier.

“I don’t actually speak that, except for a few curses,” I informed her.

“Probably best you don’t,” Warlock mused. “And you should be ashamed of yourself, young lady – I’m sure her mother was a perfectly nice woman.”

Whether the prisoner had actually insulted whoever had given birth to me was up in the air, as far as I was concerned: I wouldn’t put it above the Soninke to yank my chain for the sake of his own amusement. Still, if she’d wanted to hit a nerve then parents weren’t really the way to go for me. I was perfectly fine with having no idea who my progenitors were – parents were more of an abstract concept for me than anything else. If anything the closest thing I’d ever had to a father figure was Black, and wasn’t that a terrifying thought?

“Arch-traitor,” the prisoner spat in my direction. “I know who you are, Catherine of Laure.”

I rolled my eyes. I’d already gotten this speech from William, and he’d delivered it better.

“I’m not in the mood for this particular debate,” I replied, “so let’s shelve the subject for now. Do you have a name?”

She glared at me . Eh, I’ve had better , I thought. That’s barely a coercing-Morok level of spite.

“Why would I give you anything, uraind ?” she sneered.

“It’ll make this conversation a lot easier if I can refer to you as something else than “prisoner” or “you”,” I told her honestly.

“I could rip it out of your mind, of course, but that tends to make a mess,” Warlock spoke idly. “Delicate thing, the human mind. Not telling what might break when I go fishing for what I want.”

She held up admirably under the threat, her face betraying no sign of fear, but the way she’d gone still revealed exactly how terrified she was at the prospect. It sickened me a little to see it. Not at her for being afraid, but at myself for being part of the people inflicting that fear. I’d enjoyed putting the fear of me in my enemies before but that had been on the field, where we both had weapons. Not when they were chained in a dark room underground, trapped in a room with one of the greatest living monsters of the Empire and the apprentice of another one. But that’s a child’s way of seeing things, isn’t it? If you’re so insecure about your objectives that you feel the need to give the enemy a fair shot at you, then maybe you shouldn’t be fighting at all. It was not a game for the meek I was learning to play. I knew that, but it did not take away the sick feeling in my stomach.

“Breagach,” the woman said. “That is all you will get.”

“Cute,” Warlock commented. “Lying, is it? I didn’t think the Watch was that self-indulgent.”

I made a mental note to pick up a language primer on the Old Tongue before leaving Summerholm. Or, more realistically, tell Hakram to pick up one for me. I disliked missing context, and I’d gotten better at using my learning aspect anyway. Within a month or two I should be able to speak the basics and understand the rest.

“I am not part of the Watch,” Breagach replied calmly. “A typical southerner assumption, to believe that any Deoraithe leaving the Duchy belongs to it.”

“Well, let’s find out if that’s your first lie of the day,” Warlock smiled.

A dozen bars of red light came into being above the Deoraithe, connected by threads of gold. Breagach drew a breath in panic and struggled against her bindings but she was nowhere strong enough to burst through good goblin steel.

“Do stop fighting it, it won’t be painful if you remain calm,” Warlock spoke absent-mindedly. “Interesting breed you are, members of the Watch. Took me a while to figure out what made you tick.”

“They’re still regular humans, aren’t they?” I frowned.

“When I first cut one open I found there was no physical difference to a regular Deoraithe,” Warlock agreed. “Which is fascinating, given what they can actually do. I theorized the modifications regressed upon death – which, while an advanced piece of sorcery, is not impossible. Besides, their little club has existed for over a millennium in one form or another.”

I got the feeling I wasn’t going to like what followed.

“Grem was kind enough to secure me a live specimen, but a living dissection yielded the same results,” the Calamity continued in that same casual tone.

I was glad he was facing away from me, unable to see the disgust on my face. My fingers clenched and unclenched, but I bit my tongue. I had no authority over the man, and making a fuss now wasn’t going to bring anyone back to life.

“It was Amadeus that put me on the right track, ultimately,” Warlock said. “When trying to understand someone look at their enemies, he told me. He’s a font of useless sayings like that, but now and then they do come in useful. Who do the Deoraithe hate more than anyone?”

Breagach let out a hoarse cry, then collapsed in exhaustion against the stone.

“The elves,” the dark-skinned man finished. “Oh, how you despise those isolationist little bastards. Can’t say I blame you – even the other Good types can’t stand them. Regardless, their entire species adds more weight to their presence in the Pattern the longer they live. From there, it was a natural leap to start examining your souls.”

The red bars dropped down into the stone, digging into it, and the cords of gold thickened until they formed a ridge not unlike a painting’s frame. No, I realized as the golden magic spread to fill in the circle. Not a painting, a lens. There were arcane runes forming and dissipating across the surface, though I did not know their meaning. Warlock clicked his tongue against the top his mouth.

“Bad habit, lying,” he commented. “Though it’s interesting you’ve only taken the first three Oaths: they don’t usually send out anyone without at least five under their belt.”

I frowned. “She’s tinkered with her soul?” I asked. “That seems incredibly dangerous.”

“It would be more accurate to say they bind their souls to a source of power – one I’ve yet to identify,” Warlock explained. “They use rituals called “Oaths” to tap into it according to set patterns. Night vision, accelerated reflexes, superior endurance and even an extended lifespan.”

My frown deepened. “Not the Gods, surely?”

The dark-skinned man snorted. “A little above their reach, that. It’s not one of the angelic Choirs either, or anything demonic. My best guess is a nature spirit of some sort.”

“There are things in this land older than you could hope to conceive,” Breagach gasped.

“They always say that,” Warlock mocked. “Oh, our spirit guardian is beyond your comprehension! Its power is unrivalled, tremble and flee!”

The second part was spoken in one of the worst imitations of the Callowan accent I’d ever heard.

“There’s a difference between Gods and gods, child,” the Calamity murmured, “and I’ve more than a few of the latter’s corpses in my laboratory.”

A shiver went up my spine at the words. Maybe if he’d sounded like he was boasting I’d have dismissed the claim, but he sounded so... matter-of-fact. Like there was nothing particularly unusual about taking apart literal forces of nature to see how they worked. Monster , I reminded myself. Polite and charming, but still a monster.

“Anyhow,” the mage shrugged, “We have what we need. The Watch answers directly to Duchess Kegan, meaning she knowingly broke the terms of her client state treaty with the Tower.”

There wouldn’t be war over this, I knew. The Empire wouldn’t open a second front in the war over such a small incident. But there would be consequences.

“The tribute this year is going to be particularly expensive, I think,” I murmured.

“Politics,” Warlock dismissed, tone uninterested. The magic over the prisoner winked out a moment later. “That’s what Black and Malicia are for.”

He turned his eyes to Breagach, who while visibly tired was still awake enough to look at us with undisguised loathing.

“And you, my dear, are going back to sleep,” he continued mildly, raising a hand.

“Stop,” I said.

The stare the Calamity graced me with was mild, but I still had to stop myself from reaching for my sword.

“Black mentioned a bloodline ritual,” I said.

“We already know she’s Watch,” Warlock replied impatiently. “I tire of wasting time on this affair.”

“You said it was odd she’s only taken three of the Oaths,” I pointed out, mind slowly catching up to what my instincts had latched on. “If she was deployed even though she’s not fully trained, there’s a reason for it.”

“And you think a bloodline ritual will explain that?” the mage replied sceptically, though at least I had his full attention now.

“If I were sending a representative into a war, it’d be someone I knew I could trust,” I grunted.

The Calamity’s eyes narrowed. Ah, he’d gotten it. For all his flaws, the man was clever.

“And who can you trust more than your own blood?” he finished in a murmur, turning calculating eyes towards Breagach.

She’d gone still again. Warlock tapped a finger against his belt and a previously invisible sigil lit up, dropping a slim knife into his palm.

“Blood magic,” I spoke flatly, not bothering to hide my disapproval.

“Get over yourself, girl,” he replied in the same tone. “The same discipline is the only reason that scar across your chest didn’t kill you. Besides, I just need a few drops.”

I scowled as he walked up to the prisoner and cut on her upper arm as she tried to wiggle away, collecting a few drops and keeping them on the edge of the knife. He crouched on the ground and bright red flames lit up the tip of his index as he traced a pentagram of soot on the stone. He added a few runes at the tips afterwards, then traced a circle in the middle and flicked the blood into it. I couldn’t quite make out the words he whispered afterwards, but I recognized the cadence: Mthethwa, an older dialect. He rose and took a step back.

“And now?” I asked.

“By contracts made, I summon you,” he replied, still looking at the pentagram.

There was no flash of light or sudden smell of brimstone. One moment there was nothing, then a little creature stood inside the pentagram, sniffing at the circle. Its skin was a reddish grey, with its disproportionately large head sporting a pair of ears vaguely reminiscent of curved horns. Bat-like wings were coming out of its back and flapped as it chittered in a guttural language I’d only heard spoken once before. The Dark Tongue, what Captain had used to order the abomination that had taken us up the Tower.

“It doesn’t look sentient,” I finally said.

“It isn’t,” Warlock agreed. “Blood imps are never particularly clever and this one’s not even a decade old.”

I shot him a quizzical look.

“Devils begin as the personification of a concept,” the Calamity explained with a sigh. “The older they get, the more they can think independently of that nature. There are differences according to breeds, of course, with more abstract concepts resulting in greater intelligence.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And what does that thing personify?”

“Hunger for fresh blood,” Warlock replied absently, eyes on the imp.

I followed his gaze saw the devil was now licking Breagach’s blood like a cat would a saucer of milk, making ugly little satisfied sounds as it did. The sight was nauseating.

“Good,” the mage smiled. “And now for the pleasant part.”

He raised a hand and closed it into a fist. The imp rose into the air, letting out shrieks of dismay, then an invisible force brutally squashed it. Not a drop of the reddish mulch it turned into splattered, forming a perfect sphere still hovering above. Slowly it descended and filled the circle. There was a heartbeat after that, then lines of red emanated from the circle to touch all the tips of the pentagram. The whole thing smelled like rotten blood. Letters in the Old Tongue started appearing on the stone, forming a family tree circling around the remains of the imp. I looked askance at Warlock, who was reading them intently.

“Well now,” he murmured. “Someone’s more important than they look.”

He pointed out a pair of words close to the circle.

“That’s Duchess Kegan herself,” he informed me.

“And their relation is?” I prompted.

“Cousin’s daughter,” he replied. “Late twenties in the line of succession, but she’s still part of the ruling blood.”

“If you think you can hold me-” Breagach started heatedly, but the Calamity lazily waved a hand and she slumped down abruptly, unconscious.

I let out a long breath. “Well,” I announced, “that’s that. You’ll be keeping custody of her for now?”

“Until it’s been decided what will happen to her, yes,” he acknowledged. “You’ve secured the Hunter?”

“As secure as a hero can ever be, anyway,” I grunted. “He’s a liability. I don’t suppose you’ve got a way to bind his Name?”

The Calamity shrugged as we left the room, stopping only a heartbeat to incinerate the remnants of his ritual with a flick of the wrist.

“It’s possible to bind or usurp a Name, with the right tools,” he agreed. “But a proper ritual site is needed to manage it. The only usable one in Callow is in Liesse, which would make the matter rather tricky.”

Ugh. It figured. I’d just have to put in place as many precautions as I could. We strolled out of the room to a smaller chamber. Someone had helpfully placed a pitcher of wine on the reading table by the window and I wasted no time in grabbing a cup and pouring me something to drink. I could use a little steadying after that whole affair – the roof of my mouth still tasted like rotten blood. I poured Warlock one too after he gave me a pointed look, sipping at my own as an awkward silence took hold. He was the one to break it.

“Later tonight,” he spoke, “my son will ask to accompany you on your campaign. You will accept.”

“He’s been dropping hints in that direction for a few days,” I grunted.

There was no denying that Apprentice would be an asset and I’d already intended to say yes, but being more or less ordered to do so rankled. I wasn’t sure exactly where I stood to Warlock, when it came to the pecking order, but lower seemed like a safe assumption.

“Yes, he has,” the Soninke sighed. “That was meant to indicate he would accept an invitation if you extended it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why didn’t he just ask?”

“Black needs to go over Name etiquette with you again,” he replied, irritation colouring his tone. “You are the Squire. The command is yours, which would make it extremely rude for another Named to simply invite themselves along. Villains have been killed for being that presumptuous.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. Was it this complicated being a hero? Maybe it wasn’t too late to switch career paths.

“I’ll explain the misunderstanding,” I said, putting down my half-finished glass of wine. “I can’t say this was a particularly fun afternoon, but it was certainly educational. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a general staff meeting in half a bell and more paperwork on the backlog than I want to think about.”

“I do not excuse you,” Warlock said mildly. “There’s still one thing we need to discuss.”

“I’ll make sure nothing happens to him,” I said seriously, pretty sure I knew where this was headed. “I know he’s not used to military life.”

“Oh it’s not that,” the man chuckled. “You’re a clever girl, I’m sure you’re perfectly aware of what the consequences of allowing my son to die on your watch would be.”

I frowned. “Then what’s this about?”

“Before leaving Ater,” he spoke calmly, “you met with Malicia.”

My blood ran cold, but I kept my face expressionless.

“I did.”

No point in lying about it. There was nothing uncertain about the way he’d phrased that. The Calamity smiled.

“Allow me to share something about the rulers of Praes, Catherine. You see, both Amadeus and Alaya – Malicia, as you’d know her – see the Empire through the lens of how they operate.”

The dark-skinned man sipped at his glass, eyes shadowed.

“Amadeus thinks of it as a great machine, and so sees himself as a cog. An important one, but ultimately replaceable. A simple matter of fit and function.”

I could buy that easily enough. Black was capable of great cruelty but he was not, I believed, a cruel man by nature. Violence was a tool to him, a way to reach an outcome. That did not make him any less dangerous, or make his actions excusable. But it did matter, even if only a little.

“Alaya is a little trickier to grasp,” Warlock murmured. “She sees it as a weave, and herself as the weaver. She cannot choose the materials she was given to work with, be she can choose what she makes with them. And if a particular thread runs out?”

The dark-eyed man shrugged.

“She merely has to secure a substitute, trusting that the work she’d already woven will be tight enough to hold.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked quietly.

“Because they’re both wrong,” the Calamity replied. “Praes isn’t a machine or a tapestry – it’s a living, breathing organism.”

I frowned. “And what’s that supposed to mean, exactly?”

A hard smile split the mage’s face. “You can’t rip out a creature’s heart and just shove another in its place.”

I kept my face blank. Warlock was Black’s first companion, the dreams had shown me that much, and that he’d be my teacher’s staunchest loyalist wasn’t a surprise. But how much did he know? I hadn’t agreed to Malicia’s offer, not in so many words, and it concerned the far future anyway. Imehad told me to watch out for Scribe above the rest of Black’s companions, but Warlock was the one sitting in front of me right now. I’d seen him in action when he’d been crippled by magical backlash and within moments of stepping onto the scene he’d incapacitated two heroes and casually slain another one. If it came to a fight against him, my chances of survival were... slim.

“You can stop panicking, girl,” the dark-skinned man spoke coldly. “It is not my intent to kill you, though you’d be a fool to think I could not.”

“I see no reason we should fight,” I replied, as calm as I could manage. “We’re on the same side.”

The mage laughed, the sound darkly mocking. “You think the Empire is a single side? How delightfully naïve of you. We are not Callowans, child.”

He leaned forward and there was nothing handsome about that face now, warped as it was by barely-contained power just itching to lash out.

“We were tribes and tribal kingdoms, before the Miezans, and if you scratch under the surface we are still. I know who my tribe is, Catherine Foundling. I have fought with them, bled and wept with them.”

“Yet another Praesi telling me I can’t be part of their little private club,” I replied, anger freeing my tongue. “There’s a shocker.”

Because if the man thought I would just sit there and be castigated for something I hadn’t done, wasn’t even sure I should do, then he could go burn in the bloody Hells. Wasn’t like he was unacquainted with the damned place.

“Your birth has nothing to do with this,” he said harshly. “Neither Scribe nor Ranger are from Praes. Black barely is, by most of my people’s standards. We are having this conversation because Malicia summoned you to the Tower and made you an offer.”

“I didn’t accept it,” I spoke through gritted teeth.

“You didn’t refuse it,” he replied. “That is all someone like Alaya needs. She laid the seed, and in the coming years you will have to make a choice. As you are now, I know exactly which one you will make.”

“You are,” I spoke icily, “assuming a great deal.”

“Maybe you will prove me wrong,” Warlock shrugged. “I have been surprised in the past. But I speak to tell you this – if you don’t, there will be a price.”

“Whatever happened to not making obvious threats?” I spat.

“I don’t think you quite understand. I love Amadeus, you see,” Warlock admitted casually. “He is my oldest and dearest friend, a brother in all but blood. I don’t care one whit for the Empire or Evil or all those carefully laid plans everybody seems to be following. So you can believe me when I say that if your knife finds his back, I will not kill you.”

He leaned forward.

“What I will do is rip your soul out of that mangled husk you call a body, then cast it into the Void so you can continue screaming in unspeakable agony until Creation itself falls apart ,” he hissed.

Stepping back, he smoothed his robes and smiled pleasantly.

“I’m glad we had this talk. It’s better to air these things out,” he said as my fingers tightened against the grip of my sword. “You are excused, Catherine. Have a pleasant afternoon.”

Putting down his cup he offered me a friendly wave and strolled away, whistling the air to the Legionary song. I stood there for a long moment, allowing my breath to steady and the fear to recede. I closed my eyes and forced my fingers to leave my sword, exhaling slowly. Hakram would need to find me another book, it seemed. There’s bound to be something out there about the best way to kill a mage.

Heroic Interlude: Riposte

“Thirty-one: use a sword fit for your height and built, not the largest chunk of metal you can find. It will both improve your life expectancy and save you a great many jokes about overcompensation.”
-“Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, unknown author

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Klaus spoke as he contemplated the map.

Regardless of her uncle’s assurances, Cordelia was not enthused by the way the Liesse Rebellion was currently proceeding. The insurrectionists had avoided any majors defeat so far and managed to strike a few blows at the Legions, but it could not be said they were winning . Vale was in rebel hands and the Countess Marchford had been gathering troops from all over the south of Callow beneath the walls, but her own informants in Liesse’s staff had sent word that she was likely to evacuate the city rather than give battle to the Sixth and Ninth Legions.

“Why would she retreat?” Cordelia asked. “She has nigh twenty thousand soldiers now, including a core of dwarven infantry. The Empire has only sent two legions to subdue her: eight thousand soldiers, at most.”

The Prince of Hannoven thanked the servant handing him a bowl of soup and slipped him a few coins. Cordelia refrained from rolling her eyes, as it would have been a breach of decorum. Servants were usually paid less in the central part of Procer than they were in the Lycaonese principalities, true, but they were hardly beggars. Her uncle’s habit of slipping silver to the hired help was as much a dig at the local nobility as it was genuine charity. The grey-haired man broke off a chunk of bread and dipped it into that foul onion broth he was inexplicably fond of, scattering a few crumbs over his previously pristine doublet.

“She’s in a tricky position,” Klaus finally replied. “Most of her men are peasant levies and those are likely to scatter if they get bloodied bad enough. There’s the Black Knight to take into consideration, too. Half their boys will shit their breeches and run the moment he charges.”

The First Prince did not wrinkle her nose in distaste, though she dearly wished that etiquette would allow her to properly express her disgust at the crudity just displayed. Uncle Klaus might have been a prince, but whenever speaking of war he reverted to a soldier’s vocabulary. Instead she discreetly gestured for the servant to take away his soup when he wasn’t looking. There were many ways to get her feelings across without needing to dip into impropriety.

“Then she could hide behind the walls of Vale,” Cordelia pointed out. “She has seen to it that the surrounding lands were burned, denying the Empire opportunity to forage. If the levies have nowhere to run they will be forced to fight.”

The prince of Hannoven snorted, then frowned when he realized his meal had disappeared. He shot her an irritated look but she simply arched her eyebrow until he gave in with ill-grace. She had trained him well.

“You don’t ever want to get into a siege with the Praesi,” Klaus told her seriously.

“They have managed to take Summerholm only twice in over a millennium of trying,” the First Prince noted. “How good at it can they really be?”

“We’re not dealing with the Legions of a millennium ago,” Klaus reminded her. “Or even fifty years ago. Praes is the only nation on Calernia that has a permanent corps dedicated to siege warfare, Cordelia. We use imported dwarven designs like everybody else but they make their own, and they’ll only have gotten sharper since the Conquest. If they’re given time to make their machines, it’ll turn into a massacre.”

Ah. There was a cultural divide at play here, she grasped. Procerans rarely took cities when they waged war on each other: princes disliked the idea of having sweaty, dirty soldiers ransacking their famously rich family seats. Wars between principalities were decided on the field, as peasant conscripts could be expected to breed themselves back to their former numbers in a decade or so. Lost battles were followed by trade and territorial concessions, impermanent setbacks in the Ebb and Flow. Praesi, it seemed, played for keeps: whatever they took they intended to remain theirs as long as they could defend it.

“I do not understand how retreating will change the situation for the Countess,” the First Prince admitted.

“She’ll burn the ground as she moves further south,” Klaus predicted. “When the Legions pursue they’ll be exhausted and half-starved by the time they get to the battlefield.”

“They do have a supply train, Uncle,” Cordelia reminded him. “They can keep themselves fed.”

“That’s the whole point of having the Silver Spears based in Marchford,” the prince of Hannoven explained, tapping said city on the map with a wrinkled finger. “The moment the Sixth and the Ninth move south, he’ll hit the supply trains and harass their rear.”

“That strikes me as a particularly dangerous enterprise,” the fair-haired woman commented.

Unfortunate, that. It would be for the best if the Exiled Prince survived the rebellion. The hero was the nephew of the current Tyrant of Helike, and by right the lawful ruler of the city-state. If he managed to become famous enough it might be possible to leverage that acclaim into putting him on the throne – which would neatly solve one of her two most immediate foreign policy problems. A friendly king in Helike would secure the lower western flank of the Principate and take the pressure off of one of her steadiest allies in the Assembly.

“He’s not a green boy,” the older man replied, rubbing the grey stubble covering his jaw. “He’s fought in border skirmishes against Stygia and he’s been on a few heroic adventures since his exile. I’m not worried about him pulling off his part of the plan.”

“This newly-raised Fifteenth will be moving to meet him on the field,” Cordelia said.

“A sloppy half-legion led by a Squire with no notable accomplishments to her Name,” Klaus snorted. “They’ll slow the Prince down some, which I assume is what the Black Knight wanted, but there’s no real threat there.”

“She drove back the Swordsman when he assaulted Summerholm,” the First Prince pointed out.

Her uncle scoffed. “The Warlock did that. She was just on the scene when it happened. Besides, it’s a good thing the Swordsman was slapped around a bit. Now he’ll stop hunting Calamities and go after opponents he can actually kill. The Baroness Dormer has the troops to drive this Heiress character out of her demesne, but she’s been reluctant to engage without a Named on her side.”

The contempt in the grizzled veteran’s voice was thick. Unlike most other Calernian states, Proceran rulers did not develop a Name when they acceded to the throne – as a result, the armies of the Principate were rarely led by men and women bearing the mandate of Heaven. The score of military victories they’d accumulated nonetheless had left the Proceran military with a distaste for those who expected heroes to win their wars for them. Easy for us to say , the fair-haired woman thought, when we so rarely find villains leading hosts into our land. She still had a few other questions, mainly regarding why the Empire had yet to peel off Legions from the Red Flower Vales to reinforce their offensive, but they were interrupted by a maid who hurriedly curtsied.

“Your Highnesses,” the woman spoke. “My deepest apologies for interrupting, but the Lady Augur request your presence.”

Cordelia did not allow her surprise to show. It was rare for Agnes to send for her: ever since she’d come into her Role she’d become an even more solitary creature than usual. A prediction, then, she decided. She glanced at Klaus and he grimaced before rising to his feet, wincing at the cracking sounds his back made. A lifetime of wearing armour had not done wonders for his body, and he was no longer a young man. The First Prince dismissed the maid wordlessly and strode towards the garden her cousin haunted during daytime, her uncle following closely. Midday had barely passed and it was pleasant spring afternoon out, especially here among the hedges and flowers carefully cultivated by Proceran royalty over centuries.

Agnes was sitting alone on a wrought iron chair, her simple blue dress showing more of her legs than was strictly acceptable in polite society. Had she still been a mere branch member of the Hasenbach family Cordelia would have chided her for it, but Named got to live by their own standards. If she wanted to go around naked and covered in blood, there was not a man or woman in Procer who would dare to even comment on it. Agnes’ skin was impossibly pale for the amount of time she spent outside and her Hasenbach-blond hair was cut in a short bob that had not grown an inch since she’d become the Augur. It was tame, considering the kind of appearance changes Names sometimes led to, but it still made the First Prince uncomfortable to look at it. It was the touch of the divine at work, no matter how mundane the detail.

“Cordelia, Uncle,” the Augur spoke without turning.

She was looking at the sky, unconcerned by the glare of the sun.

“Agnes,” the First Prince replied. “You sent your maid?”

There was a long pause. “A flock of turtledoves flew east this morning, as the bells rung,” the Augur mentioned.

Cordelia did not sigh, though not for lack of desire.

“You will have to explain this to me,” she reminded her cousin, who blinked in surprise.

“Ah, yes. I forget, sometimes,” she explained. “One of your diplomatic couriers was intercepted.”

“I thought you could warn us before that happened,” Klaus broke in, frowning.

“It wasn’t planned,” Agnes replied sleepily. “Just an opportunity taken.”

“Is the Stairway still secure?” Cordelia asked urgently.

Her cousin nodded absent-mindedly. “They don’t know about that. I don’t see them finding out before it’s used.”

The fair-haired ruler allowed her shoulders to loosen. Good. If the Dread Empress had found out, the results would have been... disastrous, to say the least.

“There’s more,” Agnes spoke, finally turning to look at them.

For once she looked like her attention was entirely on the there and then, eyes sharp with worry.

“There are elves in Callow. Two of them,” she continued.

Cordelia closed her eyes and, for the first time in a year, allowed herself to swear. Burning Heavens . No, it would not do to jump to conclusions. There were precedents for elves leaving their forest temporarily, though admittedly very few. This did not have to be the prelude to military action. Gods, she hoped it was not. The only place the Forever King could turn his eyes to was south, and that was straight into Daoine. And the moment an elf sets foot in the duchy, they will go on war footing. The Deoraithe hated the elves like poison, over some ancient grudge about being the original inhabitants of the Golden Bloom. And if Duchess Kegan is focusing on the elves, she will refuse to get involved in the rebellion.

“Do you know why they left the forest?” she asked, more calmly than she felt.

“It’s unclear,” Agnes admitted, her earlier focus already disappeared as she looked away. “They’re looking for something. Or fetching something. It will come to a head in Liesse, it’s where all the knots are. Elves are... strange. It’s like trying to map the stars from a lake’s reflection.”

Two elves, headed for Liesse. The damage even two of those could do... No elf over a thousand years old would ever deign to set foot outside the Golden Bloom but that meant nothing: a dozen elven foot soldiers could wipe out a company of soldiers without losing a single man, if they felt the inclination. A single Emerald Sword could do the same without even paying attention. The elves were Good, in the broadest sense of the term, but that didn’t change the fact that they saw everyone but heroes and other elves as insolent vermin. That everyone coming within half a mile of the Golden Bloom died without warning had made that feeling very clear. Cordelia forced her mind to stay on track as her cousin drifted away into her own world.

“We no longer have time to dawdle, Uncle,” she finally said. “Assemble a host. The Dominion needs to be brought to heel by winter.”

“By your will, First Prince,” the prince of Hannoven bowed.

—

It was not a coincidence they’d run into the Silver Spears on their flight south.

Fate was a word William knew better than to throw around lightly, but to be Named was to be bound to the concept. Power calls to power. Finding the Helikean mercenaries camped by the village they needed to resupply at must have been necessary, for some reason the Swordsman did not yet grasp. There was always a reason. He needed to believe as much now more than ever. The Conjurer was dead. The Hunter was a prisoner, if not a corpse, and Breagach likely strapped to a table in some dungeon until she could be dissected. The Thief had disappeared without a word one night, and the betrayal left a foul taste in his mouth. Almorava said she’d be back before too long but William has his doubts . And can I really blame her? I led them straight into a slaughterhouse. The room they’d claimed at the only inn of the village was too small for all four of the present heroes to be truly comfortable, though none of the Helikean ones had yet to complain. Neither would the Bard, if the amount of bottles she’d gone through since claiming a chair was any indication.

The Lone Swordsman knew he was a handsome man – he’d attracted plenty of attention even before becoming a hero – but compared to the Exiled Prince he might as well have been a goblin. The man was tall and looked like he’d been carved out of single piece of marble, all perfect skin and long flowing curls that looked more golden than blonde. He must have been exceptionally vain before claiming his Name, to look this supernaturally flawless. His follower, the Page, looked more like an actual person. Short haired and slim, she was androgynous looking-enough that he had not been sure she was a woman before he heard her voice. She was also quite obviously in love with the Prince, to the extent that it was almost embarrassing to watch.

“We had her cornered, until she dropper her hammer,” the Exiled Prince said, recounting his raid on the Ninth and the way it had turned sour upon the Captain’s appearance. There was a touch of disbelief to his voice, like he still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. “Then she turned into this... creature.”

“We already knew she’s a werewolf,” William reminded him. “I briefed you personally on what we know of the Calamities.”

“I’ve seen werewolves before, Swordsman,” the Prince replied through gritted teeth. “I’ve killed werewolves before. That abomination was something else entirely. She was tall as an ogre and she moved so fast I could barely see her. My men might as well have been lambs, for all the difference it made.”

Page squeezed his shoulder comfortingly, but the Prince barely noticed. William resisted the urge to cringe. How could he not have cottoned on to the fact that his closest supporter had feelings for him? Or was he merely pretending not to? Heroes did tend to attract a lot of attention from the opposite sex, and even the same. The Swordsman had always preferred to air out the fact that he had no intention of getting romantically involved with anyone whenever he was in similar situations, but he wasn’t unfamiliar with the concept of ignoring an uncomfortable truth to avoid breaking someone’s heart. Or he could just be an imbecile , William thought uncharitably.

“She bit the head off of my second-in-command before we could do anything,” the Exiled Prince continued. “The Order of the Righteous Spear drove her back but we had to retreat anyway. She bought just enough time for the Sixth to get their ranks in order.”

There was no need to belabour the explanation any further. It was one thing to hit Praesi legionaries in the flank with the element of surprise on your side, quite another to lead a charge into the Ironsides when they were expecting you. The flower of Callow’s chivalry had been taught that lesson on the Fields and never recovered from the near-total losses it cost them to learn. For all his theatrics, the Free Cities hero was a talented commander. He wouldn’t throw his men at the enemy recklessly, not when his Silver Spears represented a solid half of the total cavalry the rebellion had at its disposal.

“It was still the largest victory we’ve managed against the Empire so far,” William replied. “And you can believe they’ve taken note of it. They’re sending the Fifteenth after you, last I heard.”

The man laughed, his long golden curls shaking as he did. The Swordsman was morbidly curious about how the other hero was able to keep them looking this pristine in the middle of a campaign, but decided not to ask. Name perk, most likely.

“A rookie villain and her understrength crew of miscreants?” the Prince mocked. “The Empire thinks too much of themselves.”

And now that wasn’t something he could just let go. You couldn’t underestimate the Squire, that was the kind of stupidity she fed on.

“Wipe that smile off your face,” William replied flatly. “If you take Squire lightly for even a single fucking moment, she will flay your hide and make a standard out of it.”

The Prince looked dubious. “I understand that she is your nemesis and that in some ways she must be your match, but she’s never led an army into battle before. As far as I know, you’re the only hero she’s ever fought. She is ill-equipped to deal with the likes of the Silver Spears.”

“The first time I met Catherine Foundling,” the Callowan spoke quietly, “she arranged the death of her four rivals in the span of a single night and then threw me into a river after I literally split open her torso. She doesn’t go down , Prince. Corner most villains and after a brutal fight it’s done, but short of decapitating her you’re not going to make her stop. She’s not that powerful, but in a way that makes it worse: she knows that, so she became tricky and ruthless instead. Not to mention I’m fairly sure her second-in-command is coming into a Name, because he scrapped with Thief and walked away without any major wounds.”

“I’m confident Page will be able to handle the orc,” the Prince replied drily, failing to notice the adoring smile the woman in question sent his way at the endorsement.

He really had to be doing that on purpose, William thought. He couldn’t possibly be that dense, could he?

“Single combat.”

Everybody turned to look at the Wandering Bard, who’d somehow managed to shake herself out of her drunken stupor.

“Welcome back,” the Swordsman greeted her. “Are you finally done drinking? That’d be a first.”

“That’s her weakness,” the heroine elaborated, ignoring him after an amused look. “Squire is a transitional Name, it can’t match the kind of raw power a fully realized hero can throw around. Get her in a one-on-one fight and you should be able to kill her.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” the Prince replied thoughtfully.

“The orc shouldn’t be much of a problem,” William grunted. “You can only expect so much out of a monster.”

The two Helikeans traded uncomfortable looks. On most days the Swordsman would have let it go, but today? No, he was done playing nice. Not with that foreigner and his cushy little life, who’d gone from heir to a throne to one of the wealthiest exiles on the continent.

“You think I’m prejudiced,” the green-eyed man stated.

“I find your comments distasteful,” the Exile Prince replied flatly. “And unworthy of a hero.”

“And I think now’s a good time for everyone to retire,” the Bard broke in, but they were far past that.

“You know what I find distasteful?” William asked with a pleasant smile. “When a rich brat from the Free Cities comes and tells me greenskins aren’t fucking monsters.”

The Lone Swordsman leaned forward.

“You’ve had an easy living down south,” he said. “All you Free Cities folk, fighting your little land wars against each other. But this is Callow, princeling. Our enemies don’t make treaties when they win, they don’t use trade embargos or petty intrigues. You know what orcs do when they come here? They rape, murder and pillage . They even eat our dead, like we’re godsdamned cattle.”

“Legion regulations forbid both rape and pillage,” the Page interrupted hotly. “And who do you think you are, you Callowan hick? Just a half-rate hero from a backwater-“

“I’m what’s left of this Kingdom after the rest of Calernia abandoned us to the Empire,” he snarled. “Two thousand years, the greenskins have been setting this land on fire at every occasion, and you think you get to lecture me about what they are? Orcs don’t make cities. They don’t trade or farm. All they do is kill, and teach their whelps the same. They contribute as much to Creation as the godsdamned plague. You think they changed as a species because of rules not even fifty years old? You can put a leash on a wolf and it’s still a vicious predator. You see that’s what they are, when it comes down to it: wolves on two legs, just itching to sink their teeth into something.”

William laughed.

“So go on, tell me it’s disgraceful the way I talk about them,” he said. “Let’s see how long you keep saying that, when they start eating your friends.”

The Lone Swordsman rose to his feet, pushing away the table.

“We’re done here,” he spoke. “Good luck with the Fifteenth, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

—

The rage had left him by the time he ended up on the roof, leaving him feeling cold and alone. It wouldn’t be the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last: both his temperament and the nature of his Name tended to put him in the position. He stayed there until night fell, drifting in and out of sleep. There’d been little enough time for that evading the Empire’s patrols. Eventually he heard someone scrabbling across the tiled roof: the Wandering Bard, he knew without looking. She plopped herself down next to him. For a long time, they remained silent.

“Did you notice?” he asked suddenly. “The villagers are avoiding us. Not just the Silver Spears – which I’d understand since they’re foreign mercenaries – but us too. At first I thought they were afraid of Praesi retaliation when we leave, but there’s more to it than that. They were glaring at us, Almorava. Like we’re an occupying army.”

“Not all of them,” the Bard said. “Some were even trying to enrol in the Spears.”

“The older men and women,” William replied quietly. “The ones who actually lived under the Kingdom – they were the angriest. It’s... not what I expected.”

“Thought it would be the other way around, did you?” Almorava guessed.

“I know taxes are lower under the Empire,” he admitted. “And the Legions have clamped down on bandits. Imperial Governors are better organized than the nobles used to be, when they’re not corrupt.”

“So they can squeeze as much gold out of their term as they can,” the Bard noted. “Not out of a taste for good governance.”

“Does that really matter to most people?” William asked tiredly. “As long as it’s easier to feed their children, what do they care if the Praesi line their pockets?”

The Bard pulled from her flask, dangling her legs off the edge. She liked to do that, he’d noticed. He’d never seen the attraction himself: he’d become wary of heights since Squire had thrown him off Summerholm’s ramparts.

“Just because they’re stronger or better organized doesn’t mean they’re right, William,” she said.

“Doesn’t it?” he wondered. “You know, when I first met Squire, she said something to me. Nobody here’s any more free than when you started. ”

He leaned back against the stone.

“She’s not wrong. If we lose, what have I accomplished except filling a few graveyards?”

“First,” Almorava spoke, “I’d argue that those deaths were all well-deserved. They’re an occupying force, Willy. They don’t get to annex another country and then whine when it fights back, even if it’s twenty years later. Second, you’re looking at this wrong.”

He half-turned to look at her, but unsurprisingly she was drinking again. She held up a finger to tell him to wait while she finished off the rest of her flask.

“Gods, that stuff is horrible,” she muttered, wiping her lips. “I can’t believe even the Lycaonese would enjoy it. But, as I was saying, you’re thinking about this the wrong way. Sure, by starting the rebellion you endangered a lot of people’s lives. Sure, for most of Callow living conditions under the Empire are better than they were under the Kingdom.”

“If you’re attempting to disagree with me,” the Swordsman frowned, “I’m sorry to say you’re not doing very well.”

“Here’s the rub, darling,” she replied, putting a finger on his lips and drunkenly shushing him. “The way things are right now? That’s not Praes. That’s Empress Malicia and her Black Knight.”

“I don’t follow,” he admitted. “Those two are Praes, in every way that matters.”

“They’re Praes right now ,” the Bard corrected him. “So what happens when one of them croaks it, or both? They’ve been in charge of the Empire for forty-odd years. That’s long, by Imperial standards. Sooner or later one of them is going to make a mistake, then the opposition will pounce – that’s how Evil works.”

“You don’t think their policies will survive them,” William realized.

That was... well, pretty likely actually. The sort of calculated, patient Evil he was fighting against was the exception and not the norm. And while villainous Roles essentially allowed their Named to live forever, in practice villainous rulers usually lasted shorter than heroic ones – whose lifespan was about the same as that of a human untouched by the divine.

“You’re not at war with Malicia, William,” Almorava reminded him. “You’re at war with the Dread Empire. Eventually some madman is going to end up climbing the Tower, and the same people glaring at you now are the ones who’d be yelling the loudest for someone to save them.”

He looked up to the sky. Full moon tonight, the Eye of Heaven out in all its splendour. How long had it been, since he’d last sat down and looked at the land he was trying to save?

“It seems unfair,” he finally admitted. “That the people I’m trying to free are complaining about it not being easy. Then again, who am I to complain?”

He closed his eyes.

“You know what it means, right?” he asked. “That I’m sworn to the Choir of Contrition?”

The Bard’s voice was quiet, almost gentle.

“That you did something unforgivable. Something you could spend your whole life atoning for and still fall short.”

He laughed bitterly. “A poetic way to put a very ugly story. I used to live in one of the villages part of the Liesse governorship, you see. My parents were cobblers. My mother’s father was a knight under King Robert so I got the sword, but to be honest we weren’t all that different from anyone else. I only started practicing with it to impress girls, though I kept it up when I saw I had some talent. It wasn’t a wealthy life, but we were better off than most – I was going to inherit the trade, since my sister didn’t care for it.”

It was good that she didn’t interrupt, ask anything. He wasn’t sure he would have been able to continue if she had.

“She was engaged to man from Liesse, the third son of some minor noble. Never liked him. He lorded his education over other people, used words he knew they wouldn’t know. Mary was clever though, liked books, so she got it.”

William let out a shaky breath. He had, in a way, never felt so naked in his life. There was not another living soul who knew that story, and he still wasn’t sure why tonight he’d finally felt the need to unburden himself. Because she was a Bard, maybe. Because before the year was done he might be dead and someone, anyone should know the truth of it.

“He was the wrong kind of clever,” William whispered. “Joined a resistance group, talked at dinner about how the people would rise one day and throw out the Legions. Was all talk at first, but one day they decided to kill one of the governor’s men. Collaborators should all die, they said. Idiots.”

He smiled mirthlessly.

“Must have been at least five spies in their group. I’m pretty sure the Eyes started it in the first place. Eventually he told my sister what they planned and she jumped right in. Walls were thin. I overheard.”

He paused, then stopped. Just thinking about what followed made him want to puke. He felt something cold against his arm and opened his eyes in surprise. A bottle of Liesse apple brandy, the stuff they made out of hard cider. He snorted and took a swallow of the suspiciously already-open bottle. Steadied his hands, which he hadn’t noticed were trembling.

“Confronted her the night before,” he confessed. “Told her it was mad. Wouldn’t change anything, and didn’t she know what the Praesi did to rebels? The whole family hangs, if it’s treason. But Mary? She was on a crusade. She was going to free Callow. The man was just a beginning, a first step. She wasn’t going to get caught and she wasn’t going to stop.”

He took a long, deep pull from the bottle. Gods, it would be so much easier doing this drunk. It would dull the feeling of it.

“I’d like to say I was thinking of my parents when I did it, but I wasn’t,” William whispered. “I was thinking of the tanner’s daughter I had a thing for, and how we might get married when I got the shop. I was thinking about how selfish my sister was, throwing me away for people we didn’t even know. For a principle , just a make-believe wish.”

Another swallow but his mouth was dry.

“I stabbed her with a table knife, right in the neck. She was dead in moments. Now here’s the part where it really becomes unforgivable. My parents weren’t home, still at the shop I assumed. I thought maybe nobody would know. But I couldn’t just leave her there, or get out the door with a corpse. People would notice.”

He laughed, because what else was there to do? Gods, every day he put on white it felt like a lie. It should be red, red like the blood he still saw on his hands whenever he prayed and the Hashmallim listened. They wouldn’t let him forget, let that night become a memory instead of a lash. They were right to.

“Broke the knife against her collarbone, so I fetched a butcher’s piece from the kitchen. Half a bell I must have spent chopping up my sister in little pieces. I was about to start putting the meat in bags when the legionaries showed up.”

The laughter froze in his throat. Would that he could choke on it, but he’d left merciful ends like that behind him long ago.

“The idiots got caught. They’d already arrested my parents and all the other families. But me? They put me in a separate cell. Then the morning after some Soninke came to me. Dragged me up, clapped my shoulder. Said I wouldn’t hang, he just wouldn’t hear of it. I’d done my duty to the Empire, I was an example to all Callowans. Told me there’d be no trouble inheriting the shop and sent me on my way.”

William let out a long, shaky breath then drowned it in some more brandy.

“This is why I can do what I do, Bard. You think I didn’t see the look of disgust on your faces when I carved up those officers? It’s fine, you should be disgusted. It was a foul, horrible thing I did. And I’ll do it again, and again, and again until Callow is free.”

He smiled, and this time it was almost genuine.

“I went a little mad, afterwards. Went into the wilds, almost starved. But then I saw an angel, and it said it would never forgive me.”

He glanced at Almorava and she looked like she wanted to weep but had forgotten how. He handed her back the bottle.

“Contrition is not forgiveness, Bard. Can never be forgiveness. It’s not in their nature. They already told me where I’m going after I die, and it’s not the nice place. So I’ll get my hands dirty for the rest of you, because that’s what I’m meant for now.”

He let out a tired sigh.

“Besides, they made me a promise,” he murmured. “Before I go Below, I’ll get to see Mary one last time. Apologize. Doesn’t matter if she accepts or not, you know. She deserves to hear me beg, for what I did. Won’t even it out, but what else can I do?”

He heard her finish the bottle, then drop it down. A long moment of silence, then the sound of glass breaking. He almost laughed – the brandy was starting to take effect.

“Oh, you poor Contrition fools,” the Bard murmured. “You break my heart every time.”

Villainous Interlude: Coulisse

“Still waters are the hungriest.”
– Soninke saying

There were so many defensive wards layered around his tent that even insects trying to crawl through would be instantly fried.

It wasn’t for his personal safety, of course. Amadeus knew better than to rely on magic for that: there were ways to undo sorcery, if you had the right tools at hand. Just the belief that he was ever safe would be a dangerous liability – heroes had a way of slipping through the cracks, especially the grittier types. No, this was purely for the sake of privacy. His contact with the Tower had been infrequent at best, these last two decades: letters took months and could be intercepted, two-way scrying could be detected and even listened on. But now and then, it became a necessity to talk with Alaya face to face. For that purpose Wekesa had crafted the both of them a highly specialized tool, two halves of a mirror linked so deeply it took but a touch to have them connect. The protections weaved into the spells were some of the nastiest he’d ever seen, and as far as he knew no one trying to eavesdrop on a conversation between the Empress and himself had ever survived the attempt.

Unlike most people expecting a meeting with the Dread Empress of Praes, Amadeus had not spent a great deal of effort making himself look presentable. There was no stubble on his jaw, not that there should be: he hadn’t needed to shave since becoming the Black Knight, as he’d never thought of himself as someone who had facial hair. He wore a simple long-sleeved grey cotton shirt with some cleverly hidden metal plates, which combined with his comfortable trousers of the same colouring lent him a fairly casual appearance. His sword was within reaching distance, but that was nothing unusual: he could count the number of times it hadn’t been on one hand, since he’d first become a Squire claimant. A gentle touch of the finger had the mirror rippling, and after a heartbeat the silhouette of Her Most Dreadful Majesty Malicia, First of Her Name, Tyrant of Dominions High and Low, Holder of the Nine Gates and Sovereign of All She Beheld appeared on the surface.

“Maddie,” the ruler of Praes greeted him.

“Allie,” he replied just as dryly.

Most people would have expected Alaya to wear some kind of sheer, mind-bogglingly revealing nightdress at this time of the night. The truth was a little different: the Dread Empress of Praes was adorned in loose woollen pants and a conservative button-up shirt that covered her up to her neck. For all that she played the part of the supremely skilled seductress in public, the dark-skinned woman had never truly left behind her very provincial views on propriety. Being part of the Imperial seraglio under Nefarious – may that hook-nosed wretch forever scream in the deepest Hells – had saddled her with a reputation, though, and she’d elected to take advantage of it. It helped that she was undeniably one of the most beautiful women in the Empire. Weaving a few spells into her dresses allowed her to turn that attraction into fascination, and so put everyone dealing with her at a disadvantage. Men and women alike tended to think with their genitals around her, a dangerous liability when trying to outmanoeuvre someone with a mind as sharp as Alaya’s. That she was widely known to be only interested in women was, amusingly enough, not much of a hindrance when it came to manipulating men. There was no shortage of prancing idiots in the nobility of the Wasteland who believed the magic wand between their legs would be the thing to change the Empress’ preferences.

“You have such an unpleasant smile,” the Empress sighed. “It always looks like it’s at someone else’s expense.”

“It usually is,” Amadeus admitted shamelessly.

She rolled her eyes, drawing a grin out of him. He did enjoy the way she acted when it was only the two of them. The woman she turned into when keeping the pack of jackals that passed for the upper class of Praes in line was sublimely entertaining, but she was also a carefully crafted façade. The Alaya he’d met when they were both so young, the same girl he’d spent so many nights with debating the Empire should be instead of the way it was, she only came out rarely nowadays. It had been ages since Alaya had thrown a tankard at anyone, even, which was definitely a shame. Amadeus was of the opinion that the behaviour of the High Lords would improve considerably if the Empress threw things at them every time they misbehaved. And considering the way some of the Tyrants have acted in the past, that wouldn’t even register as eccentric by Praesi standards.

“And now you’re smirking,” Alaya noted. “Spit it out.”

“Just remembering how terrible a waitress you were,” he informed her.

“At least I never toppled a foreign government drunk,” she replied, arching a perfectly-manicured eyebrow.

“I was tipsy at best,” he protested.

They shared a smile, but after a moment her face turned serious.

“I suppose we should get to business,” she said. “One of Ime’s people intercepted a diplomatic courier from Hasenbach.”

“Finally,” he murmured. “She found a way around the Augur’s abilities?”

“We think she can only foretell it if it’s been planned,” Alaya told him. “We’re moving additional agents into place to create more opportunities.”

He hummed thoughtfully. He’d have to pass the conclusion along to Eudokia. She’d been getting frustrated at her own failures.

“The contents?”

“Nothing too surprising,” the Empress grimaced. “She’s sounding out the League for military readiness.”

“We’ve still got three of the seven aligned with us,” Amadeus grunted. “The others won’t move with a majority vote that slim, they’d be leaving their own city-states undefended against our allies.”

“She’s just angling to keep Helike off her back,” Alaya replied. “If she pushes an official truce with the Principate through vote, she’ll have the border secure for a few years.”

“Having the Tyrant take the throne there was an unexpected surprise,” the Knight shrugged. “I won’t complain if it helps, but it was never something we planned to rely on. I’d rather she spent time on the Free Cities than dealing with the Dominion.”

“Levant will fold if she pushes back,” the Empress said. “They’re not looking for an actual war, just being opportunistic.”

It was a shame the Red Snake Wall made the Dominion’s northern border unassailable. Hasenbach was looking for a war abroad to consolidate her position and Levant would have made an easier target than the Empire without it. It wouldn’t even be the first time Procer turned their eyes in that direction: the territory now making up the Dominion had spent two centuries as part of the Principate, before seceding with Ashuran help.

“Regardless,” Alaya continued, “I have other concerns.”

Amadeus raised an eyebrow.

“I’m listening.”

“This rebellion. You could have put this whole matter to rest months ago,” Alaya said. “Peeling a legion off of the Vales to flank them and sending another across the Hwaerte would have crushed the insurrection in its infancy.”

“True,” the Knight admitted.

“I understand the need to groom your apprentice, Maddie, but this is going too far. You’re deliberately stretching out the lifespan of a threat to the Empire so that she can prove herself on the field,” the Empress told him. “This entire affair is an unnecessary risk.”

“It is a risk, I’ll give you that much,” the green-eyed man conceded. “But unnecessary? Quite the opposite.”

Alaya’s eyes narrowed. “You’re up to something.”

He shrugged. “Aren’t I always? In this case, the objective is fairly straightforward: I am putting an end to the rise of heroic Names in Callow.”

“I would argue that’s impossible,” the Empress frowned. “The best we’ve managed is to regulate the frequency they form at.”

Amadeus’ lips quirked into a wry smile. “The key word in that sentence being we .”

“Her managing to kill the Lone Swordsman would buy us a year or two at best,” Alaya scoffed. “We’ve gone over this before. Wekesa putting down the Wizard of the West didn’t stop mage-Names from forming down the line, nemesis or not.”

“You’re still framing this in terms of Catherine being one of us,” Amadeus said, leaning forward. “She isn’t. She is a Callowan using a Praesi Name for purposes that ultimately serve the land of her birth. This is no longer a story about the Empire maintaining dominion over its conquest: it stopped being that the moment she became involved. This narrative is about Callow’s soul, which of two paths it should take in the coming years: the Swordsman’s revolution at all costs or the Squire’s appropriation of the system.”

Alaya drew a sharp breath. “And if she wins-“

“When she wins,” Amadeus corrected.

“Then heroes will stop rising to oppose her, until she succeeds or loses her way,” the Empress finished, face troubled. “Maddie this is... Both of us have walked this line before, but that’s something else. You’re trying to manipulate the forces driving a Role. Calling this playing with fire wouldn’t be doing it justice.”

“I imagine it is mildly blasphemous at best,” Amadeus smiled. “Amusing, if not of any great import.”

Alaya grimaced.

“Assuming your gambit is success,” she said. “Which is, for the record, an assumption I am not yet ready to make. In the aftermath, she would have to be allowed to implement some degree of reform. Otherwise she’ll end up having to oppose us as the next obstacle in her way.”

Amadeus blinked. “Well, yes,” he replied slowly.

“That could cost us Callow, in the long term,” the Empress stated. “I do not want to have to put down a Legion-trained native army in thirty years.”

“Our current methods won’t work for much longer, you know this,” the Knight frowned. “Rebellions will keep cropping up and it’s a matter of time until the Principate is able to mount an invasion again. We can’t win a war with them while putting down domestic unrest, both Grem and I have run the scenarios.”

“Procer is being handled,” the Soninke replied.

“You can only start fires in the First Prince’s backyard so many times, Allie,” Amadeus told her frankly. “She’s already managed to cut you out of their internal politics and now she’s making making progress in the Free Cities. As soon as the Dominion backs down she can turn all her attention to us.”

“She won’t be in a position to make a move for at least two years,” the Empress informed him. “As soon as I have additional agents in position I can start funding her opposition regardless of those pesky little laws she put in place.”

It had been a masterful stroke, when Hasenbach had passed the legislation through the Highest Assembly. The origin of loans above a certain sum to the rulers of all principalities now had to be disclosed to the First Prince, which had put an end to the activities of the Pravus Bank on Proceran soil. If Alaya propped up a political opponent of the First Prince, the woman in question would know in a matter of weeks. And if the loan went undeclared, she would have a pretext to move against her enemy as soon as the information surfaced. Which it would, there was no doubt about that: Hasenbach’s spy network was nearly as good as theirs and she had a Named future-teller on her side. There was a reason Assassin hadn’t already taken care of the First Prince – both attempts made had been anticipated and neatly countered before they could get anywhere close to her. Still, there were ways around the laws. Multiple smaller loans through proxies would achieve much the same result, but putting said proxies into place would take time . When everything was finally in position, though, odds were that Hasenbach’s position in Procer would no longer be vulnerable.

“Two years won’t be enough,” he finally said. “Even if we raised another five legions tomorrow Procer would still outnumber us nearly two to one in professional soldiers. We wouldn’t be able to hold the Vales, and it would all be downhill from there.”

“And what’s your alternative, Maddie?” the Empress replied tiredly. “What does your Squire actually intend to do, if she gets her way? I’ve yet to discern an actual plan of action from her. She just strolls from one mess to the next.”

“She’ll want official authority to curtail abuses of Imperial power on Callowan soil, at the very least,” the dark-haired man spoke. “Not, all in all, an unreasonable thing to ask.”

“You want me to give a sixteen year-old Callowan girl power of life and death over Praesi high nobility,” Alaya pointed out. “I know you’ve been staying out of Wasteland politics, but you should be able to guess how well that will go over.”

The Knight smiled coldly. “So let them grumble. Let them rebel, even. There’s a reason half the Legions are still in Praesi territory. The moment they take arms they will be crushed underfoot, as they were when we first took power.”

“We’re not the underdog anymore, Maddie,” the Empress replied in an irritated tone. “There’s more to ruling than hanging whoever disagrees with you. We already took the Empire, now we have to actually run it. Something you’d know, if you hadn’t spent the last twenty years playing soldier abroad.”

He let the comment pass, this once, though sharp replies were on the tip of his tongue. There was nothing to win in allowing this to become a personal argument instead of a political one.

“The Truebloods have been pressuring you,” he guessed instead.

“They closed ranks behind High Lady Tasia,” Alaya explained. “Killing Mazus and his father was too stark a reminder that we’re keeping them on a short leash. I’m going to have to make concessions to keep them under control.”

Heiress’ mother. Not unexpected, thought definitely unwelcome. It was to be expected that the High Lady of Wolof would leverage her child’s rise into becoming the leader of that band of malcontents.

“What do they want?” Amadeus asked. “They should know better than to ask for a lift on the Chancellor ban.”

“If she was that stupid she wouldn’t be a threat,” the Empress replied. “They stayed moderate. Reinstatement of goblin breeding restrictions to pre-Conquest levels, the end of tribute reduction for Clans who provide legionaries. They also want the tributes that went unpaid under Nefarious to be collected retroactively, with interest.”

“Going for the Reforms, then,” the Knight grunted. “They’re not even being original anymore. How will you put them off?”

The Truebloods hadn’t made a push for changes in the War College, which was for the best. He’d have needed to take punitive action if they had, and the current climate was already volatile enough. The nobility’s ongoing struggle to take back the changes made when Malicia had first taken the Tower had been mostly fruitless so far, though they’d managed a handful of victories. Mostly in the way they’d managed to stop any other steps forward: his own attempt to have noble titles granted to Clan chieftains had been tabled for at least the next decade. Met with silence on the Empress’ part, the green-eyed man frowned.

“Alaya?” he said, then felt his blood run cold as the realization sunk in. “You can’t be serious.”

“Valid arguments were made,” the Empress replied flatly. “The Tribes already recovered all the losses they incurred when we took Callow. Allowing them to accumulate more numbers would shift the balance of power in the Empire to our disadvantage.”

“And the tributes?” he asked.

“They broke the law by ignoring their obligations to the Tower, even if Nefarious was unfit to rule,” the Soninke noted. “As for the rest, incentives to enrol are hardly needed given the numbers of orcs we already have under the banner.”

“If you implement both it will cripple enrolment in the Legions,” the Knight said. “The Clans won’t be able to part with even half as much of their people under that kind of a financial burden.”

“Tasia’s very objective, I imagine,” the Empress replied. “Not one I entirely disagree with. Too large a portion of our armies is not human.”

“Humans still make four legionaries out of ten,” the Knight pointed out. “Only orcs come even close to that. The gap will only widen if Callowans start joining in significant numbers.”

“That’s still over half our legionaries born to loyalties other than the Tower,” Alaya retorted.

“The entire point of the Reforms is to give them a stake in the Empire,” Amadeus reminded her. “Keeping them under our thumb is counterproductive when we’re trying to make a fist. Allie, they’re pushing now of all times because it’s working . Catherine’s boy proved as much: an unprecedented Role, bound to the Legions of Terror and in the hands of an orc.”

“Yes,” the Empress said quietly. “To the Legions. Not the Tower.”

Amadeus felt the old calm settle on him. The clarity that came with danger, the perfect awareness that had seen him survive one uphill battle after another.

“We’re better than this, Alaya,” he said. “ You’re better than this. If we begin to doubt each other now, all we built will come down on our heads.”

The dark-skinned woman let out a long breath. The controlled façade she’s put on when the conversation had taken an unpleasant turn broke for a moment, allowing a glimpse of very real dismay. Or was it? He’d never been good at reading her. There was a time where that had hardly mattered, but they were no longer the people they’d been when they were young even if their faces had remained the same.

“You think I enjoy this, Maddie?” she murmured. “Gods, you’re the only person I’ve been able to trust since I was seventeen. You may well be the only man in this entire Empire I can call a friend.”

“But,” the Knight spoke quietly.

“But,” she repeated in the same tone, “in the end, there can only be one person sitting on the throne.”

Amadeus closed his eyes. How had it come to this, he wondered? He’d always known that the degree of trust between Alaya and himself was unusual, by villainous standards. But it had needed to be, for what they’d done. By outlawing the Name of Chancellor they’d shifted the balance of the ruling class of the Empire. There was no buffer between the Empress and the nobility, which meant she had to deal with their intrigues herself. In some ways, Alaya had more direct power over Praes than any other Empress or Emperor before her – but that also meant that dealing with internal matters had to take up most of her time. Which, in turn, had meant that she’d had to delegate almost all authority over Callow to him. He’d been King of Callow in fact, if not in name, for the last twenty years. In and of itself that would not have been much of an issue, but the fault line rand deeper than that. Out of the current thirteen marshals and generals of the Empire, ten had started out as officers under his command. Their loyalty went to him over Alaya, a damning fact when the strongest pillar of the Dread Empress’ power over the Empire was the Legions of Terror. Could he really blame her for crafting a power base independent from his own? No. But blame doesn’t matter. Never has, never will. Villains must attend to reality or be swallowed by it. The Black Knight opened his eyes. In the back of his head the machine woke up, a hundred thousand gears starting to turn as his Name stirred awake.

“Forty years I have fought for this Empire,” he spoke. “I made myself into a liar, a cheat and a murderer. I smothered infants in their cribs and engineered the deaths of thousands. I watched the love of my life walk away from me. And not once did I regret it. Do you know why?”

Silence.

“Because it worked ,” he hissed. “Because we took the laughingstock of this continent and turned it into a nation to rival any other. And we did it without cutting deals, without taking shortcuts. We’ve tried their way for a thousand years, Alaya. Built the flying fortresses, bled the sacrifices. And it failed, every godsdamned time.”

He bared his teeth.

“We go back now and we’re no better than those who came before us. Praes is not special. It is not unique. It is not predestined for greatness and neither are we . The moment we forget that, we deserve to lose.”

Malicia’s face was blank of emotion.

“Are you done?”

“Am I?” he asked tiredly. “Gods, how I have wondered. If my Role finally caught up with me, if I’ve become as mad as they say I am. If I turned into just another raving fool with a Name, screaming at the Heavens. But if I’m not... Allie, all I can see down the path you’d take us is failure. Trading short-term gains for long-term disasters. So I implore you, think about this again.”

The Empress’ face softened, after a moment.

“I forget, sometimes, that you are under just as much pressure as I am,” she replied. “I’d say it’s because you so rarely show weakness, but it’s not much of an excuse. I should know better. Get some sleep, Amadeus. End the rebellion. We’ll revisit this when the both of us are in a better state.”

The mirror’s surface dimmed, leaving only his reflection. The Black Knight leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

The gears kept turning.

Chapter 13: Fireside

“Swiftness is the lifeblood of war. No army can win a battle if it isn’t standing on the battlefield.”
– Theodosius the Unconquered, Tyrant of Helike

There were still a few days before we linked up with the other Legions, but we were making good time.

The Fifteenth was camped for the night, sprawled over the plains of central Callow like some enormous steel-clad beast. Fires dotted the inside of the fortified encampment now that night was beginning to fall, both for cooking and heat: spring out here could get chilly after dark. The winter snows were long gone, melted by an unexpectedly early warming, but once the sun was gone traces of the harsh Callowan winter could still be felt. Especially for my Praesi legionaries, unused to it as they were. Seasons in the Wasteland were a complicated a changing affair, for at some point a Dread Empress had tried to “steal the Kingdom’s weather” and instead screwed up seasons for the entire Empire – not to mention breaking what little cultivable land she’d still had. It was, Black had told me, the reason that there was a permanently brewing storm in the sky above the Tower. One of the only parts of Praes spared the backlash had been the Green Stretch, forever cementing its role as the breadbasket of the Wasteland. Though that label now also extended to pretty much all of Callow, these days. The Empire imported grain and fruit heavily from the conquered lands, the wagonloads of food almost as precious as the gold they taxed out of the people farming it.

I was ahead of paperwork, for once in my life, and so I’d decided to reward myself with a bell of drinking with friends by the fire. I’d had precious little time for that kind of thing since the Fifteenth had been raised. Even with Hakram handling the lion’s share of the parchment that came my way I still needed to sign more forms than it was physically possible for me to read through during my waking hours. If our legion had been better structured I’d have been able to delegate more, but for all that legally speaking we were a full legion the fact that we remained at half-strength caused no end of headaches. Our stay in Summerholm after the Lone Swordsman business had been wrapped up had granted me a dent in the pile, though, and that was something to be celebrated. Nauk and Ratface were on duty tonight, but both Hakram and Nilin weren’t. Whether Juniper and Aisha would make an appearance was a toss up depending on the mood of my Legate, but with the addition of Masego to our little crew I’d nabbed another companion. The scholarly-looking mage was horrible at holding his drink, for a Soninke, but that only made it more hilarious.

Before I could decide what bonfire I’d claim for my miscreants I ran into Pickler, who looked to be in a murderous mood. Unusual, that: of all the goblins I’d met she was one of the most even-tempered. Not particularly diplomatic, sure – I’d caught her sketching out schematics a few times when general staff meetings ran too long – but on the goblin-eagerness-to-commit-violence scale she pretty much defined the low end. I whistled sharply to catch her attention before she passed me.

“Pickler,” I called out. “Is there a problem?”

The goblin started, jarred out of her thoughts. She came closer, pitching her voice so she wouldn’t be overheard.

“I’ve spent the afternoon within talking distance of both Nauk and Robber,” the Senior Sapper cursed. “If I don’t get a drink in me soon, I will drown the both of them.”

I winced in sympathy. I liked both the men she’d mentioned well enough, but together they could be a massive pain in the neck. It must have been worse for the common object of their affections.

“Hakram has a stash of aragh he thinks I don’t know about,” I told her with a friendly clap on the shoulder. “I’ll go grab it. Find us a fire and you can vent.”

The goblin eyed the hand still on her shoulder with a frown.

“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re not signalling your willingness to sleep with me,” she said.

The hand came off like I’d gotten my fingers burned.

“Is that what shoulder claps mean for you guys?” I asked.

“We don’t usually do touching unless we’re involved with the individual,” Pickler grunted. “Except for males, but that’s more along the lines of roughhousing.”

If that meant goblins didn’t get hugged as children, in my opinion that explained a lot.

“Well,” I muttered. “I learned something today.”

“No need to feel bad,” she comforted me. “I still have a hard time telling Callowans apart. You’re all pale and dark-haired and your accent is horrendous.”

I snorted, resisted the urge to clap her shoulder again to say goodbye and went on a holy quest to pilfer my right’s hand secret liquor trove.

—

By the time I found her again Nilin was by her side, propped up against a log and warming his feet near the flame. I tossed the tribune one of the bottles and he deftly caught it, popping the cork with practiced ease. The other three were set aside as a reserve while I sat on Pickler’s free side.

“I don’t even know what they’re trying to accomplish with the bickering,” the Senior Sapper complained. “All it does is infuriate me.”

“Knowing Robber, that’s probably half the reason he does it,” the dark-skinned boy snorted.

“That’s being pretty generous,” I commented, allowing myself a little sigh of pleasure at the sensation of sitting down.

I no longer got as saddle-sore as I’d used to when I’d started out riding Zombie, but I still felt the ache at the end of the day.

“He’d be a lot more tolerable if he didn’t act so...” Pickler started then trailed off, looking for the word. “So manly .”

I spat out a mouthful of aragh, handing back the bottle to Nilin as I coughed it out.

“Robber?” I croaked. “ Manly ? I mean, he’s my friend, but he’s also the sentient equivalent of a pack of walking razor blades.”

“That’s what a male goblin is supposed to be, Callow,” the Senior Sapper sighed. “Vicious, clever, fearless of death. He’s our equivalent of the big hairy human who goes around picking fights in bars.”

“Now there’s a disturbing thought,” I murmured, drawing a chuckle out of Nilin.

“Nauk does fall for his provocations too easily,” the tribune admitted. “He usually regrets it afterwards, but he can’t help himself when it happens.”

“He’s a sweet man,” Pickler muttered. “A little too sweet, to be honest. And he couldn’t build a trebuchet if his life depended on it.”

I choked. That was her standard for who she kept company with? If they could build a trebuchet ? I wasn’t sure whether that was a goblin thing or a Pickler thing, but I elected to have another swallow of aragh instead of pursuing the matter.

“You could just let them down gently, you know,” I said as the warmth burned down my throat. “That should be the end of it. That better be the end of it.”

A darker note had entered my voice for the last part. It was fine for my officers to express interest in one another, so long as it respected regulations, but continuing after a refusal would have crossed the line into harassment. That wasn’t something I had any tolerance for. Pickler coughed and looked away.

“It’s, uh,” she cleared her throat.

“She likes the attention,” Nilin smirked. “And I owe Hakram half a day’s pay. Gods, he’s never wrong about this stuff.”

“You can’t have it both ways, Pickler,” I said.

“It’s different for us,” the Senior Sapper admitted. “Our marriages are arranged by our mothers and overseen by the tribe’s matron. Having a choice is... refreshing.”

When it came down to it, I knew next to nothing about goblin culture. There weren’t books about it and people weren’t usually allowed into their territory past Foramen – where the vast majority of them actually lived, burrowed into the side of the Grey Eyries. They were a matriarchy ruled by the Council of Matrons, who answered directly to the Empress, but aside from that? Just general facts. They were the only ones who could make the eponymous munitions and as a species they had an interest in engineering going back since the Miezan occupation. They had a language of their own, though they never spoke it outside their confines of the Tribes and Black had implied that goblins inclined to break that rule tended to disappear. Only a handful of words from it had ever been translated, and records noted that within a generation every identified term disappeared, replaced by another . There’s a reason the chuckles are always a little nervous when Robber makes a Great Goblin Conspiracy joke. My train of thought was interrupted by a fresh arrival.

“The Deadhand finally graces us with his presence,” Pickler greeted my adjutant in a drunken slur, waving the bottle in his direction

The tall orc snorted. “I guess there’s no need to ask where my stash of aragh went.”

“I requisitioned it for the good of the Empire,” I informed him. “Besides, under your mattress? Seriously? That’s the first place people look.”

“I suppose that’s my own fault, for befriending a villain,” Hakram sighed melodramatically before claiming the space next to me. “What did I miss?”

“Goblin arranged marriages,” Nilin said. “Also, I owe half a day’s pay.”

The orc grinned. “It’s almost too easy fleecing you people.”

“I hope you get the ash plague,” Pickler muttered under her breath.

Hakram raised a hairless brow. “Worry not, dearest Pickler, I will keep your secrets,” he assured her. “... Probably. So arranged marriages, huh. I keep forget you lot do that. Seems unnatural.”

“Hakram Deadhand,” I mocked gently. “Champion of free love.”

“No proper orc would stand for that kind of foolishness,” he insisted. “Chiefs who meddle in stuff like that get an axe in the skull.”

“Save me the orc pride speech,” Nilin moaned. “Nauk already spits it out at least once a day. My clan could have walked twice that distance in the same time, Nilin. My sister’s daughter would have walked that off without a word, Nilin. I’m starting to think his sister’s daughter should be a legion of her own, with all those things she can do.”

I grinned at his utterly ineffectual imitation of Nauk’s gravelling tones. The Soninke’s voice wasn’t exactly high-pitched, but it was a far cry from his commander’s deep orcish baritone.

“In all fairness,” Hakram noted, “we really are better than you glorified herbivores.”

“Herbivore,” Pickler repeated dryly. “Big word you’re using, adjutant. Do you need to punch something to compensate?”

“The mighty Clans are ever surrounded by detractors,” the tall orc mourned. “You should be protecting my honour, Catherine. Doesn’t your House of Light say jealousy is a sin?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I admitted. “I tended to nap through the more boring sermons.”

“That explains a lot,” Nilin murmured with a smirk.

“Hakram, defend my moral fibre from the uppity Soninke,” I ordered, uncorking a second bottle and handing it to him.

He took a sip. “Tribune Nilin of the Fifteenth Legion,” he intoned solemnly. “You have impugned the reputation of the Squire. The sentence for which... is death.”

The dark-skinned boy gasped and put a hand over his heart.

“Let me tombstone read that I spoke only the truth,” he declared.

A shadow was cast over me, someone leaning over my head.

“The rebels would win this war outright, if they just kept sending us barrels of wine,” Juniper opined.

“This coming from a woman who spent the better part of a night trying to convince Nauk to wrestle an ox,” I shot back immediately.

“It would have done wonders for morale,” she gravelled, somehow managing to keep a straight face.

My legate sat on the log by Pickler, taking the offered bottle without missing a beat. I looked for her usual shadow only to find nothing.

“No Aisha tonight?” I asked.

Juniper growled. “Ratface has been dragging his leg in putting the trades he made in Summerholm on paper. She’ll be riding him hard tonight until he does.”

I exchanged a look with Nilin, then we burst out laughing.

“That’s one way to motivate him, I suppose,” Pickler snorted.

“ Children ,” Juniper grunted, rolling her eyes.

“Which reminds me,” Hakram said. “The warlock’s get won’t be joining us.”

I raised a questioning eyebrow.

“He was elbow-deep in something’s carcass when I went to check on him,” the adjutant explained. “I decided not to ask twice.”

“Understandable,” I conceded.

“But worry not, Boss,” he grinned. “We won’t be without mage presence tonight. Kilian should be joining us.”

I took in a sharp breath and straightened out the mess that was my hair. I really should have washed before coming here. Gods, I probably still smelled of horse. Dead horse, at that. I looked around and everyone was smirking at me.

“What?” I asked, the tone coming out a little defensive.

“I’m sure your hair looks just fine, Catherine,” Nilin grinned.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I replied, gathering the tattered shreds of my dignity.

“She did ask if you would be there,” Hakram gravelled knowingly.

I was not going to smile, not when I was being baited this obviously. Still, hearing that put a warm feeling in my stomach. It was just an infatuation, I told myself. Even if it’d been a while for me, it was just an infatuation.

“Why would we talk about the wasteland that is my love life when we have Pickler’s juicier one to dissect?” I replied, shamelessly throwing the Senior Sapper under the chariot.

There was a hoot of delight from the vultures and the conversation turned at the goblin’s expense. From the corner of my eye I watched Hakram’s skeletal hand close around the bottle and almost frowned.

“You do that a lot,” Juniper said.

The legate had moved next to me while the others talked, leaning close enough we wouldn’t be overheard.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Stare at the hand, when you think nobody’s looking,” the Hellhound spoke flatly.

We really need to go over the concept of letting people dodge uncomfortable subjects at some point, Juniper. I knew from experience the orc wasn’t one easily put off when she brought a subject up, so I sighed and resigned myself to the conversation.

“Can you blame me?” I asked. “I’m the reason it’s there.”

The legate rolled her eyes again.

“Lady Squire-“

I cleared my throat.

“Fine,” she growled. “Catherine. He’s an orc.”

“I’d noticed,” I replied.

“I don’t think you understand what that really means,” the Hellhound grunted. “We’re not green-skinned humans with better teeth. We’re orcs .”

“And?”

“While human children are learning to read, we’re learning to kill. While you’re picking up a trade, we’re learning to kill. While you’re going to pray in your pretty little churches, we’re learning to kill . War isn’t just what we do, Catherine, it’s what we are.”

The orc rolled her shoulders.

“If we’re not fighting the Empire’s enemies, we’re fighting each other. If an orc loses a hand, it means they were too weak or too slow. Hakram, though? He went up against heroes and came out stronger for it. There’s not an orc who’ll look at those bones and see anything but a mark of pride.”

I guessed I’d known that, on some level. My adjutant had never once even implied that he was anything but satisfied with his new hand. But that wasn’t the part that really unsettled me, was it? It was that I’d given the order. Maybe not spoken the words out loud, but I’d tacitly sent Hakram to fight the Thief. He wasn’t even a claimant, not the way I’d been before becoming the Squire – he just had... potential, almost realized. In the heat of the fight, I’d sent the closest friend I’d made since leaving Laure into a duel with a heroine, knowing very well chances were he’d die in the process. It didn’t matter that he saw nothing wrong with that. I wasn’t comfortable with what it said about me that when blades came out I could make a decision like that without even hesitating. But that’s on me. It’s not their problem to deal with.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Juniper grunted, “you should see the way women look at him now.”

I laughed. “It’s bad?”

My legate wrinkled her nose. “He’s never been one to have an empty bed for long, but it’s almost disgraceful how often he gets hit on nowadays.”

My grin widened. “Are you telling me Hakram is a womanizer?”

The Hellhound nodded, distinctly amused. “He’s discreet about it, at least. You ever notice how for such a gossip he almost never talks about himself?”

Huh. I hadn’t, actually. Though now that she brought it up, I could see how he tended to steer the conversation towards other people. I knew who his friends were and what clan he was from, but that wasn’t much at all. Something to think on. The volume of the chatter rose suddenly and I glanced in the direction of the others. In the middle of the throng, suffering what passed for my minions’ sense of humour, Kilian stood. She looked a little overwhelmed by the drunken attention, though she was smiling. Her pixie-cut dark red hair had been freshly combed, by the looks of it, and she seemed to have traded the usual legionary under tunic for more comfortable cotton shirt and trousers. I could not help but notice how they made her legs look even longer than usual, or the fact that her armour hid away rather noticeable curves.

“And I don’t want any part of that look on your face, so if you’ll excuse me,” Juniper gravelled.

I let that go without a response, though I schooled my face into an expression that was a little more appropriate. My legate took back her old seat and everyone else shuffled along, leaving an empty space by my side in what I assumed to be the opposite of happenstance. Kilian promptly filled it, gracing me with a smile.

“Finally found his stash, did you?” she said.

I opened a new bottle and grinned. “Under his mattress, if you can believe it.”

“Rookie mistake,” the Senior Mage chuckled, shaking her head in mock dismay.

The redhead leaned back against the log, our bodies closer than was strictly necessary. The kick of the liquor wasn’t the only reason for the flush on my face, though the pleasant haze of drunkenness kept me in a mellow mood.

“We should have done this more often, back in the College,” I said. “With the responsibilities we all have now, we won’t be getting chances like this often.”

“There weren’t as many of us, back then,” Kilian replied. “Just Rat Company. It’s nice, having the others along.”

Juniper was the only one who’d not been with the Rats there tonight, but I took her point. Aisha was good company, when she got that stick out of her ass, and I took a twisted sort of satisfaction out of goading Masego into drinking the hard stuff. Apparently there was no magical cure for a hangover, which made his shambling the following morning a very entertaining spectacle.

“This is all still new to me,” I admitted.

Kilian raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t go drinking with your friends in Laure?”

“I didn’t really have friends, in Laure,” I shrugged. “Colleagues, some contacts. The occasional interest. But I didn’t quite fit in back at the orphanage, or anywhere else for that matter.”

The redhead looked surprised. “But you’re one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met,” she protested.

I snorted. “That’s overselling it a bit.”

“Catherine is convinced she’s uncharismatic, for some reason,” Hakram called out from the other side of the fire.

“I make enemies a lot more often than I make friends,” I reminded him.

Juniper barked out a laugh. “Can’t really call it “making” an enemy, if they were already out for your blood. Foundling, there’s not another captain that could have talked their company into following a plan as messed up as the one you pulled in the melee. And the Rats took it on faith, going in blind.”

I grimaced. “The company didn’t have a lot to lose by listening to me, no offense to you lot.”

“There’s a difference between hitting the bottom and believing someone can drag you back up,” Pickler said. “You were the one with a plan. We all learned to trust in that, before you were done.”

Her tone was a little odd and I shot her a quizzical look. Was she still feeing guilty about the way she’d spoken up against me during the melee? She’d had legitimate concerns, even if she’d phrased them unflatteringly. Besides, it was water under the bridge as far as I was concerned. The Senior Sapper had been one the cornerstones of what could be called my “faction” inside the Fifteenth, along with Nauk and Robber. The way everyone was looking at me was starting to make me uncomfortable so I raised my bottle.

“To taking refuge in audacity, then,” I toasted.

There was a round of cheers, some louder than others, and the conversation drifted away. Kilian eventually hummed quietly, looking away from my face.

“So “interests”, huh,” she said. “Left behind any broken hearts when you got out of Laure?”

“Hardly,” I snorted. “I never got into anything too serious. Well, there was that fisherman’s son who was getting there, but I broke it off. I was already aiming for the College, back then, staying in the capital wasn’t in the cards.”

“Oh,” she spoke. “A boy. I was under the impression you were...”

The redhead gestured vaguely, though I got the gist of the meaning.

“I’m bisexual,” I informed her amusedly. “I’ve been with people of both genders. I mean, don’t get me wrong, girls are nice but there was this boy called Duncan back home who had pecs like you wouldn’t believe.”

“You’re rather horrible at this, aren’t you?” Kilian spoke wryly.

Shit. Right. Maybe should have kept that one under wraps. The aragh was not doing wonders for my tact, not that it had ever been one of my strongest traits. I cleared my throat.

“Have you?” I asked. “Been interested in girls before, I mean.”

“Only the one, so far,” the redhead sighed. “I honestly can’t tell if she’s not interested or just very bad at picking up on signals.”

Oh. Oh.

“Would you like to go for a walk, Kilian?” I croaked out.

“As long as it leads towards your tent,” she replied frankly.

“I think that can be arranged,” I said, hurriedly rising to my feet.

Well. This might turn out to be an even better night than I’d thought.

Chapter 14: Situation

“Any plan with more than four steps is not a plan, it is wishful thinking.”
– Dread Empress Maleficent II

I was in an unusually good mood.

That we’d finally come within half a day’s march of where the Sixth and the Ninth were camped was contributing: traipsing around Callow had held an element of novelty for the first few days, but by now I was sick and tired of looking at empty fields. That Hakram was so close to coming into his Name that I could finally feel something coming off of him was another factor. Soon he’d be in a position where any assassin trying to take him on was in for a rude awakening. Yet it would be a lie to pretend that the main reason for my occasional urge to whistle wasn’t that’d I’d been sharing a bed with Kilian for the last three nights. She was usually gone by the time I woke up, sadly, but that was military life for you. We were expected to put up the pretence of professionalism regardless of the reality. Besides, what we got up to before going to sleep more than made up for it. For all that she’d apparently never been with a woman before Kilian had proved to be an, uh, eager and dedicated student. I had a fresh new appreciation for all those ribald jokes about nimble mage’s hands.

According to Juniper, the latest milestone our scouting lines had found indicated we were actually ahead of schedule: Black had installed his legions at the village of Harper’s Crossing and at our current pace we’d be there before Noon Bell. It was a warm spring day, the clouds were clear and the sky was blue – I’d allowed myself to be tempted to ride in front of the Fifteenth, keeping Nauk and Nilin company. The conversation had drifted towards our coming assignment and the battle inevitably coming with it. Opinions on the fighting strength the Silver Spears would bring to bear were, as it turned out, somewhat mixed.

“Sure, Helike messed up Procer something good during the League Wars,” Commander Nauk growled. “But they were under Theodosius the Unconquered. The man was brilliant, could have done the same with a pack of goatherds. He was also a villain. Tyrants are a special breed of competent.”

“I think there’s quite a bit of difference between goatherds and Free Cities men-at-arms,” Nilin replied patiently. “Better armour, for one. Fewer unwholesome entanglements with bovids, most likely – though I’m not putting anything above soldiers if they campaign long enough.”

“I’m sure they’d put togas on the poor creatures at least,” I opined. “You know how they are about proper dress, down south.”

Nauk barked out a laugh and his tribune graced me with a smile.

“That said, I’ve gotten some preliminary reports from Black,” I continued. “At least five hundred cavalry, equipped in the Proceran style. That’ll be tricky to deal with.”

The large orc grinned nastily. “The Legions handled the knights of the Old Kingdom, Boss. We’ll swallow those pretty bastards whole and spit out their bones.”

“Poetic,” Nilin spoke drily. “And I’ll grant you that after Callowan knights every other cavalrymen look like children, but we’re not the Ironsides. We don’t field nearly enough pike to cover our entire first rank.”

“Juniper is of the opinion that if we deploy your ogres in the right place it won’t matter,” I said. “I’m inclined to agree. Not that their riders are the only challenge they’ll offer.”

There were three full lines of ogres under Nauk’s command, armoured in the thickest plate to ever come out of Foramen and wielding war hammers that were outright taller than me. I knew that because I’d stood next to one and found out with dismay that the crown of my head didn’t even reach the top of the shaft. My damnable height aside, the ogres could stop a cavalry charge flat if they stood in front of it. The war hammers would crush through the kind of scale mail cataphracts wore like wet parchment and lances would hardly do more than sting. That said, I’d fought ogres during the melee. I knew damn well they weren’t invincible. They got tired like everybody else, and they could be swarmed if the enemy had the numbers to throw at them. Which they did, in the case of the Silver Spears: Scribe’s estimates had them at two thousand men-at-arms in addition to the cavalry.

The war doctrine taught at the College stated that a legion could take two-to-one odds and reasonably expect to come out on top if they had a full supply of goblin munitions, but in this case it was different. The Fifteenth could barely field one thousand and seven hundred legionaries, a full company of which would be... unreliable. The Forlorn Hope would have to be deployed carefully, preferably in range of goblin crossbowmen in case they got the wrong sort of ideas. More than that, the Silver Spears were led by a hero. My teacher had promised he’d get me a look at the files both his and the Empress’ spies had mounted on this Exiled Prince, but even if he was an incompetent wretch just his being present changed everything. Current Legion doctrine relied on shock and awe tactics to break superior numbers, after all. If the first rank of the enemy host disappeared in a hail of sharpers and the one behind it was drowned in a wave of fireballs, enemy morale usually got shaken up something fierce.

All that went out the window with a hero in the ranks. As long as the Prince drew breath, no army he commanded would rout. They’d walk unflinchingly into the grinder and fight like devils until either we were dead or they were wiped out. Captain had told me once that, before the Reforms, no Imperial host took on a Callowan one unless they had them four to one. My own studies of the Empire’s chequered military history had illustrated why: there were at least a dozen incidents were a Callowan army brutally outnumbered had made a desperate last stand and managed a miraculous last-moment victory. Amusingly enough, under Terribilis II there’d been an official decree from the Tower forbidding the Legions from giving battle when it seemed like they couldn’t possibly lose. There’s a reason the man managed to turn back two Crusades. A shame that he’d been assassinated shortly afterwards, but that was the way Praesi politics worked: no great accomplishment went unpunished.

“That’s what we got you for, Callow,” Nauk spoke bluntly. “I’m looking forward to you running that pretentious little princeling down. Hells, I’d take a potshot at him myself if I thought it would work.”

“Getting competitive with Hakram, are we?” Nilin teased. “A commander should know better than to open war on multiple fronts – you’ve already got Robber to deal with.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Nauk grunted. “But I’d like it on official record that you’re an insubordinate twit.”

“I’ll see it done,” I promised gravely, lips twitching.

Before I could turn back the subject to our slice of the coming campaign, my attention was drawn to a pair of goblins making their way through the ranks towards us. My vision sharpened with barely a thought and I made out the green markings on their armour indicating they were scouts and not sappers – not that there’d been much of a chance otherwise, since they were coming from ahead of the column. The two of them were male, and relatively young-looking: closer to ten than fifteen, if I had to wager.

“Ma’am,” the officer among them saluted. “Commander Nauk, Tribute Nilin.”

I cocked my head to the side. “You have something for me, sergeant?”

He bobbed his head. “Sergeant Latcher, ma’am, Second Company. We were scouting the road ahead when we ran into a detachment from the Sixth.”

I raised an eyebrow. “We’re getting fairly close to their camp, so that’s not too unexpected. I’m assuming there’s more?”

“Wolf riders,” the other goblin muttered. “Ma’am,” he added hastily.

I raised a silent eyebrow, waiting for them to elaborate. The mounted orcs covered ground even faster than goblins, it was only natural for General Istrid to use them as a patrols. Especially after getting her supply line hit by the Silver Spears. She’s got to be that much more careful about them sneaking about.

“They, uh, bring a message from Lord Black,” Sergeant Latcher explained. “He’s requesting for you come ahead of the Fifteenth. Something about an imminent war council.”

I sighed. “He could have mentioned that last time we scried,” I grunted. “Still, doesn’t matter. Are they still here?”

Latcher bobbed his head again. “They’ve been instructed to act as your escort.”

“Kind of them,” I spoke drily. I glanced at my companions. “Looks like we’ll have to cut this short. Send a runner to Juniper to tell her where I’ve gone.”

“Duly noted,” Nilin replied.

“Have fun,” Nauk waved airily.

“My teacher’s a lot of things, Nauk,” I noted. “Fun is, unfortunately, not one of them.”

—

The largest of the two inns in Harper’s Crossing had been appropriated as the official headquarters for the joint Sixth and Ninth Legions. While it hadn’t been fortified – which was considerate of Black – the Blackguards were swarming the entire area, a sure sign my teacher was inside. His faceless guards were never far behind, not even in the middle of a village-turned-fortified-camp. As it happened, when my grim-faced orc escorts left me behind they were surrendering me to an old acquaintance.

“Lieutenant Abase,” I spoke up, pleasantly surprised.

The Soninke pushed up his visor and revealed his face, looking mildly exasperated.

“I should have known eventually you’d start telling us apart,” he replied. He offered his arm to clasp like he’d taught me what seemed like an eternity ago and I took it. “Good to see you Catherine.”

“Same,” I replied. “Any reason you lot are out in force today? It looks like you’re pulling out all the stops.”

“A pair of assassins tried to infiltrate the camp yesterday,” he grimaced. “Lady Scribe found them out but they killed themselves before they could be taken prisoner. We’re not sure who their target was.”

Well, shit. Abase probably wasn’t in the loop when it came to Hakram, but I had a pretty good idea who’d sent the assassins and who they’d been hired to kill. The only real question was whether they’d been sent by Heiress herself or by the Truebloods as a whole. I was definitely upping the guard around Hakram’s tent, discreet measure or not.

“He in a foul mood, then?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Abase shrugged. “But he’s been keeping long hours. I get the impression there are foreign concerns.”

“Well, only one way to find out,” I murmured. “Take care, Lieutenant.”

“Same to you, Lady Squire,” he replied with a nod.

The other Blackguards moved aside to let me pass, well used to my presence from the afternoon lessons I’d had in my teacher’s Ater estate. The inside of the inn was comfortable and well-lit, but I barely paid attention to it: there were three people inside the common room, seated around a broad table covered in maps and the tidy piles of paperwork that inevitably followed Scribe around. Black rose from his seat when I entered, a smile on his face as he strode towards me.

“Catherine,” he greeted me warmly.

I found myself engulfed in a hug I leaned into, against my better judgement. I had missed him, much as it pained me to admit it. I didn’t have to trust him to like him, and some days it was hard to manage even that much. It didn’t help he was obviously fond of me, and though I knew he could fake that easily enough I was almost sure he wasn’t. I allowed myself a moment to enjoy the rare display of affection before returning to the present. I was almost as tall as he was now, I noticed. I must have grown without noticing, not that standing higher than Black would be much of an accomplishment.

“Black,” I replied, a smile tugging at my lips.

A large hand clasped my shoulder as I drew back and I turned to face Captain.

“Sabah,” I said. “It’s been a while.”

“Too long,” the gargantuan woman replied. “Look at you, you went up the better part of an inch.”

“Hadn’t noticed,” I admitted. “My armour still fits just fine.”

I glanced at the third villain and found Scribe quietly studying me. She nodded once, then turned back her attention to the report she was reading. That she’d acknowledged my presence at all was already an accomplishment, in my experience. Still, in the back of my mind Ime’s warning sounded. Be very careful around Scribe , she’d said. Do not ever let her believe you are a threat to him.

“Oh my, Sabah,” Black murmured. “Look at the lack of tension in her shoulders.”

The warrior woman chuckled. “I see it. The Taghreb boy or the redhead?” she asked.

I grimaced. “Should I even ask how the two of you know about that?”

Black raised an expectant eyebrow, declining to reply.

“Kilian,” I finally admitted.

Not that I’d ever seriously considered Ratface. He was nice enough to look at, but if he was actually over Aisha I’d plunger my head in a brazier. My teacher raised a hand and Captain cursed, flipping a golden aureus he deftly snatched out of the air.

“Never bet against a redhead,” he said smugly.

“It’s not like you need the gold,” the Taghreb complained.

“Wine tastes better when bought through victory,” Black replied easily.

“This isn’t exactly the reaction I expected when you learned I’d taken up with someone without a Name,” I interrupted.

Better not to let them get started. Captain could bicker with the best of them, when the mood took her, and my teacher was physically incapable of letting anyone else have the last word. Black shrugged indifferently.

“We’ll need to have a conversation about risk management later,” he said. “But I am not unduly worried. It’s not without precedent.”

“Wekesa’s husband might be a devil,” Captain rumbled, “but Amna isn’t.”

I sometimes forgot Captain was married, mostly because she rarely spoke of her husband. Or her children, for that matter. I’d been rather surprised to learn she had two, her eldest actually a few years older than me. That of all people she’d ended marrying a minor Taghreb bureaucrat from the Tower had been a shock, though it did explain her occasional maternal leanings. I’d never gotten the entire story of how it came about, though given how private of a woman she could be that was to be expected.

“I’m guessing you didn’t send wolf riders out for me just to discuss my love life, no matter how much gold you had riding on it,” I finally spoke up. “The messengers mentioned a war council?”

“Take a seat,” Black said. “There will be a briefing with Istrid and Sacker later tonight, though we’ll wait for your legate for that. The council was an excuse to get you here early.”

I frowned. “Do we have a problem?”

“You might say that,” he replied. “There were developments abroad.”

“Ominous,” I commented. “Been a while since someone has been so vague at me.”

The pale-skinned man’s lips twitched, though the amusement was short-lived. Sabah idly adjusted her belt, then looked askance at Black.

“Go ahead,” he said. “We’re having her over for dinner anyhow.”

Sabah clapped my shoulder again. “I have business to attend to,” she said. “I’ll see you later tonight.”

Had she come just to greet me? That was oddly touching, in a way. I nodded back and watched her walk away.

“The Principate is assembling a host,” Black told me, claiming back my attention. “We’ve had several reports confirming that Klaus Papenheim will be leading it.”

“The First Prince’s uncle,” I mused. “Prince of Hannoven, right?”

“Correct,” he agreed. “Arguably her staunchest supporter, as well as one of her best generals.”

“You think they’re making a play for the Vales while we’re busy here?” I asked. “I thought she had domestic matters to deal with before she could.”

“I think he’s headed south,” the green-eyed man replied. “To the Dominion.”

Levant, huh. It wasn’t a nation I spent a lot of time thinking about. It was on the other side of Calernia, and considering it was surrounded by the Principate and the Titanomanchy it was unlikely we’d ever have to fight them. I did know they had several axes to grind with Procer, from back when their territory had been a fresh three principalities added to the Principate by force of arms. They’d rebelled with Ashuran backing and since built the Red Snake Wall, which made their northern border more or less impossible to cross.

“She’s not trying to conquer them again, is she? I thought she was supposed to be some sort of political mastermind,” I said.

“I doubt it will come to open war,” Black spoke. “But they’ve been making trouble in Orense. She needs to settle that before turning her attention elsewhere.”

“And the Dominion is going to be impressed by a few thousand footmen standing around awkwardly?” I snorted. “Their wall would literally eat them if they tried anything.”

“It would if they assaulted it,” the Knight replied. “That won’t be the case. She’s had the fleets of all sea-side principalities mobilized.”

“They have to be charging her through the nose for that,” I pointed out.

“Her treasury can weather it,” Black said. “It might be a different story if she went on a protracted campaign, but she won’t have to – the mere threat of landing an army past the wall will be enough to give Levant pause.”

“So she’s bluffing?” I frowned. “That strikes me as a costly gambit to run.”

“The Principate is the second wealthiest nation of Calernia, and at the moment they have more coin to spare than soldiers,” the green-eyed man noted. “There’s also the fact that throwing around that much gold will go a long way in convincing the Dominion she’s willing to pull the trigger if she has to. That her own uncle heads the host will only further that impression.”

“The Majilis has met on the subject already, though the official reason for the session was another one,” a quiet voice contributed.

I glanced at Scribe, who’d put down her quill while speaking.

“That’s the Dominion’s equivalent of the Highest Assembly, right?” I frowned, scrabbling for what little I’d learned about Levant’s political system.

“Roughly,” Black conceded. “Their official head of state is more a spiritual leader than a temporal one. Every city has their own ruler descended from one of the heroes that originally founded Levant – together they form the Majilis and choose the Seljun by consensus. Unlike the Principate, however, they have no real nation-wide policy. The ruler of Vaccei is the one who’s been testing Orense’s borders.”

“She has no support in the rest of the Majilis,” Scribe murmured. “They voted against censuring her, but she’s aware she would be standing alone. She’ll have to swallow her pride if the First Prince pushes hard enough.”

I hummed. “That’s troubling, though I don’t see why you needed me to come ahead of the Fifteenth to learn it.”

Black ran a finger along the surface of the table.

“Because when Levant backs down, Hasenbach’s last foreign liability will be Helike. Which she’ll be able to muzzle through a vote of the League, when she gathers enough allies in the Free Cities.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And that means?”

Black’s lips thinned in displeasure, though it was not directed at me. “Our timetable in Callow has changed. The rebellion must be over before summer is over, or we may very well be facing a war on two fronts.”

Chapter 15: Council

“If you can’t play to your strengths, play to your enemy’s weaknesses.”
-Marshal Grem One-Eye

I could feel the eyes of the crowd on us as we strode towards the tent Black had told me about.

Legionaries from the Ninth with the traditional red streak of paint across their throat watched us pass, letting whispers bloom in our wake. The men and women from the Sixth were friendlier, orcs most of all. Tall greenskins with the scrawled iron-grey rib on their armour that served as the unofficial symbol of the Ironsides saluted and waved, though most of that friendliness was directed towards Juniper. That she was General Istrid’s daughter had been a mostly well-kept secret back at the College, but out here? My teacher had mentioned once that Knightsbane tended to boast about her prodigious daughters when she got into her cups, and the evidence of that was all around us. Hakram formed the third member of our little clique, accompanying us more because of his Name than his position. Masego had been extended the same invitation, but he’d decline without missing a beat. Something about preferring counting ants to inflicting a session of military planning on himself, since at least there was some sort of scholarly value to the former. I didn’t particularly mind: he’d be joining me for dinner with Black and Captain anyway, so if anything urgent came up I could brief him then.

The murmurs of “Deadhand” and “Adjutant” that usually greeted Hakram’s appearance in front of legionaries were notably absent, which I took to mean Black had clamped down on the rumours here. Unfortunate that it in no way meant that word wouldn’t reach Heiress, if it hadn’t already. A problem for another day, that. The last I’d heard of the prettier of my archnemeses – was that the word? I found it hard to believe that I was the first villain to have multiple sworn enemies, there was bound to be a specific term – she’d landed a mercenary force in southern Callow and taken the city of Dormer. That had been two months ago, though, and I knew better than to think she’d have remained idle that long. Undoubtedly she would soon make an attempt to fuck me over in some unexpected way. It was a shame there were no real assassin guilds left in the Empire, because with the way my general’s pay had been stacking up I might actually be able to afford putting a price on her head. There was bound to be something possible to arrange from Mercantis, but I had no contacts in the City of Bought and Sold.

Entering the tent first, I pushed aside the cloth and found we were the last to arrive.

General Istrid was already hitting the wine, if the cup in her hand was any indication. She still looked like someone had carved an orc out of old leather, and that striking scar on her face pulled up her mouth in a permanent mocking grin. General Sacker, on the other hand, was seated on a high stool. I would have thought the sight of the small wrinkled goblin perched on the top of the wooden frame comical, if not for those yellow half-lidded eyes that missed nothing. Black was leaning over the table, looking over a map, and didn’t bother to glance up as I came in. My orc bookends followed a heartbeat later and Istrid’s face lit up at the sight of her daughter.

“Squire,” she greeted me almost absent-mindedly, clapping my shoulder as she passed me by and fell upon her daughter like a particularly affectionate pack of wolves.

“June,” she gravelled. “Look at you, all grown up in the kit. It feels like yesterday you were playing knights and legionaries with sticks.”

“ Mother ,” my legate barked, looking mortified.

I bit my lip and glimpsed the ghost of a smile on my teacher’s face. Hakram gave the whole thing a wide berth, but from the glint in his eyes I knew every Rat Company officer was going to have heard the story before morning.

“Yes, yes, you’re a legate now,” Istrid grunted, smoothing the hair on her daughter’s head gently. “Very serious. Have you been eating enough? Your cheeks look hollow.”

They did not, in fact, look hollow in any way. I decided to take pity on the Hellhound and cleared my throat.

“General Istrid,” I said. “A pleasure to see you again.”

I turned to look at Knightsbane’s goblin counterpart.

“General Sacker,” I added.

“Foundling,” the general of the Ninth replied drily. “Istrid, stop fussing over your spawn. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

The scarred orc withdrew, throwing her colleague a dark look.

“I was doing no such thing,” she denied.

The goblin rolled her eyes. “Legate Juniper, Adjutant, welcome.”

“General Sacker,” Juniper replied, gathering her verbal footing.

A wicked glimmer appeared in the goblin’s eyes.

“Whatever happened to “Auntie Sacks”?” she asked.

“ I was four years old! It was a hard word to pronounce! ” Juniper keened in dismay.

Gods, I hadn’t even known she could blush that green. Hakram leaned in close to me.

“This is the mother lode of blackmail material,” he whispered, grin splitting his face. “I will never have to suffer a speech about gear cleanliness again.”

Black cleared his throat, and everyone fell silent.

“Entertaining as this is, we do have a briefing to attend to,” he said.

Juniper’s blush deepened, if anything, and she gave him the bastard cousin of a curtsey. I goggled at the sight. A curtsey? From the Hellhound ?

“Lord Black,” she murmured.

My teacher nodded a greeting at Hakram, smiled at me and bid us closer. I took a look at the map – it covered the whole of Callow, though the word itself was nowhere in sight. A bronze figure of a knight had been placed over Vale, another one where the eastern side of the Hengest lake met the Waning Woods and a third on the crossing linking the county of Marchford to central Callow. The Silver Spears, unless I was wrong. A silver legionary figurine had been placed over Dormer and a pair of the same over the rough location of the village we currently stood on, north-east of Vale.

“We’ve been in contact with the mercenary bands under the employ of the Heiress,” Black announced and I forced down a scowl. “They intend to move on Baroness Dormer’s host before the week is done.”

Reaching for a second victory when I had yet to win my first one. Fucking Heiress. Juniper eyed the map pensively.

“Do we know how many soldiers she’s fielding?” my legate asked.

“Roughly four thousand,” General Sacker spoke in that quiet way of hers. “No cavalry. About half is light infantry, Proceran exiles from their southern principalities.”

“And the rest?” Hakram gravelled.

“A full Stygian phalanx,” Black replied.

“She’s using slaves ?” I spat out. “That’s illegal under Tower law.”

Sacker’s face was inscrutable, but I could see vicious anger lurking in the face of all orcs present. Soninke and Taghreb had suffered under the Miezan occupation, but they’d never had entire clans clapped in chains the way orcs had. When Dread Empress Maleficent had founded the Dread Empire, the outlawing of slavery had been one of the things she’d used to bring the Clans into the fold – and even over a thousand years later orcs hated slavery with an almost frightening intensity.

“Technically the territory held by the rebels is not Imperial ground, on a legal basis,” Black noted. “Regardless, she has “freed” them.”

The disdain he put in the word rang loud and clear. Nominally granting the Stygian war-slaves their freedom meant absolutely nothing, when they’d been indoctrinated from birth to obey their orders of their owners without fail. I resisted the urge to spit on the ground.

“At least it has to be putting a dent in her coffers,” I said. “Even if she only pays half of them, keeping two thousand mercenaries on payroll has to be draining no matter how rich you are.”

“It would,” Sacker croaked out, “if they were paid entirely in wages.”

“She’s allowing them to pillage,” Juniper cursed. “Burning fucking Hells. That whole corner of Callow will despise the Empire for generations.”

“She can’t be doing any of this under an Imperial banner,” Hakram pointed out. “She’s acting as a private citizen in this.”

“Yeah, like that’ll change anything,” I grunted. “All the locals will remember is that a Soninke was giving the orders. Black, why hasn’t the Empress reined her in?”

The green-eyed man’s face went blank. “The political situation back in Ater complicates the matter. Malicia has given authorization to discipline them if they act out when under shared command, but as long as she’s on her own her hands are free.”

Istrid spat to the side, much to my amusement.

“Politics should stay out of wars,” she growled.

So that was where Juniper got it from.

“Regardless of her undesirable behaviour,” General Sacker spoke, “she’s tactically useful, at the moment. Dormer’s army can’t link up with Countess Marchford as long as she’s threatening their flank. That keeps them to a manageable number.”

“Twenty thousand, right?” I frowned. “At least most of them are levies.”

“Marchford has only two forces that could match a legion on even grounds,” Black said. “The core of two thousand dwarven heavy infantry in her main force and the Silver Spears.”

“Never read anything about dwarven troops,” I grunted. “Juniper?”

“The last known skirmish involving the Kingdom Under was when the principality of Iserre diverted a river into one of their mining operations,” Juniper spoke in a baritone. “Contemporary reports are unreliable, but they seem to have been more than a match for the prince’s standing army.”

Oh, I’d heard about that. The dwarves had retaliated by sinking the Old Iserre underground and wiping out the surviving population. It was the reason most Calernian nations had laws forbidding provocation of the Kingdom Under.

“That was what, seven hundred years ago?” Hakram gravelled. “Nobody’s scrapped with them since? That information has to be outdated.”

“The drow in the Everdark have clashed with them on occasion, but any information coming out of that rathole is unreliable at best,” Black said. “Regardless, we should expect their armour, weapons and training to be at least a notch above our own.”

Not to mention they’d be even more physically robust than orcs and at least partially resistant to magic. Tough customers.

“Keeping them paid, on the other hand, must be costing the Principate a fortune,” the Knight smiled viciously. “Not to mention their... creative notions regarding private property.”

Everybody shared a grin at that. Dwarves were of the belief that only dwarves could actually own things – which meant, in essence, that taking said things from other people wasn’t thievery or in any way morally reprehensible. There’d been a famous incident in Callow where a Duke of Liesse’s family jewels had been taken by a visiting dignitary and the Kingdom Under had refused to just give them back. The poor bastard had to buy them, emptying half his duchy’s coffers in the process. If they were camped in the middle of Marchford’s army, I hoped for her sake she’d locked away the silverware and nailed down anything she wanted to keep. Otherwise it was likely to disappear underground forever.

“The dwarves are our problem,” General Istrid grunted. “You girls – and you, Deadhand – are going to have to mop up the Silver Spears.”

Black’s fingers drummed against the table’s surface.

“The defensive part of this campaign is over,” he announced. “We’re going on the offensive on all fronts. While Heiress catches their attention we’ll move on Vale, though I fully expect the Countess to retreat when we do. That makes it a priority for you to either wipe out or box in the Silver Spears. If the rebels continue their scorched earth tactics as they retreat south, our supply train must be secure. We court disaster otherwise.”

“Yes sir,” I murmured, starting when I realized Juniper had done the same.

“Our last sighting has them in the vicinity of the old ford the city of Marchford was named for. They destroyed the bridge a few days after declaring their rebellion, so you’ll have to secure it to cross,” General Sacker spoke mildly.

“Have we confirmed their numbers?” I asked.

“Their run-in with Captain cost them some officers, but their effective strength remains the same as the last report I gave you,” Black replied. “Scribe suspects they have more than one hero in the ranks, and our failure to scry them so far suggests they have a priest of some talent along. Considering the close ties of the Helikean royal family with the House of Light, that is almost a certitude.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I muttered, mind already racing.

“I want the Fifteenth to occupy Marchford itself, afterwards,” Black continued. “Having a legion pay a visit to her demesne will turn up the pressure on the Countess. She’s been careful to avoid meeting us on the field so far.”

“You intend for us to remain and garrison the city?” Juniper asked.

Black shook his head. “After re-establishing Imperial control I want you to march back to us as fast as you can. Afolabi will send troops after you’re gone. Ideally I’d like the Fifteenth to be present when we engage the Countess.”

“Sounds like plan,” I grunted.

It wouldn’t be that easy, of course. I’d learn to expect complications by now. But it was the outline of a course of action, and for now that would have to do.

—

Dinner was pleasant, but most of us had duties that prevented us from lingering. Still, when Black invited me up to his rooms for a conversation, I did not decline. We had several conversations long overdue, and it would be a while before we were in the same place again. There was a fireplace and two armchairs, the one I claimed usually occupied by Captain if the size of it was any indication. He poured me a cup of wine after doing the same for himself, cool touch of the metal contrasting the heat coming off of the fireplace.

“On the subject of your paramour,” Black said, settling into his seat.

I snorted. “I think the word you’re looking for is “girlfriend”,” I told him.

The dark-haired man wrinkled his nose. “No, I’m quite sure it wasn’t. Regardless of semantics, I’m sure you suspect I had people dig into the lives of all the people you work closest with.”

“I thought that was pretty much a given, yeah,” I admitted.

There’d been a time where the concept of my teacher invading the privacy of my friends would have irked me, but I’d left that kind of naiveté behind. My enemies had deep pockets and they were out for blood: having someone like Black watching out for liabilities was almost reassuring. While we’d never had a conversation on the subject before, none of my officers had suddenly disappeared into the night. I took that to mean they were reliable, or at least without open motive to betray me.

“Your cadre of senior officers has an unusually high loyalty index,” he noted. “Juniper’s family ties make her a given. Senior Sapper Pickler is the daughter of the matron for the High Ridge tribe but they are estranged. Hasan Qara, who you know as Ratface, is openly feuding with his father – a member in good standing of the Truebloods. Aisha Bishara is fifth in line for a lordship sworn to Kahtan but she’s had no real contact with dangerous elements. We have little hard knowledge on Commander Hune, but ogres typically stay out of politics. Still, someone to watch. Commander Nauk has made several... enthusiastic public statements in your support, though about half were made when inebriated. He’s also wanted for murder in Thalassina.”

I blinked. “Murder? Shit . What happened?”

It wasn’t like he could be arrested anymore – enrolment in the Legions wiped your criminal record clean, even allowed you to change your name like Ratface had – but it distressed me I hadn’t even suspected.

“An altercation with a Taghreb merchant,” Black replied. “The man struck him and your own went into the Red Rage.”

I grimaced. “He must have been young. He doesn’t lost control like that anymore.”

The green-eyed villain hummed in disagreement. “Emotional states are more likely to trigger an episode than physical pain. It’s one of the reasons berserkers can force themselves into the state. That flaw makes him unreliable as an officer. You’ll have to be careful how you deploy him on the field.”

I grunted, not quite willing to agree out loud even if he was probably right. Nauk had been in my corner since the beginning, in one way or another, so thinking of him that way rankled. As for the murder... I’d been on the receiving end of some of the more racist leanings of Wastelanders, so I while I was unwilling to excuse the act I could understand where he was coming from. That he’d had no real control over himself after going into the Rage was an objective fact, and that the merchant had apparently resorted to physical violence first blurred the lines a bit. And yet. Murderer, huh. Most of the time I got along with orcs better than humans: the way they looked at Creation wasn’t simpler, not exactly, but it was clearer . Less cluttered. It was all too easy to forget it was also brutal. All in all, it might not be a bad thing to have my teacher hand me a reminder of that.

“Hakram?” I probed.

“An oddity, that one,” Black replied. “Howling Wolves clan, one of the students sent to the College on Imperial scholarship. Average grades except in Old Miezan, where he failed repeatedly – and yet some of the best marks on record when it comes to practical exercises. Noted by his teachers to have exceptional organisational abilities.”

“All stuff I already knew,” I pointed out.

Or had suspected, anyway. His record since the creation of the Fifteenth spoke for itself. Black waved a hand in irritation.

“No real political affiliations to speak of, not even in his clan. He did spend a lot of time in the College socializing with officers from other companies, which should come in useful for you down the road.”

I’d been aware since the beginning that one of the War College’s functions was to forge connections in the people meant to become the next generation of the Empire’s military leaders, but I’d never found it in me to play that game. Oh, I’d drawn most of Rat Company into the fold and managed to establish an understanding with Juniper’s crowd but the bulk of the cadets had still been strangers to me by the time I’d stopped attending. Part of me regretted the lost opportunity, but I’d had bigger fish to fry. None of them would be in a position to be useful to my purposes for a few years anyhow, though Hakram having made contacts was a pleasant surprise. They might not have authority, but even as junior officers they’ll have access to information.

“Keeping the best for last?” I prompted.

“Kilian of Mashamba. Her grandmother rode with the Wild Hunt until encountering her grandfather. Specifics are sparse on how she died, but the fae rarely last when too far from Arcadia. Joined the College on the Imperial ticket after qualifying at the local school. In the top twenty students for the mage track, though her lacking endurance disqualified her from more advanced spellcasting classes.”

I frowned. “The wing thing, you mean. That’s not entirely fair. She can’t shove as much magic into her spells but she’s got much better control than any other mage I’ve seen.”

Black raised an eyebrow. “That was not a criticism of her abilities. It simply means she has a ceiling she cannot overcome when it comes to heavier spellcasting: she’ll never be able to change the course of a battle like Wekesa or Masego can.”

Not entirely accurate – if she could call down a lightning bolt on an enemy general that would certainly affect the course of a fight – but I grasped his meaning. Kilian wasn’t the kind of mage who’d ever be able to wipe out an enemy battalion with a single spell.

“So there’s no red flags in her background?” I insisted.

“Her family is poor,” Black noted. “She’s arranged for half her pay to be sent to them on a permanent basis. There’s possible leverage there, though there has been no sudden uptick in their financial situation: if she’s been bribed, she’s been careful about it. Her parents have been subject to less discrimination by local authorities recently, but that might simply be a result of having sent a child to the War College. It’s being looked into regardless.”

“That’s a no, then,” I replied.

“Nothing as of now,” the dark-haired man conceded.

He poured himself a second cup of wine, offering me the same when he saw mine was mostly empty. I nodded – I didn’t have anything else planned for the night, nothing wrong with having another few. He took a sip of the sour red, humming in appreciation at the taste.

“Your involvement puts her in a great deal of danger,” he finally said. “Any villain or more pragmatically-inclined hero will make a point of targeting her to get to you.

“I know,” I sighed. “But at this point pretty much everyone I’m close to is on someone’s kill list. Let’s not pretend Heiress wouldn’t see all my senior officers dead in a heartbeat if she could manage it.”

“Allowing your enemy to dictate how you live your life is unwise,” Black agreed. “Yet awareness of the danger is not enough. If you don’t take concrete steps to mitigate the threat awareness means nothing.”

“I’ve had people watching over Hakram,” I told him. “I’m thinking of making that guard permanent. Extending that to Kilian shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Forming your own personal guard so that they can handle security details should be a priority,” the green-eyed man said. “But that is a purely reactive way of thinking.”

“We’re in the middle of a war,” I replied flatly. “I can’t just take back the Fifteenth to Praes and start kicking down Trueblood doors.”

“It’s a pattern broader in scope than just this particular situation,” Black said. “Look at your tactics dealing with the heroes in Summerholm. While I will not gainsay your results, from the outset you ceded the initiative to the enemy.”

“They were already set up for an ambush when I arrived,” I pointed out.

“Interrupting the plans of your opponents is almost always better than letting them interfere with yours,” the Knight spoke. “I understand that making quick, improvised decisions is one of your strengths and that the unpredictability it lends you has come in useful, but in the long term that will not be enough. You need to start anticipating problems instead of merely solving them.”

I grunted. “I get what you’re saying, sir, but I’m not like you. I’m not a... mastermind, or whatever you want to call it. I see things that need to be done and I do them.”

“Learn to be,” Black replied bluntly. “If you ever want to rise high enough to accomplish what you intend, you’ll need better than you currently are. A ruler must be more than someone who stamps down flames wherever they flare up.”

He sipped at his cup.

“If you keep concerning yourself with symptoms instead of causes, eventually an opponent will land an unexpected blow – and you’ll lose someone dear to you to grasp the same point I am trying to get across.”

The green-eyed man smiled thinly.

“I learned that lesson the hard way,” he told me. “I would prefer that you did not have to.”

Sentences like that were why it was so hard to dislike Black. When the priests in the House of Light had spoken of how seductive the Dark could be, I’d always thought they meant ambition and greed. Lust, even, given how good-looking villains could be. Maybe the honest affection that sometimes showed behind my teacher’s words would have failed to take in a better person, but at the end of the day I was not that girl. I’d gone my whole life without and father or mother figures and while Black certainly didn’t fit the bill for either, I’d underestimated how easy it would be to become attached to a mentor. Someone who looked out for me, who genuinely wanted me to live up to my potential. Oh, what he wanted for me was a terrible thing. There was no denying that truth. But it also had the glint of greatness to it, and there was something horribly tempting about that.

“You ever been in love, Black?” I asked suddenly.

“I hope you’re not implying your infatuation with the mage is anything of the sort,” he replied with a raised eyebrow.

“You’re not going to give a “love is weakness” speech, are you?” I frowned.

“I am not in the habit of preaching things I do not believe,” he said.

I leaned back in my seat, enjoying the warmth of the fire.

“I know I’m not in love with Kilian,” I admitted. “I don’t think I’ve ever been with anyone. Not the kind of love the songs speak about, anyway. That’s the problem, I guess. It feels selfish to put her in danger for something this... shallow.”

“She’s a grown woman,” Black said. “She can make her own decisions.”

“You’re the one who just told me a ruler needs to be more ,” I replied. “I know she’s not coming into this blind, but there’s a part of me that feels like I should make the decision for her own good anyway.”

He chuckled and I turned to glare at him but found his finger pointing at me. He poked my forehead gently.

“Human,” he reminded me. “Villain, but still human. It’s all right to want things for yourself, Catherine.”

“Even if it hurts other people?” I asked.

“Everyone hurts,” he replied. “That is the nature of human condition. Thousands die all over Creation with every breath we take, and nothing either you or I can do will change that. All we are is what we do with that truth.”

“I don’t want to be the kind of person who hurts others for her own sake,” I admitted quietly.

“There’s nothing righteous about martyrdom,” Black spoke, tone thick with distaste. “How gloriously they die on their pyres, those blessed few who think themselves above all of... this . And yet what do they really accomplish? Refusing to accept reality for what it is instead of what you think it should be is not being high-minded, it is cowardice. I take no guidance from someone whose crowning achievement is their own death. Sacrifice solves nothing on its own. It is no substitute for the labour needed to change things, just an easy way out.”

I’d never seen Black like this before. There wasn’t a trace of the easy-going, sardonic mask he liked to affect, but the cold monster of logic I’d glimpsed in Summerholm was nowhere in sight either. There was a quiet intensity to him, the weight of genuine belief. And some parts of what he’d said resonated with me. Wasn’t that the core of my disagreement with the Lone Swordsman? He believed that people should be willing to die for a kingdom, where I believed a kingdom should be willing to die for its people. But there was something missing here. The string that would keep all that barren cynicism together.

“There is such a thing as the greater good,” I replied. “It’s an ugly ideal, I’ll grant you that. Means there is such a thing as accepting lesser evils for a purpose that goes beyond them, and I’ve always found that a bitter pill to swallow. But there are things worth sacrifice – yours and other people’s both. Heroes are wrong, I think. I’m worth just as much as everybody else. My losses matter just as much as anybody else’s. But villains aren’t right – we don’t matter more , just because of who we are.”

Black smiled strangely, still staring into the fire.

“I am the wrong person to debate matters of morality, I think,” he replied. “The truth of it is that I am the most selfish man you’ll ever meet, and I’ve yet to lose so much as a night’s sleep over it. But you asked me a question.”

He let out a long breath.

“Yes. Once.”

“How did it end?” I asked softly.

“It has yet to,” he smiled. “She is... an exceptional woman, in many ways. I wish I could see her more often.”

I hummed. “And you’ve never been worried your enemies would try to get to you through her?”

He bared his teeth in a jackal’s grin.

“I pity anyone fool enough to try.”

I polished off the rest of my cup, letting the taste linger in my mouth. Silence stayed between us for some time as we simply let the heat of the fire wash over us. I opened my mouth, then closed it. What I wanted to say wasn’t wise, exactly. But my instincts were telling me I should, and they’d seen me through all the messes in my life so far.

“I had a talk with Warlock, in Summerholm.”

“Not a pleasant one, I suspect,” he murmured.

I snorted, though the amusement was short-lived.

“The Empress summoned me to the Tower before I left Ater.”

“And?”

He seemed rather unconcerned by the prospect, which shouldn’t have surprised me. He and Malicia were supposed to be thick as thieves, and though I’d started to notice fractures in that relationship there were still decades of trust to back it.

“It occurs to me,” I finally said, “that I don’t actually know what you want.”

He smiled mirthlessly.

“That,” he said, “is a complicated question.”

Wry amusement quirked my lips. I’d replied the same thing to Malicia, when she’d asked me the same question. Maybe there was something to those supposed similarities everyone kept yammering about. He rose to his feet and I frowned.

“Going somewhere?”

He shook his head, heading for the trunk next to his bed and popping it open. He dug around the inside for a moment before fishing out a pair of books. Not, not books – journals, I saw. Neither of them had a title on the spine, but they were well-worn. He handed them to me.

“I don’t think the answer is something you could understand, right now,” he told me.

It would have sounded condescending if not for the fact that he seemed to genuinely believe what he said.

“And those are?” I asked, raising the journals.

“Information I compiled when I was three years older than you are now, shortly after I became the Black Knight and gained access to the Imperial archives,” he replied.

“Everybody with permission from the bureaucrats can access those,” I frowned.

“The real archives,” he specified. “The ones in the underground levels of the Tower.”

Of course there were secret archives. I rubbed the bridge of my nose in exasperation. I really should have seen that coming. I thumbed one open, seeing columns of numbers and names stretching down the page. Census population numbers, crossed with reigning Tyrants and some other measure I didn’t recognize. The other one seemed to be a children’s book, transcribed in my teacher’s handwriting. There were notes in the margins, though I didn’t bother to look at them right now. I’d take my time doing it later, a cursory reading wouldn’t give me much. Still, I had to ask.

“Children’s tales?” I questioned.

“The most important part of any culture’s literature,” Black murmured. “The lessons you are taught when you are young are those you carry with you the rest of your life.”

He leaned against the back of his armchair, eyes drawn to the flame again.

“You should get back to the Fifteenth, Catherine,” he said. “Dawn always comes sooner than we think.”

Chapter 16: Trust

“Treason is more art than act.”
-Dread Emperor Traitorous

I tightened the belt around Kilian’s armour, leaning in to place a kiss on the side of her neck. I felt her smile as she grabbed her helmet, half-turning to catch my lips with her own. The metal of her legionary cuirass was cold but I could almost feel the heat and softness of her underneath – it was all too easy to imagine the curves I’d taken such pleasure in unwrapping not an hour past under my hands again. She had such soft skin, for a soldier. The redhead withdrew to catch her breath and leant her forehead against mine.

“If you start that again I’ll be late for the briefing,” she murmured.

“Tempting,” I admitted. “But I suppose I’ll have to let you go for now. You’ll be back afterwards?”

Her smile turned a touch wicked and she nudged my nose with her own, playfully biting my lip.

“Can you think of a better way to work out all that tediousness?” she asked.

“I genuinely cannot,” I mused, grabbing the helmet out of her hands and carefully sliding it over her head.

She adjusted it so it wouldn’t tangle her hair – though her own pixie cut made that a trivial matter compared to the mess that my own long locks could turn into – and I tied the straps together. The redhead turned to grin at me.

“By your leave, Lady Squire?” she teased.

“Out,” I smiled. “Before I change my mind.”

“Ma’am,” she saluted with a grin, sashaying out of my tent.

How she managed that while wearing fifteen pounds of metal was beyond me, but I wasn’t above enjoying the sights. I waited until she was gone before turning to the wooden folding table that served as my desk and the two books still on it. Four days has passed since the evening Black had given them to me, and I still wasn’t sure what his intent had been. The children’s tales were, apparently, just that. There did not seem to be a hidden meaning to them. Oh, they were interesting enough on their own – they were very different from the tales I’d been raised on – but they weren’t anything I couldn’t have found in any bookstore in Ater. Unlike the other manuscript my teacher had not annotated it, though it was still in his handwriting. The lessons it taught were... strange. There was a formula to most Callowan fairy tales, patterns that could be found if you looked. First the hero or heroine’s character was established, then they were presented with a problem. A catalyst ignited the struggle against that problem, and the hero’s fight changed them in some way. Through victory the resolution came, and the state of affairs for the future was established: the ever-famous happy ending, most of the time, though even Callow dabbled in the occasional tragedy.

Praesi went at it differently. The initial stretch of the story, where Callowans would establish the virtues that would carry the hero through the story, was dedicated to establishing the ambition of the protagonists. A warlock who wanted to build a tower reaching the sky, a soldier wanting to conquer an invincible fortress. Never once were those ambitions spoken of as being overreaching hubris: the urge to be more was always praised. One of my favourite tales as a child had been the Fearless Lass, a young girl who went out in the world to learn fear and after many misadventures only found it after she married a king and put a crown on her head. In Black’s book, though, every single protagonist was born with that fear in them. The awareness that no matter how clever and powerful and ruthless they were, eventually they would be unmade. The stories all ended with defeat, either at the hands of a hero or by the betrayal of someone they loved. It was the opposite of a happy ending: there was no sense of permanence to it. Taghreb tales were particularly brutal in that regard, the most striking example being the story of “The Well in the Sands”. A young tribeswoman trying to dig a well in the desert so her tribe would not die of thirst. After tricking rival raiders, stealing the gold of a Soninke lord and capturing a goblin to dig for her, she finally managed it. Her whole tribe drank – and the morning after, found the well had gone empty. Victory, most fickle of friends , the moral went.

Was that what he was trying to make me understand? That eventually, villains always lost? Is that why you chose now of all times to pick a Squire, because war is knocking at the Empire’s door? Malicia certainly seemed to think so.

My instincts told me there was more to it than that. That he’d given me a second book only made me more certain of it. There was a story to the other manuscript too, though not written in words. The first column that stretched across the pages was, I’d found, a series of population censuses undertaken by the Tower. Not all Tyrants had bothered to take those, so there were blind spots, but most of the Empire’s span was covered. They were cross-referenced with the name of the Emperor or Empress who’d reigned at the time, and the wars they’d fought in – either civil ones or attempted invasions of their neighbours. The last column’s meaning still eluded me. It measured an area in square miles, that dropped sharply after the reign of an early Dread Empress and then remained more or less the same. No hint was given as to what exactly it was supposed to mean. Still, there was at least one pattern easy enough to notice: all the most productive periods in Imperial history, when Tyrants had undertaken great building projects like the road network and the great forges in Foramen, had come in the wake of a lost war. The Tyrant who failed was overthrown or assassinated and their replacement put Praes in order for a few decades.

So the Empire was easier to govern after getting losing wars. If that was true, then the implications were worrying. Praes hadn’t lost a war since my teacher became the Black Knight, about forty years ago. But that would explain a lot. When we’d had the war council with Istrid and Sacker, Black had said that the political situation in Ater made it impossible for Malicia to just recall Heiress regardless of the trouble she was causing. The Empire’s getting harder to keep together. I closed my eyes, sighed and killed the candle on my desk. That complicated my own plans a lot. If Praes collapsed into civil war, there was no certainty the Empress would come out on top. The Truebloods were racist aristocratic pricks but they weren’t stupid : they wouldn’t pick a fight they didn’t think they could win. Keeping Callow as a semi-independent vassal state under Malicia’s Praes was one thing, but under someone like Heiress? No. I’d rather raise a flag in rebellion than allow that. But if I did, would the Fifteenth follow me? Parts of it would, I thought. Nauk, Hakram, likely Ratface. Kilian. Juniper, though... Juniper believed in the Empire. Maybe not the people in it, but certainly the institution. And Aisha would follow her. Where Hune and Pickler stood in this remained to be seen.

So far I’d been willing to take things slow, but that time looked like it was past. If civil war did erupt, I needed to be sure what I’d have to work with – and that meant finding out where the loyalties of my officers lay. Black had told me start taking be the initiative, hadn’t he? Start solving problems before they blew up in my face. Drumming my fingers on the hilt of my sword, I frowned. Well, there was at least one problem I could check on right now.

—

The tent where Hunter was kept had a full line of guards on it at all times, as did the chariot we kept him in when we were on the move. At least four legionaries were watching him sleep at all times, with orders to slit his throat the moment it looked like he was waking up. How much good that would actually do if the hero actually returned to consciousness was arguable, but the precaution had been so basic it seemed ridiculous to me not to take it. Masego checked on the spells keeping him asleep every morning and every night, checking them for lapses or imperfections – not that there were likely to be any, given that they were Warlock’s work. The legionaries saluted as I arrived, stepping aside to let me in. Apprentice himself was leaning over the sleeping form of Hunter, wearing the leather apron I’d first me him in above his riding robes. He was peering at what appeared to be empty space through his spectacles.

“Masego?” I prompted.

“We have a problem,” he, braids shaking as he turned towards me.

My hand instantly dropped to my sword.

“Not the Hunter,” he spoke after a moment.

I glared at him. “Could have led with that,” I said.

He blinked in surprise. Social skills, I realized not for the first time, were not the mage’s strong point.

“Oh, I can see how that might have sounded alarming,” he mused. “Funny.”

“The spells are fine?” I confirmed as patiently as I could.

He waved airily. “Yes, he won’t be waking up anytime soon. Not that I’m not looking forward to handing him over to the representative from Refuge anyway.”

Black had scryed me the day after our departure from Harper’s Crossing to inform me he’d been in touch with the Lady of the Lake. She had not, in fact, sent a hero out to kill her old friend Warlock. She’d given specific instructions otherwise, actually, and was rather displeased Hunter wasn’t in the Free Cities like he was supposed to be. She’d be sending another of her pupils to pick him up and bring him back to Refuge, where he’d be tried. My teacher had implied said trial wouldn’t really be anything of the sort: the sole dispenser of justice in Refuge was the Lady of the Lake, and the only law she’d set down was do what I say . I was looking forward to getting rid of the liability, though I would have much preferred for it to happen before we marched into war. I had an itch to take care of the risk permanently, but my instructions otherwise had been made very clear. It wasn’t something I was willing to fight Black on, not for now. He’d maintained my authorization to put Hunter down if the hero was trying to escape, it would have to be enough.

“A problem?” I finally prompted.

“Possibly,” he hedged. “I felt someone scrying earlier. Did you have one of your mages try to find the Silver Spears again?”

“No,” I frowned.

Whatever means the mercenaries had using to shield themselves from Black’s mages, it worked against mine too. I still ordered regular attempts, but that was before we moved out at dawn.

“Didn’t think so,” he shrugged. “It connected somewhere down south, anyway, so the direction was wrong.”

My eyes sharpened. Callowans didn’t field mages in armies the way the Legions did, and there was no indication the Countess Marchford had changed that habit. I did, however, know of someone in southern Callow who was bound to have brought a few with her.

“Did you manage to listen in?”

Masego shook his head, the silver trinkets woven into his hair catching torchlight as he did.

“They used a modified formula and I only caught on just before they broke off contact,” he explained. “Good work, and subtle. I wouldn’t have caught it if I weren’t already examining the spells on our sleeping friend here.”

I swore. It had been a given Heiress would have plants in the Fifteenth, no matter how good Hakram’s screening process, but if one of them was a mage then it was worse than I’d thought. Passing word through physical messages was one thing and the time lapse meant I’d still have a degree of surprise on my side, but if she could check in regularly? She’d know exactly where we were and what we were up to. I doubted she was in a position to ambush us with her own troops, either physically or politically, but there were a hundred ways she could make a nuisance of herself.

“I did, however,” Masego continued, “manage to ferret out where the connection was made on both sides.”

I smiled unpleasantly. “You can find who was speaking to them?”

“I can narrow down the area to about a dozen feet,” Apprentice replied. “The rest you’ll have to find on your own, which shouldn’t be too hard: a formula like that will require very specific equipment.”

My fingers tightened around the grip of my sword. I opened the tent’s flap and called one of legionaries closer.

“Get me Hakram,” I ordered. “And tell him to assemble a full line.”

I turned to Apprentice, who was eyeing me with a raised eyebrow over the rim of his spectacles.

“Let’s find our rat,” I said.

—

“Blackspear clan,” Hakram spat. “Should have known. Not a spit of loyalty in that blood.”

Two legionaries held down the struggling orc, snarling back when he showed his teeth. Masego already looked bored with the whole affair. He’d created a glowing red thread out of thin air after my adjutant and Lieutenant Tordis’ line had arrived, following it all the way to one of the ten-man tents in Hune’s kabili. All ten legionaries had been inside and they’d been made to stand at attention while we rifled through the insides. Tordis herself had found the polished metal circle covered in runes that had been used as focus for the scrying – the spy had tried to run when he’d realized, but he’d been tackled down before he could make it even three feet away.

“Return to your tent,” I ordered the others. “And don’t speak a word of this to anyone. The whole matter is under seal, by my authority as the Squire.”

The informant had been the sergeant of the tenth, as it turned out. Not a War College alumni, one of the legionaries from the regular recruitment camps. He’d kept that he was a mage under wraps, apparently, because he wasn’t on the roster as one of Kilian’s. I glanced at Hakram.

“Let’s take him somewhere private,” I said. “I have a few questions to ask Sergeant...”

“Asger,” Tordis told me. “Sergeant Asger.”

Said sergeant seemed rather displeased at the idea of getting dragged out of sight and managed to wrench out a hand. He started an incantation, but I was having none of that: my armoured boot impacted his mouth and I heard his jaw break with a wrenching sound. The boot came down a second time and he was knocked out cold.

“Apprentice,” I spoke calmly. “I’ll need you to fix that jaw before we interrogate him.”

The Soninke mage rolled his eyes. “You sure you don’t want to get a few more kicks in first?”

I raised an eyebrow. “No, but feel free if you are so inclined.”

I saw Hakram’s lips twitch from the corner of my eye and the legionaries who’d been holding down Asger picked him up, glancing in my direction for instructions. As it happened, there was a supply tent not too far away: my adjutant oversaw the informant’s tying up and Masego set up a privacy ward without me needing to ask. Considering who’d raised him, I supposed it must have been habit by now. I ordered Tordis and her line to stand guard outside while Apprentice got to work fixing the sergeant’s jaw enough that he could speak.

“Do we know who he was talking to?” Hakram gravelled.

“Not for sure,” I admitted. “But he was talking south, and we both know who’s down there.”

He growled

“One of these days,” the tall orc bit out, “I’m going to stand on that woman’s grave and smile.”

A common sentiment, that. Apprentice stepped away from Asger and nodded when I sent a questioning look his way. He leaned back against a crate of barley bread, to my surprise. I would have thought he’d want to be done with this as quickly as possible, but it looked like curiosity had won out this once. I stepped forward and kicked the prisoner awake. The orc came back with a hiss of pain, glaring at us hatefully.

“Sergeant Asger,” I spoke pleasantly. “It has come to my attention that you’ve been engaging in unauthorized scrying rituals.”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” he spat. “I’m not even a mage.”

“Masego?” I prompted.

The Warlock’s son peered at the orc through his spectacles.

“Definitely a mage,” he noted. “Though a fairly weak one. Orcs rarely produce casters of a decent calibre.”

“And that’s your first lie of the evening,” I said in an even tone. “I’d advise you not to speak a second.”

“Fuck you, Wallerspawn,” he replied, baring his teeth.

“Watch your godsdamned mouth,” Hakram growled in Kharsum.

“Look at you, human’s pet ,” Asger mocked in the same. “Another Howling Wolves slave serving the masters.”

“You are a shame even on what passes for your clan,” my adjutant retorted.

“Yeah, let’s spit on the Blackspears again,” the sergeant laughed. “It’s done well for you lot, hasn’t it? Wolves and Red Shields and Waxing Moons – favourites of the Praesi, even those who play at being Praesi.”

Howling Wolves for Hakram, Red Shields for Juniper and Waxing Moons for Nauk. Was he really throwing a fit because there was no Blackspear clan member in my senior officers? It wasn’t like there weren’t any high placed officers belonging to them period – Morok was a Blackspear and he was a tribune in the Fourteenth, last I heard.

“You’re not here because of what clan you were born to,” I broke in, before the situation could degenerate even further. “You’re here because you’ve been passing information to Heiress’ people.”

“Allegedly,” Masego said. “It has not yet been established as fact.”

I shot him a quelling look. Now was not the time to get pedantic on me.

“May you kill each other and spare us your work,” Asger, pausing only to spit in the dirt.

He was not, I noted, denying it.

“Who was your contact on the other side?” I asked.

“Your mother, Wallerspawn,” he mocked.

“I’m an orphan, actually,” I informed him. “That said, I don’t have all night to indulge you.”

I took a deep breath and reached for the wellspring of power inside of me. The beast opened its eyes, coiling around me and baring its fangs.

“ Tell me ,” I Spoke.

Asger tried to keep his mouth closed but inch by inch it snapped open.

“Fadila Mbafeno,” he gasped. “May you choke on her her bones.”

Masego let out a little surprised noise.

“You’ve heard of her?” I asked.

“One of the better noble mages from our generation,” Apprentice said. “Old blood, sworn to Wolof.”

The city Heiress’ mother ruled over. That was probably as close to confirmation as I was going to get.

“Do you know of other spies in the Fifteenth?” I questioned with a frown.

“Everyone you love,” Asger grinned, but he’d hesitated for a heartbeat.

“I do dislike repeating myself,” I grunted. “ Answer the question .”

He screamed in anger but the words got out anyway.

“There is another. Turned in Summerholm,” he choked out. “Don’t know the name. Or anything else.”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“More than one, most likely,” Hakram grunted. “Gold opens more doors than keys.”

“I’ll set up a trip ward over our camps from now on,” Masego spoke. “If they’re a mage, I’ll be able to catch them scrying.”

If they were not, however, ferreting them out would be much trickier. Unlike Black I didn’t have a Scribe to direct agents to watch all the dark corners of Creation. I don’t have anywhere as large a charge to watch over either, though. Regardless, I’d need to stop depending on the information fed to me by my teacher eventually. Now was good a time as any to start setting the groundwork for that. But until then the Fifteenth is a barrel with a hole at the bottom, leaking out information all over the Empire.

“So what am I to do with you now, Sergeant Asger?” I murmured.

“The sale of military information when the Empire is in a state of war is high treason,” Hakram growled. “The noose for him.”

“If you keep him alive, you might be able to pass false information through him,” Masego pointed out.

Could I, though? Could I actually keep this quiet enough Heiress wouldn’t realize I’d caught her informant? It wasn’t like I could just let the sergeant return to his tenth after this. And though I’d put this incident under the seal, word would spread. It was impossible to make an arrest like this without someone noticing, even at this time of the night. Before the week was done word would have spread through the entire Fifteenth. Even if the spies didn’t know each other’s identities – which I assumed to be the case – there would still be suspicions as to why Asger had been arrested. It might be notable enough to pass either way, and there was no telling if Heiress had given instructions to report any and all arrests. Which I would have done, in her place. Then let’s presume she has. If none of the other spies were mages, or if they were too scared to scry after tonight, then I might still manage to pass some false information before Heiress caught on.

“The advantage that could give us is too minor to go through all the trouble of keeping a liability like him around,” I finally said.

“I see how it is,” Asger sneered. “When your Callowan buddies do it they get the soft death or your special company, but if it’s a greenskin? Slaves who misbehave get the noose.”

“You’re right,” I admitted, and Hakram started in surprise. “I’ve been too soft on people. And things like this will keep happening as long as I continue. So I’ll start correcting that error with you.”

I glanced at Hakram.

“Have Tordis’ men take him. He hangs at dawn, before the entire legion.”

—

I was too restless to return to my tent afterwards.

I took a walk around camp, stopping to talk with the sentries, then made my way out. Juniper has chosen a place close to a hill for us to stop today, the kind of low slope that occasionally dotted the landscape of this part of Callow. It was a half-moon out tonight, and I breathed in the night breeze with a sigh of pleasure. The camp might not smell as bad as a city, but the stench of nearly two thousand soldiers was not something to dismiss out of hand. I was amusing myself by picking out the constellations in the sky when Hakram found me. I heard him long before I saw him, even with my Name vision – my adjutant was a lot of things, but stealthy was not one of them.

“I’ve had the scrying tool handed over to Apprentice,” he told me without bothering with a greeting. “He says he might be able to make something of it, given enough time.”

I hummed in acknowledgement.

“I’ve had a melody stuck in my head, these last few months,” I said. “I just recalled a verse from it.”

I looked up at the night sky and recited the lyrics.

“ The first step is hardest, they said to her
You will have to walk through fire
It will burn away what you once were,
And always devour whole a liar .”

“Never heard it before,” Hakram admitted. “Though the melody does sound familiar.”

“I can’t remember where I heard it,” I admitted. “Silly thing to be bothered over, I guess.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” the tall orc replied, coming to stand besides me.

We enjoyed the silence for a long moment, the wind stirring my hair.

“Tordis’ line,” I spoke suddenly. “They’re trustworthy?”

“As can be,” he agreed.

I clenched my fingers and unclenched them.

“I’m transferring them – and her – to your direct command. I have a job for you.”

“Hunting rats, is it?” he said.

“All of them, Hakram,” I murmured. “I want all of Heiress’ informants found. I don’t know what she’s planning, but I fully intend to set fire to that fucking plan and shove the ashes down her throat.”

“Looking forward to it,” the orc gravelled, tone low and fierce.

I let out a tired sigh. I could feel, deep in my bones, that we were standing on the edge of a precipice. Not just with the Silver Spears, though I had a feeling I’d be feeling the aftermaths of that battle for the coming years. Here, on this hill, I had to make a choice. Trust him or not. He was my friend. Of all the people I’d met since leaving Laure, he was perhaps the only person I’d give that title to without quibbling. But like Juniper had pointed out, how much did I really know about him?

“Why did you join the Legions, Hakram?”

He chuckled, the sound like rocks being ground to dust.

“That’s not the question you’re really asking,” he said. “What you mean is what do you want out of the Legions ?”

I did not deny it. I felt him smile.

“I didn’t have dreams, when I was a kid. I learned to fight because that’s what we do. I was clever, I suppose, so the chief picked me for College and I figured – why not? The company fights weren’t interesting but they weren’t boring, and some of the classes were worth the time. Then one day I looked around and realized I was about to graduate. It scared me, Catherine, because I was going to become a soldier and there was nothing I wanted to fight for.”

I glanced at him and saw his eyes were hooded under the moonlight, lost in remembrance.

“It’s not a problem we usually have, you know,” he spoke. “Needing a reason to fight. They always tell us it’s in the blood. But it isn’t, for me. I don’t get the battle-joy when smashing some poor bastard’s face in. Still, I was prepared to just... drift through the rest of my life.”

He shook himself, as if waking up.

“Then you arrived. Some slip of a girl with a fake name, who looked defeat in the face and decided she would win anyway,” his lips stretched into a grin. “You had blind spots, though, needed someone to cover them for you. I did, and it made me realize I’m good at this.”

He waved, encompassing everything and nothing.

“So I followed and I watched. It was during the melee that I realized half the Empire would rather set the table on fire than let you have a seat – and they expected to win, too. Don’t they always? Sooner or later, better blood wins out. We mongrels are only ever meant to bow.”

His skeletal hand tightened, grinding against the hilt of his sword.

“The presumption makes my blood boil,” he growled. “It makes we want to crush them, cut through them with fire and sword down until there’s nothing left but wails and a field of ashes. It doesn’t really matter, if you end up making the world better or worse with your plans. I just want to break the odds, to bring down the ceiling on their fucking heads.”

The tension went out of him as suddenly as it had appeared and Hakram laughed, the sound delighted.

“And so, at last, I am an orc.”

I breathed out. There were things I could have said, promises I could have made, but all of them meaningless in the face of the brutal truth he had offered.

“I spoke with Black, the other night,” I spoke instead. “He told me he’s the most selfish man I’ll ever meet, and I know him well enough by now to know he meant every word. I should have been repulsed by that, but I wasn’t. Underneath all the rationalizations I think I’m just the same.”

There’d been a time where confessing that would have stung, but I was no longer that young. No longer so set in the ways of my childhood, when death had been a sin instead of a method.

“When I was younger, I looked at how Laure was falling apart and wondered why no one was doing anything. Why they were just trying to squeak away a living around the mess instead of fixing it. For years, I wanted there to be a hero who came in an offered salvation. But no one came. Then I got older and started to hear the rumours, about how they did come – and died, having accomplished nothing.”

I close my eyes.

“That’s when I realized that nothing was ever going to change, if I just waited for someone else to step up. It’s not that I think I’ve been chosen, Hakram. I haven’t. I choose. ”

I bared my teeth at the moon in a defiant rictus.

“I am no longer willing to let someone else decide my fate for me, not even for my own good. I despise the idea with every fibre of my being. And if I don’t trust them with my own life, why would I trust them with anyone else’s? Why would I entrust them with the land of my birth?”

The sentence had been spoken softly, but for all that it resonated clearly. Treason often did.

“I could dance around the words, call it a reform or a takeover of the system – but the truth is simpler. I want to rule Callow.”

It felt strange, to finally say it out loud. All these years I’d avoided even thinking it, the concept too close to selfish ambition for comfort.

“For my sake. For everyone else’s. And so I will break anything, anybody who gets in my way,” I admitted quietly. “Whether they be gods or kings or all the armies in Creation.”

Hakram met my eyes and then slowly, with all the inevitability of a great tree falling, knelt. The breeze ruffled the tall grass in the fields below us, shiver and caress both. His silhouette looked unearthly in the moonlight, more faerie than orc.

“Warlord,” he rasped.

A promise. An oath. I clasped his arm and hoisted him up.

“Adjutant,” I replied, and in that same moment it became the truth.

And so it ended. And so it began.

Chapter 17: Aplomb

“In war, begin as you would end.”

– Marshal Nim

No campfires tonight – it would give away their location too easily, not that Seneca’s dogs weren’t already on the trail. Ranker’s goblins were proving invaluable in keeping an eye on how closely the High Lord’s household troops were following them, her small warriors made light of foot and hard to find by years of raiding the other tribes. The enemy had somehow managed to block Apprentice’s scrying, something the dark-skinned man told Squire meant they likely had a mage of more than middling talent with them. The green-eyed man had expected as much: Seneca’s pockets ran deep and so far he hadn’t proved shy about shelling out the gold to see this little company of theirs dead. The High Lord was the Chancellor’s creature to the bone. They were six hundred strong now that Ranker had joined them, the raiders of the Blackfoot tribe coming to swell the ranks of Red Shields and Grem’s Howling Wolves. Not even half a Legion, but it would grow in time. If they survived the night.

“I don’t like the odds on this one, Squire,” Grem grunted from his side.

The one-eyed orc was chewing on what looked like dried meat, sitting on a rocky outcropping.

“We’ve got as many warriors on the field as they do,” Istrid replied with a hard look. “If we run when we’re this close to our backyard, One-Eye, we’ll never live it down.”

“We’ll still be living, at least, which isn’t guaranteed if we give battle,” the scarred chieftain of the Howling Wolves told her. “Numbers might be even, but a third of our number is goblins. That changes things – no offense meant, Ranker.”

“None taken,” the small yellow-eyed Matron replied, her tone flat. “I’m inclined to agree with you, if anything. A High Lord’s personal retinue is not something to trifle with.”

“And yet we’re going to crush it,” Squire said, and though his voice was calm there was something about it that gave all of them pause.

The man’s pale skin made him look like a ghost in the moonlight, his armoured silhouette casting shadows against the rocks. He looked up at the stars while he played with the clay ball he’d appropriated earlier, feeling the weight of the gaze of the followers he’d assembled settling on him. Apprentice laughed quietly, a grin that was all malice stretching his full lips.

“You have a plan, of course,” the mage spoke up. “So go on, my friend, amaze us with your latest bout of madness. Are we going to argue with a dragon again? I have to say, that was one of my favourites.”

“Good thing it wasn’t a long conversation,” Cursed tacked on in that matter-of-fact way of hers. “I didn’t like the way it was looking at me.”

Squire scowled. They had nothing to complain about, it had worked out perfectly fine in the end.

“All of you are here because you want to change things,” he told them instead. “The Empire is the culmination of over a millennium of defeats – time after time we try the same plans with new faces, somehow expecting that this once it will be different. That this once, we’ll beat them, bring down the king and scatter the knights and send the wizard packing back to his tower. Aren’t you tired of losing? I know I am, and I’ve just begun.”

He met their eyes one by one, gaze unflinching.

“It’s always going to be this way, you know,” he told them. “One uphill battle after another, the odds stacked against us a little worse every time. If we give them a fair fight, we’ll lose – it’s as simple as that.”

The green-eyed man smiled, and it was a wicked thing.

“So let’s cheat,” he said, lazily throwing up the clay ball and catching it. “There’s a new age coming, and we’re going to drag them into it – kicking and screaming, if necessary.”

A handful of grim smiles was his answer, and somewhere in the back of his head he felt Fate laughing. Let it. He’d be the one to get the last laugh.

“You want a plan, Apprentice?” he said. “We’re going to play with fire.”

My eyes blinked open wearily, the sight of my tent’s ceiling greeting my return to consciousness. No light was filtering through the slit in the goat skin walls, meaning I’d once more woken up before dawn. The bed felt empty without Kilian in it. We’d been together for less than a month, and already I missed the intimacy of a warm body by my side whenever deprived of it. I slipped out of my bedroll and pushed myself up to my feet, padding across the ground to reach for the carafe of water someone – Hakram, most likely – I had left on my bedside table. I poured myself a cup, downing the liquid in a single gulp to shake myself completely awake. Unlike with regular dreams there was no need to be afraid that the memory of the one I’d just had would become less clear with time: I knew from experience it was as good as branded into my mind. I’d be able to examine it at my leisure afterwards. And there were quite a few tidbits to examine, weren’t there? They clay ball that the younger version of my teacher had been playing with was the easiest detail to figure out: they were standard issue in the Legions now, filled with goblinfire.

The Fifteenth had been issued half a wagonload before we’d left Ater, and I knew that Ratface had gone behind my back and traded some of our extra rations for more. How exactly he’d managed that I had no idea. Supply requisitions were a bureaucratic nightmare even when the Legions weren’t on an active campaign, so likely bribery had been involved. Hakram had been right: Ratface might be a middling tactician at best, but when it came to securing supplies he had a way of getting results. I’d have to call my wayward quartermaster out on it at some point, of course, even though I rather approved of the initiative – we needed firepower more than we needed the extra rations they’d replaced. But it wouldn’t do to let him get into the habit of doing things like this, not without running them by me first. Better I deal with it than delegate the job to Juniper. I don’t want to quash his initiative entirely.

“Squire,” a familiar voice gravelled from outside my tent, “you decent?”

I rolled my eyes at that. For an orc, Hakram had surprisingly genteel notions about propriety. The orphanage I’d been raised it had been crowded enough that being half-naked in front of people I was unfamiliar with left me indifferent. Anyhow, with spring not yet in full swing this part of Callow got chilly at night – I always went to sleep dressed, since claiming wood to start a personal fire struck me as something of a waste.

“I’m wearing pants, if that’s what you’re asking,” I replied, somewhat amused.

“I suppose that will have to do,” Adjutant grunted back, slipping inside the tent.

His appearance hadn’t really changed since the night he’d fully come into his Name: he was still one of the tallest orcs I’d ever met, taller than Nauk even if he wasn’t as broad-shouldered. Dark green skin and dark eyes, with a small scar on his right cheek he’d told me was from a hunting accident when he’d been a youngling. Most of the changes had been mental – he’d been calm since the moment I’d first met him, but ever since he’d become the Adjutant he’d become positively serene. Like he knew exactly where he was meant to be, and was standing in that very place. I envied that, in some ways. Certainty was not a luxury someone in my position could afford.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” I asked as he gravitated towards the fold-up chair closest to me.

“Don’t need as much sleep anymore,” he told me.

Huh. I hadn’t known Roles could do that – I’d noticed fairly early after claiming my Name that I could have a sleepless night and function anyway, but that wasn’t the same thing. I was just better at dealing with tiredness than the average mortal, I still needed a good night’s sleep to be at my best. Captain and Black had been the same, from what I’d noticed. And as for Scribe... well, I wasn’t actually sure Scribe ever slept. I’d never seen her idle once in all the months I’d known her.

“Had another of those dreams, have you?” Hakram asked me with a knowing look.

I raised an eyebrow.

“How can you tell?”

“You always look like you’ve been given an answer and twice as many questions, afterwards,” he replied.

A fair enough assessment, I had to concede. The dreams that came with my Role tended to be relevant to what I was doing at the time, though admittedly the chronology of them could be a little tricky. I hadn’t seen Ranger or Scribe in any of them, for example, and I was pretty sure the Heir was still alive in the period I’d just glimpsed.

“I believe I just saw the birth of the Legions of Terror as we know them,” I admitted after a moment of silence.

Hakram blinked in surprise, then let out a low whistle.

“You saw the Battle of the Burning Cliffs? They still tell stories about it, you know,” he said.

“They do?” I replied, surprised in turn.

The battle hadn’t seemed like as big of a deal as the people behind it, to be honest, but then Captain had warned me more than once that things had been very different in the Empire before the Reforms.

“It’s how Knightsbane and One-Eye got the Clans to back the Black Knight in the first place,” Hakram told me. “A High Lord’s household troops wiped out to the last man in a single night? It was unheard of. If they could do that with two warbands, everyone wanted to see what they could do with twenty – or a hundred.”

I let out a thoughtful noise.

“Didn’t actually see any of the battle,” I admitted, “just the moments before it. It was enough to make me think.”

“Now there’s words to send a shiver up a warrior’s spine,” my Adjutant murmured. “Think about what?”

“They all wanted something, and they started following Black because he was the best way to get it,” I said. “So what do the people who follow me want?”

Pouring myself a second cup of water, I reached to do the same for him but he shook his head.

“Juniper wants to be the next Marshal,” I told Hakram. “Nauk wants a war. Masego mostly wants to see interesting things and Ratface wants his father’s head on a pike. I don’t know Hune or Pickler well enough to even guess.”

“Pickler wants to test all the designs she’s been fiddling with since she was a kid,” Hakram gravelled. “Hune, I have no idea. She doesn’t have any friends that I know of, and she kept a low profile even back at the College.”

I sipped at my glass. Too many questions, too few answers. I needed to get a better read on my officers before making any sort of move, and I was starting to run out of time. I needed to be ready by the time the Liesse Rebellion ended, and Black had told me we had a hard limit on that. Dawn’s first rays were starting to poke through my tent’s entrance, and in silence the two of us got started with our day. There was work to do, as always.

—

It had rained during the night.

The ford Juniper had picked out as our way across the river had swelled to knee-deep, with a current that could be tricky to manoeuvre. Still, it would have to do: the only bridge across the Left Fork had been destroyed and my scouts had been reporting more and more sighting of horsemen keeping an eye on us. We were getting close to the Silver Spears, and I had no intention of allowing them to dig in behind the walls of Marchford. I allowed the rest of the troops enough of break to fill up their canteens and rest their legs as First Company started to cross, climbing down from Zombie gingerly as they did. Massaging my legs, I allowed myself a discreet grimace after making sure no one was looking in my direction.

“You regretting that fancy horse now, Callow?” the voice came from behind me, and I turned to offer Nauk a half-hearted glare.

“Is that any way to talk to a superior officer, Commander?” I replied, rolling my eyes at the wide grin I got for my trouble.

The spectacularly large orc had continued to call me “Callow” even after my Name had become common knowledge, though he’d dropped the military rank when we’d finished with the War College. It wasn’t a mark of disrespect, Hakram had assured me – if anything Nauk was one of my more fervent supporters among the Fifteenth – so I’d never seen the need to take issue with it. Besides, watching Juniper get on his case for lack of decorum was always good for a laugh.

“We got any word from Robber and his minions?” he asked as he plopped himself down on a half-soaked log close to me.

I frowned, shaking my head. I’d told Commander Hune to send a line of scouts across the ford half a bell ago to see if there were any nasty surprises ahead, and they were about due to report. The three muddy hills the crossing led into made it hard to get a good look at what was ahead, besides the thick woods that flanked either side of the road. Keeping eyes ahead would be key here: the Silver Spears were heavy on cavalry, and they could move about a lot faster than we could.

“Hellhound on the trail,” Nauk grunted suddenly, and I glanced in the direction he was leaning his head towards.

Juniper was headed in our direction, Masego and Hakram at her sides. As usual the grim-faced legate walked like she had been blessed with a higher purpose, eyes always sweeping around her to look for any flaws in our legionaries’ kit. I watched as she stopped to chew out a dark-skinned girl for having strapped her sword-belt incorrectly, suppressing a smile when Hakram rolled his eyes behind her. Moments later Juniper was standing in front of me, offering a cursory salute before starting to speak.

“I had the heavies set up in front of the ford in case the enemy decides to pay us a surprise visit,” my Commander said, skipping the polite small talk. “We also have a picket at our back in case they’ve managed to find another way across the river.”

I let out a noise of approval. It was satisfying to see that the girl who’d played us like a fiddle during the College war games was still as sharp now that we were in a real campaign.

“We’ll need to cross soon regardless of whether Robber’s back or not,” I told her. “There’s only so much daylight we can afford to waste if we want to keep up with the Spears.”

“Agreed,” she grunted back. “Though we should be careful: he might be late because he’s run into the enemy.”

Neither of us needed to spell out that if that were the case there was no need to expect Robber back at all. If his scouts had been caught on foot by a mounted patrol, there was only one way that engagement could reasonably be expected to go. Scouts weren’t sappers: they did not carry enough munitions on them to stop horsemen for long.

“Send another tenth ahead to see if they’re coming back,” I decided after a moment. “We get moving right after.”

She nodded, snapped off another salute and headed off to see it done.

“I hope you don’t also expect me to salute,” Masego drawled. “I have a medical condition that makes it next to impossible.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Is it the same disease that makes you think you’re funny?” I asked

“Ah, it’s a cruel woman that leads us my friend,” the dark-skinned boy told Hakram, dramatically laying a hand over his heart.

Adjutant grinned.

“Were you talking again, warlock’s get? I tend to tune out the background noise.”

Masego’s brows rose.

“And here I thought you were just a good listener. Truly, my life is a comedy of errors,” he commented. “And speaking of my failings, Squire, I’m afraid that my scrying still won’t go through.”

“Wizard or priest, you think?” I asked.

“Priest, I’d put my hand to fire on it,” he grimaced. “That could get tricky when we give battle – some of them can have magic slide right off of them if they want it to.”

“As long as knives still work, we’ll be able to deal with the problem,” I muttered absent-mindedly.

It was becoming clear that Black had sent me after a bigger fish than I’d thought. Just their numbers in cavalry with a Named hero at their head would have been bad enough, but if they had casters too they would a force to be reckoned with. Not that my legion was without teeth when it came to that aspect of warfare. We had a fairly decent mage contingent – led by a very cuddly redhead – and Apprentice was worth another twenty mages by himself . I’d yet to see anyone match the likes of the ice spell he’d used in Summerholm. In the distance I could see the Fifteenth shaking itself awake from its rest, Juniper sending the heavies across the ford while the sapper companies slung their munition haversacks back across their shoulders. I eyed my still-saddled horse with a sigh.

—

The better part of an hour passed before we got word back from the scouts.

The last of Hune’s companies was halfway through the ford, the rest of the Fifteenth splayed over the hills in a wide arc. Standing on top of the tallest of the hilltops, right by the standard, I’d been in the middle of a discussion with Hakram about the night’s camping site when movement by the north side of the woods drew my attention. The party we’d sent to find out what had happened to scouts emerged from the trees, a handful of dishevelled goblins among them. I felt my stomach drop: I could only see a few from the original line I’d sent, and it looked like no one else was coming. Robber went straight for the standard, ignoring the murmurs in the rank and file as he made his way towards me as far as he could. I wasn’t the only one to see him, apparently: Juniper was by my side in a matter of moments, and before the goblin tribune made it to the top of the hill Nauk and Masego had already joined us. I would have preferred Hune being here too, but she was personally supervising the company that had yet to join us.

My fingers tightened when I got a closer look at the tribune: Robber looked like he’d been rolling through a pile of brambles and dead animals, which wasn’t all that unusual, but the barely-restrained panic in his eyes was another story. The goblin thrived on chaos – the only times I’d even seen him in a truly good mood was when he was about to spring a vicious trap on someone. It would have been enough to make most people wary of him, but I had a handle on the way Robber’s mind worked: as long as I gave him someone else to focus his malevolence on, he’d never be my problem. Given how many enemies I’d managed to accumulate in my short tenure as Squire, I rather doubted it would ever become an issue. I let him catch his breath for a moment before speaking up.

“Tribune,” I prompted. “Report.”

“We’re fucked,” he grunted, wiping blood off his cheek.

He added a hasty “ma’am” at the end of the sentence after seeing the look on Juniper’s face.

“It’s good to see war has left your usual good cheer unaffected,” I replied flatly. “But I’m going to need more detail than that.”

He ran a still-bloodied hand on top of his hairless head, either not noticing or not caring about the black trails he left on it.

“We found your mercs easy enough,” Robber spoke. “Problem was, they also found us.”

I grimaced. There was really only one explanation for why he would have come back with four men when I’d sent him out with a full line, but still I’d... hoped.

“Where are they?” I asked.

There’d be time to feel guilty about sending those legionaries to their death later. Until then, all I could do was make use of the information they’d given their lives for to make sure the same didn’t happen to the rest of my legion.

“About half an hour away,” the yellow-eyed lieutenant said. “And Boss... I don’t know where you got your info on their roster from, but it’s way off. The two thousand foot is there, but Clapper said she counted at least eight hundred horse. Maybe more.”

I let out a curse at that, and from the look on everyone’s faces it was a shared opinion. I rubbed the bridge of my nose, running through my options. Was it feasible to retreat back across the river? No, not if they’re this close. It would be disastrous if the Fifteenth got caught while it was spread between the two banks.

“They planned this,” Juniper soberly said, breaking me out of my thoughts. “They were waiting for us to cross so they could force an engagement with our backs to the river.”

Masego cleared his throat daintily.

“As the only one here who hasn’t had military training, might I inquire as to why exactly that’s making everyone look so grim?” he asked.

“If they hit our lines hard enough – which they definitely have the numbers for – they’ll be pushing us into the river one step at at time,” Hakram told him. “That would be... bad.”

The dark-skinned mage’s face retained its pleasant smile, but I could see it had gotten a little too stiff. Apprentice might not have been an officer, but you didn’t have to be one to grasp Adjutant had been understating things.

“Go get yourself healed, Robber,” I finally said. “We’ll need anyone who can hold a sword for this one.”

He looked dead on his feet and odds are it had come close to being more than a look. The green-skinned sapper saluted, but when he met my eyes I saw there was something lurking under the fear I’d glimpsed earlier. He was furious, the kind of vicious fury that twists your stomach until it bubbles up to your face.

“You gonna get them for this, Callow?” he asked.

Juniper was halfway to hoisting up by the scruff of his neck, the expression on her face thunderous, when I raised a hand to stop her in her tracks.

“I promise you this much, Robber,” I told him. “They’ll pay the long price before the day is done.”

Whatever it was he was looking for in my eyes, he found it.

“Good,” he murmured with a hard nod.

I watched him scuttle down the hill for a moment before turning my attention to Juniper, who looked like she was only barely managing to refrain herself from speaking. I thought we’d already taken care of that.

“I gave you permission to speak freely when the Fifteenth was formed,” I told her. “I don’t remember taking that back.”

The legate bared her teeth, and from the corner of my eye I saw Masego discreetly taking a step back. Wise man, Masego.

“There’s a reason we have ranks, Squire,” Juniper growled. “You let them talk like that to you every time their buddies die and the authority breaks down. He’s not your friend, he’s your soldier. Soldiers die, it’s what they do .”

Nauk looked about to speak up but Hakram caught his eye and shook his head. Good. His little feud with Robber had been amusing back at the College, but out here I had no patience for it.

“If I wanted to run a regular legion,” I said, “you’d be right. As it happens, I have no interest in running a regular legion.”

The tall orc opened her mouth, but I pressed on.

“Regular legions don’t win battles like the one that’s coming, Juniper. And this isn’t the last time we’ll be facing odds like these. You think Black raised the Fifteenth because we needed the manpower? We’re going to be the tip of the spear in this war. And the next. And the one after that,” I spoke flatly. “If Robber ever oversteps his bounds with me, it’s not you he’ll have to be afraid of – you can be sure of that. But what I want out of all of you, I’m not going to get it by flogging people who look me in the eye.”

“Hear hear,” Hakram spoke softly from my side.

There was a long, tense moment and then Juniper inclined her head.

“My apologies, Lady Squire. I spoke out of turn,” she said.

“You spoke honestly,” I replied. “And you need to keep on doing it. I’m not going to be right every time, and when I’m wrong I’ll be relying on you to point it out to me.”

I’d known from the beginning that there would be times when Juniper and I rubbed each other the wrong way. And yet there’d been a reason that it was her I’d wanted her as legate for the Fifteenth instead of Nauk or Hakram. It wasn’t that she was likely the best officer to come out of the College in our generation, not just that anyway: it was also that she was utterly unafraid of me. She watched her mouth around me because I had a Name and she’d been taught to respect those, not because I intimidated her. It was a dangerous thing for a villain to become used to unquestioning obedience. Juniper nodded again, and her face settled back in that neutral expression I found so hard to read.

“I recall a mention of victory during that lovely little chat you two just had,” Masego cut in with a forced smile. “I like victory. We should discuss victory more.”

I closed my eyes with a sigh, grateful for the way Apprentice had defused the tension still gripping the scene. So here we were now, I thought, with our backs to the river on a muddy hill and a force twice our size coming our way. Putting aside the cavalry, they had at least our number in Free Cities men-at-arms and at their head was a man with the power of a Name behind him. The Silver Spears meant for this place to be the killing grounds where they would trample over the Fifteenth, break our backs so badly that my ramshackle half-legion would be taken out of the campaign before it had even truly begun.

My eyes might have been closed but I could see the grounds my legionaries were arrayed on as clearly as if they were open, my mind slowly filling in where the mercenaries would come from: the full weight of their infantry in the centre with the cataphracts split between the flanks. The cavalry would pick out my companies of sappers and tear through them like parchment, their own footmen pouring into the gaps and sweeping over my legionaries from all sides. I could imagine the grisly scene playing out so easily, and yet... And yet I could not find it in me to be afraid.

We had half an hour before they enemy was in sight and for some that would make no difference, but the men and women under my command were Praesi legionaries . They might have been green, they might never have seen battle before, but at the end of the day the soldiers under my command carried the legacy of the armies who’d scattered the strength of Callow and carried the Imperial banner all the way to the walls of Laure. And this, this moment and these odds and this feeling of savage glee I could feeling welling up in me as I realized how our back were pressed up against the wall? It was my own inheritance. I’d known from the moment where I’d taken the knife Black had offered me that I was setting out on a path of uphill battles, and now it was finally starting. Watch closely, teacher of mine. This is where it starts. Because if those prancing knights with their glorified pigstickers thought they were going to beat my Fifteenth, they had another godsdamned thing coming.

“Ah,” Nauk grunted with a distinct undertone of satisfaction. “Looks like we’re going to win this one.”

“I’m sorry,” Masego replied wryly, “I must have missed something. Are we not outnumbered on top a pile a mud with no way of retreating anymore? Because that would be something of a relief, really.”

I opened my eyes and ignored both of them, finding that Hakram was still standing at my left looking like a serene green gargoyle. There hadn’t been so much as a hint of worry on my Adjutant’s face from the moment Robber had come back to report, I suddenly realized. He’d never doubted that I would find a way to turn this around. When you give your trust you give it in full, don’t you?

“She’s doing the face, warlock’s get,” Nauk continued, “Doesn’t matter what they throw at us now – we’re going to eat them alive.”

Coming from most people I would have taken that as a figure of speech, but with orcs it was always hard to tell.

“I don’t do a face,” I cut in, mildly offended. “Hakram, tell them I don’t do a face.”

My Adjutant cleared his throat and refused to meet my eyes.

“You do that thing where you almost smile and you show a little teeth,” Juniper told me frankly. “It looks really creepy on a human.”

“I bet heroes never get that kind of backtalk from their minions,” I muttered. “They probably don’t have to raise their own horse from the dead either. Villains get such a raw deal.”

I got a handful of smiles out of that and I clenched my fingers before unclenching them, thoughts already flying.

“Juniper,” I said. “Get Hune up here. I’ve got a plan, and we’ve got no time to waste.”

—

Our half an hour of preparation passed much too quickly for my tastes. It will have to do, regardless. Besides, my sappers had worked wonders with what little they had on hand: deployed on either side of the hills, they’d covered the muddy grounds in front of them with rows of stakes jutting out with the sharp end first. And just the right height to slide into a horse’s belly. I was banking everything on the Silver Spears ramming their cavalry into the light sapper companies on my sides instead of the heavies and regulars I’d made my centre out of. Just the stakes wouldn’t be enough to stop a cavalry charge, of course, but between them and the crossbows all sappers were equipped with? Even if we didn’t stop them cold, we’d bleed them severely. Possibly enough to rout. Gods Below, let them rout. Because if they don’t... I had another handful of tricks up my sleeves, but having to pull them out that early in the battle would cast the entire plan into doubt. The Forlorn Hope had seemed like another disaster waiting to happen, in a fight that would be this delicate, so I’d taken Juniper’s advice and spread their lines across the ranks.

The Silver Spears were milling in the distance, sergeants haranguing their men-at-arms into a semblance of ranks. They’d started trickling in slowly not too long ago, though that trickle had turned into a flood soon enough. Still, there was something vindictively satisfying about their lack of discipline: none of my legionaries would have needed that much screaming to get into a proper line. The mercenaries might be an impressive sight, with their silver armour and forest of pennants, but when it came down to a melee I had no problem believing that my bunch of ugly misfits would run them through. Whoever was in charge of the other side’s disposition had decided to run with the classics: two staggered waves of infantry in the middle, with their cavalry split in a roughly even manner between their flanks. Robber’s scout had been correct in her suspicions: there were at least nine hundred cataphracts down there.

If they played it well, the sheer amount of people they could throw into the grinder might be able to break my legion through attrition: we’d planned around that as much as we could, but in the end there was only so much Juniper and I could do. Some commanders might be squeamish at the idea of blooding their forces that badly for the win, but that wasn’t something I could count on when it came to the Silver Spears: the way they’d been hitting the supply lines of the Empire spoke of a streak of ruthless pragmatism, no matter how heroic they looked. And speaking of heroes, theirs seemed to be galloping ahead of his forces. Did he want a face-to-face meeting before the beginning of the hostilities? I didn’t feel particularly inclined to grant that, all things considered.

It wasn’t that I expected any kind of treachery on their part, though I’d be a fool to dismiss the notion entirely, but I knew from my little chats with William that talking with those types was an exercise in frustration. On the other hand, if I was rude enough I might be able to bait this so-called Exiled Prince into attacking recklessly. Something to consider. Said Prince was a pretty boy, I saw as he kept on riding closer. Long, flowing golden hair and a pale disposition that made him look a living marble statue – a little too perfect for my own tastes, but not half-bad to look at. Nothing on Kilian, though. He had a minion riding at his side with what I assumed was the Silver Spears’ standard, a pennant with a silver knight riding on a field of white . You’re not even fielding knights, you pretentious jackass , I thought uncharitably. Even your standard is full of it.

“The other one has a Name too,” Masego murmured from at my side. “Not a strong one, but still dangerous – probably an attendant-type Role, by the looks of the power. Equerry, maybe, or Page.”

I grimaced. That could complicate things. I was confident enough I could take on one Named by myself, but two was a whole other story. Hakram had yet to come into any of his aspects, so besides being a lot harder to kill than most orcs he wouldn’t be much help in that regard. Before I could even start of thinking about a way to take them out, though, I was stopped by the simple fact that the two of them kept on riding closer to my lines.

“Hakram, sword out and ready the reserve,” I barked. “They’re up to something.”

I pushed myself up, already looking for my horse, but the pair of heroes slowed about two hundred yards away from my battle line and then stopped. Maybe-Page rammed the standard into the mud and brought the horn dangling off his shoulder to his lips, letting out a loud almost crystalline sound. I could feel the shudder that went through my men at the sound of it and the power of my Name flared up angril.

“What the Hells was that?” Juniper cursed.

Masego frowned.

“Priestly stuff, I think – your usual “sound will strike fear in the heart of the wicked” package.”

“FOUL MINIONS OF THE DARK,” the golden-haired hero called out, “I AM THE EXILED PRINCE, LORD OF THE SILVER SPEARS, RIGHTFUL HEIR TO THE THRONE OF HELIKE!”

I blinked.

“Is he... is he starting a monologue?” I asked, just in case I’d somehow been trapped in an illusion.

“Huh,” Apprentice mused. “I didn’t think people actually did that. I mean, I’ve read about it, but this is a little surreal.”

“I COME TO OFFER YOU THE CHANCE TO END THIS WITHOUT NEEDLESS BLOODSHED. LET THE WITCH THAT COMMANDS YOU STEP FORWARD AND MEET ME IN SINGLE COMBAT!”

“I wish I was a witch,” I sighed. “My life would be so much easier if I could set people on fire with my mind.”

Juniper shifted uncomfortably to my left, a look of confusion painted on her face for the first time since I’d met her.

“Is he serious?” she asked me. “Why would he risk that when he has the larger force?”

Masego chuckled.

“He’s royalty, Legate. It’s not a trap – all that crown-wearing has simply atrophied the part of the brain us mere peasants get common sense from,” he told her.

Hakram had already prepping the reserve, I could see from the corner of my eye. Good, there was no need to rush into this. The Exiled Prince, apparently content that his challenge had been delivered, was sitting ramrod-straight on his horse and waiting for an answer. Single combat, huh. Someone had been reading too many stories.

“Juniper,” I murmured. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but he’s about a hundred and fifty yards away from our front?”

The Hellhound squinted, estimating the yards like I had a few moments ago.

“Give or take ten yards,” she assessed. “Why?”

“That’s effective killing range for our crossbows,” I pointed out.

The legate grunted. “And?”

“I was thinking,” I said patiently, “about shooting him.”

There was a moment of silence and everyone turned to stare at me. What? It was a perfectly reasonable plan.

“Can we... can we actually do that ? ” Hakram spoke, voice hesitant.

I drummed my fingers against my leg.

“I can’t think of a reason we couldn’t. He’s not here under a flag of truce, and even if he was we have no treaties with the rebels.”

“It seems rather unsporting of us,” Apprentice drawled, though he sounded more amused than actually opposed to the course of action.

“We don’t get points for fair play at the end of the battle, Masego,” I replied anyway.

Juniper grunted thoughtfully.

“Would get them moving for sure,” she finally said. “Might even make them angry enough to get sloppy with their battle order. Should I send for a sharpshooter?”

“Nauk’s close to the front, and he’s a fairly good shot,” I declined.

Hakram sent one of our messengers down the hill with the order and I watched the soldier make his way through the ranks until he came by the armoured silhouette of Commander Nauk. Even at this distance I could see the surprise in his body language, and when he turned to gaze up in my direction I mimed shooting a crossbow. Nauk shrugged and requisitioned one from a goblin, cranking it and settling the bolt in. There was a heartbeat before it flew, and as the murderous bolt sailed through the air I could already see the angle was wrong – it would hit the Prince’s upper chest, not the throat or the head. And anything short of a killing wound, a hero will shrug off. The way Hunter had managed to swing around his spear while missing a hand and bleeding out heavily had made that clear enough. At the last moment, though, just before it could hit the hero’s chest, some unseen force yanked it up at an awkward angle and it punched into the man’s throat. I blinked, struck speechless. In the background Masego started laughing convulsively, and I turned to shoot him a questioning look.

“You managed that with a spell?” I demanded.

If he could do telekinesis at that range, he should have told me – if he could mess about with an arrow, he could definitely choke the guy.

“Wasn’t,” he got through the fits of laughter, “wasn’t me. His armour...”

He finally got the laughter under control, though a shit-eating grin still split his face in two.

“His armour – it’s enchanted to turn away arrows. Only it’s part of a set, I’d guess, and since he wasn’t wearing his helmet...”

Understanding sunk in after a moment. The enchantment had redirected the crossbow bolt away from his chest, and right into his throat. The mercenaries were stirring in the distance like a hornet’s nest that had just gotten kicked, but in that moment I couldn’t help but burst out laughing.

So much for the Lord of the Silver Spears.

Chapter 18: Tinder

“In most histories of the Uncivil Wars, the Battle of Three Hills is but a footnote – especially given its proximity to the much more contentious Battle of Marchford. But for us, back then? Marchford might have been the crucible that forged us, but Three Hills lit the furnace.”
-Extract from the personal memoirs of Lady Aisha Bishara

The laughter did not last long.

The line of men-at-arms fell into chaos at the sight of their leader’s death while the probable Page dragged the Prince’s corpse back out of range with a cry of dismay. It would be a while yet before their sergeants got them into anything close to marching order, but there were other things to worry about. There was a noise like the beat of a hundred drums as the cataphracts of the Silver Spears charged across the muddy plain, eighteen hundred pairs of hooves striking the ground as they devoured the distance separating them from the Fifteenth Legion. The sight of nine hundred mounted killers decked in silver plate from head to toe was enough to send a shiver down my spine, but I shook the feeling off. The mud was slowing them, though not as much as I’d hoped. A handful of horses slipped under the tricky footing and rolled over their riders, but it was a mere handful. Not anywhere enough to make a dent in the strength that charge will carry. The two battalions of four hundred and fifty settled into the rough shape of an arrow as they crossed the ground, headed straight for what they must have thought to be the weak points in my line: the sapper companies on my flanks.

“They’ll be in range soon,” Juniper grunted.

“Let’s hope the stakes will do their job,” I agreed quietly.

The first volley of crossbow fire from the goblins did little to hinder the charging horsemen. Not that I’d expected it to, at that range. A few wounded horses, but the other cavalrymen streamed smoothly around the downed mounts. Gods Below and Everburning, what manner of wicked things I wouldn’t do to have cavalry like that. By the time the second volley hit, though, they were well into killing range. The bolts popped through plate on horses and men alike as my legionnaires drew the first real blood of the battle. There wouldn’t be time for more than a handful of those, I admitted to myself with a grimace. Those silver-enamelled bastards were faster than anyone loading a warhorse with that much weight had a right to be. The third volley was the bloodiest yet, and the tip of both mounted battalions disintegrated under the focused fire from my crossbowmen.

“Mages?” I asked the Hellhound.

“Just after the fourth volley,” she replied. “We want the best impact.”

They cataphracts were fifty yards away from my men when they hit the field of stakes. The ones in front saw the sharp ends jutting from the ground but it was too late to turn back – the momentum from those behind them would carry them through whatever they did. I’d seen some striking things in my life, even before I’d decided to pack up my things and become a villain – there was nothing in Creation quite like a golden Laure sunrise when all the bells in the City of a Thousand Bells were ringing – but I’d never seen anything like those swarms of riders splashing against the stakes like a wave against stone. In a heartbeat they were stopped cold, a line of eviscerated horses and upended riders marking the work of my sappers. That was the moment the fourth volley hit, and if the third one had been bloody this one was sheer slaughter.

“Raise the pennant,” Juniper ordered.

A hundred balls of flame bloomed into existence a moment after the signal was raised, and in the wake of the volley our mages sent them raging into the ranks of the enemy. Juniper had argued to concentrate the mage lines on the flanks, while I’d been more inclined to spread them out, and the sight of the chaos they were sowing made me glad I’d taken her advice. Masego clucked his tongue, reluctantly approving.

“Not a bad effect, for such a mundane spell,” he conceded.

Being raised by Warlock had given Apprentice a rather elitist view of the kind of magic taught to legion mages. He’d told me once that the fireball spell that was the bread and butter of our mage lines was a “pedestrian construct even a trained monkey could learn”, which while probably true was missing the point entirely. Easiness to learn was the criteria for all the official spellwork taught to legionaries: the point of it wasn’t sheer firepower, it was to make sure all legion mages could cast the bare basics. During battle, generals could then concentrate those basic spells in a single point to overwhelm the enemy. The doctrine of the Legions of Terror was a thoroughly practical one – it took a lot less time and effort to train twenty legionaries to cast a fireball than to teach one mage to cast one with the same strength as those twenty combined. Mages with talent like Masego’s didn’t grow on trees.

In the distance below I could see the fire had been the tipping point for the cataphracts. In the last half-bell, they’d seen their leader die, a third of their number shot by my sappers and now they’d been stopped cold by the Fifteenth’s fortifications before being set on fire. They broke, and I felt my lips stretch into a grim smile as they fled back towards their men-at-arms. The first part of our battle plan had gone off without a hitch. Whether that was just the glimmer of hope before we got crushed or the beginning of our way to victory remained to be seen.

The officers on the other side had not spent their time idly: the rest of the Silver Spears was on the move already, the mass of men-at-arms slogging across the muddy field like a great snake made of glittering steel. They were... slower than I expected, and it took me a few moments to figure out why. The horsemen. When the cavalry had charged – and then retreated – they’d churned up the ground something fierce. As bad as the footing had been for the mounted men, it was twice as bad for the men-at-arms now. Pushing through knee-deep mud in heavy armour was exhausting work, I knew from personal experience. They’ll be dead on their feet by the time they hit our line.

Exhausted as they were, the men-at-arms still struck our centre like a battering ram. The formation of Hune’s kabili buckled under the impact but stabilized after a moment. As for Nauk’s... Well, the centre of his forces was made up of ogres. The moment the enemy vanguard made contact, the hammers came down and the first row of Silver Spears turned into chunky red paste. They kept charging into the meat grinder without flinching, though. The mercenaries were nowhere as disciplined as my own legionaries but I could not deny they were tenacious. I put aside the reluctant admiration I felt for the poor bastards: sooner or later the ogres would tire and the rest of Nauk’s soldiers were just regulars and heavies. As long as the enemy kept their focus here, though, we’d stay on top. Every one of their soldiers would have to climb over the corpses of the dead to take a swing at mine, and the sheer mass of their numbers was forcing their front line right into my legionaries’ blades. The throng kept pushing forward, stomping over any of their comrades that slipped in the mud – I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of them drowned in there, heads kept in the mire by their own allies.

Still, two routs in a row had been too much to hope for. Not that it mattered: the centre was a sideshow, ultimately. If Hune and Nauk broke the battle was over, sure, but the pivot of my plan had always been the flanks. Dug in as they were in the middle of the hills’ slope, all my commanders had to do was hold on while we took care of the rest. Juniper had kept a cohort of two hundred up the hill to serve as our reserve just in case there were any nasty surprises left, ready to plug any gaps in our defence if the worst came to pass.

“What in the Dark Gods?” she barked suddenly.

I followed her gaze and found exactly what she was talking about. Moving through the mass of men-at-arms like ghosts, a handful of enemy soldiers had come to the front of the melee. There couldn’t have been more than fifty of them: men and women in strange leathers with their heads shaved, all of them wielding long spears with barbed heads. They moved as a loose arrow and in a matter of moments they wedged themselves right into Nauk’s regulars, tearing through the front rank like it was wet parchment. Shit. Who the Hells are those guys? Nauk was losing too many legionaries way too quickly, and the counter-charges he ordered failed to dislodge the bastards. The newcomers weren’t wearing the same chain mail armour the rest of the men-at-arms, and there was just no way anyone using spears should be that good at killing. Spears were useful as a wall, to press back infantry or break cavalry charges, but these assholes were using them as single combat weapons flawlessly. Juniper looked as stumped as I was, and as usual Masego was pretty much useless when it came to anything that didn’t have to do with magic or poor social skills.

“Those are Helike Spear Saints,” Hakram said out of the blue.

Everyone turned to look at him with varying degrees of disbelief.

“They’re a monastic order from the Free Cities that dedicate their life to the spear,” he informed us.

Juniper spat on the ground, whether in disgust at our luck or to show her general opinion of everyone living south of the Waning Woods I couldn’t be sure.

“That’s all well and good,” she grunted, “but what are the fuckers doing here?”

Hakram shrugged.

“The House of Light has ties to the Helike royal family, remember? I guess the hero wasn’t full of it when he said he was a prince.”

Well, wasn’t that nice. Now I had to deal with a unit of shock troops intent on avenging their boss in the middle of a battle where I was already outnumbered badly. What next, was the godsdamned Wizard of the West gonna come out of the grave and set my people on fire?

“How do you even know that?” Masego demanded.

Hakram offered up a truly horrifying sheepish grin. One of these days I was going to have to tell him he actually looked scarier doing that than when he was trying to be scary.

“Figured we might end up fighting in the Free Cities at some point, so I’ve been looking up foreign units we should be careful around.”

And once again, it was made clear why Adjutant was my favourite out of our merry bunch. I really had lucked out, the day I’d been made lieutenant of his line back in the College. I looked back at where the Saints were still tearing through Nauk’s men with practiced efficiency. Time to pull out the first of my trump cards, then.

“Apprentice,” I said, “clean that mess up.”

The dark-skinned teenager offered me a lazy grin.

“Oh? Finally letting me off the leash, are we? Good, I was starting to get bored.”

He sauntered off down the hill, and knowing what I knew about the kind of magic he could pull off I felt safe in assuming the situation was now under control.

“You sure that’s going be enough, Squire? Could send in the reserves to be sure,” Juniper asked from my side.

“The only other mage I’ve seen pulling out magic on the same level as Masego is his father,” I replied, letting the words sink in.

My senior officers were all aware of who Masego’s father – well, one of them anyway – was: Warlock, the Sovereign of the Red Skies himself. If the stories they told about the man in the Wasteland were anything like the ones I’d been raised on, Juniper should understand exactly how dangerous that made Apprentice. With perfect timing thunder boomed and a streak of lightning struck across the noon sky, hitting right in the middle of the Saints. A dozen of them died instantly and twice as many were thrown away like rag dolls by the impact. Their formation wavered, and Nauk’s legionaries immediately turned up the pressure. Masego was already chanting his second spell, blue energy crackling around him in threads visible to the naked eye.

“So that’s why you keep him around,” Juniper mused, eyeing Apprentice with more respect than she ever had before.

Captain had been right, I noted with amusement: proficiency at violence really was the quickest way to get on an orc’s good side. Hakram cleared his throat from behind us.

“Flanks are seeing action.”

My gaze swivelled to the right side of the hills, where my goblins had started to fire on the approaching Silver Spears again. Most of the men-at-arms had been herded into the middle of the battlefield the way I’d intended them to be, but it looked like someone on the other side had kept their head on straight enough that the flanks were still going to have a fight on their hands. It was hard to tell how many of them there were slogging in – at least two hundred, maybe more? There was not even the shadow of a proper formation as they tried to hack their way through the stakes. The tribune in charge had his legionaries focus on the Silver Spears trying to make a path, but they’d brought up large shields to the front to cover themselves. A well-aimed salvo of fireballs put an end to that for a few moments, but before I could count thirty heartbeats they were back at it. I grimaced: the situation was not dire for now, but eventually our mages were going to run out of juice. A glance to the other flank convinced me that was where I should put my attention, though. There were about as many men-at-arms there pushing towards the goblins, but there was a recognizable silhouette at the head of the pack: the maybe-Page from earlier, carrying a banner as he led his soldiers straight into the stakes.

Unlike my officers, I’d never attended the tactics classes at the College. I’d had a very different education on the subject of war: every other day Black would sit down with me and we’d talk for a few hours. On some occasions we’d go over old battles and the ways they’d been won or lost, but most of the time the discussion was a little more abstract. In every battle there’s a fulcrum , he’d told me, the point that can swing it one way or another. Tactics were, generally speaking, better left to the generals: it was the place of those with Names to find that fulcrum and nudge it in the right direction. He hadn’t needed to spell out that “nudging” usually consisted of killing the right people in the right place at the right time. The Page raised the pennant he’d been carrying around since earlier and the men-at-arms behind him cheered. They ran straight into the stakes Pickler’s sappers had put up and I raised an eyebrow – were they going to hack those down by hand while being shot at the whole time?

At the moment they were losing soldiers with clockwork regularity as my crossbowmen placed their shots with practiced professionalism. They averaged a shot every fifteenth heartbeat, the official requirement for crossbowmen in the Legions of Terror, but I’d noted more than once that they had better accuracy than they should. Hakram had told me Pickler was picky about the kind of wood and rope we got issued, so she probably knew something I didn’t. The moment the Page reached the stakes was when it all started going downhill: the Named boy rammed the standard in the ground and there was a blinding flash of light. I blinked it away and grimaced at what I saw – a rough path had been pulverized through the stakes, the mud still smoking where the Name’s power had struck. Soldiers poured into the breach behind him as Page charged up the hill. And that’s my fulcrum right there.

“Adjutant,” I spoke calmly. “We’re reinforcing the left flank. Juniper, I’ll be taking in the reserve.”

One of my mages sent a ball of flame hurtling through the air towards the Page, but a man right behind him raised his hand and the magic flickered out of existence. So that’s the priest that’s been mucking up our scrying.

“I’ll take the Page,” I told Hakram. “Get rid of the priest before he can make more of a mess.”

“At your command,” he gravelled back.

Juniper was already barking up a storm in the background, readying the cohort for combat. She wouldn’t lead it personally of course – it was her job to stay up here in the place with the best vantage point and make tactical decisions as events unfolded . The two hundred legionaries moved in good order but I pulled ahead, too impatient to wait. Hakram kept up with us as well as he could, but he’d only come into his Name recently. He wasn’t as good at drawing on the power to add swiftness to his limbs. By the time I reached the goblins, Page and his men had reached their first ranks. The melee that ensued was sharply in the favour of the Silver Spears: goblins fought more viciously than any other of my soldiers, but none of them stood taller than a human’s chest. There were limits to how much nastiness could even out a struggle.

Sure-footed even in the mud, I rammed into the tip of their assault with my sword bare. The man in front of me was tanned and bearded, snarling as I came to him – his blade rose but he was no more than an amateur playing at war. My shield broke his nose and my arming sword cut his throat, leaving a corpse behind as I charged into the melee. The cohort behind me swept into the fight like a hammer blow, knocking the momentum out of the men-at-arms. It had been some time since I’d fought men without a Name, and never before had I taken the fight to them without my own power being hamstrung. The experience was... enlightening. I burrowed into their line like an arrow into flesh, too horrified to smile.

They were not enemies so much as silhouettes now, streaking in front of me almost too fast to follow as I scythed through them like wheat. A young boy tried to bring down a mace on my shield but lost his hand and his head with two flicks of the wrist, crimson raining on the mud as I stepped past his corpse. Stories spoke of villains and heroes as having the strength of a hundred men on the field, and now I understood the true terror of it: they could not stop me. They could not even slow me, and even when they tried to bury me in corpses they found I did not tire. This was not a fight so much as a massacre, and I felt bile rise in my throat. It was almost a relief when the enemy hero came to meet me, casually running his rapier through the eye of a goblin. Page , the call came through the enemy’s ranks. A prayer and a promise. Well, at least I wouldn’t have to ask for introductions. Now that I was close enough to see the boy’s face I wasn’t so sure he was, in fact, a boy. Maybe he just had really delicate bone structure? I suppose I could have asked, but now didn’t really seem like the time.

“You,” Page spoke and what did you know, that was definitely a woman’s voice, “you’re the one who ordered that filthy orc to shoot.”

I assumed she was referring to Nauk, which was being quite unfair to my commander. He bathed exactly as often as Legion regulations required it, so he wasn’t any filthier than the rest of my army.

“More like mimed it, really,” I replied.

Page’s rapier slid out of the goblin’s eye socket with a wet squelch.

“It was nothing more than cold-blooded murder,” she said, her tone halfway between anguished and furious. “He was a good man. A good man .”

“And now he’s a dead one,” I spoke flatly, eyeing the rapier’s point. “Way of the world, or so I’m told.”

She was barking up the wrong tree if she was trying to guilt-trip me about the Exiled Prince’s death. He’d been asking for a duel, and if you took all the glorified pomp out of that concept all that was left was the intent to kill. If you’re asking me to be sorry that I was smarter about killing him than he was about killing me, you’ll be waiting a long time.

“I should have known better than to expect contrition from a Praesi,” Page snarled.

“I’m actually from Callow,” I told her, raising an eyebrow.

“- but I promise you this, Squire,” she continued, ignoring my interjection, “you will be sorry by the time I’m done with you.”

I didn’t mind letting her trash talk longer than this, though she seemed like she might be done. The longer she talked, the more time Hakram had to take out the priest. The reserve cohort had plugged the gap in the stakes where the men-at-arms had been pouring through and from the corner of my eye I could see the tribune commanding the crossbowmen putting her lines back in order. That small look at the situation nearly cost me my life: in the fraction of a moment where I’d taken my eyes off of her, Page had moved. Months of sparring against Captain had endowed me with reflexes that bordered on supernatural, though: out of habit I took a half-step to the side, turning a strike that would have gone right through my eye into one that left a thin mark on my cheek. I guess the conversation’s over. Shame, we were finding so much common ground. The footing was tricky with all the mud but I widened my stance and brought up my shield, the tip of my sword rising to face my opponent.

I’d never faced anyone using a rapier before – it wasn’t a popular weapon this far up north – which put me at something of a disadvantage. And if the speed she’d just moved with was any indication, Page might actually be faster than me. That I can deal with. So were Black and Captain. I’d just have to stay defensive until I had a better grasp on the way she fought, which was the way I preferred doing things anyway. The other girl was lighter on her feet, unburdened by the weight of the plate I wore, and she slowly circled around me. The point of her rapier flickered a few inches away from my face when I pivoted to match her but I refused to rise to the bait. It was only when she’d done two thirds of a circle around that I realized what she was actually doing: she’d been making her way up the slope to grab the high ground, and I’d been so cautious I’d let her do it without a challenge.

Cursing under my breath I took a few careful steps in her direction, attention divided between her stance and the tip of her sword. I almost missed it when she moved. Her weight shifted a fraction towards her back foot and the instant afterwards she was trying to run her rapier in the soft flesh under my chin – I slapped away at the point with the side of my shield but it was already gone. She immediately took the opening, the rapier sliding into the elbow joint of my sword arm and scoring blood. Hissing, I stepped back and brought my shield up. So that was the way Page wanted to play me, then: feinting with killing blows I couldn’t afford to let go and then turning them into quick, debilitating hits to my amour’s weak points. She’s fought people in plate before , I decided. No one our age improvised that well on the spot: she’d already worked out her tactics for this.

Page met my eyes and smiled a cold, cold smile. Huh. I had a feeling I would have liked her, if she weren’t currently doing her level best to fillet me. She was good. Better than me, much as it pained me to admit it. I had barely a year of training under my belt, no matter how gruelling it had been, and there was too much of a gap in experience between us for me to able to beat her at this game. William had hammered in that point in Summerholm, crushing me even at my peak of power. That’s why you don’t play the game, you play the player. The kind of training she’d gone through wasn’t something commoners could afford. She must have studied under masters for years to get this good, learning all the ways to take out different opponents with that little needle of hers. Those pearly white teeth, that perfectly fitting armour, that immaculate haircut – you’re a noble’s kid, or at least a wealthy merchant’s. There was something about the way she moved that spoke of a perfectionist streak, and I happened to know how to deal with those.

I rushed her with all the grace of an ogre tearing through a pottery shop, nearly slipping in the mud when I stepped around the blow she flicked towards my eye. She tried to make distance but my Name was howling like an angry beast, thirsting for blood. The power rushed through my veins and I saw her next strike coming before she ever moved, bringing up my shield and letting her point score a thin scratch against the metal. I rammed it into her chest as she was halfway through taking a step back, feeling a savage grin tugging at my lips. At the last moment she managed to turn her stumble into a fluid spin and for the barest of moments we were back to back – I elbowed her, my plate-covered arm ramming into her back with a greatly satisfying noise. She was quicker than I to turn around but I could keep up now, and I’d claimed back the high ground. With a snarl she tried to ram her rapier through the side of my knee joint, but I kicked the point away. I moved forward again, undaunted: I couldn’t let her make space again, that was her game. Mine was to stick close where her speed wouldn’t mean as much and my arming sword would work best.

The edge of Page’s blade shone for a fraction of a moment, glinting like a lake under moonlight before it blurred into motion. I was ready for her this time. My Name was a dark thing, I realized more every day, but it was my darkness. I owned it, and I could feel it laugh in time with my every heartbeat. My sword slapped her own away with almost insulting ease . My shield savagely impacted with her face, the telltale crunch of a broken nose resonating up my arm. She flew back, blood flying, and I let go of the shield. Page landed on the ground and tried to get on her knee, rapier providentially still in hand, but my armoured boot landed on her chest and put an end to that. She dropped the rapier and in the blink of an eye slid a dagger I hadn’t even noticed into my knee joint – I let out a noise that was half-yell, half-snarl and fell on top of her. We struggled but I was heavier and this was my battleground. All those years she’d spent learning all her sword forms and footwork, I’d spent earning stripes of my own. Far before Black had ever taken me under his wing, I’d learned to fight in the damp darkness of the Pit. I had to drop my sword to push down the hand that held the dagger, but my other one was free and that was enough. I punched her in the jaw once, twice and teeth flew.

There was the glint of sunlight on metal and she produced another dagger out of nowhere, trying to slip it into the unprotected stretch after my gauntlet, but it was a shallow wound. I gritted my teeth and worked through the pain as she desperately tried to slide the dagger out of my flesh while I groped through the mud for my sword. She did and I bit down on a scream, but it was a moment too late – my fingers closed on the hilt of my sword and I brought it down right under her chin. There was a wet gurgle and she tried to breathe through it, but I knew a mortal wound when I saw one. With the last of her strength she tried for a final strike, but there was no strength left in her: it just glanced off my breastplate. I leaned forward as the last of light left her eyes, just close enough for a whisper.

“When you see your Prince on the other side,” I gasped, “tell him he should have worn his godsdamned helmet.”

I wrenched my sword free, and that was the end of her.

Chapter 19: Flame

“Maybe I’ll lose one day. But not today, and not to the likes of you.”
– Dread Empress Maleficent the First

I pushed myself up to my feet, wincing as my knee almost gave under my own weight.

My forearm wasn’t as bad, though both wounds would require the attention of a healer before the day was done. At least I wasn’t in any danger of bleeding out even if I wasn’t going to be winning races anytime soon. My armour was a mess of mud and blood, but I was still alive. My first duel to the death with another Named and it couldn’t be called anything but a victory. There was a sweet taste to that truth. Another milestone passed . I bent over to pick up my shield, strapping it back on with a grunt and way too much fumbling for comfort. Around me the battle still raged but the Fifteenth was now carrying the day. Juniper’s cohort was driving back the Spears into the opening through the stakes Page had burned, one step at a time. There was a flash of light in the distance and Hakram roared triumphantly. I grinned at the sound and hobbled towards it.

The shield wall my legionaries had formed was advancing steadily, a rampart of steel the furious men-at-arms threw themselves against in vain. There was no formation to the footmen of the Spears. There wouldn’t be, I supposed. That wasn’t what they were meant for: they were just a battering ram used to hold down the enemy while the cataphracts rode them down. Without the silvery horsemen backing them, they’d ended up alone in an uphill melee against the finest infantry on Calernia – and they were bleeding badly for it. The cohort’s frontline split and Adjutant limped back to safety behind it, the opening closing as fluidly as it had come into existence. Hakram looked like he’d been rolling around in a bed full of charcoal and his armour’s metal was warped, but aside from that he seemed unwounded. He sketched out the distant cousin of a salute when I got to him, the two of us ending up leaning against each other more to stay up than out of affection.

“Got the Page?” he gravelled.

“Stabbed her in the throat,” I agreed.

“Cold,” he rasped out approvingly.

“The priest?” I asked.

“Bastard was a terrible fighter, but he did some thing that made him burn to the touch,” Adjutant replied.

He brought up his skeletal hand for me to see, the bones of it now blackened and burnt.

“Turns out those don’t feel pain,” he gravelled. “Choked the man out.”

I snorted.

“You know,” I mused, “I don’t always feel like a villain, but today I might have gotten a little into it.”

“Snappy sentence when you stabbed her?” he asked curiously.

“Helmet reference,” I explained.

He barked out a laugh. “That’s gonna stay a classic, you know,” he told me. “I’ll bet my good hand there’s going to be a song before the month is done.”

Gods, there probably would be. Legionaries made songs about bloody everything, it was one of the Legions’ oldest traditions. We stood there for a long moment, watching the men-at-arms losing ground. I frowned at the sight eventually.

“We can’t drive them away too far,” I said. “We need them in position for the second phase.”

“They’ll follow when we draw back,” Adjutant grunted. “It’s the other flank I’m worried about. No cohort to hold the line there.”

“The godsdamned Hellhound’s on it,” I smiled. “I’m sure she’ll figure something out.”

Carefully, we started making our way back to the Fifteenth’s unofficial headquarters. Of my senior officers only Aisha and Pickler were still there, and the Senior Sapper was conversing in low tones with several messengers, keeping an eye on the three fronts of the battlefield.

“Lady Squire,” my legate grunted. “I see you managed not to get yourself killed.”

“I’m touched by your overwhelming faith in my abilities,” I replied. “Are you sure you’re comfortable gushing this much in public? People will talk.”

The grim-faced orc rolled her eyes.

“I sent Apprentice to the right flank,” she informed me. “It was beginning to buckle.”

A cursory glance was enough to tell me this was no longer the case. The Silver Spears infantry had managed to push through the stakes, though going by the amount of corpses decorating the hill it hadn’t been easy. They’d been stopped flat anyway: an entire stretch of the slope had been turned into a hellish wasteland of jagged ice they were failing to pass. Masego was no longer even casting, his panting silhouette standing a little way behind the warped battlefield, but the Spears were fucked regardless. The men-at-arms were slipping all over the already-melting ice, some of them even getting a spike through the guts for the effort. My mage lines were breaking up any large groups of soldiers with fireball volleys while the crossbowmen picked off easy targets one at a time, taking their time to aim.

“That’s shooting ourselves in the foot,” I frowned. “We need them beyond the ice.”

“Lord Masego says he can melt it at will,” Aisha informed me. “We’re waiting for more forces to trickle to the sides before pulling the trigger.”

I hummed, casting my eyes to the centre. With the Spear Saints wiped out, Nauk and Hune had gained back the lost ground. The ogre lines had been pulled back, made to rest so they’d be fresh for the last push, but the Fifteenth’s heavies were making an object lesson as to why Praesi heavy infantry had torn through every force set against it since the Reforms. Commander Hune herself had taken the field with her men, swinging around a hammer with a handle large enough to qualify as a tree trunk. Of Nauk I saw no trace, though I’d be surprised if he was in the melee. He knew better than to risk going into the Red Rage when the fight was this close. With the centre line holding so well, the back of the mass of men-at-arms was starting to shift to the flanks. It wasn’t well-organized enough to be a command decision, from the looks of it. Soldiers were just looking for somewhere they could fight instead of waiting for the two dozen ranks in front of them to be done going through the grinder.

“How’d you know they would move to the sides?” I asked Juniper, watching from the corner of my eye as Hakram sent for a healer.

“Armies, like water, take the path of least resistance,” she quoted.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Terribilis?”

“One-Eye, actually,” the legate said. “You should borrow a manuscript of his essays on tactics – they’re a mandatory reading at the College.”

I was probably due subjecting myself to that torture, yes. It wasn’t that I doubted Marshal Grem would have valuable lessons to teach: Black had outright stated he considered the orc a superior tactician to himself. But orcs writing in Lower Miezan were always a pain to read. Kharsum as a language added suffixes at the end of words to specify gender and numbers, which didn’t translate all that well in the common tongue of the Empire. As a result, their sentences were all over the place and occasionally physically painful to read. Before I could duck my way out of the subject, the Hellhound spat on the ground.

“Whoever’s in charge on the other side finally got their shit together,” she assessed.

I followed her gaze and saw what had prompted the observation: entire companies of men-at-arms were peeling off the back of their centre and wading through the mud towards our flanks. I let out a whistle.

“That’s more than we thought,” I noted. “With the people they’ve already got there it should be, what – about five hundred a flank? They’re thinning their centre badly.”

“It’s not a bad call,” Juniper grunted. “If Nauk and Hune push downhill they’ll be the ones tripping all over corpses and falling in mud. They just need to hold long enough to roll up our flanks and close the jaws on our heavies.”

“Arguably this is the best possible outcome, for us,” Aisha smiled thinly. “When the shock sets they won’t have a hero to keep them in the fight.”

Hakram waved over a dark-skinned boy towards me and the mage saluted, stuttering out a greeting before he got to work on my knee. I supressed a smile. Well, I supposed I’d been somewhat impressive today. For once I’d actually earned the intimidation factor on my own.

“They’ll flee,” Juniper growled. “That’s the problem. They’ll salvage a larger force out of this than I wanted. The cataphracts we were never going to wipe out, but if they cut and run with a thousand infantry and keep what’s left of their horsemen they’re still a threat when we come for Marchford.”

“We can’t afford a protracted fight,” Aisha reminded her. “We don’t have the numbers for it, and if they tire our men out too badly we risk an actual defeat.”

“I wish we’d been assigned siege,” the Hellhound grunted. “A few scorpions aimed at their centre would be racking up massive casualties right now.”

“I already got that from Pickler, thank you,” I sighed. “Until we’re a fully-manned legion, we won’t be given any. Not that we particularly need the engines: Marchford doesn’t even have walls, they pulled them down after the Conquest.”

“I could make some, if you give me the manpower to cut the trees,” Pickler contributed from where she stood.

I blinked.

“We have the nails and rope for that?” I asked.

“Ratface is a man of many talents,” the goblin equivocated.

“None of that is in the fucking lists he gave me,” Juniper cursed.

I smothered a grin. At this point my quartermaster didn’t have an actual reason to not own up to the trades he’d made – he was just pulling the orc’s pigtails because he could.

“We can finish that conversation after the battle,” I broke in before the situation could further degenerate.

I felt the flesh on my arm close and thanked the healer, who blushed and scuttled off to take care of Hakram.

“My sappers are ready, by the way,” Pickler told us. “You just need to give the word.”

The Hellhound grunted and sent a messenger for Masego: he’d be needed for this part. The lot of us were watching the men-at-arms mass out of range of our mages and crossbowmen when the Soninke arrived, slightly out of breath. How he’d managed to lose none of his thickness around the waist while on military rations was beyond me, but campaigning had yet to get him in actual shape.

“This whole battle thing is rather bracing,” he told us. “I think I could learn to enjoy it – it’s more about shifting the grounds than actually taking lives. Much more interesting of an approach.”

Considering he’d likely killed twice as many soldiers as I had today, hearing him say that was a little jarring. Still, I let it go. He’d been raised by a Calamity, that his take on this would be... unusual should be expected.

“You can get the ice from here?” Juniper asked.

“Distance doesn’t really matter,” he noted. “I just have to stop feeding the constructs – which I’ll need to do soon, for the record, if I’m to have enough left in me for the fire trick.”

I cast a look at my legate and she nodded.

“Do it,” I ordered.

“So assertive,” he spoke drily. “If you keep that up I might swoon.”

“My skills at seduction are second to none,” I agreed, ignoring the sound of Hakram failing to smother a laugh.

The bespectacled mage stared at his handiwork, waving a hand and muttering under his breath.

“And one, two, three ,” he said.

In a single heartbeat, the entire field of ice collapsed into a flood of water. It toppled a few enemy soldiers, though actual casualties had been too much to hope for.

“Huh,” I said. “I expected it to shatter, to be honest.”

“I used ambient water for building blocs,” Apprentice explained. “The power was for the initial shaping, then to keep it cold.”

“Right. Can’t make something out of nothing,” I remembered. “It’s one of the original laws.”

“Sleeping with a practitioner has done wonders for your education,” the mage praised.

I flipped him the finger. He was going to pay for that comment at some point in the future, but for now there were other priorities. Juniper waved at one of her ensigns, the Taghreb putting her lips to a horn and blowing two sharp notes. Sappers advance. The sergeants on the other side managed to put a semblance of order into their lines before the entire right flank charged up the sodden grounds. To the left our reserve cohort was withdrawing uphill in good order, the flood of men-at-arms filling up the space behind them. In some ways that flank was in the most precarious situation: if the enemy soldiers spilled around them, they might get stuck in the crossfire.

“Standard,” the Hellhound called out without turning. “Sharpers, full volley.”

The orc’s voice was calm, her eyes sharp. I’d seen the way my legate could get awkward around people the few times she’d joined my minions for drinks, but on the field was utterly in element. A smile tugged at her lips, showing a hint of fang, and I realized she was enjoying herself. Not the killing itself, I thought, but the battle. Pitting her mind against the enemy’s, luring them into the trap she’d set for them. I’d always known that Juniper was a dangerous woman, on an intellectual level, but it had never quite sunk in. She didn’t really care who she fought, she just cared about the fight. I’d always thought Nauk was the most... orcish of my greenskin officers, but looking at my legate now I knew I’d been wrong. Just because she wasn’t using her own sword didn’t mean she wasn’t in love with war.

Four hundred small balls of clay flew through the air and the detonation that followed was deafening. It was the first time I’d seen real sharpers deployed in that amount. So that’s why they won the Conquest. How could even knights have stood up to this? On both sides, the front of the enemy’s line disappeared in chunks of metal and gore. I saw the shudder go through the Silver Spears at the sight of all those men just... ceasing to exist, the enemy host recoiling like it was a living thing. On the left flank our cohort broke formation to get away faster, setting up their shield wall again two thirds of the way uphill. There was no equivalent on the right, just sappers and crossbowmen scuttling away before they could get forced into an engagement. A howl of rage and anger erupted from the mercenaries at the sight of them fleeing after such a brutal hit: the mass of men-at-arms charged in their direction, eager for blood.

“They’re coming too quickly,” I said.

“Fucking amateurs,” Juniper spat. “Their left is still hesitating. They’re not even coordinating the assaults.”

The right was too far ahead. I closed my eyes. Could we pull off half the reserve cohort to serve as a stopgap? No, one hundred men wouldn’t be enough. Not with what the enemy was sending up, not even if they made it in time. Thinning our centre was just trading one danger for another. If they punched through Nauk and Hune we were done for.

“Fuck,” I spoke in a low voice. “Juniper?”

“Out of options, Foundling,” she admitted. “And we can’t afford to let them connect. If they manage to scatter our right, the battle is over.”

“We’ll get some on the left,” Aisha murmured. “Just not as many as we’d hoped.”

“Do it, Apprentice,” the Hellhound commanded after hesitating for a moment.

“I don’t take orders from you, legate,” the Soninke replied flatly.

“Do it, Masego,” I ordered.

He sighed. “You could have said please, at least,” he complained.

The bespectacled mage squared his shoulders, took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

“Though I hunger I am never sated,” he chanted in Mthethwa. “Through grass and ground I crawl, devouring all I behold. My blood knows the call, my flesh the craving. Nameless eidolons, thieves of Heaven’s grace, grant me flame .”

He snapped his fingers, and so his prayer was granted. Two small threads of flame grew out of the sound, growing in length and thickness as they coiled up his arm. The twin heads of snakes rose behind his back, flickering tongues of heat and smoke.

“I command you,” he hissed with a visible effort.

He raised his hand and the spellfire spread, the snakes growing in size until their heads were the size of a horse – and then shot forward through the sky in both directions. I watched in awe as they devoured what must have been half a mile each, arcing up until they reached their apex. And then dropped, hitting the ground in the spots we’d showed Apprentice. There was a heartbeat of utter silence across the battlefield and then the chain of goblinfire caches we’d buried in the hills exploded, drowning the flanks in green. Under my troubled eyes, six hundred men went up in flames before I could so much as let out a breath. The screaming began and I had, unless I was mistaken, just won my first battle

Gods forgive me.

Chapter 20: Ashes

“We fought,
across field and river,
carrying the Tower’s writ
to the foot of the Wall.
We fought
and did not grow old.”

– Spoken Kharsum verse attributed to Sharok the Blinded, chieftain of the Iron Bears (banned by Imperial decree)

I’d killed people before.

Occasionally I’d even enjoyed it. Some had died by my own hand, others by the consequences of my actions – or inaction. In a way one could even say that every death in the Liesse Rebellion was on my head. That particular truth had cost me a few sleepless nights, though as time passed the pangs of self-loathing came less and less often. I’d known guilt about bloodying my hands, though, that was the heart of it. And yet as I searched myself for that feeling, watching at over half a thousand men going up in flames, I found nothing. No, that wasn’t right. Not nothing, just... little. Gods, that might actually be worse. No tears need be shed for the likes of the Silver Spears, I told myself. They were Free Cities mercenaries playing hero in a Callowan war while on the take from the First Prince. The very kind of foreign soldiers who’d made Callow the battlefield for their “glorious” wars against Evil over the centuries, dying ugly deaths in the Wasteland and leaving my people to deal with the fallout of their failed crusades. There was a satisfaction to be found in evening that balance, I couldn’t deny.

After all, shutting the door on the fingers of foreign armies was one of the oldest Callowan traditions – one forged breaking the Legions against the walls of Summerholm and sharpened drowning the Vales in Proceran blood. That’s the comparison I’d like to make, but the truth is a little different isn’t it? I wasn’t Elizabeth Alban bringing down Regalia’s flying fortress or Jehan the Wise marching on Salia to hang seven princes and one: my paymaster was the Tyrant in the Tower, my teacher the very man who’d annexed the Kingdom by force of arms. My soldiers were not only Callowans but also Taghreb and Soninke, orcs and ogres and goblins. There’d been a time when seeing anything but humans west of Summerholm was a rarity, but those days were done and over with. Creation wasn’t any larger than it had been in the days of the old heroes, but it was more connected . Walls had been brought down by the Conquest that no one could build back up, lines blurred between friend and foe. For better or worse, I was the heiress to that legacy. To that terrifyingly rational breed of Evil that was not above imitating Good when it served its purposes.

It was a bastardly, calculating kind of philosophy – but then Juniper and I had just planned to burn six hundred men alive and shared displeasure at the number not being higher. I’m more bastardly than calculating, but I suppose the Hellhound can hold up the other side of that pot. I watched calmly as the forces pressing on the Fifteenth’s flanks melted like snow under spring sun, the crackle of green flames drowned out by a chorus of screams. My own soldiers weren’t in any immediate danger of being swallowed by the fire, though we’d have to evacuate the hills before a bell passed. Goblinfire could use anything as fuel, but it spread faster across certain types of ground. Sappers going through the College were taught a chart of observed spreads so they could make the calculations as Pickler had: allegedly wet mud was close to the bottom. Masego had noted the ratios on the chart displayed magically significant numbers, the implications of which escaped me at the moment. Nobody but a handful of goblin tribes knew how to make the eponymous fire, though, so I’d be sure to question him on the subject later.

I was starting to earn my reputation for using the stuff, so I might as well learn what I could about it.

With the flanks covered it was time to break the mercenaries for good. I supposed I could have gone back to the frontlines, but at this point there was no real need. The exhaustion was already beginning to set in, anyway, and getting the Fifteenth too used to relying on me to soften up the enemy wasn’t a great idea. They had to be able to operate independently of me: that was rather the whole point of having a legion to call my own. Juniper called for the horns to be sounded again and three deep, long bellows echoed across the battlefield. Beneath me the companies of the centre formed into a large wedge as the ogre lines moved back to the front to make the tip of the spear. The legionaries stepped forward, ramming themselves into the men-at-arms, and for a moment it looked like even after the horrors of the day the mercenaries would hold.

Nauk’s armoured ogres put an end to that illusion, brutally hammering their way through the core of the enemy formation and splitting it in half. Juniper grinned fiercely at the sight of it, knowing the battle was as good as done. Within moments the enemy soldiers around the edges panicked, the safety of having their comrades covering their sides ripped away from them. A few ran, and that was the finger to the scale: the panic spread across the ranks and the army collapsed. Some knots of stronger-willed enemy soldiers tried to stem the flood but my officers were War College graduates and knew full well how to handle an enemy rout – companies surrounded and overwhelmed the last remnants of resistance where they stood, allowing the runners to leave the field.

“Well,” Hakram said. “That’s that.”

“I did not think your goblinfire trick would be this effective,” Masego panted.

“It performed below predictions,” Juniper grunted.

She was very much trying to look like she wasn’t jubilant, but the look in her eyes betrayed her even if her face remained grim. Aisha, on the other hand, was not so reserved.

“ Bin hamar ,” she cursed in Taghrebi. “Two to one, our backs to the river without a speck of horse and we still fucked them. And not even gently. This was rough stuff all around.”

“Colourfully put,” Apprentice replied, grinning in a way that showed off his perfect teeth.

“We’re not done yet,” I said. “We need to to take prisoners where it’s feasible, heal our own and get the Hells off these hills before we join them on the pyre. And you can be sure that we’ll find the survivors holed up in Marchford.”

“Foundling is right,” the Hellhound said, sounding a little perturbed by the act of speaking those words. “Hard part is over, but that just means the drudgework is beginning.”

“Merciless Gods, the two of you need to have a drink,” Aisha retorted. “The Tower sent a joke of a half-legion against a numerically superior band of hardened mounted killers and we put them over our knee for a good spanking. Take a moment to fucking enjoy it, at least!”

Huh, first time I’d ever heard her curse in Lower Miezan. Aisha wasn’t stuck up – formal, they insisted on calling it – like some of the noble children I’d come across, but she did make a point of following most rules of etiquette. Better breeding demands better manners , the proverb went in Callow. Or it did in the pretty parts of the city, anyway. Dockside, the saying had been a little different: inbreeding demands pompousness .

“Fine,” Juniper grunted, pausing for exactly three heartbeats. “There, I enjoyed it. We’re done. Now get me my casualty reports, Staff Tribune.”

I smothered a smile. I supposed I could find some comfort in the Hellhound forever having the general demeanour of an angry bear.

“Senior Sapper,” I called out to Pickler. “How’s the fire spread looking?”

The diminutive goblin grimaced. “Faster than we fought. Might have to dig a few trenches to buy us time.”

I took off my helmet and passed a hand through my sweat-drenched hair.

“Draft outside the sappers for that,” I ordered. “I’ll want goblin eyes out and about when night falls. Having them falling asleep would be counterproductive.”

“I’ll talk to Commander Hune,” she nodded, offering me a salute before haring off.

“Nauk’s kabili will have been mauled,” Adjutant spoke calmly from my side.

“He was already understrength,” I winced.

Nominally a kabili was supposed to count a thousand fighting men, the quarter of a regular legion, but most of the Callowan deserters had come from the large orc’s numbers. He’d been at about seven hundred when we gave battle, and since then he’d had to weather both the Proceran men-at-arms and their monkling spearmen.

“Our sappers and crossbowmen got off light,” Hakram noted. “The reserve too. We should still have over a thousand legionaries in shape to fight for Marchford.”

“And in that thousand we’ll have two goblin cohorts, Adjutant,” I sighed. “That’s four hundred soldiers I can’t put in the shield wall.”

“We’ll manage,” he gravelled. “We always do.”

We stayed quiet for a long time as I watched my legion secure the field. The enemy had fled mostly into the woods, but the Fifteenth had been ordered not to pursue. Our scouts would find the largest groups in the coming days and we’d take them apart piece by piece before marching on the city – defeat in detail, they called it in the College. Allowing them to bunch up again would be dangerous, even if we’d decapitated their leadership. Legionaries walked across the grounds in lines, finishing off enemy wounded and occasionally taking officers prisoners. They’d be furthest down the line for healing, but if possible we’d keep them alive: anything we could learn about the remaining Spears might come in useful. And if I could get actual proof that they were being paid by Procer... No, that might be too much to hope for. I doubted the First Prince would be sloppy enough to have the funds traceable back to her.

Leaving Hakram behind, I went downhill to survey the work of my legion up close. The stench of shit and blood was nauseating, even with the battle only just ended. Here and there I noticed limbs and bits of corpses missing – orc work, that. Their practice of feeding on the dead was looked down by even most Praesi, but it was tacitly allowed by the Legions so long as it remained limited to enemy corpses. The cannibalism was one of the reasons Praesi armies moved quicker on the march than most other armies on the continent: the supply train could be much lighter if after every battle half your army could make a meal of the enemy. Goblins occasionally took trophies – almost always eyes or ears, more rarely finger bones – but they didn’t actually eat them. Their diet was close to a human’s, where orcs ate almost only meat and might actually take sick if they were kept on bread rations for too long.

The sight of the hills from down where I stood was eerie. The curtains of smoke rising into the sky framed the sight of the Fifteenth carrying its supplies out of the way, oxen and men organized in careful routes under the vigilant eyes of their officers. On the field itself the healers were setting up shop in knots, triaging my wounded and carefully gauging how much power they could expend before being too exhausted to be of any use. Praesi medicine was far above the Callowan equivalent, and not just because mages were born in the Wasteland much more frequently than they’d been in the Kingdom. They’d inherited many old secrets from the Miezans, with their only superiors on Calernia being the Ashurans – whose own mage-doctors were highly sought after even across the Tyrian Sea. I found my feet taking me to the edge of the battlefield, where the corpse-stench was not as strong and I could stand where the Silver Spears once had.

I wasn’t quite sure what I’d come to find down here. Not absolution, of that much I was sure. Regret was the first step on that path, and I didn’t regret anything I’d done today. I’d been brutal but war was a brutal thing: flinching away from inflicting death to your enemies was to have your own soldiers pay the price for your squeamishness. We might have lost, had I not condemned those six hundred men to a painful death, and that was an unacceptable outcome. I’d come too far, compromised too much of who I was to allow the likes of the fucking Silver Spears to undo all of it. Maybe, I thought, it was just for the first time since I’d taken the knife Black offered me I actually felt like a villain. Like the monster of the story. And with that came understanding that had eluded me as a child.

The villains in the stories always had a trigger, a first spark to set the blaze. They’d been wronged, laughed at. They had a grudge to settle against Creation, and they were going to do it by toppling all those righteous kingdoms like a house of cards. They flew the banners of empires they’d crafted out of cold rage and egomania, sent their Legions of Terror to conquer everything from the sacred forests of the Golden Bloom to the burnt wastelands of the Lesser Hells. It didn’t matter what they took, I was beginning to grasp, so much as the fact that they took it. What did the Tyrants care if the heroes freed their monsters or destroyed their ancient magical weapon, if they brought down the Dark Tower on their head or sunk the ancient city they’d raised from the depths? At the end of it all, even if you lost you’d already won. I finally got it, then. You’d won because in a hundred years someone was going to look at the ruins of your madness and their blood was going to run cold. Like a child screaming at the night, you filled the silence so that someone would hear.

Maybe I had a touch of that madness in me too, because I looked at the field of corpses in front of me and I could see a fate written across the mud and the blood and the eerie green fire. The banner of the Fifteenth flew high, a streak of darkness defying the noonday sun, and my legionaries swarmed like ants over the wounded to silence their cries. Maybe I’d been born a little twisted and that was what Black had seen in me, back in the streets of Laure, because there was a feeling welling inside me that was like a laugh bubbling up my throat. I’d won today, won against odds a seventeen-year-old girl with barely a year of military training had no business beating. And yet here I was alive, more gloriously alive than I’d ever felt in my life. I could see the path ahead of me, the same I’d whispered of to Hakram: whether they be gods or kings or all the armies in Creation.

My Name bared its fangs in approval.

I shivered, wishing I’d thought of putting on my cloak, and returned to my legion.

—

“Three hundred dead,” Juniper growled. “Twice that in wounded.”

I took a long pull from the water skin, raising an eyebrow at the taste. I snuck a look at Hakram, who tried for innocent but came out looking more like an ugly green cat whose fangs were still full of feathers. Well, if he wanted to add aragh to the stuff I wouldn’t complain.

“How many of those will make it?” I asked.

The Hellhound glanced at Aisha, who grimaced.

“Hard to say. Mages have steadied some of our worst cases, but they had to prioritize. If I have to give you my best estimate, I’d say that by tomorrow the casualties will have gone up to around five hundred. Taking in the cripples and those who won’t be able to fight for a few fortnights, we should have about one thousand in fighting shape for Summerholm.”

Adjutant did not smile, which made his smugness even more obvious. I rolled my eyes, then frowned as a realization came.

“Shouldn’t Kilian be here to report on the healers?” I asked.

Aisha cleared her throat uncomfortably.

“She’s unconscious at the moment.”

My stomach dropped. “She’s wounded?”

“Drew too deep,” the Staff Tribune replied with a shake of the head. “Apparently she almost manifested wings this time.”

I swore under my breath. “She’s not in any actual danger, is she?”

“It’s happened once before, during war games against Morok,” Hakram gravelled. “She was fine after two days of rest.”

I was asking Masego to take a look at her regardless, I decided. Healing was far from Apprentice’s specialty, but he’d forgotten more about that kind of magic than most legion mages ever learned. From the corner of my eye I caught sight of Hune and Nauk striding in our direction. The orc commander said something and the large ogre shook with laughter, patting the top of his head fondly with her pan-sized hands. A tribune stepped up to Nauk and after saying something Hune sped off towards us.

“Legate Juniper, Lady Squire,” she greeted in that surprisingly delicate voice of hers. “You’ve won a great victory today.”

“We,” I corrected. “None of this would have been possible if you hadn’t held the-“

A bloodcurdling scream interrupted me. My eyes swivelled in the direction it had come from just in time to see Nauk’s open hand impact with his tribune’s mouth, sending teeth flying and the man himself sprawling into the mud. Painful convulsions wracked the orc’s body as his eyes clouded red. Half a dozen legionaries raised their shields and went to form a circle around him but I waved them away, striding towards the out-of-control officer.

“Nauk,” I barked. “Snap out of it.”

There was no trace of the orc I knew on that creature’s face. Just bottomless rage, and with a feral howl he lunged at me.

“The hard way, then,” I said.

It’d been a while since I’d gotten to fight someone without swords being involved and my officer was larger than any man or woman I’d ever fought in the Pit. Still, the principles remained the same – and my grip was a lot stronger than it used to be. I stepped aside and let the momentum of his charge carry him past me, turning to face him as he slid in the mud and roared. The next time he went for my throat, I was ready for him: I steadied my footing and caught his wrist, flipping him over my shoulder and down into the ground. He’d done most of the lifting for me, charging recklessly like that. He clawed at my legs but found no give in the steel – I sat on his back and pressed down his wrist, struggling to keep it under control. Even at this awkward angle he was ridiculously strong, more than I’d ever seen him be when he wasn’t under the Red Rage. I eventually managed to catch the other hand and forced it down with the first. He struggled while screaming at the top of his lungs, but his feet couldn’t reach me and all he managed was to smother his armour and face in mud.

Eventually his movements slowed, then stopped. His breath was even and he hadn’t roared in a while, though his chest still convulsed softly. I leaned forward to take a look at him: the orc’s eyes were still red, but for a different reason. He was quietly weeping into the mud. During the fight Hune had stalked back to us and she carefully picked up the battered tribune before setting him on his feet. I frowned and gestured for him to come closer – he did, after casting a wary look at Nauk.

“What did you tell him?” I questioned.

“Casualty report, ma’am,” he managed through his missing teeth.

I closed my eyes and let out a long breath. “Nilin?”

The man nodded and I slid off of the greenskin commander’s back.

“Come on, Nauk,” I murmured. “Up we go.”

With a grunt I hoisted him back to his feet. The large orc mumbled an apology, tone shamed, but I ignored it. There was nothing shameful about grieving a dead friend, and the two of them had been close as brothers.

“Go see Apprentice,” I ordered the tribune. “Get yourself healed.”

I sat Nauk down on a mostly dry log, ordered for a pair of legionaries to stay with him and gestured for Hakram to come to me.

“Find his corpse,” I ordered.

He nodded. “And then?”

I looked up to the sky, no longer finding it so promising. The victory had taken a bitter taste, and even bitterer was the knowledge this wasn’t the last time I’d lose a friend to the battlefield. Nilin, though, Nilin was the first. There was something special about that, a deeper loss. Maybe it was because he’d been a kind boy, almost too kind to be a soldier. And only a fortnight ago we were sharing a fire and bottle, joking about gravestones .

“Get the Prince and the Page,” I said. “Put the bodies on his pyre. If Nilin’s leaving us, then he’ll get an exit to be remembered.”

I paused, eyes turning cold.

“And Hakram?”

He turned.

“Tell Juniper to ready the goblin companies for pursuit in the dark,” I spoke through gritted teeth. “I am no longer interested in taking prisoners.”

Chapter 21: Marchford

“The best revenge isn’t living well, it’s living to crucify all your enemies.”
– Dread Emperor Malevolent III, the Pithy

Nilin looked younger without his armour on.

With his eyes closed he might have looked like he was sleeping, if not for the gaping wound across his stomach. I hadn’t had to order him cleaned or his insides put back inside, and for that I’d be grateful to Hakram until the day I died. Orcs took death differently than humans, he’d told me. They preferred avenging to mourning, one of the many reasons the Steppes were such a spinning wheel of blood feuds whenever the Empire wasn’t at war. Open displays of emotion were seen as a shameful act dishonouring the dead. Nauk’s reaction to the death of a boy he’d been close as a brother to was strange by the standards of his people, and Juniper eyed him with silent disdain whenever she thought no one was looking at her. Witnessing that sent a flare of rage through my veins every time, but I’d held my tongue: I could not expect to command a host hailing from five different cultures without occasionally encountering ways I found repulsive.

Soninke and Taghreb funerary customs were alien to me, influenced by centuries upon centuries of rubbing elbows with necromancers. In Praes men and women could sign away rights to their bodies for gold, selling their dead flesh as materials the corpse-raisers would use in their work. An abomination, by the standards I’d been raised to. Of all the traditions of the Wasteland none was so despised by Good nations as necromancy. The hatred had been kept fresh in Callow by the multiple undead plagues unleashed on the kingdom by past Warlocks, while in Procer the Lycaonese had been warring with the Kingdom of the Dead since before the foundation of the Principate. Signing away your corpse was against regulations, however, and so Nilin was to burn. The Soninke preferred to bury their dead in large labyrinth-mausoleums of baked mud, but out here on the field legionaries got a Legion burial: fire and the promise of more death to come.

Lumber had been cut from the woods flanking both sides of the road for most pyres, but for this one things had been arranged differently. Dead cataphracts were piled up in a makeshift pyramid, with the two corpses Nilin rested on recognizable even from where I stood: the Exiled Prince and his Page, both still in full armour. As the highest ranking officer present the right of lighting the pyre went to me, but doing so would have felt... wrong. Nauk was the one to dip the torch in the still-burning goblinfire and toss it onto the stacks. Green flames spread over the flesh and metal with unseemly haste. Kilian had hobbled her way to the funeral against her healer’s advice, leaning heavily against my shoulder as she clasped her hand in mine. The redhead was paler than I’d ever seen her, exhausted and still shaking with the odd tremor. She stood by my side as night fell and our friend’s corpse turned to ashes.

“We were taken into Rat Company at the same time, you know,” Kilian eventually said. “Back then Nauk scared me – always loud, always looking for a fight – but Nilin and I always got along. We bought books at the same shop in Ater, traded them when we were done.”

She smiled sadly.

“I suppose I’ll have to find someone else to talk history with.”

Grief looked pretty on her but then I suppose most things did. I squeezed her hand, because what could I possibly say? Juniper was the first to leave. Hakram followed not long after, heading out to see my will done. Every single member of the former Rat Company who’d made it into the Fifteenth passed by at some point in the burning, many stopping by the flames to whisper something into the crackle.

“What are they saying?” I asked Kilian quietly.

“They’re giving Nilin a secret or a promise,” she replied. “Something to bargain with on the other side.”

It was such a deeply Praesi thing to do, I reflected, and for once the thought was fond. I kissed the side of my lover’s neck, letting go of her hand and found myself walking up to the pyre.

“I’ve never done this before,” I told Nilin, by now little more than blackened bones wreathed in green. “The priests from the House of Light handle the funerals, back home. Consecrate the graves and shepherd souls on their way to the Heavens.”

I already knew what I wanted to say, but spitting it out was proving more difficult than I’d thought.

“I’m sorry,” I finally whispered. “You were my friend, one of the first, and this cost you. But if I had to make the choice again, knowing it would end like this, I still would. I could say that we’ll win, that I’ll make your death meaningful, but how will that help you? They’re empty words anyway. We both know I would have done all I can to win regardless.”

I wondered if all the offerings he’d been given had been so bitter or if it was just my own. Shame was not a feeling I’d felt in a while, not since I’d come to Ater, but I recognized the sting of it then and there.

“Here’s something you can use, at least,” I spoke quietly. “I let him go, the Lone Swordsman. I’m the one who started all of this.”

Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought that for a moment the nearest flames to me flared up. Until we see each other next, Nilin. I trudged back to Kilian and we stood there until the moon reached its apex, silently taking comfort in each other’s presence. Nauk was still standing by the fire when we left, silent face lined with grief.

I did not meet his eyes.

—

Before my teacher had conquered Callow, Marchford had been defended by walls.

I could still see the marks where they’d stood as I rode into the city: the sappers who’d brought them down hadn’t bothered to remove the foundations. The Countess had fought with the royal army and so her demesne had been stripped of its defences and of some of its privileges – she’d barely been allowed to keep enough men to keep bandits out of her lands – but the city itself had remained in the hands of the House of Talbot. It had been the Tower’s policy after the Conquest to keep the number of Imperial governorships to a minimum, so that the transition would be smoother. The Countess’ contributions in the defence of Summerholm had ranked her city a Legion garrison, though, later slaughtered in the opening move of the rebellion. And now she’s said to be engaged to the Duke of Liesse, our would-be-king. That a fucking exile who’d bailed without ever facing the Legions on the field claimed to have a right to the throne of Callow rankled me. Especially since he’d lived out the decades since in comfortable exile across the Vales.

Six days had passed since what the men now called the Battle of Three Hills, and our advance on Marchford had gone suspiciously smoothly. My goblin companies had been hunting the remaining Silver Spears in the dark every night, but they found fewer of them every time. Interrogation of the prisoners we’d taken at the battle had yielded that the commander of the men-at-arms had apparently survived the massacre, meaning the mercenaries still had someone to rally around. While I doubted the Spears would give us battle again, now that they’d lost their main leaders and been given such a sharp lesson by the Fifteenth, I did not want them escaping to join the main rebel army. If they fled back to Mercantis to lick their wounds I’d make my peace with it, but having to face the bastards on the field in a few months was out of the question. Juniper had predicted they’d retreat to Marchford and choose their way from there, but as I led a company through the deserted streets of the city it became clear she’d been wrong.

There were no soldiers here, and you’d think there were barely any people at all. According to the Imperial census Marchford had a population of ten thousand, though many of the residents only lived there temporarily. Many of the inhabitants were miners from the silver mines in the hills, whose families moved with them to the mining sites when a fresh vein was found and only returned to the city when they were out of work. The county itself was rich, and it showed in the way the city had been built. Stone was more common than wood and the layout of the avenues had been planned, unlike the maze of dead-ends and cramped alleys that was Laure. To the south I could see the wide grounds of Marchford Manor, and even to my Name-sight they were deserted. There were still people in the city, but they’d fled at the sight of the Fifteenth and barricaded themselves inside their homes. I lingered at the crossing of an avenue, considering my options.

“Lady Squire?”

I glanced at Captain Ubaid, the young man in charge of the company escorting me. One of Commander Hune’s men, who’d apparently distinguished himself at Three Hills by killing three men-at-arms and dragging one of his wounded back behind our lines. He had sharp eyes and Hakram had remembered his marks at the College being above average, if not exceptional. He looked about as wary as I felt, casting cautious looks at the empty streets. If I wanted to set an ambush for an enemy commander, I’d wait until they were too deep in the city to turn back. Or was I being overly cautious? The locals seemed terrified of us, and there’d been no resistance at all as we advanced.

“Send a runner back to Legate Juniper,” I ordered. “We’ll be pressing on to the manor without waiting on her. She’s to garrison the city and proclaim martial law.”

“Ma’am,” he hesitated. “That seems... ill-advised. We’re surrounded by thousands.”

“We’re surrounded by scared civilians, captain,” I grunted. “Look at them – they don’t have the stomach for a fight. I’d wager the Countess took all the men of soldiering age with her when she left for Vale.”

“As you say, Lady Squire,” he deferred.

A legionary peeled off from the company to carry my message. I noted with a mix of approval and amusement that Ubaid tightened the formation as we headed south, positioning the men so that they could form a testudo in moments. Good. Just because they have a villain with them doesn’t mean they’re safe. Callow’s taught the Legions that lesson again and again, over the years. The path to the manor was bare of fortifications, and not because of any edict of my teacher’s. The hills surrounding Marchford were a natural defence that had served the city for centuries, impassable to armies save for a few goat paths the locals kept knowledge of to themselves. Back when Callow was a mess of petty kingdoms, the rulers of Marchford had fought most their battles at the ford the city was named for, only rarely facing siege in their seat of power – as a result they’d put their wealth into men and swords instead of the kind of walls Summerholm boasted. The paved road brought us to a pretty hilled garden dotted by lovely pavilions, where fountains of white chalkstone gurgled merrily. Granite statues of stone knights guarded the last stretch to the manor gates, still smiles splitting their bearded faces.

“Lovely place,” Captain Ubaid spoke drily. “Lucky they poured all that silver into the fountains instead of soldiers, or we’d have a fight on our hands.”

“Would that we did,” I replied. “That’d mean less men with Liesse.”

The stables were empty and looked like they’d been for quite some time. For appearance’s sake I left Zombie in one of the stalls, though I could have left him standing in a flower bed for all the difference it made. It wasn’t like he was going to wander. Marchford Manor itself was quite large, all beige limestone and wide glass windows. Not coloured stuff, though, so unlikely to be imported from Procer. Wide oaken doors opened without trouble when a pair of my legionaries pushed, revealing a half-dozen people in livery. Ah, finally someone to talk to. The maids I dismissed immediately as irrelevant, but one man with a closely-cropped beard wore a steward’s uniform. I entered the manor flanked by Captain Ubaid and one of his lieutenants, both of them sword in hand. The sight of the bare steel had the locals flinch in fear.

“I’m Catherine Foundling,” I announced flatly. “You may know me as the Squire. Who’s in charge here, exactly?”

The bearded man swallowed loudly but stepped forward and bowed.

“I’m Fourth Steward Greens, my lady,” he replied. “Responsible for the manor. And the city, I suppose.”

Fourth Steward. I frowned and struggled to remember the orphanage etiquette lessons I’d breezed through. He wasn’t in charge of the stables, that would be the third, so –

“Latrines,” I spoke amusedly. “You’re the sanitation man.”

“That would be me, your ladyship,” he agreed nervously.

My lips twitched.

“Do you have the authority to surrender the city to me, Fourth Steward?” I asked.

“I do,” he replied. “I think. But whether the people will observe that surrender is beyond my means to ensure.”

Heavy patrols, then. I didn’t intend to order the massacre of fellow Callowans but public order would have to be maintained. I resisted the urge to grimace. Scared people can do stupid things, and we’ve got them too scared for my tastes.

“Then kneel, Greens,” I ordered. “As of this moment, Marchford is returned to the Imperial fold.”

He did, and just like that I’d won a city.

—

Countess Elizabeth’s solar was almost decadently comfortable. It had been stripped of all the more obvious signs of wealth and what I assumed to be the most expensive paintings were missing, but even after that it was one of the most luxurious rooms I’d ever held council in.

“The city’s been stripped bare of men and food,” Ratface told the senior officers. “They barely have enough to feed themselves.”

“I’ll double the watch on our supplies, then,” Nauk growled. “Nip any notions of looting in the bud.”

I sipped at my cup of Vale summer wine, resting against the back of my cushioned seat as I studied him. He seemed steadier now, but there was something angry to the orc that hadn’t been there before. As if Nilin’s death had stripped him of the last check on his recklessness. Still, now was not the time or place to speak to him about it.

“Still no sign of the Silver Spears?” I asked Commander Hune instead.

“We’ve interrogated some of the locals,” the ogre replied softly. “Some passed through, including what remains of the cataphracts, but they’re all gone – into the hills, I’m told. Less than eight hundred in total.”

“We can’t pursue in there with the Fifteenth,” Juniper stated. “Goblins might manage the paths but I’m reluctant to commit scout companies without backup.”

She was right, much as I disliked admitting it.

“We’ll table that for the moment,” I said. “Hakram, how’s the city?”

The Adjutant hummed. “Quiet, for now. But they’re afraid we’ll put everyone to the sword to hurt the Countess.”

I closed my eyes and let out a sigh. Would they even have considered that, before Heiress had set half of the duchy of Liesse on fire? Hard to tell, but I was ever inclined to blame the other villain for the messes I found myself in.

“I want Legion regulations observed to the letter,” I spoke flatly. “If there’s any scuffles with the citizens, come down harshly on everyone involved.”

I got a chorus of acknowledgements in response. Pickler cleared her throat afterwards and I raised an eyebrow.

“If we’re going to be staying here for a few days, I’d like sanction to build siege engines,” she said.

I cast a look at Juniper. The grim-faced orc frowned.

“Dragging a trebuchet around would slow us on the march,” my legate finally said.

“I’ll keep it light,” the Senior Sapper replied. “A few scorpions, maybe one of the smaller ballista models. Think of what you could do with those, when we finally tangle with the Liesse host.”

The Hellhound glanced at me and I shrugged.

“Sanction given,” she gravelled. “You can have the sappers and a company of regulars to gather the wood.”

I was about to redirect the subject to patrol schedules when Masego interrupted. I started – he wasn’t even sitting at the same table as us, having claimed a smaller one near the windows overlooking the hills to the south.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention,” he exclaimed, peering into a scrying bowl. “First, I can confirm that it was the priest our own Deadhand killed that was blocking my scrying. Second, I appear to have found what remains of the Silver Spears’ leadership.”

He rose to his feet, carefully bringing over the bowl to us without troubling the surface. I leaned over the table and saw three men, two of them in horseman’s plate, arguing near what seemed to be the bottom of a hill.

“ We need to go deeper, to -“ one of them started but the sound went silent.

“Apprentice?” I prompted.

He blinked. “That shouldn’t be happening.”

A heartbeat later the silhouette of the Silver Spears disappeared, the water rippling without cause.

“That definitely shouldn’t be happening,” Masego said, confusion and irritation warring for dominion over his tone.

The water stilled momentarily and sight returned to us, but it was no longer the Silver Spears we saw: a pair of pale green eyes were staring back, skimming over my officers and stopping on me.

“Catherine,” my teacher said.

The sound was muted, like he was speaking through a door.

“Black,” I replied. “We’re not due to scry until Evening Bell.”

“Listen,” he began, then the sound cut out again.

“I can’t hear you,” I told him.

“Danger,” he managed. “Egg. The hills.”

The water went still again and my blood ran cold.

“Masego,” I spoke urgently, “can you-“

“Oh Merciless Gods,” Ratface whispered.

I followed his gaze out the window, and my stomach dropped. Night had just fallen, but there was no trace of the stars out there. The sky was red as fresh blood, and tendrils of scarlet were spreading through the moon. A faint scream was heard in the distance. It rose higher, and higher, and higher until all of us were clutching our ears in pain. The pressure winked out as suddenly as it had appeared, but something had changed. I looked at Masego.

“You can feel it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he whispered, fingers clutched so tight the phalanges paled. “Shit. There’s a demon on the loose.”

Villainous Interlude: Coup de Théatre

“Never hold anything in a cage you can’t put back in, should it get out.”
– Dread Emperor Terribilis II

Akua had spent most of her thirteenth summer pouring over all the writings authored by Dread Empress Malicia and her Calamities.

Neither Assassin nor Captain had ever put their name to anything, which had narrowed the field somewhat. Scribe, who could be considered an honorary Calamity of sorts, had written a single piece on organizational principles which had never been published and only ever circulated privately among high-ranking Legion officers. Some of what the woman had jotted down on the subject of redundancy in essential systems was useful, but none of it was ground-breaking. It confirmed Heiress’ personal belief that the Scribe was a very talented administrator but not a threat independently of her master. Warlock had been the most prolific author, but all of it was related to either anomalous sorceries or broader magical theory. The sheer spectrum of experiments the man had been able to afford doing did indicate he had access to more wealth than was openly known, which was... interesting. It meant there was a material power base to attack, if she ever needed to distract him. Unfortunately, none of it gave any insight into the way the Sovereign of the Red Skies thought. Still, ultimately the stewards of the path Praes had taken over the last forty years were Dread Empress Malicia and her Black Knight.

Those had been the papers she’d sought the most ardently, though she’d not been the first Praesi aristocrat to seek insight into their ruler and her right hand. Lord Black had penned a handful of treatises on tactics, though they were not personal thoughts of his: merely reports of what techniques had and had not worked during the Conquest, as well as what made them fail when they did. There was a paper on the influence of the original Miezan legions on the Praesi ones, and why some of the leftover practices needed to be abandoned – it had, however, been written before the Conquest. All the suggested changes were long implemented. The only knowledge she’d gotten of that was that the man tended to focus on underlying structures when making changes: whatever he made, he built to last. He dislikes retreating , her mother had said. The last paper she’d gotten her hands on was the after-action report from his fortnight in Stygia. Not the censored one he’d given the Chancellor’s office at the time but the one he’d smuggled to Malicia – then still a mere concubine.

Managing to have a copy transcribed had cost her a small fortune and the lives of seven family agents in the Tower but she’d found the prize worth it. Contrary to popular belief in the Wasteland, Black had apparently not gone to the city with a plan in mind. He’d found the weak points in the Stygian power structure, used Assassin to trigger a collapse and then ruthlessly played factions against one another until they were weak enough for him to impose the outcome he’d desired: a ruling Magister from the faction friendliest to the Empire. The assertion that he’d done the entire thing drunk she could safely dismiss as a jest to amuse Malicia, for his predictions of enemy moves had been too consistently accurate. Back then Akua had simply noted that Lord Black was as dangerous when improvising as he was when operating according to a set plan, but now? Now she saw the pattern. Foundling works the same way. The two of them knew they were more skilled at exploiting chaos than their opponents, so they created chaos. Whether it harmed their own side did not matter, so long as it also hurt the enemy equally – the comparative advantage they gained from disorder still swung the balance in their favour.

Malicia’s works were the most interesting, all in all. In her concubine days she’d written a history of the War of Thirteen Tyrants and One displaying a great deal of political acumen – as well as access to the private Imperial library, which was much more unusual. Members of the seraglio did not get passes unless they were nobly born, and Malicia’s birth was as common as it came. The treatise on international politics she’d penned after her ascension to the throne was arguably the most important piece to be found and it was, in Akua’s opinion, an abomination. Titled “The Death of the Age of Wonders”, it laid out what Malicia believed the Dread Empire’s stance abroad should be for the next few decades. Some of it was common wisdom: the application of political pressure in the Free Cities was an old favourite of Tyrants. But the rest, like reaching out to the Thalassocracy? Whether or not there was a need for a “counterweight south of Procer” was irrelevant: Ashur stood on the side of Good. No amount of shared interests would ever fill that gap. The need to keep Principate divided as she’d outlined was self-evident, but it was Heiress’ belief that Malicia’s ironclad avoidance of direct conflict had led the Empire directly to its current weakened position.

The Legions should have marched across the Vales decades ago instead of resting on their laurels, to burn Salia to the ground and permanently sunder the principalities.

The entire treatise had left Akua uneasy, and it was only years later she’d understood why. Malicia looked only forward, to a future she could shape with her own hands. The past glories of the Empire she dismissed as irrelevant at best and a hindrance at worst . She thinks near all Tyrants before her were fools, as if she were the only clever woman to ever hold the Tower. Akua Sahelian had been born to the ruling line of great and ancient Wolof, the only Imperial city never to be occupied by foreigners after the Declaration. As a child she’d played in the temple-mazes where her ancestors had sacrificed greenskins to the Gods, she’d grown a woman in the shade of the baked mud pyramids where rituals as old as Calernia still took place. Her very blood was running with the history of Praes, its madness and greatness both. To even entertain the pretence of wiping the slate clean with a new reign was to spit on all the Tower stood for. We are the last of our breed, Malicia. The last great villains of Calernia, perhaps in all of Creation.

The drow of the Everdark had collapsed into bickering tribes unworthy of the ruins they haunted. The Chain of Hunger was nothing more than a horde of starving rats, as incapable of villainy as any other animal. The Dead King, that famed monster who’d turned his entire kingdom into undead and invaded the very devils who’d thought to trick him, had not stirred from beyond his borders in centuries. That the Lycaonese had been able to participate at all in the Proceran civil war was a sign of how far the lich had fallen – in olden days they would not have dared to strip even a single man from their walls. Stygia and Bellerophon had been muzzled by the other cities in the League, reduced to petty border disputes, and the same city of Helike that had broken the Principate’s back under the Unconquered now flinched in the face of Procer’s displeasure. All that was left was the Dread Empire, the Tower flying the black banner promising death and ruin to all who thought themselves beyond humbling. And now Dread Empress Malicia would have them turn their backs on that inheritance. It was enough to make a woman’s blood boil.

But Akua remembered, and from this she drew strength. Dread Empress Triumphant – may she never return – had been born in Wolof, and had kept Wolofites close during her reign. She had not trusted them, but perhaps distrusted them less than others. Even as Praes collapsed in the face of the retribution wrought by an entire continent and two foreign empires besides, her ancestors had retreated beyond the high walls of their city and hoarded secrets now forgotten by everyone else. And so now Akua stood in the hills south of Marchford, the very city her rival was marching on after her victory against the Silver Spears.

Heiress had not bothered to bedeck herself in plate, though she owned several sets. That kind of cumbersome protection was hardly needed: the Soninke was a skilled swordswoman but it was a skill she’d acquired more to prevent a weakness than acquire an asset. She preferred for others to shed the blood for her, and had picked her entourage with that preference in mind. Her lacquered armour of overlapping steel scales was styled in the ancient style of Taghreb warriors, the skirt of scales making up the lower part splitting over her knee to reveal hardened leather boots. The rounded helmet protecting her head was wrapped by a scale aventail she’d covered with a red silk shawl, leaving an opening that revealed only her face. The entire set had been tailored and adjusted for her, of course – her curves were not easy to fit under such apparel, even after binding. Reining up her horse, the dark-skinned aristocrat stopped to survey the temple she had come to find.

It was a small and wretched thing, even if it had been built in stone. The single company of Proceran mercenaries she’d brought with her had taken it without any trouble, falling on the unwary sentinels by surprise. The building did not appear on any maps, for it was not a place of worship – it was a prison, one designed by the provincials to keep one of the Hell Eggs forever unhatched. Barika rode up to her side, her ornate robes a ridiculous affectation in this barbarous country. The spells woven into the cloth made it hard as steel should anything strike the other woman, as the spells in Akua’s own armour made it resistant to both extreme temperatures and foreign magic, but while such elegance would have been duly appreciated in Praes it was wasted effort out here. Callowans were a people of mud and shit, fit only for toiling fields save for a few superior breeds like the Deoraithe. Of all the members of Heiress’ inner circle, Barika was the least valuable in and of herself: she was not as powerful a mage as Fadila, not a skilled warrior and leader of men like Ghassan and not an inherently valuable piece like Chider. She wasn’t even particularly clever, though she was by no means stupid. She is my most loyal, though, I will give her that. The two women watched in silence as Commander Chider dragged the priest of the temple and slit open his throat with obvious relish, red gushing all over scarred hands as the undead goblin smiled.

“Whatever the necromancer did to bring her back,” her childhood friend finally said, “it left... marks.”

“Savagery can be useful, if properly leashed,” Akua replied.

And there was no denying she held Chider’s leash. The necromancy that bound the goblin’s soul to her corpse and the enchantments that allowed the charred husk to actually move existed only as long as she allowed them to. Undeath, while technically granting magical properties to a corpse, did not allow individuals who’d lacked the talent before their demise to use sorcery. Chider had been born without he gift and so had no way to influence the magic that kept her in Creation. In the distance, Heiress glimpsed the man in command of her Proceran footsoldiers stalk towards her. Large and fierce, Arzachel of Valencis had proved himself when her host had taken Dormer by sneaking in under cover of night and opening the gates. The man moved with the fluidity of a large cat, and his hand was never far from the hooked falchion at at his belt. From the moment she’d first met him there had been desire in his eyes when he looked at her, though Heiress was not inclined to indulge him. There were more suitable men if she felt like sharing her bed with anyone.

“The temple is secured, my lady,” he announced, his Lower Miezan softly accented. “There were few with the priest, only old men and green ones.”

“Good,” Akua replied. “Have your soldiers clear the grounds. If anyone tries to enter...”

“I know the drill, Lady Heiress,” he grinned. “Corpses all around.”

The Procerans had been a good investment, she decided. Former soldiers from the warring principalities, they’d been exiled from the Principate for banditry and hostage-taking – something she’d found an asset more than a black mark. They had a talent for finding gold that had come in useful in southern Callow: she’d already made twice as much as she’d spent hiring them by pillaging rebel holdings. The Stygian slaves had proved to be less resourceful, but then she’d not expected initiative of them when buying their leash. Dismounting gracefully, Akua left behind the mercenaries and passed the two columns that marked the entrance to the inner temple. Barika followed cautiously, her unease at the thought of what lay inside all too visible. The structure was short compared to the high-ceilinged Houses of Light the provincials were so fond of building, hidden away between hills so it could not be seen from a distance. She found the inside to be miserably bare, all naked stone with only dirty beddings to decorate. The living conditions of dead men did not interest her, though.

What she’d come for was in the centre of the room, surrounded by markings of powdered chalk: a large standard plunged into the ground, pitch black with golden snake swallowing its own tail embroidered into the cloth. It moved to a breeze that did not exist, even contained like this. Before Triumphant – may she never return – the Empire’s armies had merely been known as the Legions. The terror in the name had been earned by artefacts like this one, the vanguard of armies that had subjugated all of Calernia for the first and only time in its history.

“A Hell Egg,” Barika said, catching up to her. “Gods, I never thought I’d see one.”

“There are none in the Wasteland. She let all the demons she’d bound in Praes loose when the army of heroes assaulted the Tower,” Heiress replied. “There is one another left in Callow, according to my records, and a handful in Procer.”

What the greatest of the Tyrants had wrought was not easily undone. If it were the Sky Breaker and his wife would not still be bound at the summit of Cloudreach Peak, one cursed with endless hunger and the other with endless healing. It was said that the howls of anguish coming from them both still troubled the sleep of all who dwelled in the Titanomanchy, a reminder to the giants that defying Praes was never without cost.

“You’d think that a hero would have broken the bindings and killed the thing, after all these years,” Barika said. “They’re not limited the way villains are.”

Demons were born of Evil, and so Evil could not destroy them – or so went the theory. Only the lapdogs of the Heavens had been gifted the ability to truly destroy a demon instead of merely jailing them or sending them back to the Upper Hells.

“I chose this one for a reason, Barika,” Heiress smiled. “A demon alone would be a great and mighty threat, yet Squire might be able to contain it until reinforcements came. But a demon from the Thirteenth Hell and a battalion of devils? That is another thing entirely.”

Devils grew stronger as they grew older, more cunning and more vicious. And these have been bound on Creation for over eight hundred years.

“Thirteenth Hell,” a third voice mused. “Corruption, isn’t it? Well, that’s going to be a fucking mess.”

Akua’s sword cleared the scabbard before the first word was finished. Barika’s hands wreathed themselves in roiling shadow, barely contained. A woman was leaning against the wall in the back, a silvery flask in hand and a lute hanging off a leather strap going across chest. Taghreb? No, Ashuran. Heiress had met some of their kind in Mercantis. Not one of Squire’s known associates. Lord Black’s? Wrong direction, this is Callowan holy ground. There was one known heroine part of the Lone Swordsman’s crew who was from the Thalassocracy – the Wandering Bard. That could be a problem, she thought coldly. All the Bard variations were more dangerous than their commonly ascribed ineptitude would have one believe. They were harder to kill than cockroaches, for one, and their entire Role family instinctively understood things about the way Creation worked that even archmages could only grasp at. One of the running theories as to why even villains who should know better let them talk was that they practiced a softer form of Speaking, one that influenced instead of commanded.

“Impressive stuff, ladies,” the hawk-nosed woman praised them, “but it won’t do you any good.”

“And why,” Akua asked softly, “would that be?”

The dark-haired stranger wiggled her eyebrows.

“Because I’m invincible, of course,” she informed them cheerfully.

The Soninke aristocrat kept her face blank, resisting the urge to cast a worried glance at the standard. That kind of talk was like sending a written invitation to the Gods to make the opposite point. And yet, nothing happened . If a villain had dared to say that, the roof would have collapsed on their heads.

“You’re the Bard,” Barika said suddenly, finally catching up. “The one that was in Summerholm with the Lone Swordsman.”

“That’s me,” the heroine agreed. “Almorava of Symra, at your service. Well, not really since you’re dastardly villains, but you get my meaning.”

“I commend you on passing Arzachel’s picket,” Heiress said, ignoring the digression, “but you seem to have squandered the element of surprise.”

The woman chuckled and wiped her mouth on her sleeve after taking a long pull from her flask. Akua sneered at the lack of manners.

“Didn’t walk here, sweetling. I try not to think about how that works too much. But you know us Bards,” Almorava smiled. “We Wander into all sorts of places.”

“And you mean to stop us?” Barika snorted. “You overestimate the strength of your Name, singer.”

“Wow,” the heroine huffed. “Rude. What is it with villains and getting personal? I’m not even here to get in your way. You finally decided to get plot relevant so I’m having a look, is all.”

“You would stand aside and let us free a demon on Callowan soil?” Akua asked sceptically.

“Pretty much,” Almorava shrugged. “I mean, it’s a shit plan so why would I stop you? I’m a little surprised, though, I’ll admit. Foundling thinks with her fists and Willy thinks three days after the battle’s over, so by default you’re supposed to be the mastermind of this story. But clearly there’s no way letting loose a personification of the concept of corruption could ever backfire, right?”

“What you westerners know of demons could not even fill a thimble,” Akua replied flatly, then immediately clamped down on her temper.

An insult this puerile should not have been able to get under her skin, but the casual disrespect she was being offered had her taken aback. Even Foundling, irreverent guttersnipe that she was, had learned to watch her mouth around her. The Bard raised a hand in appeasement as she polished off another part of her flask. Heiress frowned – how much alcohol could there possibly be in a receptacle that large? Had the flask been made bottomless? That would be absurd. A working that rare and powerful would cost a fortune, even in Praes.

“No need to get all offended,” the heroine said. “I’m just wondering what your deal is. Like, what is it you do ? Being rich and pretty isn’t actually a magical power, sweetheart.”

“It seems your own deal is being a drunken twit,” Heiress smiled pleasantly.

“Oooh,” Almorava purred. “You’re one of those . Old school Praesi villain, with a closetful of self-importance and megalomania. At least that finally explains why your schemes are so terrible.”

These were more familiar grounds. This was close enough to court intrigue Akua could glimpse her opponent’s intent, and the attempt being made was feeble.

“This would be the part where I lose my temper and reveal all my plans to you, I imagine,” Heiress noted calmly.

The Bard grinned. “Can’t blame a girl for trying. But I was actually referring to your little operation in the south.”

“You mean our victories in the south,” Barika corrected sneeringly.

“You know what’s not going to be a great victory?” Almorava said. “Allowing two thousand slaves to come into contact with a hero. In private Willy’s got all the charm of kettle of fish, I’ll grant you, but out in the field? You don’t need to be a Bard to predict how that’s gonna go.”

“Slavery is illegal under Tower law,” Akua replied. “They are all free men.”

The heroine rolled her eyes. “I’m sure they volunteered to fight a war on foreign soil because you asked nicely. Well, you girls have fun with your hilariously ill-advised plan. The battle’s about to start, so I’m needed elsewhere.”

The shadows still wreathing Barika’s hands formed into long whips and she stepped forward.

“I think not,” the mage said. “You’ll be our guest for a while, Bard.”

“Nice delivery,” Almorava praised. “Way to work that sinister intonation. But I see you your creepy shadow tentacles and raise you... the Sands of Deception !”

Shoving her free hand in a pocket, the heroine took out a handful of sand and threw it in Barika’s face. The mage coughed and lashed out blindly with the shadows while Heiress carefully stepped out of the way, unsure what the effect of the artefact would be. When she went to flank the Bard, though, she found the irritating wretch was gone. Outside my line of sight for the blink of an eye, and she disappears. That is a very, very dangerous ability . There had to be limitations: Names were never this generous without taking a toll of some sort, or adding restrictive clauses to how the power could be used. Barika allowed the shadows to lapse when she realized they were now alone in the temple, picking the grains out of her robes.

“This is just regular sand,” the mage noted, confounded. “... Wait, is that the deception?”

Akua had never more keenly understood the age-old Praesi tradition of summarily executing one’s subordinates. She let out a slow breath and mastered herself. This entire interlude had been somewhat frustrating, but ultimately it changed nothing.

“She’s right, though, isn’t she?” Barika spoke hesitantly after a moment. “Why did you leave the Stygians with Ghassan if you knew they’d have to fight the Lone Swordsman?”

Heiress walked up to the standard, idly smudging the protective powdered chalk patterns the priests had been making for centuries with her foot. That should weaken the pattern enough that the demon would break out within the next two days – already she could feel a presence inside the artefact stirring awake, tasting the damaged holding spells. It would not do to linger here.

“For the same reason we play shatranj, you and I,” Akua finally replied.

Heiress had never enjoyed the game. It was horridly simple, two sides with equal capabilities taking each other’s pieces in a slaughter without elegance. And yet she was known for playing it, because she had willed it so. As a youth her mother had introduced to baduk , a game from the kingdom beyond the lands of the Yan Tei, and this one she’d actually come to enjoy a great deal. Baduk was not about a limited handful of sequences, it was about positioning. The word meant “encircling game”, and Akua had not played it once since she’d come into her Name. For the same reason you don’t know I’m a better mage than you are, Barika. So long as everyone else thought they knew what game she was playing, they predicted her moves accordingly and thought they understood her designs. Her enemies had yet to grasp the most salient of all truths: in games as in all things, the only move that mattered was the last.

She’d been setting up hers from the moment she’d first laid eyes on the Squire.

Heroic Interlude: Attaque au Fer

“Those who clap others in irons always end up choking on them.”
– Eleanor Fairfax, founder of the Fairfax dynasty

The Baroness Dormer was strikingly beautiful.

Hair like spun silver , men said, and even in her late thirties the sight of her smiling was enough to make his breath catch in his throat. William was evidently not immune to her charms, though he fancied he was less swayed by them than most. Still, of all the nobles involved in the Liesse Rebellion he thought her the best of the bunch. Unlike the Duke of Liesse and his now-betrothed the Countess Marchford, he knew that ambition did not drive the woman sitting across from him. Her fief would not grow from the liberation of Callow, and given her long-running enmity with Countess Elizabeth there would be no position of influence at court for her in the aftermath. She’d joined her force to the Rebellion because she wanted the land of her ancestors to be free, and such a purity of intent was laudable. Not often rewarded, but perhaps all the more laudable for that.

“I can bring five thousand to bear, though I hesitate to commit some of them to a battle,” the baroness said. “They are peasant volunteers, untrained in the arts of war.”

“Your household troops can take the lead,” the Lone Swordsman replied. “I don’t suppose you’ve managed to scrape up some knights?”

Chivalric orders had been disbanded wholesale after the Conquest, but the south of Callow had never truly been invaded – after the fall of Laure and the submission of the Deoraithe, the flight into exile of the Duke of Liesse had been enough to tip the balance towards surrender. The only southern demesne with an Imperial Governor assigned had been Liesse itself, and though William knew better than to think the entire sector had not been crawling with the Black Knight’s spies the scrutiny of the Tower had not been as heavy down there. In northwest and central Callow the capitulation of the Kingdom had been greeted with wholesale butchery of horse herds across the land: the old promise that Praesi would never manage to suborn Callowan cavalry had been faithfully observed. Down south, though, some smaller herds had remained in the hands of nobles. Flat refusal to sell any to the Tower had caused tensions and threatened an uprising the year following the Conquest when a general had tried to force the issue, but in the end orders had come from above to let the matter go.

“I had half a hundred when we started the war,” the aristocrat replied, “but they’re all with Talbot now.”

“We’ll make do,” William sighed. “If she’s to fight the Legions of Terror on the field, she needs all the help she can get.”

“Especially now,” the baroness murmured.

The Lone Swordsman grimaced. Word of Foundling’s unexpected victory against the Silver Spears had already spread even this far. Mages in Marchford, he expected. Now that the Praesi had made popular the use of scrying rumours flew even faster than messenger birds. I warned you, Prince. One misstep is all she needs. With the eastern flank secure, the Ninth and Sixth legions could march towards Vale with their supply train safe. Countess Elizabeth would not be facing tired, half-starved soldiers: she’d be staring down the war machine that had triumphed on the Fields of Streges in the fullness of its might. At least it was only two legions: if it had been three or four the rebellion could be considered as good as over.

“She’ll hold,” William promised. “As soon as we’ve dealt with the Heiress’ host we’ll move to reinforce her.”

“I am glad you heeded my call,” the silver-haired beauty admitted. “Fighting a Stygian phalanx would have been bad enough on its own, but with a Named to lead them? I dared not force a battle with the forces at my disposal.”

“You were right to wait,” the Lone Swordsman said. “I’ve never been to Stygia but the Bard assures me the tales are true – on even ground they are one of the finest in the land.”

The formation the slave-soldiers took in battle was a slow and cumbersome thing, but it had shredded hosts from Procer and the other Free Cities both. The Stygians did not retreat or hesitate, for the leather cord around their neck could choke them in an instant should the person owning them wish it.

“So much for the Praesi being above slavery,” the baroness scoffed. “I used to consider it their one redeeming feature.”

“The Heiress is from the old breed of eastern villainy,” William acknowledged. “They tend to break even their own rules when it gains them advantage. Keep priests close, I would not put it above her to summon devils if things go sour.”

The House of Light did not officially take sides in mortal conflicts, though it occasionally did produce a clerical Named who carried the banner of the Heavens into battle. Mundane priests who felt the calling to combat Evil could join religious martial orders but those were not part of the House proper, merely affiliated with it – hence why the Empire had slaughtered every last paladin from the Order of the White Hand but allowed the many churches and cathedrals in Callow to continue existing after the annexation. Most priests did, however, take a very dim view of bringing devils and demons into Creation. Those they would fight regardless of who did the summoning.

“I’ll make sure to have them on hand,” the aristocrat replied. “Luck in battle, Lord Swordsman.”

William smiled thinly. “That’d be a first.”

—

The tent they’d prepared for him had a cot and a table, the latter of which he would never use. The dark-haired man was no general and he knew as much – the strategizing was better left to individuals with a talent for it. The one time he’d thought he had a plan he’d gotten almost all of the people he’d brought with him killed, including another hero and the only observer the Duchess of Daoine had bothered to send. Taking off his coat, the Swordsman threw it on the cot. He’d been about to sit down and remove his boots when he paused, smoothly unsheathing his sword and bringing the edge to rest against the throat of the other Named in the tent.

“One of these days,” Thief said, “you’ll tell me how you do that.”

“Unlikely,” William replied.

Forcing the Penitent’s Blade back into its scabbard was an effort. It disliked returning without having drawn blood, even if no one worthy of being bled was around.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come back,” he admitted a moment later.

“I wasn’t sure I would,” the short-haired girl shrugged. “But here I am.”

With a tired sigh, William sat down on his cot as she perched herself on his table.

“I’m sure you’ve noticed the host surrounding us,” he began. “We’ll be marching on the Praesi army camped by Lake Hengest tomorrow.”

“They’re not camped by the lake anymore,” the Thief informed him. “I paid them a little visit while considering my options. They’re half a day’s march away from you now, though they’ve stopped for the night.”

He did not insult her by asking if she was sure of this. It would be the same as if someone asked him if he was certain his guard stance was correct.

“Heiress knows we’re after her, then,” he grunted in dissatisfaction.

It had been too much to hope for that she wouldn’t see them coming. Still, he was confident in his chances against this particular villain – unlike Squire in Summerholm, she wasn’t fate-bound to survive the encounter with him.

“Heiress isn’t with the army anymore,” the pale-skinned heroine corrected him. “She took the commander of her Proceran mercenaries with her and went into the hills. The man in charge is some Wastelander lordling called Ghassan.”

The Swordsman honestly wasn’t sure whether to be pleased by the news or not. Lack of a Named meant their victory was all but certain, but what in the Burning Heavens was the villain doing in the hills? An army couldn’t pass through them. That much was common knowledge in Callow.

“Where’s Bard, anyhow?” Thief asked.

William snorted. “You know Almorava. She comes and goes as she wills. For all I know she’s passed-out drunk in some ditch and she’ll catch up tomorrow.”

Thief – she’d never revealed her true name to them – shook her head.

“William, you should know better by now. She drinks like a fish, but when have you ever seen her drunk ?”

The Swordsman raised an eyebrow. “Every day since she first crashed through the window over the room where I’d assembled the rest of you.”

Apparently Almorava had meant to sit on the windowsill to look mysterious and all-knowing but slipped on rain-slick stone and fallen through the glass. The sultry pose she’d tried to affect afterwards had been largely negated by the fact that her face was bleeding heavily.

“The thing about being a thief,” the heroine said, “is that you have to learn to read people. Catch when they’re tired enough to dismiss footsteps on a rooftop, guess when they’re so impatient they’ll send a replacement servant through instead of checking the story.”

She drummed her fingers against the table, crossing one leg over the other.

“She plays it up well, the clumsiness and the slurring, but no matter how much hard liquor she puts away she’s never been more than tipsy.”

“You think she’s deceiving us,” William frowned.

“I think she’s playing it up for her audience,” Thief replied. “Isn’t that what Bards do?”

“She’s a heroine,” the Swordsman eventually said. “That much can’t be faked. Why would she bother to trick us when she’s on our side?”

The other Callowan passed a hand through her short hair, ruffling the tomboy cut as an uncomfortable look settled on her face.

“When we left for Summerholm, there were five heroes in our band,” the heroine said. “And we all knew going in that one of us would die to the Warlock – monsters like that don’t go easy. It couldn’t be you, because you have a mirror on the other side. Hunter was meant to be your right hand, ill-suited as he was to the role. You needed me to get into the city and to get out afterwards. That left...”

“Almorava and Simeon,” William finished. “Your point?”

“Both of them are bumblers,” Thief spoke quietly. “There was a redundancy. But how much of an impression did Conjurer make, compared to the Bard? He barely talked while she was always in the background, larger than life, drinking and badly strumming her lute.”

The Swordsman breathed in sharply. “What you’re suggesting borders on murder.”

“All she did was cover her bases,” she replied. “I can respect that, I really can. But I can’t trust it.”

“Almorava has always given me good counsel,” William said hesitantly.

“She’s given you advice that keeps her story moving along,” Thief retorted. “And I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking for a starring role in a tragedy.”

The dark-haired hero chuckled mirthlessly. “You might have joined the wrong cause, then.”

“Oh fuck this ,” she snapped, falling to her feet. “I’ve had enough of the tormented warrior tourine. I don’t care how fucking tragic your backstory is: this isn’t about you . You wanna know why I came back? Because even if you screwed up spectacularly in Summerholm, you’re still the only option we’ve got. I’ve stolen some outrageous stuff in my time, but an entire kingdom? The Empire makes my Name a mockery every day, and it’s not going away on its own. So put on your big boy pants and get your shit together, William. Nobody’s asking you to clean up every mess in Callow, just to kill some villains with your godsdamned horrifying angel sword.”

Fury flashed through the Swordsman’s veins but he kept a lid on it. He’d earned this much and worse, for his failure against Warlock.

“I tried that, if you’ll recall,” he replied sharply. “It got Simeon killed and lost us our best chance at getting Daoine into the war.”

“Because you went about it wrong,” Thief informed him bluntly. “You’re the Lone Swordsman. The whole band of heroes motif runs against your Role. Gods know you couldn’t stand us half the time, anyway, and to be honest spending more than a day at a time with you makes me want to jump off the nearest cliff.”

“The whole point of assembling heroes was to even the odds against the Calamities,” the dark-haired man barked back, patience running thin.

“And that worked out great,” the heroine snorted. “So what if the odds are horrible? That’s what heroes do . Hells, when I first heard about you you were the guy who’d assassinated an Imperial Governess in broad daylight and blown up half of General Sacker’s face. You’re not incompetent, William. What you can’t handle, we will. Stop doing the things you think are clever and start doing what you’re actually good at.”

“And what,” the Swordsman replied coldly, “would that be?”

She tossed a parchment at him.

“Here’s a plan of the Praesi encampments. Kill the people that need killing. And before you slaughter your way through every officer in there, I want you to consider something.”

Thief leaned forward and looked into his eyes.

“Do you know what an antihero is? An idiot who thinks they can use Evil’s own methods to beat it. Here’s the thing about Evil, though – they’ve used those methods for a lot longer than you. They’re better at them. If you want to make a better world, maybe you should act like someone who deserves to live in it.”

She walked out of the tent before he could think of something to reply. It took him a quarter bell to realize that at some point during the conversation she’d stolen his purse.

—

The moon was almost full.

The white-enamelled armour he’d taken to wearing after the Hanging was back in his tent, traded in for his old chainmail and leather coat. It was... comfortable. Like he’d shed a skin that didn’t quite fit for one that did. The Stygians ran a good camp, with sentinels patrolling regularly, but that was the weakness in their system. Fixed intervals made it easy to infiltrate the place, once he knew the pattern. It wouldn’t do for the slaves to show initiative, would it? he thought with disgust. How many times had the whip been cracked on their back, before the ability to improvise had been beaten out of them for good? For all that Stygia was one the Free Cities, few enough of the men living there knew anything of freedom. Moving from shadow to shadow, William made his way to the large tent in the centre of the camp. Thief had marked it as the officer’s tent, and even from where he stood he could see lamps had been lit inside. Leaning behind a crate full of rations, the Swordsman waited as a single man passed him by on the way to the latrine trench. The wind moved a tent flap and the olive-skinned soldier glanced in his direction, mouth opening in surprise.

William’s fist impacted with his stomach, knocking the breath out of him. An armoured elbow to the back of the head saw the slave fall into unconsciousness, his body unceremoniously dumped into the crate where no one would find it. The hero hastened his steps after that: eventually someone would realize a man was missing, and the alarm would be raised.

There were more guards around the command tend, a tenth on patrol and one sentinel at every corner of the square hide structure. The patrol he outwaited, crouched behind a rack of pikes, but for the others he’d have to take a more proactive approach. Loosening the strap binding his sheathed sword to his belt, William took the makeshift blunt weapon in hand and closed his eyes. Breath in, breath out. His Name lit up inside him, turning his blood to smoke and dust. The cold strength took hold of him and in a single leaping bound he crossed the distance between himself and the closest guard, the pommel of the Penitent’s Blade hitting the back of his head. He could see the other guard in the back of the tent beginning to turn in his direction, but the movement was comically slow. The man might as well have been swimming through mud. Three steps blurred and the flat of the sheathed sword slapped the chin upwards, the strength of the blow enough that just sailing through the air it caused a small gust of wind. He had to catch the man by the back of the neck to prevent his unconscious body flying into the back of the command tent. Setting down the sentinel gently, he stepped away to drag the first one out of sight as well before Creation began to catch up with him. He let out a long breath, letting the power flow out of him.

Quietly, he unsheathed his dagger and cut a flap for him to slip inside. Eight men, he counted when taking a first glimpse. All olive-skinned with their heads shaved closely and wearing nothing but brown cloth pants and a leather cord around their necks. Miezan numerals had been branded between their shoulder blades. A man in his late fifties had a one, he glimpsed a pair of twos and the rest were threes. Officer rankings. He’d heard Stygian slavemasters gave sets of enchanted irons to burn away the numbers and brand new ones when the purchase was made, to accommodate field promotions. The inside of the tent was bare, with eight cots on the ground and a single low table where they were all seated on the ground. A carafe of wine sat in the middle of the table, with eight clay cups around it that were still mostly full. Sheathed short swords were laid on the ground behind each of them, within easy reach. They noticed the moment he entered the tent, and all the threes reached for their weapons – but the highest officer present raised a hand to stop them.

“Hero,” he said, his Lower Miezan lightly accented.

“Lone Swordsman,” William introduced himself.

“First Spear Ophon,” the man replied.

One of the officers spoke in a tongue the hero didn’t recognize, but Ophon smiled sadly.

“I’m afraid we are all already dead, Parthe,” he said. “Finish your cup. Raising an alarm will only cause the death of more brothers before he leaves.”

William stepped closer, then cast a look at the leader.

“May I?” he asked.

The older man looked amused. “By all means.”

He sat himself between the twos, setting the Penitent’s Blade across his lap. Ophon said something in the same tongue as earlier and the younger man picked up a cup and poured him wine, glaring heatedly all the while. William took a small sip, having no idea whatsoever whether this was a good vintage or not. He’d always preferred ale to wine in those rare instances he drank.

“You are here to kill us, yes?” Ophon asked mildly. “To hurt your enemy.”

William set down his cup. “You don’t sound very worried about that,” he observed.

“I have seen heroes fight, unlike these young men,” the leader replied. “I know the strength of a Name. Struggle will just mean a bad death. I would rather leave Creation peacefully, enjoying my last cup of wine.”

“Spears of Stygia do not break,” the man to William’s left broke in.

“Three cities stand between us and the Magisters, Thenian,” Ophon gently chided, “yet I hear their words still.”

The younger man looked down, abashed.

“I’d heard Heiress had freed you,” the Lone Swordsman murmured.

The man from earlier, Parthe, scoffed.

“Free, yes. Slaves do not get pay, she said, and we are to be paid after the war. Yet we bear the Strangler still,” he spat, tapping the leather cord around his neck. “A strange thing, this Praesi freedom.”

“Gifts from the Wasteland are always poisoned,” William said. “My people have learned that the hard way.”

“Yet it is not the Heiress who has come from our lives,” Thenian barked. “No matter the side, it is always the brothers who pay the corpse-price. My people have learned this the hard way.”

The Lone Swordsman brought the cup to his lips again. If he decided so, he could have every man in this tent dead before the cup hit the table. Swing , his third aspect. Not even Squire had been able to match his hits when he tapped into it, whether in swiftness or strength. The hero calmly put down his cup, rose to his feet, and let his Name flood his frame. The power spread through the air, thick and lingering. William put his hand on the hilt of his sword and followed his instincts.

One after the other, the leather cords dropped.

“There are no slaves in the Kingdom of Callow,” he said. “Not as long as I live.”

Most of them groped blindly for the collar they had been branded with since birth, faces alight with wonder at the reality that they could no longer die to whim of anyone owning their command rod. Not Ophon, though. Ophon finished his cup of wine with guarded eyes.

“And what, I wonder, is the price of this freedom?” he asked quietly.

The light winked out of the others’ eyes, and it made William want to flinch. Because he knew, here and now, that he could convince them to fight for him. He could feel the pivot forming, the weighted decision that would set the course of Fate. And the rebellion needed the troops so very badly, didn’t it? They would still be free, and fighting for a just cause. Would I not have been tempted, if I were a better man? Maybe. But he’d just seen the joy, and seen it disappear. Even now the faces shuttered at the prospect of trading one master for yet another. If you want to make a better world, Thief had said, maybe you should act like someone who deserves to live in it.

“Nothing,” he replied, and the words tasted like ashes in his mouth. “Once, years ago, my sister told me that freedom is the Gods-given right of everyone who was ever born. Would that I had listened to her sooner.”

He settled the sword back at his hip.

“I’ll need one of you to escort me as I go around the camp breaking the cords,” he said. “I can draw you a map if you need one, but south of Dormer along the river you should be able to find passage to Mercantis. There will be a battle with the Proceran mercenaries tomorrow, so I’d recommend swinging around north to be careful.”

Ophon poured himself a second cup. A long moment of silence passed, as all the others watched him carefully

“Above the gates of Stygia there is a statue of a magister,” he finally spoke. “He is a tall, proud man this magister. On his shoulders are two cranes, named Redress and Retribution. They are the patron spirits of the city, said to speak in the dreams of those deemed worthy.”

The soldier peered into his cup.

“Never has a slave been graced with such favour, but all men of Stygia live with that hope – even those who are not men at all, by the laws of the city.”

Ophon smiled.

“I am an old man, hero,” he said. “I find I no longer have the patience to wait for the cranes. I would seek redress, of this girl who bought me. I would seek retribution, for the lie of false freedom.”

“First Spear-” one of the threes began.

“You are still young, Mamer,” he interrupted gently. “Do not be so eager to follow. You still have a life ahead of you.”

“Spears of Stygia do not break,” the two who’d remained silent until now rasped out. “Oaths were given. I would seek the cranes with my brother Ophon.”

“Retribution,” Thenian agreed softly, hands closing around his sword.

“Redress,” Parthe growled, and it had the weight of a promise.

William smiled, and for the first time in years it was genuine.

Chapter 22: Rescue

“Prayer and a sword gets better results than prayer alone.”
– King Jehan the Wise

The words had barely left Masego’s mouth that my officers exploded into chatter, the panic-tinged voices struggling against one another. Two exceptions stood apart: Hakram rose to calmly pour himself a cup of wine he tossed back instantly, then frowned and poured himself a second. After a heartbeat he grabbed another cup, filled it and handed the wine to the other exception – Juniper, who took it without looking. She wasn’t paying attention to the mess of voices, instead eyeing a bare bones map of Marchford county. It wasn’t Imperial work, so it wasn’t as precise as the fare we’d both becomes used to. I allowed the babble to go on a moment longer, then slammed my palm against the table. It made a sound like a sharper exploding, and in the wake of it silence fell. A moment later a crack spread across a whitewood table that looked like it was at least a hundred years old, but I valiantly managed to ignore the fact I’d just messed up an heirloom worth twice my yearly salary.

“Now that I have your attention,” I spoke calmly. “You’re the ranking officers in the Fifteenth, fucking act like it.”

I met their eyes calmly until the message had sunken in, then continued.

“Good. Masego can you narrow down where the demon is? Wait, scratch that, can you tell me what it is?”

Apprentice grimaced. “Hell Egg. There’s a Hell Egg in the hills. That’s what Lord Black was trying to say,” he said after a moment, my teacher’s title sounding almost sardonic in his mouth.

He was more used to calling him Uncle Amadeus, much as I found the idea of Black being anyone’s uncle utterly horrifying.

“Pretend I don’t know what that is,” I sighed.

“Dread Empress Triumphant-“

“May she never return,” everyone but him and I muttered, pressing a knuckle to their forehead.

“That’s going to get old fast,” I noted.

“ That one Empress ,” Apprentice spoke peevishly, “used demons and devils when she conquered Calernia. Most demons were bound to the standards of her legions, though she kept several on hand for her personal use. By the time she died and collapsed the Tower on top of the heroes that came for her, there were only a handful of standards left.”

He paused, gratefully taking a cup of wine I hadn’t seen Hakram pour for him. I suppose we could all use a liquid courage, right now.

“Black assigned Father to find those in our newly-acquired territory after the Conquest,” he continued, already forgetting the lordly courtesy he’d tacked on earlier. “There’s one near Harrow he built additional wards over. He suspected there was one in the hills around Marchford, but he could never be sure – there was some kind of priestly ward protecting it, and Imperial policy is to leave those alone unless they’re a direct threat.”

I cleared my throat. “The history lesson is nice and the Harrow location is as of now under seal by my authority as the Squire, but that doesn’t tell us what kind of demon it is. It it a madness one, like the one she dropped on Laure?”

Nine inhabitants out of ten had died in the wake of that particular abomination of a war tactic, including the entire Alban royal line. He shook his head.

“It has to be absence or corruption,” he replied. “All the others are accounted for. I’m inclined towards corruption, considering we remember why we need to have this conversation at all.”

A shiver went up my spine at that, I was unashamed to admit. Every Callowan was raised on stories about what demons could do when let loose, and both of those kinds had famous legends to their names. An absence demon was widely believed to be the reason the entire Yan Tei Empire had no mention of it anywhere during two centuries and then had suddenly reappeared in the histories. People hadn’t even noticed it was gone, or even that anything had been missing at all. As for corruption... there were tales of an elven forest kingdom on the other side of the Tyrian Sea, where a stranger had once laid a single finger on the jewel that was the heart of the woods. Within a fortnight the entire kingdom had been turned into ravening beasts that fed on blood and bones, killing thousands before the were mercifully put down by heroes. That was perhaps the most terrifying thing about demons: most of what they did could not be undone. It scarred Creation permanently.

“We’ll operate under the assumption of corruption for now,” I said. “Any objections?”

Shaken heads all around.

“Lord Apprentice,” Commander Hune spoke softly. “Do you have any idea who could have set this demon loose? Did the Silver Spears disturb wards in their flight south?”

Oh, Weeping Heavens. The mercenaries were in the hills, where the fucking embodiment of corruption was . That wasn’t going to end well for anyone involved.

“-has been the target of sabotage on her part several times before, I’m given to understand,” Masego was saying when I started paying attention to her again. “Wolof has the best historical records in the Empire, I wouldn’t put knowledge of the location past her.”

“It’s Heiress,” I spoke flatly, cutting to the chase. “It’s always godsdamned Heiress, when things go to shit like this. The Lone Swordsman is a first rate prick but he’s not the demon-summoning type. I doubt anyone else on the rebel side would have the ability to break wards good enough to hold back a demon or the balls to go through with it.”

Hune blinked. “She’s an Imperial citizen,” the ogre said slowly. “We are in the middle of military operations against a threat to Praesi hegemony. This is... absurd. What could she possibly gain from this?”

“She wants to bleed the Fifteenth, I’d imagine,” I replied. “Or discredit it us so that her own contributions to the war effort look better in comparison. She’s only invested in putting down the rebellion insofar as it advances her own position, Hune. If she’s the last woman standing when the dust over this mess settles, she gets all the rewards.”

“Trust a human to manage fucking up a perfectly good war,” Juniper growled. “No offense meant, Aisha.”

Ratface, it seemed, did not even rank a half-assed apology. I probably shouldn’t have been as amused by that as I was.

“A little taken,” Aisha replied drily. “Akua Sahelian is a wretched bitch with more ambition than sense, if you’ll all forgive my language. Wolofites are a notoriously proud and fickle lot.”

Well, if there was one constant in Creation it was that whenever there were two Praesi nobles in a room there’d be at least three differing opinions offered about every subject. Still, I filed away the distaste in Aisha’s tone for further reference – I’d taken her into the Fifteenth at Juniper’s request and had never been given reason to complain about her service, but it had not escaped my attention that she was the most politically-connected of my officers. If she were a mage, she’d be my strongest candidate for who was leaking information to Heiress. It didn’t matter how far down the line of succession she was, in the Wasteland blood had a way of telling.

“So, corruption,” I spoke, getting us back on subject. “Apprentice, you’re the closest thing to an expert we have on this. Any chance the Silver Spears will get out of the hills before they get all...”

I waved a hand around vaguely to get my point across, the precise adjective for this situation escaping me. The Soninke mage massaged his forehead as he thought.

“No,” he finally replied. “Demons of corruption become a locus of the concept the moment they’re in phase with Creation. The area they can affect grows over time, but the Tower has anecdotal evidence implying that even from the first contact it can carry over several miles.”

I frowned. “Nobody’s ever tried to chart this?”

“Once,” Apprentice admitted. “The Warlock who did went mad while trying to write down the numbers and three floors of the Tower had to be torched before the... things that formed could spread any further.”

Well, that wasn’t ominous at all.

“So marching the whole legion on the bastard isn’t a solution, then,” Nauk grunted. “Fine, if numbers don’t work we can still solve this the way the Fifteenth deals with most problems. This whole corruption bullshit takes time, right? We’ve still got goblinfire. Let’s send a sapper company in and set the fucker on fire.”

“I’m not sure whether that would work,” Pickler replied. “As far as I know it’s never been used on demons. Part of that it that the substance has only been around for two hundred years and demon summoning is rare, but we’d be committing on a long shot.”

“We’re not committing to anything,” I said. “We’re bailing, is what we’re doing. Masego, can you narrow down its location? Unless it’s right on top of us we’re getting the Hells out of here.”

“Demons leave marks in Creation wherever they are,” Apprentice acknowledged. “I know a ritual that could triangulate its location. I can’t use it much, though, Catherine. It will notice, and corruption works on magic too. Three times at most.”

He didn’t need to elaborate on how much damage an embodiment of corruption could wreak, given a thaumaturgical link to a mage of Masego’s calibre.

“Legion doctrine when presented with first class special asset is to retreat to a choke point, fortify and send for reinforcements,” Juniper said. “We could make it back to the ford in four days with forced marches, and from there we should be able to scry for further instructions.”

I shook my head. “We won’t be able to go that fast,” I told her. “The people of Marchford are civilians, they can’t keep that kind of pace.”

There was a moment of silence. I realized with a sinking feeling that everyone in the room had expected me to leave them behind.

“Catherine,” Ratface said hesitantly. “There’s at least eight thousand people in the city right now. Just getting them in shape for an evacuation would take days, and that’s if they cooperate. Which they won’t.”

“By that time we will have corrupted cataphracts to deal with and worse,” Hune spoke softly. “We don’t have the men to protect a body of people that large when on the move.”

Aisha said nothing, only casting a look at Juniper whose face had gone utterly blank. Without a word Nauk moved around the table and came to stand by my side. Pickler cursed softly, then did the same. Hakram poured himself a third cup of wine. Masego claimed a chair and propped up his feet on the table, looking fascinated with the whole situation.

“They’re rebels,” the Hellhound said flatly.

“They surrendered,” I replied. “They are now Imperial citizens again, with all entitled protections.”

“Until that surrender has been accepted by the Tower their legal status is unclear,” the legate growled. “Regardless, decisions about legion deployment are at the discretion of field commanders when higher authority cannot be reached.”

“We have a mandate to protect imperial interests,” Adjutant contributed mildly.

“Imperial interest here is not to destroy the Fifteenth failing to save people who support a rebellion against Praes,” Juniper barked. “You’re not thinking with your head, Foundling. This is sheer fucking sentimentality, and feelings have no place in the thought process of an officer.”

Slowly, carefully, I let out a breath.

“I could tell you,” I spoke softly, “that feeding that many people to corruption is the makings of a disaster. I could tell you that if word got out a legion abandoned a city to a demon every major city in Callow would rise in rebellion before summer comes. Gods, I could even say that the demon is a Praesi mess and the Praesi should clean it up.”

My eyes hardened.

“But that’s not why I’m making this decision. There are eight thousand innocents in Marchford, Juniper. I refuse to abandon them.”

“And by doing that, you’re risking the life of every man and woman under your command,” the grim-faced orc said. “Your soldiers, dying so your conscience is clear.”

“Is Callow part of the Empire?” I asked. No reply, and Juniper seemed wary. “Anyone, feel free to answer.”

Ratface cleared his throat. “I don’t think anyone is denying that, Lady Foundling” he said.

I bared my teeth.

“That’s funny, because if this was Aksum or Kahtan we were talking about I don’t think anybody would be arguing about how we should or shouldn’t be feeding eight fucking thousand people to a demon,” I snarled.

“Marchford rebelled against the Tower,” Aisha said, though she did not meet my eyes.

“So did every city in the Wasteland, at some point,” I retorted. “Hells, not even fifty years ago two thirds of the High Lords were backing the bid for the throne of the Empress’ sworn enemy.”

“There’s been seven goblin rebellions, and nearly an eight under Nefarious,” Pickler added in an undertone, and for that I could have kissed her.

“The Empire’s talked a good game since the Conquest,” I said. “But now’s the time where we find out whether it was all empty words after all. Does Praes stay the course, when it costs something to do it? Taking a country isn’t enough to rule it, Juniper. That has to be earned . If Callow is part of the Empire, then our oaths apply to it. Every soul within its borders is under our protection, whether that means fighting Procer or the Free Cities or the children of Hell. We don’t get to pick and choose who those oaths apply to.”

My eyes swept across my officers.

“The eyes of the rest of Calernia are on us. So tell me, all of you – are we hypocrites or not?”

“Not,” Nauk chuckled, running his tongue over his teeth. “Doesn’t matter who we fight, Hellhound. The Fifteenth wins, that’s all there is to it.”

“Not,” Pickler agreed. “I’ve always been curious as to whether a trebuchet can kill a demon. I doubt I’ll get another opportunity to find out.”

“Not,” Ratface sighed. “Though I’d like to live to collect my pension, so let’s not get any heroic ideas.”

The goblet in Hune’s hands looked like a small toy compared to the size of her fingers – earlier we’d all pretended not to notice when she’d partially crushed it by accident.

“This is foolish,” the ogre commander complained, then clenched a fist. There was the sound of metal crumpling like cheap parchment and wine dripped through her closed fist. “Not, ancestors forgive me. I was not raised to go meekly.”

I cast a look at Hakram, who shrugged.

“Do you even have to ask?”

That left two. Juniper’s face had gone pale green with anger, eyes burning. Aisha had slipped back into the court mask she’d no doubt been taught as a child, expressionless save for a polite smile.

“We set a pace before moving out,” the legate said. “Anybody who can’t keep up gets left behind.”

This was, I knew, as far down as I’d be able to bend her neck. I could make it an order, of course. Respect for the chain of command was so deeply ingrained in Juniper that she’d follow an order she thoroughly despised without argument. But if I do that, I cross a line I can’t uncross. What little trust we have between us will be gone, and it’ll never come back.

“Agreed,” I conceded.

Masego cleared his throat. “Delightful little bit of drama, ladies and gentlemen, good show all around. Now if we could get back to the matter at hand?”

“Highest priority is to get the locals ready to leave as fast as possible,” I said. “Kilian’s still overseeing the garrison, she needs to be brought up to speed.”

“We have a higher priority than that,” Juniper replied. “Our worst wounded are still half a day’s march away from the city, Foundling.”

Shit. I’d totally forgotten about that. They’d been too slow to keep up when we’d marched on Marchford, so they’d been allowed to trail slightly behind with our extra supplies.

“Apprentice, how likely are they to be targeted?” I asked.

“Normally I’d say the odds are low,” Masego grimaced. “But stronger corruption demons can affect the creational laws of time and space – there could be a force headed there as we speak.”

“Infantry wouldn’t move fast enough,” Ratface mused. “But the cataphracts might.”

I clenched my fingers, then slowly unclenched them.

“Hune, I’m taking one of your cohorts to back them up on the way here,” I announced. “The rest of you need to get this evacuation moving.”

“There’ll be riots,” Aisha said. “And without your... skills in defusing those, we have fewer options to deal with them.”

I closed my eyes.

“Marchford is under martial law,” I finally replied. “Do what you have to.”

—

The awareness that a fortnight ago I would have used Nilin’s cohort for this was like a throbbing wound in the back of my mind. Tribune Galia was a solid officer, an orc nearly as tall as Hakram with skin a shade of green so dark it bordered on black, but she was not my friend. She’d not been with me since Rat Company, hadn’t followed me through thick and thin in the war games. I kept those thoughts away from my face as well as I could while she hurried the cohort down the road. For once I’d bothered to bring Zombie along to a possible fight, riding ahead of the column to serve as the scouting line we were lacking. We’d already been marching for over a bell without any signs of the wounded, but we should be coming across them any moment now. The night was dark and the now blood-red moon cast treacherous shadows everywhere, so I rather wished I’d thought to bring goblins along – I was the only person in the cohort with any real night vision to speak of. I’d ordered for us to go without torches as not to warn the enemy we were coming.

Skilfully guiding Zombie through the trees that bordered both sides of the road, I reined him in when I finally caught a flicker of movement in the distance. Breathing in, I focused and sharpened my Name vision to get a better look. And there you are. About two hundred legionaries with still-limited mobility, most on foot but some on the oxen carts that also carried our additional stacks of weapons and foodstuffs. They seemed to be ploughing along at a good pace, no doubt spurred forward by the fact that even the sky had apparently gotten licked by the Hells. I turned Zombie around and galloped back to the cohort, skimming our moving lines and slowing when I found the tribune. Captain Ubaid, in command of her second company, was engaged in quiet conversation with her. They both quieted when I stopped by them.

“Found our wounded,” I announced bluntly. “They’re just up ahead, they don’t seem to have run into anyone.”

“Still no sign of the enemy then, Lady Squire?” Galia asked.

“Apprentice said it was only a possibility,” I noted. “Could be the demon’s not strong enough to be a threat so quickly.”

Just the word for what we’d be facing was enough to have both battle-hardened officers flinch. For all that Tyrants had not been above calling up those creatures in the past, they were not counted as friends by any of the Praesi.

“We’re not home safe yet, anyway,” I grunted, diplomatically ignoring their reaction. “Until we’re back in Marchford no one should let their guard down.”

“Oh, I don’t think anyone will be closing their eyes on the job tonight,” Ubaid murmured. “Not with that thing out there.”

“Should I sound a horn in warning of our approach, my lady?” Galia said.

I shook my head. “Not yet.”

I trusted Masego, strange as that was to say. Maybe not to carry all my secrets, but he had an obsession with being exactly correct that predisposed him against lying. He wouldn’t have brought up the possibility if he hadn’t genuinely thought I should be prepared to deal with it. With a polite nod to the officers I rode ahead of the column again. I took Zombie into the woods more out of habit than any real need, moving forward at a trot. Eventually I pulled my mount to a stop, simply watching my forces coming closer together. I’d never been particularly fond of forests – it was the city girl in me, I imagined – a taste ever reinforced by the horror tales about the things that lurked in the Waning Woods and the Greywood. The red tinge cast by the moon over everything turned the mess of trunks and overgrown roots into a hellish labyrinth it would be easy to get lost into. A firefly passed in front of me, then circled around and came to rest on my outstretched hand. Huh. Lucky omen, that. Fireflies were rare in this part of Callow. The insect flew up the nearest tree and I followed it with my eyes until it came to rest on a branch.

Where a creature sat, looking down at me.

It was the size of a man, with large dark eyes and long legs ending in feet pointing both ways that were adorned with claws looking like iron hooks. It bared iron teeth at me, rustling its red-brown fur as it jumped. My sword cleared its scabbard before I even thought of it and I ducked under, blade striking at its body as it flew over me.

“AMBUSH!” I screamed, but I was too late.

Horns sounded from both my cohort and where the wounded were. I’d sliced the creature, I saw, but there was no blood on my blade. Devil.

“Little girl,” the hooked thing said in Mtethwa, putting its human-like palms up. “I mean no harm.”

“I do,” I replied, swinging for its eyes.

It scampered away up a tree before I could touch it, chittering something in the Dark Tongue. The firefly gently landed on Zombie’s neck, and before I could so much as blink it expanded into a human shape with a wet squelch of forming flesh. A pale-skinned humanoid without eyes leered at me, baring rust-coloured fangs. My pommel struck it in the mouth, breaking teeth as it let out a cackle like a hyena’s. More shapes were clustering in the trees.

“Well,” I said. “This could be going better.”

Chapter 23: Defeat

“Tyrants do not lose. We face temporary setbacks.”
– Dread Empress Maledicta II

Staying in the woods was a good way to head for premature retirement, so I spurred Zombie on to get us the Hells out of there.

“This could have been a pleasant evening, you know,” I complained out loud. “Sure the blood-coloured moon is a bit of a mood killer, but when’s the last time I just went for a ride?”

“Little girl,” another hooked thing spoke from the trees, “why do you-“

Without missing a beat, I raised my sword in its direction and allowed my Name to coalesce in a spear of shadows – the projectile flew faster than the eye could follow, tearing a smoking hole through the devil’s head. Its iron claws kept it on the branch, but it stopped moving. No blood but they can still die. That’s a start. My mount wove around the trunks and branches with preternatural ability, though not because of any great riding abilities on my part. Controlling Zombie became easier with every passing month, and by now was merely took an afterthought: most of my attention was on our surroundings. And a good thing it was, too. A I took a turn a long snake-like thing dropped from above and barred my path. Oh Gods. No, not a snake. I’d seen centipedes before, but this one was large as a small horse and covered in small pincers all over its length. They were constantly moving and on its back I could see they formed patterns like human faces screaming and weeping. I could almost make out what they said, but – I stopped myself right there.

“Catherine, we don’t stare too long at the eldritch abomination that makes a mockery of all that is good and decent,” I reminded myself, guiding Zombie to jump over it.

The devil’s front reared up, opening up into a jaw lined with four weeping thorns that snapped at my horse’s tail. Yeah, I wasn’t sticking around to see anymore of that. On another note, I had a feeling the spark of guilt I’d used to get when stepping on centipedes was gone permanently.

“Little girl,” one of the devils called out in a sing-song voice that sent a shiver up my spine.

“I’m seventeen, you prick,” I yelled back, because I had never quite managed to learn when to shut up.

I ducked under a branch and finally emerged into the open, where my usual run of luck was continuing: my cohort was getting mauled by what must have been upwards of twenty devils. It was hard to tell in the dark, since the whole formation had fallen into chaos. I picked out a few gaping holes in the ground that likely meant the things had burrowed under my legionaries when setting up their ambush. Merciless Gods, I thought devils were supposed to be mindless. How long have those been around, to start thinking ahead this much? Didn’t matter, in the end. I was still going to have to clean up the mess before retreating. Speaking of messes, I cast a look west and winced. My wounded were getting torn apart, there were no two ways about it. They’d managed to get weapons out, at least, but they were in no shape to handle a pair of devils, never mind the thirty or so they seemed to be dealing with. A large silhouette the size of a supply wagon was rampaging around, goring men with a pair of curved horns sprouting off its head with unsettling agility. A heartbeat passed as I considered my options.

Could I get my cohort in order quick enough to come to their rescue? Screams were filling the night, both my legionaries’ and the creatures’. Every moment I spent hesitating, my soldiers were dying. I knew I should at least make the attempt, but In the back of my mind eerie green eyes looked back at me . The only clean victories are the ones in the stories, Catherine. I could see no way to turn this into a victory, but the point still stood. I couldn’t save everyone. I couldn’t even save most.

“Gods forgive me,” I whispered as Zombie galloped for the cohort.

Captain Ubaid was the first officer I found, screaming at the top of his lungs so his orders could be overheard over the ruckus. His company was trying to form a square but one of the monsters had burst out of the ground in the middle of their position. It looked almost like a man covered in filthy rags, but a jackal’s head sprouted from the back of its head and from the looks of it its grip was strong enough to pull apart steel and crush bones. Zombie scattered a handful of my own men as he picked up speed and headed straight for the devil. I could have taken us a little to the side to swing my sword as we passed, but arming swords were not designed to be used from horseback – instead my mount reared up and a pair of hooves slammed into the devil’s back, battering it down. The thing apparently did not have bones, but there was a sound like a door hinge breaking. I reached for my Name before it could get up, a blade of darkness extending from the tip to sever the creature’s neck. It flopped uselessly on the ground, perhaps not dead but no longer able to fight.

“Hack that into smaller pieces,” I ordered the closest legionaries, who were looking at me with something like awe.

“Lady Squire,” Ubaid called out, pushing through the ranks. “We must-“

“Get your men into tighter lines, captain,” I interrupted, tone flat. “We’re pushing forward to take the pressure off Tribune Galia.”

“She’s dead, ma’am,” Ubaid replied. “Some sort of giant snake creature burst out of the ground and swallowed her whole.”

I cursed in Taghrebi. “The other captain?”

“Firefly landed on his eye, burst through the skull,” a legionary with lieutenant’s stripes contributed, bleeding from her cheek.

My fingers clenched. We were going through officers faster than godsdamned rations, these days.

“Ubaid, consider yourself a tribune for all intents and purposes,” I said. “We’re still moving forward. I’m not leaving half the cohort behind when we retreat.”

It was a sign of how badly we were getting hurt that not a single one of them suggested we try to extract the wounded. The man nodded, exhaustion showing for a moment before the Legion discipline kicked in and his face turned into a professional mask. I dismounted and rolled my shoulder, trying to get it to pop so it’d stop aching under the plate. I glanced at the lieutenant who’d talked earlier, frowning as I recognized the features under the blood and steel.

“Kamilah,” I said. “Is that you?”

“Ma’am,” she replied with a wan smile. “I’d say it’s a pleasure to see you again, but under the circumstances...”

She’d been a sergeant in Rat Company. For a moment that almost made me reconsider what I was about to order, the sight of Nilin’s corpse wreathed in green coming up to haunt me. Calmly, I grabbed that burst of sentimentality by its metaphorical neck and snapped it. Sentiment is no longer a luxury I can afford .

“How’s your line, Lieutenant?” I asked.

“Down two men, Lady Callow,” she replied. “But we’re still in fighting shape.”

I almost smiled at the reminder of the name I’d assumed during my College days, tightening the strap holding my heater shield to my arm.

“Then get your men ready, Lieutenant,” I said. “We’re going hunting.”

—

For my cohort to be in a position to retreat, I needed two things.

The first was for our formation to be free of enemies inside its confines. That much I knew I could achieve. The second thing was a little trickier: I needed to finish this part of the fight before the devils in the woods and the ones killing my wounded moved on us. That was the reason was why I was currently wrestling down one of the two-faced monsters as Kamilah’s legionaries surrounded it. Good goblin steel slid in the thing’s sides but it only struggled harder against my grip. Its fingers ripped into my plate, scoring long gouges on the surface. I cursed and rammed my helmet into the teeth of the jackal face. It reared back with a howl and the lieutenant herself hacked into the bared neck with her sword, putting it down for good. I forced myself up. The second company that had made up Tribune Galia’s cohort was scattered in small pockets, fighting whatever devil had seen fit to prey on them. Numbers were starting to tell now that my legionaries had recovered from the surprise, but we weren’t out of the proverbial woods yet. Ubaid was advancing his company as a three-man thick shield wall, enveloping individual devils in a circle of steel to overwhelm them – but there were outliers that were too strong for him to deal with.

That was where I came in.

From where I stood, I could see two of the hook-bearing devils from the woods and one of the pale eyeless ones. Those I let go, leaving them to Ubaid. The firefly shapeshifters weren’t too troublesome as long as they were in that humanlike shape, and after the second time the hooked ones had used the shields of my legionaries as a jumping point to tear out the throat of the man behind they’d adjusted their tactics accordingly. The real problems were the unique ones, like the large skinless ape who’d just caved in the head of a legionary a little to my left.

“Skinless,” I called out. “Left.”

Kamilah’s line fell in behind me without a word, shields up and swords in the middle line. We moved forward at a brisk pace but the devil noticed us before before we could get too close. Leering in a way that displayed its oversized human teeth, it picked up the corpse of the legionary it had killed and tossed it at me like a rag doll. I barely had the time to wish it had killed a human instead of an orc before the body hit my shield like the load of a trebuchet. Gritting my teeth, I anchored my feet on the ground but the impact was so ludicrously strong it pushed me back a dozen paces, my armoured feet dragging lines into the ground. The legionary right behind me was thrown to the ground when we impacted, but I wasted no time looking back: snarling, I charged forward. Unsurprisingly, whatever ungodly place had given birth to devil had decided that just a pile of ape-shaped muscles and bones wasn’t a horrifying enough appearance. Under the red flesh I could see wriggling maggots, some falling to the ground and crawling towards corpses as the devil ran in my direction. Its fist was the size of my head, but there was no subtlety to its attack: I saw the strike coming and ducked under the swing, closing the distance. My sword sliced up through its belly, tearing muscles and spilling maggots all over my shield. The monster barely even noticed, delivering a kick to my abdomen that knocked the wind out of me and sent me tumbling to the ground.

“Gods Below and Everburning,” I snarled, pushing myself back up. “Summoning you shits should be illegal.”

“I hear that, ma’am,” one of Kamilah’s legionaries muttered.

The rest of the line spread into a loose circle around the ape and I ignored the ache in my legs as I returned to the fray. I wouldn’t kill this one by going for vital spots, that much had become abundantly clear. I’d have to cripple it enough that the legionaries could help me finish it off. The devil stepped forward lazily, the wound I’d inflicted it now filled with writhing worms. I loosened the straps on my shield and shook it off my arm, rolling my shoulder. Blocking would be pointless here, I’d have to dodge.

“Come on, big guy,” I grunted. “Let’s have another go.”

“Squire,” the ape replied in a scared child’s voice. “Please, Squire. It hurts, it hurts so much .”

“I’ve walked the Hall of Screams,” I spoke calmly, keeping the horror I felt off my face. Was it – was there actually a child in there, under all the maggots? “You’re going to need to do better than that, if you want me to flinch.”

It struck without warning, but I’d not dropped my guard. A half-step put me just out out of the punch’s path and my sword came down just under its shoulder with all the strength I could muster, cutting through flesh until it hit the bone. I felt the humerus break, but I couldn’t go any further. Maggots started crawling up my blade and hastily whipped it out, barely dodging out of the way when the ape tried to cave in my torso with its foot.

“Why won’t it stop ,” the devil screamed, the child’s voice going shrill. “Mother, where are you? Why is it so dark?”

The ape reached for the wrist of its damaged arm and ripped the entire thing out of its socket, the voice of the child screaming in pain as it swung the appendage at me like a mace. I took a deep breath and Creation slowed, all distractions fading away as my Name pulsed against my ears. I’d been wary of its power once, but compared to what stood in front of me? Gods, even the worst my Role could make was clear water compared to that filth. I steadied my footing and brought my blade down on the arm. I sliced clean through it, spilling worms as the lower half of the appendage flew in the distance and the rest passed me. Feeling my focus already beginning to wane, I ran forward. The ape had dropped its makeshift weapon and tried to grab me but I spun around the fingers, angling my body downwards and my sword to the side as I slid between its feet. The blade cut through the flesh of its lower leg, stopping only when it hit the bone: I ground my teeth in effort and hacked again, this time going all the way through. The devil toppled forward with crazed laughter, grasping at my legionaries who’d cautiously edged away from it. The moment after, as I crawled away from the remains of the leg that was were already spewing maggots like a fountain, Kamilah’s line fell on the downed devil like a pack of wolves.

Methodically they chopped away the limbs, the lieutenant herself dodging an attempt from the beast to bite through her arm before ramming her sword in its empty eye socket. By the time I’d gotten back on my feet, all that was left was a pile of wriggling flesh incapable of moving.

“You’re getting rather good at this,” I told Kamilah, trying to keep my mind away from the very real possibility that there was still an innocent child’s soul kept prisoner in the devil’s remains.

“Practice makes perfect,” the woman replied, serenely bringing her boot down to squash a worm that had gotten too close.

I couldn’t help a smile. That little sentence was the essence of the Legions, wasn’t it? The ironclad belief that as long as they remembered their training and kept the shield wall steady there wasn’t a force in Creation – or beyond – they could not beat. What did it matter, if they were facing angels or devils? A crossbow shot every twenty heartbeats and good goblin steel would see them through it. There was, I reflected, something very Callowan about that. The again perhaps that shouldn’t have surprised me. How had my teacher put it, if Warlock was to be believed? When trying to understand someone, look at their enemies. The Legions had been shaped by Callow as much as Callow had been shaped by the Legions. Shaking away the musing, I focused on the there and then. Now was not the time to get lost in thought. As far as I could see, the handful of remaining devils were fleeing the field. Yet another thing they should not be clever enough to do. Ubaid’s company had swelled with almost all the survivors from the other one: this was, I recognized, as many as I’d be able to salvage from this fiasco. I forced myself to look west. My heart clenched at the sight of the last of my wounded being swarmed over by devils, but I knew how forcing that engagement would go.

“We’re done here,” I told Lieutenant Kamilah. “We’re marching back to Marchford, as fast as we can manage. Send word to Cap- Tribune Ubaid,” I corrected myself.

“Thanks the Gods,” my old follower from Rat Company breathed out in relief. “I’ll go myself, ma’am. We can’t leave soon enough for my taste.”

She clapped her sergeant on the shoulder and made it three feet before the ground burst out under her and enormous jaws snapped shut around her body. The snake’s head was the size of a barn, but while its features might have been reptilian there was not a scale in sight. Flesh , I realized. It was made of flesh. A hundred thousand faces sown together in a patchwork of features that still moved. The devil turned its eerie cat eyes at me, then noisily crushed Kamilah inside its mouth. I felt a red haze descend on me. I did not recall bringing up my arm, but I snarled and shadows formed into something that was more a ballista bolt than a spear, flickering into movement faster than even my Name-sight could grasp. It hit the snake just under the jaw, and the shadows splashed harmlessly against the skin. The devil swallowed, then opened its gaping maw.

“Was she precious to you?” it asked, but the voice did not come from the mouth. The faces all over its skin were speaking in unison, a hundred men and women. “She was; I can see it from your anger. That’s fine. You might still save her if you’re fast enough. It takes a while before they become part of me.”

I found, to my surprise, that the rage taking hold of my bones was so deep it was stilling my tongue. I stepped forward, sword in hand, but the devil laughed.

“Come and play, Named,” it invited me, slithering back into the hole it had torn through the ground.

I took hold of my rage. I would not make decisions angry. Anger made you sloppy, clouded your judgement. This once, though, my burning desire to brutally murder that creature coincided with what needed to be done. I had no idea how quick it could move underground, but there was no way I could afford to let it harass us on the way back to Marchford.

“Sergeant, begin the retreat,” I ordered, voice deceptively even.

The orc saluted, then hesitated.

“Will... will you be coming with us, Lady Squire?” he asked.

I spun my blade in a loose circle, loosening my wrist.

“I’ll be following shortly,” I replied, and jumped into the hole.

Immediately I regretted that decision when the serpent’s head burst out of the hole and rose into the air, faces cackling. I only barely managed to catch the open mouth one of of them with my free hand as we kept getting higher. It tried to chomp down, but teeth were pointless against good plate.

“ Got you ,” the nearest face crowed as the snake continued rising in the air.

Sixty feet at least before it stopped, and there must have been at least that much underground to support it.

“Can you fly, little Named?” the face asked mockingly.

Grunting in effort, I rammed my sword into the open mouth and used the pommel as a handhold. I had enough of a grip I could hug my body closer and slip my feet into another mouth and an eye socket – I had to kick until the eye fell off, but eventually I made enough space.

“And down we go,” a woman’s face announced above me.

To my horror, the devil tipped back and let itself fall. The wind howled around me and the ground got closer with every heartbeat as I desperately tried to scale the side so I wouldn’t be stuck between the massive weight and the floor. I was only half successful: earth sprayed and corpses flew, masking the sound of my left arm and leg breaking. I bit my lip until it bled to force down the primal scream of pain that almost escaped me. The snake shook itself, then slowly rose again.

“That must have hurt,” the woman’s face mused.

“One arm and one leg left,” an old man snickered. “How long can you hold on?”

Under me I could see my cohort beginning to panic, though the officers were doing their best to keep them moving. The devil begun to waddle back and forth like a grotesque pendulum, my body shaking with it. Shit. My arm and leg were – I blinked, then rasped out a laugh. As good as dead . Gods, I really needed to add some tricks to my arsenal did not rely on me being halfway into the grave. My Name howled in approval, spinning threads around the useless limbs. With the crack of multiple fractures worsening, I forced my broken arm to reach up and force its way into another face’s mouth.

“Pointless,” a puppet from around my knee mocked me.

I hoisted myself up, kicking through its teeth to use its mouth as a foothold. Inch by inch, I started making my way up to the head. It tried to shake me off, shouting insults all the while, but the threads held. Tightened, but did not snap. The devil screamed and let itself fall forward, counting on the momentum to flip me off its head. I rammed my sword through the nostril of another face at an angle to give me a counterpoint, feeling the muscles in both my arms tear as I pushed myself in the opposite direction. Immediately it tried to push the other way to use it against me, but something that size could not move fast enough – I’d already found other handholds by then. The higher I got the more it panicked, shaking and screaming imprecations at me.

“You can’t kill me,” it screamed when I finally hoisted myself over the ridge of the head. “I am hunger incarnate, I-“

“Talk too much,” I finished coldly, shoving my free hand in the mouth.

The shadows formed into a spear and kept growing as I tapped into the furthest depths of my Name and kept feeding into it, growing and growing until I could no longer hold the power. With bared teeth I released it, and felt it burrow inside deep inside the devil’s head. The mouth closed over my forearm like a bear trap, teeth shattering against steel, and every single face went silent. Slowly it dipped forward and fell, crashing against the ground with a thunderous roar. I slipped off the side of it and landed on my bad leg with a hoarse cry, guiding Zombie to me with a thought. I leaned on my mount from my good side and hoisted myself up with only two suppressed yells of horrible pain, which was a victory of sorts. I only then noticed I’d landed less than a dozen feet away from my cohort, every single legionary of which was looking at me in utter silence.

“I don’t remember telling you to stop retreating,” I croaked out, sheathing my sword.

Chapter 24: Archer

“My mother used to tell me it gets worse before it gets better, but I’ve found it’s usually the other way around.”
– Eudokia the Oft-Abducted, Basilea of Nicae

“Two bells,” Hakram complained. “I leave you alone for two bells and you get into a fistfight with a giant devil snake.”

“In my defence,” I croaked. “It started it.”

Countess Elizabeth’s former solar had once again been commandeered for my purposes, though this time I was seated mostly because I was unable to stand. I’d been half-tempted to ride into the room on Zombie but had ultimately allowed Adjutant to prop me up on my way here. The trouser leg over my broken bone had been cut off, the same for the sleeve on my bad arm. Hakram had been visibly uncomfortable at the hint of my smallclothes that could be seen on my upper thigh, much to my amusement. For someone who supposedly slept around so much he could be rather prudish. Apprentice felt up the muscles on my leg a little too hard and I cursed him out loudly.

“Why do you always involve goats when you insult someone’s ancestry?” the Soninke mused, and I had to resist the urge to kick him in the chin.

Oh it would have hurt like a bitch, but feeling his chin give in would have been so very satisfying. The mage frowned, not having noticed any of the debate raging through my mind.

“Catherine, did you use necromancy on yourself?” he asked.

I cleared my throat. “I’ve been known to dabble.”

“That shouldn’t be possible,” he noted. “While broken, the limb wasn’t technically dead . That does explain, however, why the inside of half your limbs is in the early stages of necrosis.”

“That sounds bad,” I said. “Hakram, doesn’t that sound bad?”

“I’m still at the part of this story where you punched a snake the size of a carrack in the head and it died ,” Adjutant replied.

“It mouthed off,” I defended myself.

“Cat, if you punch everyone who mouths off to you we’ll be down half our officer corps,” the tall orc sighed.

“The surviving half would be very polite, though,” Apprentice commented drily.

I wasn’t sure whether it was having to men I rather liked fussing over me or because the banter was a reassuringly familiar feeling, but sitting here in relative safety the fresh horror of the battlefield I‘d barely escaped was starting to fade. Knowing Hakram, he’d probably done the latter on purpose.

“So what’s the damage, doc?” I asked Masego.

“I can fix most of this, but I’m not a priest,” the mage said a green halo wreathing his hand as he sunk his magic into my leg. “Broken bones will take a least three days to stop being brittle. I’ve already begun reversing the necrosis, but if you move the limbs too much the tissue won’t heal.”

“Not sure priestly healing would work on me at this point,” I said. “Took the wrong career path for that.”

“Squire isn’t a fundamentally villainous Name,” Apprentice replied. “It’s also the transitional Name leading into being the White Knight.”

“Necromancy’s a bit of a hint that this isn’t heading into White Knight territory,” Hakram snorted.

Masego scoffed.

“There’s nothing inherently villainous about necromancy, Adjutant,” he spoke peevishly. “Or any kind of magic, for that matter. Cultural taboos are just that.”

“I’ve reached deep into my Name, Masego,” I murmured. “It’s not a pleasant thing.”

The chubby mage smiled thinly. “Spoken like someone who has never seen the aftermath of an angelic intervention. Angels are just as dangerous to mortals as devils, Catherine. Both are driven by absolutes. You only need to look at your nemesis’ sword to know that.”

I frowned. “That thing is related to angels?”

“A shard of one, if I’m not mistaken,” the dark-skinned man said.

“I’ve seen it slice into stone ,” I replied dubiously.

“To embrace contrition is to feel the bite of regret,” he quoted. “The Hashmallim are not known for subtlety, or their understanding of metaphor.”

I raised an eyebrow. That was verbatim from the Book of All Things, and not one of the better-known passages either.

“The only other Praesi I’ve ever heard speak the Book is Kilian, and she’s Duni,” I said.

The Green Stretch had been through regular infusions of Callowan blood and culture from periods where Imperial power had waned and the Kingdom’s waxed, not to mention the era where most of Praes has been separated into crusader states.

“Father insisted I familiarize myself with the dominant theological movement on the continent,” the mage shrugged. “Dreadfully tedious stuff, by large, though its take on villainy was most amusing.”

“Organized religion,” Hakram scorned. “And you call us strange. Why would you ever want a middleman between yourself and the Gods? They’re bound to screw you over.”

“To be honest, Masego probably knows more about the theology of it than I do,” I admitted. “I skipped services as often as I could get away with.”

“Is this the part where we pretend to be surprised?” Apprentice asked, the green glow around his hand winking out.

He patted my bare leg, eyeing me for any sign of pain. When I showed no reaction he gave a satisfied nod.

“We’re done for now,” he said. “I’ll want to check on that necrosis in the morning, though.”

“Probably a good idea,” I agreed. “You should probably explain to me what that is when you do.”

I could see in his eyes that he knew I was yanking his chain, prompting a grin on my part, but he was already puffing up like an angry pedantic peacock when someone rapped their knuckles against the door.

“Come in,” I called out.

Juniper came into the room, Aisha and Nauk trailing close behind.

“Squire,” my legate grunted. “You look like shit.”

“If you keep sweet talking me like this, Kilian will get jealous,” I replied.

“Gods forbid,” the Hellhound spoke, rolling her eyes.

Nauk looked like he was about to burst, so I gestured vaguely in his direction.

“Out with it,” I ordered.

“Is it true you punched a giant snake until it died?” he asked eagerly.

“That’s... relatively true?” I admitted.

“Hah,” the large orc exclaimed, and Aisha cursed.

The Taghreb girl flipped Nauk a golden aurelius that the orc caught with a smug, sharp-toothed grin.

“Told you it was true. Remember when she punched out that ogre?” the commander reminded his colleague.

“Ogres aren’t the size of a small fortress,” the staff tribune muttered.

For a moment I debated stating, once again, that I’d never punched out an ogre. Or castrated one, for that matter, no matter what filthy lies Robber kept spreading. With a sigh I let it go: there was no killing the tale, at this point.

“I have the casualty reports, if you’re in a state to hear them,” Juniper broke in, silencing our common minions with a glare.

The shadow of a smile that had been stretching my lips disappeared at the words.

“How bad was it?” I asked soberly.

“No survivors from our wounded, as you already know,” the grim-faced legate said. “Out of the cohort you took we’ve got forty dead.”

That put our final numbers at a little above one thousand and one hundred. Less than one thousand in fighting shape.

“We can’t afford to keep taking fatalities like this,” I said.

“We weren’t significantly weakened by the battle,” Aisha noted. “Most of the dead were too wounded to be able to fight.”

“Defeat, Aisha,” I grunted. “Weakened by the defeat. Call it what it was.”

She lowered her head in concession.

“No point in wallowing either, Squire,” the Hellhound said. “I’ve had reports on the number of the devils, but I want your take. How many did you see?”

“My guess is around a hundred total,” I said. “We killed maybe twenty, likely less.”

“Devils aren’t technically killed, just dispersed beyond coherence. And necrosis is when flesh begins to die because of internal humours,” Masego burst out suddenly.

I raised an eyebrow. “Yes, we all knew that second one. Why mention it?” I asked earnestly, as if I’d had no idea what prompted the outburst.

“I hate you so much right now,” he muttered.

Still, that had been interesting. Had he literally not been able to help himself? Warlock’s son did have a tendency to want to be exact in all things, but did it really run this deep? Aspect-driven , I realized with a start. There must have been something about his Name that pushed him to be excruciatingly precise. That was a dangerous weakness, the kind of exploitable flaw that made you reveal your master plan because the hero bantered a little too close to home. There were more unfortunate implications, tough. Was I similarly affected by my Role? I’d wondered, once or twice, whether I’d gotten Struggle because I so often got in over my head – or whether it was the other way around. Does my Name push me to get into trouble?

“Anyhow, there will have been one hundred devils to start with,” Apprentice continued. “One hundred is a magically significant number, and “that one Empress” was known to field companies of them.”

“Would have been useful to know that beforehand,” Juniper growled.

The mage huffed.

“I would have mentioned it if I’d known it was relevant,” he replied. “I already told you most records from back then were destroyed.”

I raised a hand.

“We know now, that’s what matters,” I intervened. “And it changes things.”

“Evacuation is no longer a viable plan,” Juniper agreed. “Not even for the Fifteenth alone. You don’t fight devils on ground they picked.”

“How defensible is the city?” I asked.

“We have no walls,” Aisha said flatly. “And even if we did, we wouldn’t have the numbers to cover everywhere we need.”

“One of those I can fix,” the Hellhound spoke calmly. “Marchford is built in stone, thankfully. Pickler is currently collapsing the outer ring of houses. I’ve drafted from all companies for additional manpower. We should have at least a rudimentary fortification before the city is hit.”

I nodded in approval, then hesitated. “The people owning those houses can’t have been particularly pleased,” I mentioned.

“We’ve had a riot,” my legate acknowledged. “Adjutant dispersed the crowd before it turned too bad.”

I cast a surprised look at Hakram, who shrugged.

“I pointed out they could either let us tear down the houses or share them with a demon,” he informed me. “Funny how that word sobers up even angry young men. I’ve also committed the Fifteenth to rebuilding them when the battle is done.”

“That won’t work twice, Deadhand. City’s a pot about to boil over,” Nauk gravelled. “As soon as the light of day comes and word spreads there’ll be more rioting, mark my words.”

I passed a tired hand through my hair.

“Bulk up our patrols, and forbid legionaries to wander off alone,” I ordered. “If the city rises, this is over. We can’t allow that to happen.”

“They’re not making protecting their ungrateful hides very easy,” Aisha spoke disdainfully.

“They’re panicking,” I retorted sharply. “Civilians do that.”

There was a pregnant pause in the room.

“I didn’t mean it as a comment on Callowans in general,” the Taghreb said carefully. “My apologies if offence was taken, Lady Squire.”

I felt a spark of guilt at the wariness on her face. I already knew Aisha wasn’t the kind of Praesi aristocrat that thought of my people like cattle. She was, if anything, roughly egalitarian in her distrust of individuals of every background. I gestured half-heartedly at her.

“It’s been a long night,” I apologized. “My temper is finding targets unworthy of it.”

“Think no more of it, my lady,” the brown-skinned girl replied politely.

“Manpower’s going to be an issue,” Hakram broke in, thankfully changing the subject.

“More than you think,” I grimaced. “Some of the devils can take the shape of a firefly, and others can dig underground. We can’t leave the city itself undefended and look only after the outer parts.”

Masego started.

“Fireflies?” he repeated. “ Shit. ”

I frowned. “They’re actually the easiest breed to deal with.”

“For you, sure,” he said. “You’re not what they’re born for. They’re mage-takers.”

“I have a feeling,” Juniper gravelled, “that I’m not going to like what follows.”

“They bury in the back of a mage’s neck and take over the body,” Apprentice explained. “The practitioner’s ability to use magic is significantly improved, so there’s rituals where diabolists bind them to themselves, but if we’re not the ones who summoned them...”

“Well, let’s take checking all our mages to the top of our priority list,” I said. “And get the word out to the civilians – there aren’t as many mages born in Callow as in the Wasteland, but there’s bound to be a few left in a city this size.”

“Here’s a thought,” Nauk said. “Conscript those. We need the firepower and we’re asking them to fight for their own bloody home.”

“I’d conscript everyone in fighting shape in the city, if I could,” Juniper said. “But it’s pointless if we don’t have weapons for them to use. Our stocks don’t have that many extra supplies, and most of those were with our wounded.”

I blinked. Sometimes I forgot they hadn’t been born here, hadn’t been raised to the culture. That they didn’t really understand the people the Empire was ruling over.

“This is Callow ,” I told them. “Half the houses in the city will have swords and spears stashed under the floorboard or hidden away in the attic.”

Surprised faces all around, with quite a bit of confusion.

“The Royal Guard was never as large as the Legions, even at its peak,” I reminded them. “Whenever Procer came through the Vale, whenever Emperors marched on Summerholm, the bulk of the Kingdom’s host was always volunteers. Families keep arms and pass them from generation to generation.”

I half-smiled, drawing on those nights I’d spent serving drinks in Laure.

“ So pick up your sword, boy

Here they come again

And down here in the mud,

It’s us who holds the line ,” I sang, the refrain of a song as old as the Kingdom.

“I’ve heard that tune before,” Hakram said.

“Here They Come Again,” I told him. “It was never officially banned but Imperial authorities frown on people singing it. A little too rebellious for the Tower’s tastes, I imagine.”

“Having weapons is one thing,” Juniper grunted. “Do they know how to use them?”

“I’m less optimistic about that,” I admitted. “The men and women with martial training, however slight, will have been taken with the Countess when she left for Vale.”

“Disorganized rabble can hold a chokepoint, given sufficient motivation,” Aisha spoke flatly. “I imagine not wanting their homes become a demon-infested wasteland might do the trick in that regard.”

Hakram cleared his throat.

“That’s not something that can be assessed from this room, so arguing over the subject is pointless,” he reminded everyone. “I wouldn’t discount the possibility that Countess Marchford left with most of those weapons, either.”

Damn, I hadn’t thought of that. The aristocrat was one of the richest women in Callow, but having too many arms and armour forged at once would have rung alarms with the Empire. It wasn’t even worth considering that Black didn’t have agents embed in every major blacksmithing guild in the country.

“I’ll get started on the organization for all this, then,” Juniper sighed.

“I’ll put a pot of tea on the fire,” Aisha told her, almost getting a smile out of my grim-faced legate.

They both looked at me and I nodded my dismissal, already discussing logistics as they left the room. Nauk lingered a little longer.

“Kinda wished you’d brought me along for that last fight, boss,” he gravelled.

“Hells, so do I,” I muttered. “If I’d had a pair of cohorts instead of the one we would have swept through the bastards and gotten our people out.”

“We’ll get a second round soon enough,” the large orc conceded, then paused to choose his words.

That was unusual enough he got my full attention immediately.

“When the Silver Spears come back, after they’ve had a nice moonlit stroll with the demon... I’d like for my kabili to be the one facing them.”

“We won’t know where they attack for sure,” I frowned.

“Between you and the Hellhound, I’m sure a good guess will be made,” he grunted.

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them. His reasons were obvious enough, though I didn’t like them. A commander focused on getting payback instead of his actual tactical objectives might make mistakes. On the other hand, a commander with strong personal motivation to carry a fight might perform better than one less... driven.

“Will you lose your shit, if I put you in front of them?” I asked bluntly.

Nauk’s brutish face hardened, though not out of anger at me. He knew the question was not undeserved, and that him going into the Red Rage in the middle of a battle would fuck up his kabili’s entire chain of command.

“I swear to you I will not,” he gravelled. “On my father’s blood, I make that oath. May my Clan bury me unmarked if I lie.”

Hakram took in a sharp breath, so that wasn’t an oath lightly made.

“Done,” I finally said.

Selling that to Juniper was going to be a pain and a half, but there was a debt there to settle. He might not see it that way, but I did. The image of our friend wreathed in green flames, looking so damnably peaceful, was not one I would soon forget.

“I knew you’d understand,” the large greenskin said. “Rest well, Callow. Tomorrow the real war starts.”

And with that ominous bit of talk, he left the three of us behind. Apprentice was the first to stir.

“I’ll leave you to your sleep, then,” he said.

“Not yet,” I replied. “Conscripts and bastard walls aren’t going to get us through this, Masego. All of us know that. I need alternatives. How good are you with wards?”

He shrugged. “I could prevent anything from outside of Creation from entering this room, given a bell and the right tools.”

“I don’t mean for you to ward a room,” I replied. “How hard would it be to cover the entire city?”

“That’s...” he began, then stopped. “Insane, yes. But not impossible.”

“Didn’t think you had that kind of juice in you,” Hakram noted, sounding a little surprised.

“I don’t,” the mage replied. “I can’t think of a practitioner who would, save perhaps the Dead King. But warding isn’t about the power you can provide, it’s about what you can accumulate. The whole point of ritualistic magic is that the impetus doesn’t come from the caster’s personal strength.”

I grimaced. This was going to end up being a blood magic thing, wasn’t it?

“We’re not bleeding people, Apprentice,” I stated. “We’re not that desperate.”

He blinked, then looked offended.

“I’m not a hack , Catherine. I don’t need sacrifices to brute force my way into higher arcana,” he snapped.

“In her defence,” Hakram intervened, “when mages start talking about grand designs someone usually ends up strapped to an altar.”

“Inferior sorcerers, maybe,” Masego scorned, but he looked somewhat mollified. “What I need is a census of the number and location of hearths in the city. All of them.”

I was about to ask him why when the window burst into shards of glass. I wasted a precious heartbeat in pure surprise before my training kicked in and I reached for my sword. Which, I immediately remembered, wasn’t at my side. It was on the table. By the time I was on my feet, Hakram’s blade was out and Apprentice was casting. My hands closed around the handle of my sword and I unsheathed it, biting my lip so I wouldn’t let out a scream and the brutal flare of pain that standing suddenly on my broken leg was causing. I’d expected to be looking at a devil, maybe one of those mage-takers come for Masego, but what I was looking it was completely different. Who I was looking at, rather.

A woman, dressed in fine white chainmail going down to her knees in a skirt. Over it she wore a leather coat that covered her arms up to the wrist and came up in a hood. Her lower face was covered by dark linen, but I could still see her dark ochre skin betraying a bloodline from across the Tyrian Sea and delicate hazelnut eyes. On her back there was a quiver and almost absurdly large longbow strapped, but the weapon she had out was the longknife in her hand. Adjutant, true to form, did not waste time on banter. He took a swing at her without missing a beat but she caught his wrist and twisted it, using his momentum to spin him around and have him face the spell Masego had just let loose. The mage’s eyes widened in panic and he barked something in the arcane tongue but there was still a flash of heat and Hakram went flying.

I made to go around the table, not confident in my ability to flip it and power through. The stranger moved towards Apprentice but with a snarl he cast another spell: dark, squid-like flesh grew around his outstretched hand and a flurry of tentacles spread towards the enemy at breakneck speed. The woman snorted and stepped out of the way of most of them, hand snapping out to grab a tentacle and tugging . The bespectacled mage fell forward and she lightly jumped over him, ignoring the fact he was already halfway through another incantation. She was coming for me, there were no two ways about it. Assassin? No, the bow would be out of character and if a Calamity had been after my head I would never have seen them coming.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She dashed forward and I grit my teeth. Talking was apparently not an option. I made as if to take a swing at her, but instead brought up my free hand: the spear of shadows coalesced almost instantly and tore in her direction. She sidestepped it with insulting ease, ducked under my sword stroke and socked me in the stomach. Before I was done wheezing in pain and surprise, I felt cool steel resting against my throat as she lightly put up the blade without drawing blood.

“Stop casting that web of lightning, love,” she spoke in perfect Lower Miezan. “We’re done here.”

“Are we?” I said calmly. “I’ve walked away from having my chest more or less split in half. If you think a slit throat is going to do the trick, I have a surprise for you.”

I was, of course, lying through my teeth. But if I’d learned anything about having a Name, it was that if you said anything confidently enough people usually took you seriously.

“Is that so?” the stranger laughed. “Good to know.”

She took away the blade from my throat, then sheathed it with flourish.

“I have to say I’m a little disappointed,” she continued. “Lady Ranger always speaks very highly of the Black Knight, but if I’d wanted everyone in this room dead you would be.”

I started in surprise.

“You’re...”

The woman lowered the linen covering her face, offering me a dashing smile.

“Archer,” she introduced herself. “As the mandated representative of the Lady of the Lake, I’ve come to take custody of Hunter.”

Chapter 25: Wake

“Only heroes get to have the torch handed to them. Villains must take it from their predecessor’s corpse.”
-Dread Empress Malicia, First of her Name

Morning Bell wouldn’t be sounding for another hour but I was already up and about. I’d long gotten used to seven hour nights and the occasional shorter rest when the Legion’s pace demanded it, but not even my Name was enough to tamp down the horrible weariness in my bones. It’d been a while since I’d taken a beating this bad: the only one I could recall that topped it was my first run-in with William. I was in no danger of ever forgetting that fight, or its aftermath. Pulled levers, and twenty-five Callowans died. I still felt a flash of anger at the memory, though the executions themselves did not trigger the worst of it. That role was shared between the Lone Swordsman for having meddled with my mind and Black for having Spoken at me. I’d grown to like my teacher more than I’d ever thought possible, but the denial of my free will was not something I would ever just get over .

The previous night I’d put off Archer’s initial request for the transfer of her colleague to be done immediately, not that she’d fought me very hard on the subject. After having made her initial impression she’d seemed pretty nonchalant about the task she’d been entrusted with. That was rather telling, though I lacked information to draw conclusions from it. The internal politics of Refuge were opaque to me, and everyone else for that matter. The one undeniable fact was that Ranger, formerly of the Calamities, ruled the city. And yet the polity was not aligned in any way with the Empire. It was considered a dwarven protectorate, if anything, though the Kingdom Under disliked making definitive commitments to anyone on the surface. I would have thought a independent city ruled by one of elven blood would have drawn the Golden Bloom’s attention, but that did not seem to be the case. Ranger herself might be a half-elf, but she’d not been spared by the elven lack of interest in anything going on outside their borders.

When I found the Lady of the Lake’s envoy, she was seated in a small anteroom close to where we were keeping Hunter, legs crossed as she sat in an armchair and chatted with an interested-looking Apprentice. The bow from last night was nowhere in sight and neither was the coat, leaving her in that pale mail. The dark linen that had covered her lower face had been turned into a makeshift scarf.

“- some of the Unseelie, though they’re careful about where they emerge. There are things in the woods not even the Fae would cross lightly,” Archer said, sipping at a cup.

I glanced at the contents, noting she was already on hard liquor. Gods, not even the Praesi like their drink this much. I’d myself broken my fast with a pot of tea and sweetened porridge I’d found already waiting when I’d emerged from my bed because Hakram was a living treasure.

“There must be several gates, then, spread across the Waning Woods,” Masego replied, tone enthusiastic. “Few of them have the ability to actually cross from Arcadia into Creation.”

“Squire,” the stranger of the two greeted me when I came in.

“Archer,” I replied. “Is that aragh in your cup?”

“It’s noon in Ashur,” she explained easily.

Masego frowned.

“No it isn’t.”

The ochre-skinned girl sighed.

“It’s an expression, love,” she told him.

“An inaccurate one,” the mage muttered under his breath, much to my amusement.

I cleared my throat.

“He has this thing about being exact,” I informed her.

Archer cast a sceptical eye on the mage, then shrugged.

“Us poor bastards raised by Calamities tend to pick up quirks, I’ve noticed,” she commented, then drained her glass. “That aside, I suppose I should get around to checking on Tinkles. Shall we proceed?”

I was about to agree when I processed what she’d just said.

“... Tinkles?” I prompted, smothering a grin.

Archer gestured towards her hair.

“It’s all those bells he wears for some reason,” she said. “Worse fashion choice than the tattoos, and that’s saying something.”

I snorted.

“There’s nothing wrong with ornamenting your hair,” Apprentice intervened defensively, fingering one of trinkets adorning his own dreadlocks.

“There is if you’re supposed to go around quiet-like,” Archer retorted, rolling her eyes. “Some Hunter he is.”

“He’s a regular devil with the spear, I’ll say that for the man,” I conceded.

“No one who studied under the Lady of the Lake would be allowed to leave Refuge if they couldn’t take care of themselves,” the envoy dismissed. “He’s still the weakest of her pupils by far.”

After last night’s lovely interlude, I had no problem buying that. Even if I’d been a functional cripple for the duration of the scuffle, she’d still handled Hakram and Masego like they were bumbling children.

“Let’s get to it, Apprentice,” I finally said. “Raising the spell shouldn’t be a problem, right?”

“No. It was designed with that in mind. Probably best we get to that sooner than later, anyhow,” the mage noted. “I’m not comfortable leaving any magical effects lying around when there’s a demon of corruption on the loose. Should they come in contact the effects could be... unpredictable.”

Archer’s eyes sharpened at the mention of the demon, though she passed no comment. Behind the drinking and the easy grins she didn’t miss much, this one. How much of the cheerful façade had been carefully crafted to make us underestimate her, I wondered? We stepped into the room where Hunter was being kept and I dismissed the tenth of guards that kept a weapon on the hero at all times. Normally it would have been a full line, but twenty legionaries just wouldn’t fit in the available space. The one-handed hero had been put on a bed, though that was as far as his comfort had been attended to. There were sets of bindings keeping his arms and legs tied together, not that they would have done much good if he were awake and trying to escape. I hadn’t needed Black’s tutelage to know that keeping heroes imprisoned rarely ended well for a villain.

“He doesn’t look in pain,” Archer noted.

“No reason he should be,” Masego replied.

The dark-skinned mage walked up to the sleeping hero and shoved a hand under the pillow his head was resting on, blindly groping for something. After a moment he took out a small sculpted rock covered in runes, crushing it effortlessly in his hand. I raised an eyebrow. That wasn’t strength, he hasn’t the brawn for that. He blew the dust on Hunter’s face and carefully lay a finger between the man’s eyes.

“Wake,” he ordered.

My brow raised higher. That hadn’t been Speaking, not exactly, but there had been power layered behind the word. Nothing happened. Archer cleared her throat.

“Is this going to take a while?” she asked. “Because there’s a bottle with my name on it in the other room.”

“Should be any moment now,” Masego replied.

It took maybe another thirty heartbeats before Hunter began to stir. He yawned, and I saw his muscles tense as he went to cover his mouth but found his arms had been bound. A moment later his entire body moved as if to reach for a weapon that wasn’t there, to the amusingly feeble result of him wiggling like a tied hog.

“Tinkles,” Archer barked. “Stop making a fool of yourself.”

Hunter’s eyes swept the room, immediately finding his colleague then moving on to glare at Masego and I.

“Archer,” he finally said. “What are you doing here?”

“Taking custody of you,” she grunted, unsheathing her longknife and and reaching for his binds.

I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, then spent a heartbeat surprised at the typically Praesi gesture coming from me. When had I picked that up?

“He’s not getting out of those before I have an oath he’s not gonna fight me and mine,” I stated flatly.

“He’s my responsibility now. If he does, I’ll put him down myself.”

“ Archer ,” the hero burst out. “She’s a villain .”

“She’s a villain who spared your sorry arse,” she spoke sharply. “So watch your bloody mouth. Your entire little stunt abroad has been an embarrassment to the Lady, John. Refuge is going to have to pay reparations to the Tower.”

“Lady Ranger is blinded by sentimentality in this,” Hunter bit back. “Callow deserves to be free, even if it’s run by her old friends.”

“Funny how William’s crew always talks about freedom,” I spoke softly. “Like it’s going to feed the country when Praes burns the whole place to the ground on the way out. Like those pretty words assure you a victory instead of a field of corpses from Dormer to Vale.”

“You are a traitor to your blood, Squire,” the Hunter sneered. “All you deserve is-“

Archer slapped him.

“I don’t give one damn what flag flies over Callow, John,” the Named said calmly. “And neither should you. You know what I do care about? Following Refuge’s only law. Remind me what that law is, Hunter?”

The hero looked mulish.

“I asked you a question. What is that law, Hunter ?” Archer repeated harshly.

“Whatever the Lady says goes,” he muttered.

“And what did Lady Ranger say about the Empire?” she prompted.

“Here there be monsters,” Hunter quoted. “Leave it alone.”

“But you didn’t leave it alone, did you? So you lost a hand and embarrassed us publicly. A shame you can’t tattoo yourself better life choices,” she continued cuttingly.

“They’re tribal,” Hunter defended himself.

“Lots of tribes in Vale’s merchant quarter, are there?” Archer said, rolling her eyes. “I’ve had tea with your parents, John. They’re drapiers, lovely old couple. The only thing they did wrong was switch you too infrequently.”

I was not above admitting to myself that I was finding this entire conversation delightful. A mocking grin tugged at my mouth, though I stayed out of it. For all that Archer was falling on him like a rockslide, he was still one of hers. Adding a few swings of my own might prompt retaliation.

“I officially surrender custody of him to you,” I contributed. “I suppose you’ll be taking him back to Refuge?”

“Eventually,” Archer agreed. “He’s to stand judgement before the Lady.”

“I did nothing wrong,” Hunter growled.

“I’d plan my defence better if I were you,” the woman snorted. “She’s already pissed she actually has to rule the city instead of leaving it to function on its own, so your case isn’t looking good.”

I hummed noncommittally.

“You’ll be staying in Marchford, then?”

Archer sighed. “Anybody ever tell you you’re not great at subtlety, love?”

“Arguably that’s her trademark,” Masego grinned. “That and setting things on fire.”

I shrugged. I’d never intended to dance around the subject: with what was coming, uncertainty about my guest was not something I could afford.

“We’ll be under attack in a matter of days,” I said. “I doubt devils or what’s left of the Silver Spears after the demon’s through with them will care about your diplomatic credentials.”

“A demon?” Hunter spoke, tone aghast. “Gods, Squire, what did you summon?”

“This wasn’t my doing,” I retorted sharply. “I’m just cleaning up the mess, and I’d rather not lose ten thousand innocents in the process. Apprentice and Adjutant can only do so much, and I’m still wounded. An additional Named might make the difference.”

“I’m not sure I could kill a demon,” Archer admitted.

I frowned. “You’re a villain? I’d assumed otherwise.”

“Not all Roles are so clear cut,” the stranger replied.

“Well, that explains everything,” I commented drily.

“If we’re still in the city when the assault comes, we’ll help,” Archer finally said.

“ We ?” Hunter spat.

“We,” the woman replied softly. “You need to consider very carefully whether you want to fight me on this, John. My patience is running thin.”

That muzzled him effectively enough.

“I’d appreciate it if you informed me if you intend to leave,” I told her. “If not, we’ll brief you before the fighting begins.”

“A briefing. How very formal,” Archer drawled. “Tell you what, love. Find us an empty room with a sturdy bed and you can debrief me all you want.”

I looked her up and down, a little surprised. She was pretty, that much was obvious now that her face was visible. Delicate features and beautiful eyes, not to mention she seemed to be hiding away very healthy curves under that mail. Maybe a year ago I would have taken her up on it, but things had changed since then.

“Flattered, but taken,” I said.

The ochre-skinned woman grinned the single naughtiest grin I’d ever seen, eyeing me up and down in turn.

“That doesn’t have to be a hindrance. The more the merrier,” she winked.

Well, she certainly didn’t lack for confidence.

“I’ll leave you to your heartfelt reunion,” I replied instead of humouring her. “Apprentice, we’re about due our meeting with Hakram.”

He nodded. “I’d like to pick your brains on a few things later, Archer,” he said.

“Sounds fun,” she dismissed.

He turned to follow me out of the room but paused and squeaked as he passed her by.

“She pinched my ass,” he told me in a bewildered tone.

Archer’s laughter followed us all the way out.

—

“It took most of the night, but we have the census you asked for,” Hakram announced, unrolling a thick leather parchment that presented a map of Marchford.

It was covered in red ink dots, which had the orphan in me twitching. Maps like this cost a fortune, and while this one had likely been looted from the Countess’ manor it was still ruining an outrageously expensive item.

“Hard numbers?” Masego asked.

“Under two thousand hearths,” the orc replied. “For further details I’ll wait on Kilian, since she supervised the effort.”

The redheaded Senior Mage entered the inn common room we’d commandeered a moment later, gracing me with a smile as she did. After the last few days I could honestly say I didn’t give a single fuck about decorum, so I crossed the distance between us in two strides and dipped her for a kiss. She was just a little taller than me, so this tended to work best when we weren’t... occupied on a bed. Or a table. Or once on the desk in Juniper’s office, when my legate had been late for a meeting. Her eyes flew open in surprise, but they closed with mine and within moments I had an armful of warm Kilian nestled against me.

“I’m glad to see you too, Cat,” she spoke breathlessly when we broke apart.

“Mhm,” I replied, eloquent as always.

Masego cleared his throat. “Yes, we’re all aware that’s going on. If we could attend the matter at hand?”

“Give them a moment, warlock’s get,” Hakram rumbled.

He was smiling softly at us, the sight made slightly horrifying by the sharp fangs displayed. Considering the trove of romance novels under his bunk I wasn’t supposed to know about, I wasn’t surprised. I shook myself out of my pleasant daze.

“Right. So hearths. We have a bunch of them lying around the city. Why is that important?” I asked.

“A hearth is the magical symbol of a home,” Kilian explained. “That has weight, in matters of sorcery.”

“The Senior Mage is correct,” Apprentice said. “Though it goes deeper than that. A home is a boundary – tales about vampires in the Wasteland being unable to pass a threshold are largely false, but they have a source of truth to them. Hearths are metaphysical anchors.”

“An anchor is meant to weigh something down,” Hakram grunted. “I was under the impression our problem was that we lacked the kind of power that would need one of those.”

“You’re thinking in terms of creating something,” Masego replied, sounding excited. “Which we will, to an extent, but that’s not the core of what we’re setting out to accomplish. What you have to keep in mind is that neither devils nor demons are born of Creation. They do not, on a basic level, belong here. That’s why they have to be summoned in the first place.”

I frowned.

“You’re implying that what keeps them out of Creation is essentially a threshold,” I guessed.

“Exactly,” Apprentice smiled.

“There are extensive records showing that devils are more sensitive to thresholds than any creature borne of Creation, and even the Fae,” Kilian said. “Demons are another matter, but theoretically the same reasoning applies.”

“The central tenet of diabolism as a magical discipline is that sufficiently strong bindings can force anything to obey your will,” Masego informed us. “Even demons, though that’s justly been compared to riding a tiger with a bridle made of straw.”

“So we can turn individual houses into strongholds that’ll keep devils out,” Hakram frowned. “That’s not enough for a coherent defence, Apprentice.”

“You’re thinking small, my friend,” the dark-skinned man replied cheerfully, pushing up his glasses. “I did say we were going to create something, did I not?”

I took in a sudden breath.

“You want to set up a threshold covering all of Marchford,” I grasped.

“A surprisingly accurate guess, for someone with no schooling in sorcery,” he approved.

“Just don’t talk magical theory at her, she’ll fall asleep faster than if she’d drunk a potion,” Kilian murmured.

“That was once,” I protested. “I’d had a long day.”

“Catherine’s stubborn ignorance aside,” Masego continued, ignoring my objections, “linking a sufficient amount of hearths through ritual would allow me to set up a threshold covering up to the city boundaries.”

“How many is sufficient?” Adjutant asked. “We’ll need local cooperation for that, and that’s a mixed bag at best.”

“Twenty-four,” Apprentice assessed. “We could link more, but we’d be trading power for precision.”

I did not think it a coincidence that the Twenty-Fourth Hell marked the transition from demons to devils.

“That’s a pattern,” I said. “What do you need to power it?”

“For the initial phase I’ll need half a dozen mages per hearth, and myself at the centre to guide the working,” Masego replied. “After that, we’ll need to keep a fire running in every hearth.”

“That sounds easy enough,” I frowned.

“This is not something we can afford to mishandle, Catherine,” the bespectacled mage replied. “A ritual is not a permanent ward, and the fires will be the component that allows it to keep functioning. If a single hearth stops burning for even a heartbeat, the entire ritual will collapse.”

“If it does,” Hakram asked quietly. “What happens to the magic that was in the ritual?”

“Every other hearth will blow up and devour everything within thirty yards, at least,” Masego admitted. “I could have made this more stable given time, but slapping together a ritual at the last moment always carries certain issues.”

I remained silent, clenching my fingers and unclenching them.

“And this threshold will keep the devils out?” I asked.

“Yes,” he agreed, meeting my eyes squarely.

“Then do it,” I ordered. “But I want you to leave one part of the city uncovered.”

I traced a rectangle with my finger on the city map, facing the hills where the demon dwelled.

“I’ll need more mages to set up artificial boundaries, but it can be done,” Masego frowned. “May I ask why?”

I half-smiled. “You ever read the “Commentaries on the Campaigns of Dread Emperor Terribilis the Second”?”

Hakram let out a chuckle.

“Armies are like water,” the tall orc quoted. “They take the path of least resistance.”

“That’s our killing alley,” I grunted. “It’s where they’ll attack, and it’s where we’ll bleed them.”

Apprentice’s eyes glittered with something like savage joy. “I think I can do a little better than that, actually. I’ll need to run the numbers first, so we can discuss it later.”

I nodded.

“There’s one last matter,” I said.

There was no sign of surprise from anyone at the table, which got a raised eyebrow from me.

“You’ve been looking like you’re sitting on something,” Hakram said.

Huh. I’d need to work on that, it was something of a liability.

“When you first met Hakram, you could tell he was about to come into a Name,” I told Masego.

“My glasses have several enchantments on them,” he explained. “Father’s work.”

“And what do those enchantments tell you when you look at me?”

“That you’re on the edge of your third aspect,” Apprentice replied.

“I thought as much,” I grunted. “But I can’t afford to wait around for it. Black did this thing, in Laure, that had me go into a lucid dream.”

“Ah, that ,” Masego grimaced. “Yes, I could trigger the epiphany early. I would not recommend that, however. It’s one thing to give a Name an early start, another to force an aspect. It will be weaker than if you’d waited for it to coalesce in due time.”

“Last time I fought the devils, I broke an arm and leg,” I said. “The demon will be in a whole other class. I doesn’t matter if I’m weaker in the long term if I don’t get to the long term.”

“There are risks, Catherine,” the mage cautioned me. “If we’re already being affected by the corruption, a failure in your dream could be nothing short of disastrous.”

“I beat odds, Masego,” I replied honestly. “It’s what I do. It’s the talent that got me this Name in the first place.”

The bespectacled mage stirred.

“That kind of talk,” he spoke softly,” has me worried.”

“Our life isn’t for the faint-hearted,” I reminded him.

“Risk doesn’t worry me unduly,” he replied patiently. “But this isn’t a villain’s risk. Charging in without a plan and trusting your power to see you through is how heroes operate. Villains wait, accumulate power and engage when it is most advantageous to them. Otherwise we lose. ”

“If we tread carefully now, if we turn timid, we’ve lost,” I said. “Make no mistake, Masego: as things are now, we are fucked . We still have the numbers on our side, but not by much – and we’re facing a creature that makes a mockery of the kind of warfare we’re trained in. If we don’t grasp for every advantage in reach, we’ll die. And not the pretty, noble kind of death. Our corpses will be puppet for an abomination that’ll try to spread across the surface of Creation before enough people step in to kill it.”

“Disperse it,” he replied automatically. “I’m not saying I won’t do it, Catherine. But this is reckless.”

I passed a hand through my hair. “I know. Believe me, I know. But we’re running out of cards, and the enemy hasn’t even shown half their hand.”

He sighed. “Fine.”

“I know you don’t have a sword,” I said. “So you can use mine.”

He blinked. “A sword ? Why would I need that?”

“To... stab me?” I spoke hesitantly.

“Uncle Amadeus just ran you through with his,” Masego guessed, morbidly fascinated.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “He didn’t need to do that, did he?”

“Just physical touch from another Named is enough,” he snorted. “Gods, he’s always so melodramatic.”

“Tell me about it,” I muttered.

I glanced at Kilian, whose face was lined with worry. There was something heart-warmingly straightforward about that. There was no complication there, no myriad of different interests and loyalties at play. The longer we stayed together, the more I found that attractive about her. I still wasn’t in love with her, and to be honest I didn’t know if I’d ever be. But she was a... companion. Someone I was comfortable spending time with, trusting my secrets to.

“I suppose it’d be too much to ask you to be careful,” the redhead said.

“Wrong girl for that, I’m afraid,” I smiled.

She let out a long breath and rested her chin on my shoulder. Lightly she kissed the side of my neck and stepped away.

“Try not to get yourself killed, at least,” she commanded.

“Centrepiece of my plan,” I informed her, then stole a quick kiss.

I turned to Apprentice.

“All right, Masego,” I spoke. “Let’s get-“

The last thing I saw was an index finger headed for my forehead before darkness took me.

Chapter 26: Seek

“A villain should make plans with the understanding that everything you can conceive of going wrong will, and then a few others things too.”
– Dread Empress Regalia

I hit the ground with a thump and half a dozen yelled curses. My fall threw up a cloud of what looked like dark dust, thick and cloying. I groaned and rolled over, wincing since apparently going into a Name dream wasn’t enough to make my leg not feel like it had gone a few rounds with an angry ogre. Rubbing the dust out my eyes, I took a look above: cloudy skies as far as I could see, dark and roiling things. The way clouds got just before a storm. I managed to push myself back on my feet with only minimum urge to scream, getting my bearings as I caught my breath. I was surrounded, it seemed, by an endless wasteland of ash and dust.

“I’m honestly not sure whether or not that’s an improvement over the swamp,” I grimaced.

Last time there’d been landmarks of a sort, a sort of reverse tower where Good Twin had been keeping her smug ass on a chair. Now, though? No sign of a structure in sight. A breeze like a warm breath blew across the plain, shifting dunes of ash and dust in ever-changing patterns. Save for that eerie murmur, there was not a sound to be heard. I checked my belt and saw that my sword was still at my side, already an improvement over last time.

My armour, on the other hand, was noticeably less well-maintained. Black had mentioned to me once that Roles reacted to the way you thought of your Name rather than what you truly were. Heroes were strikingly handsome and heroines wholesomely beautiful because that was how they expected to look. On the other side, good-looking villains could turn ugly in a matter of months if they thought of their Name as a brute’s. On others, the effect was subtler. Warlock was said to have stopped aging in the prime of his life, Malicia at the peak of her beauty and my teacher hadn’t changed one speck since the day he’d become the Black Knight.

What I thought of myself through the lens of my Name did not seem much different from the way I’d always been. It did, however, seem to include slightly unkempt armour – maybe that’d change if I stopped allowing Hakram to arrange have it polished for me. I would have checked under my aketon to see if the long scar William had gifted me on our first meeting still snaked across my chest, but that would have required unfastening my armour. Not worth the trouble, I decided. I’d expected for something to have happened by now, anything really, but this vision was determined to be a boring one. I sighed and headed north through the wasteland, picking the direction at random.

My pace was slow but steady, the throbbing in my leg never quite going away. How long I walked I couldn’t say: it could have been hours or days. Nothing changed here, not in any meaningful way, and the longer I headed north the more I became uneasy. I’d been out of it for days, last time, and though I did not think forcing an aspect this close to manifestation would take as long I couldn’t afford to be out of commission for that long. Masego had mentioned the demon might be able to interfere and though I was confident I could take it on inside my own soul, it occurred to me there might be no fight at all coming.

Maybe it would just keep me asleep while Marchford burned, until one of its devils ripped my throat open.

I shivered even though my forehead was matted with sweat. Demons were not supposed to be thinking creatures, not the way mortals and older devils were. They could mimic speech, the way the... thing that served as the Tower’s gatekeeper had, but it was only ever mimicry. They were not born of Creation, and so all that sprang from it was beyond them – or so said the House of Light. Theirs was an intelligence we had no understanding of, as they lacked understanding of us. That was always what unmasked them, in the stories: a missed detail, a small error springing from their inability to truly grasp what it was to be alive. The thoughts kept me company on my lonely trek, and though I knew it was paranoia to believe that growing fear had been planted in me I had to wonder... was that what it wanted me to think?

The first break in the sinister monotony came not as an interruption, per se. Scaling a dune of ash, I noticed there was something buried near the tip of it. A scrap of leather, looked like, warped as if by great heat. Keeping a prudent hand on my sword, I scattered the dust around it. Not a scrap, a boot. With a leg still attached to it. I started digging in earnest, unearthing what appeared to be a man’s corpse. The flesh and armour were melted badly, but I would recognize the silver scale anywhere: this had been a man-at-arms, one of the Silver Spears. I looked up to the sky with a frown.

“Giant graveyard, is it?” I sighed. “There better not be bloody zombies again.”

I moved on after hacking the limbs away just in case. That first finding seemed to have been the droplet to tip over the vase, because I now found a dead body every few moments. Silver Spears at first, men-at-arms and cataphracts forever riding their butchered mounts under the ash, but eventually I started coming across legionaries. Men and women of the Twelfth, who’d died when I’d thwarted the Lone Swordsman in Summerholm. By the time I stumbled on the first of mine, I’d steeled myself for it. A Soninke girl, her corpse not quite desiccated enough to hide the sword wound that had split her head in half. My fingers formed a fist and I ground my teeth.

“I walked the battlefield when the blood was still fresh,” I told the sky. “I did not flinch then. Do you really think I’ll flinch now?”

There was no answer, not that I’d expected one. I pressed on. It shouldn’t have surprised me but it did, when I found Nilin’s corpse. No flesh remained and the bones had been blackened as on his pyre, but the senior tribune’s markings on his armour betrayed his identity. The Exiled Prince and Page lay in front of him, the bones of their hands threaded together in a morbid embrace.

“I know it was my fault,” I admitted. “I take responsibility for it, even if no one is casting the blame in my direction. And yet...”

“Oh, we’ll even that score soon enough,” someone replied.

The ash under my feet erupted and the thin point of sword nearly ran through my throat – I stumbled away, already on the back foot, and my sword came out with a metallic ring. My doppelganger sat with a smug grin in the dust where she’d apparently half-buried herself waiting for me. This one was a familiar sight. An older version of me, with a pink scar running across the nose and a face hardened by years of war. She wore a regular’s chain mail instead of my own plate, her standard-issue sword glinting in the gloom even when covered in ash.

“I had a feeling I’d run into you at some point,” I grunted. “I have a feeling stabbing you again will be the most pleasant part of this little jaunt.”

Her grin widened and she shook off the dust as she rose to her feet.

“No need for any of that, Cat,” she denied. “We’re buddies now. I kinda like what you’ve done with the place.”

“You would,” I muttered. “You also said we wouldn’t fight last time and look how that ended.”

Not to mention you just tried to stab me in the throat , I thought but didn’t bother saying. Rubies to piglets she’d have a ready-made excuse.

“Things have changed, Cat my girl,” she told me. “Thought you lacked the stomach, but you’ve been nailing it. We got a legion, a nice bunch of competent minions and we’re building up a body count. Should have found a pretext to run Heiress through by now, but nobody’s perfect.”

She paused.

“Except me,” she conceded. “I am perfect.”

I wished I’d looted a boot off a corpse, if only so I could throw it at her head.

“They’re not my minions,” I replied through gritted teeth. “They’re my friends.”

“The Calamities are living proof you can be both,” the doppelganger dismissed, then leaned forward. “But before you go all righteous on me, sweetcheeks, answer me this: if you asked Nauk to rip out some noble’s throat, would he even stop to think before obeying?”

He wouldn’t. I knew that. She knew I knew that. Hakram might ask me why afterwards, given the same order, but Nauk? He’d laugh and forget it had ever happened before the month was done.

“I wouldn’t ask,” I replied instead.

“You will,” the spirit smiled, the certainty in her troubling. “That’s the beauty of this greater good business you’ve been peddling. You can justify anything, if the final outcome’s nice enough.”

She waved around her sword, warming up to the subject.

“Heroes might spawn from this orphanage and make a big mess, so we burn it. Those nobles might be trouble down the line, so we poison the wine. That officer will be a liability when I commit treason, so in the worst of the fight she goes.”

“I haven’t done any of those things,” I retorted. “You’re just pushing my position to extremes and pretending that’s the rules I obey.”

“I can’t help unless I’m higher up in the ranks, so I engineer a war,” my twin said softly. “Extremes? I’m just getting us to the logical conclusion. Don’t get me wrong, Cat, I’m on board with this greater good wagon you’re driving. I just want us to stop pussyfooting around and get some real changes going.”

“It won’t get to that,” I snarled. “I won’t let it get to that.”

The doppelganger lightly rested the flat of her sword against her shoulder.

“See, this is the kind of thinking that’s holding us back,” she complained. “We’re not the good guys here, Cat. Let’s just... stop pretending, why don’t we? We’re the girl that sees something that needs to be done, so we do it the best we can. If that means a few thousand people die?”

She shrugged.

“Well, people die all the time,” she said. “Can’t make an omelette without burning a few armies, sacking the villages they came from and salting the land that spawned them.”

“The entire point of this,” I replied coldly, “is to avoid putting Callow to the torch. If I didn’t care about the state of the country in twenty years, I’d be with the Swordsman waving a rebel flag.”

“Callow burns, sweetheart,” she laughed. “That’s what it does . It burned whenever the Empire came knocking at Summerholm, it burned whenever the First Prince decided it was time to expand the borders. We’re the battlefield of this continent. Hells, the only time the Kingdom wasn’t putting out fires was when we were starting some of our own on the other side of the border.”

“That’s why we pay taxes to the Tower now,” I said. “The war doesn’t end until someone won and there’s no real way to beat Praes for good. They tried it, after the Second Crusade, and gave birth to Dread Emperor Terribilis instead. So they win and they rule Callow. Now I just make that rule work and we finally break the godsdamned cycle. No more invasions. No more villages put to the sword so that a different flag waves over Laure.”

“And you think the rest of Calernia is just going to take that?” the twin laughed. “No, we don’t get off that easy. Nobody wants Praes with a granary, Cat. Hiding behind the mountains and fortifying the Vales just buys everyone a few years until the armies are mustered and the dance begins again.”

“And what’s your solution?” I mocked. “Let’s kill everything that looks like it could be a liability and hope it turns out for the best?”

“I already told you how we stop the fires in our backyard,” the spirit smiled. “ We cross the Vales, with a torch in hand. If everyone else is running from the blaze they’re not making trouble for us.”

This is why Evil loses , I realized. By overreaching, by thinking you could put all of Calernia on the the defensive and not be buried by the backlash. There had to be a middle way, one between fighting the Praesi and allowing them to plunder Callow. Black understood this, I knew. He’d marginalized the nobles of the former Kingdom and gone to work on the people themselves, tried to remove any reason for rebellion rather than crush those that formed. I couldn’t change Callow, I knew that deep down. I wasn’t sure I should. But I could change the system that ruled over it, one victory at a time.

“Where’s the other one?” I asked.

“Good Twin died in a tragic accident,” the doppelganger informed me. “Her tombstone’s over there.”

I warily cast an eye where she was pointing, noting there was an actual tombstone. Of sorts. Someone had taken a legionary’s breastplate and sunk it into the ground as a marker. My Name vision worked just fine, so I could make out the inscription on the metal.

“I mouthed off,” I read, then sighed. “Did you murder her?”

“Calumny,” the doppelganger protested, deeply offended. “She died of natural causes.”

I frowned. “Is that the name of your sword?”

The doppelganger gave me a shit-eating grin. “Allegedly.”

“Can anything die a permanent death here?” I asked.

“Eh, who even knows,” the twin shrugged. “If you listen closely, though, you can still hear her spirit whining in the wind.”

I tried to listen if only out of morbid curiosity. There was, to my surprise, a noise coming from the tombstone. The breastplate shuddered, then tipped over. A figure emerged, to the dramatic gasping of my current company. Once more an older version of me came into sight, her short hair and once-pristine white robes now marred by ash and dust.

“A zombie,” the evil doppelganger announced. “Quick, kill it before it devours us!”

“You bitch ,” the newcomer gasped, glaring at the wretched spirit. “ You buried me alive .”

“Are any of us here really alive, though?” the other deflected, affecting a thinking pose.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. No wonder I ended up in over my head all the time, if this was what the inside of my soul was like.

“Your squabbles are of no interest to me,” I informed them. “I’m here for my third aspect. I don’t suppose either of you can point me in the right direction?”

“Ah,” the evil twin grimaced. “Bit of a problem there.”

The good doppelganger rose from her grave, dusting herself off angrily.

“You are reaping what you have sown, Catherine Foundling,” she barked. “Selling your soul to Hellgods attracts their like.”

“We have a squatter is what she means,” the other contributed.

“Fucking Hells,” I cursed.

“Exactly,” the white-robed twin agreed tartly.

My fingers tightened against the grip of my sword.

“You’re saying it’s inside my soul?” I asked.

“We were real close to that third aspect,” the scarred doppelganger noted. “Now it’s sitting between us and it.”

Asking how that was possible seemed more trouble than it was worth, so I held my tongue. I was not in the mood for a lecture or another flippant answer.

I cocked my head to the side. “So you know what it is?”

“ Lame is what it is,” the evil twin muttered.

“A sign you may not yet be beyond hope,” the other one countered. “It is –“

SEEK.

What I heard did not come out of the white-robed girl’s mouth. The word coiled through my veins and I fell to my knees, retching drily into the ash. Something was smiling at me, just beyond the edge of my vision. Both of the spirits had gone pale and shivering.

“What was that?” I whispered hoarsely.

“You know what it was,” the white-robed doppelganger murmured back, helping me up to my feet.

For the life of me, I could not manage a reply. I felt... soiled, like I’d been dipped in filth until it had seeped into my skin and permeated even my bones.

“And you just let that thing be?” I croaked.

“Not a fight we can win,” the other one admitted. “It’s been giving it a shot, though. Your Name.”

My head swivelled in her direction.

“You mean?”

“You’re fond of that little metaphor comparing it to a beast, aren’t you?” the evil twin smiled grimly.

“Roles are bound by perception,” the white-robed one said. “Though the shape you have given your power is deplorable, I will not deny it has a certain martial might.”

The scarred doppelganger walked up to me, colour slowly returning to her cheeks. She patted some dust off my shoulders then clapped me on the back.

“Show that bastard the door, Cat,” she ordered. “Then wake up and give that hot redhead a good seeing to, would you? Of all the things we’ve been nailing lately, she’s definitely top of the list.”

I slapped away her hand.

“The day I need a pep talk from you is the day I retire,” I grunted.

Shit, how bad was this demon for even that backstabbing pain in my ass to be trying to be encouraging?

“Oh?” she mocked, “are we-“

The breastplate impacted the back of her head brutally, knocking her to the ground.

“That,” the good twin snarled, “was for burying me alive .”

The other doppelganger did not even stir. I raised an eyebrow at her, reluctantly impressed.

“Go,” she said tiredly. “That creature plaguing us is worse than what even Evil can muster. You do the work of the Heavens in ridding us of it, however unwillingly.”

I rolled my eyes but the memory of the way it had spoken to me was too fresh for me to make an issue of this. I had more pressing business, regardless. By the time I’d made it to top of the nearest ash dune there was no trace of either of them: my surroundings had shifted, wiping it all way. And yet I was not alone. Something was following me, large footsteps creaking against the ash as the beast stalked me. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. This is my Name. I own it, it does not own me.

“ Come out ,” I Spoke.

There was a mocking huff of laughter but the beast strode out of its hiding place. I’d wondered what my Role would look like, given flesh, and now I had my answer. No fur and bones for my monster, only the shifting shadows I’d learned to craft spears out of. It must have been the size of a barn but it moved with deceptive swiftness, coiling around me in an instant. It opened jaw larger than my head, ivory fangs clicking just in front of my nose to see if I’d flinch. Its breath was cold, like the bite of the wind in winter. I stilled the fear that set my heart beating and forced myself to meet its eyes. Darker shadows, the difference between shade and the deepest of night.

“I’m not afraid of you,” I lied.

The jaws opened again and in a flash the teeth were closing around my neck. My fingers turned white against the grip of my sword, but I did not flinch. Satisfied, the beast drew back. It stalked away from and shook itself, heading north without another look. Silently, I followed after wiping the beads of blood where the teeth had pierced my skin. It was not long until we found it. It sat alone on a dune, looking at the sky. It looked, I thought, like a child’s drawing of a person. Pink naked hairless flesh from its toeless feet to the crown of its head, where I shuddered at what I saw. If it had been tentacles or horns I might have simply thought it a monster and dealt with the fear, but it was neither. Just darkly coloured flesh, cut into smaller threads as a sordid parody of hair and perfectly combed. It did not turn when we approached. It did not breathe. The beast howled and I drew my sword, and only then did it deign to glance in our direction.

I wished it hadn’t.

Its lips were sealed, made of the same fleshy growth, and its nose did not have nostrils. Its eyebrows were nothing more than dark ridges but the eyes were the worst. Holes in tightened flesh, empty. I took a step forward, the beast following. The moment I set foot on the ash dune something clicked.

“Seek,” I spoke, before it could.

My mind unspooled as I snatched away my aspect, filling with information I should not have known. I knew the exact height of the dune. I knew how many steps would take me to the demon, how I needed to balance my weight to avoid worsening my leg. The flow of knowledge was too great, like I’d opened a floodgate, so I forced it to narrow. This was the aspect I’d been looking for, something beyond the brute equalizer I’d been relying on. A pathfinder to craft solutions, and I knew my first use for it.

How do I get the demon out of my soul?

The thread narrowed, then exploded into paths. My mind followed them down eagerly. And one by one, they stopped. Hit a wall. The creature’s lips twitched up and down, its attempt at a smile. It reached for me. My beast sprung forward with a snarl but it was late, too late.

MINE.

I woke up screaming, strapped to a bed.

Chapter 27: Cut

“The worst sin a villain can commit is to hesitate.”
-Dread Empress Maleficent II

“She’s awake,” an orc’s voice said.

I recognized it. Male. Adjutant. Trustworthy.

“Take another step and I’ll activate the wards on you,” someone barked.

Spoken Mtethwa. Soninke, the son of Warlock. Apprentice.

“Masego-“

“That may not be Catherine looking through those eyes,” the second voice hissed.

Light flared and I screamed again. Bindings on my legs and wrists, but not made of rope. Roiling blue sorcery, burning into my skin.

“You’re hurting her,” Adjutant growled.

Angry. He sounded tall and angry, ready for violence.

“Shut up,” Apprentice snarled. “Diagnostic spells are complicated enough without – fale’ibashe. ”

I laughed, or sobbed. I’d never heard this man swear in Mthetwa before.

“She’s still her. But it got to her third aspect,” the Soninke whispered hoarsely. “We have to...”

“What?” Adjutant pressed. “Do what?”

“I don’t know,” Apprentice bit out. “The corruption is spreading.”

“So stop it,” the orc barked. “ Now .”

“It’s not that simple, it’s rooted in the aspect,” the mage replied.

“So rip out the godsdamned aspect,” Adjutant ordered, thundering.

I could hear something beyond them, faintly. Like a song. I’d heard it before, I knew that. Where was it from?

“I’d be mutilating her soul,” the Soninke spoke, sounding sick. “She could die.”

Oh, Apprentice. So delicate. Why was he with us? I still wasn’t sure. The song was getting easier to make out. There were words, and if I just listened right I could –

“Gods Below, Apprentice, if you don’t get started right now I will not answer for my actions,” the orc said.

Troubled, he was troubled. But a word was spoken that was like an order unto Creation and I slept.

—

There was something missing.

Before I ever opened my eyes, I knew this as well as I knew my own breath. I was no longer tied to the bed, or even in the same room. This was not the manor, everything was too small and the wooden walls were shoddy. There was a window, its painted shutters left open. Night had yet to fall but the sky was full of clouds, as they had been in my dream. This did not feel like a coincidence and I shivered, feeling nauseous. The door to my left swung wide a moment later, Apprentice absently waving a hand and snuffing out a rune I hadn’t noticed lighting up on the bedside table.

“Catherine,” he said, tone hesitant.

“Masego,” I frowned.

Relief took over his face and he hurried to my bedside. His hair was a mess, without most of the trinkets usually in it, and his eyes were red like he hadn’t gotten to sleep in too long.

“Lay back,” he ordered, and I deigned to obey.

I’d dealt with healers before, and their presumptuousness was usually there for the patient’s sake. At least this one didn’t drink, unlike the man I’d had to rely on at the Pit. His hands were soft but sure as he inspected my wrists, grimacing at the sight of the healing burns on them. They throbbed dimly, though not as much as William’s gift of a scar did on bad days.

“It’s not as bad as I thought,” Apprentice said, keeping one of my pupils open with one hand and passing a finger wreathed in flame in front of the eye with the other. “Your eyesight is unaffected and the discoloration I’ll be able to fix, with the proper ritual.”

“Discoloration?” I repeated weakly.

There was a strange taste in my mouth, and not the kind you got after a long sleep. Someone had fed me a potion. Everything still felt hazy. Masego paused, smothering the flame and taking his hand out of my sight.

“I’m sorry, Catherine,” he said. “Burning out the contamination was harder than I thought. Some of the... effects may be permanent.”

“I feel fine,” I protested.

“I know,” he acknowledged. “And I’ve been pushing a needle into your cheek for the last twenty heartbeats.”

I jerked away my head, watching a small sliver of metal fly away and land on the floor.

“I- I didn’t,” I began, not sure what to say.

“It only affects the left side of your face,” he explained, and I could feel him make an effort to be dispassionate.

I appreciated that more than I could put into words. I felt like I was walking on the edge of a precipice, and even the slightest show of emotion might tip me over.

“Your right leg,” he said, walking around the bed and gently pulling away the covers after I nodded my permission. Someone had put me into soft cotton trousers at some point. “Try to kick with it.”

I broke into a hiss of pain hallway through. A shadow passed through Masego’s eyes, gone as quickly as it had come.

“The limb remains mostly functional, and I’ll brew you something for the pain,” he said. “But you’ll have a limp for the rest of your life.”

“The necrotized flesh,” I guessed.

The dark-skinned mage looked away.

“If I’d begun to work on containment quicker, you’d still have full functionality,” he admitted, ashamed.

I closed my eyes. Every inch of me wanted to lash out at him right now. Slowly I took in a breath, then let it out.

“You saved my life,” I said.

He looked pained.

“Catherine, I-“

“Masego,” I interrupted. “You’ve known Black much longer than I have. If he knew I’d been corrupted by a demon, what would he do?”

The bespectacled man let his fingers ball into a fist.

“He’d kill you,” he said softly. “Immediately, without warning, and destroy the corpse. He would then quarantine everyone you’d come in contact with and do the same to anyone affected, however slightly.”

“And he’d be right to do so,” I whispered.

I let a long moment pass, which he seemed unable or unwilling to break. Several times he opened his mouth, then closed it. I scrambled for whatever little strength I had left in me and steeled myself.

“Tell me,” I ordered. “Tell me why I feel like I’m missing a limb I’ve never had.”

The dark-skinned man bit his lip.

“I operated on your soul,” he said. “The aspect that got corrupted needed to be cut out, or it would continue to spread.”

I forced my hands to stop shaking.

“It’s gone, the entire thing?”

“And some other parts of your soul,” he admitted. “I did not have the right tools to be entirely precise.”

I smiled bitterly. My body was already a mangled mess, even if mage healing had seen to it precious few scars showed. Now it seemed my very soul was following suit. I wondered what would happen if they buried me in consecrated grounds after my death. The thought sent a fresh shiver of fear down my spine: tinkering with a soul in any way was blasphemy of the highest order.

“No replacement will grow, will it?” I asked softly.

“The Name of Squire is permanently crippled,” he replied just as quietly.

I looked away, through the window. The clouds were roiling, just like the magic that had bound my wrists when I’d been screaming. I forced a smile on my face.

“I suppose I’ll have to do with two aspects, then,” I told him.

Masego’s face was unreadable, and for a long moment he remained silent.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” he finally said. “I was raised by a villain. I know we’re not untouchable. We bleed. We cry.”

“I can’t afford either of those,” I replied, keeping my tone calm. “I don’t have the time for it.”

“I don’t think you can afford not to. Not anymore,” Apprentice said.

“Black-“ I started.

“Wept, when he buried his parents,” Masego interrupted me gently. “Father was there, so I know.”

“ I am not weak ,” I snarled, the words escaping me against my will, and my fist broke the bedside table into kindling.

He did not flinch.

“It’s not a weakness, to acknowledge when you’ve been hurt,” the bespectacled man replied. “We all have to stop sometimes. Roles don’t make us more than human, Catherine. They just give us powers and responsibilities.”

He was speaking from the heart, and maybe that was why I didn’t ram my fist into his face. He was too genuine to be trying to hurt me, at least wilfully. The anger drained out of me, and the strength it had brought followed.

“I can’t stop,” I replied tiredly. “I owe people better than that. Gods, Masego, not even two years out of Laure and I have enough dead on my conscience to fill a dozen graveyards. I can’t let it be meaningless. I can’t lose .”

To my shame and fury, tears were welling up in my eyes. Like I was a bloody child with a scraped knee. My own body was betraying me, with trembling hands and a throat that wouldn’t stop choking up. And now there was fear in me, because of that stark reminder that there were things that cared nothing for how beyond reach a Name was supposed to make me.

“When you came back from trying to rescue the wounded,” Apprentice said. “I expected you to be in shock. Devils are some of the most horrifying creatures to ever be born of Creation and you’d just seen them slaughter hundreds of your men.”

“I pulled through then,” I muttered angrily, “and I’ll pull through now.”

Masego sighed.

“I was honestly more worried about you when you started bantering with Hakram than when you came in barely able to walk,” he admitted. “People don’t just walk off that kind of experience, Catherine, not even those with Names.”

“I do,” I spoke through gritted teeth.

The mage slowly rose to his feet, then looked at me sadly.

“I shouldn’t have to tell you how dangerous it is, for a villain to lie to themselves,” he replied, and left me to my thoughts.

The words lingered in the room long after he’d left.

—

I wasn’t supposed to leave the room, I learned.

Whatever it was Masego had done to my soul, it had left it vulnerable. The wards on the bedroom where I was kept it safe from outside influences, but until dawn tomorrow I could not wander. Visitors were allowed, but only one at a time. Hakram came first, with reports and some of my personal effects.

“Apprentice’s ritual worked,” the orc told me. “The boundaries were set and we’re preparing defences for when the enemy comes. Juniper went over the reports from your encounter with the devils, and she’s cooked up some countermeasures with Pickler’s help.”

“And the city?” I asked.

“It’s been quiet,” he grunted. “The sky has people afraid to come out, and we’ve found few volunteers to join the defences. Ratface managed to dig up a few mages, but there’s less than twenty in total and most wouldn’t qualify for legion service.”

“They have to be watched over,” I said. “The firefly devils make them a liability. Has there been any sign of them or the Silver Spears?”

“Our scouts have seen a few devils, but they’re staying away for now. There’s a watch set up to keep an eye on the hills, so the moment the Spears come out we’ll know.”

“It’ll be soon,” I murmured.

“The Hellhound agrees,” Adjutant gravelled. “Two days at most.”

“I’ll be back in fighting shape by then,” I said.

Hakram paused, then licked his lips.

“Will you?” he asked. “There’d be no shame in sitting this one out, Cat. You’re still recovering.”

“I will not sit pretty in this fucking room while the city is under attack,” I growled.

Adjutant raised a hand in appeasement.

“If you say you’ll be in fighting shape, you’ll be in fighting shape,” he replied.

We talked for a little while longer, then he rose.

“I’d stay, but I have duties,” he gravelled. “I’ll leave the reports with you. Send a runner if you need anything.”

I waved him away pleasantly, keeping my dismay off my face. I knew everything was in good hands – if anyone could prepare Marchford for what was coming, it was Juniper – but I could not quell the feeling that this entire situation was slipping out of my grasp. The bundle of parchments was full of logistics and schedules, and though I knew it was important stuff my mind refused to focus on it. I eventually set them aside and lay back on the bed, looking at the ceiling. I was still staring at the wooden panels, thinking of nothing, when Kilian came in.

“Cat,” she breathed, and before I could blink I had a lapful of redhead in my arms.

I let my face rest against the crook of her neck and basked in the warmth.

“Kilian,” I replied belatedly.

For the first time today I felt the ever-present tremor in my arms cease.

“I was worried,” the mage said. “I mean, obviously I was worried but...”

“Yeah,” I spoke quietly. “I get it.”

There’d always been a chance that a sliver of what made me Catherine Foundling would be gone, by the time Masego was done. I still wasn’t sure there wasn’t, and the notion definitely wasn’t going to help me sleep at night. If there was something missing, would I notice? Could I notice? The feeling that something was missing had yet to abate. Maybe it never would. Kilian wiggled a little out of my grasp, and to my surprise I found I’d been clutching at her like she was a lifeline. She kissed my forehead gently, and then her lips were on mine. My blood heated up in the best way and I found my hands reaching for the small of her back under her tunic, stroking the soft skin and then greedily going for lower. She let out a small sound of pleasure, then lightly bit the side of my neck with an impish smile.

“Are you sure your body can handle that?” she asked, with more than a little lust in her eyes.

“Only one way to find out,” I replied, and tipped her under me in the bed.

There was precious little talking after that.

—

We lay together afterwards, more intertwined than not.

It’d been a while since we’d had the time to just bask in the afterglow, without any pressing need to get anything done afterwards. She wasn’t due for a meeting for another bell, she’d told me. My body felt sore but for once it was a pleasant sort of soreness: I lazily reached for my shirt, which had at some point ended up in the kindling I’d made of the former bedside table.

“You don’t need to hide it, you know,” Kilian murmured, tracing the red scar across my chest with a finger.

That got a pleasurable shiver out of me, but I put on the shirt nonetheless.

“I don’t like to leave it out in the open,” I admitted.

“Orcs have it right about scars, I think,” the redheaded mage said. “They’re a reminder that you were strong enough to survive, not a mark of shame.”

“Doesn’t make it any prettier to look at,” I replied.

“Makes you different,” Kilian told me. “That’s not a bad thing.”

I ran a hand up her ribs, then allowed a finger to trace where the same scar would be on her. My lover shuddered, eyes fluttering but never quite closing. Now if she bit her lip after that, it meant we were about to go for a second round. I’d learned to recognize that sign very quickly, given the benefits picking up on it gave. Instead she moved a little closer to me, and I was only half-disappointed: strenuous exercise was still difficult, and strenuous was the least of adjectives I’d grant to spending time in bed with Kilian.

“You’re trembling again,” she noted quietly.

I moved away, but she grasped my shoulder and held me back.

“It’s all right,” she whispered.

She smiled gently.

“I’m afraid,” she admitted.

That was the way it always went with her. She never shied away from speaking her own weaknesses, just to make me comfortable with acknowledging mine. I loved that about her, even if I didn’t quite love her.

“We’re in a bad situation,” she continued. “And you’ve seen it up close, unlike me.”

I let myself come close to her again, putting an arm over her stomach and slipping another under her.

“It’s bad,” I agreed softly. “And I don’t know how we’re going to get out of it.”

Her hand came up to stroke the side of my cheek, and though I saw it there was no feeling from the side of my face. I felt my throat choke up.

“It’s that side, then,” she murmured with a frown.

She didn’t stop, though she moved her fingers further down to my neck.

“You’re soothing me like I would a horse,” I muttered with a snort.

“You don’t have to save us every time, Cat,” she told me, ignoring my attempt to change the subject. “We can help too. Isn’t that the point of having a legion?”

“If I need you to do my dirty work for me,” I replied, “then why do I deserve to be in charge?”

Kilian sighed, then drew away her hand to clasp one of mine.

“Juniper rants about you now and then,” she informed me. “About your recklessness, about how you tend to think with your fists. But for all that, never once have I heard her question your ability to lead the Fifteenth. Do you really think that will change because you won’t have a third aspect?”

I clutched her hand tighter, and I couldn’t really express how much it meant to me that even when it almost became painful she didn’t try to unlace our fingers.

“I fucked up,” I whispered. “I thought maybe if I had the power I could get us out of this mess, but all I did was make it worse. It’s coming, Kilian. For us. We’re preparing for the devils and the Spears, but it’s not them we should be afraid of. I made the wrong decision, and it might not have been the only one.”

I hesitated, then spoke the fear I’d been carrying in me since the night we’d decided to defend Marchford.

“What if I condemned all of us to worse than death, just because I wanted to be principled for once? Because I wanted to do the right thing .”

The words came out bitterer than I’d thought they would.

“There’s been Squires before you,” Kilian whispered back. “There will be Squires after you. But we’re not following a Name, you see, we’re following Catherine Foundling. And I don’t think she’s out of the game yet.”

I didn’t fight the tears that time, and the last thing I remembered was Kilian smoothing away my hair as she settled the covers around me.

For all that, I did not sleep well.

Chapter 28: Prelude

“Look, if he didn’t want to be fed to my acid-spewing crocodiles he shouldn’t have brought me bad news.”
-Dread Emperor Malignant II, the Particularly Petty

It’d been a while since I’d had a proper Callowan breakfast.

Eggs, sausage and black pudding with a generous portion of buttered bread. The accompanying pot of tea was poor fare compared to the fancy brews my officers – Aisha in particular, who carried a stash imported from across the sea even on campaign – but the taste was pleasantly familiar. Tea wasn’t grown in Callow: it had to be imported from the Free Cities and Ashur, the cheap stuff from Nicae being most popular. Mercantis was said to hitch up the price on the way north, but no less should be expected from the City of Bought and Sold. I’d woken before dawn and gotten out of room the very moment I could, slipping away from the personal guard that attempted to follow me without a second thought. Tired of Legion fare I’d sought a Callowan inn and ignored the scared looks the innkeeper kept shooting me as I ordered.

Service was prompt and the fare hearty, though I was starting to get irritated at the skittishness of the innkeeper and her husband. They didn’t seem to recognize me, at least, which was refreshing. People had this unpleasant tendency to get deferential around me, these days, but the distance here was because of my Legion armour and not my station. The only local who didn’t jump at my every twitch was a young dark-haired girl who couldn’t be more than seven, peeking curiously at me from behind tables. Her parents had yet to notice her, apparently. I smiled at her while sipping at my mug of tea and she trotted up to me, sliding on the bench across the table.

“I’m Lily,” she gabbled.

“Hello, Lily,” I replied with a smile. “I’m Cat.”

She nodded seriously, then scrunched up her nose. “Are you a Deoraithe?”

“ Lily ,” the innkeeper suddenly barked. “Get off that bench right this instant!”

“It’s all right,” I said, waving away the objection. “It’s a quiet morning. I wouldn’t mind a little company.”

Lily glared. “I’m not little , I’m six,” she informed me.

I smothered a grin. Her mother seemed rather horrified at the idea of the child talking with me, but she seemed even more afraid to offend me by yanking Lily away from the table and hiding her away. She ended up hovering around the table before taking a seat next to her daughter after seeking wordless permission from me, clutching her offspring tightly. Lily tried to wiggle out to no avail.

“I’m half-blooded, I think,” I told the little girl. “I’m a little too pale for both my parents having been from the People.”

The child blinked. “How can you not know?”

“Don’t be rude to patrons, Lily,” the innkeeper said with the mechanical promptness of many repetitions. “Not everybody knows their mum and dad like you.”

“That’s sad,” the daughter said, patting my hand for comfort.

The mother looked panicked, but the tension loosened a bit after it became obvious I’d taken no offence.

“I’m used to it,” I shrugged. “Life at the orphanage wasn’t bad – I’ve seen people have much rougher childhoods.”

I’d never realized quite how privileged I’d been to get an education and three meals a day until my first forays into the Lakeside district. There were people there who spent their days on backbreaking labour and barely made enough to put food on the table. The only difference the Conquest had made there was that Mazus’ hunger for gold had driven ever more people to live in the wretched slums as their businesses went under. It would take years to undo the damage he’d done to the city’s economy.

“You’re Callowan, then,” the innkeeper said, tone puzzled. “I’d heard some of the soldiers in this legion are.”

Fear flashed through her eyes when she realized she’d used a rather familiar tone.

“No disrespect was meant, ma’am,” she added hastily.

“I’ve never been easy to offend,” I told her drily. “And after dealing with Wasteland nobility it’s a rather welcome change not to have to look for double meanings everywhere.”

“You’ve met nobles ?” Lily breathed out, excited. “What were they like?”

“Most of them deserve to end up in a crocodile pit,” I replied frankly. “But there are some who’re aren’t bad people.”

Lily had responded to the mention of crocodiles by making vaguely reptilian noises and pretend-biting her mother’s arms, much to the woman’s dismay.

“I waved at the Countess, once,” the child told me when she got bored. “She didn’t wave back though.”

I snorted. “Well, she’s had a busy year.”

Rebellions didn’t spawn out of thin air. Most likely she’d been sitting on a plan for years, keeping her moves innocuous enough that my teacher’s agents wouldn’t pick up on them.

“People say she’s going to be queen,” Lily informed me. “She’s engaged to a duke and everything.”

I smiled mirthlessly. “That only happens if she wins the rebellion, Lily. And I wouldn’t count on it.”

That was, apparently, a little too close to home for her mother. The child was ushered away, told to go help her father make her breakfast. She muttered something about hating porridge and scampered off, though not before waving me goodbye. I waved back bemusedly. To my surprise, the innkeeper remained seated across from me.

“Ma’am, I don’t mean to pry but...” she started.

“Ask,” I replied. “If it’s restricted information I won’t tell you, but there’s no harm in asking.”

There were a few threads of grey in the woman’s hair, but the colour of it and the shape of her face was the same as her daughter’s – I could see the resemblance, if I cared to look. She screwed up her courage after a moment.

“Is it true, about the demon in the hills?” she said.

I grimaced. “Yes. It was kept bound in some sort of temple but someone let it loose.”

And we’ll have a reckoning for that, won’t we Heiress? That much I would swear oath to, and the longer that debt when unpaid the longer the price would be when I collected.

“But the Fifteenth will stay to protect the city?” she pressed.

“Orders came down from the top on the matter,” I replied, hiding my amusement.

The innkeeper let out a sound of relief. “The legion has behaved well, for an army. You don’t drink as much as the Exiled Prince’s men did.”

I very much doubted that, considering the Praesi relationship with spirits, but Juniper had likely given orders to keep the drinking out of sight.

“I’d heard there were a few incidents,” I probed.

“There were scuffles,” she admitted. “Some of the older men say it’s all the Empire’s fault.”

They were technically correct, I had to admit.

“That tall orc, the one they call Deadhand, he stopped it before it got out of hand,” the innkeeper continued. “And Tribune Ratface has been making rounds to see the people displaced by the goblins are properly fed. It’s bought a lot of goodwill, with those of us who remember the last war. Armies are not easy guests no matter who they obey to.”

Well now, Supply Tribune. I hadn’t seen much of him lately, since he wasn’t needed for most war councils, but it was pleasing to hear he’d been keeping busy.

“He’s a good sort, Ratface,” I spoke over the rim of my tea mug.

“You one of his, then?” the innkeeper asked.

“Something like that,” I replied vaguely.

She clearly recognized the non-answer for what it was and did not pursue the subject. Apparently the fact that I’d yet to ask for her head had qualified me as not a monster, because there was precious little fear in the older woman now.

“I suppose it helps you have a Callowan in charge of the legion,” she decided, then turned a curious eye on me. “You ever met her, the Squire?”

“A few times,” I agreed.

“Doesn’t seem proper, to have one of us a villain,” she said. “But it may not be a bad thing, you get my meaning? If the Empire’s going to stick around, we might as well have a voice in the Tower. Heard she helped hang Mazus so she can’t be all Evil. Nasty piece of work, that man.”

And how did you hear that, I wonder? There’d only been a handful of people there that night, and only one of them had the means to spread rumours that far and that quickly. I resisted the urge to clench my fingers. What are you up to, Black? Every time I thought I’d sketched out his endgame, something else cropped up to put the design into doubt.

“He got what was coming to him,” I agreed softly.

The front door was suddenly forced open and the innkeeper immediately flinched back, rising to her feet. I cast a look and saw the Fifteenth had finally caught up: Lieutenant Tordis and a handful of orcs snapped a salute as soon as the saw me.

“Lieutenant,” I greeted her, spearing the last of the now-cold sausage and taking a bite.

“Lady Squire,” she replied, fist over heart. “I apologize for disturbing your breakfast, but a war council has been convened.”

I heard the gasp from the innkeeper when my identity was revealed, but did not bother to turn. I put down the remains of the sausage and finished my tea before sliding two golden aurelii on the table – over fifteen times what the meal was worth, but what did coin really mean to me these days? I glanced at the greying woman.

“When the enemy is sighted,” I told her, “take your family to the centre of the city. It’ll be the safest place.”

I passed Tordis by and stepped into the morning light.

—

I’d been under for two days but my officers had not been idle.

I’d yet to take a look at the outer defences, but as we made for the council I saw that Juniper had ordered a second set of walls further in – though “walls” was perhaps too ambitious of a word. A ring of houses had been collapsed to form a citadel inside Marchford, the stone and wood stacked as a makeshift barricade already manned by legionaries. The Countess’ manor was long-abandoned, too removed from the rest of the city to be defensible. The people left bereft of a home by my sappers’ work had been packed in taverns, inns and the houses of relatives willing to put them up. Still, central Marchford was densely packed. The main avenues were kept clear by patrols so that deployments would not be hindered when the battle started, though eyes were peeking at us through blindfolds all the way through. Juniper had picked a large guildhall as the headquarters for the Fifteenth, clearing out the occupants and nailing most opening shuts with wooden planks.

The central hall was bustling with my legate’s men, reports coming in and orders coming out every few moments. Close to the wall in the back a pair of tables had been forced together to accommodate maps and seat all of the general staff – most of which, I saw, was missing. Nauk and Hune were there, as the highest-ranked officers after the Hellhound, and so were Hakram and Pickler. No sign of Kilian and Ratface, or even Aisha. I dismissed Lieutenant Tordis absent-mindedly, my attention already on the conversation to come. If so many were elsewhere then something had happened requiring their direct attention: that both Kilian and Apprentice were absent was telling in and of itself. Nauk eyed my bad leg with a frown but held his tongue as I made my way up to the others, keeping my pace steady so the limp wouldn’t be too obvious. I had a feeling tapping into my Name would allow me to power through the pain if I ever needed to run, but for daily life I might well have to take up Masego’s offer of herbs to take the edge off. Or start taking my drinking more seriously.

“I’m guessing we have a situation,” I spoke up, disinclined to indulge in small talk.

“The enemy has been sighted,” Commander Hune spoke in that incongruously delicate voice of hers.

“The Silver Spears?” I asked.

The last report I’d read had made it clear the devils were out there, though they’d yet to make a move. Juniper wouldn’t have sought me out unless the situation had changed more than that.

“They’ll be on us by nightfall,” Nauk growled. “The bastards finally arrived.”

Nightfall, huh. I supposed it’d be too much to hope whatever corruption the mercenaries had gone through wouldn’t allow them to see in the dark. When had I ever been that lucky? I glanced at the maps on the table, then frowned. There was half a dozen scrying bowls scattered in a half-circle around where Juniper stood. I tapped the rim of the one closest to me, then cast an eye on the Hellhound.

“I thought the demon scrambled scrying?”

The grim-faced orc bared her teeth. “Apprentice’s threshold ritual changed things. As long as the point of origin and the point of reception are under the ritual’s aegis, our mages can the simplest versions of the spell.”

Useful, that . Would allow my legate to react immediately to changes on the battlefield, if I grasped her intent correctly. There’d been no time to set up that sort of fanciness when we’d first taken on the Silver Spears, but defending a city was a different sort of business.

“Are we ready?” I finally asked, because what else could I say?

“I’ve spent most of my time setting up our killzone,” Pickler smiled unpleasantly, spindly fingers tracing the rectangle I’d told Masego to leave out of his ritual. “When the devils come, they will be warmly received.”

I nodded. “And the Spears?”

“They’ll go through the west,” Juniper grunted. “Quickest way to get to a hearth, and that’s what they’ll be aiming for. There’s a wider avenue where their horse will be able to charge properly.”

“I’ll be waiting for them there,” Nauk spat, and his fists tightened hard enough the knuckles popped.

“We’ll have to concentrate our forces on the mercenaries,” Hune spoke. “If the devils get loose in the city our entire defence will collapse.”

“Then I’ll be dealing with the devils,” I murmured.

No sign of surprise from anyone. I supposed that had been a rather obvious fit for me. Takes a monster to kill a monster, doesn’t it?

“Robber will be commanding the sappers assigned to that sector,” Pickler informed me. “You’ll have his full cohort.”

“You’ll get another company to follow you when the swords come out,” Juniper growled. “We haven’t settled on which one.”

“Words was put out,” Hakram told me. “Seven different companies volunteered – I have the list, if you want to take a look.”

“Don’t need it,” I replied. “I’m taking the Forlorn Hope.”

That finally got a reaction.

“Is that wise, Lady Squire?” Commander Hune asked, her buckler-sized palm resting on the table. “Deserters are not known for their ability to hold under pressure and that part of the battlefield will be the most brutal.”

“She means they could put a knife in your ribs and leg it if things look bad enough,” Pickler spoke more frankly.

“This is the very kind of situation I formed the company for,” I replied. “If they can’t be used, they should be hanged.”

I’d spoken calmly and without raising my voice but I could see several of them repressing the urge to move back. I smiled mirthlessly: one of these days, Praesi would learn to stop thinking that mercy and ruthlessness were mutually exclusive. I’d made the Forlorn Hope with the intent of deploying it in battle: if it could not be deployed, it could return to the gallows I’d snatched it from. There were only so many chances I was willing to give people.

“That’s settled, then,” Adjutant said, shutting the door on the topic. “We have one last issue to address: Archer has yet to take a stance on whether or not she’ll participate.”

“Said she’ll only talk with you,” Juniper spat, clearly disgruntled.

Not much of a diplomat, that one. I didn’t bother to specify which woman the statement was meant for, since it could easily go both ways.

“I’ll handle it,” I said. “Nothing else?”

The Hellhound shook her head. I almost walked out, but forced myself to stay a moment longer.

“Luck in battle,” I told my officers.

“Luck is for amateurs,” Juniper replied with bared teeth. “I have a plan.”

If there was ever to be a motto for the Fifteenth, I decided, that would be it. I have a plan. Watch how it goes south.

—

Archer was on a rooftop, because Named were inevitably afflicted with a deep thirst for melodrama.

Foot on the ledge, she looked in the distance where a cloud of dust revealed the Silver Spears were getting closer. I hoisted myself up through the trapdoor and waited for her to acknowledge my presence, sighing when it became clear she wouldn’t. Out of morbid curiosity I cleared my throat, just to see how far she’d be willing to push the farce. Fluidly the woman turned and a flash of silver was the only warning I got. The throwing knife had been placed expertly, spinning in a trajectory that would see it bury straight in my throat. Without missing a beat, I snatched it out of air.

“You can throw faster than that,” I said.

“I can,” Archer agreed, finally bothering to face me. “But this is still slightly swifter than a mundane mortal could manage.”

She’d been checking how much my Name had been affected by my latest debacle. Fair enough, even if this was an idiot way to go about it.

“I’m told you won’t talk with my legate,” I grunted.

“I don’t speak terms with minions,” she replied easily.

Maybe if I’d had an easier fortnight I would have been politer about it, but my well of patience was running pretty dry.

“Legate,” I corrected flatly. “She’s my legate . Regardless, here I am. Have you made a decision?”

If anything my abruptness seemed to amuse her. My irritation ratcheted up a knot in response.

“While your battle is not unworthy, is it not mine,” she shrugged. “Hunter and I will leave when enemy assaults the city. We’ll kill a few on the way out, out of politeness.”

“Fine,” I grunted.

Making my way down the trapdoor was going to be a godsdamned pain, but jumping down into the street would probably be worse. I turned to leave.

“Not going to try to convince me?” Archer asked, mildly surprised.

I shot her an aggravated look.

“I don’t have the time or the patience for this kind of game,” I said. “You’ll fight or you won’t. I get the feeling not much I’ll say will tip the balance either way.”

“Considering the corner you’re in,” the ochre-skinned woman spoke, “are you sure you can afford not to?”

I couldn’t help it – I laughed, right in her face. The look of incredulity that got me was a memory that would warm me on cold nights.

“I’m always in a fucking corner, Archer,” I told her. “I don’t think I’ve been in a fight where I wasn’t horribly outclassed since I can remember.”

I spread my arms and turned the palms up, encompassing all of the city.

“And yet, I’m still here. Standing.” I said softly. “So scuttle off if you want to. I don’t need you to make this a victory.”

I leaned forward and flashed her a hard smile.

“You think one less aspect and a limp is going to stop me? I don’t win fights because I’m the Squire – I win them because I’m Catherine Foundling. Watch them take a swing. See where it gets them .”

Interlude: Greenskins

“The Kharsum word for war is derived from the one used for a full cookpot. That tells you everything you need to know about how the Clans think of Creation.”
– Extract from “Horrors and Wonders”, famed travelogue of Anabas the Ashuran

“That was a mistake,” Lieutenant Balker offered.

“It got worse,” Captain Clipper suggested instead, flirtatiously allowing her teeth to peek through her chops.

She did have superb canines, Robber was forced to admit, but she was no Pickler. It was his curse to always be interested in the unattainable ones, he’d found, and the Senior Sapper was as unattainable as it got. A Rock Breaker tribe boy like him with the direct daughter of a Matron line? That was the punchline to a joke about overreaching, not a plan of action. Unlike humans, the Tribes didn’t glorify people trying to love above their social stature – they buried them in shallow graves. And for all that the Fifteenth was not the Grey Eyries, there would always be that invisible line there. He’d long made his peace with that.

“You’re all amateurs,” he told his minions. “And no, that wasn’t another suggestion. Clearly we should be going with I can’t believe that worked .”

There was a murmur of approval from the ranks, though some filthy traitorous elements dissented.

“Fear the goats,” someone called out. “The one true motto of the Fifteenth.”

“Captain Borer,” the tribune addressed his second-in-command loudly. “Write up that man for insubordination. And poor taste.”

Borer was one of his very favourite people in Creation simply because the other goblin had no sense of humour whatsoever. Probably because he was Deep Pit tribe, that whole bunch breathed in all sorts of nasty stuff when they were young. Borer squinted at the traitor, then sighed.

“That’s a woman, sir,” the captain told him. “Lieutenant Rattler.”

“You sure?” Robber asked, cocking his head to the side. “That’s clearly a man’s nose.”

Rattler flipped him off.

“Add to the list that she was emotionally hurtful,” the yellow-eyed goblin added without missing a beat, grinning at the wave of jeers that got.

Running a sapper cohort wasn’t like leading regulars. For one, sappers were all insane. You had to be, to willingly choose a career path that would see you deal with notoriously volatile munitions on a daily basis. There was also the fact that they were the mostly lightly armed soldiers in the Legions of Terror yet regularly saw action on the frontlines. That was fine because leading crazy people, in Robber’s opinion, was a lot like being in prison. If you wanted your authority unquestioned you had to walk up to the biggest prisoner on the cell block, rip out their eyes and make a necklace out of them. Metaphorically speaking. So far, anyway. A whistle came from further ahead, lilting and then going high. Enemy in sight.

“You hear that, ladies and gentlemen?” the yellow-eyed tribune called out. “That’s the sound fun makes when it begins.”

He saw more than a few sappers shiver in eager anticipation. Crazy, the lot of them.

“So let me hear it, before you get to battle positions,” he called out. “What’s the operational creed of this cohort?”

“KILL THEM, TAKE THEIR STUFF!” the call came back.

Robber faked wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. Considering goblins didn’t even have tear ducts, the absurdity was delightful.

“Go forth, my minions!” he cackled.

—

“Our guests have arrived,” Aisha said.

Juniper could see the devils trickling in through the scrying bowl herself. Foundling’s assessment of how many she’d killed seemed roughly accurate: a quick headcount put the enemy at around eighty. Most of them were the smaller types she’d had reports on, the iron-clawed creatures with fur and a swarm of fireflies. The larger ones would be more dangerous, given their ability to shrug off crossbow bolts, but Pickler’s traps had been designed specifically to deal with their kind. The legate looked away from the bowl and absent-mindedly adjusted the figurine representing Squire and her Forlorn Hope – it had moved a little to the left of the accurate spot when someone had jostled the table.

“Word from the west?” the Hellhound asked.

“The enemy hasn’t engaged,” the mage overlooking that particular bowl informed her.

The grim-faced orc repressed the urge to sigh. Humans , she thought unkindly.

“I’m aware of that,” she said. “What do the Silver Spears look like, sergeant? How were they modified by the corruption?”

The man frowned, peering into the softly glowing water. “Gods Below,” he said, looking nauseous. “You should take a look yourself.”

Juniper stepped closer, elbowing the sergeant aside. The mage on the other side of the scrying spell was holding up a mirror pointed at the enemy, standing on the roof of a house beyond the sapper-built wall. What the sorcery revealed was... troubling. The men-at-arms had been visibly mutated, growing cysts of flesh filled with dark pus. Some had eyes blinking from all over their faces, or even their hands, though the most disgusting of it was the way their bodies now overflowed their armour. The cataphracts were cleaner, but somehow that made it worse. Their silvery armour looked like it had melted shut and there was no delineation where the man ended and the horse began. The mounts themselves looked sickly and the hair over their skin was largely gone, patches of flesh falling away from their flanks in long strings.

The spell focused on the cataphract at the head of the pack, whose helm had been twisted in a sordid unmoving metal grin. The mage shivered at her side, but the Hellhound remained unmoved. That last cataphract seemed a likely candidate for the leader of the host, though how led the Silver Spears still were was debatable. Worth making a priority target, but not launching a specific assault to take out: she doubted morale would be an issue for the former mercenaries, as far gone as they were. Unfortunate that the usual shock and awe tactics that were the Legion’s bread and butter wouldn’t work, but this could lend advantage in other ways. If the minds of the Silver Spears were affected, they were unlikely to be able to manage sophisticated battle tactics. Bait and switch will be effective.

The legate calmly put her orders through the spell and waited for a messenger on the other side of the city to carry them to Nauk. Foundling’s insistence that the orc commander be the one handling the front with the mercenaries had come as an unpleasant surprise, though she understood the internal politics driving it. Squire was still whipping herself over the death of Nilin, she decided, and so hadn’t had the heart to refuse Nauk’s request. Hune would have been a better fit. She was a coldblood, Juniper suspected, much like she’d once thought Hakram was. Incapable of anything but the shallowest of emotions, unmoved by fear and with natural assertiveness. Had the ogre been anything but a legionary that would have made her very dangerous indeed, but as an officer of the Fifteenth that meant she could be relied on not to lose her head. Nauk had too much of a temper, much like her own mother. Though Mother does not sink into the Red Rage when displeased.

Still, for all that the other orc was a skilled commander and cleverer than he looked. Or acted, sometimes. With the spectre of Foundling’s disapproval driving him, he should manage to keep himself in line. The parts of Hune’s kabili that hadn’t been assigned to him would remain posted in strategic locations as a quick-deployment reserve, ready to plug in gaps when they inevitably arose. She’d spent days and nights going over the contingencies for this fight.

“You’re smiling again,” Aisha observed.

Was she? The Hellhound wiped her face clean of emotion. The dark-skinned aristocrat that served as her second-in-command – and closest friend – snorted.

“It’s still in your eyes,” she said. “The thirst.”

Had anybody else been speaking to her this way, she could have harshly chided them.

“I have no such thing,” Juniper replied gruffly, knowing it was a lie.

It came from her mother’s blood, she was sure of it: that deep, dark part of her that looked upon the battlefield and bared its fangs in joy. General Istrid was famous for being one of the only Praesi generals who fought in the ranks, and while the Hellhound believed that Marshal One-Eye’s way was best there was a trace of that hunger in her. She’d dedicated her whole life to the art of war because there was something in her that sang, when she gave orders and the arrow loosed by her mind found the enemy’s throat. Orcs are born in love with death , the old saying went, and what mortal lover could possibly compare? That was the boon and the curse of her people. Gods forgive her, but she was almost grateful to Heiress for having laid out such a fine banquet in front of the Fifteenth. When Juniper was done sinking her teeth into the Battle of Marchford, the blood spilled would splatter all over the pages of history. This she knew in her bones, like she knew there was no after the war for people like her. Just one battlefield after another until she went out in a glorious bloody mess that would shake the pillars of the very Heavens. Some part of her looked forward to that end... but it would not be today. Her quiver was still full.

“The sappers have engaged the enemy,” Aisha conveyed.

The Hellhound smiled, and nocked her arrow.

—

The bolt took the devil in the eye and it screamed. This wasn’t one of the smaller ones so a good shot would do little more than tickle it, unfortunately. The beast looked like the particularly dumb offspring of a bull and gazelle, if both of those creatures had been morbidly obese. All in all, it was the size of a supply wagon and seemed intent on acting like a living battering ram.

“You really let yourself go, buddy,” Robber informed it, “you should be ashamed of yourself.”

He scuttled off inside the nearest house as another crossbow volley picked off a pair of the iron-hooked devils: he’d earlier thought that taking one of the ugly bastards in the head would kill them, but when the first volley had failed to make a single kill he’d been roughly disabused of the notion. Fill them with enough bolts, though, and they stopped moving. The horned devil bellowed and charged after him, ripping through the door he’d slammed shut behind him like it was made of wet clay. Cheerfully, the yellow-eyed tribune threw some poor soul’s good tea set at the thing and legged it towards the window, jumping through and landing in a roll on the street as the shutters came apart.

“Bring it down,” he ordered the two sappers awaiting.

The hammers fell with unseemly enthusiasm, breaking the keystones Pickler had marked and weakened a few days back: the house collapsed on top of the devil. It probably wasn’t dead yet, unfortunately, since the roof had been mere thatch. Robber casually lit a pinewood match as the other two sappers threw oil jugs on the rough location of the monster, setting the whole thing aflame without missing a beat.

“How’s the main street?” he asked.

“Demolition charges took one of the big fuckers out when it tried to pursue,” Lieutenant Rattler told him, wiping her hands clear of the oil.

Callowan-made, those jugs. Sloppy work. If they hadn’t confiscated them from local stocks he would have complained about the quality. He still would, of course, but he’d have done it more if the Fifteenth had actually paid for them. There was the pop of a sharper detonating in the distance, the sound of an iron-hooked devil getting blown off a roof by his lovely minions. Goblins knew the passage of time more intimately than any human or orc could, and the tribune knew he’d been lingering where he stood too long. Already devils were honing in on his position, the dark failing to hide their silhouettes from his night vision.

“On to the next choke point,” he ordered, casting one last look at the burning wreck.

This little kip of theirs was the brain child of Pickler and the Hellhound: goblin engineering married to the steel trap that was their legate’s mind. Give ground one block after another, bleeding them dry all the way as they tore themselves to pieces going through the traps. Pickler’s love letter to the sapper corps, he liked to think of it.

And who was he to refuse such a heartfelt confession?

—

“Shield wall,” Nauk of the Waxing Moons ordered.

Clan names didn’t mean much here, where the true clan was the number on the legion standard they fought under. His ancestry still followed him, though, the Rage always whispering in his ears and waiting for an opening to take hold of him. It had gotten stronger since his brother’s death, fed on the grief and anger to become an even more ill-begotten thing. But there would no anger today. He would take his revenge the Praesi way, cold and patient and utterly absolute. Nauk had thought orcs ruthless once, for they took lives the way other races took breath: he’d learned better since. The Tower was built on blood and hatred, a monument paved with a hundred thousand lives sacrificed at the altar of boundless ambition. How could a few corpses strewn across the Steppes ever compare? Nauk of the Waxing Moons wanted to sink his teeth into the enemy’s flesh and feed until his belly was full, but Commander Nauk of the Fifteenth Legion would remain where he stood and see the Silver Spears ripped out root and stem. Another pyre for Nilin, one whose screams would be heard all the way to the Underworld.

The legionaries spread across the street and knelt as they put put down their scutum against the cobblestones, spears jutting out in anticipation of the charge of the damned. Three rows of longer spears from the men behind them bolstered the wall, his legionaries calmly watching the cataphracts form in the field. The Legions of Terror were no match for the heavy phalanxes used by the Free Cities, but they had suffered the charges of Callowan knights for centuries and learned from the defeats. The Reforms had formalized the infrequent tactics some past Black Knights had used to good effect against the Order of the White Hand, standardizing the formation into the four rows of spear the Legions now used against cavalry. Horses usually refused to charge a wall of spears unless they were trained destriers, but the mounts of the Silver Spears had been raised for war even before the demon had gotten its hooks into them. They would charge, Nauk knew. He was counting on it.

“Filthy abominations,” Senior Tribune Jwahir spoke with distaste.

The Taghreb woman narrowed her almond-shaped eyes at the Silver Spears, resting a hand on the pommel of her sword. Half the reason Nauk had promoted her to Senior Tribune was that she had nothing in common whatsoever with her predecessor, whether it be in gender, race or even general disposition. Even in the light cast by the torches and bonfires covering the entire front that much was obvious.

“Soon to be dead ones,” Commander Nauk growled. “They’re taking too long to form up, Jwahir – send them an invitation.”

The tawny-skinned officer raised a hand and the legionary behind her hoisted a banner. There was a rustle of movement behind them as two hundred goblins raised their crossbows, aimed and let the quarrels loose. Most of the monster-cataphracts were out of range, in Nauk’s estimation, but the tip of their formation lingered close to effective killing range. The projectiles fell in an arc and most of them ate dirt, but a handful of cavalrymen took hits. No kills , the commander assessed. Whatever demon buggery had mixed man and horseflesh had made it so that not even a headshot was enough to kill the abominations.

“Tell the Hellhound we’ll likely have to put down the horses to kill the horsemen,” he told the mage hovering behind him.

The bolts might have been mere fleabites, but they served their intended purpose: the Silver Spears were on the move. The damned mercenaries had placed their host as a mirror of his own, more or less. His own men were spread across the makeshift wall save for the main avenue the sappers had kept clear, where his cohort of four-deep spearmen held the ground from one side of the open ground to the other. Behind them he’d placed his sappers, though these ones were without munitions: fucking Robber’s group had gotten what remained of those to deal with the devils. The monster-cataphracts faced his spears, all three hundred of them, while they’d split their infantry into two groups of two hundred and fifty on the sides. The men-at-arms moved first, charging forward without so much as a word.

“Mages,” Commander Nauk barked. “ Fire .”

Balls of flame bloomed all over the rampart, and the Battle of Marchford began in earnest.

—

“They’re facing our spears with their horse,” Juniper observed, frowning.

Aisha drummed her fingers against the table. “Could be the corruption scrambled their brains more than we thought,” she said.

Neither of the two women expected the legate to reply. The Hellhound spoke aloud to focus her thoughts: Aisha’s contribution was to serve as a sounding board by throwing around ideas to be adopted or dismissed.

“They have a surprise up their sleeves,” the grim-faced orc decided. “Have Hune prepare the first fallback point.”

The dark-skinned staff tribune drifted away to see it done. The Hellhound glanced at the latest report from the southern front, which had that little wretch Robber’s casualties already nearing the forties. Not a sign of incompetence, though an untrained observed might have thought as much. She’d predicted heavier casualties when projecting the numbers for the engagement: a running battle through streets and alleys against devils was going to be a butchery, one way or another. The insolent twerp did have an almost providential sense of when to push and when to fold, though, which was why she hadn’t protested when the goblin had been nominated for the action in the first place. There were few officers in the Fifteenth who’d be able to see their cohort split in half a dozen smaller forces and not lose track of most of them. Yet, aside from a line getting stuck in a dead-end and slaughtered to a man, the yellow-eyed tribune had managed to keep casualties to a minimum. Good. We don’t have the men to spare.

Marchford, she’d grasped early, would be as much a battle of attrition as one of tactics. The Fifteenth could field a little above a thousand men, four hundred of which were sappers. Goblin munitions stocks were half-empty from Three Hills and there wasn’t enough goblinfire left to deploy in any significant matter – not that she could, since it was likely to collapse Apprentice’s ritual. What she did have was one of the Legions of Terror, arguably the finest infantry force to ever grace Calernia. That her forces were heavy on sappers was a minor liability, particularly in a siege setting: if she’d had only a single cohort of them she’d not have managed half as many preparations as she had.

What did the enemy have? Eighty-odd devils, most of which she could and had planned for. The threshold ritual had allowed her to dictate where they would enter the city, which simplified the matter even more. About eight hundred corrupted Silver Spears, an unspecified amount of which would be cavalry – three hundred as it turned out. In the upper reaches of the scenarios she’d planned for: the success margin for a retreat would be uncomfortably thin. In most sieges cavalry wouldn’t have been a factor at all and Pickler had suggested pulling down a few houses to fortify the main avenue into the west of city, the one linking to the road into broader Callow. It was an obvious weak point, after all. Even the Fifteenth had taken it when seizing the city. Yet Juniper had refused. If that gap was plugged there was no telling where the Silver Spears would strike: the tactical disadvantage it gave her was worth the strategic asset of being able to prepare a specific point for static defence.

“Robber’s entering the last stretch,” Aisha told her, having reappeared at some point.

“Good,” Juniper growled. “Let’s tidy up this Empire.”

—

“I’ve come to a realization, Captain Clipper,” Robber panted, casting a look into the alley.

Shit. Still a bunch of the fireflies and that scaled tiger monster that had ripped a man’s head right off.

“And what would that realization be, Tribune Robber?” the captain replied, loading her lever-action crossbow.

The yellow-eyed miscreant cast another wary look into the alley. Where the Hells were his crossbowmen? At this rate they’d arrive too late. Ah, well . Let’s change this around a bit.

“I’m actually invincible,” he told the younger goblin, offering a vicious grin. “Truly, I’ve been ignoring the evidence for too long. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

“Oh Gods,” the captain moaned.

She watched with horror as he checked his gear one last time, cleared his throat and ran out into the alley screaming at the top of his lungs.

There were five devils in there, and they paused for a moment at the sight of him. They were, he supposed, used to people running in the opposite direction.

“Well, this is awkward,” the goblin tribune said slowly unsheathing said blade with his right hand. “I was aiming for that other alley, the one without all the devils in it. Do over?”

The scaled tiger glanced at the fireflies, then again at him. A heartbeat later it had already crossed half the distance separating it from the tribune.

“I hope you bastards have eyes,” Robber spoke at the fireflies, tossing the brightstick he’d lit with his good hand while keeping them looking at the other.

The munition blew up right in the scaled tiger’s face, but he didn’t stick around to find out what happened – Clipper should have gotten moving while he was distracting them, so he legged it as fast as he could. Mage-takers, he discovered a moment later when one expanded into a pale-skinned silhouette with a wet squelch, did not actually have eyes. There went, like, half his arsenal. Still, he’d not made it this long in the Legions without stabbing a few people in dark alleys where no one could see him. Allegedly. He rammed his short sword through the devil’s stomach, spun around and deftly planted his good knife in its neck. Well, Hakram’s good knife. Probably isn’t very good anymore , he decided, that blood looks pretty nasty. Still, being the exemplary friend that he was, he took the filthy murder knife, forced his sword out and ran for the next choke point. If there’d been no crossbowmen for this one, it meant some of his sappers had gotten their idiot skulls caved in. Hellhound would get snippy about it, no doubt.

He ran down the street and turned the corner without slowing down, sliding on the blood-slick cobblestone and reflexively dropping to the ground when he heard a goblin’s voice yell “Duck!”.

A hail of very late crossbow bolts passed overhead, puncturing the scaled tiger’s body half a dozen times. The devil twitched, then dropped. Robber carefully picked up a loose pavement stone and threw it at the monster’s head – it did not react. Nodding to himself, the tribune wiped some of the black blood off his face and took a look at his saviours: Rattler’s boys, though not from the tenth he’d been expecting. That had unfortunate implications.

“First, I’m claiming full credit for this kill,” he announced.

One of the sappers reloaded his crossbow and eyed his kidney area thoughtfully as the others loudly protested. It just warmed his heart that someone was keeping the old tradition of goblin field promotion alive.

“Second,” he spoke over their treasonous whinging, “where are the others?”

“You’re the last, sir,” the shady one with the loaded crossbow said. “Captain Clipper just came through; the others are getting the reception ready.”

Robber casually flicked dirt off his shoulder, smearing twice as blood over in the process.

“Well, gentlemen, let’s get moving,” he ordered. “As soon as you all thank me for saving your pitiful lives from that monster, anyway.”

—

No wonder their infantry hadn’t thought twice about charging a wall, Nauk thought as he watched another man-at-arms jump ten feet high and land on top of the fortification. The warrior was immediately caught in the chest by a burst of mage fire and went back down without so much as a sound, but others had managed to establish a foothold. The fuckers fought better than they had before the demon had touched them, fearless and immune to pain. His men on the walls were taking a mauling, even with mage lines backing them. Still, they were holding. By the edge of their teeth, they were holding. The orc commander didn’t have any more time to grant the situation on the walls, because the enemy cavalry had finally stirred. They started at a walk, then a trot, and fell into a gallop twenty yards before reaching his line. At that point the ground gave under them, revealing the trick-ditch Pickler’s lot had dug just for the lot of them. The full first rank went under but the rest pushed through with their lances up. That was when the crossbow volley hit them. Killed few enough, but it slowed them some before they rammed into his spearmen. Still, the crash of steel against steel was deafening.

“Shit,” Senior Tribune Jwahir spoke feelingly as they both watched the first line of their formation collapse under rampaging hooves.

“Line’s steady,” Nauk disagreed, watching his legionaries waver and then solidify their formation.

Shock cavalry like lancers was good for exactly that: shock. After the initial impact they were just men on horses with an unwieldy weapon. Legionaries pulled down riders when they could and killed the horses when they could not, doing their grisly work in the dirt and blood under the torchlight. A messenger came from his back and leaned forward to speak quietly.

“Legate Juniper orders a retreat, sir,” the man said.

“ Now ?” Nauk started, then frowned.

The Hellhound didn’t give orders without reason, and she’d be well aware that he’d bleed men every step falling back to the next stronghold.

“Sound the retreat,” he told Jwahir.

Before she could, though, a sharp uptick in screams drew his attention. The centre of his spearmen was being blown through like leaves, though calling cavalry what was achieving that would have been a misnomer. Some great hulking beast made of what must have been at least five horses and as many riders intertwined in a grotesque embrace was rampaging across the formation, picking men off with spears and ripping at them with too many hungry mouths. Nauk unsheathed his sword, pushing down the swell of Rage that ran through his veins.

“Sound the fucking retreat, Jwahir,” he barked. “We’re pulling back.”

—

The Hellhound slowly sat down in the armchair someone had provided her when they’d taken the guildhall, but that she was only now using for the first time. She closed her eyes and allowed her fingers to clasp the – admittedly poorly – sculpted arms. She remained there for a long moment, feeling the weight of all her staff’s eyes on her.

“Nauk’s front is still salvageable,” Aisha assessed. “And Robber’s casualties still aren’t as high as our worst case scenario.”

Juniper did not answer. She simply allowed the images she’d been glimpsing all night to come together in her mind, forming the pattern of the engagement. Forces in motion, some set by her and others by the enemy. She could see where instinct would drive her opponent, to seek that decisive blow that would knock the Fifteenth out of this battle. And yet...

“And yet,” she murmured, fangs glinting in the lamplight.

“Juniper?” Aisha said. “What will we do?”

“I’m going to take a nap,” Juniper replied.

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“Should I just wake you when the battle’s over, then?” her tawny-skinned friend asked sardonically.

The Hellhound smiled without opening her eyes.

“It already is.”

—

The armoured boot came down and crushed the soldier’s sword hand, then came down again and broke the bastard’s neck. Nauk spat on the abomination and wiped his blooded sword one of the the still-blinking grown eyes.

“In good order , you weak-kneed prissies,” he growled.

His men reacted like the sound of his voice had been a lash, tightening their line as they slowly backed away from the enemy. The Silver Spears infantry was being a hellish pain, what with the way they ignored battle lines and threw themselves into his formation with their weapons out. He’d ordered his legionaries into the testudo to take the hits, but some scraping of tactics must have remained in the cataphracts for they’d immediately charged – the first time had cost him a full line before they’d drawn back, and that was without counting their bitch of a trump card.

“It’s coming again,” Jwahir called out, dripping blood through the openings of her helmet.

“MAGES, FIRE,” the commander bellowed.

Four dozen fireballs impacted the massive abomination who’d wrecked his spearmen, blowing it back. It careened into a house, wrecking the wall and slowly getting back to its feet. Only a matter of moments before the cataphracts hit again, Nauk knew, but he grinned nastily under his blood-streaked helmet. They were just a corner away from the plaza now, and that meant... Just in time, Nauk’s remaining legionaries fell into position at the head of the alley. The sounds of the cavalry’s hoofs against the stone rang as they charged, but they did not impact his men. The ranks split smoothly in two, letting them through to meet the line that had emerged from the plaza: twenty ogres in full plate raised their warhammers and brought them down on the riders, killing man and beast alike in a single stroke. The legionaries closed around the riders as they tried to retreat, taking their revenge for lives already claimed.

A cry of warning came that the great beast was coming again but he was not worried because Pickler, beautiful glorious Pickler, had been the one to build this fallback point. The stone the ballista threw hit the monster right in its centre of mass, a textbook perfect shot. Horse legs and unwary necks broke, though the creature wasn’t dead. It crawled forward and Nauk strode to it, elbowing aside any legionary in his way. At some point he’d dropped his shield but he had no need for it for this kind of work. The soldier closest to the abomination was run through by a spear a heartbeat after he reached the enemy, but the orc did not stop. He felt the Red Rage welling up in him, like a tide about to tip him over, but he did not fight it. He rode the wave, let its anger strengthen his limbs as he caught a lance about to skewer him and ripped it out of the rider’s arm – the hand came with it, but what did he care?

In a moment of perfect clarity, Commander Nauk saw the hoof about to cave in his chest and howled , ramming his sword in the horse it belonged to. Hands and teeth were grasping at him but he climbed the abomination until he reached the summit of it. Under him was the roiling nest of corruption, flesh convulsing and pulsing like a repulsive heartbeat. With a laugh of heady battle-joy, he plunged the lance into it. Then he ripped it out and did it again as the abomination broke its silence for the first time, screaming through every mouth it had. Again and again he plunged the lance, until finally the monster stopped moving. Rising to his feet, covered in pus and blood, the orc howled at the night sky and the red moon filling it. Seven hundred voices took up the scream and he bared its teeth and looked down at the remaining Silver Spears, watching them mass for another assault.

Hear that, Nilin? Isn’t it better than a pack of mourners at a funeral?

—

Reception Alley, as the planning committee consisting of Robber and everybody within hearing range of him fondly knew it, was a cramped mess of wooden walls and stone foundations that had already looked about to collapse before the sappers got their grubby little hands on it. It was currently filled to the brim with devils trying to push their way through to the goblins shooting at them from the neck of the alley, most of them adding insult to injury with gleeful enthusiasm. He had trained his minions well, the tribune decided.

“Gotta be at least twenty in there,” Lieutenant Rattler commented, spitting to the side as they both watched another volley take a jackal-faced devil in the throat.

A heartbeat later another quarrel punctured the thing’s crotch with a dull thump. Robber made a mental note of finding out whoever had done that and giving them a commendation. It was the little things that made this career so much fun.

“I figure we’ll have taken forty total, by the time we’re done,” the yellow-eyed officer replied.

And taken over twice that in casualties for their trouble, but it just wasn’t a party if half the guests weren’t dead on the ground by the end of the evening. Another of the mage-takers burst in the middle of his men but it was taken out within moments, long knives plunging into its flesh from every direction. Situational awareness was a natural goblin trait. They wouldn’t have lasted very long as a species otherwise, either because of predators or each other. The single mage Juniper had assigned them for the scrying link was in the back and well-guarded, though the sight of an orc twice the size of the goblins watching over him had been most amusing. Once in a while the fireflies made a play for the man, but it turned out they could be swatted like actual fireflies when they were in that form. Who knew? Well, Apprentice knew. And had told them. Which was how they knew. Details.

“This is as much as we’ll manage to sucker in,” Robber said. “They’ve gotta be making their way around by now. Light them up.”

The thing about sharpers was that they didn’t burn, not exactly. The alchemy as it had been explained to him released something called “kinetic force” which was obviously a made-up mage word. Still, all the heat that accompanied sharpers blowing came from friction with whatever they hit: you couldn’t set something on fire with a sharper. Not on its own, anyway. The only good thing about Marchford he’d found was that one of the main merchant guilds in the city had a great big stock of oil jugs that had been overlooked by the Countess when she’d stripped the city clean of useful stuff before bailing for her rebellion. About nine out of ten jugs from that reserve were currently inside the houses making up Reception Alley, along with all the sharpers and smokers they’d been able to put aside.

Pickler was more interested in mechanics than munitions, but Robber himself had always been more of an explosion sort of fellow. Kept the blood flowing. So he’d designed the network of makeshift explosives that dotted the alley himself, and he watched with unholy pleasure as his minions lit up the initial charges and scampered away. One sharp whistle from Robber himself and all his remaining cohort bailed, giving ground to the devils who clawed their way in pursuit immediately.

The explosion still flattened him. He rose to his feet to witness a burning wasteland of rock and splintered wood, strewn with the cooked corpses of devils. Billows of toxic scalding smoke covered it all, too heavy to rise in the sky even with the wind trying to move them.

“I’m a little turned on right now,” he admitted.

“Aren’t we all?” Lieutenant Rattler spoke in a reverent tone.

He shook himself out of his reverie after a moment. Silhouettes were already prowling the smoke, hissing in pain but still pushing through.

“Full retreat, my lovelies,” he called out.

Their part in this was done. By now Apprentice should have finished the second part of his ritual, the one that closed the threshold-free rectangle behind the devils. The door to retreat had been shut down, and now they were stuck with a real monster. He almost pitied the poor bastards: stuck in a box with the Boss and a hundred angry Callowans? Someone was going to have a bad time, and it sure as Hells wasn’t going to be the Boss.

—

Fifty yards away from the burning, Catherine Foundling slowly unsheathed her sword.

Chapter 29: Stand

“There’s a lot of people in the Fifteenth who remember Marchford as the day we proved we could spit in the eye of Hell and get away with it. For me, though? It was the first time I ever put on legionary armour with pride. In the end, I think that might have meant more.”
-Extract from the “Forlorn Memoirs”, author unknown

The deserters, as I still thought of them, had painted over their shields. Even in the torchlight that illuminated the avenue where we stood, that much was easy to see. The red steel scutum were decorated with what looked like a golden noose. I’d already glanced several times at the one closest to me, and finally the light-skinned lieutenant by my side cleared his throat.

“Our company sign, Lady Squire,” he said.

I frowned. “Name?”

“Lieutenant Farrier,” he replied.

“And what does it mean, lieutenant?” I asked.

I wasn’t smiling, and that was enough to make the dark-haired man wary. Blue-eyed and not much taller than me, he looked like the very picture of what I’d always been told the average Callowan was. I wondered what he’d done, to end up in the Fifteenth. Nothing nice, I imagined. Lesser criminals don’t get to avoid death row by enrolling.

“Twice now, we avoided the hangman’s drop,” Lieutenant Farrier told me soberly. “The men decided we could use a reminder there won’t be a third.”

Laudably clear-thinking of them. As far as I was concerned, the formation of this company was the last chance they would get. Anything more would be detrimental to discipline and to be frank I’d run out of both excuses and willingness to keep them alive. I wasn’t as patient or forgiving as I’d used to be. Whether that was a good thing or bad one remained to be seen.

“Not a bad sign, for a Forlorn Hope,” I conceded.

He smiled, obviously relived.

“Gallowborne, we call ourselves,” the dark-haired man admitted drily. “Born of the gallows and headed for them again, should we falter.”

A sardonic smile tugged at my lips. Callowan humour at its finest. In the distance the bark of sharpers and the rumble of collapsing houses could be heard. There were fires too, lighting up the darkness like this was a summer festival outside the walls of Laure. The silence felt heavy and my leg was acting up again. The herbal brew I’d gotten from Masego had to be diluted, he’d told me, or it would dull my reflexes as well as the pain. I was learning how to stand so less weight rested on my bad leg, but I’d never done this with armour before. I’d forgotten how heavy plate armour actually was, having become accustomed to wearing it.

“They’re getting closer,” I said, more to keep my mind on something else than from any real interest in a conversation.

Lieutenant Farrier spat to the side.

“I’ll give this to the gobbos,” he said. “They’re nasty little pests, but they die hard and loud.”

“Those goblins are giving their lives to save thousands of innocent civilians,” I replied sharply.

The blue-eyed officer chewed on that for a while.

“They are, aren’t they?” he finally said. “They might do it ‘cause orders came from above, but that doesn’t change what they’re doing.”

“Things change, Farrier,” I spoke quietly. “Greenskins aren’t the enemy anymore. The Empire isn’t the enemy anymore, at least not the way it used to be.”

The officer grimaced.

“Permission to speak frankly, ma’am?”

I didn’t have to think much on that. Denying permission wouldn’t end whatever opinion Farrier held, and I’d rather have it out in the open even if I didn’t like it. Dissent forced underground could only fester.

“Granted.”

“Fuck the Empire,” he said, spitting to the side again. “Fuck the Tower, and fuck the fucking Empress too.”

My brows rose. Certainly he wasn’t the only Callowan out there thinking that, but I had to give him a measure of respect for having the guts to actually vocalize it that bluntly.

“I won’t pretend I’m a good man, m’lady,” he continued. “Done some things the Heavens frown upon, that’s the truth of it. So did most the people here. But that don’t mean the Praesi get to hand us a sword, order us to kill their foe and then pretend they did us a favour.”

“You picked enrolment over hanging,” I pointed out.

“If I were that principled a man,” he grinned mirthlessly, “I wouldn’t have had the choice in the first place. Or tried to run afterwards. But there’s something wrong with punishing a man for having done bad by sentencing him to commit more bad in the judge’s name, you get me? Means the judge is crooked, and if they are why do they get to punish me in the first place?”

Because Praes is the law , I replied silently. Because Black and Malicia’s rule might not be just, but it is orderly and in a lot of ways better than what came before it. Because even when our rulers were heroes with the Mandate of Heaven behind them, there were still taxes and corruption and meaningless wars. And if I have to choose between a ruler that is virtuous and one who can balance the national finances, I already know who I’ll choose.

“This isn’t a bad fight, though,” he continued, shaking me out of my thoughts.

Farrier hesitated.

“And I don’t know about tomorrow, but tonight? I like what this stands for,” he admitted, lightly tapping the fifteen in Miezan numerals on his shoulder.

A thunderous detonation was heard in the distance and a cloud of smoke and fire went up in the sky. Robber’s last hurrah before he went into full retreat. Slowly, I unsheathed my sword.

“Here they come,” I said.

There was a bark of laughter from someone in the ranks.

“Again, huh?”

Grim laughter spread through the deserters.

“The knights will get the glory,” someone sang.

“The king will keep his throne,” more replied.

I knew the song. Every Callowan did, though the days where it was sung in the open were long gone. If the Kingdom had ever had an anthem, this was it.

“We won’t be in the story

Our names will not be known,” I joined in.

A hundred voices chorused, deep and thin and with accents from all over the land.

“So pick up your sword, boy

Here they come again

And down here in the mud,

It’s us who holds the line.”

Dark silhouettes appeared at the edge of the torchlight, studying us in silence. I felt it the moment Masego finished the last part of his ritual, the one that trapped the devils in here with us. A hard smile stretched my lips.

“The Princes take the Vales

The Tyrant is at the Gate

Our crops whither and fail,

The enemy’s host is great.”

Oh, this wasn’t the first time devils tread Callowan soil. Our hatred for their kind was an old one, lovingly tended to over centuries of eastern armies bringing fire and brimstone to bear on our walls.

“So pick up your sword, boy

Here they come again

And down here in the mud,

It’s us who holds the line.”

The voices rang out defiantly into the night and I felt something well up in my breast, an old sentimentality I’d thought I’d left behind me. Pride in where I was from. Pride in what it meant to be Callowan, when all the surface trappings were stripped away.

“Man the walls, bare the steel,” we sang.

“Hoist the banner, raise the shield

A free man’s death they cannot steal

When we meet them on the field .”

The devils came, crawling through fire and smoke. Wails and howls rose, coming from just out of our sight as they massed for their assault. The monsters had finally assembled all their strength, and with screams of twisted glee they charged.

“So pick up your sword, boy,

Here they come again

And down here in the mud,

IT’S US WHO HOLDS THE LINE!”

Like a wave of flesh and claws, the devils fell upon us as the last word of the old anthem were screamed at their ranks. Because that was the heart of Callow, wasn’t it? Hard-eyed defiance even when the night was at its darkest. The shield wall behind me was forced back by the sheer brute force of the assault, but the deserters held. Jackal monsters, iron-clawed apes and a handful of horse-sized centipedes made up the first wave. The larger ones were lurking at the back, clever enough even in their frenzy to wait for an opening. The first devil to close on me was one of the ironhooks, as my legionaries had taken to calling them. It leapt over me, trying to make it behind the shields, but my hand struck out like a viper. I snatched it by the neck and let my Name flood my veins, squeezing as hard as I could. Its neck snapped like a twig and I casually tossed its corpse in the face of a jackal-headed monster to my left, the distraction allowing a legionary to thrust her sword in the devil’s belly.

That was enough to earn me some attention, and one of the big ones came for me. It looked like a hyena, or perhaps the nightmarish take of a child on what a hyena would be. It ran on four feet, its whole veined muscular body covered with spotted closely cropped fur. Its front limbs were longer than the back, and turned into hardened horn that split into long claws that almost resembled fingers – but that was not the part that stilled me. Its maw made up most of the face, full of snarling caressed by a snake’s tongue. Its eyes were pure white and filled with nothing but a frenzied desire for blood. The hide around its neck was massive, wrinkled and thick. Hacking through it would be difficult, I decided as I lowered my stance and brought up my sword. I’d have to go through the eyes or the belly.

Behind me the struggle of the devils against the shield wall was a deafening clang of metal and screams, but my men were holding. There was a cold anger in the Gallowborne, the weight an old hatred taught from the cradle and finally granted an outlet. My deserters greeted the host of Hell with steel and discipline, Callowan enmity forged into a sharp blade by Imperial drills. That brief thought was all the attention I could give them, for the devil was on me a heartbeat later. I took the impact but the monster was heavier than I’d thought: its mass was enough to blow me off my feet as it cackled madly. I bounced off the shield of the legionary behind me and landed in a crouch, my bad leg flaring up in vicious pain. The devil closed its maw around my sword arm, fangs grinding and sliding against the steel plate as it tried to rip it off. I cursed and took out my dagger, ramming it in the thing’s eye.

That got it to back off and howl loudly in my face, knife still stuck in. I limped forward, because if the devil got momentum again this was going to get ugly. It reared back and struck with the horn-like claws: I hobbled nimbly to the side and hacked my sword into its ear, scoring a wound that let out smoke instead of blood. It body-slammed me in the flank for my trouble but I was ready for it this time: my Name flared and I weathered the hit without flinching, my footing unimpeded. It made a noise of surprise and turned to bite again but I wasn’t done: gathering the threads of power still wreathing me, I forced them around my fist and sucker punched the devil in the stomach with a snarl. It let out a wheezing gasp, the force of the strike tearing flesh and making it ripple.

“Welcome to Marchford,” I rasped, ramming my sword into its other eye and placing a second hand on the hilt to heave and rip through until my blade tore through the mouth and came out smoking.

Its head almost entirely split in two, it fell to the ground twitching and lifeless.

“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” I finished as I slid my knife out of the corpse and back into its sheath.

While I’d been busy putting the devil down the deserters had been weathering the assault of the other monsters with admirable tenacity. I saw corpses on the ground and while the back of the company was a mess where the ironhooks had leapt over the shield wall and started tearing into soldiers, there was a pair of dead centipede abominations on the ground and more than a few jackal-headed monsters had been hacked to pieces by legionary blades. The shield wall was proving more than a match for the enemy’s bestial fury, which meant it was only a matter of time until the large devils intervened.

As if summoned by my thoughts, the second wave moved. That there were so few of them left was a testament to both Pickler’s talent for traps and Robber’s fearless triggering of them: aside from the hyena beast I’d put down, only four of the massive devils remained. Two of them were made of the same mould as the skinless ape I’d once put down with Kamilah’s line during my failed attempt to rescue the Fifteenth’s wounded, and I knew full well how dangerous those could be. The other two I eyed disdainfully: some bull’s ugly cousin and a lizard trying really hard to be a tiger. Those I’d leave to the Gallowborne, but the apes had a real chance of making the shield wall collapse if they managed to reach it. But that was why I was here, wasn’t it? I limped ahead of the line of battle, ducking under a jackal’ swing and rising to eviscerate it in the same smooth movement. It screamed from both mouths and I left it to cradle its guts, confident it would not trouble my soldiers. The skinless ape closest to me screamed his hatred in my general direction, but the other one was content to pass me by. That just wouldn’t do. Shadows formed into a ball in front of my free hand and the projectile shot like a bolt, hitting it in the stomach. The muscles and bones shattered, maggots flying everywhere.

“It’s bad form to ignore a lady when she asks for a dance,” I called out.

If the screaming was any indication, I had its attention now. Lovely. They closed on me as a pair, yet another indication that these bastards had gotten old enough to actually think ahead – would it have been too much to ask to get purely animalistic devils? I’d have to send Heiress a strongly worded letter on the subject. My repertoire of insults in both Mtethwa and Taghrebi was an ever-expanding thing. The devils barrelled towards me like a pair of runaway carts and I could already hear the child voices they mimicked – Gods, hopefully mimicked – calling out their pleas. I stood my ground until the last moment slowing my breathing. I could no longer slide and run around my battlefields, I knew this. I was too slow, now. Mobility was no longer my game, and in brute force I could not match either of the monsters without drawing deep into my Name: something I was warier of than ever before. The well of power felt shallower now. Like it might run dry, were I careless enough.

I would cope. I still remembered the first time I’d ever seen Black and Captain fight, when I’d still been fresh out Laure and wet behind the ears. Captain had moved like lightning and hit like an avalanche, but my teacher had still won the spar. And he’d won never moving quicker than at a walking pace, letting his positioning and footwork carry the battle for him. I wasn’t quite there yet, but that kind of fighting was not beyond me either. Especially against opponents still more mindless than mindful. There was a slight gap between the two devils, for they’d come at different angles. At the last moment I lowered my body and took a single step forward, letting the monsters pass me by and run into each other.

I smiled darkly as they spun into a tangle of limbs and shrill screams, pivoting to face them again. I let them rise without contest, knowing every moment I bought was allowing the Gallowborne to clear out more of the others.

“Lesson the first,” I informed them. “The most important parts of fighting are distance and footwork. Let’s try that again.”

When they came for me the second time, after extricating themselves, they were warier. They did not charge – one tried to catch my sword while the other tried to slip behind my back. I sidestepped the grasping limb and claimed a trickle of my Name, just enough power to cover the edge of my sword and allow it to cut clean through the devil’s flesh and wrist bone when I brought it down. Without missing a beat, I caught the maggot-spilling appendage and threw it in the stride of the devil charging at my back, taking another measured step right out of its way as it tripped and collided with its brethren. Down again they went, in a tangle of limbs.

“Lesson the second,” I said. “I am not a swordswoman. Swordsmanship is the ‘tame sport they teach noble children’, or so I’ve been told. What I learned was to kill well and quickly, while giving as few openings as possible.”

My lecturing did not seem very popular with my audience. Lots of screaming all around. It troubled me how easy I was finding it to ignore weeping pleas made in a child’s voice.

“I’m hearing a lot of whinging, boys,” I said. “Get your shit together, would you?”

Well , I thought as they charged like angry bulls the moment they got to their feet, taunting works on devils. That’s good to know. I did not move, because moving out of fear was wasteful. I did not strike, for striking without purpose was meaningless. I breathed out calmly and watched them come closer with every moment, gauging the distances. The first one’s fist grazed my shoulder as my sword curved, cleanly lopping off the devil’s head. I spun to let the other one pass me by, reaching for my Name one last time. The shadow spear burst out and tore through its head before it took a fourth stride past me. A heartbeat passed, then the two corpses fell. I brushed a few maggots off my shoulder.

“Lesson the third,” I spoke to the dead. “ Callow is under my protection . Tread its ground at your own peril.”

Behind me, the deserters let out a yell and advanced, encircling the last few remaining devils in circles of steel shields. They pressed forward close so that the monsters didn’t even have room to move, swords thrusting into soft spots with vicious enthusiasm. I limped back to them slowly, sheathing my blade, and by the time I got there we were the only living creatures left standing.

“Wounded to the designated spot,” I called out. “The rest of you, with me. We’ve still got one last mess to clean up.”

For once, the cheers felt like they had been earned.

Chapter 30: Deliver

“Don’t think of it so much as a fall, but rather as an opportunity to learn how to fly.”
– Dread Emperor Venal, in the act of succeeding his predecessor

Of the original hundred I’d begun the evening with, there were barely forty left. More wounded among the missing than dead, but it was a hard man who could fight with an eye or a few fingers missing. There was only so much I could ask of anyone without a Name, and even with mine I was starting to feel the exhaustion set in. I’d used too much power, I decided. I’d have to be careful about that in the future. Learn to use my Names in ways that burned through my reserves slower that the tricks my teacher had taught me and the ones I’d taught myself from that. I kept us moving as fast as could be managed, guiding us through mostly unfamiliar streets. The night was lit up in the distance by bonfires and mageflame, as clear a beacon as I could hope for. I’d trusted Juniper’s plan to see us through this battle, and so far that trust had been rewarded. Anything that would tip the scales for the Battle of Marchford from here on out would be on my head: the Hellhound could forge me a chance at victory, but I’d have to be the one to wield it.

We started hearing the fighting long before we saw it. Screams, splintering wood and steel meeting steel. There was no other clamour like it in all of Creation, and there was some part of me that gloried in the sounds. Had Black seen that, when he’d chosen me? Had he stared into my eyes and glimpsed something in there, creeping under the ideals, that relished in the fight? It wasn’t something I was proud of. I knew, deep down, that the sword wasn’t enough to change the world. Not in any way that lasted. The real work began when the fighting was over, picking up the pieces and trying to fit them in a better way. But, Gods help me, fighting’s the part I’m actually good at. I put the thought away: it wasn’t a problem I’d solve tonight. If I didn’t survive until morning, it wouldn’t be a problem at all.

When we came upon the Silver Spears I saw with mild surprise that they had taken a beating. There were corpses in the plaza Juniper had ordered prepared and fielded with our single siege engine, but the mercenaries had been pushed back into the avenue. There we bare a hundred of them left. Nauk’s legionaries had splattered the entire width of the road with the blood of their enemies: the only place their formation broke was when the shield wall had to split around the corpse of some enormous tangled abomination of horse and man flesh. Someone had apparently climbed on top and skewered it to death with its own lance. Weeping Heavens, my legion was full of crazies. What was Ratface feeding these people?

As if to make my point for me, up ahead a horse whinnied and there was a burst of cheers from Nauk’s men. I tried to look at what was happening, but these were flat grounds and every single fucking legionary in my army was was taller than me. I was one more incident like this from having a goblin with a stepladder follow me around everywhere, I really was. I let Farrier – the only remaining lieutenant in the Gallowborne, looked like – bring my company into the fold as I looked for a better vantage point. The ballista was on a platform and I could see Hune standing next to it from where I stood. So were Pickler and a handful of other goblins, but they paid me no mind as I approached: they were lining up their next shot, my Senior Sapper letting out a little pleased sigh when the rock scored a bloody line of broken flesh in the Silver Spears.

“Lady Squire,” the ogre greeted me as soon as I came close enough, fist thumping against her armour.

“Commander,” I replied. “What’s this with a horse?”

I scanned the battlefield even as I asked the question. Nauk’s men had pressed by the large corpse, reforming a solid shield wall. The Silver Spear infantry was trying and failing to push them back, only retreating in time to let what remained of the corrupted cataphracts attempt charges. My other commander had their number, though. He was keeping his mages ready for those, drowning the tip of the cavalry wedge in mage fire every time they tried. I found the horse in question just as Hune offered me an explanation.

“One of the mounts was improperly corrupted,” the ogre told me. “They’ve adopted as a... pet.”

The last word was spoken with open distaste. Commander Hune had very steady notions about professionalism, which was half the reason she got on so well with Juniper. I watched as legionaries herded a horse without visible marks of corruption on it towards the enemy – it kicked their shields a few times but eventually ran away and bowled over a few of the men-at-arms, kicking one’s head in and spilling dark fluids all over the ground.

“A pet,” I repeated, not sure whether to be amused or appalled.

“Some of your former Rat Company men are calling it ‘Magic Goat’. They seem to think this amusing, for reasons that escape me. Is it magical because it is not, in fact, a goat?” Hune frowned.

“You use undead goats one time and nobody ever lets it go,” I muttered, dodging a proper explanation.

One of my legionaries tried to mount the thing when it escaped back to my forces, managing the feat for a solid ten heartbeats before it whinnied in distress and tossed him back into the ranks – he was caught by a dozen other men, landing unharmed. Still, there was only so much time-wasting I was willing to allow. Hakram and his picked line had been charged with keeping an eye on the back of the enemy to ensure none of the mercenaries split away from the mass and made a run for another hearth where they could disrupt the ritual, but if the Silver Spears all dispersed it wouldn’t be enough. We hadn’t anticipated the men-at-arms would be able to leap like they did, and against that the barricades Pickler had built to bar the surrounding streets would be useless.

Masego had recommended we evacuate the surroundings of all the hearths involved in the ritual and I’d signed off on that immediately, but even if there were no civilian casualties a third of Marchford would still be put to the torch by the magic going wild. We’d already turned Marchford into half a ruin, I’d rather it wasn’t a smouldering one if I could avoid it. The Silver Spears weren’t giving ground at the moment, though, even with their numbers running thin. Whenever their assaults failed they clustered around a cataphract in the back, one who never participated. It was more armour than man, the metal fused together seamlessly like a carapace – save for where the visor would have been, where it was twisted into a maddened grin instead. I sighed. I was going to have to take care of that one, wasn’t I?

I was already gauging the fastest path to the front of the line when Apprentice stumbled onto the scene. The dark-skinned mage was panting and his robes were drenched in sweat, braids in disarray. A tenth of mages followed closely behind, in much better shape.

“Masego?” I prompted with a frown.

“Demon,” he got out. “Demon’s in the city.”

My blood ran cold. I’d thought it would remain out in the hills, slowly spreading its corruption.

“How did it pass the threshold?” I asked.

The bespectacled man rested a hand on another soldier’s shoulder, pushing himself up.

“It’s inside one of them,” he said, gesturing towards the Silver Spears.

Oh, Hells. That was why the grinning cataphract was staying in the back. Corruption spread almost instantly through touch, but given enough time just standing close to my men would do the trick. Even if it lost the battle, all it had to do was wait.

“ Shit ,” I cursed, the expletive deeply heartfelt.

I closed my eyes and considered my options. The longer I let the demon work its power, the worst the situation got. How many of my legionaries were already beyond salvation? Yet the memory of my last fight with the creature remained fresh: I’d gone in unprepared and been effortlessly crushed. There was no longer anything glorious about any of the sounds of battle: every scream was a reminder that my men were slowly being ripped away from me.

“Are you combat ready?” I asked Masego.

He heaved drily, then wiped his sweat-dripping mouth.

“I’ll manage,” he replied.

I cast a look at Commander Hune, who’d been observing the conversation with an utterly expressionless face.

“Get word to Hakram,” I ordered. “We’re taking out the grinning cataphract.”

She nodded and strode away without comment. The direness of the situation was not lost on her, it seemed. I waited for Masego to catch his breath another few heartbeats, then gestured sharply for him to follow. My Name was already roiling, preparing itself for the coming fight, and I could feel a pulse of responding power come from Apprentice. It felt like lightning and morning dew, something clear and crisp and deceptively cruel – steel under silk, the bite of it felt only too late. Fitting, for a man whose soft exterior hid such a deep well of merciless power. Soldiers split away for us without there being a need for orders, driven away by the old instinct branded into the minds of all the peoples of Creation: Named are coming . Stand and die, run and live. I spared no time looking at them. The horse from earlier whinnied plaintively.

“Butcher that beast,” I ordered.

I had not Spoken, but my legionaries moved as if motivated by the crack of the whip. My eyes were ahead, fixed on the enemy. There were maybe a hundred mercenaries left, horsemen and men-at-arms mixed in an unruly throng. I felt Apprentice at my side, breath and pace steady as his magic crackled. The Silver Spears charged and I stilled my heartbeat, letting the world slow down around me. The muscles of the deformed horse at the head of the pack rippled under my dispassionate gaze, the tip of the lance headed for my throat. I considered it with disdain, stepping around the shaft and patiently placing my blade. Two impacts, and as a I continued advancing the horse and the rider’s heads tumbled on the ground. The wave of corrupted flesh and steel threatened to sweep us aside but Apprentice barked a word in some arcane tongue and a flash of fire race along the ground in long stripes, scattering the host. Neither of us broke our stride.

The grinning abomination was considering me. It came forward at a light trot, only charging when it was too close to change direction. Around us the flames formed a circle keeping us in and the enemy soldiers out, though they tried to push through the fire and fell away with shrieks. The demonhost wielded a lance but it used it like a staff, sweeping away paving stones as it swung the shaft at me. I danced around it, sword and dagger coming up to trace thin lines on the steel that bedecked horse and rider both. The corruption ran deep in this one. A lash of lightning left Apprentice’s hands, coiling around the rider’s head and trying to drag him down. In vain: though the body convulsed, it seemed otherwise unaffected. The horse’s hooves reared up to cave in the mage’s head but bounced off a flat field of blue magic, shattering it in panes of light.

“There’ll be none of that,” I snarled.

My sword whipped to scythe through the horse’s back leg, wreathed in shadows for the blink of an eye – it cut through steel and grinding bone effortlessly. Dark liquids burst out and the rider fluidly leapt down from the falling horse, landing on its feet. It turned to meet me without a word, unsheathing the longsword at its hip as it held its lance with the other hand. A shrill sound resounded throughout the battlefield and a ray of ugly black light pierced the horse’s flank: its flesh and steel shrivelled away in a matter of heartbeats, leaving behind only an oily stain on the ground. The demonhost seemed indifferent to the loss, its perfectly still metal grin still in place. Its heels rose from the ground, leaving only steel-clad toes touching it, and with swiftness I had rarely seen surpassed it struck again.

My sword parried the shaft and I ducked under the sword stroke. Not quick enough: the sword shorn straight through the top of my helmet. I limped back as fast as I could, dagger hand clumsily tugging off the straps holding the helmet together. I shook it off and I fell to the ground. Apprentice cast a spell that rang like a thunderclap, an explosion of invisible force detonating right next to the abomination’s head. It bought me a few moments, but besides forcing it to tilt back its neck there was no mark made by the sorcery. Masego had its attention, though. In a single heartbeat it had crossed the distance to the mage, sword shattering the restored blue field of light – though a second one came into existence it shattered it. It dropped the useless handle and caught Apprentice by the throat, ignoring the ring of fire that formed around its wrist and tightened instantly.

A legionary’s shield impacted its side, knocking it back and breaking its grip as Hakram entered the scene. The orc let out a guttural howl, shield battering the demonhost down again and again in unrelenting assault. Unharmed for all that rage, it moved back as if yanked by the hand of some unseen god. Its toes were barely touching the ground, I saw, and no earthly muscles were lending it the speed it had displayed: an eldritch thing was moving it according to ways beyond that of Creation.

“Apprentice?” I called out.

“You are going to burn for that, abomination,” the mage rasped coldly, ignoring me.

The gauntlets had left a pale mark matching the fingers on Masego’s throat, but aside from that he seemed unharmed. I worried anyhow, knowing corruption did not always have to be visible – but there was no time to worry about that now.

“Though I hunger I am never sated,” he spoke in Mthethwa, tongue cadenced.

The grinning demonhost moved to end him, but Hakram and I knew our work. Seamlessly I flanked the monster as Adjutant stood his ground, shield up and short sword in the middle line. The abomination did not turn to face me but it stomped a foot on the ground: wind howled and stone flew, forcing me back. Hakram, though? Hakram squared his shoulder and smiled a devil’s grin.

“Come on, you bastard. Here I Stand ,” he laughed.

The lance, edge first, struck the scutum. Corrupted steel met the work of goblins and was found wanting, for in that moment even if all the Celestial Choirs had sought to move my Adjutant they would have found their strength matched. Again and again, with mightthat split the air and screamed havoc, the abomination tried to pierce the shield and its strikes pattered like rain on a lake of oil.

“Through grass and ground I crawl, devouring all I behold.”

As the words left Apprentice’s mouth I felt my Name howl for the first time since I had last matched my strength to the demon’s. It wanted vengeance, for an aspect stolen. It wanted to even a scale that could not be evened, but would settle for the harshest price that could be exacted. A single droplet of liquid shadow fell on my blade, the ripples spreading inky darkness until it had swallowed it whole. I sped through the rubble and rammed it in the abomination’s back, finally finding purchase as I punched through the carapace. With a great heave I ripped out my sword, dark pus falling to the ground in a hissing rain. I stepped away just in time.

“My blood knows the call, my flesh the craving. Nameless eidolons, thieves of Heaven’s grace, grant me flame .”

Twin threads of flame sprouted above Masego’s shoulders, growing into great snakes of flame that obeyed this time without further command: their heads the size of a chariot, they fell like hammers on the form of the demonhost. Spellflame raged against an unseen resistance, melting away steel until it dripped on the ground and instantly searing the soft matter beneath. The spell had a hunger to it that had lacked at Three Hills, an eagerness to devour the enemy whole driven by Apprentice’s implacable anger. When the fires finally gutted out, a smoking carcass rested on the stone, trying to crawl back up. I silently stepped forward. With unforeseen violence the demonhost raked its mutated hands upwards, drawing lines on my cheek. I did not flinch.

“Wrong side of the face,” I told it, still-dark sword falling down to end the fight.

The point of my sword thrust through the thing’s head and into the stone beneath. Finally, it stopped moving. I let out a sob half relief and half surprise, power sifting through my fingers like sand. Hakram knelt at my side, his own legs shaking like leaves.

“It’s still here,” Apprentice said, voice bewildered.

My eyes flicked to the grinning abomination’s body, but it was unmoving. Oh, Weeping Heavens. It was never this one. All the demon needed to spread its plague of corruption was time and touch. Why would it have picked the leader of the pack to serve as a cloak, blindly cunning as it was? Subtlety was ever the mark of their kind. There’d been one creature, harmless as it was, that my legionaries had been entertaining this entire fight. Taking as a pet, even. I turned and watched as the horse some poor damned soul had called the ‘Magic Goat’ allowed its stomach to open, spilling out guts that took the shape of a misshapen child.

“Gods save us all,” I whispered as I finally realized how badly I’d been played.

How many legionaries had it corrupted with a kick or a ride, I wondered? To how many others had the plague spread as they stood should to shoulder in the shield wall? The demon crawled on the ground with limbs too small for its body of gore, twisting and turning against the stone. In the back of my head I heard a laugh that turned into a mockery we all heard, though the abomination had no mouth to voice it. It felt like hot knives ripping in my mind, scattering my thoughts. A heartbeat later, an arrow nailed one of its limbs to the stone. A one-handed man wearing clothes that were more decoration than true cover landed on the ground beside it. His spear rose and shone with white light as he offered a feral grin.

“Have at thee, demon,” Hunter announced, as Archer knocked a second arrow.

I rolled my shoulders and gestured for my own Named to follow. Do or die, looked like. I was starting to hate how familiar that feeling was.

Chapter 31: Sleight

“Oh, give me a bloodthirsty, fire-and-brimstone conquering villain any day. It’s the schemers you have to watch out for.”
– Queen Elizabeth Alban of Callow

Before I could properly process the sight of a hero actually being helpful for once, I felt the metaphysical equivalent of a hammer fall down over the entire avenue. The pressure lightened after a heartbeat but... No, lightened wasn’t the right word. It had been gathered , into walls that sealed off the battlefield. I shot a look at Masego but he seemed as surprised as I was. Not his work, and neither of Lady Ranger’s pupils could do magic as far as I knew. A consequence of Hakram’s finally formed aspect? Ah. Juniper. Of course she had a contingency in case the demon actually showed up. We’d been fairly certain it wouldn’t but the Hellhound wasn’t one for leaving things to chance. The mages who’d helped Masego with the ritual had been given an additional set of instructions, was my guess. Why hadn’t she told me, though? Because I’d been crippled? The thought made me grind my teeth, but I dismissed it as unfair. Juniper had not treated me any differently after my failed foray into dream visions.

So what was it about the nature of our opponent now that would make her wilfully keep me in the dark? It was a demon, and very dangerous. Not much of a justification there, even if it was a demon of – corruption. Oh. It was a given I’d be in the thick of any fight with the abomination, and the longer I stayed there the higher the chances I got corrupted. She hadn’t told me the contingency plan because I might end up being the Fifteenth’s opponent, before the battle was done. I felt a flare of grudging admiration for my grim-faced legate: she didn’t balk in the face of bad scenarios. She prepared for them however she needed to, and if someone’s feelings got hurt then so much for that. Still the ward, for I was pretty sure that was what it was, that had sealed off the avenue wouldn’t be enough on its own.

Given enough time I might be able to break through it and Masego definitely could which likely meant the demon could as well. So it was meant as a containment measure, until the actual killing stroke could be readied. That might very well explain why I hadn’t seen trace of Robber’s sappers since their scrap with the devils, and I doubted this was the last contingency she’d had the Legion mages lay. Had Kilian been privy to all of this, I wondered? She must have been, as Senior Mage. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that, but now was not the time to linger on the subject of my lover. Hunter had been – well, doing pretty good against the demon actually.

“Feel the might of my wrath, hellspawn!”

Could have done without the heroic declarations, but I wasn’t about to look this useful of a gift horse in the mouth. The haft of Hunter’s spear spun and caught the bloody form of the demon in the mouth, scattering the guts that made it up. Lack of head did not seem to hinder it: it grasped for the hero with misshapen hands, only for a violent explosion of blinding light to knock it back. I had to close my eyes, and even after that my vision swam. Of the demon there was only a smoking smear on the ground left, but I knew better than to get my hopes up. Screams came from the few remaining Silver Spears as flesh and corruption began to flake away from them, sliding to the ground in trickles. From some of my legionaries too, I saw, and I found Nauk’s eyes across the battlefield. Feeling sick in the stomach, I inclined my head in their direction and slid a finger across my throat. He grimaced but nodded – crossbow quarrels took the afflicted men in the back moments later. It didn’t stop the demon. The flecks of flesh slithered across the ground until they formed some sort of foul pile, then began coalescing into a larger form.

“Apprentice,” I called out. “We need options. Can you banish it?”

The dark-skinned mage shook his head.

“Not from inside the threshold,” he said.

Bloody, Burning Hells. Had it planned that? Known that as long as we covered the city in a ritual, we couldn’t trap it in a ward and force it back to the Hell it had escaped? Demons weren’t supposed to be sentient but this one had proved capable of deception. Then again, so are animals. Anyhow, who knew what being bound to an Imperial standard for a few hundred years could do to a creature like that?

“What can you do?” I asked.

Apprentice let out a long breath.

“I can go all out,” he said. “But you’ll need to buy me time.”

Well, Black had never promised this would be an easy job. I glanced at Archer, who’d allowed the string of her bow to slacken as she eyed the forming body of the demon. No immediate solution from there. I found Hakram already looking at me when I turned towards him and sighed.

“Fuck it,” I said. “Not like running’s going to help.”

He snorted and we moved towards the enemy as one. Getting the child-form brutalized by a hero had apparently prompted the abomination to trade up for a larger model: the coalescing shape was easily the size of a two-story house. Not as thick though: two clawed legs with half a dozen articulations had already formed to supports its spindly torso, but offhand I counted at least five arms aggregating flesh into long limbs touching the ground. That the fingers at the end of those limbs looked suspiciously human-like wasn’t something I wanted to think about too much. At first I thought it wouldn’t bother to make a head but when a long, thick strand of skin formed and started dangling from the torso I realized with disgust I’d been wrong. At the end of the strand a bubble of flesh expanded, sprouting eyes by the dozens that were set in dark purpled flesh. Muscles popped from underneath the bubble and grew large horse-like teeth, because apparently it hadn’t been looking nightmarish enough.

While Hakram and I moved, Hunter hadn’t been wasting his time. The tip of his spear wreathed in light, he charged forward with a wince-inducing war cry. The hero scythed through one of the arm-limbs effortlessly, only to back away with haste when it started crawling close to his legs. While he put some distance between them, the demon picked up the limb with another arm and casually shoved it into what was likely supposed to be its spine. With a wet squelch, the severed limb re-joined the whole. Well, that’s going to be problematic. We arrived at Hunter’s side just as the abomination put on the finishing touches on its form.

“If we can hold it back for a while, Apprentice has something that will harm it enough for you to finish it off,” I said.

“Squire,” he greeted me with disdain. “You are only slightly less of a blight upon Creation than this thing.”

“If I could cut off your hand twice, I would,” I replied cheerfully. “There, we’re friends now. Maybe we could attend the thing that wants to swallow all of the city?”

He sneered, but did not disagree.

“I’ll take the lead, minion of Dark,” he decided, and before I could argue he was charging again.

“You know he has another hand, right?” Adjutant said. “So technically...”

I didn’t have time to reply because the fight had finally started again. Hunter, either entirely fearless or magnificently stupid, had slipped under the demon’s jaw and was evading its limbs with impossible swiftness while scoring wounds on its abdomen. The light on his spear had dimmed, but heroic Names must have been painful to the monster: it was ignoring us and focusing on him. Even limping close to the demon was enough for me to feel the corruption wafting from it, creeping at the edge of my mind. I gritted my teeth and pushed back against the feeling, ducking under a flailing limb and hacking through the tip with my sword. The dark ichor that spilled from the wound blackened the steel, but I’d have to worry about that later – as long as it didn’t touch my skin I should be fine. I could have used a helmet right about now, though.

From the corner of my eye I saw movement headed for Hakram’s back, but there was a sharp whistle and an arrow took the corrupted man-at-arms in the throat – the mercenary collapsed to the ground twitching, then suddenly burst on fire. Archer has a few tricks up her sleeves, apparently, and we could stop worrying about the last of the enemy host getting to us. Arrows kept singing as Hakram and I started methodically going for one limb after the other, one of us getting close enough to bait a strike and the other hacking through while it was overextended. Eventually it realized that while Hunter’s spear was more painful the villains were doing more actual damage: it flexed its legs and with a push forced itself upright on two hands, spinning in a whirl of limbs that forced all of us back. Hunter got slapped away by a hand and the part of his bare chest it touched started warping but he screamed and another burst of violent light burned away the corruption, leaving only singed flesh.

The legs wriggled back into the demon’s torso with a squelch and spray of ichor, bursting back out in front as it steadied its footing. I frowned. Staying too close wasn’t an option for Hakram or me, given how much more vulnerable to corruption we were. Hunter would have to handle that part. What could we do that would actually hurt it, though? Three times we’d cut away an arm, only for it to shove it back somewhere more convenient to attack us with. I glanced at Apprentice, who fifteen feet away from all this was kneeling on the ground with his eyes closed and his palms held upright. Gods Below, Masego, you could have at least gone further away. Sweat was dripping from the bespectacled mage’s forehead, and even from where I stood I could feel the weight of the power he was gathering. No incantation though. Unusual, that. How much longer would he need? There was no way to know for sure.

Wreathing my sword with my Name was no longer an option, both because I was running low on power and because I didn’t like the looks of what the demon blood had done to the blade. Don’t think of this as a fight, Catherine, it’s a puzzle. How do you solve it? To keep it contained, its mobility needed to be hindered. Simply cutting off the limbs was useless. What else did I have in my arsenal? The avenue was thick with corpses and I could probably raise one, but given the nature of the demon that would be more liability than asset. I didn’t know what would happen if it touched a corpse with my Name’s power invested in it, or if it could reach through the strings I used to control my necromantic constructs. I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them. No obvious solutions, so I’d just have to try things. Hunter charged in again with a cry, so it was time for round two.

Adjutant moved like an extension of my body, always where I needed him to be exactly when I needed him there. Something about his Name, or had we simply been through enough battlefields together? I half-stepped out of an arm’s way and scored a long mark against the side but it wasn’t a strong enough hit to go through. No matter, Adjutant finished the work a moment later with the side of his sword, bringing up his shield to prevent the blood from touching him. The demon picked up the arm but disdained putting it back this time: instead it swung it at us like a mace. I knew, even as I saw the hit coming, that I wouldn’t be able to get out in the way in time. Not with the way my leg was hobbled. Hakram squared his shoulders and I felt his Name flare up, but it wouldn’t be enough. I still remembered how drained using an aspect for the first time had left me: that he’d been able to fight at all afterwards was a testament to orc constitution. With a sharp whistle, an arrow fell on the mace limb. Larger than the previous ones, and spinning wildly on itself, it tore through the flesh and dispersed it like smoke before clattering uselessly against the ground.

Saved, for now. I glanced to where the Silver Spears had been and now stood only a field of corpses. Weeping Heavens, she’d killed at least forty corrupted men in less time than it took to say morning prayers. A good person to have on yours side, Archer. Oversized fingers spread against the ground and pushed the demon up as it tried to swing its legs at Hunter, but the man deftly dropped to the ground and let the limbs pass above him. That was as much attention as I could grant the hero, because some of the other fingers weren’t merely holding up our opponent. They were scrabbling around the broken pavestones and took a handful, carelessly tossing them in Masego’s direction. I cursed: it had been too much to hope for that it wouldn’t notice what was going on there.

I reached for the last scrapings of my power, formed a spear of shadows and shot it without missing a beat, bursting through a pavestone and clipping another. There were four other rocks flying and the same spinning arrows took out one, then a second, then a third – until the angle took the last beyond Archer’s angle of fire. It would hit Apprentice in the head, I gauged. And kill him instantly. Fuck, fuck fuck – Adjutant stepped in front of Masego, shield up and legs spread. The impact caved in the shield and broke the arm behind it, but the orc remained on his feet and the stone fell to the ground. Teeth bared, Hakram ripped away the useless wreck of steel and forced back his arm in its socket with a horrible cracking sound. Gods, he hadn’t even screamed or flinched. Just... taken it, and moved on. Slowly, Apprentice rose to his feet. I called out for Hunter to run and he did so without argument for once, scything the lesser half of an arm on his way out and leaping through a house’s window with all the grace of a rushing bull.

Lines of flame rose from the ground into the sky from all over the city, too numerous to count. The threads of fire linked into a single point high above the demon and I finally understood what Masego had been doing. He’d broken his ritual, piece by piece, and taken the wild flames that would have exploded from the hearths as his own. Usurpation is the essence of sorcery , Apprentice had once told me, paraphrasing some Dread Emperor. He’d usurped his own work, and was now bringing its full strength to bear against our enemy. From the point where all the flames had gathered an enormous pillar of flame descended, enveloping the demon in the blink of an eye. I’d half-excepted the spell to disappear after a moment, but it kept on going. There was a strange sound coming from our mage’s direction, and I realized with a start it was a laugh. Masego was grinning madly as he convulsed in laughter, the glare of the flames reflecting on his glasses as he peered over them at his work. His hands were thrusting forward, unmoving as the fire raged and waves of heat scorched stone and distorted the air.

How long we stood there, watching the son of the Sovereign of the Red Skies proving the truth of his lineage, I did not know. Long enough for my limbs to turn mellow as the stress of the fight left me, and long enough for Hunter to burst out of a different house than the one he’d entered and join us. Archer leapt down from her perch moments later, eyes wary.

“Will that kill it?” she asked.

I chuckled tiredly. “Well, it probably won’t be moving for a while. We’ll still need Hunter to finish the fight: I don’t think Masego will have enough juice left to cage and banish it after that.”

She arched a fine eyebrow.

“That was an option?”

“From what I understand,” I said, “our chances of managing to trap it if it saw us coming were... not promising. This is probably as good as the Fifteenth can reasonably have expected this fight to have gone.”

Hunter himself was studiously ignoring us, and I returned him the courtesy. He’d been eager enough to attack so far, I had no doubts he’d finish the monster off when the time came. Hakram was more important to me, and I had to limp as quick as I physically could to catch the orc when he began to collapse.

“I think I’m done for the night, Cat,” he rasped.

“You did good, Hakram,” I murmured, gently setting him down against a wall. “Better than anyone had a right to expect.”

“I-” he started, but exhaustion caught up with him.

His mouthed closed and unconsciousness finally took hold of his body.

“Steady fighter, this one,” Archer commented.

“The steadiest,” I agreed softly.

Masego’s spell showed no sign of thinning. I limped to his side and put a hand on his shoulder.

“How much longer?” I asked.

He remained silent for a moment. At the edge of my sight, Hunter raised his spear – immediately, my hand dropped to my sword and I cursed myself for having ever sheathed it. I’d thought the hero too straightforward to turn on us, but now that the battle was done he must have thought he could take us out when weakened and then take care of the demon on his own. Shit, what side was Archer going to take? She was the least tired among us.

Hunter spat blood, and the demon’s hand finished ripping its way through his chest.

It looked almost human now, though naked and with unsettlingly large eyes. Archer’s retort hit him in the throat but it didn’t even seem to notice. It withdrew its hand from the dead hero and tossed him at Masego, breaking the mage’s concentration – the column of flame immediately rippled, then went up in an explosion that flattened all of us to the ground. I forced down a scream of pain as my bad leg snapped at an angle but desperately scrabbled back to my feet just in time to see the demon go for Apprentice. The same blue panes of light that had stopped the corrupted monster earlier materialized in front of the mage when the abomination leapt at him, holding it at arm’s length as its caressed the magical shield. Masego grunted as I moved to flank the demon, the shield light bursting and throwing it back. The impact had wiggled the arrow in its throat, spraying blood in an arc as it landed fluidly on its feet.

A single drop landed on Apprentice’s left wrist. Immediately he brought up the other hand, the tip of a finger glowing red-orange, and with a hoarse scream he cauterized the skin. Would that be enough? Shit. It had to be. I heard Archer unsheathe her blades and the demon lazily turned to look at me. It took a step, and then stilled. The sound of hooves against stone was heard in the distance, coming towards us from where the Silver Spears had once stood. The pace was unhurried, like the rider had all the time in the world. I let out a breath of relief. Black. My teacher had come for us. Through the smoke and dust kicked up by the breaking of Masego’s spell, a single silhouette rode. A cage of bright red and green flames formed around the demon, spinning slowly at first and then quickening until it took the shape of a whirling cone and then burst , tearing into the sky so high the whole city must have been able to see it. Behind it, no trace of the demon remained. The horse was reined in twenty feet away from us, and finally I was able to make out the rider.

“Well,” Heiress spoke with a pleasant smile. “Quite a mess you’ve made here, Squire.”

Chapter 32: Draw

“You have to enjoy life’s little pleasures, like lazy mornings and strawberries and invading Callow with an invisible army.”
– Dread Empress Malevolent III

A heartbeat passed as my brains struggled to cope with too many surprises in a row – I forced myself to focus on one at a time. Had Heiress just casually banished a fucking demon? No, that couldn’t be. I didn’t even think she was a mage, and even if she was there was no way a girl barely older than me had that much power at her fingertips. Apprentice couldn’t even do that, and sorcery was at the heart of his Name. Black I could see pulling out something from his apparently bottomless bag of tricks, Warlock probably and Malicia almost certainly but Heiress? No. I’d missed something. My eyes drifted to my rival’s saddle, noticing she was resting her gloved hand on a long wooden haft. Old wood, with fresh new runes carved into it. It took another heartbeat before everything clicked into place. Triumphant’s demons had been bound to the standards of her Legions, Masego had told us. She never let it loose. She let it out, and after she got what she wanted she just... popped it back in. Heiress’ irritatingly perfect face was the picture of friendliness, but I thought I saw a glimmer of vicious amusement in her eyes when she met my stare.

“Would I be correct in assuming she’s the person responsible for the demon running around?” Archer asked in a very, very calm tone.

“That’s the one,” I confirmed.

Heiress’ face painted itself with what I would have believed to be genuine surprise, had I not known who I was dealing with. I couldn’t make out too much of her in the dark, but what I did see was perfectly groomed. Not a speck of dust on her polished steel scales or that rather nice green shawl wrapped around her neck. Even the horse was spotless, and a beautiful beast besides: all grey, and Callowan stock too.

“Is that how you’ll be trying to get out of this grave you’ve dug?” the aristocrat asked. “By pinning the blame on me? We both know the Silver Spears would never had come over the temple holding the demon, had you not pushed them so relentlessly after your victory.”

“Oh, you bitch ,” I replied.

“Uncouth language only betrays your lesser breeding,” she informed me with a sneer. “I will not take the fall for you, Squire. You made the decision to hound their retreat out of petty spite, I am told. Something about the death of a Tribune Nilin?”

My fingers tightened around the grip of my sword until I felt them turning white. I’d thought I knew hatred, from the days where I’d lived under the thumb of Mazus. I found now I’d been mistaken. The Governor grinding his heel over the city’s throat was an impersonal sort of attack, directed at a people instead of my own person. This? This was personal.

“Well, Miss,” Archer smiled. “You and I seem to have an account to settle. Do try to struggle, it’ll be that much more satisfying.”

My eyes remained on Heiress’ gloved fingers, watching them drum absent-mindedly against the haft of wood. I could see the place where metal rings had once bound the cloth part of the standard. The dark-skinned villain met my eyes again, the implied threat perfectly clear . I let it out once. If my life is in danger, I might just do it again.

“You’d be the representative from Refuge, yes?” my rival said.

Archer flicked her wrist, slowly spinning the longknife in her hand.

“Could be I’m just a concerned citizen,” she replied.

Heiress cocked her head to the side. “I’m given to understand that you were sent to smooth over a little diplomatic wrinkle with the Tower. I wonder what the consequences for your mistress would be, if you attempt the murder of a Praesi aristocrat in broad daylight?”

“Oh, I won’t be ‘attempting’ anything,” Archer chuckled. “Anyhow, I’ve got doubts anyone here will bear witness for your corpse afterwards.”

Why had she forced the demon back in the standard? I allowed their words to drift past me as I put all my mind to figuring that one riddle out. If she’d waited a few moments longer, it might have killed me. Or corrupted me, at which point she’d have an excuse to put me down that not even the Empress could dispute. Her victory condition for this does not involve me being permanently out of the game. What was she actually after, then? Crippling the Fifteenth, maybe. Or she might have been trying to avoid something that would cause her to lose. If I’d been dead or corrupted, there were decent odds the defence of Marchford would have collapsed. At which point the entire population and the remnants of a legion would have ended up corrupted puppets. And Black would have killed her outright for it, because she’d have been responsible for an existential threat to the Empire.

By stopping now, the only strength on the field to have been damaged was mine. The Fifteenth was in shambles, I’d damaged my Name irreparably and she could just stroll in at the end of the fight to claim credit for the “victory”. It was a twisted, labyrinthine plan that had at least half a dozen possible point of failures I could name off the top of my head. The very kind of plot the Praesi brand of villains loved the most. The enormity of what she’d just done slowly sunk in. She had, when it came down to it, used a genuine threat to Creation itself as a fucking hunting hound to damage my position. Hundreds of soldiers, my soldiers , had died just so that smiling failure of a human being could hobble me for the rest of this war. I took a long breath. Archer was right: Heiress didn’t get to walk away from something like this.

“Apprentice, you still with us?” I called out.

“Still alive,” Masego replied through gritted teeth.

“If you had the standard a demon is bound to, would you be able to use it?” I asked, glancing at the bespectacled mage.

“Easiest thing in the world,” he replied, baring his teeth at Heiress.

“I’ll need you to hold off the demon for a while,” I told Archer. “This is going to get messy.”

The ochre-skinned woman nodded sharply, leaning forward in anticipation. Heiress cleared her throat.

“As to your earlier point about witnesses, Envoy,” she said, idly waving her hand. “I would dispute that statement.”

The still-lingering cloud of dust and ash dispersed under an unseen wind. Magic, I knew instantly. Without incantation, which was even more worrying – although not as much as the sight now revealed. Lightly armoured men bearing large oval shields and spears, quietly marching down the avenue. Numbers were hard to gauge, but I could see them spreading out in the distance beyond how far I could see. At least a thousand. Behind me I heard Nauk calling for my legionaries to form up in proper ranks. Gods, I’d misunderstood her endgame. She didn’t want us mauled for a long-term advantage. She wanted us as weak as possible before wiping us out with her own men, using the excuse of possible corruption as a political shield afterwards. And I’d danced to her tune the whole time, never knowing who was playing the lute. I reached for my Name, finding the well still near-empty. Might be able to pass over that if I tap into Struggle.

Alarmed yells started coming from the back of Heiress’ column a moment later. Out of principle I refused to try to push myself up on the tip of my toes to catch a glimpse of what was happening – instead I looked at the aristocrat, and for the first time a flicker of doubt passed through her face. The crossbow bolt passed three inches away from her mount’s head, clattering on the ground, and I turned to watch Robber scuttle down from a roof to the left like an ugly leering green spider. His sappers lined that entire flank, crossbows loaded and ready.

“Evening, Boss,” he said.

“Tribune,” I replied, schooling my face to make it look like I knew exactly what was happening.

I’d gotten a lot of experience at that since I got put in charge of a legion.

“The Callowan volunteers are in place,” he reported. “Learning a bunch of Proceran looters were visiting their home got them motivated good and proper.”

Half of Heiress’ army had been made of Proceran light infantry, I remembered. Robber hadn’t been at the briefing where General Sacker had told me that... but Juniper had. Three cheers for the godsdamned Hellhound, may she ever keep one step ahead of our enemies, I thought, turning to face my opponent.

“Looks like you called it off too early,” I told Heiress.

“I have numbers on my side,” she noted in a neutral tone.

“Lady,” Robber broke in with a malevolent smile. “We just fucked up a bunch of devils and most our number in mercenaries with a demon’s hand shoved up their arse. Chewing up your pretty lads will be light exercise before we turn in for the night. But please, doubt me. Try us .”

I laughed. “You heard the goblin, Akua,” I grinned. “Take out your sword. Last time we had a chance to dance, you legged it before we got to the good stuff.”

Heiress’ face went blank and she remained silent for a long moment before she sighed.

“I suppose now and then one must be willing to settle for a draw,” she said.

“I still say we knife her and put the head on a pike,” Archer growled.

“You kill her now and the Empress might have to declare war on Refuge,” I admitted. “She’s not without backing.”

With another growl, the Named shoved her longknives back in their sheaths and strode away. My rival seemed about to add a pithy comment to the situation, but before she could someone tossed an empty bottle at her head. Or tried to, at least – it missed by a solid three feet.

“Boooo,” the Wandering Bard yelled. “Boooo, villains, boooo.”

Of course Almorava would show up. This night just wouldn’t be shitty enough with the mouthy heroine making an appearance. Evidently the godly quota for screwing me over this month had yet to be filled in full. I bet she practiced the booing, too, there’s no way it could sound this excruciatingly obnoxious otherwise.

“I paid good money for this seat,” she called out from the ledge where she was seated, surrounded by a line of my sappers. “Show me some blood, or at least lose some clothes!”

The olive-skinned heroine still wore the only outfit I’d ever seen her in, garishly coloured silks that were just a little too wide for her. The sleeves were longer than her arm and larger than her wrist, flopping around as she gesticulated. I could make out a few stains on her clothes, and I’d been a waitress long enough to recognize the effect of liquor spills on nice garments. Sloppy.

“Lieutenant Rattler,” Robber gasped. “What’s the meaning of this? Why is that woman’s kidney going unstabbed? This is against all we stand for.”

A female goblin – Lieutenant Rattler, I assumed – saluted sloppily.

“I’m afraid she bribed me, sir,” she replied.

“We don’t take bribes,” the yellow-eyed tribune chided her.

“I’ll cut you in for half?”

Robber turned towards me. “Protocol was followed, Boss.”

I knew from experience that actually getting the Bard to leave was next to impossible, but at least my soldiers were making pocket change out of her presence. That was... a win, maybe? Having to ask myself that question at all honestly felt like a loss of its own.

“You again,” Heiress spoke with distaste.

“Oh, it’s... Inheritor? Successor? Legatee, maybe?” Almorava mused. “I’m sorry, you just weren’t that interesting of a person. Anyhow, nice to see you again. Watcha been doing since you let that demon out?”

At the edge of my vision I saw Archer still for a heartbeat before she continued walking away. Most of my legionaries weren’t in hearing range of the Bard’s declaration, but those that were eyed Heiress like they were measuring where to slide the knife in. The knowledge of exactly who had caused our demon troubles hadn’t been spread outside of the Fifteenth general staff, but now it was a given all of my soldiers would know who to blame before dawn rose. Godsdamnit. I hadn’t had a reason to keep that morsel under wraps aside from not seeing a reason the information should be spread, but Almorava throwing it out there was bad news. She definitely had a reason, and I doubted it was to my benefit.

“Unusual, that your accusations and that of a known heroine coincide,” Heiress spoke, keeping me in her peripheral vision as she faced the drunken minstrel. “It smells of... untoward sympathies.”

“I’d watch my mouth, if I were you,” I replied cheerfully. “Accidents happen all the time, on campaigns.”

“You kinda grew into the villain thing, didn’t you Cat?” the Bard mused. “I mean, you’ve got the distinctive wound down with your limp. You’ve already got a notable tic with the clenching fingers thing, so basically all you need now is a catchphrase and you’re set.”

I did actually have one of those. One that had been crafted in response to something said by a hero, even. Not that I was about to admit as much to the bloody pest.

“You’ll probably even manage to get a few atrocities under your belt before the war’s over, if your friend here doesn’t beat you to them,” Almorava continued, toasting me with a half-empty bottle of rum.

“Ah, heroic posturing,” Heiress said softly. “Considering the behaviour of your little band of murderers in Summerholm, any talk of ‘atrocities’ coming from your mouth is the height of hypocrisy.”

“Says the slaver,” the Bard smiled.

“I employ only free men,” the aristocrat sneered.

“Well, at least you fed them properly after buying them,” Almorava conceded. “Truly, you are the cream of the scum of Creation.”

Huh. So the Bard could get under Heiress’ skin almost effortlessly. That was good to know. Exploitable right now? Unlikely. The Ashuran had no real combat abilities, as far as I knew. In a way that made her sudden presence more worrying: physical assault I could prepare for, but the subtler forms of Name warfare were largely beyond me. I could try to slit Heiress’ throat while she was being distracted, but I was nigh-powerless while she was at full tilt. No to mention I wasn’t sure exactly what the consequences would be, if I managed it. A fresh battle with her mercenaries, possibly, and for all that I’d pretended to be unmoved at the idea I really did not want to pull that trigger. My men were exhausted and the volunteers were not real soldiers – maybe we’d win, but the odds weren’t much in our favour.

“Why are you here, Almorava?” I asked instead, playing for time.

It should keep her distracted long enough for the sappers I was pretty sure Robber had discreetly mobilized to to make their move.

“Why are any of us here, Squire?” she wondered waving the now almost entirely empty bottle around. I hadn’t even seen her take another swig. “Interesting question. Well, for you it’s that you think you’re doing the right thing. That road to the Hells you’re paving is looking real good these days. Your fellow villain thinks she is the right thing, and is hilariously mistaken about that in pretty much every way that matters. As for me, I’m just having a gander.”

“One of these days, you wretched little foreigner,” Heiress said pleasantly, “I am going to have your mouth sown shut.”

“Everyone here who was actually born in Callow, raise your fucking hand,” I spoke sweetly.

Robber raised his hand.

“I feel that, spiritually, I have told the truth,” my tribune offered when I glared at him.

“The standards for Legion discipline have truly grown lax if you allow this kind of backtalk,” Heiress scoffed. “A trickle down effect, I imagine.”

“Oh, you don’t want to start going down that road,” I replied with bared teeth.

Almorava suddenly gasped, killing the tension before it could escalate.

“Clatter, you’ve betrayed me?”

“Rattler,” the sapper reminder her. “My name is Rattler. Also yes.”

“I thought we had something real,” the Ashuran deplored.

There were a series of sharper detonations under the roof where the Bard was seated, the tiles collapsing as a neat hole and the heroine dropping in. A long moment passed until another goblin popped his head out from the house’s front door.

“No body, ma’am,” he reported.

Yeah, I hadn’t really counted on one. At least she was gone. From the corner of my eyes I watched Lieutenant Rattler bite down on a silver coin and curse when it bent easily. Counterfeit silver, I realized with an involuntary twitch of the lips. She’d bribed my sappers with counterfeit silver, and not even a good fake.

“We appear do be done here,” Akua decided, turning her horse around. “My host will be occupying the Countess’ manor, as it is the only lodging in this... backwater befitting someone of my rank.”

“You do that,” I grunted, watching her ride away back to her troops.

I waited for her to be out of hearing range.

“Robber?”

“Boss?”

“I want that manor on fire before she ever sets foot on the grounds.”

“Gods, I love this outfit,” the yellow-eyed goblin confessed.

Chapter 33: Clean-up

“Of course I don’t step on people’s throats using my own heels. Have you seen how gorgeous these boots are? I’m not getting blood on these beauties: it takes at least two princes to get the right amount of skin, and duke leather just isn’t the same.”
– Dread Emperor Nihilis I, the Tanner

We’d had to put the entire main avenue to the torch, no two ways about it. While Robber took cared of scorching the earth where Heiress wanted to make camp, my men were stuck with the clean-up. Corpses of my legionaries and the Silver Spears both were stacked on great pyres that would burn until morning. I had one made for Hunter alone, since he’d earned at least this much from me. Anyhow, I suspected Archer would want his ashes to bring back to Refuge, whenever she came back. Necromancers could make some truly terrifying things out of the ashes of a hero, with a little time and imagination, and since I had none of those in my employ better they went far beyond the reach of my enemies. Handling the corpses was grim work, but it wasn’t the worst of it. Apprentice still had enough wits about him that he could serve as a detection device for corruption with the right spell, so I had Ratface appropriate a guildhall and rotate all legionaries who’d been within sight of the demon through it.

A dozen times, I patted a man or a woman who’d served me with nothing but loyalty on the back and sent them to a backroom where a sword was driven through their back.

I would have done it myself, felt like I needed to, but I was too godsdamned tired not to screw up the job. Of all the things to have happened tonight, that one left the foulest taste in the mouth. It was Sergeant Tordis who ended up bloodying her hands, though most of her line stepped in at some point or another. Casualties to demon fuckery were less than I’d feared: the trick it had used to make a new form seemed to have killed most of the affected. There was, of course, another problem. Apprentice himself might have been touched by corruption, and could not be relied on to check himself. None of my other mages knew the spell, and Masego was the only one who could teach it to them. I had records kept of all legionaries who’d been exposed to the demon even after the... purge, just in case. I’d need to have them looked over by another mage as soon as I could manage. I could feel myself falling asleep on my feet, but there was still too much to do.

Hakram wasn’t waking up, so I’d had him moved to my rooms until he was back in action. My healers assured me this was a case of pure exhaustion, and for what it was worth Apprentice cleared him of any trace of corruption. Coming into his aspect when in range of the demon hadn’t had the consequences I feared, much to my relief. Of course, unlike me he didn’t try to fucking force it. Robber came back half a bell later, as I dipped a torch in bucket of oil standing in a darkened street.

“Boss,” he greeted me, creeping out of an alley on silent feet.

I’d heard him coming but I was too tired to bother. I shook off some oil onto the paving stones and grasped the haft of the torch more firmly.

“Report,” I ordered hoarsely.

“The munitions we had stocked in the manor went up by accident,” he lied baldly. “By the time Heiress’ boys got in place to put it out, the place was a burnt-up husk.”

I smiled thinly. There was no pretending I hadn’t given this order out of pure spite, but I did not regret it. Akua had crossed a line by meddling with demons, by setting one on my legion. The only reason we had a truce was that forcing a battle with her right now was too risky.

“Tribune, listen to me closely,” I rasped. “As long as those fucking Proceran mercenaries and their paymaster remain within a day’s march of us, there will be accidents .”

The moon cast its light on the sapper’s face, sharp needle-like teeth and malevolent yellow eyes making my soldier a scarier sight than the devils ever had been.

“There’s all sorts of accidents,” Robber mused. “I wonder what kind might happen to them?”

“Supplies will be poisoned,” I ordered harshly. “Beasts of burden will be crippled. Any men who wander the city alone or in small enough groups will end up dead in an alley. If they so much as stack two stones on top of each other, I want them pushed down and on fire.”

“Hare anulsur,” he murmured in Tahreb.

War of vultures , it meant. The tribes of the Hungering Sands had never matched the Soninke kingdoms north of them in numbers, but never once had they been successfully invaded: Soninke hosts wandering into the desert found only poisoned wells and and nights full of knives, until all that was left of the enemy was a trail of corpses for the vultures. He’d understood my meaning perfectly.

“We’ve been at war since the moment she let the abomination out,” I snarled. “Time we started acting like it.”

There was no need to tell him not to get caught, and that if he was I’d have to deny I’d ever given him this order. Goblins understood the ways of quiet war better than humans ever could. With my free hand I opened the shutter to the only lantern lighting up the street and used the candle inside to light my torch. With heavy steps I walked to the pile of firewood Tordis’ line had stacked up, engraving the faces of the twelve legionaries on it into my mind. Gods, they look so young. I threw the torch.

“Your deaths are debt,” I whispered as the flames spread. “And I will have a long price for them. I cannot give you much, where you are going, but I can promise you that.”

I turned away, Robber falling in behind without a word. Dawn was but a bell away, and I needed to get some rest: Creation wouldn’t stop spinning just because I was exhausted.

—

My entire body ached when I woke up.

All available beds had been taken by my wounded, so I’d ended up passing out on a chair in one of the empty rooms of the Fifteenth’s command centre. I tested my bad leg by putting weight on it and had to bite my lip to stop from screaming. Fuck. Well, I won’t be running any time soon. My armour was in a messy pile on the other side of the room but putting it back on seemed like a masochistic endeavour, so instead I carefully rose while putting as little weight as possible on my wounded foot. I felt filthy, and probably smelled like it too: a mix of old blood, sweat and grime. There was no washbasin, unfortunately, and going on a quest for a bathtub was a luxury that would have to wait. The only upside to how I felt was that I was too tired to be hungry. I bent over with a hiss to pick up my sword belt and strap it on, tightening it sloppily. My ponytail had turned into a tangled mess while I slept, but that was nothing new: at least it had stopped growing since I’d become the Squire.

I pushed the door open and limped into the wider chamber. There were only a handful of officers there, spread among a few tables and talking in low voices. Through the windows in the front I could see the sun had risen, and that was as much as I took in before a hush fell over the room. Every single legionary was looking at me in utter silence. I kept my face blank, unsure how to react. It wasn’t fear or resentment I saw, but something else I couldn’t quite identify. Aisha’s voice rang out suddenly.

“Back to work,” the Taghreb girl barked. “Azim, put the herbs in the pot. If I catch any of you gossiping you’re getting a double shift helping the sappers.”

Aisha was perfectly groomed, looking like she’d just walked off a parade ground. It wasn’t because she’d not been in the thick of it, because some of the other staff officers I could see were looking distinctly haggard. I even smelled a touch of perfume on her as she came closer, offering me an arm to lean on. I pushed away the gesture a touch too harshly, regretting it immediately as I hobbled to a chair on my own. She didn’t seem particularly offended, at least. I suppose that being as close to Juniper as she was, she knew a thing or two about dealing with rudeness.

“Aisha,” I grunted. “What time is it?”

“Half past Dawn Bell,” she replied, sitting on the edge of the table.

I noted with tired amusement that she was as close to me as she could be without my feeling irritated at her closeness. I wasn’t sure whether that perceptiveness was a result of her aristocratic origins or something unique to Aisha herself, but it was appreciated nonetheless.

“Hakram up yet?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Apprentice said he’d be out until noon, at least. Something about drawing too deep on his Name,” she paused, then raised her voice. “Azim, if that pot isn’t on its way I will have you strung up .”

A harried-looking Soninke officer ran towards us with a very nice porcelain pot I’d see Aisha use for tea before, nearly dropping the matching cup in his haste. The Staff Tribune dismissed him impatiently after he set it on the table in front of me. I raised an eyebrow in her direction.

“Masego left me herbs for when you woke up,” she explained.

I offered her a grateful nod and poured myself a cup of a brew smelling just like the one Apprentice had made me before the battle. I noticed her twitching at the sight of my pouring my own cup, which got the ghost of a smile out of me. No doubt the aristocrat in her balked at the idea of the highest-ranking person in the room filling their own cup, but she knew me well enough by now to have noticed I disliked relying on people for things I could do myself. The effect of the herbs didn’t kick in immediately, unfortunately. I spoke up again to keep my mind off the burning sensation in my leg.

“Where is Masego, anyway?”

“Room next to yours,” she said. “He didn’t last much longer than you, and informed me that if anyone disturbed him for any reason they’d spend a week of their life as a toad.”

I snorted. Whether or not he could actually do that was debatable – metamorphosis was a branch of sorcery that consumed a hideous amount of power for even the smallest changes – but coming from the Warlock’s son the threat would be enough to give anyone pause.

“No one can find Archer,” Aisha continued, “and Juniper’s sleeping the battle off somewhere on a rooftop.”

Surprise must have shown on my face, because the lovely Staff Tribune elaborated.

“She always does that after a fight,” she explained. “Lets her mind rest.”

As far as vices went, that was a rather mild one. Not that I should be surprised: the Hellhound was one of the most temperate people I’d ever met. Hardly drank, disapproved of gambling and I’d never heard of her being involved with anyone. Robber kept insinuating she was sleeping with either Aisha or Hakram, but then he’d also composed a ten-stanza poem about how Nauk had fathered half a dozen calves during our march to Callow. The tribune’s words had to be taken with a grain of salt, was what I was saying. I hummed, finishing my cup and pouring another. The taste of the brew was bitter but it soothed my throat, and already the pain in my leg was receding.

“Heiress?” I finally asked.

“Hasn’t made a move,” Aisha informed me. “Set up her camp around the ruins of the manor and put up a palisade. There are regular watches, but none of her men have set foot in the city.”

That was fine. I was willing to be patient: night would fall eventually, and unlike Robber’s men hers did not see in the dark. Wooden stakes would do little to impede goblins with knives and a mandate to spill as much blood as they could get away with.

“And so ends the Battle of Marchford,” I murmured. “We got so close to a real victory, Aisha. So damned close.”

The Taghreb’s face went inscrutable, then she let out a soft sigh.

“Ma’am,” she said, then stopped when I gave her a look. “Catherine,” she corrected herself. “Look at that orc over there, the woman with the lily jutting out of her breastplate.”

The sight of a broad-shouldered orc frowning down at paperwork was almost comical, I had to admit.

“That’s Lieutenant Asta,” Aisha continued. “When she went for water, around dawn, a five-year old boy walked up to her and have her that flower. Thanked her for saving his mother from the devils.”

I met Aisha’s eyes and saw she was smiling softly.

“That’s happening all over Marchford, right now,” she said. “Callowans are pitching in to help legionaries clear debris off the streets. Half my staff was ambushed by old women bringing them sweetbread and lamb stew. Catherine, a fortnight ago these people thought we were worse than the plague. Now children are bringing us flowers.”

She rested a hand on my wrist for an instant, then withdrew. Such soft skin, for a soldier.

“That look on their faces when you walked in was pride , Squire,” Aisha told me. “We’re proud of what we did here. The Fifteenth took a stand and we were bloodied for it, but we won. And that makes all the difference.”

“We didn’t get the demon,” I replied tiredly. “Heiress did.”

The Taghreb aristocrat shrugged. “That may be true. But the stories that are coming in aren’t awe about her taking care of the threat. They’re about three villains and a pair of heroes, standing between the Fifteenth and a demon. They’re about you and Hakram forcing back a monster the size of a guard tower with nothing but swords and shields, about Apprentice making a new sun in the sky to scour it clean. Maybe in the Tower they’ll care about what Heiress has to say, but not those of us who were here. We know, and more importantly we’ll remember .”

I looked away, feeling my throat choke up. How tired must I have been, for this to bring tears to my eyes? Aisha was kind enough to pretend she wasn’t seeing anything and I forced myself to finish my last cup of herbal brew. I took a few deep breaths, enjoying the last few moments of peace I’d be getting for a long while. The Battle of Marchford might be over, but I still had another war to fight. The same war that had begun the moment I’d laid eyes on Heiress, and made the mistake of ignoring because I hadn’t seen her since. A prickle at the edge of my senses chased that peace away in the blink of an eye. I immediately rose to my feet, much to Aisha’s surprise.

“Lady Squire?” she asked worriedly.

“Trouble,” I hissed, as a door behind me slammed open.

Masego hopped out, robes askew and his braids an unwholesome mess. His eyes were red and bloodshot.

“Fucking Hells,” he snarled. “ Really ? Right after the demon?”

“Focus, Apprentice,” I spoke up, forcing my voice to remain steady. “What exactly is this?”

“Something’s coming from Arcadia,” he replied, and I only now noticed he wasn’t wearing his spectacles.

I had a dozen urgent questions, but none as urgent as this one: “Where?”

His fingers lit up with red light and he traced a few runes in the air, muttering under his breath as they rearranged themselves on their own.

“Where we fought it,” he replied, and didn’t have to specify what ‘it’ was.

I felt calm settle on me. We could handle this. We’d have to.

“Aisha, evacuate the whole sector,” I ordered. “Send word to whichever commander is awake, I want the Fifteenth on combat footing immediately. Surround the place. Mages are to make sure nothing gets out.”

She saluted immediately, and I turned to Masego.

“We’re going,” I said, and it wasn’t a question.

—

“I thought Fae could only come into Creation through gates? You know, like the one in the Waning Woods,” I said to Apprentice as we hurried through the streets.

“Powerful enough fairies can create paths,” he explained, rubbing at his eyes.

The morning sun wasn’t doing either of us any favours.

“And Marchford is in a unique situation,” he added.

We turned a corner. The street was empty, Aisha’s runners having taken care of making sure there wouldn’t be anyone caught in the crossfire. It would take longer for the legion to be in position, though. We’d be without backup for the beginning of the fight.

“Elaborate,” I gritted out when it became obvious he wouldn’t.

“Slower,” he panted.

I resisted the urge to point out that I was the cripple between the two of us. He’s running drills with Hakram after this, Heavens burn me if I lie.

“Demons damage Creation,” he told me as we cut down our pace. “The separations between Creation and a realm as close to it as Arcadia will be running thin right now. Maybe forever.”

“Well that’s just fucking wonderful,” I cursed.

Fae inside a bloody city. Just what we needed right now. And I couldn’t even use all of my legion against them: at least a third would have to be watching Heiress’ army to be sure they didn’t backstab us at the first occasion. Which they damn well would, because Akua was the kind of insane megalomaniac who used existential threats as catspaws. Sometimes I understood why Black had wanted to put all the Wasteland’s nobility to the sword after the civil war.

“Are we sure they’re going to be hostile?”

“Fae aren’t hostile, Cat,” he got out. “They just like their games and don’t understand the concept of mortality. They’re basically souls given form – inside Arcadia they can’t die.”

I paused. “But in Creation they can, right? Right ?”

Apprentice cleared his throat. “That’s, uh, a matter of academic debate. The most popular current of thought is-“

“ Masego ,” I barked.

“Sure,” he replied, looking as pained by the lack of precision as he was by the act of running. “Stab away, that’ll work.”

We cut through the plaza as fast as we could and arrived at the head of the avenue just when something tore open. Blizzard poured out of an opening I couldn’t see, impossibly thick. Winds howled as frost spread across the ground, an empty ruined avenue turning into the eye of the storm faster than I could unsheathe my sword. I grimaced.

“Well, that’s promising,” I muttered.

Masego whispered something under his breath and a moment later I stopped feeling the cold. I shot him a grateful glance, and together we strode forward. It was hard to make anything out in the spinning snow, but as we got to the edge of the blizzard we saw a silhouette approach. A man? Maybe not, the features were too fine to tell and the long hair could have belonged to either gender. If Fae even did gender, which I wasn’t sure they did – some were supposed to be shapeshifters. Tall, with impossibly clear blue eyes and hair that looked more like flowing darkness than anything materially possible. Those eyes, I noted, were wide and showing white. The Fae looked at us and hesitated, then jerked.

“ No ,” it called out in a voice that was like velvet made sound, even when taken by terror.

Something dragged it deeper into the snow storm and there was a scream, then a sickening crunch. I licked my lips nervously.

“Suddenly I’m not too sure about going to have that look,” I admitted.

“You’re the commander,” Apprentice croaked out. “If you favour a tactical retreat, who am I to argue?”

We never got to make a choice, as the blizzard continued to expand and enveloped us a heartbeat later. I kept close to Masego and brought up my sword. The visibility was the real problem here, not even my Name sight could – the cold touch of steel against the back of my neck stilled my heart.

“Wekesa?” my teacher’s voice prompted.

“She’s clear,” Warlock replied, still invisible. “Though someone took a butcher’s knife to her soul.”

“Your son?”

There was a long pause.

“Also clear,” Warlock finally said.

The sword came away from my neck as the tear in the distance closed, the blizzard dispersing to reveal the sight of the Black Knight in full regalia save for the helmet. He offered me a sardonic smile.

“So,” he mused. “I’m given to understand you’ve had an eventful few weeks.”

Chapter 34: Lesson

“The Praesi take on negotiations is to slam a severed head on the table and smile at your interlocutor until they reconsider their position.”
-Prokopia Lakene, first Hierarch of the League of Free Cities

Heiress was daintily picking at eggs and sausage, cutting off small slices with a knife. How she’d even arranged for a meal to be served in the guildhall was beyond me, since I’d given standing instructions for any of my officers to tell her to fuck off if she asked for anything. Either she’d bullied a Callowan to get it done – in which case I was going to break her fingers – or she’d brought servants on a military campaign. The second seemed most likely: my life would be a lot easier if she were someone stupid enough to push me when my teacher was in the city. Speaking of the man, Black would be joining us soon enough. For now he was still busy overseeing Warlock’s work in clearing my legionaries. Until then, though, I refused to sit at the same table as the wretch in front of me. Just being in the same room had me itching to run her through, an urge it was getting harder to keep under control with every passing moment.

“You’re quiet this morning,” the Soninke aristocrat mused. “Couldn’t get a good night’s sleep?”

My fingers tightened until the knuckles turned white but I refused to fall for a provocation that obvious.

“One of these days,” I replied softly, “I am going to find something precious to you and I am going to break it.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt you’ll try,” she replied with a friendly smile that never reached her eyes.

Absurdly enough, it looked like Akua had brought several suits of armour with her. The polished silver-enamelled breastplate in the Miezan style she wore wasn’t one I’d seen before, and neither was the quilted colourful aketon she had underneath. It reminded me of the eye-catching robes and dresses I’d seen nobles wear when I’d first gone to the Tower. Was that how Praesi armies had looked like, before the Reforms? Like a flock of tropical birds girded in steel, as beautiful as they were poisonous? It was hard to imagine after a lifetime of seeing the Legions if Terror decked in the sober, practical gear they now used.

I sometimes forgot that, for all the misery its lower classes often lived in, the Dread Empire was one of the richest nations on Calernia. The Hungering Sands were full of precious metals and the Wasteland was pregnant with gemstones, both of those too close to the surface to have been claimed by the dwarves. The Free Cities had famously grown rich as the middle-man between Praes and nations that wouldn’t be caught dead trading directly with the Tower. And yet Wasteland aristocrats were still wealthier than anyone else on the surface, save perhaps Proceran princes – and even then those without silver in their principalities would have to rely heavily on trade to bridge the gap. I was shaken out of my thoughts by Black’s arrival, which was probably for the best. Another round of verbal sparring with Akua wouldn’t get me anything but the need to grind my teeth.

Black had ditched his cloak at some point, leaving him in the plain suit of plate he always wore. I could count the number of times I’d seen my teacher out of it on my fingers, but having since learned the breadth of enemies he truly had I couldn’t fault him for the precaution. It wasn’t paranoia if the people out to get you had a shelf full of devil-summoning books. Even being out on the field hadn’t managed to get his pale skin to tan, a trait I’d come to suspect was Name related, but even then he still looked... healthy. There was a vitality to him that had been missing when I’d first stumbled into him in Laure, or perhaps just been hidden under layers of amused indolence. It made for an unsettling sight.

“Catherine,” he greeted me.

“Black,” I replied, rolling my eyes at the formality of it.

“Lord Black,” Heiress said, making to rise, “It’s a pleasure to-“

Pale green eyes flicked to Akua.

“Ram it into your hand, ” he Spoke.

My rival’s hand slowly rose, shaking as she tried to fight it, and she nailed her other one to the table with the same knife she’d been using to break her fast. Heiress didn’t cry out, though her lips thinned. Unlike my leg, mage healing would fix that wound. That said, it would have been a lie to say I didn’t derive a great deal of satisfaction from what was unfolding in front of me.

“I suspect you were insufficiently disciplined as a child,” Black noted. “For the rest of this conversation, you will speak only when addressed to.”

“My lord, this is-” she began.

“Twist.”

She ground the knife into her own hand, and this time let out a small hiss of pain.

“Do you understand me, Heiress?” Black asked patiently.

She nodded.

“Good,” he smiled affably. “Now thank me, for the valuable lesson you were just taught.”

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“Thank you, lord,” she replied through gritted teeth.

The dark-haired man claimed the seat at the head of the table and gestured for me to take the one to his right. None of this was quite as viscerally satisfying as if I’d been the one to knife her myself, but for now I’d take it. Our accounts were still far from settled.

“I’ll begin with the obvious, even though I have a feeling I won’t get my way,” I started. “She let out a fucking demon in the middle of a military campaign. Honestly I feel like just letting one of those things loose at all should be enough to be buried in a shallow grave so I’d like her head on a pike, pretty please.”

I resisted the urge to bat my eyelashes for effect. Black raised an eyebrow, then turned to Heiress.

“Rebuttal?” he prompted.

“I take no responsibility for this,” she replied, face gone pale with the pain and bleeding. “The wards holding the demon were overrun by foreigners. Given Squire’s pointless pursuit of the Silver Spears after her victory, it seems obvious who is at fault.”

Not a single word of that was an actual lie, I was certain. Not that anyone in the room was fooled. The only question was whether or not her connections to the Truebloods would be enough to get her off with a slap on the wrist regardless of guilt. I had a nasty feeling they would be.

“No solid proof of your interference has been provided,” Black told Heiress. “Because of that, Her Most Dreadful Majesty has declined to give me permission to execute you.”

If she’d ever been worried it had not shown on her face, and neither did relief now. The dark-skinned aristocrat inclined her head, murmuring a platitude about Malicia’s wisdom and foresight.

“That said, I would like you to keep something in mind,” the green-eyed man continued.

He leaned forward.

“Your behaviour during this campaign has been a hindrance to Imperial interests in Callow, Akua Sahelian. Should it ever become a threat, I will send your mutilated corpse back to your mother piece by piece.”

He did not raise his voice, or change his tone in any way. He might as well have been discussing what he’d have for dinner. He’d snatch the life out of her just as casually, I knew, and though he’d not used his terror trick I felt a shiver of fear go up my spine. The way Black was looking at her but he wasn’t seeing a person: all his eyes saw were a possible liability, and he’d been leaving corpses of those behind him for decades. Akua’s face remained blank but I could feel the terror beneath the mask, the realization that she’d come very close to crossing what may very well be the most dangerous man in the Empire. At the end of the day our Names were both transitional ones, the stepping stone to something greater. The monsters out there in the world were at the top of the pyramid for a very good reason: they’d killed all their competition . Ambition did not equate power, as my life seemed ever intent on reminding me. We still had years ahead of us before we’d be a match for any of the Calamities.

“You’ve been very careful to toe the line of the law,” Black said. “It seems you believe this affords you a degree of protection.”

His eyes turned cold.

“ I am a villain, child ,” he hissed. “The appearance of the rule of law is useful to me, so I have allowed it. Do not mistake this for true fettering. Should you ever inconvenience me again, I will Speak three words and you will slit your own throat.”

The intensity vanished out of him as swiftly as it had appeared, replaced by a pleasant smile.

“In happier news, you and your mercenaries have been attached to the Fifteenth as auxiliaries for the next part of this campaign,” he informed her. “Congratulations, you’ve been granted the equivalent of a commander’s commission.”

“Thank you, lord,” Heiress murmured.

Black drummed his fingers against the table and there was a long moment of silence.

“Well?” he asked. “What are you still doing here?”

Lack of understanding flickered across the aristocrat’s face, immediately blanked out.

“A mere commander is not cleared for this kind of meeting,” Black explained patiently. “You are dismissed.”

I swallowed a snort. Oh, now that was just precious . That was probably the worst insult he’d given her today, given how self-important the other villain was. Akua rose to her feet after getting the knife out of her hand, blood dripping all over the table. There was the smallest flare of magic and the bleeding stemmed. With a stiff bow, my rival made to leave.

“One last thing, Heiress,” Black said, not bothering to turn to look at her. “You’ve made a mess all over Catherine’s table. I expect you to be back with a rag and bucket to clean it up within the hour.”

I’d been wrong, evidently. That was definitely the harshest humiliation he’d doled out in quite some time, and I took a moment to savour it as I watched Heiress close the door behind her. I leaned back in my seat, allowing myself a small break before the conversation resumed. I found Black’s eyes had drifted to my bad leg, the faintest trace of a frown on his face.

“Masego said it can’t be fixed,” I said.

“Inaccurate,” he replied. “If we amputate the leg entirely you can be grafted a fully functional replacement.”

“But?” I prompted.

If it were that simple, he wouldn’t be frowning.

“Limb grafts made by magic can be unmade by the same,” he replied. “It would be a liability against any sorcerous Named.”

“Pass, then,” I grunted.

Just because the Bumbling Conjurer was dead didn’t meant I’d never have to deal with a Named mage in the future. Mundane casters could probably manage the same kind of spellwork too, if in sufficient numbers. I cleared my throat.

“I do appreciate you turning the screws on Heiress a bit,” I said, “but this is... unusual, for you. You don’t usually intervene in these kinds of confrontations.”

“None of it was meant for your benefit,” he replied easily. “I was attempting to frighten her enough that she’d let out the demon.”

I blinked. “That... does not strike me as a good idea.”

“Wekesa began to set a binding array around this building the moment she entered,” Black patiently explained. “If I’d witnessed her bringing forth a demon responsible for the death of Legion personnel, I would have had valid reason to execute her.”

I frowned. “Can’t Warlock just find the standard she’s using?”

“He has not been able to,” Black admitted.

My brows rose. “She can’t possibly be that good of a mage,” I said.

“It wouldn’t be her own spellwork,” my teacher noted. “Wolof has been the centre of sorcerous learning in Praes since the days before the Miezan occupation. No other city has ever produced as many Warlocks. Odds are she’s using a dimensional bubble one of them created a century ago that has long been forgotten by everyone else.”

Well, fuck. How many other surprises like this would Akua have up her sleeve? Hells, before last night I hadn’t even known she was a mage. I realized the frown had yet to leave my teacher’s face, which I didn’t like the looks of.

“You look like you want to say something,” I hazarded.

“If I believed in corporal punishment, you’d be cradling your cheek right now,” he spoke flatly.

I flinched.

“You’re angry.”

“Furious,” he agreed calmly. “You did a damned foolish thing, Catherine. Fighting a demon inside your Name, when you’ve yet to even fully grow into it? Recklessness is only an asset if you understand when to use it properly.”

“I was in a desperate position,” I defended myself.

“You put yourself in a desperate position,” he corrected. “The Fifteenth did not have to engage the enemy, you made that choice.”

“And what was the alternative?” I barked. “Run away and leave tens of thousands to die? I refuse to believe that was a better way.”

“And that’s why Heiress just beat you,” Black replied, eyes shadowed. “As long as you allow people a lever that obvious to dictate your behaviour, they will.”

“She set it up so she’d get something she wanted whatever choice I made,” I replied tiredly.

On a battlefield, I was pretty sure I’d beat Heiress nine times out of ten. She didn’t go for battles, though. Most of the damage she’d done me was while she was out of sight, working through proxies and spies. Black sighed.

“I’m not telling you to stop taking these kinds of stands, Catherine,” he said. “But if you want to continue doing this, you need to turn the Fifteenth into the kind of force that can crush your opponents underfoot. Not next year, not when the war is over, now . If you cannot cut through her manipulations, you need to make them irrelevant.”

“I don’t have the men for that, right now,” I admitted.

“I scraped together all the recruits in Callowan camps before you fought your battle at Marchford,” he replied. “Within three weeks you’ll have another two thousand legionaries camped across the western branch of the Hwaerte.”

“Green recruits,” I pointed out.

“You have a core of veterans now,” Black murmured. “Men who’ve been through battles the equal of any waged during the Conquest. Officers who’ve held the line against devils and some of the finest cavalry on the continent. The legionaries who fought against the Kingdom are getting old: you might very well have the sharpest fighting force in the Empire under your command, at the moment.”

That... was a very good point, actually. The Conquest had been over twenty years ago: most goblins who’d been alive back then were dead and the older human and orc soldiers from that war were either retired or permanently behind desks.

“I don’t mean to dismiss your accomplishments, Catherine,” my teacher said softly. “You’ve made mistakes, but you’ve also won repeated victories against horrendous odds. What you did for Marchford, the story you’ve created with your actions, is something that will ripple across Callow in the years to come. You’ve taken the first step forward in the path you set for yourself. That is something to be proud of.”

For a moment I allowed myself to bask in the praise of a man I’d come to admire, for all that I despised some of the things he’d done. Only for a moment, though.

“I get why you’re angry,” I admitted. “I lost an aspect. That’s not something that you can just walk off.”

Black snorted. “A minor loss, that. The risk you took in the attempt is the infuriating part.”

I blinked. “I permanently damaged my Name, Black,” I spoke carefully. “Crippled the amount of power I can use by at least a third until I come into another Name.”

The dark-haired man rested his chin on his palm, looking amused.

“You’ve seen me used my shadow before, yes?”

I nodded.

“That is the most useful fighting trick I get out of my Name. My predecessor as the Black Knight, on the other hand, could bring down a tower with a flick of his wrist. And yet on the first Fields of Streges he was killed by a footsoldier. Not a hero, not a knight or a wizard. A young woman rammed a sword in his eye, and no amount of power could allow him to shrug that off,” he told me. “He died after tearing through a hundred soldiers, because he was tired and surrounded and he’d chosen his ground poorly.”

He smiled darkly.

“Villains like Heiress think of power as something they can rain down on their enemies, but that’s a false perception. She could set an entire field aflame and still die from an arrow in the throat. And unlike you, she will get in that situation. You make mistakes because of who you are, Catherine, not because of what your Name drives you to do. You can learn. You can adjust.”

His fingers tapped against the wood, the rhythm that of an old Callowan funerary march.

“So pick your ground,” Black spoke quietly, inexorably. “Surround her. Tire her out. And then let her do the rest.”

Chapter 35: Spur

“I trust people to act according to their nature. Anything more is sentimentality.”
-Dread Empress Malicia the First

The First and the Second were swarming over Aksum, stamping down the last pockets of resistance. Warlock – for Wekesa had claimed the Name now, ripped it out of the corpse of his hated predecessor – had done well in clearing the fort north of the city. It had allowed Grem to steal a march on the enemy and hit the outer walls before they were fully manned. From there it had been a slaughter, with Sabah dealing the last blow by ripping off High Lord Duma’s head with her bare hands. That she was able to manage as much without letting the Beast out was a sign of how far she’d progressed in her mastery of her Name. The dark-haired man sat alone on the hill as the sun went down, watching the plumes of smoke rising from the city.

With High Lord Mawasi dead, Seneca long buried and the High Lady of Nok having declared for them the war was as good as done. Wolof still stood strong behind High Lady Tasia, but she’d already approached Malicia to cut a deal. The last of the highborn, the High Lady of Thalassina, might have been been a problem if circumstances had not intervened. Corsairs had hit the port and set what passed for the Imperial fleet on fire, looting the city before retreating to the Tideless Isles. Amadeus was going to have to take care of that, when matters were settled in the Empire. The pirates had essentially killed commerce with the Free Cities, and those trade lanes were the lifeblood of Praes.

“A great victory,” a woman’s voice noted.

One of these days, he was going to be able to notice Ranger when she snuck up on him. Not today, evidently.

“Was it?” he wondered.

Hye sat down at his side, her boots sliding soundlessly against the yellow grass. The dying sun cast her honey-coloured skin in gold and red, the sight of the lazy half-smile on her sharply angled face killing the breath in his throat. She was beautiful. Always was, of course, but now and then the realization of it scattered all other thoughts away.

“Your enemy is dead,” she told him patiently. “His armies destroyed, his city made yours. If you find a way to be dissatisfied about this, I will be most displeased.”

Considering how often she still made a game of him when they sparred, this was not a threat Amadeus would take lightly.

“Mercy, Lady Ranger,” he implored drily. “Spare my already aching bones. Anyhow, if you damage me too much you’ll have no more use of me.”

They’d taken to sharing a bed on the very night Alaya had crowned herself Dread Empress, and all of this was still new and wondrous to him. He’d never been interested in women before, or men for that matter. Desire had been unknown to him except in an abstract sense but now it flared up in his blood every time he looked at is lover. Sometimes he was puzzled such a change had come over him. He’d not started to be attracted to Hye in that manner until he’d come to trust her as much as he could trust anyone, so perhaps the root of it was there.

“That’d be unfortunate,” the dark-eyed woman admitted shamelessly. “I’ve finally gotten you trained up to my tastes.”

Carelessly she linked their fingers and he allowed their shoulders to lean against one another as they watched the night fall.

“You’re usually in a better mood, after you win,” Hye finally said. “What’s happening in that clever mind of yours, that has you so disappointed?”

He remained silent for a moment.

“This does not feel like a victory,” Amadeus admitted. “We’ve accomplished nothing here.”

“You made sure that scheming freeloader is getting the throne,” Ranger pointed out, tone dipping into distaste when she mentioned Malicia.

It had been too much to hope for these two would actually get along, he supposed. That Alaya had not taken to the field with them had been the last nail in the coffin for Hye – she had no patience for people who did not take what they wanted with their own hands. Malicia being the reason they’d been able to fill their ranks with household troops from Nok had failed to move his lover on the matter, unfortunately.

“There was never any doubt about that,” Black said frankly. “That is was irks me. All this death, all this destruction, just to confirm something I knew would happen two years ago. We’ve not improved the Empire’s situation in any measurable manner, Hye. All we’ve done is clean up the mess.”

Hye smiled languidly, a touch of heat coming to her dark eyes.

“Sometimes you say things like this, and I finally understand why they’re all terrified of you,” she said.

Black frowned.

“You’ve reached the threshold, Amadeus,” Ranger murmured. “You have the Empire, you have your Calamities and your armies. You’ve broken the old, now you get to make the new.”

She slid onto his lap, and-

I woke up. For one moment, I was almost pathetically relieved I could still have dreams like this, that my Name could still manage that much. I pushed aside the covers and sat up in my bed, closing my eyes to think. I’d gotten to see a lot more of Black’s... personal life than I’d ever wanted to, though thankfully I’d woken before things got too graphic. Still, just associating my teacher with sex was ugh . That wasn’t the important part of the dream though. I doubted my Name would stoop to giving me a motivational pat on the back, which meant it was the details that were the crux of it. You’ve broken the old, now you get to make the new. Idly I thought I’d half expected Lady Ranger to have an accent, given her foreign origins, but I supposed it made since she didn’t. She’d been around for centuries, even if in the dream she’d looked of age with Black. I chewed on the words in silence. Had I really broken something, I wondered? It didn’t feel like it, not even after the twin victories the Fifteenth had gained. Then again, perhaps it was the second part of that sentence I should have been focusing on. Making something new.

That, I decided, was something I could do.

People had been on my back about choosing a personal retinue, an equivalent to my teacher’s Blackguards, and believed I’d found mine during the Battle of Marchford. I’d need to take a look at the officer rolls for the Gallowborne, but unless I was mistaken the highest ranked remaining officer among them was Lieutenant Farrier. He’d do, as their captain. Not a great supporter of the Empire, but then he’d been the one to bring to my attention that a chunk of my Legion rather despised Praes. Keeping a finger on the pulse of that sentiment would be important, in the future. I’d been wanting to bring Callowans up the ranks since the beginning, anyhow, and while having that happen through known deserters was not what I’d expected I’d take it. If the bastards could take on the literal host of Hell without flinching, they could be relied on in a fight. As far as the Fifteenth’s organization went, though, that was ultimately a small change. I needed to stop thinking of my army as a Legion of Terror I was borrowing and start thinking of it as the main tool in my arsenal. The reinforcements Black had promised would go some way in filling the ranks, but we’d still end up under the usual cut-off of four thousand the other legions used. Heiress’ men would get us up to that, more or less, but they could not be relied on. If anything, I’d do what I could to thin out their numbers in the dark.

So what did I have, that made the Fifteenth different? Juniper was the first thing to come to mind, but the Hellhound wasn’t something I could improve on. The toolbox magician, I’d heard Nauk call her once after a few drinks, and the label was accurate enough it had stuck in my mind. My legate was a fixed point, if anything. What she was could not be improve save in the unlikely event she gained a Name, so the most I could do about this was to give her more tools. Legionaries were one thing, but I needed specialists. Robber was one, because he was as much a vicious little goblin raider as he was a sapper. It might be time to take him out of Hune’s kabili and give him an independent command to mould in his image. Pickler had already shown she could handle the traps, artillery and infrastructure aspects of the Fifteenth in her station as Senior Sapper, there was no need for her to have additional help in the matter.

Saboteurs and raiders, using the same tactics William had proved could turn a city on itself in Summerholm. I’d even found them their first target already.

Wasn’t enough. What had I learned, from Three Hills and Marchford? What had been my best assets? The first time we’d fought the Silver Spears, the tipping point had been the goblinfire traps. My sappers were already all they could be, although my first order when I next sat with Juniper would be allowing Pickler free reign in building all the siege engines she wanted. Marchford had been won as much by magic as by steel, though. Three Hills too, now that I thought of it: it was Masego’s spell that had ignited the trap. Legion doctrine was to use many mages to concentrate firepower, but Legion doctrine did not take into consideration the fact that I had a mage of Apprentice’s calibre on my side. His ritual had turned a certain defeat into a battle where the Fifteenth had a fighting chance, fundamentally modifying the lay of the land. He’d needed several lines of mages to manage that, though. So I make their assignment a permanent one.

Black hadn’t been wrong, when he’d decided how to use his mages. He’d seen that the Praesi gave birth to more mages than any other Calernian polity and turned all those untrained youths into another tool for his generals, folding goblin blood mages and the rare orc casters into those ranks to bolster the firepower. By designing a doctrine that wasn’t centred around exceptional mages like Warlock he’d created an institution that would survive the death of individuals like that and remain a contributing factor on the battlefield. But to achieve this, he’d sacrificed the ability to use mass rituals that had made Praesi armies monstrously dangerous in the past. There was no need for me to follow his lead in the matter, not when I had Masego on my side. Heiress seemed to be fond of using magic to solve her problems, but I had a Named whose entire business was sorcery: she would not be able to match me in this, if I prepared correctly.

Even putting the matter of my rival aside, magic was still more of a trump card than I’d ever expected. That trick Masego had pulled with the hearths might have failed to kill the demon, but aimed at an enemy army it would kill hundreds and break morale. The rebel armies I was going to face didn’t have a caster that was a match for Apprentice, didn’t even use mages the way the Legions did. Did I have it it me to deploy that kind of mass murder against my enemies, knowing they had no counter for it? Maybe a year ago the thought of such one-sided killing would have had me flinching, but I’d gotten that sort of sentiment beaten out of me. I would not surrender an advantage out of a twisted sense of fair play, not when I already had so many hounds baying at the gate. Juniper drilled our soldiers into formations to deal with specific threats, there was no reason Masego could not drill a cadre of mages in the use of rituals to ruin an enemy general’s day.

I was feeling refreshed, the nap I’d taken clearing my mind of the brutal exhaustion that had been plaguing me since morning. There was one more thing I needed to fix about the Fifteenth, I knew. My legion didn’t have a Kachera Tribune, the general staff officer that would oversee scouting and information gathering. Filling the position wasn’t a real priority at the moment, but finding someone who could have that function was. Over and over I’d been outmanoeuvred because my opponents knew what I was doing while I was in the dark about their movements. This was no longer acceptable, not after the number of soldiers it had cost me. In the long term I might not always be able to rely on Black’s network of spies, anyhow, so the sooner I found someone to build my own the better. I could afford it, what with the general’s pay I was stacking up without ever really putting a dent in it. My instinct for that was to put Hakram on the case, but Adjutant might not be the best fit there.

He already had so many other responsibilities, including being at my side when I took the field. He did have contacts with officers in other legions, which would be useful, but it wasn’t enough by a long shot. I’ll table that for now, then , I thought with a grimace. Not for long, though. I was running out of time. Getting to my feet, I tested my bad leg and found with pleasure that the brew from earlier was still taking the edge off. The room had no windows so I had no idea what the time was, but odds were I’d slept through most of the day. My body had certainly needed as much. Picking up the trousers I’d lazily dropped on the floor, I slipped into them and picked up the cloth roll for my breast bindings. There might not have been much to bind, but the additional layer prevented chafing from the aketon. On the only table in the room a pair of journals were laid down, the same ones Black had given me. The one he’d said I needed to understand before he could answer my question.

My teacher had made no attempt to continue the conversation we’d started the night before we last parted ways, content to let me approach him in my own time, but it had been weeks since I’d made progress in understanding the last riddle inside the journals. That column outlining an area in square miles, roughly the size of two fifths of the Wasteland. Initially I’d thought it was the Green Stretch, but it was larger than that by a comfortable margin. Anyhow, what would be the relevance of just measuring the size of the Green Stretch? It had remained a constant area, while that column of numbers shifted from decade to decade. Its relation to the population census wasn’t easy to make a pattern of, either. It did tend to rise high before Tyrants attempted to invade Callow, but it also went down sharply seemingly without reason. Weather in some parts of the Wasteland could change from snow to drought in the span of an hour, so there might have been a link there, but I couldn’t quite put a finger on it.

I’d come close to asking Kilian if she could make anything of it several times, but ultimately held back. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her, but I wanted to figure this out myself. Can I still afford to, though? Black hadn’t told me how long he’d stay in Marchford, but it couldn’t be more than a few days. And when he was gone, so was my chance to finish this conversation with him. Part of me knew there was no hurry for that to happen, but there’d been too many unknowns in my life lately. This felt... important. Like Creation had put a weight on it. Like the beginnings of a pivot. I opened the journal one last time and ran a finger down the mystery column, but nothing came to mind. I was shaken out of my thoughts by a firm knock on the door a moment later.

“Come in,” I called out, not bothering to put a shirt on.

As far as I was concerned modesty had been seen to by the bindings. To my delight, the person who came into the room was Hakram.

“Cat,” he managed to get out before I strode to him and enveloped him in a hug.

He was warm, and the loose cotton shirt wasn’t enough to cover the broad expanse of thick green muscle. He laid an arm around my shoulders pretty easily, given that he was over two feet taller, and clasped me close for a moment before gently pushing me away.

“Put a shirt on,” he requested firmly.

“I’m just too much woman for you to handle, I see,” I spoke drily.

He sighed. “Yes, your strangely-coloured thin skin and lack of proper canines has me all aflutter,” he deadpanned. “Please, cover up before I can no longer control myself. Or you catch a cold.”

“We don’t do that anymore,” I reminded him amusedly, reaching for top.

“You’ll find a way,” he muttered.

“You know, given how much you apparently sleep around I’m surprised you’re a bit of a prude,” I noted as I put my head through the shirt only to realize the sleeves were still folded in.

Good thing the troops weren’t around to that, I decided.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the orc lied blatantly.

After Juniper had pointed it out, I’d started noticing how often other orcs gave my Adjutant the eye. Fighting multiple heroes and being the first of his species with a Name in centuries was apparently kind of an aphrodisiac his kind, though in all fairness it was much the same with human Named.

“You’re back on your feet, then,” I asked as I decided to actually put boots on for good measure.

“For now,” he grunted. “Though Masego told me to avoid anything too strenuous for a few days.”

“You’ve talked to him, then?” I murmured. “How did he look?”

“Tired, mostly,” Hakram shrugged. “Happy to be reunited with his father.”

I grimaced. “Saw Warlock, huh.”

Had mixed feelings about that. I’d not forgotten the pleasant little chat I’d had with the Calamity back in Summerholm, or the horrifying threat he’d made with a sunny smile. I wasn’t going to complain he was in the city, given how dire my need for a mage who could find corruption currently was, but the sooner he left after that the better. That Hakram had noticed nothing unusual with Masego was a mark in the mage’s favour, but still... I’d seen the demon ichor touch his arm. I still remembered the moment of hesitation before his father had declared him untouched. I’d need to make sure he was still whole, one way or another. Retreating in my thoughts for a moment as I finished putting on my last boot, I only noticed Hakram casting a curious look at the still-open journal when I was done.

“A lend from my teacher,” I informed him.

“I do not mean to pry,” the tall orc gravelled immediately.

I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. Pride had held me back, so far. That and a reluctance to act on trust even when I felt it. Still, if I couldn’t rely on Hakram then who could I rely on?

“Maybe you should,” I grunted. “Have a look, there’s a column I can’t quite pin down.”

He lumbered over to the table, overlarge fingers picking it up. He frowned at the pages I’d left open for a long moment, then flipped back to the beginning of the journal. His frown deepened, then he flipped to the last page. Black’s last entry was on the year he’d begun the Conquest, if I remembered correctly. Why he’d stopped then was something I’d mulled over for some time.

“I think,” he spoke slowly, “that number is the total territory in the Empire can bear crops.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I told him flatly.

He shook his head.

“Look at this,” he said, returning to the first page. “The number is much larger, then it goes down after the reign of Dread Empress Sinistra the First.”

“And?” I prompted.

“She’s the one who tried to steal Callow’s weather and ended up making the Wasteland,” he reminded me.

“So it may be related to that,” I conceded. “Doesn’t have to be cultivable land.”

He flipped back to the last page.

“The year before the Conquest,” he gravelled, “the levees in the northern part of the Green Stretch broke. It flooded a massive chunk of the fields. Look at the number for that year.”

It took a sharp descent. And yet...

“Hakram, that makes no sense ,” I said. “The population of Praes is slightly larger than Callow’s. There’s no way you can feed that many people with only that much farmland. Ater alone is half a million citizens. The whole reason death row prisoners are auctioned in Praes is so blood rituals can make parts of the Wasteland usable for crops.”

I’d been horrified at the systematic gruesome executions when I’d first learned of them, but Black had flatly informed me they were a necessity. They were, as a matter of fact, one of the reasons High Lords and Ladies had come to exist: one of their duties to the lesser nobles sworn to them was to ensure enough of their fields were fertile that they could feed their own. Since the prisoners were technically under the aegis of the Tower, the gold used to buy them helped fill Imperial coffers as an unofficial tax. The practice had become less popular since the annexation of the Kingdom, since foodstuffs could simply be imported, but it had not disappeared entirely.

“That’s why the area is larger than the Green Stretch,” he gravelled.

I bit my lip. I didn’t know much about blood magic, but for the amount of people that got bled over altars the gain seemed incredibly low. I knew mage healing was limited by the amount of magic you could pump into something living before it was saturated, though. There was a very real possibility that using the rituals on the same grounds two consecutive years might not work. Gods Below, though, these numbers...

“I mean, even if you import from the Free Cities it would be impossible to ever accumulate a surplus,” I said. “The coastal cities can fish, but every given year there would be a part of the Empire facing starvation. Hells, the moment you got a bad year of crops in the Green Stretch there’d be food shortages everywhere.”

The implications of that were massive. If from generation to generation starvation remained a constant, it would leave lasting marks on the mindset of the Praesi. And that shapes Names, in the long term. If you added what we’d just unearthed to the book of stories Black had given me, a pattern was beginning to form that put a shiver up my spine. I passed a hand through my hair, only now noticing I’d forgotten to tie it back into a ponytail. Fixing that would have to wait.

“I need to talk to Black,” I said. “Now.”

Chapter 36: Madman

“you call me villain
cast the word as you
would a stone;
seek to bury under
scorn of herded
multitude, and yet
forget my Name:

I am empress
most dread,
savage ruler of
yet fiercer race;
did you expect
meekness of me?

you call me villain
speak it a curse
as if Hells were
grasping instead
of grasped;
as if I had knelt.

you dare?
I am tyrant,
bringer of calamity;
crowned and
crowning glory
of mine empire

be fearful now
tremble; for
my reach is long
my wrath is great
patient but
unrivalled
above or below

and I will be
Triumphant ”

– Extract from the play “I, Triumphant”, author unknown, banned by decree of the Tower under Terribilis II

Finding Black was easy.

According to my legionaries, he’d not left the rooms he’d claimed on the highest level of an abandoned house since we’d had the meeting with Heiress. He’d had visitors, though, including Warlock and Juniper. I was mildly surprised to find the moon up in the sky when I started the trek to his quarters, but if I’d slept that long there was no denying my body had needed it. I’d used my Name much, drawn deeper from the well than I ever had before save perhaps on the night William had given me the scar across my chest. It was kind of ridiculous that Hakram could be back on his feet after taking even worse punishment than me, but orcs were made of sterner stuff than humans. Bigger and harder bones, thicker skin and even a proportionally larger heart. There was something different about their stomachs too, related to how they ate almost only meat, but I’d never been entirely clear on what acidic humours actually did. I set aside the train of thought, recognizing it for the dissembling it was.

It was strange to find no Blackguards looming silently by the door, watching everything from behind their helmets. My teacher’s personal guard followed him everywhere, but I supposed going through Arcadia might have been a bit much for regular humans. Black had been vague when I’d asked him how he’d managed the trip, though he’d at least confirmed Warlock had not been the one to open the way through the other realm. Likely they’d summoned and coerced one of the Fae, which I’d had no idea was actually possible until now. What they could have threatened it with I did not know, but if there was anyone in the Empire who could put the fear of the Gods in a creature like that it was Black. The stairs were rickety and I paused when I felt something odd about them, frowning as I used my Name sight on the wood. Runes had been traced in some kind of golden sorcery, I saw. Most of the mage tongue was still foreign to me, but I recognized a rune associated with explosions and another with alarms.

I sighed. Of course he’d trapped the place. His manor in Ater was the second most-heavily warded place in the city, and some of the noble families had accumulated protections on theirs for centuries. Most of the work had been done by Warlock, apparently, but he’d also used ward designs coming from as far as the other side of the Tyrian Sea. The Yan Tei were famous for their arrays, whether sealing or protective: when they’d landed their punitive army on Praesi shores, back in Triumphant’s day, they’d trapped at least a dozen demons in scrolls and carried them home after the war. That seemed like a horrible idea to me, now that I had personal experience with demons, but the Yan Tei did things differently from Calernians. No nation on our continent would be able to function with both a hero and a villain sharing the highest level of authority, but they seemed to be doing fine.

Since Black was disinclined to blow up the stairs under me, I finished the trip up the creaking steps. The door to his room was closed so I knocked and waited a few heartbeats before opening it. My teacher was seated at a table that had clearly come from somewhere else – it was much nicer compared to the rest of the furnishings, and too large to make up the stairway – with papers splayed all over the surface and a lit up scrying bowl to his side. Candles were scattered across the room, and the faraway silhouette of the moon shone through the window. As usual, his back was turned to the wall. He signalled for me to come in without turning, listening to the voice coming from the bowl.

“- won’t settle for anything less than double,” Scribe said.

“It’s like negotiating with a dragon,” the dark-haired man muttered peevishly. “Fine, it’ll be a dent in the coffers but we can afford it. But make it clear the payoff is contingent on them following the itinerary we provided.”

“Your will be done,” Scribe replied, a tad drily.

Without either of them bothering with goodbyes, the scrying light winked out. There was a sad excuse for a chair placed across the table so I claimed it without a word as I snuck a look at the papers in front of him. The handwriting in most of them was familiar: Juniper’s calligraphy was as exemplary as ever, a far cry from my own hasty scribbles. How she managed that with fingers twice as thick as mine remained a mystery. After-action reports for Three Hills and Marchford, if I had to guess.

“Bribing someone?” I asked curiously.

“In a manner of speaking,” he said “Scribe is tying up some loose ends for me.”

I hummed. “Where did you find her, anyway? The stories don’t say.”

The plain-faced woman was barely in them at all. That almost amused me, considering how important she was to my teacher’s administration of Callow: I suspected Scribe was the reason why he’d never had to set up shop in a single city while stabilizing the country after the Conquest. The implication of that was that she single-handedly served as both the head of his spy network and a one-woman bureaucracy for a territory about the same size of the Empire. Scribe was not someone to underestimate just because she didn’t go around swinging a sword, I’d known that even before Ime had warned me never to attract her ire.

“The Free Cities,” he said. “It was an interesting encounter in many ways.”

I bet. In the Tower, Scribe had implied she would have preferred for Black to take the throne instead of Malicia – and that Ranger had shared that preference. I’d glimpsed some of the reasons for Ranger’s opinion in my latest dream, but the other woman was still very much a riddle to me. I’d never got the impression that Scribe was all that invested in the Empire itself: Black was the real reason she was here. With Warlock having outright admitted to me he didn’t give a single fuck about Praes as a whole, that made two of the Calamities whose only loyalty was to my teacher. Given that Captain’s very Role was bound to the concept of protecting Black, that painted a dangerous picture. There were five major Named in the Empire, aside from the Empress, and only one of them was a staunch supporter of Malicia: the rest only supported her reign by default, allegiance filtered through the Black Knight and dependent on his position.

My teacher was perfectly positioned for a coup. He’d founded the modern Legions of Terror, personally led most of their generals on the field and crafted their very philosophy. He had the Named on his side and likely most of the army. Any other villain I could think of would have already killed Malicia and taken the throne, so why hadn’t he? That he was Duni must have been part of it: a paleskin on the throne would be met with immediate and bitter rebellion by most of the High Lords. I knew he was close to the Empress so that must have been a factor too, but there must have been more to it. The Black Knight was, ultimately, an icily pragmatic man: I did not believe that even a long-standing friendship would stay his hand if the recipient was in his way. I’d been promised an answer to those questions in a way, and it was time to collect. Phrasing would be important, though. He was a hard man to offend, but just asking by the way, why haven’t you murdered one of your closest friends and taken her stuff would have him get all sardonic on me. Something to avoid: his sarcasm tended to be on the savage side.

“The Empire is not sustainable,” I said instead.

Blurted out, really, but what I was saying wasn’t a surprise to him. He’d left me markers on the path down to that understanding, though he’d refrained from just handing me the knowledge. He’d been right to do that: there would always have been a kernel of doubt, if I’d not put it together myself. As usual, the man surprised me with how well he understood how I thought.

“Finished the books, have you?” he said. “You are essentially correct, as long as the borders of the Empire remain what they were previous to the Conquest.”

“That’s just delaying the problem, though,” I pointed out. “Eventually the population of Praes will get too big for Callow to feed, and honestly that’s something that boggles my mind. Why does the population keep getting bigger if you can’t feed it? Even if Tyrants don’t to anything to address the problem, starvation by itself should keep the whole thing manageable.”

Black leaned back in his seat, reaching for a jug of wine I hadn’t even noticed and pouring himself a glass. With a silently raised eyebrow he asked me if I wanted a cup too and I shrugged. He took it as a yes and placed the full glass in front of me.

“Because we have the misfortune of being very, very rich,” he said. “As long as the trade lanes to the Free Cities remain open, we can import large amounts of grain from Ashur and Procer.”

“Procer,” I repeated dubiously. “I could buy Ashur, since they’re merchants to the bone, but the Principate feeding the Empire? That’s a little dubious.”

“Through intermediaries,” he said. “Most people care little for the philosophical debates of heroes and villains, Catherine. In the end, there is a demand for grain in Praes and a surplus of grain in the Principate. The Free Cities merely provide the necessary fig leaf for that commerce to not rustle too many feathers.”

“So you’re telling me it is sustainable, then,” I frowned.

“No, you were correct in your initial thought. On good years, those imports and the field sacrifices allowed us to keep our head barely above the water. Should there ever be a diplomatic incident down south, though, or even if the crops were average instead of bountiful, hunger spread across the Empire.”

“And Tyrants just allowed that?” I said disbelievingly. “Hells, half of them were mad as... well, an Emperor is the usual comparison actually, and the other half were idiots but none of them were above a spot of massacre. Not a single one of them decided to clear out a few cities to make this simpler, or even just restrict childbirth? You already do it to the Tribes.”

Black sipped at his glass. I left mine untouched.

“Terribilis – the second one – was in a unique position after he reunited Praes,” the dark-haired man said. “His reign was stable, his support in the nobility widespread and the Empire’s military strength was at one of its historical high points. Twenty years of constant war had brought down the numbers to something easy to manage, and he decided to end the issue forever with magical sterilization and strict familial laws. He had, you see, no Callowan ambitions.”

The Knight put down his glass, the sound of it oddly final.

“Within a month of his first decree, he was assassinated,” Black finished.

“And that’s the end of it?” I said. “Just because one failed it’s not worth trying?”

“The second Maleficent came closer,” he replied. “She got the Empire involved in the Free Cities, where we could bleed our surplus on foreign fields. She was too successful: Ashur and Procer allied to drive her out. Maleficent did not survive her defeat. Dread Emperor Vile tried it with a magical plague that would kill two in ten, only to trigger the War of Thirteen Tyrants and One. Sanguinara – not to be confused with the Sanguinias – made any and all law-breaking a capital offense. Overthrown within the year. Bilius the Beast attempted the Dead King’s gambit of turning all Praesi into undead. Poisoned by his Chancellor, before heroes even arrived on the scene.”

“What are you saying, exactly?”

“Every single Tyrant who tried to dam Praesi population growth was rebelled against, disgraced or assassinated,” he spoke calmly.

And Malicia still reigned. The implications of that were horrifying.

“So Praes has been swelling with twenty years of easy food imports. Gods save us all,” I whispered.

“Less than you would think,” Black replied. “We had two major wars before the annexation, which killed a significant portion of people of childbearing age. Legionaries cannot have children while in service, even in logistical posts, unless a permit is granted. Malicia instituted a similar policy for the Imperial bureaucracy, which also had the effect of limiting aristocratic influence in the ranks. And the peasantry only gets fringe benefits from our access to Callowan fields.”

“But it will swell, eventually,” I said. “In ten years or fifty, it makes no difference. And when it does, the Empire will need another war.”

And Calernia would bleed. And Callow would bleed, as the land closest to Procer – for there was no doubt the Principate would intervene, even if they weren’t the target. Procerans fancied themselves the nation that kept Evil at bay, and though they had a nasty tendency to annex their neighbours there was no denying it was them keeping the Chain of Hunger and the Kingdom of the Dead bottled up.

“It will, if it remains the same Empire it currently is,” Black agreed softly.

I closed my eyes, parsing out what he’d meant by that. The problem was twofold, as I saw it. Not enough product and too much demand. Getting more product was just delaying the problem, since the demand would keep growing. Lessening the demand was the only way, but resulted in the toppling of the current regime.

“Why?” I said. “Why has every single Tyrant who tried to control population been overthrown? Many could be a bad string of coincidences, but every single one ? That’s... bigger.”

Pride flickered in the man’s eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “The right question. Why ? For years I wondered. Was Evil, by nature, inherently self-destructive? The House of Light argues as much. But the House of Light is a Calernian institution, shaped by Calernian struggles. Its perspective is limited. Creation, Catherine, is a thing of patterns and balance.”

“The pattern for Praes is fucking up pretty bad,” I pointed out.

“The pattern for Praes is to grasp,” he corrected. “The pattern for Callow is to be grasped.”

And just like that it clicked. For every aspect of Conquer, there was an aspect of Protect. For every hero there was a villain. Balance, enforced by a pattern. Praes got hungry, and so it invaded Callow. That was their pattern. The Empire failed, but the failure was so catastrophic its population problem was solved for a few decades. Then they got hungry again and the pattern started over.

“If Praes managed to get its population under control, it would no longer have the manpower to invade Callow,” I said. “Balance is broken. Anybody going against that loses, because they’re going against the entire pattern of the Empire.”

“Patterns cannot be broken,” Black smiled. “But they can be... transcended. Names themselves can be transitory.”

“The Empire doesn’t need the manpower to invade Callow, if Callow is part of the Empire,” I breathed. “Truly part of the Empire, not just a conquered territory.”

Black and Malicia – for I could not believe that the Dread Empress was not up in this to her neck – had spent decades adjusting the Empire so that it would match that state. A small, permanent professional army instead of the hordes and mass rituals of old. Praesi ruling Callowan cities, Callowans in Praesi institutions like the Legions of Terror. Focus on common external enemies like the Principate while slowly and quietly smothering the racism in the bureaucracy to pave the way for integration. Gods, I’d been raised in Laure and my first instinct in looking for protection from Governor Mazus had not been heroes, it had been the local Legion garrison. And to bind the marriage, a Callowan girl in an old Praesi Name. Me.

My blood ran cold. This was a plan decades in the making, brilliant and utterly ruthless. My first panicked instinct was to ruin it by any way I could. Could I kill Black, here and now? Did he trust me enough that he wouldn’t see the strike coming? No, that wouldn’t even stop it. Malicia would carry on regardless, and there was no touching her. If I stood against the Empire now, I would do it without any of the resources I’d spent the last year accumulating – the Fifteenth would balk at rebellion when I couldn’t even give them a reason they’d be happy with.

I slowed my heartbeat with a long breath, sharply aware of the pale green eyes studying me. If this worked, what would be the end result? What would happen to Callow? The Imperial Governorship system made permanent, most likely, and spread even further by the lands that would be confiscated as soon as the current rebellion was over. Too many nobles were participating, there’d be only a handful of baronies left west of the Duchy of Daoine. And the Duchy itself, I supposed, but that barely counted as Callow. Even under the Kingdom it had been an independent nation in all but name.

On the other hand, the cycle would be done. Over with. No more invasions, no more fire and brimstone coming from the East to lay waste to Callow. The thought of that was horribly, horribly tempting. But not of it came at the cost of killing everything that made Callow what it was. They need me for this , I realized. I was more than a possible replacement for Black, should he die or be put aside. I was, in truth, the keystone to what they were trying to build. The proof of concept it was possible at all. And that meant I had leverage. I rested against the back of the ramshackle chair, feeling my leg twinge in pain. Forcing my hands to stop shaking, I met Black’s eyes unflinchingly. Hadn’t this been my plan from the beginning? Enter the ranks, and influence the institution from the inside. Praes was seeking to change Callow, but Callow could change Praes as well. Already my mind was spinning with half a dozen ways to steer this the way I wanted it to go. The way I needed it to go.

“I won’t just let the Empire swallow Callow whole,” I told Black, ignoring the voice in the back of my head that told me that sentence preceded my head rolling on the floor.

“Then don’t,” he shrugged. “Preserve what you believe should be preserved. Change what you believe needs to be changed. If you judge it necessary to end the governorship system, do so. If you think tributary status for duchies like with Daoine will be the most stable option, do so. As long as the right banner flies, as long as we look at the same enemies, I have no objections.”

And he really didn’t, I knew. He could have been lying, but there was a weight in my bones that put paid to that notion. This was a pivot, or something close to it. As long as what Black considered his victory condition was met, he genuinely did not care what the state of Callow was.

“I don’t understand you,” I half-cursed, half-admitted. “This isn’t about being a patriot. You don’t really think Praesi are better than anyone else – Hells, most of the time you act like you’d set half the people in the Wasteland on fire given a good pretext. You do these things, like the Reforms or keeping fuckers like Mazus in check, that look like they’re Good – but they’re not, not really. Tools, you call them, but tools are used to make something. What do you want , Black?”

Languidly, the green-eyed man finished the last of his wine.

“Do you know what the most common symbol for the struggle between Good and Evil is? On Calernia, that is,” he specified.

A child could have answered that.

“A shatranj board,” I said. “The so-called Game of the Gods.”

“I’ve always hated that image,” he spoke mildly. “It implies equality. That equivalent forces are arrayed on both sides of the board.”

“Aren’t there?” I frowned. “Balance, you’ve said it yourself.”

“And yet,” he murmured, “Good always wins.”

As if he could feel me about to object, he raised his hand.

“We don’t get real victories, Catherine. Oh, we usurp a throne for a few years. Or win a handful of battles. Once in a while, we even win a war and stay on top long enough for people to believe we are unbeatable.”

His eyes turned hard.

“Then the heroes come.”

I’d seen many sides to this man, since I had first met him. I’d seen him cold and vicious, on the night he’d made a game of Mazus for my edification. I’d seen his face turn into an emotionless clay mask and humanity slide off his face like droplets, on the day he’d Spoken to me. Once I’d even seen him shaken, when the Tower had received a Red Letter. But the look he had on his face now I had only glimpsed once before, when I’d quoted the Book of All Things on the subject of fate. There was an old, implacable anger to his frame. For the first time in my life, I understood why people called becoming angry ‘getting mad’. There was a madness in him now, nearly visible to the eye. That should have scared me but perhaps there was some of it in me too, some orphan slip of a girl who believed she could snatch a nation from the jaws of wolves and make it her own.

“It doesn’t matter how flawless the scheme was, how impregnable the fortress or powerful the magical weapon,” he said. “It always ends with a band of adolescents shouting utter platitudes as they tear it all down. The game is rigged so that we lose, every single time.”

He smiled at me, a dark sardonic thing.

“Half the world, turned into a prop for the glory of the other half.”

The worst of it, I thought, was that I intimately understood where he was coming from. I still had the image burned into my eyelids of the Lone Swordsman effortlessly cutting his way through a full line of my men on his way to me, making a mockery of every skill I’d earned with his and battering down the strength of my Name with the superior might of his own. It had stung, when I’d realized how... easy that had all been for him. That if Warlock hadn’t stepped in I’d be dead, and all my friends with me. It had felt like he’d been chosen to win before the fight had ever started. Even Hunter, who’d failed to be my equal but had simply refused to go down . All the things that had made heroes heroic when I was a child had become infuriating now.

“Ah, you’ve had a taste of it yourself,” he murmured. “How much worse it must be, coming from a culture that still teaches you you can win. We don’t even have that, Catherine. The hope of the happy ending. We get to cackle on the way down the cliff, or maybe curse our killer with our last breath. You’ve read the stories, and stories are the lifeblood of Names.”

“Villains aren’t powerless,” I said.

He laughed. “Oh, if the heroes deserved their victories against us, I would make my peace with it. But they don’t, do they? Your sullen little nemesis gets to swing an angel’s feather, while you make do with steel and wiles. That’s always the way of it. At the last moment they’re taught a secret spell by a dead man, or your mortal weakness is revealed to them or they somehow manage to master a power in a day that would take a villain twenty years to own. Gods, I’ve even heard of Choirs stepping in to settle a losing fight. The sheer fucking arrogance of it .”

The second time I’d ever heard him swear, and it surprised me as much as the last. Teeth bared, he leaned forward.

“None of it is earned. It is handed to them, and this offends me.”

And when a villain disliked an aspect of Creation, they broke it . As simple as that. Of all the things that being a villain entailed I had grasped this one the easiest. What that said about me, I preferred not to think about.

“You asked me what I want,” Black said. “This once, just this once, I want us to win .”

The smile across his face was a cutting, vicious thing.

“To spit in the eyes of the Hashmallim. To trample the pride of all those glorious, righteous princes. To scatter their wizards and make their oracles liars. Just to prove that it can be done.”

There was something his eyes burning like coals and embers.

“So that five hundred years from now, a band of heroes shiver in the dark of night. Because they know that no matter how powerful their sword or righteous their cause, there was once a time it wasn’t enough . That even victories ordained by the Heavens can broken by the will of men.”

A heartbeat passed and then he sagged into his seat, as if the words had drained something. The embers in his eyes cooled. I sat in my rickety chair, and thought. A long moment passed.

“Monster,” I finally said.

A single word, carrying with it the faint memory of fear and a dark alley. Of a black cloak warming my frame on a cold night. It felt like an offered hand.

His lips twitched into something almost a smile. “The very worst kind,” he replied.

A hand clasped. I closed my eyes, and wondered whether I’d just saved my homeland or sold it.

I did not get much sleep that night.

Interlude: Nemeses

“I’ve been told one can only be betrayed by a friend, which is why I constantly surround myself with enemies.”
– Dread Emperor Traitorous

“This is a problem,” Arzachel said.

Akua stilled her tongue before it could deliver a truly scathing piece of sarcasm. The Proceran was quite good at his work, but he did have an unfortunate tendency to present obvious truths as if they were a revelation from the Gods. The two corpses had not been touched since the picket had brought them into the supply tent, the wounds in their throats and kidneys still bloody if no longer bleeding. The smell was foul, but this was hardly the first time Heiress had ever been in a room with corpses. They’d been a staple of her childhood.

“They hit the sentinels right before dawn, as far as we can tell,” the commander of her mercenaries grunted. “Knifed those two and infiltrated the camp. We don’t know how far in they got.”

Foundling’s foul little goblins at work, of that there was no doubt. Chider had warned her that the one named Robber had a reputation among her kind as half-mad even by their standards. Akua had been sceptical that Squire would let him off the leash in the middle of a campaign but she had been incorrect, evidently. Their last confrontation had radicalized her rival more than expected. The girl took everything so personally, even when she was not meant to: Foundling had committed the Praesi cardinal sin of coming to care for her power base on a personal level. It made controlling escalation particularly tricky, though admittedly it also made manipulating her child’s play.

“Are you certain they’re no longer in the camp?” she asked.

They were two days off Marchford, headed for the very ford the city had been named after. This was the first night some of her men had turned up dead, though there’d been reports of goblins skulking around the edge of her camp before.

“I combed through the camp, but goblins can hide in a bare white room if they need to,” Arzachel said. “We’ll only know for sure when we’re on the march.”

In this kind of situation Akua’s preferred counter would have been to go on the offensive, but the situation did not allow for that kind of manoeuvring. By officially designating her as an auxiliary the Black Knight had ensured she was bound by the regulations of the Legions of Terror. Any incident between her men and the Fifteenth would end up arbitrated by either a military tribunal whose members would be chosen by Foundling or directly by the Squire herself – who’d been granted absolute discretionary authority over the legion by Lord Black. That path ended only with gallows being raised. Even her own personal safety was at stake at the moment, though she already knew how she’d slip out of that particular noose when the time came.

No, until they reached her own objective she’d have to stay on the defensive. Not the optimal stance, but it could have its uses. Allowing Squire to build up her confidence with minor indirect victories would make it easier to blindside her later. Akua could not under any circumstances allow herself to be baited into a direct confrontation: it would be throwing away the last year of work entirely, and it was incredibly unlikely she’d manage to pull wool over the eyes of Lord Black twice in a row. The dark-skinned aristocrat consciously refrained from touching the unmarred skin on her hand where she’d rammed her own knife a few days ago. She suspected the man had been trying to bait her into something unwise, but she’d known better. He did not have enough to kill her and anything short of that could be healed in time.

The fear she still felt at the way he’d smiled at her would go away in time. No one had ever Spoken at her before, and while Lord Black was not in the same league as the Empress – there was a reason any agent who’d been in the same room as Malicia had to be disposed of immediately – he still had brought more to bear than any mere Black Knight should. A consequence of his lacking power in other areas, perhaps.

“Speak with Chider,” she ordered. “She’ll help you prepare for goblin raiding tactics.”

Arzachel nodded, looking away too quickly. He’d been looking at her breasts, most likely. The riding dress she was currently wearing did allow some cleavage to show, and puberty had been kind to her in that regard. Akua was the result of centuries of breeding for looks and magical power, though standards of beauty had admittedly shifted several times over that length of time. That the mercenary desired her was a useful tool of control, though that attraction would have to be carefully managed: spurned men often did childish things to ‘get even’, and she had no intention of ever sharing a bed with the Proceran. She left without a word, mind already moving on to the next situation she had to address before the march west resumed. She had a scrying session scheduled, and the woman she was going to be conversing with was not one she could afford to face while distracted.

Her tent had been prepared for the casting, the twenty-four layers of wards humming against her skin when she entered. Waiting for the Warlock to be gone had been common sense, for not even old Wolofite secrets were guarantee that man would not be able to listen in. He’d systematically broken through Wolofite warding schemes during the civil war, after all, and done so without even resorting to sacrifices. There were still entire cabals of mages in the city who dedicated their days to finding out how he’d accomplished that, though their efforts had not borne fruits in decades. Instead of the bowls of water some mages preferred, the Sehelians of Wolof had always used mirrors. Having them cast from the same ingot ensured a better and more stable connection than most linked items could manage, an advantage that had once ensured her family’s armies could communicate as far as Foramen while their opponents could manage barely half that distance. That Lord Warlock’s introduction of a long-range scrying spell accessible to all had destroyed that comparative advantage still caused some bitter feelings at home.

The round golden mirror, the size of her palm, rested innocently on the table. Akua let out a long breath and felt her mind cool. This was not a Name trick but a meditative one, setting aside distractions and allowing her thoughts to flow without emotional bias. The technique had been tortured out of a member of the Watch a few centuries ago and carefully hoarded ever since, never leaving the confines of the ruling line of Wolof. Heiress touched a finger to the polished gold.

“Show me not my reflection,” she spoke in an ancient Mtethwa dialect, “but the face of your brother.”

Her touch did not leave a fingerprint. There was no ripple, no uncouth glow: the eyes of her mother simply met hers a heartbeat later. High Lady Tasia Sahelian was nearly sixty years old, though she looked barely half of that. It was no glamour: rituals to maintain the physical trappings of youth and the same superior breeding that had led to both their beauty were more than enough. High cheekbones and perfect eyebrows, lovely dark golden eyes and full lips – it was no mystery why the High Lady still had so many admirers even at her age.

“Mother,” Akua said.

The High Lady would not have spoken first if she hadn’t, an unspoken reminder that for all that Heiress had a Name she was still not the dominant partner in their relationship.

“Akua,” her mother replied. “I’m told you’re finally on the march.”

Likely the woman already knew where they were headed, but Heiress answered the unasked question nonetheless.

“To Liesse,” she said. “We’ve been ordered to take the city while Lord Black deals with the rebel host.”

The High Lady has no visible reaction but there was a palpable sense of satisfaction emanating from her nonetheless, even through the mirror. That part of the plan had succeeded flawlessly.

“Foundling must be anxious,” Mother said. “She will be finishing her pattern of three with the hero.”

Not gloating, for High Lady Tasia was better bred than that, but something close to it. Squire had actually not seemed anything of the sort, though she had to be aware that after a victory and a draw she was headed for a defeat against the Lone Swordsman. No doubt her teacher had informed her that it was possible to discharge that mandated defeat without the consequences being fatal – though Akua doubted it would easy, with a Bard on the opposing side. While those types of Names were rarely able to intervene directly, there was nothing stopping them from manipulating the situation from behind the scene.

“Is my support on schedule?” Heiress asked.

She’d sent for her own reinforcements, detachments of household troops contributed by all the ranking members of the Truebloods. Only a thousand overall, since none of the members trusted each other enough to truly deplete their strength, but it would still double her numbers. Her mother paused.

“There have been developments,” she said.

Not a collapse of the Trueblood coalition, Heiress decided calmly. It was currently the most united it had been since Malicia’s ascension of the Tower. An exterior factor, then. The Swordsman? He should have been in Liesse with the Stygian slaves, but heroes could be slippery that way.

“Such as?”

High Lady Tasia allowed her lips to thin in displeasure.

“The ships assembled to cross the Wasaliti were stolen,” she said.

The meditation technique held, muting the sense of surprise. Not sunk, stolen . That phrasing was not happenstance.

“The Thief,” Heiress said.

“She left a note on the shore, informing us they had been ‘borrowed indefinitely’,” Mother said, eyes gone hot with rage. “A small fleet, gone inside an hour without a trace. They’re not on the river and our agents in Mercantis have seen no sign of them.”

Heroes, unmaking a month of preparations as easily as a soldier tossed dice.

“You could charter more,” Akua noted.

Mother shook her head minutely. “The Empress has finally made her move.”

That single sentence brought fresh dread that put anything personal fear inflicted by Lord Black to shame. The man was a threat, but he was ultimately nothing more than an exceedingly talented warlord. Dangerous, but he could be neutered through politics. Her Most Dreadful Majesty Malicia, First of Her Name, had always been the most dangerous of the two. While her Knight settled the provinces the Empress had spent decades fencing with the sharpest minds in Praes, leaving behind her a trail of broken ambitions and exquisitely outplayed corpses.

“She was particularly clever about this one,” the High Lady admitted. “Our request that the Clans be forced to be pay the tributes they refused under Nefarious rests on the legality that, even when not under de facto Imperial control, territories are subject to Imperial law and obligations. Under that understanding, the lands you looted in southern Callow are granted the same legal status.”

Which meant either Wolof had to pay massive reparations for the damages incurred in that territory or withdraw the request made to the Tower. That her mother was currently implying she would not have the funds to assemble another fleet of transports implied she’d already reached a decision on the matter. And we can’t rely on the other Truebloods to foot the bill. Mother is the unofficial head of the coalition, but unmatched monetary contributions would muddy that status. Akua found she agreed with the decision made here, after a moment: wealth would flow back in Sahelian coffers soon enough, while backing down on the orc issue was not something they could ever take back. It was still incredibly inconvenient.

“I’ll manage without them,” Akua said, to her mother’s visible approval.

In some ways having only expendable troops at her disposal opened possibilities. She’d already secured the necessary fuel for her rituals but being able to operate without the limitation of having to preserve any of her forces save her personal followers allowed for a degree of... recklessness borrowed household troops would forbid. Not to mention never having to pay the mercenaries would relieve the family coffers of an additional burden. She could work with this, unplanned as it was.

“Keep me informed as you approach Liesse,” High Lady Tasia ordered.

Akua bowed her head, though the commanding tone rankled. It always did. Without wasting any times on goodbyes, her mother’s profile disappeared from the mirror. Heiress waited, for now came the contact she’d actually been looking forward to. The link between mirrors activated again, responding as if it had been triggered from the other side. It hadn’t been: a spell had been used that fooled the laws of sympathy scrying relied on to make the artefact believe it was connected to its match again. An older Soninke man appeared on the surface, face wrinkled with laugh lines and sleepless nights. Not particularly handsome, but there was an intensity to him that almost made up for it when he focused entirely on something.

“Papa,” Akua smiled.

“Mpanzi,” her father grinned.

Dear one . He’d always refused to use the name Mother had given her. One of the few kinds of rebellion he allowed himself.

“You look tired, Papa,” she frowned. “Have you been working on another project?”

“Oh, nothing important,” he dismissed. “I may have stumbled onto an improvement on the Shahbaz ritual that bears promise. Still a horribly wasteful form of conversion, but it brings foundational flight closer to the sacrificial threshold.”

Heiress found a smile tugging at her lips. Only her father would call modifying a ritual formula dating back to the Declaration ‘nothing important’. On another day she would have asked him to elaborate if only to watch his face light up – not to mention that if he’d genuinely found a way to make flying fortresses less costly it could be very useful – but she had precious little time right now. She loved to talk magic with her father, though, she truly did. He had a real passion for the subject and as a child he’d made it a pleasure to learn. Akua believed that if he’d not been her teacher she would not be half the caster she was today, no matter the potential she’d been born to. And she still believed he would have been a much better Warlock than the current one, if he’d pressed his claim. So many things could have been different, if Papa had answered the call of the Name instead of denied it.

“You have that look on your face again, my child,” the dark-skinned man sighed. “The one that says you’re tugging at doors best left unopened.”

“I wish you were with me,” Akua said.

“I wish you had never gone at all,” he replied sadly.

“You know I had to,” Heiress said.

“I know your mother said that,” he murmured. “You do not have to listen to her.”

You do , Akua almost said, but it would have been unfair. Her father had been born one of the mostly innately talented mages of his generation, to the extent that he’d had a claim on the Name of Warlock after the previous one’s assassination. He had not, however, been born to a powerful family. Minor nobility sworn to the High Lord of Aksum, a deeply paranoid man whose only daughter was already married: if he’d stayed in the village of his birth, he’d have been taken in the dark of night and never seen again. High Lords did not allow strong mages to survive if they were not personal retainers or useful breeding stock. Instead he’d found protection and funding in Wolof, where her mother had required obedience and his help in conceiving a child in exchange. He’d never even been granted official consort status.

Their only contact when she’d been a child had been her tutelage in sorcery, all other interactions strictly forbidden. Not that Papa hadn’t found a way regardless, running circles around High Lady Tasia’s best mages and turning it into a game for his infant daughter. She’d loved him for that and loved him still, for he had never once asked anything of her. All her life she’d been told that the gifts of her birth raised her above others, whether it be in intellect or looks or sorcery, and that girls like her only came once every few hundred years. It had been a heady thing, until she’d realized that those gifts came at a price. She was a product of the oldest blood of Praes and her loyalty to that blood was expected to be absolute. Akua was to return the banner of Evil, real Evil, to its rightful place at the summit of the Tower. Anything less was unacceptable.

And the truth was, she believed in this. She did not know whether or not that was because she had been raised to believe it, but ultimately it didn’t matter. No matter the source the conviction had become her own. Whoring out the soul of the Empire for a few victories the way Malicia had was repulsive to her. The Empress’ path was one that looked back on all of what Praes had ever been and dismissed it as the flailing of children. Every villain who’d ever spit in the eye of the Heavens swept under the carpet like a shameful blemish, a thousand years of tears and blood denied. Akua looked back on the Tyrants of old and felt only pride, for the monsters and the fools both – for even the fools had shaken the world, in their own way. Their legacy was not wrong, it was just incomplete . It had taken years to realize that for all that her mother preached this gospel, the reality of intentions was different.

High Lady Tasia planned for her daughter to be the next Dread Empress and for herself to be the power behind the throne. Whether or not she ended up being Chancellor was irrelevant, so long as Akua enthroned was utterly dependent on Wolofite resources to maintain her reign. What Heiress had thought to be Fate was just another, larger cage . You should not have taught me as well as you have, Mother, if you wanted to succeed.

“I’ll win, Papa,” Akua said. “Believe in me.”

“Always,” he smiled softly. “I’m just getting old, Mpanzi. We old men like to fret.”

“I love you,” Heiress murmured, embarrassed.

“I love you too,” her father replied. “Nothing will ever change that. If you can believe anything, believe in this.”

Her hand remained on the mirror long after his image faded. She wished the spell had been less than perfect, so that the bleed over had warmed the metal for her touch. I’ll win , she promised herself. She’d break the cage, even if she had to break the world with it.

—

The olive-skinned old man hopped along the chalk lines traced on the ground, fumbling the last to the children’s delight. The gaggle of street kids excitedly started arguing about the kind of penalty Ophon would have to submit to – he’d stood perfectly on his hands earlier, to their amazement. The shaved former slave smiled at a fair-haired girl who tugged at his pants, patting her head and promising in all seriousness that he’d show her how to use a spear later. The child scowled ferociously and told him he’d better. All of the Stygian spears were in a constant state of wonder around children, William had found. They were made magically sterile during their conditioning, for their masters believe that while sex was a useful reward their soldier-slaves should never have their loyalties split by families of their own. The Lone Swordsman snorted as the commander of the Stygian phalanx deftly pushed himself up on a single hand, muscles tensing as he maintained the stance perfectly for a solid sixty heartbeats as the kids counted out loud.

“They seem to be settling in fine,” Almorava said.

Of all the heroes he’d worked with, the Bard was the only one who’d ever managed to sneak up on him. William’s hand dropped from the handle of the Penitent’s Blade and he turned to look at the Ashuran musician. She’d somehow managed to sit at his side without making a single sound or getting the attention of his Name, which they were both perfectly aware should be impossible. With a salacious grin she offered him a pull from the flask of rotgut in her hand. He declined wordlessly, not that it stopped her from polishing off half the stuff inside.

“You’ve been gone a lot, lately,” he said, turning his attention back to the city streets.

Liesse was beautiful this time of the year, just like he remembered. The City of Swans bordered a lake full of the birds it had been named for, the light stone and widespread garlands of flowers hanging from everywhere making it look like it was in a permanent festival. It was far cry from how it’d been when he’d first arrived with Baroness Dormer’s host and the Stygians. Liesse had been left without a garrison by the rebels and descended almost immediately into chaos without even a city guard to keep the peace. There’d been riots and looting until he restored order, and the Duke’s Plaza had been turned into a makeshift gallows where Praesi ‘sympathizers’ were lynched to the jeers of the crowd. Not that they even always waited for that parody of justice: more than a few couples mixing Wastelanders and Callowans had been murdered in their own homes, thought thankfully no one had been stupid enough to start a fire afterwards. Half the city would have gone up in flames if they had.

“Hasn’t been much for me to do,” Almorava replied, wiping her mouth and panting.

She seemed tired and a haggard, William noted. Could use a bath, not that she didn’t often. In this kind of heat liquor took its toll.

“Where do you go, Bard?” he asked. “When you’re not here.”

“You’re going to be getting a message soon,” the Bard said, ignoring his question. “From the First Prince.”

William’s lips curled with distaste. His single meeting with the woman had not left him with much trust or fondness for her. It was said that there were three kinds of Procerans: the hot-blooded Arlesites in the south, the scheming Alamans in the centre and the coldly practical Lycaonese in the north. After meeting the Lycaonese First Prince, he’d had no trouble believing what was said about her people. She used manners and diplomacy like soldiers used sword and shield, cornering her opponents one smile and polite question at a time.

“And what does her Most Serene Highness want from me?” he asked.

“Not her,” the Bard said. “Her cousin, the Augur. She’s seen what’s coming.”

Almorava’s tone had remained light but it raised William’s hackles nonetheless. There’d been an ominous weight to that sentence, for all of the heroine’s nonchalance.

“Squire,” he said.

“And the other one,” the Wandering Bard grinned. “You’re a hit with the ladies, Willy. Must be your body, because I’m sad to inform you it’s not your winning personality.”

“You don’t even sound a little bit sad,” William complained good-naturedly.

Though he’d humoured his friend in her bantering, most of his attention was already on the battle ahead of him. With both the Baroness’ men and his Stygian allies, he’d have both numerical superiority and walls. Against most people that would be enough, but he’d met Catherine Foundling before: uphill battles like this were her specialty. He’d already prepared the city for a siege by bringing in foodstuff from the neighbouring fields the moment the Countess Marchford had ordered him to remain and protect the unofficial rebel capital, but it wouldn’t be enough. Traditional siege tactics wouldn’t be the way his enemy would go at it. He’d have to watch for infiltrators, starting right now, and prepare a counter for the enemy mages. He grimaced: leading armies or even small groups was not his specialty, as Thief had pointed out a few months ago.

“I’m thinking of putting Ophon in charge of the defence,” he told Almorava, gauging her for a reaction.

She hummed approvingly. “Not a bad idea,” she said. “The former slave facing his former owner. It has a shape to it.”

“You really think she’ll let the Heiress participate?” he frowned. “I thought they were rivals.”

“She won’t have a choice,” the Bard said, putting down her half-empty bottle and taking out a deck of cards from her bag ever-full of surprises.

Tarot, he recognized when she flicked a card at him. Six of Cups. There might have been a meaning to that, though he didn’t know it.

“Are you branching out in divination, now?” he teased.

“Divination is just parsing out a story that hasn’t been written yet,” the Bard snorted. “As if I’d need cards to do that. No, I just like throwing those around people who think too much. They waste their time puzzling out the meaning when they should be worried about something else.”

He carefully picked up the card, holding it up. “Illuminate me, then,” he said. “Why does Squire not have a choice in letting her enemy help?”

“By now the Big Guy already assigned Heiress as an auxiliary to the Fifteenth,” the Bard said, “but that’s just a surface detail. Patterns, Willy. It’s always about patterns.”

“It will be the final fight between she and I,” the Lone Swordsman frowned. “You think she’ll be sending in Heiress to avoid a defeat? Using a proxy, so to speak.”

The Ashuran patted him on the back comfortingly, dropping the deck to pick up her flask. The cards scattered all over the floor and William repressed a twitch. He disliked messes, and she was making no move to pick any of it up.

“Close, but you’re missing the point,” the Bard said. “You already have all the information. When referring to Heiress earlier, what did you call her?”

“Enemy,” William said.

“Before that, you sorry human-shaped sack of potatoes.”

“I take offense to that, kind of,” the Swordsman replied mildly. “Rival. They are rivals.”

“Nemeses, even,” the Bard said, smiling nastily.

A heartbeat passed until he caught on. “You mean...”

“Yours is not the only pattern of three Catherine Foundling is bound by,” Almorava said. “One defeat for Heiress, on the shores of the Blessed Isle. One shared draw, in the ruins of Marchford. You know what comes next.”

“A victory in Liesse,” William finished. “Surely she has to be aware of that?”

“Oh, she hasn’t noticed,” Bard said. “As Fate would have it, the Big Guy would have. If he’d arrived in time to hear Heiress speak the word ‘draw’, anyway. But he was detained in Arcadia when getting there. Couldn’t find someone to open a way out.”

“A fortnight ago,” the dark-haired hero spoke slowly, “you appeared covered in snow.”

“Lovely people, the Fae,” Almorava mused. “Live closer to the Story than anybody else. They know better than to ignore the warning of a mysterious cloaked stranger.”

There was a long moment of silence between them as they watched the children play in the distance.

“You’re a very dangerous woman, Almorava,” he finally said.

“I don’t have a speck of power to my Name,” the Bard murmured. “All I am is a grain of sand.”

That can be all it takes, to break a machine , William thought.

“You’d rather Heiress survive than Squire,” he said after a moment.

“Every single time,” the Ashuran agreed vehemently.

“Foundling is trying to change things for the better, at least,” the Swordsman pointed out, though defending the traitor left a foul taste in his mouth.

“You need to stop thinking in terms of individuals, William,” the Bard grunted. “The Squire is a legacy. So is Heiress. One of those legacies is much more dangerous to Creation than the other.”

“She summoned a demon , Bard,” the hero spoke flatly. “I’ll say this for Malicia and her dogs, they’ve shown more restraint than their predecessors.”

“It doesn’t matter if she summons a whole army, though she didn’t do any summoning at all. Heiress loses, in the end. That’s her story. She makes a mess, but in the end she can’t win. These... practical Evil types. They can win, if we let them.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time Evil wins,” the hero said grimly. “Nor will it be the last, if we should be defeated.”

“They don’t win like this, William,” Almorava said quietly. “This monstrosity of a plan the madman and the tyrant have cooked up? It changes things. Opens a door that can’t be closed ever again. They think they’re different but they’re not, not really. Not enough that it matters. Patterns don’t discriminate between shades, you see. They only see black and white.”

“You’ve lost me,” the green-eyed man admitted.

“Don’t worry about it,” the Bard sighed. “Just prepare. That plan you’ve been thinking of? Do it.”

He didn’t bother to ask her how she knew about that. The Lone Swordsman allowed the Wandering Bard to rest against his shoulder for a while. They stayed like that until the sun began to set, the silence strangely comfortable.

“Nowhere, William,” she whispered, bringing the bottle up to her lips. “I go nowhere.”

Chapter 37: Apprentice

“I don’t trust wizards. Every time I levy taxes on them, they try to get my political opponents to pull swords from stones.”
-Attributed to Louis Merovins, seventh First Prince of Procer

“She’s going to betray us,” I stated.

I’d kept it to only my senior officers tonight, but the circle was still larger than I liked. Juniper was lounging in her seat, face grim as Aisha stood a step behind her with her hands behind her back. Nauk and Hune occupied half the tent by themselves, the broad-shouldered orc looking like a child next to the hulking shape of my ogre commander. Pickler and Kilian shared a bench, which I noted with amusement was high enough off the ground neither of their feet touched the ground. Probably built with orcs in mind. Hakram stood behind me as a mirror of Aisha for Juniper, though a Named one. Apprentice had taken the seat next to me without a word, and barely seemed to be paying attention. The last person in the room was Ratface, who raised a sardonic eyebrow before speaking.

“Really?” he drawled. “Because Heiress always struck me as so trustworthy.”

There were a few smiles at that, though no laughs. The mood was serious, as was our problem.

“Most of you already know our mandate,” I said. “The Fifteenth, now bolstered with reinforcements from Callowan recruitment camps and a fresh set of auxiliaries, has been assigned to take the city of Liesse.”

“The head of the snake,” Nauk gravelled with a pleased note to his stone.

“The heart maybe,” Aisha disagreed. “The head is Countess Marchford, and she’s with the rebel host.”

“Off-subject,” Hune said. “There has been warning of betrayal, an immediate danger. More important than semantics.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Masego visibly restrain himself from responding to that. I hurried on before the situation could devolve.

“Our auxiliary corps, which we may have to suppress before this is over, is made of a little above a thousand Proceran light infantry. All mercenaries hired through Mercantis. Juniper?”

The Hellhound stirred in her seat, dark eyes sweeping across the room.

“Proceran infantry can broadly be divided in three categories,” she said. “The first is peasant levies, which usually make up most of the Principate’s armies. Little to no training, basic equipment. Vulnerable to shock tactics, which are usually how Proceran win battles. The second is principality troops. Cataphracts like the ones fielded by the Silver Spears and what would qualify as heavy infantry under our classification sheets.”

She leaned forward for the last part.

“The third is the type Heiress has bought. In times of war inside the Principate, fields are burned and villages sacked. Men and women who no longer have a trade take up war as a full-time occupation, though without the benefit of princely funding for their arms. Leather and mail for armour, wooden shields and longswords for armament. Almost every single one of them will be carrying javelins, and they’re more lethal a volley at close range than anything we carry.”

The Hellhound let out a grunt.

“If you’ve been wondering why I covered the other two categories of soldiers, it’s to give you comparison points when planning. We are not talking about better-armed peasants: these are soldiers who fought in the Proceran civil war and took on infantry that’s in the same league as our heavies. They won’t be used to sappers or field artillery, but they’ll have fought mages before and some of the same tactics apply: move fast and disperse, use terrain as cover when possible. They’re faster than we are, and they’ll avoid a collision of shield walls.”

There was a pause as everyone allowed that to sink in. Nauk was frowning, Hune looked like she’d learned nothing new and Apprentice might as well have been napping for how aware he’d been of what was going on. I cast a look at Ratface and he cleared his throat.

“I’ve been given access to all the records kept by Heiress in my function as Quartermaster,” he announced. “I imagine some of them are falsified and she’s already tried to bury me in irrelevant documents, but some things can’t be hidden. They won’t have enough javelins for more than three volleys, I’m almost certain of that, and before our advance to Liesse is over they’ll be relying on us for food and water. Their forced march to Marchford burned through most of their supplies, and they lost some before when they got whipped by the Lone Swordsman.”

News of that defeat, when it had finally trickled to the Fifteenth, had evoked mixed feeling in me. Heiress getting so spectacularly beaten, even if she hadn’t been there at the time, was a win in my book. She’d had four thousand men when she’d started the night, then lost half to defection and half again to a fighting retreat. On the other hand, William had picked up two thousand former Stygian spear-slaves to add to an army that was apparently already larger than mine. The Stygian magisters were a disgusting piece of work, there was no denying that, but their horrifying training methods had also produced some of the finest Calernian infantry since the early days of the continent. The phalanx was going to stop cold whatever part of my own army faced it and then start shredding it. I had a few counters to that, thankfully, but from now on I’d have to start planning around their existence on the other side of the field.

“Our current assessment is that the forces in Liesse won’t be meeting us on the field,” Hakram spoke up from behind me, getting the meeting back on track. “We’ve prepared for the eventuality of a siege.”

I looked at Pickler and the serious-faced goblin jumped in.

“The reinforcements we picked up brought a pair of Fante model trebuchets, as well as a standard load of goblin munitions. My sappers managed to make another two ballistae before we left Marchford, bringing our total to three. We can bring down the city’s walls, if we take the time to do it properly.”

Hune cleared her throat, the sound like caged thunder. “Are all of the ballistae irregular?”

My Senior Sapper looked displeased at the question, but she deigned to answer anyway.

“We’ve got two larger ones designed to clear the top of the enemy walls as well as the one we fielded against the devils – which is fit for use as field artillery.”

The ogre commander grunted. “That’s a yes, then. I’m not entirely comfortable with using untested designs on the field.”

I raised a hand to quiet down the brewing argument before it could properly develop. Hune was a stickler for regulations and Pickler took questioning of her abilities in machinery building very personally. It was honestly surprising they’d never butted heads until now, at least never in front of me.

“We’ll be running tests as soon as feasible, but it’s my understanding of the situation that Senior Sapper Pickler’s plans are derived from blueprints in use by the Legions,” I said, and no one thought it a good idea to argue.

I disliked intervening too directly in the dynamics between the member of my high command but now wasn’t the time for anyone to get hurt feelings. Internal dissensions were close to the top of the list of things I couldn’t allow to pass. I doubted anyone here was eager to defect to Heiress after she’d unleashed a demon on us, but we’d not found all the leaks yet. Hakram had identified two small fries with unexplained scrying equipment and I’d had them quietly executed before we left Marchford, but the kind of information Heiress kept getting her hands on had to be coming from someone higher up in the Fifteenth’s food chain. Or at least someone who had access to someone cleared to know that kind of information.

“She’s going to betray us,” I reiterated. “And we need to be ready for it. When it comes to troops we have them outclassed in every way, but there’s another aspect to this fight. Kilian?”

My lover offered me a discreet smile before she started speaking, prompting a swell of guilt in me. I hadn’t had much time for her lately, and the grace with which she’d taken that only made it worse in my eyes.

“We’ve been coordinating with Lord Apprentice to set up a few surprises for the enemy,” the redhead announced.

Masego seemed to wake, finally.

“The current suspicion is that Heiress has possession of a standard which holds the binding of a relatively minor demon from the Thirteenth Hell,” the bespectacled man spoke, still slumped in his seat. “I’ve retooled a ritual that will allow us to forbid its manifestation, essentially keeping it stuck inside the standard.”

“Unfortunately, the ritual requires very precise timing,” Kilian explained when it became clear he wouldn’t keep talking. “And at least forty mages acting in concert under the supervision of Lord Apprentice.”

If there’d been a table in this tent instead of just a handful of seats and benches, I would have drummed my fingers on the surface of it.

“Heiress can’t be allowed to play that card,” I stated. “Not a second time, not if we’re to win. I’m creating a temporary task force whose sole purpose is preparing for that ritual. The involved personnel will be assigned by Senior Mage Kilian, who’ll be forwarding you a list of names later tonight.”

There was no argument from the gallery, even at the loss of mages. The memory of the rampaging demon and the round of executions that had followed its appearance was still fresh for everyone.

“I’m worried we’re focusing too much on Heiress, Boss,” Nauk gravelled. “She’s dangerous, but all she’s got is a thousand mercs and some nasty mage tricks. In Liesse there’s at least seven thousand soldiers and a bunch of heroes waiting for us. They’ve got walls, they’ve got numbers and they’ve got access to a lake. Starving them out isn’t an option, we’ll have to punch through.”

“We’ve got ideas for Liesse,” the Hellhound intervened. “At the moment we’re focusing on Heiress because those ideas require time and lack of intervention on her part.”

“Are we allowed to know what those ideas are?” Ratface asked drily.

I didn’t want to risk the plans Juniper and I had hatched getting out before they were implemented, but I could at least point my officers in the general direction.

“We’ve got a massive imbalance in our favour on the magical side,” I told Ratface. “We intend to leverage that.”

“Fortifications in all major Callowan cities have wards woven in,” Apprentice contributed. “But they’re not unbreakable and if the other side doesn’t use mages to counter us we’ll have free reign.”

“As for the Lone Swordsman,” I said. “He’ll be mine to handle. The Thief and the Bard have limited combat value, though when we get closer to Liesse we’ll have another briefing to address them.”

With everyone up to date on the latest developments, it was about time to wrap this up.

“Any other questions?” I prompted.

Pickler raised her head.

“Robber has been on assignment for over a fortnight, now,” she said.

I looked at Juniper, who nodded.

“You can consider his cohort of sappers detached from other duties for the foreseeable future,” I said. “I’ve got work for them.”

“Anything to do with the Procerans who turned up dead this morning?” Hune asked.

“We’re keeping that operation under wraps,” Juniper grunted. “High command must retain plausible deniability as much as possible.”

Given the specific orders I’d given the tribune, that much was an understatement. We were breaking both Tower law and Legion regulations, and not in ways that got you a fine and a slap on the wrist. No one else had anything to bring up so my officers scattered shortly afterwards. Hakram made to linger but I shook my head – Apprentice remained in the seat opposite of mine, slouched with his eyes closed. He’d been sleeping almost ten hours a day lately, often catching naps in supply wagons when the rest of us were marching. I waited until we were alone in the tent before speaking again.

“Masego,” I spoke up.

Dark eyes blinked open, staring at me through enchanted spectacles.

“Catherine,” he replied, fingers rubbing at his left wrist where the demon’s blood had touched his skin and now burned flesh remained. “I expect you’re about to spit out whatever you’ve been almost saying to me for the last fortnight.”

He’d noticed that, had he? At first I’d kept my distance to see if he was acting strangely. Whether or not his judgement seemed to have been affected by an outside source. The problem was, I didn’t know Masego that well. I’d shared drinks with him, spoken alone quite often, but I didn’t have the kind of friendship with him I had with Adjutant. Would I even notice, if he was acting strange? Warlock had cleared him of corruption, but I remembered that the man had paused before doing so. It could have been how the spell took to cast... or something else entirely. I’d nearly brought up the concern to Black, but I already knew what his answer would be: he’d trust Warlock’s word. Scribe had told me, once, that Blacks great flaw as a villain was personal loyalty. Warlock was his first and oldest friend. The conclusion there wrote itself. Whatever precautions I took would have to be my own.

“I’m sorry,” I said and I was, though not for the reasons he’d think.

He looked baffled. “Whatever for?”

I tapped my own left wrist and he flinched. “I took you into a fight with a demon, ill-prepared and knowing the kind of consequences it could have.”

Masego sighed, the trinkets in his dreadlocks tinkling gently as he shook his head.

“Is that really what you’ve been chewing on all this time? I would have gone with or without you, Catherine.”

I kept my surprise off my face as well as I could.

“You never struck me as the kind of man who took stands to defend strangers,” I said, cautiously.

I did not mean to give offense, though I did believe what I’d just said. Masego didn’t really care about people in a broader sense. A few individuals he liked, perhaps, but even then sacrifice was not in the cards for Apprentice. It just wasn’t the way he thought. The dark-skinned man snorted.

“Thank the Gods I’m not,” he said. “Look at all the trouble that keeps getting you into. No, this wasn’t about the people. It was about the demon.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Is this a Warlock thing? You think you have a duty to keep demons contained?”

That could be useful, though it would be coming out of nowhere. I’d never gotten the impression that diabolism and demonology were anything but passing interests of his. He’d known ways to handle the demon, sure, but it hadn’t felt like a personal specialty.

“I don’t owe anyone a damned thing,” Masego said, displaying white teeth in a hard smile. “The demon itself was besides the point, it was the effect their kind has on Creation that was worth witnessing first hand.”

“You went into battle against a monster like that for a scholarly pursuit ?” I repeated disbelievingly.

His face turned from amused to serious in a heartbeat.

“It may be that to you,” he conceded. “It isn’t to me.”

“Then help me understand,” I asked, “because this makes no sense to me.”

A pudgy hand pushed back and errant braid, ignoring the silver mirror shard woven into it.

“I don’t remember my life from before my fathers adopted me,” he admitted. “My first memories are of playing in a sprawling garden under a warm sun, tripping in a pile of daffodils.”

I didn’t interrupt, though the image had my lips twitching in amusement.

“I grew up there in that garden, sleeping outside more often than inside the tower where Father ran his experiments. Dada used to bury me in blankets and tell me stories until the moon came out. Never once did it become winter.”

Weather control? That was an almost absurdly costly branch of sorcery, and rarely behaved as it was supposed to. Besides, I’d have heard of it if some part of the Empire had resisted the passing of seasons for several years in a row – it was the kind of thing that drew attention. Masego smiled at the curiosity on my face.

“It was a spell, of a sort. When I turned nine years old, Father decided I was old enough for us to return to Ater. So he unmoored the chunk of land he’d stolen from Arcadia and allowed it to crumble.”

My eyes widened. “You weren’t in Creation?”

“Between it and Arcadia,” he replied. “Did you know the full name for that place is ‘Arcadia Resplendent’? There’s a reason for that. Beautiful doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

He laughed but there was no joy in it.

“Nine years old and I saw the world end,” he said. “I don’t think Father realized what he was teaching me. Creation is aptly named, Catherine: it was created by the Gods, Above and Below. To settle some kind of moral pissing match, apparently, but I’ve no interest in that.”

He raised his palm up and whispered a word in the mage tongue. A globe of light appeared over his hand, small sprites of energy spinning inside of it.

“All we are is a spell, and spells...” he closed his hand over the globe and it winked out, “can be dismissed. At any time. For any reason. All that’s required is will.”

“There’s more to it than that,” I said.

“Is there?” he smiled. “I’d like to believe so. Am I just an insect on a speck of cosmic mud, or does my immortal soul make me something greater? That is the question that has been hounding me all my life.”

“So you watch the places where Creation comes apart,” I spoke slowly. “To understand what makes it tick?”

Masego’s eyes behind his spectacles were smouldering with real passion, for the first time since I’d met him.

“There is a law in sorcery called the Sapience Limit,” he told me. “A mage cannot create something of a higher order of sentience than themselves. For millennia sorcerers and wizards alike have tried to discover whether it is a creational law or an original one, without success. An original law applies to the Gods themselves, Catherine. Consider the implications of that.”

I was starting to think I needed to pay more attention to Kilian when she talked magic after we got done with the fun parts.

“You’re saying that the only difference between us and the Gods is power,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Power is a consequence, a happenstance enforced by laws that were artificially set in place. Knowledge is the heart of this. And should a man know as much as a God...”

He shrugged.

“Would there even be a difference?”

I took a long moment to process that, silence heavy in the tent. Weeping Heavens, and I’d thought my teacher was ambitious.

“This is more than a little blasphemous,” I finally said.

“Fuck the Gods,” he said, calmly. “Every single one of them. I can respect what you and Uncle Amadeus are trying to accomplish, I really can – but you’re looking at the other prisoners, when you should be looking at the bars.”

I need a drink , I thought. The philosophy he’d just described could have been taken straight out of one of those old Praesi fairy tales I had a book full of. The madman with great power trying to grasp something beyond his understanding, wrecking the world in his hubris. Fuck. I’d gone into this conversation hoping my contingency wouldn’t be needed, but now I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t even a little bit. Had he been like this, before the demon? I couldn’t know. I cursed myself again for not having taken the time to get know Masego better after Summerholm.

“I’ll stay with you until the end of the rebellion,” Apprentice assured me, misinterpreting my silence. “I made a commitment, and seeing heroes in action again might yield some additional understandings. When the campaign is over, I’ll return to Marchford to study the thinning there between Creation and Arcadia.”

I cleared my throat. “That’s all I can ask of you, Masego,” I said. “You’ve already helped us much, and you’ll be missed sorely when you leave.”

“Flatterer,” he replied, but he pushed up his spectacles to hide his embarrassed pleasure.

“I know you’re not part of the Fifteenth in any official fashion,” I continued, “but I’ve considered you one of us since Summerholm. The men agree, so I made you this.”

I fished out a small brooch from inside my doublet. Bone, roughly shaped as two snakes swallowing each other’s tails around a circle stamped with the Fifteenth’s Miezan numbers.

“ You made this?” he asked in surprise.

“Can’t carve for the life of me,” I admitted, “but I killed an oxen and raised it. I can kind of shape the bones when my power is in it.”

“That explains the traces of your Name in it,” he smiled. “Help me put it on?”

I rose easily and stood behind him, picking a braid on the back of his neck and carefully threading it inside the hair. I adjusted a last time and stepped back around, only to be greeted with a warm smile.

“Thank you,” he said, touching my arm. “It means more than you think.”

He excused himself afterwards and I felt dirty as I watched him part the folds of the tent. There was just a bit of my power left in the brooch, just like he’d said. Enough to activate a small mechanism Robber had created inside before treating and filling the whole bone with goblin munitions. During the war games last year, I’d gotten to observe that the alchemy reacted violently to Name power: if it was ever activated, it would blow his neck clean off.

“Contingencies,” I murmured to myself.

I went to look for a fucking drink.

Conspiracy I

“In its infancy, the Fifteenth was in the awkward position of being within spitting distance of the heart of the Empire without being part of it. Legate Juniper, ever brutally sardonic, pointed out that give how tall their manors stood, they had a better chance of landing the spit on us than us on them. History wasted no time in proving her correct.”
– Extract from the personal memoirs of Lady Aisha Bishara

Hakram had learned the move from the battlemaster for the Howling Wolves when he was nine years old. Catch the enemy’s wrist with your hand, leveraging greater muscles, and on the other side slap your open palm on the human’s ear. The wheat-eaters were known to be delicate in the head, by the standards of the Clans. There was a pop as the dark-skinned man’s eardrums burst: the pain stopped him for a moment. The adjutant snarled, lunging forward and sinking his teeth in the exposed throat. Long fangs buried in soft flesh, ripping through veins and arteries as he shook his head out. The stranger twitched, blood spraying everywhere and coating Hakram’s face with pleasant warmth, then dropped. Eyes perfectly calm, he looked for the other man who’d tried to accost them but found Aisha had already taken care of it: she’d buried a knife to hilt through the Soninke’s eye. With measured elegance she slid out the knife, flicking away some kind of transparent fluid. Robber popped out of the side-alley a moment later, shaking his head.

“There were only two,” the yellow-eyed tribune said, face unusually serious.

It seemed even Robber took attempts to kill them seriously, on occasion. Swallowing the last of the meat, Hakram cleared his chops of the gore with a rough tongue. Good thing no other orc was around, it was considered a pretty suggestive movement where he was from – but then the Howling Wolves kept to many of the traditions from the Lesser Steppes, for all that they lived in the heart of the Northern ones. An unbroken line of shamans and blood-witches going back to the Golden Age had done much to keep the old ways alive.

“You were the target,” Aisha decided, addressing him nonchalantly as she riffled through her corpse’s clothes. “Mine spent half the fight trying to get at you.”

Hakram almost chuckled. Aisha might call that little rumble a fight, but what he’d seen of her part of it had looked more like a cold-blooded execution. The Hellhound’s second had not hesitated so much as heartbeat before putting down her opponent, not that this surprised him. Taghreb were not a merciful people and their nobility had only gotten where it was by being terrifyingly nastier than all other comers. Not even the orcs had ventured in the Hungering Sands, back in the days of their power. The only people to have mastered the desert tribes were the Miezans, and hadn’t they mastered the whole world?

“Can’t blame them, my boy Hakram is a handsome bastard,” Robber added thoughtfully. “More bastard than handsome, in truth, but he only has so much to work with.”

“Your moral support humbles me,” the adjutant replied mildly, then returned his attention to the olive-skinned aristocrat. “If they had a target, this wasn’t two locals trying to shake up soldiers after pay-day.”

Aisha raised a condescending eyebrow at him. She’d yet to manage to shake herself of that habit, not that Juniper had done anything to help. The Hellhound apparently found the sight of humans sneering at other humans amusing.

“This was an assassination attempt, Hakram,” the aristocrat said. “There’s no use trying to pretend otherwise.”

The tall orc had arrived at the same conclusion, actually, be he disliked hurrying to judgement. In a city like Ater, acting too quickly was a dangerous thing. The Fifteenth was camped half a day away from the scheming heart of the Empire and this was far from the first time they’d been probed by unknown forces. Had Lord Black not still been in the capital, he imagined it would have been much worse – the Empress’ right hand cast a long shadow, and few were willing to risk the man’s ire by attacking his pupil directly. Until today, it seemed. Hakram would not delude himself into thinking he’d achieved enough as an individual to rank an assassination attempt: it was his function in the Fifteenth Legion that merited killing.

“The Boss is going to be in a mood when she hears about this,” Robber said delightedly.

Aisha frowned at the comment, then rose to her feet. “No personal effects,” she said. “He does have a tattoo between his shoulder blades, though.”

The Staff Tribune had thoughtfully flipped the corpse over for them to look at. Hakram knelt by the dead human and peered at the inked skin. Some kind of bird picking at a corpse. He cast a look at Aisha, silently asking for information.

“A buzzard, I think,” she said. “Associated with Aksum in Soninke heraldry but I’ve never seen this symbol before.”

That didn’t mean much. The Dread Empire wasn’t as bad as Callow or Procer, where everybody and their goat had a sigil, but the Wasteland bred ancient conspiracies the way the West whelped chivalric orders and every single one of them had some sort of meaningful secret sign. Tyrants stamped them out whenever they came in the open, but for every one out in the sun there were a dozen meeting in crypts. Ignoring Robber – never a good idea, that – Aisha met his eyes squarely. Unusual. Taghreb and Soninke both avoided doing that whenever they could. Demons and devils taking human shape could use eye contact to steal your soul, as could some Warlocks. Aisha was being serious about whatever she would say next.

“We can’t tell Lady Squire,” the Staff Tribune said.

Robber burst out laughing. “Boy, did you pick the wrong crowd to try to float that.”

The goblin tribune wasn’t wrong. Inside the unofficial ‘Squire faction’ of the Fifteenth, both he and Robber were prominent members. Nauk was the only one more outspoken about his allegiances: the other orc had decided that Cat was the warlord of their generation, and as far as he was considered that settled the matter. Every matter, really. Good orcs did not question their warlord, though they ripped out the guts of anyone who did. And yet . Hakram did not believe in unthinking service. Blind obedience had been the death of many a villain. Aisha Bishara was an aristocrat to the bone, but that did not make her the enemy. The Fifteenth would come to telly on her ability to navigate the treacherous waters of Tower politics in the coming years, he suspected.

“Why?” he asked.

Aisha straightened, her face smoothing out in a pleasant mask. The apparent charms of her appearance – that Ratface still couldn’t shut up about, when he got into his cups – were thankfully lost on Hakram. Humans were like ugly hairy two-legged cows. Unlike orcs they got hair on every part of their bodies instead of just the top of the head. Why the males got beards and moustaches when the females didn’t was just one of those mysteries of biology: he suspected whatever Gods had created humans had not been sober at the time.

“You’re her favourite, Hakram,” Tribune Bishara stated.

It was not a question and he did not deny it. Exactly what Cat saw in him he wasn’t sure, but he liked her enough he didn’t care to question the bond.

“If Lady Squire hears there was an attempt on your life, she’ll be kicking down every door in Ater until she gets to hang whoever she deems responsible.”

“It’ll be fun,” Robber grinned. “Been millennia since there was a proper greenskin raid on the capital.”

That’s her whole point, Robber , Hakram understood as he remained silent. Even the goblin had unconsciously realized that Praesi soldiers would balk at entering the streets of Ater in full gear to exact retribution. The Callowan recruits were still an unknown quantity but they might see the whole affair as a way to wiggle out of service to the Legions. Too many risks involved.

“Her response could be more measured than that,” he pointed out.

People who underestimated Catherine Foundling had this nasty habit of eating dust.

“It won’t be,” Aisha said confidently. “You didn’t see her in the Tower, when one of Heiress’ minions provoked her. She broke that girl’s finger without hesitating and then paid for it. The Fifteenth’s too young, we can’t afford to make the kind of enemies a heavy-handed retaliation would earn us.”

“We’re not without protection ourselves,” the orc said.

Aisha shook her head. “We can’t get the Black Knight involved. Relying on his protection every time we have a problem just makes us a liability. We need to start dealing with these kind of messes ourselves, Hakram. Quickly, quietly, cleanly.”

She wasn’t wrong, he decided. The orc was not sanguine at the idea of involving the most famous of the Calamities in their business, in all honesty. Cat seemed strangely fond of the man but Hakram considered him a considerable danger nonetheless. He wasn’t willing to hide any of this from Squire, but neither was it necessary to send a runner to her the moment things got complicated. Taking care of issues like this fell under his function as adjutant, in fact if not in name. He took a moment to consider the possible consequences, ignoring the way impatience flickered in Aisha’s eyes, then made his final decision.

“Agreed,” he said.

“Hakram,” Robber broke in, looking startled, “you can’t possibly-“

“We hang a dozen nobles and the entire court will be out for blood,” the orc replied. “It might become enough of a mess we won’t get deployed.”

Deployed where, he did not yet know. Cat was playing that one close to the chest, but she’d made no secret of how urgent getting the Fifteenth in fighting shape was. That much was common knowledge among all the high-ranked officers of the legion.

“We still need a lead,” Robber conceded grumpily.

“I have a cousin who may know something,” Aisha offered.

The same one who ran the Sword and Cup, if Hakram had to guess. Clever of the Staff Tribune to turn a family-owned property into the unofficial watering hole of her legion, but Hakram misliked the idea of getting too many unknowns involved.

“We’re keeping this in-house. We already have a man, if we need a guide in the underbelly of Ater,” he said.

Aisha grimaced and Robber cackled.

“Let’s go visit Ratface, then,” the goblin grinned.

Hakram waited until they’d left the alley ahead of him to lean over the closest corpse and pluck out the eyeballs, popping one into his mouth. No use wasting good meat, and it looked like he wouldn’t be getting dinner.

—

Aisha knew where Hasan – Ratface, as the others still called him – was. He’d already been a regular at the Burnished Swan when she’d first become involved with him, long before other cadets had taken to drinking. It had been part of what had made him attractive at the time, the way he seemed to have lived , strayed outside the confines of cadet routine and the War College. She should have known that no one took up frequenting dives like this unless there was already something wrong in their life, and the list of Hasan’s issues would cover several small books. Their parting had been amicable, though apparently surprising to him, but having been the one to distance herself she disliked the idea of asking for his help now. She’d let Hakram do the talking, if she could: owing the other Taghreb a favour was not something she desired to happen any time soon. Robber, the irritating pest, seemed to smell her discomfort.

“A romantic reunion, eh?” he leered. “Careful not to swoon too hard, the floors look dirty.”

Weakness is a goblin’s meal , the saying went. Give this one an inch and soon he’d be chewing your bones.

“I will have you drowned in a latrine pit,” she replied in Taghrebi, smiling invitingly at him.

Hakram snorted. The goblin was, at least, correct about the floors. The Burnished Swan was in dire need of a mop and a handful of stray dogs were digging at scraps the patrons occasionally threw them. The parlour was full of bangue smoke and the heavy smell of poppy pipes from the back where hard men and women gambled with dice and bones over narrow tables. She ignored the few leers she got from older men and headed straight for the stairs, taking the lead. There were a handful of private rooms there and the one furthest back had been set aside for Hasan permanently. How exactly he’d managed that she was not sure, but she suspected that more than money had changed hands. She rapped her knuckles thrice against the door before pushing it open, Hakram and Robber trailing in behind.

Much like the last time she’d been here, Hasan was seated on a pile of cushions with piles of parchment and a cheap set of scales at his side. Two empty jugs of wine were to his left and a full one was currently employed in pouring himself a cup. The Supply Tribune’s handsome features twisted in surprise, an unseemly display of bare emotion. He must have been rather drunk: the other Taghreb despised everything their culture stood for, but he’d not left behind the concept of losing face even in private.

“Well,” Hasan spoke up, the slur in his voice barely noticeable, “this is a surprise.”

“Oh Gods, he’s drunk,” Robber said, sounding thrilled. “Quick, Ratty, how many fingers am I holding up?”

Hasan replied to the goblin’s flipping off in kind, his eyes passing over her and finally coming to rest on Hakram.

“I have a feeling I’m not going to enjoy the coming conversation,” he said.

“We left two corpses in an alley,” Robber contributed cheerfully.

One of these days, Aisha was going to strangle him. No tonight, unfortunately, but the time would come.

“There was an assassination attempt on Hakram,” the olive-skinned aristocrat said. “We disposed of the assailants.”

Hasan rubbed the bridge of his nose, then carelessly gulped down his whole cup of wine.

“Fuck,” he said. “There goes my night off. Why are you three here instead of say, in camp, arming up?”

“There was a tattoo on the back of the corpses,” Hakram gravelled. “A buzzard picking at a corpse.”

“Marked men, it’s not unusual,” Hasan replied. “I reiterate, why the Hells are you three not in camp while a runner gets Foundling?”

Aisha almost frowned. The familiar way he insisted on referring to Lady Squire was quite irritating. The greenskins could be excused the poor manners, but she knew the other Taghreb had been raised better than that. Even bastards got etiquette lessons, and Hasan had been presumptive heir to his father’s lordship for the better part of a decade.

“We won’t be getting Lady Squire involved,” she said.

Her former lover laughed. “I could swear I just heard you say no one was going to tell Catherine Foundling an assassination attempt was made on her personal adjutant,” he said. “Clearly I’ve been drinking too much. Could someone speak again but use words that don’t make me want to order a fourth jug of wine?”

Hakram cleared his throat and Aisha cast the situation an interested look. Technically speaking, Hasan was of higher rank than the orc – so was she, as a tribune-ranked member of the general staff. The hierarchy at play was muddled by the fact that technically Hakram answered directly to the Lady Squire and was deepest in her confidence. The adjutant might yield little authority in theory, but at the moment he could end a career or string a noose with a single whisper. That he’d shown remarkable restraint in the use of his influence had cemented Aisha’s respect for the orc, who she’d always considered one of the most competent members of Rat Company.

“Concerns have been raised that she may retaliate in a way that burns a lot of bridges,” Hakram said.

Robber mimed getting hanged to help getting the point across. Almost useful of him. Maybe she’d have him drowned in scum water instead. Hasan smiled thinly.

“I bet she will,” the Supply Tribune agreed. “She’ll take fire and sword to the city until she owns the hide of whoever’s responsible.”

He poured himself a glass, hand surprisingly steady. Perhaps not so drunk, after all. Or just so used to drinking he’s developed a talent for this, she thought less flatteringly.

“I don’t see a problem with that,” he finished, sipping at his wine. “Ater could do with fewer fucking nobles. This whole Empire could.”

She’d known it would come to that. Aisha felt her blood rise. For someone talented in so many clever ways, Hasan was so horribly dim in others. He couldn’t see past his grudge against his father, and had extended that hatred to every aristocrat in Praes. Which was punishingly narrow-minded, if he wanted to pursue a career in the Legions. A hundred times she’d told him, that he’d never be more than a career tribune if he was openly hostile to anyone with influence in the Tower. Gods Below, half the students at the War College were nobly born. Aisha smoothed out her temper, which had thankfully escaped anyone’s notice. Reasoning would be of no use here. For all that, her quiver was not yet empty. Softening her face, she knelt next to the Supply Tribune.

“Please, Hasan,” she asked softly, lightly touching his bare wrist. “For me. Just this once.”

His hard-eyed defiance deflated almost instantly. Her met her eyes with his for half a heartbeat, just long enough not to break custom, then looked away. Aisha almost felt guilty for exploiting the fact that he was quite obviously still in love with her when she did not feel the same, but guilt weighed little on the scales compared to the consequences of failure here.

“Bish,” he murmured. “Don’t be like that. I’m following protocol here.”

“I’m not asking you to follow the rules, I’m asking you to do what’s best for the Fifteenth,” she replied just as quietly.

And that was what tipped the vase over, in his mind. Hasan loved the Legions with an almost childlike purity. He’d found the family there that his blood had denied him and all his allegiances were founded on that bedrock. He would do much for her but even more for the Fifteenth.

“Fine,” he finally grimaced. “I don’t recognize the mark, but I know someone who will.”

He rose to his feet a little unsteadily, only to be settled by the touch of her hand on his chest.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t do that,” he muttered. “I know what you’re doing. I’m just fool enough to fall for it anyway.”

He left them in the room, heading down the stairs. There was a moment of silence, then Robber whistled.

“That was the coldest thing I’ve seen all day, and Hakram just ate a guy,” the goblin said.

“Part of one,” the orc corrected mildly.

Aisha glared at the wretch. He’d just slid back to latrine drowning.

—

So Juniper’s handmaiden had just worked the harshest of wiles on poor innocent Ratface, which boded ill for the guy’s love life. Robber sympathized, inasmuch as he could sympathize with anything or anyone. It wouldn’t stop him from mercilessly mocking the man later, but he liked to think of that as a labour of love. The Quartermaster came back with the shadiest woman Robber had ever seen, and he was a goblin . Matrons basically became Matrons by proving it was possible to be even more outrageously ruthless than their predecessors, and every single female goblin who wasn’t a Matron was one poisoning away from correcting that injustice. This wonder of humanity glared suspiciously at all of them, then spoke in soft aside to Ratface in some horribly garbled Taghrebi dialect.

“I trust them,” the Quartermaster said, with laudably poor judgement.

“You’ve killed marked men,” the woman said, then spat to the side. “What was the mark?”

“A buzzard tearing into a corpse,” Hakram said.

The stranger looked at the adjutant like he was something a dog had thrown up on her carpet. Ah, one of those . Ater wasn’t as bad as some of the northern cities of the Empire, but there were still quite a few people there who thought greenskins shouldn’t be allowed to step foot out of their lands until they were called for. Apparently Nauk had lost his shit over something like that in Thalassina, yet another proof that the thick-headed bastard was unfit to be with Pickler in any way.

“Catacomb Children,” the woman said. “Old gang, from Aksum. Used to do contract killings for the Truebloods, until Assassin had a talk with them.”

By which she likely meant that they’d all been found in a warehouse dead of a string of unlikely yet simultaneous mortal accidents. Robber had always approved of the sense of humour the Calamity was rumoured to have. If you couldn’t make murdering your enemies hilarious, what was even the point? Well, fun. And getting paid. But that wasn’t the particular point he’d been referring to, so his argument still stood flawless and unbroken.

“And where do those naughty kids hole up, my blatantly criminal friend?” Robber asked.

“Muzzle your pet,” the woman told Ratface in Taghrebi.

“That man is Tribune Robber of the Fifteenth Legion,” Aisha replied sharply in the same. “Watch your tongue, if you intend to keep it.”

Ah, good ol’ Aisha. Might despise him, but anybody insulting a legionary was in for a rough time if she was around. Almost endearing how easy it was to wind her up. The other woman spat again, but she didn’t care to get into a pissing match with someone who might as well have ‘highborn’ stamped on her forehead.

“Dekaram Quarter,” she said. “Near the buried sewer entrance.”

Robber almost whistled again. Taking a contract on a legionary was proof those boys hadn’t been great thinkers, but this was spectacular confirmation. Only raging imbeciles set up shop near Ater’s sewers: the whole place was crawling with giant spiders. At least half a million, by the last estimate, and they got bigger the deeper you went. They said Dread Emperor Tenebrous himself – well, herself now – was the one spawning them, having gone from thinking he was a giant spider in human skin to actually being one. Oh, those wacky humans. Second year tactics class spent a whole fortnight going over the logistics of clearing out the sewer system and the tunnels running under it, an exercise to demonstrate the concept of a victory too costly for the results achieved. Mages sworn to the Tower shad put wards over all the exits, but now and then one got out and nabbed some poor fool out in the streets at night. That these Catacomb Children had decided it was clever to base themselves close to a nigh-endless flood of death only barely bottled up promised it would be good clean fun to take them on.

“Two corpses, Fa’ir?” the criminal asked Ratface.

“In good shape, too. Where did you kill them, Aisha?”

The aristocrat looked like she was too good to frown but kind of wanted to anyway.

“Two streets east of the Sword and Cup,” she replied.

Hakram looked like he’d gotten caught hiding aragh under his bunk again.

“The eyes might be missing on one,” he admitted.

“Oh, was that eye-breath?” Robber asked. “Gods, you really have a problem with those.”

“Nobody sells them fresh around here,” the adjutant replied defensively.

The sketchy woman, who’d been about to hand Ratface seven denarii, took two back from the Quartermaster’s palm. She left without bothering with goodbyes, ignoring Robber’s cheerful wave.

“Hasan,” Aisha said. “What does that woman trade in?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to,” Ratface grunted, pocketing the silver.

Robber rubbed his palms together. “So this is the part where I talk to a few of my people and we have a nice chat with these Funeral Adults?”

“We all know you’re getting that wrong on purpose,” Hakram noted.

“Lies,” the goblin tribune exclaimed. “Calumny. Possibly even a set-up.”

He leaned closer to Aisha.

“You can never trust a greenskin, Bishara,” he confided. “They’re a shifty lot.”

The noble looked like she was about to say something scathing when Ratface broke in, because he was the enemy of all forms of joy and laughter.

“You can’t bring a goblin raiding party in the city, Robber,” he said. “This is Ater, not Foramen. Everyone important in the city will know they’re here within the hour and our targets disappear into the crowd.”

The tribune scowled. He’d been looking forward to giving his boys and girls some exercise.

“There’s currently two hundred legionaries on leave in the city,” Aisha said.

Staff Tribune, coming to the rescue with her intimate knowledge of duty rosters.

“So we assemble a crew, then get out hands on some weapons,” Robber grinned.

“And then we clean up this mess,” Hakram said, baring his fangs.

Chapter 38: Juncture

“Hahahahaha. Ha. You can’t beat me now, this is the first part of my plan!”
– Dread Emperor Irritant I, the Oddly Successful

Some days I wondered how I’d ended up where I was. In a technical sense it had all started when I’d come across Black in that alley, or perhaps the moment where I’d decided I would be joining the Legions.

“What I mean, though, is how did I end up here ,” I mused. “As in, asking a report from a blood-dripping goblin in the middle of the night while I lead some kind of shady war council.”

Robber, if anything, was tickled by my sudden comment. Masego was utterly indifferent to everything going on, as was his wont, and Hakram looked like the epithet of ‘shady’ offended him but he couldn’t find an argument to refute me.

“Bad life choices,” the goblin tribune offered. “Or the best. Maybe a little bit of both.”

“Don’t mind me,” I grunted. “It just suddenly hit home that I’m leading a Legion of Terror while wearing a black cape and plotting nefarious things in the dark.”

“You’re not currently wearing a cape,” Masego pointed out, about as helpful as tits on a sparrow.

“Apprentice,” I replied patiently, “I own like five capes. All of them black. I get we have a theme here, but would it kill anyone to get me some clothes that a vampire wouldn’t wear? I mean, Heiress is Evil and she wears actual colours. And does her hair nice! I bet she even has her nails filed by some half-naked oiled up manservant.”

I didn’t even have manservants. My closest equivalents were an orc with a gossip addiction and a goblin who owned a jar full of eyeballs. The House of Light had always told me Evil was decadent, where were all my creature comforts? My sheets weren’t even silk. The only opulence around was the way I never seemed to run out of wine and that was purely Ratface’s doing.

“The ponytail looks good,” Hakram said loyally.

“Hakram, I love you like a brother, but the day I take grooming advice from you is the day I jump into the Tyrian Sea,” I replied.

I poured myself a glass of Vale summer wine, ignoring the look from Hakram indicating he wouldn’t mind one. The crate Ratface had somehow gotten his hands on before we left Ater was mostly empty now and I wasn’t wasting my favourite drink on someone who’d guzzle it down like water. I sighed and got comfortable in my wooden camp chair.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to ask at some point. Whose blood is this, Robber?”

“It could be mine,” he grinned.

“Goblins bleed black,” I grunted. “Try again.”

“Not always true,” Apprentice said. “Dread Emperor Sorcerous exsanguinated a Matron and filled in human-“

He trailed off when everyone stared at him then cleared his throat.

“Perhaps not the best time,” he conceded. “Still, it’s not an absolute.”

I let him retreat with a modicum of dignity while he still could and pushed down the morbid curiosity that almost made me ask why Sorcerous had done that. He’d been the one to make the sentient tiger army, if I recalled correctly. The one that had defected the moment it got out of the Tower and was the reason tigers in the Wastelands were still so intelligent. They still found half-chewed corpses by the road every year, a testament to the way the ‘cleverness’ of Tyrants could continue to backfire for centuries after their death.

“Robber,” I prompted.

“So some of the boys and I went to have a look in Heiress’ camp,” he said. “Might have slit a few throats on the way in.”

“I’d gathered as much,” I replied. “So why does that lead you to waking me up in the middle of the night?”

“They changed up their patrol schedules after the last time we left them a few corpses,” the yellow-eyed tribune grinned. “They haven’t figured out Kilian’s scrying them to lay out the timing.”

“They will soon,” Hakram grunted. “And Heiress has the mages to block us when she picks up on it.”

“If she uses standard wards, I can teach your paramour to slip past them,” Masego noted. I let the word pass by without a comment, since it was more or less accurate. “Though given who Akua’s father is, I would not bet on it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Some other Praesi noble? I thought you could run circles around any of those.”

“Nioro of Aksum. Most talented practitioner to come out of that part of the Wasteland in at least half a century,” Apprentice said. “Father says he was good enough to have a claim on the Name of Warlock after the old one died, though he never pressed it.”

I’d never heard the name before, which was somewhat intriguing. I’d have to ask Aisha about it at some point, since none of the men in this tent followed Praesi politics in the least.

“Anyhow,” Robber said. “We planned around their schedules and routes so we could get deeper in the camp than we’ve ever been. Found out two interesting tidbits I thought you should know about now instead of the morning.”

“Amaze me,” I said.

“First, she’s got a goblin in there,” the tribune said.

Huh . I hadn’t seen that coming, I’d give Robber that much. Heiress wasn’t as consistently racist as some of the other Praesi nobility I’d come across, but she did have certain leanings. Though I’d never heard her lay on greenskins, now that I thought about it. Was she in league with one of the goblin tribes? That could get messy as all Hells.

“Recognized them?” Hakram asked.

“So just because I’m a goblin I know all the others, is that it?” Robber asked, his face the very picture of outrage.

“You’ve claimed as much repeatedly,” Adjutant replied amusedly.

The goblin tribune shrugged, the pretense of affront discarded in a heartbeat.

“Couldn’t get a good look,” he said. “Was going to, but a scroll sheath fell over and woke them up. Nasty customer, whoever they are. Pretty sure they had burn wounds, and not the small discrete kind.”

“I don’t suppose there’s a famous goblin with that as their signature?” I sighed.

“Wouldn’t know,” Robber said. “Didn’t get out much before I joined the College. Pickler might know something I don’t – she was much higher up the food chain in her own tribe.”

Another question for the pile, though I doubted it would be as easy as that.

“And the other thing?” Hakram asked.

“They’re making some kind of ritual array,” Robber said.

Apprentice’s back straightened in his seat, the reason my tribune had asked for him to be there finally clear.

“Not on the ground,” Masego immediately guessed. “The runes – on wood, stone or metal?”

“Twenty five metal pegs with small square stones between them,” the goblin informed us. “The stone’s granite, if that makes a difference.”

Robber’s tribe was one of the mining ones deep in the Grey Eyries, I remembered. Apparently he still remembered some of what he’d learned there.

“It does,” Apprentice muttered. “Ocean-dredged granite like the one found off Thalassina has properties linking it to the classical elements of earth and water. It’s used as a stabilizer.”

One of these days I was going to have to find out exactly what those ‘classical elements’ actually were.

“Got a look at the metal pegs,” Robber continued. “Wrought iron, all of it.”

“To attract, collect and retain power,” Masego frowned. “Whatever the ritual is, the scale will be massive.”

“Oh, I don’t like the sounds of that,” I cursed. “Robber did you get a look at the runes?”

“On the pegs,” he replied. “There was one that was everywhere, it was...”

He paused. Yellow eyes blinked in confusion.

“I can’t actually remember,” he admitted.

Masego let out a small noise of understanding.

“I’m going to trace symbols in the air,” he said. “Tell me when one looks familiar.”

The dark-skinned mage traced a finger in the air, hard light hovering behind his touch. A dozen runes were made before Robber stopped him.

“That,” he said. “I’m almost sure.”

Masego traced another one, two squiggly lines with a small dot between them.

“Are you sure it wasn’t this one?”

I peered at both, honestly incapable of seeing a difference between the two even if I kept staring at them.

“Could go either way,” Robber grunted.

Apprentice dismissed all the shapes with a casual wave of the hand.

“Why couldn’t he remember?” I asked.

“Those are High Arcana,” he explained. “No one without the Gift can hold them in their mind longer than they’re looking at them. Catherine, I cannot stress enough how dangerous this is. I’ve studied sorcery since I could walk and I’m not sure I could make an array using those. Someone on Heiress’ side is a mage of the very highest caliber.”

“Wolof is apparently full of stuff like this,” I pointed out. “She could just have inherited the ritual.”

Masego shook his head. “That’s not how High Arcana works. You can’t make a... recipe, using them. How the runes react to every practitioner varies wildly, even if the underlying principles are the same. The mage who made that ritual understands exactly what they’re doing.”

Last time I’d dismissed a warning from Apprentice I’d turned myself into a demon-touched cripple. I was not about to make the same mistake twice.

“So that just shot up to the top of my priority list,” I grunted.

“You recognized some of the runes,” Hakram said suddenly. “Can you guess the purpose of the ritual?”

“Retrieval,” Masego murmured. “That rune means retrieval. I can think of one entity she’s got contained.”

Well, fuck. That had just gone from bad to worse. I’d had my mage lines and Apprentice working on something to keep the demon inside the standard, but it didn’t look like Heiress was going to be using the same trick as last time. Had she anticipated I’d take countermeasures? She had a way of being one step ahead of me. Not this time, though.

“That ritual, can you shut it down?” I asked.

The bespectacled man smiled. “Breaking something is much easier than making it. I’m not without skills with High Arcana myself.”

“Whatever you need,” I said, “and I do mean whatever, you’ll get it. Hakram, I’m using my authority as the Squire to put all our resources at Apprentice’s disposal.”

There was a heartbeat after the words left my mouth where I wondered . Whether this was real or just a specter Masego had dredged up to get his hands on something. I grit my teeth and put the thought aside. Kilian would keep an eye on him, as much as she could. I couldn’t afford to leave a weapon like this in Heiress’ hands and do nothing, not even if my answer might be compromised. I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“Robber, good work. You might have saved our lives tonight. Now get washed up before you stink up my camp,” I ordered. “The rest of you, dismissed.”

I’d need to grab whatever sleep I could before our march resumed. At least my bed was warm and full of Kilian. Apprentice lingered a moment after the others left. I raised an eyebrow at him.

“A gift,” he said, fishing out something from his tunic.

It was a long pipe of carved bone with an almost comically small mouth carved like a lion’s head. I blinked in surprise.

“I don’t smoke bangue,” I told him. “Or poppy leaves.”

Bangue was more or less unknown in Callow, save for very wealthy merchants. The dreamy trance it induced was said to be highly pleasant, and without the nausea abusing drink would bring. Poppy was better known, but so were its addictive properties. Anyhow, I’d been too strapped for gold back in Laure to ever consider trying something as expensive.

He snorted. “I didn’t expect you to,” he replied. “Save for wine you are remarkably free of vices. I did notice you disliked the brew I made you for the pain, though. As it happens those herbs can also be smoked.”

I closed my fingers around the offered pipe. Couldn’t feel any magic coming from it, but with a mage as skilled as Masego that meant nothing. Was he laying a trap as I had? I searched his face and found nothing but earnestness. Apprentice was not practiced enough a liar or intriguer to pull this kind of play, I decided. Although demon corruption might make his personality moot, if it had sunk deep enough. If it had, though, there’d be signs.

“Thank you,” I said, and got a sunny smile in response.

I was definitely having that looked at by a mage.

—

Dawn found me sitting by a campfire, alone. I’d already eaten a bowl the stew that was the Fifteenth’s morning meal and set it aside. Taking the pipe Masego had given me I took a piece of tinder from the flames and lit it up, breathing deep and letting the herbs do their work. I coughed out the first few times, but eventually got the hand of it. Kilian was on duty at the moment, but before she’d left I’d had her take a look at the gift. It was, apparently, dragonbone. That precluded enchantment of any kind: the bones and scales of dragons could not be touched by sorcery. It was why putting them down so often ended up the responsibility of heroes. Part of me wanted to chide myself for paranoia, but I could not. I’m paranoid, but am I paranoid enough? The lifespan of villains had not theoretical limit to it, yet they died about as old as their heroic counterparts. I noted eventually that the effect wasn’t as solid as when the herbs were drunk, so I lit up a second time. The medicine was common enough I was in no danger of running out, and as long as I kept myself below a certain dosage ingested per day there was no danger of side effects. Aisha arrived just as I spewed out a stream of white smoke. She eyed me strangely then shook her head. I raised an eyebrow.

“My mother does the same,” she said. “Joint pains.”

I snorted. “Sit down, Aisha,” I ordered.

She folded her legs and plopped down at my side, somehow managing to make the gesture fluid and graceful.

“We haven’t talked much, you and I,” I said.

“There has been no reason to, Lady Squire,” she said cautiously.

“Drop that,” I said. “I’m an orphan of no consequence, Aisha. Titles always sound mocking to me.”

“With all due respect, Lady Squire,” the lovely aristocrat replied, “you were an orphan of no consequence. Now you are, arguably, third in rank under the Empress and the Calamities. I understand you’re trying to foster a certain attitude in your closest collaborators, but I would shame my family if I referred to you so casually.”

“Gods, it’s like dealing with Juniper all over again,” I complained.

The Staff Tribune smiled. “It took me years to get her this trained up. The Red Moons are from the Northern Steppes, but her father is from the Lesser ones. That breed has a certain disregard for etiquette, even for orcs.”

The Lesser Steppes were the part of the steppes north of the Empire that were on the western side of the Wasaliti’s headwaters. Imperial writ had always run thin there, and so had Miezan authority before it. It was said they kept to more of the old ways there than anywhere else on Calernia. None of that had been mentioned in my history lectures at the orphanage, but orcs from there broke regulations so much more often than the others I’d gotten a primer on the subject from Hakram. I inhaled from the pipe, spitting out a mouthful of smoke as the pain in my leg finished ebbing away.

“I don’t know you very well,” I said. “I brought you into the Fifteenth at Juniper’s request, and you’ve served admirably ever since.”

A flicker of something passed through the Taghreb beauty’s eyes.

“But I am the only aristocrat on the general staff, and there is a leak in the Fifteenth,” she said.

Her tone was entirely calm, but for all that I could see she was angry from the way she held herself. A year ago I wouldn’t have noticed, but a side-effect of learning to read people on the battlefield had been picking up on their reactions off of it. It must have been galling to believe your birth was being held against you, especially after a lifetime of it being held in your favour.

“That’s not the issue,” I said. “You’ve already been vetted by Black, which ends the matter as far as I’m concerned.”

She paled at the mention of my teacher. My highborn officers usually did – his long-standing dislike of the nobility was well documented and several mass graves in the Empire served as standing reminders of it.

“I know what most of my people want,” I said, unashamed at the claim I was laying on my officers. “Pickler, Ratface, Nauk. Juniper, even. You though? You’re like Hune in that regard. I never quite got a handle on what you’re after.”

Aisha remained silent for a long moment, warming her hands by the fire.

“You’ve done this before,” she decided. “Not with Juniper, I’d have heard of it, but with Hakram. There’s a reason you trust him most of us. With Hasan too, most likely, not that you’d have to dig deep to find how much he despises the nobility.”

I’d always found her insistence on calling Ratface by his actual name a little strange, though since they’d been involved she likely had her reasons. I remained silent.

“You have a use for me,” she mused. “And so you must know what I want.”

She laughed lightly.

“Have it your way, then. I am fourth in line, Lady Squire, for a lordship sworn to Kahtan. A glorious phrasing for an inglorious reality: my family’s holdings are a tower by an oasis and a village of less than two hundred people. The rest is leagues of dunes and rock. There are freeholds in the Green Stretch with more people living on them.”

She turned her eyes on me, serious for all her smiling.

“My blood goes back to before the Miezan waged the War of Chains on us, Lady Catherine. The Bishara tribe was mighty once, the first to twine its ruling line with djinn. Twice we sacked Aksum and stole the wealth of its kingdom. Now? Now we die slowly in the desert, as all Taghreb do.”

Aisha spat in the fire, the gesture so uncouth I blinked in surprise.

“I could have stayed home, served as steward for my oldest sister when she succeeded Father, but the thought was horrid to me. You are Callowan, Lady Catherine. I do not mean this as denigration: you simply have not been raised to see Creation as my people do. Sooner or later, the sands swallow everything. So I left before they got me too, and sought my fortune at the War College – that ancient dumping ground for noble children.”

Aisha looked into the flames and smiled sadly.

“What I found there, I cannot put easily into words. Friends, yes. Something like a sister and more. But most of all, I found that my people had been left behind.”

She met my eyes.

“Oh, they study our battles and praise our victories – but we are a relic of the past. I look at Praes, and see that all I’ve ever loved is dying the slow death. I believe in tradition, Lady Catherine. I believe that my ways still have a place in this Empire, and I will not let the Taghreb become faceless soldiers in an Imperial horde. If I must temper the wisdom of my ancestors with the steel of the world your master has made, so be it. We will survive. We will adapt. We are not done yet .”

Teacher, not master. The distinction became more important with every passing day. I looked at her, this lovely slip of a girl I would have thought delicate if not for the callouses on her hands, and felt a thousand years of history looking back. Ancient Kahtan had been among the greatest cities in Calernia when Callow was a mere maze of petty kingdoms, I remembered. The Taghreb had been a force to be reckoned with, once upon a time. A people who prized freedom above all, fiercely independent. I called them Praesi but there was a lie in that, a denial of history. When it came down to it her people were just as old as mine, and I could feel the same fear behind her face that sometimes kept me up at night. Are my people done? Was all that made Callow, Callow to be discarded in the quest for survival? Honesty for honesty, that was the trade I’d made with Hakram. I would offer Aisha Bishara no less on this misty morning.

“I will rule Callow,” I said. “Some day. Because I can, because I have to. Not as the old kingdom, but as a part of the Empire – and to do it, I’ll need help. Someone who can guide me when I’m dealing with the Tower and the nobles.”

I offered an arm, the way Lieutenant Abase had taught me.

“Trade you,” I offered, the tone light compared to the promise I was making.

She clasped my arm in the warrior’s way. We both leaned away afterwards, too young for the gravity of the words we’d said. Most of the herbs in my pipe had burned during our conversation, but I pulled at the last of them and breathed out the smoke.

“So tell me,” I said. “Who do I need on my side, to establish a ruling council over Callow?”

Villainous Interlude: Impresario

“The victor in a war is usually decided before the first battle’s been fought.”
– Prince Louis of Brabant, later eighth First Prince of Procer

Traipsing through Arcadia like some sort of murderous errand boy had been oddly nostalgic, Black mused, especially with Wekesa at his side. It had been the both of them in the beginning, before they’d ever met Sabah or Alaya. Their little jaunt through the realm of the Fae had not carried with it the same sense of momentous wonderment he’d felt back all those years ago, but there was something refreshing about being just a man with a sword instead of the Empress’ implacable right hand. Things had been simpler, when he was young. The lines between friend and foe had been clear, the dangers understandable. He and Malicia had climbed the Tower only to then understand the unspoken truth of it: the higher the edifice, the narrower the summit – and the stiffer the winds. These days they spent as much time making sure they remained on top as they did actually ruling. It was like pulling weeds, he’d once told Hye, if ripping out one laid the seeds for a dozen more.

He’d put aside the thoughts by the time they arrived at the fortified camp Istrid and Sacker had established southwest of Vale. The city itself had been taken without contest before he’d left for Marchford, abandoned by the rebels. They’d only occupied it long enough to make sure no armed insurgents would be hitting their supply lines. The combined forces of the Sixth and Ninth legions theoretically numbered at eight thousand, though in truth they came closer to ten with all the camp followers and support personnel. Leaving a garrison in Vale had not been an acceptable option, not when the Countess Marchford’s host numbered twenty thousand. Half of it peasant levies, admittedly, but quantity could have a quality of its own. Wekesa dismissed that ridiculous chariot pulled by winged horses his husband had gifted him years ago as Amadeus rolled his eyes. He dismounted his own horse and allowed the necromantic construct to be led away by a legionary.

“You’ll be up to your neck in scheming soon, I imagine?” Warlock asked.

“I have a few irons in the fire,” Amadeus agreed.

His old friend grimaced. “I’ll be in my tent, then. Drinking. You always get irritatingly smug when a plan comes together.”

“I do not,” Black replied, but Wekesa dismissed the words with an absent wave of the hand as he walked away.

There was no way to win with this lot. He’d always made a point of not gloating even if the enemy was dead, but Hye had promptly informed him that he made such a point of not gloating that it counted as doing it. They never let anything go, really. He’d worn leather pants once at age sixteen and it had taken them twenty years to stop mentioning it every time they went drinking. It would be another twenty before he lived down Stygia, and since Nehebkau now led Tenth the whole ‘negotiating with a dragon’ affair would likely follow him to his grave. Sighing, Black made his way to the command tent. Eudokia was already waiting inside, the pile of parchments that followed her like an obedient dog stacked on a table as she read through his correspondence. Amadeus cast a curious look around.

“Sabah?”

“Gone hunting outriders,” Scribe replied without looking at him.

“On a horse, I hope?”

The plain-faced woman shook her head and he almost frowned. The days were Captain had relied on him to cow the Beast were long gone, but if she let it out too much she still had... issues. He’d have fresh meat rations set aside for her. He’d barely poured himself a cup of wine when the generals arrived, Istrid striding in without bothering to be announced and Sacker following close behind. He’d always liked Istrid Knightsbane, in all honesty. She had weaknesses as a commander but she was not above taking advice from her staff to make up for it – and she was viciously, viciously loyal. Sacker was another story. Though the two greenskins were as sisters, after all those years working together, the goblin general had never been part of what could generously be called the ‘loyalists’ in the Legions of Terror. Sacker had been a Matron before becoming an officer and though the official word was that no goblin could sit on the Council of Matrons while serving in the Legions he’d always suspected she was the eyes and ears of the Council in the army. She would look out for goblin interests above everything else.

“Warlord,” Istrid greeted him, clasping his arm.

“Istrid,” he replied, then nodded at Sacker. “General.”

“Lord,” the goblin murmured.

The eye she’d lost at the hands of the Lone Swordsman’s attack had been replaced by a well-crafted glass one and most of her burns had been healed through sorcery. The part of her face that had been touched by magic was not as wrinkled as the one that was untouched, making her look like she’d grafted the skin of a younger goblin on her face. The effect was somewhat gruesome and knowing her she’d been leveraging it ever since.

“Countess Talbot ain’t moving,” Istrid told him, accepting a cup of wine when he poured it.

Sacker shook her head when offered the same, her single living eye watching them carefully.

“She’s not retreating anymore, then,” Amadeus said. “Good. I was beginning to think she’d march all the way to Holden.”

“She’s trying to bait us into joining up with your apprentice and sieging Liesse,” Sacker spoke quietly. “That way they can cut our supply line and fall on our backs.”

“Catherine has Liesse in hand,” he simply said.

“So now the blades come out, eh?” Istrid grinned nastily. “About time. It’ll be like old times, stomping a Callowan host into the ground.”

Black sipped at his cup, still standing. Sacker let out a small noise of amusement.

“There’s not going to be a battle, is there?” she said.

“Not as such, no,” he agreed. “Within three days the Countess’ army will collapse.”

Istrid looked like he’d just stolen a dozen sheep from her pens. “We have them, Warlord. We force a battle here and it’ll be a massacre.”

“That’s what we’re trying to avoid,” Scribe said from her corner.

Both generals jumped, though Sacker much less noticeably. Neither of them had noticed Eudokia was in the pavilion – people rarely did, unless she wanted them to. A pair of hasty ‘Lady Scribe’s later, Black cleared his throat.

“Half of that army is peasant levies, Istrid,” he said. “Farmers and craftsmen.”

There was a moment of silence.

“We kill them and there’s no one to till the fields when the time comes,” Sacker immediately grasped.

And there was the reason the goblin was slated to be the next Marshal, even with her mixed loyalties. She had an ability to grasp the larger picture that Istrid simply lacked.

“It’s not a coincidence that they started the rebellion just before sowing season,” Amadeus said. “Countess Talbot is holding all of the fields in the south hostage. If we break her army too badly or burn the farmland to smoke her out, there will be food shortages in Praes. We’ve become too dependent on Callow for grain and fruits since the Conquest.”

He’d tacitly allowed that to happen, with Malicia’s blessing. Food went into the Wasteland and luxuries into Callow: the trade relationship between the two lands bound them together tighter and improved the lot of the commons on both sides. Keeping the standards of living for the lower classes high enough was the keystone of killing rebellious sentiment in its crib, both in the Wasteland and in the former kingdom. Well-fed, gainfully employed individuals tended to think twice about throwing in their lot with rebels. They had too much to lose.

“No fight at all, then?” Istrid asked, disgruntled.

“I didn’t say that,” Black mused. “I’ll need your wolf riders ready for deployment. I am not of a mind to let rats flee the sinking ship.”

Istrid grunted and from the look in her eyes Amadeus knew she’d be among those riders when they left camp. Peace was not something orcs were particularly fond of, and the Knightsbane less than most. Crows are already gathering for what’s to come, Istrid. All you have to do is wait.

—

Morning came and word trickled out from the enemy camp that the Duke of Liesse was dead. Amadeus had ensured as much last night by slipping Scribe a piece of parchment with the words ‘Gaston Caen, Duke of Liesse’ on it. Since being raised by a school of hired killers had left Assassin with a particularly vicious sense of humour, the Duke had been found drowned in his own chamber pot. Relatively tame, Black decided, compared to some past killings. He blamed a twisted upbringing: the people who’d taught Assassin had used as a graduation exercise the murder of a target by use of as innocuous a tool as possible. Men had been killed with teacups, he’d been told, filing cabinets and even once half a blunted copper coin. Assassin’s own graduation exercise had been the murder of every single other assassin using them against each other. The other Named had a rather thorny take on irony. Buttering his bread, the green-eyed man paused to take a sip of tea as he watched the green fields ahead of him and the rebel host beyond them.

He’d had his table set at the edge of the fortified camp, a handful of Blackguards looming behind him in a concession to safety – not that they were particularly necessary, given the very lethal wards Wekesa had set around him before stealing most of his bacon and flouncing off to bother Sabah. Ahead the Callowan army was milling aimlessly like an anthill that had been kicked, hamstrung by the death of the man they’d been rebelling to put on the throne. Duke Gaston had been little more than a figurehead while Countess Elizabeth ran the campaign as his military commander and betrothed, but figureheads were important when you assembled an army drawn from the commons. The man’s claim had derived from being the highest ranked remaining Callowan noble and from some extent that the ancient Dukes of Liesse had once been kings in their own right, which put the rebels in a spot of trouble.

The only duchy with a ruler left in Callow was the Duchy of Daoine in the north, where Duchess Kegan still watched events unfolding with her armies assembled at her capital. She was not a participant in the rebellion, though, and more than that nobody wanted a Deoraithe on the throne. They might have been a people admired by other Callowans, but they were not liked . Scribe dipped a wheat biscuit in her own teacup, a truly horrible habit. He frowned at her, not that she cared.

“Why only the Duke?” she asked.

Black had been about to reply when he felt a flicker at the edge of his awareness. Ah, the pest had arrived. The Wandering Bard sat on the edge of the table with a grin, though it disappeared rather quickly when he casually palmed a throwing knife and flicked it at her head. The blade would have buried to the hilt between her eyes had the Ashuran not come out of existence as smoothly as she’d appeared. Amadeus raised an eyebrow. As he’d suspected, that was not teleportation. And it did not appear to be controlled. Another flicker and the Bard reappeared in front of the table, frowning.

“You know, that’s-“

Black’s shadow extended behind him, casually adjusting the aim of a mounted crossbow towards the heroine and pulling the trigger. She flickered out of existence before the bolt could tear through her lungs. The next time the pest reappeared she was standing thirty feet ahead of him. A tendril of shadow snuck across the grass as she glared.

“Gotta say, you’re being kind of a d-“

The tendril punctured the ground, setting off the demolition charges buried under the heroine. Black took a bite of his bread and chewed thoughtfully. The Wandering Bard did not reappear. Thrice beaten and she stayed gone, then. He’d thought that would do the trick: Names like Bards lived closer to patterns and were able to use them, but they were also more closely affected by them. None of the times where she’d been gone had been willingly triggered, he assessed. Odds were she did not control where and when she went. More than that, if the ability had not been teleportation the implications were... interesting. How could you be somewhere and then somewhere else, if not teleportation? Simply by being there, he thought, although that brought other questions with it. The appearances were not instantaneous. Where did the Bard go, when she was not in Creation? Possibly a pocket dimension. More likely, nowhere . Power did not come without costs, certainly not power of that magnitude. No wonder she drank.

“What were you asking again?” he asked Scribe after a moment.

“Why you had only the Duke killed,” she reminded him.

An apt question.

“Because the rebels are no more a monolith than we are,” he said. “As we speak, Countess Elizabeth is likely trying to put herself forward as the candidate for the throne – and she does have the most troops under her command. She is, however, widely disliked by the other nobles. Gaston picking her as a bride was a slight to the Marchioness Vale, whose rank is higher even if she is not as wealthy or militarily capable. The Countess also despises, and is despised in turn, by the Baroness Dormer. Something about being rivals over the hand of the Shining Prince in their youth. The Baroness is currently in Liesse, but she is extremely popular with the men she’s sent here.”

“That leaves the Baron Holden,” Scribe noted. “The Countess’ cousin once removed. He’ll support her.”

“He would,” Black agreed, “had I not told you to send that letter to Grem last month. By now he’ll have received a messenger informing him that Nekhaub is torching the odd barn in his holdings and that a cohort of undead is driving his landholders into the city. Not any real damage, you understand, and deaths will be avoided, but to scared civilians it will make no difference. He’ll want to return to protect his lands. It’s an ingrained instinct in Callowan aristocrats.”

“You’re dividing them,” Scribe said. “Setting them against each other.”

“Under the cover of dark, if I am not mistaken, the men from Dormer and Holden will desert,” Black shrugged. “Those from Dormer heading towards Liesse, the others towards home. That cuts down on their professional troops by a third.”

It didn’t, if you counted the mercenaries. Four thousand dwarven veterans, the heaviest of infantries. But since he’d had Eudokia deal with that matter already there was no need to belabour the explanation. As for the Baron Holden, if he followed his men in desertion – and Black was fairly certain he would – Istrid’s wolf riders would be taking him. Only when he was out of sight, though. It would not do to discourage desertion. Amadeus took another sip of tea. It was a beautiful day.

—

Wekesa was hogging the wine, as he always did. Sabah was tearing into a barely cooked side of lamb, looking vaguely guilty as she did. She avoided that kind of behaviour around her husband, who’d never so much as glimpsed the Beast, but she did not need to be so delicate around other Calamities. They’d all seen her in the fullness of her wrath, tearing off heads effortlessly and bathing her fur in blood. Black poured himself a cup of Aksum red before Warlock could finish it, slapping away the retrieval spell the smug-looking Sovereign of the Red Skies tried to hook around the jug.

“The army looks smaller than it did yesterday,” Wekesa said, trying to distract him as he pilfered some couscous from his plate.

Black refrained from rolling his eyes. Warlock only descended in petty thievery like this when he missed his husband too much, though when they’d been younger he’d also done it purely to spite the others. Until Hye had nailed his hand to a table, anyway. His lover did not brook threats to her morning tea. She’d apparently picked that up from her father, who’d been an admiral among the Teoteul until a defeat at Yan Tei hands had forced his exile. How he’d managed to cross the Tyrian Sea was a story in its own right, as was the way he’d romanced one of the few elves to ever leave the Golden Bloom. Amadeus patiently bid his shadow to form teeth and began sawing through the back leg of Wekesa’s chair, but he deigned to reply.

“The soldiers from two baronies deserted during the night,” he told them.

His prediction had been mostly accurate, though he’d somewhat underestimated the impact of the Duke’s death. At least a thousand men from the levies had melted away under the cover of darkness, smelling a losing fight. Istrid had gone to follow the unfortunate Baron Dormer with all of her wolf riders before dawn came. They had standing orders to retreat if a hero showed up, but otherwise the outcome of that fight was settled.

“They still have most of their knights,” Sabah said, clearing her throat and setting aside the clean bones of her meal.

“They do,” Black conceded. “And though we’ve proven we can deal with them now, they’ll cost us unnecessary casualties if they fight. Unlike the levies, they won’t desert easily. They badly want the return of chivalric orders and only a restoration of the Kingdom can accomplish that.”

“I still have that plague for horses you had me cook before the Conquest laying around somewhere,” Warlock offered.

“That kind of weapon is hard to put back in the box when it’s come out,” Black declined. “Anyhow, the matter is handled.”

“Can’t be too handled, the horses are still there,” Sabah pointed out.

Amadeus reached for his wine and found the cup empty. There was a very suspicious magical siphon at the bottom of it and Wekesa hadn’t refilled his own cup in some time. The Black Knight glared at the other man, who grinned mockingly. He set the teeth to saw faster.

“Contrary to what many treatises preach,” Black said, “I don’t believe that morale shocks off the battlefield are better off delivered all at once. Several consecutive blows bring the expectation of more to come. That perception comes in more useful than one instance of great panic.”

“He’s still hiding more tricks up his sleeve,” Sabah translated for the benefit of absolutely no one.

“I haven’t been around for too long,” Warlock said. “He’s gotten too-“

The back leg broke and the Sovereign of the Red Skies sprawled on the grass in a messy heap. Amadeus stole his cup of wine, pointedly not smug to such an extent it looped back around to smugness.

—

The third morning showed another chunk of the rebel host missing. The dwarven infantry had disappeared during the night, though not before quietly butchering most of the knights in their sleep. Their contract, though paid with Proceran silver, had technically been held by the Duke of Liesse. The fig leaf had been a necessary fiction for First Prince Cordelia, who could not be seen to be too directly involved in the rebellion if she wanted popular support. Black had simply hired the dwarves in advance for when their contract with Liesse expired and had the man killed. After that their orders were to stay for a single day, wipe out the enemy cavalry in the night and march back to the Wasaliti where barges would take them down to Mercantis. It had been a hideously expensive measure to take and he’d had to designate a route for the mercenaries to follow that wouldn’t allow them to loot most of southern Callow on their way out, but the results spoke for themselves. The rebel army was falling apart at the seams, fights breaking out between supporters of the Marchioness and the Countess.

The levies were staying mostly out of that, leaving the squabbles to the retinues of nobles, but seeing their only remaining real soldiers take blades to each other was the final nail in the coffin of their willingness to wage this war. Which was why Black had quietly sent envoys to the most prominent leaders among them and asked for a parley halfway between the armies. Idly trotting up on his horse, the Black Knight bade it to stop in front of the dozen men and women who eyed him warily without ever touching the reins. Those were an affectation, as he controlled his mount entirely through his Name – now and then enemies tried to seize them to unhorse him and got a blade through the throat for their trouble.

“Good morning,” Black greeted them politely.

Disbelieving glances were exchanged among the envoys, to his mild irritation. Why did people always expect him to be uncivil? Being Evil was no reason to be rude. Even when it was necessary to execute someone, there was no need to be unpleasant about it – and he had no intention of killing any of these people, if they did not force him to.

“Good morning,” a heavyset blond woman in her fifties replied, sounding as if she did not quite believe what she was saying.

One of the men, dark-haired and scarred by what he absent-mindedly decided to be a legionary’s blade, spat to the side.

“Ain’t come to exchange pleasantries,” the man said.

Black cocked his head to the side. The face was almost familiar, but then a lot of these soldierly types were.

“I’ve met you before,” he said. “Summerholm?”

If it had been on the Fields of Streges, the man would not be here to stand. The soldier blinked, then shook his head.

“Laure,” he replied. “Was in command at the Muddy Gate.”

“Your men held for half a bell,” Amadeus remembered idly. “Ranker thought you would be the first to fold, but she always did underestimate the Royal Guard. You were next to last.”

“Good soldiers, all of them,” the man glared. “Most of them dead now.”

“Yes,” Black spoke softly. “They fought well. They fought bravely. And they died .”

He had not raised his voice or used his Name to inflict fear, but a shiver went through them nonetheless. Alaya could weave lies so beautiful you wanted to believe them and Wekesa could turn a man mad with three words but Black, Black had always preferred to use truth. Nothing cut quite so deep as an unpleasant truth.

“You here to threaten us, then?” a young woman spoke belligerently.

“Do I need to?” he asked. “You know who I am. You know what I can do. Worst of all, you already know how this ends. It’s the reason you’re standing here in the first place.”

“We still got numbers on you,” another man grunted.

“I could carpet this plain with the dead,” Amadeus said frankly. “Make this a victory so brutal the Fields of Streges would pale in comparison, and they were bloodier than most. But I don’t want to, you see.”

“Yeah, you’re a real bleeding heart,” the young woman from earlier said.

Black smiled. “What’s your name, young lady?”

She paled, but after so much bravado she was too proud to back down in front of the others.

“Amelia,” she replied, chewing her lip as she did.

It seemed the rumours he could steal someone’s soul just by knowing their name had not quite died out in these parts of Callow.

“I’m a very bad man, Amelia,” he said. “What I am not is a wasteful one. I could slaughter the heart of southern Callow’s people today, but all that would accomplish is the making of corpses. Corpses don’t grow crops. Corpses don’t pay taxes.”

“Neither do rebels,” the old soldier grunted.

“So cease being rebels,” Black shrugged.

“Just like that?” the woman who’d returned his greeting asked. “We just walk away?”

“Go home,” Amadeus offered. “Go to your families. No sanctions will be imposed, no additional taxes levied or property confiscated. And the next time a lord comes to you with coffers full of Proceran silver talking of freedom , remember today. Remember that mercy once is an investment, but twice is a mistake.”

And I do not make mistakes, went the unspoken sentence.

“There is a price, of course,” he said and they stiffened.

Some smiled with triumph, confirmed in their private belief that Evil could never negotiate in good faith. Callow was a land of old grudges, lovingly tended to.

“The nobles,” he said. “The ones who took the silver. Give them to me .”

He leaned back in his saddle, then smiled at them.

“You have until nightfall to think it over.”

His horse wheeled away without a word as hushed whispers erupted among the envoys. Before the two bells had passed fighting erupted in the rebel camp, but it was all a foregone conclusion. Marchioness Victoria Lerness of Vale and Countess Elizabeth Talbot of Marchford were dropped off bound and gagged at the edge of his camp by men who wouldn’t meet his eyes as the army started dispersing into the countryside. Some of the retinues had not fought and still lived. They would be an issue later on, he knew. He’d have to assign a legion to the area to prevent the rise of banditry. The nobles were brought to his personal pavilion, where under guard they were allowed to wash up and compose themselves. Amadeus only entered afterwards, and calmly invited them to sit.

“Marchioness Victoria,” he greeted them. “Countess Elizabeth.”

They were both in their forties, though even he did not look it he was older than both of them. The Countess of Marchford was fair-haired and still roughly handsome, though too sharply boned to have ever been a great beauty. The Marchioness had dark hair braided and showing thin streaks of grey, her blue eyes watery but unblinking. Neither of them showed the fear he knew they felt.

“The Carrion Lord himself,” the Marchioness said. “Should I be honoured?”

“Come now, Victoria,” the Countess mused. “Anything less would have been a slight.”

Though mere hours before they had been at each other’s throats, in the presence of the Enemy they closed ranks without hesitation. Of all the qualities of the people of Callow, he had always admired that one best. Praesi never ceased sharpening their knives even when the enemy was knocking at the gate.

“I would receive your official surrender, if you would care to give it to me,” Black said.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” the Marchioness chuckled.

The Countess smiled. “Your offer, though kind, is declined. As the commander of the armies of the Kingdom of Callow, I must inform you that our official reply is go fuck yourself .”

Give me a hundred officers with that kind of backbone and I’d conquer all of Creation , Black thought.

“I expected as much,” Amadeus said. “Countess Marchford, the offer I made you after the Conquest still stands. A position as general at the head of a Legion as well as amnesty.”

“You don’t really get it, do you?” the Marchioness laughed. “I wouldn’t flip Elizabeth a copper if I saw her on the street starving but I would never, not for a moment, think she’d make a truce with the Enemy. We were born free, Praesi. That’s not something you forget.”

“The Marchioness of Vale is correct,” Elizabeth Talbot said calmly. “We both know how this ends, hound of Malicia. The noose, the chopping block, or whatever else your butchers in the East can think up.”

She leaned forward, meeting his eyes.

“I would do it again, Carrion Lord,” she spoke hoarsely. “Even knowing how it ends, I would do it again.”

There were a few heartbeats of silence, then he sighed.

“What an utter, utter waste,” Black murmured.

But the gears were turning, and didn’t that say everything that needed to be said? He rose to his feet.

“Crucifixion,” he said.

“Returning to Triumphant’s favourite, I see,” the Marchioness replied, though she paled.

“A legionary will be along soon, with a pitcher of wine,” Black said. “It will be poisoned. A painless one – you’d fall asleep and never wake. Whether or not you drink is up to you. Nailing your dead body to the cross will have the same effect as if you were alive.”

Villains must be graceful in victory, he believed. They knew defeat a lot more intimately than the other side. With a respectful nod, he left the two aristocrats to their last moments. The rebel army had died without the kind of battle that would make a pivot in the story unfolding across Callow. Liesse would be the closing of the rebellion, Liesse and Catherine. Looking up to the darkening sky, Black hummed an old song his mother had taught him.

It had been a beautiful day, but he’d always loved the night best.

Interlude: Rats

“ Three can keep a secret, if two are dead. Unless you’re a necromance r, anyway, then the world is your blasphemous undead oyster . ”
– Dread Emperor Sorcerous

About the only thing Ratface missed about the War College was the easy availability of good writing tables. Out on campaign he had to make do with a movable scribe’s desk, which did not contain nearly as much paperwork as he actually needed it to. Juniper’s insistence that everything be done by the book meant that reports like bred like vermin and he’d only barely managed to remain ahead of the curve since Ater by prioritizing what was immediately necessary. The backlog kept growing and even what passed for his staff – three unassigned literate legionaries he’d nabbed before someone could draft them into a higher priority chore – wasn’t enough to cut down the mass properly. Heiress, may she be devoured by a hundred different tigers, had dropped off what must be every single scrap of parchment her people had ever written on all mixed together. The Taghreb could almost admire the elegance of following an order to the letter in a way that defeated the purpose it had been given for, but as it happened he was the one stuck holding the sharper with a lit fuse. Still, he’d gotten some things out of the mess.

For one Heiress had meticulously kept track of how much she fed her former slave soldiers, and had apparently obtained those supplies by paying out of her on treasury. The rations had been nothing spectacular but they’d been nutritious and systematically on time. Slaver she might have been, he thought, but at least she had taken care of her slaves well. There was something to be said for that, though it did not make the act of buying men any less despicable. In the days before the Miezans both the Soninke and the Taghreb had practiced slavery themselves, but after being on the other side of the whip for a few centuries that concept had been forcefully excised out of their cultures. Oh, some of the High Lords treated their subjects little better than slaves – but though they might lay claim to the days of their followers, they never claimed ownership . There was a difference there, one that had been taught to visiting Free Cities slavers through gruesome executions and at least one magical plague.

The records on the Proceran mercenaries were much vaguer, and Ratface was fairly certain this Arzachel character was skimming off the top in both loot and pay. Likely Heiress tacitly allowed as much to keep him in her debt, ready to out his indiscretions to his own men if he ever misbehaved. Said men were unfortunately loyal to their leader, he’d found out when probing their allegiances. They were well aware that they were in a foreign land surrounded by hostile forces and not even gold on the side was enough to loosen tongues – not of men with any authority to speak of, anyway. It was standard practice among Wasteland to try to bribe your enemy’s troops to betray them, so most of the nobility made a point of matching any bribe offers if those were presented to them: he’d put hand to flame Heiress had done the same. She was a traditional woman in many regards, that one.

For now he was making do by reading Robber’s reports whenever they were handed in, but eventually he’d find a Proceran with more greed than sense. Heiress’ real council was her assembly of Praesi lordlings and those were beyond his reach to infiltrate, but orders had to go somewhere . A pair of ears in the right place would allow the Fifteenth an idea of what she intended when she would turn against them. They’d gotten caught off guard at Marchford but that would not happen twice on Ratface’s watch – may he swallow a hundred crows if he lied. Already he knew she’d gone to work putting out her version of the events in Praes: his contacts in Ater had reported as much. Apparently Catherine had meddled in things beyond her understanding and Heiress had been forced to step in for the sake of the Empire, putting the Tower’s interests above her own by saving a rival. No doubt the nobility were hiding smiles beyond their gasps of surprise, knowing the Callowan wretch had been outwitted by superior Praesi wiles once again.

Some days, most days, Ratface was of the opinion that taking a hatchet to every lord and lady of importance in the Empire would go a long way towards making the place run more smoothly. The real danger was if Heiress managed to get her lies entrenched in the people’s minds, which could make a lot of trouble down the line. Thankfully Praesi were so naturally cynical about any rumour putting the nobility in a positive light that many people were inclined to dismiss the story outright. Word of the Battle of Marchford had already trickled out in the legions posted in Callow though, according to a few friends, and there sides had been swiftly picked. If the choice was between rooting for he Carrion’s Lord apprentice and the daughter of Istrid Knightsbane or the daughter of High Lady Tasia it was barely a choice at all. In the Legions, Heiress was openly blamed for the demon being summoned. Whoever had been hired to make Lady Akua the saviour in that story had botched the assignment pretty badly.

Unfortunately, Ratface did not have the resources to start rumours of his own. Not outside the Fifteenth anyway. That kind of work took gold and contacts, both of which he was short on. Whenever Catherine and the Hellhound got around to appointing a Kachera Tribune he’d hand off the entire problem to them, but until then he’d have keep the Fifteenth afloat as best he could. The legion’s entire entire hierarchy was a mess, even more now that they’d gotten reinforced. Normally a full legion would be run by a general and their staff, under which stood two legates commanding a jesha of two thousand legionaries. The Fifteenth wasn’t a full legion though, and Juniper not a general: they’d gone on campaign with only two thousand men, which had made her a legate.

Commanders like Nauk and Hune usually numbered four and were responsible for a kabili of a thousand legionaries each, but even now that the Fifteenth numbered almost three thousand they remained the only officers of their rank. Both kabili were over strength, though detaching Robber’s cohort of two hundred as an independent force had cut down on that to an extent. Aisha’s purpose as an officer was to keep all this organized, a hellish nightmare on the best of days. Ratface’s tendency towards sympathizing was mitigated some by the fact that she kept denying his own requests for additional staff: known leaks in the legion had made the Staff Tribune very tight-fisted with the kind of security clearance needed to work under him. Ratface sighed and fished out one of the parchment rolls from the overdue pile, this one inherited from Nauk. The orc had never been great with numbers and leaned heavily on Nilin to handle his supply requests, which had made the man’s death at Three Hills a minor organisational disaster.

Nauk’s new Senior Tribune had stepped up since but Ratface had still inherited quite a few papers when Nilin’s affairs had been distributed. This one had been handed separately and later than the others, hence his curiosity.

Unrolling the parchment, the Quartermaster scanned the neatly written lines while only paying half-attention. Old supply numbers from Marchford, he saw. Nothing particularly relevant anymore. Setting aside the scroll, Ratface picked up another and then paused. He picked up the previous parchment again, paying closer attention to the numbers. He’d already gotten a report for Nauk’s kabili for that month, he remembered. It did not match the numbers he was currently looking at. Some of them were outright absurd – seventy-three missing scutum? An early draft? No. Nilin was cleverer than that. He’d never been close to the Soninke tribune, not even when they’d both been in Rat Company, but they’d known each other socially. Nilin had been one of the most educated people in their company, one of the few who read in his leisure time. And yet the report in front of him could have only been written by a credulous idiot.

“ Oh, Merciless Gods,” the olive-skinned bastard murmured. “Let me be wrong about this.”

“ Sir?” one of his staff asked, raising her head from her own pile.

“ Abba,” he said, closing his eyes. “Get me one of Kilian’s mages , one who can scry. And then all of you clear the tent.”

—

He got Kilian herself. Good. Better to keep this in the family as long as he could. The redheaded mage frowned when he told her exactly what he wanted.

“ That’s a specialized formula,” she said. “You’re targeting a specific scrying increment without it reaching back. That’s fairly sophisticated stuff, Ratface, and you’re not a mage. How do you even know about this?”

“ I paid for it,” he replied drily.

There were plenty of mages in Ater who were too weak to be worth forcefully adding to the forces of either the Empress or the High Lords, and they needed to eat just like everybody else. Some of them fell with bad crowds to keep their heads above the water, and Ratface had been swimming in those ugly waters since the day he’d stepped foot in Ater. Nowadays, he was just as home there as all the other predators.

“ Scrying’s restricted at the moment,” Kilian reminded him, her frown disinclined to leave.

“ I have a pass,” he said patiently.

“ I know, I know,” the Duni said. “This just seems, uh, pretty shady.”

Ratface hummed, but did not disagree. She’d soon be upgrading that assessment from ‘pretty’ to ‘very’. The fae-blooded woman spoke the formula he’d provided, carefully enunciating every syllable in the mage tongue. Using magic made her look more alive, he noticed, put a flush to her cheeks and a shine to her eyes. He could understand why Catherine was so taken with their Senior Mage, though he was not interested himself. As a man with a few issues of his own, he could smell the same on Kilian buried under the smiling and the gentleness. The spell connected, linking the scrying bowl on the table to a cube of quartz set on a bed table. The Quartermaster cleared his throat loudly, bringing awake the shape of a man in a bed. Kilian blinked when she recognized the distorted face of Instructor Raman.

“ Instructor,” Ratface greeted the man. “Good evening.”

“ It’s the middle of the night, boy,” their former Basic Tactics instructor from the War College snarled. “What the Hells are you doing waking me up? I have classes tomorrow.”

The dark-eyed bastard raised an eyebrow.

“ Your tone,” he said. “Watch it.”

The man bit his tongue, though even through a distorted image Ratface could see he was furious.

“ I need you to look into records for me, from five years ago,” he said.

“ You know I’m not allowed to look at those,” the instructor said.

“ I know you have a key to the room,” Ratface replied. “The same one you use to get back into the facilities after nights of whoring and gambling.”

“ Don’t say that,” Raman whispered furiously. “Someone might be listening in.”

“ You’re going to look into the admittance record of a former student called Nilin of Dula,” the Quartermaster said calmly.

Kilian jumped in surprise, though her control over the spell did not waver.

“ I remember him,” the instructor said. “Boy on the imperial ticket, from your company.”

“ I want to know who sponsored him,” Ratface said.

The other man remained silent for a few heartbeats.

“ That’s Tower business, boy,” he said. “I’m not getting mixed up in it.”

“ It appears you’ve come to a misapprehension as to the nature of this relationship,” the Taghreb said. “When I tell you to do something, you do it. Or I sell your debt to the Night Harpies, who’ll collect after breaking your knees and taking a few fingers.”

“ At least I’ll still be alive,” Raman spat.

A different track, perhaps.

“ When dawn comes,” Ratface said, “I’ll be making a report to Catherine Foundling.”

The instructor laughed. “I’m employed at the War College, boy. We’re under the protection of the Carrion Lord.”

“ She can take that away with a single sentence, if she scries him,” he replied flatly. “I think you need to consider very carefully whether, when I make my report, you want your name to come up as an asset or an obstacle.”

Catherine had refrained from throwing around her weight in Wasteland politics, so far, but she’d gotten pushed by the Truebloods one time too many. More than once he’d seen her talking alone with Aisha, which he took to mean she was finally starting some trouble of her own. Lord Black would back her in this particular matter, he was sure of it. The man was openly protective of his student: when the Fifteenth had been in the process of being raised, word had been put out on the streets of Ater that plucking even a single strand of hair from her head would be met with brutal retaliation. When the mailed fist of the Empress gave a warning, people listened . There were plenty of stories going around about the people who’d been stupid enough not to, and none of them ended nicely.

“ Have it your way, then,” the instructor said.

“ Now and then, that does happen, ” Ratface spoke sardonically.

—

Nilin had been sponsored into the War College by a minor official called Kadun Lombo. Not, Ratface noted, the headmistress of the local Imperial school. That could be significant. Most students on the ticket were picked by the person running their school, though in all fairness meddling bureaucrats were commonplace in Praes. A favour to a promising student not chosen could end up being paid tenfold a few years down the line, should the student rise in authority.

“ You think Nilin was a spy,” Kilian said.

“ I suspect he was a spy,” Ratface corrected.

The redhead clenched her fingers into a fist. She was not angry at him, he thought, but at the thought that any member of Rat Company could have possibly passed information to the likes of Heiress. Ever since the founding of the their legion, the former cadets of the company had taken to watching each other’s backs around the others. Avoiding that kind of clannishness was one of the main reasons cadets were split among different legions when they graduated, but the Fifteenth was not an average legion in many regards.

“ We all got offers,” the Senior Mage finally said. “After the melee.”

They did not talk of it among themselves often, but all officers who’d been brought over from the Rats had been quietly approached before they set out for Callow. Oh, and what pretty offers they’d been. They’d told Ratface he could be reinstated as heir to his father’s lordship, if he turned his cloak. He wouldn’t even have to do much, just send a few messages now and then. He still clenched his teeth just thinking about it. Just a pawn, they’d thought of him. A tool that could be bought so the nobles could keep playing their games with the lives of their inferiors. The Truebloods were a rot in the body of Praes, a sickness in dire need of amputation. And on the day Catherine Foundling wielded the knife that would do away with them, he would be there. Smiling .

“ What did they offer you?” he asked.

“ Positions for my parents in Wolof,” Kilian said. “Gold too, of course, even some magical tomes. Everybody knows the Duni are a breed of servants, out only to fill our pockets.”

Her tone was a bitter thing. Even in the College there were some who’d looked down on Kilian for her pale skin. Blood of traitors and invaders, that was the whisper that followed all of the Duni. Born of the last of the Miezans in Praes and kept light by intermingling with the crusaders who’d once occupied most of the Empire.

“She wouldn’t have had to turn Nilin,” the Quartermaster said, “if she owned him from the start.”

Kilian looked ill at the thought.

“He was my friend , Ratface,” she said. “We used to trade books, since neither of us could afford much. And you’re telling me he was lying that whole time? Gods, we almost got together during our first year at the College.”

He’d never been good with emotions, so he remained silent. Eventually she sighed.

“Cat took his death hard, you know? She didn’t want to talk about it, but she wouldn’t look Nauk in the eyes for weeks afterwards.”

Ratface had noticed. They all had. There was a reason Catherine Foundling’s men loved her – she repaid that loyalty just as fiercely.

“If I’m right,” he said, “Nauk is going to take it hard.”

The redhead cursed under her breath. “I hadn’t even thought of that. They were like brothers, these two. He relied so much on Nilin to run his kabili.”

And that was the heart of the matter, wasn’t it? Ratface was under no illusion he could find anything the agents of the Scribe could not, but how deep would they really dig when it came to a mere Senior Tribune? One who had so little to do with Catherine directly? But Nilin hadn’t just been a Senior Tribune, he’d been Nauk’s closest friend. Anything the orc learned in the highest councils of the Fitfteenth he would then be told. Access to information above that of his rank . Even Named could make miss details.

“So you’ve got a name,” Kilian said. “What now?”

“Now,” the olive-skinned bastard grimaced, “we talk to Aisha.”

—

“You think Nilin was the traitor,” the Staff Tribune immediately said, face thoughtful.

Many things could be said about Aisha Bishara – and he’d thought even more, some of them perhaps a little too rose-tinted – but that she was slow on the uptake was one of them. Some days he wondered why they’d lasted so long as a couple, when they’d both known going in that they disagreed on nearly everything of import. The sex had probably held it together past its natural lifespan, he thought. That part of the relationship had always been an unequivocal success. Ratface directed his thoughts elsewhere before his body could stir at the memory of it.

“I’m hoping he was not,” he said. “But it needs to be looked into nonetheless.”

The other Taghreb nodded sharply.

“He was from Dula, right? The small city in Aksum territory.”

Kilian cocked her head to the side. “You know people there?”

“I have a cousin,” Aisha replied vaguely.

The Bishara family’s glory days were long gone, Ratface knew, but the bloodline was still prestigious. One of their ancient chieftains was said to have wed the daughter of a djinn prince, and though the creature blood ran thin nowadays it was still purer than in a lot of more powerful families. Aisha could still put her hand into an open brazier and feel no pain, or spend an entire day under the sun of the Devouring Sands and not have her skin burn. That meant the sons and daughter of the Bishara line made good consorts for nobles looking to improve their blood rather than make a strong alliance, and that in turn meant Aisha had relatives scattered all over the Empire.

For a Soninke that might not have meant much – they murdered even family over minor titles – but for the Taghreb it was different. The tribe, even if it was no longer called that, always came first. No matter who you married, no matter how many years had passed. Unless you were a mere bastard, of course. Then getting rid of you was just good planning. Ratface smiled so that the poisonous fury he felt would not show. They had to leave the tent while she got in touch with her relative and they got in touch with their own contacts, but within a bell they had their answer. Kadun Lombo had been, it appeared, nothing more than a minor official. No known ties to a higher authority.

“Two details, though,” Aisha said. “First, when he sponsored Nilin there were rumours he was a distant relative.”

Kilian’s eyes sharpened. “Nilin was an only child, and so were his parents. He used to joke about it. Said it ran in the family.”

From the well-hidden look of surprise on Aisha’s face, Ratface guessed she hadn’t known that. She’d only been trying to be thorough. But she has that tone of victory, so she found something else. Something relevant.

“Second, Kadun Lombo had a riding accident in the month following his sponsoring.”

The Quartermaster let out a long breath. He’d hoped. Against the mounting evidence, he’d hoped.

“A loose end being tied up,” he said.

“It’s standard practice when placing a long-term spy,” Aisha said quietly. “Getting rid of anyone who could possibly give them away. The Truebloods have people in the Legions, that much is a fact. He might have been an investment from the High Lady of Aksum – he certainly had the talent to rise into someone’s general staff. It could be any of them, for that matter. They all have the resources to pull off something like this.”

Them . The Truebloods. The War College did try to weed infiltrators out, or at least identify them, but some inevitably got through. Not enough to ever cripple the army if there was a rebellion, but definitely enough that the Truebloods would remain appraised of what the Legions were up to.

“Circumstantial evidence,” Ratface finally said. “We need more. All we have right now is an odd report and speculation.”

Aisha eyed him with unpleasantly familiar disappointment.

“You were handed an inaccurate report and you just noticed? Perhaps Juniper is right and we do need to audit your books.”

That the Hellhound was out to get him was not news. She’d disapproved of he and Aisha getting involved back in the day and taken no pains whatsoever to hide it. To the extent that she’d said as much to his face. Several times. In retrospective, she might have raised some valid points. It did not make Ratface any fonder of her.

“I only got it when Nilin died, and it dated back to Summerholm,” he said a touch sharply.

“Why?” Kilian interrupted before Aisha could respond. “Why only then?”

Ratface paused. “I don’t actually know. Hakram was the one to give the scroll to me, after Nilin died. Catherine told him to handle the whole thing since Nauk was too upset to get it done.”

Aisha shrugged, somehow managing to make the mundane gesture elegant. He really wished she wasn’t as good as that, or at being beautiful in general.

“Let’s ask Deadhand for answers.”

–-

Hakram was not sleeping. Ratface was not convinced Adjutant ever slept – he certainly got an amount of work done that implied he was beyond such mortal foibles. The orc was paying shatranj with Apprentice and apparently beating the Warlock’s son handily. Both of the Named made him uncomfortable, though for very different reasons. He’d known Hakram before the orc had stepped into the realm of legend. Before he’d become Deadhand, the first orc with a Name in over a millennium. It was hard to reconcile the sergeant who’d used to badly hide his contraband alcohol with the warrior who was followed by hushed whispers from greenskins wherever he went, a demigod in the flesh to his people. As for Apprentice, well... No one who’d ever seen the mage at work would ever be comfortable around him. At Three Hills he’d turned an entire flank into a frozen wasteland of death and at Marchford he’d lit up the entire night sky with his wrath. So much power contained in the chubby frame of a mild-mannered bespectacled man, always at the tip of his fingers.

“Adjutant,” he greeted them. “Lord Apprentice.”

Hakram’s eyes swept over Aisha and Kilian before settling on him. The orc clicked his tongue over the roof of his mouth, the gesture strangely human.

“You’re hunting our rat,” Hakram said.

“There’ll be more than one,” Aisha replied. “But in essence you are correct. We think we’ve identified a leak.”

“That explains all the scrying that’s been going on,” Apprentice said. “I was going to have to ask questions about that.”

The man was distinctly indifferent when he mentioned it, toying with a new trinket in his braids. The bone amulet Catherine had made. He was only aware of its existence because she’d killed an oxen to craft it and the report had made it to his metaphorical desk.

“I got a pile of documents after Nilin died,” he said. “Among them was a parchment, apart from the rest. Why was it?”

Hakram hummed.

“It was found in his personal effects, not the papers for the kabili,” he said. “Hence why you got it later than the others.”

Kilian let out a sharp breath. “Ratface. You said what tipped you off was that there were odd numbers in the report.”

He nodded slowly.

“Adjutant,” she continued. “The parchment, did you find it in a book?”

The tall orc’s eyes were hard now, and cold. “Yes.”

Nilin’s personal affairs had been inherited by Nauk but they were held in one of the carts in the baggage train, all of which were under Ratface’s authority. Hakram pointed out the right book and from there it was only a matter of time until they figured out the cypher. Numbers for the page, the last letter of the word for the first letter of the word it actually meant. The message outlined the number of deserters in the Fifteenth to have disappeared in the wake of the fight with the heroes as well as the casualties incurred that night. It ended with a suggestion of what might be the Fifteent’s next assignment, namely the suppression of the Silver Spears.

“If it’s still here, it was never handed in,” Aisha said afterwards.

And yet Heiress had known where to find them and when. The implications of that were unpleasant.

—

Ratface grabbed a few hours of sleep before dawn came. He’d been unofficially mandated to be the one who would tell Catherine, much to his displeasure. She wasn’t the kind of woman who took her displeasure at bad news on the messenger but this was not a duty he looked forward to. Not when he’d had to see that guilty look on her face for weeks after Nilin’s death, when she thought no one was looking. The Squire had gotten up before he did, he found out. Dressed in a simple tunic and leggings she was sparring with five men from her freshly appointed personal guard, the so-called Gallowborne. The Callowans eyed him with distrust as he claimed a seat just to the side of the sparring ring, several of them moving behind him without a word. It was almost endearing how much Catherine was unaware of the fact that she fucking terrified people, he reflected.

The Squire was undefeated in battle, that was part of it, but it was the things she’d done that gave people the shivers. She’d torched Summerholm to flush out a hero barely two months out of Laure, killed a monster the size of a fortress with her bare hands and even being being crippled had failed to slow her down – apparently she’d strolled into the host of devils at Marchford and casually killed their leaders without sustaining a single wound. Hells, she’d taken a handful of Named into battle with a demon and wiped the floor with the thing for half an hour straight in front of hundreds of witnesses. That wasn’t the part that really scared the Truebloods, though. It was the way she seemed to gather talent around her effortlessly. She’d brought the most promising student in the history of the War College into the fold with a single conversation. She’d picked a nobody as her liaison and in a matter of months he’d become the Adjutant. The son of the Sovereign of the Red Skies took orders from her. She’d taken a company of deserters into battle against devils and somehow turned them into loyal hardened killers.

Men of the Gallowborne had been on report twice since Marchford for beating a man bloody for disparaging Catherine. The second time, when it had been implied the only reason the Black Knight had taken her in was to keep his bed warm, the legionary had to have all of his teeth grown back by a healer. Armoured boots were not a forgiving weapon. And now he was watching a woman his own age toy with five veterans like they were children, somehow making them run into each other without ever going quicker than at a walk. She’d mentioned once that she’d never used a sword before leaving Laure and Ratface honestly had trouble believing it. He’s known people who practiced the sword since they could walk who weren’t half that dangerous with one, and that was without even taking her uncanny reflexes into consideration. The Fifteenth had not even existed for a year and already it worshipped at the altar of Catherine Foundling – you only needed to hear the song already written about Three Hills to know that.

Squire stopped before her men were too bruised to walk, clapping them on the shoulder amicably before dismissing them. Ratface idly wondered how many of them were already in love with her. Her relationship with Kilian was not common knowledge – he’d made sure of that – and Named always attracted admirers the way carrion attracted flies. She wiped her face with a wet cloth, though she didn’t look particularly sweaty, and then finally noticed him. Catherine Foundling was not a strikingly beautiful woman, he decided: her face was sharp, almost austere unless she smiled. Her most attractive feature was the long hair that she kept in a loose ponytail. The Deoraithe colouring lent her touch of the exotic, admittedly, but compared to the likes of the Heiress there was no contest. And yet she had a strange charm of her own. Charisma, not beauty.

“Ratface,” she greeted him with a smile.

She eyed him thoughtfully after that.

“And you look like you just killed my horse, which seems a bit over the top since it’s already dead. All right, Supply Tribune, ruin my morning. I’m about due a nasty surprise.”

The Taghreb bastard cleared his throat.

“We’ve found one of the spies. You’re not going to like it.”

She didn’t, but she listened anyway.

Chapter 39: Countdown

“ Maybe I won’t go to Heaven but you’ve never owned a pit full of man-eating tapirs so who’s the real loser here?”
– Dread Empress Atrocious, best known for comprehensive tax reform and having been eaten by man-eating tapirs. They were later executed by her successor for treason after a lengthy trial.

Liesse was almost too pretty to be a real city.

The walls circling the city were forty feet high, a concession to the invasions that had plagued Callow since its inception, but they were also white or pale tan stone, with ornate crenellation sculpted to look like mated pairs of swans. That was the city’s unofficial name, among Callowans: Liesse, City of Swans. The jewel of the south, never marred by war. That was a myth, of course. When the Dukes of Liesse had still been kings they’d been brought forcefully into the fold by the fledgling Alban dynasty based in Laure and then then slapped down twice when they rebelled for independence. Under the later Fairfax dynasty they’d settled down, but the south had always looked to Liesse for instructions first. That was the whole reason Duke Gaston had been able to serve as a figurehead for the rebellion in the first place. They’d never had to throw back a Praesi army, though, and that showed in how the city had been built. A third of the city stood outside the gates, mostly trades like tanners and dyers that would have stained the pretty inside with their stink and mess. Poorer folk had shacks too, though, those who couldn’t afford the stone houses of the city proper.

It was not enough to spoil the sight. The city was all wide main avenues covered in flowers and trees, garlands hanging everywhere and sparrows flying from one church to another. While Liesse, unlike Laure, did not have a proper cathedral it had no less than seven smaller basilicas. The House of Light had a strong presence in the south, where it had grown in strength unchecked while its northern chapters were struggling to strike a balance with royal authority. Southern Callow was full of monasteries and rural chapels, all of which had fallen on hard times after the Conquest. My teacher had not outlawed worship of the Heavens – he’d been well aware he’d be dealing with constant rebellions of he did. Instead he’d repealed all the exemptions the House of Light had been granted under the Kingdom and made them just as subject as property taxes as everybody else. The brothers and sisters didn’t work for coin or keep it , though, it was a religious obligation for them. So they had to rely on donations from Callowans, who grew to resent having to pay for the upkeep of grand cathedrals and sprawling churches from their own pockets.

H ere in the south the monasteries had been the worse off, with their cloistered communities suddenly forced to sell the wine and crops they’d once offered people for free. The priests couldn’t even do that themselves, they’d had to ask lay brothers and sisters to do it for them. Inevitably some unscrupulous bastards had managed to get some of the jobs and the ensuing scandals had further diminished the credibility of people who spent their whole lives interceding for others with the Heavens and offering free healing to all those that needed it. I’d never been a great admirer of the House of Light – they asked too many questions and their horses were a little too high for my tastes – but I did not approve what the Empire was doing to it. Priests saved lives all over my homeland every day and forcing them to focus on worldly matters was of no help to anyone but the Imperial coffers. I understood the political necessity of damaging their credibility with Callowans, since they’d be a hotbed for rebellion otherwise, but pushing them towards uselessness was not the answer.

I’d rather they be legally mandated to provide healing away from their own churches for a set amount of months a year, where they might make a positive impact but not become entrenched in the community. The Heavens weren’t going anywhere, I’d have to make my accommodations with them.

“ Pondering an assault?” Pickler probed, coming to stand besides me.

I’d called for my Senior Sapper earlier. We were less than half a day away from Liesse proper, and now that we were in sight of the ramparts I wanted her take on how the siege should proceed. Juniper and I had our own notions, but a fresh set of eyes was never a bad thing.

“ We’ll bombard them first,” I replied. “We’ve got more hours to spare than men. I want them as softened up as possible before we go in.”

With Black keeping the Countess Marchford busy we had free reign in the are. I’d expected to have to watch out for raids the moment we got within a fortnight of Liesse but all we’d seen so far was outriders. The lack of resistance bothered me. The Lone Swordsman had holed up everyone he could behind the walls, and that was a lot of mouths to feed. Even with full granaries that meant he had only a couple of months before starvation set it. Maybe he understood I couldn’t afford to let the siege go on this long. Or maybe he’s still got cards up his sleeve. That was the problem with William: he was an idealistic idiot, up until he started carving sinister messages in people’s foreheads. The combination of high-minded rhetoric and brutal terror tactics had proved a surprisingly potent mix.

“ We won’t be able to collapse the walls entirely without taking out the houses,” Pickler said. “But we wouldn’t need to – we just collapse the upper half, which’ll much easier, and then we build ramps up to that using the shacks. How costly going up those ramps will be depends on the amount of siege weapons they’ll have.”

They wouldn’t have much, I knew. Callow had never been a great user of those. The Kingdom had only rarely waged offensive wars and the few cities that did use siege weapons had fielded them to counter Praesi ones. Summerholm had plenty ballistas and small trebuchets, rote models imported from the Kingdom Under. Dormer and the Red Flower Vales, as the other Callowan marches, had been similarly garnished. Liesse, though, Liesse had not had to deal with an enemy army in several hundred years. Unless the rebels had bought siege weapons through Mercantis they’d have next to none.

“ It’s not the siege weapons that worry me, it’s the army,” I said.

The only professional soldiers inside the city would be the Stygian phalanx and the Baroness Dormer’s retinue, but that wouldn’t matter. Not with a hero leading them, a hero I couldn’t even face directly: my pattern of three with the Lone Swordsman was coming to a close, and that one was supposed to be his victory. Funny thing, though, the word ‘victory’. Covered a whole range of meanings, some of which left me standing with all my limbs intact at the end of them. And when the pattern was done, well... William and I no longer had Fate pulling our asses out of the fire. It was anybody’s game then, and while he might flatly outclass me with a sword there was more to my arsenal than that.

“ Heroes can accomplish strange and terrible feats,” Pickler finally said, shaking me out of my thoughts. “They’ll survive nearly anything. What they can’t do is save their armies from being pounded into mulch by artillery.”

There was a fervent light in the goblin’s eyes, her usually placid face split with a hungry smile.

“ Before the sappers were made into a corps, we were just knight-fodder,” Pickler said. “But oh, the things we’ve learned since then. A man can only swing a sword as hard as man can. A goblin behind a machine can pulverize a fortress.”

She turned to look at the walls of Liesse and for once I thought she looked as full of malice as Robber.

“ They fight with their arms, Lady Squire,” she said. “We fight with our minds. Clever beats strong every time.”

I understood why she needed to believe that, and so did not contradict her. But in my experience, there was a threshold of strength that pure cleverness could not triumph over. I’d learned that in the Pit, taking one hit for every ten I landed and still ending up the one unconscious in the mud. Sometimes you were too small, too weak, too light for your traps to matter much. It was not a pleasant thought and I tried not to linger too long on it. I’d been in a foul mood all day, ever since I’d learned... well, that was another unpleasant thought I was trying not to linger on. The betrayal still felt too fresh, even if it had apparently been an old one.

“ At the moment we don’t believe Heiress will betray us in the early stages of the siege,” I told my Senior Sapper. “One of the things I wanted to talk you about was contingencies for-”

T here waves. Not just ripples but waves , coming from the south. My eyes turned to the city, still looking peaceful, but it had to be a lie. This was major, an even stronger presence than when Heiress had let the demon out. I could feel my Name howling in anger, fighting back a presence anathema to it.

“ Fucking Hells,” Pickler gasped. “What is that?”

I eyed her in dismay. If I’d felt that because I was Named it was one thing, but the goblin was as mundane as it got. If even she could feel what was going on in Liesse, what were dealing with?

“ I don’t know,” I said. “But we’ve got people who might.”

–

I kept the meeting as small as it could possibly be.

Juniper, of course, Hakram as my second and Apprentice as someone who could give answers. Heiress did not grant me the same courtesy: she brought her entire entourage. Fadila Mbafeno, a Soninke mage I’d already met in the Tower and that Masego had told me since was one of the most promising casters of their generation. Barika Unonti, whose finger I’d broken during the same meeting and was now eyeing me with poorly-veiled hatred. She was a mage too, and heiress to a lordship sworn to Wolof. The only Taghreb among her minions I also knew already, though Aisha had been the one to tell me his name: Ghassan Enazah, a lord in his own right sworn to Kahtan. Which put him in an awkward position, since he was openly a member of the Truebloods while his liege lady was an ally of the Empress’. The Taghreb were a fractious people, though, Aisha had told me. The High Lady of Foramen might have been one of the Truebloods but half her vassals were aligned with Malicia, the same holding true for the High Lady of Kahtan’s loyalist allegiances compared to her dependents’. The last two were the important ones, though. Not powerful in their own right but because of who they’d become in a few years: Fasili Mirembe, heir to the High Lordship of Aksum and Hawulti Sahel, heiress to the High Ladyship of Nok. Two major imperial cities, fully-fledged kingdoms before the Miezans came from across the Tyrian sea.

Not a single one of them was ugly. None as good-looking as Heiress herself, but it showed that Praesi aristocrats bred for looks as well as magic and lineage. I was used to feeling plain, though, so I put the envy aside easily. Their looks had come at too high a price anyway. Akua’s little minions stood behind her as she claimed the seat across from me, somehow draping herself across a folding chair like it was a godsdamned throne. If her dress wasn’t exquisite red silk from the Yan Tei lands I’d eat my own fingers: she was wearing a bloody fortune on her body, and said fortune was displaying her prominent cleavage. I’d long made my peace with the fact that I’d never grow into anything like those, but would it have killed her to wear a godsdamned collar for once? The heiress to Wolof smirked at me. One day, maybe even soon, she would die on a fire. Those tits wouldn’t show on a fucking skeleton, would they?

“ This is an emergency meeting, so spare me the smarm,” I said.

“ I will, of course, give you exactly the respect you are due,” Heiress said.

Her acolytes smirked as a group like they’d practice it.

“ See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” I smiled. “You mouth off like that again, and I’ll execute one of your little hanger-ons at random.”

That certainly got rid of the smirks, though they condensed on Juniper’s face instead. I checked on Hakram from the corner of my eye: he was immersed in a staring contest with the Ghassan lordling. He’d been the commander of Heiress’ host when she’d still had a host, I remembered. He’d been in charge when her Proceran mercenaries had been whipped bloody by the Stygians, though he’d apparently got off without a single wound to show for t hat defeat. If he wanted to start a rivalry with my Adjutant he was in for an even rougher ride.

“ That would be a grievous abuse of your authority,” Heiress said sharply.

“ So complain to the guy I answer to,” I shrugged. “Oh wait, that’s Black. And he’d pat me on the back and call it a good day’s work. Allow me to be perfectly clear, Akua. I am in no mood to be fucked with .”

The last part came out as a bark and to my satisfaction several of her minions flinched at the sound.

“ You’ve been summoned here because, though you might be constant pain in my ass, you might have something to contribute.”

I paused.

“ Actually, now that I think of it, this is my godsdamned meeting and you’re the only who could be useful. All of you Wasteland brats, get out of my tent.”

Several of them opened their mouths but I raised a finger.

“ At random,” I reminded them.

“ Make them draw lots,” Juniper suggested.

“ Hear that, we’ve even got a method now,” I smiled savagely.

“ Don’t kill Mbefano, she’ll be useful during the siege,” Apprentice spoke up lazily.

“ Hear that, Fadila?” I said. “You get an exemption. Feel free to speak up, someone else will get the axe.”

Fadila did not, in fact, take me up on my offer. She did look like she’d been force-fed a barrel of lemons, but given that she’d been the one allegedly in contact with several of the mage spies in the Fifteenth she was lucky I wasn’t having her drawn and quartered on principle. I was only allowing that stay of execution for so long, though. If she didn’t hightail back to Praes the moment we took Liesse, it was the quick stop and the sudden drop for Lady Mbefano. She was on my list, now. After checking in with Heiress, who gave them a curt nod, the lordlings filed out of the tent in a huff and puff of offended noble privilege. Hakram was showing the barest edge of his teeth in what was either a display of amusement or hunger. The line between those two was might thing with orcs.

“ Have you finished throwing your tantrum?” Heiress asked flatly.

“ I don’t know,” I said. “Have you finished bringing in your fucking posse at important staff meetings? I’m trying to work with you, Akua, but if you want to turn this into a pissing contest don’t get snippy when I put you in your place. You’re just a commander, here. Lesser than even Nauk and Hune, because they have more troops and they’ve never summoned a demon in the middle of a city full of civilians .”

Yeah, I wasn’t going to let that go anytime soon. Maybe when she was dead, and even then I’d probably deface her tombstone with the words “A demon? Really ?”.

“ I tire of you saddling me with the responsibility with your blunders,” Heiress sighed.

I would have believed her had I, you know, not not summoned a demon. That kind of damaged her credibility. Still, it was a testament to how skilled a liar she was that I almost wanted to to trust her version of things .

“ That conversation’s not going anywhere, so let’s put it aside,” I said. “We’ve got a bigger problem now. Masego?”

“ That ripple in Creation came straight from Liesse,” Apprentice said, pushing himself up in his seat. “It was angelic in nature.”

Juniper barked out a laugh.

“ We whipped the get of Hells already,” she said. “I suppose we were due a fight with the other side of the field.”

“ Your are overly simplifying matters,” Heiress said, and to my surprise this was not wrapped in a coating of insinuation.

She was actually contributing, would you look at that. Any time soon we’d be buddies, except that apparently she’d owned Nilin body and soul since the beginning and I’d thought he was my friend and – I stopped when I heard the table splintering, every eye on the room on me. I took my hand off the wood, sweeping away the shards.

“ Continue,” I ordered.

“ The Hells and the Heavens are equivalent only in terms of absolute might, not numbers,” Heiress said warily. “Devils are endless and ever-spawning, but angels are a set and allegedly unchangeable number. Divided in Choirs, they can never be more or less than they have always been and always will be.”

“ So we won’t have to deal with a swarm of comically naked cherubim,” I said.

The House of Light taught these were the among the most powerful of angels, associated with the Choirs of Compassion and Fortitude. A few hundred years back, though a Proceran mosaic artist had displayed those mighty angels as chubby naked sexless flying sprites. Like all Proceran fancies that one had spread across the continent, to the mild amusement of many a priest. No one reacted to my joke, so I grimaced and kept quiet. Likely the only one with enough schooling in the Book of All Things to get it was Masego, and we had different takes on humour. Since I’d put explosives in his hair, I was willing to cut Apprentice a little slack on that front.

“ If it were a cherub we were dealing with, we’d be in a great deal more trouble,” Heiress said.

“ She’s right,” Masego said. “I don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with, but it’s not that high up in the Choirs.”

“ You both speak,” Juniper said slowly, “as if we’d personally have to deal with this angel.”

Masego eyed Heiress, who smiled charmingly at him. He ignored it. I was, I reflected, rather lucky that Apprentice was a great deal more interested in dissections than women. Or men, for that matter. Warlock’s son seemed to regard all of those matters with a certain intellectual disdain, as if he couldn’t possibly fathom why anyone would do anything so unhygienic.

“ I thought it was obvious to everyone,” Apprentice said. “Someone is trying to bring an angel into Creation.”

“ Seventh Choir,” Heiress added. “The Hashmallim, appointed rulers of the Choir of Contrition.”

Masego seemed surprise. “You’re certain?”

“ I have tools you don’t,” she replied flatly.

“ Seventh Choir,” Apprentice repeated. “So that’s how long we have.”

Juniper leaned forward. “You can give me an estimate?”

“ Seven times seven hours,” Heiress said. “And then an Angel of Contrition will grace Liesse with its presence.”

Oh, I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

“ Practically speaking, what does that mean?” I asked.

“ It won’t be there for long,” Masego said. “But anyone within forty-nine miles will be made... contrite.”

“ What he means,” Heiress said, “is that anyone without a Name in that range will be confronted will all their ‘sins’ until they’re broken to the will of the Heavens. The last time a Hashmallim touched the world, three hundred thousand people picked up a sword and fought until they reached the capital of the Kingdom of the Dead.”

“ If that angel comes into Creation,” Apprentice said quietly, “every soul in Liesse, and the Fifteenth with them, will form the tip of the spear for the Tenth Crusade.”

Conspiracy II

“ They call Ater the City of Gates and then forget to mention how often those are shut on people’s fingers.”
– Dread Empress Regalia II

Hakram picked up the axe.

Such a simple thing, really. A blade linked to a ring of steel at the top of a long shaft of wood. It was light, and when he tested the edge he found it was wickedly sharp. Military-grade steel, which was restricted. Either a noble had been ignoring the Empress’ interdicts or a weaponsmith in Foramen was making some coin on the side. That wouldn’t last long: either the goblins or the High Lady’s men would catch them if they continued. That grade of weaponry was only allowed to be made in the Imperial Forges, even if not all the stock went to the Legions. Their clever Empress now made gold out of the High Lords equipping their household troops and could gauge their numbers from the orders lodged. Would these ‘Catacomb Children’ be armed just as well? An hour ago the orc would have said no, but since then he’d gotten a glimpse at what went on in the streets of Ater when no one was paying attention. They were, after all, getting their weapons from civilians.

“ This will do,” Hakram said, idly spinning the axe like it was a child’s toy.

To him it might as well have been. Heavier than a legionary’s blade, but those were light as a feather to orcs. In the first days before the Conquest some of the Clans had grumbled at using glorified knives instead of their own favoured broadswords and axes, but the story was that the Carrion Lord had made his point by pitting twenty legionaries against twenty chosen warriors. The orcs had been big, hardened killers with at least twenty raids under their belts. They’d lost anyway. A hundred warriors would fight in a hundred instances of single combat. A hundred soldiers fought as a company and won the battle. The warrior societies had not liked the Black Knight’s lesson but they had fallen in line. After a thousand years of defeats and death, they had smelled the scent of victory in the air. We won’t fight as soldiers tonight , though , Hakram knew. Urban combat was not something he had much experience with, but he could take comfort in the fact that his men would be trained legionaries. The Catacomb Children were just civilians with too much blood flowing to their heads.

“ I will expect prompt payment, Fa’ir,” the old man said, grinning toothlessly.

“ You’ll have the merchandise within a fortnight,” Ratface replied flatly.

Humans could be hard to read, sometimes, but from the way the Taghreb stood he was wary of the smaller old Soninke. The stranger smelled of spices and refuse, lips cracked and all his teeth missing. He was, apparently, the man to talk to if you needed weapons quickly inside Ater. Hakram had expected him to ask for coin but apparently barter was the way things worked in the streets – large amounts of gold drew Imperial attention. The city guard might have been a sordid joke but whenever Malicia sent the Sentinels away from the Tower they drowned wherever they were sent in blood. The two humans had spent half an hour bickering over amount of pounds and purity, so the tall orc suspected the ‘merchandise’ would be laudanum, the pain-killing brew introduced by the Miezans so long ago. Whether the Supply Tribune had been robbed or not during the trade he did not know, but from the grim look on the olive-skinned man’s face he suspected it had been the case.

“ Enough blades for a hundred men,” the old man coughed, spittle flying as he hit his own chest. “The usual warehouse by the slaughterhouses.”

The humans spoke a little longer, the Soninke twice offering tea only to be declined. He did not offer a third time, but Hakram got the impression he hadn’t been supposed to. Another of those unspoken hospitality rules, he guessed. It was irksome that people expected greenskins to follow those even though nobody ever bothered to explain them. He’d picked up on a few through talking to Taghreb cadets in the College, since the desert people had been the ones to make them in the first place, but every year he unearthed fresh ones. The two officers of the Fifteenth left the spice shop through the same back door they’d used to enter it, coming out into a filth-laden alley where he could see fat rats gorging on scraps. The orc pressed his hand to his forehead at the sight of them, giving honour to the Tower – everybody knew the Empress could use carrion things as spies if she so wished. His companion smiled in amusement.

“ Ratface,” he said. “Those were not iron or bronze. These were goblin steel. How many weapons like this are floating around the city, that you can get a hundred in an hour?”

The Taghreb spit to the side, scattering some of the rats.

“ More than you’d think,” he said. “One of the quickest ways to get rich in this city is bringing in weapons, even bad ones.”

“ The gates are manned by the Sentinels,” Hakram said. “Those can’t be bought, and they look at all the carts coming in or out.”

Weapons were forbidden inside the walls, for civilians anyway. Legionaries were allowed to bring knives but not swords or shields, the city guard was armed with cudgels and short swords and the noble retinues could come in armed to the teeth – if the Empress granted them permits, which she charged through the nose for. The Sentinels were armed too, of course, but no one who liked having their head on their shoulders talked too much about them.

“ There’s smuggler tunnels under the walls,” Ratface admitted.

Hakram’s hairless brow rose in disbelief. “Under the city. Where the giant spiders are.”

“ They don’t have webs inside all the tunnels,” Ratface said. “If you’re lucky and fast, you can even get away with all your limbs.”

The human’s fingers twitched towards his hip, though he stopped himself from touching it. Either that or he had a cramp. The way the former captain had paid for his tuition at the War College had always been a subject of speculation among Rat Company. It was common knowledge among some that he’d stolen enough coin from his father to pay for his first year, but after that he’d had to pay the bursar himself. He was not on the Tower’s ticket or part of the greenskin contingents, so where had he gotten the gold? Most thought he stole it, either pawning College equipment on the sly or by rigging gambling games. Robber had started a rumour he ‘sold his body to the night’ that had been too juicy not to spread across their entire year but Hakram thought he might just have found the answer.

“ You’ve done a run before,” the orc said.

“ Three,” Ratface said. “First two set me up and on the third it became clear I’d only get lucky so many times. Got bit and had to spend most of the payment on a healer.”

The spiders under the capital were poisonous, it was said. Not a surprise if they were truly being spawned by the former Dread Emperor Tenebrous. Everything that came out of the Tower was poisonous in one way or another.

“ And now you handle ‘merchandise’,” Hakram said carefully.

The Taghreb scowled. “Do you know what would have happened, if I’d been put out of the College? My body would have been found in an alley the next morning. Too badly defaced to be recognized.”

“ I’m not castigating you, Ratface,” the orc said calmly. “I never knew. Or even suspected.”

The olive-skinned bastard sighed. “Selling the stuff is legal and most people don’t ask where it comes from. I mostly deal in debt now, anyway.”

Hakram refrained from pointing out how much of a stereotype that was. Sitting on most of the gold and silver deposits inside the Empire, the Taghreb were old hands at usury. Ruling nobles did not dirty their hands with matters like lending but that just meant lesser relatives handled the matters. The orc gently bumped his fist against the human’s shoulder, careful not to tip him over.

“ Scruples do not feed wolves,” he spoke in Kharsum, quoting the old orc proverb. “Let’s join up with the others. Aisha should have found us men.”

Hopefully, Robber hadn’t already baited her into stabbing him.

–

Aisha had never stepped foot into a brothel before.

She didn’t particularly approve of them, though she understood they were a necessity for the lower classes. Taghreb aristocracy did not seek the company of prostitutes: they kept paramours instead, if they were so inclined. Many nobles kept an unofficial seraglio even if they did not share a bed with the people in it – it was a sign of status and wealth to be able to keep one, especially if the members were strikingly good-looking or of good lineage. It was Dread Empress Maleficent, the Taghreb warlord who’d founded the Empire, who’d spread the practice to the north of the Empire when she’d made hers an imperial institution. Hers had been filled with the relatives of allies and talented individual without the lineage to earn a post in the bureaucracy on their own, but on occasion it was true the seraglio had been turned into little more than a highborn brothel. Dread Emperor Nefarious had been the worst Tyrant in living memory when it came to that, but he’d paid the price for it when Malicia had poisoned and overthrown him. As is only fitting.

The small antechamber where she stood, staring down her nose at the ‘madam’, was surprisingly well-lit and clean. She’d always thought of places like this as sordid dumps where only the desperate worked. Like in most of Calernia prostitution was legal in the Dread Empire, though Praes departed from the norm in having brothels regulated by law. No such establishment could exist without a license from either the Tower of the local ruler and the illegal brothels that popped up now and then were harshly dealt with. Everyone involved in one was executed, even the patrons. This particular place was properly licensed, however, and frequented by legionaries and city guards. While not luxurious – legionary pay was good, but not that good – she was reluctantly impressed by how... not seedy the place was. Aisha was unfortunately too well-bred to tap her foot impatiently so she eyed the madam instead.

“ They are taking too long,” she said.

“ Most Honoured Lady,” the older woman replied, bowing her head. “Word has been given to all your soldiers. Any delay is of their own will, not mine or that of my hired hands.”

She was correct. How irritating. Aisha wouldn’t even be able to chide the legionaries properly when they emerged from the rooms in the back: they were off-duty and this was not an assignment that would ever be on the books. It might never be on anything at all, if Hasan did not manage to get his hands on actual weapons. She’d done well enough against one of the assassins with her knife, but when they hunted down the Catacomb Children in their lair the wretches would have more than knives themselves. The people of Ater had ignored the dictates of the Tower that they should remain unarmed for generations, somehow getting their hands on everything from crossbows to longswords even though weapon smuggling was punished by flogging unto death. The three men and two women who’d been indulging themselves shuffled out eventually and paled when they saw who had been waiting for them. Good, they felt like they’d been caught out. That meant they were unlikely to question what they were going to be used for.

After a brief set of orders and a grudgingly polite nod to the madam, Aisha took the five legionaries to the warehouse Hasan had told them they could use. It reeked of guts and meat salted so it would not go bad, and she’d had to refrain from having one of the crates that cluttered it open more than once. With that last group they’d managed to assemble a little above eighty of the two hundred legionaries who’d been on leave in Ater. They’d have to do with this, as the rest could not be found unless they were going to spend all night on the matter. Five hundred thousand people lived inside the walls of the Empire’s capital, the city itself one of the largest on the continent. It was still not fully occupied: perhaps a third of the total grounds were left in ruin, left to the mercy of beggars and criminals or the occasional petty mage. Dekaram Quarter was part of that ugly wasteland, and their enemy lay inside of it. None of the legionaries in the warehouse dared to talk louder than a murmur, which made it all the more surprising when Robber popped out behind her.

“ Got another five, I see,” he grinned, crouched on top of a crate to her side.

There were few lamps inside and he was hidden by shadows, not that it would have mattered to a goblin.

“ This is as much as we’ll manage,” she said, keeping her face blank.

“ Probably,” he shrugged. “I hear those were in a brothel, though. That must have been fun for you. Humans and their little quirks, huh?”

Aisha’s cheeks flushed with anger. He was being intolerably smug and she couldn’t even throw the failings of his own people back in his face. Goblins did not have brothels, or relationships the way humans and orcs had them for that matter. Breeding for the Tribes was a regulated affair planned by Matrons. Their kind did not have an equivalent of marriage – the only bloodline that mattered was the mother’s and males were chosen for breeding either for their own physical traits or because of their relation to another female. For goblins sex had little to do with romance, and a woman could birth the children of half a dozen males while considered to be involved with one she’d never shared a bed with. While goblins as a whole were hard to land a blow on Robber, little bastard that he was, did have his weaknesses.

“ We do have our foibles, I must admit. Speaking of those, how is Senior Sapper Pickler?” she smiled sweetly, smoothing away the flush form her face.

The goblin did not flinch, but his pupils contracted to a point. She’d drawn blood.

“ Ratface and Hakram should be here in a moment,” he said as if he hadn’t heard the question.

He scuttled away after that, to Aisha’s satisfaction. Pickler’s disinterest in getting involved with the two greenskins who fancied her was common knowledge among War College graduates. The Senior Sapper had the right of it, she felt. Robber was disqualified as a paramour by legion regulations anyhow, since as a sapper he fell under Pickler’s nominal authority. Legionaries could not become involved with anyone in their direct chain of command, and even for those who managed that there were fairly restrictive rules. Pregnancies while in a term of service were forbidden unless a special permission was obtained and those were exceedingly rare. Legionaries who got another legionary pregnant or became pregnant themselves were unceremoniously drummed out of the army. Should a legionary be made pregnant by a civilian, that civilian’s property would be confiscated in equivalent value for the pay the legionary would have incurred in their total term of service. Herbs were provided by company healers to avoid all of this, of course, making both men and women temporarily infertile. But those were not foolproof methods and it was a rare legion who did not have its little scandals. Aisha took the time to mingle with the legionaries before she picked out her own weapon from the stacks that had been provided.

Curiosity and restlessness were running high. Humans made up perhaps a third of the force and she concentrated on those, politely stressing that this entire affair was to be kept under wraps even after it was done. As Staff Tribune she was responsible for all personnel assignment, which lent her just enough clout to get away with it. The greenskins she would leave to Robber and Hakram – they were respected enough by their people that the soldiers would fall in line without any trouble. She would have preferred to have more humans involved, but the list of people who could be both reached and trusted to keep their mouths shut was fairly limited. Greenskins were not less intriguing in nature – goblins in particular – but their own alternative loyalties would rarely see them band with enemies of the Fifteenth. Eventually she found a scimitar in the stack and gracefully slid it into her belt. Their forces had been gathered, she thought. Now all that was left was the killing.

As her people said: Creation was begat of blood, and to blood it inevitably returns.

–

Robber had never been part of a raiding party before.

The Tribes had cut down on those since the Conquest and he’d been from a mining tribe anyway: those were too important to be bothered too much. The Rock Breakers had been feuding on and off with the Dawnstones for seventeen generations but there was no real heat to it. Mostly their Matrons fucked each other over at every opportunity. Most males from the underground tribes lived and died without ever seeing the surface, toiling in the tunnels that ran through the upper reaches of the Grey Eyries. There were better veins deeper, sure, but there was also the risk of running into dwarvish mines down there. The idea of crawling in darkness until he died of fumes or a ceiling collapse had been what drove him to leave his tribe, claiming a one of the seats in the College they’d been due that year. He hadn’t been the only young goblin trying to get an out: three seats were available but there had been four dozen males trying to claim a place. His grandmother had been third daughter to a Matron’s daughter, which had seen him put directly into the ten seriously being considered.

After that he’d had to get his hands bloody.

The first boy he’d drawn into an honour duel and opened his head with a loose stone. The others had been too wary of him after that for a repeat performance to occur. Most of them had better blood than him anyhow: Matron lineages were larger and hardier than other goblins. The second boy he’d pushed down a mine shaft when no one was looking, and that was when the rest started seeing him as a real threat. He’d almost died when the candidate just above him dropped a venomous snake in his bedding but he’d replied by throwing a sack full of badgers into the alcove where he lived. The ensuing chaos had seen the entire family shamed in the eyes of their Matron and their too-clever son immediately disqualified. All the while the older women of the tribe, the matron-attendants, had watched his struggles and grinned. Fearless they said, and patted him on the back. Fearless and vicious as a male should be. And headed for an early death , they did not say. He heard it anyway. Before that it had never occurred to him that he might be a thing, a petty bauble toyed with for the amusement of his betters.

That was why instead of continuing to slaughter the opposition he’d called for them to sit together and talk it out. The others were wary but he’d earned enough respect through his ruthlessness that they were willing to listen. None would surrender their claim, so in the end they settled the matter by playing knuckle bones. Naturally, every single one of them had tried to cheat. Robber had not won the first round, but he’d come in second after slipping in a heavier bone so that a better player would misjudge the throw. The losers withdrew their claims but he’d almost not gone to the College anyway: the matron-attendants had wanted blood, to thin out the weakness in the tribe, and to have been denied this saw them displeased. So Robber sat in front of nine and nine old crones, the lessers and the highers, and for the first time in his life he’d grinned back. Because he was free now. Because the moment he’d realized that there was no difference between a death in the dark tunnels two decades from now or a death at their wrinkled hands just now, they had lost their leash.

It was the Matron who decided it. She walked into the cave, took one look at him and spat. You scheming old witches, can’t you see he’s heard the wind? she’d said. You’re the Tower’s now, boy. Go die in a gutter for the Empress. And so at seven years old they’d sent him to Ater and the War College, to learn the trade of war. Which had somehow led him to this moment, stalking his way up a collapsed wall in Dekaram Quarter. The Catacomb Children had not posted guards, filthy amateurs that they were. They’d claimed a mostly standing barracks as their lair, scrawling a buzzard in rotting old blood next to the entrance. There was light inside and the sound of people talking. Hakram had wanted to know numbers before they assaulted the place, so now Robber and three other goblins were scuttling up the ruined wall to a rooftop. The alley separating it from the barracks was narrow, jumping distance for a goblin.

“ If they have a mage, there could be an alarm ward surrounding the place,” Captain Borer said.

Good ol’ Borer the Boring. The Deep Pit boy wouldn’t get a sense of humour even if he was bit by a sarcasm werewolf. Which, if not a thing, definitely should be. Given the kind of stuff Tyrants got up to in the Tower, it was only a matter of time anyway.

“ We haven’t got a mage good enough to disarm one anyway,” Lieutenant Rattler murmured.

Robber hissed them into silence, even the lone legionary who hadn’t actually spoken.

“ If they were clever enough for a ward they wouldn’t have tried to kill one of us in the first place,” he said.

Probably true. If it wasn’t, he’d have Borer write himself up for poor advice-giving. Having Aisha deal with those little discipline reports – which always ended up on her desk, he made sure of that – was one of his small pleasures in life. Rising into a crouch the yellow-eyed tribune broke into a run and leapt over the alley, landing in a roll on top of the barracks. He paused for a moment, waiting for an alarm to ring or the gang members to cotton on to his presence. Nothing. He gestured for the others to follow as he crossed to the other side of the roof. There was a trapdoor to go inside the barracks proper and a whole corner of the roof reeked of piss. Leaning over the edge the tribune saw there was a window allowing a peek into the barracks near ground level, noise and laughter coming out of it. Definitely more than twenty people in there, which had been Ratface’s lower end estimate for how many Catacomb Children there could be. The other goblins made the leap one after the other, joining him at the edge.

“ Who will be jumping down to have a look?” Borer asked.

“ Captain,” Robber asked, deeply offended. “Jumping? Like an animal ? No. Goblin engineering will provide. Minions, undertake the great ladder formation.”

There was a heartbeat, then the only goblin not an officer leaned closer to Rattler.

“ I told you he’s crazy, ma’am,” the sapper whispered. “I heard he keeps a jar full of eyeballs.”

Rattler cocked her head to the side, ignoring him. “Ladder, as in...”

Robber grinned. Borer looked like someone had stepped on his foot but he was too polite to complain about it. Moments later the tribune was hanging upside down with his head peeking out the window, his feet in the hands of Rattler, who herself was being held up by the other two. Stroking his chin thoughtfully, Robber took a look through the ratty wooden shutters and counted at least three dozen Soninke sitting around what had once been a common room, drinking and playing cards. There was a door leading to another room with light and sound also coming out of it. Tapping Rattler’s arm quietly, he signaled for the others to hoist him back up. Hakram needed his report, and Robber needed to stab something pretty badly. It had been, like, weeks .

–

There was no door, just an ugly red curtain.

It reeked. This whole place did. Not that it would for long: blood was pungent enough a smell it would cover the worst of it. Hakram strode in at a swift but steady pace, the twenty or so orcs they’d assembled following him in as the tip of the spear. It took a good five heartbeats before anyone even noticed he was inside and cries of alarm rang out in Mtethwa. Too late for the pretty young man standing with his back to the orc: the adjutant buried the ax blade in the human’s neck, cutting through the bones and spraying blood everywhere. Casually, he ripped it out.

“ Prisoners,” he reminded his warriors. “Anyone who looks important.”

He got howls in answer as the orcs barreled into the room, falling onto the Children still scrambling for weapons. An older man came for him, this one scarred ritually across the face and with a golden ring in his nose. The tall orc huffed out a laugh, catching the man’s wrist with his hand and crushing the bones. The human screamed in pain and dropped the notched blade he’d been grasping. A kick sent him sprawling to the ground and the axe opened his throat with a measuring swing. Like slaughtering cattle. A lot of cattle, however: more Catacomb Children were pouring into the room from a corridor. His orcs had cleared a space, though, and now humans and goblins were reinforcing them. Hakram could see the other greenskins were enjoying themselves, sinking into the battle-joy, and he howled a warning to keep them focused on the there and now. They needed answers, and corpses would not give those. His own head was clear. It always ways, when the blades came out. Oh, he knew anger now. Catherine had granted him that gift, to know burning in his veins and the all-consuming desire to crush his enemies and see them driven before him. But these poor fools were just tools, and there was no glory in putting them down. It was just work, like raising a palisade or marching a drill.

Aisha caught up to him, her scimitar bloodied, and took his left. A moment later Ratface fell onto his right – his ironically chosen bastard sword still unmarred. Hakram bared his fangs and the officers of the Fifteenth strode into the thickest knot of enemies. The Catacomb Children were untrained but not inexperienced: if anything, they were probably better at this kind of close quarters fighting than his own lot. They died anyway. Hakram slapped a big man on the side of the neck, sending him sprawling to the right where Ratface ran him through. Aisha ducked under another man’s swing and cut through his tendons, allowing the orc to step on his neck to end that struggle with a sharp crack. On all fronts the gangers were being pushed back, and with only a handful of casualties on their side so far. The first real challenge of the night came when a middle-aged Soninke even taller than Hakram and morbidly fat stepped up, barbed wire wrapped around his gauntleted hands. Fat means he’s important, the orc thought . So did the golden teeth in the man’s mouth replacing the ones he’d lost.

“ Mine,” he told his comrades and strode forward, idly dropping his axe.

The Catacomb Children moved back like a tide, the fighting ebbing away as all eyes turned on the two of them. Single combat, then. How traditional of them.

“ I am the Great Buzzard,” the Soninke thundered. “Fight me and die.”

“ You’re meat,” Hakram replied. “And this ends with you kneeling.”

Shouts from both sides drowned out the room as space was cleared in a rough circle for them. The Buzzard’s eyes turned black and spat out a mouthful of dark smoke before dashing forward at a speed that put lie to his size. The orc calmly stepped to the side, letting him pass and pivoting to continue facing his opponent. The Soninke snarled and took a swing – Hakram, harking back to his old lessons, slapped away the wrist with his open palm. It wasn’t enough. The barbed wires drew blood on his cheek, barely missing his eye. Whatever magery the man was using, it was making him faster and stronger than was natural.

“ You’re headed for the catacombs, fanger,” the Buzzard sneered. “Creation belongs to the true blood.”

He charged again and Hakram was done with probing. Squaring his stance he lowered his shoulder to the height of the man’s chest as he avoided a barbed jab, taking the impact with a grunt. His feet were driven back a few inches but he remained standing. Letting out a howl, the orc flexed his muscles and flipped the fat man on his back.

“ Through tall grass, come winter sun,” he recited in Kharsum.

The Buzzard screamed, veins popping out and darkening, and vaulted to his feet. His swings were wild now, though almost blindingly fast. Hakram gave ground carefully, then took a single step forward. His closed fist smashed the Soninke’s jaw, sending golden teeth flying.

“ Stand in our bones, coated in frost,” he said.

Another scream, this one more animal than man. The Buzzard’s eyes looked more like obsidian than flesh now. The beat of the old hymn was a pace, an exercise children of the Howling Wolves were taught. The warrior-poets of olden days had gone into battle weaving verses as skillfully as they wove death, though the practice was long lost. Now all that remained was a handful of hymns, the remnant of remnant. The obese Soninke spat a mouthful of steaming black goo but Hakram kept circling around him, ducking under the blow that followed and burrowing his fist in the man’s belly.

“ Where we were kings, by war undone,” he sang.

Behind him orcs stamped their feet with the meter, like a thunderclap following the ancient words. The Buzzard’s fist took him in the shoulder, shredding through his tunic and the flesh beneath, but Hakram ignored the flaring pain and lunged forward, fangs sinking into the man’s shoulder and ripping out a chunk of flesh. The Soninke let out a demented laughing scream, tearing him off and throwing him away. The orc landed in a half crouch, spitting out the flesh. If killing had been his objective he could have ended the fight there by going for the jugular.

“ To behold the world that we have lost,” he said.

Eighty feet struck the ground in his wake, even goblins and humans joining in now. The Catacomb Children looked uneasy, perhaps thinking the hymn was a curse of some kind spoken in a foreign tongue. Not so foreign , Hakram thought. The Clans knew these lands, once, when Warlords led us south in great warbands and Creation flinched at the sight of us. It was time to finish this. He’d taken the measure of his opponent, and knew his movements. After that, everything else was just acting out his mind’s intent. For the first time, the orc went on the offensive. The barbed fist came for his shoulder again but he wove around and caught the elbow. Steadying his stance, he broke it with a sharp twist.

“ Warmth fades, glory cannot linger,” he said.

This time, there was only silence. His leg swept the Buzzard’s and the man toppled to his knees. The Soninke opened his mouth but Hakram was done indulging the madman: he took the man’s hair in his fist and rammed his own knee into the face repeatedly. It took three times until the Soninke fell into unconsciousness, and his face wasted no time in swelling as he dropped fully to the ground.

“ All that we have left is the hunger ,” the orc finished in Kharsum, feeling his blood cool.

He changed back to Mtethwa, gaze sweeping the still-frozen criminals.

“ Kneel, Catacomb Children, or be served the sword.”

They knelt. A moment later Robber popped out of the corridor, idly pocketing what looked like a handful of eyeballs. Behind him a few goblins were carrying the unconscious body of a half-naked man whose torso was covered in runic tattoos.

“ Good show, everyone,” the yellow-eyed tribune said. “That said, we may have a problem.”

He pointed towards where the red curtain had once hung, now trampled, and Hakram’s eyes followed. Out in the streets a full contingent of the city guard was surrounding the building.

“ Weapons on the ground,” a woman’s voice called out. “Come out one by one. All of you are under arrest for murder, conspiracy and illegal weapon possession.”

There was a pause.

“ If you resist, you will be put down.”

–

Aisha had just watched a man she thought she knew unleash the single most brutal putdown she’d ever seen and she shivered at the sight of it. Hakram was nice, mild-mannered and a bit of a gossip. And he’d methodically taken apart a giant of man with ritual enhancements while reciting some sort of orcish poetry. Like he was plucking out a bad weed. The Taghreb aristocrat was used to seeing strength and fury from greenskins but this ? This had been calculated savagery. The other orcs were looking at him with worship in their eyes. Gods Below. She would never be able to look at him the same again. They had other problems on their hands now, though. The city guard was out in force, and Aisha forced her tired mind to unfold the matter. They shouldn’t be here, that much was a fact. The guards did not patrol or police the ruined part of Ater. This whole sector was considered a pressure valve for the poor and the destitute, allowed to exist without supervision until it caused noticeable trouble – at which point the Sentinels cleared it out with blades and sorcery.

And yet they were here.

They had been sent, then. By someone with enough influence or wealth to control at least a commander in the guard, which did not really narrow down the suspects. Any noble with a semblance of power could put together enough bribe or blackmail for that. No, the important part was what these guards were being used for. Aisha put the events in sequence, as her mother had taught her. First a shoddy assassination attempt was made on Hakram. Then select officers of the Fifteenth, understanding the necessity of taking care of the issue without Lady Squire being involved, assembled a force that could be trusted to keep quiet. They forced the submission of the Catacomb Children, but before interrogations could be made the city guard found them in possession of illegal weapons still covered in blood. A set up. A trap carefully designed to ensnare the very people in the Fifteenth who would understand how dangerous a scandal in its infancy could be.

And now whoever was behind this had the scandal Aisha had been struggling to avoid. Lady Squire’s own adjutant, two members of the general staff and a tribune caught breaking one of the Tower’s most harshly enforced interdicts. She’d been so busy trying to avoid the Squire making an ill-advised move she’d made one herself. If this was the Heiress’ work, then the Taghreb could almost admire how elegantly crafted the plot had been. What were their options now? If they surrendered, they’d be in a gaol and the whole city would know before a bell had passed. Lady Squire might have enough authority to get them out of this alive, but she’d be humiliated in front of the entire court and likely censured by the Empress herself. Not even Malicia’s own supporters would ever take her seriously after that. If they fought now, Aisha believed they might be able to win. But there would be noticeable losses and she would put hand to flame that on their way out of Dekaram Quarter they’d be running into a larger force of guards waiting for them. And then we’ll have killed city guards in addition to everything else.

Not even the Black Knight’s apprentice would be able to save them from the noose then.

“ We can’t fight them,” Hakram said.

Their legionaries were milling uneasily. The Catacomb Children were still docile for now, but some of them were still holding their weapons and they were feeling the change in the wind.

“ Sure we can,” Robber said cheerfully. “No witnesses, no crime.”

“ There’ll be more guards waiting for us afterwards,” Hasan said tiredly. “That was the whole plan, I think.”

The lovely aristocrat felt a wave of fondness for the man who’d once been her lover. Hasan had his flaws, but lack of cleverness had never been one of them.

“ Ratface,” Hakram said. “Do you know another way out of Dekaram Quarter? One that doesn’t take us through them.”

“ They’ll take us through the strongholds of other gangs,” the other Taghreb said. “They’ll fight us and block our way, either because they got a bribe or because they don’t want anyone going through their territory.”

And the guards would follow. All that would lead to was fighting a battle on two fronts and they would not be winning that. Not without shields and proper legionary gear.

“ Are you blanket-wetters really talking surrender ?” Robber sneered.

Hakram turned dark eyes on his friend, face serene. “Negotiation,” he corrected. “Aisha, if you’ll come with me?”

She would really rather not, but who else here had any experience with this sort of thing? Hasan probably knew his way around a bribe, but this was no backalley dealing. The commander of those guards was used to rubbing elbows with the nobles they were under the thumb of. Aisha handed her scimitar to the closest legionary and got her hair in order, adjusting her clothes. She followed Hakram out of the abandoned barracks with her palms up in the air to show she was unarmed. She wasn’t, of course. There was still a knife up her sleeve and she fully intended to slit the throat of the person she’d be negotiating with if they were going to seek a violent end to said negotiations. Bisharas did not go quietly into oblivion. They were immediately surrounded by guards when they came out, some of them bearing manacles. Calmly, without saying a word, Aisha stared down the man who wanted her to present her hands. The Soninke gulped, then took a look at Hakram. The orc was smiling just enough to show his fangs. The guard backed away in a hurry, though the men surrounding them all had their cudgels out as they were escorted to the person in charge. Aisha rose an eyebrow when they finally stopped walking. The woman in front of them, bearing a guard commander’s insignia on her mail, was pale-skinned. A Duni, that high in the Ater city guard? Surprising, though less unusual since Malicia had opened the Imperial bureaucracy to all sorts.

“ Adjutant Hakram of the Fifteenth Legion,” her orc companion introduced himself.

“ Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara, of the same,” she said.

The Duni frowned at them, as if offended by their manners.

“ Commander Barsina, Ater city guard. Are you two the leaders of this band of criminals?”

“ We are senior officers in a Legion of Terror raised by the Carrion Lord’s apprentice,” Aisha replied sharply.

The woman smiled unpleasantly. “You got a parchment with the Tower’s seal exempting you from the weapon laws, then?”

“ It was a case of self-defense,” Hakram said. “However... extended the circumstances.”

Aisha watched the ugly gleam of satisfaction in the woman’s eyes and knew then negotiation was a waste of time. Bettering the bribe was not an option if she was also doing it because she wanted to stick it to the Legions.

“ I’m sure your story will check out,” Commander Barsina said. “Until then, you’ll be guests in some of my nicest cells.”

She frowned then, looking at their hands.

“ Captain Jarad, why aren’t their hands bound?” she barked.

Aisha let out a breath and considered flicking out her knife to settle the matter differently. By the way Hakram’s footing was shifting, he was debating the same. What gave her pause was the way the guards on the outer perimeter were starting to kneel. A lone silhouette passed through the crowd, armed men and women parting for her with hushed whispers. The Taghreb had expected Lady Squire or perhaps an envoy of the Empress, but what she saw was a small woman. Her face was unremarkable, her robes of passable make and she stood unarmed. Perhaps the most noticeable thing about her was her ink-stained hands. Aisha stiffened. She’d never met the woman before, but she knew who she was looking at: the Carrion’s Lord own shadow, one of the most successful spymistresses in living memory. The Scribe. Commander Barsina paled even further and bowed.

“ Lady Scribe,” she said. “A pleasant surprise.”

The Named smiled. There was no warmth in it, or anything else. It was just flesh being moved by muscles.

“ Is it, Commander?”

Barsina stood straighter, no doubt remembering she was not without friends or authority. Oh, Commander, Aisha thought. You’re misreading the people who own you if you think they’ll shield you from the Webweaver’s attentions.

“ My lady, I don’t know what you think you know but-”

“ Everything,” the Scribe said. “I know everything there is to know about you, Barsina. I know the name you had before you disfigured your sister in Satus for marrying the man you wanted. I know whose horse you stole to make your way to Ater. I know the amount and provenance of every bribe you’ve taken since you began patrolling these streets. I know what rivals you had beaten and by who to get to the post you hold. This was allowed, because you served as a counterweight for the two commanders owned by the Truebloods. It seems, however, that you have finally folded to the pressure.”

“ How dare you,” Barsina said.

“ You are of no more use to us,” Scribe simply said.

She had not raised her voice, or changed her intonation in any way. She stated it as a fact and the night had never before felt so cold to Aisha Bishara as it did in that moment.

“ Captain Jarad,” the Webweaver said, ignoring the Duni’s spluttering as her eyes sought out the Soninke who’d been about to be chewed out by her earlier. “Congratulations, you are now a commander of the Ater city guard.”

The young man saluted, hands shaking.

“ What is to happen to Com- former Commander Barsina?” he asked.

Scribe met his eyes.

“ I know of no such individual.”

A heartbeat later, an enterprising guard behind the former commander slipped a knife in the Duni’s back. Aisha did not shy away from watching the woman bleed out on the ground. Ater, o Ater , she thought, remembering the old verse by Sheherazad, you capricious old whore . Y ou give and you take and you grow on our bones. This was not the first betrayal witnessed by the City of Gates. Likely it wasn’t even the first that night. Commander Jarad, now composed, bowed to the Scribe.

“ The Catacomb Children, my lady? Should I clear out the rabble?”

“ Leave them,” the Webweaver said. “You are dismissed. And when the offers come, Commander – remember tonight.”

The man bowed even lower. Orders were barked and the guards began withdrawing. The olive-skinned aristocrat found this little comfort as the Scribe’s eyes turned to them.

“ Such troublesome children you are,” she said. “You take after your mistress.”

Hakram cleared his throat, to her horror. “Lady Scribe,” he began, “we-”

“ Tried to step between Catherine Foundling and Akua Sahelian,” she interrupted. “An area that already promises to be littered with corpses. Take care you do not enter it so carelessly again.”

The orc had enough sense not to reply at that.

“ Most Esteemed Lady,” Aisha said, bowing. “Should we begin our interrogation of the Catacomb Children?”

“ We both know they will give you nothing of worth,” the Webweaver said, but she was smiling. “Leave them here. The only redeeming aspect of tonight is that I’ll get to see Assassin’s face when I tell him he botched the job.”

There was something in the woman’s eyes that would haunt the Taghreb’s dreams for months to come.

“ He’s going to be in a mood ,” she said with delight.

The Scribe graced them with one last look before she turned a clear pair of heels, leaving as unhurriedly as she’d arrived. Hakram and Aisha stood there for a long time, as their legionaries slowly began filtering out of the old barracks.

“ Drinks?” Hakram asked.

Aisha eyed her still-shaking hands. “Ancestors forgive me, but yes.”

Just another day in the Fifteenth Legion. Gods take pity on them all.

Heroic Interlude – Prise au Fer

“There is nowhere angels fear to tread.”
– Callowan proverb

William’s mother had been a woman of some education, a knight’s daughter. His father had only barely known how to read and always deeply distrusted any writing but the Book of All Things, which was said to have been spoken to the minds of mortal men by the Gods. It had been his mother who’d taught him his numbers and letters, and she’d been the one to keep his attention on the lessons by weaving stories from ancient Callowan rulers into them. The Queen of Blades had been the kind of vivid story that fascinated, never once defeated in battle though her invasion of Daoine had failed. So had the story of Eleanor Fairfax, the knight turned founder of the Fairfax dynasty who’d risen in rebellion against Triumphant when the Dread Empress had ruled over the entire continent. Now, though, as he walked the streets of Liesse alone and the moon was high in the sky, it was a king’s words he remembered. So had spoken Jehan the Wise: “Evil is cruel, and so men think it follows that Good is kind. This is a mistake, my son. Though fire is warm and in the dark of night we huddle around it, it also burns.”

This had unsettled him, as a child. Jehan had been Named, the Good King. A hero. Why be so wary of the very power he wielded? He understood now. Had ever since he’d gone into the wilderness half-mad and been presented with the face of Contrition. He’d seen the searing fires and felt them scour his soul clear. There were sorceries in the East – and even in some of the Free Cities – that could make a slave of a man. There were some who would compare standing in the presence of a Hashmallim to such a thing, but that was a fundamental misunderstanding of the thing. William had seen his life through their eyes. Every sin, every wrong, every petty unthinking cruelty. All of it without the veil of lies everyone cloaked themselves in without even realizing it. The lies of well-meaning and wilfully chosen ignorance. It had stripped William of his delusions and allowed him to see what he truly was.

Just a man, and not a particularly Good one.

He’d gone through those fires and come out a sword of the Heavens, handed a single feather from the wing of Contrition to see its will done upon Creation. Had they known, even then? Perhaps they had. Angels saw deeper into the nature of the world than mortals could, beyond artificial constructs like time. There was, to them, no difference between the first step of a journey and the last. That was what really changed people, when they met angels. The realization that in the end they were nothing but an assembly of sins. Choirs helped you accept this truth differently. Those touched by Compassion never took another life again, not even those of the worst monsters in Creation. Those touched by Mercy spent their days alleviating suffering wherever they went. Those touched by Judgement... did not survive the experience, should they be found wanting. Contrition was different from the others, in a sense.

The Hashmallim had never once forced anyone to take up the sword to fight Evil, but then they’d never once had to ask. Once you saw the truth of yourself and then then truth of Creation, what was left but to take arms? The only path to contrition was to leave the world a better place than you’d found it – and how could lesser be solutions be tolerated when so large a part of Calernia was still under the yoke of the Gods Below?

Nine crusades had been waged, all in all. Of those, five had been led by heroes aligned to the Choir of Contrition. Sometimes it amused William that the red cross that was the mark of all crusaders had been a symbol provided by the Dread Empire. Triumphant, in all her cruel madness, had been fond of having children crucify their own parents as a sign of obeisance. She’d paid for it eventually, when a Duchess of Daoine who’d consigned her own father to the cross met with an idealistic young knight named Eleanor Fairfax. Eleanor had been touched by Contrition, and when she rose in rebellion all of the continent gathered behind her banner and carried it all the way to the foot of the Tower. In the beginning only the Duchess’ soldiers had worn the cross, but symbols spread – by the time Triumphant’s empire was pulled down on her head every man and woman in that army had a scrap of red cloth sown on their clothes. Or branded into their skin.

And so the First Crusade came to an end. The Second came when the Praesi rose in revolt against the crusader kingdoms their realm had been divided into, and they were crushed into dust. When the Wastelanders rose the second time, though, they were led by the man who would become Dread Emperor Terribilis II. The Third Crusade ended in disaster and the end of the crusader nations – to further compound the disgrace, a weakened Callow was occupied by Procer in its wake. The Fourth Crusade, a last-ditch attempt to reclaim Praes, was drowned in such a sea of blood by Terribilis that never again was a crusade to turn East. After that the four crusades that followed were led by the hand of Contrition. Failures, all of them, for they were fighting the Dead King and his realm of horrors, a monster who called even devils to heel. Of those it was the Seventh Crusade that William found important, for as far as he knew it was the only time in the history of Calernia a Hashmallim had come into Creation.

Contrition had touched Salia, the capital of the Principate of Procer, and every soul inside had taken the cross – including the First Prince of the time. The rest of the continent had gathered behind that holy host, and for a time it seemed the endless hordes of the dead would finally run out. Siege was laid to Keter, the seat of the Dead King and ancient capital of his derelict kingdom. They’d lost, in the end. The Dead King has poisoned the land and called forth infernal hosts until there was nothing left standing in front of him but bones. But they’d come close. Liesse was smaller than Salia, only a hundred thousand people lived within the walls, but it was not the Kingdom of the Dead it would fight. Malicia was no great warlord, not the way Terribilis had been, and her greatest general was getting old. Sooner or later, a hero would finally manage to slay the Black Knight.

The First Prince of Procer was plotting a Tenth Crusade, holed up in her capital, and William would give it to her. But it would not be a Proceran enterprise, and it would not end with Callow as her protectorate. The rest of Calernia would not stand for that sin being committed a second time. The Lone Swordsman came upon the shores of the Hengest lake and looked up at the stars, breathing out slowly. There were small docks with fishing boats further down the waterside but that would not take him where he was headed. Every Callowan child knew there was a holy place somewhere in the waters, an island said to be untouched by war and the depredations of time alike. An island, it was said, but none could be seen from the city. Boots in the sand, William watched the shining waters and waited.

The white ship came, a small thing rowboat without any trace of an oar. It did not float so much as glide, the swan-shaped prow and stern almost lifelike. It beached in front of him and without a word William climbed on board, sitting on the only seat. It had been a clear night out but the ship led them into mist. How long he sat there alone with only the dark waters and the mist for company, he could not say. He’d been into Arcadia Resplendent, where time ran to a different stream than in Creation, but this was different. Whatever lay ahead was not in another realm, just a part of this one mortals were not lightly given access to. The Penitent’s Blade, always at his hip, was warm to the touch. It felt the proximity of its likeness. An angel had died in the waters of the Hengest, the legend went. He would soon find out the truth of that. He didn’t see the island until they were almost upon it, to his surprise. Pale sands formed a perfect circle in the water, entirely bare for a small chapel of roughly hewn stone.

William had been to Laure before and seen its beautiful cathedrals. He’d seen the many basilicas of the south, for that matter, and the outrageous wealth and splendour of Salia – capital of the mightiest nation on Calernia. For all that, the sight of that small chapel brought out... something in him. A sense of wonder. There were no grand materials or sculptures: it was, in truth, little more than a stone house with a pointed ceiling and a tower. The ship beached on the sands in perfect silence and the Lone Swordsman stepped onto the shore. There was, he now saw, no bell in the tower. Yet there was an empty space for one, a bar of ancient wood to hang it from. It was the first imperfection he’d glimpsed here, and he almost frowned at the sight. Dismissing the thought, he strode inside through the open door.

There were seven rows of benches on each side, little more than bare slabs of stone. No murals on the walls of paintings on the ceiling. Even the window in the back was without stained glass, revealing only endless waters blanked by swirling mists. For all that, he felt a little awed. The chapel felt unearthly, more than even Arcadia had. It was too real. The stone was the very essence of stone, the air the very essence of air: the only intruder here was him, a living imperfection in an otherwise flawless scene. Beyond the benches lay a small altar of pale stone, with a single mark on it. A sigil. It was a sinuous, complicated thing but his mind could not help but perceive it as the number three, in Miezan numerals. The Penitent’s Blade was so warm it almost burned his fingers when he touched the handle.

“You know what happens next, don’t you?”

Almorava’s voice was soft, almost kind. He was not surprised she’d turned up, though he glanced in her direction nonetheless. She was seated to his right, for once without a bottle in hand. Even she would not desecrate this place with idle drinking.

“The sword goes into the stone,” he said. “I may not know stories the way you do, but I know that.”

He’d also stay in prayer until dawn. There would be exactly seven hours left before the sun rose, no matter when he started praying. These things saw themselves into being.

“I wonder what the last hero though, when they called on Contrition,” he said quietly. “If they had doubts, too.”

“She didn’t,” Almorava replied. “The White Knight was in Salia, when the Dead King’s offer came. Five hundred children every year for peace on the borders. That the First Prince even considered it had her in such disgust she did it that very same night.”

He didn’t ask how she knew that. He wasn’t sure he’d liked the answer. Heroes were bound to the lifespan of a mortal, unlike villains, but the Wandering Bard had always known too much about things she seemed much too young to ever have witnessed with her own eyes. Perhaps it was part of her Name. Perhaps it is something else entirely.

“A better woman than me, then,” William said. “I know what I will be putting them through. It is not a gentle thing.”

“Good doesn’t have to be nice,” Almorava murmured. “Just righteous.”

The Lone Swordsman remained standing, looking at the pale stone and the sigil on it.

“She could take the Fifteenth out of range,” he finally said. “Forty-nine hours is more than enough time.”

“She won’t, though,” the Bard replied. “That’s not her nature. She’s the very worst kind of villain, you see – the kind who thinks they’re doing the right thing. In that sense, she’s even more dangerous than her teacher. He doesn’t labour under that impression.”

“And us?” he asked. “Are we also just clutching a delusion? I had a talk with Thief, before coming here. She told me she’s staying for the siege, but that she’ll be leaving Callow afterwards.”

Some vestige of amusement quirked his lips.

“She was, I believe, quite disgusted with me.”

“Thief sees Creation through the lens of her Name,” Almorava said. “That allows her more clarity than you’d think, but people with her kind of Role are not meant to look at a broader picture. She fights what she perceives as injustice wherever she sees it, but she’ll never root out the causes.”

The same, he thought, could be said of so many heroes. Theirs was a losing fight, from the onset. You could bring down the mighty who abused their power, turn back the great tides of Evil that would sweep over mankind, but how could a single person change the world? There was a reason for that, he believed. The Heavens had put the Fate of mankind in the hands of mankind, not the Named. Heroes, given extraordinary abilities, were meant to deal with extraordinary threats. Not to take the reins of the world.

“There are no root causes,” he said tiredly. “Or only one, if you prefer. People are people, with all the flaws that come with that. We strive to do Good and fall short, because we’re not meant for perfection. Sometimes I wonder if it’s all just a great jest at our expense, Almorava. If they placed a better world just out of our reach so that they can watch us try and fail to touch it.”

The Bard hummed. “Did you know it’s a matter of some debate among the priests of the House of Light whether or not Evil is inherent to the soul?”

William was Liessen: of course he knew that. Even after the Conquest the brothers and sisters were everywhere in the south of Callow, and their public debates on theological matters were considered a good show in most villages. People actually travelled to witness famous debaters at work. There was a great deal of betting involved, which was a lot less pious, but people tended to remember the arguments made even after money changed hands.

“Are you about to impart some great revelation onto me?” he asked. “That debate has been raging for as long as the House has stood, and some say the priests who built it were arguing as they lay the stones.”

“I think it’s a very interesting question, when you look at the current breed of villains we’re dealing with,” the Bard said. “There’s only three that matter: the Empress, the Knight and the Squire.”

Almorava raised a finger.

“Malicia has made a point of of improving the lot of common Callowans whenever she can. Purely out of self-interest, but she does it nonetheless.”

She raised a second finger.

“The Big Guy is stricter about enforcing those laws of the old kingdom he kept than the Fairfaxes were before him. He’s not gentle about it, but he keeps order and enforces something that looks like justice if you squint a bit.”

A third finger.

“Foundling. Well, you’ve met her yourself. She thinks she’s saving Callow. You could argue her intentions are heroic, even if she’s a little more complicated than that.”

“You despise the Empire even more than I do,” the hero frowned. “Yet this seems like a fairly impassioned defence of it.”

“The thing is, William,” she said, ignoring his interjection. “They’re not the first villains to ever win a few battles. It’s without precedent for the Empire to keep Callow for over twenty years, though. Why are they different?”

“We’ve never dealt with villains quite as skilled who did not compulsively backstab each other,” the Lone Swordsman said. “Or get killed by rivals.”

“That’s another thing, yes,” Almorava said. “There’s loyalty there. Affection, even. Not traits you usually associate with villains. Not that they’re incapable of them, but Names magnify everything you are – and you don’t get to shake hands with the Gods Below by being a choir boy.”

“I don’t follow your point,” William admitted.

“These are some of the most successful villains in the history of the Empire,” she said. “And they became that by going through the motions of being Good.”

The dark-haired man’s brow rose. “They are most definitely not.”

“Oh, I’m not arguing that they are,” the Bard said. “See, I think that we are born Evil. Because Evil is instinct. It’s that animal part of us that wants things for ourselves no matter what it does to others. It’s been dressed up in philosophy since, but that’s the heart of it.”

She smiled mirthlessly.

“But I want to believe that when the Gods made us, they gave us thought as well as instinct. We teach ourselves to be Good, William. Because we want to be better. It’s not as easy but maybe, just maybe, if we do it long enough it will be what comes naturally to us.”

“So you’re saying the Carrion Lord is trying to be Good?” he said sceptically.

“I’m saying these are the first villains in a long time who’re going with thought instead of instinct,” Almorava replied. “It’s why they’re weaker, too. They’re leaning in the wrong direction and it has cost them.”

“I don’t see how that makes anything better,” the Lone Swordsman sighed.

“Earlier, you spoke of a root cause. People being people, was it? Except people are learning, William. Even the other side’s noticed, to the extent that they try to bastardize what we are. They say that the Heavens gave us laws, but that’s not really true is it? What they actually gave us is guidelines, to make a better world. And it’s working .”

The Wandering Bard rose to her feet. Almorava wasn’t pretty, though in some light she could be called striking. The dark skin, curly hair and strong nose made her face interesting to look at but not so attractive to be intimidating. Normally she had her lute, but tonight it was nowhere in sight. She always wore the same clothes of silk and leather, but this time they were freshly cleaned. And for once she doesn’t smell like a brewery , William added a little less kindly.

“Day by day,” she said. “Year by year, century by century – we’re making Creation a better place. Even the bottom of the barrel is pulled up when you hoist the whole thing.”

“It’s a pretty thought,” the hero said. “Doesn’t help all of us who live in Creation now instead of in a hundred years, though.”

“I know,” she said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “But I don’t want you to put that sword into that stone thinking it’s for nothing. We’re part of something larger than us, William of Greenbury. Something that uses us sorely . But...”

“Good doesn’t have to be nice,” he quietly echoed her words from earlier. “Just righteous.”

He’d shivered, when she’d said his full name. He’d never told it to her, and no one had called him by that in years. What felt like a lifetime ago. Almorava stayed close to him and for a moment he thought she was going to kiss him. She’d certainly not been subtle about being attracted to him, or to quite a few other people. If she did, he would turn away. Instead she lay her head on his chest and looped her arms around him, sighing quietly. After a moment he hugged her back.

“Every time,” she whispered. “You poor Contrition fools break my heart every time.”

She drew away, hand lingering on his chest, and left without another word. Silently, William of Greenbury stepped to the altar. He unsheathed the Penitent’s Blade and slid it inside smoothly, the sword entering without resistance or leaving a mark. He knelt before the stone and closed his eyes. Behind all that Almorava had said about thought and instinct, he found a deeper truth. It Evil was truly inherent, as she seemed to believe, then to be Good was to make a choice. The thought moved him more than he thought it would.

“It is, we are told, the only choice that really matters,” he murmured.

The last line of the first page from the Book of All Things. He was making his choice, tonight. For seven hours he would pray, and then return to Liesse.

Forty-nine hours later, a Hashmallim would come into Creation the exact moment he died.

Chapter 40: Knock

“The Heavens have a way of favouring the general with the better army.”
-Theodosius the Unconquered, Tyrant of Helike

At a regular pace, the Fifteenth would have gotten to Liesse in twelve hours.

We managed it in two bells instead, eight hours, by letting the slower supply train slip behind. Juniper would never have taken the risk if the rebels had shown a willingness to sally before, but they hadn’t. They’d remained behind the walls of Liesse and now we knew why. They’d waited until we were close enough that if we fled out of the angel’s range, we wouldn’t have time to do anything else. And then we’d have to deal with over a hundred thousand conscripts for the Heavens. My senior staff was all in agreement: if an army that size suddenly appeared in the middle of southern Callow, the entire campaign was screwed. The Legions of Terror would have to retreat north to consolidate and bring reinforcements from Praes and western Callow. Which would leave the Wasteland without supervision and the borders with Procer unmanned. If this was just a peasant army we were dealing with the whole affair might be settled before the Principate’s forces came back north after dealing with the Dominion, but those people would be Hashmallim-touched. They would not break, retreat or surrender.

The summoning had to be stopped. So here we were, two hours or so before Afternoon Bell, setting up camp a mile away from the walls of the city. There was no point in trying to encircle Liesse so we didn’t bother to even make a token effort. There were only forty or so hours left before it all went to shit, we’d have to come in swinging and break through the defences to cut this off at the source. To avoid a panic, the rank and file had not been informed of what exactly was going on inside the city – just that the Lone Swordsman was attempting a ritual that couldn’t be allowed to finish. The sense of urgency would hopefully drive my legionaries to push through even when things got bad, because there was no doubt that they would.

The situation we’d been put it was... dire. We were horribly outnumbered, for one. The walls were manned by what Juniper had identified to be the Baroness Dormer’s army, a mix of retinue soldiers and southern levies. They were heavy on bows, and they’d know how to use them: Callowan professional armies like the defunct Royal Guard had been heavier on knights than archers, but farmers weren’t above hunting deer and rabbits to put on the dinner table. Smaller and swifter targets than my legionaries, if not as well armoured. The walls themselves could be pounded into rubble given long enough, but time was the thing we lacked most. The one redeeming factor in all this was that Liesse wasn’t a castle, it was a fortified city. Beyond the initial wall there was no immediate second circle of fortifications: it was houses and shops, a maze of old streets and avenues. Deeper inside, closer to the lake, there was the Ducal Palace. It had been a fortress once but after centuries of peace its rulers had come to prioritize luxury over defensibility. Which won’t matter, if we can’t get into the actual city.

“Not even a portcullis on that gate. Goddamn Liessen don’t know what a real fortress is,” Captain Farrier spoke up from my side. “The south has always been too soft.”

The Gallowborne followed me everywhere now. Twenty of them dogged my footsteps everywhere I went, no matter the hour. They even guarded my tent.

“Where are you from, John?”

The man blushed. He always did, when I called him by his given name.

“Summerholm, ma’am. Gate of the East.”

Where Legions go to die , he didn’t say. The old boast rang hollow these days, with legionaries patrolling the streets of the city.

“They’ll find a stomach for this fight,” I said. “They have a hero with them.”

“Lone Swordsman, huh?” the man mused. “Heard about him. Pretty boy, did a speech in Marchford about freeing Callow. Took the First Prince’s silver, though. So much for that.”

“He’s not the brightest man I’ve met,” I said. “But he’s a regular monster with a sword. I’ve seen Calamities fight and he’s nearly in the same league.”

“Hopefully you won’t torch the city to get him, this time,” Farrier smirked.

I rolled my eyes. If only that were an option. With the city this densely packed the tactics I could actually use were sharply limited: even the trebuchets would have to be carefully aimed not to hit the streets. Civilian casualties would be horrifying otherwise . Won’t be an issue if Masego comes through , I thought. Apprentice had gone to take a closer look at the gates, to see if what we had in mind was feasible. There would spells inlaid in the fortifications, of course. There wasn’t a defensive wall in Callow that was without that kind of protection – otherwise any powerful mage could tear through stone, given half a bell to work. Mages in Callow were rarer than in the Wasteland, though, and so the spellwork wasn’t refreshed as often. Large Imperial cities got new warding schemes every decade or so, according to my books, but in the Kingdom the wards had remained the same until they were broken. And Liesse hasn’t ever been invaded by the Legions, so it should be as old as it gets.

Masego would tell me soon. Until then there were other matters to look into. I wasn’t forced to wait long until Hakram came back with the man I’d sent for. Neither did I need to turn and look to see they were coming: all the Gallowborne had put their hands on their swords the moment they appeared.

“Lady Squire,” the man they called Arzachel greeted me with an insolent smile.

The mercenary was allegedly from Valencis, one of the southernmost principalities in Procer – the one bordering the Titanomanchy and the giants that lived in it. He looked almost like a Taghreb, though his skin wasn’t quite as tanned and the cast of his face was unfamiliar. The southernmost Procerans were called Arlesites, I remembered. Famous for their gallantry and tendency to be at war with all their neighbours, both inside and outside the Principate. With his elaborate moustache, forked beard and the wicked falchion at his side he looked like the kind of man who’d sup on babies. He was also still eyeing me with open disrespect.

“It would be proper for you to kneel,” I said.

I felt Captain Farrier hide a smile. Callowans had not been fond of Procerans even before they’d failed to lend help during the Conquest.

“I’m not a very proper man, milady,” the man shrugged.

I shared a glance with Hakram. Without the need for actual words, the tall orc laid the bone hand that had brought him his nickname and forcefully pushed Arzachel to his knees. The man spluttered and reached for his falchion, but within two heartbeats all twenty of the Gallowborne had unsheathed their swords. Arzachel cast a look at them, then spat.

“Will that be enough?” he sneered.

“You can stay there,” I replied flatly.

“You treat all your men this way, Lady Squire?” he said.

I hummed. “Not a single one of them. That’s why you’re here, actually. You’re not one of mine, you’re Akua’s – and she’s about to betray me.”

“Doubt it, but even if she was it’s got nothing to do with me or my men,” he said immediately. “We ain’t getting involved in Praesi scheming.”

“Then you should have better considered your choice of employer,” I replied without a shred of sympathy. “You’re here, and you’re a liability that cannot be left unattended.”

My tone had remained casual, but there must have been something about it that gave him pause. The smugness and self-assurance slid off his face.

“You still need my men,” he said cautiously. “You kill me and they won’t follow.”

“Yes,” I agreed softly. “I’m told they’re remarkably loyal. They’ll listen to you whatever you decide to do. That’s why your head in a basket isn’t serving as a prop while I talk to one of your lieutenants.”

Arzachel went very, very still.

“I’ve got under forty hours to take Liesse,” I said. “I don’t have time to waste on you, to find a more elegant way to do this. Elegant’s never really been my thing, anyway.”

“Lady Squire,” he said, “I-“

“ Shut up ,” I Spoke. “Akua’s clever and she’s got some talent on her side, but I’ve got the single most powerful mage of our generation taking orders from me.”

Hakram smoothly unsheathed a knife and crouched at Arzachel’s side, forcing up his palm and nicking it. Blood dripped into a glass vial he held up in his other hand before rising to his feet and corking it.

“When he comes back,” I continued, “I’m giving Apprentice the vial with your blood in it. He’ll be under orders to use the nastiest way he has to kill someone if you so much as twitch in a way that looks treacherous to me.”

The Proceran’s eyes widened in fear. He was trying to speak but his lips wouldn’t move.

“Man’s got an affinity with fire,” I mused. “Reckon he might boil your blood in your veins.”

“Bad way to go,” Hakram gravelled, thick fingers slipping the vial under his breastplate. “Not at quick one, either.”

“Now,” I smiled, “you might be telling yourself ‘Heiress is a mage. She’ll put up something to protect me from that.’ Here’s thing thing, though: sure, if you talk to her she might put up a ward. She’s skilled. What she isn’t is an endless power sink – if Apprentice swings hard enough at that protection, it’ll break. She’s got other plans, Arzachel. How much do you really think she’s willing to invest in saving your skin instead of her own objectives?”

Adjutant hoisted the Proceran to his feet, patting his shoulder amicably.

“Off we go, mercenary,” he said.

Arzachel turned to leave but I raised my voice again, stopping him in his tracks.

“Oh, and one last thing.”

I allowed my Name to flare up, the beast howling in laughter as I felt my shadow stir behind me. I had a feeling that if I looked it wouldn’t my own silhouette outlined on the ground.

“Your men are auxiliaries in the Legions of Terror,” I said. “Regulations apply to them now. If any of them loot or rape when we get into the city, it’s the gallows for them and the officer who failed to keep them in line. Dismissed .”

—

“Blasting those gates would be pointless,” Masego said, wasting no time on small talk.

Juniper grunted in displeasure, glancing in my direction.

“Thought you said the wards in Liesse would be dusty relics,” the Hellhound said.

“They are,” Apprentice intervened. “I’m fairly sure that scheme predates Triumphant.”

Hakram and Pickler pressed knuckles to their foreheads, murmuring may she never return . Juniper didn’t bother with the formula, absent-mindedly moving her hand in the gesture. Masego drummed his fingers against his side irritably. He wasn’t any more inclined to superstition than I was, maybe even less.

“It’s simple in nature, but it’s lasted this long because it was cleverly designed. The runes inlaid on the iron take magic and move it into the walls it’s linked to. Those have been designed with some standard dispersal spellwork – anything trying to blast that door would have to be strong enough to bring down the entire set of walls at once.”

There were rituals that might be able to do that, I knew. Praesi had been horrifyingly skilled with rituals even before they’d been occupied by the Miezans, the unchallenged masters of that branch of sorcery. They usually required mass sacrifices, though, and I had neither the people nor the willingness to bleed them. Pickler spoke up.

“The trebuchets are positioned,” she said. “Give me the word and we start hammering away.”

“We won’t need that,” Apprentice said. “Simple in nature, remember? The scheme doesn’t deal with the physical aspects of manifested sorcery.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And for those of us not too clear on what that meant?”

“If I send fire at it, the flames won’t damage the gate. The flames themselves are magical energy, turned into a physical manifestation. But it’ll still be affected by the heat emanating from the flames, since the heat itself isn’t sorcerous in nature.”

Kilian had tried to explain something similar to me once. She’d said that sorcery was, in a way, using your will to lie to Creation. You convinced it that your magic was actually fire or ice or light or a curse, and that it should react accordingly. The bigger or more complex the lie, the more willpower it took. I had a feeling this was all an extreme oversimplification, but it was enough for me to get the gist of what Apprentice was saying.

“Melting the gate would require hours of constant, very high temperature fire,” Pickler pointed out.

“So we don’t use fire,” I said. “Masego, you used a trick in Summerholm. Can you do it again?”

He blinked, then frowned. After a moment his eyes lit up.

“Clever,” he praised. “Yes. Though we’ll need an impact afterwards.”

“You’ll get to use your trebuchets after all, Senior Sapper,” I said, and the goblin grinned.

For a moment she looked just like Robber about to slip a lit brightstick in someone’s pants. I nearly shuddered. Goblins. That this one preferred siege weapons to slitting throats in the night didn’t make her any less dangerous.

“It’s after the way is open that worries me,” Adjutant spoke up, grounding me back in the present. “There’s heroes in the city, they’ll have set up surprises. And there’s no trace of the Stygian spears on the walls.”

“They know we need the gate to invest the city in time,” Juniper said. “They’ll be waiting on the other side, in full phalanx. If there’s a competent commander on the other side, there’ll be archers on the streets and rooftops behind them.”

It would be like walking into a meat grinder. The ring of spears would remain an unmoving rampart skewering anyone coming at it, and with a constant stream of arrows falling on my legionaries they’d be unable to form up in enough of a mass to just push their way through. We’d expected to have to face the Stygians, though, and over the last few fortnights the Hellhound had developed her own tactics to deal with them.

“Sappers and heavies,” Juniper continued. “Crack open the formation with sharpers, then keep them split. We’ll use the Procerans to soften them up first, thin the numbers.”

“We have my little surprise, if it comes to that,” I said.

“You’ll need that to deal with the brat,” the Hellhound replied. “Keep as many trump cards in reserve as you can. Getting the latter parts of this battle done without you would be troublesome.”

“How sentimental of you, Juniper,” I said, but I also nodded to concede the point.

William was due a victory, but victory was a very broad concept. My being defeated in single combat might discharge that obligation and then leave him vulnerable to an ally picking him off – after the pattern of three was over, our lives were no longer bound to each other’s hands. The trick would be surviving the defeat. I’d had a lot of time to chew over the idea, to think up contingencies. I imagined most of them would fail, which was why I had a lot .

“Speaking of brats,” I said. “Heiress. The counters are ready?”

“Kilian has her orders,” Juniper gravelled.

“I had a look at our Proceran friend earlier,” Masego said amusedly. “He’s bare of protection, and I believe the slight warming of his blood for a moment was enough of a warning to ensure good behaviour.”

“He was shaking when he left,” Hakram said. “There was kind of a... pressure, when Catherine dismissed him. Even I felt it, and I wasn’t the target.”

I hid my surprise. I’d been on the other side of that trick once, the night I’d met Black. I’d seen him use it several times since, inflicting raw terror on people just by focusing his Name in their direction. Had I reproduced it accidentally? I’d need to look into that later. It was too useful an ability not to try and add it to my arsenal. Finding volunteers for testing might be a little hard though , I grimaced. Shaking away the thought, I met the eyes of my officers.

“We’re as ready as we’ll ever be. Another half bell for the legionaries to rest, and then we get this stone rolling.”

—

Afternoon Bell was ringing inside Liesse but no one paid the sound much attention.

My horse moved according to my will, trotting slightly ahead of the assembled lines of the Fifteenth. I’d considered making a speech before we struck the first blow, but what would be the point of it? My legionaries knew what needed to be done. They knew why, and they knew who we’d face doing it. Anything else was just posturing. Hakram was on foot at my side, the two of us surrounded by the full contingent of the Gallowborne. Masego was idling somewhere behind us, talking in low tones with his task force of mages as we waited for our last guest to arrive. She made us wait as long as she dared. Heiress arrived with her usual panache with her minion Barika in tow.

Akua was wearing ridiculously gorgeous armour, as was apparently her habit. This one was lamellar steel, with whispers of gold standing out from the red aketon underneath. It split on her upper thigh, revealing beautiful greaves set over high supple leather boots. Even her horse was covered in armour that was prettier than my own very plain – and somewhat scarred, because people kept shooting me – plate. Her horse was also alive, unlike Zombie. Whether that was a victory for me or not I still wasn’t sure. Refusing to stare at the sight of her, I fished out my dragonbone pipe out of one of my saddlebags and filled it with an herb satchel, striking a pinewood match on my own saddle to light it. I puffed out a mouthful of white smoke, eyeing her unkindly.

“You realize this is a military campaign, not a court session,” I said.

“It is the burden of nobility to be superior in all things,” she replied gravely. “Not that I would expect you to understand this, given your... origins.”

“Pretty armour,” Hakram spoke up mildly. “Crossbow will punch right through it, of course. There’s a reason we use mail and plate nowadays.”

Heiress graced him with a disdainful glance, but did not bother to reply. I breathed in the smoke then blew it out in her general direction. She wasn’t close enough to feel it, but the general pettiness of the gesture was still kind of satisfying.

“I assume you summoned me for something resembling a reason?” Akua said.

“A generous assumption,” Barika added in her wake.

“Barika Unonti, isn’t it?” I smiled. “How’s the finger?”

She looked like she wanted to show me one finger in particular but she controlled herself. Smugly, I blew out another mouthful of smoke. It was good to know that my talent for pissing off people hadn’t dulled since my days in the Pit.

“Your presence had been requested here so that you can offer technical advice on our offensive, Heiress,” Hakram lied blatantly in my name.

We had her here so that if she looked like she was about to double-cross us the goblin munitions buried under her feet could be detonated and a full company of eager Callowans got to stabbing her, should Apprentice fail to explode her head first. That was actually a thing he could do, I’d found out today. Explode people’s heads. What a world we lived in. It was a good thing I wasn’t a mage, I decided, because I wasn’t sure how good I’d be at resisting the temptation to use that spell whenever I had to deal with nobles.

“How flattering of you,” Akua said drily. “Not at all a waste of my abilities.”

I smiled. “See, you’re giving me advice already. Clearly you were born for this.”

Before the conversation could devolve any further, Apprentice strolled away from the other mages and broke in.

“Everything’s ready,” he said.

Heiress smiled in his direction, showing perfect teeth on her perfect godsdamned face.

“Lord Masego, how pleasant to see you,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to say that you and I should share of cup of wine soon. We could learn much from each other.”

The dark-skinned mage peered at her over his spectacles.

“Agreed,” he said quietly. “I’ve been meaning to dissect a Named for years, Heiress. Who knows, you might even survive the experience.”

Emptying the smouldering remnants of my pipe on the ground, I smothered a grin as the other Soninke’s face went blank. Considering Masego had been in the thick of the fighting against the demon, Heiress wasn’t going to be making any ground there in the foreseeable future. I cleared my throat, turning to the closest line of Gallowborne.

“Escort Lord Apprentice on the field, please,” I ordered. “Shields up. You should be out of arrow range but it pays to be careful.”

The twenty men clustered around Masego in a lozenge as they strode ahead of the army, watched silently by the rebels on the walls. They were too far away for me to hear when Apprentice told them to stop, or to hear him when he started incanting. Heiress leaned forward in the saddle, watching carefully.

“He’s calling on a contract,” she said.

“So he is,” I agreed.

“Magic won’t break the gate,” Akua said. “It is warded to ensure as much.”

“See, that’s the problem with you traditional Evil types,” I said. “You see a gate and it’s a personal affront for it to be in your way – so you have to batter it down. You think in straight lines. Even you, Akua. Your whole thing is scheming, but you only ever scheme to remove the obstacles straight in front of you.”

The front tip of the lozenge formation scattered as a globe of ice-clear water emerged from Masego’s hand. It flew forward steadily. Arrows streaked from the ramparts and the bastion above the gate but it was a small and moving target. It hit the gate without a sound and ice burst from the point of contact, swallowing the whole surface in a heartbeat. I did not spread to the walls, covering only the gate with inhuman precision.

“It is now frozen and closed,” Heiress said. “Truly, your tactical acumen is without peer. You have a mage who can call on Cocytus at his age and this is the best plan you can craft?”

In the distance, a trebuchet swung. The stone was too high – it hit the crenulations of the bastion above, taking the tip of it clear off and impacting inside the city. I really hoped the rebels had evacuated the outskirts of Liesse. In the distance I heard Pickler scream at the top of her lungs that if the next stone was off by that much the third projectile would be the goblin responsible for it. The second stone was better aimed: it hit the gate, cracking the ice. The metal behind it groaned. As the sappers loaded a third projectile, I smiled at Heiress.

“Gate’s warded, yes. The hinges, though? The hinges are just metal. And what happens when metal is exposed to the coldest temperature devils can muster?”

“It gets brittle,” Hakram said before she could.

The third stone hit, and with a ripping sound the gate... fell down. The hinges had broken and nothing held it up anymore. I smiled unpleasantly at the aristocrat.

“As you said, my tactical acumen is truly without peer.”

The Fifteenth roared its approval behind us as Masego returned to the safety of our lines and the Battle of Liesse began in earnest.

Chapter 41: Retrieve

“ ... such wanton deviousness had been unseen since the days of Dread Emperor Traitorous, who famously passed for his own Chancellor through cunning use of a wig and a pair of cantaloupes...”
– Extract from “The Most Illustrious Histories of the Inimitable Dread Empire of Praes”, volume IV

The clamour died down before long.

The Fifteenth had been positioned according to Juniper’s plan for the forcing of the city, with Hune’s irregular kabili of over a thousand men taking point. Heavies in the front, with the strength of our sapper corps behind them. Nauk’s legionaries were split between the wings, placed so that they would be able to reinforce weak points rather than engage the enemy on their own. I would have preferred for the orc commander to be the tip of the spear but Juniper had brought up the valid point that he was a lot more likely to commit to too deep an offensive than Hune. The ogre would not let her legionaries step even once over the imaginary line set by the Hellhound. I had not cheered with my legion, sobered by the knowledge that this was just an opening blow. With the gates open my own instinct would have been to rush through and take the enemy while they were still unprepared, but Juniper had pushed back against that idea hard. The Lone Swordsman had a history of trickiness that could not be denied, and she didn’t want to have to learn what he’d planned the hard way.

“So what do you have for us now, Willy?” I murmured.

Sharpening my vision with my Name, I frowned and peered through the broken gates. Like we’d anticipated the Stygian spears were surrounding the entrance into the city – whether or not there were archers behind I did not have the angle to see, but I’d bet that there were. Neither the Baroness Dormer nor William himself were noted military commanders, but the older Stygian spear-slaves were said to be schooled in tactics and strategy. It was one of their selling points: the few Free Cities that used the slaves for war did not usually have an officer corps of their own to provide. A few heartbeats passed without any response from the other side, a fact that was almost more troubling than reassuring. Meanwhile, Senior Sapper Pickler’s boys got to work. The trebuchets began targeting the ramparts to the sides of the gate bastion, massive stones smashing into them with professional regularity. Our pair of ballistas had been pointed at the bastion itself. There was no expectation that the smaller stones would actually able to bring it down, and we didn’t actually want them to. They just had to clear the fortificiations of archers and mages, while the trebuchets made sure there wouldn’t be flanking fire on the Fifteenth when it advanced.

I glanced at Heiress, who’d been silent since my last cutting retort. Barika trailed behind her, eyes on my moving legion. They’d be giving me trouble anytime soon now, but whatever they had planned the contingencies I’d set up should hobble them. As long as Akua didn’t have the Procerans at her beck and call, all she could put forward was a small retinue of her own guards and her noble minions. Dangerous, but not so much that I couldn’t step on them if I wanted to. Getting her right here, where she couldn’t get up to any shenanigans away from prying eyes, had been the most important part. I wondered if this was how Black felt all the time, measuring risks and moving enemies over traps you could trigger at any time. It would explain a lot about the man if he did: there was nothing wondrous or adventurous about this. It was just... work. Like bartending, if more dangerous. They didn’t talk about these parts in the stories. The sleepless nights you spent anticipating the actions of your enemies, the grind of preparing your counters to their moves. All the while knowing that you might never need the work at all, or that it might turn out you’d made the wrong kind of efforts entirely. And he did this for all of Callow for over two decades.

The thought was chased away the moment the rebels finally gave answer to our drawing first blood. A lone silhouette passed through the gates, gait assured and unhurried. For a moment I’d thought it would be the Lone Swordsman, come to defy an entire army on his own, but my Name sight found an entirely different face: Thief. The heroine was strolling with her hands in her pockets, whistling if the shape of her lips was any indication.

“Not the Named I was expecting,” Hakram gravelled.

“Preaching to the choir,” I said. “Angling for single combat, do you think?”

“She doesn’t have a fighting Role,” the orc frowned. “I could more or less handle her before I came into my Name: she tries you and she’ll end up bleeding on the floor.”

There was no flattery in that reply, just a matter-of-fact acknowledgement of how good I’d gotten at killing things.

“Even if she calls for a duel, she’ll be getting the princely reply,” I said. “We don’t have time to waste on posturing.”

The Thief agreed, apparently. She stopped sixty feet away from the gate, on the open field but still out of crossbow range. A ballista stone flew over her head, hitting the wall without making a kill but keeping the archers crouched behind the fortifications. She flipped a finger in our general direction then took up a leather pouch from her side, turning it upside down as if to empty the contents on the ground. A heartbeat later, twenty-odd river barges fell in a crash of wood and floodwater. I blinked just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

“What the actual fuck?” I said eloquently.

I had a few more relevant questions in mind, but that was the one that came out. I glanced at Heiress, whose face was emotionless. Not tell to find there, unfortunately. Had the Thief... summoned boats? This was aspect stuff, there was no doubt about it, but she wasn’t a mage. That I knew of, anyway. I gestured for one of the Gallowborne to come closer.

“Tell Apprentice to hurry back here,” I ordered. “This was, uh, not part of the plan.”

“If this turns into a naval battle, we’re down a fleet of our own,” Hakram commented drily.

“Less sass, more figuring out what the Hells was the point of that,” I ordered.

There hadn’t been much water, and it was already seeping into the ground. Still, I somehow doubted making a little mud had been the plan there. There was no sign of the Thief anymore, but I knew it’d be too much to hope for she’d been crushed under the barges.

“They’re blocking access to the gate,” Hakram said.

I cursed. True, the boats had fallen all over the place: some forward, yes, but some backwards also. The ones in the back probably forbade entrance to the same gate we’d just knocked open. The heroes had replied to our forcing a way in by dropping a mountain of wood in front of that path. I might have picked up on that faster, had I not been befuddled by the absurdity and overkill of the answer.

“They’ll be putting the gate back up as we speak,” I grimaced.

“We can order Pickler to smash the boats to kindling,” Adjutant said.

“That’ll take too long,” I said. “And I doubt our trick on the gate will work twice.”

The orc cast me a cautious look.

“You only have so many cards up your sleeves,” he warned me.

“I only have so many hours before the actual bloody Heavens show up,” I replied, then turned to another of the Gallowborne. “Run to Juniper. Tell her I’m slapping down my first trump early.”

There’d be no need to be any more precise than that, not with the Hellhound. I closed my eyes and reached for my Name, opening pupils on a corpse far to my left. The ox rose to its feet. I’d been meaning this particular surprise for Willy, a way to make swordsmanship irrelevant to our coming fight. I’d had several of our labour oxen slaughtered and stuffed with goblin munition loadouts, including one full of goblinfire. He’ll be expecting them after this. The ox I’d reached for was one heavy on demolition charges, the flesh carved deep and filled to the brim. It would have been enough to casually level a city block, Robber assured me, so it should be enough for the barges. If not, I had another six oxen to finish the job. I set the undead construct to a steady trot, only then opening my eyes. Hakram was looking at me, trying not to grin. I sighed.

“Out with it,” I said. “What did they call this one?”

“The Oxis of Evil,” he confessed.

Sappers were, I reflected, the worst of the worst. As if to prove my point the ox I controlled came into my field of view and I noticed there was someone riding on it. A goblin. I couldn’t use my Name sight and control the corpse at the same time, but there was no real need to.

“Remind me to demote Tribune Robber,” I told Hakram.

“I’ll make a note of it,” the orc said.

“Lesser footrest,” I decided. “That’ll be his new rank.”

“You don’t have another footrest,” Adjutant pointed out.

“But if I did,” I replied vindictively, “he’d be beneath them.”

Heiress, to my surprise, had not taken the occasion to snipe at either myself or the Fifteenth. She was looking at the scene, turning her back to me. Discreetly, I gestured at Captain Farrier to have another two crossbowmen ready to take her out. I didn’t trust how quiet she’d gotten. With Pickler’s engines keeping the enemy archers busy, Robber and his mount covered the ground with only a handful of pot-shots taken at them. One arrow hit the ox right in the brains, but the corpse wasn’t exactly using those at the moment. A few moments before impact Robber leaned forward and struck a match, setting off a fuse before rolling off. Landing on his feet, the goblin spread out his arms at the soldiers on the rampart and yelled out something. I was too far away to hear, and anyhow I was busy cutting the strands connecting me to the ox before it exploded. The corpse hit the side of the closest barge, horns getting stuck in the wood, and a moment later Creation lit up.

I’d again underestimated how much munitions were amplified by Name power, it seemed. The hand of an angry god swatted aside the centre of the boat pile, smouldering planks of wood catapulted in every direction. One large piece hit the first rank of Hune’s heavies, slapping down an orc nearly as large as Nauk like he was a child. I winced. Broken bones for sure, even if he’d caught it on the shield. When the mess settled down I saw that something resembling a path had been cleared. Half a barge was still in the way and would make passing under the bastion much trickier, but it would also be usable as cover. Like I’d suspected, the gate was already back up. Our way to get rid of it had left it largely intact, after all, even if I doubted they’d have repaired the hinges so quickly. I was beginning to think I should have used the oxen on the walls, surprise or not. With the Fifteenth ready to pour in the gap the moment it settled we might have avoided the mess at the gate entirely. Too late for that now.

“You were using your sight on Robber?” I asked Hakram.

He was actually better as sharpening his senses than I was, nowadays. He still lacked a second aspect but the few tricks Black had taught me he’d taken to like a fish to water.

“I was,” the orc agreed.

“What was he yelling?” I asked with morbid curiosity.

Adjutant smothered another grin.

“I believe it might have been ‘knock knock, motherfuckers’,” he informed me.

“ Lesser lesser footrest,” I muttered under my breath.

Behind us, horns sounded and the Fifteenth began to stir itself to movement. The foreplay was over and Robber fled back to the safety of our lines to the loud acclaim of his cohort of insane murderous hooligans. That they were actually my cohort of insane murderous hooligans was something I was trying very hard not to think too much about. In the distance I saw that Apprentice was coming back in my direction, then frowned when he started gesticulating wildly. I gazed in the direction he was pointing at. The Procerans, I saw, were not moving in formation. They were supposed to slip in front of Hune’s men to harass the Stygians before impact was made, but they were splitting off my host to the left.

“Heiress,” I barked.

There was a chorus of swords being unsheathed and two dozen crossbows instantly covered Akua and Barika . My rival cleared her throat daintily.

“As the Sahelians have unfortunately been put under a strong financial burden by Her Most Dreadful Majesty, I’m sad to inform you we can no longer afford to keep the mercenaries in our pay,” she said. “As a result, I no longer command them and therefore no longer qualify as an auxiliary officer according to Legion regulations.”

“They’re in the Tower’s employ,” I said.

“They’ve never signed any contract with the Tower, or been handed gold by it,” she smiled.

“Get off your horse,” I spoke softly. “Hands on your head, and the same with your minion. You so much as make a vaguely suspicious move and my men will drop you.”

Akua did not move.

“On what grounds do you demand this?” she asked curiously.

Apprentice barrelled onto the scene a moment later, panting and looking like he was about to throw up.

“Catherine,” he said, his robes now sweat-stained. “ That’s not Heiress .”

Without missing a beat I reached for the knife at my belt, palmed it and threw it. It spun and sunk to the hilt in the leg of whoever was wearing Heiress’ face. The illusion shattered with a tinkling sound and the sight of Arzachel, bound and gagged, was presented to my eyes. Barika laughed.

“Too late,” the heiress to Unonti said.

The haft of Hakram’s axe caught her on the temple a heartbeat later, throwing her down the horse and sending her straight into unconsciousness before she even hit the ground. There was surge of power in the distance, from among the mercenaries.

“The demon,” I said. “Masego, are we-“

“It’s not getting through,” he interrupted.

And like he said, a moment later, there was a responding surge of power from where Kilian’s task force of mages was waiting. We’d prepared for this, thank the Gods. Horns sounded again and the left flank of the Fifteenth turned to face the Procerans. They didn’t seem interested in giving battle, though. They were fleeing towards the walls. Not that Juniper cared: before twenty heartbeats had passed the legion’s ballistas had been repositioned and a pair of bloody furrows was carved in the mercenary ranks. Pickler’s sappers had managed to hit the ground at the right angle for the stones to bounce and continue rolling, killing dozens instead of mere handfuls with every shot. Wouldn’t have worked as well on better armoured men, but these were light infantry. I glanced at Masego, whose face had turned ashen.

“We have the wrong target,” he said. “She’s not bringing something through.”

Ripping one of the silver trinkets from his hair – this one with a reflective surface – he spoke a few words and an image appeared on the side of it. Zombie moved closer to him and I hunched over. We were looking at the Stygian spears, arrayed behind the gates.

“They’re the target?” I asked.

“Not them in specific,” he muttered. “This is High Arcana, it works through... associations. Metaphysical concepts.”

One of the former slaves in the front ranks staggered, his muscular body turning into a weak husk in the blink of an eye before he dropped dead on the ground. One after another, the Stygian spears dropped. Two thousand, they were. Before thirty heartbeats had passed every single one of them was a corpse.

“Weeping Heavens,” I whispered. “What kind of a ritual is this?”

“She fed them, didn’t she?” Masego said. “She gave them water and rations. Hers. And she just retrieved that gift.”

“If it’s retrieved, that means she got it back ,” I hissed.

Two thousand lives in fuel. The power to the east had not dimmed, it had grown. And even as I thought, I could feel it taking shape. The ballistas continued taking their toll but they were irrelevant now. Heiress had never intended for the Procerans to be the force she used today. They’d been a red herring for me to focus my efforts on, thinking I was scoring victories by hobbling them. In front of the fleeing mercenaries a tear in Creation formed, pouring out a geyser flame and sulphur.

“Contact the task force,” I ordered Masego immediately. “Shut this down, now .”

The image on the trinket shifted and Apprentice immediately began talking in a low voice to someone. I didn’t stick around to supervise: he knew how to handle that situation better than I did. I passed by Hakram and the Gallowborne securing the unconscious Barika. Someone had gotten Arzachel off the horse and handled the wound, but he wouldn’t be talking: his tongue had been removed. So that’s why the Procerans are listening to Heiress. Odds were someone with Arzachel’s face was giving them their orders. When had she made the switch? I doubted she’d managed to put a prisoner on a horse under my nose without my noticing, so she must have found a way to fool Apprentice’s spectacles from the beginning. But then how did he figure out she wasn’t the one on the horse when he came back? Suspicion gnawed at me, but I set aside the matter for now. My eyes turned to the ritual gate, and what I saw there had my limbs going numb. Devils were spewing out of it by the hundreds. Ironhooks, jackalheads and the lizard-tigers. Other kinds I’d never seen before too, with wings.

All of them were going for the walls. The ironhooks would be able to climb them with no trouble. Some would die going up, shot by archers, but eventually a foothold would be made. And then the levies would panic, and the whole infernal host would spill into the city. Thousands would die, I already knew. Tens of thousands, even, since the civilians would be so tightly packed. All of it because I’d thought Heiress would use an old trick again instead of pull out a new one. My Name was silent. It should have been howling in anger and outrage, but there was not so much as a ripple in the pond. The stillness in my mind was all mine. So was the vicious, frozen fury going through my veins. Eventually Kilian’s task force managed to shut down the ritual gate by following Masego’s instructions, cutting through a giant snake as it did. It didn’t matter: another one had passed through unhindered, and it was closing its jaws on the top of the ramparts. Lesser devils were already beginning to use it as a way up.

I got down from my horse and walked to Barika’s prone form, crouching to slap her awake. I felt like my body was not my own, like I was puppeting myself the way I did corpses. The Soninke opened her eyes with a pained gasp.

“You breed are ever sore losers,” she sneered the moment her eyes swam back in focus.

I felt myself exhale.

“It truly is a game to you, isn’t it?” I said. “Even when people die. Just part of the steps.”

“You’re in over your head, Foundling,” Barika said. “You have been since the beginning.”

I smiled.

“You know, I’ve had a lot of time to think about things on the march here. After Marchford, you see, I seriously considered assassinating Heiress even after Black essentially warned me off the idea. Do you know what held me off?”

“Fear,” the aristocrat mocked.

“Yes,” I agreed softly. “You’re right. I was afraid , Barika. Not of her but of... escalation. How much worse would she get, if she felt that her life was on the line?”

“Your mistake,” the Soninke said, “was to think that you should only be afraid of us when you threaten our lives.”

“Right again,” I chuckled. “Not in the way you meant it, but there it is. I keep expecting you lot to have lines you won’t cross. But you don’t, do you? You weren’t raised to think that way. Anything goes if it gets you what you want.”

“Torture might be preferable to your petty moralizing,” Barika said. “Not that you’ll get anything out of me. I’ve been trained to resist the likes of what you can bring to bear.”

“You probably have,” I acknowledged, and rose to my feet. “Thank you, Barika Unonti, for this valuable lesson.”

Calmly, I took the crossbow of the closest Gallowborne and placed a bolt through her eye. She was dead before she even realized what was happening.

“Masego,” I said, looking down at the corpse. “Scry Juniper. I’m ordering a full frontal assault.”

“And what will we be doing meanwhile, Catherine?” Hakram asked.

I spat to the side.

“We’re going to have a conversation with the man who cut off your hand.”

Chapter 42: Flaw

“Sometimes you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, executing the hens who laid them on trumped up charges and setting the most rebellious henhouse on fire as an example to the others.”
– Dread Empress Maleficent II

Behind me the Fifteenth formed into a battering ram.

Cohorts repositioned smoothly as Juniper’s orders were relayed, forming a long broad column with myself and the Gallowborne at the head of it. The Procerans and the devils still suffered the occasional shot from Pickler’s engines but the mercenaries had largely been allowed to flee. I’d had a hard conversation on the subject with the Hellhound mere moments ago – she’d been of the opinion that Nauk’s kabili should sweep through them so we’d have fewer to fight inside the walls, where my legion would be constrained by the size of the streets. She’d given in, though, when I’d pointed out one important fact: Heiress was after something inside the walls. She would not have burned so many bridges otherwise, resigned a commission handed to her by the Black Knight himself and summoned an godsdamned actual host of devils. This was no longer a siege, it was a race – and I’d need every soldier inside with me.

Since then, what felt like too long had passed. Barika’s execution had cooled my blood somewhat, but the fury had been replaced by restlessness. More than once I’d considered just taking the Gallowborne and going in without the rest of the Fifteenth, but it was just too much of a risk. The kind I couldn’t afford, not with heroes on the prowl and Heiress just one fig leaf away from open rebellion against the Tower. Masego was still hunched over his scrying trinket, eyeing the unfolding battle inside the walls.

“I thought we couldn’t scry behind the city walls,” I said.

“The devils disrupted the wards,” Apprentice replied. “I can have a look anywhere short of the Ducal Palace itself. And the lake. That place is swimming in so much holy power I doubt either of us could even eat the fish from it.”

“How’s it looking for the defenders?” Hakram gravelled.

“Their commander set up concentric rings of defences inside the city,” the bespectacled mage said. “The walls are lost, but in their retreat they set on fire all the houses behind them. It appears to be slowing the devils down and the soldiers are gathering on the first ring for another stand.”

“The Lone Swordsman?” I asked.

“I found him twice,” Masego said. “At the moment he appears to be single-handedly holding an avenue against the devils.”

“Keep an eye on him,” I ordered. “We’ll be headed in his direction as soon as we’ve established a beachhead.”

Apprentice replied with a gesture that was half-agreement half-dismissal of the conversation, eyes still peeled on his instrument. Behind us the horns finally sounded, signalling it was time to begin the advance. Like a great beast coming to wake, the Fifteenth began to march. I set Zombie to a trot and the Gallowborne followed. From the corner of my eye I saw Hakram gently remind Apprentice that he was supposed to be walking, jolting him out of his thoughts. I couldn’t tell exactly where it had begun, though I thought it might have been the middle of the column. One voice started, then hundreds joined in and the avalanche swept over the entire legion. My soldiers were singing.

“He was a prince and a handsome lad

On a pretty white horse, all iron-clad

His lance was silver but his heart gold

A peerless champion, or so we’re told

Oh! The Lord of the Silver Spears!”

Most of my legionaries were terrible singers, though with that many voices in chorus it was hard to even tell. I cast a look at Hakram, who was whistling the tune and trying not to grin.

“So he cornered us on a muddy hill

His knights were up and eager to kill

But he said halt! We need not fight!

Only the she-witch will die tonight!

Oh! The Lord of the Silver Spears!”

Well, at least they were moving. The tune had been set to the cadence of a legionary’s quick march, because of course it had. We got in range of bowshot from the walls fast enough, but there was no one left to shoot at us. All the defenders had retreated. That showed foresight on the part of the commander on the other side: they’d been given orders in case the walls were breached.

“He rode up to us and rang his horn

Called out the Boss with all his scorn

Then sat there idle, proud as all Hells

Waiting while she bid her farewells

Oh! The Lord of the Silver Spears!”

The river barges were no longer smoking but they were messy terrain to go through. The Gallowborne had to break formation around what had once been a prow, shields up and casting wary looks ahead. Hakram’s axe – he’d changed weapons after Marchford, and proved deadlier with this one than he’d ever been with the last – had been in hand since we’d started moving. Once in a while he nudged Masego in the right direction with it, since the Soninke still refused to look away from his instrument.

“So we shot him, right through the throat

So much for that armour and all the gloat

So learn the lesson from that sad day –

Fuck with the Fifteenth and you’ll pay

Oh! Poor Lord of the Silver Spears!”

I snorted. Well, that was one lesson to derive from Three Hills. If singing what was essentially trash-talk as they marched kept my legion’s morale up, I wasn’t going to mess with the formula. The Gallowborne formed a wedge as we approached the gates, slowing down. Said gates had been propped up where they were supposed to stand, but even from my saddle I could see there was nothing holding them there but their weight.

“Adjutant,” I said.

The tall orc laughed and moved forward, my personal guard splitting around him. Holstering his axe in the loop of leather he used to hold it, Hakram brought up his tower shield and hunched his shoulders. I felt his Name flare up and squinted in his direction. To my senses his Name felt like something steady and large, almost like stone. It was strange that I could get even that much from him – I never had from Apprentice and Heiress, or even Black. He bullrushed almost faster than I could follow with the naked eye, shield impacting the metal gates with a sound like bell ringing. A heartbeat later the whole thing toppled, falling to the ground in a cloud of dust. Almost instantly arrows fell all round him, a pair sliding off his shield with a metallic clatter. He backpedalled and the Gallowborne formed a ring of shields around him. Through the smoke and dust on the other side, I could see burning buildings and a handful of archers already retreating.

One lingered to try to take a potshot at me, but one of my guards popped out from behind the shields and placed a bolt in his chest. The man fell, likely dead, and that was enough to make the others flee outright. Scouts, I decided. Placed here to tell William when we’d be crossing the gates. Were they still under the impression that Heiress and I were working together? They couldn’t be, not after Pickler had turned the ballistas on the mercenaries. It might not matter to them at all, I thought. As far as the heroes were concerned any force but their own managing to hold the city was a disaster.

“Forward,” I ordered. “Secure the area.”

The Gallowborne sprang into movement as the first legionaries began catching up to us. Hune’s regulars, with sappers behind them. Juniper wanted to establish at least basic fortifications around the gates in case we had to defend the chokepoint from the devils. So far it looked like our taking of the entrance wouldn’t be contested, but I doubted that would last. The way I saw it, the defenders had two problems at the moment. First, they had to hammer back the devils. Otherwise they’d rampage across the city and kill anyone they could get their hands on. Second, they couldn’t allow the Fifteenth to dig in past the gates. If we did there was no getting us out: urban warfare was not a specialty of the Legions of Terror, but we had the professional soldiers and the munitions to force our way in one city block at a time. The moment Juniper had a solid beachhead it was all downhill for them. Zombie took me past my personal guard and into the plaza behind the gates, leaving them scrambling to catch up.

From the corner of my eye I saw movement around a rooftop and instantly brought up my shield. It was a devil. One of the winged creatures I’d glimpsed earlier, looking like a hairy dwarf gargoyle with claws and bat wings. The devil sat there on top of a burning roof, apparently not inconvenienced by the smoke and flames.

“Devil,” I called out. “Get ready for a wave.”

Captain Farrier bellowed orders and the Gallowborne tightened formation. I remained on my horse, calmly studying the devil as Hakram strode to my side.

“It’s not attacking,” I said.

The tall orc made a thoughtful sound. “Waiting for reinforcements?”

“Heiress will be trying to push deeper into the city, not hit as we enter,” I said. “Otherwise she’ll overextend right in front of the Lone Swordsman.”

Something that was not likely to end well for her. If Masego was to be believed, the hero was turning any street he was in into a one-man meat grinder. If he ever ran out of devils to kill, he’d be going on the offensive for sure.

“She could be looking through its eyes,” Hakram suggested.

More likely. No need to allow that to continue any longer.

“Farrier,” I yelled. “Crossbows on the devil.”

Before fifteen heartbeats had passed the creature was trying and failing to duck under shots, shrieking as its leg was nailed to the thatch. It’s not fighting back at all , I frowned. Masego arrived at my side, finally bothering to look up from his scrying. I leaned to the side in my saddle.

“Can you capture it?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow and flicked his wrist upwards, muttering a few words. Panes of blue light formed a pyramid around the devil, neatly imprisoning it. Another flick of the wrist and the pyramid was ripped off the roof, skidding against the ground as it was pulled in our direction. Half a dozen crossbows were trained on the imprisoned creature before it had even finished moving. Getting down from my horse, I ignored the protests of my guards and walked to the devil. I knelt in front of it.

“Apprentice,” I said. “Open the panel in front of me.”

Immediately everyone but Masego began protesting, but I gestured for them to shut the Hells up.

“It’s not going to fight me,” I said.

The panel flickered out of existence and I leaned forward, pointing a finger at the devil. It shrunk back, screaming in dismay.

“It can’t fight me,” I said.

Apprentice knelt at my side, speaking in the arcane tongue. He clicked his tongue disapprovingly.

“Only nine layers of binding,” he said. “Sloppy work, even by mass-summoning standards.”

Nine lines of runes made of light formed in the air in front of him. The dark-skinned mage ran a finger down them, stopping at the eighth line.

“They can’t attack anyone part of the Legions,” he said, sounding surprised. “If they touch a legionary they have to just... stop moving.”

I closed my eyes, letting out a breathless laugh.

“Of course they can’t,” I said. “The angle Heiress will work after this is that she was trying to make sure the angel wouldn’t have anyone to convert, in case I failed. She was just covering all the bases like a good Imperial citizen.”

Hakram let out a sharp breath. I hadn’t even realized he was standing behind me.

“If she wants to pretend that, her devils can’t kill legionaries,” he said. “Otherwise she was getting in the way of a Tower-sanctioned military operation.”

“Well now,” I murmured. “Doesn’t that just change things?”

I grinned, slow and mean and showing too much teeth for it to be friendly. It looked like I wasn’t the one getting hampered by politics, for once.

“Hakram,” I said, rising to my feet. “Send a runner to Commander Hune. The moment we have enough troops in the city I want her forces to swing east in force and flank the devils. They are to slaughter any hellspawn they see and engage the defenders only if attacked.”

Adjutant saluted and immediately got to it. I offered a hand to Apprentice, hoisting him up.

“You still have a general idea where the Lone Swordsman is?” I asked.

“He moved further east,” Masego replied, “but I can find him. Is that where we’re headed?”

“As soon as Hakram is back we’re moving out,” I said.

“You take me to such interesting places, Catherine,” Apprentice spoke drily. “What’s next, a church full of demons that is also on fire?”

I shrugged. “Day’s still young.”

—

We hugged the wall on our path east, as much to run into devils as to avoid running into rebels. A single company of regulars and we still must have killed twenty of the creatures on our way through: the Gallowborne realized early that if you ran in their direction they just backed away without fighting, making them really easy to corner. Jackalheads and ironhooks, mostly, but one of the lieutenants was a deft hand with a crossbow and brought down a couple of the already-nicknamed monkeybats. Time was hard to estimate in a city on fire, which was unfortunate given how often I seemed to run into those. Twice we ran into small crews of scouts, but they retreated without fighting. Couldn’t really blame them: not a lot of people would want to scrap with a company of hardened veterans led by three Named. The further east we got, the thicker the crowd of devils became. They started fleeing at the sight of us, which was irritating but could be worked to our advantage. If we cleared wherever we stepped just by being there, we could take the pressure off the defenders.

It would be a fine line to walk. I didn’t want William and his troops to get off too easy or they’d give the Fifteenth trouble later, but if they collapsed now we were all in trouble. I’d had an idea, when I’d realized how Heiress’ devils were bound, that might neuter them savagely. I needed to be in the right place for it to work, though, and that place was the thick of the fight. Where all the enemy soldiers were. That was not, I reflected, ideal. On the other hand, if I didn’t start improvising now this whole battle was fucked. Even worse, there was no telling where Heiress currently was: Apprentice could find no trace of her when he scried, and I still had no godsdamned idea what she was actually after. I couldn’t help but think that the devils were another distraction, something for me to get stuck in while she had free hand to accomplish... whatever it was she’d set out to accomplish. But I can’t take care of that until I’m done with William.

If the Lone Swordsman burst onto the scene while I was dealing with Heiress, I was pretty much dead. All the contingencies I had for him involved a degree of controlled conditions, which was half the reason Masego would not be leaving my side for the rest of this battle. The best outcome I could hope for with the heroes was a truce until the devils were out of play, but that seemed... unlikely. Not opening an additional front on each other might be more feasible, but if Heiress was already past their lines I’d have to pursue – and somehow I doubted they’d just clap me on the back and let me through. That could get messy. Weeping Heavens, my life was a series of progressively worse messes. I’d been kind of hoping the worseness would eventually reach a plateau of awful and stop, but so far that height was nowhere in sight. Anyhow, I need to survive today to witness that shining ray of hope , I thought darkly. I slowed Zombie’s gait with a twist of will, the Gallowborne following suit around me. I’d had an itch between my shoulders blades for a while now, one I’d first believed to be the result of sweat and rough clothes. But it wasn’t going away.

“Hold your fire,” I told my guards. “Thief, come the Hells out. Let’s have a chat.”

There was a long moment of silence afterwards and I almost began to think I’d read too much into this. I hadn’t, though: the short-haired woman strolled out of a nearby alley, hands casually in her pockets. No weapons in sight, but considering she’d thrown two dozen boats at the field earlier that meant less than nothing. She was smiling, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

“I love talking,” Thief said. “It allows me to ask all sorts of questions, like ‘why the fuck did you summon a bunch of devils, you unholy twit?’”

“Wasn’t me,” I said. “We’re clearing them out wherever we can.”

“If they’re not on your side,” Thief said, narrowing her eyes, “why aren’t they attacking you?”

“It’s complicated,” I replied, “Long story short, Heiress is running a scheme.”

“Well that makes it all better then,” the heroine said with an unpleasant smile. “ Does that mean we’re friends now? Wanna hold hands, maybe braid my hair?”

“Heiress wouldn’t have had the excuse to pull something like this if you assholes weren’t summoning a brainwashing angel,” I retorted sharply.

There were limits to how civil I was willing to be with these people, and the kind of incivility I was willing to take from them.

“Desperate times,” Thief said, face turning blank. “What do you want, Foundling?”

“I want to talk with William.”

“Not sure he’ll be all that interested in talking,” the heroine said.

“That’ll be my problem to deal with,” I replied.

Thief mulled over that for a moment, then shrugged.

“No skin off my back if he puts you down, I suppose. Follow me,” she said. “Last I heard he was on the hunt for your little friend.”

I frowned. “Heiress?”

“That’s the one,” Thief agreed. “They should be playing the ‘who’s losing an arm’ game by now.”

The heroine leaned forward.

“Here’s a hint: the answer is usually ‘ not him’ .”

Red Skies

“This eye for an eye business is horridly proportional. I assure you, if I’m losing an eye then so is everyone else.”
– Dread Empress Sanguinia II

“So you’re going to be fighting this Warlock, I take it?” Tikoloshe said.

The incubus was lounging in a camp chair, something Wekesa had believed to be physically impossible before being presented with the current evidence. The devil looked like a man in every way, the deception perfect unlike with some of his less cunning kindred: smooth dark skin and closely cropped hair, an intelligently angular face and smiling eyes. When he’d first summoned the devil Apprentice had admittedly been curious about what appearance he would take. Incubi formed their looks around the deepest desires of the individual who’d brought them into Creation, though they could discard that shape at will if they so wished. There’d been no oiled-up muscles or revealed hairless chests: Tikoloshe had come through dressed neatly and almost conservatively, his tastefully embroidered tunic topped by a collar that rose up almost up to his chin. It had surprised Wekesa, but somehow it felt accurate. There was a reason incubi and succubi were often summoned by practitioners seeking to perfect their craft: learning what they truly found attractive allowed them to discover something about themselves in a subject matter where humans were in the habit of lying to themselves. To know yourself was to know your power.

“That is the plan,” Wekesa agreed, pouring himself a drink from the carafe on the table.

His tent in the camp of Malicia’s rebel army – officially the actual rightful Legions of Terror, though that would have to wait on a final triumph to become reality – was a little to the side of the others, warded heavily and under instructions by Amadeus not to be disturbed. Apprentice had managed to accumulate a few creature comforts during the campaign, like a real table and a steady supply of wine, but bare necessities like a bed that wasn’t a glorified block of wood or a real bathtub still escaped him. At least a few stone candles topped by blue mage fire made lanterns and their greasy scent unnecessary. Not that mud and greenery mere a much better scent, admittedly.

“ Plan is not the word that comes to mind,” Tikoloshe spoke idly. “You are still young, and this Warlock is in the fullness of his power. I detect the hand of your vicious little confederate at work in this.”

Amadeus had made no mystery of his opinion that the incubus should be forced to cough out all his tricks and secrets and then put down like an animal, a position that had not endeared him to Tikoloshe. Wekesa disagreed, as it happened, and his friend trusted his judgement enough to let the matter lie. The devil was too interesting to be wasted in such a manner.

“He actually tried to convince me to delay the fight until we could catch him without support,” Apprentice said. “Something about hounding him until he was too weak to put up a fight, then striking the finishing blow.”

“I suppose even that man can be right, once in a while,” Tikoloshe conceded easily. “Pour me one as well, would you?”

Wekesa raised an eyebrow in surprise but complied, handing the devil the goblet after it was full. Their fingers touched when Tikoloshe took the cup and just that was enough to raise the tension in the tent by a notch. It would have been easier to ignore the attraction, Apprentice knew, if he hadn’t been so certain the bindings on the incubus were perfect. That near-certainty that the sex would be fantastic made it even worse.

“I know for a fact devils do not need sustenance while in Creation,” Wekesa said, watching the other man sip at the wine.

“We don’t,” Tikoloshe acknowledged. “I do, however, quite enjoy the taste of wine. The Praesi stuff is vastly inferior to the vineyards from the west, but it makes for an acceptable table vintage.”

“So you can differentiate between specific kinds of tastes,” Apprentice said, eyes sharpening as he leaned forward.

The eighth of the twenty-three bindings the incubus was under prevented him from ever lying, one of the many reasons the devil was such a fascinating source of information.

“ I can,” Tikoloshe said, hand rising to indicate an equivocation. “A consequence of both the length of my existence and what you might call my... nature.”

“Lust,” Wekesa said.

“Desire,” the incubus corrected. “Lust is such a limited concept, and I am a most complex creature.”

“You are an entity driven by an absolute,” Apprentice said. “Absolutes are, by their nature, simple. They would not function otherwise.”

Tikoloshe smiled. It was not patronizing or mocking: it was the smile of an educated man enjoying a lively conversation. Wekesa sipped at his wine to distract himself. He’d always had a weakness for clever men.

“Desire is to want ,” the incubus said. “I want all things, Apprentice. The pleasures of the flesh issome of the most instinctual desires to your species, so they tend to be the strongest desire in my kind as well. But I’ve been around for a very long time, and I’ve learned to be... discerning in my own desires.”

“Like wine,” the dark-skinned mage said.

“Fine meals, enjoyable conversation and even such small things as a bath at the perfect temperature,” Tikoloshe said. “I find beautiful calligraphy as stirring as bedsport, in its own way.”

Wekesa eyed him thoughtfully.

“How old are you, Tikoloshe?”

The devil laughed. “I was first called into being when the witch-queen of what you would now call the northern Principate became dissatisfied with her husbands. I was no longer young when the Miezans first came upon the shores of this continent, blown by a storm.”

At least a millennium and a half , the dark-skinned mage thought. Humbling, to think that the incubus would likely exist long after all he knew had crumbled to dust.

“Seen it all before, have you?” he said.

“The Dread Empire always wounds itself, left to its own devices,” Tikoloshe said. “This scrap is but a pittance compared to the War of Thirteen Tyrants and One.”

“We’ll be different,” Wekesa said. “When we win.”

The incubus laughed softly.

“Will you? Why? I’ve seen your leaders, Apprentice. Seen what they desire. You’re lucky the pale boy isn’t the one aiming for the throne – he’d murder every child in this nation with his bare hands, if it got him what he wants. Not that your ‘Malicia’ is much better. The woman craves control the way a starving man craves a meal.”

Apprentice leaned back in his seat. “And me? Have you see what I desire?”

Tikoloshe raised an eyebrow. Such a human gesture on such an inhuman creature. His kind really were the most skillfully deceptive devils could get. The impersonation was flawless.

“You know my bindings prevent me from doing so.”

“I’ll just tell you, then,” Wekesa chuckled. “I want to do magic.”

The devil cocked his head to the side.

“Simple, isn’t it?” the dark-skinned mage said.

“I wouldn’t say that at all,” the incubus replied softly.

“All of this...” Wekesa gestured broadly. “The backstabbing, the politics, the war. It bores me. I want to dissect the world, Tikoloshe. To open up Creation and see where the Gods traced their boundaries in blood and power.”

“How blasphemous,” the devil said delightedly.

“We will be different,” Apprentice said. “For the same reason we keep beating opponents out of our league. They think they’re strong because they’ve accumulated power and we haven’t, but that’s a fundamental misunderstanding. We’ve never used our own strength: we let Creation win for us.”

“You seem remarkably lucid, for a madman,” Tikoloshe noted.

“I might still die tomorrow,” the mage said. “Which is why I need to ask you two questions . I compel you to answer. Were you trying to seduce me throughout this conversation?”

“No,” the incubus replied.

“ I compel you to answer ,” he spoke again. “Are you attracted to me?”

“I am attracted to everyone,” Tikoloshe said.

The dark-skinned mage drained the rest of his wine, then rose to his feet. Wekesa unbuttoned the top button of his tunic. He raised an eyebrow at the incubus.

“Well?” he said. “What are we waiting for, then?”

—

When the High Lord Duma had ordered a fresh set of forts built in the northern reaches of his demesne, it had been met with a degree of surprise by most. The High Lordship of Aksum covered a third of the Wasteland but it had not been under threat by anyone in a long time: though Dread Emperor Nefarious had become a reclusive hedonist, the Empire was still largely at peace. Amadeus had recently told Wekesa it hadn’t actually been the High Lord’s notion at all. The refusal of the Clans to pay their owed tributes to the Tower had pushed the Chancellor – who’d effectively ruled Praes, in those days – to consider war with the greenskins. Though Wolof stood between Aksum and the steppes, the latter was still the last line of defence between the orcs and the Green Stretch. The Empire’s bread basket had to be protected at all costs, if it came to war. Widespread food shortages caused by rampaging greenskins would lead to the kind of unrest that had toppled Tyrants so many times before.

Now those same fortifications served to hinder the advance of a rebel army , though admittedly its ranks were filled with greenskins as had been feared. Amadeus had a way with them, especially the orcs, and the Chancellor had forced the entire species to take sides through the famous debacle that was the Night of Red Winds. A costly mistake, thinking that wiping out an entire clan would cow the rest. Now that act of treachery was the battle cry of ten thousands of angry orcs, all of them fighting for the rights of Dread Empress Malicia as the rightful ruler of Praes. Under Amadeus and Grem One-Eye the rebels were flying from victory to victory, and Alaya was using that as leverage to bring the fence-sitters among the High Lords to their side. Already Nok had declared for them, and word was Kahtan might do the same soon. All very promising, if hopelessly uninteresting to Apprentice. He had more practical matters to concern himself with, anyway. Such as the fortifications ahead.

The hillfort in front of him was the northernmost in the defensive lines of Aksum, and every attempt by their little rebellion to even assess what forces were inside had been met with abject failure. Scouts who got within half a mile were made into desiccated husks by spells coming from inside, a ritual Wekesa was rather familiar with. He’d learned the underlying concepts of it, when he’d been one of the many apprentices assigned to the Warlock. Before the man had tried to kill him and then sent monsters to hunt him when Wekesa managed to escape. Before he’d fallen in with a strange Duni boy who wanted to change the Empire one corpse at a time, before he’d met a sly-humoured waitress who would be forced into the seraglio by the whims of a broken madman. He’d occurred a debt, when he’d left the Warlock’s tutelage, one that predated the family he’d found since. This was his account to settle and he’d looked forward to it for a very long time.

Apprentice had garbed himself in a well-fitted set of clothes for the occasion. A traditional Soninke agbada , though cut a little more closely than was currently the fashion. The garb came in three parts: a pair of loose dark grey trousers that narrowed around the ankles, a long-sleeved shirt of the same colour and the garnet, open-stitched sleeveless gown worn over them both. Effectiveness and appearance should be married when feasible, such was the Soninke way. There was a hint of golden embroidery on the gown, the patterns arcane and hard to make out. The patterns strengthened the shield amulet he wore under his clothes, which was quite necessary: he’d sunk a lot of power into the defence, but his opponent was in another league entirely. Wekesa had always known he was strong in sorcery, abnormally so for one not born to a cultivated bloodline, but inborn talent was no match for decades upon decades of accumulated power and infernal pacts.

The fort was basic, he saw, likely because High Lord Duma had skimmed off the top of the funds provided to him by the Tower for their construction. A single ring wall stood close to the summit of the hill, with a squat tower inside. Wekesa was close enough to make out the silhouettes on that wall now, the two dozens of mages flanking the middle-aged Taghreb with a prominent hook nose he’d once looked up to as a teacher. Twice on his way down the dirt path the amulet under his clothes had warmed against his skin, a sign the Warlock had tried and failed to evaporate all the water inside his body. Apprentice strolled up to the fort, only stopping thirty feet or so away from the gates. The Warlock looked like he was about to talk, so he fished out the stone in his pocket and threw it in the man’s direction. It bounced off an invisible wall, getting lost somewhere on the battlements.

“A tracking charm,” the Warlock sneered. “That’s what you’re bringing to the table?”

Wekesa took out his dragonbone pipe, casually stuffing it with bangue. He struck a match and lit it, inhaling the herbs with a small sigh of pleasure.

“I’m out of juice,” Apprentice replied honestly. “Couldn’t even light this pipe with a bit of flame if I wanted to.”

“Disappointing,” Warlock said. “Though you were ever a disappointment.”

“Why?” Wekesa asked. “Because I wouldn’t let you feed me to a devil so you’d get a cut of my magic?”

“A bargain was struck,” the older Named said. “And I will yet get my due. Did you think just a shield would be enough to stop me? It may have been crafted skilfully, boy, but my power has grown since we last met.”

“I can feel your minions probing it,” Apprentice noted. “I imagine as soon as they find the fault lines you’ll start hammering at them.”

“That was always your weakness, Wekesa,” the Warlock said. “You’re too feeble on the offensive. So much raw power at your disposal and you chose to specialize in an inferior branch of sorcery.”

“Wards are the purest form of sorcery there is,” the dark-skinned mage disagreed, inhaling the smoke and blowing it out. “Wards are boundaries, and when you look at it with clear eyes Creation is nothing but a set of interlocked boundaries set by the Gods.”

One of the minions leaned close to the Named, whispering. Warlock pushed the woman away.

“You really are powerless,” his old teacher said. “You come to fight me incapable of casting?”

“Well, I’ve already cast three spells today,” Wekesa mused. “I can only wring out so much power out of this body without getting wrinkles and who wants that ?”

“Lord Warlock,” another minion called out. “Look up.”

Apprentice did not have to look to know what they’d noticed. Red skies as far as the eye could see. The third spell he’d cast that morning was beginning to take effect, right on time. Already drops of liquid fire were starting to rain, pattering against his shield. One of the minions was set aflame and began screaming as the hellflame spread all over his body and consumed him in a matter of moments. The others hastily put up shields of their own.

“Is this all you could manage?” Warlock mocked. “A meagre rain of flame? I taught you better than that. Shaping a spell like this will drain your power for an effect any half-baked practitioner can protect themselves from. Only worth using against the giftless.”

“I didn’t,” Wekesa said. “Create a hellstorm, that is.”

The older Named looked taken aback.

“You lie,” he said, beginning to smell the rat.

Apprentice blew out a stream of smoke, smiling serenely.

“You said it yourself, Warlock,” he replied. “I’m just a ward specialist. Fighting you in a casting war was always doomed to failure – you have reserves of nastiness you haven’t even begun to tap into, I’m sure.”

“You broke a boundary,” the Taghreb cursed.

“Weakened,” Apprentice corrected. “Temporarily, and only for entities meeting certain parameters. Still took everything I had left.”

In the distance a chunk of flaming rock the size of a small house hit the ground with a sound like thunder, spreading waves of hellflame on impact.

“And you were wrong, by the way,” Wekesa continued. “Earlier. It wasn’t a tracking charm. It was a homing one.”

The stone that was passing into Creation from one of the lesser Hells was the size of a fortress this time. Apprentice had aligned the boundaries so it would be just above the hillfort, and ensured it would hit with the homing charm. The Warlock crushed the pebble he’d thrown into dust with a single word, but it was too late for that to change anything. Now the laws of Creation were ensuring the trajectory. Maybe if they’d seen the stone coming sooner they might have managed to stop it, but the only mage with the talent to do that was the Warlock – and Wekesa had kept him talking, knowing the older man would not be able to resist gloating.

So now, watching the other Named invoke half a dozen devil pacts to try to break the trajectory and fail against the weight of thousands and thousands of pounds of rock, Apprentice continued smiling and enjoyed his pipe. His own shield, designed over months of careful work until he’d finally granted it power into it that morning, had been crafted to keep him safe specifically through this event. Howling winds and eldritch fire blew around his protective bubble but he was safe underneath, watching his enemies be crushed by what was effectively a small mountain of rock and unholy fire. Eventually he was able to see again, and he felt his Name fill like a glass of wine. As far as he could see, in all directions, this corner of Creation had been turned into a hellish wasteland of stone and flame.

Casually emptying his pipe on the ground, Warlock began the trek back to camp.

Chapter 43: Truce

“The best defence is to have killed all your enemies.”
– Dread Emperor Terribilis I, the Thorough

Even with Thief guiding the way, we ran into problems.

Apparently her place in the hierarchy of the city wasn’t as well-established as William’s: twice knots of rebel soldiers tried to refuse passage. The first instance of it wouldn’t have been much trouble if it came to blades – we outnumbered them, and the carts they’d upended as a makeshift barrier would fold like parchment in front of any Named – but the second was... tense. Five hundred household troops in Dormer livery, who didn’t even bother to hail us before they started shooting arrows. One of my Gallowborne was wounded and I was that close to forcefully clearing them out, but Thief jumped in between us and screamed sense into them. It took too long for my tastes to get through. The more we waste time here, the more of a head start Heiress gets on her objective. I got glares and muttered accusations of being a traitor as we passed the enemy soldiers, though this time I wasn’t the only one. The Gallowborne got their share of hisses accusing them of being collaborators, being obviously Callowan themselves. My personal guard seemed to take the accusations in stride, for now anyway. I knew from personal experience how much those whispers could sting.

Mostly because they had a morsel of truth to them.

I’d had my doubts William would manage to corner Heiress – she was a slippery one – but they were put to rest before we ever laid eyes on them. In the distance I saw a stream of black flame rise from an avenue, clipping the edge of a rooftop. The fire spread in the blink of an eye until it covered the entire rooftop and then snuffed itself out, leaving nothing behind. I honestly wasn’t sure whether I was hoping the Lone Swordsman had been hit by that or not. I believed Heiress would be easier to kill, if it came to a fight, but I doubted anything good would come out of her getting her hands on a hero’s corpse. I frowned as my men picked up the pace. Not that she could actually kill William, anyway. As long as he and I were still bound by our pattern of three, we could only die at each other’s hands. More or less. I’d gotten a reminder in Marchford that demons were not things of Creation and cared little for its rules. Thief left us as we turned a corner, bounding up to the rooftops with catlike grace. So much for her playing the intercessor.

“Shields up,” I called out.

The Gallorborne interlocked into a wall of steel in front of me, allowing me to focus on the scene ahead. None of Heiress’ little friends were with her, it appeared. Her only attendants were two dozen Procerans, currently panicking as they spectacularly failed to keep the Lone Swordsman contained. William was wearing his usual horribly pretentious longcoat over mail, boots skidding across the stone as he danced among the mercenaries and took them apart methodically. No helmet, his dark hair ran free as he smiled thinly. My eyes narrowed as I realized his abomination of a sword was nowhere in sight: he used a Callowan longsword, well-made but not angelic in the slightest. Things were already looking up. Parrying was a valid tactic again, it seemed. Heiress pointed a finger in the hero’s direction and seven dots of green light formed in front of it, each of them turning into an arrow point that immediately shot off towards the hero.

The arrows remained linked to the dot they’d formed from, the spell lights homing on William as he ducked and weaved around them. Heiress barked a word in the arcane tongue and the ligaments of light, scattered all around the hero, tightened in an attempt to bind him. Before they could touch him a flash of light emanated from the Lone Swordsman, dissipating the spell as he reached behind him and effortlessly plucked the javelin one of the Procerans had thrown at his back. Spinning on himself, he sent it back at the mercenary: the point took the man in the throat, killing him instantly. I’d give William this: he was an ornery little shit, but he could fight . Hunter had been a priceless asset the only time we’d been on the same side, and the deceased hero had been nowhere close to the Swordsman’ league.

“Willycakes,” Thief called out from a rooftop to my right. “I brought ‘friends’.”

The hero cast a glance in our direction. I took Zombie around the decapitated corpse of another horse, Akua’s if I was not mistaken. Explains why she’s on foot now.

“Foundling,” he spat. “Never far, when Callow bleeds.”

“Willycakes,” I greeted him drily. “And Akua too! Having a rough day, Heiress?”

“Just taking a walk, Catherine,” Akua said languidly. “Stepping on vermin, now and then. They do seem to be everywhere, in this city.”

The Soninke aristocrat had discreetly slipped one hand behind her back. Casting as we talked, I was sure. And we’ll be having none of that, thank you very much.

“Apprentice,” I said. “Be a dear and shut that down, would you?”

The bespectacled mage chuckled. “ Now you talk sweet to me. Typical.”

Pushing up his sleeves, Masego cracked his fingers and grinned maliciously.

“If you would grant me this dance, Lady Akua? Here, I’ll lead .”

The dark-skinned man’s clothes shuddered, as if caressed by a breeze, and he pushed his open palms forward. The Procerans surrounding Heiress were scattered like toys by an invisible force, while the Soninke herself hastily brought her hidden hand forward and traced a single sigil in the air. A bubble of nearly-transparent magic formed around her, turning opaque under the force of Masego’s own spell trying to hammer it down. I left them to it, for the moment, and turned to William.

“I can cripple the devils all over the city,” I told him.

“But,” he sneered.

“You’ll need to reach into the deepest parts of your will and manage... not to contradict me instantly,” I said.

“I make no such promises,” the Lone Swordsman said.

“I’m trying to save your godsdamned hides here, Willy ,” I snarled. “For once in your life, do the smart thing instead of polishing your principle codpiece.”

“William,” Thief broke in. “Some of the barricades are already buckling. Whatever she’ll do can’t be worse than children getting killed in their cribs.”

The Lone Swordsman met my eyes, green to brown. If he was expecting me to be intimidated by it, he was barking up the wrong tree. I’d stared down more intimidating things than the likes of William. The sound of fire and screams drifted in from the distance.

“Fine,” he said, looking away.

“Apprentice,” I said.

The overweight mage casually tossed me one of the trinkets from his dreadlocks, eyes never leaving Heiress. Their little scuffled had changed in nature while I negotiated with the idiot: Masego’s force and Heiress’ shield were now a shifting landscape of differing pressures, some parts buckling in and others jutting out. He’d yet to manage to power through. I snatched the silvery pyramid out of the air and brought it close to my mouth. I cleared my throat, and the sound of it resonated broadly: like Apprentice said, once it was activated any sound touching the trinket was massively amplified.

“Under my authority as the Squire, I declare the city of Liesse under martial law,” I announced, my words drowning out everything else for a moment. “As of this moment, every human inside the city walls has been conscripted into the Fifteenth Legion.”

The silver trinket darkened the moment I finished speaking, losing its shine and even cracking in some places. I dropped it into a saddlebag, reluctant to disturb Apprentice from his contest of will by tossing it back.

“As long as the acting commander of the forces inside the city doesn’t do something stupid like, you know, openly contradicting me,” I said, “the devils can’t touch anyone anymore.”

“So now, that we’ve all joined the Legions I have to ask the most important question: how’s the pay?” Thief asked.

Hakram shrugged. “For the enlisted? Not bad. Silver though, not gold.”

“Adjutant,” I sighed. “Stop humouring the heroes.”

William absent-mindedly walked over to one of the Procerans who was trying to get up, opening his throat with a flick of the wrist. The others scrabbled away in panic.

“And this protection holds even if you’re dead, I take it?” the hero asked.

I unsheathed my sword.

“I’m not sure I like the direction this conversation is heading,” I said mildly.

There was a pop ahead as Heiress’ shield finally gave way. She swept her arms gracefully in a circle and with a triumphant smile redirected whatever spell Masego had been using in our direction. Apprentice frowned and tapped the ground with his foot: the invisible force exploded halfway to our group in storm of invisible power, ripping out pavement stones and tossing them around. I ducked under one, pressing against my mount.

“ Two hundred paces ,” Heiress said. “ Eight binding, lifted. Attack .”

Three heartbeats later, a jackalhead leapt down from a rooftop and landed in front of the recovering Procerans. It leered hungrily at us.

“William, remember that time we had a truce until everyone else was dead?”

And then you pretty much split my belly in two and left me dying on the ground, I refrained from adding.

“Granted,” the hero said. “And not a moment longer.”

I’d heard that one before, and though he’d observed the truce to the letter the red scar across my chest was a reminder of how short a truce like that could be. I slid down from my horse, sword still in hand.

“Captain Farrier,” I called out. “Hold the back of the street. Don’t interfere otherwise – this one’s above your pay grade.”

“Good hunting, ma’am,” the captain replied, already getting his men in position.

Hakram rested his axe on his shoulder, baring his fangs.

“Priority target?” he asked.

“Heiress,” I said. “Masego-“

“Battlefield control, like we practiced,” he interrupted easily.

I felt my Name pulsing under my skin, eager to sink its teeth into my enemies. Well, it wouldn’t go hungry tonight. Already I could see devils swarming in our direction from the east, jumping over rooftops and gathering in the sky. What Heiress had done must have served as a beacon for them, because every single one I saw was coming for us. Joy. For the first time it occurred to me I wasn’t sure what would happen to the bindings on the hellspawn if Heiress died. Would they just all be unmade? That would be... bad. They’d rampage across the city. On the other hand, I couldn’t afford to spare someone like Akua. She was likely to escape if I took her prisoner, and as long as she held a modicum of control over the devils she had the largest stick to swing out of the three Named currently fighting for control over Liesse. Not an acceptable situation, so I supposed I’d have to burn that bridge when I got to it. I wasted no more time over the thought: the longer I dallied, the more devils would be on us.

With my left hand I unsheathed the knife at my hip and strode forward, Hakram covering that same flank. Unlike Adjutant, I had no shield. Since my leg had been crippled by the demon I’d been forced to admit that this kind of fighting no longer worked for me: I couldn’t afford to take hits from behind a shield anymore. My footing wasn’t as solid as it used to be. Instead I had to focus on footwork and attack, timing my movements precisely and going for killing blows. One of these days I’d seen about getting a bow or a crossbow to use to widen my range of options, but for now I’d make do with belt of throwing knives strapped across my plate chest piece. And also the handful of... other surprises I carried in the satchel attached to the side of my belt. My first real opponent of the day was an ironhook who jumped straight off the roof to sink its claws into my throat: I ducked under it, letting it land behind me and turning to sink the point of my sword into the back of its neck.

I was already moving again before the corpse dropped to the ground. Already there were a dozen devils standing between Heiress and us, but when she’d made her decision she clearly hadn’t factored in heroes . The Lone Swordsman was on the offensive, and I saw that Masego hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said the man could single-handedly hold a street off: the hero moved forward at a walking pace, and everywhere he went devils died . There were no bursts of light, no displays of Heavenly wrath or even Name-enhanced strength as he fought. William simply waited for their attacks, avoided them by a hair’s breadth and sent heads rolling with a single measured swing. I’d studied swordsmanship under one of its greatest living practitioners for a year, sparred with a woman who could tear through steel with her bare hands and fought a demon of the Thirteenth Hell on foot with only five people at my side. And yet, in that moment, the sight of the Lone Swordsman calmly dispatching one opponent after another sent a shiver down my spine. That was what the Mandate of Heaven looked like, I thought. An inexorable march forward against which even the most monstrous of strengths failed.

One of the hairy dwarf gargoyles tried to sweep down on me but its head was instantly pulped without any intervention on my part, the rest of its swarming companions dispersing with cries of fear. Apprentice was keeping the distractions off our back, like he was supposed to. Hakram and I impacted the mass of devils a heartbeat later. My Name flared up and I let myself sink into it, not to shape the power but to use the awareness that came with it. Everything came in flashes: a hand reached for my throat and I spun my wrist, slicing cleanly through it. I glimpsed a scream jackal head before I rammed my knife between its eyes, spinning around the devil as I tore out my blade. An ironhook came for my legs but Adjutant’s axe split its head in two before the orc kicked the corpse into the open maw of a lizardtiger. Another monkeybat landed screaming on my back but it instantly began to turn to dust as Apprentice took care of the problem while I opened the throat of another ironhook. A jackalhead bounced off of Hakram’s shield and tried to tackle me but my knife flicked up and opened it from crotch to throat. I abandoned the knife in the devil’s body and caught a garygoyle by the throat, squeezing until it’s head popped off. I half-stepped away from a lizardtiger’s lunge, crouching to take back my knife as Hakram’s axehead tore through its neck.

Everything was crisp-clear, like the air on a cold morning, and I felt a sort of savage joy welling up in me. From the corner of my eye I saw Thief wading across the devils on the rooftop behind Heiress, weaving around the grasping creatures like she was running an obstacle course. She leapt towards Akua’s back but was intercepted halfway through by a gargoyle. Undeterred, she somehow bunched up together and used the devil as leverage to jump again, landing in a crouch behind Heiress. The aristocrat pointed a palm at her, green runes appearing in a linked circle around her hand: there was a detonation like a sharper exploding and the heroine was blasted through the wall of the house behind her in her shard of wooden splinters. I wasn’t worried. Even heroes with Roles unsuited for fighting were remarkably hard to hurt. Another wave of devils came for us by Hakram’s side but they didn’t manage to get far. Collars of whirling wind formed around their throats, tightening and dragging them back.

I hacked through the shoulder of a jackalhead Adjutant battered down with his shield and allowed the orc to finish it as I pressed ahead. One last ironhook, who managed to weave under a sword stroke only to take a knife in the belly, and finally I was on Heiress. All that stood between the two of us was the last few Procerans – who eyed me with undisguised fear. To my right I saw the Lone Swordsman cleaving through a devil and casually stepping between the halves of the corpse. I ignored him for now, eyes on Heiress. Who smiled.

“Almost,” she said.

There was a flash of blinding light and immediately I back stepped, grabbing a devil by the throat and pulling it between myself and the light as I clenched my eyes shut. I opened them the moment I felt the devil bite into my shoulder, fangs somehow managing to dent the steel plate. Tossing the devil away, I looked in Heiress’ direction and cursed. There were nine of her now, all running north.

“ Masego ,” I screamed. “ Get her .”

If she got away now, we were in trouble. Shit, which one was she? William started running, slicing a devil in two without stopping and headed after the closest Akua. I called on my Name, feeling it respond eagerly to my anger. A bolt of lightning threaded through the crowd, hitting one of the Heiresses in the back – the smoking corpse of a Proceran mercenary fell to the ground. The Lone Swordsman lopped an arm off another one, not even bothering to finish him off. Shadows coalesced into a spear as I tried to pick a target. A jackalhead tried to break my neck but Hakram had caught up and his axe sent the lupine head tumbling to the ground. Not the one in the middle, I thought frantically. Too obvious. To the left? It was away from William. I cursed and chose one of the three on the left, the one getting away the fastest. The spear of shadows flew straight, clipping Heiress in the shoulder.

Another mercenary fell to the ground, half his chest missing.

“Fucking Hells,” I cursed again.

The Lone Swordsman relieved another Heiress of her leg, but it was a decoy again. Only five left now. I couldn’t follow, damn me. I couldn’t run, not like I used to, and the devils were continuing to stream in. Without Apprentice to cover the skies, I was having to fend off the godsdamned gargoyles every time I wasn’t putting down some other devil going for my throat. William though, bless his Callowan hide, was hounding the fleeing Heiresses with all the viciousness he could muster. Another decoy died to an explosive ball of red light courtesy of Apprentice, and the last four were clustered together. The Lone Swordsman ran one through, didn’t even stop to look whether it’d been the real Heiress – it hadn’t – and burned another one alive with a blast of almost blinding light. Only two now, and William was closing in.

That was when the fireball caught him in the face.

The hero was thrown back, rolling on the stone. Ahead of him Fadila Mbafeno, on a horse and holding the reins of another, withdrew her hand. A dozen devils surrounded her like a hellish honour guard. One of the Heiresses deftly slid atop the free mount, claiming the reins and wasting no time in making her getaway. More devils poured in, filling the gap between the Lone Swordsman and my other rival, and I had to admit then and there we would be catching her right now. I hissed in anger, taking out my temper on the closest devil – my sword blade hacked through the chest, the jackalhead screaming in pain before I put it of its misery.

“Retreat,” I called out to Hakram.

We needed to regroup, and then get ready to press forward again. I sure as Hells wasn’t done with this fight.

Chapter 44: Victory

“Does not show traditional heroic talent for forging strong friendships but considered a leader by her peers. Responds aggressively to threats. Displays continued recklessness and an aptitude for thinking on her feet. This agent recommends disposal before she can turn into a legitimate threat to the peace of the realm.”
– Report ‘for the eyes of Lord Black only’, concerning the Imperial ward Catherine Foundling

“GALLOWBORNE, TIGHTEN RANKS!”

My personal guard dragged the wounded behind their shield wall and began retreating in good order under the bellowed instructions of Captain Farrier. They’d held up surprisingly well against the assault of the devils, I saw. Less than a line of casualties. Some of that could be attributed to the fact that they’d fought defensively and not been the focus of the hellspawn to start with, but there was more to it than that. They’d held the line against devils before, at Marchford. They’d been through the crucible already, and all the soldiers who would have flinched in front of the howling horde were already dead. To borrow one of the more brutal sayings of the Queen of Blades, war had separated the wheat from the chaff. I fell back behind the protection of the shield wall, Adjutant swatting down anything that came even remotely close to us. Masego, I saw, had already done the same. My Callowan soldiers gave him as wide a berth as they could: Apprentice had shown enough of what he could do that my rank and file stepped lightly around him.

Getting back to my personal guard had been a matter of running more than fighting. The Gallowborne were now at the back end of the avenue where most of the fight had taken place, backs against a stone guildhouse to limit how many angles they’d have to defend. I took a look back to where I’d done most of my fighting today and grimaced: it was packed with devils, milling around and beginning to mass for an offensive against my men. No sign of William, though there was no doubt the bastard was still alive. It would take more than devils to do in the Lone Swordsman, even if he didn’t have his creepy sword. I bit my lip and considered my options. Heiress had either run off on a horse northwards or tried to fake me out again by continuing on foot to the east. I was inclined to believe she’d been on the horse: she wouldn’t be as sanguine disposing of her Praesi minions as her hired ones, and Fadila had followed her on the ride. Could be how she’s selling this, though. I resisted the urge to spit and set the matter aside. Wasting time to speculate on her tricks was playing right into her hand.

North or west? North of us there was the ritual site the Lone Swordsman was using to bring the angel into Creation, which my gut told me was her target. Whatever she was intending to do to that ritual, it couldn’t be allowed to come to pass. She was dangerous enough without having stolen an angel’s power or worse, corrupted it. There were precedents for that, though they were legend and not recorded history. Not that the existing Praesi records were all that reliable, considering Tyrants were the ones who decided what got written. Even worse, with Callowan histories largely put to the torch or confiscated after the Conquest there were no other record to cross-examine them with. North, I decided. It would have to be north. Trying to force our way through the devils was a recipe for a rout, even with three Named on our side, so we’d have to swing around. What was it Heiress had said, when she’d fucked us over? Two hundred paces. How much ground would that actually cover? Was it centred around her? It made most sense as a circle, but even if that was the case that didn’t tell me whether those two hundred paces were the radius or the diameter . That’s why we bring specialists, Catherine .

“Masego,” I said, jolting the mage out of his thoughts. “What Heiress did, with the devils. How does it work?”

The dark-skinned mage pushed up his glasses.

“I layman’s terms, she put down a metaphysical banner where she stood that formed a ward. Inside that ward, the eight binding for devils she’s summoned is lifted.”

In the distance a crossbow bolt caught a jackalhead in the chest. The devil yelped and retreated, but they were beginning to test our defences. We couldn’t linger here much longer.

“What’s the shape of the ward?”

“Circle,” he immediately replied. “Cast this hastily, it can only be that.”

“And the two hundred paces...”

“Diameter,” he frowned. “I’m assuming, considering the amount of sorcery she used to create it.”

Good news. Five streets to the right should be enough, maybe seven if they were too narrow. We’d lose time going around but that couldn’t be helped. I closed my eyes, visualizing what Heiress had done. Wait, Masego had said a ward . A fixed point, then, that she wouldn’t be able to control after she’d made it unless she was on hand.

“Apprentice,” I said slowly. “That ward, can you affect it?”

He blinked. “Given enough time I could break it, if that’s what you’re asking. Would there be a point to that? They can’t misbehave outside its boundaries, and what she did to lift the binding seems to be attracting them.”

Yes, I’d noticed that last part. I almost smiled, showing my teeth. Hakram let out a bark of laughter and Masgeo looked confused.

“Apprentice, when she lifted a binding she made a hole right?”

“You want me to lay a binding of my own,” the mage immediately understood.

It was always a pleasure to work with clever people.

“Right now every devil in Liesse is drawn to this ward like it’s a beacon,” I said. “Let them. When they get here, though? Make them fight .”

—

Modifying the ward was much faster than dismantling it, though not without problems. Heiress had laid traps into its structure, because of course she had. Masego took the precaution of creating a small levitating orb of light that sucked in the torrent of black flames that spewed out the moment he accessed the ward structure. He also had to take apart a set of fake runes he assured me would have rotted my eyes in their sockets if I’d looked at them. Still, before the devils mounted a proper attack he finished the job. What I saw afterwards was a sight I would take to my grave. I’d witnessed great and terrible things, since leaving Laure. Walked the grounds of the Tower and passed through the Hall of Screams. I’d watched a battlefield turn into a hellish wasteland of green flames at Three Hills, fought a fully incarnated demon in the ruins of Marchford. None of those held a candle to seeing a thousand devils rip each other apart gleefully in a massive melee, rending each other’s bodies apart with tooth and claw. I felt a shudder go through the Gallowborne as they watched, awed by the sight of the monsters turning on each other mercilessly. We didn’t stick around to see the fight play out, turning west to swing around the ward.

There was no banter, not after the mess we’d just left behind. My soldiers were in a subdued mood, and as I rode Zombie I kept an eye out on our surroundings. Twice I glimpsed goblins on rooftops, nodding back to their salutes before they scampered into the shadows. Robber’s cohort had been given a very specific task and it was pleasing to see they were on top of things. This particularly plan I’d hatched with Aisha’s help, and though events had conspired to complicate its completion I’d also been handed a golden pretext to use it. By the time we’d begun marching north again we’d gotten deep enough inside the city I was surprised we weren’t running into rebel soldiers. They must have retreated past the second ring of defences, though who had actually given that order was anyone’s guess. William must have been in overall command by sheer virtue of being a hero, but he wasn’t a battlefield commander. My money was on the Baroness Dormer, which wasn’t a bad thing for the Fifteenth. As far as I knew she hadn’t fought in the Conquest and had no real military experience. She was the kind of opponent Juniper would eat for breakfast.

The narrowness of the street we were in had forced the Gallowborne into a column instead of a stronger formation, which made me uncomfortable. These would not be good fighting grounds if we ran into the enemy. I was considering moving us to a broader avenue when I saw a single silhouette ahead of us, walking calmly towards my men. Trouble , I thought, calling a halt.

“There has to be another way,” Adjutant said quietly.

“We’ve discussed this before,” Apprentice replied flatly.

We had, and it was too late to back out now. I’d try talking first, but my history with talking sense into people was a littlecheckered. Still, who knew? There were a lot of ways for the third encounter between a hero and a villain to go. Few of those to my advantage, but sometimes you had to roll the dice even if the game was rigged. William paused four city blocks away from my forces, casually sweeping his sword along the ground. The brute strength and speed of the sweep created swirls of wind in front of him, scattering dust. The message was clear: the Gallowborne were not to advance any further. I dismounted Zombie, idly checking my weapons. My throwing knives were safely secured, and the satchel on the back of my belt held tight. Passing the shield wall, I strode forward to meet the Lone Swordsman on the field. His scrap with the devils had cost him no wounds, I saw. His long coat was torn in several places, but somehow that just made him look rugged. The chain mail under was still pristine and his dark hair stylishly tousled.

I was drenched in sweat under my plate, my bad leg ached and my hair had knotted against the edge of my open-faced helmet in a way that itched. Fucking heroes. He probably smelled liked flowers, I thought bitterly, while I smelled like horse and blood and being in over my head for at least the tenth time this year.

“And so we meet again,” William said, green eyes cold.

“That’s usually what happens when you go looking for people,” I spoke drily.

“As Heiress is no within my reach at the moment, I must call our truce at an end,” the Lone Swordsman said.

“Who would have seen that coming,” I spoke in a monotone. “Alas, you’ve taken me by surprise. Curse your unexpected betrayal.”

Apparently the hero hadn’t foreseen quite this much mockery when he’d prepared for this conversation in his head, because he did a piss poor job of hiding how irritated he was. Honestly, that was on him. I’d never shown him any respect before, why would I start now?

“Die,” he said. “And not nicely.”

“Villains have limited retirement options, William,” I said gently. “This isn’t exactly a revelation to me. What I’m curious about, though, is what happens after . Say you manage to kill me. What then?”

“Then your legion loses its leader,” he said. “I rally the army of Callow and we drive your butchers out of Liesse.”

“I’m not giving out any orders at the moment,” I pointed out. “My legate is. And as for you driving the Fifteenth out of this city... Well, the last time it fought a battle against a proper army, it spanked a force twice its size of professional soldiers. Half of which was mounted. You think levies and a bit of southern retinue is going to stand up to veterans like them? William, my soldiers brutalized devils when they were just a bare skeleton of a legion. They’re led by a woman so clever she sometimes scares me , and we’re on the same fucking side.”

“Are you quite done boasting?” the Lone Swordsman asked with disdain.

I ground my teeth, pushing down my flaring temper. Gods, it was like talking to a stone wall that was just sentient enough to be an obstinate jackass.

“What I’m telling is that this battle is over,” I said. “We’re in the city. There’s no walls to hide behind and your barricades are just going give my sappers a good laugh. There’s no winning this for you anymore, William. My death makes no real difference. If anything it just makes it easier for Apprentice or Adjutant to kill you afterwards – no more Rule of Three keeping you alive.”

“All those pretty sentences covering for one word: surrender,” he mocked. “That’s always been your answer, hasn’t it Catherine? Licking the Tower’s boot and hoping your foreign paymasters take pity on us.”

“For once in your life,” I growled, “try to think beyond your pride. What are you accomplishing here? The rebellion is over, William. The Duke of Liesse is dead. Black dispersed the Countess’ army without even giving battle. Procer has its own troubles in the south and it can’t afford to open up another front. There are no reinforcements coming for you. You are alone. ”

“Yes,” he smiled strangely. “Alone. It was, I think, always supposed to end like this. It is... fitting.”

“This isn’t a story, William,” I said tiredly. “Thousands of people are going to die. It won’t be glorious, it won’t be heroic. It’ll just be piles of corpses littering the streets getting picked at by the crows. All those lives snuffed out for no good reason.”

“You know, I once told Almorava the very same thing,” the hero said. “About it not being a story. I was wrong. This is a story, Catherine. It always was. Even this conversation is part of it: my last temptation before the end. I made a choice, Squire, and I stand by it. Some things are worth dying for.”

“And the people of Liesse, are you choosing for them too? Because when Contrition comes calling, it won’t ask them nicely to enrol. You’re robbing them of free will so you can play the leading role in your little tragedy.”

“You know little of the Hashmallim,” he said. “All they do is show you the truth of what you are. Of what Creation is. They don’t force anyone’s hand, Catherine. They don’t have to, once you understand. There is only one path forward.”

“All you’re doing is letting some creature from another realm into the heads of hundreds of thousands to tinker with their will,” I snarled. “Gods save us all from principled men. You’re really the same as he is, when it comes down to it. You have a point to make and you don’t care what it costs to everyone else. Because you want to be right, even if half the continent burns for it. At least villains own what they are.”

William laughed.

“And what do you stand for, Catherine Foundling?” he challenged. “Over a year we’ve fought, you and I, and I’ve yet to see you take a stance. You claim your way is the one that works, but what have you actually accomplished? You don’t have morals, Squire. You don’t have beliefs. Like a reed, you bend however the wind blows.”

“I want peace,” I said. “I want order. I want good crops and fair taxes. I want Callow to prosper, and I don’t care who rules it as long as it does. If I have to strike deals with monsters to see that done, I will. Kingdoms, empires, they’re just lies we all agree on so our lives have a frame. What matters is the people, not the deceit. The Kingdom of Callow is no longer a lie that serves its people, and so it needs to die .”

“A kingdom is more than the sum of its people,” William said. “It has a higher meaning, a higher purpose. I am a citizen of the Kingdom of Callow, and so I am free. And I will fight so that one day all other Callowans can claim the same.”

“I should have killed you, that first night,” I said. “I didn’t understand what I was unleashing. I thought I did, Gods forgive me, but I could not have been more wrong.”

“Too late,” the Lone Swordsman said, sword rising. “Let us end this, Squire. This time, there is no Warlock to save you.”

I unsheathed my sword calmly.

“If I’m going to beat a truth into you today, William, it’s this one: I’m the person people need saving from .”

He moved like lightning. The longsword carved through the space where my head had been a heartbeat earlier, but I’d ducked under the swing and rammed my fist into his stomach. It didn’t do much – I doubted he’d even bruise – but I wove my Name into a trick and a quick burst of shadowy energy pushed him back. I pressed the advantage, feinting for his arm but turning it into a lunge that would take him through the throat. His blade came up to slap mine away as he twirled gracefully and I smiled. With his old sword, he might have managed to cut through my blade with his own. Now, though? Now we both fought with steel. The fight was a little more even. I moved sideways, circling him slowly, and he moved to match me. I’d meant to continue doing that until the afternoon sun was in his eyes – unlike me he had no helmet to shield his sight – but the bastard knew his way around a sword fight. Right before he would have stepped where I wanted him to, he ran a finger along the length of his sword. There was a flash of blinding light but I was prepared for it: he’d pulled a similar trick in our last duel and I’d been thinking of counters even since.

Sharpening my senses with my Name was one of the first tricks I’d learned, but it had taken me a while to realize I could also do the opposite. For less than a heartbeat, I blinded myself. When my sight came back I caught his wrist as he brought his sword down to cave my head in, my own sword swiping at his lower leg. I drew blood through the thick leather boots and spun away from him, hastily giving grounds. Gods Below, pushing back his swing even for a moment had nearly broken my arm. He was stronger than the last time we’d fought, and I didn’t mean that in an abstract sense: he was physically stronger. And faster too, I was pretty sure. How he’d managed that without putting on muscles mass I couldn’t know, but it felt like Name shenanigans at work. I spat to the side in dismay. My own Name had never been gracious enough to give me anything physical but better reflexes, which apparently all Named got anyway. Fucking heroes. I’d deal with it anyway. If I’d learned anything from our last duel it was that I wasn’t going to beat him with a sword. Brute force had never been my thing, when it came down to it: trickery and cheating had been my bread and butter since the first time I’d stepped into the Pit.

“You’ve gotten better,” the Swordsman noted.

“Your Name is bullshit and so are you,” I said.

I probed his defences with the tip of my sword but he was not so easily baited. I feigned a strike to his side but had to hastily retreat when his blade came within an inch of my throat. He turned the strike into a blow at my shoulder, pushing forward, but I spun around him. For a heartbeat we were back to back and I slipped my free hand inside the satchel at my belt, snatching a sharper. As we pivoted again to face each other I pushed a trickle of power into my hand, energy crackling around my fingers. Savouring the look of surprise on his face, I punched him in the stomach with the clay ball. It detonated loudly, tossing him like a rag doll. It also broke three of my fingers, but that was just the price of doing business. Focusing for a heartbeat, I wove threads of necromancy and snapped the bones back in place as I rushed after him. He tried to get up but my armoured boot slammed into his chest, knocking him back down. I had to step back to avoid a strike that would have slipped in the weak point of my greaves but I took out a throwing knife and flicked it at his sword hand, relying on my Name’s reflexes to guide the throw. It nailed him right in the wrist and he hissed in pain.

Apparently I’d hit a nerve – or an artery – because there was a flicker of power before a burst of light emanated from his frame. I deftly stepped out of range, but William took the occasion to get back to his feet. The light had pushed the knife out of his wrist, I saw, and the wound was already closing. Well, that’s new. Taking him apart piece by piece wasn’t an option, then. His wrist was still bloodied, I noticed, so I supposed bleeding him out was still possible. There was a lot of blood in a human being, though. Odds were I’d run out of throwing knives before he ran out of red to bleed. More than that, I couldn’t count on him running out of power anytime soon. He’d flatly outclassed me in that regard even before Masego had carved out a third of my Name. You might say I was out of my depth. Engaged in an uphill battle. It was, most definitely, a Struggle . Something dark rose in the back of my mind at the thought, howling in rage at the Heavens as my Name finally woke up. My veins warmed with power and I grinned.

“Let’s try that again,” I said.

I dashed forward, the pain in my leg gone as the pavement stone gave under the pressure of my charge. I lowered my head under the Swordsman’s swing and unsheathed my knife, ripping through his sleeve as I passed him. The chain mail under held, but I felt the rings get carved. Goblin steel had few equals on the continent. He pivoted to hack at my shoulder but I parried the blow with my knife, forcing him to step around the arc of a sword strike that would have cleaved through his neck. Clasping my wrist with his free hand he forced it down, the sheer strength of his grip denting plate armour, but I rammed my knee his stomach. He staggered back, releasing my wrist, and I slammed the pommel of my sword on the crown of his head. He let out a curse and backed away, bleeding where I’d struck. I wasn’t about to let him recover: in a matter of moments I was on him again, swinging as my Name laughed in delight. Evidently he didn’t use his head much, because the hit hadn’t slowed him down: with a deft twirl of his sword he ripped my knife out of my hand, allowing the chain mail on his arm to catch my sword at an angle that made the blow impotent. I stepped back, abandoning the knife, and he tried to make distance so he could take back the flow of the engagement from me. Screw that , I thought, and reached for my satchel again. I tossed a brightstick at him and he looked insultingly sceptical until I aimed my hand at it and shot a small burst of shadow and caught the spinning munitions in the air.

The brightstick exploded inches away from his faces with a burst of light and deafening sound. I’d closed my eyes even as I moved forward. It was too much to hope that he’d be permanently blinded and have his eardrums burst the way a normal man would, but a moment was all I needed. Somehow, even blinded, he managed to catch my first strike with his sword. I let him pass, spinning my wrist to turn the attack into an arcing blow that caught his shoulder. I’d reached into my Name as I struck, drawing on its strength, and I felt the mail give. My blade came away red. Once again I felt his power rise but I grit my teeth and reached for my own, striking at his chest with the heaviest spear of shadows I could muster. The rest of his duster was torn blown through, his power scattered and the mail smoked . I was winning. Gods, I was actually winning. He’d fallen to his knees, but his eyes were working now. Snarling, he hacked at my flank. I let the armour take it, half-stepping to blunt the impact. My hand reached for my satchel a third time, taking out a sharper.

His eyes widened and I could see the thought process going through his mind, clear as day. I’d finish moving before he could reposition his sword to stop me. His mouth opened, to say what I did not know. His power flickered a third time but with a snarl of triumph I shoved the sharper into his open mouth. Before the light could fully manifest I’d shot a burst of shadow at the sharper and it blew .

The Lone Swordsman’s body skidded across the stones, his precious light doing nothing to help him. When the momentum stopped carrying him he did not manage get up, limbs twitching weakly. I could already feel the power I’d gotten from my aspect leaving me more with every heartbeat – I’d been liberal with its use, which had made it end even faster than usual. I knew the moment it was gone I’d be exhausted and my leg would be a very real problem, so I had to end this quickly. Trap , I thought as I moved forward. This feels like a godsdamned trap. A downed hero who just got the beating of his life, unable to move? This was the part where I made my monologue and he begun his comeback. I couldn’t just leave him there, though. He’d already shown he could heal himself to an extent and if he came back from this I was in deep, deep trouble. I’d give it better than half odds I’d be flat out of juice the moment my aspect tapped out. And if it comes to a contest of skill between us, I’m going to die a very ugly death. Well, I did have one last surprise in my satchel. Very carefully, I took out my last clay ball. I had to sheathe my sword to strike a pinewood match and light the fuse on the goblinfire. Heart beating fast, I tossed the projectile at the hero.

I knew, before the ball was even halfway there, that I’d made a mistake. The Lone Swordsman’s arm rose weakly, brandishing his sword. He rasped out one word.

“ Swing .”

His wrist flicked and a gale blew as if he’d cleaved the world in half. The goblinfire exploded in the air, spreading in droplets that landed everywhere. That was, I decided, bad. A heartbeat later the last of my aspect-granted power winked out. I wasn’t entirely out, but I wouldn’t be able to make a spear even if my life depended on it. Which it very well might. That was, I decided, very bad.

“ Rise ,” the Lone Swordsman rasped.

Light spread around his body in thick cords, healing his wounds and hoisting him up. He looked in bad shape, but he was definitely moving.

“Very, very bad,” I muttered.

Apparently we were past the banter stage because William was on me before the chords of light were even gone. My arm moved sluggishly but I parried the first blow, free hand reaching for another throwing knife. Fingers closed around my wrist.

“No,” the Lone Swordsman growled.

“Yes?” I hazarded, the word drowned out by the plate covering my wrist breaking apart completely under his grip.

I slugged him in the face with the pommel of my sword but he took it unflinchingly, pushing me back.

“I’d settle for a maybe,” I said.

My cutting sarcasm, unfortunately, failed to draw blood. Weeping Heavens, I was pretty sure he’d sprained my wrist under the steel. That limited my options pretty sharply. He advanced on me again, eyes ringed with a sort of luminous clarity that gave me a headache just to look at. I backpedalled blow after blow, giving ground. I was running out of tricks to turn this around. Slapping away my blade, he hammered down on my only good wrist left with his own pommel – the impact forced me to drop my sword. Well, I still had knives. The hero’s blade sliced through the belt keeping those up, though I managed to snatch one before they fell to the ground. I’d had knives, I corrected mentally. The Lone Swordsman had unfortunately brought a longsword to a knife fight, which admittedly gave him a bit of an advantage. I stepped around a hew and got in close but he swept my legs. I hit the stone with a dull thud and he stood above me with his sword raised.

“And now,” he said solemnly, “I Triumph .”

“Do you know what the difference is, between a Squire and a Swordsman?” I croaked out.

He blinked in surprise.

“I have a horse,” I announced.

A moment later Zombie hit his back. I closed my eyes and reached for the heart of the necromantic construct, where Robber had cleverly reproduced the same device he’d made for the brooch in Masego’s hair. The bits of bone scraped together as I used the very last dregs of my power, producing a single spark. The demolition charges stashed inside my mount blew up instantly and the world turned white, heat licking at my face.

A heartbeat later I opened my eyes, though I didn’t remember closing them. I tried to move but my everything was broken and I wasn’t laying down where I’d been. Shit, I blacked out. My right arm looked like I’d tried to make a knot out of it, which wasn’t promising. My leg was also apparently on fire. Goblinfire. Repressing a horrible scream of pain, I managed to sit up and hastily unclasped the greave with green flames on it, feebly tossing it away. My left hand blindly groped around for support, the wrist pulsing in pain, but instead I found something metallic. My knife, I realized. The one Black had given me what seemed like years ago. My thoughts felt slow and disjointed. I found William laying unconscious a few feet away from me and dragged myself along the ground, knife still clasped in my fingers. The moment I got close enough, I wildly stabbed into his exposed neck. Steel sunk into flesh and I let out a hiss of triumph. The hero’s eyes opened and he gurgled out a word.

“ Rise .”

“Oh, come on ,” I croaked.

The already-closing wound was pushing out my knife. The chords of light weren’t as thick as last time, but there were still working. I got my knife out and stabbed him again. Or would have, if he didn’t catch my wrist. His other hand came up and I glimpsed his sword, shining like a lake under moonlight. It passed through my plate like it was parchment, plunging straight into my heart. The hero pushed himself up to a crouch.

“And so it ends,” he said.

I could feel my Name running through my veins, not to save me but for some... deeper purpose. It was true, then. We curse our killer with our last breath , Black had said.

“You will die before the day is done,” I rasped.

“And yet,” the Lone Swordsman smiled, “I win.”

My vision was blackening. I could feel life leaving my body. Serenely, I smiled.

Gotcha , I thought, and died.

Chapter 45: Corpses

“It probably doesn’t count as cannibalism if you’re already dead.”
– Dread Empress Sanguinia I, the Gourmet

Nefarious’s corpse hadn’t even cooled before they’d dismembered and burned it, scattering the ashes so broadly not even a wraith could be formed from the remains. A lesson the Court learned centuries ago at the knees of the first Dread Empress Sanguinia, whose reign of terror had not ended with the cup of poison she’d drank. She had, if anything, become even more dangerous after her death. The Chancellor was a thorough man, for all his flaws, and had no intention of giving a sorcerer as accomplished as Nefarious a foot on the land of the living. The hall on the twenty-fourth floor of the Tower had long been used for official court sessions, and that the Chancellor had chosen it as the place for his summons spoke openly to the man’s intentions. He’d been ruling the Empire in all but name for the last decade anyhow, no doubt he saw actually taking the throne as a mere formality. He had the backing of the High Lords, the Legions – this sad, ugly sister of what the Legions of Terror had once been – were in his pocket and he controlled Ater. Ascensions to the throne had been built on a third of that kind of support. And yet...

Amadeus gazed at the sprawling mosaic that made up the entire floor, lost in thought. The centrepiece was arguably the depiction of the First Crusade and Dread Empress Triumphant’s fall, but that wasn’t what interested him. Closer to the bronze and gold doors there was a motif about Dread Empress Maleficent I, the founder of the Empire. It showed her driving out the Miezans – a historical inaccuracy, as there had only been one bare skeleton of a legion left, but the lie was central to the creation myth of Praes – and uniting the Soninke and the Taghreb. She’d been Taghreb herself, governor of Kahtan under the foreign occupation. The more numerous and politically powerful Soninke had her assassinated within the decade and one of their own took the throne, but you’d never guess it from the way the High Lords were smiling at her side. Behind the humans knelt greenskins, orcs and goblins mingling in abject adoration of their superior. Another lie. The Clans had only been cajoled into joining the Declaration by bribery and the Tribes had to be forced into the fold by violence.

So many lies, for a single floor. A pack of gilded ornaments hastily slapped over an inglorious beginning, carefully polished over the millennia since until they became accepted as the truth of history. What would they say of today in a thousand years, the Black Knight wondered? Would they speak of it as the beginning of a golden age or the whimper of a stillborn rebellion? The nobles and sycophants milled about the hall, clumping together in whispering circles. None of them approached him. Some had tried to play him the fool when he’d been younger, thinking a Duni would be easy prey, but the trail of corpses he’d left behind since had dissuaded them of the notion. Still, at least some of them should have been trying to forge an alliance with him to better their fortunes under the new regime. Word of his many disagreements with the presumptive Emperor must have spread. Was this the prelude to an attempt to remove him form the game entirely? He found the thought amused him. Chancellor’s intentions upon taking the throne were still a mystery to him, though he could make some educated guesses.

He was shaken out of his thoughts when the man in question strode through the open doors. The whispers stilled and the crowd parted reverently as the Chancellor walked to the throne. Running a hand on the stone and iron the man stood there for a moment, smiling. Finally, he sat and the crowd let out a single breath. Relief, envy, admiration. Already vultures were gathering behind the curtains of professed loyalty, scheming how they would carve out an advantage from the succession. There would be need for a new Chancellor, and that Name was ever brimming with claimants. For now, though, they knelt. Like a wave washing upon the floor, the mighty fell to their knees – until the wave reached him. Amadeus stood, leaning against the wall.

“You take liberties, Black Knight, that I have not allowed,” the Chancellor said.

The rebuke resounded like the crack of a whip in the silence of the hall. Black pushed himself off the wall and strolled to the centre of the crowd.

“I,” he said, “do not kneel.”

The Chancellor chuckled.

“I may yet allow you this privilege, should you prove loyal,” he said.

The fury wafting from the nobility, still kneeling, was delightful. Truly, it was making Amadeus’ day. Coming here had been worth it just for that. The older man continued speaking when it became obvious Black did not intend to reply.

“You will hunt down the wretched concubine Alaya, who murdered my predecessor,” the Chancellor said. “You will drag her in chains to this hall, so I may render judgement.”

Amadeus smiled.

“No.”

“This is an order Black Knight,” the man barked. “As Dread Emperor Baleful the First, I command your obedience.”

“I serve the Dread Empress Malicia, First of Her Name, Tyrant of Dominions High and Low, Holder of the Nine Gates and Sovereign of all She Beholds,” he said. “You have no right to command me, Chancellor. Or to sit on this throne.”

“This is treason,” the man screamed.

“This is inevitability,” Amadeus replied.

Some of the crowd rose. Swords were unsheathed, incantations whispered. It would be for naught.

“Some of you,” the Black Knight said, “will fight this. Will cling to the old order, futile as it may be. For you I come bearing the word of the Empress.”

He grinned, wide and sharp and vicious.

“Tremble, o ye mighty, for a new age is upon you.”

I woke up.

I did not gasp for air, or blink in surprise. I was just... awake. The dream I’d just had I remembered with perfect clarity, my teacher’s last words echoing in my head. They felt like a warning. They felt like a promise. I pushed myself up into a sitting position only then noticing that someone’s hand was on my shoulder, helping me up. Dark skin, slender fingers. Apprentice. I did not feel his touch at all. There were bound to be a few downsides to being an undead abomination, I supposed.

“Catherine,” Masego said, studying me carefully through his spectacles. “Do you understand me?”

“In general?” I said. “Like, maybe half the time. The rest I just nod and pretend it’s obvious.”

“You just got sassed by a corpse, warlock’s get,” a voice said. “That’s gotta sting.”

I glanced in that direction and saw Robber crouched on a crate, expression unreadable. We were inside a house, I realized. Where I couldn’t be sure. My throat itched and I ran a finger on it, feeling stitches. So I could feel some things, then. It was just muted, like I interacted with Creation through a veil.

“He cut my head off, didn’t he?” I said.

“And one of your ankles, before we drove him off,” Hakram said.

Him I’d known was in the room without needing to turn. I felt his Name pulse and mine answering to it. There was a connection there, one I did not yet understand. So much about Name lore still remained hidden to me. Was it the same, for Black and Captain? Hakram was, I supposed, my equivalent of the gargantuan Taghreb. With perhaps a little of Scribe thrown in for good measure.

“I guess he learned from the last time,” I said, looking at my similarly stitched-up right leg. Damn, I’d run out of usable limbs at this rate. Of all the habits I could have picked up, why was getting crippled the one to stick? “Doesn’t seem to be hindering me any.”

“You shouldn’t be able to feel pain anymore,” Masego said. “Or pleasure, for that matter. You’re essentially a cadaver with limited sensory abilities.”

“You sweet talker you,” I said, getting up. “How long was I dead?”

Even with the amulet I was wearing under my armour – a receptacle to catch my soul after I died, the way Apprentice had put it – his most conservative estimates had been that it would take him a little over a bell to raise me from the dead. Well, “raise” me was a bit of a misnomer. I was still dead, just walking about. With my soul stuck in a piece of amber hanging off my neck. I’d had better weeks.

“About an hour,” Hakram said.

I blinked in surprise, or would have if my body still worked that way. My eyelids didn’t move until I consciously made them do it. Gods, that was going to be weird.

“Masego?” I prompted.

Robber tossed me by sword belt, which had been taken off me at some point. I buckled deftly, noticing my men had even brought a replacement greave for the one I’d lost to goblinfire. It didn’t match the rest of the gear, but unlike Heiress I didn’t have half a dozen spare suits of armour to draw from.

“A force was helping me along,” the bespectacled mage said. “Your Name, and... something else. It was like Creation did not want you to be dead.”

“Ominous,” I said, tightening the strap on the greave Hakram had handed me.

“Says the undead abomination,” Robber pointed out cheerfully.

“At least I don’t own a jar full of eyeballs,” I said absent-mindedly. “Speaking of dodgy business, Tribune, how’s your progress? Shouldn’t you be out in the field?”

The goblin preened. “No need. We’ve got two out of three already and the third one’s been found. Just a matter of time. Your little trick with the devils made it much easier to get around the city.”

“Don’t posture, it makes you look like the bastard child of an inexplicably green gargoyle and a pigeon,” I said. “Still, good work. I want all three behind our lines the moment you can manage it. No fuckups, there’s a lot riding on this.”

“So I’ve heard,” the goblin said, grinning malevolently. “Up to no good, Boss?”

“Good cut my head off not an hour ago,” I muttered peevishly. “We’re not exactly on speaking terms at the moment.”

I turned towards the more productive members of my posse.

“Where are we, exactly?”

It looked like a house, but too small to be one from the street where I’d gotten stabbed to death. That was still a thing that had happened. I’d call this the worst week of my life, but that would just be taunting fate.

“Past the first barricade,” Adjutant said. “In the forward beachhead of the Fifteenth. When it became clear the devils weren’t going to be a problem Hune marched deeper into the city and smashed through their first line of defence. There’s fighting at the second ring of barricades but we haven’t made another push yet.”

I raised an eyebrow, having to gauge approximately how high it was supposed to go. Gods, this undeath business was a pain. It was a good thing I didn’t intend to stay like this for long.

“Nauk’s kabili has been sent further east to assault through there. Juniper thinks if we hit them on two points they’ll collapse and fall back to the Ducal Palace,” Hakram said.

“If the Swordsman shows up, dividing our forces is gonna be... costly,” I said.

“There’s been no sign of Tall, Dark and Very Stabbable,” Robber said. “Or Queen Smug. I’d put good money on them tangling as we speak.”

“He barely managed to limp away after the beating you gave him,” Adjutant said. “She’ll have the advantage.”

“That’s not good,” I said with a grimace. “She’ll be wanting to meddle with the ritual.”

And I need it , I didn’t say. Only Masego and Hakram were fully in the loop as to the end game of the gambit I’d run by getting myself killed by William. Apprentice had made it clear from the beginning that while he could raise me from the dead, he couldn’t actually resurrect me. True resurrection was the province of Good. That was the underlying pattern: Evil was handed the means to avoid death, Good to reach past it. Staying undead wasn’t an option, as far as I was concerned. Masego could currently puppet me if he so wished, since he held the leash on the spells that had me walking around, but in theory someone could wrest that leash away from him. Warlock definitely could, and given Heiress’ talent with sorcery given enough time I was pretty sure she’d be able to work out something too. There were advantages to my current state but way too many liabilities came with it. Not to mention the whole being a moving corpse aspect. That would put a hamper on quite a few parts of my life, I thought, a certain redhead coming to mind.

I clenched my fingers experimentally. That part seemed to be working fine, and being able to take ridiculous amounts of punishment would come in useful. I reached for my Name and found it weaker than it had been before my death. No, not weaker. Looser . If before it had been a mantle draped comfortably on my shoulders, now it was hanging by a thread. Squires weren’t supposed to die, I supposed. That I was still a Squire at all was something of a disappointment, to be honest.

“You’re frowning,” Adjutant said.

“I was hoping getting myself offed would serve as a shortcut in some ways,” I said. “Maybe lead into another Name.”

Masego chuckled. “You’ve the wrong Role for that,” he said. “You are meant to be the successor to a Knight, whether Black or White. Unless one of them dies you’re quite out of luck.”

“Figures it wouldn’t be that easy,” I said. “Well, aside from a few issues it looks like my little jaunt on the other side filled up the reserves. Next time I scrape with Willy things will go differently.”

“I’m not saying you should mutilate his corpse,” Robber said. “But, you know, if you happen to stumble onto a few eyes I know this guy who has a collection.”

“You don’t even eat them,” Adjutant complained. “It’s a waste, is what that is.”

“I’m going to pretend I never heard that,” I confided in Masego. “When those words I’m definitely not hearing stop, tell Hakram to find his shield. The three of us are going for yet another horrifying magical adventure.”

—

It was up to debate whether we had good or bad timing, because Hune was about done preparing for her push when we arrived. The ogre was looking at a map held up against a ruined wall by two legionaries, still coming up taller than it even crouched. She saluted crisply when the three of us arrived.

“Lady Squire, Lord Apprentice,” she said, then paused. “Deadhand.”

Deadhand and Dead Girl, I thought, running around foiling Good. There was a song in there.

“What’s the situation, Commander?” I asked.

“Commander Nauk has begun his offensive,” the ogre said. “Already the rebels have started stripping their defences here to reinforce the east. Legate Juniper intends for us to hit them when the troops are beyond the two points, overwhelming them in detail.”

Good ol’ Hellhound, baiting the enemy into a mistake and then slitting their throat over it.

“Any sign of the heroes?” I said.

“None at the moment,” the gargantuan woman said. “Though we have sapper lines ready should they make an appearance. I take it you’re here to join the assault, my lady?”

“We won’t be sticking around,” I said. “We’ll be using it as cover to head for a target deeper into the city.”

The ogre nodded slowly, the clever eyes set in that brutish face studying me patiently.

“The place where the ritual is,” she said. “You believe the Lady Heiress intends further mischief.”

“Something like that,” I said.

The ogre’s buckler-sized hands tightened into fists. There seemed to be genuine anger in him, perhaps the first display of open emotion I’d ever seen from her.

“That woman is in dire need of killing,” Hune rumbled. “Treason against the Tower cannot be tolerated.”

“Preaching to the choir there,” I said. “Who’s at the tip of your offensive?”

“Tribune Ubaid,” Hune said.

Ah, an old friend then. No doubt the former captain would find this scrap a pleasant stroll after our fun little evening with the devils near Marchford. Interesting choice to put regulars in front, but I supposed that with all the fresh recruits in the Fifteenth Hune was looking to blood some of her legionaries.

“I’ll get out of your hair, Hune,” I said.

“Good hunting, Lady Squire. One sin,” the ogre said hammering a hand against her breastplate.

“One grace,” I replied, doing the same.

Finding Ubaid was easy enough. His legionaries were already formed up, the rest of the kabili falling in line behind them. The Soninke was inspecting the gear of his first line, handing out praise and criticism freely. His cohort of two hundred milled with excitement as we approached, smelling the blood to come. The man himself snapped a sharp salute.

“Lady Squire.”

“Ubaid,” I said warmly. “We’ll be joining you for the assault.”

“An argument could be made they’ll be joining us,” Masego said.

“Don’t mind Apprentice,” I said, “he always gets crabby right before the swords come out.”

“I do not -”

“You’re making her point for her, Masego,” Hakram whispered loudly.

The mage closed his mouth with a snap, looking disgruntled. Ubaid looked like he badly wanted to be somewhere else but was too polite to flee. It would be strange going into battle without the Gallowborne at my back, but I’d elected to leave them behind since I wouldn’t be taking them with me to the ritual site anyway. Currently they were with Juniper at the central command node, charged with guarding the trump cards I’d tasked Robber with finding me. I took the lead as we began the march, the other two at my side. Hune had chosen one of the main arteries as her angle of attack, though I could glimpse legionaries spread out over the two adjoining streets as well. Tribune Ubaid’s cohort remained concentrated on the avenue we were using, as per Legion doctrine. It was a short walk to the second ring of barricades, and when we got there I saw there were already sappers in place. A company at most, but they were keeping the rebels busy by taking crossbow shots whenever a Callowan peeked out from behind the barricades.

I was reluctantly impressed by what the defenders had managed to build as their rampart. Unlike the upended carts and sacks of sand and grain of the first barricades, these ones had foundations of stone pulled from Gods knew where. There was narrow path through the rampart leading straight into a smaller barricade, which would force my legionaries to split between two sides when trying to overwhelm it. I couldn’t see what the defenders were standing on from where I was, but some sort of scaffolding must have been built behind the wall: a handful of men were watching us, crouching down behind the walls whenever one of the sappers took aim at them. Taking this promised to be costly, I assessed, and the numbers were on the side of the defenders. As far as I could figure Hune was going to collapse the barricades with munitions and charge through the wreck as soon as the defenders were positioned to stop Ubaid’s cohort, catching them flatfooted. It should work. The prospect of the losses displeased me, though. On both sides.

What point was there in continuing to kill the rebels when the battle was as good as done? Without William around to stiffen their spines, I might actually be able to talk them into a surrender. It was worth a try instead of jumping straight into the slaughter, anyway. I signalled for Ubaid’s cohort to slow and went for the wall, sword still sheathed. From the corner of my eye I saw one of the archers knocking an arrow and waited – the shaft was released and I tapped into my Name, watching it come closer. Snatching the arrowhead out of the air was what I was intending to do, but it ended up being more along the line of catching it with my palm. There was, I reflected, no real way to play that off as if it had been my intention all along. I didn’t feel any pain from the wound, so simply sighed and broke off the shaft before wiggling the rest out. There was a gasp of horror from the barricade and I heard someone say the word Squire. Good, there’d be no need for introductions. Some of the sappers were about to answer the shot in kind so I immediately spoke up.

“Hold,” I said. “You, behind the walls. I’m Catherine Foundling, ranking commander of the Fifteenth. Who’s in charge here?”

There was a round of hushed conversation behind cover until a confident voice quieted it. A few heartbeats later a woman rose to the top of the barricade, dressed in good plate. Even under the helmet I recognized those silvery strands of hair and that pale, strikingly beautiful face: it appeared I was in front of the Baroness Dormer herself. I’d seen her exactly once before, when I’d been a child. She’d visited Laure to settle a trade dispute and I’d managed to be part of the crowd watching her ride into the city. I’d skipped lessons for it, if I remembered well, because I’d wanted to see the noble so many people said was the loveliest woman in Callow with my own eyes. I cleared my throat, absurdly amused to be standing in front of the same woman who’d made me realize I was attracted to both genders in such a different situation.

“That would be me,” the Baroness said. “You’ll forgive for not bowing, Lady Foundling. I no longer recognize the authority of the Tower.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said drily.

“I was also under the impression you were dead,” the woman continued.

“Not nearly as much of a problem as you’d think,” I mused.

“Impressive, but we planned to defend the city against you regardless,” the Baroness said. “I have no intention of surrendering my men so they can be butchered in Malicia’s name.”

“That’s about to happen if you don’t surrender, Baroness,” I said. “I’m willing to give you fairly lenient terms to end this without further bloodshed. Prisoners will be treated fairly.”

The silver-haired woman’s eyes narrowed.

“The Tower has only one way of dealing with rebellion.”

“You’ve been out of the loop for too long,” I said. “Black granted amnesty to the vast majority of the Countess Marchford’s host. Nobody wants to drown the south in blood, least of all me.”

“The vast majority,” she repeated. “And what of the Countess herself?”

“Executed,” I admitted. “That, however, was Black. He’s not here, I am. Liesse is mine to deal with as I see fit, by Imperial mandate. I you surrender I promise amnesty for your men and a fair trial for you.”

She seemed almost amused by that.

“That I committed treason by the Tower’s reckoning isn’t exactly in dispute,” she said.

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “But all I’ve heard of you leads me to believe you got involved in this because you believed Callow would be better off for the rebellion. That rebellion is over, Baroness Dormer. But you can still spare the people who fought for you.”

She hesitated.

“We could hold you off behind the barricades,” she said.

“Apprentice could level those with three words and a wave of his hand,” I said matter-of-factly.

“Five and really more of a flick,” the overweight mage corrected.

“Not the time, Masego,” I said under my breath, watching the noblewoman on the wall.

“The Lone Swordsman said you were treacherous and silver-tongue,” she admitted ruefully.

“I’m sure he’s said a lot of things. You should be more worried about the things he hasn’t said, though. I’m betting he didn’t inform you that the ritual going on is to bring an angel of Contrition to the city,” I said.

She paled, and just like that I knew I had her. William, you didn’t think this through. They’re not heroes, they’re just people. No one signed up for your personal Crusade. It’s one thing to be ready to die for Callow, it’s another to be conscripted by the Heavens.

“You’re lying,” the Baroness said.

“Noticed how he stopped carrying that sword of his around? That was a Hashmallim’s feather, I’m told. Three guesses what it’s being used for, and the first two are also summoning an angel,” I said.

“How can you be so pithy about this?” she asked, sounding horrified.

“Because I’m going to cut his throat – for the second time today, mind you – and put an end to all of this,” I said. “This is what I do , Baroness. I clean up the messes made by the fools. I did it at Three Hills, I did it at Marchford and I’ll do it again here. Gods as my witness, I’ll keep on going until there’s peace from Daoine to the shores of the Hengest.”

I met her eyes calmly.

“I could threaten you now,” I said. “Point out that I punched a devil the size of a fortress so hard it died or that I basically walked off getting decapitated not an hour ago. But I don’t really need to, do I? You know who I am. What I’m going to tell you instead is that I’ve had a very long day – and that I won’t be making this offer twice.”

I clenched my fingers and unclenched them.

“ Choose .”

She folded. She dithered a while still, but she folded. I wished it actually felt like a victory, and not like I’d just broken my homeland’s spine over my knee. I didn’t stick around to oversee the rest of the surrender. I handed it off to Hune after getting in contact with Nauk’s kabili with a scrying spell. The orc commander had already broken through his section of the barricade but my orders were enough to restrain him even after he’d gotten his blood up. The Baroness managed to get most of the remaining soldiers to surrender, but some refused and tried to retreat. There was only one way that was going to end, but I didn’t have the time to spare pity for the last gasps of this rebellion. We headed north again, towards the lake.

“The site won’t actually be in Creation,” Apprentice said. “Well, technically yes, but depending on whether or not you adhere to orthodox Trismegistan theory it-”

“Masego,” I said sharply.

The dark-skinned man cleared his throat.

“I’m saying getting there won’t be as simple as taking a rowboat and rowing to an island that doesn’t, precisely speaking, exist.”

“If you were trying to make this simpler,” Hakram said gravely, “you have failed.”

Apprentice looked frustrated, passing a hand through his sweaty mess of braids. We’d taken a brisk pace, and military life had yet to get him in better shape.

“Look,” he said. “This place is an angel’s corpse, more or less. Angels are of Creation, but not in Creation.”

I ignored the “depending on what school of thought you believe is correct as to the nature of Spheres and Laws” he added in a mutter afterwards. I didn’t know if it was possible to have a headache while undead and wasn’t particularly eager to find out.

“Practically speaking,” I said, “what does that mean?”

“The site is effectively on Creation without being part of it,” Masego said. “Like a pebble on a larger rock. There are... rules though. There has to be a way in, for something like that to be able to exist. A connecting point, where the pebble touches the rock.”

“So we use that,” Hakram said.

“That would be ideal,” Apprentice said. “If it’s still there.”

I glanced at the bespectacled mage. “You think Heiress blocked the way?”

“Or the Lone Swordsman,” he said. “If he knows how.”

William had never struck as being particularly knowledgeable about stuff like this, but he didn’t have to be. Not with the Wandering Bard on his team. And isn’t your absence starting to make me a little nervous, Almorava? What are you up to? Guided by Apprentice, we eventually happened upon the shore of the Hengest lake. There were actual docks further east but that wasn’t what Masego had been looking for, apparently. I was pretty sure what he had was right in front of us: a small, thin rowboat without oars. It was pale and the prow was swan-shaped. It was also on fire, which was much less promising. Almost nothing but the prow remained, the rest sinking into the water.

“I’m thinking Heiress,” I said.

“It does bear her tender and delicate touch,” Adjutant said. “Apprentice, I hope you have another way to get us in.”

“No,” the Soninke said then remained silent for a moment. “Not us , anyway.”

“You made that unnecessarily tense,” I told him gently.

He blinked in confusion and I decided there were more pressing matters at hand.

“Explain,” I said.

“Pebble, larger rock,” he said.

“Many syllables,” I said, “Catherine confused.”

“And so they all died, because the Squire couldn’t ever miss an opportunity to be sarcastic,” Hakram said gravely.

I cleared my throat, or at least tried. The sound that came out was more like I was choking on my own lungs. Dying was proving increasingly troublesome.

“Look,” Apprentice said. “The rule is, there must be a connection. There’s none available, so Creation will work with me if I try to make one. I’m creating a second, smaller pebble that touches both the larger pebble and the rock.”

“Honestly, you could have just said you’re creating a pocket dimension that touches both the site and Creation,” I said.

“Gods, why am I even on your side?” Masego complained, throwing up his hands in the air.

“You like us, though Hells if I know why,” I said, patting him on the back. “Now about that metaphorical smaller pebble. You went all exacting in a way I’m guessing means not all of us can go.”

“I’ll be casting,” Apprentice said. “And I need an anchor, temporary as it will be.”

“Does it have to be Hakram?” I asked.

“That depends,” he replied. “Do you want the pocket realm to collapse on you while I get non-Named smear on my boots?”

“No,” Adjutant interrupted before I could reply. “No she does not.”

I shot the orc a look. I’d been going to say as much. Eventually.

“So just me, then,” I said. “This doesn’t feel even remotely like a coincidence.”

“Three Named want this city,” Hakram said. “Three Named fight for it. The pattern comes to a head.”

“This is about more than just Liesse,” I said. “This is about all of Callow.”

I started to pass a hand through my hair but remembered halfway through the gesture I was still wearing my helmet. Awkwardly I brought the arm down, hoping neither of them had noticed. I cleared my throat again, this time with a little more success.

“Do your thing, Apprentice.”

—

Apparently Masego couldn’t just wave his arm and rewrite the fabric of Creation, which was very inconvenient of him. I almost told him as much but Hakram gave me a look of his own. I almost tried to pout at Adjutant, but refrained when I forced myself to visualize how horrifying it would actually look. It took too long for Apprentice to prepare his spell for my tastes, but before an hour had passed he was ready.

“The entrance will only be open for a handful of heartbeats,” he warned me. “Be quick. And remember, you’ll have to find your own way back.”

He put a hand on Hakram’s shoulder and spoke urgently in the mage tongue, palm pointed in front of him. I almost didn’t see the portal when it appeared. It was transparent and oval – and shorter than me. Adjutant likely wouldn’t have been able to fit through even if he hadn’t been needed as an anchor. Gritting my teeth, I took a running start and threw myself into the pocket dimension.

I landed in a roll on the other side, managing to stay on my feet for a moment before the disorientation hit and I fell in a sprawl. I hastily got up, warily casting a look around. I was apparently on a wide strip of rock that stood over an inky black void. Charming. I didn’t get close enough to the edge to have a look down. I did not want to be the first undead to ever throw up. I’d never been great with heights, even if the crippling aspect of that fear was long behind me. The terrain ahead of me was broken, full of spires and pitfalls. I made my face grimace out of sheer distaste for the work ahead of me, then got moving. Climbing higher allowed me to peer in the distance, where I saw a gate of light. At least that part was visible. I got halfway through before I slipped and fell at the bottom of well of spires, cursing loudly on my way down. Plate armour wasn’t exactly climbing gear, even when you no longer felt its weight. I wedged my boot in an opening and clasped my fingers around an outcropping that should allow me to pull myself out when my arm started trashing about.

The spells animating me? No. I felt heat for the first time since I’d woken up, searing and bloody. Worse than even getting hit with William’s light had felt. I fell back down, screaming in pain as my limbs shook uncontrollably. How long that lasted I couldn’t tell, but eventually my limbs stilled. I felt... empty. Like some part of me was missing.

“Funny,” a voice said. “That should have killed you.”

I looked up and saw a face peering down at me over the rocky ridge. Half of one, anyway. Horrific burns and sword wound had taken most of the left half. The rest was of a red nearly orange. I’d only ever met one goblin that colour.

“Chider,” I rasped.

“Please, Catherine,” the dead goblin said, “Call me Squire.”

Smiling pleasantly, she dropped a lit sharper on my head.

Chapter 46: Squire (Redux)

“Note: only offer the hero the chance to replace my right-hand man when my right-hand man is no longer in the room.
Additional note: find out estimated rebuilding cost for the summer palace.”
-Extract from the journal of Dread Emperor Malignant II

Two things happened in quick succession.

First, I snarled something very unkind about Chider’s mother and a he-goat. Second, I snatched the sharper out of the air and threw it back up. Unlike during my first run-in with the goblin, I was now familiar with goblin munitions. I knew how long they took to blow – the standard issue stuff anyway. The sharper exploded halfway up, giving me a gentle hint the mixture had been tinkered with. What was it with all my enemies getting their hands on goblin munitions? The Legions really needed to keep a closer eye on their stocks: they were supposed to be the only organisation with access to munitions. I’d have a talk with Black about it, I was starting to get pretty irritated with how people kept throwing those at me.

“Yeah, I won’t be calling you that,” I said, dragging myself up to my feet.

I’d expected to feel aftershocks of what I was pretty sure had been my Name getting ripped out of me, but there were none. My limbs moved surely and smoothly. The pain must have been in my soul, horrifying as that thought was. I could still feel an itch in the back of my neck, though, almost like I was missing a limb. Chider replied to my polite announcement by dropping a brightstick, this prepared to blow up directly in my face. One of these days, the Gods were going to have to grant me dumber enemies. There had to be a finite number of clever ones, and I was starting to murder my way through that list. I ignored the falling cylinder and wedged my foot into a crevasse. The flash of light and the deafening noise might have been a problem if I were still alive, but at the moment I was past worrying about burst eardrums. They’d make no real difference.

Jumping while in full plate would have been hard even when I’d still had my Name, but I was just about done playing around. Ripping a few muscles to get the job done wasn’t something I was going to balk at. My first leap got me halfway up and I forced my limbs into making me jump again when I hit the side of the pit, landing in a sprawl back on top. I heard Chider scuttling away from me, hiding in the rocks. The novelty of having an enemy shorter and physically weaker than myself was quite refreshing. Well, weaker for now. She’d be settling into the Name any moment now, and it was all downhill from there.

“I should have seen this coming, really,” I said. “Warlock mentioned the only place in Callow to ‘bind or usurp a Name’ was in Liesse. Figured I was safe with no other claimant around, but that was evidently incorrect. Breaking the laws of nature to screw me over – classic Heiress.”

I heard the snap of a crossbow being shot and turned in time to see the bolt coming for my chest. My hand snapped up, following my will, and snatched the projectile out of the air. One out of two, I mused, breaking the haft and dropping it on the ground. I’d had better success rates, but also much worse.

“The part of this that puzzles me,” I continued, “is you . You’re smarter than this, Chider. I’m on my way to fighting my two rivals and you’re a middling threat standing between us. There’s only one way this can go for you.”

The undead goblin slipped out of the rocks to my side, jamming a knife in my knee joint. Frowning, I slapped her across the face. I hadn’t held back even a little bit and it showed: her neck twisted sharply with an unpleasant sound. She picked herself up from the rock the hit had thrown her against, idly snapping her neck back in place. No full resurrection for her either, then. Weren’t we quite the pair, jolly undead abominations brawling in the middle of place that had been freshly forced into existence? I took the knife out of my knee, gauging the weight of it. Good goblin steel. It would do.

“That would be true,” Chider said as she rose to her feet, “if you were still the Squire. You’re free meat now, Callow-girl.”

I sighed.

“I’m serious,” I said. “What’s the end game for you here? Say you manage to somehow destroy my body. Heiress manages whatever the Hells she’s up to with your help. What do you do after ?”

“I change things,” Chider replied, pulling out another knife.

Gods, was that what I sounded like to other people? No wonder I got stabbed so often. Never assume a goblin is out of knives , I thought, watching her twirl the blade between her fingers. Robber carried so many that by all rights he should clink whenever he walked around.

“As the Squire?” I said. “The moment Black meets you, he’ll hack you to pieces to put the Name back in play. If he’s in a bad mood, he’ll give what’s left of you to Warlock. Do you still dream, Chider? Because that’s the stuff of very real nightmares.”

“I have friends of my own,” the goblin said.

“No, what you have is an owner ,” I said. “And she’s not gentle with her tools – today should have shown you that clearly enough. Chider, you’re about to get thrown under the carriage. You really think Heiress is going to stick her head out for you? Gods, you think the Truebloods will? They don’t hide what they think about greenskins.”

Snarling, the goblin attacked. Rude. She could have at least informed me we were done talking. What was it with telling people they were wrong about everything that made them so aggressive? Already Chider was faster, quick enough she was hard to follow with the naked eye. I felt the blade scrape my chest plate but it failed to go through and I kicked her before she could stick it into my neck. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what she thought that would do at this point. Make me bleed out? My heart wasn’t beating anymore, and the stuff inside my veins was basically red water giving me a little more mass. I caught her wrist when she came for me again, initially forcing it back before something dark flared in her leering eyes. She begun turning the struggle around. Name strength, I decided, was a lot less pleasant from the other side. I spun around her and helpfully handed her back her knife, sticking it into her neck. Didn’t seem to have much effect, but my boot on her back did: she was sent sailing again.

“You think I don’t know all of this?” Chider spat, landing in a crouch, “I’m not drowning in options, Foundling, unlike you. I’ll survive today, then tomorrow and then the day after that. That’s what goblins do . We survive, even when Creation is out for our blood.”

I unsheathed my own knife.

“You know,” I said thoughtfully, “I think that a year ago I would have tried to help you. To compromise. But I’ve lost too many friends since, Chider. Crossed too many lines to turn back.”

That burned face split into a horrifying grin.

“If you think I’ll lay down and die for your little narcissism trip,” she said, “you’re in for a rude awakening.”

Fair enough. I strolled forward, pace unhurried. She darted in my direction but I feinted for her hand. Unnaturally quick, she brought up her knife to block – and I swiped mine across her face, ripping through her teeth. She backpedalled hurriedly, free hand coming up to touch the ruined fangs.

“I’ve been doing all this talking,” I said. “You probably thought it was a blunder. She’s been Named too long, she got cocky. What I was actually doing, though, was giving them time to settle in.”

She leapt for me with a howl but that was mere savagery. I’d fought more dangerous things than an angry undead goblin in the past, even a Named one. Hells, I’d fought more dangerous things today . I calmly stepped aside, left her to slide on the rock and feinted for her eyes. The knife came up again, faster than a blink, but I’d already redirected the strike and was ripping through the shoulder muscles on the right. She’d likely thought she was being clever when she’d traded chain mail for leather, banking on speed over taking hits. Her limp right arm now taught her differently.

“The reflexes, I mean,” I said as I circled around her. “They take a while to get used to, don’t they? I remember how odd it was when I first came into the Name, getting a set of reactions that weren’t entirely mine.”

I brought up the tip of my knife and this time she reacted properly, not falling for the probe – which didn’t help her when my other hand unsheathed my sword and hacked through her bad arm. The limb fell to the ground. I intended for this to be theme for the evening, as it happened.

“You can ignore them, of course,” I said. “But that costs you a moment, while you push them down. A lot can happen in a moment. Still, I imagine that given a fortnight you’d get used to it.”

My eyes turned cold.

“Unfortunately for you, you don’t have a fortnight.”

Chider spat out teeth, bringing up her knife.

“Fuck you, Callow-girl,” she said. “No matter what you do, I will Surv- “

I rammed my sword through her mouth, tip coming out on the other side. There would be no aspect comeback for this one. I jammed my knife into the soft side of her elbow, cleaving the muscle. Her fingers convulsed around her weapon but there’d be no more swinging at me. Holding her upright, I ripped out the clasps holding the upper part of her leather armour together. The flesh under was scarred with burns, barely even flesh at all.

“I warned you,” I said, “ Now give me back my Name .”

I struck her as hard as I could, my armoured fingers ripping into her flesh. I dug through the necrotized organs, finding the snake-like length of her spine after jostling around a bit. Hand inside the goblin up to my elbow, I grit my teeth and tore out her spine. It snapped halfway through her abdomen and Chider fell limp. Dropping her to the ground after withdrawing my smeared gauntlet, I wrenched out my sword and beheaded her for good measure. I stood there, eyes closed. I would have let out a breath if there’d been any air in my lungs. I did not have to wait for long before awareness flooded into me for the second time in my life. It felt like coming home.

I was Catherine Foundling, daughter of no one and nothing. I’d broken armies, snatched victory from the jaws of my enemy. I’d spent lives like coin and bought the fate of a kingdom, cheated death and spat in the face of Corruption. On the night I’d first claimed this Name, I’d branded my path on the soul of a hero. And on the night where I claimed it again, that path was coming to an end. I was, once more, the Squire.

My senses sharpened and I waited for the beast that rode my shoulders to make itself known, already smiling. I’d almost grown fond of it. The expression faded when it made no appearance. I frowned and sunk in the depths of my Name. They felt shallower now. Not weaker, but as if the depths had not yet been... earned. My blood ran cold when I realized I had not claimed back my Name – I’d just claimed it, period. I was starting at the beginning again, and I couldn’t feel a single one of my aspects. Just the potential for them, those bundles of shapeless power. My eyes opened in sheer surprise. Those three bundles of shapeless power.

“Oh, Heiress,” I said gleefully. “You fucked up .”

Chider had been her work, of that there was no doubt, but why would Akua have done this at all if she knew it would give me back strength? I might not have my aspects anymore, but my Name was effectively restored to the strength it had possessed before my run-in with the demon. I had the well of power to effectively use the tricks Black had taught me once more. Why would Heiress make me stronger? She’d made a habit out of sabotaging me at every turn. Even if she was planning on using me against William, this made no sense. Unless she didn’t know she was doing that, I thought. Only two people knew there had been more to my crippling than the leg: Masego and Hakram. And Black, though that hardly counted.

I’d not told another living soul, and as far as I knew neither had they. And it wasn’t like Heiress could just take a look at my aspects whenever she pleased: Apprentice had needed to set up an entire room full of hellishly complicated wards to operate on my soul. Akua had never been allowed into the Fifteenth’s camp without heavy guard, and any use of magic on her part would have been met with immediate force. She hadn’t known, I realized. She hadn’t known I’d robbed myself of an aspect. She’d thought that by using Chider as a receptacle for my Name she could weaken me for months, maybe even kill me when she ripped it out – if she was lucky. That was the thing with luck, wasn’t it? It never landed quite where you’d thought it would.

“And instead you put me back on the horse, you scheming bitch you,” I murmured.

Gods Below, it was about time one of her little plots backfired. Now I just needed to cram her next one down her throat and make her choke on it. I knelt by Chider’s twice-dead corpse, wiping my sword on her before sheathing it. I did the same with my knife after wrenching it out. If I’d had anything to set her on fire just to be sure I would have, but for now this would have to be enough. I didn’t have any munitions on me, much less goblinfire – not that using a substance that burned magic in a dimension made by a mage wouldn’t have been a horrible idea anyway. I peered in the distance and saw the gate of light was still there. For how long that would remain the case I wasn’t sure, but I thought it best to hurry.

Feeling the mantle of my Name on my shoulders after that distressing period where I hadn’t made a tedious procession more tolerable. I could no longer remember what I’d felt like before I’d become the Squire. Being entirely human was just a... hazy concept. I was beyond sickness now, beyond the old limitations of my body like heat and cold or not being able to tinker with my own senses. After tasting true power, there was nothing more horrifying than being powerless. The honesty of that thought made me uncomfortable.

It was hard to gauge lengths of time in a place without a real sky, but I felt like I’d kept a good pace. The gate of light I’d glimpsed at a distance was even taller than I’d thought, thrice my height – so more or less twice anyone else’s – and almost as broad. I couldn’t make out anything beyond it. Apprentice had said there would be a way into the ritual site, but I found it odd he hadn’t said anything about a gate. For that matter, if he could make a gate why hadn’t he crafted one for me to enter here in the first place? I frowned, then picked up a stone from the ground and threw it. For a moment it looked like it would pass through, but then there was a flash of light and a loud bang.

“You’re getting predictable, Akua,” I said.

Stepping around the gate, I found the exit Masego had actually made after looking for a few moments. Like the portal that had allowed me through, it was transparent and hard to make out in the lack of proper lighting. Akua’s false gate was just close enough to make it hard through wiggle through, because why make it just a death trap when you could also make it an inconvenience? I took a deep breath I didn’t strictly need, finding the familiarity of it reassuring.

“Final round, winner takes all,” I muttered before passing through.

Beast

“I stared into the abyss and found what stared back... wanting.”
– Translation of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness, widely attributed to the young Dead King

The flesh parted under her teeth and she drank deeply of the warm blood before tossing away the little man’s corpse. The cattle were screaming, trying to flee, but tonight the streets belonged to her. The Cursed fell back on four feet, shaking her fur with a howl of glee. Already she was matted with red, the smell of it all over her gloriously intoxicating. One of the things thought itself brave and stood against her, sword raised. It smelled of fear. She pounced, claws ripping through armour like parchment and that little toothpick falling uselessly to the ground with the arm that held it. They were so small, so weak . Her fangs tore off its face, leaving only bone and ripped muscle as she swallowed the flesh greedily. There had been fifty of them when she’d... she couldn’t remember. There had been fifty, and now only thirty were left. The Cursed was still hungry, and so she prowled the cobblestones of Ater.

Bolts thudded into her back, some punching through the armour still hanging off her frame, but they were as the bites of insects. Claws sinking into stone, she leapt onto the wall of the house they were hiding on top of and pulled herself up on the roof. They tried to flee but it was much, much too late. Red in tooth and claw she fed on their fear and flesh, slaughtering the dozen like the panicked animals they were. Too soon she was the only living thing on that rooftop, fur glistening in the moonlight. She sniffed the air, finding the trail of the others. They thought that scattering would save them. As if anything could hide them from her. Leaping back into the street, she went on the hunt again.

Behind walls they huddled, but she burst through the stone to partake of the feast inside. Into the maze of streets they ran, but she could hear their heartbeats like the thunder of drums. She found, and fed. In the dark they hid, thinking themselves beyond her sight, but the darkness was an old friend. Their screams rose up to the sky, and neither desperation nor the courage of men proved shield against her wrath. She grew. Claws sharpened, her bones cracked as her limbs lengthened and the hide under the fur became harder than iron. She was larger than the armour, even with those clever straps, could handle. The plates fell to the ground as the Cursed licked her chops, tearing out the last man’s innards to slurp the noisily. There were no more. Corpses, but no feed. She sniffed the air. This district was empty, but others were not.

She was hungry again.

She ran west like the wind, stone cracking beneath her weight. The Cursed slowed as the she came to the boundary, smelling magic-trap-forbidden. There were two cattle-dangerous standing there. She knew them. Tall, thin, two swords. Ranger. Amused, beard, magic. Apprentice. They were in her way.

“Gods, she ate all of them didn’t she?” Ranger sighed.

“Is that sympathy I hear, my dear?” Apprentice said. “Anyone stupid enough to provoke her enough for... this is clearly too stupid to live in the first place.”

Two-swords looked at her. The Cursed pounced but there was a wall-not-wall. The light hurt. She howled.

“Is the ward going to hold her?” Ranger asked.

Apprentice laughed.

“She’s been a this for almost hour and ate, what – two full patrols? Last time she got in this deep she ripped her way through a full company of devils, courtesy of my old teacher. If the boundary lasts for half an hour I’ll count myself lucky.”

“Never seen a werewolf get this big before,” Ranger said, cocking her head to the side. “I mean, she’s taller than the houses.”

“She’s not a lycanthrope,” Apprentice said. “As far as I can tell, a Warlock put a curse on her bloodline a few centuries back. And this, kids, is why you put an escapement when you cast a blood ritual.”

“ Praesi ,” Ranger said, shaking her head. “How long until Amadeus gets here?”

“Depends on when the messenger finds him,” Apprentice replied. “The Tower is beyond my ability to scry.”

The Cursed pounded at the wall-not-wall, ignoring the pain. The cattle was not fleeing. Insolence.

“Talking to Alaya again, is he?” Ranger said, disgruntled.

“Gods, am I ever not getting involved in that mess,” Apprentice said, smirking at two-swords.

“I’m not jealous,” Ranger denied immediately. “And your ward’s breaking, you smug Wasteland throwback.”

“I’ll add another layer,” Apprentice frowned.

“Don’t bother,” Ranger said. “Make me a gate. I’ll keep her busy until he gets here.”

Two-swords smiled at the Cursed.

“Come on, big girl,” she said. “Let’s go for a round.”

—

She howled as she broke through the wall, landing on her side. Her back was broken but it reset itself with a snap and she got back on her feet, fangs bared. Ranger followed her inside the house calmly, one sword in hand. Sheathed. The predator-dangerous swung in her direction, too fast, and the wind almost sent her flying. The Cursed sank her claws into the stone and held on.

“So you can still learn even when you’re like this,” Ranger said. “Interesting.”

She stood on two feet and hunched, reaching for the wall behind her. She tore out it out with a grunt and threw it at two-swords, but it was too slow. Boot hit her in the stomach and sent her flying through the house on the street behind. She fell back on all fours, eyed predator-dangerous.

“I’ve broken stone golems hitting half that hard,” Ranger informed her. “You are ridiculously hard to hurt, sweetheart.”

“She ramps up the longer she’s like this,” a new voice said. “Another hour and even you would have trouble with her.”

Another person passed through the broken house. All steel, dark cloak. Sword but no shield. He took off his helmet: white skin, dark hair. Familiar.

“Finally,” Ranger said. “You took your time.”

“I was delayed,” Black replied. “The Chancellor’s work.”

“I can probably knock her out without hurting her too much, if she’s too far gone,” two-swords offered, standing close to the other.

Black’s hand touched Ranger’s shoulder.

“She won’t attack me,” he said.

The Cursed growled. Insolence. All-steel walked to her slowly. He didn’t smell like fear at all.

“Sabah,” he said. “Look into my eyes.”

She howled.

“ Look into my eyes ,” he Spoke.

The head of the Cursed snapped up, obeying the command.

“What do you see?” he asked gently.

Pale green. Gears slowly turning, a house of steel that would grind Creation to dust. Death was looking at her through chips of jade. The Cursed shivered.

“Wake up,” Black ordered.

The Cursed twitched. Bones snapped and she convulsed on the stone, feeding back into herself. The hunger was ebbing away, the warmth leaving her. Sabah woke up naked and shivering, promptly throwing up on the ground. The taste of blood and bile mixed in her mouth. Someone wrapped a cloak around her, way too small to cover her properly from the cold.

“Gods,” she rasped. “I lost it again.”

Amadeus knelt at her side, putting an arm over her shoulder in comfort.

“You were meant to,” he said.

Sabah folded onto herself, huddling under the cloak. She could smell Wekesa coming closer with linen in his arms. The acute senses wouldn’t leave her for at least another bell.

“You think someone made her change on purpose?” Ranger said, kneeling on her left and gently patting her side.

“She was meant to rampage through an occupied district,” Black said. “Kill someone important, to give the Chancellor leverage over us.”

“I would have, if they hadn’t stopped me,” Sabah said, throat still raw. “Thank you, Hye. Things got...”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ranger said. “I’ve been itching for a good spar anyway.”

Sabah tried to laugh but it came out half a sob.

“It’s getting harder to keep it under control,” she admitted.

“I know,” Black said quietly. “But I may have a solution. Remember Istrid, the chief of the Red Moons?

“The one who wrestled you?” Sabah vaguely recalled.

Amadeua nodded.

“She told me about a place in the Steppes,” he said. “Where those who can’t control the Red Rage go to learn how.”

“The Chancellor told you to go to Stygia,” Sabah said.

“The Chancellor can go fuck himself,” Black replied frankly. “We leave tomorrow.”

—

It was an old saying among the orcs that hard lands bred a hard people. The Northern Steppes proved the truth of that, particularly in winters. Snow and ice as far as the eye could see, burying the unprepared in vicious and unexpected storms. Wolves the size of a horse stalked the cold, taught over centuries that travellers made for an easier meal than the well-protected orc cattle herds. It had been the better parts of a month since they’d left the territory of the Red Moons behind, following the directions Istrid had given them. Apprentice had gotten progressively more passive-aggressive about their destination as the days stretched, irked by the cold and the lack of decent wine. He’d tried to steal Ranger’s tea this morning and gotten a knife through the hand for his trouble, to everyone else’s amusement.

“It will be where it will be,” Wekesa mocked for the hundredth time. “They should have called it the City of Vagueness.”

“I’m sure the Clans will rename it, after such a heartfelt plea,” Black said.

“Don’t you get snippy at me, farmboy,” the dark-skinned mage said. “I’m not the one who decided to find a place that’s not on any maps and technically doesn’t exist.”

“ Farmboy ?” the Black Knight said amusedly. “I was a soldier, after I left the freehold. You could go with that at least.”

“You were a soldier for less than a year and deserted after the only battle you were involved in,” Apprentice said flatly.

“I still got paid once,” Amadeus mused. “It should count.”

Ranger raised an eyebrow. Sabah hid a smile: the half-elf had been ignoring the banter between those two for most of the trip, but she always paid attention whenever anything about Amadeus’ past was brought up. Usually by Wekesa – Black rarely spoke about himself, even among people he trusted.

“You were in the Legions?” she said.

“I enrolled before the Fields of Streges,” he said. “In my mother’s old company.”

“They misspelled his name on the rolls,” Sabah contributed with a grin.

“No doubt the Legions are on the lookout for the wicked deserter Amadous,” Wekesa said dramatically.

Ranger hummed. “I was in Procer at the time, but I heard the Fields were pretty bad for Praes.”

A shadow passed over Black’s face.

“An understatement if there ever was one,” he said. “If there was a stronger word than rout I would use it.”

Sabah had only ever heard rumours about what had happened there, but they all ran along the same lines. The Wizard of the West had apparently whipped Dread Emperor Nefarious so badly the man had taken flight without even getting on a horse. Hadn’t left the Tower since his return to Ater, either. Still, some good had come of the defeat. If the Black Knight hadn’t died on the field Amadeus’ eventual claiming of the Name would have been a lot more complicated. Murdering Black Knights was a tricky business, as they’d spent the last year teaching to half the Wasteland. Eyeing up ahead, Sabah blinked as she found a hut that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Smoke was rising from it through an opening, which they definitely would have seen from a distance. The tall Taghreb cleared her throat, claiming everyone’s attention. She pointed ahead without saying a word.

“Distinct lack of bones, for a place they call the Land of Bones,” Wekesa said.

“They might have wine in there,” Black mildly replied.

Apprentice cheerfully took the lead without any more need for convincing. Sabah had been worried they wouldn’t all fit inside – she was taller than the hut by a full foot – but that worry proved unfounded. The structure was much larger on the inside than it looked from the outside, which apparently was enough to distract Apprentice from his quest to get sauced for a moment as he prodded at the walls curiously. There was someone inside, behind a fire pit. It was hard to make out too much under the pile of blankets and furs smothering the silhouette, but it looked like an orc. A woman, and an old one. Pulling at a dragonbone pipe, the stranger watched them in silence. A hint of fangs and wrinkled green skin could be made out, under sunken yellow eyes.

“You’re not one of mine,” the orc finally said in Lower Miezan when they were all seated.

Wekesa had been about to reply when Ranger discreetly elbowed him.

“I’ve been told this is where orcs come, when they want to learn how to control the Red Rage,” Sabah said.

The creature’s attention fell entirely on her at that. She had an unsettling gaze, and now Sabah wasn’t sure it was an orc at all seated in front of her.

“I see the curse in you, girl,” the stranger said. “It is not the Blessing.”

“And yet,” Sabah said quietly, “here I am.”

“You are not of the Clans,” the creature said. “How do you know of the Land of Bones?”

Sabah glanced at Black and he nodded.

“Istrid of the Red Moons told us the way,” she said.

The stranger scoffed. “She knows not what she has done. Do you know what this place is, southern devil? It is the graveyard of our greatness. These are the holy grounds of the Broken Antler Horde. Destroyed, by the same people whose language you ape.”

The Miezans. In Praes the histories spoke of the War of Chains, when the Soninke and the Taghreb had been brought to heel, but little of the war that had come after to force the submission of the orcs. They’d been one of the most powerful nations on Calernia at the time, she knew. They’d ransacked the Soninke kingdoms with impunity and returned to the Steppes with gold and human slaves. Even the elves had tread lightly around them.

“I am not Miezan,” Sabah said. “I come from the same people who rebelled to drive them back into the sea.”

The creature pulled at her pipe, blowing out a stream of red-coloured smoke. The smell of it was heavy, almost like incense.

“There is a truth in that,” she conceded. “Before there was the Tower, Maleficent was Amina – and Amina was a friend to my people. It was not her who broke the promises of the Declaration.”

She cast a look of thinly-veiled hatred at Wekesa, who was the only Soninke in the hut. It was an old story, this one. Maleficent had founded the Empire but ruled it for less than a decade before the High Lord of Wolof had murdered her and stolen the throne. The Soninke nobles would not brook a Taghreb ruler when they were so much more numerous and powerful than the people of the desert.

“For this, you may enter. You and no one else,” the stranger said, then suddenly cackled. “Though you may not find what you think you will.”

“Well, that ’s helpful,” Wekesa said. “Clearly coming here was the right notion all along.”

“You can wait in the cold, boy,” the creature said. “As for you, Sabah the Cursed, you must pass behind me.”

There was a flap there in the leather. It hadn’t been there before she’d mentioned it. Why was every otherworldly entity they ran into so bloody dramatic? Sabah looked at the others. Black met her eyes and spoke for the first time since they’d entered the tent.

“Whatever is there,” he said. “Win. Come back to us.”

Nothing more needed to be said. Sabah crawled through the opening. She’d been expecting the cold to hit her in the face but the weather out there was dry. Rising to her feet, the Taghreb took a calm look around. She was in a broad plain of burnt out huts, the ground as far as she could see covered in a layer of ashes. Something crunched under her feet and she glanced down. Bones. Orc, by the thickness of them. They were everywhere, buried in the ashes. In the distance she could see a throne of stone, and something sitting on it. Well. It wouldn’t get any closer if she didn’t start walking. Sabah began the trek across the plain, the remains of dead warriors breaking under her stride. She wasn’t tuned to magic, not the way Black and Apprentice were, but even she could feel something heavy at work here.

She was no longer so sure she was in Creation.

She felt the movement more than heard it, warhammer in hand faster than the blink of an eye. The heavy steel head impacted the skeleton and scattered the bones. The bronze axe it was carrying sunk into the ashes and the Taghreb sighed. It was going to be one of those days, wasn’t it? All around her she heard warriors rise from the ashes, and even more rose in the distance. Hundreds of them. Thousands, even. Gods Below, how many orcs had died here? A swing of the hammer scattered another skeleton when it got close, but this was a losing battle. There would be no fighting her way through this mess with a weapon in hand. Already the Beast was licking its chops inside of her, miffed at the lack of flesh but eager for a fight. Anger brought it out against her wishes, but Sabah had surrendered to the curse of her own will before. Those times were always the worst: when she opened the door herself, it was always harder to close it. There’d be no Amadeus to bring her back here.

“But there’s no one here I care about either,” she told the skeletons. “You’ll regret that, before we’re done.”

Sabah closed her eyes and let out a long breath. The Beast grinned, and the world went red.

—

The Cursed shook off the spear buried in her back, scattering the dead things with a wild swing. Time had passed. Long. The sun had come and gone several times. Her thoughts were becoming sharp again, now. The dead things still came like a horde without end. Bone-things, and others made of cold flesh and teeth that tore. Nothing she could eat. Someone was ahead of her, on a thing made of stone, but now matter how much she ran she could not get close to it. All there was was the fight. The Cursed roared and tore through the bone-things, breaking them and sinking her claws into warped flesh. Iron was no bane to her and neither was bronze. A sword cleaved the back of her leg and she slumped, slapping away the dead and wildly turning to keep the others away. So many destroyed, and still they came. She was mighty and tall, larger than a tower, but the insects were swarming her. They bit and sliced and held on, trying to bury her with their numbers.

Her leg healed but it was slow. The well was running out. She was getting tired, as she never had before. It was unpleasant, not what the Cursed was meant to be. She growled at the bone-things but they were not afraid, could not be afraid. She stepped on the enemy, breaking them with weight, but another spear was driven into her back. Too many. They were not tired. Letting out a pained noise, the Cursed broke through the mass of dead and again tried to reach the stone-thing and what sat on it. More rose in her path, swifter than she could break them. She stopped even trying, just forcing herself to continue forward as the sharp things tore at her fur and hide. The stone... throne, that was the word. She was getting closer to it now. It was not fleeing her anymore. The Cursed took a spear to the side but leapt forward. More were massing, a flood trying to turn her back.

She howled, but the wall of spears broke her stride. She slowed. Skeletons cut through the back of her legs and they did not heal. She crawled forward, dragging herself through the ash with her front feet. The presence was a greenskin. Larger than any the Cursed had seen before. It was wearing stone and bronze, with eyes like flame and fists like hammers. It looked at her in silence. The dead were hounding her but still she crawled, and reached the steps before the stone. Her claws rose, to tear at the other, but the spears of the dead finally forced her down. She breathed shallowly. There was no more healing. The other looked down on her, face beyond description. The Cursed heaved one last time and folded back into herself, leaving Sabah naked in the ash. Slowly bleeding out from a hundred wounds. Gods, the pain. The pain was blinding. For the first time in her life the curse had failed, leaving only the woman beyond it.

“Do you understand, now?” the other said.

Sabah made a wordless noise.

“There is no winning,” it said. “You cannot beat the Rage. The Beast. You have no control. It was a lie to believe you ever did.”

“I’m still alive,” Sabah managed.

“Yes,” the other said. “You have proved worthy. Rise.”

The pain receded and Sabah managed to push herself up. She rose to her feet unsteadily.

“You are not of the Clans. No matter. We will do great things, you and I.”

Sabah looked into the flames that served as its eyes.

“Great things?” she said.

“You will lead others, assemble the Blessed. And together you will rip out the heart of this wretched Empire,” the other said.

Visions passed through her mind. Herself, bedecked in bronze. Leading a host of humans and orcs, breaking cities and leaving behind only the grass of the steppes. A perfect horizon without end of blue sky without anything to mar it. Glory eternal, a throne of bones raised on the grounds where the Tower once stood.

“Kneel to me, child,” the other said. “I will bestow upon you the control you crave. I will grant you a fate without rival.”

Sabah looked into the flames, and remembered a night years ago. A green-eyed boy in a dark barn, who looked a monster in the eyes and smiled. The dark-skinned boy at his side, more fascinated than afraid. You’re not a monster at all, are you?

“Are you a god?” Sabah asked.

“I am war,” the other said. “I am blood and bronze and glory. I am the horde that was and will be.”

The Taghreb chuckled quietly.

“I already have a fate,” she said. “I know who it’s bound to. I made that choice years ago.”

“You have a greater purpose now,” the other said.

“Greater? They’re going to be legends, you know. My boys,” she smiled. “And I’ll be standing at their side. It’s all right if my Role is a quiet one. I don’t have as much to prove.”

“ You will kneel ,” the god hissed.

“I take orders from only one person, and he ordered me to win,” she said. “I will Obey .”

She felt the Beast inside of her grin, and this time when the red came she embraced it. Sabah’s body distorted and the god would have stepped back if it could.

“You have something I need,” she spoke through her growing fangs. “ Give it to me .”

There were screams this time, but they were not hers.

—

She parted the flap. The thing in the blankets shrieked at her the moment she came in.

“What have you done ?”

The Tahghreb dropped the corpse she’d been dragging by the hair onto the floor. Its ribcage had been ripped open, missing the heart that still stained her lips red.

“You’re going to need another god,” she told the creature. “I broke this one.”

Amadeus was looking at her with a searching gaze. Wekesa was eyeing the god’s corpse like he was debating if he could get away with stealing it.

“Sabah?” Amadeus said.

“Captain,” she replied. “Call me Captain.”

Chapter 47: And Justice For All

“The question of who the most vindictive people of Calernia are has long been debated. Some say it is the Arlesites, who will duel to the death over the use of the wrong adjective in a verse. Others say it is those of the Free Cities, where the moving of a border by half a mile will spawn a war lasting three generations. Others yet say it is the Praesi, who indulge in political assassination the way other nations enjoy a cup of good wine. I would humbly put forward, however, that the answer is the people of Callow. Steal an apple from a farmer of the Kingdom and fifty years later his grandson will find yours on the other side of the continent, sock him in the eye and take three apples back.”
– Extract from “Horrors and Wonders”, famed travelogue of Anabas the Ashuran

I landed in sand.

Hastily I got up and brushed away the mess, taking an assessing look around. I was on an island, looked like, a perfect circle with some kind of shoddy chapel built in the middle. The water surrounding it went on for a dozen feet before stopping abruptly into darkness that looked much like the one that had surrounded Masego’s bridge. I eyed the dark, deciding to be very careful about falling in there. I wasn’t sure what the rules were here, but I doubted that anything pleasant would come out of tripping into the endless void. In unsheathed my sword, ears prickling at the sound of struggle inside the structure. I moved quietly towards the open doors, only pausing when I glimpsed runes on the side of the chapel. Heiress’ work, or had they always been there? Without knowing that I couldn’t risk messing them up. For all I knew, scraping a line through one of those would have the Hashmallim knocking at the door in a matter of moments. I’d rather not fight an angel if I could avoid it, really. I’d been in some pretty rough fights over the last year but I doubted I’d walk away from that one. Before I could cross the gate there was a loud bang and someone was thrown out. William landed on his feet, sword raised, and snarled. I pressed against the side of the wall just out of his sight.

“I begin to sympathize with the Miezan extermination of your kind,” the hero said.

That didn’t really narrow down the possibilities as to what he was scrapping with. The Miezans had been pretty liberal with extermination policies. A tall silhouette of smokeless fire strode out into the sands, its face without features.

“There’s no need to be rude about this,” it said in a calm, cultured voice.

It raised a hand towards William, spawning a stream of fire from the palm. The hero blocked it with his sword, light flaring as he forced back the sorcery. Well, I wished them fun with that. The Lone Swordsman was going to get a good stabbing before this was over, but I had nothing against letting whatever Heiress had summoned soften him up first. Might even make him a tad less impossible to kill. I waited for their fight to take them around the island and slipped inside. For an angel’s corpse, this place was pretty dingy. Two rows of stone benches – seven on each side, which didn’t feel like a coincidence – led up to an altar with a sword in it. A sword in a stone. That... had a shape to it. A story. Something I might be able to use, if I played this right. I recognized the sword in the stone, as it happened. It was the same bitch of a blade William had used in most of our fights. An angels’ feather, used to summon another angel. There were candles behind the stone, seven of them. Most of them had melted, with only two remaining.

There was someone by the altar, looking down on it as she tinkered with runes hanging in the air. Heiress, and would you look at that her back was to me. I crept forward silently, hugging the wall. As my practical decision of the day, I’d come to the conclusion that a sword in the back was a victory I could live with. It would be almost poetic, considering how often she’d slid the metaphorical knife into mine. From the corner of my eye I saw something blur in the air on the opposite side of the chapel, near a pillar. Someone dropped quietly to the ground, looking harried, and Masego looked about ready to retch. The blur disappeared and Apprentice took a look around, eyes finding me after a moment. He opened his mouth to talk, then thought better about it. I gestured towards Heiress and he nodded. Taking a long breath, I reached for the depths of my Name and formed a spear of shadows. Flying faster than an arrow, it tore through Masego’s head, dissipating the illusion.

“Well,” Heiress said. “It was worth a try.”

I noticed the silhouette by the altar wasn’t where the sound came from. I couldn’t quite pin down where it did.

“He already told me I was on my own in here,” I said. “For now, anyway. They’ll find another way through eventually.”

The fake Heiress dropped to all fours, a sight that would have amused me if it didn’t imply there was actually something under that particular illusion.

“You know, if I remember correctly you actually have a sword,” I said. “Yet you never seem to use it. Afraid of a little tussle, Akua? I promise I’ll be gentle.”

I closed my eyes and expanded my senses. Whatever the fake-Heiress was, she didn’t seem to breathe. I couldn’t hear the actual Heiress do that either, though, so it was worth taking with a grain of salt. The illusion ran towards me and I immediately got away from the wall to make some space. The creature leapt over a bench but my senses told me otherwise: I swung my sword to the side and hit flesh, a bald creature of rotted flesh and fangs blinking into existence as it screamed and scampered back. The fake-Heiress passed harmlessly through me as the creature disappeared again.

“Is that a ghoul?” I asked. “Scraping the bottom of the barrel there.”

There was an airy chuckle.

“Seen your little redhead mage, lately?”

I took a sharp breath. No, it couldn’t be Kilian. She was safe with the mages of the Fifteenth, surrounded by hundreds of legionaries. Akua has spies in the ranks , my mind provided. She could have abducted her. And then killed her and turned her into a ghoul, just for the sake of messing with me? No. She’d not planned for me to make it this far. Chider had been her trump card to get me out of the game, make me unable to interfere with whatever she was up to. If I hadn’t been dead already, getting my Name ripped out would probably have made me unconscious – if not killed me outright. She was just playing mind games.

“You’d probably be a better liar if you weren’t so smug,” I said.

The patter of feet against stone was heard behind me, but it wasn’t what I was watching for. When Heiress spoke, the words resounded in every part of the chapel – except one. The corner to the left of the door. I allowed the invisible ghoul to come close, then ducked when it leapt for my chest – my sword came up, ripping through the creature’s stomach as it passed over me. The screaming, wriggling shape blocked the sight of my free hand for a moment and I formed a burst of shadows, pivoting to fire it at the too-silent corner. It hit a shield that flared blue, revealing the silhouette of a frowning Akua underneath.

“Found you,” I said.

“Chider failed, I see,” she said.

“Oh, she did exactly what you intended,” I smiled. “You’re just not as smart as you seem to think you are.”

“Coming from you ,” she said, “that is truly insulting.”

The ghoul came for the third time and I waited for it to rush – then snatched a limb out of the air. I swung the creature like an improvised flail, smashing her against the bench. Really, a ghoul . And she had the gall to say I was being insulting. Keeping a hand on the struggling creature, I hacked through her head calmly and returned my attention to Heiress. Who was smiling. Oh dear. The undead creature exploded a moment later, and as I was thrown against the wall all I could think was that undead bombs was my godsdamned gambit. Leaving the protection of her shield, Akua slowly unsheathed her sword. It was an ornate piece, gilded and the length of it covered in runes. Why did everyone else get to have a fancy magic sword? I shrugged off the impact and rose to my feet, my own sword still in hand.

“Do you know what irritates me the most about you, Catherine Foundling?” she smiled.

“I have better hair,” I replied and burst forward.

She raised her blade in a classic guard, which almost made me grin. I’d fought plenty of people using that before. They were all dead. I batted her sword away and got in close, swiping for her eyes. She danced away, making distance between us. Her free hand came up, crackling with energy, but I ducked under the bolt of lightning and hit her stomach with the pommel of my sword, bending the lamellar steel with the impact. She let out a grunt of pain that was music to my ears before forcing me back with an attempt to slice through my neck.

“Please, continue to pontificate,” I said. “Where’s my monologue, Akua? You’re turning into a disappointment of a rival.”

“You wretch,” she snarled, and brought up her hand to cast again.

I laughed and smashed her wrist with my blade – steel ground against steel, failing to cut through but forcing it down. The ball of flame that erupted hit the ground at her feet, blowing her away as the heat licked at my face.

“You know,” I said as I walked towards her prone form, “I always assumed that even behind the scheming you’d be able to give me a good fight. But you can’t, can you?”

I smiled coldly.

“I might be a little heavy on the brute force, Akua, but even thugs have their day.”

I raised my sword above her and... froze. The fear on the dark-skinned girl’s face melted away as she rose to her feet calmly. My body began rising in the air, hovering a foot above the floor.

“You are not Evil,” she said. “That it what irritates me most about you, Catherine. You just ape the methods, reassuring yourself your intentions are still Good. You act like your Name is a weapon and ignore that it has a meaning. ”

She slid her fingers down the length of her blade, the runes shining at the touch.

“Your master is the same. Lord Black, fear of the continent,” she mocked. “He is a rat hiding at the center of maze of traps he spent decades building. Dangerous, perhaps, but behind all the tricks he is weak .”

She chuckled.

“No matter how clever the traps, they will not save him from a boot. You shy away from what you are, Foundling, and Creation abhors such spineless dithering. I know what I am. I embrace it, because that is what a villain is . That is why I have power...”

Her sword rose.

“Monologues,” I said, “Not even once.”

The Lone Swordsman hit her with a burst of light before I even finished talking. I dropped back to the ground with a pleased hum: his little Name trick messed with sorcery as well as my own Name shenanigans, it seemed. William, covered in soot, eyed me with horror.

“All according to plan,” I lied.

“You’re dead,” the Lone Swordsman said. “I cut your head off .”

“Eh,” I shrugged. “I got over it.”

I paused.

“Also, you were supposed to reply –“

I had to backpedal away hurriedly when Heiress threw some sort of orb of shadows where we were standing. Her armour was smoking, and for once she actually looked frazzled. Her hair was messed up, I noted with amusement. First time I’d ever seen her look anything but pristine. Heiress was next to the altar, though she steered clear of the sword. Good, now everyone was here. I could actually begin using my bastard cousin of a plan, though... I frowned, looking at the candles behind the altar. Another one had melted entirely, leaving only the last. I thought they represented seven hours each , I thought.

“William,” I said.

“No,” he said immediately.

I ignored that part for the sake of convenience.

“When you were last here, did time pass normally?”

His eyes flicked to the candles, and his face turned white.

“That’s impossible,” he said.

I knew time passed differently in Arcadia – it was the basis of the trick Black had used to get to Marchford in a fraction of the time it would have taken him on a horse. And Arcadia worked that way because it wasn’t in Creation proper. Which meant...

“You moved the entire island elsewhere,” I said. “That’s what the runes on the chapel are for. “

“You mean to trap the Hashmallim,” the hero said.

Heiress stood tall against the glare directed at her by the Lone Swordsman, almost preening.

“This is my house now,” she said. “And the only rules here are mine.”

Shit. Couldn’t let that go unchallenged, not if I wanted my plan to actually work.

“This is Callowan ground, wherever it may be,” I said. “Back me up on this, William.”

Akua scoffed. “The truth cannot be-“

“Shut the Hells up, Praesi,” the hero barked. “These grounds are of the Kingdom as long as I live.”

Good ol’ Willy. You could always count on him to screw over at least one person in the room at any time.

“You’re right,” I said. “She is an invader here. The enemy.”

“You’re one too,” William said with disgust.

“She’s not one of us, you halfwit,” Akua sneered. “She doesn’t have the will or the blood.”

It was refreshing to be in a situation where my opponents actually hated each other more than they hated me. Heiress was in the full swing of her gloat and the Lone Swordsman has his heroic shackles all raised, especially now that it was out in the open that Akua had screwed with an angel’s corpse. Which he finally seemed to remember then and there. Keeping a wary eye on me, William moved towards Heiress. Who was too busy watching me from the corner of her eye to to really do anything about it. I grinned. The Lone Swordsman raised his sword and Heiress backed away, preparing to cast.

“ What did you do ?” Akua said suddenly, looking at me.

“I have three things,” I said. “A kingdom, an enemy and a claim.”

William snorted.

“A claim?” he said. “You-“

“I am the heiress to the King of Callow,” I interrupted calmly.

“There is no King of Callow,” the Lone Swordsman said.

“Yet a man rules it, and I am his chosen successor,” I said.

Akua flinched, then looked at the sword. Too late now: she’d already given me what I needed. Of her own free will, too. That had to sting. William took the opening to dart for the blade, wrapping his fingers around the hilt and tugging it out. It did not move. His eyes turned to me, scared for the first time since I’d met him.

“It isn’t yours anymore,” I said.

“It was granted to me by the Hashmallim,” he said.

“It’s a sword in a stone. You did that yourself, with no one forcing you,” I smiled. “It’s a symbol, now, in a story about Callow.”

“She’s an orphan,” Heiress said quietly, aghast as the situation sunk in. “She’s the Squire .”

“Would you kindly get your hands off my sword, William?” I said.

They didn’t even need to share a glance before they both turned on me. Wasn’t that going to be a fun ride? The Lone Swordsman was so fast on the move he almost blurred to my Name sight, even damnably faster than when we’d gone for our last round. This time, though, he wasn’t predestined to win. That made a difference. I stepped around his blow but ate Heiress’ spell right in the face: some kind of dark shroud that stuck around my eyes. I flared my Name, clearing it up some, but it was hard to make out William’s sword as he swung again. I took the hit to the shoulder, at this point utterly indifferent to the fact that it bit through steel and into my flesh.

“Still dead,” I reminded him, forming a burst of darkness around my hand and slamming it into his chest.

He went flying and I ran for the sword. The floor under my feet turned liquid but I leapt and landed in a roll just in time to get hit by a bolt of lightning. I was getting really sick of that spell, I thought as my muscles twitched uncontrollably. Was I smoking? I couldn’t really smell anymore, so it was hard to tell. William’s boot hit my back and I was sent sprawling but he’d made a mistake: I fell forward, and Heiress’ next spell hit him instead. He yelled in dismay as a swarm of something sounding like bees gathered around him and I took my fraction of an opening, falling belly first right in front of the altar. Heiress cursed, then actually tried to curse me, but I grinned in triumph and my fingers closed around the hilt of that fucking sword epople kept trying to kill me with. Gods, it burned even through the gauntlets. There was aheartbeat of pure pain and then it felt like I’d just gotten a brightstick to the face. There was warmth, and everything went white.

I was standing alone in a featureless plain. Not, not alone. Something was looking at me. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it – the weight of its stare. I looked down at my hands, noticing I was without armour. My clothes from the orphanage, huh. They looked less rumpled than usual, too. Apparently the Heavens did not approve of my sloppy laundry habits. I put a finger on my bare wrist and frowned when I felt no pulse.

“I beat you fair and square, your presumptuous fucks,” I called out. “Cough up my resurrection.”

The weight turned from noticeable to crushing in a heartbeat, forcing me to the ground. I could feel my bones grind into dust as my back snapped. They were looking at me. There was... where my Name should be, there was only fire. Something scouring me from the inside.

Repent. Repent. Repent .

The images passed through my mind as if I was still standing there. Black, offering me a knife in a dark room. Two men against the wall, bound and with terror on their eyes. Blood on the floor.

Repent. Repent. Repent.

The empty banquet hall in Laure, where Mazus’ death was dispensed with a single sentence. The monster offering me a deal with smiling eyes. Agreement, followed by a sword through my chest.

Repent. Repent. Repent.

So many things. Sparing William, sacrificing thousands for my ambition. The innkeeper’s daughter, swinging on the gallows. Breaking a man for supplies in Ater. Ordering those men dead in the cells at Summerholm, on suspicion alone. Leashing the Gallowborne with the threat of destruction. The dead, oh so many dead. Three Hills. Nilin, the traitor, my friend. All those I’d failed against the devils in the night. Marchford. Hunter, who’d fought and died for strangers. The people of Liesse, at the mercy of devils because I hadn’t seen the betrayal coming. The light going out of Baroness Dormer’s eyes as she surrendered.

Repent. You will not be forgiven. Repent.

I saw things that had not happened, now. Yet. Rising alive from the altar, a crown of light on my brow. Heiress dead at my feet. The Swordsman, kneeling. My red right hand. Liesse rebelling, weapons taken out of hidden cellars, exhumed from hidden stashes. A host sweeping across the south, ranks swelling as cities revolted one after another. Taking back the Blessed Isle, burnt-out towers remade in marble. Breaking the nine gates of Ater and pulling down the Tower on my enemies.

Repent, Queen of Callow.

I gurgled out a wretched laugh. You can’t ever lose, can you? Even when you’re beaten I have to become one of yours. I forced myself to remember something else. They tried to struggle but it was just as much a part of me as the rest had been. You don’t get to pick and choose what I am. Two silhouettes cloaked in black, standing alone in front of the throne.

We do not kneel.

It wasn’t enough. Those were not my words. I had borrowed them, and in borrowing lessened them. They demanded contrition. They demanded justification, for all my many sins. I had none. I clawed desperately into the depths of myself. Looking for something, anything. What I found... was a starry sky, in ruins that moaned in the wind. A dark-skinned girl, tempting me with a way out. Four dead on the floor as she fled. A lesson learned, a question answered.

Justification only matters to the just.

They flinched.

“I swore it,” I croaked. “Whether they be gods or kings or all the armies in Creation.”

I no longer saw a crown on my brow. They hadn’t liked that at all, had they? So much for being Queen. The fires withdrew, leaving me empty. Still dead. Unlike their trap of a Name, this I took umbrage to.

“You can’t cheat me,” I laughed. “You’re not the Gods. You’re part of the story too. You have to follow the rules .”

I opened my eyes, looking up into the perfect blankness.

“And if you won’t give me my due,” I said. “I’ll Take it.”

They shrieked but the power flowed into me. I felt my body spasm. My heart beat. My blood flow. The plain blurred, collapsed into me as I laughed.

I was standing in the chapel again, the Lone Swordsman’s sword through my belly. William’s green eyes stared into mine, my hand on his shoulder as I used him to stay up. It was a strangely intimate pose.

“What is this, Squire?” he whispered.

I ripped out the thing inside of him, took it for my own. His skin turned paler, his face bloodless.

“ Rise ,” I replied.

Shadow spread across my body in thick chords. Healing me, pushing his blade out of my flesh. I could feel my heart beat and it was glorious . All the little things I hadn’t realized were gone, now returned to me. The sword was still in my hand, the blade that has once been his. I rammed it into his neck, biting deep as he fell twitching to the ground. My boot rose once, twice, thrice. The skull gave the third time, breaking like an overripe fruit. My gaze swept across the room, finally falling on Heiress.

“I believe,” I said, “that we were having a conversation about power. By all means, finish your thought.”

Chapter 48: Threes

“Nothing is half as dangerous to a villain as victory. We raise our own gallows.”
-Dread Empress Maleficent the First

“You’re still a villain,” Heiress said. “You’re still the Squire.”

Maybe, but things were... different now. I’d gotten an aspect much faster than I should have. Take . I could feel the now-shaped bundle of power inside of me, but there were complexities to it. It held the aspect I’d stolen from the Lone Swordsman, his godsdamned healing trick that had seen him survive the most brutal beating I’d ever dealt out. Rise. It was mine, now, but the way it was was hard to explain. I’d stolen the shape, maybe, but not the essence: there would only be so many times I could use it before it faded. When it did, though, I would be able to Take again. Or so I believed. My ignorance on the subject of Names and Roles was starting to be galling, but unfortunately there was no such thing as a how-to book to being a villain – the closest thing to that was my dreams, which tended to focus more on attitudes than practical knowledge. The dreams were, I thought, a teaching tool. A way to learn from the mistakes and victories of your predecessor. I wondered if Akua got them too, memories from the Heir that my teacher had killed.

“And yet, you are alive,” Heiress said quietly. “That should not be possible.”

I smiled cheerfully.

“Angels are sore losers, but rules are rules,” I said.

I could not be dead and win. I had won, so I must be alive. As the true owners of the sword, the Hashmallim had been supposed to see to that. They’d tried to flip it around by making me a heroic Queen of Callow, but I wouldn’t be having any of that. I already had a way and it was finally working: I wasn’t going to turn my cloak this deep in the game. That they’d thought I’d willingly slaughter the Fifteenth as the first step in a kingdom-wide rebellion showed how little angels actually understood human nature. Those legionaries were mine, after all. Bastards to a man and entirely too lippy, but they were my bastards. They flew my banner, fought my battles and sang my songs. I would have been twice the traitor some called me to turn my back on them. I’d been called quite a few things in my life – the majority of them pretty unpleasant, because Creation was out to get me – but contrite had never been one of them. I owned all of me, even the parts that weren’t pretty to look at.

For someone who was about to meet her makers, Akua seemed entirely too at ease. I felt flush with power right now, but that still rang alarm bells. Obviously, she had something up her sleeve. Didn’t she always? Not for the first time, I wondered what Heiress’ aspects actually were. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one entirely dedicated to screwing me over, though how that would be phrased into an imperative I wasn’t sure. Clearly, at some point in this fight I’d stepped into her “clever” web of schemes. I should, I knew, probably spend some thought trying to figure out exactly how I’d done that. On the other hand, I believed it was a safe assumption that my ripping off her arms and beating her to death with them wouldn’t be part of any of her plans. It would also be extremely cathartic for me, which was an added bonus. I frowned. Was it actually possible to beat someone to death with an arm? Well, it couldn’t be too different than doing it with a fish. So probably. Only one way to find out.

“So this has been an oddly civil talk,” I said. “Let’s fix that, shall we?”

“If you insist,” the dark-skinned girl said.

Runes formed in the air around her hand and lit up. Nothing happened. She didn’t hide her dismay quite fast enough for me not to notice it.

“Tried the demon, huh?” I said.

“You did something to prevent my access,” she accused.

“That’d be the redhead, actually,” I said. “And she’s definitely earned a treat for that.”

Akua sighed. “Well, it seems we’ve established killing you is likely beyond me at the moment.”

“You say the nicest things,” I said.

I strode forward with the angel sword in hand. It wasn’t burning me anymore, but I wasn’t feeling power from it either. It was, by all appearances, just a very sharp sword. Probably for the best. I’d been taught some very specific things about magical weapons anyway. There was a reason I didn’t wield any when the Tower held the largest stash of magical artefacts on the continent: the way Black told it, relying on a magic sword – or a magic anything, really – was effectively signing your own death warrant if you were Named. They always failed you at the worst possible moment. Considering I’d just killed the Lone Swordsman with his own fancy angel sword, I was beginning to see his point.

“As it happens,” Heiress said, “you can’t kill me either.”

“They all say that,” I mused. “But you’ll notice I have bits of hero all over my boots. Hopefully it doesn’t stain, Hakram would have a bitch of a time getting that out.”

“I mean, Squire, that should you kill me you’ll not survive the act,” Heiress said flatly. “I’ve bound this dimension to my life. Should I die, it will immediately collapse.”

I squinted at her.

“Are you telling me you just tried to summon a demon of Corruption in a dimension you bound to yourself? That’d be a special brand of crazy even for you.”

I cleared my throat.

“And by crazy I mean stupid. So very, very stupid.”

Akua looked a little insulted at that and I could see her gearing up for scathing rebuttal, but she mastered herself at the last moment. Clearly those years getting under the skin of my opponents in the Pit were still seeing good use even though I’d found other employment.

“I could show you the runes proving this if you weren’t magically illiterate,” she said.

“That’s slander,” I said. “I’m functionally magically illiterate. There’s an important distinction there.”

My absolute refusal to take her sinister revelations seriously was riling her up, by the looks of the colour on her cheeks. I was rather enjoying that, truth be told. Whether she was actually telling the truth was a toss up, in my opinion. A contingency like this was right up her alley, but on the other hand I got the impression I’d already murdered my way through most of her contingencies. It might not matter if she was telling the truth, though. Given enough time, Masego was bound to find a way into this place. The moment he opened a way out, I could just smoke her and bail. Maybe toss a couple of goblinfire balls to make sure no eldritch abomination crawled out.

“I guess we could stand in our respective corners of the church and think that over,” I said.

She smiled condescendingly.

“Apprentice will not find the gate to this place,” she said.

“’cause you’re such a big bad witch?” I said sceptically. “I suppose you might manage to hide it with a spell. On the other hand, it’d be pretty hard to do that without limbs. Which brings us back to the original plan of beating your ass. Progress, eh?”

“This dimension was crafted by Triumphant herself, you cretin,” Akua said. “Not even the Warlock could find it.”

“Harsh words,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Alas, you’ve hurt my feelings. Negotiations are breaking down already.”

“Do you have no self-preservation instinct at all, you fool?” she hissed.

I snorted.

“Akua, my opening gambit for this battle was getting myself killed ,” I reminded her patiently. “You’re barking up the wrong tree here. But sure, I’ll take this seriously. If you apologize for your impolite language.”

I grinned.

“It was, I’m sure you’ll agree, beneath the dignity of such an august personage as yourself.”

I hadn’t seen anyone wanting to murder me so badly in a while. Page, maybe, but even her glares hadn’t been quite so venomous. I was morbidly curious about whether or not sheer anger might give Heiress heart palpitations.

“My words were not helpful to this conversation,” she conceded through gritted teeth.

I could have made something of that but there was only so much taunting she’d take before lashing out. She had an offer to make, clearly, and at the moment she was my only way out of this dump. I could always run her through the moment we were back in Creation, though I suspected it wouldn’t be that easy.

“I’ll allow it, in the spirit of good will and cooperation,” I lied. “Now spit out your bargain.”

The Soninke straightened, painting solemn haughtiness on her face. It was actually a good look on her, but then she’d always been gorgeous. Shame about that whole thing where I was going to kill her or die trying, but she shouldn’t have picked this fight if she didn’t want to get stabbed repeatedly.

“In exchange for safe passage, I ask three concessions of you,” she said.

“No,” I said immediately.

Her eyes flashed with anger. “This is not how negotiations are done,” she said.

“It is, if you’re buying contraband painkillers in the alley behind an illegal fighting pit,” I said.

I was being wilfully obstructive here, but not because I felt like being ornery. ... Not just because I felt like being ornery. When it came down to it she’d had training in this and I hadn’t. The only way I wasn’t going to get robbed was by making her so furious she got sloppy.

“Three for three, or we’re done,” I said. “We can find out the hard way whether your little Triumphant bubble really can’t be found by Masego. Resourceful man, Apprentice. I’ll take those odds.”

Akua looked like I’d just flipped the negotiation table over hear head and made her clean up the mess, but she swallowed her anger. She didn’t have nearly as much of an upper hand here as she pretending she did, we both knew that.

“Three for three,” she conceded. “In exchange for safe passage for you into Creation, you will refrain from killing me or spilling my blood for three days and three nights.”

Ah, and there it was. The way she’d try to wiggle out of this mess. She’d bail out of Callow and return to the Wasteland, where the only way for me to kill her would be starting a civil war in Praes. That wasn’t nearly as hardy of a shield as she thought it was, but it was still an obstacle. I remained silent, trying to go through my options. I could just tell her to die in a fire and bet everything on Masego pulling through against all odds, but I didn’t like the shape of it. Crawling away from trouble she’d raised was what Heiress excelled at most. I’d already told Black more than once that for the shit she’d pulled her head should be on a pike, but the Empire had given her a suspicious amount of leeway. Either Black and Malicia were idiots, which I knew they weren’t, or there was something else at play. I’d never seen the Heir in one of my Name dreams so I couldn’t be sure, but avoiding blame might be one of the central powers for that Role. I’d already put my own slant on the events that unfolded today, so there would be no screwing my opponents with that story twice. Three days and three nights wasn’t that long, anyway. It wouldn’t get her out of southern Callow even if she managed to get her hands on a horse – which I’d make damned sure she wouldn’t, even if I had to kill every mount in the city. If she was on foot, I could have three cohorts shadow her and wait out the time before they carpeted wherever she stood with munitions.

“Fine,” I finally said. “Second?”

“Your monstrous little goblin seized my associates,” she said, and my heartbeat stilled. “I want them released into my custody and the terms of the first concession applied to them.”

Shit. She’d noticed it, then. Robber had spent the entire battle marauding in the streets with his cohort, capturing her Praesi lordlings. Did she know what I wanted them for? I couldn’t just give them away, not before my gambit played out. I closed my eyes. No killing or spilling of blood , I remembered. Those were the terms. There were ways around that. Not pretty ones, but she’d pushed me a lot further down the ruthless side of the slope than she thought. She’d asked for two things, though, even if she’d tried to phrase it as one. That felt... significant. Usable.

“Pick three,” I said.

She’s had five people in her retinue at the beginning of the battle. Barika, who I’d executed before the battle began properly. Fadila, the mage who’d bailed her out of the first three-way melee with the Lone Swordsman. And then there were the other three. Ghassan something or other, the boy with the sword I’d shamed in front of the court in Ater. Apparently a Taghreb lord in his own right. Then the actual important ones, the heir to the High Lordship of Aksum and the heiress to the High Ladyship of Nok. Akua’s face went blank, her eyes considering. I’d taken her by surprised with that.

“Is Barika still alive?” she asked.

I smiled unpleasantly.

“Going sentimental on me, Heiress? Could be she is. Could be she isn’t.”

“If she is dead,” the Soninke said softly, “there will be a reckoning for it.”

“Oh, there’ll be one of those anyway,” I said with my friendliest expression. “You can count on that.”

Her face smoothing out into an unnaturally calm expression, Heiress composed herself.

“Fasili Mirembe, Hawulti Sahel and Ghassan Enazah,” she said.

The two high nobles and the failed military commander. Picking her minions based on political influence instead of competence, huh. Sloppy habit. It would cost her in the long run, if she lived that long.

“Sold,” I shrugged. “In exchange, you will extend the truce terms given to you to all under my command.”

“Agreed,” she said, sounding slightly miffed.

Yeah, I’d seen that one coming a mile away. If I couldn’t nail her at will, I was allowing a mage able to use High Arcana – whatever the Hells that actually was – to run rampant in a city full of my subordinates. She could have slaughtered her way through my entire high command and I wouldn’t have been able to lift a finger to help.

“Third?” I said.

She was picking her words very carefully, which I took to mean she was about to try to pull a fast one. I was wrong, as it turned out. She was just being ridiculously audacious.

“After the war, I will petition to be granted governorship of Liesse,” she said. “You will support this petition in court.”

I blinked and then almost laughed, but she was being absolutely serious. The “no, Gods no, are you even serious, I didn’t hit you on the head nearly that hard” was halfway to being spoken when I paused. She didn’t know what I’d taken her minions for, I realized. Otherwise she wouldn’t have angled for this. I had actually managed to put together a plan she hadn’t seen coming . I forced my face to be completely blank. It would be suspicious as all Hells, but not as suspicious as my starting to smirk. Heiress as governess of Liesse had... possibilities. For one, she didn’t have to stay the governess. And while she was, she would be stuck in Callow. On my playing field instead of hers, away from all her allies and surrounded by a population that would utterly hate her guts. I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. I would be surrendering the population of Liesse to the very woman who’d set a host of devils on them. But I’ll have a whole arsenal of tools to make sure she behaves. My own support wouldn’t guarantee she got the post, I told myself, but I knew deep down that she wouldn’t have asked for it unless she thought it would tip the balance in her favour. I had thought, perhaps naively, that after starting a war to get in a position of power I’d have sacrificed enough of my people to the altar of necessity. It seemed not. Part of me balked at the notion, but the rest had already decided it would be done. It was just a matter of deciding what I’d get in return.

I could get the names of all the spies in the Fifteenth. That was horribly, horribly tempting. There were problems with that, though. There could be others like Nilin – and my fingers clenched just at the memory of him – who’d been placed in the College by nobles years ago, and not all of them would be known to Akua. I suspected all the Truebloods shared their information with Heiress, but they likely didn’t share their sources. I wouldn’t be cleaning house entirely. And it wouldn’t stop her from placing fresh agents afterwards, anyway. The Fifteenth was going to be recruiting after all this, so it wasn’t like she’d lack opportunity. Could I ask for an unspecified favour? No, she wouldn’t go for that. It would give me too large of an advantage over her. I needed to strip away from her a tool she’d be able to use against me in the future. I tried to figure out a way to cut her off from Trueblood support, but the phrasing would be too tricky. There’d be ways around it. What did she have that I didn’t? Fancy armour. Curves. A magic sword. A demon.

“Agreed,” I said. “You’ll surrender the standard controlling your demon to Apprentice before a bell has passed.”

I paused.

“With the same demon still bound to it,” I added hastily.

She’d been about to accept the terms when I spoke, and looked irked when I added the last part. Close shave.

“Agreed,” she replied.

The terms were set. Getting actual oaths going proved a little more complicated. Heiress suggested we swear on our Names, but I wasn’t doing anything of the sort when she outstripped me in Name lore by such a wide margin. I proposed we swear on the Gods, but from the way she paled at that an oath to the Gods Below was a lot more dangerous than one to the Gods Above. We ended up compromising with a blood oath. She cut her palm, which was apparently tradition but unlike her I actually used my hands to swing a sword so I nicked my shoulder instead. I refused to mix our blood to seal the pact, citing the fact that her stupidity might be catching. I was actually more worried about her being crazy enough to put poison in her own blood or some sort of magical plague, but I wasn’t about to admit that. It wasn’t paranoia if you were dealing with Praesi. I cut off a bit of the Lone Swordsman’s coat and we both dripped blood on the leather – myself first, just in case – which was apparently enough. I felt something like a manacle form around my hand, though there was nothing visible.

It was a novelty watching Heiress cast a spell that wasn’t actively meant to harm me. She carved out a gate of light out on the shore and stepped through first when I invited her. I followed almost immediately, not willing to remain on that creepy island any longer than I had to. Her transition through was a lot smoother than Masego’s had been, and I found myself on the shores of the Hengest just by the spot where the boat from earlier had finally finished burning. Heiress stood with her hands raised, surrounded by the Gallowborne with all their weapons out. Adjutant was the first to see me cross, and he told Apprentice to stand down.

“Catherine,” Hakram said, looking relieved.

“Just a moment,” I said, and sucker punched Akua in the stomach.

She let out a wheeze: I’d put my Name to work in that strike, and her armour bent under the impact. Sorcery crackled to life around her hand but I punched her in the stomach again and it winked out as she fell to her knees. Calmly, I took her wrist and snapped it.

“You probably thought I forgot to bargain for my own safety,” I said. “I didn’t. I just knew it wouldn’t matter.”

“You can’t hurt me,” she gasped.

“I can’t kill you,” I corrected. “Or spill your blood.

My boot came down and shattered her knee as punctuation. She screamed.

“Did you actually think you’d bargain your way out of this?” I said. “No. Not after what you did.”

I smiled coldly.

“What was it you called me, when you sat down with Black in Summerholm? A nobody, I think. With a reputation as a brawler and nothing else to my name. Here’s the thing, though, about brawlers.”

I broke her other wrist, interrupting her second attempt to cast.

“We know how to hurt people without making them bleed,” I said casually.

Under the gaze of a hundred Callowans and two other Named, I methodically broke every bone in Heiress’ body I could smash without making her bleed. She’d heal all of this, eventually. But she’d be incapable of being a problem for me for at least a month. Her face remained intact – hits there bled too easily – but by the time I was done with her she could no longer move on her own.

“Now let’s find out how well you bargained,” I muttered.

I thought about breaking her bones repeatedly for three days and three nights, keeping her in the city until the truce ran out. The shackle around my hand tightened. Not that, then. I thought about allowing her to leave but having soldiers follow her. The shackle tightened again. The Fifteenth counted as an extension of myself for the purpose of killing, then. Damn. Dropping her in the lake? Also a break of the oath. I couldn’t think of anything else at the moment, but I had a whole cadre of senior officers to run it by. As well as a man who’d been raised by a villain.

“Looks like you get to survive,” I said. “For now, anyway. Captain Farrier?”

“Ma’am?” the Callowan replied, sounding a little awed.

“Have this woman dragged to the Fifteenth’s headquarters in the city. No need to be gentle about it, but make sure she doesn’t bleed.”

He saluted. Letting out a long breath, I turned to Hakram and Masego.

“Come on, boys,” I said. “We can talk as we walk there. The day’s not quite done.”

—

Juniper had claimed a guild hall as her forward command centre, as she’d done in Marchford. I could see why she’d pick up the habit: they were usually the largest building in a Callowan city that wasn’t a church or a noble’s home. They were usually closer to the main avenues than those two as well, since they saw so much people come and go. After assuring the Hellhound that the angel situation was dealt with and that I’d give her a full report later, I managed to extract myself from that conversation and steal away Aisha from her. I’d need her for the coming conversation. The storage room where Robber had dropped off Heiress’ minions had been cleared out except for four tightly bound rolls of angry Praesi, who started making noise through their gags the moment I strolled in. The Gallowborne propped up Heiress against a wall before I dismissed them, keeping only Apprentice and Aisha at my side. I crouched by two of the captives and took off their gags, ignoring the immediate indignant demands they bellowed.

“Do you even know who I am, you ignorant mudfoot?” the Soninke boy demanded.

I scratched my cheek. “I actually forgot your name,” I admitted. “Aisha?”

The delicate-looking Taghreb looked halfway between despair and amusement.

“Fasili Mirembe,” she provided. “Heir to Aksum.”

“See, I know who you are now Babili,” I told him. “Note how you’re still bound. This is not, in fact, an accident.”

“You can’t kill them,” Heiress croaked out from her corner.

“Look who’s back from the land of dreams,” I said. “And you’re kind of right, I suppose. For three of them anyway. Sorry, Fadila, but you didn’t make the cut. Your boss decided you were too low on the priority list.”

I unsheathed my knife. The dark-skinned mage’s eyes widened in panic.

“Wait,” she said, “I-“

The point of my knife rested against her throat, not quite strongly enough to draw blood.

“Yes?” I said.

“I’ll leave, go to the Free Cities,” she said. “Never return to the Empire.”

The other nobles in the room watched in utter silence, even Aisha.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not unkindly. “But you’re complicit in mass murder and a loose end besides. Exile isn’t an option, here. Not with the kind of games the lot of you have been playing.”

“Catherine,” Apprentice said. “It would be a waste. I’ve told you before, she’s one of the most talented practitioners of her generation.”

“That makes her a very bad loose end, Masego,” I said. “The kind that comes back to bite us in the ass at a critical moment.”

“Grant me custody of her,” he said. “I have projects that could use an additional pair of hands.”

I frowned.

“You’d be responsible for her, and Black might object,” I said.

The bespectacled mage snorted. “Let me handle Uncle Amadeus. As for responsibility, I intend to ask for some very specifically worded oaths.”

I eyed Fadila dubiously.

“How about it?” I said. “Lab assistant or early grave? It’s up to you.”

“Thank you, Lord Apprentice,” she said in a trembling voice, ignoring me and trying to sketch a bow while tied up. “I will not forget this.”

I called the Gallowborne standing guard back into the room and had her dragged out. We could settle the details of that affair later.

“If that little display was meant to intimidate us, you have failed,” the bound Soninke girl said.

I cast a look at Aisha. Hawulti Sahel , she mouthed silently. Heiress to Nok .

“Oh, Sawuti,” I said. “If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention. I can’t kill you or bleed you, sure. But Apprentice could, say, rot off your eyes. He did it to the Bumbling Conjurer’s face in Summerholm. Nasty as all Hells to look at, let me tell you.”

They stiffened.

“Good news,” I said. “That’s not what we’ll do. Apprentice, you have the tools?”

The chubby mage unrolled a pack of leather full of what looked like scalpels and pincers as well as a few objects clearly meant to poke holes. They would have looked like a cutter’s kit – or a torturer’s – if not for the runes covering every nook and cranny of them. Hawulti let out a whimper.

“Mage, are you?” I said. “For the benefit of all you fellow ignorant bastards, those are tools used to extract and bind a soul.”

The terror in the room was now palpable.

“See,” I continued, “Heiress made the mistake of bargaining only for the safety of your bodies. I’m not going to touch those. Tricky things, oaths. But if I return empty husks to the Wasteland, well, I’ll technically have respected the terms.”

“You don’t have it in you,” Heiress said from her corner.

“A year ago, you might have been right,” I agreed. “That was before you started fucking around with demons and feeding civilians to devils. You escalated, Akua. We’re not playing around with war games anymore.”

“You’d start a civil war,” Fasili said. “Touch one hair from our heads and half the Wasteland will rebel.”

“You know,” I sighed, “I’m getting rather sick of this whole ‘you can’t touch’ me complex Praesi nobles have. You seem under the impression it gives you free rein to do whatever you please without consequence.”

They genuinely didn’t understand me, I saw. Consequences, for them, was what happened when another noble outmanoeuvred them. Maybe when they fell for one of the Empress’ own schemes. The idea that they might have to answer to a Callowan in dire need of a bath and twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep was completely foreign to their way of thinking. I might as well have been speaking in tongues.

“I’m not going to waste time on the lot of you,” I said. “You’re not who I want to talk to.”

Masego put the scrying bowl on the ground while I put the gag back on Ghassan, and I saw the realization dawn in Heiress’ eyes even through the pain. She’d dropped the ball a few times today, but she wasn’t an idiot. The point had never been to end her minions. It was to blackmail their parents, the ones with the real power. Apprentice claimed a drop of saliva from the two high nobles, mixing it with the water in the implement. He whispered an incantation and it the water turned to steam, hanging in the air like a sheet of parchment. It took a while for the connection to be made, but eventually the steam formed two images: a pair of faces looked back at me, surprised and furious. I glanced at Aisha.

“High Lord Dakarai of Nok,” she said, inclining her head to the left, then to the right. “High Lady Abreha of Aksum.”

The High Lord of Nok was a handsome Soninke in the prime of his life, a thin greenish scar running through an eye and lending him a dangerous edge. The High Lady of Aksum looked to be a hundred, dark skin wrinkled like a goblin’s. She must have been prodigiously old for that to be the case, since Praesi dabbled in rituals to keep their appearance young long past what Creation had intended.

“Good evening,” I said. “I am-“

“The Squire,” the old woman said. “I see you have Fasili in your custody. This should be interesting.”

“You’ll be releasing my daughter immediately,” High Lord Dakarai said. “If you want to survive the coming fortnight, anyway.”

“Father,” said daughter broke in, “she’s gone mad, she-“

“ Shut up ,” I Spoke.

Her mouth snapped shut. The other prisoner got the message.

“I dislike repeating myself,” High Lord Dakarai said, tone flat.

“We have that in common then,” I said. “This isn’t a courtesy call, as it happens. I’m going to blackmail you.”

There was a moment of silence and I heard Aisha sigh deeply.

“That was refreshingly direct,” High Lady Abreha mused. “I’ll grant you the same courtesy. No. Release my idiot nephew and I won’t have everyone you love crucified.”

“She can’t kill them,” Heiress said from her corner.

The eyes of both high nobles flicked to the side. Those two were old hands at Wasteland games, and so there was not so much as a flicker of emotion on their faces. High Lord Dakarai raised an eyebrow.

“Is that the Heiress?”

“She’s having a bad day,” I said. “It’s about to get worse. She’s correct, though, she bargained for the life of your successors. Unfortunately the bargain didn’t cover their souls. What I’ll do with those I’m not sure yet, but I’ve been meaning to get a girl jewellery and Nauk keeps telling me offering the remains of common enemies is ‘an essential part of all courtships’.”

Masego cleared his throat.

“They’ll survive the extraction with few side effects,” he said. “At least one of them should retain motor control, should the soul ever be returned.”

“Isn’t that Warlock’s boy, trying to step into Father’s shoes,” Dakarai said without a speck of humour. “You should have advised your master better, Apprentice. There will be consequences to your actions today.”

“My nephew is a mediocre bargaining piece, Squire,” the High Lady Abreha said. “I have others. Some of them are even less annoying.”

I didn’t even glance at said nephew, though that must have been a little hard for him to hear.

“He’s you acknowledged heir, though,” I said. “I suppose you could name another one. Say I ripped out his soul, though, and later shoved it in another body. One in Black’s hands. Your nephew would still have a claim, no? And a backer.”

I smiled coldly.

“I imagine that might get a little messy for you.”

That part of it was courtesy of Aisha, since I’d had no idea how Praesi inheritance worked. In short, anybody to ever have been acknowledged as the heir by the ruling lord or lady had a legitimate claim. Dying and rising as undead erased that claim – since those very angry undead High Lords lost a civil war, anyway – but neither of my prisoners would technically die at any point. The idea of an individual with a legitimate claim in the hands of my teacher, Aisha had explained, would have these two treading very carefully. Heiress wasn’t the only one with a political stick to hit people with, and mine was really more of mace. One covered with spikes and with a noted distaste for the nobility.

“Your attempt at scare tactics are decent, if ultimately irrelevant,” High Lord Dakarai said. “The Heiress might be fair game for you, but my daughter is not. Raise a hand to a member of the old blood and the Empire will rise in rebellion. You are trifling with forces beyond your reach, child. Release my daughter .”

I looked him calmly in the eyes, then laughed. Genuinely, honestly laughed. He was too confused to be offended, I thought.

“Gods, the lot of you. You keep saying there’ll be a civil war if I do anything to one of yours, even if they try to kill me or my soldiers. Black and Malicia have gone soft on you, haven’t they? They let you think that you’re actually a threat.”

I grinned nastily.

“Do it. Rebel. You think that would be a defeat , for me? Praesi nobility has been looting my homeland for twenty fucking years . Half of me is rooting for you to tell me to get bent just so I can take the Fifteenth back across the river and bury all of you in a mass grave. The Legions won’t follow you, and the Legions are where the power is. And let’s be honest, half of Callow will be trying to enrol so they can set your palaces on fire as payback for the Conquest.”

I shrugged.

“I imagine the Empress will be cross with me, for a while,” I said. “Black, though? Black might actually smile and if that doesn’t scare the shit out of you I don’t know what will.”

I met their eyes, one after the other.

“How did that line go again? Ah, yes. Tremble, oh ye mighty, for a new age is upon you .”

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“I’ll back whatever petition you’re pushing,” High Lady Abreha suddenly said. “I’ll also withdraw my support from the petition on orc tribute, if you take his daughter’s soul anyway.”

“ Abreha, you treacherous bitch! ” the other noble thundered.

The old woman cackled.

“You were still suckling your ugly mother’s teats when the Calamities came knocking, Dakarai. I was in the room when that line was last spoken. I told Tasia, I told her that Malicia would only tolerate so much. This is her hand, pulling the leash to remind us who rules.”

I glanced at Aisha, but she shook her head.

“We need both, otherwise we don’t have enough backing,” she whispered.

Four of the the High Lords and Ladies, that was our target. There were only seven of them overall, so anything backed by the majority needed to be at least seriously considered by the Empress. The current balance of power in the Empire was skewed against the Empress: three of them were loyal to Malicia but four were part of the Truebloods. It was why they were giving her so much trouble at the moment. I’d been in talks with Black for over a month and he’d been serving as a go-between between myself and the Empress, first to sell the idea of a ruling council over Callow and then to get support from her allies. We’d gotten two out of the three, at the cost of guaranteeing a seat on the council to a member of their family each. Now I needed to get my last two high nobles on board, and if the way to do that was threatening to rip out a few souls I was willing to have that on my conscience.

“I can’t accept that deal at this point in time,” I politely told High Lady Abreha.

She seemed unsurprised. High Lord Dakarai waspishly asked what exactly I wanted him to do and without wasting and more I told them. Another round of threats was exchanged, but with Aisha whispering more diplomacy in my ear I eventually got what I wanted. Oaths were given on both sides, the exact wording already prepared by Masego. When the scrying session ended, I was left feeling drained but thoroughly satisfied. Was that what actually pulling off a plan felt like? I kept expecting Creation to retaliate brutally at any moment, but for now it seemed like I’d gotten away with it. I cut the two high brats loose and informed them they were no longer my problem – the oaths I’d given would see them safely back to their seats of power. Which left Ghassan and Heiress. I looked at my rival and crouched in front of her.

“I have to let you go,” I said. “It physically pains me to admit it, but you took care of that much.”

Masego stood behind me, leaning against the wall.

“Apprentice had to rip out one of my aspects, at Marchford,” I told her, and her eyes widened.

Exactly how much she’d screwed up began to sink in.

“When I planned all of this – and I did – I figured I’d just kill you. If I couldn’t, I figured I’d even the scales the Callowan way. Your three aspects for the one I lost.”

She managed a smirk, which was really an accomplishment considering how many of her bones were still broken.

“But your soul isn’t actually in your body,” Apprentice said. “The ritual you must have completed for that to be the case and your Name still somehow function is, well, the most brilliant piece of sorcery I’ve seen done in my lifetime.”

He sounded genuinely admiring.

“So we can’t touch you,” I said. “You might be feeling a little smug about that, I suppose. Wiggling out again. It occurs to me, though, that the reason you never quite seem to understand that you shouldn’t fuck with me is that you never lose anything, in our confrontations.”

I met her eyes.

“I killed Barika,” I said. “I put a crossbow bolt in her eye and had her body buried in sanctified grounds. She’s not coming back, ever. And now we’re going to sit together, you and I, to watch Apprentice rip out your minion’s soul and bind it to a stone.”

I met her eyes calmly.

“I’m not a monster, Akua. I’ll destroy it when our truce is done, and let him go to the Underworld. But when you crawl away from this mess, when we’re done, you’ll remember this moment. What happens, when you set fire to my homelands for your little plots.”

We sat. We watched. And when it was done, I leaned into her ear.

“If you do manage, somehow, to get the governorship? I’ll be watching you. Waiting. And this time there will no bargaining to save you.”

I got up and looked down on her.

“Now get the Hells out of my kingdom.”

Chapter 49: Triumph

“There’s a degree of argument among scholars as to whether the Liesse Rebellion was the underlying cause of the Uncivil Wars or the first of them. I was there, though, and I can tell you this: the seeds that were sown in Liesse are what we reaped in the years that followed.”
– Extract from the personal memoirs of Lady Aisha Bishara

I’d have thought they would do this in Whitestone, with all the sprawling avenues and gardens there to use, but I’d severely underestimated how many people would be there for the ceremony. Half the city must have been packed around Fairfax plaza, filling every nook and cranny Marketside. Merchants were selling chilled wine and ale as well as something that smelled like those spicy sausages from Hedges. I was more interested in the grilled fish on sticks from the lake, though watching some man obviously devoid of taste scarfing down one macerated in the Southpool way instead nearly put me off my appetite. Ratface had told me that in Praes the designated idiots in all the jokes were the people from Nok, but here in Callow it was the Southpooleans. Too much mud in their part of the Silver Lake, it clogged the brains. The old rumour that their people mated with giant carps was a fond a well-polished assertion in the rest of the country.

The Fifth Legion was out in force, today. They’d opened a cordon from the Green Gate to the plaza and kept it open by liberal use of clubs when the crowd got too enthusiastic. Which it had, much to my surprise. I’d been at the heart of the force that had ended the Liesse Rebellion in fire and steel, but by the way people were cheering as I rode through the streets you’d think I’d restored the Kingdom. Some people actually threw flowers: bell lilies, the same blooms Eleanor Fairfax had once worn a crown of. A symbol of victory old as the Kingdom, now used to praise the girl who’d made sure that same Kingdom would not rise in her lifetime. The irony of that was cloying, and I would have told Hakram as much were he not three steps behind me to my left. Apprentice, to my right, had somehow gotten his hands on a chariot pulled by two pale silver winged horses.

I’d seen Warlock use a similar one back in Summerholm, running over the Lone Swordsman as his way of joining the fray. The horses were likely a pretty picture for the celebrants – they’d bring in mind the old tales about unicorns, now gone from Callow and into the Waning Woods – but from where I sat I could see the melded at the base of the wings. Clearly, those horses hadn’t been born with wings. I supposed that I should count myself lucky they didn’t breathe fire, like the flying pig had. Masego clearly had no idea how to actually guide a chariot, much to my amusement, but there seemed to be spells on the reins that did the work for him. Still, now and then his hand jerked out of his control and he tried very hard to pretend he’d meant to do that all along.

Behind us the Fifteenth filtered through the streets, the Gallowborne in front. The name had been officially sanctioned, and the paint on their shields depicting a golden noose was still fresh. The same emblem was on the banner Captain Farrier carried, gold on red with the embroidered motto they’d picked themselves: best of the worst . Robber already had several limerick couplets unflatteringly relating the words to their abilities in bed, which inevitably had spread like wildfire in my legion. Behind my personal guard, Juniper and her general staff were at the head of the column. The orc was looking unusually cheerful today, which more or less meant she wasn’t actively scowling at anyone. I even knew why, since Black had passed one that bit before official word could come in: she was, today, to be made the youngest general since Reforms. Before those didn’t count, in my opinion, since there’d been quite a few High Lords and Ladies barely into their teens granted that authority for political purposes. Marshal Grem One-Eye had only been granted the position officially in his twenties, though he’d ascended to the office of Marshal the same year. Still, she might yet beat that record too. There was always another war around the corner, and the old guard was beginning to be more old than guard.

I caught a handkerchief floating through the air, thrown from a balcony. The pretty blond girl who’d tossed it flushed deeply when I looked in her direction. Nice dress, I noted, and quite revealing. It was satin, so she was likely from lesser nobility or wealthy merchant class. I tucked it into one of the pockets sown inside my cloak. It was still the same pitch-black garment Black had gifted me last year, but it had undergone... modifications. There were three strips of cloth bordering the bottom of it now. Taken from three banners: the Silver Spears’, Marchford’s and Liesse’s. Hakram had procured and sown them himself on the march to Laure, since he was apparently a deft hand with a needle. I liked the effect, and it did not escape my attention he’d left room for many more stripes.

The procession was slow, but eventually we arrived to the plaza. I dismounted from Zombie the Second, who for now remained a living creature, and let a sigh of pleasure out at finally standing on my feet again. Adjutant and Apprentice flanked me as we waited for Juniper to join us, her perfectly polished armour reflecting the glare the noonday sun. The four of us stepped towards the platform ahead of us. There might have been wood under it, but it was out of sight: the entire structure was covered with a red woven carpet, the style of it Callowan if not the colour. The Empress had likely ordered it from Laure weavers to reinforce ties there. Malicia herself was seated on a throne, an ornate thing made almost entirely out of gold. The arms of it were shaped as lions holding bells in their mouth, a rather bold statement. Lions were a symbol associated with the throne of Praes, while bells had been the symbol of the Fairfax dynasty the Empress had overthrown.

Apparently the lions were a recent change, as it had been previously been tigers who’d served as the emblematic animal. They’d gone out of style after the sentient tiger army fiasco, Aisha had told me.

The Dread Empress was still absurdly beautiful, and I privately decided that having gotten a good look at her was half the reason the people of the city were cheering. The crown on her head was ivory inlaid with lapis-lazuli with a perfectly spherical sapphire as the centrepiece. Her dress was white bordered in thick braids of gold, revealing the beginning of her breasts and her bare shoulders. Splendid gold armbands with scenes of the Imperial civil war held from her upper arms and a heavy necklace shaped a dozen Towers linked circled her neck. None of it held a candle to Dread Empress Malicia in the fullness of her glory, sitting in the shade of her red pavilion. The four of us came to stand half a dozen steps down from her throne and stopped. She smiled, and the world felt like it had gone bright. Just a quirk of the lips, and I knew men would have killed their own siblings to get another one. They probably had.

Even Hakram was blushing, and I knew for a fact he found humans unattractive. Masego seemed a little surprised at himself for being affected at all, which made sense to me. I’d never seen him display any interest in anyone from either gender, and wasn’t sure he had that in him at all. The Empress rose, and for the first time I noticed that Black was standing to the right of her throne. He looked shabby, compared to Malicia. His plate was without ornament, his sword undecorated and his cloak looked almost threadbare. Until it caught the light, anyway, and then suddenly it looked like it was made entirely of crow feathers. It wasn’t enough to make him look like anything but a sworn sword guarding his ruler. At my side Masego and the two orcs knelt as Malicia took a step forward.

I remained standing.

“Rise,” the Empress ordered, and they obeyed.

Malicia’s words reverberated across the entire plaza without her ever raising her voice and the silence that ensued was so absolute you could have heard a pin drop.

“Order has been restored to Callow,” she said. “Procer’s attempt to place a puppet on the throne has been thwarted, the misguided rebels of the south shown the errors of their ways.”

Or a grave, for those who hadn’t been nailed to a cross. So that was the angle she was going to take on this whole thing. Poor Callowans had been tricked by the wicked Procerans, made to bite the hand that fed them by bribery and coercion. The Empire would, of course, be merciful. But no so merciful as to spare the nobles who’d masterminded the rebellion.

“Laure remained loyal,” Malicia said, her voice caressing the city’s name in a way that almost gave me a shiver. “As did so many of our subjects. For this, there will be reward.”

The anticipation in the plaza was palpable.

“All taxes in cities that remained loyal with be halved for a year,” she announced. “And in this greatest of Callowan cities, I declare a week-long festival to honour our victory.”

The crowd went wild. Halved taxes, huh. Good call. Trade had slowed when the blades came out and this would get it started again. As for flattering the ego of Laureans, it was hard to go wrong with that. I was honest enough to admit that the people of the city I’d been born in thought of themselves as the only part of Callow that really mattered. Apprentice looked bored out of his skull, but Hakram and Juniper were listening with sharp eyes. The Hellhound had already pressed me privately on the subject of what the Fifteenth would be doing in peace time, and the Empress’ current focus on Callow was revealing. I knew my legion would be on assigned duty to a city, I just didn’t know which one. Black had been even vaguer than usual, implying there were plans being hatched higher up in the ranks.

“Though I reward loyalty, I must also reward service,” Malicia continued when the cheers died out. “Legate Juniper of the Red Moons, step forward.”

The Hellhound did, and knelt when the Empress elegantly gesture for her to do so.

“For your resounding victories at Three Hills, Marchford and Liesse, I name you a general of the Empire. As of this moment, the Fifteenth Legion is granted full status as a Legion of Terror and the ensuing right of recruitment.”

The cheers at that were more sporadic, though I got the impression the crowd would vocally approve of pretty much anything Malicia would say today. Greenskins still weren’t popular in Callow, though in cities that was beginning to change as they spent time in garrison duty. Juniper remained kneeling.

“Lord Apprentice,” the Empress said, after Masego also knelt. “For your distinguished service in the pursuit of peace, I grant you Imperial sanction to raise a mage’s tower anywhere in the territories of the Empire.”

The history behind that was a little more complicated. A mages’ tower was essentially a fortified laboratory warded so heavily it would make a fortress flinch, and after having to put down a dozen rebellions springing from those the Tower had restricted their raising. The only person currently sanctioned to have one was Warlock, who had linked the three dozen laboratories he actually had through a pocket dimension to get around the technical restriction of one. Now Masego could raise one as well, and I knew where he would: Marchford. He’d already told me that after the ceremony he would be leaving the Fifteenth to go study the thinning of the borders between Arcadia and Creation where we’d fought the demon. He’d be missed, but I knew if I really needed him he’d come. We were friends. How odd, that I actually had those now.

“Hakram of the Howling Wolves,” Malicia said. “I welcome you as the embodiment of the ties between the Clans and the Tower, the living proof that our people are united as they never have been before. You have served well and faithfully, proving the worth of your Name. For this I grant you all the attending the dignities of a lord of Praes.”

But not, I noticed, the actual legal title. Black had been trying to push the recognition of clan chieftains as nobles in their own right for decades to no avail. The reasons for that involved the Clans not technically owning the steppes they lived in and the justifications behind the whole tribute system, which had apparently been even more of a clusterfuck before the Empress had reformed it. Still, this was not a meaningless gesture. Hakram could now own land, raise a retinue and would be tried in the noble courts of Praes should he ever commit a crime. That last part was admittedly largely irrelevant as long as he served in the Legions, since he answered only to military tribunals while in service, but should he break the law as a civilian he might be the first greenskin ever taken to trial in the noble courts. He could technically style himself Lord Adjutant in public, now.

“And lastly, Catherine Foundling.”

The Empress dark eyes were on me, her red lips quirking fondly. It was a lie, that fondness. I’d done little to earn personal affection from the ruler of the Empire. And yet, looking at her smile, I almost wanted to believe in the lie. Some people could be dangerous without ever holding a blade. I barely noticed the crowd going quiet again behind me.

“Our Squire was born in this very city,” the Empress said, and there was a rumble of approval. “In Callow’s hour of need, she led soldiers from all parts of the Empire and scattered the forces of disorder.”

Only true if I counted as a Deoraithe, but it painted a pretty picture.

“For her valour, she now stands before me as the Lady of Marchford.”

For a moment I thought I’d gone deaf. The clamour from the crowd filled the sky, as they stomped the ground and screamed themselves hoarse. I met Malicia’s eyes and inclined my head, hiding my surprise. My mind was already spinning. What the people had heard was a no-name orphan becoming a noble, granted the rule over one of the oldest and richest holdings in Callow. A promise that the old nobility was dead, and under the rule of the Tower anyone could rise. What I’d heard, though, was different. The Empress had granted me a Praesi title, ruling over Callowan land. It was a statement. We’re here to stay. No rebellion will ever sweep us out. I closed my eyes and let the crowd’s approval wash over me. I’d have to think on this, on what it meant, before the day was out. But just for a moment, I allowed myself to enjoy it.

—

The suite in the Royal Palace was the same one I’d been given after becoming the Squire, though this time I was conscious when moving in. There would be festivities tonight and I’d need to change for them, so I took a bath in that same Miezan wonder I’d already sampled once. When I emerged scoured clean and smelling like lavender I dried myself, tying a towel around myself. I felt something more than heard it, and reached for the knife I’d left by the bath.

“That won’t be necessary,” Black’s amused voice informed me.

I sighed. One of these days, the two of us were going to sit down and have a nice talk about the wonders of knocking. I returned to the room to catch the familiar sight of my teacher lounging in a chair by a Proceran bureau . He was idly thumbing through a book of Kilian’s, a treatise on fine elemental manipulation by Dread Emperor Sorcerous. I’d tried to read through it a few weeks back and emerged from the attempt more confused about how magic worked than when I’d started. Whatever the transitional phasing of energy was, it was fiendishly complicated. And also possibly not real? How something could simultaneously not exist and be considered a basis for spellcrafting was beyond me. I ignored my teacher and stepped behind a cloth screen to change into comfortable breeches and shirt. It wasn’t that I was shy about my body, more that it felt... wrong to be naked around Black. Like pissing in a church. It had been bad enough seeing him make out with Ranger in a Name dream.

“So you’ve got bad news for me,” I said as I emerged. “You’re getting sadly predictable in your old age.”

“I’m not even eighty yet,” Black replied with a twitch of the lips.

Not that he looked a day older than twenty-five, unless you paid very close attention.

“You’re correct, though,” he said. “Sit down.”

I leaned against the pillars of my enormously oversized bed instead.

“As the last appointment of the sort done directly by the Tower, Akua Sahelian was granted the governorship of Liesse,” he said.

I blinked, started to speak then closed my mouth. I pushed myself off the wooden pillar and, very calmly, punched it so hard it splintered.

“That is insane ,” I said. “Is this because I sent the letter? I put all my recommendations that she get the post in quotes, Black. The only way I could have been clearer was to add a sentence afterwards going ‘by the way, this is sarcasm, the only thing Heiress deserves is a summary execution’.”

“Her bid had other backing,” he said.

“Gods, if Malicia had waited another week the appointment would be put of her hands. The whole point of the ruling council is controlling the governorship system,” I snarled. “I don’t know what she’s up to, Black, but people are going to be butchered.”

“I am aware,” he said quietly.

“This will cause unrest, mark my words,” I said. “It’s open knowledge she’s the one who set the devils on the city. Gods Above, you’re putting in charge of Liesse the same woman who saw over two thousand of its citizens fed to literal hellspawn.”

The butcher’s bill after the siege had been heavier than I’d thought it would be. The evacuation of civilians deeper into the city had not been complete, some people refusing to leave their homes even with an army knocking at the gate. Black did not reply. I stared at him until the fury began to wane. All I’d just said he already knew.

“This isn’t your doing at all,” I said.

“It is not.”

My eyes sharpened.

“Malicia?”

He grimaced, and that was all the answer I needed.

“Why? She must have reasons,” I said.

“I would assume so,” he replied.

I sat down on the bed, my limbs feeling heavy. What he’d just said... Shit. That had implications . Black and Malicia had been thick as thieves since I’d first met them, and though I’d known there were some fractures there they’d always presented a united front. Disagreements were settled behind closed doors, where no one would hear – not even me. That my teacher was even willing to admit this was entirely the Empress’ game meant he disagreed with the decision so much he was not willing to put up that façade for the conversation.

“Is she cutting you out?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“I will be getting answers on the subject when we return to Ater,” he said. “She doesn’t trust any defensive measures but the Tower’s for this conversation.”

There were only so many people who would have the guts to eavesdrop on a conversation between these two.

“The Truebloods are up to something,” I guessed.

“You kicked a hornet’s nest when you forced them to back your petition,” Black said.

“You were along for the ride the whole time,” I reminded him.

“I was not criticizing you,” my teacher said, lips twitching. “Quite the contrary.”

I might still have to kill you, one day, I thought as my cheeks warmed. The longer I knew the man, the more complicated my relationship with him grew. I’d thought, when I first became the Squire, that I would have to fight him tooth and nail for every scrap of power. Instead he’d had my back every step of the way, battering down doors I couldn’t open on my own. I loved him a little bit for that. For seeing something in me I’d always believed was there, but that no one else had ever acknowledged. I also hated him for it, because I could no longer think of him as the enemy. Warlock had said that one day I would have to make a choice, and I believed him. And when that day came, when the knife was in my hand, I knew that if I killed him I’d miss him. As a teacher, as a mentor, as perhaps the closest thing to a father figure I’d ever had.

He was the Black Knight, and I was the Squire.

“I’m your successor,” I finally said.

“You are,” he agreed.

“I’ve wondered why you have one of those at all,” I said. “The Empress has a theory but I don’t think it fits anymore. If it ever did.”

Black rested his chin on the top of his hand, draped over his chair.

“I have been doing this for a very long time,” he said.

“Villains live until they die,” I said.

“Yes,” he said softly. “Until they die. Over the length of my career, I have myself killed twenty-three heroes and heroines. I’ve orchestrated or otherwise ordered the death of easily thrice that.”

He shrugged indifferently.

“I’ll meet someone better, eventually. Or they’ll get lucky: it only needs to happen once. It might be today, it might be next month, it might be decades from now – but they’ll get me.”

“So I’m your contingency?” I said.

“You’ve heard it, haven’t you?” he asked instead of replying. “The song.”

My heartbeat stilled.

“The first step is hardest, they said to her

You will have to walk through fire-“

“It will burn away what you once were,

And always devour whole a liar,” I finished.

He smiled, and it was sharp as a knife.

“They will learn to fear you, Catherine. I hope I live long enough to see it.”

A shiver went through me as he rose to his feet. He knew the song. Gods Below, he knew the song. Two years that question of where I knew it from had plagued me.

“You’ve heard it before?” I asked.

“Once, when I was young,” he said. “It was not for me.”

“Where is it from?”

“It’s not from anywhere,” he said.

I frowned.

“What’s it called, then?”

“ The Girl Who Climbed The Tower ,” he told me, and left.

—

Masego’s rooms weren’t far from mine. I’d expected to find him alone there, but was pleased to discover he was talking with Kilian. They both rose when I came into the room.

“Cat,” Apprentice greeted me.

“My Lady of Marchford,” the redhead teased, curtsying.

I strode forward and swept her into my arms, dipping her into a long and deeply satisfying kiss. Gods, I’d missed spending time with Kilian. Eventually Masego cleared his throat and I released her. She was flushed and her eyes a little wide.

“Already taking advantage of the servants,” my lover sighed. “Typical noble.”

“Don’t bother returning to the legion quarters tonight,” I said. “I don’t think you’ll be using those much.”

“Your bed i s much nicer than mine,” she conceded.

I threaded my fingers through hers.

“Somewhere in this godforsaken palace there must be a dress that fits me,” I said. “It might even be in a colour other than black, one hopes. We’ll go dancing tonight, at the festival.”

“Dancing was not one of the Fae talents I inherited,” Kilian said.

“Wear thick shoes,” I recommended. “It’s not one of mine either.”

She smiled, cheeks dimpling as she brushed back a strand of hair behind my ear.

“I’ll leave you two to it, then,” she said. “Always a pleasure, Lord Apprentice.”

Masego grimaced. “Gods, don’t call me that. It makes me sound like I should know what’s going on at court.”

She waved us goodbye with a last smile and the door closed behind her. Masego’s room were smaller than mine, I noticed amusedly, and already filled with a dozen pile of books. I could see what looked like a dead pig cut open in his bathtub, which was just so typically Apprentice I couldn’t help but snort.

“We’ll have to discuss where I’ll build my tower,” Masego said. “Sit?”

I sat on what appeared to be the sordid Proceran invention known as a pouf. It was particularly frilly, and couldn’t decide whether it was a stool or a sofa. Praesi had it right with the cushions, I thought.

“We’ll settle that when we get there, I think,” I said. “Obviously I’d prefer if it wasn’t in the middle of the city.”

“The hills would be best,” he said. “Where the demon was first contained.”

And that was why I was here, wasn’t it? Apprentice had claimed an actual chair and looked rather curious as to why I was here at all.

“Masego,” I said. “Could you hand me the trinket I gave you? The one made of bone.”

He frowned, then cocked his head to the side.

“Why? You’ve had no definitive proof I’m not corrupted.”

I blinked. “Wait, you knew ?”

He looked rather offended.

“You thought I didn’t ?” he said. “Catherine, it smells like goblin munitions. It has a piece of your Name in it.”

“And you wore it anyway?” I said disbelievingly.

“Well, yes,” he said slowly. “After being exposed to a demon it was necessary for me to have a kill switch in case Father’s diagnostic spell has failed.”

I was, honestly, at a loss for words.

“That’s, uh, very enlightened of you,” I said.

“It was a reasonable precaution,” he said. “Arrangements like it aren’t uncommon among villains. I know Uncle Amadeus has a way to kill Father should he ever be corrupted, and he himself has an arrangement with Assassin to be executed should he ever become a threat to the Empire.”

He shrugged.

“Your method was crude and relatively obvious, but it would have been effective.”

“I kind of feel bad, now,” I mused. “I mean, I already did. But now I feel bad in a different, novel way.”

“You should ,” Apprentice muttered. “Honestly, thinking I wouldn’t notice. You might as well have written ‘magical bomb’ on the surface.”

“I’m... sorry?” I ventured.

“I’ll expect a more elegant method of disposal before we get to Marchford,” he said. “As well as a written essay on the subject of why trying to deceive a man with my superb intellect is a fool’s errand.”

“I’m a villain now, I shouldn’t have to do homework,” I whined.

Both of us were smothering grins. Apparently I could do something right, once in a while. Not for lack of trying in the other direction.

—

This particular annex to the Royal Palace, called the Songbird’s Cage, had been built by Eleanor Fairfax’s grandson to house his mistress away from the prying eyes of his queen. He’d had the doors and windows barred and locked when said queen had started visiting the mistress more often than he did, spawning half a dozen songs running on the theme of caged doves, all of them involving puns about ‘locks and keys’ that thought themselves very clever. In later years, it had become where Callowan royalty held prisoners that weren’t officially prisoners. Several rebellious Dukes of Liesse had cooled their heels there until talk of secession died down, as had Fairfax uncles with a little too much ambition. It was fitting that the Baroness Dormer would be held there. A line of Gallowborne led by Captain Farrier trailed behind me as we tread the corridors, waving away the legionaries from the Fifth that guarded the unlocked door. My guards took position around the entrance – I’d expected a bit of friction there, but the two orcs from the Fifth began asking questions about Marchford instead.

Few of my legionaries had to pay for their own drinks, these days.

I knocked politely and waited until I was bid to enter from inside. I could have just strolled in, but it cost me nothing to be polite. If I ever ended up in her position, I hoped I would be extended the courtesy. Somehow, it was doubtful I would. Villains didn’t get taken prisoner, as I understood it. We turned our cloak or died, there was no middle ground. I had a nice cloak now, though. Turning might damage it. I supposed I’d have to stick with the whole villain thing for now. Anne Kendal, the Baroness Dormer, was still stunningly beautiful even in the subdued garments of a prisoner. She’d been allowed to keep her personal wardrobe, by my order, save for armour and weapons. Sitting in the solar of her suite, by the window, she’d been reading a book in candlelight. It wasn’t dark out yet but the windows were facing the wrong way to let the sun in properly.

“Lady Squire,” she said. “I did not expect a visit for some days.”

“There’s been some new developments,” I said. “May I sit?”

“By all means.”

I took the comfortable armchair facing hers, then lightly slapped two scrolls on the table. One held the seal of the Legions of Terror, the other the Tower’s.

“My trial is over,” Baroness Kendal immediately grasped. “I wasn’t even asked to stand in front of the judges.”

Her smile turned bitter.

“So much for a fair trial.”

“There would have been no point in you being there,” I said flatly. “I stacked the tribunal.”

Surprise and confusion flickered across the Baroness’ face. She’d been taken prisoner by the Fifteenth when the city of Liesse was under martial law – it was in my power to decide she should be tried under a military tribunal. I’d quietly sit down with the officers involved and told them what the verdict was going to be. There had been no debate.

“Open it,” I said, pushing forward the scroll with the seal of the Legions.

She broke it open and her brow rose as she scanned the lines.

“I am not to be executed,” she said.

“You’ve been stripped of your holdings,” I said. “That much was a given. You may still call yourself a baroness, but not the Baroness Dormer. Doing so would qualify as unlawful claim to Imperial property, under Praesi law. I think the punishment for that is lashes? I skimmed the reading, to be honest.”

“This,” she said, “does not seem like the work of Praesi law.”

“Things are changing,” I said. “There’s a reason I fought this war. Open the other one.”

Steeling herself, the noblewoman broke the Tower’s seal. Her eyes widened.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Before the week is over, the Empress will announce the creation of a ruling council over Callow,” I said. “This is your appointment to a seat on it.”

Seven members, there would be. Black had one, as the official head of the council – and also held the sole right of veto over any motion passed. One seat for the Empress’ representative, two in the hands of the high nobles who’d backed me willingly. One for me, and two appointments left for me to choose. It would work through majority vote, and I’d own that. Black had already told me privately he’d only attend the first few sessions before officially passing his vote and right of veto into my hands. With two seats in Callowan hands, my own vote and my teacher’s, I’d be effectively capable of passing any motion I wished. I’d agreed to Black being head of the council without any quibbling: I was not, at the moment, capable of ruling Callow. Especially not if I now had the rebuilding of Marchford to worry about as well. The council was a temporary measure meant to ease me into the trade ruling until I made a decision about the reorganization of Callowan territories.

“I’m a rebel,” Baroness Kendal said.

“You were a rebel,” I said. “Now you have a seat and vote in the institution that will pick the Imperial governors for all the holdings that were confiscated in the rebellion – including your own. Congratulations, Baroness.”

“Who else will be in this... institution?” she asked faintly.

“Three Praesi yet to be determined, Black, myself and someone I’ve yet too choose. I’m considering picking someone from the House of Light, but I’ll need a priest that’s not a zealot. I was hoping for your help in finding one, actually.”

“So Praes still holds the leash,” she said. “Majority vote, is it?”

“ I hold the leash,” I corrected. “There’s governors needed for Vale, Dormer and Holden. We’ll be choosing them. I don’t know about you, but I figure it’s time at least some Callowan land is governed by Callowans.”

“Not Liesse,” she said, clever eyes searching mine.

“Liesse is my problem to handle,” I said. “We’ll have authority to set laws and taxes for all of Callow – except maybe Daoine. The Duchess is already sending envoys to argue that since her duchy is a tributary state it doesn’t fall under the council’s authority.”

“Kegan was born grumpy and only got worse with the passing of years,” the silver-haired woman murmured. “Am I to understand that this council will have authority over all Imperial governors?”

I smiled coldly.

“That is correct,” I said. “It is within the scope of our mandate to remove governors and governesses should they prove unworthy of the authority they wield.”

Oh, there were quite a few laws specific to governors I was going to pass. First among them a rule forbidding any Callowan official from summoning or dealing with devils. Then another one limiting the amount of city guards allowed, as well as the founding of a group investigating corruption in the collection of taxes. Heiress might have her appointment for now, but she sure as Hells wasn’t going to keep it.

“The Empress has forged anew the crown of Callow,” the Baroness said. “No, she’s gone even further. The Fairfaxes could not dismiss nobles who displeased them at will. The powers you described are unheard of outside of the Free Cities.”

“Things are changing,” I repeated quietly. “You could refuse the appointment, of course. Head into exile.”

Black had told me that if she made that choice Assassin would dispose of her before she ever crossed the border.

“No,” she said. “I rebelled because I saw a better path for Callow. What kind of a hypocrite would I be, if I left now?”

A dead one, I did not say. I rose to my feet, inclining my head respectfully before heading for the door.

“Lady Foundling?”

I paused, then turned to match her stare.

“Why me?” she asked.

“Because there was more to the Liesse Rebellion than the Lone Swordsman and Proceran gold,” I said. “Because you weren’t wrong, really. Just not strong enough to win.”

Because I know I can bend you to my will if I need to , my mind whispered. I left the room and the noblewoman with it. The Gallowborne immediately broke out of conversation, falling behind me. Captain Farrier stood at my side as we strode away. We left the Songbird’s Cage, and I strolled through a pleasant garden. Sunset was beginning. The birds in the trees already sang their songs, the silver fountain in front of me gurgling quietly. I stopped a moment to enjoy the quiet.

“Where to now, Countess?” Farrier asked.

I looked at him, at the calm blue eyes and the angular face. Not for the first time, I reflected he had the most Callowan face I’d ever seen. Malicia had made a statement, in front of the crowd. Named me Lady of Marchford. And now, in this quiet garden, John Farrier was making another one. Countess, he’d called me. Not Lady. One of us or one of them. I looked up to the reddening sky, my fingers clenching and then slowly unclenching.

I did not correct him.

Interlude – Precipitation

“Procerans have always been the villains in our plays, scheming Alamans and grasping Arlesites. Given our history this is understandable, my Strategos, but you and I know the truth of of it. The Principate is the final line of defence between Calernia and Evil. Two millennia they have kept the Dead King on his shore of the northern lakes and even longer have they turned back the ratling plague, without aid or succour from the rest of the continent. When Procer fails, the light of civilization dims and the monsters all get a little closer to our homes.”
– Eleusia Vokor, Nicean ambassador to the Principate

The League of Free Cities did not have an official seat, because that would require a hard majority of its constituent to agree on any single subject for any length of time.

Anaxares was of the opinion that this was even more unlikely than usual, these days. Stygia was on the wane, as they’d hit that part of the twenty-year cycle where their old slave soldiers were being discreetly butchered and the fresh ones finished their training, but their northern neighbours were in no shape to take advantage of it. Atalante and Delos were too busy fighting over control of trade routes to Mercantis to turn their attention elsewhere, a situation further inflamed by the murder of an Atalantian logothete at the hands of a frothing Delosi preacher. In Delos, the will of the Heavens and the will of the asekretis of the Secretariat were considered to be the same thing. Woe to anyone who would defy that vicious little pack of scribes. To make everything even more complicated, Helike had spawned one of their godsdamned Tyrants a few years back. The boy had promptly proceeded to piss all over the last fifty years of border treaties, seizing Nicean assets and tickling the chin of the Proceran princess in Tenerife. There was opportunity in that, however, for the Great City of Bellerophon. First and Mightiest of the Free Cities, May She Reign Forever.

Anaxares capitalized the words even in the privacy of his own mind because you never knew when the kanenas were looking into your thoughts. His delegation must have at least two of them out of the ten diplomats who’d accompanied him, not that he’d be able to tell which were part of Bellerophon’s “agents for the protection of the people”. His home was the only true democracy on the continent, a fact its citizens touted at every opportunity, but the will of the people was preserved by the spilling of blood. The kanenas made sure of that, ensuring anyone who looked like they were trying to seize power for themselves disappeared. A system of random lot-drawing made all appointments every three years, which meant the competence of the city’s administration could vary wildly from one year to another. The only part of Bellerophon’s state apparatus was that was not randomly allotted was the diplomatic service, of which Anaxares was unfortunately part of. The small pebble lodged inside his body – and that of all members of his family – was a grim reminder that at any point one of the kanenas could decide that he’d gotten ambitious and kill all of them with a word.

The pebble would return to its original size and break his body from the inside. It was, Anaxares had been told, a particularly gruesome way to die. His predecessor had been splattered all over the insides of a meeting hall in Nicae just for being offered a bribe.

Naturally, the filthy Penthesians had made a game of trying to have the envoys of Mighty Bellerophon executed by their own people in as few words as possible. The kanenas had gotten their hands on one of the sheets they used to tally scores and plastered copies all over the streets. There was a reason Anaxares’ city kept trying to invade theirs, ugly knock-off Mercantis that it was. Did they really think that just because the wealth of Praes flowed through their river they were better than anyone else? They weren’t even Evil . Admittedly Good and Evil in the Free Cities were more like backing a charioteer team than a true affiliation but the principle of the thing made it galling. You’d think the Dread Empress would send her gold to one of the cities on the right side of the metaphysical fence. Not that he’d ever say as much out loud: the Empress’ agents were everywhere in the Free Cities these days, clashing in back alleys with those of the First Prince.

It was Helike’s turn to host the League delegates, which no one had been all that happy about. The city had gone even madder than usual under the Tyrant, whipped into a frenzy at the memory of Theodosius the Unconquered and the legendary victories the man had achieved on the battlefield. Anaxares had been in the city for a mere fortnight and already could no longer stand to look at statues of the man. He was currently drinking from a cup with Theodosius’ face on it and sitting on chair engraved with his work at the Siege of Tenerife, when the Helikeans had crawled through the sewers to avoid the butcher’s bill taking the walls would have cost. The representative for Bellerophon shifted uncomfortably against the wooden frame, ignoring the screaming delegate from Atalante calling the senior Secretariat member from Delos a “quill-waving lunatic”. His eyes flicked to the Tyrant in question, who’d named himself delegate for Helike instead of sending an actual diplomat.

The boy was dark-haired and olive-skinned, with a bloodshot red eye and a hand that seemed to be permanently shaking. He was sixteen, Anaxares knew, and had been sitting on the throne of Helike since he was twelve – when he’d seized power and sent his much older nephew fleeing in exile. Bad seed , the delegate for Bellerophon thought. The Tyrant had been smiling for what seemed to be hours now, and the grin widened when he met Anaxares’ eyes from across the table. That same friendly young man had made swearing a stoning offense in his city and drowned a Nicean delegation in their own wine barrels when they’d protested their seizure. Named . Mad, every single one of them.

“Proper forms were filed by Secretariat members of good standing,” the Delosi delegate said calmly. “The caravan went through our territory without a permit, seizing its merchandise was perfectly legal.”

The woman’s tone never rose, but it could be seen in her eyes she was beginning to get irritated. Fair enough, Anaxares thought. Atalantians got on everyone’s nerves, what with the way they were moved to emotion so easily. The famous warrior Atalante who’d founded their city was said to have wept at the sight of the rising walls, so clearly it was some sort of cultural defect. Public weeping was not allowed in Bellerophon, as it had been deemed Against The Will Of The People.

“Is there a form for murder ?” the Atalantian screeched, sounding triumphant like he’d achieved some sort of great victory with the reply.

The Secretariat member blinked.

“Seven,” she said. “Though for five of them, after committing the crime the criminal must present themselves for execution within twelve hours.”

That wasn’t going anywhere, so Anaxares let his attention lapse and considered the other diplomats at the table. The Nicean delegate was listening carefully but the man had been hitting the wine pretty hard so this might actually seem interesting to him. The delegate from Stygia – Magister Zoe, she’d introduced herself as – was openly bored out of her skull and had been scribbling on a sheet of parchment for a while. Anaxares squinted at the lines while trying not to be too obvious about it. There were stanzas, he saw. It looked like a sung version of the argument between the Atalantian and and the Delosi that had been lasting for the better part of an hour. Some liberties had been taken with the plot, unless he’d missed a lot of unspoken sexual tension between those two. The delegate from Penthes was... looking at him already. Smiling. Anaxares resisted the urge to make the sign of of warding, the one that politely asked Evil to look at someone else instead please. That covered all the diplomats seated at the table, though there was another one seated on a bench a little to the side: the envoy from Mercantis.

The City of Bought and Sold was not part of the League proper, but they’d been granted the right to sit in on its meetings because of “aligned interests”. Anaxares suspected a grand amount of bribes had also been involved in making that right part of the League’s charter, though that was the kind of suspicion best left alone. The merchant lords of the Consortium did not have a standing army, or even a city guard, but they had a great deal of gold and enough hired killers to populate a small city. The woman Mercantis had sent was morbidly fat, of course. They always were. It seemed to be considered a prerequisite for rising to the higher tiers of the Consortium, and so anybody who could afford to pack on the weight did so with gusto. The waste that implied offended Anaxares’ Bellerophan sensibilities. The Grain Of The People Should Go To The People , he thought, just in case one of the kanenas was listening in . Down With Foreign Despots, May Glorious Bellerophon Reign Forever.

“You’re wasting everybody’s time,” the Stygian magister said, breaking into the middle of the argument. “Either submit the matter to League arbitrage or shut up.”

Anaxares snorted. No one had ever submitted anything to League arbitrage without being sure what the verdict would be ahead of the submission. If either of the arguing delegates had considered the incident worth the bribes and concessions buying a verdict would cost, they wouldn’t have been bickering about it in the first place. His amusement had been noticed, though.

“Do you find my people’s pain amusing, Bellerophan?” the Atalantian said.

“The Glorious Republic of Bellerophon has no stance on the incident,” he said.

“You’re a person, you should have an opinion,” the man said dramatically.

Anaxares went very still.

“I am a mere vessel for the will of the people,” he babbled hurriedly, “unfit to pass judgement on my own. Long Live The Republic, Peerless Jewel Of Freedom.”

Eyes closed he waited for the pebble to shift and tear through his organs. There was a long moment of silence in the room, but nothing happened.

“Damn,” the Penthesian said. “That would have been a five pointer.”

“Don’t blow up the Bellerophan, this one is less fucking insane than the usual ones,” the Nicean delegate said.

“ Language , you two,” the Tyrant said. “Please, ladies and gentlemen, let us have some decorum.”

No one felt quite safe enough to roll their eyes at that. Diplomatic immunity only went so far when you were dealing with a Tyrant.

“Delos sees no need to submit the matter to arbitrage,” the Secretariat member said.

The Atalantian looked like he’d just bit into something foul.

“Neither does the city of Atalante,” he said.

“Good,” the Nicean delegate said, after draining his seventh cup of wine. “If that’s over with, the city of Nicae had a motion to submit for League consideration.”

He held out his cup for a servant to fill again. Anaxares raised an eyebrow. He doubted this would be a rehash of the old Nicae demand for the League to declare war on Ashur – no one else cared that the Thalassocracy suppressed Nicean commerce. If they’d wanted to own the Samite Gulf, they should have won at least one of the four wars they’d fought for it. Ashur made sure to line the pockets of all the other cities with fleets anyway, which ensured their predominance at sea would never be seriously challenged. Not that any of this mattered to Anaxares: Bellerophon was landlocked . Ships Are The Work Of Wicked Foreign Oligarchies , he added just to cover his bases.

“The Strategos feels that tensions with the Principate have been escalated unnecessarily,” the Nicean said. “Their civil war is over and the First Prince has the principalities in order: we need to nip this in the bud before they turn in our direction.”

Everybody carefully did not look at the Tyrant, who had both the distinctions of being the boy responsible for those elevated tensions and the ruler who’d be expected to lead the armies of the League if it came to war. That wasn’t a coincidence: whenever Procer came knocking, Helike always became the first among equals. Their army might not have been as large as Stygia’s, but it had never lost a war to the Stygians either.

“To achieve this,” the Nicean continued, “the Strategos has ordered me to present a motion to open ten-year truce negotiations with the Principate.”

Anaxares’ eyes flicked from one delegate to another. The magister was surprised but no one else seemed to be, not even the Tyrant. Ah. As he’d earlier thought, no one ever bothered to present a motion without knowing what the results of the vote would be. Of the seven Free Cities, four were aligned with Good – Nicae, Atalante, Delos and Penthes. Bellerophon and Stygia openly embraced the Gods Below, while Helike waffled between one side or another depending on whoever ruled them at the time. Even if rivalries between cities usually trumped any greater allegiance to the Gods, when it came to League foreign policy the Good cities tended to stick together. They never pushed too far of course, since forcing their will too often would trigger the collapse of the League, but it looked like this was going to be one of those times where they banded together.

“Atalante votes in favour,” the diplomat said.

“Delos votes in favour,” the woman from the Secretariat said.

“Penthes votes in favour as well,” the filthy Penthesian added.

Well, that carried the vote. Some advantage might be gained in ensuring a Bellerophon presence when the negotiations begun, and the four cities having their way here should give him enough leverage to ensure that. Anaxares signalled a... servant, repulsive as that thought was – People May Be Servants Of The State But Never Of Other People, A Thousand Years Of Damnation On Vile Foreign Autocrats – to fill his cup of wine but the woman drifted away without apparently seeing him gesture. Irritating.

“We won’t be doing any of that,” the Tyrant said cheerfully. “Procer can go hang and the pox on anyone who says differently, if you’ll forgive my language.”

Magister Zoe raised an eyebrow. They had a talent for condescension, the Stygians. The ones who weren’t slaves anyway.

“I sympathize with the sentiment, but a majority has been reached. Exactly how do you intend to reverse it?”

“Well,” the Tyrant began, bloodshot eye fluttering, but he was interrupted by a dull thump.

The Nicean delegate had hit the table face-first, cup of wine still in hand. The man did not look to be breathing, and Anaxares’ own breath caught. The Delosi slumped in her chair a moment later, the Atalantian had just enough time to scream before choking and the Penthesian simply... stopped moving, between two heartbeats.

“The dosage must have been inaccurate,” the Tyrant mused. “Someone’s getting stoned for that. I had this entire speech planned, I was going to sweep my arm and then-“

The young man made a noise Anaxares assumed was meant to represent death by poison, which was by definition silent.

“This is madness,” the Stygian barked, apparently unshaken by the fresh murder of over half the people in the room.

That was the slavers for you: ice all the way to the soul.

“The poison?” the Tyrant asked, surprised. “It was quite affordable, actually. Bought it from Mercantis.”

The representative from the Consortium had not moved since the deaths and seemed utterly unconcerned. She was openly amused at Magister Zoe’s angry look.

“The Consortium believes in a modern, cost-effective form of murder,” she said. “A wide range of substances is available to any with the means.”

“I believe she was referring to the act of poisoning itself, Lord Tyrant,” Anaxares said, surprised at how steady his voice sounded.

Having carried a death sentence in his stomach since the age of twelve had done wonders for his composure, the delegate from Bellerophon reflected.

“There will be war for this,” the magister barked. “Murdering envoys? It’s-“

“Villainous?” the Tyrant said softly, smiling again.

His bad eye looked redder now. Like it had fed on the deaths. His hand was not shaking for the first time since Anaxares had met him. The Bellerophan was something of a connoisseur in the domain of foreboding, and considered that sign a particularly ominous one.

“That’s the problem with Magisters,” the boy said cheerfully. “It’s all slavery and murder with you, there’s no art to it. No whimsy. When’s the last time any of you did anything just because you could?”

He gestured enthusiastically.

“You’re taking it too seriously. You have all this power and all you ever use it for is making sure you keep it. Do you have any idea how boring that is?”

“Stygia will have no part of this idiot war of yours,” the magister hissed.

“Of course you’ll take part,” the Tyrant grinned. “And you’ll be on my side, too. Because if you’re not I’ll sack your city, tear down you walls and swell my ranks with your slaves.”

“Am I to assume this threat extends to Bellerophon?” Anaxares said calmly.

“Anaxares, was it?” the boy asked. “I have to say, I’m loving the whole serenity thing you have going on. And if your Republic doesn’t back me, I’ll roast your children like poultry and sell them in Praes. Maybe overcharge on transport, they’ve been screwing us on tariffs recently.”

“You’re at war with over half the League and you’re threatening the rest?” Magister Zoe said, sounding appalled.

She had, the Bellerophan thought, yet to grasp exactly what it was they were dealing with here. Magisters were too used to being in control. Anaxares had never been under that delusion: his people were the current carrying him, on any day as likely to dash him on the rocks as they were to carry him safely to shore. Having no real influence over the course of his life was a familiar feeling. If he cared enough to comfort the foreigner, he would have told her it got easier after you stopped thinking of your future too much. Much like drowning, it was much easier on you if you didn’t struggle.

“Four cities or six or half of Creation,” the Tyrant shrugged. “It makes no difference to me. Gods Below, act Evil for once in your life. It’s like it’s a hobby with you people.”

That red eye shone malevolently as the Named stared them down.

“It’s not a hobby, my friends, it’s a side. A side in the war that defines Creation. Did you think you could sit the fence forever? Speak the words without ever paying the price? Naughty, naughty, if you’ll forgive my language.”

The Tyrant grinned and for a moment all Anaxares could see was that horrible red orb and and the curved stretch of pearly white teeth. A devil’s grin on a devil’s face.

“We’re the villains, my friends. We’re the things out there in the night that they’re all afraid of, the reason they bar their doors and shutter their windows. This place is in dire need of being remembered that truth.”

The boy laughed and Anaxares shivered.

“So muster your armies, rustle up your devils and let your monsters out of their cages. Let’s have us a jolly good time, eh?”

The Bellerophan decided to call for another cup of wine and didn’t particularly care if it was poisoned or not.

—

Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer, put down her correspondence.

Her quarters in Orense were like a warrior past his prime: fair to look at still, but already showing signs of decay. She was not surprised. Prince Rodrigo of Orense’s finances could aptly be described as “dregs”: the commerce that had begun to bloom again had petered out, his fields emptied of farmers who’d died as soldiers and the entire south of the principality had been ransacked by Dominion raiders. The man could no longer afford to live in the style he was accustomed to, and for a prince of Procer there were few blows harder to one’s pride than that. It had turned the older man bitter, as had his repeated bloody defeats in the Proceran civil war. Though he’d never been a claimant himself, the two candidates the prince backed had been crushed by other alliances after he’d sunk his fortune into their causes. And now the Dominion of Levant was pillaging his lands with impunity, or at least had been until Cordelia came south. Gratitude might have been expected, but then the man was an Arlesite.

The army Uncle Klaus had raised was not as full of northerners as the one that had won her the throne, but the core of the host had still been forged on the battlefields of Lange and Aisne. It was there that Lycaonese steel, tempered against the ratling warbands of the Chain of Hunger and the endless harassment of the Kingdom of the Dead, had proved superior to the numbers of southern principalities. Numbers were still Cordelia’s problem, as it happened. There were only four Lycaonese principalities: Rhenia, Hannoven, Bremen and Neustria. Though neither Bremen nor Neustria were surrounded by mountains as the other two were, their lands were still hard to farm on. The four Lycaonese principalities had the four smallest populations of any principality in Procer, and though unlike southerners the Lycaonese had universal military service the attrition still rankled. She could only afford to lose so many soldiers from her support base before she was too weak to strong-arm the Highest Assembly.

So now she drew from the ranks of her allies, the princes and princesses who’d joined her willingly when it became clear her cause was on the rise. Few principality troops had been made available to her, but her allies had not been stingy with fantassins. Cordelia was somewhat unschooled in matters military, but as her uncle explained it these were men and women who’d served as peasant levies in the the civil war after being disposed by the fighting, making it their trade. Not as good as soldiers who’d trained since infancy, but those were costly and hard to replace. There were tens of thousands of fantassins floating around Procer at the moment, the First Prince knew. People who could only live for violence and now found themselves without anyone willing to pay for them to commit it. She needed a war, and quickly, before they turned on their own people. The first step in mitigating the problem was folding as many of them as she could into the ranks of her own armies, but that wouldn’t be enough. She’d have to accelerate the economic recovery of the south to find them lands to occupy, which she’d been trying to avoid until her position was better secured.

She’d a received a report that morning from Uncle Klaus announcing he’d thrown the last Dominion raiders out of the south of Orense and set up defensive positions a few miles away from the Red Snake Wall, which had been one problem solved. That was not the report she was looking at, though: this one was from an agent of hers in the Free Cities, informing her that two days ago the Tyrant of Helike had murdered four League delegates in broad daylight, then declared war on their cities. Calmly, she placed down the letter on the surface of her gilded desk.

She’d pressured, bribed and otherwise convinced the leaders of the same cities whose envoys had been poisoned to pass a motion to negotiate a ten-year truce with the Principate. It had taken her years and quite a bit of silver, but she’d done it. And when she had, she’d known there would be two ways that League session could end: either the Evil cities accepted the muzzle, or there would be war. Either one would force Helike to cease probing at Tenerife’s borders, binding the princess who was already one of her closest allies to her even closer. And it would secure our south-eastern flank , she thought. The Tyrant of Helike still stood alone, as far as she knew, but the odds were that the other two Evil cities would join him. Could she influence them the other way, to stack the odds towards the outcome she desired? Bellerophon was more or less impossible to affect measurably, since they executed anyone who looked like they might put some order to the mob that ruled the city. Stygia... No. She was weak in that city and the Empire owned the ruling coalition of magisters body and soul. Literally, in some cases. Stygia would lean in the direction Malicia wanted it to.

Who would win the war? Stygia and Helike had the two largest armies, but Nicae had the largest population and Penthes was the richest. Both sides would be emptying Mercantis of mercenaries before the month was done, lining the pockets of the Consortium with their bidding wars. As things currently stood, Cordelia would be inclined to believe that the Good League would beat the Evil League. And yet the Tyrant had triggered this war. The boy had something up his sleeve, something more deadly than a mere Name. More than that, it was a certainty that Praes would intervene. They would not send one of the Legions south, but the First Prince suspected the Calamities would be coming down. A counterweight was needed, Cordelia knew, but she did not need to trouble herself with that. The Heavens had already provided: a fortnight ago a ship had docked in Nicae carrying the White Knight, returned from his years in the Titanomachy. The survivors of the Lone Swordsman’s band of heroes would cluster around the new one, though how many had survived Liesse she did not know.

The Thief was still reportedly alive, but no one had seen the Wandering Bard in weeks. Liesse had been such a mess she was still trying to sort out exactly what had happened there. Devils had been summoned, then disarmed. The Squire had forced the surrender of the Baroness Dormer then spared the woman. She’d killed the Lone Swordsman and apparently returned from the dead, which the House of Light adamantly maintained was impossible. There was already talk in Salia of naming her an abomination in the eyes of the Heavens. The entire Liesse Rebellion had died an ugly death at the hands of this Callowan slip of a girl and her master, killed with a whimper instead of the bang Cordelia had been hoping for. Daoine had never entered the war, and was now on the back foot with the Tower since one of Duchess Kegan’s relatives had been caught helping a hero.

Had her observers not gotten a close look at the Legions of Terror in action, Cordelia would have called the entire affair a detestable waste of silver and lives. Several books’ worth of reports were already being compiled into a combat doctrine that would see use in the crusade, but she’d failed to meet all her other objectives. Praesi hegemony in Callow was stronger than ever and the Empress had killed unrest for good with her masterstroke of a “ruling council”. Considering there would be four Praesi sitting on that council, Malicia had come out of this rebellion with tighter control over her foreign holdings than she’d started with. Trying to hobble the Empress was like cutting off a hydra’s head: every time two more grew, more vicious and cunning than the last. At least the woman’s nobility was giving her trouble. As well they should: Cordelia had been sinking coin into their cause for half a decade using a labyrinthine series of intermediaries. Her payback for the depredations of the Pravus Bank.

Things were unfolding all across of Calernia and Cordelia could not longer afford to grant the Dominion the lion’s share of her attention. It was time to end this. Setting aside her correspondence, the First Prince of Procer took a fresh sheet of parchment and dipped her quill in the ink.

—

“We’re too close to the wall, I don’t like it,” Prince Klaus Hasenbach announced for a third time.

“They need specific conditions to wake the snake,” Cordelia said calmly. “Which we do not meet.”

In a concession to the heat of summer, the First Prince had worn a dress of a much paler blue than was present on the heraldry of Rhenia. It ended conservatively above her collarbone, tailored to hide the way her Hasenbach blood had seen her born with shoulders better fit for a lumberjack than a noble. The cloth of gold bordering the cut suggested the outline of her chest without lingering inappropriately, as the belt of sapphires set in gold that hung loosely on her hip did for that curve. Her long blond tresses had been carefully combed and bound with a brooch that had been in her family since days before the Principate, a beautiful little piece shaped like the spearman that was the emblem of the Hasenbachs. The crown, though, was from Salia. A simple circlet made from white gold, a metal only the First Prince could wear in public by ancient law. It was meant to subtly set the aside the ruler of Procer from all others.

The pavilion Cordelia had ordered raised was not close enough to the Red Snake wall to be in its shadow at this time of day, but in a bell it would be. The structure was impressive, seen from this close. The foundations only stood ten feet tall, limestone painted over red, but the bulk of it was the titanic sculpted red granite snake that stretched from the sea to the beginning of Brocelian Forest. The sheer scale of it was absurd, the largest project ever undertaken by the gigantes outside of the borders of the Titanomachy. That it was enchanted to protect the Dominion of Levant from any who would seek to pass it was arguably even more absurd: enchantment on that scale was almost without precedent. Only the Miezans had ever cast magic on that scale, as far as she knew. It made assailing the Dominion by land impossible, though landing ships far enough down the coast was still an option.

Lady Itima of the Bandit’s Blood, ruler of Vaccei, would know this. The other members of the Majilis had already told her she would get no support from the rest of the Dominion in a closed session so she’d had to look for support elsewhere. Her bloodline’s ancient ties to the gigantes weren’t strong enough for them to break their enforced isolationism, which had seen her turn to Ashur instead. The Thalassocracy was the natural choice for an ally, really. The Ashurans had supported the war of independence that had seen Levant form out of former Proceran principalities and it was a central tenet of their foreign policy to ensure Procer never became a sea power. The Thalassocracy’s war fleet dwarfed the Proceran one by a rapport of ten to one, all of them lifelong sailors who could only rise through the citizenship tiers by uninterrupted service. Some of them would even have experience in naval warfare, as two decades ago Nicea’s latest attempt to gain primacy in the Samite Gulf had been bloodily suppressed by their captains. In comparison, the Principate had never fought a single major naval engagement in the nation’s entire history.

As long as Ashur backed Vaccei, it was untouchable.

Itima would know this, and when she came it would be with the swagger of a woman who knew the Principate would beggar itself if its armies camped out in southern Orense until she got bored. She would expect concessions, perhaps even angle for the ceding of territory. This was a negotiation now, though. Cordelia’s uncle had spent his days learning the trade of war and come out of it one of the finest generals on Calernia, but swords had never been the First Prince’s way. She’d learned diplomacy and intrigue, spent years sharpening her mind by fighting the most dangerous woman on Calernia across the continent in a hundred different simultaneous battlefields. Itima of the Bandit’s Blood had picked the wrong battlefield to challenge her on. When the ruler in question arrived, her favourite refreshments had already been set up – chilled wine from Alava – and attendants swarmed around her delegation like hummingbirds around nectar. Uncle Klaus has wanted to remain seated when she arrived as a sign of his disdain, but Cordelia had given him a steady look until he conceded the matter. When it came to etiquette, he usually did.

Itima was a middle-aged woman with tanned skin, startling blue eyes and hair cut so closely it might as well have been shaved. Her two sons followed her closely, tall young men with hard faces and the scars of people who had seen battle before. Likely they’d been the ones leading the raids their mother had ordered. Cordelia smiled sweetly at them and the younger of the two gave a startled blush before he blanked his face. Their mother was not so easily charmed and eyed the goblet of wine presented to her with distrust before turning her attention to the First Prince. Who stood there and said nothing. Silence fell across the pavilion, broken only by the murmured of Cordelia’s attendants seating the rest of the delegation and plying them with treats and flattery.

“Your Most Serene Highness,” Itima finally said.

Good. An acknowledgement of Cordelia’s superior rank was the right tone to set for this conversation.

“Lady Itima of the Bandit’s Blood,” Cordelia replied, elegantly taking the seat at the head of the table before the woman could slight her before doing it first.

The ruler of Vaccei took the seat facing her, the two sons looming behind the chair in a rather meagre attempt at intimidation tactics.

“If I may introduce Prince Klaus Papenheim of Hannoven,” she said, nodding at her uncle.

Said uncle was drinking from the cider cup she’d arranged for him to get specifically so he wouldn’t talk.

“My sons, Moro and Tarif of the Bandit’s Blood,” the blue-eye woman replied, not bothering to specify which was which.

Not that she needed to. Cordelia had extensive files on every member of Itima’s allies and family. Tarif was the younger one who’d blushed, and had a well-documented fondness for blondes. He was quite good in bed, the agent who’d sent the report had assured her. The First Prince found him handsome enough, but a dalliance with someone of his rank might have an expectation of marriage – which she’d made a point of avoiding. It gave her much leverage in Procer.

“Would any of you care for a meal before we begin negotiations?” she offered.

“I’d care for you to stop wasting my time,” Itima said. “We’re here because I’ve got you in a corner and you know it. I have my demands. Most of them are not negotiable.”

Cordelia smiled politely, then gesture for one of the attendants to step forward. The young girl bowed and lightly set a scroll on the table. Lady Itima seemed about to say something scathing until she noticed the seal keeping it closed. A ship with a crown for a sail, seven coins forming a half-circle above it. The official seal of the Thalassocracy of Ashur, used only on formal diplomatic documents.

“What is this?” the Levantine asked.

“A reassessment of our respective positions,” Cordelia said.

Itima broke it open and began reading, skipping the first few paragraphs and the inevitable niceties and title-trading they consisted of. The fair-haired Lycaonese knew the moment Itima first arrived to the actual treaty terms because the tan woman’s face dropped.

“This is a fake,” the Levantine said accusingly.

“You know it is not,” the First Prince said calmly. “The Thalassocracy will remain neutral in the event of a war between you and the Principate, so long as the borders remain unchanged afterwards.”

“I have assurances for half of the third tier citizen’s they’ll sack your entire coast,” Itima barked.

“Yes, and that was cleverly done,” Cordelia conceded. “Yet all of them fall silent when the only second tier citizen speaks.”

Ashur’s citizenship tiers were a maze to outsiders, as there were over twenty of them, but it could be understood that the dozen or so third tier citizens ran the Thalassocracy on a day-to-day basis. The only individual to stand above them was Magon Hadast, a man in his seventies whose ancestor had been the captain of the initial ship of settlers to populate the island. There could only be one second tier citizen for any colony of the Baalite Hegemony – which Ashur still technically was – at any time, and there was no rising any higher than that: first tier citizens could only be born in Tyre, the city to have spawned the entire Hegemony. Magon’s word was law in Ashur, and though he was not a heavy-handed ruler he’d been displeased at the idea of getting in a slugging match with the Principate over the ambitions of a single woman from the Dominion.

“The old man doesn’t speak,” the Levantine said.

“Not to you,” Cordelia said. “You are a skilled diplomat, Lady Itima, and an intelligent woman. I am both those things, but I also happen to have the resources of the greatest surface nation on the continent at my disposal. This defeat does not speak of incompetence but of a mere disparity of means.”

“We’ll hold the beaches against you,” the ruler of Vaccei said, anger glittering in her eyes.

“The first time, perhaps,” the First Prince said. “But the time after that? Or the next? We will land eventually. And we will bury you in numbers until Vaccei falls.”

“The rest of the Majilis will side with me the moment you tread Dominion soil,” she said.

“The rest of the Majilis are already considering which of their relatives should rule Vaccei after the removal of your dynasty,” Cordelia explained gently. “I am not invading Levant, Lady Itima, I am ending a threat to Procer.”

“And you’ll just leave after you take back your old principality, will you?” Moro sneered.

Cordelia met his eyes and smiled kindly.

“I do not want a war, Lord Moro,” she said. “I am not the one who crossed borders and sacked towns. Frankly, the loss of so much life needlessly appals me.”

“There’s a reason we have the wall in the first place, Proceran,” Itima said. “We know your kind.”

There was a truth in that, Cordelia knew. Many a First Prince or Princess had looked south and pondered the fresh conquest of old territory, their hands stayed only by the attention of Ashur and the impossibility of taking the Red Snake Wall.

“The Principate has done foul things in the past, it is true,” she said. “Taking Levant – and then trying to keep it – was one. The occupation of Callow after the Third Crusade was another.”

“The League Wars,” Tarif counted out quietly. “The Humbling of Titans. The Red Flower Massacre.”

And hadn’t they paid grand prices, for all those foreign adventures? Just like Dread Empress Triumphant’s red-handed madness had directly led to the formation of the Principate after her fall, Procer had given birth to its own enemies. The Principate was more distrusted in Callow than any other nation save for the Empire, the gigantes killed Procerans on sight south of Valencis and old Arlesite warmongering was the reason there was a League of Free Cities at all. Cordelia believed the Principate had grown as large as it would ever be. All that further wars would accomplish was set the rest of the continent against them, and they could not afford that. Alamans and Arlesites principalities had the luxury to believe the might of Procer was unchallenged, safe in their southern domains, but Cordelia knew differently. She was Lycaonese, from the tip of her toes to the crown of her head, and all of her people knew one truth as sure as they knew their own breath: Evil is real. It is not a story or a lesson, it is a piece of Creation as true as rain or music. Evil is on the other side of the mountain, of the lake, and when spring comes it will march for your home. And it will never, ever stop unless you make it.
“When I became First Prince,” Cordelia said, “I gained another title. Warden of the West.”

“Aye, your kind have claimed to be ‘wardens’ of our land for a long time,” Itima said with a hard look.

“I do not think that it was that title should mean,” the fair-haired woman said. “Not anymore. Gods, Lady Itima, we were so busy squabbling over a crown that we allowed Praes to conquer an entire kingdom. That is not what the Principate should be.”

“And what is that, exactly?” Moro asked with a thin smile.

“ We are the wall ,” Cordelia said, and she spoke with the ironclad belief of a hundred generations of Hasenbachs before her. “We are the bulwark between the West and the monsters. We have been looking south all those years, and now Evil wakes. Do you think the Tower will stand alone, when their Legions spill out onto the continent? The Dead King will rise from his slumber and drown the world in death . The Everdark will band under a single banner and etch the Tenets of Night in blood across our cities. The Chain of Hunger grows larger and bolder every spring, and when they come it will not be in warbands – their hordes will blot out the horizon.”

She leaned forward.

“So please ,” she said, speaking as sincerely as she ever had. “Do not make me fight you, Lady Itima. There will be only one war that matters in my lifetime, and it will not be in the south.”

The tanned woman looked shaken.

“You ask me to ignore centuries of bad blood,” she said hesitatingly.

“I ask you to stand with me,” Cordelia replied quietly. “Not as a subject or a vassal, but as an ally.”

She could see it in the sons’ eyes, that they understood. What was coming, crawling closer to them every day.

“They say there is only one choice we can make that ever really matters,” the First Prince of Procer said. “I beg you, for all our sakes. Make the right one.”

She offered a hand, and after a long moment the ruler of Vaccei took it. The rest of the Dominion would follow, Cordelia knew. It would not be enough. Gods forgive her, but it would not be enough. She’d have to intervene in the Free Cities, to make peace between Ashur and its rivals, to somehow mend bridges with the Titanomachy. Cordelia would have to lie and scheme and strike deals in the dark of night until her desperate, ramshackle alliance stood together.

Because the madmen were coming. The monsters of legend. The ones that cast shadows on the world from their flying fortresses, who broke the very fabric of Creation with their sorceries. They were coming, and while the Principate had bled itself in a hundred wars they had learned . Cordelia had always loved the words of her mother’s family, the quietly dignified Pappenheim boast thrown in the face of the Enemy, but in the end she was a Hasenbach first. It ran in her blood, the old duty no one had given them but they had taken up anyway. Because it was right, because they could, because no one else would.

Because We Must.

Gods Above, let that be enough.

Epilogue

“Your mistake, Queen of Blades, is in thinking that virtue is the province of Good. Every Tyrant who has ever claimed the Tower, every fool and every madman, had the seed of greatness in them. Courage, cleverness, ambition, will. We may lose our way, we may lose ourselves, but every time we get... a little closer. You think I am afraid of death? I am a droplet in the tide that will drown Creation. I take pride in this, even in my hour of failure. Empresses rise, Empresses fall. But the Tower?
Oh, the Tower endures.”

– Last words of Dread Empress Regalia the First

“It’s an ugly thing, isn’t it?”

There was truth in that. So many tales had been woven around the throne of Praes that the lies could no longer be told from the truth, but there was no denying the thing was ghastly. Stone and iron welded together brutally by a man without a single artistic speck to his soul. The first Warlock had many talents, it was said in the records, but creation was not one of them. The pile of stone was squat and rough, the back of the seat slightly crooked towards the left and the iron used to keep it together had dripped onto the floor when heated. After Triumphant had brought down the Tower on her killers in a final act of spite, it had been found intact. Not a single loose stone had so much as touched it. The people who’d dug up the room had all gone mad and killed themselves within a week of unearthing it.

The throne of Praes was not for the sight of meek souls.

“It should be,” Amadeus said. “They had a firmer grasp on the truth of what we are, back then.”

An empire cobbled together out of warring tribes and kingdoms who had failed to unite even in the face of the invading Miezans. A lie agreed on by Taghreb and Soninke, by the orcs and the goblins, that the peace forced upon them by the foreigners could survive their leaving. Praes was not a Mtethwa or Taghrebi word – it was Old Miezan, ripped from the hands of the enemy and held aloft as a trophy by the first Dread Empress. Maleficent had known, he believed, all the peoples of the Empire should be remembered the clang of shackles every time they spoke of their nation. That way they would never forget the War of Chains, forget that there had been a time all had been humbled. Once we could not look beyond our own knives and petty disputes, so Creation buried us. Remember.

A hopeful woman, Dread Empress Maleficent. She’d been hopeful all the way until the High Lord of Wolof had stabbed her in the back and stolen her throne, laying bare the truth of her empire: power gained through the spilling of blood will be taken by the spilling of blood. Always. Praes could be held, but it could not be owned. There would be no Dead King to reign forever here, no Tenets of Night all must bow to. The Dread Empire would have a hundred thousand Tyrants, all of them lost and grasping beyond their reach until their doom fell upon them. And the Tyrant would rise anew, with fire in their eyes and unquenchable ambition in their stomach that Creation would deny – but oh, the craving. Wasn’t the craving what it was all about? It was an unusually poetic thought for Amadeus, a man not particularly prone to sentiment outside of some very defined boundaries. He did not linger on it.

A thousand poets had etched their sentences on the soul of the Wasteland, but he was not one of them. The legacy he sought was of a different sort, if no less elusive.

“We all know it’s a lie, Maddie,” Alaya laughed. “Look at all those pretty gildings close around the throne – close, but not touching. Some lines even Praesi won’t cross.”

The hall was empty, would have been for the better part of a bell. Alaya always put up the most vicious wards available to the mistress of the Tower whenever they claimed this place for their drinking. Tonight they had, by informal agreement, chosen to sit by Dread Emperor Malevolent III. ‘The Pithy’, the histories of Praes named him. As far as Amadeus knew, he’d done little in his ten years or reigning save for putting a goblin rebellion and failing spectacularly at making the empire a naval power. The Ashurans had sailed straight into Thalassina and burned the half-built fleet: the only surviving captains had immediately defected, setting themselves up as pirates in the Tideless Isles and becoming a recurring blade in the back on the Empire’s merchant shipping.

There would be, he knew, a little detail about the man he did not know that would surprise a laugh out of him when linked to something Alaya said to him tonight. She’d always delighted in weaving little hidden jests in her words for him to find later when thinking back on them. She’d been like that even the Sentinels had come for her at her father’s inn, before the soft but deadly games of the seraglio had honed that skill into a blade that cut as often as it teased. Many a lord and lady of Praes had woken up in the dead of night weeks after their audience with Malicia, shivering when they realized the full implications of a seemingly innocent sentence. Amadeus took the bottle when the Dread Empress of Praes offered it, tossing back a gulp of terrible wine and grimacing at the taste.

“Gods, I’m not sure why we keep drinking that swill,” he said.

“Nostalgia,” Malicia mused. “Of all the spirits made on Calernia, though, I will concede that the ones made in the Green Stretch are the worst. By far.”

She pulled deeply at the bottle when he passed it back, wiping the smooth back of her hand against her mouth without even the pretence of manners. Times like this, Amadeus could still glimpse the girl he’d known. The one with the laughing eyes and the burning ambition, still unhardened by the dark days ahead of her. And yet, save for a few conversations by moonlight, he’d never known much of that girl. It was the promise of Malicia to come he had truly struck a friendship with. The half-tread path between smiling Alaya and the hard-eyed Dread Empress who would rule over the Wasteland.

“It tastes like dirt and lack of prospects,” he said after taking another drink.

Alaya snorted. If one of her courtiers had ever seen or heard her do something so undignified, they would have thought their senses to be lying before they believed it to be truth. It still warmed him, after all these years, that she trusted him enough to allow that small part of herself that belonged only to her to flicker into life in front of him.

“Truly,” she said, “the taste of home.”

She raised the bottle in a mocking salute to the throne.

“To the Green Stretch,” Amadeus toasted. “And the most glorious mud in all of Creation.”

The tone was sardonic, but the memories ran deeper than that. Back to a time where they had been nobodies in the breadbasket of a failing empire: him thinly clad in a Name he’d put on as a deserter’s cloak, her as the great beauty of a town so small it was not on all maps. They’d rise, hadn’t they? Gone further than they had any right to. Not that right ever mattered much to either of us.

“It actually costs more to have it brought to the Tower than to buy the wine itself,” Alaya admitted, tone amused. “I buy it in crates to satiate my conscience.”

“You have entire crates of this horror somewhere in the Tower?” Black said. “Truly, your arsenal is a fearsome one.”

Thunder crackled outside just after he spoke, lending his words a strangely ironic weight. There was always a storm of sorts around the Tower, raging or preparing to rage. Wekesa had informed him the rapidly shifting weather patterns across the Wasteland were linked to the phenomenon, though Amadeus had not inquired further after making sure that link could not be exploited to control said weather. Pity, that. The desertification of the Wasteland would never be entirely undone, but it could have been mitigated with the right tools. Laying back against the marble pillar, an old friend by his side, Amadeus watched the unfolding history of Praes made mosaic across a floor and said nothing.

“Hasenbach has flipped Ashur,” Alaya finally said, and the amusement was gone.

He did not ask if she was sure. Her agents had penetrated the Thalassocracy deeper than Eudokia’s, and they did not make mistakes.

“We still own his son,” he said.

“He’s just a voice in their committees, until his father dies,” Alaya said.

That was always the problem, with Ashur. They genuinely believed in their tiers, that a higher-ranked citizen was fully deserving of the authority granted to them and that trying to overreach before promotion was worthy of contempt. The Baalite hierarchy had sunk so deeply into their society that even centuries after the Hegemony had become irrelevant to the larger affairs of Creation, eclipsed by younger and greater powers, the tiers were still held as sacrosanct. As long as Magon Hadast lived Ashur would be a friend to Procer. A wary and self-interested friend, but that would be enough if the right promises were made. They would be, of that Amadeus had no doubt.

“That girl becomes more dangerous to us every year,” he said.

“That girl is us,” Alaya said, “forty years ago, looking at the stars from a different land.”

The dark-haired man did not reply immediately, silenced by the accuracy of the thought. They’d always known that there would be a price to pay for what they had done in Procer, for the lives he’d had Assassin take and the wars Malicia had kindled with gold and soft words. The First Prince was finally coming to collect. Did he regret it? No, the thought came immediately. It had been a strategic imperative for the Principate to be paralyzed during the Conquest if it was to succeed. That war had always been going to find their doorstep. All their plots had done was delay the first knock by a few decades.

“Levant, now Ashur. She’s trying to forge an alliance against us,” he said. “Dear Cordelia might get her crusade, after all.”

The tone was light, the implications were not. If Hasenbach managed to forge her broader, continental version of the League of Free Cities she only had to wait until the pretext for a Tenth Crusade fell into her lap. Amadeus held no illusions about the fact that it would.

“The Free Cities are where we can kill this in the egg,” Alaya said. “The more that war spins out of control...”

The more Hasenbach’s allies would be tempted to ignore her overtures of peace and order to get involved and claim their cut of the spoils. The moment two forces belonging to two different of her would-be crusaders met with swords out her entire enterprise would collapse. Alaya had the influence abroad to ensure that much. If it happened. Neither of them trusted anybody currently involved in the war to make this happen, unfortunately. Sending in the Legions of Terror, while tempting, would give Hasenbach a gathering cry for all Good and banner for her damned crusade. Which meant a smaller, more measured intervention.

“Wekesa will meet me by the Wasaliti,” Amadeus said. “We’ll all take a ship down through Mercantis.”

From there, he would see where the weakness in the Good League was. Penthes, most likely, for Praesi influence had gained ground there in recent years. However little of that was currently left, it did not matter: the Calamities had done more with lesser openings.

“Squire will be getting her vote and veto earlier than anticipated,” Alaya said mildly.

“It was always the plan she would get them eventually,” Amadeus said.

“After you schooled her properly in ruling,” Malicia murmured.

And there was the rub, he knew. It was one thing to entrust to a seventeen-year-old Callowan girl – with occasionally more mouth to her than sense – half of the territory in the Empire after he had taught her what he knew of ruling, quite another to do so before . Alaya’s fears were not unwarranted, he thought. For at least the first year, Catherine was likely to butcher and coerce her way through anything she perceived as an obstacle. She would do so mercilessly and without hesitation, too, because there was something utterly ruthless at the core of Catherine Foundling. Callowan defiance, perhaps, but married with something brutally pragmatic. Something that would use what it could not break and break what it could not use. Sabah had once told him that Catherine was what a child of his and Hye’s would be like, and though he’d batted away the notion he had not denied it. It was, he knew, a dangerous sort of attachment.

“The deep end is where she learns best,” he said.

“You sound proud,” Alaya noted.

Amadeus laughed quietly into the great and empty hall.

“Two years, Allie,” he said. “She has been at this for two years, and already two heroes are dead at her hand. Everything they sent against her, she has scattered . Armies, devils, even a demon. Gods Below, a few months ago she all but mugged an angel.”

He reached for the bottle and took a swig.

“Proud?” he said. “Proud does not do it justice.”

Alaya took back the bottle and drank deeply before setting it on the cold floor.

“Affection,” she said fondly, “has always been your weakness. One you turned into a strength of sorts, but still a weakness.”

That was why they’d always functioned so well, they both knew. Because Alaya could see the things he was blind to and take the measures he would not, because he was willing to make the leaps of faith when she had run out of faith years ago. Nefarious had much to answer for. He’d died by Alaya’s hand, and Amadeus had not been willing to step in the way of a hatred so earned and bloody, but if he had... Poison would not have been his weapon. He would have unleashed the reserves of viciousness Wekesa had deep inside of him, made it a death no one would ever forget as long as Creation stood. And Wekesa would have done it, without even needing to be asked, because his oldest friend loved Alaya too in his own way. In a way less trusting and more aware, he thought, but that did not detract from the depths of it. Warlock had wanted her on that throne as much as Black did, after the civil war, wanted to see the hint of the laughter they’d known return to those dark eyes. Wanted to see the fear gone from them.

“Before I go south,” he said. “There is still one matter to attend.”

“Heiress,” she said.

“She has defied Imperial authority twice, Alaya,” he said. “First with the demon, then again at Liesse. She was planning on capturing the Hashmallim, for what purpose I do not know.”

“I do,” Malicia said. “And I trusted your apprentice to unmake that plan.”

“She needs to die,” Amadeus said bluntly. “Loudly, badly, publicly. I don’t understand why she’s still alive at this point. We’ve done worse to people of blood as old for lesser offences.”

The Dread Empress of Praes took the bottle and brought it to her lips. She drank for a long time, and when she leaned back against the pillar her smile was a dark thing.

“It’s not about Heiress, Maddie,” she said. “It never was. It’s about her mother.”

Amadeus’ brow rose, but he did not interrupt.

“Tasia Sahelian,” Alaya spoke, relishing the words. “High Lady of Wolof. A tick, Maddie. A tick I could not get rid of, and who bound others to her schemes. And now I am about to break her.”

A game that broad would have had surface stirrings, Amadeus knew, and calmly his mind revised every major event to have happened in the last five years in the light of what she had just said.

“The gold,” he said after a long moment. “The reparations you levied on her – you knew she’d pay. You never thought it would make her withdraw the orc tribute petition.”

“One move at a time, for the last decade, I have slowly emptied her coffers,” Alaya said, still smiling. “Inconsequential laws she paid the fine to break. Tariffs raised on goods she needed. Bribes offered she needed to match. And down went the treasure of Wolof, one aurelius at a time.”

“She still has coin,” Amadeus said. “Her network of spies has not been reduced and her subversions in the bureaucracy continue.”

“Oh, she has coin,” Dread Empress Malicia murmured. “Silver, to be exact.”

Amadeus’ eyes sharpened. “Procer. I thought you’d cut off the flow.”

“I did not,” Alaya said. “And now she is dependent on it so stay above the waterl. Her overextension will reach a peak when she sinks a fortune into restoring Liesse – whose infrastructure, I am afraid, is about to collapse.”

The dark-skinned woman put down the bottle on the floor, and the cold clink of it was like an executioner’s axe.

“And then the silver will stop.”

That would end her, Amadeus knew. The loss of face when she had to publicly default on the many commitments she’d made would shatter any credibility with the rest of the nobility. Her own family would rise in revolt to remove her. It would go further than that though.

“The Truebloods,” he said.

“Will, within a year, end as a political entity in the Empire,” she said softly.

Because Heiress, emboldened by her continued toeing of the line going unpunished, would make another mistake. Give Malicia another lever to pry apart the Truebloods and deal with them individually. The Reforms could begin again , he thought, but those promised skies were too sunny. In the Wasteland, that was always the prelude to the worst of storms.

“If Tasia is willing to take those risks,” he said, “it means that her end game can be reached within a year.”

“That is my assessment,” she agreed.

He closed his eyes. Liesse, it all came back to Liesse. That had been the prize mother and daughter both had wanted out of the rebellion, and not merely to steal some taxes.

“Heiress,” he said. “She has a different plan. What is it?”

There was a long moment of silence, marred only by the patter of the rain outside.

“Do you trust me?” Alaya said.

A year ago , he thought, you would not have needed to ask. A year ago, though, he would not have pressed for answers in the first place. Four words she had spoken, with so many deeper meanings behind them. After all these years , she was saying , after all the times we have hurt each other without knowing or being allowed to let it stay our hand, do you still believe in this? What we have built, the two of us. All the sacrifices we made, the choices we bloodied ours hands with, do you regret them? Even though the chasm is deep and the way across long, though the darkness is thick and we are both so, so tired – will you make that leap of faith again, if I ask you? Amadeus closed his eyes, and leaned back against the pillar. Gently, he threaded his fingers through Alaya’s.

“Always,” he said.

Because he was the Black Knight and she was the Dread Empress, and together they had twisted the strands of Fate until they snapped. Because he was Amadeus and she was Alaya, and though the children they’d once been were long dead the dreams they’d woven together under starlight were not. She rested her head against his shoulder, and for a long time they did not speak.

“A ‘jolly good time’,” she eventually said.

He snorted. The Tyrant of Helike’s words as he threw the south-east of the continent into sheer bloody chaos.

“One day,” Alaya continued, “we will have foreign allies who are not complete imbeciles. By sheer dint of odds, it has to happen eventually .”

“That’d be the day,” Amadeus said wistfully. “But until then...”

“Even if the heroes come,” she said.

“Even if the angels rage,” he said.

“Even if all of Creation stands against us”

“We’ll win ,” they whispered.

In the distance, thunder rumbled.

Neither of them flinched.

—

Akua Sahelian let the sorcery seep into her body. Old stones from the first foundations of Wolof, having drunk deep of the ancient magic there, surrounded her in an unbroken circle. Turning the power within them to the purposes of healing had been the work of an afternoon, one of the first tricks with high arcana her father had ever taught her. The sorcery came and went in tides a prefect match for her heartbeat, alone in the warded room she’d had prepared in the lower levels of the ducal palace of Liesse. She would have to sit there on her chair of lightning-struck oak for a full bell to finish healing the last of the wounds inflicted on her, so Heiress closed her eyes and thought. Sleep would have been so very restful, but it was no longer the kind of luxury she could afford. Not now, when here plans truly began. Not now, when the enemy prowled around her seat of power in search of weakness.

Foundling has unleashed her twisted little goblin again, the one with the thief’s name. The wretch was officially out on manoeuvres, but he’d really been haunting the roads in and out of Liesse. There’d been no lack of targets: even after her loss of face, Heiress’ allies were legion. They were coming to her city now, flocking to make a darker mirror to the Empress’ court in Ater. Not all of them made it: twice already an entire party had disappeared without trace in the night. Both of them had been headed by members in good standing – if not high authority – of the Truebloods. Aisha Bishara was picking the prey, she knew, surgically removing the most reliable of Akua’s allies before they ever made it to the protection of her walls. It wouldn’t be enough: word has spread and now the Praesi were coming in larger, heavily armed groups. More than a single cohort of goblins, however brutal, could handle.

Not for the first time in the last moon’s turn, Heiress’ thoughts turned to the city she ruled over. To the battle that had taken place there and the infinitely more important events that had unfolded behind it. She could admit it, in the perfect privacy of her own thoughts.

Liesse had been a disaster.

Out of her ten-odd objectives when the Fifteenth had left Marchford, only one had been met. Forcing support for her bid as governess. That was it. As for the others? The Hashmallim, instead of being trapped in a dimension she owned as fuel for the next part of her plan, had been essentially bullied into resurrecting Foundling. Resurrection . The sheer effrontery of that, she reluctantly had to respect. The Squire was still an ignorant thug, but she was an ignorant thug who’d spat in the eye of the Heavens. A little of what it meant to be Praesi had sunk into Catherine Foundling, whether or not the other woman wanted to admit it. The Lone Swordsman was dead, as she had wished, but his death had empowered the Squire in ways she could not yet fully understand. Far from weakening her rival, the killing had added an another blade to her arsenal.

The devils she’d meant to use to thin the population of Liesse – to spill so much blood the grounds would be consecrated to the Gods Below, to flush out the rebels and make room for her coming allies – had been turned on themselves within half a bell of being unleashed. The sheer amount of contracts she’d permanently lost through that was painful to think about. The demon she’d secured as the blunt tool she would occasionally need? Now in the hands of the Apprentice, the same man who’d turned her bindings into a meat grinder as easily as pouring himself a cup of wine. Had she been the kind of woman who shivered in fear, Akua would have at that. The son of Warlock with a demon dating from Triumphant’s – may she never return – day in his hands was not a notion she cherished. Another asset lost. If she could have turned Masego to her purposes the problem would not have been quite as keen, but she had no angle there.

Apprentice had, as far as she could tell, no real vices. He did not drink much, ate often but of peasant fare and socialized but with a few people – all of them either family or members of the Fifteenth. It had been mildly interesting to learn he played shatranj with the Adjutant and talked spellcrafting with the Duni Senior Mage, but there was no lever there. Sex was similarly useless as an approach: as far as she knew Masego had never lain with either a man or a woman, or even shown interest in either. She had agents of both genders do everything but show up in his bedroll naked and the man hadn’t even noticed, most of the time. Frustrating, especially since Apprentice was the only of Foundling’s Named contingent it was even slightly possible to bring to her side. Trying that with the orc was a fool’s errand. Heiress did not sigh, even in this room where no one could hear or see. Apprentice would be building his mage’s tower soon, she knew. Perhaps he could be tempted with exotic materials or test subjects. It could hardly be a worse failure than the seductions, anyway.

Akua knew she should not be focusing on Foundling, not when she had so many more pressing matters to attend, but her thoughts seemed unwilling to abandon the Battle of Liesse. That some of her objectives would not be met, she had expected. It was inevitable. But a failure of such magnitude?

Foundling had ripped her way through one contingency after another, quipping even as a walking corpse. An entire host of devils, neutered then slain. The Lone Swordsman, lured into her path, beaten bloody and then tricked into ending his pattern of three. Her burning of the only way into the church had barely slowed her down, and there was Chider. Chider had been her trump card, her assured victory. Stealing the Name of Squire had been certain to work as long as she was owed a victory against Foundling, and had. And given her an aspect more dangerous than ever before, not to mention restored the fullness of the Name. She hadn’t known , that the demon had crippled the Name. Her spies in the Fifteenth had not reported as much on the walk to Liesse. There would be a reckoning for that failure yet. Chider had always been supposed to die permanently, either at Foundling’s hand or Lord Black’s, but for her to be disposed of faster than you take a bath?

No, that had not been part of the plan.

By dying, Foundling had inserted a flaw into Akua’s plan. The ripping of the Name should have incapacitated her for hours, would have if she’d not been a corpse, and so bought Heiress the time she needed to deal with the Lone Swordsman and imprison the angel. An ironclad victory had been wasted on a matter that had ultimately proved trifling, and there would be no second pattern of three. Creation did not embrace such tedious repetitions. The work of two years had been wasted: provoking Foundling and then fleeing on the Blessed Isle, the messy draw at Marchford... Akua had spent much time to guarantee herself a victory when she needed it most only to find that triumph utterly empty. It was enough to make her blood boil.

And there had been that final conversation, in that dinky little room where her companions had been turned into bargaining chips under her own nose. When Ghassan’s soul had been ripped from his body as Foundling sat quietly next to her, forcing her to watch. And this time there will be no bargaining to save you , Foundling had said. There had been something in Squire’s eyes, when she’d said that... Akua Sahelian had been raised among people who killed for sport and bound the very denizens of Hell to their will, but what she had seen there had made her flinch. She’d asked her mother, once, why her hatred for the Dread Empress ran so deep. Why it was so personal. I met her eyes, when I surrendered , Mother had said. And what I saw there scared me. Heiress understood, now, how that single moment could consume someone. She remembered the calm implacable certainty in the Callowan’s dark eyes and felt her hand tremble, if only for a moment.

She could not concentrate on Foundling. Squire was the brazier she’d lit so everyone would watch the flames and ignore the knife. Killing Foundling had never been her purpose. The results of that would have been disastrous: Akua would have become the slated successor of the Black Knight, the last thing she wanted. Dealing with Lord Black from anything but a position of power would be... dangerous, to say the least. Heiress’ game had always been with greater opponents, and the rivalry with Foundling had served as an apt smokescreen for it. There were only two people in Praes who could stop her: Dread Empress Malicia, First of her Name, and Tasia Sahelian. For all her failures she had, after all, gotten what she needed from the rebellion. The first prize was Liesse. Deep in the south of Callow, where the Empress’ reach was weaker and old sorcery was woven into the walls. There was power there, power that could turn the work of decades into the work of months.

The second prize, the most important, was a story. Heiress uses devils. Heiress uses demons. Binds them, commands them, makes them her own. She was just starting to be known in the Empire, and already her Name was fundamentally intertwined with diabolism in all the stories. That was the deeper plan, the masterpiece she had crafted over the years. The Name of Heiress after all, was in many ways inferior to that of Squire. It strengthened her body and her sorcery, but not as well as her ‘rival’s’ did. The applications of it were perhaps a better fit for her, allowing her to manipulate and deceive with a deftness beyond her years, but when it came to combat it was flatly outmatched. That much had been made clear in Liesse. Both were transitional Names meant to lead into something else, but Squires were bound to become Knights. A Heiress, though? A Heiress could become anything.

Heiress uses devils. Heiress uses demons. The worst of diabolists.

Already she was beginning to transition, and the moment she did she could finally put all the forces in motion. Begin crafting the key to the cage, the way out of the trap she had been bound by since her birth. A year, that was all she needed.

A year and she would change Creation.

—

The Wandering Bard, lately Almorava of Smyrna, sat on a stone by moonlight and idly strummed her lute.

It made a noise like a chorus of cats drowning. The sound was made all the more jarring by the fact that she had not, until that moment, existed then and there. Or since the Battle of Liesse, really. She’d watched from a distance as William killed the Squire and known what it meant. That the Lone Swordsman had lost, that Liesse was lost, that the rebellion was over. There had been no need to linger, and she’d not had the heart to watch William die. Whether or not he had deserved better was debatable but he had tried . Badly and often in ways that were misguided, but he had been trying to do good. It was a shame, that his story had never been going to end well. William of Greenbury would have been a very different man, in ten years. She knew this because she could feel the shape his story would have taken with her fingertips, if he had somehow managed to pass the hurdle that was Catherine Foundling and all the monsters behind her. It was not to be. Contrition used its heroes until they broke, and in breaking parted the clouds to allow the shine of the sun to triumph.

It was sordid, the Bard felt.

She would write a song for him, one day. One worth singing. But she would not do so tonight. The death was too fresh, rawer than she had thought it would be, and William had never been the sort to sing. He’d been a man of thought and silences. Of impatience and recklessness as well, but in some stories those same traits were called boldness and courage. It was always about what you made of it, and in the Lone Swordsman there had been surprisingly much to make of. Dropping the lute on the mossy green earth, the Bard fished out a bottle of her haversack and popped it open. She sniffed. It smelled like anise. Gods, it was a bottle of that foul fig distillate Ashurans were so fond of, wasn’t it? Of the many sins the Baalite Hegemony had to answer for, bringing this abomination over the Tyrian Sea was undoubtedly one of the worst. She had a drink anyway. It burned on the way down, warmed her and reminded her she was alive. That was always a comfort after she’d had a Wander.

She was currently sitting within a stone’s throw of the walls of Liesse, which told her exactly what was about to happen. How much time had passed she couldn’t be sure, but there was only one plot thread left dangling. They must have taken their time, she frowned, eyeing the now-pristine walls. Heiress must have been governess for at least a moon’s turn. Likely they would be arriving at exactly the right moment to hit the hardest, having followed the instructions there were given to the letter. To the number of heartbeats passed, even. The Bard drank from her disgusting trial of a bottle again. Her teeth were starting to taste like anise and an ever-expanding alcohol problem.

“You might as well come out, boys,” she called out. “You’re not fooling anyone.”

The elves did not appear, because appearing had the implication they had not been previously there. They had been, they’d just decided that Creation would not be able to see them. That was the way with the older elves: they decided what rules applied to them. They could not ignore more than one, but that was usually enough. Besides, she would not put anything past these two: they had been old before they’d ever set foot on Calernian soil. Few people would have called the two Emerald Swords beautiful, she decided. By the standards of humans their faces were too long and angular, their skin so perfect as to seem almost marble and those wide eyes filled with so much contempt it was nearly a physical thing. They were tall and slim and terrible to behold, like a coldly shining star. The one on the left was called Dawn and the other Dusk. They were both men, not that she could have figured it out from looking at them if she had not already known. The Bard let out an obnoxious whistle.

“Two Emerald Swords, huh?” she said. “The Forever King really wants her dead.”

They did not reply with words. Infinitesimal twitches, impossible for anyone but a Named to notice, served as an exchange between the elves. Obstacle , Dawn said. Unforeseen , Dusk added, deeply offended.

“He’s a bargain bin prophet, your man,” the Bard snorted. “He thinks a crown and a few dreams means he can read the weaves? Please .”

Sharp and ugly fury erupted in both of them without changing them in the slightest. Kill , Dusk said. Hero , Dawn reluctantly disagreed.

“Them’s the rules,” the Bard said. “Can’t touch a hair on my head so long as your King doesn’t give permission. And he would have needed to see me coming for that.”

She guzzled down more or that sin against the Heavens, allowing some of it to trickle down her chin. She wiped it off messily. Disgust twitched across their frames. It was almost too easy to toy with them, really.

“You’re going to use words to talk to me,” she said. “If you don’t, I’ll just have to start speaking elvish – or what’s that fancy name you folks give it again? The True Tongue?”

“Your language is carrion,” Dawn said in Lower Miezan, as she’d known he would. “I will need to rip out my tongue after soiling it so.”

However soiling the act of speaking a language not elvish, it would have been nothing to having a mere human speak their precious True Tongue. Even a hero.

“You’re such charmers, you lot,” the Bard drawled. “You know, I had high hopes for your kind when you first arrived.”

She gestured expansively.

“Armada of white ships lands under the Everdark, pretty little elves burn it immediately. You go into the woods and genocide your way through the Deoraithe until you own the land. I told myself ‘old girl, these ones mean business’.”

She grinned sharply.

“But then you stayed in your Golden Bloom, didn’t you? Closed the borders and ignored the rest of the continent. That was a disappointment, let me tell you. You had such potential .”

“The affairs of mortals are of no interest to the elves,” Dawn said.

There was no intonation or inflection to the words. They were just spoken, as if by a being made of stone. The Emerald Sword could be made to speak a human language but not bother with the frills of it.

“Not you elves, anyway,” the Bard said. “It’s why they kicked you out, isn’t it? The others. The ones that breed with humans, whose kingdom is larger than this entire continent. Lots of room there, but not enough to fit your opinions about lesser races.”

“The Kingdom of the Golden Bloom will remain forever unmarred,” Dawn said.

“Oh, sure. Pure, pretty as a painting, all that good stuff.”

The Bard paused, then smiled.

“Shame about that birth rate, though, no? How many kids you popped since coming here again?”

None , they all knew the answer was. That was what happened when you murdered the original owners of a forest and tried to claim it your own. It remembered, and no amount of singing to the trees was ever going to fix that.

“We know who you are, Keeper of Stories,” Dawn said. “She of a Thousand Faces. Speak your piece.”

“I hadn’t heard that one in a long time,” the Bard chuckled. “Keeper of Stories, eh? Just doesn’t sound the same in Lower Miezan. I go by the Wandering Bards, these days.”

They did not reply. They saw no further need to indulge her, she realized with amusement. She gulped down another chunk of her horrible, horrible liquor.

“The Forever Twit sent you to knock off the Heiress,” she said. “Not happening. Fuck off.”

The wooden sword had bit deep into the stone, less than hair’s breadth away from her femoral artery. She’d never even seen Dusk move, and as far as she could tell he was still standing where he’d always been. The only difference was the absence of the spellwood sword at his hip.

“Do not,” Dawn said, “mock Him again.”

“You lot developed a temper in your old age,” the Bard grinned. “It’s almost cute, the way you think violence is something that could scare me.”

She’d accented the word in Lower Miezan the same way it would have been in elvish. It was enough to horrify the both of them.

“You know what she intends,” Dawn said.

“Better than either of you, or the man who holds your leashes,” the Bard said. “But you know what really ruffles my feathers, Dawnie? That he thinks he has a right to meddle .”

Her voice had gone cold. They were both wary now.

“’cause the way I see it,” she continued, “you signed that away long ago. Around the time Triumphant was kicking around. Remember Triumphant? Lass about wee high-“

She waved her bottle around, spilling some on her sleeve.

“- scowled all the time, conquered the continent? Any of that ring a bell? Around the time she took Callow, she turned her eyes to the Golden Bloom. And what did you bunch of rabbit-eared sissies do then?”

She paused.

“Anyone? Seriously, it’s not like you two weren’t around.”

She sighed.

“You bailed out of Creation is what you did,” she said. “You took your pretty little kingdom and fled right into Arcadia. And boy, was she pissed when she realized it. Wiped out two cities in rage.”

The Bard drank again, loosely sprawled on the stone. She knocked down the lute by accident and did not bother to pick it up.

“And now you think you get to cut away the part of the story you don’t like,” she said. “Really, the nerve of some people.”

The Wandering Bard grinned nastily, the white cut of her teeth like a slice of sharp moonlight.

“ This is my game ,” she hissed. “Amateurs are not allowed.”

She leaned forward.

“Crawl back to your forest, Emerald Swords,” she said. “And tell your owner that if he ever tries anything like this again, he will rue the day.”

Neither of the elves moved.

“I will not,” the Bard said softly, “warn you again.”

And just like that they were gone. As if they had never been here at all. The sword was gone, the stone it had cut completely untouched. Almorava of Smyrna sighed, and looked at the stars. She finished her bottle, and she died.

The Wandering Bard opened her eyes in a crowded tavern room. People spoke all around her, not a single one of them looking in her direction. She sitting alone at a table in the back. She looked at her hands, surprised not to see any wrinkles. Young twice in a row? That was rare. She was definitely getting laid in this one, it just felt better when you were still young. Her skin was of a pale tan, the appearance of most hailing from the Free Cities. Who was she?

Aoede of Nicae.

It had a ring to it. And she got tits, this time! An improvement. Almorava had been a disappointment in that regard. Hair was a bit long and too curly for her tastes, but she’d made do with worse. Aoede’s leathers still smelled of anise and threats, but that was part of her charm really. She passed by the bar, snatching the bottle of liquor a dark-haired man had in front of him and then stealing a cup to pour herself a drink. The man in question was passed out, and she clucked her tongue disapprovingly. Not only was this a lightweight move, by the looks of the sun it couldn’t be past noon. The man behind the bartop shot her an amused look.

“That stuff will kill you, sister,” he said in tradertalk.

Aoede smiled.

“Son,” she said, “I’ve got more lives than a bag of cats.”

Keeping the bottle, if not the cup, she strode out into the sun. The White Knight was bound to be close, or she wouldn’t be there. Contrition, in the end, had not done the trick.

Maybe Judgement would.

Regard

“Refuge is not a city so much as it is a cluster of vagabonds, held together by awe of the Lady of the Lake. There are no laws here, save for her whims, and those she inflicts only rarely. The Kingdom Under seems to consider Refuge a protectorate, though they have no real presence on the premises, and I should not need to remind you of Lady Ranger’s infamous ties to the Calamities. The Consortium must tread lightly. This is the woman who once hunted the Wild Hunt for sport, and she has not grown meeker with the passing of years.”
– Varrus Ipsimos, agent for the Consortium

She’d had to steal a boat in Cleves, for no one had been willing to sell one to her when they’d guessed her destination.

They were not Lycaonese up there – Alamans, though a far cry from those of the central principalities – but living in the shadow of the Kingdom of the Dead had taught them hard lessons. People who tried to cross the Tomb, that deep dark lake festering with the animated corpses of monsters and men alike, never left its waters. Their hands joined the thousands of others reaching from the waters to drag fishermen under the deep. The crossing had not been uneventful: the Dead King now had eyes watching the path through the rocks she’d used the last time. It had made for an amusing distraction until she reached the shore on the other side of the river that fed into the Tomb. The path after that had been even more treacherous. The air had been poisoned in the Kingdom since the Seventh Crusade, thick lingering green tendrils of something toxic fouling the air, but that part Hye already knew how to deal with. She’d had cloth enchanted that covered the lower part of her face and allowed her to breathe safely, for even if the poison could not kill a Named it could have made her sick.

That would not have been ideal, in a land patrolled night and day by massive shambling armies. And they’d gotten better at finding intruders, too: the Dead King must have implemented her suggestions from the last visit. The bone wyverns had been unexpected enough she’d almost been caught the first time they appeared, and the closer she’d come to Keter the tighter the defences had been. Using the old roads of the kingdom that had existed before this entire land had been turned to undeath wasn’t even worth considering: they were all heavily guarded and in disrepair besides. No, she’d made her way through the broken countryside and kept to the shadows. It had taken her several months to make it to the old capital, the placed they now called the Crown of the Dead. The seat of the Dead King’s power, and where behind tall walls a permanent portal into one of the Hells stood.

Keter had once stood on a plain, but that was no longer true. Centuries on centuries of mining into the deep had made the city an island surrounded by sheer cliffs going so deep only the ever-burning fires at the bottom could be made out in the darkness. How deep that chasm ran, Hye had no idea. She’d heard the dwarves had mined around all of the Kingdom of the Dead, and immediately plugged any tunnel form there into their lands with molten steel. Whether that was true or not, it did not change the fact that there were four roads into Keter: broad ramps of stone stretched over emptiness, tread tirelessly by sentinels long dead. The walls of the city rose so high only one part of Keter could be seen from outside: a great spire of dark stone, jutting out into the sky like an arrow. An orb of hellfire always hovered above its tip, ever-shifting as the demon bound inside cast its searching gaze on the streets inside. This was the fortress that had broken the spine of five crusades. Impossible to breach, they said, by force or by stealth. Not even the most skilled of heroes could do it.

It would be Ranger’s fourth visit.

Now, the Dead King had started nailing undead under the bridges so they could raise alarm after she’d climbed across under it the first time. He’d had dead sorcerers permanently assigned to stirring up sharp winds in the void between Keter and the rest of the plain after she’d rappelled her way across, the second time. He’d hardened the metaphysical borders with Arcadia after she’d slipped through there the third, and she supposed that after this one he would make sure his bone wyverns collapsed when they were captured. The giant bone creature, flapping through the air more by the grace of magic than by its leathery wings, crashed into the walls of Keter with a resounding clap. She leapt off its back and landed on the stone, finding purchase for her hands and immediately beginning to climb. Hye had been noticed, of course, and she still had the better part of a hundred feet before her before reaching the top of the ramparts. The bloody wind sorcerers had crashed her ‘borrowed’ mount before she could get any closer. The gaze of the demon in the orb landed on her and it began screaming , the noise shaking the air.

“Hello, Artie,” she waved.

It kept screaming. The first arrow streaked past her as she was already moving, scuttling up and to the side to present a harder target. There were, in Keter, four kinds of undead. The Bones, as she called them, were the ones currently manning the ramparts as the demon alarm sounded and trying to put arrows in her. They were not particularly clever on their own, no more intelligent than dogs, but the Dead King could seize control of them at any moment. The second kind, the Binds, would actually be dangerous. Those had souls bound in their bodies, and were just as sentient as the living. The third kind, the Revenants, she would not encounter until she was deeper into the city. They were, as a matter of fact, the reason she had come in the first place. As to the fourth, there was no need to name the category. There was only one entity in it, the Dead King himself. Wedging her feet into outcroppings – they really needed to saw those off, it made climbing easier than it had to be – Hye wrenched out her bow and notched an arrow. Knock, draw, release.

The Bind who’d been directing the Bones shooting at her took it right in the skull, the impact of the arrow shattering the bone under the helmet it punched through and releasing the soul inside. That should buy her just long enough to make it to the top, she thought as she slung the longbow over her back.

It did, as it turned out, though by then masses of dead warriors were snaking their way up the stairs leading into the city. Blades in hand, Ranger idly scattered the closest Bone as she considered her options. The Dead King was trying to clog up the way until his heavy hitters could arrive, she decided, or he had this entire part of the walls blasted with sorcery. She’d need to move fast. Sheathing one of her shortswords, Hye caught the wrist of another Bone and wrenched out the arm. This one was wearing old Proceran armour long gone out of style, bust most importantly he’d had a shield as well as the longsword now clattering on the ground. A big tower shield, the same kind the Praesi used in their Legions of Terror. Bronze and iron instead of steel, she noted. That must have been a truly ancient warrior. Idly sheathing her other sword as she danced out of the reach of another Bone, Ranger took the shield and broke into a run. Those stairs had cover on both sides, thick stone borders with a smooth top.

With a shout of glee she leapt down and put the tower shield under her, using it as a slide. The sheer angle of the borders was enough for her to keep gaining momentum, going fast enough that the Bones headed for her were too slow to react to strike at her. There were a few Binds in the line but those she slapped away with her blades, crouched and grinning.

She was about halfway down when she realized that, for once, the Dead King had anticipated her. There were spikes of iron in the stone from halfway up, jutting out at the right angle to catch her. Before the first impact she leapt off the shield and continued into a run, letting her Name strengthen her limbs so she could keep the pace. That round went to the Corpse Lord, then. Having to tap into her Name this early meant she’d have less fuel when things got interesting. She leapt again, ducking under an arrow and landing in a roll.

Hitting the paved streets of Keter, Crown of the Dead, Hye Su eyed the gathering hordes around her. Run? Run.

–

The problem with undead soldiers, Ranger decided, was that they never got tired. She’d been awake for three days and night herself, and if not for her mother’s blood running through her veins she would likely be dead in an alley. She’d inherited different things from her parents: in body she was her mother’s daughter, but in mind her father’s. Dada had never been one to let common sense get in the way of an adventure, to her mother’s mild despair. Being a half-elf had few drawbacks, save for the Emerald Swords occasionally trying to purge you from existence, but then Mother had taught her a few tricks to deal with their lot. She had, after all, taught most of them. Not that elf-killing tactics would help her much here, Hye thought. Putting down a handful of extremely powerful individuals was a different kind of fighting than scything your way through a horde of weaker ones.

Ducking into the shadows at the patrol of Binds passed her, Ranger waited until she could no longer her their steps before moving again. This deep into the Hall of the Dead there were no Bones. Calling where she was the basement of the keep would have been inaccurate, for beneath her went so deep inside the earth the furthest levels were flooded with molten stone. She was around the middle, really, and almost where she needed to be. Putting a spring to her step, the Ranger ghosted through the corridors until she reached the wide-open gates of the nameless room where the portal to Hell stood. The hall was broad and long, had once been a throne room, but now it was bare save for the sculpted obsidian arch surrounding the wound in Creation.

That, and the two silhouettes standing by it.

One was a man, pale and clad in silver-lined armour. His face could not be seen under the helmet and the long white cloak did not manage to hide the heater shield and longsword he kept. The other was a woman, tall and massively built. She had no weapons but for the stripes of leather around her knuckles. No armour but a threadbare tunic, and she hadn’t even bothered to wear boots. Promising. Both Revenants stirred when she strode into the room, walking forward at a pace.

“So one of you is one of those fancy monk-types from Levant,” she said. “And the other some kind of knight? Help me out here.”

The man unsheathed his sword.

“I was the White Knight, once,” he said gravely.

“ Now we’re talking,” Ranger murmured.

“I was,” the woman said, “the Sage of the West.”

Unsheathing a single sword, Hye offered them a swordsman’s salute.

“I am the Ranger,” she said. “I hunt those worth hunting. Rejoice, for you qualify.”

Nothing more needed to be said. The fell on her without hesitation, the Knight’s sword coming for her neck and the Sage sweeping her feet. Hye tested a parry against the sword and found the dead hero’s strength not overwhelming – she would not need to dodge every time. The sweep she avoided deftly by leaping, leg wrenching out to land a kick on the Sage’s chin – or would have, had the hero not caught the blow and casually tossed her away. Ranger landed on her feet a dozen feet away, then slowly unsheathed her second sword. This, she reflected, might actually be challenging. She knew from experience that this far in the Dead King would not longer bother trying to drown her in lesser undead, so she could take the time to enjoy herself with these two.

The Ranger stepped forward and let her blades sing.

–

The Sage was the first to go. She could even now turn her skin harder than steel, the ghost of an aspect to a Name she no longer held, but steel was something she’d learned to cut long ago. A hand lost, then a leg, and from there on no amount of fancy magic hand-to-hand tricks was going to save her. The Knight, though? The former White Knight was the hardest fight she’d had in a long time. A century, at least.

“You have no aspects to tap in,” the Revenant eventually said, batting away a probing blow and attempting to bash her face in with his shield. “Unusual.”

Hye laughed.

“You have it the wrong way, Knight,” she said. “I’m always tapping into my aspects.”

She flicked her sword around his and wrenched upwards, forcing the blade out of his gauntleted hand in the exact same way he’d done to her early in the fight.

“Learn,” she said.

The White Knight effortlessly snatched his blade out of the air and struck, but she’d moved ahead of him. The blade passed through the air, and when he brought it back towards his body her own followed. Like flowing water filling a cup. Her own strike bit deep into his armour, shattering the steel and the the skin and bones underneath.

“Perfect,” she said.

The former hero was beyond pain and wounds meant nothing to him, save for the fact that the broken bone of his shoulder made it harder to swing his sword. He retreated cautiously, shield raised, as he sought a better angle of attack. Hye idly sheathed one of her swords and hummed as she came for him. The moment crystallized for her, the Knight carefully placing his sword stroke and the shield rising as he prepared to charge her. It was timed perfectly. She would be caught by one or the other, because she’d come forward too quickly with an improper guard. A swordsman of the dead hero’s calibre would need only one opening like that to kill her. It would not touch her. She spun around the shield, and if the Knight had still been human enough for such a thing his eyes would have widened. It wasn’t that Hye had become faster, because she hadn’t. Tricks like that could be adjusted to, countered. Just sinking the power of your Name into your limbs was a brute force application. What she did was... different. She simply was not where the enemy’s weapon was. Her single short sword swept like quicksilver, taking the Knight’s head. In a blur of movement, she relieved him of one limb after another and then broke the spine itself. Slowly, the necromancy began seeping out of the dead hero onto the floor.

“Transcend,” she finished calmly.

She was out of breath. Ahead of her, the portal flickered. That was as much of an invitation as she was going to get. Sheathing her blade, Ranger idly passed into Hell. The other side led into a banquet room, for the Dead King owned the gate and the places it led to. A long table with stone benches, covered with plates of still-warm food and quite a few carafes of wine, was headed by a wooden throne. On it sat a dark-haired child, too pale to be alive and too gaunt to even try pretend it was.

“Really?” she said, headed for a roasted chicken. “The creepy child route is what we’re doing? You have to know that’s a horrible cliché.”

She was starving, so she broke off a drumstick and bit into it with relish.

“Stop killing my heroes,” the Dead King said. “I only have so many to spare.”

“I’ll think about it,” Ranger lied.

The ancient abomination sighed.

“The wyvern trick won’t work twice,” he said.

“You should also take care of those footholds on the wall,” she spoke through a full mouth, grabbing a plate and stuffing it with couscous. “The spikes were a nice touch, though.”

The monster kept a surprisingly good table, for a creature that no longer needed to eat. Kingly habit, probably.

“Why do you darken my hall, Ranger?” the Dead King asked.

“Darken your...” she snorted. “That’s rich, it really is. Can’t a girl visit an old friend?”

“We are not friends,” the lich denied.

“That’s a carafe of my favourite wine,” Hye said, pointing towards the receptacle in question.

“Coincidence,” the Dead King said.

Ranger sat on the bench, spitting out a chicken bone before she could choke on it.

“Mama went back across the sea,” she said. “Finally talked a Baalite captain into taking her there to lay my father’s bones to rest.”

“You should also go there,” the monster said. “Far away. Give serious thought to never coming back.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” Ranger said. “I need a hobby.”

“You could leap off a cliff,” the Dead King suggested.

Hye poured herself a cup of wine to wash down the couscous.

“It’s just been so boring , lately,” she said. “The most excitement there’s been is Praes trying to invade Callow again and getting hilariously brutalized on the Fields of Streges.”

“The Tower has not been in worthy hands for centuries,” the Dead King said contemptuously.

“We’re not talking about your weird boner for Triumphant again,” Ranger said. “I really don’t want to know the logistics of how that would have worked.”

She paused. Boner. That was was funny because he was undead so- never mind. She had a little wine.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’m thinking about a hunting trip in Arcadia. The Wild Hunt was very uppity when I met them.”

“If I could lock you in there, I would,” the Dead King said wistfully.

“You don’t mean that,” Ranger dismissed. “Wait – are you trying to distract me while massing devils outside this room?”

There was a long pause.

“No,” the Dead King lied.

“Good talk,” Ranger said, rising to her feet hastily. “I’ll see you in a few years.”

“Please don’t,” the lich said.

Hye made for the door, then paused and backtracked. She stole another chicken leg and a carafe of wine before legging it.

–

The tavern was nearly empty at this time of the night – people in the Green Stretch were farmers, went to bed early and rose with dawn. She would have noticed the three who entered regardless: they had the feel of Names to them, that knotting in the threads of Fate. They headed straight for her table and Hye sipped at her wine thoughtfully. They made for a strange bunch. Two men: one a tall and almost ridiculously handsome Soninke, the other a pale Duni type with vivid green eyes. Amusingly shorter than his companion. The Taghreb woman dwarfed them both, at least eight feet tall and built like a living battering ram. The Duni must have been the leader, because he was the one to talk. He gestured at the empty chairs around the table.

“May we?”

“You are the size of at least two people,” Ranger said, pointing at the Taghreb.

“Is that why I keep eating them?” she deadpanned.

Hye grinned. Well, at least they had a sense of humour. That was surprisingly rare in in villains.

“By all means,” she said, gesturing at the chairs. “What can I do for you?”

“You would be the Ranger, yes?” the Soninke asked in a voice betraying his education.

No weapons on him. Mage, most likely. Praesi did love their sorcery.

“That’s me,” she said.

The Duni sat across from her and smiled. He was handsome, if not as much as his friend. Not really her type, but she could appreciate eye candy when it was offered.

“I hear,” he said, “that you can get people into Callow.”

Ranger hummed. Well, that should kill a few months at least.

Reign

“Authority is the lie we all agree on for fear of chaos.”
-Dread Empress Maleficent II

There would be three attempts on her life.

Alaya understood this instinctively, even as she rode through the gates of Wolof. The High Lady Tasia Sahelian had offered her surrender before the Siege of Aksum began, anticipating a defeat there even with the Warlock taking the field to support the Chancellor’s claim. She had been correct in this: Wekesa had buried his old teacher under the weight of his scorn and walked out of the burning wasteland the undisputed bearer of that Name. Terms had been agreed on before the walls of Aksum were ever breached, negotiated through intermediaries in person as they gave instructions to their representatives through scrying links. Neither of the women had trusted the other not to make an assassination attempt through a direct scrying link given the skill of the mages they had at their disposal.

Alaya had extracted concessions and not minor ones. Enough coin to pay for the campaign Amadeus had waged in her name and more, surrender of artefacts and ancient magical texts – and most importantly, the giving of an oath of fealty at the Tower. In person. The public act of submission had lent Alaya the legitimacy she had desperately needed, allowed her to bring minor nobility in line without needing to use swords or gold for it. In exchange Tasia had been confirmed as High Lady of Wolof, her lands and privilege left untouched even if she had been one of the most vocal supporters of the would-be Dread Emperor Baleful. Already she’d had some very pointed conversations with Maddie on the subject. He was of the opinion that Tasia’s head should be on a pike above the gates of Ater, and had not been shy of informing the High Lady of that same opinion. To her face. In front of the entire court.

Her friend – perhaps her only friend, for Wekesa would always love Amadeus more than her – had a brilliant mind, she’d known that since the beginning. Since they had met at her father’s inn. There’d been desire in his eyes when he’d first looked at her, but unlike most men he had listened when she spoke. He had argued and engaged and when he disagreed with her he always presented a cogent and coherent point of view. He did not realize, she thought, how rare a thing that was. The boy he’d been and the man he’d become both had minds sharp as a razor, but they had been shaped by the way they’d ascended to power. By strife against the Heir, the treachery of the Chancellor and the same rebellion that had seen her become Dread Empress Malicia, First of her Name.

Amadeus wanted to hang every noble in the Wasteland and the Devouring Sands, strip their bloodlines all of lands and turn the entire Empire into freeholds answerable only to the Tower. There was an almost seductive simplicity to that thought, of doing away with the vicious aristocrats and the knives they meant for her, but like all simple solutions to complex realities it would do more harm than good. For one it would resume the civil war after having stripped them of their only noble allies, and therefore the coin said allies had provided to keep their armies fed and equipped. And then, of course the cities of the High Lords would have to be taken. Wolof, Okoro, Thalassina, Kahtan. Aksum they still held, and Foramen was under the occupation of the Tribes – another knot she would have to untie, and soon. Those four cities were some of the oldest in Praes, and most of them had been accumulating wards and artefacts since Triumphant’s fall. There would be no surrender if Alaya’s armies came to end the aristocracy, even if she was winning. Especially if she was winning.

Only desperate deals with Below and the menagerie of horrors they unleashed.

It was, she believed, possible to siege and take those strongholds with the armies they had. But the cost of it in lives and resources would ruin Praes for a generation, at the very least. Leave the Empire weak to the incursions of the Order of the White Hand always watching from the Blessed Isle, leave it ripe for another goblin rebellion or the same secession of the Clans that had very nearly happened under the Chancellor’s rule. Alaya would not oversee the collapse of Praes as an empire, not to obtain results she could seek through other means. The disconnect, here, was one of perspective. Amadeus as a Named had fought authority every step of the way, while Alaya had worked within it until she could assert control over the establishment. The Black Knight’s responses to problem were either assimilation or destruction, while the Dread Empress – especially one without a Chancellor – had to take more indirect paths.

Amadeus did not want to have authority in Praes, he wanted fresh clay he could shape as he wished. And he thought that to make that happen, the aristocracy had to be buried. It would not work. Two millennia of history, of entrenched cultural mores, could not be washed away with blood. If they killed all the High Lords, lesser lords would seek to take their places. If they killed them too, richer landholders would seek to become nobility. Ambition to rise was the beating heart of Praesi identity, it was who they were . Much as she hated the thought, it was not something Amadeus could understand: he was Duni, had always been an outsider. Would always be. It was hard to embrace a culture that barely considered you to be a person, that castigated you for sins committed by the long-dead Miezans or destroyed crusaders occupants. Alaya sympathized, but Dread Empress Malicia could not afford such sentimentality.

And so here she was, riding into the stronghold of High Lady Tasia with little escort save for her Sentinels – the same faceless soldiers who had once nailed her father to the floor and dragged her to the Tower – and her spymistress. Ime, once servant to the Heir and now one of her most trusted. Old blood, the kind of lineage that would be accepted as a sitting member of the Imperial council without protest. These things mattered, now that she was no longer the leader of a rebellion. Actions had broader and subtler consequences than they had in those simpler days.

“There’s no archer in range,” Ime said, bringing her horse closer as they began trotting down the avenue. “Or mage.”

“She would never be that crass, darling,” Alaya chided her spymistress. “Besides, she knows full well that if one of her retainers takes my life Black will torch the city and salt the ashes.”

“She’ll try something , Malicia,” the spymistress said. “If she doesn’t she loses too much face with the other High Lords.”

“She already has,” the Empress said mildly.

She never would have seen the blow coming, had she not expected it.

“ Halt ,” she Spoke.

The two Sentinels froze, one halfway to sinking his knife in her back and the other still clearing his sword from the scabbard. Interesting, that Tasia had found a way to overcome the conditioning and indoctrination all members of the personal guard of Tyrants went through. Wekesa had suggested it would be possible in one of their talks, though likely not without breaking the minds of the individuals involved. But Warlock, however talented, did not have access to a spell repository predating the Miezan occupation. No protection was flawless. Ime’s knife was already in her hand – the other one hidden away to silently cast – but such an intervention would not prove necessary.

“ Kill yourselves ,” the Dread Empress added calmly.

Without hesitation, the two Sentinels rammed their blades into their own throats.

“We could have interrogated them,” Ime said as they watched the assassins twitch in their death throes.

“And found nothing useful,” Alaya said. “Tasia will have ripped anything relevant out of their minds already – and likely framed one of my allies. You know this, Ime. Compose yourself.”

The dark-skinned woman breathed out once, then became the picture of serenity.

“My apologies for the lack of poise,” the spymistress said, inclining her head.

The Empress patted her hand affectionately. They had shared a bed several times, and she would have to see to it Ime did not become overly attached. It would be too glaring of a weakness in a woman of her position. Fondness and friendship were all well and good, but Alaya had no intention of ever having a consort.

“Already forgotten,” the Empress said, guiding her mare to resume movement down the avenue.

She closed her eyes and smiled. One, Tasia. Do not make me wait overlong for the others, it would be most inelegant.

—

The solar where the High Lady Tasia received her guests was one of the oldest structures in the Empire. Once the throne room of the petty kings the Sahelians had murdered to rule over Wolof, over the centuries it had become a private reception hall for the rulers of the city. It was, of course, larger than her father’s entire inn had been. The light-coloured wood panelling – hickory, Alaya believed it was called – that covered the walls was from a tree that did not grow within the borders of Praes. It was found almost exclusively in the southern stretches of the Kingdom of Callow, a subtle statement of Sahelian power and influence. The encrusted precious stones and gildings that tastefully adorned everything of importance in the hall were to be expected for a family as old and wealthy as this one, but the way arched ceiling had been enchanted was unique even among Praesi. It was a perfect reproduction of the sky above Ater, the illusion spells crafted to beautifully Alaya could almost have believed she was looking at the true sky.

“It is a wonder, truly,” the Empress said, sparing it an admiring glance.

Tasia smiled, in a way perfectly pitched to carry friendliness without dipping into condescension. The craftsmanship there was as skilful as that of the ceiling. The High Lady of Wolof was beautiful, she thought. Soninke cheekbones, perfect eyebrows and full lips. Her eyes were fully golden instead of the lesser tinge of younger bloodlines, and her long hair was immaculately braided. Alaya’s own beauty would leave this one indifferent: a meditation trick the Sahelians had stolen from the Watch would ensure that much. It was recorded in the Tower that the ruling line of Wolof possessed it, though the exact method was unknown.

“The city has many ancient treasures, Your Most Dreadful Majesty,” the woman said. “They are, of course, at your full disposal.”

“A comforting thought,” Alaya said earnestly.

“It is a regret that will long haunt me, that I stood with the Chancellor,” Tasia said. “I did not understand what I was facing, Your Majesty. I do not think any of us did, until the end.”

“Strife is the face of Praes,” the Empress quoted.

One of Sheherazad the Seer’s more famous verses.

“This is true,” the High Lady acknowledged. “Yet women in our positions must choose our battles carefully. I made a decision in haste, though you have been kind in your chastisement of it.”

Oh, how talented you are at this, Alaya thought admiringly. Since the moment she’d received her, Tasia had been presenting herself as regretful for her actions. Yet also experienced, well-connected and apt at navigating the political currents of the court. Even now, that subtle reminder that they were both women while also vaguely equating their respective levels of authority? Beautifully done. Then she reinforced that she had been made contrite, that Alaya had power over her. Gods, the things I could achieve with a woman like you in my service. Not even a bell into this visit and Tasia had made herself the obvious candidate as Chancellor in all of Praes. A shame, that the High Lady very much wanted her dead.

“Some of my advisors find me too merciful,” she said lightly. “I must admit that after my years in the Tower, I find the prospect of such relentless violence distasteful. There are more civilized ways of doing things, don’t you agree?”

“Your wisdom in this shines brightly,” Tasia said.

For a heartbeat, Alaya saw, her meditation trick had almost broken. You are right to be afraid, my dear, the Empress thought. My predecessors had Named, but I have the Calamities. None of you understand the depth of that meaning yet. Sipping at the exquisite tea brew her host had provided, the Empress decided that she had reached the correct point in the conversation to pull the leash. Earlier would have been uncouth, but later than this would be diffident.

“They will not be joining us, I’m afraid,” she said.

Tasia’s face showed surprise, a flawless act threaded with a bit of truth.

“Your Majesty?”

“The assassins,” Alaya elaborated, setting down her cup with a nearly inaudible clink.

“You believe an attempt on your life will be made?” the High Lady said, the picture of outraged bewilderment. “I beg of you, my Empress, give me the names of those you suspect. They will be put to the question immediately.”

“Oh, they’re quite dead,” the woman who had once been a waitress and now ruled an empire said. “Some people have assassins, you see, but I have the Assassin. I must say I am surprised they could penetrate your city’s defences, especially since I believe we were both targets in this clumsy escapade.”

The corpses would never be found. Let Tasia wonder about how that was possible, it should occupy her for a few sleepless nights. These three killers had been meant to kill her and severely wound Tasia. Amadeus would be fed the lie that both of them could have been saved but that the healers had, selfishly, decided to prioritize the life of their patron above that of her own. They thought that would be enough to direct his wrath at the mages instead of Wolof – though afterwards, a trail would be laid to direct him at the High Lady of Nok. That they actually thought Maddie would be taken in by that was highly amusing to her. The commonly-held belief that all Duni were idiot labourers good only for farming was continuing to talk aristocrats into stabbing themselves in the foot even after all these years.

“I am distressed you were truly unaware, High Lady Tasia,” she continued earnestly. “So many at court speak well of your mastery over Wolof that I was taken in by their enthusiasm.”

The other Soninke was too old a hand at this game to let the flare of rage she must have felt at that show in any way. Already she must be realizing that the story would be spread across the nobility of the Empire within days. They would guess the attempt had Tasia’s hand behind and that it had not only been thwarted but turned into a source of humiliation – leading to the implication that the High Lady could not even keep control of her own fief . That makes two, darling. Now give me the third.

“Your Majesty,” the dark-skinned woman said, rising from her seat only to kneel at the Empress’ feet. “With your leave, I will not rest until I have learned who seeks to take our lives. Justice must be meted out, harshly.”

And there it is , Alaya thought. The third knife, the subtle one. You expect to rise my Chancellor, to wait patiently until the time is ripe and take my throne and my servants for your own.

“Oh, Tasia,” she said softly. “You really don’t understand who you’re dealing with, do you?”

She chuckled.

“You will not be my Chancellor.”

The calm, finally, shattered.

“My Empress?” she said, face blank.

“It won’t be High Lady Jaheera, as you are so deathly afraid of,” Malicia added. “There won’t be a Chancellor at all.”

“Your Majesty,” she said slowly, “claimants have already begun to emerge.”

“They will die,” Malicia said, as if she was discussing the weather. “And keep dying, until the lesson has been learned.”

There was a flicker of fear in those golden eyes, gone almost too quickly for her to see it. Blasphemy had a way of doing that, in the old bloodlines. To censure a Name entirely was without precedent, as far as the Empress knew.

“Do you know why I chose Malicia as my reigning name?” she asked. “Maleficent the Third was bandied around by many, before the coronation. A dear friend of mine even suggested Trustworthy, so that my enemies would not be able to plot without feeling like fools.”

Tasia remained silent, for this single moment entirely lost.

“I chose Malicia,” the Dread Empress of Praes said, “because it is without precedent. Not a legacy.”

She smiled pleasantly.

“I will not raise flying fortresses, you see. I will not craft plagues or turn armies invisible. We’ve tried that, Tasia, and it failed . The Age of Wonders is over. It died quietly, with a whimper, and the rest of Calernia moved on. It is time we did as well.”

She sipped at her tea again.

“Now do sit down, darling. You must tell me where you obtained this brew, it is exquisite.”

Prologue

“The most dangerous opponent for a master is a novice. Therefore, seek to be a novice in all things.”
– Isabella the Mad, only general to ever defeat Theodosius the Unconquered on the field

Anaxares, to his surprise, was still alive.

Perhaps his utter irrelevance in the grand scheme of things had seen him spared, he pondered, but such a thought was too optimistic. More likely the kanenas had all assumed another one of them was going to trigger the stone in his stomach and one would get around to it whenever they remembered. His impending death was such a certainty he no longer spared any time troubling himself over it – what point was there in cursing the river when you were already drowning? At the very least his last days would be interesting, in a truly horrifying manner. The Tyrant of Helike had seemingly adopted him as a pet of sorts, naming him an official advisor to the crown and now dragged him along wherever he went. The villain was amused by his calm. Calling the contraption the two of them were currently on a litter would have been a misnomer: the boy had essentially built a massive dais, slapped a throne on it and now had it carried around by porters everywhere.

A pavilion could be added to cover the surface when weather demanded as much and tables were positioned to allow for the taking of a meal should the Tyrant demand it. The wretched labour involved offended his sensibilities. Foreign Slavers Will Be Known By Their Wicked Works , he added out of habit. May They All Choke On Ashes And Also Snakes. The villain had tried to have a smaller, noticeably cheaper throne put next to his for Anaxares to sit on but the Bellerophan had flatly refused. He’d claimed a wooden stool for the people and discreetly carved the sigil of Bellerophon – three peasants waving pitchforks – on the side. The small act of rebellion had been deeply satisfying, if utterly meaningless. Not, he decided, an inept description of his own existence.

“ Finally ,” the Tyrant said, “we’re getting decent weather.”

Anaxares looked up at the massive storm clouds gathering and cocked an eyebrow. The lands between Helike and Atalante were known for the occasional bouts of week-long rain and storms, blown south from the Waning Woods and the madness that passed for nature over there. The Fae toyed with the winds and the sky the way men did with their clothes, and the farms beneath them paid the price.

“It will be harder for your army to retreat in the mud,” Anaxares said.

He knew next to nothing about strategy – in Bellerophon the only people allowed to read books on the subject were the citizens who drew army positions, and even they had the knowledge erased from their minds past their term of service lest they Use It In Horrid Rebellion Against The People – but so far the Tyrant’s campaign against Atalante had not impressed him. For one, there’d been no battles. The famous Helikean army had marched east towards Atalante, whose farmers had already emptied their fields, without contest from the enemy. The Atalantians had remained behind their walls as the emptied their treasury buying up all the mercenaries in Mercantis they could afford, only taking the field after they outnumbered the Helikeans two to one. Twenty thousand men had then dutifully marched towards the Tyrant, who had immediately taken his army back through the farmlands he’d just gleefully set fire to.

“Oh, we’re done retreating,” the Tyrant said cheerfully. “I’m bored with it now. Got what I need anyway.”

Anaxares pulled at his third wineskin of the morning, trying to wash down the taste of impending doom. The Tyrant disapproved vocally of his drinking habits, but the man’s servants kept bringing him skins anyway.

“As my advisor,” the boy said, his bad hand visibly shaking, “what would you advise me to do now?”

Just being called that qualified Anaxares for thirty-three different counts of treason by Bellerophan law. Fifty-something, even, if you counted all the articles about foreign collusion separately. His remains would be on trial for years after the initial execution.

“Return to Helike, slit your own throat and let your replacement beg the mercy of the League,” he replied without missing a beat.

“You’re a terrible advisor,” the Tyrant complained. “I should have you hanged.”

Anaxares shrugged.

“If that is your wish.”

Less painful of a way to go than internal organ crushing, he assessed.

“You haven’t gotten tedious yet,” the boy mused. “I guess you can live.”

“I am, of course, relieved and grateful,” the Bellerophan deadpanned.

“You should be,” the Tyrant said cheerfully. “I’m so merciful, it’s why my people love me so much.”

As far as Anaxares could tell, the reason Helikeans ‘loved’ the Tyrant was that they had been told they did by men with swords and grim faces. The army, though, did seem genuinely loyal. Not surprising: whenever a Tyrant took the throne, they started invading everything in sight. The last one to hold the Name had broken the desperate alliance of Stygia, Atalante and Delos before the southern Proceran princes had intervened and put her down. Glorious war had been waged, victories tallied, and within a decade all the borders had returned to what they’d been before the woman had claimed the crown. Named or not, one could not change the face of the Free Cities.

“Admittedly there is no other claimant to the throne, since your nephew’s death,” the diplomat said instead of rehashing the histories.

“Pretty idiot got himself shot by an orc, of all things,” the Tyrant said delightedly, the red in his eye deepening for a heartbeat. “He always talked too much, it’s how he lost the throne in the first place.”

The Bellerophan’s eyes sharpened with interest as he swallowed another mouthful of wine. The Tyrant’s seizing of the throne of Helike had been one of the most unexpected diplomatic development of the last decade, in the Free Cities, but precious little was known about. A boy that had been by all reports a nonentity before the coup had in a single day taken control of the city and the army, killed the king in his own bed and purged his nephew’s supporters brutally. The nephew in question had fled the city with most of the young nobility and his surviving loyalists, becoming the Exiled Prince in the process.

“Talked too much,” Anaxares repeated, leaving the tone questioning.

“See, Dorian’s father was a lot like mine,” the Tyrant said. “Drank too much, dallied with servants, let the nobility and the army run things. Everybody liked that state of affairs. Dorian, though? He was just so pretty and so good .”

The bitter hatred in those words almost fouled the air.

“Now, the old guard didn’t care much for him. But their heirs? The swarmed him like flies a corpse. Hung on to his every word, his promises of reform and a better Helike.”

The Tyrant seemed almost amused at the prospect of the betterment of his city-state, as if such a thing was unimaginable.

“They figured out eventually that when Dorian took the throne, he was going to be an actual ruler ,” he snickered. “Their own children would back him in this. Now that angered them quite a bit, Anaxares. If you steal power and keep it for long enough, eventually you start to think you have a right to it.”

He waved his good hand expansively.

“So they looked at the only other child of royal blood,” he said. “Approached me. And I said: why not ?”

“They thought they could rule through you,” the diplomat said. “A mistake of some scale.”

“Most of the I fed to dogs,” the Tyrant smiled, that flash of sharp pearly teeth. “The others fell in line.”

“You were twelve years old,” Anaxares said, feeling old. “And already Named.”

“I wasn’t the Tyrant then,” the boy said. “Just Kairos. Can you keep a secret, advisor?”

“No,” the diplomat replied immediately. “I will report everything you say to the kanenas at the first opportunity, before my summary execution.”

The villain grinned.

“Treachery is pleasing to the Gods Below,” he said. “There’s a crypt in Helike, under the palace, where the first foundations of the city were laid. There’s a creature there, lying under a tomb of stone sculpted to look like someone holding a sword. There is a crack in the side just large enough that you can hear the thing inside whisper, if you press your ear to it.”

Anaxares would have shivered, if years of walking with death in his belly had not effectively burned fear out of him. The words were casually spoken but the description felt more vivid than it should have. He could smell the dusty air, feel the unsettling whisper of an abomination against his ear.

“I don’t know what it is. My father said it’s the first king of Helike, still straddling the line between life and death,” the Tyrant said. “The king, though, once said it is the god who once owned the ground the city was built on – tricked into the tomb and forever bound to give us advice.”

“Advice?” the diplomat repeated.

“Prophecies,” the boy said. “All of royal blood can ask one question if it, in our lifetime.”

“And it told you you would rule?” Anaxares guessed.

The Tyrant laughed.

“It told me,” he said, “that I would die when I turned thirteen. That there was nothing I could do to change this.”

The boy smiled.

“It was,” he said, “a great gift.”

Looking down at his shaking hand, the Tyrant seemed lost in memory for a moment before he gathered himself.

“We spend so much of our lives, Anaxares, shackling ourselves. Avoiding doing this and that because others would frown upon it. Because it is wrong and wicked and unworthy. Once I knew there was only death ahead of me, I started doing what I wanted. I ceased censuring what I was to please others.”

“The drow believed the same as you, when they embraced the Tenets of Night,” the Bellerophan said. “And look at them now, Tyrant – packs of savages inhabiting the ruins of an empire. Censure Is Just, Law Is Necessary.”

Glory To Peerless Bellerophon, Whose Laws Are That Of The People , he added silently.

“Your city is the mutilated remains of a people,” the boy said. “That you wielded the knife yourself is the only thing setting you apart from the rest of Creation.”

“We have no rulers, in Bellerophon,” Anaxares said.

This time there was no need for him to speak the words taught to all of them as children, the capitalized praises learned before one could walk. This, he believed for himself. Because the Republic was flawed, deeply flawed, and he could admit this to himself even if he deserved death for it. But what it stood for was... greater than the sum of its faults.

“No crowns. No nobles. No Names. This is not an accident, Helikean, it is a statement . We are all of us free or we are none of us free. There is no middle ground.”

“You’ve lived a heartbeat away from death all your life,” the Tyrant said, “and still you don’t quite get it, do you? You Bellerophans just traded one tyrant for fifty thousand. You don’t get to decide who you are. Others do that for you.”

The boy rose to his feet, stretching out gingerly. He looked almost fragile, thin and sickly under his red silken robes.

“When those nobles and generals came to whisper treason in my ear,” he said, “I did not hesitate. Because I felt like usurping a throne, because I hated Dorian. I was curious to see if it could be done. I was going to die soon, anyway, and what did I care what followed that?”

Anaxares was not a warrior, or a large man. He was thirty and more familiar with wine than a hard day’s work. For all that, looking at the boy, for a moment he was convinced he could snap his neck almost without effort. That the bones would break like a bird’s, shatter like glass. Then he saw the eye, the damnable red eye, and the Tyrant was a looming titan looking down on him.

“So I did it,” the boy hissed. “I crushed them and I stole the crown and I called the would-be puppeteers to heel. And when I turned thirteen, sitting on my throne as the Tyrant of Helike – I did not die. Because Fate isn’t a path we must follow, Anaxares, it’s a tug-of-war between the Gods.”

He leaned closer.

“And sometimes, if you put your hands to the rope, you can tug it your way,” he whispered.

The Named withdrew with unnatural agility, laughing. The intensity there had been to him was gone like mist in the sun. The Tyrant ripped out one of the banners that flew at every corner of his dais – his personal heraldry, a leering skull with a red eye on gold – and leapt down onto the wet grounds. The porters who’d been carrying the dais hastily slowed, not daring to drop the entire thing even as their muscles creaked lest their ruler be splattered with mud.

“Come along, advisor,” the boy said. “We must speak with my general.”

Anaxares followed. The soldiers, hard men and women in scale armour with swords and shield, turned into awed children whenever they saw the Tyrant. Some reached hesitantly for the hem of his silks, which the boy tolerantly allowed. There was no sign of discontent among them even after the pantomime that had been this campaign: in Helike, Tyrants did not fail. Not without betrayal or half the world set against them. They would follow the little madman into the fray without hesitation or doubt. The general they were seeking found them first, riding towards them. A woman, the diplomat saw, then his gaze lingered on her throat. Not that she had always been that.

“Sire,” the general said, dismounting hastily and kneeling.

“General Basilia,” the Tyrant said, patting her armoured shoulder affectionately. “The army is to cease retreating immediately.”

Something feral flashed in the woman’s eyes.

“We are to prepare for battle, then? The enemy is half a day’s march away, we can still set the grounds.”

The Named chuckled.

“There is no need to array our soldiers for a fight,” he said. “Stay in a column. We will be marching on Atalante before nightfall.”

She almost hesitated, Anaxares saw, but did not protest. Loyal, this one. To a boy more than half mad. Gods save them all. He should have brought the wine.

“As you command, sire,” she said. “There is a farm not far from here, should I prepare it to accommodate you?”

“No need,” the Tyrant said. “My advisor and I will be awaiting our friends on the field.”

Without even the semblance of an explication, the boy strode away with the standard resting on his shoulder. The diplomat sighed and made to follow but he was stopped by the general, who put a gauntleted hand on his shoulder. She glared down at him.

“If he dies,” General Basilia said, “you will follow him shortly. Screaming .”

“Nine,” Anaxares replied.

“What?” she said.

“The number of times I’ve been threatened with death today,” the diplomat clarified. “Will we make it to ten before noon? It is an auspicious number, in Bellerophon.”

He strode away after that, while she was still too surprised to protest. He found the Tyrant alone in a sprawling field of grass, gazing ahead. The boy hummed, as he approached.

“And now?” the diplomat asked.

“Now we wait,” the Tyrant said.

—

It was mid-afternoon when the forces of Atalante arrived.

They were a sorry bunch to look at, compared to the soldiers of Helike. Citizen levies armed with spears and shields and decked in hardened leather, city and caravan guards who’d traded cudgels for swords, unarmoured conscripts with javelins and slings. Only the cavalry looked professional, nobles with long lances and chain mail. The mercenaries looked more fearsome, infantry from all parts of Calernia that dwelled in the mercenary villages surrounding the shores of Mercantis until hired by patrons. There were Ashurans there, he saw, with their curved bows and ornate armours. Levantines with painted faces and hooked swords, even Callowan knights with long banners who must have survived the Praesi purges. Behind him, the army of Helike remained in an orderly column and did not move. The commanders on the other side ordered a halt, but after most of an hour passed without anyone moving orders began being screamed along the Atalantian lines. In good order, the enemy began to advance again.

“They’re not even sending an envoy to talk with me,” the Tyrant complained.

“You murdered the last one,” Anaxares said.

“It’s still very rude,” the boy said, rolling the wooden shaft of the standard between his palms. “They ought to have better manners than that.”

The diplomat watched twenty thousand soldiers marching in his direction and wondered which one would kill him. Hopefully one with a sword. Spear wounds tended to kill slowly, he’d been told, unless something important was pierced.

“Last night, Malicia’s hounds set foot in Penthes,” the Tyrant said conversationally.

“May The Ground Open Up To Swallow The Base Penthesians,” Anaxares replied out of habit.

“The city will be eating itself alive before a fortnight has passed,” he said. “Nicae won’t move until they’ve grown fat with Proceran silver and ‘mercenaries’, Delos will be dealing with the Stygian phalanx moving north. That leaves only our dear Atalantian friends and their escorts.”

“Who you have decided to fight,” the diplomat said. “Without your army.”

“Oh, I could have had General Basilia tear those poor fools alive, if you’ll forgive my language,” the Tyrant said. “It wouldn’t even have been very hard. That’s how the Praesi do things, nowadays. Let tactics and preparation carry the day.”

The frail boy’s lips curled in distaste.

“And to think they were once the greatest among us.”

“The Dread Empire is the most powerful it has been in centuries,” Anaxares frowned.

“And their Empress plays shatranj with the First Prince across an entire continent, winning more often than not,” the Named said. “For all that, they’ve lost their way.”

The Bellerophan raised a sceptical eyebrow.

“It’s not about winning, Anaxares,” the Tyrant said. “It’s about how you win.”

The standard rolled again between the boy’s palms as the enemy host crept ever closer.

“Even now, if I gave General Basilia the order I believe she could win this. It would be a victory, yes, but would it be a victory for Evil?”

“You are a villain,” the Bellerophan said. “A victory for you is a victory for Evil.”

“A mere clash between armies? No,” he said. “It takes more than that. The war I am fighting has little to do with steel: I am soldier for the Gods Below in the game that will settle Creation. A point has to be made, a sense to the story.”

“And what is the point of us standing on this field, watching death arrive?” Anaxares asked.

“Twenty thousand men march to end me,” the Tyrant said. “They will break, because they are in my way. Watch, diplomat, and learn.”

The boy drove the standard into the ground, flying his banner of one in the face of the host that spread across the plain.

“I am Kairos Theodosian,” he laughed. “Tyrant of Helike. And I say that my Rule extends to even the sky. Come, servants of the Heavens. The Age of Wonders is not dead yet. Not while I breathe .”

The cloud above thickened, more black than grey now. For a long moment nothing happened, and then lightning struck the soldiers of Atalante. Thunder clapped, the sky danced to the whims of a madman and Anaxares watched the largest army he had ever seen break apart at the seams. The Tyrant of Helike stood there, smiling.

His hand no longer shook.

Chapter 1: Right

“Do not make laws you do not intend to enforce. Allowing one law to be broken with impunity undermines them all.”
– Extract from the personal journals of Dread Emperor Terribilis II

Evening Bell had just rung and the room was now lit with candles.

Most of the Southpool eldermen – the ones involved in my little visit, anyway – had extended invitations for me to stay in their own homes, but I had politely declined. Governess Ife would have those under watch, for the first time in years. After the Conquest eldermen assemblies had been made toothless by the near-absolute powers granted to Imperial governors, an abrupt fall for men and women who had once been a power to rival the guilds and the nobility. Their newfound irrelevance had allowed them to survive the discreet purges that had gone through all cities under direct Praesi occupation, which the governors were only now learning had been a mistake. A mistake driven by culture, as it happened. There was no equivalent to eldermen in the Wasteland, where power inside the larger cities was always in the sole hands of the ruling High Lord. Black had apparently been of the opinion that time would smother the institution on its own without any need for blood: Callowans born without having ever known the assemblies would not be inclined to defer to them, particularly when their old powers were in the hands of others.

He’d only been half-right. In Laure – where the guilds and House Fairfax had always been much stronger – the assemblies were already dead and buried before I was born. In Southpool, though, it was a different story. The Counts of Southpool had long been weakened by their proximity to the seat of a beloved monarchy, and the city was not strong enough in trade for the guilds to have a major presence. Governess Ife, now on her third mandate ruling the city, had found the opposition to several of her toll stations and extraordinary taxes to be strong and exceedingly well-organized. There had been riots, and at first she’d backed down after manoeuvring so the manner of it would not make her lose face. Then she’d quietly begun eliminating the most respected of the eldermen, breaking the assembly’s influence one corpse at a time. Like most forms of Callowan resistance after the Conquest, the enterprise had been doomed from the start. The eldermen of Southpool were now a pale shadow of what they’d once been, unable to mount any opposition worth the name.

But oh, they wanted to.

When I’d had Ratface contact them through intermediaries, they’d accepted my offer without even listening to all the terms. They were lucky I wasn’t out to screw them, because it would have been child’s play. I wasn’t exactly a great admirer of eldermen assemblies – the way eldermen were appointed by the vote of other eldermen made them too much like a knock-off nobility for my tastes – but I needed a check on the authority of governors and they were my most palatable option. It was better than letting the guilds have the reins, anyway. Fairfax kings had spent centuries locking the guilds out of direct political power, and in my opinion they’d been right to. Whenever the guildmasters got a scrap of authority they immediately used it to forced every commerce they could under their thumb, which filled their coffers but also broke smaller traders. Harrion, the owner of the tavern I’d once worked at, had always held the guilds in disdain. He’d been one of the few people in Laure I’d actually liked, so I supposed his opinion might have coloured mine.

The tavern I was currently hiding out in reminded me of the Rat’s Nest quite a bit, actually. The wooden walls were just as rickety, the floor creaked like a dying man and the smell of soured wine and vomit was so ingrained it would remain even if the place was put to the torch. I’d preferred dipping in the lake to using the only bathtub they had here, judging I’d come out of that adventure rust-tinged. I hadn’t drawn attention in doing so: like in Laure, most everyone living by the lake used it to bathe. Without armour and with only a knife for weaponry, I’d been able to keep my presence quiet. Deoraithe, even half-bloods, were rare outside of Daoine but in this part of the city people knew better than to ask questions. The only reason I’d gotten a few looks was currently entering my room, closing the door behind him. Hakram had put on a cloak but there was no hiding his height or his fangs: Adjutant was the tallest orc I’d ever met, with only Juniper coming close.

“I have it,” Hakram said, taking out a thick leather-bound book from under his cloak and dropping it on the table.

I put aside The Death of the Age of Wonders , the treatise I was now reading for the second time. Written by Dread Empress Malicia, I’d thought I could glimpse something of how her mind worked through her words. All I’d gotten, though, was that she was a firm believe in checks and balances when it came to the nations of Calernia. That a woman who’d claimed the Tower could believe foreign alliances should be determined by shared interests instead of alignment to Good and Evil was a fascinating departure from the norm, but it taught me little about Malicia as a woman. Dismissing the thought, I cast my eyes on the book Hakram had brought and flipped it open. Columns of numbers and words, scribbled so poorly even my own handwriting was legible in comparison.

“Won’t that make for pleasant reading,” I sighed.

“I already took a look, it’s why I’m late,” the orc said. “Here, let me.”

He moved the pages with a carefulness that was almost comical, given the size and thickness of his fingers. About halfway through he ceased, and laid a finger on a particular number. Three thousand golden aurelii, spent on...

“Furniture repairs,” I snorted. “Maybe she does have a sense of humour.”

“I’ve found the carpenters that supposedly did the work,” Hakram said. “Elderwoman Keyes knew them. I have sworn statements they did no such thing.”

“And we have the ledger from the Guild of Assassins, accounting for the three thousand aurelii,” I said quietly. “That should be enough.”

Barely a fortnight after claiming my fiefdom in Marchford I’d tasked Ratface to get in touch with all the so-called Dark Guilds of Callow, the criminal mirror to the merchant organization. I really shouldn’t have been surprised he was already on speaking terms with all the major ones. The Assassins had been reluctant at the idea of letting me claim a ledger, even if it was to be used against a Praesi. Black had tacitly sanctioned the existence of all the Dark Guilds after the Conquest, preferring limiting them to quotas rather than attempting an eradication that would drive them into the arms of heroes. The Assassins had quibbled until I’d offered them a calm reminder that Tribune Robber could be pulled from his current assignment at any time. The malevolent little shit was starting to have a reputation and I wasn’t above using it for my purposes. Still had cost me a small fortune to buy the ledger off of them, which mattered a lot more now than it would have a year ago. Marchford was haemorrhaging coin with no solution in sight, but that was a problem I’d return to chewing on tomorrow. Tonight I had a governess to deal with.

“She didn’t have time to cook the books?” I said. “Better than this, I mean.”

“She let Heiress’ people take care of the official ones,” Hakram said, amused. “But she didn’t trust Akua with her personal records.”

Ah, Praesi backstabbing. The gift that kept on giving.

“You worked quickly,” I praised.

He shrugged.

“I knew what we needed, I just had to Find it,” he said.

I hummed. Adjutant’s second aspect, one I still wasn’t sure what to think about. There was no denying how useful it had turned out to be – Hakram now frequently stumbled onto exactly what we were looking for, as long as it was feasible for him to do so – but relying too much on aspects was a good way to earn a one-way trip to the graveyard. I’d encouraged him to use it sparingly, but the both of us were drowning in responsibilities these days: there was a reason he’d come into the aspect in the first place. I changed the subject to more current concerns.

“The Gallowborne are in the city?” I asked.

“As of an hour ago,” Adjutant said. “They’ll be noticed soon, if they haven’t been already.”

“I don’t mind if word spreads,” I grunted. “It’ll discourage Ife’s household troops from getting any ideas.”

The eldermen had assured me that the city guard would stay out of it, but Ife’s own men were from the Wasteland. The governess was from a family sworn to the High Lords of Nok, with minor but very old holdings – held since since before the Miezans kind of old. That tended to breed unusually strong loyalties in Praesi.

“One last thing,” Hakram said. “Heiress’ envoys, they’re led by an old friend of ours.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Can’t be Hawulti, she hasn’t set foot in Callow since our pleasant chat in Liesse,” I said.

As the heiress to Nok, the Soninke would have been the natural choice for an envoy here.

“Fasili,” the orc said. “Slow learner, that one.”

The heir to Aksum. Apparently his aunt bluntly stating he was expendable in a scryed conversation with me had driven him even deeper into Heiress’ camp. Unfortunate, that. Aksum sat on half a dozen emerald mines, the largest in Calernia, and it had grown rich off of them. Fucking Praesi, rolling in gold and gems when Marchford wasn’t even breaking even.

“Let’s gift him a reminder, then,” I said. “Come along, Adjutant. Let’s have a talk with Governess Ife.”

—

The ranks of the Gallowborne had swelled in the six months that had passed since the end of the Liesse Rebellion. They were not a single company any longer: they numbered four hundred at the moment, the members still handpicked by the former Captain Farrier – now a full Tribune. Still, after a conversation with Juniper I’d forced his hand when it came to selection: there were Praesi now, if only a few, and orcs. Keeping anybody but my countrymen out of the ranks of my personal guard would have sent the wrong message, on that much I agreed with the Hellhound. About seven out of ten were still Callowan, though, and some of those recruits were fresh off the battlefields of the rebellion.

Not all of them had fought on the Empire’s side.

The first time I’d gotten a report that a former member of the Countess Marchford’s retinue had tried to enrol in the Fifteenth, I’d poured myself a stiff drink. My initial thought that this would be an isolated occurrence was quickly proven wrong, as hardened soldiers who’d been ready to run out the Empire not a year ago kept on flocking to my banner. Juniper had been of the opinion that they should taken in and then dispersed across the legions that garrisoned Callow, never allowed to gather enough they would be an issue if they rebelled again. Aisha had been more nuanced, suggesting that folding some into the Gallowborne first as a sign of goodwill would gain me approval with the people of Marchford. It was Ratface who’d been the dissenting voice. Take them all in, he’d said. Otherwise you’ve a city full of veterans with no one to fight for. Yet. He’d been right. The others hadn’t liked it but I’d put my foot down. The Fifteenth filled its rank to the brim before the first month had passed, which was when the first problem had come. We had our four thousand men and still recruits kept showing up.

Word had spread outside of Marchford, and the retinues of half the lords and ladies who’d fought in the rebellion had come to my city. I could not scry Black to ask him for advice, as he was in the Free Cities at the moment and scrying spells tended to break up over the mountains, but to all our surprise it was Nauk who found a solution. Or rather, failed to see where the problem was. Why do we give a shit if we’re over four thousand? he’d said. Our charter’s incomplete. Every legion, when founded, was granted a charter by the Empress – truthfully the Black Knight, but he did so in her name. It granted the soldiers right to pay, specified right of recruitment and formalized the right to be equipped by the Imperial forges at Foramen. It also specified the size of the legion. The Fifteenth though, unlike any other legion in living memory, had been raised as a half-legion of two thousand legionaries. That part of the charter had been left unspecified as a consequence, which Nauk took to mean there was no hard limit on our numbers.

A reminder that Black always, always played the long game.

The Fifteenth Legion now consisted of a little over six thousand men and was still growing. Juniper had hastily brought in recruits from Praes to balance the composition of the legion, but now over half was made up of Callowans. My general regularly made pointed comments about their conflicting loyalties,and she was right to. I’d realized too late that those men and women had not stopped fighting for their rebellion: they simply thought they’d joined the banner of a quieter, more successful one. In Praes, these days, I was seen as a symbol of the permanence of the Tower’s rule over the former Kingdom. In Callow, though? Countess , they called me, but I knew that some of them really meant Queen . This was trouble, in the same sense that fire was warm or Heiress was a megalomaniac. Regardless, if there was currently an advantage to having recruits pouring in from all over Callow it was that some of my Gallowborne were familiar with Southpool. They knew their way around the palace.

“We’ll have control of the grounds before you get to the hall,” Tribune Farrier said quietly from my side.

The two of us were peering at the silhouette of the former residence of the Counts of Southpool. My personal guard has moved swiftly and professionally to secure the palace, after a relative of the eldermen had unlocked a servant entrance. The Gallowborne would be outnumbered, but it was unlikely it would actually come to a fight tonight. Their presence was largely meant as a deterrent for when desperation struck. And even if it comes to that, they’ve fought harder things than men. After Marchford and Liesse, there was precious little that would make the Gallowborne flinch.

“Try to avoid incidents,” I said. “I’d like this to go as cleanly as possible.”

Or I’d have to answer to the Ruling Council for the mess. While I did own a winning coalition of the votes there, I was not beyond questioning. Baroness Kendal – Anne, as she insisted I call her now – had not lost her principles with her surrender and Sister Abigail abhorred violence of any sort. The two Praesi members had been uncomfortable at the idea of what was going to unfold here tonight, though both were owned by High Lords opposed to the man who owned the governess. That had been enough to make it a unanimous vote, without the appearance of Malicia’s representative. The Dread Empress had sent a messenger to cast her vote anyway, without saying how she’d known what the motion put to the council would be.

“My officers are steady,” Tribune Farrier said calmly. “There’ll be no fuckups, Countess.”

“I’ve come to expect as much, John,” I said, clapping his shoulder.

He blushed. He always did, when I called him by his given name. A part of me was still girlishly delighted I could have that effect on people.

“Forgive me,” he said, “but I still believe you should take a full line.”

“There’s no one in that hall for me to be afraid of,” I said amusedly. “A tenth is more than enough. Besides, Hakram will be there.”

“With all due respect, ma’am,” he said, “Lord Adjutant is a target too. It’s been a month since they tried to knife him, we’re overdue another attempt.”

If you’d told me two years ago that assassination attempts on my closest friend in the world would become a somewhat tiresome routine, I would have been fairly sceptical. And yet, here I was, wondering how far the next hired killer would make it before someone but a crossbow bolt in them. The last one hadn’t even made it past Apprentice’s wards before getting put down. Robber had managed to get a betting pool running without having been in Marchford for months, I assumed through the magical power of being a vicious little bastard. Hopefully the next one would make it past the second line of defence, I had twenty denarii riding on it.

“A tenth will be enough,” I repeated dryly. “Hakram, how are we looking?”

A green cabinet with a cloak slapped on top it, also known as Adjutant, stirred in the distance.

“Like we could use a bath from a place where fish don’t swim,” he said.

“That’s insubordination, it is,” I complained.

“I’ll get away with it,” he shrugged. “My commanding officer’s a soft touch.”

“I’m surrounded by insolence, John,” I solemnly told the tribune. “What did I ever do to deserve this?”

“I’m told you flipped off an angel,” he replied frankly. “That’d probably do it.”

“That’s...” I started. “Well, kind of true I guess. Still.”

I strode away, my escorting tenth falling behind me seamlessly as Hakram came to my side. The tall orc had put on his legionary armour before we set out, making the cloak even more useless a disguise than before. I’d not bothered with plate myself, keeping to a simple cloth tunic dyed in pale blue. The cloak, though, was the one I was becoming known for. The same one Black had given me years ago, now adorned with strips from the standards of the enemies I’d beaten. It swirled dramatically behind me as I kept a quick pace towards the banquet hall of old fortress of the counts of Southpool. I had a sword at my hip, now, as well as the knife I’d taken my first life with. Overconfidence had killed more powerful villains than me. The Gallowborne had cleared the corridors of everyone when they’d seized the palace, so we moved without contest. The hall I was looking for was easy enough to find, as it had once served as the room where audiences were held: it was dead at the centre of the structure. The doors to it were already open, though I whimsically wished they hadn’t been. This reminded me of another night, in Laure, when I had been on the precipice of the changes that would lead me where I now stood. A lifetime ago, it felt like.

By the sound of it, the guests had yet to notice anything was going on. I made a note to compliment Tribune Farrier on the efficiency of his men. I strolled into the room casually, casting a steady look around. Twenty people in attendance, with Governess Ife at the head of the table. Servants stood to the side in silence, in the Praesi way. Most of the guests were Callowan, though I recognized Fasili as the governess’ right side. A Taghreb sat by him, a young woman I did not know. Hard eyes and a scar on her face hinted at a retainer, and one not unfamiliar with violence. Three of the eldermen I’d struck my deal with were in attendance, clustered near the end of the table. Like servants. They were the first to notice our presence, as Hakram pulled down the hood of his cloak and the Gallowborne fanned out behind me. For another few heartbeats the conversation continued, then awareness spread and the hall turned silent as a grave.

“Get out,” I said. “Now.”

When Black had stood in my place, he’d used his Name to spread fear in the crowd. I didn’t bother, though I’d finally managed to learn the trick to it. The Callowans rose in barely-veiled panic, streaming by the blank-faced silhouetted of the Gallowborne as they fled. Fasili and his retainer only rose after he finished his cup of wine.

“Governess,” the heir to Aksum said, slightly bowing his head. “Always a pleasure.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” Ife replied with a gracious smile. “Until next time, Lord Fasili.”

The Soninke moved unhurriedly, pausing before me.

“Lady Squire,” he said icily.

The Taghreb retainer cast a wary eye on me, hand falling to the sword at her hip.

“Fasili,” I said. “Do be careful on the way back. I’m told Liesse has a banditry problem.”

“A temporary state of affairs,” he said.

“More than you know,” I smiled pleasantly.

I turned back to the governess, eyeing her curiously. A middle-aged Soninke, her frame still hinting at the slenderness of her youth but now grown thicker. Her eyes were not quite golden but very close. A sign of old blood, Aisha had told me.

“Lady Squire,” she greeted me. “You honour me with your presence.”

“Governess Ife,” I said, grabbing a seat and dragging it at the end of the table facing hers.

The sound of wood scraping on stone almost made her wince. I plopped myself down, then fished out the dragonbone pipe Masego had gifted me. Calmly, under her befuddled gaze, I stuffed it with wakeleaf from a small packet I got from a pocket sown into my cloak. I produced a pinewood match and struck it on the table, lighting the pipe. I inhaled a mouthful of grey smoke and spat it out, carelessly tossing the match into an abandoned cup of wine. There was a long moment of silence, broken only by Hakram failing to entirely smother a chuckle.

“Should I arrange for the servants to bring you a meal?” the Soninke finally said. “I have some of the finest cooks of the provinces in my employ.”

I inhaled the smoke, then let out a stream of it. The wakeleaf had become a guilty pleasure of mine, in the last few months. Aisha usually sprinkled a handful of leaves in her tea, as they sharpened wit, but Apprentice had informed me they could be smoked as well. They were, unfortunately, quite expensive. Grown only in Ashur, having been brought from the other side of the Tyrian Sea when the Baalites first founded the cities that would become the Thalassocracy. I used them sparingly as a consequence.

“The night I first became the Squire,” I said, “I stood in a hall much like this one.”

There was another long silence.

“The story is well known, in some circles,” she said, face without expression.

“Mazus wanted to be Chancellor,” I mused. “Ambitious, though back then I did not understand exactly how ambitious he truly was. I do not think you suffer from the same flaw, Governess Ife.”

“I do not understand your meaning, Lady Squire,” she said, eyes wary.

“Greed, you see, I can tolerate,” I said. “There’s probably been rulers that didn’t skim off the top, but I imagine they were in the minority. It’s an old sin, that one. As long as it doesn’t get out of hand, I can live with it.”

“An enlightened attitude,” the governess murmured. “If your visit is meant to be a... reminder of the virtues of moderation, your warning has been received.”

Hakram calmly placed the ledger on the table, pushing aside a plate filled with pheasant. I would give this to Governess Ife, the fear only showed in her eyes – and even then, only for a moment. I spewed out another mouthful of smoke, letting the haze wreathe my face like a grey crown.

“A thousand aurelii a head,” I said. “A point in your favour, that you bought Callowan instead of importing specialists from the Wasteland. Even if what you bought is murder.”

“I’ve no idea what you are referring to, my lady,” she said.

“We have the matching ledger from the Guild of Assassins,” I replied.

Ife closed her eyes.

“My term is at an end, then,” she said calmly. “I will be gone by the end of the fortnight. Will the replacement you have chosen require quarters before that?”

“So you don’t have a mage in Laure,” I said, cocking my head to the side. “Not one that can scry, anyway.”

I inhaled from the pipe, letting the wakeleaf quicken my blood. I’d thought, that same night in Laure, that when the time came I would enjoy this. That it would feel like justice . It feels like killing , I thought as I blew the smoke. And less cleanly than if I’d used a sword.

“As of last night, the Ruling Council has determined that acts committed as an Imperial governor fall under the jurisdiction of Callowan authorities,” I said.

She was a clever woman, the governess. She did not need for me to explain it any further.

“It would be a mercy,” she said, “to allow me poison.”

“It would be,” I agreed quietly. “But this is Callow, Governess. We hang murderers here.”

The Gallowborne moved forward.

“String her up,” I ordered.

She did not struggle as my soldiers took her away. I closed my eyes and leaned back in the seat. Eventually my pipe ran out and I emptied the ashes on a cooling plate.

“It was necessary,” Hakram said.

He was standing behind me, close enough to touch. He didn’t though. He knew me better than that, had seen me in this kind of mood before.

“When’s the last time we did the right thing, instead of the necessary one?” I asked tiredly.

“You think this wrong?” he said. “She commissioned murders, even if she did not wield the blade herself. By our laws, she has earned death.”

“I don’t think it was personal for her,” I said, eyes drifting to the ceiling. “She was just consolidating power. Like I’m doing right now, Hakram. If she deserves to hang, don’t I?”

“She was breaking the law,” the orc gravelled. “You are enforcing it.”

“The only reason I don’t break laws anymore is because I make them, now,” I scoffed.

Adjutant laughed softly.

“And that disturbs you?” he asked. “You have toiled to earn that prize since before we ever met.”

“There’s nothing right about this,” I finally said. “I didn’t win tonight because I’m better than her. I’m just more powerful. I have a bigger stick, so I decide how it goes.”

“ Humans ,” Hakram mocked gently. “You speak that as if it were a tragedy, instead of the first truth of Creation: the strong rule, the weak obey.”

“I thought,” I said quietly, “that we could be better than that.”

“Justifications only matter to the just,” he gravelled.

I half-smiled. My own words, thrown back at me. And yet...

“I burned men alive, at Three Hills,” I said. “Hundreds of them.”

“Your enemies,” he said. “Soldiers.”

I let out a long breath.

“I have done, Hakram, terrible things,” I said. “Ugly things. I’ll do more, before this is over. If it is ever over.”

Once, when we’d talked under moonlight, the orc had compared trying to change the world to pushing a boulder up a mountain. And then watching it roll down the other slope . It doesn’t work that way, though , I thought. There is no summit to the mountain. You just keep pushing until your body gives, and you’re the first thing the stone crushes on the way down. If that was all it could be, though, if all you could ever do was buy some time...

“I made those decisions for a purpose,” I said. “I did not cover this land with corpses just to change the flavour of tyranny that rules it. If I don’t make it better now, when will I?”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“We hang murderers, in Callow. Even the ones Black struck deals with.”

I slid back the pipe into my cloak.

“Get a message to Ratface,” I said. “He is to prepare for the dismantling of the Guild of Assassins.”

Chapter 2: Might

“We make the shepherds kings at the end of our stories because they already know how to lead recalcitrant, bleating creatures of limited intellect.”
– Prokopia Lekapene, first and only Hierarch of the Free Cities

Laure had not had an Imperial governor since the unlamented death of Mazus.

The former capital of the Kingdom had been put under martial law while the bastard was still swinging from a noose in the market place, but no replacement had been appointed afterwards – the Empress, as I understood it, had used the possibility of the appointment to effect a little spring cleaning at court. The final body count had been comparable to that of a small battle, with even the Truebloods discreetly clawing at each other through intermediaries as everyone tried to place a relative or dependent at the head of the richest city in Callow. It had come to nothing when the Liesse Rebellion had begun, as there had been no question of ending martial law in Laure while the south was in revolt. The issue of what to do with the city had ultimately become the subject of the very first meeting of the Ruling Council, and it had revealed how the lines would be drawn between its members.

There were, theoretically, seven members. Black was one, the designated head of the council and the only member with the right of veto – which he had given to me along with his vote. Baroness Anne Kendal was another, the first appointment I’dd made. Sister Abigail of the House of Light was the third, a septuagenarian who’d served as a travelling sister for thirty years before settling in an abbey near Ankou in her middle age. She’d been one of the most vocal members of the House to advocate against armed rebellion after the Conquest. She still had, Black had informed me, been put under surveillance by both he and Malicia by sheer virtue of having so many connections across Callow. The House of Light did not have a true hierarchy but some of its members were more influential than others, and Sister Abigail was in the highest tier even among those.

Hakram had also choked the life out of her great-nephew at Three Hills. He’d been the priest who’d prevented us from scrying the Silver Spears, having volunteered to serve with the mercenaries as a liaison for my predecessor in ruling Marchford. The way she seemed to genuinely hold no grudge over the events unsettled me, I had to admit. Priests who’d been under the vows for long enough were always... unearthly but Sister Abigail was in a league of her own. I’d never seen her be anything but the picture of health and Ratface had told me she’d healed a bleeding gut wound in the cathedral without breaking a sweat. There was power behind the doting grandmotherly smile.

The two Praesi with seats were like night and day. Murad Kalbid was sworn to the High Lady of Kahtan, a distant cousin who’d married into a lesser family, and was exactly what Callowans picture when they thought of the Taghreb. Desert-lean and with tanned skin like leather, the middle-aged man had a closely-cropped beard and moustache that made his dark eyes stand out. I’d never seen him without a sword at his hip and he could light candles with nothing but a word. Satang Motherless, as the Soninke was apparently named, was the survivor of a succession dispute in Aksum who’d come into the service of the High Lord of Okoro. She seemed to me a lesser take on Heiress, when it came to appearance, with cheekbones not quite as high and curves not quite as full. Her hair she kept in a series of braid the way Apprentice did, though without the magical trinkets. There was a red mark on her cheek that looked like three lines, and I couldn’t tell if it was a tattoo or some particularly vivid birthmark. Whatever it was there was sorcery in it.

The two foreigners had wasted no time in striking an informal alliance, working together to nudge the Council in directions their patrons would approve of. Early on they’d tried to suggest that properties seized from the nobles who’d fought in the rebellion should be put to auction under Murad’s supervision, supposedly to raise funds for the reconstruction, but I’d stamped the notion down hard with Sister Abigail’s support. Half the treasures would be gone before the first sell was ever made, packed in carts headed for the Wasteland. Aisha was convinced Satang was in communication with Heiress, but I was not so sure. Nothing concrete had been dug up by my people, though admittedly what passed for my spy network was barely out of the cradle. I’d still have to act as if she was, just in case. I knew for a fact Akua kept close eye on the proceedings here in Laure, to prepare for the blows before I could land them on her. So far I’d only tightened the screws by stripping the Liesse governorship of lands and by passing a decree that banned any Callowan official from summoning or dealing with devils, but I wasn’t done. Not until she crawled back to the Wasteland, or preferably straight into the Underworld.

The last and seventh seat was for Malicia’s personal representative, and had gone unfilled. The Empress had sent messengers to cast her vote on occasion, so far only for issues that related to the scope of the Ruling Council’s authority over Callow.

Tonight’s session would be light, in theory, with only my own accounting of the events in Southpool being a topic after we received the monthly report from the magistrates that now ruled Laure. Baroness Kendal had been tasked with overseeing them personally after the appointments were made, but the two Praesi had insisted on a regular report to the council. They weren’t entirely wrong. I doubted a woman like Anne Kendal would try to fill her pockets with bribes but General Orim still garrisoned the city and he’d been openly sceptical about a former rebel being given power over his legionaries. Being able to say there would be oversight by Wastelanders and myself had gone a long way in soothing those ruffled feathers. Compromises , I grimaced. I’d had to make quite a few of those lately, and I didn’t like it. I missed Black, to my dismay, and more than the man I missed his advice.

The room the Ruling Council used for its sessions had once been the private meeting room of the sovereigns of Callow. The Queen of Blades once sat in that same seat I called my own and so had Jehan the Wise. So had the likes of Mazus, later on, but that era was over now. It was tastefully decorated – marble floors with hexagonal tiles and old wood panelling under a beautifully painted ceiling – but I wasted no time on the sights before heading for my seat at the head of the table: the other members were already there. All six of them. So the Empress finally sent her representative , I thought, studying the woman in question. Soninke, dark eyes betraying a common birth and no callouses on her palms. Not a fighter then. Probably a court appointee. Neither of the other Praesi in the room seemed to know her and that clearly made them uncomfortable. As it should. Wastelanders were afraid of Black in the dark of night, I’d found, but they were always afraid of the Empress. She’d given them reason to.

“We’ve a newcomer, I see,” I said, taking off my riding gloves and setting them on the table.

The representative rose from her seat and gracefully bowed.

“An honour to make your acquaintance, Lady Squire,” she said. “I am Lady Naibu, representative for her Most Dreadful Majesty on the council.”

Lady Deputy , in Mtethwa. Ime’s sense of humour still made me wince from across an entire empire. I really shouldn’t have expected any better of a woman who thought calling herself patience would lend her mystique.

“We’re pleased to have you with us,” I half-lied.

Not that convincingly, if the way Sister Abigail discreetly coughed into her sleeve was any indication. Baroness Kendal smiled pleasantly, murmuring courtesies at the newcomer from her neighbouring chair as Naibu sat and I settled into my own seat.

“I didn’t see the magistrates waiting outside when coming in,” I said. “Was their report already given?”

“It was delayed until tomorrow, Lady Squire,” Setang said. “There’s been news of greater import from Dormer.”

I raised an eyebrow. Anne Kendal’s former barony had been one of the first governorships to be filled after the rebellion – she’d suggested one of the town’s eldermen for the first mandate, to smooth the transition when a more long-term appointee was found, and after having him looked into I’d seen no reason to refuse.

“There’s been a Fae incursion,” Sister Abigail said. “A handful of Summer court fairies snuck into the town after finagling an invitation, then forced the people to dance until a priest drove them off.”

I blinked slowly. The Fae ? They never left the Waning Woods. Dormer was one of the Callowan holdings closest to the woods, certainly, but it was still a few days of riding away. The only known gate into Arcadia was near Refuge, and- I stopped cold. That was no longer true, was it? Masego had speculated as much months ago and he’d confirmed it since: when the demon of Corruption had lingered in Marchford, it had weakened the borders between Arcadia and Creation. Nothing had come through, so far, but... Shit. I need to talk with Apprentice.

“There were no dead, as I understand it,” Murad said, facing the sister.

“A handful of sprained limbs was the worst of it,” Baroness Kendal replied, drawing his attention.

“Then there should be no need to lower the taxes due,” Setang smiled.

The segue was too smooth for the two of them not to have planned it.

“The priority at the moment should be making sure the Fae don’t come back,” I said sharply. “There’s no legion garrisoning the region, if some of the fairies into the rougher stuff come knocking they’ll be vulnerable.”

“I am told the Fifteenth regularly holds field exercises,” Naibu spoke up, the first time since the conversation had begun. “Perhaps one might be arranged close to the town.”

I eyed her cautiously. I’d been thinking of saying as much, but hearing the words coming from an unknown had me rethinking it. My men would be close to Heiress’ wheelhouse, if they went there, and if she hadn’t cooked up some nasty tricks since we last met I’d eat my godsdamned gloves.

“I’ll speak with General Juniper,” I finally grunted. “It’s placeholder solution, regardless. The Fifteenth is based in Marchford so if this become an unstable border there’ll be a need for a more permanent presence.”

“Reaching out to the Lady of the Lake might yield answers as to why it happened,” Sister Abigail suggested. “She’s said to know Arcadia better than anyone alive.”

I knew the Empire was in diplomatic contact with Refuge, but I honestly had no idea how that contact was maintained. Scrying that close to a gate into Arcadia would basically be sending a written invitation to the Wild Hunt but surely they couldn’t be sending messengers on foot every time? Less than half of them would actually make it to Refuge: those entire woods were even more of a death trap than the Wasteland. I didn’t want to admit to ignorance in front of those people so I smiled knowingly instead, meeting Setang’s eyes until she looked away. When in doubt, pretend it was always part of the plan.

“Measures will be taken,” I said vaguely.

That should keep them guessing. No one else seemed to have anything else to add, so Baroness Kendal suggested we adjourn for the night – my own report on Southpool could wait until tomorrow, when we saw the magistrates. It was a little abrupt considering how little we’d talked but they’d grown to know a little of me in the last six months: whenever proceedings got too tedious or I had other business I tended to end the sessions early. Council members rose one after another, bowing before asking my leave. I gave it absent-mindedly, eyes on Naibu – who was still seated. Well now. That promised to be interesting. Sister Abigail was the last to leave and she closed the door behind her, leaving only silence. I was about to speak up when Malicia’s envoy suddenly twitched. Not just a little, too: her entire body convulsed before stilling suddenly. A heartbeat hadn’t even passed before I was on my feet, sword in hand.

“That won’t be necessary, Catherine,” she said, voice eerily calm.

The Soninke held herself differently now. Straighter in her seat, hands folded primly into her lap. There was command in her bearing.

“Your Most Dreadful Majesty,” I said.

The meat-puppet smiled approvingly.

“Deputy, is it?” I muttered. “Someone had fun with that.”

“This is a flesh simulacrum with a semblance of personality inserted,” Malicia shrugged gracefully. “One of Nefarious’ rare slivers of brilliance. It serves my purposes better than coming to Callow in person.”

I sheathed the sword slowly.

“Are you always in there, or...”

I gestured vaguely.

“Do not ask that question if you want to sleep well tonight,” the Empress smiled. “Suffice it to say, anything my deputy hears will eventually come to my ears. You may consider her opinions to be mine for all practical purposes.”

One of those days, I was going to come across something from the Tower that wasn’t the stuff of nightmares. But not today, evidently.

“I take it there’s things going on I don’t know about,” I said.

There was a safe bet if I’d ever made one.

“You are not incorrect. First, however, I bring news from the south,” Malicia said.

I perked up at that. Black had been in the Free Cities for a few months but word trickled up to Callow slowly. Whatever I heard was always late enough to be largely irrelevant.

“Last I heard he was in Penthes,” I said.

“There are currently twelve claimants to the title of Exarch in the city,” the Empress informed me amusedly. “A little excessive even for him, but they are effectively out of the war until the matter is resolved. At last contact he was headed for Nicae, but with the latest developments I believe he’ll turn to Delos.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“It hasn’t fallen?” I said. “I thought the Tyrant was marching on it.”

It had drawn quite a bit of attention when an unheard-of villain had come out of nowhere and grilled the third of an army on his way to Atalante. Said city-state had been sacked and conquered a few weeks afterwards, its armies dispersed in the field. Apparently half the mercenaries Atalante had bought turned to banditry after the defeat and had then been press-ganged into the Tyrant’s army one band at a time. The Named and his army had moved towards Delos afterwards, which was the last I’d heard.

“The initial assault was repulsed,” Malicia informed me. “The Tyrant is sieging the city with his... usual flair.”

The last part was spoken with distaste.

“The man basically tore through an army on his own,” I said slowly. “And he was slapped down by a place known for its scribes ?”

“There are heroes in the city,” the Empress said.

Well, shit. That explained why Black was headed there, too.

“I don’t suppose we know the Names?” I asked.

“The White Knight is one,” she replied. “And a woman I believe you know, though she goes by a different face now: the Wandering Bard.”

I cursed. White Knight sounded ominous like all Hells, but the Bard was a pest I was more familiar with.

“Well, she was bound to turn up eventually,” I said. “That’s going to be a mess.”

“There are at least three others, but on those I’ve yet to acquire anything concrete,” the Empress added.

Five heroes. The usual number, when something was going to go horribly wrong for villains. Was there a specific term for that, I wondered? People used cluster for fish and herd for sheep, there had to be a term for heroes. A murder , I snorted. Or maybe a gaggle, like with cats. So Black was going to be stuck dealing with a full gaggle of heroes. That ought to make his year.

“Procer’s still staying out of it?” I said.

“Dearest Cordelia has been sending her disaffected soldiers to Nicae,” Malicia said. “More than ten thousand already and the number grows by the day. More importantly, she convinced Ashur to lift its restrictions on Nicean commerce – so they can actually afford to feed them. The fulcrum of the war will be the battle that host fights, the current conflicts are merely setting the stage.”

“Keeps her too busy to sniff around Callow, at least,” I muttered. “Small favours.”

The Empress took a hand off her lap and rested her chin on the palm, somehow managing elegance in a body not her own.

“Callow is what brings me here as it happens,” she said. “You’ve been rather busy of late, Catherine.”

That, I reflected, did not seem like the beginning of a pleasant conversation.

“Still learning the ropes,” I said. “There’s so much to do even three of me wouldn’t be on top of things.”

“Delegating to Baroness Kendal was the step in the right direction,” Malicia said. “Continue to find trustworthy individuals and invest them with authority.”

I cocked my head to the side.

“Not a lot of those around,” I admitted.

Most of the people I could rely on were in the Fifteenth, and I couldn’t keep piling civilian duties onto them. Their workload had already expanded massively with the way the legion had swelled.

“Then find leverage on people you do not trust and use them regardless,” the Empress said. “Murad has children in Kahtan and cares for them. A scare there would keep him in line. He has experience commanding a city guard and you need someone to head Laure’s.”

“I’m trying avoid importing leadership from Praes,” I said, trying to keep my tone not accusatory..

“The Empire decapitated Callow’s ruling class two generations in a row,” Malicia noted. “Train replacements, by all means, but you need people filling positions now . Through your actions you’ve begun to centralize authority in Callow without crafting an administration that can wield that power. The result of that can only be anarchy.”

I swallowed. I was, well, out of my depth here. The Empress sighed.

“You are young, younger than ever we were when we seized power,” she said. “I do not expect immediate flawlessness of you. What I can teach you, I will.”

She leaned back into her seat.

“Let us go over your actions in Southpool, as an exercise,” she said. “What do you believe the common perception is of what happened there?”

“A corrupt Praesi governess was removed,” I frowned.

“Forcefully,” Malicia said. “Strung up in front of the fortress gates for all to see.”

“The Empire isn’t exactly shy about making examples, as a rule,” I said.

“In exceptional cases,” the Empress said. “Governess Ife was not one. Removing her was necessary for your purposes, but the manner was incorrect. You should have had her assassinated discreetly and moved in your replacement.”

“If she just disappears then the point doesn’t get made,” I grunted.

That whole matter was still like an itch I couldn’t scratch, and going over it wasn’t exactly my idea of an agreeable evening. I listened anyway: the Empress hadn’t managed to command a pack of wolves like the High Lords for over forty years by looking pretty. If she had advice, it was worth hearing.

“It is made to the people it is meant for,” Malicia disagreed. “More than that, think on what the people of Southpool saw. Wasteland nobility, hung like a common Callowan criminal.”

“She acted like a common Callowan criminal,” I said, temper flaring as I struggled not to raise my voice.

“Every eye on Callow is on you, Catherine,” the Empress said. “ You are the person setting their cues . If what you employ is violence, in violence they will follow. Against all available targets.”

I rubbed at the bridge of my nose, then grunted.

“Fair,” I said. “Riots against the legions aren’t what I was going for. Still, I don’t have assassins to use. My closest equivalent is...“

“Currently checking the progress of your opponent,” Malicia completed for me, when I let the sentence trail. “The natural tool for you would be the Guild of Assassins, but you’ve other ideas.”

I grimaced. Of course she knew. No part of that had been a question.

“In the future,” she said, “have your mages use a more advanced version of the scrying spell formula. Apprentice will know several. The one you currently use is exceedingly easy to listen into. Heiress certainly has been, among others.”

That she wasn’t being smug about it actually kind of made it worse.

“Their existence as an entity breaks Tower law,” I said defensively.

“There has never been nor will there ever be a nation without hired killers,” Malicia replied. “You might, at best, disband the organized aspect of it for a few decades. The trade will still be plied as long as someone has a knife and another has coin.”

“So I should just allow a pack of murderers to do as they want because people are assholes?” I retorted. “What’s the point of even having a law against it then?”

“The purpose of law is not to define right and wrong, it is to regulate behaviour,” the Empress said. “You are a ruler now, Catherine. Your only concern should be control .”

She shrugged languidly.

“If you deem it necessary to assert greater control over the Guild of Assassins, do so,” she said. “But attempting to destroy it entirely would set you on a collision course with all of the Dark Guilds. You cannot rule a realm if you are at war with every institution in it.”

“Are you ordering me not to disband them?” I asked through gritted teeth.

Anything short of that wasn’t going to make me back down. The simulacrum the Empress was possessing studied me for a moment.

“No,” she finally said. “If you fail, it will be a learning experience. If you succeed – well, I have been faced with the occasional surprise over the years. I will warn you, however, that you do not currently have the resources to face them.”

I grimaced. Marchford had been one of the richest cities in Callow, before the rebellion. Before a demon had set camp for a few days over the silver mines, filling the streets with disaffected miners and their families. There was a reason enrolling in the Fifteenth was so popular at the moment. With bridge that was the main trade route in and out of the hills only just freshly raised after the Silver Spears had torched it, trade had yet to pick up. And that wasn’t even counting on the gaping hungry maw that was rebuilding the devastated city. I was beginning to regret having told Robber to torch that manor, since I’d been supposed to actually live in it.

“Apprentice told me the mines will be purged of contamination within a few months,” I said. “It’ll be easier after that.”

“Upon you return to Marchford,” Malicia said, “you will be presented with an offer by the Matron of the High Ridge tribe. It could prove a solution to your woes, though you should think long before accepting it.”

I frowned. High Ridge? Pickler’s tribe, that, and the reigning Matron would be her mother. Ominous.

“Make haste back to your holdings, Catherine,” the Empress said. You’ll find greater trouble there than you know – your bastard has been surprisingly competent in suppressing rumours.”

The meat-puppet leaned forward, the Dread Empress of Praes looking through it.

“But above all, do not think for a moment that Heiress being silent means she has forgotten you. You might be a legacy, Catherine Foundling, but then so is she .”

Lady Naibu twitched, then went still. The only sign of life there was the steady rise and fall of her chest.

“It’s going to be one of those years, isn’t it?” I sighed.

Interlude: Gate

“Oh, I get it. The real treasure was the people I had executed along the way!”
– Dread Emperor Irritant I, the Oddly Successful

“Something’s coming through,” Kilian said.

Dawn was beginning to warm the stones of Marchford’s central plaza, but there would be no bustle of humans today. There hadn’t been for half a fortnight: the Hellhound had closed off this entire section of the city and garrisoned it heavily at Apprentice’s recommendation. Nauk brushed off a speck of ash from the stripes on his shoulder that now marked him a legate of the Fifteenth, irritated at the way the burnt wood got everywhere. The very redhead who’d just handed him the latest bit of bad news had ordered for braziers full of holly and apple tree to be set up in all four corners of the plaza and kept ever-burning.

“How big, this time?” the orc asked.

The Senior Mage muttered in the mage tongue and squinted at the runes that formed in the air.

“Still minor,” she said. “The frequency is increasing, though. They’re building up to something.”

Nauk spat to the side.

“Those are scouts, Kilian,” he said. “Like a clan would send before a killing raid. They’re looking for weaknesses.”

Spikes of iron had been hammered into the stone in irregular patterns on the first day to make it harder for the Fae to step into Creation, but the border had been getting thinner with every dawn anyway. Juniper had prudently ordered that containment wards be set up around this section of the city before moving in legionaries, deploying most of the Fifteenth’s mages to attend the defences. Nauk had been put in charge of manning the defences with his jesha of two thousand, the largest combat deployment of the legion since the Liesse Rebellion. While Kilian went around marking stones and muttering to herself with her posse of mages following, he’d looked for more pragmatic means of making sure anything that wandered into the plaza didn’t make it any further.

Pickler had set up half a dozen engines of her own design on the rooftops that offered the best lines of fire, sappers huddling around them in quiet clusters even now. Fortifying the alleys was old hand for his legionaries, after the battles of Marchford and Liesse, but Nauk wouldn’t bet on stone doing much to hold back fairies. The scrawny little shits were basically magic poured into a body, as he understood it, and he’d seen the kind of damage a properly motivated mage could wreak. Grabbing his now-cold mug of tea from the table where he’d left it, the large orc rose to his feet and drained the bitter brew. Drinking leaf water still struck him as the most absurd of human habits, but unlike a good slab of meat the tea wouldn’t leave him indolent afterwards. One of the first lessons they taught young raiders, in the Waxing Moons: always hit the enemy after a meal, if you can. They get sloppy and slow.

There was no great flash of lightning or pretty lights, when the fairy entered Creation. A slight shimmer in the air, then a sparrow was flapping its wings at the centre of the iron spike maze. It narrowly avoided running into the iron-wrought invisible wall that had flattened the first of its kind to come through, skilfully weaving around it. Nauk left behind the informal command centre of his jesha, well behind fortifications and lines of legionaries, and strode to the edge of the plaza where he could get a better look. The fae-sparrow began threading through the maze, unaffected by any wind born of Creation as it flew.

“They’ve been watching from the other side the whole time,” Kilian said quietly.

Nauk had already deduced as much yesterday: the fae never made the same mistake twice. Kilian’s course track at the College had been the magic one, though, so he wasn’t surprised she hadn’t gotten her hand in the broth until now.

“No mischief in this,” the orc said. “They’re not behaving like tricksters. Something bigger and meaner is telling them what to do.”

“My wards wouldn’t even slow the Wild Hunt down,” the redheaded mage said. “So there’s that, at least.”

“Don’t know shit about fairies,” Nauk admitted.

Which wasn’t entirely true. He had an old family recipe for braising them with southern spices, but Kilian was quarter-fae and might be displeased by the revelation. Humans always got all offended when orcs mentioned eating other humans, like eating each other wasn’t the most natural state of Creation. You’d think they’d never eaten a rabbit, by the way their hackles got raised. You just had to accept that, to the Clans, everyone else might as well be rabbits.

“The Tower might have reliable records about them, but anything we have is useless,” the mage said, brushing back a strand of her short red hair. “Whichever is lord and lady of what might change thrice before one of our days is over. There’s supposedly four Courts of Arcadia – one for each season – but the delineation between them isn’t clear. They don’t all exist at the same time, either.”

“That sounds like a problem for General Juniper to figure out,” Nauk said cheerfully. “And the Boss, whenever she gets back.”

“She’s only a few days away now,” Kilian said absent-mindedly.

The orc eyed the human amusedly until she coughed to hide a blush and looked away. He had a feeling there’d been precious little military business discussed during that scrying session. It was an open secret in the upper echelons of the Fifteenth that Kilian and Cat were involved, though only among officers who’d been there since the founding of the legion. The fresh blood wasn’t trusted yet. Nauk didn’t have much against Callowans – they were steady in a shield wall and they died spitting in the enemy’s face, so there was spine to respect – but he wouldn’t be trusting any of those boys until he’d shared a proper battle with them. There was an unspoken line in the sand between the legionaries who’d fought in the Liesse campaign and those who hadn’t, one that had overtaken the weaker lines once drawn by race.

The sparrow made it out of the maze after a little while more, landing on the ground. The bid’s form shimmered and in its place came a kneeling man wearing silken robes all in shades of blue. Pale-skinned, like the locals, though fine-boned and taller. He was the first one to made it all the way through, and that did not bode well.

“Get that thing out of my backyard, Kilian,” Nauk ordered. “Before it can make a mess.”

The Senior Mage raised a hand, then made a fist. There was an eldritch crackle and the smell of ashes spread across the plaza as thin spikes of light gathered around the redhead’s hands. The fae’s silhouette twitched, but it did not disappear. Kilian gritted her teeth.

“O lords of iron, bar my gate through your embrace,” she barked. “Choke it that trespasses, smother in coils unmoving.”

The twitches identified until there was a sound like bone breaking and the fae dispersed into thin air. Kilian panted for a moment afterwards.

“They’ve got a foothold,” she said. “Prepare for combat.”

“ Finally ,” Nauk grinned, rolling his shoulder with a loud crack.

The legate cast a look at the legionaries forming a steel-clad circle around the plaza, dug in behind wooden spikes and fields of caltrops.

“UP AND AT IT, YOU WHORESONS,” he called out. “THEY’VE COME KNOCKING.”

All around the formation swords were drawn, shields raised and crossbows armed. The veterans who’d defended this very city from devils now ready to give the boot to the latest idiots to believe they could get a slice of Catherine Foundling’s fiefdom. That was probably the best part about following Squire, Nauk thought. There was always someone trying to knock her off and they made the most hilarious faces when fed their own entrails.

“Outer boundaries are holding for now,” Kilian said quietly. “My mages are feeding the wards, though, so don’t expect magical support.”

“I brought my own support,” Nauk said, baring his teeth at the spindly scorpions Pickler had built.

Whatever arcane bullshit had been making it hard for the fairies to cross was gone now, the orc saw. Before there’d never been more than one coming across at a time – the only time two cats had manifested, they’d disappeared before even touching the ground – but now he could count at least three dozen shimmers in the air. The twinkly bastards must have been out of sparrows, because what came out was over thirty tall men and women in splendid court dress. Long-sleeved tunics of frost and woven shadows played off dresses of snow and bones, the fae wearing them even more striking than the otherworldly clothes. They were not humans, Nauk thought. Their faces were too long, their eyes too large and bright. Their teeth were the teeth of killers, not prey. Shades of skin went from dark as ebony to driven snow, not a single one of them resembling another. All were armed. Spears of bone and bronze, swords of translucent ice set with lapis-lazuli, even a few bows of dead wood whose string appeared to crafted from wind.

“The Fair Folk,” Kilian said, tone halfway between longing and fear.

“Twits should have worn armour,” Nauk grunted, unimpressed.

One of the ladies idly touched an iron spike with her foot. It shattered like glass. So much for that line of defence, the legate thought.

“Lovely children,” the same fae spoke, tone carrying everywhere without ever being loud. “Who speaks for you?”

Nauk pushed aside the legionaries in the front line and made his way through. Kilian followed, hands hidden behind her back. Some of the legionaries had almost dumbstruck look on their faces, the orc saw. Mostly humans. There’d been something lilting in the fairy’s voice, like a buzzing in his ears, but after years of dealing with the Red Rage it might as well have been tickling.

“Legate Nauk of the Fifteenth Legion,” the orc introduced himself.

He’d stopped sixty paces away, though he still felt exposed so far from the shield wall.

“Senior Mage Kilian, of the same,” the redhead added a moment later.

The fae’s gaze lingered on the mage, but turned to the orc soon enough. She smiled in a way that was probably meant to be enchanting. She might have succeeded, if she didn’t look like a skinny pale pack of twigs in a dress. Nauk like women a little greener, and with a talent for engineering.

“So strong,” the fae praised. “So wilful. This will be a day to remember.”

What was it with supernatural creatures and thinking creepy worked for them?

“You got a name?” the orc asked.

“I am the Lady of Snags and Bones,” she smiled. “The-“

“You’re trespassing,” Nauk interrupted flatly.

She looked a little miffed at that, the first time her mask of perfection was marred.

“This land belongs to the Lady of Marchford,” he continued. “You’re walking her street and breathing her air, without permission. Fuck off.”

It might have been for the best he’d never taken any of the diplomacy classes, Nauk mused.

“Ah, but we like it here,” one of the men said. “I think we’ll stay.”

There was a round of perfect laughter from the rest of the fae. The man strode forward and bowed theatrically.

“I am-“

“I don’t really care,” Nauk admitted bluntly.

“Nauk, let the man finish,” Kilian chided. “We’ll need more than one name for the report.”

“There will be no report,” the Lady of Snags and Bones smiled. “This place belongs to Arcadia now, and we do not bother with such bores in the Land Resplendant.”

“You must have many questions, Legate Nauk,” the man said in a conciliatory tone. “We will help you in this.”

“Only the one, really,” the orc said.

“Ask us, dearest one,” the woman encouraged.

“Iron,” Nauk of the Waxing Moons said, baring sharp fangs. “Does it spoil the taste?”

“Pardon?” the man said, blinking in surprise.

“For when you end up in the cookpot,” he explained.

Kilian finished casting the signal, the number five in Miezan numerals forming out of fire above them, and the scorpions began spitting out bolts of cold iron. The orc unsheathed his sword and began backing away as the first wave of bolts speared a handful of fairies, dragging out horrifying screams as their veins turned dark and pulsing all over their bodies. Now, typically speaking, would have been the dead moment between two scorpion volleys when the sappers reloaded the engines. These were not the classic design of the Legions of Terror, however, they were children of Senior Sapper Pickler of the High Ridge tribe. Bolts dropped down from wooden magazines, a lever was cocked and the scorpions fired again .

“LEGIONARIES, FORWARD!”

Commander Jwahir, one his Senior Tribune after – well, even now thinking of that too much was likely to make him lose control, so he forced his thoughts out of that path. Jwahir’s voice had been the one calling out, the Taghreb well-briefed on their defensive plans and her role in them. Even with the steady stream of scorpion fire coming from the rooftops, the fairies were not pinned down. Immediately they scattered in all directions, which unfortunately involved down the path of Nauk’s own retreat. The so-called Lady of Snags and Bones was one of two that did, as well as some dark-skinned fae with a long barbed spear.

“This could have been painless for all of you,” the Lady mourned, advancing with a sword that could have been either crystal or ice.

A crossbow bolt from the ranks sailed straight for her neck and she batted it aside without even looking.

“I feel like this might be the weak part of this plan,” Kilian said, hands quickly tracing runes in the air even as she retreated with him.

“Don’t be a killjoy,” Nauk said. “How often do we get to kill anything ourselves, these days?”

“ Us killing them is the weak part,” the mage replied.

The Lady leapt forward like a great cat but the orc was ready for her. His rectangular legionary’s shield caught the translucent blade and it bounced off the red-painted steel, though not before heavily denting the surface. Nauk had been a heavy before being an officer, so he wasn’t armed like a regular: his longsword swung before she could retreat. She ducked under the swing with a mocking laugh, scoring a blow on his greaves that frosted over immediately. Fucking fairies, now he’d have to requisition another set. Kilian would have been in more trouble than him, since she didn’t have a shield of her own, but when the other fae came for her she barked out a word in the arcane tongue and lightning flashed. The fairy parried the bolt of electricity with its spear without missing a beat and went to run through her throat only to hastily retreat when the lightning swung around and went for him again.

New trick, that. Her talks with Apprentice must be paying off. Feet steady, Nauk continued retreating with his shield up even as the Lady continued to assault him. She was too nimble for him to get a proper hit in, especially when wearing a full set of plate. Kilian kept her opponent away by weaving her streak of lightning, constantly murmuring under her breath even as she broke it into separate pieces and finally managed to sink part of it into her opponent’s shoulder. The fae twitched uncontrollably, skin burning until a volley of crossbow bolts from their left put him out of his misery.

“You cannot defeat the Court,” the Lady of Snags and Bones snarled, face turned ugly by hatred. “We will not die, will not relent, until we have our due.”

Her strike sheared off the upper third of Nauk’s shield but the legate smashed the rest into her stomach. She flinched, which bought him just long enough to toss the useless thing at her head. She batted that away easily enough and even managed to catch his downwards swing with her sword. Muscles flexing, Nauk tried to force his blade down. Useless , he realized. Even one-handed she was stronger than him and worse her pretty little sword was digging into goblin steel. A crack appeared, then the longsword shattered as she smirked triumphantly. She thought he was unarmed, now. Orcs are never unarmed. He lunged forward and his fangs sunk into her throat, his useless remains of a sword clattering against the ground. Nauk ripped out a chunk and pushed on the the ground, swallowing bloodless flesh as the Lady screamed. Ugh. Tasted like bad pork. A spear of flame erupted from Kilian’s hand and dispersed the Lady of Snags and Bones for good.

“A gorget would have covered the throat,” Nauk told the puddle of water. “That’s why we wear armour, you bloody glittering amateur .”

The closing wall of shields and the crossbows fired from behind them had managed to pick off the fae not run through by Pickler’s repeating scorpions. The Fifteenth Legion was, once again, master of the field. Nauk returned for lines as cheers spread, Kilian at his side.

“We’ll need to send Juniper a report,” he said. “First incursion was repulsed, but it won’t be the last.”

As if to prove him right, a sharp keen immediately erupted in the centre of the plaza. He glanced back, and the way there was only a single shimmer in the air was not as reassuring as it should have been.

“Kilian,” he growled urgently.

The mage was already looking at her warding runes, face pale.

“There’s nothing I can do to stop that,” she spoke in a low voice. “Nauk, whatever it is it’s huge . It has a bigger draw on the wards that the last band put together.”

The moment he was behind the shield wall he began barking orders. Whatever was crossing, they were hitting it with everything the moment it was corporeal. He’d been expecting some sort of giant winter monster, but what actually arrived was a single woman. Decked in an armour of twisted dead wood from head to toe, her long dark hair was the only part of her visible under the helmet – save for the eyes, an eerie unnatural blue. A sheathed longsword was at her hip and a spear made entirely of bronze was in her hand. The fae glanced at the storm of arrows and bolts headed for her, then tapped the bottom of her spear against the ground. Frozen out of the air, the projectiles fell in useless piles.

“We may have a problem,” Kilian said.

Mist rose from the bolts on the ground, obscuring the field of vision. Nauk’s officers were not prone to panic, though, and ranks tightened quietly. The mist thickened, then began swirling. Wicked-looking shards of ice began to form in the whirling mess and the legate grimaced at the idea of that spell hitting his lines. One of which, he noticed with a flare of anger, was splitting in two. A single man in robes passed through them, scowling heavily at the growing storm even as the ranks closed seamlessly behind him. Dark skin, spectacles, could stand to lose a few pounds. Apprentice had finally decided to intervene. The Named strode into the storm, tracing symbols, and a heartbeat later it erupted into a column of steam. The fae stood unruffled where it had been, pointing her spear at the Soninke.

“Do you have any idea,” Apprentice snapped, “how many experiments I’ve had to put on hold to come here?”

Nauk choked out a laugh. The warlock’s get was in a mood – this was going to hurt . A dozen blades of ice formed in the air in front of the spear and shot off in Apprentice’s direction, so swift they were but pale blurs. The mage extended a hand and they were yanked to the side, passing to his left before turning around his back and forming into a single large spiked sphere as they returned to the sender. Kilian let out a sharp breath. The orc glanced at her curiously.

“He rewrote the formula halfway through,” she said.

“That’s nice,” Nauk said.

“Nauk,” she said. “That’s like... solving an equation with blind variables, replacing those variables with the values you want to get an entirely different result and doing the whole thing in the span of three heartbeats .”

She sounded admiring, and more than a little envious.

“There can’t be more than six people alive today who can do that,” she said.

“Look, now he’s making a friend,” Nauk contributed helpfully.

The fae was hovering in the air now, desperately trying to reach for its sword even as Apprentice glared at it.

“Whoever sent you is still listening, right?” the Soninke said. “Allow me to make this perfectly clear: if you interrupt my research again, you will be the next test subject .”

Apprentice closed his fist and the fae wrenched into a ball with a sick crunch before falling to the ground. The Soninke was already walking away, complaining under his breath.

“I will abuse my rank to get out of writing the report for this,” Nauk informed Kilian, making a tactical retreat before the redhead could protest.

Crowned

“That slip of a girl from Rhenia is playing ruler, coming south with her pretty little army. I’ll have driven her out of Brus by winter, then we can turn our attentions to real threats like the Princess of Aisne.”
– Extract from the correspondence of Prince Dagobert of Lange, dated four months before the fall of Lange

Routine was something Cordelia embraced.

There were only so many hours in a day, to her regret, which made it important to regiment them so she could get the most out of what she had. Rising with dawn, she broke her fast with her closest advisors and took measure of any difficulties they might have encountered. Afterwards she walked the length of the fortress-city’s ramparts, allowing the brisk morning air to finish waking her as she paused to talk with soldiers. It was important, particularly in Lycaonese lands, to have the love of the army. The principality of Rhenia as she’d inherited it was more an army with a land than a land with an army, every institution in it shaped so that they could support country-wide mobilization at any moment. It had been decades since the Chain of Hunger had crossed the Three Rivers in numbers larger than a few hundreds, but her people had long memories: there’d been a time where every spring had thousands of hungry ratlings throwing themselves at the walls. Those days would come again, she knew as every Hasenbach before her had known deep in their bones. And when they did, her principality would be prepared.

For all that, in the two years since she’d become the Prince of Rhenia she had attempted to broaden the horizons of her people. While Lycaonese soldiers fought and died to keep the rest of Procer pristine, southern princes feasted and grew rich while sneering at the coarseness of the very soldiery saving them from the perils of the north. Their lands were fertile, compared to the rocky northern fields, and the numbers of southerners had been swelling for generations. Until recently, anyway. Since the First Prince had died, the rest of the Principate had taken to devouring itself with ugly zeal. The reforms Cordelia had dreamed of as a child, of tying the Lycaonese principalities together through common trade laws and the absence of borders, had been burnt up by the fires of civil war. None of the northern rulers were interested in implementing economic or diplomatic reforms when there might be an Alamans army at their doorstep demanding submission any day. Clearly, any progress to be made would have to wait until a First Prince of Princess was elected.

Or so Cordelia had thought when she was still a child of ten, her mother serving as her regent after a ratling raid took her father’s life. Margaret Hasenbach, once Margaret Papenheim, had never been entirely comfortable ruling the principality. She’d been a field commander for her brother in Hannoven until her marriage and had always balked at having to rule Rhenia when others did the fighting for her. Cordelia had begun taking on responsibilities as seneschal of the keep by age twelve, and by age thirteen effectively ran the fortress and its dependencies while Margaret Ironhand rooted out the ratling nests infesting the mountains. She’d died when Cordelia was fourteen, not by the blades of her enemies but by the affliction known as the bloodless heart. Priests could not heal what had been born weak: they could soothe the pains of the children of the Heavens, but not reverse what the Gods Above had wrought. Cordelia’s uncle, the Prince of Hannoven, had served as her regent for the last year before she came of age but he’d never presumed to contradict her in anything.

Uncle Klaus, a childless widower who’d flatly refused to remarry after the death of his deeply -loved wife, had always treated her more as a daughter than a niece. He’d gone as far as naming her his heir presumptive above any of the branch Papenheims, a decision that had caused some unrest when made official. Even now he was in Rhenia as often as Hannoven, the most trusted of all her councillors. She’d not been shy in leveraging her uncle’s fame as a military commander when forging the four Lyaonese principalities into a single united front, one that would give pause to any southern prince who would command the allegiance of any single Lycaonese ruler by force of arms. In some ways the reforms she’d sought as a youth had come to pass: in her correspondence she now spoke not only for Rhenia and Hannoven but also for Bremen and Neustria, an alliance the match of any of those setting the rest of the Principate aflame. And yet the Alamans and Arlesite rulers she wrote to insisted on treating her as an idiot child, to be deceived into supporting them by honeyed words and empty promises.

Cordelia Hasenbach was nineteen and well-bred, so she did not throw tantrums, but some of the letters she received made her wish she could choke the southerners the same way her mother had famously done to a ratling warlord. Correspondences, as it happened, was what occupied her time for half a bell after touring the fortress walls. On this particular morning she chose to read her missives in the squat hall overlooking the training yard, allowing the sound of drilling recruits to wash over her. A single cup of watered-down wine stood by the sheaths of parchment covering her table, sparsely indulged in. Uncle Klaus was ‘keeping her company’ as she worked, which meant he was resting his elbows on the balustrade, on his third skin of mead and regularly heckling the recruits below. Decorum was rarely a skill Lycaonese rulers prized, to her despair. Cordelia put down the letter she’d been reading and reached for the wine, allowing herself a fuller sip than usual.

A shame she despised the sensation of being drunk. After that letter, it felt almost warranted.

“Your father got that same look on his face, whenever people wanted him to arbitrate farming disputes,” Uncle Klaus said, laughter in his eyes.

The Prince of Rhenia put down her cup gingerly, touching her pristine lips with a cloth as etiquette dictated when a highborn lady drank spirits.

“Not an inapt metaphor, considering the pettiness of what was put to ink,” she admitted.

Klaus snorted, fingers coming up to put a semblance of order to his salt-and-pepper beard. It was getting shaggy, Cordelia noted. She’d have to arrange for a barber to attend him tonight, one that would not be cowed by her uncle’s ferocious scowling.

“You’re still talking to those idiots down south?” he said. “I don’t know where you got that patience of yours from, because it’s certainly not your mother.”

“One of those southern princes is likely to rule Procer in the years to come,” Cordelia said. “Cultivating a civil relationship before the ascension can only be to our benefit.”

The older man chuckled, dropping down on the seat across from her and bringing the skin of mead to his mouth to pull at it.

“And how is that civility going?” he asked.

Well-bred ladies did not scowl, Cordelia told herself. They were not, however, above having a man’s favourite fur coverlet disappeared and replaced with a fancy velour one. She’d even see to it it was embroidered in the Arlesite way, with fragments of courtly poetry and scenes of duels fought for praise and honour.

“Cleves and Hainaut pledge neutrality in all fights to come,” she said. “If they take any more losses they will no longer be able to effectively watch over the Tomb.”

“They never should have sent men south,” Uncle Klaus growled. “Just because the Dead King’s being quiet doesn’t mean he’s not watching. They have a duty , like we do.”

Cordelia rather thought he uncle was doing those particular princes injustice, but she did not comment. The principalities of Cleves and Hainaut formed, with Rhenia and Hannoven, what should be considered Procer’s most vital line of defence. If the Kingdom of the Dead began looking outwards again, they would be the ones charged with holding the line until southern armies could be mustered. The fair-haired Prince of Rhenia agreed with her uncle that above all those rulers should look to seeing their walls fully manned, but these were ultimately Alamans princes. They were more involved in the Ebb and the Flow than northerners, bound by the intricate webs of alliance that spanned the centre of the Principate. Neutrality from the onset would have been difficult for them to maintain, with their cousins and nephews taking up arms so close to their own borders.

“Those pledges are the only pleasant news this day has brought,” Cordelia said. “The rest is... unpromising.”

“Aequitan and their allies got whipped all the way out of Creusens,” Klaus frowned. “That should knock them out of the war. With his back secure, Lange will go after Aisne – the winner of that tussle will get the crown, by my reckoning.”

“Princess Aenor of Aequitan raised another army as of the last fortnight,” the fair-haired prince said. “Levies armed with dwarven weapons. They will resume their offensive as soon as they have gathered in sufficient numbers.”

The Prince of Hannoven scowled.

“That’s the third host she wrecked on the field,” he said. “Who’d be fool enough to lend her the coin for a fourth?”

“The Pravus Bank,” Cordelia replied quietly.

Fury flickered across the older man’s face until he mastered it.

“You told them it’s Praesi gold, Cordelia,” he hissed. “This flirts with godsdamned treason.”

It had taken her years, to ferret out that it was the Tower pouring gold into the defeated princes of Procer. Years and the help of her cousin, become the Augur by the grace of the Heavens. She’d related that truth to every ruler in Procer within the month after she’d acquired solid proof, to warn them from allowing the Dread Empress to continue fanning the flames of civil war. To no avail. The still took loans, still raised armies with them, and after near two decades of strife hatreds now ran so deep princes would rather be up to their neck in Praesi debt rather than allow their rivals to triumph. It was madness, the worst kind of madness. The first fluctuating alliances had eventually turned into a handful of steady blocs that bloodied each other on the field every summer without ever coming closer to the crown, ruining the very Principate they wanted to rule. Fields were going fallow, trade was effectively dead and rulers spent peasants like coin. The sheer disregard princes where showing to the men and women they were supposed to rule disgusted her deeply.

“They will not listen, Uncle Klaus,” she said tiredly. “They do not care anymore. Dagobert of Lange demands we raise our armies and support his claim, or suffer brutal taxes under his reign. Constance of Aisne offers to recognize me as overlord of all Lycaonese if I assault Dagobert’s back, as if this sort of splintering would not effectively dismantle the Principate.”

“So let them mutilate each other,” Klaus said. “They don’t deserve our help.”

Cordelia allowed herself to sigh. This kind of thinking, she knew, was common among Lycaonese. Let the southerners kill each other, what did the people of the mountains care for it? It would also be the death of the greatest nation Calernia had ever seen. A brutal but swift civil war would not have allowed for entire regions of the Principate to grow to despise each other. This drawn-out farce, however? As of this moment, Procer was effectively divided between four or five kingdoms that would rather see their cities burn than allow one of the others to rule over them. Another decade of this and it would be the end of the Principate. The fracture lines were already visible and growing deeper by the year.

“We have a duty, Uncle,” Cordelia said.

“To fucking Dagobert of Lange?” Klaus laughed. “I wouldn’t toss the bastard a copper if he was begging on the street. We owe that man nothing .”

“Think beyond our borders,” the blonde woman said. “Think of what it means , if Procer splinters.”

“It means we don’t send coin south ever again to men who’ve never seen the Grave,” the Prince of Hannoven said coldly. “It means green boys who’ve never fought a ratling don’t get to feast away spring while my people die for their sake.”

“Levant will gobble up at least Orense,” Cordelia assessed clinically. “Likely Segovia as well. Tenerife will become either one of the Free Cities or a dependency of Helike. The Dread Empire will take Bayeux and Orne before a decade has passed.”

“And why is that our business?” Klaus grunted.

“When the Dead King rouses his armies and crosses the lakes,” Cordelia said quietly, “ who stands with us ?”

She met her uncle’s eyes.

“When the Chain of Hunger gathers the might for an invasion, who bolsters our strength?” she said.

“We’ve held them back since before there was a Principate,” her uncle replied.

“We turned them a way as a nation that spreads from here to Valencis,” Cordelia said. “That is why Procer exists, Uncle. Because Triumphant slaughtered so many of us we had to band together as a nation or see ourselves devoured by our neighbours.”

“So now you want us to bleed for some princeling in silk,” Klaus said bitterly. “That’s always the way, isn’t it? The south makes a mess and we foot the bill.”

There was a truth in that, and for all that Cordelia had eschewed many of her people’s customs she was not beyond feeling that bitterness herself. Was she to entrust the fate of her people to a grasping idiot like the Prince of Lange? To the Princess of Aequitan, who would rather take Praesi gold than bow her head for the sake of the Principate?

“No,” she said. “Not this time.”

“Cordelia?” her uncle said.

Cordelia Hasenbach felt serenity take hold of her, for the first time in years. Her path was clear, finally. If no one else, then I.

“Send messengers,” she ordered. “To every tower, every hold, every fortress. We gather for war. Anyone we can afford to take from the defences comes with us.”

The greying man frowned.

“And who do we fight for?”

“The First Prince of Procer,” she said. “Cordelia Hasenbach, first of her name.”

Gods save them all, but she would salvage a nation out of this madness. No matter the cost.

Heroic Interlude: Arraignment

“Sixty-seven: putting an arrow in a villain during their monologue is a perfectly acceptable method of victory. Heroes believing otherwise do not get to retire.”
– Two Hundred Heroic Axioms, unknown author

Delos was organized in tiers. It reminded Hanno of the city he’d been born in, Arwad. Smaller than Smyrna, the capital of the Thalassocracy, it had been even more strictly regimented than the larger city. There were differences, though, that grew more apparent the longer he spent here. In Arwad people lived and died in the citizenship tier they’d been born to, while in Delos positions in the Secretariat and the attending privileges were... fluid. The city itself was arranged to reflect this: behind the walls, districts were built on clockwise platforms that spiralled higher and thinner until they reached the House of Ink and Parchment. The district where one lived was determined by committees of Secretariat, the arrangements subject to monthly review according to performance and seniority. A botched report could see you lowered by a district, reaching fifty years in the civil service could earn you a manse in the shade of the city’s centre of power.

The way the city had been built had made it easy to defend in the siege. The Tyrant’s forces had broken through the gates once and found the lowest district turned into a killing field, the stairways up to the second district collapsed or barred as the walls of the houses above effectively became a set of inner walls. The Helikean madman had nearly won anyway. It was not his professional army he’d sent as the first wave: only mercenaries and forced conscripts from the people of Atalante. The sheer disregard the Tyrant had spent their lives with had almost managed to buckle the defences, until Hanno had intervened with his associates. Revealing there were heroes in the city had been tipping his hand early, but it was better than allowing Delos to fall. Blooding his team had been necessary, anyway. The sisters had never seen full scale battle before and the Valiant Champion had only ever worked alone. What the Bard did or did not know was buried under a sea of bad liquor, but to his understanding her Role was not meant for fighting.

As for him? To be the White Knight was to be an instrument of war in the hands of the Heavens. His years in the Chamber of Borrowed Lives had shown him the Role behind his Name, even as his skills grew, and made his hazy understanding of this into an irrefutable fact. Hanno was the veteran of a hundred battles, each more desperate than the last, but he’d not spilled blood himself before that day. Or perhaps he had. The sorceries of the Gigantes were beyond the comprehension of men, even those touched by the Gods Above. The Tyrant’s response to the repulsing of his first attack had been... unexpected, though not entirely unforeseen. The walls of Delos were sixty feet high and almost half as deep, the most impressive curtain walls in the Free Cities by a fair margin, which made the city brutally costly to assault. The villain, instead of preparing to starve out the defenders, had instead built a set of large stone towers and filled them with siege engines.

The Secretariat had been sceptical these could be a threat and denied him the permit to launch a sortie to disrupt the construction. The Bard had run around their table and tipped over their inkwells in protest, which had gotten all of them thrown out as well as fined for “disruption of order”, “miscreantism” and “wanton waste of Secretariat resources”. Hedge and Ash had been quite displeased with her afterwards, but the White Knight did not judge. The Tyrant, once the towers were built, had linked them with rope bridges and brought forward the prisoners. Six hundred and sixty-six per tower, men and women and children from Atalante. And just like that, as Hanno watched from the walls, the Tyrant had them butchered like animals. Sacrificed so that the ground around the towers would rise into the air, floating until it was above the height of Delos’ walls. They’d been bombarding the city ever since, night and day. The Hedge Wizard, tanned face paling in horror, had tried to compose herself by noting Praesi mages would have done better. They’d only have needed half as many sacrifices per tower.

They’d lost the first district again a fortnight later after Helikean infantry forced the gate under the cover of siege engines, and if the Champion had not fought her way through the host until she could hold the gates by herself for a bell the city might well have fallen. Hanno had led the counterattack of the beleaguered defenders from the ranks, the Ashen Priestess covering the host with her power so that any wound not mortal would heal within moments. It still might not have been enough, had her sister Hedge not hypnotized the Helikean officers into giving a hundred contradicting orders to their men. The Tyrant’s soldiers had been driven out, then the iron gate melted and fused with the stone so it could no longer open. It would not be enough. Hence why Hanno was here on the walls, waiting for a permit.

“You could at least look like you’re brooding,” the Wandering Bard complained. “At best you’re contemplative.”

Aoede’s feet were dangling off the walls, her ever-present flask in hand. He could smell the hard liquor from where he stood, the breeze carrying it like some toxic fume. The Wandering Bard looked like a hundred other girls from Nicae, full-figured and with dark curls going down to her back, but the stained leathers and the lute slung over her back set her apart. So did the way her liver had yet to kill her. Every Named learned the trick to burn poison out of their bodies early in their career and it could be used to sober yourself up, but as far as he could tell she didn’t use it. Interesting, though not as much as the way she sometimes moved between places faster than should be possible. Aoede often acted the fool, but she knew too much to be harmless. Of all the heroes in his band, she was the one he was wariest of. The others had their motivations worn on their sleeves, but the Bard? Behind the haze of drunkenness there was an intent he had yet to figure out.

“Brooding is pointless,” Hanno said in tradertalk. “If something distresses you, act upon it. Otherwise you surrender all right to complain.”

“So speaks the Choir of Judgement,” she said. “Though you’re fairly moderate for one of theirs. Most would have executed the upper Secretariat and taken command of the siege after out little tower episode.”

He eyed her silently for a moment.

“I do not judge,” he finally said. “That is not my Role.”

“You’re going to be a fun one, I think,” Aoede grinned.

Hanno wasn’t quite sure how to take that, so he let the matter go.

“Do you have a reason for seeking me out?” he asked.

“Secretariat just validated your permit,” the Bard said. “Tonight’s the night.”

The White Knight looked upwards, at the floating towers and the people manning them.

“Good.”

—

The earth under the towers gave a dim red glow in the dark, though it was not enough that torches and magelights were not used all over the floating platforms. The moon was near-gone tonight and behind clouds to boot, so the dark silhouette of the massive eagle was not greeted with shouts of alarm. Hedge was as graceless in this form as when she was human, but she managed a landing at the feet of the easternmost tower without crashing into the wall. The other three heroes riding her back, tied to it with ropes, slid down quietly. The Bard was gone again, no one knew where. Hanno adjusted the longsword at his belt when the moment he touched solid ground and put on his barbute. The solid steel helmet with the T-shaped opening lacked the protection of a visor, which most warriors preferred when wearing plate as he was, but the White Knight preferred the better visibility. The Champion and the Priestess came to his side a moment later.

Though they were both women, the two were a study in differences. The Ashen Priestess was tall and slender where the Champion was short and bulky, the first aggressively serene where the second always wore a sunny smile. The only commonalities were the tanned skin common to Levant and the Free Cities as well as his own native Ashur and the dark hair – though Priestess wore hers short while Champion kept hers in a thick braid that reached halfway down her back. As befitting of a martial Named the Champion was decked in plate even thicker than his own, her helmet forged to look like a snarling badger. Ash, as her more gregarious sister insisted she should be called, wore a mere coat of silvery mail covering a padded tunic. He could feel the power wafting from it, though it was not sorcery. Names like the Priestess’ relied on the magic of priests instead of mages, that gift of the Heavens that wove miracles beyond understanding.

The shape of the massive eagle shuddered, then collapsed into a kneeling woman. The blood relation between the Hedge Wizard and the Priestess could be seen with even cursory examination, the two sisters sharing much of the cast of their face as well as their build. The eyes were where they differed the most. Ash’s hickory-like eyes were common in the Free Cities but Hedge’s eclectic arcane bag of tricks had come at a cost: one of her eyes was blue, the other a vivid shade of yellow. The mage’s colourful patchwork robes were covered with barely-visible arcane symbols and more pockets than she could possibly be needing. Hedge stayed kneeling for a moment, the coughed out a few feathers.

“Gods,” she gasped. “I’m going to be craving rabbit for weeks.”

Champion helped her up to her feet, then clapped her back. Hanno saw the mage repress a wince.

“Eagle trick, very great,” the Levantine heroine said, her tradertalk heavily accented. “Witch can have many rabbits after victory.”

“Wizard,” Hedge corrected absent-mindedly. “It’s a genderless noun.”

The Champion ignored that as cheerfully as she usually did.

“We shouldn’t linger,” Priestess said. “We’ll be seen.”

Hanno cleared his throat quietly to draw their attention.

“Swiftness will be of the essence,” he said. “If they cut the bridges between the towers, this will get much more difficult.”

“Kill invaders quick,” the Champion agreed. “Then go back for parade.”

“You can fill out the paperwork for that, if you want one,” Hedge muttered under her breath.

The White Knight grimaced at the thought. It would take at least a fortnight to get the form to request the request form.

“You know the plan,” he said. “Let’s end this for good.”

They moved seamlessly, what they lacked in experience made up by the instincts of their Names. The door at the bottom of the tower was barred but the greataxe the Champion used – almost as tall as she was, and used single-handedly with her large shield on the other hand – smashed it down with a single swing. The hall behind it was swarming with Helikean infantry but Hanno did not waste time engaging them. The Priestess and the Champion would take care of it. Calmly unsheathing his longsword, the White Knight headed for the stairs. A cluster of soldiers tried to get into his way, shields raised, but a trickle of power to his legs had him smashing into the mass of them like a trebuchet stone. They scattered under the impact and Hedge hurried behind him, dropping a ball of multi-coloured light in their midst that exploded into bindings. His first kill of the night came when a spearman atop the stairs thrust the tip towards his head. The flat of his blade slapped away the shaft, then a twist of the wrist buried the point into the man’s throat. Without stopping he flicked out the sword, the Wizard pushing the body below when it fell on her.

Hedge’s assessment had been that the ritual room would be close to the middle of the tower and she was proved correct: a heavily barred iron door with glowing runes on it was the only thing on the second level. Letting the Wizard finagle her way through the wards would have taken too long and he could already hear soldiers rushing downstairs, so Hanno drew on his Name. The Light flooded his veins, harsh like a desert wind hollowing out his insides, and it wreathed his hand in a gauntlet. He punched through the iron like it was parchment, ripping out the bar holding the door in place on the other side.

“That’s one way to do it,” Hedge said.

She hurried inside anyway. The room was covered with ritual symbols, painted in what he was fairly sure was blood. In the centre, surrounded by a pentagram whose every corner bore line joining the broader web of runes, was a single perfect disc of obsidian.

“Stoneglass,” the Wizard grimaced. “Of course they’d use the most unstable kind of anchor available.”

“Is this a problem?” Hanno asked.

“There’s a not insignificant chance the ritual will blow up instead of converting,” she said.

The White Knight frowned.

“How not insignificant?”

“Eh,” Hedge said. “It’ll work out. Probably.”

He did not think that had been meant to be reassuring, which was good because he was not reassured in the slightest. Before he could reply, the mage muttered something under her breath and strode into the symbols. Immediately a dozen orbs of red light appeared in the air, but the Wizard snapped her fingers and a bluebird slipped out of her sleeve, wings flapping as it chirped merrily. A dozen rays of fire instantly incinerated it, but by the time its ashes fell to the ground Hedge was barely a foot away from the disk. A spherical barrier of transparent force formed around it but the Wizard whispered an incantation and it started flickering until it disappeared entirely. She deftly placed a polished pebble on the disk and backed away hastily.

“We don’t have long,” she said, absent-mindedly producing a little mirror to catch a ray of fire and turn it back against the orb that had shot it out. “Are the others done?”

Hanno cast an eye down the stairs. There was a plume of ash as Priestess dispersed a man out of existence with a word, and not a single person or object in the vicinity of the Champion remained unbroken. She, at least, seemed to be having a good time.

“More or less,” he replied.

He whistled sharply, drawing their attention. The Champion waved, Priestess sighed and immediately began making her way up. Hanno’s attention turned to the stairs leading above and he frowned. He’d heard soldiers earlier and prepared himself to cover Hedge’s back, but none had arrived. That was not a good sign. The White Knight put a spring to his step and emerged on the third floor, which was abandoned. There was a pair of unmanned ballistae and racks full of projectiles as well as a set of stairs leading to the roof, but no enemies. The threshold to the side led to the rope bridge linking this tower to the next one and he immediately moved towards it. The arrow whistled an inch to the left of his head, the soldiers on the other side of the bridge already in formation. That was no issue, but the way two of them seemed prepared to cut out the bridge was. Instead of pouring more reinforcements into the fight below, the Helikeans had retreated in good order and positioned themselves to cut off their losses if necessary. How unpleasantly competent of them.

Barely a heartbeat had passed since the arrow clattered against stone and Hanno’s mind quickened. He would not make it across the bridge in time, which would endanger the entire operation. He would not make it across the bridge in time on foot . The White Knight was moving forward before he even thought of it, Name pulsing inside of him. The winds howled through his veins, carving their marks.

“ Ride ,” he whispered.

Light roiled violently by his side, taking shape and flesh until a horse stood – without breaking stride Hanno hoisted himself on it, extending his hand so that the lance of light would form inside it. The horse moved swifter than any mortal mount could have, across the rope bridge within three breaths. The lance pieced through the first soldier’s torso, flesh wafting smoke, and a sword stroke sent the other one’s head tumbling to the ground. He’d moved quickly enough the Helikeans were too surprised to immediately attack. Hanno let go of the lance, allowing it to disperse, and the horse’s hooves caved in the head of the man at the centre of the enemy formation. A heartbeat later the mount was gone and he dropped to his feet, landing gracefully even in plate.

“Fucking Hells,” one of the archers in the back exhaled, knocking an arrow.

The longsword cut through both the bow and his throat in the same swing.

“Retreat,” an officer barked. “Collapse the next-“

He swallowed his tongue before he could finish, clawing at his throat as he choked. Hedge had caught up. There’d been twelve soldiers, before he’d crossed the bridge. Now there eight, seven when he caught a man’s blade and broke it before his hand snaked out to grab him by the neck. His grip strengthened, the cracking sound heralding another death. These were Helikeans, though. The descendants of the same soldiers who had waged war on the mightiest nation as a single city-state and forced the man to surrender or see Salia burn to the ground. They did not flinch or fail. One allowed his blade to run him through to keep it stuck as the two remaining archers took aim again – only for the first to twitch, then disperse into a cloud of ashes that had the other coughing. Priestess had arrived. By the time the Champion had crossed the bridge with her axe raised, there was no one left alive on that side of the tower. The other two heroines made their way more slowly.

“Kill everyone,” the Levantine complained. “Like hog.”

“What do pigs have to do with this?” Hedge blinked.

“She means we hogged the kills,” Ash said.

“Yes,” Champion agreed enthusiastically. “You all big hogs.”

“Would you stop calling me a-“ Hedge began, tone irritated, before Hanno cleared his throat.

“You can take point, Champion,” he told the short woman. “We need to get to the westernmost tower and fast .”

There were seven towers, in all. The Wizard’s overtaking of the ritual on this one would take care of roughly half, but for the destruction to be complete they would need to do the same on the other side. They were on the third story now, where all the rope bridges would lead, so at least there would be no need to move around. That did not simplify matters as much as Hanno would have thought, as he found out. By the time they cleared the third tower, the one they’d landed on had begun to move. There was a deafening sound as it rammed itself into the second tower, half-collapsing but continuing to push it into the third one. At the fourth they found the bridge out already cut when they arrived. Hedge would not be able to turn into the giant eagle again until dawn, and she lacked another form that would carry them all. Priestess managed to craft a thin line of solid light for them to walk across while getting peppered with arrows. The Champion took three in the chest but her Name was remarkably robust: it barely slowed her down. Less than an hour had passed when they arrived to the last tower, but it had still taken much longer than he would have liked.

Behind them three towers had impacted into one large ruin, but the central one was barely touched. Hedge would have to add some momentum to the conversion on this side if they wanted to break the central tower, which she informed him would increase those “not insignificant” chances of blowing up. The seventh tower was already deserted when they arrived, the rope bridge that used to lead to it having been cut from the sixth tower’s side. Magelight could be seen shining through the stairs that led below.

“This is a trap,” Priestess said.

“Not even a subtle one,” the Wizard added.

“We mighty,” Champion argued. “Trap feeble and dim, like Procer soldier.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hanno said. “We need that tower moving.”

And so down they went. There was no iron door here, only a single hall that took up the entire inside of the tower. A banquet hall, as it happened. There was a long table set there, set with a feast that would have fed three dozen people – and it was still warm, by the looks of it. There were five seats set, and one was already filled. The Bard waved.

“You lot really took your time,” Aoede said. “I’ve been here like, forever.”

The only other person in the room laughed. Behind the table the same ritual array that Hanno had seen before was reproduced in painstaking detail, save for one difference: at the centre of symbols, the obsidian disk was set on a ridiculously gaudy throne flanked by leering gargoyles. One where a boy was lounging lazily. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen, but he looked frail for that age. His limbs were thin and his skin unhealthily pale, his body topped by wispy brown curls bearing a crown of gold with jewels set in them. The boy had a sceptre of ivory across his lap, with a roaring gold lion’s head. The Tyrant of Helike smiled at them, his ugly red eye twitching.

“So you’d be the White Knight, then,” the boy mused. “And sundry sidekicks. By all means, sit. I’ve had a meal prepared for you.”

“The wine is great,” the Bard said. “Fruity, with a hint of arsenic.”

“You’ve had enough of it to kill several villages,” the Tyrant commented. “I’m actually impressed.”

“Pheasant look good,” Champion said.

“Poisoned,” Hedge hissed at her in a low voice. “The word you’re looking for is poisoned .”

Hanno ignored them, calmly making his way down the stairs. The villain stirred on his throne, looking at him.

“Is this the part where you rail at my Evil ways?” he asked. “I’ve been looking forward to that.”

“I do not judge,” the White Knight said.

The silver coin appeared in his open palm, as it always did. As a child, Hanno had seen the laws of men fail. He’d believed in the citizenship tiers, before he’d seen what they did to his mother. And yet Ashur was on the side of Good, was it not? So many places across Calernia were, and yet injustice was rampant. The thought had tormented him, as a child. How could one tell which laws were just and which were not? Picking and choosing was... imperfect. One’s discernment could never be flawless. It was constrained by the events of one’s life, the limits of one’s intellect. Hanno could have, he supposed, destroyed the laws he’d seen destroy his mother. But what would he have replaced them with? His own beliefs, as fallible as those of the men and women who’d crafted the laws he railed against? That was not rectifying an evil. It was replacing it with a different shade of the same. But he’d found an answer, hadn’t he? He flipped the coin, watched it spin in the air. It landed on his palm. The crossed silver swords, not the laurels. The Seraphim had rendered their judgement.

“Kairos Theodosian, Tyrant of Helike,” the White Knight said, tone eerily calm. “The Choir of Judgement has looked upon the sum of your existence, and found you wanting.”

Heat flooded his veins, lighting up his senses. For once, everything felt right .

“The verdict is removal from Creation.”

The boy cackled madly.

“Now that’s the stuff, hero,” he said.

The Tyrant rose to his feet, twirling his sceptre.

“Bard, play something ominous,” he ordered.

Aoede raised a finger, drained the rest of her cup, then picked up her lute. Every other time she’d played in front of Hanno it had sounded like she was committing musical murder but this once, the song ran true. Deep and urgent and dark, like death circling. He almost shivered.

“Your soldiers are dead,” the Priestess said, standing by his side.

“You are alone,” the Wizard said, hands already tracing runes.

“Your skull make cup,” the Champion enthused. “Get me many lovers.”

The boy grinned, red eye burning.

“I am the Tyrant of Helike,” he said. “Dead or not, they are in my service .”

The villain’s sceptre pulsed gold and made a sound like a gong ringing. Hazy silhouettes formed in ranks in front of him. Soldiers, all of them. Ranks upon ranks filled the room and they unsheathed their swords, strung their bows. Lances were raised and horses whinnied.

“Shit,” Hedge cursed to herself. “We got monologued. Never let them finish the monologue, Hedge, that’s how they get you.”

The soldiers moved and the White Knight charged. There was a sheen of light to his sword, and not even spectres were beyond his ability to cut. He sidestepped a lance, cut through the apparition’s belly and carved through the head of the man-at-arms behind it. The heat built up inside of him, spilling out in motes of power as he killed his way through the host. The Hedge Wizard spat out a stream of smoke that enveloped the spectres in front of her as Priestess wove a circle of sunlight around her that burned the soldiers whenever they neared it. The Champion bashed a spectre’s face with her shield, apparently indifferent to the fact that they were intangible. She was not, as far as he could tell, even using her name. The Tyrant’s crown lit up and shot a beam of red light at him, because naturally the madman would turn his regalia into a magical weapon, and Hanno grit his teeth as his plate began melting. If it was not lethal, then it was just pain and obstruction. Those he could deal with.

Hedge threw a small ball of fur at the Tyrant that turned into an angry ferret, distracting enough by clawing at his face that the beams ceased. Now would be the time to call on another of his aspects, he knew. But even with the villain distracted, spectres kept appearing faster than they could be killed and the Champion was beginning to get buried. The moment she was, the sisters would be under assault and it was all downhill from there. There were on the Tyrant’s chosen ground, and Hanno had seen enough heroes die in the Chamber to know how this would end.

“Hedge,” he called out. “Crash the tower.”

“We’re still in the tower,” she reminded him.

“Yes,” he said patiently. “There’s no way we could survive that. Therefore we will .”

“Do it, Alkmene,” Priestess hissed. “We can’t keep this up.”

The Wizard cursed again and leapt forward, turning into a sparrow before she hit the ground. She began rising in the air but archers took aim and Hanno hurried towards her – too late, he’d be too late. One after another, the arrows clattered uselessly against the Champion’s great shield as she charged through a spectre to get there in time. Casually, she decapitated an apparition and kicked the intangible body into another. The sparrow flew through the melee, weaving around swings and arrows to land in a crash on the obsidian disk. The Tyrant threw a now-dead ferret at her, but taking the stoneglass off the throne had been enough. The tower, after a heartbeat, began to fall. The villain frowned thoughtfully.

“I had something for this,” he said. “This tower will be your grave? No, Anaxares said that was second-rate. This isn’t over yet?”

The gargoyles flanking the throne animated and began flapping their stone wings, grabbing the Tyrant by the shoulders. The dragged him upwards, heading for the stairs. The boy suddenly inhaled.

“Oh! I’ll get you next time, heroes !” he said shaking his fist in their direction.

By the time the villain was out the hall, which was still falling, the spectres had dissipated into a thick mist lingering on the ground. Hanno waited until the Wizard had turned back into her proper form.

“I don’t suppose putting the disk back will end the freefall?” he asked.

“With the momentum we have going?” she grimaced. “It’ll blow up in our faces instantly.”

The White Knight sighed. So much for the easy way.

“Everyone, gather close,” he said, reaching for his Name.

They did. Hanno closed his eyes and gathered his power, waited for the beginning of the impact that would signal they’d touched the ground.

“Wait, how are you not wounded?” Hedge said. “I saw you take hits.”

“Witch not so smart,” Champion said. “Ghosts no real, can’t hurt.”

“ Ignorance is not a magical power ,” the Wizard yelled.

The White Knight felt the shudder under his feet, and instantly released all he’d gathered. The world went white.

Chapter 3: Demesne

“You can never have too many tiger pits, Chancellor. That’s the same lack of vision that has people say “that’s too large a field of energy to absorb” or “calling yourself a living god is blasphemy”.”
– Dread Emperor Malignant III, before his death and second reign as Dread Emperor Revenant

Marchford had come under attack during my absence.

That much became clear as soon as we got in sight of the city. There was no dramatic plume of smoke announcing it but the way the Fifteenth had been deployed was sign enough. The outskirts of the city were untouched but I could see from a mile away that the central plaza had been heavily fortified and was manned with soldiers and siege engines – all of them pointing towards the inside instead of the outside. Juniper had managed to keep life going outside of the restricted zone she’d carved out in the middle of Marchford, to my approval, but that she’d even needed to do this much was telling. I’d learned much about Legion formations, over the last year, and what I was looking at was standard practice for a long-term static defence. Whatever fight had been picked it was not over, even if there was nothing to see right now. Just when things had been starting to pick up for the city, I glared. Typical.

Zombie the Second kept a slow pace, as I was the only mounted member of my party. The Gallowborne were infantry through and through and Hakram, who I would have preferred to be mounted, could not be. Orcs panicked horses just being being close, unless they were trained war destriers. Those were in a short enough supply that any the Legions of Terror could get their hands on were sent straight to Thalassina. The Thirteenth Legion was garrisoned there and, having been raised out of Callowan rebels and criminals, actually had a cavalry contingent. The knights of the Kingdom could have eaten that bunch for breakfast and still been hungry, but compared to the orc wolfriders that represented the Empire’s only other mounted option they were still a vast improvement.

“That’s two rings of defence,” Hakram said. “Whatever tickled the Hellhound was nothing to sneer at: she usually prefers stacking the first line to defence in depth.”

Which meant Juniper had to face the serious possibility that her first line of fortifications would be swept away by the opponent. There weren’t a lot of forces on Calernia that could threaten a hardened wall of legionaries backed by mages and siege engines. Most of them were supernatural in nature.

“You lost a month’s pay, then,” I said, squinting at the city ahead. “That’s too blatant to be Heiress’ work.”

“Whoever physically assaulted the city could be a catspaw for her,” Hakram said smugly. “It’s impossible to prove she wasn’t involved.”

I cursed under my breath. That was the same as people blaming Assassin whenever any prominent figure died – it could be true, in theory, but how the Hells would anyone know?

“You’re never going to win, either,” I pointed out.

“Until I do,” Hakram grinned toothily. “Just a matter of time.”

I’d put money on heroes, myself. They always turned up at the most inconvenient of times, and just when Marchford was beginning to have some breathing room would have definitely qualified. No head was on a pike by the road, though, so I could safely assume no hero had gone into my city and committed suicide by Hellhound.

“Did anyone have fairies?” I said.

“Ratface,” Adjutant said after a moment.

“I hate it when he places bets,” I muttered. “He always knows more than he’s letting on.”

We’d had to form the pool on the down low, since Juniper frowned on the practice. Something about it diminishing the dignity of officers. The general couldn’t technically punish me for anything, but she insisted on hour-long meetings about patrol routes and drills whenever she caught me involved. The Hellhound’s sadism knew no bounds. I cast a look at the column of Gallowborne following behind, then sighed.

“Let’s pick up the pace,” I said. “The sooner I hear the reports, the sooner we can take baths.”

Hakram frowned at me.

“I washed in the river not three days ago,” he said.

“So now you smell like river and wet dog,” I said, spurring on Zombie before he could reply. “Soap, Adjutant, soap.”

It was rare enough I got to have the last word these days I savoured the feeling all the way to Marchford.

—

A patrol met us outside the sight of the city walls, or at least the promise of walls. After I’d had the parts of the city wrecked during Battle of Marchford made liveable again, getting some actual defences for my home built had been a priority. I’d charged Pickler with designing and building the fortifications months ago and she’d had a shiver at the words I was fairly sure was a sign of arousal for goblins – her eyes had gone a little wide and fluttered, too. The first plan the Senior Sapper had drafted would have turned the city into the same kind of army-breaker Summerholm was meant to be, but I’d sent her back to the drawing table after a quick look. Marchford was not a border fortress and while it was to be the seat of the Fifteenth it would live or die on trade. Which her seven overlapping rings of walls and bastions would complicate a great deal: no real thought had been given to civilian streets and arteries, or even housing districts. The second draft had been much more reasonable.

The towered curtain wall around Marchford she’d sketched was nothing too fancy, but where the Talbot Manor had stood before I’d had it torched would become a proper fortress. Permanent barracks were added to accommodate the Fifteenth, with access to training fields for drills and mock battles. That draft I accepted, and mandated she start working on when feasible. That was the first rub, unfortunately: being feasible. Her sappers had been needed to repair the bridge in and out of Marchford, and when that was over simply would not have the numbers to undertake as large a project as building the fortifications for an entire city. Not if I wanted to be done before a decade has passed, anyway. That wasn’t acceptable: the entire reason I needed those walls now was so that when Heiress tossed her next abomination at me my soldiers would have something to stand on.

The obvious solution was drafting hand from the rest of the Fifteenth, but Juniper had flatly refused. It was one thing to keep sappers busy in peace time, another entirely to draw from the rank and file for a civilian project. Especially when she was integrating a massive influx of Callowans and other fresh recruits into the Fifteenth, trying to turn them into a cohesive fighting force. Fortunately, Marchford was a mining city. There was available skilled labour, which at the moment milled around aimlessly or enrolled into my legion to make ends meet. That was the second rub, so to speak. Those miners would need to be paid . I was, sadly, close to broke. There was not enough trade coming in to fill my coffers, and raising tariffs on what was currently coming would just kill it off entirely. Taxing a city who’d effectively been sacked less than a year ago and of which a third of the population had lost their income when the mines closed – courtesy of Heiress fucking me over with a demon whose corruption was still far from gone – was a good way to have revolt on my hands. I still drew my pay and so far had done little to spend it, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to what was needed.

The only saving grace here was that my legionaries also drew pay from the Tower and had nowhere to spend it but Marchford. That had slowed the bleeding some, though there was only so much that buying ale, whores and grub could do for a city. In the end I’d had Pickler outline the foundations for what would be be the city walls and freed her to take care of the bridge. We needed the trade more than the defences, right now. Staring at those ropes and pickets put me in a foul mood, a reminder that soon I’d need to either borrow coin or effectively go bankrupt. I’d ordered Aisha to look into my options before I left for Southpool, so maybe she’d have good news for me. That’d be a first.

I dismissed the patrolling legionaries without bothering to ask questions about what had happened to the city, heading straight for the guildhall Juniper had appropriate during the Battle of Marchford and never returned. On the way there, after having sent off most of the Gallowborne back to the barracks for well-deserved rest, I was presented with the sight of a tired but still ridiculously pretty redhead escorted by a gaggle of mages.

“Lady Squire,” Kilian smiled.

I spurred on Zombie instead of replying, scooping up my Senior Mage by the waist and setting her in front of me before she was even done squeaking in surprise.

“ Cat ,” she protested. “We’re in-“

One arm still wrapped around her waist, I leaned forward to interrupt her with a kiss. She smiled against my lips before sliding a hand around the nape of my neck and replying in kind. Teasingly, I bit her lip before withdrawing when we were both out of breath.

“Kilian,” I finally said. “I missed you.”

She rested her head against my breastplate, for once the fact that she was slightly taller than me not apparent.

“Missed you too,” she muttered. “Even if you’re making a spectacle of us, you utter brute.”

Hakram cleared his throat loudly, because he was the most inconsiderate creature ever spawned in Creation. I ignored him, pressing my lips against the crown of Kilian’s head and already craving something stronger. I hadn’t seen my lover in two months and to say I’d missed her would have been something of an understatement. Hakram cleared his throat again, louder.

“We’re having a moment, you sack of sentient manure,” I said.

“Good afternoon to you, Senior Mage,” Adjutant said, cheerfully ignoring my insult.

“Lord Adjutant,” Kilian replied, with as much dignity as she could manage while wrapped in my arms.

“I see you’ve been abducted by some sort of barbarian warlord,” the tall orc mused. “Whenever you manage to free yourself from captivity, I imagine we’ll be needing you for the staff meeting with General Juniper.”

The redhead wiggled in my arms and reluctantly I allowed her to slid off the horse. Zombie the Second took all of this rather placidly, staring at a food stall on the other side of the street with greedy eyes. Kilian coughed, got her pixie-cut hair in order again and composed herself.

“I was actually sent by Juniper,” the Senior Mage said. “The general staff was assembled for a meal, so she’s extending an invitation. The most pressing reports could be handled at the same time.”

I grimaced. Well, no sense in delaying it. I could go for a bite anyway, there were only so many times you could eat standard Legion rations before wanting to jump off a bridge. Oh , and I’d get a real bed tonight. Gods that would be nice. I snuck a look at Kilian, drinking her in even if legion gear was the opposite of enticing. With a little luck I might even have company in that bed, and I was looking forward to that a great deal more than sleep. After I’d learned that our scrying sessions were very likely being listened in on I’d curtailed, uh, certain activities we’d sometimes indulged in when time allowed.

“You’re staring, Cat,” Hakram said.

“Am not,” I lied.

I slid off my saddle and handed Zombie to one of the Gallowborne. Kilian smiled and began moving, Adjutant and I following.

“Killjoy,” I hissed at him under my breath before we caught up.

He grinned back unrepentantly. One of these days, I promised myself, I was going to get a minion that didn’t give me lip.

—

“No wonder you’re so small,” Nauk said. “Look at the size of those portions.”

I pointed my fork at him over my bowl of oxtail stew and sambusa.

“I will end you, you ugly green gargoyle,” I promised. “Don’t think I won’t just because you’re a legate now.”

Hune rumbled in approval.

“His commander would handle the paperwork more quickly, if she had his rank,” the ogre said.

There were no seats capable of accommodating someone the other legate’s size, so in the end someone had taken off the back of a stone bench and dragged it inside. Unlike the rest of us, who were taking our portions from the communal bowls, Hune had been brought her own. Considering her side dish of koshari was larger than my torso I could see why.

“I’m not doing the forms for it, if you murder him,” Aisha said, daintily picking at her plate from her seat at Juniper’s left.

“They’ll be handled promptly, don’t you worry,” I said, and Hakram cursed under his breath.

He should, since they would most definitely end up on his desk instead of mine. The Hellhound speared another slab of uncooked red meat with cumin from the bowl only orcs were using and dropped it on her plate.

“Don’t start murdering officers, Foundling,” the general said. “I’m told it’s habit-forming.”

That was almost a joke, and I still wondered at how the orc was willing to unbend even that much in private. Never when anyone but the general staff was there, but it was still like night and day compared to when the Fifteenth had first been formed. Going through the Liesse Rebellion together, all the desperate battles of the campaign, had warmed her considerably towards me and the officers who could once have been considered my “faction” in the Fifteenth. Those old lines were long gone, now. Like Captain had once told me, showing proficiency at violence was the quickest way to earn an orc’s respect. Ratface and Kilian were chatting with Pickler further down the table but I refrained from sending a longing look in that direction. There would be time enough for that after we were done eating. I dipped the sambusa in the stew and bit off a piece of the meat-stuffed pastry. Still warm, I hummed in appreciation. Someone had gotten their hands on a decent cook from the Wasteland.

“So,” I finally said. “Looks like I missed a battle.”

The amiability – or what passed for that with Juniper – slid off my general’s face the moment the subject was broached.

“A single skirmish, so far,” the Hellhound said. “Fae crossed over from Arcadia in small numbers.”

Further down the table, Ratface smothered a grin. The bastard, in all senses of the word. He’d be filling his pockets deep with that one.

“Do we know why?” Hakram asked.

The conversation in the back had petered out when I’d begun the formal part of our meal, and Kilian was the one to field the question.

“They’re claiming the land for Arcadia,” she said. “Exactly how far their definition of ‘the land’ extends isn’t clear at the moment.”

I fished out a piece of ox and popped it into my mouth, chewing thoughtfully and wiping my hands on the cloth afterwards.

“That’s a problem,” I said. “I’m already using that land.”

“We think they’re Winter Court,” Nauk said. “They used ice, anyway, and they were arrogant little shits.”

“They’re all arrogant little shits,” Juniper grunted. “Wouldn’t be fairies otherwise.”

Sometimes it was reassuring to see that the vast majority of my officers were even more terrible at diplomacy than I was. Made me look better than comparison, at least.

“No negotiations were attempted so far,” Aisha said, the exception to that last thought. “That does not mean, however, they are impossible.”

“They did not seem inclined to negotiate, Aisha,” Kilian said mildly. “Otherwise we would have tried.”

I raised an eyebrow. She must have been on the scene herself, then. I would have been worried, but the redhead knew how to take care of herself. She might lack in power compared to some other mages, but she made up for it in swiftness and control.

“I believe the terms used by Legate Nauk after the introduction were ‘fuck off’,” the Taghreb said, tone sardonic.

I shot the orc in question a look. He grinned, then shrugged. Well, Nauk had always been more of a blunt tool than precise instrument. There was a place for that. Sometimes it wasn’t about how fancy the trick was, it was about how hard you could clobber the other guy. And as far as clubs went, my legate was among the finest.

“Dealing with fae is like dealing with devils,” Ratface said. “They always screw you on the technicalities.”

“I’m not taking the option off the table,” I broke in. “But at the moment, that’s not the situation we’re looking at. If they’re invading our priority is clear.”

“Defences,” Juniper growled with approval. “Our mages have set up wards, but the reports are the border between Creation and Arcadia is thinning regardless.”

I glanced at Kilian, who grimaced.

“That is beyond my knowledge,” she admitted. “Apprentice might know more.”

“I notice he’s not here,” I said. “What’s he been doing all this time?”

“He cleared out the strongest of the fae to cross and threatened them not to attempt it again,” Hune said. “He did not leave his tower before, and has not since. It borders on dereliction of duty.”

The ogre’s tone was thick with distaste. Masego , I sighed internally. How are you worse at making friends than I am? Not, I would admit, that Hune was the cuddliest of my merry bunch. She didn’t speak much and was easily irritated. I’d had her under my command for about a year and still knew next to nothing about her. Hakram, usually a fount of useful gossip, had nothing to tell me about her either. Quiet, competent, never socialized much even at the College. Nothing I hadn’t observed with my own eyes.

“Lord Apprentice is not officially part of the Fifteenth Legion,” Juniper said, in the tone of someone who’d had to make that point before on several occasions. “He has no obligation to us.”

“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “Assuming he can’t contribute, what do we have on our side of the field if the fae come back?”

Pickler rocked in her chair, which I noted with amusement was stacked with cushions so she’d sit about the same height as the rest of us.

“My sappers have built two rings of fortifications around the plaza, using the existing houses as props. We’ve installed cast iron foundations on everything, which Senior Mage Kilian informs me should afford them some protection against fae magic,” she said. “To target the fae themselves, I’ve had scorpions of my own design installed and nailed to the rooftops. One of the invaders used strong winds during the incursion, which would limit their effectiveness, so I’ve also had catapults loaded with sharper-filled iron balls placed behind the second ring.”

Pickler seemed as if she wanted to say more, but one look at Juniper and she rethought the notion. I checked with a glance and, predictably, Nauk looked like she’d just slipped him some tongue. Ugh. I should not have inflicted that image on myself.

“We need to consider the possibility those fortifications might be made permanent,” Juniper said, thankfully claiming my attention.

“We’ll need to redirect civilian traffic through different streets if that’s the case,” Ratface said. “The plaza sits in the middle of the main artery in and out of Marchford.”

I sighed.

“Start looking into it,” I ordered. “Wishful thinking isn’t going to make this go away.”

The Taghreb bastard raised an eyebrow.

“Well,” he said, “if you believe some of the stories...”

I looked at Aisha.

“Him you’ll do the forms for, right?”

“They’re already filled just in case,” the Staff Tribune replied without missing a beat.

“Defence is all well and good,” Nauk grunted. “But you don’t win wars from behind walls.”

“Can’t send scouts into Arcadia, Legate,” the Hellhound said. “Not with the way it warps time. The logistics would see them dead or the information gathered useless.”

“So don’t send scouts,” the large orc said, baring his teeth. “Send an army. We happen to have one of those lying around.”

“We don’t know enough to commit to that at the moment,” I said. “For all we know, this could be a minor incident that will never escalate.”

There was a moment of silence at the table. Hakram was the first to snicker, which broke the dam. Laughter splattered over the room, ebbing after a few moments.

“I’ll talk to Apprentice, see what he knows,” I said, still smiling. “Anything else that’s urgent?”

“No Legion business,” Juniper said, and that was that.

We dug into the meal properly and I allowed the renewed sounds of chatter to wash over me. It was, I thought, good to be home.

Chapter 4: Developments

“The viper that bites a Matron dies poisoned.”
-Taghreb saying

After the table was cleared most of my officers went with it. They had duties to attend to, after all. While Juniper wasn’t holding the legion to wartime duty rosters, the influx of fresh recruits in the Fifteenth meant the usual peacetime hours were far less than what was currently being demanded of them – especially with a budding portal to Arcadia in need of garrisoning. Of the four that remained seated at the table when servants brought wine, only two were a common fixture at these little meetings. Ratface and Aisha effectively ran what passed for my network of informants, through his underworld connections and her relatives in the nobility. They’d done well, in my opinion, but they were going up against spymasters who’d had decades to place their own people or outright inherited a web of informants from their predecessors. Spies were among the most precious parts of a noble’s inheritance, in the Wasteland.

Pickler, on he other hand, was a rarity. As much because she had no interest in these things as because she rarely had anything to contribute. That she’d stuck around would have surprised me, had I not remembered the Empress’ warning: I was going to be presented with an offer by the Matron of the High Ridge tribe. Pickler’s mother, allegedly estranged. I didn’t know much about that situation save for assurances I’d received that having Pickler in the Fifteenth wouldn’t mean a Matron would be looking to slide a knife in my back. Robber, usually maliciously eager to gossip, had been tight-lipped when I’d brought it up. Goblins always closed ranks the moment you brought up anything relating to what went on inside the Grey Eyries. Still, I could guess at the shape of it. Pickler’s open and vehement distaste for politics could not have gone over well back home, or her lack of interest in anything that didn’t involve building new and improved ways to kill people.

Kilian was around more often, as my Senior Mage. Since she had a finger in everything from our magical defences to setting up scrying channels her input was occasionally needed. And with Apprentice so often holed up in his tower these days, she served as our expert in the supernatural when he wasn’t around. Her knowledge wasn’t nearly as expansive, I had to admit, but she’d placed highly in the War College’s mage courses for a reason. Where Masego would have a tailored solution to any problem we encountered, Kilian simply hammered in obstacles with group rituals and repeated spellwork. Less elegant, maybe, but I didn’t want my legion to ever become too dependent on Apprentice. When it came to fights he’d be at my side more often than not, and it wouldn’t do for my mages to become ineffective whenever he wasn’t around. There was a reason my teacher deployed Warlock as a combat asset on his own instead of the leader of other mages.

That made for six of us in the room, if you counted Hakram and myself. There’d never been any debate about Adjutant being there, of course. At this point not having the tall orc at my side felt like I was missing a hand. I’d noticed over the last year that Hakram rarely spoke in meetings, not unless he wanted a point clarified for my benefit, and did not often venture his own opinion. Sometimes he gave it to me in private afterwards, but more often than not he simply kept his peace. Hakram listened and waited and when I came to a decision he saw that turned into a plan of action. It made it easy to rely on him, that I knew he had no objective – hidden or not – he was working towards. Of all the people I was close with, he stood alone in this. I accepted the cup of Vale summer wine Ratface poured from the carafe, allowing myself to savour the taste. It was a little early in the day, admittedly, but I was going to need a godsdamned drink if we were going to talk about the mess currently known as Marchford.

“So, watcha got for me,” I prompted.

The two Taghreb traded looks. For all that their relationship had apparently imploded years ago, in my experience they actually got along fairly well. Ratface inclined his head and Aisha cleared her throat.

“The upheaval in the Wasteland continues,” the Staff Tribune said. “The mass defections started by the High Lady of Aksum, while slowing in frequency, have yet to end.”

I grinned. It always put me in a good mood when I heard about the Truebloods get the bad end of the stick. Not long after I’d extorted three high nobles into backing the creation of the Ruling Council, one of them had officially withdraw from the Truebloods. High Lady Abreha of Aksum, the cackling old bat who’d cheerfully betrayed her fellows the very moment the wind had turned. Though she had not joined the Loyalists, Malicia’s faction in Praes, losing a High Lady had started an avalanche of setbacks for the Truebloods. Lesser nobles had begun withdrawing their support or been assassinated by successors who did before a fortnight had passed. While few of them changed their allegiance to the Loyalists, the humiliation for the remaining Truebloods had been both public and potent. I’d watched all of that unfold with no small amount of glee.

“The most recent defection was by a lord directly sworn to Wolof,” Aisha said. “As High Lady Tasia is the head of the Truebloods, the loss of face involved was massive. Rumour has it she could not afford to match the bribe offered by the Empress, which has... interesting implications.”

I let out a whistle.

“We’ve confirmed Heiress has made no attempt to send any of the revenues collected from Liesse to the Wasteland,” Ratface added. “Cat, I think there’s a wedge there.”

“Praesi stabbing Praesi in the back,” Pickler said derisively. “There’s a surprise.”

Aisha raised an eyebrow.

“An interesting comment, coming from a goblin,” she said.

Pickler shrugged, then looked away. That was as much as she seemed to want to get involved, at the moment.

“And all these unaligned nobles, what are they doing exactly?” Hakram asked.

Aisha smiled, then gracefully sipped at her wine. I could see no hint of her teeth as she did – that was Praesi etiquette for you.

“They are no longer unaligned,” the Staff Tribune said. “High Lady Abreha has begun to gather them under her banner.”

“The Moderates, they call themselves,” Ratface added.

I raised an eyebrow.

“That’s a promising name, but I’m not getting my hopes up,” I said.

“The Moderates oppose certain of the policies championed by the Empress,” Aisha said, “but do so without the undercurrent of opposing the Empress herself. They’re growing as an alternative to the Truebloods for nobles who disagree with certain recent reforms.”

The approval in her voice was not masked in the slightest.

“So they’re the good, polite racists,” Pickler said bitingly. “There’s a relief, I thought there were only bad, rude ones.”

“One does not need to hate greenskins to realize breeding restrictions on the Tribes are necessary,” Aisha replied, tone aggressively mild. “Or to believe that orcs chieftains being made nobility would disrupt a very delicate balance of power.”

“It probably helps, though,” the Senior Sapper said with a flash of needle-like teeth.

“That’s enough of that,” I said quietly. “Pickler, you know Aisha’s not one of those nobles. She’s never treated you anything but politely. Aisha, half your people would accept making a bridge out of dead goblins as a decent way to save on stone. She’s not swinging out of the blue.”

The Taghreb noble’s face went blank, but she inclined her head. Pickler grabbed her goblet and drank.

“I do love these little chats of ours,” Ratface said. “But I believe there’s one last thing for you to mention, Aisha?”

The lovely Staff Tribune cleared her throat.

“Infighting between the Truebloods and the Moderates has already begun, but their agents at court do agree on one prominent matter,” she said.

Well, that ought to be good.

“I’m on the edge of my seat,” I said drily.

“To be blunt,” Aisha said delicately, “that point is you . You are worrying them.”

“She’s had knives at her back since she became the Squire,” Hakram said calmly. “What makes this unusual?”

“When you were merely the Squire, Lady Catherine, you were a minor threat with the potential of turning into a larger one,” the olive-skinned aristocrat said. “Your coming to command the Fifteenth, while unfortunate, was not judged overly alarming. That changed, however, when the Fifteenth kept growing .”

“They think you’re amassing a private army to come knocking at their doors,” Ratface grinned nastily. “Their tender noble hearts are all aflutter at the notion.”

“That’s absurd,” Kilian spoke up from my left. “We don’t have nearly the men for that. We’re what, six thousand now?”

“Seven thousand as of the census last week,” Aisha said. “By my estimate, we’ll be eight thousand come summer. The size of two standard legions.”

“I don’t have the corresponding number of mages under my command,” the redhead frowned.

I frowned, then pieced the discrepancy together.

“Mages are required to graduate from the College before service,” I said. “We’ve been taking in Callowans.”

“There simply aren’t that many mages available for us to bring into the fold,” Aisha agreed. “Many went to the Fourteenth when it was formed, and there are rumours a Sixteenth is about to be raised.”

That, I realized with a grimace, was a problem. A lot of the legion military doctrine rested on the fact that mages and sappers would be available in proportionate numbers to the amount of regulars. No wonder Juniper was insisting on drills so much. She was going to have to revise her tactics entirely before we next got into a fight.

“I don’t suppose any of you have a workaround?” I asked.

“We could recruit from civilian talent,” Aisha said. “That would bring complications, however.”

“Good mages in the Wasteland have patrons,” Ratface said. “They’re not allowed not to.”

“And they’d need to be trained to Legion standards,” Kilian murmured. “We don’t have the facilities for that. Not to mention using the War College’s methods without sanction would be low treason, at the very least.”

“Joy,” I muttered. “Think about it anyway. If you have a stroke of genius, you know where my door is.”

Hakram set down his wine with a metallic clink.

“Practically speaking, what does the nobles being worried about our numbers mean?” the tall orc gravelled.

Ratface shrugged, looked at the other Taghreb in the room.

“Support for the only visible check on your power,” Aisha said.

“Heiress,” I said.

Well, wasn’t that a treat. It would have been too much to hope for I’d be allowed to expand my ranks without there being consequences, I supposed. I passed a hand through my mess of a hair, which I’d taken out of its usual ponytail for the meal. It would need combing soon. Kilian nudged me with her knee under the table, smiling.

“We’ll find a way,” she murmured. “We always do.”

I pressed a kiss against her shoulder as Ratface rolled his eyes and Aisha politely looked away. Acknowledging the sight of emotions in others was impolite, for Praesi, unless you were deeply intimate with them and behind closed doors. Pickler was looking at us like she would some sort of strange chimera, more puzzled than anything else. The goblin notion of romance, as I understood it, was rather different from the human one.

“That’s one,” I said. “Ratface?”

“Are we done already?” the Taghreb said. “It was just getting interesting.”

His lips tightened immediately afterwards, swallowing a whimper, and Aisha smiled. I suspected he was going to be limping out of the room when we were done. The bastard coughed.

“I’ve placed people in the lower rungs of two of the major Dark Guilds,” he said.

While there were apparently quite a few minor criminal associations that styled themselves guilds, there were only three in Callow that really deserved the name. The Assassins, the Thieves and the Smugglers. The Thieves had been the ones to make it through the Conquest the least affected, and the first to strike a deal with Black. Their activities were tacitly allowed as long as they didn’t threaten Praesi interests, in exchange for a few concessions. The only really important one among those was informing on any resistance group they came across. No wonder my teacher hadn’t been actually challenged by one of those in the two decades he’d run Callow. He really had eyes everywhere, didn’t he?

The second guild, the Smugglers, had not gotten away unscathed. Not because the Tower had tightened the screws, at least not in the usual sense.They’d been making a fortune out of importing Praesi luxuries before the Conquest, but their roles as middlemen had become unnecessary when actual trade routes had opened. Making it worse, quite a few drugs and substances that had been illegal under the Kingdom were nothing of the sort under Praes. After floundering for a few years, they’d managed to find a niche in importing foreign luxuries through Mercantis while bypassing tariffs – the Wasaliti, after all, was no longer patrolled by war barges. Their following attempts to get weapons into Callow had been met by the assassination of half their leadership, and they’d taken that warning to heart. Since they’d restricted their activities to what wouldn’t earn Black’s attention, offering a cut of their profits in penance. They were a pale shadow of what they’d used to be, though, by far the weakest of the three guilds.

The Assassins had happened upon a middle ground between those two, neither crippled nor largely untouched. Their more patriotic elements had been purged by the Named who exemplified their trade, leaving only hardened professionals behind. Those had shown no qualms in cooperating with the Tower and even some Imperial Governors, though assassinating Praesi without unofficial sanction had been forbidden. While not as numerous and entrenched as it had been before the Conquest, the Guild of Assassins had settled comfortably into its new role. They had, if anything, thrived under the rule of officials coming from a culture where their trade was not only accepted but held in some esteem. Few nobles of the Kingdom would have ever contracted a Dark Guild for work, after all, but Praesi were not above employing local talent when bringing in their own specialists would have been too costly.

“The Smugglers were easy enough to infiltrate, since I’ve had indirect dealings with them in the past,” Ratface said, shaking me out of my thoughts. “As for the Thieves, getting a foot in was doable but rising in the ranks will take years. They tend to operate in local cells.”

“You couldn’t get anyone in the Assassins?” I asked.

The handsome Taghreb shook his head.

“They recruit by invitation only,” he told me. “Murder convicts, mostly, taken in by spiriting them out of prison before they hang.”

I made an understanding noise. That would make it tricky to get anyone inside. If Black had managed the feat, he’d never told me.

“Got anything out of it so far?” I said.

“Nothing all that useful, though one piece does stand out,” Ratface mused. “The Guild of Thieves has recently had a change of leadership. Their ‘King of Thieves’ was overthrown.”

“A shadow war across Callow would have been noticed,” Hakram said.

“They don’t operate like that,” the Supply Tribune said, shaking his head. “The person in charge is whoever has some fancy crown. Any member of the guild can try to steal it.”

I raised an eyebrow. That seemed like a horrible way to run an organization, considering anyone close to the guildmaster would be tempted to steal it. Besides, all it took was for an idiot to get lucky once and you’d have a fool at the helm. Aisha made an approving noise and I glanced at her. Ah, of course she’d think well of it. Praes was run on basically the same principle, only with more murder and demons.

“Keep an eye on them,” I finally said. “I’ll want to know where they stand when we move on the Assassins.”

Ratface nodded.

“Speaking of,” he said, “I found out what you wanted. They’ve none or negligible presence in Marchford.”

“Well, I was due something uplifting,” I muttered. “Any idea why?”

“The Countess Marchford hated them deeply,” Aisha said. “She cleared them out of the city a few years after the Conquest, after they killed her husband and infant son.”

I leaned forward in interest.

“How?” I asked.

“She torched the entire city quarter they operated out of,” Ratface told me grimly. “Had anyone that crawled out of the ashes drawn and quartered in the public square.”

Well. Not exactly something I could replicate across Callow. Horrifying as that method was, I couldn’t help but be somewhat impressed. Elizabeth Talbot had not been one to fuck around, when she wanted something done. The Duke of Liesse had no business ever getting near a throne, but the Countess Marchford would have made the kind of queen that took more than a page in chronicles. Not all of it good but, Hells, who was I to throw stones?

“My turn?” Pickler asked impatiently.

I looked at the two Taghreb, but neither of them had anything to add.

“Good,” the goblin muttered, then straightened in her seat. “Lady Foundling of Marchford, I bring an offer from Matron Sever of the High Ridge tribe.”

I watched my two Tribunes from the corner of my eye. Ratface looked surprised and concerned. Aisha’s brow rose, until her eyes widened in understanding. Then her face returned to pleasant and unreadable. Something that passed through Court at some point, then , I thought. I’d been under the impression goblins stayed out of Praesi politics, so my curiosity sharpened.

“I’ve got an official letter for you to gawk at,” Pickler continued, discarding ceremony as quickly as she’d taken it up, “but the gist of it is this: the High Ridge tribe and its allies would like to establish a goblin settlement in your lands.”

I blinked.

“What?” I said, for eloquence was one my foremost virtues.

I paused.

“Is that even legal ?”

“The Empress reinstated breeding restrictions to show favour to the Moderates,” Aisha said quietly. “In a gesture of goodwill, however, she allowed the establishment of a new goblin tribe for the first time in two hundred years.”

“Matrons fought over the right like a bag full of angry cats,” Pickler shrugged. “Mother’s the most vicious old bitch of that pack of vicious old bitches, though. She ended up on top of that pile of bodies.”

“There’s never been a goblin settlement outside of the Grey Eyries before,” Hakram said, sounding surprised.

I glanced at him.

“Foramen,” I reminded him.

“Foramen has been ruled by humans since the Miezan occupation, even if goblins work the forges,” the tall orc replied.

That... might be true? I really had no idea. Praesi history not related to the Tower wasn’t something I’d read a lot of. Anyway, no point in quibbling since odds were he was right and this wasn’t the most salient issue at the moment anyway. My eyes returned to the Senior Sapper.

“That’s an,” I started, looking for the word, “... interesting offer.”

“She doesn’t expect you to accept out of love for goblinkind,” Pickler said, amused. “She’s offering for the goblins in question to build fortifications for the city, free of charge. The tribe would occupy the designated land but pay rent for the privilege, as well bribe you generously for your generosity in considering the matter. Everybody knows Marchford’s ledgers are bleeding like slow raider.”

I felt it safe to assume the raider in question was bleeding because he’d been too slow to dodge a knife. That expression told me a lot about how what living in the Grey Eyries would be like.

“I’ve been looking into ways to fill the coffers,” I said, glancing at Aisha.

The lovely tribune shook her head.

“While I find the notion of a tribe of goblins within sight of where I sleep horrifying, none offered terms you would find acceptable,” she said. “There’s quite a few families willing to make a loan, and some are even willing to forego interest. All want a governorship as part of the deal.”

“Come on,” I griped. “There’s got to be at least one that just wants to fleece me.”

“With almost no remaining Praesi governors, anyone who could secure such a post under your reign would gain a massive advantage against their rivals,” Aisha said. “None are willing to forego that chance. I have, however, accumulated some funds when they attempted to bribe my intermediaries. The appropriate portion was added to your treasury.”

“That’s something, I guess,” I said, reluctantly amused.

The mirth died quickly enough when my gaze returned to Pickler.

“You talked about rent,” I said. “Not a grant of land.”

“While swearing fealty to you would have been hard enough to swallow,” the Senior Sapper said, “The possibility that one day a male descendant of yours might rule Marchford pretty much killed that idea.”

She shrugged.

“They’re not wrong,” the yellow-eyed goblin said. “It’d be pretty disgusting for a Matron to take orders from a man.”

“I’m feeling somewhat insulted, right now,” Ratface mused.

Pickler eyed him pityingly.

“You’re a fine warleader, Ratface,” she reassured him. “You’re just not cut out for important matters like ruling or raising children. Men are too emotional for those things, it’s not your fault.”

“Matrons have taken orders from Dread Emperors,” I pointed out, morbidly fascinated.

I’d always known the Tribes were a matriarchy, but I’d never actually seen that in action before. Pickler was a clever, intelligent and talented officer. Who’d somehow come to believe that barring half her people from leadership positions could be anything but shooting herself in the foot.

“Tyrants don’t count,” she said, eyeing me sceptically. “They’re Named. They’re not like other men.”

“So you’re telling me an entire culture recognizes me as objectively better than Ratface?” Hakram said, leaning forward.

I snorted.

“You’re a traitor to your gender, Hakram,” the Taghreb said. “For shame. Where’s the solidarity?”

“ I recognize you’re objectively better than Ratface,” Aisha told Hakram. “I’m sure I could get a petition passed around to collect broader opinion.”

“So I’m to leave this room both without all my toes unbroken and my dignity?” the bastard mused. “You people are animals.”

Pickler sneered in the general direction of the gallery before returning her attention to me.

“Think it over,” she said. “Left the letter in your affairs, since I didn’t want to bother remembering all the legalese. They’ll expect an answer soon.”

I nodded slowly. I had no intention of agreeing to anything before talking it over with a few other people, anyway. That the Empress had allowed this at all meant she tacitly endorsed the idea, but scrying her for a conversation wouldn’t be a bad idea. Getting Black on the other side of a bowl would be even better, but I had no real way to contact him. Pickler slid down her pile of cushions and saluted me before stalking away. Aisha and Ratface took the hint, and made their exit not long after. Hakram was polishing off the rest of his wine, so I turned to Kilian. Who was already looking at me, I was pleased to see.

“So, Senior Mage,” I said. “When do you get off duty?”

“I’ve no responsibilities until afternoon tomorrow,” she replied with a smile.

I raised an eyebrow.

“How’d you manage that?” I asked.

“I forewent my free days for the last month,” Kilian said. “Though I did manage to walk the city a bit before that.”

“Oh?” I said, fingers toying with the edge of her tunic.

“Found a little shop in the merchant district,” she said idly. “They do very interesting things with lace.”

My breath caught. Smiling impishly, she leaned closer.

“I’m wearing one of their creations right now,” she murmured.

I rose to my feet.

“And we’re done here,” I announced.

Catching Kilian by the hand I immediately headed for the door but paused when I passed by Adutant.

“Hakram,” I said. “My buddy. My friend.”

“Cat?” he replied bemusedly.

“I’ve been sleeping in an empty bed for two months,” I said. “If someone knocks at my door before noon tomorrow for anything short of an invasion, I will have them hanged .”

Kilian snorted, and we were out of the room before the orc could reply.

—

I woke up in the middle of the night.

The armful of redhead at my side was still asleep and my pillow was decadently soft after having been on the road so long, so I closed my eyes and buried my head back into it. Someone banged on the door again, more urgently this time. I cursed, then got up. Kilian’s eyes fluttered open.

“Cat?” she asked sleepily.

“Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

I almost went to open the door before remembering I was naked. Picking up a shirt from the pile of dirty clothes I really needed to have laundered at some point, I slipped it on. The asshole on the other side of the door banged again. Adjusting the shirt to it covered my thighs, I made my way to the door and wrenched it open. On the other side, a legionary with lieutenant stripes stood with his hand raised.

“ What ?” I hissed at him.

The Soninke took in the sight of me dishevelled, half-asleep and entirely furious before gulping nervously.

“Lady Squire, the Winter Court is attempting to invade the city,” he managed to get out. “General Juniper sent me to wake you.”

I sighed, then rubbed the bridge of my nose. One of these days, I was going to learn to keep my fucking mouth shut.

Chapter 5: Beachhead

“Look at how edible you are. You’re basically asking for it.”
-Warlord Grog the King-Eater, addressing the king of Okoro during the sack of the same

“So what are we looking at?” I asked.

I took my helmet when Hakram offered it, clasping the chin straps as I checked the longsword sheathed at my belt. The moon was out in full, but it was hard to tell given how many torches there were out in the streets. Legionaries were evacuating the citizens of Marchford according to Juniper’s prepared plan as we made our way through the streets, half the Gallowborne behind me. The rest was still assembling under Tribune Farrier. They’d catch up eventually. I wasn’t sure whether I’d want them to follow me into the fray, anyway, but if nothing else they’d be able to bolster our lines.

“The first defensive perimeter collapsed almost instantly,” the tall orc said. “Hune’s men dug in behind the second one, but they’re out of their breadth here.”

I could see the blizzard that had overtaken the central plaza of my city even from where I stood, a column that went high into the sky like some cheap snow imitation of the Tower, so Adjutant’s words struck me as a bit of an understatement. I’d pit the Fifteenth against anything that had feet or claws, but you couldn’t stab the weather. Well, they couldn’t anyway. I might be able to work something out. In my experience, you could stab pretty much anything if you tried hard enough. Now there was a decent motto for the freshly-founded Noble House of Foundling. If I ever got around to having any descendants – and I wasn’t planning on it, at the moment – I’d have it put up on a spiffy banner for when they inevitably got into a fight way out of their league. A legacy to be proud of.

“No shit,” I said. “I meant what kind of forces are they fielding?”

“Infantry,” Adjutant said. “Every single enemy soldier should be considered a mage, and their weapons look primitive but they have no trouble cutting through ours.”

“You’d think people would get tired of that gimmick,” I sighed. “Anyone looks like they’re in charge?”

“Not as of the last report I got,” Hakram replied. “I’m guessing if there’s a leader they’re either still in Arcadia or hidden by the storm.”

We turned the corner, a line of legionaries moving aside with hasty salutes so they wouldn’t get in our way. I nodded absent-mindedly, not really paying attention.

“They have wings, right?” I asked, making a gesture that was meant to represent flapping butterflies but came across as mildly obscene.

“That’s how they overran the first perimeter,” Hakram agreed soberly. “Headed straight for Pickler’s scorpions to take them out then spread across the rooftops. Hune moved crossbowmen to box them in, it’s working for now.”

That did not feel like a long-term solution. Eventually they’d find a way to get through and there was no way I was allowing a bunch of fae to run wild in Marchford. Gods, just thinking of the cost of rebuilding after a rampage was enough to make me feel faint. Why were my enemies never considerate about collateral damage? Admittedly I’d ordered Marchford Manor torched myself, but I sure as Hells wasn’t taking the blame for the devils and that walking horror Heiress has set on the city.

“Mages can’t do anything about that?” I said.

“They’re busy making sure the blizzard goes up instead of covering the city,” Adjutant said. “They’re working on shutting it down entirely, but whatever’s making it packs a punch.”

“Have you-“

“Sent a runner to Apprentice before I even caught up to you,” the tall orc interrupted me.

Hakram, you prince among men. Always on the ball. If there was someone could make this mess less of a mess – or at least someone else’s mess – it was Masego. I wasn’t all that eager to head into a snowstorm without someone who could make fire at my side, truth be told, cloak over my plate or not. If the Fair Folk wanted to make it snow, I wasn’t above retorting with a whiff of the ol’ brimstone. We were close to the plaza, now, and I could feel the temperature steadily dropping. Joy. The two of us slowed when a legionary popped out of the woodworks and immediately headed in our direction, dropping a knee when she got in front of me.

“Countess,” the young Callowan said.

“Up,” I ordered. “You were sent for us?”

“Legate Hune conveys her respect and would like to inform you the southern part of our formation is close to collapse,” the light-skinned girl said.

Gods, how old was she? Seventeen at most. Barely two years younger than me but she felt like a kid, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and one bad day away from getting on a battlefield she wouldn’t walk away from.

“She has reinforcements headed there?” Hakram asked.

“We’re stretched thin until Legate Nauk moves his men into place,” the messenger replied. “She fears what she can spare will not be enough.”

Well, fuck . Hune had three thousand soldiers under her command – one time and a half the size of what a kabili should be – and she was still hard-pressed? Given the relatively small size of the area she had to contain, that meant the fae were tearing through her men like wet parchment.

“We’re close,” Hakram said, eyeing me.

“We’re going,” I replied. “Tell the legate as much.”

The girl got to her feet and saluted as I turned to the Gallowborne behind me. The officer at their head was an orc, one of the few in my personal guard.

“Lieutenant Sark,” I called out.

“Ma’am?” the officer replied.

“Send word to Tribune Farrier: we’re headed south. He’s to back up the lines there immediately. Same for your men.”

The greenskin eyed me calmly.

“You’ll be going into the storm, ma’am?”

“Looks that way,” I grunted. “Gotta get at whatever’s in there.”

He grinned, showing off yellowing fangs.

“Good hunting, Warlord.”

See, stuff like that was like I liked having orcs backing me. No insistence on coming along or waiting for Apprentice, just an encouragement to go out and kill things that wanted to kill me. I didn’t waste time on any further talk: we moved double-time for where the enemy assault was apparently the strongest.

—

Legion doctrine for static defence was fairly straightforward. Establish a shield wall of heavies everywhere without walls, place sappers and mages behind it to disrupt enemy formations. Most of the killing was actually behind the melee, by bolts and fireballs shot into the massed enemies. Unfortunately, both the Miezan legions and the Praesi inheritors had crafted that tactic relying one one assumption the Fifteenth was currently paying for: that they would have more or better spellcasters on the field than the enemy. The Empire was the only nation on Calernia with a formal mage corps in their army, so they usually had at least twice the number of spellslingers the enemy did if not more, and the Miezan empire had been built on sorcery the likes of which had never been seen before or since. Neither nation had ever tangled with the fae, and it was showing.

Instead of the orderly shield wall I was expecting, I was currently looking at half a dozen clumps of legionaries desperately trying to fight off the enemy while fairies darted past them to take a bite out of my panicking sappers. The sharp cracks of munitions and disorderly crossbow fire announced the death of a few more of my goblins every few heartbeats. I was confused at how the fae could have managed to break a shield wall without one of their own until the first time I saw some dark-skinned man dressed in furs glow as he spoke and a human walking out of formation as if in a trance, just to get speared through the throat. The Winter Court was falling on my men like a pack of wolves, using ice and illusions and charm to break them apart and pick them off one at a time. The defensive formations of Hune’s men were not a rampart so much as a buffet the enemy could choose from at will.

Most of the fairies were shaped like eerie humans with wings, though not all. Wolf-like hounds made of ice and shade wove in and out of sight, tearing out throats and mauling men over their shields. The only saving grace of that disaster I was watching was that it wasn’t also in the middle of a blizzard. Silver lining, eh?

“That is not how I saw my night going,” I admitted.

“They’re probably smarter than devils too,” Hakram growled with distaste.

My longsword came out of its scabbard without a sound and I move forward with my shield raised. Adjutant’s axe and scutum immediately moved to cover my left flank as the Gallowborne spread out in ranks behind us. Hune’s sappers took cover behind them as soon as they could, retreating with relief, and then a heartbeat later I was in the thick of it. A pale-skinned woman in a flowing blue dress that shimmered like a mirror leapt in my direction, a bone sword in hand. I breathed in, breathed out, and felt my Name stir. The beast grinned, eyes opening: my veins warmed and the world slowed. Hello, old friend. Would it be strange to say I’ve missed you? The sharp point of bone was headed straight for my throat, uncaring of the gorget protecting it, and I wasn’t taking the risk of letting that blow land. The flat of my sword lightly tapped the fae’s wrist, nudging the strike away, then with a flick of the wrist came around to tear straight through my enemy’s throat. I had at no point ceased moving forward. A heartbeat later, the fae’s headless corpse fell to the ground behind me.

Weeping Heavens, it was good to be back in the field.

To my left Hakram sunk his axe into the head of a shadow hound, hard enough shards of ice flew and its muzzle hit the ground. With a grunt he tore it out, then brought down an armoured boot on the creature’s neck to make sure it wouldn’t get up. I could feel myself smiling, the battle-joy taking hold of me. Gods, after all this talking I’d been forced to do lately it was such a delight just being able to hit something. The Gallowborne were advancing steadily behind us, picking off any fae trying to charm them with crossbows before they could get too close. The fairies swarmed in the air above them, but my personal guard was made of sterner stuff than that. They’d been through Marchford and Liesse: a bunch of fae weren’t going to make them flinch. I left them to it, moving towards Hune’s besieged legionaries. Ragged cries of “Fifteenth” came when they saw me, and they threw themselves back into the fray with fresh ferocity. That drew some attention. The fae, strange translucent wings flapping, hovered in front of me. I genuinely could not tell what gender it was, if it even had one.

“Let go of your weapon, sweet one,” it crooned.

My shield smashed it in the face, breaking its nose with a brutal crunch. Huh, so fae did bleed red. You learned something every day. I started speaking again, so I hit it again with morbid fascination.

“Here, have it,” I replied drily, ramming my sword through its chest.

“Don’t play with your food,” Hakram chided absent-mindedly.

His axe went clean through a wild-haired fae with two spears of shadow, then when it fell the bottom of his shield came down on her head repeatedly until it was nothing more than bloody pulp.

“I’m not impressed with the calibre so far,” I said. “Enemies that weak shouldn’t have broken our lines.”

Immediately after saying that, I hunkered behind my shield and braced for impact. The tip of a bronze spear punched through the steel, an inch away from my right eye, and I grinned. I’d had a feeling that would hurry things along. I ripped my arm out of the leather straps binding it to the shield, stepping back as I took a look at my opponent. Male, wearing an armour of twisted dead wood. Couldn’t see much of him aside from long dark hair and entirely blue eyes staring at me like I was an insect. Eh. I’d gotten more scathing disdain from Praesi nobles, he’d have to step up his game if he wanted to make a dent. There was a bronze sword at his hip, still sheathed. I flicked my wrist and the contraption of steel wires Pickler had built me triggered, dropping my knife on the palm of my gauntleted hand. If I triggered it differently, it could even shoot the knife like an arrow. My Senior Sapper made the best toys. There were another three fae decked in the same armour at the new one’s side, fanning out to flank Hakram and I.

“Nauk described a female with the same gear as responsible for the last blizzard,” Adjutant said, hefting his axe over his shoulder.

“Four heavy hitters, then,” I frowned. “Someone’s looking to make an impression.”

The first deadwood soldiers ripped his spear out of my shield, then laughed. It wasn’t a human laugh, or even a person’s. It sounded like the ice of a lake cracking come spring, like frost sharply spreading over glass.

“Children,” he mocked, and though he was speaking no language I knew I understood him perfectly. “We are the footsoldiers of Winter. The Sword of Waning Day. Die screaming.”

“Oh hey, a pack of flunkies with a fancy name,” I deadpanned. “Never slaughtered my way through one of those before.”

They moved as one. Before the first exchange was even done I was very, very glad I’d scrapped with the Hunter before. I’d had precious little training against opponents using spears save for my fights with the hero, and if I hadn’t learned to read movements from that I’d likely have earned a gaping hole through my shoulder within the first five heartbeats of the fight. The two deadwood soldiers who focused on me were quick, light on their feet and worst of all they knew how to work together. Soldiers, I decided, might not be the right word no matter what they called themselves. They were like hunters, harrying a prey into position so the finishing blow could be struck. Unfortunately for them, they were going to have to reconsider their position in the food chain of Creation. I closed the distance with the one who’d spoken, getting in up and personal where his choice of weapon was more hindrance than help. I nearly ate a bronze shaft in the teeth but instead ducked under it, sliding my knife into the armour about where his lower ribs should be.

The goblin steel bit into the wood but failed to punch through. Not regular wood, then. Everybody always got these fancy enchanted things, it was godsdamned unfair. I had to dance away when a spear tip pierced through where the back of my leg was a heartbeat before, then sharply twist my footing when when the first deadwood soldier went for my throat. They were too quick, I thought. In plate I wasn’t able to keep up, and my armour might as well be silk for the difference it would make if they landed a hit. I heard Hakram bellow and glanced in his direction: he had a spear through the leg, though he’d traded that for his axe buried in one of the fae’s neck. Right between the helmet and armour. It did not slow the enemy down, to my dismay. The deadwood soldier simply ripped out the axe, tossed it away and unsheathed her sword. Adjutant spat to the side, threw his shield in her face and took the spear out of his leg. He did not look concerned in the slightest about how he was bleeding.

My momentary distraction was costly. I saw the spear blur from the corner of my eye and hastily slapped the shaft to the side with the flat of my sword, but I’d missed the other one: it punched straight through my plate, then my knee, then entirely through and into the pavement. I was stuck where I was like a bloody pig on a spit. The soldier who’d hit me unsheathed his sword as the other one, the one who’d spoken, drew back his spear as it became coated with frost. This was the most pain I’d been in in over a year, and for a moment I focused on biting down on a scream. Then I watched a frosted spear head moving with unnatural swiftness towards my head, the whole world narrowing down to that one threat. I was not going to be able to dodge that, I knew. All the lessons I’d learned from some of the most celebrated killers of our age flashed through the back of my mind, but I pushed the aside. Eyes crossing as I followed the trajectory of the spear, instead of trying to move my body I bid my time and then bit . I caught the very end of the point between my teeth.

If Black ever heard of this, I thought, he was going to drill me until I died. The fae shifted his footing to simply push the spear forward – which would be very, very bad – but I spat it out and parried the sword blow from his partner. This was going to end very quickly if I didn’t start moving again, so I flicked my wrist at the sword fae and forced it to duck smoothly under my thrown knife while with my now-free hand I tore out his spear, flooding power in my arm to compensate for the poor angle. Bleeding like it was going out of style, one leg hanging loosely and pretty much useless, I eyed my opponents.

“She struggles still,” the sword fae noted in voice that sounded like a deer’s death rattle, like an owl swooping down.

“Title of my memoirs,” I gasped. “On that note: Rise .”

Thick chords of shadow spread across my body as my wounds closed. A little more of that bundle of power inside me faded away. Luckily I hadn’t had to use much of it so far – I doubted I’d run into anything as useful to Take anytime soon. The sight of my wound disappearing in the span of heartbeat, healed perfectly, was enough to give the fae pause. The healing wasn’t painless, of course, it hurt just as much as the wounding had because the Choir of Contrition was obviously a bunch of bleeding sadists. That moment of surprise cost them. I forced power into my legs and in the blink of an eye I was on the deadwood soldiers with a spear, ramming his buddy’s own weapon through the small chink between his wood breastplate and the lower parts of his armour. The creature gasped in pain but I ignored it, twisting to meet the assault of the other fae. The sword was angled for my throat, which was smart of him: I’d just conclusively proved that hacking away at my limbs was useless. Nothing short of a killing blow was going to stop me. Unfortunately for him, sword blades going for me was something I was intimately familiar with. I caught his wrist, twisted it sharply and forced him to his knees. A hard stroke was enough to send his still-helmeted head tumbling to the ground. I glanced at the one with the spear through the belly, saw he was on his knees desperately trying to take it out.

“A year ago,” I said, “that struggle comment would have been a great set up.”

The point of my sword went through one of the eyeholes, came away wet with blood and some silvery fluid that turned into smoke. I got read to back up Adjutant, but he’d apparently turned the situation around. He tossed the corpse of one soldier at the other and, taking the spear by the shaft two-handed, began to brutally beat down the still-living fae.

“Hakram,” I muttered. “That is not how you use a spear.”

The fae tried to retreat but I kicked it in the back, having approached quietly, and Adjutant brought down the spear – without even needing to turn it around, since he’d been holding it upside down – to pierce the creature through the throat when she was down. We caught our breaths for a moment, him still bleeding and me feeling my Name’s power simmer down without an opponent to take it out on.

“I can’t help but notice the blizzard hasn’t gone away,” Adjutant finally said, bending over to pick up his axe.

I eyed the raging winds ahead warily. Behind us my legionaries had managed to get their line in order, only to be entirely relieved of pressure moments ago when the fae started fleeing back into the blizzard. While giving Hakram and I a very wide berth. That showed a remarkable understanding of how that fight would go.

“Could be there’s another one inside,” I said.

“Ten denarii there’s something even nastier in the middle,” Adjutant said.

“That’s not a bet,” I said, “that’s you stealing my hard-earned salary.”

I sheathed my sword.

“The one who talked,” I said. “He said something that troubles me.”

“We are the footsoldiers of Winter,” the orc quoted softly.

“If they’re not lying,” I said. “If those were really the rank and file...”

“How strong will an officer be?” the orc completed.

What did that even make the fae my legionaries were having trouble with? Skirmishers? Or civilians , I thought, and the shiver that went up my spine had nothing to do with the cold. Nothing here was adding up. I didn’t know much about the fae, but if they’d attempted to invade Creation before someone would have fucking written about it. I refused to believe there could be several hundred books about the godsdamned Licerian Wars, which hadn’t even happened on this continent, and not a single one about ‘that one time Arcadia poured out as an unstoppable flood of death’.

“There’s other gates in and out of Arcadia,” I said. “And they don’t seem to have trouble like this. There’s fae in the Waning Woods, sure, but they don’t invade places as an army . Refuge is a day’s walk away from a gate and they’re still on the map.”

“So why, then, is the Winter Court sending soldiers here?” Hakram asked. “Is it because this isn’t a proper gate?”

A wave of warmth washed away the cold a moment before someone cleared their throat. I turned.

“I’m rather curious about that myself,” Masego said. “And I know where we can find answers.”

Chapter 6: Backlash

“One learns more from defeat than victory. Therefore, fear the general that has never won a battle.”
– Isabella the Mad, Proceran general

Masego hadn’t changed a bit since I last saw him. Tall, dark-skinned and boyishly chubby under his loose clothes. His spectacles were fogged by the cold. He’d put on a thick cloak and his trinket-threaded braids were covered by... I was honestly at a loss as to how to describe that abomination. Knitted colourful yarn vaguely shaped like an ugly hat trying to devour an equally awful hat?

“I’m sorry. I’m happy to see you and all but what is that ?” I asked, pointing at the inanimate creature squatting over his head.

“My father knitted it,” Apprentice replied, tone defensive. “Didn’t want me to go out in the cold with my ears uncovered.”

I almost asked him which father had committed that crime against anyone with eyes, but I wasn’t sure whether that thing would be more disturbing if made by the Warlock or by an incubus, so I refrained from finding out. Probably the incubus, I morbidly thought. Warlock had always been impeccably dressed every time I saw him. Even the occasional casual worse-than-death threat hadn’t been enough for me to stop noticing how ridiculously attractive the man was. Between him and Malicia, Evil had the whole hot and dangerous thing covered. Though Kilian was all I needed, of course, I loyally added afterwards. Certainly much less likely to kill me, and I’d come to learn that was not a given in relationships when you were a villain.

“Catherine,” Hakram said.

“I’m here,” I hastily replied.

“Masego, you’ve got something?” the orc prompted.

“Yes,” the Soninke mage said, pushing up his spectacles. “The anchor for the blizzard is further inside. I’ve narrowed down a location.”

“You can’t just break the spell from here?” I asked.

“It’s not a spell. And spells cannot be broken, only dispersed,” Apprentice said. “This blizzard is pouring out of Arcadia through a semi-stable gate.”

“Shut the gate, shut the weather,” I said. “Got it.”

“Possibly,” the bespectacled man said. “It depends on how strong the bleed over from Arcadia into Creation was.”

“I’m not having permanent winter in the middle of my city, Masego,” I said. “Broke, demon-tainted and covered in ice is where I draw the line.”

“We take the hard stances,” Hakram said gravely.

The prick. I was about to reply when I caught sight of movement ahead in the storm. Within a heartbeat my sword was back in hand and Adjutant’s axe raised.

“We’ll revisit that later,” I said, taking the lead and moving into the blizzard.

“I’m a rebel,” I heard Hakram tell Masego in a pleased voice.

“And you cheat at shatranj,” Apprentice replied peevishly.

“I don’t even need to, with you,” the orc said.

I sighed. Did heroes have to deal with this much bickering? At least neither of them were prone to monologues, there was that. The howling winds and the snow they carried were blinding but not a problem for my little crew: a bubble of translucent blue power formed the moment we entered, courtesy of Masego. Between that and the warmth he was radiating, this was almost comfortable. Almost. No sight of the movement I’d glimpsed, which I naturally took as a bad sign. Just because I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead didn’t mean the fae could not. For all I knew they were quietly surrounding us even as our boots crunched in the snow. Stealthy we were not.

“Masego,” I said. “If we were surrounded, could you tell?”

“Yes,” he said. “With the right instruments.”

I paused.

“ Do you have the right instruments?” I asked.

He blinked behind his spectacles.

“No,” he said. “With the amount of fae magic flooding the area the best I can currently do is locate the direction of the gate.”

“How long have we been walking?” Hakram frowned.

“I can’t tell,” I said. “That is probably not a good sign.”

“Time dilation inside Arcadia varies wildly from place to place,” Masego contributed helpfully. “In some sections a night could last a century in Creation, in others merely a few heartbeats.”

“We’re not in Arcadia, though,” I said. “Right?”

Apparently howling winds did not make awkward silences any less awkward. You learned something every day. I glanced at Apprentice.

“Masego?”

“We’re close to the gate,” he said.

“Masego.”

“Should be there soon,” he said.

“ Masego .”

The chubby Soninke cleared his throat.

“I cannot tell,” he admitted. “To my senses it feels like we are, but that shouldn’t-“

With a quiet ping the javelin punched through the shield bubble and would have taken the mage in the throat if I hadn’t snatched it out of the air by reflex. I glanced down at the weapon. Bronze, covered in runes. That were glowing. I managed to throw it away a moment before it blew up in shards of metal and ice, some of the shrapnel scoring lines on my cheeks.

“We come in peace,” I blatantly lied, calling out into the storm with a sword in hand.

Hakram tried to turn his laugh into a cough.

“Catherine,” Masego said, “the fae are unparalleled masters of deception. They’re not going to fall for-“

The blizzard cleared ahead of us, revealing a slender silhouette. A man in a scale armour of woven dead wood and obsidian, horned helmet covering his entire face – even his eyes – save for his chin and mouth. The pale skin revealed under was pale as a corpse’s. A spear in hand, he sat astride what would have been a long-legged shaggy horse if not for the long horn protruding from its forehead.

“I hate it when you do that,” Apprentice muttered.

“Good evening, Lady of Marchford,” the fae said.

My wariness immediately went up a notch. The lesser fairies hadn’t quite managed to sound human when they’d spoken, too melodic and sing-song to be entirely mortal. The deadwood soldiers hadn’t even tried, magic and images dripping from every word. This one, though? He sounded like a person. The most dangerous monsters were always the clever ones.

“That’s me,” I agreed. “And you are?”

“A Rider of the Host,” he replied politely, inclining his head. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

I could feel the capitalized letter in that, the same way you did when someone spoke a Name. This was not headed in a pleasant direction.

“Rider, then,” I said. “I don’t suppose you’re moving people behind us as we speak?”

“You have my word no fae will attack while under truce,” he replied calmly.

That wasn’t a no. I glanced at Masego, who nodded sharply. Whatever was coming at our back when negotiations inevitably broke down – and if I was being entirely honest with myself, there was no real chance they would not – he’d be the one to handle it.

“So you’re in charge of the fae invading my city?” I said.

“I was given command of this host,” the Rider said.

Eh, close enough. The way he’d worded that instead of giving me a yes or no probably meant he was omitting something, but the intricacies of fae politics were something I gave a remarkably low amount of fucks about . Do not make me learn fae politics, you bastards, I silently thought. I can barely handle the human ones.

“I don’t suppose you’d just scamper back into Arcadia if I asked?” I said.

The Rider smiled, revealing a mouthful of milky sharp teeth.

“Are you offering a deal, Lady of Marchford?” he said.

“Gods, am I ever not falling for that one,” I muttered. “Look, whatever you are. I could drum your sorry excuse for an invasion out of my backyard, but I’ll take losses doing it. No getting around that. I’ve got other cats to skin, so why don’t we just call it a night and both walk away?”

“That sounded like a threat,” the Rider noted.

“It was,” I replied frankly. “You’re probably some sort of force to reckon with back in Arcadia, but this is my wheelhouse. I’ve walked away from the corpses of scarier stuff than you.”

“Lady of Marchford, this is home,” he said, smiling.

“Catherine,” Masego whispered.

“I’m a little busy at the m-“

I bit down on that. Last time I’d passed on Apprentice’s advice in a bad spot I’d walked right into demon fun time, swiftly followed by the screaming soul surgery interlude. Learn from your mistakes, Foundling.

“Yes?”

“Remember that question you asked me?” he said.

I nodded.

“We are,” he whispered. “They took across a shard of Arcadia.”

Oh, this just kept getting godsdamned better.

“Rider, did you pricks fairy-land the middle of my city?” I growled.

“The truce is over,” the fae replied.

The blizzard swallowed him instantly.

“So that’s a yes,” I said. “Gods Below and Everburning. You bastards are starting to catch up to Heiress on my murder list.”

I didn’t hear them coming, because they didn’t make a sound. It was the kind of instinct my Name gave me, the same that allowed me to catch an arrow in flight or roll out of a building on fire before it collapsed – both of which had happened to be depressingly often since I became a villain. A slender wedge of mounted fae ghosted out of the howling winds, spears at the ready. Like the Rider who’d spoken to me they were astride the murderous-looking cousin of a unicorn, though their own armours lacked the obsidian that had been on the last one’s. Maybe he had been in charge. My eyes narrowed at the sight of their hooves never leaving a mark in the snow. I wouldn’t put that above them, really, but more likely... My wrist snapped up and a spear of shadow coalesced, tearing unfailing through the wind and straight through the lead rider’s chest. He dissipated, the lot of them just a cold mirage.

“Cat,” Hakram said, tone alarmed.

My eyes swivelled where he was pointing his axe, to our left. Another wedge of mounted fae. A trickle of Name power drifted up to my eyes, forcing them to sharpen in the poor light. They weren’t leaving a trail either. Which meant... And would you look at that: another silent wedge was coming up from our back. They, one the other hand, were leaving hoof prints. The answer seemed clear, which two years of dealing with Akua Sahelian had taught me meant they were probably fucking with me. I formed another spear of shadow and swivelled to throw it to our right, the only avenue that they weren’t visibly using. A heartbeat later the faint silhouette of a rider ducking under the spear, pressing against her mount, flickered into visibility for the barest moment. There you are.

“Brace yourself,” Apprentice said.

Blinding blue light flared up, his bubble turning into a broad rectangular panel straight in their path. The rider at the tip of the wedge, still closely pressed against her mount, guided her unicorn into leaping over it. And hit another panel with a dull thump, this one entirely invisible. I snorted. That was a new trick. The two wings of cavalry split smoothly, beginning the way around before the lead fae had even hit the ground. The blue panel’s glow intensified before it blew up, detonating in a flash of heat and light.

“Masego, can you tell me where the talker is?” I asked.

“Behind them,” the Soninke replied without missing a beat.

“That’s where I’m going, then,” I said. “You boys try not to get yourself killed – I’m pretty sure I can’t afford a double funeral.”

I began moving before they could reply. I’d barely taken a dozen strides before the protection of whatever ward Apprentice had going on ceased, the wind almost battering me down. I’d gone through the middle, since it was the clearest path, but the riders in the back of the two columns peeled off and went straight for me. So much for the easy way. That made one, two, three... eight in all. Joy. I was going to be feeling this in the morning, wasn’t I? Stilling my breath, I stood my ground with my sword in hand. I’d been taught to deal with mounted men, though not fae. The only dangerous part of a lance is the tip , Black’s voice reminded me. Watch the horse. Cavalry tramples what it can’t skewer. These were spears, not lances, but the principle held. The riders were used to hunting together, I noticed. They silently adjusted their angles so they wouldn’t charge into each other if I managed to avoid them.

Whatever sorcery had made them almost invisible was gone, but I was smelling a rat. So far they hadn’t once used a straightforward attack, there would be more to this. Frowning, I formed a small orb of shadow and shot it at the leftmost rider – who guided his mount a little to the side to avoid it, never breaking stride. Not a fake? There was a flash of flame behind me as Masego got serious and my question answered himself: only half the riders cast a shadow in the sudden light. Gods, I was already starting to hate fighting fae. So, how did one dodge a blow they couldn’t see coming? Don’t be where it hits , if Captain was to be believed. I’d been taught that lesson one hammer swing at a time. Name power trickled into my legs and I pushed off, sending a spray of snow behind me. I kept a low profile, eyeing the spears headed for me across a loose half-circle, and shifted tracks to head under a unicorn before I could be turned into several bloody pieces of Foundling. My sword flashed up, opening the creature’s belly as I slid under it and I winced as the ice-cold water that flooded out of the wound.

I landed in a sprawl behind the faltering beast, forcing myself to my feet and running in the direction Apprentice had told me. I could feel the riders wheeling around for another charge behind me and resisted the urge to blindly shoot a spear of shadows in their direction. My well was deeper since my Name had been restored, but there were still limits to what I could draw on. I couldn’t afford to waste too much power on longshots, not with a hard fight ahead of me. Now, running away from a mounted killer with your back to them and flat fields around you was about the single worst position you could be relative to cavalry. I was not unaware of this, of course, but standing my ground back there with the other two at my side was a losing battle. Our bag of tricks was nothing to sneer at, and had only grown since the Liesse Rebellion, but there was only so long we’d hold our own against creatures that were literally defined by trickery.

No, the way to end this was ahead of me. Cut the head of the snake, other assorted and vaguely violent metaphors. The riders behind me would catch up soon enough, but I was banking on that changing nothing. The silhouette of the Rider of the Host was hard to make out, even with Name sight, but it was there. On a hill, overlooking the scrap and radiating genteel disdain. Yeah, that one had all the little marks of nobility to it. Even in Arcadia, some things were the same. I got to the foot of the hill before the enemy caught up. Glancing at the Rider, I was considering my options while the spears got ever closer when he spoke up.

“Enough,” he said. “I will deal with this. Break the others.”

Ah, there it was. I did love a bit of hubris in my opponents. I’d mouthed off to the big bad fairy and gotten in front of it, of course it was going to want a piece of me. And it wouldn’t want its underlings to get involved, because it was making a point. Probably not about honour, with the fae, but arrogance would do in a pinch. I wasn’t picky.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” I said. “Last time I saw Masego get pissy he torched a demon so hard it melted the stone under it.”

“We are not demons,” the Rider said, raising his spear. “We are not mindless abominations. Our existence has purpose.”

“You’re also supposed to have brains,” I said. “So I genuinely don’t understand why you’re making a mess here. Even if you somehow manage to beat my men, you have to realize the Empire is going to throw all you until you break.”

“These matters are beyond your understanding, Lady of Marchford,” he said.

“I’m going to enjoy punching that line right out of your mouth,” I replied cheerfully, baring my teeth.

The spear lowered, the Rider charged and my Name howled in joy so loudly it drowned out the wind.

Usurpation

“One hundred and forty-three: do not try to avert prophecy, fulfil prophecy or in any way tinker with prophecy. Swallowing poison will lead to a quicker death and less ironic horror inflicted upon Creation.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

Kairos was twelve years old and he had less than a year to live.

That was what he’d learned today, going down to the crypt even though he had been forbidden to by the king. The... thing in the tomb had spoken its prophecy in a croaky whisper, that he would not make it to his thirteenth nameday. He wished he could say he was surprised, but had anything ever been more obvious? He’d been born frail, with a dead eye and limbs that shook. Ripped from his mother’s womb too early when her pregnancy had turned sour and she’d begun withering like grapes on the vine. The priests and the mages had said he wouldn’t survive his first winter and his father had washed his hands of the matter, putting him in a distant wing of the palace and drinking all thought of the matter away. But Kairos was still dragging his crippled hide around the city to this day, a prince of the blood no one would look in the eye. Royal or not, he was a pariah. Misfortune had touched him young and never let go, they said. Bad seed . That was what happened when kings wed commoners, even for love.

The odd-eyed child closed the door after dismissing the servant, kneeling with shaking legs by the bowl. Dipping a cloth in the warm water, he wiped away the dust and dirt from his face before resting his head on the table. Kairos exhaled, his breath unsteady. His lungs had not been entirely formed when he’d been born, the priests told him. It was why sometimes he choked on his own spit, clawing at his throat until a God as cruel as it was merciful returned his breath to him. Those same priests urged him to entrust his life to the Gods Above, to seek relief in the life after this one. Until then, he should find solace in prayer and good deeds: those would not soothe his body, but they would wash away his sins. They never said exactly what sin he had committed. Presumably being born was bad enough there was no need to belabour the matter. The cripple laughed quietly, though a rasping cough killed the mirth halfway through. His knees felt like they were swelling already, but he stayed kneeling.

He clasped his hands and tried to clear his mind, to let the words of the House of Light fill it. Nothing came. Staring down into the bowl, Kairos sighed.

“I am trying,” he told the Heavens,” to find a reason to worship you. Any reason at all.”

His distorted reflection stared back, the blood-filled dead eye made even more monstrous by the water.

“There’s a place beyond the Heavens where righteous souls go, your people tell me,” he said. “A paradise of sorts, from which no one has ever returned. A reward for those who embrace the seventeen cardinal virtues while living out their allotted time on Creation.”

Idly, he flicked the side of the bowl. His kneecaps throbbed painfully but Kairos was no stranger to pain. It was an old friend, the teacher that had reared him from the cradle and followed him in every misshapen step he took. The water rippled, turning his reflection from ugly to abstract.

“It has tempted me, on occasion,” he said. “The thought of a place without suffering. I have to wonder, though – what would I even do there?”

He chuckled.

“Sing your praises, rejoice with all the other worthy souls?” he said. “Tell me, o Gods Above – what should I praise you for?”

Silence answered him. It always did. Even in the heart of the House of Light, where Dorian said he could almost hear the singing of the Choirs, he was given only silence. Even the Heavens played favourites. Hesitant knocks at the door roused him from his thoughts.

“Enter,” the child said.

A servant, head shaved as was tradition and in white robes that hid their gender, knelt by the open door.

“Prince Kairos,” they said. “The king sends for you.”

The cripple shakily rose to his feet, leaning heavily against the table.

“I am feeling ill,” he replied. “Tell my father I am unable to attend him.”

Two men came by the doorway, decked in the ornate bronze armour of the palace guard. Had their swords ever seen any use, Kairos wondered? Doubtful. All the real soldiers went into the army.

“The king insists, my prince,” one of them said.

“Does he, now?” the cripple said. “I’ll spare all of us the indignity of you getting me there slung over your shoulder.”

Knees throbbing, Kairos followed them into the corridors. The servant stayed kneeling until he was gone. The walk was long, by his standards, and made worse by his exertions of the day. His chambers were in the oldest part of the palace, the one that had once been the heart of the fortress when Helike was little more than a castle with huts around it, but this section was all marble and gold. Frescoes of kings and Tyrants spread colourfully along the walls, all depicting the many victories of the city’s warlike rulers. That never ceased to amuse him. His father had never wielded a sword in his life, or even ridden a horse. The few skirmishes with Stygia and Atalante that had taken place in his lifetime had been overseen by one of the many generals cluttering the palace, which while blatant parasites at least knew their way around a battlefield. The line of Theodosius was sinking further down the wine barrel every year.

They did not head for the Great Hall. While it was the place where audiences such as this should take place, the king rarely left his parlour unless he had to. The place had grown when the adjoining chambers had seen their walls knocked down to make room for more seats and a direct route to both the cellars and the palace kitchen. What little business was still conducted by Helike’s royal line instead of being tossed into the hands of councillors happened there, more often than not. Kairos had only ever stepped foot into the room a handful of times. He was not invited to the courtly games and drinking binges that took place behind those doors. He would not have attended even if he had been: there were few things fouler to look at than a man deep in his cups. The obnoxious laughter always made him think thoughts the Heavens would frown upon.

The guards were still flanking him when he limped into the parlour. The room was half-full, which still meant almost a hundred people. The King of Helike was on a long couch full of cushions and courtesans, a cup of wine in hand and chuckling as he fed one a piece of honeyed plum. The sexagenarian had kept a full head of hair, though gone white, and his face still kept the remains of the handsomeness of his youth. For a man who spent most of his time feasting, he was not all that fat. His face was red, though. Wine took its toll. The rest of the parlour was arranged in a half-circle of couches all turned towards the free space in the centre. Usually, it was filled with dancers, musicians and other performers but today all it had to offer was Kairos’ crippled form. A disappointment, no doubt. The couches closest to the king were filled with sycophants and nobles, but the wings of the half-circle on both sides effectively made up the heart of Helike’s ruling class. To the left, the most powerful nobles and the most influential generals formed a sober and uncomfortable cluster. All of them were looking at him.

To the right were Dorian and his cronies. Many were sons and daughters to the very same people across them, but there were others. Priests, even a member of the Order of the Righteous Spear. The heir to Helike himself looked like a living statue. Perfect pale skin unmarred by his hours in the sun, long flowing golden locks that cascaded down his shoulders. Kairos’ nephew had that peculiar sort of vanity where he refused to style himself, preferring to awe people with his natural good looks. The other prince was tall and perfectly proportioned, talented with a sword and lance. A famed horseman and promising commander, fair-handed in all things and an orator of talent. That hadn’t stopped Dorian’s father from drunkenly slipping in the baths and breaking his neck, of course. It used to take half a continent to put us down , Kairos thought with disgust. Now all it takes is a wet tile. The golden-haired prince smiled encouragingly in his uncle’s direction. The cripple looked away, limping his way to the couch where the king was finally deigning to notice his presence.

“Kairos,” King Amyntas Theodosian greeted him flatly. “You made me wait.”

“The shaking of my legs does not bow to decrees,” the prince said.

He did not manage to thread as much apology in that as he should have.

“Neither does your head, boy,” the king barked. “I forbade you to go into the crypt. Do you deny you disobeyed me?”

“Grandfather,” Dorian spoke up. “My uncle is obviously feeling ill. Perhaps this matter could be settled another day?”

Kairos eyed his hand, which was shaking like a leaf. Not, though, out of fear. How strange. When he’d woken this morning, he had been already flinching at the thought of his father’s displeasure. Now, looking at the fury painted over the king’s face, he could think of only one thing: what are you going to do, Father? Kill me before I die? The prince closed his hand, tucked it under his tunic where it could not be seen trembling.

“I do not,” he said. “Deny it, that is.”

Some part of him wondered if he should have thought this through. Found an excuse, cooked up a scheme to shield him from the king’s anger. He hadn’t though. He didn’t even have a reason for admitting to this. Just morbid curiosity.

“You disobeyed a royal decree,” King Amyntas growled. “That is treason .”

“I suppose it is,” Kairos mused. “How tawdry of me, if you’ll forgive my language. Still, I’m surprised you only sent for me now. I left the crypt before dawn came. Were you too drunk until now to hear the report?”

The silence in the room was deafening. Not a single person even dared to breathe.

“Are you mocking me, cripple?” his father spat.

“Obviously,” the prince replied. “I did try to make it blatant, for your sake.”

“I could have you killed for this,” the king said, looking almost sober now.

Though no less furious, evidently.

“It will spare me the walk back to my chambers, at least,” Kairos said. “By all means, get on with it.”

The was a ripple in the parlour, though his words were not the cause of it. Dorian made his way to his side, graceful even in haste, and knelt as a supplicant.

“Grandfather,” he said. “My uncle is delirious with pain, that is the only explication for his words. I implore you, do not make this decision in anger.”

The king looked at his precious golden grandson humbling himself against marble and hesitated. How proud you are, nephew, even on your knees , Kairos thought. The cripple limped to the closest table and snatched a cup of wine, pouring it out before casually tossing it at the other prince. The bronze made a delightful little bonk as it hit the back of his head before rolling on the floor.

“Get up, Dorian,” Kairos said. “Your wretched pity is the worst indignity I’ve been subjected to today.”

Surprise and irritation flickered across that perfect face and Dorian turned towards him. The odd-eyed child drank in the sight of it. It as like finally drinking cool water after years of being parched.

“Uncle-“ he began.

“You are more platitude than man,” Kairos said. “I want no part of what you peddle.”

“You’ve gone mad, boy,” the king said, sounding horrified.

Slowly, the odd-eyed child took out the hand he’d slipped into his tunic. It was, he saw, no longer shaking. He wondered if there was a meaning in that.

“Guards, take him to his quarters,” King Amyntas ordered. “Prince Kairos is under house arrest until I decree otherwise.”

The men pulled him away roughly under the stares of the entire court, as he continued thoughtfully looking at his hand.

–

His sleep was dreamless and his hours empty. The apothecaries tried to shove half a dozen different remedies down his throat, but he flatly refused to have anything to do with them. He was going to die, soon enough. What little time he had left would not be spent moving from one daze to another. His first visitor was, naturally, Dorian. It was midmorning after he was first put under arrest that the heir to Helike came, followed by that androgynous fanatic of his. The daughter of a fairly prominent noble, he remembered, though he could not recall her name. Slender and short-haired, and the way she could have been either a boy or a girl branded her a servant in his eyes. In Helike it was only they who made a point of surrendering the more obvious trappings of gender. Still, it hardly mattered since she herself hardly mattered. The girl hovered by the entrance when her master entered, leaving only reluctantly when he dismissed her and closed the door. Kairos would give it decent odds she was waiting outside in the corridor.

“Good morning, Uncle,” Dorian greeted him, taking the seat across his. “Has your health improved?”

The odd-eyed child put down the cup of water he’d been drinking on the table, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

“I am twelve years old, and I can tell that girl is in love with you,” Kairos said, wrinkling his nose as he ignored the greeting.

“Semia is a dear friend,” Dorian replied. “Put no stock in rumours.”

“Your kindness is worse than cruelty, nephew,” the cripple said.

The golden prince flinched, then mastered himself.

“I’ve been talking to grandfather,” he said. “Your arrest will be revoked soon.”

The odd-eyed child raised an eyebrow.

“Why?” he asked.

“Traditionally, all of royal blood are allowed-“ Dorian began.

“I mean why did you talk to Father?” Kairos interrupted.

The man looked surprised.

“You are my uncle,” he said. “I would not see you punished this way.”

“You don’t love me, Dorian,” the cripple said.

“We’re family ,” the prince replied, almost offended.

“So you feel guilt, and go through the motions regardless,” Kairos said. “I must admit I find that rather disgusting, if you’ll forgive my language.”

The heir to Helike looked irritated, then his face softened.

“I understand you’re in pain, Kairos,” he said. “And frustrated. You’ve been mistreated ever since you could walk. Grandfather is not the man he used to be, and how you’ve been treated was... ill-done. It will be different, when I rule. You will not have to be alone anymore.”

“No one has ever disliked you before, have they Dorian?” the child said, cocking his head to the side. “Not to your face, at least.”

“I want to help you, uncle,” the golden-haired man said earnestly.

“It’s not because you’re beautiful, you know,” Kairos said. “Or even because so many people love you while they despise the sight of me. It’s because you’re hollow.”

“Pardon?” the other prince said.

“You’re not a person, Dorian,” the child said. “All you are is an object, moving according to rules not your own. You don’t want anything for yourself.”

“It is the duty of a ruler to sublimate their selfish desires for the good of his people,” the prince replied quietly.

“I am going to die,” Kairos smiled. “Sometime soon, I am told. And yet, just with the few moments yesterday in that parlour, I’ll have been alive longer than you will be throughout your entire life.”

“I made a choice, uncle,” Dorian said. “I’ve been given so many gifts, I owe it to Creation to use them for the sake of others.”

“We don’t owe anyone anything,” Kairos said.

And in that moment, the words coming out of his mouth without thought, he finally understood it all. There was a trap and there was bait. Live according to our rules, the Heavens said. Toil and struggle and die, fritter away your days and you will be rewarded after death. It doesn’t matter what comes after. Only now. All we are is what we do . And if you let Gods decided that for you, you’re not anyone at all.

“I always admired it, you know,” his nephew said. “The way you kept going to the House of Light even if you never got anything from it. Not like I do. It doesn’t matter if they say you were born bad, Kairos. You’re trying , that’s what matters.”

Dorian leaned forward.

“We are what we do.”

“Yes,” the boy who would be the Tyrant smiled. “I couldn’t agree more.”

When the nobles and the generals came that night, cloaked and bearing treason in their eyes, he was still smiling.

Chapter 7: Elaboration

“Ah, but being defeated was always part of my plan! Yet another glorious victory for the Empire.”
– Dread Emperor Irritant, the Oddly Successful

We’d gotten the usual banter and I’m-going-to-kill-you, no- I’m -going-to-kill- you posturing out of the way, so it was now time to get to the stabbing. Admittedly my favourite part, especially when I wasn’t taking on a hero. This sad sack of smugness might pack a punch, but he wasn’t carrying a solemn promise of victory handed down by the Heavens. If I started chopping of limbs he wasn’t going to get back up with an irritating one-liner about Evil always being defeated. As good ol’ Willy had learned in the end, that wasn’t always true anyway. Sometimes Evil snatched a last moment resurrection, stomped in Good’s skull and went dancing with a good-looking redhead afterwards. Probably not victory the way the Gods Below or the average Dread Emperor conceived it, but I wasn’t going to be taking life lessons from people who’d thought the invisible army plan was a good idea.

The Rider didn’t seem to bother with the same tricks his minions had used, devouring the slope on the way down faster than I believed was actually possible. It occurred to me that most everyone I fought had cavalry while I had to make do with a pack of malevolent goblins, which struck me as pretty unfair. Before I could further lament the fact, I had to unsheathe my sword and brace myself for impact. It would have been a mistake to think of the Rider as a mere lancer, I decided. For one, his murderous unicorn effectively had a second spear jutting out of its forehead. More than that, unlike most horseman, killing his mount was unlikely to slow him down much. The way he’d introduced himself had me guessing he was in some way linked to the state of a horseman, but I doubted taking care of that would knock him out of the fight. Creatures that introduced themselves with fancy titles usually had some power to back up that presumption. That or they died early and bad.

Eyes calm, hands steady, I watched the points of the spear and the horn come for me. The spear would be the dangerous one: it wasn’t like the unicorn could twirl around the horn for a second go once it was past me. I hoped. Letting out a long breath, I adjusted my footing to be able to dash forward without missing a beat just before the Rider got in range. The horn I ducked under, the spear I narrowly avoided – it scraped my left pauldron – and I made to slide under the unicorn to open its belly. The back of the spear hit me right above the nose, knocking me down as I cursed. I rolled to the side, but not quick enough: the unicorn’s hooves came down and caved in my breastplate. Strike one for my plate being anything more than expensive dead weight today, since that could easily have been my ribs. I hated breaking ribs, half the time shards got into my lungs and I ended up coughing blood.

I managed to swing at the spear point before it took my throat, knocking it aside, and rolled before the unicorn could continue dismantling my plate. That thing was being way too bloodthirsty. Sure I hadn’t been a virgin for a few years, but there was no reason for it to take who I brought into my bed so personally.

“Look,” I gasped, managing to get on my feet and hastily backing away from a swing. “He was a fisherman’s son. They swim all the time, do you have any idea how fit they look?”

Murder made horse was not impressed by my protests, if the way it tried to kick me was any indication. The Rider, what little of his face could be seen expressionless, fluidly adjusted his hold and slapped down the spear at my head. Too fast for me, when I was still sidestepping his mount. It dented my helmet, which was a much more acceptable loss than my skull. I took back everything unpleasant I’d said about my armour today. The second strike I parried, but his handhold shifted again and he twisted deftly hitting my sword out of my hand. All right, this was headed nowhere. If I didn’t want to end up an expensively armoured corpse I was going to have to change the beat to this. Before the third strike – this one a lunge – could put me further on the back foot, I managed to get back in front of the unicorn. Predictably, it objected to this state of affairs and with a whinny took a step forward to put its horn through my throat. I was still unarmed, but I did have two free hands.

My gauntleted hands closed around the horn and I sharply pivoted. Lift with your legs, Cat , I reminded myself. Before the Rider could rearrange my presented spine at spear point, I flooded my limbs with power and pulled . For a single glorious moment I lifted the unicorn, swinging it forward like some kind of wildly failing mace until it reached its apex over my head. At which point the horn snapped. This had not, I mused, been one of my better plans. Below getting into a verbal fight with Heiress at the Tower, though still above letting William go at Summerholm. I hastily threw myself out of the way, seeing the Rider gracefully leap off his mount from the corner of my eye. The moment I got back on my feet I aimed my arm at the downed unicorn – which looked like it had broken a leg on the way down, good for me – and snapped my wrist. The backup knife shot like an arrow, sinking right into its eye. Pickler, you queen among goblins. I can’t believe I argued with you about a second knife being overkill .

I stepped back and picked up my sword, adjusting my cloak around my neck.

“Let the record show I’m not above murdering a unicorn if it looks at me funny,” I announced.

The Rider glanced at his dead mount indifferently.

“A worthy effort,” he conceded. “If ultimately futile.”

I paused for a moment, too many scathing replies on the tip of my tongue for me to be able to settle on a single one, but I ended up having to back away when he tried to run me through. I blinked in surprise: he’d been fast, on the unicorn, but this was something else. Quicker than even the deadwood soldiers had been, and they’d been in a league above me. Was that part of the fae package, then? Sorcery and tricks and swiftness. Not great on the staying power, but if they killed you before it became an endurance match that was hardly a problem. The fairies would be useless as tits on a sparrow if they ever tried to make a shield wall, but that wasn’t the way they fought at all. It was like fighting an army of skirmishers, all of them mages, with a backbone of heavy hitters behind them. That was not a good match for the Fifteenth, or even the Legions of Terror in general.

Sword in hand, I circled the Rider silently. Another flicker and the point was skidding off my arm, leaving a long scar on the steel – I tried to catch the shaft with my free hand but it retreated too quickly. All right, so finesse wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Closing the distance should have been my solution, but I was wary of getting that close to a creature so much faster than me, spear or no spear. I was going to have to take a hit, I realized with a grimace. I could walk it off if it didn’t hit anywhere too lethal, and while his weapon was in my guts it couldn’t defend. I missed the days when the initial parts of my battle strategies hadn’t involved getting my stabbed instead of my opponent. Stepping forward, I kept my eye on the spear. That proved to be a mistake. The Rider took a hand off the shaft and a heartbeat late a gust of chilling wind slammed into me.

I dug in my feet, but it wasn’t enough. The wind intensified and I was sent flying upwards, like I’d been smacked by a god’s invisible hand. The world spun around me but I kept just enough awareness of my surroundings to notice the four javelins of dark ice forming in a loose lozenge ahead of me. About where I would be in a few moments, I assessed with strange clarity. And it was a sucker’s bet that whatever made that ice darker would enable it to punch through plate. Well, couldn’t have that. Fortunately, I still had a few tricks I’d learned since Liesse I’d yet to unpack. My Name flared, in the way it did whenever I formed a spear of shadows, but I went for something more... tangible. The darkness pooled together into a circular pane right in my trajectory, and I twisted so that I would hit it feet first. It was not quite as steady to the touch as solid ground, but it would do. I allowed my knees to bend when I hit the pane and effectively threw myself back down in the opposite direction.

The first ice javelin skimmed the edge of my gorget and I winced. I half-turned, still falling, and saw that two other projectiles were going wide. The last one was headed for the middle of my back, though, which was less promising. I formed an orb of shadow in my palm as it neared and shot it straight into the point at the last moment – the javelin exploded into shards when it hit, and I braced myself for my coming reacquaintance with the ground. Optimism, that. Instead I turned back to face the sight of the Rider with translucent wings sprouting off his back, just as his spear punched through the plate covering my belly. I gasped in pain, writhing around the point, and he tore it off without missing a beat. Kicking me away he fluttered back and I landed bleeding on the ground. My knees gave and I ended up in an ungainly crouch.

“Rise,” I croaked.

Nothing happened, and panic welled up.

“ Rise ,” I repeated.

No, it was working I realized. Just slowly . The wound began to close at a snail’s pace, and I could feel it drawing much deeper from that bundle of power than it should have. Shit. Black had warned me, hadn’t he? Borrowed power always turned on its user.

“Your lack of understanding of your own aspects is a marvel to behold,” the Rider commented.

A flicker and he was in front of me, palm thrust out. I forced myself out of the way of the gust of wind, hissing at the pain of my still-closing wound.

“Thrice gifted is your Name,” he said, idly circling me. “Thrice used can your stolen power be, from dusk ‘til dawn.”

Well, that was useful to know. Would have been even better to know it before I’d gotten myself run through twice, but beggars can’t be choosers.

“Thanks for the tip,” I grunted. “While we’re at it, I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me your nefarious plans?”

I readied myself for another rousing round of Catherine-tries-not-to-die, but the attack never came. The Rider was twitching, mouth twisting in discomfort.

“Since you are about to die anyway,” he said reluctantly, through gritted teeth, “I might as well reveal the depths of your failure.”

Wait, what? That never worked. Not even with Heiress and she lived for this stuff. It certainly didn’t look like he wanted to tell me any of this.

“This struggle is but a distraction,” the Rider said. “You are meant to waste time and die here while the true war is fought in Creation.”

Masego had told me once that Arcadia worked according to different rules than Creation. I’d only been pretending to listen when he’d been talking about how that affected the creational laws governing the flow of time – which was, apparently, a classical element. I really needed to learn what those were at some point – but one part had actually been interesting enough I’d tuned back in. Arcadia was, in a lot of ways, rawer than Creation proper. In Creation stories bound only the Named, but in Arcadia everything was a story. It was why everything was so changeable. I was standing in front of an enemy clearly winning against me, at his mercy, and had just prompted him to gloat and reveal his plans. So he had . Even if he didn’t want to.

“Alas, I am in despair,” I badly lied. “Tears, woe is me. Why would you do something so wicked?”

The Rider cursed in a tongue I could barely process as spoken.

“If Summer is at war, so must be Winter,” he said. “The boundaries have been thinned, the host will be assembled.”

I squinted at him.

“You’re insane,” I said slowly. “You’ll... never get away with this?”

The fae looked at me, then at the dead unicorn. There was a long moment of silence. Then he bolted. Just... legged it, as fast as his little fairy feet could manage. I frowned, then raised an arm. I formed a spear of shadows and shot him in the back. The Rider cursed again, though he managed to avoid most of the damage – all I did was clip his shoulder. That might be more of a problem than I’d thought, though: one of his wings burst into existence, then out. Huh. Was this what being a hero felt like? No wonder they were always so overconfident. I caught up within moments. For all that some intangible tide had turned in my favour, he hadn’t gotten any slower. The spear wove elegantly around my sword, but instead of letting him drive me back I forced my way close. His palm shot off, but I was in no mood for a repeat of the flight adventure. I punched his hand, which while not the most elegant of solutions still broke a few fingers with a hard crack. The Rider turned his wounded shoulder to me, and the wing formed a moment later.

I was blown back like I’d been hit by a blast of pure unformed magic – my occasional spars with Masego had taught exactly what that felt like, in unpleasant detail – but pivoted on myself and used the momentum to take a swing. I hacked into his elbow, tearing through the wood and obsidian scales, before having to raise my arm to block a swing of the shaft. I almost made a comment about how the tides had turned, but bit down on my tongue at the last moment. Gloating was for amateurs, and here in Arcadia might have very final consequences. My gauntlet was half-crumpled but that didn’t hurt any less when I swung again, decking him in the face. He flinched back and my sword came down again. Cleaved straight through the elbow this time, the limb flopping to the ground. The lack of blood was a little off-putting, but I didn’t break my stride.

My leg swept his as I rammed my pommel into his chest, but I realized a moment too late that wouldn’t work on this kind of an opponent. His good wing burst into existence, getting back on his feet, and he slammed the bottom of his spear into my chest. Gods, I was basically wearing scrap metal at this point. Even knowing how that had ended up for the Exiled Prince I was tempted to get an enchanted suit of armour. Might not get my ass killed if I used it only the once. I smacked at his hands with my pommel and he dropped the spear. Within a heartbeat a sword of frost had formed in his hand but an orb of shadows had formed in mine: I rammed it through the spell, dissipating it before it could form properly. I heard a grunt and in a spray of crystal-clear water a forearm emerged form the stump to replace the one I’d cut off. Well, there went attrition tactics. I went for a killing stroke instead, side of my sword smashing into the side of his neck.

There was a spray of scales and he fell: I stepped back to adjust my stance for a deeper blow. Both wings flickered into existence, and before I could hit him agains he shot off into the sky. Well, shit. It figured that if he could grow an arm back he could fix whatever I’d done to the shoulder. I was debating how feasible it would be to make a series of shadow platforms to pursue – not very, it ate through my reserves like you wouldn’t believe – when a rope of green smoke slithered its way through the air until it coiled around his foot. The Rider hacked at it with another ice sword but it just went through, cleaving through his boots and doing nothing to the smoke. Which was pulled a moment later, smashing him into the ground like a falling star. Hakram idly walked up to him, burying his axe into the skull repeatedly and with great enthusiasm. I turned to eye Masego, who dismissed the green smoke rope with an idle gesture.

“Catherine,” he greeted me calmly. “I see you’re still alive.”

“Arguably my best skill,” I replied.

The dark-skinned mage blinked.

“Catherine you died. Not even a year ago,” he said.

I might have insulted myself by accident there, I reflected. I cleared my throat.

“Your guys are taken care of?” I asked.

“Most,” Hakram replied, wiping sweat off his brow as he joined us. “Some fled.”

Kill-stealer , I mouthed at him. He grinned back unrepentantly.

“I meant to take a prisoner for interrogation, but they were not inclined to cooperate,” Apprentice said.

I glanced at the corpse of the Rider. With all three of us we might have managed to capture him, but given how dangerous he’d been that would have been risky. Probably for the best he’d gotten the orc treatment.

“I learned a few things from this one,” I said. “This whole fight was bait. They want us to wander around Arcadia while they mass for an assault on Marchford.”

“I suspected as much,” Masego shrugged. “We’re no longer in the shard.”

I frowned.

“How d’you figure that?” I asked.

“We’re not surrounded by blizzard, for one,” he said. “And I cannot feel the boundaries of the shard anymore. We’re in Arcadia Resplendent, that much is certain.”

I sheathed my sword, trying to hide my surprise. He was right, about the blizzard. It was still windy out but visibility was clear. I hadn’t even noticed. When it had gotten easier to move I’d been paying attention to the fight, and must have unconsciously chalked it up to my Name taking care of the problem.

“He said something else that caught my attention,” I said. “Something about Winter having to be at war when Summer is.”

Hakram looked vaguely pained and I felt with him. The idea of there being a whole other breed of these guys out for our blood wasn’t exactly thrilling. Masego looked pleased, naturally, because he wasn’t going to have to rebuild a city that was broke, demon-corrupted, iced in and on fire. I did not care for the way that list kept getting longer.

“That explains a great deal. The Courts of Arcadia are named after the seasons, but they have nothing to do with those same seasons on Creation,” Apprentice said. “Consider them more like states of mind. When Winter and Summer become the two existing courts, it means Arcadia is at its most contrary.”

“If they’re pissed at each other,” I said, “why is Winter making itself my problem?”

“Symmetry, Catherine,” the bespectacled man enthused. “If Summer is at war with an enemy exterior to Arcadia, Winter must be the same. I would say there is no personal enmity behind this invasion, not that fae can truly be personal about anything. The weaker boundary at Marchford simply made it the obvious target.”

“Stop sounding so cheery about creatures trying to murder us,” I requested, then shifted uneasily.

Back in Laure, the Ruling Council’s session had been delayed to talk about an incident in Dormer: a handful of Summer fairies making a mess down there, though not a large one. The picture that was putting together was not one I liked at all.

“How likely is it that the courts could be targeting the same enemy?” I asked.

Masego blinked.

“Impossible,” he said.

Oh, good. That made the mess even more complicated but I’d take it.

“Though, of course, from the fae perspective no nation as we know them would be considered the ‘same enemy’,” he added absent-mindedly. “Making the distinction largely academic.”

Don’t punch him , I told myself. You still need him to get out of this place.

“Should have led with that, warlock’s get,” Hakram said, tone amused.

“Oh,” Masego said.

He glanced at me reproachfully.

“It was a very poorly-phrased question,” he said.

“Quit while you’re ahead,” I advised. “All right. Fine. So Winter’s going to keep attacking as long as Summer does, and we have no idea why it’s attacking or even who specifically.”

“If I was trying to keep you busy and had an understanding of the fae mindset,” Hakram said. “I would provoke a war with Summer, knowing Winter would be forced to mirror the action. Likely at Marchford.”

I sighed.

“Heiress,” I said.

That did sound right up her alley. As Governess of Liesse, even if Summer was at war with her city specifically, I’d still be forced to protect her from the consequences of her actions. It was my duty as a member of the Ruling Council, and her city was full of Callowans to boot. Meanwhile I’d have to deal with an assault on my demesne from an entirely different court, eroding the strength of the Fifteenth while simultaneously forcing me to use other means to deal with Summer. It was the kind of overly complicated plot with massive potential for backfiring that was her bread and butter. Hells, she might as well have signed the whole thing. I clenched my fingers and unclenched them.

“Winter’s got a boss fairy, right?” I said to Masego.

“There will be a king or a queen, yes,” he agreed.

“If I punch it until it dies, that feels like a problem solved,” I grunted. “If Winter stops attacking then Summer would have to as well, no?”

The chubby mage frowned.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “Possibly. Regardless, Catherine, if you attempt to fight the ruler of a court you will get killed. Those creatures qualify as a god by most measures.”

“Dying’s never stopped me before,” I said.

“We lack angels to loot for a resurrection, this time,” Hakram said. “Cat, there’s no need to go at this alone. This is bigger than us. The Tower needs to step in.”

If Malicia gets involved I’m tacitly admitting the Ruling Council can’t run Callow without her help , I thought. I bit my lip. I’d need to think on this more.

“First we get out of here,” I finally said. “Masego, you said we’re no longer in the shard. Does that meant we can’t leave the same way we came in?”

“We’ll need a gate to step through or a fairly powerful fae to open a path,” he said.

“Do your thing, then,” I said. “Where’s the closest gate?”

“Explain the fae to me, Apprentice,” he muttered. “Find me a gate, Apprentice. I could be taking apart a pocket dimension right now, you know. They never ask for anything.”

He just beginning to trace runes in the air when Hakram cleared his throat. I looked at him, then the direction he was pointing at. There were snow-covered hills as far as the eye could see, with the occasional thicket of dead trees and a few distant mountains. There was also a path now, paved in ice. It snaked across the hills towards what looked like a glistening city.

“That wasn’t there a moment ago,” I said.

“We weren’t looking for a gate a moment ago,” Apprentice said.

“Gods, I hate this place,” I cursed.

I eyed the road, which began atop the hill just beyond us and looked as pristine as if it had just been built. For all I knew it had been.

“We’re not using that,” I said. “That is an insultingly obvious trap.”

Hakram clapped my shoulder, amused.

“It would be an easier walk than the snow,” Masego said, just shy of complaining.

“You could use the exercise,” Adjutant said, nudging him.

I blinked. If Hakram was next to him, then who had – I went for my sword, and someone laughed.

“You lot are terrible at not getting killed,” Archer told me cheerfully, hand still on my shoulder.

Villainous Interlude: Chiaroscuro

“It is a shallow soul who fights to the cry of ‘might makes right’. The truth is more concise: might makes.”
– Dread Emperor Terribilis I, the Lawgiver

When young mages were taught the limits of sorcery, one of the first principle they were introduced to was that of Keter’s Due.

The largest sorcerous event ever to take place on Calernia was the creation of the Kingdom of the Dead by the king known to history as Trismegistus: a single man had, within the span of ten hours, cursed to undeath the entire population of an area comparable in size to the Wasteland. Though of course details were sparse, given that this had transpired before most of the continent was literate, through the higher order of mathematics introduced by the Miezans it was possible to piece together the broad lines of what had unfolded. Though High Arcana essentially bypassed the need for direct conversion and sympathetic links that limited lower sorceries, even those mysteries could ultimately be understood through numbers. A recent understanding, that. Early magic had been limited by capacity to channel power of individuals, the mental and physical exhaustion they could take before the continued manipulation of the laws of Creation burned them out.

The Taghreb had attempted to go beyond those limits by breeding with supernatural creatures more apt at using sorcery, most notably the djin. Limited success was attained: to this day, mages born to the southerners were on average more powerful than those born in the rest of the Empire. The Soninke solution had been less... carnal, and ultimately more successful: behind the walls of Wolof, the first ritual magic of Praes had been born. Those early rituals were brusque and inexact, relying heavily on human sacrifice to make up for deficiencies in what was not yet know as spell formulas. It was still a massive improvement over individual forms of sorcery, though this superiority was ultimately the reason further progress stalled: already having an edge in spellcasting, the ancient Soninke kingdoms sought to lessen weaknesses instead of improving a strength. A mistake that cost them in the War of Chains.

As in most things magical, the Miezan occupation changed everything. The foreigners from across the Tyrian Sea brought across with them Miezan numerals and the Petronian theory of magic. Though in many ways inferior to the Trismegistan theory later adopted by the Empire under Dread Emperor Sorcerous, the Petronian theory turned the ramshackle artistic ritual efforts of the Soninke mages into a proper method. The energies released by human sacrifice or other means of fuel began to be quantified and measured, matched to the requirements in scale and effect of what the mages set out to achieve. Which ultimately led to the discovery one of the great limits of sorcery: in the span between the release of energy and its conversion into a spell effect, whether it be ritual or individual, some of that energy was lost. Worse, that quantity of energy was not fixed but proportional to the total sum of energy released.

What was actually wasted varied from a tenth to fourth when it came to individual casting, but could go up to seven parts out of ten when it came to rituals. Though advances in spellcrafting and the theft of the entirely different Baalite spell formulas inherited by Ashur managed to lower that proportion, no spellcaster had ever managed to get the waste under a tenth in any form of sorcery. That tenth was colloquially known Keter’s Due. To turn an entire kingdom into undead, the Dead King in his capital of Keter was forced to open a stable and permanent portal into one of the Hells. And while nine tenths of that energy was properly channelled in ritual, the remaining portion turned the city of Keter into a warped ruin of anomalous magical phenomenon. The problem of Keter’s Due was that it limited what could be accomplished by ritual magic if you were in any way invested in where it took place. The larger and more powerful the ritual, the more dangerous the waste of power released.

Akua’s intentions were of titanic scale, which meant this was a titanic problem.

Turning Liesse into a ritual array had been achievable, especially after the widespread sabotage of all major infrastructure that had followed her taking stewardship of the city. Who exactly was responsible for that, she was still unsure. It had been too subtly wrought to be Foundling’s doing, and too moderate a retaliation to be the Lord Black’s. That left the Empress, but there was no way the woman would have allowed her control of the city if she actually knew what Akua intended. Her best guess was that she had not been the target at all, which was somewhat amusing if an irritation. Even with that interlude, Akua had been satisfied with the gain she’d made in the rebellion. Liesse’s wall ran with old and powerful wards, and the city had been built by the corpse of an angel. Tying both those assets into her own project had been a highly stimulating magical puzzle, one she’d been working on since the age of thirteen. And she had done it.

Akua was genuinely regretful that there was no one should could trust enough to boast of the achievement. It might be the single greatest accomplishment of her life. It was, though, somewhat of a comfort that eventually every living soul in Calernia would tremble at the mention of it. Powering the array had been the first issue, and one she’d come very close to solving at the Battle of Liesse: imprisoning a Hashmallim would have given her everything she needed and more. Unfortunately, Foundling had turned the Lone Swordsman’s blunder to her own purposes. Akua was not a debutante trying to pull off her first poisoning, so of course she’d had alternatives prepared. Fuelling anything of this size with demons was asking for trouble, considering the Due, so she’d had to look into gods. Securing the entity that dwelled in the heart of the Greywood had proved unfeasible, but her second target had panned out. Mostly.

The seventeen conduits she’d had her agents acquire – to the cost of many, mnay lives – were kept under enchanted sleep in chambers below the Ducal Palace. The seeking rituals she’d done had revealed that the entity they were bound to was artificial, not a natural force, but that made no real difference. According to her calculations it was even more powerful than the Hashmallim had been, which was a boon as well as a curse. When a stable binding was established and she triggered the array, Keter’s Due would effectively wipe Liesse and its immediate surroundings off the map. That was not an acceptable result, since she would be on the premises and fully intended on staying human. That was arguably the brilliant part of what she’d achieved with her array. She had found a way to still use the waste energy, what could be construed as a pre-conversion escapement that effectively negated the downsides of such a large ritual. Given the scale of the entity she’d found, however, she’d had to revise her schematics and broaden the size of the array’s escapement.

That meant more stone needed, more time and an ever-growing list of liabilities.

Secrecy was paramount: the moment the Named of the Empire became aware of what she was making they would immediately move to destroy her. Though she’d prepared Liesse for assault, Akua was not ready to face the full might of the Legions of Terror. Her infiltration and co-option of both the Scribe’s and the Empress’ spy networks in Liesse was a temporary state of affairs. The longer she had to falsify the information coming out of the city, the higher the chances her agents would be caught and purged. Already Malicia had flushed out the first level of her infiltration, and even if she was abroad Scribe would catch up eventually. The Webweaver was a tool, not a player, but she was a very effective tool. There were, of course, more pressing threats. The worst of which had been unleashed by Foundling, who seemed to have a bottomless bag of talented lunatics to throw at Akua’s plans.

The heiress to Wolof was about due another of her backers coming to a grisly end, so her mood was already cautious when she allowed Fasili into her solar. There was no point in shuffling the parchments on her desk – she knew better than to keep anything compromising where there weren’t two dozen highly lethal wards forbidding entry to anyone but her. There were only seven safekeeping this room, a mere warning by Praesi standards. The Soninke bowed after entering, lower than he should to anyone not the Empress. Fasili was a fair hand at flattery, a skill helped along by the stunning good looks bred into all highborn Praesi.

“Lady Akua,” he greeted her. “Gods turn a blind eye to your schemes.”

“Lord Fasili,” she replied, affecting warmth.

She didn’t particularly care for him, though he was useful. Having the heir to the High Lordship of Aksum on her side opened doors and brought resources, even if he was semi-openly feuding with the woman who actually ruled that region. If she’d not been Named he would have been sizing her up for a dagger in the back to afterwards usurp control of her own faction, but as it was she was untouchable. That didn’t make him trustworthy in the slightest, but it did mean he was not a rival. He was a danger mostly to her other supporters, squabbling for the position as her right hand. For now, there was no need to deny him the perception that he was.

“I bring unfortunate tidings,” the man spoke in Mtethwa. “Another patrol has been destroyed.”

Surprising , the Named thought. After Foundling’s goblin had begun killing off her patrols she’d ceased using Praesi and had instead conscripted Callowans, knowing Squire would be reluctant to kill her countrymen. Maybe enough to recall her tool to Marchford, if he killed a few.

“She has gained in ruthlessness,” Akua said.

There was an undertone of approval to her voice. She’d learned the hard way not to underestimate the other woman, and seeing Squire adopt the more enlightened attitudes of the Praesi did not entirely displease her. It did not benefit her, of course, but Akua having strong enemies meant that Evil itself was strong. A skilled enemy was often more useful than an inept ally.

“Though you are no doubt correct,” Fasili said, “in this instance the deaths lack the marks of the other ’s agents.”

Akua’s lips quirked the slightest bit at the word the man had used. Other . Nyengana , in Lower Miezan. The connotations did not carry across the languages. It meant not us, therefore inferior. Not other tongue on Calernia offered such a broad selection of terms to convey contempt as that of her people. The amusement was, however, fleeting.

“But it does bear marks,” she prompted.

“A survivor was left,” Fasili said. “He claims their patrol fell prey to a hunting party of fae from the Summer court.”

Akua’s face remained the picture of serenity.

“Not unexpected,” she smoothly lied. “Though ahead of my predictions.”

The fae ? What in the name of the Dark Gods were they doing so far out of the Waning Woods? She’d been aware that Foundling was having trouble with the Winter court since the very first incident – the bastard Taghreb with the odious name Squire had running her spy network, though a talented amateur, was still an amateur – but she’d chalked that up to unforeseen side effects of using a demon of Corruption. Even Triumphant, may she never return, had only used those sparingly. Within a decade the thinning of borders would have fixed itself without any need for intervention, and if it kept Squire busy until then all the better. This, though? This was not a coincidence. If both courts were making a move on... Well, what they were attacking was the crux of the issue here, wasn’t it? It was unlikely to be the Empire, which left the unfortunate possibility it could be Callow itself. That could be problematic, given that almost the entire extent of her resources was tied up in the former kingdom.

The heiress to Wolof delicately grasped her decanter of Praesi wine and poured herself a cup, then one for Fasili as well. The other Soninke bowed his head in appreciation and took a seat when she wordlessly invited him to. He discreetly passed his palm over the cup before taking it in hand, skilled enough that the alchemical pellet of lesser antidotes made no sound when it sunk into the wine. For all that High Lady Abreha seemed to think little of her heir, Akua had found him to be everything a noble of Praes should be: ruthless, patient and subtle. He’d already arranged the disgrace of two possible rivals for his position since he’d returned to her court, in both cases through a dizzying series of catspaws and intermediaries. If she’d not had two devils discreetly tailing his every move, she might even have missed some of the intricacies of his plots. As it was, Fasili was in the palm of her hand. She knew who he was sleeping with, who his enemies were and where his coin was kept. It would be the work of a slow afternoon to destroy him, if the mood ever struck her.

She wouldn’t, of course. The other Soninke was a talented commander of men – though not as talented as Ghassan had been, before Foundling had ripped out his soul – and his schemes occupied enough of the players in her court that they had no occasion to dig too deep into her own activities. He’d made one attempt to investigate that himself, but the man he’d bribed to transcribe her architectural plans had been made to disappear the same day, along with the entire chain of intermediaries used. The message had been duly received and no further attempt ever made. Akua did like to deal with intelligent men: she never had to repeat herself. Sipping at her wine – her own pellet had already been at the bottom of the cup when she’d poured – the Soninke allowed herself to enjoy the taste of home. This particular one was from the outskirts of Nok, the grapes grown there tinkered with over centuries so they would pair well with the taste of antidote.

It was something of a faux pas among the nobility to serve wine where one could taste one’s precautions.

“We’ll narrow our patrol routes and double the numbers deployed with each,” Akua said.

Fasili inclined his head, allowing the faint trace of a smile to touch his full lips. He would be amused, Akua thought. Like most war-inclined aristocrats in the Wasteland, the man knew the deployment doctrines of the Legions of Terror inside out even if he’d never stepped foot inside the War College. This particular measure was straight out of the treatises penned by Marshal Grem One-Eye, as they both knew. Most Wastelanders never bothered to read those, preferring to settle for what had been written by the Black Knight who, even if Duni, was still Praesi. Neither Akua nor Fasili, however, had been inclined to pass on the insights of the greatest military mind of their age simply because it had been born inside a greenskin body. Though Malicia’s dismissal of everything the Empire stood for was a mistake, it would be just as much of a mistake not to learn from the successes she had gained from a degree of practicality. Talent must be used wherever it was found. That much the Dread Empress had divined correctly.

“I’ve been given to understand that the Moderates are gaining ground,” Fasili said, tone casual. “Rumours imply that High Lady Amina might formally withdraw from the Truebloods.”

Which would mean Foramen and the Imperial Forges were not longer aligned with Akua’s mother, cutting off another means of influence for the Truebloods. High Lady Amina was owed half a tenth of any profits made by the Imperial Forges, making her one of the single wealthiest individuals in Praes. Losing those coffers – as well as the knowledge of the quantity and location of any armament made in the forges filling them – would be a major blow. The Named sipped calmly at her wine, then arched an eyebrow.

“Inconsequential,” she finally said.

Fasili managed to hide his surprise well enough that the only detail to betray it was the slight widening of his eyes. Akua watched the gears grind behind that handsome face, almost amused. If she was not bothered by the Truebloods falling apart, it meant that she was no longer dependant on them for backing. The implication there being she’d either struck deals with individual members of the faction that made their affiliation irrelevant – which she had – or that she intended to strike out on her own. Which she did, in a manner of speaking. She would not turn away the allies Foundling’s reckless accumulation of troops was gaining her, but the days where her efforts had been an extension of her mother’s designs were coming to an end. It would be strange, to stand without the protection the woman had afforded her all these years even if she hated her. Strange and exhilarating. The cage was finally breaking.

“Do you ever get tired, Lord Fasili?” Akua asked suddenly.

The man blinked.

“Of?”

“This,” she said, tone whimsical. “Of what we are. Of what we do.”

There was wariness in those eyes now. He was wondering if she was trying to entrap him in some way, to make him misstep so that she could bind him closer to her will. Akua could have told herself she didn’t know why she was speaking with this man, someone she could use but not trust, but that would have been lying to herself. Because Barika is dead. The pang of loss there surprised her, as it always did. Praesi did not have friends and confidantes, she’d always been told. They were too obvious a target, too large a liability. And yet on most days she still turned to her left to share a thought, only after realizing that the girl she would speak to was long dead. Barika was not the costliest loss she’d incurred at Liesse, but it was the one she felt the most often.

“Never,” Fasili replied. “My line is that of kings and Empresses. It would be a disgrace to reach for lesser prizes.”

In most cultures, Akua mused, one of her closest allies admitting to wanting a throne he believed she herself coveted would have been cause for a rift. For Praesi, though, it was duly expected. Ambition was bred into them before they were even born. Each High Lord and Lady saw to it their inheritors were more beautiful, more intelligent, more powerful than their predecessors. Some families had eschewed the Gift in their ruling line, for necromancy and diabolism often complicated the succession, but those that hadn’t always brought in the most powerful mage they could secure. Praesi aristocrats were expected to always look forward. If they could not claim the Tower or a Name, they were to strengthen the family and prepare the grounds for their successors to surpass them. For any trueborn Praesi to not attempt to reach the heights their ancestors had touched, to never try to go even further, was... blasphemy. Turning your back on everything that had come before you, all that set you apart from those beneath you.

Fasili Mirembe has assessed he could not currently claim the Tower or become an independent force through a Name, so he had aligned himself with Akua. Through this he sought to better his position, gain material advantages and favours that would allow him to either further the interests of Aksum or his own. Most likely he intended on being her Chancellor, if she became Dread Empress, and bide his time until he could knife her and become the Emperor himself. None of this offended her. Ambitions like these were what kept her people sharp, what set apart Praesi from the rest of Calernia. Akua’s people never settled for what they had been born with, never allowed themselves to stagnate. The Dread Empire had gone through hundreds of different faces and iterations before it had conquered Callow, but in the end it had . Because the Kingdom of Callow had been the same since its foundation, while Praes shifted with every Tyrant. And now Dread Empress Malicia wanted to kill the very soul of their nation.

Borders set in stone, never to advance again. The wonders of sorcery that were the envy of the continent, suppressed or abandoned. The High Lords, the very whip that drove Praes to improve, neutered into irrelevance in a fate more insulting than mere extermination. Centuries of toil to make the orcs a warrior caste incapable of functioning without the Tower thrown to the wayside by granting them authority. The goblins, who would always answer to their Matrons above anyone else, allowed to sink their claws in the Legions of Terror. Oh, Akua knew what was being done. Malicia and her Knight were making Praes a nation where the power was in the hands of institutions, not Named. An Empire that was no longer malleable for every Tyrant to make into whatever tool they needed to overcome the forces of Good. A fixed monolith, bound together by a philosophy that was nore more than the absence of philosophy. A nation that did not stand for anything but standing.

“Do you know why the Truebloods are losing, Fasili?” she asked.

“My great-aunt has splintered the opposition,” he replied immediately. “Without a united front, Malicia cannot be overcome.”

Akua smiled, the open display of emotion making him uncomfortable.

“They were never going to win,” she said. “After the civil war, when she set aside Black’s cold hate and refrained from a war of extermination against the nobility, we came to believe the Empress was one of us. That she played the Great Game.”

“Iron sharpens iron,” the other Soninke murmured.

And the sharpest iron takes the throne , she finished silently. Praes would always be strong, for only the strongest could claim the Tower. Every child that mattered was taught this from the cradle.

“But she doesn’t, Fasili,” Akua said. “This whole time we’ve been trying to win the same way we did with the Maleficents of the Terribilises of olden days. Acknowledging she has touched greatness but knowing that to grow again the Empire needs a fresh Tyrant. One still hungry.”

“The Empress has achieved more than almost any before her,” Fasili conceded reluctantly. “It is then her due to keep power longer than almost any before her. This changes nothing. In time she will lose her way and be overthrown.”

“She won’t be,” Akua said. “Because while we schemed for advancement, to be her successors, she has waged a war of destruction on us. And a few months ago, she won.”

The dark-skinned woman brushed hear hair back, though it was perfectly styled.

“She barred the office of Chancellor, the most important ward against reigns that linger,” Akua began to enumerate. “She opened the highest ranks of the Legions and the bureaucracy to lowborn and greenskins, smothering our influence there. With Callowan grain she has made field rituals irrelevant, severing the bond that kept the lesser nobility dependant on us. Trade with Callow has established sources of wealth we do not control, ending our ability to win through coin. All we have left is the court, where we claw at each other for ever-lessening gains and she smiles down at the corpses.”

Fasili had gone very, very quiet. He eyed her with barely-veiled horror.

“She’s not trying to win the Game,” she said. “That wouldn’t matter. No one can win forever. She’d trying to end the Game.”

“Then we must rebel,” he said. “ Now , while we still can. If you bring this to the attention of the High Lords, they will back you. To do otherwise would be folly.”

Akua drank daintily from her cup.

“They already know, Fasili,” she said. “The hard truth of it is that if we wage war, we will lose. We cannot beat the Legions, and the Legions are loyal. Lord Black will not turn on his mistress and the Warlock bound the soul of the last envoy to a chamber pot. The Truebloods attempted to win through guile, and they have failed. My mother clings to her crumbling plans and grows desperate, while the weak-willed among them seek to surrender.”

She met his eyes calmly.

“For that is what the Moderates are: a surrender. Do not think otherwise for a moment,” Akua said. “In exchange for survival and scraps of influence, they turn themselves into coffers and spell repositories for Malicia to plunder as she wills.”

“I will not allow my blood, a line that goes back to the War of Chains , to be used as a fucking court ornament ,” Fasili barked, eyes burning. “Evil does not surrender. Evil does not bow to inevitability. We spit in the eye of the Heavens and steal our triumphs.”

Akua allowed the unsightly display of emotion to pass without comment. It was not unwarranted, when one learned one’s entire way of life was teetering on the edge of destruction.

“I never believed in the Trueblood cause,” Akua admitted idly. “At the heart of their movement there was a sliver of hypocrisy. They believed their ways are superior, and therefore they should lead Praes. But if their ways were truly superior, would they not already be ruling?”

“ Their ways,” Fasili repeated, eyes narrowed. “You speak as if they are not yours as well.”

“You’ve read the treatises of Grem One-Eye,” she replied. “So have I. Would your parents have? I know my mother did not, and many consider her mind as sharp as the Empress’.”

“There is a difference between reading the words of the foremost general in the Empire and discarding everything we are,” the other Soninke flatly retorted.

“The duty of our predecessors was to make us more than they were,” Akua said. “They have succeeded in this: that is why we see a brilliant tactician instead of mouthy greenskin brute. For ages we’ve sought to forge better bodies, better sorceries, better minds – and yet we fight the same ways we’ve done since Maleficent first took a dagger in the back. We improve capacity without ever addressing perspective .”

“If that were true,” Fasili replied, “we would not be having this conversation.”

“We’re not having this conversation because of our families,” the dark-skinned woman said. “The Empress is the one who forced our eyes open.”

“The Empress would see us eradicated,” the heir to Aksum hissed. “And she is succeeding .”

“And for that,” Akua replied quietly, “We owe her much. Fasili, when was the last time that we were truly in danger? Not of losing the throne to another of the great families or of failing another invasion. When was the last time the High Lords and Ladies faced extinction ?”

The man bit his tongue, then actually thought.

“The Second Crusade,” he said. “When the first revolt against the crusader kingdoms failed.”

“And from those ruins rose Dread Emperor Terribilis II,” Akua said. “One of our greatest, and a Soninke highborn. He did things differently from his predecessors and turned back two Crusades.”

“And so we should surrender to our superior on the throne?” Fasili said bitterly.

“You miss my point,” she said. “We flirted with destruction and we became better . Seven hundred years have passed since then, Fasili, without ever being in such a situation. We’ve become soft since then, narrow-minded. Arrogant.”

She smiled thinly.

“And so the Hellgods put us through the crucible again,” she said. “ Adapt or perish . Are we relics to be discarded, or the beating heart of what it means to be Praesi?”

“We’re not done,” he said. “We’re never done.”

“My mother,” Akua said, “would have me be the swan song of Praesi villainy. The last stand, raging against the dying of the night. But our parents succeeded, Fasili. They made us better than them. We can learn .”

“Take what made them successful,” the man said slowly. “Make it ours.”

“Praes is a story,” she said. “A Tyrant to lead us. A Black Knight to break heroes. A Warlock to craft wonders. A Chancellor to rule behind them. And an Empire like clay, to shape into the tool they need: an entire nation built to empower the ambitions of a single villain.”

“Our Empress rules,” he murmured. “Our Black Knight leads. Our Warlock crafts nothing and our Chancellor is nothing. All the while the Empire calcifies into institutions, impossible to move.”

Yes . Finally, he was beginning to understand. None of them were acting as they should, not in the way that mattered. Malicia was more Chancellor than Empress, Lord Black had reigned as king in all but name for twenty years and the Warlock learned without ever building. They were trying to change the story but oh, they had not thought that entirely through had they? Because once the changes began, they were no longer in control. Anyone with the right power could shape the story too. Akua looked at them, and she did not see rulers. She saw stewards. They had made themselves to be administrators, and in Praes those ever only had one function: to enable the designs of the villain above them.

“Foundling came closest to understanding,” Akua said. “It’s how she beat me, at Liesse. It wasn’t her Name she used.”

Akua drained the last of her cup, gently put it down on the desk.

“It’s never been about the Names, you see,” the Diabolist smiled. “It’s always about the Roles .”

Heroic Interlude: Appellant

“One hundred and twelve: always be kind to any monster held in a cage by your nemesis. When it inevitably gets loose, it will remember the kindness and attempt to destroy the villain instead.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

A series of explosions rocked the machine and the enormous drill ceased spinning.

Though the Lowest Plaza still had a massive gaping hole in its centre, Helikean soldiers were no longer pouring out of the tunnel: when the Tyrant had fled, swearing ‘eternal and unholy revenge’, they’d begun retreating in good order. Hanno let out a sigh of relief. He’d not needed to tap into any of his aspects to turn back the breach, but after unleashing his Name so many times he was starting to tire. Ash was already making her way through the Delosi soldiers, curing anything short of death with a touch and that semi-permanent frown. The Ashen Priestess was admittedly one of the more combative healing Names: it should perhaps be expected that her bedside manner was rougher than that of the average priest. The White Knight wasn’t exactly displeased. His memories told him that the all-loving types often had difficulty dealing with the realities of war, especially those sworn to Compassion. Their inability to reconcile the way Creation was and the way it should be could lead to some very ugly breakdowns.

The Champion was currently collecting “trophies”, hacking off the tip of swords so she could make rings out of them to add to her necklace. There were already enough of those that the thing could be considered an additional layer of mail around her neck. A somewhat grisly ritual by heroic standards, but that was always the way with Levantines. The heroes that had founded their nation had been rebels fighting the Proceran occupation, after all, and they’d been much more willing to bloody their hands than the average Named on the side of Good. Hanno sheathed his sword and took off his helmet to wipe his brow. Hedge crawled out of the wreckage of the machine moments later, covered in soot from head to toe. She’d gone in there to blow the runic array powering the drill while he held the line, and one again gotten off essentially untouched. Hanno wasn’t surprised: there was a reason he kept sending her on the riskiest ventures.

As long as the Hedge Wizard and the Champion kept bickering ‘amusingly’, they were essentially untouchable. Their heroic band would be much too grim if they died, too dark for the amount of absurdity the Tyrant kept injecting into this siege. The White Knight eyed the giant drilling machine belching smoke and sighed again. Well, the flying towers had been a wash so he supposed it made sense for the Tyrant to try underground afterwards. Usually even villains hesitated before trying that route, since there was always the risk of running into a dwarven tunnel, but this particular monster was a reckless one. Almost too reckless, he’d begun thinking of late. Every assault that had been made on Delos so far did have a decent chance of succeeding, but they were also all half-baked enterprises. It was like victory and defeat didn’t particularly matter to the man planning the operations, which was somewhat worrying. If taking Delos wasn’t the way the Tyrant got what he wanted, what was?

Delosi officers began arranging crews to drag away the broken machine and cordoning off the hole in the ground until it could be properly filled. The Secretariat’s armed forces were not particularly strong, in his opinion, but they were well-organized and had superb morale. Delosi believed that the decrees of their Secretariat were the will of the Heavens, so whenever they were deployed they would not break regardless of casualty rates. It had not been unusual for half a battalion to be wiped out on their first deployment, in the first skirmishes of the war, and yet the same men and women who’d been through that grinder did not hesitate going back to it the following day. He could respect that, the act of putting your faith in something larger than yourself. In this case it was somewhat misplaced, of course. The Secretariat was an institution made my men, and so held the flaws of those men. To find infallible judgement, one had to look higher. Hedge made her way to him, patting away the soot with a lack of method that spread the unsightliness more than got rid of it.

“That should be it for a fortnight, at least,” she said. “Unless he thinks up another machine.”

“He’s tried above and below,” Hanno noted. “We should expect a dimensional shortcut next.”

The Hedge Wizard snorted, her mismatched eyes shining with anticipation.

“If he’s going to meddle in Arcadia that problem might just fix itself,” she said. “The Courts are on war footing; they’ll be shooting everything that moves.”

“The first step always works, Hedge,” he reminded her. “It may backfire later but it’s a virtual certainty he’ll make it into the city.”

The dark-haired woman grimaced.

“That sounds like you’re asking me to do ward work,” she said. “Breaking those I can manage, White, but making them? That stuff is hellishly complicated and it blows up if you get even one number wrong.”

Hanno had been about to suggest a mere alarm measure instead of something more taxing when he saw Delosi troops coming down from the upper levels. The White Knight felt curiosity rise when the officers among them ignored the efforts of the other soldiers and headed straight for him. The highest-ranked among them, a weedy woman with a commander’s insignia branded on her breastplate, came forward and saluted sharply.

“Lord White,” she greeted him. “There’s been an accident.”

“A large one, for a commander to come inform me personally,” he said.

“There was a fire in the House of Ink and Parchment,” the commander said. “An entire wing collapsed. Casualties involve several members of the Secretariat.”

Hanno’s eyes sharpened.

“Which ones?” he asked.

The commander didn’t know since she was not high-ranking enough to be cleared for the information, as it turned out, but she’d been provided with a list. For once Delos’ obsession with records was saving time instead of costing it. The olive-skinned hero scanned the scroll, skipping the names of anyone not ranked Secretary – anyone below that had no real influence in the city. Secretary Colchis, Secretary Mante, Secretary Theolian. Secretary of War Euphemia. Every single high-ranked member of the Secretariat who’d at any point spoken in favour of Delos continuing to intervene in the war past the siege.

“That fire was not an accident,” he said quietly. “It was enemy action.”

Hedge looked at him grimly.

“You think the Tyrant used the assault as a distraction?” she asked.

“Wasn’t our Kairos who did this,” Aoede said.

Hanno released the handle of his sword. The Bard had not been there a moment ago, but in between a single blink of his eyelids she had... filled the space. Arm slung over Hedge’s shoulder, the Wandering Bard for once wasn’t smiling.

“You should have some memories about this,” Aoede told him. “This is-“

She never got to finish. Of the twenty-odd officers that surrounded them, over half had weapons in hand: the Bard vanished before a knife could take her in the belly, wielded by the very commander who’d brought him news.

“ Stand down ,” Hanno barked, blade in hand.

In the span of a single heartbeat the hero noticed three things. First, all the officers with their weapons out looked horrified. Second, there was the faintest trickle of power inside them. And third, they were now turning their weapons on themselves. The White Knight dropped his sword and wrestled down the commander before she could slit her own throat, but Hedge was not so quick. The others dropped to the ground, dying or dead, before anything else could be done. The commander stopped fighting back after a moment and he only just managed to keep her from biting off her tongue. Name pulsing, Hanno focused on the power he’d glimpsed. He managed to feel five layers of something before it was gone, washed away before he even tried to make it disappear.

“Commander,” he said calmly, releasing her mouth. “Are you with me?”

The woman blinked.

“Lord White?” she croaked. “Why am I on the ground?”

Hanno got back to his feet, helped her up.

“Can you remember anything unusual that happened to you today?” he said.

The officer paled.

“No,” she admitted.

“She wouldn’t,” Hedge said quietly. “Someone Spoke to her.”

The Ashuran glanced at his companion.

“You’ve seen this before?” he asked.

“I know the theory,” the Wizard replied. “Five orders. One to wipe the memory, one trigger, one act and two contingencies.”

This... he’d seen this before. Fought this before. The White Knight closed his eyes, breathed in and out until his heartbeat slowed and then ceased entirely. In that moment, his mind filled. A thousand lifetimes he had lived yet not lived, spread across centuries. Hanno focused, filtered through two points: compromised officers, high-tier leadership crippled. Seventh Crusade, White Knight. No, opponent was the Dead King. First Proceran War, Good King. No, this wasn’t bribery. The Paladin, fall of the Blessed Isle. Conquest. Commander of the vanguard and the western flank assassinated, had to be replaced by officers less seasoned. Every outpost off the Isle gone dark. Sentries made unable to see the placement of goblinfire at the base of the walls. His heartbeat returned.

“Calamities,” Hanno spoke. “We’re fighting the Calamities, and they’re about to attack.”

There was a sensation in the back of his head, like a lever being pulled, and a ward covering the Lower Plaza awoke.

A faint smell hit his nostrils and soldiers began dropping like flies.

—

Alkmene wasted a good two heartbeats looking at Hanno like he’d just murdered her puppy. The Calamities, as in those scary Praesi fuckers up north with a graveyard full of heroes behind their lair? Shit. Shit . Words stronger than shit, which were not coming at the moment because oh Gods they were all about to die . Productive panic, Hedge, she reminded herself. Productive panic is how we survive. They were now inside a ward, which had been remotely triggered and until now had been hidden behind the much larger magical emanations coming from that godsdamned drill from the Hells. Alkmene tested the strength of said ward with her mind and found she might as well be trying to bring down a wall by pelting it with pastries. Modify it? And now the back of her eye was itching, just from a light probe. Whoever had designed that pattern was a vicious bastard and a half. All that was left was alleviating the effects, then. Her teachers had always taught that that a Gifted faced with a ward could only do three things: break, modify or alleviate. By the looks of it, this one was a straight translocation ward that was bringing in some kind of gas at a fixed rate.

Hedge pulled up a scarf from under her robes and covered her mouth. Most poisons could be outright ignored by Named and the rest could be burned out with a trick, but quantity ingested did influence how well that worked. From the way all the Delosi were stiffening and falling to the ground so quickly, this was not a weak brew. Not magical in nature though. That made things easier. Muttering a word of power, Alkmene created a ball of air in the middle of the plaza. The translucent sphere began spinning, sucking in the gas as fast as it could. She kept murmuring and it kept expanding, devouring more and more. Wouldn’t save many of the soldiers, but it would at least make sure their band didn’t go into the fight with enough paralysis poison in their lungs to kill a dozen oxen. Ash, in the middle of the incapacitated men, slammed her staff against the paving stones. There was a pulse of power and the people on the ground began breathing again, turning this from a massacre to a crippling blow. On the other hand, by doing that she’d... Hanno was running towards her sister faster than anyone in plate should be able to, but he wouldn’t get there in time.

A red wedge immediately opened up in the sky above Irene and a burning rock the size of a house fell through.

Alkmene cursed, flicked her wrist and sent the ball of air straight at the projectile. For a heartbeat it seemed like it would push it back, but then with a pop the spell gave. It was just enough of a delay that her sister was able to prepare herself, thank the Gods. Before the pocket meteorite could smash her into paste Irene was swallowed by a cloud of ash that swirled around her before spearing upwards. The rock itself turned into ash when it made contact, hitting the ground and obscuring the entire plaza in a thick cloud. Alkmene sharpened her eyes just before visibility went and winced at what she saw. Irene’s eyes were already grey, which was a bad sign. She’d already used too much power. The Hedge Wizard set that aside the moment she began to feel another spell being crafted, and looked upwards. There was a ball of opaque blue light hovering in the sky above the city, a stable shielding ward. The Warlock, she realized with a dry swallow. She was going to have to fight that. What had her teachers called getting into a mage’s duel with Praesi again? Death by stupidity , she remembered. But godsdamnit, she’d have to anyway. If the Warlock was busy with her he wasn’t smashing everything down here to bloody chunks. Alkmene cursed again and fished out three tiles from her pockets.

She threw them ahead of her, watched them form three steps hovering in the air.

“You don’t have to win, Hedge,” she encouraged herself. “Just, you know, not get horribly killed. It’s all about the standards.”

Nervously laughing, she began the climb up.

—

Even as the ash billowed past him, Hanno replayed the sequence of events of the last sixty heartbeats in his mind. Nonlethal but dangerous ward that affected mundane soldiers, triggered as the opening move. Their spellcaster moved to mitigate the damage, taking herself out of the equation. Their healer then attempted to heal the affected, leaving herself wide open for retaliation while the other two fighters in their band were too far away to intervene.

Had the Ashen Priestess been a common healing Named, that projectile would have killed her instantly.

They’d almost lost a fourth of their fighting strength before the first exchange was over, and that realization sent a shiver up his spine. These were not military tactics, they were hero-killing tactics. Targeting people in their charge to make them expend effort, then immediately striking their weak point with overwhelming force. Their opponents were not only used to fighting heroes, they were used to fighting bands of heroes. The White Knight calmed his mind. There would be three of them. The Warlock was in the sky, and Hedge was moving to distract him. Now he needed to find the Captain and the Black Knight before they could take one of his companions out.

“Ash,” he called out. “Champion.”

“We here,” the Champion yelled back.

“One, five,” a man’s voice calmly said. “Brazier.”

Magic flared in the distance and the place where the Champion’s voice had come from burst into flames. The light was enough for Hanno to make out a lone silhouette to his left. A man. Short, in plate with a heater shield and a longsword. The White Knight, without making a sound, headed in that direction. With a burst of speed he emerged behind the man and rammed his blade in this back – only to pierce through shadows that collapsed into a pool before snaking away along the ground. There was a faint whistle and he ducked under a crossbow bolt, almost missing the second one aimed at his knee. He managed to parry that one at the last moment, though it marked his armour. The hero could still feel the presences of Ash and the Champion, dimmed. They were still alive, though the fire had hurt. Gritting his teeth, he made his choice and followed the shadows.

They were swift, but not swift enough to outpace a hero on foot. After a few moments it became glaringly obvious he was being led away from the plaza, towards the second level of the city. The sound of fighting erupted behind him, the Champion hooting in joy, but he’d have to trust they could handle themselves. Leaving the Black Knight unattended with an ash cloud as cover was just asking for one of them to die. Hanno found steps under his feet, a sure sign he was leaving the plaza, and shortly afterwards fell the pressure over his shoulders vanish: he’d left the bounds of the ward. The ash cloud behind him, the hero looked for his opponent and found him almost instantly. In the middle of the avenue stood a man, in a bare suit of plate that had the marks of frequent use. His shield had no heraldry painted on it, his sword went without decoration. The only splash of colour was those unsettlingly pale green eyes that could be seen through the slits of the helm.

“You’re a long way from home, Black Knight,” Hanno said.

The man did not reply. He moved forward, shield raised. The White Knight felt the Light flood his veins, scouring his insides, and with hard eyes met the enemy.

—

The enemy had made a mistake when they’d chosen poison as their means of attack. The method had been clever enough, Irene would concede, as the sheer quantity of poison had made it hard to counteract. Now that she had this much ash to work with, however, it was child’s play to neutralize the effects. After absorbing the airborne toxin with it she’d directly targeted the enemy ward with her power, since Alkmene was apparently incapable of doing as much. Hammering blindly at sorcery with miracles tended to lead to unpredictable side effects, so instead of destroying the ward she’d erased the part that was bringing in the gas. Or at least she’d begun doing that, before nine feet of plate and muscle with a giant hammer had come for her head. How they’d not seen or heard the behemoth approach, given that the ash cloud had settled on the ground by then, was beyond her. Likely the woman’s Name was involved. Regardless, the Champion had stepped in before her earthly body could be made an earthly corpse.

“You not just big girl,” said heroine enthused, narrowly avoiding a swing. “You biggest girl.”

“I’m flattered,” the Captain replied politely. “But also thrice your age and married.”

The Ashen Priestess had never thought much of fighting banter. If you had breath for it, you weren’t trying to kill your opponent hard enough. The Champion was more or less holding the enemy at bay for now, so she focused on the ward again. She could see why her sister had found the structure troublesome: there were little patterns that would make even looking at it dangerous for a mage. Doing so through the lens of a miracle, however, meant it could not touch her. Irene began sharpening her power into a chisel again, breaking one rune after another. Her soul was only loosely attached to her body by a chord, high in the sky as she continued chipping away at the ward. The Priestess smiled as she wiped another cluster, then felt the chord being tugged. Looking downwards she saw the Champion’s shield getting caved in by a hammer blow, quickly followed by the heroine getting punched in the face. Both hits she had gotten by standing between the villain and Priestess’ immobile body. Irene had seen the Champion laugh off a horse’s kick, but after that punch she spat blood before forcing the Captain back. She then unkindly slapped Irene’s body in the face a second time, the chord forcefully dragging the heroine back inside at the impact.

“Ashy,” Champion grunted as the Priestess blearily opened her eyes. “Get your miera joint. This no stroll in park.”

Irene eyed her companion in confusion before she caught the meaning. Get your shit together , Rafaella had meant.

“The ward’s out of play,” she said. “I’m back.”

“Good,” the Champion said. “Two-time big girl now.”

Said ‘girl’ was not currently attacking them, Priestess could not help but notice. The Captain was not wearing a helmet so the studded earring in her left ear was quite visible. And currently glinting with sorcery.

“Confirmed,” the Captain said. “Going full tilt.”

“I no like sound of this,” the Champion admitted, throwing away her crumpled shield and hoisting her axe.

“It’s nothing personal,” the villain said. “I was given an order, and now I Obey .”

The moment she spoke the word, her presence in Creation became heavier . Aspect. Well, that was going to be troublesome. The Ashen Priestess reached for her miracles as the Captain blurred into motion.

—

Hanno’s sword slid off the shield and he backpedalled to avoid the blades that would have scythed through his knees. At least now he knew how the villain had shot two crossbows at him earlier: the Black Knight’s shadow extended into two tendrils behind his back, the two of them wielding swords simultaneously to the villain’s own movements. The sheer amount of fine control that had to go in that was staggering, not that the hero had time to stop and stare: even with the Light sharpening his reflexes beyond human capacity he was having trouble coming close without taking a hit. The first time the villain had revealed the tendrils he’d waited until their blades were locked before plunging two blades straight into the White Knight’s neck: they’d gone through the gorget and would have gone on to his spine under it if he hadn’t detonated the Light beneath his skin to blow them back. The burns from that were painful, and unlike other wounds wouldn’t start healing given enough time.

Hanno breathed out, having a little space, and timed his advance. The first shadow-wielded sword skimmed his shoulder as he shot forward, trailing sparks. The second came down in a swing but he rolled forward, landing on his feet just in time to parry a lunge that would have gone straight through his eye. The White Knight slapped away the shield, flicked his wrist, and with wide eyes saw the fuse on a clay ball reaching the bottom. It exploded in his face, throwing him back. Before he even landed on the ground the Black Knight was behind him, shadow tendrils swinging swords at the height of his neck and torso. Gritting his teeth, Hanno detonated the Light on his side to stop his momentum – it blew straight through his plate. He took a shield bash to the face, blinding him, and then felt a blade go straight through the elbow joint of his sword arm. Biting down on a scream, he reached for his Name and let out a pulse of blinding light. By the time he was steady again, the Black Knight was twenty feet away and the shadow limbs were aiming crossbows at him.

The hero moved his blade to the hand with a functioning elbow behind it. He wasn’t as good with his left as his right, but it was a near thing. At the moment he could only see two shadow tendrils, but Hanno wasn’t falling for that again. He’d seen a third one hiding those goblin munitions behind the shield, after knocking it aside. The crossbows drew back, however, when both Named heard the sound of marching troops coming down the avenue leading up to the third level. Reinforcements, the Ashuran thought. Alone against the villain they would be wheat waiting for the sickle, but with him too? No matter how many limbs the Black Knight had, he only had one torso. The Delosians spread across the length of the avenue in a shield wall, bowmen setting up behind them. The villain’s limbs retracted and he patiently waited for the soldiers to approach. What was he... No .

“Retreat,” the White Knight bellowed.

“Two, five through eight,” the green-eyed man spoke calmly. “Half.”

Hanno felt magic flare in the distance and saw the villain flatten himself against the ground. He followed suit, and a heartbeat late felt the warmth of a spell pass above him. He got back on his feet as soon as his senses told him the danger was past, jaw tightening when he saw the aftermath of the sorcery. Every soldier in the avenue had been cut through at the waist as if by a giant blade. Blood and viscera stained the stone even as the men twitched away the last of their lives.

“Warlock, you have bleed,” the Black Knight said. “Walls were damaged. Recalibrate.”

Some of the houses had been sliced through as well, Hanno saw, but he was far past caring. He’d just seen two hundred men butchered like animals quicker than you could fill a glass. The White Knight breathed out, mastering his fury. I do not judge. To take justice in his own hands was surrendering his blade to chaos. Only the judgement of the Heavens was not limited by the shackles of mortal perspective.

“ Ride ,” Hanno hissed, running.

Light howled into existence, sharping itself into a steed that the White Knight mounted without missing a beat. His sword returned to its sheath as he devoured the distance, a blinding lance of light forming in his extended hand. The Black Knight cocked his head to the side and the shadow tendrils extended from his back. Hanno waited for the swords, but instead they extended even further and pushed the villain off the ground like giant spider legs, tossing him towards a rooftop to the left. By the time the Ashuran got to where the villain had stood there was nothing left to charge. The mount disappeared a heartbeat later and the lance with it, Hanno landing on his feet. His gaze turned to the rooftop, where the Black Knight was studying him.

“Two, six,” the man said. “Pitch.”

Everything went dark just as the tiredness from using the aspect hit him.

—

“Oh, come on ,” Hedge yelled as she started falling.

It had been bad enough when little dots of red light that burned straight through everything began pursuing her, but now this? There was no way using giant snakes made of flames as a mobile semi-sentient defence could be considered reasonable. Mages used those as a fancy knockout-punch, not decoration . She only had two tiles left – that little dot surprise had punched straight through one before she learned what they did – which meant she wasn’t so much ascending as leaping from one stair to another. While at least a league up in the sky, pursued by killer lights and very insistent giant fire snakes . Normally the absolute sheer terror knotting up her guts would have been crippling, but having come within an inch of death seven times within the last few moments she’d punched straight through that ceiling of fear into another realm of fresh and previously unexplored horror. She was never going use a staircase again, and anyone who tried to make her was going to spend the rest of their life as the ugliest frog she could manage.

The Hedge Wizard summoned the two tiles back to her, shoving one under her feet hastily so she’d stop freefalling. The dots were slow enough they’d take a bit to catch up, but she was now officially back in snake trouble territory. The odd-eyed woman winced as she saw the spell construct’s jaw unhinge. Just before it closed on her she muttered a word of power and both she and everything she touched turned into flame, just long enough for the snake to pass through her. She came out of it wearing fuming robes and knowing she was running out of tricks to survive that. Her Name allowed her to use and understand sorceries so wide in scope and different in nature that it was effectively impossible for anyone else to know them all, but it did have one glaring flaw: she could never use the same trick twice the same day. Her bag wasn’t running low, at the moment, but it was certainly running low with things she could use to avoid giant flaming snake death. This was, she reflected, a bit of a problem.

She wouldn’t be able to keep this up much longer, while the Warlock did not even seem to be running his actual defences. Could he even, from inside that bubble ward? He’d been casting area-wide magic sporadically, but she wasn’t actually getting any spikes in magic from in there when he did. There was actually a non-negligible chance he was just triggering distant wards while overseeing the battlefield. The most direct action he’d taken so far was the pocket meteor, and that was before she’d found him in the sky. So if I break that bubble, I might be disrupting their entire plan . That was the kind of risk she had to take, horrifying as that notion was. Alkmene did not think they were going to pull through this otherwise, not with how dim she could feel the others getting. Hanno was getting the worst of it, she sensed, but whoever Champion was scrapping with was delivering a hell of a beating. Hedge gingerly rolled her shoulders, watching the swarm of light dots approaching.

The wizard summoned her free tile to her hand and tapped the one she was standing on three times. It broke her heart to destroy an artefact she’d made so recently – because of their equally recent flying tower fiasco, as it happened – but it was marginally better than getting destroyed herself. The tile began lengthening and she ran down the length, feeling it becoming more and more brittle the longer it spread. Halfway to the bubble it shattered under her feet. She managed to get the second on in place before beginning to fall, angling it so it served as a sloped ramp. Immediately she began sliding off but another word of power had her soles sticking to the surface, allowing her to start running upwards. Not, unfortunately, fast enough to lose the dots. Hedge muttered under breath and flicked her wrist: a ghost image of her, reproducing her magical signature, began running away across thin air. The dots weren’t sentient at all, unlike the snakes, so it would be enough to fool them.

One of said snakes managed to loop back to her right before she got to the bubble, though, leaving her only an instant to make her decision. She went with the risk, since her last tile was already beginning to break. She leapt on top of the bubble and pressed herself against the ward, hoping to all the Gods the snakes had been designed not to collide with the bubble. The fire construct veered away at the last moment and she clenched her fist in triumph. Not dying, her favourite kind of victory. Immediately she began tinkering with the ward beneath her. Unlike the first one they’d been hit with, this one had been designed to weather a beating instead of being hard to modify. Small favours. No doubt the Warlock already knew she was there, so her window would be very, very small. Huh, this was actually massively strong. She could have unloaded her entire arsenal at this and barely scratched it. Were the villains under the impression she was a slugger kind of mage?

With a smile of triumph, she switched the last two runes, preparing the fae flame even as a circular hole in the bubble opened.

There was no Warlock inside.

There was , however, an unstable elemental matrix that had only been kept from exploding by the containment ward.

“You utter asshole ,” she managed to say before it blew up.

—

The warhammer came down and shattered Champion’s shoulder, then spun to turn her left kneecap into powder. The Captain did not even attempt to kill the downed heroine this time, going directly for Irene. She’d learned from that initial mistake.

“ Heal ,” the Ashen Priestess murmured.

The shoulder snapped back into place, the knee yanked itself up and the Levantine woman got back on her feet. Irene had been tapping into her aspect for over half the fight and it was starting to take a toll. The wounds healed themselves more slowly now, and not as fully. Given how absurdly tough the Champion was she was able to walk it off anyway, but it was a game of diminishing returns. In more ways than one: the Captain’s hammer came down on the box of light surrounding the Priestess three times before Rafaella was able to engage her again. After the third blow the box thinned, and Irene was certain if the villain had time for a fourth it would outright break. If it did, she gave it half and half odds she survived the experience. Unfortunately the Champion now got back into the fight a little slower every time while Captain showed no sign of tiring. Whatever aspect she’d used earlier wasn’t empowering her by much, but it wasn’t running out . This had effectively become an endurance match, which villains weren’t supposed to be able to win. They would this time, though, because the Calamities had hit when their band was fresh from turning back an enemy assault.

That did not feel like a coincidence.

“Champion,” Irene called out.

“Small busy right now,” the Levantine replied, ducking under a hammer blow.

The mere force of the swing was enough to kick up a cloud of ash behind them.

“I need you to buy me sixty heartbeats,” she said.

“Also want moon and stars?” Champion complained.

“It’s that or we die,” the Priestess frankly replied.

Rafaella smashed her battle axe into the behemoth’s plate, driving her back a step and cracking the metal.

“Dying not good,” the Levantine conceded.

The Captain leapt back.

“I need Burden in, um,” she said. “Big square in the middle.”

There was a pause.

“I’m not Black, Wekesa,” she retorted irritably. “I don’t keep track of where everyone goes all the time.”

Thirty heartbeats left. She could make it. Her aspect continued ebbing as she pushed another one to the surface. That was the limitation on Heal – she could keep it going, but making it stop took time. There was a flare of magic in the distance and suddenly the box flared into existence above her head. A moment later it broke and massive pressure forced her to her knees. Champion was still on her feet even if she was buckling, she saw, but Captain seemed almost unaffected. The hammer rose and she blurred again.

“ Oppose ,” the Champion laughed.

There was a sound like a crack made in the weave of Creation and the pressure lifted. Rafaella’s axe smashed into the head of the hammer that would have split open the Priestess’ head, the impacts perfectly matched. Both weapons flew back and Captain warily stepped away.

“ Ignite ,” Irene croaked out.

All over the field, the ashes began smouldering. She could feel them pulse in harmony with heartbeat, as much a part of her as any limb. The heat rose and the ashes began rising into the air, forming into spears. The Captain took a look around, then cracked her neck.

“Been a while,” she said. “It won’t be gentle.”

The villain’s eyes turned blood red, her body convulsed and she began shifting . They were, it seemed, not yet out of the woods. Worse, the woods were starting to look rather hungry.

—

This was not working, Hanno thought as the blade sheared through his cheek. The wound began to heal almost immediately, but his Name didn’t replace blood. Of which he had lost too much already. The White Knight’s eyes narrowed when he saw his opponent giving ground. He was hearing something. Was the villain ordering another strike? Hanno sharpened his hearing, catching only the last words.

“Listen closely.”

Then the munitions detonated. The hero hissed, involuntarily clasping his free hand to an ear. The man had used the elongated sticks that made light and noise earlier, but this was different – it made only noise, but was horribly loud. In that moment where pain filled Hanno’s thoughts, the Black Knight made his move. The olive-skinned hero brought up his sword in time to parry the first strike and sidestep the tendril-moved blade that would have sunk straight in his carotid. But he took the shield bash to the face, and then the other shadow-wielded blade went through the slight space between his breastplate and the lower parts of his armour that only mail covered. The sword chipped on the rings, but it tore through his guts anyway. The sword in the villain’s hand drew back, and in that movement Hanno read his death. It would take him in the eye, killing him in a way no Name could prevent. The world slowed. It wasn’t about power, the White Knight knew. He’d gauged how much both their names could throw around, and he trumped his opponent handily. It was the disparity in skill and experience. Hanno did not have any tricks his opponents had never seen before, and he had not seen most of his opponent’s.

That had always been going to be the way, he’d known from the start. He would have to go against villains who’d been around for decades longer than he, who’d been accumulating power and skill long before he’d even been born. It was why he’d left for the Titanomachy instead of going north to die like the others. I am not enough, but I am more than me. The Light flooded his veins again where it had started to ebb and he silently spoke the word he needed to.

Recall.

They flooded through his mind until he sorted them by height and build. Knight Errant . Hanno’s body moved by itself, the reflexes of his Name replacing his own. He leaned backwards, the tip of the villain’s sword passing just above his nose, and his hand closed around the grip of the sword in his gut. Ignoring the struggling shadow tendril, he hit the Black Knight in the chest with the pommel. The impact bought him a moment he flawlessly used to spin around his opponent. The very instant they were back to back he slapped away the tendril-moved sword that would have taken the back of his knee and with two swords in hand stepped away from his opponent. The villain did not miss a beat, stepping into a lunge that Hanno turned into a parry that knocked the sword out of the man’s hand. It did not stop him: a tendril caught the sword and swung for this throat as the other one slapped another blade into the palm of his armoured hand. No, this wouldn’t work either.

He touched the flood again. Righteous Spear . Tossing away the villain’s weapon, Hanno felt the sword in his hand flare with light and turn into the spear he needed. A parting gift from the Gigantes, a weapon that could be whatever his Name required. The barbed tip of his spear flicked towards the villain’s throat but bounced off the shield. The Black Knight immediately closed the distance and Hanno spun with the man’s swing, shaft of the spear coming to knock down the side of the shield before he spun back to – to have the shaft be caught by a shadow tendril. Weapon forced out of his hand, Hanno touched the flood again. Sage of the West . His armoured gauntlet expertly caught the side of the shield and he leveraged his weight to slam it into the villain’s own helm. The man was caught off guard long enough for Hanno to slide under his guard and flip him over his back. He pivoted smoothly to hammer his heel into the villain’s helmet but the side of his greaves was caught.

“ Destroy ,” the Black Knight said.

The life he’d been tapping into... disappeared. Like smoke. He was the White Knight again, standing awkwardly with his foot in his opponent’s grasp. The villain grunted and smashed him into the ground like rag doll. Tendrils of shadows with two dozen of the clay balls from earlier wrapped around him, all lit. Hanno touched the flood again. Thief of Stars . He slid out of the bindings, though the edge of the explosions caught him. He was tossed to the ground, landing in an ungainly sprawl. It wasn’t enough. He’d have to... The coin appeared in one hand as his weapon reformed in a burst of light in the other.

“Burn,” an indifferent voice ordered.

The stream of flame caught him in the chest. His plate was of the finest steel that could be found in the Free Cities and still it boiled in the blink of an eye. The force behind the flames was brutal, driving him into the pavement as the stone scorched and cracked around him. Mercifully, it ceased. The time to worry about the state of his body after the fight was past, Hanno acknowledged. He breathed out and let the Light fill him. He’d lost hold of the Thief, now the White Knight once more, and his body hoisted itself back to its feet. Flesh a tapestry of red and black, he stood to face his enemies. There were two, now. The Black Knight and his sorcerous accomplice. A tall black man in burgundy robes, currently eyeing him with distaste.

“Wekesa,” the Black Knight said. “The Wizard?”

“Survived the blast,” the Warlock replied. “Currently chasing my second fake.”

“Then why are you here?” the other villain asked.

“The Tyrant is retreating.”

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“You’re certain?” the Black Knight said.

The sorcerer rolled his eyes.

“No, I confused them with the othe r besieging army that’s leaving,” he deadpanned.

“A backstab I expected, but a retreat?” the Knight murmured, then shook his head. “Are any of them on their third aspect?”

“Sabah’s got her two on their second, the Wizard hasn’t even used one,” the dark-skinned man said.

The Black Knight sighed, then sheathed his sword.

“We can no longer win this,” he said. “Full retreat.”

“They’re on the ropes, Black,” the Warlock said.

“Yes,” the other villain agreed darkly. “We have them cornered, with all their trump cards left. That is not a story that ends well for us.”

“You’re not getting away,” Hanno and the Light said.

The Warlock glanced at him then smiled unpleasantly.

“Well, you say that, but...”

Everything went dark again.

—

It was night out when Irene finally hit her limit.

Hanno would survive, which was what mattered. The magical burns had been nothing she hadn’t seen before, if never quite so severe, but there’d been some things she could not fix. There were two patches of skin gone almost stone-like on the side of his neck and a few others on his side that seemed able to simply ignore her miracles. It was like the Heavens saw nothing there that needed to be healed. She’d have to ask him about it, when he woke up. Her sister was sprawled across a chair behind her, looking exhausted, and the Champion was snoring away loudly on the only other bed in the room. She didn’t begrudge the Levantine that in the slightest: she’d had most bones in her body broken at least three times, and Irene had not had the power left to both soothe away the lingering pains and deal with the White Knight’s wounds. Washing away the last of the peeled-off skin with the wet cloth, Irene dropped the resulting mess in the water bowl by her side.

“He’s rather plain for a hero, isn’t he?” Alkmene said quietly, studying their leader.

“That speaks well of him,” Irene replied, dragging herself up. “Means he’s not vain.”

She brought a short stool next to her sister’s seat and with a sigh dropped her head on Alkmene’s arm. The odd-eyed woman stroked her hair affectionately.

“You know what I mean,” her sister said. “Look, we didn’t change much when we became Named but there were some changes. I’m a little thinner. You’re taller than me by at least an inch more than before.”

“That’s because he’s a Judgement boy,” the Bard said.

Both sisters flinched at the interruption. Aoede was sitting by Hanno’s bedside, pulling at a bottle of rum.

“Where have you been all day?” Irene asked flatly.

“Nowhere,” the Bard grimaced. “They’ve figured out a few things.”

It would have been impolite for either of them to pursue this any further, unfortunately. One did not simply ask another Named how their Name affected them. The answers tended to be intensely personal, and sometimes forcing an answer could have grave consequences for everyone involved. The olive-skinned woman brushed back her curls, waving her bottle.

“But like I said, it’s because he’s a Judgement boy,” she continued. “The Seraphim don’t have a lot of tolerance for self-delusion. You’re taller ‘cause in your head you were that much taller than your sister. Irene is thinner ‘cause she never thought of herself as going to keep those pounds.”

“That’s fascinating,” her sister said blandly, reaching for a pitcher of wine and pouring herself a cup. “And you didn’t warn us the fucking Calamities were coming to town because?”

“Here’s a warning, since you want one. Don’t drink that,” the Bard replied easily

Irene frowned and her sister pulled away her hand from the cup like she’d been burned.

“Why?” the Priestess asked.

“There’s five Calamities,” Aoede said. “You’ve met three. One’s retired. And the last one is...”

“Assassin,” Irene whispered, eyeing the cup like it was snake. “It’s poisoned?”

“And just when the both of you are flat out of power to burn,” the Bard said admiringly. “None of us ever saw a whisk of him, and he’s still come closest to killing a hero today.”

Priestess found her hands were shaking.

“They’ve learned to work around me some,” Aoede said quietly. “There’s rules. I knew they were coming but not when .”

Irene waved away the unspoken recriminations they’d been offering. The Bard was not the enemy.

“Merciful Gods,” Alkmene muttered. “This has not been our day.”

“We’ve got some time before Hanno is back on his feet,” Priestess said. “We can rest a bit.”

“Seven days and seven nights before he wakes,” the Bard said. “Only one thing to do until then.”

“And what’s that?” Irene asked, raising an eyebrow.

The bottle of rum landed in her lap.

“For once,” the Ashen Priestess said, bringing the bottle to her lips, “I think you might actually be right.”

Chapter 8: Lies

“Invading? Good Gods, of course not. We’re merely manoeuvring.”
-Dread Empress Sinistra II “the Coy”, after being hailed by the garrison of Summerholm

Archer hadn’t changed at all since I last saw her. Fine white chainmail went down from her throat to her knees, splitting in a skirt. Over it she wore a long leather coat that came up in a hood that was currently down. The dark green linen she’d covered her face with last time had not been brought up, leaving open her exotic dark ochre face and hazelnut eyes. Only people across the Tyrian Sea had that skin tone: not the Baalites or the Yan Tei but those from some faraway land whose inhabitants were known only as the tigermen. The pair of longknives at her hips were sheathed and her ridiculously large longbow still strapped to her back, along with a quiver full of arrows closer in size and thickness to javelins than anything else. Even under the armour faint curves could be glimpsed, and there was no denying she was almost as good-looking as she thought she was.

“Lady Archer,” Hakram greeted her respectfully.

She’d pretty much mauled him effortlessly on their first encounter, which tended to leave positive impression on orcs. I brushed off Archer’s arm, frowning at her.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

She ignored me, to my irritation. Huh. I wasn’t used to people doing that anymore. Whether they were my enemies or my friends, everyone paid attention when I glared these days. That had a way of happening when you’d killed as many people as I had.

“Sweetcheeks,” she grinned at Masego. “How are we?”

“Less than pleased by the appellation,” Apprentice replied.

“It’s a compliment,” she assured him.

“Stop verbally molesting my people and answer the question,” I said.

She glanced at me, still grinning.

“What’s the magic word?” she prompted.

For a heartbeat, I seriously debated ordering Masego to cast something on her. Nothing lethal, just unpleasant. Her hair turning into snakes, maybe. Would that be magic enough for her? Ultimately I sighed. This wasn’t worth getting into a pissing match for.

“Please,” I said.

“Well, since you asked nicely,” Archer shrugged. “I was headed for your little city – what’s it called again, Marching, Mossboard? – when I spied with my little eye a bunch of very lost villains.”

She knew what the name was, I thought, meeting her eyes. She knew I knew she knew what the name was. She was just pulling my strings because she could. It was good to know that even if the better part of a year had passed she was still a major pain in my ass.

“You are the poison ivy of people,” I told her. “Why were you headed for Marchford?”

“Your boss called in her marker for the Hunter incident,” Archer replied. “Asked Lady Ranger to send a fae expert.”

I smiled thinly.

“So where are they?” I said.

Hakram snorted. Masego looked like he wanted to inform me Archer was the expert even if he knew I was being sarcastic, but barely managed not to.

“That’s hurtful, it is,” she said, sounding pleased. “My turn to ask the questions then. Why in the all the bloody Hells are you lot this deep in Arcadia?”

I blinked.

“How deep are we, exactly?” Masego asked.

“Not as deep as yo could be, sweetcheeks,” Archer replied without missing a beat, wagging her eyebrows. “But to put it in laymen’s terms, you’re pretty close to Skade.”

“The seat of the Winter Court,” Apprentice said, sounding surprised. “That shouldn’t be possible, we haven’t wandered long enough.”

“This place seems to have a very loose definition of possible,” Hakram grunted.

“The orc gets it,” Archer said.

“There’s rules even in Arcadia,” Masego said flatly.

“The rules in this neck of the woods are whatever the King of Winter says they are,” the woman shrugged.

“The implication being that the King wants us in Skade,” I said quietly. “ That’s going to end well.”

“Yeah, I meant to ask,” Archer said. “What did you guys do to piss off the Winter Court? Did you abduct some of their people?”

“We didn’t do anything,” I complained. “They just showed up one day, started invading my city and got really condescending about not telling me why.”

Archer rolled her eyes.

“A few warbands is hardly an invasion,” she said.

“Squire’s not exaggerating,” Hakram said. “They’ve stated their intention is to conquer Marchford.”

The ochre-skinned woman raised an eyebrow.

“That’s... unprecedented, as far as I know,” she said. “Fae mess around with mortals outside Arcadia all the time, but they don’t stay there as a rule. Are you sure you didn’t piss them off somehow?”

“I honestly can’t think of a way I would have,” I replied.

“Huh,” she said. “Well, you’re still lucky in a way. You’re stuck with Winter and they’re shit at fighting. Whatever poor bastard is stuck with Summer is in for a rough ride.”

“The ones I’ve fought so far weren’t pushovers,” I said.

“If you’d been in a scrap with the host of High Noon you’d have a lot more holes in your armour, Squire, and they’d still be smoking,” she said. “Summer’s the season of war. They always win the round against Winter if it gets to a pitched battle.”

Ah, the familiar feeling of being in over my head and yet still glimpsing another peril over the horizon that would be even worse. I was depressing how used to that I’d gotten.

“That’s a nightmare for another night,” I said. “If you were headed for Marchford then you know a way out of here?”

“Sure,” Archer said, and pointed towards the city.

It was still insolently glistening, but at least I had a name for it: Skade. It was also apparently the seat of the Winter Court, so the way my instincts had been screaming trap, trap, this is a trap was once again justified.

“Do you have a way out that doesn’t involve us dying painfully?” I asked.

“I was headed towards a gate before I saw the lot of you,” Archer said, “but that’s meaningless now. This close to Skade we’re going wherever the King wants us to go.”

“So if we walk in the other direction...” Hakram said, trailing off.

“We’ll get back here in a few hours,” she said. “Though if he’s pulling that sort of stuff at least he’d not meddling with time.”

I sighed. Was I ever going to meet some sort of all-powerful creature that wasn’t a real prick about it?

“So to Skade we go,” I grunted.

Archer nodded.

“Better keep off the road,” she said. “Otherwise they’ll see us coming. Wait until night time and try to sneak through?”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“We’re taking the road,” I said. “Apprentice, you have parchment and ink?”

“Oh thank the Gods,” Masego muttered, then cleared his throat. “Yes, I do.”

“We’re going to caught pretty early,” Archer pointed out.

“Caught?” I smiled. “Why, we’re not hiding. We were, after all, invited.”

—

About an hour in we ran into a hunting party. Not in the sense that they were hunting for us, but in the way that Callowan nobles hunted deer and rabbit. There were a dozen fae, all mounted on too-perfect white horses, but among those only four mattered. Two men and two women, colourfully dressed where the others were in drab blue-grey and armour. The nobles – for I was relatively certain that was what they were – immediately took the lead and diverted their party towards us. Of them the first to speak was a man dressed in a tunic of woven shade and starlight which hurt to look at if I did it for too long. My companions spread out warily, but as I’d told them to did not reach for their weapons.

“Well well well,” the noble began. “What have we-“

“ Finally ,” I interrupted. “You there, the ugly one. Dismount immediately and give me your horse.”

I was careful not to point at any guard in particular, letting them decided among themselves exactly who I’d been speaking to. There was a flicker of surprise across all their faces. This was not, it seemed, going the way they’d thought it would. Good.

“Pardon me,” the man said. “But what did you just say?”

“I ordered your attendant to give me his horse,” I corrected haughtily. “I have to say, the reception so far has been most disappointing. I expected envoys to meet us at the border, not for us to have to walk like peasants.”

“You are mortals,” one of the ladies said, tone bemused.

“I am the Lady of Marchford,” I sneered. “Here at the personal invitation of the King of Winter. Obviously you were sent to welcome us, so surrender horses for myself and my retinue. We’ve wasted enough time.”

There was a heartbeat of silence as they all stared at me. I offered back my best impression of Heiress, silently conveying that to such a hallowed personage as myself their mere presence was almost offensive. One of the ladies smiled, her teeth looking more like a crescent moon than bone.

“We welcome you to Arcadia Resplendent, Lady of Marchford,” she said. “I am the Marchioness of the Northern Wind. Please forgive the manners of my uncouth companions.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” I said, my frown heavily implying that there was .

“It will be our pleasure to escort you, my lady,” the man who’d not spoken added. “Though it pains me to be so direct, may we see the King’s invitation? Since Winter has gone to war, none are allowed to wander without one.”

“Of course,” I replied dismissively. “Servant, show them the invitation.”

I gestured at Archer, who raised a mutinous eyebrow at me.

“Do not tarry, sullen wench,” I said, savouring every syllable. “Or it’s a smart blow to the ear for you.”

She glared at me and grit her teeth but took out the folded sheet of parchment, handing it to a guard. Said guard rode closer to the nobles and presented it. They looked at the parchment, then at us, then to the parchment again. It was fake, of course. I’d known it would be pointless to try to forge something that would pass muster, since we had no idea if invitations like that even existed and what they would look like if they did. So I’d gone the other way and made it a ridiculously obvious fake. It was even signed ‘the King of Winter’, since none of us knew what his actual name was. I could see the nobles wanted to immediately call us out on it, but they hesitated. I smothered a grin. It was just like dealing with Praesi. It was a transparent lie, so naturally there had to be something they were missing. Was it a trap aimed at them, perhaps? A true invitation made to look like a fake so they would offend and give pretext for execution?

“This is a false invitation,” the first fae to have spoken finally said, tone wary.

My companions stirred, preparing for a fight, but I’d bluffed with thoroughly empty hands often enough to know not to react.

“Aleban, don’t be obtuse,” the Marchioness laughed. “Of course it’s true, look at the signature.”

Aleban looked about to protest, then his eyes suddenly narrowed at the Marchioness. The other male fae began to grin nastily and the other woman steered her horse subtly away.

“Since the Marchioness of the Northern Wind states it is true, then it must be,” he said sneeringly. “I am sure His Grace will be pleased when you bring them to him for audience.”

“Oh, I would never dare overstep my station in this manner,” the Marchioness smiled. “The Lady of Cracking Ice is the darling of the Court, surely her hand is best suited for this task.”

Said Lady had been the one edging away and even as her face went thunderous as the sudden swerve in conversation I could not help but notice she was quite stunning. Most fae were subtly wrong, with faces too narrow and eyes too large, but this one was outright ethereal. I was almost reminded of Kilian by the cast of her face, though she had sharper cheekbones and paler skin than my lover.

“I simply could not claim this privilege in the face of so many nobles of superior rank,” the Lady demurred. “The Baron of Blue Lights humbled us all with his singing last night, surely introducing such hallowed guests would be another feather to his cap.”

“You are too kind, my lady,” the fae who’d been grinning replied smoothly. “I am but a paltry courtier compared to the might that is the Duke of Sudden Rime. Would it not be best for him to have this honour?”

Aleban, who was apparently a duke, smiled serenely.

“You are too humble, my good Baron,” he said. “No one but you is a match for this task. Do you not agree, Marchioness?”

“Oh, most definitely,” she said, deploying a fan of pure ivory with a flick of the wrist and hiding her vicious smile.

“It is agreed, then,” the Lady of Cracking Ice murmured.

See, that was my favourite part of dealing with schemers. They always thought too deeply, and when it made them uncertain they immediately began passing the potential backfire to someone else. Fae were supposed to be the trickiest creatures in existence: if there was even a speck of uncertainty they’d make sure none of the fallout could mar the hem of their dress. We weren’t out of the pit yet, of course. Even if they went along with it now that didn’t mean they wouldn’t turn their cloaks the moment we entered Skade and claim they’d been toying with us all along. Got us in the city, though, and that was the first step.

“All of you show me such favour,” the Baron said calmly. “I will not soon forget it, I assure you.”

The guard returned the ‘invitation’ to Archer, who looked like she really wanted to stab someone in the face. I hid my glee behind a dignified façade. Ignore me, would she? My vengeance would be as swift as it was petty. Our escort ordered guards to dismount and I paused a moment when I realized that unlike mortal riders, none of them used spurs or even a saddle. There was just a beautiful silk blanket. Not using the horse for a getaway then , I thought. I was a more than decant rider these days, but I’d never tried it without a saddle. My companions mounted after I did, with varying degrees of success. Hakram was pleased his horse hadn’t begun blindly panicking the moment he approached and Archer was a better rider than me by the looks of it. Masego, on the other hand, was hugging his mount’s flanks and looking pale.

“Apprentice,” I said, bringing my mount to his side.

“This is unnatural,” he muttered back. “Mages walk or fly. This horse business is just asking for a broken neck.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it under control,” I lied.

“Is there an issue, Lady of Marchford?” the Baron asked.

I smiled blandly.

“None at all,” I said. “By all means, my lord baron, take us to Skade.”

“It will be my pleasure,” the fae replied darkly, to the amusement of the other nobles.

We set out down the road, the fairies leading the way, and Archer rode closer to me.

“ Sullen wench ?” she hissed.

“You’re right,” I replied pensively. “That was a bit much. I take back the sullen.”

—

I’d seen quite a few beautiful places, in my time.

I’d seen the Silver Lake under moonlight, when it was most deserving of its name. I’d seen the royal palace of Laure, stone and tapestry and centuries of power. I’d walked the halls of the Tower, where opulence was a given and horror lurked behind every drape. Even the Wasteland had been beautiful in its own harsh way, flickering from storm to blinding sun in the span of a bell. None of them held a candle to Skade. Arcadia was not Creation, and so not bound by its rules. The Winter Court had taken this to heart when it had built its seat. Archways carved from snowstorms, streets made of solid glistening water and even auroras turned into lanterns: it was madness, but a madness utterly bewitching. I could see trees made of ice with leaves of stone that shook in the breeze, bridges of mist linking towers that were solid a moment and gone the next. The gate into Skade was an archway of ever-shifting ice, a high relief that changed the stories it depicted with every look. And in front of it, in two unmoving rows, stood Swords of Waning Day. The same soldiers I’d fought in Marchford, made a silent honour guard. Our party rode up a gentle slope, headed for avenues inside.

Then the first soldiers unsheathed their swords.

For a moment I panicked, but kept my face calm. If this came to a fight we weren’t making it out alive: Hakram and I had struggled enough with two, two hundred were far beyond our capacity to handle. Any notion they were taking those out for a salute was dismissed when they turned towards us. No, I noticed after a moment. Not us . Archer. Who did not look particularly surprised.

“Soldiers, what is the meaning of this?” the Duke of Sudden Rime asked.

“This one smells of the Darkest Night,” one replied, pointing his sword at Archer.

The woman cleared her throat, gave me a sideways look.

“The Lady of the Lake has visited Skade in the past,” she said. “She, uh, might have left an impression.”

The deadwood soldiers hissed like angry cats when she mentioned the Ranger’s title. From the corner of my eye I could see the fae nobles exchanging glances. They looked surprised, then cast very wary looks in my direction. Oh, right. I’d called a pupil of the Ranger a sullen wench and threatened to slap her around. They had to be wondering who the Hells I was to be able to get away with that. I smiled prettily in their direction, which seemed to unsettle them even more.

“She’s with me,” I said. “And will not fight unless provoked.”

“Her mistress took the Prince of Nightfall’s eye and set it on a ring ,” the soldier barked.

“It makes for very tasteful jewellery, if that’s any consolation,” Archer said.

“So this is what dying stupidly feels like,” Hakram mused.

“I’m sure Lady Ranger will give it back if he asks nicely,” I lied. “Regardless, Archer is part of my retinue. She is not to be touched.”

“Who are you to-“ the soldier began, before a fracture line ran along the length of his body.

His eyes widened, then he fell into a shower of shards.

“I am bored with this interlude,” the Lady of Cracking Ice said. “Shall we proceed?”

We did, and the soldiers gave us a wide berth. I leaned towards Archer.

“And Summer is worse?” I asked.

“Way worse,” she said grimly, then lowered her voice. “So we’re in the city. What’s the plan now?”

“The situation is fluid,” I replied. “We’re keeping our options open.”

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Hakram cursed.

I smiled winningly at my companions.

Warden I

“May you become the weakest link in the Chain of Hunger.”
– Ancient Lycaonese curse

Amadeus lightly tapped the mark on the map spread across the table.

“Aisne,” he said. “That’s where it’ll take place.”

The room where the Dark Council usually held session was empty save for him and Alaya, their most accurate map of the Principate spread across the table and cluttered with small figurines representing the armies being deployed. The largest concentration was around the city of Aisne, seat of the principality of the same name. The largest current alliance in Procer was mustering there to meet Cordelia Hasenbach’s forces in a pitched battle on the flatlands to northwest. Said battle, in his estimation, would take place within the month. The Lycaonese under Hasenbach didn’t have the supplies for a long campaign and the longer the war stretched the more vulnerable their borders.

“Princess Constance had to make that concession for Brabant to swing to her side,” he added. “Their prince doesn’t want whatever army loses to turn to banditry on his lands afterwards. There’s too many fantassins floating around at the moment for anyone to control after the battle.”

“The Princess of Aisne has three times Hasenbach’s numbers,” Alaya noted, sipping a cup of terrible wine in her seat. “Common military doctrine would say she’s assured a victory unless she makes a major blunder.”

It always amused Amadeus to hear her speak of ‘common military doctrine’. It wasn’t that the Empress wouldn’t make a good field commander – she had the right instincts, though she’d need seasoning – but rather that Alaya had always left the military matters to him. Most of what she knew about war she knew from books, and Praesi ones at that. The dark-haired man was of the opinion that over half the books on war written in the Empire were worthless when applied to a proper war machine. The Legions of Terror as they currently were had little to do with the unruly hordes that had been the staple of Praes military enterprises for centuries.

“She has the advantage,” he conceded. “But not by as large a margin as you’d think. About two thirds of what Aisne and her allies field are levies and fantassins, not professional soldiers.”

“Hasenbach has a much smaller population to draw from,” Alaya said. “She might have more professionals proportionally, but when it comes to hard numbers her edge is only a few thousands.”

“True,” Amadeus said calmly. “But she has three factors on her side. First, most of her soldiers are Lycaonese.”

“And so they’ve seen battle before,” Alaya frowned.

“It’s more than that,” the green-eyed man said. “The force that presses at their borders is the Chain of Hunger. Ratlings are weaker than humans on average, unless they’ve had a few decades to grow, and they’ve no true siege weaponry save for the Ancient Ones. What they do have, however, is numbers .”

It was a very rare thing for him to have to spell out anything to Alaya, and this was no exception.

“They’re used to being outnumbered,” the Soninke said.

“And in the fights the get in, retreat is not an option,” Amadeus said. “They won’t flinch when the casualties rise. Princess Constance’s soldiers will. Wars in the south of Procer just aren’t fought the way they are up north.”

The Empress sipped at her drink, mulling it over.

“The second advantage would be the Augur,” she said.

Amadeus nodded.

“Hasenbach’s army will know where and when the enemy will move. She showed against Lange exactly how dangerous that can be,” he said.

By the time the Lycaonese had moved to siege the city, Prince Dagobert effectively had no army. His troops had suffered three ambushes in a row, then a series of brutal night raids that butchered his best soldiers before they could fight. The Prince of Lyonis turned on him immediately and the Princess of Segovia was entertaining envoys from Hasenbach in her tent even as the city gates were being breached, her army watching passively. With Brus having capitulated within a month of the Lycaonese offensive beginning, that had brought four southern principalities to Hasenbach’s banner and turned that unknown young girl from the north into the foremost candidate for the title of First Prince. The other rulers of Procer had begun plotting against her before the dust from the last battle had settled, of course. The Princess of Aequitan, who still had backing from most southern principalities even after her repeated defeats, had temporarily joined hands with her hated enemy in Aisne. Between the two of them the coalition spanned a massive eleven principalities and covered almost as much territory as Praes and Callow combined.

“Which leads me to the third factor,” Amadeus said. “Klaus Papenheim.”

“The Prince of Hannoven,” Alaya murmured. “Her uncle.”

“Without contest the best general in Procer,” the green-eyed man said. “In terms of skill I’d rank him below Grem, but he’s the most experienced living commander on Calernia.”

A distinction always worth making, considering the existence of the Dead King.

“Hasenbach winning is the worst outcome for us, Maddie,” Alaya said. “She’s purged most of our agents out of her sphere of influence, but more importantly she’s fighting the right kind of war. She kills princes but spares commoners, her armies don’t pillage or burn fields. Wherever she goes, she knits Procer back together.”

While if the coalition led by the Princesses Constance and Aenor won, it would immediately collapse into infighting as soon as the larger threat was dealt with. Maybe even before. The women detested each other personally as well as politically, and with Dagobert of Lange out of the running they were itching to have a go at each other with their other borders secure.

“I give her better than half chances of winning at Aisne, as it stands,” Amadeus said. “I take it you’ve infiltrated the coalition?”

“I’ve applied pressure to keep it together,” Alaya agreed. “And I’ve been working on Hasenbach’s southern allies. Not all of them are steady.”

“If one of her flanks turns on her in the middle of the battle she’s done,” Amadeus noted. “Not even Papenheim could turn that around when outnumbered by this much.”

Alaya set aside her cup and rose to her feet, running a finger along the border between Callow and Procer.

“As long as the Principate is united, the Empire is threatened,” Malicia said. “Let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that.”

—

Mornings this far south were indolent things, in Klaus’ opinion.

In Hannoven there would be mist and biting cold keeping his men awake, but down here the lazy heat of summer was trying to drag them all back to sleep. No wonder the Alamans had no stomach for real war. Their land was soft and had made them soft in turn. So they’d turned to drinking and scheming instead of doing their duty, once more making a fucking mess of Procer until the Lycaonese came south to clean up their godsdamned mess. It made his blood boil, that this band of shit-eating buffoons had somehow managed to wage war for over a decade without one of their fat arses somehow managing to claim the throne. Made him want to thin the herd a bit so that the next generation would remember that if they kept pissing the bed until Klaus’ people had to step in there would be a price to pay. Cordelia had told him not to, though. Said they’d need the Alamans and the Arlesites in years to come and that filling a few mass graves with the arrogant twats would burn those bridges. Klaus had informed her that the day he needed an Alamans to defend the walls of Hannoven was the day he began a hike to Keter, but she’d talked him around. Somehow.

That was the thing with his niece: you start a conversation with her knowing the sky was blue and an hour later come out of that room willing to start a war over the fact it was green, never able to pinpoint exactly when she’d convinced you. It just... happened. At least it worked on other people too. The Prince of Brus had gone from being invaded to putting a rapier through a man’s belly for implying she was not the rightful First Prince in the span of a single month. The boy who now ruled Lange was eating out of her palm even after watching his own uncle sent to the headsman’s block at her orders. Klaus had always known Margaret’s child was meant for greater things. His sister had been a cast-iron bitch that scared the shit out of even the ratlings, but she’d always been meant for a soldier’s life. She’d died spitting in the eye of the Plague, as the line of Papenheim had since times immemorial, but she would not have been able to lead the Lycaonese the way her daughter did.

There’d been some who looked down on his niece when she’d been a young girl, because she wasn’t much of a fighter. Because she cared for etiquette, because she corresponded with Alamans princes and dressed in skirts instead of mail. All of those were eating their words now, watching Cordelia spin the heads of the southerners and beat them at their own game. His niece had learned their ways and she was not turning them against the arrogant princelings with a cold ruthlessness that would have made her mother proud. Not all their allies were so impressed, though. Cordelia had two princes firmly in hand, but Luisa of Segovia was a wily old fox who’d switch sides the moment she got a better offer. Segovians , he thought with distaste. They had such a hard on for coin they might as well be Ashurans. As for the Prince of Lyonis, he knew so little about loyalty he probably wouldn’t know how to spell the word. That was the one they had to watch for betrayal, when the time came.

Klaus broke off a piece of bread and thoughtfully chewed it, watching the field. He was never all that hungry before the killing began, as it happened. He broke off another piece and fed it to his horse, who licked his palm in appreciation. Ratbiter was getting a little old as well, he thought. The days where the destrier dutifully trampled whoever was in his way would soon be over. Tossing away the rest of the bread and washing away the taste with water, Klaus affectionately slapped the animal’s neck.

“We’ve still got another few in us, don’t we old boy?” the greying general said.

The horse whinnied and the prince smiled grimly. The alliance opposing them was getting ready around Lange, but he had no intention of waiting until they were ready to strike. Princess Constance was still moving in supplies to feed her horde of fuckups and the Augur had told him where and when to strike. The general adjusted his helm and unsheathed his sword, silently watching the column of horse-drawn carriages lumbering north to Aisne. They wouldn’t have expected him to move through Salia with his cavalry, he knew. Salia, as the future seat of the First Prince, had remained neutral so far. Until Cordelia had negotiated passage for him. The rest of his army was still crossing the south of Brabant, loud and visible and drawing attention. Klaus turned to his ranks of horsemen and offered them a wolf’s grin.

“All right, boys and girls,” he called out. “It seems fucking Dagobert up the arse didn’t get our message across. Those two sweet princesses are going to need a repeat performance before it sinks in, my darlings. So make sure that smoke can be seen all the way from Aisne, you hear me?”

Their call back was deafening. Feeling twenty years younger, Klaus Papenheim brought up his shield and charged .

—

“He’ll win,” the Augur said. “On all paths, he wins.”

Cordelia mandated court dress for all her attendants, even the Lycaonese, but her distant cousin Agnes was something of an exception. Named, after all, lived according to their own rules. Heroes were rare in Procer, at best a once in a generation appearance, and they were treated with distant awe. By most, at least. Soldiers tended to be sceptical of them, given that the Principate had face both heroes and a handful of villains in battle and come off the better without any Named of its own. There was an institutional contempt for nations like Callow who relied on heroes to fight the enemy, and when Praes had successfully invaded the country there’d been many who’d shaken their heads and said it was an inevitable outcome for a kingdom who relied on the Heavens for protection. Which was absurd, in her opinion, since Callow had to deal with all-powerful madmen who could burn cities with a single spell while the Principate dealt mostly with mundane armies. Regardless, a Named like the Augur commanded respect from even seasoned generals.

It had been illuminating, seeing the change in how people treated her cousin. Agnes had been a lonely child and then a lonely girl, thought odd by most for her awkwardness and endless enthusiasm for bird watching. While never bullied – she was a Hasenbach, however distant from the main line – she’d been avoided. Cordelia herself had been one of the few people to make a point of spending time with her, though they never had much in common. They were blood regardless, and so she’d always made time for her cousin when her duties allowed. And then one day Agnes had casually predicted a ratling raid at dinner, absent-mindedly referring to herself as the Augur. Overnight people began bowing to her and seeking her advice, to her confusion. She’d shied away to the attention and been extremely grateful when Cordelia set aside one of the few ornamental gardens in Rhenia for her, spending her days sitting in her chair and watching the sky. Always distant, Agnes had become almost otherworldly: the cares of Creation passed her by, and even when speaking with people she seemed distracted.

The gifts of the Heavens always came at a cost, Cordelia knew.

“Does he come back safely?” the blonde asked.

Agnes nodded.

“Hawks to the east, flocking,” she said.

Cordelia patted her cousin’s hand gently.

“I do not know what that means, Agnes,” she said.

“Oh,” the Augur blinked owlishly. “The Empress waits. She has knives for you.”

As expected. Malicia still had a hand to play. That she would be backing Aisne and Aequitan was a given, but the Dread Empress of Praes always had more than a single scheme at play. She’d be targeting the weak points of Cordelia’s own alliance, Segovia and Lyonis. The Prince of Lyonis was the most openly treacherous of the two, never having forgotten that he’d been a contender for the throne when he’d had his relatives in Cleves and Hainaut behind him. Princess Luisa, though, was where Cordelia thought the betrayal would come from. She had too many merchant interests, too many ways for the Empire to reward her changing sides. She’d already prepared for the eventuality, placed safeguards to remove her from play if she acted. It would have been a relief, she thought, if Procerans were all she had to deal with. But that would be a naïve expectation: all of Calernia had a vested interest in the outcome of this civil war. Praes most of all, for they had engineered it, but the other vultures were circling.

It was only a matter of time until the Dominion of Levant began eyeing the exhausted and impoverished principalities of the south. And when they began to move, everyone else would. Helike was quiet for now, its king kept occupied by gifts of gold and dancers from the Princess of Tenerife, but that would not last forever. The Free City had declined in influence too much of late, and those were the tell-tale signs of a Tyrant rising. The Chain of Hunger had not troubled Lycaonese borders overmuch, but eventually the ratlings smell weakness on the walls and assault in force. Cordelia had stripped the strength of her people bare for the war in the south, knowing the risks it entailed. She could not afford a long war, two years at most of which she had already spent half. She had to end things in Aisne so her people could return north as soon as possible, for if the princesses of Aequitan and Aisne survived this blow the fighting could stretch on for years.

A gamble, then. Cordelia had always disliked those. It felt like making light of the lives she was responsible for to risk them imprudently, but what else could she do? If she did nothing Procer would collapse. If any of the rulers aiming for the throne had any vision at all she could have supported them instead of struck out on her own, but as things stood? She’d warned them all of who stood behind the Pravus Banks, and still they took the gold. Because if they didn’t, their rivals might and they’d lose an advantage.

“Do you think it had to be this way, Agnes?” she asked quietly.

Her cousin glanced at her, then smiled.

“There’s a lot of people who ask me things, Cordelia,” she said. “Do you know why you’re the only one I always answer?”

The Prince of Rhenia shook her head.

“Because you do what you think you need to do, not what you want,” the Augur said. “That’s why you’re worth helping, even if it’s tedious.”

Cordelia sat next to her cousin in the morning sun, looking at the sky for a long time. Eventually she closed her eyes. She had planned all she could, she knew. All she could hope now was that she had, this once, planned better than the woman trying to destroy Procer.

Chapter 9: More Lies

“Gentlemen, there is no need to worry: our plan is flawless. The Emperor will never see it coming.”
– Grandmaster Ouroboros of the Order of Unholy Obsidian, later revealed to have been Dread Emperor Traitorous all along

A few years ago I would have been able to enjoy the beautiful madness that was Skade as we rode through it, but being apprenticed to Black had ruined me. Now I was wondering how a city with a population of a several thousand could manage to feed itself when all the fields around it were covered in snow. Or who cleaned the streets for them to remain this pristine. Were there fae street sweepers? If so, were they available for hire? Marchford didn’t look nearly as nice. And that was without even getting into the logistics of running a monetary system when everyone and their sister could make illusionary coin. Unless all coin was illusionary? This entire race was giving me a headache just to think about. The rest of my companions seemed more concerned with getting their bearings, which I already knew would be pointless. I’d looked back after we turned a corner twice now and found an entirely different street behind us, the second time even on a different floor. The seat of the Winter Court was nearing Tower-levels of mindfuckery, though at least it wasn’t also full of death-traps and demons. I hoped.

Archer’s casual assessment of the Winter King as “pretty much a god” wasn’t a significantly better alternative, but I’d take what I could get.

If I was getting out of this with most my organs on the inside, it would be by picking a story and sticking to it. The fact that’d I somehow wiggled my way into being the heroine when facing the Rider of the Host likely meant Arcadia didn’t care for my being Evil so long as I acted heroic. That broadened my options a great deal. There were at least half a dozen tales about some clear-sighted commoner with a Good heart walking into the court of Callow and unmasking the schemes of wicked courtiers trying to trap them, though my introducing myself as the Lady of Marchford might have killed that in the crib. Trickster stories, then? Trying to outwit fae at the game they’d allegedly invented struck me as asking for an invitation to a feast that lasted a century, but with the story on my side I might pull through. Sadly, I hadn’t been abducted by a fairy queen with designs on my virtue so professing my pure-hearted affections for Kilian would be of no use. To be honest I wasn’t great with temptation anyway. Wouldn’t be sleeping with one of my senior officers if I was.

“Catherine,” Hakram said in a rasping whisper. “Watch.”

I glanced at the tall orc, then around us. We were riding through a marketplace of sorts, filled to the brim with hundreds of fae. Stalls that were riots of silk and pale wood offered an array of wonders for perusal. Some one-eyed old man with skin dark as a Soninke’s was offering a bottled wish, moonlight made silver and the heart of a once-good woman, all set on an elegant quilt of woven winds. Fares just as absurd stretched as far as the eye could see, the entire plaza much too large for the width the surrounding walls suggested. I saw Masego eyeing what a peddler promised to a drop of the blood of the Forever King with sharp interest, so I kicked his foot. He jumped in surprise and then coughed in embarrassment.

“You start buying things here and you’ll leave with a dozen different fae owning a slice of your soul,” I hissed.

He looked mulish.

“It’s not like I’m using all of it,” he whispered back.

That was the single most Praesi thing I’d ever heard him say and rubbed the bridge of my nose in despair. You’d never find a Callowan selling their soul like that, I thought irritably. Well, except that one time I’d become a villain. So maybe sometimes you found Callowans selling their souls like that, but in most cases I felt like my opinion held up. I glared at Masego anyway, until he gave up with a huff.

“Don’t you pout at me, you’re a grown man,” I muttered.

When had I become the voice of reason? People were supposed to talk me out of things, not the other way around. Still, this felt dealt with so I turned my attention back to the marketplace. Hakram wouldn’t have been interested in the wares here, I was sure. The orc take on having an economy was raising cattle, looting other clans and the occasional bit of barter. Aside from books and booze there wasn’t much in Adjutant’s tent and I would know: I riffled through his stuff at least once a month when I got bored. So what had he been trying to point out to me? I began paying closer to attention to the fae themselves instead of what they haggled over, but how they were dressed wasn’t what caught my attention. It was how they behaved.

Two fae bargained over a silver chain almost perfunctorily, going smoothly back and forth until it became clear the man – who looked like a noble fallen on hard times, his robes threadbare and his hands without rings – could not afford the chain. At which point he publicly bemoaned his lack of wealth, going on twice as long as he had while bargaining. There was something wrong here, like they were acting instead of truly talking. Further away I saw a gorgeous but common woman hacking off her beautiful golden locks and offering them in exchange for a precious stone, and that was when it finally clicked . On the other side of the market place I found an earnest-looking man pawning off an heirloom ring missing its jewel in exchange for a pretty ivory comb. It was an old tale, one children in Callow grew up hearing about as a warning about blind good intentions. They’re going through stories , I realized. All of them . There wasn’t a single outcome here in the hundreds of conversations taking place that wasn’t already set in stone.

It was enough to make me shiver. They might almost look like us, but the fae were other . Something apart, obeying completely different rules. An entire people of actors going through the motions since before Creation even existed. How many times had they gone through their stories, I wondered? If Roles were grooves worn into Creation by repetition, accumulating power by repetition, then these were an entire race of Named. Everyone from the chimney sweeps to the king himself, following along the paths set for them. And now I’d just walked into the midst of that with a lie on my lips, throwing myself headfirst into a maze of interwoven tales that went back unbroken since the dawn of existence. Gods Below, this was more dangerous than I could have ever dreamed of. I forced a smile on my face and sat ramrod straight on my horse as we passed through the market. I met Hakram’s eyes and saw fear there to mirror mine. We’re in over our head. More so than usual.

“This must me where we part, Lady of Marchford,” the Duke of Sudden Rime announced.

I could see interest and fascination in his too-blue eyes as he watched us, having long chased away his initial distaste at our presence. For all that he was more than willing to pawn off responsibility for us to the Baron. Was this a story as well, I wondered? There might not have been an exact precedent for my actions today, but if another tale was close enough they might have moved towards it. Or perhaps not. Their arguing over who’d be responsible for us had felt too organic, not at all like the haggling fae behind us. It had felt like they’d been genuinely unsure of the outcome, no matter how smoothly the conversation had gone. Still, how much could I rely on that impression? Fae were some of the greatest liars to ever exist. There were too many unknowns at play here for me to get a good read on the situation.

“I am most certain we will meet again,” the Marchioness of the Northern Wind said, flashing hungry teeth. “I look forward to it eagerly.”

“I’m sure our dearest Baron will take great care of you,” the Lady of Cracking Ice added, smiling at the fae in question.

“Your reception has been most graceful,” I replied, careful to avoid even the implication of debt.

The nobles tittered and rode past a house of stone too white to be anything of Creation, disappearing the moment they turned the corner. The Baron turned to us, face expressionless.

“As I’ve not been given instruction by His Majesty to bring you under his roof, it seems you will be settling in the guest palace,” he said.

“That will not be necessary, my lord baron,” a voice intervened.

The fae nobles we’d encountered so far had been sharp-faced with even sharper tongues, but none of them had struck me as made for strife. Intrigue yes, and cruelty absolutely but fighting? None of them had the silent assurance of someone used to taking lives. This one, though, looked liked he’d been made for war. His mount was ebony, and I did not mean that in a poetic sense: the horse was sculpted out of dark wood, polished so perfectly it could have been black marble. The man himself was wearing a sober long-sleeved tunic with buttons of shade, the sword at his hip slender and without a sheath. I could feel the power in it, and not mere sorcery: it felt like sharpness made object, a principle made into thing. His skin was pale and his cheeks freshly shaved, thin red lips forming a permanent scowl. A black silken blindfold covered one of his eyes, silvery writing sprawled across it. I’d never seen someone who fit the turn of phrase of being raven-haired better before: just looking at the dark locks I could almost hear the flap of wings.

“My Prince of Nightfall,” the Baron of Blue Lights replied, bowing low.

“That ought to end well,” I muttered.

The prince’s eye flicked in my direction at the words, meeting my stare. I matched his gaze and found myself peering into darkness, a night so dark no stars would ever grace it. I began to drift from my body until I reached for an older memory, one branded into my soul. I felt my back snapping again, my bones grinding to dust as the weight above spoke a single word: Repent . I’ve stared down Hashmallim , fairy, a little dark isn’t going to cow me. Night is when villains rule. I found myself on the horse again, the Prince of Nightfall smiling amusedly.

“His Majesty sends his regards, and grants these awaited guests the use of the Still Courtyard until they can be properly received,” the one-eyed creature spoke.

“A great honour,” I said, which for all I knew could be true.

Well. Fuck. I’d never seriously hoped the Winter King wouldn’t know we were in the city, but him sending what looked like his Court’s equivalent of one of the Calamities had not been the plan. Not that I had a plan, per se, but this definitely wasn’t it. Having Aisha along right about now would have been great, since my companions might all be Named but between the lot of us all we knew about plotting would barely fill a page. Written large. There might even be illustrations.

“I look forward to your attendance of Court on the morrow, Baron,” the prince said, the implied dismissal clear.

The Baron of Blue Lights bowed gracefully a second time, eyes lingering on us before he left. Confusion and fear were plain in his gaze. I feel for you, my friend , I thought. There’s probably someone out there who knows what’s going on, but it’s sure as Hells not either of us. I nodded politely at him and Hakram elbowed Masego so he’d do the same with the rest of us. There was a long moment of silence with only the five of us in the street. The Prince of Nightfall smiled at Archer, somehow conveying a few centuries of hatred in a mere quirk of the lips.

“Did you know, girl, that I once swore if your mistress had a child I would feed it to her?” he idly said.

“The Lady of the Lake isn’t one for children,” Archer replied with a friendly smile of her own. “She much prefers jewellery.”

While I admired the guts behind mouthing off to the immortal creature that had night for eyes, I kind of wanted to throttle her right now. We don’t taunt the monster, Archer. Not when it’s already out to get us. Oh Gods, was this what it felt like being in charge of me? The balance of appalled and impressed was miraculously even. How had Black not had me killed off by now?

“While I’m sure you and the Lady of the Lake have a colourful history,” Adjutant said, “we are all here under the banner of the Lady of Marchford.”

It was a sad day when the orc in a group was the closest thing you had to a diplomat. I yawned in an almost offensively fake manner to change where this was headed.

“Alas, I am but a feeble delicate young girl and travel has tired me,” I said. “Is the Courtyard far, Your Royal Highness?”

“Ah, I forget myself Lady Foundling,” the Prince said. “You are well known for your... frailty, after all. It was untoward of me to delay.”

There was enough sarcasm injected in that single word to poison a well. I was reluctantly impressed.

“All is forgiven,” I drily replied.

“If you and your retainers would follow me, I will lead you to the Courtyard,” the one-eyed fae said, his horse moving into a trot without prompting.

We trailed after him and I gestured for Archer to come closer. She leaned in.

“I thought the whole changing-seasons motif meant fae are reborn when their Court comes around again,” I said quietly. “Like a cheap cousin to reincarnation.”

“It does,” she agreed.

“Then he’s missing an eye even now because...”

She nodded.

“ Every time ?” I whispered.

“She likes the ring,” Archer shrugged.

Whoever had first said that Named became crazier the older they lived clearly had something of a point. It wasn’t long before we arrived at the Still Courtyard, though my guess was that it wasn’t because it was all that close. More that everything in Skade was close, if you were high up enough the fairy food chain. The Prince of Nightfall was royalty, if the title was any indication, but what exactly that meant I was unsure. Was he related to the king? I wasn’t sure whether fae could even have children if they didn’t have them with mortals. The Still Courtyard was a low-hanging square building with a front of ornate greenwood pillars and bare stone steps. Through the arched entrance I could see the courtyard it was named after, a pristine garden of untouched freshly-fallen snow. A dozen blue-attired servants were already kneeling outside when we arrived, none of them daring to look up. They didn’t even register in the prince’s eyes, as far as I could see.

“I hope your rest will be peaceful,” the raven-haired fae said.

Ah, implied threats thrown our way by someone who could kill me with relative ease. He was making this feel like home. The Prince cast a look at Archer, then moved on.

“I will see you all in Court on the morrow,” he added. “Until then, Lady of Marchford.”

“Looking forward to it, Your Royal Highness,” I replied with insincere enthusiasm.

The Prince of Nightfall rode away without glancing back, leaving us and the servants alone. They were still kneeling, so I cleared my throat.

“So,” I said. “About those rooms.”

They rose, and as I peered at them I saw they were... hesitant. Not afraid, I decided, but unsure of what they were supposed to do. They’re not used to having guests , I thought, or maybe just not mortal ones.

“I am the steward for this courtyard, Hallowed Ones,” a female fae said, bowing before us. “We are honoured by your presence and have arranged chambers for your leisure.”

I thought about asking for her name but held myself back. No, it wouldn’t do to get too involved: I might be stepping into a story by accident. I looked down at my armour, which was sadly full of holes where people had taken it upon themselves to stab me, then at Hakram’s similarly scarred set of plate.

“I could use a nap and a bath,” I said. “How about you lot?”

Apprentice leaned forward on his horse.

“Does this courtyard have a library?” he asked.

Well, good to see he still had his priorities on order. I swore on all the Hells, if Masego landed at the bottom of the sea the first thing he’d ask the mermans was if there were any books around.

“It does, Hallowed One,” the steward said. “Maeve can take you to it, if you so desire.”

Maeve was, from the look of it, a very pretty servant with a low neckline who was now smiling invitingly at Apprentice. Another servant looked at her, then Masego and his face turned thunderous. Well, I mused. If there was anyone among my companions I could feel pretty safe wouldn’t get involved in some deadly fae love triangle, it was Apprentice. Masego gingerly got down from his horse and immediately headed inside, gesturing for the servant to follow him.

“See you later,” I called out, then sighed. “Someone stable that horse. We’re only borrowing it.”

“I could do with a nap,” Hakram admitted. “Feels like I’ve been awake for days.”

Odds were decent we had been.

“You should also take a bath,” I encouraged.

The orc wrinkled his nose.

“I washed myself in the river when we were returning to Marchford,” he said.

“He smells like blood and sweat,” Archer commented. “It’s quite nice, actually.”

“See, Archer likes how you smell,” I told him.

He grunted in displeasure but silently conceded the point, dismounting as the Named in question turned to look at me.

“What was that supposed to mean?” she said.

“You live in the woods and I’ve only ever seen you wear one outfit,” I replied frankly.

“You could see me out of it, if you asked nicely,” she winked.

“We’ve been over this before,” I said, dismounting and handing off the reins to a servant.

“Sadly,” Archer sighed, doing the same.

We made our way inside, pausing as we passed the threshold. There was no sound. In a city there was always noise in the background, people talking or working or the hundreds of different that kept it all going. Even out on the field, you heard animals or wind or the gurgle of water. Here there was only silence so absolute the sound of my breath felt like someone screaming. The Still Courtyard, huh. That would take some getting used to. Ahead of us the footsteps of the servant leading us to our chambers were soundless, and the entire thing made me uncomfortable enough I felt the need to keep talking.

“So what’s with your ‘hitting on everything that moves’ habit,” I said. “You realize that even if you showed up naked in Masego’s bed he’d be more likely to ask how you got your scars than anything else, right?”

“Nah, I just like fucking with him,” she admitted with a grin. “He gets so confused and offended.”

“I don’t,” I said, “and you keep offering.”

“Twice isn’t exactly a lot,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Still, let me put it this way. How long do you think you’ll live, Squire?”

“I’m a villain,” I said. “So theoretically forever.”

“I didn’t ask for the Evil manifesto,” she said. “We’ve had villains in Refuge, I know the speeches. What do you think.”

I shrugged.

“If I make it through the next few years, maybe another twenty after that?” I guessed. “Depends on the opposition I end up getting.”

“We never have a guarantee we’ll make it through the first story,” Archer said quietly looking ahead. “Named have more of everything – power most of all, but also danger. I could die tomorrow or in ten years, but sooner or later I get an ending. And when I do, I want to have lived as much as I could.”

I could see where she was coming from, honestly. There were a lot of perks that came from being Named, even if I hadn’t partaken in most of them. Got that as much from my own sober inclinations than Black’s outright austere example, I figured. You only needed to crack open a history book to see a lot of Black Knights and Warlocks had sown their wild oats with enthusiasm. Hells, Masego’s father was married to an incubus . Dread Emperors and Empresses outright had a seraglio, even if Aisha kept assuring me sex wasn’t a large part of that. As for heroes, well, good-looking and righteous was a pretty common type for a lot of people on Calernia. If anything heroes were more likely to end up in bed with another hero than villains were with other villains. I was hardly chaste myself, but sleeping around had never appealed to me past my initial fumbling attempts to learn what I liked. What I had with Kilian mattered to me as more because I could trust her than because she was delightful in bed. Trust was a lot more precious to me than sex these days.

“You’re actually quite prudish for a Callowan,” Archer said. “Your people are a lot more salt-of-the-earth as a rule.”

“I wouldn’t use Hunter as a measure for Callowan mores,” I snorted. “That outfit was a little bare by anyone’s standards.”

“Those leather pants, though,” Archer sighed fondly. “He had an ass like you wouldn’t believe.”

I wasn’t exactly eager to discuss the merits of the buttocks of a man whose hand I had hacked off after beating him savagely, so I wisely decided to go into my rooms when the servant showed them to me. The ochre-skinned girl took the hint, following another servant to her own. My guide was the steward from earlier, and before I could even take a look around she knelt at my feet.

“Hallowed One,” she said, looking down. “An invitation awaited you when you arrived at the Courtyard. May I give it to you?”

I was genuinely tempted to say no and see what came of that, but kicking the hornets’ nest could wait until I’d had a bath.

“Sure,” I said. “It was sent specifically for me?”

“An invitation is always sent to the Courtyard, Hallowed One,” the steward said hesitantly. “It’s simply that usually we... do not receive guests, in this part of the season.”

And just like that today’s game of this does not feel like a coincidence in the slightest had found a winner. Eyes still on the ground, the fae offered me a scroll with a seal of frost on it. It would have looked natural if not for the emblem that could be glimpsed in the ice. What the emblem actually depicted I had a hard time understanding, the image blurring under my eyes and the words Duke of Violent Squalls coming to the front of my mind whatever I did. Fancy.

“There’s a bath adjoining the room?” I asked.

“Whatever you require will be found,” the steward said.

Close enough to a yes, I figured.

“That’ll be all, then,” I said.

Time for a bit of light reading, I supposed.

Chapter 10: Entrance

“No one ever won a war by being shy.”
– Queen Elizabeth Alban of Callow

The door didn’t make a sound as it closed. I was in a pretty little antechamber decorates in shades of wood, leading into a large bedroom. I eyed the featherbed with untoward intentions, noting it was twice as large as my own in Marchford. Silk covers and enough pillows for three people: this was exactly the kind of staggering decadence I’d been promised when I’d hitched my wagon to the Evil horse. Instead I had to deal with goblins who couldn’t keep their knives in their pants, half the Empire out for my blood and a demesne whose ledger ran so red it looked like it was bleeding. All of which I had to handle while sleeping in woollen sheets, to add insult to injury. There had to be someone I could lodge a complaint with. Hells, maybe that could be the first thing I ever prayed to the Gods Below about – how about some grapes and oiled up manservants, you stingy fucks?

With a snort I unbuckled my belt and sheath, tossed them on the covers. Normally getting out of my plate was a job best fit for two, but I’d been stabbed enough today it had gotten a great deal easier. I got rid of the greaves first, then the gauntlets and then fiddled with the breastplate and pauldrons for a while. By the end of it I had a lovely little pile of goblin steel full of murder holes on the ground, and with a sigh of pleasure I got rid of my armoured boots. The smell was ripe, so I tossed them as far away as I could. Being Named got me out of many of the little ugly details of life – didn’t get sick anymore, tired much slower and I hadn’t had my monthlies in about two years – but it did nothing for sweat. Or what the inside of a boot smelled like after a hard day of fighting.

The aketon I placed on the bed, leaving me in only a pair of heavy cloth trousers and able to breathe comfortably for the first time in what felt like forever. I passed a hand through my hair, tugging off the leather ring keeping it in a ponytail. I grimaced at the sensation of sweat long gone cold, then forced myself to get up instead of just dropping on the silk to lie there like some sort of moaning spineless mollusc. There was an archway into a side room to the left, so I picked up the invitation scroll and padded that way. Strange how even this far into a land of ice I barely felt the cold: I was fairly sure that wasn’t my Name at work. Who knew, maybe even fairies got gold. To my pleasure I found a low bath set in a quaint little square of stone, already drawn. The water was limpid, almost impossibly so.

It also did not seem to be warm.

I got closer and dipped a toe inside, flinching at the wintry temperature. Yet after the moment the cold started to feel refreshing. Purifying, almost. Huh. Well, it wasn’t like I had alternatives. I placed the scroll by the edge and got rid of my trousers, gritting my teeth before sliding into the bath all at once. The sudden cold was overwhelming for the first few heartbeats but when I got used to it the sensation from earlier returned. It was rather calming, really. I ducked under the surface to rinse my face and hair, shaking underneath before coming back up close to the side. Carefully I broke the seal on the scroll having shaking my hands off the worst of the droplets, watching the frost dissipate. Inside was an invitation, like the steward had stated. Not directed at me specifically, I noted, but at whoever was in the Still Courtyard.

Whoever that usually was, they were pretty far up the food chain. The language was both elaborate and ingratiatingly polite – and given that it was the Duke of Violent Squalls who’d sent this, that probably meant this was for royalty. Or not, I frowned, reading the lines again. No mention of royal title was made, but some of the phrasing implied the receiver was foreign . Regardless, it was an invitation to a ball held in the Duke’s palace in the city, after nightfall. A masquerade to boot, because evidently I’d stepped into a shady Proceran romance. At least Hakram would be at home, I thought with a grin. He had like three of those stashed under his bunk. The one I’d thumbed through involved a lot of corsets being manfully ripped off and longing sighs all around. It was a sign of my deep love for the orc that I hadn’t told Robber about my find.

I set the scroll aside and leaned against the side of the bath, closing my eyes with a sigh. The Winter King, I decided, would have more than one place to stash guests until he could receive them. It was not a coincidence we’d been sent to the one where there would be a vaguely addressed invitation waiting for us. We – I – had been meant to get this. More than that, the way I’d lied through my teeth to get us into Skade had either been expected or was something the quasi-god ruling this place intended to use. For his advantage, probably. That was usually the way it went. What in all the Hells the ruler of half of faekind would want with a Squire from the Dread Empire was where I was drawing a blank. The Winter Court had staked a claim on Marchford, sure, but I was beginning to grasp it was more complicated than that. For one, if a noble of the calibre of the Lady of Cracking Ice had stepped into my city there would be corpses from wall to wall.

Instead we’d gotten a few of their soldiers, a single group of riders and a bunch of aristocrats that must have been hilariously low down the pecking order for them to be taken out by mere legionaries. I didn’t mean to sell the Fifteenth short: there weren’t a lot of forces in the Empire or out of it I wouldn’t pit them against. They were highly skilled professional soldiers led by the most talented tactician I’d ever met, with the core of their troops blooded against devils and heavy cavalry. They were not, however, equipped to stand against a host of demigods who could warp the landscape with an idle thought. No, if the Winter King had been serious about getting a foothold in Marchford right now he’d have one. Actually taking the city, then, had not been his objective. If you know the means and the results, you can grasp your enemy’s intent, Black had taught me.

The attacks had been the means. The results were that I’d sallied out to fight the fae, by necessity stepping into Arcadia to shut down the door on their fingers. There was a distinct possibility, then, that getting me here – whether that was Arcadia in general or Skade I could only guess – had been the entire point of that affair. I took a moment to master my rage at the thought. I had no way of knowing how many casualties we’d taken on the second attack, but the number would not be small. My soldiers, killed just to get my attention. I breathed in and out until I could think beyond murdering my way through everyone responsible for that . All right. We’d been pushed towards Skade by the Winter King, and after getting there had been directed to the Still Courtyard. I was willing, for now, to assume that had been the plan. I’d been neatly guided to the city, every step thinking I was bluffing my way out.

At the Courtyard we’d found an invitation waiting for us, meant for someone of high rank but perhaps not of the Winter Court. I was pretty sure mortals didn’t usually come this deep into Arcadia unless they were as ragingly insane as the Lady of the Lake, so odds were this invitation was for another fae. That meant the Summer Court, and wasn’t that just another kettle of equally murderous fish? The Courts were meant to be at war, I knew, but somehow they were not. Summer was out there making someone regret their decisions and Winter was puttering about in my backyard – yet even with that difference from the norm, the stories were unfolding. Like they had in the marketplace, everyone going through the motions and always leading to the same outcome.

“He wants us to play someone else’s role,” I spoke into the empty room.

We’d been summoned to fill the shoes of some Summer fae, inserted into a story we didn’t know the plot of. Why? And that was the question, wasn’t it? Two people out there were playing shatranj on a board I didn’t know about, and once more I was a pawn. I wouldn’t be finding any answers in a bath, though, so it was time to go. I hoisted myself out, reaching for the cloth set aside on a bench to dry myself. I raised an eyebrow when I saw my trousers had disappeared, setting the cloth on my shoulder and heading for the bedroom. My armour was gone as well, I saw, as was everything but my sword belt and cape. Neatly placed on the bed was a dress of green brocade with accents of gold thread, along with an ornate fox mask of gold with green accents.

I tried on the dress as much out of curiosity as because I wouldn’t be going out naked in the corridors to ask for my plate back. It fit perfectly: sleeveless, high-collared and going down to my ankles, it was the single most comfortable thing I’d ever worn. A looking glass made of ice to the side told me the cut was hinting at my having cleavage in a way that was slightly less than honest. I could move easily in it, though bending over was tricky – still, no more than it would have been with armour on.

“Well, it wouldn’t do to show up at a masquerade in plate,” I murmured.

I buckled my belt around my hip, adjusting so my sword would be easy to draw. Looking for something to replace my boots I found exquisite crystal slippers. Not happening , I snorted. Those would be impossible to fight in. The pair of supple leather boots by them was more to my taste, as were the green silk thigh-high stockings inside them. Hadn’t worn anything this nice since I’d gone dancing with Kilian in Laure, I thought, and decided I was definitely stealing all of that when I bailed out of Arcadia. The cloak settled comfortably around my shoulder, Hakram’s handiwork of striped banners flourishing behind me as I turned to pick up the mask. I left the room to look for the others, blinking when I saw out the window that night had already fallen. How long had I been in that bath? Stupid question, Catherine. Like time means anything here: Could have been in there just long enough to dip your toe and it’d still be dark out.

Archer’s rooms had been just further down the hall so I checked there first, but the door was open and no one was in. I wandered a bit before running into a servant, who after the obligatory kneeling and abject submission guided to me to the library – I was apparently the last out and all the others had gone to Masego. Library, as I found out, was something of a misnomer. Though the walls were covered with stacks filled with volumes, the amount of plush chairs and tables made it clear this was meant to be a room where people were received. Small orbs of fairy flame floating like chandeliers lit up the place with a subtle blue tint. Apprentice was easily found: he was alone on his chair, an orb floating right above his head as he paged through a manuscript. Two piles of volumes flanked him and he paid no attention whatsoever to the others.

This was the first time I’d ever gotten a good look at Archer, so I paid close attention. My guess that she was stacked underneath the layers seemed to have been right on the nose: her grey vest and white shirt curved noticeably. Over it she wore a long woollen coat of darker grey, embroidered with gold patterns along the border that matched the exact shade of the gold on my dress. Long grey trousers ending in soft leather shoes, her neck covered by a carelessly arranged silk scarf matching the coat. I could see the handle of her longknives peeking out, but of the bow there was no trace. She had a thinner face than I would have thought, and a remarkably slender nose. Hazelnut eyes met mine, going up and down my dress with a grin. Yeah, I’d seen that one coming.

I almost laughed when I saw Hakram. He wore a dark velour doublet and matching trousers that made it clear exactly how broad his shoulders were, but the amusing part was the cape: black fur with pure white bordering, it made him look like Creation’s fanciest warlord. The axe – not his own, it had been broken earlier this one was too silvery to be his after repair – hanging off a leather ring at his belt lent him a slightly more martial appearance, as did the thick leather boots. The skeletal fingers that had seen him called Deadhand by his own peeked over the edge of his sleeve, unnaturally still.

“There were golden earrings and white war paint,” he said in an aggrieved tone. “ War paint , Cat. What is this, the War of Chains? No one’s used that in centuries.”

“I’m sure you’d make for a very costly hour at a brothel,” I reassured him.

He groaned and covered his eyes.

“I always did wonder if orcs have the same... machinery down there as we do,” Archer said with a shit-eating grin.

“We’re not having the ‘what do orc genitals look like’ talk,” Hakram replied firmly.

“I have a book, I’ll loan it to you,” I told Archer.

She raised a perfect eyebrow.

“Got curious,” I shrugged. “And he gets all irritable when asked about it.”

“Masego never changed,” Adjutant said, desperately changing the subject.

We all turned towards Apprentice, who was still reading.

“I think he’s under a silencing ward,” I said with a frown.

I took out the the invitation scroll and tossed it at the darks-skinned mage’s head. It hit him right in the glasses and he nearly jumped out of his skin, dropping the book and hastily dispersing the spell around him.

“Oh, is it time to leave yet?” he asked.

“My guess is that will be whenever we decide to go,” I said, “but we’ve got places to be. Go get ready.”

That got some attention from the others.

“The invitation?” Archer asked.

“We’re going to a masquerade,” I said. “To find out exactly who we’re supposed to be.”

“That seems counterproductive,” Masego pointed out. “We’d be wearing masks.”

I wasn’t sure if I was just terrible at the vague-but-meaningful announcements or Apprentice was that much of a pain, but clearly my technique needed work.

“Did you notice how we’re all wearing different clothes, Masego?” I said.

He paused, pushed up his spectacles.

“Yes,” he lied.

Archer coughed into her hand, failing to disguise her laughter.

“I’m guessing there’s a fancy outfit in your rooms,” I patiently told Apprentice. “Go put it on.”

“My robes are clean, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said. “There’s a self-cleaning enchantment on them.”

So that was why he never used the Fifteenth’s laundry chains. I’d always assumed he had some poor – literal – devil handling it.

“We also have masks,” I said, bringing up my own.

I glanced at the others, who didn’t seem to have their own, and Hakram gestured a table in the back. Theirs were there: a black obsidian bear for Adjutant, and a gold-and-grey falcon for Archer. Apprentice snapped his wrist, whispering a word in the mage tongue, and a thin blank carnival mask of ice formed over his face. It accommodated his spectacles perfectly, at least.

“Fine,” I said, “have it your way. But don’t come complaining to me if the fae make fun of you.”

“Do I have to talk with them?” he asked very seriously. “I’m not even close to finished with these.”

He rapped his knuckle atop the pile of books to his left to clarify. I bet the Lone Swordsman never had to deal with shit like this, I thought irritably. Killing him had been an act of justice just for that.

“You can bring one,” I said. “And only read when someone’s not verbally trying to entrap us into something lethal.”

He muttered under his breath. His fathers had spoiled him, I thought. I didn’t want to make assumptions here, but I was betting on the incubus for the worst of it. He was probably a soft touch when it came to discipline. The matron at the orphanage always spanked us if we made noise after lights out, now that was a firm hand. I took back the invitation and adjusted my cloak.

“All right, you sad excuse for a band of minions,” I said. “Gird your loins, we’re going on a magical adventure.”

Archer clapped, painfully slowly.

“I’m guessing the speeches aren’t why they put you in charge,” she said.

“Last time we went on an adventure I ripped out someone’s soul,” Apprentice said. “Do I get to keep it this time if we do it again?”

“Hakram?” I asked despairingly.

“Have you seen how tight those trousers are?” he grunted. “Doesn’t get more girded than that.”

If we all got killed, I better go last. I felt like I’d earned it.

—

There’d been a carriage waiting for us outside the Courtyard. Four white horses and a coachman who’d bowed to us as we claimed the seats inside. I’d gotten Hakram on my side, making the tactical decision to sacrifice Masego behind if Archer got grabby. I peered out the window, watching Skade in the light of ever-present fairy lights. I didn’t recognize any of the streets we went through from earlier, though that didn’t mean much. The night sky above us was just as confusing: now and then I got a glimpse of the stars they way they looked above Callow, but most of the time they were entirely foreign constellations. The way they kept changing between every look probably didn’t help. We were quiet on the way to the duke’s palace, only stirring when we began to hear music in the distance.

A beautiful voice was singing, though I couldn’t make out the words yet, accompanied by what seemed like a set of string instruments. The carriage eventually slowed and I waited patiently until servants came to open the doors for us. I stepped down onto a woven blue carpet leading to a set of stairs, moving aside to make room for the others as I stared at the Duke of Violent Squalls’ palace. Gods Below, it was made of wind . Walls and stairs and columns, sculpted out of every stirring wind that looked like a physical thing. Boreal lights shone like lamps and I could see more of them inside, in a grand hall. A servant attempted to take my cloak and I waved him off as the others caught up to me.

“Stable and self-sustaining,” Apprentice murmured. “Interesting. I don’t think it could be reproduced outside Arcadia, but the underlying principles...”

“Think about that after we’ve made it through the night,” Adjutant said.

Archer finished adjusting her falcon mask over her face and gallantly offered me her arm. I rolled my eyes and strode forward. Servants parted for us, bowing low, until we reached the summit of the steps. There a man with spectacles was holding an unrolled scroll in his arms, discreetly peering at us through the glass. An announcer. So much for the masks hiding identities. I slowed in front of him and he began to speak, then closed his mouth. He looked panicked for a few heartbeats before clearing his throat.

“Lady Catherine Foundling of Marchford, the Squire,” he announced.

I looked at him, the suddenly ripped the scroll out of his hands. I ignored his protests and scanned through the list of names until I found where he’d been looking at. Four names, the most important of which was the first: Princess Sulia of High Noon, envoy for the Summer Court. I gave him back his list.

“Fuck,” I said feelingly.

Archer was announced as ‘Lady Archer of Refuge, first pupil of the Darkest Night’, before catching up to me.

“What do you know about how wars start between Winter and Summer?” I asked her.

“They have several reasons, never use the same twice,” she replied.

Behind us Hakram was announced as ‘Lord Adjutant of the Fifteenth, the Deadhand’.

“Is one of them some princess called Sulia getting her ass killed at truce talks?” I asked.

The other Named frowned.

“That rings a bell,” she said. “But I think she gets captured. Trap?”

“Isn’t it always?” I grunted.

Masego joined us after his introduction of ‘Lord Apprentice of the Wasteland, Son of the Red Skies’. We all clustered at the threshold of the entrance hall for a moment.

“Problem?” Hakram said.

“We’ve taken the place of diplomatic envoys from Summer in a story,” I whispered.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Apprentice said. “I suppose it’s a good thing we have you along.”

I glanced at him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re very good at murdering our opposition,” he said, genuinely believing he was giving me a compliment.

I occasionally forgot Masego had been raised by villains. For him that probably counted as praise.

“You don’t know for sure I’m going to kill someone,” I said.

“Not gonna lie, I’ll be disappointed if we don’t,” Archer noted.

“I’ve done diplomacy before,” I continued.

“I don’t think extorting the High Lords counts,” Apprentice said.

“Or looting that angel,” Hakram added.

“I think bullied might be more accurate,” Masego said.

“If you guys keep this up I can guarantee you someone’s getting killed,” I said.

“That’s the spirit,” Apprentice said, patting my shoulders. “Now let’s move along, Catherine, we’re blocking the way. You really need to pay more attention to your surroundings.”

He strode into the hall before I could come up with a reply, still gaping. The others followed, Archer turning back only long enough to give me a mocking grin.

Chapter 11: Swerve

“Only if it’s ‘being executed’.”
– Dread Emperor Terribilis I, upon being asked for a last request by a hero

There were hundred of fae inside, each more glittering than the last. I’d seen the court of Praes and the opulence of its nobles, but this was a Court . That capitalized letter mattered. These immortal creatures had been at this game since the Empire was nothing but a madwoman’s dream and the difference showed. We’d gone through the duke’s antechamber and entered what must be the reception hall, keeping together as we did. Hakram being at my left had a reassuring weight, like having a shield. Our entrance had made a stir but we weren’t immediately approached: all we got was a myriad of discreet looks as fae murmured over their drinks. Archer took wine from a tray of silver cups, ignoring my disapproving look as she tasted the glittering liquid and hummed in approbation.

“Good stuff,” she said.

“Don’t get drunk,” I warned.

“You know the poison trick works for flushing out liquor, right?” she said.

“And if this was wine from Creation I would have kept my mouth shut,” I said. “It isn’t.”

“Eh,” she shrugged.

And on that bit of stunning eloquence we silently agreed to let the matter go for now. Given that I’d seen her guzzling down hard liquor instead of tea for breakfast last year, I was willing to bet on Archer being able to hold her drink better than most. Anyway, I had more pressing cats to skin than trying to make a sober woman out of this one. The reception hall had half a dozen interwoven stories of the same wind-material this entire place was made of, all centred around the ballroom floor in the middle of the ground level. Which was, for now, empty. Or almost – I’d finally found where the music came from. There were seven fae on a podium against the wall, most of them playing instrument but a single one singing the words I still couldn’t make out even this close. Magical shenanigans, I assumed. The melody was sad and I could hazard a good guess as to why: all of them were clapped in silvery chains and looked like they’d gone a few rounds with an Imperial interrogator. And not one of the nice ones.

“Those aren’t Winter fae,” Hakram said, watching the same people.

They were most definitely not, I grimly thought. Their clothes were in tones that matched the décor but they themselves stood out. There was a warmth to their being that all the other fae around them lacked, a softness to their silhouettes: to my senses they felt like candlelight while the guests felt like ice. Summer Court prisoners. I was beginning to glimpse a shape here. I was in the shoes of a Summer princess, likely part of a diplomatic mission of some sort. After coming to a masquerade thrown by a duke, I would then run into some of my fellow Summer fairies who’d been forced into servitude and cruelly beaten. Someone was trying to goad me – the role I was in – into doing something unwise. Interesting that the princess would be expected to save them, though. Summer wasn’t as prone to tormenting mortals in the stories as Winter, but they weren’t exactly paragons of kindness either.

“That’s where we’re expected to go,” I murmured. “So let’s go elsewhere. Any of you know anything about mingling with aristocrats?”

“Smile and pretend you’re listening,” Masego said absent-mindedly. “If there’s a lull in the conversation say how interesting with a mysterious look.”

“So that’s a no,” Archer said amusedly.

Well, she wasn’t wrong. I took the lead and went to the left. The others followed. Entering one of the side galleries seemed to have been an unspoken signal that we were fair game for conversation: all the guests who’d been keeping their distance began approaching. I wasn’t the only target, it swiftly became clear. Or even the first one. Some green-haired woman with eyes that looked like jewels struck up a conversation with Masego about magic and I gave it up as a lost cause the moment the words “partitioned stable matrix” were spoken. As far as temptations went that was one was mostly harmless, so I left him to it. Archer was approached by tall grinning dark-haired twins – of different genders, I thought, but it was hard to tell which was which – bearing bottles of liquor that looked harder than wine. They’re tailoring themselves to what we want , I thought.

“Lord Hakram, I believe?” an older fae coughed out. “You have the looks of an orc from the Howling Wolves, if I may be so bold.”

Adjutant raised an eyebrow.

“I am,” he gravelled.

“How nostalgic,” the noble smiled gently. “It has been ages since I’ve encountered one of your kind. I had the pleasure to visit the Antlered Field when the one called Kharsum became Warlord.”

The tall orc leaned forward unconsciously.

“You saw the election of the Unifier?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” the fae said. “Always a lively affair, orc statecraft. I’ve watched battlefields littered with fewer dead.”

I’d been wondering what take they would use with Hakram. Orc history made sense. His people had lost so much knowledge since the War of Chains and the occupation that followed. Every bit of lore from back then was worth more than gold to his people, another piece of stone to add to a mosaic that was still more bare than filled. He glanced at me and I nodded. Sticking together wasn’t making us any gains at the moment, we’d have to wait and see what the flow of the story was. I was rather curious what angle they’d assail me with, truth be told. Unless they could find me a practical way to turn the Imperial governorship system into a functioning nation-state, they didn’t have much to distract me with. The answer came in the form of the Baron of Blue Lights – one of the nobles who’d escorted me into the city – strolling casually in my direction. When we’d last met he’d been wary but interested. Now he looked at me with open hatred.

“Antagonist, are you?” I said with a smile before he could get a word in.

He blinked, face going entirely blank for a moment. Like his entire being had shut down. You lot don’t like it when I don’t speak my lines, do you? I’d found my first lever to pull. Wouldn’t get me through this mess, but it was something I could use.

“Do you enjoy the singing, my lady?” he said after a moment, defaulting back to sneering.

I’d seen Heiress pull better sneers than that, I thought with amusement. He wasn’t even silently finding the very concept of my existence distasteful. Second-rate performance.

“Not one much for music,” I said. “Also beating the performers seems in poor taste, but that’s just a personal preference.”

“Captives have no rights,” he said.

“I mean you guys haven’t signed any of the Calernian treaties about prisoner treatment, so I guess you’re factually correct,” I mused. “Not that the Empire has either, mind you. The whole blood sacrifice thing would be a breach of terms I imagine.”

The Baron seemed completely at a loss as to where to go from there.

“They will all be whipped if one misses a note,” he tried.

“That’s nice,” I said. “Does everyone take a turn, or is it just the one torturer? Never whipped anyone before so I don’t want to make a fool of myself in public.”

I wondered what it said about me that I was beginning to enjoy myself. Obviously there’d been an assumption here that on moral grounds I would object to the Summer fairies being chained up and tormented. Swing and a miss, that. Not only were those musicians essentially immortal creatures that would come around again next time Summer happened, but they were also not mine to protect. Now if it had been members of the Fifteenth or Callowans on that stage, he’d be choking on steel right now. My motivation to save fae from fae, though, was effectively nil. I’d been taught the hard way, after all, that if you tried to save everyone you only ended up getting more people killed. I wasn’t unfamiliar with hard choices and this... simply did not qualify. I wasn’t risking my life or the life of my friends for ultimately meaningless fairy schemes. Villain, Baron, not hero. I get to pick my fights.

I patted the Baron of Blue Lights on the shoulder and left him blank-faced behind me. I idly wondered whether my refusing to bite I had killed the trap entirely, or if I’d merely survived the first volley. Probably the second one: my luck was the stuff weeping despair was made of. And just to confirm that shining sliver of pessimism, lounging by a pillar I saw the Prince of Nightfall eyeing me wryly. I grimaced. This one wouldn’t be as easy to fuck with.

“Enjoying the masquerade, Lady of Marchford?” he said.

Predictably, the man’s mask was a raven. I got the less than reassuring feeling that it was watching me independently of the wearer’s eyes. I leaned against the railing by his side, watching the empty ballroom below.

“It’s been enlightening,” I replied. “Pretty obvious trap, for entities supposedly cunning made flesh.”

“A well-laid trap does not rely on surprise but on the opponent’s nature,” he said.

A servant with a plate approached us. There were two pipes on it, both already lit: one smelled sweet and musky, and the Prince grabbed it. Ground poppy, if I was not mistaken. The other had the distinct sharp tang of wakeleaf, a personal vice of mine.

“Is it poisoned?” I asked the dark-haired fae.

“If I ever decide I want your life,” the Prince said, “poison will play no part in your death.”

“That’s not a no,” I noted.

“It is not poisoned,” he sighed.

I took the pipe. Would be a shame to waste the stuff, especially when I could so rarely afford it these days. Ashur had raised all its prices on the merchandise imported by Praes after war blew up in the Free Cities, and the island was the only pace where it was grown. I inhaled with a little sigh of pleasure and blew out the grey smoke.

“Your King picked wrong when he baited me into coming here,” I said. “Whatever it is you’re after, you’re not going to get it.”

“That’s the beauty of it, Lady Foundling,” he smiled, face framed by a cloud of poppy. “What we want is what you want. Our victories are one and the same.”

So the Prince was in on whatever his boss was up to. Good to know. I wasn’t deluded enough to think my idle talk had been enough to trick the man into revealing that, so the implication was that the Prince believed it didn’t matter if I knew.

“Where’s Princess Sulia, right now?” I asked suddenly.

He chuckled.

“Setting fire to the south of your little kingdom,” he said. “Even for one of us, the Princess of High Noon has a beautifully simplistic view of things.”

I inhaled again, let the wakeleaf warm my blood and sharpen my wits. The idea of an entity with the same kind of power I could feel emanating from the Prince being loose in Callow was horrifying beyond words, but I could not flinch now. I might never get another occasion half as good to gather information.

“Now I get that you think you can mess with me ,” I said. “I’m just a wet-behind the ears Named with a single aspect.”

The Prince of Nightfall blew a ring of smoke, raising an eyebrow.

“While my role has little to do with intrigue, that is an exceedingly poor lie,” he said.

I kept my face calm. Could he really tell? Masego would know, but he also knew better than to say anything. I’d learned from the fights of the Liesse Rebellion that aspects were trump cards to be used sparingly and best kept hidden – the Lone Swordsman had known about Struggle before our second fight and used it against me, which he wouldn’t have been able to if I’d kept it quiet. I’d taken in the lesson and kept what I’d gotten in the aftermath of the Battle of Liesse close to my chest, the edge hidden until I could use it to crush Heiress.

“No idea what you’re talking about,” I lied. “Anyway, like I was saying, messing with me is one thing. Invading Imperial territory like the Courts have been doing, though? That’s another. There’s bigger fish in that sea, and you’re pissing them off.”

“Your Calamities are away,” he said. “And even if they were not, their finely crafted defences were not meant for us.”

Two things I could take from that, I thought. Either they’d struck Callow now because the Empire’s most dangerous villains were all abroad save for the Empress – who had to stay in Ater – and they expected whatever they were after to be achieved before the Calamities came back. That or they genuinely believed they could take on Praes on its traditional battlefield and win. Of that, I wasn’t convinced. When push came to shove there weren’t a lot of drastic measures the Dread Empire was above taking to get a win. While in Arcadia the Legions would get wrecked, but on Creation the fae were weaker. And if there was a Calernian nation with the magical know-how to make real trouble for the Courts, it was definitely Praes – or the Kingdom of the Dead, I supposed, but you’d have to be a special kind of stupid to take a crack at that. Entire Crusades had been annihilated without even reaching Keter.

“It’s still a bad fight to pick,” I said.

Another servant with a plate of pipes came by and the Prince traded his for a fresh one. I glanced at the second hit of wakeleaf.

“Is it poisoned?” I asked again.

“No pipe you will be offered tonight will be poisoned,” the dark-haired fae said irritably.

I took the second one. There was a still a bit left at the bottom of my current pipe and the waste broke my heart, but I couldn’t know if I’d get another offer.

“The first time I ever stepped into Creation,” the Prince of Nightfall told me, pulling at his pipe, “I found it a brutish, ugly thing. A pale imitation of Arcadia painted with lesser pigments. While my fellows rejoiced across the fresh playground, I began to withdraw.”

The longer he spoke, the colder I felt. Not the sharp bite of winter, I decided, but more like the cool air that spread after sundown. I tugged my cloak closer around my dress.

“I paused after coming across a fox,” he continued with a smile. “It had fallen into a trap laid by one of your ancestors, you see. A snare that caught its foot. It knew it would die, if it remained there.”

I frowned.

“It chewed off its foot,” I guessed. “The smart ones do that sometimes.”

“Yes,” the Prince of Nightfall agreed. “And it escaped. An insignificant animal, yet it could do something that would never have occurred to any of us.”

Oh Gods did I not like the sound of that.

“You’re chewing off your foot right now,” I said.

The dark-haired fae blew out a thick stream of smoke ahead of him. He leaned forward suddenly, and right in front of my face clacked his teeth mockingly.

“Our teeth are a great deal sharper than a fox’s, Lady of Marchford,” he said. “Beware you don’t get chewed.”

Dropping his pipe onto a servant-held plate that hadn’t been there a moment earlier, the Prince of Nightfall sauntered off. I let out a long breath and stilled the trembling in my hands. I took another pull of wakeleaf and closed my eyes. Hello fear, my old friend. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I spewed out the smoke and opened my eyes to find another fae leaning by my side. Tall, like most of them, and so pale he might as well have been made of snow. He was closer than was strictly proper and his hare mask did not hide the affection in his eyes. I’d seen the first of my antagonists, I thought. Looked like it was time to meet an ally.

“My lady, this is a trap,” he murmured softly.

“No kidding,” I said.

“The Duke of Violent Squalls means to entrap you,” he said. “Soon he’ll make a scene to trick you into a wager. You must not rise to his provocations.”

I sighed.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

His face went blank. I was supposed to know him, then. Which meant the Princess of High Noon had friends in Winter. I glanced at how close he was standing to me. Maybe more than a friend, even. Wasn’t that the stirrings of a proper tragedy? Woe was them, love from across opposite sides. Gods Below, even William had known better than that.

“I am Prospin, the Count of the Last Gasp,” he said stiffly. “As you well know.”

“Tell me about this wager, Prospin,” I said.

“My lady, you can’t ,” he implored, reaching for my hands. “It would destroy me to lose you.”

Oh yeah definitely more than a friend. I took away my hands before he could touch them.

“I’m sure you’ll survive,” I replied drily. “Now tell me about the godsdamned wager.”

“How you toy with my affections,” he lamented.

The Princess of High Noon liked them clingy, apparently. Took all kinds.

“In exchange for the freedom of the musicians, the Duke will ask that you wager your voluntary captivity,” he said.

“How’s the wager settled?” I asked.

“Duels, for you are a creature of war,” Prospin said. “He has three champions ready.”

Creature of war, huh. I guess we did have that in common, the princess and I.

“Terms of the duel?” I prompted.

“Death or surrender,” the Count whispered.

I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. I could work with that.

“My lady, they are ready for you,” he said. “I beg of you, do not give them what they want.”

And there was the truth, wasn’t there? They’d been ready for me since the beginning. Every move I’d made since the first attack on Marchford had gotten me deeper into their plan. It was an infuriating feeling, and I got quite enough of that from Black already. Except my teacher wasn’t here: there was no safety net under me, no monster looking over my shoulder and smiling at my enemy. If I fell here I’d break more than bones. The thought only refreshed the fear from earlier and that was unacceptable. I would not be cowed. I would not be made their puppet in this eldritch game they were playing. They wanted to push me around? Fine. Now it was my turn, and I was going to push back . I’d been drawn into their tempo for too long, and that was how you lost fights. At best I’d manage to crawl away to survive, and that just wasn’t enough. Not when I’d have dead soldiers to buried when I returned. They were owed better. If I couldn’t solve a problem, well, I could always make it their problem.

“Which one is the Duke of Violent Squalls?” I asked.

“My lady-“ the Count began, but I had no patience for it.

“Prospin,” I said. “You can either tell me, or you can go over this railing before I ask someone else.”

The fae’s face went blank.

“He’s the man by the ballroom floor,” he said after a moment. “At the centre of the cluster of nobles.”

I glanced down and saw the group he was talking about. The Duke wore a grey doublet with cuffs of wind, same as his palace, and his mask was shaped like a wolf. His cronies were tittering at something he said.

“Thank you,” I told the Count absent-mindedly.

I walked away without bothering with any further talk. On my way down I passed by another face I recognized, the Lady of Cracking Ice, and she offered me a nod. I looked at the beautiful white gloves she was wearing and smiled a feral smile as I came closer. By her side was a distinguished-looking man in armour, the sight of whom had me adjusting my thought.

“I need to borrow something for a moment,” I told the man, reaching for his gauntlet.

I got it off his hand before he could properly react – it was largely ornamental, held there only by clasps – and got moving before he could protest, throwing a ‘thanks’ over my shoulder. The Duke of Violent Squalls and his cronies hadn’t moved, the man in question with his back turned to me as he replied to another noble’s question. I was maybe three feet away from him and he couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. Well, that was just asking for it.

I judged the gauntlet’s weight, then tossed the chunk of metal as hard as I could into the back of the duke’s head.

It hit with a beautiful thunk. The fae yelped and I could feel the gaze of every single person at the masquerade going to us as he turned to face me with rage in his eyes.

“Evening,” I said, puffing at the pipe. “Don’t think we’ve been introduced. My name is Catherine Foundling, and I hear you want to throw down. Let’s get this going, shall we?”

I blew the acrid smoke in his face for that extra touch and decided, why the Hells not?

“Bitch,” I added.

The entire hall was silent as a grave, save for the sound of Archer’s belly laugh.

Chapter 12: Double Down

“It admittedly took me a few years to make my peace with the fact that Lady Foundling’s take on diplomacy is essentially to bring a bottle of cheap wine and a sword to the table, then remind the interlocutor that while the wine might be awful it is still arguably better than being stabbed.”
-Extract from the personal memoirs of Lady Aisha Bishara

“You insignificant insect ,” the Duke of Violent Squalls barked.

I smiled pleasantly. So it could work. The Duke was addressing me directly instead of the role of the Princess of High Noon, which I needed him to do badly if my plan was going to succeed. Well, plan might have been a little too ambitious of a word. I was following my instincts, which while usually leading me to breaking someone’s bones also tended to get me out of corners in more or less one piece. I could not win this if I played out their story, I knew. I would be quite literally fated to lose. Time to drive the cart off the road. Chaos had always been where I thrived, and no people were so ill-equipped to deal with it as the fae.

“That hurt my feelings, it did,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “We going stand here trading insults all night, or we going to talk terms?”

“You give me insult in my own home and speak of terms?” the Duke hissed. “I should destroy you where you stand.”

I could feel wind starting up in the ballroom, the hem of my cloak stirring with it. There were probably Names that gave you a precise read on how much power an opponent could throw around, but sadly Squire wasn’t one of them. All I got was that he was a glacier compared to the icicle of the average fae, not that far beneath the Prince of Nightfall himself. Joy. That was, I mused, the first hint that Duke or not he probably had a large role in the story of the Winter Court. Was the Winter King trying to use me as a catspaw to get rid of an enemy he wasn’t allowed to touch? Unlikely, I finally decided. While I was supposed to get into conflict with this one, the dispute was also supposed to be resolved by champions. My hacking his head off wasn’t supposed to be in the cards.

“You won’t, though,” I said. “Because I’m a guest and the lot of you are all about rules. That’s a fairly big one, as I understand it.”

“You will not be my guest forever,” the Duke of Violent Squalls said coldly.

The wind his cuffs were made of turned furious without his visibly doing anything to cause it. I’d need to have a talk with Masego about how having the aristocratic title to something something worked, practically speaking. Might be a way to sever that. Without his magic the fae was just a man in fancy clothes, and I wasn’t above stabbing those when it got me what I wanted.

“Somehow I doubt that getting into a pitched battle in the streets of Skade is going to go over too well with your king,” I said. “I’m his guest too, remember?”

“If you think that makes you untouchable, you are severely mistaken,” the fae said.

“You’ll still get a slap on the wrist,” I smiled. “And I get the feeling that a king’s slap around here tends to... leave marks.”

Around all us, all the faces of the fae I could see were blank. They just stood there in utter silence, not so much as breathing as they watched it all unfold. It was like standing in a hall full of statues.

“I’m a kind soul, though,” I lied. “So I’m offering you a way to seek redress that dodges the issue.”

“A formal duel,” the Duke said, pale lips stretching to reveal teeth of ivory. “Yes, that would be acceptable. Crushing you under my heel will be most satisfying.”

And now I have you , I thought. No champions, just the immortal monster and me in a ring. With a little prodding he’d eagerly left behind the story of the Princess of High Noon becoming captive and walked into entirely uncharted territory. I did not pick that word by mistake: there was no map we were following, here. No story. Which meant, I figured, that I could insert my own. How do you beat someone you can’t beat? I mused, remembering rocky fields in a land that right now felt so very far away. More innocent days, those, when I’d been playing at war instead of waging it . But I had not forgotten the most important lesson I’d learned from the War College: don’t win according to the rules, win despite them.

“So all that’s left is settling on the wager,” I said.

The Duke’s lips stretched even further into an ugly rictus.

“If you lose, you will cede me the soul of everyone under your command,” he said.

“I’m not under her command, for the record,” Archer called out from an upper level.

I gestured rudely in her general direction without bothering to turn.

“Sure,” I agreed. “What I want is-“

“Yes, yes,” the Duke said, waving his hand dismissively. “The Summer fae can have their freedom.”

“Those poor bastards aren’t my problem in the slightest,” I said with a raised eyebrow.

I tapped my third finger, eyeing his own hand. The piece of jewellery responsible for the seal on the invitation I’d received could be glimpsed there, a ring of white wood set with a flat opal positively reeking of magic.

“Your signet ring,” I said. “I want it. I also want to have always had it.”

“That is a heavy price for you to demand,” the Duke sneered.

“You just asked me for a few thousand souls, jackass,” I replied flatly. “Don’t whine about trinkets, it’s unseemly.”

“Your death,” he said, “will not be quick.”

“I’m hearing a yes,” I said. “Anybody else heard a yes?”

“I agree to the terms of this wager,” the Duke spoke through gritted teeth. “Since you are so eager to die, let us proceed. Will the ballroom suffice?”

I grinned and wagged my finger.

“I spent all day travelling,” I said. “A delicate flower such as myself needs rest before strenuous exercise. You wouldn’t be trying to cheat , would you?”

I gasped in mock-surprise.

“I thought better of you, Duke,” I said solemnly.

“Dawn, then, on the Fields of Wend,” the fae replied with a sneer. “My honour will not suffer for a longer delay.”

“You should put it out of its misery, if it’s suffering that much,” I replied, because I had never learned to quit while I was ahead. “Still, I agree to your terms.”

I mentally added to my list the need to find out exactly what those Fields were. Sounded like it might be important.

“A spot of entertainment before Court,” the Duke of Violent Squalls smiled. “How refreshing.”

I would have cast aspersions on a place that counted blood sport as entertainment, but considering I’d made more coin in Laure from the Pit than the Rat’s Nest a saying about stones and glass houses came to mind. Although, frankly, someone who could afford to live in a house made of glass could probably do with a few rocks thrown at them. If anyone got that rich there were bound to be a lot of peasants starving in the background. I had nothing more to gain from continuing the conversation, so I suppressed my urge to get the last word and strolled away. My pipe had gone out, I noticed with a sigh. Typical. Before I made it more than a few feet away all the fae around us started moving again, like a spell had suddenly been lifted. Whispers flared up immediately, but I wasn’t intending to stick around and leanr what they were. I found Hakram hastily making his way down the stairs without needing to look for long, dragging a protesting Masego along as Archer watched on in amusement.

“Well,” Archer said. “That certainly livened up the party.”

“Glad I could be of help,” I replied sardonically.

“You were had,” Adjutant gravelled.

I raised an eyebrow. Masego let out a little noise of understanding.

“Everyone under your command,” Apprentice said. “Given your position on the Ruling Council of Callow, that could be argued to apply to every soul in the former kingdom as well as the Fifteenth. Oh dear.”

I blinked. Shit . Hadn’t thought of that. I’d been more or less at the head of Callow for a year now, but it had never quite sunk in that I wielded the bastard cousin of a queen’s authority. I still thought of myself as Catherine Foundling, the Squire, not anything more.

“He couldn’t really collect on that, could he?” I said.

“With that large of a debt owed him, the Duke could likely be able to come into Creation in the fullness of his power,” Apprentice said. “After that, I have no real notion. It would be unprecedented as far as I know.”

“The Calamities would smoke him before it got to that,” I frowned. “And Ranger can take the Prince of Nightfall even in Arcadia, she could handle him.”

“I’m not sure she would,” Archer said. “Depends on her mood at the time. A duke might not be enough of a challenge for her to bother.”

“She’d just let a few million people get their souls stolen?” I said, appalled.

“You’re the one who just wagered them,” Archer pointed out. “The Lady of the Lake is beholden to no one, Foundling. The suggestion that she is would go... poorly.”

Huh. I’d always like the stories about Ranger best when I was a kid, but that put them in a different perspective. I passed a hand through my hair.

“I’m not going to lose, regardless,” I said. “So it doesn’t matter.”

“You have a plan,” Adjutant said.

“Something like that,” I agreed. “Need some time to set it in stone, hence why I delayed. We need to get back to the Still Courtyard.”

“Already?” Archer complained.

“Actually, I have an assignment for you that doesn’t involve,” I said.

“Sounds serious,” she said.

“Try to find out anything you can about the Duke of Violent Squalls, while you’re drinking yourself to death,” I told her. “And I do mean anything you can. Even small details could be useful.”

“That seems like something that should have been done before you threw a gauntlet at him,” Archer noted. “Though, praise where it’s due, funniest thing that happened all night. And I include Adjutant’s clothes in this.”

“Glad to have you on this team,” I said with a sigh. “Masego, on our way out I need you to have a good look at the Duke. Pay close attention to what he looks like.”

“I’ve seen him in my spectacles,” Apprentice said. “Anything more is unnecessary.”

So those could do more than just see sorcery. That was useful to know.

“Let’s go,” I said, giving the fae a last glance. “We’re wasting daylight – and don’t you godsdamned dare to correct me, Masego, it’s an idiom.”

He scowled all the way back to the carriage.

—

The moment a ward came down to prevent fae from eavesdropping on what would be said inside the library, I turned to my two companions with a winning smile.

“All right, gentlemen, I have work for you,” I said.

Apprentice took off his spectacles, laid them on the table.

“I imagine my task has something to do with why you asked me to look at the Duke,” he said.

He murmured a few incantations and tapped a finger against the left rim. A wispy image of the the Duke of Violent Squalls formed above the spectacles. With a flick of the wrist, he made it rotate. I leaned forward to have a closer look: I’d stood in front of that very fae, and I couldn’t recall that much detail about the clothes he’d worn. I let out a low whistle.

“That’s something,” I said. “How good are you with illusions?”

“Not my field of specialty, but anything possible with Low Arcana I can achieve,” Masego replied casually, as if he hadn’t just stated he could match the work of over nine tenths of the mages in Calernia in a fairly difficult branch of sorcery.

“I need you to make me a glamour,” I said. “One I can wear.”

“Now does not seem the right time for you to develop a sense of vanity,” Apprentice said.

“I need you to make me look like I’m related to him,” I continued, ignoring the aside.

He hummed.

“I’ll need an anchor to inscribe the Working on,” he said. “Using anything of Arcadia will make it particularly effective, which should improve the quality of the result.”

“Get one of the servants to find you something, then,” I said. “A necklace, if possible, one I could wear under my clothes.”

He nodded absent-mindedly, clearly already thinking of the logistics of what I’d asked him to do. Masego with a puzzle would not pause to ask me why I wanted to look like I was related to the fae I was going to kill, but I could feel Hakram’s eyes on me even as Apprentice rose to his feet and left both the room and the ward behind him.

“The signet ring, that you will ‘always have had’,” he said. “Looking as if you were a daughter of his blood. These are not coincidences.”

“Which leads me to what I want from you. I need you to Find me a story about patricide in one of these books,” I said, gesturing at the stacks around us.

Hakram cocked his head to the side.

“Daughter who never knew her parents kills a duke, only then realizing that the signet ring on her hand matches his livery,” the orc said. “Fate led her to kill her father. A tragedy, but one that sees the daughter a duchess at the end in a hollow victory.”

Ah, Hakram. If I had a hundred people with minds as sharp as his Callow would run itself.

“That’s the idea,” I agreed softly.

“The part I’m missing is why you would want to be a Duchess of Winter,” he said.

“We’ve gotten in a place where think that what we want out of Skade is to leave it alive,” I said, plopping my elbows on the table. “Arcandia, it makes it seem like everything outside is distant. But we entered it for a reason.”

“To shut down Winter’s invasion of Marchford,” Adjutant said.

“Winter can’t invade Marchford if Marchford is part of Winter,” I murmured.

“That’s...” the orc began. “Cat, there’s risks. And there will be consequences. As long as you rule the city, it will have ties to a Court that places in Creation usually don’t . We have no idea what that could mean.”

“We have a fucking portal spewing blizzard where my marketplace should be, Hakram,” I replied tiredly. “That ship has sailed. The fae are there and they’re not going anywhere. If I’m one of their aristocrats, at least I get to make rules in my demesne.”

“The Empress will have some things to say about one of her cities also answering to the King of Winter,” he gravelled.

“She won’t like it,” I agreed. “But I think she’d like a slugging match with Winter even less. Praes can’t afford that right now, not with Procer lurking at the gate. She’s a practical woman, when it comes down to it. You’ve seen the kind of heavyweights Winter can deploy, if they need to. You really think the Legions can handle that?”

“The Legions of Terror can kill anything in Creation or out of it,” Hakram replied without missing a beat.

The ironclad certainty in that voice was a thing to behold. That was something I was only beginning to understand about orcs. I’d once thought that they just separated everything into ally or enemy and that it leant them a certain clarity, but it ran deeper than that. Orcs were slower to come to a belief than humans, but when they did that belief would not waver. Hakram had decided I was worth following, and that certainty had carried him all the way into a Name. Never mind that no orc had held in in over a millennium. Juniper also believed that the Legions of Terror could take on any opponent, and so she’d crushed mercenaries and devils alike with mere cunning and ruthlessness, playing them every step of the way. They were both exceptional individuals, but I could see a trace of what drove them in all the orcs I knew. I thought of what the Clans would have been like, at the height of their power, and almost shivered. A hundred thousand orcs, knowing deep in their bones that their Warlord could not be beaten. No wonder the Soninke had been terrified of them for centuries, that the Deoraithe had raised a giant wall spanning leagues just to keep them out.

“But casualty rates would be high, until we found the proper method,” Adjutant finally conceded.

“Hold on to that thought, Hakram,” I said. “When we get back home, I’m pretty sure we’ll need to clear out the host of Summer.”

“That’ll be a fight to remember, when we’re old and grey,” Adjutant replied, baring his fangs.

In that moment he reminded me acutely of Nauk, and I felt a pang. I missed them, I realized. My little band of misfits. Juniper and Aisha, Ratface and Pickler – and Kilian, most of all. Hells, I missed Black, the man that was so very carefully not-my-father, whose approval I craved as much as I feared it. The sermons at the House of Light had never said Evil would feel like this. Like a family, the only one I’d ever had. Maybe that was how the Gods Below got you, I thought. They made you love people who could do horrible things just enough that you’d forgive them for it.

“Let’s make sure we live that long first,” I finally said. “The Duke is going to plaster me all over the floor if we don’t cheat. Find me my story, Adjutant.”

“And then?” the orc asked.

“And then,” I smiled, “we’re going to bullshit so hard it becomes a prophecy.”

Warden II

“There’s only a thousand of them, I don’t care if they’re on a hill. This will be over by midday, Black Knight, mark my words.”
– Dread Empress Sulphurous, the Technically Correct

As midnight neared, two women on opposite sides of the same continent found themselves looking up at the sky at the same time by Fate or coincidence.

Dread Empress Malicia, First of Her Name, tugged her modest cotton nightgown closer together and watched the crescent moon from her rooms above the clouds, near the summit of the Tower. Soninke called it Sorcerous’ Grin, for the eldritch rituals the Emperor had concocted in its light had not been seen since the days of the Miezans. Some said a sliver of the man was still up there, scheming his escape from death.

Cordelia Hasenbach, claimant to the throne of Procer, had been looking through one of the few windows in Rhenia’s main hall for hours. She’d seen the moon rise, and thought it fitting. Lycaonese soldiers called it the Ratbane: the crescent in the sky heralded the beginning of the fight to crush the ratling warbands that crossed the northern rivers every month. There would be blood, soon. The fate of Procer demanded it.

Neither of them would find sleep that night. Malicia quietly poured herself a cup of truly terrible wine, the taste of it bittersweet. Cordelia stirred the embers in the fireplace with an iron poker and eyed the dancing red motes, her mind faraway.

In Aisne, the game began.

—

This would haunt her until the day she died, Therese knew. The foulness of what she had to do would be a lash on her back for the rest of her life. But what choice did she have? They had her wife. They had her children . The Lycaonese woman crept softly to Klaus Papenheim’s tent, where a single candle still burned. Twenty years, she’d fought for the prince. She’d followed him unflinchingly when he’d charged two hundred cataphracts into the meat of a ratling army of thousands, backwhen the Longtooth Lord had tried to breach the walls of Hannoven. She’d pulled him out of the mouth of an Ancient One when the tower-sized monstrous rat had been about to bite clean through his plate, the year after. She’d gone through a hundred battles and skirmishes at his side, fighting for a duty no one south of Neustria would ever understand.

And now she was going to murder him her prince in cold blood. The tent’s flap parted silently under her hand and she reached for her knife with a knot in her throat, the knowledge of what she was about to do like ashes in her mouth. There was a single lit candle at the table, Therese saw with a blink of surprise, but no sign of Prince Klaus himself. Not at the table, and not in his bed. The first stroke of the sword took her in the back of the knee and she fell with a grunt of pain. Looking up she saw two old comrades, soldiers she’d bled with, looking down at her with grief. One kicked the knife out of her hands and she did not attempt to get up.

“I’m sorry, Therese,” one said.

“So am I,” she said, and closed her eyes.

She had failed. Would they kill her family anyway? Maybe not, if she died for this. She heard the blade come down, and she almost smiled. The Enemy had worked through her but found House Hasenbach ready for them. There was satisfaction in that.

“And Yet We Stand,” she whispered, a heartbeat before the sword took her life.

—

He would not be remembered as a hero, Louis knew. By taking one life tonight he would save tens of thousands tomorrow, but he would win no praise for it. His name would be a byword for treachery for decades, the servant who had turned on his mistress at the behest of her enemy. He knew this, but still he carried the dagger under his clothes. He had no wife, no children, but he did have a sister. Barely more than a child, the sweetest little girl. And he’d known, when the First Prince’s man had come to him, what kind of Procer he wanted her to grow up in. Not one where anyone old enough to bear a weapon was handed a pike and sent to the grinder. Not one where armies roamed the land, burning everything as they passed while their rulers spent lives they should be guarding like coppers. He could make a better world, and he would. Not matter the cost.

Princess Constance of Aisne would be deep in slumber: the wine she’d indulged in would make sure she did not stir. Louis slipped in through the servant entrance and stepped quietly into his ruler’s chambers. The tall glass doors leading to the balcony were open, pale drapes fluttering in the wind as the moon’s light coated everything in a soft glow. The princess’ body was wrapped in her covers, her lover of the month pressed close. Both still asleep. Taking out the knife, Louis let out a soft breath. He could do this. He had to. He was already nervous and froze when he glimpsed two silhouettes from the corner of his eye, though he relaxed when they did not move. They were... two other servants. Dead, their throats slit and blood dripping onto their clothes. One corpse’s hands had been angled to cover his eyes, the other’s her eyes. What?

The last thing Louis ever felt was a blade opening his throat in perfect silence.

—

Jacques was set for life, after this. A single night’s work and he would live like a prince for the rest of his days. He supposed what he’d been told to do was treason, but what the fuck did he care? Treason was for crowned heads to debate. Fantassins like him were just meant to die obediently while the owners of Procer traded a few acres of land still covered in blood, keeping it for maybe a decade. Then the call came again, sons dying for the exact same godsdamned acres their fathers had: no one won at this game save for the princes, and he was fucking sick of it. He’d been offered a way out, a real future, and he was going to take it. They weren’t asking anything he wasn’t glad to do, anyway. The Prince of Brus might be suckling at the Hasenbach tit, nowadays, but some of Jacques’ friends had died keeping the savages out of their land. He had not forgotten that, unlike their cockless wonder of a prince.

A few free drinks had been enough for him to learn when the patrols would go by, and any idiot could get his hands on a torch. The Lycaonese restricted use of fire on campaign, but their writ ran no further than their own camps. The presumptuous bastards were outnumbered by Alamans already, and after tomorrow the gap would widen further. Good riddance. Let them crawl back to their barren wasteland of a home and resume mating with ratlings. The torch in his hand was dripping oil, so it had been a good notion to wrap his hand with a cloth first. The fantassin didn’t bother to try to break padlock on the granary, instead taking a step back and pressing his torch against the wooden wall until it caught fire. He did the same on the three others before tossing away his torch and making his exit. Screams of alarm spread eventually, but far too late. The grain would burn. Let the fucking Lycaonese dine on the ashes.

Jacques whistled as he returned to his tent, already thinking of the nice little shop he was going to open in Brus when all this mess settled down.

—

Annette’s hands were shaking. She hated doing this, she really did. The horses hadn’t done anything to anyone. They were innocent, and no matter what the House of Light said she wasn’t convinced they didn’t have souls. They were such wonderful creatures, so gentle and affectionate if you had a way with them. Annette did, as her father before her, though unlike him she’d not become the stablemaster for the Princess of Aequitan. The others respected her know how, though. She was the one they went to, when one of the horses got sick and no one knew why. Even mages listened when she spoke. They’d be waking her up before dawn, she thought, to ask her to treat the very wrong she was about to commit. If only there was another way! But there wasn’t, and she must. For love .

She still couldn’t believe a man like Antoine had fallen for her. He was a servant too, of course, but part of the household of the Prince of Cantal. Not a muckabout like her. You could see it just by the way he talked, the way he dressed so cleanly and wore his elegantly styled beard. They’d been together for two months now, and after the war they would get married. He’d promised, and he wouldn’t have gotten her those white roses if he didn’t mean it. But now some wicked person was threatening his life unless he did an equally wicked thing, and doing it so unreasonably . There was no way Antoine could have gotten to the Princess of Aequitan’s horses, her guards beat anyone who even got close. But Annette could.

Her shaking hands poured the exact number of drops she was supposed to into the trough before moving on to the next one, the translucent liquid disappearing without a trace in the water.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the horses. “But they’ll kill him if I don’t.”

—

Lucien Hauteville, chief cook for the army of the Princess of Segovia, was not in fact called this at all. He’d been born Jacob of Satus, though he’d left both the name and the faint Praesi accent behind when he’d joined the Eyes of the Empire. He wasn’t technically one of those anymore, having long ago graduated from skulking in taverns with a compromising tattoo on his arm while the real agents did the work. Having survived his infiltration of a resistance group in Denier, he’d been raised from the ranks at the order of Webweaver herself and sent to Procer. That had been decades ago, when the Conquest was still fresh. He’d dug deep roots in Segovia since, married and become a respectable member of the Princess’ household. And never had he ceased sliding a monthly detailed report between two loose stones outside the palace for another agent to pick up.

One did not cross the likes of the Lady Scribe, no matter how comfortable abroad one became. Unlike the Carrion Lord, the Webweaver would not crucify you: you’d just suddenly... disappear, along with everyone you ever cared about. Besides, if he was careful he could maintain his cover and return to Segovia after this. It’d been a while since he’d carved up anyone, though he’d once had a talent for it, so it was for the best that the task he’d been given was slightly more indirect. Princess Luisa’s highest-ranked commanders had a habit of unofficially gathering for drinks and wakeleaf on pleasant evenings, and had not broken the pattern even on this campaign. That was the kind of target of opportunity an Eye would never outgrow sinking their teeth into.

Jacob silently barred the door of peasant house the officers had commandeered, smiling at the sound of raucous laughter coming from inside. He splashed oil over the wood, then selected another five places around the house to help the fire get started. Humming under his breath, he struck a pinewood match and set the first point ablaze. They didn’t notice until he was getting started on the fourth – too drunk, he thought – and by then they were as good as dead. Ignoring the panicked screaming and the desperate attempts to hack through the door, Jacob finished his work and melted into the darkness. The smell of cooking flesh on the wind brought fond memories, but also ideas. Pork for supper tomorrow, perhaps? He’d recently learned to make Levantine sauce, with the little peppers. He’d ask Princess Luisa.

—

When dawn came, two women on opposite sides of the same continent broke their fast with parchment laid out in front of them. Reports, one set received through messenger pigeons and the other through an elaborate scrying relay.

Dread Empress Malicia allowed herself a smile, as she was alone in the dining room. Princess Constance of Aisne was still alive and the coalition held. A victory, mitigated only by the horses of the Princess of Aequitan’s entire cataphract contingent being poisoned. Assassinating Klaus Papenheim would have been a coup, but she had never thought the attempt likely to succeed. And with a third of their supplies gone, Hasenbach’s armies would be forced to give battle soon. With one of their flanks shaky, as the senior staff of the Princess of Segovia had quite literally gone up in smoke.

Prince Cordelia Hasenbach frowned at the letters in front of her, delicately eating a spoonful of broth as her attendants stood silent. Aequitan had been significantly weakened, but aside from that she’d failed to make an effect. Her most important victories had been defensive in nature, protecting her forces instead of weakening her enemy’s. The loss of the granaries was not a major setback, she decided, as Uncle Klaus had intended on giving battle soon, but it meant retreat was no longer a feasible option even if necessary. This round, she silently conceded, went to the Empress.

In Aisne, the game continued.

—

By Klaus’ reckoning, the Battle of Aisne begun when the enemy caught sight of his outriders on the plains to the northwest of the city. His boys had immediately retreated when the coalition had sent out a larger cavalry force after them, but by then the horns had been sounded. The massive armies of the two reluctantly allied princesses begun their lumbering march to the battlefield, even as the Prince of Hannoven’s own soldiers spread into formation. It was nearing noon when the enemy arrived, and by then Klaus had arranged his forces in a broad forward triangle. To the surprise of the coalition, the centre of his formation was not made out of Lycaonese infantry but of the armies of Lyonis and Segovia, themselves bordered by Brus and Lange while his northerners formed the wings on both sides. From atop his horse, the Prince of Hannoven watched mockery erupt among the staff of the Princess of Aisne.

They probably thought that he’d positioned the troops that way because he believed that Lyonis and Segovia would run at the first opportunity if not flanked by more loyal armies. He would have believed the same, in their place. Messengers immediately began going back and forth between the armies of the princesses of Aisne and Aequitan, and he knew exactly what they’d be talking about. Instead of a thick battering ram, the commanders in both armies would be arguing in favour of spreading out coalition lines so that they could envelop Klaus’ smaller army. It was the best way to make their superior numbers count. Now we see if you were right, Cordelia. Another hour passed and then the coalition army began moving forward as they’d been, to the grey-haired man’s dark amusement. His niece had read the opposition like a book.

Neither princess, in the end, was willing to allow the other one’s armies too far from her sight. There was always the risk that the other ruler would delay the attack on their flank just long enough that the other racked up the most casualties, only striking after Klau’s formation was already broken. They already thought victory was in the bag, he realized, so they were planning for the aftermath. There was a devent chance that a second pitched battle would erupt the moment his army was scattered, between the two ‘allied’ princesses. An old Alamans proverb that came to mind: victors should not offer their back to the door. Just after your enemy had won was the best time to slide in the knife. Even if spreading out would have been better tactics, politics were making them stupid. And the wretches wondered why there was a need for a Lycaonese on the throne.

The Prince of Hannoven watched the enemy infantry advance for some time, then glanced north. Both Klaus and the coalition had massed their cavalry into a single force and sent it to the side, as had been the norm in Proceran warfare since the days of Isabella the Mad. The coalition cavalry, trusting in their larger numbers – though that advantage had shrunk somewhat with Aequitan’s horses being poisoned, something that still had the old soldier grinning – moved forward first. The two masses met in furious charge to the side the main armies, and for the first time that day the difference between Lycaonese and southern warfare was made clear. In Alamans and Arlesites wars, cataphracts either fought other cataphracts or ran down infantry out of formation. Mobility was key, and so light armour was favoured. Lycaonese cataphracts, on the other hand, fought against ratlings. The barbed arrows and spears used by the Chain of Hunger, which were often poisoned as well, meant that plate armour had become the standard.

When the cavalries impacted it was a massacre. His Lycaonese horsemen tore straight through the tip of the enemy wedge before beginning to slow, and in close quarters the gap between plate and chain mail took its toll. The melee lasted for the better part of an hour until the coalition cavalry broke and fled, having lost perhaps a third of their number. Klaus doubted they would be seen again for the rest of the engagement, though he’d keep eyes on them just in case.

The sight must have been a shock to the princesses of Aisne and Aequitan, he decided, but now it would not be enough to give them pause. The two princesses were smelling a victory right now. When the ranks of infantry had met the sound of shield walls colliding was like thunder, but after an initial valiant effort by the centre of Klaus’ formation the sheer mass of the coalition army began to push the soldiers of Lyonis and Segovia back. That impact reverberated until it turned into an actual retreat, the arranged triangle of his formation slowly caving inwards. All that, he had planned for. He kept a close on on the centre since they were the most important part of his strategy. The Segovians, he noted, were fighting like devils. They were making the coalition bleed for every inch as they retreated.

He owed Princess Luisa an apology, it seemed. The old fox was keeping her part of the bargain and more. Slowly his outwards triangle was turning into an arc of the opposite curvature, the Lycaonese he’d placed at the two back wings of the triangle now turning into the tips of the arc as the coalition pushed deeper and deeper. Then the soldiers under the Prince of Lyonis turned their slow retreat into something more like a rout, leaving a hole in the formation, and Klaus cursed loudly.

“Fabien, you weaselling fuck,” he said through gritted teeth. “I hope they spit roast you in the Furthest Hell for that.”

—

Prince Fabien of Lyonis pressed his horse forward, his troops keeping pace as well as they could. No doubt the old brute from Hannoven was pissing his pants about now. Without Lyonis holding the centre with the Segovians, there was a gaping hole in the centre of Papenheim’s formation. Now the coalition would flow into the room, splitting their enemies into two smaller forces and overwhelming them individually. The decision to turn his cloak had been quite easy, as it happened. While his cousins in Cleves and Hainaut were no longer willing or able to support his bid for the throne, his correspondence in Arans had begun yielding results of late. The moment Hasenbach retreated to the mountains with her tail between her legs he could seize Brus and strongarm the boy in Lange into backing him, putting Fabien back at the head of an alliance to rival any of the others.

Both Constance of Aisne and Aenor of Aequitan had offered to pay him for the privilege of becoming their rival, amusingly enough, and securing another loan from the Pravus Bank had been child’s play. Whether it was the Praesi furnishing that gold or not ultimately mattered little to him: after he became First Prince he could default on the debt and what would they be able to do about it? Invade the Principate to collect? Laughable. It could be argued by that emptying the Empire’s coffers he was doing the work of the Heavens, he’d decided. Besides, if he didn’t take the coin his enemies would. That kind of an advantage could be enough to bury him even if he was careful. All that was left, he thought, was to decide was whether or not the army of Lyonis would strike the soldiers of Lange on its way out of the killing field. He was inclined to do so. If he could grab the boy prince, that entire principality was as good as his.

“Brother,” he heard from the side.

Ah, Sophie. Still playing the soldier, he saw, with her plate armour and pretty white horse. The youngest of his sisters always did have a fancy for the military life.

“An auspicious day, Sophie,” he smiled. “We’ve just won the Battle of Aisne.”

“So I see,” the dark-haired girl replied. “Are you sure turning on Hasenbach is wise?”

As their horses pulled side by side, Fabien snorted contemptuously.

“She’s a decent hand at the Ebb and Flow, for a Lycaonese,” he conceded. “But she’s a long way from home. The girl must learn her place.”

“I happen to have a notion of where that is,” Lady Sophie agreed.

Before he could blink her sword was out of her scabbard and buried in his throat.

“On the throne,” his sister said calmly. “The First Prince sends her regards, brother.”

Sagging on his horse, the last thing the Prince of Lyonis ever heard was his sister taking command of the army and ordering it back into formation.

—

Prince Etienne of Brabant watched the army of Lyonis fall back into line, and in that moment made his decision. He still believed that Princess Constance would make for a good First Princess, and not just because she’d promised to wed her son to his eldest daughter. She had the connections, the experience and the vision to bring the Principate into a golden age. But he’d been ruminating Hasenbach’s letter for months now, and come to the conclusion that the girl was right. It was no longer important who took the throne: Procer could not afford to go without a supreme leader anymore. The divides were beginning to run too deep. If he kept supporting the Princess of Aisne, the end of the civil war was nowhere in sight. Aenor of Aequitan had comparable backing and would never bow to a woman she despised so much – but she had no personal enmity with Hasenbach. None of them did.

That was, he supposed, the best reason he could think of for putting the Lycaonese girl on the throne. She would not be an effective First Prince, he thought: she didn’t haven enough allies among the Alamans and the Arlesites to keep the Highest Assembly in line. But she had just enough backers to be crowned, and with her as a figurehead the healing could begin. Hasenbach was unmarried and had shown no interest in remedying that, so her dynasty need not last longer than a generation. An Alamans could reclaim the throne in a few decades and Procer could move on from these ruinous days. All Etienne had to do for this to come true was betray an ally. Ah, well , he thought. The waters ebb and flow, but the tide is eternal. There was no changing the nature of this game, harsh as it could be at times. He gestured for his page to sound the clarion.

Coming late to Princess Constance’s cause had meant she’d sweetened his alignment with quite a few perks, including the forces of Brabant being positioned to the back of the coalition army. No doubt she’d come to regret that decision now. His army paused, realigned at the exhortations of the serjeants and then charged into the back of the coalition forces. It was only then that he noticed it: in the distance, the Princess of Orne was doing the very same thing. In the span of a few heartbeats, the situation of the two princesses leading the coalition had turned from the eve of victory to the better part of an encirclement. Just enough of a way out was left that the coalition soldiers would have a path to flee instead of fight to the death, he noted. The Prince of Hannoven’s experience at work.

Slowly, Papenheim’s cataphracts wheeled behind the coalition and formed a wedge, preparing for a charge into the exposed back. Weeping Heavens , he thought, all the pieces coming together. This is going to be a massacre. Perhaps Hasenbach did have it in her to be more than a figurehead, if she could be this ruthless.

—

Klaus Papenheim had more than a few battles under his belt. The campaign into Lange had seen precious few pitched engagements – ambushes and raids had been the way he’d picked, making use of the Augur’s powers to find vulnerable moments – but he’d fought ratlings by the shores of Lake Netzach many a time to prevent them from putting enough warbands together to threaten Hannoven. This, though? This was something else. The ranks of the coalition began shrinking until the entire force... crumpled. After sending his cataphracts charging into their backs twice he had to hold the riders back or risk them being swept away by the human torrent of fleeing soldiers. They had orders to make sure neither the princesses of Aisne or Aequitan managed to flee the field, and the veteran knew that before nightfall he’d have both women as prisoners in his camp. The Augur’s foretelling of where they’d go had made sure of that.

He might have just ended the Proceran civil war today.

Some principalities would refuse to bend their knees still, but there would be enough rulers backing Cordelia that she could be elected First Prince legally. He’d never really doubted that his niece could do it, could lead them to victory, but there’d always been a sense that the victory was a distant thing. Years ahead, after long and hard struggles. Instead he’d campaigned for a little over a year and the entire south of Procer had burst open like an overripe fruit. The grey-haired man almost shivered. He knew that the Lycaonese armies were not, in the end, overwhelmingly stronger than those of the Alamans and Arlesites. They had advantages, but so did the southerners. For the first time he truly realized what Cordelia meant, when she’d said that the Empress was in the process of destroying Procer. She was making us brittle, beyond repair, and no one had even noticed.

Prince Klaus Papenheim found his gaze turning to the east, where in the distance the shape of the tall mountains separating the Principate from Callow could almost be glimpsed. This wasn’t over. Not even close to it.

—

When nightfall came, two women on opposite sides of the continent found themselves looking down at hastily-brought reports.

Cordelia Hasenbach, now First Prince of Procer in all but name, put the sheaf of parchment down and allowed herself to savour the feeling for a moment. She’d won. By the skin of her teeth, but she had won. She’d proved that a mere mortal could take on the all-seeing monster in the Tower and come out ahead. The Principate was not dead and Calernia would not sink into anarchy. Then the moment passed, and the Prince of Rhenia composed herself. There was work to do. There would always be work to do, and more now than ever before.

Dread Empress Malicia’s face remained serene even as she put aside the letter and rose to her feet. Contingencies would have to be implemented. The throne could not be denied to Hasenbach, but it could be weakened. The dark-skinned woman came to stand by an old shatranj board, her Name glimpsing the shivering souls that Dread Emperor Sorcerous had bound to the pieces.

“This one goes to you, darling,” she murmured. “Shall we play another?”

Without waiting for a reply, she nudged forward a pawn.

Chapter 13: Forgery

“The heart of warfare is deception. Therefore, the generals who can deceive even themselves are invincible.”
– Isabella the Mad, Proceran general

Researching the old fashioned way would have taken much more than the single night we had. Much, much more: after a while I noticed that every time we took a book from the stacks and looked away, another one appeared in its place. Hopefully Masego hadn’t noticed that, or I’d never be able to convince him to leave. Already telling him that we couldn’t loot the library on the way out was going to be a bloody chore, I wasn’t eager to fight that battle twice. In the end, we relied on Hakram’s aspect to get our results: Find. There was no denying how useful that trick had proved to be since he’d come into it, but I remained wary. That was always the trap, with Names: they gave you an advantage that would enable you to crush all your enemies, if you just... kept leaning into it. And it was always so very tempting to, wasn’t it? The more you used it the more effective it became, the stronger the advantage got.

I’d become so used to relying on Learn to, well, learn things that when I’d lost the aspect after Liesse I’d found myself almost crippled. I’d been teaching myself the Old Tongue, the Deoraithe language, before the dust-up with Heiress. When I’d gone back to the books afterwards I’d found to my dismay that I was going to have to start almost from the beginning. The information in my head was incomplete, like I had learned vocabulary lists by rote instead of actually figuring out the language. Almost a year later, I wasn’t even even fluent. Back when I’d had Learn, I would have spoken like a native in six months while barely putting any effort into it. Black had been right, as he often was: people who depended on their Names for results fell apart when robbed of those powers. If you use your Name instead of skill, you never develop the skill. There was a reason my teacher had taught me swordsmanship the hard way.

That was the axe I had to grind with Find. When Adjutant used it, he found in a matter of hours answers that would normally have taken us weeks. It handed us solutions, and if we ever started to rely on that we’d be screwed the first time we ran into a hero that could shut it down. We’d played with the aspect nonetheless, to figure out how it worked, and found it wasn’t without limits: the information he looked for had to be at hand and the need for it clear. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t warping Creation to get us what we needed. He was using a weaker version of Providence, the golden luck that always had the very thing they needed land in the lap of the heroes at the best possible moment. Masego had theorized that what the aspect actually did was tinker with the odds, essentially making something that could possibly happen much more likely to actually happen. Adjutant wouldn’t ever be able to point a spot on a map and have that location be full of ancient magical weapons, but he could crack open a book at the exact page he needed to read.

I’d worried that the library might not have the story we needed, but the refilling stacks effectively killed the fear. Here in Arcadia, an aspect so subjective in nature was massively more powerful than it would have been in Creation: reality was more fluid in the realm of the fae.

His first attempt found us a story about a shepherd from Summer killing a Duke of Winter in single combat with a sling, winning the battle for Summer. It had a familiar ring to it. It was an old and popular tale in Callow that we’d first gained the Red Flower Vales by a shepherdess killing a Proceran prince with the same weapon when the prince tried to steal her flock. Dead princes always made for fireside favourites, in my experience. Callow had not forgotten the the Proceran betrayal after the Third Crusade. The story was not, however, what we needed. Hakram narrowed his search on the second attempt and found something more to my liking. A boy from Winter becoming a soldier to escape a prophecy he’d kill his own father, only learning too late his mother had had an affair with a Lord of Summer after killing the very same man on the battlefield. That had a shape we could use. It lacked the inheritance, but it stacked the odds in the favour of the long-lost child.

He tried again and found something even closer. A prince of Winter abandoning his own daughter in the wilds for she was fated to kill her father, only for her to be found by a childless prince of Summer and be raised as his own. Killing her birth father on the field, she became a Princess of Winter only to find the horrible fate still dogged her: she was sent as as the champion of Winter to settle a duel, only to find the man who’d raised her to be her opponent. This evidently being a tragedy, she won again and destroyed everything she’d ever loved. Grim, but I could work with that. Stealing bits from both parricidal stories to craft it into a fresh one should do the trick. I leaned back into my seat with a servant-provided cup of wine, Hakram frowning at the pages as he read the third story once more.

“Prophecy’s the important part,” I said.

“We don’t have one,” he pointed out.

“So we make one,” I replied.

“I don’t think scribbling ‘Catherine murders a duke, gets a duchy’ on a parchment will get us anywhere,” the tall orc grunted.

“When I fought the Rider of the Host,” I said, “he trapped himself into a role. Had to reveal things to me because of it. I think that has long as the fae recognize it’s a story, they’re bound by it – no matter how obvious a lie it is.”

“So we need the fairies to know there’s a prophecy, one just good enough to pass as true,” he said. “That’s... problematic. We’d need that knowledge spread before the fight.”

“Apprentice would be able to make a scroll look old and magical,” I said. “There’s no reason we couldn’t make a dozen fake scrolls and throw them through the windows of high-ranking members of the Court tonight. The Duke himself doesn’t have to be warned – ignorance is part of the tragedy.”

“Still feels thin,” Hakram gravelled. “You can make yourself look like his long-lost daughter and it’ll help, but we need more.”

“A tragic element,” I said, thinking out loud. “It doesn’t have the right weight if I genuinely don’t care I just stabbed my ‘father’ to death.”

I sipped at the wine again, wondering at how it tasted exactly the way Vale summer wine did at the peak of summer when served cold, the heavy heat making it the sweetest thing you ever drank. No wonder Archer had kept hitting the bottle.

“I could have Apprentice put the belief in my head that the Duke is actually my father,” I reluctantly said.

Hakram grimaced.

“I like Masego, Cat, and I doubt there’s a better mage in the Empire save for Lord Warlock – but messing with memories is always bad business,” he said. “You weren’t conscious when he operated on your soul. It... wasn’t pretty.”

Mostly I remembered searing pain and a lot of screaming, so I’d take his word for it. Masego had saved my life, that day, but the process had been less than pleasant.

“We’ll shelve that, then,” I said. “What else do we have?”

I was an orphan. That was a prerequisite for any of this to be able to work, I thought, but I couldn’t make more of it. I was the Squire. That had been my trump card in Liesse, given the roots the Role had in both Praes and Callow, but in Skade there was no ground to gain from it.

“The Winter King brought us here,” Adjutant suddenly said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“So he did,” I agreed.

“Set aside the story for a moment,” the orc said. “We’re here because he wants something from you.”

“We don’t know what that is , though,” I said.

“A hungry warrior will trade his sword for meat,” he quoted in Kharsum.

If you need something bad enough, you’ll take even a terrible deal. In other words, we had some kind of leverage on the King. The Prince of Nightfall had compared the Court to a fox gnawing off its own leg – there was desperation in that image, not just viciousness. Pretending we had an immortal winter god’s backing when getting into a fight with an immortal winter lesser god felt like fool’s gamble, admittedly, but hesitation was the province of the slow and the dead. Fuck it: I’d already faked the king’s signature to get into Skade in the first place, after all. If he’d wanted to turn the screws on us for that, we’d already be screaming.

“I have three things,” I murmured. “A prophecy, an heirloom and the word of a king. Now that has the right weight to it, don’t you think?”

Hakram shivered and I smiled.

—

“You look the way bad decisions feel,” Archer told me.

It was past midnight when the ochre-skinned girl swaggered into the library, reeking of liquor and throwing herself onto the table in an ungainly sprawl. Masego, who’d been finishing up the eighth fake scroll until she’d put her hand over it, sighed and moved his work to another table. I picked up a book and dropped it on her face as my reply, though even drunk she had the reflexes to snatch it out of the air. Archer wasn’t wrong, exactly. After Apprentice had given me the silver chain enchanted with the glamour I’d had a look in the mirror and winced. Kilian pulled off the fae blood, but it could be kindly said that I did not. My features were already sharp and constant fighting had put muscle to my frame, so the exaggeration of both traits with a few fae features thrown in made me look like a pile of harsh angles forced into a person’s shape. I did, however, look like I could be related to the Duke of Violent Squalls. That was the part that mattered.

“I’m hoping you have more than insults to give me,” I said.

Archer rose to a sitting position with a tired moan, dangling her legs off the edge of the table.

“You picked a fight with a bigwig,” she said.

“He’s a duke,” I said. “That was given.”

“He’s the duke, Foundling,” she said. “Look, you know it’s not the same king or queen in charge of Winter every time the season comes, right?”

“I’d gathered,” I said.

“The role can go to all the fae that are right now princes and princesses,” Archer said. “They have different natures, so the story of Summer and Winter can unfold differently according to who has the crown on both sides. That’s why sometimes one Court wins and sometimes the other. Outcome’s decided the moment the story starts.”

“He’s not a prince, though,” I pointed out.

“He’s just as bad,” the other Named said. “Whenever you have a Winter ruler trying to avoid the war, he’s the one that fucks it up. He’s the cornerstone for the war happening anyway.”

“So if he threw his masquerade...” Hakram said, trailing off.

“Then the current King is trying to avoid a war,” I finished. “The Duke’s important .”

On the bright side, the odds of my getting away with pretending the King of Winter was backing me had just significantly improved: I’d be ridding him of a nuisance.

“So even for a duke he’s going to be a bastard and a half to kill,” I said.

“That’s the word,” Archer agreed. “Things I have also learned: man’s not married, he’s got a bunch of minions on his side and he uses what wind sorcery would be if it was actually useful in a fight.”

“Wind sorcery is very useful,” Masego disagreed without ever looking away from the scroll. “It lacks the offensive abilities of some other elemental spells, but it has few equals when it comes to dictating and restricting enemy movement.”

“It feels like you’re to disagree with me,” Archer said, “but your words prove my point.”

“It’s the basis for scrying, you ignorant thug,” Apprentice snapped.

“Ooh, scrying,” the woman replied, rolling her eyes. “ That ’ll tip the balance in a fight with a Named.”

Gods, I missed Juniper. Nobody squabbled this much when she was around to glare. People without strong opinions didn’t become Named, I knew, which was why you could never have a band of them in a room without it coming to some arguing. It didn’t help, though, that Archer’s mission in life was to be the piece of gravel in everyone’s boot and that Apprentice was exceedingly easy to rub the wrong way.

“This conversation’s postponed until we’re back in Creation,” I ordered. “Archer, I know you have a fascination with asses but you don’t need to be so much of one. Apprentice, you know if you let her irritate you she’s going to keep pulling your pigtails.”

“But she was wrong,” Masego muttered mulishly.

Archer hid a grin behind her hand and I moved to change the subject before they could start again.

“Heard anything about the Fields of Wend?” I asked her.

“There’s a lake outside the city,” she replied. “With shifting glaciers in it. They use it to throw balls sometimes.”

Not, I thought, a good battlefield to fight against someone who has a knack for using winds. Not that any place in Winter was, to be honest. Still better than a closed space like the inside of the palace had been, especially since the damned place had been built from the Duke’s power.

“Well, that ought to be interesting,” I said.

“So now we wait for dawn?” Archer asked. “I might actually die of boredom, Squire.”

I glanced at Apprentice.

“How long until you’re done with the scrolls, Masego?”

“Give me an hour,” he replied absent-mindedly.

“Stay awake, Archer,” I said. “I have something for you to do after this.”

“Tell me it doesn’t involved paying attention to what people are saying again,” she implored.

“I want to to break people’s windows by throwing lies at them,” I replied.

She grinned.

“Sometimes, Foundling, you say the sweetest things.”

—

I managed to grab a few hours of sleep afterwards. Enough that I was fresh, anyway. I could have slept longer but my mind was awake so instead I found myself trudging to the courtyard this place was named after. Servants popped up out nowhere, not unexpectedly, and I sat by the edge of the snow with a steaming cup of tea and a pair of sweet apple turnovers. I’d say this for the fae, they cooked better pastries than anything I’d tried back in Creation. By my estimate there was still about a bell left before dawn, so I took my time eating. I heard footsteps behind me, a sure sign one of my companions was also awake: the fae didn’t make noise. Archer plopped herself down, leaning back against a wooden pillar. She had a plate of cold cuts and yet another bottle of wine, I noted with dark amusement. I wasn’t sure it was possible to empty the cellars of Winter, but she was certainly giving it a gallant effort.

“Did you even sleep?” I asked.

“Couldn’t,” she replied. “I’m too curious about what’s coming.”

I hummed. If all went well she wouldn’t need to fight anyway. Besides, even if she’d been up all night she didn’t seem tired in the slightest. I wasn’t actually in the mood for conversation, so I let silence reign as I drank my tea and nibbled at the pastries. Couldn’t muster much of an appetite – never could before a fight, though during I always ended up feeling hungry.

“So what’s your deal, exactly?” Archer said suddenly.

I eyed her sceptically.

“My deal?” I repeated.

She scarfed down a piece of meat before replying.

“Every Named has one,” she said. “Lady Ranger wants to break anything that thinks it’s stronger than her. Your mage wants to open up Creation to see what the gears look like. The orc wants to murder everything in your way.”

“And you?” I deflected.

“You already know what my thing is, Foundling,” she smiled. “I want to live large , so I can die without regrets. You, though? I can’t seem to get a read on you.”

Funny thing, this. I was more used to being on the other side of the conversation. I’d had one just like this with Hakram, what felt like years ago. Then another with Masego, when I got a glimpse at the detached mania that lay at the centre of him.

“People don’t usually ask me that,” I said. “Don’t need to. I’m pretty straightforward, when it comes down to it. All I want is to dig Callow out of the pit it’s in.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Aren’t you the Tower’s lieutenant there, nowadays? Seems like a done deal.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” I grunted. “I have the reins, within limits. I won. Pit’s still there, kingdom’s still in it.”

Archer eyed me, expression unreadable.

“So that’s really all you’re after?” she said. “Picking up a half-crown for the land you were born to?”

I smiled mirthlessly.

“Disappointed, are you?” I said.

“You’re the heiress to people who changed the face of Calernia,” she said, not denying it. “And I don’t mean conquering a kingdom – who gives a fuck about where borders are drawn? That comes and goes. When the Lady of the Lake was with the Calamities, they broke a story old as dawn. Just picking up a lesser piece of that is... small .”

The word was spoken with distaste.

“Last year,” I said, “I crushed the skull of a man who thought he was a visionary. He wanted to save Callow, he insisted. Thing is, I don’t really believe you can save people anymore. I tried that and it doesn’t ever quite seem to work right. I think it’s because it doesn’t matter, if they worship at the House of Light or sacrifice at some dark altar – most days they’re just people, and those are the same everywhere. They till the same fields, pay the same taxes, marry their neighbours and die fat if they’re lucky enough.”

“Named are more,” Archer said. “We’re the brighter flame: the people who can actually change things.”

“Are we?” I smiled. “The part of the Conquest you pay attention to is the Calamities sweeping all opposition aside. You think that’s because they were mighty, but that’s not the part that matters. They were figureheads, enablers. Praes won because it had grown as a nation while Callow had not.”

“The Empire grew because villains made it grow,” she replied flatly.

“And don’t you think it’s telling the most successful villains since Triumphant put their efforts into reforming institutions rather than building a bunch of flying fortresses?” I asked. “People won that war, not Named. Malicia and Black, they’re brilliant – but there’s been a lot of brilliant Named over the centuries, on both sides. What makes those two different is that they know change comes from the bottom, not the top.”

“That’s...” she hesitated.

Heresy, she wanted to say. That it went against everything we knew. History was forged by the hands of those that stood out and crowned themselves with power, those precious few even the Gods recognized as apart from the masses. Except that’s a lie. A thousand Dread Emperors and a thousand Kings, but nothing ever changed – until what lay behind them did. It’s not the tip of the blade that kills, it’s the force that drove it into your belly. That was, I was beginning to grasp, what I’d done wrong in Callow. I’d fought to put all the authority in my hands with the vague notion that I could fix it all afterwards, but how was that any different from what the Lone Swordsman had been doing? There were people all over the Empire who could make things better, if they were allowed to. And if there were forces trying to stand in the way? Well, I was a villain. The parts of Creation I did not like, I would break .

“Right now I have an enemy in Liesse who thinks by sheer will and ruthlessness she’ll drag Praes back to a golden age that never existed,” I said. “I’m not worried about her, deep down, because even if she claims I’m the one going against the grain she’s the one fighting the tide.”

I broke off a piece of turnover and popped it into my mouth.

“Last spring, a little boy gave an orc a crown of flowers. There’s something beyond any of us happening in the Empire, right now,” I said. “Malicia and Black think they control it, but I don’t think they do . They’re watching the story when what’s important is the people telling it. They want me to part of the machine they’re built, but I don’t think that’s my role.”

“Then what is?” Archer asked quietly.

“When heroes and villains come knocking in the name of fate,” I spoke, tone calm and measured. “When they try to drag us back to where we were by force with a Choir behind them or the host of some howling Hell – I’ll kill them all . Every last one of them.”

Softly, Archer laughed.

“Ah, Foundling,” she murmured. “I was wrong about you – you’re not boring at all. You’re just as mad as the rest of us.”

I looked up at the sky. Night was dying.

“Drink up, Archer,” I said. “Dawn’s coming and we have a god to rob blind.”

Chapter 14: Trick

“I can’t beat your band of heroes, true, but what if there were another eight bands also out for my blood? Ha! What are you going to do, form a line?”
– Dread Emperor Irritant, the Oddly Successful

I took one look at the Fields of Wend and started cursing in Mthethwa. Lower Miezan just didn’t have that register of pure spite the Soninke tongue did. A mile of glaciers lay at my feet, their differing heights and shifting movements filling the air with the sound of fracas every few heartbeats. Named or not, if I got stuck between two of those I’d be a woman-shaped pile of broken bones. I was really hoping the prophecy of lies was going to work out, because if it didn’t it was going to take Hakram most of a day to find all the bloody pieces of what was left of my body.

“You got fucked on the arena,” Archer noted cheerfully. “And not even in the fun way.”

“I’d noticed, thank you,” I replied crabbily.

The only saving grace of the Fields was that the uneven relief would make it easier to take cover when the Duke of Violent Squalls started throwing a storm and a half at my head. I was very, very glad I’d decided not to wear armour. I wasn’t so good a swimmer I’d avoid sinking to the bottom if I slipped. My plate had been repaired by the servants and set out for me, but I’d chosen something lighter instead. Grey trousers went down into the same pair of good boots I’d taken to the masquerade, over them a thick gambeson that went down to my knees. After my last few scraps with the fae I’d learned that my plate served only to slow me down. The sword at my belt rested comfortably, the handle veiled by my usual cloak. I’d gotten little use out of the garment and its supposedly spell-resistant abilities since Black had gifted it to me, but today seemed a good day to bring in an additional precaution.

The four of us had taken the carriage to the duelling grounds and found quite a crowd waiting for us there. More fae were in attendance than there had been at the masquerade, though by the looks of it they were still all aristocrats. Before being a pain in my ass, Archer had taken the time to discreetly point out the handful of fae she’d bombarded with prophecy the night before. At least one of them had the scroll on his person, idly toying with it as he watched us. Would it be enough? I had no idea. Masego’s glamour amulet was nestled safely under the gambeson, and I’d been met by a sea of blanks faces when I’d arrived, until they all resumed normality. I couldn’t know whether that meant they’d bought it, but it was too late to back out now anyway. The crowd parted for us effortlessly until we came to stand by the Duke himself. I eyed him carefully. The bastard was in armour, unlike me. Plate of what seemed like actual silver – though I wasn’t enough of a fool to hope the metal would be as soft as it should be – and a cape of blue silk dotted with pale hellebores. He had a falchion at his side, ornately jewelled, but no shield. Mage , I thought . Free hand needed for spellcasting.

That was good news of a sort: it meant that he couldn’t simply command the winds with a thought. Possibly. Relying on that assumption might just get me killed, so I’d have to fight as if he could until proven otherwise. A fae I’d met before, the Lady of Cracking Ice, smoothly stepped between myself and the Duke.

“Since we’ve all arrived,” she smiled, “we can begin the proceedings. At the invitation of the Duke of Violent Squalls, I will be serving as the officiant witness. Does the Lady of Marchford have any objections?”

“None,” I said.

“This is pleasing,” she said. “As is custom, I must ask you if the grievance between the two of you can be resolved by any other manner.”

“No,” the Duke of Violent Squalls spoke carelessely.

“He could kneel at my feet and beg for mercy, then I’ll consider it,” I suggested.

Wind picked up sharply around us as the fae aristocrat glared hatefully at my face.

“Didn’t like that, did you?” I mused. “That’d be a no, then.”

“Very well,” the Lady of Cracking Ice said, sounding amused. “The terms set by the offended party were death or surrender.”

“I withdraw the outcome of surrender,” the Duke spat.

“This is quite irregular,” the Lady said with a frown.

“I’ll allow it,” I shrugged. “Didn’t intend to let him surrender anyway.”

“Since both parties are in agreement, it will be so,” the Lady conceded. “Participants are to make their way to the Wending Heart and stand at their respective edge. The duel will begin when the blue light above your heads shatters.”

I glanced at the Fields. What she’d called the Heart was easy enough to find: it was the tallest of the glaciers, topped by a perfectly round platform of maybe forty feet in diameter. There was already a shining blue orb hovering over it. I watched the glaciers around, getting a read for the movements: staying on flat ground with someone who controlled the wind was a death sentence. Ranged combat was no specialty of mine, but if I wanted to live long enough to make it to close quarters I’d need some form of cover. Hakram clapped me on the shoulder.

“Wade in their blood, Cat,” he said.

“That’s the plan,” I replied.

I cast a look at the other two.

“If you have to die,” Archer said, “die loud .”

I would have settled for a ‘good luck’ but that wasn’t really her style, was it?

“Get it done quickly,” Masego told me. “I’ve experiments that should not be left unattended for too long.”

“Love you too,” I mouthed back.

Rolling my shoulder to limber it up, I began my trek to the Wending Heart. Time to find out whether the magical power of lies could kill a man.

—

There was enough snow on the glaciers that the way wasn’t too slippery. I was more sure-footed than a mortal had any business being, regardless. Couldn’t remember when I’d last tripped or slipped on anything, though even before becoming the Squire I’d not been prone to clumsiness. Probably because I was short, it saddened me to admit. No need to adapt to growing limbs if they stayed the same length.

“It will be most amusing to make a plaything out of an entire kingdom,” the Duke spoke as we moved. “No fae has ever possessed such a bounty of souls.”

He walked so lightly he didn’t leave footprints, I’d noted. It was doubtful I’d be quicker than him, armoured or not.

“You know, I keep hearing about you Winter fae being great at mind games,” I said. “But so far? Not impressed. I’ve had better quality trash talk from orcs and I’m pretty sure that Heiress could make you cry, given half a bell.”

We both made the leap to the Heart, his landing admittedly more graceful than mine.

“Why bother with such games?” he said. “You are outmatched beyond your understanding.”

“Not the first time I’ve heard that line,” I laughed. “Usually the person speaking it is dead before sundown.”

I took the northern edge as he strolled to the southern one. Behind me a lower platform of ice was idly drifting, maybe fifteen feet below. There were a few spires on it that would do nicely as a shield until I could find a good angle to approach. I unsheathed my longsword as he did the same with his falchion, sneering, and with a loud crack the blue orb above us broke. Before I could so much as blink wind howled, and I was casually tossed off the Heart. For a heartbeat I watched the distant ground under me and, with cold detachment, considered that this wasn’t exactly a great start. Even as I began falling I saw a large globe of air forming around me and made the decision that I wasn’t sticking around to find out what that would do when completed. My Name flared and I formed a circular pane of shadow under my feet, leaping off it towards another glacier.

I landed rolling in the snow, arrows of wind hitting the ground behind me and spraying ice everywhere. Archer might have undersold the whole wind magic thing a bit, I thought. I cast a look backwards the moment I got back on my feet and saw the Duke was standing at the edge of the Heart where I’d begun the duel. And he was lazily pointing a finger in my direction. Great. I made a run for it. Two glaciers to pick from: what looked like a barren peak of ice or another flat platform below. I picked the platform – better line of sight – but when jumping down found myself hurtling towards a wall of perfectly still air. Ugh. Wind magic was good at restricting movement, Apprentice had said. The understatement trend continued. I hated fighting mages, it was all tricks and no slugging and slugging was what I was best at. I forced myself to twist in the air and landed feet first on the apparently-solid wall, allowing a trickle of power to go down my legs so I could throw myself at the ice peak instead of falling into the waters below.

I hit the ice with a grunt and plunged my sword into it so I wouldn’t just start slipping, hanging by a single hand. Another trickle of power into my arms and I spun on myself, tearing out the sword and landing more or less on my feet at the top of the peak – just in time to duck under a sharp-looking sickle of wind. The Duke of Violent Squalls was no longer standing at the edge of the Heart, I saw. That was a mixed bag. On one hand, he no longer had high ground and a good field of vision. On the other, I had no godsdamned idea where he was now. I got an answer when the peak under me exploded in a shower of ice and I caught the glint of a moving blade in the spray. Below, and behind. The falchion sliced through my cheek, missing a deeper wound only because my footing had quite literally been shattered. I bit down on the hiss of pain and swung blindly at the silhouette of the fae – but he was gone before I could get even vaguely close.

I landed on what remained of the peak with my cloak over my head to shield from the falling ice, managing to vault to another glacier before a wind spear the size of a ballista’s bolt tore through the ice under me and collapse the whole thing. Shit. If I got hit by that, I wasn’t walking away from it. I kept moving even if I didn’t have a precise destination in mind: so far every time I’d slowed for more than a moment I’d been hammered by magic. All right, so this was like fighting an extremely mobile armoured mage without any need for incantations, who could very likely fly as well and would be unaffected by the terrain. I’d, uh, had better days. Here’s a rule for not dying stupidly , I remembered Captain telling me. Never give a mage room to set up. The longer they have, the more dangerous they get. The few spars I’d had with Masego had only reinforced the notion. If I wanted to avoid further nasty surprises I needed to know where the Duke was.

“Gods Below, this is going to hurt,” I muttered.

I climbed to higher ground and crouched, waiting for my enemy to catch up. The first strike I saw coming. A cylinder of wind with ice shards inside formed ahead of me and began spinning ever faster, shooting out a volley of glinting ice spears that tore through the spot I’d been in a moment earlier. The second, though, I did not. The entire glacier I was standing on broke in half and even as I moved to the left side the Duke of Violent Squalls came out of the waters below, like an arrow adorned with translucent blue wings. He was carving his way up with his falchion, now wreathed in a wind version of the weapon that was three times the size of the original. I let the reflexes of my Name take over, stepping back: If I’d been a heartbeat slower, I would have lost an arm. As it was he ripped his way up the side of my body and straight through the clavicle. The wind weapon blew up a moment later, tossing me onto another glacier before I could strike back. I managed to land on my feet, sliding back and blood flowing down the mangled gambeson.

“Rise,” I said, the aspect coming to the surface.

I’d gotten what I wanted, but the pain wiped away any notion of smiling at that victory. I’d touched the edge of his cape while he was carving me up, slid a thread of my Name’s power into it. A variation on the trick I used with the bone contraptions crafted to trigger goblin munitions, though this had been much more delicate. If I focused I could get a vague sense of where that bit of power was, since it was as much a part of me while away as it had been before. And right now, it was circling around my left. The flesh knitted itself back together as the aspect I’d Taken from the Lone Swordsman did its work, though it pained me that I’d had to use that card this early in the fight. It would be diminishing returns, from now on, and I could only use it another two times. My feet padded against the snow as I focused to keep a read on where the Duke was, astonished by how quickly he was getting around. Just ahead was an ice spire, and in about three heartbeats by my estimation he’d be behind it. I blew out a steamy breath and called on my Name, fashioning a spear of shadows that shattered the spire in a heartbeat.

Let’s see how he dealt with being on the other side of that. I’d been moving before the spear had even left my fingertips, so I came out of the mist just as the Duke was turning in my direction. I swung with a grunt of exertion, tip of the blade managing to cut through the tip of his nose as he smoothly leaned back. With a flick of the wrist I reversed the strike, hacking through the edge of his right eye just before our bodies impacted. He screamed in anger as we rolled on the ground. Unlike the fae, I knew how handle myself to come out on top when we slowed. Not much of a scrapper, this one. I slugged him in his bleeding face as I drew back my sword, the sound of my fist crushing the bones of his nose the sweetest of melodies. A burst of wind threw me off him but I managed to have it put me back on my feet, immediately going back on the offense. He swung his falchion without even trying to hit me, the displacement of air caused by the strike magnified until it became a squall that knocked me off my trajectory.

I adjusted my angle without flinching and hacked down at his shoulder. I grimaced before the strike hit: I’d misjudged my strength, that was going to hit plate instead of neck. To my surprise, my blade cut straight into the silver-like metal. I felt flesh give underneath, if not deeply. My sword, unfortunately, was now stuck. His free hand pointed towards my chest and the spear of wind that impacted me a moment later blew me straight off my feet. Along with breaking half my ribs and puncturing a lung, by the feel of it. I managed to keep enough of a grip on my sword that it came with me while my body hit a wall of ice behind me with a dull thud. I coughed out blood, feeling the lung he’d struck beginning to fill already. Hells, that magic hit like a horse.

“Rise,” I rasped out.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, I felt the wound beginning to heal. It felt like getting stabbed all over again, Merciless Gods. I managed to push myself back to my feet anyway. The Duke’s hand was on his armour, looking appalled. And scared , I saw, for the first time since the duel had begun.

“What madness is this?” he barked. “You do not have the power to even begin to touch my armaments.”

I wiped the blood off my lips and grinned red.

“Guess it was just meant to be,” I said.

Strike one for the power of lies. It wasn’t handing me the victory in a handbasket – the fake prophecy hadn’t been well-crafted enough for that – but I’d touched the story just enough I could twist it. That there was a chance for me to win. The hole in my lung closed, though my ribs still felt like a clan of orcs had been stomping on them. With only one good eye left and a broken, blood nose the Duke had come out ahead but he no longer looked so pristine. With a snarl of rage, he flicked his hand upwards and I took that as my cue to make a tactical retreat. I jumped atop the wall behind me and legged it to another platform. Good instinct, I saw a moment later. Winds roiled in a circle enveloping the entire width of the glacier then came down like the hand of an angry god – the entire mass broke like glass and sunk under the water, sending waves in every direction that had the glaciers rocking like ships in a storm. The Duke of Violent Squall had not moved, wings keeping him aloft in the air as his eyes searched for me. Deciding that running the Hells away was the better part of valour, I ducked behind an ice spire and continued my escape.

The sliver of power in his cape told me he was on the move a heartbeat later, when I concentrated. Going under the water again, I thought. Running out of tricks, was he? Or perhaps fae weren’t allowed to be too creative. If they could make too many decisions, their stories might not unfold as they should. I gauged where he came out of the deep and moved to flank him. I felt the Duke pause and smiled. I’d done enough damage the creature was wary now. He seemed to be hiding beneath a glacier’s cliff, so I crept quietly atop and only allowed a trickle of power into my legs when it came time to leap, teeth bared and sword high. Another eye, I thought. If I could take its vision away this would become a great deal easier.

I realized I’d fucked up about halfway to the ground.

The Duke of Violent Squalls was not under me, waiting to get stabbed. His cape, however, was. Trap, and I’d literally leapt at the occasion of falling into it . A globe of air, the same magic he’d used early in the fight, formed around me. A heartbeat away from my feet touching the ground the air solidified , trapping me like a fly in amber. I stayed there hanging, barely able to breathe, as a spire of ice shimmered and revealed itself to have been the Duke. The snow-pale fae smiled and idly waved his hand, the globe shrinking closet to my body before rising higher in the air, taking me with it.

“Sooner or later,” he said, “vermin gets caught. Shall we give them a spectacle worthy of my name, Lady Foundling?”

His wings beat and he took me back to the Heart still in his globe, landing fluidly on the ground as I hung in the air above him. I could feel the fae on the shore watching us, though I couldn’t see them. The Duke has positioned me as if I was still about to fall on him, a mocking smile on his face. Four spears of ice rose were carved out from the ground by roiling wind, rising to align with my shoulders and knees.

“Did you think resembling my form would make me hesitate?” he asked amusedly. “Let me disabuse you of the notion.”

In that moment I watched his eyes and saw his entire concentration had gone into manipulating the spears. That was the thing with magic: no matter how old and bad you were, it was impossible to cast more than one spell at a time. He was invested , and withdrawing from that would take a few moments. The Beast laughed, standing behind my shoulder and baring its fangs. I could feel its warm breath on my cheek, feel my Name pulsing with it. For a moment I almost forced myself to speak, to ram a cheeky reply down his throat, but I pushed down the urge. Monologues are for amateurs. The spears began moving, slow to my eye, and I reached for the second bundle of power inside of me. Heat flowed through my veins and in the back of my head I heard a snapping sound, the very same the Penitent’s Blade had made when I’d broken it over my knee. I’d thought about keeping it, after Liesse. When it was just a very sharp sword. But then the day after it had become light as a feather, for angels were not prone to metaphor, and I had seen my death writ on its edge. So I’d broken it, into a hundred pieces I’d had scattered over rivers and lakes so it would never be forged again.

It had not been an act without consequence.

“ Break ,” I croaked.

For an instant all I felt was my will pushing against something infinitely larger. If the Duke had fought me, I grasped, I would have been swept away by the tide effortlessly. But he wasn’t fighting me. Magic was will, and his will was in the spears . The globe shattered, the Beast howling in approval. I’d been caught with my sword raised to strike and though the momentum had been blunted that was again how I began descending. Panic went through the fae’s eye and a hastily-redirected spear caught me in the shoulder – but it was the wrong one, I laughed – then another tore through my side and finally my arm came down even as the ice tore through flesh and bone. The tip of the blade punched through the silver armour and straight through the heart.

“You,” he gasped.

“Me,” I replied, taking all that was left of my Name and pouring it into the blow as I scythed down through his body, cleaving it in half.

Icy red water poured out of the gaping wound and I ignored the pain from my shoulder long enough to raise my blade one last time, meeting the Duke’s eyes as I struck. The head flew. I let out a groan of pain and exhaustion as I dropped to my knees. Shit. I’d been spending power like coppers throughout the entire fight just to survive, and now the well had run dry. Couldn’t even muster my last use of Rise, it was slipping through my fingers. I groped blindly for my hand and found a signet ring there, gurgling out a triumphant laugh. With an ugly gasp I broke the spear that had bit deep in my shoulder, leaving the ice inside and haltingly getting to my feet before trying the same with the one in my flank. My fingers were too weak – I botched the job and cried out when the ice dug deeper into my flesh. I saw the fae on the shore, vision swimming, and almost wept at the idea of having to make my way back there. Worse, the Heart was still rocking from the massive blow the Duke has struck earlier with his magic, though it was almost unnoticeable now. I paused. Entirely unnoticeable. The hair on my arm rose. Something was wrong. I looked down at my blade and dropped it in surprise. The red droplets falling from it were staying in the air, frozen. And now that I’d dropped it, it was staying still as well.

The Duke? Was this a variation on the globe from earlier? If the Duke wasn’t dead – no, he had to be. Otherwise I wouldn’t have the signet. There was a sharp snip from behind me and I turned. There was someone sitting at the edge of the Heart, a piece of ice and a knife in hand. He – it was a man, slender and dark-skinned – was carving the ice. His hair was long and dark, coming down in waves over his shoulders. On his brow I glimpsed a crown, fashioned in grey dead wood and weeping blood-red sap. He turned to me and a single glance was enough to have me fall to my knees. The ice in my shoulder burned , until the pain left and a strange and terrible clarity replaced it.

“Catherine Foundling,” the King of Winter spoke.

The words were not words. They were mountains old as dawn ground to nothingness one season at a time, they were ice so deep in the heart of the world it had never seen the light of day. My ears were bleeding.

“Come, sit,” he ordered. “It’s time we had a little chat, don’t you think?”

Chapter 15: Bestowal

“Most live out their days on an isle of vapid ignorance, shying away from the dark and hungry waters that surround it. To seek power is to brave the tides, but one who does should not expect to see those shores again.”
– Translation of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness, widely attributed to the young Dead King

I forced myself back to my feet. This was too close to kneeling for my tastes. The movement came easier than I’d thought, easier than it should have – whatever he had done with the ice, it had strengthened me. For however long it would last. Fae gifts were notoriously fickle things. The King was carving his bauble of ice, ivory knife shaving off one sliver after another another. The sound was almost deafening, in the silence that had grasped this world. I made my way to the edge one step after another, almost slipping as I sat down. My bare hand held onto the ice and I managed to settle by his side without tumbling down into the waters, pushing down a groan of pain. The ruler of Winter casually allowed another sliver of ice to fall down, indifferent to my struggles. I opened my mouth, then closed it. I’d stood before entities as powerful as this one before, but for once I was entirely unsure what to say. Not cowed, perhaps, but so aware of the current frailty of my existence I might as well be.

“You did well with Auster,” the King said.

I could still hear echoes to his voice that had me cringing, but it was not as brutal as it had been easier. I wasn’t seeing things instead of hearing words, at least. Had he restrained himself, or was I getting used to it? The second thought almost had me shiver. Some changes could only come at a price.

“First time killing a Duke,” I croaked. “Wouldn’t recommend it.”

My throat was scraped a little too raw to manage flippancy properly, sadly. My attempt at humour fell flat – looking at the King’s face for too long hurt my eyes, but from what I glimpsed there was no trace of amusement.

“Larat believed you would avoid the tale entirely,” the King said. “But he is a creature of war, mine own Hound of Winter. One does not rely on the Prince of Nightfall to trace the path ahead.”

The lack of depth perception probably didn’t help his case, I thought, and the almost chuckle that escaped me set my lungs aflame. Gods , that was not a pleasant feeling. I needed to get run through less often.

“You backed me in a corner,” I said.

“And this offends you?” the King of Winter said, sounding amused for the first time. “Submission is ever the lot of the weak. If you would rage at anything, rage at your own impotence.”

I hacked out a mocking laugh along with what might just have been a chunk of my lung. The bit of flesh stained my lips red as I spat it out, like rouge paid for in blood.

“I’m not,” I said. “Impotent. Wouldn’t be here if I was. You need something from me.”

“Ah, mortals,” the creature fondly said. “Always you seek to bargain until the very last breath. Your kind is a wonder.”

I’d always believed, deep down, that if I ever met a god it would be about this condescending. I was darkly pleased to be proved right.

“I already took what I need,” I said.

“You took what I allowed,” the King replied. “Do not mistake allowance for triumph.”

Even with the clarity the ice had forced on me, I was exhausted. It had taken every scrap of what I had to get me through the fight with the Duke taking only three lethal wounds – never before had I ever spent that much power so quickly. His power had not made me better, not really: it just felt like I was too tired to sleep. If I’d been having this conversation with Heiress I would have called what was being said posturing, but what need did the fucking King of Winter have to posture with me? He could end me with a thought. He was in a league so far above my own even trying to grasp the difference between us might kill me. And Ranger fights things like this for sport. Merciless Gods, what kind of monsters had Black gathered under his banner?

“I’m too close to the grave to play this game properly,” I said. “I lied my way to a claim. Are you going to deny me?”

He laughed. It sounded like wind against dead branches, like blood freezing inside a still-beating heart. I could feel the bones in my neck creak, feeling so fragile a single snap would break them.

“This is Winter, Catherine Foundling,” he said. “You own what you kill.”

“Then you’ll stop attacking Marchford?” I asked.

“That purpose has already been served,” the King said. “We are now part of the dream you call Callow.”

And that settled that. I’d achieved what I’d set out to achieve, though I knew there’d be a price coming. It left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, the way this had all gone down. I’d been played since the beginning by something so much more dangerous than me that there was no retaliation I could deal out. The leverage I’d thought I had was enough to keep me alive, but nothing more – and pushing it would likely get me killed. I sat there next to a god, and prepared to make a mistake. I’d once thought that Masego’s need to always be exact was because he was the Apprentice, but that wasn’t entirely true. He’d had that tendency before he became the Apprentice, I now believed. Archer had led me to the greater truth: Named, whatever their Name, were more . We were larger in everything, and when we grew our flaws grew as well. Urges that had been ignorable when we were mortal no longer were. Black would always seek victory regardless of the costs, Archer would always indulge in what appealed to her and me? I’d once thought it was my reckless streak that had grown into the flaw that would get me killed, but that wasn’t quite right. It was that the part of me that would have been able to bite its tongue was long buried. My mouth opened, knowing I was about to commit a blunder. Because this wretch of a god had killed some of my people, and I could not let that go unanswered.

“You killed my men,” I said. “When you sent your fae into my city.”

“Your men would have died,” he said. “What does it matter, that it was my doing or that of time?”

“You robbed them of the life they could have lived,” I replied through gritted teeth. “You took from them. A debt is owed.”

“Their existence weighed less than wind,” the King said. “Nothing can be taken from nothing.”

“This is not a bargain, King of Winter, it’s an oath ,” I hissed. “One day, we’ll meet again. Not tomorrow, not next month, not for decades. After your game’s played out. After I’ve learned to kill gods. On that day, I’ll come to collect.”

“Will you?” he wondered.

It did not even take a heartbeat. Instantaneous would have been wrong still – it had always been the case that the water in my eyes was frozen. I felt blood running down the side of my face that should not be feeling anything at all. My bad leg, the one that still limped when I tired, twisted and broke with a sound like dead wood snapping. I heard the whistle of wind, more deafening than a hundred thousand horns, and after a flare of pain that dragged me to the edge of unconsciousness I heard nothing at all. I choked on my own tongue as frost spread over my skin, robbing me of the last of my senses.

“If I were a prince,” the King told me, “I would be the Prince of Bleak Solstice. Some of that remains even under the Deadwood Crown.”

I was a prisoner in my own body, the only sensation left to me the feeling of his fingers tipping up my chin.

“I could inflict on you every pain you’ve ever felt and some you cannot even conceive of,” he said idly. “But you are of no use to me broken. One of those flitting around is quite enough.”

His thumb ran its way up my cheek until it rested under my eye, and his other hand came to match it on the other side.

“You are in need of a reminder, Catherine Foundling,” he said, “of the difference between bravery and ignorance.”

The King clucked his tongue.

“No, not the eyes,” he said. “Yours are too dull to make a fitting ornament. Something, perhaps, a little more pointed.”

He withdrew from my face and the relief lasted for barely a moment before I felt his hand tear through my chest. I screamed soundlessly as his fingers closed around my beating heart, ripping it out like he was picking lint from cloth. The sorcery that had blanketed my senses lifted like a veil, leaving me on my feet with the King standing in front of me. I could see my heart in one hand, frozen black and solid. In the other was the bauble he’d been making out of ice, now a perfect carving of the moon. He thrust it where my heart had been, flesh closing around it as he withdrew and it began beating.

“I recognize you as heiress to the Duke of Violent Squalls,” he said. “Made by prophecy, heirloom and the word of a king. Your inheritance, claimed by rite of blood, is confirmed.”

I gasped for air, feeling the blood in my veins cooling further with every passing moment.

“Catherine Foundling,” he said. “I name you Duchess of Moonless Nights. I grant you the seat of Marchford, and on these sacred grounds claim your fealty.”

My surroundings ebbed away, replaced by deep and bottomless darkness. I stood there unmoving, seeing only the dark-skinned king and the blood-red sap dripping onto his brow from his wooden crown.

“I demand no fidelity and offer no respite,” the King of Winter laughed. “I demand no faith and offer no protection. I give you slight and deceit, I receive hatred and betrayal. The Court of Winter receives you as one of its own, ‘till your last desperate breath clawing at the dark.”

Power pulsed in my chest, spreading through my veins. I felt the third part of my soul, the missing aspect I had yet to forge, fill with something old and too large to comprehend.

“I stand by my oath, dead thing,” I rasped. “Before my days are done I will see you unmade .”

“Then you are a Duchess of Winter in truth,” the King grinned, teeth like stolen moonlight. “I charge you with the defeat of Summer, Catherine Foundling. I charge you with the making of peace , exacted from the battlefield.”

He leaned forward.

“You have six times the coming of your title, or your heart is forever mine,” he said.

Hands rose to my face again, to my eyes.

“Now sleep,” he said, “and dream .”

Fingers pulled down my pupils and darkness took me.

—

Dawn does not exist, then it does.

I see two cities and two lands around them. One is made of plenty, orchards of fruitful trees and fields of green. Juice runs down the chin of children as they bite into peaches, playing under the sun by pale walls. Colours for which there are no names yet fill half the world, proud lords and ladies clustering at the feet of a crowned and faceless silhouette. In its gaze is Summer, the heat that burns and hangs in the air like vapour. The other land is ice and illusion, and there nothing grows. Wind howls and creatures die under knives of obsidian, the warmth of their blood staining lips and chasing away, for a single blessed moment, the cruel bite of the chill. There the games of the children are vicious, for victory can only come from the defeat of others. At the heart of a maze, lords and ladies with smiles treacherous cluster at the feet of a crowned and faceless silhouette. In its gaze is Winter, the cold that that devours and leaves only absence behind.

War does not exist, then it does.

The hungry reach for the bounty of the full and this brings strife, as their taking is not gentle and this offence cannot go unanswered. Clarion calls make the sky shudder, for the host of Summer is a thing of might. They come in silk and steel, red pennants stirring in the wind like the promise of blood to come. Where they go noon follows, relentless and unforgiving as its heralds. Winter is not announced. It creeps like a snake in the dark, a slithering host of shades and clawed things that want , want until it hollows them out. They wear dead things and wield sharpness torn from the ground, eyes covetous under the blanket of night. None are valiant in the dark but all are desperate. Justice , the hooves of white winged horses thunder as they take flight. More , the blue-eyed things on horned horses whisper back, slender lances glinting. There are cries and screams. The moon falls, burnt black, and as it breaks the world Summer triumphs.

Noon spreads across two lands. Nothing is left of the hungry but ashes, trampled contemptuously. Ice melts away, leaving behind bleak black earth. The world is made a festival and Summer prospers, ripening again and again. The proud grow ever prouder, until the first fruit spoils. The sun does not rest and the land buckles under it. Pride turns to arrogance and under red pennants lords and ladies spill blood, turning on each other. Only one can have most, and none have ever tasted defeat. The land is scorched but there is no relief, for Summer advances and does not know retreat. The red haze hangs in the air like sickness as stomachs go from full to bursting like the fruits gone overripe, fire and steel claiming all until only the crowned and faceless silhouette remains. It remains seated on the throne as yellow leaves and roots claim the world, facing the sun until only a seared carcass remains.

This is the truth of Summer: everything burns out.

Green sprouts from bleak black earth, and from this harvest a city grows. Spring has come. In the other land yellow turns to orange and brown, leaves falling to the ground as the land is finally freed from agony. Autumn has come. From those remains grows a city, feeding on what little there is to offer. One land grows to plenty, the other dies a slow death. The sun rises, ice spreads.

The story comes again.

The hungry reach for the bounty of the full and this brings strife, as their taking is not gentle and this offence cannot go unanswered. Clarion calls ring out, but they are silenced. The serpent slithers into the heart of Summer, offering peace and hidden fangs even as its hunger sharpens behind honeyed words. Poison spreads in the blood and champions die, for not even the mighty can overcome the many soft deaths of Winter. When the host of Summer comes it is gaping and limping, fresh to a war that came unannounced. Justice , the hooves of white winged horses thunder as they take flight. The shades laugh as they devour them. More , they whisper back to the dead. The mighty die slow among their red pennants, striking at smoke and mirrors as snow begins to blanket the world. The sun grows ever paler until it falls from the sky, shattering as it breaks the world and Winter triumphs.

Night spreads across two lands. Proud corpses are clawed to bloody bone as the host clad in death and theft spills forth. Juicy peaches are ripped from trees and bitten into as the trees that bore them wither and die. Ice snakes across once-green fields made bare by the hungry. Winter feeds, feeds until it can almost understand fullness. It is not enough. Pale and gloried walls are torn down, pennants drained of colour until all is bare and empty and still the host wants . There is less and less while there are still many so vicious games are made ever more vicious for in the end there will be only one mouthful left, and only one mouth to devour it. The night deepens and desperation does with it, as bleak winds and starvation take what murder and betrayal does not. Not even feeding off each other is enough. Then only the crowned silhouette on the throne remains, unmoving in the cold as it tries to feel something, anything and dies an empty husk.

This is the truth of Winter: we all die alone.

The cold turns on itself and a remnant of a remnant frees itself from the ground, green sprouting from the bleak black earth. From this harvest a city grows, for Spring has come. In the land that was once Summer, the bare bones of what was once plenty are gnawed on. A city of the dying forms around the little turning to nothing, for Autumn shapes itself out of the coming of absence.

The story comes again. In the end, there is no end.

—

I wasn’t sure exactly when I crossed the boundary from sleep to wakefulness. There was no transition, no burst of awareness. I was not awake, then I was. The thought had me shivering. I was under quilt, in a bed more rough than soft, and wearing clothes I didn’t remember putting on. I rose to a seat and found myself surrounded by bare stone walls that were somewhat familiar. There were sounds coming from outside, but one closer: in a corner of the room, slumped in a chair, Hakram was snoring. Marchford , I realized. I’m back.

“Catherine?”

I glanced at the door as Adjutant jerked awake at the noise. Masego was at the threshold, looking somewhere in the middle of relieved and worried. I brushed back my hair absently.

“So,” I said, “There’s now a god on my murder list. Someone be a dear get me a drink – it’s going to be a rough few months.”

Villainous Interlude: Proscenium

“We should never forget that for a great evil to be defeated, a lesser evil must first become great.”
– Queen Eleanor Fairfax, founder of the Fairfax dynasty

Liesse was under siege, though forces had yet to deign test her walls. With the Summer Court having seized both Dormer and Holden, the two Callowan cities closest to the Waning Woods, the Empire had abandoned the south and begun mustering north of Vale instead. With fae hunting parties scouring the land coming from the west and the east, Akua had been forced to rely on her own wiles to keep her territory safe. Summer was holding court at Dormer and the true threats had yet to take the field, but even lesser nobles of Arcadia were dangerous enough. Unlike those of Winter, they would not control and subjugate the population: all those who did not immediately bow to the Queen of Summer were destroyed a riot of flame. Which was rather unfortunate, since Diabolist still needed southern labour to finish her work in Liesse. The fae were not being accommodating of her timetable.

Gathering a force of her own to field had proven tiresome, though she’d been granted an unexpected boon. Since she’d publically sacrificed the last mercenary force she’d hired in Mercantis – not that the merchants had particularly minded, after she’d paid up her very expensive penalty fees – hiring fresh blood had been difficult. The war in the Free Cities had ensured the most reputable companies were already all being employed by one side or the other, anyway, leaving behind only the dregs. Levantine raiders too savage for that already savage nation, a company of unreliable drow exiles and, amusingly enough, Helikean soldiers who’d been enemies of both the Exiled Prince and the ruling Tyrant. The last of those three were the steadiest, but they numbered only a thousand.

The boon, she had engineered herself with the gracious help of Mother and Dread Empress Malicia. Even as the south of Callow went up in flames, the Wasteland had gone to war with itself. After High Lady Tasia of Wolof had defaulted on several payments owed the Tower for granted privileges, Akua’s cousin Sargon had immediately attempted a coup. Normally he would not have dared: it was one thing for Cousin Sargon to set himself against Mother, another to attempt the theft of the due of a Named. But the Diabolist had sent him a discreet message, conceding to his claim in exchange for several concessions involving gold and sundry favours. Armed rebellion exploded in Wolof before the day was out. Sargon had won the initial skirmish after deploying a dozen powerful devils, at which point Mother had responded by unleashing a demon on his men. The mess that ensued escalated in brutality.

Dread Empress Malicia sent in all the Legions garrisoning Praesi territory to restore order even as what remained of the Truebloods watched the greatest among them being cornered like an animal. Akua had, naturally, reached out to the most prominent members left. Gold, men and mages had flowed to her territory as Holden fell to the Summer Court and she became flanked on both sides. Including her mercenaries, Akua now had slightly over ten thousand soldiers under her command. Of them almost a tenth were mages, though only a handful of those could touch High Arcana. Still, it had been an effort to keep the delight off her face: oh, the kind of things she could make with this many spellcasters at her disposal.

And she would have to make them, of this there was no doubt. No reinforcements were coming for the foreseeable future. The legions of the Wasteland were busy keeping Wolof contained, and would not be able to march anywhere for months. There’d been talk of some of the legions guarding the Red Flower Vales under Marshal Grem One-Eye coming south as the orc himself took operational command, but Proceran movement on the other side of the border had smothered that notion in the crib. Cordelia Hasenbach might rule over a mongrel nation, but Akua had to give her this: she was a fair hand at the Great Game. With One-Eye and his men remaining to prevent an invasion by the Principate, command had fallen to Marshal Ranker in Denier – who’d also had to decline, as the Duchy of Daoine had declared full mobilization of the Watch and refused to give any explanation.

That left General Istrid with seniority, and she’d stripped Summerholm of its garrison before marching south to muster all she could north of Vale. As a crowning irony the single largest army in Callow, the Fifteenth under General Juniper, was forced in a defensive position at Marchford and unable to participate. The gate into Arcadia could not be left undefended: the Winter Court might just decide to establish a beachhead of their own, and not even Praes could withstand the pressure of two Courts running rampant. Until Foundling reappeared, her people were paralyzed. It had been most amusing to see everything Squire had built over the last year collapse the moment she was gone, Diabolist had to admit. Upon hearing word of Squire’s disappearance into Arcadia the Praesi among the Ruling Council had swiftly struck a deal with the Guild of Assassins and seized power in Laure before declaring martial law across Callow – a move greeted with widespread rioting in the cities.

Best of all, when the usurpers had first accessed the treasury they’d found absolutely nothing: the Guild of Thieves had already emptied it in full, and to add insult to injury taken a tithe of a tenth from every Imperial Governor’s own funds. Callow had descended into utter anarchy and in the chaos Akua’s own hands were freer than ever before . She held the only remaining stronghold in the south, her workforce had swelled with refugees and until Summer was dealt with she was essentially untouchable no matter what she did. The Empire could not afford for her to rise in rebellion, not with this many wolves at the gate. The situation, Diabolist thought, had fallen into her lap like a gift from the Gods Below. The dark-skinned woman strode the smouldering battlefield where her forces had prevailed not an hour past, Fasili trailing her dutifully. He’d been in command for the engagement, the largest one her army had waged so far.

“Fewer than two hundred casualties, Lady Diabolist,” the other aristocrat said. “The revolving wards were a success: all their heavyweights focused on breaking them rather than firing mass magic at our troops.”

The conversation would be a very different one if the new wards had failed, Akua thought. There’d been a Count among the catches of the day, and if one of those had decided to decimate her ranks she’d have lost at least a fifth of her soldiers. What the fae of Summer lacked in subtlety, they more than made up in destructive power. The very reason that her mages had been instructed to capture instead of kill, at it happened.

“I want their corpses raised by nightfall,” she ordered. “Form a separate unit from the unded, under a cadre of necromancers. I expect their ranks will swell before this is over.”

“It will be as you say,” the other Soninke nodded.

“As for the wards, I’ve been told one of them was fractured,” the Diabolist said. “We’ll need to refine the concept.”

“Your First Mage is already designing improvements,” Fasili replied. “We won a great victory today, my lady. Fae with titles of this magnitude are hard to kill, much less subdue.”

The Diabolist’s lips quirked the slightest bit at the words. Fasili would take it as approval of his flattery, but the truth was different: it had been a very long time since any Praesi had a First Mage. The title had fallen out of favour when the Name of Warlock emerged: being the most powerful of a High Lord’s spellcasters had been judged to be meaningless when there was the greater accolade of a Name to be claimed. Her revival of the title had been for largely personal reasons, though she did approve of the tribute to ancient custom.

“The Count of Golden Harvest,” she said slowly, savouring the title.

“And two Baronesses,” Fasili added with a vicious smile.

Fewer than a hundred fae without court titles had also been caught, though they paled in importance compared to the other three. They would be useful fodder, true enough, but for some rituals quality was required over quantity. Leaving behind the sea of tents her soldiers were setting up for he night, the two of them made their way to the wide flat plain to the side of where the battle had taken place. There were four massive wards in place there, her mages milling around them like busy little bees. The largest held all the lower-ranked fae, shackled in iron and badly beaten. Though much weaker than the titled fae, their number alone was enough to make them dangerous: a hundred and fifty mages maintained the ward in rotating shifts to ensure no concerted attempt could be made to break the glowing sigils hanging in the air that kept them prisoner. The other three wards were not so heavily manned: they held one of the high-ranked nobles individually each of them under three times three bindings, all interlocked and reinforcing each other.

It was around the wards imprisoning the Count of Golden Harvest that a greying Soninke with a closely-cropped beard was kneeling, fingers dancing nimbly across a set of runes floating in the air. Akua studied them curiously: High Arcana, all of them, yet she did not recognize all of them. She was not surprised. Brilliant she might be, but she was still young and Dumisai of Aksum had spent a lifetime plumbing the depths of sorcery. A moment later the runes rearranged themselves before disappearing as a hum of power came form the ward surrounding the Count. The fae grunted in pain, drawing interest from the mage close to him.

“Is it physically painful to have more than nine tenths of your power restrained?” he asked in Mtethwa.

“I will see you made ash for this insolence, sorcerer,” the Count of Golden Harvest hissed.

“Your threats are of no academic value, creature,” the man noted. “This is most unproductive.”

“First Mage,” Fasili interrupted, his head dipping in respect.

The sorcerer jerked in surprise, only then realizing he had company behind him. He smiled at Akua’s right hand man hesitantly.

“Good evening,” he began, then trailed off. “... You.”

“Lord Fasili Mirembe,” Akua provided, too well-practiced to be openly amused..

“Yes,” he said. “That.”

“Papa,” the Diabolist greeted warmly as her father rose to his feet.

“Mpanzi,” the older man smiled. “Lord Warlock’s research appears to be accurate. From what I’ve seen fae are made of the same matter than Arcadia itself – there is no difference at a fundamental level between one of them and, say, a stone taken from there.”

“How dare you,” the Count said angrily.

Her father absent-mindedly waved a hand and a gag of blue runes appeared in the fae’s mouth, stuffing it shut.

“Your ritual is prepared, before I forget,” he said. “Very good materials you’ve secured. Conversion rates for fae will be much higher than with human sacrifices.”

“That will be all, Lord Fasili,” Akua said, half-turning towards him.

“By your leave, Lady Diabolist,” the other Soninke bowed.

He cast an irritated glance at Papa before leaving, but there was no true heat there. Her father’s absolute lack of ambition in matters of authority made him the opposite of a rival and her known fondness for him meant he was too costly to retaliate against for a slight as minor as the one he’d been handed. No doubt an officer would be on the receiving end of Fasili’s irritation before the night was over. One of the drow, most likely. They found it difficult to take orders from a man, even if that man had given his allegiance to a woman, and Praesi highborn did not have much tolerance for insoburdination.

“He seems a very reliable young man,” Papa said, watching him walk away.

He would have you dead within an hour if given leave , Akua thought. Her father had spent his entire adult life under the distant, if vicious, protection of Mother: he’d never had to develop the kind of nose for enmity that most powerful Praesi mages needed to survive. His judgement in these matters was... lacking. In most people Akua would have considered this a crippling flaw, but in truth she preferred him like this. Unaware of the dangers lurking around him, able to do what he loved without worry. She could keep him safe from the scavengers. Diabolist had made it very clear to her subjects that Dumisai of Aksum was not to be touched: feeding a scheming minor noble to a swarm of imps in full view of her court had made that point very thoroughly.

“He has his uses,” Akua conceded.

Papa nodded, already visibly bored with the avenue of conversation.

“With today’s lot you’ve almost two hundred of the lesser fae,” he said. “That should be enough for a Lesser Breach.”

The term was fairly technical, and few aside from Praesi mages would have known its meaning. Diabolism was, at its heart, a branch of magic concerned with the summoning, binding and contracting of devils. And demons, of course, though resorting lightly to such creatures was the path to fates worse than death. Her people had practiced this kind of sorcery since days predating the Miezan occupation and while it had originally been a means for a single practitioner to gain power or knowledge, under the Empire it had become developed as a tool of war. Dread Empress Triumphant – may she never return – was widely held as the greatest diabolist to ever live, above even the Dead King. She’d summoned and bound entire legions of devils, put demons at their head and her bindings had been so well-crafted they had held for centuries after her demise. To raise an entire hosts of devils, as she had, means other than summoning them one at a time had to be used: the amount of wasted time and power would otherwise be massive.

The method to get around this was called a Breach: a portal into one of the Hells would be opened, with a mass binding woven into it. Any devil crossing into Creation would be subject to said binding, allowing for a degree of control – though a much looser one than if the binding had been designed for a specific entity instead. Convention divided Breaches between the Lesser and the Greater. Akua herself had used a Lesser Breach at Liesse when deploying her army of devils until the mages of the Fifteenth shut it down, fuelling it with the lives of the Stygian slaves. A Lesser Breach was temporary and unstable by nature, impossible to maintain for long. A Greater Breach was a different matter entirely, and only one had occurred in all of Calernian history: the Dead King’s ritual in Keter, which had opened a permanent and stable portal into one of the Hells. Little progress had been made since then in understanding exactly how the Greater Breach had been made, though Diabolist had come to understand some part of it.

“More fuel would be preferable, but I don’t have the time to spare,” Akua said. “I’ll have to do with limited numbers and make second Breach when we’ve the fae for it.”

“You’d get more meat for the expense if you went lower than the Thirtieth Hell,” Papa pointed out. “As it is a seventh of that power goes into the Due.”

“Foundling made it very clear during the Rebellion that a well-trained army will tear through anything lower than the Thirtieth, given time to prepare,” Diabolist replied. “The Summer Court is in a league above what her forces were back then. If I want the devils to survive the first engagement, I can’t use chumaili or kichabwa .”

Her father hummed, mulling it over.

“Well, you won’t get many walin-falme but you can be sure they won’t die easy,” he said.

The term meant imperial guard , in an archaic dialect of Mtethwa. The devils were old favourites of Tyrants seeking to invade Callow, preferred to more bestial breeds for their above average intelligence and ability to use forged armaments. They were also noted for their resistance to fire, though it was difficult to model how effective it would be against fae flame. Their leathery skin and deformed bat wings had many mages speculating Dread Emperor Sorcerous had used them as breeding stock to create the much larger winged monsters that were used to access higher levels of the Tower, and would allow them to answer fae flight on the battlefield. It was a shame, truly, that she would not get more than four hundred of them from the Lesser Breach. Their inaptitude for tactical thinking was perhaps their greatest weakness, and the reason they usually served under the command of the Black Knight of the era. Akua lacked such a commander however, which was why it had been so important to capture the high-ranked fae. The Lesser Breach could wait until the prisoners had been brought back to Liesse, but Diabolist intended to summon her officers tonight.

“The Count first,” she said.

“For the best,” Papa agreed. “He’ll be the most exhausting.”

The two of them strode into the ward keeping the Count of Golden Harvest contained, the thick and heavy magic washing over their skin. Her father flicked his wrist and the gag in the fae aristocrat’s mouth dissolved.

“You court your doom, mortals,” he said harshly. “My Queen will have vengeance for what happened today.”

“There is a theory by a very clever man,” Papa said, entirely ignoring the threat,, “that fae can die in truth.”

“Your ignorance rivals only your arrogance, sorcerer,” the Count sneered.

“Slitting your throat returns you to Arcadia, to be born again,” her father continued. “But, ah, fae are made of power are they not?”

“We are Summer incarnate,” the creature smiled. “You will all burn under the sun.”

“Yes, power incarnate,” the greying man said admiringly. “What happens, then, if this power is used up ?”

“No mere insect can undo the workings of the Gods,” the fae said.

“I do not believe,” Diabolist said, “that we have been introduced.”

The Count glanced at her with contempt.

“I know what you are, cursed one,” he spat. “Defeat is carved into the bones of your kind.”

“My name,” she said, “is Akua Sahelian. I am a villain.”

“The pale imitation of an ancient enemy,” the fae mocked.

“Oh yes,” Diabolist agreed softly. “That is exactly what I am. The Enemy , they call us in the West. I am the last of a line unbroken since time immemorial. My kind has usurped the mantle of gods, stolen secrets from beyond Creation and turned kingdoms into sea. I am Praesi of the old blood, fae. You should kneel in awe.”

“You are the dying ember of a fire long gone,” the Count sneered. “Soon to be put out by the might of Summer.”

“You think you know might ?” Akua laughed. “I will turn your blood to smoke. I will feed the horrors that crush your bones with the sound of your screams. The hearts of your children will raise my fortresses to the sky and make my ships sail on solid ground. You may have been godlings in your wretched home, but you’ve stepped down from that pedestal – and down here, we bleed the likes of you over altars. Your poor, misbegotten creature. You actually believe you have a chance.”

Her Name pulsed beneath her skin even as her eyes turned cold.

“But you’re in Creation now, Count. Here be monsters.”

The Count smirked.

“Do you seek to frighten me, child? Summer does not know fear.”

Akua slowly unsheathed her knife, resting the wickedly sharp edge on the side of the fae’s throat. He looked into her eyes, undaunted. Diabolist smiled.

“No, not yet,” she murmured. “But I will teach you.”

Raid

“Though goblins are the most secretive of all peoples, audiences with Matrons granted me some insight into their people. The Tribes have no true concept of war because there is no such thing as peace, to a goblin – only the temporary witholding of violence.”
– Extract from “Horrors and Wonders”, famed travelogue of Anabas the Ashuran

There was nothing quite like a spot of murder to get the blood going in the morning. There weren’t any proper roads this close to the southern Marchford hills, but there was a dirt path wide enough for carts to take. Special Tribune Robber’s detached cohort had never set an ambush there before: it had been easier to catch them close to Dormer previously, but since that whole region had gone up into literal flames he’d had to readjust. The Wasteland was bleeding people and wealth like a slow fucking raider, and all the meat was headed for Liesse. Not a week past he’d watched a full thousand Taghreb household troops march to Heiress’ – well, Diabolist now if the rumours were to be believed – stronghold in an orderly column. That had been too much of a mouthful for his people to swallow, though he’d had the wells ahead of them poisoned as a ‘welcome to Callow’ present. They’d get a few corpses out of it before wising up and sticking to their own supplies.

This particular bunch was more in his wheelhouse. Only a hundred of them, though his scouts said they were heavy on the mages. That was fine. The Tribes had not gone through seven goblin rebellions without learning how to deal with those, even before the War College had shoved anti-caster doctrine down his trousers. Hit first, hit hard and mess with the field of vision. Robber’s cohort had been lying in wait for half the night, and now that dawn had broken the Praesi were on the move again. Five carts, dragged by oxen. Hard to tell what was inside with the cloths over the loads, but the last two they’d caught had been full of stone and metals. What the Diabolist wanted those for was anyone’s guess, but to the yellow-eyed tribune it smelled of a flying fortress. He kind of hoped it was. Not only would it mean he’d get to assault one of those before the year was out, it would also solve the Boss’ refugee problem.

Call him a cynic, but he doubted the Diabolist had let all of those people into Liesse out of the goodness of her Wastelander heart. They might as well have ‘ritual fuel’ branded onto their foreheads.

All of his raiders were old hands at this by now, so there was no need for him to give any orders. The tribune remained pressed into the ground, his form covered with grass and leaves. Most of the time putting soldiers on both sides of the road meant you were a fucking amateur commander and losing a few of your own to crossfire, but his people weren’t greenhorns. They wouldn’t blindly volley into the mass: his cohort wasn’t rich enough in ammunition to afford not picking its targets. Wide unblinking eyes watching the Praesi approach, Robber silently counted down until the fun began. Just as the middle of the procession hit the ground they’d picked, Captain Clipper whistled and the demolition charges blew. Lieutenant Rattler had dug underneath the path during the night to place them. By the looks of it, she’d flavoured the mix with a few smokers. Robber approved, it was a vicious little twist on the usual recipe: even as the oxen panicked, three patches of billowing toxic smoke spread along the enemy column.

“KILL THEM!” Robber called out, rising to his feet.

“TAKE THEIR STUFF!” the call came back.

The Praesi just screamed, which wasn’t anywhere as snappy. Bad form, the goblin mused. Even the usual yells of you can’t do this or do you know who I am had more of a flavour to them. That flavour was usually blood, more specifically blood in their mouths, but who was he to judge? Still alive, that was who. The tribune left his crossbow on the ground, leaning into a run even as he unsheathed his knives. Borer was in charge of the shooting, and though the man remained hopelessly worthy of his name bolts began taking lives before the special tribune stepped into the fray. A streak of lightning from the column hit the ground with a spray of dirt ahead of him, but Robber adjusted his stride to go around without missing a beat. The casting from the mages was sporadic, and wherever it came from was drowned in brightsticks before they could manage a second round. Sliding under a frenzied ox, the yellow-eyed tribune emerged at the back of black-robed Taghreb and punctured her kidney without any warning. She tried to get a last word out, but a knife to the throat took care of that. Blades still dripping, the goblin moved on.

He’d given orders to take a few prisoners, but his merry minions did tend to pull the trigger whenever something got into their crosshairs. He didn’t entirely blame them: any Praesi important enough to know something would have a few nasty curses in their arsenal. Smoothly scuttling under a cart, Robber sought his next target. Of the original hundred Praesi, half had died to the initial charges and volley. Another few had been incapacitated by the smoke and maybe twenty had died to the blades of the raiders who’d gone charging in. Borer’s boys were putting bolts in any isolated ones, and that left... a nice little cluster of twenty near the middle of the skirmish, shielding a furious-looking Soninke from the violence. Now that looked like someone who’d give up useful stuff under the knife. Robber sheathed one of his blades, took a brightstick out of his haversack and shoved it under his armpit as he struck the match. A heartbeat later he popped out from under the cart with a lit cylinder in hand, running at the cluster as fast as he could.

Two robed men turned their eyes to him immediately. Robber grinned nastily and went though the old drill. One, they cast. Two pairs of hands rose and two pairs of lips spoke words in the arcane tongue as his feet devoured the distance. Two, they aim. They’d been trained for battle-casting, he saw. They only picked their angle once his feet were on the ground, between steps. Three, be elsewhere. He rolled to the side, the space he’d occupied a heartbeat earlier filling with flame and sizzling dark energy. Smoothly returning to his feet, he tossed the brightstick right above their heads and closed his eyes. The bright flash and loud bang would make sure they weren’t able to cast a second time before he was on them. Pupils contracting even under his eyelids, Robber blessed the Gobbler for having made his people’s senses harder to shake than those of humans: he’d been in the brightstick’s range too, but he’d get back his eyes and ears before the mages did. Leaning so far forward his chin almost touched the floor, the tribune sliced through the back of one’s leg and simultaneously buried his other blade in the other’s belly.

The Praesi in charge was still blinded, he saw, and with a grin he leapt onto the man’s face. Wrapping his legs around the Soninke’s neck as he toppled to the ground, Robber sunk his teeth into the flesh beneath the hair. Much screaming ensued, to his amusement. Please, I didn’t even touch the skull. Unlike orcs fangs, goblins ones weren’t capable of crunching through bone: his kind were more scavengers than predators.

“I got the big one,” he called out. “Wipe out the rest.”

“Crossbows, fire at will,” Captain Borer calmly ordered. “Munitions, withhold.”

The tribune’s second-in-command lacked that touch of in-your-face that was the usual signature of sappers, but something had to be said for keeping your calm when the blades were out. He almost reminded Robber of Hakram, if the orc had traded away his sense of humour and a few feet in height for superior goblin good looks. Poor Hakram, sadly born one of goblinkind’s homelier cousins. Thick skin, thick bones, but small eyes like a ferret and too much muscle to ever crawl his way through a tunnel. The Soninke under him was panicking so Robber let go long enough to kick him in the face until he fell unconscious. A handful of crossbow bolts later and no Praesi were left to make trouble, his people swarming the field eagerly. Robber wiped his blades on the unconscious Soninke’s face before sheathing them.

“So what have we got, my pretties?” he asked.

“Stone, Special Tribune,” word came from further down as canvas was ripped off carts.

“These guys have the worst loot,” Lieutenant Rattler complained.

“Rattler, stop whining and bind this one,” Robber said, pointing a foot at the unconscious Soninke.

“You know I’m right, Chief,” she muttered, eyes flicking down and lips demurely covering her teeth in a display acknowledging his authority.

She’d been Loud Eagle tribe before joining the Legions. One of the few surface tribes that still raided regularly – their Matrons and women took more of an interest in matters of violence, as a consequence. War was still spoken of of male’s work with that understated contempt, but no Matron would let a matter so important to her tribe entirely in the hands of males. There was a reason Robber didn’t put anyone fresh from the Eyries in her line: Rattler was opinionated enough that she’d reinforce bad habits from home. A lot of male goblins deferred to women, even those of lower rank, for their first few years in the Legions. Fucked with the chain of command, not that the Special Tribune cared a lot about that – but officers afraid of contradicting a female wouldn’t speak up themselves, and that he actually gave a shit about. Didn’t help that there wasn’t a single female goblin in the Fifteenth that wasn’t an officer, since they didn’t enrol in the ranks: it was the War College for them or nothing at all. Command was the birthright of their gender, after all.

The Special Tribune spat to the side. There was a reason unruly types like him were dumped into the Legions: back home he’d have started to ask questions eventually, and though he’d have gotten a shallow grave for it the Matrons didn’t like anyone rocking their boat.

“Well, would you look at that ,” Captain Clipper called out. “Chief, we’re rich.”

Robber flicked a glance in the direction: Clipper was in the middle cart, sitting on what looked like a pile of solid gold ingots. The Special Tribune whistled.

“There’s your prize, Rattler,” he said. “Praesi gold. We get any richer than this and it’ll start the Eight Rising.”

“I nominate myself as Goddess-Queen of all the Tribes,” Clipper announced imperiously.

“Will you use your power for good?” one of the sappers asked, grinning.

“No,” Clipper decided. “Fear me, expendable minions. You will die in droves for my amusement.”

“As rival candidate, I nominate Borer wearing a wig,” Robber yelled.

Considering goblins were hairless, the hilarity of an expressionless Borer ruling with luscious blond curls was not to be underestimated. There were murmurs of approval among the horde.

“You can serve as my treacherous consort, Robber,” Clipper generously allowed.

The seductive flash of fangs was nothing new – the captain was a notorious flirt – but the way she’d accented his name in Lower Miezan had him frowning. It was almost the same that his name would be pronounced in stonetongue. Well, the last part of it anyway. Though in the bastard tongue of the Empire he was called Robber, a more accurate translation of his name in the Eyries would be the-glint-in-the-eyes-of-one-about-to-rob-the-unwary . Doing even that much was walking the line of what got you Preserver attention. Robber was not eager to have the hounds of the Matrons slaughter his entire cohort in their beds for leaking parts of the stonetongue to outsiders. He’d chastise her later in private.

“Float the notion by the Boss, see how that turns out,” he suggested.

“Fifty fifty odds, if it results in dead Truebloods,” a sapper called out.

There was a hearty round of cackles. His cohort set to torching everything but the gold cart – that was headed back to Marchford with their wounded – as Robber signalled for Borer to join him and they headed together for the still-unconscious Soninke. Rattler had tied him up good and proper, so they wasted no time in slapping the Wastelander awake. Eyes opened blearily and filled with rage before a heartbeat had passed. Gods, they were so predictable sometimes.

“Do you have any idea-“

Robber slapped him.

“Name?” he asked.

“I am Mulade Humin, heir to-“

Robber slapped him again.

“Nice to meet you, Mumu,” he said. “I’m Special Tribune Robber, official lesser lesser footrest to the Lady of Marchford.”

“What is the meaning of this attack, goblin?” the Soninke spat.

“You mean, like, in a philosophical sense?” Robber mused.

“I mean how dare you attack a highborn under the protection of the Lady Diabolist?” the noble sneered. “We will have your hide for this.”

Robber slapped him a third time, this once more for his personal satisfaction than anything.

“I’d worry more about surviving this conversation than what’s going to happen to me, if I were you,” the goblin said. “Borer, show him the knife.”

Captain Borer sighed and went fishing in his haversack, producing an oversized dagger with saw teeth and a ruby the size of an egg set into the pommel.

“This is the murder knife, Mumu,” Robber said. “Every time you don’t tell us what we want to know, we’re gonna use it.”

“Cheap tactics will not-“

Borer stabbed him in the shoulder without any need for prompting. The Soninke screamed.

“It’s like you’re not even listening,” Robber said, sadly shaking his head. “Now, Mumu, what does dear ol’ Akua need all this stone and gold for?”

“I don’t know,” Mulade said.

“Guess,” Robber said before Borer stabbed the man in the other shoulder.

“Sandstone is used in rituals,” the noble finally panted after another bout of screaming. “It has the property of clarity and you can’t find the right kind in the provinces.”

“What’s she building?” the Special Tribune asked.

“No one knows,” Mulade babbled hastily. “The Empress is trying to find out.”

“And if I asked you to guess?” Robber said, brow raising again.

“I’m not a mage,” the noble replied mulishly. “And you killed all of mine.”

“Fair enough,” the goblin shrugged.

He rose to his feet. Borer, without missing a beat, slit the prisoner’s throat. The man didn’t even have time to panic. Which was good, fear gave human flesh a bad taste and they were low on rations. The Special Tribune took a brightstick out of his haversack and began flipping it absent-mindedly. His cohort had done good work down here, but it was all diminishing returns from now on. Fae moved fast, and there was no telling how far up north they intended on going. Slitting Praesi throats was one thing, but tangling with a Court? Robber’s minions didn’t have the munitions for that. Nowhere near enough goblinfire in stock. His instincts told him it was time to bail before the hammer fell, but leaving a mystery untouched behind the walls of Liesse didn’t sit right with him either.

“Borer,” he finally said.

“Special Tribune?” the other goblin replied calmly.

“Take the cohort back to Marchford with the gold,” he ordered. “I’m taking a tenth south to have a closer look.”

“Is that wise, sir?” his captain asked, large eyes more green than yellow blinking.

Robber grinned unpleasantly, tossing up the brightstick.

“You know what they say, Captain – only cowards live to fifteen.”

He was thirteen, now, going on fourteen. About time he started taking some serious risks.

—

They’d waited for a moonless night. Swimming in the Hengest Lake wasn’t exactly his idea of a good time – as a rule goblins made better drowners than swimmers – but whoever ruled Liesse with the Diabolist gone ran a tight crew. Patrols were regular and wary, wards had been put everywhere and no cart passed the gates without a thorough inspection. Couldn’t put wards on water, though. It was one of those weird magical rules, like being unable to scry underground. Robber’s tenth emerged by the docks in silence, keeping to the shadows until the patrol above them passed. The Hellhound would be pissed, the goblin thought, when she heard that Liesse had tighter defences than Marchford. He’d make sure to send her a written report about it so she couldn’t ignore him.

“Rooftops,” Robber whispered, and his raiders nodded.

Going up was an old favourite of his people when forced to infiltrate cities. Unlike goblins humans rarely looked up unless given a reason, and Robber’s kind had no problem scaling stone walls – anything that couldn’t climb and lived in the Grey Eyries wouldn’t get to live long. Liesse was good territory for this kind of travelling, even better than Summerholm. The Gate of the East had been built to resist the Legions so its districts were punctured with wide avenues meant to stop exactly what he was doing, while Liesse was just an old maze of narrow streets this far into the city. Keeping out of sight, the dripping goblin waited for the rest of his tenth to join him. Going through the lake sadly meant they’d had to leave their munitions behind: the haversacks had been made with resisting rain in mind, but swimming was a little too much. Lieutenant Rattler was the last to scuttle across the tiles, and all of them knelt quietly as another patrol passed below.

“We’re going to trigger a ward sooner or later,” Rattler murmured.

“There should only be alarms, this deep,” the Special Tribune said. “And those are prone to triggering too easily. As long as we move fast we have a chance.”

“The Ducal Palace will be a fortress,” a sapper whispered.

“That just means it’s where the good stuff is,” Robber grinned, baring his fangs. “Quiet as the grave, my lovelies, or we’ll end up in one.”

They moved out. Parts of the city weren’t as he remembered, the goblin saw. Entire areas had been torn down and rebuilt in stone. And there’s guards on all of those. Whatever the Diabolist was up to, it was big. The Special Tribune made a point out of memorizing the layout as they travelled: the warlock’s get might be able to make something out of the pattern. Getting a closer look at whatever was inside those new buildings might have been even more useful, but it would also mean giving up the game early. Wastelanders always put the important stuff in the palaces, it wasn’t worth scrapping their chances to have a look there just for some minor hints in the inner city. The raiders only slowed when they reached the furthest edge of the roofs, the open expanse in front of them allowing no discrete path into the headquarters of the Praesi in Liesse.

Even at this hour of the night, the Ducal Palace was an orgy of torches. Most of those were fancy blue ever-burning flames that weren’t actually ever-burning – they needed regular juice from mages to keep going. Sadly, they did cast better light than regular torches. There was a full company of guards around the main entrance and from their perch they could see that behind the wall surrounding the palace there were more soldiers patrolling. Like they’d thought, the place was a fucking fortress. And if it didn’t have more wards than the average mage’s tower, Robber would eat his own toes. They waited for an hour in silence, trying to find a pattern in the patrols before admitting it would take too long to figure one out. Likely the Praesi had borrowed Legion doctrine anyway, which meant varied intervals.

“Side, has to be,” Lieutenant Rattler finally said.

“We won’t have long before a patrol passes,” Robber said. “I want us up that balcony with the closed doors within sixty heartbeats.”

Tricky, even for his folk. Goblins were usually faster on their feet than humans and he’d taken no deadweight with him south, but that was a very narrow window of action even for them.

“We could send a bleeder,” a sapper whispered.

Robber shook his head. It was an old raiding tactic to send a few young boys to bait the enemy while the real raiders struck another flank, but it wouldn’t work here.

“The moment they see one of us this entire place goes on lockdown,” he replied. “They’ll activate all the wards until sunup just in case, and that’s the end of it for us.”

Triggered wards, they could deal with. You just had to be lucky and quick enough not to get the nastiness going, or not be there when it did. But Praesi with enough magic to burn would just fill an entire area with flame so no one could pass through, and he wasn’t going to bet that the Diabolist didn’t have the juice. Heroes might have the constitution to walk through blockades like that, but Robber’s tenth was a great deal squishier.

“On my mark,” the Special Tribune said.

They waited for most of an hour before making for the outer wall. Robber took the lead, and was exceedingly careful about looking for runes when scaling the stone – he didn’t see any until he reached the top, and leapt down instead of risking putting his feet too close. His tenth followed him like shadows as the padded across the promenade and reached the side of the palace. Above them, two stories up, the balcony that would be their way in towered. There was a mark against the wall where what he guessed had been a trellis once stood, but the Diabolist’s people had removed it. Bare hands would have to do. The old stone didn’t give them much purchase, since it had been recently polished, but the mortar lines were enough for a goblin. Robber was the first over the balustrade, and there he froze. Two things gave him pause: first the doors to the inside were cracked open just large enough for someone to get through. Second, he’d just set foot on a rune trigger array.

“Chief?” the sapper behind him asked.

“I am so invincible,” Robber decided, “that even magic refuses to get into a fight with me.”

Someone climbing up cursed and he moved to make room for the others. Kneeling over the runes carved onto the floor, he ran a finger down the grooves.

“Huh,” Rattler said, once again last to arrive. “How are we not dead?”

“Someone was here ahead of us,” the yellow-eyed tribune murmured. “Someone who can make wards dormant.”

“You think the Boss went through?” a sapper asked.

“If she had, there’d be a hole in the ground and half the city would be on fire,” Robber noted. “Boss isn’t great at quiet.”

“But Named work, you think,” Rattler guessed.

“Could be the Eyes,” he frowned. “But whoever did this, they’re inside now.”

He rose back to his feet.

“Too late to turn back,” he said. “We go forward.”

They didn’t wander around blindly. Robber had been in the loop before the Battle of Liesse, when the Hellhound had ordered Pickler to draw up plans to breach the palace if the rebels holed up inside. He’d been more interested in the choke points he’d need to blow to separate the defenders, but he’d gotten a notion of how the Ducal Palace was laid out as a result. The rooms the Dukes and later the Imperial Governors had claimed for their own were in the back, with a view of the lake, but there was no point in heading there. The Diabolist wouldn’t be keeping anything interesting upside where anyone could find it. No, it would all be below. Thrice the goblins found other dormant wards on their way to the cellars, at least one of which they would have triggered before noticing it. Merciless Gods, whatever was down there the Diabolist really didn’t want anyone to find. The room that barred the access to the cellars, they found, had a closed door. Robber pressed his ear to the wood and heard nothing. Empty or warded to be soundproof? Whichever it was, the risk had to be taken.

“Blades out,” he ordered.

He pushed the door open, knife in hand, and found a room full of guards. All of which were on the ground and unmoving.

“Fucking Hells,” Lieutenant Rattler breathed. “The Assassin?”

Well, it certainly wasn’t the work of the Eyes. They were good, but not that good. The Special Tribune ushered everyone in and closed the door behind him, only then taking a closer look at the guards.

“No, not the Assassin,” he replied, seeing one breathe. “They’re still alive.”

“ Shit ,” a sapper hissed. “That reeks of hero, Chief.”

The situation did have the right combination of overwhelming skill and rank stupidity to be heroic work, he had to admit.

“Draper, slit their throats then catch up,” he ordered. “The rest of you with me.”

The stairs down beckoned him, the way wide open. The goblin froze for the second time tha night when he felt the touch of steel on the side of his neck.

“Draper,” a voice spoke quietly. “Don’t slit those throats. I don’t like leaving corpses behind. Good thieves don’t need to.”

Robber knew for a fact that a heartbeat ago there had been absolutely nothing to his side. And yet, right now, a woman stood there. Callowan, by the skin tone, with short dark hair and wearing comfortable leathers. Sharp blue eyes were studying him amusedly. They had met before, once.

“Evening, Thief,” Robber said. “Taking a stroll?”

“What can I say,” the heroine smiled. “I’m the curious type and there’s just so much here to be curious about.”

“Was thinking the same thing,” the goblin grinned. “Mind you, would you sheathe that knife?”

The woman raised an eyebrow.

“And why would I do that?”

“’cause I’ll sheathe mine,” Robber said, lightly tapping the blade he had pointed at her kidney.

“I could kill you before your wrist moved,” the heroine said.

“Probably,” Robber shrugged. “It’ll get messy afterwards, though. And hey, if I’m croaking, you can be sure I’m not gonna do it quietly.”

“You’d be sacrificing your own soldiers,” Thief said, narrowing her eyes.

“Lady, we’re sappers,” Lieutenant Rattler chuckled. “The only way we die is loud .”

The Callowan thinned her lips.

“No throat-slitting?” she asked.

“Goblin word of honour,” Robber grinned.

“What’s that actually worth?” the heroine asked with morbid curiosity.

“Gold, as long as you’re winning,” the goblin chuckled.

The Thief rolled her eyes, but the blade returned to its sheath.

“Well, this was delightful but we can go on our merry ways now,” Robber suggested. “We just want a peek downstairs.”

“You can’t,” the heroine replied. “It took me an aspect to get through those wards, and when you trigger them you’ll empty half a Hell.”

The Special Tribune hummed.

“We trade gossip, then,” he said. “What’s in the basement?”

“A millennium of paranoia carved into the walls,” the Thief said. “And over a dozen Deoraithe strapped on stone beds.”

Robber chewed over that for a moment.

“Are they Watch?”

“No idea,” Thief shrugged.

“Doesn’t sound good even if they aren’t,” the goblin admitted.

“There’s a reason we’re even having this conversation, goblin,” the heroine replied frankly.

Robber decided to let that one go. Heroes in general did not have a great many quandaries on the subject of stabbing goblins.

“So, word is you robbed the treasury in Laure,” he said.

“I like shiny things,” the dark-haired woman smiled.

“Boss might take offence to that, when she’s back,” he said.

“Everybody knows Foundling’s in Arcadia,” the heroine snorted. “She’s not getting out for a few years, if ever.”

“I’ve known Squire for two years now,” Robber said. “And I’ve never known anyone to make a profit by betting against her.”

The Thief rolled her eyes.

“It’s one thing to kill a hero, another to fuck with the Winter Court,” she said. “And if she’s got issue with what I’ve been doing? She can take it up with me. I’ll be in Laure, wearing her jewels .”

Robber would have replied, but before he could he was once more looking into thin air.

“Chief?” Rattler prompted. “What do we do now?”

The goblin sighed.

“We run, my lovelies, all the way back to Marchford,” he said.

He paused.

“We can steal the silverware on the way out, at least,” he decided. “Wouldn’t feel right not to.”

Villainous Interlude: Stormfront

“The covenant of the hungry lasts as long as the meal.”
– Taghreb saying

Anaxares was having a tea party with monsters.

A civil one, he had to admit. The ridiculously large and opulent table – it was Ashuran pearwood, he was fairly sure, which meant it was worth a small castle – had been set on a platform in the morning, long before the Black Knight had actually arrived. There were jewels set into the surface of it that glinted the same no matter what light fell on them that he believed would be able to shoot out beams of energy if the Tyrant spoke the right incantation. At least the whole thing wasn’t floating. The boy had suggested all of this should be happening with the platform a hundred feet up in the air, but Anaxares had flatly informed him he wasn’t setting foot on anything that wasn’t touching solid ground. After the usual round of inventive death threats, the Tyrant had conceded the point and instead had gargoyles place over all four corners. At least one of them was badly failing to pretend it was still inanimate. Anaxares had thrown a biscuit at it earlier, just to see what it would do.

Glare at his back when it thought he wasn’t looking, apparently. Foolish creature, all Bellerophans knew you should always assume someone was looking at you. The Kanenas See All, For Their Eyes Are The Eyes Of The Law And The Law Is Omniscient , he added dutifully. Kairos had put on a version of the Helikean infantry armour that was made of pure gold, with pauldrons he suspected were actual real skulls. All three people at the table were politely pretending they could not hear the hissing angry ghosts bound inside said skulls. The Tyrant had tried to dress him up in silks but Anaxares had ignored the servants and instead continued to wear his old diplomat’s robes, which he made a point of washing himself. They were beginning to look rather frayed, but accepting clothes from the boy would count as Taking A Bribe From A Foreign Despot. Him aside, the two villains sitting across each other were a study in contrasts. Studying Named as openly as he was always a dangerous business, but Anaxares was already a dead man. What was left to fear?

He’d expected the Black Knight to be some tall muscled Soninke, but the villain was short – shorter than the Tyrant, if not by much – and pale like a Callowan. He’d not believed that particular rumour to be true. Weren’t the farmers on the side of Good? It was hard to tell what his build was under the plain plate he wore, but it was obvious that though he was no slab of muscle he was an athletic man. In opposition Kairos Theodosian was so thin he looked almost sickly. Like most people of the Free Cities the Tyrant was tan and dark of hair, that last part one of the few things the villains had in common. It was the eyes, though, that set them apart the most. The murderous red eye of the Tyrant looked upon everything with warm poison while the pale green gaze of the Black Knight was cold, unmoving detachment. They were two different takes on an old breed, these villains, and though their faces were pleasant and smiling Anaxares could smell the violence wafting in the air like summer heat. The Praesi set down his cup on the saucer, Nicean porcelain clinking softly.

“That was the purest arsenic I’ve ever drunk,” the Knight said. “My compliments to your alchemists.”

There was a reason Anaxares had left his own cup untouched. Unlike these two he couldn’t be expected to walk off a mouthful of poison.

“That’s very kind of you,” the Tyrant beamed. “We tortured the secrets of substance refinement out of a Taghreb exile a few decades back, so really it’s all thanks to the Empire.”

The two of them were still smiling. Anaxares would have shivered, if terror had any point to it.

“I see you’ve set your table with fire rubies,” the Black Knight noted. “A nice touch. I might lose an eye if you triggered those without warning.”

“ Burn ,” the Tyrant suddenly barked, leaning forward.

A heartbeat of silence passed and nothing happened.

“You could have flinched, at least,” the boy pouted.

The Black Knight smiled serenely, drinking another sip of poison.

“Shame the rest of the Calamities couldn’t come,” Kairos said, whimsically changing the subject.

“It would have been most impolite of me to enter your camp without some precautions,” the green-eyed man said.

“Are you implying I would murder an ally in broad daylight for no good reason?” the Tyrant said, aghast.

“You would,” Anaxares said.

“I could state it outright, if you’d prefer,” the Black Knight kindly offered.

The crippled boy tried to drum his fingers on the table casually, but his hand was shaking so badly it looked more like he was thumping it. The ghosts bound to his armour screamed angrily, the sound strangely muted. The diplomat was beginning to find it soothing, to be honest. He felt too weary to scream in horror himself but having someone else express the sentiment was gratifying.

“Don’t,” Kairos finally decided. “My most trusted advisor took the fun out of it.”

Green eyes turned to study said advisor almost curiously, to the man’s dismay.

“You are Bellerophan, correct?” the Knight asked.

“You already know the answer to that,” Anaxares replied, picking up a biscuit.

He’d been assured those weren’t poisoned, so he broke off a piece and scarfed it down.

“It’s been a subject of debate as to why you are still alive,” the pale-skinned man said, not denying it.

His eyes flicked at the Tyrant, who shrugged.

“Haven’t done a thing,” Kairos said.

It was actually hard to tell when the Tyrant was lying, in Anaxares’ opinion. He did so frequently and about matters both mundane and important without rhyme or reason, which meant establishing a baseline for truth and lies was difficult.

“Thinking too much about why is the curse of unenlightened peoples,” the diplomat asserted. “Peerless Bellerophon Is Always Correct For The People Cannot Be Wrong, May They Reign Forever.”

“I love it when he does that,” the Tyrant said. “It’s like they’re whispering sweet propaganda straight into my ear.”

“Bellerophon does have a surprisingly effective indoctrination apparatus,” the Knight agreed.

Spoken like an Enemy Of The People, Anaxares thought with a frown.

“So why are you haunting my doorstep, Black Knight?” Kairos suddenly said.

There’d been no transition from pleasantries to business, no hint or warning. The Bellerophan had seen him do this many a time now, with almost everyone he spoke to. He was not sure whether the quicksilver change was meant to unsettle whoever he dealt with and gain him an advantage or if the Tyrant was genuinely that unstable. It might, he suspected, be both.

“We meant to speak with you in Delos, but events conspired against it,” the other villain replied.

As a career diplomat, Anaxares could admire how well-crafted that sentence had been. The use of the word conspiracy would imply fault, while on surface absolving responsibility – a counterpart already on the defensive would feel bound to offer explanation. A shame that tactics like those were worthless against the Tyrant. The boy, after all, was mad.

“Your play there spoiled my amusement,” Kairos complained. “I was a sennight away from making a dragon from the bones of their fallen. I was going to crash it into the citadel and demand their surrender.”

“You would have been repulsed,” the Knight said, and it was spoken like a fact.

Considering every assault by Helike on Delos had met that exact fate, Anaxares believed him to be entirely correct.

“That’s the problem with Praesi, these days,” the Tyrant replied with an unpleasant smile. “You worry too much about things like victory and defeat.”

“No worry would have been necessary on your part,” the pale man said. “Victory would have been yours if your host had assaulted the walls instead of retreating.”

“And how boring that would have been,” Kairos said. “I take no hand outs from the Tower, Carrion Lord.”

“We have enemies in common,” the Knight calmly pointed out. “Dismissing the possibility of common striving against them is counterproductive.”

Kairos cackled.

“You don’t have a pattern of three against the White Knight, do you?” he said.

The Praesi’s face was blank, a wax mask without expression. Then, slowly, his brow creased.

“Neither do you,” he said.

“Someone’s hourglass is running out,” the Tyrant grinned, sing-songing the words as his red eye pulsed. “Regretting taking that apprentice, are we?”

“My decision has never been more justified,” the man disagreed serenely.

“ Spineless ,” Kairos stated with thick contempt. “You lack rage, Black Knight. If you were any more resigned to your fate you’d be licking the boots of the Heavens.”

The Knight did not seem particularly offended by the insults. He did not seem, Anaxares, as the kind of man who could easily be offended. It would have been most unpleasant to negotiate with him.

“There is a difference between acknowledging the possibility of failure and embracing the outcome,” the Praesi said.

“That you even accept the chance of defeat is disgusting, if you’ll forgive my language, much less that you plan for it,” the Tyrant hissed. “You are a villain . We do not go gently into the night.”

“There are graveyards full of men who thought the same,” the Knight replied. “They died having accomplished nothing.”

“You’re scribbling on sand and calling it a legacy,” Kairos mocked. “Nothing that happens before or after you matters – only the decisions you make now . And those I see you make? I find lacking.”

“Means are irrelevant,” the Black Knight coldly said. “Results dictate all else.”

“I despise you and everything you stand for from the bottom of my heart,” the Tyrant enthused. “Shall we work together?”

Anaxares quietly choked on the biscuit he’d been nibbling at, entirely ignored by the other two.

“That would be best,” the green-eyed man acknowledged. “The Empire is not interested in direct intervention. Resolution by local actors is preferable in Her Dread Majesty’s eyes.”

“What you actually want is for Procer to lose their pretext to go a’crusading,” Kairos laughed. “So what’s the plan, my dearest friend? Peace with Nicae?”

“Cessations of hostilities between League constituents would allow you to turn your attention elsewhere,” the Black Knight replied. “There are no real gains left for you to make.”

“And just by coincidence, that ‘elsewhere’ happens to be eyeing your borders,” the Tyrant mused.

“Aligned interests are not the same as subordination,” the other villain said.

“Not all that far, though,” Kairos said. “Regardless, Nicae’s not interested in peace right now. They’re growing too fat on Proceran silver and soldiers.”

“Stripping them of that fat would make them reconsider their position,” the Knight said.

“One last battle, eh?” the Tyrant laughed. “That could be interesting. But they’ve so many heroes, my dear friend. I’m terrified of what those could do to me. I’m only one boy, after all.”

Kairos had not even attempted a token effort to make that lie sound plausible, the diplomat noted.

“We intend to engage the White Knight and his companions again,” the pale man said.

“I feel safer already,” the Tyrant grinned toothily. “It’s so nice, having friends.”

The Black Knight nodded, unmoved.

“Scribe will be in contact with you shortly,” he said, rising to his feet.

The boy waved away the notion, unconcerned. He waited until the Praesi was at the edge of the platform.

“Black?” he called out.

The man glanced back.

“I’m going to betray you, you know,” the Tyrant promised.

The thing that looked back at the boy then was not a person Named or not. Humanity had slid off that face like water off a clay mask, leaving behind absolutely nothing – the thing behind those eyes was coldly taking their measure, calculating the span of their usefulness and the death that would follow it. Carrion Lord, they called him, and the diplomat finally understood why. Why this... thing could cow the third of a continent.

“You will try,” the Black Knight replied. “They always do.”

—

The diplomat had expected them to leave after the other villain exited the camp, but they remained at the table. Kairos was still drinking his tea, exaggeratedly holding up his little finger so it never touched the cup.

“What are we waiting for?” Anaxares finally asked.

It was the crown of noon, and staying in the sun this long always gave him a headache.

“The counteroffer,” the Tyrant said.

The sound of the teapot’s lid being raised drew his attention a moment later. There was a woman leaning over it, from the Free Cities by the looks of her. Long and curly dark hair, curvy under her leathers that he could smell reeked of spirits even from where he was seated. The stranger had a silvery flask in hand and was pouring what looked like Proceran brandy inside the teapot – she didn’t stop until it started spilling over, only then pouring herself a cup of ‘tea’. Nine tenths of that had to be liquor, he thought. And it was probably still lethal to drink, not that it stopped her from gulping down her her cup and messily wiping her lips with her sleeve.

“I don’t know where you get your arsenic, Kairos, but it’s the good stuff,” she said. “You can really taste the almonds.”

“Anaxares, this is Aoede the Wandering Bard,” the Tyrant smiled fondly. “She’s here to manipulate me like she did near Delos.”

“You’re a heroine,” the diplomat said, face creasing in surprise.

“I’m starving is what I am,” the Bard complained. “Hand me a biscuit, would you?”

Anaxares did, too baffled to object.

“Did you have fun with the Big Guy?” Aoede asked with her mouth full.

“You were right,” Kairos said. “I want to kill him so very much .”

“Yeah, he doesn’t really play your kind of game,” the Bard said. “Who’s this charming fellow, by the way?”

She was pointing the remnant of his biscuit at him like a wand, hand wavering as she poured herself another cup of of tea-flavoured liquor.

“This is Anaxares, my most trusted advisor,” Kairos grinned. “I abducted him. He’s not very happy about it.”

The dark-haired woman squinted at him, slurping her cup loudly. For a moment Anaxares could have sworn she was entirely sober and studying him with a piercing gaze, but then she choked on the liquor and the moment was gone. She thumped her own chest until she stopped coughing, spilling biscuit crumbs everywhere.

“You’re a class act, Tyrant,” she said admiringly, still breathless. “Haven’t seen anything that brazen since Traitorous.”

“Flatterer,” Kairos replied. “Now, speak treachery to me Aoede. Treachery most foul.”

“Right,” the Bard said, putting her cup down and leaning against the table. “So obviously I’m trying to trick you to your death here.”

“As is only right and proper,” the Tyrant agreed.

“So here’s something for you to consider,” she continued. “You should off a Calamity.”

“Or not,” Anaxares suggested mildly. “We could, in fact, not do this.”

“Tell me more,” Kairos ordered.

“So your grand plan, it’s not really a plan,” the Bard said. “It’s a juggler’s philosophy.”

“I’ve no idea what you could possibly mean,” the Tyrant smiled.

“First step always works, so always have a first step going,” Aoede said. “Now, a lesser soul would say all that will accomplish is destroy more and and more of Creation until it all collapses on your head because you missed a beat.”

“The part that matters is the dance,” Kairos smiled. “Not the bow at the end.”

“And I applaud that, I really do. Here’s the thing, though,” the Bard said. “You’re running out of enemies, Kairos Theodosian.”

“I can make more,” the Tyrant pointed out.

“Lesser ones,” Aoede shrugged. “Not a lot of heroes running around at the moment and you’ve already slapped around most of the League. You need to expand your roster, my friend.”

She added an exaggerated wink after calling him that, to the Tyrant’s visible delight.

“So I backstab Praes, if you’ll forgive my language,” he mused. “Alas, killing a Calamity also helps the horse you have in this race.”

“You don’t need to wield the knife yourself,” the Bard said. “Use my heroes against them, just blatantly enough the Big Guy knows what you did.”

“It is lesser treachery that you peddle, then,” Kairos replied, tone disappointed.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” the dark-haired woman slurred. “Point isn’t to make the Calamity die, it’s to make an enemy of Black . He loves them like family, you know. You need to hurt him at least that deep if you want him not to let go of the grudge. Anything less and the moment he’s back in Praes you drop off the stage.”

“This plan involves making an enemy of one of the most dangerous men on this continent for no tangible gain,” Anaxares said. “It is not a good plan.”

“Don’t be foolish, advisor,” Kairos said. “Making an enemy of one of the most dangerous men on this continent is the point of the plan, not a side-effect.”

“And to think you said I was bringing lesser treachery to the table,” the Bard said shaking her head. “I’m wounded, Kairos.”

“I’m deeply sorry,” the Tyrant said. “As an apology, let me offer you this: nocere .”

The jewels on the table immediately lit up and shot half a dozen beams of scorching red light at the Wandering Bard, who disappeared into thin air before a single one of them made contact. There was a long moment of silence.

“She’s playing you,” Anaxares pointed out, aware it was blindingly obvious but believing the boy could use a reminder.

“Oh yes,” the Tyrant smiled, and his eye pulsed red. “Just imagine the kind of enemy she’ll make, when I betray her too.”

Chapter 16: Shambles

“See, this is exactly the kind of trouble I’d be avoiding by mind controlling the entire world. You fools are making my point for me, can’t you see?”
– Dread Emperor Imperious, shortly before being torn apart by an Ater mob

“That’s not the good news face,” I said.

There were only three of us in the war room: Juniper, Ratface and myself. We’d have a real staff meeting later today or tomorrow, but for now I’d kept the people to a minimum. When the whole family was at the table discussions tended to take longer, and for now what I wanted was a solid notion of what had happened in Callow while I was gone. And, to my unpleasant surprise, I’d been gone quite a bit longer than I’d thought: three months as of the morning I woke up. Considering Summer had already been probing the borders when I’d left and being well aware that Heiress was going to go full bastard the moment I disappeared, I was not expecting a basket of flowers. Yet the sheer dourness on the Hellhound’s face gave me pause. I glanced at Ratface – he wasn’t looking any happier. Well, at least it was unlikely to be worse than having my heart stolen by an angry Winter god. Weeping Heavens, let it not be worse than having my heart stolen by an angry Winter god. I firmly believed that was not too high of a bar to set for this conversation, but already I was getting the beginnings of a headache.

“Everything’s fucked,” Ratface flatly contributed.

“Fucked how ,” I prompted. “That’s the important part.”

“Military affairs first,” Juniper said. “We are at war on at least two fronts, possibly up to five.”

I missed the days when two mortal enemies had been the upper limit, not the starting point.

“Summer,” I counted out. “Heiress?”

“Diabolist,” Ratface corrected grimly.

“She transitioned?” I said. “Shit. I had my money on her aiming for Dread Empress off the bat.”

“You weren’t the only one,” my Supply Tribune said. “Everybody’s wondering what her game is, right now.”

“A lot of people dying, if I had to venture I guess,” I grunted. “All right, Juniper, lay it on me. Summer. What are we dealing with?”

“We don’t have hard numbers,” the Hellhound replied. “Trying to scry them lost two mages their eyesight.”

The dream I’d had before waking up in Creation was still fresh in my mind – it didn’t feel like a memory, something that would fade in time or become less vivid. A Name dream was the closest equivalent I could come up with, and even those didn’t feel quite as... tangible, afterwards. Considering some of the things I’d seen Summer do in that sequence, I wasn’t all that surprised scrying them was dangerous. It must have been like staring straight into the sun.

“But you have guesses,” I said.

She nodded, and tapped her thick fingers against the map spread across the table to get my attention. There were two red stones set in southern Callow: one on Dormer, the other on Holden. Considering those two were the closest Callowan cities to the Waning Woods, why they were marked as Summer strongholds needed no explanation.

“We’ve received intelligence from General Sacker that was collected from refugees of both cities,” Juniper gravelled. “One of them was former Royal Guard, so we can put more stock in her assessment of force numbers. At least five thousand both times, and we’re fairly sure it wasn’t the same army.”

Ten thousand godsdamned fairies. No wonder she’d looked like someone had shot Aisha, earlier. Even the few hundred lesser fae we’d had to contain in Marchford had inflicted rough losses on the Fifteenth, and unlike those poor expendable bastards Summer would have titled fae leading their hosts.

“Have they moved since taking the cities?” I asked.

“No,” my general said. “Not on any large scale, anyway. They’re sending raiding parties but nearly all of them are headed towards our second problem.”

The orc did not need to point at the black stone set over Liesse for me to know what she was talking about.

“She shouldn’t have any forces to speak of,” I said. “I had the Ruling Council strike down her right to anything but a city guard.”

And her own personal retinue, a privilege granted to Praesi highborn that not even I could touch. Given her high birth the number allowed was not negligible – a thousand men – but still very far from an army.

“She doesn’t care about the Council anymore,” Ratface said. “No one does, Cat. But we’ll talk about that mess later.”

A trickle of the fury that went through me at those words must have shown on my face, because when the dark-eyed Taghreb looked at me he paled. I took a long breath, calming myself. It did not escape my notice that the temperature in the war room had significantly cooled. Joy, another power that’ll start backfiring if I don’t learn how it works , I thought . Just what I needed.

“She’s hired mercenaries,” Juniper said. “Levantines, Helikeans and allegedly some drow.”

“The last bunch she hired was wiped out to the last man,” I frowned. “By us, even.”

“She scraped the bottom of the barrel in Mercantis,” Ratface said. “But over half her people are from the Wasteland and those will be reliable. She’s pretty much taken over the Truebloods.”

“And her mother’s done nothing about this?” I said, surprised.

“Her mother is fighting her own war in Wolof,” the tanned man replied. “Against a nephew trying to overthrow her and the Legions trying to contain the angry beehive the city turned into.”

“The Empress intervened,” I said.

“With a light touch,” Juniper grunted. “But she can’t allow the kind of summons they’re throwing at each other to spill out into the Wasteland. There’s reports of a demon being used.”

I didn’t ask what kind – any kind was bad enough. That meant no reinforcements from Praes, which was as much a relief as it was a problem. We’d be on our own for this.

“Praesi,” I said. “So, household troops and mages?”

“A lot of mages,” Ratface said. “And with Liesse currently packed with refugees, I don’t need to tell you how bad that could get.”

“If she so much as sacrifices a single man she’s rebelling,” I coldly said.

“She’s already rebelling, Foundling,” Juniper said. “She’s been summoning devils to pit against the fae – your Council made laws against that. And you don’t assemble an illegal army of ten thousand if you intend to return to the fold afterwards.”

“She’s reached her end game, then,” I muttered. “Fuck. It’s always trouble to fight Praesi when they’re cornered. Everybody knows that.”

There was no longer any debate about whether or not Heiress – no, Diabolist, I needed to remember that – was ending up on the chopping block by the end of this. She’d given me an excuse to see her head on a pike and she knew I would not allow it to pass me by. Which meant that, by the end of her play she intended to be beyond any sanctions I could inflict. Was she trying to carve out her own kingdom in southern Callow? That would be building on sand, she was hated there.

“All right,” I finally said, still digesting the news. “Those two are covered. Now what’s the rest?”

Juniper glanced at Ratface, who shrugged then cleared his throat.

“Duchess Kegan has put the Duchy of Daoine on war footing,” he said. “She’s mobilizing both her army and the Watch, and she’s refused to explain why.”

“Oh come on ,” I barked. “I already conceded Council authority doesn’t extend to Daoine. What the Hells more does she think she’s going to get by rebelling?”

“We don’t think she’s rebelling, not since last week anyway,” Juniper said. “She’s imprisoned Praesi in the duchy but she hasn’t killed them and she hasn’t declared war on the Empire.”

“Deoraithe don’t declare war,” I replied flatly. “You realize there’s a one going on when you’re neck deep in Watch.”

“I said the same thing, but then Robber returned from the south,” Ratface said.

“Special Tribune Robber,” Juniper sternly corrected.

Considering how much grief she’d given me over promoting the goblin, I was more than a little amused she was now insisting on the proper address. It wasn’t that she’d disagreed that Robber with a detached cohort would bleed Akua’s forces in the south, the orc was well aware of what the vicious little bastard could do. But removing an ‘insubordinate wretch’ like him from the usual chain of command and the supervision it entailed had not sat well with her. She was Legion to the bone, though: now that he had the position she wouldn’t let anyone dismiss the respect it was supposed to carry. Not even Robber himself, much as he tried.

“Yes, Special Tribune Robber,” Ratface said, barely refraining from rolling his eyes.

He was going to be paying for that later, by the look on the Hellhound’s face.

“He broke into Liesse with a tenth,” the Supply Tribune continued. “And found out the Diabolist has Deoraithe stashed below the Ducal Palace, at the centre of some sort of array.”

I raised an eyebrow, reluctantly impressed.

“Her laboratory had to be a regular fortress,” I said. “He managed to get through the wards?”

“Not exactly,” Juniper growled.

“He ran into the Thief,” Ratface said, eyeing me carefully.

“She was bound to turn up eventually,” I sighed. “I’ll get furious about her meddling when I can spare the time. So, captive Deoraithe and the Duchess mobilizing her troops. Might not be rebellion, then.”

“We can’t afford the risk that it is,” Juniper said. “Marshal Ranker pulled the Twelfth Legion from Summerholm to reinforce her at Denier in case she needs to deny the crossing.”

Ranker would be horribly outnumbered, I frowned. Eight thousand legionaries against what, a conservative estimate of twenty thousand at least a fourth of which was Watch? Ranker’s Fourth Legion was heavy on the sappers, since the core of it had been raised from the tribe she’d once ruled over as Matron, but there was only so much preparation could do.

“Marshal Grem should be in charge,” I said. “What has he been doing?”

“He deferred operational command,” the Hellhound gravelled. “He’s need in the Vales.”

“Which brings us to our fourth problem,” Ratface said. “The Principate is moving.”

“Godsdamnit,” I cursed. “Is there anyone who’s not trying to invade us right now?”

There was pause.

“The Golden Bloom,” the Taghreb said.

“Don’t you bring the fucking elves into this, Ratface,” I said. “We already have a net surplus of genocidal maniacs.”

“The Tower’s used the emergency channels to inform everyone of general rank or higher that the Golden Bloom is phasing out of Creation,” Juniper told me.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“Last time they did that was was when Triumphant was kicking around, right?” I moaned.

I ignored the twin ‘may she never return’ the other two spoke, while pressing their knuckles to their foreheads.

“That’s not a no,” I decided. “And just like that, Diabolist kicks up the priority list. Fucking Hells.”

“Most likely, yes” Ratface grimly agreed.

“If One Eye’s staying at the border, that means we have three full Legions sitting this out,” I said.

The First, Tenth and Eleventh. Considering a dragon and a vampire ran the last two, I could at least find a silver lining in the fact that their absence would limit collateral damage. Two thirds of the Tenth Legion were undead mostly because General Catastrophe had the nasty habit of torching his own soldiers as well as the enemy. What that would do close to a major city I preferred not to think about.

“The Marshal has sent word he does not believe the Principate seriously intends to make an invasion attempt,” the Hellhound said. “The two principalities at the border assembled their armies, but they don’t have the men to breach the Vales.”

“They’re just acting up so our Legions can’t leave,” I grimaced. “We could call that bluff.”

“We can’t afford a slugging match with the First Prince when our own backyard’s on fire, Cat,” Ratface said. “She gets to have this one.”

How lovely, that the old trend of Procer screwing over Callow continued no matter who was in charge of it. There were some permanent constants in Creation, like the Tower being a pile of horrors beyond human understand and the Principate always being run by a bunch of rapacious assholes. One of these days, Cordelia Hasenbach and I were going to sit down and have a nice little chat over the subject. Knives might be involved.

“So your mother’s in charge of Imperial response, then,” I said, eyes flicking to Juniper.

“General Istrid,” the orc replied, galaring, “has seniority. She’s currently mustering north of Vale. Her own Sixth Legion has been joined by General Sacker’s Ninth already. The Fifth under General Orim is supposed to be joining them, but has been delayed.”

Orim the Grim and his boys served as Laure’s garrison, so I supposed we’d arrived to the part of the conversation where I was going to get absolutely livid .

“Tell me,” I ordered.

Ratface swallowed loudly.

“Foundling,” Juniper said. “Your shadow’s moving. Cut it the Hells out. It’s not the Supply Tribune’s fault your Ruling Council collapsed.”

Surprised, I glanced behind me and found my shadow still as it should be. I raised an eyebrow. Juniper wasn’t the type to exaggerate, to I’d take her word for it.

“Sorry, Ratface,” I said. “Picked up something in Arcadia, it’s making my Name act up.”

The Hellhound’s eyes narrowed.

“Is that why you’ve turned into a botched weather ritual?” she asked. “Learn to control it before we march. If you can make ice at will it has useful implications for our supply train.”

Only Juniper, I mused, would respond to my usurping a part of Winter by trying to make me into the Fifteenth’s personal magic coldbox. I coughed to hide my amusement.

“I’ll get right on it, General,” I said. “Tell me about Laure, Supply Tribune.”

“Approximately two weeks after you disappeared into Arcadia,” Ratface said, “Murad Kalbid and Satang Motherless executed a coup in the capital.”

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. I’d tried, I had , to involved Praesi in ruling Callow. I’d held up my part of the deal I’d struck with the High Lords on the Empress’ side. I should have remembered that even if they were Malicia’s tigers, they were still fucking tigers. They’d always strike when they smelled weakness.

“And they succeeded?” I asked, eyes still closed.

“The two Callowan members of the Council are gone,” the dark-eyed man said. “Sister Abigail was killed in broad daylight, allegedly by members of the Guild of Assassins. Baroness Kendal was wounded, but she managed to flee and no body was found.”

I opened my eyes.

“Her Dread Majesty’s representative?” I prompted.

“Disappeared,” Ratface said. “If anyone knows where, they’re not telling. The usurpers are turning over every rock in Laure looking for her so it’s probably not their doing.”

“Oh, they’re not going to be finding that woman anytime soon,” I murmured. “So they murdered their way to the top, like good little Wastelanders. Then they declared martial law?”

“Across all of Callow,” Ratface agreed. “There’s been rioting in every major city as a consequence.”

I cursed in Kharsum, which had the Hellhound frowning. She kept telling me my accent was horrible, more offended by that than the rough language.

“How bad?”

“Bad enough General Istrid is mustering outside Vale because she believes if she tries entering the city she’ll have to take it by force,” Juniper said.

“The governors you appointed, the Callowans,” Ratface said. “They’re denouncing the current Council as illegitimate and refuse to answer to Imperial authorities until you ‘restore order’.”

“They weren’t sure I would come back,” I groaned.

“Neither were the usurpers,” Ratface said. “They took a risk by making their move.”

I chewed over that for a while.

“Why’s Orim stuck in Laure?” I asked. “Those two are treacherous pricks, but they aren’t idiots – after the initial riot they should have lined the pocket of the Guilds to calm things down in the city.”

“They don’t have the treasury,” the dark-haired man said, sounding amused. “When they tried to take it they found the vaults empty.”

“Then who the Hells has it?” I asked.

“Guild of Thieves,” Juniper informed me. “They left a note.”

“They have to know they’re declaring war on me by doing that,” I frowned.

“Special Tribune Robber found the source of their courage in Liesse,” Ratface said.

I blinked. Before I’d left, he’d told me that the Guild was under new management: a new King of Thieves had taken their reins. No, not a king – a queen.

“Thief,” I hissed. “The Thief did this. She runs them now?”

“As far as we can tell,” Ratface said. “She, uh, passed a message through the Special Tribune. If you have an issue with what she’s been doing, you can take it up with her in Laure.”

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“You’re leaving something out,” I said.

“She was rather unpleasant about the phrasing,” the Supply Tribune replied frankly.

I decided not to push. I was pissed enough as was and more anger wasn’t going to make me think any clearer. I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes again, thinking this through. I had six months to either break the Summer Court or force a peace settlement on them. I hated the thought of giving Akua any longer to prepare, but bloodying my army on the walls of Liesse when there were still flame-happy demigods wandering the countryside would be a major blunder. I couldn’t just march the Fifteen south, though. I needed General Istrid’s army in the field, and they weren’t moving until the Fifth Legion joined them. Juniper’s mother was reckless but not even she would take on Summer with only eight thousand men. So that meant I had to clean up the mess in Laure before taking care of the rest. Opening my eyes, I set my hands on the table.

“I’ll need Nauk and his men ready to march,” I told Juniper. “And Robber’s cohort. Laure takes priority for now.”

“We’d be thinning the defences around the portal,” the Hellhound said.

“We’re emptying them,” I said. “Winter’s dealt with, at the moment. I bought us at least six months until anything goes down.”

Six times the coming of my title, the King of Winter had said. Overly dramatic phrasing but at least I had a number.

“Then the rest of the Fifteenth be moving as well,” Juniper said.

“Six months, Hellhound, is also our timetable for wrecking Summer,” I said. “I hope you’ve been thinking about ways to kill fae.”

“Oh, Foundling,” the orc replied happily, baring her teeth. “I have been thinking of precious little else.”

I was not too proud to admit to myself that Juniper scared me a little, sometimes.

“Give Nauk two thousand men,” I told her after a moment. “That should be more than enough. That leaves you a little over full legion to work with, no?”

“More,” my general replied. “As of yesterday’s census, the Fifteenth Legion now numbers eight thousand soldiers.”

I blinked.

“ What? ” I spluttered.

“The south is literally on fire, Cat,” Ratface said. “And we have a reputation for both taking in Callowan soldiers and killing anything that invades the region. We’ve had a lot of recruits pouring in.”

“As well as some less desirable individuals,” Juniper added coldly. “The nephew of the defunct Countess of Marchford showed up last month.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“He tried to take back the city when it was under fae siege and occupied by what’s pretty much two full legions?”

Nobility wasn’t as inbred in Callow as it was in the Principate, so that level of blatant idiocy was a little surprising.

“He’s renounced his claim on Marchford publicly, actually,” Ratface said. “Says he wants an audience with you, won’t talk to anyone else.”

“He’s in a cell,” the Hellhound said. “I’ve no patience for agitators.”

“I’ll look into it,” I said.

Another thing for the list. There either needed to be more hours in a day or I needed to find a way to get rid of sleep entirely.

“We’ll have a more formal meeting to plan our operations, but get Nauk ready to go as soon as possible,” I said, rising to my feet.

I made to leave, but turned when Juniper called out.

“Foundling.”

I met her eyes.

“Catherine,” she said, more softly. “What happened in Arcadia?”

“You’ll get the whole story when everyone’s there,” I said. “But in short? I fucked up. The Winter King was playing me before I ever stepped foot in there.”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“Doesn’t matter,” I finally added. “I think I got what we need to win this war.”

The hourglass had already been flipped and time was slipping away. What I’d thought I needed was more of it, but I might have found a way around the need. I was the Duchess of Moonless Nights, nowadays. And Apprentice had once told me that high-ranking fae could open portals both in and out of Arcadia.

Chapter 17: Allegiance

“There’s a natural hierarchy to the world, Chancellor: there’s me, then my boot, then all of Creation under the boot.”
– Dread Empress Regalia

It felt good to be back in plate. It felt even better to know that I’d be facing opponents that could actually be deterred by armour – no more of this ‘fae blades cut through everything’ bullshit. It’d been like fighting a hundred less competent version of the Lone Swordsman, though admittedly with much less lecturing thrown around. Small favours. My cloaks swirled behind me as I walked down the stairs, the most recent addition to it glimmering even in the dark. How Hakram had managed to get his hands on a piece of the Duke of Violent Squalls’ clothes I had no idea, but the wind-like cloth had been added as another mark of victory to my name. A third of the black cloth was now covered by stolen banners of dead men. How many years, before there is no black left? At the rate I was making enemies, not many. If I survived the year, odds were Akua Sahelian’s would be joining the lot. There was a thought to warm my absent heart.

It was cooler, underground. There’d been two sets of goals in Marchford, before I’d taken the city back in the rebellion. The cells for petty criminals, near the centre of the city: the ones I was currently in. The other had been for highborn prisoners, in a wing of the Countess of Marchford’s manner. The very same I’d had Robber put to the torch purely to piss then-Heiress off. If I’d known back then I’d have to pay for rebuilding the godsdamned thing, I might have held off. The awareness that I’d ordered that manor burned followed me into the dark. The man I was visiting, after all, had once called that seat of power his birthright. Elizabeth Talbot did not have any children, but she had a whole tribe of relatives. Her designated heir was her brother’s son, Lord Brandon Talbot – who’d been among the rebels broken by Black but had managed to escape and survive.

From the fact that his head had not ended up on a pike in the following months, I assumed neither my teacher nor Malicia had thought him worth the effort of hunting down. With that in mind I’d expected to find a living example of every noble wastrel tale waiting down in his cell, but the reality was different. Brandon Talbot was a man in his early thirties, powerfully built with a thick beard and long hair held in a ponytail much like mine. He was seated on a stone bench in the back, managing to make the position look almost dignified even if his well-tailored clothes had obviously not been washed in some time.

“I was beginning to think I’d been forgotten down here,” the man said.

“No such luck,” I replied.

I glanced around. There was a table and seats meant for guards, under a pair of torches, and I claimed one of the chars. Turning its back to the prisoner, I straddled it and propped up my elbows atop it. He was staring at me, I saw, a strange expression on his face.

“Taking a good look?” I said.

He blinked, then shook his head.

“I mean, I’d heard,” he said. “But it’s another thing to see it. You’re so young .”

I hid my surprise. Usually, at this point, my enemies offered up banter. Or a denunciation of some sort. Maybe a dig at my height, which made stabbing them afterwards a sort of justice.

“Age stops mattering, when you become Named,” I said.

“Age always matters,” he disagreed softly. “There was a time this country didn’t make soldiers of its children.”

I smiled thinly.

“And then we lost,” I said. “A lesson learned.”

“Of all the things we lost back then,” Brandon Talbot murmured, “I think I might grieve that one the most.”

“Is that why you came here?” I asked. “To tell me of the past glories of the Kingdom?”

“The Kingdom died,” he said, tone sad. “Once on the Fields of Streges, and again when the Carrion Lord snuffed out the dream last year.”

“It was not a Callowan dream,” I replied harshly. “It was a Proceran one, bought with the First Prince’s silver.”

“Oh we all knew that, deep down,” Lord Brandon admitted. “That we were being used. But we glimpsed a world that was more than waking up every morning with the Tower’s boot on our throat. It was not a bad dream, Countess Foundling.”

“Lady,” I corrected. “ Lady Foundling.”

He peered at me, dark bangs and darker shadows framing his face.

“Are you really?” he asked.

“To you?” I said. “Yes.”

The man laughed.

“You think I’m your enemy,” he said.

“I think you committed treason,” I said. “I’ve hanged men for less.”

“And yet here I am,” Lord Brandon said. “Without a rope around my neck.”

I smiled mirthlessly.

“It would be a very grave mistake,” I said, “to confuse curiosity for mercy.”

“But you are curious,” he said. “Most would have sent me to the gallows without even an audience. Your orc certainly wanted to.”

“General Juniper would have been well within her rights to give you a traitor’s death,” I replied harshly.

“I’m not trying to speak ill of your friend, Countess Foundling,” he said, waving away the notion.

Blue eyes considered me carefully.

“She is your friend, yes?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“And yet they say you fight for Callow,” Lord Brandon mused. “Most would think those two things irreconcilable.”

“But not you?” I snorted. “If you’re looking for a pardon for that concession, you’re knocking at the wrong door. I’m eighteen, not an idiot.”

He did not entirely manage to hide his surprise when I mentioned my age. Oh fuck him, I thought. I wasn’t that short. I’d been almost an inch taller than Black before he left, it wasn’t my fault I was surrounded by godsdamned giants all the time.

“What do you want, Lord Talbot?” I said. “You had to know you’d end up in a cell if you turned up here.”

“I want you to save Callow,” he said. “While there’s still some of it left to save.”

“Always the cry of the highborn, isn’t it?” I laughed, darkly amused. “Bring it back the way it used to be! When everything was perfect because we were rich and powerful and we ran the fucking show.”

“This land was at peace, once,” he said.

“I keep hearing people talk about bringing back the Kingdom,” I said. “Like putting a crown on some Fairfax relative would magically fix this fucking country. You all act like everything was perfect before the Conquest, like it was some never-ending golden age. It wasn’t. I’ve read the records, and what you’re trying to resurrect never existed. All a rebellion won would accomplish is slapping a fresh coat of ruin over a bitter truth: all that’s changed is whose palace the taxes build.”

“If you hold us in such contempt,” he said, “why claim to fight for us?”

“Because there’s a difference between Callow and the Kingdom,” I hissed. “One is people . The other’s gilding. People I’ll draw my sword for, every time. The rest can burn. It’s not worth a single drop of godsdamned blood.”

“The people are dying, Countess,” Lord Brandon said.

“So they are,” I conceded tiredly. “And so I go to war again.”

“I don’t mean the fae,” the noble said, shaking his head. “Or even the butcher you gave Liesse to. Callow is dying. Our way of life. Another fifty years of this and we’ll be light-skinned Praesi, save for a few bitter enclaves.”

I didn’t reply, because he was right. I knew he was, and worst of all I didn’t have a solution. Because the monsters were as cunning as they were powerful, and they had been playing this game since before I was born. Winning it through schools and trade and the featherweight of apathy. It was one of the first thing Black had ever told me: he didn’t need people to agree, just not to care. And it was working, wasn’t it? During the Liesse Rebellion, no holding north of Vale has risen. So few soldiers had answered the Duke’s call that he’d needed to bolster his forces with mercenaries. The dream the noble said my teacher has snuffed out had been a feeble thing from the start: peasant levies ordered into the field, barely held together by household troops and foreign soldiery. And before the war was done those same levies had delivered the same nobles who’d called on them at the feet of Black, bound in chains. Fear, I knew, had driven them there. But also more than that: no one in that army had really believed they could win anymore. Some hadn’t even been sure they should.

“I know,” I admitted.

“But this is not your design,” Lord Brandon pressed, leaning forward.

His eyes were alight, almost fervent.

“I’m trying to find a path between destruction and rebellion,” I said.

“The let us be Callowans,” he said. “Changed, perhaps, but still us . There is still a spine under the boot, Countess. There’s still a flicker of the flame no matter how many times they stamp it out.”

“Those are pretty words,” I noted. “I don’t trust pretty words, Talbot. I trust practical measures. Tangible things I can work with.”

“Bring back the knightly orders,” he said.

I stared at him for a long moment. The knights of Callow, huh? Even over twenty years after the Conquest, their silhouettes were still branded behind the eyes of children who’d been born long after the last of them were disbanded. For a lot of people, the knights were Callow, just as much as the bells of Laure or golden fields spreading as far as they eye could see. They were also a basketful of military orders disbanded by order of the Dread Empress because they were a direct threat to Praesi hegemony.

“I don’t have the authority to repeal Tower decrees,” I said.

“Not lawfully,” the noble said very, very quietly.

It still rang loudly, in these rooms empty save for the two of us. Treason had a way of doing that. I looked at him, and finally understood what I was sitting across from.

“You’re not an agitator,” I said. “You’re an envoy .”

“So I am,” he agreed softly. “We’ve watched you, Countess. Seen what you preach more than empty words.”

I’d been playing this game for too long to be fooled by flattery.

“Don’t lie to me,” I said. “You’re not coming to be because you think I’m worthy. You’re coming to me because you’re desperate . Because in fifty years, we’ll be light-skinned Praesi – and if I die, you’re not getting another Squire who gives a shit about Callow.”

He did not deny it. I allowed myself to see it, for just a moment. Knights come again, and this time on my side. Not riding down my legionaries. With Summer and the Diabolist ahead of me, the thought was horribly tempting.

“How many?” I said, mouth gone dry.

“You have not agreed,” Lord Brandon grimaced. “You must understand that-“

“You’re asking me to cross Dread Empress Malicia,” I said, tone like steel. “If you think you grasp even a fraction of how dangerous that woman really is, you’re a fucking fool. How many? ”

The man studied me in silence for a long time.

“Two thousand,” he said. “More may emerge if you don’t butcher us in our sleep.”

Two thousand. Gods be good.

“The Duke of Liesse didn’t even have that much horse,” I said faintly. “And Black had most his knights killed in their sleep.”

“Those of us that rose with Gaston of Liesse went to die, Foundling,” the noble murmured. “Reaching for that dream, one last time. It was the old, the tired, the despairing. The rest of us stayed hidden. To teach old ways to the young, and wait.”

Half the houses in the city will have swords and spears stashed under the floorboards or hidden away in the attic, I’d told Juniper the first night we spent in Marchford. Because this was Callow. Because we’d carry a grudge for ten generations, if that was how long it took to even the scales. Because those who wronged us always, always paid the long price no matter what it cost is. And now I’d just been told that two thousand knights were hiding in the countryside, biding their time. Under Black’s nose, for years. Pride in my countrymen warred with horror at the thought of what could have happened, if they’d all risen. Praesi thought they knew about patience but they’d only been invaded the once, and not like us. We’ve had wolves at the gate since the First Dawn. It taught us hard lessons and oh,look how well we’ve learned them. I was more moved by the thought than I cared to admit.

“How quickly can you gather them?” I croaked.

Lord Brandon kept his face calm, but his eyes betrayed him.

“Two, maybe three months,” he said.

“You’ll be part of the Fifteenth,” I said. “Under General Juniper. Anything less is declaring war on the Tower.”

“It is a lesser yoke,” the dark-haired man said, “than the one currently choking us.”

I rose to my feet, feeling faint. I could feel the Beast’s head leaning over my shoulder, its warm breath heating my cheek. It was grinning.

“I, Countess Catherine Foundling of Marchford,” I said, “do order the creation of the Order of Broken Bells and charge Lord Brandon Talbot with gathering men under its banner.”

The man looked about to weep, and softly nodded.

“You’ll be out within the hour,” I said. “Get me knights, Talbot. Before it’s too late.”

—

“I don’t like this,” Juniper said.

It was almost noon. Leaving the orc to hover behind me, I put a hand against the glass and tried to feel warmth. Nothing. I was so cold to the touch these days that my breath should come as vapour. I stared at the sun and idly thought that the conversation that I was about to have would have better fit the night.

“Are you listening, Foundling?” the general growled. “I don’t fucking like it, this inner circle shit. We’re a legion, not a gang. Officers of the same rank get the same briefings.”

“What I have to say isn’t for everybody’s ears,” I said.

“Hune should be there,” the grim-faced orc continued as if she hadn’t heard me. “She’s my second, not Nauk.”

“I trust Nauk,” I replied without turning. “Hune is a blank slate.”

“Then have one of your little talks with her,” the general said. “Like you did with Ratface and Aisha.”

I snorted.

“Jealous we never had one?” I teased, sounding more light-hearted than I felt.

“Please,” she dismissed. “I already see too much of you as is. Couldn’t stomach more.”

Before I could summon up a reply, my ‘inner circle’ began piling in. They’d come as a group, it seemed. Only officers for this one: Masego was holed up in his tower, seeing to the experiments he’d left in the hands of the assistant he’s stolen from Diabolist, and Hakram was keeping Archer busy in the sparring yard. Leaving her to her own devices would just lead to more property damage I couldn’t afford to repair. Nauk was the first in, from the sound of the steps. Robber and Ratface came in bickering about ‘misappropriation of Legion resources’, which I’d probably have to look into at some point, and Aisha’s presence could be deduced from the dainty sigh that followed them. Pickler was light-footed and silent, but my ears were more than mortal now. Kilian wasn’t here. I owed it to her to tell her when it was just the two of us.

“Boss,” Robber called out. “Do I not even get a ‘good murdering, you filthy goblin’? I really feel like I’ve earned it.”

“The filthy in particular,” Aisha commented.

I turned to look at the officer’s I’d had at my side since the College, who’d followed me through a rebellion of my own making and bled in my name. I did not manage to smile.

“Oh shit ,” Ratface cursed.

He’d always been a perceptive man.

“About an hour ago,” I said, “I committed treason.”

There was a heartbeat of shocked silence, then the room exploded. Aisha’s face had gone blank, Juniper looked furious and Pickler somehow managed to be bored in the face of a blunt admission of sedition. Nauk was grinning and thumping the table. Ratface’s face was darkly pleased and the noise covering all the rest was Robber’s loud, shrill laughter.

“If I may request specifics, Lady Catherine?” Aisha politely asked.

Well, I wasn’t back to Lady Foundling or Lady Squire. That was something.

“Yes, Foundling,” the Hellhound barked. “Tell us more about the forveala’sak treason.”

I didn’t know the Kharsum term she’d put in there, but by the look on Nauk’s face it must have been truly filthy.

“I’ve founded a knightly order,” I calmly said. “And released the former Countess’ nephew to fill its ranks. I’m told we should have two thousand riders within three months.”

Not a single hint of her thoughts touched Aisha’s face. Ratface leaned forward, face eager.

“Are we rebelling?” he asked.

“You shut your fucking mouth,” Juniper shouted. “We’re not rebelling.”

“Not unless the Tower forces me to,” I replied frankly.

“Fingers crossed,” Nauk laughed loudly, like I’d just handed him a bag of rubies.

“How many cousins and uncles do you have in the Legions, Nauk?” Aisha asked him, tone emotionless. “Think for once in your life.”

“Now,” Juniper interrupted, turning to me. “ Now you choose to pull this shit, when the horde is at the gate.”

“That is the best time to pull something like this,” Pickler clinically said. “The Tower can’t afford to antagonize us. Not if it wants to hold Callow.”

“So we’re going rogue,” Robber grinned malevolently. “About time. I was getting tired of playing nice.”

“I will not see the Fifteenth turn on the Empire while I breathe,” Juniper said and her voice was like bedstone.

That killed every smile in the room. There was no longer any anger in her voice, I heard. She was beyond that now. She was looking at me and I’d ever only seen her with eyes that cold when she was thinking of how to destroy an enemy. I’d learn to read orcs, since my days in the College, but even if I hadn’t I’d know exactly what I saw on her face: betrayed. She felt betrayed, by someone she’d thought a friend.

“Juniper,” Aisha spoke softly into the silence. “Listen to her. Don’t assume.”

The Hellhound shook her head.

“Is that what this has all been leading to, Catherine?” she asked, and the genuine grief in her voice tone cut me like a knife. “Recruiting Callowans. Subverting officers. Gathering Named Were you trying to ease us into treason before we ever began?”

Her voice shook.

“Was it just so you could carve yourself a kingdom?”
“Hellhound,” Nauk said, and for once his voice was soft. “We all knew this was coming. From the beginning.”

“Not like this,” Juniper said. “Not like this.”

“I’m not rebelling,” I told her, meeting her eyes. “I’m not asking you to fight your mother, Juniper. Or you your family, Aisha. But things can’t continue as they’ve gone on. Not anymore. Not after all the lines they’ve crossed.”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them. Gods, why did I have to feel so cold? My gaze swept across the room.

“There’s something sick in the Empire,” I said. “You’ve all seen it. Some of you have felt it first-hand. Merciless Gods, the people ruling the Wasteland think half the people in this room are cattle .”

“And you think raising a banner will change that?” Pickler said, eyes hooded. “You’re good at killing, Foundling, but you can’t kill a thousand years of hatred. Your sword is of no use there.”

“If the people in power can’t even stop killing their own,” I said quietly, “why are they still in power?”

I felt the shiver go through the room. Was this what William had felt like, when he’d first spoken to his rebels behind barred doors and shuttered windows? That weight, power and responsibility both. It would kill me, if I was not careful, like it had killed him.

“We’ve taken oaths,” Juniper said. “All of us, and you too .”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I swore. To the Legions. To what Praes says it is.”

I stared her down.

“Do you think the High Lords live up to those oaths?” I asked. “I look south, and I see the highest among them rebelling for the second time in two years. Twice she’s walked away with a warning, free to bleed us again. How many of us do they get to kill before we say enough ?”

“They’ll never stop,” Ratface whispered fervently, addressing everyone and no one at all. “You know that. They’ll never stop unless we make them.”

“And how many people will die, for that better world?” Aisha asked quietly.

“Mountains,” I replied. “But for once, it won’t be us doing the dying.”

The beautiful Taghreb closed her eyes, let out a deep breath.

“Emperors rise,” she said. “Emperors fall. The Tower endures. Gods forgive me, the Tower endures.”

I did not allow myself to feel joy. This wasn’t over yet.

“Beautiful things, ideals,” Pickler said. “But I’m a goblin, Foundling. You can’t eat principles. You can’t carve a tunnel with them. They don’t win wars.”

Robber let out a whisper of a laugh, and my eyes immediately went to him. I’d never heard him a noise anything like it in all the time I’d known him. It had sounded, I thought, almost wistful.

“They kill us,” the Special Tribune smiled, “for sport.”

Pickler turned to face him, face flickering with dismay.

“Robber-“

“Listen to me, Pickler,” Robber said. “No, actually listen for once. The Matrons, the High Lords, the whole fucking lot of them. They’ve had the crown for centuries. They’re fat, now. Lazy. They think they own it. You know what that means. You’re a goblin, right? They don’t get to play if they’re not willing to bleed.”

“We can’t win this. We can’t beat them,” Pickler hissed angrily, but her voice broke after. “I will not let us die doing the right thing. We are going to grow old , all of us. I will not – I don’t-“

“We can,” I said softly. “You know that already. It’s what scares you. No shame in that. I know what’s ahead better than any of you, and I’m terrified. It’ll be blood and mud and grief, but don’t think for a moment we can’t do it.”

The Senior Sapper took her hands of the table brusquely, to hide their shaking.

“It’ll be to the death, Foundling,” she said, amber eyes flicking away. “To the death. Do not start this lightly.”

She sagged in her seat afterwards. Ratface’s eyes sought mine and he chuckled.

“I always thought I’d die railing at them, you know,” he said conversationally. “Just another corpse for the pile.”

He paused, body shaking with nervous energy.

“I was brought into this war when they tried to murder me in my bed,” he said. “You never needed to ask.”

My eyes went to Nauk, who’d gotten up to lean against the wall. His arms were clasped and there was something hungry in his gaze.

“To the end,” he said, fangs bared. “I made my choice before I knew it was a choice, Callow. To the bitter fucking end.”

And just like that, there was only one. Juniper was close, had been this whole time, but she’d not moved in a while. She came closer to me, spine straight but shoulders tight.

“Swear to me, Catherine,” she said hoarsely. “Not my mother. Not any of them. That they won’t be the enemy.”

“I swear,” I told her, and offered my arm.

For the second time in our lives, she took it.

“Warlord,” she whispered, and it sounded like an oath.

It should have felt like a victory, I thought. All I felt was cold. Gods, all I felt was cold.

Chapter 18: Crack

“Kingdoms don’t die on battlefields. They die in dark, quiet rooms where deals are made between those who should know better.”
– King Edward Alban of Callow, best known for annexing the Kingdom of Liesse

Masego’s mage tower did not even attempt to look like anything else. It was at least a hundred feet tall, for one, which was taller than some keeps I’d come across. But that alone could have been the work of masons. The moat surrounding it was a different story: twenty feet wide and circling the building, it held no water but instead pitch-black darkness. No bottom could be seen, and a few months back I’d dropped a stone to see if it would do anything. As far as I knew, it was still falling. Apprentice had been particularly cagey about telling me exactly where the Hells it led, if anywhere, but that was in part my own fault. I’d flatly forbidden him to proceed with his original notion, which had been to fill a normal moat with giant fire-breathing lizards. Not dragons, he’d been very insistent in telling me. They didn’t have wings, and weren’t nearly as large. But the idea of those things inevitably getting loose and either rampaging across Marchford or making a lair in one of the silver mines had led me to put my foot down.

He’d been very snippy about it.

There was a single stone arch leading across the moat to the dark iron gate in front, wide for two people at a time at most and bare of any railing. There was a reason I picked messengers that weren’t faint of heart when trying to get in contact with him. I tread across carefully. The entire surface of the tower was covered in grey mosaics and leering carvings of obsidian, which he’d assured me were there for purely magical purposes. He’d thrown enough magic babble at me to justify that point that I was pretty sure that he just really liked how it looked. Being raised by a devil and a villain had let my friend to have some fairly specific tastes in architecture, sadly, which could be best described as ‘nightmare trying to seem friendly and failing’. The iron gate was covered in runes, and there was no knocker. In the centre, an iron-cast wolf’s head stood out from the surface and animated when I arrived. There was a devil bound inside, I knew, though Masego had tried to not say as much by referring to it as ‘an entity from a secondary realm of existence’.

“A visitor,” the wolf said. “Only the worthy may gain entrance here. To prove your wit, answer me this riddle-“

“Answer mine first,” I replied flatly. “Who’s going to find out if my punches can dent iron if they don’t open right now?”

The wolf paused.

“That is now how this usually goes,” it complained.

“I get that a lot,” I smiled thinly.

“Your name is on the allowed list,” it said. “You may enter.”

There was a pause, then it added uncouth barbarian in a loud whisper. I flicked its eye out of spite even as a doorway opened on the surface, ignoring its yelp and string of curses. The lowest level of the tower was much like any entrance hall decorated by a Praesi with too much gold to waste, though there was one major difference. Namely, the winged tapir that was fleeing down the stairs with loud shrieks as a dark-skinned woman in robes ran after it. It’d been a while since I’d last seen Fadila Mbafeno. Once one of Akua’s minions, I’d nearly killed her in Liesse before Masego intervened and said she was too talented a practitioner to waste. He’d extracted an oath from her to be safe she wouldn’t turn, in the early days, though she’d since been freed of it. Those kinds of binding magical oaths caused some fairly vicious side-effects if allowed to linger for too long. There was a burst of blue light from the Soninke’s hands and shining chains emerged from her sleeve, wrapping around the shrieking tapir and forcing its wings and feet to stop moving. She grunted in effort when dragging it back to her. I cleared my throat and had to admit I found the look of surprise and panic on her face when she realized I was here delightful.

“Fadila,” I said. “Keeping busy, I see.”

The winged tapir kept shrieking at the top of its lungs until she kicked it, at which point it moaned plaintively.

“Lady Squire,” she said, panting. “Some of the specimens occasionally get... rowdy.”

I snorted.

“First time I met Masego,” I said, “he was catching a fire-breathing pig with wings.”

I squinted at the tapir.

“That doesn’t breathe fire, right?”

“He does not,” Fadila replied, trying for poise. “Which has very interesting implications, considering the amount of sorcery he’s been exposed to.”

“I’m, uh, sure it does,” I lied. “Masego should be expecting me.”

“He’s set up the scrying room on the second level,” the Soninke said.

Oh, good. Then he’d found a way to get in contact with Black like I’d asked him. Apparently it was possible if we took advantage of the relay system the Empress used to receive my teacher’s reports, but he’d told me piggybacking on that without killing some of the mages involved would require some finagling.

“You have fun with this abomination of nature, then,” I said cheerfully, passing her by.

The tapir was licking her feet in what I gauged to be a gesture of appeasement, but she didn’t seem moved by the offering. By the time I was nearing the second level the shrieking had started again. The door to the scrying room was already open, so I wasted no time in going. This wasn’t the kind of place where it was healthy to wander, no matter what Apprentice insisted. The man in question was kneeling in front of a wall covered entirely by polished silver, the work so finely done it worked as a mirror. He muttered something under his breath and the silver shone for a heartbeat before dulling.

“Figured it out?” I asked.

Apprentice rose to his feet, brushing off his shoulder.

“If I shunt off enough of the Due into a dispersal ward, the weight shouldn’t cascade,” he told me.

“An obvious solution,” I said, pretending I knew what any of that meant.

He eyed me sceptically but didn’t bother to call me out.

“I can initiate the connection at any time,” he said.

“Before you do that, we need a little chat,” I said. “I don’t want to keep you in the dark, so I’ll just state it outright: I might have dabbled a bit in treason.”

“Dabbled?” he said, frowning over his glasses.

“You know, dipped a toe in the treason pool,” I said.

“I wish you would have told me beforehand,” he replied. “Now I’ll need to rework Marchford’s ward pattern to be able to face advanced scrying rituals.”

I cocked my head to the side.

“That’s it?”

“Oh no, treason,” he said in a mockingly high-pitched voice. “No villain has ever done such a thing before. All my extensive interest in Imperial politics is now put in danger.”

I snorted.

“What’s that voice supposed to even represent?” I asked.

“How little I care about any of this,” he replied frankly. “I’m sure you’ll find some compromise with Uncle Amadeus, and the Empress probably knew you were going to do this before the thought ever crossed your mind.”

The bespectacled mage pressed his hand against the mirror-wall, spoke a word in the arcane tongue and idly made for the door.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said. “I think one of the tapirs got loose.”

“Stuff like this is why you don’t get to have giant fire-breathing lizards,” I called out.

“You have no standards, Squire,” he complained one last time before closing the door behind him.

The wall had been pulsing this entire time, but with a silvery ring an image came into focus. Pale green eyes met mine as I leaned against a table. Black’s brow rose in surprise.

“Catherine,” he greeted me. “Masego tapped into the relays?”

“The technicalities went over my head, but yes,” I said. “Hello, Black. It’s been a while.”

“It has,” he agreed calmly. “I expect you’ve a reason for this. We’ll have to rebuild the entire network now – this will have sent flares for anyone looking.”

“This morning,” I said, “I founded a chivalric order.”

The pale man did not seem particularly surprised, though it was always hard to tell with him.

“I wondered if they’d get in touch with you,” he said. “I assumed they already would have, if they were ever going to.”

I blinked.

“You knew there were knights in hiding?”

He seemed amused.

“I am not without Eyes, even in the south,” he said. “Though I can’t say this strikes me as a wise decision. Making such a bold move for a few hundred men in cavalry is inviting backlash for limited gain.”

“Two thousand,” I said quietly. “Likely more.”

He wasn’t openly shocked. He had too much control for that. But his face went blank, for a heartbeat, and that was the closest thing he’d ever show.

“I miscalculated,” he said, and I could see his mind working furiously behind the calm. “No centralized organization – ah, relying on local support. Cells with no contact after the initial founding. Whoever came up with the notion is most likely dead by now. What a waste.”

Only Black, I thought, would go within moments from realizing he’d been outsmarted to being saddened at the loss of such talent.

“I thought you’d be angrier,” I said.

“Angry?” he mused. “You’ll have folded them into the Fifteenth, if I’m not mistaken. You’ve obtained half a legions’ worth of the finest heavy cavalry on Calernia for the Empire. Pleased would be closer to the truth, though doing this without Malicia’s sanction will bring trouble.”

I frowned.

“She wouldn’t have given it,” I said.

“Not without exacting concessions in exchange,” he said. “Which you’ll have to make anyway, unless you intend to wage ware on the Empire.”

His eyes narrowed a fraction as he studied me.

“If that is your intent, giving me prior warning was a mistake,” he said.

“I don’t want to fight you,” I confessed. “But I don’t think you’ll like what I’m about to do.”

“You know where I draw the line,” he reminded me.

“I’m not going to oversee the eradication of my own people’s culture, Black,” I said.

“Then don’t,” the dark-haired man frowned. “I take no issue with Callowans having a way of life, only the aspects of it that threaten Imperial control.”

“Imperial control is what got us here in the first place,” I flatly replied.

“An independent Callow is not feasible,” he said carefully. “You know this.”

“I know,” I said. “But if this is going to work, there’s going to be a need for heads on spikes. The rot needs to be cut out or we’ll be here again in five years.”

“You’ve more immediate threats to deal with than the Wasteland,” he said after a moment.

He was not disagreeing with me and it was enough to have me shiver. He’d told me, once, that after the civil war that saw Malicia crowned he’d wanted to get rid of the Wastelands’ nobility. It was the Empress who’d stopped him. I wouldn’t be going that far, but – he was not disagreeing with me .

“I do,” I said. “But after...”

“After,” he agreed softly. “When I return.”

His image on the wall turned and I heard someone speak to him.

“Then block it,” Black said. “Before they can-“

The mirror-wall dulled, my teacher’s profile disappearing without warning and leaving only my face looking back at me. I breathed out slowly. So I wasn’t burning this bridge by doing what I intended to. Relief flooded me as I closed my eyes. I stayed there for a moment, and eventually I thought back to an evening long ago, on a balcony where a storm was gathering. I’d asked Black a question, back then and I could still hear his reply like he’d just spoken it. When they get in your way? Step on them.

Of all the lessons he’d taught me, I thought, I had learned that one best.

—

“So are you going to tell me why you made sure I wouldn’t be at that meeting?” Kilian asked.

We’d come to share a wineskin by the ruins of had once been Marchford Manor, the blackened remains swept away months ago by Pickler’s sappers. Rain and wind had scattered the ashes, leaving behind only the remains of the garden and the gaggle of statues that had filled it. The two of us were seated on a scorched stone bench, its once-elaborate carvings now hidden by soot. I passed her the wineskin and watched my lover drink from the Vale summer wine. Night had just fallen, the moon slowly climbing to its apex. I hesitated for a moment, then forged on.

“I’ve gone against the Empress,” I said.

The quarter-fae was lovely, in the shade. Her red hair had grown long enough it bordered the limit of what was acceptable by Legions regulation, framing her pale face and hazelnut eyes like a tongue of flame. Kilian set down the wineskin after a moment.

“The noble Juniper put in a cell,” she finally said. “He talked you into something.”

“I’ve been headed there, I think,” I said, “since the moment I learned there was a coup in Laure.”

“There will be consequences to that,” the redhead softly said.

“There would be consequences to doing nothing,” I replied. “I chose the ones I could live with.”

She remained silent for a long time. I could feel her, now, in a way that I previously could not. The bundle of power inside of me sang out when it came closer to the smaller sister-thing inside her. I no longer needed to hear or see her to know when she was in a room.

“You’ve never been very good at compromise,” Kilian said.

I frowned.

“I’ve done almost nothing but for the last two years,” I replied.

“You compromise,” the lovely mage said, “when the other is stronger. And you are no longer powerless.”

“I’m not sure what you’re saying,” I admitted.

She smiled gently at me.

“Why did you not tell me with the others?” she asked.

“I thought I owed it to you for it to be just the two of us,” I said.

She drank another mouthful of wine, then passed me the skin.

“Catherine,” she said. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not-“

“You didn’t want me in that room,” Kilian said calmly, “because if I left you over this, you didn’t want it to happen in front of the others.”

I very nearly denied that. But instead I took the wineskin and drank.

“The thought might have crossed my mind,” I said.

“I’m not sure whether I should take that as a kindness or an insult,” she murmured, looking up.

It’d been a long time since I’d last felt without so much as a speck of control over a conversation. I hadn’t missed the feeling.

“When we started this,” Kilian said. “I knew I’d always be third in line. Behind Callow, behind the the Fifteenth. On a good day, if duties allowed, I might wiggle up to second. But not often.”

I felt my stomach knot.

“Kilian, I know we haven’t spent a lot of time together lately. I’ve not been able to-“

She leaned into me and pressed a kiss against my shoulder.

“I’m not angry about it, Cat,” she said. “I just told you, I knew that from the start. But you’re leaving me behind. That’s just a fact.”

“I’m not,” I insisted.

“I have fae blood,” she said. “But you took two people into Arcadia, and I wasn’t one of them.”

“Kilian, it was dangerous ,” I said. “The kind of things I do in places like that, the kind of risks I take, they’re...”

“Too much for me,” she finished after I hesitated. “Because I’m weak.”

“You’re one of the best mages in the Fifteenth,” I said.

She chuckled wearily.

“And what does that matter, when you have the Apprentice at your side?” she said.

“I don’t share a bed with Masego, for one,” I sharply replied.

“Is that what I’m to be remembered as, then?” Kilian said. “The girl who warmed your bed on your way to power?”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” I said. “I trust you.”

Her eyes met mine.

“Then why wasn’t I in that room?”

I looked away first.

“Just because I was afraid doesn’t mean I don’t trust you,” I said. “I’ve told you things I’ve never told anyone before, Kilian.”

“And I love you for that,” the redhead smiled. “Even though it’s stupid and dangerous and it might just get me killed.”

The rush that came with her saying those words had never dimmed and I gloried in it for a moment. But then the smile went away.

“But now I think of the conversation you had with them, earlier,” she said. “And I know you made a decision. You needed to convince all of them, and there was a risk I could distract from that effort. So you made the call.”

She sighed.

“You know, I think the better part of everyone you love in this world was in that room,” she mused. “And you manipulated them anyway. I don’t believe you had that in you, when we first met.”

You’re wrong, I thought. I’d just never had a reason to use it.

“I’m glad you do now,” she murmured. “We’ll need it to survive the coming months. But I have to think of myself too.”

“I thought you were happy,” I murmured. “With us, with-“

Me , I left unsaid.

“I am,” she said, laying a hand on my cheek. “But you’re leaving me behind, Cat. And the kind of things I would have to do to catch up would end us anyway.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said.

“As long as I don’t control my blood,” she said, “My magic is shackled.”

“Masego could find a way,” I said.

“He already has,” she replied. “It’s an old ritual. It requires sacrifice, and would make me as a full-fledged fae.”

“Kilian, I’d put half of Winter on an altar if it helped you,” I honestly said.

“It would require humans as a stabilizing element,” she added quietly.

My heart skipped a beat.

“You can’t seriously be considering that,” I said.

“It could all be done lawfully,” she said. “It would be costly to buy the death row prisoners, but demand has lessened and I’ve the funds for it.”

“It’s not about the law,” I hissed. “It’s about decency . They’re people, not things.”

The redhead chuckled softly.

“You can take the girl out of Callow,” she said. “But not Callow out of the girl.”

“You’re Duni,” I said.

As good as Callowan, in most Wastelanders’ eyes.

“ They make that distinction, not me,” Kilian said, tone hardening as she withdrew her hand. “I am Praesi, Catherine. It’s not any more a crime for me to love my home than you yours.”

“This isn’t about where we’re from,” I replied, aghast. “It’s about human sacrifice .”

“And how many of us will die so you can make what you want out of Callow?” she said tiredly. “I don’t see much of a difference. At least it’s strangers I would be using.”

“There is,” I started, but stopped when she lay a hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t want to have this fight, Cat,” she said. “If I did I would have brought up the notion when I first learned of it. I’ll just say this: if there’s anyone who should be able to understand how hateful it is to have a yoke around your neck, it’s you. To just be... less than you could be.”

“There’s lines you can’t uncross,” I said.

“And how many of those have you left behind?” she replied quietly, rising to her feet.

My stomach dropped.

“That’s it?” I said. “Just like that you’re leaving me?”

Because I won’t condone bleeding people like animals , I bit down on. Kilian’s face was hard to read in the dark, but there was no joy on it.

“No,” she finally said. “But I need to think. About what compromises I’m willing to make to make you happy.”

She passed a hand through her hair.

“I’ll be sleeping in the barracks from now on,” Kilian said. “Take care of yourself, Catherine. It only gets harder from here.”

I watched her walk away in silence, and kept watching long after she was gone. Eventually I looked up at the moon, and wondered if I was even still capable of crying.

Chapter 19: Order (Redux)

“In the aftermath of a rebellion do not execute merely those who rebelled. Remove those that remained uncommitted as well, for any power not bound to you is a threat.”
– Extract from the personal journals of Dread Emperor Terribilis II

The gate opened into Fairfax Square.

A year ago, this plaza had been filled to the brim with people come from all over the north of Callow to see the Empress bestow her rewards upon the victors of the Liesse Rebellion. Now? It was night-empty, though that had as much to do with the hour of the night as Laure’s recent... troubles. I’d thought about trying to open the portal directly into the Whitestone, since it was much closer to the palace, but ultimately decided against it. Even after experimenting with the power under Masego’s guidance it was still a roll of the dice where I’d carve a way out into Creation: better to take the widest place I knew in the capital and limit the risks. As for the time, well, it was much easier for me to open gates when it was dark out. My title in Winter likely had something to do with it. Not that even darkness seemed to affect the hard limit I’d found to my power: I could only open a portal once a day before my body began to revolt against the amount of fae power coursing through my veins.

Pushing myself to a second opening had hurt enough I’d not tried for a third. Having most liquid in my body freeze might very well have killed me, if not for the healing power I’d stolen from a hero and Apprentice’s immediate and panicked help. The coming of dawn seemed to wipe away the slate when it came to fae sorcery in my body, for some arcane reason, which was my most promising lead around the limitations so far. But given how dangerous toying with this power had turned out to be I was much more inclined to let Masego run the calculations in his tower than try more direct experimental methods. What I’d stolen in Winter, I had been forced to admit, was not without limits. No matter. It was still a massive advantage over all my opponents. Zombie the Second’s hooves clacked against the stone as I emerged first from Arcadia into the deserted heart of Laure. Legionaries followed in good order, their armour touched with frost even with the furs they wore over it.

“Three days,” Nauk said, striding to my side as his soldiers spread out. “ Three days , Catherine.”

My horse stirred uneasily as the presence of an orc so close, but I stroked his neck until he calmed. Even mounts raised with greenskins never got entirely accustomed to them: there was just something wrong about the way orcs smelled, apparently. Considering that anything that moved qualified as meat for the cookpots, according to the Clans, I couldn’t really blame them.

“I don’t think all our crossings will be so uneventful,” I replied.

“I don’t care if we have to fight a running battle every time,” he laughed. “It was a month and half’s journey, if we marched my people halfway to the grave. The Fifteenth’s the fastest army in Creation now. Hells, we barely even need a supply train.”

“The fastest inside the Empire, maybe,” I said. “I wouldn’t try to portal anywhere I haven’t been before.”

“The warlock’s get said he’d be able to run the numbers for it,” the orc legate said.

“Masego was raised by a vicious creature of pure Evil and also a devil,” I said. “His definition of safe is a little skewed. I’m not using his model unless we get really desperate.”

“So in a few months, then,” Robber grinned.

I’d heard the goblin approach, for once. I was getting used to his skulking.

“You never know,” I sighed. “We could get through a single year without drowning in the deep end.”

“Just wouldn’t be the Fifteenth if it we were fighting battles we’re supposed to win,” Nauk contributed.

That was so sadly true I didn’t bother to deny it.

“Hakram?” I asked the Special Tribune.

“With the rear guard,” he replied. “We’ve had some curious little bastards coming closer.”

I grimaced. While no Winter fae had made contact my sentries had reported silhouettes in the distance keeping an eye on us. I doubted any of the big ones would bother to come in person, but until I knew whose underlings those scouts were I’d have to tread carefully. I might be a Duchess but I was a Duchess of Winter . As usual, the side I’d ended up on was the one known for vicious infighting. I watched the legionaries move into a defensive formation across Fairfax Square and drummed my fingers against my saddle.

“Robber,” I said. “Hunt me some rats. I want anyone aligned with a Dark Guild in my city in custody, and soon.”

The goblin’s eyes glinted malevolently in the dark.

“And if they don’t want to come along?” he asked.

“You’re operating under my authority,” I replied. “Use whatever means you deem necessary.”

The chuckling sound he made was so unpleasant it should have counted as a crime.

“You’ll have them by sunup, Boss,” he said, saluting so sloppily I barely recognized the gesture.

He whistled sharply as he trotted off, his merry pack of killers popping out from the ranks to assemble around him. They looked like ugly green imps, I thought as I watched them, but they acted more like a pack of wolves – clustering around the nastiest among them, eager to sink their teeth into something.

“General Orim will have the city under martial law,” Nauk said. “That means patrols in the street.”

“Adjutant will be handling the Fifth,” I grunted.

In part because of all the men I had with me I trusted Hakram the most not to get into a pissing match with another legion, in part because he was the Adjutant . The importance of Hakram being the first orc Named in centuries had been piled on over by the messes we kept getting ourselves in, but it was no small thing. His kind looked at him with something like a worship, an old dream given new flesh. Orim the Grim was an orc of the Lesser Steppes: by my estimation, being faced with an orc with a Name instead of a Callowan girl with the skin tone of the enemy he’d spent half his life fighting would make him more apt to listen. My few past conversations with the man had been stilted, if polite, so there was no relationship to call on from my side. It was coming to regret, these days, that I’d not cultivated closer ties with the generals and marshals that served in Callowan territory. Having a better idea of the kind of people they were would have been useful in planning my actions.

The Gallowborne were the last to leave Arcadia and immediately they closed ranks around me. Tribune Farrier cast wary eyes around us, seeking out danger in the shadows. His inability to follow me in Arcadia had made him even more stubborn about my being accompanied at all times, which I hadn’t thought was actually physically possible. Getting him to close the read guard had been like pulling out nails with my teeth. Hakram took the tenth that I’d put under his direct command years ago – Sergeant Tordis’ men, though she was now a Lieutenant – and after offering me a nod from a distance headed west through the streets. The largest barracks in the city were close to the wall there, and that would be where General Orim had his headquarters. Hopefully he’d manage to handle that situation before it become a problem. I was, after all suddenly dumping almost two and a half thousand soldiers into a boiling pot that had already tipped over several times.

“Royal Palace?” Nauk said.

I nodded.

“Pass word down to your people,” I said. “If they see any Praesi in this city that are not part of the Fifth, they are to put them under arrest.”

“They won’t like that,” the broad orc said.

They weren’t meant to.

“They get one chance to surrender peacefully,” I said mildly. “If they resist? Kill them.”

The legate grinned.

“Aye,” he gravelled. “That we will.”

Nauk’s kabili of two thousand split into five groups of two cohorts, marching down the major avenues leading up to the Whitestone. The full cohort of Gallowborne remained around me as we took the centre of the formation with my legate’s own four hundred in front of us. It wasn’t long before we started getting attention. People peeked at us through shuttered windows, still too afraid to break curfew to come out. It was hard to read the mood of a city in the middle of the night, but fear was what I was getting. With the fake Ruling Council and the Fifth Legion openly at each other’s throats, that was more than understandable. We encountered our first patrol a quarter hour in – drawn by ripples we were causing in the city, a pair of lines from the Fifth came to see what was happening. They ran into the leftmost wing of our formation but were sent straight to me for an explanation. The Soninke lieutenant in charge saluted hastily when she realized who she was dealing with.

“Ma’am,” she greeted me. “Lieutenant Tomuka, Fifth Legion.”

“Lieutenant,” I replied pleasantly. “You may continue with your duties, though I believe you’ll be recalled to the barracks soon. The Fifteenth is taking over.”

“We, uh, weren’t aware you were going to be coming, ma’am,” the Soninke said. “Our scouting lines didn’t report a force headed for the capital.”

“They wouldn’t have,” I simply said. “Before you return to your patrol, I have a few questions for you.”

“I’m at your disposal,” she grimaced.

“The usurpers in the Royal Palace,” I said. “How many men do they have at their disposal?”

“Five hundred, by our latest estimate,” the lieutenant said. “They’ve barricaded upper Whitestone and forbid access to even legionaries.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“And General Orim has allowed this?”

“The general says as long as they’re holed up in the palace we won’t have to put down any more riots,” she replied frankly. “It’s not worth making an issue about.”

I leaned back on my saddle.

“Only five hundred, Nauk,” I called out. “We go in hard.”

Loud orcish laughter was my only response. I glanced down at the uneasy lieutenant.

“I’d suggest sending a runner to any patrols in the area,” I told her. “Wouldn’t want anybody caught in the crossfire.”

“I’ll kick that up the ladder, ma’am,” the Soninke said noncommittally.

Oh well. It didn’t particularly mind an audience, truth be told. It might remind General Orim exactly who he was dealing with, when we sat down to have a little chat.

“Dismissed, Lieutenant Tomuka,” I said, spurring Zombie the Second ahead.

A single line of Gallowborne broke from formation to follow me as I headed for my legate. Even when surrounded my other legionaries they didn’t feel I was quite protected enough, evidently. Nauk was in hushed conversation with one of his officers, a Taghreb with the marks of a commander on her armour.

“Nauk,” I said, interrupting him. “Scout reports.”

The orc turned to me after clasping his second-in-command on the shoulder.

“Three barricades,” he said. “About a hundred people on each. We’re assuming the rest will be inside the palace.”

I hummed. It would be smarter to wait until we had some flanking positions before making an assault, but I wanted this done with as quickly as possible. These people were too unimportant for me to able to spare much effort on them. I doubted the enemy had anything in their employ that would be able to handle an assault by legionaries, anyway.

“I’ll take the central one with the Gallowborne,” I said. “Staggered hit on the other two.”

“You’re hogging the good stuff, Cat,” the orc complained.

“Well, this ought to make up for it,” I said, “If they don’t surrender, Legate, I want you to make a point .”

“We flagging them as not citizens, then?” he pressed eagerly.

By Legion regulations, Imperial citizens – even those in rebellion – could not have their corpses eaten after death, unless their will specifically stated otherwise. Even at the height of the Liesse Rebellion, the people who’d taken up arms had qualified as citizens. The Tower, after all, claimed all of Callow as its own.

“By my authority as the acting head of the Ruling Council, I strip any hostile forces inside Laure of their citizenship,” I replied after a moment.

That was a way to get my point across, sure enough. Corpses with their faces chewed off and missing limbs might would appal most the city, but it would send a message to the High Lords: fuck with Callow under my watch and I’ll take the gloves off. It was about time they started catching up to that truth. The Taghreb commander paled at my words, but she knew better than to comment. I glanced at Tribune Farrier.

“Muster your men, John,” I ordered. “We’re taking the lead.”

“Gladly, Countess,” he said, a hard look on his face.

Farrier had never thought much of Praes, and though he’d come to have a rough sort of camaraderie with the men and women of the Fifteenth his opinion of the Empire at large had taken a sharp nosedive when news of what had happened in Laure spread. He’d made it abundantly clear in the past that he followed me , not the Tower, and he’d not changed that stance by an inch in the months since that declaration. Nauk’s cohort split to allow us passage and I led my personal retinue forward at a brisk pace. It wasn’t long before we entered the pale facades and sprawling gardens of the Whitestone, and from there it was only a matter of time before we ran into the barricade.

The Ruling Council’s hirelings had picked a good spot. I’d give them that much. They’d propped up crates and carts between an iron fence surrounding a garden and the high wall of what must have once been a noble’s compound. The avenue was narrower than most, and I could see from atop Zombie that even at this hour the barricade bristled with pikes and crossbowmen. The latter of those weapons was as clear an indication of the origin of the soldiers as the skin colours I could discern in the dark: Callowans and most other Calernian nations fielded bows, not crossbows. And certainly not the lever-action crossbows whose designs were the work of the goblins of Foramen’s Imperial Forges. Household troops, then. Not mercenary pushovers. I set Zombie at a trot, gesturing for the Gallowborne to stay behind as I closed in on the barricade. I could see the enemy soldiers stirring, crossbows being brought to the fore.

“Disperse, citizen,” a man’s voice called out. “By order of the Ruling Council of Callow, this section of the city is closed off.”

A Taghreb had risen atop a crate, and he’d been the one to speak. An older man, scarred and with a curved scimitar at his hip. He looked liked he could be Aisha’s uncle, though one from the ugly side of the family.

“There is no Ruling Council,” I said. “Only two Wastelanders who illegally seized power and botched it so badly they have to hide from rioters.”

“General Orim acceded to our demands to stay out of this area,” the man replied impatiently. “You will be written up for disobeying orders if you press us any further.”

I snorted.

“Look at the symbol on the shields of the men behind me,” I said. “Do they look like they’re part of the Fifth?”

A golden noose on a field of red was what he’d find. My personal retinue had not existed for long but there were few people in Callow who wouldn’t recognize their heraldry. They’d made something of an impression, in Marchford and Liesse.

“Gallowborne?” he said. “The Hells are you doing this far north? No matter. The Ruling Council passed a decree forbidding entrance into the city to any legion but the Fifth. Your presence here goes against the Tower’s law. Your general should fuck off south to play with the fairies.”

“If Juniper was in command, we wouldn’t be talking,” I said. “You’d be eating your third volley. But I’m a soft touch. You get a chance to surrender before I string you up above the city gates.”

The Taghreb laughed.

“And who do you think you are, girl?”

Huh. It’d been a while since the last time someone hadn’t recognized me. Or basically fed me a line just asking for a witty retort. If I’d been in a better mood, I might just have toyed with him a bit. I wasn’t. I wasn’t angry either, just... irritated. That I had to lose hours dealing with the greed and stupidity of short-sighted fools when I should have been dealing with the monsters torching my homeland.

“Countess Catherine Foundling of Marchford,” I said. “The Squire.”

“And I’m the fucking Empress,” the Taghreb mocked. “I’m just hiding the tits under the-“

I called on my Name, forming a spear of shadows, but something... bled into it. The power I’d gotten from Winter, the one that had grown tendrils into my soul when I became the Duchess of Moonless Nights. I abandoned that working and turned my will to the enemy commander instead. Shadows coiled around his neck, coming into existence, and there was a sharp sound. His head popped off his body and fell to the ground where it shattered into shards of ice. Well, that was new. Not worth having my heart literally ripped from my chest for, but it would come in useful.

“I’ve got another half-dozen titles,” I continued calmly. “I won’t bother to list them out. Now that idiocy killed your commander, who’s in charge?”

“ Fire, you fools,” a woman’s voice hissed. “Before she kills us all.”

“The hard way it is, then,” I sighed. “GALLOWBORNE, FORWARD!”

I formed a panel of shadow in front of me to catch the crossbow bolts, frowning at how easy it was. It didn’t take any less power than it had before, I noted as the steel-tipped projectiles thudded into the makeshift shield. The well was just deeper than it used to be, deeper than it should be in a transitional Name like mine. Weaker than the kind of power I’d felt in the Duke of Violent Squalls, but not by that much – and wasn’t that a terrifying thought? That kind of a gain never came without a cost, and I wasn’t sure what I’d be paying with. If I ended up losing my soul because of fae shenanigans, I was going to be pissed . I just knew that stealing it back would be horrendously difficult, and I didn’t have the time to spare to murder my way back into a semblance of humanity with all the other things going on. The enemy didn’t bother shooting at me again after it was made abundantly clear they might as well be aiming at a wall, instead aiming their crossbows at the raised shields of my retinue.

I wasn’t having any of that.

Dismissing the shield, I called on the power a third time. I’d shot bolts of shadow out of my hand before, and even learned how to strengthen or weaken them: this time I poured as much as I could into the working without it blowing up in my face, and loosed the projectile at the foot of the barricade’s centre. The resulting explosion of wood and screams had me blink in surprise: I’d essentially pulverized three feet of barricade and assorted people with a gesture, and I wasn’t even winded yet. Yeah, definitely sitting down with Masego to have a talk about this.

“Plug the gap!” the same woman’s voice called out.

“Fire,” Tribune Farrier’s voice calmly ordered.

My own people’s volley did little more damage than the sporadic fire they’d been subjected to – it was hard to hit a target holed up behind cover, even a panicking one – but it did what it had been meant to: suppress the enemy before the first rank hit them. I spurred Zombie forward into the gap I’d created, where the enemy was trying to form a line, and didn’t even bother to call on my Name. My warhorse trampled his way through the fledgling formation and I spilled a man’s brains on the ground with a measured stroke of my sword. There must have been ten soldiers around me, but they were tired and scared and facing a Named. Well all knew how it was going to end. Within heartbeats the Gallowborne were at my sides, methodically butchering their way through the Praesi troops. Pikes and crossbows were no match for veteran sword and board infantry like my retinue on the best of days, and even less since I’d taken to occasionally drilling them muself. The skirmish was quick and brutally one-sided, the back of the enemy formation beginning to run for it before the front even collapsed. I waited for us to have seized the barricade properly, then picked out Farrier from the crowd.

“Tribune,” I said. “Send a runner to Nauk. The centre is secure. The Fifteenth is to advance on every front and converge on the Royal Palace. Leave a detachment behind for our wounded.”

I glanced at the rest of my personal guard. They were not, by the looks of it, particularly thrilled by the victory. There’d been nothing to this fight but whimpers and dead men. Like the seasoned professionals they were, the Gallowborne went around finishing off the enemy wounded as the meat of the cohort resumed formation.

“The rest of you, with me,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”

I led and they followed. The outer gates to the Royal Palace were wide open, and its grounds freshly tread. Evidently the runners from our last engagement had made it here ahead of us. The gardens were similarly deserted but up ahead I could see where the remaining forces of the Ruling Council were waiting for us. Crossbows were peeking out of windows on both levels of the main hall and the large gates in front were closed. Probably barricaded from behind. I trotted up ahead again, and ignored the hesitant hail from a window to the left. Cloak streaming behind me, I guided Zombie to the bottom of the marble steps and stared at the massive bronze gates.

“ Break ,” I said.

My Name flared even as the metal crumpled like parchment under my eyes, falling apart with a sound like a gong being struck. In the hall behind, two dozen soldiers stood shaking and pale.

“Surrender,” I ordered. “I will not tell you twice.”

As the Gallowborne silently spread their ranks behind me, soldiers began dropping the swords. In the windows crossbows dipped as men retreated and the poor fools in front of me knelt. Farrier came to my side and I addressed him without looking.

“The two usurpers will be inside,” I said. “Secure them.”

“By your will, Countess,” he murmured.

I got off my mount and offered the reins to one of my soldiers, dismissing John’s strong suggestion that I take an escort with a sharp gesture. They would be more hindrance than help where I was headed. Ignoring the terrified soldiers as I strode into the palace, I headed straight for the heart of what had once been the seat of power for the Fairfax dynasty – and the Albans before them. The room where the Ruling Council had once held its sessions was deserted, and the door to it locked. Nothing the strength of the Named couldn’t force open. It was evident by even a short look that the luxurious room hadn’t been used in some time. The two Wastelanders must actually have been arrogant enough to have used the former throne room for their audiences. Idly taking off my helmet and shaking loose the hair under it, I set down the chunk of goblin steel on the table with a loud thunk. My gauntlets soon followed it, thrown carelessly as I headed for the chair at the head of the table. I paused there, my hand on the arm of it.

“I’ve felt you looking since the moment I left Arcadia,” I spoke into the gloom. “Come out.”

The woman slipped out of the deeper shadows in the corner, idly strolling to the seat on the other end and plopping herself down on it.

“Evening, Squire,” the Thief said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Chapter 20: Skew

“An alliance of victors is like a hearth in summer.”
– Julienne Merovins, tenth First Princess of Procer

I’d met a handful of heroes since I’d first become the Squire, and Thief was one of the harder ones to place. She was, quite blatantly, an egotist. Yet she lacked some of the traits that were common with the more arrogant heroes: both the Lone Swordsman and the Exiled Prince – the Prince in particular – had been almost unnaturally handsome. The appearance of a Named usually changed to reflect how they thought of themselves, after all. Yet Thief was not particularly good-looking, I noted as I studied her. Maybe two inches taller than me, she was a skinny woman with short dark hair and blue-grey eyes. The leathers she always wore had been cut for her frame, but weren’t particularly tight: much like me, she’d have little to show for it if they were. Most of all, she lacked the weight to her presence that I’d come to associate with powerful Named. William, for all his flaws, had been able to mesmerize a room full of rebels with but a few words. I had a hard time imagining Thief ever doing the same.

“You sure you should have taken off that helmet?” the heroine smiled. “You’ve seen how costly a mistake that can be.”

I withdrew my hand from the arm of the chair, and slowly sat down. The seat wasn’t made for someone wearing plate, evidently, and it groaned under the weight of my armour.

“We going to play the threat game?” I asked bluntly. “Thief, I could have killed you with a hand tied behind my back last time we met. I’ve since murdered a demigod for power. We both know how that fight goes.”

The other woman’s eyes turned cold.

“A fair fight, maybe,” she said. “I’m not in the habit of having those.”

I snorted.

“And I am?” I replied. “Look, I’m as willing as tangle as the next villain but if I get an occasion to put a shot someone’s back in the dark, I’m sure as Hells taking it.”

“How remarkable,” she sneered.

“Well, I have been spending a lot of time with goblins lately,” I said. “But I gotta say that putdown’s a little rich, coming from someone whose entire Name is about theft.”

Thief smirked.

“Oh?” she said. “Is someone displeased their treasury’s gone?”

“I am,” I smiled thinly. “I’m about to have to find food and lodgings for at least a hundred thousand refugees while also running a military campaign and I don’t have the funds for any of it.”

“The Tower will shell out the gold,” Thief dismissed.

“The Tower’s putting down internal troubles, and I’m about to spit in its eye,” I said. “It’s not going to be giving me a single copper for the foreseeable future.”

“Villains stabbing each other in the back at the first sign of trouble,” the heroine grinned unpleasantly. “History does tend to repeat itself, doesn’t it?”

“I’m not-“ I began, then stopped. “Oh fuck you .”

She blinked in surprise.

“Who do you think you are, exactly?” I asked.

“A heroine, villain ,” she replied.

“Someone tried to mind rape a city of a hundred thousand last year, Thief, and it sure as Hells wasn’t anyone on my side,” I barked. “You think being William’s minion for a few months gives you a pass to be an asshole forever and still have the moral high ground? Think again.”

“I spoke against that,” Thief hissed.

“Words are wind,” I said. “You could have taken a stand. You didn’t. So much for heroism, eh?”

“I might have made mistakes,” she said through gritted teeth. “I’ll own up to that. But you know what I’m not, at least? A godsdamned collaborator.”

My face blanked. I’d been called a traitor before. By a crowd in Summerholm, when I was fresh into my name, and by the Lone Swordsman in the months that followed. But it was the first time anyone had actually called me a collaborator to my face. No doubt quite a few people had thought it in the past, but I’d never actually heard it spoken out loud. It stung more than I would have liked, even now. Things with a grain of truth to them usually did.

“I took the path that damages Callow the least,” I said.

“You took the path that involved selling your soul to the Hellgods,” she replied flatly.

“I got a close look at the Hashmallim, in Liesse,” I said. “I think you think your side’s any gentler than mine, you’ve been listening to stories too much.”

“My ‘side’ hasn’t stolen an entire fucking kingdom,” she snapped.

I shrugged.

“And what’s it done to free it since?” I asked.

“It rebelled,” Thief said. “And you murdered the people that did. I’m sure they felt very saved .”

“You think putting a crown on Gaston Caen would have helped this country?” I said, leaning forward. “Gods, Thief, the man fled into exile before the first legion was in sight of Vale during the Conquest. He was a bloody coward and the First Prince owned him down to his toes.”

“So you say,” the heroine sneered.

“So the facts say,” I coldly said. “You think she poured that much silver into a doomed rebellion so an old rival of the Principate could be restored? She wanted a western protectorate to push back Praes, that’s all there was to it.”

“Elizabeth of Marchford would have been queen,” Thief said. “She would not have settled for that.”

“You think she would have had a choice?” I pressed. “After Praes burned the land on the way out, who would have leant the coin and crops to keep Callow alive through the winter?”

“That would have been the Empire’s fault,” she hissed.

“Gods Below, am I tired of hearing about fault,” I shouted. “Fault and blame and Good – none of it fixes any of this . If you want a solution, you deal with realities. With what exists, not the pretty little world that ‘should be’. Praes would have acted in its interest, and that meant torching the country. Procer would have acted in its interests, which was making us a protectorate. Anyone who plans without acknowledging that isn’t planning, they’re lying to themselves. That’s what I can’t stand about the lot of you. Do you think doing the right thing is enough? Fuck you. I’ve had to bloody my hands to get this far, Thief. I didn’t enjoy it, and some of the things I’ve done will haunt me to my grave. But the only clean victories are the ones in stories. Preach all you want, I have gotten things done .”

I panted, out of breath, my tone quieted.

“Which of you pricks on the other side can say the same?” I asked.

“Sometimes you have to take a stand even if you know you can’t win,” she said.

“That’s pride talking,” I replied. “That’s killing people for your principles, and I can’t think of anything more selfish than that.”

Thief laughed bitterly.

“You know, there’s truth in what you say,” she admitted. “But none of it would have mattered if you were a heroine.”

I’d been at this game long enough that the surprise never made it to my face.

“William was never meant to lead,” Thief said. “He was terrible at it. But I look at the party we had, and can’t help but thing there was always supposed to be one. All of us were born in Callow, except for the Wandering Bard – and I’m not convinced she was supposed to be a part of it. One Named for every Calamity, if you’d been on the side of Good. And we’ve all seen what you can do with an uphill battle.”

“I know them, the Calamities,” I said. “I know what they can do better than most. It wasn’t a fight that could be won.”

“The Heavens have a way of evening odds,” she said.

“Prayer is what people rely on when they’ve run out of plans,” I replied. “I’ve no patience for it.”

In this, at least, I was truly Black’s successor.

“What you’ve built is collapsing,” Thief said.

“By the end of the year, there will be no Praesi governor in Callow,” I said.

“I’m not talking about the governors,” she said. “I’m talking about the Ruling Council.”

“It’s done,” I said tiredly. “I tried, it failed. Come sunup the two of them will be dead and I’m not surrendering that authority ever again.”

The heroine frowned.

“You’re naming yourself queen,” she said.

“Vicequeen, most likely,” I said. “A ceremonial title: I can’t run the country if I’m waging war abroad, and it’s become clear I’m not great at it anyway. I’ll name a Governor-General to handle everything and keep power in name only. The Tower won’t accept anyone but a villain at the head of Callow.”

Thief stared at me for a long time.

“What do you want, Squire?” she said. “I thought you’d come here to threaten me or force a fight, but that’s obviously not the case. Why are we here?”

“A tenth,” I said.

The heroine blinked.

“What?”

“You get to keep a tenth of the treasury,” I said. “The rest goes back in the vault.”

“Are you trying to bribe me with coin already in my possession?” she asked.

“Bribe, no,” I said. “I’m hiring the Guild of Thieves.”

“We’re not for hire,” Thief said.

“Fine, I’m giving you a ‘gift’ for anticipated services, then,” I grunted. “Do I need to wink, or are we on the same page?”

“That’s not-“ the heroine stopped before finishing her sentence. “What do you want to hire us for ?”

“The Empress and Black have networks of informants forty years in the making, backed by the Legions of Terror,” I said. “The First Prince has a hundred thousand battle-hardened veterans and the wealthiest nation on Calernian at her feet. If I want to play in the same league, I need talented people and I need them now . Your people are criminals, but they’re criminals with presence in every Callowan city and a fountain of foreign contacts. Right now I only have eyes in the Legions and the Wasteland – I’m blind everywhere else and it’s already cost me.”

“I’m a heroine,” Thief reminded me.

“If William had stuck to killing criminals in the streets of Summerholm, I would have given him a salary and a godsdamned badge,” I replied frankly. “I work with the monsters because they give me the means to do what I need to, not because I have any illusions about what they are. I don’t fight heroes out of principle, Thief, I fight them because they keep trying to kill me and make a mess of Callow in the process.”

“And if I don’t cooperate?” she asked lightly, but her eyes betrayed how serious she was.

“This is the part where I say ‘if you’re not an asset, you’re a liability’, right?” I sighed. “I get back the treasury, is what I do, because I need it. And then as long as you stay out of my way, I will politely pretend you don’t exist.”

I smiled thinly.

“And I think you will,” I continued. “Stay out of my way. It’s not like you want any of my opponents to win instead: I’m the lesser evil. Besides, in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s wolves at the gates. I don’t have the time or energy to spare on pointless pissing matches.”

The Thief stared at me in silence. I met her eyes without flinching.

“Assassin tried to recruit me, when I first came into my Name,” she suddenly said.

“I’m told he’s a regular bundle of laughs,” I replied.

“The conversation couldn’t have lasted more than a quarter hour,” Thief said. “To this day, I shiver when I think of it. That... thing was death made flesh.”

I wasn’t sure where she was headed with this, so I kept my peace.

“And yet,” the heroine said, “I think you might just be the most dangerous villain I’ve ever met.”

“You’ve never met Black,” I said.

“It’s not about power,” Thief replied. “You make it easy to want to follow you. Because you make sense, because you get results. I should try to kill you tonight, because if I don’t you might just damage Calernia beyond repair.”

“Will you?” I asked.

Silence reigned.

“Baroness Kendal is still alive,” Thief said. “She was wounded, but took refuge in the cathedral. The priests are hiding her.”

I nodded slowly, then rose to my feet.

“I’ll need the treasury back in the vault before I leave,” I said.

“Minus our tenth,” Thief smiled bitterly, looking up at the ceiling.

I made for the door, passing her by.

“Squire,” she said. “No, Foundling now I suppose. If you ever become what you say you’re fighting...”

“Then more dangerous people than you will be putting me down,” I replied, and walked away.

I got the last word, I thought, largely because she had nothing to reply to that.

—

“Lady Squire,” Orim the Grim greeted me.

He’d been sleeping until recently. I’d learned to tell the signs, with orcs – the voices got a little deeper, and they showed their teeth more often. The general was almost as tall as Hakram, who was unusually so for his kind, and his skin was of a yellow-green I’d only ever seen in goblins before. It was uncommon in the Lesser Steppes, I knew: almost all my legionaries from there were of a green so dark it looked like black. Of the man himself, I knew little. When it had become clear he’d remain one of the important people of Laure for the foreseeable future I’d asked my own orcs about him, but gotten only vague outlines. Juniper had told me he’d been chieftain of the Silent Men before Black recruited him halfway through the civil war, one of larger clans in the Lesser Steppes. Nauk had remembered he’d been known for his warring with the Deoraithe of the Wall, and all Hakram knew was that he’d once wiped out an entire smaller clan in a single night for having stolen some of his cattle. I wasn’t surprised, considering the cognomen his legion had earned during the Conquest: Exterminatus .

The Fifth had been under Marshal Grem’s command during his assault on the Wall, a campaign undertaken to make sure none of the Deoraithe would be with the army of Callow at the Fields of Streges. After taking one of the forts, Orim the Grim had put every soldier in it to the sword as keeping any prisoners would have slowed his march. That had happened a long way from Laure, though. In the capital his reputation was as a fair but distant commander who would not hesitate to resort to violence if pushed. His open enmity with the late Governor Mazus had won him some esteem, since the Fifth’s legionaries had made it a point to put the governor’s men in their place whenever they could. I’d been raised to the sight of big armoured orcs punching the teeth out of city guard who overstepped, and it had gone a long way in teaching me to see greenskins were not the enemy. A long time ago, that. My ascension to the Ruling Council has not granted me any better insight into the man, since he’d withdrawn from any relation to it after ensuring the Fifth would not have to obey any orders from its members.

“General Orim,” I replied.

The room in the barracks was almost bare, a sure sign the orc didn’t use it regularly. In my experience greenskins like to decorate with trophies from victories anywhere they stayed longer than a few weeks. The Fifth’s general staff was nowhere in sight: it seemed Orim had grasped that this wouldn’t be that kind of meeting. Save for a table with a jug of some dark alcohol – almost empty by now – and two cups to accompany it, there was little of note here. I’d not been offered any of the drink, and had not asked: orcs drank liquor hard enough to leave holes in whatever it touched. Something about their stomachs taking to alcohol differently, Hakram had told me. As it happened said orc was seated at my side, across from the general. He polished off the rest of his cup and let out a pleased little sigh.

“Callowan drink just isn’t the same,” Adjutant said.

“They make passable wine in the north,” the general replied amusedly. “But nothing close to brannahal .”

My eyes narrowed. I did not recognize the word. It was from an older dialect of Kharsum, I thought, but aside from the part meaning fire I didn’t recognize the rest. As for the mention of the north of Callow, I almost grimaced. ‘Wine’ to the north of Ankou was actually a heavily concentrated version of brandy made by farmers and cattle-herders out in the field. It was said that in a pinch it could be used instead of lamp oil.

“Deadhand tells me you’re to handle order in the city,” Orim suddenly said.

Coming from a Praesi, the way he’d been called by his nickname instead of his Name would have been an insult. From an orc, though, the meaning was different. The Clans didn’t really have titles aside from chieftain. Even their rare mages did not get much distinction from the mass. Orcs who distinguished themselves in some way earned a nickname, and for someone not sharing a clan to use it was a mark of respect. Evidently Adjutant had made some inroads here while I’d been busy in the city.

“I have the usurpers in my custody,” I said. “I’ll be executing them publicly come morning and re-establishing a civilian government afterwards.”

“We’re under martial law,” Orim gravelled.

“We don’t have the soldiers to waste to enforce that,” I replied calmly. “I need you with General Istrid as soon as possible.”

“She knows the people here, general,” Hakram said. “If she says the peace will hold, it’ll hold.”

The older orc conceded the point with a grunt.

“Where is the Fifteenth headed?” he asked.

“I’ve sent Juniper south,” I said. “She’ll be gathering additional men as she goes.”

“She should be marching to Vale,” the orc bluntly stated. “To put her soldiers under her mother’s command.”

“That won’t be happening,” I replied frankly. “The forces will remain divided for the campaign.”

“Ruling Council’s dead,” Orim said. “And it didn’t have authority of the Legions went it was still breathing.”

“I am the Squire,” I coldly said. “Her Dread Majesty is preoccupied with Wolof and Black is abroad. My orders are not to be gainsaid.”

The general’s face went stony.

“Knightsbane’s fought two wars and a hundred skirmishes,” he growled. “So have I. What do you have under your belt, three half-baked battles? The soldiers should go to Vale.”

“I could make this about power,” I replied idly. “We both know that using a sliver of power I could order you to drown yourself and you would. But I don’t need to. I have information you don’t. The chain of command is clear. Do it .”

The orc was twice my size. Scarred, bursting with muscle and capable of popping a man’s neck off his shoulders with his bare hand – and yet he knew better than to try to loom. Orim glanced at Hakram and saw only ice there. Adjutant had picked his side long ago. The general scoffed, but did not push any further.

“You’ll have orders for General Istrid,” he said, tacitly offering to carry them.

“Juniper is already in contact with her by scrying,” I said. “The Knightsbane will be marching on Holden as soon as your men arrive.”

The older orc frowned.

“We’re pretty sure the fae can portal from one stronghold to the other,” he said.

“They can,” I confirmed. “We’ll be splitting their forces with multiple assault so you don’t bear the brunt of it.”

“And you think they’ll just let General Juniper leisurely stroll south?” he sceptically asked. “They’ve raiding parties out.”

“And the Diabolist has an army out in the field,” I said. “So far the Summer Court has refrained from hitting Liesse. I’ve sent two Named down there to remedy to that. Akua Sahelian will have to be dealt with after the fae are repelled, and I don’t want her forces fresh when it happens.”

Apprentice had been less than pleased at being partnered with Archer, but sending either one on their own would have been a disaster.

“My detachment will be stabilizing Laure, then we’ll move on,” I continued. “To Denier. I mean to free Marshal Ranker’s legions if I can.”

Orim’s dark eyes lingered on my skin, the visible reminder that I was at least half-Deoraithe by blood.

“Kegan’s not to be trusted,” he said. “She was never comfortable under the Tower – the Fairfaxes allowed her to run things the way she liked without even tribute.”

“I know what she wants,” I said. “That gives me leverage. And twenty thousand men is nothing to sneer at, if they can be pointed in the right direction.”

“Rely on them and you’ll get a knife in the back,” he gravelled.

“The correct word is use, not rely,” I said. “When can I expect you to move out?”

He mulled over it.

“Two days,” he said. “Supplies are mostly ready, but I want them prepared for a hard march.”

I nodded.

“We should be gone, by then,” I said. “Until we are you can liaise with Adjutant if you need anything. I’ll be busy pacifying the capital.”

He saluted, reluctantly, and I pushed back my chair.

“Hakram?” I prompted.

“I’ll be in touch, general,” Adjutant said.

We left together. I still had over a bell before dawn, by my reckoning, but I’d need to sleep at some point. And when I woke up, I’d have to make sure the largest city in Callow didn’t start rioting the moment my legionaries left. Joy.

Chapter 21: Example

“To conquer until all of Creation is desert or province: that is the ideal of Praes. Mock their failures if you must but do not ever forget their victories.”
– King Albert Fairfax of Callow, the Thrice-Invaded

The sword tore through flesh and bone with a meaty sound, sending the guard’s head rolling on the ground. A waste – Black would not have pursued him, had he fled. Shaking the blood off his blade with a flick of the wrist, the green-eyed Knight stepped deeper into the Pirate Queen’s sanctum, feet burdened with grim purpose.

“Amateurs,” Ranger said from his side. “They didn’t even have a proper watch.”

“They thought they were safe,” Black replied.

“They won’t after tonight,” Warlock added. “If any of them survive, anyway.”

The chatter was unnecessary, but he’d long become used to Warlock’s cheerfully morbid comments enough that it barely registered. Still, he traded a half-amused, half-exasperated glance with Ranger. They met another corsair on their way to the throne room but this one did not even get to open her mouth before Wekesa turned her upper body into ash: dealing with the pirates was child’s play after a year of back alley dogfights with his rivals and the Order of the White Hand, not to mention the civil war that followed. Not a reason to get sloppy, but overestimating an enemy was just as dangerous as overestimating them. By the time they reached the doors to the Pirate Queen’s own throne room the sounds of the mess outside had started to drift up to their ears. Curses and screams of terrors tore through the night’s quiet, the same reaction Captain always elicited whens she dared to cut loose. Black pushed open the driftwood doors in front of him without breaking stride, ready to finally put an end to the night’s slaughter.

“They sent the Black Knight and his death squad for little ‘ole me? Guess I should be flattered,” the Queen laughed as she rose from her throne and unsheathed her cutlass. “So which of you feels like dancing with death, children?”

Ranger sighed and shot the Queen in the leg, arrow knocked and flying faster than you could take a breath.

“Is it me or does that never get old?” Warlock mused. “They always get the funniest look on their faces when we won’t play along.”

The Pirate Queen dropped to the floor with a hoarse cry of pain, clutching her leg. Black wasted no time closing the distance and kicked her cutlass out of her hands.

“You are correct,” he said. “I am the Black Knight.”

“Do you have no honour –”she started.

“No,” Black replied, crouching to be of a height with her.

“Drop the knife, Pirate,” Ranger called out. “Otherwise the next one goes through the eye.”

There was the clatter of metal on the ground and the Queen let go of the blade she’d pulled from under her tunic, grimacing.

“Fine, you lot are big and bad,” she snarled. “You made your point. Why am I still alive?”

“Because you set half of Thalassina on fire a few months back,” Black said.

“You going to parade me around Ater ‘cause I’ve been a bad girl?” the pirate asked with an ugly smile. “And to think I’d heard you were dropping the old way bullshit.”

“You misunderstand me,” the Black Knight replied. “It takes talent, to execute an operation of that breadth.”

“You should work on your recruitment pitch, love,” Queen sneered. “I’m feeling a mite uncooperative at the moment.”

Black’s eyes hardened.

“Your prize ship has been sunk. Most your lieutenants are dead. You are kneeling on the floor of your very seat of power,” he murmured. “Bringing you to this took me four people and a rowboat, Pirate. You asked me what my point was? This is it . Do not make me repeat myself.”

“Fuck it, and fuck you,” the Pirate Queen smiled. “I’m not flying an Imperial flag, and I’m sure as Hells not gonna take orders from the Tower. Do your worst, boy – I’ve laughed in the face of harder men than you.”

Warlock’s eyes became wreathed in fire and the dark-skinned man stepped forward, but Black help up a hand to stop him.

“You call yourself the Pirate Queen, but I’ve noticed your crews sometimes refer to themselves as corsairs,” the Black Knight said.

“You trying to bore me to death, Knight? I’ll give you points for originality,”

“Unlike pirates, corsairs are known to sometimes operate under official sanction,” Black said. “Not as part of a nation’s navy, but as... auxiliaries of a sort.”

The Pirate Queen eyed him dubitatively.

“If we’re not raiding Praes then who?”

“By the end of the week word will spread to the Free Cities that the pirate threat has been dealt with,” Black smiled coldly. “I expect merchant shipping to Thalassina to resume soon after.”

“Well look at the balls on you,” the Queen whistled. “Won’t they just bail again when I start boarding their boats?”

“Not if you confine yourself to a handful of them per month,” Black said. “A risky business, certainly, but there will be enough who think the payoff worth it. The Dread Empire would, of course, collect a cut in exchange for the right to operate in its waters.”

“So you want my ships on a leash, is that it?” the pirate sneered. “What if I say no?”

The green-eyed man laid the flat of his blade on his knees.

“That is your prerogative.”

There was a long moment of silence as the Queen mulled over the offer. Sighing, she finally spat in the palm of her hand and offered it to the man in front of her. Black spat into his own without batting an eye, ignoring her puerile attempt to crush his fingers when they shook on it. He rose.

“A woman named Scribe will come tomorrow to work out the details of the arrangement. A pleasant evening to you, then,” the Knight said as he sheathed his sword. He made for the door, but before he could pass the threshold the Queen called out to him.

“Knight,” she asked. “If I’d said no, what would you have done?”

“Used your head a prop when making the same offer to your second-in-command,” Black replied, not even bothering to turn as he strode out of the Pirate Queen’s throne room.

There was no slow transition between sleep and wakefulness. I was one, then I the other. I rolled out of my sheets still tired and padded across the room to the window. Dawn had come a gone hours ago, by the looks of the sun. Grabbing a blanket from a seat, I wrapped myself in it but found it did nothing to hinder the cold. It wasn’t coming from outside, I supposed. Breathing out quietly, I stared at the gardens sprawling below and considered the Name dream I’d just woken up from. It’d been a while, since I’d last had one of those. I’d known for years that Black had handled the pirates based in the Tidelesse Isles after the Empress ascended to the throne, but that there’d been a Named involved was not common knowledge. Considering that the pirates had first come from a Praesi fleet smashed by the Thalassocracy one at port, that they’d eventually be forced back into Imperial service was darkly amusing. The history lesson wasn’t why I’d gotten the dream, of course. I had decisions ahead of me.

Robber, by now, would have prisoners from the Dark Guilds. If there were any from the Thieves I’d have to release them, but that still left the Smugglers and the Assassins. Months ago, I’d thought to dismantle the Guild of Assassins. Even before Ratface had laid out the logistical difficulties of that, I’d had a little chat with the Empress on the subject. Pointless, she’d called the entire enterprise. I still disagreed with her. There was a difference between a handful of men and woman who killed for coin spread all over Callow and an organized guild of them. The part she might have been correct about was that the amount of time and resources I’d have to sink into this far outweighed the gains to be made – namely, the absence of a godsdamned gang of killers for hire in my homeland. The situation had changed since she and I had talked: back then, all I’d had to worry about was Heiress plotting in the south. Now I had other cats to skin than a guild that probably killed fewer people in my territory every year than roadside accidents.

My Name was urging me to make vassals of them. Pretty bluntly, too. I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. It wasn’t a decision I was willing to make before looking one of them in the eyes. I turned away from the window. Breakfast, first, and then a show. Hakram should have organized everything by now.

—

“It’s not a Praesi invention, you know,” Adjutant said.

“Huh,” I said. “That’s surprising. They’re the ones famous for it.”

The sun had melted any traces of frost our passage had made in Fairfax Place. Not that anyone would be able to see them anyway: the plaza was packed to the brim with the people of Laure. Hakram had to place criers at street corners to arrange as much, since just nailing parchments announcing the mandatory presence would have been largely pointless. The overwhelming majority of people in the capital couldn’t read, and it was still one of the most educated places in Callow – some of the Fairfaxes had encouraged scholarship, though never to the extent of funding academies like they did in some of the Proceran principalities. I imagined that kind of expense would have been hard to justify when the Legions could be marching on Summerholm at any time. It was impossible for a crowd this size – there must have been twenty thousand people in the plaza alone – to be silent, but it was quiet . The appearance of my legionaries had been so sudden no one knew quite what to make of it.

“Miezans brought it with them over the sea,” Hakram told me. “It was the punishment for rowdy slaves.”

The tall orc was standing besides me, so I could see the displeasure on his face as he spoke. Considering orcs had made for very popular slaves in the Miezan Empire, I could take a guess as to why.

“So when Triumphant was using it, it had... implications,” I murmured.

Adjutant refrained from adding ‘may she never return’ though his hand twitched when he supressed the reflex of bringing his knuckles to his forehead.

“I’m telling you this because the High Lords will think it’s part of the message you’re sending,” the orc said.

I nodded. The both of us watched Nauk’s men drag the usurpers to the tall wooden crosses we’d had placed in the middle of the plaza. Satang looked numb, but Murad was struggling against the pair of Callowan legionaries forcing him to move. One of them lost patience and cracked a gauntleted hand across his mouth, drawing blood. The two Praesi were hoisted up the cross, and then an orc brought out the iron spikes and the hammer. Satang’s hoarse scream filled the plaza as the legionary nailed her first wrist down.

“You are rowdy slaves to me,” I muttered. “Well, that ought to get their attention.”

“They’ll be pushing to censure you through the Imperial court,” Hakram said.

“The Court I have to worry about isn’t in Ater,” I replied.

Another gut-wrenching scream echoed as the work on Murad began.

“Breaking entirely with the Tower would have consequences,” Adjutant said. “Ones we are ill-equipped to handle.”

“I’ll be calling myself a vicequeen, no a queen,” I said. “There’s an implication there I still answer to Her Dread Majesty.”

“You’re claiming a territory as large as Praes as under your direct command,” Hakram pointed out. “You’d be more an ally than a vassal.”

“She’ll get tribute and soldiers,” I said. “She struck the same deal with Daoine.”

“You’re not this thick,” the orc gravelled. “Don’t pretend.”

Callow wasn’t Daoine, of course. Its fields fed the Wasteland and its population was near the size of Praes’. There was a difference in the balance of power – Malicia could not allow me to just declare the de facto independence for a territory this large. It would be a major loss of face, influence and wealth for her. She would likely have to deal with internal rebellions if she was somehow convinced of the notion.

“I’m done letting High Lords having a say here, Hakram,” I said.

“ Please ,” Murad screamed, but the legionaries forced his legs together and drove a spike through the flesh and bone.

“Then find concessions to make,” Adjutant replied. “We’ll have around twice our number in legionaries on the field by the end of this. Fighting them would not end well, and the Empress will give the order if you leave her no other choice.”

I conceded the point with a sullen grunt. Kilian hadn’t been wrong on one thing: I had tired of compromise. The last spike tore through Satang Motherless’ ankles and the legionaries wiped the blood off their armour with calm professionalism before moving away. The two Wastelanders hung from their crosses limply. Time for my part, then.

“The Ruling Council is officially dissolved,” I spoke, weaving a thread of power into my voice so it would carry for blocks. “As of this moment, I take command of Callow until martial law is lifted. A Governor-General will be appointed shortly to oversee Laure.”

I paused to let that sink in.

“You may disperse,” I finished.

I allowed my eyes to scan the crowd. This was, in essence, the pivot of my presence in the capital. If a riot ensued everything was gonna go to shit – I’d need to leave behind a garrison and it was all down here from there. The scene with the two usurpers had been as much to sate them with blood as to offer a reminder: rebels died ugly deaths. Silence, the kind you only got in a church, reigned supreme. Then the first man knelt. From there it was like an avalanche. Within heartbeats, there was not a man woman or child standing in Fairfax Place. I breathed out slowly, then composed myself.

“Take me where Robber keeps them,” I ordered Hakram, and we left without a word.

—

Going back Dockside was oddly nostalgic. I’d earned coin for blood here, back in the day. Would that the trades I made were still so innocent. The warehouse belonged to the fishermen’s guild, though they were more a loose association than one of the true powers claiming that same name. It smelled of salt and dry fish, the reason why becoming obvious when the two of us entered: rows of bluegills and widemouth basses were hanging from the ceiling. I vaguely knew the salting was done different in other parts of Callow, but Laure was known for its particular take on the process. Southpooleans insisted their way of doing it was better, but they were just as wrong about that as they were about everything else. That was the lightest thought I allowed myself before painting blankness over my face. Weakness had no place here. There’d been legionaries standing guard around the warehouse and what looked like at least half Robber’s cohort was spread inside.

Crossbows out, they kept an eye on the two dozen Callowans who’d been dragged out of their beds last night and brought here without an explanation any more elaborate than a kick in the back if they weren’t moving fast enough. None of them were tied, I saw, save for a single pair. A man and woman who looked – and smelled liked tanners – but had an entire tenth of goblins keeping an eye on them at all times. Robber strutted up to me, a bit of blood on his lower lip, and massacred yet another salute.

“I’ve got a treat for you, Boss,” the Special Tribune announced.

“It better not be a corpse,” I said.

It was always a godsdamned corpse with him. He was like the world’s most murderous cat, only it was worse because he was supposed to have a conscience. Or whatever the goblin equivalent of that was. Probably more knives.

“I would never,” the yellow-eyed wretch said, deeply offended. “I’m a tender, gentle soul. I’m just misunderstood.”

“I saw you eat a man’s finger once,” I said.

“Well, he was dead,” Robber shrugged. “Wasn’t like he was going to be using it.”

He made sure to pitch his voice high enough to our guests would be able to hear him. I used to wonder whether he did things like for entertainment or for interrogation tactics before I’d realized there was no real difference between the two for him.

“So what have you got for me,” I asked.

Engaging him would only keep sending this conversation spiralling further into madness and mind games.

“Smugglers’ Guild,” he said. “All except my present. Those two ‘tanners’ with enough steel and poison on them to kill a small village.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“How’d you find them?” I asked.

“Ratface had them marked as potential members in his briefings,” the goblin said. “We only had to kick the door and run in screaming to check if they actually were.”

I resisted the urge to rub the bridge of my nose . Results, Catherine , I reminded myself. He still got results.

“Anybody high ranked?” I said.

“Top two Smugglers in the city,” he said cheerfully. “Was going to torture that out of them, but they kept telling me. They seemed to think it would make us release them.”

“Black tolerated their activities,” I said. “They’re not used to Legion attention.”

To my teacher it had been more valuable to keep an eye on what was being brought into Callow illegally than to curtail their activities. Knowing him, he’d probably considered their dodging fees and tariffs like a payment of sorts.

“The were sloppy,” Robber grinned viciously. “If that’s the best criminals your people have to offer, it’s no wonder you turned to Praes to get things done.”

“We’ve a hole in the budget,” I warned him. “Don’t think I won’t sell your hide in Mercantis for a few coppers.”

“Please,” he cackled. “I’m the official footrest of the queen of Callow. I’m worth at least a couple silvers.”

I managed not to grimace at that, but it was a close thing. Not the footrest thing, that was an old joke between us, but this ‘queen’ business. That was a warning from him, that the rank and file of the Fifteenth expected for me to have a crown by the time we’d cleaned up the mess. Balancing the next few months was going to be like walking a tightrope. I allowed him to waddle away like he’d won. Little ‘victories’ like that usually kept him happy for a day or two, and when he was in a good mood he got into much less trouble.

“The assassins are watching you,” Hakram said quietly.

I knew better than to look.

“Let’s talk to our guests, then,” I grunted.

I gestured for the goblin cohort to get the prisoners moving, seating them on a row of wooden crated. A few of them recognized me, apparently, because the moment I got closer they spoke up.

“Lady Foundling,” a man in his fifties called out. “I must really protest. This is entirely unnecessary! We could have met at our offices-“

I glanced at the lieutenant standing behind him. She grinned, then smashed the copper bottom of her crossbow into the back of his head.

“Let’s make one thing perfectly clear,” I said. “This is not a courtesy visit. If you want to walk out of this room alive, I would discard the notion that you are in any way protected by the deal you made with Black.”

I turned cold eyes on the crowd, saw a few shiver.

“I am not him,” I said. “I have different expectations of you.”

Sharp laughter came from further down the line. It was a woman, in her twenties with a missing eye. Looked like she’d been in a few scraps.

“Posturing,” she said. “You don’t have the balls to go against the Carrion Lord. We all know who you answer to.”

I studied her for a moment.

“ Choke on your tongue ,” I Spoke.

Her eye went wide. She tried to breathe but couldn’t hand desperately clawing at her throat. You could have heard a pin drop in the warehouse, by the time she fell blue-faced to the ground.

“I trust,” I said, “that there will be no more of that.”

Several of the Smugglers had pissed themselves. I wrinkled my nose in distaste. Robber was right, they’d gotten soft under Imperial protection.

“Callow is at war,” I said. “You have been called upon to serve.”

The man from earlier – he must have been the local head – nodded in abject submission. His hands were shaking.

“Anything you need, Lady Foundling,” he babbled.

“You’ll be sending representatives to the Fifteenth,” I said. “They are to put themselves at Supply Tribune Ratface’s disposal and obey his every order. And while you do that, gather rations for an army on the march. You’ll be keeping my army supplied through the Wasaliti on its way south. I’ve no patience for parasites while the country is under siege.”

That should allow Juniper to manoeuvre the way she needed to. Marchford just didn’t have the supplies for an extended campaign, and with both the war in Wolof and General Istrid gathering legions near Vale there would be no time to requisition what we needed. I turned to the two assassins, who’d been watching all of this in silence. They were not scared, I saw. They weren’t from a breed as easily unnerved as the smugglers.

“Neither of us has the authority to grant any demands you could make,” the man among them said.

“Not even the head of our Guild in Laure would,” the woman added, then shrugged. “Kill us, if you must. It makes no difference.”

“You can carry a message,” I said. “That will do.”

“And you think the Guildmaster will listen?” the man said, cocking his head to the side.

“We have watched your men try to find us,” the woman told me. “Prune branches if you can. The tree will survive.”

I’d asked Ratface, a few months ago, to find me the Assassins. So I’d be able to wipe them out in one go. The anger that had driven me back then – the righteous indignation at the concept of a band of killers being allowed to run amok Callow without consequence – was not as sharp at it used to be. I had no spite left to spare for mortals, not when I was set against forces who thought of ripping out my heart as a mere warning.

“I won’t kill you,” I replied softly. “Oh no. I’ll drag you back to Marchford, and then I’ll let Apprentice rip out the information I need from your minds.”

The woman’s body stiffened ever so slightly.

“You’ll most likely survive that,” I casually continued. “Though not unscathed. What’s left of you, I will trade to the Winter Court for a favour. They do enjoy their little games, the fae.”

I felt the room cool around me.

“I doubt you will, though,” I said. “Winter tends to play rough.”

“Striking at us would take men you need elsewhere,” the woman said.

The male assassin’s eyes flicked towards her, then he sighed.

“A message can be carried,” he conceded.

“Tell your Guildmaster that he’s on notice,” I said coldly. “His actions over the next few months are what will determine whether I go through your ranks with fire and sword and all the things that are worse I’ve refrained from using.”

The woman nodded slowly.

“And the terms?” she asked.

“You take a contract in Callow, it goes by my desk,” I said. “There’s so much as a shoemaker that dies without my approval and I rip you out root and stem. You don’t need to worry about running out of work, though.”

I smiled thinly.

“I have a list,” I said. “It will grow longer, before all is said and done.”

The man considered this for a moment.

“And should the Guildmaster acceded to your request, will you handle the matters directly?”

“I’ll be the one handling you,” Adjutant said from my side. “Won’t be hard to find. There’s not a lot of orcs with one of those.”

He brought up his bone hand, displaying the fingers. It made the assassins visibly uncomfortable, hardened as they were. They were, after all, still Callowan. Necromancy was the Enemy’s tool, and one of its most unpleasant ones.

“You’re dismissed,” I said, gesturing for the goblins to untie the assassins.

It wasn’t enough to worry about this war. I had to worry about the one after that, and when the High Lords knocked at one gate and Procer snuck through the other? There would be a need for ill-gained goods and dead men. All it cost me to get them was a principle.

I was fast running out of those.

Chapter 22: Govern

“We do not forget.”
– Official motto of the House of Iarsmai

I hadn’t set foot in a House of Light since becoming the Squire, though to be fair my attendance at the daily sermons had always been shaky. This wasn’t just any house, though: it was the Alban Cathedral, the beating heart of the faith in Callow. There were hundreds of brothers and sister here at all times, and Praesi occupation had done nothing to change it. The priests, after all, had not taken part directly in the fighting for the capital during the Conquest. They’d healed any who went through their doors, but none had taken the field. The House of Light did not concern themselves with who ruled the land, only the souls of the people who lived on it. Or so they liked to say. Some priests were more politically-inclined than others: a few of the sermons had been very harsh on the subject of Evil and its servants, though they’d always refrained from outright preaching rebellion. That was the line Black had drawn when conceding freedom of worship in the conquered kingdom.

The main hall was filled with beds when I entered, though thankfully most of them were empty: with the end of the riots, the influx of wounded had ceased as well. I left the Gallowborne outside, and for once Tribune Farrier did not protest: the idea of being at risk here was as absurd for him as it was to me. White-robed priests stirred when I strode in, with an older woman coming forward. She did not have any marks distinguishing her from the others – the brothers and sisters had no ranks, and seniority did not always mean authority – but the simple fact that she was the one headed for me said it all. She had Deoraithe blood, I noted. Too pale to have both parents from the Duchy though. The sister bowed.

“Sermons have been suspended for a sennight, my lady,” she said.

“The it’s a good thing I’m not here for one,” I replied. “Take me to the baroness.”

She smiled with feinted confusion and began to answer, but I cut her off with a sharp gesture.

“I’m Catherine Foundling,” I said.

“I am aware, Lady Squire,” she said.

“Then you should know deceiving an Imperial dignitary while the city is under martial law qualifies as treason,” I said. “Don’t make that mistake. It would get ugly for both us, and I’m not here to hurt her.”

“The cathedral offers refuge to all,” she insisted.

“Look outside, sister,” I said tiredly. “There are no refuges left. Don’t make me ask twice.”

She looked like she’d bitten into a lemon, but didn’t protest again. There were catacombs under the cathedral, every child knew, but people not sworn to the House of Light were not allowed to set foot in them. Most of the Fairfax dynasty was buried there, save for the few whose heads were in the Hall of Screams. I hadn’t known for sure there were rooms other than the graveyard carved out in the foundations, but it was easy enough to suspect. They had to keep the food somewhere, not to mention the more contagious patients. Baroness Kendal was in one of the rooms that served the latter purposed, if I had to guess. I could feel power coming from the walls that made me uncomfortable, had the Beast raising its hackles underneath my skin. The whole cathedral was full of it, but it was particularly pure down here. I wasn’t surprised, considering I could be more than twenty feet away from consecrated grounds. The sister knocked at the door and the baroness herself opened it, her arm in a sling.

“Lady Catherine,” she said, blinking in surprise.

I looked at the priestess.

“You may go,” I said, and it wasn’t a suggestion.

She didn’t enjoy that, but I didn’t particularly care. I turned to Anne Kendal, taking in the sight of her. She was still pale, and not in the pretty way she usually was – it was the pale of someone who’d bled too much, not the ivory of good breeding.

“May I come in?” I asked.

“By all means,” she replied, moving out of the way.

The room wasn’t much to look at. A cot and a small table covered with fresh linens. A water basin in the corner, and an open book on the bed: something religious, by the looks of it. The baroness closed the door behind me.

“I’d invite you to sit down,” the baroness said, “but I seem to be short on furniture.”

“I don’t intend to stay long,” I half-smiled. “You should sit, though. You still look like you’re recovering.”

“The assassins punctured by lung and cut into my spine,” she admitted. “Even the touch of the Heavens has been slow in working.”

Gods . I hadn’t thought her wounds had been that bad. No wonder people thought she was dead. And I’d probably let the people who’d done it go not a bell ago. The taste of self-disgust was thick on my tongue.

“I was aware of the risks when I accepted your offer,” Kendal reassured me, misinterpreting the look on my face. “Praesi play for keeps.”

“Don’t they just,” I muttered.

So did I, these days. I had a fresh batch of corpses in the city to prove it.

“I’d heard the Fifteenth had arrived, but I hardly believed it,” the baroness, smoothing a silver curl back as she sat on the bed. “They’d have had to leave months ago.”

“We went through Arcadia,” I said.

She stared at me like I’d just grown another head.

“That’s... possible?” she said.

“If you’re a Duchess of Winter,” I replied.

She looked genuinely unsure what to say at that. I forgot, now and then, that the kind of eldritch places I went and the many different creatures that tried to kill me in them were just legends to most people. Stories they never expected to see take flesh. I’d lost those kind of certainties: if it could be real it was and it was probably after my head for some godforsaken reason.

“Will you be using that as your title?” she finally asked, which she probably felt was relatively safe grounds.

“I’m leaving that up in the air until I’ve had a chat with Her Dread Majesty,” I said. “I don’t suppose the priests carried word of what happened today?”

She shook her head.

“They say isolation from the worries of Creation will allow me to heal quicker,” she said.

“Ruling Council’s dissolved,” I said. “I stormed the palace last night and had Murad and Satang publicly crucified just before Noon Bell.”

“Gods save us all,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “It is ill-bred of me to say as much, but they deserved to die. Not this painfully, but they did.”

“My legionaries will put them out of the misery after sundown,” I shrugged. “Point will have been made by then.”

That was as much pity as I was willing to expend for those two. I only had so much to spare, and there were many souls more deserving of it.

“If I may ask, who rules Callow then?” Kendal asked, eyes fluttering open.

“I do,” I said. “But I’m going off to war for Gods know how long. Congratulations, Baroness Kendal: you’ve just been appointed Governess-General of Callow.”

She eyed me carefully.

“There is no such thing,” she said. “And if there was, the Empress would frown upon it.”

“The Empress will have to cope,” I said. “And I’ll have to give her something for it, I’m sure. No doubt she’ll have her price ready when we speak.”

“I suppose I should thank you for the privilege,” she finally said.

“Don’t thank me,” I said. “I want you to turn this country into something functional while I go off to kill the people burning it down. I’ll leave you my seal – that gives you authority over everyone in Callow who’s not in the Legions.”

“The city must be in shambles,” the baroness sighed.

“Heal quickly, Anne Kendal,” I said. “Your home needs you, and so do I.”

—

In the end, it took two more days before Laure was settled. The appointment of the Governess-General was met with enthusiasm by the city – she was well-known there and better liked – and quiet distaste by the legionaries of the Fifth. None of them had forgotten that she’d once been the Baroness Dormer and one of the foremost nobles of the Liesse Rebellion. That she had been made the highest-ranking person in Callow after myself was a bitter bill to swallow. They’d just have to deal with it: I didn’t have anyone else remotely as competent and trustworthy at my disposal. That made for one fire mostly put out, so on to the next: the Deoraithe. I’d used the Fifth’s mages to scry Marshal Ranker and inform her I would be headed for Denier immediately, though I couldn’t give her a clear date of arrival. It was a good thing I didn’t even try an estimate, because this time travelling was... difficult.

What I took my soldiers through did not look like Winter. Or Summer, for that matter. Unless I was mistaken we’d marched through the borderlands between both. It had been deserted on Winter’s side, but on the last few days of the journey we’d begun so see larger and larger patrols from Summer gathering in the distance. It took us a week, in the end. Still shorter than it would have taken us through Creation, but inexplicably longer than it took us to get to Laure from Machford. There did not seem to be any rhyme or reason to the time spent in Arcadia, and my control on it was erratic. I’d barely needed to do anything the first way through, but on this one not getting stuck for months had been a constant struggle. I did not believe our third way through would go uncontested.

The gate opened a full day south of Denier, since I’d never been in the city itself. I allowed my legionaries a bell to recover on these less-treacherous grounds before beginning the march anew. My two and and half thousand men came in sight of the city’s walls on the evening of the following day, though the Marshal’s scouts found us long before that. I didn’t bother to meet them in person – Nauk served as a go-between while I spoke with Hakram. When it came to Legion gossip, Adjutant was without equals.

“So,” I said as Zombie trotted at his side. “Fourth Legion.”

The tall orc shot me an amused look.

“Cognomen Blackhands ,” he said.

“I already knew that part,” I complained. “Everybody knows that.”

“They don’t usually know where it’s from,” Hakram gravelled. “Ranker was the Matron of the Hungry Dog tribe, before she took up with Lord Black. She took all goblins of age with her into war and sent the children to half a dozen other tribes.”

I whistled, reluctantly impressed.

“That’s a hell of a bet to make,” I said. “He was still an up and comer back then, and the Empress a relative unknown. Still doesn’t tell me where that cognomen is from.”

“Hungry Dog tribe had a ritual, when time came to choose their matron,” Adjutant said. “All the candidates put their hand in a brazier – the one who kept it the longest got to rule.”

“High pain tolerance doesn’t mean good leadership,” I grunted.

“It’s about who was willing to suffer the most to get it,” the orc said. “I can respect that. Ranker kept her hand in there for half a day, long after everybody else had abandoned. Her left hand’s a blackened ruin, and she’s refused any healing ever since.”

“And they named an entire legion after that?” I frowned.

“Officers in the Fourth kept the tradition,” Hakram said. “Even those not goblins. Most of them take healing afterwards, but everybody has to be willing to burn for power.”

“That feels like it should be against regulations,” I said, then glanced at him. “... is it?”

The thing with being Named was that rules only applied to you if you allowed them to. For example, my relationship with Kilian was technically breaking a rule about fraternization – she was under me in the chain of command. I’d learned the most important of the regs, but some of the smaller ones I’d, uh, only skimmed. In my defence, there were a lot .

“It’s skirting the line about voluntary injuries,” the orc replied. “That can qualify as desertion, if you’re not careful. But the Marshal’s been with the Carrion Lord since the beginning. Those that were get to run their legion however they want.”

A woman used to getting her own way, then, and one of the three highest-ranked military officers in the Empire to boot. I narrowed my eyes, thinking back to an old Name dream of mine – she’d been with Grem One-Eye and Istrid during the civil war. That’d been what, thirty years ago? And she’d already been a matron candidate before that. I wasn’t clear how old you had to be for that, but at least ten years old felt like a safe bet. Considering it was rare for a goblin to make it past thirty-five, that Ranker was at least forty was notable.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Near sixty,” Hakram said. “And no, nobody knows how she made it that old. Most common guess is that Lord Black had rituals done to extend her lifespan.”

“He doesn’t like using blood magic,” I frowned, as there was no real question about what kind of a ritual could be used for such a purpose. “He would have needed a very good reason.”

“She’s the most powerful goblin in the Empire, bar none,” Adjutant said. “And she’s a vocal advocate for the Tribes being involved with the Legions. Pickler says a lot of the Matrons were in favour of going isolationist after the civil war.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“They made a lot of gains when Malicia won the throne,” I pointed out. “Breeding restrictions were lifted and they pretty much run the Imperial Forges.”

That part hadn’t been taught in the histories back at the orphanage, but it had been in the pile of books Black had dropped into my lap when I first became the Squire. I’d taken me a few years to understand that those were meant in part to be a primer to Imperial politics – by learning how all the major players had gotten where they were, I could get a read on what they wanted. Before the civil war the High Lords of Foramen had owned all the forges in the city, though they’d used goblins as labour. Malicia had given ownership to the Tribes and only allowed High Lady Banu to take a cut from the proceeds. A significant one, but it’d been a sizeable blow to her power base. I’d not been surprised to learn that she was part of the Truebloods.

“They’ve always had a bend that way,” Hakram shrugged. “And no one gets involved with the Tower for long without getting burned. I can understand wanting to take their win and go home.”

I hummed.

“So she’s a key player, then,” I said. “If she goes, the Matrons she’d keeping in check get bolder.”

“She’s not someone you can bully, Cat,” he warned. “She’s run Denier for twenty years and the Fourth is rabidly loyal. Get on her bad side and even our goblins will get restless. She’s to the Tribes what One-Eye is to the Clans.”

The looming figure of an era, he meant. Even Juniper got star struck when she spoke about Marshal Grem, and she was not a girl who impressed easy. I allowed the conversation to ebb as I considered what was ahead of us. Duchess Kegan who’d raised her army of twenty thousand was only half the problem I had to deal with. I knew what the Deoraithe wanted, and our shared enemy was common ground enough I was more or less confident I could point her in the right direction. The question was whether I could make Marshal Ranker buy into the notion. Marshals weren’t just the Imperial officers with the authority to command several legions: they had a broader responsibility put on them.

One-Eye was charged with securing the border with the Principate, Marshal Nim with keeping peace in the Wasteland. Ranker was meant to keep the Duchy of Daoine in check, positioned near the best crossing of the Silver Lake’s tributary to slow the Deoraithe down if they rebelled. I had, theoretically, the authority to give her orders. But her responsibility to keep an eye on Daoine came straight from the Tower, and that meant gave Ranker at lot of leeway. Malicia’s orders came before anyone else’s, no matter the circumstances. I remained silent all the way to the city, but no solution presented itself.

—

Denier was a sleepy little city, about the size of Summerholm but nowhere as heavily fortified. It had rarely ever seen fighting: whenever the Empire had bypassed Summerholm and crossed the Hwaerte, they tended to go straight from Laure. The city had been stormed during the Conquest, but it had surrendered after a token resistance – it was in no way capable of resisting the likes of what Praesi sappers could unleash. Its only real military importance came from the fact that it stood near the easiest crossing into Daoine. Higher up the river the harsh currents made navigation tricky and the making of a pontoon bridge nigh impossible. The waters west of the city were almost lazy in comparison and full of large mud banks. There was no bridge into the Duchy, of course. That no such thing would be built without the sanction of the Dukes and Duchess of Daoine had been one of the conditions written into the treaty that saw Daoine folded into Callow after the First Crusade. No Fairfax had ever dared to go back on that word, even when the northerners flouted the authority of the throne.

The greatest general in Callowan history, Elizabeth Alban, had famously attempted to invade the then-Kingdom of Daoine. By the the Queen of Blades had already proven her ability by occupying three principalities of what was not yet the Principate, crushing a Liessen rebellion and turning back a Praesi invasion. The expectation had been that, within a few months, the Deoraithe would be made subjects of Callow. Instead she’d had to slog through the countryside for two long years, losing thousands to ambushes and night attacks while her supply trains disappeared. Historians usually noted that given another year she might have won anyway by forcing a decisive battle at the capital of Daoine, but the invasion had collapsed when the Praesi had crossed the border again under Dread Empress Regalia. After the Wastelanders were defeated and the Empress killed as her flying fortress crashed into Laure, the Queen of Blades had begun planning a second invasion.

So the Watch had murdered her in her bed, in her own seat of power.

No ruler of Callow had ever forgotten that pointed warning. Had half the population of Daoine not been wiped out by Dread Empress Triumphant when she took the continent, the Duchy might very well be a sovereign nation to this day. A combination of worries about Praesi resurgence even after Triumphant died and Eleanor Fairfax’s deft diplomacy – helped along by her famous ‘friendship’ with the Queen of Daoine – had seen the kingdom made a duchy, though one so removed from the authority of the throne it was effectively a vassal state instead of truly a part of Callow. That state of affairs had been maintained after the Conquest, with regular tributes and fixed war time obligations being signed over to the Tower by treaty. My short-lived Ruling Council had changed nothing in that regard: Duchess Kegan’s envoy had flatly refused any notion that they were subject to its authority and I’d recognized that as a fight I couldn’t win. And wasn’t even sure I wanted to, to be honest. Daoine had always gotten on just fine on its own. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.

The gates were open for us when my soldiers finally made it to Denier, ranks of legionaries atop the walls watching us. I rode in at a brisk pace, and only reined in my horse when a Taghreb with the markings of Staff Tribune headed in my direction with two lines for escort. I quietly ordered the Gallowborne to allow them passage, though Farrier saw to it they immediately surrounded the legionaries of the Fourth when they got lose.

“Lady Squire,” the olive-skinned man greeted me, sharply saluting.

“Staff Tribune,” I replied. “You look like a man carrying a message.”

“Marshal Ranker asks that you attend to her immediately, ma’am,” he said.

I cocked my head to the side.

“My men are not yet settled,” I said.

“I would handle this myself, my lady,” he said. “The Marshal would like you to that within a bell Duchess Kegan will be crossing the river with a party to treat with us. If you’re to be part of the conference, you will need to be briefed.”

I smiled at the Taghreb, cursing viciously inside. Well, there went my plan to work on Ranker for a day or two before talking with the Deoraithe. One of these days, I was going to force Fate into a physical manifestation and then I was going to stab it.

Chapter 23: Reassessment

“From small slights, long prices.”
– Deoraithe proverb

For all that the marshal’s envoy had impressed upon me the urgency of the situation, I found myself waiting. The balustrade overlooked an inside courtyard, and from my perch I watched the soldiers milling below. I’d left a line of the Gallowborne down there along with Robber and a line from his cohort. My personal retinue wouldn’t be mingling with the goblins, but the Special Tribune and his men were not so distant. They were, perhaps, a little too friendly. I winced when Robber rolled all over the paving stones, clawing at another goblin’s eyes and cackling loudly. Their sharp nails drew blood on each other, but aside from my own visibly horrified Callowans none of the legionaries seemed anything but amused. The other greenskin was larger – likely from a Matron lineage, then, since those were supposed to be bigger and smarter than other goblins – but my own bastard was younger and more vicious. It ended with him sitting atop his opponent, licking the blood off his fingers to the cheers of all the goblins in the courtyard.

The door my back was turned to opened silently, but my senses had gotten even sharper since Arcadia. I could feel the air moving, almost, and the soft creep of leather boots headed for me. The only other person in the room came to stand by my side at the balustrade, deftly climbing atop a stone seat so they’d be able to lean their elbows against the edge like I did. I didn’t show surprise, or even bother to turn around. I already knew who it was, and years of dealing with Robber had taught me the dangers of allowing a goblin to set the beat of a conversation.

“Tribe?” a soft voice asked.

“Rock Breaker,” I replied.

Marshal Ranker chuckled, the sound a dry rasp.

“I can see why a barren old bitch like Weaver would get rid of him,” she said.

Only then did I glance at the small, wrinkled old woman that was one of the three most important commanders in the Legions of Terror. Marshal Ranker’s skin looked like leather left out too long in the sun, all cracked and dry and a brown-green that was unpleasant to look at. Her face was a curtain of heavy wrinkles leading to thin brown lips and a pointed chin. Her eyes, though, had me wary. Deep set and dark, with small threads of red in the sclera. This one was ancient, by the standards of her people, and old goblins were either dead or exceedingly dangerous. The infamous blackened hand her legion was named for was curled and unmoving, looking crippled for good, but I knew better than to take anything shown by this woman as face value.

“Her loss,” I said. “His record speaks for itself.”

The goblin clicked her tongue.

“That boy learned his lessons too well,” she said. “We tell them they’re supposed to be fearless, but that’s a lie. They’re still supposed to be afraid of us .”

Of the Matrons. I didn’t know much about the Tribes, not that anybody did, but what little I’d learned from Robber and Pickler had not endeared their ruling class to me. It had always been absurd to me to wrest authority out of the hands of the capable because of some arbitrary objection to those capable individuals having bollocks. If there was one aspect of Black’s philosophy I had wholeheartedly embraces, it was that power belonged in the hands of the competent – wasting talent out of petty bias was to lessen all those involved.

“Fear’s never enough,” I said. “Not on its own.”

“Empires have been built on less,” the Marshal snorted.

“Not this one,” I said.

There was a pause.

“And yet you crucified them,” Ranker said.

“They crossed me,” I replied. “Some fear was required.”

I got a bark of harsh laughter for that.

“Marshal Ranker, of the Hungry Dog tribe,” she finally introduced herself.

“Catherine Foundling,” I said. “Duchess of Moonless Nights.”

“I’m aware,” the goblin lightly replied. “As I’m sure you are that you’ve had crossbows pointed at you since you first stepped into Denier.”

I smiled wryly.

“You’re not going to mention the fact that this entire room is rigged with demolition charges?” I asked.

Smell was a sense as well, and I’d learned to recognize the sharp tang of goblin munitions.

“Much like you weren’t going to mention you sent your Adjutant to poke around the city,” she replied.

“He’s not a spymaster,” I shrugged. “Just a friendly orc who likes to share a drink.”

“The dangerous ones always smile,” the Marshal said.

I snorted.

“I’ve been advised you’re not someone to trifle with,” I told her.

“I considered trapping your little crew in an avenue and setting the whole thing aflame with green,” Ranker casually said. “Your tiff with the Empress has poor timing. But that would trigger another uprising, and that’d be even more trouble than you.”

The sheer nonchalance she’d just admitted that with was chilling, but I was no stranger to cold these days.

“All I’m doing is hacking off the dead wood,” I said. “And there’s a great deal of that. You’ve been around long enough for-“

“Save me the speech, Duchess,” the goblin interrupted cuttingly. “I’m not one of your lapdogs, and whatever hopes you’re peddling I don’t care for. I’m a fucking Marshal of the Dread Empire, kid. I know where my loyalties lie. If it comes to it, I’ll kill you if only to spare Amadeus the pain of doing the deed himself.”

“The way things used to be done in Callow won’t work anymore,” I said. “You have to be aware of that.”

The Marshal hacked out a laugh.

“And whose fault is that? I read Sacker’s report on Summerholm. The Liesse Rebellion is as good as your doing. You set up that highborn chit in the south who’s giving us trouble now, too, and to add insult to fucking injury you’re taking advantage of an invasion to make a power grab,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned the only difference between you and those poor bastards you nailed to crosses is that you have a bigger stick and catchier battle cry.”

“I actually have a purpose, unlike those ‘poor bastards’,” I replied coldly. “And I’ll see it through no matter how much wailing comes from the gallery.”

“I’ve been threatened by scarier Named than you, Duchess,” Ranker said. “And I’ll say this for the Chancellor – he wasn’t dumb enough to do it in my own territory. You’ve risen quickly, and we all know how that story goes. The fall comes as quickly, and twice as hard. Take care not to drop your carcass on anything I care about.”

I sighed.

“Are we just going to stand around trading veiled threats all day?” I said. “I was under the impression Duchess Kegan was headed our way.”

“There is no us ,” the Marshal said. “You’re one conversation gone south away from rebellion. And you have some sort of plan for the Deoraithe. Out with it. If it has to come to steel, let’s get it out of the way.”

“You wouldn’t leave this room alive if it did,” I said flatly.

Ranker eyed me with those dark, deep-set eyes.

“No,” she agreed. “But neither would you.”

I’d seen that look in the faces of people before. William’s, when he’d decided to call Contrition onto Liesse. Akua’s, when she’d told me she would collapse the dimension were were in if I refused to negotiate. Ranker wasn’t Named – she lacked the feelings of power and weight both – but she did have that kind of resolution to her. She would, if she found my intentions unacceptable, rather bring down this entire place on our heads than allow me to go through with them. I’d never had that goblin razor-sharp fearlessness turned on me before, and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Could I kill her before she even spoke an order? I had no doubt. I shouldn’t, though. There was nothing to gain from it, and it worried me the urge was there. Kilian’s soft accusation that I hated to compromise came back to my ears, along with the bundle of things I still felt about that conversation I’d set aside rather than deal with. Had I become too used to getting my way? Or maybe it was subtler than that. I’d won often enough that the idea of losing even in a small way had me reaching for violence. Because Ranker would be beating me, by coercing me into revealing my hand like this. That was a fact.

The surrender of control rankled. I’d stayed in this room even after smelling the munitions because I’d believed that whatever measures she had taken they wouldn’t be able to kill me. I’d done that even after being told by the person I trusted most in the world that I was dealing with a real threat. Stupid. More than that, I’d been arrogant . Ranker had survived the death of more powerful villains than me. This isn’t a mistake I would have made a year ago. I would have liked to blame this on my Name, on whatever the Winter King had done to me, but that felt like a cheap excuse. I’d gotten so used to reaping the lives of non-Named like wheat I’d stopped seeing them as truly dangerous, and that was the kind of conceit that got people killed. I wasn’t in a small pond anymore. I’d reached the sea, and the things that lurked in it would gobble me up if I didn’t start stepping more carefully. I breathed out. Decide on your objective , I told myself, returning to Black’s old mantra. Decide what lines you’re willing to cross to get to it . If I retreated here, all I lost was pride.

Perhaps I could use a little less of that.

“I want take Kegan’s army through Arcadia,” I said. “And use it on my enemies. The fae first, then Diabolist.”

“And why would she agree to that?” the Marshal asked.

“Because I know what she wants,” I said. “And I can help her get it before it’s too late.”

The wrinkled goblin looked down at the legionaries in the courtyard.

“We can deal,” she finally said.

—

We met the Deoraithe at nightfall.

Only ten of them came across the fishing boat, but they did not need to be any more: nine of those wore the brown-grey cloaks of the Watch, longbows strapped on their backs and longswords at their hips. I’d never fought a full-fledged member of the order once charged with manning the Wall protecting Daoine from orc incursions, but I knew better than to underestimate them. Even the half-baked observer they’d sent to the Lone Swordsman’s side had managed to put an arrow in my back barely an inch away from my spine. I still had the scar, a pink puckered star on the tan skin of my back. The tenth, then, must have been Duchess Kegan Iarsmai. The woman was short – though still taller than me – and learn, with always-moving brown eyes and the stride of someone used to others following behind. She wore no highborn clothes, only hardened leather armour with the crest of her house on the chest. The Duchess had forgone a helmet, allowing her long dark curls to stream down her back. She was not ugly, but neither was she pretty: her features were hawkish and her middle-aged bearing carved of sternness.

Our side of the negotiations was less uniform in nature. Marshal Ranker had taken a tenth of hardened Soninke and Taghreb regulars with her, while I’d picked a tenth from the Gallowborne. Callowans, mostly, but also two orcs. They were ten steps behind myself and the sole goblin on the scene, and the looming silhouettes of the Watch stayed at the same distance when the Duchess advanced. She glanced at Ranker with open dislike, then frowned at the sight of me.

“’Evening,” I said. “I’m-“

“Lady Catherine Foundling,” Kegan cut through. “We have paintings of you. Marshal, I was not made aware there would be a Named tonight.”

“A last moment adjustment,” Ranker replied. “But not unfitting. She does have to authority to treat with you.”

The Duchess turned her eyes to me.

“Daoine is not subject to the Ruling Council,” she said bluntly. “Nor will it ever be. Our tributary arrangements with the Tower need no broker.”

“Not what I’m here for,” I said. “I hear you have an army assembled on the other side of the river.”

“That is none of your concern, Squire,” she said.

She glared, at both me and Creation in general.

“Ancestors save us from meddlesome children,” she muttered in the Old Tongue.

“I also speak that,” I replied in the same.

She offered me a sneer.

“Poorly,” she replied.

Ouch. That actually kind of stung. Wasn’t my fault it was a hellishly complicated language. Even Alamani wasn’t as bad, and people from other parts of the Principate preferred speaking Lower Miezan than learning the language.

“You’re not crossing, Kegan,” Ranker informed her.

“You think a second legion and whatever the Carrion’s Lord apprentice brought will be enough to stop me?” the duchess coldly replied. “No amount of traps will be enough to turn me back. I am due, Marshal.”

“It would be,” I shrugged. “I’ve beat worse odds, Watch or no. But I’d rather avoid a fight.”

“Then get out of our way ,” the Deoraithe hissed. “My debt lies not with the Tower.”

“I know,” I said.

“So how many did the chit take?” Ranker asked. “Twelve? Fifteen? Surely not twenty. You can’t have gotten that soft since the Conquest.”

“The man who beat us at the Wall is a long way from Denier, goblin,” Kegan said. “Do not make me teach the two of you what we have learned since those defeats.”

“You won’t get there in time,” I said, and her eyes went back to me.

“You know not what you speak of,” the duchess said.

“I know Akua Sahelian a lot better than you do,” I smiled thinly. “You’d have to march through the entire span of Callow, and if you force the crossing you’ll be doing it with the Empire harassing you the whole time. She knows that. She planned that. By the time you get to Liesse, she’ll have finished whatever ritual she’s cooking up.”

“I wanted answers from you, but I already obtained them,” the Marshal said. “What we have now is terms.”

“For what ?” Duchess Kegan asked.

I rolled my shoulder, delighting in the crack.

“Allowing you to use my shortcut,” I said.

Interlude – Apprentice

“The source of wonder and horror is the same, and the boundary between them thinner than you would think.”
– Dread Empress Sanguinia I

“That is a Count, I believe,” Masego announced.

Father’s spectacles were of no use at this range, so he’d had to use his Name. An aspect, more specifically – Glimpse . Apprentice disliked relying on the power conferred onto him by the Gods Below, as he’d always considered it something of a crutch that would cripple his ability to improve his casting without such means, but he could not deny the abilities it lent him had their uses. Even from a mile away, behind a set of obscuring wards, he’d been able to gauge the forces animating the Summer fae. The intensity and breadth of those forces were inferior to those of the Dukes and Duchesses he’d observed in Skade but superior to those of a Baron. There were outliers, of course. The Lady of Cracking Ice had been by an order of magnitude stronger than the other nobles accompanying her in the initial meeting even though her title was the lowest. He suspected the rough equivalent of Roles that was carved into the consciousness of fae was the true factor behind the power those entities could muster, but without proper investigation it was impossible to turn this into a credible thesis.

Regardless, this particular fae seemed to have the power common for one titled Count. The power of his Name keeping his eyes from blinking, Masego studied the fluctuations in the forces. A shame the Count was not in range of his spectacles. One of the enchantments on them helped him quantify the energies at play in a way his aspect simply could not. Still, the actual forces did not seem greater by a significant margin than those of the same-titled Winter fae he had studied. The qualitative difference that allegedly allowed Summer to win every time open war was waged between those Courts must have come from a different source. Nature of the energy, perhaps? The symbolic properties of fire and ice as per the table of classic elements were cleansing and preservation – typically, aggressive properties won over defensive ones when diametrically opposed. Could it be that simple? The dark-skinned mage itched for ink and parchment, but it would have to wait.

“I told you,” Archer crowed. “We just need to keep shooting stronger ones in the head and eventually a big one will show up.”

“That is a vast oversimplification of still poorly understood social dynamics,” Masego replied peevishly.

“You know, really smart people don’t actually need to use long words,” the ochre-skinned woman grinned.

That was such a brutal insult that Apprentice remained too appalled to reply for a solid thirty heartbeats. By that time, Archer had strung that ridiculously large longbow of hers. Even with the power of his aspect having faded away, Masego could see the sorcery worked into it. The wood, already magical in nature and likely from the Waning Woods, had been further strengthened and so had the string. It was, in his estimation, physically impossible for anyone but a Named to successfully draw that bow. Even then, what the woman was preparing to do seemed rather dubious.

“He’s a mile away,” Apprentice said. “There is a breeze. Longbow range is, at best, four hundred yards. Useless against armoured targets past two hundred. The distance you are aiming at is over four times that.”

“That’s very impressive,” Archer grinned. “Learned all those pretty numbers from a book, did you?”

Masego had, in fact, learned those numbers from a book on military tactics he’d borrowed from Hakram. He coughed to hide the blush that touched his cheeks at being caught out.

“For a mortal, those numbers matter a lot,” the woman said, eyes hooded with pleasure. “For a Named, they matter a little. For me , though?”

Her grin turned sharp.

“If I can See it, I can kill it.”

Vision-driven aspect? Given her Name, it was only logical. Masego’s train of thought was interrupted by the sight of Archer on the move, and for an instant that was all the filled his mind. He’d fought at this woman’s side before, but he had never witnessed her in action with a bow – only seen the arrows she shot. Archer moved so swiftly he saw only a blur, string taut and then loose as the first arrow flew. Another two followed before a heartbeat had passed. Merciless Gods. His eyes followed the last arrow, studying the properties as it flew. They were silent, and so clearly enchanted. No, he realized, not enchanted. Made of material with natural sorcery. Inherent properties , he understood with a sharp intake of breath. Silence, and some kind of amplification. Sharpness or penetration, he could not tell. It did not matter. Most defensive wards relied on the assumption that any projectiles targeting them would be either entirely mundane or have an active sorcerous component to them, more commonly called an enchantment. The arrows Archer had used would sail right through those, qualifying as neither by the strictures of sorcery. Mage-killers. That was what those projectiles were.

As a child he’d often lingered around Father and Uncle Amadeus whenever they used Imperial business as an excuse to have drinks and bicker, and one of his favourite games had been ‘could you beat’. He’d demanded a plan for the two of them to vanquish everyone from the Dead King to a company of legendary heroes, and always been given an answer. Until he’d asked them for the plan to fight Ranger. The two of them had traded looks, and then his uncle had smiled over his cup. Don’t , he’d replied. Watching that woman’s foremost apprentice at work, he was beginning to grasp why. The Count didn’t realize he was being targeted until the first arrow took him in the chest. Fire flared as he fell, but the second arrow nailed his shoulder to the ground anyway. The third went through his left knee, immobilizing him for good.

“Do your stuff,” Archer said, waving her hand like she’d not shot a godling thrice in broad daylight.

Masego gathered enough concentration to activate the dispersed components he’d left around the area where’d they killed the last two patrols. The Count rose into the air, shackles of chirping light forming around his limbs. That should keep him prisoner for the duration they needed, and so the first step of their plan was complete. Apprentice dispersed the obscuration ward around them, since neither of them were using their Names anymore, and began the walk to their prisoner. It’d been over a month since Catherine had sent them south to ‘bait the Summer Court into attacking the Diabolist’. Masego had been assured that the notion made strategic sense, not that he particularly cared. Only now did he realized that Catherine had used his eagerness to secure some high-quality fae specimens to rope him into doing actual work. Truly, she was becoming more ruthless every month. That was how he ’d been talked into going south, anyhow, but he’d wondered why Archer had acquiesced and asked her as much. She’d been sent as a fae expert on loan from Refuge, not a soldier to be used in the Squire’s wars.

“Eh, just staying with the army would have been boring,” she’d replied. “Hakram’s not even around to spar with anymore.”

Adjutant had informed him over one of their nightly games of shatranj that those ‘spars’ mostly consisted of Archer beating him black and blue until she felt like having a drink, which thankfully was frequent. He believed the orc. The foreign-looking woman had brought more drink than rations in her haversack on their trek south, and insisted they stop at villages to replenish her stock.

“That seems like a thin motivation,” he’d said.

“The idea of screwing over Sahelian does give me the good kind of shivers,” the woman had admitted. “And, well...”

Ah , he’d thought. He could understand the unspoken reason as well. As a boy he’d sometimes wondered why his father did not lead the Calamities. He was the most powerful among them, after all, capable of wiping a city off the face of Creation in a single night. He’d always liked Uncle Amadeus, but like did not usually enter the equation when it came to villains. The strongest held command, that was the natural order. Now, though? He’d learned better. Masego could probably kill Catherine, if he truly put his mind to it. Two days of preparation required at least, but it was doable even with the power she’d gained in Arcadia. He didn’t want to, though, and not just because taking up her burdens would be atrociously inconvenient to his research.

She had a way about her, that... It was hard to explain. Sometimes he thought of it as akin to the way smaller celestial orbs circled around larger ones, but that ignored some fundamental aspects of it. It was warm and nice and almost addictive, being part of the family around Catherine Foundling. That heady sense of belonging , the way that when she talked you believed there was nothing you couldn’t do. Apprentice did not enjoy ‘adventures’, as a rule, but he believed his life would be lesser if he’d not followed Squire on them. And so he did not ask any further questions of Archer, because neither of them would be comfortable with where that conversation would take them. Some things were best left unsaid, and in the end he was not inclined to bare much of himself to this stranger. For all that it was nigh impossible to get the woman to shut up, Masego still knew next to nothing about her or what she was capable of. This was not, he thought, a coincidence.

They hurried on the way to the Count. His scrying ritual, adapted to notice the outskirts of the presence of fae instead of looking at them directly and facing the full backlash, had told him there were no patrols closer than half a day’s march. Still, their actions today were as good as lighting a beacon for anyone looking for them. They needed to be gone before anyone came looking, if this was to work. Which he wasn’t sure it would. Neither of them, as it turned out, were particularly good at planning. Apprentice usually let Catherine and Hakram handle this sort of menial work, and Archer had admitted that her plans usually didn’t go much further than ‘fight the enemy until it died’. He’d agreed to sharing a drink with the woman only once on their way south, when they’d come up with their plan to push Summer to attack the Diabolist. They’d tried to guess why Liesse had not been attacked yet, when the two cities to its flanks had already been taken by Summer. Masego had eventually mentioned the ancient but powerful wards protecting the city, and the other Named had agreed that those would give fae pause. They were, after all, exceptionally sensitive to boundaries.

They needed, therefore, to make it easier for Summer to attack the city. Sadly, neither of them knew anything about military tactics. Apprentice had , however, made a comprehensive map of the wards in the walls of Liesse before the battle of the same name. Leaking that information should help, they’d agreed. So he’d written it down on a parchment, they’d located a small fae patrol and handed it to them. Or tried to, at least. The fae captain had ordered them to immediately kneel and swear allegiance to the Queen of Summer or be destroyed, Archer had offered them a drink instead and they’d rather taken offence to that. A quarter hour later, they had five fae corpses she’d had to kill with a broken bottle and they weren’t anywhere closer to their objective. They’d tried again, attracting another small patrol and just leaving the scroll with the information on the ground while hiding. The fae had torched it and ordered a search of the region. Five other corpses later, they’d agreed that diplomacy did not seem to be working. Alternatives were needed.

Wondering what Father and Papa would do in a similar situation Masego had arrived to the conclusion that capturing a fae and rewriting their mind so the information was inside it before releasing them to the Court was the most expedient solution. Archer’s suggestion that they just carve all the details on the corpses of the fae was clearly flawed, since there was no guaranteed they wouldn’t just torch the corpses on sight like that had the scroll. They’d ambushed a third patrol, keeping the captain alive and Apprentice had taken out his tools to tinker with the forces that passed for the creature’s soul. Frustratingly, there hadn’t been enough room. As entities who did not learn , per se, there was no space inside the mind of the fae for much aside what was already there. Carving out some unnecessary things like the ability to see or the knowledge of how to use sorcery had resulted in unmoving bodies with blank eyes. Worse, apparently removing the ability to move stopped them breathing as well – that was just poor design, he’d complained. Archer had suggested they abduct several captains and spread the information across them, but that would both take long and risk more inaccuracies the more operations he had to do.

“We need a bigger fish, then,” Archer had suggested.

“We’re in a landlocked region of Callow,” Apprentice had reasonably pointed out.

She’d called him a condescending pedant, he’d called her rampantly ignorant and they’d eventually agreed that a more powerful fae was needed. Simply flaring their Names wouldn’t work, since for all they knew it might draw an entire army. Archer had then introduced the notion of ambushing a patrol and then remaining close by, then killing the fae who came to investigate until one holding a sufficient high title showed up. He hadn’t liked the plan, but been unable to come up with a better one. A sennight later, here they were looming over an imprisoned Count. The fae glared at them, only barely conscious.

“How dare you-“ he started, but then his mouth closed.

Masego tied off the spell structure and left it active to keep the creature silent. He was in no mood for a rant, not when he had to do such a delicate operation. Reaching into the pocket dimension he’d created after the rebellion, Apprentice took out the leather pack holding his tools in place and casually created a pane of force to hold it. Humming lightly, he took out what looked like a knife so thin it could not possibly cut anything. He looked at the fae and patted the man’s shoulder reassuringly.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll cut out the part that dictates pain very early. It shouldn’t hurt at all after that.”

“It’s much less creepy when they don’t scream,” Archer noted approvingly.

Masego got work.

—

Well, it had worked. More or less. The two of them were hiding in a bush under an obscuration ward, watching the host of Summer spread to surround Liesse. The Diabolist had seen them coming, which had interesting implications. Either Sahelian was using the same indirect scrying he was but more accurately, or she’d found another way entirely. Most likely the second. Wolof had many secrets in its vaults. Regardless, they knew the Diabolist had been aware of the fae headed her way because the army she’d had on the field had retreated behind the walls and was now manning them. As well as a truly impressive amount of devils, Apprentice noted. She must have used a Lesser Breach to gather so much on a short notice. Her skill with sorcery continued to impressed. The two Named watched the host of Summer spread across the plain, for it was a sight to see.

Ten thousand fae, he’d estimated. Entire regiments of ivory-armoured fairies stood ramrod straight, spears held high and a river of banners and pennons fluttering in the wind amongst them. Archers armed with longbows of pure white wood stood behind them, feathers not of any creature known to Creation fletching their arrows. Not a single one of them could be called anything but young and beautiful, the ardour of war wafting off them like a fume. Fae bearing trumpets of gold and rubies stood in every regiment, ready to let out the clarion call of conquest that lay in the heart of every Summer fae. A thousand knights in silvery plate sat astride winged horses, long lances and shields of exquisite make in their hands. They were forming in a loose triangle behind the infantry, their mounts stirring eagerly. The nobles stood out starkly from the rest, colourful figures made of fire, steel and silk that warped the air with heat wherever they stood. No two sets of plate they wore were the same, every one a masterpiece that would have made a mortal craftsman weep to look at.

The defenders were no less dreamlike to witness. Praesi soldiers wearing the distinctive colours of the family they were sworn to on their tabards manned the few bastions on the wall, their chainmail blackened dark as a crow’s feathers as was the custom in the Wasteland. Their armaments were sharp goblin steel, the finest blades of Calernia put in the hands of men and woman trained from birth to use them in the service of their lord. Between them stood rows upon rows of walin-falme devils. Tall and with the dark leathery skin of bats, they wore plate marked with the brand of Wolof: red and black, a curving golden lion inside the splash of colour. These bore spears and axes of cast iron, the metal known to be the ugly death of fae. Spread amongst all of these were small clusters of Taghreb and Soninke in tailored robes, panes of lights inscribed with runes flickering around them. War-mages, the finest the Wasteland had to offer. This was not an army that would go gently, not even against the strength of Summer.

It was a host ripped straight from the old days of blood and darkness, when all of Calernia had feared the sound of Praes at war. It was an ancient dream, this one, but Masego’s fathers had taught him better than to love it.

“I forgot to ask before we left, but do we actually want Summer to win?” Archer asked, chewing on dried meat.

Masego blinked, shaken out of his thoughts. While he’d been spellbound, his companion seemed less than impressed.

“You weren’t paying attention during the briefing?” he said.

“Nah,” she admitted easily. “I figured you would.”

Apprentice cursed.

“I thought you would,” he admitted.

“It’s their fault for making it boring, really,” Archer said.

“They kept talking about logistics and supply trains,” Masego agreed bitterly. “I don’t want to know anything about those, Hakram.”

“I mean, just guessing here,” the dark-eyed woman said. “Foundling wouldn’t want all the people inside butchered right?”

“I think not,” Apprentice said. “She gets irritated about people killing Callowans unless it’s her doing it.”

“So we don’t want Summer to win,” Archer pointed out triumphantly. “They do tend to burn stuff a lot. And people. I don’t think they understand the difference very well.”

“Everybody burns people, it’s a common execution method across Calernia,” Masego replied absent-mindedly, trying to remember anything about the briefing aside from Adjutant’s voice droning and Catherine drinking too much. “I think we may want them both to lose.”

“Is that something that happens?” she asked, sounding puzzled.

He glanced at her.

“Have you won every fight you were in?” he asked sceptically.

“Well, no,” Archer said. “I spar against the Lady Ranger. Never landed a blow on her unless she allowed me.”

Apprentice drew on his extensive military experience, which consisted of three battles where he’d largely spent his time setting people on fire or exploding them when Catherine asked.

“I think it’s like shatranj,” he mused. “You know, towards the end of the game when most pieces have been taken. We want them both to lose pieces.”

Archer glanced at the city and grimaced.

“I think we may have given Summer a bit too much of an advantage,” she said.

Masego followed her eyes and paled. One of the fae, on a winged horse, had ridden up to the city walls. The volley of arrows shot at her burst into flame and scattered into ashes long before they got close, and it only got worse from there: a torrent of heat formed in front of her and impacted the walls, beginning to melt the stone. Well, that was one way to beat the wards. They could not be held back by the boundary if there was no boundary.

“This is bad,” Archer decided.

The Diabolist, though, did not flinch. A heartbeat later Apprentice’s ward shivered as a large-scale ritual triggered. The waves of sorcery coming from Liesse were almost enough to scatter it, though when he had a Glimpse at the city he saw this was but a sliver of what had been at play. Slowly, Liesse and the ground under it began to rip their ways out of the soil . And only this much wasted power? he thought. At least a mile around the city should have been turned into a wasteland, for something this large. The Diabolist seemed to have managed to keep it all within a hair’s breadth of Keter’s Due, which meant this workingl might have had the single most efficient ritual array in Praesi history. He was itching to have a look at it even as Liesse rose into the air and kept rising, tons of soil falling out from under it. He could almost see the array itself, what had gone into activating it. This was no mere blood sacrifice, she’d used fae to fuel it and, just for a moment, the Apprentice touched something greater than himself. A larger truth still beyond his understanding, a mystery in the almost religious sense of the term, and though he could not grasp it just witnessing part was almost enough to... And then the moment was gone. He was shivering and more excited than he had been in years. He’d nearly transitioned into another Name, just by looking at this. He was close . In the distance, the host of Summer lit up a thousand bright colours as their wings formed. The soldiers and devils on the walls prepared to meet the assault.

“We have, technically, accomplished the task we were sent south for,” Masego said.

Archer looked at the army of Summer taking flight.

“Retreat?” she finally asked.

Streaks of sorcery filled the sky with sounds like thunder. As devils spread their wings and the battle began in earnest.

“For now,” Apprentice said. “We’ll be back.”

Deadhand

“I do not fear wicked men, who know only cruelty and pain. The fear they inflict leashes them as well. But a decent man? Oh, there is no limit to the devilry a decent man will fall to, if he believes it necessary.”
– King Edward III of Callow

Catherine, after some gentle prodding, had finally gone to bed. She still had quarters that were nominally hers in the royal palace, and not even the rebels had been arrogant enough to lay a hand on those. The dark-haired woman he called both friend and leader was too tired to even notice the Gallowborne discreetly following her at a distance, three of them ordered to guard her door through the rest of the night. Hakram did not believe that there were many entities within the bounds of Callow that could kill Squire in combat, but daggers in the nights were a different matter. They still got the occasional assassin paid for by Wasteland gold, though considering the amount they’d killed over the last year Praes had to be running out – there were only so many times Adjutant could have the heads of those enterprising fellows put on pikes before the pool of volunteers got truly shallow. Tribune Farrier lingered close, wiping blood off his sword hand with a cloth as Catherine’s retinue herded the prisoners away none too gently. The Praesi household troops were still too shocked to protest the treatment.

“Lord Adjutant,” the pale-skinned man finally saluted, thumping his fist against his breastplate.

The tall orc replied with the same gesture. He rather liked John Farrier, and believed the feeling was nearly mutual. The man was less than fond of greenskins in general – his grandfather had gotten his head caved in by an orc during the Conquest, and Callowans kept grudges – but their shared loyalties had done much to bring them closer. Another few months to work on him, Hakram thought, and they might even get to a place where they shared drinks. Adjutant would keep at it. The two of them were arguably the members of the Fifteenth who saw the most of Catherine, it was worth putting in an effort for them to get along. Hakram’s purpose had been to keep everything running smoothly long before it became his Role.

“You look like you want to say something, Tribune,” Hakram gravelled.

That or he was in pain. Humans had such delicate faces, it made their expressions harder to read: neither orcs nor goblins were so... complicated. That the wheat-eaters rarely meant to use their teeth to convey what they were actually conveying only made it more confusing.

“She pulled ahead of the cohort twice, tonight,” the dark-haired human said, “And refused to take an escort when she went deeper into the palace.”

Worry. This he could deal with.

“That was no slight to your abilities, Tribune,” he said. “She’s... impatient with this entire situation. And when she was headed for her meeting, guards would have been of no help. If anything she might have needed to protect them.”

The pale man’s eyes narrowed.

“The Thief,” he guessed.

“You haven’t had to clean up a corpse,” Hakram said, “which means she will be cooperating with us.”

“She ain’t the nice heroine type,” Farrier said. “She won’t be above sliding a knife in the Countess’ back down the line.”

The orc rumbled his approval. Awareness of threats was a good trait for the head of a personal guard to have. Catherine has chosen well in catapulting Farrier up the ranks instead of drawing someone from the officer pool. But then she’d always had a way for gathering talent to her banner, hadn’t she?

“It will be seen to,” Adjutant said.

The Callowan nodded sharply.

“The Countess didn’t give me any orders for the prisoners,” he added after a moment.

A concession, this. Tribune Farrier only answered to the Squire, theoretically speaking. That he was requesting instructions, even in such a sideways manner, was an offered hand. Though not an unexpected one: as far as the Empire was concerned, whenever Adjutant spoke it was Catherine Foundling’s voice articulating the words. Even nobles courted his attention, nowadays, and wasn’t that just the most hilarious thing he’d heard all year? Some brute like him from the Northern Steppes, wielding enough influence to give pause to highborn. Most days Hakram would have preferred to wash his hands of that entirely, but having that kind of clout made it easier to fulfil his duties.

“Staff Tribune Bishara lent us one of her men,” he said. “He’ll be going through the prisoners to see which can be ransomed back to the Wasteland. The rest we’ll be handing to the Governess-General for judgement.”

The Tribune’s eyes widened.

“It’s true, then?” he said. “Baroness Kendall is still alive?”

“We’ve had word of it,” Adjutant grunted. “We still need to confirm, but it seems likely.”

“Thank the Gods,” Farrier said. “If anyone can put some order in Laure, it’s her.”

He bit his lip the moment the words left his mouth.

“Not that I mean to impugn the Countess’ abilities,” he hurriedly added.

“She doesn’t enjoy being behind a desk,” Hakram said. “It’s not a crime to notice it.”

It would have been hard for the both of them not to, given how often she used personally drilling the Gallowborne as an excuse to foist off paperwork on him. It wasn’t that she was incapable of ruling, Adjutant knew. She had, after all, managed to set Callow on the path to recovery after less than a year in charge even with the Ruling Council slowing the process. In large part that had been through allowing her newly-appointed Callowan governors the leeway to do as the saw fit, but knowing when to give over power was also part of ruling. But she hadn’t taken to it the way she had to battlefield command, that much was glaringly obvious. The Squire shone brightest with a sword in hand, like the Warlords of old. There was a reason orcs called her that, and it wasn’t just respect. A damned shame it was not possible for her to transition into that Name: it would suit her better than that of Black Knight in many ways. But even after centuries to be the Warlord was, deep down, to be an orc. The orc. There was no changing that bedrock foundation.

“We’ll keep them in the city gaols, then,” Farrier said. “It would save the Baroness some trouble to execute them now, but I suppose a public trial will help strengthen her grip on the city.”

Hakram nodded and allowed the man to leave, trading salutes. He waited until the Tribune had left before clearing his throat.

“Tordis,” he said.

The orc lieutenant emerged from the shadows where’d she been leaning against the wall, hand resting idly on the pommel of her sword.

“Deadhand,” she replied, inclining her head.

Catherine had granted him a tenth under Tordis as his personal command during the Liesse campaign, and he’d later expanded their numbers to a full line after having Tordis promoted from sergeant to lieutenant. He’d needed the manpower, even if his original task of finding the leaks in the Fifteenth had largely been handed off to Ratface and Aisha since. The lieutenant was an old friend from Rat Company, and one he’d shared a bedroll with in the past. There’d been nothing more to that than flesh and comradeship, and neither of them had been interested in anything more serious – her being under his command had effectively closed off that avenue for good since. Squire had already amusedly called him a harlot for a month last time she’d seen a woman come out of his tent, and if she ever did that around Robber odds were he’d have to deal with a song about it. The goblin had proved he could compose truly filthy rhymes when’d he’d penned that tune about Nauk and the Fifteenth’s oxen, so Hakram was eager to avoid the pitfall if he could. He’d made a point of being even more discreet since becoming the Adjutant.

“Take word to Nauk,” he said. “I’ll need legionaries tomorrow to serve as public criers. Callowans, if possible. No more than a company.”

She nodded.

“And send someone to speak to Farrier,” he added after a moment. “We’ve got two high-profile prisoners, and I want them held separately from both each other and the rest of the soldiers.”

There might be mages among them, and there were discreet ways to scry. Better to keep the High Lords in the dark about what was happening in Laure as long as possible, or they’d start to wonder how the Fifteenth had made it so quickly to the old capital. It was only a short set of conclusions from there to figuring out they’d used Arcadia, and that trump card was best kept under wraps while they still could. The moment they realized that the Fifteenth could march straight into the Wasteland without ever needing to cross at the Blessed Isles, they’d start taking desperate measures. Too many of them had openly aligned with the Diabolist for them not to fear brutal retribution now. Catherine had something of a reputation in that regard.

“Should I have a study prepared for you?” Tordis asked.

Hakram shook his head. His bare bone fingers tightened.

“I still need to have one last conversation tonight,” he said.

—

Hakram had visited Laure more than he’d ever thought he would, since the Liesse Rebellion, but the former capital of Callow was still foreign city to him. Unlike Robber, who would start feeling at home the moment he’d stabbed someone in an alley anywhere in Calernia, he’d never become comfortable here. Marchford was starting to feel like home, though not as much as the Fifteenth, but the history here would never allow the orc to feel as anything but a stranger. How many hundreds of thousands of his kind had died, trying to take these streets for the Tower? Laure had been the beating heart of the Praesi occupation since the Conquest, but for all that it still felt Callowan to the core in a way few other cities he’d visited did. It was unlike Summerholm, where Callowans strode through the streets eating Soninke grilled meats and Praesi bartered in the markets with pale-skinned merchants, or even Marchford where young widows now traded heated glances with good-looking legionaries while goblins cheated at dice games with old men in older taverns.

Even Liesse, in the depths of the south, had felt... different. There was a difference there the way there was a difference between Taghreb and Soninke: cousins, but not ones who always got along well. Hakram had come to learn that Callow was no more a monolith than Callowans often assumed Praes was. The northern baronies to the east of Daoine were little involved with the rest of the realm, busy with their cattle-herding and weaving, and the wide central plains surrounding Vale saw themselves as a breed apart from both the Liessen to the south and the larger cities bordering the Silver Lake. There were divisions, but shallower ones than in the Wasteland. They were more like the Clans, only willing to squabble amongst themselves so long as there was no other enemy to fight. The Legions of Terror had forged unity between these old tribes one failed invasion at a time, he thought. Breathing the foul city air, Hakram dismissed the thoughts and slowed his steps until he stood in the centre of an intersection.

He reached for his Name, the feeling like putting on his armour and letting the weight of it settle on his shoulders. Find , he whispered inside his mind, and the wheel spun.

He picked the avenue his Name nudged him towards and trod down until the next intersection, where he invoked his aspect again. It was slow going, and twice he had to readjust the course. His target was moving, and had noticed it was being pursued: his ears caught the sound of footsteps on rooftops, too large to be those of goblins. It took half a bell for him to end up in the part of the city Catherine called “Dockside”, though no sign marked it as such. The orc was panting lightly when he found the alehouse he suspected was the hiding hole, cold sweat going down his back. The more he called on the aspect the more tiring using it became. But he was well-rested, and barely needed to sleep these days. He could take it. The establishment was shuttered, but there were lights peeking through. The footsteps quickened behind him, and Adjutant turned to meet his greeters.

Two men, Callowans. The older one took out a knife, a slender little thing that almost made him want to laugh.

“Alehouse’s closed,” the younger one said.

“Not to me,” Hakram gravelled.

“Shouldn’t have come alone,” the older one said, “if you were going to mouth off.”

He moved. Adjutant did not bother to take his axe in hand. He waited, then caught the wrist holding the knife and bent his legs: his muscles shifted as he swung the man around, using him to clobber the other Callowan. The two of them landed in a pile of limbs and curses.

“I’d be within my rights to kill them,” Hakram called out to the night.

“Squire agreed to a truce,” Thief replied, strolling out of the alley.

“Then discipline your people,” Adjutant grunted. “If they’d killed a legionary, a great deal of blood would have followed.”

“I refrained from drowning your goblins in the Lake when they poked around,” the short-haired heroine said. “That’s already showing a great deal of restraint.”

The orc glanced contemptuously at the two thieves, who were hastily rising to their feet.

“Don’t try to rob Legion personel again,” he told them. “You’ll live longer.”

The Thief glanced at her men.

“Scuttle off, boys,” she ordered. “And remember not all orcs are this calm after steel comes out.”

Hakram did not bother to watch them flee into the night, his attention all on the Thief.

“Let’s talk,” he said, and it wasn’t a suggestion.

“For a bunch of villains, the lot of you sure do chatter a lot,” the woman sighed.

She signalled from him to follow her anyway, her knuckles against the door resounding in a pattern so swift he almost missed it. The door opened and they were ushered in. The place was a pisshole, as the exterior had indicated. After his years at the War College Hakram was no stranger to those, though, and at least out here his nose didn’t have to deal with clouds of poppy smoke hanging in the air. The dozen men and women inside, scattered throughout the tables, watched him in silence as he followed Thief to to a dimly lit alcove in the corner. She already had a pitcher of ale on the table, and she stole a tankard from another table on the way to the table to fill it. The tall orc sat, the wooden chair creaking under the weight of him, and after taking a sip made an effort not to grimace. The ale might as well have a rat still floating in it. She couldn’t possibly be drinking the same stuff, could she?

“Deadhand,” Thief enunciated. “Now there’s a fancy title. Catchy, too. Praesi do have a way with that.”

“You were there when I earned it,” Hakram said.

The heroine laughed, pushing back her bangs.

“Is that what this is about?” she asked. “Are you holding a grudge, Adjutant?”

Her grin was almost mocking.

“Can’t have that,” she said. “We’re on the same side now. Gotta get along.”

Hakram set aside the tankard patiently.

“Catherine likes to think of the best of people,” he said. “That they see reason. That they will hold to their promises.”

“Naïve, for a villain,” Thief said.

“It has paid off more often than not,” Adjutant said. “Put trust in people and they feel the need to live up to it.”

“I’m deeply honoured Her Gracious Majesty Foundling has seen fit to make me a minion, of course,” Thief smiled. “All hail the queen.”

“Of course,” Hakram continued calmly, “sometimes people think to take advantage of that. To use their second chance against her.”

“It’s almost like the fish she’s selling smells slightly off,” the Thief mocked.

Adjutant’s dead hand snaked across the table, lightning-quick, and seized the woman by the throat. He knocked the table away rising, slamming her against the wall hard enough the wood shattered like clay. He heard a chorus of knives being taken out in the room to their side, and slightly raised his voice as he continued choking the heroine.

“A single one of you moves and I’ll snap her neck,” he mildly informed them.

None of them did.

“When people make that mistake, Thief, and aim a knife at her back – they find me waiting,” he continued, still in that mild tone. “Now, what I’m doing tonight will make you hate me. That’s fine. As long as you also remember the fear in your guts right now. Listen to that fear, when you start thinking about turning on her. Because I’ll be watching, and unlike Catherine I don’t believe in second chances. Much less third ones .”

He released Thief, letting her drop to the floor and gasp for breath.

“Enjoy your evening,” he said politely. “I look forward to working with you.”

He walked away, and not a soul dared stop him.

Villainous Interlude: Exeunt

“If Creation is not mine, what need is there to be a Creation at all?”
– Dread Empress Triumphant, First and Only of Her Name

“They think they have us cornered,” Fasili said.

There was laughter in that tone, the intonation he used in Mtethwa implying mocking irony – he’d inflected the word for ‘think’ with the same sound as the one for ‘fool’. Winds were whipping at the city wildly as it rose into the sky, the power Akua had called ripping Liesse from solid ground and casting it up. The aftermath of the ritual she’d called on still burned in her bones, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. It was the largest working she’d ever undertaken, dwarfing even the two Lesser Breaches she’d made in her lifetime, and it had been exhilarating. The traces of that monstrous sorcery would permeate the region for decades to come, long after every trace of the fae currently trampling it were gone. Standing atop the highest bastion of the city gates, the Diabolist and her mortal second-in-command were watching the army of Summer splayed below. A host of legend, she conceded as she studied the glittering ranks. But she had one as well and it would not come out the lesser of this strife.

There were two princes and a princess among the ranks of the enemy, the strongest hand the Summer Court could play without sending its own Queen into battle. One of those stood head and shoulders above the others: the same princess who’d forced Diabolist to trigger her ritual early when she’d begun melting the ramparts with brute force. Given the cascading nature of the wards woven into the walls, if she’d been left at it much longer the entire outer rampart would have crumbled along with most of the dark-skinned aristocrat’s army. No matter. Akua had planned to use the ritual as soon as the enemy made their move anyway, though she’d expected an assault of thousands and not a single fae. The highest caste of the Fair Folk was nothing to sneer at, she acknowledged. Among all the entities she could call on nothing but a handful of obscenely ancient devils could match their power. She had three of these summoned, as it happened, a perfectly symmetrical match. The Gods Below sometimes saw fit to hand gifts to their most faithful, and who else but she could still claim that title?

“The harvest has been plentiful,” Diabolist said. “Let us reap the benefits in full.”

The ritual array for turning Liesse into a flying fortress-city was not the one she’d been building for all these months, of course. A ritual so straightforward would not have required Akua to sink all the resources at her disposal into the city. No, all she’d done was activate a secondary array, one she’d originally designed as a security measure in case the Legions of Terror came calling too early. It was the reason she’d allowed all those refugees from the south behind her walls, even if like rodents they ate up her granaries: hey could serve as acceptable fuel in a pinch. Ultimately, that had proved unnecessary. She’d managed to acquire a Duchess of Summer with her traps before needing to retreat and the fae noble had been more than enough for the purpose. Diabolist preferred this outcome, as it happened. Keeping the city full of refugees should stay Foundling’s hand when the hour of reckoning came. And if didn’t? Well, there were always uses for such large quantities of lifeblood.

The High Lords of Praes knew how to turn massacre into power better than anyone else, living or dead.

What had finally driven the fae to attack, she wondered? Was it taking a Duchess? The reaction seemed too delayed for that, weeks passing before the attack came. Until recently they’d been content to fight her in the plains of the south, rightfully wary of the wards protecting her stronghold. Akua’s instincts were that Foundling had a hand in this, but the latest news had her in Laure crucifying fools. The Diabolist had had to resist the urge to roll her eyes, when she’d heard resistance had been attempted after Squire had entered the city. As if the likes of Satang Motherless and Murad Kalbid had it in them to thwart the likes of Catherine Foundling. Akua’s enemy had flaws, but she was a power worthy of the Name she had claimed and growing more Praesi by the year. A pair of castoffs from the Wasteland were nothing more than dust in the face of that. More interesting was the way Squire had been able to travel so quickly. Given Foundling’s recent journey in the realm of the fae, Akua was inclined to believe she was carving paths through Arcadia to move faster than Creation permitted.

A fascinating notion that, one that while not unknown – the Calamities had done the same on occasion and there were records of heroes doing so as well – had never been used on this scale before. It was one thing for a handful of Named to hurry through the outskirts of Arcadia, quite another for an army to march through the territory of the Courts. Whatever had happened in Winter after Squire wandered inside its boundaries, she’d gained great power there. Measures would have to be taken so she couldn’t pull the same trick on the Diabolist, but that was a notion for later. Today, after all, Akua Sahelian was going to war. The phrase, even as an idle thought, set her blood aflame. It felt right . It felt like she was finally touching upon what she had always been meant to be, unsheathing a blade for the first time after years of forging it. Liesse reached the height it was meant to and then ceased ascending, stabilizing in its flight. Beneath her the wings of the fae coming for her head lit up the field and the winged cavalry began its charge upwards. Clarions sounded, piercing the afternoon afternoon air like blades. The call of Summer. From the walls of Liesse, a hundred hide drums began to beat. Doom, doom, doom they announced. Praes is at war. Tremble, any who stand in its way.

“Lord Fasili,” she said. “Take command of the army. I will be joining the fray.”

“May you blot out their horizon forever, my lady,” the Soninke replied, bowing.

There was fervour in his eyes. He too understood what this battle stood for: in this twilight of the Age of Wonders, the last true sons and daughters of Praes had taken up arms . Oh, you poor fools of Summer. Twilight is the coming of night, and night has ever been our time. We will own the dark and shape the day that comes after it. Adjusting her long crimson, Akua breathed in the wind and reached for her Name. It was pulsing inside her still, like the blood in her veins, as much a birth right as the rest. Call , she whispered inside her mind, and as her aspect rose to the surface her mind unfolded across miles. A small sliver of it inside every devil she had brought into Creation, an iron shard inside their very being that shackled them to her will. This was more than the mere bindings her ancestors had managed. It was ownership in truth, the kind of tyranny that had once been the sole province of those who climbed the Tower.

“Fly,” she ordered, and every one of them heard the words. “Scatter all that opposes me.”

A full thousand walin-falme spread their leather wings instantly. Her harvest had been bountiful indeed: once she’d thought she would have only four hundred to call on, but the revolving wards designed by her father had allowed her to capture so many fae she’d managed over twice that. The devils took flight eagerly, screaming promises of death in the Dark Tongue. Diabolist could have called on a flying chariot to carry her to war, but it would have only slowed her down: rising smoothly over the edge of the rampart, she strode onto the afternoon sky. Beneath her feet glass-like panels of force appeared and she strolled towards the wave of enemies filling the air. Only one other person did the same: the man who’d taught her this spell, her father. The first wave of fae rising through the air reached him before they did her, but she was not worried and for good reason. Without Papa so much as raising a hand, all the enemies that came close to him started... bubbling up under their skin, before simply exploding in bursts of flame. Smiling at the sight, Diabolist glanced at the insolent things headed for her. A swarm of ivory and steel, flying pennants of red and gold. Doom, doom, doom the drums sounded. A promise, an oath.

“Justice,” the fae clamoured.

“Death,” Diabolist replied, and granted it to them.

High Arcana runes light up around her, coming easier than they ever have before, and the air in front of the enemy formed into a ball that condensed for three heartbeats before detonating with a sound like thunder. A hundred fae were swatted down like flies, their bright wings winking out, and twice as many were tossed aside by the impact. Raw power pumped through her veins, her very Name feeding on the sight of her supremacy. The tide of fae swallowed her up as the enemy host headed for the walls, while in the distance the winged cavalry charged straight into her swarm of devils. The melee that ensued was brutal, cast iron in furious eldritch hands smashing into the silvery arms of the Summer Court’s peerless knights. Diabolist paid it no further mind, as waves of fae were falling upon her.

“Seven lanterns, lit and smothered,” she incanted. “I have spilled blood and broken bone, known the desert sun and offered pure incense.”

High Arcana wove itself into her words, every syllable shaping the runes according to her will as if she were painting with sorcery.

“Howl, hunger, hollow. Threefold is my will: obey, winds.”

When it came to wind sorcery, not even the finest of the Soninke could match the Taghreb. A current of bone-dry wind formed at her back, sweeping around her and gathering all the fae that had been approaching her with it. Laughing, she quickened the sweep and broadened it until the dozen soldiers she’d first caught became hundreds. The current of air, full of flesh and steel, formed into a ball above her head when her hands rose. Her fingers formed a fist and with a sick crunch metal and bodies alike shattered. Her veins burning at the power she still held onto, Diabolist flicked down her hand and flung the ball into the enemy ranks – it carved a line through them, though killed precious few.

“It seems mere soldiers are no match for the likes of you,” a voice spoke from ahead.

A pale woman with golden hair, her scale armour a different shade of green in every scale, stared at her calmly. Sword in hand, she saluted gallantly.

“I am the Countess of First Bloom,” she introduced herself.

Diabolist closed her eyes. She could feel the fae landing on the walls, fighting her soldiers and drying in droves as wards and goblin steel carved through them. Her mages snuffed out fae lives with streaks of lightning and darkness, sending rituals old as Wolof into the throngs of assailants. Streams of lesser devils poured out of summoning circles, a storm of shrieks and claws that died as quick as they came into existence but left behind bleeding limbs and tired hands. Deaths, so many deaths, of both mortals and fae. Every one of them permeating Creation with strands of power.

“In the name of my Queen, I consign you to death by the flames of Summer,” the Countess announced, irritated by the lack of response.

Diabolist smiled.

“I will teach you,” she said. “What fire truly is.”

Claim , she spoke silently. Her third aspect, and the one worthiest of a ruler. In a heartbeat, all those strands of power shivered and fell under her authority. The aristocrat gathered them to her, siphoning them into the spell she’d begun crafting even as she spoke.

“Burn, misbegotten creature,” the Countess of First Bloom cried out.

Heat turned to fire, a torrent of bright golden flames pouring out towards the Diabolist. She was a mighty thing, this Countess. But not mightier than a thousand deaths made sorcery. Akua’s silhouette was wreathed in power, for a heartbeat, and then for a hundred feet in every direction the sky turned into a nightmare of dark flame. Not quite hellfire, but centuries of mages in Wolof had managed to craft the closest thing to it a mortal could manage. A hundred grasping hands and hungry maws of flame devoured the noble fae and any foolish soldier who’d come too close to the struggle. The golden flames that had arrogantly attempted to take her life were buried and smothered, the hellish scene lasting for thirty heartbeats before disappearing in a curtain of wisps. There was nothing left of the Countess, not even blackened bones. The Diabolist stood alone in the sky, the fae soldiers parting around her like a receding tide. She had not taken a second step since first casting. Doom, doom, doom the drums sounded.

The walls were holding, by a thread. Her soldiers died like dogs under fae spears and swords, but wherever Summer gained a foothold sorcery scoured the walls clean. The casualties were brutal, but what did she care when her dead men rose within moments to hold their blades again? Her thousand devils had lost the clash against the winged knights, but taken a toll: half her walin-falme were gone, but so was a third of Summer’s most dangerous soldiers. Papa, bored with simply allowing fae to die on his defences, had gone to toy with them. Now they were fighting an enormous snake of green lightning, dispersing it with their lances only to find it forming again behind them and having left a few smoking corpses in its wake. It was only when a Duke went to duel him that her father retreated to the walls, activating a set of wards to force him back before joining the defence. The three greatest of her devils were there as well, Diabolist saw. They towered above the rest, but there was a reason they were not with the lesser devils she had meant them to command: the same princess who’d almost collapsed her walls had landed atop the rampart, and after burning clean any Praesi who came close to her had begun to fight all three at the same time.

She was, the Diabolist realized with dismay, winning . Of her three great devils the one she could see most clearly was a massive creature of rippling ebony muscle, two large sets of horns growing atop his hairless head. Jenge Kubawa, he was called. The Lord of Despair, a devil from the Twenty-Seventh Hell said to have once held back the invading army of Aksum for a day on his own, in the days before the Miezan. Akua watched the fae princess rip out one of his horns, shove it into his throat and follow through with a burst of flame that burst straight through his chest and out his back. She would have to go and handle that situation. Still, that left the two princes unaccounted for, which was even more worrying. Where were they – ah.

“A praiseworthy resistance, for mortals,” a man said contemptuously, tone belying his words.

Two fae stood in the sky across her, neither of them using their wings. Without even needing to exert their power the air around them warped form the heat, idle mirages flickering at the corner of her vision. The one who’d spoken was dark-skinned like a Soninke, though his pure white hair lent him an unsightly appearance. He was, otherwise, beautiful – and his armour of burnt stone was touched with red veins that made it look like burning coal. Against his shoulder a spear of pure crystal rested. The other one was pale and dark-haired, his perfectly-cropped beard looking sharp enough to cut flesh. He wore no armour, only long robes of woven sunlight and flame. His fingers delicately clasped around a sword of pure gold, runes inscribed on the flat of the blade ever-moving. She knew better than to look in any of their eyes. Doom, doom, doom the drums went.

“I am the Prince of Deep Drought,” the pale one said with a beautiful smile. “Would you be the Lady Diabolist?”

“A presumptuous question to ask, when half your party has not introduced themselves,” Akua replied.

The dark-skinned one sneered.

“I am the Prince of Burning Embers, mortal,” he said. “ Kneel .”

The weight of the order struck her like a blow, but Diabolist was indifferent. The soul he was trying to command was far, far away. She would not need it for some time yet.

“I am Akua Sahelian,” she replied. “You may yet survive, if you swear yourself to me.”

The Prince of Deep Drought looked sympathetic.

“My lady, though my brother spoke uncouthly the sentiment was correct,” he said. “This battle is lost. Sulia will destroy your devils, your army will fail and you cannot hope to triumph against two princes of Summer. Surrender to us, and make obeisance to our Queen. You can find fulfilment in her service.”

“I cannot win, can I?” the Diabolist asked.

“That is the truth,” the Prince of Deep Drought agreed.

Akua smiled.

“I have two truths for you in return,” she said. “I am a villain, and this is the first part of my plan .”

Out of instinct, the two of them began moving. Too late.

“ Bind ,” Akua said, calling on her final aspect.

It was meant to force devils to her will, this power of hers, but fae were not of Creation either. This and the sheer power of the entities before her limited what she could accomplish, but in the end this lay at the heart of her Name: to be the Diabolist was to hold power over creatures foreign to the world. The Prince of Burning Embers jerked, then the spear he held spun smoothly and went for his brother’s throat. The other prince’s eyes widened and he called on fire, his assailant evaded the flames without missing a beat as Akua willed him to do. The fight that followed was swift and merciless. She’d picked the least powerful of the two to bind, but he was clearly more used to combat: the other was a superb swordsman, but relied more on sorcery and Diabolist’s puppet simply did not allow him to use it. Twice she let the Prince of Burning Embers take hits on purpose, in places that would endanger his life but not his ability to continue using his spear. It would make him easier to finish off afterwards. In the end, she did not manage to kill the Prince of Deep Drought – though the spear tore through his stomach. Feeling her control slip, Diabolist raised an eyebrow.

“Kill yourself,” she ordered.

Eyes raging, the Prince of Burning Embers ran his own spear through his heart even as his brother tried to stop him. Runes lit up around Akua as she began using the massive power coming from the death of a Prince of Summer to empower another spell, casually eyeing her remaining opponent.

“Shall we revisit the issue of victory, prince?” she asked.

“ Let’s ,” a woman’s voice said, and the panels of force that served as Diabolist’s shield shattered like glass.

Pain tore through Akua’s side as fire claimed her flank, hastily put out by a barked incantation that froze the entire section solid. Gods, how could she not have felt the princess coming towards her? The woman’s hair was fire-red, her skin pale and her eyes a terrible thing to behold. Like the heat of the sun made flesh, just being looked upon by them was exhausting.

“I told you two not to get arrogant,” Princess Sulia of High Noon said. “Mortals are trickier than Winter, this campaign has proved as much.”

Diabolist steadied her breathing and healed the burned flesh on her side. The flames had gone straight through the armour she wore beneath her cloak, ignoring seven layers of enchantments – five of which were meant specifically to ward off fae.

“She seized him, Sulia, how could even a Named -” the other fae began, but the princess cut him off.

“We have no stories here,” she said. “Except the ones they make. It is madness, rampant madness. Order must be restored. To ashes, if needs must.”

“Oh, I quite agree,” Diabolist said. “You have no place here. And you’ve delayed my plans long enough.”

The Princess of High Noon eyed her, perfect face disdainful.

“I’ve no time to waste bantering with cattle, you’ll simply have to-“

The fae royalty went still. Akua glanced at the other one – the prince was akin to a statue as well.

“Retreat,” Sulia called suddenly, and the word echoed across the entire battlefield. “To Arcadia.”

The dark-skinned aristocrat raised an eyebrow.

“But we were only beginning to get acquainted,” she said.

The Princess of High Noon bared her teeth.

“We will return, Diabolist,” she said. “We will finish this fight, once Summer is no longer being invaded. You and your compatriot laid a cunning trap, I will grant you this much.”

Not even a flicker of surprise touched Akua’s face. A portal opened and the two fae vanished in the blink of an eye, taking the corpse of the prince before she could do anything. All across the battle gates into Arcadia opened, the host of Summer disappearing through them without warning or explanation. Within twenty heartbeats, there was no one left in sight but her own army. There was a long moment of silence, then a cheer that shook the heavens. The Diabolist remained where she stood, before finally surrendering to a discreet bit of genuine laughter.

“Oh, Squire,” she said almost fondly. “You truly are the gift that keeps on giving.”

Doom, doom, doom went the drums.

Villainous Interlude: Decorum

“Morality is a force, not a law. Deviating from it has costs and benefits both – a ruler should weigh those when making a decision, and ignore the delusion of any position being inherently superior.”
– Dread Emperor Benevolent

Two years at most: that was how long Amadeus had to live.

Maybe only a year, if he blundered badly enough. He’d walked away from his meeting with the Tyrant of Helike knowing this, and was still exploring the implications. When no pattern of three had formed with the White Knight after their confrontation in Delos, Black had found several implications. The first was that the scope of that hero’s story was narrower than he’d thought: it extended only to the civil war in the Free Cities, and as an outsider to that narrative Amadeus did not have the weight required to qualify as a rival. That possibility had been a factor in why he’d cautiously called a retreat even though the Calamities had, arguably, been winning. If they were mere side-characters in that conflict, the most likely pattern for them was to be victorious early then brutally crushed after the heroes improved their power. A whetting stone for the blades of the Gods Above, essentially. By removing himself early he would not have allowed the pattern to truly form. And yet, the premise was flawed.

The White Knight, Scribe had informed him, was not of the Free Cities. He was Ashuran, somewhat surprising given his dark skin. A little digging had allowed his spymistress to find out the man’s mother had been a Soninke exile, eventually executed because of one of the labyrinthine laws that governed the citizenship tiers of the Thalassocracy. The White Knight’s reason to be involved, then was not ‘right of birth’. The two sisters that were part of his heroic band were themselves from the Free Cities, but neither the House of Light the Ashen Priestess had served in nor the hidden covenant of wizards her sister had studied under had been harmed by either Praesi forces or those of the Tyrant. ‘Personal connection’ wasn’t the reason either, then. Amadeus had made sure that both those places of origin would remain untouched for the duration of the war: heroes with butchered families, adopted or otherwise, became infinitely more dangerous.

The only motive that fit was ‘ethical opposition’, but if that was the case Amadeus should have ended up the rival to the other Knight. He represented a larger and more active power than the Tyrant of Helike, arguably with a deeper historical connection with Evil. Unless, of course, some deeper unknown connection existed between the White Knight and the Tyrant. That theory had been buried during his conference with the vicious child from Helike: the other villain was not bound by a pattern of any sort.

Amadeus did not consider his own intellect to be superior, in the larger scheme of things. He’d been at the side of Wekesa for decades and early understood that Warlock was perhaps the most brilliant mind to grace Praes in ten generations, however narrow his interests. Only Alaya stood in the same league, a mastermind who’d been able to fill the function of two Named for over forty years with sheer cunning and ruthlessness while facing men and women who were bloody ambitions made flesh. He was not the strongest, either. In matters of brute force, Sabah could snap him in half in the span of a single breath when it came to martial might Hye stood unequalled under the sky. Black wasn’t even the best at killing: Assassin’s body count dwarfed his, for both Named and mortals, and had been collected without ever taking a single wound. As for Scribe, the way she’d effectively become the bureaucracy and spy network of an entire kingdom without ever having a permanent office was far beyond his capacity. Amadeus’ only noteworthy talent, in his opinion, was clarity of sight. The ability to look at a situation if not without biases then with fewer of them than anyone else doing the same.

That same clarity was how he’d understood why he was not currently in a pattern of three. The White Knight was, in fact, supposed to face a Black Knight as a rival. That individual was simply not him.

Midnight bell was nearing, the villain thought as he glanced up as the starry sky. Wekesa was already asleep inside the gaudy tent he’d taken out of his pocket dimension along with most of their supplies. There would be no waking him until dawn. Sabah was napping at his side, buried in blankets up to her neck like some sort of gargantuan cocoon. Sitting on a log, Amadeus stirred the fire ahead of him with the long stick he’d carved out earlier and shaped a plan. Planning with two years in mind, he now had to destroy or neuter every major threat to the Empire before Catherine became the Black Knight. He would make a second series of schemes in the days to come with the notion of him surviving only a year in mind, but first he needed to establish what the optimal results could be. He’d once thought he had a decade left in him still and planned to have his apprentice ready to replace him in half that but the timetable would have to be adjusted. There were four fronts he would have to settle: Callow, Praes, the Free Cities and Procer. In the back of his mind gears of iron turned as his eyes remained on the dancing flames.

Callow and Praes, as it currently stood, were intertwined issues. The former kingdom was, last he’d heard, under attack by several forces. The Courts of Arcadia, the rebel forces of the Diabolist and a potential Deoraithe uprising. Alaya already had plans in the works for the Diabolist, but that was no longer enough. She had to be dead within the next six months, with minimal casualties. This much he could rely on Catherine to accomplish, and solidify her grip on Callow in the process. The Courts had been an unexpected set of pieces in this game. Amadeus had three standing operational plans for the Legions to turn back a fae incursion depending on where they crossed, but none were designed to handle a full-fledged invasion. Winter had been temporarily handled by his apprentice, but that was mitigating the symptoms instead of the root cause. It was necessary to find out what had driven both Courts to leave Arcadia and permanently destroy that incitement. For now, Amadeus lacked the information needed to make a decision. Scribe would need a few months still to find out what he wanted, so he’d have to trust Catherine to hold them at bay until then.

She should be able to, and that calibre of opponent would quicken her growth. Dealing with creatures whose power was massively larger than her own would prepare her for the fights with heroes she would be facing as the Black Knight. The nature of fae being so closely associated with patterns would also sharpen her eye in this regard, enough she would not be caught on the wrong side of a narrative easily. The dark-haired man had originally meant to train that aspect of her against the High Lords through the controlled battleground of rule over Callow, but in this case the substitute was superior to the original. The Deoraithe were a thornier issue, especially since he still did not know what had driven them to act. Alaya and he had originally allowed the Duchy of Daoine to remain untouched after the Conquest because it served as an ideal border state against the Golden Bloom, both because of the Deoraithe’s rabid hatred for the elves and their limited avenues for growth. While powerful, by themselves they would never be powerful enough to be a true threat to the Empire – and their culture essentially ensured they would never seek foreign allies.

Now, though, it had been proved they could be made to move. Unless the motive for their deployment was unique and incapable of being reproduced, the odds of which were low, then it was possible for Daoine to be leveraged into action again. That made them a liability, the kind that could not be allowed to exist with a crusade on the horizon. By the end of the current unrest, Daoine would have to be either bound to Catherine definitively in her capacity as ruler of Callow or broken beyond capacity to act. If it was the second case, the best time to act would be after they’d fought battles in the south: wiping out the Watch in their own territory would be extremely costly. Destroying the army and culling the population of breeding age by four tenths should be enough. Amadeus disliked leaving a wounded enemy still breathing, but logistics dictated exterminating the entire Duchy would require too many resources and take too long. He’d send word to Grem and Ranker to assess the situation and act accordingly, if he was unable to return in time to pass judgement.

That left the more complicated issue of the relationship between Callow and Praes, or more accurately the Dread Empress and the Squire. Catherine was about to seize direct power over her homeland, which was one of the outcomes he’d considered most probable. The moment the Ruling Council had been formed, there were only two ways it could go forward: either Squire would terrify the Praesi establishment into submission or she would wipe it out entirely and become de facto queen. Neither result displeased him, as the Ruling Council had always been meant to be a crutch that would allow his apprentice to learn to rule. Given how long Amadeus had left to live, such a slow-paced process was no longer feasible: Catherine discarding the crutch by herself accelerated the process by a few months. Alaya would be furious at the loss of control, he knew, but she would be aware that Catherine ruling Callow with the backing of the population was an unmitigated victory for the Empire. Squire breaking away entirely from Praes was, after all, impossible.

That was the truth under the surface current, and why he’d never once felt threatened by his apprentice gathering an independent power base. Catherine was, after all, a villain. The Principate would not consider Callow ruled by villainous queen any more acceptable than it being an imperial possession. Strife between Praes and her kingdom reborn would only weaken her in the face of Proceran advances: as long as Catherine Foundling held power in Callow, she needed the Empire to survive. Amadeus had taken more stringent measures as well, of course. Though Callowan soldiers had been part of the Fifteenth since its foundation, he’d made sure to give her mostly criminals in the initial batch. That meant that all her closest collaborators were Praesi: her general and all the senior staff were from the Wasteland. Though being in close proximity to a charismatic Named for several years ensured their strongest loyalty would be to her, their ties to the Empire made them into counter-weights against thoughts of breaking away entirely.

Much like him, personal loyalty mattered a great deal to his apprentice. As long as declaring independence antagonized all the people closest to her, Catherine would seek a middle ground instead. Since a boundary had been set in that direction, the other boundary had to be established on the Praesi side. Alaya should already be working on a way to bind Squire to her, and would be well aware that coercion would result in permanent enmity. He did not have to bother himself with this part of the equation. Instead, what he would have to turn his eyes to was the stability of the Wasteland. Alaya’s magnificent decades-long plan had finally come to fruition and destroyed the Truebloods in full. Three legions would scour Wolof clean as soon as a winner emerged from the succession struggle there, removing a nest of unrest in Praes for at least twenty years. It would not be enough. Every former Trueblood not currently aligned with these so-called ‘Moderates’ would have to be killed and their entire family line ripped out root and stem. Amadeus was not above borrowing the strength of Callow to accomplish this, if other legions balked at the slaughter. The Clans were loyal, and need not be touched, but he would need to have a frank conversation with the foremost Matrons and explain to them that if they made a single questionable move Wekesa would bring down the Grey Eyries on their heads. Ranker would back him in this, he knew. She’d long run out of patience with the more isolationist of the Matrons.

All of this would secure their back within a year, if handled properly, which left exterior threats. The Principate was the foremost among those. Cordelia Hasenbach had roped in both Levant and Ashur, which have her utmost naval supremacy and a quiet southern border. When Procer came knocking, it would be with everything but the northern garrisons. At least a fifty thousand professional soldiers, easily twice than in levies, and that was without counting any armies sent to reinforce by the Dominion. If most of the Legions were at the Red Flower Vales, it was possible to resist that strength as long as there was no unrest inside Imperial territories. That was not enough, he decided. If Procer retreated with enough of its force intact, the problem was only delayed by half a decade at most. The Principate had to be decisively beaten, its alliances sundered and the First Prince killed. She was, frankly speaking, too dangerous to leave alive. That meant campaigning inside Proceran borders in an offensive war, which would most likely lead to defeat given the current balance of forces.

It was time to start using harsh measures, then. Using the Calamities to destroy the capital of the Principate, for a start, should incapacitate its ruling infrastructure. Using a surprise strike to torch and poison the central principalities, the main farmlands of Procer, would lead to widespread starvation come winter. As for the Thalassocracy, if they could not be reasoned with Assassin would need to eliminate their entire two highest citizenship tiers. That would create chaos that could buy the Empire two years at least, and if Procer could be dealt with during that time the chances of Ashur resuming the war alone were low. The Dominion of Levant was too far and too decentralized to cripple in one stroke, but their ties to the alliance were also the weakest. They would not remain committed if victory did not look feasible. There were even harsher moves that could be made, of course – the Tower was still in contact with the ancient abomination that ruled the Kingdom of the Dead. But putting that devil back in that bottle after it was uncorked would be impossible, and in the long term more dangerous to imperial interests than the current Procer.

Amadeus had spent over fifty years carefully making sure not to burn too many bridges, to avoid the very kind of crusade the First Prince was assembling, but the hour of reckoning had come. The Principate needed to be so badly damaged it would not recover for a generation, if possible while leaving most of Levant’s strength intact – the Dominion would not be able to resist the bait of a weakened south if its armies were still strong. Most importantly, Cordelia Hasenbach had to die. Even if another war of succession did not erupt, whoever replaced her would be part of one of the regional power blocs Alaya had made emerge. They would have powerful internal enemies to deal with, and given the nature of the Highest Assembly that meant a Principate divided in fact if not in name. All of this, though, would come next year. There was a more immediate problem at hand, the Free Cities.

The balance of power could not be allowed to swing in the favour of Good down here. At the very least, neutrality had to be forced with the Tyrant remaining in a strong position. The threat of Helike armed to the teeth at her back would force Hasenbach to keep troops in the south to dissuade an attack. Neutrality would be better than an outright victory for the Tyrant , Amadeus thought. If the Tyrant won, Procer had an excuse to wage war in the region and secure it before turning to Praes. If the balance was restored, they had a knife at their back and no diplomatically acceptable excuse to remove it. If Procer started intervening in the affairs of foreign nations, its allies would protest. Hasenbach could not afford to lose them if she wanted a crusade in more than name . And the moment the Tyrant is no longer a threat, the entire Free Cities will start viewing the troops she sent as an invasion force. The desired outcome, then, was a truce in the Free Cities with a guarantee they would not participate in the larger conflict. How could Amadeus accomplish this?

Currently, Atalante was under occupation and Delos out of the war – the removal of the more combative elements of the Secretariat by Assassin had seen to that. The strife he’d begun in Penthes was keeping them busy, though they’d still managed to repulse an attack from the ramshackle army of Bellerophon. The slave armies of Stygia, headed by their Magisters, had joined Helike on the march to the last remaining active opposition in the war: Nicae. Which was filled with mercenaries, Proceran fantassins and its own decently skilled forces. Taking Named out of the story, after marked but not severe casualties Nicae should fall to enemy forces. With a band of heroes backing the city, though, the situation was different. It became ‘the last stronghold, besieged by the hordes of Evil’. Defeat was virtually assured as long as this remained the narrative, and Amadeus did not currently have enough authority with Stygia and Helike to properly influence their decision-making. They would have to be bypassed entirely, then.

The lynchpin of this entire situation, as far as he could tell, was the White Knight. He was the Named keeping the band together. Without him they would either disperse or lose the coherency needed to be a true threat. If the White Knight was dead, Amadeus believed he could turn the victory of the Evil-aligned cities into a bloody draw that would weaken both sides enough they could be forced to negotiate a truce. The Tyrant would be trouble – he’d already begun disrupting Warlock’s scrying, which had cut off the dark-haired man’s conversation with his apprentice – but he was also fickle. As long as he was presented with a more enticing game than his current one, he could be brought to the table. All Amadeus had to worry about was surviving the boy’s inevitable attempts to kill him during the battle for Nicae. Contingencies were already being put in place. The key to this entire situation, then, was eliminating the White Knight. The villain poked at the flames again.

It could be done, with the right preparations. The lack of pattern would not hinder this.

“You look like you’re up to no good,” Sabah said sleepily.

Amadeus smiled. It was an old joke, now more comfortable than funny.

“Did I wake you?” he asked. “I apologize.”

“I sleep lighter than when we were started out,” she said. “We’re getting old, Amadeus.”

The Black Knight chuckled, sliding down the log to sit next to her.

“You’ve still got a few decades in you,” he said. “Enough you’ll see your both your children get grey hair.”

“Amna’s raised them well,” she said wistfully. “I think of them more often than I used to, out on adventures like this.”

Both time she’d given birth she’d left his side for a year afterwards to mother the children, but inevitably Sabah had left Ater to join him – he’d spent most of his time in Callow, the last twenty years. Her husband had done most of the rearing, repeatedly refusing promotions in the Imperial bureaucracy to have enough time for it. Black rather liked the man, though how his old friend had come to fall in love with that diminutive, mild-mannered specimen had long been a subject of wonder.

“I think,” he said, “that our time is drawing to an end.”

The large Taghreb turned amused eyes to him.

“You’re not usually this maudlin,” she said. “We’ve handled worse than the Tyrant. He’s like a crippled take on Heir, only with a sense of humour.”

“He really was a pompous ass, wasn’t he?” Black smiled.

“Catherine’s rival is worse,” Sabah grunted. “I’m looking forward to the kid hacking her in a few pieces.”

“It will be a learning experience for her,” Amadeus murmured. “Killing the Heir was a turning point for me.”

“You were softer before,” Sabah agreed softly. “We all were. I still remember what it felt like back then, looking at his corpse. Like there was a storm ahead.”

She frowned.

“Feels the same now,” she admitted. “Like we’re reaching a pivot.”

I’m going to die soon , he almost told her. But he couldn’t, because if he did she would fight it. Even harder than Warlock would, because Warlock understood that some things were worth dying for. Captain didn’t. She had no great cause, no febrile drive to understand the nature of Creation. Sabah only wanted them to live as long and happily as they could, and if she had to cave in other people’s heads for that so be it. He’d always loved that about her, the purity of the sentiment. He’d never met another Named like her, so unconcerned with their own power. In that sense she was the strangest among them.

“Do you ever regret it?” he asked suddenly. “Coming with Wekesa and I, the morning after we first met you.”

She looked at him, bemused.

“We’ve been at this over forty years, Sabah,” he said. “We’ve killed so many people I can’t remember all the faces. We won, when it mattered, but there were dark days too. Those just don’t make it into the legends.”

The massive Taghreb patted his shoulder gently.

“You’re an idiot,” she told him, not unkindly. “You two are family. You might as well ask me if I regret breathing. Besides, f I hadn’t come along you twerps would have mouthed yourself off into an early grave.”

She paused.

“And you and Hye would still be pretending you still didn’t desperately want to bone,” she added.

“ Sabah ,” he protested.

“Oh, she’s just teaching me swordsmanship,” she mocked in a high-pitched voice. “Like that didn’t turn into an excuse for you two to get sweaty and handsy before the first lesson was over.”

“I learned a lot from her,” Black said.

“I know,” she said. “Tents don’t block out noise very well.”

As one of the foremost tacticians of the age, Amadeus recognized that this was not a battle he could win. Retreat was required. Besides, at least he’d never used an entire roasted pig as a courting gift, unlike some other people that would go nameless.

“I need you to do something for me,” he said.

She raised a thick eyebrow.

“Eudokia tells me Procer is still sending grain and silver to Nicae by land convoys,” he said.

The Tyrant, for reasons only known to him, was allowing them to pass untouched.

“We need to turn the screws on the city before it turns into a battle,” he said. “The emptier their coffers and granaries, the better.”

It would be easier to force them to negotiate if they were all but destitute.

“Been a while since I hunted on my own,” Captain said, staring into the flame. “Might do me some good. The Beast gets wilful when I keep it on the leash for too long.”

He nodded silently and left it at that. Eventually she drifted back into sleep, the two of them nestled close to the fire.

“Two years,” he murmured. “It will be enough. I’ll make it enough.”

The Gods could help anyone who got in his way, if they so wished. It would make no difference.

Heroic Interlude: Injunction

“Forty-nine: if any wizard over the age of fifty suddenly becomes evasive when asked about your parents, you may safely assume yourself to be either royalty or related to your archenemy in some way.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

The interesting thing about morality, Hanno had found, was that it evolved across the years. Living through shards of a hundred heroes and heroines’ lives had made it impossible to deny as much, though he disliked the thought that concepts like Good and Evil could be mutable. The Book of All Things, after all, did not change – neither should ethics. Yet, a few thousand years ago, most of Calernia had once practiced slavery. The ancestors of nations that now found the very notion repugnant had then been unable to function without it. Procerans, in days before there was a Procer, had raided each other for plunder and workers. The Titanomanchy had built its wonders as much by the legendary craftsmanship of the Gigantes as on the backs of a hundred thousand Arlesite slaves. Even Ashur, his homeland, had once kept a citizenship tier beneath them all where forced labourers and servants were inducted into. But over the years, that ugly reality had been... outgrown. Recognized as unworthy of all those who would call themselves the children of the Heavens.

And so slavery went from commodity to sin, and Creation was made a little brighter. There were, of course, holdouts. The drow of the Everdark still sent raiding parties to the surface to grab the unwary and spirit them below. The Kingdom of the Dead still farmed men like crops, growing them and reaping them in an even darker kind of sin to swell the ranks of its armies. In Mercantis people were sold like cattle to all those who had the coin and the inclination, the City of Bought and Sold concerned solely by the lustre of gold. But the city famous for it, the one that had perfected the art of chaining others centuries before the Miezans first glimpsed the shores of Calernia, had always been Stygia. Its slave phalanxes, the Spears of Stygia, were famous on the continent for unflinching obedience and having had fear scoured out of them by the concoctions and sorceries of the Magisters. The entire city was a den of iniquity every passing day in a way that made the worst excesses of Helike pale.

The White Knight watched the tall banner floating above the camp, gold and grey set with two pure white cranes. Redress and Retribution, they were called, the patron spirits of Stygia. Lesser gods that had settled in the heart of the city when it was first built – he knew this for a fact for he’d watched one of them millennia ago centuries ago. Golden beak dipped in blood, eyes older than her entire bloodline red with hatred that was utterly inhuman. It would not matter. She was the Sword of the Free: she would wrest her people from chains and lead them to found a city in the east. A land where no would ever rule over them again. She rose, wounded but unbowed, and fought again. Hanno blinked, chasing away the memories not his own. Over two months since he’d fought the Black Knight and still sometimes the other lives trickled through into him. He’d come very close to dying, that day. That had consequences.

“Money for thinking,” the Champion said.

“Copper for your thoughts,” Hedge corrected in a low voice.

“Copper is money,” the Levantine replied condescendingly. “Witch wrong again. Do you no get tired of it?”

“Let’s move,” Hanno said, interrupting before the bickering could start in earnest. “Follow the plan.”

He saw the Hedge Wizard open her mouth from the corner of her eye, but her sister thumped her with her staff. Priestess was, he had to admit, the most reliable of his companions in temperament. Though considering her competition was a drunken disappearing Bard, her actively argumentative sister and brawler who kept trophies of her kills, that might not be saying much. Still, he knew from the Chamber of Borrowed Lives that no Named who lived longer than a few years managed to avoid growing some... quirks. The power conferred onto them by the Gods shaped them as much as they shaped it. Regardless he got along with her the best. More than once they’d found themselves sharing a comfortable quiet in the back while the rest of their band bickered aimlessly. The four heroes crept across the grassy field, Hedge’s spell keeping them hidden from the moonlight even as they neared the outskirts of the Stygian camp. A palisade of wooden stakes had been raised and spear-slaves patrolled behind them. He could hear them pass by, when he pressed his ear against the wood.

“Priestess,” he said.

The dark-haired woman nodded. The tip of her staff traced a circle on the surface of the palisade and a heartbeat later the wood crumbled into ash. They passed through, one after another. Hanno glanced at Champion and Hedge through the slit of his barbute.

“Half an hour,” he reminded them. “That’s all we’ll need. Retreat afterwards.”

“Will make river of blood,” Champion said enthusiastically from under her badger-shaped helm. “Eat hearts of enemies.”

“That’s cannibalism,” Hedge said.

“Not so,” the Levantine said. “Says in Book. Allowed if they wicked.”

“The Book of All Things does not excuse eating people,” the Wizard firmly stated.

“Maybe in lame Free Cities version,” Champion replied sceptically.

They both turned to the Ashen Priestess, the only individual among them with an actual religious education. The heroine stared back with hickory-coloured eyes.

“I’m not humouring this with an actual response,” she informed them flatly. “Get moving before I decide to make the two of you incontinent.”

“Mighty Priest-Witch true monster,” the Champion said admiringly before fleeing.

Hedge met her sister’s eyes for a moment longer before making a tactical withdrawal, paling a bit.

“Can you?” Hanno asked, morbidly curious.

He had a trick to discern lies – it was common, for those sworn to the Choir of Judgement – but using it drew on his Name and he still had a fight ahead of him.

“I fed Alkmene an herbal concoction when were we twelve to make her believe I could,” Priestess admitted, the sly shadow of a smile on her lips.

Hanno would have snorted if the situation was any less serious. They fell into step together naturally, his longer stride shortening to accommodate her own. There’d been no need to rely on his few memories of fighting Stygia in the past to deduce where the Magisters would be camped: while the entire rim of he fortified camp was rough burlap tents, the centre was absurdly luxurious and bustling with servants during the day. Without Hedge to guide them around the wards and keep them out of sight, the two of them had to be careful. The White Knight could feel sorcery, if he attuned himself, and Ash could outright see it – but neither of them were trained in picking up on the subtler effects, much less bypass them. They sidestepped an alarm ward early on, but found to their displeasure that deeper in there was another ward that circled entirely around the circumference of the cmap. The Priestess could dismantle it, of course, but that would be giving away their presence. They hid in the shadows for a while instead, waiting for their distraction to arrive, and were eventually rewarded by a spray of fireworks that set fire to a dozen tents in the distance followed by a booming voice challenging the entire camp to single combat. Slaves soldiers immediately began to mobilize, and only then did the two heroes cross the alarm ward. Stealth was no longer the game, now. Swiftness was the line of life and death.

The first Magister they found was obviously drunk, a grey-haired woman leaning against a post and breathing like someone trying not to throw up. Lean face, eyes dulled by liquor and long dark robes whose sleeves tangled with the many rings on her fingers. All Magisters were mages, and only gained the title by showing power and ruthlessness. Neither of those things mattered, when the mage could not see you coming. The White Knight’s sword took her in the throat without warning, hacking straight through. A cry of surprise came from ahead, the corpse dropped and the battle began.

Green sorcery lashed out in a stream at him, but Hanno ducked to the side and broke into a run. A Spear of Stygia burst out of a tent to the side, but in a flash turned into a pile of ashes. The Magisters were aware they were under attack, now. Within moments at least a dozen more mages stormed out of the large silken pavilion in the centre of the camp, the rings on their hands glinting as they immediately began spellcasting. The Wandering Bard had told him there were fifteen in total, sent by Stygia to lead its army against Nicae. Decapitating the head of the snake was why he’d taken come with his companions tonight. A slave army without masters was as good as paralyzed, and might actually retreat back to Stygia. The more casters joined the fray, the closer to him the spells came: they stood in a tight cluster, and for all that they were wretched souls one and all he almost admired the skill being shown. Spells led into each other, herding him into harsher attacks like a horse being led to water. The Light flooded his veins, sharpening his reflexes far beyond limits as he began to weave and duck through the volleys directed at him, not even a full step ahead. Another slave tried to spear him through the side, only to be caught by the edge of a black orb that saw the man;s skin contract and tear under the sudden pressure. The Magisters did not care who else died in their attempt to put him down. He’d expected nothing less from slavers.

“ Ride ,” the White Knight said.

Light wove itself into a horse in the blink of an eye and even as Hanno deftly leapt onto its back he felt a lance of light form in his hand.

“Aspect,” one of the Magisters noted, tone calm.

“Suppression,” another ordered.

Fourteen jets of black light bloomed, emanating from outstretched hands, and combined their streams at him. Hanno struck at the malevolent power with his lance, but after a few heartbeats his weapon broke into shards and the power of the Magisters tore through his mount as well – the White Knight grit his teeth to ignore the pain of the feedback from having an aspect overpowered. He fell kneeling to the ground, unsheathing his sword again.

“Full attack, before he uses a second,” a woman’s voice stated.

Before the White Knight could react, three stakes of obsidian nailed both his feet to the ground, going through his armour like it was butter. The twelve remaining Magisters finished their incantations a moment later, fire reeking of sulphur blooming in their hands.

“We are Magisters of Stygia, boy,” the woman who’d just spoken, a cold smile on her face. “Even heroes kneel before us.”

The twelve spheres of hellfire hit him in the chest almost simultaneously. Hanno unhesitatingly flared the Light under his skin where the impact was happening – though that was enough to spare his flesh, their spells melted straight through his plate and threw him into a tent like a rag doll. If he’d not used his Name, there would be a smoking hole where his ribcage currently stood. With a grunt, he rose to his feet and tried to get the silk panels off his head before he could get hit again. No doubt the slaver mages were feeling rather smug at the moment, certain of their superiority. They’d been batting him around since the beginning, after all. That was their mistake. They’d used their strength on the one who, of the two present, could take a beating. All the while ignoring the other.

“Though their horses and chariots are like a river unto Creation, though their spears be forest and their sword be mountains, the Gods pass judgement unto them. Do not dread, for I bear the word of the Heavens and that word is begone .”

The Ashen Priestess’ voice rang loud a clear like a trumpet across the chaotic camp. Finally rid of the silk, Hanno was just in time to see the circle of blinding light form around the standing Magisters. Panic flickered across their faces for a single moment, and then the miracle wiped away the world. Even his Name wasn’t enough to keep the ringing out of his ears, or prevent the blindness that burned his retinas. Ten heartbeats later, when the terrible whiteness finally left his eyes, all the White Knight saw where the Magisters had once stood was a faint shimmer of light. Of the men and women, there was not a trace. Ash was panting, leaning on her staff: this was one of the more strenuous miracles she could call on, and one that took long to prepare. Against the likes of the Calamities, attempting to use it would be a death sentence. But these had been a different breed they were facing. Men and women ready to lean into their arrogance. And for all that the miracle took long to bring forth, there was no denying the effectiveness of the harsh judgement of the Heavens meted out. The White Knight limped to his friend and allowed her to lean on his shoulder: they needed to get moving soon, but they had a few moments still. There was a flicker of movement behind them and Hanno’s fingers tightened around the grip of his sword, but it was only a bird. A pigeon, to be exact, and it landed on his shoulder.

“Well, the distraction worked,” Hedge said, her voice unnaturally coming out of the bird’s mouth. “Maybe a little too well.”

A sound like a dozen cauldrons rolling down a street resounded behind them, which from experience he knew meant the Champion was running. The Levantine came into sight not logn afterwards, her breastplate splattered in so much blood she might as well have dipped it in a barrel of the stuff. The White Knight frowned when he saw no one was in pursuit. Even with the Magisters dead the slave soldiers should be continuing the fight. Why was no one following?

“Funny cripple here,” the Champion announced delightedly. “Giving speech. We beat him like renting mule, yes?”

“The Tyrant?” the White Knight said.

Why was he – oh. The hero closed his eyes.

“He’s taking over the Stygian army,” Hanno said.

“Can he even do that?” the pigeon complained, too close to his hear for comfort.

“Masterless slaves and a ruler Name? It’s basically handed to him,” the Wandering Bard announced cheerfully.

All their eyes flicked to their wayward fifth member, who was leaning against a wooden pole with a flask in hand. Said hand, apparently sweaty, slipped and she nearly hit the side of her head against her support before gamely trying to pretend she’d always meant to do that. Hedge snorted, which was impressive considering she was a bird at the moment.

“Where were you, Aoede?” Ash asked.

“Seeing a guy about a thing,” the Bard replied vaguely.

“You are the world’s most terrible riddler,” the pigeon stated. “There’s no mystery, only non-answers and a blatant drinking problem.”

“The point of this was to remove Stygia from the equation,” the White Knight said, ignoring the byplay. “We’ve failed.”

“But you successfully hit another point by accident, so it’s all good really,” the Bard told them with a smile.

Hanno frowned.

“And what would that point be?”

“Taking a tool out of the other monster’s toolbox,” Aoede said, toasting her flask. “That said, my lovelies, now might be a great time to leg it. You’re about to have a very motivated army looking for you.”

The hero glanced at Priestess, who shrugged in resigned agreement.

“Retreat, then,” the White Knight said, feeling somewhat robbed of a victory.

Even as they began their flight, Hanno saw the Bard slipping an arm around Champion’s armoured shoulders and leaning close.

“Do you happen to like monster stories, Rafaella?” she asked.

“Speak me more,” the Levantine grinned.

Chapter 24: Vanguard

“My dear Chancellor, I didn’t murder my entire family and use their blood to turn myself into an undead abomination to be told I couldn’t do things.”
– Dread Emperor Revenant

We’d wasted another sennight at Denier, to my displeasure. In part haggling terms with Duchess Kegan, who must clearly have been a fishwife in a past life, and in part because we were waiting on the Twelfth Legion to finish its march towards us. Those four thousand men were still led by General Afolabi, who I’d met once before when the Lone Swordsman was making trouble in the city the Twelfth garrisoned. I’d been unimpressed by his inability to handle the mounting tensions in Summerholm, he’d been unimpressed by the fact I’d launched an ambush on a hero in his own backyard without warning him. Neither of us were particularly pleased to see the other, but if I had to traipse through Arcadia I’d rather do it with thirty thousand men than twenty-six thousand. Besides, I rarely had to deal with him directly: he was under Marshal Ranker’s command and his legionaries stuck to their own camp. It took us another three days to ferry the Deoraithe army across the river with fishing boats and barges, the mounting delays driving me up the wall.

The longer we tarried here the longer Diabolist had to set up her end game. I was anybody’s guess how long we’d be in Arcadia, and more importantly where the gate out would be. After all, I didn’t control that part. Masego had given me a very complicated explanation on the subject involving alignments, symmetry and what had struck me as a bit of religion no matter how much mathematics he brought into the mix. My own understanding was a bit simpler: my will was a needle. By opening a gate I was punching through the fabric that was between worlds into Arcadia, but where the needle had to punch through to get me out of Arcadia was determined by where I’d come from and where I wanted to go. No doubt there were sundry metaphysical implications to all of this, but if I wanted to be babbled incomprehensively at I could just buy people drinks. Hells, considering I’d basically taken control of the treasury for Callow I could actually afford that these days. Progress.

Our supply situation had been another headache, and I’d never missed Ratface more than when Ranker sent a copy of our stores for the campaign to my desk. The Marshal and General Afolabi had essentially emptied Denier and Summerholm’s granaries to ensure they could operate alone for a few months, but there was a major difference between driving those supply carts down Callowan roads and through the wilderness of Arcadia. Getting the matter sorted took another two days, then another two when Duchess Kegan insisted on bringing he own carts across the river instead of relying on Legion ones. My officers learned to enjoy their wine cold, because the temperature in the room when I heard about that descended sharply . There’d been talk from the Deoraithe of keeping a different supply train instead of keeping all the rations together, but after I glared the meeting table frozen they’d ‘magnanimously’ declined to further pursue the matter.

And now here we were, over a fortnight after when I’d wanted us to leave, assembling the allied armies in the darkness before dawn. The largest gate I could open was an equilateral triangle seventy feet at the base, so there was no possibility of going through in ranks. It would have to be a marching column, which had prompted another round of what I refused to even call bickering. I knew bickering, it was the true tongue of all my closest friends. There was fondness in bickering, a give and take. This was just an ugly brew of distrust and spite spilling over what should have been an exceedingly straightforward manner. Marshal Ranker had wanted her two legions to go through first, and General Afolabi had backed the notion. Duchess Kegan had suggested her own infantry be the first to cross, heavily implying the goblin couldn’t be trusted not to set up an ambush for her army on the other side. Ranker had then wondered out loud if there’d been enough left of the body of Kegan’s younger brother to identify him after Grem One-Eye killed him at the Wall, during the Conquest. Before that could get any uglier, I’d slammed my fist on the table.

It had promptly broken, because these days I was pretty sure I could punch through iron if I put my mind to it. That wasn’t worrying in the slightest.

Anyhow, that had gotten their attention. I’d told them that it was my fucking gate so my people were going through first, led by myself, after which Ranker’s Fourth would follow. The Deoraithe would go through next, and General Afolabi’s legion would be in charge of the rearguard and covering our supply train. Tactically speaking this entire disposition was shit and nobody liked the compromise, but apparently breaking furniture made people less prone to arguing with you on minor details. Robber had since informed me that rumours went around the camps about my temper, nowadays, but I doubted even Black would have been able to handle this level of futile squabbling with a smile. As for Juniper, well, she’d have sent them to cool their heels by digging holes and filling them at least twice by now. Gods, I missed the Fifteenth. The wretches gave me lip, sure, but at least they did whatever I asked them to without arguing for a quarter bell first. Still, here we finally were. The blood in my veins cooled and power wafted off my armour like smoke even as the gate shuddered open before me. I found myself panting when my mind finally returned to itself, leaning against the neck of my horse. I waited ten breaths for the tiredness to leave me before looking at the Gallowborne around me.

“Forward,” I ordered.

We went through. Moving into Arcadia was a hard feeling to describe. It wasn’t a pressure, not exactly. It was like being stripped away of a second skin you didn’t know you had, leaving you feeling oddly naked even when wearing full plate like I was. I’d ridden ahead of my retinue so I had a moment to get my bearings before they caught up to me, breathing in the scene. It was night here too, but nothing alike. The fields south of Denier were cabbage and radish, mostly, while here it was long grass as far as the eye could see. A lazy breeze had the fields shivering while in the sky above us a full moon hung. I would have known we were in Summer even if I were blind, just from the irrational hatred I could feel welling up inside of me. The power I’d gained in Skade did not like being here at all, and the hatred sharpened when I glanced up at the moon. Really? I thought. The moon? My title was Duchess of Moonless Nights, so I saw the logic in it, but come on. I’ve fought some pretty absurd things since I became a villain, but I draw the line at the godsdamned moon.

I spurred Zombie the Second ahead as the Gallowborne came through behind me, immediately spreading out in formation and following behind me. In the distance, a few miles ahead, I could see tall and pale towers reaching for the sky. I frowned as I looked: the power I felt from that place was a mere shard of what Skade had felt like, so this was unlikely to be the seat of the Summer Court. But it was likely there’d be fae there, and the faint presence of the exit gate I could feel in the distance was beyond it. Far behind it. Shit. I’d had strong suspicions I’d have to fight my way through the third Arcadia voyage, but an expedition into the heart of Summer was beyond my worst expectations. Fighting the Summer Court in their own territory was not a recipe for success. But what choice do I have? We’d have to move quickly, before Summer could muster its entire army and strike at us. Force march directly to our way out, ignoring the fae as much as possible – getting drawn into a campaign out here would be consigning the thirty thousand soldiers I’d managed to assemble to the grave. It wasn’t long before the entirety of the Gallowborne were behind me, and the moment the first of Nauk’s legionaries set foot into Arcadia I began moving forward.

I wished Hakram was at my side, but I’d had to leave him back in Creation to make sure no idiocy would unfold between the ‘allies’ while my back was turned. The great tragedy of Adjutant was that I could only have one of him.

“Ma’am, are you certain we shouldn’t wait for reinforcements?” Tribune Farrier asked quietly from my side.

“I need to be sure there’s no army waiting to ambush us,” I replied. “If we have to give battle when most our forces are stuck on the other side of that portal, I have no words for how fucked we are.”

The dark-haired man nodded obediently, though he did not seem convinced. Since I was astride a horse I was the only one whose head was above the grass, and I allowed myself to luxuriate in the feeling of being the tallest person around for once as we moved towards the towers. My retinue moved warily in a square formation I was near the middle of, the greenery making the lines wobbly: this was not land made for marching. I could see no trace of any roads, and to my mixed relief and dismay no road conveniently appeared after I had that thought. When nearing a mile away from the gate, I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. No sign of anyone, but the grasslands made it hard to gauge that accurately. There could be ten thousand fae crouched down somewhere and none of us would notice until we stumbled over them. My instincts screamed trap, though in all fairness they almost always did. That healthy level of paranoia had kept me alive through a few years of being mortal enemies with Akua Sahelian, though, so I wasn’t inclined to dismiss it out of hand.

“It’s quiet,” one of the soldiers behind me said.

“If any of you finishes that thought, I’m feeding them to Nauk,” I said sharply.

I reined in Zombie and the entire formation slowed as I leant down to hide my profile, waiting for the hammer to fall. Nothing, huh? Nice try, but I wasn’t falling for that again. I waited for another thirty heartbeats and sweet, sweet vindication came in the form of a volley of arrows taking flight from our left. A trickle of power touched my eyes and my sight sharpened, gauging the number of shafts. A hundred, maybe? Not many more than that. The Gallowborne reacted professionally, falling in the testudo formation mere moments before the projectiles finished their arc. If they’d been mere arrows, that would have mostly nixed any notion of inflicted casualties. Unfortunately, on the way down trails of fire bloomed behind the arrows and they hit the shields with streams of flame. I had no room to manoeuver, stuck inside the formation as I was, and I wasn’t going to risk an arrow-catch while fighting bloody fae. I threw myself off Zombie the Second moments before a pair of arrows hit his neck and flank, detonating with burst of red and yellow flame. My mount died instantly, and I swore filthily in Taghreb. Those utter bastards.

Did these pricks even understand how much a good warhorse cost? Some of us actually had to pay for things, not just play pretend with a fucking illusory economy. They’d damaged him enough I probably wouldn’t even be able to raise him from the dead: I still needed mostly intact muscled to make a corpse move, necromancy or not. Only a handful of my retinue died to the first volley, though I saw that the arrows punched through steel shields and detonated afterwards to burn even when they couldn’t kill. Rising to my feet, I unsheathed my sword and ripped my heater shield from Zombie’s falling corpse. A second volley was in the sky before we’d recovered from the surprise of the first and I winced in anticipation – I could see what they’d meant to do. First wave damaged the shields, second hit the unprotected soldiers. This was going to hurt. I hid my surprise when I saw the arrows fall in a half circle around us instead, though I grasped what they were actually doing the moment I saw the tall grass going up in flames. Sorcery drove the flames to complete the encirclement rather than burn aimlessly faster than I could say I really hate fighting mages . So they wanted us to stay penned up and die.

“GALLOWBORNE,” I called out. “SHIELD WALL AND FOLLOW ME.”

I strode to the wall of flames ahead, shield up, and let the frozen river of power that was my third aspect come to the fore. I wasn’t using it – I’d not ye grasped it well enough for that – but just using the power was enough for my purposes. The fire stood three feet taller than me, but that hardly mattered: with a hiss I unleashed ice onto the flames, smothering them and carving a path ten men deep.

“Lion Devours Gazelle,” a man’s voice calmly stated ahead.

I charged through, the shield wall behind me, and saw silhouettes emerge from the grass even as a third volley flew at us. This one did not arc in the sky: it was shot straight forward, and though the impact was not as strong the bursting flames shot holes straight through my ranks. Pale blades like ivory were unsheathed in perfect silence as four dozen fae formed into two lines in front of me. The fae were tall and lovely, dark-haired and wearing a tabard marked with an oak over their silvery chain mail.

“Charge,” I barked.

The longer before we closed in melee, the more they’d thin us out with arrows. The Gallowborne were but a step behind me as I ran, the sensation of over a hundred steel boots thumping the ground in unison sending a shiver down my spine. I felt hot breath against my neck, the Beast licking its chops hungrily. It was eager for blood, after the frustrations of the last month. Truth be told, so was I. The man ahead of me struck lightning-quick, fearless, but he was no Duke of Violent Squalls. Not even a deadwood soldier. I stepped around the blow and flicked my wrist, tearing through his neck between the helm and the mail. The face of the woman behind him was splashed with crimson but she did not flinch: she went for my neck without missing a beat. The flat of my blade touched hers, redirecting the blow, and my shield hit her in the stomach. She coughed blood and before she could react the pommel of my sword hit her in the eye – I felt the skull cave under it, but my boot stomped down on her throat and crushed it to be sure. In front of me, I saw nothing but grass. I turned and saw the same all along the line: my retinue’s charge had been met for a moment, then the fae had disengaged without even attempting a proper melee, melting into the greenery.

“Oh shit ,” I realized.

The fourth volley killed at least twenty of the Gallowborne. They’d fallen out of formation when trying to force the fae into close range fighting. Ahead of us four dozen fae formed into two ranks, pale swords in hand. We’d been at this for perhaps a quarter hour and already almost a third of my retinue was dead or wounded.

“Shield wall,” I ordered.

Lion Devours Gazelle, the unseen commander had called it. Piece by piece they eat us . The fae had perfectly grasped the weakness of my force, compared to his. We had few crossbows – a mere three lines – and no good line of sight to use it. Range was theirs, and the moment my crossbowmen revealed themselves they’d be eating a volley. Trying to get up close would just result in the same thing every time: a quick and fruitless melee followed by the Summer fae disengaging just before the archers fired. Bleeding us one skirmish at a time, taking us on a merry chase until all that’s left is a trail of corpses. By the size of the last volley and the number of swordsmen who’d faced us, I’d guess they weren’t more than a hundred. We’d had double their numbers in hardened veterans when the steel came out, led by a Named. Another quarter hour of this and our numbers would be even. Another quarter hour after that and they’d outnumber us. There was nothing I could do about it save attempting to charge them by myself, and they’d just spread out to shoot at me from every direction while a handful of swordsmen kept me pinned.

“They beat us,” I said, the words leaving a sour taste in my mouth.

Farrier was to my side, cheek burned red and an arrow wound on his shoulder, and I saw surprise flicker on his face.

“Countess,” he said, “we can still-“

“The longer we’re at this, the more soldiers we lose,” I cut through. “Call the retreat.”

I hadn’t noticed in the heat of the fight, but they’d been drawing us further out. Towards the towers in the distance. A hundred is about the size for a heavy patrol. I’m not liking the odds there isn’t an army waiting for us there, even if it’s not a large one. If we went any further and they had reinforcements coming, we were as good as dead. They’d fire at us while we retreated and we’d take losses from that, but if I got stubborn here I was risking a wipe-out. I’d lost fights before. Been outmanoeuvred by Juniper, been beaten by Black’s superior skills or crushed by Captain’s overwhelming might. But never before had I been so harshly outclassed when it came to tactics, and I did not like the feeling one bit. So this was Summer. The season of war, I’d heard it called. I’d seen nothing like the people I was facing now in Winter, and the thought had me uneasy. These weren’t warriors they were soldiers and soldiers fine enough to be the match of the Legions. We can’t linger in Summer , I thought. We’ll lose the entire army if we misstep even once. Farrier had barked hard enough that my men were already retreating in a semblance of good order, and I saw some of them were picking up the corpses of their comrades.

“Leave the bodies behind,” I ordered, tone bitter.

“Countess, you can’t possibly mean that,” a lieutenant said, tone aghast.

“We can’t afford to be slowed down,” I said.

I watched the silhouetted of the fae in the distance, their swordsmen already dispersing into the tall grass. Getting ready for another volley already.

“We’ll be back for them,” I said, clenching my fist.

There wasn’t much I could do right now, but there was one thing left. I reached for the power of Winter inside me, grasped as much as I could and poured it into my sword until the metal frosted. I kept taking more and more, until I felt my blood go from cold to freezing. Any further than that and it would turn to thick red slurry inside my veins. Gritting my teeth, I swung the blade ahead of me. Ice sprouted into wall ten feet high along the arc of the swing, even as exhaustion flooded me. I’d used too much tonight already and now my armour felt like an anvil on my back.

“Hurry,” I said, raising my voice. “It won’t slow them down for long.”

By the time the fae ceased pursuit, there were barely a hundred members of the Galloworne left.

There would be a reckoning for this.

Chapter 25: Intent

“Trust the Heavens but tie your horse.”
– Callowan proverb

It was past dawn when the last soldier crossed the gate.

As soon as Robber stepped foot in Arcadia I had him prepare his cohort for scouting, but held off on sending him until Marshal Ranker’s legion was through. A few quiet sentences with her and moments later a thousand goblins melted into the countryside, with warnings about fae patrols and the kind of tactics they’d deployed so far. I had a pavilion mounted for me half a mile away from the gate, surrounded by Nauk’s two thousand, and settled on a folding chair while my few mages tended to the injuries of the surviving members of my retinue. I could have gone to sleep, but I still was too angry to rest and unwilling to miss anything. Instead I sat chewing on my mistake with a wineskin in hand as the reports began filtering in. There was not a soul within a mile of the gate, the scouts said. Neither was there any sign of the bodies I’d left behind, and even the places I’d skirmished at were now pristine: no sign of fire or fighting. Half a bell later one of Ranker’s officers reported her line had found a road to the west that looked like it was leading to the towers in the distance.

When the sun finally rose over the horizon, it found me still in the pavilion. There’d been one last development, not too long ago: Robber’s cohort had caught a fae close to the road, when confirming it led to the towers. Said towers, the report also elaborated, were actually a fortress. One whose walls were now manned. They knew we were coming. I sent word to the Marshal and the Duchess to join me the moment the hamstrung fairy was brought into camp, Hakram hovering behind me. He felt guilty about not having been with me when I’d run into trouble, as if I hadn’t been the one to order him to say in Creation to supervise.

“Would have made no difference if you were there,” I said.

“You don’t know that,” he gravelled.

“It... this wasn’t about power, Hakram,” I said. “I alone would have been able to cut down a third of them, if they’d fought the way I wanted them to. The Gallowborne would have wiped them out if it had been a melee. They’ve killed harder things than lesser fae. We fought them badly – I fought them badly, and I lost.”

“You did as well as you could,” he said.

“They’re not invincible,” I told him, irritated at the attempt at comfort. “They picked their ground, their time and the lay of the engagement. We just need to start thinking of them as a proper army instead of just a troupe of fairies, because they’re sure as Hells fighting like one.”

“Well said,” Duchess Kegan stated, her approval a tad condescending.

The ruler of the Deoraithe was not growing on me, it had to be said. I wanted to like her, I really did, but she was like the human version of a stone in your boot. Ranker brushed past her rudely, to the highborn’s irritation, and I was careful not to show amusement. I’d gotten this far by pretending to be above the bickering, taking sides would be surrendering what little advantage I had.

“Your boy caught one of them, then,” the Marshal said, gingerly climbing atop a folding chair and helping herself to my wine.

She sniffed at the nozzle, hairless brow rising.

“Vale summer wine? Fancy.”

She drank anyway, not that it would do much for her. Goblins were better a processing liquor and poison than either orcs or humans.

“Robber’s good at finding things,” I said, letting my voice carry enough that said Special Tribune would hear it from behind the pavilion flap where he was currently lurking.

“Stabbing them too,” my murderous minion contributed with a grin as two other legionaries from his cohort dragged a fae heavily bruised and missing an arm.

Male, this one. More lightly armoured than the ones I’d run into, but his leather armour bore the same symbol I’d seen on the tabard of the patrol: a green oak. His remaining hand and feet were bound tightly, leaving him unable to do anything but kneel at an uncomfortable angle.

“I won’t need you for the interrogation,” I told Robber.

The goblin pouted, which on his face looked positively horrifying. Like a fish trying the same, but with needle-like teeth peeking through.

“Can I watch at least?” he wheedled.

“Scram,” I said, and he read the mood correctly.

He swaggered away without pushing it, arms around the shoulders of his two cohorts, and I refrained from sighing at the sight. There were witnesses. The fae was gagged, so I rose to my feet to force down the cloth.

“Whose lands are we in?” I asked.

The soldier spat on my boot.

“Not the answer I was looking for,” I said.

“Call back the boy,” Ranker shrugged. “And send for knives.”

“Torture will take time,” the Duchess frowned.

“Better to move delayed than move blind,” the Marshal said.

Hakram cleared his throat, drawing their attention. I glanced at him.

“You forget you have a Named leading you,” the orc said.

Ah. Well, I’d never used it on fae before but considering how they were bound to stories it might actually work better than on mortals.

“ Answer my questions ,” I Spoke.

He twitched, fighting against the order, but eventually stilled.

“Whose lands are we in?” I repeated.

“The Count of Olden Oak,” the fae said.

“How many soldiers do you have?” Duchess Kegan asked.

The fae smiled sardonically and said nothing. Ah, the wording. I asked him the question as Ranker sent the tan woman a mocking look.

“Two thousand,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Any other nobles here?” I asked.

“The Baron of Dawning Day.”

I frowned. That was two titled fae, which struck me as too many for the middle of nowhere. Weren’t most of the nobles out with the army of Summer?

“Ask him where in Arcadia we are,” Ranker said, thoughts going along the same line.

“The border marches,” the fae replied when I did.

The two older women exchanged looks.

“If we march a sennight to the north, what will we find?” I asked.

That was, after all, about where I felt I’d be able to make a gate out . Let it not be the city of Summer, let it not be –

“The lands of the Princess of High Noon.”

I needed to start being more careful about what I wished for, I decided. I glanced at the other commanders of the army, silently asking if they had any other questions. Neither did. I shot Hakram a look, and without any need for words he stepped forward and casually snapped the prisoner’s neck.

“Be a dear and drag that outside, would you?” I said.

He snorted in amusement, but obeyed.

“So we need to march deeper into Summer,” Ranker said, sharp eyes on me.

“And quickly,” I grunted. “They’ll consider this an invasion, there’s a good chance they’ll recall their armies from Creation to drive us out.”

“Then the fortress had to be taken,” Duchess Kegan said. “We can’t leave two thousand soldiers at our back, not with the amount of supplies we carry.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Reports said it was a castle, curtain walls at least forty feet high. Legion standard?”

The last two words were spoken looking at the Marshal, who nodded pensively.

“Mages around the siege weapons, to ward from their magics,” she added. “Securing replacements out here would be difficult.”

“We’ve no notion of how long it would take to break down fae walls with mortal trebuchets,” Duchess Kegan said disapprovingly.

“I understand time is an issue, Duchess,” I said impatiently, “but I’m the only one here who’s tangled with them. We rush those walls and we’ll lose thousands, likely to no gain.”

“If you use legionaries, yes,” she said. “The Watch will take the walls and open the gates. Be ready to invest the fortress and deal with the nobles.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“You didn’t bring any ladders,” I pointed out. “Or any siege fixtures at all, for that matter.”

She smiled thinly.

“There will be no need for them,” she said.

I glanced at Ranker, who chuckled.

“At worst there’s fewer Deoraithe in existence,” she said, tone making it clear she believed this to be no great loss.

I eventually nodded. If nothing else, I’d get to have a look at why so much fuss was always made about the Watch.

“We march, then,” I said.

—

Nauk’s two thousand took point. There screens of goblins to the side in case any surprises had been laid out for us, but our advance went unchallenged until we came in sight of the fortress. It was an impressive piece of work, compared to a mortal castle, but compared to the likes of Skade it was rather mundane. Pale walls encircled four towers, whose only hint of sorcery was the way they were intertwined in a way that evoked roots. Glittering soldiers in the same silvery chain mail and tabard as the patrol stood atop the rampart, armed with bows and swords. There weren’t two thousand up there, by my estimation – maybe half that – which meant they’d kept reserves. The large oaken gate opened when Nauk’s legionaries ceased marching well out of bow range, a single mounted man riding out even as I frowned. Behind me the allied army spread, the Deoraithe host right behind while the two legions took the wings. I didn’t even need to focus to feel the power wafting from the rider, or notice it wasn’t in the league of the Winter counts I’d encountered. The baron the prisoner had mentioned? Hakram at my side, we watched the fae caracole atop his white steed and raise his lance in a mocking salute.

“You have entered the lands of Summer Eternal, invaders,” he called out. “Only death awaits you here.”

I heard someone striding towards me, Nauk’s legionaries parting for them. I wouldn’t be taking the Gallowborne with me today, not after the losses they’d incurred. Farrier had protested but his own shoulder was only held together by mage healing, and if it got broken again within a fortnight he’d be crippled for life.

“A champion,” Duchess Kegan said, occupying the side of me Adjutant didn’t. “How quaint.”

I’d read enough about Deoraithe to know what they thought about this kind of posturing in matters of war. I didn’t answer, waiting for the armies to reach their assigned positions as the fae continued yelling.

“Are all of you cowards?” the rider called out. “Will not a single of you meet this Baron of Dawning Day on the field to redeem your honour?”

“He’s in crossbow range,” Adjutant said. “Shall we give him a princely answer?”

I chewed over that.

“I don’t trust our shots to put him down,” I finally said.

“I have the finest bowmen in Calernia under my command,” the Duchess said.

“Better to kill him now, so he’s not on the walls to make trouble for your people,” I said. “Hakram. Can you do it?”

The orc looked at the baron for a long moment.

“Shouldn’t be too much trouble,” he said.

“Then shut the bastard up,” I ordered.

He laughed, clapping my shoulder before striding away. I felt the Duchess’ gaze on me.

“A princely answer,” she repeated. “Is is true, then. You had the Exiled Prince shot instead of duelling him.”

“If I personally killed everyone in my way I’d never have time for anything else,” I lightly replied.

She let out a sound that could be construed as amused.

“Perhaps there is some of the blood in you,” she conceded.

That would have been slightly more touching if she hadn’t just spent the better part of a month being a pain in my arse. If she wanted to rope me in using my Deoraithe heritage she was barking up the wrong tree, regardless. I knew nothing about my parents and to be frank I wasn’t particularly curious. Whoever they’d been, they had nothing to do with the person I was now. Still, the woman did have twenty thousand soldiers under her command and they wouldn’t be going anywhere after the scuffle against Akua was over. Needlessly antagonizing her would be foolish.

“All I’ve ever known of Daoine was through books,” I said. “Oh, and one of your relatives that put an arrow in me that one time.”

“You spared her,” the Duchess said. “That did not go unnoticed.”

Truth be told that had more to do with Black’s orders than any notion of mine, but I saw no need to tell her that. That aside, wonder of wonders: for once my reputation for leaving a trail of corpses in my wake was coming in useful. People were starting to assume that whenever I didn’t kill someone I did it on purpose.

“She’s a talented archer,” I said. “An inch to the side and it would have cleaved my spine. It’d be a shame to waste that kind of talent.”

“High praise,” Kegan said. “Perhaps she will live up to it today.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“She’s here?”

“She finished her oaths last year,” the Duchess said. “The entire Watch was mobilized to put down the madwoman in the south. An unexpected turn of events, that Daoine would share an enemy with you, but not entirely unwelcome.”

Well now, that was positively friendly. I’d have to be a special kind of idiot for that sudden thawing of tone not to worry me. Especially since it was happening the first time we were having a conversation out of Marshal Ranker’s earshot, surrounded only by soldiers known to be loyal to me. The picture that was painting was very, very dangerous. I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. I could try to probe her intentions and beat around the bush, but that kind of game wasn’t my specialty. I could cope with it in small doses, but I wasn’t betting on getting the upper hand against a woman who’d ruled a duchy for several decades. Fuck it. It was sad to admit, but I had more burnt city incidents that diplomatic victories under my belt.

“You’re talking a lot more sweetly than usual today,” I bluntly said.

“There will be an after the war,” Duchess Kegan said. “It is not too early to begin considering it.”

“In my experience, people who talk that vague are tiptoeing about treason,” I noted.

Her face showed no reaction. Why was everyone trying to negotiate with me so good at keeping their thoughts hidden?

“Your actions of late might be considered that,” the Duchess said. “Dissolving the Ruling Council. Naming a former rebel Governess-General of Callow. Replacing every Praesi governor with a Callowan, save for one.”

Denier, that. The man under Ranker’s thumb had never given me an excuse so I’d had to settle for waiting out his term. I could see what she was hinting at, and I needed to shut down that avenue right now if I didn’t want a third godsdamned civil war in a row to erupt the moment Diabolist’s head ended up on a pike.

“Callow will stay under the Tower,” I frankly replied. “That isn’t up for debate. The nature of that relationship, however, will be renegotiated. I have backing in this.”

The older woman’s eyes narrowed to slits.

“Does the Carrion Lord mean to depose the Empress?” she asked, finally discarding the pretences.

“No,” I replied, about as sure of this as I could be with someone like my teacher.

“Interesting days ahead,” the Duchess finally said.

“Procer is coming,” I said. “Not this year, I don’t think, but within the decade.”

“Offers were made, during the rebellion,” Kegan acknowledged.

I’d always suspected, to be honest, but it was still an upset to have that suspicion confirmed. While I’d been fighting a war with swords against the Lone Swordsman, there’d been another war entirely going on behind the scenes. I was only now beginning the grasp the form of it, and what I learned was chilling.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Independence and an alliance?”

“As well as a princess for my grandson, when they come of age,” she replied.

“But you didn’t bite,” I said.

“Grudges incurred after the Third Crusade have yet to be settled,” the Duchess said, tone harsh.

I frowned. The Deoraithe held on to slights like a drowning man to driftwood, but that still felt like too weak a reason. It wasn’t like Praes hadn’t taken regular runs at the Wall for over a thousand years. Hells, Dread Empress Triumphant had infamously crucified a King of Daoine for not bowing low enough.

“And?” I probed.

She hesitated, then continued.

“The Watch has guarded the Wall for a long time, Duchess Foundling, but that is not what it is meant for,” she replied. “The border being quiet allows us to tend to an older duty.”

There was fervour in her voice, by the time she finished speaking. The Deoraithe hate the elves . That was no great mystery. Perhaps not common knowledge, but any book about Daoine’s history made a point of mentioning it – the Deoraithe had once lived in what was now the Golden Bloom before being driven out of it. Warlock had once theorized in front of me that the Watch was meant to imitate the strange abilities elves gained as they grew old, gaining through sorcery what the others were born to. Was that what she meant? That without the orcs raiding west Daoine could turn its attention to the elves?

“A conversation to finish at another time,” Kegan said. “The duel you ordered is coming.”

The entire conversation hadn’t taken long, but in that span Hakram had made his way through Nauk’s legionaries. My Adjutant had always been tall even for an orc, and I was almost certain he’d grown taller since coming into his Name. Not as broad-shouldered as Nauk or stout as Juniper, but he carried himself with a presence nowadays that had an almost physical weight to it. He’d grown into his power and it showed. Hakram no longer used the sword and and shield that had been his lot as a legionary: first he’d traded the sword for an axe, then the shield for another axe in the wake of our fights with the fae. He’d told me that if we were going to keep fighting creatures that could cut through steel like parchment he’d rather carry a second blade than dead weight. The weapon the orc took in hand as he strode onto the field was more a long and large hatchet than a battle axe in a conventional sense, goblin steel forged into a haft and head he still twirled like it weighed nothing. The Baron of Dawning Day ceased his strutting atop a horse when a challenger appeared, reining in his horse and guiding it to face Adjutant.

The legionaries in the first ranks began stomping their feet and it spread like fire among the Fifteenth, goblins and orcs and men of every stripe. The ground shook under two thousand steel-shod boots, and to that harsh meter voices rose to match.

“Dead the hand and dead the man,
Sharp the blade and sharp the fang
For no matter how tall they stand
When iron rests we see them hang.”

Hakram’s stride went unbroken as he called out to the fae, his words drowned out by the voices and beat as to the sides of the host the other Legions of Terror joined their boots to the song. Ten thousand souls stomping as my legionaries sang their eerie anthem. The Baron of Dawning Day’s lance descended and without any further taunts he charged.

“Lord or priest or knight in pale
On burning hill or dawning vale
The scale settles it all the same:
Red and broken lies the name.”

Adjutant did not move, calmly awaiting the charge. My heartbeat quickened at the sight, but I trusted in him. Given his size and strength, the natural comparison among the Calamities for my right hand was Captain. I’d fought them both, though, and knew that was a mistake. Sabah was strength and swiftness unrelenting, more hurricane than woman when moved to violence. Hakram... Hakram fought like Black. Even more than I did. Patient and measured and ruthlessly brutal in motion. The lance shone brightly under the sun, but still the orc did not move. Only when the mass of muscle and steel was teen strides away from him did his hand whip out: the axe spun, blade sinking through steel plate between the eyes of the Baron’s charger.

“Dead the hand and dead the man,
Sharp the blade and sharp the fang
For no matter how tall they stand
When iron rests we see them hang.”

The white horse died and momentum carried it in a messy slide across the grass as the Baron deftly leapt off it and landed like a cat on the ground. Adjutant moved three steps to the side, taking his second axe in hand as the dead horse tumbled just past him. Casting his lance aside, the Baron of Dawning Day unsheathed a sword bright as the morning he was titled after. The orc awaited him patiently, unmoved by the sight. In the blink of an eye the fae was on him, sword leaving trails of light behind every swing as he furiously tried to take his opponent’s life. Calmly giving ground, Hakram avoided a cleave turned into a thrust a little too shallowly: the green skin of his cheek parted under fae steel, leaving a blackened mark like it had been burnt. The Baron avoided the haft of the axe with mocking ease, but it was a distraction: Adjutant’s fist caught him in the chin. Bone broke, for an orc’s strike was no small thing and this orc had strength beyond mortal bounds. Spitting teeth, the fae snarled furiously and harsh light bloomed in front of him. I sucked in a breath: even from where I stood I could feel the heat of it, and so close it would have been impossible for Hakram to dodge it.

“Queen or king or Heaven’s get
Never unpaid goes their debt
Learn bitter with the last breath
The left hand gives only death.”

When the light died out, Adjutant’s smoking frame towered three feet back from where’d he’d been. He was steaming like cooked meat but unharmed. I could still feel the wisps of his Name on him, the remnants of the aspect he’d called on: Stand. He’d withstood the strike of a demon using it, once. Fae sorcery was lesser in comparison. I saw his axe had been turned to blackened scraps by the Baron’s power, though, and felt a sharp surge of fear. The sound of his laughter dispersed it. He’d been driven back to the horse’s side by the impact, and deftly he claimed back the axe he’d left in the mount’s head. He didn’t close the distance again, though, which I found strange. Though visibly shaken by the way his sorcery had failed to quell his opponent, the Baron immediately returned on the offensive. Light flared around the blade, and only then did I understand Adjutant’s intent. The orc’s legs lowered, the muscles of his arm flexed and his skeletal hand dug into the horse’s flesh: with a loud grunt, he seized the entire corpse like a mace and smashed it into the charging fae. The Baron hastily tried to cut through the flesh, but only succeeded in parting the belly: the mass still ploughed him downwards like a fragile doll. The carcass bubbled and burst in a shower of gore as the fae emerged, panting, but there was no recovering from his misstep. The crescent blade of the axe caught him him in the neck, cleaving to the spine. The orc booted his stomach to wrench the steel out, leaving him twitching in the gore, then calmly cleaved straight into his skull.

“Dead the hand and dead the man,
Sharp the blade and sharp the fang
For no matter how tall they stand
When iron rests we see them hang.”

Dead. And now, just now, when the sight of it was still fresh in the eyes of the fae above? That was the moment to strike. Even as thousands of feet thundered in approval and Hakram’s blood-red axe rose to the sky, I drew Duchess Kegan’s attention.

“Now,” I said. “Send them in now.”

The older woman nodded slowly, still troubled by what she’d just seen, and drew a red scarf from a pouch on her side before holding it up. Without a sound, two thousand men and women of the Watch broke into a perfect run. Like the song had said, there were scales to settle.

And like the song had said, Summer would lie red and broken for it.

Chapter 26: Advance

“You’d be surprised at the breadth of things that can be powered by the souls of the innocent. Fortresses, swords, my favourite chandelier.”
– Dread Empress Malevolent II

Calling how they moved a formation would have been inaccurate.

A tide, maybe, or wisp of fog. The grey-brown cloaks fluttered behind them as the Watch charged towards the fortress, the fae only recovering from the sight of my right hand slaughtering their champion when the Deoraithe were mere feet away from the base of the rampart. A volley of flame-touched arrows bloomed, but it was like trying to catch smoke in your hand: the flames touched only the ground and the Watch began its ascent. Duchess Kegan had said that they wouldn’t need ladders, and now I saw why. Every soldier took out a pair of steel stakes and I watched as the first to move forward leapt up before ramming his first stake into the stone. Using it as support, he threw himself up and bit into stone with his other stake. A flick of the wrist got the first stake out of the stone, and then he hoisted himself up again. Twenty feet up the wall, in the blink of an eye. Merciless Gods , I thought. I might have been able to do that, but one of my soldiers? Suddenly Daoine’s dream of taking the fight to the elves seemed more than an elaborate ritual suicide.

The fae did not lose their composure, continuing to pour down arrows. At my side Duchess Kegan raised her hand again, a black scarf in hand. The three thousand remaining soldiers of the Watch, longbows already strung, released a volley of their own. The arc was perfect, almost pleasurable to watch, at though the projectiles were mere steel they scythed through the Summer fairies who’d been careless enough to leave the protection of the crenels. A burning log was tossed over the rampart but the Deoraithe did not miss a beat. Those allowed room by the angle pressed themselves against the stone and let it pass them by, and a woman whose chest would have been caved in instead leapt atop the log, using it to leap again upwards and resume climbing with her stakes. And Grem One-Eye beat them , I thought. When they were defending their own damned wall. I’d always thought that in a few years after she was seasoned Juniper would be the best tactician on Calernia, bar none, but what I saw was forcing me to reconsider. It was one thing to beat devils, another to crush this.

Less than eighty heartbeats after they’d begun moving, just after another volley shot by the Watch who’d stayed behind forced the fae to take cover, the first Deoraithe landed on top of the wall. The fighting then was not so one-sided: Kegan’s monsters were quicker and stronger than humans had any right to be, but so were the fae. Longsword met longsword as a dozen footholds formed on the rampart, but the Watch had not been deployed to take the wall. As soon as the last Deoraithe made it up, the clusters moved again and disappeared into the fortress. Headed for the gate, no doubt. My turn. Nauk’s men made way for me as I marched to the front of the two thousand legionaries of the Fifteenth, eyes on the still-closed gates. Adjutant joined me moments later, armour blackened by the sorcery of the baron he’d put down.

“They’re impressive,” the orc gravelled. “Maybe the finest soldiers on Calernia, pound for pound.”

I hummed, not disagreeing. Now that the initial shock at their performance had waned, though, I felt that I was missing something. Only a quarter of Duchess Kegan’s army was made up by the Watch. Why, if they were so effective? If she had twenty thousand of them the Wall would never have fallen during the Conquest. Were there requirements to being able to become part of the Watch? It couldn’t be that they were all mages. Deoraithe weren’t known to birth a lot of those, and no one had five thousand mages to field save for Praes – who’d bred those numbers up over millennia – and perhaps Procer, by sheer dint of its population’s size.

“Resource investment,” I murmured.

Hakram raised a brow.

“Legion officers and mages take half a decade to train properly,” I said. “The Empire can bear that because it’s rich and its population large. Daoine is a duchy , not a kingdom. They might not have the means to support too many of those – that kind of power can’t come without a material cost.”

Praesi were wealthy beyond comprehension and cheated with blood sacrifices besides, otherwise raising even a single flying fortress would beggar the Tower for half a decade. Deoraithe didn’t have that shortcut available, though. Them grabbing people to sacrifice, even if they kept it strictly in-house, would have been noticed eventually.

“Every time one of them dies a small fortune goes up in smoke,” Hakram grasped, brow creasing. “They do have the population to field a larger army than twenty thousand. A choice was made.”

“Quality over quantity,” I said. “They began treading that path long before the Reforms took Praes down the same road.”

Duchess Kegan’s hand, then, was not as strong as she had been pretending. How many years would it take to replace any casualty incurred by the Watch? She might be able to afford that in times of peace, but if she ever warred against the Empire her treasury would be bleeding out from a dozen different unavoidable expenses. If I could realize this at a glance, I had a hard time believing that Malicia and Black could not. Was that why they’d never acted like they considered Daoine a real threat? Something to keep in mind, when I next spoke with the duchess. It was not long after we finished speaking that the gates began moving, a dozen silhouettes on each side pushing the massive copper things open. In front of them the rest of the Watch had clustered together in a tight formation, and the moment the way was clear they began a smooth and almost leisurely retreat. I unsheathed my sword, raising the blade.

“FIFTEENTH,” I screamed. “ADVANCE!”

The nut had been cracked open. Now the butcher’s work could begin. The ranks behind were four hundred broad, following behind just short of a run as Hakram and I took point. The retreating Deoraithe split around us, a few of them ceasing their retreat just long enough to shoot arrows at fae trying to close the gates before we arrived. Fifty feet , I gauged. The soldiers of Summer behind the gate hurriedly sent a volley at the Fifteenth, the same kind of chest-height shots that had torn through the Gallowborne. This wasn’t my retinue, though. It was a full jesha of two thousand, half the forces making up a regular Legion of Terror. These men had been trained to deal with mages, and without missing a beat the mage lines within the Fifteenth returned fire. A wave of fireballs flew, tailored for size instead of strength or speed: the spells taught in the War College were not the most powerful or the most effective. They were the most flexible , the formula easy to adjust for the situation. Every mage cast, and when the large balls of flame met the arrows a curtain of flame flickered across the grounds. Not a single projectile made it through. Heat licking at my face, I strode through the already-fading fire. Twenty feet.

“Been a while since we were in a scrap side-by-side,” I said.

“Liesse, I think,” Hakram mused. “Learned a few things since then.”

“So have I,” I said. “Try to keep up.”

There were maybe ten feet between me and the fae when I dashed forward, sinking into my Name. I’d always found clarity in doing that, in allowing the world to slow as my perception deepened and my blade followed, but it was different now. The air no longer felt just crisp, it was cold – like a windless winter night, everything tinged with frost. An arrow flew towards my throat but my sword came up without missing a beat, slapping it to the side as I pivoted on myself and fell on the first rank of the fae. At my side a roar sounded and blood sprayed high as Adjutant began to paint in red. We hit their line like a trebuchet stone, ploughing straight through. There was no room for elaborate tactics, here, no Lion Devours Gazelle. If they didn’t hold the gate, they were done for: they had to stand and fight. It would be a red gutter before long, and the gutter was where I shone. One of the fae threw tongues of flame at me and I didn’t even bother to dodge them: they hit my armour head on with only hissing steam to show for it, the ice-cold steel unmarred. My shield hit the opponent in the stomach, smashing him back, and I gutted him with a clean sword stroke.

Adjutant stood at my side, sweeping the enemy aside with wild laughter as we drive deeper and deeper. There was a deafening sound behind us as Nauk’s heavies impacted the fae line, orcs and humans in a tightly-locked shield wall beginning their push. This was not the kind of battle the Summer fae were meant for, I thought. Not these, anyway. Mere swords and bows were no match for the implacable advancing steel wall of the Legions of Terror. The path Hakram and I were carving through the enemy filled with soldiers, a wedge in the enemy formation that split them. Already they were wavering – the Watch had killed hundreds on their way through, and what stood behind us now was not the full strength of the enemy. There still had to be some left on the walls.

“ Spargere ,” an officer’s voice called out.

Small clay balls with lit fuses sailed above the ranks, falling in the throng of fae. The sharpers exploded a moment later, shredding flesh and bone. With a resounding cry the shield wall pushed forward and the army of Summer folded under the pressure.

“Fire,” the same voice called out.

Four dozen balls of flame flew above the fae ranks. They wouldn’t hit anyone, but they weren’t meant to. One by one they detonated, the pressure flattening the fairies under them even if they didn’t kill anyone. The fae lines wavered and again the cry sounded, the shield wall pushing forward. I’d been killing my way through anything foolish enough to stand in my way, the tip of the spear, and finally I saw only one woman in front of me – behind her was an empty courtyard, leading deeper into the fortress. There was fear in her too-large eyes. Her sword parried my blow, but her grips was weak. With a grunt I pushed down, flexing my muscles as she joined a second hand to her first and desperately tried to hold me back. Too weak. I broke through her guard, carving her from shoulder to rib across the body. After so many strikes against armour even the goblin steel of my sword was starting to dull, but with enough power behind the blow that mattered little. I stepped onto the courtyard lightly the sound of fangs tearing through flesh heralding Adjutant following me as he tossed a corpse with a ripped throat to the side. Heavies filled the corridor we’d open, splitting the fae in two, and it was the beginning of the end for them. They began to break.

“We can leave them to Nauk,” I said. “We have a Count to settle matters with.”

The orc nodded, licking reddened chops. The inside of the castle was still made of the same white stone, but in the shady corners I saw roots peeking through. Count of Olden Oak, huh. Might be more to the title than just heraldry. A set of stairs led to the upper keep and without wasting any more time I began the way up. We passed through an empty banquet hall without slowing, my gaze lingering at the larger and larger amount of roots I saw growing through the stone from every corner. Was this entire fortress a tree, the oak the fae noble was named for? I knew fuck all about what oaks actually looked like, having been raised in a city, so I could be looking at one for all I knew. There was another set of stairs in the back of the hall and we headed there, the both of us feeling the pressure coming from higher in that direction. We ended up in a corridor covered with living mosaics of leaves that shifted with every glance but didn’t stick around to look at them: through an arc we could see a third and final set of stairs, leading to what I would have called a basilica if the the coloured glass of its windows didn’t display the glory of Summer victorious.

The way up was long and sharply sloped, the stairs broad and too large to be covered in one stride. The sun shone down, but it was not illuminating stone: we were surrounded by the brown bark of an immense oak, growing in the centre of the towers we’d glimpsed from the outside. The large structure ahead had coppers doors like the outer fortress, though these were wide open. The atmosphere was eerily green-tinged.

“Twenty denarii he’s waiting for us inside on some kind of oaken throne,” I said.

“I’m not taking that,” Hakram snorted. “Twenty denarii we get a monologue about the might of Summer before the fight.”

We kept moving even as we talked but the moment we rose onto the first step the strange buzz of fae wings sounded in the utter silence. From the heights of the giant tree ten fae descended on translucent wings, landing halfway up the steps with unnatural grace. Each of them held a leaf-shaped shield and a long lance of wood. I raised an eyebrow.

“So if he’d been called the Count of Plentiful Cows, would you be fighting with udders and hooves?” I called out.

The words echoed across the distance, my mockery repeating twice more before fading.

“Though crowd,” Adjutant deadpanned.

The ten fae spread in a line without replying, wings flickering out of existence, and the spears rose. Since the grim-faced pricks weren’t willing to save us the climb before we fought it out, we began the way up. I caught Hakram studying them carefully as we rose then punched his shoulder to draw his attention, eyebrow raised.

“Go to the Count,” he gravelled. “I’ll handle them.”

“You’ve used one aspect already,” I frowned. “And your other one’s not much use in a fight.”

The tall orc bared his fangs.

“I feel... close,” he said. “To the third.”

Ah, and now I understood why he’d suggested it. Iron sharpens iron, Praesi were fond of saying. They meant it as a justification for their obsession with scheming against one another, but I’d found the saying had some truth in it. For both villains and heroes, conflict drove advancement. No, perhaps that wasn’t exact. Weighty actions allowed you to sharpen your Name, and conflict had a way of birthing those. Whether it was arguing with an enemy or beating them down, a Named could temper themselves. It wasn’t that Hakram thought he’d stomp over all these fae – they were obviously meant to be an elite guard of some kind, no matter how ridiculous their equipment. But he believed that a dangerous enough fight might allow him to reach his third aspect.

“I don’t like risking you,” I said, more honestly than I’d meant it to. “Duel’s one thing, this is just taking a risk to hurry something you’ll get eventually.”

He half-smiled, which given the size of his teeth still made him look more horrifying than sentimental.

“You can’t be the only one taking risks,” he chided. “And we’ll need all we can bring to bear, soon. If not for this war then for the next.”

I was still less than fond of this idea. It wasn’t just that finding a replacement for Adjutant would be impossible, though there was no denying that was a fact. Even if Apprentice fused Ratface and Aisha into a single abomination of nature the combined talents wouldn’t be able to handle a tenth of the work he did. Hakram was my friend. Gods, probably the person I was closest to in all of Creation. My first instinct was to kill anything that might threaten him and put the head on a spike to ward off anybody else who might want to try. I knew that look in his eyes, though. It was the same one he got before disappearing for a few bells and a problem mysteriously solved itself – there would be no talking him out of this no matter how much I glared.

“Wade in their blood, Hakram,” I finally said, raising a gauntleted fist.

“Luck in battle, Catherine,” he replied, hitting his fist with mine.

We were only two steps away from the fae, and they’d yet to move. I supposed they thought it made them look imposing.

“The way is barred,” a fae said.

“So was the front gate,” I replied.

I dashed forward, sending a sliver of power into my legs. Bypassing a step entirely I landed in front of the rightmost fae, whose spear immediately whistled towards my throat. From the corner of my eye I saw movement – ridiculous as they looked, they were quicker than the soldiers from earlier and better coordinated. If it had come to a scrap that would have mattered, but unfortunately for them fleeing was another game entirely. I formed a circular panel of shadow in the way of the one trying to flank me and ducked under the spear of the other, never breaking stride. Wouldn’t have worked if I was any taller, but for once being so offensively short was an advantage. The shadow pane shattered a heartbeat later, but I was already on the step behind them. I glanced back and saw that none of them was deigning to pursue. Hakram ripped the shield out of the hands of one and smacked another fae’s face with it, but he was surrounded within moments and the situation looked sharply to his disadvantage. My fingers tightened until the gauntlet creaked, but I forced myself to look away and continued my way up. He wouldn’t have told me he could handle it if he couldn’t.

I forced myself to clear my mind the way I’d been taught even as I headed up to the structure that was the crowning glory of the fortress, the very heart of the Count’s domain. From the sides of the stairway – there were no rails here either, though unlike with the Tower I was willing to cut Summer some slack since at least they could fly back up if they fell – I could see roots leading up to the inside of the building. Well, that was promising. I’d seen my fair share of fucking horrors in Winter, I supposed I was due exposure to the other side of the coin. The copper gates were open, like I’d seen earlier, but as I made it to the top I finally got a glance inside. For the first time since breaching the fortress, what I saw gave me pause. It wasn’t the tall silhouette of the Count that gave me pause, his back turned to me as he gazed out the green and red glass in front of him. It was the sight of the inside of the basilica, though the living wood that made hundreds of stacks filled with books and baubles was a stunning sight. No, it was the hundred corpses of the Gallowborne that hung from the branches covering the ceiling.

I let out a long, quiet breath. Fury was not unknown to me. I’d felt both boiling anger and frozen, bitter hatred since I’d become the Squire. But the sight of men and women who’d died for me trussed up like trophies in someone’s sanctum killed the emotions in me. I’d seen the Carrion Lord once. The monster the tales spoke of, instead of the sardonic teacher I’d come to love. Seen the humanity in him smothered like a candle, leaving behind only a thing capable of anything if it furthered its objectives. If someone was looking at my face right now, I thought, they might just see the same thing. He’d told me, once that were the same in some ways. Maybe he was right, because right now I felt capable of being monstrous. My footsteps broke the silence in the room as I walked forward, the heartbeats of the Beast echoing in turn. It was there, I knew as well as I knew my own breath. Still as the grave, but looking at the Count with my eyes. It did not delight in the violence to come, for once. It bowed to it.

“I’d never considered any of this personal,” I heard myself say, my tone without a speck of feeling. “I am, after all, invading your home. You’ve not participated in the invasion of Callow, and my only reasons for sieging this keep were of a strategic nature.”

The Count of Olden Oak turned to face me, tall wooden spear in hand.

“But this?” I murmured, looking at the corpses of people I’d known, trained with, laughed with. “This was a choice. Those have consequences.”

“Duchess of Moonless Night,” the fae greeted me calmly. “You seem displeased.”

“We passed civil the moment you hung up those corpses,” I said. “I could torture you for this, I suppose, but that’s a cheap sort of satisfaction. Meaningless, really. There’s no evening this particular scale.”

“Winter pretending to be righteous,” the man mocked. “A farce of farces.”

“I revoke your right to exist,” I said, tone measured. “I will take what I want from you, and then you will end.”

He opened his mouth to speak again but I shot forward. The man wore no armour, only green robes, but with fae that meant nothing. My sword came down but the shaft of the spear caught it – whatever sorcery was in the wood made it harder than steel, my blade bouncing off. I was past caring. I smashed my shield into his shoulder, but his hand came up to block it: green light shone on his palm and the momentum of the strike vanished. I gave ground, stepping back and slowly circling around him. Swift as a hawk he struck, spear aiming for my eyes, but I hit the tip of his spear with the top of my shield to knock it off course. The spear rose past my head but instantly a branch grew from it, whistling towards my throat. I blinked in surprise as it pierced straight through, only backing away in time to prevent it from severing my spine. My vocal chords were done for, but I no longer needed to speak an aspect to call on it. Rise , I thought. The wound slowly began to close even as the branch that had grown from the spear withdrew back into it. So this was a Count of Summer, I thought. I had no makeshift prophecy protecting me from this one, no shield of lies to blunt his power.

He would lose regardless.

I moved forward again and the spear whipped out, tearing a hole through my shield – a last moment adjustment prevented it from piercing through the hand that held it. He made to withdraw the spear but I focused my will and the ice welled from the steel and froze it stuck inside. I managed to swing at his face before he forced it out anyway, twisting away from by blow – I cut clean just underneath his eye. Green light came out instead of blood, bark growing to fill the wound. I was not the only one with a healing ability, it seemed. The hole in my shield froze shut with dark ice and I went back on the offensive: his growing trick was too dangerous to allow him the initiative. The tip of my blade probed his guard as I angled my feet for a thrust, his eyes flickering down to notice it. The Beast howled. When he slapped aside the thrust with his spear I was already moving, twisting the momentum into a pivot that smashed into his spear when he managed to block it again. I tore through no flesh, but the strength behind the strike threw him back a few feet. I was stronger than him, then. My title of Duchess was not entirely meaningless.

The spear snaked forward as he moved towards me, casually slapped aside. Even as it passed my flank I saw the branch grow and head for my kidneys, but I was ready for it this time. I dropped my sword and caught the bursting wood with my hand, forcefully moving it aside. Ice glistened on the lower edge of my shield, sharpening it like a blade, and I rammed that edge into his shoulder. I cut through the robe and he hissed in pain, then wrenched out the shield while throwing myself to the side before the two branches growing from the first one he’d made could punch through between my ribs. I landed in a roll, without a weapon, and the Count smirked. Green light shone the gaping wound going from his shoulder to his pectorals, bark filling it instantly. I flicked my wrist and Pickler’s contraption triggered, a knife slapping down onto my palm. My Senior Sapper had made sure that there would always be steel in my hand when I needed it, her sharp little mind ever-refining the tool I’d once used when fighting the Lone Swordsman.

“You seem to be at a disadvantage, Duchess,” the fae mocked.

I had no interest in trading barbs with meat. I charged again but found the distance between us had been too lengthy: the Count flicked his fingers at me, a dozen strands of green light shooting towards my chest as I advanced. I stepped aside, adjusted my angle and continued moving forward but he still had control of the sorcery: the strands struck down at my boot, roots growing from them and nailing me to the floor. My momentum cut short, I had to force myself back in order to avoid tripping. Immediately the fae struck, moving to the side my shield didn’t cover with the grace of a cat. My knife wouldn’t be able to do much against the spear, at this distance. You have made a mistake , I thought with vindictive satisfaction. I adjusted my grip on the knife to be the same I’d use for a sword, and then with a flicker of will from the short blade a full sword length of dark ice grew. I cut through the spear, and thought it immediately began to grow back his eyes widened.

I tore through my boot out of the roots effortlessly. I’d already proved I beat him in raw strength – arrogant of him to think he could bridge the gap with sorcery. My shield hit his stomach, knocking the breath out of him without his little healing being of any use. My blade carved straight through the wrist that held the spear, and though it grew back in bark that didn’t bring back the weapon to his hand. Sorcery attempted to do so, but when it began rising from the ground I exerted my will again and froze it stuck. I cut his throat, without missing a beat. Green light filled the wound, but I was already striking again. I sliced through his eyes and he screamed, but a heavy groan sounded out behind me. I risked a glance and saw that a hundred spears of wood were descending from the branches covering the ceiling. In that heartbeat, the world slowed. I could move out of the way, give ground again and avoid the danger. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to crush him under my boot, and the bone-deep hatred I’d felt when first entering Summer well up in response.

I didn’t set it aside, this time. I took it, owned it, carved it into a weapon. It was mine, and it would answer to my will like any other aspect.

“ Fall ,” I said.

The world went dark. A boundless night sky spread above us, without a single speck of light to break the black. There was a cold here that was old and merciless, and the branches that would have pierced me slowed and turned grey. The sap inside them froze and they died . The Count of Olden Oak’s bark-crafted eyes stared blindly into the dark as he panicked. I could feel a flame inside him, feel it dimming with every passing heartbeat. Frost spread across his body slowly, and I could feel him on the brink of death. I smiled and the night went away, wrenching me back into the sunlit basilica. He was barely conscious now, so little of him left a child could have beaten him to death. His power would grow back, though, given enough time.

“Oh, you don’t get to die yet,” I said. “I still have a use for you.”

What little was left of his mind smelled of fear, and it was not unwarranted.

Chapter 27: Expedition

“No matter how hallowed the crown, it fits only one head.”
– Proceran saying

There were no maps. That was the great dangers of Arcadia, I was learning. Well, that and the fact that it was a shifting hellscape filled wit quarrelsome demigods. I’d not realized until now how much planning a march depended on the maps provided to Fifteenth by the Tower: we had no idea what was ahead of us now, and any reports brought back by scouts might have become inaccurate by the time we reached they place they’d been. I knew where we needed to go – could feel it in the back of my head like an unmoving iron spike – but that knowledge came without a precise idea of the distance I needed to march. Based on the last two times I’d travelled to Arcadia I was guessing about six days, but that was a guess . We could be here for a fortnight if I was misjudging the situation. We’d set out with rations for three weeks, expecting to resupply when we met up with the Fifteenth back in Creation, and we had since... expanded our granaries. The regulations for the Legions of Terror forbade looting, but I was Named: I could overrule those whenever I wished. They were mostly meant to avoid antagonizing local populations when the Empire took territory, anyway, so I was breaking the letter more than the spirit.

And Hells, since for once in my life I wasn’t fighting in my own homeland I’d ordered Robber to loot this fucking fortress to the bedrock. Taking anything heavy would only slow us down, but there was plenty of jewellery, gold and silver lying around. It would have been better to have Ratface along for that – the Taghreb was capable of squeezing silver of of stone, given a bell – but he was more useful to me at Juniper’s side, preparing the second phase of our campaign against Summer. Night fell all too quickly as the armies camped around the fortress, torches and bonfires lighting up the dark. I’d claimed the basilica where I’d beaten the Count as my command centre, and it was where I’d be holding my meeting with the senior staff of the combined armies. Passing the banquet hall I’d glimpsed on my way up earlier in the day I raised an amused eyebrow at the sight of two goblins with knives prying out the gilding from the corner of the high table before shoving the gold in a bag. Enterprising lot, Robber’s cohort. I decided not to ask how they’d gotten so good at ripping off precious metals from objects, since I’d really prefer not to know.

The Summer Court was torching southern Callow, it was sonly fitting that their own treasures would pay for the rebuilding of it. The Deoraithe were too proud to ask for a cut and Ranker was from the generation that had drafted the regulations I was breaking, so amusingly enough it was all going in my war chest.

The entire fortress had been ours a half-bell after I’d smacked down the Count, Nauk’s men sweeping in and the other two Legions taking the walls on the sides when the fae there pulled back to deal with my men. Ten corpses and a bloodied but satisfied Adjutant had been waiting for me when I first left the basilica – he’d gotten his aspect, he’d said, but he’d rather keep what it was exactly under wraps for now. The fae personal guard looked like they’d been hacked to death with his axe, not some power, so I was rather interested in what had allowed him to bridge the gap. It could wait, though. If there was one thing I’d learned about aspects in the years since I first became the Squire, it was that they were trump cards best kept quiet until they could shine. The knowledge that I had Struggle, back in the day, had allowed the Lone Swordsman to plan around it. Best to leave Hakram’s new weapon unknown until it could be slapped down on the table at our enemy’s detriment. The officers were already waiting for me when I passed the still-open copper doors, settled around a large circular table clearly stolen from another part of the castle. It still had dried blood on it, not that anybody seemed to care. No insulting slogans had been carved on the surface, though, so it probably wasn’t a goblin who’d found it. They liked to leave a mark, my little monsters.

This particular meeting had required broader attendance than the usual triumvirate of Ranker, Kegan and I: a hooded figure from the Watch stood silently behind the seated Duchess. At the Marshal’s side an old acquaintance was frowning, General Afolabi. He seemed displeased that Nauk was in attendance, representing my jesha from the Fifteenth. I could see his point – as a mere legate the large orc was by far the lowest-ranked person here – but he could put his objections in a pipe and smoke them, for all I cared. Speaking of. I took out the dragonbone pipe Masego had once gifted me and ripped a small pouch of wakeleaf. I’d earned it, after today. I struck a match on my aketon and inhaled in puffs until fire caught, tossing aside the blacked pinewood. In my absence, Adjutant had been more or less in charge. Though his official rank in the Legions was technically below that of a tribune, by virtue of being Named and my right hand there was no one here who could gainsay him about much of anything.

“Done stripping the place clean?” Ranker said as I claimed the seat across from her.

I inhaled with a sigh of pleasure, then blew the smoke idly.

“Jealousy is unseemly in a woman of your rank,” I replied with a smug smile.

Hakram cleared his throat.

“You all know why you’re here,” the orc gravelled. “Casualty reports first.”

“Twenty-nine dead,” Kegan said calmly. “The wounded will be back on their feet by morning.”

Merciless Gods, and they’d been the ones to scale the walls. Everyone and their sister had a bloody arcane weapon, these days. It was a good thing I’d reinstated a knightly order, because otherwise I was going to be the only one on the field without some awe-striking shock troops to deploy.

“Two hundred and change dead,” Nauk volunteered. “Mages are handling our wounded, maybe another fifty will need to stick with the supplies for the rest of the march.”

“Less than a hundred for the Fourth and the Twelfth together,” Ranker said. “The Fifteenth took the brunt of the assault for us.”

Two thousand fae in a heavily fortified position, and we’d wiped them out with fewer than five hundred casualties in the span of a day. I could get used to being the one with the numerical advantage, if things went that smoothly every time.

“From my interrogation of the Count of Olden Oak I learned that these were Summer regulars,” I said. “A border garrison to check Winter aggression. Half their number was stripped when the Princess of High Noon invaded Creation.”

“If this is the quality of soldiery we’ll be facing, perhaps this entire matter has been overly planned,” Duchess Kegan noted.

Marshal Ranker hacked out a laugh.

“This was a siege, you twit,” she said. “Not what those boys are meant for. On a plain with equal numbers and some nobles to back them they’ll be trouble.”

The hooded man behind the Duchess stirred at the insult but Kegan settled him with a glance. I watched the interplay without a word, pulling at my pipe. The wakeleaf was blunting the sharper edges of my mood, perhaps for the best.

“I agree with the Marshal’s assessment,” Hakram said. “They showed their mettle when they tangled with the Gallowborne: if they catch any of our infantry without crossbows or mages, it will go very differently.”

“Which leads us to the crux of this matter,” Afolabi said. “Where are we headed, Lady Squire? Surely you made inquiries with your prisoner.”

The Count of Olden Oak was currently a guest of the Fifteenth, tied up under seventeen layers of wards and a rotating watch of mages. I’d been forced leave so many to the task that to take care of my wounded I’d had to send for mages from the Fourth.

“We’re headed for the lands of the Princess Sulia, as some of you are already aware,” I said. “When politely asked, our friend revealed that it’ll be mostly a straight march to there. Only two obstacles in the way: a river and the keep of the Count of Golden Harvest. We’re in luck for the second one – the Count is currently in Creation, along with most his troops.”

“Is there a bridge or a ford?” Ranker asked, leaning forward.

“There’s supposed to be a bridge, if we keep down the road that led us here,” I said. “I wouldn’t count on it still being standing, though. They had time to send messengers before we took the fortress.”

“As long as the bare bones of s structure remain my sappers can take care of it,” the Marshal dismissed.

“We’ll be relying on you, then,” I acknowledged, spewing out a stream of smoke. “Even if the river was swimmable we have too many supply carts for that to be valid way across.”

“We should begin marching before dawn,” Duchess Kegan said. “We’ve already wasted a day on this castle. The longer we tarry the higher the chances the armies in Callow are recalled.”

None of us was eager at the idea of fighting the higher ranks of the Summer Court on their own ground. In Creation their power was limited, but out here? There were some entities numbers meant nothing again and the Princess of High Noon struck me as one.

“Forced march,” Nauk grunted in agreement. “We’re in their lands now. Our way to get out of this with most our feathers is to be gone by the time they’d done mobilizing.”

“We’ll exhaust our soldiers if we follow your... plan ,” General Afolabi drawled in disdain. “And risk ambush, if we move hurriedly. Legionaries dead on their feet will be ill-equipped to handle fae harassment.”

“The orc is right,” Duchess Kegan retorted flatly. “Better we lost a few hundreds to ambushes than thirty thousand to a hopeless pitched battle.”

“Nauk,” I said, and though my tone was calm it sounded out like a clap. “The orc ’s name is Legate Nauk of the Fifteenth Legion.”

The Deoraithe met my eyes, displeased, but I matched her stare. We both knew I was in the right in this. Eventually she nodded, lips thinned.

“Legate Nauk is correct,” she conceded.

I smiled mirthlessly, blowing out smoke. If she wanted to keep on good terms with me Kegan would need to watch her fucking mouth around my people.

“Whatever the pace, we need eyes ahead,” Ranker spoke into the silence. “The Fourth and the Twelfth have scouting contingents. Your detached cohort under the Special Tribune can join them.”

“I have another task for them that’ll take them away from the army,” I refused. “Consider them unavailable for the foreseeable future.”

“What are they doing?” Afolabi asked.

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“The matter is sealed, General,” I replied. “I will unveil it when I deem it necessary.”

“This isn’t the time to play mysterious,” the man said through gritted teeth. “We’re in hostile territory with no path of retreat. Recklessness will get us killed . Your last gamble torched a third of Summerholm, Squire. We cannot afford a repeat performance.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Nauk’s fist clench and he half-rose form his seat but Hakram sent him a quelling look. I drummed my fingers against the table lightly, taking the pipe out o my mouth.

“You’re leading to something,” I said. “Spit it out.”

“Marshal Ranker has the rank and the experience to make the proper decisions,” the Soninke said. “Command of the expedition should be formally ceded to her.”

I glanced at the goblin in question. She didn’t seem surprised, but neither did she seem appreciative. Not her idea? Hard to tell.

“No army of Daoine will ever take orders from Praesi,” Duchess Kegan replied coldly.

“Marshal Ranker?” I prompted, tone light.

“You’ve yet to make a major mistake,” the goblin said. “Doesn’t mean you won’t.”

Mhm, there were subtleties to that reply. She wasn’t disagreeing with Afolabi, but she was distancing herself from the push somewhat. Either she was leaving herself room to throw him under the carriage after using him as a catspaw or she truly had nothing to do with this.

“You fucking Wastelander prick,” Nauk growled. “Do you really think you-“

“Nauk,” I interrupted without looking at him. “Sit down.”

He did. He’d heard me use this voice before.

“I’ve perhaps been too lenient,” I said. “I do have less experience than most the commanders at this table, hence why I’ve been taking advice. But allow me to make something perfectly clear, General.”

The temperature in the room descended sharply, and for once it was on purpose. I met the Soninke’s eyes, and to his honour he did not flinch.

“I am in command,” I said, cocking my head to the side. “Here. In Callow. Wherever we meet for the rest of your natural life. I’m not going to threaten you over this, or seek revenge for the slight. To be frank, you’re just not important enough for me to spend that much time on you.”

The man blanched in anger. I set my pipe on the able and slid it towards him.

“I could Speak to you,” I noted. “But I don’t really need to, do I? Whine all you like, we both know the chain of command here. So what you’re going to do instead is head downstairs to the kitchens, to clean my pipe. When you’re done, you may come back and sit at the table.”

I tapped my fingers against the table impatiently.

“ Now ,” I ordered.

Choking on his rage, the man snatched the pipe off the table and strode away. That was the last sliver of attention I gave him.

“As Marshal Ranker said, we should send scouts to have a look down the road as soon as possible,” I said, continuing as if nothing had happened. “Duchess Kegan, given the speed the Watch has shown I would trouble you to send a detachment of it ahead to check on the state of the bridge.”

“I’ve a hundred used to going into the Steppes to map orc movements,” the Deoraithe replied, tacitly agreeing.

It wasn’t that she was cowed, because she wasn’t. Neither was Ranker, for that matter. They’d both dealt with scarier villains than me, though I was playing catch up in that regard. But I’d just made it clear that, if pushed, I was willing to push back. I might still be too young for them to see me as an equal but I was, at least, not someone to be fucked with lightly. It would be enough for now. I glanced at Hakram, and he began speaking again.

“Now,” he began, “for the forces we’ll dedicate to guarding the supply train.”

—

We were back on the road by dawn the following morning. The first day was uneventful, but that very night we first saw the signs of trouble to come. None of the armies involved had set up a fortified camp before dark, given the pace we were putting the soldiers through. It would only slow us down, and given that the Deoraithe did not practice the same doctrine the meat of our army would be unprotected besides. Double watch and a ring of fires had been deemed barley sufficient, but if we’d not posted goblins out we would have still missed the fae studying us in the dark. Only a handful and far out of the light cast by the fires, but to goblins the dark made no difference. No attack followed, but from then on it was clear there was an enemy force watching us. That we could only guess at the size and position of it was dangerous, given how good at ambushes Summer had already shown itself to be. The lack of attack, though, led me to a theory. Arcadia ran on stories, didn’t it? More than that, on story logic . Time and distance were dictated as a consequence, unless a bigwig like the King of Winter decided otherwise.

If I was right, then it would all play out when we got to Princess Sulia’s lands. One the last day, at the last moment. I spent most of the second day’s march trying out the notion, thinking of how it could be turned to my advantage. No sign of the fae in daylight, though the Watch detachment Kegan had promised came back with news: they’d found the bridge. As expected, it had been scuttled ahead of us. Ranker spent an hour asking the cloaked soldiers for details before declaring she could have a bridge able to support two carts at a time up in a bell and a half. I’d eat into the day’s march, but swimming was apparently not an option: the current was harsh and the river broad. When we camped out for the night I sent for a tenth of mages, half of what the Fifteenth had left – the rest had all gone with Robber. More than once during the night I wished I had Masego or even Kilian along, instead of these ones. The difference in skill showed badly. I emerged only around morning bell, exhausted, and found I wasn’t the only one in that state. The fae had hit us during the night, in a manner of speaking.

A handful of soldiers had appeared at the edge of the camp and shot fire arrows at the tents of the Fourth, retreating before a response could be mustered. The damage was minimal so Ranker had originally thought this to be the work of a few reckless fae scouts, but when the attack repeated at the edge of the Twelfth’s camp the Marshal and the Duchess understood exactly what was happening. Both goblins and Deoraithe were familiar with the kind of tactics a smaller mobile force could use against a larger invading one. Every hour or so fae popped out of the woodworks and shot their arrows, not to kill or even burn supplies but to keep our soldiers awake. They were eroding strength through exhaustion, and not even the Watch was able to catch up to them on their home grounds. They succeeded in their ploy, to my irritation, and there was little I could do about it. We allowed the soldiers to rest for a few hours during the afternoon when we finally reached the bridge and Ranker put her sappers to work. So far we’d been left untouched during daylight, but I was of the opinion they were trying to make us drop our guards during the day in anticipation of a strike. The other two agreed.

Attacks intensified during the third night, to my mounting frustration. We’d camped on the other side of the river in case they torched the bridge Ranker had built during the night – it was wooden – and it proved a farsighted precaution. It went up in flames mere hours after nightfall, cutting off our best path of retreat. Putting together our scout reports, we’d come to the conclusion that there were only about three hundred fae currently harassing us. A flea on the lion’s back, but the lion was having a hard time getting a good night’s rest. This time they went for out sentinels shortly before dawn, and we had to rouse the infantry to force them to retreat. It was on the fourth day they attacked, though not exactly in the manner we’d predicted. A full two thousand fae led by a noble tore into our scouts ahead of the column. I hesitated to sally out myself, since I wasn’t sure if it was a distraction while another force readied to attack the glaring weak point that was our supply train. I sent Adjutant instead, but by the time he arrived the fae had disappeared and left only charred corpses behind. They hit our scouts twice more that day, and though I was furious I eventually pulled back them back closer to our armies.

The Twelfth had already lost two hundred scouts to the mess, and the Fourth half that. Almost as much as the total casualties we’d incurred taking the fortress, without a single scalp to show for it. Ranker wasn’t a Marshal for nothing, though. That night she cooked up a few surprises for the enemy. Half past Midnight Bell the sound of buried demolition charges resounded, catching the enemy sneaking around our back by surprise. The sappers waiting on the fae quickly found themselves outmatched, but they’d not been meant to win that fight: the Watch sallied out in full to hit the fae, carving out a few hundred corpses before they managed to flee. There was a sense of relief in the camps after that when the fae didn’t dare to continue the harassment that rose my wariness. Ranker’s too, as it happened. They struck again at dawn, while the soldiers were still half-asleep, but at the Marshal’s suggestion we’d filled the supply wagon with soldiers and when the five hundred fae recklessly going for the carts arrived they were greeted by a steady crossbow volley. This time we managed to take prisoners, and the interrogations that followed were... illuminating.

We’d crossed the domains of two nobles already in our march, both of them gone to war with the host of Summer. Warned ahead of our arrival by the messengers of the Count of Olden Oak, the skeleton garrisons left behind had followed at a distance while sending runners ahead for reinforcements. The garrisons of all the surrounding demesnes had gathered under the Lady of the Verdant Orchard, four thousand in full, and taken to delaying and harassing us until a larger army could be assembled to wipe us out. Word had been sent to the heart of Summer, Aine, and to the Queen herself. What would come of it our prisoners had no idea, but I didn’t want to stick around to find out. If the Queen of Summer took the field we were fucked beyond Lower Miezan’s ability to express. With a better idea of what was on the other side, the decision was made to pick up the pace. As the prisoners had said, the fortress of the Count of Golden Harvest was empty of all life. It broke my heart to leave the place unlooted, but I didn’t have the men or time to spare for it. It was a calculated risk to keep marching past nightfall on the fifth night and it paid off: the fae raiders stripped another hundred men off our skin, but we managed to reach the edge of Princess Sulia’s domain.

We fortified the camps, for that last night, and heavy but rotating watches allowed the soldiers to rest up before the last day and the battle I could feel in my bones was coming. Following that iron spike in the back of my head, I led the host to a wide grass plain by midmorning. This, I knew instinctively was where I could open the gate out. I took my time surveying the grounds. To the north the road continued across the plain, but our surroundings were not so uncluttered. To the west hills rose, low and round in the beginning but growing too steep to march through the deeper they went. To the east a sunny forest sprawled out for miles, the trees thick enough one could easily hide an army in there. It felt like a trap, though one whose jaws had yet to close. Last time we’d needed six hours – a bell and a half – to get the army through the gate. Which meant we had to hold this plain for at least six hours in the face of whatever came knocking. Ranker and Duchess Kegan came to join me as our armies spread across the span of grass, the three of us silent for a while before I spoke up.

“Defensive positions,” I said. “When Summer comes knocking, I want them to be warmly received.”

“Good grounds, for a battle,” Ranker murmured. “If all you’ve promised comes to pass.”

“Let’s hope it does,” I replied. “You’ll be a very farsighted corpse by sundown if it doesn’t.”

“The sole saving grace of this affair,” Kegan said.

I couldn’t help but snort, but the amusement left me quickly. This was it. The day that decided whether I’d wrecked my chances at quelling the mess in Callow or not. Let’s find out which of our traps has the sharpest teeth, Princess of High Noon.

Two hours later I opened the gate and we both rolled the dice.

Interlude: Commanders

“When historians try to pin down Foundling’s methods they point to the Battle of the Camps or the Princes’ Graveyard, but those came later. After she’d learned her trade. If you want to understand how she operated, look to the Battle of Four Armies and One – from the beginning to the end, she was playing an entirely different game from every other commander on the field.”
– Extract from “A Commentary on the Uncivil Wars”, by Juniper of the Red Shields

Nauk of the Waxing Moons was having an interesting day. He’d been woken up before dawn when the watch officers had been forced to break up a brawl between legionaries of the Fifteenth and the Twelfth: the enmity between Afolabi and the Boss had trickled down, and no one who’d been through Marchford and Liesse was inclined to leave any teeth in a mouth that talked shit about Catherine Foundling. The poor fuckers were lucky they’d not run into the Gallowborne when flapping their mouths: that grim collection of paleskins drew steel over things like that and didn’t sheathe until the blade was red. The legate had been in a mood when he’d stepped to the scene, but Hakram already had it in hand. The men from the Twelfth were handed to their officers for discipline – and with Marshal Ranker looking over Afolabi’s back no one was under the illusions they’d get off lightly – while his boys were dragged back into their part of the camp. Fighting among legionaries when in hostile territory drew sharper sanctions than just brawling: it would be a hard flogging for them. When Deadhand had said their punishment would be delayed until the return to Creation they’d smirked, but that had disappeared real quick when Hakram had added that to even it out he’d deliver the flogging himself.

Nauk fancied that the memory of his old friend stomping a fae noble by swinging a horse one-handed would scare them into acting like proper fucking legionaries for a few weeks at least.

“She made another enemy,” the legate grunted as he watched the last of them leave.

“He’s Soninke old blood,” Deadhand replied. “Was never going to be a friend. He’s more useful as an example regardless.”

The good thing about Hakram was that he didn’t believe in kissing ass. Never had. If he said the Boss’ decision to send a godsdamned general of Praes out of the room to clean her pipe like a misbehaving child had some sense to it, it meant he believed it. He wouldn’t have been afraid to disagree openly if he did – not with only Nauk around to hear, anyway. The legate spat to the side.

“If you say so,” he said. “The Wallerspawn weren’t moved, by my reckoning.”

The other orc’s brow rose. Nauk scoffed.

“She speaks with a Laure accent, Hakram,” he said. “She’s as much one of them as I am.”

“She’ll still smack you in the mouth if she hears you say that word,” he replied. “We have larger scores to settle than old grudges like that one. They’re our allies, at least for now.”

Easy for Deadhand to say. His grandfather hadn’t died taking a run at the Wall. The old scrapper had been too deep in the Red Rage to retreat when the Watch came out in force, and ended up with his head on a spike for it. It might still be there for all he knew.

“Deoraithe, then,” Nauk conceded in a grumble.

“Kegan’s hard iron, I’ll give you that,” Hakram conceded in Kharsum. “But she was watching, and she’ll remember next time she feels like pushing.”

“Politics,” Nauk snorted. “Glad you’re the luckless bastard stuck dealing with those.”

“Not that different from College alliances, when it gets down to it,” Deadhand replied, turning to gaze out into the night. “Everybody wants something.”

The legate grunted, conveying his general fucking distaste for Wasteland schemery.

“Grab what sleep you have left,” Hakram finally said. “Tomorrow’s a red day if there ever was one.”

Nauk of the Waxing Moons grinned, baring ivory chops to the night.

“Looking forward to it,” he said.

They got to the place by midmorning, and even as the rest of the armies dug in Nauk pawned off his duties to Commander Jwahir to study the grounds at his leisure. The Taghreb woman was a better hand at organizing, anyway. He’d picked her as his second for that very reason when he’d lost his brother so fucking senselessly at Three Hills. The same eerie road they’d used to get here continued to the north, supposedly reaching Aine and the seat of the Summer Court eventually. How long it would take to get there, no one had any idea. Apparently time was subjective in Arcadia, which sounded like the kind of shit the warlock’s get babbled about after a few cups. Not close enough for whatever was in there to reinforce the opposition in time, which was the important part anyway. There was no sign of the enemy for now, and they’d checked. The woods to the east were empty, and thick enough besides you couldn’t march in proper ranks through them. The hills to the west couldn’t be marched through from the other side, as far as the goblins could tell, but that meant fuck all when the opposition had wings. If Nauk was in a betting mood, he’d bet on Summer placing a nasty surprise in there to flank them where the lines were engaged.

At least this would be a defensive engagement. The kind of fight most of their host were best at. Wallerspawn liked to let the enemy come to them and they were heavy on bowmen besides, while Marshal Ranker’s gang of cutthroats had the sharpest sappers in all the Legions. As for General Afolabi’s Twelfth, their cognomen was Holdfast . They’d stopped a Callowan force twice their size from making it to the Siege of Summerholm, during the Conquest, by digging in and letting them die on their palisades. After losing a full kabili at the onset of the Liesse Rebellion and needing the Fifteenth to bail them out of the mess in Summerholm, those boys and girls would be eager to wipe off the black marks from their record. They’d fight with fire in their bellies no matter what came calling. The absence of reliable information about what that would be had been a stone in the large orc’s boot for this entire expedition. Apparently there was going to be some kind of princess, but what the Hells did that mean? The legate was more interested in numbers and those were still anyone’s guess. The almost thirty thousand assembled here were nothing to fuck with lightly, and Nauk would bet on them to handle up to twenty-five thousand Summer screamers no matter what nobles backed them.

Thirty thousand would be dicey, though. More than that and it was going to get bloody, and not in the way the legate enjoyed. The Fifteenth had been outnumbered before, at Three Hills, and outclassed at Marchford. But never both. Even the Boss would have a hard time pulling a win from that mess if it came down to it. Speaking of . Pretending he couldn’t see Jwahir looking for him with her report-face, Nauk legged it as discreetly as an orc his size could. Catherine was sitting on one of the decadent cushioned chairs they’d looted back at the fortress, lounging like a lazy cat with that dragonbone pipe of hers. Nauk occasionally wondered if she knew what even just this much dragonbone was worth: you could buy a mansion in one of the better parts of Ater for the gold it would earn at an auction. She blew out a stream of smoke as he rested his elbows on the back of her chair, the wooden frame groaning in protest.

“Nauk,” she greeted him.

She spoke his name the way it would be spoken in Kharsum. It was always eerie, when she used the tongue of his people. She had a flawless heartlands accent without having ever stepped a foot there – Name fuckery struck him as the guilty party there. The legate could the side of her face well, from this close. Sharp and high cheekbones that had gotten even sharper since she’d gone into Arcadia to exact her share of hide from Winter, tan skin had had gotten ever darker with all the marching in the sun they’d been doing of late. Whether she was pretty by human standards he had no idea – she certainly had her fair share of people panting after her, though she’d ever only given Kilian the doe eyes. Nauk knew better than to ask how that had turned out. It hadn’t escaped anyone’s attention that the two of them had been keeping separate beds for months and that they rarely spoke directly to one another anymore.

“Cat,” he growled back.

“Shouldn’t you be preparing your men?”

The tone was casual, but he knew to take it seriously anyway. The Boss was nowhere as much of a hardass as Juniper, but she liked to run a tidy crew. Even those who’d been with her since Rat Company were expected to pull their weight.

“Jwahir has it in hand,” he said. “I’ll look it over later. There a reason you haven’t made the portal?”

“I expect that they’ll appear not long after I do,” she replied, amused for some reason beyond him. “Better we dig in first.”

“Gonna be a rough one, this,” Nauk grunted. “Might take us more than a bell and a half to retreat if we’re under fire the whole time. And the last ones to leave will be given a bitch of a fight.”

He’d been standing close to her long enough to start feeling the cold now. Whatever she’d done in Winter it had changed her. Worse temper, though she’d never exactly been a delicate flower, and nowadays wherever she stood was always a mite frosty. Nauk didn’t mind. It reminded him of home, of the Steppes in spring just after the snows melted. From his height he could see the corner of her mouth twitch. The blade-smile. Someone always ended up bleeding out on the ground before too long whenever she made it.

“Princess Sulia will be in command, on the other side,” Cat said. “She was described to me once as having a “beautifully simplistic view of things”.”

“Don’t need to get fancy when you can torch everything all the time,” Nauk said, admiration and disgruntlement warring for his tone.

“Dealing with someone like that is a lot like dealing with a hero,” the Boss mused. “She’ll enter the field thinking she knows the story ahead of her, because that’s all she’s ever known.”

“I’m guessing that’s not a nice story, for us,” Nauk said.

“It’s a story about invaders taking a beating as they try to retreat,” she said. “Most likely capped with a last stand at the gate to cover the last of us fleeing.”

“We taking the rearguard, then?” the legate asked.

Would be a fight to remember, that was for sure. He wasn’t fond of the notion of sacrificing his jesha to cover other Legions and Wallers– Deoraithe, better he use that even in his mind, he wouldn’t put it above her to be able to smell shit like this – but if that was what was needed to win the war he’d grind his fangs and take the reaming.

“Oh Gods no,” Catherine laughed quietly. “Summer’s going into this with the perception that our strategy is all about limiting losses. I didn’t come here to flee limping, Nauk. I’ve come for blood .”

Nauk felt his shoulders loosen and chuckled. Not because of the words, though they’d been reassuring enough, but because of the tone. Quiet . Catherine Foundling was always at her most dangerous, when she got quiet. Time to make that known across two worlds, he figured.

—

“The girl was right,” Duchess Kegan said.

Adair shifted on his feet, watching the same sight she was. Countess Foundling had opened her gate but a half-hour ago, not long after the goblin had finished her preparations, and already the host of Summer was arriving. They were coming from the north down the road, as had been anticipated, but Kegan doubted that was the only direction they would strike from. This Princess Sulia had proved competent enough to annex most of southern Callow: she’d have more subtlety to her intent than a mere battering ram.

“About the timing only. She was wrong about the numbers,” Adair said softly. “My men say over fifty thousand.”

The ruler of Daoine closed her eyes, allowing herself the weakness only because no one but her old friend was close enough to see it. More than fifty thousand. They could barely afford to fight half that.

“Summer must have mobilized its full might to crush us,” she finally said. “There cannot be anything but sentinels left in Creation.”

“The Fifteenth and the Knightsbane’s command were on the move due south when we crossed the gate,” Adair noted. “She might have meant for all of us to serve as bait while they take back Dormer and Holden.”

“Neither force is large enough to hold the cities, if Summer attacks afterwards,” Kegan said, frowning.

“She is young,” Adair shrugged. “And yet to be defeated. That breeds arrogance.”

“She is not a fool,” the duchess murmured. “Let us be careful to avoid the mistake of taking her for one. It would be a costly misstep to make.”

And oh, what delicate dance it had been to deal with that terrifying child. Where the Carrion Lord had dug up this monster she did not know, for surely the stories about her being an Laurean orphan were a smokescreen for the truth. Obscure Imperial wards did not go on to win the kind of battles Catherine Foundling had, not after two years . Twice heroes had died at the girl’s hand, devils and demons scattered by mortal men under her command, a resurrection forcefully snatched out of the hands of a descending Hashmallim. These were the signs of a legend in the making. If the Black Knight had ever been linked to one of the People, Kegan would have believed Foundling to be a child of his own blood raised in obscurity to avoid the knives of the High Lords. As this was not the case, she must have been found young and trained away from prying eyes to be unleashed as a weapon to suppress future Callowan rebellions. The villain’s foresight never ceased to chill her blood, schemes decades in the making coming to fruit at precisely the right time.

Still, it seemed his weapon had gone slightly astray. She was on her way to becoming a power in her own right, and that meant she could be negotiated with. Kegan had early understood the same truth that Ranker – that rotten old bitch – clearly did: to prevent Foundling from realizing the strength of her position, the stick had to be used with only a rare carrot dangled. It was a careful balance to strike, given what they were dealing with. The Duchess of Daoine still felt her blood run cold when she remembered that slip of a girl glancing at a general of Praes, casually mentioning she could Speak to him if she wished. The implied threat had been lost on no one at that table. Cross me and I will take away your free will, easy as snapping my fingers. Gods, barely eighteen and she could already use her Name to impose her will on others. Not even the Carrion Lord had been this precocious and Kegan knew the terror of the man better than most. Her own aunt had been left an arrow-filled corpse in her own fortress when the Duni was still but a Squire, swatted down like a fly in inside of the most heavily defended fortresses on Calernia. Praes was not to be trifled with, not without very good reason.

The gruesome mantle of the Calamities was being passed to fresh Named, and though yet young these monsters would grow as dangerous as the old ones.

Adair stirred again and it claimed Kegan’s attention. She followed his eyes and saw the host of the fae spreading across the plain, facing the fortifications. Around sixty thousand she counted, revising upwards the earlier assessment. There were knights on winged horses that the duchess anticipated to be trouble even if they could not use sorcery, which seemed unlikely.

“The hills,” Adair murmured.

There was, Kegan saw, a single person there. In a hooded cloak, leaning back against the slope as they sharpened a sword with a whetstone. At this distance, not even the Watch could get much more from eyesight. Whoever they were, they did not seem inclined to move from the height . A chronicler? Kegan wondered. It seemed odd for a scholar to be armed, or be here at all. She was debating sending scouts to make inquiries when movement emerged at the head of the army of Summer. Two silhouettes, both mounted. One pale and dark-haired with a perfect beard, wearing robes of woven flame and sunlight. A sword rested at his hip, no other weapon visible. The other was taller and there was no doubt about her identity: the Princess of High Noon was as the tales told, hair like fire and terrible to behold. Swirls of heat marred the air wherever she moved. The Princess Sulia was bearing a banner of truce, and rode halfway between the two awaiting armies before slamming the wooden shaft into the ground. Foundling’s right hand found them not long after, the imposingly tall orc with the necromantic abomination at his wrist. He nodded politely, and etiquette dictated Kegan return the same. She did so grudgingly.

“Lady Foundling invites you to join the party that will meet with Summer,” he said.

“Then I will do so,” Kegan replied flatly. “This is more than we bargained for.”

“It always is,” the Adjutant smiled, sinisterly baring teeth. “You’ve seen the person in the hills?”

“We have,” Kegan replied.

“She instructs they’re to be left alone,” the orc said.

“Why?” Kegan frowned.

“The exact words were “if that’s who I think it is, we really don’t want to get in her way”.”

“Quaint,” the duchess sneered, not allowing the uneasiness she felt to show.

An ally of Foundling’s? No, it couldn’t be. All the Named that followed her were accounted for. And if it was a Winter fae the army of Summer would have moved to attack them. It could not be the Wild Hunt, since this was not the seasons for it – only in Spring and Autumn did these entities come into being. Too many factors were unknown to her on this battlefield and Kegan did not like it in the slightest. She joined the rest of the diplomats regardless. The Countess herself and Ranker were all of it: since the other side had not cluttered the grounds, there was no need for them to do so. The goblin’s face was a mask, but the girl herself seemed remarkably at ease. Like they weren’t walking to treat with demigods in the fullness of their power. Monster , Kegan thought. Only a monster would be half-smiling as they approached the fae.

“Princess Sulia, I presume?” Foundling said.

“Duchess of Moonless Nights,” the creature replied.

It hurt to look at her for too long, Kegan found. Like staring into the sun.

“Word does spread fast,” Foundling drawled, tone amused. “Who’s the man with the sharp beard?”

“I am the Prince of Deep Drought,” the fae said, and though his face was beautiful the hatred turned it ugly. “We finally meet, pawn of Winter.”

The girl clucked her tongue.

“I’m at least a rook, really,” she said. “There’s no need to be insulting.”

Was she really unaware that every time she spoke the fae shivered with the urge to kill her? Kegan wondered with dismay. Why had she even come to treat if she was only going to taunt them?

“You wanted to talk,” Ranker interrupted.

It was adding insult to injury for Kegan to ever have to feel thankful towards the likes of that withered old prune.

“Surrender,” Princess Sulia ordered, and there was a weight to the tone that almost made Kegan want to kneel. “All of you may still swear yourselves to Summer. Only the broken thing wearing Winter’s seal needs to die today.”

“It’s always refreshing to meet someone who’s worse at diplomacy than I am,” Foundling noted, seemingly impressed.

The Duchess of Daoine gritted her teeth. Was the girl still pretending she’d not carefully used Kegan’s enmity with Ranker to get her way more often than not, baiting them to argument only to come in as a “mediator” at the last moment? Not even the Carrion Lord was this smug a manipulator – the Knight had the decency not to pretend he was doing anything but taking what he wanted from you. The Princess of High Noon ignored the Named, instead turning her eyes to the sole goblin.

“You need not die pointlessly, mortal,” she said. “The laws of Summer will shield you after you swear allegiance.”

The goblin’s burned hand clutched tight until her sharp nails drew blood on her own palm. She met the fae’s eyes with a grin full of fine fangs.

“I am a Marshal of the Legions of Terror, you pretentious tart,” she said. “I live by only one law: one sin, one grace . You want my surrender? Come and take it.”

The fae’s eyes turned to Kegan, and she’d steeled herself. She felt what Ranker must have, the crushing weight on her shoulders that wasn’t even an exertion of power – the Princess of High Noon did this just by sparing a mortal a sliver of her attention.

“I am a Duchess of Daoine,” Kegan replied coldly. “I answer to neither god nor men, much less the likes of you .”

“Quarter will not be offered twice,” the Prince of Deep Drought said, tone sad. “It is not yet too late.”

“Speaking of that,” Foundling said, popping her neck with a gruesome cracking sound. “If you want to avoid me beating you like a rented mule it’s not too late to make peace. I’ll need hostages and reparations, of course, but you can still get away with losing only a hand.”

We are going to die, Kegan realized with crystal-clear clarity. We are going to die because whatever the Carrion Lord did to teach this child broke her mind.

“Did you think we wouldn’t notice the Prince of Nightfall’s stench wafting from the woods?” the Prince of Deep Drought mocked. “He only had time to bring a third of Winter with him. You are outnumbered still.”

The duchess glanced east, where there was still no sign of anything in the woods. Had the fae been tricked, or had the scouts? There was a game at play here and she knew neither the rules nor the players.

“I’m trying to be merciful here,” Foundling said, and the lie was so insultingly blatant Kegan almost cringed. “Are you really going to spit on my goodwill?”

The Princess of High Noon did and the ground where she’d spat caught fire.

“Ah well, I tried,” Foundling grinned, and it was an unpleasant thing to watch. “See you soon.”

—

The fae held to the terms of the truce, the enemy army not beginning to move before the three of them had returned to the fold. A part of Ranker was sharply curious about whether they were respecting truce terms as they were held in Calernia or whether the concept of truce as known to Calernia had initially come from Arcadia, which was widely held to have existed before Creation itself. A matter for another time. She’d slip the question in her correspondence with Tikoloshe, the staggeringly ancient incubus might have an inkling. The Marshal had planned the defences of the allied armies without the knowledge of there being reinforcements from Winter inbound, if there truly were reinforcements inbound. She’d had eyes on Foundling’s little raider ever since he’d first come to Denier, and though her scouts had lost track of him after the fortress her people had noticed the large amount of mages who’d disappeared with him. Was that the Squire’s plan? Using the Count of Olden Oak and some unknown ritual to pretend Winter had sent troops, faking the presence of some powerful Winter fae. Wekesa’s son took orders from her, so he might have coughed out a few secrets before she set out on her journey north. That would be deep cunning and deep planning, however, and she’d not struck Ranker as that kind of villain so far.

If false, it was the kind of bluff that could easily be called. It might gain them some time, but not much and not enough to affect the outcome. The evacuation had already begun, with the supply – and loot – carts leaving first. The former Matron saw the logic in it. They’d have to be taken across eventually, and this kept as much military strength on the field as possible for as long as possible. The Deoraithe regulars were slated to go through next, with the rest of the order to be determined as the battle unfolded. Ranker had been watching the Squire’s movements carefully since it had come out she had some scheme in play, but gotten little information for it. After the gate out was opened Foundling had some of her few remaining mages scry across, and established contact for a few moments before breaking off. Her own mages had been listening in, and no words or images had gone through. Ranker, she-who-has-the-bearing-of-one-of-high-rank in the stonetongue and one-meant-to-stand-above-others-mercilessly in matrontongue, had been through more red days than any other goblin alive. She’d been warring in the Eyries when the Calamities were still in their cradles, she’d killed her way through the civil war and the Conquest and a dozen minor actions besides.

For the first time in many years, though, she felt like she was walking in deepest dark. The Squire was mad, this was obvious. All Named were, the successful ones merely managed to make that madness methodical the way Amadeus and the Empress had. And even with those two, one could could glimpse the cliff edge and the sharp drop that followed. Sadly, that meant Ranker genuinely could not tell whether Foundling has been taunting the fae royalty because she was confident in victory or because she was too far gone to be able to conceptualize her own defeat. Even if this Prince of Deep Draught – and Gobbler take them all, weren’t these titles even more pretentious than the ones Wastelanders jerked each other off with? – was correct and there were Winter fae in the woods, unless there were a great many more hiding than the twenty thousand implied this was still not a winning hand for the allied armies. The only visible unknown factor was that madwoman in the hills, and Ranker had needed no instructions from the Squire to steer clear of that. Putting aside that nothing good had ever come of an army picking a fight with a single mysterious stranger, Ranker had seen that ugly hooded cloak before.

There were some kinds of crazy not even goblins were willing to touch, and that one definitely qualified.

The Marshal’s general staff gathered around her as the fae began their march, questions painted on their faces. Aabir, her Staff Tribune, took one look at her and grimaced. He’d known her for a long time, long enough to read the truth off her if she wasn’t trying to lie.

“She still hasn’t told us the plan,” he said. “This is madness, ma’am. How can we be expected to fight when we don’t know all the forces at work?”

“It makes sense, in a way,” Kachera Tribune Saddler said more cautiously. “We do not know how well fae can scry in their own realm. We cannot leak a plan we are not aware of.”

Ranker raised her black hand and was granted immediate silence.

“As as I see it, there are two options here,” she said. “One, Black’s Name rotted his mind and he went the way of the Old Tyrant, appointing a raging imbecile as his successor. If that’s the case, even if we’re not dead today we’ll be in a few years. There’s other wars around the corner.”

Procer, she did not need to say. They all had the rank to be in the know.

“And two?” Saddled asked, eyes blinking sleepily.

He was getting old, wasn’t he? And to think he was merely forty.

“Two, the Squire is the kind of brilliant that walks hand in hand with crazy and stupid,” Ranker said. “I’m choosing to put my faith in Black. Make your own choices, but whatever they are get ready for a hard ride. The fae mean business – expect to have two sorcerers on par with the Wizard of the West pounding us.”

Dangling a bit of hope, appealing on the worship of Amadeus that had become as much a part of the Legions as the singing and the drills and then an immediate threat to prepare for. It should be enough to keep their minds on the battle. Ranker wished she could be so easily distracted, but she was too old to fool herself. She climbed onto the platform she’d had raised to get a decent view of the battle, her bones protesting the indignity before she settled on a cushion. At her sides messengers, mages able to scry and signal officers stood ready for orders. Afolabi would have a similar set up on his side of the fortifications, and he was enough of a professional his grudge against Foundling would be put aside for the battle. You poor fool , she thought. You should be more worried about her grudge against you. The girl’s Callowan, they gnaw on those like bones. She dismissed the thought and turned her eyes to the battle, to Summer on the march. Ranker had prepared the plain for a hard battle, and today she would get to see how fae died.

The allied camp consisted of two ringed wooden palisades, with the gate in the centre. There was an avenue with smaller movable barricades going straight through, punctuated with two sets of rough but solid wooden gates. Ahead of the first palisade she’d had her sappers dig a trench ten feet deep with spikes at the bottom, which had unfortunately limited how much work she’d been able to order on the plain. There were weight-triggered demolition charges buried according to the Third Delay Pattern she had herself designed during the civil war, but she didn’t expect to see much death from those. The lily field was what would blood them, closer to the trench. An array of pits three feet deep with a sharpened stake at the bottom, hidden under branches and dead grass. The prince and princess had retreated into their ranks for the offensive, warier than the Marshal would have thought. The chit in the south must have bled them at some point for them to be this careful. Might yet work out to her advantage, Ranker decided. The first line was the same infantry they’d seen earlier in their expedition through Summer, and it kept advancing until across seven points in that line demolition charges blew.

The spray of blood and flesh had long ceased being exciting and turned into cold mathematics, coin put into tools that killed men but could have been spent otherwise. The assessments in her unspoken records shifted with every battle. Though the damages had been minimal, the enemy could only guess at the concentration of charges and it stopped them from advancing. Right out of the farthest bow range they’d shown at the fortress, as she had meant them to. The wings of the three first ranks of the fae lit up and Ranker glanced away, their trajectory already happening in her mind. The winged cavalry in the back wasn’t moving, as she’d guessed it would not. The Watch was being kept in reserve to deal with them, but it seemed that her assessment that the knights would only strike after the fight was engaged was correct. Ahead of her agonized cries sounded, so Ranker deigned return her attention closer to camp. Two for two, it seemed. The Princess of High Noon had only figured that there would be demolition charges ahead of the trench, and so sent a first wave to clear them and gain a foothold. Instead they’d gone straight into the lily field and were bleeding out like stuck pigs with the sappers on the outer wall tossed sharpers to clear out those who’d landed on solid ground.

Now the fight began, as the second wave that had taken flight moments after the first landed in the shreds of meat and bone that were their comrades. The lily patches had been revealed, so they managed an actual landing this time. If Princess Sulia had meant for them to then attack the walls Ranker would have called her a fool, since they could have directly assaulted the walls. But that wasn’t the intent at all, was it? The third wave, right behind the second, was the one to assault. The second was bringing up bows, finally in range to use those devastating fire arrows that had harassed the allied camps on the march here. The Legions fired their crossbows straight into the bowmen in good order, while the Deoraithe standing between the first and second wall sent a volley into the sky at the fae headed for the wall. A costly trade off, Ranker saw. Legion crossbowmen took their toll but the enemy fired back and fires bloomed across the palisade, hurriedly put off with sand and dirt. There were damned holes in the outer wall, and when the enemy infantry came marching in they would have breaches ready for them. As for the bloody useless Deoraithe, they barely killed a hundred. Shooting fae in the sky was like trying to shoot a fish in the ocean.

The melee at the outer palisade began in earnest, but Ranker wasn’t worried about that. The legionaries would hold steady against numbers that low. The other waves in flight were more worrying, one to back the bowmen and the other the vanguard. But most worrying of all was the dozen fae that rode out of the ranks in a scattered line and raised their hands. A rolling wave of flame swept across the plain and the Marshal’s dead hand twitched. One after another, her charges blew from the sorcerous heat. A field full of potholes but clear of dangers ahead of them, the fae infantry resumed their advance. The Marshal felt a grudging sliver of respect for the Princess that was her opponent. She’d been willing to send a few thousand into the grinder just to keep the enemy busy while she prepared a clear way forward for the rest. That was the kind of decisiveness that won battles. Not, however, if she could help it. Ranker gestured for one of her mages to come closer.

“All mage lines,” she said. “Wave fireballs to knock the fae out of the sky before they land on the outer palisade. Steady, constant.”

The order went across smoothly and the broad balls of flame that bloomed got the situation under control. Trying to kill Summer fae with fire was like trying to drown a salmon, but the impact was enough knock them down. Those that try to fly above instead ate arrows as the Deoraithe finally began pulling their weight. Outer palisade was in hand, for now, but the fae army was hungrily devouring the distance as it charged forward. That was, Ranker saw, when Winter struck. The darker half of the Fair Folk did not come announced. It moved in silence, a tidal wave of warriors adorned with dead wood and black stone that struck the eastern Summer flank like a snake. At their head a one-eyed man rode a horse of shadows, the spear in his hand glinting of murder. They were impressive to watch, but the Marshal did not care how fucking impressive they were. She watched for numbers, and found only the twenty thousand the Prince of Deep Drought had sneered at. The same numbers pulled off the flank of Summer in good order, slowing the assault some but not by enough. If these were all the cards Foundling had to play, the battle was a loss slowly crawling to them.

The wave of infantry hit the outer palisade and the legionaries buckled. Deoraithe reinforced them, but there was only so much room and the fae kept coming . Ranker could see the rest of the battle play out in her mind. They’d hold, at least until Winter began to break. Then the pressure would strengthen and they’d lose the outer palisade. And then inch by inch they would die, painting the ground of Arcadia red. Summer would lose half its army, she thought. But it would win, and only wisps of the army that had come into Arcadia would escape through the gate.

“Marshal,” her Senior Mage’s voice whispered urgently.

She’d not heard him coming to her side, deep in thought as she had been.

“I’m listening,” she said.

“Lady Squire’s mages scryed across the gate again,” he said.

Ranker licked her teeth.

“Same as last time?” she asked.

“Just a contact, then nothing,” he agreed, then flinched and turned west.

The madwoman was still sitting on her perch, the former Matron saw. No, what had drawn her officer’s attention was the gate that had just opened in front of the hills.

“Kolo, what is that?” she said.

“A gate, Marshal,” the Senior Mage replied.

“I can see that,” the goblin snarled. “Where is it from?”

“Creation,” he whispered.

There was a sound then, that Ranker had not heard in twenty years. A horn, but not the large horns the Legion used. The kind of blowing horn that someone could carry in hand. Once, twice, thrice the call went out. All knights charge , it meant. That call had not shuddered across a battlefield since the Fields of Streges, and the Marshal was not ashamed to admit she felt the age-old shiver when the knights of Callow charged through the gate, killing lances down as they whistled through the air. The banner she did not recognize, a bell of bronze with a jagged crack through it set on black. Three thousand of the finest cavalry Calernia had ever seen ploughed into the western flank of Summer and Ranker began laughing.

“Oh, you conniving bitch,” she said breathlessly. “You never intended for us to evacuate, did you?”

Eyes bright, one of the only three Marshals of Praes rose to her feet.

“Orders,” she said, facing her mages. “My dears, do I have orders.”

Chapter 28: Gambits

“I’ve yet to encounter a situation that couldn’t be improved by a copious amount of lies and body doubles.”
– Dread Emperor Traitorous

Well, it’d taken two years and some change but I was finally on the right side of a cavalry charge. And all it had cost me to get there was a lot of murdering, and that one spot of high treason.

The thoughts were flippant, but the sight before me killed the urge to continue in that vein. Three thousand knights of Callow were breaking through the western flank of the fae, taking death with them wherever they went as they carried the banner I’d named on a spur. I’d read about the chivalric orders, the men and women who had once been the pride of the Kingdom, and I thought I’d understood the kind of weight they could bring to bear. I’d been very, very wrong about that. Two thousand fae died in the blink of an eye, pierced by lances and trampled by destriers. It wasn’t that the knights were gifted with eldritch power, not like the Watch. They were mortals through and through, though trained in war since they could walk. Neither were they like the paladins of the Order of the White Hand, sworn to fight Evil and made able to call on lesser miracles for it. Or so the old books said, anyway. The Order had been long buried by the time I was born, Black destroying it in an exceedingly thorough manner so that no hero would ever rise from their scattered ranks. No lost daughter of the White Hand would ever claim an old birth right and bring rebellion to Callow.

No, they were just Callowans. I watched a gout of flame splash against the breastplate of a long-haired woman and leave it untouched. Just Callowans, but no babes in the woods for it. The knights of Callow had not been forged by the old wars with the Principate, though enough of those were fought. No, they were the answer of the Kingdom to the sorceries of the Wasteland. There was a reason a Warlock could not simply wave his hand and burn a thousand of them to ashes. Clad in steel and prayer , the old song went. Hymns from the House of Light were carved into their armaments, mere grooves in steel until sorcery touched them. Then they glimmered, and magic slid like droplets off a duck’s back. It was not immunity: they could still be harmed through the protection, often had been, but it was telling that when Black had thought to break them he had turned to orcs and pikes instead of whatever madness Warlock could have unleashed. In front of goblin steel, the armaments of the knights were armour like any other. There was a lesson in there. The chivalric orders had been founded to check a threat, and when the nature of that threat changed they were caught flatfooted and destroyed.

Today, though? I’d found them an enemy that could not, would not change.

“Captain Firasah,” I said, and the mage at my side stiffened. “Word from the other side?”

“She has gone through, ma’am,” the one-eyed Taghreb replied.

Firasah had been one of the mage officer who’d tried to scry the Summer forces when the Fifteenth had still been in Summerholm. She was one of the lucky ones – she’d excised her eye before the burns from the backlash could spread across half her face. Not all the mages had been so fortunate. She’d hesitated when I’d told her we would be scrying Winter while on the march, but as I’d thought my title shielded the mages from the frozen fury that had poured through the connection. It had done little to soothe the Prince of Nightfall’s temper, when I’d found him, but the bait of Summer crippled I had dangled had been too tempting for him to resist. The lateness of the arrangement had limited what forces he could bring, though, more than I would have wished. Another ten thousand fae would have made it all much easier. He’d taken another royal with him along for the ride: the Princess of Silent Depths. They’d asked for prizes and to know my plans.

Naturally, I’d lied.

“Good,” I replied quietly, closing my eyes.

I’d begun this battle thinking I was aware of every string being pulled. Winter was out for blood and plunder, unquenchable hunger in their bellies. Kegan and Ranker wanted to leave Arcadia as soon as possible, convinced this fight could only be measured in shades of defeat. And Summer? Summer wanted to crush me. To turn the quibbling mortals who’d dared step foot in their domain to ashes. I’d understood that before the other two commanders in my army, because I had an advantage they didn’t. I still remembered that hard-bitten hatred I’d felt after crossing the gate, when I’d gazed upon the moonlit field. It didn’t matter, whether or not it made tactical sense for the Princess of High Noon to withdraw from Creation to assail us. She had to. It was in her nature. I was of Winter, and Summer could never shy from a challenge as brazen as the one I’d issued. This battle had always been a certainty. It was a matter, then, of stacking the odds in my favour. I needed a story, or at least an engagement that had the shape of one. A larger Summer force blundering into a trap had served that purpose, leaving me only with the need to, well, make an actual trap.

So I’d spared the Count of Olden Oak, though through his actions he had earned an ugly death at my hands one day. Because a fae of count rank could open gates . Not gates like mine, sadly, but their ability to sort of step through the boundary protecting Creation could be extended to a group. Like half of Robber’s cohort, along with enough mages to keep the Count of Olden Oak suppressed by layered wards. Iron knives had to be taken to him to convince him of making the gate, sadly, since the flame of Summer inside him made Speaking ineffective. Robber had been able to take care of it. He’d gleefully informed me that the College had an entire week of classes dedicated to the subject, along with the question of ‘how much torture is too much torture’. The answer was apparently more complicated than I’d assumed. The goblin’s assertion that it was an old cadet favourite along with the class about why ‘vast and terrible powers’ were not a valid reason to lack a supply train, I chose not to think too much about.

When back in Creation, his orders were to scry Juniper in a hurry. Depending on where the Fifteenth was relative to where he emerged with the Count, there could be two options. The first was that the legion would be too far too join up in time for the battle, in which case he was to simply call for the knights to ride in haste ahead of the infantry. The other was to bring all he could across and smash the fae flank according to the directions I have him. I’d confirmed, before the beginning of the fight, that the second situation had come to unfold. On the other side of the portal that had just opened the entire Fifteenth was arrayed, and by now they would have begun to cross. So would Apprentice and Archer: the person who’d been on the other side of the scrying I’d arranged the moment I opened the gate was Masego, Captain Firasah was certain of it. Good. Then I could proceed according to what I’d meant this fight to be instead of a lesser scenario. Wiping out Summer in full here would be too much to hope for, I was aware. We were too deep in their territory for that. But if I played my cards right, I might just get what I needed to fight this war on my terms.

The thing was, when I’d left Marchford I’d been thinking of taking a force through Arcadia as a risky gamble that would allow me to steal a march on the Diabolist. After all, everybody knew fae were stronger in Arcadia. Able to use more of their power. The assumption of every commander in this war had been that I would try to fight them in Creation, where the grounds were more to my advantage. But were they really? The thought had been in the back of my mind since Laure. I could concentrate the Legions and the army of Daoine in the south and try to smash the Summer Court there, but that would be costly . We’d lose thousands in that fight, and thousands more would be too wounded to be of any use when I put down Akua. If I got Winter involved, that meant letting rapacious fae loose in Callow under the command of an entity I’d have a hard time handling, much less killing if it came to that. And even if I won, then what? Maybe we chewed half their number before they retreated having cost us twice that much, and then they would just pop out from somewhere else. The Fifteenth and whoever else I dragged with me were perhaps the most mobile force on Calernia at the moment, but the fae had the same advantage and they were better at using it.

So if I didn’t want them to waltz past my army and burn Callow from the Waning Woods to the Silver Lake, I needed to dictate where they had to go. The way Juniper had done to me in our first war games, giving me her flag so she could be certain where I’d be instead of waiting out the days to a draw. The first place and moment I knew they’d be for sure? Here. Today. I had to bleed them hard here, because Arcadia was the only place where I could make their numbers meaningless. As long as I had the story on my side today, I could butcher them in droves in a way I simply couldn’t in Creation without losing thousands myself. I couldn’t end them here, that was true. There would be a second battle, and to be able to dictate when and where that one happened I was going to have to get a little... reckless. This was the only chance I’d get, which meant we were returning to the old standard of all or nothing. I’d never lost that bet before, and I didn’t intend on starting today.

Most everything had been going the way I wanted it to, which was why I’d been less than surprised when Ranger had shown up. There was no doubt it was her: I knew that cloak for my Name dreams. I’d swiftly given orders to not provoke her in the slightest – as I understood it she refrained from killing Praesi for sport more out of courtesy for Black than any real fondness, and that might go out the window the moment someone irritated her. I’d thought she might be here for the Prince of Nightfall, to collect a second eye for her jewellery, but she’d not stirred when he’d come out. And she’d made no move against Princess Sulia, which had been my other guess. That was... not good. Were it someone else I would have presumed she was waiting for the fae to tire themselves out against each other before sweeping in, but that went against my understanding of Ranger. If she was here for a fight, she’d wanted whoever she was fighting at their peak. The longer she refrained from getting involved the more nervous I got, but what the Hells could I do about it? I was pretty sure I could take Archer, if I needed to, but the other Named had been pretty frank about the kind of margin her teacher outclassed her by.

That had pretty blatant implications about how that fight would go if I picked it, which I really didn’t want to.

I opened my eyes and watched the battle. I still had cards to play, more than the opposition probably thought, but if I wanted to make this a win I’d have pick the right moment. To the east, Summer and Winter clashed. The centre of Winter’s line was made up of a chunk of five thousand of my old buddies the deadwood soldiers, and they were chewing up the Summer regulars real bad. The flanks, though, were made up of the same rabbled that had assaulted Marchford – and they were taking a bloody beating. The tricks that had worked on my legionaries left other fae indifferent, and unlike the Summer fae those twits didn’t fight in a proper battle line. Warriors against soldiers , I thought. My ‘allies’ had to take out their heavies early when the left flank wavered, a thousand Riders of the Host on their murderous unicorns charging out of the woods to slam into the enemy and take off the pressure. The winged knights of Summer took flight, though, and with matching numbers on both sides there was only one way that scarp would go. The battle in the sky above them wasn’t going beautifully either.

Princess Sulia and her easily offended patsy had lit up their wings and flown above to scrap with the Prince of Nightfall and the Princess of Silent Depths, and watching that go down made me want to wince. The Winter prince opened with filling the sky with a howling blizzard, which the Princess of High Noon promptly screamed out of existence. Just screamed. Not even fire or anything. That must have been embarrassing. Watching the Summer royalty fight was giving me a notion of what it must have been like watching Apprentice and I go all out. Sulia kept the Winter royals busy up close and personal while the Prince of Deep Drought lashed out with sorcery. The Princess of Silent Depths slowed them down some when she called on some kind of power whose weight could be felt even from where I stood, bringing down crushing pressure that dented the ground under them – pulping fae from both sides in the process – and nearly knocked the Summer pair out of the sky. Didn’t last long, though, and Princess Sulia retaliated by hacking her arm off and smashing the Prince of Nightfall’s nose with it. I would have admired her style, if I wasn’t next in line on her kill list.

It was unfolding like a lesson on why Winter got whipped whenever it came to a battle, and though they were holding for now – Silent Depths made herself a brand new arm out of ice and promptly tried to strangle the prince on the other side with it – that hourglass was going to run out eventually. Couldn’t let that happen, much as I would have liked for the Prince of Nightfall to become an object lesson about why trying to use me was a bad idea. I still had a use for them.

The east was going more smoothly. Regulars of the Fifteenth were establishing a beachhead as they continued crossing, though it would take a while before there were enough to be effective. Apprentice had told me months ago he’d be able to turn fae into portal-makers of my own calibre, given a prisoner of sufficient rank, but I couldn’t help but notice the portal he’d finagled was noticeably smaller than mine. I suspected there was another lecture about the ins and outs of turning fae into fodder for runic arrays on the horizon, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. As for the knights of Callow, well, they’d carved their way through what must have been four thousand fae before withdrawing in good order. They would have taken more if the fae in front of them had not taken to the air instead of docilely allowing themselves to be run down. Now the Summer soldiers were attempting volleys, but even their tricky little fire arrows weren’t swift enough to catch up to good cavalry on the move. The knights rode out of range, losing only score of men to the fire: heavy plate armour was nothing to sneer at, and without the fire sorcery those arrows were little different from mundane ones.

They formed up again and began wheeling around to take the fae in the back, to my delight. A few thousand Summer regulars had hastily formed a line where they’d been charging before, only to find themselves facing nothing. It took the edge off the mass attacking the walls of my camp as well, and on that side Afolabi’s legionaries were teaching the fae how the Twelfth had earned its name. I might not like the man, but when it came to war he knew his business. I could already see a threat forming, though for now the advantage was ours. The fae who’d been readying themselves to weather another cavalry charge had nothing but a few hundred legionaries of the Fifteenth in front of them, and if they took it into their head to take that gate there wasn’t much Juniper could do about it from her side. I’d have to give them something else to worry about.

“Captain,” I said. “Get the message across: they’re to meet me on the field. They just need to find the loudest screaming.”

“Ma’am,” Firasah saluted.

I rolled my shoulders under the plate. Shame I couldn’t have prayers carved into it like the knights, but considering I’d kind of sold my soul to the Gods Below odds were all I’d get from that was charred skin. Well, maybe not sold. It’d been a little too casual for that, wasn’t like I’d had a scribe make the transaction official. Pawned felt more accurate. I sent a runner to Nauk and watched as all around the central avenue of the camp barricades were set aside. Hakram came to me side not long after, fresh from the fighting on the outer palisades. His axe was slick with red and his pauldron cut straight through. His good mood was evident.

“Sortie?” he asked.

“About that time,” I agreed, tying my hair in a ponytail.

I shut the claps of my helmet and slid on my gauntlets, flexing the armoured fingers carefully. Good. They might not be much help against a proper fae blade, but they did ensure that whenever I punched something it broke.

“Duchess Kegan sends word that she’ll have regulars and the Watch follow,” Adjutant said. “Since those winged knights aren’t coming from us.”

“Numbers?”

“Nine thousand total,” the tall orc said. “Marshal Ranker is of the opinion that pulling off more will weaken the walls too much.”

When it came to sieges, at least, I was inclined to follow the old goblin’s lead. She’d been the one to mastermind the taking of Summerholm and Laure, during the Conquest.

“They’re pulled as close and thick as we’ll get them,” I noted.

“She said the same thing,” Adjutant grinned, like the ugly green cat who’d caught the bluejay. “First blooming before we begin our countercharge.”

“You know, I’m sure there’s a lot of things Summer is ready for,” I mused. “Magic, flying fortresses, Named. Goblin engineering, though? I doubt it’s one of them.”

Nauk’s two thousand formed into an avenue-wide battering ram, heavies at the front, and the Deoraithe readied behind them. I took the front, with Hakram at my side and the remains of the Gallowborne clustered around me. Behind us, near the centre of the camp, the sound of gears and pulleys releasing filled the air. A dozen ballista bolts tipped with cold iron screamed through air, followed a heartbeat later by trebuchet stones. The Gallowborne opened the gates wide for me, and in front of us I saw scores of fae bleeding on the ground even as the ranks ahead were punctured with rocks the size of horses. Ranker had been kind enough to soften the opposition for us, and would continue pounding at the flanks as we drove forward. Gods was I glad the fae disdained machinery.

“FIFTEENTH,” I called out, unsheathing my sword. “ FORWARD .”

All the Hells broke loose, but for once we were the damned.

Closure

“The most important part of any summary execution is to remember to have fun and be yourself.”
– Dread Empress Malevolent II

The last time Alaya had come to Wolof was decades ago, when the ashes of the civil war were still warm. She’d gone to humble a rival and assert control on a stage all the High Lords would be avidly watching, and found victory. She’d not returned until now. The more years passed, the more desperate High Lady Tasia had become. Even when she’d thought she was winning, she had felt the noose beginning to tighten. Now the Dread Empress of Praes had returned to the oldest city in the Empire, one that boasted it alone had suffered no foreign occupation since the Miezans. Even the crusaders under Eleanor Fairfax had shied from those high walls and the horrors kept leashed behind them. A statement that had resounded lightly, coming from a host that had pulled down the Tower itself on the head of the most powerful madwoman to ever rule Praes. Alaya did not share Amadeus’ contempt for Dread Empress Triumphant, as it happened. Oh, she did not deny his reasons.

Triumphant had spent a generation of the Wasteland’s youth on foreign fields, forged the Principate through her massacres and managed to drive to war two empires separated from the Empire by an entire sea. It could not be denied that she had broken Praes so thoroughly that four decades had passed before war could be taken to the crusader kings that had carved realms out of the Wasteland’s meat. For all that, Triumphant had understood the nature of the Empire better than any Tyrant before or since. Under her rule there had been no betrayals, no scheming Chancellor or rebellious High Lords. All had been united in terror of the monster of monsters. It was not a sustainable method of rule, of course, as the swift collapse of Triumphant’s conquests has proved. Yet there were lessons to be learned from her successes, not to be dismissed for her penultimate failure.

For the Empire to function as a single, smoothly running entity, there could be no snake held close. Triumphant had achieved this through overwhelming might, Alaya had by censuring the Name out of existence. There could be no High Lords in a position to pose a threat, either. Instead of crucifying half of them and binding devils to the rest, she had achieved this by slowly and carefully destroying the influence of the Court in the ruling structure of the Empire. The only conflict among the highborn now was between the Moderates and her own followers, warring for her favour and backing. Having achieved both these conditions, what Dread Empress Malicia needed was terror . The ability to inflict large-scale destruction at will, to give pause to anyone who would threaten her position. A deterrent beyond argument. She’d once thought Amadeus could be this, but her dear friend was a scalpel and what she needed was an earthquake. Catherine might become this, given her affinity for destruction, but she was difficult to control and would need years to grow.

Alaya had sought alternatives and found one that suited, a keystone for the monument she had spent her entire life crafting. It would require sacrifice to be birthed, but if Malicia had to bleed it would be by her own design and no one else’s. Quietly amused at the thought, the Empress watched the legionaries pour through the gates of Wolof.

Taking the city by force, even with the three legions assembled here under Marshal Nim, would have been horrifically difficult. Wolof was the heart of sorcery in Praes, its ritual sites millennia old and its vaults of monsters deep and terrible. But the city had not stood united behind High Lady Tasia. It had been eating itself alive as Tasia’s nephew attempted to usurp her seat, all those powerful mages and hardened soldiers slaughtering each other in the streets. Sargon Sahelian had unleashed all the devils held by ancient pacts only to corner dearest Tasia into calling on a demon of Madness. Half the city had violently butchered itself merely from suffering its presence, until desperate rituals managed to banish it. And then Marshal Nim’s legions had calmly marched through the gate, wading through the sea of corpses. Fifty thousand dead, by the most conservative estimates. The contracts of at least a hundred devils had been twisted beyond control by the demon and the creatures were still loose in Wolof, Legion mages sweeping through to bind and banish them wherever they could be found.

Many would escape into the Wasteland, roaming for years before they were finally caught. No matter. It would occupy the days of new High Lord of Wolof long enough he would not realize his power was being curtailed until it was too late for Wolof’s influence to recover in this lifetime. Sargon was still among the living; this much had been confirmed. He was under Legion protection and would remain there until he swore allegiance to Alaya. The Dread Empress set her mount to a trot, the silent Sentinels surrounding her scaring even legionaries enough that they gave the procession a wide berth. The ancient fortress at the heart of the city had been breached this morning, its wards shattered and the few remaining loyal household troops put to the sword by the newly-raised Fourteenth Legion. They’d been in need of tempering, Marshal Nim had told her over a cup of wine. Forcing a dug-in position with heavy mage presence would bloody them enough they would be ready for the inevitable war with Procer. It was not as inevitable as the ogre thought, but that was a hand best kept in the dark until the very last moment.

High Lady Tasia had been captured by noon, after much struggle. Two full cohorts had died in the struggle before mages managed to break her power. She’d drained the life of hundreds to replenish her vitality when wounded and almost managed to collapse the fortress on the soldiers of the Fourteenth with some sort of ancient artefact. It was an undeniable confirmation that Alaya had been correct to accept her surrender decades ago, no matter how Amadeus had chafed. If she could do this much when spent, how much blood would it have taken to break her in the fullness of her power? Now the proud aristocrat that schemed to destroy Alaya for so many years was bound and shackled, unable to call on even a speck of sorcery. The Empress could have ordered her executed, and would, but a conversation was owed before. An old enemy was dear as an old friend, in some ways, and some courtesies were due. Tasia had almost as much of a hand in what the Wasteland had been shaped to become as Alaya herself, after all.

No unnecessary risks were taken. Additional runic shackles of different patterns were added to ensure Tasia would not be able to use a last moment surprise, every inch of her body inspected for weapons and artefacts. The room where they would speak would be in the city, not her fortress, and heavily warded against dimensional interference. No hidden space would be emptied to destroy them both. The Sentinels spread out around the beautiful stone manse the Empress had chosen for this matter, some following her inside but remaining at the door of the salon she entered. Tea had already been served when Alaya entered – her own brew, a precautions perhaps unnecessary but taken regardless – though the fragrantly steaming porcelain pot remained full. With her hands bound, Tasia had been unable to pour herself a cup. The High Lady of Wolof was bruised and not even her poise could hide her exhaustion, but she had not been touched since her capture. Torture of an old enemy was very much gauche, after all, beneath women such as them. Even in this state, Tasia was beautiful. She did not seem a day older than thirty, her smooth dark skin and golden eyes something even a young girl would envy.

“Your Dread Majesty,” the High Lady of Wolof greeted her.

“Dearest Tasia,” Malicia smiled, taking the teapot in hand and pouring two cups deftly.

She waited for an invitation before seating herself across the elegant table for two. Hands still shackled, the other Soninke sipped at her cup before chuckling languidly

“My favourite,” she complimented. “You always did play the Game beautifully.”

“Iron sharpens iron,” Malicia replied in a backhanded compliment.

Tasia leaned back against the cushioned back of her seat, a minor breach of decorum her old enemy would never have allowed herself if she’d thought she would survive the day.

“It was the irony of it I could not resist,” Tasia said. “All that gold you poured into Procer, turned to silver and sent to my coffers. You might as well have been funding me yourself.”

“It was a long game,” Malicia said. “And an expensive one. Truly, ruining you cost more than the Conquest itself.”

“You knew since the beginning, then,” the High Lady sighed, almost admiring. “Nigh forty years of preparation for a single blow. I am in awe, Malicia. We’ve not seen the likes of you in centuries.”

You have never seen the likes of me , Alaya thought. And never will. That was your mistake from the beginning, measuring me through names long dead. It would have been tawdry to gloat, and so the thought remained unspoken.

“I truly do regret that you will not see the coming years,” the Empress said, genuinely saddened. “That you must leave us at all. A mind like yours, Tasia, the wonders I could have crafted with it.”

“It was always going to be this way,” Tasia said gently. “You are smothering the soul of Praes one exquisite scheme at a time. I honour the method, but despise the intent.”

Alaya conceded the point silently. A waste, but perhaps an inevitable one. Tasia had been one of the few highborn in the Wasteland to grasp her intent. It was her tragedy that she’d lacked the ability to do anything about it.

“Would you like to tell me your plan?” Malicia offered.

The High Lady sipped her tea, considering the matter.

“Yes,” she decided. “You must have grasped the shape of it, by now.”

“Your daughter to replace me,” the Empress said. “Yourself holding the strings.”

“She chafed at the notion,” Tasia confessed. “But as long as I held her father, she would have submitted.”

“He fled the city not long before she betrayed you, I believe,” Malicia said.

“He must have been in contact with her for years under my nose,” she sighed. “Such a talented man. He would have made a fitting consort, had he any ambition at all.”

“Callow?” Malicia asked.

“Cowed through diabolism,” Tasia smiled. “I’d gathered a great many contracts, before my nephew usurped them. As for your Duni hound, he could be leashed through his attachment to that Callowan girl. With him under our thumb the rest of the Calamities would have fallen in line.”

It never ceased to amaze Alaya how, even after decades of Amadeus crushing them in every conflict, the High Lords never quite managed to understand exactly what they were dealing with. They would all have been dead within the year, even if their fall broke Praes for generations.

“You believed your agents in the Legion would bring enough to your side, then,” Malicia said.

“Ah,” Tasia breathed. “You found them?”

“I have hooks in the minds of every officer of legate or above in the Wasteland,” the Empress said. “Your attempts to turn them were doomed from inception.”

The other woman smiled.

“A precaution to check me or the Carrion Lord, I wonder?” she said.

Amadeus was not aware that she’d surpassed the limitations of Speaking, that much was true. By feeding her aspect of Rule into the act she could plant commands without ever saying them out loud, something not even Wekesa could reproduce. Maddie would be furious if he knew, but there were risks Alaya was not willing to take and twelve thousand men in Praes she did not control directly was one of them. As for Tasia’s insinuation, it was only that. Amadeus would never turn on her, not even if it killed him. If there was one person she could trust in Creation it was him, even if in the dark of night the fear came to her. Alaya would not be ruled by old wounds, and chose to match faith for faith.

“I take it you have no true notion of what Akua is doing in Liesse?” Malicia said.

“I’d believed it to be wards, to keep the Squire at bay,” Tasia said. “Evidently I was wrong. She must have infiltrated my spies.”

“Mine as well,” Malicia laughed. “Though not as well as she thinks.”

“You’ve been watching her since the beginning, then?” the High Lady asked.

“Oh yes,” the Empress murmured. “I went to a great deal of trouble to get her the materials she needed without her catching on.”

The golden-eyed woman hid her surprise, but not quite well enough. Alaya pretended not to notice – Tasia was quite weary, some allowances must be made.

“You don’t intend to destroy her work,” she said.

“No,” Malicia said, savouring the fragrant tea. “She’s truly brilliant, your daughter. She would be a match for Warlock, were he thirty years younger. I must compliment you on the education you afforded her.”

“Talent must be fostered,” Tasia waved away, managing to inject grace to the gesture even shackled. “A weapon, is it?”

“The likes of which have not been seen since the birth of the Kingdom of the Dead,” Malicia said.

“Yet you do not intend to make use it, after taking it from her,” the High Lady of Wolof said.

“I imagine she will unleash it at least once, when dear Catherine comes for her,” the Empress replied. “It will be demonstration enough. A deterrent, Tasia. It will be the deterrent we have always needed. A weapon even Cordelia Hasenbach fears.”

“A lesser ambition, this,” the other woman chided.

“I would rather rule the Empire forever than the continent for a year, darling,” Malicia replied. “A mere difference in intent.”

They remained silent for a moment after that, the comfortable quiet between two women who had for so long tried to ruin the other.

“She may yet triumph,” Tasia finally said. “She has the best of me and of her father as well. If what we are could ever beat you, it will be through her.”

“She will try,” Malicia said sadly. “They always do.”

Finishing her tea, the High Lady of Wolof met her enemy’s eyes.

“The cup,” she said. “Coated with poison before I was taken here?”

“Sweetsleep,” the Empress agreed.

“What a soft touch you are,” Tasia teased. “It could have gone either way, couldn’t it?”

“Yes,” the Dread Empress of Praes lied.

“Liar,” the High Lady of Wolof smiled fondly, and her eyes closed.

She took no breath after that.

“Goodbye, Tasia,” Alaya murmured. “I think I will miss you, if only a little.”

Chapter 29: Scale

“Ah, mortal wounds. My only weakness.”
– Dread Empress Sanguinia II

This wasn’t like fighting devils. Wasn’t like fighting mortal soldiers either, because mortal soldiers couldn’t summersault in mail and swing swords like they were feathers. We’d bloodied he fae so far but that had been through tactics, no what I’d been taught to call qualitative superiority. It was one thing to lead Nauk’s heavies in forcing a gate when we outnumbered the enemy ten to one, another to charge into a sea of Summer swords and expect to come out on top. We would have to anyway. If the eastern flank was allowed to collapse, we were all fucked. The knights had bought us a lull and they were far from done with the day’s bloody work, but now the Fifteenth and its allies needed to bring it all home. Summer would have trump cards of its own, of that I had no doubt. I refused to believe all they had in their arsenal was regulars, winged knights and a handful of nobles. If that were the case, they wouldn’t have a history of crushing Winter in open battle. My role, then, was to force the hidden blade into the open and promptly break it.

There were probably elegant ways to do that, fancy manoeuvres and strategies, but Akua hadn’t been entirely wrong when she’d called me a thug. I didn’t have the time for elegant, so watering the ground with red until something came to stop would have to do.

Fire greeted us when we came out screaming. Ribbons of flame shot out like spears, shivering through the air and burning clean through steel and flesh. The tongue that would have put a hole in my belly I cut without without missing a beat, and Hakram contemptuously ignored the fact that his own shoulder was smouldering. We were the only ones so dismissive: sorcery the fae had shaped in the span of a breath stopped a shield wall two hundred wide, and stopped it cold. We couldn’t allow them to pull these kinds of surprises often, I thought. We didn’t have the numbers to handle those kind of casualties. They could trade three fae for every legionary sallying and still have it be nothing more than a drop in the bucket. I’d enjoyed having the bigger army on my side, at the fortress of Olden Oak, but now I was back in familiar territory: outmanned and in way over my head. I smashed into the Summer line like a runaway cart, the slivers of power I’d fed into my legs when I got close seeing me shoot forward quicker than the enemy had anticipated. I hacked my way through some poor fool’s hand and threw him at the man behind him, face grim.

The hateful thing about the fae was that their sorcery was not rituals. Every one of them was at least a middling caster, and their tricks were heads and shoulders above those that the Legions taught their mages. Cutting my way into the throng had only killed the fire ribbons of the fae in front of me, the rest could have cared less. We weren’t entirely unprepared, though. What few mages had not gone with Robber finished their ritual a few heartbeats later, disrupting the fae flames and allowing the heavies to finally close the distance. My insistence that Apprentice teach our mage contingents some things to deal with the fae was paying off, though they were few and no replacement at all for a caster of Masego’s calibre. With Adjutant at my side, I set to keeping the fairies busy. Perspective went up in smoke as we waded into the enemy host, replaced by quick flashes of movement and steel. My shield was carved away strike by strike, ice growing to fill the gaps without the need for me to even will it as I traded glancing blows for death strokes. Calm, measured, ever going forward. This was not war, it was just a chore taken care of to the backdrop of screaming.

Nauk’s voice screamed for a wedge to be made and to my sides legionaries took formation, shields high and swords piercing forward like this was just a drill on the training yard. Getting our foot in the door had been costly, I saw from the corpses and flickers of sorcery that still took lives every few heartbeats, but we had it. At this rate there would not be much left of Nauk’s jesha by nightfall, but we had bought something precious with those lives: room for the Watch. The cloaked Deoraithe did not deign to use bows, this time. They took to the left of our wedge with knives and longswords, scything through the Summer regulars with war cries in the Old Tongue. The rank and file of Daoine’s army poured in behind them, propping up the Fifteenth. They were no legionaries, but they were well-trained soldiers in mail with swords and shield that did not flinch in the face of sorcery. I caught all this in a glance, for it was all I could spare. The trail of dead behind me had apparently marked me as enough of a threat the fae were getting inventive .

I ran through a soldier but her charges’ momentum had her collapsing on me, another three fae piling up on me as a dozen of them rose in the air and began calling on colourful lights. A few crossbow shots from the Gallowborne slowed them down, but I was too busy dealing with the writhing, clawing mass trying to pull down my shield to be thankful. The lights hit the lot of us like a dozen sharpers, tearing through flesh and bone and blowing up straight off my feet. I was thrown against the raised shield of one of my retinue and sharply refused his hand to help me up: my fucking shield was gone, again. And my sword was bent and burned to the point of uselessness. Those pricks . I’d spat in Malicia’s soup already, where did they think I was going to be getting goblin steel from now on? I sidestepped a spear, chucked the remains of my sword into the man’s face and ripped the weapon out of the fae’s hands. Had no idea how to use one of these, so I snapped it in half and broke a soldier’s jaw with the shaft before taking her exposed throat with the point.

She had a sword, thank the Gods, so I lifted it up her corpse and took it in hand. Too light and long for my tastes, but it would do. Anyways, it wasn’t technically corpse-robbing if the battle wasn’t over right? Deoraithe arrows took care of the flying casters before they could have another go at blowing me up – and huh, my breastplate was actually melted and I simply hadn’t noticed – so I gripped the neck of a fae trying to put a spear in Hakram’s back and squeezed until something gave with an ugly crack. He grunted thanks and I waved them away, barely remembering to drop the corpse in my grip first. The Fifteenth had gained ground since the Watch had taken the field, steadily advancing as the cloaked lot essentially took care of the left flank. Watching the fights there was hard on the eyes. The Deoraithe were as quick as the fae and twice as ruthless, deaths on both sides happening almost faster than the naked eye could see. Whoever led Summer now that the Princess of High Noon was busy beating Winter royalty raw had to know they were in trouble, I thought.

Our sortie had put a knife in their bellies, and between the knights and the Watch the palisades had managed to sort themselves out. Ranker’s engines were still pounding wherever the fae were thickest, and though bloody trails could no longer be seen now that they’d gotten used to it every shot still left its share of dead. The trade of corpses was in our favour, and if Juniper managed to get enough men on this side of the gate then we’d have them encircled on three sides and it wouldn’t matter if they were more than us – it was the soldiers at the edge of the circle that fought, not those in the middle. They needed a win on one of the three sides, and they needed it quick because even if they unfucked one of the flanks as long as my sortie went unchecked there was a chance we’d split the meat of their army in two. If we did, they were done. So bring out your monsters , I thought. Now is the time.

The fae lines parted and I finally got to see Summer’s answer to the Sword of Waning Day, the deadwood soldiers that had given me so much trouble on our first encounter. Fae tended to prefer mail, and light one at that, but these were different. Heavy plate of gold from foot to neck, thick gleaming rubies dotting it in arcane patterns. Golden armet helms atop, with the thin slit for their eyes steaming from whatever was inside. Long heater shields polished like golden mirrors, almost as if someone had tried to make a kite shield for a footman, covered their left flanks. In their right hands halberds of pure ivory were held. Was I supposed to be impressed they used a two-handed weapon with one hand? I was pretty sure I could do the same. Wherever the tread the greenery smoked and died, which did not bode particularly well. If they were half as good as killing as the deadwood soldiers, then Nauk’s legionaries were going to rout. I’d taken Named to handle a few members of the Sword of the Waning Day, and there must have been at least ten thousand of these shiny bastards ahead of me.

Well, at least I knew what part of this battlefield the enemy commander was most worried about. I looked at those rubies, and the armours that seemed made of pure gold.

“Catherine,” Hakram gravelled. “Why are you smiling?”

“Because by the time this is all over, I’ll be able to afford rebuilding Marchford,” I said.

The golden fae slammed the butts of their halberds against the ground as one, a wave of heat washing over me and everyone else I could see. The warmth didn’t leave, afterwards, it hung in the air. The Summer fae in it quickened, while my legionaries grew sluggish. Oh that was just bullshit . Warlock could probably do something similar, but there weren’t ten thousand of the handsome bastard. Ranker, bless her wretched goblin soul, caught the danger. She had the ballistas fire at the golden fae, a dozen bolts that should have punctured their ranks. Instead the cold iron-tipped bolts hung in the air mere feet in front of them, and slowly began to turn. That, uh, wasn’t a great development.

“Dodge,” I yelled.
On the bright side, they’d been aiming for Named and not legionaries. Unfortunately that meant me, and even though I flattened myself against the ground and avoided the worst of it two of them tore into the same shoulder. Gods, those things were fucking heavy. I bit my lips to avoid screaming and crawled on the ground trying to get them out as the golden fae began to advance. My fingers were twitching too much, pain continuing to roll through my body in harsh waves. It was the iron, wasn’t it? You couldn’t steal fae power and not expect to have some fae weaknesses come with it. Adjutant was the one who got them out of me, and I muttered Rise through gritted teeth as my broke shoulders and ribs snapped back in place and the wounds slowly started to close. The well was beginning to run dry, I could feel. Another damned liability I was going to have to deal with. Hakram’s plate was dented in three places, but the bolts hadn’t broken through. The sight was no comfort. He must have called on his aspect for that, and that was another advantage we’d just lost.

“Is it possible to bruise a lung?” I said, spitting a thick gob of blood to the side. “Because I think I bruised a lung.”

Whatever Hakram would have replied I didn’t get to hear, because I was too busy exploding. Or at least that was what it felt like. At least a few of my ribs were now more powder than bone, an entire pauldron was liquid and burning through my aketon and to add that special touch I was now falling. From the sky. Where I did not remember going of my own will. I coughed blood again but managed to shape a pane of shadow and ice under me, landing on it like a rag doll. The strange noise of fae wings in action erupted, and a dark-skinned woman in mail of jade came to face me. Her eyes were golden as the armour of the fae who’d been wrecking my day, golden as the Diabolist’s. For all that, she was no Soninke. Her power filled the air to thickly I could almost taste it. Duchess, I thought. She had to be. Unlike the Summer nobles I’d fought so far, she did not talk and posture. She pointed the tip of her sword at me, and I hastily broke the panel that held me up. The air where I’d been exploded again, not in flames or light but as if the wind itself had gone mad. Another panel formed under me, and this time I landed on my feet.

“ Rise ,” I barked.

The ribs began to fix themselves but it was slow work and Gods I might not be able to afford slowness.

“Wither,” the duchess said, her voice stunningly musical.

Three panels, I judged in less time than it took for my heart to beat. That was how many supports I’d need to leap my way to her. I moved before the thought was finished, and that was the only reason I survived. The hem of my cloak was caught in the area where her power surged, and the cloth thinned and dried instantly. Considering the amount of water there was in my body, the thought of what would have happened to me if I hadn’t moved was chilling. I moved faster than any mortal could have, but in the sky only the fae reigned. When I landed on my second panel she simply flew higher and pointed her sword at me again. Fuck . This wasn’t a Rider of the Host I was scrapping with. If I kept this up, I was going to get killed. I unmade the panel and dropped down another fifteen feet before landing on another. We were staggeringly high, I only now noticed. That first hit had sent me up as if I’d been tossed by a trebuchet. Below us the golden fae had engaged the Fifteenth and the Watch, and the engagement was gruesomely one-sided. I needed to wrap this up quick if I wanted to have an army left by the time I broke my legs landing.

“Aren’t you supposed to introduce yourself before we tangle?” I called out.

If nothing else, her title would give me a better read on what her powers came from.

“I am the Duchess of Restless Zephyr,” she replied. “You are a corpse.”

I wasn’t particularly fond of being on the wrong side of that line, I decided. The healing power I’d stolen from the Lone Swordsman was being a real trooper about getting me back into fighting shape, but it only worked so fast. At least I was no longer in any danger of choking on my lungs. I leapt another two panels upwards to avoid getting exploded after her announcement, keenly aware that I was burning through power quickly. Even just maintaining a panel was draining, and unless I wanted my blood to turn to ice again I was going to have to find another solution.

“Would you like to make a wager?” I called out.

Come on, you’re fae , I thought. You lot feed are always up for a bet.

“No,” she replied, after trying to explode me again.

That was starting to get old, I would admit. Play to her nature, Catherine. She wants a kill, not a crippling. She’s been throwing around hard hits since we started.

“I am going to destroy you in one blow,” I lied, sword rising above my head as if I was preparing some trump card I really wished I had right now.

The Duchess of Restless Zephyr laughed. She was maybe thirty feet below me, and in the face of the flaring of my Name she smiled mockingly.

“You are no true duchess,” she said. “Just a mortal playing the fool. Learn your place.”

Unlike my parchment-thin deception, the ball of roiling winds that formed above her head was very much a threat. She kept feeding power into it while I tried to look like I knew what I was doing. Which I might. Maybe. It was a gamble with horrendous odds, but still better than jumping around beneath the clouds and hoping she ran out of juice before I did. Studying her face I gauged when she was about to finish preparations, the sneer and hint of triumph giving it away. If I got hit by that ball, what was left of me was going to rain all over this battlefield in little chunks. I really hoped that would hold out for her as well, because I was about to surrender an advantage that had saved my life at least three times in the last year. Her wrist began to move my fingers tightened around the hilt of the sword I’d stolen.

“ Take ,” I said.

Her eyes went wide as we both felt the same thing: my Name claiming ownership over the winds she’d been gathering. The remains of what I’d stolen from the Lone Swordsman vanished, and instead a painful surge filled the aspect. I gritted my teeth to avoid screaming. Claiming Summer power when I was already bound to the Winter Court felt like my insides turning out. I struck down with my sword and the ball of winds followed, smashing into her and detonating. Dry winds howled all around as the arm she brought up to shield herself was ground out of existence, her tall silhouette plummeting down like a gold of old had kicked her back down to Creation. My control over the winds was beginning to wane, and I hurriedly forced them down to follow the Duchess. She’d fallen in the back of the lines of golden fae, the ground heaving at the impact, and that was where the winds unleashed the fullness of their fury. Fae were scattered like insects, the hurricane my opponent had meant to destroy me with blooming life a flower in every direction. That, I mused, should help my army get their bearings back.

Then the winds contracted, crushing whatever they’d drawn in with them, and shot back up towards me as my aspect once again became a shapeless bundle of power needing to be defined.

“Shit,” I said, for my wit was peerless in any world.

I was quick to flee, but not quick enough. The ball had been popped already, but the winds were far from tender: they pulsed and detonated into a circle that had me sailing through the sky for the second time today. And was that the feeling of another rib breaking? Ah, no, just fracturing. It had happened to me often enough that I was beginning to be able to tell the difference just from the kind of pain that had me clenching my teeth. I couldn’t even tell what direction I was falling in. I shaped a pane of ice in front of me but I was going so fast I just tore right through it. Another two tries only managed to slow me down and cut the side of my neck with shards. The landing was going to be problem, I mused. And this time I couldn’t rely on stolen hero tricks to get me back on my feet afterwards. I was debating creating three panes in a row to see if that would do the trick when I felt my fall slow. Yanked out of the air, I started to float down like a feather until I was caught in a strong pair of arms.

“We meet again, Foundling,” Archer grinned.

“Are you seriously trying to pretend you were the one to cast the spell?” Masego asked peevishly. “You’re not even a mage.”

I sighed, leaning back bonelessely in Archer’s arms so I could stare at the braided Soninke.

“Hello, Apprentice,” I said.

“Do I need to explain to you how gravity works,” Masego said, “And what it does to the bones of women in plate falling from the sky?”

“I am invincible,” I gravely said. “Gravity bends to my will.”

Naturally, Archer took that as an excuse to drop me.

Chapter 30: Riot

“The classic Callowan blunder. Sending an army into the Wasteland you can’t handle if it comes marching back as undead.”
-Dread Emperor Sorcerous

Magical healing felt slow and inefficient, after having grown to the heroic alternative, but it had to be said that Masego was exceedingly good at it. It was better not to think about how many people he must have needed to cut open to get there. Hopefully at least the majority of them had been dead at the time, though with Warlock you could never be sure. It was all flying pigs until he got in a mood, then it was corpses all around. Apprentice politely clapped my shoulder to signify he was done and I rose from my crouch.

“You’ll need a blacksmith to truly rectify the state of your armour,” he said. “But it is no longer liquid, at least.”

Speaking of liquid, Archer was polishing off the bottom of a copper flask even as we spoke. The two of them seemed in a decent mood, though not eager to join the fray. Given that Summer’s army could be quite literally world-ending if it got into the swing of things, I didn’t blame them. I got the blood and what looked like flakes of skin off the hilt of my sword – Gods, those were probably mine weren’t they? – and took a deep breath.

“All right,” I said. “First we need to pick up Hakram. Before we do, Archer, could you tell me what the Hells your teacher is doing here?”

She ignored me, finished guzzling down whatever liquor she was packing and dropped the flask to the ground. It was a good thing the enemy already knew where we were, otherwise no doubt they could find out just by following the trail of those that no doubt followed in her wake.

“No idea, Foundling,” she replied cheerfully. “She won’t be here for the princes and princesses. She got bored with those a while back. Whatever it is, though? I recommend not being even remotely in the vicinity of her way. That, uh, doesn’t tend to go well for people. And gods. And castle that one time.”

It said a lot about the Lady of the Lake’s reputation that I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if she’d destroyed an entire keep because it had made the poor decision of being built somewhere inconvenient to her. Black had told me there were to people on Calernia against whom it was useless to think in terms of victory, where one could only attempt to limit the damage and lose the least amount of skin possible. One was the Dead King, who he’d charmingly referred to as ‘the original abomination’. The other was the Ranger, whose utter disregard for odds I’d been raised hearing stories about.

“Well, I’m not intending to get in a fistfight for her, that’s for sure,” I grimaced. “I’ve recently run out of borrowed lives.”

“I fear you may run out of ribs as well, if you keep at it,” Masego drily said.

Now that was just unwarranted. I hadn’t broken any of those in, like, at least sixty heartbeats. I was going to ask about having them reinforced with steel, though, because nowadays they were snapping like twigs.

“I can’t commend your judgement but you pain tolerance is impressive,” Archer added, never one to leave someone unkicked while they were down.

I flipped her off.

“Goat-daughter,” she replied in Taghrebi, ridiculously proud of knowing the word.

“Masego have you been teaching her cusses?” I sighed.

“It was either that or arguing about whether Creation is a sphere again,” he admitted.

I raised an eyebrow at Archer.

“I’m just saying, do you know anyone who’s gone the whole way around?” she said. “Have you done it yourself?”

Apprentice twitched and I decided to change the subject before he went on a rant about had proved Creation was round. I knew better than to hope he did not have three philosophers and several volumes to reference.

“We’ll table that for later,” I ordered. “I, uh, left Adjutant back in the middle of the melee. Anyone have any suggestions of how to take him out? Our target is east.”

I ignored Apprentice’s peevish murmur about how Hakram, at least, probably hadn’t broken any ribs. That was a deeply unfair comparison, the orc had a whole aspect about not breaking.

“We could kill our way through,” Archer suggested.

Ah, Archer. Violence wasn’t her only tool, just the only one she ever bothered to use.

“I’m open to other suggestions,” I prompted.

That was when the screaming began. Sword in hand faster than I could blink, I turned to look at the source of it. It was only one voice, though a remarkably loud one. The Duchess of Restless Zephyr was back in the sky, missing an arm and most the half of the body attached to it. One of her wings was pure flame, I saw, which made her flight awkward but admittedly still better than I could manage.

“I’d really hoped she was dead,” I said.

“She seems peeved,” Masego said, master of observation that he was.

“You could say we didn’t part on great terms,” I conceded.

The dark-skinned mage’s eyes glimmered with Name power, peering at the Duchess.

“She’s bleeding out power,” he noted. “Her very frame is unstable. I expect she will detonate, left alone long enough.”

Archer whistled merrily, stringing her bow.

“Never bagged a duchess before,” she said.

“That’d be kill-stealing and you know it,” I said.

I did not, however, tell her not to put arrows in the woman until the issue went away. It was one thing to banter with my companions, another to allow a threat of that magnitude to live even a moment longer than she needed to. It swiftly became clear that screaming at the top of her lungs was more than a coping mechanism for the fae. A pack of a hundred winged knights peeled off from the rest, lances high as they formed up around her. It would have been untrue to say I felt the weight of the Duchess’ gaze, but I was pretty sure if she was capable of glaring someone aflame I’d be a bonfire right now.

“I might run out of arrows,” Archer said. “The fancy ones, at least.”

I eyed her quiver, which looked plain but had as much sorcery wafting off of it as all her enchanted ammunition put together.

“They’re in range, for you?” I asked.

“Sweetcheeks,” she grinned. “There’s not a damn thing in any world that isn’t .”

It was talk like that that had me believing the ochre-skinned woman wasn’t a villain. None of us who’d managed to live this long would so willingly dip down hubris and slip it too much tongue. Archer wasn’t all boasting, at least. She nocked her first arrow smoothly and released almost quicker than I could follow. The arrow flew. A hundred yards from the fae it was buried in a wave of flame and I thought that the end of that, but moments later a single silhouette fell from its horse. I sharpened my eyes and let out a staggered breath. Right between the eyes, from at least a mile.

“See?” Archer preened.

“Archer,” I tried.

“I told you,” she interrupted.

“Archer they are charging ,” I barked. “ Keep shooting .”

She pouted, but smooth movements followed and arrows took the sky. I looked at Masego, who seemed more bored than worried.

“I don’t suppose you have something to stop a cavalry charge?” I asked.

“It is unlikely any of my wards would do more than slow them down,” he said. “In Arcadia, that is. Layering is pointless if they unmake the layers as fast as I craft them.”

“Keep the Duchess busy, then,” I ordered. “She has this nasty wind trick.”

Speaking of the devil, the screaming had ceased. She was hurtling through the air, keeping up with the knights, and pointing her sword at us. The rider next to her toppled from an arrow through the neck, Archer chuckling at my side.

“Masego,” I said urgently.

The air exploded, but a transparent box formed around it. The winds howled, barely contained.

“Interesting,” Apprentice praised. “Derivative work, of course, but fae do tend to keep close to their title and Court.”

The box contracted until it broke, and the wind dispersed with a hiss. Gods I’d missed having a powerful mage around. It made it so much easier not to die. Archer was ignoring us, taking apart the knights one at a time. How many had she slain, easy as swatting a fly? Twenty, maybe more. When she ceased moving, though, I cleared my throat.

“There’s still some left,” I helpfully pointed out.

“I’m out of mage-killers,” she said.

The air exploded again. This time Masego had evolved his defensive measure: a series of transparent walls redirected the fury of the wind, ultimately heading back towards the charging fae. It dispersed long before reaching any of them, but just what he’d been able to do might be deterrent enough that the Duchess wouldn’t try it again. If she’d pulled that when they were closer, they would have lost a few for sure.

“You don’t have any other enchanted ones?” I asked.

“None that are fireproof,” she said, calmly unstringing her bow.

Given the size of the thing I would have said something about overcompensating, but now that I’d actually seen her use it the words stayed stuck in my mouth. Skill was skill, no matter how ridiculous-looking the tool enabling it. Archer unsheathed her longknives, tapping one against her leg impatiently.

“They could hurry up, at least,” she complained. “Not like we can charge back at them.”

“Oh my,” Masego murmured. “That could... No, first I’d have to overtake the matrix.”

“Apprentice,” I said, a little worried.

“Everything is going to be fine,” he said dreamily, eyes still filled with Name power.

I had never more wished to have a shield. And so the three of us stood valiantly against the coming charge. Apprentice was muttering to himself, lost in his own world, Archer had taken to cleaning her fingernails with one of her blades and I was silently wishing I could just duplicate Hakram a few times and not have to rely on these two anymore. More like valiant-adjacent, maybe. I steadied my breath and adjusted my stance as the knights and Duchess angled their descent, the lot of them moving flawlessly together.

“Whither,” the Duchess of Restless Zephyr screamed.

“ Deconstruct ,” Apprentice replied, fingers dancing across a stream of shining runes.

The fae aristocrat yelped, losing control of her spell. The bone-dry winds slipped her leash, turning on her. Her wing of flame dispersed as her body turned to a husk, skin turning to leather in the span of a heartbeat. She crashed, but I couldn’t spare a longer look than that: I was too busy trying not to get skewered. Flattening under the lance wouldn’t work. I’d never gotten anywhere by betting against fae reflexes. Instead I sunk into my Name, let the calm wash over me and watched the tip of the weapon. The only dangerous part of a lance is the tip, I told myself , repeating Black’s words. I pivoted around it at the last moment, letting the knight pass me by. Immediately I had to duck under the horse of the man behind him, sword coming up to split its belly open. I emerged drenched in blood and guts to see the third rank was too far ahead to strike me, but the fourth had adjusted its angle. And was converging on me. Apprentice came to the rescue, a sphere-like black rip into the fabric of Arcadia forming amongst the fae. It didn’t seem to do much but draw them closer to it, but it should keep them busy for at least a bit.

That left the first rank, which had deftly landed on the ground and was turning back around. I heard screams and laughter to the side, which probably meant Archer wasn’t in too much trouble. Even as lances turned to me, I felt an itch between my shoulder blades. I knew better than to ignore the hints of my Name, and moved before a thrown javelin could add a steel component to my spine. The thrown weapon sunk into the ground and exploded in flames, the enemy knights riding straight through the screen of fire. This, I decided, was not going to work. Even if the Duchess didn’t come back from her mistake, there was only so long I could keep avoiding being run through. Especially if I had to dodge javelins at the same time. Relief came in the shape of Archer, who barrelled into the flank of the knights charging me. She was riding a horse, because of course she was. Two arrows were stuck in her mount’s neck and she used them to guide it along with no small amount of spurring. That... could work. Maybe. I wasn’t above fleeing a losing fight. Masego’s black sphere must have petered out, because I heard the whistle of javelins let loose followed by neighs.

I was already moving, though, and the thumped into the ground behind me. There were still half a dozen knights after my hide, even though Archer was making a joyous nuisance of herself, and it was those I went for. They were on the ground now, and while the sky belonged to the fae down here they were in my wheelhouse. I ran at them, smoothly cutting the distance. They’d learned from the last time, adjusted to my speed, and when I pivoted around the first lance I found another two aimed at my chest. An exertion of will had a panel of ice forming in the way, breaking instantly but buying me a precious few heartbeats. I pushed a sliver of power down my legs and leapt at the knight I’d just avoided, colliding with him atop the winged horse. I took a hard knock in the nose and he tried to to slide a knife in my ribs, but I caught his wrist and twisted it to throw him off the horse. Which was not best pleased about this turn of events. I tried to slide my feet into the stirrups, but the neighing fucker was bucking me off. And now the other knights were back at me. Great. I had to throw myself off to avoid taking a javelin in the chest.

“Fine,” I growled. “The hard way.”

I rammed my sword through the horse’s eye as my free hand whipped up to blast a knight off his horse with a spear of shadow. I kept the power close, forcefully shoving it into the dying mount through my blade. The beast twitched once, twice, and its dark eyes went pure blue. That was new.

“Up,” I ordered, and it rose back to its feet.

I leapt on, and this time there was no bucking. I looked for the others and found Archer had already retreated, and forced a visibly dismayed Masego to ride with his arms around her belly. Considering Apprentice hated even regular horses, a winged one had to be a nightmare for him. I set my mount to riding with my mind alone, the knights gathering in a wedge behind me. That was going to be a problem.

“Retreat,” I called out.

Archer laughed, but at least she listened. I dug into the muscle memories of the horse I’d raised and put on my finger on the part that concerned flight. The wings extended brusquely and as I screamed it began batting its wings and we rose into the air. So did our pursuers. The feeling of the wind whipping at my face was exhilarating, but death followed close. They were already gaining. I sent the horse downwards to avoid a javelin, but when it exploded into flames the fire formed into a hawk and hurtled back towards me. Within moments a menagerie of birds was forcing me into acrobatics that had my heels digging into the flanks of the dead horse – Zombie the Third, I mentally named him – as I tried my best not to fall off. The other two caught up with me and I gestured towards our forces still fighting on the field, but Apprentice shook his head.

“The Duchess,” he said.

My arm whipped out to cut through the shaft of a javelin. I smothered the fire that came out with ice before it could form. Godsdamnit.

“Fine,” I yelled. “I’ll draw them off.”

I took a sharp right to avoid incineration, flicking my wrist to send a knife into my palm. The knights were on me. This was going to be tricky . They had range, damn them. The knight at the tip of the wedge rammed his lance halfway through into my mount’s body, but it was too dead to care at the moment. I leapt off my horse onto the bastard, desperately trying to convince myself this was a good idea. My armoured boots hit his chest and he fell off, but brilliant wings burst into existence. Right, falling wasn’t a problem for them. I managed to land on the saddle but my boots were slick with blood and it was bucking – even as I began to slide I saw the lance going for my knee. Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die. My foot landed on the tip of the lance and even as it ripped into the saddle I kicked the fae’s chin. Blood sprayed and teeth with it. I began to fall but managed to sink my knife into the horse’s flank, hoisting myself back up. The Name reflexes were barely enough to save my life, sword coming up to slap aside another lance so it just pierced through my only previous pauldron. Heat at my back, it was time to move. The wave of flame hawks was at my heel.

The horse was beginning to go down so I leapt off again, screaming every Mtethwa curse I knew and then some. The knight I impacted didn’t manage to bring up his lance in time, but he did manage to sock me in the mouth with an armoured hand. I tasted blood. My knife found his throat, and I took the trade gladly. Heat again, and so close I left the blade. I bunched up for another jump but it was too late. I was blown off by a storm of flame, what little skin I had exposed taking the brunt of it as even my plate warmed. I grit my teeth and formed a pane of ice to land on, licking my busted lip and pointing my sword at the fae.

“Taking all comers,” I croaked out. “You only outnumber what, fifty to one?”

Half the lances flickered with light and turned into swords as they fluidly formed in a circle around me. Bury me in numbers, would they? And this time with blades to take care of me if the lances failed. I panted quietly, and planned the timing. My control was still rough. As one, without a word, they charged. There would be no dancing around all those blades, Named or not. It was a good thing I didn’t intend to. I watched the enemy close in and, at the last moment, broke the pane. I began falling again as the knights closed in on empty space, though disappointingly enough they were too skilled for collisions to ensue. The smoothly slid around each other even as I landed with a thump atop Zombie the Third, almost slipping again before I shoved my boots into the stirrups. I wasted no time in getting the Hells out of there. That was as long as I could buy the other two. They’d gainfully employed my many near-death experiences, I saw. The Duchess of Restless Zephyr, still unconscious, hung floating in a bubble of blue light Masego was dragging behind them with a chain made of the same. I caught up with them before the knight caught up with me: dragging the fae aristocrat slowed them down.

“I swear on all the bloody Gods, Apprentice, if you had me do that just to get a live duchess I’ll bury you so deep underground you will never see light again,” I yelled.

Brow creased in concentration, he waved dismissively. We fled towards the melee, where things were not unfolding as well as I’d hoped. The attack I’d stolen from the Duchess had slowed the golden fae down, but they’d formed back up and even with the Watch backing it the Fifteenth was taking a beating. At a glance, half of Nauk’s legionaries were already dead. The entire line was buckling, even with the Deoraithe regulars propping them up. We managed to get in bow range before the knights were on us, and it was enough to make them break off at least for now. Close , I thought. I caught sight of Hakram swinging his axe towards the centre of our line, but he was having trouble with the enemy. They were fast as a Named, and though not a strong as the orc there were a lot of them. I guided my horse down, but Masego called out for me to wait. I watched my companions pass over the golden fae, and there Apprentice cut off the chain binding the bubble to him. A moment later the bubble popped out and the Duchess began to fall, dropping in the ranks of the golden fae. Nothing happened.

I glanced at Apprentice, who was fiddling with runes, and only looked away when I heard the world groan. Bone-dry winds formed around the Duchess’ body and blew up violently, turning the fae by it into empty husks that fell apart like sand. It continued to grow, the winds scattering in every direction and tearing a gaping hole in the golden fae formation . Masego, you beautiful sack of pedantry. That might just even the field out. The dead horse smoothly flew down, and I landed in front of a gaping Adjutant as the winds whipped behind me.

“Get on,” I ordered. “We’re hunting royalty.”

Chapter 31: High Noon

“My dear friends, I have a confession to make. Some creative reframing of the truth may have taken place during the planning of this coup.”
– Dread Emperor Traitorous, addressing the Order of the Unholy Obsidian upon successfully usurping the throne from himself

Now, in my experience planning the ending of a lesser god required three necessary steps. The first of them was, naturally, lies. Though this once I had found no make-believe prophecy to ensure this fight did not begin and end with my being incinerated, I had prepared a few nasty surprises. The Summer Court didn’t really bother to talk with mortals except to give them orders, as far as I knew, and that was going to come back to haunt them. The second step was a certain proficiency for violence, which between four battle-hardened Named we should have covered. There would be no talk of my taking on the Princess of High Noon by myself. That would return us to the whole incineration outcome, which I would confess I was less than fond of. Archer would have less of an impact using longknives instead of a bow, true, but with her and Adjutant at my side we might be able to keep the princess distracted long enough Apprentice could hit her with the good stuff. Well, Evil stuff. The labyrinthine mess that was adjusting my terminology now that I was consorting with the damned could wait to be sorted until there was less of a war going on.

With a little luck, at some point in the next decade I’d have a day where no one was actively trying to invade Callow. That was the dream, really.

The third step was having a right to that victory. It was different than the false prophecy I’d used to kill the Duke of Violent Squalls. One was, as I liked to think of it, plausible deniability. It gave me an excuse to win, if I could manage it. After all, I’d still had to stab the bastard to get his stuff. Having a right was more like fixing the scales, the way Fate did for heroes. It was still short of providence, the golden luck that dropped the laurels in the lap of the Heavens’ favourites, but it was close. When I’d fought Heiress and the Lone Swordsman in Liesse, I’d walked over two Named that were each a match for me on their own on my way to take the sword in the stone and my resurrection with it. The weights of the scale had been in my favour, then. It didn’t guarantee victory, but it made it easier for me to win and harder for my opponents. The signet ring had done the same thing for the Duke of Violent Squalls. I’d ‘always had it’, which at least in Arcadia had given me claim to the fae’s power before it was physically on my finger.

Finding an equivalent for the Princess of High Noon had been the hardest part of this. I couldn’t just rely on the fact that she had invaded Callow: I was, however unwillingly, doing the same to Summer. That scratched off the mark on both sides of the slate, I was betting. There were dozens of stories about hard-headed young girls facing down gods for some cause or another, but all of them about heroes. I’d wiggled my way into that sort of role before, but only when standing for a greater cause than myself. I fell short of that here. They keystone would have to be found in the way that even with my Named companions I still stood hilariously outclassed. It was an old shape, that, the underdog triumphing over the unbeatable opponent. I’d chewed on that for days, pruning story after story until I returned to one of the oldest ones I knew. From before the House of Light, when Calernians had prayed to the Gods Above and Below but also made sure to give offerings to the ancient things that strode the world. Dread Emperor Sorcerous had once famously called usurpation the essence of sorcery. There was a deeper grain of truth in that, one broader in meaning. Transgression was the essence of what it meant to be Named. Breaking the rules for your own sake or that of others. And one of the most ancient of those transgressions was the blade meant to break the Princess of High Noon. The theft of fire.

Would it be enough? I could not know. Never did, until the blades were out and chaos reigned. But I’d gotten this far by doubling down whenever the stakes were raised, and I would not flinch today.

The four of us had flown east, to where the fae clashed. Winter was not getting the better of it. The centre, where the Sword of Waning Day fought, had managed to gain ground. But the flanks were collapsing. The Riders of the Host had managed a harsh draw with the winged knights of Summer, but come out more bloodied and forced to retreat. To the sides the Summer regulars were driving back the Winter fae one step at a time, defeat already writ large. It would end with the deadwood soldiers an island in a Summer sea, collapsing when the winged knights returned to shatter their lines. While the lesser fae died in droves, the royalty that led them had fought just the same. There again, Winter was losing. The Prince of Nightfall now stood alone against the Princess of High Noon and the Prince of Deep Drought, the princess who’d been with him nowhere in sight. They were on the ground now, the armies giving all three of them a wide berth. I did not like the one-eyed prince. He’d been party to his king’s playing of me, and been free with threats besides.

Watching him battle two other royals, though, I felt a reluctant sliver of admiration. I’d not been wrong, in thinking him made for strife more than any other fae of Winter. The Princess of High Noon was more powerful., blatantly so. She moved like a storm unrelenting, howling winds stirring in the wake of every strike as she crushed everything in her way. The Prince of Deep Drought had been wounded, one of his arms held to his body only be strings of red, but he wove sorcery like an artist. Flame and light and dust, moving with Princess Sulia as if it knew her movements intimately. And facing that fury was a one-eyed man, clad in a long tunic of shade with a slender blade in hand. Trying to strike him was like trying to grasp a shadow, and though he was outmatched in every way he did not retreat a single step. None of the three paid us any mind when we took the winged horses down, dismounting more swiftly than gracefully. Hakram had been pale as sheet the whole ride, and was now visibly glad of being on solid ground. I glanced at my companions, then cleared my throat. I supposed I would have to say something before leading them into the storm.

“So we’re going to stab a god,” I said. “I mean, we’ve done it before. But this one is a few places higher in the pecking order of things not to trifle with.”

Archer snorted.

“But we’ll win because we stand for something greater than ourselves?” I gallantly attempted.

“We do?” Apprentice asked, surprise. “What?”

“Violence,” Archer suggested.

“Peace, order and the Imperial way,” Hakram offered, the filthy traitor.

“We lie a lot,” Masego mused. “It could be lies.”

“Lies and violence,” Archer proudly called out, raising a fist.

Apprentice did the same, apparently under the impression this qualified as a battle cry. I refused to grace the mutiny with a response.

“Just don’t get yourselves killed,” I sighed. “I don’t want to have to train up replacements.”

The fae royalty took notice when we joined their little tiff, the Summer fae breaking off and angling so we wouldn’t be able to flank them. The Winter prince offered us a mocking salute with his sword.

“I’m guessing the Princess of Silent Depths is dead,” I said, not bothering with greetings.

“That is mostly accurate,” the Prince of Nightfall replied, because why would fae ever be anything but vague?

“Can you handle the sorcerer?” I asked, eyeing the Prince of Deep Drought.

“He cannot,” the Summer prince sneered.

“Yes,” the one-eyed fae replied with a nasty smile. “You’ll be dancing with Sulia?”

“That’s the idea,” I agreed. “I put together a crew of miscreants and everything.”

The red-haired princess eyed me like I’d tracked mud onto her priceless carpet, or maybe like I was the mud.

“They have made an abomination of you,” she said. “More than mortal, less than fae. Destroying you will be a mercy.”

“I get that a lot,” I replied honestly.

At least in Procer, the House of Light had apparently declared me anathema to the Heavens. I knew because Black had the report framed and sent to Marchford. It hung on the wall of my bedroom across from the bed.

“Shall we begin, Granian?” the Prince of Nightfall taunted his Summer mirror. “I’ve been meaning to see how many limbs you can lose before dying.”

The Winter fae’s translucent wings burst into existence and he shot off into the sky. The Prince of Deep Drought looked at Sulia and she nodded. He followed, leaving the four of us facing the heaviest hitter the Summer Court had to offer short of its queen. Why had this seemed like a good idea again?

“I played your role, for an evening,” I told the princess. “Was a bit of a bore. Had to liven it up myself.”

“I was not made for intrigue,” the Princess of High Noon said. “This, however? I was born for it. From it. This was a blunder, Duchess. You are attempting a story, but that is worthless if you do not have the power to carry it out.”

“You think you’re my opponent,” I smiled coldly. “An interesting thought. Let’s see where it gets you.”

Three things happened in the heartbeat that followed. Princess Sulia’s wings sprang to life. Adjutant and Archer charged forward. And I spoke one word.

“ Take ,” I said.

Two columns of fire erupted from my back, not concerned by the plate in the slightest. I screamed hoarsely, but this was a necessary sacrifice. If she went up, we were done. She could just stay up there and bombard us until there was nothing left but ashes, and trying to match her up there with the horses was a good way to get ourselves killed. If felt the Winter power in my veins reacting violently, even worse than when I’d stolen sorcery from the Duchess of Restless Zephyr. These were only wings, even if made of sorcery, but the power was so much purer it felt a dozen times worse. I hastily discarded the power, heralding the first bet of this fight. What happened when I took something was still unclear in a lot of ways. Would she get the wings back even if I released them? I was hoping not, that my aspect severed the connection by appropriating what I took. If that wasn’t the case, I was going to have to pull out an upset that I really needed to come later. The flames gutted out and I let out a hiss of triumph when they didn’t reappear on the princess’ back. This might not be a permanent state of affair, but for now it was putting our foot in the door.

Apprentice was incanting, the light of runes glinting off his spectacles. We needed to keep him uninterrupted long enough to make a difference. I’d never fought at Archer’s side before, not with her using blades, but Hakram had felt like an additional limb ever since he became the Adjutant and he was used to her from all their sparring. Four blades struck as one and it felt right . Like coming home. The fae’s sword clattered against mine, beginning to carve through until ice grew to stop it. The princess ducked under the swing of Adjutant’s axe, pushing me back effortlessly and smashing Archer in the belly with her fist. The other Named was thrown off, but she landed on her feet and she was back into the fray within moments. Heat pulsed off the princess and cold came from me too met it. Her power dwarfed mine, but she would not win this uncontested. The three of us pressed the offensive. Without even a word needing to be said, we fell into a rhythm. I forced a parry, setting the fae up for Adjutant’s strike as Archer used the opening it made to attempt to draw blood.

She was beating us anyway. Flame blew Hakram off his feet, charring his face, and without him to distract Archer was caught by the throat. I desperately wove ice and shadow around the princess’ wrist, and the heartbeat it took for her to disperse it earned my companion just long enough to wriggle out of the grasp. Her breath was laboured, but at least her neck hadn’t been snapped.

“ Rampage ,” Adjutant growled.

The orc charged back into the fight, his charred skin healing. Every strike was stronger and faster than the last, until even the Princess of High Noon had to take care.

“ Flow ,” Archer managed to croak.

It was almost hypnotic to watch her longknives move. There was no single blow, every attack coming from the last in an uninterrupted stream. She moves as she had when firing arrows, but that was comparing a candle to a bonfire. Between the three of us, we almost stood a chance. I turned a probe into a lunge that would have taken the princess in the neck, but she contemptuously moved an inch to the side and ignored it. I saw her sword rise to carve through Hakram’s wrist and snapped my own, my last knife landing in my palm. I threw it at her head and the blade spun gracefully before being sliced cleanly through. The axe took her in the chest, breaking coloured mail but no skin. A boot to the stomach pushed the orc back, but he was still growing stronger. It did not slow him for long, and in the moment where the princess stood on only one leg Archer’s longkives struck. The two blades came form opposite directions, one for the knee and the other for the neck. Without missing a beat Princess Sulia jumped and lay herself flat, strikes passing above and beneath her. She twisted sharply and a boot to the face shattered Archer’s chin as she was sent sprawling to the floor.

Breath caught in my throat, I adjusted my wrist and pumped the entire arm full of my Name. I hit her at rib-height, the strength of the blow sending mail rings flying, and she smashed into the ground hard enough the earth dented. Her eyes turned gold-red, the heat grew, and Apprentice finally finished casting. Twenty-three sigils of blue light came into being above the princess with a loud hum, though not loud enough to drown out her pained groan. Heat shimmered around her and one of the sigils popped. I glanced at Adjutant, panting. The skin that had healed was beginning to flake off, the burns returning if not as grave as before. Whatever power had possessed him was gone, though. Archer was back on her feet, but her lower face was one large and bloody bruise. Another three sigils popped. We didn’t have much longer left.

“Oh, oh ,” Apprentice said, watching the struggling fae with wide eyes. “I was wrong, fundamentally wrong.”

Shit. That did not look good at all. The bespectacled mage laughed, looking utterly crazed.

“It cannot be quantified,” he muttered. “The method was erroneous from the onset. It is all made of the same building blocs, and those blocs are a figment . Mysteries, miracles of smoke and mirrors. The godhead is not behind boundaries, it is a trick of perspective .”

Power rippled across his frame, his eyes glinting with a light that had a shiver going up my spine. One of the sigils formed again, though it popped moments later.

“Apprentice,” I said carefully, and he interrupted.

“No no no,” he laughed. “Not that. Not anymore. Hierophant. Usher of mysteries. Vivisector of miracles.”

Was that what this was? A transition in the making?

“You are a god, yes?” he smiled at the Princess of High Noon, pushing up his glasses. “ Show me a miracle, then.”

He waved his arm carelessly and Archer’s jaw set itself back together with a loud crack. Fingers clutching something only he could see, the Hierophant brought his hands down. The sigils glowed so bright I had to shut my eyes in pain. Like a star being born. For all that, the words that drifted to my ears were calm.

“Everything burns,” the Princess of High Noon whispered.

Arcadia broke. The brightness passed, and I opened my eyes to a world of endless ashes. I’d called on something of the same breed, when defeating the Count of Olden Oak, but it had been nothing but a drop to this ocean. Princess Sulia stood with restored wings, hair of flame and eyes that burned with something more . Above her raised hands hovered the sun. I could feel myself buckle from the pressure alone, my hair smouldering against my sweat-soaked scalp. Masego’s spectacles shattered in his eyes and he screamed. Hakram wavered, then fell to his knees. The burns from earlier were spreading across his face. Archer’s hands shook like leaves until she stabbed a longknife into her leg, the pain allowing her to not be swept away by the weight bearing down on all of us.

“You may feel honoured,” Princess Sulia said. “I have ever only called on this to bring an end to Winter. The four of you will be the first ashes on this field formed of Creation.”

“You’re wrong,” I croaked.

“Will you try to take the sun from me, Duchess?” she said, amused. “You will burn, one way or another.”

She was right, of course. If I tried using Take I’d die before I finished speaking the word. I was the Squire, after all. No role stood behind me in this. But I’d meant it, when I’d told her I wasn’t her opponent.

“Not that,” I grinned, all teeth and malice. “There’s not four of us.”

Behind the Princess of High Noon a woman appeared, short-haired with blue-grey eyes. She wore loose leathers and her face was red with sweat.

“Yoink,” the Thief said, and stole the sun.

Chapter 32: Close

“Oh, on most days we lose. But once in a while, just once, it works. And those moments of perfect clarity where all the world is in the palm of your hand, a hundred thousand middling minds made into flawless assembly by your will? Those are worth all the rest.”
– Dread Empress Regalia II

Well, we weren’t all going to die. That was nice. If my mouthing off had been followed by Thief failing to steal the sun, I would have been real embarrassed before I got my fool ass killed. Wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about a heroine with shaky allegiances getting to shove the – possibly, I wasn’t sure exactly how this worked – literal sun in her knapsack, but it did beat dying horribly. So, you know, I was willing to chalk up that one as a win. The skin of Thief’s hand was cracking and black by the time the orb of fire disappeared, even though she’d never touched it at all, but away it went. The moment it was gone, Sulia screamed . I imagined it was a lot like losing an aspect, and when Masego had cut out mine the process had been excruciating. She collapsed to her knees and the lights went out. The not-world we were in began to collapse, wrinkling on itself, but I was having none of that. Now, if I’d pit my power against the Princess of High Noon she would have crushed me effortlessly and then maybe allowed me a moment to contemplate the sheer stupidity of my actions before ripping out my spine. This wasn’t a fight, though. Power was leaving her like a leaking sieve, and even though I suspected that even whatever was left at the end would be enough for her to beat us again I wasn’t going to give her the opportunity to get her shit together.

“ Fall ,” I said.

It hadn’t been dark on the ashy plain, not exactly. It’d been not so much darkness as the absence of light. My power filled the endless expanse, propping it up and claiming the framework for itself. I saw my companions shiver in the sudden cold, now nothing more than shaded silhouettes in boundless dark. The night sky above us was without stars, but it didn’t feel like anything was missing. A sky from before there were stars , I thought. In here, whatever this place was, my will was the only one that mattered. Masego spoke a word, but there was only silence here. Silence, cold and weight. I turned my eyes to the Princess of High Noon, saw her frame light up with steam as my aspect slowly smothered the power of Summer inside her. She fought it harder than the Count of Olden Oak had, slowing down the process to a crawl. Letting out a long breath, I closed my eyes and sharpened my mind. Black had first taught me the exercise when I’d begun to learn the sword, but I’d only understood its true worth when I came fully into my Name. My mind became as a blade, the way I would when I formed a spear of shadows, but I let myself fall deeper into the process. Distractions and stray fought fell away. Doubts were scoured clean until nothing was left but pure, sharp intent.

With a clear and resounding snap, the Princess of High Noon froze.

I opened my eyes and released the night. After the utter silence that had preceded them, the noises of the battlefield were deafening. A wave of exhaustion nearly toppled me, though it did not scatter my wits enough for it to escape my notice that my blood flow had slowed. A few exertions away from it to start turning into red sludge, if I was lucky. I was out of the game for hours, maybe days. But I’m not done as long as I can speak.

“Masego,” I rasped. “Bind her.”

Sulia wasn’t dead, oh no. When I’d made the decision of fighting here in Arcadia, even with all the odds I’d stacked in my favour, I’d hesitated for one reason. The losses I would incur had to be made worth it by a greater gain. Bleeding Summer alone was not enough to drive me to make a gambit like that, not with what I was putting on the line. There were major liabilities to fighting the fae in Creation, of course, but that in and of itself wasn’t a reason to fight them in Arcadia instead. The risks taken by giving battle in Summer were too high to justify the decision with just that. But then I’d stopped thinking of this battle as a battle alone, and placed it in the context of a campaign. There would be a final clash between my forces and the Summer Court, that much was certain in my eyes. And given that any advantage of mobility I had through my portals the fae had as well but better, when I returned to Creation there was no real way for me to dictate where that last clash happened. Considering the Legions were at their best on prepared grounds and anything but our best might just come short, that was not a recipe for victory. I’d understood that I needed something to force their hand, and that was why my soldiers and my allies were now dying on this unearthly field.

The Princess of High Noon was my leverage, and I’d not understood exactly how strong that leverage would be until only two royal fae had come to stand for Summer. There should have been three, which likely meant the Diabolist had gotten rid of one for me. I’d give this to Akua Sahelian: she was a horrid, cold-blooded and treacherous monster but when she put it all on the line she could slug it with the best of them. I was still going to stab her repeatedly and burn the corpse twice, of course, but I could respect the strength if not how she got it and how she used it. Two royals meant there were two people left to lead the armies of Summer. If the Prince of Nightfall killed his opponent, and I believed he could, that left the Queen of Summer as the only heavy hitter in her court. She wouldn’t be able to let that stand, not with Nightfall and a princess left to back the King of Winter. If the other court turned its eyes on her, and it was in their nature to do so, then she’d lose that fight and badly. With Sulia back at her side, she could maybe scrap out a draw. She needed the Princess of High Noon back, and needed her badly.

So if I dragged Sulia back to Creation, bound and gagged? Then the Queen of Summer could only come to take her back or face destruction. My bet was she’d come with her entire army, where I wanted and when I wanted. I honestly couldn’t think of another way to bring the war to a close in the next three months and some that remained of the time the Winter King had given me, and so here we were.

Hierophant, for though the change was young already I could no longer think of him by his old Name, did not immediately reply. Over his palm hovered the shards that had once been his spectacles, and though the enchantments on them were gone there was something a great deal more dangerous to be glimpsed in them now. The last thing they’d witnessed was the Summer sun in the fullness of its glory, and that light was still alive in the glass. It might never leave. Masego left the shards hovering in the air, weaving arcane patterns, and lightly touched his eyes. He could no longer see through them, I realized. He’d glimpsed a miracle and the miracle had burned away his sight. The dark-skinned mage smiled strangely, and then his fingers dug into his face. With a scream he ripped out his eyes, blood trickling down his face as the glass shards broke again and again until they were nothing but small gains. Forming into two orbs, they set themselves into his eye cavities. There was a shimmer of heat and the blood turned to red vapour as dull glass eyes replaced the ones in his hand.

“The whole Hierophant thing was kind of attractive, until you did that,” Archer said. “Way to ruin it.”

“It was a fair trade,” Masego said, voice pensive.

The bloody eyes disappeared without need for even a gesture, whisked out into the pocket dimension where he kept his tools.

“Seven pillars hold up the sky,” he said peacefully.

There was a cadence to it, the hint of an incantation. Seven wooden pillars formed around the fallen Princess Sulia, looking distinctly physical. My knowledge of sorcery was limited, but even I knew the most traditional limits of what a mage could do. It was the kind of thing that was useful to know when killing caster, and since Diabolist was one I’d made sure to learn at least the broad strokes. It was possible to turn power into material substance, but the draw should have been massive . Comparable with teleportation, and the only people who’d ever managed that were the Miezans. Masego seemed to have done it casually, and did not look winded in the slightest. Like he’d just ignored a law. Gods, what had he turned into?

“Four cardinals, one meridian,” he said. “The wheel unbroken, spokes that are not. Thou shall not leave the circle.”

Four runes appeared around the fae, linked by a circle of pale light. The ice shattered but Sulia hung in the air, faintly conscious yet unable to move. I helped up Hakram from where he was still kneeling, eyes closed and breathing irregularly. He leaned heavily on me, which almost saw the both of us toppling to the ground until Archer caught his other side and steadied us.

“Careful there, big guy,” she said. “This isn’t the place to take a nap, though I salute your attitude.”

The orc cleared his throat, but did not say anything. He was in even worse state than I was. I looked for Thief, but she was gone again. Not much about the aftermath, that one. The disappearing act wasn’t so much mysterious as it was a constant irritant. I’d been known to be, uh, less than polite on occasion but at least I didn’t leave in the middle of things. I felt the gaze on me before the entity it belonged to deigned to land. The Prince of Nightfall ignored us entirely, touching the ground by the Princess of High Noon and studying her with a harsh smile.

“Oh, Sulia,” he murmured. “The sheer indignity. You’d have been furious it if it was one of us, but mortals ? No amount of lives will allow you to wipe that shame away.”

“You killed your prince?” I asked.

He turned to me me, single eye shining with amusement.

“Very much so,” he said. “If the end ever comes, he will still be flinching when we next meet.”

“We need to break the army,” I said. “Quickly. My troops are going to begin evacuation as soon as I send the order.”

“There is nowhere she will not follow you, with Sulia in your hands,” he said. “You lack not for boldness. I wonder if I should be flattered, that your domain resembles mine so closely.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding as if I had any idea what he was talking about.

“Your third aspect,” Masego said, long accustomed to my wiles. “It is... more.”

The raven-haired man glanced at the braided mage, inclining his head by the barest fraction.

“You have good eyes, for one of your kind,” he said.

The Hierophant inclined his head in return, accepting the compliment wordlessly. The Prince of Nightfall breathed in deeply, as if he was savouring the heat, and looked up at the sky. It was still day, I saw. The light still shone. Yet there was no sun. That might be a problem. What exactly had Thief gotten her sticky fingers on?

“I will lend a vassal to escort you back to your lines, keeping to the spirit of our bargain,” the prince said. “Do not forget your end.”

How the Hells I was going to manage to pay the price he’d demanded for his assistance was a headache for another day, I decided. I looked at the battle lines and saw Summer was wavering. They’d felt the defeats that had happened on a deeper level, and it was costing them something.

“We’ve won,” I said.

“The Duke of Green Orchards will call retreat within the hour,” the fae agreed. “You killed his sister earlier, and they have no champion left to match me.”

I looked west, to the hill, and saw the silhouette had yet to move. The Prince of Nightfall followed my gaze, single eye narrowing.

“If she is not gone by dawn tomorrow, I will have my due,” he said.

I looked at him, then shrugged.

“Good luck. Gods know you’ll need it.”

—

We pursued the enemy when they retreated, but not far and not for long. I wanted Summer thinned of all the meat I could manage before we fought them again, but I was well aware that the moment Princess Sulia had been defeated an hourglass had been flipped and we wouldn’t survive the last grains running out. Masego said that, in the worst case, she could turn a journey of several days into one that would take her until nightfall. We should be able to manage that. Juniper only sent two thousand regulars across before closing the gate, the flanking force they represented taking its toll before the fae host managed to extricate itself. Mostly green recruits, I noticed. It was so very typical of my general to use a battle in goddamned Arcadia to blood her fresh recruits that I couldn’t help but smile. Juniper was Juniper. I was pretty sure if we ever invaded one of the Hells she’d just treat is as tempering exercise. The knights and the Winter fae did most of the hard work in running down whatever soldiers of Summer were cut off from the retreating host, and though it was only a rough estimate Marshal Ranker sent me an officer with her best read on the casualties. On our side, nearly six thousand. Nauk’s two thousand men at the beginning of the campaign had been whittled down to a bare five hundred. Most of the rest were Deoraithe regulars and fewer legionaries, though the Watch had allegedly lost a tenth of their number.

Summer, by Ranker’s estimates, had lost around twenty thousand of the sixty they’d brought to the plains. Among those, over a third of the ten thousand the golden fae who’d very nearly wiped out Nauk’s jesha had died. They’d suffered more from the two blasts that had been extracted from the Duchess of Restless Zephyr than mortal blades, apparently. I wasn’t looking forward to another scrap with the golden ones, and fully intended on a sit-down with the Hellhound over the subject. This had been a victory, if a bloody one. We’d traded losses at over thrice dead for every one of ours. Winter, though, had not made out so well. Twenty thousand had been led here by the Prince of Nightfall, but only nine thousand would leave the field. Their cavalry was good as done, while the winged knights of Summer still had over half their numbers, and they’d lost one of the three royals directly under the King in the battle. I wasn’t all that broken up about it, to be honest. A Winter that was better off than Summer but still weakened was very much to my advantage.

Our wounded had been sent through first, the slow work accelerated when Masego crossed into Creation with the Princess of High Noon and then used our other aristocratic prisoner to forge a second gate that our men could use to evacuate. I gave Duchess Kegan leave to use that one to get her people out at her own leisure, getting the Legions through the one at behind the palisades. It was quicker this time around, for a variety of reasons. One more gate, lesser numbers and our officers had managed the logistics of this before. It was past noon when the last few hundred began to file through, and sitting on the bloody grass I let out a sigh of relief. Masego was lying down on my left, dull glass eyes thankfully hidden by his closed eyelids. It would be a while before I got used to those. He had to be on this side to close the gate he’d crafted, he’d told, me and I’d decided to remain with him so he wouldn’t get distracted.

“The Queen won’t be able to follow us for some time,” the mage said. “There are difficulties, to something that powerful crossing in Creation. They weren’t meant to.”

“How long is some time?” I said. “A week, a month, a year? I can’t have her stuck here for too long. Not if I’m to win this war decisively.”

“No more than a month,” Hierophant said. “She would not be able to stay for much longer than that, either. She’s too deeply intertwined with Aine.”

“I can work with a month,” I grunted. “I’ll need around that long to have everything in place for our second tilt.”

“It won’t be anything like today,” Masego warned.

“They always get better, the second time around,” I agreed softly.

The others had already gone across. I’d told Archer I didn’t mind if she wanted to go have a chat with her teacher, but the other woman had shuddered and muttered something about hunting eyes . She did enjoy her dramatics. Ranger, if that was really her, still hadn’t moved. Might have been she just came to have a look? Regardless, as long as it wasn’t made my problem I was glad to wash my hands clean of the whole thing. Nothing good came out of meddling in the affairs of Calamities, even former ones. I sighed, then hoisted myself back up onto my feet. Gods, I was going to be more bruise than woman tomorrow. I offered Masego a hand, but saw his fingers were tracing the grass. Casting? No, he was trying to move the green strands. And failing.

“Oh fuck,” I whispered.

I looked ahead, to the gates. Maybe a little more than a hundred people left between the two of them, but none of them were moving. Frozen like statues. I’d seen something likes this before, shortly before getting my heart ripped out.

“She’s here,” the Hierophant said, rising unsteadily.

The difference in light was so subtle I almost missed it: it was the shadows that gave it away. Even with the sun missing, the light had been cast as if coming from the something that no longer existed. Now, though, the angle was different. It all came from above. Hand shaking, I looked up. There was no sky. Only an ocean of golden flames, as far as the eye could see. Masego began murmuring softly and with a sound like a gong transparent wards formed around the soldiers still leaving. They resumed their movement for a heartbeat, until the wards shattered.

“You said we should have had until nightfall,” I said. “Aine is days away, and she wasn’t moving.”

“No, not moving. She was casting ,” Masego said, regretful. “Time has been suspended across all of Summer.”

I cast a panicked look at my soldiers. Shit, at the gates . The Queen might be able to cross through those. If she did, we were done. All our armies wiped in moments.

“I have never done this before,” a soft voice said, awed.

In front of us stood a young girl. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen. Her skin was tanned, but not like a Taghreb or the people of the Free Cities. Like a farmer, and her hands held the calluses of one who tilled fields. Her hair was a mass of golden curls, let loose without styling. She wasn’t beautiful, the way some fae were. If would have taken her for some farmer’s daughter, with those broad shoulders and solid muscles. Her eyes were brown, unremarkable, and when she smiled at us her cheeks dimpled.

“Is this what he saw in you?” the Queen of Summer wondered. “You change the patterns.”

My mouth was dry. I had the itch to cough, but my body was still and beyond my control.

“It is not enough,” she said after a moment, and the sorrow on her face was heartbreaking. “The story will correct itself. All you represent is delay. How tired he must be, to embrace this.”

She sighed, then peered at us.

“There are five of you,” she said.

I could not even nod.

“Born under cursed stars,” she told us gently. “You most of all, Catherine Foundling. The five of you would be woe unto all you behold.”

She had no weapon in her hand but I had not felt this terrified in a very, very long time.

“I will spare you this,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s all I can do for you. Summer is not kind.”

Hierophant’s hand moved, but the Queen glanced at him and it stopped.

“If you’d had a few years, Masego,” she said. “You have not seen enough.”

Her hand rose and the sky fell. Now. Come on, now is when you come. She has to be why you’re here. I’d never heard anything more beautiful than the sound of a sword clearing the scabbard. The sky split in half and Ranger stood between us as if she had always been there. My hands were shaking, and though I abhorred the weakness it stood for I was so relieved I could move again I almost didn’t care.

“It was the Chancellor, who named us the Calamities,” the hooded woman said, a single sword in hand. “The man always had a way with words. ‘You are a calamity to friend and foe alike’. Only ever screamed when he died, though. I guess it’s hard to be witty when getting drawn and quartered.”

She hummed.

“The Woe,” Ranger said, mulling over the word. “Too broad a mantle for you five now, but you’ll grow into it.”

“I have no quarrel with you, Lady of the Lake,” the Queen of Summer said, brow creased slightly.

Just the sight of it made me want to comfort her, even remembering she’d just tried to kill us.

“Run along, kids,” Ranger said, face hooded by shadow save for the sharp grin on her face. “Once is all you get from me.”

“We could help you,” I croaked.

The blade did not move, and neither did the hand that held it. And yet for a heartbeat I felt like my throat had been cut, like blood was gushing out. The intent had been so strong it had almost become a fact.

“I dislike ignoring my impulses,” Ranger said casually. “So do not suggest that again. He would be angry, if I killed you, but we’ve been angry before. It passes.”

“My soldiers,” I said, knowing I was testing death but unwilling to leave them behind.

The Calamity shrugged carelessly.

“What are they to me?”

She couldn’t have... no, not even Black would. But I looked behind me, and there was no denying the truth. The Deoraithe, the legionaries. Nothing left but ashes. She had not protected them. Only the two of us.

“You will not leave,” the Queen of Summer said.

She spoke the words easily, and still I felt my bones creak under the weight. Ranger unsheathed her second sword and the pressure vanished.

“I looked for you, in Aine,” the Calamity said.

“It would have been a meaningless fight,” the Queen said.

The Named had already ceased to pay attention to us, I saw. She’d given us our chance, and that was all she felt she owed.

“So you had me running through a maze instead,” Ranger snorted. “Cute. No maze here now, though. Too far from your throne.”

“This strife is unnecessary,” the Queen insisted, as if she couldn’t possibly understand why this matter was still spoken of at all.

“I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced,” the Calamity laughed. “I am the Ranger. I hunt those worth hunting. Rejoice, for you qualify.”

We fled, through the ashes of men who’d fought for me not hours ago. The gates closed, and the last of Arcadia I saw was a lone silhouette standing in a storm of flame. We’d won today, I told myself. Even with how it had ended.

I should have gotten used to that bitter taste in my mouth by now.

Villainous Interlude: Cadenza

“Taxes. Taxes and triplicate forms.”
– Dread Emperor Terribilis I, upon being asked what powerful sorceries he would use to humble the High Lords

Warlock had eyes on it from the beginning.

Not scrying, for that could be traced, but delayed relays that caught images at regular intervals. Wekesa had formed enough alternating way stations that while it was possible to follow the trail back to the beginning, it would take months at a flat minimum. What Amadeus saw was puzzling, at the start. Procer sent decoys caravans, armed to the teeth, but those were seen through easily. He sent Sabah to hit the lone carts using lesser known paths, and these carried the ingots of silver and gold that were being fed to Nicae. The two first true caravans were ambushed and seized at the same location, which led him to a possible answer: consecrated grounds. By having blood spilled at the same hands at the same place, ritual weight could be crafted. That might signify his initial notion that this was a trap put in place by the Tyrant was correct, because the heroes under the White Knight would not lower themselves to use blood magic in this manner. Not with a man sworn to the Choir of Judgement at their head. Then the third caravan used a different path, and blood was spilled in a different location. He had, evidently, been incorrect. Reassessment was needed. Scribe had begun placing agents in the ranks of the Helikean army long before the war between League members began, and he turned to her for clarification.

“He caught my agents,” Eudokia said.

“All of them?” Black frowned.

“Yes,” she confirmed. “They still serve as soldiers, but any information they try to pass gets replaced by the words to a Helikean drinking song about a shepherdess and her three husbands.”

The Tyrant’s doing, then. The boy did like to pretend he has a sense of humour.

“Extraction?” he said.

“Even removing the soul from the bodies doesn’t sidestep the issue,” she said.

Name application, then, possibly an aspect. There were few sorceries in existence that could truly affect a soul in a manner more complex than cutting out parts and outside the Empire that branch of magic was not often studied. Infiltration of Helike was a resource sink, then, though one he might revisit should he need to busy the villain for a span of time. Scribe turned her focus to Nicae, at his instruction, and continued the other task he had assigned her. The fourth caravan took a different route again, and this contradicted his read of the matter. If the intent is opaque, change the perspective. Amadeus marked the locations on the map, and had Wekesa study them.

“If the next one dies here, there’s an arcane pattern being formed,” Warlock said, tapping a cattle path that would begin to sketch out a circle from a bird’s eye view.

It was not the location where the fifth caravan was destroyed. Repetition in the face of failure, Amadeus believed, indicated either incompetence or that what was perceived as ‘success’ by the beholder was not the objective. The sixth caravan passed through the initial route, and he ordered Captain to let it pass. It was possible that the later caravans had been a smokescreen to draw him away from his first thought, that of consecrated grounds.

“If that’s what they’re doing his mages are botching it,” Wekesa said. “He can still consecrate the grounds to Below like that, but if he doesn’t maintain a regular pattern then it’ll be so weak it’ll be useless. There’s a reason the old crowd uses prisoner sacrifices for the effect, it allows you to control the alignments.”

“The drivers have been women more than men,” Amadeus said.

“There’s rituals that take gender into consideration, but not this kind,” Warlock said. “And they’re exceedingly imprecise, so there’s no way they could take out Sabah. It’s too fluid a concept to be used as a solid anchor.”

That was usually the way, with cultural mores. If the intent is opaque, change the perspective . Neither consecration nor geographic location. Temporal placement? The hours where the caravans had been taken formed no useful arcane pattern, according to Warlock. Using the date by the Imperial calendar led to a dead end, but then outside Praes it was rarely used. The Free Cities counted the years from the founding of the League, but that was another dead end. The ancestral calendar of Helike was similarly useless.

“Keteran Calendar,” Warlock finally murmured, peering at a table full of opened books with a cup of wine in hand.

Amadeus adjusted his thinking, bringing the corresponding numbers to mind. Nothing that seemed relevant to him.

“Take out the second killing,” Wekesa said. “Then instead of using only the date as is, subtract using the year Sabah was born.”

The Black Knight closed his eyes, assembled the answers.

“Spell formula,” he said. “But this is ridiculously indirect.”

Warlock ignored him, scribbling ink on parchment and translating numbers to runes then speculated requirements from there.

“It’s not just that,” the Soninke grimaced.

“It would take thousands to create even a minor effect with so weak a sympathetic link,” Amadeus pointed out.

“The effect itself is how I know we’re on the wrong track,” Wekesa sighed. “Look, this is a projection of the illusion that would be formed if this formula was empowered.”

Warlock tapped the table once, and spell light glowed softly. In front of them, a hand was rotating in the air. Only the middle finger was raised.

“This is the Tyrant’s play, then,” the green-eyed man murmured. “That as good as confirms it.”

The combination of childish insult and advanced understanding of spellcrafting mechanics was telling. That a secondary pattern inserted into the primary one purely for the sake of the taunt was there at all was somewhat worrying. Amadeus had not been under the impression the Tyrant had mages this talented as his disposal, or such understanding himself. Another change of perspective was needed, but before that more information must be obtained. In a calculated risk, he sent Sabah to sack the seventh caravan. A different route, once more. Amadeus drank, watched the flames and thought. Eudokia came with her reports when the moon was high.

“The magisters were open to negotiations to have their army returned to them,” Scribe said.

“But?” the Duni prompted.

“Distraction,” she said. “They’ve already secured other means to accomplish this.”

The Tyrant. That he’d bothered to involve Stygia at all spoke volumes: they had a role to play in his ultimate intent.

“He rules Helike,” the Black Knight said. “Occupies Atalante. Has a representative from Bellerophon, struck a pact with Stygia and prepares to siege Nicae.”

Eudokia nodded without a word. She’d understood the order perfectly.

“The Bard?” he said.

“Still gathering,” she replied, and disappeared into the night.

Amadeus closed his eyes and thought. Eliminating theories one after another would take too long, and the caravans could not simply be allowed to pass. The longer Nicae could afford to import supplies from Ashur, the longer the siege stretched out and the longer he would have to remain. He could not afford to stay away from the Empire for that long, not with the... colourful rumours about what was currently unfolding there. To find the pattern, then, he would need to begin with the individual or individuals thathad crafted it. Necessary common factor? Understanding of High Arcana . Nothing less could be used for a ritual of this class. Still and silent, Amadeus counted. He had known seventeen individuals capable of using High Arcana, in his life. He brought up every single conversation he’d had with one of them, and sought commonalities in perspective. In the back of his mind, the gears ground. Too shallow a pool of information. He repeated the exercise, adding everything he’d ever read from an individual who cleared the condition to the process. Two days he stayed there, his companions knowing better than to disturb him. It was night again when he opened his eyes.

“Planar perception,” he told no one at all.

The understanding of sorcery of that level led to a different understanding of Creation as well, one divorced from the material concerns that shaped his views. To Wekesa, for example, the lay of the land they both looked at was fundamentally different. Looking at the situation through the version of this filter he could construct, he found his answer. Height . No topographical map of the region accurate enough for his purposes could be obtained, which meant direct observation. Warlock handled it, putting together the images obtained through relays.

“You’re right,” Wekesa admitted. “If you look at the pattern using the height they were killed at instead of the location, I can recognize the shape.”

“How many do they need?” he asked.

“Assuming I’m correct and the first killing was a decoy, four more,” his old friend said.

“Nine in total,” Amadeus said. “Thrice three. A killing stroke?”

“Offensive in nature, at the very least,” Warlock said. “We stop shy of what they need?”

The Black Knight smiled, very mildly.

“No,” he said. “I think not. They will get exactly what they need.”

Eudokia found him as he ate for the first time in days, methodically replenishing his strength.

“An offer was made to the Secretariat,” she said. “Penthes as well.”

The pale-skinned man chewed thoughtfully.

“He aims to be Hierarch, then,” he said.

How the Tyrant had managed to exert pressure on Bellerophon enough they would agree to this would have to be found investigated. Such a lever was too useful to be left solely in the boy’s hands.

“Assuming he secures all the votes,” Amadeus said. “Intent?”

“Broader games,” Scribe suggested. “His methodology requires constant opposition.”

That was a possibility, the green-eyed man thought. A straightforward one, however. That did not immediately disqualify it as a possible objective, but it was not a mark in its favour.

“Worst case scenario,” Eudokia asked, changing the approach.

“Tenth crusade, involving the entirety of Hasenbach’s coalition,” Amadeus replied without missing a beat. “Dead King uninvolved. Chain of Hunger unable to exert strength. Drow situation unchanged.”

“Kingdom Under?” Scribe said.

“In another expansion phase,” the Black Knight reminded her. “They will profiteer through weapon trade, at most.”

They’d left behind the question of what the Tyrant was after, and were instead studying what effect he could have on the Empire under the worst circumstances possible should he ascend to the position.

“He would be a destabilizing factor,” Scribe said, and there was no greater insult in her eyes than what she had just uttered.

“One without the ability to grab land or hamper commerce outside affordable losses,” Amadeus said. “By nature, even should he manage to align with Procer he will be damaging to them.”

Not worth directly opposing in this , the verdict was. Not unless other information surfaced that changed the forces in play.

“I’ve assembled an initial dossier,” Eudokia said.

Amadeus raised an eyebrow.

“Different face, but she has been active in Procer,” Scribe said.

“She’s behind Hasenbach?” he asked.

If the Wandering Bard had enabled the First Prince to rise, the failure in intelligence that had resulted in him being unware of this was... massive. It put everything he knew of the Proceran situation in question.

“No recorded contact,” Eudokia said. “But she was in Rhenia.”

The Black Knight was too old and far too removed from the boy he’d once been to let the dismay touch his face.

“The Augur,” he said. “There could be indirect influence. Anything further back?”

“No link to the Troubadour or the Magnificent Minstrel,” Scribe said. “But getting anything prior to the Conquest has been... difficult.”

The records had been tinkered with, she meant.

“There’s no precedent for an uninterrupted stream of consciousness,” Amadeus said.

“Heavier inheritance,” Scribe suggested.

Name dreams writ large. It was possible. Few things were not, when it came to Named.

“A line of Wandering Bards going back for centuries, advancing some collective purpose,” he said. “That is... an issue. There must be limits.”

“She has never intervened directly,” Eudokia said, and he waved his hand in irritation.

They’d both known what. It was a staple of bardic Names, being able to influence the story but rarely change it with their own hands. Power only through fronts, never wielded personally.

“Has she ever been linked to anyone not Named?” Amadeus said.

Reluctantly, Scribe shook her head. Given the incomplete records at their disposal, she was unwilling to commit fully to that theory.

“When attached to the Lone Swordsman, she operated within his moral boundaries,” Eudokia said.

Limits to her actions dictated to the story she was bound to and the nature of its heroes. Another theory to test.

“It’s her blind spots we need to to find,” he said. “The majority of the threat she represents comes from her awareness of our movements.”

Eudokia nodded. Amadeus frowned.

“Pick a target,” he said. “Assassin is at your disposal. I cannot know.”

“Risk margin?” she asked.

“I trust your judgement,” he replied.

No more need be said. Sabah killed, four more times. But as skilled as the mages of the Tyrant were, they were not Warlock. A single strand of hair was placed in the centre of the runic circle, and the curse meant to kill Captain found another target. Usurpation was, after all, the essence of sorcery. After it was done, Wekesa complimented the ritual. It was, apparently, not derivative of Praesi work in the slightest though it had been designed under the shared Trismegistan theory of magic. Behind the tall walls of Nicae, the Ashen Priestess died screaming. There was no warning, and no saving her. The ritual had been performed to kill a Named much more physically able. Amadeus approved, when he learned of it. Always kill the healer first. Targeting the White Knight might not have succeeded, and of the others the Priestess was the most apt to tip the balance in a clash. Before dawn, every practitioner involved on the attempt on Sabah’s life was dead. They left behind a note indicating they had taken their own lives out of guilt. Assassin’s sense of humour had grown whimsical of late.

“Your reasoning?” Scribe asked, after.

“No hero was involved in the story until the very end,” he said. “It was a struggle purely between villains.”

“Ah,” Eudokia said. “She can only see us when we stand opposed to her narrative?”

“Possibly,” Amadeus frowned. “Otherwise she sacrificed a heroine for no visible gain.”

“If she is bound by the White Knight’s morality, she could not do so,” Scribe said.

“Possibly,” the green-eyed man repeated. “I am... unsettled, Eudokia.”

Her eyes were still as ponds.

“The word for ‘bard’ we use comes from Old Miezan,” he said. “Language has evolved, even in our lifetime.”

“If the line were that ancient, there would be records,” Scribe said. “Unless.”

“Unless,” Amadeus agreed softly.

Unless something was cleaning up behind them, be it their Role or the Gods Above. Such a direct intervention would allow similar direct meddling from the Gods Below, of course. Balance in spirit, if not in practice. Yet he could think of only one event in Calernian history that would qualify. The creation of the Kingdom of the Dead. Which preceded written history in Praes by centuries, by conservative estimate. If the line of ‘Bards’ was that old, the Heavens had been playing a longer game than any of them. The ramifications of that were beyond the scope of his understanding, a feeling he was unused to and did not particularly care for.

“It could be Triumphant,” Eudokia said.

Triumphant cost us so much more than we gained . If she’d been the intervention of the Gods Below, they had let themselves be robbed by the opposition. Black closed his eyes.

“If she cannot be killed, she must be trapped,” he said.

He felt Scribe nod. She sat at his side, close enough to touch but never quite getting there.

“You are tired,” Eudokia said.

Innocuous words, but the deeper meaning was there.

“I am dying, I think,” he murmured.

There was a long silence.

“If Catherine wields the knife, I will destroy her,” she said, as if she was speaking of the weather. “And if I fail Hye will not.”

Amadeus did not reply. If he’d been the kind of man to pray, he would have prayed then. But he was not, so instead the gears began to turn and he wondered how many of the people he loved he would have to kill, before it was all over.

Villainous Interlude: Thunder

“We have grown to mock Tyrants for they are mad but that is a very dangerous thing. A madman thinks the world other than what it is, and in a mortal that is a harmless thing. Not so in one who moulds Creation to their will, as all Named do.”
– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

Anaxares had been named a general, at the Tyrant’s orders. Sixty-seven, the diplomat mused. He was now technically committing treason under sixty-seven different articles of Bellerophan law, and starting to wonder if he would reach a hundred before he died. His remains would be on trial for at least a decade, and he did not envy the Defender Against The People who drew the wrong lot and was made to defend his rotting corpse. It seemed to few, to have grown from middling fifty counts of treason to over sixty when made to serve in a foreign army. The law codes were in need of revising. It should have landed him roughly in the eighties. The mere fact that no difference was made between officer grades was a glaring oversight, and if allowed a few moments to make a statement before the kanenas summarily executed him he would jot down a few notes on the matter.

“Pay attention, Bellerophan,” General Basilia barked. “This is important.”

Kairos’ foremost commander was currently attempting to teach him the basics of war, as he would apparently be given command of five thousand men during the assault on the walls of Nicae. When Anaxares had asked the boy why, morbidly curious, he’d been answered only by off-putting giggles. Troubling.

“I will not. I am a diplomat in the service of the Republic,” he said. “Anyone but the officers drawn by lot learning military tactics is illegal.”

The woman glared at him, sceptical.

“Are you telling me your shithole of a city doesn’t have career officers?” she asked.

War Is Of The People, Served By The People And Ordered Only By The People.

“That would be setting apart individuals from the rest,” he said, somewhat offended on behalf of Bellerophon. “This learning can and should only be temporary, removed after it had seen lawful use.”

“Gods, no wonder you fucks have never won a war,” the general said, aghast.

Anaxares narrowed his eyes at the wicked foreign oligarch. It had been determined by the Will Of The People that enough draws counted as a victory, and therefore proof of the superiority of the Republic in all things. That this was factually incorrect by the standards of wider Calernia was irrelevant to the purposes of this conversation.

“Who do you even learn from?” Basilia asked.

“Bellerophon has secured the finest military manual in existence to train its officers,” he replied.

“ Manners of War by Tyrant Theodosius?” the general asked. “I suppose the Ars Tactica by the first Terribilis would be close enough.”

“ A Hundred Victorious Strategies ,” Anaxares said.

Ah, that made sixty-eight. Leaking of military information to The Deceived Servant Of A Grasping Despot. General Basilia’s lips twitched as if she was trying very hard not to weep or laugh.

“Isabella the Mad’s book?” she asked, voice rough.

“She was the only one to ever defeat Theodosius on the field,” the diplomat said.

“That’s, uh, a very generous assessment of the Maddened Fields,” General Basilia said, and tried to pass her convulsive laughter for a cough.

He sighed. Mockery, he thought, was the last refuge of those afraid of the First And Mightiest Of The Free Cities, May She Reign Forever.

“Well, at least you haven’t learned any bad habits,” she said. “You won’t be on the first wave over the walls, anyway, if you listen to your commanders you should be fine.”

“I will not,” Anaxares said.

The woman frowned.

“I will actively attempt to hinder your victory, should I remain in a position of authority,” he informed her serenely.

“I’ll remove you from command,” she threatened.

“Do so,” he said. “Please.”

Was there a lawful difference between having temporarily served in a foreign army and remaining in service? Ah, yes, the third amendment. Unfortunately it only applied after death, with the assumption being that any Bellerophan committing such treason would immediately be killed before trial could take place. Another area in need of clarification to be pointed out to the Republic.

“The Tyrant has his reasons,” Basilia finally said. “He sees further than anyone else.”

“He is drunk with power,” Anaxares told her gently. “And quite possibly mad.”

“They’re all mad, diplomat,” the woman said, smiling. “That’s why they win. Theodosius took on the entire Principate at its peak and walked away the winner. That takes something stranger than courage. Oh, we have the finest army on Calernia don’t get me wrong. We can handle thrice our number in what everyone else has to field. But it’s with a Tyrant on the throne that we shine, and it was the fortune of my life to be born under one.”

Anaxares was not unaware of the blinders the Republic had set around his eyes, though he’d never seen the need to attempt to take them off. It was his first time, however, seeing the same thing on the face of someone not from Bellerophon. How strange, that they too could have faith in something greater. It took the diplomat tipping over a carafe of wine over three maps and wilfully misremembering the names of his commanders before the Helikean gave up in schooling him. Kairos sent for him, but when he entered the tent there was no sign of the Tyrant. Seven people stood stiffly under the silk panes, eyeing the embroidery with cold mistrust. And good reason. It was gold thread, a blatant misuse of wealth that should be in the hands of the people.

“Diplomat Anaxares,” a woman said, tonelessly.

Kanenas . She was not even trying to hide it. The others all had that muted look on their faces that would have betrayed their function as well, had the Bellerophan been traitorous enough to attempt to find such a thing out. Anaxares did not bow, for that was a foreign flourish judiciously disposed of by the Republic. All men were equal, even with those who could kill him with a thought.

“I have committed treason on sixty-eight counts,” he said, and calmly listed them.

The longer he spoke, the more the tension left his shoulders. It was not that Anaxares had ever expected to live through any of this, or even dedicated a great deal of thought to the matter. It was, after all, out of his hands. But it was a relief, that this strange affair finally be closed. That his fate had been left dangling had been a burr in his boots, an irritant. His existence and the contradiction it represented to the truth of Bellerophon should not have been left so long unanswered.

“If the Republic is willing to provide ink and parchment, I have comments to submit to the eyes of the people for after my execution,” he said.

He’d never considered using Helikean tools. No proper Bellerophan would have read anything written with them. The seven kanenas studied him.

“Your pending execution has been suspended by vote,” a man said. “Your services to the people have made you a Person of Value.”

The diplomat watched the seven other people in the tent. They stared back, unblinking. Something rose inside of him as the silence continued, something he had not felt in a very long time. He’d thought the years had scoured it out of him, but perhaps that had been vanity. It was not hope, of course. He had no use for that. It was anger . Harsh, unforgiving fury. How dare they? How dare they turn on what they should be, on everything they should stand for?

“No,” he hissed. “This is unacceptable .”

“This committee has been empowered to record and respond to your words,” the woman who’d spoken earlier replied flatly.

“There is no such thing as Person of Value,” Anaxares snarled. “If the people have decreed this, the people are wrong and in need of purging. We are a Republic of laws . I have broken these laws. I must be executed according to them.”

“To go against the Will of the People is treason,” another woman said.

“Then execute me, by all the Gods,” he shouted. “The people have committed treason against the Republic through this vote. This is how he wins , you fools. By bending what we are. It only needs to happen once and everything we’ve built is stained.”

Eyes hard, he stared them down.

“We are the Republic of Bellerophon,” he said through gritted teeth. “We do not compromise. We do not make exceptions . I will slit my own throat before allowing this.”

“Correct,” the man said.

“Correct,” another man said, and a woman with him.

“Treason,” the woman from earlier replied.

The air in the tent grew thick with sorcery as all seven kanenas went still. Something broke with a sickening crunch behind the face of the three who’d agreed with him. Anaxares did not look as the bodies droppedd. Citizens did not get involved in the debates of the kanenas , or the grisly ends they inevitably came to.

“You are forbidden to commit suicide by law,” the woman said. “And to wilfully take actions that will result in your death as well.”

“You can’t do this,” Anaxares said.

He was genuinely afraid for the first time since boyhood. This... Gods, what was this? It was wrong, all wrong, something had broken and he needed to Mend it.

“We do nothing, diplomat,” a man said. “The People Have Spoken.”

They left him there, shivering in his own sweat. His hands shook and he had to sit for his legs would not longer bear the weight of him. Nightfall was coming, and with it the assault on Nicaw. The armies were gathered, but he cared nothing for it. Yet he would have to lead the soldiers, for if he did not the Tyrant might decide to kill him and he was forbidden by law to chance this. The boy. The boy was behind this, one way or another. Kairos was waiting for him on a throne that overlooked the walls, all grey stone with a dozen gargoyles fanning him and feeding him grapes. He had a cup in hand, though not of wine. Juice of some sort.

“What did you do,” Anaxares demanded. “ What did you do? ”

The Tyrant of Helike laughed, laughed with his red eye shining and his weak arm clutching at his robes like claws.

“Oh yes,” Kairos Theodosian murmured. “You’ll do nicely.”

“You’ve tainted us,” the diplomat said.

“I gave them what they wanted most, deep down,” the Tyrant said. “Under all the laws and the lies.”

A gargoyle waddled up to him, stone wings folded over its back, and offered a wineskin. The Bellerophan saw it too well. His eyesight should not be this good, all these minute fractures in the bespelled rock should never have been noticeable. That realization brought exhaustion with it that had him half-toppling on the platform the throne was set on. He took the skin and drank deep, drowning and drowned.

“Would you like to hear a story, Anaxares?” the Tyrant asked. “It’s a thing of beauty, this one.”

“This must be unmade,” the diplomat begged.

“Oh, it’s too late for that,” Kairos smiled. “Much, much too late. This story, my dearest friend, is about three people.”

Anaxares’ hands were no longer shaking, his body numb at the horror of what was hapening.

“The first is a monster,” Kairos said. “She’s not like the others monsters, though. She has no face and as many lives as there are stars, and behind those veils only one single burning desire. It’s a thing I can see, you know. What people Wish . And when I look at her, what I see is glorious .”

“The Wandering Bard,” Anaxares croaked.

“Now, this monster she has plans and plans and plans,” the Tyrant sighed admiringly. “So many irons and so many fires. She doesn’t care about any of us, when it comes down to it. All she looks at is the line in the sand that’s just a bit above the reach of high tide, and we can’t have that now can we? She’s not real picky about what she’ll use to wipe it away, practical creature that she is.”

Kairos leaned closer, grinning widely.

“Let me tell you a secret, my friend,” he whispered. “She’s already won. The opposition was watching the wrong fire the whole time, and the intricacy of the trap is exquisite . She made the kill without them ever seeing her.”

“She’s losing,” Anaxares said. “The Calamities killed one of her heroes with your own sorcery.”

“No no no,” the Tyrant said. “You’re looking at it all wrong. Even if my pretty little mages had been untroubled, the Beast would have survived. The Healer should have too, life split in half with her sister. A touching story of sisterly love, if you care for that sort of thing. She didn’t because she was a sacrifice . Her weight was stolen, because there was another use for it. With nothing you can only trade for nothing.”

“Then you are a pawn as well,” the diplomat said. “In the Bard’s game.”

“Funny thing, control,” the boy mused. “Everybody thinks they have it. Because they follow Fate or fight it, because they see the lines or make them. No one is in control, Anaxares. Not even the Gods, otherwise what would be the point of Creation? We’re not the answer, we’re the question. The book even says so.”

The cripple hacked out a laugh, patting himself.

“She thinks I made you to kill me,” Kairos said. “She’s wrong, my dearest bosom companion. I’m not some Praesi of the old breed, oh no. I have more unusual ambitions. But here I am, getting ahead of myself. We have a story, yes? The second person is not a person at all. He is a thing .”

The hate and contempt in the boy’s voice had an almost physical weight to it.

“He thinks he’s a person and that’s the most disgusting part,” the Tyrant smiled. “Cogs and wheels and he started out thinking it was about being right, about being fair, but it hasn’t been like that in a long time. He just wants to win, but it’s a kind of victory that means nothing at all. That poor, blind pile of cogs.”

Kairos tittered.

“He thinks what runs him is reason but that is a conceit,” the Tyrant said gleefully. “That will sting, when the lie is stripped away. He thinks he’s above pride, you see, but that’s about all that’s left of him because he thinks everyone lives by his rules, Anaxares. Even if the ends aren’t the same, he thinks the means are.”

The boy’s good hand rose, fingers walking the arm of the throne like some small nimble creature. The odd-eyed villain snapped his fist shut instead of walking it off.

“Just like that,” he said. “Plot and plan and seize a crown at the end, even if this one isn’t really a crown. More like an agreement, and you know I have a weakness for those. The old Emperors, they got it. That the Empire was the tool, not the aim. But in his little head Praes is the centre of the world, and as long as he thinks like that Aoede is going to whip him again and again, if you’ll forgive my language.”

“She’s going to kill him,” the diplomat said.

“Of course not, my beauteous blooming flower,” the Tyrant tutted. “Nothing so crass. She’s going to hurt him. And when the cold thing turns into a wounded animal, well, that’s when he starts making mistakes.”

“And the third person is you,” Anaxares said. “Pulling all the strings.”

Kairos turned to him then, and the smile on his face was one of pure and childlike joy. The Bellerophan had never seen anything half so terrifying.

“Gotcha,” he said, like a child pulling a prank.

The cripple shivered under the setting sun, his face almost feverish.

“I heard a story about one of the first kings of Helike, once,” he said. “His father had gathered a great menagerie of animals, it goes. Peacocks and great lizards, gazelles and aurochs from all over Calernia and beyond. And one lion as well, brought in as a cub. It lived in a cage all its life, fed choice cuts of meat meant behind bars. So the first thing that king did, when he took the throne, was open all the doors.”

The Tyrant hummed.

“I heard a lot of reasons why he might have done that,” the odd-eyed boy said. “Revenge on a father who cared more for animals than him, getting rid of expensive frivolity and even because he believed caging animals was wrong. I think, though, that I understand him. Just a little.”

Kairos leaned forward.

“I think what he wanted was to see if a lion was still a lion, having lived in a cage all its life,” he confided. “I think he just... wanted to see what would happen.”

“What did?” Anaxares asked, tone rough.

“The lion slaughtered them all,” the Tyrant of Helike grinned, and the red in his eye was an endless sea of blood. “Nature tells, my friend. Nature always tells.

The boy’s grinned widened, long and sharp and pearly white.

“I wonder what your nature is, Hierarch.”

It was a title and a curse, the ruling seat of the League that had only once been filled since the founding.

It was all these things, but most of all it was a Name.

Villainous Interlude: Calamity I

“That’s the thing with invincibility. You have it until you don’t.”
– Dread Empress Prudence the First, the ‘Frequently Vanquished’

Nicae had been built thrice, with three different intents. The original settlement had spawned from the federation of a handful of fishing villages banding together to facilitate trade with the Baalite colonists settling the shores of Ashur after having absorbed or exterminated the tribes that lived there. The shape of them could still be seen, the three largest of those villages having over the centuries grown into the three ports of the city. The second time had come after Stygia took half the infant Free Cities by military force, back in the ancient days where they were the only Calernians to have a standing army. Nicae was occupied for decades, until the Stygian army attempted to force their general onto the throne of Stygia and the chain of events that would lead to all freeborn Stygians being forbidden to take arms began and heralded the collapse of the fledgling Stygian empire. The office of Basileus was proclaimed as absolute ruler, tall walls built to shield the people from marauders and a war fleet built. What was left of that intent was now known as the Old City, the beating heart of power in the maritime city, raised in old stone and winding streets.

The third and last time Nicea was built anew was after the Second Samite War, when repeated defeats at the hands of the Ashuran fleets proved the ruling Basilea’s incompetence in matters of war beyond question. So the office of Strategos was born, the admiral who’d managed to bring them back from the brink give control over all military affairs and promptly overstepping his given powers by raising a second set of walls to circle the slums that had grown past the old ones and ordering the construction of the Greenstone Rampart. A set of greenstone towers jutting out from the sea and protecting the three ports, warded intensively and bristling with dwarven engines. There had been foresight in this, in Black’s opinion. Though Nicae had never won their wars over rule of the Samite Gulf in the centuries that followed, the Greenstone Rampart ensured the city itself never fell from the sea. Ashur had to settle for terms instead of subjugation, and Nicean sails continued to be seen in every ports – if never quite as free to trade as they would have liked.

The city had been built to resist armies not led by villains, unlike the hardened castles of Callow, and it showed. If Summerholm had been assaulted by a handful of floating towers as Nicae was, the Royal Guards would have been focusing trebuchet fire from the positions behind the walls to bring them down before the outer rampart could be overrun. All that the Niceans managed was sporadic ballista fire that did little more than chip at the foundations. The massive ramps being tugged forward by enslaved citizens of Atalante and Delos lumbered forward, archers killing the slaves by the score by barely slowing the advance. A mistake, this. They would run out of arrows long before the Tyrant ran out of expendables. How it would unfold from there was as good as writ, if the heroes did not get involved. The Stygian phalanxes would climb the ramps and scatter the mercenaries and militia that held the rampart, forcing the Niceans back behind the taller walls of the Old City as the Helikean army passed through the gates untouched. From there, it would be butchery. The armies of Helike were better fit for field battles than siege, but their infantry was hardened and well-armed.

The famous Helikean horse would not be able to bring their full strength to bear inside cramped streets, would not be able to used their devastating combination of horse archery and spears, but they would run down scattered mercenaries like animals. This was the writ of the battle, as it stood. The only question was of where the heroes would intervene to attempt to turn the tides. The outer walls seemed the most likely stage, for whether it held or broke would decide the battle. Yet the towers were hero-bait in its finest incarnation. Amadeus was not unaware of the tactical advantages that having a force in the sky gave, against a mundane army, but there was a reason he’d stamped down on any notion of the Legions of Terror fielding them. There were practical concerns, like the logistics of feeding a host that was leagues above the ground and the requirements to raising such a fortress in the first place, but most of all it was that flying fortresses tended to crash . It was like hanging a sword with rope above the heads of the men in that fortress and sending a formal invitation to any present hero to cut it. Whatever fleeting advantage was gained by the fielding of the fortress was inevitably overshadowed by the massive costs incurred when it was brought down.

“Slid past their wards,” Wekesa whispered in his ear over the enchanted piece of silver he’d inserted under the skin. “Someone tried to improve them recently, but their caster has more breadth than depths. Scrying patterns in place.”

“Locations,” Black said.

“Hedge Wizard is headed for the towers,” Warlock replied after a moment. “Valiant Champion with the Proceran fantassins on the wall. Can’t find the White Knight or the Bard, though the scrying grows unstable over on three, twelve to fifteen diameter. I’d say our boy Hanno got his hands on an amulet to scramble us.”

Tricks rarely worked twice on heroes. It would have been overly optimistic to believe that the enemy would not seek to neuter the tactics they’d displayed last time, even if this was only a mildly effective parry. As the communication spell that connected Wekesa to Amadeus and Sabah was derivative of scrying, it was likely it would be made ineffective when the Duni engaged the White Knight. Only inexact sorcery prior to the distance being closed could feasibly be deployed.

“No sign of the Ashen Priestess?” Amadeus asked.

“Not a one,” Wekesa confirmed. “She might actually be dead, Amadeus.”

“I imagine she will be,” the Black Knight replied. “Until it is decisive for the heroes that she is not. Too many third aspects remain unknowns for us to assume we’ve seen the last of her.”

“Once in a while,” Warlock said amusedly, “we do take Creation by surprise. We might have gotten lucky, for all you know, hit some weakness we were unaware of.”

“We do not belong to the side that gets lucky, my friend,” Amadeus murmured.

The villain closed his eyes, weighing his options.

“Sabah, keep an eye on the walls,” he said. “Do not back the Tyrant against the Champion unless it is a certainty the city will hold.”

“And if he’s about to die?” the Taghreb replied through the spell.

“Let him,” Black said. “Our only concerns are that Nicae falls and the White Knight dies. He is essential to neither.”

“I hear you,” she said.

The instructions were enough that she would be able to tap into Obey, if it proved necessary.

“Wekesa,” he said.

“The Hedge Wizard again, I’m guessing,” he mused.

“Yes,” Amadeus confirmed. “And more. Red Skies protocol.”

There was a lengthy moment of silence.

“We haven’t gone that far since the Conquest,” Wekesa said, and his voice was pleased. “You’re certain? No collateral damage concerns?”

“Reputational damage is irrelevant if the Tyrant becomes the Hierarch of the Free Cities,” the green-eyed man murmured. “All targets of opportunity are fair game. Use what you will, save for what falls under the Dark Day protocol.”

“Ah, you sweet thing,” Warlock drawled. “I have been meaning to try out a few spells.”

Power bloomed in the distance. The stars above them began to grow crimson, staining the night, and the Black Knight moved. He had a hero to kill.

—

He’d crafted another decoy, for he had no reason not to. As expected, the Hedge Wizard ignored it. She flew directly for the towers, her great wings flapping on one of the three dozen open scrying links he’d crafted. It had taken decades to refine this particular method of farsight, creating runic arrays that would grant him eyes wherever he needed them without actively needing his attention and steering. It was also one of the reasons Wekesa rarely took the field in person: the arrays were exceedingly easy to disrupt, if found. Using distractions to keep the enemy guessing at his true locations while he worked his Gift from behind wards was the most effective use of his abilities. Warlock did occasionally miss the vindictive pleasure of incinerating the opposition in person, but he was no longer a young man. Incautious villains did not get to live as long as he had.

“It will be good night,” he smiled, watching the battle unfold.

How long had it been, since Amadeus had granted him this much leeway on the field? Too long. Oh, his old friend still forbade the use of any sorcery that would grow unchecked if not stopped and any permanent rifts in Creation, but Wekesa was not eager to use the spells that would fall under the Dark Day protocol. Magical plagues had a nasty habit of growing beyond anyone’s control, and only a fool would expect to keep a leash on a permanent portal linking to another dimension. The Dead King had managed it, some Soninke argued, but even millennia past that man’s apotheosis mages still sifted through the remains of his reign to advance their craft. Warlock was disinclined to renounce his humanity for another form of immortality when villainy alone could yield the same results, properly used. It was a poor man’s escape of the Final Shackles, anyway. For all his power, the Dead King remained undead. His nature had grown eminently less changeable, his ability to learn crippled, while humanity... Humanity was such a miraculous fluctuating thing. Tikoloshe would not have remained so eternally fascinated by it otherwise.

Behind his wards, watching it all, Wekesa stroked his beard and found three opportunities. The first was the outer walls. Sabah had yet to get involved there, and so he need not be worried about her being caught in the crossfire. Dead under the walls, killed in hatred. And now the the Stygian phalanx was marching up the ramps, more blood would flow. Power was largely irrelevant to what he was setting out to accomplish, for the kind of force that could be gathered by mass sacrifices and theft of godhead was a blunt instrument. It would be used then spent, leaving the practitioner that called on it spent as well. No, what he sought was affinity . Finding similarities on both sides of the boundary before thinning it enough the realities grew muddled and overlapping. It was not a flawless method, of course. There were an infinity of Hells and more adjacent dimensions than even he could discover, but he could only use those he knew of. Knowledge, as in all things, was the great limitation.

Wekesa knew many things, though, secrets old and new ripped from ancient tomes and the minds of lesser gods alike.

“ Imbricate ,” he murmured.

Two-hundredth and seventy-third Hell. The realm of slaughter unending and meaningless. On the weaker side of the scale, weak in devils and imprisoned souls both, but it was so very close. The Tyrant was responsible for it, stripping this battle of much meaning save his own whims. The blood across the field and walls shivered, then boiled. Guiding the alignment took all his concentration, balancing the power he was willing to invest through the runic arrays to the depth of imbrication that was useful. Creation and Hell snapped into place, and his lips quirked. Men rose around the ramps and on the wall, missing limbs and bleeding and every one of them dead. The corpses took up their weapons, broken or whole, and those that could not struck with bare hands instead. Driven by endless hatred the dead turned on everything in sight, including each other. Screams and chaos spread across the battlefield, but Wekesa paid no attention. The imbrication would fade away within the hour, and needed no more supervision from his will. Now, where was the little Wizard?

Inside one of the towers, if the trail of her Name could be trusted. Which it could not, given there were tricks to fake this and given the nature of her Role she was all but mandated to have them. An interesting thing, this Name. The Hedge Wizard relied on providence more than the average hero, in his eyes. By Heavenly mandate she would always have the exact trick needed to escape the trouble she was in, more irritatingly hard to kill a pest than any save a bardic Named. Abandoning subtlety was occasionally needed to deal with the likes of her. The Tyrant had lost his finest mages, and so his floating towers were even more unstable than ones the heroes had wrecked at Delos. No doubt the boy expected to detonate them at some point in the battle, and Wekesa would grant him his wish this once. Delving past the outer wards was a thing of ease, given that there were Helikean standard and so a century of learning behind anything come of the Wasteland, or even Callow for that matter. Callowan Gifted were largely amateurs borne of a particularly shoddy apprenticeship system, but centuries of being assaulted by Praesi mages had forced them to develop very effective, if simplistic, warding schemes.

Actually attacking the core was unnecessary. The conversion array that kept the tower afloat was so flimsy any proper disruption would lead to cascading failures. Wekesa’s own offensive, meant to manifest limited kinetic force within the range of a mile at a regrettably high conversion rate, shone and one single rune in the tower’s array was damaged. Thirty heartbeats later the tower exploded, heated rocks carving a swath of destruction in the outer city. Civilian casualties, he noted, would not be light. Ah, well. It wasn’t like Amadeus was trying to annex this one. The scrying spell he had pointed at the location blanked until he adjusted the parameters, reforming to deal with the arcane energies still filling the air. The Hedge Wizard had been inside, he saw. Yet remained largely unharmed by the explosion. Half-phasing into Arcadia, by the likes of it. Clever, but given the unstable nature of the tower’s array the energy would have scattered across the spectrum. She would have been affected. The Hedge Wizard, running across floating tiles, began to head for his decoy. Warlock smiled fondly. Trying to trace his location through it, was she?

“Ah, youth,” he said.

He’d cleaned off the rust. It was time, he supposed, to get serious.

—

The young woman was bleeding, bent in a corner and moaning in pain. The White Knight slowed as he came by her and came close. Amadeus raised an eyebrow, but Hanno was not so foolish as that. The sword cleared the scabbard in an instant, cutting through the animated corpse’s neck. A twist of will had the other three corpses he’d scattered across the rooftops pull the triggers of the crossbows just as the hero’s sword began to touch flesh. It was not enough. The sword flashed out and parried the two bolts that would have taken him in the back, letting the third pass him by for it would not have touched him. Mistake . The third bolt hit the goblinfire ball he’d put inside the woman and green flames erupted instantly. The Light formed a blinding halo around the White Knight before the fire could touch him, the Heavenly power soon devoured but allowing him to retreat without it touching his flesh. There was only so much of the Light the man could call on without hollowing himself out, but Black knew better than to turn a death match with a hero into a matter of endurance. That way lay the wiping of a bloody lip, a trite quote from the Book of All Things and an improbably second wind when he himself was at the end of his rope.

The three corpses leapt down the rooftops and ran towards the White Knight, open and clearly visible wounds across their bellies. The kind a villain might put a ball of goblinfire in, if he so wished. Amadeus had not, of course. It would have been a waste of substance he had a limited stock of as well as the introduction of an uncontrollable factor to a battlefield where precision would be key. But Hanno could not afford the chance, and so he backed away to give himself room. Mistake. Amadeus’ shadow snaked across the gloom behind him, puncturing the loose pavestones and detonating the demolition charge under his feet. The explosion would have earned broken bones from less powerful a Named, but for a White Knight the only advantage won was toppling him. Another twist of will and three crossbow bolts whistled at his prone form. He rolled over at the last moment, evading all but one, yet that last bolt struck his arm. Not his sword-arm, unfortunately, but he would have to deal with the wound regardless. The three corpses retreated out of sight. Hanno ripped the bolt out of his arms and cauterized the wound with Light, predictably.

“Is this all you amount to, Black Knight?” he called out. “Smoke and mirrors, ambushes and a handful of tricks.”

As if engaging a hero on their own terms was anything but sheer stupidity. The provocation was not a very skilful one, a betrayal of the man’s youth for all the danger he represented. Amadeus gave him what he wanted. From the ruins of a home across the street, a corpse in armour identical to his plate strode out. Unsheathing a plain steel sword, the undead offered Hanno a mocking blade salute. The hero charged, but he had learned. He flared the Light before coming close to the puppet, shrugging off the crossbow fire from the other dead. Mistake. There was no need for him to arrange detonation when the hero’s blade was wreathed in Light. The sword went clean through the plate and the goblinfire blew, spreading across the edge. The White Knight hastily dropped it, and there went the shapeshifting weapon that was of clear Gigantes make. The hero’s lips turned to a snarl and he made a blade of Light. A liability to exploited. Killing heroes, in Amadeus’ eyes, was much like peeling an onion.

Layer by layer it went, until all that remained was the weeping.

—

Gods, she’d forgotten how nightmarish it got when Warlock went off the deep end. The sky had gone red and the dead were rising. Typical. That strange Levantine girl was having the time of her life with it, though, and so was the Tyrant. He’d begun screeching about treachery from his hovering throne, pleased as a cat that got the cream. The boys were underestimating this one, she thought. Amadeus thought he was straight out of the old Imperial mould and so doomed to shoot himself in the foot at his moment of triumph, but he did not smell of that kind of crazy to her. Whatever schemes he had going, and Sabah did not care to parse out the insane maze that would be, she doubted they would involve rising too high. He was the kind of irritating prick that made a virtue of defeat and pissing everybody off, just like the Heir had been. And Wekesa, well, he did tend to think that everybody that wasn’t a mage was a little slow. Considering he’d been set to starve or freeze to death in the Wasteland while on the run as Apprentice, back when he’d met Amadeus, she was a little amused at how he kept turning up his nose at practical skills. Like starting a fire without getting a devil involved.

The Champion kept the wall afloat when the mercenaries began to run by using an aspect, though Sabah was too far to hear what it was. Whatever it’d been, though, it had turned Proceran rabbits to lions. They were carving their way straight into the Stygian phalanx, not that the Tyrant seemed to care. When it came to the two of them, the Taghreb judged it an even match. The heroine never managed to land a proper hit, but the beams of light the villain used hardly scuffed her plate. Sabah sympathized, having taken a swing at the muscled girl herself in the past. Anything but the war hammer the Levantine with the badger helm walked off: it was like hitting a wall. A different story when the Beast came out, but there weren’t a lot of things in Creation that could ignore Sabah when she let that loose. Captain sniffed the air, and grimaced at what she got from it. Brimstone, and the red in the sky was getting deeper. Sooner or later something nasty was going to start raining down. Better if she could finish off her heroine before it got to that.

She seemed like a good kid, the Champion. Heart in the right place, spoiling for a fight the way the young ones often were. Heroes still cutting their teeth tended to think they were invincible, before running into their first proper villain. Those that survived that emerged stronger form the experience, and there lay the problem. Sabah didn’t particularly care if someone worshipped the Heavens instead of the Gods Below. Her people’s deities were most loved when they were looking somewhere else. Imagine the kind of pricks they’d be if we weren’t on their side , Sabah , her mother had been fond of saying. The issue was that when heroes got a little killing under their belt they tended to go looking for a bigger fight, and right now Praes was the biggest fight to be had on the continent. Except for the Kingdom of the Dead, but who’d be dumb enough to try that? Hye didn’t count, she had an odd knack for killing things she shouldn’t in the place where she should have godsdamned common sense. Still, it was a shame. The Champion truly did seem like a good kid.

Sabah had killed a lot of good kids, over the years.

Didn’t particularly enjoy it, but if the choice was between the people she loved and some young fools who thought they could fix the world with a spell or a sword, well, that wasn’t a choice at all. World didn’t really want to be fixed. Wasn’t supposed to be. But the broken chariot kept on rolling down the road, so why fuck with what worked? Amadeus had tried it for forty years and he’d had good days for a toil, but a lot more bad ones. Wekesa had understood quicker, washed his hands of the whole thing and instead taken care of his son and his experiments. But Sabah wasn’t willing to let Amadeus into the deep end with only Eudokia to prop him up, so Captain she had been. Was and would be. Sometimes that meant doing things she didn’t like, but she doubted anyone in the world enjoyed their work everyday. She got her hands bloody, but it could have been worse. The truly dark things Amadeus always did himself. He’d never been one to let others do his dirty work for him, if he could avoid it. Sabah watched the fight on the ramparts turn, biding her time, and she was not made to linger.

The Tyrant summoned a stream of what looked like spectres – he’d regret letting something like those loose with Wekesa on the battlefield, she mused – and while the Champion held the mercenaries around her died until she was forced to retreat. Best keep an eye on that, Captain mused. Wouldn’t do to let the girl meddle in Amadeus’ fight with her leader.

Sabah followed the heroine into the streets, eerily quiet for a woman her size.

Dues

“Even the kindest hero stands over a spreading graveyard.”
– Theodore Langman, Wizard of the West

Vivienne Dartwick had wondered, about what made her different from all the other pickpockets and thieves that haunted the nights of Southpool. As far as she could tell it was that she didn’t need to steal. Her father had been a baron under the Count of Southpool, but never a martial man and so though he had sent troops to join the armies failing to turn back the Conquest he’d never fought in a battle himself. He was a baron no longer, since all noble titles in the county had been abolished after the first Imperial Governor was appointed, but even after the Praesi took their cut Vivienne’s family remained wealthier than a talented merchant could hope to become with a lifetime of work. Her mother had passed in a hunting accident when she’d been young, and the strangeness of that had been what set her on her path. Mother had been a devil with a bow and a better rider, so her mount getting scared by a wolf and and breaking her ribs in panic stretched credulity, somewhat. She’d only been seven, back then, and Father had made sure to keep her in the dark. It had worked for a few years, but not forever.

He’d gotten forgetful in his old age, and the bar on his study’s door could be forced up if the lock wasn’t properly turned. Vivienne had only gone in to smoke his pipe since he never let her try it, but when rustling through the drawers to find it she’d seen her mother’s name on parchment. Her father had petitioned Governess Ife, successor to the original governor, to investigate the circumstances of her mother’s death. He’d called them highly suspicious. The letter the Governess sent back was dripping with implied threats and made a point of mentioning rebel elements. Treason didn’t fetch the same punishment everywhere, in Callow, since the governors were given free rein to run their territory as they wished. She’d heard that in the south if someone got caught the entire family was executed. In Southpool, though, it was only the directly implicated that got the noose. The families got away with a harsh fine. She’d remembered, then, that around the time of her mother’s death Father had become very frugal for a few months.

That painted a picture she did not like.

It wasn’t that her family was in trouble, not anymore. Her father had sold a smithy they’d once owned, which he said wasn’t turning up much a profit under the Tower’s weapons prohibitions anyway. But when she next had her lessons with her tutor, Vivienne made sure to ask the man about laws. About how much the fine for being associated with treasonous elements was. It... wasn’t a small sum. She could understand why Father had cut corners until he could find a buyer for the smith. But it was a very cheap price, for her mother’s life. There was something wrong about the Praesi killing her mother and making her family pay for it. It was like an itch in the back of her mind she couldn’t scratch. It should have been them it cost, not her father. And that was when it began, when she decided to make right. Gold couldn’t ever make up for her mother, but she could make them feel it. The number she came up with was a whim. Ten times what they’d fined, and once more to make up for the fine itself. It was enough to build three manors in the country, she knew, but anything less would have an insult.

Vivienne knew she wasn’t as pretty as some of the other noble girls, not matter how nice her dresses and how many ribbons the maids put in her hair, but she wasn’t ugly and boys got dumb when you smiled at them and pretended they were interesting. It wasn’t hard to find one of the Imperial orphanage boys near Kingspot Alley that ditched their lessons to mess around in the streets and knew how to pick a pocket. Talking the boy into teaching her was a lot harder, and she had to go through the kitchen for honeybread when the cooks were asleep before he agreed. Vivienne found she had a knack for it. She’d always been good with her hands, even if her handwriting was wobbly, and if she apologized when running into people all they saw was a little girl who felt real sorry, yessir. Getting her tutor to pretend she was still at her lessons was harder, but he’d been sleeping with one of the maids and Father would have thrown him out if he knew. As long as she kept pace with her learning, the man would keep his mouth shut. He’d have a hard time being hired by other nobles if he had a bad reputation.

Within two months she was better than the orphan who’d taught her, and after stealing a sharp little kitchen knife she began trying her hand at cutting purses. She’d need help, though, if she was to steal bigger things than a drunk trader’s ale money. People to find targets for her. The eldermen were useless. People said they’d had a hand in the old riots that made the Governess back down, but ever since they’d been terrified of her. The Guilds were weak and poor and they answered to people in Laure, and everyone knew those were Praesi lapdogs. The guilds that were out in the open, anyway. The Guild of Assassins had people in Southpool, and they took contracts if you put the word in the right place, but Vivienne wasn’t out to kill anyone. What would be the point? Governess Ife would just be replaced by some other Wastelander, and they might be worse. Coin, though, coin would hurt her. So Vivienne hung out in one of those seedy taverns where there were rumours the people of the Guild of Thieves came to drink. No one said anything to her, even when she cut purses, and she was about to go spare when a grinning old man from the north told her to sit down at his table.

“Ain’t no one that’s going to apprentice you, girl,” he said. “No matter how much stolen copper you flash.”

“I’m good,” Vivienne complained.

“Passable,” he said, the Harrow accent thick. “But you look like a little noble, and no one wants that kind of attention.”

That night, sneaking back in her room, Vivienne stood in front of her mirror with the kitchen knife and hacked through her hair. It stung and tore, but she went through with it to the end. She went back to the Kingspot orphans and found the idiot boy flirting with some tanner’s daughter. He looked nervous when she walked up to them, but she ignored him. She traded one of her cheaper dresses for the girl’s spare clothes, and returned to the tavern.

“Took a knife to it, did you?” the grinning old man asked.

“I’ll take a knife to you too, if you don’t help me,” she threatened.

That was how she apprenticed to Sidehands, which he insisted he was his name. He was an old crook and he’d claim nine tenths of whatever she stole as long as he taught her, but he let her buy tools and taught her how to use them. More importantly, he introduced her to the wrong sort of people. Fences, handlers who had servants from important places on the take and a few roughs who’d make a ruckus if you needed someone distracted.

“Ain’t a lot of rules in the Guild,” Sidehands said. “We’re not a rule-abiding kind, and even the King’s only the King as long as he keeps his crown out of other people’s hands.”

“But there are,” Vivienne said. “Rules.”

“We don’t kill,” the old man said. “That’s the one that matters. And we steal from the right people.”

“’cause we’re thieves, not murderers,” she said, duly impressed.

“’cause if we start putting knives in people the Guild of Assassins is going to start floating us by the docks one by one,” Sidehands replied, amused. “We take from merchants, we take from traders, we can take from ye old nobles. But we don’t fuck with the Praesi. Otherwise they send for the mages, and there ain’t no cover of night that’ll get rid of a scrying spell.”

“The Hedge Guild has mages that could do that,” Vivienne said.

“Now there’s a bunch of real thieves,” Sidehands chuckled. “You should see their rates. Don’t think about it, girl. All the mages with real talent were pressed into the Legions and what’s left is crawling with Eyes of the Empire. You ask them to block a scrying spell and the city guard will knock at your door before the hour’s done.”

He grimaced, then patted her shoulder.

“Besides, there’s worse out there,” he said. “The Guild took a deal, when the Carrion Lord came riding in. He ain’t the kind of man you want to cross.”

Vivienne smiled and agreed and because everyone trusted a smiling little girl Sidehands thought she’d stick to the rules. As if. Two years she was apprenticed, and her nights were spent picking locks and working windows. She enjoyed it, the double life. When Jenny Gartrand was a real bitch about her hair – it looked fine , the maids cut it so it was evened out – the night after she stole her pony and her collection of hunting bows and pawned them for a neat profit even after her teacher took his part. Father eventually noticed how much time she spent in the city, but bless his soul he assumed she had a boy there. He awkwardly tried to tell her this wasn’t the old Callow anymore and it was fine if she wanted to marry a tradesman for love but she had to be careful about pregnancies and it was both mortifying and the most loving thing she’d ever heard. She did find a few corners with boys she liked, but they sure as Hells weren’t tradesmen and there were no wedding bells around the corner. She was fifteen when Sidehands told her she was as good as he could make her, and offered her a seat on the Guild.

“You’ll be the only highborn on there, but they’ll come around,” the old man said. “Hard for any of us to get a legitimate foot in the door to those parties and that’ll whet their appetite. Don’t let them rob you on their cut, Vivs, they’ll need you more than the other way around.”

She twitched when he called her that, as she always did. The only part about this she’d regret was that she’d never get a Guild name. She declined, politely, and talked about how her father was getting old and he’d need help running the family properties soon. She made vague assurances she’d be up for jobs now and then, and never followed through on it. The Guild of Thieves had rules, and she’d already gotten what she needed from them. Vivienne spent what she’d earned with thrifty hands on getting a few servant tongues to loosen, and she began to get her dues. There was no Legion garrison in Southpool, it wasn’t large or important enough a city for that, but the roads west went through it and there were a bunch of Legions holed up at the Red Flower Vales. Her first time out on her own, she waited until the wagons with the pay stayed for the night and broke into the Governess’ palace. She’d have to be careful, she knew. Sidehands’ warnings about mages still rang in her ears. But she needed to know if she could do it.

And Gods, could she.

It was easier than it should have been. Her steps more silent, her hands quicker and her ears sharper. She got into the sealed courtyard where the wagons had been left and slid down a pillar from above while the guards talked, hiding under the wagon until they moved on. There were a few left even after the patrol had gone away, but she timed it well and stayed in the shadows. She left with a single silver ingot that night, shoved under her leathers. It was only when word spread that the wagons had been broken in that she realized that she’d done something she shouldn’t have been able to. The city was gossiping about the dozen legionaries who’d gotten hanged for putting their hands to the silver. They were the only ones who’d been allowed behind the wards that protected the courtyard, so it must have been one of them who’d stolen an ingot when they wagons were checked later that night. Vivienne’s blood went cold, when she realized how close she’d been to being caught. She hadn’t thought that the Praesi would be that cautious inside the palace. More importantly, she hadn’t triggered the wards.

Vivienne Dartwick knew she was good, but she wasn’t literally magic .

Except that she was, now. She could hide in broad daylight where there wasn’t a single shadow, and when she did there was a word almost on the tip of her tongue. When she cut a purse she could feel the urge to put it away somewhere that didn’t quite exist, even if she didn’t know how. Yet. She was Named, she came to understand, and when she did she knew exactly who she was. She was the Thief. The Gods Above had looked upon her work and found it worthy of blessing. That knowledge burned within her, the sheer certainty of it. She went back to the palace, and this time it was not a single ingot she took. Governess Ife’s entire jewellery box disappeared, and though she had it appraised through a series of intermediaries she never pawned it. Too obvious, it would get back to her. It was when she debated on where to stash it that she grasped her first aspect. Hold. The box went into a place that wasn’t, and she returned to work. The Governess had one of the few eldermen who still tried to oppose her disappeared by the Assassins, and since he had no heir his wealth was now Imperial property. She stole the entire thing, including the cart, just to make a point.

One of the Praesi lickspittles that made up Ife’s inner circle had delicacies imported from the Wasteland through the Silver Lake at great expense, and Thief popped caramelized dates into her mouth when strolling rooftops for a month. The Praesi made a ruckus about it, tried to have the captain’s ship confiscated, so she went back and stole every single thing in his rooms. The Governess put two thousand aurelii out on contract to Guild of Assassins for the head of the person who’d robbed her, so Vivienne stole the prize money and out of professional courtesy dropped half at a contact point for the same Guild. A very polite note of thanks was nailed to one of the rooftops she liked to pass through, though it did mention if a greater bounty was put out they would still take the contract. Over four months Thief made away with thrice the fine for her mothers’ murder, and planned on making it to four when she got her hands on the payment the Governess intended to float the Guild of Smugglers for some illegally-forged swords of dwarven make. Shame it wasn’t goblin steel, the sum would have been at least double, but she supposed even Praesi didn’t want to come to the attention of the Tower. She’d heard about the Carrion Lord hanging half the staff of an Imperial Governor down south for selling weapon-making licenses without permission.

Sidehands had been right about that, at least.

The warehouse by the docks was without guards, which was the first sign something had gone wrong. Ife wouldn’t use city guard for this, but she’d imported some killers that didn’t ask questions from the ol’ desert back home. Vivienne found the first corpse shoved behind a pile of crates, and frowned at the sight. Messy work, the Soninke must have been stabbed at least a dozen times even if that first throat wound should have killed him outright. That was the sign of a nervous hand, so that meant not the Assassins and not one of the other Praesi making a play. They tended to have a better quality of murderers on the payroll. Three quit leaps had her using the alley walls to get on the roof, which sadly did not have a trapdoor leading down. The Governess wasn’t an idiot, just a morally bankrupt murderer sanctioned by an entire nation of morally bankrupt murderers. She shimmied down the side and pried open the planks she’d broken when she’d learned this would be the warehouse, landing on a high beam. Ah, and there was the company. There were fourteen of them, Callowans. Not from Southpool, by the accents. Somewhere down south.

They’d dragged the rest of the guard corpses inside, five piled on near the oil lamp because evidently she was dealing with raging imbeciles. They were also arguing by the three thick trunks where the gold of the Governess was awaiting her tender touch.

“I’m not dragging these fucking things unless we’re sure the gold is actually inside, Philip,” one of the men said.

“What else would be?” that very Philip replied. “Bloody tulips?”

“We could sell those,” another one contributed. “I hear them Praesi nobles go crazy over the fancy flowers.”

“I wish I could sell you , Jake,” the first man complained. “But Hells, how much could a dumb fucker like you even be worth?”

Well, that would have been entertaining if the idiots weren’t fucking up a perfectly good theft. If she got close enough she could just Hold the coffers, but she’d have to break out of her stealth aspect to do that and the prize was in the lamplight. At least one of these men was going to keep his eye on the gold. A distraction, then. Vivienne stalked across the angled beam and leapt to a flat one crossing the length of the warehouse, quiet as a cat. Now, how to go about this? Dropping something heavy in the front wouldn’t do it, they might panic and try to run with the coffers. Although, it might just be enough to have them bolt. If the corpse outside was any indication, they were fairly nervous about the affair. The lamp light flickered, and Vivienne looked down. The men had gone quiet.

She went very, very still.

Thief was looking down on fourteen corpses. She could see, from how the corpses were positioned, exactly how it had happened. Someone had come close to the first, the slit his throat. Then they’d grabbed the hand of the dying man and put it in the hand of the second, moving from man to man and making a daisy chain of the falling corpses. Fourteen pairs of dead eyes looked down on cut throats, each hand pointing at next man. The beam behind her creaked and she turned in her crouch, dagger in hand. There was a silhouette in the dark she could almost make out the features of. It was a man. She blinked. It was a woman. It was neither and she couldn’t remember a single thing about either of the people she’d glimpsed. Not their hair, not the shape of their face not even the colour of their skin.

“Vivienne Dartwick,” a voice that was a dozen whispering voices said. “Thief.”

Hide , Thief thought. She could still feel the thing’s eyes on her. She leapt down and she should have been invisible, but when she headed for the window she was preparing to jump through there was a silhouette leaning against the wall to the side.

“You will survive the night,” the monster said.

The shock was enough for her aspect to ebb out.

“You’re,” she said and bit her tongue.

It waited for her in silence. It felt amused.

“Assassin,” she got out.

“You have not followed the rules, Vivienne Dartwick,” it said. “An agreement was made.”

“I’m not a member of the Guild of Thieves,” she said.

“You are a citizen of the Empire,” it said. “You are Named.”

“And we all know what you do to heroes,” she bit out, because she was going to die anyway wasn’t she? “Is that why you’re here? To nip me in the bud?”

“Are you?” the thing asked.

She shivered.

“A heroine?” it finished.

It had not come to kill her, she realized. This was an offer. Become a lapdog for the Empress, or else .

“I will not lick the boot on my throat,” she hissed.

“Then you will live under it,” the monster said. “There are rules. There are consequences. And only one warning.”

She blinked and it was gone. She didn’t come back home, that night, or the three nights that followed. When she did she saw her father had a healing gash on his throat. His manservant’s hand had shaken while shaving him, he said after he finished fussing over her. Vivienne knew better than that. Thief fled the city and did not steal from Praesi again, not even after her father was buried. Are you? That was the thing had asked. The words were echoing in her ears, when she heard of the Lone Swordsman and his call for other heroes to join rebellion. She went, against her better judgement. They echoed again in Laure, that night the devil came calling under moonlight.

She was not so certain of the answer as she’d once been.

Villainous Interlude: Calamity II

“Who should really be afraid, between the dragon and the peasant with a sword?”
– Dread Emperor Reprobate the First

The Hedge Wizard was attempting an offensive. Wekesa was more irritated than worried, but these things had a way of growing out of control if allowed to go unchecked. The girl had used an aspect relating to conversion to survive the trap laying behind his decoy, an expected outcome though the specifics of her counter had come as something of a surprise. It had been a mistake on his part to strengthen the detonation in hopes of an early crippling: she’d made the power her own and promptly shoved it through an exotic spell formula. Proceran-derived, by the looks of it. Interesting, that. Practitioners of the Principate had been heavily influenced by the Gigantes traditions that still lived strong in the Titanomachy, though they still subscribed to the much-maligned Pelagian theory of magic. When it came to broader sorcery they were far behind Praes, but there were few their match when it came to enchantments. The sleeping spell Wekesa had used to keep the Hunter under control last year, for example, had been a modified take on an old Proceran enchantment. Removing the requirement of true love’s kiss had been a stark improvement, even if it weakened the overall strength.

That the roots of the Wizard’s formula were in enchanting had been obvious. The only way she could have successfully used an amount of power that large and unstable was by forcing a strict condition on it. Two thirds of it had gone to waste regardless, but the remainder had covered seven miles in search of the assigned criterion. She’d found five instances, because Wekesa wasn’t a fool and he’d laid false trails. Running after the relays of false positives would keep her occupied for the moment, until a proper response could be mustered. This was, in the end, the limitation of the branch of sorcery the Soninke had chosen to master. It lacked the immediacy of more direct magic. Wards and boundaries required outside factors to be accelerated in forming or a great deal of preparation. The raging dead on the walls had returned to the grave, by now, and it would be a quarter bell yet before the Red Skies were ready for actual use. Watching the scrying screens in front of him, Warlock tracked the silhouette galloping across the plains towards his second relay.

She’d chose the shape of a horse, this time. Shapeshifting had always an interesting branch of magic, in his eyes, but ultimately a dead end. It was fixed to the limits allowed by creational laws and even High Arcana could at most allow slight deviation from this. No shapeshifter could take the shape of a dragon, for one, or even most creatures with sorcerous nature. The physical and metaphysical composition was too different, and something could not be made of nothing – particularly if that something had markers fundamentally different from anything else in Creation. Warlock put the thought aside. He would return to those experiments soon enough, after this little dust-off was settled. His son had sent him promising results before Wekesa had to leave for the Free Cities showing that tapirs, unlike pigs, would gain wings but not the ability to breathe fire if infused with enough sorcery. That meant there was a qualitative difference between what lay at the heart of a dragon and – ah, yes, distraction. Warlock tapped into one of his inert arrays with a thought, arranging the runes through the medium of High Arcana.

He’d have to use his own will for this, which was unfortunate. Wekesa was aware that few aside from the oldest Soninke bloodlines and the purest of the Taghreb had as much power to call on, but it was still a limiting factor. No mage had endless power, and burning out when calling on the kind of sorcery he did would have... dire consequences. A circle of runes formed in the air above the shapeshifted wizard and locked with a hum. A hundred times the gravity should be enough to turn her to a smears, he estimated. The array triggered without missing a beat, but the Hedge Wizard’s form shimmered. Instead of being plastered all over the grass she reappeared three feet to the left of his spell, human again. Warlock raised an eyebrow. That had looked like teleportation, but it was mathematically impossible. Adjusting the nature of the scrying array, he dismissed the gravity circle and studied the sorcerous trail. Ah, displacement. She’d let the power push her through the half-existing space between dimensions. There must have bleed, or she would have reappeared directly outside his spell instead of drifting to the side.

Drumming his fingers thoughtfully, Wekesa tapped into another inert array. A different approach, then. Direct applications had proved ineffective but perhaps indirect would see better results. A bag of tricks as eclectic as hers would not come without drawbacks, which made it an obvious avenue of approach. Forging four runes of containment on cardinal points, Warlock crafted an inwards zone of disruption: within the boundaries, all power would be randomly amplified and diminished. His lips half-quirked when he saw the tiles she used to walk across the sky rip straight through her sleeves in their uncontrolled expansion, exploding in a shower of shards when they forcefully surpassed their capacity. The Hedge Wizard used the blood from the cuts in her hands to trace a line across her face, and to his displeasure this sealed all power on her. She ran out of the boundaries dictated by the zone, unharmed save for a few cuts. Warlock dismissed the spells, glancing at the seven inert arrays that remained around him. He could, of his own capacity, use perhaps another four workings of this calibre without being at risk of burning out.

The girl was proving to be troublesome. The Wizard of the West had wielded ten times her raw power, but he’d been... brittle. Breakable, when outplayed. This one was weaker but fluid, and Wekesa wondered if that was what she’d always been meant to be. The White Knight had been gifted an aspect that made him extremely versatile, a way to compensate for Amadeus’ massive advantage in experience in skill. The Champion was apt to weather great violence and had previously been paired with a powerful healer that dabbled in offensive miracles. The fighting elements of this heroic band, by the look of it, had ben crafted specifically to kill the remaining Calamities. It wouldn’t be the first time the Heavens attempted such a trick, but it was the first instance in decades where the band managed to come together before core members were eliminated. A greater degree of caution on his part was advisable.

Warlock began to insert his will into an array, but ceased when he felt his relays being tapped into. The girl had found one of them, and instead of following to the next in the line was... mapping out the inner workings? He saw her lips move on his scrying screen, reading the word. Learn . Wekesa’s face creased in wariness. It was one thing for a transitional Name like Squire or Apprentice to have that aspect, quite another to see it in a full-fledged Name. Ranger was living proof of how dangerous it could be, given enough time to accumulate weight. The Hedge Wizard smiled in triumph, then created another relay to add to his own system. Using that, she immediately followed the current down to his current location. Her face appeared on the scrying screen ahead of him, looking back.

“Found you,” the heroine said, eyes hard.

She’d used her second aspect, Warlock mused. He could return the courtesy.

“ Link ,” he replied.

Laws were nothing more than boundaries, and it had been his life’s work to learn the manipulation of those – even the law of sympathy. This was his most abstract aspect, but perhaps the most dangerous. It allowed him to create sympathetic links between entities that, by right, should have none. In this case, one of the remaining floating towers and the relays the Hedge Wizard had just taken over. Idly tapping a rune, Warlock used his access to trigger the collapse of the tower and the power raged through the connection. The impact was brutal. Her right shoulder, the entire arm and part of her rib cage simply... evaporated. The heroine threw up blood and Warlock began crafting an array to finish her off, but she managed to whisper one word.

“ Repurpose ,” she said.

The same conversion aspect as before, he deduced. The leftover wisps of the the tower’s power – and ah, it had collapse on the city as well, though not exploded – came together like blue smoke and reformed the mass she had just lost. The result was more magic than flesh, he noted, but it would allow her operate well enough. Not a single-use aspect, then. Neither was Imbricate, which made them an even match in this regard. Wekesa leaned forward, breaking the scrying connection and ignoring the battle. She had earned his full attention.

—

Ride would have been a lethally dangerous aspect, in the hands of another hero. It leant a sharp increase in speed, armament that ignored enemy armour and and protection that nothing short of concentrated spellfire would be able to dent. It was wasted on the White Knight. The man had spent too long learning the skills of others and neglected his own abilities, turning an aspect that should have been a near-unavoidable killing stroke into a weak gambit unlikely to ever draw blood on another Named. Shadows hooked through the window and dug into the walls, dragging him through the space and tossing him straight through the door in the back of the house. Brushing off wooden shards, he landed one street across and through the opening watched the White Knight pulverize the entire wall in a blinding flash of light, the aspect dimming after it had struck a target. Hanno landed in a crouch as Black sent out his shadow tendrils, green eyes seeking structural weak points. Two sharpers detonated a heartbeat later and the roof collapsed on the hero’s head as the villain made for the rooftops. Better to change his angle of attack before reengaging.

He’d already baited out one aspect without using any of his own, though admittedly two of his three were less... direct than those of his predecessors. Lead strengthened whoever he led on the field, but had no real use in a duel such as this, and while Conquer was currently sharpening his physical strength and reflexes it would do little else in this kind of situation. The aspect was better fit for war than skirmished between Named, a reflection of his departure from the traditional role of the Black Knights of old. As for Destroy, it was best employed as a tool for denial of enemy abilities. Anything it could accomplish on a purely physical level could be accomplished by more mundane means he had available, and should he ever attempt to use it in direct opposition to a hero’s aspect the difference in power would see him promptly crushed. Or worse, corner his opponent badly enough they would have to learn new abilities on the spot that he had no solid measure against. It was a balancing act, this, where he must carefully lead the enemy in a position where they could be killed without ever overpowering them by too much.

The most effective moment for the kill was usually when the hero had pulled out their trump card, or just after they had, and even then there were risks. Should he ever fail to manage a killing stroke then, the situation could be reversed in a heartbeat.

Now, with Ride taken out of the equation the second stage of this fight should be approaching. The moment the White Knight was put in a dire situation he would tap into the aspect that leant him the different skillsets he’d used to recover from his incoming defeat in their last duel, but this was not a state of affairs that should be approached lightly. For one, Hanno would become exceedingly difficult to contain the moment he began using these other skills. The loss of his enchanted weapon should hinder him, the very reason Amadeus had arranged its destruction, but it would have been foolish to assume the man could not produce similar results using the Light. It was, after all, the very stuff of the Heavens shaped by will. Maintaining it had to be tiring, however, and this had been a side-benefit to be achieved by getting rid of the artefact. Amadeus knew better than to attempt to win through heroic exhaustion, but slowing down the enemy was very much possible. And if the White Knight attempted to compensate for that by using his Name, well, he would be effectively hollowing out his own power and heading directly for a collapse down the line. That would be another opportunity for a kill, in Black’s experience, if he was quick enough.

The dark-skinned hero emerged from the rubble without wounds, dark eyes searching for the opposition. Amadeus exerted his will and one of his two remaining corpses moved behind the shutters of an empty house, drawing enemy attention. He struck in just that moment, staggering four blades at calculated intervals. The first held by a tendril was parried when the White Knight immediately turned to face him, the second would have struck at the weak point of the greaves but was avoided by a shift of footing and the sword he swung himself was caught in hand. Mistake. His shield struck the hero in the chest, taking advantage of the weakened stance to throw him off his feet, and the fourth blade plunged down from above and went straight through the plate. Goblin steel scraped against the collarbone instead of carving it. He’d been imprecise, and so lost an opportunity for a deeper wound. Unfortunate. Amadeus gave ground immediately and the shadow-held blades retreated with him, just in time to avoid the burst of Light the hero detonated in his wound to seal it.

A costly way of healing, this. The touch of the Heavens on mortal flesh was never light, or without consequence. Amadeus could see the function it was meant for, though. If the White Knight was truly meant to face Catherine after she’d succeeded him, then he gave the man six in ten odds of winning a duel against her. His apprentice still had the nasty habit of overcommitting at close range once she’d drawn blood, and a semi-offensive form of healing like this would be damaging to her. Combined with her lack of experience with different kinds of Named, the White Knight’s aspects would gain him a decisive advantage in a clash. As usual, the Heavens stacked the fight before the fight ever happened. Best he never let it come to that, for everyone’s sake. Catherine was too important to die at the hands of some hunting dog of the Seraphim.

“Thousands will die tonight, because you keep me from checking the Tyrant,” the White Knight said, circling around him.

Heroes did have a fascination with talking, didn’t they? Black reached for the bundle of power he’d left in the second corpse that remained, watching through its eyes. Sixty to eight heartbeats before it arrived, depending on the struggling. Running out the hourglass by talking was acceptable.

“I have no personal enmity with anyone here,” Amadeus said calmly. “And this war is not of my making.”

“Yet you participate in it,” the White Knight pressed. “You have responsibility for this. Guilt.”

“I’ve been afflicted by many things, in my old age,” Black said. “Guilt is not one of them.”

“And you believe this makes you better?” Hanno said.

“Oh, I am very much a monster,” Amadeus conceded, reluctantly amused. “But then so are the things you serve and yourself as well. A mere different shade of barbarity hardly puts you in a position to lecture, White.”

The hero would have replied, but Black’s undead cleared the corner and the man went still. The corpse held a struggling woman in its arms, knife at her throat.

“Surrender or she dies,” Amadeus said.

The man went directly for him, without hesitation. The Choir of Judgement did not suffer lack of decisiveness in its servants. A twist of will saw the woman released and she fled straight to hero and now that had him hesitate. A different matter, a hostage and an innocent in need of protection. The White Knight was not the first hero sworn to Judgement he had fought. Their kind was taught to think of people in particular categories, and during that heartbeat the hero had to readjust his assessment of her. In that very moment Black struck, blades in motion. One tendril was sent directly towards the woman’s back, slowly enough Hanno could parry it if he moved there.

“ Recall ,” the hero said.

He blurred in motion, shaft of light lashing straight through the shadow holding the sword as he protected the civilian. Spear-wielding skillset, possibly a lancer . High mobility, expect piercing strikes. No wound, but Amadeus’ base objective had been achieved regardless. Now the more difficult work could begin. In silence, the green-eye man advanced.

—

It was getting warm out, and not just because Sabah was swinging half a hundred pounds of solid steel at the kid. Warlock’s ritual with the sky was getting stronger, getting closer to what he’d pulled at the Fields of Streges. It was only a matter of time until the rain of fire began, and anybody’s guess if he would limit it to just that. Captain wasn’t eager to start dancing around tower-sized burning rocks falling from above, but she was no stranger to it either. The Valiant Champion was way ahead the curve even for a hero her age and she’d learned from their fight at Delos, but she wasn’t used to fighting an opponent like Sabah and it was costing her. That shift in her footing, right there? It was meant to deal with something Captain’s size, yes, but something on four legs. A monster, not a person. The hammer ploughed into her shield and tossed her into the wall, though the thing didn’t break. She’d learned the trick for putting Name power into weapons since they’d last fought, though she used it to strengthen the steel instead of add sharpness to a blade the way most Named did.

Given another few years, this one would have been a right terror. She hit like godsdamned trebuchet and her defence got stronger with every scrap. Sabah had fought quite a few heroes meant to stand and deliver, over the years, but this one was head and shoulder above the rest of the crowd. She could take punishment like a Holy Shield and still swing like a Blood Sword. At least she didn’t go berserk like the latter. Even with the Beast out Sabah had found him hard to put down when he started spasming and his body unhinged. Those people from around Hedges were weird fucks, even for Callowans. Still, tonight was tonight and not in a few years. The kid was still out of her league for now, and down an aspect as well. Sabah hadn’t had to use one of hers yet, though since this was their second scrap she’d probably have to at some point. The more you fought heroes the more of a pain they became, as a rule. Putting some length to her stride, Captain moved to strike while the iron was hot.

The first hit the Champion ducked under and it put a hole in the wall, but the second nailed her to the floor through the shoulder. Didn’t break bone, though. Fucking Name strengthening. Sabah kicked her in the stomach but she brought up her shield in time and it just blew her back a few feet.

“Good fight,” the Champion praised, grinning through her badger helm. “Getting blood flow.”

“You’ve got the most potential to grow out of your band,” Captain replied honestly. “I’m glad we’re fighting now and not after you went adventuring a few years.”

“Life is adventure,” the girl philosophized in broken tradertalk. “Kill many things back home. Much slaughter of other claimants.”

Well, they did say the Named of the Dominion were closest to the old breed of heroes. The ones who’d gone traipsing like well-armed vagrants around Calernia, killing dragons and looting every tomb in sight. Before the House of Light had gone and civilized them, like that entire religion wasn’t about licking the feet of the angels telling you what to do. Sabah had never understood why anyone would pay a tithe to be given sermons, but people out of the Wasteland did tend to get strange ideas in their heads. Captain usually left the statecraft to Malicia and Amadeus, but she did know that when it came to commerce middlemen always screwed the buyers. Why most of Calernia wouldn’t think to apply something that simple to the Gods they kept to, she had no notion.

“I don’t suppose you could just go back to Levant?” Sabah asked. “Leave the Empire alone. I’m fairly sure Black would not pursue if you just stuck to your borders.”

“Eh,” the Champion refused. “Much boring. No good fight there. Procer all peace-talking, now. You legend, Biggest Girl! Many songs for slaying of you, and drinks without pay.”

Not talk about the power of friendship or justice to be served, which she had to admit was rather refreshing. There were only so many times you could get those speeches before they kind of... melded together. About half of them quoted the Book of All Things, too, and Sabah hadn’t read that so she never got the references. She sighed.

“I apologize, then,” she said. “Because I don’t think this ends well for you.”

“You much kicking of my arse,” the heroine ruefully admitted. “But I Valiant Champion, not no-balls Arlesite. I stand, and Exalt .”

Second aspect of the night. They were doing brisk business. Sabah watched the ripple go through Creation and frowned. Domain, huh. Champion types did tend to have those. Amadeus had been caught in the Unconquered Champion’s pocket dimension a few years back and Sabah had... not taken it well. Wekesa hadn’t been able to locate him at first, so they’d had to face the possibility he was dead. She’d lost control of the Beast when she’d been told the news, and woken up to a butcher’s yard of half-eaten corpses. She still had dreams about that, sometimes. She’d not been that out of control since she’d been a young girl. If Warlock hadn’t started carving into the soul of the hero’s childhood friend to find a hint about what the nature of the dimension was, the others might have thought him dead too and that would have gotten... bad. If Ranger had come down from Refuge to avenge him, she didn’t think Vale would have survived it – or anyone trying to get her to stop, for that matter.

The girl’s domain was just an arena, Sabah saw. Old sunny stone with empty stands stretched in a long oval, but maybe not so empty as they seemed at first. If she sharpened her ears she could almost hear cheering and applause. The two of them were standing in sand, and the Valiant Champion raised her axe. Her movements were more fluid than before. She was probably stronger inside here, a sharp increase of everything as long as the domain held. Fit with the word, anyway. That poor kid. She’d picked her grounds, yes, but she’d also taken Captain somewhere she didn’t have to worry about the consequences of going all out. It was one thing to lean into the Beast when there was a risk she’d end up eating a portion of Nicae. Another when it was just the two of them. Sabah rolled her shoulder, and dropped the hammer.

“ Unleash ,” she said, and the world went red.

Villainous Interlude: Calamity III

“The truth of monsters is that, in the end, they die. If they didn’t we would have to call them gods.”
– Eudokia the Oft-Abducted, Basilea of Nicae

The Beast moved, but Sabah was within it. It was not control, for control was an illusion, but it was enough. She could yet think, even with blood and heat pumping in her veins. The Valiant Champion screamed a war cry and swung her axe, but what did the Beast care for this? The enemy steel dug into her flesh, blood and fur spraying, but with a roar she bit down on the hero. The shield gave under her fangs, even with the strength of a Name behind it, and she crunched into the plate before throwing the Champion to the side. The Beast had wanted to swallow the girl whole, but Sabah knew this would have been a mistake. Covered in blood and spit, the heroine rose to her feet. She began to speak but the Beast huffed out a laugh and struck again. The wound the axe had carved was already healed, the intertwined madness and power within her growing with every moment. The heroine raised the broken remnant of her shield but a shoulder bump was enough to send her crashing into the walls of the arena

Stone broke, bone broke and the scream whetted the Beast’s appetite.

The Champion was better at fighting beasts than men, but Sabah was not like anything the girl had ever thought before. Of all the Calamities, only she had embraced the old truth: if you were strong enough, even Fate broke under your teeth. Fountains of sand exploded behind her as she charged and the heroine hastily leapt onto the stands. The cheering sounded, oh, and the clapping as well. The Beast roared and it drowned out all the worlds. Claws scrabbling against the stone rails, Sabah gave when the enemy tried to use to high grounds to strike at her head. Tail twisting behind her, the Beast paced the sands of the arena and waited for the Champion to come down. The girl was catching her breath, though. Wasn’t moving. The Beast crouched, then leapt onto the stands. Benches and flickering silhouettes shattered as she rolled onto the stone, rising back to her feet. The sun came down harshly, blinding her, but Sabah sniffed the air and felt the wounded enemy coming closer. Petty arena tricks.

Clawed paw rising, the Beast struck down into the stands. The arena shook. Again and again she did, until the entire wing collapsed beneath her in a shower of stone and dust and sand. The glare of the sun was gone, now, and she saw the Champion hopping from ruin to ruin. Shaking herself clear of the dust, Sabah forced her will onto the Beast. Claws closed around stones as she rose onto her back legs, tossing chunks of rocks the size of houses at the heroine. She dodged the first, swatted aside the second but was buried under the third. The Beast licked its chops in satisfaction and leapt onto the stone, shattering it and the stands beneath it. There was a tunnel underneath and the Champion flopped down onto the ground.

“ Rally ,” the heroine gasped.

She shone like the sun and all the flickering silhouettes flocked to her, filling her until her strength swelled. Her armour was smoking, her axe shaking with barely held power. Sabah recognized the aspect from earlier but the Beast cared little for the detail. Her paw whipped out from the outside, tearing through the outer wall of the tunnel and sending the Champion flying again. She landed on her feet at the very top of the stands, where the domain ended, and charged back down. The Beast sniffed the air. Blood, blood and ruin. The heroine’s strength waned and her little world with it. Sabah leapt down onto the sands and let her tail sweep a trail behind her, turning to watch the enemy. The Champion did not flinch, and followed her without hesitation. The Beast wanted to be a thing of teeth and claw, but Sabah thought otherwise. Her long legs swatted at the sands, sending up a cloud, and in that blinding curtain she struck. The heroine stood fast, both hands on the handle of her axe for her shield was long gone. The shining blade cut through the Beast’s leg, but Sabah did not pause. She rolled over the heroine, and the wild joy of hearing bones creak and plate give filled her senses.

It was a wonder, that even after calling on an aspect the Champion was strong enough to throw her off. The Beast hit the wall and howled as her leg grew back, bone and flesh sprouting from the cut. The heroine’s breastplate was dented, and her lips dripping with blood. It was enough to make the Beast hungry . Sabah stalked forward and waited for the heroine to charge. The sweep was not meant to hit her, just force her into the right place. Claws closed around the struggling heroine, and the Beast swung her down at the stands. Again and again and again, until there were a dozen gaping holes in the stone and only then did she toss the girl up in the air. The Champion rose higher and higher in the sky, until she touched a ceiling that wasn’t and crack snaked across the firmament like it was a pane of glass. The arena shattered, and the smells of smoke and death wafted to the Beast’s nose. They were in the city again, where they’d first crossed. The Beast roared, and went for the kill.

Sabah watched.

—

It had been a very long time since Wekesa had found an opponent this troublesome. He’d grown arrogant in his old age, it seemed. Come to believe that a mere few layers of deception would be enough to keep a hound of the Heavens off his back. This entire battle was something a tactical mistake, in his eyes. This was far from the first time the Calamities split to deal with a heroic band, but the circumstances were not in their favour. Amadeus was adamant the White Knight had to die, however, and in this Warlock was not inclined to disagree. Not as long as Masego was attached to that Callowan slip of a girl. Promising as the young villains assembled around Catherine Foundling were, they were not ready to deal with this calibre of heroic opposition. Better to crush the Wizard to dust here so she would never be a threat to his son. Crushing a rune-covered stone in his palm, Warlock murmured an incantation and watched a bubble form around the Hedge Wizard. A derivative of the effect demons of Time could have, this, at least in theory. Actual observation of such a specimen would have been too dangerous even for him, as the Fourth Hell was nothing to trifle with.

The heroine was stuck, at least for now. He immediately gave ground while weaving High Arcana, the seven spears of red flame that formed sinking into the bubble. It was a crawl, from his perspective, but it would not be from hers. The Wizard moved, inch by inch, and the bubble popped. She had, it seemed, seized the guiding flows and broken them. Unfortunately for her, that did nothing about the spears. She twisted around most, but one took hit her in the shoulder and and another in the leg. That should have crippled her, but the illusion she’d replaced herself with broke instead. The heroine stood a foot to the side, panting. Wekesa frowned and penned her into what he’d come to call a quicksand ward. It didn’t prevent anything, not exactly. It simply made any exertion of power or movement much harder than it should be. Against a practitioner of limited power like her, forcing a burnout was a perfectly viable strategy.

“You killed my sister, you monstrous old fuck,” the Wizard gasped. “You’re not walking away from this.”

Buying time to cast with distracting words. He’d pulled the same trick many, many times.

“I’m rather surprised it stuck,” Wekesa noted. “I suppose once in a while luck smiles on the opposition.”

Her spell flared into existence. The Liessen Chisel, by the looks of it. One of the better Callowan works, an old favourite of the Wizards of the West. It had been crafted specially to cut apart the stabilizing elements of wards, but to accomplish this it did require a certain of raw arcane power. She’d chosen poorly, given the ward around her. Her spell collapsed the ward and a heartbeat later her wrist bones both snapped. She screamed, but did not stop casting. Heroes had an irritating tolerance for pain. A mundane mage would have lost the thread of whatever they were casting when inflicted with such a distraction. High Arcana runes bloomed in front of the both of them.

“She was better than any of you,” Hedge hissed. “She was good .”

“She was Good,” Wekesa corrected. “And evidently not quite better enough to avoid the Tyrant’s ritual.”

Her eyes went wide. Ah, she hadn’t known that bit had she? There was more than one intent at work in this band of heroes. That light delay in working her will gave him the initiative. The red flares formed around the heroine’s head, the intensity of the glow they produced varying wildly. She finished her spell a moment later and the moment the power took shape all three flares exploded into a cage of red. The green smoke she’d crafted went through the bars, but she was forced to dismiss it and create a cone of force around herself to avoid being incinerated. Wekesa’s spell would have fed on both of her castings, which should earn him just long enough to craft something more powerful while she got rid of it. Duels between Gifted were very much a game of shatranj, in his experience. Reacting to the immediate movements of the pieces without glimpsing the long-term intent was a good way to end up dead.

“You’re not invincible,” the heroine barked. “I just need to find the right trick.”

The red cage transmuted into red smoke a moment later, but he placed the last rune and four bands of transparent force formed around the wrists and ankles. They tightened without any need for prompting, crushing bone. Amusingly enough, what part of her wrists that was not powdered was now almost reset form the initial snapping. Warlock could have gone for a more lethal working, but he was wary of committing to such before she’d used her last aspect. Each of them had called on two, and the odds were that the loser of his duel would be the first to give in and call on the third. His own loss, he knew, was unlikely at this stage but very much a possibility. He’d already begun to prepare an exit strategy in case it came to that. The Hedge Wizard wrapped strings of sorcery around her limbs to keep them working, so naturally Wekesa inserted a little gift into the spell and turned them into angry snakes. He felt sorcery take hold of his own limbs and almost smiled. Ah, a transfer. Classic Stygian work. He did not bother to craft an answer: the third layer of the wards on his person prevented the spell from ever going through.

“Have you ever considered,” Warlock said, “that there is no right trick ? That for all the gifts the Heavens have dropped onto your lap you could die here tonight?”

The blue pane of light hit her head-on, sending her stumbling to the ground, but her limbs shapeshifted into some sort of lycanthropic derivative by the looks of the hair. Interesting, considering under most recorded instances lycanthropy was a curse and not a natural state of being.

“They don’t really encourage you to think about consequences, do they?” Wekesa continued blithely. “Your masters, that is. Perhaps you-“

He paused, then chuckled.

“Oh, you crafty child,” he said. “You almost had me there. Almost .”

Hellfire was a drain, usually, but with the Red Skies so close to the boundary it was barely an effort to form them. The smell of brimstone filled the air and the crimson flares devoured the spell she’d formed while he talked. Not one he’d ever seen before, this, though the shape had similarities to Keteran formulas. Cascading of some sort? That would have been very dangerous, if it had it the wards on his body. Instead the hellfire engulfed the girl and she dropped to the ground. Another three heartbeats before she died of it, and he prepared to counter whatever trick she’d use to get away from certain death. That was not, as it turned out, what he should have prepared for. A beam of light hit the downed heroine, and it took Wekesa a heartbeat to parse out the sequence. This particular spell was, in theory, an offensive one. But it had a central sequence in the formula modelled after a miracle, which meant... the hellfire gutted out and the Tyrant grinned, lounging on his floating throne above them.

“I have come to betray you,” the cripple cheerfully said.

“Alas, I am surprised,” Warlock replied sardonically, and snapped his wrist.

The throne exploded and the boy went flying. That, he reflected, had been worth the seven hours of preparation. The Hedge Wizard was back on her feet. If they thought two of them would give them an advantage, they were sorely mistaken. They’d only given him more to work with. There was a soft sound at his back and the villain turned. An empty bottle of wine had been dropped on the ground. The Wandering Bard, if he had to venture a guess. The heroine cursed and shot him a glare.

“I’ll be back,” she said, and wings sprouted from her back.

She shouldn’t have taken the time to talk, he mused. He finished the spell before she’d risen more than a foot into the air, and the sliver of darkness touched her back. Every wound he’d inflicted with his sorcery tonight reopened and she dropped screaming. The Tyrant was back on his feet and trying something. Dangerous for his age, this one. Another runic stone broke under his grip and the bubble formed before both it and the villain disappeared. He should be stuck in Arcadia for at least a few moments. Things had grown out of control, here. If both enemy factions were on the move and even the Bard had played a hand – and wasn’t it fascinating she would have had the chance to do that even with Assassin after her? – then the others were in danger. Time to wrap this up.

“ Reiterate ,” the Hedge Wizard croaked out.

Ah, there was the third. Light collected around her body, a different take on the spell from earlier that had reformed her missing body parts. Warlock brought down his hand and the hellfire spear drove through her skull.

“Consequences,” he reminded the dead heroine, and made sure there would not be enough left for a resurrection.

—

Amadeus was faintly amused at the notion of anyone trying to kill him with a bow when he was a known acquaintance of Ranger. The volley of Light arrows trailed behind him as he ran across the rooftops, splitting tiles and thatching both. An archery-based Name, this one. Warlock had been the one to kill the last Archer, but the green-eyed had tactics to deal with the likes of this. The shadow tendril tossed a brightstick in the White Knight’s face, himself avoiding blinding by pushing a sliver of Name power into his eyes to blind them preventively. A heartbeat later he’d gained his sight back and three swords whistled towards the sides of the hero. Change . Still blind, Hanno batted away the blades with his bare hands and tugged at the length of one. Amadeus immediately cut it, forming a branch from another tendril to catch the falling blade before retracting all of them. Hand to hand fighter, if he was not mistaken. The Levantines were known for those. Black attacked again, eyes sharp. The enemy was shifting between skillsets more slowly, now that he’d gone beyond twenty. Thirty in a night might be his limit, though that was not an assumption to be relied on.

The blow dented his shield, and did not even require the Light to do so. Dangerous. Amadeus tossed the now mostly-useless tool in his opponent’s face and placed his blows. Blade to the ankle, avoided. Blade to armpit, parried bare-handed. The crossbow bolt form the last tendril hit the back of the knee but failed the penetrate. The villain clicked his tongue disapprovingly. That had been almost point-blank, meaning Name power had been at work. He ducked under an open palm that would have collapsed his throat, pivoted around the hero and rammed his blade under his arm. The White Knight danced away but his bare hand was cut by one of the blades coming around. The second should have punched through the back of the knee, Name or not, but the hero deftly stepped atop the blade and flipped away before Black could cut the connection and make him fall. Breathing hard, the White Knight raised both hands above his head and a greatsword of Light coalesced. Change . Not a known quantity, this skillset. There were greatsword wielders among the Lycaonese to the north of Procer, but the Principate was ever thin on Named.

A probe, then. It was worth sacrificing his last corpse for what would be learned. The undead charged out of a ruined house from behind the White Knight and was cut down without a second thought. From too far, Amadeus noted. The greatsword had lengthened. Not something he would be unable to deal with. The Black Knight advanced cautiously, shadows stirring behind him, and the greatsword rose again. The Light flared, and for a heartbeat the shadows he manipulated were lit out of existence. Amadeus did not miss a beat, for he’d been waiting on such a trick since the beginning of this duel. The few heroes he fought more than once all tried it, thinking him crippled without his additional limbs. The moment where White was occupied amplifying the Light, he accelerated and closed the distance. The greatsword came down, longer than before, and when he sidestepped the cut it twisted and turned to a lateral blow. He leapt and his armoured boot landed on the White Knight’s faceplate. The roiling Light had the goblin steel smoking, but he used the man’s head as a stepping stone and leapt again.

By then the shadows had returned to him.

The blade drove itself into the White Knight’s back, piercing a lung before the Light burst out and scrapped it. Unfortunate, though inevitable. He only had so many blades hidden in his shadow, and two thirds were already gone. There was limited space inside, unfortunately, so decisions had to be made about what occupied it and there were tools more versatile than swords at his disposal. The White Knight’s stance adjusted as Amadeus landed fluidly on the ground. Change . Seven heartbeats for the full shift, this time. The hero was overusing his aspect. A single longsword of Light, this time, held in one hand. The villain raised an eyebrow, recognizing the stance from the very recent past. The Lone Swordsman had used it, in Wekesa’s illusory reproductions of the tussle in Summerholm. That had interesting implications. The White Knight was using the skills of Named, then, as he had suspected. William of Greenbury had been largely self-taught, meaning there was no teacher, mundane or otherwise, to draw these skills from. It was quite possible Hanno was limited to heroes as well, dead ones in particular. That this could be done at all set an interesting precedent, one he would have to ask Warlock to look into.

Black let out a long breath. He was beginning to tire as well, though he’d conserved his strength as much as was physically possible. He was no stranger to working through tiredness, and how he would not to compensate for it. The White Knight strode forward at a swift pace and swung. Amadeus stepped out of the blow, circling cautiously. The Lone Swordsman had been heavily dependant on his blade, as he recalled, which was a limitation the one made of Light would only work partially around. Was it worth trading a minor wound for a more severe one? No, that was hurried thinking. The moment he began to bleed the tide began to turn. He feinted to the side and was immediately parried, or would have been if he hadn’t dropped the sword. He twisted to catch it with his other hand and reversed the momentum, but he’d made a mistake. He’d taught Catherine too much, there were similarities in their ways of fighting. And the Lone Swordsman had duelled her several times before dying. The boot caught him on the shoulder and he only barely managed to land in a roll, backing away hurriedly as the other man advanced. He had wondered with the White Knight would rely on the skillset of a relatively green hero.

Hanno was not without cleverness, and unlike his first aspect this one he had fully mastered.

Still, this was an avenue to exploit as well as a weakness. Bringing back to mind the few sparring sessions he’d had with his apprentice before she left to quell the Liesse Rebellion, Amadeus adjusted his angle. Feint to the side, but he let the prompt parry pass him by. The second feint where he pretended to attempt a similar manoeuvre to before, the White Knight ignored and instead darted the sword of Light at his neck. Black caught the wrist and there was a heartbeat where the both of them were going through sets of instincts. The hero acted first, giving in to them and using a counter that would have worked perfectly if Amadeus had been inclined to continue fighting with the same fondness for close range as his student. The punch went wide, for he was already backing away and freeing the wrist. Instead he angled his blade to the side and carved into the White Knight’s throat, the full weight of his body pivoting behind him. Blood sprayed out as he gave ground, closed by a burst of Light. That would have been a kill, on a lesser hero.

The White Knight opened his palm, and there was a silver coin in it. Amadeus let all other distractions fall to the wayside. The coin spun in the air, one side with laurels and the other with crossed swords. It fell back on the palm, swords up.

“Amadeus of the Green Stretch, Black Knight of Praes,” the White Knight said.

The point of the sword went through the roof of his mouth. Amadeus withdrew his bloodied blade and put the full strength of his Name behind the swing, but when he touched the neck it bounced off. Something infinitely larger than him swatted him him down and he was thrown down onto the pavestones. They collapsed around him, the ground shaking. Seraphim. His plate was ripped open and he was bleeding from the eyes and mouth. The White Knight was collapsed as well, a mere five feet away, but it might as well have been a mile.

“Formulaic aspect,” the Wandering Bard said. “You’re a little young to know about those, I suppose. Should have let him finish, Big Guy. You don’t interrupt the words of the Choir of Judgement without a price.”

Black closed his eyes and sought out his surroundings for a corpse to raise. It was deserted of anything, dead or alive. He got on his knees, spewing blood and shaking. She could not intervene directly. If he managed to strike the final blow before the hero recovered, this could still be salvaged. Sinking into his Name he called on the shadows, but they did not heed his will. He’d exhausted all he had simply to survive the blow from the Seraphim, damn them and damn him and damn them all. Creation ripped open in the distance and howling winds spilled out. The Tyrant of Helike fell out, without visible wounds. Amadeus closed his eyes. Solutions. Or a way to turn this into a mutual defeat, should this prove impossible.

“Well isn’t this is a mess, if you’ll forgive my language,” the Tyrant grinned. “Your ornery friend with the spells cost me a Wish , but it was worth it to see all this with my own eyes.”

He still had an aspect. His other two were done, but Destroy could still affect the situation even if he could not. Affecting a physical structure? There was a half-collapsed house close enough he might be able to make it collapse onto the White Knight. The backlash from using the aspect without a speck of power to his Name would likely kill him. Alternatives were needed. The Tyrant strolled to the unconscious hero and with a groan slung his arm over his shoulder.

“I’ll just be taking this,” the odd-eyed boy said. “Don’t mind me, carry on.”

“Enemy,” Amadeus croaked. “He is your enemy as well.”

The Tyrant shrugged.

“Why do you think I’m doing this?” he said. “Given long enough you might figure out a way to kill him, and it’s not like this one can do anything about it. Can’t have that, can we?”

He pointed his thumb at the Bard, who waved cheerfully.

“Until next time, Black,” the boy smiled, and dragged the hero away.

For a moment Amadeus considered collapsing the house, but this was mere petulance. With another Named shielding him, it was a guarantee the White Knight would survive. There was a loud crack from the rooftop. The Bard, he saw, had a bag on her knees. There were walnuts inside and she was breaking them open before popping them into her mouth.

“That’s going to cost me, you know,” the Named said casually. “It was supposed to be Hedge, but your Warlock is a fucking terror lemme tell you. Makes the old country proud.”

Nothing good could come of listening to bardic Named, but he did not have the power left to shut down his senses.

“Would you like me to tell you how your friend is going to die?” the Bard asked.

“Bluff,” he said. “Champion does not have the skill or story to handle Captain.”

“She’s not fighting Captain,” the Bard said. “She’s fighting a monster. ‘swhy I picked Champion. The domain, big guy. She was bound to let out the Beast in that.”

The White Knight was finally far enough that his amulet ceased taking effect.

“Warlock,” the green-eyed man said. “The Bard is here. I am incapacitated. Sabah under threat.”

“Amadeus,” his oldest friend’s voice replied. “She’s...”

Black closed his eyes, and that was the only moment of weakness he allowed himself. The grief, the fury, it all went into the box and he closed it shut. All that remained was the cold clarity that was his only remaining safeguard. Green eyes opened, turning to the Bard. She broke another walnut, chewing it loudly.

“You still don’t get the story that made it happen,” she said.

“The caravans,” he said, but did not elaborate.

There was something here he was missing. Pieces to the puzzle.

“You don’t speak Levantine,” the Bard said. “Or you’d know their word for maiden doesn’t have a gender. Meaning’s closer to ‘virgin’.”

Lack of sexual congress alone became the qualifier, if that was true. Every caravan had a single individual leading it, he remembered, men and women of different age and origins. Amadeus did not speak any of three major Levantine dialects, or even the Baalite tradertongue they’d been influenced by. There had been no need , and so many other things he had to learn.

“Monster took the maidens, and repeatedly, so that’s one,” the Wandering Bard said. “Now, I needed a monster-killer and she’s the closest thing we have left to one of those. That’s two.”

He might as well have wielded the blade himself, he thought. He’d killed her one order at a time.

“Third, I needed the monster to be the one attacking,” the Bard continued nonchalantly. “That was the easy one. Love, Amadeus. Love always fucks you over. All I had to do was suggest Champion join White after the wall fell, and your dear friend stepped in.”

It wouldn’t be enough, Amadeus thought. They’d only fought once before, and not on that story. There lacked weight. The old thing wearing a girl’s face smiled, nut cracking in her hand.

“You could say it was a team effort, pulling it off,” she said. “Our little secret, right?”

He did not reply. Engaging her any further could only be to his detriment. Warlock would be coming in all haste.

“I’d say sorry, but you brought this down on yourself,” the Bard said. “I could probably destroy you in full, big guy, but that would take time . And effort. So I’m going to give you advice, instead.”

The Wandering Bard leapt down from the rooftop, half-falling. She came close, kneeling at his side.

“Go home,” she said. “Murder your little friend in the Tower and reign until someone puts a knife in your back. You’re not as good at this game as you thought you were.”

Hatred, Amadeus thought, was pointless. A bias that brought no benefit. And yet.

“But you won’t, will you?” the other Named sighed. “You don’t negotiate.”

She rose back to her feet, brushing away walnut shards.

“I doubt we’ll meet again,” she said. “And fucking Kairos slipped one by me, so I’ll have my hands full.”

The Wandering Bard looked down at him, shoving her hands in her pockets.

“This one feels like a sin, doesn’t it?” she mused. “Remember that, when the gears start turning.”

Chapter 33: Promises

“No matter how good the horse, it can only bear one saddle.”
-Callowan proverb

Our march through Summer had taken a month, from the perspective of Creation. Longer than I would have liked, but still miraculous compared to how long it would have taken me to come down from Denier the old fashioned way. Juniper agreed.

“Hugging,” she sneered. “You’ve gotten soft, Foundling.”

It was awkward embracing an orc with a solid two feet on me and broad as a barn, but I put the effort in. For all that the Hellhound mocked me, her grip was tight as well. We’d not gone this long without seeing each other since the Fifteenth was founded.

“You haven’t,” I said. “Gods, what do you eat? It’s like they carved you out of slab of muscle.”

She tried not to look pleased at that, but I’d been dealing with wilier operators of late. My general was a refreshingly open book. Ratface had apparently gone mad with power since I’d suborned the Smugglers’ Guild to him, but since he’d abused his power to find me a fresh crate of Vale summer wine I was going to let that one go. Pouring myself a full cup of the pale wine, I allowed myself a little sigh of pleasure after sipping the alcohol. The stuff I’d dragged with me through Arcadia just wasn’t the same, mostly cheap red vintages from the south. The two of us claimed the folding chairs in her own tent, not having bothered to gather people in the larger command pavilion. We’d have a proper briefing with the others at some point, but I wanted to talk with her before Marshal Ranker and the Deoraithe were dragged into the conversation.

“You’ll have news for me,” I said.

She grunted in assent, sniffing at her goblet full of aragh before downing it. A sure sign this was to be informal: Juniper never touched anything stronger than watered wine in the usual officer meetings.

“Holden is back into the Imperial fold,” she announced. “General Istrid and her legions annihilated the fae garrison and are now fortifying the grounds.”

It was one of Juniper’s little quirks that she only ever referred to her mother by her rank even in private. As for what she’d told me, I was pleased. I needed to herd the Summer Court through known grounds and allowing them two footholds into Callow would have muddied the waters. Now they’d have to come through Dormer, which made it a great deal easier to plan for them. It was shame three legions and some of the finest battle commanders in the field had to be left where I couldn’t use them, but anything less and I was fairly sure the Summer Court would try to force passage. After our last scrap they’d be wary of picking a fight with the Legions of Terror on a chosen field, though. They might win but their losses would leave them too weak to be able to handle the army I’d assembled. Some days it gave me pause, that I’d become someone who could use twelve thousand veterans of the Conquest as a mere deterrent. I’d come a long way from pit fights and waiting tables.

“Losses?” I asked.

“Light,” the orc noted. “It was only the bare bones of a garrison. You kicked the hornet’s nest when you invaded Summer.”

“Oh, I pissed them off way beyond that,” I grunted. “I’ve got a Princess of Summer in chains, Juniper. They’ll be out for blood.”

“Keeping that prisoner secure is a logistical nightmare, I’ll have you know,” the Hellhound growled. “Kilian and half our mages had to be set aside permanently so we’d never lack practitioners for the rotations.”

“It’ll be worth it,” I said. “Largest bargaining chip I could get my hands on short of taking the seat of the Summer Court itself.”

“You assume the fae can be bargained with,” the Hellhound said.

“They always cut deals, it’s in their nature,” I said. “And if for once I can avoid having to pay the price by scraping myself raw, I’ll have no complaints.”

“Devils and fairies always get more than they give,” the orc warned.

“Then it’s a good thing I stole a lot of their shit,” I replied bluntly. “I don’t mind overpaying as long as I get what I want. I’m not going to get stuck in games with them, Juniper. I’ll get exactly what I need not try for an inch more. Only way I can get away without getting fucked too hard.”

“We’ll get nothing if we’re not winning,” she said. “Don’t lose sight of that.”

That was the Praesi way, wasn’t it? No, maybe not Praesi. The way of the Legions, Black’s way. Compromise could be reached, but only from a position of strength. On their own terms. Our way, I must confess. Kilian hadn’t been wrong when she’d said I had no taste to compromise when I could get things how I wanted them instead.

“Masego’s getting ready for the Queen,” I noted. “Or as much as he can, with an entity like her.”

“The Hierophant now, I hear,” Juniper said. “Fancy Name. Never heard of it before.”

There was hint of doubt there. Older Names, those better known, tended to be more powerful than relative outliers like my friend’s. They’d accumulated more weight over the centuries, greater legends to draw from.

“He’ll pull through,” I said. “Always does. But I’ll admit, for this kind of work I almost wish Diabolist was on our side. There’s a lot of bad to be said about the old school, but they have a peerless record when it comes to things like this.”

“She might pull it off,” the Hellhound said. “But whatever she gained from that victory she’d use to screw us the moment the battle was over.”

“I know,” I sighed. “The competence doesn’t come without the rabid crazy. And speaking of dear old Akua, where the Hells is she?”

“We have no idea,” Juniper grunted. “Scrying doesn’t work, and the last time we had eyes on her was when she took Liesse above the clouds. She could be anywhere by now.”

I frowned.

“She can’t stay up there forever,” I said. “She’s got over a hundred thousand mouths to feed, and if she starts dragging civilians to altars she’ll have riots on her hands.”

I wasn’t sure what a riot would look like a dozen leagues above solid ground, but I’d guess it wouldn’t be pretty. Akua’s mind was like a sack of angry, treacherous badgers but she wasn’t stupid. She had pretty thick blinders on, sure, but I’d never seen one of her schemes collapse on its own. She wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous if they did.

“Ratface says she can manage two months at most,” the Hellhound said. “A guess based on what she reported to your Ruling Council when she was Governess, with the assumption she was lying through her teeth on the numbers.”

I’d trust the Taghreb’s judgement in this. He was a middling tactician at best but when it came to supplies and logistics, there was no better man in the Fifteenth. I’d been lucky to get my hands on him back at the College, and even Juniper occasionally offered praise of his abilities. Never where he could hear, and always tempered with generous criticism about his more underhanded dealings, but that my general said anything at all was telling.

“So now we have to guess at the where she’ll be coming down,” I said.

“We don’t know enough about what she’s after to be remotely accurate,” the Hellhound grunted. “Will she be after supplies? If so, Vale will likely be the target. Is she aiming to cripple the Legions in Callow, to carve a realm from the ruins of the south? If so, she must turn her eyes to Holden.”

“Or she could be after sorcery,” I said.

“Legion mages don’t have the learning to even try to unpack that,” Juniper said. “You’ll need the Hierophant to write a report about possible targets.”

Then I’d need Hakram to go through it and cut out all the unnecessary parts Masego would have added, I noted silently. Odds were Hierophant would write me a damned volume with an annex twice as thick. The Soninke was ridiculously wordy, when given ink and parchment. I drank deep from my cup, mood soured.

“So we have a month before the Queen of Summer can enter Creation, if Masego is to be believed,” I said. “Then another month before Akua drops down from the sky to fuck everything up, as is her sacred and solemn duty.”

“Busy year,” Juniper snorted.

“At least Procer hasn’t invaded,” I said, trying for a bright side. “And no one’s unleashed a demon in a year.”

“High Lady Tasia did, in Wolof,” the orc reminded me.

“I can’t believe I have to lower my standards lower than they already are,” I complained. “Well, nobody’s opened a permanent portal into the Hells. There. I refused to go any lower.”

“Give it time,” Juniper grinned, ivory fangs flaring.

She’d meant it as a jest, but there was too much truth to it for me to laugh.

—

It would be two days before the armies marched south, beginning the trek to Dormer. We were still waiting on supplies and we had a horde of wounded to deal with. I could have begun to put a dent into the pile of urgent scrolls that no doubt awaited me, but for tonight I decided I’d done enough. My body could go on, but I was exhausted in a deeper way. There were only so many twists and turns I could take before it was too much. I slogged my way back to my tent, painfully aware that no one would be awaiting me inside. I’d passed by Ratface’s quarters beforehand and ignored his many requests for me to look at the books in favour of bullying him to hand me another bottle. Juniper and I had polished off the last one after she’d finished her aragh, talking for a few hours until it got dark. It still amazed me that the two of us had gone from being at each other’s throats to people who could actually enjoy the other’s company, no matter how much she insisted otherwise. It was rare thing for me to seek two bottles in a day, but I had a feeling I’d need another drink if I was going to sleep at all tonight. I could still smell the incinerated corpses of the soldiers I’d failed in Arcadia, the hundreds that had died at the whim of two vicious creatures beyond my understanding.

There were Gallowborne around my tent and I spent a few moments chatting with them before going inside. They’d gotten off light from the last battle in Arcadia, and Tribune Farrier was already recruiting to fill the ranks left empty by the dead. I hoped the volunteers would understand what they were in for. I’d gotten half my retinue killed because I’d been sloppy and arrogant, and while I didn’t intend to ever make that mistake again there were harder fights ahead. I wished Black was there so he could tell me about his own guard. He’d had his for decades, he must have known ways to keep them safe without making them irrelevant. Or maybe he didn’t. My teacher might not share my qualms about people being killed in his name, not even people he knew. I’d gotten harsher in the last few years but I was still a long way from being iron as cold as the Black Knight. There was no candle lit in my tent, but to a Named that made no difference. That was why I saw the silhouette sitting on the edge of my cot, and though for a hopeful moment I thought it was Kilian the notion disappeared when the details sunk in.

It was a woman. Soninke, dark eyes, and while shy of pretty not exactly ugly. I’d seen her before, known her under the name of Lady Naibu. Lady Deputy , in Mtethwa. My hand left the grip of my sword and I inclined my head respectfully.

“Your Most Dreadful Majesty,” I said.

This was Empress Malicia’s own puppet, the soulless flesh simulacrum she could use to be two places at once.

“I’ve already told you there is no need for such formality,” the Empress dismissed, using someone else’s hands.

I glanced at the flaps of the tent but the Gallowborne had yet to move.

“You may consider this a private audience, Catherine,” Malicia smiled.

Fuck. My tent was in the middle of an army over thirty thousand strong. The boundaries of the Fifteenth’s fortified camp were set with wards Masego had designed personally. I had thousands of sharp-eyed goblins running around. And yet there she was, on my own godsdamned bed. This could have been an assassin and no one would ever have known. I wasn’t ashamed to say that it was almost enough to scare me, this reminder about how far the Empress’ reach went. I set the bottle on the table and ripped out the cork.

“A glass as well, if you please,” the Empress said. “It has been ages since I’ve tried anything from Vale.”

And she knew my favourite wine. I wasn’t even surprised, to be honest. Black had already told me he’d had a file about me before I ever became the Squire, and it was pretty much a given the Empress would have one twice as thick somewhere in the Tower. I poured her a goblet as well and handed it to her.

“Thank you,” she said. “I hear you’ve finally met Ranger.”

I blinked.

“This is turning out a lot more civil of a conversation than I expected,” I frankly said.

The meat-puppet chuckled. It would not do forget that was what I was looking at, to be taken in by the charm and the pleasantries. I was dealing with a woman who’d hollowed out a body of its immortal soul for the sake of convenient conversation.

“Did you expect me to come storming in, demanding justifications?” she said. “The Empire is a balancing act, Catherine. I do not introduce weight without careful consideration.”

There was silence after that, until I realized she was still expecting to answer her first sentence. Gods, I was exhausted. And near enough to tipsy.

“She came real close to killing me,” I said. “Just for suggesting I could help her in a fight, if I’m not mistaken. She’s not much like the stories.”

“I am not particularly fond of her myself,” the Empress said. “And not only because she attempted to talk Amadeus into running me through and seizing the throne after the Conquest.”

I grimaced. I’d gotten hints from Scribe there’d been undercurrents of that in the past, but never heard it so bluntly stated before. Or been sure the Empress knew of it.

“She’s a monster,” I said. “Bad as the Diabolist, in her own way. I don’t get why Black likes her so much.”

“Love,” the Empress said. “It is love, my dear. She’s an extraordinary creature, I’ll grant that. Her little philosophy is what drew him in, and eventually what parted them.”

I raised an eyebrow. That the puppet managed to see that in the still-dark tent was another detail I filed away for the future.

“Be all you can be,” Malicia murmured. “Do anything you want. If someone stands in your way, end them. If you cannot, respect that rule until you can end them.”

“That’s just anarchy,” I said. “I won’t lie and say I don’t break laws when it’s useful, but I still recognize there’s a need for them.”

“It is easy to believe your whims are the only law of Creation, when you grow powerful enough,” the Empress replied. “She will kill herself sooner or later, crossing something she could not afford to cross.”

“She got into a death match with the Summer Queen,” I said. “I doubt that’ll do the trick but she won’t walk it off easy.”

I was getting tired of standing up with a goblet in hand, so I downed the wine and grabbed a chair. I set it to face the Empress, sagging against the wooden frame.

“Hye always did overestimate herself,” Malicia shrugged. “A matter of little import, in the end. She’s remained in her little hovel in the woods for decades and shows no sign of greater ambitions.”

I could have told her otherwise. That Archer believed her teacher was the best thing to come along since the Gods had whelped Creation, that I’d lost three hundred soldiers because Ranger couldn’t be fucked to do anything about them. But those words I kept for people I trusted. I respected the Empress, what she’d accomplished and the people she’d crushed to get where she was, but I didn’t trust her in the slightest. So instead I leant over to grab the bottle and filled my goblet. Fishing out a satchel of wakeleaf from my pocket, I grabbed my pipe as well and looked at Malicia.

“Do you mind?” I asked.

“By all means,” she said. “A filthy habit, but one I tolerated in Wekesa for over forty years.”

Good enough. I struck the match and lit the dragonbone pipe, taking a deep breath. Time to get to the meat of this conversation, I believed.

“I created a chivalric order,” I said, and blew out a stream of smoke.

“I am aware,” the puppet replied. “The obtainment of cavalry, I do not begrudge you. We’ve never managed to secure more horses than needed to replenish the ranks of the Thirteenth Legion without risking rebellion. But this is more than cavalry. It is a Callowan institution.”

“You tried to kill it,” I said bluntly. “The both of you. It failed, so I’m making use of it instead.”

Malicia raised an eyebrow.

“Another decade and it would have disappeared painlessly,” she said. “It takes coin to train armed men, Catherine. Their means had to be running low, especially given the numbers you managed to gather.”

That was true enough, and the reason the knights had approached me in the first place. A little more honesty, then. I drank from my cup and chose my words carefully.

“I won’t allow them to disappear,” I said. “They’re a keystone of what Callow should be.”

“There lies the issue, my dear,” the Empress said. “The abolition of the Imperial governorships, I can stomach. You will have to be publically given sanction for it and pay for the gain of authority, but as a tool they have effectively run their course. The forging anew of a Callowan state, however, is a different matter. In large part your people have defined themselves as nation by their resistance to outside invaders. Some of which currently occupy the country.”

I pulled at the pipe, inhaled the bitter smoke and let it out.

“I’ve never called for rebellion against Praes,” I finally said.

“That is irrelevant, and untrue besides,” she replied flatly. “You’ve preached the destruction of the aristocracy of the Wasteland, which cannot feasibly be achieved without warfare. That is rebellion, no matter your semantics. Even if you personally never raise your banner, Catherine, you will not live forever. Your successors will inherit a well-armed and centralized ethnically Callowan state, trained at the expense of Praesi gold in the methods of the Legions. It is a certainty they will seek independence, by force of arms if need be.”

I grimaced. She wasn’t wrong, not entirely. Fifty years for now, if I got myself killed, I could easily see the next Governor-General call on mostly Callowan legions to give Praes the boot. And it was not the outcome I wanted, seductive as the idea of a resurgent Kingdom was sometimes. Even if they managed to win, which I knew better to assume, half the country would be ruined for a generation. And should they succeed, it would just be going back to the old cycle of invasion and death, the plague on my birthplace I’d taken it upon myself to end.

“I tried the Ruling Council,” I said. “It failed , Malicia. Badly.”

“You botched the Ruling Council,” she corrected. “It could have been in the palm of your hand, but you disdained the methods to see this through. All the while chipping at Praesi authority by hanging one governor after another. It was a functional method of rule, Squire. You dislike Wasteland influence, but you seem to forget that we won the Conquest. I’ve already compromised a great deal. Almost more than is reasonable.”

“You also engineered the destruction of an entire culture,” I bit back. “You won, yeah. But I’m not in this seat across from you because of my sunny personality. I’m here because you want Callow to be brought into the fold without having to put down another dozen rebellion and assorted heroes. You had to know there would be costs to that.”

“Then present me with alternatives,” Malicia said. “I could attempt to craft one myself, in truth, but that would be a mistake. If you want to hold the power and authority you do, both granted to you by the Tower, then prove you deserve them. You are not a partner, if I have to salvage your every blunder. You are a burden.”

That was harsh, but I recognized it for what it was. An invitation. An opportunity to actually become a player in Imperial politics. That wasn’t the kind of offer that came twice in a lifetime. I set aside the half-empty cup and breathed out the wakeleaf smoke.

“Name me Vicequeen of Callow,” I said.

“An empty title,” she replied. “Your Governess-General will be doing the governing while you lead your legion.”

“I won’t keep it long,” I said. “A few years at most. And you’ll have set the precedent that the Tower appoints them.”

She did not reply but studied me instead, which I took as prompting to continue.

“They have to be Callowan, that’s what I ask,” I said. “You still get to pick someone that won’t hinder Praesi interests.”

“And the knights?” she said.

“Folded into the Legions,” I said. “Malicia, you and Black have occupied this country but you haven’t really made use of it. You got taxes out of the governorships, but what else? If all you want is to shake a land until gold comes out, there’s easier targets. You can still get your cut from the viceroy, but there’s so much more that could be had. How many Callowans are really in the Legions, aside from the Fifteenth? There should be a portion in every one, even those in the Wasteland. Callow has population on par with Praes, and if you don’t need to use your armies to keep it in check that population goes to fill your armies. You could get cavalry that doesn’t need to eat its full weight in meat every month. Hells, you could start fielding priests with the Legions if you name someone who has pull with the House of Light. But to get all that, you need someone Callowans will actually listen to.”

“And you can accomplish all this?” the Empress said. “Without breaking from the Tower?”

“Yes,” I said hoarsely. “No matter who gets in my way. Whether they be gods or kings or all the armies in Creation.”

On the second evening I’d ever spent with Black, I’d remembered a sermon from the House of Light. One about the really dangerous devils. How they gave you exactly what you wanted, and let you find your own way to the Hells with it.

I took her hand anyway, Gods forgive me.

Chapter 34: Talks

“Tonight we must speak of Callow, that stubborn graveyard of empires. Princes and princesses of Procer, we must now admit this truth: we have lost an entire kingdom to peasants and bandits.”
– Beginning of First Princess Éloïse of Aequitan’s speech to the Highest Assembly, on the subject of withdrawal from occupied Callow

“HAIL!”

Three thousand swords rose in salute, bare steel shining under the sun. I’d read about this, in what few records of the knightly orders still remained. A steel avenue, they called it. An old tradition born under Elizabeth Alban when the Queen of Blades had annexed almost a fourth of what was now Procer in a series of lightning-quick campaigns. It had only ever been used to honour ruling kings and queens of Callow, and now I was being greeted with one. The bluntness of that defiance was almost refreshing, since they had no idea I’d just been granted vicequeenship of the Callow. I’d talked a good game to the Empress, but I wasn’t unaware that by founding the Order of Broken Bells I’d saddled a hungry tiger. Now I had to ride it, or be dragged down and devoured. I wondered if rulers ever truly managed to be in control, sometimes. Malicia and Black certainly gave off the impression they were, but how much of that was a front? The more authority I gained the less I felt like I held the reins.

Brandon Talbot looked better than he had last time I’d seen him, a filthy prisoner in the underground gaols of Marchford. His dark beard was cropped closely, his hair combed with care and he now stood with his back straight. Proudly. I had no trouble believing a woman like the Countess Marchford had thought he would make a worthy successor to her title. His plate was of Callowan make, of lesser steel than what the Imperial forges could make but covered in hymns of the House of Light. Old, it was easy to tell, but recently polished and very well-maintained. There was no telling it had been used in battle a mere few days ago, much less against the likes of the Summer Court. I strode down the steel avenue and he fell in at my side.

“I hear congratulations are in order,” I said.

The man inclined his head.

“I will only remain as Grandmaster of the order for a few years, Your Grace,” he replied. “Until a younger candidate can be raised to take the title.”

He’d been elected by acclaim, as I understood it, in large part because he’d been the one mad enough to walk into Marchford unarmed back when Juniper was running it. That kind of risk-taking always earned some respect from soldiers, in my experience, especially with the kind of stakes he’d been playing for. Another hail sounded when we passed the end of the twin rows, headed for open pavilion that was the command tent for the Order of Broken Bells. A pair of tall banners trailed the wind to the sides, showing a pair of cracked bronze bells set on black.

“We would have flown your banner as well, Your Grace, but your quartermaster informed us you have none,” he said.

I kinda wished I’d been there for that conversation, Ratface of all people trying to explain to a highborn that I might have a demesne but I’d not actually bothered to get any of the symbols a proper noble considered their due.

“Never got around to it,” I said, entering the pavilion.

Robber had put a goat skull on a pike and tried to pass it for my heraldry, but Hakram had him assigned to latrine duty for a week in reprisal. Ah, Adjutant. He’d taken to my petty kind of justice like a wolf to a limping lamb.

“House Talbot has been dissolved, but it would be an honour for you to claim our sigil,” the man suggested.

An arched silver bridge set on blue, if I remembered correctly. There was worst heraldry to be had – the rulers of Hedges had sheep as theirs, which boggled my mind – but it wasn’t mine .

“That won’t be necessary,” I said politely.

No wine at the table in here. Right. Callowans didn’t usually start drinking until the evening, and and it wasn’t even noon yet. Even if the knights had been dispersed in the countryside for over two decades, I couldn’t help but notice their chairs were nicer than mine. Except the one I’d looted from Summer, anyway. That one was sinfully comfortable and I actually slept better in it than my own cot. I took the seat at the head at the table and Grandmaster Talbot seated himself at my right. I slapped down a sheath of leather on the table and took out the parchments within, Aisha’s beautiful Lower Miezan cursive filling it.

“You’ve officially been granted the rank of commander in the Fifteenth Legion, Grandmaster Talbot,” I said. “You’ve got more three times the men under you a commander usually does but you don’t qualify for legate rank, much less general.”

“Because I am Callowan,” he smiled thinly.

“Because you never went through the War College,” I corrected. “You don’t know shit about Legion tactics. You’ll still counted as a member of the general staff, though, so you’ll be in the high-level briefings as the commander of our cavalry contingent.”

Aisha had bitterly complained about the bureaucratic nightmare that was getting a mere commander that kind of clearance, but she’d gotten it done anyway. I could have just waved around my seal and gotten it done on my personal authority as the Squire, but I didn’t want to go that far unless I was forced to. Juniper already gave me enough lectures about how far we’d strayed from traditional Legion structure, and it would look better to the rest of the generals out there if I at least pretended I cared about the proper way things were done. The noble read through the papers, then glanced up.

“This states I have been given leave to organize the Order’s command hierarchy as I wish,” he said.

“The Empire doesn’t have a precedent for a cavalry contingent this large,” I said. “Even the Thirteenth Legion only has a thousand riders.”

He nodded slowly.

“Knightly orders were limited to a thousand full-fledged knights, under House Fairfax,” Grandmaster Talbot said. “One of the reasons there was such a wide variety.”

I was a little amused he was tiptoeing around the reason for that. Under the Alban dynasty the orders had been much larger, but there’d been a bunch of small-scale conflicts between them and nobles, both sides arguing the other was overreaching their authority. Triumphant had razed the whole squabble to the ground, but when it had begun to pop up under Eleanor Fairfax’s grandson he’d stripped the orders of their fortress holdings and severely limited their size. A dozen of small orders was a lot less dangerous to the nobility than three or four large ones, and easier to fold under the command of the crown when invaders came knocking. Traditionally it was the crown prince or princess who’d held command, a tradition that ended when Juniper’s mother had shattered the charges of the Shining Prince at the Fields of Streges right before a goblin slit his throat.

“Banners of a thousand,” Brandon finally said. “Under my ultimate command. We still have many squires in our ranks, and a single battle was not enough to season them.”

“Get it written properly,” I ordered. “And get the parchments to Staff Tribune Bishara before nightfall. She’ll be expecting them.”

“A very talented woman,” Talbot said approvingly.

There was a look in the man’s eyes I wasn’t unfamiliar with. Well, Aisha was exceedingly pretty. I doubted she’d be interested in a Callowan twice her age, but him looking wouldn’t hurt anyone as long as he kept it mannerly.

“A detachment of five hundred could be arranged to serve as your personal guard,” he said, putting away the parchments.

“I already have a retinue,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “Red shields, golden noose on them? They’re hard to miss.”

“The ‘Gallowborne’, yes,” he said. “Criminals and Praesi.”

“I’ve trained a lot of them myself,” I said calmly. “On foot, I’d put any of them against three of yours. I doubt there’s any company on Calernia that’s been through rougher fights.”

“They’re sharp men, I’m sure,” the Grandmaster said. “But a match for five hundred knights of Callow?”

I drummed my fingers against the table.

“The Gallowborne,” I said, forcing the calm to stay even as the temperature in the pavilion descended sharply, “are my retinue. They’ve been mine since I snatched them from the gallows, Talbot. They’ve bled for me. They’ve died for me. And they will remain at my side until they can no longer serve.”

I was uncomfortable with how possessive that had sounded, and the bearded man did not speak of the matter any further. Eager for a change of subject, I cleared my throat.

“You told Adjutant you needed to speak with me,” I said.

There was a reason it wasn’t Hakram handing him the paperwork, and it wasn’t because I’d been looking for a sword salute. Though I wasn’t complaining I’d gotten one, either.

“There are matters it has been brought to my attention you left unfinished, Your Grace,” he said. “I understand we are at war, but they still need to be dealt with in haste.”

I leaned against the back of my chair.

“I’m listening,” I allowed.

“House Foundling,” he said, and grimaced. “Forgive me, but that it an orphan’s name. It is not fit for the ruling dynasty of Callow.”

“What a funny coincidence,” I drawled. “I am an orphan.”

“You share that name with thousands of others,” he said. “Your Grace, you must consider the difficulties this will cause. Taking a reigning name is in order.”

I drummed my fingers against the table, again. A sliver of my opinion of this whole bullshit must have shown on my face, because the knight had to repress a flinch.

“As of last night, I am the Vicequeen of Callow by official sanction of Her Dread Majesty Malicia, First of Her Name,” I said. “Not queen , though. My successor to the title will be chosen by the Tower, when I see fit to surrender that position. There’s no need for a fancy dynastic name.”

“Your Grace-“ he began.

“The title will remain in Callowan hands,” I interrupted flatly. “Compromise was reached. Leave it at that. To be frank, Talbot, you’re not really qualified to weigh in about the shit that goes on that high up. I’ve survived dealing with the High Lords by stabbing them repeatedly and publicly until they got cautious. They would swallow you whole and spit out your bones.”

He seemed a little offended by the brusqueness of that, but he’d have to make his peace with it. What I’d said was very much true. If I put this poor bastard in a room with Akua Sahelian she’d have him on permanent puppet strings before a quarter hour had passed.

“Your line will still rule Marchford in perpetuity,” he said. “The name matters, Your Grace.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“I became Named as Catherine Foundling,” I said flatly. “I will die with that name as well.”

“There must be records of your birth parents,” he tried desperately. “A Deoraithe name will not be as well received, but it is still something.”

“As far as I’m concerned, the closest thing I’ll ever have to a father is down south killing fools,” I replied coldly. “And he doesn’t have a last name. Born a farmer, you see. As for the people who birthed me, they are strangers. I owe them nothing and will take nothing from them.”

The man bit his tongue, but it was clear he wanted to argue.

“I am not a noble, Talbot,” I said. “I don’t really like them, as a rule. No offence meant to you in particular. I’ve bled for every inch of power I have, and the notion of anybody just... inheriting theirs has grown repulsive to me. There will be no restoration of highborn power in Callow.”

“You will still reign, Your Grace,” he said. “You must realize that certain measures have to be taken to cement your legitimacy.”

I peered at him closely, and read the deeper hesitation there.

“Oh Gods,” I said. “You want me to get married.”

“The baron of Hedges has a son your age,” he pressed on. “All the branches of House Fairfax were exterminated after the Conquest, but there are remains of other ancient lines. Duchess Kegan is the foremost remaining Callowan noble, and a direct marriage alliance with the House of Iarsmai through a cousin would yield great benefits.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said, mildly horrified.

“I am given to understand you might prefer the company of women,” he said delicately. “There are certain miracles known to the House of Light that could make such an arrangement feasible.”

“I go both ways,” I replied faintly. “But that’s not the issue here. I have a – I’m not looking for anyone, Talbot.”

“I have heard that you keep company with a Duni, yes,” he hinted. “You would not be the first ruler of Callow to keep a paramour, if you’ll forgive my crassness.”

Merciless Gods. I was eighteen, so I supposed in the eyes of the remaining nobles I was fair game in the marriage alliance market. Callowans got married a lot later than Praesi, since unlike the Wastelanders we didn’t actually breed bloodlines, but nobles did tend to be ahead of the curve in that regard.

“That’s not happening,” I said flatly. “And this conversation is over.”

I wasn’t getting saddled with a lordling or a child anytime soon, no matter what people might want. I honestly wasn’t sure I wanted to ever have kids, and even if I did make that decision down the line it wouldn’t be to pat some fucking aristocrats on the back. There were a lot of things I was willing to bargain with, but who shared my bed wasn’t one of them. Brandon Talbot’s lips thinned, but he did not argue.

“I’ll get heraldry done,” I sighed, throwing him a bone as I rose to my feet. “Get the paperwork to Aisha, Grandmaster. We’ll speak again at the staff meeting.”

I could not get out of that pavilion quickly enough.

—

I’d chosen to hold this meeting under the stars, since I felt most comfortable at night these days. The bonfire crackled, flames high and occasionally licking at the roots of the tall oak that oversaw our little quiet corner of Creation. Masego had slapped down some complicated-looking wards the moment he’d arrived, not even bothering to vocalize an incantation. His new Name came with some perks apparently. I took a moment to let this all settle in. It was the first time all five of us were in the same place, in Creation at least.

Archer was seated on a wide branch above us, because she never wasted an occasion to literally look down on everyone else, and with a knife in hand she was carving what looked like like a sphere out of dark wood. Her ochre skin looked ever darker at night, and though she’d left her longcoat and silver mail behind in favour of a woollen brown tunic and trousers, she’d kept the dark green scarf that she usually covered her lower face with around her neck. I had a much better look at the curves on her, without the armour on, and she winked when she saw me looking. I turned away. Because it was in Archer’s nature to be a bloody pest at all times, she made a point out of dropping the wood shavings on Masego’s head until he got tired of asking her to stop and put up a translucent pane of sorcery over his head.

Hierophant himself looked... strange. Familiar yet different. He wore a black cloth blindfold over his glass eyes, but sometimes bits of red and yellow light could be glimpsed through it. His hair was still long and braided but the shining trinkets he’d once worn in them had been replaced by dull bars of iron carved with runes. His usually colourful robes had been traded a black tunic that made him look like a chubby crow when he was sitting, but actually lent him something of a presence when he was on his feet. The Legion-issue boots were an amusing last touch to the ensemble, worn down as they were. His fingers kept twitching, as if to reach out for something no one else could see.

Hakram sat at his side, his heavy plate made something else entirely by the ravages of the battles we’d been through. The goblin steel had been darkened by Summer flame, twisted by heat not of Creation, and though it still fit with padding under the metal the appearance reminded me of the steps leading to the Tower. The obsidian that had been warped by sorcery, shaped into silhouettes of weeping men and women one must tread on to rise. Adjutant had gone through the crucible of fire and become stronger for it. His Name pulsed steady to my senses, firm yet oddly serene. His hand of bones was eerily still, reeking of dark sorcery anchored into his very Name. His eyes were dark and still as ponds, the fangs glinting in firelight still bloody from his supper.

Thief sat across the fire from me. I’d never been in her presence long enough to notice before, but she didn’t hold herself like a commoner. I’d had etiquette lessons at the orphanage and I recognized the same marks on her, in the way she kept her wrists straight and her back as if leaning against a high chair. Her leathers were loose, but I could tell we shared a body shape. She was taller than me, since it was basically divine mandate that everyone but goblins be, but not by as much as the other. Dark hair and blue-grey eyes that were always moving, always looking for movement. Pale fingers were toying with a carving knife that was clearly sapper issue: she has wandering hands, this one, and a habit of picking up knickknacks. Must have been part of her Name, because it seemed too compulsive for a mere habit.

Five Named were sitting around the fire. That was, I knew, no small thing. Even more now that Ranger had tossed us a name, turning the curse of the Queen of Summer into something more. The Woe, she’d called us. It had felt like a pivot then and still did now, the beginning of something larger. What it would be, I was almost scared to find out. Hakram tossed up a wineskin at Archer, which was enough to distract her from pissing off Masego for a bit. I took that as my cue to begin.

“So, on our first outing together we robbed Summer of what appears to be its literal sun, before capturing a princess of the blood,” I said. “I’m not one for omens, but it strikes me as a good note to begin on.”

“Lies and violence,” Archer cheered, dropping the wineskin on Masego’s shield.

The Soninke mage snatched it, taking a gulp and coughing when it went down the wrong pipe. Apparently a fresh Name didn’t mean he could handle drink any better. Good to know. I felt Thief glance at me, raising any eyebrow at what Archer had said.

“Archer is a horrid wench, and whatever she says about mottos is not to be trusted,” I stated.

“Well, it’s still better than sullen,” the Named in question mused.

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“I expected something more... professional,” the Thief finally said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Did the Lone Swordsman run that kind of crew?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“No,” the heroine conceded, “but your band was a step ahead of us the whole time. I always thought it would be rather business-like, on your side.”

“You thought we were a step ahead?” Masego croaked, wiping his mouth.

Hakram snorted.

“We strolled from one disaster to another, trying to keep the fires from spreading,” the orc said, sounding amused. “Mostly fires not of our making, I’ll add.”

“Haven’t been in this outfit for long,” Archer said, “but it hasn’t struck me as overburdened with plans.”

“That’s going a little far,” I intervened, mildly offended.

“We got into Skade by writing on a scrap of parchment that we could, Catherine,” she pointed out. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m on board with our whole ‘that’s stupid enough they’ll never see it coming’ way of going at it. But masterful schemers we are not.”

“You had us dead to rights at Summerholm,” Thief frowned.

“We only understood what was happening after the city was on fire,” Masego said.

“And we got blamed for that, after,” Hakram added.

“Everything in Liesse unfolded according to your plan,” Thief tried.

“Arguably. Though she did get killed,” Adjutant said.

Archer’s eyes swerved to me.

“Wait, you died ? Have you been undead this while time?” she asked. “You don’t look it.”

“Resurrected,” I replied.

She looked even more dubious.

“You’re a villain, Cat,” she said. “That’s not exactly in your wheelhouse.”

“Yeah, the Hashmallim weren’t real pleased about it either,” I grunted. “They threw a fucking fit.”

“Is that how that happened?” Thief frowned. “I did wonder. You talked a Choir into breathing second life into you?”

“Talked is a strong word,” I mused.

“We;ve settled on ‘bullied’,” Hierophant contributed helpfully.

“You bullied,” the Thief said slowly, “the entire Choir of Contrition. Into resurrecting a villain actively trying to oppose them.”

“Not even the Lady of the Lake fucks around with angels,” Archer said approvingly. “That’s actually impressive.”

“Don’t bring Ranger into this,” I grunted. “She came a heartbeat away from slicing my throat open the only time we met.”

“Oh, she’s always like that,” the other woman dismissed. “Don’t take it personally. She once threw Tinkles out a window for hitting on a trader girl instead of practicing his stances.”

“I’m glad he was sloppy, then,” I admitted. “Hunter was hard enough to put down as he was.”

Thief blinked, then looked up at the woman on the branch.

“I forgot,” she said. “You are an apprentice of the Ranger as well. You must have known him well.”

“He was only around for a few years before joining up with your little rebellion,” Archer shrugged. “Of the Lady’s five pupils he was always the odd one out. Not surprised he ran off, though it was still monumentally stupid.”

“He was,” Thief began, looking for a diplomatic word, “different.”

“Half-naked,” I said. “Half-naked is the term you’re looking for.”

“I never minded the sights, Catherine,” Archer grinned. “The man had a body worth a stare. The bells, though, and the tattoos? Gods, it was like he was trying to ruin his looks.”

“The tattoos weren’t a Refuge tradition?” Thief asked, looking surprised.

“Is that what he said?” Archer snorted. “No, they aren’t.”

Masego cleared his throat politely.

“This conversation is both baffling and horribly tedious to me,” he informed us. “I believe you were addressing us, Catherine?”

“Right,” I said, and immediately delegated. “Hakram.”

The tall orc straightened, putting aside the wineskin he’d been hogging this whole time. Thief had thawed a bit when we talked, but her guard went right back up when she turned to him. There was story there, I thought. Adjutant must have had one of his little talks with her at some point. I trusted him, so I wouldn’t meddle, but I’d have some questions to ask my second.

“We currently have two threats that must be dealt with,” Hakram gravelled. “The first is Summer Court and its queen. The second is Akua Sahelian, lately the Diabolist.”

“The villain that let the devils loose on Liesse,” Thief said, eyes gone cold.

“That’s the one,” I said. “And believe me, devils are some of the milder stuff she’s thrown at us in the past. You’ve gone to the city yourself, I hear. You saw what she’s up to.”

“Some sort of ritual,” the skinny Callowan said. “It involves Deoraithe that are part of the Watch, and that’s about all I know.”

I glanced at Masego, who somehow picked up on it. That was going to keep being creepy for a while.

“While I’ve not conducted such experiments myself, I’ve read the notes my father has on the Watch,” the mage said. “They are connected to a deity of unknown nature, and gain their supernatural abilities by binding themselves to it through rituals they call Oaths.”

“Our best guess at the moment is that the Diabolist is trying to get at the deity through them,” I said.

“Considering the massive size of the array she created in the city,” Masego said, “she will need at least a lesser god to empower it. The scale of the effect might be comparable to that of the creation of the Kingdom of the Dead.”

“Liesse is also currently flying,” Hakram said. “Which will make it difficult to assault. That aside, the city’s current location is a mystery.”

I met Thief’s eyes.

“I’ll have my people look into it,” she said.

I nodded.

“Much as I hate giving Akua a reprieve, she’s not the most pressing threat at the moment,” I said. “Summer’s out for blood, and its Queen will be crossing into Creation about a month from now. What we can do about her is not inspiring. Masego?”

The dark-skinned mage smiled thinly.

“Given at least three days of preparation, I can buy us a quarter bell before she breaks through my wards and massacres every single one of us,” he said.

“That’s reassuring,” Thief said cuttingly.

“Not great, I’ll admit, but we still have two cards in hand,” I said. “First we have the Princess of High Noon, which she really needs if she doesn’t want to get knifed by Winter after we’re all dead. And we have the sun, courtesy of your kleptomania.”

Thief looked faintly amused, but did not reply.

“So,” I smiled. “We’ve got the whole night, and wine I really doubt was legally acquired. Let’s see if we can think of something to avoid dying horrible, horrible deaths. The floor’s open, my friends.”

Chapter 35: Questions

“To bargain with devils is to paint with your own blood: the greater the work, the harsher the price.”
– Dread Empress Maleficent II

I shivered in discomfort when I crossed the boundary into the prison. It felt wrong in a fundamental way, and if I’d not already gotten enough hints that becoming the Duchess of Moonless Nights had changed my nature in some eldtritch way this would have done the trick. There were worrying aspects to that. I’d already made sure that cold iron didn’t really hurt me more than any other kind, but Masego was of the opinion that spells crafted to affect entities not of Creation would sting a great deal more than they used to. Given that diabolism as a sorcerous discipline dealt with exactly that, I was going to have to take a few precautions before dealing with Akua. Who was now Diabolist. If she could be sure she could grab a godsdamned Hashmallim before even coming into the Name, she could deal with my bastardized fae title: those two things weren’t even close to being in the same league. I shook away the thought. The place where I now stood wasn’t another dimension, not exactly. The way Hierophant told it, if he was to keep the Princess of High Noon contained he very much needed for her to be in Creation.

Her power was lesser here, a large part of it surrendered to cross a threshold she did not belong on this side of. If she was in a pocket dimension, however, then all bets were off. Even after being robbed of the sun, Princess Sulia was absurdly powerful and she might just rip her ay through the wards with her bare hands if she needed to. So the prison my mages maintained was on Creation, a complicated array that had me reaching for a drink just to look at the plans of. I’d forced Masego to use progressively smaller splurges of magic babble until he found the right metaphor: the whole thing was a drain, more or less. A bunch of escapements had been attached to her that bled out power as quick as she regained it, dispersing it into Creation. The results weren’t pretty: the grounds around the prison were alarming to look at, a circle of land that grew, got overripe and died in the span of a dozen heartbeats. And then again, and again, and again.

Ratface had poked his nose in and asked whether the phenomenon could be used to accelerate crops, and gotten the reply that it could. But the crops would be, essentially, plant-shaped dust. And possibly poisonous as well, because why wouldn’t the fae make this as horrifying as possible? I’d left the quartermaster plotting with Pickler about possible uses for it, catching something about ‘targeting farmland’ but also ‘spoiling rations’. Should have expected that, really. It was the Praesi way to look at things best left not meddled with and ask ‘can we make a weapon out of this?’. That’s how you lot got the Wasteland, Ratface. They were still a step short of cackling and attempting to steal another country’s weather on the villain ladder, but I’d remind Hakram to keep an eye on those two anyway. The last thing I needed was a bunch of Summer-birthed plant monsters running amok in Callow when we finally gave the Courts the boot.

The Princess of High Noon was still hovering in the air, runic shackles on both her wrists and ankles. She was awake now though. Her hair was fire, much like Kilian’s when she drew too deep on sorcery, but that was where the resemblance ended. My... Senior Mage looked human, though more delicate in her bones than the average Duni. There was nothing mortal about the looks of Princess Sulia, though: she was power made flesh, a blind sculptor’s dream of what people would look like.

“My warden visits,” the Princess of High Noon said.

“That’d be Hierophant,” I replied easily. “Though I suppose the responsibility ultimately lies with me.”

“Have you come merely to equivocate, Duchess?” the fae said. “If so, spare me your presence. Better silence than your ramblings.”

“I came to talk,” I said. “I happen to have a few questions for you.”

“And I will indulge you in this?” the princess mocked.

“Could be I’ll have you tortured if you don’t,” I noted.

The mocking smile did not wane in the slightest.

“I have been under the knives of Winter across many, many lives,” she said. “Anything mortals could muster would be childish imitation.”

“Speaking as someone who’s been on Masego’s operating table, you are very much mistaken,” I said. “And that was when he was helping . But you’re right. I won’t have you tortured. I don’t really condone the practice, as a rule.”

“Then the King of Winter has left traces of who you once were inside this misshapen carcass you wear,” Princess Sulia said. “Rejoice, Duchess. You are less an abomination than you could be.”

“Again with he abomination talk,” I said, rolling my eyes. “That’s no way to treat someone come to bargain with you, Sulia.”

She actually laughed at that. It didn’t sound like a person’s laugh, more like exhaustion and heat and the clash of steel against steel.

“You have already struck bargains, mortal,” she sneered. “Two that my eyes can see. I wonder what you promised Larat, to have him risk my wrath on the field.”

That was the Prince of Nightfall’s name, I was pretty sure. The Winter King had mentioned it once, but the whole getting my heart ripped out afterwards adventure had ensured it didn’t have a place of honour in my memory.

“I’ll trade that secret, for questions answered truly,” I said.

Her eyes turned to me, and if had not stolen a mantle of power I suspected it would have physically hurt me to meet her gaze. Even as it was, it pricked behind my eyes to match her stare for stare.

“I do not often bargain with your kind,” she said.

“I imagine the while incinerating them on sight thing limits your options in that regard,” I replied drily.

“There is little of worth to be found amongst mortals,” she shrugged, or tried to.

Her bindings didn’t allow a lot of room for movement. Normally she wouldn’t even be able to speak, but Hierophant had released that binding before I came in.

“Nine questions,” I said. “And I will give you the terms of my bargain with the Prince of Nightfall. You are to answer them to my satisfaction, or they will not count.”

“You seek to rob me, child,” she sneered.

“I already have,” I replied with my most unpleasant smile. “Yoink, remember?”

Her face boiled with anger and I cursed myself mentally. I really need to learn to shut my mouth when treating with monsters. If I’d managed to not fucking declare war on the King of Winter halfway through our conversation, in the middle of his very seat of power no less, I’d still have an actual heart instead of whatever he’d shoved into my chest.

“Enjoy that transient victory, Duchess,” she said. “Summer comes for you now, and there is no escape.”

I sighed.

“You know, I don’t actually want to fight you people,” I said, using ‘people’ in the loosest sense of the word. “You invaded my home without provocation and started butchering everyone that didn’t kneel to a queen from another realm. I’m not Ranger, Sulia. I don’t get into death matches with demigods for the bragging rights.”

“You think we want to stride this godforsaken wasteland?” she burst out. “Creation is madness. The disorder is like an itch none of us can scratch, and the people –“

She bit her tongue, glaring at me like I’d forced her to speak up.

“Nine questions,” I repeated. “For the terms the Prince of Nightfall gave me.”

I paused and hastily continued.

“With the previous stipulations added,” I finished.

I still had the pact the King of Winter had forced on me to barter with if that wasn’t enough, though I’d rather avoid handing a potential weakness like that hand wrapped to one of my most dangerous enemies. The Princess of High Noon was supposedly terrible at scheming, but the rest of Summer was bound to have some noble that was a fair hand at it. The fae grit her teeth, but after a long silence calmed herself.

“I accept this bargain, as the terms were stated,” she said.

Gods, finally. I’d been after answers since the moment the damned Winter Court had popped up in Marchford and so far had gotten only cryptic comments for my troubles. I’d thought about getting my hands on a Winter noble for interrogation more than once, but I wouldn’t be able to trust answers from someone too low in the pecking order – and a Count was probably as high as I could aim to grab, even now. The Princess of High Noon was second only to the queen, in the Summer Court, and probably the least tricky operator I could hope for at that hallowed height.

“Why did the Summer Court invade Callow?” I immediately asked.

Eight questions left.

“It was an obligation,” Sulia replied. “As Winter was waging war upon Creation, so must we. Her Majesty chose Callow as our enemy, and I know not her reasons.”

That explained, to an extent, why the Courts could be both be fighting me when Masego had said they shouldn’t be able to attack the same target. If Winter was fighting Praes and Summer was fighting Callow, the difference should be enough to appease whatever arcane rules they obeyed to. It also confirmed that the Summer Queen was up to something: she hadn’t been forced to pick Callow, and I doubted she’d made that decision without a reason. That meant there were two fae rulers trying to get something out of my homeland, and in both cases I had no real notion of what that was.

“When the queen lives as a princess, what is her title?” I asked.

Seven questions left. This one came at Hierophant’s request. He’d told me he would have a better idea of how to counter the queen if he knew what form her powers usually took.

“Princess of the Morning Star,” the fae replied through gritted teeth.

Hadn’t liked that one, huh. She clearly knew why I’d asked. I’d wonder about exactly what the implications of the answer were when I had mages with me to make sense of it.

“What forces remained to the Diabolist when you left the field at Liesse?” I asked.

Six questions left. This one she took better than the last. Akua had not made a friend there, looked like. She usually didn’t.

“One greater devil,” the Princess of High Noon said. “No more than six thousand mortals. Twice this in undead and lesser devils.”

Good. This wasn’t anything I couldn’t deal with, considering the armies I had at my disposal. I’d have to be a raging imbecile to think this was all Diabolist had at her disposal, but it should make up the bulk of her strength on the ground. I mine could beat hers, all that was left was the battle between trump cards. That one would be harder, given how long she’d had to prepare, but I had four other Named on my side. My bag of tricks went a lot deeper than hers, these days, and if that failed I had the right kind of people to smash my way into a victory.

“What is your plan to escape this prison?” I asked.

Five questions left, and she looked furious. Had she really thought I wasn’t going to ask that? I’d been dealing with the Ruling Council and the High Lords for over a year. Green I might be, but I wasn’t that green. She really was terrible at this. Or simply not used to bargaining from a position of weakness , I thought. What were the odds she’d been in a story that went like this before? I very much doubted she’d ever played a question game with Winter, if the talk of torture was any indication. There was a very real chance she was flailing because she’d never stood on grounds like these before. You and me both, Sulia . I was just better than the fae at keeping my head above the water.

“I am transmuting the flesh of my left arm into power not siphoned by your array,” the princess said. “It will allow me to break through the wards eventually.”

“Answer’s incomplete. When will you be done?” I pressed.

“In a month,” she grunted.

It figured. She would probably have broken out in the middle of our tangle with Summer and wrecked our armies from the inside. Hierophant was going to have to take care of this somehow. Now, for Juniper’s question.

“There are golden fae in your host,” I said. “What are their weaknesses?”

Four questions left. When they’d fought against the legionaries under Nauk, they’d ripped straight through the men until Masego and I had dropped a pair of surprises into their formation to take their pressure off. They seemed to be the equivalent to the Sword of Waning day that Winter fielded, though a great deal more dangerous. Unlike the deadwood soldiers they fought in a real formation.

“The Immortals are bound to the Queen of Summer,” she said. “Should she die they will perish as well.”

Hardly a weakness, that. There had to be more to it.

“And?” I prompted.

“They weaken away from Summer,” she grudgingly added. “They carry banners with shards of the sun, but should these be destroyed they will lose much of their power.”

And now my mages had a target. Progress. I’d covered everything I’d been asked to find out by others so far, which left me four questions to try to ferret out what I personally wanted to know that didn’t qualify as an ‘immediate concern’. By the standards of my officers, anyway. I was of the opinion that the answers that would win us this war weren’t numbers or weaknesses.

“What does the Summer Court mean to do with Callow, if they take it?” I asked.

Three questions.

“The taken territories are to be made part of Arcadia and Summer itself,” the princess said. “Along with all those who live in them.”

I closed my eyes, mind spinning. The Winter Court had tried to do something similar, I was pretty sure. During the attack that I’d gone into Arcadia to end, the fae had brought a shard of Arcadia into Creation. That had failed, but the Winter King had taken me as a vassal afterwards, binding Marchford to him through me. If Summer was after the same ends, then that lay at the heart of the plays on both their parts. If Summer grew larger, then the balance between it and Winter swung in their direction. It might even introduce fresh stories to the Court’s advantage, and would explain why the Summer fae had been forcing Callowans to swear fealty to the Queen of Summer in my reports. I was still missing something, though. If grabbing land had been the objective, why had Winter struck one of the most fortified targets in Callow? The Fifteenth had been at Marchford for months before they began their attacks. Sure it would have been easier to cross there, but Summer had proved it wasn’t impossible to do so in other places. If Winter had opened a gate into, say, Vale? They might have grabbed the entire central plains of Callow before the Legions could react. Sulia had already stated that Winter had been the ones to begin this dance, which brought forward even more questions. He hadn’t been the one reacting, meaning it had been a deliberate choice.

“Why did the King of Winter target Marchford, specifically?” I asked.

Two questions.

“I cannot know for certain,” the princess said.

“Your best guesses,” I grunted.

“The boundaries were thinner there, making an invasion possible,” the fae replied. “Or he needed a Named in his service to act in Creation without crossing himself.”

Shit, hadn’t given her an actual number of guesses. Just plural, so she got away with two. It wasn’t worth using another question to ask for what would be more speculation on her part. I might have misread the situation, I frowned. When Summer had crossed, they’d had the weight of symmetry on their side: Winter was at war on Creation, so they must be as well. That might have made it easier for them to leave Arcadia, and they’d certainty been better at it. They’d spread a lot quicker and in several places compared to Winter’s one failed beachhead. Since the Winter Court had been the ones to begin the pattern, and an unprecedented one at that, they might not have had another choice than to go for the lowest-hanging fruit that was Marchford.

Then again, if I put myself in the King’s boots, what better target than Callow was there? On Calernia, at least. There was no other territory so divided and recently weakened by war. If he’d pulled this shit in the Principate, he would have been in a great deal of trouble. The Free Cities, maybe, but there were far more players there and a larger amount of Named. All he’d have to deal with here was a Squire with her crew and the Diabolist down south. My people were untested, many recently come to their Names and Akua had ‘going to rebel real soon’ good as stamped onto her forehead. It occurred to me, at that moment, that I might be the cause of all this. That I might have ensured the Winter Court would invade my homeland and force Summer to do the same by allowing the Liesse Rebellion to happen in the first place. I’d put blood in the water and the monsters had tasted it, taken it as invitation to come out and play.

“Merciless Gods,” I whispered.

Thousands had died, in the rebellion, but how many more to the fae? All of southern Callow had been occupied. My own legion had come under assault. Hells, I’d created the perfect conditions for the Diabolist to try her crowning scheme and there was no avoiding the truth that putting that madness would be bloody work. I’d let a hero go, once, and spoken words to him. Years later and Callow was still paying the price of that decision one corpse at a time. I took hold of myself. I could not afford to show weakness in front of a Princess of Summer, even one my prisoner. I met her eyes and saw she had missed nothing. She did not delight in my horror, but neither did she shy away from it. I need to know , I thought. To get at the bottom of this, before it was too late. This was larger than fae plying their usual tricks. Both Courts were playing for larger stakes than I’d thought.

“If either Court keeps part of Callow,” I asked hoarsely. “What happens in Arcadia?”

One question left. The Princess of High Noon smiled, slowly and broadly.

“I do not know,” she laughed. “Nothing, my queen says, for it will pass. Everything, your king says, for that clay has never been shaped.”

I felt like I’d been handed the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, the one that made the shape of the whole clear. The Winter King didn’t actually care all that much if I could force out Summer. He’d prefer it, because then any advantages that would come into being would be entirely on his side. But even if I failed, as long as I lived he still had Marchford and a Named he could influence. He would have an even deeper connection to my city than Summer would manage with their stolen territories, if he kept my heart. It dawned upon me that, as far as he was concerned, he had already won. It was just the degree of victory that remained to be determined. The Prince of Nightfall had compared the fae of Winter to foxes chewing through their own keg to escape a trap, back in Skade. Willing to destroy something part of them to escape a greater doom. And I’d seen, when I’d become the Duchess of Moonless Nights, the unending circle that was the lives and deaths of the Courts. The outcomes were always fixed from the start, but that was because in that circle there were only known quantities .

If I became part of that, if Callow did? In Arcadia, the Summer Queen had said the ‘story would correct itself’. She thought this attempt would fail and everything would return to the way it used to be when the wheel turned again. She was just playing out her role as assigned to her, Summer Ascendant destroying everything in its path. But the King of Winter thought he could escape the wheel, and was gambling with the lives of everyone in Callow for his roll of the dice. It didn’t matter so much that he beat Summer so long as an outcome without precedent lay at the end of the road. Even if he lost, he could be born to a different story when the wheel turned. If the wheel turned, which would no longer be a given. I’d been looking for a master plan in the Praesi tradition this whole time, but there’d never been one. It was just a desperate man throwing stones in a pond so the same old reflection would stop staring back at him. If a single thread of fae influence remained in Callow by the time this was over, it might be enough to drag then entire country into the mess. I had just become the greatest living liability to peace in my homeland.

I had to break them both, the royals on each side. Destroy everything that they were. The consequences otherwise were beyond what I could easily understand. I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them. The Summer Queen. She would be the lynchpin of this, as the only one of the two I could reach.

“Sulia,” I said. “What is the role at the heart of the Queen of Summer?”

My last question. My most important.

“Threefold are the duties of the Laurel Crown,” she said. “To destroy Winter. To protect Aine. To see the Sun victorious.”

Three, always three. And I would need them all in my palm, if I was to bend a god to my will.

“Now complete your end of the bargain, abomination,” she hissed. “You’ve had your fill of me.”

“I will take the crown of seven mortals rulers and one, to lay them at the feet of the Prince of Nightfall,” I said.

Her face went still. A glimmer of something like fear passed through those shining eyes, and shit that wasn’t good at all.

“You know not what you have promised,” she said. “ This must not come to pass .”

“Then tell me why,” I said.

Silence, silence and hatred.

“I thought as much,” I murmured. “Sweet dreams, Princess of High Noon.”

I left. I didn’t look for my friends, though I felt the urge. Right now I felt too disgusted with myself, with them, with everything I had wrought since I first became the Squire. I loved them, and I should. I’d paid an ugly price for them. How many lives I claimed I wanted to save had I traded away to have them at my side? I sought someone else instead, someone who would not pick at the loathing. I needed advice, and I had the puppet of one of the greatest living rulers in Calernia within my reach. I found the woman waiting in my tent and sat down in front of the body Malicia was looking through from far, far away.

“You said you would teach me, once,” I told the Empress. “So teach me now. I need to outwit a god in the flesh, before a moon has passed.”

Dread Empress Malicia, First of Her Name, Tyrant of Dominions High and Low, Holder of the Nine Gates and Sovereign of All She Beheld, watched me for a long moment.

Then she smiled.

Chapter 36: Malice

“It is impossible for the Empire to make an appreciable gain so long as this gain is a loss to every other nation on Calernia. To remedy this, we must discard the traditional lines of allying only to Evil polities and make it so that it is in the interest of other powers for us to rise.”
– Extract from ‘The Death of the Age of Wonders’, a treatise by Dread Empress Malicia

“When beginning a scheme, one must first consider the desired outcome,” the Empress said. “All other practicalities are derived from this, and determining whether that outcome is feasible at all is the most important part of the process.”

I’d lit candles, tired of the gloom inside my tent even if I could see through it. Malicia had taken one of my folding chairs and somehow managed to make it feel like a throne just by the way she held herself – through another woman’s body, no less – while I’d dropped into the seat forcefully borrowed from the Count of Old Oak. ‘Looted’ was such an ugly word. I’d used one of the candles to light up my pipe and propped up my feet against a low stool. Black had never insisted on a formal setting for his lectures and the Empress seemed inclined to continue along the same lines. I’d lain off the wine for the night, deciding the wakeleaf would be indulgence enough. At this rate I was going to run out of satchels of the stuff, though now that Ratface had the Smugglers under him getting my hands on more shouldn’t be too troublesome. Still costly, though. Letting out a stream of smoke to the side, I drummed fingers against the ornate chair arm. I knew what I wanted, I was just pondering the right phrasing.

“I want the fae out of Callow and their influence removed,” I said.

Malicia smiled. It wasn’t breath-taking, not the way I knew she was in person, but just looking at it made me feel at ease. Comfortable. Like I was sitting across from an old friend and not one of the most dangerous women alive. It was the smile of someone who had studied the image that best brought out those feelings and crafted a flawless replica to wear. The Empress was made up of smoke and mirrors in arrangements that had been refined for decades, an illusion masterful enough that it remained effective even while I knew what she was doing. She was everything Akua Sahelian wanted to be, and wasn’t that a terrifying thought?

“You are using an absolute, Catherine,” she chided. “Avoid these, for they leave no room for compromise. You should be aware, by now, that there is no such thing as an absolute victory. The Empire conquered Callow through overwhelming military victory, but did this remove the realities of its occupation? Compromise, much as you dislike it, is a necessity. Without something to offer as boon, your enemy has nothing to lose. This ensures from the beginning that your opposition will be entrenched.”

“The Imperial governorships don’t feel like a compromise, from where I stand,” I pointed out.

“Because they were not a compromise with Callow, whose perspective you still espouse in large part,” Malicia replied. “They were the boon granted to the High Lords after they were denied the direct subjection they believed their due.”

I grimaced. Praesi aristocrats ruling over Callowan cities would have been... bad. The way the histories said the Proceran occupation had been, and probably even worse. When Callow had been divided into a handful of principalities under royals that displaced the old aristocracy, the entire kingdom had been in state of constant simmering rebellion. The knightly orders turned bandit against the foreigners, Principate dignitaries were knifed in dark alleys by everyone from thieves to merchants and fields went untilled as farmers disappeared into the countryside rather than toil for the invader. It hadn’t been great battles that saw the Principate withdraw but the constant grind of attrition on every facet of the occupation.

“That would have been disastrous,” I said.

“Very much so,” Malicia agreed. “That is not to say the governorships were not designed to quell unrest, of course. It is not happenstance that Imperial governors were only granted four year mandates, or that Amadeus was given authority to oversee them.”

I drew on my pipe, looking for the meaning in that. Four year mandates. From where I stood, what did they mean? The sweet smoke hung in the air before my eyes for a while, until I dug far enough back in my childhood I could get a handle on what she’d meant.

“Mazus was hated,” I said. “But every four years, there was hope he wouldn’t be given another mandate. That his abuses would come to the attention of the Tower and that he’d be recalled.”

“Impermanence,” the Empress said. “That was the key. The belief that the enemy could be removed, if they were patient. And who did you look to for salvation, in this matter?”

“The Tower,” I said. “Black.”

I kept my breathing steady, but my blood ran cold. Every time I thought I understood the breadth of the plans they’d made to keep Callow part of the Empire, I found another hidden knife. It was deceptively simple, wasn’t it? If the heroes that popped up failed and failed visibly, then relief had to come from another source and the only one available was the Tower. Imperial governors had been allowed relatively minor abuses that filled their pockets and kept their families happy in the Wasteland, while my people were taught to look for deliverance in Ater one mandate at a time.

“To conclude this matter,” Malicia said, “that is why your abolishment of this system is not offensive to me. I no longer need to appease the High Lords, for as an internal threat they are ended for the foreseeable future. The remaining objective is to stabilize Callow as part of the Empire, and you represent a valid alternative in this.”

I dimly realized, in that moment, that this exchange had not occurred naturally. She had, even before first mentioning the occupation, known how I would react to that mention. The Empress had then used what I’d say to lead into what was both a lesson about what I’d come to her for help and a gentle reminder of the political currents I’d have to deal with when getting Callow back on its feet after all this. Gods. It was such a little thing, but such a telling one. That a woman I’d barely spoken to a handful of times could predict me this easily and fold that into a broader intent without missing a step. I cleared my throat.

“No absolutes,” I conceded. “I want the fae physically gone from Callow and any harmful influence removed.”

“Good,” Malicia smiled, and for a fleeting moment I was reminded of sunny days on the docks and the first girl I’d ever kissed.

There’d been seemingly genuine joy on her face and for a heartbeat I’d believed it. She wasn’t using sorcery, I knew that. There was no artefact or Speaking at work. She could spin me around with just words and body language. I wondered if it was more effective because I was Named – I’d not been able to study people so closely or accurately, before becoming the Squire. I’d become more sensitive to details, and that sensitivity would feed straight into her game: I’d grown used to listening to my instincts, and my instincts told me what I saw was true. Gods, if that was true then she’d managed to turn one of the basic advantages every Named took for granted into an edge for her alone without exerting so much as a speck of power. I reached for the bundle of Winter inside me, let the freezing cold flow through my veins. I was careful not to let the bleed affect the temperature, since it would be as good as sending up a written notice of what I was doing. The icy sensation spreading through me brought some much-needed clarity with it. I pulled at my pipe to hide the vapour that would have come out of my mouth amidst the wakeleaf smoke.

“Then let us speak of the entities that would stand in your way, should you seek to achieve this,” the Empress said.

“The Winter Court,” I said. “The Summer Court. Possibly the Diabolist, if she goes full opportunist.”

“These are entities that will actively oppose you,” she said. “Extend your perspective, my dear, to those who do not want you to fail but may withhold assistance for their own interests.”

I frowned.

“The Dark Guilds,” I said. “Some of the upper echelons of the Legions of Terror. I’d say the High Lords, but you seem to have them in hand.”

“Those of them that would invest in seeing you defeated have already done so through the Diabolist,” Malicia said. “You may consider the aristocracy of the Wasteland as no longer in play. Let us begin with the lesser liabilities. How can you clear them away?”

“I have no leverage on the Guild of Assassins,” I admitted. “Haven’t found a real way to affect them aside from threats. The Smugglers have been scared into cooperation. And for the Legions, doing anything there is like throwing a stone in a glass house. They answer to you and Black alone, so meddling never struck me as being in the cards.”

“That is because you still think of yourself as a separate entity from the Empire,” the Empress gently said. “Discard this perception, Catherine. A few scrying sessions making it clear that you speak with my authority end the issue entirely. If I am to rely on you, as you wish me to, learn to rely on me as well.”

I balked, more out of habit than any reason I could express in words. I fiddled with the shaft of dragonbone and forced myself to seriously consider what the Empress had said. Had I ever really considered myself as part of Praes? I already knew the answer to that, deep down. I’d taken my first steps onto this path with the notion that I would join the Legions to gain authority and then use this authority to change things in Callow. The heart of it had always been that I’d be part of the Praesi hierarchy without ever belonging in it. I’d stuck to that, even as the situation changed month by month. I’d relied on Black, sure, but only to teach me and shield me from other Wastelanders. Even when I’d forged the Ruling Council, the motives for its structure had all revolved around limiting Praesi influence in my homeland. There was a reason it had stung back in Laure, when Thief had called me a collaborator. I still saw the Empire as the enemy and for years I’d been dancing from one flourish of rhetoric to another to avoid owning up to that, because almost everyone I loved came from it. Saying I didn’t oppose Praes, just the parts of it I found unacceptable. That I was willing to live with what it could be, if not what it was right now.

But I was running out of excuses to not make use of the parts of the Empire that I’d already said I believed in. I wasn’t above throwing around my weight as the Squire to get my way, because I’d always thought of the Name as mine . But it wasn’t, not really. Praes at large listened to the Squire because she was the apprentice to the Black Knight, the leading villain of the next generation of Calamities. The moment I’d taken Black’s hand I’d chosen a side for everyone to see, and lying to myself about it wouldn’t get me anywhere. I couldn’t have the authority coming from being part of the Tower’s rule without actually being part of the Tower’s rule . It wasn’t a nice thought. It was bitter, and it felt like I was spitting on everything I’d ever dreamed of as a girl. But it would work. And if I kept mouthing off to heroes about how their pride and principles just got in the way of getting the shit that mattered done, then I had better be ready to follow through. Otherwise I should not have lived this long.

“Then please do so, Your Majesty,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Can I assume you have leverage on the Dark Guilds?”

“Malicia,” the Empress reminded me. “Call me Malicia, darling. And I have a few irons in the fire. Scribe was the one to call them to heel after the Conquest but I’ve people in their ranks. Enough that a message can be sent.”

I breathed out. There were only smouldering remnants in my pipe, so I took a last pull from it and set it aside. The smoke drifted lazily in the candlelight, a wall that would do nothing at all to protect me from the woman in front of me.

“That leaves the worst three,” I said.

The Empress shifted slightly in her seat and I side-eyed her. There was something... In some intangible way, I felt like I could trust her more now. Also like I should take my feet off the stool and straighten up. The Winter cold wavered when I realized exactly what she’d done. She’s mimicking Black’s body language , I thought, horrifyingly impressed. If they were closer in height I might never have noticed. There was an amused glint in the puppet’s eyes when I stared at her face. She knew perfectly well that I’d noticed.

“We arrive at the interesting part,” the Empress said. “Before touching upon how these entities can be affected by us, consider their nature as agents and how this informs their actions.”

My brow creased.

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

“As an example, let us study Cordelia Hasenbach,” Malicia said.

I leaned forward interestedly. It wasn’t everyday I got to have an assessment of the ruler of the Principate from the mouth of the very same woman who’d been fighting her across the continent for the better part of a decade.

“At first glance, dearest Cordelia is the most powerful individual on the surface of Calernia,” the other woman said. “She commands the largest and wealthiest nation on the continent, her armies are recently blooded and her personal diplomatic reputation is pristine.”

“Procer’s isn’t,” I immediately said. “The reputation, I mean. No one that has a border with the Principate remembers them fondly.”

“Indeed,” Malicia smiled. “The history of the nation she rules does influence what actions she can and cannot take. At a more basic level, consider the limits of her position. Cordelia Hasenbach is Lycaonese, the Prince of Rhenia. Her support base is primarily Lycaonese as well, which means it is poorer and less populous than that of her internal opposition. She can only project military strength temporarily, for the Lycaonese armies are needed at the northern borders. What does this mean for her position in Procer?”

“She has rich, powerful rivals,” I said. “And she needs to keep them in check if she wants to keep her throne.”

“Precisely,” she smiled. “To compound the issue, the civil war that Amadeus initiated and I fed has ravaged large swaths of the Principate, leaving her with large amounts of dispossessed and unemployed soldiery. She is unlikely to face open rebellion, as it would be reputational suicide for any ambitious rival to try to remove her by force after the last decade of war. Yet if she does not deal with this issue, she risks being set aside in favour of a ruler that will.”

“So she needs to keep her soldiers busy and out of her lands while she rebuilds the Principate,” I frowned. “Then why Praes? Why Callow? There’s easier targets. Sure her reputation will take a hit if she scraps with Levant or the Free Cities instead, but it’s kind of expected of Procer they’re going to be real pricks to their neighbours.”

“We now return to your earlier insight about reputation. If Cordelia acted as you said, she would face the same issue that the Empire traditionally does,” Malicia said. “She would stand alone. Make no mistake, Catherine, Procer has been greatly weakened. It cannot afford war on more than one front, which is certain to erupt if the Principate turns expansionist again. The Calernian balance of power would be shattered if she was allowed to make gains.”

I chewed on that. Hasenbach needed a war, but she also needed her other borders quiet. Which meant a target that didn’t worry everybody else, and the way she could accomplish that was...

“A Crusade,” I sighed. “It has to be a Crusade, from her perspective. She can’t not be at war and she can’t take on any of the southern nations without pissing off the others. But if she’s fighting Praes, not only can they not backstab her they might actually have to help.”

“And so we come upon the nature of Cordelia Hasenbach as an entity,” the Empress said. “She must be at war, but cannot be at war with a nation that is Good. These are the rules she has to obey.”

“It’s why she can meddle in the Free Cities but only to back the faction fighting Helike,” I said. “Otherwise her southern borders catch fire. She has to fight against Evil or her alliances all collapse because no one can trust Procer.”

“Have you wondered why I never expressed fears of you attempting an independent Callow, Catherine?” Malicia smiled. “This is the reason. Assuming you achieved that result and even sought to remove the impetus for Imperial invasions by trading us grain, you would still have to face Procer. You are, after all, a villain. An acceptable recipient of dear Cordelia’s wrath from a diplomatic perspective, and from a political one a long-term threat. Procer cannot afford another hostile border, from a purely logistical standpoint. It needs Callow to be Good and at war with Praes, to keep them both in check.”

That made it twice that she’d turned an offhand example into a pointed lesson as to where I had to stand. As I understood it this was unusually straightforward for her, but I wasn’t surprised. She would be tailoring her approach to who she was approaching, and I wasn’t unaware I reacted best to people being direct. The part she’d left unspoken was that if Callow with me at the head was at war with the Principate, it would be without the Legions backing me. That wasn’t ending well for my side, and since Praes wouldn’t be able to tolerate a Proceran protectorate just across the river that meant Callow would once more become the battlefield of the continent when the Tower made its move.

“Point taken,” I said. “Nature, huh. The Summer Court is the easiest to figure out. The Queen has three rules that bind her, I’ve been told: destroy Winter, protect Aine and ‘see the Sun victorious’.”

“All points of pressure you can feasibly reach,” Malicia said.

“I’ve got the sun stashed away, so I can bargain with that,” I said. “Threaten to destroy it, maybe? I get the impression to actually do that in Creation would be a very bad idea, but it wouldn’t be the first time I lied to a god. The other two are a little trickier.”

“As I understand it, my dear, Winter is not a static state,” the Empress said. “It is transient, fated to come and pass. You do not need to think of destruction as requiring force. If what Winter is no longer corresponds to what Summer believes it should be, that may very well qualify as ‘destruction’.”

“You mean force it to pass into Spring or Autumn,” I said, taking a look at the notion. “I’m fairly certain the seasons only shift when either Summer or Winter has lost the war. I’m not sure that’s feasible.”

Malicia smiled warmly.

“It would be a mistake, to believe yourself bound to the traditional fae outcomes,” she said. “This entire affair began by one of the Courts believing these were not impossible to avert.”

A way to make Winter no longer Winter. There might be something to that.

“That leaves Aine, the seat of Summer,” I said. “I can make gates so getting there isn’t impossible, just... really stupid. There’s no winning a fight there, and the fae can cross back into Arcadia much easier than they come into Creation. It won’t be undefended.”

I paused.

“I’ll need all three, if I’m to force the Queen’s hand about anything,” I said. “She’s not really a thing that gets compromise. Anything less than complete failure, anathema to what she is, and she’ll just keep on slugging.”

“If your strength is insufficient, borrow strength,” Malicia said. “She has enemies as well, does she not? If I understand your plan correctly, this assumption lay at the heart of your taking prisoner the Princess of High Noon. Should Summer fail to secure her return, should they lose too many soldiers, they will afterwards fall in the face of oncoming Winter. This is one of the limitations she must abide.”

I spared a moment to hope my intentions weren’t this fucking transparent to everyone out there. I would have spared another to be intimidated by the fact she’d understood my plan without being involved at any point in the making of it, but I’d grown dull to that breed of surprise by now.

“Winter winning fucks it all up too,” I said frankly. “I’m not sure if worse is the right term, but it will definitely be a similar yet different shade of godawful.”

“Let us speak of Winter, then,” the Empress lightly said. “You have treated with the King of Winter in person. Become bound to his Court, in part, and fought at the side of his greatest captains. What did you glimpse from this?”

“Take two vicious, spitting furious cats and shove them in a bag,” I said. “Then add that it has been there since time literally immemorial. The King’s the cat real desperate about getting out of that bag.”

“A colourful description,” Malicia said, arching an eyebrow. “Yet short on useful specifics.”

I almost laughed, until I remembered how fucking dangerous it would be to actually like this woman.

“He doesn’t have a plan, I think,” I said. “Or his plan was just to drag Callow into this mess and he doesn’t really need to control what comes after that. He wants out, Malicia. I don’t think how he gets out actually matters all that much. And that he thinks that way at all is scaring the other fae. I don’t think he’s supposed to.”

“That,” the Empress said quietly, “is worrying. Wekesa once told me that Arcadia is akin to a first draft of Creation, and mirrors it still. If Winter is meant to he be the reflection of villainy, and yet bound to it, there are... implications.”

I didn’t have to look all that far to find the villains who’d made the largest mark on Calernia in the last century, so her meaning was pretty clear.

“It’s not that clear cut,” I said. “The parallels aren’t so direct. But it’s crossed my mind, yeah.”

“A matter to consult more sorcerously-inclined minds over,” Malicia finally said. “Desperation is a useful tool, Catherine, especially if it can be given outlet. If your read of the creature is correct, it is the easiest of your obstacles to bargain with.”

I grimaced.

“He has my heart,” I said bluntly. “And I don’t mean that in a romantic sense. Ripped it out to make a point which, uh, complicates negotiations a bit.”

The Empress smiled, almost fondly.

“I sometimes forget how much Amadeus has left his touch on you,” she said. “Catherine, one cannot always deal from a position of strength. That is mere vanity. And doing so does not mean the negotiations will be at your expense.”

“Fae always screw you on deals,” I reminded her.

I’d always thought that Black’s quirk of lips was terrifying, the blade-smile that always heralded something dark happening to someone he thought deserved it. Looking at the Empress’ face then, the languid and almost lazy amusement, I found something to match it. This had been the closest to a glimpse of the person underneath the crown I’d gotten since I’d first met her, and what I saw there had my fingers itching for a blade.

“Darling, you forget what side you chose,” she drawled. “You stand with the Dread Empire of Praes, Catherine. We have murdered gods and made doorkeepers of demons. We have tricked angels into damnation and made orderly host of the hordes of Hell. Fae?”

She smiled amusedly.

“Fae will be a pleasant reprieve from the High Lords, my dear. Let me show you.”

Fuck , I thought. Now I like her.

Chapter 37: Procedures

“Truth and silence lie better than the silvermost tongue.”
– Soninke saying

It was a little odd to be half-naked in front of three people, but the only person that was feeling awkward about it was Hakram. The moment I’d begun unbuttoning my shirt he’d cleared his throat and looked away, and had been staring at the ceiling of my tent for a solid half hour by now. Considering I had it on good authority – Robber, ever up for a bit of gossip if it was at someone else’s expense – that he was still sleeping around on the regular his prudery for this was pretty amusing. As for the other two, well, Masego couldn’t have been any less interested in tits if he tried and this wasn’t anything Kilian hadn’t seen before. I shifted on the stool at the memory of some of the instances where she’d done a great deal more than just looking and Hierophant clucked his tongue disapprovingly.

“Don’t move,” he said. “This is delicate work.”

I’d have to take his word on that, since I couldn’t actually see what he was doing. He was prodding around the area of my heart with a long oaken wand covered in runes that was entirely ignoring my flesh, pausing now and then to look at the collection of hovering runes in the air by his side. Kilian was crouched at his side, forming a ball of light over her upturned palm. They’d said it was because they needed a ‘point of comparison’, though they’d been vague about what exactly that meant.

“It’s not grounded in the heart,” the Senior Mage frowned.

“Agreed,” Masego said, and I felt him poke something inside me.

Runes shifted in the air and the redhead inhaled sharply.

“That should kill a human outright,” she said. “It’s enough sorcery to turn all the liquids in her body to ice.”

“Named, Kilian,” the blind Soninke reminded her. “And this ‘moon’ seems to have been purposed to regulate the energies.”

I cleared my throat.

“So you have answers for me, then,” I said.

“We can confidently say that your third aspect is bound to your title of Duchess of Moonless Nights and not the heart replacement the king forced upon you,” Hierophant said. “A fascinating piece of work, that.”

“So when I get my heart back,” I prompted.

“You should keep the aspect, assuming you remain the Duchess,” Kilian said. “Though it will severely limit your abilities.”

I met her eyes, but she turned to look at the runes.

“The moon the King of Winter placed inside you serves two purposes,” Hierophant elaborated. “The first it to mimic the role in your body your heart would. Fascinating, as I said. I did not believe the fae had so keen an understanding of human anatomy.”

“And the second?” I said.

“You might consider it a heart in the magical sense,” Masego said. “All the Winter power that you can bring to bear is siphoned into it, then released for your use natured in a way that lessens the damage to your body.”

“That feels like something that’s going to fuck me over when I get my actual heart back,” I said.

“Without that filter I’m not certain you will be able to use your third aspect,” Kilian said. “I’ve never seen the direct aftermath, but I was given to understand it is a domain?”

“And I definitely know what that is,” I lied. “Pretty sure Hakram doesn’t, though, so to be polite someone should explain.”

“Actually,” the orc began, but I shushed him.

“It’s all right, Hakram,” I said. “We’re your friends. You don’t need to pretend with us.”

“I explained to you what that is mere months ago,” Masego said, sounding surprised as he eyed the orc. “Perhaps you should drink less. It’s beginning to affect your memory.”

Adjutant glared at me helplessly and I grinned.

“I’ll keep an eye on him, I promise,” I told Hierophant.

The dark-skinned mage nodded, then looked up at me through his eye cloth.

“Creation is, in essence, matter with a set of rules imposed by the Gods upon it,” he said. “A domain is when an entity, in this case you, temporarily overlays different matter and rules over it.”

Well, that sounded mildy blasphemous. And incredibly dangerous.

“In your case, ‘Fall’ appears to create a bubble of empty darkness where you may use Winter energies to lower the temperature beneath what should physically be possible,” Masego continued. “Unusually offensive in nature. Most domains provide different territory and a comparative advantage to the entity that creates it.”

“It shouldn’t be possible for a Squire to have a domain at all,” Kilian said frankly. “Transitory Names are not strong enough. Domains usually belong to lesser gods, full-fledged Named late in their career or particularly ancient monsters.”

“It’s a rare ability even among heroes,” Masego noted. “Aside from the Champion lines in Levant and allegedly the Saint of Swords, there shouldn’t be any other living human practitioner.”

“Then how did I get one?” I asked. “I didn’t exactly rub a lamp and make a wish to get this, Hierophant.”

“Djinn were usually bound to urns, not lamps, and did not grant wishes,” Masego replied absent-mindedly. “It does occur naturally in some entities. Every dragon has a domain at their heart of their body, it’s what allows them to breathe fire. And Father has theorized elves essentially become a living domain when they get old enough.”

“You have a pretty good look at my body right now,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “See any scales or pointy ears?”

“No,” Hierophant told me seriously. “And I would be able to see them even if they were invisible.”

I saw Kilian’s lips twitch form the corner of my eye.

“Now,” Masego muttered, “this is not conclusive by any means but I do have a theory.”

“All my ears are listening,” I said.

He stared suspiciously at me but I gave him my most innocent smile. His frown deepened, so maybe I needed to put some work into that.

“I believe this to be a leash,” Hierophant said. “You are given powerful abilities, but to make use of them properly you must give the King of Winter foothold in your soul. Removing that foothold turns what was once an asset into a liability, giving you strong incentive to remain bound to him.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Kilian said quietly, and Masego seemed surprised.

The Senior Mage flicked her fingers and three rows of runes parted from the rest.

“I’ve never had occasion to do a full mapping ritual on my father,” the redhead said, “but this corresponds more or less to how his body reacted to fae sorcery as a halfblood. Higher tolerance, but there’s no actual attempt made to make it harmless . In someone born, that’s only natural. But in an artificial construct?”

“Power limiter,” Hierophant said, glass eyes gleaming under dark cloth.

“Your saying he screwed me,” I said.

I paused.

“More than previously believed,” I added.

Kilian nodded slowly.

“When you draw deep on the power, you must get backlash,” she said.

“My blood starts to freeze,” I admitted.

“You were crippled,” Hierophant said bluntly. “You have the power of a Duchess to draw on, but if you actually did so it would kill you. It explains why you were at such a disadvantage fighting that Summer duchess in Arcadia, when in theory you should have been on even footing.”

“Countess at most,” Kilian said. “Your domain allows you to fight out of your league but the King made certain you would never be powerful enough to be a threat to him.”

I clenched my fingers. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, even if it did. I’d been so focused on how the threat was my stolen heart that I’d never thought to question the additions to my power I’d discovered. Archer had told me that the Duke of Violent Squalls was supposed to be one of the big names in the Winter Court. Someone who was supposed to turn the story back to war if the fae that ruled Winter was trying to avoid it. There was power to that kind of role, and by taking his title even in a different form I should have swung a great deal harder then the average duke or duchess. I’d thought it was because I wasn’t really fae, but evidently there was more to it than that.

“Can you fix this?” I finally asked.

Masego smiled.

“If I were still the Apprentice, no,” he said. “But such miracles are now within my purview. I will need preparations and the process will not be gentle, but it can be done.”

“You’ll still get backlash,” Kilian warned. “You’re a mortal bearing a fae title, that much is unavoidable.”

“The proportion of power than can be drawn before backlash could be increased tenfold, at the very least,” Hierophant said. “A Duchess in full. You’ve an unusually tough constitution, you should be able to weather it.”

“Ominous,” I said. “Get this ready. The sooner we get it done the better.”

“It could be ready tomorrow, but three days hence would be easier,” Masego said. “For ritual purposes, the new moon will benefit me.”

The mage got back to his feet, adjusting the black robes over his corpulent frame. Kilian followed suit, brushing back red hair in a gesture I followed with my eyes out of habit. Masego left the tent without bothering to excuse myself, entirely forgetting Hakram was still in here. The redhaired mage lingered for a moment.

“Catherine,” she said.

I hesitated.

“Dismissed, Senior Mage,” I replied.

Her face shuttered and she gave a stiff salute before leaving. I began to button up my shirt again, fingers almost shaking. That had taken more determination that I’d expected.

“You decent?” Adjutant asked.

“Never,” I drawled. “Villain, remember?”

“No one’s a villain every hour of the day,” Hakram grunted. “And if you’re being lippy about it, that’s a yes.”

I struck a suggestive pose when he turned, my top two buttons still undone, and he groaned.

“Just too much woman for you, I understand,” I said sympathetically.

“You’re barely half an orc,” he gravelled.

“I’m vicequeen of Callow, you savage,” I grinned. “That could be construed as treason.”

“If you have me arrested, who will handle the paperwork?” he said.

“You have always been my most loyal,” I hastily replied. “Never doubted you a moment.”

The orc snorted and reached for the carafe of wine Masego had refused to let me touch. He poured two glasses and pressed one into my hand. Oh dear. That was the herald to a serious conversation, wasn’t it? The joke about his drinking habits died unspoken on my tongue.

“We haven’t talked about it,” he said.

“The heart?” I said. “It hasn’t been a priority so far, to be honest. It was functional and there’s other fires to put out first.”

“Cat,” he said flatly. “You know that doesn’t work on me.”

My lips thinned. No matter how well it served me, there were times I wished he was just a little less perceptive.

“There is nothing to say,” I grunted.

“It’s a nasty habit you have,” Hakram said. “Thinking admitting something hurt you means you’re weak.”

“Already got that speech from Masego last year,” I sighed. “I cope. We’re in the middle of a godsdamned war, in case you hadn’t noticed. This is so far down the ladder of shit I need to deal with it’s not even worth mentioning.”

Hakram drank from his cup and I did the same.

“You were happier, with her,” he said. “Everyone saw that.”

“Happy doesn’t come into this,” I barked. “I didn’t sign up for happy ever after . The colour of my cloak’s a bit of hint there.”

“Bullshit,” Hakram said, and it was vehement enough I flinched. “That’s an excuse and you know it. Fix this or don’t, but do not pretend that being a villain means you have to be miserable. You know that’s untrue.”

“What the fuck do you want me to say, Hakram?” I hissed. “That I miss her? It’s not exactly fucking riddle when I feel like I put a fresh knife in my ribs every time she’s in the room.”

“That is a start,” the tall orc gravely said.

“She wants to cross a line,” I said tiredly. “I can’t stop her without doing the same. Talking’s not going to change any of it, so this is just salting the wound.”

“I understand she wants to do a ritual,” Hakram said cautiously.

“She wants to slaughter people like animals,” I spat. “To get rid of whatever it is that screws her up when she draws too deep on magic.”

“Human sacrifice,” he said. “How many?”

“I didn’t ask,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. One would be too much.”

I eyed him, saw the lack of expression on his face.

“Gonna take her side, are you?” I bitterly said. “Say I’ve done worse. That it makes me a hypocrite to find even the idea repulsive.”

“You assume much,” Hakram said. “Do you think Callowans fed most the altars in Praes? Wars with the Kingdom came once a reign, Catherine. In peace they looked for fodder in the Steppes.”

That have me pause, because he was right. I had assumed, deep down, that no one born on his side of the Wasaliti would really get where I was coming from. One of the reasons I’d never talked about this with anybody. It had been extremely presumptuous of me.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I didn’t mean-“

“I know,” he sighed, fangs flashing. “I will not pretend my people are anything but red-handed, Catherine. We have fed upon mankind since the First Dawn. We kept slaves and sacked cities, splattered blood across the writ of Creation. But this, we understand. The Miezans taught the Wasteland to hate chains, and in turn the Wasteland taught us to hate the altars. When Lord Black decreed the Legions would no longer bleed their own for victory, he earned deeper loyalty than he understood.”

I looked away, because I knew that Black hadn’t done that because he thought it was right or just. He’d thought it necessary, that those rituals were a crutch that did more harm than good. He probably knew that already. Most of the orc generals likely did as well, but to greenskins action always mattered more than intent.

“I’ve killed people,” I said. “A lot of them. Because they were my enemies, because they were in my way. Sometimes even to make a point. Guilt, what was actually deserved , I stopped bringing into it somewhere along the way.”

Hakram drank and did not speak.

“I started the Liesse Rebellion,” I admitted suddenly. “I let the Lone Swordsman go after starting him down that path. Because I needed a war to rise.”

The orc set down his cup.

“I suspected,” he gravelled. “It was too personal for you. More than it ever was when you were pruning away the undesirables in Callow.”

“In sparing him, I killed thousands,” I said. “I used them as a tool. And that’s despicable, Hakram. I hate it, that for a moment I stood in the same place the High Lords do when they decided to hike the taxes or murder a few of my people for convenience. I think that’s the line I can’t live with crossing. Being the kind of person that doesn’t see people as people, just objects .”

“The kind of person that would use killing others as fuel for a ritual,” he said.

“I know it’s different for Praesi,” I said. “You read Black’s journal, same as me. There were years where sacrifices for the fields were all that kept famine away, and I won’t cast stones at people doing ugly shit to survive. But there’s no need for that anymore. Not if the grain can come from Callow instead. But it’s still done, and there has to be a point where culture isn’t an excuse anymore, right? Gods, if it was someone’s culture to eat fucking babies does that mean I just have to smile and pretend it’s not vile? Because there’s a lot of that going around, Hakram. The Matrons are our allies, so we have to pretend the things they do every year to boys just like Robber because they’re boys aren’t revolting. Ratface’s own father tried to have him knifed in his bed because he was inconvenient, and I’m supposed to just laugh it off and say ‘that’s the Taghreb for you, there they go murdering again’? Fuck, I’ve done dark things but at least I don’t pretend it’s all right for me to have done them. I don’t encourage it.”

Gods, but it felt good to actually say that out loud. Because I knew who I’d sided with, and now more than ever I knew who I answered to. But there were compromises that rankled. Things I had to pretend I didn’t see because I couldn’t pick every battle that should be picked and still think I’d win. That was the thing, with stories. They never told you that the ogres had kids that would starve without a father or that the valiant knight that helped you was part of a larger institution that might trigger civil war if left unchecked. If you wanted a clean ending, one that didn’t leave a bad taste in the mouth, you had to end the story just after the victory. Otherwise you got to see that you could win loudly once, send Evil skittering back into the dark, but that everywhere across Creation there were lesser evils taking place every hour of every day and there wasn’t much anyone could do about it.

“Ah,” Hakram said softly. “You hadn’t realized.”

I looked at him.

“That Kilian is Praesi,” he said. “With all that entails.”

“She doesn’t need to do this,” I said, almost pleadingly. “She’s not as powerful as she could be, it’s true. But she’s still better than the average Legion mage. If it came down between her dying and the ritual being made, Gods forgive me but I’d do it. Because I’m in love with her, and I’m selfish and I’d rather be a monster than lose her. But it’s not going to kill her, to be who she is. This is just wanting more for herself at the expense of others.”

“She can do it legally,” Hakram said. “Using death row criminals at auction.”

“I know that,” I said through gritted teeth. “And I know that the people who’d bleed wouldn’t be choir children. That they’ll die anyway, probably on another altar in a way that benefits someone else. That even in Praes you don’t get the noose lightly. But if they hang, Hakram, that’s law. That’s the exercise of justice, or the closest the Wasteland can have to it. There’s a difference between hanging someone for a crime and slitting their throat open so your magic comes more smoothly. And it stings that I shared my bed with someone for more than a year who doesn’t get something that basic.”

I drained the rest of my cup.

“Gods, is human sacrifice too low a bar to set?” I said, and I felt exhausted. “Because in my enemies I’ll live with it. Until I can make them stop, and I will. But Kilian’s on my side. Used to be a lot more than that. And I refuse that this should be who we are.”

I looked at the orc.

“What’s the point of any of this, if we’re just the High Lords with a nicer reputation?” I asked. “I’m not better than her even if she does this, Hakram. I’m probably worse, if a count can be kept for things like this. And we both know I’ll do worse things before this is over. But I won’t put on a smile and pretend this is all right. I’m not willing to be that person, not even for Kilian.”

The tall orc finished his cup.

“This is,” he said, “half the conversation you needed to have. Perhaps you should seek the other half.”

He left the tent, left me alone with the words I’d spoken still filling the silence. They were no comfort. Never had been.

Chapter 38: Host

“It is said that the founding First Prince spoke of Procer as a great tower, every principality a stone raising it to ever greater heights. I have found the sentiment more poetic than accurate. Procer is no single tower but twenty-three of them, and their owners constantly steal each other’s stones to rise at the expense of the others.”
-Extract from ‘The Labyrinth Empire, or, A Short History of Procer’, by Princess Eliza of Salamans

Even having kept out most of the general staff, the pavilion was crowded. Enough that we’d had to bring in a second table to shove at the end of our usual one, a ramshackle assembly Pickler had covered with a tablecloth in a move that fooled absolutely no one. It made me want to wince a little, considering who was seated around it. We were looking like disorganized amateurs to some of the most powerful people in Callow. The wine, at least, they couldn’t complain about. Northern red, because I sure as Hells wasn’t breaking into my own stash for the sake of people I mostly couldn’t stand, but decent vintage and cooled by mages. I’d helped myself to a cup early because I already had a feeling this conference was going to scrape my nerves raw. If there wasn’t frost on something before this was over, I owed Hakram more than I should have willingly bet. I’d stolen a horse – with wings, even – from Arcadia as well as gems and my favourite chair, but I had no illusions Zombie the Third would still be in one piece when the dust settled this year. That meant buying another charger, and those were costly .

To the left, Duchess Kegan Iarsmai of Daoine was seated, managing to convey general disapproval at the existence of everybody else without her face actually turning up in a sneer. I was reluctantly impressed by the feat, which was magic in its own right. Her second had taken a chair for once, the hooded and silent man I’d taken way too long to learn was called Commander Adair. The head of the Watch, though his title was just that and not a Name. That hadn’t always been the case, historically speaking, but as far as I knew the last Commander had been killed by my own teacher years before the Conquest. Something about skirmishes with the orc clans that lived in the Lesser Steppes had prompted him to step in, and explained how Black had forged bonds with prominent chieftains like Grem One-Eye and Istrid Knightsbane before the Praesi civil war.

To the right, the senior officers of the Legions of Terror had clustered. Marshal Ranker was at the heart of them, not even her blackened twisted hand managing to make the sight of a wrinkled goblin her size perched on a cushioned stool entirely humourless. She’d brought her own Staff Tribune and on her other side sat General Afolabi Magoro. The dark-skinned man had been less than fond of me even before I’d publicly spanked him for speaking out of line, and since then never faced me with anything less than the blank emotionless mask that was taught to all Soninke highborn from the cradle. Tonight, though, there was something wary about him. The Empress had been good as her word, I mused. Malicia had whispered in the right ears and made it clear that those who did not fall in line behind me were earning her displeasure as well as mine.

It would be a lot easier to dislike the monsters I worked with if they weren’t so competent, I thought.

Adjutant was seated at my left, a courtesy offered to Juniper who’d taken his usual place at my right instead. If the Hellhound was nervous at the prospect of addressing hardened veterans most of which outranked in both formal authority and experience, there was no trace of it on her broad face. The only cup of wine my general had taken had been duly watered, and left mostly untouched. Of her general staff, only three had been called to sit across us. Ratface, though mere a Supply Tribune, had the place of honour. The report he was slated to give was by far the most important. Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara flanked him on one side, here as much because she knew the duty rosters of the Fifteenth like the back of her hand as because I intended on picking her brains about the people here after the conference was over. The last addition was Grandmaster Brandon Talbot, and it had been a row to get him a seat in here at all. Juniper had made it clear she didn’t trust him in the least, commander or not, but I’d stood my ground. The same reasons she disliked him were why he needed to be in here: he was a voice for the Callowans, something none of my other senior officers could feasibly pass for. Considering more than half the Fifteenth had never stepped foot in the Wasteland, there was a need for that now. The Hellhound might not like it, but it was the truth.

It was more people than I would have liked, for a conference this sensitive, but the realities of the situation had imposed. The soldiers gathered outside formed the largest host Callow had seen since the Conquest, but it wasn’t near as united as the forces that had fought. A little less than half of them were Deoraithe, loose allies to me at the best of times, and the chain of command on the Praesi side was a fucking mess. That I was on top, no one could deny. Under that, though? Marshal Ranker had everyone else beat in rank and seniority, but Juniper commanded the largest legion by far and answered to me alone. Afolabi wasn’t a contender in this sense, but he had connections in the Wasteland and his Twelfth had gotten off the lightest casualty-wise from our expedition through Arcadia. That Kegan openly feuded with Ranker and spoke to Juniper like she was a particularly stupid child had made any attempts to keep things civil in the past a throbbing headache.

“All right, everyone’s here,” I eloquently begun. “We’ll begin the march south tomorrow at dawn, but before we do it’s time everybody was brought in on the campaign plans.”

“That would be pleasing,” Duchess Kegan said coldly.

“Unorthodox, making plans without your senior commanders,” Marshal Ranker added.

I reached for my cup, and reminded myself I still needed those two. It wasn’t feasible to shove them both in a bag and run away with their armies as they fought inside.

“Our operations are contingent on factors none of you have the clearance to know about,” Juniper growled.

“A Marshal of Praes lacked clearance?” General Afolabi said.

I turned to Adjutant.

“Hakram, you seen my pipe?” I nonchalantly asked.

The Soninke stiffened in his seat.

“In your tent,” the orc sighed.

“What a shame,” I said, and gave Afolabi a friendly grin.

I could have done without the approving look from Kegan, or Talbot for that matter. Just because I was stepping on the fucker didn’t mean I was any fonder of the rest of them.

“Before we set out, certain logistics have to be seen to,” Juniper said. “Our host currently numbers near forty thousand soldiers. The battles in Arcadia saw an unusually high proportion of wounded, many with with wounds that are beyond mage healing. Supply Tribune Bishara, report.”

Aisha inclined her head a fraction, then addressed the table in a calm voice that was very clearly trained.

“As you are all aware, the Imperial-held city closest to our camp is Vale,” she said. “Though it is not garrisoned at the moment and has proved recalcitrant to assist the Legions of late, this situation has been remedied.”

Marshal Ranker eyed me.

“You have people in the city?” she asked.

I raised an eyebrow.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said.

To be accurate, Thief had people in the city and she’d gotten in touch with them. That she’d been able to do that at all had interesting implications. Namely, that the Guild if Thieves had access to a form of communication swifter than riders. It couldn’t be scrying, since they shouldn’t have the mages for that and scrying was a lot less common that my exposure had led me to believe. The High Lords used it and so did the Legions, but outside those ranks it was actually fairly rare. Less now than before I’d been born, since the Warlock had published a spell formula on par with the ones the old Wasteland families had kept to themselves, but in Callow there weren’t a lot of mages that could scry. Same with most nations outside our borders as well: the highest tier of practitioners in Procer and the rest might know how, but even then not as proficiently as Praesi. The knowledge had been slow to trickle out of the Empire, though is was only a matter of time before it did. Still, that Thief had a trick that worked along same lines had been both intriguing and helpful. She’d contacted the guildmaster in Vale and gotten the man to pass the messages I needed.

“Though we will detach two mage lines to keep the worst of the wounded stable, treatment will have to be deferred to outside institutions,” Aisha continued.

I felt more than one look cast towards me at that. Though she’d not spoken the name, none of these people were unaware that ‘outside institutions’ meant the House of Light. Brothers and Sisters sworn to the Heavens, healing legionaries of the Tower. It wasn’t without precedent on individual basis, I knew from my childhood in Laure, but cooperation that open certainly was. I’d had to reach out to Governess-General Kendal to get that stone rolling, since she had pull with the priests. I spent more time negotiating than stabbing people that deserved it, nowadays, which never failed to foul my mood even if it was necessary. My Staff Tribune inclined her head again, her contribution finished for the moment. Marshal Ranker was the first to speak up.

“Akua Sahelian,” she said. “Do we have a read on her locations? I dislike sending off wounded without escort until we know she’d not going to ambush them.”

“Nothing solid,” I said. “Unless Duchess Kegan has something to share?”

It was an open secret among the people in the pavilion that what Diabolist was up to involved fucking with whatever empowered the Watch. She might have means to keep an eye on the other villain we didn’t know about.

“She’s still in Callow,” Kegan reluctantly said. “We know nothing more.”

“So far the Diabolist has avoided direct confrontation with the Legions,” Adjutant gravelled. “While this cannot be relied on, if she seeks to damage the armed forces of the Empire she has better targets.”

The three legions in Holden, under Juniper’s mother. They’d been warned to keep an eye on the sky just in case.

“Wounded legionaries and a civilian city are an easy target,” General Afolabi said. “If ritual fodder is what she seeks, Vale is wide open.”

“The Diabolist can strike any city in Callow if she wants,” Juniper grunted. “There isn’t much we can do about it. Vale is still the best bet for our wounded.”

I drummed my fingers on the table.

“I’ve seen the most of Akua of anyone in this room, as far as I know,” I said, leaving a heartbeat for someone to disagree. No one did. “From what I understand of her, she’s not going to actively harm Praesi military strength unless it’s set against her. No matter what she’s cooked up in Liesse, she’s going to need the Legions in the coming years. She wants to be in charge of more than just a flying city and for that she needs armies.”

“You believe she means to overthrow Her Dread Majesty,” General Afolabi said.

He didn’t seem particularly surprised. Whether it was because he hid it well or because of course Akua was going to try to take over the Empire, I couldn’t tell.

“She’ll need more than Liesse if she wants to breach the Tower,” Ranker snorted. “Even if the Empress doesn’t dig into the nasty stuff down in the vaults, it remains the most heavily fortified place on Calernia.”

“Better schemers than I have failed to predict what Diabolist is after,” I said flatly. “Guesswork will lead us nowhere, and we have more pressing concerns.”

I glanced at Juniper.

“The supply situation has been addressed,” the tall orc said. “Supply Tribune Ratface, elaborate.”

The Taghreb bastard smiled lazily.

“We’ve been in touch with the Legion headquarters in Ater and they’re sending rations and armaments down, but it’ll take at least three weeks to get it all in order,” he said. “Until then, we’ll be relying on brave Callowan volunteers to ship us food down the Hwaerte.”

“You mean smugglers,” Talbot said, lips thinning.

“Food is food, Grandmaster,” Ratface replied, managing to make the title sound like an insult. “Unless you would prefer magnificently legal starvation, of course. That could also be arranged.”

Ranker’s Staff Tribune coughed into his hand to disguise a laugh, but his Marshal didn’t even bother to hide her smirk. Fucking Hells, you’d think a literal god out for our blood would be enough to make them stop sniping at each other for a week.

“Ratface,” I warned.

“No offense was meant, my good knight,” the Taghreb apologized.

I turned a dark look on him and he made an effort to look a little more contrite. We’d be having words about this later, and by the face Juniper was making that would be after she got done with him.

“You’re all aware we’ll be marching on Dormer,” I said. “We’ll be keeping to the river as we go down, for ease of transport. It’ll delay us some but if we keep the pace we’ll arrive at the city in time to pre-empt the Queen of Summer.”

“Yes, the Queen,” Duchess Kegan said. “She has already demonstrated her ability to wipe out hundreds in moments. How is this do be dealt with?”

“I expected Warlock’s boy to be here to explain that,” Marshal Ranker noted.

“Hierophant is currently making preparations,” I lied.

Masego had bluntly told me he would rather set himself on fire than attend the conference, and I’d chosen not to fight that battle. This was delicate enough a balance without bringing his lack of social graces into it. The only worse idea I could come up with was bringing Archer, who by now would already have hit on two of them and brawled with a third.

“We will be bringing outside pressure to bear on Summer as we engage them,” Adjutant said.

Ranker’s eyes narrowed.

“Fae,” she said. “You dealt with Winter again.”

“I employed the services of a talented negotiator, this time,” I replied vaguely.

An understatement. I’d never seen the Empress in her element before, and it had been an... eye-opening experience.

“We don’t need to exterminate the enemy host,” Juniper said, as if she’d seen nothing difficult about tearing through a bunch of demigods and their mostly invincible magic army. “But a position of strength will need to be achieved before we can force terms on them.”

“They won’t fall for the same tricks twice,” Ranker warned.

“They lost most their winged knights,” Grandmaster Talbot said. “But the golden fae proved unusually resilient.”

They’d wiped out three quarters of Nauk’s force while simultaneously handling the Watch and a brutal pounding from Masego, he meant. They’d been hard fuckers to deal with.

“They’re called the Immortals,” I said. “And we found a weakness.”

“Their standards,” Juniper said. “Getting rid of them will sap their strength.”

“If this is to be a victory, that must take priority,” Kegan said. “I will not send the Watch into the grinder twice without assurances.”

“Hierophant will be busy handling the Queen, but I will be deploying Named to settle the matter,” I said.

“The nature of the planned engagement has not been touched upon,” General Afolabi said.

“We meant to assault Dormer directly,” Juniper said.

Ranker scoffed.

“And give them walls?” she said. “That’ll double the butcher’s bill.”

“Open field won’t work for us,” I said. “We don’t have twenty thousand Winter fae in the woods ready to pop out. If we’re to have any chance of beating them, they can’t be in a position to bring their full force to bear.”

“I’ve read the accounts of the siege in Arcadia,” the Hellhound said. “It stood out to me how ill-equipped they were to deal with Legion siege tactics.”

“Summer’s not used to being on the defence,” I said. “And they’ve never seen anything like goblin munitions or our engines.”

“Both of which we could use from our own fortified position,” Afolabi pointed out.

“Fae will be weaker in Creation,” Kegan said. “The possibility of a field battle has perhaps been too hastily dismissed.”

“Your Deoraithe are not trained to deal with the kind of quick redeployments flight allows the fae,” Juniper told her bluntly. “Your soldiers would be a liability.”

Duchess Kegan looked down her nose at the orc and smiled mockingly.

“Perhaps a more experience voice could weigh in on the matter, girl,” she said.

The temperature in the pavilion cooled and the Deoraithe’s eyes turned to me.

“ General Juniper has more experience than you,” I smiled brightly. “Since being appointed at the head of the Fifteenth, she has won three pitched battles and a siege. What great victories do you have under your belt, Duchess?”

Ranker’s vicious satisfaction was palpable.

“Lady Squire speaks true,” Afolabi suddenly said. “Summer has demonstrated it has trouble dealing with unorthodox tactics. I would prefer the walls be ours, but penning them in the city would rob them of several advantages.”

I was feeling generous, so I’d chalk that up to him deserving his rank rather than the Empress having had a word with him.

“You have something in mind,” Ranker said, studying me. “For Dormer. I’m assuming more elaborate than tossing sharpers at the walls.”

I leaned back into my seat.

“Summer has some skill with fire,” I said. “But then, so do we.”

Gods , I thought, it’s never a good sign when goblins grin like that.

Chapter 39: Exposition

“It’s hard for people to understand what it means to have been part of the Fifteenth. We were farmboys and thieves, not people that were ever supposed to matter. Fodder for noose and ledger. But then she came along, and told us we were to be the doom of gods. Heavens forgive me, but I believed her then and believe her still.”
– Extract from the ‘Forlorn Memoirs’, author unknown

The banners flew tall in morning wind, carried by the Gallowborne. Two banners now, for I had not forgotten my promise to Talbot. A silver fifteen in Miezan numerals set on black was the herald of my legion, the standard under which it would fight until we were all ground to dust by time or steel. I kept to the colours, but by emblem was different. Silver scales shivered over us, measuring a crown and a sword. The sword weighed heavier, as much on cloth as it did in Creation. House Foundling’s words were sewed under them, the one debt I owed Akua Sahelian I would never be able to repay. Justifications matter only to the just. Grim words, perhaps, but none had rung more true since I’d taken the knife and the offer behind it. Juniper had not commented on them after an initial guarded glance. The two of us marched with the vanguard, though when we came in sight of Dormer she would retreat to her command post to rule over the battlefield. The Hellhound killed with her mind, not her hands. She was more terrible an opponent for it.

Ahead of us lay plains that had once been green, before Summer came to own them. Now half the land was scorched black and the rest lusher than was possible in Creation. Orchards bore fruits regardless of the season, fields already harvested grew again tall and golden wheat. There would be food shortages, in the coming months. My homeland had seen war twice in three years, this one even more devastating than the last. Even if the blackened earth was made cultivable again, how many of those fields would lack men to till them? Summer had killed many, harmed more and I knew Akua would bring deeper wounds still. She was of the old breed, the one whose madness was worthy of some awe if only for the scale of its folly. Walking the aftermath of Three Hills I’d gotten a glimpse of what that felt like. Seen fate written in mud and blood and eerie green flame, and though doom had lurked in that vision when I’d thought of embracing it I had felt so gloriously alive .

I’d fought battles since then. Desperate ones, and the pull of that first moment had long faded. It would have been a lie to say I did not still relish in victory, in breaking whatever lay in path, but I had been tempered by so many dances on the blade’s edge. It was one thing to gamble the lives of strangers for your purposes, to risk it all on a roll of the dice, but I’d come to dread it. I’d won more often than not, so far, but how long could I keep that up? My mistake had been coming to love them. It was also my last saving grace. How easy it would have been to become like Black, utterly divorcing affection and necessity, if I’d not found a family in my companions. My teacher had done great things, by embracing that cold unfeeling clarity. But atrocious ones as well, and I would not follow him down that road. The more my Name and the mantle I had stolen from Winter set me apart from humanity, the more I understood I had to grasp tightly onto it. The thing I’d become otherwise would care nothing for what I wanted to build.

“We’ve come a long way from the College, haven’t we?” I said.

For once, Juniper did not chide me for being foolishly sentimental. The Hellhound had been my opponent once, I thought, if never quite my enemy. It felt like a colourless dream now. I’d grown to rely so much on her that I’d feel lost if she was gone.

“Didn’t think much of you, back then,” she grunted. “Too mouthy. Not as clever as you believed you were.”

“I never did manage to get the drop on you, after the once,” I chuckled.

It was a strange thing, recognizing that someone was cleverer than you. And Juniper was, I would not deny it. It wasn’t so clear-cut a thing as most people pretended when posturing, of course. Cleverness was no perfect shield. The smartest woman in the world could be outmanoeuvred by a fool, under the right circumstances. Or by luck, or by a myriad other factors that no one ever really liked to talk about. But the fact remained that Juniper saw things I didn’t, when it came to strategy. Pondered a few steps deeper, arranged her thoughts more clearly. Diabolist did the same, when it came to plotting, and it had little to do with her Name. There was always someone better. I’d felt slighted by that when I was younger, as if just by being me I had to be the best at everything I undertook. Nowadays I just felt relieved, that I had someone at my side who could steer us away from the mistakes I would have made. Was there anything more worthless than pride, if the cost of it was the death of those precious to you?

“You always get strange before battles,” Juniper sighed. “After too, sometimes. Like you’re far away.”

That was pretty funny, coming from a woman who was in the custom of finding high ground to sleep on whenever a fight was finished. And that was without mentioning how she’d apparently napped through the latter part of the Battle of Marchford.

“You’re odder than me,” I said. “Calm as you are. Nauk can’t stop grinning for half a day before a battle.”

“Hakram doesn’t,” she said.

“Hakram’s different,” I replied.

She grunted, conceding the point.

“Used to think he was a coldblood,” Juniper admitted. “Everything was surface deep with him. Nothing real under.”

Coldblood. A disease of the mind, I’d been taught. People who felt less, didn’t get remorse or really understand consequences. Adjutant had told me some things in the dark that let me see why she’d thought him one. What she’d taken for absence was just apathy.

“I take after my father more,” the orc said.

I looked at her, surprise. She rarely talked about her family, and what little she did was only about her mother.

“He’s the one who raised you, right?” I said.

“Until the College,” she said. “He’s always been... calm.”

“So he lost the rite of raising,” I said.

The orc looked amused.

“Read that in a Soninke book, did you?” she said.

“Taghreb, I think,” I shrugged. “I had a lot of books plopped onto my lap before meeting you, the titles kind of meld together nowadays.”

“The custom exists,” she said. “But only Praesi think it’s common. If a couple needs to fight to choose who’ll raise the child, they shouldn’t be having children. It’s a sign of immaturity.”

“Well, I learned something today,” I mused.

She bared the faintest hint of her fangs in what I knew to mean amusement. Or flirtation. Probably the former, all things considered.

“I have it too,” she said suddenly. “My mother’s blood. The battle-joy.”

I studied her in silence.

“I was born for this,” she said. “Of this. It’s what I am and I can’t remember ever craving anything else.”

It was always hard to tell with orcs, but I thought she looked uncomfortable. Almost ashamed. No fangs visible, hairless brows pressing together.

“We’re supposed to want glory for the clan,” she said. “To make our own grow stronger. But all I saw were fucking huts and cattle and I couldn’t wait to leave. I almost ran away, when I was younger. There’s only so many times you can sketch out formations in the dirt before you feel choked .”

I knew that feeling. I had followed me in Laure, when I was waiting tables and picking up bruises in the Pit when I should have been in the Wasteland, learning at the College. Like I was just wasting away my days. That I should have been out there doing something, anything but just sifting through the muck to earn enough coin to really begin my life.

“I hate the orphanage, at the end,” I quietly said. “It wasn’t that they were out to get me, it was just...”

“In the way,” Juniper finished. “Quicksand you’d get stuck in if you waited too long.”

She laughed hoarsely.

“I used to fight battles in my head when herding aurochs,” the orc said, almost sounding like she was mocking herself. “All the victories of the Conquest, how I could have won them better.”

“I kept a tally of who I’d kill when I had the authority,” I admitted. “Mazus was always top of the list. But then he hanged, and it had little to do with me.”

Juniper hesitated.

“What Lord Black was to you,” she said. “You were to me.”

My face flickered in surprise.

“Not a mentor,” she growled, but the irritation petered out. “The offered hand, I mean. If I hadn’t become your legate I’d be a junior officer in someone else’s legion right now. I never thanked you for that.”

“Don’t,” I said. “I wouldn’t have gotten this far without you, Juniper. Stings to admit it, but it’s true.”

“Wouldn’t be the same without you either,” she said. “It’s not about the rank, Catherine. The rank is just what gets me there. I want...”

There was something burning in my general then that I’d never seen in her before. I’d seen her cold and amused and furious and irritated more times than I could count. I’d even seen her tender, though only with Aisha.

“More,” she said, sounding angry at the inadequacy of the word. “Three Hills, Marchford even Arcadia. No one’s fought like that before. We get to make that. They’ll study our battles, centuries from now. Some other girl stuck herding godsdamned aurochs will think about our mistakes, how she could have outsmarted our opponents.”

“Making history,” I mused.

She laughed.

“Fuck history,” she said. “We’re changing the face of war . And it’s just beginning, Catherine. The storm ahead will make this all look like drizzle.”

Ahead was Dormer, the full might of Summer and the Queen that ruled it. But she thought beyond that, and so did I. The Diabolist had carved doom out of stone and sorcery, and she would not quietly into the night. And on the horizon, Procer sharpened its blades. In a year or ten, the Principate would come calling and with the greatest army on the face of Calernia. There would be heroes in that host, and not like the ones I’d killed. The real legends, the heroes weren’t bound to small stories like mine. The Calamities were the greatest monsters of the age, but they’d lived so long because they kept their wars small and their enemies distracted. One day the great Named of the other side would come forward and the old wars would be born again. Those that warped the lands, flattened mountains and burned cities. I’d have to be ready for them, for the people who wanted to make my home the battlefield of the continent again. If I could not have peace in truth, then I would settle for the peace of the grave.

It was the kind of victory I’d been trained for.

“I don’t think,” I said quietly, “that we’ll be remembered fondly. Not you, and certainly not me.”

“Ah,” Juniper of the Red Shields smiled. “But they will remember us.”

Silence reigned for a long moment after that, more comfortable than I would have thought. The Hellhound wasn’t someone who felt the need the fill the air with words when she had nothing to say. Something I’d grown to appreciate, since Archer had joined by band. The quiet was how I came to hear it even though the wind blew the other way and we were ahead of the thick of the host. The Fifteenth and its allies trailed at our back like a great snake of glittering steel, and it was from my legionaries that the song came. Lightly, at first, the words indistinct even to my Name-sharpened ears. But after the first time it was sung, thousands more voices joined in. Even the vanguard around us.

“I was born out in the green where their banners flew high
And the boots of the great lords they did tread over us
Oaths we made and service gave, kneeling to the oldest lie
But now the world’s turned around and we sing this chorus.”

Orcs and goblins. Soninke and Taghreb. But, most of all, Callowans. The muster of my homeland sang, light and bright but there was such anger underneath. It scared me. My veins sang with it, but it scared me.

“Come forth you old devils,
Bring out your lesser evils
Blight the skies and the land
You’ll be met sword in hand

One day your children’ll tell
Of the deep and rebel yell,
That on his field so sombre
Conquered host of horror.”

Juniper looked up at the sun. The red-painted steel had warmed over the march, though like most orcs she did not sweat easily.

“I wondered if they’d sing it,” she said.

“You knew about this?” I said quietly.

“Aye,” she said. “Nauk penned part. Named it too. In Dread Crowned .”

Gods, what had I unleashed? I’d thought I understood. That I had crafted an escapement for what would have made Callow claw at itself, a release that would let it change and escape the curse that defined it. But it wasn’t just Callowans that sang. Greenskins and Praesi joined their voices to the chorus, and though their anger was of a different make it was no less harsh for it. There was a story the House of Light liked to use in sermons. That on the day of the First Dawn, the Gods Below had created all the evil in the world and released it. The Gods Above had caught it all in the box without a lock, and Creation would have been as the Heavens had the first of men not opened it, seduced by the whispers of devils promising godhood lay within. That was why the brothers and sisters taught rules, the priests said. So that on the last of days, when Good triumphed, the evils would be forced into the box again. Again it would be without a lock, but mankind would have learned. They would not open it again.

I’d carved a crack into the box and now the insides were spilling out. It hadn’t been evils, inside. It had been anger. Bitter old anger that had not before been given a banner to rally under. It had one, now. It flew behind me, scales that weighed crown and sword and found the crown wanting. There was a promise there I had not meant, but was written for all to see.

“On the plain where folk were fair we stood and greatly slew,
And by the ford a score devils with a great demon too
Prince and page and swordsman proud to our steel they all fell
The world stolen we take back and damn you all to Hell

The chorus came again . My blood ran cold, and pressed against my ear the Beast laughed. It was awake, alive and savouring every moment of this with malevolent glee. Blood , it whispered. There will be blood over this . The Fifteenth Legion sang, and declared war on the mighty of the world. My general was looking at me.

“You promised a revolution, Warlord,” Juniper said.

She bared her teeth, perfect ivory fangs.

“We will not settle for anything less.”

She laughed, harsh but joyous.

“Did I not tell you?” she said. “ They will remember us .”

It spread. To the legionaries of the Twelfth and the Fourth, men and women not bound to me. To the Deoraithe, though not as many. I had gathered forty thousand soldiers to my banner, and they sang of treason to the morning sky. I could hear refrains in it, slivers of people I knew. Robber’s sharp, vicious smile as he whispered they kill us for sport . The fever in Ratface’s eyes as he said they’ll never stop unless we make them . Pickler’s warning, echoed in every chorus. It’ll be to the death, Foundling . Do not begin this lightly . I’d spoken the words. Those had consequences, for Named more than any other. If you employ violence , the Empress had told me, in violence they will follow. I had not made peace. I had traded one war for another, and this one would be a thousand times bloodier than the last. I would be woe unto all I beheld, the Queen of Summer had so sadly told me. There had been a weight to the name when it was granted to me and finally I was feeling it in full. I’d thought I owned this, because I’d been the one to speak the words. That I could control it. Oh but the arrogance of that. You couldn’t break open a dam and order the river.

I had taught them this. And Gods, they had learned. One decision after another, spitting in the eye of gods and compromise both, and I had promised them that if we paid the butcher’s bill we could change the world. I’d told Archer that there was something happening in the Empire beyond any of us. That they were not in control. Neither, I understood then, was I.

“Be they high or resplendent our oaths stand taller still
And in the west do quiet lie graves we have yet to fill
Learn ye mighty that from Tower’s shade to vales of red
The Fifteenth by call of horn stands ever crowned in dread.”

The song carried us all the way to Dormer. Behind broken walls Summer awaited us, a riot of silk and steel not of Creation. We had made good time, as it was not long past Noon Bell. We had until dawn before a god in the flesh came to destroy us.

It was no longer, I thought, the worst of my problems.

Background

“The true tragedy of Evil is that it is not absolute. That even the worst of men can love their children, be moved to kindness. Damnation is earned piecemeal.”
– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

Hakram had grown to rely on the sharper perception his Name lent him. Often he used it in fights, to read the strikes of an opponent and brutally capitalize on them, but now and then it had more mundane use. Like telling when Archer was getting restless and about to ‘request’ they spar. At the first sign tonight of it he’d immediately sought out Masego to suggest they play shatranj, giving him an excuse to avoid the solid hour-long beating that would have ensued otherwise. He wasn’t particularly proud of it, but dignity was a worthwhile trade for lack of bruises. The tall orc glanced at the board and moved his chancellor to threaten a mage. The Soninke sitting across him radiated displeasure at the sight. It was somewhat amusing, Adjutant thought, that transitioning into the Hierophant had done absolutely nothing to improve Masego’s skill at the game.

“You’re cheating,” Hierophant accused, sounding deeply offended.

Adjutant offered a mocking hint of fangs, knowing the other man would know exactly what it meant. The mage was familiar with orcs. That Masego was entirely convinced that his superior breadth of knowledge should make him the better player at what was widely considered a game for scholars and strategists was one of the orc’s petty delights. He always took it so personally when he lost.

“You should call it a draw then,” Archer suggested eagerly.

The ochre-skinned woman was messily sprawled across three armless chairs which she had very clearly stolen from Juniper’s command tent. If she’d portrayed boredom any more clearly, it would have qualified as sorcery.

“I’m not going to lose,” Masego said through gritted teeth.

“Of course not,” Hakram said, fangs bared just a little more.

Archer loudly sighed.

“We’re at war,” she complained. “How can this be so horribly dull? All we do is march all day.”

“Isn’t that what war is?” Thief drawled. “Months of tedium, then a day of terror.”

The orc glanced at the fourth person in the tent. He’d been somewhat surprised, when she’d joined them. Since their conversation in Laure, the Thief had made a point of avoiding his presence. Only after Arcadia had she begun to shed the habit, occasionally joining these informal gatherings. She still gave him dark looks, when she thought he wasn’t looking. That was fine. Given enough time, Catherine would pull her into her circle as she had the rest of them. Should this not occur, she would likely turn her blade on him first. As he’d meant to ensure, when putting fear in her. A little discord within their band was worth that additional precaution in case she turned on them. Hierophant moved forward a footman to protect the mage and Hakram snorted, taking another footman with one of his. The chain of captures that would ensure from that would leave Masego down a footman and with a rider unprotected.

“Been in a lot of wars, have you?” Archer challenged.

Conflict, Adjutant had learned, was how the woman related to others. Considering some of the things he’d heard of Refuge and the nature of Lady Ranger’s tutelage, there was sense in it. The Waning Woods saw more monsters than balls. Masego had passed whatever bar Archer set when they’d gone south to stir trouble for the Diabolist, though with how she picked on the mage it could be hard to tell. There’d been difference, though. She acted as a nuisance still, but the barbs were no longer probing. When it came to the orc himself, acceptance had come after the Battle of Marchford. He’d held in the face of the demon, which had gained him esteem. She thought much like an orc, in those matters. It made her easy to like. Thief, however, had never truly fought at their side. Her intervention in Arcadia, while crucial, had not been the kind of contribution Archer recognized. That would be trouble, he’d thought more than once. Thief was not a fighter, or even an assassin. Her talents were more indirect, and that perspective seemed bound to her Name. The Callowan would not change, and neither would Archer. He’d have to finagle a middle-ground for them to meet, before this became a true issue.

“This makes two,” Thief replied easily. “Stuck to the last one longer than you did, the way I hear it.”

On the other side, Hakram thought, but the woman had probably noticed that this kind of distinction didn’t really matter to Archer. People out of Refuge did not seem to care about those lines, much as it was said the Lady of the Lake did not. They were islands unto themselves, bound to others only as long as it suited them. It still impressed the orc that anyone would have the balls to ‘retire’ from the Calamities, considering the kind of monsters that made them up.

“There’s only so much in Callow to fight for,” Archer shrugged.

As good as a concession of the point, for her. The subject change that followed confirmed it.

“What the Hells is Catherine doing, anyway?” she asked.

“Trying not to yell at her generals,” Masego said, superbly tactless.

Archer glanced at Hakram, and his brow rose to invite her to speak her mind.

“Aren’t you usually there for that stuff?” she said.

“Routine reports,” the orc gravelled. “We’ve yet to encounter any fae on our march south. This is more diplomacy than military matter. She grants them time to imply value.”

The woman wrinkled her nose.

“There has to be something at least vaguely interesting happening in those,” she said. “She doesn’t let me come.”

“She’s afraid you’re going to kill someone,” Masego candidly said.

Directed at someone else it might have been taken a slight, but Archer’s pride let these kind of things slide right off and she laughed instead. It was, Hakram suspected, one of the reasons she was so powerful. Will, strength of belief – these were the traits that strengthened Named. He was never so sharp and strong as when he carried out Catherine’s will. She’d told him, once, that Lord Black had taught her it was certainty that set apart Named from mortals. He’d committed this to memory, as there were few in the Empire that understood namelore better than the Carrion Lord. Unshakeable pride was a different path to that peak, it was true, but the results spoke for themselves.

“That commander from the Watch is bound to be pretty though,” Archer mused. “He could probably take a light spar.”

No, Hakram thought. He most definitely cannot. He’d seen members of the Watch in combat, and they were not comparable to Named. They stood head and shoulders above even the strongest orcs he’d met, and were swifter than goblins on foot. But they were not match to even fledgling Named, as individuals, and Archer was no fledgling. Hakram glanced at the board, noting Hierophant seemed smug. Ah, he meant to trade a mage for a tower. The orc deftly moved the tower across the board, threatening the blind man’s tyrant and pulling out the smugness by the roots. Ah, that never got old.

“Duchess Kegan might take offense to that,” Thief said. “She’s famously prickly, even for a Deoraithe.”

Adjutant had never quite managed to nail down where her accent came from, in Callow. The intonation was too faint, as if she’d been trained out of it. That was interesting, in and of itself. It would mean she’d had a tutor, and this meant wealth or status. Now and then Thief slipped and spoke knowledge that was not common, as she just had. The Duchy of Daoine was deeply isolationist, and it was unlikely anyone but nobles or regionally-connected merchants would have heard rumours about the character of its duchess. She was not a well-known figure, in Callow. Archer fluidly rose and came to stand behind Hierophant, leaning her elbows on his shoulders. Her scarf dipped down, covering his nose. It was hard to tell whether the contact or the obstructed vision irritated him more. The Soninke’s hand rose, sorcery flaring around it, but she batted it away.

“Careful with the scarf,” Archer said. “It has sentimental value.”

“So do my shoulders,” Masego muttered. “Yet you paw at them.”

One of these days, Hakram though, he was going to realized she wouldn’t do things like this nearly as often if he didn’t keep being irked by them. Adjutant had no intention of telling him, though. He only had so many sources of entertainment.

“Priest’s threatening your knight,” she said, pointing at the board.

Hakram’s eyes narrowed. He was certain Hierophant would not have noticed otherwise.

“That’s a mage,” Masego said, but he was beaming.

“In Praes, maybe,” Archer replied, rolling her eyes.

Thief moved to stand behind the orc. He did not tense, though this took an exertion of will.

“The scarf,” the short-haired woman said. “Mercantis weave. Not common in Callow. Would fetch gold for sure.”

“Not for sale,” the other woman replied flatly.

Hakram glanced at her, and took a footman while she was too distracted to advise Masego.

“Sentimental value, huh,” Thief drawled. “Is Mercantis where you’re from?”

The orc kept his eyes on the board so he would not betray his interest. He’d never seen anyone with skin the same tone as Archer’s, before meeting her. He doubted there more than a dozen across the entirety of Calernia. Her ancestors, if not her, must have come from across the Tyrian Sea. She was clearly not Yan Tei, so likely one of the Ashuran trade ships. No one but the Baalite Hegemony and the Yan Tei knew the route to safely cross the famously storm-prone sea. Not since the Miezans had been undone by the Licerian Wars, anyway.

“You could say that,” Archer said. “It’s the first thing I ever owned. A gift from the Lady.”

The orc’s fangs ground against each other, they way they always did when one spoke of slavery even in a way so indirect. It was an open secret that people were one of the many commodities that could be obtained in the City of Bought and Sold, though the consortium ruling it did not publicly endorse the practice.

“Steady there, big guy,” Archer said, tone almost fond as she looked at him. “That score has long been settled.”

“There should never have been a score at all,” Hakram gravelled.

“Every nation on Calernia practiced slavery at some point,” Masego absent-mindedly said. “I imagine Praes still would, if it had never come under Miezan occupation. The labour demanded of their subjects by the first Tyrants were essentially that, regardless. Father always said the true mortar of the Tower was hypocrisy.”

The blind man paused.

“It is a metaphor,” he said, just in case anyone had thought otherwise.

Hakram sighed. Behind him, the Thief snorted.

“You’re not very good at people, are you?” she said.

“I know more about anatomy than any of you,” Hierophant replied, mildly offended.

Three half-smiles bloomed, and for a heartbeat it felt like they were more than a set of strangers following Catherine Foundling. Then Thief drummed her fingers on his shoulder, and the orc’s tongue ran against his fangs. Archer caught it, and grinned.

“Oh my,” she said. “Someone’s unsettled. Now there’s a rare treat.”

“It’s like he’s afraid to give me a chance,” the Callowan drawled. “Keep playing, Adjutant. It’s not like I’m going to choke you.”

Hakam’s brow creased, and though he looked at the board his thoughts were elsewhere. She was, evidently, settling their earlier dispute. This seemed directed at him personally, and was being done in a manner Archer had made clear was acceptable within the bounds of their group. Thief was either clever enough to rebel in a way that was within the dotted lines, or she was getting comfortable enough with them to pursue a grudge. The former was a warning sign, but set forward cunningly enough there was little he could do about it. The latter was something to encourage. He somehow got the feeling that she’d been aware of the difficulty this would pose him before she’d even moved. Troublesome. Both Archer and Hierophant were, to put it kindly, less than socially adept. That had made it simple to gently steer them away from conflicts with each other. Thief would not be so straightforward to deal with, it seemed. It would not do to forget she had been part of a group of Named before, and stood one of its few survivors. The orc moved a footman forward. Masego reached for his mage, but Archer clucked her tongue.

“You’re opening a lane for his tower,” she said. “Move your footman instead.”

The orc gave a hint of fangs again to unsettle Hierophant.

“Is she playing, or are you?” he asked.

The Soninke’s brows creased behind his cloth. Then he moved the footman.

“You’re trying to provoke me,” he breathed, surprised. “Archer, are we winning?”

The ochre-skinned woman glanced at the board.

“Kingtip in ten,” she said. “He got sloppy.”

“Where did you even learn to play?” Hakram said.

“Hunter was mad for it,” she said. “Also terrible, and willing to bet taking off clothes.”

“ Hunter ?” Thief said, sounding surprised. “I don’t meant to speak ill of the dead, but-“

“Yeah, he was pretty fucking awful at it,” Archer snorted. “I had him streak through the woods once. Almost got eaten by basilisk, it was hilarious.”

“You sound like you were friends,” Masego noted. “You’re not angry we tried to kill him?”

He paused.

“Twice, I believe,” he finished. “I’m not certain if they count as separate attempts.”

“He picked the fight,” Archer shrugged. “His fault if he lost. The Lady’s always been clear that once we leave Refuge we’re on our own. Some of her students have killed each other before, after getting out. She teaches heroes and villains both.”

“Pragmatic of you,” Thief said, and it did not sound like a compliment. “Admittedly the Lone Swordsman’s band was less than harmonious.”

Hakram slid his chancellor across the board. Archer didn’t even bother to ask before reaching over Masego and threatening his tyrant with a tower.

“Never met him,” she said. “But Catherine says he was a real prick.”

“He was not an easy man to like,” Thief conceded. “Whatever forged his Name must have been rather unpleasant, and left marks.”

“I found the Bard the most grating,” Hakram said. “Smug. Like a goblin without the redeeming qualities.”

The fingers withdrew from his shoulder. Interesting. They’d had word that Lord Black was fighting a Wandering Bard in the Free Cities, though she was said to have different appearance. Tension there? They’d never displayed any during their encounters, but as her Name stated the Bard came and went. She’d been noticeably absent at the Battle of Liesse, for one.

“I hear she goes by a different name, these days,” Thief said quietly. “Don’t be fooled by the drinking and the jokes. She’s dangerous. Got into William’s head at the end, and not in a nice way.”

“Father and Uncle Amadeus are fighting her,” Masego said. “She won’t be the first bardic Name they kill.”

“I’m not sure how doable that actually is,” Thief said. “Knew her for the better part of a year, and I never once saw her take a wound she wasn’t directly responsible for.”

That, Hakram thought, was disquieting. No Name could truly make someone untouchable, so there must have been flaws and restrictions, but it was still something of note. Something to plan for. They’d not seen the Bard since the end of the Liesse Rebellion, but that did not mean they never would. There were no true books of namelore, for no Named would everwillingly pen their own limits and weaknesses, but the orc had found legends of some use in this regard. It was difficult to obtain volumes while on campaign, but the war come to an end eventually. His aspect should allow him to Find something worth the perusal, given enough time. Adjutant felt a bundle of power kin to his own approach and turned to watch the tent’s flap be pushed aside in time for Catherine to join them. It was always a surprise to see how short she truly was, though he knew better than to remark on it.

Her skin, always tan, had grown darker during the march through Summer. Her face had been sharp since he’d first lain eyes on her, but it was even sharper now. Had been ever since she’d killed the Duke of Violent Squalls, and he felt the old well of pride whenever he thought of that. A few loose strands of hair swept over her forehead, and though the others would not have noticed he saw she was tired. It lay in the way her eyes were tighter, more guarded. As if she expected someone to take advantage of it. She was also in a foul mood, but that was made rather obvious by the way she glared at him and flipped him a golden aurelius. He caught it smoothly.

“Don’t be smug about it,” the Vicequeen of Callow warned him.

“You froze the table,” he stated.

“I froze the table,” she sighed.

Archer’s snort echoed loudly.

“I had it under control, before Masego did his heart shenanigans,” she complained. “Now it’s like I’m starting from scratch.”

“I deeply apologize for increasing your power tenfold,” Hierophant huffed.

Catherine’s eyes swept around the tent, coming to rest on the chairs Archer had been lounging on earlier.

“So that’s where those went,” she mused. “Archer?”

“It could have been Thief,” the culprit protested.

“If it was they’d be in the bag,” Catherine said. “Although, Thief, if I have to hear Ratface whine about the rate our paring knives are disappearing at one more time I will be cross .”

“I’ve too many anyway,” Thief drawled, retreating from his back. “A pleasant meeting, Squire?”

She grabbed a chair and slumped onto it.

“I swear, it’s like the Gods made a fucking condescension tree and Kegan dropped from the branches fully grown,” she savagely said. “And Ranker’s actually worse, if you can believe it. Not even Robber enjoys being a prick that much.”

From the corner of his eye Hakram saw Thief hide a smile. Catherine had always had a way with words. The way Nauk told it, when they’d first met she’d been so bluntly insulting in Kharsum after he’d provoked her that he’d almost been speechless.

“You should kill one,” Archer suggested. “People always get more respectful after that.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Catherine muttered. “What are we playing? And tell me someone has wine.”

“Shatranj,” Masego said. “I am crushing Hakram.”

The dark-haired woman glanced at the board.

“Are you?” she said. “Can’t tell. Never learned how to play.”

“Would have thought the Carrion Lord would have slipped that in between lessons,” Thief drawled. “Seems up his alley.”

“He actually hates the game,” Catherine mused. “Has a whole speech and everything.”

“We can teach you, then,” Adjutant said, and hastily began to put the pieces back to their starting position.

Archer had been right. Another eight movements and he was done. Hierophant’s immediate protests that he’d been about to win filled the room, though not as loudly as Archer’s laughter. Thief produced a wineskin with a flourish of the wrist, and seemed deeply amused by the fact that no one bothered to ask where she’d obtained it. The Woe, was it? That could wait until the light of day. They were due, he thought, the occasional warm evening.

Chapter 40: Rising Action

“When approaching a siege, a general must draw distinction between tactical and strategic importance. The costs of a victory on the tactical theatre of a campaign may yield defeat on the strategic one.”
– “Considerations on Warfare”, by Marshal Grem One-Eye

Most towns and cities in the south were lightly fortified, but Dormer was an exception. While it was true that since House Alban had united Callow there’d been relatively little war in the south, the barony had roots than ran much further back than that. In the days when the Kingdom of Liesse had held sway over the south, clashing with a stubbornly independent Marchford and the encroaching Kingdom of Laure, Dormer had been made vassal to the rulers of the south by force of arms. That submission had never sat quite right with the rulers of the city, and they’d rebelled against the kings of Liesse several times. It all went back to the Wasaliti river and the island it flowed down to: Mercantis. The barons of Dormer had old ties to the City of Bought and Sold, and grown wealthy as the middlemen between it and the rest of Callow. Wealthy enough to afford tall walls, and later a fortress to overlook their demesne. There’d been little need to keep improving these after the unification of Callow, though, and revenue had been hurt by the tariffs set from Laure that had the coin going into the pockets of House Alban instead.

The city had grown beyond the ancient walls, with most of it now outside the grey stone and the fortress behind it. It was not a particularly large city, truth be told. At its peak after the Conquest there’d been perhaps fifteen thousand souls living there. Now there were more than twice that number of fae holding it, and no trace of the Callowans that should be there. A disquieting thing, that, but also a relief of sorts. If some of my countrymen had remained inside, I would have hesitated to use some of the more brutal tactics in my arsenal. Considering the opposition, that might have been costly. I’d beaten Summer once before, in Arcadia, but I’d done so relying on tricks and a story. I wouldn’t have the benefit of either here, and that meant having to crush them the old fashioned away. I did, however, have some advantages on my side. The first was that this was a siege.

I’d grown up thinking of the Legions of Terror as a field army, but that was a somewhat false perception. It was true the Legions were most remembered for the Fields of Streges, when they’d near wiped out the armies of the kingdom, but most the battles in the Conquest had been sieges. The Blessed Isle, Summerholm and Laure. The campaign against Daoine in the north had not been so clear-cut, but it had involved taking the Wall. To understand the Legions as an institution, I’d come to realize, I had to keep in mind what Black had crafted them for: conquering Callow. Warfare in the kingdom had been deeply influenced by the nature of constant invasions, most of them Praesi. The cities of the west and the north were hard fortresses meant to resist Praes until House Fairfax could send an army to turn back the Legions, and so Callowans had grown adept at making fortresses. Our mages had learned protective magics and wards, passed down sorceries meant to banish devils and disrupt great rituals. Our armies fielded more heavy cavalry than any other on Calernia and around the professional core that had been the Royal Guard, massed volunteers had formed the bread and butter of Callow’s hosts. All of it evolved to beat the large mage and villain-led hordes that used to be the staple of Praesi armies.

When the Conquest had begun, what House Fairfax faced was an entirely different beast. Orcs no longer used as meatshields for better-trained humans but armed in good steel and taught to stand in ranks. Goblins, once little more than expendables sent to die against walls or let loose on the countryside, instead turned into crossbowmen and sappers. Mages no longer standing at the back to unleash rituals but massed in the ranks to replace a few dangerous tricks by continuous deployable firepower. Summerholm, the famous Gate of the East, had fallen not to devils and flying fortresses but trebuchets and ballistas backed by full encirclement. The Legions of Terror had been built to take some of the most heavily-fortified cities on the face of the continent, and while the tight formations they used on the field were less effective in city streets, those narrow passages where were munitions and mage lines shone.

The second was that I was dealing with an enemy who knew little of this breed of warfare. The winner of the war between Summer and Winter was decided either behind closed doors or on a battlefield, not by borders and walls. The forces of the Count of Olden Oak had taught me a hard lesson when I’d taken the Gallowborne scouting in the grass, but when we’d assaulted his fortress his army had crumpled under the pressure. Summer was not meant to be on the defensive, and what I’d come to consider the greatest weakness of the fae was that they were not adaptable the way a mortal host would be. They would have learned from our clashes in Arcadia, of course. They weren’t that crippled by their nature. But when faced with an unknown, something unprecedented, they tended to revert back to pattern. That made them predictable, to an extent, and the handful of monstrous tacticians I had on my side could make a lot out of the enemy being predictable.

I knew better than to think I knew all the cards the other side had to play. Even putting aside the fact that the Queen of Summer was on her way and she’d be a whole mess of her own, I’d glimpsed powers in the dream that had followed my becoming Duchess of Moonless Nights that I’d yet to see them deploy. They were out of princes and princesses to lead them, but there was at least one Duke left and they were not entities to take lightly. Summer, by now, would be desperate to take back the Princess of High Noon. They wouldn’t be pulling any punches, and even though crossing into Creation would have weakened them this time I didn’t have Winter to use as fodder on my flank. It’d be my armies that took the brunt of the losses, and like the Summer Queen I couldn’t afford to take too many of those. Not when Diabolist was still on the loose, growing more dangerous by the day. On the other hand, I also couldn’t afford to be overly cautious. If the fae in Dormer weren’t in deep trouble by the time their Queen popped out, she wouldn’t even consider treating with me. Which I really, really needed her to do. Actually taking her out was beyond my capacity. The best Hierophant could do was delay, and when that failed it would swiftly begin going downhill for us.

It was Marshal Ranker that opened the dance.

After the first few fae patrols were repulsed by sheer numbers, Summer had retreated to the city. No sign of the Immortals yet, which we’d taken to mean they would be behind the walls. Thief and Archer were already gone to deal with that. Out in the streets and houses we’d could only see Summer regulars, and those were the first obstacle moving forward. Hard to gauge numbers on grounds like those, but there should be at least thirty thousand. Using the buildings as cover, they would turn Dormer into a butcher’s yard if we advanced . So we take away the cover. The trebuchets let loose and the ballistas with them, ripping through the centre of the outskirts. Houses collapsed, a handful of fae crushed, and the sappers began their work. The ballistas were faster by a fair margin, but it was the trebuchets that did the heavy lifting. Stone after stone, they began reducing the outer city to rubble.

“And now we see if they take the bait,” Hakram gravelled.

I hummed but did not reply. The Gallowborne had given the two of us wide berth, save for Tribune Farrier. He carried my banner, though he’d pass it when we entered the fray. Juniper had predicted that after we began smashing the outer city the fae would try to grab back the initiative by breaking our siege engines. For the average Legion of Terror, that would have been a problem. We were lighter on archers than most Calernian armies, since mage lines effectively served the same function. Wouldn’t be the case for us, though. We had something the Empire had never fielded before: the army of Daoine. Flatly inferior to legionaries when it came to heavy infantry, save for the Watch, but when it came to archers? They’d used longbows to defend the Wall for centuries, and fae were nothing new to them. It might be greenskins that had tried their borders most of the time, but Praesi had made attempts too. There wasn’t as much difference between winged devils and fae as the latter would like to think.

“And there they go,” I muttered.

Ten thousand wings lit up and the Fair Folk rose into the sky. The height of the flight would be the most pressing issue, here. It wasn’t like the Deoraithe could shoot halfway to the moon, while fae could just pour arrows downwards while staying out of range. That was our first trap. Hierophant wouldn’t be taking the field for most of this battle because I needed him to control the three wards he’d prepared, and I watched the soldiers of Summer as they flew straight into the first of those. They didn’t have time to ever fire a volley before a buzz so loud it was half a thunderclap filled the air. Their wings winked out for two heartbeats, then the buzz sounded again and they reappeared. Only a handful fell, making it to the ground before being filled with arrows. An oscillation ward, Masego had called it. He’d essentially made a massive rectangle in the sky where ever two heartbeats the flow of sorcery would be disrupted. I’d asked him if he could just shut them down, but apparently that would have been too much of a drain to maintain. Even with the new Name he still had limits.

What it accomplished was make it exceedingly hard for the fae to just hover over the engines and leisurely set them on fire. If they wanted to make a dent, they’d have to descend into arrow range. Our little surprise spread chaos in their ranks. Half kept trying and failed repeatedly while the rest went down out of the ward’s area and began to trade fire with the Deoraithe. They had the better of it, to my distaste. Kegan’s soldiers were spread out, tight ranks would have been a written invitation to be hit with the fire arrows, but a loose formation was far from the equivalent of flying in the godsdamned sky. As soon as the situation steadied below, the fae who’d been struggling with the ward joined the others and I watched as five knots formed led by fae nobles. By the feel of them, nothing higher than a baron.

“That,” I said, “is going to be trouble. Ritual?”

“Close enough,” Hakram grunted. “No more than twenty in each formation. We’ll hold.”

We’d better. The battle was going to get a lot harder if we lost those trebuchets. All five knots formed large spears of flame easily the size of ten men in a line, and after a heartbeat they shot down at our five trebuchets. My fingers clenched as the projectiles fell, crackling loudly until they hit thin air. The shape of blue domes covering our engines shone as the fae sorcery tried to tear through, and though they shivered in the end they held. Close. Much too close for comfort. The entirety of the Fourth’s mage contingent was feeding those shields and the fae had almost broken through anyway.

“If they keep pounding away at us with those I’m not sure we’ll hold,” I murmured.

“Hope Marshal Ranker read them correctly, then,” Hakram replied.

The old goblin, when going over the battle plan, had made one prediction: they will not be willing to get into a slugging match. Whoever led the host of Summer would be trying to minimize casualties at all costs, and that meant backing away from tactics that were effective if they got too expensive. The Deoraithe continued to trade arrows, losing two men for every fae they took, and I grimaced. We couldn’t afford to slug it out for too long either. Another volley of flame spears descended, and finally we have answer. The Fifteenth’s mages had gone through the College same as any other legion’s, with one major difference: Masego. Who was occasionally willing to throw my mage lines a bone in the form of a ritual, if he was in the right mood for it. In Marchford, when it had become clear that our numbers in legionaries had far outgrown the quantity of mages that traditional legion structure dictated we should have to match it, Juniper and I had diverged from standard doctrine. We’d consolidated them under Kilian and drilled them in use of rituals. Now we’d see if that was going to pay off.

Two massive javelins of lightning formed above our shields and struck across the sky. The fae scattered around them even as the Fourth’s mages desperately tried to keep the fae fire from reaching the siege engines. The javelins blew and streaks of lightning spread, killing scores of Summer soldiers but failing to disrupt any of the knots that forged the spears. And so now we begin our staring contest, you Summer fucks. There were only so many times the javelin ritual could be cast before my mages started burning out and dying. They knew that. I knew that. What they couldn’t know was how many times they could. If they were lucky, they might shatter our shields and torch our siege engines before their losses got too high. Or we could trade blows for an hour as they racked up casualties they couldn’t afford. Another wave of fire, lightning gave answer. My mages aimed at a knot this time, and killed a few. Useless, as it turned out. If the way a handful of fae from the ranks went back to fill the numbers was true indication, any of them could participate. It must be the barons that were the key.

Two more exchanges. On the last we lost a trebuchet, damn their stubborn hides. The moment the spear went through and touched wood the entire damn engine turned to ashes faster than I could blink. My mages weren’t fools, though. On the first round they struck the sides with javelins, herding fae towards the centre, and when they struck there with the second they did real damage. After one success, the fae dug in. A mistake. At least a dozen of Ranker’s mages must have died when the shield broke, but the rest went to reinforce the other shields. Another two exchanges where they failed to break through, and I smiled coldly. They’d blinked first. Of the ten thousand who’d come there must have been a little less than eight thousand left, a trade that had cost me at least two lines of mages and over two thousand Deoraithe archers. More of the Summer soldiers had died to the lightning ritual than the bows, by my count. We’d starkly underestimated their agility.

The fae did not retreat. They flew north, and landed on the plains behind us. That, we had seen coming. There were few things more dangerous to a besieging army than being hit in the back as they stormed the walls. I’d wanted to keep at least two out of the three wards Masego had judged he could handle to bolster our offensive, but Juniper had talked me out of it. There was no point in breaking through ahead if our back was collapsing, she’d said. Our second trap was in that very field where they’d landed. The Fourth under Ranker and the Twelfth under General Afolabi stirred and began to march against the fae at our back. They numbers less than eight thousand, considering Ranker had a chunk of her sappers manning our engines and all her mages shielding them. The Fourth would be significantly weakened because if it. But the cognomen of Afolabi’s Twelfth was Holdfast . Defence was their speciality, and that was what the two legions had been charged with. A holding action keeping the fae tied up. Masego abandoned the ward in the sky and activated the second one. Wind howled across the plains, surging forth from a line ahead of the two legions. Though it wouldn’t kill anything, by our reckoning it should make flight all but impossible and for the fae to keep in tight ranks exceedingly difficult.

There was a drawback, of course. It needed Hierophant’s full attention to keep active, and that meant it would cease when the Fifteenth made for the walls. That was the bet we’d made: by the time the engines had finished demolishing us a clear path to the walls, the fae at our back would be in bad enough a position that the two legions holding them would no longer need the help. Risky, Ranker had called it. If we were wrong we’d have to pull back some of the Deoraithe to bolster them, and there was chance if we did that we wouldn’t have the numbers to punch through into the inner part of Dormer. It was coin flip. We could not, in the end, predict everything. For one, none of us had thought they’d sent fae nobles out this early. When we closed on the walls had been my own call, and that mistake had come mighty close to fucking us over. Even now, I winced at the notion that General Afolabi was going to have to deal with five barons. The ward could only help so much. If I hadn’t sent out Archer already I would have told her to back him up, but the chalice had already been filled.

Even under bombardment by Summer, the engines had not paused. How long had passed, since the battle had begun? At least an hour, maybe more. The trebuchets had levelled us an avenue and cleaned fae out of it, but it would take hours longer yet. We should be done before nightfall, unless we were disrupted. Behind us the two Legions of Terror dug sixty feet behind the edge of the wards and let the fae come to them. It was bloody work. The Summer soldiers found that the empty space beyond the ward was a meat grinder of sharpers and crossbow bolts leading straight into tight ranks of heavies, and hundreds died before they stopped rushing into the killzone. After that, though, they wised up. Masego’s ward was a line that couldn’t cover the entire plain. It couldn’t even be a curve, since apparently for arcane reasons that would have been much harder to maintain. The fae began going around and the fight turned truly nasty. General Afolabi pulled back sappers and crossbowmen to back up the regulars he sent to block them, but that weakened his centre. Enough that two of the barons got a foothold.

Those were, to put it bluntly, beyond the ability of munitions to deal with. One of them lit up like a golden bonfire of gold and torched through a solid hundred heavies before being driven back by the Twelfth’s mages. The other one screwed with the ward, bending the wind across a dozen feet of the line until it turned around and blew into the lines of the legion. Fae began pouring through immediately and it all went to the Hells after that. Twice, as the hours passed, I almost went to reinforce them. Both times Hakram held me back. We couldn’t afford for me to start using my aspects yet. I would say this for Afolabi’s legionaries, they stood their fucking ground. When the fae formed a beachhead and it looked like the centre was going to collapse, four lines of heavies went into the thick of it with lightning bolts clearing them a path. There were a few sappers behind their shields, and though half the heavies got wiped in a single stroke of the sword of the baron twisting the wind the goblins threw a dozen demolition charges at him and blew half his head off. Of that near one hundred legionaries that went in, less than twenty made it back to their lines. They’d bought General Afolabi the room he needed, though. The moment the ward returned to full effectiveness, he plugged the gap and forced back the other baron with concentrated spellfire.

An hour before Evening Bell night began to fall, and by then the field was littered with dead. But Ranker had accomplished what she’d set out to do. A straight line to the northern gate of Dormer had been carved out of rubble, the fae still in the outer city split on both sides of it.

“Our turn, now,” I quietly told Hakram.

“Do or die,” he said.

I gestured at the Gallowborne, and the Fifteenth stirred to march. To war, to Dormer, to doom. Whether it’d be theirs or ours, I could not yet tell.

Chapter 41: Turning Point

“Better behind a Tyrant than before them.”
– Praesi saying

The right to lead the vanguard, as always, belonged to Nauk.

The orc legate was not as clever as Juniper or careful as Hune, but when the time came to hammer in a door there was a reason he was the man we sent for. More than any other orc I knew, Nauk had no give in him. He was stubborn and aggressive and his men loved him – even the humans, which was no given for a greenskin commander. In Arcadia he’d lost three fourths of his jesha to Summer regulars and the Immortals, and his men had stood their ground without flinching. How many hosts in all of Calernia would have done that, in the face of those kind of casualties? The Battle of Four Armies and One had effectively ended his command and we’d had to repurpose another jesha for him to lead, but he’d taken the reins swiftly. It helped that half the two thousand he now led had been under his nominal authority before I’d taken him north to Laure. Still, if it had been another officer I would have been wary of making them the tip of the spear when their forces were still unblooded and fresh to his command. Not with Nauk, though. What Summer did not kill today would become my vanguard in the wars to come.

My sword hissed against the sheath as it was bared, Hakram hefting his axe at my side. It would be the two of us, in the beginning, without the Gallowborne. The kind of fights I’d be seeking were not ones you took mortals into, however well-trained. Behind us the legionaries of he Fifteenth advanced in tight ranks, shields hefted. Heavies in the front with sappers behind them, about to find out if the tactics Juniper had crafted to deal with fae were effective or not. Our engines had demolished us a clear path to the walls and split the Summer regulars in two, but it would have been madness to assault the ramparts without a solid beachhead. That meant getting in the thick of it, for good or ill. The enemy was not slow in giving answer. Darkness had fallen, but for a heartbeat it felt as if day had come again: across the city flames bloomed and arrows rose into the sky. I was familiar with that trick by now, the fire-driven arrows that detonated upon impact. Watching them tear through the Gallowborne had made sure I would never forget.

Masego’s third and last ward activated with a sound like a massive siphon. The arrows flew unabated, but the flames were whisked out of existence. Fire suppression ward. It would cripple our mages as well, prevent them from using fireballs, but Summer lost far more to this than we did. That Hierophant had triggered this one meant the legions at our back had lost their best defence, and all I could do was pray they’d thinned the fae enough they’d be able to hold without it. The dice were thrown, now, and there was no use giving it any further thought. Juniper would handle the rest. Arrows clattered against shields behind us, the testudo formation drilled into the legionaries sparing them from the worst of it. I heard Nauk scream for his men to pick up the pace and left him to it. Hakram and I had other duties before us: we were, it could be said, going hunting .

“Where to?” the orc gravelled.

I’d closed my eyes, letting Winter flow through my veins, and opened them only when I found an answer.

“West,” I said. “Close to the river. Baron or unusually strong lord.”

“It’ll be good to shake the rust off before we take on the real threats,” he drily said.

We left the road and took a corner around what smelled like an abandoned tannery. Wasn’t surprised it was this far out. Most Callowan cities had laws forcing trades that produced fumes that dire to remain on the outskirts, no matter how useful. The streets out here were little more than dirt paths between wooden shacks, most not even broad enough for the two of us to pass through together. Though our entry had not gone opposed, Summer did not disappoint: by the time we reached the first broader street, we ran into our first ambush of the night. The only warning was arrows whistling, betraying the location of silhouettes standing over thatched roofs with bows in hand. I stepped to the side without missing a beat and Hakram had been moving before I’d even noticed. Archers on top, but there would be more. A dozen emerged from abandoned houses at our front and back, swords in hands, as the archers smoothly nocked their second volley.

“See Adjutant, they do love us,” I mused. “There’s a party and everything.”

“Don’t play with your food,” the orc chided.

We split without needing to warn each other. Fighting with Hakram was like having a third arm, had been ever since he came into his Name. The archers were not amateurs: they aimed where we’d be, not where we were, and even adjusted for swiftness above that of mortals. Not well enough, though. I was quicker than I’d been before Masego had tinkered with my heart, and Adjutant had reflexes that were above even my own. He used his Name more efficiently than me, I’d come to suspect. Hakram barrelled into the fae swordsman, axe splitting open a skull before the arrows even struck ground. As for me, I glanced at a sidewall and made the wager it would survive my weight. A leap saw my foot land on the side of it, then another had me landing in the midst of the archers. They reacted smoothly, swords bared in the blink of an eye, but there were only six. My shield swung out to crush the skull of the one closest to me, and it might as well have been an eggshell. I turned a blade aside and carved open the fae’s throat, spinning to turn the swing into another. They barely had time to raise their swords before three were dead.

The ease of it scared me. They had been difficult to deal with, once. Now I broke one’s wrist with my shield, pierce into the second one’s eye with the tip of my blade and the third made to retreat. A flick of the wrist and a blade of ice and shadow took her in the back of the neck, snuffed out instantly. The last fae did not even have time to curse before my shield smacked into his face, breaking the chin and crushing the windpipe. Magic made flesh or not, there was no walking that off. Hakram was a whirlwind spinning amidst struggling fae, taking a life with every stroke, but I glimpsed arrowheads through a window at his back. They had, it seemed, kept back archers. I let out a long breath and pushed a sliver of power into my legs. The leap sent me sailing into the air, tearing through the wall and landing on my knees in a shower of shards. Three inside, I saw. One lost his wrist to the first flick and I spun. Second was thrown out the window with his skull crushed by a shield bash. Didn’t even need to kill the third. I backed out of the house and let it collapse onto him. That’d been a load-bearing wall, apparently.

“Retreat,” a musical voice called out.

I was watching the man it belonged to before he even spoke. The fae around Hakram scattered, though not before his axe harmstrung one’s leg and his boot came down to crush her skull. The fae was the one I’d felt earlier, a tall pale man with grey hair that looked made of granite.

“How many titled nobles do you have in the city?” I asked.

“Enough to break you,” the fae smiled. “Her Majesty will take your head personally.”

Shame I didn’t have the time to hack off that one’s limbs and bring him back to Masego so the mage could dig out the information.

“Well,” I said. “One less after this.”

I didn’t actually see the arrow coming, and that was telling. It was utterly silent, and all I managed was to have it strike my shoulder instead of my back. It punched straight through plate and I grimaced. He hadn’t come alone, and no regular had done this. I broke off the shaft and ice spread over the wound, sealing it shut.

“I think,” Hakram said calmly, “that there will be no need to seek them out.”

On the outskirts of Dormer, five fae stood around us. One was on the rooftops, green-haired and from the looks of the longbow in his hand he was responsible for that friendly tap I’d just received. Two more in the streets, dark-skinned and wafting smoke. They looked liked twins, one a man and the other a woman, each armed with a short spear and a blade. The last one looked like a Yan Tei, honey-skinned and utterly hairless. She had a short sword in one hand, and a thin wheel of pale steel in the other.

“All right, so,” I hummed. “Correct me if I’m wrong.”

I pointed my blade at the twins.

“Baron and baroness,” I said, then moved to the longbow man. “Count.”

I mulled over the rest a heartbeat.

“Smug weaponless man’s a jumped-up lord, and the one who brought a wheel to a swordfight’s a countess, but one ahead of the curve,” I finished.

“I am not jumped-up,” the grey-haired fae hissed.

“That’s exactly what you’d say if you were, though,” I gently told him.

The smoking twins grinned, and Gods was I glad Archer wasn’t there to make something of that. The one who’d looked at what made wagons move and thought ‘I bet you could make a weapon out of that’ offered a half bow.

“I am the Countess of Wrathful Skies,” she said. “Second-in-command to this host. Should you surrender presently, I can guarantee you will not be tortured prior to execution.”

“Ah, the Praesi gambit,” I mused. “Always a crowd-pleaser. I’m going to have to reply with the famous words of the Duke of Violent Squalls.”

Silence reigned for a moment.

“You have not said anything,” the man with the bow said.

You had to love that about the fae, if nothing else: you could always count on them to feed you the line.

“Neither did he,” I said. “ Because I killed his smug ass .”

Now that the usual diplomatic niceties were done with, I imagined negotiations were about to break down. Best get ahead of that.

“Think you can handle the twins?” I called out to Hakram.

“Long enough you’ll kill your way through the rest, at least,” the orc agreed.

And then they tried to shoot him, because they were just terrible diplomats. I got a better look at the arrow, this time. Entirely wood, and wreathed in green light. Likely had to do with the Count’s full title, whatever that was. In the heartbeat where Adjutant moved so the shot would skim his pauldron instead of tear through his shoulder, the rest of them moved. Grey hair called on something that had the ground around him denting and every stone in sight turning to dust. The Countess’ wheel began spinning and lightning gathered along the sides of it, growing larger by the instant. The smoke wafting from the twins thickened into a cloud that enveloped them entirely. I cracked my neck. This, I thought, was going to be a memorable ride. Best get it over with quickly, or we’d be too battered to handle whatever Duke actually ran this show.

I went for the archer first. If he was actually a Count it was dubious he’d be a pushover in close quarters, but neither Hakram not I could afford to be watching for arrows at all times while dealing with the rest. Moving faster than anyone should be able to within the bounds of Creation, the green-haired fae had another arrow flying before I’d even made it to another roof. For a moment I thought he’d missed, but he’d never aimed for me at all: the house I was going to use as a stepping stone fell apart in a cloud of dust and I cursed. All right, so they weren’t idiots. Which was a real shame. Idiocy was a trait I prized in people trying to kill me. Wrathful Skies attacked before I could change my course, landing at my side wreathed in lightning. When she struck, it was with two blades. One made of steel, going for my throat. The other, lagging slightly behind, was made of lightning. I made he mistake of parrying the short sword and in that instant the lightning connected with our weapons, coursing down my blade and sending down horrid pain and convulsions across my body.

First time I’d ever got hit by a lightning spell. I would not recommend the experience to anyone. I managed to duck the arrow the other fucker shot at my back, but when it struck ground instead green sorcery glimmered and it grew pins like a porcupine.

“Shit,” I eloquently grunted, and threw myself to the ground.

A storm of arrows burst out and flew in every direction. A least five hit my plate, and if I hadn’t gone down would have gone straight through the aketon into my flesh. I rolled to avoid the lightning wheel coming down on my head but that thing was trickier than it looked: when it touched the street a wave of lightning spread from the point of contact and had me convulsing again. This, I thought, was not going according to plan. Because all of this clearly just wasn’t enough, stone powder coalesced above me and formed a massive obelisk that... dropped. Lightning first , I thought, gritting my teeth. I reached for Winter and frosted shadows formed an envelope around my body. They got burned through as swiftly as I willed them into being, but that bought me just long enough to scrabble out of the way of the obelisk. It turned to powder immediately, but I had other problems on my hands. I dropped my shield, since in the face of lightning it was just a liability, and grabbed the Countess of Wrathful Skies’ wrist when she tried to swing down at me. Steadying my footing, I rotated and threw her right into the trajectory of the arrow that was meant for the back of my neck.

A green shimmer and it was gone, because the bastards weren’t going to make it that easy on me. Stone powder formed around me in the shape of a bubble. Containment, huh. At least they were taking me seriously. I released the shadow envelope and backed away, but the powder followed. Their first mistake of the night. He should have readjusted instead. The Countess had landed on her feet and her wheel rose up, gathering ever more lightning. Another arrow flew silently towards my chest, but I wasn’t falling for that one twice. My wrist flicked with unearthly precision and I slapped it aside. When the smaller arrows burst out, it was too far for any of them to hit me. He did not retire that trick. Might be he can’t when it’s already been loosed . The stone had caught up to me, by now, and Wrathful Skies had a streak of lightning floating above the wheel that looked like it was going to sting. My opening.

“ Take ,” I said.

The Countess’ eyes went wide as I claimed the sorcery above her head, for just one moment wresting it from her control and tossing it straight at the fae lord trying to contain me. Struck him right in the chest with dark satisfaction. I was moving before my most dangerous opponent could react, and the lack of arrow to duck had me surprised until I heard Hakram’s hoarse grunt. Shit . I didn’t have time to spare a look as I avoided stepping stones entirely and leapt straight at the archer. I got a boot in the helmet for it but caught it with my hand even as I began to fall, drawing on Name strength so even from that awkward position I managed to snatch him off his foot and swing him down behind me. Right into the face of the the Countess of Wrathful Skies, as she prepared to run me through. The two of them were smashed to the ground in a pile of sprawling limbs. I thinned my lips, well aware I couldn’t afford to use Fall on these two even if it would be a near-guaranteed kill. I needed it for the Duke. Shot a spear of ice at them out of spite and immediately moved towards the lord.

He was back on his feet, in a narrow alley between two houses. The powder formed a wall in front of me but I sped up and went through before it solidified. Hastily he dragged it back to him and shot spears of stone at me, the first at feet height and then rising. Panting, I threw myself into a slide and narrowly went under the bottom stone. I landed in a crouch in front of him and even as his skin turned to stone my sword came up. Straight though the belly. He gasped and I rose as I withdrew the blade, cutting straight through his neck in the next swing. The head rolled on the floor, and there went the first of my opponents. The walls to my side groaned, and I cursed when I saw the arrows groaning from them. Fuck, could he pull that on all wood? Furious at the waste, I dug into Winter and froze both walls before he could get the arrows flying. Another twist of will had the walls collapsing, and even as the houses followed I turned to face the other two remaining. The Countess kept her lightning wheel close, and not powerful enough to be worth stealing. She’d learned. Not that I’d Take it lightly, anyway.

I could get another two uses out of that aspect tonight at most, and every one I used on these was one less I could pull against the Duke.

“Yew,” the Countess said. “Travel. She’ll target you otherwise.”

“I would never,” I lied.

The possible count hesitated, but then lay hand on a wooden wall and disappeared. Well, fuck. That was going to be a pain to deal with. There was smoke in the distance where Hakram was fighting the others, and I could hear rhythmic singing in a dialect of Kharsum I was unfamiliar with. If he was well enough to sing, I decided, I could afford to be careful dealing with these two.

“You are Duchess of Moonless Nights in truth,” the Countess said. “Reports of your power were greatly understated.”

“I’m just putting my whole heart into it, this time,” I sharply grinned. “So, have you distracted me long enough for him to line up his shot yet?”

“Why,” the fae drily replied. “I would never.”

What I’d meant to do was duck the arrow then kick it into the Countess’ face to make me an opening. It started going wrong on the first part: while I avoided the arrow by a hair’s breadth, it was already growing pins. I had to roll through a window into a house to avoid the storm, and Gods Below was that a mistake. Everything began growing spikes a heartbeat later.

“I have made better tactical decisions in the past,” I conceded out loud.

I managed to tear through the door in time to avoid the worst of it, but worst was a relative term when even the bloody door was shooting arrows at me. About six of them stung their way straight into my back, through plate and aketon both. A lot more worryingly, Wrathful Skies was waiting for me in the street with the wheel raised. There wasn’t so much sorcery there it would be worth stealing, and that moment of reluctance cost me. A dozen tendrils of lightning struck out and the better part of them managed to hit me. The really dangerous part, I managed to realize even as my body screamed, was that the spell was continuous. The other fae slid out of a wall to my side and nocked an arrow but let it gather green light. Ominous.

“ Take ,” I gasped.

The Countess immediately cut the lightning, but it wasn’t her I was going for. For an instant I felt the green light and knew whom it belonged to: the Count of Green Yew. His title spoke to growth and wood, to- pain spiked my thoughts, scattering them. There was no fire in this, but it was still born of Summer. Anathema to what I had become. It had been enough anyway. The power I’d taken disappeared from the bow and I shoved it into the same door that had wounded me. Tendrils of wood rose and caught the lightning, freeing me. A heartbeat later the arrow struck where I would have still been, but I was already moving. The Countess’ sword rose to parry my own, but it was only steel at this very moment and in a contest of strength, I trumped her outright. Her blade driven back she began to step back but I caught her throat with my bare hand. Lightning flickered as she called it back from her wheel into her body but it was much, much too late. My fingers clenched and a sickening crack resounded as I snapped her spine and pulped her throat. Before her body had dropped to the floor I was turning to the Count of Green Yew, but he was already gone.

Retreat? It would be hellish to go through this city with the fae popping out of every house to take a shot at us. No, can’t be. Summer doesn’t retreat, not like that. He could, however, have decided to kill Adjutant so the twins would be freed to act against me. Shit. Aside from the fact that if Hakram died I was going to murder every last one of them, from the first fucking regular to the Queen herself, fighting blind like the smoke-using fae must impose was one of the ways I most hated fighting. I’d grown too use to relying on my Name-sharpened senses. There was no time to dawdle. The smoke cloud was easy enough to find, and I legged it towards there. I kept a eye on my surroundings as I did, wary of an ambush, but I had forgotten one fact about fae: they flew . Three arrows landed in a triangle around me, and the pins grew a heartbeat later. Heart sinking, I froze them. I’d already used more than I’d wanted to, and I still had one other major draw to deal with before I got to the Duke. At this rate I’d be dead on my feet by the time I got there. On the other hand, at this rate by the end of this all that would be left of the Summer Court was going to be three guys and a graveyard.

Small comfort. The Count of Green Yew was flying half a mile above me and already nocking an arrow. Making my way up there was going to be tricky, against an opponent that specialized in range combat. The first house I chose to use as a stepping stone was collapsed before I even touched it and I had to resist the urge to flip him the finger. Discarding the fanciness, I created a circle of shadow in the air and leapt atop it. I was going to stab the bastard even if I had to claw my godsdamned way up. The second circle I made, even as I dismissed the first, was torn through by an arrow. I fell back to street level and took a deep breath. That fucker . I was going to have to make multiple platforms every time, wasn’t I? Drawing the power, I blinked at what I saw above. He has to see that, I thought. But the Count shot another arrow at me instead, and even even as I danced away I was laughing.

The lower edge of the trebuchet stone caught him at rib height.

I got a glimpse of red splatter and white bones before it got out of sight, and faintly made note to find out what goblin had made that shot so I could order them promoted. Hells, if I could accomplish that as vicequeen without burning too many bridges I was going to have them made count . They’d sure as Hells earned it. It was harder to find Hakram than I’d thought, after, because the smoke had dissipated. I found Adjutant panting and bloodied in a marketplace, his armour black as coal and his face bearing nasty wounds that were going to scar. His dead hand gleamed strangely, at least the parts of it I could see. Most of it had been shoved through the baroness’ eye cavity. Gods . My second didn’t fuck around, when he got serious. He ripped it out in a shower of gore and crouched, almost too exhausted for words.

“Had to use Rampage,” he croaked. “Kept Stand. Think they were weak for barons.”

I offered him my arm to grasp and helped him to his feet.

“Dipped a little too deep as well,” I said. “Hopefully the others were more conservative, otherwise even if we take out the Duke we’ll be wiped when the Queen comes through.”

“Plan’s not to fight her,” he said.

“And those always go so well,” I drily replied. “You up for a run? We need to catch up to Nauk.”

“I’ll live,” he said. “No inner bleeding. Is it possible to bruise your kidney?”

“I think mine is permanently blue,” I said amusedly.

We made our way back to the main path, and only had to stop twice for him to retch. There wasn’t a lot of blood in it and Hakram was an orc, so I wasn’t overly worried. His people were built resilient, and Named took that to an extreme. That part of the city had already been secured, though the vanguard was long gone. It was the Deoraithe that held it now and they made way for the both of us. Emptying his stomach had put Hakram back on his feet, more or less, so he was spared the indignity of my holding him up all the way to the front. Nauk found us before we fond him. The fae, I saw, had razed a ring of houses around the city wall. There must have been a moat as well, once, because I saw a pit around even the gates that had been burned clean. It was empty now. The Fifteenth had dug in their positions around the edge of the wall, trading sporadic crossbow fire with the fae above. No sign of the Immortals on the walls, which was relief and worry both.

“Cat,” Nauk grinned. “Good hunting?”

“We cleaned house in the west,” I said. “Can’t answer for the rest.”

“Whatever you did there, it collapsed their flank,” the legate said. “We hold most of that side now. To the east we’ve got ten thousand holding a neighbourhood near the walls. Deoraithe failed to break through, but they’re contained.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“And the rest?”

That left ten thousand missing.

“They tried another run at the trebuchets,” Nauk said. “We lost another two and half our ballistas, but they were beaten back. Saw them fly behind the walls.”

I grimaced. That was a lot more fae in the inner city than I’d wanted to deal with.

“The Immortals?” I prompted.

“We think they hold the castle,” the orc said. “To make sure the Queen has foothold when she crosses.”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“Doesn’t matter,” I finally said. “We break through now. What time is it?”

“Midnight Bell was an hour ago,” Nauk replied.

Then we needed to hurry. Behind the walls would be an even uglier fight.

“Scry Masego,” I ordered. “He’s to dismiss his last ward and join us for the push.”

The legate bared his fangs.

“Wade in their blood, Catherine Foundling,” he said.

“Gods, I hope not,” I replied. “Hakram spends long enough cleaning my armour as is.”

The grin I got was worth the words, considering the casualties his advance must have caught. When I found Adjutant again the Gallowborne were already with him. Tribune Farrier saluted, and promptly handed me a shield. It had, I noted, my very fresh heraldry painted on it.

“Figured you might break your first one,” the dark-haired man said.

I thanked him decided not to tell him it was actually fine and that it had just entirely slipped my mind to double back to pick it up. I rolled my shoulder and took a look at the walls. Those might take hours to breach, if we let the trebuchets do the heavy lifting. Even more now that we’d lost over half of them.

“Cluster tight around me,” I ordered Farrier. “Shields up. They’ll be aiming at us all the way.”

“They always do,” the Callowan smiled. “And yet, here we are.”

I smiled back, though the affection was short-lived. There were a lot of new faces among the men, and I knew exactly why. I took the lead, Hakram at my side and the Gallowborne at my back. The fae on the walls only fired a few arrows at us, though that’d change if they saw we didn’t retreat. I closed my eyes and let Winter loose. I took a step, and ice rose. One step after another, a stairway of ice rose in front and then above the gates of Dormer. It was, I knew, wide enough for three hundred men to go up. It was burning through my reserves, cooling my blood. It was also how my armies were going to take the city.

I advanced, and the Fifteenth advanced with me.

Chapter 42: Plateau

“Ah, but every palace you destroy has to be rebuilt! You’ve single-handedly pulled the Empire out of a slump, hahaha. Once again sweet victory is mine.”
– Dread Emperor Irritant I, the Oddly Successful

The sappers strapped the demolition charges against the guildhall’s wall and scuttled away as fast as their feet could take them. The moment they’d gotten clear, two apple-sized balls of flame bloomed and struck at the munitions. Stone shattered, though few shards went in our direction – the goblins had long mastered the art of shaping the direction of the blasts. Two dozen regulars charged into the rubble before the dust and smoke cloud had settled, running into stiff fae resistance. This far into Old Dormer they’d started to hole up in the larger buildings, turning them into strongholds they used to sally out at the Fifteenth when our lines drove past them. My eyes sharpened and I made out the silhouettes in the smoke. Less than thirty, regulars one and all. The few set up on a balustrade were going to be costly to dislodge, but I couldn’t afford to stick my nose into every fight. I let the crossbowmen have at them as my legionaries rammed their shield wall into the enemy on the ground floor.

I’d left Hakram behind when we’d taken the walls, and hadn’t seen him in the better part of an hour. The fighting there had been brutal, especially with Masego’s ward gone, but Nauk’s vanguard had punched through and carved us a beachhead on top of the ramparts. It had been grim work after that, driving them back inch by inch until the enemy commander sounded a horn and they retreated into the inner city. The battle for Dormer was being fought on three theatres, now. Ranker and Afolabi held our backs, the Deoraithe infantry had resumed assaulting the fae dug in the east as soon as the siege engines had turned their fire there and now the Fifteenth was spilling into Old Dormer like a flood. The flood, unfortunately, had eventually run into dike. It would have been too much to hope for that the last stiff opposition we’d run into was the Immortals, holed up in their castle.

The most ancient part of Dormer was, I’d come to realize, built around a handful of low hills joining into a larger one. The baronial castle was atop that, overlooking the old city and the port, and just like Whitestone Quarter back in Laure the wealthy estates had clustered around the seat of power in the city. Weren’t a lot of high nobles this far south, but there’d been wealthy merchants and those who’d once been landed knights before that status was burned out of the social fabric of Callow. The Fifteenth had overrun most of the lower level of Old Dormer in swift order, save for a few strongholds that were being bloodily taken piecemeal, but it had stopped cold in face of fae lines on two fronts: the port and the lesser hills. The fucking nobles had built walls around their estate, because naturally it wasn’t enough to be rich you had to keep the rabble away from your statues and gardens too. Nauk had lost a full company trying the lowest hill, wiped out in a storm of flame faster than they could scream, before pulling back.

The port was crawling with fae, and I’d bet that was where the ten thousand who’d bailed from the second run at the engines had gone. Regulars alone the Fifteenth might have managed to drive into the river, but as it happened the rivers was swinging back. There was a Count in there who had water sorcery, and the prick had been cautious enough so far we hadn’t been able to reach him. When I’d gone to lead the charge he’d surrounded the entire port in a wall of water twenty feet high, and while I could have probably forced my way through that I was unwilling to exhaust myself on a second stringer. I’d linked back with the meat of the Fifteenth under Legate Hune and scried Masego, diverting him in that direction. It’d take a while for him to get there, though, so I’d gone with Hune’s boys to bring down the last few dug-in fae around the port. I watched in silence as the legionaries finished clearing the guildhall, and nodded in approval at the light casualties. Only five dead, and with the mage line close by the wounded would be back on their feet soon enough. Speaking of the devil , I thought. A thickly-built Soninke with lieutenant stripes on her shoulder and the light armour of our mage contingent was making her way to me. I turned without needing to be hailed, and discomfort flickered across her face.

“Ma’am,” she saluted. “Lord Hierophant had sent word he’s near the port, preparing a ritual to make a path through the water.”

I rolled my shoulder absent-mindedly.

“Then let’s give him a hand,” I mused. “Any word from Adjutant or Archer?”

“Last report has Lord Adjutant in pitched battle with a Summer baroness near the hills, ma’am,” the mage replied. “Neither the Archer nor the Thief have been in touch.”

It’d been over half a day now, I thought. Any longer and I was going to have to get concerned, though worrying for Archer was not unlike worrying for a forest fire at summer peak – it was usually wiser to worry about the fire than for it. As for Thief, well, of all the Named I’d come across she had the most splendid survival instinct. If Diabolist ended up breaking the world, Thief would be the last human alive to share it with rats and cockroaches.

“Tell Hune to back up Adjutant with whatever mages she can spare,” I frowned, and looked around.

Hard to tell my way around an unfamiliar city, though the massive water wall in the distance was a bit of a hint as to where I should be headed.

“Should I send word to Lord Hierophant you will be reinforcing him, ma’am?” the mage called out as I began to walk away.

“Let it be a surprise,” I said. “He loves those.”

—

“You know I despise surprises,” Masego said, glaring at me.

Impressive, considering he had no eyes. He was getting better at that. I clapped his shoulder, and even being careful nearly sent him tumbling to the ground.

“What happened to your spirit of adventure?” I replied.

“That’s a myth,” he said disdainfully, slapping away my hand. “Father’s dissected several heroes and never found any trace of it.”

Ah, Warlock. If I was the kind of girl to pray, I would that I never had to go digging through that man’s basement. I had a feeling whatever I’d find there would give the Tower a run for its money in the ‘horrors beyond understanding’ department.

“It’s a metaphor,” I said. “I know you don’t know what those are, but-“

I grinned at the deeply offended look on his face and barrelled on before he could interject.

“- I just don’t have the time to educate you tonight. Your ritual is ready?”

“Yes,” he glared.

“Go on, then,” I said, vaguely gesturing. “Do the thing.”

The water rampart loomed ahead of us, showing no sign of collapsing on its own. It bisected houses in some parts, and the legionaries had checked inside only to find out it had gone straight through stone and wood. I didn’t have the heart to ask if any of my men had been in the way when it was made. Runes bloomed around Masego, and it was difficult for me to keep their image in my mind. High Arcana, then. A curtain of transparent power made a tunnel through the water across the length of the street as Hierophant’s face creased in concentration. After a moment, he relaxed. Good enough for me.

“It’s a figure of speech,” he said.

“No idea what you’re talking about,” I airily replied.

A full cohort was already forming ranks in front of the tunnel and without missing a beat I took the lead. The commanding officer was a hawk-faced Taghreb, and like most my staff would have been too young for his rank in most other legions.

“Captain Fazil, Your Grace,” he introduced himself when I glanced at him.

“Keep your ranks tight and your shields up, Captain,” I said. “This is going to be a ride.”

His lips quirked in that subtle Praesi way denoting polite amusement.

“Well,” he said. “Can’t be worse than Marchford.”

“I hear that,” I muttered.

I’d say this for the fae, while they were a pain to deal with at least they weren’t godsdamned demons. I was really hoping Diabolist was out of those to call on, but stood ready for bitter disappointment.

“Shouldn’t we be behind the shields?” Masego said after catching up to me. “That is what they’re meant for.”

“Chin up, Lord Hierophant,” I said. “Make it look like we know what we’re doing.”

“I thought we knew what we were doing,” he said.

He glanced at me worriedly and I whistled loudly.

“Catherine , tell me we know what we’re doing. ”

“FORWARD!” I screamed, unsheathing my sword.

“I could be in my tower,” he complained. “My nice, comfortable tower. Fadila never takes me to battles, you know. She makes me tea. She keeps very tidy notes and lets me sleep in.”

I didn’t bother to suppressed my snort of laughter at that, letting out ring loud and clear. That must have left an impression on the fae awaiting us on the other side of the tunnel, because their line wavered at the sound. I felt the first volley before they let it loose, the blooming of power just out of sight. With trails of flame the arrows filled the tunnel with burning light that reflected eerily in the waters around us. Slow, compared to how they’d felt when I first encountered them. It was easy enough to pass under the curve when I picked up the pace, though most hadn’t been aimed at me. The sound of sorcerous shields pinging told me Masego had seen to that, at least for now. I ripped into the frontline like storm, silhouettes flickering one after another as I immersed myself into the reflexes of my Name. One, two, three and what was the point in keeping count? They came and died. The flowed around me, after a while. Made room, and that was when I realized they’d known ranks would do nothing to stop me. I could see the long warehouses of the port in the distance, and atop them fae stood in knots. Spears of Summer flame were being formed, like the ones they used to pound at the siege engines.

If I actually got hit by one of those I wouldn’t die, I didn’t think, but I wouldn’t be getting back up on me feet for a while either. They’d meant, evidently, to draw me in and keep me pinned. Arrows from all sides flew, and I had to conceded that if it’d been just me they might well have caught me with this. I wasn’t, though. Alone. Sorcery slithered around me, shining blue, and began to spin blindingly fast. The arrows struck it first, and were drawn into the spin flawlessly. The spears struck one after another and flame filled my field of vision for long moments – but, in the end, was drawn in as well. The spinning ended abruptly, and a forest of arrows clattered against stone as Masego made his way to my side.

“Reckless,” he chided.

“Kept them busy,” I replied.

I’d bought my legionaries their beachhead, and wasn’t going to hold their hand through the rest of this. The Count had been the problem here, and with Masego backing me we should be putting him down in short order.

“By the river,” Hierophant said. “I believe he’ll be releasing the wall soon.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good thing,” I grimaced.

“The sheer weight of water will crush anything near it,” he noted. “A shame we’ll be otherwise occupied; it would have been interesting to witness. It is quite rare for water sorcery of this scale to be used save by the Ashurans, you know.”

That would have been interesting enough a line to warrant encouragement if we were drinking in a tent, but we had other priorities at the moment. I took the lead and we advanced towards the river. It was different fighting with Masego than it was with Hakram. Hierophant had been with me since my first real campaign, true, but we’d only really began fighting together near the end of the Liesse Rebellion. It was in the months after that we’d developed the technique, and it hadn’t been truly tested yet. Tonight would see to that. The theory was simple: Masego was a fortress, and I was the garrison. Panes of solid light forming a rough sphere around us hung in the air as we moved forward, and I darted out of their protection to clear the way whenever we met opposition. Arrow fire petered out after the first two volleys did nothing to dent our defences and the fae came in close quarters instead. That was my part to deal with. My shield caught the edge of a swinging blade and forced it down, my sword point taking the fae in the throat before I lightly stepped back. Another filled the void before the movement was even finished.

“Clear,” I called out.

The panes flickered out of existence and as I stepped aside Masego finished murmuring an incantation, a burst of howling wind tearing into the mass of fae before us. Doubtful it’d killed anyone, but it did buy me room. I sallied out the moment the burst ended, blade high and carving through the fae that tried to plug the gap. Moments later I saw movement in the distance from the corner of my eye and calmly retreated just as Hierophant restored the panes of light, safely behind the walls as the arrows burned harmlessly. It was a slow way forward, but for foes who’d never faced it before it was very, very hard to deal with. The two of us ploughed through fae lines even as my legion fought in the distance, clearing two streets in a row with only minimal exertion. The dark-skinned mage didn’t even look winded. I could feel the bundle of power that was the Summer Count near the water, but frowned when I saw there was a row of back-to-back warehouses in the way. We’d have to go the long way around if we kept to the streets, and that was more time than I cared to give the enemy. Cutting through a fae’s wrist and half-stepping back behind the panes, I spun the blade slowly to limber my wrist. There’d been a lot if killing tonight.

“Warehouse to the left,” I said. “Burn.”

Masego looked at the wooden walls and raised an eyebrow, red runes lighting up around him. The smell of sulphur spread thick in the air and even as the panes broke, a stream of black flame emerging from his hand and turning into a snake with gaping jaws open wide. The construct tore through the warehouse wall, the crates piled behind it, what looked like dried fish hanging form the ceiling and then the second wall before disappearing in a flash. The fae had been ready for us, this time, and arrows flew the moment the shields were gone. I stood vigil, blade scything through the first few in perfect arc and a twist of will flash-freezing the few that hadn’t take care of. The panes were back before a fuller volley could be sent and we resumed our advance, going through the still-smouldering shortcut. The moment we saw the inside was empty of fae our pace went brisk, though Masego stilled before we left the warehouse and finally reached the docks.

“Now,” he said. “Cat, he’s not releasing it. He’s repurposing it. Hid the intent from me by delaying ‘til the last moment.”

“He’s going to smash us with it,” I sighed.

I broke at a run immediately and the overweight mage followed as best he could. The Count stood at the edge of the docks, alone, and I thanked any Gods listening for the fae pathological need for melodramatic scenes. If he’d had an honour guard of Summer soldiers this would have been a lot harder. Turning too-large deep blue eyes on us, the fae smiled gently.

“Welcome, Duchess of Moonless Nights,” he said. “Allow me to-“

By the time he’d gotten to the word ‘Nights’, I had the sharper out of my satchel and lit. The toss was a beautiful arc that would have the explosion happen right in his monologuing face. A tendril of water snaked out of the river and caught it before, though, the munitions never detonating.

“This is-“ the Count began.

“I’ll handle the water,” Hierophant interrupted, tone interested as he looked behind us.

“Would you-“

“I’ve got him,” I replied, and charged with my shield angled up.

The first tendril of water was caught on it and ricocheted upwards. I smoothly spun around the second and leapt over the third, landing in a roll at his feet. His hand whipped forward and there was a gargantuan groan but the distinct lack of downing that followed meant Hierophant was good as his word. My shield caught him on the shoulder and I felt bones break. He didn’t even try to fight the impact, allowing it to throw him into the river. He landed on his feet, never actually going through.

“And now-“

I followed, letting Winter flare under my feet. It froze the water on touch just long enough for me to be able to make it from one stride to the next. I was on his chosen grounds now, though, and it showed. Instead of the handful of tendrils I got a full three dozen, coming in a flawless circle. Couldn’t afford to slow down or I’d sink, so I’d have to time this just right. I picked the highest tendril and froze a smooth shard of it, then leapt atop the attack meant to kill me. Immediately the others adjusted course towards me, but while his sorcery was versatile it was too slow . I wasn’t surprised Princess Sulia hadn’t taken him to the Battle of Four Armies and One, the Winter fae would have eaten this one alive. My sword came down as I fell atop him, cutting straight through his shoulder and the pale blue mail that covered it. The Count screamed and before I could response I was thrown away by a waterspout, the back of my plate dragging along the length of the docks and ripping through the planks. Fuck, that hurt. I’d cut off the arrows the Count of Green Yew had shot in there, but there were still bits inside and they’d wiggled horridly into my back muscles. I got back on my feet slowly, keeping a sliver of attention on the presence in the back of my head. The fae was in the air, now, red and gold wings keeping him aloft.

“ Finally ,” he hissed. “This is absurd. You have no respect for the proper courtesies, child. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“One day,” I replied, “you guys are going to stop falling for this one.”

Zombie the Third ploughed into him from the back, screeching loudly as his wings flapped and the hooves smashed into shoulder blades. My mounts must have weighed twice as much as he did, and fae or not that took a toll. The Count plunged into the docks headfirst with a broken back, and much to my amusement got stuck between the planks I’d already ripped. I didn’t waste time on anything fancy and just punched through the back of his neck with the tip of my sword.

“G odsdamnit , Catherine,” Masego moaned.

Oh right, he still had all that water to deal with. I guided Zombie into landing at my side and dragged the Count’s broken body off of the docks just in case leaving it close to river would heal it somehow. You never knew with fae. Hierophant’s arms were held up and shaking as he dealt with what looked like a small lake of levitating water. That was a lot bigger than I’d thought it would be. I, uh, left him to that. It looked under control. He eventually managed to make an escapement that slowly emptied the water back into the Wasaliti, though he was panting by the end of it. I patted Zombie’s back.

“Who’s a good abomination to the laws of men and decency,” I praised it. “You are.”

It preened, blue eyes glittering.

“Are you indulging yourself?” Hierophant said, sounding like he was rolling his eyes.

No there was an image, but I didn’t linger on it because I stood frozen.

“I, uh, didn’t make him do that,” I admitted quietly.

“Her,” Masego corrected.

“How do you – never mind, I don’t want to know,” I muttered. “They don’t usually do that.”

“Your necromancy has grown different than Uncle Amadeus’,” the blind mage mused. “That has interesting implications.”

“This,” I decided, “feels like an issue for Tomorrow Catherine to deal with. She’ll bitch about it, no doubt, but she hasn’t had to kill her way through a fucking army of murderous fairies so screw her and her whining mouth.”

“Usually when villains started referring to themselves like this, it is before they go deeply and irrevocably mad,” Masego informed me. “It is a well-documented phenomenon.”

I could always count on this one for reassurances, couldn’t I? I was picking my particular shade of scathing sarcasm when movement above stilled my tongue. To call what was happening there flying would have been somewhat generous, I decided. It was, if anything, falling at a slightly forward angle. I imagined the fae’s ability to flap its wings was somewhat affected by the fact that Archer had sunk two knives in its back and was trying to guide it with them. By their angle, they’d come from the castle. That was good. The way the fae died in mid-flight was slightly less so. Archer’s lips moved in what was no doubt a vicious curse and she jumped after retrieving her knives, spreading her arms wide.

“She’s aiming for us, I think,” Masego said, frowning.

“Going to hit that warehouse instead,” I noted. “Her ride died too early.”

We began to stroll towards the likely end of her trajectory when Hierophant suddenly smacked a fist into a palm.

“I could ease her way down, like I did with you,” he offered.

He had, huh. I gauged Archer’s fall. Nowhere as bad as mine would have been, though she’d bruise for sure. And if I remembered correctly, after catching me the wench had dropped me.

“Nah,” I smiled. “I’m sure she has it under control.”

Twenty heartbeats later Archer crashed through a thatched roof in an explosion of straw and wood. Masego and I casually walked into the warehouse and found her lying sprawled on broken crates full of salmon. She moaned.

“You didn’t catch me,” she accused.

“My hands were full,” I said.

“You could have sent your horse,” she bit out.

“It’s a sensitive soul,” I defended. “Didn’t want to risk hurting it.”

“Ugh,” she groaned. “You two are the worst.”

I looked around and found no sight of her expected shadow.

“Where’s Thief?” I asked.

“Last I saw her she was telling me I was a horrid idiot who didn’t understand the meaning of stealth and that I deserved to die,” Archer mused. “She was smiling when she said it, though. I think she’s warming up to me.”

I coughed to hide my laugh.

“I’m sure she is,” I lied. “How much did you get done?”

“Right, report,” Archer breathed, vaguely flapping a wrist at me instead of rising. “So, we stole a bunch of banners and planted the goblinfire but then we ran into these guys. So Thief was all like ‘Archer, you peerless beauty whose approval I secretly crave-“

“Sounds just like her,” I said flatly.

“- we should run’. But then this guy was all like ‘Yeah, you better run’. So, you know, I shot him in the eye. And I’m going to be honest with you here, Catherine, they didn’t take well to that. At all .”

“You don’t say,” I murmured.

So that was why Black never took my reports unless he had a bottle of wine at hand.

“So anyways this other guy comes in and he’s all ‘I am a Duke, the Queen is going to kill you all’, you know the usual stuff. So I tried to stab him but he threw me through a window and then set fire to the stables I landed in. Now,” Archer firmly stated, “I could have taken him.”

“Of course,” I agreed, without the faintest hint of irony.

“But I know how worried you get and I’m a good friend, so I came back instead. Grabbed some fae, stabbed it to get its attention and now here I am.”

She flapped her hand again.

“Report over,” she cheerfully told me.

I ripped a salmon from its hook and threw at her head, ignoring the loud protests about respect due to those wounded in the line of duty.

“Masego,” I said. “Please heal this idiot, then scry Hune’s staff. Adjutant is to drop whatever he’s doing and wait for us at the frontlines. It’s time to end this.”

The fae, I learned when he got in touch with Hune, apparently thought the same: the Immortals had come out.

It went downhill from there.

Chapter 43: Cliff

“Of course not, did you see the height of that drop? That is the last we’ve seen of the Shining Prince, I assure you.”
– Dread Empress Sinistra IV, the Erroneous

Historically speaking, villains leading assaults against a numerically inferior force situated atop a hill did not lead to the kind of outcome I would prefer. That was a problem. On the other hand, if I didn’t lead an assault against those hills Summer would still have a decent chunk of its army left when the Queen arrived. That would be a much bigger problem. On the other hand, if I ended up with most my armies dead by the time we got a royal visit I would be fucked regardless. The Queen wouldn’t negotiate with a host on its last gasps, even if hers was wrecked. It would also give a lot of power to my ‘allies’ in Arcadia I’d rather they didn’t have, given that they were literally incapable of not being treacherous. Kind of like High Lords, really, only they were less smug about it.

“This is a dilemma,” I noted, squinting ahead.

The Immortals had come out to play. Pouring out of the castle on shining wings, they’d propped up the regulars holding the ring of walled properties around it and by the sound of the horns that were now blaring they were about to begin a counterattack. I’d pit the Fifteenth against regulars any day, especially if we had dug in positions, but the golden fae were another story. By my reckoning, they were physically on par with what I’d been able to do when I’d still been fresh to my Name. There were, unfortunately, ten thousand of them. No, I corrected silently. Less than that. Both Masego and I must have taken out a chunk of their numbers in Arcadia and I could hardly believe they’d scythed through both Nauk’s men and fought of the Watch simultaneously without taking some losses of their own. Let’s be generous , I thought, and assume nine thousand are left . That felt a lot like saying it wasn’t as bad to have a sword tearing into your lung rather than entirely through.

“We can’t retreat,” Hakram said.

Brawling with another titled noble fae had not done wonders for Adjutant, it was plain to see. He had a nasty cut across his cheek that was going to scar even after healing magic had been poured into it and he had a black eye already turning dark green. The fact that the pauldron on his armour was loose hadn’t escaped my notice either. That likely meant his opponent had dislocated his shoulder so hard it had ripped out the steel bands. For all that, he was standing and steady. Couldn’t ask more of him. His words only sunk in a moment later. He wasn’t wrong, not exactly. If the Fifteenth gave ground now we were abandoning fortified positions in favour of a street fight with opponents that could fly. They were a lot better at skirmishing than we were, I had to admit. On the other hand, I’d put my hand to fire that after the first wave of regulars softening us up the second would be Immortals. Those would tear through walls like wet parchment.

“Masego,” I said. “Scry me Juniper.”

I’d gathered most of the Woe on a flat rooftop before we went on the offensive, in part to catch our breath and in part to try to find a weak point for us to break through. Masego had also taken the time to dig the arrows out of my back and heal the wounds, prompting the inevitable jokes about having been stuck with fae wood by Archer. It’d taken long to get everyone there, to my dismay. We must be past First Bell by now, and if the presence of so many fae hadn’t warped the passing of time too much that meant we had only about two hours until dawn. At this time of the year, two hours before Morning Bell was when the sun started peeking through. Hierophant no longer needed his trinkets to scry, I saw. He drew a circle in the air that shimmered like water and heartbeats later one of the mages attached to Juniper’s headquarters appeared on the other side. My general shouldered him aside before long, her face looking comically large in the circle.

“Catherine,” she said. “What went wrong?”

If the situation was slightly less dire I would have made something of that, but I didn’t have the time to spare. The fae were mobilizing.

“Immortals reinforced the outer ranks,” I said. “They’re preparing for a push, if I’m not mistaken.”

The request for advice went unsaid, but she heard it anyway. The orc grunted in displeasure at the news.

“Begin Operation Candlelight immediately,” she said. “And hit the walls before they sally. If we don’t keep up the pressure we lose Old Dormer.”

I grimaced. We both knew that would mean brutal casualties for the Fifteenth. I’d known this was not going to be a clean battle or an easy one, but sending so many of my men to die still left a bad taste in the mouth.

“What’s the situation on the other fronts?” I asked.

“Deoraithe are getting fucked to the east,” she bluntly said. “Fae drew them in and set the entire sector on fire. General Afolabi had scattered the host at our back, but they’re still harassing. There’ll be no reinforcements form the Twelfth or the Fourth.”

“Shit,” I said. “Kegan tried to send in the Watch, didn’t she?”

“Had to threaten putting her in chains to shut that down,” Juniper growled. “They’re already headed your way, not that she’s happy about it.”

The Duchess of Daoine had always been the largest liability in this. There’d been a risk she’d scrap the entire operational plan if she thought she was losing too many men. We’d made a deal for her to help me with the fae in exchange for a crossing and backing against Diabolist, but she’d always put the interests of the Deoraithe above everything else. I had a feeling Juniper’s threat had been a lot more colourful than just chains, and I was glad she’d lost her temper. If Kegan started acting out the delicate balancing act that was this battle could very well collapse on our heads.

“See you on the other side, Hellhound,” I said.

“Don’t die an idiot, Foundling,” she dismissed, and the scrying link died.

“She’s growing on me, I’ll admit,” Archer noted.

“You say that about everyone that insults me,” I sighed. “Hakram?”

“I’ll get this started,” the orc replied.

I let him leave without comments. It was Legate Hune that had the scrying connections to Robber and his cohort of miscreants, though the orders about resuming the offensive would have to be carried to Nauk as well.

“So, candlelight. Are we romancing the fae now? Bold move,” Archer mused.

“We’re going to burn them out,” I said. “Assaulting the castle was always going to be bloody as all Hells, so we planned to hem them in with goblinfire.”

“Doesn’t that burn uncontrollably?” Archer said.

“It can be delayed with ditches,” Masego noted.

“Ditches dug through pavestone?” the woman mocked.

“It does,” I broke in before that could degenerate further. “It’ll be a race for us to break through the front before we’re neck-deep in green death as well. To be honest I’d rather burn them out entirely, but Hierophant says we need to hold the beachhead to contain the Queen.”

“Summer has prepared a crossing point,” the mage said. “She’ll still be able to cross without it, if after a delay, but then we would not know where. That complicates warding a great deal.”

Archer cleared her throat.

“So, just to be sure, the plan is to set fire to a castle and then charge into it?” she said.

“That’s oversimplifying a lot,” I protested. “There are nuances.”

“Your general’s going to be pissed you disobeyed,” she grinned.

Yeah, that battle was already lost. Better get out with as much dignity as I could manage. I strode to the edge of the roof and sharpened my vision. Hakram had waste no time, I saw. The Fifteenth was already forming ranks for the assault and moments later green bloomed in the distance. Then again. To the left and the right of the castle. There would be another foyer behind it, I knew, though the ramparts hid it away from me.

“All right, we move,” I said. “We’ve got until dawn to kill us a duke.”

—

At this point I wasn’t holding a shield so much as an arrowcatch that occasionally got set on fire. I wiggled my fingers around the latest arrowhead, that had come a little too close to comfort to carving straight through my thumb. Goblin steel didn’t do much to block those when there was that much sorcery behind them.

“Hierophant, if I become a godsdamned porcupine because you’re being a perfectionist I will be cross ,” I snarled.

Archer, standing behind Hakram and the tower shield he’d claimed for the assault, put an arrow in the eye of the enterprising fae who’d come so close to lowering my amount of fingers. She was a vision, it had to be said. Movements perfectly smooth and fluid, she let loose a shot with every breath and I had yet to glimpse her fail to make a kill. She was clearing out the walls wherever she aimed as swiftly as the fae filled the gaps, quicker on the draw than even Pickler’s repeating scoprions had been. Adjutant wasn’t doing nearly as well, a dozen arrows stuck in his shield and one gone through his boot. Which he’d had to stomp around to put out the flames that had immediately spread, something I would have enjoyed watching if I wasn’t busy standing around like Creation’s angriest practice dummy.

“This is complicated work,” Hierophant said.

“Gods Below, just burn our way through,” I yelled.

The Soninke needed to hurry the Hells up. Around us the Fifteenth was assaulting the walls with ladders, and dying in droves as they did. It wasn’t that the ramparts were difficult. They were garden walls, more or less. But the fae had gathered archers behind them and were shooting massed volleys down on my legionaries. Half the ladders had gone up in flames before touching the walls and the fae on them were fighting furiously to keep us from establishing a beachhead. And these are the fucking regulars , I thought. The Immortals withdrew deeper in. The broad avenue that led straight to the castle passed through a fortified gate that Summer had closed and would laugh in the face of a ram: it had a heavy steel portcullis in front of it, protected by thick arches of stone. We’d need sorcery to punch through that, but Masego was dithering like a bloody milkmaid.

“Ah,” Hierophant sighed. “Disappear.”

I raised my shield to catch another arrow that would have taken him in the throat, glancing over the side. A wave of darkness had engulfed the gate and the rampart bordering it, solidifying for a moment before it disappeared. It left behind absolutely nothing. No stone, no wood, no steel. It was as if nothing had ever existed there at all. Gods. Had he annihilated everything? No, I could feel something at the edge of my senses that was not unlike Arcadia. He’d shunted the entire gate off in another dimension.

“FIFTEENTH,” Nauk’s voice roared from behind me. “TIGHTEN RANKS, YOU UGLY GRASS-LICKERS. FORWARD!”

The answering shout was deafening, thousands yelling and steel brought up. Woven inside, though, I could hear the soft buzz of arrows that still fell like rain.

“Into the breach,” I shouted at the rest of the Woe, barely audible over the pandemonium.

Hakram moved to cover my left and Masego hunkered up behind us, runes of light blooming with but a gesture. Archer put one last arrow through a fae’s open mouth before joining up and together we advanced. Our way through the absent gate was uncontested, but in the walled avenue it led into ranks of fae were awaiting us. Black had once compared leading Named into battle to leading a chorus, and as we struck I finally understood why. We were, as a group, greater than the sum of our individual skills. The grooves were already there for us to settle into, as if they’d been carved before we even begun. Archer opened the song. She did not waste her arrows on the rank and file, instead surgically putting down any fae that looked like an officer. Even as we tread the pavestones, they dropped with every heartbeat. Hierophant added his voice to the melody, whispers in the mage-tongue weaving rings of darkness in the fae ranks that bloomed and tore through mail and flesh. The chaos was our cue. Adjutant and I dug into it with relish, a storm of steel and strength that shattered and broke the straw men standing in our way.

My blood sang with the song, the heat of it something not even Winter could deny me. With every stroke and every stride we painted death across the face of Summer, Archer’s long knives joining us in the steps without missing a beat. I could feel it without ever laying eyes on it, the swing of Adjutant’s axe I could duck under to overextend a screaming soldier and carve through his throat with a flick of the wrist. Hierophant’s sorcery flashed across the melee like coils of ruin, passing so close I could feel the caress of the power unleashed without it ever touching me. I could not tell the passing of time, every sight flowing into the other by what could have been an hour or a heartbeat. I felt myself grinning, teeth bared as Summer gave . Fae let themselves die on my blade merely to slow it, others striking in that instant of killing but what did I care? I was not one blade but many, my body just a vessel for my will. Dust swallowed the dead man whole, the edge of the axe dug into the chest of the thing that would have slain me even as I spun and and slit the throat of the fae to my side with inhuman precision. Not a drop of exertion wasted, as if slaughter could be measured and quantified.

The four of us stood surrounded by a field of corpses when I returned to myself, not a single living fae in sight. I was panting, though instead of exhaustion I felt invigorated. This, I thought, had been deeper a religious experience than anything I’d ever felt in any House of Light. The sensation ebbed and the absence of it was hollow. Sound returned, the fighting of legionaries behind us and the slow breathing of the Woe around me.

“Shit,” Archer croaked softly. “That was... Fuck .”

Hierophants’ eyes were bright, though his mind faraway. Adjutant looked oddly serene, shield resting on his shoulder as he leaned on the haft of his long axe.

“Yeah,” I muttered, and speaking at all felt like I was whistling in a graveyard.

I shook myself out of it before long, and assessed our situation. Making a unified push into the upper city had always been a fantasy, I knew. There were avenues up here, made broad for carriages, but aside from the path that led straight up to the castle the rest was a maze write by the whims of the powerful who’d once lived here. The Fifteenth had taken the outer walls as we’d been killing what I now grasped had been the reinforcements meant to drive my legionaries back. Now the knife fight began, my men having to spread through dozens of gardens and manors as Summer fought them for every inch.

“Castle’s where we need to be,” I said, pointing my sword at the faraway silhouette of the tall towers.

I could glimpse spreading green in the distance, a reminder that the fae were not the only enemy we had to beat. The goblinfire had made certain they would not be able to flank us, that they would be forced to fight us in a narrow corridor, but with every hour that corridor became narrower for us as well. Resistance would become harsher the deeper we went in. Archer wiped her longknives on the cloak of a decapitated soldier before sheathing them, running her tongue against her lips. My eyes could not help but linger on the sight as I wondered what kissing her would feel like, and peeling that leather off her. Shit, fighting didn’t usually get my blood up this way. It had just felt... intimate, more than killing ever should. I looked away before she could notice. Nauk came to the rescue, thank the Gods, leading up a cohort of legionaries with the Gallowborne at their head. The large orc whistled at the sight of the corpses strewn around us, Tribune Farrier coming to stand at his side.

“Not that looks like it was a proper fucking fight,” the legate said. “See that, you wretched layabouts? That’s the kind of work I expect from you.”

There were a few barks of laughter.

“Legate, Tribune,” I greeted, sheathing my sword as I took in the sight the two.

Nauk was grinning and splattered in blood. He’d been leading from the front again. Farrier’s mail was scorched on the side, but aside from that he was in good health.

“We’re making a push to the castle,” I said. “I take it this is our reinforcements?”

“Hune’s bastards are handling the flanks,” Nauk replied. “Scraped up my only intact cohort and brought your reds and gold along to spice the wine.”

“Your Grace,” John Farrier said, offering a nod that bordered on a bow.

“Catherine,” I sighed.

He’d become irritatingly formal since it had been made open knowledge I’d been named Vicequeen of Callow. It had taken me the better part of a year to wean him off that the first time, and I wasn’t looking forward to fighting that war again.

“Keep your eyes open, boys and girls,” I called out. “We’ve got their second line ahead and the Immortals behind that. You’re in for a rough night.”

“Hells, ain’t that every night in this outfit?” someone called out from the ranks.

“Wouldn’t be the Fifteenth if we didn’t get proper fucked before sunup,” someone else laughed.

Well, they weren’t wrong .

“Gallowborne take the lead,” I told Farrier. “If we run into the Duke, you run.”

“Ma’am,” the dark-haired man protested. “We’re-“

“Ants, to a thing that powerful,” I flatly said. “You have your orders.”

He nodded, though he didn’t seem pleased about it. Nauk was eyeing him approvingly. Loyalty didn’t really count for orcs unless you were willing to die for it.

“We done braiding our hair?” Archer drawled. “I’m getting bored.”

“There’s nothing wrong with braids,” Hierophant muttered, putting his own braids in order.

I wisely decided not to touch that and instead gestured for Nauk to call the march. It would have been much harder, I thought, without Archer. We were ambushed from rooftops twice on our way forwards, but between her bow and the line of sappers that was distressingly eager to wreck noble houses given half an excuse we weren’t given a serious challenge. That was when I started to get worried. We should have, by now, run into either a barricade or another heavy knot of fae. I let my stride lapse.

“Something’s wrong,” I said.

Hakram nodded.

“I am no tactician,” Masego said, “but it seems poor planning to allow your enemy to gain foothold on your walls. We might have simply spent the strength of Summer, Catherine. They might no longer have nobles to field against us.”

I shook my head.

“Remember how many people there were, at the masquerade in Skade?” I said. “Summer should have at least that many.”

“Duke hasn’t come out, either,” Archer frowned. “He didn’t seem this shy when we tangled.”

I closed my eyes and considered the battle as if I were not part of it. The front in the plains was effectively over, by Juniper’s report. The fighting in the east had turned brutal, but given the numbers Duchess Kegan could field it was highly unlikely the fae there had turned the tide. Unless they had flown away, as they’d allegedly done earlier . No, they can’t do that quietly. Either one of us would have seen a few thousand glowing wings in the sky or Juniper would have scried Hune with a warning. The forces left in play, then were the remaining regulars in the upper city and the Immortals. And the Duke, followed by whatever nobles he’s got left. If I was a Duke of Summer, needing to keep a fortress at all costs and three of sides around it already on fire, what would I do? Immortals would be my sharpest knife, so I couldn’t waste them on attrition. So I’d put the regulars on the wall and send the nobles to bolster them.

No, he can’t do that. He already sent out three Counts and a handful of solid barons and we just tore through them in less than an hour. Sending nobles against the Woe would be trying to put out a bonfire with oil. Named couldn’t advance alone, though, or at least not do so and expect to hold any grounds they took. Which he must suspect we needed to, with how hard we’d been going after the castle. So what he’s aiming for is the soldiers . Then why not push harder to hold the walls? Why hadn’t we had a rougher fight going in? I mind mind, I watched the Fifteenth die in droves to enter the upper city and then take the fight to the maze of walled and sprawling domains, harassed by a much more mobile enemy every step of the way. But giving ground. Juniper had said, earlier, that the fae to the east had drawn in the Deoraithe before setting fire to the city. They’re doing the exact same thing here , I realized. Only they won’t burn their own fortifications, they need those to scatter the legionaries. Once they reel us in... In a line across the upper city, golden banners rose high in the sky.

In utter silence, the Immortals advanced.

Chapter 44: Drop

“The only thing more dangerous than being hated by a villain is to be loved by them.”
– Dread Empress Regalia II

That made it twice, that the Summer Court manoeuvred me into a situation where there was absolutely nothing I could do. The golden banners flew high, and with every moment they remained there my legionaries would be dying. In tight ranks, with sappers and crossbowmen at their backs, heavies might have a chance against the Immortals. But dispersed across a dozen different mansions, spread out in pursuit? It would be slaughter. And for once, we would be on the wrong side of it. A part of me already grieved the death of those soldiers, though I knew that even greater caution would have made no great difference. If I’d grasped the enemy’s intent here, Juniper likely had an hour ago – and she’d still sent us in, because this battle was against dawn as much as against the fae. Another quieter, calmer part of me was already tallying how many losses the Fifteenth would incur and assessing whether it would cripple us before the fight against Diabolist.

I didn’t always like the woman I’d become. It was a damningly short walk from we need this whatever the cost to one sin, one grace . That my shade of ruthlessness was different from Black’s was cold comfort. It sometimes occurred to me, in the dark of night, that if I got my and settled Callow I’d be the last monster remaining in it. It was an unsettling thought but remembering the girl I’d once been, the one who’d once thought that there was no need for monsters at all, brought as much disgust as it did rue. Keeping my hands clean clean wasn’t going to stop armies marching, or fields unburnt. It wasn’t going to do a single fucking thing except make myself feel more righteous. And still, once in a while, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would have felt like to be proud of the tired woman that looked back when I stood before a mirror. I clenched my fingers and let out a long breath. Whining about the price I’d had to pay to get a seat at the table wasn’t going to change anything.

Blood had been spilled, there was a foe ahead of me. They would break or I would, it was as simple as that.

“Combat formations,” Nauk barked. “Time to earn your ghelsin’in pay, children.”

Kharsum, that. Meant fuck, basically, though with the implication of going at it from behind. Wonderful language, Kharsum. Had more variations on ‘fuck’ and ‘eat’ than any other tongue I’d come across, which honestly said quite a bit about them as a people. There were no Immortals in sight yet, but a banner had risen ahead. Only a matter of time.

“Catherine,” Adjutant said, coming to stand at my side. “We knew it’d be bloody. This changes nothing.”

“Think about the tactic, Hakram,” I said. “This isn’t jaws clamping on our fingers, we lose a thumb and it’s over. They’ll drive us back to the walls, then the Immortals will retreat and the regulars fill the gap again. They’re going to harvest us, one push at a time.”

“That sounds bad,” Archer whispered at Masego. “You’ve been in wars before, Zeze. This is bad, right?”

“Don’t call me that, you horrid sweaty goblin. And she’s Callowan,” Hierophant whispered back. “They love farming, do it all over the country. It could be good.”

“It’s bad, Zeze ,” I sighed, ignoring Archer’s delighted chortle. “The Duke of Green Orchards, if it’s really him in charge, essentially turned the outskirts of this place into a meat grinder for the Fifteenth.”

“What’s the blades, in this tortured metaphor?” Archer asked.

“The Immortals,” I replied.

“So we kill the Immortals,” Archer mused. “There, problem solved.”

“It does seem a fairly straightforward issue,” Masego agreed.

Though I had some truly cutting sarcasm to grace them with, I held my tongue. Archer was, well, right might be a bit of a stretch and I definitely wasn’t giving her the satisfaction of saying anything like that but there was a nugget of correctness hidden in that boulder of aggressive ignorance. To pull this off, the Duke would have to spread the Immortals in a thin line across the upper city. And if we broke through that, he was in trouble. The castle would be wide open, save possibly for him and a handful of other nobles. That meant either betting this battle on him crushing us, which was risky for him given our highly murderous track record against Summer, or pulling back the Immortals to get in our way. The Woe could, in my opinion, feasibly deal with either the Immortals or the Duke. Both would be beyond us.

“We punch through and he’s on the backfoot,” I said to Hakram.

“Even if all we manage is to keep the centre from collapsing,” the orc replied, “it’s a rallying point for the Fifteenth and a funnel for reinforcements. It would turn into a match of attrition he cannot afford.”

Neither could we, we were both aware, but what other options did we have?

“Nauk,” I called out.

“Warlord,” he grinned. “We got a plan?”

“Smash through everything until we’ve won,” I said honestly.

“Ah, the Foundling gambit,” he gravelled. “It’s never failed us before.”

“Don’t say that where people can hear, and that’s an order,” I hurriedly replied.

That kind of stuff had a way of spreading. Legion humour was, uh, more than a little dark. Four hundred men already standing in tight ranks across the breadth of the avenue began their advance after a few yells. The Woe took the lead and I sharpened my senses to watch for the likely ambush that awaited further down the road. Though darkness was hardly bar to my sight, the smoke that was spreading across the sky was. Balls of magelight hovered above the two cohorts, kept going by our mages, but I barely noticed them: what was most visible in my eyes was the bevy of standards in the sky. Which was why, when one disappeared, I immediately noticed. Far left , I thought. Hadn’t seen much of what was there, though I’d noticed trees from a distance. Had my legionaries managed to turn back the – ah, Thief was still on the prowl. And aiming to complete her collection, by the looks of it.

“Archer,” I said. “How many of the standards did you two manage to take?”

“Half, maybe?” she shrugged. “After the first few they noticed and we had to be more careful, but there couldn’t have been more than twenty in all.”

And I was currently looking at eight still giving off that golden hue. Thief might not have been much of a fighter, but she was far from useless. I abandoned the train of thought without lingering, as moments later we’d finally come across the enemy. Ahead of us was a roundabout, though a fancier one than any I’d ever seen in Laure. It was wide as a plaza, the avenues circling the statue garden in the centre wide enough for two carriages to share it. Among the alabaster statues of what looked like past rulers of Dormer and a noticeably larger depiction of Eleanor Fairfax – though the sculptor had taken liberties there, since I doubted a knight of her calibre would have ever worn armour that left so much of her tits out in the open – the Immortals had formed a textbook perfect square. Even simply standing around, they were wrecking the greenery of the garden: the trees that weren’t already outright on fire were all smouldering, and the grass looked like a mage training yard. The Summer Court’s elite had not changed since I’d last seen them. Gold plate set with rubies glimmered under closed armet helmets of the same, heater shields so well-polished they could serve as mirrors filling one hand and ivory halberds the the other. Facing them, my legionaries spread across the roundabout. The Gallowborne took the centre, Nauk’s cohort split to cover the flanks.

“Summer Triumphant,” an Immortal from the front ranks called out.

Two hundred halberds slammed down in perfect unison, flickers of flame spreading from where they touched the ground. The words had not been spoken in any language I knew, and hardly been words at all. They’d been the crackle of wildfires, the clash of steel and the spilling of blood on hungry earth. Summer’s the season of war , Archer had once told me. Their words rang of that truth, a boast that rattled the night air.

“KILL THEM,” Nauk screamed.

“TAKE THEIR STUFF,” the Fifteenth screamed back.

We charged, wings enveloping their flanks as smoothly as if this was a practice battle. Like sea against rocks , I thought. The halberds rose, the halberds fell, and there went the first rank of my legionaries. As streaks of lightning filled the air and sharpers were thrown in long arcs, Adjutant and I rammed into the enemy. It was not like fighting the regulars. They did not give, when my sword struck their shields. And there was no slapping aside a strike of those halberds. No match for me in strength, perhaps, but not that far either. No wonder they broke the Sword of Waning Day, when they fought. Winter’s sharpest blades were rusty knives compared to these. Hacking my way into their formation was like taking an axe to an oak. My first blow hit a shield without purchase and bounced off, the halberd taller than I was sweeping down to tear through my shoulder in answer. I had to stick close to the Immortal to avoid it, and doing that felt like rolling around in a pile of embers. They heat they gave out wouldn’t melt my plate, maybe, but it would heat it until it scalded to the touch given long enough.

It took Adjutant and I working together to pry the line open. His shield got a halberd stuck and the tip of my sword pierced just over the tip of the enemy’s, sliding into the opening between the helmet and the gorget. The blood that coated my blade when it withdrew was smoking, but the fae was dead. I kicked the enemy down and forced my way into the gap even as the Immortal behind that one advanced, trying to force me back with his shield. From the corner of my eye I saw Adjutant’s knees give as the shaft of a halberd struck his shoulder and that distraction cost me. The side of my shield caught the halberd’s point at the very last moment, hard enough to change the angle from my chest to my forearm. The ivory went through plate and I screamed as fire burned in my veins. I would have had to give ground, if Archer hadn’t come to back me. Slithering around my shield she struck high, plunging a longknife in the Immortal’s throat and spinning to throw herself at the man at his side. I ripped out the halberd the corpse still clutched and let Winter loose, the flame smothered by impossibly deep cold. I let the strength linger, and took full advantage of the room she’d carved me.

The Immortals were meant to fight in ranks, the enemy in front, and from the side they struggled. Not the most flexible of weapons, halberds. I slammed my shield in the flank of the Immortal to my left and when he turned snarling Adjutant’s axe smashed through his helm and splattered blood. Now that my second was at my side, we began to widen the gap. One of us baited, the other struck. I learned at the cost of what was going to be a nasty scar under my eye that anything but a killing blow was useless on them – they did not seem to feel pain, and baldly ignored wounds. Being on the other side of that was a lot more infuriating than I’d thought it would be. With Archer weaving in and out of our side, knives always moving, we forged a wedge of corpses in the centre of the formation that the Gallowborne filled without prompting. The rest of my legionaries were not doing nearly as well, I saw when I got a rare moment of respite. Hierophant had seen the flanks were failing badly in the face of the opposition and lent them a hand, but the two spells he was working simultaneously took up all of his concentration. A hovering ball of shadow had sprouted tendrils that struck like sledgehammers on the left, while to the right a panoply of small silver circles flew around and shot beams of pale sorcery that not even the shields of the Immortals could withstand without twisting.

We’d killed maybe a fourth of them, fighting tooth and nail for every corpse, and already taken over twice that in casualties. I grit my teeth and pressed on. Attrition would grow more to our advantage the fewer of them were left, and though only the wrecks of two cohorts would emerge from this fight we would emerge victorious nonetheless.

“Sons and daughters of Summer, stand deathless under the sun,” a voice thundered.

Oh shit. Did that mean what I think it meant? Behind me, the dead Immortals proved the truth of the name. Great gouts of Summer flame poured out of the wounds, and they rose to their feet – most of them in the middle of the Gallowborne. A dozen of my retinue died in the first heartbeat and I screamed in fury.

“HIEROPHANT,” I yelled. “KILL THAT STANDARD.”

Before I’d even finished speaking a handful of runes formed just before my eyes, shining blue, and transmuted into a word: warded. Fuck. We weren’t the only ones who could use those.

“BATTER IT DOWN,” I screamed.

We were way past conserving power for the Duke of Green Orchards. At this rate we’d never even reach him. The detonation that followed rocked the entire plaza, statues flying in pieces and even Immortals being thrown to the ground. I widened my stance and was only blown back a few feet, though Hakram was thrown straight into two legionaries and had to extirpate himself from the mess of limbs and armour. To my horror, when I looked up, a globe golden light shone around the standard as it remained unharmed. Oh, this was bad. I ripped the halberd out of the grasp of an Immortal swinging at me, dropping my shield, and swung it around so that the edge of the blade tore into his skull. He dropped dead like a stingless puppet, but how long would he remain like that? The fae might not be able to pull that trick as often in Creation as they could in Arcadia, but how many times would that mean? Four, nine? My legionaries couldn’t even afford for it to happen twice. I would have called out to Archer, asked her if she had anything in her quiver that could take care of that, but she was busy trying not to get skewered by a pair of very angry Immortals.

It was a shiver, or at least that was how it felt to see it. It spread from the left flank, slithering through the thick ranks of Immortals and only turning into something real when the silhouette emerged out of thin air. Thief put a foot on a shield meant to smash her down, using it as a foothold to move to the shoulder of another Immortal. The fae tried to shake her off but she was already moving, jumping off the helm of an Immortal and somersaulting in the air. She went through the golden globe like it wasn’t there at all, hand snatching the standard at the apex of her leap and spiriting it away in a heartbeat. I felt the impact before she’d even begun to come down, the way every Immortal on the field flinched. I grinned, right up until the moment she was engulfed in apple-green flames and began screaming. Wings ablaze with eerie light, the Duke of Green Orchards stood atop the battlefield with mild disinterest writ on his face. A single hand held up, her kept Thief aloft and burning seemingly without effort.

I furiously tried to break through the Immortals ahead of me, but their ranks had tightened and the halberds were keeping me back. They weren’t going for a kill, just delaying me. It was Hierophant that managed to step in.

A gust of wind blew out the flames and Thief’s blackened body was dragged back behind the lines through the air. Gods, her entire hair was gone. She was scorched, but breathing and moaning in pain. Masego immediately began healing her, but she was done for the night. For more than that.

“Lady Foundling,” the noble fae greeted me politely. “It appears this affair will come to close momentarily. Perish .”

The nightmare began. Before he’d finished speaking I’d leapt off my first ice platform and was about to land on my second, and Archer had sent her first arrow flying for his eye. The shot went through the silver flames that appeared when it got close, but it slowed enough the duke caught it with his hand, crushing the wooden shaft to powder. The other hand had lashed out with green flame, a small orb of it tumbling towards me. The size of an apple, and the exact colour. Fuck. I’d thought for sure he’d be more like the Count of Green Yew, and hoped the torched trees would mean he was limited in his power, but he obviously had a work around. That first hit on Thief had been nowhere as strong as what I’d seen some dukes and duchesses pull out, but it was still exceedingly dangerous. A twist of will had a platform to my side forming and I took a turn there to avoid the throw, frowning when I saw the apple kept tumbling down. Was he really unable to redirect those? Oh Merciless Gods , I realized. I lashed out with ice, trying to keep the explosion contained when it hit the Gallowborne, but it was too little and too late. Then dark globe of ice was torn through almost instantly, green flame pouring out and consuming a full tenth. It moved from there, devouring men as the Duke calmly moved his hand to guide it.

Hierophant struck directly at him, a dozen spears of what looked like water-like shimmering iron getting stuck in the silver flames as they kept pushing at it. The fae grunted and the green fire gutted out. I should have advanced, but my eyes remained on the half-bare skull of Tribune John Farrier. Most his body was gone, even bones turned to ash. On all front of the melee the Fifteenth was giving ground, step by step as halberds tore through mail and plate. I’d known John for over a year now. Had fought by his side, bled with him and laughed with him. I’d liked him and relied on him. And he’d been swatted down carelessly, like a fucking insect.

Creation grew muted.

I could feel it all deeper now. Feel the night grow thicker, until the sight of the moon in the sky was obscured. Feel the beating from the shard of Winter that was my heart slow, and then cease entirely as I drew deeper from that well than I ever had before. My breath came out steaming and my plate crackled as frost spread over it. I peered at my anger, at my fear and calmly picked them out. I fed them to the cold, let them disappear into the flow until nothing was left at all. I’d always held back, I knew that deep down. I’d ripped the mantle of a god from its corpse and still acted the mortal. Wanted to be just Catherine Foundling. All these worries of humanity and remaining someone I could stand. The whining of a petulant child . I would be whoever I needed to be to keep my people alive, and damn me for flinching in the face of that truth. Beneath me the Immortals stirred and I felt the threads coming from them, those that had once bound them to the banner even in death but now lay inert. I reached out for them, two hundred threads growing into rivers as I forced the power of Winter through them. There were screams, there were curses and shaking and clawing at their armour. It made no difference to me. The Immortals died like flies, falling to the ground under the weight of my mantle.

“Rise,” I ordered, and they did.

Blue eyes burning behind their visors, the pride of Summer gripping its weapons as wings of ice spread from their backs.

“Shit,” Archer muttered, still among them. “That doesn’t look good.”

My gaze met the Duke of Green Orchards’ and the man smiled.

“Ah,” he said. “And now we finally meet, Duchess of Moonless Nights.”

The trees in the garden below burst into green flames, apples forming by the dozens and dropping from the branches without missing a beat. I moved with four hundred wings, my snarl on the lips of every Immortal. A storm of green flame swallowed the world, and the battle began in earnest. For the first heartbeat, it was only the two of us. I could sense his will in the flames, shaping them as men and beasts to fight my Immortals. They rose into the sky, pursued by Summer wrath, and Hierophant struck again. I saw his will slip into the green, follow along that of a lesser god and learn its workings.

“Shape is intent,” the blind man whispered. “Intent fractures.”

Like picks in stone, the Hierophant’s will struck at the sorcery and collapsed it. With a sound like a bell the flames reverted into apples, hanging harmlessly in the air, and my Immortals buried the Duke in a storm of blades. For a heartbeat all that could be seen was a pile of armour and ivory, until branches grew out. A globe of wood was spreading, swallowing the Immortals as it did, and I could feel them struggling against the crushing pressure inside. It would not save him. My will buried like a blade in the minds of the imprisoned corpses, forcing Winter into them until their bodies were overfilled vessels. One after another they burst, ice digging into the wood and tearing it from the inside. It groaned and broke, then the Duke burst out from the top in a shower of shards. Archer’s arrow would have torn through his knee, if he hadn’t caught it. He raised a mocking eyebrow.

Then it blew.

Hissing in pain, his fingers shredded, he seized the floating apples again. I ignored that, plaques of ice forming under my feet as I ran across the sky to him. The flames exploded as I felt Archer tap the back of one of the surviving Immortals. Without even glancing in her direction, I sent the corpse aflight with her hanging on the back. We reached the Duke at the same time. The fae pulled the fire to him, but through ears not my own I heard Hierophant speak.

“Burning is transmutation set by boundary,” he said. “Boundaries are mutable.”

His will rang like a bell and the fire intensified, beginning to burn even itself until all that was left was a single flame that guttered out. Archer and I leapt together as the enemy’s face darkened and he allowed himself to fall, the burnt out husks that were the trees below us collapsing into a hunks of burning wood that gathered to him in a protective shield. I grabbed Archer by the arm and tossed her at it, leaping down from a platform to follow. Her blades dug into the shield to no avail, and so did my sword. Frost spread from where I’d struck, putting out the flames but little else. A hand lightly touched the globe, Thief’s scorched face grim as she leaning against Adjutant.

“ Steal ,” she coldly said, and the shield disappeared.

Beneath it the Duke of Green Orchard’s eyes were wide. Seven wooden pillars formed around the fae, followed by four runes linked by pale light. The same binding Hierophant had used against the Princess of High Noon. The duke’s body grew rigid and Archer’s blades dug through his abdomen on both sides, straight into his lungs. I did not bother to speak. My blade ran straight through his neck, spider webs of ice spreading from the wound as life winked out of him. I panted, slowly, and felt the remaining Immortals collapse one after another. Nothing but corpses, now.

“Hierophant,” I said. “Destroy the corpse.”

He did not quibble. Hazy power devoured the remains, leaving nothing behind, and slowly I returned to myself. I’d taken four hundred men into battle. Sixty still lived, most of them wounded. All that remained of the roundabout was a smoking, broken wreck.

“Nauk,” I croaked. “ Where is Nauk ?”

I strode through the ash and corpses, shouldering aside a legionary and glaring at the first officer I found. She paled, shivering.

“Where is your legate, lieutenant?” I seethed.

“Ma’am,” she stammered, “he’s...”

I saw the few remaining mages attending to the wounded as best they could, yellow light covering their palms. I could see Nauk among them. He was not moving, his breath faint. The left side of his face had been made a burnt eyeless husk, and the arm on the other side ended at the shoulder. They were not healing him. Fury spiked, the pavestones under me cracking.

“ You ,” I said, hoisting the closest mage by the chest. “Why aren’t you healing him?”

He only babbled uselessly, so I dropped him.

“There’s nothing more they can do, Catherine,” Masego said, passing me by as he knelt by the legate’s side.

“Then craft me a fucking miracle, Hierophant,” I hissed.

He frowned, then drew runes over Nauk. The frown deepened.

“I can keep him alive,” he said. “Anything more is beyond me. Parts of his mind were shredded by the fire.”

“Do it,” I rasped. “Who? Who can heal him?”

Pinpricks of light formed above Nauk, sinking into the body as Masego murmured. The orc’s breath grew steadier, but nothing more.

“Father,” he said. “Possibly Diabolist. Or...”

He hesitated.

“Tell me,” I said through clenched teeth.

“It was fae fire that did this,” he said. “Fae sorcery could likely heal it.”

I clenched my fingers into a fist.

“Catherine,” Adjutant said.

I hadn’t even noticed him approaching. Thief was further away, leaning on Archer. Neither of them met my gaze.

“Dawn is coming,” he said. “We cannot linger.”

I forced myself to grow calm.

“Can you do anything more?” I asked Hierophant.

He shook his head.

“They’d already stopped the bleeding from the stump,” he said. “All I did was restore the organs.”

“Then we go,” I said, turning to the silhouette of the castle ahead. “Let’s end this.”

Chapter 45: Falling Action

“And so Maleficent said: ‘Though you be god I am Empress, crowned of dread, and by my hand comes your doom. Rage in vain, for from your bones will rise a great tower whose shadow will be cast upon all the world.’”
– Extract from the Scroll of Chains, first of the Secret Histories of Praes

The fortress that lay at the heart of Dormer jutted out incongruously, great jaws of granite gaping down at a city that had known only peace for centuries. The seat of power of the barony had been built in tiers, an elegant ring of grey stone making the first. The was power here, and not young. Though no moat had been dug into the hill, the empty circle around the castle would been a shooting gallery to bleed an investing host were the walls manned at all. But there was not a soul in sight, the faint night breeze lazily winding through deserted bastions. No contest of our advance had been made as we approached, only flames in the distance betraying the truth that Summer had yet to surrender. The pace had been irritatingly slow due to Thief’s hobbling, but I had mastered my anger before it could lash out. There were more deserving targets for my wrath than those who had fought and burned for me.

The gate was the sole concession the Barons of Dormer had made to concord, sculpted columns of marble and ivory built over the ancient rough gate and portcullis hidden away by the younger arch displaying the words and heraldry of House Kendall: Honour Lies Immortal , written along the curve of the wreath of ivy. I strode past the pale marble steps, the faces of the ancient rulers of the city staring back at me from the shadowed reliefs. Scenes of glory one and all, from the founding of Dormer to the first oaths sworn to House Alban when Callow was made a single kingdom. There were lies unspoken in this, victories made false by denial of failure. Winter pulsed in my veins, itching to take blade to the unsightliness. I breathed out mist and crushed the impulse. You serve me , I whispered at the cold. Never the other way around . The urges were more insidious than those my Name still caused, my own thoughts painted with a Winter brush.

The portcullis was closed, bands of steel tightly wedged into granite, and perhaps before I would have sought one of the servant entrances. But what did mere steel mean to me now? My gauntleted hands clasped around two bars, and the metal screamed as I ripped open a path. No more difficult than snapping a branch, and Winter murmured in delight at the destruction.

“That’s one way to do it, I suppose,” Archer said.

The first words spoken since we’d left the field where so many of my men lay dead. I did not glance back as I stepped into the courtyard. To the side I could see the smouldering ashes of what had once been stables built around the wall, but I had no interest in sightseeing. In the distance, at the heart of the fortress, I could feel a gate in the making. Not at all like mine, where my will was a knife used to cut through the boundary between Creation and Arcadia. Someone had built a canal on the other side, and was now carefully prying open the lock. The river would pour through unimpeded, when the time came, and sweep away everything that stood in its way. A Queen is a god in the flesh , I thought. No creature so powerful can lightly cross boundaries.

“There is a ward ahead,” Hierophant said, studying a handful of shining runes. “Barring the inner reaches of the fortress.”

“It will break,” I said.

The hall we strode through was old as the walls, the raw stone made to look luxurious by tapestries and and hanging drapes in the green of Kendall heraldry. The Proceran carpets under our boots had already been singed by the fae who’d once held the fortress, the edges of blackened and twisted. Stairs rose ahead into a balustrade, sculpted ivy leaves shaping the railing. We had not succeeding in getting our hands on plans of the fortress, before the battle, but I could feel the gate-to-be like the north of a compass. Further in, where the great hall where the Baroness of Dormer had once held justice and audience before the Tower stripped her of right and title both for her rebellion. How long had this castle stood, I wondered? There might be nothing left of it but rubble, when dawn came. I guided us through the corridors, the power wafting from me eagerly scattering the last wisps of Summer’s presence in little tufts of hissing steam. The air grew cool and crisp wherever we passed, and more than once I felt Hierophant shiver.

We found the ward as we emerged from the corridor that would lead us to the great hall, its copper gates laying wide open behind it. A wall, though one of woven sunlight and shivering golden Summer flame. I could feel it spread beyond my sight, a great cage of power crafted to protect the arrival of the Queen of Summer.

“How long will it take you to open a way, Hierophant?” Adjutant asked.

My sword left its sheath with a quiet hiss before the blind man could reply. I struck out, boots leaving trails of ice behind as my blade rammed against the light. The walls shook around us, but the ward stood strong.

“Knocking at the door might take a while,” Archer noted, sounding amused.

“I can walk through,” Thief rasped. “If Hierophant tells me how to unmake it from the inside-“

“ Break ,” I hissed.

I opened the floodgates in full, let Winter pour through my veins and seep into the most destructive of my aspects. My blood was cold, I only now noticed. It had been for some time. Yet I felt no weaker for it, the frost instead lending a sharp clarity that it had once taken effort to reach. Duchess , I thought. My will found easier purchase when bending Creation to its will. Shade and ice flared along the edge of my sword as it struck the ward and for a heartbeat it felt like I was trading blows with the Duke of Green Orchards again. Then the ward broke, as I’d ordered it to. Stone around us shattered as well, the walls anchoring the sorcery torn through as the ward desperately scrabbled to remain coherent. There was a sliver of life in it, a will to guide it. Had they sacrificed a fae to forge this? No matter. Ice smothered that wisp of thought, blanketing the corridor. I resumed marching through the ruins surrounding us, the wide doors of copper held up only by a thin arc of granite as I passed through them. Adjutant caught up to me first, leaning close.

“Catherine,” he murmured, though we both knew the others would be able to hear anyway. “Calm yourself, before you begin making mistakes.”

“I am calm,” I replied, and I was. “What I am is out of patience . If it gets in my way, it dies. We’re past half-measures, Adjutant.”

The orc looked as if he wanted to argue, but I was disinclined to allow it. The great hall lay spread out before us, a shabby thing compared to those I had walked in the Tower. Long tables on both sides flanked a supplicant’s path leading to stone platform set against the back wall and the tall glass windows over it, the dying moon cloaking the simple bench of whitewood on it in a halo of light. There , I thought. The crossing would take place there. Let it not be said the Queen of Summer would ever settle for less than a throne, in any world she strode. Hierophant came to stand by my side as the others milled around the hall.

“Still the better part of an hour before dawn, by my calculations,” the mage said.

“There’s no need to wait that long,” I said. “Implement the contingency.”

Eyes of glass shifted to me under black cloth, a brow rising.

“You know my study of the sun is incomplete,” Hierophant said. “Should I be forced to loose the arrow the Due would be comparable to that of the very event that named the concept. There will be no city left, no armies, and it is unlikely anything will grow of these grounds before Creation is unmade.”

“One does not call a god to heel without risking calamity,” I said.

He paused.

“I want to work a pathing spell on your mind,” he said. “This is reckless even by your standards.”

“Winter has nothing to do with this,” I said. “But if it will make you feel better, by all means.”

His touch against my forehead was surprisingly warm, as was the sorcery that seeped into my mind. I could feel it curling like smoke along my thoughts, until finally he withdrew.

“It is influencing you,” he said.

“But,” I said.

“No more than the mantle of your Name,” he admitted. “Your mind is still your own.”

I heard Archer let out a baited breath, behind me. Hierophant no longer quibbled after that. It was a wonder, watching him work. I’d seen him weave sorcery before, even High Arcana, but this went a step beyond. Eyes closed, heartbeat almost still, the blind man crafted me a miracle. It was not runes that he threaded together but echoes of things he had seen, flickers of great feats he had witnessed. I saw his father’s silhouette standing before a tower that built itself turning into the Princess of High Noon with her hands raised, a pyramid of blood-streaked mud lying at the heart of a maze melding with a glimpse of a city rising into the sky. Pillars of translucent, shimmering power struck the ground in a perfect circle around him and I felt their reach rise through the ceiling into the night sky above. Eventually, he opened his eyes.

“Thief,” he said. “Release the sun.”

The burns on the heroine’s face had peeled off, replaced by red and tender skin through healing magic, and so I read the hesitation on her face plainly.

“There is no need to be afraid,” I said.

No, not us. Not today. She nodded slowly, and fingers found the pouch at her side.

“Here it goes,” she said, and opened it.

The glare was blinding, for a heartbeat. Hierophant’s unearthly ward caught it whole, drawing it to the pillars as even the coldness coming from my frame was swept away by the raging heat. And then it dimmed, as suddenly as it had come. The mage grunted in effort. It hurt my eyes to look at it, but I did not look away: I might never see such a sight again. The ceiling above us was not torn through so much as it evaporated, the fortress around us melting like butter in the heat. The sun of Summer rose into the sky, chasing night away, and with it came dawn. I turned my eyes to the dais as the lock gave and the Queen of Summer came, granted entry by our will. There was no gate. Between two moments, absence was filled a young girl. Golden curls streaming down her white robe, she still looked half a child and every inch a farmer’s daughter. There was nothing unearthly about her tan and her dimples, or those brown eyes that could have belonged to any mortal. The left side of her body was touched with red, bandages peeking through the collar of her robe. Ranger had wounded her, at least.

“Oh, children,” she sadly said. “You know not what you do.”

It would have thought her mortal, if not for the hint of pressure behind her. Like she was the seal on a boundless ocean that could sweep over Creation at any time. Winter coiled inside me, frozen furious hatred that wanted to rip her small frame apart no matter the cost to me or anyone else. I ignored it.

“You have been summoned,” I said, “to discuss terms of surrender.”

“Come to me, my armies,” the Queen said.

I did not need to look to know every fae in Dormer had taken to the sky, the words touching their minds. The city emptied in moments as wings flared and the tide of soldiers flowed towards us. Hierophant staggered as if hit in the guts, blood whetting his lips. The Princess of High Noon, I thought, had just been freed from her prison. Over the molten ruins of the fortress surrounding us ranks upon ranks of soldiers and pennants stood perched in silence, more arriving every heartbeat, and only then did the Queen turn her eyes to me.

“So many dead,” she mourned. “You have earned him victory with your blood, Duchess. Yet Summer does not surrender. You know this. You have seen it with your own eyes.”

“You have three duties,” I said.

“She’s trying for the sun,” Hierophant said, tone alarmed.

“Destroy it, Masego,” I said.

It was with vicious satisfaction that I saw surprise twist the Queen’s face.

“A desperate lie,” she said, but I felt her power still. “You would destroy us all. Break this land beyond mending.”

It wasn’t fear I saw in those eyes, not exactly. I wasn’t sure she really could be afraid. But there was uncertainty. Hesitation. Three words, and I had stayed the hand of a god. My lips twitched, and strange joy bubble up in my chest. I laughed, loudly, and allowed a hard grin to split my face.

“If I can’t win, you misbegotten thing, then we will all lose,” I hissed. “Look into my eyes. Tell me again I’m lying.”

I would have rocked back, had I not gone through the crucible of standing judgement before the Hashmallim. An entity infinitely greater than I enveloped everything that I was, will beyond comprehension taking sight of everything that I was and had been. The Beast coiled at my side and whispered back. Whether they be gods or kings or all the armies in Creation. The Queen of Summer flinched .

“Madness,” she said, appalled.

“I am a villain,” I laughed. “I stand before you the pupil of a madman, heiress to a thousand years of darkness and terror. Test me again and I will make this a wasteland to have even the Gods shudder.”

“Summer does not retreat,” the Queen said, and it rang like a thunderclap.

“Summer has lost ,” I replied unblinkingly. “As we speak the Prince of Nightfall breaches the walls of Aine, the city you are sworn to protect. Around you stands the butchered remnants of your host, awaiting doom at Winter’s hand. And in my palm lies your Sun, three words away from destruction. The Laurel Crown has three duties, and in those three duties you have failed.”

There was a moment of silence, before the Queen sighed.

“And so comes the dying of the light,” she murmured. “The wheel spins, Catherine Foundling. To end is to begin. We will not go with a whimper.”

My heart would have thundered, if I still had one.

“Or,” I said. “I could give you exactly what you want. Aine safeguarded. Winter unmade. The Sun returned to your sky.”

“You promise beyond your ability,” she said.

“All I require from you is a word, and you will get your wish,” I smiled. “And I ask a boon granted, for what I deliver to you.”

She studied me again, tasted the truth of my words.

“This,” she said, “has never happened before.”

“And never will again,” I said.

“I will hear the terms of the bargain offered,” the Queen of Summer said.

It was no coincidence it happened the moment she spoke the words. The grooves carved into Creation would have ensured as much, smoothly turning truth to story. Coincidence that was anything but. At my side power coalesced, stealing the efforts of Summer to allow its ruler to cross as a path of its own. A circle left open closed, as with a sharp smile the King of Winter came into Creation to face his created opposite. Sleek and dark-skinned and crowned in dead wood seeping red, the fae breathed in the air of Creation with relish.

“Oh, what a beautiful morning,” he said.

“Treachery,” the Queen of Summer said, words ringing of steel and the death of men.

“Ever a favoured diversion,” the King agreed. “Though I come for something... stranger.”

He turned his eyes on me, the gaze of a teacher pleasantly surprised by a pupil. I itched to carve them out of his skull, and not using something sharp.

“With your permission, Duchess?” he said.

“According to the terms offered by Her Dread Majesty,” I replied.

“You will have your boon, greedy one,” he said. “Ah, but what a daughter of Winter you make. Is she not delightful, Ista?”

I grit my teeth to get through the pain of hearing the name of the Summer Queen spoken, feeling Masego go rigid as a board as he did the same. Coat of black sweeping behind him, the man walked to his enemy and with a flourish he knelt.

“Ista of the Morning Star,” he said. “Bearer of the Laurel Crown, Queen of Summer Triumphant. I ask your hand in marriage, to rule Arcadia an equal by my side.”

He extended his own smoothly. One word, I’d told the Queen. She could still have it all, if she only said yes. The armies of Winter would end the assault of Aine, I would return the Sun and Winter would be undone. I watched the kneeling fae with cold, cold smile. I’d made an oath, once that I would unmake him. And I just had, with him having to thank me for it. There will be no more Winter , I thought. Only a single court ruling Arcadia, neither and both. The Empress had been right. The pivot was always going to be the Winter King, because he was the only entity that would see my preferred outcome as a victory. It had all hinged on him agreeing, because he was the oddity and he could make decisions that led outside the stories he despised. Summer would have to be forced, I’d known from the start, and I’d done exactly that. The Queen would agree, because she could not do otherwise. She was bound to seek to discharge her duties, and I’d put her in a corner with acceptance as the only way out. To refuse here would mean actively going against what she was, and she could not physically do that . Black had told me once that I’d kill Akua, one of these days, not because of my own power but because her nature would force her to make mistakes I would not. I wondered if he would proud, that I had used his lesson to destroy two gods without lifting a finger against either of them.

“I accept your offer,” the Summer Queen said, taking his hand, and I could see the horror on her face.

She was fighting it, trying to take back the words. But she couldn’t, just like the Rider of the Host I’d once forced to monologue by playing the hero. The change that followed the words was hard to describe. It wasn’t something I saw or felt. Neither of them metamorphosed into something different. But it was no longer two separate entities that were before me. I’d heard a riddle once, in Laure. When is a stone not as stone – when it is a wall . Nothing changed, yet it was not the same. The king rose to his feet, and pressed a tender kiss on the cheek of the livid queen.

“And so the war comes to a close,” the King of Arcadia said. “A realm cannot be at war with itself.”

A shiver went through the host of fae around us, as is something had been torn out of them.

“The matter of boons remains,” the Queen of Arcadia said, and the eyes she turned on me were burning. “Promises must be kept.”

I stood before two gods and did not kneel. I would not, in this moment, pretend this was anything but my win. That I’d bled thousands on the field, caused the death of men dear to me for anything less but utter victory.

“Upon the granting, you will have discharged your duty to me,” the King said. “And so will have earned the return of your heart. What do you request of us, Duchess of Moonless Nights?”

“Of you, I request release from vassalage forevermore,” I told the fae.

“I am most saddened to grant this,” the dark-skinned king said.

He did not seem surprised. I turned my eyes to the queen. I would have to tread carefully, here. If I fumbled the phrasing, she’d do her best to fuck me over. The temptations lay in the back of my mind, beckoning sweetly. To go back on my deal with the Empress and request that the whole of Arcadia come together to kill Diabolist. But she’s not wrong. They’ll wreck the entire central plains to do it, and we’d be risking some fae influence remaining. And there was another, young but no less demanding for it. I could ask them to heal Nauk. It would be a trifle, to them. But there might be other means to save my legate. And I would never get this chance again. A heroine, I thought, would have made the right choice. The only justifiable one. But I was not a heroine, and justifications only mattered to the just.

I spoke, and betrayed a man I called my friend.

“Of you I ask permanent right of passage through Arcadia for me and all I command, uncontested and unhindered,” I said, voice hollow.

“I grant you this,” the Queen replied curtly.

“And so peace is upon us,” the King said. “Steel yourself, Catherine Foundling.”

I felt the hand tear through my chest before I could even open my lips, and the world went dark.

Chapter 46: Denouement

“Never wound a man you do not intend to kill.”
– Extract from the personal journals of Dread Emperor Terribilis II

It was a strange thing, to bury a man. Of the Praesi only the Soninke shared the custom, and even then only the highborn who boasted ancient labyrinth-mausoleums of baked mud to receive their own. Peasants and Taghreb burned their dead instead, save for those who had sold their remains to corpse-raisers while they still lived. There were no ancient mazes in the Green Stretch, and the dues to the dead were different for Duni. It was said that some of Amadeus’ people still kept to the Gods Above in hidden places, conducting rituals even without priests to bless them, but his family had not been so twisted. Mother had proudly served in the Legions, after all, and thought little of the ornate boot-licking westerners called religion. Yet Duni buried their dead like Callowans did, the nature of that half-stolen custom changed by centuries upon centuries of Praesi rule and all that came with it. The Squire’s shovel patted the surface of the freshly turned wet black earth, the last grave he would dig today.

There were four of them. Father, Clarent, Belladona and Valerius. He’d not spoken to any of them since deserting the Legions, and the first time in three years he’d laid eyes on his family had been to see them crucified by the burnt-out husk of the farm. The Heir had not needed to sign his work, for he had already boasted of it. Discipline, he’d called it, for a mudfoot who did not understand his place in the world. The Soninke had not well taken his defeat in Callow, the way Ranger’s knowledge of the lay of the land had allowed Amadeus to lead the paladins to his enemy’s camp instead of his own. Sabah had offered to help him dig, meaning kindness though the offer was ignorant. Wekesa had not, no more learned in Duni customs but instinctively knowing the offer would be crossing a boundary. It was Hye, in her own cold way, who had honoured his family. She’d stood vigil at his side in silence as he dug, a sacrifice of hours freely offered to people she had never met.

Amadeus wedged the shovel into the ground and stood by the unmarked graves he’d dug by the side of Mother’s. Silently, he unsheathed a knife and split open his palm. Passing from grave to grave he trickled droplets of red the way he had been taught even as his companions stood behind him, still and quiet. There would be incomprehension on their faces, he knew. Praesi knew well the power of blood, but were wary of spilling their own. There were many rituals a skilled mage could work, with such a reagent. But there were no consecrated grounds in the Stretch, to prevent corpse-theft, and the Tower did not care to chastise necromancers that kept to the practice if their birth was high enough. The spilling of blood, to Duni, was an oath. ‘They who marked that grave in red will seek redress, should this grave be disturbed.’ He could have spoken the word, but he alone stood pale-skinned on this field. There would have been no meaning in it.

He had wept, taking them down from the crosses, but the tears had dried and left nothing behind. Amadeus did not recognize his own voice when he told the others to leave him to the vigil, to be stood until the moon rose. It was too raw a thing to be his, absent of calm and thought. They deferred, though before long Ranger returned to his side. Hye knew no commands but her own desires.

“We’ll kill him for this,” she whispered, standing at his side.

The green-eyed man smiled.

“The Heir,” he said, “meant to cloud my mind. Fill it with grief and anger. Unusually clever of him, truth be told. I lose much if I lose my distance from it all.”

“It always turns on them, plots like this,” the half-elf said. “They get more than they bargained for.”

Amadeus studied the palm he had cut mere hours ago, finding it perfectly smooth. It would not scar. Wounds on Named rarely did, lest they were dire or meaningful. He wondered what kind of man it made him, that this was not meaningful to him. He wondered if he should grieve that he could not manage to care. Had he been this cold, before he became the Squire? It was hard to remember.

“He made a mistake,” the Duni said. “Not the one you believe this. This is just... insufficient.”

Ranger did not answer. She’d always had a talent for that, knowing when to fill silence and let it stand.

“I believed I loved them,” Amadeus said. “But I killed them, Hye, the moment I claimed my Name. I always knew that. Stories require clean breaks. We cannot have homes to return to, however humble they may be.”

“You absolve him for this act?” the honey-skinned woman asked.

“No, not that,” the man murmured. “Never that. One must stand responsible for one’s actions. But it would be unseemly, to blame solely his hand for this end. If not him, Creation would have seen to the matter otherwise. Paladins venturing deeper into the Stretch, perhaps. Or wisps of a faraway ritual poisoning them in agony. Foe would have been provided, Ranger. Evil ever grows through conflict.”

“You could have fought it,” she said.

“And lost,” he replied. “Creation can be gamed. We have proved this. But it cannot be overturned. There are lessons to be learned from the Tyrants of old. Power is not earned with clean hands. Their mistake was only to think bloodying them anew will always bring gain.”

He saw Ranger’s lips quirk into a rueful smile.

“And now you debate philosophy over fresh graves,” she said. “Your grief lasted as long as the tears.”

“I began grieving them the moment I became the Squire,” Amadeus said. “This will not turn my path, Hye. A loss has been added to the tally, that’s all. There will be many, many more.”

“And love?” she said.

“A sweet thing, to be sure,” the Squire said. “But love is not what I bared my blade for.”

She laughed, quietly.

“You’re not boring at all, are you?” she said. “The blood you spilled, what does it mean?”

“An oath,” Amadeus said. “A warning.”

Ranger’s knife glinted silver in the dark as she cut her palm, joining her blood to his own on the dark earth. He met her eyes and wondered what was watching him back, that hard and blazing thing that had his heart skipping a beat.

“And now what, Squire?” she teased.

“I read a play once,” Amadeus replied. “Forbidden by Imperial decree. There is a part I enjoyed, and it goes like this-”

His voice carried, without ever rising in tone.

“Be fearful now
tremble; for
my reach is long
my wrath is great
patient but
unrivalled
above or below.”

Hye’s answering smile was a thing of death and Amadeus looked away, staring up at the stars and letting his grief ebb to the sound of grinding wheels of steel.

I woke to a riot of light. I was naked, I promptly noticed, and on a bed of stone. I did not feel the cold in the slightest, which I did not take to mean much considering I similarly felt nothing of twin clamps and scalpel someone had shoved into my chest. Masego, unsurprisingly sitting at my bedside with his brow creased, idly dismissed a rune that had formed to the side of his head without looking away.

“Don’t move,” he ordered. “This is precision work.”

“Good morning to you too,” I croaked, forcing myself to remain still.

“It’s past Noon Bell,” he noted.

It said a lot about my life these days that I was largely unmoved by the sight of a man sitting by my naked body elbow-deep in my chest without my say-so. His free hand reached for the scalpel, delicately set aside, and the fingers I couldn’t see pivoted something inside my body. There was a click, felt though not heard, and I felt Winter bloom through my veins. The well, I realized with widened eyes, was not gone. The mantle was still laid upon my shoulders. Taking out something that looked like a torturer’s tool out of me, Hierophant clicked his tongue in satisfaction. He prodded with a long rune-covered stick at what should have been my lungs, by the angle, and though my body felt nothing I could feel something pressing against Winter. With a nod, he set aside the stick and removed the clamps.

“It’ll take at least a sennight to settle properly,” he said. “But the working was successful.”

“Now,” I said, “would be a good time to explain what exactly you did.”

I was a little amused that neither of us cared all that much about my nakedness, but set that aside in favour of actually learning what the Hells was going on.

“Neither your soul nor your body could support the title without the metaphysical stabilizer the king replaced your heart by,” the blind man said. “Your power began destroying your body the moment he removed it, and the edges of your soul were fracturing.”

“You predicted as much,” I said. “Didn’t you carve some sort of protection on my ribs when you tinkered with the moon?”

“My calculations were inaccurate,” he said, and he sounded deeply pained. “The runes shattered within the first hour. You are the last titled entity of Winter, Catherine. That had unforeseen consequences.”

I rose to a sitting position, and spied neatly-folded clothes on a chair to my right. Ah, Hakram, you prince among men. I put a shirt on, though I couldn’t be bothered to hop around putting on trousers and underclothes before I got a full explanation out of Masego.

“So things got fucked,” I summarized. “How’d that translate to ‘get elbow-deep inside Catherine without even buying her a bottle first’?”

“I wish you would rephrase that,” he sighed. “I created an artificial framework around your soul to support the power. To anchor it properly into you, there was need for some surgical work.”

“So it’s all good,” I proposed.

“To an extent,” he conceded. “The power is no longer entirely intrinsic.”

“What do entrances have to do with this?” I said, grinning wretchedly and with full awareness if what I was doing.

He visibly twitched, to my delight.

“Intrinsic,” he insisted. “Meaning-“

“We all know what entrances are, Masego,” I interrupted smoothly. “What does that mean, practically speaking?”

“That the framework can be attacked,” he said through gritted teeth. “Through sorcerous means. It can also only withstand the fullness of your power for some time, at least until I’ve put together a stronger array. That may take months, there is no precedent for this I am aware of.”

“So you put scaffolding around my soul,” I mused.

“An uneducated yokel might describe my work in such a manner, yes,” he said.

“And mages can take an axe to the scaffolding if they know what to look for,” I continued. “Which would be bad.”

“Yes, Catherine, someone ripping out a working attached to your very soul would be ‘bad’,” he hissed. “How astutely deduced of you.”

“Are we talking decked in the face by Captain bad, or ‘oh shit I just mouthed off to the Hashmallim’ bad?” I squinted.

“That is not a quantifiable scale,” he began, but rallied valiantly. “Are you familiar with the concept of cascading failures?”

“The Wasaliti doesn’t have falls on it, Masego,” I told him helpfully. “You really should have paid closer attention when you studied geography.”

The dark-skinned man opened his mouth, closed it, then rose to his feet.

“I wash my hands of this,” he announced. “We’ll finish this talk when you’re capable of taking anything seriously.”

“Don’t be like that, Zeze ,” I grinned.

I put my hand over my heart in a solemn oath.

“I promise not to yank your chain anymore,” I lied.

He studied me for a long moment.

“You always say that,” he complained. “But you never do.”

He was learning, I would give him that much. He promised to send in Hakram on his way out, after giving me long enough to get dressed so I would not offend Adjutant’s delicate orcish sensibilities. I’d screwed with him mostly because it amused me, but there’d been the shadow of another intent in there. A little time alone to process the Name dream I still remembered with eerie clarity would not go amiss. There was a lot to parse there, aside from a few revelations I could have done without – namely that watching Black turn into the Carrion Lord had got Ranger going and that she probably saw taking out knives as foreplay. I was not overly surprised on either count. My Name had always been heavy-handed with the hints and I knew better than to always follow the vague advice the dreams carried with them, but this one had been particularly direct. My teacher had buried his family, and odds are before the day was done I’d have to light John Farrier’s pyre . A sweet thing, to be sure, but love is not what I bared my blade for. Fresh on the back of my hesitating to ask Nauk’s healing as a boon, that struck particularly close to home.

There were dangers to caring for my men, and considering setting aside a war-winning trump card for a single man to wake again made them stand out starkly. My Name was telling me to grow harsher. That the moment I’d let the Lone Swordsman go I’d begun a path that would be paved with the corpses of foes and friends alike. There was truth in that I could not deny. If what I set out to accomplish was greater than any of the myriad souls that made the whole, I should not flinch in the face of sacrificing any of them. To do otherwise would be crippling myself from the onset. The priests of the House of Light would have called that embarking on the path to damnation, but oh that ship had sailed long ago hadn’t it? I found it hard to reconcile the smiling man I trusted with the man bathed in starlight speaking those quiet words, but they were one and the same. Neither false, perhaps, but if they ever came at odds I knew which would win. I had seen the Black Knight’s face bared of the pretence of civility.

“You’re telling me to let go,” I murmured.

I’d never been particularly good at that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to start. You could win wars, I knew, without thinking like him. Without tallying it all in my mind, staring at Creation through the prism of gain and loss. But I remembered the sight of the burnt skull of a man who’d trusted me, believed in me, and I could not help but wonder if I might have avoided that if... Some Empress or other had once said that the worst sin a villain could commit was hesitate. She’d not been wrong. Every moment I spared to gaze at my hands and ask whether there was too much blood on them or not enough, my enemies were moving. Growing in strength as I stood still. There is a point where continuing to ask a question makes it meaningless, because Creation has already passed you by. Diabolist would not care for my qualms. Neither would the Empress, or the First Prince or whatever greater threat lurked behind them because wasn’t there always something larger? I smiled bitterly. I was, in the end, a practical woman. It mattered more to live than to be someone I could live with.

I slipped on the rest of my clothes in silence, and was fitting my boots when Adjutant rapped his knuckles against the door. I called out for him to enter.

“Cat,” he said, studying me closely. “How are you feeling?”

“Like the war’s not over,” I said bluntly. “Report.”

“You were under for a day and a night,” he said. “The Deoraithe are getting restless, you’ll need to settle the Duchess soon. I’ve had Robber watch them, there’s more to this than just wanting to strike at Diabolist. The Watch are acting oddly.”

“Akua’s making her move,” I grunted. “I suppose I should be thankful she didn’t show up in the middle of the battle to fuck everything up.”

“She is no longer in a position where she can move quietly,” Adjutant noted. “She must be very, very careful. If she slips now, even once, it will be the end of her.”

“Fifteenth?” I asked, steeling myself.

“Casualties were significant,” he grimaced, unknowingly baring fangs. “The fight for the upper ring bled us dry.”

“Give me numbers,” I said.

“Aisha’s still tallying them,” he said.

I frowned.

“You don’t have to coddle me,” I said flatly. “It’s been more than a day. The captains will have handed in their reports.”

“We had another situation to deal with that delayed matters,” Hakram replied. “Diabolist sent envoys. They’re currently awaiting audience with you outside the city.”

I heard the leather rip as my fingers tightened around it. Fuck. One of these days I was going to be able to take a nap without waking to a fire urgently in need of putting out, but evidently it wouldn’t be today.

“Get me another pair of boots,” I sighed.

Chapter 47: Offers

“Here is the truth of our dreadful crown: to claim it a declaration of war on banality, on mediocrity. The banner of the enemy is apathy, the slow grind of the inevitable. Victor or ruin, every Tyrant that ever lived bet their madness against the bridle of the Heavens.”
– Dread Empress Regalia II

I wore plate, a suit of it untouched since it had left the Imperial forges of Ater. My own had been wrecked by combat, both my power and that of my enemies. It would be days before our smiths could make anything of it, and Akua Sahelian’s envoys awaited me now. The goblin steel covered by the red tabard of the Legions had been forged for someone of broader build than I, and so the aketon I wore underneath was bolstered with more padding. The cloak I that streamed down my back had long ceased to be dark, strips of banners sown onto the length by Hakram’s clever hands. I knew them well, those marks. The Silver Spears, the colours of House Talbot and Kendall, and now greater honours still. Cloth of wind for the Duke of Violent Squalls, a red tongue of heatless flame torn from the Princess of High Noon and now a golden ribbon ripped from one of the banners of the Immortals, the Queen of Summer’s own. The black cloth that still looked like feathers in the right light was half-covered, by now, and in time there would be more. The collar of the cloak felt tight against my neck, worn in the Praesi style, but I wore it regardless. It was a statement. All these were mighty, once. Now I bear them on my back. Think twice, before you take a swing.

The envoys Diabolist had sent numbered twelve. Three times that number in Legion mages kept them under ward, but I was unconvinced it would be enough if they truly wanted to get up to something. My mages were hardened veterans, but most they knew of magic had been taught at the War College. They were no match for practitioners who’d inherited legacies old as the Kingdom of Callow, centuries of tricks and trumps that no one outside the Wasteland had more than glimpsed. Into the pavilion that lay at the epicentre of the heavy wards, I took only two people with me. Aisha, whose knowledge of Wasteland currents I may very well need to navigate that conversation, and Hakram. Him I trusted to see what I did not, and to keep me from making mistakes. I parted the cloth flaps and found only two of Diabolist’s people were seated, the rest standing patiently behind them. One Taghreb, one Soninke. Both women I had never seen before, though that meant little. Akua and I drew talent from different pools. I’d inherited ties to the Legions from my teacher and links to Named besides, but my nemesis had the highborn of Praes at her disposal.

I had her beat in Named and armies, as far as I was concerned, but in most everything else we were either matched or she my better.

The two who’d been seated when I entered smoothly rose and bowed. I’d learned a bit since my first public humiliation at Court, in large part because of the very woman at my side, and so I was able to dissect the nuances. The angle was lower than that owed to an Imperial Governor, yet higher than the one a ruling High Lord would expect. As with most things Sahelian, the gestured bordered between compliment and insult.

“Your Grace,” the Soninke said in Lower Miezan. “This humble servant is Deka Wolde, mfuasa to Wolof since the Declaration. At my side stands Samiah of Fatimi, sworn to the Qara.”

My eyes narrowed at the second name, flicking to the Taghreb. Fatimi was the name of the lordship Ratface’s father ruled, the Supply Tribune’s name before he’d taken another at the College having been Hasan Qara. He was, I remembered, a member in decent standing of the Truebloods. Whether he’d since joined with the Moderates I had no idea, but if he’d sent one of his own with Diabolist that seemed doubtful.

“Lady Sahelian sends strange envoys,” Aisha drawled in Taghrebi. “Blood treats, sand shifts.”

I forced myself not to raise an eyebrow. I knew what the saying meant, more or less. Praesi nobles usually only ever negotiated with other nobles, even though ruling lords and ladies rarely met face to face. It was a show of good faith to have a relative sitting at the table. When the Soninke had caller herself mfuasa , it meant she was from one of the so-called ‘servant blood’. Retainer families that, while not highborn, had been in the service of a High Lord’s line for so long they were considered to have higher status than the rest of us peasants. Powerful mage lines usually fell into that, since it was always useful to have a few spares around to breed some talent into the blood. This Deka’s family, if she was to be believed, had been in the service of the Miezans since the founding of the Empire. Still didn’t make her noble, though. A statement could be read in that, considering I was now Lady of Marchford and a Duchess besides: the highest of Praesi servants stand equal to foreign titles. Ah, good ol’ Akua. She never was one to pass a good slight when opportunity knocked.

“This humble servant offers manifold apologies,” Deka said, bowing again. “The Lady Diabolist means no slight. It was understood that Vicequeen Foundling may not take kindly to one of the true blood.”

I almost snorted. So Diabolist was worried if she sent an aristocrat all she’d get back was the head. Yeah, I could buy that.

“Sit,” I said.

Deka bowed again.

“This humble servant dares not gainsay you, but must offer the word of her mistress,” she said. “The Lady Diabolist requests that Lord Hierophant attend this conference.”

“This isn’t a place where Akua Sahelian gets to make requests,” Hakram gravelled.

Another bow. Gods, her back was going to kill her by day’s end. Unless they’d bred her family for the flexible spines, which horrifying enough might actually be the case. You never fucking knew with the Wasteland’s old blood.

“It is as you say, Lord Adjutant,” Deka said.

I sighed.

“Aisha, have them send a runner,” I told my Staff Tribune. “Make sure he knows it’s not a suggestion on my part.”

She nodded and saw to it. If that wasn’t clear enough he might ignore the summons, and that would just be awkward. The envoys might take issue with grabbing a seat before Masego showed up, but I did not in the slightest. I took the seat appropriated from Summer a while back and leaned back against the cushion. I studied the ten standing in silence behind the envoys, now that I had the attention to spare. They were, I saw, what the soldiers of the Legions of Terror had been once upon a time. The true heart of the old hordes that had battered Callow’s gates, not the greenskins tossed used to blunt charges and the levies sent to die storming walls. Soninke and Taghreb, dressed in ornate mail from head to toe that glimmered with sorcery. Their swords would be enchanted as well, every city weaving its preferred spells into the steel as they were forged. Helmets with curtains of mail on the sides and a descending prong of steel covering the nose revealed hard eyes, made to stand out by the colourful scarves tied around their necks. My people had fought men like these for centuries, until Black had replaced them with the legionaries I commanded. They were not to be underestimated, and it was their kind that would make up a great deal of Diabolist’s host in Liesse. They were standing around what looked like a tightly bound rectangular package taller than I was, which brought questions considering the sorcery I could faintly feel coming from it. My men had already investigated and I’d gotten a report saying it was a mirror inside, which might mean scrying with Diabolist herself was in the cards.

There were no refreshments on the table, and I did not offer any. Aisha seated herself at my left, leaving the other side open for Hakram though he stood behind me instead. It was Masego that dropped into the chair, when he finally arrived. He looked irritated, though his brow rose in interest when he laid glass eyes on the two main envoys.

“Mages?” I asked.

“Above average talents,” he said. “The Taghreb in particular. Drake blood, is it? I’d heard some families near the Eyries managed to bring it into the line.”

“The compliment honours me greatly, Lord Hierophant,” Samiah said, bowing even lower than she had for me. “This servant’s ancestors knew fortunate encounters.”

“Your ancestors managed not to turn themselves into scaled abominations when stealing properties from famously unstable lifeblood,” Hierophant noted. “That takes skill as well as fortune. I confess curiosity. Is your blood thicker than that of a baseborn human? Your heart certainly beats slower.”

“Masego, we don’t ask people about their blood thickness at diplomatic conferences,” I sighed. “Sit, you two. What does Akua want? Last I saw her I was one oath away from repeatedly shoving steel in her throat until she stopped twitching.”

The two women bowed as smoothly as they had rise, seating themselves across us.

“An explanation for the mirror would be warranted, before beginning is had,” Aisha said.

She spoke Lower Miezan, but the cadence of the words was all Taghrebi. The way she’d avoided using pronouns was as well. Aisha called it ‘noble dialect’, and every major Praesi language had a form of it. It was the kind of impersonal double-talk highborn used in negotiations with each other, conventions established ages ago that had become unspoken law. Formal diplomatic language that Akua had never bothered to use in her dealings with me before, or any highborn Praesi I’d met for that matter. That I was usually killing or coercing them at the time likely had something to do with it. Still, it was interesting she was dusting off the manners now. Whatever the envoys were after, Diabolist was willing to pretend she was taking me seriously for it. Funny how people suddenly became polite after you murdered a demigod.

“This humble servant brings word from the Lady Diabolist,” Samiah said. “The tool is meant to provide sympathetic link for scrying. Authority to treat in the name of the Lady has not been granted, for the Lady would treat directly.”

“Hierophant?” I prompted.

The dark-skinned mage leaned forward in his seat.

“Wolofite scrying array, the kind the Sahelians kept to themselves,” he said. “A few hidden runes to record sound but-“

Light trickled between Masego’s fingers and a hiss came from the hidden mirror, the acrid smell of smoke filling the pavilion.

“- they has been dealt with,” he finished. “There will be no surprises. Provincial work, whoever carved these. The pathing spells to find double-bind runes have been known for decades.”

If the envoys were miffed Hierophant had just casually marred what was probably an ancient and expensive heirloom belonging to their mistress, they showed no sign of it. Unlike Masego I had a decent read on the Diabolist, and I knew there was no way she’d have missed the fact that with him in the room there would be no sneaking those runes through. Odds were it was an old artefact, and he’d just casually burned a chunk of it because he disliked the quality. Either she’s showing off her wealth and what little she cares of it as a reminder of the resources she has at her disposal, or it was the artefact best suited for this conversation and she simply didn’t care since our talk is important enough to warrant the loss. Either way, Akua, your point has been received

“Proceed,” I waved nonchalantly.

The envoys rose and bowed before delicately undoing the bindings around the cloth covering the mirror, setting it up so that it faced us to the height of a standing person. Fancy. The two women touched a palm to the silver surface they’d revealed, sorcery sinking into the metal before they stepped away and joined the soldiers. There was a ripple across the surface, and then I looked at Diabolist in the flesh. As usual, she’d dressed to make an impression. Red and gold, which I’d come to notice were favourites of hers, made up the silks of her long and perfectly fitted dress. I would have been able to appreciate the sight of that perfect hourglass figure and and smooth long legs if the very sight of her didn’t make me want to reach for my sword. I noticed, after a heartbeat, that she was seated on what appeared to be a throne. Some gaudy thing of gold and jewels, with arms that ended in the grinning faces of devils. I leaned towards Aisha.

“Isn’t it illegal for anyone but the ruling Tyrant to sit on a throne?” I asked.

“Since the Declaration, yes,” she replied faintly.

I snorted, turning my eyes back to Diabolist.

“Well, apparently you’re done fucking around,” I said. “There’s a nice change of pace.”

Akua’s golden eyes studied me emotionlessly.

“Its is unfortunate,” she said, “that someone gave you the impression your mannerisms are charming. Deka?”

“This one feels power comparable in scale to a Prince of Summer,” the Soninke said.

My hand rose and she began choking as her throat filled with ice, clawing at the skin desperately. Aisha stilled at my side. Not a single other person in the pavilion moved.

“Envoys are covered by law,” I said. “Spies aren’t.”

Diabolist watched my actions with detached curiosity. She wrote her off before ever sending her , I realized. Trading a fresh eye on me for a retainer’s life. I lowered my hand.

“Walk out,” I said calmly. “Present yourself to the nearest legionary. You are now a prisoner of war.”

The woman looked to Akua, who inclined her head by the barest fraction.

“This humble servant thanks you for your mercy, Your Grace,” Deka bowed to me.

“You’re trying my patience,” I noted calmly, and gave Hakram a glance.

Understanding passed without need for words. He’d see to it, and led her out.

“It was necessary,” Diabolist said, “to understand who I was treating with before we began in earnest.”

I smiled coldly.

“Where’s all that nice flowery noble tongue gone to, Diabolist?” I asked. “Your people were being so sweet to me before.”

The Soninke smiled like we were old friends. It never reached the eyes.

“This noble one will, of course, be glad to offer such courtesy should it be returned,” she said.

“I’d have to stop cussing if we did, right?” I asked Aisha.

She nodded.

“Carry the fuck on,” I told Diabolist with a winning smile.

I was being ornery mostly because I’d rather eat a bowl of knives than be civil to the monster on the other side of the mirror, but there was another intent behind it. Now and then I managed to get under her skin, and that had a way of tripping her up. I’d never managed it before outside a death match, but there was no loss to me here even if it failed. Flipping the finger to Akua’s noble sensibilities was reward in and of itself.

“You appear to have dealt with the fae invasion, Squire,” Akua said. “I offer you congratulations.”

“I don’t think well deep enough in Creation to throw those down that would convey how little they mean to me,” I cheerfully retorted.

“You have done great service to the Empire,” Diabolist said, unruffled.

I supposed after actually trying to stab her verbal digs felt a little lacking from her side of the equation.

“You’ve abducted one of said Empire’s cities,” I said. “Don’t suppose you’d care to give it back?”

“That could be arranged,” she said. “My use for the city itself is permanent, but the inhabitants could be released.”

“The two of us had a conversation on the Blessed Isle, once,” I said. “You told me you’d put everyone inside my orphanage to the sword, if I didn’t renounce my Name. Do you remember what I replied, that night?”

“That you would make a monument to ruin of me,” Akua Sahelian said, and she sounded almost fond. “You refused me, naturally. Those, however, were forty lives. I hold over a hundred thousand of your countrymen in my palm now.”

“You know that’s not how that works,” I serenely said. “I let one of your pack of vultures pull this on me once then every High Lord will threaten to start summoning demons in Callowan cities for leverage.”

Diabolist cocked her head to the side.

“When we first met, you would have hesitated,” she praised. “I must confess I rather enjoy the woman you’ve become, Catherine. You’ve been scoured of your former impurities.”

“Spoken like someone I’m going to murder before the year is out,” I said. “Is this the part where you tell me we’re not so different, that we could work together? You burned that bridge when you let the demon loose, Akua.”

“A blow meant to cripple you, that you dealt with in a way that demonstrated great aptitude,” Diabolist said. “Had you not been able to weather the likes of it, we would not be speaking.”

I blinked.

“You’ve never actually admitted to that before,” I slowly said.

“There is a certain satisfaction in discarding the pretence,” the dark-skinned beauty mused. “You should be aware by now I’ve never seriously attempted to take your life.”

“You were never aiming to be Black’s apprentice, I know,” I flatly said. “Bit of a jump going from that to us being friendly, considering you did try to cripple me several times and are directly responsible for the death of both soldiers and innocents under my charge.”

“The alternative to the posturing would have been standing against the Empress prematurely,” she said. “We both know the outcome of such a trial. It was never personal, Catherine. While I do find you grating, you are not without redeeming qualities.”

Aisha leaned it.

“She may very well mean what she says,” the officer murmured. “While her actions are those of a foe by the customs of your people, to a Praesi allying with her would not be unthinkable should the rewards be sufficient.”

I watched the Diabolist, that genuinely friendly visage she must have spent years perfecting. I was not looking at a person so much as a collection of cold ambitions that masqueraded as one.

“I’m being told you might mean that,” I said. “But we understand each other, don’t we Akua? You know what I think of your Great Game. You know better than to think I’m going to link hands with the likes of you, no matter what you offer.”

I heard Adjutant silently return to the pavilion, coming to stand behind me.

“You speak so because you believe I am going to lose,” Diabolist said. “That is not an unreasonable position.”

“I know you’re going to lose,” I said. “You have a month before Liesse has to come down, or you have a hundred thousand rioters on your hands. And the moment you’re grounded, I’ll be leading the largest army since the Conquest to take your head.”

“And so we touch upon the reason I requested the presence of the Hierophant,” she said.

I glanced at Masego. He didn’t react. I elbowed him.

“Is it over?” he asked.

“Pay attention,” I chided. “She’s got something she wants to say that concerns you.”

He looked dubious, but his face turned to Akua.

“As the only son of Lord Warlock, I assume you are familiar with what the Calamities refer to as the ‘Dark Day protocol’.”

Masego frowned.

“I am,” he said. “It’s a classification for workings they use. The best way to describe them would be kingdom-killers . Uncle Amadeus has never lifted restriction on their use that I know of, though study is another matter.”

“Twenty years ago,” Diabolist said, “Lord Warlock comprehensively researched what I believe came to be called the Still Water project.”

It was distressing the way Masego paused at that.

“That is under Imperial seal,” he said. “Everyone involved was killed and their souls bound to prevent necromancy. Uncle said if it ever got out we could do that there would be a Crusade mobilized within the month.”

“A trial was run,” Akua said.

“In a closed pocket,” Hierophant said and his voice shook. “You... You have a ritual that can – no a ritual would have been noticed. You have an artefact that allows you to scry other dimensions. Gods, the advances that could lead to. The Hells could be mapped with this. Arcadia, we could learn the full boundaries of Creation .”

I’d never before seen him look hungry, desire twisting his features.

“It is currently in my possession,” Diabolist said. “And could be made available for your study, should you choose neutrality in the coming conflict.”

Yeah, I wasn’t letting that go.

“It’s yours after we kill her,” I said. “Hierophant, focus. Still Water, what does it mean?”

“Father was trying to discover if necromantic state could be achieved almost entirely through alchemy with sorcery as only a trigger,” Masego said. “After consuming sufficient amounts of a reagent humans can be turned into undead with a minor ritual, with exponential potential for number of affected as relative to expended power.”

“That sounds like an undead plague,” I frowned. “The Empire’s used those on Callow before, they don’t work. The House of Light always ends them in the crib.”

“It is metamorphosis, Catherine, not a magical disease,” he said impatiently. “Miraculous healing has limits. It can heal a sickness but not change the natural state of being of a human – reconnect a cut limb but not regrow it. The power of the priests would kill the undead, not cure them.”

I breathed in sharply. Shit. If there was no cure and all that was needed was for people to imbibe the substance, then the only limit on that was the amount of reagents the Empire could afford – and Praes was very, very rich. If they play it quiet enough, half of the Principate could be a shambling horde before they realize what’s happening. And Akua had implied she knew of this.

“The refugees,” I said. “The people of Liesse. You fed them the substance.”

“Our understanding of the process was incomplete,” Diabolist conceded. “It took me several months instead of the theorized one to reach the ideal concentration. The process was accelerated when I held the only available source of water, of course. As you can see, it is temporary for you to have the largest army on the field. That can be remedied in the span of an hour should I wish it.”

“I’m not sure I have the words to express how dire the consequences of that would be, for you,” I quietly said.

“I would rather not employ these means myself,” Akua easily said. “Yet you now understand I am not in nearly as desperate straits as you believed. Which is now I would now make you an offer.”

My fingers clenched until the knuckles turned white.

“Would you like to rule Callow?” the Diabolist asked. “Truly rule it, I mean. Not whatever ramshackle arrangement the Empress promised you. You would be queen in truth.”

“Under you,” I said.

“Not a dishonourable state of affairs, as the rest of Calernia would be soon to follow,” she said. “I do not care, Catherine, for the petty duties of running this continent so long as it bows to me. I understand, of course, that by the customs of your people I have caused personal offence. I would provide gift to even the balance. I am given to understand one of your companions, the Legate Nauk, was wounded beyond your means to heal. I will return him to fullness of health myself, as a gesture of good will. Truly, so long as you limit your ambitions to the bounds of Callow is there is no reason the two of us cannot find accord. You would find me a most tolerant ruler.”

I closed my eyes, sought calm and found only Winter. A frozen landscape without end, reflecting the ragged edges of my anger in a sprawling hall of mirrors. The air turned cool. The wards around us shivered. How many times am I going to have to betray you, Nauk? But I had not traded him for a boon, and I would not trade him for an empire. Eyes opened, and the envoys ahead flinched.

“Here is my own offer, Akua Sahelian,” I said softly. “Set Liesse down. Abandon everything, flee to Ashur and sell what you must to buy passage across the Tyrian Sea. If you do that, spare me the horror of bringing down everything you’ve ever built on your head, you’ll keep your life. This I call fair bargain, and more than you deserve.”

“I had hoped,” Diabolist said, “that I would not need to break you before we came to an arrangement. If you march against me, terms will not be offered when next we meet. They will be given .”

“I give you oath, Diabolist,” I said and I hardly recognized my voice for it was a thing of ice and iron. “If you do this, there is no place in Creation or beyond that will safeguard you from me. Not Heavens or Hells, not even if every lord in Arcadia swears to you. The doom I promise you will have men trembling in a thousand years when they speak of Akua’s Folly and the woe that came from it.”

The Diabolist smiled tenderly, as if I had confessed my love for her.

“Oh, Catherine,” she murmured. “I almost regret it, that this ends with you kneeling.”

Before she’d finished the last word I had flipped the table and crossed the pavilion, sword in hand and shoved to the hilt through the mirror. Ice spread through it and it broke with a deafening crack, shattering in a hundred pieces of shining silver. I did not bother to look at the remaining envoy or her escort.

“If any of them move,” I told Adjutant, “kill them all. I want them shackled and in a dark hole before a quarter hour’s passed.”

He nodded slowly as I strode out of the tent. Hierophant followed, panting as he tried to catch up.

“Catherine,” he gasped. “Wait.”

I turned to him, forcing calm.

“The array on Liesse,” Masego said. “It’s too large. The power of the entity she bound does not make sense if Still Water is her intent. She could achieve it with something a hundredth the size and a dozen mages.”

I froze.

“This isn’t it,” I croaked.

Hierophant shook his head.

“She has yet to reveal her weapon,” he said.

A city floating in the sky, a god stolen and bound, a hundred thousand men turned undead. All of this, and it was only the opening of the waltz.

It was time, I thought, for hard measures.

Chapter 48: Interrogation

“I was once told that character is what you are in the dark. I found, my dear Chancellor, that I was the dark.”
– Dread Emperor Sorcerous

“There,” Hierophant said.

It had been a pleasant surprise to learn that Masego had not ignored the talks with Diabolist purely because the matters discussed bored him. He had, in fact, been tracking the other end of the scrying spell since its establishment. Though Akua had used relays to muddy the water, I doubted she’d seriously expected her work to fool the eyes of a Named mage. The implication there lay bare: it didn’t matter if we knew where she was, because she was ready to pull the trigger at any time. On Still Water, and whatever else she had up her sleeve. The neatly ordered lines of light in the air formed a broad map of Callow, though it ignored cities for geographical features. Studying it, I picked one of the stones Juniper used when planning operations and set it down on the earthly map I’d sent for.

“This looks accurate to you?” I said.

The Soninke did not turn, and I got the eerie impression he was looking with his glass eyes through the back of his head.

“Half an inch upwards,” he said.

I adjusted and grimaced as he dismissed the spell.

“No way to tell if she’s set down, is there?” I asked.

“She will have to, to use her array,” Hierophant said. “On a working of this scale, the slightest imprecision would have massive repercussion. I’ve never heard of a flying fortress capable of remaining entirely still in the sky.”

So this, I thought, was going to be our battlefield. Akua had brought Liesse in the heartlands of Callow, precisely at the intersection of three cities: Vale, Ankou and Southpool. All cities that had gone largely untouched by the Liesse Rebellion and what men were already beginning to call the Arcadian War. On one hand, that brought her within marching distance of the legions under the command of Marshal Grem One-Eye. On the other hand, those legions were posted there because they were in spitting distance of the border with the Principate. There was, I knew, no realistic way to keep anything that would go down there quiet abroad. Diaobolist, as was her habit, had begun to fuck us over form the very beginning. Black and Malicia had spies under every rock in this land, but not even that would be enough to keep the method of necromancy used here under wraps.

It’d taken another sit down with Masego to understand how much of problem it would be if Still Water got out. I knew there was something called Keter’s Due that was one of the limits of sorcery, the amount of power that got wasted with every spell and ritual, and apparently the Due one was one of the reasons why large rituals were only ever used if you didn’t mind wrecking wherever they took place – like, infamously, the Kingdom of the Dead. Warlock’s horror project was bad news in part because most the heavy lifting was done through alchemy, with only the trigger being sorcery. It could be used again and again without any great resource investment save the reagents. Calling it world-shaking innovation would be stretching a bit, in my opinion, since there were still obvious limits on how it could be employed. If people didn’t imbibe enough of the reagents, the ritual wouldn’t do much at all, and after the initial use other nations would certainly start keeping an eye out for it.

It was still a brutal weapon, one that had the potential to wreck large swaths of territory if employed properly – which it would be, if the Empress and Black were the ones plotting the use. Given that the First Prince was already itching for a Crusade, there would be consequences when it got out. The best I could hope for was to slow the spread of information and destroy the proof. I knew better than to hope that would lead to more than a delay. Diabolist had just effectively ensured we’d be at war with the Principate within a few years, at a guess the moment they finished getting on war footing. Given the titanic size of Procer and what it would actually mean to have its full strength thrown at the Empire, I doubted Black would give them the time to gear up in peace. He’d strike first and strike hard, aiming to cripple them before they mustered their armies properly. If they don’t start the war, we will. Dark as the thought was, I would prefer the latter. Better to fight on Proceran soil than Callowan.

I reached for the bottle and topped up my glass. I had no idea how long Diabolist would need to finish her array, assuming she hadn’t already, and that meant the time scale of this campaign was still in the dark. If I took a few months to gather reinforcement, was I going to have to deal with the sky raining fire? On the other hand, with the army that stood on the other side, could I afford not to? Unless she’d gotten reinforcements since her scrap with the Princess of High Noon, Diabolist had only six thousand proper soldiers but twice that in undead and devils. Then she’d get the entire population of Liesse, of course, and she still had one ‘greater devil’. For something to qualify as greater in the eyes of a Princess of Summer meant it wasn’t to be taken lightly, by my reckoning. It would mean nothing to hit fast if my armies failed to take the city. There are still so many unknowns , I thought, and glanced as Masego made to leave.

“Stay,” I said. “I need you for the coming conversation.”

“Though my judgement is laudable, I have not much exercised it in matters of war,” Hierophant said.

“This one’s not about war, not exactly,” I said. “I sent for Duchess Kegan. I want to know exactly what Diabolist got her hands on that has her so worried and what the consequences of killing it would be.”

The blindfold creased with his brow.

“Deoraithe are notoriously secretive,” he said.

“And it’ll be the three of us in the tent alone,” I grunted. “I already am compromising. I’d rather have Hakram and Juniper in here as well.”

“And you believe she will see it this way?” the blind man asked, genuinely curious.

“Let’s hope she’s reasonable,” I said.

The mage looked amused at that, for some reason, but he grabbed the seat at the edge of the table. It was meant for over a dozen, the same I used for staff meetings, and looked rather strange so empty when I’d grown used to it being full. I drank from my cup as Hierophant summoned the bottle to him and poured himself one as well. I raised an eyebrow.

“Would it really have been that much of an effort to get up?” I said.

“You sound like Father,” he muttered.

Whatever I would have made of that – and already I had ideas – had to be set aside for he moment, as Kegan graced us with her presence. It would be revisited though, the grin I sent Masego’s way promised as much.

“Your Grace,” the Duchess greeted me, then grudgingly inclined her head at Masego. “Lord Hierophant.”

“Duchess Kegan,” I replied over the rim of my cup. “Please, sit.”

The courtesies on her part were stiff, and I knew exactly why. Twenty thousand Deoraithe had marched out of Daoine, a quarter of them Watch, and now only fourteen thousand remained. Her casualties had the Battle of Four Armies and One had been relatively light, but Dormer had been bloody business. Made worse, I knew, by the fact that Juniper had refused her use of the Watch when she struggled against the Summer regulars in the outer city. Instead they had been sent to fight the Immortals, and courted disaster there as well. I’d yet to get a spoke report, but the written one I’d gotten my hands on said the Watch had been getting brutalized before Thief came to their aid by snatching the standard on that flank. Half the Watch had been buried, either here or in Arcadia. It was the kind of losses that would take a generation to recover from, and we hadn’t even come in sight of Liesse yet. Kegan took a seat distant from both mine and Masego’s, to my dark amusement. It was almost childish, the three of us sharing a table meant for four times our number as if there was nothing odd in it.

“Your messenger did not specify the reason for your summons, only that the matter was urgent,” the Duchess said.

She eyed the bottle, but did not reach for it. I had no intention of wasting Vale summer wine on the likes of her, and so did not offer.

“We know where the Diabolist is,” I said, and gestured at the table.

She glanced at it, eyes lingering on the stone I’d placed.

“A blunder on her part,” the Deoraithe said. “You could easily muster forces from the adjoining cities without even use of portals. Orders through scrying would allow you to gather and arm men in great numbers.”

“I’m considering my options,” I said.

I balked at the idea of sending half-trained civilians into the den of madness Akua would have have prepared for them, but I was not unaware I might not have a choice. What we had left might not be enough to deal with more than a hundred thousand undead, much less the horde of devils she was sure to have contracts for.

“That is why I called for you, as it happens,” I continued. “The odds are already stark as is. We can’t afford to go in blind.”

The tan face of the aristocrat went blank.

“I have already shared with you what I can,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow. She’d told me that whatever Akua had bound ‘could be considered a deity of sort’, which was actually less than what Masego had been able to tell me – and all he knew was second-hand from his father.

“Behavioural changes were observed in the Watch,” Hierophant said. “Of this you have not spoken, or truly much at all.”

Kegan’s eyes went cold.

“Has your esteemed father not put enough of my people under the knife to discern some truths?” she said.

Ah, sarcasm. She should know better than to think that would work on Masego. He had a decent read on those he knew well, but strangers?

“No,” Hierophant replied frankly. “He is under orders never to grab a member of the Watch without legal cause, which has been very difficult since the Conquest.”

“How sad for him,” Kegan replied blandly.

“That’s very kind of you,” Masego said, sounding surprised. “It has been very irritating to have such a fascinating mystery within reach but forbidden from study.”

“Warlock’s not the one asking you the question, Duchess,” I said. “I am.”

The woman’s eyes returned to me.

“The terms of our treaty with the Tower place the affairs of internal rule within our sole purview,” she said.

“And if the thing was still within your borders, I’d cheerfully pretend it didn’t exist,” I said. “It isn’t. It’s being used as fuel for whatever Diabolist means to throw at us, and I’m not taking a swing at that without a broad idea of what’s waiting on the other side.”

“The breach of terms was Praesi,” Kegan stiffly said. “It is not for Daoine to pay the price for that treachery.”

“Akua Sahelian has been attainted as rebel by the Empress,” I sighed. “You know who stands for Praes, right now? I do. You know, the person trying to fix this fucking mess.”

“A mess you have no small hand in making,” the duchess coldly said. “Did you not personally petition the Court to have the Diabolist named governess of Liesse?”

“I was bound by oath to do as much,” I reply, but it was a weak answer and I knew it.

It had occurred to me, of late, that it was hard to tell if I was the pillar propping up Callow or the stone around it’s people’s neck. I wasn’t done losing sleep over that, but neither was I going to let it bind my hands when dealing with a woman actively refusing to inform me of a danger we both faced.

“And I am bound by duty not to speak of this matter,” Kegan said.

I let out a long breath and calmly put my hand on the table. The other woman watched it, and her features loosened almost imperceptibly when she saw the wood had not fogged or frozen. She thought it meant I wasn’t furious. Wrong. It just means I’ve gotten back a sliver of control.

“I’ve made a lot of oaths and promises, in the last few months,” I calmly said. “Some pretty grandiose threats, too. I won’t bother with that here, Kegan. I’ll just put two truths in front of you. The first is this: to have a decent chance at victory, I need to know what I’m facing. The second is this: I do not need your consent to get an answer.”

I could Speak, I could have Hierophant rip it out of her mind or half a dozen other ways. With ever month my arsenal grew, and I grew less reluctant to use it. I could use any of those tools and even make sure she wouldn’t remember a bit of it when she left this tent. Masego had learned much from his work against fae in the south, when I sent him to use Summer against the Diabolist.

“You have made much of treating fairly,” Kegan said, but I could see fear there.

“And I will again,” I said. “I’ll offer mercy whenever I can. Justice too, as much as it can be had -but never when the cost is defeat. That is my line in the sand. Cross it at your peril.”

The duchess met my eyes, even afraid, and for that she won my respect. It would not stop me from asking Hierophant to carve open her mind, if I had to.

“A lesser evil is still an evil,” she bitterly said.

“I prefer necessary to lesser,” I said, “but will not quibble over the rest.”

Kegan breathed out, and reached for the wine. She poured herself a glass and whet her lips before speaking.

“It is not a god in the way Praesi would know of it,” she said. “It is a gestalt.”

Masego gasped.

“Souls,” he said.

Kegan nodded.

“Every single one of the People that have died since the elves took the Golden Bloom from us,” she said. “Millions, by now.”

“And the Watch is bound to them,” I said.

“They borrow the strength of our ancestors, one day to take back our home,” the duchess said.

“You forged a god,” Hierophant said, and spoke with a touch of awe. “This might be the single greatest working of necromancy Creation has ever known. Unlike Keter it would keep growing . Every decade you can have more Watchmen, or stronger.”

I had other worries.

“If Diabolist controls your... gestalt,” I said. “Can she control the Watch through it?”

“The past rulers of Daoine had similar worries,” Kegan said. “A degree of separation was created to prevent a Warlock from effecting this should they find out. It is one of the reasons the Watch has not been able to grow more numerous but not more powerful over the centuries. The number of oaths that can be taken is limited. The usurpation was still felt, however. It is quite unpleasant.”

“You should have spoken of this to Father years ago,” Hierophant began excitedly, “there are numerous theories that-“

I cut him off with a raised hand.

“Can it be destroyed?” I asked.

“Yes,” she reluctantly said.

“And what would the consequences of that would be?” I pressed.

“I am unsure,” she admitted, and I turned to Masego.

“You’d be destroying the gestalt, not the souls,” Hierophant noted. “As individual entities they would go on existing, released from whatever binding kept them together.”

I grimaced.

“That sounds bad,” I said. “It would damage the surroundings, right?”

“Containing them in a location would be feasible, with the right set of wards,” he said. “Otherwise, should they be unconstrained, I imagine over a third of Callow would be turned into a blasted, violently haunted wasteland. I’ll need a direct look or more precise numbers to project the exact fallout.”

“I have brought specialists to wrest back control from the Diabolist,” the duchess said. “Preventing her from interfering with the process is the most salient issue.”

Glass eyes turned to her.

“It find it unlikely,” Hierophant said, “that Deoraithe mages could undo the work of a Named practitioner of Akua Sahelian’s skill.”

I drummed my fingers against the wood.

“Duchess, get your people talking with Hierophant,” I ordered. “We’ll see how feasible your way is. I’d much prefer it was. But if it isn’t...”

I grimaced.

“Well, Diabolist put a sharper in the middle of her army,” I said. “I’m not above lighting it to finish the war.”

Fletched

“To follow a principle is to ascribe value to it, and value always has worth that can be quantified. Is to value quantifiable worth above all, therefore, not to follow the greatest of all principles?”
– Extract from “Bought and Sold”, a collection of the teachings of the Merchant Prince Irenos, founder of Mercantis

It was the second time Indrani was made to serve at an auction of the Closed Circle and she knew better than to hope it would be the last. She was exotic . The word came even more often than pretty and mannerly in the mouths of Honoured Guests, as if the colour of her skin had made her some wild animal instead of a nine-year-old girl. Merchant Lord Septim had been complimented too many times on how much of a coup acquiring her had been for Indrani to ever think he would not continue volunteering her as a servant for the evenings. It was rare occasion, at least. The Closed Circle never held auction more than once a year, and it was not guaranteed to. The nature of what was put to auction forbade it from being regular occurrence. The masked men and women of the Circle called it ‘an auction for which that cannot be bought’ but Indrani had already grown used to the way Mercantians slathered drama over everything like honeyed glaze. The Closed Circle, as far she understood, put up for trade things that couldn’t be bought with gold. It was barter the way slaves like her did in the pens, but with enough goldleaf and expensive wine involved they got to pretend it was different.

She hadn’t been there when the goods for auction were announced, but by milling around serving drinks she got to overhear enough conversations to piece together a few. There was a letter that could ignite war in the Free Cities, the secret to earn the love a Proceran princess and the greatest shame of a Callowan baron. Strangers things too, a glimmer of Arcadian moon and a sword without a blade forged by a Praesi emperor. The last, she knew, had been traded at the last auction. She’d not seen it, but they said the Warlock had been there looking for an ancient song that revealed the lay of some lesser Hells. He’d offered something from the vaults of the Tower in exchange, which had gotten the Merchant Lords excited. The Dread Empire sat on the greatest troves of treasures in Calernia, it was said, but these days rarely took them out from the warded rooms where they were hidden away from Creation. Indrani didn’t give a fuck about what the Easterners got up to in their deserts, but the owners being in a good mood was good for her as well.

Septim wouldn’t sell her until she’d flowered, he’d already said as much, but when he felt generous she got a few hours out in the city instead of remaining bound to his estate. Once that had been one of her rare delights, but tonight the notion she might see her leash loosened felt empty. Indrani had been careful, hoarding what she could and stealing when she was sure she could get away with it – the trick was to steal from free servants, there was almost never a tracking rune on their possessions – and paid for one a questor to find her parents. She’d had to go to the lower city to find one whose fees she could afford, but after two years of scrounging finally she had managed. It had been pointless. Her mother was already dead, assassinated as part of a squabble between Merchant Lords. Her father had been sold in Ashur and died in a mine collapse as a ‘free’ member of its lowest citizenship tier. The questor told her that was a committee’s fault, higher tier citizens debating for a week on whether it was worth digging out the people in the collapsed shaft or not.

Eventually, lack of air had settled the question where words failed.

Indrani wondered if she was supposed to swear vengeance on their behalf. Feuds were not rare between Mercantians, though always short-lived, but there were Callowan and Praesi slaves in the pens that still stole knives to kill each other over things their peoples had done hundreds of years ago. There wasn’t much, she thought, to seek vengeance for. Her father she’d never even met, and she barely remembered her mother. Warmth and the smell of spices, that was all. The name she’d been given by the woman had been kept since Merchant Lord Septim thought it would make her more authentic , but the way it was spoken was different from what little she remembered. It was spoken in Lower Miezan, not whatever tongue was spoken by the people of her parents across the Tyrian Sea. All the girl could muster was a vague sorrow at would could have been. It was left formless because her life already had form: she was to sing, to learn the Three Dances and the Seven Tongues and earn great profit for the man who’d snatched her from her mother’s arms at the cost of a small fortune.

She’d gone quiet and her smile had lapsed as she thought, she realized. Indrani force da cheerful smile and dearly hoped no one who had rivalry with Septim had seen her. All it would take was a single comment to humiliate the Merchant Lord and she would have earned a caning. Luck might be in her favour, for there were few Mercantians at Closed Circle auctions. A third of the people in attendance were fat Merchant Lords and Ladies, but the Consortium kept light presence at events like this. The Merchant Princes of Mercantis had long ago ordered as much, to ensure it would be powerful foreigners that came to the City of Bought and Sold for the ineffable prizes offered. Indrani, a sweet smile painted on her face, presented her silver platter to the closest Honoured Guest. A woman, though not like she’d ever seen before. She had the skin of the honey-coloured Yan Tei but her face was different and her ears were pointed. Her red dress alone was proof she was wealthy enough to be here, silks that could only be had from Praes and Ashur. The rough leather boots stood out from the perfectly presented rest, a stain on the jewels and beauty. The Honoured Guest considered her for a long moment before claiming a goblet of Helikean pale.

“Well now, a yamin-ine ,” she said, “Where did the fat ones get theirs hands on one of you?”

“This one does not understand what you speak of,” Indrani replied.

“I imagine your parents made it through on a Baalite ship before Fate fucked them bad enough you ended up here,” the Honoured Guest mused. “Your peoples don’t often cross the Tyrian Sea, girl. They never learned the routes.”

“This one was born in Mercantis, Honoured Guest,” Indrani said.

“You can drop the slave talk,” the woman said, rolling her eyes. “And that platter as well. You’re interesting enough an oddity you’ll be fetching me drinks for the rest of this bore. Send your owner to me if they object.”

The slave swallowed noisily. She wasn’t an idiot. She knew there were men and women that were... interested in girls her age. She was pricey enough a commodity that Septim had never made her available for those kinds of deals, but for an Honoured Guest? No one got in this hall without being powerful enough to curry favour with. Could she run? The rune carved into the back of her neck would start boiling her blood if she went too far from the anchor, but it might be worth it if she could avoid this. The woman drained the cup and dropped it on the platter, reaching for another. She’d just drank, Indrani knew, a vintage worth a boy of working age in good health. Like it was water. The waste was like a slap in the face, utter disregard for the wheels of value and interest she’d been taught ruled the world.

“Whoever decided there’s need to mingle for an hour after the prizes are announced should be shot,” the Honoured Guest sighed. “I’d burn the invitations if they didn’t occasionally have useful stuff.”

“The Closed Circle is pleased to provide for all your needs,” Indrani said.

The woman snorted.

“Did you know your people abduct the salamdeul who wander too close to the border?” she said. “Rip out the hearts in some pretty grisly rituals to the Gods. Having one of you in slave livery is like putting ribbons on a tiger.”

“This one knows not what you speak of,” Indrani said, desperately reaching for the phrases she’d been taught. “Are you enjoying the auction, Honoured Guest?”

“Praesi highborn speak just like that,” the woman said. “They put accents on different parts, but you’re coming from Baalite bastard talk and they from Wasteland tongues. Their nobles think they’re being distinguished, but they forget Miezan envoys were always slaves. Mercantis was founded by exiles, you see, you keep the traditions closer to true.”

“This one was not taught history,” Indrani tried.

The Honoured Guest smiled strangely.

“I know a man who once said ignorance of precedent is the doom of empires,” she said. “Though you’re too young for romance, I suppose.”

The girl hid her relief as well she could. Those particular duties would not be asked of her, it looked like. The stranger patter her shoulder as one would pat a pet. Some owners were like that, liked to think of themselves as benevolent.

“Most of the time, more trouble than it’s worth,” the woman said. “It’s the exceptions that fuck you, mark my words.”

“This one will, Honoured Guest,” Indrani replied.

It was toothless enough, as far as babbles went, and she’d been forced to smile and nod and much uglier stuff.

“Ranger,” the woman said. “Call me Ranger.”

The slave stiffened. That was not a name, it was a Name . The half-drunk guest at her side had been granted mantle by the Gods themselves, whether Above or Below. She stood in the presence of greatness, and greatness was helping itself to another cup of wine and downing it so quickly she must barely taste it. Indrani glimpsed a tall silhouette coming from behind and felt cold fear course her veins. Merchant Lord Septim was young, barely thirty, and had yet to gain the fat that Mercantians influential enough to vie for the title of Merchant Prince uniformly wore. His tan face was leathery and desiccated, a match for those hungry empty eyes that she had learned to fear. Whims were rare in the man, and generosity ever passing.

“Lady Ranger,” Septim smiled. “I see you’ve taken a shine to my Indrani.”

The honey-skinned woman glanced at the Merchant Lord like he was waste scrapped off her boots.

“Speak in my presence again and I’ll slit your throat,” she mildly said.

The Merchant Lord paled.

“Shoo, copper-counter,” Ranger said. “My patience is already running out.”

Indrani did not smile. When the Honoured Guest was gone, she would still be a slave – and one who had witnessed Septim’s casual humiliation. There was a beating for her in it, waiting around the corner. The memory of the barely-veiled fury on her owner’s face wouldn’t do much to take away the dull throb of a caning’s aftermath.

“Merchant Lord Septim is said to be the foremost candidate for the princeship, in a decade,” Indrani warned quietly.

Ranger chuckled.

“I could open the little shit up from balls to throat and all the Consortium would do is send me a bill,” she said. “Everything’s for sale here. Even the city, famously, though no one’s ever had the coin for it.”

The girl did not reply, for she had nothing to say. Mighty as the Named was, she would be gone soon enough. The sun set every night, no matter how warm, and never rose twice the same. Attachment to the transient was the way of dead slaves.

“Wekesa’s little trinket should be interesting, but the loafer in the Tower wouldn’t let anything too useful of her grasp,” the Honoured Guest said. “The only thing worth a second glance here is the invitation.”

“I know not of what you speak, Lady Ranger,” Indrani admitted.

“A written invitation to Skade, made from the soul of some poet the Winter Court took fancy to,” the woman explained. “I could carve my way into Arcadia, but that takes a while, and my gate’s even more finicky.”

“This one was unaware that your hallowed self kept friendship with the fae,” the girl said.

“Oh, I don’t,” Ranger smiled. “You might say I’m fond of their jewellery, but that’ll have to wait until the seasons change.”

Indrani smiled as if she understood. The woman seemed amused but not fooled.

“So what did they train you for?” she asked.

“This one has been taught to sing, and still learns the Three Dances and the Seven Tongues,” she said.

Lady Ranger laughed loudly and unapologetically, as if it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

“Gods, singing ,” she gasped. “Child, your people gouged out the eyes of a Minister of the Left and sent them to his Emperor along a demand for half his southern territories. My father sacked Sing Du twice, burned An Yang to the ground and still lost to the Striped Fleet. There was a century where the Ashokas bled the high chief of the Onogur as their coronation ceremony . A drop of your blood has more war in it than half this continent put together.”

She might as well have been speaking in tongues, for all the difference it made. Names of peoples and cities beyond a sea but a handful knew how to cross, never to be seen or even heard of again. What did it matter to Indrani that some kingdom she’d never heard of and she shared the smallest sliver of kinship with was mighty? She had never left Mercantis, hadn’t even seen most the city. The stranger was marching in with her colourful stories, and by night’s end would march out and leave a mess behind her – a mess Indrani would pay for. She hated that, hated it like poison. She also craved it. It was the difference between one who had power and one who did not.

“None of those names mean anything here,” Indrani harshly said. “My blood even less.”

“So you have some fire in you,” Ranger smiled. “Good. We’ve got some fate, you and I, but I’ve no patience for hollow dolls.”

“We have never met before,” Indrani said.

“My father would never have been exiled, had he not lost to your people,” the Honoured Guest shrugged. “Would never have met my mother. That gets you a second look, at least.”

“I am not for sale,” she bitterly said. “Will not be for years yet.”

“What the lords of this place deem to be law matters very little to me,” the woman said. “Have you ever used a weapon?”

Indrani shook her head.

“Mercantians do not keep war slaves, my lady,” she said. “Only Stygians do. To lay hands on a blade here is killing offense, save for the pit fighters.”

“Let’s see if you have it in you, then,” the Lady Ranger said. “Follow.”

They were noticed. Indrani felt like flinching. Slaves should not be noticed, no good ever came of it. The Honoured Guest elbowed aside a dark-skinned Praesi who bowed and offered her manifold apologies, not that she bothered to listen, and she snatched a hilt without a blade from atop marble pedestal. She pressed it into Indrani’s hands, who winced as she held it. Moments passed without anything more than the sensation of cool metal against her palm. The absence stung harder than she’d thought it would, and the girl damned herself twice for having hoped. Hope is the bitter brew, hope is the usher of despair. One day at a time, never looking back or ahead. I will survive this.

“Sorcerous was a real prick anyway, as I hear it,” the Lady Ranger mused and dropped the hilt back on the pedestal. “Wasteland aristocrats always like to talk about sorcery being the best thing the Gods bothered to shit out, like it ever saved them from a knife in the throat. Steel, girl, always wins. Remember that.”

Indrani nodded and the worthless advice and followed the madwoman. They came to stand in front of another pedestal, this one bearing a horn bow with carved images along the length of the arc. The eyes of everyone in the room where on them by now. There would be no escaping the consequences.

“Lycaonese,” Ranger told her. “They’ve always liked these, nothing quite like them to kill ratlings from a wall. This little piece must be older than the Principate, back when the Iron Kings still ruled.”

She’d spoken with a degree of respect, but handled the bow like it was a tool instead of a literally priceless artefact. She strung it casually and pulled, eyeing the bend with a critical eye before handing it to Indrani. The girl’s fingers closed around the bow and found it fit just right. Perfectly, as if it had been made for her hand. In the background she heard a masked woman of the Circle tell Ranger it had been crafted by Peerless Artisan and the enchantments on it would never lapse, but the words passed her by without taking hold. Indrani’s eyes remained on the bow and she let instincts she should not have guide her hands. She looked ahead and pulled the string, feeling the weight of an arrow that did not exist take hold. It felt... it felt like what her mother should have felt like. Coming home. Closing a circle. She shivered, and only returned to herself when the Honoured Guest put a hand on her shoulder. The woman leaned close.

“If you could loose an arrow at anyone, who would it be?” Ranger whispered.

Indrani was careful not to look for Septim, not to remember painful throbs and bruises that were allowed to swell before magic was taken to them. The Named chuckled.

“And after him, the rest?” she said.

Indrani slowly shook her head.

“A debt,” she said. “Not a cause.”

Ranger smiled and took the bow from her hands, placing it back on the pedestal. The absence left her hollow.

“What’s your name, girl?”

“Indrani,” she replied.

“Indrani,” the Ranger repeated, mulling over the word. “It will do for now. Come along, duckling. We’re leaving.”

“I’m not for sale,” the slave replied, alarmed.

“Consider this your first lesson, duckling,” the Lady of the Lake said. “Rules should only be a concern when someone is able to enforce them upon you.”

Indrani saw a wild glint in those eyes, and her fate writ in it. Never looking back or ahead , she thought.

She smiled, and for the first time in a very long while it was genuine.

Chapter 49: Hearsay

“Truth is a lie grown old and beloved.”
– Soninke saying

The woman sitting in my tent I had fully expected, but the fragrant pot of tea set on the table I had not. Not for the first time I wondered how deep the rabbit hole went: how deeply had the Empress infiltrated the Fifteenth, that she could see water boiled and a tea set put down in my own godsdamned tent? As for Malicia herself, I offered her a nod before plopping down in the seat across from hers. The meat-puppet of the woman who ruled about a quarter of the continent poured me a cup of pale steaming tea, adding two blots of sugar and a silver spoon to the saucer before handing it to me. I was long past being surprised at her knowing details about me, but that she’d taken the time to learn how I took my tea was a nice touch.

“How was your day, darling?” Her Dread Majesty Malicia, First of Her Name, asked me with a sweet smile.

I winced, well aware that she was putting forward that very domestic image purely to screw with me for her own entertainment. As long as she didn’t start massaging the back of my neck I’d cope.

“Well, this afternoon I pretty much scared the Duchess of Daoine into telling me a secret older than the Kingdom of Callow,” I said. “I put it under the seal by your authority too. No one but Masego and I are ever going to know the details.”

I stirred the tea before putting down the spoon on the table – which even with my botched etiquette lessons I knew was quite unmannerly – and took a sip. Huh, tasted different than the Ashuran stuff. Closer to Aisha’s brews, though the taste was clearer. The Empress smiled.

“Ah, hedging your bets,” she said. “You do not want the knowledge in the Tower’s records, lest it be misused decades from now.”

Pretty much, yeah, though I refrained from agreeing out loud. I wasn’t sure I’d trust Black with the knowledge that there was that kind of juicy leverage on Daoine up for grabs, much less whatever murderous clown might be succeeding the lot of us whenever our work inevitably caught up to us. Masego would keep quiet, I knew. He’d been raised to respect symbols like the Tower’s seal and he wasn’t exactly the gossiping type to start with. I doubted Kegan would trust the son of the Warlock to do anything at all, but she’d just have to deal with it. I’d needed Hierophant in the loop to have a chance of this not ending in the ruination of Callow. Which, in all fairness, it still might. One on one I’d bet on myself against Akua, but she’d had a long while to prepare. For a mage, especially one as powerful as her, that made a difference. Liesse was going to be the greatest slaughterhouse of my young but bloody tenure as the Squire.

“So,” I said. “Not going to ask me what terms Diabolist offered?”

The Empress sipped at her own cup, taken plain.

“Shall I guess?” she said, amused. “The queenship of Callow, naturally. Anyone trying to turn you would begin with this. It would have to be paired with a threat that promises to either destroy this land or ruin it, lest you dismiss her from the onset.”

Elegantly, Malicia tapped a finger against the table.

“She will have been serious in her attempt,” the Empress assessed. “A personal touch as well, then. A full ritual to unshackle your former paramour, perhaps, or healing for your recently wounded legate. Her spies should be capable of sending word of that in time for the offer being made.”

I drank deeper from the cup. She’d been right on the nose for all of it, not that I’d expected any less. Dread Empress Malicia had been doing what Akua was trying to for over forty years, better and against more dangerous opponents.

“She went for Nauk,” I said. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised you know all about Kilian.”

“Did you really think you would be able to wield so much power in my name without your weaknesses being thoroughly investigated first, my dear?” the Empress chided. “If there were means available to remedy her state that did not break your principles, I would have seen it done already – if only to remove a way to pressure you.”

So, confirmation even someone with Malicia’s resources and frankly ludicrous sorcerous archives couldn’t find a way to help Kilian without ritual sacrifice. I’d been considering asking a favour there to sidestep the issue entirely, and was almost relieved it wouldn’t be possible. Owing a favour to the likes of the Empress was not something to undertake lightly. It left Warlock, maybe, but that wasn’t much better. And if I must make bargain with the Sovereign of the Red Skies, Nauk comes first.

“I did not come to speak of the Diabolist, though I expect we shall,” Malicia said. “I have news from the south.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Is Black finally done murdering his way to a settlement?” I asked. “The situation in Callow could use his special touch, I’ll admit.”

The Empress paused, and my eyes sharpened. I’d never seen her visibly choose her words before, but I was near certain that was happening before my eyes. Shit. What went wrong?

“Amadeus was defeated,” Malicia said. “Though Procer has not spread its influence to the League, that achievement was not his doing. A Hierarch was elected even as Nicae fell to the Tyrant of Helike’s armies.”

“He lost to the White Knight?” I said. “Fucking Hells, I thought he was green. How did he manage that?”

“I am given to understand there was betrayal on Helike’s part, but that the foremost architect was an old acquaintance of yours,” the Empress said. “The Wandering Bard, under a different name.”

I frowned.

“She was a pest,” I said. “And dangerous, I won’t say otherwise, but definitely not in the league you’re describing. A second-stringer like the Bumbling Conjurer, with a sharp grasp on her powers and limitations.”

“As of Amadeus’ last report, ‘Aoede of Nicae’ has made it on the Red List,” the Empress murmured. “You have not been introduced to it yet, I believe. It is a list of names circulated among the Eyes of the Empire, of individuals that must be assassinated whatever the cost should opportunity be presented. She shares the distinction only with Cordelia Hasenbach and Klaus Pappenheim, at the moment.”

My tea was cooling, so I gulped down a mouthful as I marshalled my thoughts. Black had been sent to the Free Cities to make sure nothing happening there gave Procer and excuse to start a Crusade, and it looked like that had been accomplished even if not by his hands. It was, unfortunately, made moot by the fact that Diabolist had a bucket of red in hand and was determined to paint a big target all over the Empire’s face.

“He’s all right, though,” I stated, almost a question.

I refused to believe the Empress would have been so casual about this if my teacher was dead. I had only a vague grasp on the relationship between those two, but there was a great deal of trust and affection there. Frankly, I would have believed they were a couple if Malicia wasn’t strictly interested in tits and Black pretty much indifferent to anyone not called Ranger.

“He was severely beaten, but not wounded,” the meat-puppet said. “I would not call him ‘all right’, regardless. Captain was killed fighting a heroine.”

I let out a sharp breath. Fuck. I’d always liked Sabah. She’d been the most reasonable of the Calamities in a lot of ways, and ever since the day I’d met her she’d acted like some sort of giant warrior aunt to me. And I knew her for two years and change. The Calamities were together for over four decades. I’d only rarely seen them together, but they’d been a family. They’d be grieving her for years.

“He must be wretched,” I said.

“And coming north as quickly as he can as of a month ago, along with Warlock and Scribe,” Malicia said. “Be warned, Catherine.”

My fingers clenched.

“ Don’t you fucking try that ,” I snarled. “He wouldn’t hurt me. Not even at his worst.”

The Empress looked at me, and for a heartbeat I forgot this was a body she possessed. The woman I’d seen on the throne that night had come again, cold empire made flesh.

“I love that man,” Malicia said, and the calm of her voice could be called anything but savage, “in a way I doubt you will ever love anyone, Catherine Foundling. He has been part of my soul since we were children looking at the stars. Do not ever believe that whatever paltry affection you lay at his feet is but a pale shadow of mine.”

I flinched.

“I have never seen him like this,” the Empress said. “Whatever the Wandering Bard did, it wounded what is at the core of him. This goes deeper than pride or what he felt for Sabah – he is as a raw, bare nerve.”

“So he’ll go cold,” I said. “I’ve seen him like that before. It’s terrifying, but not dangerous to either of us.”

“ Think , Catherine,” the Empress coldly said. “For all that he arms himself in logic, underneath still lives the sixteen-year-old boy who watched Nefarious flee and felt only disgust. If he’d never been at the Fields...”

She shook her head.

“It doesn’t matter,” she dismissed. “Every Named is crystallized from a single moment and that was his. What you should worry of is that his judgement has been impaired. He will serve the sword to anything in Callow that he deems to threaten Praesi hegemony.”

“All that’s left is Diabolist,” I said. “And he’s welcome to wield a sword there, if he gets to her first.”

“Be warned,” Malicia repeated quietly.

The tone was solemn, and had me doubting. I actually hated her a little bit in that moment, because no matter if this was true or not it remained that she had the ability to make me doubt one of the pillars my life relied on. That alone was enough to harden distrust, made worse by the awareness that I needed her. Her support and her help, so that what I meant for Callow was anything but failure.

“So there’s a Hierarch,” I said, bluntly changing the subject. “Is that going to be a problem?”

“The man bears it as a Name,” the Empress said. “As did his sole predecessor. He is a career diplomat for Bellerophon, called Anaxares.”

“Bellerophon’s the easternmost city, right?” I frowned. “The one that elects its rulers.”

Democracy, it was called. There was a part of that that appealed to me – letting people choose their own way – but I’d never really bought into the notion. People were dumb, broadly speaking, and mobs even dumber. For all that I’d acquired a distaste of nobility, filling a hall with drunk tradesmen and asking the lot of them to make laws was no way to rule a country. Someone had to hold the reins, or all you got was bickering and indecision. Just because I believe that place shouldn’t be inherited didn’t meant is should be carved up and handed off to a hundred thousand strangers out in the streets.

“The Hierarch was prisoner to the Tyrant of Helike since the beginning of the war in the south, and the Tyrant seems to have been instrumental in arranging his election,” Malicia said. “We’ve yet to acquire a full profile on him, since infiltrating Bellerophon has always been... difficult. What little we’ve seen of him is puzzling. He seems aggressively opposed to taking any action at all in his function as head of the League.”

“He wouldn’t participate in a Crusade, then,” I said.

“It seems unlikely,” the Empress said. “I would not commit to an answer without deeper study.”

“Good,” I grunted. “If we don’t have to worry about an army sailing up the Hwaerte, then I just need to put down Diabolist quickly and lock down the Vales hard enough Procer thinks twice about invading.”

If the First Prince managed to rope in the Thalassocracy it was possible they’d try to land armies in Praes, but I actually rather hoped they did. That land was death on invaders. Between the Wasteland and the Hungering Sands it was more or less impossible for an army to live off the land there, and every major Praesi city was filled to the brim with nasty surprises for anyone meaning to try their walls. Even at the peak of the crusader kingdoms, the authority of the kings had not held further than a few miles away from the cities they ruled. And even then they’d not conquered the whole of Praes. Wolof had badly broken the army trying to take it, and neither the Northern Steppes nor the Grey Eyries had ever come under crusader rule. If Cordelia Hasenbach tried to take Praes from the coast, she’d find the region a bottomless hole swallowing her men and coin. Crusades always ended when they got too costly, half a dozen failed runs at the Kingdom of the Dead had taught Calernia as much.

“And so we return to Akua Sahelian,” the Empress said.

I grimaced.

“She got her hands on something called the Still Water project,” I said. “I’m guessing you know what that is. I’ll have a hard time ever forgetting.”

Malicia sighed. It was, for her, an unusually human gesture.

“I told Wekesa the trials were a liability,” she said. “But he was adamant. Argued it would revolutionize understanding of rituals.”

“Did it?” I asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” she conceded. “After I decreed the matter to be under seal, he largely abandoned the avenue of research. What he learned before that would allow us a fighting chance against the Dead King, should he ever wage war upon us.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“And that’s considered likely?”

“The Empire has been in conflict with the Kingdom of the Dead in past centuries,” the Empress said.

“I’m pretty sure I’d remember that,” I said. “That kind of mess would be worth a page in the history books.”

“You will find almost no record of them,” Malicia said ruefully. “An attentive historian can find a period of twenty-five years between the reigns of Dread Emperor Pernicious and Dread Empress Maleficent the Second that is unaccounted four. The three Secret Wars were waged through the Hells, a vanity project that was an attempt to seize the Dead King’s infernal dominion. An invasion through a hellgate in Ater was so imminent after the third that the woman who would become Maleficent II called on a pair of demons to erase most of a Hell and the previous two decades with it.”

I let out a low whistle. I disapproved of fucking with the fabric of Creation on a general basis, even the parts that smelled of brimstone, but I had to admit that Maleficent had gone above and beyond in getting rid of the mess on her hands.

“Setting aside a revelation that will be haunting my nightmares in months to come,” I said. “I have to ask – how many of those other continent-shaking horrors do you have locked up in the Tower? Because, without being arrogant, I think I can put the fear of the Gods in the Principate. But if the shoes keep dropping, they won’t c are about how many people I’ve stabbed. They’ll be in for a death match.”

“Four,” Malicia said. “None of which are in danger of being revealed, as they never made it past the theoretical stage. Two inherited, two of Wekesa’s making and dependant on him being alive.”

Well, fuck me. There’d been a lot of nights lately where I had that sliver of doubt about whether I’d made the right choice in working within the Empire instead of against it. Wondering if by choosing to be a villain I’d ensured all the ruin that had come to Callow since. That put most of the doubts to rest, because I knew better than to believe Black would not have pulled the trigger if he was facing a victorious rebellion with foreign backing. My teacher had picked a soft embrace for Callow because he’d thought it to be the way to bring it into the Empire that would lead to the least resistance. I was not fool enough to delude myself into believing he would not turn to harsher means should it fail.

“I’ll admit to some disquiet over that,” I said. “It’s not that Emperors as a rule are murderous pricks that would use those given half an excuse, but yes it is in fact exactly that.”

“The resources involved are significant,” the Empress said. “None of them are minor projects, and we both know how large developments such as these tend to end.”

I didn’t really consider ‘don’t worry about it, a hero would probably take care of that if it came down to it’ to be a valid response, but I wasn’t exactly in a position to pursue the subject at the moment. It might be worth bringing it with Black later. He had a bone-deep hatred of those kinds of weapons that might get my foot in the door as far as he was concerned, but that pragmatic streak cut both ways. He might want to keep those in the vault for a rainy day.

“There’s going to be massive casualties,” I told her after a moment. “She implied she can pull Still Water on the entirety of the people inside Liesse. That’s at least a hundred thousand undead, and a battle won’t clean all of those up. There’ll be spill in the countryside.”

“The Legions of Terror are versed in peacekeeping operations,” the Empress noted. “And a visible common enemy has uses.”

The Legions of Terror are versed in peacekeeping operations. Gods, there was a sentence to give a farmer the shivers.

“This is going to end up blamed on Praesi, Malicia,” I bluntly said. “The Legions cleaning up afterwards won’t win a lot of love when it comes from the massacre of a hundred thousand civilians at the hands of the Wasteland’s favourite daughter.”

“Public sentiment is already being prepared,” the Empress said. “Your visibility of late is not without impact.”

Ah. They were going to point at me and say here’s the good girl, she beat the bad girl and would you look at that she’s wearing our colours. Aren’t you all glad the Tower’s in charge? Lowered taxes for everyone. I’m not sure that’ll be enough, but if Procer comes knocking at the gate Callowans might just pick the devil they know. Especially if the devil just named one of their own vicequeen, with pretty knights riding at her back. I was getting rather tired of the feeling my interlocutor had been three steps ahead of me the whole time, but I doubted it would end anytime soon.

“I have a hypothetical to speak of,” I said.

“I am listening,” Malicia said.

“Now, let’s say there’s this girl and she’s not all that good at scheming,” I said. “Hasn’t got the knack for it. But she learned to read forces in movement, so to speak, and looking at the last year she noticed a few things.”

The Empress studied me openly, and did not speak.

“The girl’s been hacking away at moving targets this whole time and until recently never had time to breathe,” I said. “But she does now, and trying to look at the year from a different seat she saw a few oddities.”

I waved my wrist lazily to elaborate.

“Like Akua being able to amass the reagents for Still Water without calling down Hells on her head,” I said. “Or importing so many little trinkets through southern Callow unimpeded. Now, this girl’s people are green. No surprise they missed those things. But there’s two people who should have been keeping an eye on the situation. One gets a pass, since he was away. The other, though? The other’s absence of movement is intriguing .”

“I am curious,” Malicia said. “What do you believe this other would have to gain, by allowing the breadbasket of her empire to be devastated?”

“See, that’s the part that got the girl at first,” I said. “Then she thought, you know what’s the problem with Callow? It’s got all this farmland, but it’s full of stubborn Callowans. It’d be much easier if a chunk of them were gone. You could have Praesi farm there instead.”

The Empress said nothing.

“But then the girl thought that was too heavy-handed,” I mused. “Measures like that could have been taken long ago and weren’t. So what was to be gained, yeah? It occurred to her, then, that she was still thinking in the present. The wrong sort of game. Now, looking ahead, you know what might be useful for this other? Callow strong enough to fight the Principate, but too weak to make waves. And there’s this image, too. Of the girl putting steel into Akua Sahelian’s throat until she chokes on her blood, and how that’ll make her popular with some people.”

My eyes hardened.

“Puzzled her at first, since the other would lose a few feathers from the whole affair, but it makes a twisted sort of sense,” I murmured. “If Callow’s behind the girl and the girl is behind the Tower, well, all sort of troubles go away.”

“And in this hypothetical, what would the girl say to the other?” Malicia asked.

“That now’s not the time to bare knives,” I said. “But that if anything like that was pulled again there would consequences, and that lately she’d gotten quite good at killing.”

The Empress idly turned her cup.

“I believe this girl you speak misunderstands a few things of the other’s methods,” she said. “You see, unlike her fellow she does not believe a war with Procer is winnable. It is one of the few points on which they dissent, and she has gone to great lengths to delay and even attempt to prevent such a war from occurring.”

I wouldn’t enable Diabolist if what she was cooking up brought a Crusade on our heads , I took that to mean. Believable, though months of growing doubts weren’t going to be quieted by a few offhand sentences spoken by one of the most skilful liars in Creation.

“That’s a little worrying,” I said. “Considering that war is around the corner.”

“The man you spoke of spent a lifetime preparing for it,” Malicia said. “It is, in his eyes, the culmination of everything he has ever done. To win it would validate all that he has fought for. One might say he is unable to envision this war cannot be won, for it would contrary to who he is.”

“And she thinks he’s been blinded by that,” I said. “I’m not sure it matters, at this point. The war’s coming regardless.”

“It’s an interesting puzzle, isn’t it?” she mused. “How does one win a war that one is fated to lose?”

“And there’s an answer?” I asked.

Dread Empress Malicia smiled beautifully.

“Why, you never fight it at all.”

Chapter 50: Preparation

“Doubt is the mother of failure.”
– Dread Emperor Terribilis I, the Lawgiver

In the end, it took me three days to get eyes on Liesse. Marshal Grem One-Eye had sent out mages as soon as the city was glimpsed over the horizon, and my own mage lines kept coordinated with his own until we had four scrying links covering the major angles of the Diabolist’s lair. What I saw did not bode well. The city had gone up with its walls largely intact and significant portions of the grounds under it and lost neither as it went down. The surrounding territory had been worked over with magic so that Liesse now stood atop a steep hill. Thousands were digging trenches and traps in the plains around it, working day and night without pause because they needed none. They were Callowans, but they were also dead. Without fanfare or a cackle, without a sound at all, Akua Sahelian had killed more of my people in a night than Black had throughout the entire Conquest. Men, women and children. The young and the old – Still Water drew no difference, and neither had she.

I’d been a viciously dark mood since I’d gotten proof of it, and the mood had only gone darker when I’d seen what she was up to. Devil-summoning arrays had been carved on the walls, large siege weapons like those of the Legions placed onto bastions and additional wards were made every hour to fortify the city against magical interference. Hierophant had already confirmed I couldn’t open a portal directly within the walls, not that I’d ever seriously thought there was a chance of it. The Summer fae would not have dithered attacking her for months if they’d had that as an available option, and I was still much less skilled than they at using fairy gates. I disliked wasting time in Dormer, but Juniper had flatly informed me that after a brutal battle like the last one the men needed time to recoup and recuperate.

It wasn’t just a matter of dealing with the wounded, though there’d been a great many of those. Our supplies had been running thin, and it was only Ratface’s promised river barges coming through the city harbour filled with steel and goblin munitions that had the Legions in proper fighting fit again. Aisha had been a little less blunt in reminding me I’d had our troops going through forced marches and battles one after another for months, but no less firm. Even if it gave Akua time to dig in, the truth was that the Fifteenth simply hadn’t been in a state to take the fight to her right away. As I saw to my house, Ranker and Kegan saw to theirs. The duchess kept to herself, but I saw almost too much of the old goblin for my tastes. It was her that suggested we had siege weapons of our own prepared in Laure and Southpool rather than rely on only our own, and when she began approaching the problem that way the Hellhound followed with aplomb.

For one, there were three legions in Holden under her mother that were sitting ducks unless I intervened. General Istrid had been sent there at my own order to prevent the Summer court from making a beachhead other than Dormer, and discharged that duty perfectly. But her twelve thousand men were now months away from the actual fighting, with a supply line that was chancy at best. Even if she began marching north immediately, she wouldn’t be able to reach Liesse before the battle was weeks past. Could I afford to allow twelve thousand veteran legionaries to sit over a strategically useless position while I fought Akua? No, I could not. Not if the assault on the city was going to be as brutal as I suspected.

The only question then, was where I would transport them. The gates allowed me to significantly quicken the logistics of assembling a host that was spread throughout Callow, but they weren’t a perfect solution. For one, I needed to be with the moving armies. And much more importantly, I couldn’t actually use Arcadia as a staging ground. Whether the terms of my bargain with the fae court would protect my soldiers when they weren’t actually travelling was irrelevant, since that wasn’t how gates worked from my end: whenever I made an entrance, there was a corresponding exit. I couldn’t actually get out of Arcadia by another place, as far as I knew, and our previous alternative of having Hierophant use fae nobles as portal-openers was no longer an option. Our prisoners had all been rather forcefully released by the Summer Queen when she still bore that name. And, last of all the weaknesses, going through Arcadia still took time . It as a shortcut, not fucking teleportation, which as probably for the best. Even with the mantle of a Duchess on my shoulders I was pretty sure attempting teleportation of any kind would flat-out kill me.

And so, sitting with Marshal Ranker and General Juniper, we planned out our little shell game. Akua had eyes on us, we on her. The side that would have the advantage when the battle began was the one who’d hide the knives better. Callow had already been put under martial law long before I went south, and as things stood I was both vicequeen and highest-ranked Named remaining of the region. I was also wielding my authority with the explicit backing of Her Dread Majesty – there was not a single in person in my home who had solid ground to stand on in refusing an order of mine. Would that I could enjoy that power even a little: I had wanted nothing more than to have it since the age of thirteen, when I’d made the decision to start saving up for the War College. I couldn’t, not when the first order I gave was for immediate muster of the city guard in Southpool, Ankou and Vale. There was immediate pushback, argument from the Callowan governors I’d overseen the very appointment of that none of those men were trained soldiers.

I ordered for them to come anyway. Southpool was on the weak end of the scale, with only five thousand, but Ankou’s city guard traditionally served as militia when Procer attacked the Vales and even though the city was smaller it boasted eight thousand and better equipped. Vale was the largest of the three, and though it put up only six thousand men I sent Grandmaster Talbot to squeeze blood out of that rock. Vale had always been the heart of central Callow, and though no great trade city as an agricultural one there were few equals to it on Calernia. There was wealth there, and though second-rate compared to the real wealthy cities of Callow it had historically been enough to support a great many soldiers and knights – some of the earliest chivalric orders had been founded there, they said. I left Talbot work his patriotic sorcery on the powerful of the city and another three thousand came out of that, including about a hundred knights. Gods, it was like those had been hiding under every rock. It was pleasing, in a way, that the governors were willing to fight for the people under their care when I would order those people to the grinder.

A shame I was not in a position to entertain their worries.

The place of muster for the city guards was set a little to the east of halfway between Southpool and Vale, which meant the Ankouans would have to pass south of Diabolist’s lair and lose at least a week to it. Wouldn’t matter, since I’d be busy ferrying Legions meanwhile. My options there had been more limited than I would have liked. The legions under Marshal Grem, for one, weren’t going anywhere. I’d approached the subject of peeling off at least one, but the reports I’d been given in return were... stark. There’d been increasing skirmishes with the border principalities over the last months and Procer was massing soldiers in Bayeux. The Marshal’s assessment was that if there was any large troop movement on the Empire’s side, the Principate would try an assault on the Red Flower Vales. Fucking First Prince. It didn’t matter if she was bluffing us or not, since we couldn’t afford to chance losing the narrow valleys that would give us a fighting chance against Proceran invasion. The Wasteland wasn’t going to be any help either. Malicia’s meat-puppet had made it clear the legions in her backyard needed to stay there, to keep the highborn in line and more importantly keep the fucking mess Akua’s mother had made in Wolof contained.

Much as I would have liked another twelve thousand soldiers, I couldn’t blame the Empress for not pulling them out when the alternative was devils spilling out in the Wasteland. The only reinforcements from the Legions at hand were the same I’d sent into Holden, and they were nothing to sneer at. I’d met all the generals in command there – Istrid, Sacker and Orim – and all three had been through the crucible that was the Conquest, but more importantly the civil war before it. Almost every one of my highest tier of commanders in this campaign would be familiar with Praesi war tactics of the kind Diabolist was likely to pull. That knowledge wasn’t as reassuring to have on my side as another ten thousand soldiers, but it might end up saving more lives. Already I winced at the notion of sending guards into the kind of madness Akua would have prepared for them. There was no choice. The usual voice in the back of my head that insisted there had been and I had made it saw itself buried. I would allow myself doubt and grief when the wars was done. Until then, all they would so was slow me down in what had very clearly become a race of sorts.

Either Akua Sahelian would finish her scheme and break the Empire, or I’d mass enough strength to put her down.

There was a part of me, the same that had been taught by Black, that kept to the iron-clad belief that she would fail in the end. That whatever she was juggling would backfire on her, either because she’d but off more than she could chew or because I’d break her stride. But as the days passed, I had to concede it was a possibility I might fail. I couldn’t quite manage to believe I would, but then I doubted any of the rulers Triumphant had crushed had thought they’d end up a note in the margins of history either. I knew better than most how dangerous Diabolist was, and how disparate the forces I was bringing against her was. There was advantage in that bastard mixture of Deoraithe, Callowans and Praesi I was leading. But there was weakness too. I failed, Hells even if I won but died winning... Well, I would be leaving behind me a mess that might be beyond salvaging. In rising to prominence I’d crossed a lot of lines and ripped open quite a few old wounds. None of that would be undone in the wake of my death, but I’d no longer be there to even try to guide the currents.

I wondered if Black had that same sense of cold fear, when he looked at the Empire. The ugly realization that a lot of what you’d built was dependent on you to remain functional, and that if some farmboy with a magic sword put six inches of steel through your throat it would bring ruin on hundreds of thousands. Recklessness, for all that it often cost me, had seen me win one uphill battle after another. Never without some of my blood spilled on the ground, but I’d forged victory out of being the only person in a fight willing to cross the line. Whether it was allowing my own death to get out of a Heaven-mandated defeat or lying my way to the contraptions of godhood, audacity had allowed me pull through situations that should have seen me dead or broken. But I could, I was coming to realize, no longer operate this way. Before all it took was for one gamble to fail, and the whole house of cards I had built around myself would come tumbling down. I’d gone out of my way to make myself, if not essential, then as close as anyone could be in Malicia’s empire. But that cut both ways . If I get myself killed, everything I bound to me suffers.

I’d bound quite a few things to me, by now. Armies and institutions, even the very hierarchy that now ruled Callow. When you became someone of consequence, if only followed that your death would have those same consequences.

I’d never been good with fear. I’d always pushed through it by heading into the breach repeatedly until I stopped flinching, steeling myself by taking the weakness as a personal insult. But this... this was no longer dealing with a fear of heights by standing at a rooftop’s edge the way I had when I was a girl. If I slipped and fell, Callow went up in flames. It wasn’t a fear for my own death as much as fear of what it would mean, and I was finding it much harder to push down. That was the problem with learning the currents that guided an empire from behind the scenes – you could never unsee it, after. It was not a pleasant thing admit I knew no other way to fight. Black had once told me I needed to start thinking ahead if I did not forever want to be fighting to the tune of my opponents, and I liked to think I’d learned how. To an extent. But it was one thing to sit with the Empress and plan the unmaking of the Summer Court, another to plan the steps of a waltz with the Diabolist. Fae had rules they could not break. They were, in some ways, predictable.

All that Akua had binding her was having been raised with all the blind spots of the old breed of Praesi villainy, and those weaknesses were not meant for villains to exploit. One slip and it was all over. I’d long become used to gambling with my own life, and once when I had been younger and more ignorant even gambled with Callow’s fate through my clash against the Lone Swordsman. I was older now, and if not wiser at least a great deal more aware. If I threw the dice and they came up wrong, then from Harrow to Dormer my people suffered for it. If there is no Named to use to bind Callow to the Empire, they start to use harsher methods. I hated the thought, and the hesitation it brought with it. One of the old monsters who’d held the Tower had once said that the worst sin a villain could commit was to hesitate. She’d been right. I had won and kept winning because I had made a blade of temerity and struck out at my enemies with it. After a year of trying to keep Callow together in the face of slaughter and invasion, I wasn’t certain how long I could keep doing that.

The thought came, unbidden, that this was not a coincidence. That Her Dread Majesty had uses for a hunting hound, but only so long as it could be leashed. And hadn’t she done exactly that, by giving me the very same authority I asked for? I did not allow myself to think if it too much, not right now. I could spend months trying to discern the intent of the likes of the Empress and still end up grievously, hilariously wrong in my conclusions. But . I would, one of these days, sit with Hakram over a bottle and ponder this. Because it would have been arrogant to believe that the Empress had spent decades trying to suborn Callow with soft methods but would never try tactics that had proved so effective on me as well.

The itinerary that was ultimately settled on was simple. I would take Legate Hune and a detachment of two thousand into Arcadia, taking a fairy gate to Holden where we’d link up with General Istrid and her three legions. From there we’d take another gate to the muster point north of Vale where the guards form the adjoining cities had been ordered to gather. Then I’d make one last trip south, to hopefully shave off a few weeks from my host’s march to the north to assemble with the rest. I’d always taken Nauk with me on journeys like this, and the Gallowborne as well. One was unconscious and more than halfway into the grave, and there remained only five of the cohort of two hundred that had once made up the other. Aisha had already suggested I disband them and assemble another retinue, but I’d refused. They’d died for me, John and his men. I would not spit on that by replacing them before the moon had even finished waxing.

“Senior Mage Kilian will have to remain with the Fifteenth,” Juniper said, “but her second should go with you. I want our own mages on the ground, to keep scrying in our house.”

“We have to assume Diabolist can listen in on all of those,” I grunted. “The Empress certainly can.”

“Ratface made his own codes that differ from Legion protocols,” Aisha said. “I would think that our conversations, at least, will be hard for her people to decipher.”

“She’ll still be expecting most our troop movements,” I said. “The Callowans I ordered to muster were warned she might make a sortie, but that only takes us so far.”

“I am not certain she will,” Juniper growled. “There would be obvious benefits to hitting our forces before they’re gathered, but the heart of her strategy remains to defend Liesse until she can deploy her ritual. She might not want to take the risk, considering you can pop out of Arcadia at any time to hit the city.”

“Assuming she can’t track me when I leave Creation,” I said. “We don’t know that she can’t.”

“I would not plan strategy around the assumption,” the Hellhound conceded. “But overestimating an opponent is just as dangerous as the opposite. If we are too careful to guard against means she does not have, we uselessly limit ourselves.”

I sighed.

“Yeah, true enough,” I said. “Pinpointing exactly what she can do has proved to be something a problem, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter that much. If we’re too slow we’re fucked anyway.”

Juniper rasped out a laugh.

“Won’t be the first time we fight against the hours as well as the enemy,” she said. “I doubt it will be the last. You leave with dawn?”

“That’s the plan,” I said, and turned to Hune. “Your people will be ready?”

“Orders were already given,” the ogre replied.

I looked away quickly, knowing if I kept staring anger would well up again. I had axes to grind with Hune, though I’d forced myself to keep my mouth shut about it. She’d done nothing that was against regulations, or outside her authority. Didn’t make me any happier about it.

“Dismissed, then,” Juniper grunted. “Catherine, a word?”

This hadn’t been an official staff meeting, and so there were only four of us in the command tent. Aisha gave my general a warning look before following the ogre out.

“I’m listening,” I told the orc.

“What the fuck is your problem?” she bluntly said. “You’ve been treating Hune like she ate your horse ever since Dormer. If you have something to say, say it. I’m her commanding officer.”

My eyes hardened.

“You don’t want to knock on this door, Hellhound,” I warned.

“I just did, Foundling,” she growled. “Out with it.”

I’d gained enough control that the wood under my fingers did not freeze, but not enough it didn’t fog as the temperature cooled.

“We had two trump cards to play, when taking a swing at the upper city,” I said flatly. “The Watch and the knights. She sent both to the flanks against the Immortals instead bolstering my own push.”

Juniper eyed me in silence.

“I get one,” I said. “The Immortals were taking their tool. But if the knights had backed me, Nauk would be awake right now.”

The Hellhound’s lips curled into a snarl.

“If you were an orc, you’d be on the floor bleeding from the mouth right now,” Juniper said, tone eerily calm. “And if you say anything like that ever again, I’ll resign my commission.”

My fingers clenched.

“Explain,” I said through gritted teeth.

“She made a call,” the Hellhound said. “As commander on the field. She did not do it lightly, or with unsound reasons. Just because you’re angry Nauk got wounded does not give you the right to treat her this way. She isn’t your friend, Catherine. She is an officer in the Legions of Terror .”

“I took four hundred men when I advanced,” I said. “You know how many came back.”

“And she saved twice that many by sending our heaviest hitters against the Immortals,” Juniper barked. “She made a tactical decision. It was the right decision, and I would have made the same. You had four Named with you, one way or another you were getting through. The others were expendable.”

Juniper rose to her feet and paused when she passed me by, laying a hand on my shoulder.

“It’s good,” she said gruffly. “That you care. The Empress wouldn’t. But you need the harden the fuck up, Catherine. We’ll both have a lot of dead friends before this is over.”

She left me to ponder that in the silent tent, eyes closed. Callowans had a lot of songs about the glory and righteousness of sacrificing yourself for the kingdom. I knew quite a few. None of them spoke of sacrificing those you loved though.

As always, the songs were thin gilding over the ugly truths of what I’d have to do.

Chapter 51: Overlooked

“It is ever the temptation of chroniclers to ascribe great failures to a single turning point, a flaw revealed or enemy virtue displayed. This simplification of history ignores the starker truth of all great enterprises, that in the end though all leaders are captains of a ship they rule neither wind nor tide. Failure and victory are the collection of choices small and great, shaped by perspectives of the myriad making them.”
-Extract from ‘The Ruin of Empire, or, a Call to Reform of the Highest Assembly’, by Princess Eliza of Salamans

The fairy gate had opened half a mile away from the outskirts of Dormer, and that was where the two thousand legionaries of the Fifteenth made camp. It had taken us a week of marching through Arcadia to cross what was essentially the full breadth of Callow, not a fae in sight. I was still only beginning to grasp the full implications of what the boon I’d obtained from the fae royals meant for warfare in Calernia. So far I’d only used the fairy gates to move quicker within the bounds of Callow, but that was a self-imposed limitation. With Hierophant to chart me a path, I could feasibly muster an army in Marchford and have it pop out in front of the Principate’s capital bristling with steel. Keeping an army in the middle of enemy territory supplied without turning to banditry would be near impossible, but what did it matter? I could leave the same way I’d come when my foodstuffs ran out. If the Red Flower Vales could be kept in Imperial hands, I could strike at Proceran territory with impunity while the First Princes’ army were stuck besieging one of the most heavily fortified borders on the continent.

It was enough to have me shiver. There was precedent for the kind of power I wielded as the last Duchess of Winter, villains and heroes alike that had shown a capacity for destruction just as great. The gates, though? I couldn’t think of one.

The Fifteenth had returned midmorning to Creation and I’d wasted no time in arranging matters with General Istrid. Juniper’s mother had always been my favourite of the Praesi commanders in Callow. Within moments of our first meeting, two years ago, she’d expressed the opinion that Governor Mazus had been in need of a good hanging. Always a way to get on my good side, that. She wasn’t much like her daughter, aside from the rough manners that were so common with orcs. If anything, she reminded me of Nauk – or the other way around, since I’d become acquainted with her first. She rode out to meet me on one of the great wolves that her people used as mounts, meeting me halfway to Holden. She gave warm welcome, though not without some grousing.

“You sent us across the country from the real fight, Squire,” she growled after clapping my back.

Before I’d stolen my mantle, Named or not it would have jostled me. The woman had ferocious strength still, for one in her fifties.

“Needed you to herd them towards me, general,” I replied. “Otherwise the front would have spilled across the south, and there was no putting that genie back in the lamp when it got loose.”

“Sacker says the same thing,” General Istrid said, visibly disgruntled. “A real shame. I won’t ever get a good crack at the fairies, with that peace you shoved down their throats. At least we get a turn in the dance with the Diabolist.”

“I won’t say she’s more dangerous than a pair of literal gods,” I said, “but we’re in for a rough month. You heard about the necromantic ritual?”

The exact nature of Still Water was still under Imperial seal, so the official story was that Akua had used some kind of ancient ritual to turn the entire city into undead. Considering the trove of horrors that still lay dormant in the Wasteland no one had questioned it too much, but I was aware it was only a matter of time until the truth of it trickled out.

“They’re supposed to be high-grade undead, right?” she growled. “That’s fucked. Skeletons and zombies need a necromancer guiding them to be a threat, but a hundred thousand bloody ghouls aren’t something to sneer at.”

“My caster tells me they’re closer to the kind of undead the Dead King uses for officers,” I told her. “We’re calling them wights.”

“The highborn twit should have paid closer attention to her history lessons,” the orc laughed. “We proved that dead men and household troops are no match for Legion steel when we put the Empress on the throne.”

There was truth in that, I felt, but also dangerous assumption. As far as I knew there’d been no battle of the scale of the one looming ahead during the Praesi civil war. Akua would have at a hundred thousand wights and six thousand living under her command, by our estimates, and the forces I was gathering would be a little over sixty thousand. Even during the Conquest armies that size hadn’t been fielded in the same theatre, and for good reason. It was going to evaporate at least half the Imperial treasury to keep that many people fed and armed, and the aftermath was likely to turn a chunk of the Empires’ breadbasket into wasteland. Nations fought with smaller hosts for a reason, even when they could muster great ones. The ride to Holden was spent recounting the Arcadian campaign at the general’s demand, until I stood in council with the other two generals in the city. Orim the Grim and General Sacker were significantly less friendly in the manners, though never actually impolite. Sacker did have that sharp goblin sardonic turn of phrase, but refrained from verbally pulling my pigtails the way she had on our first meeting.

I’d risen in rank quite a bit since then.

General Istrid had begun preparations for a march the moment my mages had scried hers, and I was rather pleased to hear the twelve thousand legionaries would be ready to leave come dawn. There was a certain pleasure to working with veterans knowing their way around a war. The Fifteenth’s officers were getting there, but my legion was not a well-oiled machine yet. Part of that was on me, I knew. Even after the brutal casualties we’d taken in Arcadia and Dormer, the Fifteenth was still twice the size of any other legion and severely lacking mages. It was a rare month I did not thank the Gods for granting me both Ratface and the inclination to not look too closely at how he kept us supplied. Even Juniper had ceased slapping his fingers when he bent the rules a little, using the fact I’d effectively suborned the Guild of Smugglers to him as an excuse to wash her hands of the matter. It was not the place of an Imperial general, she said, to meddle in civil affairs. A little rich of her to say considering Marshal Ranker used to run Denier through the governor, but in theory it was supposed to be true.

I rode back to camp a few hours before sundown, declining the offer of a roof over my head in the city in favour of sticking with my men. I was still chewing on the conversation I’d had with Juniper before leaving. That Hune had made the right call, even if it had seen one of the few people I considered a friend halfway to the grave. Even if it had led to the Gallowborne being all but wiped out. The ogre legate was the only one of my senior officers I’d never truly reached out to. I hadn’t made a lot of mystery about that, it must be said. When I’d first crossed the Empress by resurrecting a knightly order, she’d not been one of the people I gathered to tell. The Hellhound had objected back then as well, though I’d dismissed her words by saying I did not trust her the way I did others. Nauk, I recalled grimly, had been the very example I used. It might have been a mistake, I now thought. By visibly keeping Hune out of my ‘inner circle’ even though she was the second highest officer in the Fifteenth, I was making a self-fulfilling prophecy. Trust freely granted, in my experience, had a way of making people trustworthy. Of making them want to live up to that trust. I’d never attempted that with the legate.

It might not be too late to rectify that mistake, though. I still didn’t like the call she’d made, I admitted to myself. But it was a dislike that was borne of reasons personal. I do not have a monopoly on ruthlessness employed to save lives. I’d raised the Fifteenth out of people I knew, had shared struggles with, and they had since the beginning been given a measure of my trust. Hakram, Nauk, Ratface, Pickler, Robber. Even Juniper and Aisha, who had been opponents in the College but ones I respected. Hune had been brought in at the Hellhound’s word and so never fully welcomed into that fold. It was part of a larger flaw in the way I did things, one the Empress had already warned me against: I rarely gave power to those I did not personally know and like. It was telling, perhaps, that Anne Kendal and Juniper were respectively the effective ruler of Callow and the commander of the largest military force within its borders. But I could not continue along these lines if I wanted my homeland to ever climb out of the hole. No matter how skilled the few I fully trusted were, they were not enough to form the ruling class of an entire kingdom. I shook myself out of the thoughts and sought Hune instead of continuing down the spiral and of excuses and recriminations.

The ogre wasn’t with her officers. I found her at the edge of the camp, tucked away between two low hills and kneeling on the ground. Even like that she still towered several feet above me. I remained at a distance, though when I saw her lips move I sharpened my hearing to listen in. I’d had a casual disregard for other people’s privacy even before I began employing spies. Pouring wine into a wooden bowl, she murmured to herself.

“O Faceless Gods, I give you thanks,” the legate said. “For crossing survived and refuge found, for the breaking of the chains of men.”

Breaking a small loaf of black bread with fingers large as sausages, Hune crushed it into crumbs she dispersed next to the bowl. Crossing survived, huh. I knew ogres were not native to Calernia. They’d been brought over as slaves by the Miezans, and ended up joining the Dread Empire when the first Maleficent founded it in exchange for land to live on.

“Neither poor nor rich, neither free nor bound,” she murmured. “For the promise made to our ancestors, I offer bread and wine.”

My brows creased when I saw the crumbs rot and the wine turn to vinegar. Hune was not a mage. No ogres were, they could not be born with the gift. This was the closest to the miraculous powers wielded by priests I had seen on the Empire’s side. I knew there were cults in the Empire that sacrificed to the Gods Below in exchange for powers, but I’d never actually seen the Hellgods extend their hand to Creation before. It was chilling to watch, light as their touch had been. A reminder there’s more than one side of the old war looking at us. The ogre emptied the bowl onto the grass and brushed her hands clean, picking up the empty wineskin before rising back to her feet. She did not seem all that surprised to see me. Ogres, as far as I knew, did not have senses better than a human’s. She might just have been expecting me. Reaching me in a few strides, Hune lowered her massive torso in a bow.

“Lady Squire,” she said.

“Legate,” I replied. “Didn’t take you for the pious type.”

Her face did not react, neither irritated nor amused.

“I am not Praesi,” she said. “My people have their own ways.”

“So I see,” I said. “I’ll admit to some ignorance on the subject. Never found a lot of books written about ogres the way there are about orcs and goblins.”

Hune studied me calmly.

“We are not numerous enough to merit scholarly attention,” she said. “Are you seeking reports, ma’am? I gave instruction to my commanders to have them prepared, but I remember the details if you would prefer them spoken.”

“No, your officers already have me in the loop,” I awkwardly said. “They’re, uh, quite thorough. The precision of it will shave a few hours off Ratface’s workload when we link up.”

“I am sure your words will please them,” the ogre said. “How may I offer service?”

I was honestly unsure if she was politely putting me off or not. There’d been some people currying favour with me when the Fifteenth was founded, before Juniper had put her foot down. Even after, though, it was rare for people not to lean into an opportunity to talk with me when they could. I left matters of promotion to the Hellhound without meddling, but I was still arguably one of the ten most influential people within the Empire. I was a little at a loss at how to deal with whatever this was. I wondered if the Empress had felt the same, when she’d summoned me to the Tower for audience and I’d bluntly pushed through the small talk.

“Sit with me for a while,” I finally said. “If you’ve no pressing duties.”

“I can spare some time,” Hune said, her tone hinting at neither displeasure nor expectation.

I ended up with my legs going down the slope, thinking of how ridiculous we must look from a distance. Even with my plate making me seem larger, it would take ten of me put together to even remotely rival the legate in mass. I ran a hand through my hair, wondering exactly how I should go about this. It’d been easier, with the others.

“Are we to revise the command decisions I made in Dormer, my lady?” the ogre broke in while I was still debating.

Ah. She’d picked up on that, had she. Hard to play coy about displeasure when mine literally lowered the temperature.

“No,” I said. “It’s been pointed out to me that my objections were personal. Childish, arguably. I apologize for how I acted.”

“You were not impolite or unprofessional,” the legate said. “Even if you had been, you are Named. It is your prerogative to speak as you wish.”

“Doesn’t mean I should,” I replied. “So have the apology anyway.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” Hune said calmly. “Was there anything else?”

I turned to her and studied her face. There was something brutish about the ogres looked, the way their features were slightly broader than a human’s would be if they were the same size. It made them look a little slow, but there was nothing dim about those deep and dark-set eyes meeting mine.

“You don’t like me very much, do you Hune?” I asked.

The ogre’s face shuttered.

“I am an officer in the Legions of Terror, under your command,” she said. “If my demeanour offended you in any way, I apologize and stand willing for any punishment you deem fit.”

Catherine Foundling , I thought ruefully, charmer of the year.

“It’s not a crime to dislike me,” I said. “And I’m not offended. I’m honestly surprised at how well along I’ve gotten with the people around me. I wasn’t exactly the most popular girl at the orphanage.”

“You are apprentice to the Carrion Lord, named Vicequeen of Callow by Her Dread Majesty,” the ogre said woodenly. “Praises are your due.”

“I’m not all that interested in praises,” I said. “But I’d like to know what... this is about.”

I waved my hand vaguely. There was a flicker of irritation in her eyes, but I couldn’t call it a victory. It was too shallow. The kind of irritation you had for a fly buzzing in your ear, not something I could use to bridge a gap.

“Ma’am, I am your subordinate,” Hune said. “This is unnecessary.”

And that was the heart of it, wasn’t it? I didn’t consider my people to be subordinates, or at least not just that. They were the people I drank and laughed with, the people I shared a fire with. There’d been less of that since I’d begun gathering Named around me, it was true. But I’d not allowed those relationships to go fallow either.

“I ask more of my officers than others do of their own,” I said. “I try to give more as well.”

“We,” the ogre said bluntly, “are not equals. You hold power of life and death over everyone in the Empire, save a hallowed few. This pretence, my lady, is tedious.”

“So this is about power,” I said.

The sigh the legate let out was cavernous. I was pretty sure a single one of her lungs was the size of my entire torso. Should have done this when it was dark out , I mused half-seriously. Seems to work better that way.

“Is this an order?” Hune asked.

I nodded. I would have preferred not to make it one, but evidently that wasn’t an option.

“Then with your permission, I will speak frankly,” the legate said. “You are dangerous .”

“Usually when people call me that they mean it as a compliment,” I said. “I’m getting the feeling that’s not the case here.”

“The treaty with the Tower that granted us the Hall of Skulls and adjacent lands comes with mandatory service in the Legions,” the ogre said. “There has not been a war since the Declaration where my people did not fight and die.”

“I’m not unfamiliar with being on the wrong side of Praesi rule,” I said.

“With all due respect, ma’am, that is untrue,” Hune said. “You were born in the wealthiest city of the Empire’s breadbasket and raised by an institution whose education is on par with that of lesser nobility.”

“The orphanage saw lean month toos, Hune,” I said. “We had Governor Mazus running the city for years before he got the noose.”

“Every month, one of my people is murdered and drained of blood after coming too close to a lord’s border,” Hune said. “When the Green Stretch has a bad year, families sign themselves into servitude to avoid shortages. The Reforms barely lowered the amount of warriors that must be provided for service. We are strong enough to be of use and too few to be worth appeasing. Callowans hang when they rebel or resist, ma’am. We earn death by existing .”

“That can be changed,” I said. “Hune, none of this is set in stone. It’s not inevitable. It only works as long as we let it .”

“And speaking words such as these, you have raised a host that answers to you before the Tower,” the ogre said. “You promised freedom to the greenskins, insurgence to the many colours of men. And yet two things you have brought in fact: ever greater titles to you, and war wherever you tread.”

“Because it’s working,” I replied bluntly. “There’s opposition because we’re gaining ground. We push hard enough and it’ll break. We’re not going against infinite strength. At some point they have to bend or lose.”

“That may be,” Hune said. “Perhaps you will deliver all you have sworn. But you are not the first silvertongued monster birthed by Praes. We have seen them come and go, and what has changed? In the end all of them smile, and ask us to die in their wars.”

“I’m not asking you to die,” I said. “I’m asking you to fight. If not for me, then at least for something you want. To do more than just... linger.”

“We fought heroes,” the legate said. “Then devils. Then the courts of the fae. Now we march against a madwoman of the old way. What meaning have any of these to me? I took oath, and will serve in the Fifteenth until I die or my term ends. But you ask me to bleed for strangers and thank you for it. That is not the due of a soldier. It is the due of a servant.”

“I don’t want servants, Hune,” I said sharply. “I want comrades.”

“Servants are what you have, my lady,” the ogre said. “Your causes are their causes. You are Named, and so this is only natural. But I took oath to the Legions of Terror and not the army of House Foundling.”

“I’m not asking you to commit treason,” I said.

“We are riding with knights,” she replied bluntly. “Half the Fifteenth is Callowan. You strong-armed the Dread Empress into naming you ruler of this land. Do not misunderstand me, Lady Foundling, I wish you well in these ventures. The world may be better for your victory, should it come.”

Her dark eyes narrowed.

“But I will not die for another woman’s dream,” Hune said.

Slowly, she rose to her feet.

“I apologize for any offence I have given,” the ogre said. “May I be dismissed?”

I bit my tongue and nodded. I watched the legate stride away and passed a hand through my hair.

So much for mending that bridge.

Chapter 52: Tensile

“What cannot bend is fated to break.”
– Taghreb saying

I wouldn’t say aragh had grown on me, but it was the most common of the strong stuff that was peddled among legionaries. That had always been a source of wonder to me, that men and women who already carried so much weight over so many miles would still find it in them to slip a bottle of drink somewhere in there. Booze always found a way, didn’t it? I hadn’t asked Ratface to get me one, but it had magically appeared in my quarters after I’d gotten paring knives to stop disappearing from our supplies. My quartermaster was a tricky bastard with many an axe to grind, but it was little things like this that endeared him so much to me. Trust a Praesi to understand sometimes after a shit day you could need something a little stronger than wine. I poured myself a finger’s worth in a silver goblet that Robber’s men had ‘found’ back in Arcadia, aware I’d be going through at least a third of that bottle but unwilling to actually pour myself a full glass. It would have felt like to blunt an admission. I knocked it back and let out a groan at the the fire going down my throat, shaking my hair.

“Gods, that would outright kill a child,” I rasped out. “Should I pour you one as well?”

Thief was pouting when she came into sight, going from not to there in a heartbeat’s span. She sat astride the table, leather creaking on wood, and presented a golden chalice. I looked closer at it. Those were bells engraved on the side, weren’t they? The heraldry of House Fairfax.

“Did you steal this in Laure?” I asked. “From my own treasury?”

“Stolen?” she said. “How dare you, sir. This was bestowed upon me by the Vicequeen of Callow herself, for services rendered.”

“I paid upfront, actually,” I grunted, but I poured and the aragh sloshed in her ill-gotten goods. “Orphanage never covered how to negotiate with thieves, which in retrospective is an oversight on Black’s part.”

Thief tried the liquor and grimaced, coughing.

“You drink this?” she croaked. “ On purpose ?”

“You get used to it,” I lied.

The look she shot me was more than a little sceptical, but she got down her second swallow without her windpipe rebelling. I leaned back into my chair and granted myself a second finger’s worth.

“How do you do it, anyway?” Thief asked. “Tell when I’m there. I was under cover of an aspect, and I’ve stood inches away from men in broad daylight without them batting an eye.”

“I guess you could call it a Name trick,” I said. “You never had a teacher, did you?”

“Not one Named,” Thief frowned.

“Then I will share my hard-earned knowledge with you,” I affably said. “You know how when you came into your Name there was this set of instincts just under your skin?”

The brown-haired woman cocked her head to the side.

“It felt more like a hand guiding mine,” she said.

“Close enough,” I said. “When you’re about to get wounded or killed, you’re going to get a tingle just like it.”

She nodded slowly.

“I had no intention of striking you,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, but you were looking at me,” I said. “It does the same thing just... fainter. Black had people following for weeks back in Ater until I learned to pick up on it.”

“Then if I moved without looking?” she said.

“Probably wouldn’t be able to tell you’re there at all,” I said. “I didn’t get the impression this was common knowledge, anyway. I doubt most Named we’ll face will know the trick.”

Thief finished her chalice and presented it for filling. Feeling magnanimous, I deigned to comply.

“Are you sure you should have told me that?” Thief asked suddenly. “If I turned on you, this could allow me to land my first strike unseen.”

I took another mouthful of aragh, the roughness of the drink now beginning to be replaced by a vague sense of warmth across my chest. I waved lazily.

“Will you?” I asked instead of replying. “Turn on me?”

“If I deem it necessary,” Thief said, and for all that she spoke nonchalantly her eyes were serious.

“You say that like it’s a rare thing,” I told her. “You think Masego obeys my every order? Gods, let’s not even talk about Archer. Even my soldiers have lines in the sand they won’t follow me past.”

“You did not mention Adjutant,” the other Callowan said.

“Hakram’s the only person in this misbegotten world I trust unconditionally,” I replied, perhaps too honestly. “If he turns on me, I’m fucked regardless. No point in worrying about it.”

“He does more than you know,” Thief said.

“That’s what trust is,” I said. “Not needing to know what he does. I’m guessing the two of you had an unpleasant conversation at some point. Is there anything you want to bring to me? I’ll listen if there is.”

She studied me for a while, then shook her head.

“Nothing I can’t handle,” she said.

I raised my cup in a toast, then polished off the remainder.

“So what do you have for me?” I asked.

“Less than you want,” she shrugged. “There’s twelve thousand of them, I only had time to have a look at the upper officers.”

“And?” I prompted.

“Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I can tell,” Thief said. “If there are planted commands they are too subtle for my senses. I have difficulty feeling sorcery aside from wards, so it’s possible.”

“I hate dealing with Akua,” I sighed. “The bag of tricks she inherited is a bitch to handle.”

“I’m unsure why you would believe these legions would be her target,” she said. “Did you not send them away from the front?”

“She had to know I’d be pulling together all the forces I can before taking a swing at her,” I replied. “Istrid’s legions are going to be the core of our offensive against Liesse. If they break halfway through the assault we’ll be in deep trouble.”

“The Fifteenth still seems a better opportunity,” Thief noted. “It was raised recently and has a reputation for battlefield promotions.”

“The Fifteenth has been under Masego’s eyes for over a year,” I said. “She tries to enchant one of my senior officers and Hierophant will catch it. These three legions have been out of my sight for months.”

“And you believe she’ll have agents somewhere in them?” Thief said.

“I know she does,” I grunted. “That’s not even up for debate, it’s the base for half the plays I’ve seen her pull over the years.”

I filled my cup again, then hers when she hinted at desire for a top-off.

“Diabolist has been too... open,” I said. “She’s a chip off the old tyrannical block, I won’t deny that, but Akua’s wheelhouse has always been the indirect. The massive army of undead, whatever traps she cooked up around Liesse – those are dangerous, but they’re not the only arrows in her quiver. They’re blunt instruments when she’s a girl with a thing for daggers.”

“She spent months preparing for the ritual in the city,” Thief said. “I would look there for her sharpest blade.”

I drank and grimaced, though this once not because of the aragh.

“That’s been worrying me as well,” I said. “I mean, I’d have to be insane not to worry about a fucking ritual involving centuries of accumulated souls, but there’s more than that. Diabolist thinks what she’s prepared is going to put her on top of the pecking order, and she may have blinders but she’s not stupid .”

“I don’t follow,” the dark-haired-woman admitted.

“Think of it this way,” I said. “Akua has a large army and backers in the Wasteland, but not enough to handle the Empire at full tilt. Say we march up to Liesse, she pulls down the sky on our heads and our entire force is annihilated. She still loses, because she’s fresh out of a god and the Empire’s still standing. Weakened, sure, but there’s other armies it can field and other commanders too. She’s not winning, she’s delaying a defeat.”

Thief’s eyes narrowed.

“You’re implying she can use the ritual more than once,” she said.

“Pretty much,” I said. “This doesn’t make sense otherwise. And isn’t that the stuff of nightmares? Either the ritual works once but it has a permanent effect – but she didn’t rant about ascending to godhood when we talked, so I don’t like the odds – or whatever she can pull, she can several times. And it won’t be just a few either. If I die she’s up against Black, and he’s not the kind of man who shies away from a long slugging match.”

“Great sorcery always comes at a cost,” Thief said, but there was unease on her face.

“She won’t care, if she’s not the one paying,” I said. “We’ll have to go into that fight facing the possibility she has both her current armies and a deployable catastrophe in her pocket. We can’t face that and win with traitors in the ranks, Thief. It’ll be a razor’s edge as is.”

My fellow Callowan looked grim.

“I’ll take a closer look as we march, extend it to your men as well,” she said.

“Please do,” I said, indolently toasting her. “And while we’re on the subject, it’s getting tiresome to call you Thief all the time. I assume you have a name?”

“Juliet,” she replied without batting an eye.

I squinted at her.

“That was a lie,” I said. “Your heartbeat quickened.”

“Alas, you’ve seen through me,” she drawled. “Samantha.”

My squint deepened.

“Did you force your heartbeat to quicken just to sell this current lie?” I asked. “Because that’s genuinely impressive.”

“Did I? Vivienne,” she said.

“Your heart went faster again,” I sighed. “Now you’re just screwing with me.”

“I would never dare defy you, Your Grace,” Thief said, sounding wounded.

“I’ll call you Boris,” I threatened. “Don’t think I won’t. Robber will have a song about it before the moon’s turned and that’s a promise.”

She brushed back her bangs, seemingly amused.

“Vivienne Dartwick,” she said.

Huh, that sounded highborn. Wouldn’t have pegged her for one, though it wasn’t impossible. There’d been a lot of former nobles who’d fallen on hard times after the Conquest.

“Had a feeling it was that one,” I baldly lied.

My money had been on Juliet and I’d been coming pretty close to pretending I’d used a Name trick to know it was the truth. And they said I’d never learn prudence. I turned to offer an another refill but found only thin air. I waited for a long moment, but couldn’t feel her eyes on me.

“I might have shot myself in the foot there,” I admitted.

—

I ended up drifting from the path Masego had charted me. The fairy gate opened a few miles southwest of where I’d meant it to, though honesty compelled me to admit that might be on me more than Hierophant. Was I going to present it that way when we next spoke? No, absolutely not. Still, holding the destination in my mind when I opened the first gate was proving tricky when I’d never been there before. It was hardly a disaster, though. We’d have camp ready for sundown instead of Noon Bell, and a few hours of delay were hardly worth a second thought when I’d managed to lead fourteen thousand legionaries from Holden to central Callow in the span of a mere nine days. General Istrid was of the same opinion.

“That is a nasty trick you’ve got,” the orc gravelled. “The Procerans are going to piss their pants the first time you appear in the middle of their fields without warning.”

The two of us had gone with the vanguard, which for once was not made of my men. Istrid was riding a wolf the size of a pony, though noticeably broader. My own Zombie the Third had me standing taller than the orc, for once, since the great wolves stood closer to the ground. Mine also had wings, not that it was a competition. If it had been, though, hard to beat the flying undead horse. Her full contingent of wolf riders had preceded us, a horde of eight hundred that brought out old primal fears just to look upon. Beasts like those with riders just as green had been a plague on Callow for centuries, no match for the kingdom’s knights on the field but able to ravage large swaths of territory and withdraw if they were not checked quickly enough. The reminder that they were on my side rang a little hollow when Istrid’s own mount occasionally snapped at my own with fangs the size of daggers.

“Might not work out that cleanly,” I said. “Black tells me they have a Named future-teller on their side. I figure there’s decent odds there’ll be an army waiting for me on the other side of the gate.”

Neither of us bothered to pretend war with Procer wasn’t around the corner.

“Then they have to pull off thousands from the border to wait for you,” Istrid grinned savagely. “Their armies don’t march so quick, Squire. You hop south, then you hop north and just like that their army’s split in three – or the Fifteenth’s torching their fields and poisoning their wells. Big place, Procer. Won’t be easy to defend.”

I hummed and did not disagree. I wasn’t convinced, though. If Cordelia Hasenbach got her Crusade, that cause would attract more than armies. There’d be heroes too, and those had a knack for being in the right place at the right time to wreck the plans of people that worked on my side of the fence. The Fifteenth had been right behind the vanguard and I glimpsed Hune’s tall silhouette, surrounded by a dozen smaller ones as she advanced. I must have let my gaze linger a little too long, because Istrid noticed.

“Thought you liked them smaller than that,” the orc snorted.

“Wasn’t that kind of look,” I said.

The general wasn’t exactly someone I wanted to discuss who I kept bed with, so I did not elaborate. Although, to be fair, the Istrid Knightsbane had been happily married for several decades so in that regard she was definitely doing better than me. The orc’s very daughter had informed me that the word in Lower Miezan really was married and not ‘mated’, no matter what some Praesi books said. It wasn’t an exact translation from the Kharsum term, which was closer to bound-in-fortune , but the meaning was the same even if the customs differed some.

“Oh, I see how it is,” General Istrid grunted with amusement. “Got on your nerves, did she?”

I cast a steady look at the orc, who seemed rather unimpressed.

“We had something of a disagreement,” I diplomatically said.

“She doesn’t like you,” the orc said, fairly bluntly.

I winced.

“That’s a possible interpretation of it, yes,” I said.

“You’ve been running with Named too long,” the general said. “That sort of thing matters with a pack of villains, but she’s an officer.”

“I can work with people who don’t like me,” I said. “Hells, Juniper didn’t when we started out.”

“She’s a sweet girl, my daughter,” Istrid casually dismissed. “Ogres are harder to deal with.”

I stared silently at the general. Juniper. Juniper, sweet ? I’d seen her chew out a man so harshly over sloppy gear that he’d teared up. Even Robber tread lightly when she was in a bad mood, and the goblin regularly rode undead creatures I’d stuffed with explosives into active battlefields.

“The commander for my riders,” the orc elaborated. “Finest one I ever got, leagues above the woman I had during the Conquest. I still want to break his teeth every time his smug lips open. Don’t have to like him or trust him, though, because in the end we’re both under the banner. Doesn’t matter if you can’t stand your legate, it’s the Legions that come first – trust in that instead of the woman.”

Except my banner isn’t exactly Malicia’s, is it? It stood on the same side, I’d made sure of that as much as I could. But our interests weren’t all aligned. The ogre hadn’t been wrong when she’s said the Fifteenth was more likely to heed my orders than the Tower’s, if it came down to it. That Hune probably wouldn’t felt like a liability, but not one I could do much about. Setting aside the fact that the Hellhound would dig her heels in if tried to have the ogre transferred, I couldn’t exactly use ‘loyal to the Empire above me’ as a reason to act. I wasn’t sure I should, anyway. How likely was it that she was the only soldier in the Fifteenth who thought this way? We had a lot of Callowans these days but most my officers tribune rank and above were from the War College, and that meant greenskins and Praesi. I didn’t like the thought of having a lightning rod for those who shared the belief, but there were risks to not giving those people voice at all. I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. It would have to wait after the war, anyway. Changing the second in command of the Fifteenth right before the largest battle it’d ever been in would have been sheer stupidity.

“I got a lesson in ogre opinions,” I sighed. “Not a pleasant conversation, though it was worth having.”

“Nim’s never been accused of being too much of a laugh,” Istrid contributed. “There’s a reason she was assigned in the Wasteland. Mok’s better.”

Marshal Nim, that was who she referred to. The ogre that led the Seventh Legion and held overall command of every legion in Praes. The other was General Mok, commander of the Third and currently at the Proceran border under Grem One-Eye. The two most powerful ogres in the Empire, not that you’d know to hear Istrid speak of them.

“Surprised one made Marshal,” I finally said. “I didn’t get the feeling from Hune they particularly wanted to get involved with the rest of Praes.”

“Oh, they talk a good talk,” the general conceded. “But they like a good scrap as much as anyone. They can’t farm for shit in their hills, anyway, so they have to bring in the food with coin.”

“Thalassina’s pretty close,” I noted.

As the main trading port in the Wasteland, it was from there the grain imported from abroad poured through. There would be advantages to that, if trade was what kept the Hall of Skulls fed.

“Though that can’t be pleasant all the time,” I added after a moment.

The disadvantages of having a Praesi High Lord this close to your backyard rather spoke for themselves. Istrid snorted.

“They can talk when they share a border with Wolof,” she said. “Or the fucking Wallerspawn.”

A moment later she remembered my tan wasn’t all from the sun, and cleared her throat.

“No offence meant,” Istrid said.

I wasn’t eager to get into an argument with an orc about who exactly was in the wrong when it came to centuries-old border wars that had occurred often enough Daoine had seen fit to build a giant wall, so I let that one go. Probably for the best, since we were interrupted not long after. One of my mages hurried at our side, bringing word from the latest scrying. Diabolist was on the move, undead had poured out of Liesse. They were going, I was told, south. Towards the eight thousand men Ankou had sent out at my order.

It looked like the Second Battle of Liesse was going to have an opening act.

Chapter 53: Manoeuvring

“War is a breed of conflict decided by the allocation of resources. Through better apportionment a lesser nation can defeat a greater, but never if decision-making is of equal standing on both sides.”
– Extract from “The Modern Legion”, a treatise by Marshal Ranker

Come nightfall I held council. We’d ended the march two hours before sunset when the scouts found grounds suitable for a camp, and the legionaries had taken to building it with veteran expertise. The Fifteenth’s two thousand under Hune had raised palisades in the centre, with the camps of the other three legions forming a triad of spokes coming from it. Wide avenues were made for swift troop deployment, watches set before the wooden walls were even finished and scouting lines scattered around in case the enemy attempted to steal a march in the dark. I’d hesitated about the camp, but decided not to gainsay General Istrid when she suggested we should stop. Another two hours of marching wouldn’t gain us much ground, but proper fortifications would make a real difference if the Diabolist’s host tried a surprise offensive. That I’d call a war council was to be expected, given that the decision to march had been made that very morning and was a major departure from our previous operational plan. I’d spent the daylight in conference with mages and Thief, trying to get a better picture of the opposition, and I was glad I had. I would not have enjoyed looking like a reckless fool in front of these particular commanders, though there might be some grain of truth to that.

More reckless than fool, I liked to think, but that was the kind of judgement best passed on the dead.

I had three of the foremost Imperial officers in Callow facing me. General Istrid Knightsbane, commander of the Sixth Legion. Ironsides , their cognomen was. To orcs, perhaps the only one of their own that could top the reputation of Istrid’s legion was Grem One-Eye’s, for they’d earned that title breaking a charge of Callowan knights. General Orim – the Grim, his men fondly called him – led the Fifth Legion, cognomen Exterminatus . They’d earned that name during the Praesi civil war, executing near five thousand Praesi prisoners to ensure they wouldn’t be slowed on the march. The third and last was General Sacker, commander of the Ninth Legion. Cognomen Regicides . Her goblins had been the ones to kill the Shining Prince when he’d ascended to the throne of Callow halfway through the Fields of Streges. The red paint on her throat was kept by all her men as well, a reminder they’d slit open the throat of royalty without flinching. Hune and myself were green, compared to that assembly. The Fifteenth had been founded only two years ago, and though it had a score of victories under its belt most of my men were still just a few months out of the training camps. The fights I’d put them through so far had hardened them, but it would be years before they had the wealth of experience of the three legions now with me.

I cleared my throat when all were seated, and one of Hune’s aides provided scrolls to the three generals. Sacker seemed amused at the formality, Orim indifferent and I bit back a sigh when I saw Istrid was reading through hers too quickly for it to be anything but a glance.

“We’ve confirmed two things about the enemy,” I said. “The first is that they number between twenty and twenty-five thousand, with two thousand at most being living.”

“Always the way, with undead armies,” Istrid grunted. “They keep enough necromancers to have a leash and a few elite troops but nothing more. If they mix the forces too much they’ll start needing a supply train, and dispensing with those is one of the major advantages of raising the dead.”

“I’ve had intelligence that Diabolist had no more than six thousand living in he entire forces as of five months ago,” I said. “If we manage to wipe that two thousand, it’ll cripple her army before we move on Liesse.”

“I don’t like the numbers,” General Orim bluntly said. “If we were dealing with bones or shamblers we could handle two to one, but these ‘wights’ are supposed to be upper grade.”

“We let this go unchallenged and they’ll wipe the Ankou levies, Orim,” General Sacker spoke, her voice a dry whisper. “Then raise them still fresh. No coincidence, that number of mages. If we do nothing they gain another eight thousand foot, already armed and armoured.”

“Setting that aside, allowing a third of our Callowan reinforcements to be killed before the battle even begins will have stark effect on morale,” I flatly reminded them.

Considering I’d ordered those city guards to march in the first place I balked at the idea of letting them get attacked without reinforcing for personal reasons as well, but there was no point in speaking of that to these three. All of them had been part of the Conquest, I doubted they had many qualms about spending Callowan lives.

“It was foolish of their commander to circle by the south,” Hune said, the stone we’d dragged inside for her to sit on pushing into the ground. “They should have gone north and joined with the Southpool levies.”

Even half-crouched, her head touched the ceiling of the tent.

“That one rests on my shoulders,” I said. “I ordered them to muster as swiftly as possible, which is why the Southpool men were already on the move. Their commander took what she saw as the least risk-prone route, however incorrect her judgement.”

“Can’t expect too much of civilians in armour,” Istrid said, which was not excuse but perhaps lessening of blame.

Disinclined to let the conversation linger here, I moved it along with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

“Second thing we’ve confirmed: the enemy commander is Lord Fasili Miremebe,” I told them. “Formerly heir to Aksum. If someone can be considered the Diabolist’s right hand, it’s him.”

“That crazy old witch Abreha disinherited him?” General Sacker croaked. “Breaking with the Truebloods in full then. Bold, for her. She usually hedges her bets.”

“Don’t you spoil this campaign with talk about bloody politics,” General Istrid grunted. “I take it gating to their back isn’t an option? I doubt we’d be treading the plains if it was.”

It was my first instinct to keep them in the dark about my exact capacities, but I forced myself to ignore it. Paranoia had a place, but war councils wasn’t it.

“I’ve never been in the region before,” I said. “In those cases I need Hierophant at my side to chart a path through Arcadia. In theory I could try, but there’s no telling how long we’d be in there or exactly where we’d come out.”

“I can still be used to retreat, at least,” General Orim growled. “Being able to leave beyond pursuit is already major advantage.”

My brows rose. I’d never actually considered that. In part because I’d never lost a pitched battle, but also because I did tend to think on the offensive. General Sacker had been reading through the scroll carefully while we talked, and only spoke again when she’d finished.

“The Mirembe boy has only middling military record,” she said. “One internal purge at his great-aunt’s behest, held the left wing when Sahelian was manhandled during the Liesse Rebellion. Are we sure the information is correct?”

“It was supplied by Her Dread Majesty,” I said. “I can’t guarantee it, but I am disinclined to doubt.”

I’d had my own people dig into Lord Fasili as well, of course. Aisha had connections in Praes and had called on them, but they’d not unearthed anything the Empress’ spies had not and not everything they did. I had been worth the effort anyway, if only to confirm part of what I’d been given by the Tower. Blind trust had never been a virtue in my eyes, and was much worse than that if offered to a villain.

“Tutored by Asmund of the Dark Teeth Clan and Lady Taslima Ubid,” General Orim said, frowning at his scroll. “I know one of these names.”

General Istrid let out a noise of surprise.

“Asmund, the senior tribune from the Third?” she said. “Thought he was dead.”

“Lost a hand and resigned his commission after they put him under the Quartermaster,” the other orc told her.

“Taslima was on the general staff of the Eleventh,” Sacker croaked. “Senior Mage.”

“There’s a reason I had that on the final report,” I said. “Legate Hune?”

“Fasili Mirembe has studied the Legions,” the ogre stated bluntly. “In depth, from officers that fought during the Conquest. He will be prepared for our tactics.”

I inclined my head at the legate.

“I very much want him dead,” I said, not bothering to phrase it delicately. “If we manage to off Diabolist’s best general before the battle proper, her forces will be shaken when we assault. She’s only got so much talent left to call on.”

“It’ll be tricky catching up to them in time,” General Istrid said. “Their men don’t get tired on the move, and it’s not impossible for them to march through the night.”

“Not often,” General Orim said. “They can’t let their necromancers get too tired or they’ll lose hold of the undead.”

I cleared my throat.

“We don’t have the sorcery to scry through their wards on hand,” I said. “But I can scry Hierophant, who most definitely can. From our current positions, if the pace remains the same, we should meet with the Ankou troops two days before they do. Our current guess at when battle would take place is nine days, barring the unexpected.”

I watched rueful smiles bloom across the faces of the three greenskins facing me.

“Unexpected. Heh,” General Sacker whispered.

“Ah, to be young again,” Istrid mused.

—

I’d told Thief, not too long ago, that Akua had been too straightforward of late.

I learned how correct I’d been exactly one day too late, when I was scried in panic by the Fifteenth’s mage lines in the south. Liesse had spewed out a second army in the middle of the night, while we were encamped. After the ritual ended I remained alone for a long moment, and considered how badly I might have just fucked up. When I’d gone to collect the three legions before taking a fairy gate north I had tipped my hand. Diabolist now had an estimate of how long it would take me to ferry troops and she’d planned accordingly. As of now, the host under Fasili had kept the same pace and my own was only two days away from linking up with the Ankou troops. I closed my eyes and considered the parts in movement. If we kept marching west, we lost two days. Keeping in mind how long it would take me to pass through Arcadia if things went well, if we did this then Akua’s second host of twenty thousand would very likely have time to attack the men coming down from Southpool. Four to one against mages and undead? They’d be shattered within an hour of the first sword being drawn. The rest of my forces were in southern Callow, and if I left now to try to get them on the field up here would be pointless. Both the Ankou troops and the Southpool ones would be wiped by Akua’s armies before I even finished gating back to the rest of the Fifteenth.

I should have seen it coming, when I ordered the muster. Diabolist wasn’t an attacker by nature, not exactly. She was an opportunist. She’d waited until she could get a read on how quickly I could move, then gone to pluck the low-hanging fruits. The worst of it was that there was no real way to warn either of the Callowan forces. They weren’t Legions, they didn’t have mage lines for me to contact. The colder part of me considered the decision to make even as the rest remained in shick. If this was to be purely about numbers, I knew what call I had to make. Southpool was sending five thousand men, Ankou eight thousand better trained and better equipped. She didn’t even need to do anything. She just waited for me to blunder, and I did. There were advantages to being the swiftest player on the field, but costs as well. If you were the first to move then your actions were out in the open. But I hadn’t thought it would matter. I’d believed, deep down, that Akua would remain holed up in her lair and let me come to her. Because that was what villains did, wasn’t it? They raised the flying fortress and let the heroes knock at the gate. And now people were going to die because I hadn’t been careful enough. I only realized I was crushing the goblet in my hand when the wine wet my fingers. I called for my commanders as soon as I was no longer frosting every surface in sight.

“We’re losing one of those armies,” General Istrid bluntly said.

There wasn’t any hemming and hawing from the others. I could see in their eyes that the five thousand from Southpool had been written off before I was done speaking the sentence.

“Though her stratagem was a surprise, the deployments remain real,” Hune noted.

I invited her to elaborate with a look.

“Fasili Mirembe is within reach,” she said. “So are his necromancers. Their loss would still be a blow to her defences.”

“Five thousand levies for a third of her mages or more,” General Sacker croaked. “It is an acceptable trade.”

“That’s if we can decisively beat the boy,” General Orim grunted. “If he retreats in good order after a cursory skirmish, we will have been fully duped.”

“So we strike hard,” General Istrid growled.

Or is that what Diabolist wants? I thought. For us to commit here, where she knows we’re coming and has time to deploy every manner of nasty trick? The first time I’d ever seen Akua, when he’d spied on her conversation with Black, she’d called herself a skilled commander. I’d chalked that up to arrogance since, since she had no real victories to her name, but the arrogance might just have been mine. I’d never seen Akua Sahelian fighting an actual war before, had I? Before the battles had always been just a tool for positioning, a way for her to implement her plots. Now she’d bared her knife, and on our very first round she’d been the one to draw blood. As ever when dealing with Diabolist, the spiral of second-guessing and doubt was as dangerous as her actual actions. Whether Fasili and the mages were bait or not did not matter, in the end. Fighting him with the Ankou troops was still the best decision I could make. It niggled at the back of my mind that thinking about the best decision Juniper could make was exactly how I’d predicted her actions, during our war games, but was that alone enough to have me gate for the Southpool men instead? No , I admitted. It was almost presumptuous, to call joining up with Ankou reinforcements the best move . All it is is the lesser mistake of the tow before me.

“We keep going,” I said, and the words felt like ashes in my mouth.

I did not ask any gods for forgiveness. The ones that would grant it were my foes, and the ones I worked for knew nothing of the word.

—

It was a close thing, and I only avoided disaster by leaning into my instincts. Two hours before sunset, on the day before we joined the Ankou troops, I passed down instructions not to make camp and to continue marching after dark. Guided by magelights and goblins, our host of fourteen thousand pressed on until midnight. The pace slowed in the dark, but I was feeling an itch on the back of my neck. A sense of danger not yet revealed. Three hours of rest were granted before we resumed the march, and so narrowly avoided disaster. We found the Ankou city guard out in the field shortly before Morning Bell. We found the host of the dead as well, lines tirelessly advancing under the light of the rising sun.

“And that’s why when a Named tells you to keep marching, you fucking do it,” General Istrid said, and spat to the side. “This would have been a bad one, mark my words.”

We were both mounted again, the orc remaining at my side as our legions spread out. My helmet kept under my arm, I gazed at the enemy host.

“They marched through the entire night,” I said. “Gods, if you hadn’t warned me they could...”

“Their necromancers will be tired,” the Knightsbane said. “But our legionaries are as well. We’ll have to be real careful with that shield wall, Squire. Formations are what lets us win this. If they break them we’ll be in deep shit. Your countrymen can’t be relied on, not with dead on the other side and numbers that high.”

“You underestimate them,” I replied. “This is Callow, general. We’ve seen the dead walk before. We’ve turned them back, again and again.”

“From walls,” the orc grunted. “This is open field, and I don’t see no fucking knights. Just scared guards in cheap mail with spears they’ve only ever drilled with.”

“That’s why we spread Hune’s men through them, to serve as a spine,” I said.

I’d put the legate in charge of that entire division of the host, replacing the commander from Ankou. That ten thousand combined would serve as our centre, with the Fifth serving as the right wing and the Ninth as the left. Both legions had left a gap between themselves and the Callowans, bait for Fasili to send his wights through in an attempt to isolate our forces. Istrid’s own Fourth we were keeping in reserve behind the rest, with her wolf riders as an independent command.

“Twenty-three thousand on their side, twenty-two thousand on ours,” the Knightsbane growled. “We’re in for a bloody day.”

“If we can wipe their casters they fall apart,” I said.

Without the necromancers controlling them the wights would lack organization. They’d still fight with the intelligence of living soldiers, more or less, but without officers or orders. Numbers mattered less when they belonged to a mob.

“They won’t leave their mages unprotected,” General Istrid said. “I’m guessing they’ll go back to old Legions tactics from before the Reforms. They’ll keep five thousand back in a square around the casters and come in a wave, then rely on sorcery to punch a hole and try to flip our lines.”

“We don’t have enough mages and sappers with the Fifteenth to break a wave,” I murmured. “Hune’ll keep the fireballs back until she has to plug a gap to avoid exhausting her mage lines.”

“They’ll have a ritual prepared,” the orc laughed. “Those wily old Wasteland foxes always do. But I ain’t worried, to tell you the truth.”

I glanced at her, raising an eyebrow. General Istrid’s lips split into a vicious grin, ivory fangs glinting in the morning sun.

“Whatever sorcery they’re going to pull out, Squire, I doubt it’s going to be worse than you .”

Interlude: Skirmish I

“If I had an aurelius for every assassination attempt, I wouldn’t have to keep raising taxes.”
– Dread Emperor Pernicious, the Imperiled

Commander Joan Ansel had feigned anger when the ogre took command, for that was what her men wanted from her, but deep down all she felt was pathetic relief. This was all far beyond her ability to deal with. She’d been Royal Guard, once upon a time, and fought in the Siege of Laure until one of the gates gave and the Praesi ran loose in the capital. That record had seen her appointed to lead the city guard of Ankou a decade down the line, but her men forgot she’d been a captain back then. What did she know of leading armies, of field tactics and the like? Her job had been the hold the fucking wall with the company of soldiers that answered to her, and that duty she’d discharged and well. It hadn’t been her men that gave, when the Empire came knocking. This, though, this was all more than she could handle. The truth of how close they’d come to being wiped out by the enemy before the Legions ever caught sight of them still had fear running down her spine. Weeping Heavens, she’d still run if she could. Not that it was an option.

The fair-haired woman glanced back over the ranks and caught sight of that lone silhouette on horseback, a colourful cloak stirring in the wind behind it. The Black Queen herself had come to take charge, and she was said to have strong opinions on desertion. Joan hid a flinch under her helmet. They’d all heard how the Gallowborne had been snatched straight from the gallows and used ‘til they were spent on foreign fields. The woman knew Her Grace had been named Vicequeen of Callow by the Tower, that she did not hold the throne in her own right as the Fairfaxes had, but balls to that. It was open secret the Black Queen had slugged the Wasteland in the stomach until it spat out a crown for her to wear. She’s never lost a battle , Joan told herself. We won’t die today. She clutched that belief tight, watching the ranks of the dead advance. Thousands upon thousands, pale as the grave even in the morning sun. Their armaments weren’t pretty like those of the Legions, no matching colours and smooth lines. Just pieces of armour slapped together over a marching corpse, blades and spears and every weapon that could be gotten cheaply in hand. They did not look fearsome, until you saw there was only death in those empty eyes.

Her men, at least, had decent mail and good spears. The city guard used clubs and knives within Ankou to keep the peace, but it was tradition old as the kingdom that all of them drill with the spear every month. The city was the last holdfast between Callow and the fucking Procerans, if the Vales fell. It was expected to be able to hold until the kingdom’s armies arrived. Ankou has walls , she thought. Here there is only barley and black earth. Both would be stained red before long. Joan felt her hands shake with tremors they’d disdained when she was still young, but she’d been a dumb twat at twenty hadn’t she? Thinking Laure could hold against the godsdamned Carrion Lord and his pack of monsters. Now she neared fifty and knew better. There was no winning against the Wasteland. And the harder we fight, the harder we die. The thought was dark, but Joan had not felt this powerless in decades. The Imperial Governor in Ankou had been content to wring taxes out of the people and ignore them otherwise, until his term ended last year. They’d all gone on with their lives with no one bothering with them.

Now Joan was back in the Tower’s eye, sworn to die in its name.

“Commander Ansel,” the mountain said. “Your men seem dispirited.”

Joan swallowed and looked up at the ogre. Legate Hune, she’d said her name was. One of the Fifteenth’s top officers though not one she’d ever heard of, like the Hellhound or Hakram Deadhand. The creature was large as a dozen men, and those eyes were studying her like she was some sort of insect one misstep away from being squashed. Gods , she thought, why did I not retire? Coin would have been tight, but better poor than dead.

“They’ll hold, ma’am,” she stiffly told the monster. “They know the stakes.”

You didn’t need to be some great general to see the Black Queen had put Joan’s men in the centre because all she wanted from them was to hold. The wings on both sides were Legions, and it’d be them who decided the battle while Callowans died like dogs . But if the centre collapses, this turns into slaughter . The dead would split the Black Queen’s army in two and overwhelm it in small bits. The fair-haired woman knew this, but she wasn’t sure her soldiers did. And even if they do, are they going to give a shit when their faces are getting chewed off? Joan shivered. It was easy to see the disaster this could turn into.

“They will,” Legate Hune agreed calmly. “Pass this down to your officers: the legionaries of the Fifteenth are under instruction to kill any men fleeing the battlefield. Cowardice will not be tolerated.”

Joan’s eyes flicked to the Black Queen, still unmoving in the distance. Gods it was eerie how still she was.

“The Vicequeen will not gainsay that order, commander,” the monster said coldly. “You will find no saving grace there. She has no patience for the yellow-bellied.”

Easy for you to call people that , she thought. You’re a fucking battering ram unto yourself.

“We’ll hold,” Joan said, and hated how weak it sounded.

She breathed in and out, kept her hands against her side to end the shaking.

“Down here in the mud, it’s us who holds the line,” she whispered, and that one had some iron to it.

The old song spoke about dying free, though, didn’t it? She smiled bitterly. Well, songs were songs. Creation was never as pretty as they said.

—

Orim of the Tarred Dogs breathed in deeply. The air was crisp and clean out here, nothing like the squalid reek of Laure. He felt the part of him that was the general melt away, the chief he’d once been baring his fangs anew. Gods, it was good to be at war again. To have an enemy to chew up, an army to break and scatter and crush underfoot . It was the way orcs were meant to live, not playing fucking wet nurse to a mob of bleating Callowan cattle. Oh, he knew why Lord Black had garrisoned him in Laure. The day he’d spilled the lifeblood of five thousand Praesi on Wasteland grounds still rang in people’s ear, a whisper of fear and death if he was crossed. It had kept the likes of Mazus in line and the local waste as well. But having to be patient and kind and all those hundred tedious little duties had worn away at him. Orim was fifty-three, now, but today he felt young again. It was going to be a good day, and all he regretted was that he had to fight under a green girl instead of Grem or the Carrion Lord. What Lord Black saw in the Wallerspawn was beyond him. She had a way with killing, but the Empire had no shortage of killers. Few of them were so irritatingly high-minded about getting the job done.

His general staff arrayed around him, Orim studied the rebel army. The wights would not be easy meat, but this was a battle that could be won. The Wastelander boy leading the other side had thickened his ranks before approaching, massing the dead to match the line of Callowan levies. Deeper lines, though. The mixed Fifteenth and levies numbered ten thousand in total, but the rebels must have closer to fourteen or fifteen thousand facing them. It was like Istrid had thought, Mirembe was aiming to break the centre and split them. There was more to enemy tactics than a single wave though. A chunk of three thousand wights had been split from the rest of the host and was heading towards Orim’s own Fifth Legion. Behind the centre of the rebel army the living could be glimpsed, Praesi household troops and mages that couldn’t be more than two thousand. There were another three thousand wights in a ring around them, which was a damned shame. Istrid’s riders could have looped around to hit the Praesi if they hadn’t kept those.

“General Sacker seems to have the lucky draw of the day,” his Staff Tribune said.

Orim grunted in assent, though he didn’t look at the Taghreb. Sacker’s Ninth made up the left wing, and unlike his own legion there was no detached division heading for her. The orc licked his chops, the atrophied muscles of his face keeping his lips near-unmoving. A weakness he’d been born with, one that had seen him called Grim for how hard it was to smile. He’d been lucky it hadn’t been obvious when he’d been a babe. Orcs born flawed didn’t make it through long winters.

“Prepare to receive them,” he ordered. “Staggered welcome.”

His Senior Sapper snorted, then spoke to the flag-bearers. Twice red cloth rose, and it was fewer than thirty heartbeats before the scorpions began firing. Steel-tipped javelins tore through the first rank of the three thousand wights moving towards the Fifth like wet parchment. The undead were within three hundred feet, good killing range. The second volley flew twenty heartbeats later, this one angled to punch through more than one wight per projectile. The rebels had put cheap armour on their dead, but going through flesh and bone still took strength: it was a rare javelin that took more than two. The wights began to quicken their steps before the third volley launched, much as Orim had expected. If he’d had longer to prepare the chief would have made his sappers trap the advance, but the rebels had been too swift for that. No matter. Undead hordes had no skill to them, even the clever ones, and this one seemed to have no skirmishers to field. They’d bleed for that. The flags rose again and the Fifth’s sapper lines shot forward across the field. They slowed right before the enemy entered range, the sharpers thrown carving holes into the enemy ranks with loud cracks. The goblins immediately began to withdraw at a measured pace, munitions detonating every ten heartbeats with disciplined precision.

“We’ll have a more than a tenth of them gone before they reach our shield wall, at this rate,” his Staff Tribune observed.

“Close up is where undead shine,” Orim reminded her. “This won’t last.”

He’d learned that the hard way, when they’d marched on Okoro during the civil war. Skirmishers scythed through the first few ranks of enemy undead and he’d thought it was going to be a slaughter, but it had ended up so close a victory it might as well have been a draw. Undead did not tire, or break when they lost too many. You couldn’t flip their line the way you did the living because they didn’t panic and flee. They didn’t stop unless you broke them all, or the necromancers holding their leash. Three thousand wights against the four thousand men of his Fifth seemed like throwing away bodies but it wasn’t that. The boy on the other side knew whatever dead managed to reach their lines would keep Orim’s legion too busy to redeploy for at least an hour. He’d going to be hitting the centre’s right side , the orc thought. The wights sent against the Fifth had been meant to prevent it from reinforcing there: Mirembe was trying to create weakness for him to tear through. But that wouldn’t be enough, not with Istrid’s legion kept back to plug exactly that sort of gap. So what are you truly up to, Wastelander?

One hundred feet until the wights hit the shield wall. No crossbow fire had greeted them when they entered range, for that would have been a pointless waste of bolts. Nothing that light would put down the likes of them. Orim spat to the side and made his decision.

“Heavies to the front,” he said. “Senior Mage Dolene.”

“Sir?” the Soninke replied.

“No volleys,” he ordered. “A Hook, then Lob until told otherwise.”

Whatever the rebels were up to, it depended on him being pinned down. To unmake their design he must tear through the opposition as quickly as possible. The orc watched as the ranks of the Fifth smoothly redeployed, the sappers taking refuge as his men and orc in heavy plate came to the fore. They would tire swiftly, he knew, but regulars would not make as much of an impact. He would take the gamble. Mere moments before the wights smashed into his frontline fireballs bloomed, rising up at a sharp angle before being pulled down backwards into the first rank of the wights. Hook . Flame consumed the undead, intensely concentrated so it would bite hungrily into dead flesh. The horns sounded and his heavies let out a loud cry, shields raised as they charged into the enemy. There was a thundering crash of steel on steel and the mage lines crafted flame again, tossing them into the roiling mass of wights far from the frontline. Lob , the doctrine called it. Meant to weaken the pressure of the enemy so it could be devoured in waves.

The glare of the sun glinting on his helm, Orim the Grim watched the struggle of steel against dead flesh and his lips half-twitched into a grotesque smile.

—

General Sacker watched from her raised platform as the line of Ankou men bent under the weight of the undead and frowned. Her missing eye itched, the urge of scratching the scarred tissue ever an effort to master. Either the enemy was blundering, or they had. The Callowans had thin blood and there could be no turnaround expected from them, but the centre was holding in the face of the wights. Legate Hune’s legionaries steadied the parts of it that wavered, filling the gaps with red-painted steel and unflinching discipline. The Matron was almost impressed. Most of the Fifteenth was fresh out of the camps and of conquered stock to boot, which had seen her lower her expectations, but the men she saw fighting did so as proper legionaries. It is not merely Names that won them the victories, then. Something to consider. Any pack of goatherds could win a battle against an army if a demigod stood at their head, but the Squire had yet to act. This was the men of the Fifteenth alone and they were acquitting themselves more than passably. Had Sahelian’s dogs made the same erroneous assumption she had, perhaps?

It seemed unlikely. The Diabolist had fought Lord Black’s apprentice many a time, and seen the Fifteenth in action twice. Yet Fasili Mirembe’s army was headed towards defeat, should matters continue to unfold as they now did. Sacker’s men were cutting through the wights in front of them at a steady rate, sharpers and demolition charges opening holes she saw broadened with mage fire. Her regulars were pushing back the enemy, slowly but surely. And when they found nothing but field in front of them, they would turn to flank the wights facing the Callowans. Sacker’s remaining eye was not as sharp as it used to be when she’d been a young and red-handed Matron – alchemical concoctions could lengthen her lifespan, but not reverse the ravages of time – but she saw clearly enough. And what she saw was this: there were too few wights facing her Ninth. There’d been no need for Lord Mirembe to have fifteen thousand undead facing the ten thousand at the centre. Some of these now stood before her legionaries, but not enough to account for the numbers. Where had the rest gone?

When the battle had begun, there’d been a gap between Orim’s Fifth and the centre. When the Fifth became tied down Legate Hune had lengthened her line to avoid getting flanked through it. Studying the mass of silent yet writhing undead, Sacker found a current. The ranks are thinner where the gap was , the goblin thought. They’re massing wights in front of it to prepare for a push. Mirembe on the other side had to know it would not win him the battle even if he broke through there. Istrid would charge into there fangs bared and stabilize the centre. And after that? Sacker pondered. The Praesi still had a ritual up their sleeve, this was a given. Superior sorcery was their greatest advantage. They wait until Istrid is committed there. Orim won’t be able to disengage from the wights after him, even if they’re not a real threat to him. The orc had engaged the three thousand sent towards him aggressively, she’d noted, using tactics that Legion doctrine usually preached should be used against levies. The picture, slowly, began to paint itself. With the Fourth filling the gap, the only uncommitted force on the field would be Istrid’s riders. And if the rebels hit the Fourth with their ritual, not only do they reopen the gap but they’re costing us legionaries instead of Callowans.

Wolf riders alone would not be able to turn back the wights pouring through. They were not meant for hard fights like those. What, then, would be sent to prevent Sacker’s own legion from intervening? The old goblin’s eyes turned to the Praesi holed up behind the battlefield. Household troops, around a thousand. Half that number of mages and officers. And four hundred men in Helikean scale armour, most likely mercenaries. By themselves, not a threat. But able to withstand eight hundred wolf riders if those attempted a charge on the mages. Which left the three thousand wights currently deployed in a ring around the Praesi free to tie down the Ninth Legion while the left flank collapsed. It was a pretty little strategy, she would admit. Neatly designed to exploit the weaknesses of their host. It did not, however, account for the Squire. They cannot be so blind as to discount her , she thought. There is still an element missing. Whether it could be found would decide the victor of the day.

—

Abigail screamed herself hoarse, smashing her shield in a dead man’s face. The nose broke with a crack but the shit didn’t care in the slightest, hacking at her from the side. Good legionary mail had the blade bouncing off but it would leave a bruise. Sweat pouring down her face, she rammed her sword in the wight’s throat and felt the spine give to goblin steel. She hacked the head off while it continued wailing at her, her shield denting under the force of the blows. Even headless the wight kept on attacking, and something smashed into her helmet that had her vision swimming. She felt someone pull her back and a tall orc filled the empty space, forcing down the wight and letting the legionaries behind him hack it to pieces.

“Captain, you still with us?” a man’s voice asked.

Abigail wiped the spittle and sweat off her lips, focusing on the person it belonged to. Sergeant Tadaaki, whose dark face was creased with worry. She clapped the Soninke’s shoulder, feeling a wave of nausea coming over her.

“I’m f-“

She bent to the side to empty her stomach on the ground.

“Fine, sergeant,” she moaned after. “I am fine.”

No bleeding parts, so there was nothing to bother what few healers they had with. The disgusting taste lingering in her mouth, Abigail wiped her face and deeply regretted having tried her lieutenant’s ‘mystery stew’. Secret Taghreb recipe her fucking ass. Didn’t look any better coming out than it had going in . Never falling for that one again. That wasn’t godsdamned rabbit floating in the stuff, no matter what he said.

“Take a breather, ma’am,” the sergeant said. “I’ll handle the frontline.”

“Don’t get aggressive, Tadaaki,” she said. “We can’t afford the losses. Bloody militia’s shaky enough as is.”

“They’re your people,” the Soninke replied, flashing a grin.

Abigail spat the scum out of her mouth, hoping the man whose boot she’d dirtied hadn’t noticed.

“They’re Ankouans,” Abigail argued. “They’ve got more in common with goats than a good Summerholm girl like me.”

Everybody knew the people in Ankou were barely Callowan at all, what with all that breeding with Procerans. Sergeant Tadaaki left her to the sound of laughter. Good sort, that one, for a Wastelander anyway. Captain Abigail made her way to the back of the line and undid the straps of her helmet, taking it off long enough to let her sweat-soaked curls cool a little. Gods Above , she thought as she watched the melee ahead, what a mess. She could not believe she’d ever been drunk enough to think enrolling in the Legions was a good idea. Abigail had come within an inch of dying twice in the last year, and now held the dubious distinction of knowing what fae blood tasted like. Screaming while hacking at Summer warriors came with drawbacks when red flew. Well, it beat being a tanner at least. Her family home had gone up in green flames when the Black Queen tangled with the Lone Swordsman a while back and her uncle had made it clear that being allowed to live under his roof came at the price of going into his trade. Her two brothers had folded, but she’d decided she wasn’t going to smell like rotting corpse garbage for the rest of her life.

She was coming to reconsider that decision, but with three years left to her service that meant less than nothing. There wasn’t anyone in the Fifteenth that was idiotic enough to think that desertion was an option. The captain rolled her shoulders, wishing she could take off her mail for even ten heartbeats. Her aketon was drenched, and now that she wasn’t busy trying not to get killed she realized that her nipples itched something fierce. Ugh. She took a look at the melee to distract herself, knowing she’d have to go back before long. Tribune Ashan would report her otherwise, and Legate Hune was strict with disciplinary actions. The wights were chewing into the lines, but not as bad as she’d thought they would. The Ankouans were holding up pretty well, for a pack of hacks with spears. Probably helped they didn’t let the dead get too close. Her own company rotated the lines often enough no one was dropping from exhaustion, though the enemy was hard on regulars like her. They swung harder than living men did, and if their armour had been any better they’d have been a hundred Hells to put down. Still, overall she called this better than Dormer – though ‘less dangerous than fire-spitting immortals from a legend world’ was a fairly low bar to set, now that she thought about it. At least she hadn’t pissed herself this time, so there was that, though if the battle continued for another few hours there was no guarantee that would last.

It was because she was at the back of the line that she noticed it. She could see the rest of the army, compare where it stood to where her men did. Realize that her part of it was being pushed back, step by step. It wasn’t some great turning of the tide or anything like that. Just... pressure. Slowly increasing. And we’re bending in front of it.

“Shit,” she said feelingly, and fumbled the clasp of her helmet after forcing it on. “Shitshitshit.”

Tribune Ashan’s cohort, of which her company made up half, was the anchor for right side of the centre. If they broke, then the wights had nothing to stop them and the swarm was going to be coming from all sides. Unsheathing her sword, Abigail went back cursing into the fray and really hoped that someone, anyone, was noticing how close to disaster they were edging.

Interlude: Skirmish II

“Mark my words, the Imperial banner will be flying above Summerholm by midsummer.”
– Dread Empress Regalia II, shortly before initiating the Sixty Years War

“Sound the horns,” General Istrid said.

The Red Rage pulsed in the back of her head, the song of slaughter sweetly beckoning. She’d learned to ignore it, since she’d taken her oaths to the Legion all these years ago. Still the urge was always there, to let the howl loose and sink her fangs into one quarry after another until all was left of her was the joy and the blood. Orcs never really went tame, even when you drilled them and clad them in man’s armour. Her warlord understood that, had never tried to make them anything but what they were. Instead he gave them enemies and taught them to be better killers, to wed savagery to discipline and something greater than themselves. Some of the younger greenskins nowadays thought that great thing was the Empire, but they’d been born in different times. Istrid of the Red Shields worshipped only at the altar of the Legions of Terror, the greatest killing machine Calernia had ever seen. What was Praes, to her? A pack of squabbling humans decked in silks and too much gold. Should she ever get the order, she would burn everything they had raised to ashes and salt the grounds of their ancestral homes.

It might just come to that. The Rage pounded her temples like a drum at the thought. Black’s scrappy little apprentice had men singing of revolution these days, and even Her Dread Majesty was getting her hands dirty in the Wasteland. After they dealt with this Sahelian girl, the old order was going to see revisiting . She savoured the killing yet to come, for many reasons. The Red Shields Clan was not unbroken lineage like the Howling Wolves or the Ivory Fangs, but the shamans still spoke histories from the dead clan that had birthed her own. Of the days when greenskin hordes sacked Wolof and Okoro as they wished, took tribute from the kneeling kings of Aksum and fought great battles against Deoraithe in the Golden Bloom. Even before the Miezans the strength of her people had been waning in the face of high walls and cunning sorceries, but Creation was a wheel ever spinning. Every dog had their day, if they were patient enough. Her people’s felt like it was coming.

The Fourth did not use Praesi-made horns for their signalling. Istrid had her own crafted from the bones of the great drakes whose remains still littered the Steppes, great carved things that took an ogre to blow them. Their call was deep and shivering, the hollow cry of creatures long dead to this land. It was the promise of death, and Istrid’s legionaries marched to it against the last gasps of the old order.

Squire’s legate had done what she could but these Callowans were watchmen, not Royal Guard. When the wights pressed where the line was thinnest and the men of the Fifteenth started dying, the left side of the centre wavered. Istrid had ordered the horns sounded before it could collapse entirely, and watched as her legionaries steadied the front before edging the Callowans aside. Her Fourth had earned their cognomen at Black’s own word, after the Fields, for turning back the mounted killers of the kingdom. Ironsides . It had a lot of people thinking she’d raised her legion for defence, for taking a hit and swinging back. Ignorance, that. Istrid Knightsbane had climbed her way to the heights where she now stood by massacring everything in her way, be it rivals chiefs or Wasteland lords or the chivalry of Callow. She’d raised her army in her image: brute force made host. She had fewer sappers than any other legion in service, only the requisite number of mages and the Fourth was the only Praesi host with more heavies than regulars on the rolls. There was a reason they paired her with Sacker, she knew. Her old friend would use finesse where she did not, temper her more belligerent instincts. But there would be no need for deep thinking, today.

In front of her dead men stood and she would shatter them. That was all there was to it.

The orc tightened the clasps of her helmet and licked her chops. Her personal guard clustered around her, as eager for the fight as she, and Istrid glanced at her seniormost legate.

“Bagram,” she announced. “Command’s yours.”

“Wade in their blood, Knightsbane,” the orc replied, flashing fangs.

Just a little too long in doing that for it to be entirely proper, but the old bastard had always been flirtatious. Istrid limbered her aging shoulders with a roll and unsheathed her blade. Ahead of her the lines impacted with a heady fracas and she picked up the pace. Legionaries moved aside for her until all that was ahead was the dead, a teeming mass of pale flesh and steel that came in silent waves. The orc stomped the ground and let out a hoarse yell. A hundred of the same gave reply, greenskins from steppes both Northern and Lesser. Berserkers like her. There were some who said there was no longer a place for the Red Rage, in this orderly little world the Tower was building. No place for the old dumb brutes from the north.

“ Bone and flesh torn asunder ,” she whispered in Kharsum, letting the old words wash over her.

Her father had spoken them, and his mother before her. All the way back to the Broken Antler Horde and the years where Creation had stood in awe of the orcs.

“ Caked in doom and mask of cinder
Stand ye ever red in tooth and claw
Like empty, great and gaping maw .”

The old rhyme eased her into it, the way it was meant to. Istrid’s body shook with spasms as a scream not her own filled the air. Muscles tightened, bones creaked and the world turned to shades of crimson. The wight ahead of her struck, but so did she and her sword ripped through bone and flesh, bending steel and smashing it into another undead.

“FORWARD,” she bellowed, laughing madly.

And so they went, doom upon all the world.

—

Abigail kept cursing even as the mage healed what was left of her eye. She could still feel the teeth going into her flesh, ripping and tearing as she struggled to get the wight off of her. It said a lot about the day that she was one of the lucky ones. Her entire line had been wiped out trying to steady the fucking Ankouans when it looked like they were going to rabbit: with the guards giving ground her twenty had been surrounded and torn through in moments. If a mage line hadn’t burned her a path to retreat, she’d be in some wight’s mouth like the rest of her soldiers.

“Cowardly shits,” the captain spat. “I hope she hangs them all.”

“Unlikely,” Lieutenant Salome noted. “And if you continue speaking, I cannot promise you’ll ever see again.”

Abigail shut the Hells up, though she was starting to have opinions about Legion healers. They worked slower than the brothers and sisters at the House of Light and their bedside manner was a lot less pleasant. They weren’t as good at healing, either. The lack of gentle persuasion about attending sermons more often wasn’t enough of a trade-off for maybe losing half of her total eye supply.

“There,” the solemn Taghreb said. “That should be enough. Keep in mind this is a patch job, Captain. Actual restoration would take hours of precision work, and will have to wait until this is no longer an active battlefield.”

“I know the triage protocols,” Abigail griped. “I sat through the fucking lectures.”

The Legions had to be the only army in the world where they made you sit like a schoolgirl after the drills. It was a good thing she know how to read, too, because it was a requisite if you ever wanted to make tribune. She had her eye on that promotion, as it happened. Officers of that rank weren’t expected to be on the frontlines as often, which should do wonders for her life expectancy.

“Legate Hune left instructions for the soldiers that were in your section to present themselves for redeployment,” the olive-skinned mage told her. “Try not to get killed, Captain Abigail. It would be a shame for my work to have been pointless.”

“You’re all heart, Salome,” the dark-haired woman drily replied.

Much as she disliked the notion of going back into the thick of it, the Callowan had expected she’d be sent for. Half her company still lived but it wouldn’t be headed back to where it had been bled – that space was now occupied by the Fourth, which had come out swinging. And screaming. Gods Above, so much screaming. It must have been an orc thing. The legionaries were turning around the situation there, at least. Their frontlines had been stacked with heavies and they’d slammed into the wights like a runaway cart, gaining back all the grounds that’d been lost in the span of a quarter bell. Now they were carving a wedge into the undead, which she assumed was the preludee to an all-out assault. Abigail made the rounds and collected the remains of her company from the tender attentions of the healers or the grounds where they’d dropped down exhausted before making her way to command. Senior Tribune Locks was the one who met with her, the reason for his ridiculous Legion-assumed name made clear by the dark curls going beyond his helmet.

“We’re keeping you in reserve for now, captain,” the Soninke told her. “Most likely you’ll be joined with another company that took casualties and sent to steady the levies.”

Steadying the godsdamned Ankouans is how I lost half my company, you smug prick , she thought.

“Looking forward to it,” Abigail said, playing up her Summerholm accent so the sarcasm wouldn’t register.

She spent half a bell after that standing behind the lines like she was on death row, but she couldn’t complain. Better the wait than the fight. She was no tactician, but at the moment she’d wager the judgement that things were looking up for her side. The Fifth on the right flank was still stuck dealing with wights, but the undead were beginning to thin. The Ninth was going through the enemy slower but with fewer casualties, and the Fourth was digging into the undead like this was summer solstice and they hadn’t eaten all week. It could be generously said that the centre was holding, though not much more than that. There’d been no glaring fuckups that would require her to be sent back into the mess, and she told herself she’d light a candle in a House for that. As long as it cost copper, anyway. She wasn’t putting down silver for the folks Above, not unless she got a promotion and her hooks into a pretty boy that was supernaturally flexible in bed.

She was made to regret the blasphemy immediately.

There’d been a bunch of fancy Wastelanders looming behind the undead since the blades had come out and they’d finally stirred themselves to act. The move they made was on the Black Queen, and Abigail had to give them praise for the balls of it if nothing else. Catherine Foundling had a reputation for brutally murdering her way through problems, so it was pretty brave of them to so openly embrace that label. Blinding panels of light formed around the Squire in the distance, slowly spinning. Abigail would have looked closer but it hurt her eyes to, and not just because of the light. The shapes she could discern were hardly shapes at all, and even glancing was enough to have the beginnings of a migraine forming. To be honest, she wasn’t too worried about this. Trapping the Black Queen was kind of line trying to put a bonfire in a box – it’d work for that short moment until the whole thing caught fire and then your hands were on fire as well and by then it was way, way too late to do anything about it. Unlike some of her dumber countrymen Abigail didn’t think there was anything gloriously patriotic about trading a Praesi monster in charge for a Callowan one, but Heavens was she glad to be in the Fifteenth and not in the ranks of whatever poor fucking fools were fighting it.

There was something to be said for being on the winning side, and monster or not Foundling had a history of being the last woman standing on the field.

The thing was, the light panels stayed there. No howling blizzard tore them open. This, Abigail thought, did not bode well. The rest of the army must have agreed because a shiver went through the ranks. Not the old legionaries, they were made of sterner stuff, but the Ankouans were wavering. And the men of the Fifteenth were... It was hard to put into words. You didn’t have to like the Black Queen to put your trust in the legend. In the stories about the girl who’d tricked resurrection out of angels and swept her way through armies and heroes alike. Abigail had seen her in Dormer, when she’d raised the stairs of ice and swept the Summer fae off the walls. It had been like watching a force of nature, not a person. Sometimes the captain still woke up with cold fingers even when she slept by the fire. You couldn’t see something like that and not believe, even if only a little. So why isn’t she breaking out of the cage? The Praesi took advantage, and if there’d ever been the history of Callow writ in a sentence that was it.

Abigail had heard stories about the Conquest. Every kid did, not matter where in the country they were raised. But those had been about battles and sieges, cunning ploys and foul deeds . This isn’t anything like that at all , she thought. Darkness was made smoke above the chanting silhouettes of faraway mages, and that smoked moved. It slithered across the cloudless sky, spreading smoothly like ink in water, and it was only when it reached the army it clustered into a ball above it. Then it exploded again, into a hundred dark tendrils that swept through the centre of the host. Wherever the tendrils passed, men died. Choking and screaming, clawing at their throats as the smoke went into their bodies and poisoned something inside them. Black tears streaked down their faces, leaving ash-like trails. Abigail’s blood ran cold, and in that moment she understood why old men called Praes the Enemy . This was not war, it was... She didn’t know a word ugly enough for it.

How many had died, over these ten heartbeats? A thousand, at least. There was a gaping hole right in the middle of the army, and already the wights were pouring through. Abigail almost thought she heard a snap, when the morale of the Akouans broke. They were going to leg it, she thought. They guards were going to flee and they were all going to die. The smoke thinned and began to disperse, leaving only a field of corpses behind. That, and one soldier. That one survivor took off her helmet, shook free a ponytail, and the captain’s heart caught in her throat.

“Rise,” Catherine Foundling ordered, and the dead men obeyed.

The word had been spoken half a mile away, and still Abigail heard it like had been whispered into her ear. Akouans and legionaries rose to their feet, cold blue eyes shining, and the dead fell upon the dead. Something old and harsh rose up in the captain’s veins, something she had thought herself beyond. It wasn’t pride, because who could take pride in one of their own matching the Wasteland horror for horror? But it was something close to it, when she thought of the sneering mages on the other side who’d swatted down thousands likes insects. Be afraid , she thought . Like we are, like we’ve always been. Be afraid of the monster coming for you all, because there is not a speck of pity or mercy in her.

“Kill them all, Black Queen,” Abigail whispered hoarsely, and meant every word of it.

—

Sacker watched frost spread across the ground, dead men claw at the dead, and felt her body shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the sudden cold. She’d seen Lord Black in the fullness of his power, turning the men behind him into a sword no army could withstand. This was something else. It was the madness and might of the Old Tyrants turned to sharp purpose, and the part of her that loved the Tribes above all else wept at the sight of it. O Carrion Lord, what have you wrought? The Squire was a host unto herself, a wrathful child who’d stolen the mantle of a lesser god and would wreck the world with it until it fit her vision of how things should be. The goblin was a true daughter of the Grey Eyries, daughter and great-daughter of Matrons, and she knew old histories and the dark truths they carried. No Empresses had been so terrifying as the ones that though they were in the right. That thought they were doing the necessary thing. The Praesi knelt at the altar of Dread Empress Triumphant – may she never return – and named her the greatest Tyrant that ever was or would be. But she’d been a storm to be waited out, nothing more.

There would be no waiting out Catherine Foundling, she knew. The girl had been taught by the most patient of monsters, and surpassed his greatest weakness. Lack of power.

Is this to be your legacy, Amadeus of the Green Stretch? Will you leave us with one last laugh at our expense, knowing the world will burn in your wake? Sacker held more respect for the Black Knight than she’d ever thought she would give either a human or a male, but even so she did not think he deserved a pyre as great as the whole of Calernia. It was all made even more bitter brew by what what she knew, that the Squire would be needed in the wars to come. They needed the likes of her to turn back Procer, to smother the Tenth Crusade in the crib. I hate you a little, old friend, for the knowledge that you shaped a situation where we would have no choice but to embrace her. Every inch of Sacker told her that she needed to kill this girl, kill her right now before she crossed a line they could not return from. But to follow her instincts would be to cripple the Empire and the Tribes with it on the eve of the greatest war they had seen in centuries.

The goblin let fear and grief hold her for a moment, before she wrested back her mind. There were orders to give. The rebels had played their hand and seen it faul. It was only a matter of time until Istrid and Orim broke through, and when they did the battle would be good as won. All that remained was to play out the rest of this.

“Raise the banners,” General Sacker told her staff. “Heavies in front, mages are to Lob at will. Let’s end this farce.”

It should have felt like a victory, but all she could think about was what lay ahead. Her people kept to the Gods Below, as the Praesi did, but they had given the oldest face of these deities a name: the Gobbler. It was said, among the Tribes, that when the Creation was born the Gobbler had spewed out all the peoples of the world. The last and smallest of them, crawling from the open and exhausted maw, had been the goblins. It was whispered to the daughters of Matron lines that they had been the last to come and that they would be the last to go. That they would be spared the calamities of greater peoples, hidden away in their deep places.

Watching Winter spread through the dead, freezing and shattering everything in its path, for the first time since she’d been spawned Sacker doubted this truth.

Chapter 54: Wake

“I imagine the High Lords would be inclined to protest the mind control, if I hadn’t seized control of their minds, which just goes to show this was the right decision all along.”
– Dread Emperor Imperious

I’d believed, once, that the way Black thought was what made him different from his predecessors. The manner he tallied gains and losses, let the numbers guide his decisions instead of more sentimental inclinations. I’d thought it a strange thing, that a man born in Praes could think that way at all. But I’d understood, as I watched a thousand men die in a manner I tacitly allowed as part of an overarching strategy, that it’d been a false perception. Most Praesi thought that way already, when you dug a little deeper. That was the principle behind a sacrifice, wasn’t it? Breaking something of worth so it would bring you something else you found of greater worth. A few thousand people for a flying fortress? Well, the Empire had a lot of people but few sorcerous war machines. Tendrils of something eldritch touching your mind for a demon summoning? Power was prized over sanity, when one intended to climb the Tower. My teacher had just taken a concept at the heart of everything Praesi and brought it to its logical, cold-eyed conclusion.

The House of Light said men could be worse than devils, for devils were driven to Evil by their nature and not by choice. That it was greater sin to turn away from the light than be born of the dark. Choice, that was the word the priests exalted above all others. That men had the right to make decisions granted by the Gods and that what they did with this right defined who they were. For the Children of the Heavens sin is in action, not in birth. I didn’t believe that, not really. Malicia was a monster not because she’d fed a civil war that lasted decades and killed dozens of thousands, but because she was someone who had it in her to make that decision. Her sin, if I was to insist on such a word, was that she was a woman with that capacity. Even if she’d become a cloistered sister in southern Callow and never hurt a fly until she died, she would still have that bleak thing within her. Evil was not an act so much as it was a state of mind, a way of thinking I had been raised to despise even against the best efforts of the Imperial orphanages.

But I had the bleakness in me too. It was almost pathetic it had taken me so long to admit to that fact, that it had taken writing off a thousand men under my protection as bait before I could no longer deny it, even deep down. I’d sacrificed the Ankouans, and men of the Fifteenth as well, to draw out the ritual Akua’s hounds had up their sleeves. I’d have done the same with General Istrid’s men or any other of the soldiers on this field, because that ugly bloodletting had seemed to me the path to victory. Was this what you saw in me, Black? The same absence where better people have qualms. The decision had been no different – no worse – than sending the vanguard into the jaws of Summer at Dormer or forcing a battle against the full might of the Court in Arcadia. But the selfishness of this one had been bare, beyond even my ability to paint over. It should have grieved me, but aside from dull shame the sight of the dying had done nothing to move me. If I cannot be kind or just, then I will at least be victorious.

I had sacrificed my last illusion of being a decent person for a win, and I could not even muster regret at the the thought of that. Maybe Diabolist had spoken truth, when she’d said I’d become like Praesi. The gap between them and me was not as wide or deep as I would have liked. I heard Hune approach through the silence, her heavy footsteps unlike any other, but did not turn to greet her.

“Legate,” I simply said. “You have a report for me?”

Ahead of us were the remains of the day. My little necromantic trick, turned from dagger to sword by Winter’s mantle, had turned the tide at exactly the right time. While I led my own dead smashing the wights, the legions on the flanks had begun breaking through. Istrid’s Fourth had been the first among them, but closely followed by General Orim and the Fifth. Ranker’s legion had not been far behind them, a quarter bell at most, and the moment the Ninth was free move the battle had been over. With four breaches in the enemy line their formation had collapsed and then the rebels had grown desperate. They’d fled, of course. Dying for the cause was not a Wasteland virtue. To prevent pursuit Lord Fasili had thinned his centre and thrown everything he could at the marching veteran legions while he and his fellow living escaped. It hadn’t been enough. Orim had sent a division of one thousand to delay the wights meant to block him and pursued, only backing down when Fasili threw his last reserve of three thousand wights at the Fifth. Akua’s general had brought twenty-three thousand soldiers south and fled with barely two thousand when the Battle of Dead Dawn ended.

To my fury, I’d been unable to engage in pursuit. With the necromancers gone the wights had gone wild, turning on each other as well as my soldiers, but their numbers had not dwindled swiftly enough. I could have followed on foot, or with a confiscated horse. But I’d weighed the gains and losses. If I pursued, there was a chance I could kill Akua’s best general. It was not a given I’d be able to, though, since he had hundreds of mages and at least one ward he believed could trap me. If I remained, I could significantly lower casualties on my side by carving my way through the disorganized wights with my procession of dead soldiers. Uncertain greater gain or certain lesser one. A year ago I would have pursued, but I’d been taught the price of recklessness since then. Powerful as they might be, villains who faced armies on their own died to them more often than not.

“Two hundred and thirty-three fatalities from the Fifteenth,” Hune said, delicately handing me a scroll. “Twice that many wounded. Numbers are still coming from the other three legions and the Callowans lack even basic registries, but I am projecting at least two thousand dead Ankouans from the debriefs.”

A quarter of the initial Ankouan force gone before Afternoon Bell even rang. The colder part of me assessed that, even with the five thousand men from Southpool sure to have been lost, this battle had still seen me come out ahead in the grim arithmetic of war. On the surface, at least. Diabolist could afford to lose more troops than I could. At this rate of exchange, I’d be the last woman standing in my army and she’d still have over a third of hers. Or what we thought was hers, anyway. Inside the walls of Liesse was barred to scrying and trying to guess the amount of people there’d been in the city when it rose into the sky was a logistical nightmare. Refugees didn’t exactly declare their intent to travel, nor fae offer casualty reports.

“Then we’ve decisively proven the Legions can beat wights when the armies field similar numbers,” I said after a long moment.

“I would mitigate that statement,” the ogre said. “A third of our number were Ankou watchmen. That said, Liesse is a fortified city. The nature of the engagement there will be different.”

“You’re worried about her mages,” I said, hazarding a guess.

It wasn’t a stretch to do so. They had me worried as well.

“They will have had months to prepare the grounds,” Hune said. “Superior spellpower and numerical advantage will weigh heavily against us, ma’am.”
“Superior spellpower,” I smiled wanly. “Not something they can claim, I think, so long as we have Hierophant.”

“One man,” she said.

“One Named ,” I replied.

“They have one of those as well, Your Grace,” the ogre reminded me. “Had I not been informed there are temporal concerns at work, I would have advised for a protracted siege instead of an assault.”

Temporal concerns, huh. A roundabout way of saying everybody was worried about what Akua Sahelian would be able to cook up if we didn’t kick down her front door quickly enough. The ogre’s notion wouldn’t have been wrong on a tactical level, if we set aside Diabolist. But it would have been a mistake on a strategic one. The longer it took us to put the rebels down, the higher the chances Procer would attack while half the legions were tied up around Liesse. The ogre wasn’t high enough up the ranks to be in the know for that, though I’d wager she’d heard some rumours. They were cropping up often of late and I doubted it was a coincidence. The Empress, I suspected, was preparing public opinion for the wars to come. Even if she had a plan in the works that involved never fighting those at all. Malicia was not the kind of woman inclined to leave any of the angles uncovered. I had no intention of discussing any of that with the ogre, through, so I changed the subject.

“Fasili Mirembe,” I said. “Your opinion on him?”

“Skilled,” the legate immediately replied. “Clearly studied Legion doctrine in depth. He accurately gauged how long it would take the legions to deal with the wights set against them. His tactical judgement is solid as well. The Ankouans were the correct target for his ritual.”

“Terror tactics,” I murmured. “He was banking on a Callowan rout to win this.”

“They have evidently made plans to limit your ability to act on the battlefield, ma’am,” Hune said. “I am somewhat at a loss as to how they were fooled by a decoy.”

“That was Thief,” I said. “Keep quiet a Name’s power and it can be hard to differentiate between them, from a distance. It won’t work twice, but it shouldn’t need to. Using wards against Masego is like trying to drown a fish.”

“I confess a degree of wariness over how heavily we rely on Named for for our tactics,” the ogre noted.

She sounded, I thought, almost like my teacher. Never rely on an artefact or a power for victory. They will always fail you. There is no such thing as being invincible, but lack of glaringly exploitable crutches will do wonders for your lifespan. There was truth in that, but the number of Named on my side was my main advantage. I would be a fool not to exploit it to the fullest.

“We’ll meet him again in Liesse,” I said, winding the conversation back to Lord Fasili.

“I would rank him as inferior to most Imperial generals, General Juniper among them,” the ogre said. “Though battles are rarely so clear-cut as to allow such gaps in ability to be a deciding factor.”

She was right about that. On open grounds with identical armies, it would change quite a bit. But in a massive pitched battle around Liesse? That was a different story. I had faith in the Hellhound, but I did not think she would be better at leading a traditional Wasteland army than an intelligent man who’d been raised to do that very thing. We still come out ahead by miles when it comes to experienced officers. They’ll be dependent on magic to control the wights, and that’ll make it hard to manoeuver quickly. Juniper had been crafting a plan of attack for Liesse for quite some time now, refining and improving it every day. I would trust in her, as she trusted in me. I silently watched the legionaries piling up corpses all over the field, preparing the pyres that would be lit before nightfall. Wights broke after they were damaged enough, whatever sorcery animated them ceasing to function, but some of the corpses still struggled as they were dragged away. They would burn anyway.

“Do you think you’re a good person, Hune?” I suddenly asked.

“That’s a human way of looking at the world,” the ogre said. “Drawing lines and saying that standing before or past them defines who you are.”

“Then how do ogres think of it?” I said, glancing at her.

The legate smiled thinly, fat lips tightening in a line.

“We are what Creation lets us be,” she said. “That we get to decide is the first and oldest lie.”

“I was taught differently,” I said.

“And how much control did you have over that?” she asked.

She shook her head before I could reply.

“I must return to my duties, Your Grace,” she continued. “I leave you to your musings.”

I inclined my head in dismissal, not eager to keep her around. I had another conversation ahead of me, after all. As she strode away I sought the six hundred and forty-nine remaining undead I had raised, a writhing bundle in the back of my mind. I could see through their eyes, guide their hands and feet, but there was... danger in that. There were too many, more than I could truly handle. Orders that were more thought than word could direct them as a pack, but if I went any deeper I was certain there would be consequences. A god, perhaps, would not have been troubled by those. But stealing one’s mantle had not raised me to godhood: all it had done was allow me to claim some of that power as my own. Safety lay in shallowness. It was my instinct to release the dead from service now that the battle was over, but I thought twice of it. I’d proved in the past that I could go a great deal of damage by filling dead animals with munitions. Six hundred purely expendable troops were too useful of a tool to dismiss without good reason.

“I know you’re around,” I said.

Thief clucked her tongue, and appeared ahead of me. She was sitting on a dead man’s back, though from this angle I could not tell whether it’d been one of mine or a wight. She pulled at a waterskin, looking somewhat ill.

“I’ll never get used to the smell,” Vivienne Dartwick said. “The reek clings to you, somehow.”

“I thought the same after my first real battle,” I said. “I barely notice it now, to tell you the truth.”

Thief’s answering smile was sharp.

“And that doesn’t worry you?”

“Not only villains fight battles,” I said. “Or have noses, for that matter.”

She didn’t press the subject, nor I had not expected her to. Talking with Vivienne, I thought, was much like sparring. All deft footwork and probing for weaknesses, a game where victory and defeat were ever moving targets for both players.

“A great victory,” Thief drawled. “Should I offer you congratulations?”

“A skirmish,” I said.

“Forty thousand men fought on this field,” Vivienne said.

“Not even a third of either real armies,” I said. “Minor parts of the whole. That makes it a skirmish, no matter how large of one.”

“If this was just a skirmish,” Vivienne said. “Then why did Diabolist risk her best general?”

My fingers clenched, then unclenched.

“I,” I murmured, “have been wondering about the same thing.”

Looking at all of this, there were parts that weren’t adding up. I could generously assume that I’d lost five thousand men today. Diabolist, on the other hand, had lost twenty thousand. Even with the five thousand Southpooleans she would kill and raise, I’d come out of this round ahead by ten thousand souls. It wasn’t a horrible trade, for her. The more troops I lost the fewer I had to assault her walls with. But she sent Fasili, and hundreds of mages. Knowing she could lose them. Akua never did anything with only one intention in mind.

“The wards they tried to pen me in with,” Thief said. “I could have strolled out at any time. They weren’t keyed to me, if you get my drift.”

“You think she wanted to find out if she could put me in a box at will,” I said.

“I’m no general,” the dark-haired woman said. “But I get the impression that, army for army, she has you beat. What you’ve got over her is a bunch of Named, and arguably you’re the most powerful of them.”

I wasn’t so sure of that, to be honest. When it came to killing single opponents, maybe, and Named in particular. But Hierophant could wipe a company from the face of Creation without losing his breath, these days. And Archer was, well... Hard to contain, for lack of better term. She was the living incarnation of the proverbial grain of sand in the machinery. Adjutant wasn’t overwhelming by himself, but that wasn’t his Role in the first place. He was supposed to empower another Named, and though he worked best with me he could serve that function with others as well.

“It would be reckless of her, to risk so many mages just to answer that question,” I said.

“If you’d been stuck behind the wards,” Thief said, “would this battle have been won?”

I grimaced. Maybe. But then, maybe not. And if Diabolist had wiped three legions and a contingent of the Fifteenth right before our last battle, well, there went my chances of taking Liesse. This campaign could survive the loss of the Ankou city guard. Fourteen thousand legionaries were another story.

“There’s too much we don’t know for sure,” I finally said. “Guesswork and schemes are her bread and butter, we won’t be coming out on top if we keep playing this her way.”

Thief was silent for a long moment, staring at me.

“You want me to go to Liesse,” she said.

I slowly nodded.

“Not to fight,” I clarified. “But I need eyes in the city before attacking it. I’ve tried to seize the initiative repeatedly, Vivienne, but she’s always been a step ahead of us.”

“It won’t be like my last visit there,” Thief said. “She knows I’m part of your little band of miscreants. She will have measures in place.”

“I know,” I said quietly. “I’m asking anyway.”

“This is the part,” she said, “where you use your eloquence to talk me into this.”

I looked up at the blue sky and smiled bitterly. I could manipulate her, I thought. I’d glimpsed levers to pull in our past conversations. I had a grasp on the kind of threats and pressures that would make her cave. But this, the urge to bend her to my will that I was feeling in my bones? That was how villains forged the same blade that’d kill them. I didn’t know if that sharp instinct was from my Name or Winter, or more distressingly neither of them at all. But I would not give in to it.

“Do you think you’re a good person, Vivienne?” I asked instead.

“Good is irrelevant,” Thief said. “There are debts, paid and not. The rest is garnish.”

“A hundred thousand Callowans,” I said. “Killed and made servants. That, I think, may be the debt of our lifetime. Help me settle it. Please .”

Vivienne said nothing at all, and drank from the water skin. She wiped her lips and chuckled darkly.

“I used to think there wouldn’t be a need for idiotic heroics, on this side of the fence,” she said. “How I miss that assumption.”

I didn’t push any further. It had, in the end, to be her decision. Anything else and there would be a cost, sooner or later. I do no want servants , I thought, the conversation I’d had with Hune on a hill still fresh in my mind. But some part of me whispered that kindness was as much a leash as fear, in its own way, and that what I wanted mattered a great deal less than what I actually did.

“Don’t dawdle south,” Thief said. “I’ll be cautious, and retreat if the danger’s too great.”

“That’s all I can ask,” I said, and the matter was settled.

By nightfall, the pyres were burning. A hundred candles of cooking flesh in the night. Thief went north, to the enemy’s lair. I had the three legions under General Istrid escort the Ankouans to our mustering grounds, and returned south with the remained of my men. To the Fifteenth, to Juniper and Hierophant and the plans that would make or break Callow.

And, I found out, to Black.

Prodigy

“No man in Creation is so dangerous as a well-meaning fool.”
– Dread Empress Regalia II

When he’d been nine years old, Masego had seen the end of the world. He thought of that, sometimes, at gatherings like this one. When making meaningless small talk with strangers, wondering if they had any idea about how fragile everything around them truly was. That the world was nothing but the whim of greater beings, apt to be snuffed out the moment they learned what they wanted. But all he saw in the eyes of the highborn was hunger and ambition, and could there ever be anything more boring than that? The silhouettes melded into each other, a hundred boys and girls cut from the same dull cloth. Even those with a measure of the Gift were blind, like they were just refusing to see what was around them . They might as well be animals or statues of clay, but still he had to stand and smile and pretend he’d remember their names if he ever met them again. He usually didn’t. Papa chided him over that, said connections were always useful, but Father just laughed. Still made him come, though, even if it was only a few times a year.

“- a pureblood Liessen charger,” the girl said, and Masego only now noticed she’d been talking this whole time. “Getting her across the Wasaliti was difficult, of course, but my family is not without friends.”

The boy squinted through his glasses.

“I thought there was a decree about the Thirteenth Legion getting first pick of mounts out of the provinces,” he said.

Father had arranged for a tutor to teach him about these things, which had only succeeded in motivating him to learn how to craft illusions. If he slept through the lessons it was easier to stay up late working on his own projects. Uncle Amadeus had called him worse than his father when he’d learned, but it had sounded like a compliment. His uncle did that a lot, say things he didn’t mean while smiling. It had taken Masego a while to understand how that worked, and even now he found the man’s face hard to read sometimes. It was like he was trying to make things confusing. The girl, whose name he didn’t even try to remember because he was pretty sure he hadn’t been paying attention when she’d introduced herself in the first place, laughed like he’d said something funny and put her hand on his arm. She had warm fingers, he noted, but he didn’t enjoy strangers touching him. Well, she was Soninke and highborn so she was probably clean at least. Still, since he’d turned twelve people kept pawing at him at these receptions. He really wished they’d stop, or at least tell him why.

“What do such trifles mean to people like us, Masego?” she smiled, cheeks dimpling.

He forced himself not to squint again. It sounded like she broke the law a lot, which was kind of stupid. Yeah, Father had told him that those didn’t really apply to him until Uncle Amadeus said they did, but that was just him. This girl would probably get hanged if people knew, so why was she telling him?

“Horses are nice,” he tried.

The girl blinked in confusion and withdrew her hand. That was his chance, he decided. If you didn’t retreat early when people got grabby they’d follow you all night.

“I think I hear someone calling me,” he hastily said, and fled before she could reply.

He was pretty sure this was the city home of the High Lord of Thalassina – though why someone who lived by the sea would want a house in Ater he had no idea – so hopefully he hadn’t just been rude to a relative of... whoever the High Lord was. There was an S in there, he was pretty sure, maybe more than one. The whole place was pointlessly large and dripping with gold, jewels and weird wood Papa told him was worth more than either, but worse of all it was filled with people. So many people. More than two hundred, though there were a lot of servants and supposedly those didn’t count. Masego declined to take one of the bits of meat pastry from a plate, since he’d been told those were poisoned, and discretely tried to find either his fathers. They weren’t anywhere in sight, but there were three floors and a rooftop garden so that didn’t mean much. Before he could embark on that journey of discovery, he found himself cornered by another girl and what looked like a pack of minions. Another Soninke. He squinted, pretty sure he’d seen this one before. Three months ago, when High Lady Tasia Something had the party with the magic lightshow? That had been very interesting, though people kept trying to talk to him during. Which, rude. And they said he had bad manners.

“Lord Masego,” the girl smiled. “A pleasure to see you again. You so rarely come to these little evenings.”

Shit, he was supposed to know who she was.

“Oh hello,” he said, and after a moment found a clever ruse. “...You.”

Flawless. He was going to get away with this cleanly.

“A very familiar way to refer to Lady Akua,” one of the minions said.

The boy frowned.

“I thought minions weren’t supposed to talk when important people do,” he pointed out. “Father says they used to execute people for that.”

The minion who’d spoken, some Taghreb, went pale at that. Damn it, Masego hadn’t meant to make him feel bad about his manners. Now he felt like an ass.

“It’s all right,” the boy reassured the stranger. “It’s just an old custom. Those aren’t very important.”

The Akua girl’s smile didn’t change, but he got the impression he’d said something wrong. Was it because she was pretty? Pretty girls always had these expectations about things he should be saying but no one had ever written those down, as far as he knew, and why would people not do that? It was just bad scholarship, honestly.

“A shame you believe so, my lord,” she said.

Masego frowned.

“Why?” he asked. “Do you want him to get killed? That’s a little rude to say right in front of him.”

The Soninke girl looked bemused, and also a little pained, but before she could say anything Masego felt a giant palm settle over his head and relief wash over him.

“Aunt Sabah,” he breathed. “Wait, careful with the hair.”

The big woman grinned and ruffled his braids even as he squirmed.

“Making friends, Masego?” she teased.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I think I insulted them but I don’t know how.”

He leaned closer to his aunt and whispered.

“They must have very thin skin,” he gravely told her.

He offered the girl and her minions a smile after that, but some of them looked angry for some reason.

“Lady Captain,” the girl said, and bowed.

“Sahelian,” Aunt Sabah replied. “Growing into a proper little lady, aren’t we?”

“I am ever my mother’s daughter,” the girl smiled.

Oh, Masego thought, they must be friends. Now he felt kind of bad he hadn’t remembered her name. Aunt Sabah took her hand off his tresses and patted him.

“One of High Lord Idriss’ mages prepares to make a demonstration in the gardens,” she said. “Your father sent me to get you.”

The moment magic was mentioned he forgot all about the other people, perking up.

“Skill display or a formula reveal?” he asked. “Because they’re not usually very good at the displays.”

“Formula,” the big woman said. “Come on, we don’t want to miss it.”

Masego wasn’t a savage, so he remembered to wave at the girl and the minions before he followed his aunt to the stairs.

“You don’t have any idea who that was, do you?” she asked.

The boy glared.

“Of course I do,” he said. “It was...”

Shit, he’d forgotten her name again. Come on, Masego, she just told you.

“Lady Ubua,” he said, pretending he was sure.

Aunt Sabah’s shoulders shook like she was holding something in. She must have eaten too much.

“Yes,” she said, voice tight. “That is exactly correct, and you should always call her that.”

Masego let out a sigh of relief when she was looking away. Ubua, Ubua, Ubua , he said in his head. He couldn’t forget, just in case Papa asked him later. They slowed when they got to the second floor, and his aunt steered him to the side. He was a little confused as to why, at first, but then he saw Uncle Amadeus talking with some important-looking Taghreb. His uncle was very pale, though Father had told him it was because he was a Duni – which wasn’t a disease, even if it sounded like it – and he usually looked sinister but tonight he was smiling and standing real close to the other man. They must have been old friends, he thought. The Taghreb was smiling very widely and his hands were shaking with excitement.

“Brat,” his uncle lazily said, turning to him. “Heading up for the reveal?”

Masego nodded.

“Do you think people will try to talk to me?” he asked. “Because they did last time, and it was very tedious.”

Uncle Amadeus’ lips quirked.

“Stay close to me and I’ll serve as your guard,” he suggested.

Masego beamed. His uncle turned to the Taghreb.

“Think on it, Lord Baneg,” he said. “It would be my pleasure to arrange it.”

The Taghreb said his courtesies very quickly, bowed and left.

“What were you talking about?” the boy asked.

“Giant spiders,” his uncle said. “Lord Baneg seems to have an interest in seeing them up close.”

Masego hummed in approval. As a provably repeated phenomenon of unclear sorcerous origin that displayed manifestations going outside the bounds of the classical table of elements, the giant spiders under Ater were a fascinating study subject.

“Is he a mage, then?” he asked.

Uncle Amadeus patted his shoulder.

“No,” he smiled coldly. “No he is not.”

“He must be a great scholar,” Masego mused.

It wasn’t people’s fault, that they weren’t born with the Gift. Yes, it made them kind of useless and ignorant but it wasn’t like they could help it. Just like he couldn’t help but finish the tray of lemon tarts when Dada made them, no matter what his other father said. It was, like, Fate. Delicious lemony Fate. The three of them were given a wide berth as they headed for the stairs, which tended to happen whenever Uncle Amadeus was around. He didn’t have a lot of friends, which was why Masego had been glad to see him getting along with the lord earlier.

“Our little Masego was making friends when I found him,” Aunt Sabah said.

“Was he?” his uncle said, eyebrow quirking.

“Oh yes,” his aunt said, voice tight again. “With Lady Ubua. You know, Tasia’s daughter.”

His uncle’s face blanked, which meant he was sad. Or angry. Or happy. Ugh, people were complicated. There should be a guide.

“Auntie’s lying,” Masego said. “I think I made them angry. Somehow. I don’t know why they thought I was the rude one when she said she wanted to kill her own minion, but maybe she’s just not that bright.”

“It’s not good to insult people, Masego,” Amadeus said. “You should send a letter to Lady Ubua to apologize.”

“Do I have to?” he whined.

“I’ll help you write it, don’t worry,” his uncle said, a tremor going through his shoulders.

Aunt Sabah was grinning, which made people around them back away even further. Masego sighed, but figured he might as well. Father always said he was only supposed to hurt other people’s feelings on purpose. They passed through the third floor and the boy tugged at his aunt’s hand.

“There,” he said, pointing ahead. “Papa’s talking with people.”

There was a cluster of at least a dozen highborn in a circle around his father, most of them women. Papa said something that had them laughing and drank from his cup, nibbling at cut of meat. Some of the ladies were looking a little red in the face, but people did that a lot around his fathers. Papa saw him from the corner of his eye and smiled, saying goodbye to his friends and sauntering up to them.

“Tikoloshe,” Uncle Amadeus said, inclining his head.

“Amadeus,” Papa smiled. “Always such a pleasure. And Sabah, dearest. A shame you did not bring your children.”

“Bad enough I have to come, I’m not going to torture them with this kind of company,” Aunt Sabah snorted.

“Do give my regards to your husband,” Papa said.

His aunt laughed.

“’Loshe, I’m not going to help you flirt with him,” she said. “Give it up.”

“But he always gets so flustered ,” Masego’s father said, smiling over the rim of his cup.

Uncle Amadeus’ face was blank again. It was like that a lot, around Papa. Father said they didn’t get along very well but when Masego had asked why he’d just said it was ‘complicated’. The boy tugged at his father’s tunic.

“There’s going to be a formula reveal upstairs,” he said. “I don’t want to miss it.”

His father’s brow rose.

“Have you earned it?” he said. “How many people did you talk with tonight?”

“Ten,” Masego said, having honestly no idea whether he was lying or not.

Papa studied him closely.

“Zego, are you lying to me?” he asked.

“It’s not a lie if you don’t get caught,” Masego replied cheerfully.

The Empress had said so, once, so it must be true. Papa sighed.

“We will mingle after the demonstration, you and I,” he announced. “And I will have no backtalk.”

The boy grimaced but didn’t argue. That way lay Callowan apples instead of pastries for dessert, which was basically torture and probably illegal. The adults talked while they made their way up to the garden, mostly about Aunt Sabah’s children and how quick they were growing. She said they were going to be bureaucrats like their father, which sounded horrid but he supposed someone had to do it. The rooftop garden, he decided after they went up, was actually very nice. It wasn’t just plants, there was also obsidian sculpted to look like flowers and trees and in little nooks he could see runes had been carved. Much of this, he realized, was actually illusions. He drifted away from the adults and elbowed aside a bush of large green leaves, kneeling at the foot of an obsidian tree and tracing the runes hidden in the roots with his fingers. The work was simplistic, he thought. The harmonics in the sound production could be significantly improved if they took out the array stabilizer and separated the core into two different workings. Yeah it’d be a little trickier to power but then you could have illusionary wind moving the leaves and also-

“Look at you,” Father sighed. “They lose you for ten heartbeats and you get dirt all over your robes.”

Masego looked up at his father, then down at his knees. Huh, it was true. He’d been kneeling in soil this whole time and pushing aside the dirt covering some runes had gotten some all over him.

“This is very unprofessional work,” the boy said gravely. “They used a cascade pattern to keep the sorcery flowing, Father, it’s like they’re not even trying .”

The dark-skinned man crouched at his side, the edge of his tunic brushing the soil.

“What is the Third Law of Artifice, Masego?” he asked.

“Sorcery anchored in the material will only work perfectly for the sorcerer who created it, because every caster leaves a different mark,” the boy dutifully recited.

“And the corollary?”

“The more complicated anchored sorcery is, the more prone to failure it becomes over time,” he said. “Simplicity is pow- oh. They made it shoddy on purpose , so that anybody could use it.”

“The mage who first built the Stoneglass Garden was very talented,” Father said. “But he knew his successors might not be as skilled, so he kept the system simple.”

“That’s stupid,” Masego said bluntly. “If they’re not good enough, they don’t deserve to use it.”

“This is a showpiece, Masego,” his father said. “It’s meant to be used as often as possible.”

“All they’re showing is that they’re shit at spellcrafting,” the boy muttered under his breath.

Father looked amused as he rose again, offering a hand to help him up.

“Come,” he said. “Let’s have a look at that formula. I’m told the demonstrator has improved significantly on an old Thalassinian spell.”

Masego followed eagerly, excited again. There was a place in the middle of the garden where a large round platform of stone was left in the open, seats of pale wood set all around it. His uncle was already seated but Aunt Sabah wasn’t, which made sense. She’d probably break the chair if she tried, she was really heavy. His fathers had him sit between them, Papa fussing with the tresses his aunt had messed up and shooting her a dark look. Silence washed over the garden when some Taghreb woman got onto the platform, bowing and talking a lot about how some High Lord was great and blah blah blah, honour and old blood and Gods when were they going to get to the magic already? Eventually she raised her hands and began tracing red runes in the air. Oh, so she used Miezan tracing. That was rare, it was a lot more rigid than the techniques developed under Dread Emperor Sorcerous. A triad of runes formed a triangle as she continued murmuring, then a thin needle of blue fire erupted from the centre of it. She guided it into shapes, but Masego’s eyes narrowed as she watched. The initial quantity of fire had not changed: she was just thinning the intensity so it looked like there was more. It was inefficient. It was slow. It was inaccurate .

“No,” he said, and rose to his feet.

There was a ripple of murmurs around but he didn’t care, going onto the platform.

“You’re doing it wrong,” he insisted. “Look, look closer until you can have a Glimpse of what you should be doing.”

His fingers danced across the air, using her lame Miezan tracing instead of proper High Imperial. He slowed when he made the initial runes, making sure she’d be able to see where he differed – adding a draw pattern to her initial burst, then followed along the same lines of her spell but actually making more blue fire because the working was still drawing on his sorcery instead of diluting the power like hers had. It fit, but already his mind was running through ways to improve the spell. Refine it, cut away at the impurities. Masego felt clarity descend on him like morning dew, fresh and limpid on his tongue. A sigh came from all the lords and ladies like they were a single person, and Father came up to steer him away from the platform. Some old man that was too light to be Soninke but too dark to be Taghreb came up to them, all smiles.

“My congratulations, Lord Warlock,” he said. “A Name at his age is an achievement that will sound across the Empire.”

Masego squinted at the stranger, then leaned close to his father.

“Father, who is that?” he whispered.

The only thing that broke the silence that followed was Uncle Amadeus’ convulsive laughter.

Chapter 55: Reunion

“The heart of succession is always murder. The new cannot grow where the old remains.”
– Theodore Langman, Wizard of the West

Four Calamities had gone south, and Scribe with them, but only two awaited on the other side of the fairy gate. I’d not expected to see Assassin, but looking at Warlock and Black standing side by side my heart broke a little. It was the way they stood: slightly apart, as if they expected a larger person to be behind and leaning over their shoulders. Captain had left a gaping hole behind her in more ways than one. Out in the open our greetings were polite, friendly even, but distant for all that. None of us were inclined to emotional theatrics in front of so many watching eyes. Warlock made himself scarce without bothering to explain, hard eyes lingering on me even as his handsome face smiled without a speck of sincerity, and my teacher silently led me to a tent in the heart of the Fifteenth’s camp. Before I even came in sight of it I could feel the wards pulsing, a least two dozen woven tigether that reeked of coiled and contained violence. Not Masego’s work, this. There was a depth and sophistication to it Hierophant had yet to reach.

It was where my teacher had been sleeping, I saw with a start. The inside was sparse and austere, functional Legion furnishings surrounding a standard issue cot. A handful of scrying tools could be glimpsed in a corner, glinting softly in magelight, and the short folding table that stood to the side was flanked by two rickety stools. The second most powerful person in the Empire slept here, and I could have bought everything in the tent with a mere month’s salary. I’d never been too inclined to luxuries myself, but Black took it a step further. The tent’s flap closed behind us with a quiet swish, leaving the two of us standing in the soft sorcerous glow. I was taller than him now, I realized. By a little more than an inch. How long had it been, since we’d last seen each other? A year, or close. He was still pale in that way that was more corpselike than Callowan, all the life in him gathered into those eerie green eyes. Named did not get tired the way normal men did, did not feel that burden as acutely, but in the lines of his face I read something like exhaustion.

The silence stretched on for a long time, me looking at him and him looking at me. If we were different people, I thought, he would be embracing me. But that wasn’t who we were, so instead his fingers fleetingly touched my shoulder, using the excuse of brushing off lint that did not exist, and I forced myself not to lean into the touch. Those were the lines we lived between, even now.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, “about Sabah.”

For what couldn’t even have been the full span of a heartbeat something like raw anguish flickered across the man’s face, before it was whisked away into the void.

“So am I,” he said, and there was something almost tired in his voice. “So am I.”

I couldn’t remember moving but found myself on a stool as Black claimed his own, watching as he broke the clay seal over a roughly-hewn bottle. He poured himself a cup of the red liquor within, and looked askance at me. I nodded and was handed cup of my own.

“Those who leave are met again,” he said quietly, the words cadenced and formulaic. “Be it Above or Below.”

Our cups clinked dimly and we downed the drinks. It tasted like wine, I thought, if someone had dumped half a bottle of hard liquor in a bad red vintage. I kept myself from grimacing.

“What happened?” I asked. “Last I heard the situation south was under control.”

He poured himself another cup.

“I have grown arrogant,” he said, and it was not a recrimination so much as a statement of fact. “I was caught up in my own cleverness, convinced I understood the nature of the opposition. So blind a nascent Name escaped my attention, that I failed to realize I was facing perhaps the most dangerous opponent of my long career.”

“The Wandering Bard,” I said.

Almorava of Smyrna, though now she went by a different name and face. I’d thought her a nuisance and not a threat, when I’d fought against her, a meddler that could help along defeat but never cause it. It appeared I’d been very, very wrong about that.

“You will face her too, in time,” Black said. “Do not make the same mistakes I did. No matter how powerful the heroes she will align herself with, she is the greatest threat among the opposition. If she is not contained, she will make you rue that failing.”

I studied him silently. The Empress had called him a raw, bare nerve . I’d hoped that she was wrong, but there was a shadow in the man across from me that gave me pause. It wasn’t the dark spiral of doubt and recriminations I knew best, but something... colder. As if he’d cut away the human parts of him, deemed them useless and to be set aside until the current messes could were fixed.

“It’s all right to grieve her,” I said. “I do, and I never knew her the way you did.”

The dark-haired man’s smile was mirthless.

“I will grieve her properly when affairs here allow it,” he said. “There will be a funeral in Ater, in a few months. I expect you to be there.”

I nodded slowly. He drank from his cup, fingers steady yet somehow fragile.

“I will have to tell her family,” he said softly. “I haven’t yet. It feels like less than her due to scry her husband for that conversation.”

He closed his eyes, finished his drink and the sliver of vulnerability there’d been on his face was gone when the green stare returned.

“I’ve been spending the last few days reading reports,” he said. “You’ve done well here, Catherine. There are few people that could have so deftly handled the fae.”

“The Empress helped me clean up the mess,” I replied honestly. “Couldn’t have done it without her.”

“Another pleasant development,” he noted. “I was glad to hear of your cooperation. You will need to rely on her in the future, and she on you.”

“You talk,” I said, “like you’re going to die.”

He laughed cuttingly, but the edge did not feel like it was directed at me. Or at him. It was the laugh of a man who looked up at the Heavens with only contempt.

“Oh there’s still a few years left in this hide, if I avoid the right mistakes,” he said. “There will be dangers in facing Diabolist, to be sure, but I am aware of the stories I must sidestep.”

Gods but I was glad to hear that. Because there was a picture that could be painted in Liesse, one that involved my mentor and my rival and the bloody succession that had been the way of villains since the First Dawn. I wasn’t... Fuck, I knew Black was a risk. That as long as he lived there would always be limits to how far I could push things with the Tower. But I wasn’t ready for him to die. I wasn’t sure that I would ever be. It wasn’t even just that I felt safer with him, the hazy memory of a warm cloak around my shoulders threaded with the bone-deep certainty there was not a line he wouldn’t cross to keep me alive. I worried my lip. It’d been easy to tell Grandmaster Talbot that the monster in front of me was the closest thing I’d ever have to a father, when he was so very far away. It was harder to do it now that he was here with me. It would have been breaking a pane of glass we’d always been careful to keep there, even if sometimes our hands pressed against that divide close enough to feel the other’s warmth. The hard girl with a distant father figure , I thought mockingly. When did I become such a hackneyed banality?

“Be careful,” I said, voice rough. “You’re still useful to me.”

Something like a smile quirked his lips and he nodded. I poured myself another cup to avoid looking at him even if the liquor had tasted like bad decisions, and felt a sliver of gratitude when he changed the subject.

“Diabolist must be dealt with before summer’s end,” he said. “We had a conversation, you and I, while I was in the Free Cities. About changes that must be had in the Empire.”

“I’m not sure the Empress will agree to the kind of changes I want,” I said. “I’ve made promises, Black. I thought I had it under control, but...”

“In Dread Crowned,” he said, lips curving around the name of the song my legionaries and thousands more had sung. “A lovely tune. Almost lovely enough one cannot hear the clamour for war under the words.”

“I made a deal with her for the vicequeenship of Callow, like you said I should,” I told him. “But the Wasteland is sick , Black. There’s centuries of rot set in. We can’t build anything that’ll last without clearing it away first.”

Because, much as I’d come to like Malicia, I could not help to think that our deal would not survive her. That all it took was a knife in the back by some ambitious High Lord and the armies would march, because the Empress was a creature of pragmatic reason but she was the exception and not the rule. If we were to really, truly make this work then the cabals of scheming highborn had to go. Or it was just a matter of time until another version of the coup in Laure took place, and we’d come too far now for that to lead to anything but rebellion. I hadn’t forgotten it wasn’t the Truebloods that’d made a grab for power in the capital, when I’d disappeared for a few months. It had been the Empress’ own allies, supposedly mine as well. To trust men like them was like throwing tea in the sea and expecting it to turn brown.

“And so, summer’s end,” Black said calmly. “Procer will not begin their campaign in autumn, not if it means taking the risk of fighting through the winter in foreign lands. We will have until the first pangs of spring to do what must be done.”

The tone had been serene, measured. Cold as the Winter running through my veins, and I was not ashamed to admit it scared me.

“And what exactly is that?” I asked.

“Praes,” he said mildly, “will be purged. From Court to gutter. I will not allow knives to be bared at our back as we prepare for the greatest war the Empire has seen in half a millennium.”

I looked into those pale green eyes and glimpsed the house of steel behind them, grinding wheels of steel that knew no pity or pause. There had been weight to those words.

“The Empress has already broken the Truebloods,” I said. “Most of them call themselves the Moderates now, and the rest is on the run.”

“Twenty years, I have kept my tongue as Alaya ruled Praes her way,” Black said. “She has done much with that time. Won a civil war without ever mustering a single army, and so much more I could never have done in her place. But it is not enough .”

His fingers clenched.

“I look west and I see the chosen daughter of the old ways, sitting atop a throne of death and sorcery in naked challenge to the Tower,” he hissed. “I look east and I see the remains of the same fools that fought us decades ago, defeated but not yet defanged. Those that kneel may be spared, Catherine. There is still use for them. The rest will burn, and from those ashes we will fashion an Empire that can turn back Hasenbach’s crusade.”

Strange, how fear could make a moment grow crystal-clear.

“That means going against the Empress,” I said. “Is that your intention? Rebellion?”

The cold intensity that had wrought the man’s frame went out like a smothered candle and he passed a hand through his hair. It was, I thought, one of the most human gestures I’d ever seen him make. More than his power or his words, the complete control Black held himself with had always been what made him feel unearthly. That made it thrice I’d seen the control slip tonight. It had my stomach clenching.

“No,” Black said. “Never that. Alaya rules. But she must understand that the time for long games is past. Praes now faces an existential threat. Compromise is no longer an option.”

“And what happens to Callow, in that path of no compromise?” I asked.

“You have a crown,” my teacher said. “Let us dispense with the bastard fig leaf that is putting vice in front of your title. Your people already call you the Black Queen, Catherine. Take Callow in hand. Deal out justice and authority as you see fit, so long as the kingdom is ready for war.”

My blood thrummed. I’d heard that title whispered, by legionaries and sundry soldiers. I’d been very careful not to claim it though. There were implications to it that would undo some very delicate balances that had been struck. But if Black was going to break those anyway... I did not look forward to it, what it would mean to be queen. The tedious matters of statecraft, the never-ending petitions and burdens on my hours. But who else would I trust to take the throne? I would leave the ruling in hands better fit for it than mine. But I would wear the crown and command the armies. And when peace was finally bought by enough death, I would put down my sword and make ploughshare of it. Find a successor that had the talents of peace I so damnably lacked.

“They won’t go quietly,” I warned him. “The last of the old breed. There will be blood.”

“They should have been put down like rabid dogs forty years ago,” Black said coldly. “Their mages conscripted into the ranks, the rebel holdings confiscated and their treasuries used to raise additional legions. For centuries they have hoarded secrets and rituals to use as knives in their bids to power. Let those be used on our enemies instead: the days were dissent could be tolerated are over. All of Praes will fight for the Empire.”

And whatever parts of it refuse will be destroyed , he did not say. He did not need to.

“You want to turn the Empire into a great war machine,” I said. “And it’s a tempting thing, I’ll admit. Legions boots over ever smug highborn throat. But what happens to it, after the war? If you make a Praes that is all forges and army camps, then it’s not going to put down the swords after we win. It’ll start looking for another conquest.”

I did not mention the possibility that, even after all that, we might still lose. There was no point in having that conversation at all . Except I’ll have to take precautions , I thought. Prepare Callow for the possibility, so that it would survive the defeat. I missed Hakram like a godsdamned limb.

“I imagine I will be dead, by then,” Black said. “But Alaya will rule, and you will have learned to do the same. The two of you can make the Empire what it should be. In this I have no regrets.”

“Cut out that fucking talk,” I sharply said. “You’re not dying so easily. If you’re helping me make this mess, you’re helping me clean it afterwards. There’s too much I don’t know, Black. Too many gaps in need of filling.”

He smiled, suddenly, and for the first time I’d seen him today he felt as young as he looked. His hand hesitantly extended over the table and patted my own before withdrawing. It felt awkward. I wished he’d kept it there longer.

“Do not try to become me,” he said. “I was a tool that served a purpose, and that purpose is coming to an end. This Empire will outgrow me and so will you. To linger beyond that would be to become a crutch, and do disservice to us all.”

“You don’t get to quit halfway through,” I said through gritted teeth.

I hated that my voice broke just a little.

“Oh, child,” he said, almost tenderly, and took my hand in his. “Do not grieve this. You will surpass me, Catherine. I saw that in you the moment we first met, that glint in your eyes that was the best of me without the worst.”

“This isn’t about surpassing anyone,” I hoarsely said.

“It always is,” he whispered. “I will gracefully leave the stage, when the time comes, and leave it proud of what will come after me. I knew this to be the outcome the moment I began.”

I squeezed his fingers and closed my eyes. No , I thought. This is just a story, Black.

And I’d already proved I could break those, if I was willing to pay the price.

Chapter 56: Recess

“And on your grave we shall have inscribed: he was witty all the way into the tiger pit.”
– Dread Emperor Vindictive

Nauk had a whole tent to himself, unlike the rest of our wounded remaining with the host. Unconscious or not he kept his rank. His Senior Tribune had been temporarily granted full legate authority, but no one had ever dared to talk of actual promotion in front of me. All those that could speak of the matter knew me better than that. There was no lit candle inside, but that hadn’t made a difference to me in years. I dragged the lone stool in the corner across the dirt and sat on it, eyes stuck on the orc’s inanimate form. His breath still rose and fell faintly and the wounds had begun to heal, but there was nothing pretty about it. His left eye was gone, taken by Summer flame along with ear and cheek and a chunk of his dark hair. It looked like a bonfire had devoured half his face, and though the burns were no longer a horror of charred skin they had scabbed green and peeling. This, I knew, he would be able to live with. That kind of scarring was almost a point of honour to orcs. My eyes shifted to the side and lingered on the stump that ended at his shoulder. The loss of his fighting arm would be harder blow.

Prosthetics could be made, I knew. The Warlock had made a hand for Hakram, after Summerholm, and I did not doubt Masego would be able to make something even more functional now that he had transitioned into Hierophant. But Nauk would forever be a cripple in the eyes of his own, without a Name to make up for his defect. There was much to love in orcs, be it the bone-deep loyalty or the fierceness in the face of peril, but the Clans were not known to be kind to failures – and that was what they would call him for this, I had no doubt.

“I never should have taken you into that fight,” I murmured, brushing back an errant strand of hair. “Neither you nor the Gallowborne. It was arrogant, to think I was powerful to keep you alive.”

I was, in the end, a villain. My power was not meant to be a shield for those I loved . All I can do is kill the enemy before they kill you , I thought. But that too would fail in time, like Black had failed Captain. Death could only be cheated for so long no matter how cunning and ruthless and strong you thought you were.

“I’ve been told Pickler visits you every night, after her hours are done,” I told the orc. “The others came too, even Robber. You haven’t been forgotten.”

There were no wards around the tent but there were guards, and when I heard them give way without comment my mind ran down the list of the few people with that authority. Wouldn’t be Juniper or any of the general staff – most of them had ordered a bonfire made away from prying eyes and begun showing up with bottles when Evening Bell rang. I meant to join them, eventually, but I’d come to visit my mistake first. Not Black, either. He’d been scrying generals and court officials all day, and likely would continue until we left for Liesse. That left only three. Hakram, but the approaching steps were too light. Archer wouldn’t have come here at all. And that meant...

“Lord Warlock,” I said calmly, hand withdrawing from Nauk’s forehead.

The Sovereign of the Red Skies was no more bothered by the darkness than me. He strolled casually to my legate’s side, leaving the body between us, and frowned at the unconscious orc. I studied the villain in silence, eyes tracing the sculpted face and fit form that was made plain by his tailored tunic. There’d always been traces of silver in the man’s short hair, and salt as well as pepper in his beard, but I fancied I saw a little more of both now. He was still, I thought, perhaps one of the most handsome men I’d ever seen. An older man, certainly, but that only added to the allure: there was nothing boyish about him at all. The admission was set aside earlier than it used to be, the way I could dismiss Akua’s looks. Some part of me considered the Warlock an enemy, and enemies were not to be blushed over. He did not reply to my greeting, or call on sorcery. All he did was stand there and look.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “About Sabah.”

Dark eyes finally turned to me.

“Your sympathy is a shallow thing of little meaning, Squire,” he replied. “You knew her for scarcely three years, perhaps a month in all of shared presence. Your grief is pale imitation of ours.”

“And yet I still grieve her,” I said.

His face twitched, sorrow and hatred mingled. In my veins Winter flowed, the darkness in the room thickening. My mantle craved the strife like a parched man craved water.

“She was always the best of us,” Warlock said. “All she wanted was for us to be alive and happy. It made her so very easy to love.”

I did not reply. Tread lightly here, Catherine. Winter had caught the scent of war, and in this it is so very rarely wrong. The tall man continued to watch me, the silence growing tenser every heartbeat.

“I am trying,” the Sovereign of the Red Skies said, “to think of a reason not to kill you right here and now.”

“You might not find that so easily achieved,” I calmly replied.

I’d come too far to flinch in the face of even a man like this. A slow smirk split the Soninke’s face.

“You speak to me of trouble when your soul is one spell away from turning on itself,” he said. “Proud little Squire, having learned all the wrong lessons. Did you really think a mantle was so easily claimed? That there would not be consequences to usurping a demigod?”

My eyes flicked to Nauk’s silent form.

“I am sharply aware of my limitations,” I said.

“You are an altar raised to your own ambition, child, and the foundations are shaking ,” he jeered. “You have lied and murdered your way through affairs beyond your understanding. Can you even still suffer the touch of cold iron?”

He laughed sharply, teeth like ivory showing in the dark.

“Perhaps it is too early for that still,” he said. “But thresholds must already be growing difficult, yes? Wards stand stone where they were once parchment, your power mercurial where it was once firmly grasped. You are not more than human, Catherine Foundling, merely other .”

My fingers twitched, hidden under Nauk’s cot by the angle. I felt like reaching for my sword even as the words winded their way into my head. There was an unfortunate stench of truth about them. The edges being turned on me did not cut deep, but my patience was running thin in the face of a berating I had not earned. Or, at the very least, not from him .

“You once warned me about lines I shouldn’t cross,” I coldly said. “I’ve kept to those terms. And yet here you are, knife on your fucking tongue. Act like even half the man you pretend to be, Warlock.”

Power flooded the tent. Not as a spell or an attack – the Sovereign of the Red Skies had simply ceased hiding the sorcery always roiling inside him. Just by standing there, just by being, he was a storm made flesh. My Name’s hackles rose in answer, frost touching my shoulders and my shadow deepening into an endless pit . I stood in front of Hashmallim unbowed, Wastelander. You will not scare me into lowering my head with cheap theatrics.

“Lines,” the Warlock hissed. “You dare speak to me of lines when just by existing you bring death to Amadeus? You stand before me reeking of bargain incomplete, a thing stitched together by blood and ignorance, and pretend you are safe for even a single soul in this wretched world?”

Something bubbled up inside me, and against my will a laugh escaped my lips.

“You blustering fucking hypocrite,” I said. “Who are you to cast stones, Sovereign? You’re more abattoir than man. Have you ever accomplished a single damned thing by means other than cutting up men? All I can put to your name is death and horror. I have been civil because Masego is family and for some godforsaken reason Black forgives what you are, but do not mistake that for fear, not for a single moment. You think your record cows me? I’ve bled for it, Warlock, but I have beaten gods . All you are is an aging bag of curses.”

The cloth of the tent around us withered until it was threadbare and blackened, Winter baring its fangs through my open snarl. The Warlock’s eyes dilated, red bleeding into them as the smell of brimstone spread through cold air.

“Hye should have killed you when she had the chance,” he said. “He would have forgiven her, eventually. Damn her for having looked only at the hunt.”

My fingers clasped around the hilt of my sword.

“Talk is meaningless,” I said. “Either act or shut the Hells up.”

The Soninke’s shoulders twitched and for a moment a I thought it would come to violence, my sword already halfway out the scabbard, but in the end the monster stayed his hand.

“My son asked for the life of this tin soldier of yours,” he said, tone emotionless. “Have it back, and count the debt of protecting Masego through his transition paid. Watch your step, Squire. If slaying you keeps him alive, you will not live to see winter.”

I forced myself to leave, because if I stayed there would be blood. Terror was writ plain on the faces of the two legionaries standing guard outsides, and any notion they hadn’t heard the argument was dead the moment I glimpsed it. My sword slid back fully into the sheath and I took a deep breath, wrestling down fury I knew to be not entirely my own. My temper was worsening. Like all the rest , I thought darkly.

“Everything you heard here is under the Tower’s seal,” I told the guards.

I lingered long enough to receive stammering assurances from them, then left. Part of me wanted nothing with the bonfire and comrades awaiting, but disappearing into my tent to stew over this wasn’t going to improve anything about my night. Even if the mood was gone, I would show up. Other , the Warlock had called me. Other than human. Maybe I needed all the company I could get.

—

“You’re having another,” Hakram bluntly ordered. “It’s a little early for morning dew, so I can hazard a guess why you have wet shoulders.”

I grimaced but offered up my cup to the orc.

“Could we at least drink something that doesn’t taste of burnt orange?” I complained.

I got a few smiles for that, though no laughter. No one was quite drunk enough yet to have reached that place where everything was funny.

“Dhahab is an acquired taste,” Aisha conceded.

“ Acquired is the right word,” Ratface drawled. “That bottle is worth twice its weight in gold.”

There were ten of us around the crackling flames, and though some of the faces had changed it had reminded me so much of evenings in the War College that I’d ached. Simpler times, though back then they’d felt anything but. These days whatever didn’t involve half a river’s worth of blood felt innocent.

“They served this at receptions in Ater,” Masego noted. “Though it tasted different then.”

“Milkweed extract,” Aisha explained, her cheeks rosy. “It’s the traditional paired poison.”

My Taghreb staff tribune had begun hitting the bottle early tonight and already abandoned the flat stone that had been her seat in favour of lying against the large trunk we were using as a bench. Having traded a cotton shirt and slender trousers for her usual uniform, I got a good glimpse of why Ratface had been stuck on her for so long every time she stretched. The toned curves were hard to notice under the aketon, but now they were in full display. I didn’t allow my eyes to linger, though, and the reason why spoke up right after.

“We’re roughing it like proper peasants, then,” Kilian smiled, cheeks dimpling. “How appropriate.”

I expected Archer to make something out of that, but when I looked she was busy trying to discreetly tie Masego’s braids in a knot. He kept slapping away her hands, so evidently not a great success.

“Frosted another table talking with Kegan?” Juniper asked, seizing Aisha’s cup and watering down her liquor even as she pouted.

“I wish,” I grunted. “Got into an argument with the Warlock.”

“Were you asking about his s-“ Robber started, but Pickler pushed him off his seat with the ease of long practice.

It did not escape my notice he half-leaned into the touch before allowing himself to be toppled. That infatuation had yet to disappear, then.

“Really?” Masego said, coil of lightning forming around his finger just in time for him to shock away Archer from her latest attempt with a flick. “Father doesn’t lose his temper often. As far as I know, the last argument he got into was before I was born.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Huh,” I eloquently said, nursing the liquor. “Who with?”

I wasn’t actually all that curious, but steering the talk away from the fact that I’d drawn steel on one of the Calamities in the middle of my own war camp seemed a solid notion. Even if he’d been fucking asking for it.

“Uncle Amadeus,” Masego said. “Uncle wanted him to open an academy for mages, after the Conquest.”

“There already is,” Ratface pointed out. “There’s a track for mages at the College.”

Hierophant rolled his glass eyes under the cloth.

“A real academy,” he said. “He refused, of course. Father had no interest in teaching squalling Wasteland brats.”

“The War College has a limited curriculum, it’s true,” Pickler said, and I noticed a subtle slur to her words. “The Eyries have entire volumes on engineering and alchemy that will never see light of day.”

“The spell scrolls at the College are very narrow in scope,” Kilian agreed. “And all the more sophisticated treatises are theory, not practical.”

“Praesi hoard spells like dragons do gold,” Juniper said. “That’s always been the way.”

I downed the rest of dhahab and reached for an open bottle of wine before Hakram could fill my cup with that sin against tastebuds a third time. I poured too quick, red spilling over the rim, and unthinkingly licked my fingers clean. Feeling eyes on me I turned, and found Kilian watching. I cleared my throat, in a hurry for a distraction.

“That may change,” I said. “I’ve had a talk with Black.”

There was a heartbeat of silence, my teacher’s name falling like a shroud on the previously light mood.

“Lord Black,” Juniper insisted, breaking the silence.

I snorted into my cup and saw a few smiles bloom. I hesitated to call anything about the Hellhound girlish, but the way she got so coquettishly proper about Black came pretty close.

“I call him sir about once a year, that should be enough formality to meet the quota,” I said. “Regardless, there’s going to be changes in the Wasteland after we clean up the Sahelian mess.”

Stillness hung in the air like fog, the fire crackling loudly around us. The quiet was pregnant with words none of us dared say.

“That sounds like murder talk,” Archer cheerfully said. “Doesn’t that sound like murder talk?”

“It does,” Robber said, grinning hungrily in the dark. “And with official sanction, no less. That is going to be a ride .”

Hakram cleared his throat.

“Enough blade-talk for he night,” Adjutant announced. “War will still be looming tomorrow, but then we’ll have to be sober.”

“Cheers to that,” I said, raising my cup.

“A toast,” Ratface shouted. “To liquor, obtained by entirely legal means!”

“To victory, fickle bitch that she is,” Aisha added just as loudly.

She handed her cup to Juniper long enough to pass the bottle to Pickler, never noticing that the orc poured half of it to the ground.

“To stabbing Diabolist in the face,” Archer said. “Like, at least twice.”

“To claiming her personal possessions afterwards,” Masego contributed.

“If you keep that up, warlock’s get, I’ll have to adopt you into my tribe,” Robber said, placing his hand over his heart.

“That’s illegal, they’ll have you killed,” Pickler noted.

“Then I’ll make my own tribe,” Robber said.

“Also illegal, will also get you killed,” Pickler replied without missing a beat.

“Boss,” Robber said, turning to me, “you need to make your own tribe so I can abuse that power most sorely.”

My brows rose.

“Congratulations, Special Tribune Robber,” I ceremoniously said. “You are the first and only member of the Lesser Lesser Footrest Tribe, by my authority as Vicefuckingqueen of Callow.”

“You said I’d go back to just lesser if I behaved,” the goblin whined.

“Which you did not,” Pickler said, sounding amused.

“ Goblins ,” Juniper sighed, then raised her cup. “To the Fifteenth.”

“Boring,” Archer catcalled from the side, obnoxiously drawing out the word.

“To making it this far,” Kilian said, bringing up her cup before a squabble could erupt.

“To us,” Hakram said, and with that sentimental finish we all drank.

The drinks kept flowing after that, and as the hours passed the stillness returned bearing sted tiredness instead of nervous anticipation. We did not speak of plans or war or the deaths to come, however close they may be. We talked like the friends I’d wished to have, back at the orphanage, and that I had found in this strange place along that winding path my life had taken. That the path also took me to dark and ugly places, I could not deny, but once in a while it led to golden nights like this as well – and they almost made up for the rest. When talk finally died down half my friends were asleep, Aisha draped over Juniper’s side and softly snoring as the general fondly looked down at her. Hierophant was having a quiet conversation with Pickler as Robber interjected less than helpfully, Archer passed out over the mage’s lap. For all that they bickered constantly, it had become plain for anyone to see how close the two of them were. He’d tightened her cloak around her shoulders, earlier, gentle in a way I’d never Masego be with anything but books. I was gazing at the scene, something between happiness and contentment having found me, when Hakram nudged my rib. He inclined his head to the side and I followed the direction, finding Kilian worrying her lip. She rose when she noticed my gaze and I closed my eyes. An overdue conversation, this. I rose to my feet as well, clapping Adjutant on the shoulder, and offered the redhead my arm.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I whispered.

Chapter 57: Revolve

“Men make swords, Heavens the sheath.”
– Callowan saying

The moon was out in full, and though part of me still grew irritated at the sight of the pale orb I’d learned to ignore it. I’d wondered once or twice at why the Winter King had granted me the title of Duchess of Moonless Nights, when his court had such a close association with the same celestial sphere. I still remembered the dream that had followed the usurpation, doubted I would ever forget even a single detail of it, and in it it’d been Summer that wanted to break the moon. Was that the intent from the beginning? To have it in my very mantle that I would seek to destroy you? Now and then I had to wonder who had really played who, when I’d tangled with the Deadwood Crown. If my every desperate gambit had been foreseen by the immortal thing that now ruled the whole of Arcadia, turned to his purposes. I could have lingered on that line of thought, and wanted to, but the feel of Kilian’s arm under mine was a reminder of why I’d begun this walk. I would not suffer cowardice from myself, not even in this.

Southern Callow took well to autumn, even at night. Though the shades of orange and gold some godly brush had painted across fields and trees could not be glimpsed after dark, there was an undercurrent of serenity to the country. Of peace, more than anywhere else in my homeland, for these parts had seen less of war than any of the rest. The last two years had been eager in attempting to make up that disparity, though even the worst of Summer was no match for centuries of Praesi invasion. I caught myself sidestepping the heart of this again, and clenched my fingers. The two of us moved in silence, away from the bonfire and closer to a small pond bordering wheat fields. The muddy banks were covered with footsteps from the soldiers who’d come here to fill canteens and barrels, but at this time of the night we were entirely alone. Except for the frogs , I thought, sharp ears catching echo of their song. We found a pair of carved stones by the shore, polished by what must have been decades of wind and rain, and sat there without a word.

The wind brushed the reeds ahead of us, and as I watched them I realized I had no idea what to say. A glance at Kilian told me her face was hesitant as well, though the reasons for it were her own. Some part of me thought there should be a physical weight to this, given how serious it all felt, but I found none on my shoulders. Something like a quiet laugh escaped my lips. Look at us, grim-faced as if the fate of the world rests in the balance of this conversation. Like this isn’t two girls of not even twenty summers settling a dispute of absolutely no import to Creation.

“Would you care to share the jest?” Kilian asked.

For a heartbeat I’d expected her to take my laugh as mockery, but that had been doing her disservice. She was not offended, merely curious. She’d never been the prickly one between us.

“I was considering matters of perspective,” I said.

I finally gave in to the urge I’d avoided all night and looked at her properly. She’d trimmed her hair. Last time we’d spoken it had been at the edge of what regulations allowed, but now it was in a clean pixie cut like when we’d first met. She was still, I thought, heartbreakingly lovely. Porcelain and flame framed hazelnut eyes, and the body I knew so intimately radiated a warmth I knew was completely imagined. Winter had seen to that. The mantle had done a great deal more, though. I’d been months since I needed to look at her to know she was there, ever aware of the measure of fae blood she carried in her veins, but as my power had grown so had that awareness. I was a Duchess, and she unsworn to any of the lords of the fae. There was a whisper in the back of my mind that spoke of mastery, of needing only to reach out and will it for her to kneel at my feet. The disgust that welled up in me at that spoiled what enjoyment I’d had of the peace and quiet.

“Great things,” Kilian said, “are made up of myriad smaller ones. I do not think import and magnitude necessarily walk hand in hand.”

A few sentences traded, and what I saw was our relationship made plain. I stepped away from it, making mixture of retreat and reason, while she stepped forward to bridge the gap at the cost of making herself the vulnerable one. There was, perhaps, expectation I would follow suit. But never demand. Time and distance had allowed me to see the boundaries we’d set more clearly, and the shred of shame I felt over them was well-deserved. There had never been anything equal about this, in what was given or received. The question that had hung in the air for the last few months was whether or not something that had never been balanced could be made so. Speaking with Hakram had broadened my outlook, but little else. I bared the blade first because in the end that was my nature, wasn’t it?

“Were you happy?” I asked. “Before.”

The redhead smiled, somewhat ruefully.

“You have a trick to tell when people lie, don’t you?” she said. “That does seem a mite unfair, going into this conversation.”

I looked away, gazing at the pond and the small ripple I could see a fish making as it swam.

“Of all the things that are unfair in this,” I said, “I would consider that a lesser measure.”

She sighed.

“The point of this,” she said, “was never for you to take lash to your back like an Ashuran supplicant. What has blame ever done to mend the world?”

“Ignoring fault is how tyrants are made,” I said.

“You are hardly that, Catherine,” she said, and without looking I felt her hand rise.

It hesitated, then went down again. I was uncertain whether or not to be glad.

“I was,” Kilian finally said. “Sometimes. Others not. We had our conversation because I feared one side would grow at the expense of the other.”

It had been kind of her to phrase it so delicately but the meaning was clear enough. Whatever had been good about it, for her, had been giving way to the bad. And I’d hardly noticed, my mind on a hundred other matters. The thing was, I did not have it in me to apologize for that. I wasn’t even sure she wanted me to. At the end of the day, my life didn’t come first. Neither did the people I shared it with. The lines I was willing to cross to ensure both of those were preserved had only grown in number, but that part of the matter remained unchanged. Because there’s a difference between important and important to me.

“You did most the talking, last time,” I said. “So I’ll get the wheel moving tonight.”

I itched to pick up a stone and toss it into the pond, anything to break the damned stillness that smothered the air around us, but I’d done quite enough running for the night.

“It was hypocritical of me to hold you up to standards that I break myself,” I admitted. “Standards I don’t even hold up everyone close to me to.”

Kilian brushed back her bangs, face wearing an expression I could not quite read.

“You thought well of me,” she said. “And so you thought I kept to the same principles as you. That’s not a crime, Catherine. It was just...”

“Presumptuous?” I suggested, a mirthless smile stretching my lips. “I placed expectations on you, then grew angry when you didn’t meet them. That’s on my head and no one else’s.”

Ferreting out exactly why I’d had those in the first place had been more delicate, the kind of introspection I was always reluctant to delve in. It hadn’t been that I cared for her, or at least not just that, because I cared for other people too. If Masego had spoken of a ritual fuelled by human sacrifice, would I have been angry? Yes, absolutely. But it would not have felt like a betrayal, the way it had with Kilian.

“I used you,” I said, tongue stumbling on the ugly word, “as a refuge. From all the dark shit that goes on in my life. And that meant I wanted you to keep your hands clean regardless of what you actually want. Or need.”

I felt her eyes lingering on me but did not meet them.

“I hadn’t thought you would actually admit that,” she said.

The faint surprise in her voice was probably the deepest cut she could have made, because she hadn’t meant it to be one at all.

“You once told me one of my virtues is recognizing when I’m wrong,” I said. “It’s fallen a bit to the wayside, lately, but it’s not gone.”

I’d made a lot mistakes, in the last two years. Won great victories too, but one did not excuse the other. I’d make more, because I had talents but also flaws and no matter what Warlock said in the end I was only human. But at least I could stop making them out of wilful ignorance. It wasn’t as much as I wished it could be. But it was what I could do. Power alone was never enough.

“I was not blameless, if we have to speak of it that way,” she said. “We did not have a conversation, last time. I’d made the decision before we ever spoke, and that was unfair to you.”

I nodded slowly. Silence followed, until I pushed forward.

“So what do you want, Kilian?” I asked quietly.

A lot could have been avoided, I thought, by asking that question a few years ago.

“Catherine, look at me ,” she hissed.

Her emotions were roiling. I could feel that with my sense that wasn’t quite a sense. But it was in her voice I read the anger, and it surprised me enough I obeyed. She was, I realized, genuinely furious.

“Don’t do you fucking do this,” she said.

Irritation flared up.

“Do what?” I bit out, exasperated. “Amends? Gods, Kilian, I’m trying . What more do you want?”

Her cheeks were flushed red, and for a moment I felt like kissing her. It passed.

“You’re not trying,” she said. “You’re treating me like someone you have to bind to you. I’m not Hakram, Cat. Or Aisha. I know you. And this is what you do when you bring someone into the fold. You’re acting like I’m the enemy, not the girl who shared your godsdamned bed for two years.”

“I know a lot less about that girl than I thought I did,” I flatly replied. “I’m-“

I bit down on my tongue, took a deep breath.

“No,” Kilian said, eyes hard. “We’re not doing it like this. Like I’m a horse you have to soothe or a hound you have to feed. I’m not interested in the Squire, Cat. She has no place in this conversation.”

“I don’t know what you want from me, Kilian” I hissed. “I just tried asking and you bit my fucking head off.”

She met my gaze, the demand that I not look away laying bare.

“Do you really need that badly to be in control, even for this?” she asked. “Gods Below, Cat, there’s no one else here. Would it cost you that much to allow yourself to be a person for an hour?”

“Yes,” I said, and I was surprised by the fury in my own voice. “Because people break . People have limits. I can’t have that anymore, Kilian, not when I’m making pacts with the Empress and planning wars with Black. Legends don’t blink, and if I’m anything less than that we are fucked . Because they’re stronger and they have decades on me and Weeping Heavens, this entire Empire is a house of cards and everybody’s tugging at it. I am in over my head, I always was, and it is this close to catching up with me and everyone I’ve dragged into this.”

The only sound in the silence that followed was my panting breath, paired with the unpleasant realization I’d begun to speak furious and ended up pleading. I passed a hand through my hair, exhausted in a way my body no longer allowed me to be.

“I can’t do this, Kilian,” I whispered. “There are no good choices anymore, just a spread with different shades of horror that I’m forced to pick from. Every time I think it’s coming together another thing drops and I have to become a little worse to deal with it. By the time I finish what I set out to do, I’ll be more poisonous than what I wanted to break. And I can’t back out because the alternative is every single one of you dead . And you know what’s the part that actually grieves me? I did this. I got us here in this mess, and I would do it again. Because this is bigger than me or you or the others, and if that’s not ritual sacrifice by another name then I don’t know what is.”

All hail the Black Queen, I thought bitterly. I’d already put thousands to the sword to get here, what were a few thousand more for the pile? Blood was the grease in the wheels of Creation, and whose it was they cared not. Kilian reached over and slid her fingers through mine. I let her, though I knew I’d regret it.

“You are not alone,” she said.

Of course I was . Because at the end of the day I have the power, I have the authority, and no amount of love can fit two people on a single throne. I parted our hands and rose to my feet, brushing off my knees.

“Your ritual,” I said.

“Tonight doesn’t have to be about that,” Kilian said.

“It already is,” I replied steadily. “I have no grounds, as either the Squire or the Vicequeen of Callow, to tell you not to do it.”

The redhead frowned.

“And yet you still find the very notion repulsive,” she said.

“This isn’t about me,” I said. “That was the mistake from the start, thinking that it was. I will, one day, grind that practice into nonexistence. Because it offends me, because it is a blight on Creation and the way of thinking it spawns is my enemy. But until then, it is against no law or regulation. Do what you deem best.”

Her face went blank.

“That sounds,” she said, “like goodbye.”

“I love you,” I said. “I’ve never said it before, not like this, but I do. It didn’t really sink in until I saw the amount of principles I was willing to break to keep you.”

A shiver went through her frame.

“Is that supposed to make this better?” she said, voice raw.

“It was due, regardless,” I said. “You were always the one that reached out. But this was about being equals, wasn’t it? I don’t think that means power, or titles, or authority. It’s about neither of us being expected to bend our knees to the other’s beliefs.”

My hand rose, going for her cheek, but she shook her head.

“Don’t,” Kilian said. “Not if you’re going to excise me out of your life. It would be crueller than just walking away.”

“I’ll still care for you,” I said quietly. “That’s not going away. We are friends.”

The redhead smiled bitterly.

“You bloody fool,” she said. “Do you really think friends is what I want from you? Getting just a part of someone after having had all of them can’t be counted anything but a loss.”

I almost took it back, right there and then. I could still do it, I thought. Salvage something out of this mess. But I didn’t. I felt like weeping for what I was giving up on, but it’d been a long time since I’d been in tears and I wasn’t sure I still could. My mantle and my Name woke, intertwined beyond separation, and I could have shunted all this... tangle off into them. Let the cold clear it all away. But I was not yet so far gone, and so my hand came down instead. I did not say goodbye. It was too cheap and end for this. Instead I bowed my head, and left. Grace had never been my strength, and there’d been precious little of that on display tonight. I found my feet taking me back to camp instead of the bonfire, where I knew Hakram would be. I had no taste for the conversation that awaited there, would not for a long time. Instead I found a tent, still lit with magelight even at this hour, and let the wards wash over me as I entered. Black was seated on one of his rickety stools, his thin shirt for only armour as he poured over papers arrayed before him. He took one look at me, then let out a breath that was almost a sigh.

He leant back to claim a cup from his bedside and filled it with the wine at his table, pressing it into my hands. I could have sat across from him, but instead I went on his bed. I folded my knees against my chest and cradled the cup. I barely remembered what it had felt like, to be a child, but it must have been something like this. He did not speak, but neither did his eyes return to the papers.

“I met Ranger,” I heard myself say. “She almost killed me, in Arcadia.”

“So I’ve heard,” Black said. “She is... difficult at the best of times.”

It was not an apology, nor had I expected one. The Black Knight did not apologize for himself, much less others.

“But you love her,” I said.

He inclined his head in agreement.

“I have, on occasion, thought of it as a singular obsession,” he said. “But perhaps that is merely as close to love as I can manage, given what I am. It is enough for the both of us.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why do you love her?”

He smiled faintly.

“I have wondered the same for many years,” he said. “I have loved – still love – others, but never quite in that manner. In the end, I think it is because she does not need me.”

I drank from the cup, a bitter Wasteland red that lingered on the tongue. I was glad of it, in no mood for sweetness.

“Does it get easier?” I asked. “Carving away pieces?”

Pale green eyes met mine.

“Yes,” he said.

It was a lie. We both knew that. But I loved him a little, for saying it anyway.

The last part I remembered of that night was my father’s hands putting a blanket over me.

Chapter 58: Hard Measures

“And so Subira of the Sahelians slew Maleficent and said: ‘Emperor am I now, Sinister of name and deed. Let this be the truth of our empire, that iron ever sharpens iron ‘til the last cut is made.’”
– Extract from the Scroll of Thrones, second of the Secret Histories of Praes

There was a House of Light standing at the heart of the largest Praesi army in a century. The irony had amused me more than it should, and the sharp taste of it on my tongue had driven me to make the temple my headquarters for the night. There’d been no one to contest my decision: the lone sister remaining of the priests who’d once tended to the village now swallowed up by tents and palisades was out. Among the legionaries, I was told, tending to the wounded and the sick. I could admire the dedication, though she’d find few soldiers willing to allow her ministrations save for those of my Fifteenth. Praesi had a deep abiding distrust of anything that claimed it came without strings attached. Misplaced wariness here, but common sense in the Wasteland.

“By the pulpit, please,” I told the legionaries.

A pair of broad-shouldered orcs set down my gloriously comfortable fae seat before the low wooden frame, casting uncomfortable looks at their surrounding. There was hardly anything to look at, this village being too small to even warrant mention on most maps. The House had been built in the style of the central plains anyway, instead of the more ornate Liessen ways. Walls of wood and clay, a single window in the back that was nothing more than a hole bare of glass or shutters. There wasn’t even an adjoining backroom for the priests to sleep in – only a house more hut than cottage huddled up against the wall outside. A third legionary, this one bearing captain stripes on her shoulders, lingered by the pulpit with my writing tools in her hands.

“You can set those down,” I said. “I don’t believe we’ve met before. You’re one of Hune’s, right?”

“My cohort serves under Legate Hune, yes,” she agreed, the thick Summerholm accent making it plain where she was from.

She grimaced.

“Ma’am, are you sure you wouldn’t prefer your tent?” she asked.

They know where my tent is, I thought . They’ll be watching it.

“Captain,” I began.

“Abigail, ma’am,” the woman provided.

“That will be all, Captain Abigail,” I said gently. “You may go.”

The Callown sharply saluted, half her face rosy in that way flesh tended to be after protracted mage healing. All the way up to the eye, I noted. She must have fought in the skirmish against Fasili and his wights. The pair of orcs followed her after dismissal, joining the contingent of guards that would be outside, and I let myself fall into the cushioned seat. Out of habit I pushed the inkpot and quill to the right side the way they’d taught me at the orphanage, reaching for a sheath of parchment and unrolling it. The soft calf skin had seen use before, though without Name sight I would never have noticed the hints of words that remained on it – whoever scraped the skin had done thorough work. Calmly, I opened the buttons of my shirt and reached for the three documents I had been keeping on me ever since receiving them. One was from Malicia, though not of her handwriting. The second bore Thief’s hasty scrawl and the third was a hand I knew more than passingly, Ratface’s. All of them bore names. Setting the three ahead of my own parchment I inked my quill and began to write. Two columns, the first for those that were in more than one document and the other for the single mentions. I blew carefully on the ink after finishing, and only then paused. Seven names from the first column were given a mark. Those I let dry on their own, settling into the seat and waiting for Hakram. Adjutant, ever a prince among men, did not make me wait for long.

“Masego says it’s all ready,” the orc told me without bothering with niceties.

I approved. This was not going to be a good night for those.

“And he’s certain it won’t be detected?” I asked.

The tall greenskin snorted.

“He thought you’d ask that,” he said. “Should I give you the answer he prepared?”

“I assume it’s very condescending,” I said.

“Almost poetically so,” Hakram grinned.

The flash of fang he bared was low, close to the lips and paired with eye contact. That, I had learned, usually meant amusement in an orc. Though not all of them, to my irritation. The clans from the Lesser Steppes kept to their own strange customs. He lingered after, and I drummed my fingers against the pulpit.

“Out with it,” I said. “Do you need more men? Because there’s only so many I would count trustworthy, and I don’t want to dip into the Broken Bells for that.”

“Forty is plenty,” he replied. “Truth be told, I want to keep the second line you gave me after the business is over, if it can be done. I have too many irons in the fire these days for the number of hands I can command.”

“I’ll talk to Juniper,” I said. “But Nauk’s command was gutted in Dormer and Senior Tribune Jwahir is low on veterans, so I wouldn’t count on it for a few months.”

I raised an eyebrow after that. Another line under his command was very clearly not what he’d wanted to talk about. My mood turned sour when I remembered another matter I’d recently slid under his purview.

“Wait, is this about Nauk?” I said. “I thought that was going fine.”

He shook his head.

“Hierophant took a look, like you asked,” the orc said. “He’ll be awake in a week, up and about in a month. You can leave that to me, Cat. I’m just worrying about our... timing.”

“It had to be tonight,” I reminded him. “The assault starts come morning. If we’d done this earlier she would have had breathing room.”

“There are officers on that list,” Hakram said, and it was not a question.

“Highest is a tribune,” I replied.

Confirmation from Thief and Malicia. That one had stung more than I’d thought is would, given that he’d enrolled back in Ater.

“I mislike what this’ll do to our chain of command,” he bluntly said. “On the eve of the largest battle we’ve ever fought, no less.”

“You can’t’ seriously be suggesting we just leave them there,” I said, appalled.

He sighed.

“No, not that,” he said. “I just wish we’d done this early enough the replacements would be settled. Before you begin, I understand why we didn’t.”

“The wager’s that we’ll gain more than we lose from this,” I said. “I stand by it.”

The orc looked away, the thoughtful look I caught first eminently strange on a greenskin’s face.

“It’s been a long time coming,” he finally said.

“I wish it was a masterstroke,” I admitted. “It’s why we delayed so much. But even now it’s just spring cleaning, isn’t it? We won’t be getting all of them.”

“I doubt there’s a single army in the world that could boast that ,” he ruefully said. “Perfect is foe to functional.”

A saying translated from Kharsum, that, though there was one much like it in Callow. Still, I silently admired the fact he’d managed to put alliteration in there through a language barrier.

“It won’t be pleasant work,” I said.

As close to an apology as I could offer him.

“Pleasant’s herding aurochs back home,” Hakram said. “We chose different lives, you and I.”

I inclined my head.

“Good hunting, Adjutant,” I simply said.

What his lips bared was not a smile so much as a row of knives. He left me to my thoughts, and though my mind was spinning it never lingered on any single thread. There were too many moving parts ahead, though thorough planning should see to the worst of it. It began in truth when Grandmaster Talbot was ushered through the door, an hour before Midnight Bell. The nobleman – as a knight he still qualified as that, even though his family’s ancestral holdings were now my own demesne – was impeccably arranged even this late, dark locks combed and his beard without a single hair out of order. The cloak on his shoulders I nearly raised an eyebrow at, though the black and bronze I saw were the colours of the Order and not of House Talbot. It still looked more decorative than truly useful, but wasn’t that always the way of highborn? He knelt smoothly before the pulpit, and if he’d taken any offense to a villain using holy site for writing desk there’d been no trace of it on his face.

“Your Grace,” he said. “I come as summoned.”

“On your feet, Talbot,” I said. “I’ve never had much fondness for kneeling, mine or otherwise. I have work for you.”

He rose as elegantly as he’d gone on his knees, but now I saw sharp attention in his eyes where before there’d only been curiosity.

“It was my understanding that the assault would begin with Morning Bell,” he said.

“It will,” I said. “That’s not what I want you for. Or the Order, to be more precise.”

“We are ever at your disposal, Your Grace,” Brandon Talbot said.

Noblespeak for having not fucking idea what I was talking about, and I was glad of it. If they saw me coming... I’d kept my preparations light and quiet, but Akua had always been the better hand at this game.

“I have a list of names for you,” I said. “When you return to the Order’s encampment, you will rouse your men and proceed through the Fifteenth to arrest everyone on it.”

The man’s eyes widened.

“You have found traitors in the legion,” he said.

“Most of these I’ve known about for months, if not years,” I said calmly. “I’ve had Adjutant hunting for them since before he even had his Name. The intent was to watch who they came in contact with, but Diabolist has been very careful. In the end I had to rely on other eyes.”

“And now you would purge them before engaging the Wastelander,” Talbot murmured.

It wouldn’t be all of them, of course. She’d have more, carefully hidden under instructions to lay low. But by killing what I hoped was the majority of her agents when she had no time to replace them I’d be either crippling or ending whatever scheme she had prepared. It took more than a handful of spies to carry out a plan, no matter how well-placed. I folded the parchment I’d written on and held out my hand. He hesitated before coming forward and taking it, eyes lingering on my fingers. I smiled discretely. I remembered enough of my etiquette lessons to know nobles weren’t supposed to taken anything directly from the crowned head of Callow, and it was almost charming he kept to that even now. Grandmaster Talbot opened the parchment and read through, expression growing grimmer the longer he did.

“There are more than I would have believed,” he said. “And Callowans among them.”

“I doubt they knew who they were selling the information to,” I noted. “She’ll have used Callowan or Duni intermediaries. The names in the second column gave intelligence, but should not be considered agents. Just treasonous.”

“Tribune Katlego,” he said, eyebrows rising in surprise as he studied the first column closer. “Second in rank among Legate Hune’s officers, I believe.”

“I’m told hostages were taken,” I said.

The Empress had written as much. But he’d folded instead of going to me, and so on the list he went.

“That is the reason there is no mark by his name,” I added after a moment.

“And those have meaning, I take it,” the man said.

“Those seven officers,” I said mildly, “are going to resist arrest. They will, unfortunately, die in the struggle.”

The knight’s face went still and he studied me silently.

“Trial would be inconvenient, even with a military tribunal,” he said.

“They have relatives in the Legion,” I said. “Or connections at court. This will make fewer waves.”

“This is murder,” he said.

There was no condemnation in his voice. It was easy to forget, sometimes that while the nobles of the kingdom had been no High Lords they’d been far from being babes in the woods. Callow was no stranger to knives in the dark. His words had not been question but statement of fact, and I did not deny them.

“So it is,” I agreed. “See it done promptly. Supply Tribune Ratface has a man outsides, awaiting you with details on the location of everyone on the list.”

Brandon Talbot folded the parchment and slid it inside his doublet before putting his palm over his heart and bowing.

“By your leave, my queen,” the Grandmaster said.

I met his eyes, and did not correct him. I had few advantages over my enemies, I thought as I watched him leave, but the Order of Broken Bells was one of them. Callowan loyalists who’d been in hiding until a few months ago, and had hardly left my sight since. They were near certain to be free of infiltration and unlikely to balk at the killing of Praesi. It would not be entirely quiet work, of course. The knights mobilizing after dark would draw attention. I was counting on it, because there were very few mages on that list. Not nearly enough to explain how quickly Akua was made aware of my movements. Which meant there were more hidden, and like good spies they would report the ongoing purge to their mistress. At which point their locations would be caught by Maesgo’s ward, and Adjutant would would take them. A scheme, I had been taught, should always have more than one payoff. I was slow in learning, Akua, but I have learned. The lists I had received from others I put to the flame. I sent for legionaries and had my seat and affairs removed after, though I did not leave the House. I sat on a wooden bench close to the entrance, little more than a carved log, and waited.

As the hours passed I received reports, some more pleasing than others. The Broken Bells had killed twelve, not seven as I had ordered. Whether Talbot had taken this occasion to settle some scores with an excuse or whether those had been genuine accidents, I would have Hakram find out tomorrow. Adjutant caught two mages trying to reach Diabolist, one a lieutenant and Duni as well. We found the sloppy and the scared, I thought. The truly dangerous ones did nothing at all. I had considered, when planning this, snatching the lot of them from the gallows as I had once done with deserters in Summerholm. But I still remembered flames and Summer’s wrath, the soldiers who’d died screaming for me, and found I did not have it in me to do it. Whatever the Gallowborne had begun as, they had been mine in the end. I would not forge them anew out of dross like this. It was near First Bell when the reports trailed off, and in the wake of that end I dismissed my guards. Returning to my tent felt like a chore, and so I simply rested my head against the wall in the corner of the House. I knew, closing my eyes, that Adjutant would have people close by. It was enough.

I closed my eyes, and sleep found me. An eternity later, I woke to a soft hand on my shoulder.

“Dawn approaches, my friend,” a woman’s voice told me. “The Legions have sounded assembly.”

I’d been entirely awake from the moment I was touched, and drew back the hand that had gone for my sword out of habit. There was a woman standing at my side, barely out of girlhood. Her fair hair was kept in a thick braid, and her robes were simple. The sister , I thought. I was surprised they’d let her in at all, with me asleep. From the corner of my eye I glimpsed a legionary sitting in another corner, and while the sister turned away I dismissed him with a nod. One of Hakram’s? Most likely.

“There’s time yet,” I said.

The woman laughed softly.

“I did not think the Legions so lenient,” she said. “You must be an officer.”

She doesn’t know who I am , I realized. I was not wearing armour, and my clothes were well-made but nothing ostentatious. My blade was a longsword, not standard issue, but a priestess might not have noticed that.

“I am,” I replied amusedly. “It’s going to be a long day, regardless. A few moments of respite will not be begrudged.”

“May I sit?” the sister asked.

“It’s your House,” I shrugged.

“Not mine in the slightest,” she said, though she sat at my side regardless. “I was glad to hear the Fifteenth does not forbid worship of the Gods Above. Places such as these should be refuge to all, no matter their oaths.”

“The Empire’s never been heavy-handed with the priests,” I said. “No reason General Juniper should be different.”

“Or the Black Queen, I suppose,” the sister mused. “We do live in interesting times.”

I snorted.

“No denying that,” I said. “Maybe a little less troublesome, after today. With the Diabolist gone the work of fixing this country can begin.”

The priestess smiled to take away from the bite, but shook her head in disagreement.

“Will it?” she asked. “Evil warring on Evil cannot result in Good.”

I laid back against the wall, eyeing the light peering through the hole ahead. I had at least an hour left, long enough to wash and eat before muster.

“I was told never to argue philosophy with the sisters, when I was a kid,” I said. “But that seems too dismissive by half.”

“I care little for arguments,” the sister said. “But discussion is one of the tools the Gods granted us to make the world a little brighter.”

“Shall we discuss then, Sister?” I teased.

Her face grew serious.

“Saving one soul is saving all of Creation,” she said.

From the Book of All Things, that. One of the more sentimental quotes, and not one I put much stock in. Even if Malicia embraced the Heavens tomorrow, the Empire wouldn’t change in the slightest – save maybe with the addition of her blood on the floor.

“Ah,” I mused. “Hard to have a discussion with that premise, isn’t it? I don’t really think we believe Evil to be the same thing, when it comes down to it.”

“Then teach me,” she said. “I would not close my ears to the truth.”

“You know, I was raised on the same stories as you,” I said. “I used to believe that Evil was mostly about a good ol’ rousing round of hangings and sundry blood magic.”

The blond priestess smiled gently.

“But you don’t anymore?”

“You could say I’ve had the benefit of an extensive education on the subject,” I replied. “The way I see it, Sister, Evil is about refusing to play by the rules of the game.”

She frowned. It was a pretty look on her, as I imagined most were. It would have been a lie I didn’t find something attractive about purity, though power had always been what I preferred.

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow,” she admitted.

“It think starts with asking why ,” I said. “Why should I forgive? Why should I not kill? Why should I obey? And eventually you realize that there’s all these rules handed down to you and then you get to the real question – why shouldn’t I just do whatever the Hells I want?”

I chuckled, the sound of it resonating in the near-empty House of Light.

“That’s when you realize the answer’s pretty simple: because someone thinks I shouldn’t, and will stop me if I do.”

I let out a long breath.

“Most people stop there and become a minor league sort of evil. That one jackass in every village that always talks shit, the merchant that short-changes you or another corrupt judge.”

My fingers idly closed around the pommel of my sword, thumb rubbing the leather wrap around the handle.

“But once in a while, you get someone who doesn’t flinch. Who decides it’s not enough, and replies: try me. And then they pick up a sword.”

I met her eyes and offered her a half-smile.

“That’s Evil, I think – walking past the line in the sand and refusing to apologize for it.”

The look on the Sister’s face was unreadable.

“You sound proud.”

I shrugged.

“Proud is a strong word,” I said. “But it’s been some time since I was ashamed of it.”

“Strange,” she said softly. “You did not strike me as someone who would embrace fear.”

It was my turn to frown.

“I think you might have missed my point.”

She shook her head.

“The way of thinking you just described assumes that the world around you is your enemy. That is not courage, it is fear .”

I laughed.

“Look around you, Sister. The Diabolist is stealing cities, the Principate is marauding near the borders and just two years ago the south was in open rebellion. The world is full of enemies.”

“Because you treat them like one,” she told me seriously. “If you solve all your problems with swords, swords are the only reply you will ever get.”

“That’s a nice sentiment,” I replied, “but it’ll be cold comfort when the Procerans invade.”

She sighed.

“Ah, borders. I’ve never quite understood why they matter so much to people. You draw imaginary lines on the land and tell people to remain on one side, as if ink and parchment could make you its owner.”

I had quite a few scathing things to reply to that, but since she’d been polite enough to let me speak uninterrupted I supposed I should afford her the same courtesy.

“Do you know why the House of Light does not preach rebellion against the Empire? Because it doesn’t really matter, whether we have a king or an empress. Rulers come and go, but what really matters doesn’t.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“And what would that be, exactly?”

“Trying to be better,” she told me, and passion shone in her eyes. “No one is born Good. It’s something you have to work for every day, and sometimes it can seem like more trouble than it is worth – but what else is there?”

She leaned forward.

“So many of us see life as a race and will do anything to pull ahead, but that is the conceit of a child. If we all cross the same finish line the only thing that matters, the only thing that can matter, is how we get there.”

I grinned, but it was more a show of teeth than mirth.

“Sentiment like that is how they get you every time, Sister. So what if we all cross the same finish line? Down here in the mud is what really matters. What we make of it. And if I only have so much time kicking around Creation, then I’m the one who’s going to decide how it’s spent. Not the Gods, not whoever’s got a crown, me . I own my life, and damn anyone telling me I need to live it abiding rules that are just a key to the other side.”

She met my eyes, unafraid.

“Life is what you share with others,” she said. “Hoard it and you will die all the poorer for it.”

I ran a hand through my hair, frustrated that she just wouldn’t see what I saw.

“You don’t even get to set the rules you live by,” I said. “You’re a leaf spun in the wind deluding itself into thinking as long as it behaves it’ll land somewhere nice.”

She smiled, eyes gentle and sad. The kind of eyes you gave someone who was so far lost they didn’t even remember what the path looked like. Her pity burned me harder than Summer’s flame ever had.

“And you think your way will let you choose where you land?”

My mantle roiled under my skin, the weight of all the choices I had made and would make, the sum of what I was and would be.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Sister,” I told her, “I don’t want to be the leaf – I want to be the storm .”

She laid a gentle hand on my wrist.

“In the end,” she murmured. “I choose to believe that being Good matters more that being strong.”

“In the end,” I replied clearly, “I would rather be wrong than be cowed.”

And what more was there to say, after that? I rose, letting her hand fall away.

“Be safe,” she said. “There are great dangers about.”

I smiled, feeling a sliver of grief for all that this was.

“Oh, Sister,” I said. “All those dangerous people? I’m the one they answer to.”

Chapter 59: Anacrusis

“Peace is a fine thing, but war is the crucible of crowns.”
– Queen Elizabeth Alban of Callow

There was something oddly intimate about being dressed, even if it was with steel instead of skirts. It began with the grieves, Hakram kneeling at my feet to tighten the straps. He was tall enough there was need of stool to put my foot on, since even kneeling he still reached near my chin. He had clever fingers, belying their size, and though he was not gentle he was quite meticulous. Then the pua , the long thigh and lower leg piece with an articulation at the knee. Over my aketon I put on a shirt of mail in the legion style, six interlocked rings spreading into a thick cover, and as he reached out for the vambraces I set the breastplate over the mail myself. The straps were hardened leather, reinforced with iron, and they creaked as I tightened them. I held out my arms for him to fit with the vambraces, watching his face crease with concentration. Pauldrons followed, marked only with the Miezan numerals of the Fifteenth instead of the heraldry and titles that were gathering to me like flies to honey. Armguards were adjusted to my comfort and articulated gauntlets finished the portrait. The fingerbends looked like fins, I’d always thought. There were usually stained red by the end of a fight, with either my blood or my opponent’s. The gorget clasped tight around my throat, and though uncomfortable I knew better than to whine. I’d killed enough people through the throat to know leaving it open was sheer stupidity.

I’d expected to be presented with my old open-faced helmet as the last of steel to bear, but what I was offered was different. This one was not of Legion make, with hinged cheeks and a flat noseguard in front. It had a long tail to cover the back of my neck, true, but there was a flap in the back through which my ponytail was meant to go. The cheeks were fully covered, going into a long angled mouthguard crafted so it would rest against my gorget. The strip of steel that served as noseguard was shorter than I was used to, and above it was a ridge of steel meant to prevent blades sliding down into my exposed face. What had been forged above the ridge was what had me frowning: it was crown. Black iron set into the helmet, not jutting, but a crown nonetheless. My eyes flicked to Adjutant.

“You know I do not wear ornate armour,” I said.

“I know your teacher does not,” the orc said, and pressed my palm against the steel. “It is not him we follow.”

This isn’t a squire’s armour , I thought. It is a queen’s, and her crown is black. For all that I had avoided the regalia of my rising rank, it seemed it had finally caught up to me.

“Vicequeen,” I reminded the orc.

“For how long?” he asked quietly.

I winced. Months, perhaps a year. But Black was not one to go back on his word, and he’d given it. A crown for me, so long as I readied Callow for war. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was time to get rid of the fig leaf. Past a certain point reticence was more arrogance than humility. Or, even more to my distaste, a form of fear. I lowered my head and let Hakram set it down on my brow. The cold touch of steel was no burden, but the promise it bore was different story.

“It is fitting, I think,” I murmured, and Hakram’s eyes met mine. “That you would be the one to crown me.”

His face twitched at that, a flinch only half-swallowed. My gauntleted hand reach for his arm and squeeze him comfortingly.

“I have relied on you for so many things, since you were my sergeant,” I said.

“I did what I could,” Adjutant replied gruffly.

He looked away, and were he anyone else I would have thought him abashed.

“We made a deal once, under moonlight,” I said.

“That was no deal, Catherine,” the orc said. “That was an oath and I stand by it. I called you Warlord then, and I don’t regret it. I don’t keep to the old ways, not like Nauk, but it is no empty word. I haven’t used it since because it-“

He scowled, unsure of himself for once.

“It’s not the right title, not for the two of us,” he finally said. “Too shallow in the wrong places. We are more than war.”

It was times like these I understood how peculiar Hakram truly was, compared to others of his kind. It wasn’t his temperament, or his way with people. There was an underlying threat to the way orcs like Nauk and Juniper and every other orc I’d met saw the world, and in Adjutant it was absent. I thought much of the Hellhound, but never would I imagine her saying we are more than war . It would go against her nature. To my general peace was the wait between campaigns, rule a necessary evil best left to the hands of others. Since he’d come in my service, Hakram had acted in myriad ways: diplomat, steward, tactician and warrior. A confidant, too, and how many times would my temper have led my astray if not for his calming influence? It’d been my Name that gathered the Woe, but it was Adjutant who was keeping them together. That much was becoming undeniable as the weeks passed. It would have been easy to dismiss this as part of his Name, becoming whatever I needed him to be, but Names did not come from nothing. There had to be will behind them, an intent to fill the gaps I left without ever realizing it. There were a great many victories to my name, nowadays, but few of them would have been possible without the tall orc quietly going behind me and doing the labour I never even considered needed to be done.

I wondered if this was what Scribe felt like to Black: a limb whose absence left you a cripple in all the worst of ways. I’d made much of my feelings for Kilian, lately, and the ever-complicated knot that was my relationship with my teacher, but if I had to name the person I loved most in the world it was the orc standing in front of me. Because he’d chosen to trust me when he had nothing to gain, long before a Name came into it. Because he was a decent man and he still believed in what we did – and as long as I had that, that shining truth tucked away in the back of my mind, it did not matter what horrors I hitched my course to. Hakram was perhaps my closest friend in the world, but more than that he was compass. Without him I would be lost in more ways than one.

“Oaths bind both ways,” I said. “The part that is mine to uphold, do you judge it upheld?”

He laughed quietly.

“You’ve always kept your eyes on the horizon,” he said. “On the next task, the next enemy, the next war. Look down, Catherine Foundling. See where you are.”

In his deep-set eyes there was something feverish, the fire he always kept under lock and key let loose for my sake.

“We’re winning,” he said. “Just by standing here, we’re winning. Because they only rule us only as long as we let them, and the moment that truth bleeds it dies. They can kill every last one of us and it won’t matter, because as long as the banner’s been raised once someone will rise to carry it again.”

Baring fangs, he met my eyes.

“They wouldn’t let us have a seat at the table, so we broke it,” Hakram said, and there was a savage satisfaction to him. “That will not go quietly into the night, no matter what happens today.”

“It’s going to get worse,” I said quietly. “After Diabolist. We know her kind, what it can do: rise tall and fall just as hard. It’s the people behind her we need to end, and they’ve owned the Wasteland since before it had that name.”

“ How tall the spears, and great the host ,” he spoke in Kharsum, cadenced and low,” This empire’s bier, of graven ghosts .”

His smile grew sharp, and there was not a thimble of mercy to be found in it.

“They say the last of the Warlords spoke that verse, after the Miezans destroyed the holy grounds of the Broken Antlers,” Hakram said. “We were great, in those days, great as any power birthed since.”

The Beast stirred under my skin, coiling lazily as it tasted the stench of death in the air – death past, and death yet to come.

“That’s the thing with eras, Catherine,” Adjutant said, hard-eyed and proud. “They come to an end. So let’s bury it together, the two of us – this fucking Age of Wonders they built on our backs.”

I clasped the arm he offered, and it felt like an oath.

—

Liesse looked like the gates of some godforsaken hell. The walls of sun-kissed stone had covered in great runes and the pale blocks had withered like fruit on the vine. Atop them stood unmoving thousands facing us, and though this was a fortified city and not a fortress they were tall ramparts and well-built. Behind them the labyrinth of alleys and shops would be crawling with wards and undead: we’d bleed for every street. I’d taken this city once before, fought my way through the Lone Swordsman and his army, but this was a different kind of threat. This was Akua Sahelian, and though I bore her no small hatred I would not deny she was cunning, ruthless and powerful. The Diabolist had called the last of the Truebloods to her side, gathered sorcerers and warlocks and every breed of practitioner the Wasteland could boast. The elements unleashed was the least of what I could expect. There would be devils, and perhaps even demons. She’d gone too far to flinch at the notions of what might come if she failed. What made Akua dangerous beyond all that, though, was displayed before the city.

Thirty thousand undead stood, but not in simple ranks. As I marshalled armies from every corner of Callow, Diabolist had prepared her grounds to receive me. A ditch had been dug and palisade raised behind it, wights with spears massed behind. Three bastions of rough stone had been raised behind, filled with mages and what few siege engines she had. No great fortifications, these, but our own trebuchets and scorpions would be lower on the ground and would have to be brought into range as hers awaited. To the sides of the ditch stakes had been hammered into the ground with broad depths, a clear deterrent for my knights. The nature of my forces was not unknown to her, and she knew that between the two of us it was me who was pressed for time. There’d been talk of assaulting the other walls, since this front was so deeply fortified, but though there would be such an attempt the main thrust would have to be through this direction. It was where the gates were, the weak point in the defensive wards. The fortifications facing Procer were the newest, since that side had once been facing Lake Hengest and had lacked any fortifications, but since then she’d raised walls atop a sharp slope of beaten earth and anchored wards in them. The stretch between those walls and the Ducal Palace had been made into a killing field worthy of Summerholm.

It was the most direct way to the heart of her ritual, but the casualties we’d taken forcing our way through there would be... staggering. That knowledge, about the anchor of her ritual, had come without any need for spying. Above Liesse, Akua Sahelian’s madness was laid bare for all of Creation to witness. Pillars of darkness rose from the roof of the palace half a dozen leagues into the sky, where their true nature was revealed: a cage. Like claws the darkness clasped a gargantuan orb of roiling smoke, ever-moving and testing the confine. Only a handful of people on the field knew the true nature of it for sure, though I suspected the Warlock would divine it after a closer look. He’d helped design the containment wards about to be activated around the city, after all. The souls of the Deoraithe cast a heavy shadow on the morning sky, becoming more a stormy dusk the closer one came to the city. Millions upon millions, accumulated since before Praes stood a single nation or the Miezan so much as caught sight of Calernia’s shores. It was, I thought, almost as deep a desecration as Akua’s casual slaughter of a hundred thousand innocents. Almost.

“Not impressed,” Archer volunteered. “Now if she’d set the sky on fire that would be something, but this is just decorative.”

“Shut your fucking mouth,” Juniper spat. “Lord Black is about to speak, and if I miss a single word because you’re whining you’ll regret it.”

The Fifteenth, for once, would not take the vanguard of the fight. That would be the duty of the veteran legions, with my men serving as a mobile reserve to be deployed when the city was breached. The field outside was not ours to take. I’d gathered most my people regardless, since the Woe would have duties before it came to the fighting in the streets. Thief was the most glaring absence, come to camp only for a few hours when we’d first arrived and then disappearing into Liesse again. She’d given me priceless information, though, and though she would not be fighting there was one last task ahead of her. Hierophant was clearly bored out of his skull, impatient with anything that did not involve toying with the wards he’d spent several weeks designing, and Archer was even worse. She’d gotten restless the moment she saw the armies arranged, spoiling for a fight. Juniper’s general staff stood with her and as usual Hakram was the lone isle of serenity to be had. As for Robber and his cohort, they were my knife in the night. What I had in mind for them did not involve being out in the open.

“Archer, don’t assault my general,” I said absent-mindedly. “I don’t have a spare.”

Juniper sneered in my direction, but did not comment. She’d been telling everyone to be silent for a half hour now, long before Black was even close to making an appearance. He was out now, though. Atop his dead horse barded in steel, in bare plate from head to toe and black cloak streaming behind him. He’d offered me the right to make the address, but I’d declined. Speeches had never been my strength – I worked best with small numbers. I would have to learn the skill, eventually, but this was too important a battle for fumbling. Horse passing before the armoured ranks of the Legions, my teacher slowed his mount and came to rest. When he spoke, it was with sorcery behind his voice: there was not a soul in our host that would not hear him.

“We have fought this war before,” he said, and his words washed over us like a wave.

There was pause, but not long enough for stillness to set in. I could admire the skill of it – his fame as an orator was not unearned.

“Forty years ago, we fought it from the Steppes to the Hungering Sands,” he said. “Twenty years before that it was fought as well, and again and again all the way back to the days of the Declaration. A thousand battles spanning a thousand years.”

The Black Knight’s power filled the air like a haze, and even where I stood I could feel it whispering to me.

“ Legionaries ,” he called, a bone-deep shiver giving answer. “Look atop those walls and know you face a millennium of blood and arrogance staring down at you. You know that banner. Your fathers and mothers fought under it, against it. Under that standard Callow was bled a hundred times. Under that standard, Praes tore itself apart at the whims of the mad and the vicious. Are you not tired? I am.”

He laughed, a thing of dark and bitter anger.

“I have fought this war since I was a boy,” he said. “And so have you, in every shop and field and pit there is to be found in this empire. There is no peace with this foe, only struggle from dawn to dusk.”

His voice rose.

“Legionaries,” he called. “You of Praes and Callow, of Steppes and Eyries, you have fought this war before and won it . Forty years ago, we broke the spine of the High Lords. Yet here they stand before us, fangs bared. Will you let this challenge go unanswered?”

It was the orcs that begun. Feet stamped the ground, swords were hammered against shields. It came and went like a summer storm, deafening in sudden fury and sudden absence.

“I will not tell you our cause is just, for justice does not win wars,” he said. “I will not tell you victory is deserved or assured, for Creation owes nothing. If the world refuses you your due, then declare war upon all the world .”

His sword cleared the scabbard, the sound of sharpness and steel a call to war.

“On this field, on this day, two truths rule,” he said. “There is only one sin.”

“DEFEAT,” sixty thousand voices screamed back.

“There is only one grace.”

“VICTORY.”

Shields rose, swords unsheathed, horns sounded and with that last word filling the air the Second Battle of Liesse began.

Villainous Interlude: Crescendo

“Then let us be wicked,
Let us be reddest ruin
Rent, broken, crooked
Black hearted and cruel

Then let us be doom,
To both friend and foe
Fly banner of gloom
We lowest of the low

Rise, rise all ye villains
You rogues and madmen
Proudly claim the stage,
Of this wondrous age

We are not kind or just
Deserving of any victory
We are a thing of dust
Promised only misery

So smile, Tyrants,
And let us be wicked”

– Final monologue of “The Many Deaths of Traitorous”, a play on the reign of the Dread Emperor Traitorous

In the depths of the city of Liesse, beyond layers upon layers of wards and traps, there was a room. For more than a year it had been slowly crafted to perfection, and for years before that had Akua Sahelian spent days and nights refining its design. Removing impurities and inefficiencies, balancing ease of use and breadth of effect so that only a single soul in all of Creation could use it as it was meant to be used. Should she live for a hundred thousand years she would never make anything half so great, for it was the culmination of everything that she was. All that she loved and hated, all that had made and fought her. There had been a child, once, who looked upon pyramids of mud and blood and felt awe. At the skill, at the scope, at the power that still dwelled within – and though Tasia Sahelian had toiled greatly to make a hollow husk of that girl, a mere receptacle for her ambitions, that spark of wonder had never been snuffed out. It had grown into flame, and that sacred burn coursed through her veins today. And it whispered of triumph .

Diabolist felt the city pulse like a living creature, arrays of sorcery spread across it like arteries all leading back to the heart that was her. In this moment, she knew, she was half a god. How easy it would have been to grow drunk on that might, had she been of a lesser line. But she was a Sahelian, the blood of the original murder. The killers of the first empress, who’d writ the truth of Praes in blood and treachery. Her forbears had been kings and queens, and Tyrants more than once. Rule, the ownership of power however fleeting it may be, was nothing less than her birth right. Walls of carved stone around her were as a pond, and on those reflective facades she saw the Legions of Terror standing with a man before them. The Black Knight, she thought, spoke well. Yet it was wrong, for him to be the speaker. It should have been Catherine Foundling, her match and mirror. Her red right hand in the making. Once she had thought too little of the Squire, believed her to be nothing more than tool and obstacle, but how she had learned since. Fasili had once remarked it was a shame Foundling was not born Praesi, for she had the seeds of greatness in her, but Akua knew better.

It had to be this way. It was the fire, the righteous indignation that made Squire who she was – a burn no lesser than Diabolist’s own. If she’d never been crushed underfoot, she would never have risen from it fangs bared. The Soninke closed her eyes and smiled. She could glimpse the ending of their story already, grasp the edges of its shape with her fingers. Akua would break Catherine Foundling, shatter her beyond repair, and the creature of jagged edges and hatred that remained after would kneel at her feet. And what a fearsome monster she would be, upon emerging from that crucible. She would sweep through Diabolist’s foes with fire and sword, a woe on all she faced worthy of the name bestowed upon her. It made Akua shiver in pleasure just to think of it. The Diabolist opened her eyes and let the words of the Carrion Lord burrow into her ears. The only distraction was her father’s shuffling at her side, for there was only one seat in this room and it would not tolerate the sitting of any but her.

“He’s not wrong, Mpanzi,” Dumisai of Aksum said. “They say nowadays that the legions won that civil war, the orcs and the goblins, but I remember it still. The Calamities owned it body and soul: it defined them as much as their Names. Better not to fight them at all.”

Spoken, she thought, as a man who could have been the Warlock but chose obscurity over the uncertainty of struggle. The odds, she knew, would not have been in her father’s favour. The Sovereign of the Red Skies had begun to earn his title when he was still the Apprentice, and though claimants gained powers when embracing their claim Lord Wekesa would have had the full might of his old Name behind him. Yet it was never a certainty, that an Apprentice would become the Warlock. Praesi Names were never easily won. Akua loved her father, but she would not deny that in the face of offered greatness he had flinched.

“I do not hate them,” Diabolist said. “Nor the Empress. For all their flaws, they sought to make our people rise. I am not Mother, Papa – I do not despise what they are. It is a mistake made in good faith, and killing them was never the point of this. I am surpassing them. If that must involve taking their lives, then so be it.”

And how long had she dreamed of this, of escaping the shackles? The Carrion Lord had been right, in part. They could not win the war by repeating the same defeat with a hundred different fresh faces. But the pair that ruled Praes had abandoned everything that the peoples of the Wasteland were to avoid another disgrace, and that was a betrayal greater than mere failure . They could win and still be Praesi, Akua knew. Go to your grave gladly, Black Knight, having learned the truth of that – you were, for all your weaknesses, a patriot. She would not deny the fearsome depth of that loyalty, however twisted it was. The man’s words ended in the tired adage of the Legions, screamed back by the soldiers, and Diabolist rose to her feet.

“Go,” she told her father. “And stay safe. You are worth more to me than petty victories.”

His arms wrapped around her and for a heartbeat she was a child again, his chin nestled atop her head.

“Live,” he whispered. “Whatever the cost, whatever the consequences. Live. Nothing else matters.”

“Believe in me,” she asked.

“’til my last breath and beyond,” he promised.

No empty words, coming from a sorcerer who knew the mysteries he did. He left after that, the passing warmth of him lingering behind. Diabolist stood before the rune-inscribed walls and laid a single finger on them. They lit up like a starry sky, reaching for a hundred different arrays spread across houses and bastions and pits. The Carrion Lord had spoken for the ruling order, for the woman who held the Tower. She would speak, then, for the Wasteland. For the Empire that was and would be, for the greatness that was not yet forgot. Akua Sahelia stood proud, for there was more to her than mere ambition.

“We are,” she said quietly, “the last of the Praesi.”

They would hear her, her words carried by sorcery worn and ancient. They would hear her and know they might be wicked but they were not wrong.

“The Tower,” Akua said, “is in the hands of a woman who would rule us forever. Before us stand her legions of dupes, led by her most loyal hound. Your heard them speak of dues, and so know they deny the oldest truth of our empire: there are no equals .”

It was like drinking spring water, to speak words she truly meant instead of whatever must be said to gain. Relief, that after years of scuttling in the dark she could raise her true banner.

“There are the rulers and the ruled,” she said. “The greater and the lesser. To deny this is to deny the Gods themselves, for that is how they made us. And now our Empress bows and scrapes to a conquered people, ignoring the reality that saw them conquered.”

She let silence ring loudly.

“ Power ,” she hissed.

There were others in foreign lands that would call this ugly truth, but she spoke to Praesi: the people of altars and pacts, of naked ruthless ambition. What she offered them now was the song of their ancestors, sung anew with fresh promise.

“Twenty years ago, we were more powerful than the people of Callow,” she continued. “Twenty years ago we were better than them, for beyond all the lies and stories that is the bare truth of Creation: the powerful own the world.”

A laugh escaped her lips, sharply mocking.

“They call themselves a different breed, these hypocrites, but what is arrayed before you? Mere force of arms.”

And her people knew steel, that old friend of ambition. How many of their ancestors had claimed the Tower wielding it?

“In the end, all they are is another movement in the Great Game. The enemy might be powerful, but that should bring you no fear.”

She leaned forward, hard-eyed.

“Iron sharpens iron, and when we emerge victorious we will be so sharp a blade as to make the world tremble.”

Akua smiled, a display that should have been beneath her but at this last pivot of her life was not.

“Glory in this day, sons and daughters of Praes,” she said. “The Age of Wonders is upon you, and though it is great and terrible to behold, let Creation remember this – so are we .”

And in the wake of her words, as the Legions advanced and flanking forces sallied, sorcery bloomed. No wild cheers, from the people of the Wasteland. Acclaim came in the form of death unleashed. A thousand mages stirred to action, and when they struck it was with the wrath of a people cheated their destiny. How long had it been, since Calernia last saw the finest of Praes moved to war? Too long. With every streak of lighting and storm of flame that balance was redressed, and in the face of steel a rolling wave of power was sent forth. It would have swept the legionaries aside like kindling, had it touched them.

It did not, because the Sovereign of the Red Skies had taken the field.

High above a star was born, and it came into the world with a keening cry. It pulled the sorcery like a withdrawing tide, swept it upwards until it was filled and a ring of raging sorcery detonated across the sky with a sound like thunder. The mage lines of the Legions, these half-mages minted and spent like cheap copper, gave answer. A dozen rituals burned and massive lances of flame were sent at Akua’s bastions, but what did she care? These were but pale imitations, and the original stood arrayed against them. Half the lances dispersed within a heartbeat of being thrown, the formulas torn apart like the half-baked jokes they were, and the rest were turned against their own side. The fires changed from lances to beasts, lions and snakes and tigers, and with dull roars they attacked the advancing legionaries. Dozens died incinerated within moments, before the Carrion Lord lent the weight of his aspects to the men and led them through the inferno. Lead , Akua thought. Conquer . Not tools for the killing of heroes but for the leading of armies, and as the Black Knight’s mantled came upon them the legionaries became more . Swifter, stronger, indifferent to the raging flames.

The Diabolist did not strike as the Sixth Legion followed the Carrion Lord in his sweeping advance, turning her eyes to the sky instead. There a single silhouette rode a winged steed stolen from Arcadia, cloak of many colours streaming behind her. An artefact in the making, gathering weight with every fallen army stitched onto the rest. Already Akua suspected sorcery would slide over like like water off a duck’s back, and it was still nascent to its true form. Squire would strike at the heart of the enemy, for that was her nature. Not through aspects, it was too early for that, but Catherine Foundling had another signature. The winged steed passed over the ranks of dead manning the entrenched palisades, deftly avoiding spellfire from the bastions as a simple knife cut down what appeared to be sacks tied to the sides of the mount. When the first arrow took flight from impossibly far, flames coating it, Diabolist almost laughed. There it was. One, two, three – eight in whole. Every single sack of goblinfire was ignited while still dropping, and fell like green rain over the wights. Some reached the bastions filled with mages and engines, but there were panes of force awaiting. The goblinfire burned into them, but they were thrown aside and her sorcerers left untouched. Her general’s careful experimentation with the most dangerous tools of the Legions had paid fruit.

Diabolist returned to her seat, settling against the wooden frame as her eyes remained fixed on the unfolding battle. Soon. She would have preferred to let the Legions overcommit, but the Warlock would soon go on the offensive and he was not to be taken lightly. The Fifteenth, she saw, was not part of the assault. A reserve, likely kept for when the walls were breached. It would serve other purpose, but Akua was not displeased. They would be tied up regardless, removed from the equation. That was how her enemies would lose, in the end. Dispersed to deal with half a dozen threats, they would fall one by one. The Sixth Legion reached the outer field of traps, and Akua’s mages triggered their arrays. Within three heartbeats what had been an empty field was filled with howling lesser devils.

And then they died.

Diabolist froze, blood going cold. Every single devil summoned by the arrays had turned into red dust before so much as striking a blow. The Warlock’s doing, it could only be him, but how had he known? He’d have needed to begin casting before the triggers, which meant... Someone has studied the lay of our defences , she realized. And done so with a great deal of precision. Akua’s fingers tightened around the arms of her chair. It might be assumed that the devils in the secondary arrays would meet the same fate, and without them serving as a slowing mechanism for the advance of the Legions then soon her palisades would be under assault. And with the goblinfire already thinning the ranks of the dead, they would break. Now. It had to be now.

The Diabolist breathed out and her mind stilled. It’d been seven years now, since she had separated her soul from her earthly flesh. It had spared her ugly end in this very city, once, and from that it was likely her foes had come to assume it was a measure meant for her preservation. To ensure that even if her body was destroyed, she could invest another and continue her plans. As it happened, that had merely been a fortunate consequence. Akua had removed her soul in preparation for something... greater. In the depths of the Ducal Palace, where the anchor of her great working awaited, a small cylinder of pure obsidian covered in runes lit up. Inside it was bound her soul, but it was no mere phylactery. It was a key . Her soul touched the untold millions of dead Deoraithe she had caged, connecting to the greater weave. All over Liesse runes burned bright, the glare alone melting stone and shattering wood around them as the greatest ritual Praes had seen since the days of Triumphant began.

Runic letters formed in front of her, a contract written, and then she gave the sorcery shape.

On the plains to the flank of the encroaching legions, a dot of yellow flame formed. In it the contract she had written shone, and the flame grew. An empty circle was forged, the diameter half a mile wide, and the yellow flame solidified. Creation screamed , screamed in protest as it was ripped apart forcefully and the Hellgate opened. Not a Lesser Breach, but a Greater. The first since the fall of Keter, and unlike the Dead King she would not be forbidden a second. The souls of the Deoraithe were not spent, merely thinned, and would coalesce again in a matter of days. It would take her even longer to stabilize her own, but the true terror of her work was the scale. Distance meant nothing, to sufficient power. She could open a gate in the heartlands of the Principate without moving ,if she so wished. Akua Sahelian’s army was the entirety of all the Hells, and as the first devil crossed her gate, the binding she had written in the flame leashing it to her will, she laughed. The host at her disposal was without end, and she had crafted this ritual so it could only ever answer to her. The array was part of her, as much as any limb or drop of blood.

Waves of wasted power coursed into the escapements she had designed so very carefully, empowering wards that would have taken hundreds of mages to use and just like that Liesse... disappeared. Forced half a step out of Creation. There had been a reason that she had chosen the southern city out of all the governorships she could have secured. The corpse of the angel, though left behind, had ensured that Liesse was always slightly askew from Creation. Easier to move, and given clear boundary by the ancient wards surrounding it. And so now the city was out of reach, save for one entrance she had crafted herself. It lay at the heart of her fortifications on the plains, and the enemy would bleed themselves dry trying to take it. All that planning from the clever generals on the other side yet here they stood now, the forces meant to assault the walls on the sides utterly useless and the exposed flank of the army facing endless onslaught.

Hell began pouring out of the Breach, and the Diabolist smiled the smile of a woman who was going to conquer the world.

Chapter 60: Opening

“Victory is transient. To seek it is to remain so. I have seen the face of that which is eternal, and it stands beyond struggle.”
– Translation of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness, widely attributed to the young Dead King

Flight was markedly less exhilarating when people kept trying to kill me during, I decided as I guided Zombie the Third into a sharp dive to avoid a bolt of black lightning. Half a league up in the sky, the wind howling around me, I watched disaster unfold on the field below. The order of battle agreed upon had been fairly simple: the first wave would be the Legions. The Fifth, the Sixth and Twelfth would strike the initial blow, as the Fourth and the Ninth moved to the sides of Liesse bolstered by Callowan levies. The Deoraithe bowmen would move behind the centre, followed by the men-at-arms, and the Fifteenth would remain as a reserve. I was to soften up the enemy fortifications with Archer’s help and a goblinfire trick, and until the aftermath of the green rain everything had been going to plan. Then Akua had opened a fucking Hellgate and Liesse had just... disappeared. Gone into thin air.

She’d chosen the place for the gate perfectly, I had to admit. Behind the Fourth’s advance, though the gated was oriented towards the Deoraithe second line. There were only a few devils coming out of the woodworks right now, but if that trickle turned into a flood our armies were going to break. The Fourth would be cut off and overwhelmed, the back of our centre up to its neck in hellspawn from behind and fortified casters from the front. The entire host would be splintered, and of the only two forces still in play – the Fifteenth under Juniper and Ninth with half the levies – the Ninth was positioned on the opposite side of the field where it needed to be. With out entire centre in the way. In the span of a single heartbeat, Akua had fucked both our left flank and centre while making our right wing useless. I would have admired that a little, if I wasn’t too busy being furious. Zombie responded to my spurs as a living beast would, though I could still command its undead flesh regardless of its own will, and we arced down gracefully.

The staff officers of the Fifteenth parted for me in haste and I reined in the winged horse before someone could get trampled. Juniper, leaning over a table, ignored my entrance. Her brows were creased in thought. I cleared my throat.

“I heard you coming, Foundling,” she said. “Now shut up. I’m thinking.”

Yeah, that was about par for the course. I sighed and dismounted, Hakram appearing just in in time to be handed the reins. Hierophant and Archer were still out of sight, but I could feel them approaching. No, feel was perhaps the wrong term. It was an instinct, like the the one that warned me of danger, whispering that they were coming close. Whatever we’d done in Dormer, when all of us save Thief had fought as one, it had left a mark. The implications of that worried me.

“The Carrion Lord’s advance has not slowed,” Adjutant said.

“I saw,” I grunted back.

There was danger in that, though I knew better than to assume Black wasn’t aware of it. With the legionaries he had under the mantle of his Name advancing so much more swiftly, what had once been a wave was turning into a sloppy wedge. If he got too far ahead... He wouldn’t, I told myself. Black had been winning battles before I was even a look in my mother’s eyes.

“Senior Mage, report,” Juniper growled.

I almost jumped. I hadn’t noticed Kilian was there at all. Red hair free, she’d had her eyes closed and a loose chord of interlocked runes clutched between her fingers. After a moment she flinched in pain and opened her eyes.

“The Hellgate is beyond my ability to understand,” she announced. “As for Liesse, I have some notion. The city is not gone, merely phased a step out of Creation. There is still a point of access to it.”

The Hellhound made room at the table, hairless brow raised.

“Here,” Kilian said, pointing down at the map.

I leaned over to see and winced. That was behind the palisade and trench, in open space overlooked by all three bastions and currently filled with wights. This one was on us, I thought. We’d all been so convinced the field fortifications were a battle measure none of us had taken the time to inspect them for anything like this. Not when we’d barely scratched the surface of understanding the kind of wards covering the walls. Juniper did not reply, brow creasing deeper. Archer and Hierophant passed the ring of legionaries exactly when I knew they would, the brown-skinned woman the only one smiling of the two.

“Masego,” I called out. “I need an opinion.”

“My preliminary analysis is over,” he replied. “This is a Greater Breach, Catherine.”

Kilian sucked in a sharp breath, but everyone else seemed as confused as I was. I assumed bad. Very bad, even. Usually the best bet to make when it came to Diabolist.

“A stable Hellgate,” Hierophant added when he noticed the lack of understanding.

He sounded a touch irritated. I sucked my lip. If this had just been a play to pull out reinforcements like Akua had done at Liesse, the gate would have eventually closed on its own even if we didn’t manage to shut it first. A major danger, but something that could be handled. This was different. There was a hole in the fabric of Creation in the middle of Callow and on the other side was a literally endless horde that wanted to devour everything in existence. At least I assumed. I didn’t know much about the lay of the Realms Below or the beings that dwelled inside, but I doubted Diabolist had reached for Hell that was all about weaving straw baskets.

“Withdrawal is not feasible,” Juniper said, calm tone cutting through the silence that had followed Masego’s words. “The god bound above the Palace is not gone, and regardless time plays in her her favour more than ours.”

“Hierophant, can you close this?” I asked.

He snorted, then realized I’d been serious.

“Catherine, a Greater Breach cannot be closed by definition. It is a permanent bridge between layers of existence,” he said.

I grimaced.

“Can you just pop a cork in the hole, then?” I pressed.

“Theoretically,” he agreed. “It would be temporary, however. And require power superior to that employed in the original breaching.”

“He means no,” Archer cheerfully said.

I kind of wanted to hit her in the face for that.

“If we shut down her ritual, does the gate close?” I pressed.

“You do not seem to grasp the principles involved,” Hierophant said flatly. “The ritual is done. The gate is there. The Breach was made. There is no unmaking this.”

I turned my eyes to Kilian, who raised up her palms in surrender.

“Diabolism is not a field of study covered in the College,” she said. “I know nothing of this.”

“Juniper?” I tried, grasping as straws.

The orc’s hands left the table and she folded them behind her back.

“If we do not contain the Hellgate within a half-hour, the battle is lost,” she said. “And so will be all of Callow west of Summerholm and south of Daoine, within amonth.”

The weight of that announcement rang like a bell. How many people was that? Most major cities fell within those borders. Vale, Southpool, Laure, Denier and even Ankou. I couldn’t quite remember the exact numbers from the last Imperial census at the moment, but Laure alone was almost half a million souls. I spat to the side.

“Then get your blades out, people,” I said. “We’re going for a walk.”

Whatever answer I might have gotten to that was drowned out by the sound of neighing and crackling flame, followed by the pungent smell of brimstone. The chariot landed with a crash, pulled by two pitch-black winged horses, and in it stood a man decked entirely in scarlet: the Sovereign of Red Skies, dressed in his full glory of war.

“Belay that,” he said, and there was nothing lazy or amused in his voice.

That had me even warier. He was not a man to take the situation seriously unless he had to, in my experience. With a flourish of the wrist the Warlock produced a small flat stone and tossed it at me. I caught it without missing a beat, raising an eyebrow.

“Into your mouth, Squire,” he said. “Welcome to the Link.”

My eyes flicked to Masego, who nodded absent-mindedly. Safe enough, then. Gingerly I put the stone in my mouth and shuddered in discomfort when I felt it move on its own, fusing with the flesh beneath my lower teeth. A heartbeat later sorcery gently flared and I heard the sound of flesh being run through directly in my ears.

“Catherine,” Black said. “Good.”

“Black,” I murmured. “We’re in deep shit.”

“Perhaps less than it seems,” he replied, and on the other side something screamed and died. “You are to join me on the front along with Adjutant and Archer. The bastions must fall, and quickly.”

“The Hellgate?” I asked.

“Wekesa has a theory,” Black replied.

“That leaves Masego free,” I frowned.

“He’s going to-“

My teacher was interrupted by a sound I’d heard once before. A faint scream, rising higher and higher in pitch. Then another. Then another. Oh Gods. Had she really? Even for Akua this was playing with fire. The ‘Link’ cut out, before I heard Warlock grunt and sound returned as suddenly as it had gone.

“Hurry,” Black ordered. “The Fifteenth is to accompany Wekesa against the Hellgate. Overall command is ceded to Marshal Ranker as of now.”

Silence returned to my ears and I turned to face my officers. Several of them had gone pale, hands shaking.

“Demons,” I said.

“It was a given they would be used here,” Warlock said conversationally. “Not even Sahelians are so mad as to call on the Unmakers within a closed realm. Masego, you are to contain them.”

Hierophant’s glass eyes did not move under the cloth, but I could feel his attention move across the field and find the unfolding catastrophes.

“Madness,” the dark-skinned mage said. “Apathy. And...”

He hesitated.

“Order,” the Warlock finished. “That one seems to be the oldest. It might be Shango’s Doom itself, the contract is still unaccounted for. Begin with Madness nonetheless, before we lose half our men to the spread. They devour grounds unlike any other breed.”

Hierophant nodded, not bothering to reply, and strode ahead without paying attention to any of us. So much for planning together. I forced myself to focus even as in the back of my head threefold song began to be sung. How much worse, I thought, did it have to be close to them? Unless my sight betrayed me, the rebels had brought forth the madness right in front of the centre of their outer palisade.

“General Juniper,” I said. “We have our orders.”

The orc’s eyes flicked to the most powerful mage in the Empire.

“We are meant to escort you,” she deduce. “Am I to take this as meaning the Hellgate may be closed?”

The Warlock smiled.

“Oh, that clever child’s work is not so easily undone,” the man said. “The gate will remain. Destruction, though, is the tool of the uncreative. I have other means.”

That cleared up very little. Was is something that came with the magic, the urge to be a mysterious jackass? The dark-skinned man rolled his shoulder to limber it and cast a wary eye to the looming Hellgate in the distance.

“Well, no time dawdle,” he sighed. “General, I will need your men to establish a solid beachhead on the other side of the gate. Do be quick about it. I’ll limit the spill until you arrive on the scene.”

The reins came down like a lash and the winged horses neighed, the very sound unnatural. Within moments he was tearing through the sky again. My fingers clenched, then unclenched.

“Juniper,” I said, turning to meet my general’s gaze. “Can you do it?”

The was a heartbeat of silence, then the Hellhound chuckled and her lips split into a grin that was nasty little piece of work.

“I am,” she said calmly, “a general of the Legions of Terror, anointed and sworn under sacred standard. If a Hell wages war upon the Empire, then I will invade that Hell.”

Her voice did not rise, or her intonation shift. It was, as she said, as simple statement of fact. There was something in her eyes when she spoke that wasn’t quite a Name – she did not have the weight behind her for that, likely never would – but was just as fearsome in its own way. It was cold, absolute and merciless certainty. The stare of a woman who had killed the enemy a hundred times in her mind already, and knew all that remained was acting out the movements. The tremors left the limbs of her officers, straight-backed pride flowing to fill the gap. Named did not have a monopoly on greatness, I thought. Sometimes all that was needed was the unshakeable will of one who never even considered defeat a possibility.

“Then hear my order, General,” I said, and my mantle stirred at the shape of this. “Even if it is impossible, even if all that rules Above and Below stands arrayed against you – win . I will allow nothing less from you.”

“Warlord,” she said, chops bared and head bowed.

I left it at that, because between the two of us nothing more needed to be said. There might be a day where Juniper failed in the face of ruin, because in the end did we not all fail? No matter how clever or powerful, an ending always came. But, I thought, it would not be today. Not against this. Adjutant stood at my side, loosening the leather ring holding his axe, and I found Archer staring at me with a pleased smile.

“Zeze’s playing with the hellspawn and Fury Green’s got her own battle to win,” Archer drawled. “So what do you have for us, Cat?”

My eyes found the distant silhouettes of the bastions, flickering with sorcery and siege engines.

“String your bow, Archer,” I said. “The three of us are taking down the strongholds with Black.”

Had the day not been so dire, I might have been unsettled by how feral the grin I got in response was. Today, though? I was counting on it.

—

Zombie the Third got us near the front, but that was all I would ask of it. Three people were too much to have any room to manoeuver, and twice we were nearly torched on our flight forward. We made a slow, fat target for any mage with a little juice to send out. I sent back the undead horse behind the lines and took a deep breath. Shit, steel and blood . The scent of battlefields. I’d landed us close to General Orim’s Fifth Legion, which currently made made up the left side of assault. He trailed behind Black still, even though my teacher had abandoned the centre for the right, but he’d caught up some since I’d last had a look. Black had run into some heavy resistance at the palisade, and had yet to pierce through the enemy centre. That wasn’t the part of this battlefield that worried me.

Hierophant’s lid on the demons unleashed was paper-thin, it was obvious to see. Not only had he been ordered to maintain three sets of wards against demons simultaneously, but he was facing constant pressure by the mages in the bastions trying to undo his work. It was worthy of a little awe, I thought, how he was still managing to keep his head slightly above the water for all that. I could not even see the demons, save for the occasional heartbeat-lasting glance, since they were surrounded by smooth globes of ivory-like solid sorcery. Around those wards sticks of incense floated, slowly burning out only to be engulfed in ivory flames at the last moment and from ashes born anew and full. The strength of the wards? It made sense. I’d seen some sticks burn much more quickly when the ovals came under fire. Regardless, those few moments where the demons were not completely contained were enough to twist their immediate surroundings. I saw legionaries but also wights, things that should have no soul of their own, begin howling and tear at themselves and everything close to them. Others simply... ceased. Fell down, dead for their hearts no longer beat.

The creepiest was the work of the third. What it touched of Creation became... unwoven , in some fundamental way. Air was breathed, but gave no breath. Flesh remained fixed even as men moved, sliding off like oil. Ground became like the sea, and I even caught sight of a man who took a ball of flame to the face rise and walk back, flesh mending, only to advance as he first had and be struck by the very same spell. It was not that the demons ran amok. If they did, the Legions would have broken already. But just by being contained in front of the first palisade protecting the bastions, they created a rampart of death that could not be passed. The legionaries had to go around them, and not come too close, which took them straight into the enemy fire. Tough the goblinfire still burned and had thinned the ranks some, the wights were still thousands and bitterly contested the palisades. Most of the killing, though, came from the bastions. Sorcery lashed out in never-ending waves, trebuchets and scorpions that were the deadly work of goblin engineering carving bloody streaks in the advancing men. Already at least a thousand dead carpeted the field, and dozens more died every heartbeat.

I breathed out and unsheathed my sword, gathering power. Archer idly nocked an arrow and Adjutan’s grip tightened against the shaft of his axe with a crisp leathery sound.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get this started.”

Chapter 61: Tempo

“It is true, Chancellor, that a house divided cannot stand. Why do you think mine is the only one I left standing?”
– Dread Emperor Callous

Legionaries were dying like flies. I’d never seen infantry assault a dug-in position held by mages and engines before, and now that I had I could only say it was ugly work. The enemy had been trained in counter-siege tactics, that much was obvious. The first killing grounds were the trench, deep and wide and filled with stakes at the bottom. The men of the Fifth set down planks to bridge it, but planks were mere wood and wood was no match for the sorcery being flung at it. The bridges rarely lasted longer than twenty heartbeats, forcing the legionaries to come at the palisade in clumps instead of a single overwhelming wave. The palisade itself was nothing special – tall and well-built, but lacking wards or anything arcane – but behind it stood an awaiting sea of wights. Goblin munitions made half a dozen breaches along the length of the fortification, but the legionaries were failing repeatedly to push back the undead behind the openings. This, I thought, would be where we began.

Men scattered around the three of us, as much because they knew what we could do as because of some animalistic instinct that screamed Named, move aside while you still can . I could have leapt the trench easily enough, but that would be defeating the purpose. My sword arced along the ground and thick, dark ice formed in a bridge large enough for ranks of ten to pass. Retaliation was immediate. The fluid, silvery spell that flowed towards my chest I cleaved through without missing a beat and felt the sorcery coming apart at the seams. The five scorpion bolts were a touch more difficult to deal with. My Name pulsed and I let the world slow around me, Winter coursing through my veins. The first bolt froze and shattered with but a twist of will and the two behind it followed suit effortlessly, but the trajectory of the other two was angled too far. Clucking my tongue I ducked under the shots, but the sound of screaming and flesh being pierced behind me told me the men of the Fifth had not been so quick on their feet.

They were not the first legionaries to die today, nor would they be the last.

“Archer,” I said. “Silence those engines. Leftmost bastion.”

The arrow she nocked was more javelin than anything else, not even fletched – given the ridiculous size of her bow, though, it still fit. Golden stripes ran down the side of the wood, glinting with something like power. Not a spell, I thought, but power inherent. That was much more dangerous.

“Cover your ears, my darlings,” she drawled.

Thunder sounded with the loosened string. The javelin roiled with lightning before it was even released, and it flew ina crisp trajectory. Panes of power lit up above the bastion’s ramparts like fireworks in shades of blue but the arrow sailed right through them. Lightning tore through a scorpion’s wooden frame, shattering it like it’d been swatted by some irritated titan. I didn’t know how many of those fancy arrows she had, but I’d leave her to it. This alone had been enough to panic the mages in the bastion, though I knew better than to think it would last.

“Adjutant,” I said, idly spinning my blade to limber my wrist. “Let’s make the Fifth a beachhead.”

I heard Archer cackle behind me as I strode across the ice bridge, followed by the sound of spells tearing into the ground where she’d previously stood. Hakram and I advanced shields raised and found nothing but palisade ahead – the legionaries pouring in behind us were already making for the sides where breaches had been made instead of remaining here.

“Hold,” I barked.

Just wood, I thought, and almost snorted. There’d been a time where that would have been enough to slow me down, but I’d left that behind me years ago. My shield whipped into the palisade and there was a loud splintering sound. I’d felt the braces on the other side shake and so I struck again. Again, again, five times in whole before the entire section collapsed ahead of me. There was a heartbeat where the palisade fell back and that was all within my sight, but then the wights raged forward and the fight began. In the distance thunder struck again, Archer’s laugh like the ring of doom, and then I rammed into the enemy ranks. There was no place for elegance or subtlety, here. It was just a slog through mud, blood and steel. The kind of graceless fight that had first seen me rise, back in Laure and the Pit. It was almost like coming home and there was a beat to it, a song of crushed skulls and scattered men, and as I sunk deep within myself I embraced it. Adjutant’s blurring axe was another of my limbs, moving in accord to a will that was not entirely my own but still mine to shape.

The howling corpses of my people came for my head and they were swept aside. My shield smacked a wight into a spreading pool of green fire as my body pivoted to turn a sword-blow into a wasted swing, Hakram’s axe tearing straight through the neck of the undead who’d swung it. Like a whirlwind we advanced, and the hordes of the dead were no match for two Named at the peak of their transient power. The Fifth Legion followed behind, rows of red shields streaked with mud, and what ground we gained was not given back. It wasn’t enough, I thought. I went deeper, let the beat guide my hands and feet. Swifter, sharper, until they were just wheat before the sickle. The cold part of my mind knew this was dangerous, remaining in this place where all that existed in Creation was blades in motion, but victory did not come to those who hesitated. What ended it was the song, because it had refrain to it I’d not first heard. Threefold it crooned, feeding me whispers of destruction unending, and when I realized where it came from my blood ran cold. I tore myself out of the trance, limbs trembling, and prayed to any deity listening that it had not been too late.

“Hakram,” I croaked, “stop. Now . The demons...”

He let out a hiss that reeked of fear.

“Hierophant should be containing them,” he said.

“Can you really contain something like that?” I muttered.

The thing that had been coursing through our veins was gone, and though we still stood strong before the tide our advanced had stopped cold. I didn’t want to use an aspect, not out here before I’d even caught glimpse of Akua and the reckoning that lay between us, but the Fifth alone would not be enough to break through the wights. Thunder struck again, Archer a weapon in my arsenal not even the Praesi had answer for. The stone in my mouth warmed with sorcery, and Black’s voice cut through the racket of battle.

“Squire,” he said. “Leave the Fifth on its own. Move on the left bastion. I need you to draw fire if you can.”

My eyes flicked to the right flank, and I finally noticed I had not been the only one to punch through the palisade. Black was on foot now, leading the Fourth’s heavies, and where he went death followed. Tendrils of shadow punctured the ground with impossible precision, triggering one array of defensive wards after another while tight ranks of shields drove back the dead. Before long he would be at the foot of the bastion, though the only way up for the legionaries would be the ramp descending from the back of it. It was no mystery why he’d asked me to draw fire: the mages from the two closest bastions were filling the air with sorcery, and though the legionaries under his mantle were not so easily killed the spells still tore smoking holes in his formation every few moments. Casualties were mounting, faster than he could afford.

“Understood,” I said. “The demons are proving an issue, Black.”

“Purge protocols will be put in place after the battle,” he simply replied, and the sound cut.

Joy. That was going to be a glorious aftermath, herding together men who’d fought for us through literal Hells and torching anyone even remotely contaminated. Still, if the alternative was letting soldiers touched by demons back into the wild... There was no winning when it came to dealing with demons, only limiting the damage as much as possible.

“Hakram,” I said. “Go back for Archer. We’re hitting the left bastion in full force. Tell her... tell I don’t care how she gets there, as long as it’s fast.”

I was going to regret that, I suspected. The orc nodded.

“And you?” he asked.

“I’m going to remind Akua’s minions why she keeps running when we fight,” I grimly said.

Slogging through the wights barring the path to the bastion would take too long, I decided. But I had option. A platform of ice and shadow formed before me and I leapt atop it, beginning my trek to the enemy.

—

There was a very important difference, I mused, between fighting one angry demigod in the sky and fighting a hundred mortal mages at range. The mages didn’t hit nearly as hard, sure, but they hit a lot. That was proving to be something of a problem, given how gravity kept being a bit insistent about the whole falling thing. The orb of spinning black light hit me in the chest and knocked me straight off the platform – I smashed my shield into it but the steel began to boil, so instead I let myself drop half a dozen feet before making another platform. Under me the sea of wights grasped upwards, some clever enough to begin piling up to reach me. Right, upper grade undead. Fucking Praesi and their endless magical bullshit parade of horrors. My shield was dripping liquid steel but I froze it back into a semblance of usefulness, part of my mind already forming another platform as I did. I’d learned pretty early on that picking up the pace was the most important part of this game.

I was halfway there, but this close they were having an easier time pushing me back. I could see their faces from here, behind the glowing panes, and there was as much terror to behold as there was sneering. The way I kept stubbornly not dying was probably the reason for the former. Two leaps before I got my shoulder clipped again, and that had me slipping long enough for a lash of lightning to crack down at my head. I hurriedly hid under my cloak and the sorcery washed past, but then the fuckers shattered the platform under me and I dropped down onto the wights. I landed on one’s head and even as a hundred hands and blades went for me I coiled my legs and jumped back up. The pane of ice I made at an angle, immediately leaping off it and ending up already in flight when the mage volley came calling. Steady, Catherine , I told myself . Steady and careful is how we get there. I faked a forming platform to the right then veered to the left on another, lips quirking at how eagerly they fell for it.

I heard a hoarse yell, and my brow rose as I saw a trebuchet stone hit the wights ahead. The Legions had finally set up their engines in range, looked like. Then a silhouette rose slowly from atop the stone, resetting a broken arm with a scream, and Adjutant tossed his crumpled up shield at a wight’s head. Had he just... That had worked ? I knew he was tougher now that he was Named, but this was ridiculous. He got hit by a fireball right in the chest and thrown off the stone so I hurriedly made a series of platforms and reached him before he could get his idiot ass killed. I leaned over the hoist the orc by the scruff of the neck, smacking aside a smoky-looking spell, and resisted the urge to chew him out in the middle of an active battlefield.

“Where’s Archer?” I asked instead.

“Fire,” he replied, eyes going wide.

I cursed and dragged him through another jump – less than a hundred feet now, they were getting quicker.

“She said something about ‘stealing your stuff’,” he got out.

“She would,” I bitterly complained.

I focused on the little bundle in the back of my mind and found Zombie the Third in flight, Archer on his back and whooping joyfully. Her tone was not any less obnoxious heard through a necromantic abomination’s ears, apparently. I’d learned something today.

“This is going to hurt,” I told Adjutant.

“Catherine, don’t-“

I threw him, right at the bastion. My armour creaked under the strain but the orc flew and smacked right into the blue panes of light. Ah, they’d adjusted for physical stuff after Archer kept destroying their engines. That was unfortunate. On the bright side, they were now panicking so another two platforms had me landing atop the bastion while they did their level best to incinerate Hakram with hellflame. Break was on the edge of my lips, just waiting to be brought out and shatter their little protections, but I pushed down the urge. Not an aspect, not against second-stringers like these. My sword dug into the shield and my Name flared, sorcery impossibly turning into ice and cracking beneath the force. It shattered, and their protections must have been tied because the whole thing gave as one. I landed in a crouch, my frost-tinged armour glinting even in the shade, and let out a steamy breath. Hakram dropped down like a stone a heartbeat later, crashing without even the pretence of control and cursing loudly in Kharsum all the while.

Bastion, I thought as I placed it all in my mind’s eye, was the right word for this. From the outside it looked like a broad tower of hewn stone, but up here it was revealed for what it was: a large fortified platform, for the use mages and engines. Fewer than a hundred mages left – attrition had taken its toll – and maybe thrice that in household troops and men who worked the engines. Actually taking the bastion, I thought, was perhaps not within my means. Wrecking it, though, absolutely was. It would have to do. The Fifth was lagging too far behind to be counted on for this.

“Though I be a speck of dust, I-“ a man began incanting, and without blinking I raised my hand.

His throat filled with ice, his eyes froze over and just like that he died.

“Oh Merciless Gods,” a woman whispered, then gathered herself. “WARDS.”

Too late for that, I thought. Adjutant was back on his feet, though given his armour always looked like it had been put to the torch it was hard to tell whether the earlier flames had hurt him or not. He was moving fine, though. That would be enough: all I needed him to be was a target. The buzz of sorcery filled the air and the household troops advanced, but I ignored them entirely. I’d not come to kill rank and file, however pretty the armour. I dashed forward and lowered myself under a man’s swing then slipped past him, shield coming up to swat aside the man behind and then I was through, past their forming defensive line. There were shouts behind but I paid them no attention, running to the mages. I carved through the first man’s chest before he could even finish making a ball of flame, moving to the next before his corpse had even dropped. Taghreb and Soninke all of them, in rich robes and jewellery. The finest of the Wasteland. They died, one after another. Once I might have thought there would be something cathartic about scything through the very kind of people who’d plundered my homeland for decades, but I’d been wrong. All I felt was sickened.

This wasn’t a fight, it was a massacre.

They formed their first ward before I’d slaughtered my way through the first dozen but it had been done in haste. I let Winter flow my veins and it broke under two swings, a pair of mages falling to their knees bleeding out of their eyes and nose when it shattered. I flicked my sword and a spear of ice went straight through a Taghreb’s stomach even as I broke a man’s skull with a smash of my shield. They were terrified, and the Beast was drinking it in like fine wine even as bile rose in my throat. A few of them banded together and managed to bind my shield with lightning, convulsions running up my arm, so I dropped it immediately. Before a heartbeat had passed I was elbow deep in a man’s ribcage, flesh parting like mud under gauntlet and Name strength.

“Monster,” a sorcerer hissed.

“Amateurs,” I judged them.

I withdrew my hand from the dead man, dripping red, and conceded the stranger might have something of a point. I stepped around the ten bolts of shadow he threw at me and ran him through anyway, because it was too late to flinch now. Not when I was surrounded by an army made up of my dead countrymen, lashed to these people’s will. That I had blood on my hands did not make these mages better in some nebulous way: all it meant was that we were sharing similar gutters. The household troops were trying to get ay my back, but they’d run into a problem called Adjutant. By the way he was moving, swifter and stronger with every swing, he’d called on his first aspect of the day. Rampage, I thought, would be enough to keep those out of the way for a while. I danced around another volley of spells, too quick for any of them to handle this close up, and Archer joining the fight was heralded by the loud crack of shattering wood. Zombie whinnied as he crashed into a trebuchet, his rider fluidly leaping down before impact, and my lips thinned. If Archer had broken my flying horse I was going to be cross . It wasn’t like I could just waltz back into Arcadia to get another one.

“Sorry I’m late, had to make a detour,” Archer called out.

“Mages first,” I replied, in no mood for banter. “Then the engines.”

It was poor form, I supposed, to tell the enemy or plan before it was carried out. I’d have hesitated if they actually stood a chance of stopping us. It’d been bad enough when I was the only fox in the henhouse, but with Archer having her knives out the mages were finished. After she cut the first one’s throat any semblance of coordination went out the window and from there on it was just... work. Red labour, moving from one soon-to-be-dead man to another. Cut through the half-summoned devil, go around the spell, and then another corpse hit the ground. Dimly I realized I felt like throwing up. I pressed on anyway. After the last mage was dead Archer went to back Hakram and I turned to the engines. Seven trebuchets, twice as many scorpions. There’d been a few more of each before, but Archer had taken her toll earlier. I’d anticipated some fighting before breaking them, but apparently there’d be no need: all the people operating them had fled down the ramp while I whet my blade. Scorpions were easily dealt with, finicky things that they were: rip out the string, shatter the frame. The trebuchets were hulking masses I only vaguely understood the working of, so I kept it simple. There was a thick beam connecting the sling to the counterweight, going through the pivot above. I put my hand to the part of the beam next to the string and froze the wood, then shattered it with the pommel of my sword. It should be enough to take them out of the battle. I turned to the still-ongoing scrap with the household troops and my brow rose.

They were still keeping in formation, to their honour. But Archer kept killing their officers whenever one spoke, so what had likely been meant as an orderly retreat down the ramp and into the wights was turning into a rout. Adjutant, I saw, was beginning to wind down. His Name thought the fight was spent, so the aspect was petering out. That could be dangerous, if he was still surrounded by soldiers. There was a mass of wights below the ramp in the back, but they’d not engaged. They were... fighting? But there were no legionaries down there. Ah , I realized. We killed the mages guiding them. Now they’re just tearing at anything in sight. Some pockets still seemed to be orderly, and my guess at the culprit for that was the mages on the central bastion. The battle wasn’t done because we’d softened up the left flank, though now the Fifth would have a much easier time punching through. I looked at the other strongholds, and saw the one on the right had already fallen. The Sixth’s banner flew above it, now, and unlike me Black had been followed by legionaries. He’d not destroyed the engines: he’d ordered them turned on the undead. Of him I saw no trace, but in truth I didn’t look for long.

The Twelfth, I saw, had followed behind the Sixth. They were fighting their way to the central bastion, though advance was slow and costly. How long had all of this taken? An hour, in whole? And Akua must have prepared this field for months. Even without the other Calamities, Black was a weight on the balance unlike any other. I went to reinforce Archer and Adjutant, and that was the last straw. The household troops fled into the clawing field of wights, judging all too accurately that they had better chances of survival down there than against the three of us. There was a heartbeat of silence, the three of us panting atop a stronghold surrounded by corpses, and I closed my eyes. I willed a sliver of my Name into the Link, finding it highly receptive. I had no fondness for Masego’s father but he knew his way around enchantments.

“Black,” I said. “My bastion’s done.”

There was the sound of steel against steel on the other side.

“Can you see the way into Liesse?” my teacher asked.

I squinted in the distance, towards where Kilian had pointed on the map earlier. There was, I saw, a pit. I couldn’t see what was in it and it was surrounded by wights, but it was the only thing close to a gate I could find.

“I think so,” I said. “Hole in the ground?”

“I will arrive momentarily,” he said. “Have your Named join with the Twelfth for the assault on the last bastion. You and I will proceed into the city.”

“I don’t like the shape of that,” I admitted.

“It has been taken into consideration,” he replied. “Do not dawdle. Resistance is intensifying close to the pit, I will not be able to wait for long.”

The sound cut and I frowned, trying to look for him on the field. There was a single man on a horse, swiftly cutting his way through the wights. Huh. He wasn’t even fighting them, not really. He trampled exactly as many as he needed to go forward and ignored the rest . And he’s getting close , I thought. Time to go.

“We’ve got orders,” I said.

Archer snorted.

“Because I’m so fond of those,” she said.

“They involve a lot of killing,” I said.

“You have my attention,” the wretch grinned.

“The two of you are going with the Twelfth to hit the last stronghold,” I said. “Follow into the city after if you can, but that might not be feasible.”

Hakram frowned.

“You’re going on without us?” he said.

“Bonding time with Black,” I said. “I assume some form of murder will be involved, possibly also a chilling speech on the nature of power. As prelude to further murdering.”

“You have the weirdest relationships with people,” Archer muttered.

Archer. Archer had said that. I did not dignify it with a response. I whistled sharply and Zombie rose from the trebuchet wreckage where he’d been lazing about this whole time, trotting up to me. I slipped a foot in the stirrup and mounted the saddle.

“Try not to bite off more than you can chew,” I said. “I have a hard time believing this is the best Diabolist could do with months of preparation.”

“I’ll keep her out of trouble,” Adjutant said.

Yeah, from that look on her face that wasn’t happening. Ah, well. So long as neither of them died I’d live with it. Sheathing my sword, I spurred on my mount and after a gallop to the edge of the bastion his wings unfolded and we took flight. Black, I saw, was already at the edge of the pit. He’d either dismounted or lost his horse, but didn’t seem all that hindered for it. I winced as I saw his shadow and blade move simultaneously, tendrils severing three spines and sword sending a head flying over the span of the same heartbeat. I used more power making a platform than he had using his shadow right then – he’d be able to keep this up for hours, no matter that he’d told me to hurry. Still, I guided Zombie in a low pass and threw myself down. I landed at his side, legs bending, and watched a dead hand flop the ground neatly severed. Charming. Zombie flew off and I straightened my back. Green eyes took in the state of me, then returned to the enemy.

“So is there a secret knock to get in?” I asked, glancing at the pit.

All I saw inside was darkness, and not even a kind my Name sight could see through.

“We’re going to jump,” he said.

“You’re enjoying this,” I accused.

“Am I?” he hummed, and pushed me.

I said some very unkind things about his ancestry in Taghreb as I dropped, and didn’t stop even when he started falling at my side.

“You’ve considerably improved your vocabulary,” he noted.

I sighed. Around us was only darkness, anchored by the sensation of falling. Considering this place was out of phase with Creation, I was wary of the fact that this felt like so long a drop. Akua had already shown she could meddle with the span of time in her little horror bubbles. After half an eternity our fall slowed and we landed softly on what felt like stone. Nice touch, that. She wasn’t even going to pretend she’d not expected company. There was a tunnel ahead, its boundaries not marked by solid so much as absence. I could see again, at least. And what I saw was a large and looming silhouette at the end of it, ram horns sprouting from its head.

“A gatekeeper,” Black said. “Quaint.”

“She’s a real traditional girl, our Akua,” I drawled. “Twenty denarii she yammers at us through a runic array when get in.”

“Twenty more she compares herself to Triumphant,” Black replied amusedly. “They always do, Catherine. I’ve heard three dozen variations on that speech by now.”

He paused.

“They quote the play,” he said, pained. “Every time. I know the entire third act by rote.”

“I’ll take that,” I mused. “She probably thinks she’s above name-dropping, like this isn’t basically a glorified flying fortress.”

I raised my voice.

“That’s right, Diabolist, I went there,” I catcalled. “Your whole plan is so last millennium, and I bet you actually call your lair a lair when talking to other people.”

I didn’t look, but I got the impression Black’s lips were twitching. Heavy footsteps sounded ahead, followed by the cloying smell of brimstone wafting up to us.

Two blades left their scabbard as one, and we advanced.

Chapter 62: Verse

“One hundred and eighty-seven: should one of your trusted companions be taken hostage at knife-point, check for the following features – cliff, moat, or any kind of sharp drop. Should one be nearby, you may assume the situation will solve itself momentarily.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

Heavy footsteps and the scent of Hell, yet no ominous breathing. I got to see the reason for the absence the moment our opponent came into sight. The devil, for there was no denying it was that, stood a good twenty feet tall. Broad as cart, if not more, it had a shape almost human if humans could be of that size. It wore no clothes, its sculpted body made of something neither stone nor metal but evoking both, and in its hands it held a long mace that looked like a massive rib. Granite? Hard to tell, in the dark. Still, it was the head that drew attention or more precisely the lack thereof. Atop the devil’s neck was only a polished surface, like someone had ripped off the head of a marble statue, and from the sides sprouted the ram horns I’d glimpsed earlier. Well, there went my usual plan. Decapitation did the trick with most everything, if you were thorough enough. For all that the devil lacked eyes it had no trouble keeping track of us, and for something its size it was damnably nimble. Also strong, I thought with a wince as the rib-mace smashed against the ground with a deafening sound.

Yeah, I wasn’t getting hit by that if I could help it. I no longer had the Lone Swordsman’s hero juice that would allow me to get back up afterwards.

It should have been, I thought, a difficult scrap. But it wasn’t, because the two of us were moving seamlessly. It wasn’t like with Adjutant, who was a limb of my own, or the way it had when the Woe had... come together in Dormer. Black was just always in the right place, like he had a supernatural sense telling him where that was. The devil leaned forward to smash down the mace on me and my teacher was right behind, edge of his sword flashing with shadow as he carved a scar on the thing’s back. It screamed mouthlessly and turned, swinging wildly, but he was exactly half a step out of the arc. Its free hand reach for Black, fingers creaking as they moved, but then I was free to act and my blade went into the back of its knee. Not, sadly, deep enough to push through. But enough it turned screaming again, and when it did Black hacked halfway through its mace-wielding wrist. The devil went wild and the both of us backed away smoothly, one behind it and one before, neither of us out even slightly out of breath.

There was a game of shatranj being played here, with every step and every swing, and the devil was losing it. Much as I would have liked to say I was a player unto myself, I wasn’t. I was just... part of the dance. Another moving part my teacher worked with as he orchestrated the death of a creature that could easily have torn its way through a full company of heavies without taking a wound. Sometimes I forgot that, for all that I’d mostly seen Black scheme and lead men, his Name was that of a killer of heroes. To be the Black Knight was to be the right hand of the Dread Emperor, the slayer of the anointed champions of the Heavens. There was no searing light or shouted righteousness, down here, but there was death. Being painted on a canvas of flesh, one stroke at a time. I enjoyed being part of that as much as I hated it. Following the lead of a professional was... soothing, and the victory being arranged would be sweet. But it’d been some time since I’d had anyone above me in the pecking order on the battlefield. The feel of it was like fly that wouldn’t quit buzzing around me.

When the devil emerged from the wild frenzy that had seize it, we advanced again. It leapt back, over my head, but nimble or not it was heavy . A twist of will had a spear of frost ramming into its side, doing little but breaking skin but slamming it against the side of the corridor. Absence, that was what the boundary looked like, but whatever it was it was not lightly shaken: the devil smashed against it and fell scrabbling to its feet. Neither of us intended to give it the breathing room. The rib-mace skidded against the ground, moving so blindingly fast it was a blur, but I leaned into my instincts – I felt the breath of death under my feet, cloak rustling, but already I was rolling forward and beneath its guard. There was a sound like stone breaking and the devil half-collapsed forward. I stepped to the side of the falling torso and hacked at its sides, for lack of better target, frost touching the wounds I made and never leaving. I smelled a kill.

“Withdraw,” Black said.

I moved without hesitation. The creature did not attack, and I got a look at why: while I’d been distracting it in the front, my teacher had slipped behind and deepened the wound in the back of the knee until the entirely limb was cut off. The devil, struggling to keep us at bay with its mace, roughly tried to force back its severed parts together. To my distaste, I saw the unearthly material began to mend itself. Of course Akua had some kind of self-healing abomination, which also shrugged off my power in anything but strong concentration and who was fucking twenty feet tall as a gatekeeper. Her ego probably didn’t allow her to be any random asshole, she had to be Queen Asshole, reigning queen of all the assholes in the world.

“Now,” Black said, when the stitch job was half-done.

The devil screamed again, and I was close enough to feel the sound coming from its entire body. It was the thing itself screaming, and the act that nothing to do with mouth or throat. I pressed forward without flinching. I realized what my teacher’s intent had been a moment before it bore fruit. The devil attempted to rise to its feet to fight us but the stitching was not yet complete: the moment it put weight on the limb, the healing broke and it fell down again. Typical Black, I thought. I might have been the kill the thing brawling up close, but it in his eyes the uncertainty was not worth the risk. Instead we’d withdrawn to create another occasion, one for a clean kill. It was the fighting style of a man who’d spent his entire like killing heroes. Knowing the dice would always favour the other side, he’d learned to remove chance from the equation entirely. It was an alien way of killing to me, who tended to double down when things got risky instead. But there’s a reason he’s lived this long when heroes keep taking a swing at his neck, and I’m looking at it.

Frost swept up my sword and I drove the blade into the back of the devil fallen at my feet. From the corner I could see Black cutting through the back of its mace-wielding elbow, motions fluid and not a single one wasted. The devil screamed but it was done. With a last attempt at taking me in hand it tried to rally, but from where my blade had sunk into its flesh ice was spreading inside. The hand never reached me, the limb itself frozen ad I kept pouring Winter’s power into its frame. From the beginning to the end, the fight could not have lasted longer than a quarter hour. Neither of us had taken a single hit, or been in any great danger of dying. There’d be a grand total of two words spoken throughout, no quips or taunts – the absence had been heavy it would have felt like whistling during a sermon to start. I spat to the side, out of breath more for use of my mantle than because of physical tiredness.

There’d been a lot of talk since I became the Squire about the similarities between us, but this... execution had just laid the differences bare for all to see. We both used chaos, but the manner was different. The dark-haired man would wait patiently, put himself in the correct position, and then set fire to the field. He’d then ruthless capitalized on those weaknesses, using chaos as just another tool in his arsenal. Me, though? Chaos followed wherever I went, so I’d made it my home grounds. Learned to drink and breathe that kind of mess, so that when it hit the field I was the only one unhindered. It’d gotten me through two messes in Arcadia, Marchford and Summerholm, but never without a price. On the surface his was of doing things was flatly superior and I still intended to learn from it, but I wasn’t Black. I didn’t have that kind of calculation in me. And though Akua had been full of shit when she’d called him a rat in a maze of traps, she’d touched something true: my teacher’s way only worked so long as he was prepared. It was, in a word, fragile .

I could learn from him without turning in a shoddier version of who he was. I had to, or the fights ahead would cost me a lot more than Nauk.

“ Mongowa-umun ,” Black said in Mtethwa. “It was a greater devil, though not a famous one. Likely an old Sahelian contract kept secret for a rainy day.”

“She only had one of those left, according to my sources,” I replied. “I expected it to be deeper in the city, to be honest.”

“There will be worse,” Black said, shaking his head. “A host, yes, but that will not be the thrust of her defence. The old breed has always preferred sorcery to armies, in the end. Sorcery comes from a single will, armies have to share victory.”

“Wards,” I said. “But we have a layout of those. Thief saw to that.”

“Two things must you face, when breaking a High Lord,” Black murmured, quoting from one of Terribilis II’s treatises. “Tall and ancient walls, manned by wrath. Then the seat of power, where old devils lie.”

“This isn’t a Wasteland city,” I said. “She didn’t have ten centuries to fill her vaults with every different shade of madness she could think of.”

“It is a manner of thinking, Catherine,” he replied. “Her seat of power, the Ducal Palace, will be where she has invested greatest effort.”

“Frontal assault’s not an option, then,” I grimaced. “Not that I’d seriously considered, given the army in the city and whatnot.”

Pale eyes glanced at me and he nodded.

“Your little surprises,” he said. “Do you have way to contact them?”

“There’s a mage along,” I admitted. “But it’s not like either of us can scry. Akua bailing out of Creation wasn’t part of the plan. Instructions were given before the operation began.”

“I am uncertain what that would result in, if currently carried out,” Black said. “There is a need to account for that liability.”

“You want me to find them?” I said. “I never liked the metaphor, but needle and haystack. And in this case the needle is both murderous and actively hiding.”

“Think, Catherine,” he softly said, “about the fight ahead of us. The shape of it. In the process of that confrontation, can we afford to have a sudden tipping point of unknown timing and effect?”

I grimaced. If this were just me, I’d say yes. I was confident that, whatever came of it, I’d be better at dealing with it than Diabolist. I didn’t care about what actually happened as much as I did what I could make from that. But that wasn’t the way Black worked, and considering he was the mentor in this little jaunt of ours maybe sticking to the safe side was the better notion. I was still wary that he’d told me to leave Adjutant and Archer behind. There were a lot of stories that could spring from the two of us hitting Diabolist’s lair alone, and few ended well for him.

“So I look for them,” I said. “In the trapped horror-city swarming with undead and mages. Gods, you always take me to the worst places.”

“No,” he said. “I have... a notion for their use. Make your way to the Ducal Palace and prepare an approach. Quietly .”

My fingers clenched. I studied his face and found it as inscrutable as ever, pale and calm and seemingly in control.

“You know I’m not great at the courtesies, so you’ll have to forgive if I’m being too blunt,” I said. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

He cocked his head to the side but did not reply. He didn’t seem offended, but then he didn’t seem much of anything at all – I was well aware that the only reason I saw mild curiosity on his face was because he was letting me.

“I went along with this because I thought you had a plan,” I said. “Something that doesn’t end up with you taking a spell for me or dying to free me from some trap. But I have to ask, Black, are you actually trying to die? Because us going off on our own before we pick a fight with Diabolist reeks of you being there in chains when I enter her throne room.”

My tone turned harsh.

“I don’t care if you think you’ve reached the end of the rope,” I bit out. “I’m not going to help you go out in a blaze of futility. Gods Below, this is Akua . She has a magic weapon and a fortress of doom, but you’ve taught me since the moment I became a claimant that the story she began only ends one way. This isn’t just foolish, it’s actively detrimental to the Empire. I don’t care if you’re Named, we’re on the eve of war with the Principate – now is not the time to start sacrificing our best generals.”

I was panting by the end of it, fear and anger having bled out into my voice. I hated how vulnerable I’d sounded, even if I’d scrupulously avoided making this personal.

“If you are quite finished?” Black calmly asked, and I grunted in agreement. “Good. You misunderstand me. I’ve no intention of dying today, Catherine, though it is certainly possible regardless. You have not seen my full hand, so to speak.”

“You know better than that,” I said. “Tricks going against the current don’t stick . It makes it seem like you have a chance for the moment, but then Creation fucks you anyway because it’s a very large machine and you’re a very small grain of sand.”

“Of this,” he replied, “I am aware. And yet I would proceed.”

It was tempting to ask him what had him so sure he’d make it out, but even if there’d been a guarantee Akua wasn’t listening in – which there wasn’t – I didn’t believe he would have told me. Black was more pile of secrets than man, sometimes, and he did not share those without good reason. My fear, even for him, did not qualify.

“This is what you’d say,” I murmured, “if you were trying to force a succession on me.”

“Yes,” he acknowledged serenely.

“And you know how to fool the Name tricks for lying,” I said.

He’d been the one to teach them to me, after all.

“I do,” he agreed.

“But you want me to believe you anyway,” I finished.

He inclined his head, conceding the point.

“A leap of faith,” the Black Knight said, and for some reason he sounded amused.

I’d learned to recognize pivots, to feel the weight of their touch on my life. I’d come a long way since first hearing the word, Juniper telling me of it under the stars months after I’d made my first choice that mattered. Not a Choice, no, not the way the Book of All Things spoke of it, but perhaps something touching the facet of that greater concept. In the collection of decisions and acts that made up a Name, the stuff of it, some mattered more than others. This? This was not one. I breathed out and sharpened my mind but there was no fulcrum to be found. No sense that scales could be shifted. Was it because he was being truthful, that my wariness was unfounded? Or is it because he has already made a choice of his own, and it has long been out of my hands? I could not keep a man who sought death from it, I knew. Much less one as able as my teacher.

The part of me that was Catherine Foundling yet not, the girl I was and had been but seen through the darkened ice that was Winter and my Name, crept up my spine inexorably. It told me that if this was unacceptable, I should force my will upon it. Brand his soul with a queen’s decree, that he would struggle for life whatever the costs. But that whispering thing met pale green eyes, so calm and measured, and it faltered. It would be fair, it insisted. Once, in Summerholm, he had robbed me of my own will before swinging nooses. Though that debt had grown muddled by the ways we had intertwined since, it would stand so long as it was not repaid. I was Callowan, after all, even now. We were a people of long grudges. I forced the set of ugly instincts down. Warlock had not been wrong, to call me other . I wondered if all the villains I’d jeered at in the old stories, called fools for not thinking it through, had started out like me. Bargain after bargain, one desperate compromise after another until you hardly recognized the creature looking back at you in the mirror. Damnation never felt like damnation until it was too late, did it? I forced myself to be Catherine Foundling and no one else, the coldness in my veins slowly receding.

“You told me once, that you thought of martyrdom as an act of cowardice,” I said. “Symbolic vanity.”

“And I stand by those words,” Black said.

I closed my eyes and breathed out.

“Don’t you dare make me grieve you,” I whispered.

The sentiment passed, and my eyes opened. I found his matching mine, brown and green and neither giving ground.

“Into the breach we go, Black Knight,” I said.

“Into the breach, Squire,” he softly agreed.

Interlude: Liesse I

“Do not ever speak of victory before the last foe is dead.”
– Queen Elizabeth Alban of Callow

Juniper of the Red Shields spat to the side. This was going to be messy business, and she told Aisha as much.

“The Lord Warlock should be able to hold the gate until we arrive,” her old friend replied.

The Named had mustered up a storm of green acid in front of the opening, and for now nothing was coming out but already the spell was thinning.

“The Lord Fucking Warlock wants us to establish a beachhead on the other side,” the general said. “He better pull his godsdamned weight if he wants it done.”

Spellcasters, always a finicky lot. Orcs as a rule put little stock in them. The Miezans has slaughtered the old shaman lines wholesale and what remained after was little more than bone-tellers and mystics. They made ceremonies worth bearing with, but in a fight they were decoration. The Clans lived and died on steel. Praesi were made for them, though, meddled with all kinds of nasty shit in the blood to get better with the ‘Gift’. No wonder the whole breed was half-mad. Mages had their place in the modern legions, as field artillery and field healers, but something like the Sovereign of Red Skies could only make her uneasy. You couldn’t have that kind of power without it costing you somewhere else. Even Catherine had changed, since she’d killer her way to a fae title, and not just that her temper froze tables now. She only had one foot on the ground now with the rest of them, now. Juniper could live with it. Foundling’s mind had always been like a bag of rabid badgers, as long as she kept that pointed at the enemy it wasn’t too much of an issue.

She’d ordered the Fifteenth to begin reorienting before she ever got the order from Lord Black, reading the lay of the battlefield. Someone needed to plug the gap, else the Fourth would be cut off from the rest of the army, and only her legion was in the right place. The Deoraithe were technically closer, but they were a fucking mess at the moment. When Sahelian’s people had brought out the demons, aside with screwing with Legion scrying it had also made an impassable wall in the enemy centre. The three legions sent in as the first wave had moved around smoothly, the Fifth taking to the left and the Sixth to the right with the Twelfth behind it, but Kegan’s soldiers weren’t legionaries. Most of them hadn’t seen combat except with the Fifteenth, gone soft now that the Clans no longer raided the Marches. The grinder that had been the Summer Campaign had already cut away the worst of the chaff, but getting blooded didn’t make them any better trained. The Duchy of Daoine didn’t usually go on the offensive, and it was showing badly today.

The first wave of archers, right behind the three legions, had split in two. One half heading for either side, circling around the demon grounds. But they were shit at it. They’d lost all cohesion, their formation turning into some kind of wavy column instead of the tightly packed ranks they should have been. The entire left half had slowed to a crawl the moment the Hellgate opened, afraid of being flanked but opening themselves to it just by milling around like scared herd animals. The infantry behind them was worse, in a way. They’d kept to the long rectangle formation they’d been sent forward as, but they fucking idiots kept advancing. When the front ranks realized they were about to either hit the tail ends of both archer contingents or tread too close to the demon grounds they’d tried to stop, but the officers in the back hadn’t cottoned on yet. There was nothing quite like watching over ten thousand Deoraithe warriors trip all over themselves to make a woman wonder how exactly these fucks had managed to hold the Wall in the face of her people for over a millennium.

Marshal Ranker was now in command of the army and she was trying to clean up the mess before it got them all killed, but scrying was still touch and go even with the warlock’s get putting the demons in some kind of egg bubble. At least they weren’t running rampant – if Hierophant managed to keep that up until the battle ended, she’d kiss him full on the bloody mouth. Wouldn’t even complain about his ugly soft cow teeth. According to protocol the Legions had gone back to flag and horn signalling, but the Deoraithe weren’t familiar with most of those. Trying to order them around like that would only add to the chaos. Juniper had managed to get one of Marshal Ranker’s staff officers in a scrying link and gotten authority over the Deoraithe for the moment, but she’d already sent messengers on foot to Duchess Kegan by then. It rankled to break the line of command like this, but it was her men going into the breach now. She wasn’t taking any chances, even if it ruffled feathers. Juniper watched the battle unfold in front of her, splayed out for her to see, and then closed her eyes. She breathed out, and let the pieces move.

The Fifth under General Orim had managed to take the leftmost bastion after Catherine slaughtered her way through the mages there, but it was having trouble to pierce further in. Her mother’s Sixth had the rightmost bastion, but they’d gained too much ground under the Black Knight: they wouldn’t be able to go back on the offensive until they’d consolidated their lines. General Afolabi’s Twelfth was getting ripped apart taking a swing at the last remaining bastion, but they’d earned their cognomen the hard way. Holdfast . They’d proved the truth of that at Dormer against Summer nobles and they were showing it again: losses were heavy, but they were going forward and they weren’t flinching in the slightest. Gods, the Twelfth would be a skeleton of a legion by nightfall. The Ninth under General Sacker hadn’t even tried to swing around the entire army to get at the Hellgate, they were headed straight for the fields of stakes making up the flanks beyond the right palisade. If she got there quick enough, she could smash into the wights form the side and take the pressure off the Sixth.

Good. The front wasn’t in danger of collapsing, so long as General Orim remained cautious and Hierophant didn’t drop the ball. The Fourth under Marshal Ranker had made a well-oiled turnabout and was now headed for the Hellgate from behind, but that’d take most an hour if she didn’t want her men dead on their feet when they got there. The only arrows in Juniper’s quiver were the Fifteenth and whatever Deoraithe she could scrape up. Eight thousand under her direct command five thousand legionaries and a half. Two thousand and a half heavy horse, though. Callowan knights. There was much that could be done with that, at least on this side of the gate. She had no intelligence on what lay on the other side, so initial approach would have to be centred around advance and containment. The breach would have to wait until she had area secured, and she was not looking forward to sending men into that. Much as she hated to even think it, she was missing Nauk. The man was an unseemly emotional brute without finesse, but if you hand to send a vanguard into Hell he was the breed of officers you wanted at the head of it. Senior Tribune Jwahir was steadier than the legate had been, but she didn’t have the same bite.

“Juniper,” Aisha said. “The storm’s broken. I don’t know how many they gathered on the other side, but it’s not a trickle coming out. Full battalions and – shit . Akalibsa . Those are are akalibsa .”

Taghreb loan word. The orc’s mind spun back to the lessons at the College until she found where she’d heard it before. Imperial civil war, Battle of the Black Grounds. Summoned by the Warlock of the time to bolster the usurping Chancellor’s expedition into the Steppes.

“Dog-devils,” Juniper said.

Incarnations of blind hatred. An old favourite of Taghreb mages, much like the walin-falme for the Soninke. No wings, but swift on their feet and they bore their own arms and armour. It had long endeared them to the desert tribes, who in ancient times had lacked the means to provide these to their war-summoned devils. The general opened her eyes, and watched the flood pour out.

“Aisha, sound the horns,” she said, baring her teeth. “The horse is to peel to the left and await my signal to charge. The Fifteenth is to stagger as follows: right forward, then centre, then left.”

Her friend’s slender face creased, but she nodded. Juniper watched her legion move and waited. The waltz had begun.

—

Hierophant cocked his head to the side.

He was a mile away from his foes, but that little mattered nowadays. His eyes had been touched by Summer sun in the fullness of its glory, and little that was under the sky lay hidden to them. What had once been sight of sorcery’s shaping granted by the enchantments Father had laid upon his spectacles was now part of him, and fae flame had filed that working down to sharp point. The press of sweating and bleeding soldiers between himself and his quarry were ignored, gone from his vision with but a thought, and all that remained was foe. Threefold summon had brought them into Creation, an oddity he would have enjoyed discussed with his father had there been time. He’d believed the concept to have been discredited, for while in theory the overlapping of Dues helped lower the power required in practice the fine tuning required made it too risky for the benefits. No mage fool enough to take chances when summoning a demon lived long, much less three.

Admittedly, it had been something of a challenge to contain all of them simultaneously. It had to be a single working, for three different wards of that magnitude were beyond his ability to maintain and if he’d attempted to split between a ward covering to and the other one the imbalance of power would have been... difficult to deal with. Overall efficiency was lowered by containing such different entities with the same spell, but this way lowered the risks of calamitous failure. Still, the amount of bleed displeased him greatly. It was the demon of Order that was hardest to handle, as Father had suspected he might. Whether the Beast of Hierarchy truly was the old monster that shattered the city of Shango and ripped it from Creation he could not be certain, but it was proving rather troublesome. By their nature the breed was difficult to contain, though thankfully much less prone to fast-spreading infection than the likes of Madness and Corruption. The issue was that the demon’s effect on Creation was... selective, for a lack of better term.

Beasts of Hierarchy took creational laws, the hierarchy of the world as set by the Gods, and replaced them with something superficially similar but at cross-purposes. Air still existed, yet could not be breathed. Solid was as liquid, friction added where there should be none. Points became fixed without rhyme or reason, and so many other weavings: there were as many ways for the demon of Order to act as there were creational laws, if not more. There’d been reports that – ah, perhaps another time. Masego frowned as the demon of Apathy ceased its attempts to bleed through the Ivory Globe, instead gathering its essence into itself. Clever thing. Demons were not truly sentient, of course, or at least not in a way mortals could understand. At best they could imitate such intelligence. But they could solve problems, regardless, and this demon was attempting to turn its own corruption onto the very ward containing it. Apathy, this kind had been given as a title, but it ran deeper. It slowed and ended the movement of all forces, physical and metaphysical. The trick at work was an attempt to make his ward cease to flow, becoming so brittle it would shatter.

Runes forming under his fingers, the braided mage hummed. The globe of cleansing ivory light shattered and the demon moved without hesitation – indeed, it was incapable of such a thing – but Hierophant was not longer a green boy. He had seen wonders and horrors, had them seared into his soul so deeply they had changed his very nature.

“Glint on glass, stolen yet earned,” he murmured. “Passing jewel, foe’s crown: dawn .”

For a single glorious moment, he saw all of it again. The sun of Summer in all its furious implacable might. Even the mere remembrance the ground scorched for thirty feet around him in a perfect circle. It was no kinder to the demon. Scathing light burned the envelope of thick murky skin around the core of it, ripping it to black shreds as the creature let out a sound that was neither pain nor anything at all – there mere excretion of it was a burden upon Creation wherever it sounded, a slowing of all it touched. The demon folded upon itself, surrendering its outer essence, and as the dawn passed Masego formed the Ivory Glow anew around it. It had gone, he saw, twenty feet forward. Another forty and it would be close enough to affect nearby soldiery, who would have panicked had they enough of their mind left to do so. The touch of Apathy would fade after a few more moments, but never entirely leave them. There would always be that empty space within, sapping away at all they were.

The Beast of Hierarchy had changed law while he’d been distracted, and with a downturn of the lips Masego adjusted the Ivory Globe’s frequency. Too much went through anyway. Keeping the demon fixed in its current position, he mused, would not be the issue. It could not apply its essence to the Ivory Globe itself, for Hierophant had usurped the properties of the divine in crafting them. His study of the angel’s corpse near Liesse had borne fruit in this regard. Yet their struggle was, ultimately, one of repertoire. So long as Masego could grasp the creational law being substituted and knew of a working to remedy this, its grasp outside the ward would be highly limited. The moment he failed on either counts, however, the spread would begin to work its way through the battlefield. The demon of Madness was proving difficult enough already, concerning that. Though in no danger of escaping, at the very moment his ward ebbed low a sliver of the creature’s essence pushed through. With Order and Apathy, this was regrettable but of no great concern. Madness was another story.

Its effect lingered, accumulated and spread. Already for twenty feet around it the fabric of Creation was irremediably tainted and would have to be purified beyond recognition, lest anyone wandering these grounds from here to the end of time be taken by red madness. Though not the most dangerous of breeds to fight, the true ability of their kind was in the spread. The longer it remained, the more dangerous it became. It was no wonder that when Triumphant had come upon Liesse, though she had myriad demons of all Hells it was a demon of Madness she had sent to the city. Half a night had been enough to destroy the entire city, and the taint would have spread to the entire region if left unchecked much longer. Even as Masego adjusted the Globe again to check the Beast of Hierarchy, it occurred to him that he was but a single man trying to contain a flood with his bare hands. He would, in time, fail. He’d been reliably informed by Archer that some performers in Levant walked tightropes tall in the air for the entertainment of screaming peasantry, and perhaps this was an apt metaphor. The dark-skinned mage could, in fact, walk the metaphorical rope.

He could not, however, keep doing it for hours without slipping.

Adjusting the Globe again – the Beast was becoming swifter in recognizing when it failed to wade through, which was worrying – Hierophant turned his eyes to that tall platform of stone that still remained in rebel hands. There was a technical name for it, he mused, but he could not remember. Flat, low tower? Fat, short stronghold? The lack of precision was like an itch he couldn’t scratch, but he forced himself to move on. Sorcery was being woven there, of no small scale. Were they to resume assaulting his wards? That had been deeply unpleasant. Unable to strike directly at them he’d had to pour power to fix the holes being made, which would have exhausted him into sloppiness if they’d kept it up for much longer. He simply could not abide sloppiness. The glass eyes took a broader view of the threads of sorcery being braided, but after a moment he dismissed it. Necromancy, which was none of his concern. His sight returned to the demons. Brushing back a braid Masego thought of a conversation he’d once had with Catherine, years ago. They’d been speaking of the hero Hunter, then still among the living, and she’d uttered the strange saying that when that kind of man smiled you called what he showed arrow-catchers .

He’d naturally informed her that even for a Named, attempting to catch an arrow with one’s teeth would likely result in either shattered teeth or an arrow going through the roof of the mouth. She’d looked at him with that tolerantly amused look of hers, and explained that that was the joke. A very poor one, in his opinion, but it had to be said most things to come out of Callow were hopelessly shabby. Still, the little talk had stuck with him. He looked at the demons and traced runes, High Arcana one and all. The Ivory Globes winked out.

Hierophant bared his teeth, and tried to catch an arrow.

—

“Bless that child,” Marshal Ranker said quietly, watching the Fifteenth move. “She inherited the best of both her parents.”

The goblin was not a withered old witch like the Matrons in the Eyries, obsessed with bloodlines. It was true that goblins of matron lines were larger and stronger, cleverer and even lived longer – but Ranker had learned the reason for it when she became Matron, and wondered if the price for it was not too steep. Her people had done ugly things to survive on the surface, after losing their ancient underground kingdom to the dwarves. Yet, for all that she put less stock in breeding, it could not be denied that few girls had been better bred for war than Juniper of the Red Shields. Istrid Knightsbane was living legend, earned on the Fields of Streges, and the girl’s father had been worth stories in his own days. Oguz Sharphand was the reason Grem One-Eye was called such, and few champions had been more acclaimed among the Clans until his legs were crippled. No, General Juniper was worthy of her rank regardless of youth. She’d begun sending the Fifteenth forward before the orders ever came, and now as Ranker watched the legion stagger as the cavalry peeled off she felt a sharp grin split her face. She knew that formation from reading her histories. The Callowans had used one much the same, when they’d crushed Dread Emperor Nefarious at the Fields of Streges.

Few of her own officers would have thought of using the old kingdom’s tactics, even with knights under their command. For all that Legion doctrine was flexible and comprehensive, it encouraged one to think within a certain box of tools. Some of the sharpest tools on Calernia, yes, and they had proved their worth again and again. Yet for a commander to ever be considered for marshal, they had to prove they were able to think beyond that box. Istrid’s daughter had that steel in her, though it was not yet properly tempered. Grem is come again , she thought. The torch had hands worthy of being passed to. The Fourth was heavier on sappers than most legions, and so turning it around after the Hellgate opened had not been so slow as it should have been. The regulars would lag slightly behind, but if General Juniper succeeded in seizing this side of the gate then sappers would be useful in keeping it even alone. There was need to hurry, regardless. The Sahelian chit had pulled a fast one on them with that gate, deploying it just after Ranker’s legion was too far gone to pull back in time.

Orim was getting the short end of the stick, much like he had after the Conquest when he’d been sent to watch over Liesse and a pack of squabbling Callowans. The Squire had fallen onto that flank like an avalanche of death and ripped straight through the bastion, but she was gone now and the Fifth had to stand its ground against foes that outnumbered it brutally. The wights without necromancers guiding them were not as much as a threat, however, and in truth the lot of them had not impressed Ranker overmuch. If the Dead King’s host was of this make, then the Procerans must be even more shit soldiers than she’d thought. Any nation that warred so much had no business being so bad at it, though she wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth considering the fights ahead. Her Fourth was halfway to the Hellgate, when she felt the ripple. Felt it, like a physical thing. Rheumy eyes turned back to the battle behind, and what she saw had her blood run cold.

The rebels were raising the dead. This, they had expected. It was an old Wasteland trick to have the enemy’s own dead turn against them halfway into the battle. The Legions had followed protocol, keeping sappers near corpse-piles when feasible. But it was more than that. The wights, it was the wights that had been the true intent. They’d thought that killing the mages meant they could no longer be controlled, that more casters were needed, but now the tide turned on the overextended legions as one. And they were no longer mindless. The undead stood in ranks now, in formations instead of an unruly mass. They moved and killed with purpose. Marshal Ranker had seen more battles than nearly anyone alive in the Empire. This, she realized in moment of perfect clarity, had been a trap. Since the beginning. From the positioning of the demons in the centre to split their forces to ground being given, all to draw them in as deep as possible with reinforcements split and too far behind. The rebels had sacrificed hundreds of their own mages, the favourite sons and daughters of Praes, to set up this very moment where the jaws closed in on the Legions of Terror. They’d been too used to winning, Ranker understood with anguish. We didn’t think they’d learned .

Mind spinning, she unfolded what was going to happen. The Fifth, too far deep, was about to be overwhelmed. Afolabi’s Twelfth Legion would be ground into the Sixth’s flank until it collapsed, weakened as it was. And though the right flank would hold, Orim would break and the wights would spill through. Either they’d swing around and hit Istrid, or they’d ram into the back of the Fifteenth while it attempted to contain the gate. If the Fifth was scattered, the battle was lost.

“Sound the horns,” Ranker ordered hoarsely. “We’re reinforcing Orim. Now, at running speed .”

Then the wards keeping the demons contained winked out and screams beyond mortal understanding sounded across shadowed sky.

Hierarchy

“Heed my warning princes and princesses of Procer: for every empire laid low by Evil, a hundred were wrecked by mere greed and stupidity.”
– Extract from ‘The Ruin of Empire, or, a Call to Reform of the Highest Assembly’, by Princess Eliza of Salamans

They kept telling him he had servants now.

The League of Free Cities had no official seat even when a Hierarch ruled since Prokopia Lakene, first of that Name, had never established one. Her native Penthes was too far from the heart of the Free Cities, and she’d preferred playing off cities against each other to aligning with a single one. In the end Nicae was where the Conclave was called, with the Tyrant’s armies still camped outside the recently-breached walls. Delegations from the cities arrived within days of each other, begun to travel long before the Siege of Nicae came to its bloody end. They all came to answer the call to elect the Hierarch of the Free Cities. Atalante, now freed of Helikean occupation for the price of its vote. Delos, whose Secretariat had sent a swarm of askretis to harass him with scrolls before the Conclave even confirmed his ascension. Magisters of Stygia from the ruling faction in their Magisterium, politely inquiring if he desired slaves to run his household affairs. The filthy Penthesians had sent five claimants to the title of Exarch of their wretched city, all demanding his arbitrage. The Strategos of Nicae was dead, slain in battle while she fought the Helikeans, and until one could be appointed the Basileus of the city had seize power in full. The man had granted him the ancient palace of the Strategoi as a residence, as much a bribe to Anaxares as a slight to the office that was ancient rival to his own. For Helike the Tyrant stood alone, and the Republic had sent only one diplomat. The rest of the delegation were kanenas that followed him like a second shadow wherever he went.

He’d refused it. The palace, the servants – servants, as if any soul in Creation was suborned to anything but the Will Of The People – the soft bed and the draperies. Anaxares would have naught to do with this madness. He could not return to Bellerophon, to the Republic, and so he had tried to find work in the city. But the fishermen knelt and shook when he’d asked if hands were needed, and the fields outside the city went without tilling for they were still covered by soldiers. He knew nothing of smithing or shoemaking, for his entire life he had been nothing but a diplomat for his people and he had learned no trade. And so he had wandered into the ruined parts of the city, freshly sacked, and sat in the ashes with a begging bowl. For warmth he burnt trash, for unlike civilized Bellerophon where such things could only be done where an assembly of citizens from the quarter decided to allow in Nicae anyone could do so wherever they wished. He had a threadbare blanket ripped from a burnt house for his bed, and the sea for bathing water. It was a wretched living, but better than this talk of palace .

Anaxares had become a curiosity, to his distaste. Noblemen and functionaries came to his alley to drop coins in the bowl and attempt conversation, though he never replied. Some left gold, and that he tossed aside for other vagrants to have. Copper he took as alms, and silver if there were few enough, not that merchants accepted to take his coin. He had to leave it on their stalls over their protests, and some even tried to force it back into his hands. Mighty Hierarch , they wept. Glorious One. All I have is yours . When he first heard the words he threw up in an alley afterwards, shaken to his core. It was wrong. All wrong, and there was nothing he could do to fix it. There was no hope some delegation would come to its senses at the last moment and gave the single vote against that was needed to prevent his election. The Gods had elected him before men ever spoke their piece, cursing him with a Name regardless of his desires. The Tyrant had been their instrument in this, and for that Anaxares was glad he had seen nothing of him since the night where Nicae fell.

Kairos had ordered dragged at his feet a bloodied hunk of meat that he said was the White Knight, a hero anointed by the Heavens. Taken prisoner in the fight, he said, and now it was the Hierarch who must decided his fate. The Tyrant was, the boy grinned, ever the head of the League’s loyal servant.

“I give no orders,” Anaxares had said.

“Silence is an order as well, old friend,” the Tyrant laughed. “Your will be done.”

The diplomat had washed his hands of the affair, walked away, and in the days that followed men and women of import had come in his alley to praise his mercy. Called his restraint in allowing the heroes to leave unmolested a beginning to mending the wounds of the League. He did not reply, but learned even his silences had weight now. Consequences. There is no escaping this , he thought. Even when I do nothing, it is something. He tried regardless. Decades under the watchful gaze of the kanenas had taught Anaxares to think along grooves already learned, to stay within the path decided upon by the People, but he went further. Eyes open, breathing steady, the diplomat tried to think of nothing at all. To abnegate life, for he was forbidden from taking his own. Hours became mere blinks of blank absence but Creation, Creation always dragged him back. Through hunger or heat or a myriad other little pulls that there was nothing he could do about. Never before had the diplomat so despised that he was but a sack of blood, bound together by bones and skin. He leaked and scraped like a peach, years of soft living having made him too tender by far.

The scrolls from the Secretariat kept coming, and though he was tempted to use them to feed the flames he refrained. That would be statement as well. He let them pile up at his side instead, pretending they did no exist and ignoring anyone telling him otherwise. He only understood his mistake too late. Anaxares had made himself a story, and stories were the beating heart of Names. He bit his tongue until it bled to avoid saying the word, but it sounded in his mind anyway. Receive . Another curse forced upon him, beyond his control. To his eyes and ears came whispers and images on the wind, and there was no avoiding them. There was no rhyme or reason to the aspect – it came and went as it wished, sometimes twice in an hour and sometimes absent for two days.

“You’re sure he’s just staying there?” a man in Penthesian robes said.

“Our men say so,” some kneeling figure replied. “The Hierarch has gone mad.”

“All Bellerophans are mad,” the Penthesian said. “This is... something else.”

The morning after the man he’d glimpsed came and left gold in the begging bowl, speaking of supporting him as Exarch to restore order to Penthes.

“The third request for war reparations had been delivered,” a plain-faced woman said.

Her face was tattooed with lines of blue and black ink, marking her as appointed askretis of the twelth rank.

“It was ignored?” a man asked.

His own tattoos were but two thin stripes, black and blue. Anaxares had never seen a member of the Secretariat so highly placed as to have only two lines, not even as an envoy.

“But not burned,” the woman said.

“There must be some manner of proper method for submission we are unaware of,” the man said. “Send a scroll requesting it.”

The woman he’d seen stood before him before an hour had passed with a scroll in hand, and Anaxares was forced to admit the visions were true and not merely torment set upon him by the Gods. The next vision he received, there was no mystery as to who he saw. The Basileus of Nicae had visited him before, a young olive-skinned man with perfect teeth and braided black hair.

“It would be improper to appoint a Strategos before the Conclave has taken place,” the Basileus told an assembly of nobles. “We must not slight the Hierarch by proceeding without his guidance.”

“A Strategos would best represent us at the Conclave,” an old man in armour bit back.

“The Bellerophan’s demented, Your Excellency,” a woman intervened soothingly, addressing the Basileus. “The Tyrant will be the power behind the throne.”

“No one knows what the Tyrant wants,” the Basileus said, looking wary. “He could have seized the Free Cities by force, if he so wished, yet he’s withdrawn from all his conquests. I will not act recklessly before knowing his plan.”

Bickering erupted after and Anaxares was reminded of the debates in the Republic, for a moment. It passed. These were richly dressed, in some closed room away from the people they claimed to rule for. There was not even an empty space left for the Gods Below to fill, should they care to vote – they never had in the history of Bellerophon, but the right had been granted and so it remained. The vision did not die, it merely shifted to another sight. The diplomat felt his fingers clench. Kairos Theodosian was seated alone in his tent, sipping at a goblet of water with a slice of lemon in it. His hand shook like a lead as he added some pale powder to the water from a satchel. A pair of gargoyles were fanning him with long feathered fans, though not very well. Their movements were too choppy. His red eye closed as he sighed in pleasure, drinking deep, but when it opened it was looking straight at Anaxares.

“So which one is this?” the Tyrant grinned. “Bard likes the personal touch and scrying’s not that subtle. Is it you, my glorious liege?”

The monster cackled.

“Already an aspect,” he crowed. “I knew you’d take well to this. Belief, Hierarch. That’s what makes Names, and it’s not something you can fight.”

The vision ended, and Anaxares was unsure whether it had ended naturally or been broken. He forced himself not to consider the ways of his ‘aspect’ more closely. It would have been leaning into the madness to embrace this Name even slightly. Once begun, there was no going back. In the end, two week passed before the Conclave was held. Every delegation sent messenger to inform him of it, the Basileus even coming to the alley. The young man looked at the filth and ashes with barely veiled-distaste, repeating the hour and location thrice as Anaxares ignored him. It would be in the palace, he said one last time as he dropped coppers into the bowl.

The day came and Anaxares did not go.

It was near nightfall when they sought him out in the alley. Servants preceded them, a swarm carrying carpets and wooden seats so that no part of the representatives would have to be soiled. Only Bellerophon, he saw, did not bother. When the diplomat came, she sat on the ground. Anaxares spared her a glance, but did not recognize her. She was too young to have served with him. In that broken alley, a crowd of the most powerful men and women in the Free Cities assembled around him. Five Exarch claimants from Penthes. Two two-striped askretis of the Secretariat. The Basileus and the Tyrant, and from Atalante a pair of grim-faced preachers clutching beads representing the seven Heavenly Choirs the city claimed as patrons. From Stygia a familiar face watched him: Magister Zoe, the only other delegate spared when Helike first began the war. Mercantis had no representative. The Consortium had right to sit on on League session, but this was not one like the others – the City of Bought and Sold had no say in the election of a Hierarch, as it was not member of the League. In the end, the Basileus was the first to speak. It was his right as host.

“A powerful message, my lord,” the young man said. “Making us come to you.”

Anaxares’ fingers clenched.

“If I cut out my tongue,” he bitterly said, “you would expect me to give verdict in ink. If I cut off my hands, you would demand I blink my agreement. Were I but a burnt husk, still answers would be asked of me.”

He bared his teeth.

“Fine, then,” he said. “I will speak. I am no lord , Nicaean. The very existence of that title is offensive to me. Do not ever call me such again.”

The man’s face flushed with anger, but he mastered himself. Young, the diplomat thought. He was too young and green to participate in such matters. Ambition had blinded him.

“No offence was meant,” the Basileus said through gritted teeth. “I misspoke.”

The moment of silence that followed was broken by the Bellerophan diplomat. Once upon a time, Anaxares thought, he might have been the one sitting there.

“The People have decreed the Republic is to put forward motion for the election of Anaxares the Diplomat as Hierarch of the Free Cities,” she said.

“Would that I could rip that treason from their mouths,” he replied harshly.

“Delos vote for,” the askretis he’d seen in the vision said.

“Atalante votes for,” one of the preachers said. “Mercy smile on us all.”

“Penthes-“ an Exarch claimant began, but he was interrupted.

“Votes for,” another barrelled through.

“Nicae votes for,” the Basileus flatly added.

“I bear mandate from the Magisterium to vote in favour,” Magister Zoe said.

“Helike,” the Tyrant smiled, red eye shining in triumph, “votes for.”

“Damn you all,” the Hierarch whispered hoarsely.

“All rise for the Hierarch,” the Bellerophan diplomat said.

The sheer wrongness of watching one of his own people honour a Foreign Despot – for what else could he be called, now? – saw bile rise in his throat. The delegates rose one and all, bowing low. Kairos was the first to be seated again, allowing a gargoyle to feed him grapes. It kept hitting his chin instead and chattering in anguish, but of anything it brought the boy enjoyment.

“The League of Free Cities now stands united again,” the other two-striped askretis said, her voice solemn. “And so Delos now presents a matter for the Hierarch’s arbitrage.”

None of the delegates showed surprise. This, he thought, had been arranged before they ever came here.

“First Prince Hasenbach has been corresponding with the Secretariat,” she said. “And most other cities as well. She seeks truce, and alliance if she may. This is no longer a matter that can be settled by the cities.”

Years as a diplomat had taught Anaxares the ways of the League, and so he knew she spoke truth. In the absence of a Hierarch, the only way for every city-state to be bound to a treaty was if it was agreed upon by member majority vote. Otherwise every city chose for itself. The passed motion to make truce with the Principate had been what first drove the Tyrant to begin his war, and now that the war was over the point of contention was resurfacing. Worse, after the election of a Hierarch precedent dictated they alone held authority to make such treaties for the League as a whole. The head of the League held no more sway than allowed within the walls of the Free Cities, but they spoke for the League as a whole – Prokopia Lakene, his only predecessor, was said to have believed this to be the only way the Free Cities would stand equal to powers like the Principate and the Thalassocracy. Her opponents had whispered she sought to make another Procer out of the Free Cities, and her work had collapsed after her death and the round of wars that followed.

“Procer’s itching for a crusade,” Magister Zoe drawled. “’tis nothing unexpected. Let them cut their teeth on the Empire. Whoever wins, we can extract concessions from the loser.”

“A Stygian preaching opportunism,” the Basileus bit out. “Speaking of expectations. Some of us had the fucking Calamities raining hellfire on our cities but a month ago. Where is your talk of cranes now, Magister? Where are my people’s retribution and redress?”

“You had the Sovereign of Red Skies wrecking your city,” Zoe said slowly, her tone implying she was addressing an imbecile. “And now that you survived this, you want to give him reason to come back ? Boy, appoint a Strategos and let someone with godsdamned sense do the speaking for Nicae.”

“Language, my friends,” the Tyrant chided cheerfully. “In front of our Hierarch, no less. For shame.”

Half-hearted apologies were muttered at Anaxares.

“Praes is a den of darkness and iniquity,” one of the Atalantian preachers said. “Let us walk in the light of the Heavens, and join the First Prince’s righteous enterprise.”

“This and a slave’s pisspot for your Heavens, priestling,” Magister Zoe replied tartly, her following gesture highly obscene.

Kairos frowned at the sight, but did not repeat himself.

“There are still three Calamities left,” the male askretis said. “This is not a war to be undertaken lightly. What do we stand to gain, by fighting monsters in their own lair? Let us make truce with Hasenbach and wash our hands of it.”

“Truce doesn’t mean the end of trade,” a Penthesian claimant said. “The Empire will be hungry for grain and steel. Procer will need truce before it feels safe to invade, but we need not grant them more. The longer the war lasts, the greater our profits.”

“And if Procer wins?” another claimant sneered. “Will Hasenbach think fondly of us, then? Best we side with her now, and avoid trouble after the dust settles.”

“It is the belief of the People that nothing is owed,” the Bellerophan diplomat said. “The wars in the north are of no import to Mighty Bellerophon, First and Greatest of the Free Cities. Involvement is unnecessary.”

“Spoken as a delegate whose city shares no river with the Praesi,” the female askretis said. “Isolation is a valid choice only for those who are isolated.”

“There’ll be a flood of refugees going south if Procer manages to take the Vales,” a Penthesian predicted. “The Wastelanders will dig in and flip open the grimoires, but the Callowans? We’ve all heard the rumours. Open rebellion followed by the fae, and they’ve got some girl villain stirring the pot. The place is a wreck, and it’ll bleed people down the Hwaerte and the Wasiliti on every boat they can find.”

“Mercantis will take in many,” Magister Zoe said.

“The Consortium will welcome the rich and send the desperate on their way,” the Basileus replied flatly. “Save for those they force into slavery.”

“The Red Flower Vales are not so easily breached,” the male askretis said. “And the Legions of Terror are no mere footmen. None of us believed Callow would fall, twenty yeas ago, yet the Dread Empress surprised us. She may yet again.”

“The Vales are only one flank, Delosi,” a preacher said. “If Ashur lands an expeditionary force on the coast of Praes, the Empire may well collapse from the inside. As is ever the lot of Evil.”

“We do not know for a fact the Thalassocracy’s siding with the Principate,” the Basileus warned. “Ashurans are a treacherous people by nature, it springs from the Baalite blood.”

“Magon Hadast pulled the rug out from under Levant to her benefit last year,” a Penthesian snorted. “The man’s made his choice, and the rest of the citizenship tiers will follow his word like heavenly decree.”

“Blasphemy,” an Atalantian hissed.

“Kiss angel feet all you like, priest, it makes you no holier,” the Penthesian sneered.

Anaxares let the squabbling wash over him and studied the envoys, tightening the blanket around his shoulders. The diplomat from Bellerophon had not spoken again, and watching her he had no trouble guessing wise. The Republic had not granted her right of negotiation, only to present its position – her hands were tied. Two of the cities, he understood, were truly married to their stances. Stygia pushed for absence of treaty, because it desired to raid the losing side for slaves. It had no real allies in this, but Magister Zoe was unmoved. The Magisterium must have given her strict orders. Atalante, though fresh out of Helikean occupation, was intent on joining the shaping crusade. Why? The city was broken: he had seen it with his own eyes. Was it truly faith guiding the preachers, or the need for plunder to fill the coffers for the rebuilding? It may be both. Atalantians were an emotional breed, and now that they were forbidden revenge on Helike they might be seeking to even the scales with the Tyrant’s allies. Foolishness. They should be seeing to the harvest, not talking of war. The Hierarch watched them, and saw the lines. The words he needed to speak to sway them to war or peace, to alliance or enmity. They were on the tip of his tongue. He bit down on it until it bled.

There was no greater sin than to rob the free of their freedom, and he would have no part in it.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” Kairos Theodosian said. “Lend me your ears.”

The silence that followed as absolute. There’d been many among those present who’d mocked the Tyrant, once, but that had been before the war. In the span of a year the Tyrant of Helike had sacked two cities of the League, forced a third to surrender and forced the election of his chosen candidate as Hierarch. For all that – horrifying as it was – Anaxares had been named head of the League, the true power within it was a crippled boy with shaking hands and too broad a smile. When he spoke now, men listened.

“All this talk of the crusade whispers that we are but accessories to it,” the boy said mildly. “Witnesses and servants, not truly of import. Without even knowing it, you have surrendered the fate of Calernia to Cordelia Hasenbach and Dread Empress Malicia.”

His good eye twitched, a spasm he did not control.

“Does this not shame you?” he smiled. “To have learned the lesson of our irrelevance so deeply you no longer question it?”

“No one wants to follow you into war with Procer, Theodosian,” the Basileus said.

Brave young man, Anaxares thought, but not a very clever one.

“Leo, Leo, Leo,” the Tyrant sighed. “Is silver truly all that is needed for you to become Hasenbach’s pet?”

“How dare-“

“The days of Tyrant Theodosius are past,” Magister Zoe interrupted, cutting of the Nicaean. “No one disputes your... achievements, my lord. But Procer is no longer a loose confederation of warring princes. Should we strike at one principality, we bring the full weight of the Principate down on our heads. No amount of lightning will turn back that tide.”

“Then your objection is one of capacity,” Kairos said. “Not intent.”

“The Magisterium has no love for the Principate,” she snorted. “Neither does anyone here with any sense.”

“Procer is the bulwark against Evil to the north,” the Basileus barked.

“The Lycaonese have served such a purpose with distinction,” the female askretis said. “This does not erase the many bloody deeds of the Arlesites. Many a war has the League fought against the principalities of the south.”

“The League of Free Cities,” the Tyrant said smilingly, “is pathetic. We have held on to our borders by the skin of our teeth, but what great power has not humbled us? Praes occupied half our cities for two decades under the second Maleficent. Ashur strangles our trade whenever it pleases and Procer, oh Procer – have you all forgotten why this League exists at all? How close we came to being under the rule of princes.”

“Tyrants ever speak of war,” an Atalantian said. “Yet always defeat finds them. How many of our people need die for your ambitions?”

“Look at the world, my friends,” Kairos chuckled. “Look at the lay of the land. The Empire stands besieged, Procer prepares to bleed breaching it. Ashur is led by an old man who would send the Thalassocracy’s fleets to war very, very far away.”

The boy’s eye shone red, red like blood, and his grin was a villain’s grin.

“When has such an opportunity ever come to us?” he asked. “Never before, and it may never come again. Do you want to be remembered as the men and women who had a chance to bring greatness to their people but flinched away out of mere fear ?”

His bad hand was steady now, curled like claws.

“Are you not tired, my friends,” he asked, “of kneeling to these greater nations? Are you content with forever remaining pressed between titans, hoping none turns and rolls over us?”

He bared his teeth.

“I want the Samite Gulf,” he said. “I want Tenerife and Salamans and Valencis to be cities freed, brought into our league. I want Praesi and Procerans to cease warring over who rules our own streets.”

He raised his hand.

“And so I call for war,” he hissed. “A good old war, my friends, the kind that carves up a continent forever. I want sieges and desperate charges, I want hosts breaking and smoke darkening the sky. I want the rivers to run red and palaces to burn. Give me the sound of horns and shields shattering, the sound of arrows falling like a rain of steel. Give want victories so great they will tremble to hear of us from Smyrna to Rhenia.”

The red was deepening, Anaxares thought, to unearthly crimson. The boy’s words hung in the air like a haze, silvery as a fae’s glamour.

“And those victories I promise you, true as my Name,” the Tyrant grinned. “There is a fate just within our reach, if we dare to grasp it.”

Kairos turned to him then, and inclined his head in a gesture of respect that was anything but.

“Your arbitrage, Hierarch,” he said.

There was no greater sin, Anaxares of Bellerophon thought, than to rob the free of their freedom.

“I give no orders,” he said. “You may all do as you wish.”

The man looked in Kairos Theodosian’s red eye, and wondered if he was imagining the faint sound of laughter ringing in his years.

Interlude: Liesse II

“There’s not a lot of difference between court and a swamp. Colourful things are poisonous, lots of buried corpses, crocodiles are often involved.”
– Dread Empress Prudence the First, the ‘Frequently Vanquished’

Masego had forged his first dimensional pocket at the age of fourteen, the gruelling work of six months resulting in accessible space no larger than a cramped closet. Though the access and retrieval patterns had been flawless, the result was ultimately flawed: nearly half the power invested by ritual had gone to waste despite his best efforts. Father had refused him another attempt until he further improved his craft, as the costs of such an undertaking were... prohibitive. It was only in the days after the Liesse Rebellion, when he had a mage’s tower of his own, that he’d returned to the chalkboard and tried again. The power of his Name had granted him perception and control beyond that of any mortal mage, and though Masego had always disdained relying on those powers he’d hated the thought of an imperfect product even more. He’d come within razor’s breadth of the Due, and with a weaving of High Arcana made a full room only he could access. He’d considered it a worthy effort, then, though still short of the perfection he aspired to. His horizons had expanded since.

He had tread the grounds of Arcadia since, Winter and Summer and the hinterlands between. He’d laid naked eye on the silent line between Creation and other realms, shaped and breached it according to his whims. His path to understanding High Arcana did not lay in the study of boundaries, not like his father’s, yet he had learned. One could not witness the seams of what the Gods had sown together without deriving insight from the act. The boy he’d been, who watched the world end, stepping into the silhouette of the man he now was and understanding that, in the end, it was all a lie. An agreement, a lending of form and function that was by definition temporary. In time, all this would end. That which was beheld was moulded by the shape of the beholder, and as runes whirled around him in patterns the Hierophant smiled. The sun had burned sight from him and so he had made the sun his sight, carving open the stuff of miracles for his due.

No throne was so great it could not be toppled by madman’s writ.

Creation sang under his guiding hand, melody woven and folding unto itself. The fabric of the world wrapped itself around the demons before they could flee his reach, forcing them into a realm that was Creation and yet not. Foam on the wave, for a fleeting instant made a realm into itself. An instant was all that Hierophant was need, for so long as the unit existed the span was his to fashion. Masego stepped forward into the pocket he had wrested from nothing, his lie made truth by will imposed, and found the realm stretching as far as the eye could see. To bring strife to demons inside a closed realm, Father always said, was madness. Yet here he was, watching a shifting maze of smoke and mirrors, and in his bones he could feel the essences of his foes spreading. The Beast of Hierarchy wielded its own as a hammer, attempting to shatter the frame, but it was in a cage beyond its understanding. The realm broke, but all that did was set an ending. When that ending came was in the hands of the Hierophant, and he was not yet done done with his creation.

Madness whispered song sweet and insidious, echoing across haze and empty spaces, but found no purchase. The strife it sought to sow reflected upon itself, parted smoke without ruination. It was Apathy that sunk its claws into the realm, the scars it left wherever it tread beyond even his mending. No furrows in matter, no, simply... inertness. Matter made so still in all incarnations it might as well have been void. It had become the most dangerous of the three, yet this was not beyond Hierophant’s prediction. Apathy was the oldest foe of wonder, and wonder was now the lens he perceived the world through. To destroy his enemy had always been where the trick of this would lay, Masego knew. It was the Heavens that granted their own the power to unmake even foreign essence through burning indignation, for in their stale eyes there was no place for such contamination in the orderly world that was to be built. The Gods Below granted no such boon, and had taught their own different lesson. Though we all lose in this summoning, what does it matter so long as the foe loses more?

To Evil, victory mattered more than the aftermath of that glorious moment.

Akua Sahelian’s cohorts had learned this well, bringing their arsenal of ruin into the world. The flickering bindings he could see shackling the beasts spoke not of control, but of direction. A plague unleased with the understanding that it would bring ruin to all it touched until fear pulled the leash and ripped them from Creation. It would have been child’s play in this realm, for Hierophant to sharpen his will and rip through the runes. Yet in doing so he would sunder the means of recall. Summoning made into true presence, no longer contingent on the consent of mortal men. To catch the light of the Heavens and shine it a lantern upon this place would have done well, but Hierophant had seen too little. Glimpses of Contrition, before he knew how to watch, and stood witness to the corpse of an angel of which only white dry bones were left. There was no miracle for him to vivisect and assemble to his will, not even the shadow of one. He could not dismiss or destroy, and so only one path remained Hierophant.

“To borrow the fang of the beast, and strike the beast with it,” Masego sighed. “How very crude.”

Runes flared around his hand and the skin bubbled like water, until it parted bloodlessly and a drop of ichor flew from it. It had remained there since Marchford, so weak as to be cauterized and contained yet never entirely gone. Corruption. A perfect drop of it. The dark-skinned man turned to the maze of his own making, and felt the weight of his foes’ attention bearing down on him.

“Let us play a game, creatures,” he said mildly. “I call it ‘burning down the house with everyone in it’.”

The drop of ichor sunk into the ground and Hierophant began.

—

Brandon Talbot, Grandmaster of the Order of the Broken Bell, leaned forward on his mount. Heliotrope’s flanks were covered with sweat under the armour, but the Liessen charger was still far from exhausted. They were a hardy breed, raised for war. Once the favoured mounts of many chivalric orders, when their kind had still been the pride of Callow instead of the last remnant. But that remnant still stood, under its own banner if one suborned to the Tower through complicated ties of rule and authority. That was worthy of pride, if only a little, and today the last scion of House Talbot allowed himself to feel it. This, he thought, was the kind of battles he’d been born for. That they had all been born for. Not bitter struggles with fae or the petty butchering of traitors in his liege’s own camp. Though the foot at the side of his knights was Legion instead of Royal Guard, against them both was arrayed the old enemy. Hellspawn garbed in stone, with the fangs and faces of rabid dogs baying for the death of all men. There was purity to this moment that he’d sorely missed from his days as a rebel vagrant in the south, a beautiful clarity. One one side rode knights, to protect the people of Callow. On the other stood devils and sorcerers, spawn of the vicious East. It was the manner of battles his ancestors had fought, and there was honour to be found in this.

The painting was marred by the truth that his comrades were often greenskins and Wastelanders, but Brandon had been taught patience by the woe the Liesse Rebellion had brought to the cause. A lesson his aunt had once known, but discarded when she began to believe she would not live to see the kingdom of her youth forged anew – save if she struck deal with the Procerans, a bargain with the devils to the west who preached fellowship yet warred as much as the Praesi. Brandon was not so old as to grow desperate, not yet, and so he had looked to the lay of the kingdom and made his choice. Better a tyrant born of Callow than the Empress’ own leash at their throat. And he’d been right, he knew that now. Already so many of the Fifteenth were Callowans, and the further Queen Catherine broke with the Tower the more she would grow to rely on her own people. Not rebellion, no, not in the Grandmaster’s day. But there would be a day. Where Callow would be kingdom in truth even if the Wasteland denied it the name. Where a great and fierce army having learned from the victors of the Conquest would give the Tower pause should it seek to overstep again.

He would play the long game, and win.

But for that scheme to bear fruit, Brandon mused, he first had to survive this day. The Order had sallied out at the order of that scowling orc general, the one they called the Hellhound, and at first the Talbot had thought it foolishness. A young girl’s blunder, for General Juniper was said to have seen barely twenty summers. The Grandmaster had once been heir to Marchford and Elizabeth Talbot, once held to be the greatest commander of the Kingdom of Callow when that name was more than a dream. He had fought in no wars before the Arcadian Campaign but he had been taught strategy and war-making, to lead men in battle as his forbears had for centuries. He’d thought it best to have his knights stay at the flank of the legionaries, ready to swoop on the enemy when they engaged the infantry. Yet the Hellhound had oddly staggered her foot and sent him out into the wilderness to await signal for a charge. It had seemed an ever-worsening blunder as he obeyed and impotently watched the devils spill out from the gate and spread along the length of this oblique formation of he general’s. Oblique. That had been the word that led him to understand.

His aunt had once spoken it to him when he’d been a boy, in her solar at Talbot Manor as she sat him in a chair and placed iron figurines on a drawn map. The Fields of Streges, she’d been showing him. It would have been a lie to call them the first ones, for that stretch of field had seen a hundred battles between Callow and Praes, but the battle she showed him had been the one before the Carrion’s Lord massacre on that plain. When Dread Emperor Nefarious, fresh to his throne and cocksure of his might, had attempted an invasion. Good King Robert had met the old legions and their hordes of greenskin auxiliaries on flat grounds, and staggered his advance much like this. Even as the Wizard of the West fought the Emperor, the Black Knight of those days had ordered greenskins to pour down the staggered side and sweep it aside. It’d been a bloodbath, though not the one the Wastelanders wished for. And now Brandon stood in the place of the old knightly orders, under banner of bronze and black, ready to unleash death at the end of a thousand lances.

The stage General Juniper had crafted them went like this: at the back lay the Hellgate. From it flood of devil still poured, but that flow was slowed for lack of space. In the face of the approaching Fifteenth the dog-devils had formed ranks, at least in part. The Fifteenth was staggered in three sections. The rightmost was most ahead, followed after beat by the centre and a beat after by the left. The hellspawn stood steady before the right tip of that oblique line, but they were pouring unheeding down the left. Without line or formation, without even the semblance of orders. From where his horse stood, Brandon could see the shape of it as a long diagonal line. At the bottom of which was the Order of the Broken Bell. Before the the Hellhound ever sounded the horns, the aristocrat prepared his knights in three wedges. Three blades ready to plunge in the enemy’s flank. The Grandmaster raised his lance, and within ten heartbeats all the knights had gone silent at the sight as he cantered ahead of his riders.

“Knights of Callow,” he said, voice pitched and clear across the field.

Truth’s not the point of a battle-address, Brandon , Aunt Elizabeth had taught him. Put fire in the bellies for the fight ahead.

“You all know it was Her Grace, who named us,” he said.

Silence, to heighten what was to come.

“The Order of the Broken Bell,” the Grandmaster said slowly, enunciating precisely. “Long have I pondered the sense of this, for our queen is a woman of few words and deep meanings.”

He raised his lance high, steel tip shining bright even under this shadowed sun.

“It was no slight, my knights,” he said. “It was a reminder, that in years past we failed . The fracture across our banner is warning, remembrance of that dark day where our weakness broke Callow.”

There was murmur across the lines, but no denial. They had all been raised to the truth of this, that for all the might of the old kingdom the might of the Praesi had been greater still.

“But there is still a bell on our standard,” he shouted. “We have a people still, if no kingdom. And now before you stride forth the hordes of Hell, to destroy even that.”

He raised his voice.

“Knights of Callow,” he said. “Will you fail them today? Or will you redeem the truth of your standard?”

Lances struck shields, a thunder crafted by the souls and hands of men. No , the shouts came. Redemption in steel , the calls went. Once, twice, thrice the horns sounded. All knights charge , the call old as the soul of this ancient land. Lances lowered, shields rose and horses swept across the field as the last knights of Callow went forth to meet their ancient enemy. Brandon Talbot laughed the laugh of a man who had finally found his place in the world.

—

Istrid smashed the head of a boy who’d been one of her own until moments ago. One of the fucking wights ran him through, and within a heartbeat of hitting the ground dead he’d risen as one of the enemy. The rebels had pulled a new trick. Raising legion dead was no great innovation: they’d done the same half a dozen times, during the civil war. But back then it’d been a ritual, one sweep and done. Enough for the protocols to be amended with sappers watching corpse-piles, but no great worry. The orc had thought this to be the same old trick, and one wasted – her goblins had munitions breaking her dead within moments of them rising. But the ritual had not ceased. The wights had turned savage, and now every legionary they killed rose. It was grinding at her frontlines brutally, every death twice as costly. The Sixth had gotten its shit together after Black went to murder his way to an ending, consolidated the grounds and brought the sappers to bear, but now the tide was against them. If this were a raid, Istrid would have called for a retreat. But it’d been a long time since she’d gone out to kill her kind for cattle and glory, and this was a battlefield. Retreat here would mean casualties in the thousands as they tried to disengage from the undead horde.

So her men stood, fought and died.

It was worse for the others. Afolabi’s legion had taken rough beatings in the Arcadian Campaign and even worse making a go at the central bastion, and the sudden turn had found them bloodied and overextended. Now they were being torn apart company by company, every break hastening the next. Sacker and her Ninth were giving pitched battle over the fields of stakes north of this mess, but no amount of sharpers would allow her boys to break through in time. The Ninth was too light on the offense, they weren’t built for a hard brawl. It took off the pressure some, wights moving there to ward them off, but not enough to pull them out of this mess. The Fifth Legion, she could see even from where she stood, had it even worse than the Twelfth. Orim was retreating back to the palisades he’d taken as Marshal Ranker hurried to his aid, but she was too far and the wights were in close pursuit. How much of the Fifth would be left, by the time they had the palisades protecting them? Half, maybe less. Unlike the Twelfth, they had no other legion to hold one of their flanks.

Istrid spat phlegm on blood-sodden ground and left the frontlines, legionaries filling the gap she’d left. She needed better vantage before making a decision, or better yet Bagram’s take. Her legate would have been watching the whole time. Making her way through closely-pressed ranks took too long for her tastes, though it was no fault of her men’s. The more the wights pressed around them, the tighter the shield wall became to compensate. She felt the current of it as she moved, the way ground was being lost inch by inch. The Sixth was no longer fighting forward, it was trying to hold its grounds – and failing .

“General,” Bagram saluted when she found him, arriving blood-streaked and tired.

“Legate,” she rasped. “The Twelfth. How long do they have?”

“Every legionary will be dead within an hour,” he said, not mincing words. “General Afolabi’s own standard went down not long ago. He may very well be dead.”

Fuck, Istrid thought. She had no love for the arrogant Soninke, but commanders of his calibre didn’t grown on fucking trees. There were few better generals to hold a fortress than him, and they were going to need men like that when Procer came knocking. She turned to watch the battlefield, and her lips tightened when she watched another of the Twelfth’s companies shatter then rise howling at their comrades. The only good news, as far as she could tell, was that the godsdamned demons were gone. They’d just popped out of existence after the warlock’s get let them out. The Deoraithe were marching forward to fill the void, or at least some of them. Their army was a fucking mess, the left half of the foot and and bowmen being pulled down to the Hellgate. Where her own daughter was trying to face down an entire Hell with less than ten thousand men and no help from Ranker. Gods, this had all turned into a fuckup faster than you could blink. The entire army was falling to pieces, and no one was in a position to do anything about it than her.

“I’m taking our reserves,” she told her legate. “We’re backing the Twelfth, then withdrawing behind the palisades.”

Bagram grimaced.

“We’ll be thinly spread, general,” he said. “If the wights punch through our lines the enire formation will collapse – we’ll have no men to plug the gap.”

“We’ll be surrounded on three sides if Afolabi’s boys break,” she growled. “Better bloody than buried.”

And so she went, near a thousand with her. Heavies and regulars, sweeping through the dead at her command. Advance was slow, slower than she would have liked or the Twelfth could truly afford, but what choice did she have? If she hurried she was handing her men to the enemy as fresh fodder to spend against her own. They hammered into the wights pressing down on the other legion, buying enough time for them to retreat with a semblance of order. Holdfast , a cognomen earned. Even with half the Twelfth gone terror did not rule its ranks. The sorcerers guiding the undead struck back at the reverse, the horde turning on them like a pack of hounds. Her Sixth was made of sterner stuff, but the centre of the Twelfth crumpled like wet parchment when wights threw themselves over the shields and Istrid had to lead berserkers to prevent the whole formation coming down on her head. Howls filled the air as Red Rage held back the tide where Legion discipline had failed, and she screamed until the Twelfth fell back in line and the retreat was shored up. Elbowing men aside, Istrid of the Red Shields moved like flame through the ranks and hardened resistance. She was tiring, she knew, but far from done. Neither was this battle, if she had anything to say about it.

Tumbling through a knot of legionaries too slow to withdraw she slapped a man upside the head and swatted down a wight too eager for the kill with a backhand, barking order for them to pick up the pace. She’d taken wounds, she felt as the red haze ebbed low, but nothing that would kill her. More scars with stories for the telling. Yet one stung. She passed a steel-clad hand over the throb and her gauntlet came back with yellow as well as red. Istrid blinked, and twisted to look at the cut on her flank. Shallow little thing, she thought as her heartbeat slowed. Just deep enough to get the poison in. Istrid Knightsbane fell to her knees, but her last thoughts were not of her husband or daughter. Goblin steel, she rasped as the world went dark.

Goblin steel had made that cut.

Interlude: Liesse III

“Oh, woe is me, you’ve destroyed my army... Hahaha, you fell for it again! I haven’t paid them in a year, they were about to depose me. Once more, Irritant triumphs against all odds!”
– Dread Emperor Irritant I, the Oddly Successful

Orim was dead.

Ranker had hoped otherwise even after seeing his standard go down, but now that Wekesa’s boy had disappeared the demons scrying links were stable again and confirmation followed swiftly. The Fifth’s mages had commanded that his senior legate was now in command. Even worse, the bloody havoc was not singular to the left flank. Istrid was gone, allegedly to sorcery, and Afolabi had been hacked to pieces by his own dead men. It’d been a long time since the goblin had seen one of her own kind fearful, much less one of matron blood, but when Sacker had contacted her there’d been that recognizable ugly glint in the other woman’s eyes. The reformed command structure of the Legions of Terror had been born of long conversations around fires she’d had with Black and Grem back in the days when they had been rebels on the run, and so Ranker knew the legions would not be taken out of the battle by the death of their generals. To blunt that old weakness of Praesi armies, who had once collapsed the moment the Black Knight or the Emperor was slain, had been one of their first reforms. Yet it would have been wilful blindness to say morale would not be butchered by the sudden deaths of old and beloved commanders.

Reputation always cut both ways.

The chain for supreme mastery of the host now ran three deep: herself, Sacker and then young Juniper. Istrid’s daughter was making sweeping advance against the devils but was too far to be of true use. Sacker was on the wrong side of the battlefield, and fresh in engaging the wights through the field of stakes. After them legate seniority would be the rule of law, but Ranker trusted no career second with a battle like this. It would have to be her. Salvaging the remains of the Fifth had been her first manoeuvre, and to achieve this she had not been shy in spending the lives of the Callowan levies. They came back undead, true enough, but better guards arisen than legionaries. She was willing to trade three Callowan for every proper soldier pulled out, if not four. Some tried to run, after the first bloody clash. She had crossbows tear through the deserters, and calls made that the same fate awaited all cowards. It put spine in them, long enough for it to matter. Less than two thousand of the Fifth Legion pulled back behind the barricades, losses utterly disastrous. A year would not be long enough to train replacements for that , she thought . And Procer will not even give us that much.

The ditch that had once been meant to hinder Legion advance had now become its very line of defence, shield wall clustered tight behind it as sappers turned the thin space between ditch and palisade in a storm of munitions. The Fifth’s siege engines were trained on the horde of wights, and her own hastily assembled to join them. The left flank steadied, slowly but surely, and the danger of complete and utter rout passed. For now. Legate Bagram had led the Sixth and Twelfth into similar retreat on the other flank, his giving ground made easier by the Ninth swinging at the wights from the side. The rebels in the last bastion saw opening in that, and took it. The moment the Ninth stood alone the wights turned towards it as one, to break the solitary legion, but they were not dealing with an orc. Sacker was a cunning old fox, and she’d prepared the grounds: the undead tumbled through a field of buried munitions and razor wires with mass casualties as Sacker retreated at her own pace, long gone by the time the undead had broken through her traps. The Ninth marched down to anchor the side of the bloodied Sixth and Twelfth, and Marshal Ranker had that side’s combined command officially ceded to the only general there.

They would hold long enough for the Deoraithe advancing to prop them up. Cursory reading of the field would have one think that would allow their side to turn the tide, begin a counterattack backed by Daoine bowmen and fresh infantry, but the old goblin had been watching more than troops movements with her rheumy eyes. Numbers. It was always about the numbers, and if nothing changed Marshal Ranker knew this battle was lost. Casualties were starkly heavier on the side of the rebels now that the Legions had a proper position, but that moment of overextension had been too costly. They’d been weakened, and now the rebels were grinding away at them with their own dead. A Legion of Terror was a complex and carefully crafted engine, meant to serve multiple purposes and consequently involving a great many specialized parts. There was a truth underlying that Ranker had never put to ink in any of her treatises, and neither had the other two architects of the Legions: there were a series of lines in the sand that dictated the combat efficiency of a legion. Lines defined by casualties and supply expenditures. Not simple ones, as a legion was made of too many parts for that. But the two most salient points of failure were dead regulars and lack of goblin munitions. One of these lines crossed would cripple a legion. Two ended it as a fighting force.

On both flanks, the numbers were teetering dangerously closed to both red lines for most the legions on the field. Her Fourth and Sacker’s Ninth were fresh in comparison, but also the most fragile of the legions: they had higher proportion of sappers and engineers, and lower proportions of heavies. There was a reason the Ninth was nigh-always paired with the Sixth, the largest heavy infantry force in the Empire. Her own legion was not quite so delicate, but it was still far from the heavy assault force she needed now. Good for holding grounds, as it currently did. But breaching the barricade anew would cost her more dead regulars than she could afford, or this entire army for that matter. Marshal Ranker’s eyes studied the enemy lines, and the rate at which the dead rose. Her lips tightened. It would take until nightfall, she thought. Several hours yet. But when the sun came down, the largest army assembled by the Dread Empire in over twenty years would effectively be ended as a fighting force.

The Fifteenth, if taken from the Hellgate, could perhaps tip the balance. Wekesa had implied it could be dealt with, and so Ranker grit her teeth and sent near half the forces of Daoine to hurry that fight along. The Watch, even, though it could have been used elsewhere to great effect. It was too much like rolling the dice for her taste, but she was short on alternatives. A miracle was what they needed. Answer came, to that unspoken prayer. A miracle of sorts. It was not great sorcery or a clever trick, a Calamity unleashed or strategy revealed at the last moment. It was a screaming fool riding a flying horse, dragging an orc by the neck as they crashed into the central bastion.

Which then exploded.

—

Wekesa was unused to feeling admiration for others. It was a sentiment usually reserved for Alaya or Amadeus, whose aptitudes shone brightest in areas of no real interest to him. Dumisai of Aksum, the father of the girl currently giving them some trouble, had occasionally earned a sliver of respect for his research as well: though not ground-breaking work by any means, the man’s enlightened refinement of old Wasteland rituals was often worth a second glance. But even the insights of the man who might have once contested his Name were ultimately the work of a second-rate sorcery. Dumisai was to sorcery what goblins were to engineering – a skilled craftsman, but very rarely the herald of true innovation. He improved but did not create . His daughter, it seemed, was of a different breed. The Warlock silently studied what appeared to be a perfectly stable Greater Breach and inclined his head in genuine respect at the other mage’s achievement. This was match for any work of his that fell under the Dark Day protocol, and truthfully above most his own devices.

The core of the work was hopelessly Praesi, of course. Pure Trismegistan design, from the set of secondary stabilizing arrays to the the displacement of the energy source to the sky in order to limit the effects of the bleed on the immediate surroundings. Yet Akua Sahelian had starkly surpassed ever single preceding effort ascribed to that branch of magical theory with her magnificent use of escapements to ensure even Keter’s Due did not go to waste. It was, he would concede, a masterful thing. The precision involved was mind-boggling, likely the result of years of calculations, and the sheer variety of arrays involved was worthy of praise. Liesse had runic base for flight, for planar displacement and for repeated Breach ritual use. This might be the single most variable magical weapon in the history of Praes. It would be delight and the occupation of entire decades to study her work, after the Diabolist was killed. Still, reproduction was not possible. This much he’d already determined. The Greater Breach before him was... simplistic. There’d been a binding inscribed in the heart of the Hellgate that bound any devil crossing it, along with a mild compulsion to cross for any who looked upon it, but the binding itself could only be called incomplete. To function properly, it required one with the Name of Diabolist to be the one initiating the ritual.

This city-artefact was tailored so that only one soul in all of Creation could use its full potential, the very same villain who’d built it.

In his estimation, with the right modifications part of the functionality could be maintained without Sahelian. A Greater Breach would still be possible to open, though with nowhere as large of breadth of range and precision. But the devils pouring through that Breach would be so loosely bound as to be effectively independent. At best, given six months, Warlock could ensure they were barred from a specific territory. Any modifications more extensive would require years of research and a complete redesign of all major arrays: everything was interlinked. The slightest change would unbalance every other system. It was no wonder, he thought, that Diabolist had chosen displacement as a protective measure. Devices this sophisticated had a dangerous tendency towards fragility, one of the many reasons Wekesa himself preferred to rely on imbricated forces rather than runic arrays. Amadeus and his liability of an apprentice were currently traipsing the belly of the beast, and he was glad to have impressed on his old friend the dangers of meddling with such delicate arrangements. He would know better than start breaking every array in sight, and though the girl was an ignorant thug who did not she would be reined in by her teacher’s orders.

Gaze leaving the Breach, Warlock considered the soldiers fighting before it. The Fifteenth was making short work of the devils – akalibsa , of all things, how very provincial of Sahelian. Some things were not so easily outgrown, it seemed. The Knightsbane’s daughter, by the looks of it, had arranged some sort of tactical trap and torn apart the devils with the same horsemen her mother was famous for breaking. The irony was not quite worth a chuckle, but close. Annihilation did not seem to be the intent here, curiously enough. A path of retreat had been left open to the akalibsa and the devils were fleeing through it, simultaneously destroying the last of their formation and preventing more devils passing through the Breach by their panicked stampede. Within moments a mass of shield-locking legionaries had the opening secured, and sappers lined up behind them. A killing field in the making, Wekesa thought. Clever girl. This was, he decided, nearly sufficient preparation for him to beging intervening. Lashing the the shapeshifted devils that dragged his chariot, the Sovereign of the Red Skies began his descent.

—

Masego had always deeply disliked when scholars spoke of sorcery as an art, for it was anything but. Mages were often compared to painters and singers, spellcrafting termed as a piece instead of the precise formulas they truly were. It was only the ignorant who found more beauty in such subjective matters than in the perfect arithmetic of imposing one’s will upon Creation. There was greater splendour in one flawlessly balanced formula than in all the statues and painting of the world. It was why Hierophant had become who he was, the reason for his love of witnessing that which was previously unknown: to fit and explain what was once a mystery within the greater frame of sorcery was the most genuine act of grace possible to one of mortal flesh. Every such truth brought into the light of day expanded the span of Creation as a whole, perhaps the only action that could ever accurately be called selfless. After all, beyond the petty squabbles of Above and Below lay a deeper truth. We are rats in a cage, one and all, and the choice spoken of in the Book of All Things is but a trick. The true choice is this: to claw at the other rats, or seek the edge of the cage.

Masego, like his father before him, had chosen purpose beyond the largely pointless vagaries of transient existence.

It was unfortunate in some ways that the insights he had gained following that purpose would not be used in the very kind of squabble he would rather avoid entirely, but on occasions concessions must be made for the ones we loved. Besides, he would gain much from victory today. The Sahelian artefact that allowed one to scry beyond Creation, for one, and unrestricted study of the Diabolist’s own sorcerous efforts. Of course, victory had to be obtained first. This was proving more tedious than he would have liked. It was a noted fact that demons, for reasons not yet understood, did not affect each other. When two different such entities attempted to contaminate with their essence the same portion of Creation, one saturated the fabric of reality first and the other’s effect simply washed over it. The phenomenon had not been studied in great depth, sadly, or rather it had but that research had not been preserved. Practitioners who kept extensive notes on matters demonic tended to be... affected by the very keeping. Their immediate surroundings as well. Even too much knowledge of such entities had its costs, and it was not false archetype to consider diabolists as particular prone to derangement. If not worse.

Still, it was quite fascinating to watch the spreading corruption of Hierophant’s own creation check the efforts of the three demons that were attempting to destroy him. Like ink in water the drop of ichor he had inserted in the thread of the dimension had spread, but unlike ink had not thinned in the spreading. It had, if anything, strengthened. This had proved problematic in some ways – he now had to regularly craft a secondary control spell for his guidance and transfer the reins to it lest the corruption reach him directly – the effectiveness could not be denied. Already he had smothered Madness in a globe of corruption it was completely failing to breach in any way. There was, as far as he could tell, not so much as a single mote of bleed.

“Fascinating,” Hierophant murmured, cocking his head to the side.

The Beast of Hierarchy was proving more difficult to restrain. Abandoning what could be considered ‘offensive action’ for its kind, it had instead replaced a law regarding space that Masego had yet to grasp. Even within this closed realm, where the boundaries and rules had been defined by his will alone, it managed to escape his sorcery effortlessly. He’d been reduced to using a defensive screen of corruption to prevent the demon of Order falling upon him, which was little different from setting fire to his own garden so thieves could not get at the cabbage. Apathy was something of a mixed bag. Though once the largest threat it was no longer, yet to consider it contained would be something of a stretch. While immobile, it was so because its essence had forged an envelope of inertness around it. Corruption could not breach it, and it kept disrupting efforts to wrap fully around its envelope. Frustrating, this. Anything less than perfect containment was no containment at all, with creatures such as these. Still, this was only preparation. The attempts at containment had been purely to sate his curiosity, the true thrust of his offensive would begin – ah, now. Sufficient corruption had been spread. Hierophant extended his hand, and from his pocket dimension a long shaft of wood fell.

A gift from Catherine, who truly could be a good and understanding friend when she tried. The old standard was long rid of any cloth but the runes were what truly mattered, carved into the old wood, and with a subtle shiver they responded to his will. The same demon of Corruption he’d once fought in Liesse came out screaming into his realm, leashed to his will. Within moments, not that time had much meaning here, it cornered the Beast of Hierarchy. With the others stationary, he could finally act. Trying to kill demon with demon would, of course, be as attempting to drown a fish. But it was not the demons he sought to affect. Corruption crept down the bindings the rebel mages placed upon their arsenal of ruin, sliding down the sympathetic links like thick oil. Masego smiled, and without ever leaving his realm found himself looking into the terrified eyes of mages hidden behind layers and layers of ward.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he said.

The demons struggled and screamed. For a moment he pondered offering a pithy line to send them off with, but he did not have a knack for such matters.

“Try not to scream,” he suggested. “It only makes it worse.”

Corruption surged. They did not listen.

—

Juniper watched the devils scatter like rabbits before her legion and felt only visceral satisfaction at the sight. Minimal casualties. The three wedges of Callowan cavalry had struck the dog-devils like a falling hammer. Collapse complete and immediate, thousands of bodies friend and foe moving according to her will in perfect harmony. The Hellhound had never enjoyed a roll in the hay half so much as she did this single moment. It must have been the way Pickler felt, she thought, when some device she’d made worked perfectly. That instant where the cogs turned and the chord snapped and the perfect suddenly clarity it brought. She felt flushed and feverish, and beyond that hungry for more. Another battle, another moment where the arrow loosed by her mind found the target and hit the bullseye with that palpably pleasurable thump. Gods, she had been blessed to be born in these years of the Empire. With war after war tumbling towards her like a drunken lover, offering the bounty of one field of steel after another with open arms.

Juniper felt Aisha’s stare lingering on her, and so wiped away the unseemliness on her face before the Taghreb decided to comment on it. Teasing would only detract from the glorious lightness now running through her veins, no matter whose mouth it came from. Besides, she knew Aisha had touched this feeling as well. The orc remembered the war games of the College, the bright eyes shining on Aisha Bishara’s face when Wolf Company tore into the flank of some astonished company of fools with fire and sword. Her Staff Tribune saw more parchment than steel, these days, but it was inside her still. The desert tribes of the Taghreb had been raiders as famed as her own people, in the olden days before the Miezans came. The Empire liked to paint a veneer of civilization over its peoples, nowadays, but blood always ran red. No one could escape the truth of that.

“The Deoraithe,” Juniper said, gathering herself together. “Report.”

Aisha’s face bobbed down, though not deep enough to hide the smirk on her lips.

“Lord Hierophant’s removal of the demons further muddled their deployment,” the Staff Tribune said. “But we have three thousand archers and the same in foot headed our way. Duchess Kegan has, reluctantly, ceded operational command over them.”

“And the Watch?” Juniper gravelled.

“Marshal Ranker has granted us use of it,” she replied, cheeks dimpling. “The Lord Warlock’s statement that the gate could yet be ended has her... invested.”

The battle’s other front was too far for the Hellhound to have a good look at what was happening, but the situation did seem dire from what she could see. Both flanks had fallen back behind the palisades and ditches they’d once taken, and the Deoraithe in the centre were rushing too slowly to fill the void left by the demons. If the Hellgate could be taken care of quickly enough, the Fifteenth could move up to reinforce the flagging legions. Swiftness was of the essence, more than ever.

“The Order of the Broken Bell is to pursue the fleeing devils,” Juniper said. “Prepare fresh lines for a push into the Breach. I’ll want the Watch to back them as soon as possible, too. But before that... The Warlock said he needs us to clear a space. So we’ll clear him a fucking space.”

General Juniper of the Fifteenth Legion bared her fangs.

“Tell Pickler her moment’s come – engines free .”

—

Senior Sapper Pickler of the High Ridge tribe hopped from one foot to the other, feeling like the young girl she’d never before been. Finally, finally the Hellhound had let her off the leash. All this talk of strategic surprise, of comparative advantages and blah blah blah. Gobbler be witness, the orc could prattle on like an old raider sometimes. A depression in the grounds had one of her engines bumping as the oxen tore it free and the goblin turned on the legionary driving the beast.

“You,” she hissed. “If there’s a single cog askew, I swear on all the Gods I will flay you piece by piece and make you eat it .”

The goblin paled and started babbling excuses, but she cared little for his inanities. She crept to her lovely scorpion and stroked the rough wood, checking the beauty for damages. Nothing. Good. Not that she’d take back her words. Pickler was not her mother and despised all she stood for, but she was matron-blood nonetheless. Punishments as unusual as they were cruel were her birth right.

“I’m watching you,” she barked at the legionary. “If you don’t have any use for your eyes, you despicable little vandal, maybe Robber should have them instead.”

Satisfied the ignorant masses had been sufficiently cowed, she stalked forward to the gate. Juniper was fronting heavies with sappers behind them, breaking up the devils that had begun pouring out again with sharpers and then letting them wash up against the shield wall, but that was just a temporary arrangement. They needed to pierce through, since the Warlock apparently had some kind of scheme to close the gate. Not her concern, and she’d not asked for further information. Instead she made her way to the front and began haranguing the legionaries to prepare themselves for a parting when her precious ones arrived, which would be soon though if the oxen-drivers hurried and messed up her engines there was going to be a rousing bout of crucifixions following shortly. And not the nice kind. She’d find the rusty nails herself, if she had to. Ten scorpions of her own design were set down as she hovered, and two of the never-before unveiled Spitters. Getting Ratface to sign off on the logistics of providing ammunition for her two latest wonders had been like pulling a bald dragon’s teeth, but she’d gone above his head and arranged for the Squire to stamp her seal of approval. It had been an easy sell, given the other woman’s love affair with all forms of wanton destruction.

That the half-blood Deoraithe had immediately suggested goblinfire be used as ammunition as well was one of the things that helped Pickler believe there might be worth in following her.

Ratface had later redeemed himself of his sins by using his ‘talents’ to ensure her childhood dream came true. Before her, delicately being set down on the ground and deployed, were the first ten built examples of the gloriously-named Pickler Model of the Imperial Artillery Templates. The Supply Tribune had managed to push the official acceptance of the design in Ater with only three separate instance of blackmail and bribery, a splendid navigation of the maze of squabbling and obstructionism that was the Imperial bureaucracy. Fast-tracking the review had not even required a murder! The Taghreb would truly have made a halfway-decent consort to a Matron, had he been born of her people. Not a breeding partner, of course, or even a first consort – those were expected to be properly demure and covered in scars – but perhaps a fourth or even third.

The scorpions she ordered set in a straight line, with some room between them, and the sappers taught to handle them eagerly began field preparations. The two Spitters were set at an interval behind, the munition carts behind them very carefully unloaded. Even with cloth-filled crates carrying them on wheels had been risky business, but if that much had not been possible the Hellhound would have never allowed them to be deployed. She had no appreciation for real engineering, their general. Pickler did not usually hold battlefield command, save in case of sieges, but in this particular instance she had left behind the general staff to personally supervise. She’d told the others it was to keep an eye on finicky machines, but that was an ugly lie. Her designs were flawless. She just wanted to seem them unveiled for the first time from up close. Sauntering ahead, the Senior Sapper gauged the wind and distance before ordering a last series of adjustments. Then she screamed for the legionaries ahead to part, and glory unfolded before her very eyes.

Ten bolts sprang forward, steel-tipped, and shattered their way through the first three ranks of stone-garbed devils. Before the killing was even over, the strings on her scorpions loosened and with a mere pulling of the lever reset. The wooden store above the scorpion’s length unclenched and another bolt dropped. Chak , and death flew. Lever, drop. Chak , and death flew. A manic grin split the goblin’s face as she watched the poetry of the world in motion, the work of her mind and hands unleashed. This, she thought, was worth every strapping she’d received for stealing chalk and drawing designs on den walls. Worth every bleeding she’d suffered through for tinkering with her own hands, disgracing her line by doing man’s work. It was worth her mother smilingly telling her she’d slit her throat and leave her body to the buzzards if she ever tried to return to the tribe. The Pickler Models scythed their way through the devils, until the six shots in the stores were emptied and the wooden boxes had to be changed. In that heartbeat, as the devils surged again, the Spitters fired. It pained Pickler to say it, but these were not her sole work. The engines were, of course, but not the ammunition.

Alchemy – the use of it of course, not the production as that secret would never leave the Eyries – had never been a true interest of hers. She had designed the clay projectiles, but within the concoction that awaited was Robber’s own recipe. Three sappers had gone blind in the experimental process and twice that many deaf, but as she saw the Seedlings fly she thought it had been entirely worth it. Only one per Spitter, who as machines were almost more a long sling than anything resembling a scorpion. Flat but angled upwards, kept as close to the ground as possible to limit the shaking. They were not yet able to be fired from behind a shield wall, though already she was planning a second model that would remedy that weakness. The Seedlings, each half as large as trebuchet stone, arced up and then fell among the throng of devils. What ensued was sheer artistry. First an explosion, for sharpers had been used to make much of the substance, but then spread a blinding white flame spilling from that blast. The devils screamed, screamed as the fire seared flesh and stone and cooked them alive. After seventeen heartbeats the flame went out, the longest Robber had been able to maintain the burn when exposed to open air.

When the flames winked out, the scorpions had been pushed forward five feet. The stores began their mechanical work as the Spitters were advanced five feet as well thenloaded anew. And so began the push forward, heavies closing on the sides of the gate and forcing the devils into a hall where only death awaited. Senior Sapper Pickler of the High Ridge tribe cackled, and paid no attention to the weak-bellied legionaries around her that flinched at the sound.

Screams filled the air as firing resumed, and it was the song of progress .

Interlude: Liesse IV

“Rulers must exercise restraint. Every action ripples across Creation, bringing three unintended consequences for every one anticipated.”
– Extract from the personal journals of Dread Emperor Terribilis II

“Well, I’m not getting close to that,” Archer announced.

Their arrival on the bastion had been somewhat haphazard, Hakram thought, yet the fight had managed to go sharply downhill within moments. Before they even got their bearings fully half a dozen wards had blown up and mages had begun screaming, their flesh boiling and twisting violently. The orc calmly considered the sight even as he rose to his feet, eyes moving from one roiling shape to another. This was not, he decided, sorcery. Or not just that. The effects were too varied. Some rebels were growing spores on their skin, others had bones protruding from their skin in a crown of spikes and yet more had... stranger outcomes. A woman’s silk robes turned into a carapace, her the ruby set in her thick golden necklace blinking like an eye. He had seen the likes of this before, in Marchford. When a warband of young Named had picked a fight beyond their understanding, and come so very close to annihilation for that arrogance. The rest of the dots connected themselves without effort. Diabolist had surrendered the demon she’d unleashed there as part of the terms of settlement in Liesse, and the custody of it had been granted to Masego.

Adjutant felt like shivering. It was one thing, he thought, for Catherine to fight fire with oil. Quite another for Hierophant to do the same. The consequences of Masego making a mistake would be graver in many ways. It occurred to him for the first time, then, that they had perhaps learned the recklessness of the woman they followed too well. We are no Calamities , the orc thought. The crucible of our forging was one of desperation, and we have learned both the best and the worst of that. Victory against all odds, victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, could never be gained without a cost. Habit had taught them to disregard that, because behind them more steady hands always swept away the mess. But those steady hands were dying now. If they did not learn to check this recklessness, it would bury them. Or worse, the orc thought as he watched the corruption take hold of the mages. In the distance a sound like a thousand sharpers sounded and Hierophant returned to Creation in a storm of power. The orc’s eyes flicked, and his face grew grim.

The Deoraithe had advanced where the demons once stood before Masego spirited them away, and now that the blind sorcerer had returned he’d come back among them. Tendrils of power washed over the heart of the bowmen, corruption spreading with them. They had traded three great catastrophes for two lesser ones. Hakram seized serenity, let it sink through his mind and wash away doubts and fears. Clarity took the scales from his eyes, and he assessed the situation on the bastion. Corrupted mages, more than a hundred. It was no longer spreading actively, but the taint had taken them whole. Praesi household troops were hesitating, split between the duty to clear out the two Named who’d just dropped down among them and the dim realization that the mages they sought to protect might no longer be on their side. On anyone’s. Could he and Archer take care of both forces alone? No, he assessed. Their intention here had been to disrupt, and Hierophant had achieved that without them. They must now contain instead, and the two of them were not enough. Without hesitation, he made his decision.

“Who is in command among you?” he called out to the soldiers.

“Shut your fucking mouth, greens-“

Archer had put an arrow through the roof of the woman’s mouth before she was done speaking and was already nocking a second.

“Not the answer we were looking for, my darlings,” she smiled.

“Your sorcerers are corrupted,” Hakram said. “They must be cleared out before we all die.”

Power began to feel the air, so heavy he could taste it, but it was wrong. Like stagnant water.

“Listen to me,” Adjutant barked, and his Name flared.

Like quill being dipped in an inkwell, void filled for purpose. It was not Speaking, not quite. He was not Catherine, able to bridge the gap of a Name too young and thin by sheer stubborn will. But he was the Adjutant, and they were soldiers. That mattered, in the eyes of Creation. They turned to him, and there was a glint in their eyes that spoke of orders awaited. Just a glint, but it would be enough.

“About turn,” he ordered. “Rapid advance, watch your formation. Strike before they can start rituals.”

There was heartbeat of stillness, then the world pivoted. They moved.

“Archer,” he began, turning to the other Named.

“Disrupt anything big,” she sighed. “I know how this goes. Gods, you take all the fun out of this. It could have been a real messy scrap but you’ve gone and made it all orderly.”

Adjutant hefted up his axe and joined the ranks of the men he’d been about to kill mere moments ago. Sorcery lashed forward and he bared his fangs in answer.

—

Wekesa had always considered the works of goblins with fond but distinct contempt. Short-lived creatures that they were, their kind always strove to leave behind a legacy of steel and chords to pull curtain over the tragic frailty of their existence. There were occasional sparks of brilliance in the dross, but in the end even the very best of engines only ever managed to match a single trick of the many a properly trained mage had in their arsenal. It was one thing for Amadeus, who had the preoccupations of an entire empire on his shoulders, to find worth in this. Sorcerers truly worth the name were few, and even fewer were willing to have anything to do with the Legions. But for him? The toys of children were rarely worth a second glance, and those that were worth more than that tended to attract... untoward attention. Warlock was confident he could survive the carnage that would follow the reception of a third Red Letter, but the same could not be said for the Empire. Still, for all that the little engines under him were proving to have some use in clearing out the devils they should not warrant anything of the sort.

It was hard to grasp exactly what incurred the wrath of the gnomes, but they’d tolerated the existence of both scorpions and goblin munitions for centuries. Greater efficiency in the employment of both should pass without making any waves being made.

The Fifteenth did swift work of taking the creational side of the gate, and afterwards swept forward through the Breach in an orderly manner. The Warlock’s chariot tumbled through the air above the advancing ranks, passing a boundary that few alive would be able to sense. The Hell that awaited him on the side had amusingly mundane scenery, by the standards of such things. Endless yellow sands spread in every direction, shifting dunes and scorching winds. The sky was deep crimson and bereft of any celestial orbs – a hint in the location of this particular Hell among the lay of them. Though his people swore by Below, when they swore at all, this was broadly mistaken. The Hells were, as much as direction could apply to them, somewhat to the left of Creation. Attempting to map them was a fool’s errand, of course. Emperors and Empresses and ruined Praes dozens of times attempting to do as much, only for it to become undeniable the labyrinth of hellscapes was constantly shifting. It was a pit of writhing snakes, moving with every heartbeat. It was said that as soon as a mortal mind thought of a Hell that did not exist, it would come into being. Wekesa had never managed to conclusively prove or disprove that adage, but he had reliably established that the Hells were in constant expansion. That had forced him to reconsider some theories as to the nature of Creation.

Wekesa had long suspected that the reason for the existence of angels and devils was that the Gods could not intervene directly in Creation or any of its adjacent realms. Not, like the Book of All Things stated, because a wager forbade it – but because the Gods were Creation. That their power had been made into the world all mortals inhabited and could not be withdrawn without unravelling the entire edifice. Hence the establishment of catspaws defined as opposite, but ultimately serving the same purpose: advancing the experiment. It was beautiful work, he’d thought. Well-deserving of the word divine. Yet if the Gods were invested in the making of Creation, what power fed the expansion of the Hells? The Heavens and their Choirs, after all, did not grow. But neither did they lessen, which was perhaps a hint. Angels had been slain or made to fall in the past, but no Choir had ever been measurably weakened. His current theory was that there was fixed quantity of power behind Heavens and Hells, and that Above had chosen fixed figure where Below had preferred endless mutability – at the risk of thinning the brew. Few devils could withstand even the gaze of an angel, after all.

Ah, so much to study and yet he had to settle these irritating distractions before returning to what mattered. Wekesa traced a handful of runes and a line of darkness scythed through the first few ranks of the devils clustering before the Breach, allowing the struggling legionaries to establish a solid foothold. The chariot rose into the sky again and his gaze swept to the distance. The devils here seemed endless in number, though it was not so. Still, two dozen columns slithering along the dunes like giant snakes of soldiers were trudging forward towards the Breach. Tedious, this. Warlock could have begun the work of slaughtering them, but he could not spare such expense of power if he was to build upon the work of the Sahelian girl. Crafting a lasting effect from scratch was already stretching the limits of what he was capable of doing without burning himself out. Much as he disliked the thought, he would have to rely on the Squire’s men. His nose wrinkled in distaste even as he guided the chariot downwards. Wheels spun wildly against sand, splashing yellow hands around as he reined in the devil-horses, and Wekesa lightly leapt down to the ground.

Eyes sweeping from someone of high enough rank to be worth addressing, he found a woman with the markings of a Senior Tribune on her shoulders. It would do.

“You,” he drawled. “I’ll need a space cleared to work. A circle with a diameter of seventy feet, and add another dozen around that where your soldiery is not to step. Precision will be required.”

The woman paled.

“Sir, this may take time,” she said. “Resistance is proving stiff, even with your help, and the engines must-“

“I’ve not interest in the practicalities,” Wekesa said flatly. “See it done. Now. I’ll mark the boundaries visibly as a courtesy to your general, but do not expect any legionaries crossing it to survive the experience.”

He truly did miss working with the likes of Ranker and Istrid. Their officers knew better than to question his orders. Warlock had no taste for grovelling, but he did believe that the occasional bout of terror would do a great deal to temper these youngbloods. As promised, he began by setting a boundary: dots of red light formed around the area he claimed for his own, legionaries hastily getting out of the way before consequences could ensure. With that dealt with, the true casting could begin. First, an outer ward. Circular, diameter of seventy-three feet. Little more than a filter to prevent the elements touching his work. Wekesa snapped his wrist and three red flames formed, burning bright, and began moving. His brow created and guided them with his mind, burning the sand to glass in the form of a perfect circle. Even as they began elaborating on that initial pattern he stepped forward into the circle and knelt in the centre, every lesser rune added as he moved leading towards him. The Warlock closed his eyes and let time ebb away. The flames wove in intricate patterns across the sand, arrays and runes he bolstered by drawing foci from his treasury dimension.

Amethysts taken from lifeless grounds first, clarity touched by death to prevent the bleed from cascading. Chalcedony from a riverbed, to nurture the currents of sorcery without them struggling against each other. Branches of still-living alder for precision, lead ripped straight from the earth to draw the impurities. Lesser reagents, but he did not dare bring materials with inherent properties into this ritual. Aspect sorcery was difficult enough to shape without additional variables being brought into the formula. How long the work took him, he did not know. But eventually his eyes opened and around him an intricate series of interlocking runic arrays marked the grounds of Hell. Wekesa looked for imperfections carefully, ignoring the sound of fighting ahead and to the sides. None he could see, and he forced himself to go over the calculations one last time. He’d done workings of a similar nature in the past, but never one exactly the same. It would suffice, he decided. Leave him all but burned out, but not so much he was unable to defend himself if needed.

“I do apologize,” he murmured, words meant for the Sahelian girl who would never hear them. “It is beautiful work, truly, and to meddle with it is unseemly. But you have made yourself an obstacle.”

Imbricate , his mind spoke, and the aspect shivered across this realm. Closing the Greater Breach was, of course, impossible. The ritual lit up around him, lights to blind all the world, and the Sovereign of the Red Skies turned his will on the span of the gate. Usurpation had even been the essence of sorcery . What could not be closed could be redirected . Power drained out of him at an alarming rate, but Wekesa seized that thin boundary and attached the work of his aspect to it. What had once been a Breach leading to Creation now led to another Hell, and his veins burned with the effort of weaving that addition into the heart of the Hellgate’s nature. If he did any less, he was only delaying the inevitable. Panting softly, the greatest living sorcerer of the age rose to his feet. It was done. The sound of the panicking legionaries washed over him, the buzz of flies. Wekesa looked upon them, wondering at the numbers. A few hundred, a whole thousand? There were even a few Deoraithe he could see. Without the Breach at their back, the soldiers were already being surrounded. They were stranded, after all.

He was not.

Dusting off his robes, the Warlock stepped onto his chariot and set the horses to flight. He was not inclined to linger here, and it would be a long way back to Creation.

—

Ranker’s people had a saying, about miracles: sudden dawns blind. It lost nearly all its nuances when translated in Lower Miezan. The usual word for dawn in goblintongue meant first-light-after-dark, but in this case the implied context was Light instead of light and raider-night for dark. Light for the the searing hatred wielded by heroes, and the meaning of strife that had been associated with the many defeats of the Legions since the subjugation of the Tribes. It was a reminder that sudden upsets always fucked goblinkind, one way or another. Like most goblin sayings, it had a completely different meaning in matrontongue. The word for sudden was narrow-vision-of-swiftness and for blind to-miss-in-wilful-ignorance. Matrons were not warned of the harsh hand of the Heavens. They were warned of seeking momentary salvation at the price of a later great cost. The old Marshal watched the Second Battle of Liesse unfold around her, and found that both meanings had grounds.

The explosion on the bastion must have been the work of the Hierophant, because that first sorcerous detonation had been followed by a shitshow of demonic corruption. There was a vicious fight going up there even as she looked, between two of the Woe and the handiwork of another. If those two hadn’t been up there... She turned to Kolo, her balding and ever-nervous Senior Mage.

“You’re sure the control array still stands?” she asked, for the third time.

The Soninke licked his lips and nodded.

“It’s not in use, the mages are no longer guiding the wights – they must be going according to the last instructions – but it still exists,” he confirmed. “They could take back control if they tried.”

Burning, bloody Hells, they were lucky that demon-juice tended to turn the affected dumb if the demon wasn’t around to guide them. But there was still potential disaster looming. If the corrupted mages spread that corruption down the sorcery that allowed them to control the undead... That was the kind of catastrophe that broke cities. Kingdoms, even, if it wasn’t checked in time. And there was no telling if one of the rebels would wise up before they were cleared out and start pissing in the proverbial pond. And that wasn’t even the worst of it.

“Scry him again,” Ranker said. “Brute force it if you have to.”

“Ma’am, we could have half our mage lines behind that ritual it would change nothing,” Kolo said. “Trying to touch the Hierophant is... He must have something of Summer inside him, because even looking too close evaporates the entire scrying bowl.”

He grimaced.

“Including the stone, ma’am,” he added. “The damned stone .”

Wekesa’s only son had emerged from whatever sorcerous madness he’d been up to right in the middle of the advancing Deoraithe bowmen. That had been bad enough – at least a hundred had died just for being in the wrong place when he returned – but the poison in the wine had been the fact he’d apparently come back in the middle of a godsdamned storm of corruption. It’d splashed all over half a dozen companies. The boy had immediately started scouring the area with flame, which was the right decision to make. But it also meant he was now torching his way through the middle of the first wave troops headed to prop up the centre, killing dozens with every heartbeat. The infantry coming behind the archers had no idea he was killing only corrupted – they thought this was treachery, and now the entire front had gone to shit. Kegan was barking up about betrayal over the scrying links, and even after being told what was truly happening she was threatening to pull back her troops entirely. Ranker had told her if she did there’d be a court-martial and execution before the day was over, but there would be no putting this fruit back on the branch. Daoine was going to holler for blood after this, take it all the way up to the court if they had to. And we lost too many men today to be able to afford a rebellion in the north. All that, and the most dangerous question had yet to be asked.

Had the Hierophant been corrupted?

Ranker had seen him emerge in a godsdamned whirlpool of demon essence. That wasn’t something she could just ignore. A Named that obviously powerful with a demon whispering in his ears was not something the Empire could afford. Or Calernia, for that fucking matter. There was a very real chance the boy would need to be put down, and now . But she didn’t have the means to carry out that decision if she made it, and what would come of it was... Warlock would kill them all, even if they were right. Not even Black would be able to stay his hand, not when it came to family. And Foundling had made Hierophant one of her little band of roving disasters. The goblin had it on good authority the girl had lost her shit over one of her legates getting torched by the Summer Court so badly it had broken half of Old Dormer. What kind of a tantrum would she throw over losing a Named?

The only saving grace in this entire blunder of a battle was that Wekesa had come through and the Hellgate was closed. Or something like that, anyway. Her mage lines couldn’t give her a straight answer, but they agreed that the way the gate had become see-through meant nothing would come out of it anymore. The troops that had gone through had yet to come back, though, and Ranker suspected they would never. She’d ordered for the Fifteenth to prop up the centre anyway and they were on the move – the sight of those legionaries marching towards her people had gone a long way in making Kegan shut up. With the wights rudderless, for now, the flanks were holding steady. This battle, the Marshal thought, could still be turned around. If they were careful and lucky and there were no great upsets. The old goblin’s eyes turned to the Hierophant standing alone in a storm of flame, surrounded by charred corpses, and she whet her lips. Her Senior Mage stayed at her side in silence, knowing better than to speak.

There was a decision to be made, and Marshal Ranker made it.

Chapter 63: Bridge

“A dilemma is no such thing if it is flammable.”
– Dread Empress Sulphurous, the ‘Technically Correct’

Liesse looked like it’d spent a few years rolling around in nightmare juice, but at least the result’s old floor plan still more or less held up. I’d taken this city once before, and though this time I’d come knocking without an army at my back I still knew my way around. The new occupants, though, were something of a problem. For one they were all dead, which was not a desired quality in the inhabitants of what had been one of the most thriving cities in Callow, and the entire place had gone to Hell. Literally. Akua’s idea of a garrison apparently involved a generous helping of devils let loose in the streets. Which, hey, not a problem if I stuck to the rooftops. But the devils with wings were, and the penumbra that hung over Liesse like a veil wasn’t quite enough on its own to hide me. The inevitable long periods spent huddled under whatever was available to hide allowed me to stew in anger that was growing sharper by the moment. It wasn’t enough that Diabolist had slaughtered everyone within these walls, the population of the second largest city in Callow and all the refugees from the south that’d been fleeing the fae. No, she had to wreck the actual city as well.

There would be no salvaging Liesse after this. Setting aside the madwoman’s little helpers currently having the run of the streets, the entire place had been turned into some fucking Praesi ritual tool. There were runes everywhere, wards I could feel buzzing when I came too close and even the lay of the streets had been fucked with. Akua or one of her minions had ordered the already messy sprawl of Liessen streets to be turned into a maze of collapsed dead-ends and barricades. This was no longer a liveable city. It might become one again eventually, but that’d take years of highly dangerous and professional work as well as what I could only qualify as a prodigious amount of money. Which, even if I did have – which I didn’t, because rebuilding a twice war-torn nation and my own ravaged demesne wasn’t exactly cheap work – I wouldn’t be able to spare. Because, once again fuck you Akua, this little murderous tantrum was the call for every godsdamned nation on Calernia that could spare an army to march for the Red Flower Vales. At best I’d be able to put wards around this wreck of a city and forbid entrance by Imperial decree.

Every speck of coin I’d be able to spare would be going to fortifying Callow and ensuring its people didn’t starve through this winter, or the seasons after that. I somehow doubted the Tenth Crusade would be over in a year. It was going to be a long and brutal slugging match between the most powerful nations on the continent, and my people were troublingly unprepared for it.

My advance was slow, but it was still an advance. The deeper I got into the city, sticking to shadows and hiding places, the thicker the patrols became. I’d half-expected Diabolist to send an army of ten thousand wights just outside the tunnel that Black and I entered the city through, but there’d been no one in sight when we did. Just a set of hidden runic arrays that my teacher promptly tore apart with his shadow before we made a run for it. That had me wary. Diabolist was of the old breed but she wasn’t stupid. I kept having to repeat that, these days, but that made it no less true. Just because we’d torn apart her vanguard outside Liesse didn’t mean she was done: if anything, that probably meant the heart of her plan was in here. What that plan actually was, I still couldn’t tell. Sure, she’d opened a Greater Breach in the worst place possible at the worst time possible for our army. She’d followed up that disaster by tossing three demons at us, which meant both Warlock and Hierophant had their hands tied with damage control. But how long did she expect that to last, really? At some point one of those two threats would give, and then the Named that was freed up would turn to cleaning up the remaining wights.

Black and I had come into the city ahead of the rest, but I fully expected that before too long we’d be followed by the Legions. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the Watch had already begun landing at the bottom of the pit. Was that her plan, then? Forcing an engagement in a narrow tunnel that couldn’t really be bypassed? Once more that might work for a while, but we had two sorcerers on par with if not outright superior to her outside and I really doubted her little get-out-of-Creation trick was impervious to the Warlock’s entire bag of tricks. Right now, I couldn’t see a way for her to get out of this alive. She’d last a while, there was no denying that. She’d even cost us a horrible butcher’s bill before it was all said and done. But tonight or in a week, even without Black and I lifting a hand, this path led to her head on a pike. Or the Hall of Screams, if the Empress was feeling vindictive. Which meant I was missing something, because Diabolist only ever planned for defeat when it got her something she wanted and she was too fucking arrogant to care for something that sprang from her death. Akua Sahelian’s cause was herself: everything else was, ultimately, expendable. It wasn’t the kind of thinking that led to a woman martyring herself for some kind of philosophical point.

Not that it would succeed, anyway. Black had already made it clear that the aftermath of Second Liesse was going to be one long thorough purge of everything and everyone even remotely associated to the Truebloods. And she has to know that , I thought. That she gave him the excuse he’d been waiting on for decades. There was a way, in Diabolist’s eyes, where today ended up with her on top and beyond reprisal. I was going to have to find what that way was and shove blades into it until it stopped twitching.

The first step towards that was getting eyes on the Ducal Palace, which was where Diabolist was bound to be holed up. Probably on an overly ornate throne, drinking expensive wine. I just knew her armour would be nicer than mine, too. Shame about all that blood that I was going get all over it. I ended up on a rooftop overlooking the outside of the palace, and grimaced when I took a closer look. I’d grilled Robber after he’d infiltrated the place a few months back then Thief after she did the same a great deal more recently, and they’d not been wrong to call it a fortress. They’d both mentioned that the area in front of the outer walls was open field, with space once occupied by shops and mansions torn down and cleared out to make it even harder to approach unnoticed. That part had changed, I saw. It was now entirely filled with tight ranks of perfectly still wights in full arms and armour. How many did that make? Thousands, at least. This was easily larger than the biggest marketplace in Laure, and it could fit that many people during festivals. Behind the walls I saw runes and stalking devils, and even clusters of mages she’d kept back.

Frontal assault wasn’t looking all that feasible, but there weren’t any obvious backdoors to exploit. It’d been a little too much to hope for that there would be: it wasn’t like Diabolist lacked the manpower to cover ever nook and cranny. A distraction, maybe? Something loud enough she’d send men to quell the mess, making an opening for us to sneak through. But she’ll be expecting that , I thought. She knows we’re in the city. It might be that patience was our only real option. Waiting until the Legions made landfall and she had to shift her forces to hold them back, then going for the head of the snake. And even then, it wouldn’t be a sure thing. I did hate it when my opponents were competent, it complicated everything. I waited under cover for what must have been at least half an hour, watching patrols and unmoving sentinels, but no opening ever emerged. At this rate Black would join me and I’d have no plan to suggest.

The explosion took me by surprise.

Not because there was an explosion at all – that’d pretty much been made a certainty the moment I’d sent Robber’s cohort into the city through the path Thief had found me – but because it sounded wrong. It wasn’t the kind of detonation that came from goblin munitions. It got worse when I quietly shifted rooftops to have a look at where the noise came from: one of the wings of the Ducal Palace was half-collapsed and smoke was trailing into the sky. Shit , I thought. If that was what I thought it was...

“A good plan,” Diabolist said. “Or rather it was, the first time you used it.”

My blade was out before she finished the first word and I twisted around only to find Akua Sahelian in all her glory leaning against the edge of the rooftop, looking down at her assembly of wights. I’d been incorrect in assuming she would put on armour. Instead she had draped over her full curves a complicated robe of red and gold with snow white silk borders. The back of her neck was covered by a low-hanging veil set with patterns of precious stones, and the oblique cut of her skirt revealed legs covered by form-fitting soft leather trousers. Even her boots, I thought, looked like they cost a year’s salary. My first thought was: well, that’s twenty denarii . My second thought was really more of a response, namely forming a spear of shadow and tossing it through her throat. It made a hole in the silhouette that glowed around the edges but almost immediately closed. An illusion. Diabolist raised an eyebrow.

“How uncouth,” she chided. “As I was saying, there was some cleverness to the thought. Sending Thief after the keystone of my ritual while my eyes were on you and the Carrion Lord.”

“Some cleverness,” I replied flatly, keeping eye on the wights below. “How kind of you to concede that.”

They weren’t moving, at least not those I could see. That was little comfort, given where I was currently standing.

“Dearest Catherine,” Diabolist drawled, sounding amused. “You employed this same trick to steal the very sun of Summer. Did you truly think that would go unnoticed? Of course I prepared for the eventuality.”

“It was a trap,” I sighed.

This entire city was, I’d known that going in, but I’d thought that my little contingencies might be snuck past her.

“Just because the keystone needed to be there once does not mean it needed to remain there,” Akua languidly said. “Even if your little burglar survives my precautions, she will find nothing there to steal.”

I frowned at her.

“So is this a back-patting session, Akua?” I asked. “Because I’m kind of busy. You know, working out the logistics of killing you.”

She waved away my words airily. It really was shame I’d only be able to brutally murder her the once. I felt kind of cheated by that fact.

“I am in no hurry,” she said. “You are. After all, your army is losing the battle outside quite spectacularly.”

I went still. She could be lying, of course. Very likely she was. When I’d left two thirds of her mages on the field were dead, Masego had her demons imprisoned and the wights were collapsing on two fronts. Juniper was headed out to contain her Hellgate with the Warlock at her back, and so while I wouldn’t consider that situation under control it should at least not be outright fucking us over for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, I’d thought since the beginning that this was going too well considering the amount of time she’d had to prepare her defences. There was a chance, however slight, she wasn’t lying through her teeth.

“Istrid Knightsbane is dead,” Diabolist said. “General Orim and General Afolabi are as well. Their legions were gutted around them, then rose in my service. The remaining commanders are hanging on by a thread, and that thread is thinnin g with every heartbeat. Even if they manage to retreat, this cannot be called anything but a defeat.”

My fingers clenched.

“If it’s true, that’s a mess that’s going to cost us badly,” I said. “But it doesn’t really matter, does it? The moment you used your ritual you made this about Named. Even if you wipe out my whole army your side collapses the moment you die.”

“Can you?” Diabolist asked, and she sounded genuinely curious. “Put aside your pride and your hatred, for a moment. Do you truly believe that even if you came to stand before me, you would come out the victor of that confrontation?”

“I’ve killed more terrifying things than you, Akua Sahelian,” I hissed.

She laughed, and gracefully arced her arm to display our surroundings.

“No,” the Soninke smiled. “No you have not. I am not a fettered god you can trick or a petty tool hollowed out by the Heavens. I am heiress crowned by inheritance, in the fullness of her might. That I bother with these ramparts between us is a mere mark of respect – I could break you with a word, Catherine. You have risen too swiftly. It has made you fragile .”

“I think I’m supposed to pity you,” I said. “For being so far gone that you can’t even understand what a repulsive creature you are and how it’s going to get you killed. The worst part of it, Akua, is that you have all these gifts . You’re so fucking capable, and I have bad enough a need for capable people I might actually have ignored what a monster you are if you’d not proven again and again you’re poison to everything you touch. But you just had to cross those lines, the ones that mean I have to put you down whatever the cost.”

Diabolist sighed.

“Must you still bother with the pretence of righteousness, even at this late hour?” she said. “It has grown increasingly quite tedious.”

“Is this the part where you trying telling me we’re not so different?” I said. “Fuck you and the flying murder fortress you rode in on, Sahelian. I’ve done some nasty stuff, but you? You don’t have limits . It’s worse than a sickness of the mind, because you chose to be like this. You glorify it.”

She seemed amused, and in that expression I saw a lot I’d rather I hadn’t. I saw the Empress weaving plots that bound me ever tighter to her reign, I saw Black imparting a lesson that was always as brutal as it was practical. We’d both been raised in the shadows of the same monsters. It had left marks on both of us, and the knowledge of that shared brand had bitter taste in my mouth.

“Tell me, old friend,” Akua said fondly. “What are your principles, exactly? I keep hearing of these lines and the way I cross them yet you never elaborate. I have murdered for my ambitions, this is true. But then, so have you. Is it simply the scale of the killing that is your objection?”

“Friend? Gods, when people say your kind gets drunk in power I didn’t think it was quite that literal. You’ve loosed devils on innocents, Akua,” I said coldly. “You summon demons to make use of them in war. You’re racist, backstabbing and utterly amoral. You murdered a hundred thousand of my countrymen in cold blood to make a fucking point .”

“Nearly all these acts have been committed by those you call allies as well,” Diabolist mildly said. “Your own teacher has methodically butchered Callowans for decades to cow them. Perhaps never a hundred thousand at once, this I’ll grant. But between the Conquest and the occupation? My dear, I broke a city. He broke a nation, and kept it so. I daresay the sum of corpses to his name is a few graveyards ahead of mine.”

She stretched lazily.

“You’ve yourself made pacts with entities that are hostile to Creation,” she continued. “And even now bear their mantle, a diabolist in frost instead of brimstone. You’ve consistently put Callowan lives above those of Praesi and greenskins, which indicates a certain... disregard. In matters of treachery, shall we revisit the inception of the Liesse Rebellion?”

She laughed, the sound of it rich and almost enchanting enough the urge to kill her didn’t have my hand tightening into a fist.

“As for the same moral fibre you so often chide me for lacking,” she said, and met my eyes calmly. “Catherine, when have you ever displayed it yourself? I was under the impression that to be righteous one needed to do more than merely commit lesser sins instead of great.”

“The difference,” I replied coldly, “is that killing is something I’m driven to, while it’s your starting point.”

“What difference is truly there,” Diabolist asked, “if we both come to kill? Does hemming and hawing over bloodying your blade somehow exempt you from the nature of your actions?”

“The difference is that at some point I stop , Akua,” I said. “I have an end. You don’t. It’s one massacre after another until someone puts you down. The payoff for all the ugly things done at my hands or my orders is peace. Real, lasting peace. A way out of the loop that’s fucked over both our peoples since the First Dawn. What’s your payoff, Diabolist? Progressively greater atrocities, until you finally run into someone stronger than you?”

“That,” Akua said smilingly, “sounds like a justification.”

I flinched, because it was just true enough to cut.

“Did you ever wonder why all these renowned villains displayed such immediate fondness for you?” Diabolist said. “Or did you merely assumed you were unfathomably charming? You have always been a threat to the very order they’ve spent a lifetime building, even when you set out to serve their purpose.”

“I’m aware I’m being used,” I replied flatly. “I can live with that, so long as I’m using them as well.”

The Soninke clicked her tongue against the roof her mouth disapprovingly.

“Sentiment is a blinder, Catherine,” she said. “Consider the facts. From the moment you’ve become the Squire, Callow has been graced with one bloody reaping after another. Did you ever stop to consider this was no accident but the actual intent?”

She leaned forward.

“Did you ever consider that Callow cannot rebel if it too busy burning ?” she said. “That the ashes of a kingdom are easier to subjugate in full than a resurgent nation under your hand?”

“I know exactly what they’re after,” I flatly replied.

“You ‘know’ what two of the most exquisitely manipulative villains alive have told you,” Diabolist corrected. “Is a few scraps of affection all it takes to bind you?”

“Did you think a clever speech would be all that was needed to sway me?” I said. “I know what you are, Akua. It’s what I would be, if I believed in nothing. If I thought I was the only thing that mattered on Creation.”

“You will hate me,” Diabolist said. “That is as it should be. But I know you as well, Catherine Foundling. And there is a truth you have flinched from looking in the eye, for it is distasteful to you: the Empress and the Carrion Lord, though you may be fond of them, have a plan for Callow. Me?”

She shrugged.

“Its existence is a matter of indifference to me, so long as tribute is paid,” Akua said. “And so now I ask – is there truly a bridge you will not burn, if it means better outcome for your people?”

Her smile was thin and sharp, a slice of ivory between red lips.

“Let us find out,” she said. “We will begin, I think, by severing the ties holding you back.”

She looked towards the Ducal Palace, the very picture of nonchalance.

“Do hurry, Catherine. I have the Black Knight.”

My blood ran cold, even as the illusion dispersed and the undead below began to move. A reminder, those, that no matter how convincing she could be I was still mere feet away from thousands of my people she had murdered and enslaved. There were some things that could not be painted over by eloquence. The wisps of sorcery that Diabolist had left behind spun again, and even as I prepared to forcefully disrupt them a silhouette formed and my hand was stayed. Exactly one sentence was spoken to me, and then the silhouette was gone before I could so much as open my mouth. Loudly, I swallowed. My fingers clenched and then unclenched as I watched the wights beginning the climb towards me. In the distance mages wove sorcery and devils took flight, the full muster of Diabolist’s madness finally taking the field. I closed my eyes, breathed out and stilled my mind. I opened them to sight of a corpse-like hand grasping the edge of the roof.

“ Fall ,” I said, and darkness obeyed.

Chapter 64: Solo

“Food riots, is it? Well, I do enjoy when a problem is its own solution.”
– Dread Empress Sanguinia I, the Gourmet

It was a funny thing, hate. Before a sword through the chest set me on the path to becoming the Squire, I’d thought I was beyond it. That learning to see beyond the grudges and the anger was what set me apart from the heroes that died like flies as I grew up. I’d thought that by setting aside the hate I would be able to act with my hands unfettered, to bring lasting change instead of raging against the Tower for half a year and getting my throat slit in my sleep. It’d been a peculiar kind of arrogance, but arrogance nonetheless. None of us could ever be clear as spring water, not even Black. His brand of vainglory was just shrewder than most – because could you really call one man setting himself against the entire Heavens anything but arrogance? People could step on ants without even noticing it, no matter how clever the ant. Oh, when Named spoke to each other we didn’t call it arrogance. It was will, or madness, or half a dozen other little euphemisms that allowed us to feel slightly better about what we were doing. But that the end of the day, one truth always came out: to be Named was to believe, bone deep, that Creation should be a certain way. Beyond that it was just quibbling about the means you used to make sure it did.

It was conceit to believe I could be more than I was, some pure instrumentality of outcome or ideal. When I’d fought the greatest monsters of Arcadia, we’d called them gods. Lesser gods, of course – even in hushed whispers, deference must be afforded to the prickly holders of the penultimate thrones – but gods nonetheless. I should have understood it properly then, because what were even the most powerful of the fae but Named with the weight of millennia behind them? It was why they’d lost. Because when they’d come down to Creation, to this messy battlefield of ours, they’d been forced to fashion themselves into people. In Arcadia, they were perfect: not in the sense of flawlessness, no, but in the way that a cog in a machine fit exactly the form and purpose it was meant for. A god made to masquerade as a mortal had the fatal flaw of perfection removed from the perfect. But us Named? Oh, we were different breed. Mortals made gods, or at least clawing at the foot of that golden pedestal. Born of a fractured thing we took up those sharp edges and wielded them like blades to cut at each other. An aspect was not a reward in some arcane lottery arranged by the Gods, it was a wound. A hurt, a disappointment, a rage made into knife.

And in matters of self-mutilation I had few rivals.

So I seized my hatreds and accepted them for what they were: the foundations of my power. I’d been told once that a Name could not spring from void, but that’d been untrue. It was Roles that were shaped by the currents of Creation, left glittering and polished stones at the bottom of the riverbed. Names were something more... intimate. A collection of sharp moments before and ahead of you. Huddling hungry under covers, after the price of bread had risen. Blood in my mouth as I fought a man too large and strong to beat, defeat crawling ever closer. It was a lesson on the nature of stories, learned by burned shores. It was a faceless tribunal whose verdict I had refused. I’d tried for so long to make something of all this, to weave together a tale that did not have bile rising in my throat. But there was nothing sacred about baring your blade, nothing laudable about telling the world it must bend or break. If I disdained the lay of Creation as ordained by the Gods, the banners of black and white, then I must either make my own or find myself nothing but a butcher among butchers. And so I took those vivid moments and made them a blade, and that blade I bared once more. It could begin here, under cover of moonless night.

It would.

The darkness did not spread, it fell. There was a sky above but not one that could be touched. It was not a boundary, a ceiling. It was a pit above, a biting void of nothingness that could not be filled. In front of me the hand of the wight froze with a snapping sound and my boot came down, shattering flesh and bone. I leapt down onto the street and found myself among a host of silent statues. Stillness alone reigned as I tread forward, leather creaking softly against the frosted ground. The Diabolist had set an army before me, one a Squire could not hope to scatter. But it had been some time since I was only that, and where Catherine Foundling would have been checked the Duchess of Moonless Nights strode unimpeded. I was not truly doing any of this, I thought as I walked through the ranks and passed a wight that simply... fell apart when my cloak brushed its frame. This was not a spell, sorcery as I understood it. It was, as Masego had said, a domain. The old and merciless cold of this place was as much a part of it as the unbroken black of the sky. My own kingdom of winter and night, and in this place all but me were guests. I wondered what it said of me, that this was the shape my own soul made realm had come to take.

Nothing pleasant, I suspected.

The silhouettes and edifices were juxtaposed, I instinctively knew, not fully drawn into the domain. They had existence both inside and outside of it, and so did I. A domain, not merely a weapon , I mused. There was more to this than an eldritch killing blow. The gate to the Ducal Palace was closed and had once been warded. But this was Winter, the land of soft silent deaths and unending hunger. The cold devoured it all, stripping it bare until a flick of my fingers had the gates falling from the hinges and even the last wisps of sorcery died. Beyond the gate awaited men and devils, and these were not so empty as the wights. There were still specks of warmth at the heart of them, like trembling candles. An indifferent glance was enough to smother them, like pinching the wick with a thumb and a finger. I climbed the steps that paved the way to the hall even in this silent world of mine, watching wards and wights flicker out around me. There was something ahead, I could feel it. A boundary to this place that should have none. I went through stairs and galleries, treading the graveyard of my own making until ahead of me hateful warmth gleamed before my eyes. Light red and yellow, a circle slowly turning with images I could not truly see inscribed inside.

A ward, one meant to check fae. Thresholds must already be growing difficult, yes? Warlock’s voice whispered in my ear. I let out a breath cold as the air around me and rolled my shoulder to limber it, then struck at the ward as hard as I could. Something shattered, but it was not Akua’s magic. Like a broken mirror the world around me cracked and crumbled, colour and heat rushing back around me. I stood in the same hallway than before, every surface covered in ice and steaming. All things came to an end, it seemed. Not merely the good. I was tempted to unsheath my blade and try to force my way through the ward again, now looking like an innocuous door of oak, but I was not a rat running through Akua’s maze. I would not spend my strength against walls she had tailored to hold me back. Instead I closed my eyes and sharpened my senses, sinking deeper into my Name. I’d slaughtered my way into here, but I’d not been that thorough in the killing. There would be remains to find. After ten long breaths I finally heard heartbeats and footsteps, but not to the sides. There was only the silence of the grave there. Above. Threading my will into the ice covering the ceiling I thickened it, sunk its claws into the stone until it cracked. Then, without further ceremony, I crouched and leapt upwards.

Stone shattered around me and I emerged in a rain of shards, landing on a gutted carpet. There were three men in the room, and a crawling shape that was not anything of the sort. They screamed, unsurprisingly, and I noted with distant amusement that the walls and only door of the room had been covered in wards akin to the one Akua had set below.

“An amateur mistake,” I told them. “Not covering every surface.”

The creature of pink and bloated flesh on the ground opened a maw that was like a lizard’s, if the scales had been ripped away, and a long black tongue extended. On it a triad of red eyes were set, and as they glared at me I felt lethargy seep into my frame. I let Winter flood my veins and the assault dissipated like morning mist. My sword left the scabbard and in one smooth movement spun around my hand so I could nail the devil’s head to the floor. The men, Soninke all three of them, were mages. Panic remained but bled into sorcery, hasty incantations barked. A spear of purple flame sizzled to my side as I stepped around the spell, pivoting fluidly to avoid the stream of dark tar-like fluid shot by another mage. The third, to my amusement, did not even attempt a blow. He disappeared into thin air, veiled behind an illusion. I moved forward, sword carving through the fire-wielders’ chest then taking him by the shoulder and spinning the dying man around so he could shield me from the shower of white sparks the other one cast. Flesh melted under them, eaten away cleanly, but that did not prevent the mage from being bowled over by his comrade’s corpse when I tossed it at him. Sharpening my ears I waited for the sound of footsteps and found the last one attempting to flee by the door.

“Predictable,” I chided.

I flicked my wrist and a spear of shadow tore through the illusion, going straight through the man’s stomach but splashing harmlessly against the warded wall. I did not spare another glance for the corpse, instead turning to the only survivor. He managed to push the corpse I’d thrown at him to the side, only to find the tip of my sword resting on his throat. He swallowed, the lump in his throat moving as he did.

“Mercy, High One,” he croaked. “I surrender.”

“I thought about it,” I said. “Having one of you still breathing guide me through the mess. But there’s always the risk you’ll lie, you see.”

“I would never,” he swore.

“You won’t,” I agreed, and the sword point flicked down to plunge into his heart.

He twitched, gurgled and even as life began to leave him I poured Winter inside his frame. When I tore out my sword, his eyes were already blue.

“Get up,” I told my newest helper. “I haven’t damaged your throat, so you should be able to talk.”

He rose, but said nothing. I sighed. Undead.

“Say something,” I ordered.

“Something,” the corpse said.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. I, it had to be said, had literally asked for that.

“Tell me everything you know about the defences the Diabolist built in the palace,” I ordered. “We can begin with that ward down below, and how I can get past it.”

Dead men, as it turned out, did tell tales.

—

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Diabolist redefined the meanings of ‘overly complicated’ and ‘cripplingly paranoid’. The Ducal Palace was essentially a labyrinth of wards and traps that no one but her knew the full lay of. Akua was rumoured – but not confirmed – to have a metaphorical skeleton key that would let her pass through everything unharmed but her many minions had to make do with being keyed in on at most a handful of wards. My talkative corpse couldn’t even get me through the one I’d failed to quite literally punch through earlier. He did know how to get past the equivalent on the second floor, but not how to go any further than that. Neither he nor his buddies had been high enough the pecking order for that. This was something of a problem, especially after I confirmed that the first contingency following the palace being attacked was every soldier within ten blocks rushing to secure it. I was going to be up in my neck in enemies if I didn’t hurry, and this entire place was designed to make hurrying more or less impossible. I’d freely admit that puzzles weren’t something I particularly enjoyed, so the notion of spending a few hours being swarmed by wights while trying to figure out how Diabolist’s mind worked was not high on my list of priorities.

So I’d taken another angle.

The newly-renamed First Volunteer, after being squeezed for every drop of information he knew on the palace defences, was told to guide me to the next knot of mages that were holed up. Diabolist had crafted this ridiculously complicated maze for me to run through? Fine. I could deal with that. I just needed to kill and raise mages until I had enough around to figure out the way through to her. It still took me the better part of an hour before I saw real progress. With seven dead mages trailing behind me I finally go to a window on the edge of the west wing overlooking the central courtyard. Behind it I could see the centre of the palace, where they all agreed the throne room would be. I turned towards my panoply of undead and cleared my throat.

“Should Have Ducked,” I said. “That section of the palace, does it have more of the threshold wards?”

A man with most his cheek missing watched me with blue eyes.

“It does not,” he replied.

I glanced at my most recent acquisitions, A Dress Is Not Armour and Surprisingly A Bleeder, who were standing impossibly still.

“Either of you ever been in there?” I probed.

I got twins shake of the head in reply. Diabolist had restricted access to that part of her lair to her inner circle, apparently, none of which I’d managed to get my hands on. I wasn’t eager to enter there blind, but I’d already had to abandon one way through because the wights had caught up and it was only a matter of time before they got to here as well. Breaking the window and making my way on foot was, according to these fellows, enough for me to enter. That reeked of trap, but not one I could afford to avoidk. If Diabolist really did have Black, leaving her the time to cook up a ritual was the worst thing I could do. I’d had my Named ripped out in this very city once, and though I wasn’t sure whether the alignment that had allowed that to happen still existed it was not a risk I wanted to take. I was not unaware I might not be the target this time, if she pulled that ritual again. For a moment I considered taking the dead mages with me, but just as quickly I dismissed the notion. Taking corpses in a fight with a Praesi sorcerer was just asking to get fucked with.

“You are to destroy each other with fire,” I ordered. “The last remaining mage is to destroy themselves using the same.”

They bowed and I raised an eyebrow. I hadn’t ordered that. The longer I kept them around, the smarter they were getting. I was breaking the glass with the pommel of my sword when the first flash of fire erupted behind me, but I didn’t look back. I landed in the courtyard in a crouch and wasted no time out in the open. A good thing, too. Streaks of flame immediately began to bloom above, lashing down in my direction. Stone blew up behind me as I ran and more streaks formed ahead. Best not to get hit by that, I mused. I’d probably walk away still alive, but not without some damage I could ill afford. There was servant’s entrance up ahead but also two other flame arrays lighting up so I swerved to the side and went straight for the wall instead. There was sorcery in it, but it did not feel like the wards that’d blocked me. My perception wasn’t sharp enough to get more than that. Name flaring, I rolled out of the way of fire that left smoking trails in the stone where I’d been a heartbeat ago and came out standing right in front of the wall. Sending the power to my fist, I swung against the stone. Triumphantly I felt the stone give, but what followed was less pleasant.

The closest description I could put into words was that it was like swinging at a spinning wheel. The stone gave for a moment, but then force came back at me and blew me off my feet. Flame came down from the side and I formed a pane of ice at the last moment but the fire evaporated it and thundered trough. I angled myself so that my cloak would catch the worst of it and still half my pauldron was torn off, leaving behind a smoking mess. Fuck, I eloquently thought as I legged it before I could be turned into a smoking crater by the next volley. I did not fancy my chances with the servant entrance, either. Even if I made it there unharmed I could not seriously believe Diabolist wouldn’t cover the obvious way in. She lived in there, so there had to be a convenient path inside for her inevitable servants and attendants, but that didn’t mean she had to leave it there when fighting an invasion. That left... I glanced to the side. A long way around, into what looked like a ripped up garden. Mostly open ground. I leapt away from another strike and slid across the stone, noticing as I did that the first hit was followed by another two immediately. Were the arrays focusing? Shit. Yeah, garden was out. I looked at the wall I’d failed to break and bit my lip. All right, Catherine, what do we do when we can’t go through? I cocked my head to the side, then frowned. Well, it could hardly be worse than the garden path. Probably.

I ran back for the wall, ducking another volley by the skin of my teeth. Diabolist’s ward had punched back, but only when I’d tried to go through . So there was a chance this would work. Also that I would die, but that came around as a possible outcome with depressing regularity. A twist of will had a handhold of ice forming on the surface. I’d seen the Watch do something similar once – wait, no, I was going about this wrong. I threw myself off the wall as fire struck the surface and, damnably, was almost immediately spat out mere inches away from where I was. No matter. I landed on a platform of shadow and began working my way up. Much easier. Going upwards instead of sideways was trickier, but as it turned out a much shorter path. Four passes had me leaping through a window that had felt absent of wards and I rolled through the wood and glass shards to rise smoothly to my feet. The window had felt like an oversight. It had not been, I learned almost immediately. All the surrounding surfaces were warded, more discreetly, and behind me I heard the sound of flame lashing out through the opening.

“I can’t believe I fell for that,” I admitted.

Definitely should have kept going up all the way to the roof, I mused. I managed to throw myself out of the way before the array torched me, at which point the situation cheerfully continued proceeding downhill. I really should have known: Praesi never turned down the opportunity to fuck you over twice when it was on the table. Around me were the same spinning wards as outside: when the streaks of fire hit the wall, they started to ricochet wildly in every direction. Too quickly for me to avoid. I hid under my cape but the impact was still enough to smash me into the wall, which fucking smashed me back because of course it would. Then another array shot fire into the room, and at that point there was more flame than empty space in this place. I was about to reluctantly try to use an aspect to force my way out when there was another explosion. The door flew off the hinges, smacking me in the side. I took it in stride, flipping the wooden surface to reflect another streak of fire, and then from the corner of my eye I saw a green, ugly mug pop out of the door frame.

“So,” Robber grinned, “about that promotion.”

Chapter 65: Elision

“A hero should not confuse striking at Evil and doing Good, lest their Good become the act of striking.”
– Theodore Langman, Wizard of the West

I slumped against the wall, catching my breath, and resisted the urge to deck Robber in the face. He looked like he was enjoying this way too much for it to be healthy. That’d been a close call, inside the room. At this point I was unsure whether Diabolist was actually out to kill me or not – she’d been hinting pretty heavily she wanted me to be the Black to her second-rate Malicia – but just letting me get hammered by those arrays until I was burnt pulp would have been enough to get me captured even if it didn’t get me dead. Dead might be the better outcome of the two, if it came to that. Assuming it even stuck.

“How the fuck did you all get in here?” I panted.

Robber alone, I could have bought. He was tricky that way. But there was a full line skulking around the corridor. Some were wounded, I noted, and not just by blades: there were tell-tale marks of spellfire on some of their gear. They’d been in a scrap before getting here, but I’d assume not even the Special Tribune’s pack of marauders had been audacious enough to assault this horror of a palace. Goblins were a blade best used in the dark or in the enemy’s back. There was a reason they weren’t put in shield walls.

“Special Tribune Robber, ready to report,” the wretch said, sparkling with insolence.

I was going to regret this, I suspected. But at least odds were good I’d be able to sift out a few useful nuggets out of the mixture of lies and blatant exaggerations he would offer.

“Proceed,” I sighed.

That he saluted with the wrong hand before beginning to speak, I thought, was likely emblematic of what was about to follow.

“So,” Robber said, “we were just walking around, staying out of trouble.”

“Were you,” I flatly said.

“I’m a great believer in the sanctity of law and order,” Robber said, putting hand over his chest.

It was, I noticed as a splitting headache dawned, over the wrong side to be covering his heart. Idly I glanced up and chalked up the lack of thunder following that audacious blasphemy as yet another sign the Gods Above were washing their hands clean of this whole mess.

“Then wights started swarming over the arrays we were supposed to blow up, which was all right,” the goblin told me. “But then mages showed up, and the key places got locked up real tight. So then Captain Borer – that’s him right there, a repeat troublemaker I’ve had to report him several times-“

I glanced at the side where he was pointing and found a smaller goblin, with dark green skin tinted even darker over where his eyebrows would be if his kind weren’t hairless. It made it look like he was perpetually frowning. He looked pained, but also reluctant to outright contradict a superior officer.

“We should make trouble, is what Borer said,” the Special Tribune blithely continued. “It’s pathologic with him, I’ve been looking into getting him a mind healer.”

“I imagine they’d take a single look at you and run screaming,” I mused.

“That’s racist, Boss,” Robber informed me, trying to give me what I assumed to be doe eyes but ended up looking like a goblin wearing some poor doe’s skin and batting his eyes through the horrifying flesh mask. “Anyway, as the qualified voice of reason I put my foot down. Was about to look for some important people to help have some falls down the stairs when we ran into Lord Black.”

My eyes sharpened and I leaned forward. This was the first I’d heard of my teacher since we’d parted ways, unless you counted Diabolist boasting she’d captured him.

“He’s not with you anymore?” I pressed.

“No,” Captain Borer said, before I could be strung around some more.

“That’s another gold star of shame for you, Captain,” Robber told him with a leering grin. “I expect you to wear all twenty-three of them on your chest when we return to camp.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I told the poor bastard. “Robber, stop fucking around. I don’t have the time to spare. Where’s Black?”

The goblin turned serious, or at least as much as close as he could ever get.

“He took us to visit an old friend,” he replied. “General Fasili Mirembe. The Carrion Lord figured he wasn’t outside with the vanguard, you see. He had to be in a room somewhere he could command from without risking his very expensive blood.”

“Why target him ?” I frowned. “Diabolist is the head of the snake. Fasili getting the axe wouldn’t actually change much.”

“That’s exactly what Borer said,” Robber baldly lied. “Only much less respectful. The Black Knight did that weird smile thing – I see where you get it from now, it was kind of uncomfortable seeing it on another face – and told us that if you want to learn how to bury a villain, the first person to hit up is always their second.”

My fingers clenched.

“He was after something that Fasili would have,” I said.

“Skeleton key,” the goblin said. “There’s only supposed to be one, but you can’t stab your warchief in the back if you can’t get to her.”

“That’s how you got in here,” I deduced. “But your people look like they’ve fought. There was resistance?”

“There was a whole garrison of dead around him,” Robber acknowledged. “We couldn’t handle that much, not even going in quiet. So Lord Black made a distraction.”

I closed my eyes and silently cursed. Fucking Hells, Black. A dangerous gamble at the darkest hour that would allow extremely important information to reach me in my moment of need? That explained why Robber had gotten here exactly when I needed him to – my teacher had effectively twisted Creation’s arm into ensuring as much. At the price, it seemed, of getting overwhelmed by Akua’s minions and taken prisoner. He was playing shatranj with us all and treating himself a piece like any other. I spat to the side and turned my gaze onto Robber.

“If it went down this way, you’ll have gotten more than a key,” I said.

That large a sacrifice would have impact. It would get me an edge of some sort.

“He told me to pass along a message,” the goblin said, and this time there was no humour in his voice. “It went ‘Only one strike. Make it count.’”

And there it was. The way out of the coming trap that Diabolist would have laid for me. I grit my teeth. We would have words about this, if he survived the day.

“How much of your cohort is left?” I asked Robber.

“A bare hundred,” the Special Tribune replied. “Dug-in mages are tricky to handle.”

Considering that meant half his men were gone, that was something of an understatement. I rose to my feet and rolled my shoulder. Those fire arrays had stung , cloak or not.

“All right,” I said. “Here’s what you’re going to do.”

I spoke, and as I did his grin got a whole lot nastier.

—

I’d been taught that, while assaulting the stronghold of a villain, there were three things to watch out for.

The first was the monster. It wasn’t always a greater devil or a demon, though admittedly that was the traditional Wasteland playbook. Some entity, usually difficult to handle, would be leashed somewhere in the lair to be used as a way to beat down an enemy too powerful for the villain themselves to handle. It was too much to hope that in this case it would be the greater devil we’d shanked before entering Liesse – that’d been a gatekeeper, and while it would have been difficult to handle on my own it wasn’t the kind of brutal counterstroke that someone with Diabolist’s resources would be able to keep around. I had a fight ahead of me, and it wasn’t going to be a pleasant one. My advantage here was that even by villainous standards, Akua was massively arrogant. She wanted me for her attack dog, apparently, so she wouldn’t open the game by sending whatever her monster was after me. She’d want the personal touch, at least until I backed her in a corner and those kinds of considerations went out the window. Considering I’d had to hack my way through both fae courts over the last year to varying degrees, my bet was on something related to Arcadia. I’d even had Masego and Archer send Summer after her neck a few months ago, so it made sense that I’d be made to pay for that one way or another.

The second was the trial, because there was more to killing a villain than just running them through. There was always a cost, a crucible you had to go through to earn that kill. The peasant boy that ended up slaying the dragon didn’t just pick up the magic sword in a rubbish heap, he had to bleed first. What made a hero a hero wasn’t the fancy weapon or the birth right, it was the courage. Or whatever other trite and actually fairly common quality they’d had in them all along. The shade that had once owned the sword would force a test, or the devil guarding the phylactery whisper some sweet temptation. I was of the opinion that lacking that kind of trial was why the Lone Swordsman hadn’t gone out in the blaze of glory, just two stomps to the back of the neck. We’d been opposed, yes. But there’d been little personal about it except for mutual dislike. To me he’d been a means and then a liability. To him I’d been a symbol of everything he wanted to destroy. Behind that, neither of us had thought of the other as more than a stepping stone towards the real fight. Diabolist wasn’t a lit sharper tossed at me by the Hashmallim, though. The higher the both of us rose, the clearer it had become that the story could only end with one of us dead or kneeling. I was partial to dead. That wouldn’t come without a price.

The third was the pivot. Fight between Named were never as simple as who pulled out their aspects first or who was better with spell and sword. While an animated corpse without a single aspect and a shaky mantle, I’d been able to beat a still-fresh Heiress and Lone Swordsman in Liesse because while they went for blood I’d gone for the story. It’d felt like a complicated thing to juggle at the time, but in retrospect it’d been fairly straightforward. Here, now that we’d returned to the very city where I’d once died, there were a dazzling amount of moving parts. Black. Warlock and the Woe. The Empress. And Diabolist herself. That last thread, in my eyes, was what would make or break this day. There was a moment ahead where the weight of Creation’s attention would be on both our shoulders, and when that moment came the one of us who made the choice first was going to be the one who got to walk away. There was a lot of danger to that. Spinning that wheel with William had been one thing because the Lone Swordsman, for all his many flaws, had principles. He had lines he hesitated to cross even for a win, if only a few. Diabolist did not. Her principle, ironically enough, was the same that the Legions had chanted outside her gate. Victory mattered, everything else was dross. If I wanted to win, I had to go into that room ready to cut down something I loved.

She had Black. I did not like the forming shape of this.

My sword was already bared when I found the heart of the palace. The Dukes of Liesse had been kings, once, and their ancestral seat still looked the part. The flight of steps before me had not been built to be lightly ascended. The granite was rough, the steps too tall for more than one at a time to be climbed. What began as a broad procession grew narrow as it rose, leading to tall gates of bronze that now stood sealed. Behind them, I knew, awaited the woman I had come to kill. Sorcery permeated the air here, so thick that every movement felt like I was stirring unseen wisps. So thick I could not tell if there was an array hidden, which meant there was one . The very trap, I thought, that Black had let himself be taken to help me beat.

I took a step forward and split .

—

Catherine Foundling found herself tired, after a hard bout in the Pit, and slept at the Rat’s Nest. She never stumbled across a man raping a girl, or what came of it.

—

Catherine Foundling bet on herself in the Pit and lost, without having meant to. Her savings thinned. She never earned enough to go to the College.

—

Catherine Foundling had watch sergeant’s a hand around her throat, choking the life out of her. The man began to speak, but through his belly emerged a sword that keened.

—

My boot touched the stone. I was myself, across three lives I had never lived and one I was living. I began the climb in utter silence.

—

Catherine stood in the crowd when they hung Governor Mazus. It was vindication, sealed by the choked cries of the man that was just another Wasteland leech. But the Rat’s Nest would not pay for her her tuition in Ater, not anymore, so she sought Booker and made a deal. In the months that followed she no longer came on the nights where bruises were what men paid for. She earned gold with a sword in hand, catering to the howls a mob that would settle for nothing less than death. The coin she earned was drenched in blood, but blood was the trade she had chosen and she made her peace with that truth. Catherine did not know blades well, when she began, and her opponents did. She learned, but when she stood among the crowd of cadets awaiting placement in a company she had only one eye and more scars than a girl her age should have.

—

Coin was what killed the dream, not the schemes of foes she would never meet. Catherine found her savings disappearing like smoke, and Harrion telling her the Rat’s Nest could not longer afford her was the final nail in the coffin. It was a bitter truth, and the bitterness seeped into her bones. The orphanage had taught her enough for a position as a tutor or tradeswoman, but the thought of it had her choking in anger. Impotence cut deepest of all. When Governor Mazus hung she was not in the crowd: her brawl with a guard that had hands prone to wandering had ended with the woman’s neck snapped. Marked for the gaol, barred from the Pit by Booker, she took the offer when it came. Better the Smugglers than the Assassins or the Thieves, she decided.

—

Catherine did not believe in heroes, but she believed in debts. When two monsters cloaked in black arrived in the alley and struck at her saviour over the cooling corpses of her would-be murderers, she chose her side. They survived only by the skin of their teeth, the Lone Swordsman losing a hand to a moving shadow as a large woman turned into twisted abomination. They fled the alley, the city, the region. It was doomed, she knew. The monsters always won here. But for the first time since she’d been born Catherine Foundling breathed free air, and it was intoxicating. William learned to listen to her, after she opened the throat of the first Eye of the Empire after them. It was in Summerholm that her Name found her. Squire , the Heavens whispered. She knew whose death was needed to become more.

—

The War College taught Catherine her limits. She was good. Swift with a sword, clever with her mind and with a talent for the unexpected. Tiger Company fostered her skills, seeing in her lieutenant or captain in the making, and for a time she was sergeant under the cold-eyed ogre they called Hune. It was not the already-famous Hellhound that put blood in her mouth. It was Lizard Company, Morok’s brutes shattering her tenth and leaving her broken on the ground. One of the orcs stomped her wrist twice, calling her Wallerspawn , and it never healed properly. She never forgave their kind for that, not the wound but the blind ugly hate she glimpsed in the orc’s eye. Goblins were tribe of their own, regardless of company, and the better Praesi pretended she did not exist. The worst made sport of her, and settling that with teeth on the ground made her as feared as she was alone. She had the talent to make captain, but was never elected by the others. Sergeant was the highest she ever rose at the College.

—

Catherine could afford the tuition now – and she could ten times over, because she was good with a lie and even better with a knife – but she no longer wanted to go. She’d had a glimpse of the true face of her people, beyond the well-worn stories of the Old Kingdom. Every night she rubbed elbows with murderers and thieves, not one of them Wastelander. What was there to save? Within two years there were only two above her in Liesse who belonged to the Guild of Smugglers, and only one after gold and whispers were traded. She left the title to the other, but the reins were her own. The quotas imposed by the Tower rankled, but she knew better than provoke that beast. It was the rest of the gutter she turned to, the forgotten and the ignored. The Hedge Guild folded first, after their most dangerous mage was found strung up downtown. The King of Thieves stole two shipments from Mercantis as a warning against great ambitions, so when she got her hands on him she melted down his pretty crown and poured it down his throat. The Assassins offered truce. She told them to kneel. Blood followed.

—

They killed their first Calamity the day before she turned eighteen. The Warlock was a monster, but a monster who loved his son. That was the death of him, and half Summerholm as well. The Penitent’s Blade beheaded the sorcerer among the ashes of his tower and Squire mustered enough kindness to have the Apprentice’s corpse left by his side for the Praesi to bury. They were growing. Thief, Bumbling Conjurer, Hunter and Bard. William found them and bound them, but it was Catherine who made a sword of them all, that wielded it against the Empire. The scent of rebellion was in the air. They ghosted across the land of her birth, followed by a thousand spies, and wherever they went governors and generals died. The Empress sent more. The Black Knight drew them into Liesse and burned the city around them but they were gone, gone through the corpse of an angel and back to haunt him soon enough. Procer sent coin and promises but both were spurned. They had sworn to see Callow free, whatever the cost. One foreign master would not be traded for another, and as the flames burned higher and the graveyards grew full.

—

She was twenty-three when rebellion came to Callow. Long past the College, Captain Foundling had seen luck good and ill. The Fourteenth Legion, raised in the year after her graduation, had offered better opportunity to rise than the old legions already thick with veterans. But peace, oh peace was her trouble. It took three years to go from lieutenant to captain, and the tribunes above her were all young and hale. Her company was obedient and well-drilled, but loved her little. Most were Praesi, and her reputation in Ater had followed her to the camp. The droplet that tipped over the cup was that the Fourteenth never fought. It was sent to garrison Summerholm as the other Legions fought, dispersing riots and patrolling empty streets as her desperate countrymen died in droves in the south. Vindication, that the Empire could not be fought and beaten. Vindication but no hope. It had been long since Captain Foundling was last kind, not since she’d killed men for gold in the Pit, and so her conscience went untroubled when she slipped poison in her superior officer’s ale. That was the game, in the Wasteland, and if it must be played she would. She would rise whatever the cost, to her or anyone else. After that it was only a matter of patience and skill. Staff Tribune Foundling was twenty-nine, when civil war erupted, and through chaos she rose higher still.

—

The Guild of Assassins cost her a hand and a permanent limp, before they were broken over her knee. From blood-filled gutters Catherine Foundling fashioned her crown. There was only one throne in the Empire, this she knew, but come night from Harrow to Dormer her will was the writ of law. The Tolltaker they called her now, for there was no sin under Callowan sky she did not get a cut from. A woman with ink-stained hands came one morning and presented her two scrolls. One held a seal, the Tower’s own. The other a list of quotas. It was not a negotiation, and neither of them pretended otherwise. She thought of that, when the heroes came and asked for a way to enter Summerholm unseen. They were going to kill the Black Knight, they promised. She smiled and said she would arrange it. The coin she got from selling their location to the Praesi was spent on a beautiful mansion in Whitestone, where the nobles of Laure still huddled and pretended relevance. After the heroes were all killed, she put it to the torch. Because she could. Because she had no reason not to. To remind the soft-bellied aristocrats living there of what fear tasted like. She watched the flames and wondered when it had all stopped mattering.

—

My boot scuffed the last step and I stood before the gate. Closed, but kept so by sorcery. It parted without a sound when I pushed and before me the throne room stretched. Tapestries hung from the rafters like columns, each an old triumph of the Empire presented in colourful cloth. The contrast to the bare stone of the floor was stark. Runes shone on the walls and balls of blue flame lit up the darkness bright as day. My gaze moved to the back, where the Diabolist awaited. Languidly sprawled on the old throne of the kings of the south, Akua Sahelian watched me with bright eyes. There was no sign of Black. She wasn’t keeping him here, then.

“Swiftness, Catherine,” she smiled, “has ever been your unmaking. You never learned patience.”

“ Break ,” I replied coldly.

The throne shattered like a cheap bauble and the wall behind it too. Diabolist fell prone, laughing, and I had no intention of allowing her to cast. Frost formed at the edge of my sword as I shot forward, granite cracking under the force.

“What your Hierophant has wrought, I claim,” Akua said.

The last word reverberated. Aspect, I thought. Then it felt like a hand around my throat, and I screamed. There was a vice around me, and as my Name desperately clawed at it I found myself stumbling while Diabolist rose.

“I told you, didn’t I?” the dark-skinned woman said. “That this ends with you kneeling. What I have claimed, I bind. It is mine .”

I fought it. My knee shook and slowly began to bend, so I wrested my hand from her control and stabbed my blade into the leg. Pain flooded my mind and I embraced it.

“Kneel, Catherine Foundling,” Akua Sahelian ordered. “And rise my Black Knight.”

“Fuck you,” I gasped. “He’s-“

“Dead,” Diabolist said. “He was not the kind of man easily kept prisoner. Why take the risk?”

I buckled, and one knee touched the floor.

—

Rebellion spread across Callow like a wildfire. Liesse first, but then the south rose up and wherever they went spears were dug out from fields and cellars, ploughshares hammered into swords. Old banners were dusted off, and when the knights of Callow knelt before her the whole kingdom boiled over. It was a bloodletting unlike any Catherine had ever seen. Garrisons swarmed by angry mobs, mages killed with stones and knives and clubs. The Empress gave answer with a hard hand. The day after Summerholm was liberated, Legions surrounded the city and torched it with goblinfire. The rebellion flinched. Assassin dogged them every step, even slit Hunter’s throat, and though she killed him twice with William’s help he always came back. The fought the Praesi near Marchford, a pitched battle, and they would have won had some orc commander not disobeyed her general’s orders and attacked instead of retreated. In the wake of the defeat madness spread. There had gone their last chance to keep any of this contained. It was no longer a war but a hundred smaller ones, and wherever they went they won but they could not be everywhere. The south held, nonetheless, and though the central burned the fight was far from lost.

Then Procer invaded, seizing the Red Flower Vales.

The Praesi had been ready for it, unlike Squire. They retreated to the ashes of Summerholm, destroying everything as they went. Fields salted, villages torched and wells fouled. If they could not have Callow, it would be as much a Wasteland as their home. The banner of the kingdom grew ragged, but still the people rallied to it. Every man and woman who could hold a sword took one up, and though the levies died by the thousands the tide was turned back. The Lone Swordsman hung seven princes and one and the Conjurer, long grown beyond the bumbling, brought down the mountains on the Vales. Shut, for good. The host marched to the ruins of Summerholm, the last foothold of Praes in the kingdom, and there the Black Knight awaited. Three days and three nights the battle went. The Hwaerte ran red with blood. But in the end Catherine Foundling rammed her sword through the back of the Black Knight’s neck and from that death rose Knight as well, decked in white. The monster’s bag of tricks had finally run out but oh, the cost. Callow was not a kingdom, it was a graveyard and an army. The Fields of Streges were taken back, and through those lands Callow reborn marched to reclaim the Blessed Isle. Whispers awaited them there. Dread Empress Malicia was dead, murdered in the Tower.

Dread Empress Magnificent, First of Her Name, awaited them as well. With a host the likes of which had not been seen since the days of Triumphant: demons and fortresses aflight, swarms of devils and every greenskin not buried in Callowan fields.

“Kneel,” Akua Sahelian ordered, crowned in dread.

—

General Foundling had struck a deal with the devil. The Empress had been losing her grasp for years now, and High Lady Tasia Sahelian might be a viper but she was a viper on the rise. She swore the damning oaths, and over the corpse of every other senior officer in the Fourteenth rose a general. It was on the fields of Callow she fought her part of the war. The nests of rebellion that sprang up all over the Old Kingdom when the Praesi turned their knives on each other were carefully brought into the fold of her legion, promised the settling of old grudges against the same generals that had crushed Callow in the Conquest. Even the knights came to her banner, after High Lady Tasia’s mages broke the right minds and reformed them into something more flexible. One occupying legion after another shattered even as the war became a thing of horror in the Wasteland, and from that destruction General Foundling made herself a force to reckon with. The Knightsbane, drawn and quarried by Liessen chargers. General Sacker given a true red throat instead of one her legion affected. Orim the Grim, a smile carved on his lips as he bled out. Marshal Ranker burned alive, save for the black hand that was her old boast. Wherever she went, legends died.

Nearly every cadet that had gone through the College in her days was dead, either at her hand or that of Sahelian assassins. It was Grem One-Eye and his second, the one they called the Hellhound, that broke her siege of Summerholm and pushed her back in the heartlands of Callow. With but a handful of ragged legions they beat her again at Denier and smashed her one last time near Marchford. It didn’t matter. The High Lords had risen one and all in the backing of a villain for the Tower, ome going by the Name of Heiress. Tasia’s own daughter, it was said. And if One-Eye was fighting General Foundling in Callow, he was not winning the war for Malicia in the Wasteland. Word trickled that Heiress levelled half of Ater winning a duel against the Warlock, that the Black Knight had retreated to the Steppes to raise another army with the Empress. Marshal Grem and the Hellhound retreated to Summerholm and Callow was Catherine’s, finally. The Imperial governors were seized and executed, even those allied to the Sahelians, and General Foundling refused a crown but prepared for the next part of the war. It never came, the embers smothered when a Hellgate was opened in the heart of Summerholm. The last true stronghold of loyalist resistance, wiped out in a single night. Before dawn, precisely a hundred Callowans died for every governor she had killed.

A warning that did not go unheard.

Procer seized the Red Flower Vales, declaring the Tenth Crusade and forming a coalition that spanned half of Calernia. General Foundling began talks with the First Prince, but they ended when a ziggurat of stone large as Laure cast its long shadow over the very city. Dread Empress Magnificent, First of Her Name, had come to reminder her of oaths taken.

“Kneel,” Akua Sahelian ordered, crowned in dread.

—

The Praesi were at each other’s throats, but what did the Tolltaker care? The quotas would not change no matter who held the Tower. But then, oh wonder of wonders, months passed and the war continued. Then the first two legions were pulled out of Callow to reinforce the Wasteland, and that was just the scent of opportunity wasn’t it? Catherine Foundling had left behind the illusion that there was something remarkable about her people along with her girlhood years, but she was Callowan still. For small slights long prices, and there had been so many slights offered since the Conquest. The Tolltaker mustered her empire of ghosts and crooks, and began a waltz with the many devils claiming the floor. It was a long and bloody night, when every Imperial governor in the old kingdom found death knocking at their door. The nobles, feckless wastes that they were, gathered in hidden rooms and plotted a nation born anew. She had no interest in dead dreams, and so the right whispers fhad Eyes of the Empire rounding them up for treason. They were looking for her as well, of course, and the Legions with them. They found nothing, for her kingdom was not made of castles but of a hundred ugly pacts made in the dark. Those could not be besieged, could not be fought on the field.

There was blood in the water, and so the west stirred. Procer marched into the Vales, filling every nook and cranny with their dead before the Legions could be dislodged. A host of Procerans marched into the central plains, claiming that they had come to put Gaston of Liesse on his rightful throne. So the Tolltaker had him killed, right in the middle of his precious little army. She had never enjoyed anything half so much as watching sixty thousand foreigners milling about, trying to think of justification for their invasion. They spoke of liberating Callow, in the end, and as they tangled with the remaining legions Catherine found her own amusements. The pot of rebellion was already boiling, so she helped it along. Weapons from the Kingdom Below, acquired through Mercantis, reached the hands of mobs. The Assassin came for her but she set the warehouse aflame with stolen goblinfire and whatever the creature had been, it did not crawl out. She learned to live with a hole through the lung, her breath always rasping. One by one the last aristocrats of Callow found knife in the back or poison in the cup, even as knights emerged from the south and fought both Procerans and Praesi for rule of the land.

There was no great plan, no matter what her lieutenants believed. There was only the dance, and every day she lasted against the monsters was yet another victory. The rebel in the Wasteland won, though that part of Creation had come to deserve the name twice over in that making, and after claiming the Tower she moved west with all her strength. Hellgates bloomed across the land and Procer retreated back behind the Vales before calling for a crusade no one else wanted. The knights fought against the tide, valiantly, and equally valiantly they died. In the wreckage of it all Dread Empress Magnificent, First of Her Name, came to Laure. The call came and the Tolltaker went, for someone who cared for nothing had nothing to lose. In the throne room of ancient Fairfax kings, a Praesi stood and looked down at her.

“Kneel,” Akua Sahelian ordered, crowned in dread.

—

Across three lives I had never lived and one I was living, I knelt. A face as beautiful as it was terrible allowed a smile of triumph to flicker.

—

Only one strike. Make it count.

—

I/General Foundling/the Tolltaker/the White Knight rose, and shoved steel through her throat.

—

My boot touched the stone. I looked up to doors of bronze wide open and began the climb, humming the tune to a song I had never heard.

Chapter 66: Refrain

“On the third month of the year I found myself on the outskirts of the city of Okoro, and stumbled upon one of the famous Praesi field rituals. The throats of ten and three men were slit on dusty ground, and from the lifeblood spilled the earth turned from yellow to black. Granted audience with the lord presiding, I asked him the meaning of the ceremony. ‘Everywhere men bleed,’ he told me. ‘In Praes we get the full worth of it.’”
– Extract from “Horrors and Wonders”, famed travelogue of Anabas the Ashuran

The Diabolist was lounging on a Callowan throne when I stepped into the hall, and wasn’t that just the image of my people’s lot since the Conquest? The Praesi had crawled into the country in the wake of Black’s victories and claimed every seat and symbol of power, masquerading as rulers when all they’d been were thieves. Not, I thought damningly, even particularly skilful ones. I’d once thought that the Imperial governors with better reputations than Mazus reflected a certain restraint in the wave of highborn that had been appointed as petty kings over Callow. I knew better now. It’d been fear that kept them in line, fear of Malicia’s deep schemes and Black’s sharp sword. That’d always been the weakness of their reforms, when it came down to it. The aristocracy of the Wasteland, the people that really held power in the Empire, had never bought into the ideologies they peddled. They only saw a knife taken to old rights and privileges, and no amount of victory would ever reach them over that. No matter. I’d put fear in them as well, if that was what it took, and forging that fear would start with Akua Sahelian’s death.

She looked the same as she had in the dream, I noted, save for one detail. Around her neck hung a necklace, the centrepiece of which was a small cylinder of obsidian. My eyes lingered on it, my Name sniffing out the soul that lay within. Trap , I decided. She’d been clever enough so far to keep her soul out of anyone’s grasp, she wouldn’t risk it here and now. Likely it was meant to bait out an aspect from me, but a liar lost power when you knew them as one. The hall was empty and echoing as I strode forward, the tapestries hanging from the rafters stirred by some invisible current. The whole room was thick with sorcery, more than my senses could parse. She had prepared her grounds, and that was a mark on the right side of my earlier assumption: Diabolist intended to get her hands dirty. Maybe not with a blade – I couldn’t see one on her and she wasn’t wearing proper armour, but neither of those things meant much – but she intended on fighting me herself. At least in the beginning. I disliked it, that I wasn’t able to tell where she’d pull her monster from. It put an itch between my shoulder blades.

Against that calibre of opponent, one mistake was all it took.

“You were forewarned,” Diabolist said.

“Was I?” I drawled. “Please, do elaborate.”

I could read it on her face, no matter how blank she kept it. The urge to tell me what that trap in the stairs had been, to expound on her own cleverness. I’d been struck with it a few times as well, that need to tell your opponent exactly how you’d screwed them over, but it was different in her. More intense, and not just because she ran deeper to the source of villainy than I did. It occurred to me, in that moment, how lonely a person Akua must really be. Unable to trust anyone, to do so much as offer a genuine laugh. It was no way to live. The highborn of the Wasteland were inhuman as much because of their history as because they denied themselves the basic trappings of humanity. If all you were was artifice, what was there left? But I had no pity to spare for the likes of Diabolist, and the only reason I refrained from further mockery was that her extolling her own virtues would be useful to me.

“Hypocrite,” Akua chided me. “You cast disdain at my feet for the occasional exegesis, yet how many of your little... diatribes have you indulged in, since you became the Squire?”

“If I cast anything at you, Diabolist, you can rest assured it won’t be the feet. Still, I don’t actually know what that word means,” I grinned. “You know, on account of being a mudfoot peasant.”

“Monologue,” she sighed. “Your fixation on your origins is unseemly, Catherine. The promise of the Tower is that anyone can rise, regardless of birth.”

“See,” I mused, “the way you felt the need to add regardless kind of defeats your point.”

“Should I be ashamed of what I am?” Akua asked, amused.

“I mean, I could give you a list of reasons why but that’d take a while,” I said. “It’s a pretty long list. In essence, Gods yes .”

“Barring assassination, I will live at least three decades older than a baseborn,” Diabolist said. “My natural capacity for sorcery is beyond even that of your Hierophant. I know more, can accomplish more, I am objectively more than others. Why should I apologize for this?”

“Got not issue with the whole Wasteland breeding program,” I began, then adjusted. “No, that’s a lie. I think it’s disturbing as Hells, but not all that worse than the usual marriage alliances everybody else does. I don’t take issue with your talents, Akua. Just what you do with them.”

“It was too much to hope for that the Fourfold Crossing would rid you of the attitude, I suppose,” Diabolist said. “Particularly given that you cheated your way out of it. I’ll admit to some curiosity as to how you accomplished that.”

“Come closer,” I smiled. “I can show you.”

Her nose wrinkled.

“Violence,” she said. “The Carrion Lord’s doing, then. He does like to keep you in the dark, doesn’t he?”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, Black helped me out of that trap you laid for me,” I deadpanned. “Treachery. Ach, what betrayal. I will never forgive him.”

“It was more than a trap,” Akua sharply said. “It was refinement. The clearing of impurities. Or it would have been, without his meddling. As always, he sees defeat in you where he found his own.”

“Was I supposed to derive some kind of lesson from that?” I snorted. “’cause I came in ready to stab you in throat. Not much was learned there.”

The mention of defeat pricked my ears, though. Black had never been shy about teaching me through examples of when he’d screwed up in the past, but it was the first time I was hearing about this Fourfold Crossing. The part I disliked the most about dealing with people like Akua was that they could read me like a book, unless I made a conscious effort not to. She found the hint of interest in me, and expanded. I let her. Usually I’d go in sword swinging to prevent her from making any preparations, but at the moment I could see both her hands I really doubted she was going to pull out anything throughout this conversation she hadn’t managed to prepare while I was getting smacked around by her defences outside.

“Three months, he remained under,” Diabolist said. “He might have stayed forever, had the Apprentice not pulled him out.”

I was the opposite of an expert on magic, but if this wasn’t High Arcana I’d eat my own toes and High Arcana did tend to operate through a kind of logic I could make sense of. Black had sent me in with a warning I’d only be able to strike once. That meant there would have been consequences, if I hadn’t gone after Akua in all four lives. That this was the detail he’d warn me about told me something about how his own go at it had unfolded – he didn’t tend to warn me about specific things unless it was something that’d tripped him up in the past, preferring to offer general knowledge and let me figure out my own way from it. So he’d fucked up in one of his lives. I wasn’t surprised. It was a nasty kind of trap to spring on anyone, if they didn’t go in knowing the key, and for all his cleverness Black had never learned how to lose. He’d won, where it mattered, when his story mattered. He would have stubbornly kept on until he got a victory out of it, even if the game was rigged and he knew it was. That was, in a way, his defining trait.

“He still alive?” I casually asked.

“For now,” Akua said.

I huffed out a laugh.

“Amused, Catherine?” she probed.

“You’re dead,” I said. “You already were, but now? It’s just a matter of how it happens.”

“I warred and won against six legions and the muster of Callow,” Diabolist said. “Against your collection of woes and the most dangerous of the Calamities as well, alone – and still you underestimate me.”

I smiled viciously.

“You think I’m short-changing you,” I said. “I’m not, Akua. What offends you is the lack of respect, but there’s nothing about... this I can respect.”

“I-“

“-lose,” I interrupted. “You always lose. That’s your outcome. You use methods that lead to defeat, because every time you win you make another dozen enemies fitted just for you. I just happen to be the one closest at hand.”

“It only takes once, to change everything,” Diabolist said.

“The refrain of every Empress before you,” I said. “It’s time that was buried. I have axes to grind with the new way, but the old one is in dire need of a grave. Do resist. I’ve been looking forward to the screaming.”

The dark-skinned woman rose to her feet elegantly, brushing her shoulder.

“Well then,” Akua Sahelian said, “shall we begin?”

“That’s your first mistake,” I said. “Thinking I’m only now beginning.”

Thing was, she wasn’t the only one around here who claimed an inheritance – and the way I’d come into mine was a lot more intimate than hers. Black was known for using his shadow, and while I couldn’t mould mine the way he did I was not without tricks. The balls of blue flame that lit up the hall had my silhouette splayed against a tapestry and from there, out of her sight, lines of frost had spread up to the ceiling. Robber was right, I mused. Humans so rarely looked up, Praesi least of all – their Gods dwelled below. I wouldn’t call what I’d crafted an array. I did not have the know-how to make one, and my power was of a different breed besides. But I’d accumulated power in four dots on the ceiling above Diabolist as she spoke, and in that moment I let them loose. Ice shot downwards in four thick pillars, headed straight for her, and the dance began.

That she would survive the first strike was a given. I’d approached the formula that was killing her with that in mind. If I couldn’t get a kill – or even a grave wound – out of the first attack, what could I get? Tying her down. That was the most that was feasible, and so I opened the waltz with something she’d need to be stationary to deal with. That was how mages died, even Named. Lack of mobility. The whirlwind of flame that formed around her reeked of Summer, unsurprisingly, but even as it shattered the pillars of ice I kept pouring power into them. Could I win, if this fight became about reserves? On open field, I’d say yes. But not in here, not in the seat of her power. Letting a caster dig in always led to ugliness, and she’d had months to prepare this room. Sending the Summer Court after her had been a tactical necessity but a strategic mistake, I decided. Keeping her busy had been needed. But anything that didn’t kill Diabolist would be ripped apart and repurposed by her, and now she’d shrugged off my initial blow as a consequence. I doubted it’d be the last time I paid for that.

I’d passed long evenings with Masego, preparing for this fight. Discussing not the theory of sorcery but the practicalities of using it, the limits. The conclusion I’d arrived to was that if I wanted to win, I had to do so within the first ten exchanges. Any longer than that, and her bag of devilries would outshine mine. I’d be stuck on the defensive, and that was the beginning of the crawl to defeat. One exchange had passed. My cloak fluttered behind me as I ran, ten steps passing before she recognized the danger of it. The whirlwind of fire thickened then blew up, forcing back the ice for a precious single heartbeat, and among the pillar of flame was revealed to be nothing at all. Second exchange: she was buying distance, with an illusion. A year ago, that would have been a problem but I had ways to deal with that, now. And the power to spare to use them. My foot stomped against the ground and ice spread from the touch, spreading like a tide. I wasn’t much, not even enough to slip on. But it spread quickly and the silhouette of two boots was revealed.

“There you are,” I said.

Diabolist dismissed her illusion and reappeared with runes hovering in the air before her. High Arcana. Third exchange then. Now she would attempt to hobble me, knowing if she didn’t my sword would find her throat. Lightning spun, first a bolt but then weaving itself into a cage. I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. Her lack of experience fighting against Named was showing – it would have been good against a mortal, but not the likes of me. My body convulsed in pain as I forced my way through the crackling tendrils, but my body was a vessel to my will. I had will enough that pain was just discomfort, something that could be set aside as a distraction if necessity called for it. I was on her within three heartbeats, my own ice no hindrance to me at all. Her wrist snapped, rings of darkness forming around it as the shape of a sword was forged in black. The stance she fell into before I struck was one I recognized. There were half a dozen schools of Soninke swordsmanship and this one I recognized on sight. Koanguka Moko , the Hand-in-Falling. Best used for duelling. I knew how to pick out the weaknesses of that form, how to bait it into a killing stroke, but that was playing her game. Giving her the time to cast again .

You were taught this , I thought. As a child, when your mother decided you must have the skill of a duellist to settle the affairs of the blade between Named. But this wasn’t a duel, and I wasn’t a swordswoman. So when her sword came up perfectly angled to have mine glance off I didn’t fight it – instead I punched her in the belly, and the fourth exchange began. I’d struck hard enough to wreck steel, to powder stone. I would have pulped a legionary with that blow. Akua was blown off her feet by it, but a subtle ripple shivered across her robes and there was no gratifying feel of guts and bone giving under my hand. I let the world slow around me as I sunk into my Name, the sight of Diabolist flying into one of her banners burning itself into my eyes. If I made a mistake here, all the momentum I’d accumulated was gone. It would be hard to recover from that. I needed... I needed to interrupt that rune she was forming and control where she landed, at the same time. My eyes flecked to the tapestry and my hand followed, dark ice forming on the contraption of metal keeping it hung from the rafters and shattering it. When Akua hit the tapestry it folded under her but I got a glimpse of her face, of the small quirk of the lips that betrayed triumph. Trade, I decided, gritting my teeth. The Summer flame hit my shoulder even as I swept the edges of the tapestry, biting down on a scream as I wrapped Diabolist in a very expensive sack and pivoted to smash her into the ground.

The fifth exchange began with me trying and failing to put out the fire burning into my side. I forced Winter into it but Winter always lost, when fighting Summer. I could, if I took a moment, sharpen my will and drown it out. But it would take time I did not have, and this wasn’t my sword arm. I’d wait until I was in danger of losing the arm. Diabolist spoke in the mage tongue, flailing on the ground, and though the words were alien to me the feel of the spell was not. She’d used something similar the last time we fought in Liesse. Even as the floor beneath me roiled with sorcery I leapt, boots landing sideways on a platform of shade as the ground turned to liquid save for a circle around her. I leapt off and came upon her just as she forced aside the tapestry over her, sword point crisp and clear. I rammed it into her chest, an inch away to the left of her heart. Angle would’ve been awkward otherwise, and given her protections I wasn’t taking the risk of it glancing off entirely. Akua’s lips thinned with pain and she lay her hand on my good shoulder even as I twisted the blade to worsen the wound. Too late for me to the dodge, I assessed.

The force that came from her hand blew me off my feet, but I took it in stride. I had, after all, won two victories going into the sixth exchange. The first was that she’d had to dismiss her liquefying spell to cast this one. The second was that, while she rose to her feet and healed her wound with a pale face, I rose to mine and finally had the time to smother the Summer flame without losing the tempo. My shoulder was a ruin of melted steel and burnt flesh, but the cold ended the distraction of the pain and I’d fought through worse in the past. I could almost run my finger along the length of the coming four exchanges, as if they were written in the air, and what I saw there had me smiling. She would notice it soon enough. The moment she reached for one of her arrays and found nothing, she was clever enough she’d put it together. Why I’d encouraged her to keep talking, why I’d not tried to take the fight out of a room she’d carefully crafted into her sanctum. It would have been more madness than gambit, if not for one single thing: just because I’d never used that trick in a fight didn’t mean I couldn’t .

The seventh exchange began when I shot forward. She’d learned from our earlier bout, and this time she didn’t go for lightning. Panes of red light formed behind me, four of them, and when I struck at the one before me the other span and smacked me to the side. I slid across stone and found another set before me when I tried to turn. Ah. Problematic. Unless. I formed a spear of ice and tossed it at the first set, getting it spinning, and carefully adjusted my angle running into the one before me. It jostled my bad arm painfully even through the cold when I was thrown, right into the first set – and from there straight at Diabolist, whose face was amusingly flabbergasted.

I crouched low, sword swinging upwards, and that was the eight exchange opening. The black sword formed again to parry my blade, but she was a second-rate swordswoman at best: I spun on myself, breaking her footing, and even as she fell I flipped my sword and the pommel came down on her pretty white teeth with a deeply satisfying shattering sound. There was nothing graceful or elegant about this: I rolled over her and sat on her body, punching hard enough her sorcerous shield shivered once more and the ground cracked beneath her. She’d had to have felt that, enchantment or not. Threads of light bloomed behind her, tying around her body and ripping her out from under me. I got up to my feet before she could, though the threads hoisted up her a heartbeat later.

The ninth exchange happened when she flicked her wrist at me and nothing happened at all. Her face went blank. I began gathering power into myself, shaping it. Behind us, slowly, the bronze gates collapsed. They were burning green.

“You set fire to your own path of retreat,” Diabolist said, sorcery flaring around her as her teeth healed.

“Wrong again,” I replied. “I set fire to everything .”

In one of those little quirks of Creation, an entire pane of the wall to our side collapsed the moment I finished speaking. Behind it lay a hellscape of goblinfire unleashed. Robber hadn’t skipped on the stuff, I noted. I wouldn’t be surprised if this entire section of the palace was melted stone by the time the fire went out.

“Is this the sum of you, Catherine Foundling?” Akua said. “Were you so disbelieving of victory you decided to burn us both?”

“Do you ever get tired?” I smiled rudely. “You know, of being wrong all the time.”

For the tenth exchange, I opened a gate into Arcadia and stepped through it.

Chapter 67: Middle Eight

“Change, my friend, is the admission that one falls short of perfection. A plebeian sort of doubt, best reserved for rulers who don’t make their enemies eat their own hands.”
– Dread Emperor Revenant

I’d picked my battlefield to stack the game as much in my favour as she had in hers when I’d engaged in the throne room. Much as it irritated me to admit it, there was no real chance my little fire snare would actually kill Diabolist: it was a death trap I hadn’t seen through to the end. Even between villains, there was only one way that kind of play could end. That was fine, since the point hadn’t been to put her down. Gods, I wish it could be that easy. What I’d accomplished was put the hurt on her before putting the torch to whatever nasty surprises she’d prepared just for me. It’d always been made abundantly clear to me that taking a swing at a well prepared mage was a Bad Idea, and I’d venture that warning counted twice as much if the mage in question was Named. Here, though? We were on my chosen grounds. And when the time came to make that choice, I’d picked somewhere I had spilled blood before: the Fields of Wend. I honestly couldn’t think of a better place to kill Akua than a mile-wide stretch of shifting and uneven glaciers in the heart of what had once been Winter.

I’d come out on the edge of the glacier the fae called the Wending Heart, the tallest of them all and topped by a perfectly round platform, and moved away swiftly. Had I mouthed off at the Duke of Violent Squalls here once? It felt like I had. Admittedly when it came to assumptions about my diplomatic proceedings ‘gave insult’ tended to be the right bet. The only downside I could figure was that there might be fae interested in out little scrap who came calling, but even when it came to that I had the advantage. I was still a titled Duchess, and earlier Akua had been throwing around Summer flame. Exactly how it had all come together after the wedding between the King and Queen of Arcadia was still a mystery to me, but I assumed using what could only be violently stolen power wouldn’t exactly please that crowd. And, unlike me, she had no oath from the royals to guarantee her safety. This was as much as I’d be able to tilt the balance my way before it came to a head, short of having the Woe at my back.

I left the fairy gate wide open. Getting Diabolist here was half the point of this in the first place, and besides I wasn’t going to bet on my being better at manipulating that power than her if I tried to close it and she tried to keep it open. Call me sentimental, but if hubris had to get me killed I’d at least require a kind not quite so blatant. Akua strolled through indifferently, casting a look of mild curiosity around her.

“Ah, Catherine,” she laughed throatily. “Your particular mixture of cleverness and ignorance never ceases to injure, does it?”

I studied her carefully. She was moving too slowly. Taking in her surroundings but not really assessing them the way she had earlier – she wasn’t finding good space to stand or noting places to avoid. That meant her attention was elsewhere. I sharpened my senses, but all I could hear was the loud rumble of glaciers smashing into each other. If there were fae, I thought, I should be able to at least make out the edges of their presence. What was she looking for, then? Whatever it was, I suspected letting her have it would lead to no good. With a twist of will, I closed the gate.

“ Claim ,” Diabolist said, tone casual, and ownership of it was ripped from me.

All that remained was a hole in the air too small to even crawl through, but she’d just thrown away an aspect on taking it. I swallowed a breath. It looked like I had a problem on my hands: Akua never did anything without at least three reasons. I let Winter flood my veins and found it still answered unhindered to my will. Then what – no, that was the wrong way to go about this. I was getting sucked into her tempo, and the moment that happened I was done for. It was nearly always better to disrupt than to respond. I charged forward. The sooner I got the both of us off this platform the better.

“The courtesy is late in the giving,” Akua said, “but must be afforded nonetheless.”

I got within three feet of her before the entire Heart spun, and that threw me off my stride long enough for a streak of darkness to strike at my chest and send me sliding back. The tendril of black remained around Diabolist, coiled like a loyal and eager snake. How the fuck had she done that? The spinning, not the pale imitation of my teacher’s trick. This was a fae place of power, she should have no sway here.

“Thank you, Catherine Foundling, for the valuable lessons you taught me in Liesse,” Diabolist said.

I wasted no breath on a reply, but my blood ran cold. This was an echo to words I’d spoke to her at the Blessed Isle, once, and to Barika Unonti right before I put a crossbow bolt into her eye. Not something to be lightly spoken. Akua was beginning a monologue, though, and that was my chance. I was warier in my approach the second time. I tested her defences with a flick of my blade and when the tendril of darkness struck out I bent under it and stepped behind her guard. My blade whistled as I carved through her throat but fuck , I’d lost the tempo and she was one step ahead of me – all I cut was a shade, an illusion, and Akua shivered back into sight at the opposite edge of the Heart. I pivoted without hesitation and returned on the offensive.

“On that night where you broke my bones,” the dark-skinned woman said. “The two of us began a conversation about power that went unfinished. Shall we resume it?”

I breathed out and sought calm. Splashing around like a fool trying to catch a fish barehanded wasn’t going to get my anywhere. Method was how I turned this around. First, finding out if what I saw was real. I touched Winter, the howling desolation made even thicker here in the very place where I had earned my mantle, and ice formed around Diabolist’s feet. She did not even spare it a glance before it began melting, but it was confirmation. I moved then, quick as wink.

“There are weaknesses to my ways,” the villain acknowledged. “Repeated conflict with you has made this clear. But you seem under the impression that means they are without worth. A dangerous assumption.”

I expected the blow to come the moment I was within a foot of coming in striking range, and she did not disappoint. I only caught sight of the thin transparent wedges that cut silently through the air by sharpening my eyes, and though that allowed me to avoid them it also cost me. A ball of dazzling lights formed in front of my face and erupted instantly, searing a dozen colours into my vision. I struck blindly at where she’d been but my sword bounced off something solid and something else caught my ankle and tossed me away. Even as I fell on back in the ice and rolled, I grit my teeth. She was toying with me. She could have done some real damage right then, if she’d been so inclined.

“I’ve told you this before: a Name is not a mere tool,” Akua said. “It has meaning . It is the choosing of a side, of a Role. To borrow its power while denying the Role is to willingly cripple yourself.”

Even as I considered a different angle of attack, a part of me wondered if this might be the wrong way to go about it. She’d never had such an easy time handling me before, which smelled of a pattern or trick I didn’t know. Talking so much should have seen me put a sword in her throat by now. Unless it’s not the right moment , I frowned. Was Creation, even here, putting a finger on the scales until it had received proper theatrics? It wouldn’t need to do much, I thought. Not even weaken me. Just make Diabolist a little luckier, nudge her instincts a little. Keep her dice rolling sixes and her hand full of trumps.

“Ah,” Akua said. “You begin to understand. You are only half a villain. It is not your fault, my dear. You were taught incorrectly by a man who believes power derives from methodology, from philosophy.”

Should I let her keep her talking? If I got stubborn about striking a blow when it was all set against me, I might make a hard mistake and take a wound that would prevent me from actually taking advantage of the opening. If there was an opening at all, which was already an assumption. If she got to finish her speech, though, I suspected I was fucked.

“Power,” Diabolist said. “That is our philosophy. The only philosophy. The rest we craft in the wake of seizing, in a vain attempt to justify what was never just – for justice is as much an invention as the rest, a trinket built by the hands of men.”

“It’s an empty world you peddle,” I told her. “That’s why you get stabbed at the end, Akua. No one wants to live in it but you.”

“Shall I tell you a secret, Catherine?” she smiled. “The true altar before which every man and woman in the Empire kneels is not dedicated to the Gods Below. It is the Tower, that nameless god that wears ever-changing faces anointed in the blood of the last. The Empress is dead, so the Empress rules.”

“Backstabbing isn’t a fucking virtue , Diabolist,” I bit out. “It’s why Praes fails all the time. Why even with all its power it lost to Callow again and again for over a millennium.”

“Not a virtue, no,” she said. “A liturgy, worship sincerer than any pact made in the dark through ancient prayers.”

“See, there’s no point in having a conversation with you,” I said. “Because you’re not being impartial about this, it’s your religion. And your religion is godsdamned poison. Even when given a real functioning alternative, you’d rather throw a tangible victory away than consider you might have been wrong.”

“Ah,” Diabolist smiled. “But am I?”

“It always comes back to the same thing with you, doesn’t it?” I grimly said. “Until the very moment someone put a knife in you, you’ll pretend just the fact you’re breathing means you’re right. And it’s not just you. Malicia was wrong. There should have been a fucking culling, after the civil war. You can’t negotiate with people who see negotiation as a sin.”

“You mistake me,” Akua said. “I ask if you truly believe I am wrong? You stand before me bearing a mantle won through theft and murder, the old sacraments of our kind. Having assembled a host that would follow you against the Empress, having seduced into your service talents slighted by the old order. Protest all you like, the path you tread is old and well-worn.”

“I’m not you,” I hissed.

“No,” Diabolist agreed. “You lack that purity of purpose, dulled by those who should have sharpened you. I will cure you of this, Catherine.”

“I used to think there was the remains of a person in you,” I said. “Something left of the child that was beaten into becoming this. But there isn’t, is there? You can’t even understand what affection is anymore.”

I could not let myself be drawn too deeply into this. Slowly, quietly, I gathered power to myself. It would all ride on that single opening. If I managed to overpower her then, I could turn this into the kind of brawl she was utterly unfit to fight.

“Why so shy?” Akua laughed. “Use the word you truly meant. Love. And that is where they robbed you, Catherine. It is the leash they use to keep you in line. And so you stand before me a Squire instead of a Knight, expecting to win when you have no weight . What story carries you in this place? What Squire could possibly stand where you do?”

“I’m a little more than that,” I said, and that was my one chance.

I struck. Every speck of power I’d managed to draw in, a deafening clap sounding as I filled the world with ice. Half the Heart was made a jagged thing of frost and I already I was moving. Merciless Gods , I thought as the ice shivered, she can’t possibly- The strength of Winter sagged, the ice broke and along the lines I had struck thin ropes of sorcery came back to me. I struggled against them but they were like draining ditches, the power flooding through them and going nowhere. The bindings began to tighten and there was only one way out of this.

“ Break ,” I said.

The ropes shattered, and in that very moment I felt Akua smile as she strode through shards of ice.

“Finally,” she said. “ Bind .”

I’d felt something like this before, mere feet away from where I now stood, and the irony of it was cloying. Alone of all the things in the world, I was trapped in amber. Sweat slowly trickled down my cheek, leaving a salty trail behind, and even as the first drop fell with a soft sound on my armour I felt Winter go still. Not all of it. Around me the glaciers still creaked and broke in their ceaseless dance, but the mantle I had claimed from the Duke of Violent Squall sat like an obedient dog who did not even dare to breathe. No, more than that. Warlock had warned me, that I was not entirely human anymore. The fae title had been woven into my Name, its domain becoming an aspect, and so when Diabolist bound Winter she bound my Name as well. I felt my mind scrabbling against a wall of glass, reaching desperately for my last aspect – which even if unsuited would do something, anything – but there was no purchase. I no longer ruled my Name, my mantle or even my own body. I was appalled, then, at the arrogance I’d had in trying to kill this woman with the very instrument she could use to crush me. Akua slowly circled around me, her long dark hair made shining by melted frost.

“It would have been a fight,” she said. “If you were not merely dwelling in the penumbra of villainy instead of embracing your better nature. A Black Knight anointed the last of Winter would have been... difficult to call to heel. I would have preferred it, nonetheless. They cheated the both of us our true iron.”

Instead all she’d had to to was talk, and bait out my only aspect that might feasibly break her hold. For all that Diabolist had pretended to be absorbed in her words, she’d had me dancing to her tune since the moment she stepped into Arcadia. Akua’s hand strayed to my face and she wiped away the sweat almost tenderly. It felt like a violation, however fleeting the touch, and one made even worse by the pretence of warmth.

“You will never like me,” she told me. “But you will learn to love me, eventually. We will do great things, you and I. As we were always meant to.”

She smiled, like a young girl sharing a secret with another in the dark.

“It is petty, but I am glad you have Deoraithe blood. Even if only in part,” she confided. “They are a greater kind than the rest of Callowans. Nearly Praesi in their settling of grudges.”

I was not a person in her eyes, I realized. Just cattle to be inspected for good teeth and lustrous coat. I’d ceased being someone to her, if I’d ever been, the moment she decided she had a use for me. Her hand withdrew from my face, instead adjusting my cloak around my neck.

“The throne room would have seen you lose as well,” she mused. “But here? Oh, the mistake that was. Diabolist , dearest. Strange vistas such as these are not foreign to me. You took us to a place of usurpation and murder, and though you have learned of those ways you are yet young to that learning and came late to it besides.”

Her lips quirked and she stepped away.

“You will already be thinking of ways to cross me,” she said. “So let me disabuse you of that possibility.”

I should have been, I thought. But I was stuck in a quagmire of my own horror, beginning to realize how badly I’d fucked up and how it might destroy everything. Even if Black somehow got me out of this, I knew what the price to that would be. There were no longer good outcomes to this. This fight was a disaster there would be no recovering from. Entire legions shattered on the eve of a great war, an entire city of Callowans lost and made to serve beyond death, and beyond all that someone was going to have to die over this. Me or Black, or – and the possibility was one that for all my previous confidence I could no longer deny – I might just lose. Completely, utterly, beyond denial. It only takes once to change everything , Diabolist had said earlier. I’d crawled from victory to victory these last few years, leaving burning wrecks behind me but still coming out ahead. There’d been nights where I wondered if some of those could be called victories at all, but now that I met the eyes of an actual defeat I knew the answer. I had my skin crawling, the crystal-clear understanding of exactly how fragile all I’d built was. How one bad day would be all it took to unmake it entirely.

“You will kill the Black Knight with your own hands, and in doing so become my second,” Akua said, bringing me back to there and then. “Because there is no going back from that, you see. The Calamities will hunt you regardless of whether or not your own will guided the blow. The Empress, given the choice of keeping them or you, will choose them. And so your only salvation will lie in my service.”

Would she? Would Malicia really? If it meant losing the Woe maybe not but then she might nor really be losing them. Hakram would stay by my side, but Masego had been raised with Black as an uncle and Archer’s teacher was his lover. Where their loyalties would lie I couldn’t be sure. Thief might bail before it ever came to that, she had a history of doing it. And if one side had both Hierophant and Warlock on it, and Scribe as well? The Empress couldn’t afford not to choose it, not if she was facing a rebellion from Diabolist. Spies and powerful mages would be what she needed most of all in the days to come, if Black died.

“That was always your side’s conceit,” Diabolist fondly said. “Thinking that being clever and quick enough, you could have the power without paying the price.”

The dark-skinned woman inclined her head and without my prompting my hand rose, tearing open a portal back into Liesse. Not, I grasped, blindly aiming. Going through Arcadia was like threading a needle. And in owning both the place where the needle had first passed and the place where it would come out, Diabolist had been able to control exactly where that fairy gate would lead.

“There’s always a price, Catherine,” Akua chided me.

She went through the portal, and I followed. Behind it Black awaited.

Chapter 68: Coda

“Here, have a butter knife. Let it not be said I do not tend to the needs of my beloved subjects.”
– Dread Emperor Revenant, having dinner with an enemy

It was a pretty room, for an abattoir. As usual, Diabolist had indulged in a décor that was halfway between an overly ornate brothel and a cult’s secret altar. The walls were pure bas-relief of pale grey marble, and even as my body obeyed instructions not my own I caught glimpses of what they displayed. Hells, twenty-one layers of them forming progressively smaller circles centred around the pedestal in the centre of I tall. Braziers of blood-red flame cast flickering shadows that seemed to make the reliefs of the devils move just out of sight, but my attention rested squarely on the man hanging in the air. Above a raised pedestal Black was held up by golden bindings on his wrists and ankles that had him spread-eagle and incapable of moving anything but his neck, which he craned at an angle to watch us coming in.

“You’re late,” he told me, bluntly ignoring Akua.

Diabolist tittered amusedly. She was like a cat playing with a mouse, savouring the struggle before the inevitable kill.

“You may speak, Catherine,” she said, flicking her wrist.

I licked my lips, a rush of pleasure at getting back control of even just a part of my face spoiled only by the knowledge that she could take it back at a whim.

“She bound my Name,” I said. “I don’t control my body.”

Black had lost his helmet, at some point, and his face was bruised. His armour had been stripped as well, and that sight was foreign to me. Beyond the cuts and scrapes I knew mattered nothing to a villain as old and set in his self-image as my teacher – they would be gone soon enough, leaving not even scars – it was seeing him without the shell of steel that discomforted me. It made him look vulnerable. But his eyes were sharp as ever, and his pale green gaze turned to study Diabolist with disdain.

“Temporary enslavement, truly?” he said. “I expected better of Tasia Sahelian’s daughter.”

That drew blood, I saw with a smirk. There was a heartbeat of frozen fury in Akua’s eyes before she schooled herself into a blank mask.

“You killed barely a tenth of the soldiers I assigned to your capture, Lord Black,” Diabolist replied. “Today is a day for disappointments, it seems.”

Black seemed amused, and utterly unconcerned about the fact that he was trussed up like a pig for me to slaughter. That would have given me hope if I didn’t know for a fact he would behave exactly like this even if he had no last card up his sleeve.

“Arcadia was a mistake,” he told me, returning to ignoring Akua. “You won a greater comparative advantage in capacity, but in Arcadia narrative matters most of all. You lacked the necessary weight to win, Catherine. In the future, consult further than Hierophant. His lack of interest in stories is a glaring weakness.”

If I could frown at that, I would have. He knew for a sure I’d consulted others when planning this out: he’d been one of them.

“This is almost touching,” Diabolist drawled. “Fatherly Amadeus, advising his pupil to the end. Mother made you out to be much less sentimental.”

My teacher raised an eyebrow.

“Adults are talking,” he told her. “We can return to your wasteful little tantrum afterwards.”

“Perhaps a reminder of your current situation is in order,” Akua mildly said.

Her wrist flicked and the bindings stretched out. A series of sharp pops signalled his joints had given under the pressure.

“I’ve had worse sparring with Sabah,” he noted, face betraying not so much as a flicker of discomfort.

“It’s already a cloudy day, Black,” I said. “Strop trying to make it rain.”

Green eyes turned to me.

“There is wisdom in moderation,” he conceded.

Shit, there went my sudden hope. He’d given the correct answer to our identity key. Cloudy and rain were an inquiry, wisdom and moderation a confirmation. There shouldn’t be anyone else who knew the key. I tried to look at Diabolist but found I could not, my movement restricted. As good as an assurance she’d been looking at me.

“Why so quiet, Akua?” Black said. “Come now, if there is moment to gloat now is it.”

Diabolist slowly crossed the room until she stood by his side, her face remaining in a pleasant façade.

“This is not personal, Carrion Lord,” she said.

“Of course it is,” the pale-skinned man smiled. “You’ve sold your people the lie this is about the old ways and the new, but we both know otherwise. You’re not a mere reactionary. I stand for the order that has been keeping you contained for decades, and through my death you gain clear skies.”

“You have served Praes well,” Diabolist said. “And in this final act will serve it still. You may leave the stage knowing your labour will not go to waste.”

“You,” Black said, “are the incarnation of waste. Of every destructive instinct that must be carved out or repurposed lest we ever reach old ends through old means. Your accolades are as worthless as every single thing you’ve ever said and done. They will pass, and be forgotten. We will all be better for it.”

“Empty defiance,” Akua said. “A lesser end than you deserve, but that choice was not mine to make. Ill-done nonetheless. I will spare you further disgrace.”

My hand moved and unsheathed my sword, the sound of steel bared ringing too loudly in the room.

“Do you still believe it,” I asked suddenly. “That it’s cowardice?”

His gaze moved back to me, and what I saw there had my blood pounding against my ears. There was no fight in him.

“Proceed, child,” he told Diabolist. “Play out this farce to the end.”

She hesitated, in that moment. With her attention flagging I got the opportunity to watch her, and what I saw had my lips quirking. She was hesitating because she could not believe, deep down, that anyone would be unafraid of death. Because you are , I thought. So very, very afraid. Some ancient Alban king had once said that a man only began to live when he had something worthy dying for. I’d never really believed that, myself. If you really believed in something, you owed that belief that it be seen through to the bitter end. But Akua? Akua believed only in herself. She could not conceive of any victory that did not involve her breathing at the end, and applying that belief to Black she was being shaken by his indifference. Wondering if he had some last trick to save his own hide. The hesitation passed after she looked at the walls around us, at the runes hidden in the bas-relief, and reminded herself of the strength of her defences.

“Farewell, Carrion Lord,” Akua said. “Die knowing that the torch you now pass will cast a shadow on all of Creation.”

“Uninspired,” Black judged.

The sword went through his stomach. I’d not guided the blow, and it seemed his words had irked Diabolist enough she’d chosen to give him a slow death instead of a quick one. He gurgled and twitched as the dark-skinned woman stalked at my side. Laying a hand on my shoulder she leaned close to my ear.

“How does it feel,” she asked in a murmur, “to reach the dawn of what you were meant to be?”

I wasn’t the one to answer. A laugh came ripping out of a throat that was patched together from half a dozen voices, hoarse and soft but all whispering.

“Akua Sahelian,” the thing kept in bindings said, “Diabolist.”

Even as it bled out, slowly crawling to death, its skin was flaking off. Beneath the appearance of my teacher was a middle-aged Soninke of the same build. Then it was a young Taghreb woman. Every blink had a different face to it, and the longer I watched the less I could remember about any of them. Akua stepped away from me like she’d been burned.

“Assassin,” she said. “No, a fake. You are in Procer, I know it. The Prince of Orne died choking on his own correspondence.”

Ah , I thought as an old detail finally clicked into place. It’d always niggled at me, that Black’s favourite executioner would have a signature. His little ironic deaths. Wasn’t half the point of having a skilled assassin that the enemy never knew you’d killed one of their own at all? The point of a signature, I grasped, was that people recognized it. Watched out for it . It’s like the Eyes of the Empire , I thought. The deadly hidden in the obvious. How many people has Assassin killed over the years that had perfectly natural accidents no one ever thought to question? Then it sunk in that the fucking Assassin knew the identity key I shared with Black, and my blood ran cold. Even knowing it had been a measured risk on his part, the fact that at any time in the last year I might have been talking with this monster instead of mine and never known it was sobering.

“You die nonetheless,” Diabolist sneered.

“A hundred times before,” Assassin said in that voice was not a voice. “A hundred times more.”

Akua’s hand whipped up, a spear of black flames formed and tearing through the other’s villains guts in moments.

“Where is your father, child?” the Assassin said. “The Carrion Lord sends his regards.”

And then it laughed, laughed until there was too little left of it for even that. Ashes fell in clumps on the ground until the hellflame devoured even that. Diabolist was shaken, I saw. That I could see it at all was telling, because I could now move my neck. And wiggled the fingers of my free hand, however slightly. The binding was not perfect.

“Did you know?” she hissed, wheeling on me.

I rasped out a laugh.

“All according to plan,” I lied.

Or perhaps not. Just not my plan. Diabolist mastered her anger but there was more than that I saw in her eyes. Fear, fear spreading with every pump of her heart. The realization that she was no longer in control. I relished it, fed on it. She strode to the wall and slapped down her palm on it, the reliefs shifting to leave a smoothly polished circle as she spoke in the mage tongue. The cadence I recognized, if not the words. She was scrying. The surface of the stone rippled and lights swam into focus until an image was formed, and at the heart of the circle pale green eyes met Akua’s gaze.

“Good evening, Diabolist,” the Black Knight said, and cut off her father’s ear.

I’d never seen the man before, though I knew his name from intelligence reports. Dumisai of Aksum. He’d apparently abandoned her mother’s side to join her shortly after she became governess of Liesse. The scrying stone shifted, revealing a windowless room filled with hacked corpses and my teacher standing in the middle of it with Dumisai kneeling at his feet. Hands bound, his body a collection of swelling bruises. He screamed when Black’s sword cut through his ear, shaking as blood spewed. Akua let out a raw sound, before she went cold.

“A hostage,” Diabolist said. “You should know better.”

Black, not bothering to reply, flicked his wrist and cut off the remaining ear. The man screamed again, louder.

“Mpanzi,” he hoarsely said. “Do not flinch, this is-“

Akua’s breath was steady, her face still as a pond when she interrupted. She looked at Black.

“You intend to negotiate, evidently,” she stated.

“Still alive, Catherine?” my teacher asked.

“Feeling cautiously optimistic about it too,” I replied. “No thanks to you.”

“He is bleeding , Black Knight,” Akua said coldly. “He is of no use to you dead. Your trick won you a small victory, but do not overplay your hand.”

The pale man’s lips quirked ever so slightly.

“I cannot claim that trick to be mine,” he demurred. “The Wandering Bard taught me a hard lesson in Nicae, about weight and the shifting of it. I expect she will rue that, before my days are done.”

“Your demands?” Diabolist asked.

“Three questions, answered truly,” Black said. “If this is done, I will spare your father. At even the suspicion of a lie, I will kill him immediately.”

I had to force myself not to glare. Questions? Really ? Now of all times?

“And what guarantee do I have you will hold up your part of the bargain?” Akua said.

“You’ll have no oath from me, child,” he said. “I give you my word. Take it or leave it.”

My hands rose and I felt the cold touch of steel against my neck.

“I could kill your apprentice with a single word,” Diabolist said.

“That has been attempted before,” Black said. “To the woe of all involved. By all means, see where it takes you. It’s been a long day, I could use a laugh.”

Though I appreciated the pat on the back, I was currently lacking a fucking angel to swindle so I really wished he hadn’t just said that. Akua felt desperate, at the edge of the precipice. That was a dangerous place for her kind of villain to be.

“Three questions,” Diabolist said. “Answered truly.”

My hand came down and the blade with it, but that meant nothing. She could do the same without lifting a finger at any time.

“You acquired a great many ritual objects to build this device,” Black said. “Were any bought through the Closed Circle in Mercantis?”

Diabolist looked at him for a long time.

“Yes,” she said.

For a second my teacher looked very, very old. Exhausted down to his bones. But it was gone as quick as it had come, leaving me to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing.

“What contact have you had with the Wandering Bard, envoys thereof or affiliates bearing messages for her?” Black asked.

That got my attention. I’d been under the impression that the Bard had been meddling down south, too busy to put her hand to the chaos in Callow. That he would even ask this implied he was not so certain as that as I’d believed.

“We had a single conversation in the hills beyond Marchford,” Akua said. “That was our only point of contact, to my knowledge.”

If anything, that reply seem to had him get warier. Shit. Another thing to watch out for, though. I couldn’t see an angle for her to play in this mess, but that was always what fucked you wasn’t it? The knife you didn’t see coming.

“The cylinder around your throat has a soul bound within,” Black said. “Whose is it?”

Diabolist’s lips thinned and she hesitated. Cold steel tightened against the back of her father’s neck. I felt it on my back, between my shoulder blades. Discretely I made a thumbs down, and tapped the side of my leg once. Then a thumb up, and tapped the side of my leg twice. It was gone. Then it came back once, twice. Another piece fell into place. Soon, now.

“A newborn child’s,” she finally said.

He turned to me.

“Her contingency, Catherine,” he told me. “A blank slate with her mind woven in, meant to eventually possess that same child’s body if she dies. You will have to destroy it.”

“I’m a little tied up at the moment, Black,” I said irritated, then winced at the accidental pun.

“Your questions were answered,” Diabolist said. “You gave you word.”

“So I did,” Black agreed, and the blade left the man’s neck. “Move along, Dumisai.”

It swung down but no blood was spilled: the bindings on the mages’s hands were cut instead. There was a flicker of surprise in the eyes of both father and daughter, and in that moment of surprise the binding slackened further. Patience, Cat , I cautioned myself. The mage trembling got to his feet and my teacher sheathed his sword.

“Do you know why grand designs like yours always fail?” he asked Akua.

“You have lost your leverage, Carrion Lord,” she coldly replied. “Your life will soon follow.”

“Because they’re loud ,” he continued. “You light a beacon that no one can miss. The lasting victories are always the quiet ones. Farewell, Akua Sahelian. You were warned.”

Dumisai of Aksum opened a door, and the moment freedom was open to him a volley of crossbow bolts thudded into his face. Black’s word had been kept, to the letter. He’d spared the man. No promise had been made about any sappers that might be waiting outside. I felt the blow ripple through her, through the binding, and finally I tapped the side of my leg twice.

“ You ,” Diabolist screamed, the hatred in her eyes was poison but she was looking in the wrong direction and she had been made to play the wrong game since she first scried.

It was going to cost her.

“Surprise,” Thief rasped, and stole the binding.

She came into sight, wounded and burned but gloriously still alive, and the world slowed as the sequence I’d been awaiting began. Diabolist turned and barked in the mage tongue in the same movement. Vivienne recoiled as if she’d been slapped, gritting her teeth. I closed my eyes, part of me knowing exactly what was about to unfold. Akua would wrest the binding back from her and seek to shackle me again, to kill Thief and then Black. Even as I ran my finger down that line the rest of me turned inwards, to the scaffolding Hierophant had fashioned around my soul. It was meant to prevent from collapsing on myself because of the power I’d stolen from Winter, I knew. The best effort of a once-in-a-century brilliant mind to keep me alive and whole. That’d been the mistake. It was, as he’d warned me, the leash Diabolist used to bind me. But the error ran deeper, because for all the horrors at his fingertips Masego was a fundamentally kind boy. He’d tried to keep me unbroken. Shield me from pain, from hunger, from the many prices the decisions I’d made had laid at my feet but had since gone unpaid. There it was, I thought. My pivot. I’d awaited some dilemma that would have my conscience or my heart bleeding, but oh that wasn’t the kind of story I’d made was it?

No. For all that I’d lashed myself with guilt when the mood took me, it had always been others paying the price. My people, my soldiers, my friends. My teachers. Again and again they bled so that I would not, and the arrogance of that had seeped into my bones as over that sea of corpses I set my throne. It had made me believe I was owed victory, deep down. Perhaps even that I deserved it. And now Creation was forcing my eyes open and making me watch what I had wrought, whispering that I had a choice. I could roll the dice once more, with a laugh in my throat and a sneer on my lips, throw my challenge and my pride in the face of Diabolist and bet on a victory that heaped yet another ruin to the pile. There was a chance of triumph, glinting at the end of that path. I had Thief and years of treading the knife’s edge, hatred enough to surpass Akua’s own. If I risked it all in the moment before she bound me again, I could avoid the reckoning once more. Or I could give answer. I had stood before a tribunal of merciless angels once, but this judgement was a deeper thing. It was a settling of accounts in full, the surrender of all the safeties I’d been given without earning them. Just my choices and their consequences, whatever those might be. It would not be pretty. It would not be as easily set aside as a doubt in the dark of night or a death snatched back by trickery. All I had to do was to... lean in.

A single heartbeat passed. Thief lost the binding, and I made my choice. In matters of self-mutilation, I had few rivals. In my mind’s eye I looked up the scaffolding Hierophant had built and I ripped it off .

Diabolist’s binding found me but there was no purchase, because Winter was no longer a thing tamed. It ran wild through my veins, through my Name, and a scream ripped its way out of me. My blood was red ice, my bones snapped and beyond it all my heart beat once – and ceased. There was a world within that I owned, and it was bereft of stars and moon because in the depths of that darkness even those had been smothered by frost. It did not kill me. No, in a way that would have been a mercy and my mantle knew no such thing. What I had of life was a last gasp, the desperate clawing of death’s rattle as the whole world was buried around me. Bleak. That was the word, and now I understood the meaning of it in full. Winter had taken it all and left nothing behind that would warm me, no refuge to reassure me that I was still Catherine Foundling. Even my Name was stripped bare, its power dimmed and dull. I had no aspect left but one, and that one was gone far beyond what an aspect should be. Squire, I thought, but the name rang hollow. Tied to me only by the barest thread. Transition loomed ahead, patiently awaiting the right fulcrum.

“Oh fuck ,” Thief whispered.

I turned to watch Diabolist, feeling the warmth and fear wafting off her fragile frame. So very mortal, for all her arrogance.

“Your trial I have cheated,” I said. “And suffered defeat for that crooked passing.”

“ Call ,” Akua Sahelian said.

A bundle of power inside her unfolded under my patient eye and I flicked my wrist. Ice spread through it, cracks spreading as she flinched. Ah, I thought. Devoured but not gone. The corpse of her aspect I took for my own, let the winds and the snow bury it. It would await my purposes there.

“Vivienne,” I said, and when I spoke her name she shivered.

I did not, though the sheer act of voicing it had felt like I was stroking her cheek. A true name, freely given. There was power in this.

“Stand aside,” I said. “It is time for me to end this.”

She mutely nodded, backing away as Diabolist wreathed herself in Summer flame. Cold crept across the room, the air going still and the stone growing cool. I did not need to will it. It happened.

“The pivot I snatched from your grasp,” I told Akua. “And so you no longer have hold over me.”

I felt her will scrabbling against my own, trying to seize the threads of Winter, but all she could touch was the summit of the glacier. It was beyond her ability to move.

“What are you?” Akua Sahelian gasped.

“The monster,” I said. “The one you should have bound tighter .”

I limped slightly as I advanced, an old wound once erased but now made anew. The Gods did enjoy their little ironies. I read it in the way she moved, that shifted. How she was going to wield the fire. It only took the slightest of adjustments to let it pass me. Was this how it felt, to have the weight of Creation behind you? How novel. Diabolist backed a way but I touched her chest over her heart, ever so slightly, and there was a quiet snap. Her expression went still, and I buried my arm through her chest up to the elbow.

“I’ll be seeing you soon,” I told her as she died. “I still have an oath to keep.”

Chapter 69: Swan Song

“Thus the Gods granted us the first boon: as we live we will die, and in dying be granted our just deserts.”
– The Book of All Things, fourth verse of the second hymn

I knelt and ripped the necklace from Akua’s neck, silver links giving easily. The obsidian was warm to the touch and my fingers clasped around it. Black had told me to destroy it. He was not the kind of man to be troubled over the death of a newborn child, if that child served as a tool for his enemies. It was tempting to do as he’d asked, to just tighten my grasp ever so slightly and watch it shatter. But the Empress had spoken a sentence to me, and that gave me pause. It was too early, I thought, to begin closing avenues. I rose and tossed the cylinder to Thief, who caught it without missing a beat.

“Foundling,” she said. “Are you...”

Words failed her after that. I supposed there was no delicate way to ask someone if they were still sane.

“Close enough,” I said. “Stash it. Unless I tell you to admit otherwise, it was destroyed.”

The other woman’s eyes narrowed. She wasn’t like the others, I thought. Adjutant and Hierophant, even Archer, they would speak their minds to me but almost never refuse an order. Thief and I had ties of a different nature. She had only come under my banner when she made a bet on me as the only actor on the stage interested in keeping Callow from being devastated. The moment that was no longer my path, she would turn on me. I could taste the truth of that in the air.

“One hundred thousand,” Vivienne Dartwick said. “At least. Maybe half that again, with the refugees. She massacred and enslaved them, Catherine. Denied them even a proper burial. And you want to keep this?”

I studied her closely, my eyes sharper than they should have been. I no longer needed to force a sliver of my Name into them to better my vision. Claiming the mantle in full had brought consequences more than metaphysical. In the cool air of the room I could feel the warmth of her, a bundle of life that had me disgustingly hungry . Winter did not make, it took. Until nothing was left. Thief had not come out of the day’s butchery untouched, for all her liveliness. Her short dark hair had been licked by fire on the side of her head, leaving the whole of it looking unbalanced, and under the frayed locks I could glimpse skin burnt and blackened. The left side of her leathers was flecked with blood, and close to her leg entirely drenched. I could still see the holes in her clothes where shards of stone and metal had torn apart her flesh. It would pass. Within the month she would be the same as she’d been, her Name smoothing away the wrinkles to her appearance. She was in no shape to fight right now but then fighting had never been what her Name was about.

“Do you know why my arm keeps getting twisted?” I said. “Leverage, Thief. That is what I lack the most. They all have things I want or need, and I have precious little of the same. That little piece is a kind leverage. It may be that I never use it, and that within the month I’ll shatter it. But there’s a knot of choices right ahead of me, and I will not go into it having robbed myself of a card to play.”

“She doesn’t get to come back, Foundling,” Vivienne said. “Not after this . That’s a line.”

Part of me, the same that had eyes turned to the transition ahead, balked at being dictated terms by one subordinate to me. I breathed in and out, then forced that cold anger to the side. It was of no use to me. Anger was a blinder and I already had too many of those.

“Agreed,” I said.

Thief nodded slowly, and with a flourish of the wrist she had the cylinder disappearing into that place where all her loot was kept. It was an aspect, she’d intimated to me more than once. That should be beyond the reach of anyone so long as she lived, and Thief was very good at remaining alive.

“Now what?” Vivienne asked. “I suppose we’ve won but this doesn’t feel like a victory.”

“It’s not over yet,” I said, and looked down at the Diabolist’s corpse.

I could raise it from the dead, I knew. Without the soul lingering she’d be an empty vessel, but a very powerful one. That could have its uses in the wars to come. Another temptation, this. The first of many to come: power obtained always wanted to be used.

“There should be a part of the city on fire,” I said.

“I’m familiar with the Foundling Gambit, yes,” Thief snorted.

Given how often goblinfire was my solution to a thorny situation, I supposed I could no longer deny that name. It irked me anyway, that my signature would be green flames devouring friend and foe alike.

“Toss her corpse into it,” I said. “I need to find Black. He’ll be at the centre of the mess.”

“And when you find him?” Vivienne said.

“Offers are made,” I replied. “And then a choice.”

Gods forgive me, but I hoped I’d make the right one.

—

Liesse had been twice claimed by death. First when Diabolist murdered and raised anew the people that dwelled within its wall, making it a house of undeath beneath her throne. And now, as the Ducal Palace burned like a green candle in the penumbra, the city had been made a necropolis in full. No one ruled here now. Not me, not Black, not the Empress. Wights only half-leashed owned the streets as the last of the living rebels huddled in their strongholds, hoping they would be spared the sword of the Tower or the teeth of their own creations. I was not inclined to mercy in this. Examples would be made, would have to be made if I was to keep Callow in hand in the aftermath. This brutal a massacre could not go unanswered. Even if the thought of letting it go had not been repulsive to me, such an obvious and blatant injustice would be the fodder of a rebellion neither Calow nor Praes could afford. It might even make heroes, sent by the Heavens to put down the last of the Calamities. Or me. The days were I could argue my methods were anything but an evil – and perhaps not even the lesser one, I thought as I walked the ruins of what had once been the heart of the south – were long gone. I was not guilty of the butchery Diabolist and her ilk had made, but it had happened under my watch. Not guilty, perhaps, but a part of responsibility could not be denied.

There would be a reckoning for that, in time. Praesi liked to say that the Tower always got its due, but the Heavens were even less often cheated of theirs.

I could feel the centre of the array in the distance, pulsing like a living thing, and I let my feet take me there. It was beginning to sink in, the depth of what Diabolist had done here as mere means to obtain expendable foot soldiers. Liesse had once been a sprawling festival of basilicas and trade, the first destination of the wealth that came pouring out of Mercantis through Dormer. It’d been the largest city in Callow after Laure, and the beating heart of southern culture. Its destruction gutted the entire south. One hundred thousand people. It’d been easier to live with when it was just a number of soldiers Diabolist could field, but now that she’d been slain I was forced to face the truth that a significant chunk of my people was... gone. Irremediably. Men and women and children, the old and the young. Not soldiers but people, the part of this country that actually mattered . It was one thing for the struggles to scythe through soldiers and conscripts, but this? It was something else. It was not to be forgiven, or forgotten. When I’d been a young girl – what an arrogant thought, I mocked myself, for someone not even twenty to have – I’d chosen to put together enough coin for the War College because reformation was the path of least death. Of least damage. A part of what had led me to that decision had been fear, I could admit to myself. I’d been raised to tales of the Conquest, of the overwhelming victories of the Legions, and thought that Praes could not be beaten.

It was now quite clear that it could .

Had Akua meant to sow the seeds of doubt, with her Fourfold Crossing? I was not sure how much I could trust the visions, if they were shaped illusion or truth, but in one of those lives I had driven Praes out of my homeland. At great a cost. Dream-like visions of countless slaughters flickered in the back of my head. But looking at Liesse, knowing the Principate was mustering its armies, I had to wonder if the massacres of that liberation would be worse than what had already taken place and yet would. The Empire was fragile, that could no longer be denied. For all that my teacher had sought to make it a nation that relied on men and institutions instead of Named, that new order was being enforced by the cudgel that was the Calamities. And behind them, the many quiet cullings of Dread Empress Malicia. But that desired metamorphosis was not complete. It had run into old money and old power, and though the Truebloods had been the visible and despicable face of that I no longer believed they were the whole of it. It had been Malicia’s own allies that double-crossed me in Laure, when I went into Arcadia. That she’d either not been able to prevent that or had not bothered to spoke volumes: her grip on the Wasteland was not nearly as tight as she would have us believe.

She’d effectively purged the Truebloods, for now, and muzzled their successors. But that struck me as a nothing more than ripples atop the pond. The High Lords were sill wealthy as a dozen kings, sitting atop fortified strongholds and centuries of accumulated sorcery. They were, for now, obedient. That did not mean they would remain so, and when they did I had to wonder – which Callowan city would get the axe next? This hadn’t been a Callowan war, it’d been a pissing match over ownership of the Tower. But it’d still been one of our cities that got wiped out, a hundred thousand Liessen that got turned into abominations not even as the outcome but as part of a Praesi’s plan . I’d been willing to back the imperial occupation so long as it was the lesser evil, and even now I believed Callow as a client kingdom under the Tower with me keeping the peace would be better off than as Proceran protectorate. But what did it matter that the taxes were lesser and the administration more efficient, if every decade or so a city was wiped off the map in a succession struggle? I couldn’t write this off as an outlier or an exception, not so long as the High Lords remained powerful.

As long as they existed an influential entity, sooner or later the next Akua Sahelian would be born. And the next one would be a little smarter, a little more careful in her rise to power. Worse, while awaiting that I would have to fight tooth and claw with the same people who’d back that coming Heiress to make sure my people were not murdered and robbed for the profit of foreign highborn. I was getting tired, these days, of begging and scraping for the bare essentials of my people’s survivals from people who it was becoming evident needed me to remain in power. It could be that Malicia would reform the Wasteland, one ploy at a time. That the institutions Black had built would overtake the old nobility in power and influence. But banking on that was a gamble, and I was running out of reasons to make it. I’d grasped, over the last year, that the way to finally leave that endless cycle of war between Callow and Praes was if one side finally won. With the Empire already occupying my homeland, working within those boundaries had struck me as the better choice. But now it was having to consider the costs of that position, and they were not light. Even if Praes was tamed, as much as such a place ever could be, there would be war with the Principate. And that war would be fought on Callowan borders.

Procer alone, I believed we could beat. The Red Flower Vales could be defended even against the massive armies the First Prince could field, and the Principate could not afford long and costly wars. It had borders to the north that could not go undefended, and sooner or later the princes would start squabbling again. For now, the memory of their recent and vicious civil war kept the peace. But that wouldn’t last forever, and keeping a few border principalities at bay was no impossible task. But if the Principate came knocking again and again as the heart of a crusading host, that was an entirely different game. I had no guarantees that Cordelia Hasenbach’s successor wouldn’t continue pursuing her policies of making war abroad to keep peace at home. Crusades had never been kind to Callow, even when it stood on the side of Good. I’d sworn my oaths to the Tower to keep my homeland from being made a battlefield every few decades, but I was not having to consider I might just have changed the face of the invader – without even sparing Callow massacres at the hands of Wastelanders. None of this could continue as it now lay.

I loved Black, for all the horrors I knew he’d committed. The Woe as well, and the family I had found in the Fifteenth. But I had not begun treading this path for love, and I would not remain on it for sentiment. The Empress had spoken a sentence to me, sorcery riding the wave of Diabolist’s workings. She had earned the right to make that offer, for the favours she had done me. That did not mean I would take it. I’d told Hakram once that I had not been chosen, that I instead I chose . Yet for all the power I now had at my fingertips, I was no closer to seeing what I’d chosen come to life. The echo of the final defeat I’d almost been dealt at Akua’s hands still lingered in me, the realization of fragility . I could be wrong, just like anyone else. I might be the worst thing to happen to Callow yet, the very thing I was trying to kill one ruinous battle at a time. And if that was the case... Choices needed to be made and pride had no place in the making of them.

Even as that thought touched me, I found the heart of Diabolist’s grand design. Deep in the palace behind arrays that welcomed me: I had the key Fasili had made and Robber taken from him. How Black had entered I did not know, but suspected his imprisonment of Akua’s father had opened doors for him. He was not above bleeding men for answers. This was the core, I thought, but not the room from which she would have controlled it all. That would be hidden elsewhere. But it was the keystone, were her own soul had once been the tool she used to rip apart Creation before she’d hidden that as well. It’d been a courtyard, before, walled in but spacious. Now runes carved into stone covered everything, power trickling towards the empty array in the centre like tributaries to a river. Transparent panes of force jutted upwards high in the sky, up to the distant place where the souls of centuries of Deoraithe roiled under containment. There was an altar of obsidian among a circle of carved stones, and at the edge of that circle I found Black standing in silence. I knew, objectively, that I was now taller than him. Yet as I watched his lone figure, decked in plain steel and threadbare black cloak, I felt as if he was the one who towered over me. His hand rose to acknowledge my arrival, though he did not turn. I came to stand at his side, the two of us watching the core of the device that had caused so much death.

“Another rival dead,” he said. “Though you paid a dear price for it. You reek of Winter, Catherine.”

“She wasn’t my rival,” I said, disinclined to discuss the other issue for now. “Not truly. Her story never had much to do with Callow, did it? And that is where mine lies.”

After a moment of silence, Black lowered his head in acknowledgement.

“She should have been killed years ago,” he softly said. “I regret that I did not proceed regardless of permission. A few months of madness uprooted decades of work. What an utter waste. The south will take decades to recover.”

I had not expected him to express grief over the death of my people save in matters where they affected his own designs, and so was not disappointed by the nature of the sentiment expressed. Love was a fine thing, I thought, but it did not blind me to the nature of this man. It had not been coyness or affection, when I’d called a monster the night we first met. It was the truth of him. Charming at times and so easy to love, but a monster nonetheless.

“It ends now,” I said.

“So it does,” Dread Empress Malicia softly agreed.

There had been changes in me, and that I saw through the illusion she had come to us through was a herald of them. Whatever trick the Empress had employed to turn Diabolist’s own device to her purposes was but a pale imitation of what glamour could do, and even as I thought this I suddenly knew I could use glamour as well as any fae. My fingers clenched. Mantles never leant power without a price.

“Malicia,” Black said. “Your presence is no longer unexpected.”

“Amadeus-“ she began.

“The Closed Circle, Alaya,” he said calmly. “You cannot possibly have missed that. You own two of the members.”

I turned to watch the illusion. It was no meat-puppet, this time: this was the Empress in her full glory come to grace us with her presence. Even through sorcery she was lovely beyond compare. Tall and sculpted and more perfect than any mortal could truly be, her favoured colours of green and gold silk dipping into a low neckline it was hard not to glance at. The most beautiful woman in the world, many called her. Any other time, I would have allowed myself a guilty moment taking in the sight. But right now words had been spoken that forbid me such distractions.

“That’s why you asked,” I said. “Because you realized Diabolist wouldn’t have pulled all this off without being noticed.”

“That she unearthed Still Waters was beyond my predictions,” the Empress said. “It blindsided me as much as you.”

“That’s not a fucking excuse,” I hissed. “That’s what the two of you are supposed to do . Keep the Wasteland under control while I keep Callow willingly in the fold. Black was in the Free Cities most of the year and I’m not even giving him a pass here because Scribe’s people should have picked up on this. The two of you have spy networks that cover half the godsdamned continent. This goes beyond mere failure. I’ve kept my part of the bargain. You haven’t.”

Black was watching Malicia, and something passed between them wordlessly. My fury spiked.

“No, this doesn’t get swept up under the rug,” I said through gritted teeth. “The two of you don’t get to settle this with each other behind closed doors. A hundred thousand people died . A major city was made into a tomb, and now I’m learning this was part of a plan? There is no part of this that’s acceptable. I’ve gone along with everything because you’re supposed to be the reasonable ones, the kind of people who nip this shit in the bud. Fucking Hells, I didn’t declare war on Diabolist a year ago because there was an understanding that she would be contained. My sympathy to your ‘political concerns’ doesn’t extend to allowing your troublesome elements to commit fucking genocide .”

Black’s face was grim.

“There is no excuse,” he admitted. “In this I have failed you utterly.”

If he’d said anything else, even pretended he actually cared about the dead, I might have struck him. But that flat admission of failure took the wind out of my sails for heartbeat. My heated gaze turned to Malicia instead. Black and I could settle our own accounts after the rest of this was addressed.

“You’re not in charge,” I said. “She is. And she seems like she knew what was going on more than you.”

“I failed to grasp the full scope of the matter,” the Empress said.

“You think?” I growled.

“How we came to current situation is regrettable, and for this I will make appropriate redress,” Malicia said. “It does not change the choices that must now be made.”

It was a practical way of thinking, that. At least on the surface. The truth of it was less pretty.

“But it does,” I said. “All this, the oaths and the compromises? It works because I can trust you. To keep the Reforms going, to keep the highborn in check, to not tacitly allow an old breed villain to mass murder and turn Callowan cities into magical gate-making weapons. Did this really sound pragmatic, up in the Tower? Because looking around me, I see six legions all but gutted on the eve of a crusade and a story that’s the best rallying cry for rebellion I’ve heard since the godsdamned Conquest. Now, I’ve fucked up quite a few times since being put in charge of Callow. I’ll own that. But I have to say, I’ve yet to manage to fuck up quite this badly .”

“We cannot,” the Empress said, “weather a crusade.”

“Praes cannot,” I corrected coldly. “Convince me that Callow shouldn’t open the godsdamned Vales to the Principate because, right now? I’m thinking it might actually be the lesser evil. How many of your own legions would stick with you, if it gets out you willingly allowed the Diabolist to rise? I come out of this room promising to hang every High Lord and make peace with the Principate, and I’m guessing no legion west of the Blessed Isle stays with the Tower.”

“If you do this, Callow ends as a nation,” Malicia said. “There is no ruling class left in this region, only the dregs of previous nobility. The First Prince will arrange marriages to these in order to bind her new border protectorate to Procer and station all her dispossessed fantassins in Callow as a garrison force. As a villain, you will naturally be killed or exiled. Your home will be ruled by royal second sons and daughters from then on, as permanent a battlefield as the northern principalities. Within three generations Callowan culture will remain mostly as some local quirks, while in every other matter Proceran law will apply. Callow will be fresh principalities in all but name, until even that is disallowed.”

My fingers clenched until the bones turned white. So that was a blow against rolling over for Cordelia Hasenbach. My own fate was ultimately a side note: if I had to go for Callow to finally stop bleeding, then I’d pull that trigger without hesitation. I’d had a good teacher when it came to the lesson of not getting in your own way. But trading Praesi occupation for Proceran annexation wasn’t what I’d signed up for. It did not escape me that Malicia was responsible for a lot of what she predicted – she and Black had been the ones to shave away Callowan nobility one assassination at a time, and it was them who’d ensured there would be restless former soldiers in Procer by feeding the flames of civil war. But responsibility wasn’t how any of this got solved, much as I despised the notion of cleaning up a mess not of my own making.

“That might be true,” I said. “It still doesn’t make sticking with you shine in comparison. Callow still gets fucked under the Tower, even with me in between. The Principate are pricks, but at least they don’t turn cities into graveyards. ‘Low taxes but the occasional spot of genocide’ is a pretty low bid to beat.”

“There will be no second instance,” the Empress said. “It was an extraordinary occurrence – and mistake – allowed to meet an extraordinary threat.”

“The High Lords-“

“Are broken for a generation, now that you killed Akua Sahelian,” Malicia said. “A generation is more than I need to ensure they never rise again.”

“And what happens when the next extraordinary threat comes around?” I pushed. “Does Vale get it next?”

“Ah, you misunderstand me,” the Empress smiled. “There is no next threat. So long as we are no longer the aggressor, which can be ensured in way satisfactory to you, we have the deterrent to effectively smother in the crib any call for a crusade. The weapon does not need to be used, Catherine. It just needs to exist .”

That was what she’d said, just after Diabolist spoke to me. Her one sentence. Take this city without destroying it, and there will be no more wars . And she might be right, I thought. If any mobilizing invading army was immediately sanctioned by a Hellgate opening in that nation’s heartlands, it would put a hard damper on the calls to go crusading. And if she never gave them a banner to rally around by attacking neighbouring countries, how many rulers were really going to be willing to risk that mess for a point of principle? It wouldn’t be the pretty peace I’d envisioned, but thinking this could be done cleanly has brought nothing but disaster at my feet. And yet.

“Reparations,” I said. “If you’re really serious about this, everything that got wrecked in a Praesi war gets rebuilt on Praesi coin. And we’re done with compromise within the borders. Callowan law as decreed by the crown is paramount. No more legions garrisoning our cities or Praesi ruling them. Callow is now sanctioned to raise its own army, answerable directly to me.”

The Empress studied me.

“You ask for an independent nation under nominal Tower authority,” she finally said.

“Diabolist took a ride on the crazy side,” I said, “but she was right about one thing: there’s always a cost. You want me to keep Callow in the fold? Fine. Here’s my price.”

“I will require Liesse to be under direct Imperial control,” Malicia said, and it tasted like triumph.

“I’ll want soldiers in the city as well,” I bluntly replied, mastering myself. “Your people already pulled that trigger once. It’s not happening again without my permission.”

“You can’t be serious,” Black said, and he sounded genuinely appalled.

I turned to him, but his eyes were entirely on Malicia.

“Catherine is young, and so I forgive the impulse of seeking easy solution,” he said. “But you, Alaya? We built this empire on the bones of men who make fortresses like this. We have seen them fail .”

“We have seen them use those weapons and fail, Amadeus,” the Empress said, and it was like I wasn’t even in the room. “This is different. We avoid the conflict entirely.”

“This is a clarion call for every hero on the fucking continent,” Black harshly said.

I almost flinched, even now. It was rare to hear him curse, much less in a tone that icy.

“Think beyond your precious war, Amadeus,” the Empress bit out. “It cannot be won. It cannot even be fought or we risk everything.”

“ This risks everything,” he spat. “Let’s not even talk about how it will look to keep a weapon built on Callowan corpses – this is foolish, in and of itself. It would have us dependant on a device not of our own making we barely control, and the dependence alone is enough to bury us.”

“It will draw heroes,” Malicia said. “I will not deny that. But we have killed heroes before, a great many of them. And now they will lack rulers backing them. A hero without a kingdom’s backing is just a dangerous vagrant, Amadeus. A lesser threat than a full crusade, by any objective measure.”

“It will not be green boys and scrappy orphans who come calling, Malicia,” Black said. “Every old monster hidden in some faraway corner will crawl out of the woodworks to end us. You think the White Knight is the sharpest blade the Heavens have to bare?”

“You speak of beating back half the continent and tell me this is the threat?” Malicia replied, tone growing sharp. “Set aside your bloody pride for a moment and think . We did not build this empire so you could throw it all away because you want to bloody the eye of the Heavens over some philosophical point.”

“We did not build this empire so you could bet its fate on a magic trick instead of preparations forty years in the making,” he said, tone just as sharp and twice as contemptuous.

“Your way has Callow a battlefield for the fourth time in three years, Black,” I said, and from the way both of them twitched I saw they’d entirely forgotten I was there. “I can’t accept that. You can’t ask me to accept that, looking at what’s around us and who’s responsible for it. It’s... enough. Too much has already been done. If the heroes come, we’ll kill them. Hells, the fortress doesn’t have to stay here. We can fly it halfway into the Tyrian Sea and sink their boats as they come. The heroes will come with the crusade anyway. What do we actually lose by doing this? If the weapon is broken, well, the armies haven’t gone anywhere have they?”

“Your own apprentice agrees with me,” Malicia said. “It is not your way, but what does that matter if it works ?”

Black closed his eyes. I could feel the weight of this settle onto both our shoulders, the pivot of this empire.

“Maddie,” the illusion softly said. “Trust me. One last time. One last leap.”

He flinched like she’d struck him, and it felt wrong for me to see this at all. Like I was looking at them stripped of their skins, of all the many layers of deception and protection they had accumulated since they were young as I was. But the gears at work were greater than any of us. With the pivot came more. My mantle stirred. Queenship would be granted to me by the Tower, by Name and by right. But not like the rulers of the Old Kingdom, no. Mine would not be so pristine a reign. If I was to be queen, it would be a queen cloaked in black with hands bloodied red. Though young and half-formed, the Name was taking shape. Beckoning. Behind my teacher and the Empress, I glimpsed a silhouette leaning against the wall in the back. A woman, with long dark curls and sloppily stained leathers. She had a silver flask in hand, and was taking a long pull from it. She met my eyes while wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. I know you , I thought. Not this face, but I know you . She winked, and just like that she was gone. I saw Black had opened his eyes, and that his hand was raised.

“I am done,” the Black Knight said, “with half-measures.”

I moved, Malicia spoke, but we were both too late.

“ Destroy ,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch said, and his Name pulsed.

The array broke and the souls of the dead swept us all like a tide.

Chapter 70: Reverb

“Six wars I fought since my coronation, so hear me when I say this: war may be fought for righteous reasons, but no war can ever deserve that epithet.”
-King Jehan the Wise, apocryphal last words

It was a cork forced into a leaking barrel, not a long-term solution. I hesitated to call this luck, because Black was nothing if not calculated even at his worst, but the damage had been limited. Destroying the array had freed the souls of the Deoraithe but there’d been an interval between that unleashing and the city smashing back into Creation. The wards Masego had promised held, keeping the dead shades from turning a third of central Callow into a haunted wasteland, but Liesse itself was beyond salvaging. The wights inside had gone wild, tearing apart everything that wasn’t nailed down and quite a bit that was. Thrice a ruin now, the old heart of the south. There was nothing inside left alive, not even the rebel forces who’d been dug in. That close to the flood of souls their protection had been about as useful a parchment shield. As far as my people could tell, the few that’d survived the initial onslaught had been killed by the rampaging wights. I’d been cheated out of my hangings, but it had been an execution nonetheless. Besides, there were survivors from the battle outside the city. I would settle my scores with Akua’s lot one way or another.

“It remains a major strategic liability so long as we leave it like this,” the Hellhound said.

I was avoiding the camp and he decisions that awaited me there, at the moment, but there was no getting away from Juniper. My general’s face was calm, but there was a subtle hunch to her frame she had once lacked. Like she was trying to fold into herself. Her mother had died, I’d been told, while trying to hold the right flank. He risen corpse had been hacked to pieces by her own legionaries and she’d had to be brought to the pyre in full armour to hide the marks. Juniper had put the torch herself, Adjutant said, while I lay half-conscious in a tent after crawling out of the ruins of Liesse. I might have died in there, if Thief had not come back for me. Black certainly would have, the backlash of his stand having put him in a coma he’d yet to wake from. Seated on an upturned stone, I watched the wreck of a once-great city and bit into mutton jerky. I offered the Hellhound a bite but got only a quelling glare for answer. Her loss.

“I’ll be putting Hierophant to work,” I finally said. “He believes the remaining wights can be brought under control.”

“That leaves the shades,” Juniper grunted. “I’m less than comfortable with having a jug of goblinfire in the middle of the supply line for the Vales. Much less camping by it. Those wards break, Catherine, and up goes two thirds of the remaining imperial forces in Callow. And you damn well know Duchess Kegan’s been making noise. Ignoring her won’t work forever.”

The necromantic nature of the powers backing the Watch was out of the bag for good, to no one’s pleasure. Procer would make something of that, no doubt. There were too many people on the plains who were seeing what was undeniably the souls of the dead for containment to be even remotely feasible, not that it was my secret to keep in the first place. And since the moment the dust settled the Duchess of Daoine had been loudly demanding her wizards be given access to the wards and the city so they could begin the work of weaving the souls back together into a gestalt. I’d had Adjutant’s people take a look at her forces: the Watch was powerless at the moment. Nothing more than well-trained soldiers. I’d refused to meet with Kegan until Hierophant could have a better look at Liesse, but around dawn today he’d given me his verdict: the weapon was broken. Not for good, but it would take several years and massive resources to bring it back to even superficial functionality and I could afford the costs in neither time nor coin. One word, that was all it’d taken, and just like that Black had smothered the last hope for my homeland being spared the Tenth Crusade.

“The souls go back to Daoine,” I told Juniper with a sigh. “They’re no use to anyone here, and I’ll need the Watch to take the field before long.”

“A start,” the Hellhound conceded. “Frankly, I believe we should torch the whole city with goblinfire. You’ve heard the reports.”

Soldiers near the wards said they glimpsed dead loved ones speaking to them from behind the boundary, begging to be let out. Some of the mages keeping Hierophant’s wards powered came back trembling and talking of whispers in their ears. Others lost track of time entirely for hours on end. I’d had to order the northernmost camps to be demolished and rebuilt south because the legionaries inside them were plagued with vivid and persistent nightmares. You couldn’t kill that many people in a place without there being consequences to it, and killing was only the first of horrors that’d been visited upon Liesse.

“I’m not committing to that until I get assurances it won’t worsen the situation,” I said. “But as soon as I get back to Laure I’ll make it an official decree that the area as far as two miles outwards is forbidden territory. Markers will be placed.”

“There’ll be adventurers heading in there even then,” Juniper said. “Looters with more balls than sense.”

“My options are limited, Juniper,” I told the orc flatly. “I will not compound ruin with disaster. Ratface has a blade to the throat of half the Dark Guilds and Thief has her own people – I’ll have to count on them to keep the situation as much under control as it can be.”

“Heroes-”she began.

“Are coming,” I interrupted. “I know. Marshal Grem still holds the Vales, that should ward off the worst of it, but I’ve already ordered a watch on the Hwaerte. The Smugglers will know if anyone tries to sail up the river. If we’re lucky the first wave will only hit us with the crusade and we’ll have winter to prepare unhindered.”

“When have we ever been that lucky?” Juniper bitterly said.

The death of Istrid Knightsbane had changed her, I thought. Tempered her in some ways, but as in all things at a price. She’d always been sombre but her mother’s passing had put out some ineffable light in her. It’d cut close to home in a way the rest of our campaigns had not, I supposed. More than once I’d thought of reaching out, but her grief was not something I could truly understand. I was an orphan, after all. Aisha would pick up what pieces she could. I scarfed down the last of the jerky and licked my fingers clean.

“There are going to be changes,” I said.

She looked at me for a long time, then sighed. She gestured for me to move and I made room on the stone. The orc sat by my side, over a head taller and twice as broad. I studied her face and was surprised at how young she looked, even after all this. The Hellhound was such a force of nature it was easy to forget she was only a year older than me.

“What happened in the city, Catherine?” she asked.

No one had who’d not been in that room knew exactly what had gone down, not even Thief. There had been no order to arrest Black while he was unconscious forthcoming from the Tower, but I knew better than to believe the matter was at an end. I suspected the Empress would have tried it, if there wasn’t a real risk the legions around Liesse would have refused and raised banner of rebellion around my teacher’s sleeping form. That I could see no move on her part did not mean they were not being made.

“Lines were drawn,” I said. “I’m still deciding on which side I’m falling.”

“Are we rebelling?” she bluntly asked.

After a heartbeat of hesitation, I shook my head.

“Not for now, anyway,” I admitted. “But we can no longer be dependant on the Tower for protection. Right now the situation is... fluid.”

A year ago, I thought, I would have backed Black against the Empress without hesitation. Maybe even a fortnight ago. But not after today, not when he’d consigned thousands of my countrymen to death for a point of pride.

“We can’t afford a civil war with Procer at the gates,” Juniper growled.

“I doubt it’ll come to that,” I said. “But there was a break. The blades might be sheathed until the outside threat is dealt with but they’ll come out eventually. I will not allow Callow to be the field where that struggle is settled, and that means an army giving them all pause.”

“You want me to head it,” the Hellhound said.

“You already are heading it,” I replied. “Your responsibilities will just expand.”

“Raising an army without the Tower’s permission is treason,” Juniper reluctantly said.

“I have permission,” I said. “Or had. I will proceed regardless of whether that’s confirmed. Like you said, the Empire cannot afford a civil war. Much less one fought against me.”

“Callowan recruits, I assume,” she said.

“I’d grab every legionary in the country if I could,” I said. “As it is I’ve had Adjutant working on the Fifth and the Twelfth. The orc now in interim command of the Fifth has been... open to overtures.”

“But not the Sixth,” Juniper said, dark eyes studying me.

Her mother’s legion. No, I’d not crossed that line. I would have liked to say I’d made that choice out of consideration for the feelings of a dear friend, but the truth was not as pretty. I’d refrained because Juniper in command of Callow’s army was worth more to me than a chance of pulling into my orbit the remains of the Sixth.

“No,” I agreed. “Not the Sixth.”

She closed her eyes.

“I’ll talk to Legate Bagram,” the Hellhound whispered. “I know him well.”

“I’m not asking you to,” I told her, wanting to be exceedingly clear about that.

“I have already chosen the side I fall on, Warlord,” Juniper replied, eyes opening and flashing with anger. “My words were not lightly spoken. Do not bring dishonour to us both by coddling me.”

Only an orc, I thought, would find offense in someone respecting their grief. Best not to linger on this, and as it happened I had no lack of distractions to offer.

“The Fourth and the Ninth are the real wildcards,” I said. “Precarious as their position is.”

It had not escaped anyone’s attention that the only senior commanders to survive the battle were both goblins and Matrons. Rumours of betrayal were already sweeping through the camps and in truth I’d done nothing to stamp them out. Adjutant had given me a report by voice only that I’d ordered him to never repeat: Istrid Knightsbane had been killed by poison, not sorcery or undead. He’d told me the cut that killed her was too clean to have been made with anything but goblin steel, and that raised questions . All legionary weapons were made with the stuff, straight out of the Imperial forges of Foramen, and the High Lords had definitely gotten their hands on some of it. Yet I very much doubted this was Diabolist’s handiwork. The timing was off, and I suspected she would have gloated about it when we fought if it was her doing. If only to make it plain she had more support among Praesi than I believed, even in the Legions. It shouldn’t be Black’s either – General Istrid had been one of his most vocal loyalists. That left three likely culprits in my eyes, the ones who had the most to gain from that death.

First was the Empress, who’d had to know when considering her scheme that Black would stand opposed to it. Had she begun cleaning the upper ranks of his most loyal before the insurrection was over? It was unlikely she’d get an opportunity to make a kill this quiet for years. She was not to be dismissed as to practical for this, not after the flying murder fortress gambit she’d tacitly allowed. The second was the First Prince. Assassinating senior and famous commanders before an invasion was right up her wheelhouse, from what I’d heard of her. I found it hard to believe she’d managed to place an agent in the legions without the Eyes noticing it, but then she had shut down major imperial operations in Procer before. With the home front settled, she might be looking outwards. The last I hesitated to even think, because if it was true the Empire was done and this entire house of cards was going to fall down on my head.

It might be the Matrons. Isolationist as they were said to be, Robber had told me enough about the crones ruling his people I knew taking a few scalps to better position commanders of their own kind was not something they’d think twice about doing – if they thought they could get away with it. And if it was them... Suddenly it no longer felt like a coincidence I’d been offered desperately needed coin in exchange for a goblin settlement in Marchford. It felt like a calculated move to secure an ally before an uprising could be started. It might be I was being paranoid in thinking this, but in Praes the question was never if you were being paranoid or not. It was if you were being paranoid enough .

“General Sacker would not have a hand in my mother’s death, no matter the rumours,” Juniper sneered. “They were like sisters, Catherine. Their bond was decades in the making.”

“I don’t believe it either,” I replied, only saying half the truth.

Goblins just didn’t think the way humans or even orcs did. To them betrayal in the name of advancement was no betrayal at all. Still, I suspected that if there’d been an agent of the Matrons at work here it would be Marshal Ranker. She was the one who’d been left the senior commander here by the deaths, and though the rumours were impugning her reputation no one was daring to question her authority. Not even me, as she’d stepped lightly knowing that a Named outranked even a marshal in the eyes of the Tower if push came to shove. But neither had I helped her any with my not inconsiderable clout: as long as her reputation was in the gutter, I had an in with anyone who bought the rumours. And I needed the men, needed them badly if I was to give any of the jackals fighting over Callow’s bleeding body any reason to be wary. The Fifteenth wasn’t enough for that, not with the nearly one thousand men the fucking Warlock had left stranded on the wrong side of the Hellgate. If the villain had been here to deal with, we would have had words on the subject. The legionaries going in had known it was a possibility they would never come back, but the blow was still being felt and I doubted the bastard had done anything to try to save them.

“They may retreat to Summerholm,” Juniper finally said. “Without Lord Black to mediate or the Tower ordering otherwise, that is the safest hold for them to wait out the mess.”

“It’s not happening,” I told her flatly. “The don’t get to garrison one of my fucking cities anymore. If they want to go east, let them go all the way to the Blessed Isle. The Empire can supply them there, because it sure as Hells won’t be my granaries coughing out the goods.”

The Hellhound stared at me, frowning.

“You are establishing borders,” she said.

“I am,” I acknowledged.

“That is too large a territory to cover for a single host,” Juniper stated. “You mean to raise several armies, then, and that is beyond the writ of a general’s authority. My command extends only to the Fifteenth.”

“You would need to be a marshal,” I agreed.

I’d had Hakram take care of the physical aspect of that last night. A marshal’s baton was traditionally made of wood from the Wasteland, usually ebony, but I didn’t have any on hand. The elongated stick I took out from under my cloak and handed to Juniper was stone, rough granite. It’d been sculpted, but where was no mandate from the Tower in formal Mthethwa to be read. Among the traditional relief of legionaries in arms was set my own heraldry, the scales with the sword and the crown. The detail did not escape the orc’s considering eyes.

“They will never promote you to marshal,” I said. “You’ve been with me for too long, your loyalties are suspect.”

“Then this is a mere bauble,” she said.

“It is the regalia of the Marshal of Callow,” I smiled thinly. “It’s not actually illegal for a serving commander to have other titles, you see. I had Aisha look into the legalities.”

It wasn’t nearly that clean-cut, no matter what I said. Lords and ladies of Praesi who served in the Legions had to renounce their claim to any noble title for the duration of their service. But that was landed titles, and what I was granting her was not. There was even a precedent, though a distant one: Dread Empress Maleficent II had showered her successful commander in the Free Cities with local honours, since those were much less expensive than rewards at home. As a client state under the Tower, Callow currently fell in the same areas as the subjugated territories down south the ancient empress had taken. It was a fairly thin excuse and the High Lords were bound to howl, but Malicia had a lot more to prove than I did at the moment. If she couldn’t even finagle her way through this, what point was there in backing her? Juniper’s thick fingers clasped around the stone.

“I dreamt of holding a baton, as a girl,” she said. “But not like this.”

Isn’t that Praes in a sentence? I thought. Everything you want, just not the way you want it.

“You’re now the highest commander in this kingdom,” I told her. “Your rank of general is irrelevant. The Fifteenth, while remaining a legion, is also the first division of the army of Callow. Congratulations, Juniper. You’re the youngest marshal in the history of this empire.”

“I am not,” she said darkly, “an imperial marshal. I can live with that disappointment, if I hold the command regardless. But if I am to be your second, Catherine, I will need my hands unbound. There will be conscription, even if limited. I will need forges to make what the Imperial ones in Foramen will no longer provide, and granaries to feed the soldiers.”

“And you’ll have them,” I promised. “I will have this country ready for war, when it comes.”

The Hellhound suddenly snorted.

“I suppose I should kneel,” she said. “Are there no ceremonies to be observed? Should a blade not be laid on my shoulders?”

“That’s for knighting,” I told her. “It would also involve me slapping you across the face as hard as I can, and no offense but I’m not sure you would survive that.”

“Then we do this the way of my own people,” Juniper said, and rose to her feet.

She unsheathed her sword and bared her arm, cutting across leathery flesh. I rose and did the same under her expectant gaze.

“Under the gaze of That Which Lurks Below, I make these oaths,” the Hellhound said, tone heavy. “I will make war for you, and be true in the shedding of blood. In lean seasons I will offer meat from my table, and in bountiful days be granted the same from yours. Your foe is my foe, your kin is my kin. I swear this by iron and salt, by grass and wind and the death of men. In ruin and glory, our threads are bound. Let they who would sunder this pact be devoured ‘til not even bones remain.”

She offered her bleeding arm and I met it with mine, crimson trails staining us both. I did not know her people’s customs, but I knew those of mine. Not from teaching, for etiquette lessons had never covered the likes of this, but from old stories. From days when this land of mine had still be a true kingdom.

“Gods be my witness, and strike me down should I break this solemn oath,” I said. “Honour granted will be kept, homage rewarded by sanctuary unbroken. To she who is faithful and true I will be the same. She who loves me I will love, and shun all that she shuns. No injury or slight shall go unavenged, be they the work of the great or the small.”

“I name you Warlord,” Juniper grinned sharply. “Willing and hungry.”

“I name you Marshal of Callow,” I replied, “and in my own blood anoint you.”

The baton was touched with red, when she took it, the both of us having shed droplets. Fitting, I thought.

There would be more to come.

Prosecution I

“He who casts judgement will ever be judged in turn.”
– Ashuran saying

Hanno had borne eighteen inked notches on his arm since the age of twelve, yet never truly grown used to the privilege. The seeker who’d come to his native district for the yearly tests had done more than simply choose the tier of his citizenship: the man had set the path of his life until he died. Hanno’s own father had been of sturdy frame even young and possessed no aptitude for scholarly matters, and so had kept the tier of his own parents: twenty, with a note by his name indicating preferred assignment to the mines. The boy himself had been found to bear different talents. He had remembered the seven colours of the marbles he was shown for a fleeting moment and their respective numbers too, then proved to have some understanding of numbers and letters. Eighteenth Tier, the seeker decreed. The lowest rank of civil servants in the Thalassocracy, yet a world apart from the back-breaking daily labour that was his father’s lot. His mother had no ink on her arm at all. She had not been born in Ashur, and would never be a citizen. Even two decades after she had made her home in Arwad, she still needed to give way to any citizen on the street and show an official scroll proving her marriage to Father when yearly taxes were collected. She would be forcefully evicted to the foreigner’s district if she failed to do so even once, whether she had an Ashuran son or not.

It sat ill with the boy. Had his father been a ship’s captain of the Tenth or even sat on any of the lower councils, Zoya of Thalassina would have been safeguarded even in widowhood. But promotions up the tiers were rare, near the bottom, and that Father’s name was to the side of a Soninke exile’s in the registers made it certainty he would never sit on any council at alll. A Tenerifan would have been forgiven, perhaps even a Nicaean. But Mother had been born in the Tower’s shade, and even centuries after the Great Conqueror had been slain the memory of her atrocities was laid at the feet of all her people. It was a story often told in the alehouses still, though less was spoken of Ashur’s surrender to the villain and more of the coming of the Hegemony’s fleet to liberate its daughter-holdings. Hanno had no fondness for the Baalites himself, and avoided those that came to Arwad as much as he could. They were arrogant, and never lower than the Seventh: to offer even accidental slight to men such as these could have grave consequences, even an offhand word enough to have him demoted out of both tier and title of court scribe for the Outer Tribunal. It would be a hard blow to the family if it happened. The notches on his arm allowed him access to the markets deeper in the city where the better fare was sold, and earned the coin to afford it.

He had been raised on black bread but enjoyed breaking his fast with the grey now, and even white bread with butter once a month. Going back to miner’s food would not be pleasant for any of them. Hanno swallowed the last of his boiled egg and touched his knuckled to the table to thank the Gods for the meal under his mother’s tolerant gaze. He’d risen an hour before dawn so he would be able to visit the temple, but even so Father had been gone when he woke. His labour in the mine began before dawn and ended past sundown.

“You should make the proper gestures as well,” he told his mother. “It would help with... it would help.”

He’d answered the jeers about his mother being some kind of foreign seductress with fists and and feets, when he’d been younger, but now that he was fourteen he could no longer risk it. If he was brought to the attention of the guards as a troublemaker, he might lose his position at the Outer Tribunal.

“You have your faith,” Zoya of Thalassina smiled. “I have mine.”

“The Hellgods are no true gods,” Hanno muttered. “Just great and mighty devils.”

“This land knows little of devils, Hanno,” she said, brushing back an errant lock of his hair. “I came to these shores because of this. But do not speak such ignorant words. Below listens. Below remembers, and pays its debts in full.”

His lips thinned but he did not argue, for he needed to hurry. His parents did not often speak of religion, for his father rarely set foot in a temple save on festival nights and his mother kept her faith quiet. She a;sp kept a small tile in a dark corner of the house, and every time the moon was full shed blood and salt on it. For luck and long life, she said. The tile was always pristine after the moon began waning, though he’d never seen his mother clean it. Father often teased it was a waste of time, for her Gods were pricks one and all. But how much worse would they be, without tribute? Mother always replied. Hanno kissed his mother’s cheek and took his satchel from the floor, waving her goodbye and picking up the pace so he’d have enough time for full prayer at the temple. Barcalid District was near the edge of the city, not far from the docks, and so its temple was smaller and poorer than those of the wealthier districts. Hanno loved it nonetheless, for it was said to be one of the first temples the Baalites had raised on these shores when they settled them. He set down his satchel on the steps outside, sure not even a tierless thief would fool enough to attempt theft on hallowed grounds, and knelt before the gateless arch of old wood. Three heartbeats he spent kneeling, then rose and advanced with quiet footsteps into the sanctum.

There was no light within save for the sun’s coming down through the openings in the ceiling, and a pair of braziers in the back. That part of the temple Hanno shied from looking at, for on a thin carpet set over an iron grid the Speaker would be seated. The heavy scent of the incense and redwood being burned in the thuribles hanging from the grid in the pit below drowned out every other smell, even this close to the street. Head bowed, Hanno walked the full path around the seven pillars in silence. The masks paced on the jutting wood were not set with precious metals and jewels as they were in richer temples. No, in his district they were clay and driftwood, seashells and baked mud. There was an eight pillar in the back he did not walk before, the one whose masks were sculpted straight into the wood. The faces of the Gods Below, never to be taken off and worn by the Speaker as the faces of the Gods Above could be. Neither denied nor embrace , the old saying went. After walking the path Hanno returned to the second pillar, as these days he often did. It was most fitting for a court scribe to pray before the Face of the True or the Face of the Just, but it was the Face of the Kind he had always preferred. Even among the poor masks of this place it was unadorned, a simple visage of wood hanging from a nail. No inscription or carving.

Hanno extended three fingers and kissed the tip before touching them to the mask. Of all the faces of the Gods, he loved this one best. It asked nothing of the faithful but to offer kindness without expectation, to allow a sliver the light granted to mankind to be offered back to Creation. Gods Above, You Who Are Kind, let me cause no pain , Hanno prayed . Let my hand be gentle and my tongue guileless. Let the only life given me be a gift unto others. A whisper of bare feet and rough spun robe kissing the ground behind him had the boy opening his eyes. The Speaker stood behind him, wearing their birth face. It would have been impious to attempt to see if the priest had been born man or woman: a Speaker renounced it all when they became so. Gender, name, past. They spoke for none but the Gods, and their words were that of the very Heavens when they wore a Face.

“Do you seek guidance, child?” the Speaker said.

Hanno bowed his head deeper.

“Not this morn, Speaker,” he replied softly.

He was humbled by the offer, though also scared. It was rare for one of the priests to offer guidance unasked. It was said that if a Speaker spoke untruth while wearing a Face their flesh would be burnt by Heavens’ own hand, a mark of shame for all to see. The faithful only rarely asked a Face to be worn and guidance provided, for the words of a Speaker often brought to light truths unpleasant. The Gods Above were father and mother both, and their love for their children was ever dispensed with firm hand. The Speaker’s eyes lingered on him.

“You have a light in you, child,” they said. “Do not let it go out.”

And then they were gone, as quietly as they had come. Hanno bowed again before the Face of the Kind but left without walking a farewell path. He would be expected in court soon enough and his usual shortcut through the foreigner district was sealed now that it was under quarantine. Some trader from the Free Cities had brought the welting pox along with their goods, and with so many priests out of the city to prepare the Festival of Ropes in the countryside the sickness was spreading too quickly to be stamped out by ordained healing as sicknesses usually were. The boy had to bare his arm to the guards at the Halan District’s gate to be allowed entrance, though they knew him well. Law was law, in Arwad. Lower tiers had no place treading these grounds unless summoned by the Outer Tribunal. The courthouse where Hanno had been apprenticed was one of the lesser even among the Outer Tribunal, but he did not mind. It was a rare day where it saw no case brought for adjudication, and for such a small court it had a large scrollhouse.

The many laws of Ashur made up most of the collection, including a full set of Madrubal’s famous treatises the Ten Scales , but many foreign laws were set to parchment as well. The Outer Tribunal often settled disputes with foreign traders having occurred within the city, so the laws of southern principalities like Tenerife and Valencis were kept by the side of the more-often used records of Nicaean and Delosi legalities. Hanno enjoyed the quiet days most, as he’d obtained permission to read the scrolls when no duties were left to him. Today would not be one of those, though. Baring his arm a second time before the constable, Hanno greeted the old man with a smile.

“Good morning, Veno,” he said. “Looks like a warm day, doesn’t it?”

The constable eyed his arm for the notches, as he had every morning the boy came to the courthouse since his testing. That the ink was there every time changed nothing, for duty was duty. All must serve as ordained, for Ashur to shine.

“That it does,” the constable agreed. “The sun will do my bones some good. You should hurry inside, Hanno. The foreigners came early.”

The dark-skinned boy winced. That did not bode well for the very same Stygians who’d sought adjudication. He didn’t know what tribunes had been drawn to oversee the trial, but he knew quite a few who’d take offence to what could be perceived as foreign impatience. Not his trouble, though. He thanked Veno for the advice and passed through the scrollhouse with only swift greeting to all the senior scribes and archivists, avoiding conversation. As one of the youngest in the courthouse and more than decent with a quill, he tended to be given assignment as scrivener when trials took place. The duty was usually long, tedious and unforgiving of mistakes, which made it quite unpopular with his fellows. Failing to properly transcribe the spoken words of a tribune was a good way to get on their bad side if they noticed it, and that usually got you assigned every chore in sight for a few weeks. His suspicions were proved correct: when he set down his satchel and made the cursory bows before the only official judicial scribe of the courthouse, he was given an affectionate pat on the head along with a greeting. That usually meant Scribe Zenon was about to send him off after a chore.

“Scrivener?” Hanno sighed.

Scribe Zenon as, a duly recognized judicial scribe, was a citizen of the Fourteenth tier. He was quite friendly, however, and often reminded the lesser citizens under him that if he’d sought to be surrounded with formality all day he would have remained serving in the High Tribunal.

“Clever boy,” Zenon said fondly. “It’s not as bad as you think. The serving tribunes are Lagon and Discar, but the absent is Yzebel.”

Serving tribunes were the adjudicators of any trial brought to the Outer Tribunal, always in a pair. Should they prove to disagree on the verdict, a third tribune known as the ‘absent’ would tip the scale one way or another. Serving tribunes usually paid little attention to the scrivener, but the absent one was seated right behind them. If said tribune was prone to reading over shoulders, the duty could become quite nerve-wracking. Tribune Yzebel was nearly seventy, though, and known for both terrible eyesight and motherly fondness for younger scribes. In this he had truly been fortunate, and Hanno discretely made the three fingers over his heart in thanks to the Face of the Kind.

“Go on,” Zenon told him, smilingly. “I’ll let even let you use the courthouse quills this once, as reparation for this delightful morning duty.”

Hanno’s face split in a smile. It was a little thing, but an accolade nonetheless. Scriveners were usually made to use their own ink and quills, and strictly disciplined should those be damaged in any way. The ability to take care of your own satchel was considered a mark that one was qualified for further advancement within the tier. The courthouse quills were of much better quality, though, and the inks preserved in ritual boxes said to have been made in Praes. Which, while a land of lawless savages, was said to be ruled by powerful mages. Both would be a pleasure to work with. Hanno bowed low in thanks, and headed to the courthouse proper. Trials took place in an open courtyard, when weather permitted, with twin raised seats reserved for the serving tribunes before which those in need of adjudication would stand. A lesser seat was to the side for the absent tribune, and before it a carpet and wooden writing desk. Hanno bowed to the tribunes in the proper order then sat at the desk as Tribune Yzebel waved him down affably.

The case was not an overly complicated one. The supplicants, a pair of Stygian traders, were not disputing against Ashurans but asking compensation of the Thalassocracy itself. Such a demand would usually be under the authority of the High Tribunal to settle, but as the loss had been incurred within Arwad itself it had been passed off to the Outer after being put before a committee. The Stygians had come to Arwad with a hold full of slaves, to obtain tea from across the Tyrian Sea before making shore in Nicae with their goods and returning home to great wealth. They had been forced to remain in the city because of the quarantine, and though priests had prevented them from catching the welting pox they had lost most their slaves to it. As they had lost goods because of an Ashuran decree, they sought reparations of equal worth from the Thalassocracy. Upon being asked by Tribune Lagon the provenance of their slaves, they refused to answer the question. Some eastern shore of the Free Cities, Hanno guessed. Villagers from some coastal nowhere taken in a raid, though the Stygians could not admit to this before the Tribunal without the entire case being dismissed. The serving tribunes remained even-handed, though they must have suspected the same. Ashur did not reimburse traders for natural calamities and their effects on trade, but it was law for compensation to be offered for the inconvenience of forced quarantine if it resulted in provable loss. The Stygians insisted they be offered back to their harbour fees as well, if not the worth of their slaves, but the demand had no basis in Ashuran law and so they were sent off fuming. Hanno penned the last of the official record and set the quill down, finding Tribune Yzebel leaning close.

“It looks done quite properly,” she smiled, wrinkles thickening.

“I would not fail the Outer Tribunal,” Hanno replied gravely.

She mussed his hair, which he rather disliked but did not object to.

“Old Zenon tells me you’ve been spending time in the scrollhouse,” she said.

“I enjoy reading the scrolls,” the boy honestly replied.

“Good,” Yzebel said. “Some of our archivists are getting long in the tooth, young Hanno. If you keep discharging your duties so admirably there may be a place among them for you when one retires.”

The boy’s eyed widened, and he bowed low. Archivists were of the Eighteenth tier as well, but even within that tier there were differences in rank. To be custodian of written works was to stand above a mere scribe, and it was not unheard of for long-serving archivists to rise up a tier. They were also much appreciated among committees for their learning, and those who had seat on such things often wielded the highest authority within their own tier – if not slightly higher. He was still beaming from the tribune’s words when he left the courthouse to present his transcription, though the joy was replaced by surprise when he found Scribe Zenon waiting him for him at the outskirts of the scrollhouse.

“Hanno,” the man grimaced.

“Sir?” the boy said. “I was bringing you the transcripts, if that is your need.”

“No,” the older man said, “but hand me those anyway. Your father, he works in the mines to the south?”

Hanno’s head dipped hesitantly.

“I’m so sorry, child,” the scribe said quietly. “There’s been a collapse. Go back home, your district seat should have the Lists of the Lost soon. He may have been lucky.”

His father, he learned within the hour, had not been lucky.

—

Sorrows never came alone. There was no body to bury, and that was the blow that truly unmade his mother. The mine shaft that collapsed over his father’s head had been old and already picked clean, and so the committee of Thirteenth tier citizens that oversaw the aftermath of the disaster decided it would be amongst those that would not be cleared out. It would be, they said, a net monetary loss for the Thalassocracy. Hanno knew his family was not wealthy enough that they would have been able to afford a driftwood funeral for Father, that his body would have never been set on a raft for the eastern tide to take back to the faraway home of all Ashurans, but that it would not even be buried in consecrated grounds wounded him. The Gods Above would know their own, and the soul of a good man would be brought at their side, but for profane earth to be the tomb of his own father was a shameful thing. The priests laid blessing upon the whole mine and spoke the names of the lost, but that was as much to allow work to resume as to honour the dead. Worse, there was but a month left before the yearly taxes were to be collected. Without Father, his mother would be expelled from Barcalid District and sent into quarantined grounds. It could not be borne.

Hanno went with every dawn as a supplicant to the district seat to ask the ruling committee to grant an exemption, but he was never even allowed to state his case before them. His fellows in the Outer Tribunal shared his sorrow, but none had the influence or inclination to intervene. The boy swallowed his fear and begged every tribune that would listen to speak in his mother’s favour, but increasingly cold refusals were his only answer. There was no more talk of his becoming archivist after that. As the day grew nearer and his fear mounted, Mother grew calmer. Grief had numbed her at first, but that distance eventually turned into something else. She offered comfort he was not willing to receive, and began to speak of the city of her birth. Faraway Thalassina, on the coast of the Wasteland. She told him of the seashell walls that surrounded it, of the great port where traders from all of Calernia and beyond came to call. Of the beautiful and terrible highborn, of their strange sorceries and exquisite clothes. Of the Empress they said was the most beautiful woman in the world. He asked her, then, if she wanted to go home. She told him his father had been home, and that it was now beyond her reach. The morning after, he found her gone when he rose.

The tile in the dark corner of the house was gone as well.

It was instinct that had him find her but it came too late. The same committee that had left his father to mass grave was attending the districts where pensions were due to widows and widowers, and on that day that had come to Barcalid.

“Gods of my ancestors, grant me due,” Zoya of Thalassina snarled, throwing the tile at their feet. “Blood for blood, life for life. Let every breath be a torment, every night a terror, every pleasure turn to insipid ash. Let them have no rest or peace until my love lies in the grave he earned. I curse you to this with my last breath .”

Even as guards hurried to wrestle her down, she took a knife and opened her own throat. As her blood stained the tiles the light of day dimmed, and with the curse still on her lips his mother died. The Gods Below listened. The Gods Below remembered, and in that moment paid their debt in full. He knew this to be true when the first man of the committee began to scream .

—

The weeks that followed were lived only by the ghost of him. Even as one cursed citizen after another found their salvation beyond the ability of hurriedly summoned priests and took their lives to flee the agony, whispers spread through the district. Witch , children called his mother. The Witch of Barcalid, don’t say her name or you’ll be cursed too . Wasteland spawn , old women muttered, shaking their heads disapprovingly. They always go bad, didn’t I tell you? The district’s ruling committee summoned him to stand before them after a full fortnight under house arrest. As the last member of the family, he was informed a decision had been reached to strike every mention of Zhoya of Thalassina from Ashuran records and registers. Any trace of her presence, every act she had ever made, was now never to be mentioned again. He would not be given the body. It had been burned at sea without his permission, far enough no ash would ever touch the shores of the Thalassocracy. Hanno sat in a sunny courtyard before twelve Ashurans with grave faces and was told his own fate would now be debated. Though he had committed no crime, the depth of his involvement in the murders had yet to be established. Complicity warranted punishment under the law, should he charged with such.

“In light of your exemplary service under the Outer Tribunal, a chance has been granted you to denounce the act of the woman who gave birth to you,” a man told him.

A name had been given, but Hanno could not recall it. Looking up at the bright sky, the boy remained silent.

“You would have sent her,” he finally said, “in a quarantined district.”

“As was only lawful,” a grey-haired woman said flatly.

Hanno considered this.

“It was lawful,” he eventually conceded. “Was it just ?”

“Justice is the exercise of Ashuran law,” the same woman said. “Nothing more or less.”

He studied her face for some time.

“My father’s body,” he said. “Will it be buried properly?”

The men and women of the ruling committee looked uncomfortable, some looking away.

“That is not for us to decide,” a man said. “Another committee will be assembled to reassess the matter.”

They would do it, he understood in that moment. Because the citizens who would be charged with that debate would be wary of the curse finding them too. Because Mother had made them afraid .

“This matter does not fall within the business of this hearing,” the grey-haired woman said. “Further departures from such will be punished. Hanno of Barcalid District, citizen of the Eighteenth Tier, will you or will you not denounce the actions of the woman that gave birth to you?”

They would not even say her name, he thought. Even that had been stricken.

“Zhoya,” he said. “Zhoya of Thalassina. That was her name.”

“You have broken censure,” a man said coldly. “This will be taken into consideration.”

“No,” Hanno said calmly. “I will not denounce her. It is not for the likes of you to stand in her judgement.”

They demoted him to tierlessness, though they refrained from naming him a criminal. The ink notches on his arm were removed by a mage, his skin left smooth and unmarred. Though still a citizen, he was now stripped of all rights – even that of keeping the home he had been raised in. Hanno pondered this. It was Ashuran law, and once he would not have questioned it. Now he wondered, for he had been forced to see the laws of his people were not always what he believed they should be. His eyes had been opened, and all the old truths were as smoke in the wind. If a law was not just, could it truly be a law? It shook him, because he could not trust himself to see the truth. He knew his own anger, his grief. And even without it, he would be as flawed as the men who had made the laws he now decried in his heart. It had been correct to refuse the committee, he decided. They were as blind as he. Homeless and umoored, he found his feet taking him to temple once more. Three heartbeats he knelt before the gateless arch, and entered hallowed grounds. This time, he did not walk the path. Forward he went, and knelt again at the feet of the priest shrouded in incense.

“Speaker,” he said. “I seek guidance.”

They looked at him through the mist.

“What face would you have me bear, child?” they asked.

“I ask,” Hanno said, “for the Face of the Just.”

Chapter 71: Reprise

“It is easiest to win a game when no one else knows you’re playing.”
– Dread Empress Maleficent II

I was no longer capable of staying in a fully warded tent for more than a few moments before I got this itch . It always began on my palms, small pricks that I would have thought were drying sweat if I still sweated. Then it was the bottom of my feet, and from there it was only a matter of time before I felt like scratching out my own skin. I had, the first time, and hadn’t realized what I was doing until there were long gouges in my arm scored by my own nails. They’d bled, and when Masego had seen to the wound his face had creased in surprise. It was not inexact, he’d said, to call what ran through my veins blood. But it was more than just that, now. It was as useful a reagent as fae blood, he mused, and perhaps more in some ways. That it was no longer warm was something of a hint in that regard, but his current theory was that the liquid in my body was Winter. I dimly remembered my veins freezing solid, when I’d ripped apart his work. That had not been a metaphor, or a passing thing. He’d insisted on a full study of my body after that, not that I’d protested much. Even naked I no longer felt the cold, save as some sort of strange perception – warmth and frost were like... colours, more than anything else. That my skin could feel colours should have worried me, but the worry never really came.

It had been dimmed. This entire fucking world felt dim, and I had to force myself to work up anger at that.

The results of his exploratory spells had been illuminating in all the worst of ways. My bones were no longer bone. They had shattered, he told me, then been made anew in ivory. I’d been under the impression that ivory was a sort of bone, but I’d take Masego’s word on the contrary. He’d muttered something about pores and marrow before telling me he’d need several months of invasive regular procedures to get a clear idea of how my body now functioned. He’d then absent-mindedly added that my while my heart still beat that seemed to have nothing to do with moving around blood, which was just the latest horrific episode in the shit I’d been putting my body through since becoming the Squire. I’d naturally told him that his proposed studies weren’t really feasible, and we’d settled on him having a look whenever the both us had the time to spare – which was, admittedly, pretty rare. The two three-hour sessions we’d done since had seen him grow more and more interested, which usually when a boy was looking at my naked body had different connotations.

Two facts I would have almost preferred not to know came out. First, he told me my body should no longer actually be considered a body. It was, objectively speaking, a ‘construct’. I’d pretended I knew what that meant and gone through the usual dance of inviting him to elaborate to I could figure it out from context. There is nothing natural about a construct , was the part that struck me hardest . It is made, not born, and so does not function as truly living thing would. He’d refused to outright state it, since he was still lacking proof, but I’d gotten out of him that the ‘flesh ‘and ‘blood’ I now wore had precious little to do with what had been those same things before Liesse. I had been born anew, in a way. Not a pleasant one. It was also why my limp was back even though the Hashmallim had healed it. Beyond what he told me, I glimpsed something that managed to bring back the taste of fear to my mouth even if only faintly. Fae were known for illusions most of all. Was I just wearing a trick of light, a deception of Creation? Could I be dismissed , the way fairies and devils could be? That wards were now anathema to me might be a hint in that direction.

The second fact had been shrouded in inscrutable magetalk babble when he started expounding about it, as he told me about something called ‘Principle Alienation’. One of the limits of sorcery, apparently, and also the reason diabolism was such a popular branch of it. I got him to talk in actual Lower Miezan after a while, and the basics of it were this: any mortal individual trying to use power was shackled by the limited mortal understanding of Creation and its many layers. A mage could not use the powers of a demon, at least in part, because they could not perceive the fabric of the world the way a demon did. Hence why Praesi were so fond of binding otherworldy creatures into their service, gaining access to powers they themselves would not be able to use. I was no summoner, and told him as much, but his reply ran along different lines than expected. I was wielding powers a mortal could not, so it followed that whenever I used them I became less mortal.

I’d not felt all that different, after coming back from Liesse, and some part of me had kept to the wild hope that the consequences would not be as dire as I had foreseen. His verdict finally disabused me of the notion. The moment I began calling on Winter my mind would move along similar lines as a fae’s. My thoughts, my perceptions, my desires: everything I considered to be me would become a pale mirror of themselves. I’d not cheated my way out of the ramifications of being fae, I’d just made myself a... different breed of the species. The deeper I drew on Winter the more I would become some creature wearing my own face, and though that creature would keep all that I was it would not truly believe in them. My beliefs would just become duties enshrined in ice, as binding and unmoving as those that had doomed the Queen of Summer. I could be fluid and powerless, or unbending and powerful. I spent the rest of that night in my tent getting as drunk as I could and negelecting a dozen urgent duties, wishing my hands could still shake at the terror I felt. I’d always treated my body as a tool, a vessel to get me where I needed to be. Now that it had become exactly that I was realizing the deep divide between saying something and living it.

Yet I had no time to spare for my own troubles, not with the catastrophes laying just beyond the horizon. And so after I sobered up, the following morning I sent for Duchess Kegan of House Ismail. Hierophant as well, and him before the other. He had an axe to grin I wanted settled before going into the other conversation. I poured myself a cup of wine as Masego sat himself at my left, whetting my lips on the Vale summer wine and finding the taste of it almost sour. Some part of me wondered if it was a consequence of the changes I’d gone though or just another cost for the mantle I had claimed in full. Winter took everything. Maybe even the smallest of pleasures. I offered the blind mage a cup but he shook his head.

“Its barely past Morning Bell,” he said. “Did you even break your fast?”

I had not. Eating, while still pleasurable in some ways, did not seem to be something I needed any longer. The hungers I still felt had nothing to do with food.

“Ranker,” I said, deciding to change the line of inquiry.

“Ah,” Masego said, glass eyes shifting under his cloth to look at me. “Is it finally time for sanctions? I would have thought she would be in the tent for this.”

“I’ve had Hakram look into your complaint,” I said.

His brow rose.

“Three mage lines attempted to stick me inside a ward in broad daylight before the better part of a hundred thousand soldiers,” he said. “How much investigation can possibly have been needed?”

If the situation in the camps wasn’t such a mess, the fact that he’d actually lodged a formal complain with the Legions would have carried a lot of weight. Especially given who his father was. But the lines of command were shaky at the moment. Ranker was both the senior commander here and the subject of the complaint, and while I outranked her as both Named and Vicequeen of Callow that authority was half a fiction. Her legion would stick with her whatever happened, and likely General Sacker’s as well. I couldn’t just bury this, of course. Not only did I owe Masego better than that, she had turned on an ally in the middle of a fucking battle. The problem was that she’d had reasons for that, and not bad ones.

“As I understand it, the ward wasn’t actually meant to harm you,” I said.

He scoffed.

“It would have left me bereft of sorcery in the midst of men attempting to kill me, had it succeeded,” he said. “Murder with a borrowed knife.”

I didn’t disagree, but the old Matron had been careful to cover her back before acting. She had, before witnesses, scried Duchess Kegan to order that Hierophant not be harmed. Which practically speaking would have done nothing – entire parts of Kegan’s host had just seen dozens of their own incinerated without warning, they would have attacked whatever she said – but it did give Ranker plausible deniability. Combined with officially stated worries about Hierophant being corrupted by demons, she’d not technically done anything I could punishher for. And pushing the matter regardless when the situation was so volatile was a recipe for a fight breaking out.

“I can’t actually punish a marshal, Masego,” I admitted. “With the Empress being silent and Black unconscious in theory I’m the supreme authority here, but I don’t have the support in the Legions to force the matter. What I can offer is a compromise.”

“An attempt was made on my life, Catherine,” Hierophant said, cocking his head to the side. “Support is irrelevant. Give me two lines of mages and I will turn her camp into a crater with a bare half day of preparation.”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid,” I said. “You’re right to be angry. Furious, even. But you can’t wipe out a few thousand people for one woman’s decision.”

“I can,” Masego disagreed, “if they shield her from retribution.”

“I’m not asking you to just let this go,” I said. “Hakram’s been in talks. The mage lines involved will be punished.”

It was a good thing Adjutant needed so little sleep, because since my return I had been running him ragged. This was arguably the most delicate negotiation I’d sent him on yet, given what could come of a failure. I felt Hierophant’s stare on me though neither his eyes nor his body moved, the subtle weight if his attention.

“Executed?” he asked, and his voice was hard to read.

“Demoted back to the ranks,” I said. “All pending transfer to another legion, pay docked for a year’s worth.”

“A slap on the wrist,” he said. “This is not even symbolic. No, rather it is symbolic of them getting away with it .”

I’d thought he would say that. I’d not blamed Adjutant when he’d come back with those terms, though I’d been less than pleased. Marshal Ranker was not the kind of goblin easily talked into bending the neck, much less when she believed herself to be in the right. The days where I had considered the Legions my teacher’s domain and therefore sacrosanct were over, though. And the Praesi were not the only ones with hired killers at their disposal.

“I had Adjutant push for the Legions they transfer to being posted in the Wasteland,” I said.

“Out of sight is not evening of the scale,” Masego said.

“No,” I agreed. “But Ratface’s staff now has a representative from the Guild of Assassins attached. Those mages will be heading back to Praes through cities I control.”

Masego frowned for a moment, then his expression brightened.

“Ah,” he said, beaming. “You’re implying you’ll have them killed before they reach the Wasteland.”

I could have done without it being stated that bluntly but yes, that was exactly what I was implying. It was a waste of no doubt competent mages, but Ranker should have fucking thought twice before taking a swing at one of mine.

“You need me to be ‘satisfied justice had been done’ in front of everyone else,” Masego continued, sounding pleased even as tried to wink before remembering halfway through he no longer had eyelids.

The sight of that was a little distressing, but I’d cope.

“Pretty much, yeah,” I said. “No need to rub elbows with the goblin that tried to take you out, but try no longer to be publicly out for blood.”

“I never get to scheme,” Hierophant mused, appearing rather chuffed. “It’s rather pleasant to be involved in your plots.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said.

He nodded.

“Good,” I grimly said. “Because you’re not going to enjoy our talk with Kegan nearly this much.”

His expression soured, but before he could begin to speak I raised my own voice and ordered the legionaries outside to let in the Duchess. I’d hear her arrive a little while back, but this needed to be wrapped up before she got involved. Masego would be easier to talk into things after being mollified. Some part of me wondered what kind of person it made me to be manipulating one of my closest friends without hesitation, but the voice wasn’t as loud as it used to be. Or nearly as persuasive. The Duchess of Daoine parted the flaps of the tent with her hand and sketched half a bow in my direction. The stare she gave Hierophant was distinctly less than friendly.

“Your Grace,” she greeted me. “I am pleased your strenuous duties have finally allowed time for audience.”

Yeah, I’d kind of deserved that. Even at the kingdom’s peak there been nobody but the royal family higher in rank than the head of the House of Ismail – she likely wasn’t used to being given a brush-off, much less one as blatant as one I’d repeatedly given her.

“Take a seat, Duchess,” I said. “I’m told you have grievances to bring forward.”

“An understatement if there ever was one,” Kegan sneered, and pointedly sat herself across the table from the both of us. “My men were murdered, and the very murderer sits at your side. Not an auspicious beginning.”

Hierophant opened his mouth, but I raised my hand.

“Let her lay it out first,” I said. “You can give answer afterwards. Duchess, the floor is yours.”

“Seventy-three dead, without even ashes to bury,” Kegan said. “Thirty-nine wounded permanently. Do I need to call witnesses forward? This entire host saw the killings.”

“Your men attempted to kill Hierophant as well,” I said, and her face turned dark with fury.

“Is the defences of one’s life now a crime in the eyes of the Empire?” she barked.

“The Empress isn’t here,” I said calmly. “I am. And I am not condemning their actions, only establishing the full facts. Do you have anything to add?”

“Murder of Deoraithe is a breach of our treaty with the Tower,” Kegan coldly said. “And I believe that under the regulations of your own legions, the wanton killing of allied soldiers qualifies as treason .”

“So it does,” I agreed, and was more than a little glad I sat down with Aisha before this. “’Wanton killing’ being defined as ‘killing without just pretext’ under the same regulations.”

“Are you implying there was anything just about this?” the Deoraithe said, and her tone could have frozen oil.

“I think this was a tragedy,” I said. “But also a largely accidental one. Masego, if you would explain yourself?”

His glass eyes were fixing the duchess with a stare as unfriendly as her own.

“I was not aware I needed to explain my actions to aristocrats ,” Hierophant said, the disdain he put into the word ironically reminding me of the same highborn he was looking down on.

“I’m asking you to clarify why you did what you did,” I said. “Lest your actions be interpreted inaccurately.”

That, more than anything else, jolted him into talking. Throwing around rank here would have been completely useless.

“Upon returning from the dimensional fold in which I battled the three demons,” Masego said, “My sudden juxtaposition to Creation brought back with it a large quantity of demonic essence. That essence having corrupted soldiers, I purged the location before it could further contaminate. Any further killing was made in my own defence.”

“The killing of corrupted individuals regardless of Praesi citizenship is legal under purge protocols,” I clarified for Kegan. “Which the Black Knight declared the moment the rebels called forward their demons. Hierophant hasn’t broken Tower law by doing this, and killing men that were attacking him is similarly legal.”

“I could have killed twice as many,” Hierophant flatly said. “You should be thanking me for my restraint.”

I almost winced. I really, really wished he hadn’t said that. Reading a room had never been one of Masego’s talent, but even by his standards this was a blunder. Predictably, Kegan’s face a was a mask of bitter and poisonous fury.

“You feed my people to demons, murder them and then those trying to protect them,” she hissed. “And you require thanks for it?”

“The Lord Hierophant misspoke in an attempt to hide his deep regret at the tragic necessity of his actions,” I lied. “Please forgive his lack of manners.”

“I am the Duchess of Daoine,” Kegan of House Ismail softly replied. “I do not forget. I do not forgive .”

It was rather sad this wasn’t even the worst I’d anticipated this conversation could go. Masego looked about to speak again but the look I sent him smothered that in the crib.

“ Deep regret ,” I stressed.

“I did not mean to harm them,” Hierophant sighed, sounding his age for once.

It was rare for him to have to face consequences for the collateral damage that followed in our wake. Most the time, it was our foes that got the worst of it. That sentence was probably as good as I could hope for, though Kegan understandably seemed less than appeased.

“Before you speak again,” I interrupted. “He could not know your men would be where he reappeared.”

I didn’t know if that was true and frankly didn’t care what the truth was. She would be in no position to gainsay me anyway: the mages could understand what Hierophant had pulled on the field in the whole of Calernia could probably be counted on one hand.

“And he was not the one who ordered your soldiers forward,” I continued. “That would be Marshal Ranker.”

It was unfair of me to throw her under the chariot here, to be honest. It was Masego who hadn’t kept anyone in the loop when he’d done... whatever it was he’d actually done. I knew how he got when he had a puzzle in front of him, everything else fell by the wayside. It was something I would have to change in him, the going off without a word. Trying to fix the moral compass of a man raised by a monster and also an incubus was far beyond my ability, but I could at least fashion a facsimile of one through practicality. As long as he understood discussions like this would keep happening if he didn’t change his ways, he should be willing to adjust in order to avoid the tediousness. That aside, Ranker had given orders according to what she believed to be the lay of the battlefield and her mistake had ultimately been understandable. By my reading of the reports she’d believed the entire army would collapse if the centre wasn’t reinforced, so she’d merely taken what she saw as the lesser risk. But Kegan hated Ranker deeply, had for decades. And the marshal wasn’t one of mine, quite the opposite. If doing her disservice was what kept the peace, she could go hang.

“Regardless of orders, there is fault,” the Deoraithe said, but there’d been a noticeable thaw in the poison. “My men were killed at the Lord Hierophant’s hand.”

Ah, Black. Even now your lessons are useful . People always preferred blaming an old enemy if you gave them the chance.

“And for that there will be redress,” I said. “Though there was no ill-intent, the deaths cannot be ignored. To start, Hierophant will help your mages reform the gestalt in Liesse.”

Masego turned to me, displeasure visible on his face, but that was the least of the concessions I could and would make. Kegan set aside her anger for a moment, more interested in the prize I’d put on the table: confirmation that no one would contest the souls of her people. Keeping her wizards at bay had, in an unexpected way, made what must have once seem as a given feel like it was now a concession. I’d count my blessings in that.

“Full access to the city will be granted?” she pressed.

“Under supervision,” I said, and before she could argue I raised a hand. “Not out of distrust, Duchess. That city is a nightmare made stone and my people are the ones who’ve been keeping an eye on it. I do this to avoid you losing a few of your practitioners in the bargain.”

“It would not be necessary if access had been granted since the beginning,” Kegan said, but did not disagree any further.

“Hierophant,” I continued, “will also put his considerable prowess in sorcery at your disposal in order to help your practitioners ensure the gestalt cannot be stolen like this again. After which he will never speak a word of those measures to anyone, by royal decree.”

“Catherine-“ he began.

“We fuck up, we pay up,” I bluntly told him. “This isn’t Praes, Masego. We don’t get a pass because we’re Named or powerful. If the laws protect you, they protect them too.”

He turned sullen at that, and that was the very reason I’d not warned him of this in advance. Look at me, Kegan , I thought. I’m going against one of my closest and most powerful supporters to set things right with you. Keep that in mind before deciding I’m an enemy. I knew the blind man’s irritation would pass after he dug into the thick of the sorcery that was involved in what had been promised. There was a reason I’d chosen that out of all the possible avenues of making reparations. The Duchess would see one of the foremost Named in the Empire put to the service of her people, while Hierophant would forget this was a punishment at all after the first month. And if this required going to Daoine for a while, it just so happened that would keep Masego out of the reach of the Empress and the Calamities for while. That also had its uses. But I’d have to give more, for what I wanted out of Daoine. Masego had no part of that, though, and it would be better if he wasn’t there at all.

“Hierophant’s actions took place while he was under my command,” I told Kegan. “Therefore the responsibility is mine in part. In my function as Vicequeen of Callow I’ll offer further reparations, but I believe my comrade’s part in this is done.”

Masego mostly looked pleased he wouldn’t have to keep being involved in this, but it wasn’t him I was watching out for. It was the Duchess. In her eyes I could see the struggle: make a play for further punishment and risk whatever other indemnities I would offer, or show goodwill she didn’t think he deserved and bank on that adding to the honeypot? Greed won, as I thought it would. The Duchess was about to have some lean years, if my suspicions about the costs of replacing the Watch’s casualties were true. She’d want to hit me up for coin more than try and likely fail to have Hierophant further punished.

“That part of the grievance is considered settled,” she conceded.

Good. Masego didn’t bother with courtesies when he left the tent as quickly as he could, but the two of us had cats to skin of greater import.

“A moment,” I said, and my heartbeat stilled.

The air in the tent cooled. Once that would have seen every surface in sight frost over, but I’d gained more than just power when I’d claimed my full mantle. Winter hung thickly in the air, a barely visible pale mist. No one would be able to scry through that, and my perceptions were extended far enough no one would be able to come and listen in without my knowing it. I felt the legionaries outside shuffle at the sudden drop, the two as visible to me as if I was standing before them, and I raised my voice to send the pair away. When I turned my eyes back to Kegan she had gone pale. Fear, I noted. It wafted off her like a scent. I breathed it in and smiled. It would be easy to get what I wanted from her. All that was needed was to weave myself into mind like a quiet whisper, slithering into her brains until terror ruled her and my words were her only relief. She would beg me to serve. If I twisted her just right, set a sliver of darkness and ice deep inside, I could have her plagued with nightmares that would keep her on my leash forever. My fingers clenched. Callowan , I told myself. She is Callowan. The urge lessened. It still lurked, but the power was no longer waiting to lash out.

“Gods,” the Duchess said. “Your eyes, they... It is true, then. You are no longer human.”

My eyes? I raised an eyebrow and a light tap of the finger on the table had it frost. I looked upon my reflection and found nothing amiss, fixing the Deoraithe with a quizzical look.

“Like frozen ponds,” she whispered.

Useful, I thought, if they were truly this disquieting. The part of me that should be finching was utterly silent.

“We will not be overheard,” I said. “Would you be entirely opposed to some honesty between us, Duchess? It should limit the tediousness.”

She shivered at my voice, or perhaps the cold.

“I am not disagreeable,” she managed with laudable composure.

“There is a war coming,” I said. “I would like the know where Daoine will stand, and before it reaches our doorstep.”

“The terms of our treaty with the Tower require a host of no less than ten thousand soldiers be provided in case of foreign invasion,” she said cautiously.

“If I was here on behalf of the Empress, this tent would be warmer,” I said.

She stared at me for a long time.

“You speak of rebellion,” she said.

“Nothing quite so... turbulent,” I replied.

“Then what, exactly?” she pressed.

I smiled, broad and sharp.

“Do you play shatranj, Duchess?” I asked, voice echoing strangely.

This I time I knew why she shivered.

“I do,” she said.

“To have a game , you see, you need an unspoken assumption,” I murmured. “That all the pieces will obey .”

She stayed. She listened.

And after, she made a deal.

Chapter 72: Curtains

“Tall your tower may be, but what was raised by the hands of men can by those same hands be torn down.”
– Queen Eleanor Fairfax of Callow

The moon had come and gone, chased away by the approach of dawn. I still had the better part of a bell left until the sun rose, but I sat patiently. It would make the fourth time Archer went into the city now, and she’d come close enough the last I could reasonably expect her to succeed on this trip. I’d come to regret not bringing a folding chair for my vigil, but the log I was leaning against was comfortable enough apathy had seen me decline going out to get one. I enjoyed the silence, to be honest. The reprieve from everything. Out here I could allow even my thoughts to go still, though I never let myself to sink into sleep. I still could, I’d found out. Much like eating it was no longer something I needed to do, and when I did it was... less than restful. I always dreamt, and the dreams were not the pleasant kind. Winter devouring a world whole, until all that was left was ice and darkness. My eyes lingered on the ward setting the boundary around Liesse, and I found the same silhouettes from earlier had yet to retreat. Shades of the dead standing a vigil of their own. I could feel their eyes on me, fixed and unblinking.

There was hunger in them, but it was lesser than my own and that had them attracted to my presence like moths to a flame. Had I truly become the Black Queen, I thought, had my teacher not broken that transition as recklessly as he had the city, they would have been mine to rule. To shape and order as I wished, wresting true ownership of the weapon Akua had made from the Empire’s hands. The shape of that was still seductive. It would have been a gamble, it was true, but then so was any other path. And it had been the only outcome presented to me I’d found even slightly acceptable. Peace in my time, huh. The freedom to rebuild Callow as it should be, safe and prosperous. That path led to a place where I was no longer needed, but that might better for all involved. What salvation I’d tried to bring to my people had bled them as starkly as ruin, and would yet unless I found a way out. Keeping the damages to a minimum had failed, that much was obvious. It’d only ever been a mitigating measure anyway, not a plan. One of those was taking shape in my mind, even as I gathered more and more soldiers to my banner, but oh the risk of it.

Gamble was too light a word, but if every other path led to a land of graveyards it was a risk that must be taken.

Archer’s presence was heralded by the retreating of the shades. Even through the translucent wall of the ward I could see her tying a rope atop the rampart and shimmying down smoothly. Some curious shade wandered too close and was immediately carved through in a silver blur, the other woman’s longknife wounding it as if it was a thing of flesh. The others scattered immediately in a chorus of whispers I was careful not to listen too closely to. The sooner Hierophant bound those souls again the better for all involved. Archer tugged down the rope after landing and sheathed her blade, striding towards me unhurriedly. The ward pushed back her hair and clothes when she crossed it, but from the swagger to her step I knew she’d finally managed what I’d asked of her. A cold smile stretched my lips. Good. It was not the kind of thread I could allow to be left hanging.

“So if Zeze told you shit was under control in there, he was gravely mistaken,” Archer told me with a shit-eating grin. “Get it? As in grave-“

“You’ve just ensured we will never sleep together,” I told her frankly. “Your being an ass I can live with, but puns ? I do have standards.”

“Spoken like the Ice Queen of legend,” the Named replied cheerfully.

She plopped herself down at my side, sprawling over twice the amount of space I’d occupied and elbowing be out of my comfortable stance. I threw back her hand in her own face and she yelped, more out of outrage than pain.

“Is that any way to treat your beloved minion?” she complained.

“Almost half of that was true,” I noted. “That’s a record for you.”

“Ugh,” she grunted. “You’re such a joyless thing. I thought villains were supposed to be the fun ones.”

“You’ve been part of two wars and several killings that will go into legend since linking up with me,” I pointed out.

“Maybe, but I haven’t gotten laid in like a year,” she whined. “I’m this close to just dragging your pretty officer into a tent for the night.”

I glanced at her. That could mean any number of people, given that her tastes did not discriminate between genders.

“The one with the funny name,” she elaborated.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Ratface?” I tried.

“That’s the one,” she cheered. “Aisha gets real chatty after a drinks, and she had nothing but compliments for-“

“And this part of the conversation just came at an end,” I announced firmly.

“You never gossip with me,” Archer told me, displeased.

“I’ve delegated all gossiping duties to Hakram,” I said, swiftly throwing my closest friend under the chariot. “And if you’re being this much of a pest, you have something for me.”

“Say please,” she grinned.

“Please stop trying my patience,” I sweetly replied.

I was rewarded by Archer rustling through her knapsack and dropping a cylinder of obsidian in my lap. I ran a finger down the length of it, and the soul bound within shivered. Oh , I thought. So you know who I am. That’s an unexpected pleasure.

“Kind of wanted to stab her a few times,” the brown-skinned woman told me in a conversational tone. “You know, for Hunter.”

“I tore out her heart while she was still alive to feel it,” I informed Archer.

The other woman blinked at me, then let out a whistle.

“Well shit,” she said. “That’s a way to get your displeasure across, I guess. Old school of you, Cat.”

“She had a way of bringing that out in me,” I muttered, eyes on the soul container. “I lost my temper when she sent an envoy. Made an oath, even. Not the kind of thing I can back out of nowadays.”

If you do this, there is no place in Creation or beyond that will safeguard you from me , I’d sworn. Not Heavens or Hells, not even if every lord in Arcadia swears to you. The doom I promise you will have men trembling in a thousand years when they speak of Akua’s Folly and the woe that came from it. I could feel what I had spoken binding me as surely as if I’d sworn on the Gods Below.

“I thought about sending her to the Tower,” I admitted. “She’d have a place waiting for her in the Hall of Screams.”

“But that wouldn’t be quite your vengeance then, would it?” Archer knowingly said.

That, and I no longer trusted the Empress with possession of Akua’s soul. Not when I could no longer be certain another city wouldn’t go up in flames for a weapon to be forged. It was one thing to use that weapon after it was already made, another to enable Malicia to commit mass murder if she got desperate enough. Even if it was Praesi who got the axe this time, which I couldn’t be sure of. There was a part of me that was urging me to just destroy the soul. To make sure the possible liability was ended for good. But as reasonable as I knew that action would be, I couldn’t quite bring myself to take it. I wasn’t sure whether it was genuine hatred that had me stay my hand, or if I simply couldn’t break the oath. Both were worrying liabilities.

“I have a cloak,” I finally said.

“The murder cloak, yeah,” Archer mused. “Called thus because you murdered someone for every piece you add to it.”

I forced myself not to sigh. It would only encourage her.

“Haven’t added her banner to it yet,” I said. “I was thinking maybe something more pointed was in order.”

Archer eyed me sideways.

“ Shit ,” she said. “Her own soul, really?”

“It can be done,” I said. “I’ve heard the Warlock bound someone’s soul to a chamber pot once, Masego should be able to do something similar.”

“I can’t decide whether that’s better or worse than skinning someone and making a cloak out of that,” she mused.

“Past a certain point the nuances don’t matter much, I think,” I said.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Archer said, face turning up to stare at the sky. “They never do. We just tell ourselves otherwise so we can think someone else is worse.”

“Never took you for the philosophical kind of girl,” I said, head leaning back next to hers.

“That’s because it’s pointless to dig to deep,” she shrugged. “How long are we going to live, either of us? Not long enough to see more than the smallest bit of Creation. If that’s my limit, I want to sample as much of that bit as I can instead of just getting miserable about all this Good and Evil twaddle. Ain’t no settling that, no matter how hard you try. If you get involved you just get chewed up like all the others before you, and I don’t owe anybody that.”

“Hate to break it to you,” I said, “but you are involved. What do you think we’ve been doing for the last year?”

“I have no idea,” she admitted, sounding pleased at the notion. “But you’re a pretty shit villain and you gave the Choir of Contrition the finger, so I’m looking forward to finding out.”

I wouldn’t get a better opening than that, I thought, so I might as well speak up now.

“You got a letter,” I said. “From Refuge.”

“Huh,” she grunted. “What’s in it?”

“Are you implying I’d read your personal correspondence?” I said.

“Haven’t you?” she snorted.

“Of course not,” I said, and let a beat pass. “I have people for that.”

“I can’t believe you’re half-assing even your spying on me,” she sighed. “Was it from the Lady?”

I hummed in agreement.

“She says the debt Refuge owed the Tower is settled,” I told her. “That your mandated service as my fae specialist is at an end. Didn’t actually summon you back, though.”

“She wouldn’t,” Archer said. “It’s not how Refuge works. The Lady of the Lake’s not a queen, Cat, she’s just... the woman with the biggest stick, I guess. We learned from her, but we’re not like an army or anything. We do whatever we want.”

I made a noise of understanding, not willing to comment on any of it given my continued sharp dislike for Ranger.

“So what are you going to do?” I asked.

“Don’t be thick, you chump,” she sighed. “I’m staying. You should know that by now. But you should also know I’m going to leave eventually.”

I had known that, deep down. Of all the Woe she was the one least bound to me. Adjutant and Hierophant had attachment to the Empire, and Thief to Callow. But Archer? Archer had come for reasons entirely her own, and would leave when she tired of them.

“To where?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she laughed. “But there’s so much I haven’t seen. The Everdark, the Titanomachy. And you must have been told this entire continent is a nowhere. There’s nations on the other side of the Tyrian Sea that are larger than all of Calernia. Hells, we don’t even know what’s to the west.”

“No one’s ever found anything in the Skiron ocean,” I reminded her. “Except sea snakes that were a tad unfriendly, and not the small kind.”

“Doesn’t mean there’s not,” Archer murmured. “Wouldn’t that be something, Cat? Being the first Calernian to walk an unknown shore?”

“It would be,” I admitted.

I’d be something untainted, too, and there were few of those left in my life.

“Maybe I’ll go with you, Archer,” I said. “Gods, there’s bound to be a day where I’m done. Where I can finally just leave.”

My tone was tired, but it was not kind of tired sleep could cure. Archer stirred.

“Indrani,” she said. “Call me Indrani.”

We stayed there until dawn, laughing and talking of places so very far away.

—

It was always odd to see Adjutant loaded with parchment instead of weapons, but not a bad sort of odd. It wasn’t unfitting, just different from what I was used to seeing. This time, though, the look I gave the scroll he handed me was harsh. It contained names, thirty-four of them. Mages taken prisoner after the Second Battle of Liesse.

“And they’re currently in containment?” I asked.

“Under ward and guard,” the orc said. “Both our own. The Fifteenth took custody of all prisoners.”

“I’m not recognizing a lot of those names,” I told him. “I expected highborn.”

“They’re all mfuasa ,” Hakram informed me. “The Truebloods weren’t willing to gamble on Diabolist with kin, at least not important ones.”

Servant lines, huh. Old retainer families of the High Lords who’d been in their service for so long they were above peasants in the Praesi pecking order. Akua had sent the same to me as expendable envoys when we’d had our little chat before the battle. I shoved the scroll under my arm and unfolded the other one he’d handed me.

“Nearly two thousand,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “I knew you’d grabbed a few, Hakram, but not that many.”

“They’re not all Praesi,” he said. “There’s some Helikean mercenaries and even seven drows.”

“Exiles?” I asked.

“Soldiers don’t go to Mercantis when they’ve still got a home,” he said.

I wiggled my elbow at the scroll he still held in hand.

“And what’s on that?”

“The names of the highborn within the household troops,” he said. “I’ve had Aisha look into them, to add notes regarding their background and what could reasonably be asked for ransom.”

“Ransom,” I repeated softly.

“I know,” he said. “Not what you want. But it’s not a small sum, Catherine. And the moment you start raising armies and rebuilding the country, our coffers are going to bleed like a stuck pig.”

“The Tower is meant to pay reparations,” I said.

“The Tower’s gone silent,” Hakram growled. “That is not a good sign.”

That was too true for me to deny. I’d expected Malicia to begin talks with me the moment the dust settled, and that she’d so far made no attempt was raising my hackles. Something was afoot. I needed the coin, that much was true. And yet. I handed Adutant the mage scroll back, and refused the one with highborn names.

“The closest road,” I said. “It’s between Ankou and Southpool, correct?”

“Closest paved road,” he corrected. “There’s dirt ones all over the region.”

It was half a bell past dawn, and that meant matters were in need of settling. The prisoners first among them, since they were beginning to be a noticeable drain on our supplies. I looked north, where the road we’d spoken of would lay.

“We’ll begin on the outskirts of Ankou,” I said. “One every mile.”

“One what?” the orc asked.

“Do you remember what Black did, after the Liesse Rebellion?” I said.

Adjutant had never been slow to understanding.

“The Countess Marchford and the Marchioness Vale,” he said.

“Nailed to the gates of their own manors,” I mused. “I have a lack of those at hand, so the side of the road will have to do. One every mile, Hakram. Crucified .”

They wanted to make a fucking statement with their rebellion, did they? I could make one as well. You come here and you murder Callowans? This is what happens. This will always be what happens. Let them think of that every time they passed a corpse left to the crows.

“You still have a list in hand,” Adjutant finally said.

“Take care of the other two,” I said. “And throw in the mercenaries. I’ve no mercy left for those. Then you can assemble what’s left.”

“Should I have gallows raised?” he asked.

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them. Necessity and dues. Always the hardest balance to strike.

“Do,” I finally said.

The orc studied me closely.

“Will they be used?” he said.

“That’ll be on them,” I said. “They’re going to get the only thing any of us ever get. A choice.”

I waited in my tent with a bottle of aragh and the latest reports while he saw to it. The Taghreb liquor was already tasteless, and it had a kick. It was one of the few drinks I could still enjoy. By Noon Bell my sappers had raised the gallows and the remaining prisoners were herded out of their camp and onto the plains. Four companies of heavies stood around them, and as many regulars kept them moving in good order. They looked haggard, I saw when I left the tent. Not tortured or beaten, but kept on the least amount of rations possible and in chains even when they slept. A far cry from the resplendent soldiers they’d once been, decked in the Wasteland’s finest arms and armour. Adjutant was at my side when I stood before them, his looming presence a weight additional to my own. I gave him a nod and he barked orders, legionaries using the flat of their blades to silence the quiet talk of the prisoners.

“You know who I am,” I said.

One of the prisoners in the back called out something and there was a splash of laughter.

“Adjutant,” I said.

He went himself. Even those who’d laughed went utterly silent at the sight of the man being dragged to the gallows by his hair, kicking and screaming. The goblins slipped the noose around his neck and the lever was pulled. The sharp snap sounded like the crack of thunder across the eerily quiet assembly. Feet hanging above the deck, the corpse moved with the breeze.

“You know who I am,” I repeated, and this time no one spoke. “I would be within my rights to hang every last one of you. It would, in all honesty, make my day .”

I sighed.

“But I am not a wasteful woman,” I said. “You are dead, make no mistake about that. Tribunals have been convened and a verdict passed.”

I’d stood before soldiers, once and spoken words like this to deserters. I’d come to care for them, in the end, but that had never been what was meant to happen was it? It had been a weakness on my part to get attached. One I was in no danger of repeating with this lot.

“The manner and time of this end is at my discretion,” I said. “ I own your deaths . And I would rather spend them than throw them away. The last time I made such an offer, there was the promise of release and amnesty at the end of service.”

My tone went cold.

“You get no such mercy from me,” I said. “You are rebels and murderers, the willing tool of a madwoman who met her deserved end. You will die fighting for this land you butchered, be it tomorrow or in ten years.”

I flicked my wrist and Hakram gestured at an officer, who brought forward a standard and plunged it into dark earth. Gold on red, the cloth was. A golden noose set against crimson, with the words of dead men written beneath. Gallowborne. The best of the worst .

“You can refuse,” I said. “Where that leads you is behind me. Or you can kneel, and make an oath.”

In the end, they knelt.

—

Thief found me right before Evening Bell, as I was beginning to consider going out to look for her myself. She didn’t bother to sneak in this time, striding straight into my tent and dropping into her seat with a grunt. Vivienne took the bottle of aragh on the table and pulled directly at it without asking, setting it down after with a loud thump.

“It could be worse,” Thief finally said.

“I didn’t expect your report to be pleasure reading,” I said. “Not that you ever bother to write those.”

“Get used to it,” she said “I’m not leaving a parchment trail for the Eyes to get their hands on.”

Fair enough, I conceded. I knew better than to put stock in the delusion there weren’t informants in the Tower’s pay remaining in my own legion, much less all the other ones camped by Liesse.

“Start with the worst,” I said.

“Southpool,” she grimaced. “Eldermen and former nobility are meeting. The whole city’s incensed about their levies being wiped out.”

“Rebellion?” I asked.

“Nothing overt,” Thief said, “but if they want to get their hands on weapons, the nobles are the ones to talk to. It’s not a good sign they’re involved.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“Get the names to Ratface,” I said.

Her face blanked.

“I’m told he has an envoy from the Assassins in his staff,” she said.

The implied question was quiet clear.

“Not unless they force me to,” I said. “They get a warning first. I’ve seen enough dead Callowans for several lifetimes. But if they actually rebel, Vivienne, it’ll be more than a handful of old men who end up killed. That I won’t allow.”

She slowly nodded. Whether or not that had convinced her I couldn’t tell.

“The south is a mess, but uprising’s the last thing on their mind,” she told me. “With Dormer and Holden emptied and Liesse... well, I’m not sure there’s a word for what happened to Liesse. Refugees are trickling back to the other two, but with Liesse gone everything in sight of Hengest Lake is lawless. There’s bandit packs forming to claim what food is left, and village militias aren’t above looting other villages to keep their families fed through winter either.”

“I’ll send a detachment south,” I grimaced. “It’ll take a while to get supplies in place, though. Isn’t the governor in Vale doing anything?”

“He’s driving back any refugees camping in his lands with the last of the city guard,” Vivienne darkly said. “City’s under martial law and he’s started rationing.”

Another mess to deal with. There was always another one waiting around the corner.

“Laure?” I pressed.

“The Governess-General has kept order,” Thief said. “My people had some quiet talks with those who wanted to start riots for a spot of looting. Summerholm and Denier are steady too, word’s still only trickling in. Expect trouble when it’s no longer rumours.”

“Ankou?”

“Marshal Grem sent in a garrison force,” she said. “Quiet for now, orcs in armour marching through the streets have a way of making people think twice about throwing stones. And before you ask, the north barely even noticed the rest of Callow is on fire. The Baron of Hedges has been heard saying the chaos to the south is a Praesi issue, not his people’s, and he won’t send even a copper down in aid.”

Those isolationist pricks. Even during the Conquest they’d barely sent any men to fight the Empire. As far as the sheep-fuckers were concerned they were a kingdom of their own, whatever the maps said. Southpooleans might be backwards mud-lickers but at least they pulled their godsdamned weight when catastrophe came calling.

“We’ll see about that,” I muttered. “They’ll be sent an invitation to Laure soon enough.”

Thief hummed.

“A little closer to home, did you know-“

“I know,” I quietly said. “I have him a bell out of courtesy. If he doesn’t come to me after that, I go to him. And I won’t be polite.”

“So long as you know,” Vivienne said.

I leaned back into my chair.

“I need you to do something for me,” I said. “Quietly.”

Blue-grey eyes faced me.

“How quiet are we speaking?” she asked.

“I’ll glamour you a body double and keep her out of sight,” I said.

Thief let out a sharp breath.

“Why?”

I reached for the aragh and filled my cup.

“Not that long ago,” I said, “I was given a choice where none of the outcomes were really a victory . Just a different kind of ugly compromise.”

I knocked back the glass, allowing it to hit the table with a satisfying clang.

“So I had to ask myself – am I really playing the right game?”

I smiled grimly.

“Let’s find out.”

—

The Blackguards had made their own little camp within the camps. They’d raised palisades, had sentinels posted at all times and allowed no one in. It didn’t matter. I’d had Adjutant send people to keep an eye on them, and the ripple that had gone through the soldiers earlier could only have one reason for it. Black was awake. He was awake and his four hours had run out. By now Scribe would have filled him in on everything going on – that she knew about, at least. That was as far as courtesy would take me. I went directly for the gate, which as little more than a moveable part of the palisade. It opened, but that was as far as I was allowed. A dozen Blackguards blocked the opening behind and one went forward to speak to me. I cocked my head to the side, inhaling the scent of him. I knew this one.

“Lieutenant Abase,” I greeted him.

He pushed up his visor, but his hand never left the pommel of his sword.

“Ma’am,” he said. “It’s actually captain now.”

The Blackguards wore no insignias when on campaign, as my teacher disliked the notion of leaving the enemy the capacity to easily pick out his retinue’s officers.

“Congratulations,” I said. “I know he’s awake. Move your men aside.”

The Soninke grimaced.

“I’m under orders not to let anyone in,” he said.

“His orders?” I asked. “Or Scribe’s?”

“Orders,” he replied. “That’s all that matters.”

My eyes flicked to the men behind him. Fear, I sensed. In him and the others both. I wondered if it should be considered some kind of accolade, to be capable of causing that in soldiers who had fought at the side of the Calamities for decades.

“You were kind to me,” I said quietly. “Whenever you could. So I’m going to give you one chance, to reconsider being the man who’s in my way.”

“Duty has no end,” he said in Mtethwa.

It had the cadence of a saying, I thought.

“My patience does,” I replied in the same.

Winter flared but I did not weave the same kind of brutish applications I’d once used to crush throats or shatter bodies. It was closer to a glamour, really. The man’s eyes went wide and he screamed, clawing at his plate as he felt hungry shadows tear into his flesh. The sound of swords unsheathed was heard ahead and I fixed the soldiers with a measured stare. Little bundles of life and warmth they were, huddled inside their steel shells. So very fragile, and what had they done to earn restraint from me? They were not in my keeping. They were obstacles. My hand rose.

“Enough,” Scribe’s voice rang out.

I looked at her. There was no sign of fear on her, no scent. Impatience at most.

“Clear them,” I said, voice ringing with the cracking of ice.

“Stand down,” the villain ordered.

I watched them sheathe their blades, and only then withdrew the weaving inside Abase. I strode past him without a second look, feeling myself slowly begin to thaw. I’d expected guilt, however slight. It never came.

“He is recovering,” Scribe told me flatly. “You could have waited until tomorrow.”

“That you would presume to dictate that even now,” I said, “is why a decent man was just screaming. I’ve given you a bell. You have no right to expect more of me, not after what happened in Liesse.”

“What happened is that he saved your life, child,” Scribe coldly said. “A sentiment you grow less deserving of by the moment.”

“Loyalty’s a fine thing,” I said. “Until it starts to blind you. Look around you, Scribe. Does it seem to you like anything was saved ?”

“You have no notion of the sacrifices that were made for your sake,” the woman said.

“You have no notion of the sacrifices I was forced to make,” I replied. “This entire conversation is unnecessary. If I wanted him dead do you really think you could have stopped me?”

“Careful now,” Scribe softly said. “That sounded like a threat.”

“I assure you,” I said just as softly. “If I ever threaten you, there’ll be no doubt about what I’m doing. Get out of my way or take me to him, I don’t care. But I’m going. Now.”

I was past being scared of her, no matter the ice in her eyes. What I smelled off her in that moment was resentment, and just like that the pieces clicked. I laughed.

“He’s ordered you to let me in, hasn’t he?” I said.

“His judgement is impaired,” she said.

“No,” I said. “It really isn’t. He just knows me a lot better than you.”

I brushed past her and she did not try to block me. She kept pace in silence as I went deeper in, absently noting that the camp’s layout was different from legion doctrine. His tent should have been in the centre but it was further back. I did not need a guide to feel that much. He was seated when I came in, Scribe at my heels. Plain trousers and a loose white shirt, leaning back on his seat before a table. No armour, no weapons save the knife at his hip.

“Catherine,” he greeted me. “That will be all, Eudokia.”

I felt her stiffen without turning.

“I am staying,” she said.

“No,” he gently replied. “You are not.”

“I will not let you kill yourself on some orphan girl’s sword, do you hear me ?” she hissed. “We are better than this. You are better than this.”

“I knew the likely consequences before acting,” he said, smiling at her. “Go. Do not mourn me too long, if it comes to that.”

“This is not how we end,” Scribe insisted. “You promised, Amadeus, you-“

“Until the last step,” he murmured. “I remember. We do not always get to choose where it happens, old friend.”

He rose to his feet, slowly, and pulled her close. She did not struggle, and I was uncomfortable watching how closely she moulded herself against him as he embraced her. Black withdrew after a moment and kissed her brow.

“Everything ends,” he whispered gently. “We have always known this.”

He spoke something in a tongue I did not know and she replied in the same. The look she shot me before leaving was a thing of hatred, but she left regardless. I stayed silent and standing as Black seated himself again. After a moment, he unsheathed the knife at his hip and set it down on the table. Slowly, he turned the handle towards me.

“If that is the intent,” he said, “let us not waste time.”

He tugged at his collar, of all things, baring his neck. I sat across from him. I did not take the knife in hand, but neither did I tell him to sheathe it.

“I will ask questions,” I said. “You will answer.”

His lips quirked in amusement, and I felt like breaking his teeth.

“A trial,” he mused. “Fitting, I suppose. Ask.”

“When we planned my fight against Diabolist,” I said. “I mentioned drawing her into Arcadia. You knew what would happen if I did.”

And you didn’t warn me , I left unsaid.

“Of three things you must be watchful, when assaulting the stronghold of a villain,” he said. “A pivot, a trial...”

“And a monster,” I completed. “So that really was your intention from the beginning. Getting me close and bound, so I’d get a clean shot at killing her when she flinched. It’s why you went after her father from the onset.”

“I was not confident in our breaching her defences otherwise,” Black said. “Not without significant sorcerous support it was dubious would be available. Even getting you in that position was difficult.”

“Our,” I repeated. “That’s the first untruth you spoke to me tonight. There was no our . You made a decision, and took a gamble that would have seen me enslaved or worse if it failed.”

“I did,” he admitted, without any frills. “And did so knowing you would see it as a breach of trust. Had you not pieced it together yourself, I would have told you afterwards.”

His heartbeat did not change, but with him that meant less than nothing: he was the one who’d taught me to both use and fool that trick. He was also, I knew, one of the finest liars I had ever met. I’d once put quite a bit of faith in his old promise he would never lie to me, but that faith was running ragged these days. Would he lie, right now? There were ways more pleasing to me to frame his actions, if that was his intention. That he would have revealed his breach of trust to me after didn’t change the fact that it had happened, and he’d know damn well how little of a difference it would mean to me. I was making me furious, having to look for deception in every sentence of a man I’d once been able to trust implicitly. He had robbed us both of that trust.

“You let me believe she took you prisoner,” I said. “You had the means to warn me you weren’t. Why didn’t you?”

“In part because I was not certain you would be able to deceive her,” he said. “In part because of the story you used to become Duchess of Moonless Nights. It was my understanding that if you slew Assassin while believing he was me, it would prevent the eventuality of a... repetition of pattern.”

Patricide, he’d danced around saying. Even now neither of us were comfortable with the implications of the word.

“You shot yourself in the foot,” I said. “No, not just that – you emptied a full godsdamned quiver. If you’d spoken to me about it, we might have found a different way to take care of that. But you didn’t trust me, Black, and so here now we fucking are. The two of us with a knife between, and me having genuine reason to kill you.”

“I believed at the time that it was an elegant solution,” he said. “The arrogance of an old man, in retrospect. Cheating Creation is never quite so simple as one would prefer.”

“There’s a lot I can forgive you for,” I said. “And did, though I shouldn’t have. I even let go of the fact that you Spoke to me in Summerholm the once, after a few years. Made excuses for it, that I was under influence myself and making what could have been a costly mistake. But this... It’s actually worse, you know. Before the battle even began, you were already treating me like a tool. Not an equal, not even an apprentice. A fucking tool .”

“That is who I am,” he told me honestly. “In the face of conflict, that will always be how I act. I will reduce all individuals involved to instruments, and seek what I consider the best outcome. I will not spare myself a distinction, though I do not consider this to improve the principle of the behaviour in the slightest.”

And it didn’t, I thought. It made no difference. I used to think it did, but there was nothing laudable about not particularly valuing your own life long with everyone else’s. That just meant he was one of his own many victims. It was a sort of madness that seemed principled on the surface, until you saw it in action. Saw what it cost everyone around the madman. What admiration I’d once given this had just been fool’s gold, the shine leant by an unbroken line of victories. Now that the break had come, only the ugliness of what it truly was remained. Black was, I could not longer deny, a fundamentally evil man. That he used practical and sometimes beneficial means to pursue his objectives in no way redeemed that. I was ashamed that this disappointed me, deep down, that I had expected more when he had been so honest about what he was from the beginning. Because to me, he had been charming. Kind, even loving in his own way. Yet a monster still. It was an effort not to reach for the knife.

“You disregarded every word I said, before wrecking the array,” I said, tone surprisingly calm. “I made – Gods, you could almost call it a plea. To end the bleeding. To spare my people another war. You didn’t even bother to answer.”

He inclined his head in disagreement.

“I weighed it,” he replied. “It did not tip the balance. I believed then, as I do now, that keeping the weapon was certain to ensure the destruction of the Empire at the hand of heroes. I still believe it a miscalculation on Malicia’s part to assess that having it, even unused, would not lead to a crusade. It would not only ensure it but begin a story that makes victory effectively impossible. She did not account, you see, for the Bard. Without her existence, perhaps a peace would be feasible. With her being given this thread to use, however, I would think it likely we would all die within two years.”

“You didn’t either,” I said. “Account for the Bard. She was there, right before you used your aspect. And she was smiling .”

Of all I had to consider, that was maybe the only mark in his favour. That he was human, and he’d been wounded like a fox being hunted so he could be herded in the right trap at the right time. That he’d run into someone better at this than him, and we were all being made to pay the price for it.

“That,” he said mildly, “is quite worrying. I did not think her capable of operating independently of a heroic band or Name. I have journals that include notes from my time in the Free Cities, as well as several other matters. They will be given to you.”

“No,” I said quietly. “I don’t think so.”

“I assure you,” he said, “the contents are both accurate and useful.”

I pushed back the chair and rose to my feet.

“The most arrogant thing you’ve said tonight, you didn’t even bother to speak,” I told him. “It’s the assumption that I’m still your successor .”

Black was not, for all his flaws, an unintelligent man.

“You are no longer the Squire,” he said.

“There’s not enough of the Name left for me to qualify,” I said.

“Then,” he began, and on his face surprise and fascination warred.

“I don’t know yet,” I smiled. “But I breathe easier knowing it’s not something you anticipated. Because I know you. If I walk out of this room after slitting your throat, it’s still part of your plan. I’d still be playing a part you set out for me.”

Contingencies, I imagined, would see to the death of the Calamites. And I would left in an uneasy partnership with the Empress, preserving the legacy he had sought to build.

“There’s a part of me right now that just wants to let you go,” I said. “To call our slate clean. Debts paid for sparing your life. But that’s now who I am. I’m not you either, tough, and I don’t want to be.”

I snatched the knife and lunged over the table, driving it into his belly. He let out a soft gasp, and then I twisted the blade.

“You’ll live,” I said. “But it’ll scar. And whenever you look at that scar, I want you to remember tonight. The choice I’m giving you. Gods forgive me, but monster that you are I still love you.”

I looked into his eyes, that pale green gaze that was always so unsettling.
“I am,” I said, “going to build a better world. Even if I have to drag everyone into it kicking and screaming. So there’s your choice, Black: either you make yourself into a man that deserves to live in that world, or you’re just another corpse I step over on my way there.”

I left the knife in him, stepped away, and paused by the edge of the tent on my way out.

“This should go without saying,” I said. “But if you’re still in my lands by the moon’s turn, I’ll put your fucking head on a pike.”

A heartbeat passed and I smiled, the burden of years leaving my shoulders.

“Take care. I’ll see you when the war comes.”

I left and did not look back.

Epilogue

“You who pass this gate, know yourself beyond hope.”
– Written above the gates of Keter, earthly seat of the Dead King

He would not speak to her until he was no longer in a vulnerable position. Alaya had known this because she knew the man, how his mind functioned. Amadeus did not treat from position of weakness. Her Black Knight arrived a few days earlier than anticipated at the Red Flower Vales, taking refuge with the loyal legions that garrisoned it in the face of Procer. The empress had found a degree of dark amusement in the way that Catherine Foundling’s armies now lay between the armed forces most loyal to the two most powerful villains of Praes. Almost like a matron breaking up a childish squabble between her wards. As always, the girl thought the worst of them. A civil war would not have been an acceptable outcome even if had a crusade not been in the making. The coming struggle would be steep enough without wasting soldiers in settling a matter best addressed privately. The current assessment of the younger villain’s loyalties was growing clearer with every movement she made in the absence of instructions from the Tower, and the picture painted was not promising.

The remains of two legions had been suborned to the insolently named Army of Callow, followed by the announcement of large-scale recruitment across the kingdom. The girl’s return to Laure had been followed by an energetic centralization of power around the yet-unbestowed crown, though it seemed she had learned from her previous blunder. A bureaucracy was forcefully being assembled by drafting any remotely competent Callowan and withdrawing talents from the Fifteenth. Given the girl’s propensity for charging at the first battlefield in sight, the power would effectively be wielded by Baroness Anne Kendal over the next few years. A former rebel with close ties to the House of Light and the last remnants of Callowan aristocracy. In the optic of consolidation of power within the kingdom, it was not a blunder. From the greater understanding of Callow within the Empire, it was a warning sign. A cohesive power bloc capable of ruling was being formed in Laure, one with bone-deep enmity towards the East.

That the Duchy of Daoine seemed to have turned into one of the crown’s backers was also worth a second look. It was a well-positioned source of manpower with hard borders and a history of resisting Praesi rule. The girl would need to squeeze the northern baronies for coin, however, or risk leaving the upset south in the lurch. An angle to use, if necessary. If it came to rebellion, further partition of Callow was now a feasible solution. When the south had been bound together by noble rule and marriage alliances it would have been a misstep, the seed of a rebellious Kingdom of Liesse being sown, but now that the city was wrecked and the aristocracy decapitated matters had changed. A southern vassal state dependent on Tower subsidies to recover would remain largely tranquil. It was what had once been the calm centre of Callow that was now trouble, the cities built by the shores of the Silver Lake. Large urban populations, strategic trade location and now a fledgling bureaucracy indebted to the crown made them the beating heart of Catherine’s power within Callow. Alaya had stayed her hand, for the moment. Killing the girl would ignite country-wide rebellion and besides she had yet to overstep the tentative terms reached in Liesse. Pressure could be applied through the promised reparations and the precarious western border.

Which was not in the empress’s hand at the moment, strictly speaking, but in those of her Black Knight. One of several matters in need of settling. Alaya thought of the raised hand, the word spoken that had unmade over a decade of careful planning, and grew cold. Dread Empress Malicia set the unnecessary emotional spasm aside. A mistake had been made, in placing blind trust. The extent that leaning should ever be indulged was in trusting individuals to act according to their nature. Anything more than that was asinine sentiment, a weakness on her part. When the mirror flickered with life, she was awaiting it. Dressed blood red, a sprawling dress with long sleeves and a neckline that was more suggestive than revealing. The golden circlet on her brow was almost an unnecessary touch – the dress alone would be enough for Amadeus to understand that it was the Dread Empress of Praes that had given audience, not Alaya. The silver mirror revealed the sight of a man unarmoured. A loose white shirt did not quite cover the sight of bandages covering his abdomen, but the pale green eyes were as sharp as she had ever seen them. Alaya felt a surge of fury. It was the Empress that had given audience, but it was Amadeus that had come.

“You are wounded,” she said, smoothing away the emotion.

“So I am,” the man agreed, tone almost amused. “It has been a year of sharp lessons, and this one sharper than most.”

“The girl,” Malicia said, and it was not a question.

Even now, after it all, the fury returned. Not directed at him but at the arrogant child who dared believe she had even the shadow of a claim on her Black Knight’s life. In this, she had overstepped . Catherine Foundling had never been properly taught the precarity of her position.

“A point,” Black said, “on the nature of trust. How that blade cuts both ways.”

“She has earned no trust,” Malicia coldly said. “The ability to kill is the grace of a killer, not a qualification to rule. Whatever measures she now takes are no erasure of past failures.”

“Yet I wonder,” the man mused. “Regardless, she is not the reason for this audience. The matter is best set aside for now.”

“Is it?” the Empress said, voice smooth as silk. “Your wayward apprentice raises armies and appoints officials loyal to only her. The matter is not to be dismissed as a mere detail. It is a pressing reality, and a liability in the making.”

“I had hoped,” Black said, “to avoid the losing game that is the attribution of fault. That line of conversation would ensure otherwise.”

The unspoken read thus: her loyalties were shaken by the Diabolist’s massacre, and it was your inaction that allowed this to unfold .

“I have always known fault to be as much a matter of nature as opportunity,” Malicia replied.

The unspoken read thus: you gifted great power to a nobody and never bothered to instil loyalty more than skin deep, this was inevitable.

Black sighed.

“Do you not find it tiresome?” he said. “To leave so much within the margins?”

Malicia’s face was a frozen mask of disdain.

“You have lost the right to make that request,” Alaya said.

“Shall we speak of trust, then, my Empress?” Black softly replied. “I am not without words to offer on that subject.”

Guilt never came. She would not apologize for taking measures preventing him from throwing away his life in a hopeless war, however slighted he felt by the truth that he had become a foe to his own survival. That was on his own head. Not even love would make her neck if she was in the right.

“Warlock agrees that the weapon should have been kept untouched,” Malicia said, and there was a part of her that enjoyed the flicker of dismay on Black’s face.

“Wekesa would eat every child in Callow if it allowed him to research without interruptions,” he replied. “That endorsement rings empty.”

It was also first blood. He was not, she knew, plotting to seize the Tower from her. But the knowledge that if he had the Warlock would not have stood at his side was a crack in the certainty that lay at the heart of him. What she need break to salvage even shards of what they had once been.

“And who whispers agreement in your ear, Black?” the Empress asked. “ Scribe ? If you slit her own throat she would assume you had reason. She has made a virtue of being a tool.”

It was not a mistake to have spoken that, though Alaya regretted the sharpness of the words. But Malicia knew that the cruelty was necessary to lower the worth of the unconditional support in his eyes. The Duni’s face grew cold, the first stirrings of anger.

“You speak of matters you understand precious little,” he said. “There is no part of you that does not come with condition .”

Malicia met his eyes with equanimity. Alaya flinched at the old whisper spoken aloud. Black tiredly passed a hand through his air.

“I should not have said that,” he said, the threshold of an apology.

“You rarely speak without meaning,” the Empress said, refusing the crossing.

Something passed in the man’s eyes she could not put a word to, and that was a rare thing.

“We were better than this, once,” Amadeus said.

“Were we?” Malicia wondered. “Forty years, and never once did we cease dancing around that single truth.”

Her eyes went hooded.

“There is only one throne in this empire,” the Empress said. “You are not sitting on it. There is a reason for that.”

“Empresses who thought crown meant right have often reigned, in Praes,” the Black Knight said. “Rarely, I remember, for long. A mould unbroken ever only makes one thing.”

“Don’t you speak to me of making,” Alaya hissed. “Twenty years you made Callow your playground, only ever returning to take lives and let me clean up the messes while you gallivanted back. You only ever remember the necessities of rule when they get in the way of your games. You make plans without ever bothering with the actual people, writing them off as liabilities to dispose of if they do not immediately obey. Praes is not an essay . You cannot unmake everything of it because it strikes you as inconvenient.”

“It is worse than inconvenient,” Black said. “It is flawed. The Wasteland has made a religion out of mutilating itself. We speak of it with pride. Gods, iron sharpens iron? We have grown so enamoured with bleeding our own we have sayings about it. Centuries ago, field sacrifices were a way to fend off starvation. Now they are a staple of our way of life, so deeply ingrained we cling to them given alternative. Alaya, we consistently blunder so badly we need to rely on demons to stay off destruction. We would rather irreparably damage the fabric of Creation than admit we can be wrong. There is nothing holy about our culture, it needs to be ripped out root and stem as matter of bare survival . Forty years I have been trying to prove success can be achieved without utter raving madness, and what comes at the end?”

His tone grew harsh.

“The only person I ever thought actually understood this put her seal to the destruction of two decades of gruelling work to acquire a fucking magic fortress,” he hissed. “Some godsdamned throwback from the Age of Wonders that will go down in flames and take the Empire with it.”

“Your way,” Malicia coldly said, “is insufficient .”

Now that he’d opened his wound, she could bare her own.

“The Legions will fail,” she said. “The Calamities will fail. Your ramshackle effort at successors will fail. Did you think that just because you were clever, just because it was hard, it would be enough? We took Callow, Black. We put chalk to the slate. The Heavens will throw crusade after crusade at us until the mark made is erased, because we are not allowed to win that fight . The only way to survive is not to fight at all, and for that I needed a tool.”

Malicia stood ramrod straight.

“A hundred thousand dead?” she said. “I would bleed thrice that number without batting an eye, because without the tool we lose . We break, we end, we come at an end. I warned you off Akua Sahelian because she provided what I needed: a strong enough deterrent to keep the wolves at bay. And I did this behind your back, because if I did not you would have gotten in my way. Because you have fallen in love with your own legend. The Black Knight, undefeated. How far is that from invincible, Amadeus? Shall we talk history on that subject?”

“This makes us a leech,” Black replied coldly. “And that is exactly how we lose. If we are a net drain, we are removed. That is a fact . There is no keeping Callow if by the sheer act of keeping it we foster constant rebellion. And if we lose Callow, it all comes down on our heads.”

“We have already lost Callow,” Malicia replied harshly, “and three legions with it, all thrown into the lap of some fucking orphan girl because you thought you could be cleverer than Fate. Do you truly not realize that the terms of the occupation both failed to pacify Callowans and fostered unrest in the Wasteland? One does not conquer an entire kingdom to grant it effective independence twenty years down the line, Black. We were meant to profit from it.”

“They were meant to profit from it, were they?” he said. “After fighting tooth and nail against every measure that made is possible, they still deserve spoils because – what, they were born to that privilege? That they were even spared was a concession. But they were allowed to grow fat off a conquest they actively hindered . I held my tongue because you used their rapaciousness for your own purposes, but oh what a mistake that was. The point isn’t to make Callow a pack of plundered provinces, it has never been that. It’s to ensure we never again destroy ourselves invading that country. Are we so enamoured with that kingdom’s crown we cannot allow anyone else to wear it? We win by slipping the noose, not moving the border. By breaking the pattern that has whipped us ever since Maleficent made an empire out of Praes. It is irrelevant who actually rules Callow so long as we no longer need to invade to avoid starving . From that moment on, we start to grow. To change. To be anything but a snake cursed to eat its own tail and choke. Anything less than that is defeat. Anything more than that is expendable.”

He was panting, after. A sac of venom decades in the swelling finally emptied.

“There have been bad nights, since I took the throne,” Alaya said. “Nights where I wondered if it would not have been better had you become Emperor and I your Chancellor. You have laid those fear to rest. This , this is why you cannot rule. Because you’re not interested in ruling Praes, only in securing a war camp for your pissing match with the Heavens. You cannot butcher your way into having a different homeland, Black. It’s a pretty plan you laid out. But you are not the only living man in Praes, and so it fails . Because the Empire is not an instrument, it is a nation and that nation wants things. It will not docilely wait until your point is made.”

“Enough,” Black said. “Gods, enough. There comes a time where the wound is no lanced, just bled.”

“Agreed,” Malicia said. “There will be no further argument. You have made a mess, and as always I will clean it up. You remain in command as my Black Knight. You will hold the border as best you can, and rein in your apprentice as necessary. As for me, I will take the measures necessary for survival. You will not approve of them. I no longer care.”

The Empress would have ended it there, but Alaya could not.

“We will survive,” she said. “And when the danger has passed, as much as it ever can, you will come home. I will not throw you away, Maddie. We are not beyond mending.”

He smiled, ruefully.

“Can you feel it, Allie?” he asked.

The Empress frowned.

“It’s quiet,” he said. “Subtle. I suppose it always starts out that way, when one loses control.”

“The Tower will not fall,” Malicia said.

“It may not,” he said. “I genuinely don’t know. For the first time in decades, Alaya, I don’t know .”

He laughed.

“It’s strangely invigorating,” he said. “To have every plan you ever made ripped apart. Do you remember what it was like, when we were young? When we still felt wonder?”

“Black, you are worrying me,” she said.

“Your terms are accepted,” Amadeus said. “Not that there was any doubt. I will come home, in the end.”’

He looked away, and strangely smiled.

“I wonder what it would look like,” he murmured. “A better world.”

The mirror darkened. Alaya went still, something like grief but deeper than the word could ever mean taking hold of her. Dread Empress Malicia rose to her feet.

There was no rest, the old saying went, for the wicked.

—

Brandon Talbot had only stood in the throne room once before as a child, when King Robert still ruled and his aunt had introduced him to the royal court. He’d been so young he barely remembered any of it, and in those days he had been of precious little import. Aunt Elizabeth was to be engaged to the Shining Prince, so he’d warranted an official introduction but nothing else. In those days there had been no talk of him ever becoming Count of Marchford. The union of Elizabeth Talbot and King Robert’s eldest son had been expected to be fruitful, leaving him only the head of a cadet branch meant for knighthood and little else. How strangely the world spun, that he now stood at the side of the Queen of Callow instead of kneeling with the guests. Those he had to share that distinction with were, admittedly, something of a mixed bag. None could deny that Baroness Anne Kendall was a patriot and a woman of great wisdom, and though her surrender in the wake of the Liesse Rebellion had lowered her esteem in the eyes of some he did not share those misgivings. The Governess-General, he knew, was nearly as influential as the queen in some parts. If not more. Chancellor in all but Name , men whispered. Queen Catherine’s open fondness for the baroness had been taken by many a sign she was not determined to wage war to he bitter end on the aristocracy.

At the baroness’ side stood the argument for the opposite belief, the newly-appointed Marshal of Callow. The title left him a strange taste in the mouth. There had never been any man or woman titled such in the history of the kingdom, as supreme command of the hosts was always held by the royal family or the paladins of the White Hand. It was a Praesi title and not even an old one, created during the Reforms. That a greenskin not even twenty-five was now second only to the queen in the command of Callow’s armies had been oft commented upon, and openly mocked in the north. Popular sentiment, though, had not been incensed. The ‘Hellhound’ had no small place in the legends already being peddled of the Arcadian War and Akua’s Folly. The orc was seen as the second coming of the still-feared Grem One-Eye, and one that had proved it would protect the innocent even in the face of the hordes of Hell. Brandon was no fool, and so had never tried to speak against the appointment. The heart of the Army of Callow was still the Fifteeenth, and it would be months before any of his countrymen rose to true positions of influence in those massively expanded ranks.

To the queen’s right was the same man as always, that tower of burnt steel and fangs that was Hakram Deadhand. The Adjutant. Even when the old crowd spoke of the unseemly predominance of orcs in Queen Catherine’s court over cups of brandy, there were few who dared slight this one. The skeletal hand of the Named was said to snatch the life out of fae and mortals alike, the steel of his axe gone stark red for all the blood he’d spilled with it. Grandmaster Talbot had spoken with him occasionally while on campaign and more often now that precarious peace was restored, and found him both personable and polite. More dangerously, he was also very attentive to details the queen was known to have little patience for – though in truth Brandon had judged her not nearly as disinterested as the rumours implied. The Deadhand had taken to building the kingdom’s court with the same savage enthusiasm his forebears had displayed raiding Callowan farmland: the new offices overseeing the nation’s granaries and treasury had been highly unpopular with the aristocracy at first, but their undeniable efficiency in mending the south had done much to quiet the grumbling. The Grandmaster was one of the few of his people high enough in rank to understand what was being built, though. A war machine unlike any he had ever seen. Callow was being put on war footing long before the first blade left the sheath.

There was a reason the Order of the Broken Bell had been charged with recruiting every youth in the kingdom that could swing a blade and ride a horse.

The last man to share the queen’s side was the only he could muster true dislike for. Hasan Qara, who for some godforsaken reason insisted on being called Ratface, had been named Lord Treasurer of Callow after resigning his commission from the Fifteenth Legion. The Taghreb was said to be some Wasteland lordling’s bastard, though bastardy was considered a lesser taint in the East. He was also, as far as Grandmaster Talbot was concerned, a crook and a criminal. His lordly title remained a pure courtesy one, at least, without any lands attached. It was still a bloody disgrace that a Peer of the Realm would meet with the likes of smugglers and hedges mages in broad daylight. The Bastard Lord, as some already called him, had begun what he termed a ‘much-needed reform of the hellish nightmare that is Callowan tax collection’. That governors no longer paid taxes directly to the Tower or even the short-lived Ruling Council had thrown the old system into disarray, every governor and noble trying to short-change the crown whenever they could. Lord Qara’s taxmen and their Legion escorts were already a dreaded sight, and the complicated maze of exemptions and tariffs he’d had the queen put her seal to always seemed to have her allies come out wealthier and her enemies poorer. He was clever, Brandon disdainfully thought, but in the way Taghreb usurers so often were.

As the admittedly tedious ceremony chugged on towards the moment of proper coronation, Brandon turned his eyes to the crowd that stood witness. Baron Darlington of Hedges and Baroness Morley of Harrow were of the highest rank among those, surrounded by kin and lickspittles. Both, he’d been told, had declined the queen’s invitation to her coronation by telling her envoys their health would not allow them the journey. The second envoys she had sent came with a minstrel, and as the tune of of the Lord’s Lament played in their halls the nobles had reconsidered their refusal. The pointed reminder that Queen Catherine was not above having even royalty shot when it suited her had struck true. The last landed nobles of Callow had faces to solemn to be truly pleased of being in attendance, but rumours of the crown’s young reforms had seen them hurry south so they would not be made to feel the sting of disobedience through their coffers. As far as nobility went, the only others worth the note were the envoys of Duchess Kegan of Daoine.

That the ruler of the last duchy in Callow had sent her own eldest son and high-ranking officer of the Watch to attend had rightly been seen by many as endorsement of the queen’s reign by the Deoraithe. Ties had been made there, Grandmaster Talbot thought, that he knew little about. Inquiries were in order. The queen had yet to appoint a Chamberlain for her household or a Keeper of the Seals to have her decrees upheld and her courts of law put to order, after all. It was no certainty that Queen Catherine the First would keep all the seats of the old King’s Council, but if she did Brandon intended on seeing the remaining seats filled with proper Callowans, not Daoine interlopers. Neither did it escape his notice that Kegan’s son was a handsome lad, not much older than the still-unmarried queen. Another matter to ensure never came to fruition, though he could hardly blame her for trying. He had himself ensured that his representatives at court were well-bred young men and women of comely appearance, merely to have that avenue... open, should it take the queen’s fancy.

The rest of the guests in attendance were the representatives of governors and guilds, as well as every elderman in Laure. Brandon had expected trouble when their ancient prerogatives inside the city began being taken over by the crown, but the Deadhand was a clever sort. They’d been offered appointments in the new offices, and with enough accepting their influence came to benefit the reforms instead of being plied against them. The stood there with awe befitting commoners being allowed to witness the birth of a dynasty, however fragile its line of succession. As the sister sent by the House of Light finally ended her droning and recitation of old phrases, Queen Catherine bent her head to accept her crown – though, in all honesty, given her height she had not strictly speaking needed to do so. Eyes flicking to the crown, Brandon grimly smiled. No gold or jewels in this one. It was a jagged circlet of iron that sat heavy on her brow. A warlike crown for a warlike queen. The old regalia of House Fairfax would not see use again, the cloak of black and patchwork that Queen Catherine wore a dark replacement for the old ermine-bordered mantle of the Fairfaxes. Rumours had spread that Akua Sahelian’s own soul had been added to the banners of the defeated, that the Wastelander witch could be heard screaming in torment if one listened closely enough.

A saying was born of it that had Grandmaster Talbot shivering every time he heard the words: crowned by dread and cloaked by woe.

“Before you stands the ordained Queen of Callow,” the sister said. “Kneel.”

One after another, they did. Only standing by the throne like him were spared that, as Catherine Foundling slowly sat the ancient throne of the kingdom. Brandon was not the first to notice – he first saw when he followed the queen’s gaze, the raised eyebrow on her cold face. It was difficult to tell how many there were. A few dozens? Less than a hundred, surely. Brandon had fought their like before, but their garments were no longer the same. On unearthly steeds of every shade the fae rode through the hall, the Fair Folk as terrible and beautiful as they’d always been. Brandon found he could not look away from the fae at their head. Riding a horse of ebony, the man was soberly dressed for his kind. A simple tunic, though the buttons seemed made of shade, and over a pale and narrow face a black silken blindfold covered an eye. There was a sword at his hip, without a sheath, and even looking at it hurt the knight’s eyes. It was that one the queen addresses.

“The Prince of Nightfall,” she drawled. “An unexpected... well, pleasure ’s a strong word.”

The procession of fae ended when the prince reined in his mount before the queen, inclining his head in respectful greeting.

“Prince no longer,” the fae smiled. “I have abdicated my title, as have all with me. The Hunt claims no lord amongst its hunters.”

Brandon’s breath hitched. The Hunt. Was he speaking of the Wild Hunt ? The rapacious fairies that made sport of mortals fools enough to wander into the Waning Woods, or walk ancient mounds under pale moonlight.

“Should I call you Larat, then?” the Queen mused, and her voice echoed with something eldritch when she spoke the name. “Why do you darken my hall, Nightfall?”

“Do we not stand before a queen, forged of Winter?” the fae asked.

“I paid the price for that, thrice over,” Catherine Foundling said. “If you think the mantle can be taken back, we’re about to have a conversation on the subject of fatal mistakes.”

The fae laughed, and it was like the tinkle of silver bells.

“You mistake me,” he said, and his sword rose.

It clattered against the stone, laid at the feet of the queen. One after another the fae passed and threw their own blade, a pile of death rising. Brandon Talbot was living a fever dream, witness to a scene ripped straight from legend. It was all too vivid to be real.

“We swear to your service, Queen of the Hunt,” the fae said. “Queen of Air and Darkness, Sovereign of Moonless Nights. We swear ‘til the day of last ruin, ‘til all debts are paid. We would ride beneath your banner, in this world and every other.”

The Queen of Callow rose to her feet, as bright and terrible as any of them, and softly laughed.

“What clever foxes you are,” she said. “Your oaths I accept, in the spirit they were given.”

Her sword hissed as it left the sheath, and she stood before the fae.

“Kneel, and rise in my service.”

The Hunt knelt, the Hunt rose, and Brandon Talbot knew he would never forget the sight of this so long as he lived.

—

A crusade, Cordelia Hasenbach thought, should be decided in a manner grander than this. There would be speeches in the coming months, every herald in Procer and beyond speaking the writ of the Mandate of Heaven handed down to the children of the Gods. Spreading the call to the Tenth Crusade wherever there were ears to hear it. The First Prince herself would address the Highest Assembly on the morrow’s eve, giving an oration she had first prepared years ago. The motion would not warrant a vote from the Assembly, though she knew it would pass should it presented. By tradition only the highest office in the Principate could call for a crusade, though it would be an empty thing if no other nation joined their voice to it. Procer had fought crusades alone before, but every one a disaster. She would not repeat that mistake. The young woman had dedicated the span of her life to ensuring it would never be made again. For all the pageantry that was to come, the Tenth Crusade was born in one of the lesser halls of the palace in Salia, with barely a dozen people seated at the table.

For Procer, only she and Uncle Klaus were present. The Prince of Hannoven had not been granted seat as a prince but as the future commander of Procer’s armies in the campaign to come. The grizzled old soldiers had spent more time drinking mead than speaking, so far, save when matters military were raised. Assurances had been needed that the Principate’s armies were readied for war, no matter how righteous the cause or urgent the need. The Thalassocracy of Ashur had sent three representatives only, members in good standing of their foremost War Committee. Citizens of the Fourth tier one and all, most of which would take command of Ashur’s fleets when the hostilities began. Their very presence had been leverage for Cordelia to use, a gift from Magon Hadast. The only citizen of the Second tier in all of Ashur had not sent diplomats but soldiers, the agreement to join the crusade implicit to that decision. The envoys, after all, would not have leave to negotiate diplomatic matters. Only those pertaining to war.

The Dominion of Levant had sent the most envoys, in her judgement a consequence of its ever-fractious people. The current Seljun, the figurehead ruler of the Dominion, had officially deferred the decision of whether or not to join the Tenth Crusade to the Majilis. Though literature often drew comparison between the Highest Assembly and the Majilis, for they were both councils composed of the highest nobility in their respective nations, Cordelia had never found much similarity beyond the surface trappings. The Levantine council was a toothless and ineffectual beast, with every lord and lady among it having right of veto and every interest in ensuring power was never centralized within the Dominion lest their own privileges be curbed. Princess Eliza of Salamans had fought two wars and died an attainted traitor to ensure the Highest Assembly would never be such a plague on Procer, or the First Prince relegated to being little more than a first among equals. As it was, the entire Majilis had come to Salia to treat with her. The five lords and ladies of Levant, all descended from heroes. Cordelia’s agents suspected every one of them had applied veto if a smaller delegation did not involve them personally, and she was inclined to believe it.

They only ever ceased their squabbles when they perceived her to be high-handed, the old and well-deserved hatred of her people the true mortar that kept their nation together. They had been the most difficult to speak with, ever looking for slight or arrogance in every sentence of hers. It was for the best Uncle Klaus had spoken little, given his mild contempt for a nation he liked to say existed only because the Thalassocracy willed it so. This was, to an extent, true. Some of Cordelia’s predecessors would have waged war upon war to claim the lands, had Ashuran fleets not made seaborne invasion of Procer’s old principalities a fool’s errand to attempt. It was still less than courteous to say as much, and the Levantines had easily ruffled feathers when the hands involved were Proceran. Invitations had been sent to the Titanomachy through the Dominion, as the Gigantes killed on sight even diplomats of Procer, but the giants had declined to send even an observer. Their borders would remain closed, it seemed, no matter how dire the threats to the east. Cordelia had ruled for too long to be disappointed by the confirmation of her fatalism. That bridge had been burned too thoroughly to be rebuilt, even several centuries after the betrayal known as the Humbling of Titans.

The Gigantes had long memories.

The elves of the Golden Bloom greeted visitors with arrows if they were not heroes, and were said to have removed their domain from Creation besides. Even were it otherwise, Cordelia would not have sought them out. They had never joined their number to any of the crusades, and their inclusion in the Tenth would have had stark diplomatic consequences when it came to dealing with the Duchy of Daoine. Entrenching opposition in Callow would be needlessly costly for what the Hasenbach desired to be a war fought mostly in Praes itself. Popular sentiment in Callow was rather difficult to read, these days, but they were a people of long grudges who had never quite forgiven their occupation by the Principate. Should foreign soldiers fight over their fields for too long, there was no telling if the Callowans would turn on the crusaders.

Still, it was the League of Free Cities that troubled Cordelia. She’d come so very close to securing a truce and south-eastern border with it, until the Tyrant of Helike began his war. Even that had been an acceptable outcome, if she was to be honest. After the initial victory of Helikean forces over Atalante and the brutally effective Praesi intervention that took Penthes out of the war, heroes had created a deadlock over the siege of Delos without easy resolution. Though the loss of life involved was regrettable, it had given Cordelia opportunity to exhaust the strength of a dangerous element outside her borders by funding and arming Nicae. She’d even lightened the burden of restless soldiery within her realm by sending a few thousand into the war. She had believed Helike triumphant and ruling the League to be the worst possible outcome, and so when the forces of the Tyrant and the Magisterium moved against Nicae she had considered direct intervention. That a Hierarch would be elected in the wake of the city’s fall had been beyond her predictions, and more worryingly the Augur’s as well. Now no ruler in the region would treat with her, even privately, as usurping the Hierarch’s prerogative might see the rest of the League turn on them.

Attempts to begin diplomatic correspondence with the man himself had been utterly ineffective. That her agents reported Anaxares of Bellerophon to be a long-serving diplomat, even if one in the service of an Evil polity, had been a promising beginning. Yet the man had put every missive she sent to the flame, and had reportedly been personally offended when her envoys tried to speak with him in person. Whether or not the Hierarch was the puppet of the ruler of Helike had yet to be determined, but the head of the League seemed disinclined to rein his member-states. Or even speak of the matter. Perhaps the only redemption of the situation there was to be had was that the Hierarch had not spoken in the favour of war, and his absence of a grip on the cities meant it was unlikely a unified League would march against her. It was still a liability. Her uncle had made it plain that at least twenty thousand men would have to be left south to discourage incursions from the Free Cities while the crusade was being fought. A loss, she would admit, but not a crippling one. Ashur and Levant would both contribute much larger hosts to the war when they gathered their strength.

“Late spring at the earliest,” Lady Itima of Vaccei announced. “But we will march, First Prince. All of us. There can be no other choice.”

Set on the table before all the representatives were two reports form her agents in Callow, speaking of the same city. Liesse, though it had been ripped from its ancient grounds and dragged across the kingdom. The first report detailed what sparse information she had been able to gather about these strange undead the Diabolist had been able to make. Wights , the Praesi called them. One had even been obtained and smuggled across the border, and examinations by wizards had established the alchemical nature of the transition into undeath. The Empire had unveiled two weapons through their civil war, and though this was the subtlest of the two it was perhaps also the most terrifying. If all the Empire needed to sow undeath was access to a city’s cisterns, none of them were safe. The Empress’ reputation for having a large and extremely effective web of spies had cost her dearly in this. A less demonstrably far-reaching ruler would not have seemed so immediate a threat. The other report held mostly technical notes, but it was the sheet of parchment with the drawing that had truly stuck a blow. The sight of the city of Liesse with a mass of dead above it, and the Greater Breach the weapon had opened on a Callowan field.

A Hellgate, and not a passing one. Gods, Cordelia had known there was great madness waiting in the east but even she had underestimated the depth. No crusade had ever managed to land even a glancing blow on the Hellgate that lay within the depths of Keter. It alone had been enough to maintain the terrible grip of the Dead King for untold centuries even with entire battalions of heroes failing to end him. The thought of the Tower with the ability to create Hellgates at will was enough to put a shiver up anyone’s spine. She’d been open about the weapon being either damaged or destroyed during the civil war, the truth of that was still uncertain, but she’d not even had to raise the notion of it being possible to repair herself. The Levantines had done so without prompting, and pressed for a dismantling of the Empire to ensure it would never be capable of making the likes of it again.

“As for the charter you proposed, we are in agreement as well,” the lord of Tartessos said. “It will require the signature of the Seljun to be binding, but the Majilis can provisionally ratify it. Your... appreciation of our concerns has been noted, and does you honour.”

Cordelia was very careful not to let the triumph show in her eyes. This was the true victory she had won today, the founding of her Grand Alliance. Though it had been presented as a council of nations participating in the Tenth Crusade that could adjudicate internal disputes, there was no clause forcing the alliance to end after Praes was laid low. Years of diplomacy had finally borne fruit. The treaties would prevent Procer from attempting to expand into the Dominion again long after she died, and with this foundation she could forge ever closer ties over the length of her reign. With the three great powers of the west so aligned, the Principate’s attention could be turned to the true enemies. The Chain of Hunger. The Kingdom of the Dead. The Everdark. The treaties were not even a pale shadow of those that bound together the League of Free Cities, but they could be built on. They would be.

Cordelia knew she would not see the continent know true peace in her lifetime, but she could lay the foundations for those that would come after her.

The envoys were entertained for refreshments after the negotiations closed, yet the First Prince did not linger overlong. She had spoken to the Augur, last night, and been given prophecy. Fortune comes to you unnanounced , her cousin had whispered. You may yet grasp it. Some of the White Knight’s band had survived the struggle against the Calamities in the Free Cities, and were said to be heading for Salia with the man himself. Crusades, Cordelia knew, were a call few heroes let pass them by. Though no formal declaration had yet been made, the ways of Named were not easily understood. The Heavens may have whispered secrets in their ears, as they did the Augur. The flaxen-haired prince dismissed her attendants after retiring to her rooms, unweaving her braid herself. She was not unaware that it softened her features when unbound, and though she knew she was no great beauty she could sometimes pass as one with the right ministrations. She did not hear the window open, and was frowning at letter from the Princess of Tenerife when someone cleared their throat.

Cordelia froze. It was a woman. Short of hair, pale of skin with blue-grey eyes. Her leathers were loose over a slender frame. Callowan , the First Prince thought . She has the look.

“Would you like a drink?” Cordelia Hasenbach asked.

The woman snorted.

“I wish,” she said. “But getting into this place was hard enough sober. Have you ever tripped into a moat? It’s honestly the worst .”

The First Prince smiled pleasantly.

“I will take your word on it,” she said. “I would be remiss if I did not ask who you are, of course.”

The stranger plopped down onto a seat across from her.

“I am a halfway decent thief,” the woman said. “A patriot, when I can afford to be. But, most importantly-“

She sharply smiled.

“- I am an envoy from the Queen of Callow.”

“Are you now?” Cordelia said. “I believe I will be having that drink, myself. We have much to talk about.”

—

The Hierarch saw many things, close and faraway. Deals being struck behind closed doors in this very city, armies mustered and betrayals paid for. In a cold room of black stone, he watched the most beautiful woman he’d ever glimpsed wipe away a tear and clench her teeth. By the crackling hearth of an inn he saw a knight and a champion clasp arms with older heroes, whispering of Heaven’s Mandate. He saw a young girl on an ill-fitting throne, lost but unwilling to retreat. He saw the fields of a Hell tilled and strewn with villages, its people never having known a blue sky. He saw knives bared beneath the earth, north and south, skins of black and green ghosting through tunnels. He saw a green-eyed man grinning in the face of havoc, alone with well-worn maps. He saw... a silent young girl, her skin pale as porcelain. Her blue dress was light and her hair cut in a short bob. Her eyes met his, impossibly.

“Curious,” the Augur said. “You were not within the sparrows.”

“The People have decreed omens to be ignorant superstition,” Anaxares told her.

“Ah,” Agnes Hasenbach murmured “You too. No star left uncharted.”

Hierarch woke in a dirty alley, huddled under a threadbare blanket. It had been the clink of coppers being dropped in his begging bowl that woke him. Anaxares was not alone. At his side, leaning back against the husk of a wall, a woman sat with her knees gathered to her chest. She smelled of liquor and sweat, though the black curls he could see framing her face were pristine. The stranger drank loudly from a silver flask before turning to him, and when he saw her face he recognized her. Aoede of Nicae. The Wandering Bard. The heroine offered him the flask, wiggling it in a farce of temptation.

“It’s the good stuff, for once,” the Bard grinned. “Don’t skip, doesn’t happen often.”

The Hierarch of the League of Free Cities, anointed temporal ruler of a hundreds of thousands of souls, tightened his blanket around his frame. He looked aside and pretended the woman did not exist. He had gained much practice in this skill of late, with envoys from the Free Cities and beyond.

“You know, when the second wave of Baalite settles came to Ashur they brought animals from home with them,” the woman said. “One of them was a large flightless bird, called an ostrich. Odd creatures. Liked to bury their heads in the ground, a feeling I can empathize with. When the first famine came, though, the big fat ostriches were slaughtered like poultry. Even though their heads were in the sand.”

Anaxares stared ahead, silent.

“Tough crowd, huh,” the Bard mused. “It’s too late to stay out of it, Hierarch. You’re Named, now. Means you’re fair game.”

“I did not choose this,” Anaxares said.

“So I’ve heard,” the Bard said. “Kairos has that thing villains often do, where they confuse symmetry with humour. Probably got a giggle out of waving an old mistake in my face.”

The diplomat eyed the woman, who was drinking again. After so long not being able to afford wine, the sight of the liquor being guzzled had his body feeling pangs.

“None of this was meant for you,” he finally said.

“Oh, that touch was probably just a drop of arsenic in the wine,” Aoede shrugged. “But I made your Name, sweetcakes. Back in the days before I knew better.”

“Prokopia Lakene was rightfully elected,” the Hierarch frowned.

“Right’s a pretty broad word, when it comes down to it,” the Bard said. “She was silvertongued like you wouldn’t believe, true, but that’s where I went wrong. The moment the tongue was gone, so was the Name.”

“The League survived her,” he said.

“The League’s skin deep,” the Bard said. “None of the forces behind moved any differently after it was formed.”

The heroine offered the flask again, and this time Anaxares took it. The liquor within was sweet and tangy, tasting of apples. Much stronger than wine, or anything he’d ever drank before.

“Or it was, anyway,” Aoede said. “But now here you are. And you’ve got a lot of – well, people is a bit of stretch but you get my drift – puzzled. Both upstairs and down. So here I am too, welcoming you to the neighbourhood. Instead of fresh bread and a bottle of wine, you get overly personal questions and maybe a dollop of sinister threats. Depending on how it all pans out. Have another pull, diplomat. It’s the sweetest thing either of us will taste for a while.”

Anaxares did, before handing it back.

“I abstain,” he said.

The woman sighed.

“That’s not how it works,” she told him, as if he were a witless child. “Right now you’re sucking at the teat but you’re not swallowing. There’s always a side picked, Anaxares. Always.”

The Bard waved her flask enthusiastically.

“See, that’s where you’re raising questions,” she said. “’cause Kairos forged you, and Kairos is in deep with the folks Below. But you let the White Knight and the Champion go, sparing me a deal that would have been... costly . Your people like a bit of sulphur on the altar, it’s true, but their idea of worship does little more than keep those in a fresh coat of red. And I’m sorry to say, but you’re what we call a mumbler. You speak the words when the right stars are out but there’s no real meat to the faith, you get me?”

The Bard leaned closer.

“It’s fine if you want to fuck around like a raft on the tide for a while, Hierarch, but keep in mind sooner or later you’re going to hit shore,” she said.

That , Anaxares thought, or drown .

“What,” he asked patiently, “do you want from me?”

“I want you to stop taking a nap in the middle of the board,” the Wandering Bard said. “Stepping around you is already getting tedious, and Kairos is better at it. I don’t mind having a few layabouts around, sweetcakes, but only when I put them there. You’re no work of mine.”

Anaxares studied the woman for a long moment then shook his head.

“I do not answer to your Gods,” he said. “They drew no lots and hold no appointment.”

Something like surprise flickered across the woman’s face.

“You’re Named,” she reminded him.

“I am citizen of the Republic of Bellerophon,” he replied.

“You were created with purpose,” the Bard said flatly. “Fulfil it.”

“This purpose was not voted upon by the People,” Anaxares said. “I do not recognize it. Forcing it upon me is unlawful.”

“Look, the puppet show in your backwater dump is good for the occasional laugh,” Aoede patiently said. “But you’ve been sent up a rung, Hierarch. That’s not the game you’re playing anymore.”

The Hierarch smiled.

“I know you,” he said.

“We’ve met before,” the Wandering Bard agreed warily. “Had tea and everything.”

“No,” Anaxares said. “I know you, old thing. You are the sound of the lash, the deal in the dark. You are the servant of stillness. I deny all you peddle.”

“You are mad,” the Bard said. “And putting a knife to your own throat. They will take you apart .”

“If the Heavens seek to impose their will, they will be made to stand before a tribunal of the People,” the Hierarch serenely said.

“Your own fucking Gods will bleed you like a pig,” the Wandering Bard hissed.

“Then they, too, will be hanged,” Anaxares noted. “As honorary citizens of the Republic, they are subject to its laws.”

“You-“

“Aoede of Nicae, I charge you with treason,” he said, rising to his feet. “Collaboration with foreign oligarchs and agitation in the name of wretched tyrants.”

“You can’t be serious ,” the Bard said.

“Should you fail to be present at your trial,” the Hierarch continued calmly, inexorably, “you will be tried and convicted in absentia. As per League law, you may petition the Basileus of Nicae to request amnesty on your behalf.”

He looked down at the woman.

“It will be denied,” he told her. “But to petition is your right.”

Eyes wide, the Wandering Bard opened her mouth to reply but between two heartbeats’ span she... disappeared. As if she had never been there at all.

“This,” the Hierarch of the Free Cities said, “will be added to the record as an indication of guilt.”

He left the alley, the quarter, the city until he found the boy awaiting him. Kairos Theodosian took one look at him and laughed, his red eye burning.

“Now there,” the Tyrant grinned, “is the madman I was waiting for. We are going to have such fun , you and I.”

—

In the depths of a Hell that had long lost its name and number, a monster opened his eyes. In Keter, a stone that was an old and treasured gift shone red. It had not done this since the days of Dread Empress Triumphant. The Dead King laughed.

“ Finally .”

Prosecution II

“Men often speak of justice as the middle way, the compromise, but that is the guise of lesser evils. Justice is to uphold that which is right, and there is no place for compromise in this.”
– King Jehan the Wise of Callow

In olden days, when Creation was yet young, a mighty king in the east was entreated for judgement. A great lady had harshly struck a servant, who in his wroth at the blow wounded her with a blade. The king stood in his hall and listened to the words of both until day passed and night fled, yet found no answer to give. For the king sought to be just and justice is a rare and fleeting thing. In his despair, the king called upon the three famed judges of his realm and sought their advice.

The servant must die, said the first judge, himself a great lord. It was law that no servant may strike a master, and laws must be obeyed lest the realm itself fall into disarray and men wound men with impunity. There is just order to the world, the first judge said, and this order must be upheld even when that which is protected stands undeserving.

The servant must be spared, the second judge said, once a servant herself. Though the wounding of the lady was a sin, so was striking of the servant. In committing sin of her own, the lady diminished the sin of the other. To be just is to shield the weak from the strong, said the second judge, and the balance of sin must be weighed by power.

Forgiveness must be given, the third judge said, an old and kind man. Though order was needed and the helpless owed shielding, to take and ruin life for the passing madness of a moment was to do disservice to all. Let the lady and the servant kiss cheeks and thread hands, the third judge said, for is is in mercy that justice can be found.

The mighty king heard the words of his judges, yet he was not satisfied. The answer of the first judge he found wanting, for it trusted in the laws of men and men are flawed. The answer of the second judge he found wanting, for it placed circumstance above sin. The answer of the third judge he found wanting, for it was not judgement at all but mere amnesty. The king slept not for months as he pondered, and thus was born the Riddle of Fault.

You who sought the Face of the Just, you will give answer.

Hanno had not known sleep in a fortnight where the words did not sound in his mind again and again. He caught himself whispering them under his breath after he woke, every single one singed into his mind as if a brand had been applied. Every time his eyes closed he saw the Face of the Just again, that slate of coal with harsh threefold eyes. Six times six wings he had glimpsed through them, and scales of copper where men would have borne skin. He had knelt at the feet of the Face of the Just but been granted no guidance, only more questions. That, and rusted coin so hard-bitten the metal it had been minted from could no longer be discerned. The Speaker had taken shaking breath, after offering the riddle, and with trembling hands blessed him.

“Seek the silent tide,” they had said. “The coin will afford passage.”

The boy slept in the streets, huddling in an alley in the outer districts with the other tierless beggars until the city guard roused them with spear butts at dawn and forced them to disperse. He was hungry and tired and aching, but he had been told to seek the silent tide and so he did. He dragged himself to the docks, though without inked notches on his arm he could only enter those open to foreigners. There awaited ships and men who used strange tongues, Arlesites speaking the singing Tolesian dialects and merchants from the Free Cities who gabbled in tradertalk among each other. None looked at him twice, after seeing his bare arm. They had learned the worths and measures of Ashur, the meaning of being stripped of duty and due. Tierless were as ghosts within a land of the living, ungainly to look upon and best driven to ruins and empty hovels. For hours Hanno wandered aimlessly, sandals beating against stone as he sought something he did not know how to seek. His mind felt dull and dim, as if he had been robbed of the fire that once warmed it and shade had crept in its stead.

As twilight came, he found the tide. There was nothing to see, and that was what he saw. Though foreigners swarmed the harbour like locusts, filling every nook and cranny, there was a bubble of stillness. As if kept separate by some unseen wall, men passed it by without ever looking at it. Hanno himself tread by it thrice before his eyes found purchase, and almost forgot as soon as they had. There was an old man, blind and crooked, who sat at the edge of the pier with a wooden fishing rod in his hands. At his side was a slender ship of creaking wood and woven reeds, left unmoved by the tides. A sail hung from a pole, unraised. Hanno sat by the man’s side in silence and waited. The fishing rod never found bite, and the man’s only movement was the slow rise and fall of his breathing.

“They are not kind,” the stranger said, voice like grinding stones.

The boy considered this.

“I did not ask for kindness,” Hanno finally said.

“Whatever squabble brought you here, they will not care,” the old man said. “They do not give, child. They take and take and take until there is nothing left but smooth stone.”

“I have nothing,” Hanno said, and it was oddly liberating to speak the truth out loud. “I am nothing.”

“Five I have sent, in my day,” the stranger said. “None returned. Ashur is not loved by them, child. There is too much rot in the flesh, and the Seraphim despises that sin most of all.”

“Then I will not return,” the boy said. “What does it matter?”

“Might be that you do,” the old man darkly said. “My days run out. There is always need for a boatman.”

“You went,” Hanno said, and it was not a question.

“Aye,” the old man said, turning to offer a leering toothless grin. “I looked away, boy. If I can offer you advice, it is to fail utterly or not at all. The middle ground is the worst of it.”

A shiver went down his spine.

“I will tread to the end of the path,” Hanno murmured. “No matter what lays at the end.”

“Then offer me your obol,” the old man said. “I gave you fair warning.”

The rusted coin was in his hand before he reached for it, and he pressed it into the old man’s palm. Face a mask of grief, the stranger flicked his fingers and sent it spinning into the air. It fell into the sea without a sound or a ripple. Hanno slowly rose to his feet, making for the boat, but the old man clutched his arm feverishly and drew him close. His breath was foul.

“There is no riddle,” the stranger whispered. “Listen to me, boy, there is no riddle .”

The boatman released his arm, form shivering. He let out a cackle.

“What will you punish me with now, you old snakes?” he called out to the sky. “You have already done your worst. The only way left is down, and you are not so merciful.”

The boat was not moored. Hanno fled to it, distressed by the ugly rictus on the old man’s face. He knew not how to navigate, but raised the sail and pushed off. Where must he go, now? There was no path to follow on water. Wind caught the sail and the boat moved, dragging him away from Arwad and onto the sprawling sea. Was it sorcery or miracle that moved it? It did not matter. There was, he noticed then with quiet amusement, no tiller or rudder at the back. He had not been meant to find the way on his own. Days and nights passed, and though never did the ship end its journey neither did it come in sight of any shore. Hunger tore at his belly, ate away at his limbs. Thirst burned deep in his throat without even a drop of rain to quench it. Had it truly been been a fortnight? He could no longer tell, lying prone at the bottom of the boat and drifting in and out of consciousness. Hanno could barely even move, now, but death did not come. His skin darkened with the sun, grew rough like leather, and only when his ribs came to ache did he drift into his final sleep.

Hanno stood outside of himself, watching his silhouette brawling with another child’s. He remembered this, dimly. This was Barcalid District and he was nine years old. So was the other boy, the son of a digger in some inland mines. The whole family was born to the Twentieth Tier and would die to it – and even within that tier, they neared the bottom. The boy’s parents toiled in one of the mines where foreign prisoners were made to work through their sentences before release. Death came often and cheaply there, his father had once told him. Wasteland witch , the boy had called Hanno’s mother, looking for the approval of other children all the while. They cheered when Hanno struck him across the mouth. They tangled over stone, struggling wildly until Hanno kicked him in the stomach hard enough to make him puke. The others changed their colours with the turning tide, calling the boy weak-bellied and abandoning him to shiver alone in the street. The younger Hanno joined them, but the older one remained. He watched the boy wipe away angry tears and spit out the last of the vomit before dragging himself to his feet. He returned home, where no one awaited. Later that night his mother returned, and offered him the third of a black bread loaf before crawling into her bed to sleep. The father came back long after dark, smelling of liquor.

Don’t ever lose a fight again , the father said, and struck him across the mouth just as the younger Hanno had. The boy gritted his teeth and eventually fell asleep under threadbare blankets. The skies shifted and passed as Hanno watched the boy grow into a man, wed and have children of his own. Watched him strike others as he had been struck, violence begetting violence. Nothing lost and nothing learned. A life of fists without a single offered hand.

Hanno stood, and knew himself watched. There was no invitation, yet the expectation rang like a bell – and behind it awaited judgement. He would not, he suspected, be offered right to defend his actions twice. As the life of the boy began again, with young Hanno’s first blow rippling across his cheek, the older boy frowned. He had not sought that fight. Insult had been given. Neither was he at fault for the father’s sins, or the life delivered unto all of them. Where, then, did the fault lie? Ashur had birthed and raised them, but Ashur was but an assembly of Ashurans. Were they all complicit, then? Simply for being born? He could not find the fault in this, or the justice. Just people, acting as people always had and always would.

“Through ignorance, I contributed to evil,” Hanno Tierless said. “I ask not for absolution.”

What is the answer to the Riddle of Fault?

“I don’t know,” the boy whispered.

The voice had come from nowhere, and did not ask again. The world shifted once more, and Hanno stood a ghost again. He watched himself seated before twelve Ashurans in a sunny courtyard as a grey-haired woman asked him to denounced his mother without ever speaking her name. He watched six wings of copper erupt from his back, visible to none, and his gaze grow heavy with power. He watched himself render judgement upon the would-be judges, and find them wanting. I charge you , he heard himself say, with cruelty and indifference. I charge you with choosing law over right, with embracing blindness. As as his eyes shone, they could not weather the Light that came with it. Blindness embraced embraced them in return. He left that courtyard a righteous man, and brought that righteousness to all of Ashur.

“No,” Hanno said. “That, too, is evil.”

The boy he watched bore power, but he was not just. To mete out retribution upon those he found at fault was no different than what he had despised, in the end. It was only the judgement of power . The rule of strength, bereft of equity. There was no sin in law or the defiance of it, but to clothe retribution in the guise of justice was a thing of evil. What justice could there be, in the blind exertion of violence? To do such a thing would make him unworthy of the very strength being used.

What is the answer to the Riddle of Fault?

“Not this,” the boy whispered.

The world changed once more. This time, no vision or fantasy was put before his eyes. Only a collection of moments, all his own. Wrath, first. The wanton boiling of blood, the taste of victory in his mouth as his strength triumphed over that of others. Lust and envy came hand in hand, covetous eyes laid on women wed but still beautiful. Resentment in knowing they would never be his. The urgent press of lips against lips, the knowledge that the girl loved him but not him her discarded for the heat in his veins. Deeply buried hatred, for those who stood higher than him. Who ate better, who could decide their own lives. Who could see Creation with eyes instead of scrolls. Disgust and fear at tierless beggars. The ugly press of reassurance when violence was dealt to make them leave his sight. Pride at his skill with a quill, at his cleverness and memory. The unadmitted contempt for those less blessed. Kindness offered only for his own pleasure, for the thrill of knowing himself good. Taking bread from his father’s portion, telling himself he had earned it more. Moment after moment came before his eyes, and Hanno Tierless knew himself to be a ghastly soul.

The urge was there to look away, to end the parade of shame. The burn of the admissions did not grow easier with the number, every one fresh and acute. What utter arrogance, to have thought it possible for him to be worthy of any power at all. Hanno looked at the plain writ of his life, the parts of it he had taught himself to ignore brought to light, and found nothing of worth. Not a single selfless speck of dust. All his life he had worshipped at the temple, kneeling beneath the Faces, but all he had ever offered was sordid mockery. Faith picked and chosen, made hollow by his very nature. It did not matter, that there were worse men and women. Not here before the Seraphim. He was being made to answer for his own life, cut clean of all ties and deceptions. Hanno would have asked for forgiveness, but there was nothing to forgive but imperfection and imperfection would always be his lot.

What is the answer to the Riddle of Fault?

Hanno was clever, well-learned and discerning. He knew the words of the riddle, the three judgements and the indecision of the king. One judge offered order. Another offered excuse. The last offered mercy. Reason whispered to him that there was fairness to be found. A path between, where justice could be glimpsed. Let both the lady and the servant answer for their sins, the matter separate. Balance between the three judgements, wisdom found between the extremes. But it was the wisdom of a mortal, and Hanno had been taught the weakness of it.

“The fault lies with the king,” Hanno Tierless said. “For believing himself capable of justice.”

They showed him, then. What it was they saw.

The endless shifting tapestry that was all the decisions that were made and could be. The impossible lay of action and consequence, of motive and result. It was too much. It was too much for him to see, to understand. The boy screamed, felt all that he was fray as he glimpsed a whole he had never been meant to glimpse. The sum of all that was and would be, the culmination of endless paths. Hanno felt feathered wings envelop him, cold arms of metal embrace him closely. He was blind, now, and had never felt more blessed.

“Do not be afraid, child,” a voice whispered into his ear. “You are now beyond fear.”

“We give you nothing.”

“We take everything.”

“You will win no honours.”

“You will know no love.”

“You will find no peace.”

“Hanno of Arwad, we claim you.”

“Truth and sum and whole.”

“We charge you with service unending.”

“We burden you with unknowable mandate.”

“You will weep without solace.”

“You will die a thousand deaths.”

“But in the end, you will rise.”

We anoint you our White Knight.

Instrument of Judgement, Doom of the Wicked.

The Seraphim embraced him, and it felt like home. Like clarity and scales ripped from his eyes, never to grow again.

—

The boy woke to a thumb and a forefinger hoisting him by the scruff of the neck. Dark eyes large as boulders studied him curiously. The giant let out a breath like a gale.

“Man-child,” it said. “You reek of the Seraphim, yet you live. Curious. Have you come to deliver sentence onto the Gigantes?”

In his palm lay a silver coin. One side bore laurels, the other crossed swords. He knew this to be true without laying eyes upon it. The boy considered the question he had been asked.

“I,” Hanno slowly said, “do not judge.”

Prologue

“If my allies were half as reliable as my enemies, I would have a different moniker.”
– King Henry Fairfax, the Landless, upon being told of the Praesi invasion of Principate-occupied Callow

It went against Iason’s instincts, but Amelia had been right. She had a knack for these things, it came with her Name. They must keep a low profile, at least for now. The sooner they moved out of Dormer and into the countryside – rumour at the market was that large swaths of the south were still patrolled only irregularly by the Legions – the better, but as long as they stayed in the city they had to be quiet. It’d been most a day now since the three of them had left the river barge they’d stowed away on, and they’d split for the afternoon. Lergo had gone to have a look at what the locals called Summer Hill, the mound of melted stone where they said the Black Queen had tricked the Queen of Summer into returning to Arcadia. The Ashuran had whined like a child about having to abandon his flamboyant crimson clothes for something less attention-grabbing, but he’d given in anyways. And made eyes at Amelia all the while, the pretentious twit. The Red Mage had proved he was a force to reckon with in a fight, but Iason had not grown to like him in the months since their band first assembled. The Gallant Bandit herself had gone to find them accommodations for the night, so he’d been charged with obtaining foodstuffs for the journey ahead.

The marketplace in Dormer was thriving, for a city that’d been emptied and set aflame not even a year ago. It was Callowans running the shops and stalls, but there was a gaggle of foreign merchants as well. Iason found it difficult to tell apart the Taghreb and the men of the Free Cities, for they looked much alike in skin and faces, but the black-skinned Soninke stood out starkly. The hero bargained half-heartedly with a peddler for lentils and dried meat, rather certain he got robbed on the exchange. He was paying with silver fidi from Mercantis, one of the few coins no merchant in Calernia refused, and he was not certain how it compared to Imperial coinage. The merchant’s smiling admission he had no scale to compare the weights did little to inspire trust, though the man was unmoved when Iason threatened to seek another peddler. Odd behaviour, from a merchant who could not even afford a stall.

“There,” the peddler said, taking pity on him and giving back a few coppers.

Not a mintage he recognized, Iason noted. It could be worthless for all he knew.

“Don’t look at me like that, son,” the merchant snorted. “That’s from the Royal Mint in Marchford, not Harrow trash like everyone else is trying to offload. Call it my kindness of the day.”

“Callow has a mint?” Iason said in Lower Miezan, surprised. “I thought it used the Tower’s coin.”

“The Bastard Lord had one built,” the peddler told him approvingly. “That’s Taghreb for you. Vicious fuckers one and all, but they’ve a nose for business. Mind you, everyone still takes Praesi mintage. Have to, with all the gold coming south these days.”

“There are a lot of foreigners,” the hero agreed, casting a wary look at a nearby Soninke.

The peddler looked amused.

“You don’t sound like no Callowan, boy,” he said. “Delos?”

“Atalante,” he replied. “My father was, anyway. I was raised west.”

He’d grown to manhood in the principality of Creusens, but admitting as much in this city would have been the act of a fool.

“We got a lot of Wastelanders around nowadays,” the peddler agreed. “Trying to get their hands on grain, you know. Mercantis caught on so the Consortium is gouging them on prices and buying up the reserves in the other cities to drive up the prices. They’re used to this country being the greener pasture.”

“Few of them are smiling,” Iason said, only now noticing.

“That’s ‘cause the Bastard Lord restricted commerce in foodstuffs,” the merchant grinned nastily. “They want more than scraps, they have to get a permit in Laure. The really desperate ones are ruining themselves emptying tavern larders one at a time, but already the court is clamping down on that.”

“That seems like a loss of profit for you all,” Iason said.

“Worth it, to have the crown’s men around when some Wastelanders try to get nasty,” the peddler said, spitting to the side. “Not that there’s been a lot of those. I’ll say this for the Black Queen – since she crucified all those pricks after Second Liesse, Praesi have been stepping real light around here.”

The hero was almost nauseated. They said the villain ruling Callow had nailed hundreds to crosses after slaying her rival, made them grisly ornaments along the road. The merchant should have been appalled, but if anything he sounded grudgingly approving. Iason had never been skilled at hiding his thoughts – it went against his Name to be less than Stalwart in anything he did – and the peddler picked up on it. The man spat to the side again, looking warier now.

“You with the House of Light, son?” he probed.

“A lay brother,” Iason said. “Never took the full vows. I don’t have the disposition for it.”

Full-fledged brothers had to vow pacifism, and it was in his nature to meet injustice sword in hand.

“Didn’t know that was a thing,” the peddler said, but he was mollified.

It wasn’t, not in Callow anyway. The House of Light in Procer tended to consider its equivalent in Callow to be a very... provincial cousin. Prone to eccentricities. That the Order of the White Hand, true anointed paladins, had been allowed to hold lands of its own in the old days was spoken of as impious back home. It was just history, now that the Order had been exterminated, but Iason had a personal interest in the matter. His Name had but few previous incarnations, and most of them had come to be in Callow. The hero did not linger after that, already uncomfortable with how much attention he’d drawn. He hoisted the sack over his shoulder and made his way to the quarter by the docks, where Amelia had said she’d find them an inn. He was wondering how to find her, when she found him instead. The Gallant Brigand was almost as tall as he was, lithe and graceful in a way he could not help but stare at. Dark hair kept in a ponytail was usually covered by a highwayman’s hat, though she’d stashed it away for the sake of discretion, and the notched scar on her cheek somehow only added to her beauty.

“There you are,” Amelia smiled. “Fruitful foray?”

Iason cleared his throat uncomfortably. The cloistered life in Aviliers had not taught him how to deal with beautiful women, and he was always on the backfoot around her. At least Lergo wasn’t there. The Red Mage always seemed to make it worse with his glib and cutting japes. As if the sorcerer himself didn’t hang on her every word.

“I have supplies,” Iason stiffly replied. “Have you secured accommodations?”

Amelia snorted and clapped his shoulder.

“Secured accommodations,” she repeated teasingly. “You need to loosen up, Iason. Though I suppose that would be against type.”

I can be fun , the Stalwart Paladin silently insisted. Just because I can’t set things on fire with a word doesn’t mean I’m a bore. Instead of saying that he ended up chewing on his tongue like a fool, to the woman’s visible amusement.

“Come on,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “I found us a place. Be warned, though. It was cheap for a reason.”

Iason frowned when he first saw the inn, as the warning seemed inaccurate. It was not luxurious palace, but it was spacious and swift perusal of the common room revealed it to be scrupulously clean. Perhaps she’d meant the food would be horrid? It hardly be worse than the cooking they’d inflicted on themselves journeying from the countryside to Atalante after forming their band in Nicae. The Gallant – Iason did not like to think of the other part of her Name, no matter how much he liked her – shot him a toothy grin after he set down the sack, and a moment later a loud screaming match began in the kitchen adjoining the common room. The hero grimaced. Lergo strolled in an hour later, still looking put-out at wearing wool instead of blindingly red silk, and claimed at seat at the table where Iason had been sharing a drink with Amelia and failing miserably at small talk. The Red Mage stole his tankard and drank from it, wrinkling his nose at the taste. The sorcerer had been born to one of the high tiers of citizenship in Ashur, he was likely used to much better fare. Everything about him smacked of arrogant privilege, which had not become any less grating with time.

“Had a look at that hill,” Lergo casually said in tradertalk. “That was a serious scrap. If our cousin up north can tangle that hard, we’re in for quite a vigorous dance.”

The cousin up north, they’d taken to calling her to be discreet. Catherine Foundling, Queen of Callow. The Squire, some said, though others implied she had another Name yet to be revealed. The breadth of the swirl of rumours around the villain that ruled Callow was staggering, for one so young. Undefeated in battle. She murdered a god to steal his mantle and tricked two others into doom without ever unsheathing her blade. She has more lives than a cat, holds sway over dead and fae alike. Her cohorts, the Woe, had been revealed to the wider world through the infamous massacre they called the Doom of Liesse back home. The Hierophant, a cold madman whose strange sorceries tamed demons and stilled miracles. The Thief, a fallen heroine said to have once stolen an entire fleet and even snatched the sun out of the sky. The Archer, the greatest pupil of the Lady of the Lake who had never lost in single combat. And the last, Hakram Deadhand. The Adjutant. They said he was unkillable, that he was large as an ogre and his hand of bones could wrest out your soul. The heirs to the Calamities had made a bloody debut, last year. Iason had paid close attention to the rumours, knowing even the slightest hint could make the difference between life and death.

The three of them had come, after all, to kill the Black Queen.

“That might have been the fae, not her,” Amelia whispered in the same language, one of the few they all shared. “Her talent is supposed to be ice, not fire.”

“And what a talent fire can be,” Lergo said, grinning suggestively at the Gallant. “The element of passion, you know.”

Iason’s teeth clenched.

“We’re still on the outskirts,” Amelia said. “We’ll hear more when we go deeper into the country. The south looks like very promising grounds to begin our work.”

They would, to her. The Gallant Brigand had been vague about her activities before joining their band, but Iason had pieced together that she’d made her mark in the wake of the Tyrant of Helike’s armies as they sowed chaos across the Free Cities. The southern parts of Callow were still feeling the aftermath of the last three wars, and so she would be moving on somewhat familiar territory. Robbing the powerful to help the powerless was a worthy cause, even if he disapproved of her methods. Banditry was a sin in the eyes of the Heavens, else why would so many bandit Names be sworn to the Hellgods? They had to delay the conversation after that, for the innkeepers came to offer their service. Callowans both, an old married couple. They offered stew on the house, though the ale was not, and to Iason’s mild irritation lingered afterwards to chat with what seemed to be their only current patrons. Some matters were their own explanation.

“Dormer born and raised, the both of us,” the old man – Albert, as he insisted on being called – told them proudly. “City’s had a rough few years but we’ll get back on our feet, you’ll see.”

“I heard Dormer was part of the Liesse Rebellion,” Amelia said smilingly, “but the damage was all from the fae, I am told?”

“Good Anne dragged us into the mess, it’s true,” the old woman grudgingly admitted. “She cut a deal with the Black Queen after, though, spared us the worse. And she’s moved up in the world since, eh? Governess-General. A balm on everyone’s soul that.”

“Her whelp of a nephew’s governor now,” Albert said. “He did fine getting people out before Summer came, but too many still died. His aunt he is not.”

“That’s not on the boy,” the old woman sharply said. “That’s because a villain is queen. Ma always said that makes you cursed. Just look at the Wasteland.”

“Your mother also said a bowl of cream and bread crumbs would keep the fairies happy, Mary,” the old man mocked. “How’d that go again?”

The three of them sat awkwardly as the old couple argued loudly, Iason deriving some satisfaction form the fact that Lergo looked as uncomfortable as he felt himself.

“I couldn’t help but notice the portraits by the kitchen door,” Amelia intervened. “You have children?”

Gods they had they been lucky to run into her, Iason thought. And not only because looking at her when they trekked through the countryside made the journey a great deal more pleasant. Neither he nor the Red Mage had a way with people.

“Only the one now,” Mary soberly said. “Our youngest died at First Liesse. Them devils summoned by the Diabolist did it.”

“Aye, and the Black Queen killed her dead,” Albert grunted. “She’s a hard one, make no mistake, but these are bad times. Hard is what we need. Even Jehan the Wise hung himself some princes. Seven and one, like in the song.”

“It’s ungodly is what it is,” the old woman barked. “A villain queen? No good will come of it.”

“She was crowned by a Sister all proper, Mary,” the old man insisted. “What more can you ask?”

“Everyone knows the House up north went tame,” she sniffed.

“We’ve heard a lot about the queen, down south,” Iason said. “Some of it was less than pleasant.”

“Never said she was a choir girl,” Albert defended. “But Hells, it’s still better than Procer ain’t it? Kingdom’s back and Praes is playing nice. If the rest of the world would just leave us alone we’d muddle on just fine.”

“He has to say that,” Mary told them. “Lily went and joined the army, the fool girl. Taking orders from an orc calling herself marshal of all things.”

“If the orc pays her taxes and fights at the border, I say she’s welcome here,” the old man said stubbornly. “A whole goblin tribe settled at Marchford and that turned out all right. You have to forgive Mary, she’s a country girl. I’m a learned man, me. Went to Laure once when I was a boy.”

“Not the Laure story again,” the old woman sighed.

Lergo spoke up, sparing them the Laure story, and Iason had never before been so close to feeling fondness for the man.

“We intend on travelling north,” the Red Mage said. “Are the roads safe?”

“Sure, if-” Albert began, but he paused.

In the distance, bells were ringing. Four times, Iason counted.

“Again?” the old man said.

“Last one went straight to the Blessed Isle, made it far inland after,” Mary said. “Guess that was the last of the clever bunch.”

“That’s thrice now,” Albert complained. “Last time it took all day to clean up the docks after. No wonder we never get clients, with all them foreigners mucking up the city.”

He paused, the glanced at the three heroes.

“No offence,” he assured them.

“None taken,” the Gallant Brigand lied. “We’re new to town, so I’m at a bit of a loss. What did the bells mean?”

“Oh, you dears don’t need to worry,” the old woman said. “Just stay indoors, it was the curfew bells. It’ll be foggy out soon anyway.”

“Curfew?” Iason said. “What for?”

“Heroes,” Albert said. “Some must have come. Streets have to be cleared until that’s done with.”

The Stalwart Paladin’s blood ran cold. Already? How could the Empire possibly have known? It hadn’t even been a whole day. The three heroes shared a look and excused themselves to their rooms, telling their hosts of travel weariness, and made council in Iason’s own.

“We can’t stay here,” Amelia began. “We can’t risk putting those two in the middle of a fight between Named.”

“They must have scried us, it’s the only explanation,” the Red Mage whispered. “That shouldn’t be possible, not with the Paladin bearing Heaven’s touch. Unless you screwed up, Iason.”

“I don’t use the touch, mage,” the Paladin coldly replied. “It is there. Always. There is no intent needed.”

“I used to hunt for Helike supply caches, back in the day,” the Gallant Brigand said quietly. “Easy work, good loot. The way I’d find them was by watching the roads the Tyrant’s men used most, then doubling back.”

“I don’t follow,” Iason admitted.

“That is because you’re a sword-waving simpleton,” the Red Mage drawled, and the Paladin resisted the urge to punch that twinkle out of his eye. “The touch, it blocks actual scrying but the spell would still register failure. They moment it did they must have known we were coming, and they tracked us with the same. That’s impressively clever, I’ll admit.”

“Then they might be able to track us to here,” Amelia urgently said. “We need to move now.”

Neither of them argued. Iason left silver by his bed to pay for both the night and the trouble, as his companions grabbed their personal affairs. The Mage took longer, and returned decked in red silks.

“We are trying to be discreet ,” the Paladin hissed, his accent thickening.

“Discreet is over,” the man shrugged. “Now is the time for panache.”

“Well, I hope you can run in those,” the Gallant amusedly said, adjusting her hat. “Out the window, boys.”

Heroic work, Iason thought, involved a lot more jumping down windowsills than he’d anticipated. He’d not needed to change, as he’d never taken off the chain mail under his coat and rarely wore a helmet. The Heavens provided armour when he required it. He landed as silently as a man wearing over twenty pounds of steel could, which was not very. The Gallant landed smoothly as a cat, and the Red Mage nearly broke his ankle landing. The Paladin smothered a smile, as it was unkind to take enjoyment from the misfortune of others. However richly deserved.

“Well,” Amelia said, lowering the brim of her hat. “There’s that fog Mary was talking about.”

It’d been late afternoon and the winters in southern Callow were mild this late in the year – spring would not come for months yet but there was no snow in sight – which made the sudden appearance of thick fog rather jarring. There was nothing natural about this.

“Might I suggest we leave the city before a full legion comes after us?” Lergo suggested drily. “Blood doesn’t show on these robes but it does smell.”

“Keep an eye out,” Iason said, for the first since he’d come ashore back in his element. “As an opening move, this only makes sense if only our vision is restricted.”

Otherwise the enemy was simply helping them escape. As the moved quietly through the streets, the Paladin wondered how many of the Woe would have come. The full five? That might be more than they could handle. Two or three, he was confident they could deal with. Four they could flee. Five with a sorcerer as reportedly powerful as the Hierophant among them would be too many. Best that they never encounter the enemy at all, and disappear into the countryside where they would be harder to track. Amelia suddenly stopped.

“We’re being watched,” the Gallant Brigand said.

He did not question her: she has an aspect relating to this, though he knew not the word. Iason could see no one so he sharpened his hearing. Scuttling above, on the rooftops.

“Goblin,” he said, and unsheathed his longsword. “Roof to the left.”

The Gallant followed suit with her sabre and the Red Mage fell behind them. Eyes watching above, Iason saw a leering green face pop out from thatching. Yellow eyes shone bright in the fog, above a grin of needle-like fangs.

“Don’t you think it was a little racist to assume I was a goblin?” the creature mused. “Plenty of people use rooftops, you know. They’re like streets that make it easier to murder.”

The Stalwart Paladin blinked, then opened his mouth. Had he – but the goblin had just said... He closed his mouth.

“You’re quite brave, to seek out three heroes on your own,” the Red Mage said.

“Well, we don’t live old as a rule,” the greenskin said. “But hey, that’s why there’s a lot of us.”

Iason’s hearing was still sharpened and that was why he heard them move. Not one but dozens, and they’d all struck at once. He’d expected crossbows but instead what came tumbling down was balls of clay with lit fuses, and without missing a beat he called on the protection of the Heavens. A halo of light wreathed him and his allies as well, but he’d miscalculated. The munitions exploded into blinding brightness with a deafening clap – he had to blink it away and force the Light into his eyes. The Red Mage cursed, and when Iason’s vision returned there was no sign of any goblins. All they had left behind was a red trail of burning powder in the sky. They marked our position , he thought. He glanced at the others. Amelia had covered her eyes with the brim of her hat, but by the looks of it the noise had still affected her.

“Run,” he said, not sure how loud he was being.

The roar of the munitions was still sounding in his ears. The others understood him well enough to obey, and they headed for the closets gate without even the pretence of discretion. Dormer had turned into a ghost town, every door and window closed. In the fog, he could barely make out the shape of the houses unless he empowered his eyes with his Name. It began clearing out close to the gate. Whoever had done this, he thought, must have relied on the river to provide the water. Lucky them, they’d chosen the gate opposite. Providence. The gate was unguarded, and that was when he began doubting his last thought. No, he mused. Not unguarded. There were two people by the guardhouse. One seated on a bench, the other standing by it. Iason squinted. It was a woman, seated. Tan skin and high cheekbones, long hair in a practical leather binding behind her. Her legs were crossed and she was pulling at a pipe. The man at her side was almost inhumanly slender, a whip of a body in a long black tunic. At his hip was a sheathless sword, and one of his eyes was covered by a dark silken blindfold with silvery lettering. It was the hair that attracted his attention, though. It must have been a trick of the light, but for an instant it had seemed made of crow’s feathers.

“Iason,” the Gallant Brigand urgently said. “The woman’s cloak.”

He looked. It must have once been entirely black, he thought, but it was no longer. A patchwork of colourful strips had been woven over it, and even some matter he did not recognized. It looked like rippling wind. The collar, though, what laid woven into it felt like a sin. That made this the Mantle of Woe, and the woman wearing it...

“Catherine Foundling,” he said. “The Black Queen.”

The woman spewed out a stream of smoke, still sitting. Iason met her eyes. For one of her reputation, he was distinctly unimpressed. There was no pressure there, only a young woman looking vaguely exhausted.

“Afternoon,” the Black Queen said. “Welcome to the Kingdom of Callow, folks. Evidently you know who I am, so that saves us some tediousness.”

“Your trap will avail you nothing,” Iason said harshly.

“This isn’t a trap,” the villain mused. “Not unless you make it one. If I wanted you dead, Robber wouldn’t have tumbled you a warning shot. It would have been goblinfire instead of brightsticks, and already it’d all be over but the screaming.”

“How civilized of you,” the Gallant Brigand said, her tone slightly mocking. “Since we’re all being so friendly, might I venture as to ask what you want from us?”

The Black Queen spewed out a stream of smoke, studying them calmly.

“That’s my line,” she said. “Setting aside that you passed the border illegally, having three heavily-armed Named wandering the countryside without so much as a by-your-leave just isn’t in the cards. What are you here for?”

“Introductions first,” the Gallant demurred. “I am-“

“Amelia of Helike, daughter of Lasarn,” the one-eyed man at her side smiled, teeth like ivory. “You are known to us.”

Amelia blanched. The way he’d spokeen that last sentence... Iason was not one to frighten easily, yet it had sent a shiver down his spine.

“That’s Larat,” the Black Queen cheerfully said. “Or at least that’s what I call him. It pisses him off a lot, but why even have a treacherous lieutenant if you’re not going to taunt them at every opportunity?”

“We have come to study the aftermath of the fae incursion, Your Majesty,” Lergo said. “Purely academic curiosity in my part, I assure you.”

The lie sat ill with Iason, but he kept his mouth shut. Informing the woman that they had come to slay her and release Callow from her grasp would lead to a struggle he was not certain they could win. Not yet. The Black Queen pulled at her pipe, then sighed.

“Red Mage, was it?” she said. “A warning for you. Of all the shit decisions you’ve made today, trying to lie to me is close to the top of the list. Don’t do it again. I take it you’re here to kill me, then.”

It was a little insulting, Iason thought, that she sounded more irritated than threatened by that deduction. Arrogance was ever the downfall of Evil, he reminded himself. She spewed out another mouthful of smoke.

“Then what?” she asked.

“Pardon,” Lergo replied, sounding baffled.

“You kill me, glory to the Heavens and all that good stuff,” she waved. “Then what?”

“The people of Callow are freed,” Iason said. “They rise against the wicked Praesi and-“

“This,” the Black Queen sighed as she interrupted, “is why I have to keep killing you people. Look, I understand better than anyone how easy it is to start thinking you can just stab your way out of a mess, but you haven’t thought this through . Putting my head on a pike just makes a different sort of mess.”

“That’s what tyrants always say,” the Gallant quietly said. “That they may be a plague, but the world would be worse without them. You have to lance a wound for it to be able heal.”

“You’re not lancing anything, kid,” the villain said. “You’re just bleeding the body. And it’s been a long time since anyone thought that helped. Look, I’m not barring Callow to heroes. You want to wander the south healing and rebuilding? Fine by me. You get a Legion escort, but they’ll stay out of your way. You want to have a swing at Black? Not my problem, but you’ll have to get to the Vales through Procer. You want to actually have a look at the fae marks, or even Liesse? I’ll need oaths as assurance, but we can deal. This doesn’t have to be a fight.”

She paused.

“But,” she murmured. “Since I know what you’re thinking. Larat.”

The one-eyed man’s grin broadened, and power rippled across the street. The air cooled, and Iason almost summoned his Heavenly Armaments in answer. There was might in that creature’s frame, and nothing human about it.

“We’ve been tracking you since Mercantis,” the Queen said. “We’ve had long enough we could have hit you still in the river. Do you know why you were allowed to make shore?”

“I assume some form of sadism is involved,” the Red Made drawled.

“In a manner of speaking,” the villain smiled. “See, I learned from a man that would have had you corpses at the bottom of the Hwaerte before you even noticed. But I’m trying, I guess, not to be him. Or worse.”

Slowly she rose to her feet, and emptied the pipe before stewing it away in her cloak. The smile and the easy manners went away. Idly she rested her hand on the pommel of her sword, and Iason felt fear. There was iron in that woman’s gaze that had not been there before.

“You’ve seen I’m prepared,” Catherine Foundling said. “You’ve seen I have the muscle to put you down. But I didn’t put on the fancy hat to kill kids. So please , I beg you – don’t make me.”

It sounded genuine enough that the Paladin hesitated. The sentiment that they were kids to her was insulting, but what lay behind it... The wiles of devils are many and varied. Trust not the words of those sworn to Below, for deception is their truest tongue. He would not balk at his duty.

“Go home,” the Black Queen said tiredly. “Or Hells, join up if you want to. I’ll find something for you to do, this country’s still half a wreck and it’s not like I don’t take in heroes. But if you force this, it only ends one way. And once we start, I might not be able to stop.”

“You are a blight upon Creation,” the Stalwart Paladin said, almost regretfully. “An instrument of the Hellgods, carrying within the seed of damnation. May the Heavens grant you mercy in the afterlife, but for the sake of Creation you must be removed from this earthly shell.”

“What he said,” the Gallant Brigand agreed. “Only, you know, less priestly. Fuck you and your offer and your entire evil legions.”

“Yes yes, praise the Heavens and much defiance. That aside, out of curiosity,” the Red Mage smirked, “has that speech ever actually worked ?”

The Black Queen breathed out, and in a moment she went from tired girl only a few years older than them to razor-sharp killer. It was in the eyes, in the way she held herself. She had the poise of someone used to taking lives.

“No,” she said. “But I’ll try with the next batch anyway. Sixth time’s the charm, right?”

The one-eyed creature laughed.

“They never listen,” he said, sounding pleased. “I do believe offering mercy might actually make it worse. Fascinating.”

Six. Iason felt a trickle of fear go down his spine. How many heroes had she killed? No, it didn’t matter. She only needed to fail once. The hero folded into himself, and let his aspect reverberate within his soul. Arm . Plate of pure Light formed around him, a full suit topped by a winged helmet. His sword shone radiantly and as Lergo began to incant he advanced. The villain did not move, eyes still on him, but the Paladin felt the shifting currents of power. To their side a gate opened out of thin air, and as he glanced there Iason saw two things. The first was two score goblins, bright-eyed and eager in their furs as they occupied a frozen wasteland. The second was six scorpion-like contraptions of wood and metal, and as that sunk in they began to fire. The bolt hit him in the chest, then two others, yet it might as well have been children throwing mud at a stone wall. The steel bent, the wood shattered and he barely even felt the impact. He had no moment to spare enjoying the small victory, however. The Red Mage was most endangered by this sort of assault. Though gifted with a particularly strong talent for destruction, Lergo had confessed he was incapable of even the most basic of shieldings. The sorcerer managed to save his own hide by turning to ash the handful of projectiles aimed at him, but he would not be able to keep this up forever.

The Stalwart Paladin moved between his companion and the volleys of steel-tipped bolts, letting them strike impotently at the armaments bestowed upon him by the Heavens. The Gallant had been the most unruffled among them, dancing out of the way and somehow even parrying a projectile with a casual flick of the wrist.

“I’ll break the machines,” Iason said, and his voice thundered. “Keep the villains busy.”

Though the Black Queen had caught them by surprise, she’d been arrogant. With only one creature and mundane soldiers at her disposal, it might be feasible to slay her here and now. To free Callow of tyranny within a day of coming to its shore would be a grand deed, worthy of hymns and remembrance. Yet if the tide turned against them, the Paladin would rather see them defeated before the fled. It would be the beginning of a Pattern of Three, he suspected, and that would greatly enhance the swiftness of their growth. Indeed, the might even encounter another hero after they fled. Providence had a way of rewarding the righteous. To Iason’s mild irritation, the goblins manning the siege engines proved passingly clever. Seeing that their bolts had no effect on his armour as he advanced, they turned their fire to his companions. Some sorcery must be behind the machines, he thought, for there could be no other explanation for how swiftly they kept firing. No matter. He was quick enough on his feet that only the odd bolt made it through. Clever as the goblins were, they’d not been quite clever enough to flee his approach.

Iason crossed the gate into the frozen landscape and raised his sword the moment he felt the bite of urgency near his shoulder. It was not quite enough, the angle too awkward. A blade shattered his pauldron of Light and ripped into the chain mail below, though not deep enough to wound, and the Paladin breathed in sharply. A tall orc decked in burnt plate discarded a broken axe and spun out another, face grim. The hand of bare bones gave away the name of the greenskin that had struck him. The orc spat to the side.

“Masego will be pissed,” he said. “Half a day’s work and it kept for a single blow. At least you’re not reforming.”

Iason grit his teeth. The Heavenly Armaments did have that weakness – they could only be used once day, and could not be forged anew while in use.

“You will not land another,” the Paladin promised.

The orc’s eyes were on his mail, not his blade, and they narrowed. The heraldry, Iason realized. It’d been made visible by the rip.

“Half-House, le Miroir Verdant,” the greenskin said in lightly accented Chantant. “Proceran, then. Good, I’ve been meaning to try one of you out before the big Names come.”

“I am the Stalwart Paladin,” Iason thundered. “And you will lose more than a hand today, orc.”

“I’m the Adjutant,” Hakram Deadhand replied, baring his teeth. “I had a light meal this morning.”

They both moved with the swiftness of Named, tangling halfway there. Iason managed to hammer down on the orc’s wrist, loosening the greenskin’s grip on the axe, but the dead hand closed around his throat. The bones blackened as the Light furiously bit into them, but they did not give and Iason struggled in vain before the Adjutant tossed him back out the portal. He landed in a crouch, shifting his weight as his fighting-master had taught him. The orc rolled his shoulders and strolled out of the gate unhurriedly.

“ Iason ,” the Gallant screamed.

It felt like being kicked by a horse. The entire left side of his armaments shattered under the blow and as he flew he felt the Black Queen following with impossible swiftness. She arrived at the end of the arc before he did, snatching his foot and smashing him into the pavement. He saw her change her grip as she stood above him, ready to plunge down the point into his throat even as he tried to rise, but salvation came in time: a streak of red lightning had the villain ducking away in a hurry. The sorcerer had come through, thank the Gods. The Paladin got to his feet and took a swift look around as the Black Queen circled him slowly. Deadhand was now tangling with Amelia, and though he’d yet to land one of his brutal blows she was on the backfoot. Looking for an opening, he decided. It was not a bad match. The other conflict was. Lergo was weaving spells into one another admirably, flame and lightning and hexes flowing into the next seamlessly, but the one-eyed fae was toying with him. There were three cuts on the Red Mage’s cheek, perfectly parallel and scabbed black. Iason suspected they might have been killing blows, if the fae wished it so. He needed to lose Foundling soon and come to the sorcerer’s aid, or he was going to get run through when the creature bored of the game. This was no time to hold back.

“ Smite ,” the Stalwart Paladin said.

The Black Queen attempted to avoid the aspect, but she was too slow. Light came down from above a perfect a perfect heptagon of seven feet on every stroke. For a moment the shape seemed almost solid, the wrath of the Heavens shattering the paving stones and even the ground beneath. A heartbeat later it was gone, leaving the half-kneeling form of a smoking villain. Her face was a tapestry of burned flesh, her hair gone up in smoke and her bare hands crushed. Her eyes were unseeing, struck blind by righteous retribution. The villain spat out a gob of black blood that steamed and ate away at the earth.

“You have William beat when it comes to impact,” the woman noted, her voice a croak yet somehow cold.

She rose, and as she did the air cooled and her flesh knitted back. She shed the burnt skin like a snake, and her pupils broke as fresh ones forced themselves forward.

“As a general rule, striking aspects tend to go one of two ways,” the Black Queen said, voice empty of emotion. “Broad but shallow, small but deep. I would not have walked off Swing so easily. A nice trick, but ultimately-“

“ Smite ,” he interrupted.

She was standing again, which meant resuming the fight was not longer unchivalrous. There was a heartbeat between the Light striking and the word being spoken, and it was enough for her to evade.

“Ultimately still a trick,” she finished, as the smiting struck the empty pavement.

Only once more could he call on the aspect. He would have to get in close, prevent her form evading and... No , he thought. He was being baited. She was keeping him busy while her minions killed the others. Though it grated, Iason turned and without a word ran for the Red Mage.

“Hakram,” the Black Queen said, voice echoing strangely. “Switch.”

The orc moved away from Amelia without missing a beat, barrelling towards the Paladin immediately. Form the corner of his eye he saw the human villain pass them both in a streak, blade sounding against the Gallant Brigand’s own. Lergo cried out in pain, his incantation interrupted, and Iason’s fingers clenched around his sword. It was not all lost, he thought. The Adjutant was much slower than his mistress. The axehead came whistling down but Iason’s blade shifted angle, the combination of years of training and what he’d learned since coming into his Name. The Heavens-touched steel cut straight through the haft of wood and into the steel pauldron behind it. The orc began to retreat, and then the Paladin spoke.

“ Smite .”

Light filled his vision, but it was no harm to him. He felt the orc’s body flinch but somehow it remained standing. Though the greenskin’s footing was shot, so was his, and aside from smoking skin and amour the orc seemed unharmed when the aspect ebbed. And aspect of his own had been used, the Paladin suspected. There was the taste of power in the air. It was not enough. Iason ripped his blade free and smashed the guard in the orc’s face, knocking him clear of his feet. His Light-girded boot came down and broke the villain’s knee. That should cripple him for the rest of the fight. The greenskin struck out with a knife but Iason fluidly stepped back. Leaf Stirred By Hand, his master had called it, and when the knife withdrew he stepped forward following it. The blade whistled down, the orc bared his fangs and another blade knocked the killing blow away.

“You will not have him,” the Black Queen said, something sharp and heavy in her tone.

She frowned, and shook her head. Something in her eyes thawed measurably as she grimaced.

“Ever grasping is the tyrant’s lot,” Iason replied in Chantant.

“What’s he saying?” the woman asked. “My Chantant’s shit, and his accent is horrible.”

“He called you a tyrant,” the orc said.

“Wouldn’t be the first,” the Black Queen grimly said, parrying his blow and landing a riposte that failed to break through the Armaments.

He was pushed back, to his fury. Years he had trained for this, gruelling hours spent in the cloister’s courtyard being worked to exhaustion by his fighting-master. He’d learned the Five Ways and the Verdant Stances, been taught how to dismantle the foremost styles of every nation under the Calernian sun. But the Queen wasn’t fighting like a swordswoman. Whatever she had learned, it was no proper swordsmanship. She ignored his feint and pivoted around his back, her elbow hitting his flank and breaking his footing. He pivoted to face her but she’d moved with him and he had to give ground to avoid an oblique blow that would have carved through his throat. Iason gave further ground. Staying close, he would only get caught in her pace. It was then he realized that he could no longer hear the Red Mage fighting. He looked back and saw no sign of Lergo, or of his opponent. The air where they’d been fighting reeked of power and darkness. Gods, this was turning out too much for them. They had not been heroes long enough, none of them even had their full aspects.

“ Cut ,” the Gallant Brigand coldly announced.

She emerged out of thin air behind the Black Queen, aspect howling as her blade carved clean through the villain’s abdomen. She’d... done it? Then the woman’s silhouette dispersed, and Iason realized they’d been had. Glamour , he realized with a shiver of fear. That was glamour . He rushed forward but it was too late. Amelia almost managed to avoid the blow out of sheer instinct, but goblin steel ripped through her coat and muscles. Her left arm fell down limply, and even as she caught her sabre with the other one the Black Queen caught her by the back of the neck and squeezed. There was a sickening crack, and just like that Amelia was dead. There was not so much as a flicker of emotion on the villain’s face, he saw. Not a speck of humanity to be found. Just ice and hatred wearing a body. Her silhouette blurred for what must not even have been a heartbeat, and Iason pushed through the grief. Glamour again, and he could not see through it. He stepped back warily, and the impotence of it burned. Sharpening his ears found nothing, she was stepping lightly and her illusion advancing towards him. He needed to see, he needed to find her, he needed to...

Discern .

Power rippled through the Paladin’s frame washing him clear of tiredness and pain and the weakness of the flesh. This was more than mere sight, he knew instinctively. It would tell truth from lies, read the movements of the flesh before they came to fruition. He could see her now, wreathed in mirror-like mist. She was stalking his side, eyes patient.

“Enough,” he snarled. “You will not get away with this, butcher .”

He caught her by surprise, striking without warning. He glimpsed the parry before it ever rose, flicked his blade to the side and cut into her shoulder. She wove back, her footing swift, but his Light-gauntleted hand struck her across the mouth. He headbutted his winged helmet but came off the loser for it, forehead bleeding as he returned in kind and she rocked back in pain. His fist caught her in the stomach and she gasped. His blade shone radiantly as it scored a deep cut across her upper leg, but somehow the cutting of her muscles was not enough to make her fall. Fingers coated in frost and shadow slugged into his cheek, shattering the Light, and the two of them fell to the ground struggling. Using his weight to come atop her, he caught her wrist and dug his finger into her eye. She bit him, down to the bloody bone, and he snatched his hand back before he could lose the finger. She struggled under him but he was much heavier, and his fist broke her chin before she could wrestle away his arm. He’d felt teeth loosen. Forcing her arm aside his fingers closed around her throat, and suddenly she smiled.

The knife went ripped through the mail as Adjutant struck into his flank. Iason was thrown off the Black Queen by hundreds of pounds of angry orc, as as he hit the ground the world slowed. Light wreathed him, but still soft fingers touched his forehead. The Stalwart Paladin closed his eyes, an opened them in an endless spread of pale blankness.

You will bleed, a chorus of voices whispered into his ear. You will suffer. You will weep, yet find no relief. Though your soul is young and your weight feeble, you will take on the burden of many. Iason, son of Idrim, We offer you the misery of Endurance. We would embrace you one of our own, to blood and tears and bitter end. Iason Brightsword, Son of Tears, will you withstand horror so that others do not?

“Yes,” Iason whispered into the void.

The blankness rippled, and he was no longer alone. Two silhouettes with burning eyes and unspeakable shapes stood before him. And another, between him and them.

“There will be none of that,” Catherine Foundling sharply said.

You do not belong here .

The weight of their wrath was crushing, almost enough that Iason fell to his knees and it was not him they gaze upon in anger. Yet the Black Queen stood undaunted, cloaked in ice and shadows. And more. There was a silhouette riding her back, arms laced around her shoulders. A beautiful and dark-skinned woman.

“I already told the Hashmallim to walk it off,” she said. “Am I really going to have to revisit this with every fucking Choir?”

Arrogance. Your doom comes.

“Might be,” she said. “But not today, and not through this weak an instrument. Fuck off, you bottom feeders. This one’s been claimed fair and square.”

“You can’t fight angels,” Iason hissed.

“Who said anything about fighting them ?” Catherine Foundling said, and then she rammed a knife in his belly.

The blankness fled, Iason’s eyes opened and the last thing he ever felt was a spike of frost going through his forehead.

Interlude: Stairway

“Though official records state that the Principate fought a mere score civil wars, it should be noted that this does not include wars fought between less than five principalities. Should the definition be amended, Procer has on average fought a civil war every decade since the year of its founding. No single nation has ever spilled so much Proceran blood as the Principate itself.”
– Extract from ‘The Labyrinth Empire, or, A Short History of Procer’, by Princess Eliza of Salamans

The trouble with this war, Prince Klaus Papenheim had told his niece since the first day, wasn’t that it wasn’t going to be a war. It was going to be half a dozen of them, fought all across Calernia more or less simultaneously. That was the great danger looming within the Tenth Crusade, that once all the forces had been put in motion there was no adjusting the blows. Cordelia, bless her soul, had taken his warnings seriously. The face of warfare had changed while the Principate clawed itself bloody, and now Procer had to change with it or be left behind. He’d never asked how his niece had gotten her hands on the Praesi. It was for the best, he’d decided. The Prince of Hannoven had been raised with death as mother’s milk, but the fight against the Plague was clean in a way the games in the south weren’t. They made sport of men’s lives, down here, and he’d never had the stomach for that. Regardless, the ten Wastelanders had offered up the most precious secret of the East: the rituals of scrying, that old Praesi trick turned into a lethal tool of war by the Carrion Lord. The spells that allowed armies with entire kingdoms between them to move as one, taking apart hosts twice their size with surgical precision.

Gathering wizards to learn them had been costly, he suspected, and it must have been more so to keep the magelings in the Principate’s service after. Though in Lycaonese lands spellcasters were prized, for their sorcery was a mighty thing wielded from walls against the ratling hordes, the southerners had a more complicated relationship with spellslingers. Wizards and witches had once owned a seat on the Highest Assembly, in recognition of their great contributions in easing the alliance between Arlesites and Alamans that first founded the Principate. Yet in the centuries since they had fallen out of favour. Their great influence, often second only to the rulers of principalities, had been seen as a threat by the royals of the south. Meddling in an election had turned on them when the candidate they opposed, Louis Merovins, managed a narrow victory. The man had spent most his reign suppressing them after revoking their Assembly seat in retaliation, a struggle finally brought to an end two rulers down the line when the mage association known as L’Oeuil D’Or was forcefully disbanded.

Since then the casters had become tradesmen like any other, offering charms and potions for coin – though never healing, as the House of Light frowned upon any infringing upon their hold in that domain. Some cities in the south still had informal assemblies, he’d been told, but they were toothless things and kept that way by ancient decrees banning the collection of dues while still imposing heavy taxes. Until now. First Prince Cordelia Hasenbach of Procer had, in the wake of her speech announcing the Tenth Crusade, founded the Order of the Red Lion. An congregation of wizards and witches exempted from the old decrees, in exchange for sworn service to the crown. Hundreds of them, who might be passable war casters at best but all knew how to scry with a degree of skill. Klaus had a hard laugh, when he learned the charter binding the Grand Alliance together had specific provisions for such an order without ever naming it. His niece had been moving her pieces into place for near a decade now.

The Prince of Hannoven was pleased with the addition of the mages to his war council, though not because of their pleasant personalities. Near all of them were strutting Alamans pups, drunk on the shiny new heraldry and fresh importance. None of them seemed to understand they were not the sudden dawn of wizardly resurgence but instead a glorified pack of messengers. They had no say in where they were deployed, Klaus having decided the arrangements himself after consulting some of his own – much more trustworthy – Lycaonese mages. Dozens had been sent south to the Dominion, to keep the mustering armies of Levant pointed in the right direction, and near a hundred sent in little linked clusters his wizards called ‘relays’ to make it possible to keep the lines open to the Ashuran fleets even as they sailed. The rest had been spread with measured weighing of priorities, linking first to Salia where his niece ruled but also to the forces that Prince Amadis had schemed his way to leading. The Iserran weasel needed a close eye kept on him, and Klaus would have preferred to lead those armies himself if he could. He knew why he could not, though.

In the Red Flower Vales awaited the two men he considered to be the greatest field commanders of this era: Marshal Grem One-Eye and the Carrion Lord.

Sending the likes of Amadis against them would have been like throwing oil at a fire, and Cordelia had reluctantly told him that the man had intrigued too well to be entirely side-lined from command. The Prince of Iserre, however, had been too clever for his own good. With him were the armies of the remainder of his pack of intriguing malcontents, and every unruly fantassin his niece had been able to scrape together. Nearly fifty thousand in total, a host almost as large as the one Klaus was commanding. But it would be the Queen of Callow that Amadis tangled with, and the Prince of Hannoven had heard much about that one of late. He’d once dismissed her as a nobody, during the Liesse Rebellion, but he’d been made to eat that dismissal raw since. She’d gone from victory to victory in the last few years, and if half the rumours about what her pack of villains was doing to heroes making their way into Callow were true... Well, there was one in every generation. Klaus’ had borne the Black Knight that awaited him in the Vales, and the great monster of Cordelia’s own looked to be the murderous orphan who’d set her throne atop a sea of corpses.

Prince Amadis would win, he suspected. The shit had more than a dozen heroes at his back, and two old forces of nature among them. It’d been a pleasant surprise to find out that Laurence was still alive, old sack of piss and vinegar that she was. The Saint of Swords was an army unto herself, and the Grey Pilgrim that went with her was supposed to be some kind of legend in Levant. No, Amadis would come out ahead. But the villains would bloody him and wreck the armies of his allies – and as the commander of that host, all the blame would fall on his shoulders afterwards. There’d be no more agitating the Highest Assembly for the Prince of Iserre, after that disgrace. Klaus spat to the side in disapproval, alone in his tent with the latest correspondence. It was sinful that good, honest soldiers would die in that mess but that was the nature of war. The Veiled Lady not discern between deserving and not when she claimed the butcher’s bill. Enough of Amadis’ backers knew their way around a battlefield that a real debacle would be avoided, at least. There was noise outside the prince’s tent and he set down the latest supply census – Brabant had cut corners on what they brought, the fucking cheapskates – to rise to his feet.

“What’s the racket, men?” he called out.

“Your Grace, I have-“

The voice yelped instead of finishing, preceded by the sound of a spear’s butt hitting a foot none too gently. Klaus passed a hand through greying hair and sighed. That was one of his wizards, he was certain. The eager shits were still under the impression that military protocol did not apply to them since they served under the First Prince instead of the army itself.

“Victoria, let him in,” the Prince of Hannoven said.

“Bertrand de Guison, officer of the Order of the Red Lion,” his guard announced, her tone darkly amused as she parted the tent’s folds.

Klaus would need to have a talk with her. Her dislike for southerners was well-earned – her two sons had died on Alamans fields fighting to put Cordelia on the throne – but the magelings were too useful to be roughed up over petty offenses. The wizard entered limping, his heavy robes emblazoned with a rampant red lion on pale. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, Klaus thought, and that he believed that to be young suddenly reminded him how old he’d gotten. Even his niece was closer to thirty than twenty, now. A Papenheim hold vigil until death relieves them , his father had always told him, but the Veiled Lady had seen fit to spare Klaus longer than he’d believed possible. So few of his time were left, save for enemies.

“Your Grace,” the mage bowed. “I herald news of great import.”

He’d called out in Reitz when he was outside the tent, but now the boy was speaking Chantant. The Prince of Hannoven squinted. He’d had lessons as a child and spoke the Alamans tongue well enough, but never quite managed to shed his Lycaonese accent. It made him sound like an ignorant brute, he was well aware. Just for that, the mage got to stand throughout the conversation.

“I’m listening,” Klaus said.

“The chapter of the Order assigned to the Rightful Due has contacted us,” Bertrand eagerly said. “Admiral Hadast has struck the first blow of the Tenth Crusade.”

That would be Magon Hadast’s son, Klaus noted, not the Ashuran ruler himself. The head of the Thalassocracy was too old and fragile to campaign himself. The ‘Rightful Due’ – Gods, the fucking Ashurans and their ship names – was the flagship of the Thalassocracy’s first war fleet. It’d set sail more than a month ago, and true to their reputation the Ashuran ships and their wind mages were striking with impossible haste.

“A victory, is it?” Klaus asked.

The mage nodded.

“One for the ages, Your Grace,” he said. “The Tideless Isles were seized with but a handful of Ashuran ships sunk, and ten times as many prize hulls seized from the corsairs. What few are not dead or in chains fled for the Wasteland.”

And so the first battle of the Tenth Crusade was fought hundreds of miles away from the Empire, Ashur snatching anchorage for its fleets before it began attacking Praes from the coast. It was beginning, Klaus thought. Now the Praesi would have to move troops to protect their coastal cities, denying reinforcements to the western front even as Ashur burned and looted everything within earshot of waves. Now that Hadast was in place, armies could finally begin to march.

“Contact your fellows in the Northern Army,” Klaus told the mage. “Pass this message to Prince Amadis: the seal is broken, climb the stairs.”

“By your will, Your Grace,” the man bowed elaborately.

Gods, Alamans. They turned every conversation into a bloody play.

“That aside,” Bertrand continued, “your guard-“

“I didn’t see anything,” Klaus grunted. “There’s a war on, boy. Get moving.”

The wizard looked like he’d swallowed a lemon, but learning some humility would do him good. The prince waited until the mage was gone before speaking again.

“Victoria,” he called out. “Get yourself relieved and come in to pour yourself a drink.”

Prince Klaus Papenheim frowned.

“And find the White Knight and his gaggle too, while you’re at it,” he said. “I’ll want a word with them before we march on the Vales.”

—

Prince Amadis Milenan’s fingers drummed the table lightly. The sound of it was soothing, and well worth the expense of having brought the furniture from his summer palace in Iserre. Amadis had ruled his principality for more than twenty years now, and steered it unfailingly through troubles and civil war largely because he had a knack for telling which way the wind was blowing. At the peak of the civil war, he’d been considered a key supporter of Princess Aenor of Aequitan while secretly corresponding with both Princess Constance of Aisne and Prince Dagobert of Lange – before the latter’s grisly demise at the hands of Hasenbach’s northern savages, anyway. No matter who triumphed he had been positioned to become one of the most influential princes in the Highest Assembly. By refraining from pressing his own claim while keeping close ties with neighbouring principalities, he’d ensured that Iserre would come out of the strife wealthy and pristine: from there, it would have been child’s play to trade marriages for concessions and arrange for his kin to rule Procer when the time came. Then the Battle of Aisne happened, and Cordelia Hasenbach broke the board.

He’d not been there himself, preferring to send one of his many cousins to command the levies he had sent to aid the coalition. But he’d heard stories. Of entire allied armies turning against princesses he’d considered among the most cunning and dangerous alive halfway through the battle. Of the brutal slaughter the Lycaonese had visited upon the flower of the south’s manhood. That defeat sounded across all of Procer, and in the wake of that sound Amadis found his careful plans lay shattered on the ground. Still, he’d come out of the disaster better than any of his former allies and set to work leveraging that sudden prominence. His ties in Orne and Cantal served him well, soon bolstered by generously termed loans to Creusens and wedding his youngest daughter to the heir to Segovia. The aging Princess Luisa has sided with Hasenbach after she broke Prince Dagobert and remained a close ally after, reaping the benefits of her early support, but her son had greater ambitions than being the loyal dog of a northerner First Prince. Princess Aenor’s successor, Princess Rozala, eventually joined his alignment as well after she found her mother’s old supporters closing their doors to her in an attempt to curry favour with Hasenbach.

Six principalities stood behind him, out of the twenty-three that formed Procer. Twenty-four, counting Salia, but as it was the seat and personal domain of whoever claimed the crown its officials avoided partisanship. It was a greater portion of the realm than it seemed. The four Lycaonese principalities to the north were ardent Hasenbach supporters, but estranged from the courts of the south and forced to spend what little coin they had seeing to their borders with the Chain of Hunger. Cleves and Hainault had turned inwards after their disastrous adventures in the civil war, fearing the Kingdom of the Dead would catch scent of their weakness and begin raiding their shores again. Over a third of the principalities still relevant to rule of Procer stood behind him. Amadis did not have the votes in the Highest Assembly to dismantle Hasenbach’s position, not unless she blundered and angered rulers keeping aloft. But he was now widely considered the second most powerful ruler in the Principate, and even the hint of his displeasure gave other princes pause.

Not that the First Prince had been idle all this time. She was, Amadis would concede, a much defter hand at the Ebb and the Flow than any Lycaonese should be. That clever bit of diplomacy with Levant had tied Orense to her with a debt of gratitude, and his own admittedly lacklustre military record meant that Salamans and Tenerife preferred looking for protection against Helike with the First Prince than his own faction. Their support had borne fruit, with twenty thousand men being sent south to guard the border even as the rest of the Principate gathered for war. Yet for all her cleverness, Hasenbach was not beloved. Her heavy-handed reforms of the bureaucracy in Salia had won her no friends among the highborn who had once enjoyed lucrative sinecures close to the heart of Procer’s power. The decrees she had passed trough the Highest Assembly to disburse funds for the upkeep of fortresses guarding the borders with the Chain of Hunger and the Dead King’s realm were similarly unpopular with the impoverished south, though she’d had the votes to force them through regardless.

Still, Amadis had never considered the woman a true threat to his rising ascendance. Watching the massive undertaking she had apparently managed to prepare under his nose without a single soul noticing, however, he was coming to reconsider that assessment.

There must have been at least five hundred mages involved, he thought as he left his tent and came to stand in the field. That meant easily thrice that number in servants and tradesmen supporting them, the sum of it making a sizeable town on its own. And there must have been soldiers, to ward off anyone curious even in this distant stretch of the Principate. The Prince of Arans must have been involved as well, for all this was taking place amidst his lands, and never had Amadis unearthed so much as a hint that the man was one of Hasenbach’s. Neither had his people in the treasury found trace of the sizeable amount of coin that must have been allocated in seeing such an undertaking through. Had the gold come through the Lycaonese principalities? Fielding their armies south in the civil war should have nearly beggared them, it should not have been possible. Unless, of course, Hasenbach had falsified the books in Salia. The Prince of Iserre hummed. He could have her censured for that. The measure was mostly symbolic, and required simple majority to pass. Would it be worth it to call in the favours? It would certainly blacken her name, but to make such a play as a crusade unfolded might do the same for his own.

Someone came to stand by his side, and a low whistle was let out.

“She plays a deeper game than we thought,” Princess Rozala of Aequitan said.

Barely twenty, Amadis thought, with all her mother’s beauty yet none of the grace. Being raised in a time of war had done nothing for her manners, a shame given the past glories of her hallowed line. Iserre and Aequitan had been foes as often as they were allies, over the centuries, a complicated dance of love and hate that saw the lines between rivalry and alliance ever blurred. No one understood better than his people that a skilled enemy could serve as better ally than a friend.

“I discern the Prince of Hannoven’s hand in this,” Amadis said. “It is too... martial a measure to be the First Prince’s own thought.”

“It certainly explains why she had us getting drunk near the border with Bayeux instead of mustering with the Iron Prince in Orne, anyway,” Princess Rozala mused. “And here I thought she merely wanted to keep you from getting your grubby paws all over her allies.”

“A mark of weakness, that she would find it needful to do so,” Amadis said with a thin smile. “Too many of her backers see the sense in what I say.”

“There’s no great brilliance in pointing out that Callow is ripe for the taking, Amadis,” the Princess of Aequitan snorted. “Anyone with eyes can see it. It’s the division of the spoils that’s going to set tongues wagging. Assuming we can even wrest the right to dispose of them.”

“Enough of the Highest Assembly took command of their armies we can convoke a session in Callow without her,” the Prince of Iserre murmured. “With the right promises we could circumvent her entirely.”

Neither needed to say that if this took place, Hasenbach’s reign would never recover from the blow. It was one thing for a decree to be defeated in the Assembly – not even the most beloved of First Princes had avoided that indignity at least once – but for a ruling First Prince’s known intent to be defied that openly? She would barely even qualify as a figurehead, after. The disgrace might be enough for her to abdicate and flee back north with her tail between her legs. There were other ways to chance the face of the Principate’s rule than mere warfare. The two of them stood in uneasy silence afterwards, looking at the work of the mages. The ritual had begun with dawn yet was not even half-done by his reckoning. The harsh slopes of the mountains separating Procer from Callow burned away under constant sorcerous fire, leaving behind smoking steps of stone stretching ever further. Now that the Prince of Hannoven had given his leave, Amadis had been filled in on the full details of this little scheme of the First Prince’s. Though no great commander himself, the Prince of Iserre knew enough of martial endeavours to be aware that the Kingdom of Callow’s great advantage in war had always been that the only path of entry from the west was the Red Flower Vales. Narrow passes and valleys, whose fortifications had only grown more expansive since the Wastelanders had annexed Callow.

This was no longer true.

The Stairway, as Hasenbach’s lieutenant among the mages called it, was the work of years in ritual preparation and planning: an exhausting labour that would carve a way through the mountains between the principality of Arans and northern Callow at the narrowest point in the mountains. The planned point of emergence was to the north of the city of Harrow – which was, he’d been assured, essentially undefended. Amadis had been ordered to take his host through the Stairway and begin a march south, shattering every army in his path until he took the defences of the Red Flower Vales from behind while the host of Prince Klaus Papenheim assaulted them from the front. He’d also been mandated to establish negotiations with the Duchy of Daoine, though it had been made clear to him treating with Duchess Kegan would be handled by one of the First Prince’s personal envoys. In this, he was not worried. Callow was such a lawless place, these days. Envoys could meet with all sorts of accidents as they journeyed. And if they did, well, was it not his duty as a loyal subject of Procer to fill that void? A diplomatic victory with the Deoraithe would do much to solidify his position before he convoked the Highest Assembly within Callow. The higher is fortunes rose, the lower Hasenbach’s fell.

“The wizards tell me the ritual will be completed within two days,” Prince Amadis of Iserre told his accomplice. “We must swiftly steal a march afterwards.”

“Steal a march,” Princess Rozala repeated mockingly. “My, how commandingly you speak to me. One would almost believe you to be the leader of this glorious host of ours.”

Amadis smiled at her.

“How is your brother these days?” he asked. “I hear his talents as an orator have thawed even the First Prince’s disposition.”

The woman’s face turned dark, and she looked away. Rozala did need the occasional reminder of how flimsy her position in Aequitan truly was, with her younger brother currying favour at court. Hasenbach was unlikely to be so gauche as to directly intervene in a principality’s affairs of succession, but she could do a great deal to help the boy’s cause without tipping her hand.

“Let us not quarrel, Your Grace,” Amadis said. “Can you not feel it? We are going to make history, you and I.”

The Prince of Iserre’s smile broadened as he watched the Stairway grow. The world, he knew, was on the eve of great changes. And Amadis Milenan would be at the heart of them.

Chapter 1: Observatory

“Those who withstood the sword, I laid low with ink.”
– Words carved into the tomb of Dread Emperor Terribilis I, the Lawgiver

I rarely used the council room these days. Under the Fairfaxes the King’s Council had been the greatest organ of power in the realm, closer to the crown than any and wielding influence far beyond that of the titles of the men and women having been appointed to it. I’d retained only parts of it, though, the ones I found useful. I had no need for a Chamberlain to see to the ‘royal household’, when mine was essentially me and whatever part of the Woe happened to be in Laure at the time. And even then I doubted Thief had slept in her chambers more than twice. She preferred prowling the city when she was there. Masego disdained his rooms as well, though for reasons somewhat more worrying. No, broadening the authority of the palace’s seneschal had been quite sufficient. Not that all old roles had been so easily disposed of. With Anne Kendall in the seat of Governess-General, Juniper as my Marshal and Ratface as my Lord Treasurer there’d been only on seat left worth filling: Keeper of the Seals. In the old kingdom, those had been tasked with overseeing courts of law and making sure the decrees of the crown were upheld across Callow. That seemed a glorified clerk’s position, until one remembered the way the kingdom had functioned under the Fairfaxes.

Though laws decreed in Laure held sway across the realm in theory, in practice the hair-raising labyrinth of ancient privileges and prerogatives held by most highborn houses made it a nightmare for any single decree to be uniformly observed. I’d been amused to learn that House Talbot, whose old demesne was now my own, had for several centuries been allowed to trade in lands directly held by the crown without tariffs as part of an old deal that saw a generous loan offered to a king so he could build a summer palace by the Silver Lake. I’d been even more amused to learn that said palace had been wrecked by Praesi within the decade when they attempted to invade the heartlands of Callow through an underwater invasion – orcs with gills, apparently – down the Pening river. One of the Malignants, that’d been, I was pretty sure. A Dread Emperor of the worst mould, incompetent at everything but murderously ensuring his rivals didn’t overthrow him. Regardless of historical curiosities, the Empire had actually allowed me to inherit a significantly more centralized realm in many ways. With Baron Darlington of Hedges and Baroness Morley of Harrow the only two remaining landed nobles in Callow, I didn’t have nearly as many powerful people barking about privileges and prerogatives.

What I did end up having, however, was my court’s first real power struggle. Now that the governors across Callow all answered to the crown through the Governess-General the office of Keeper of the Seals held a lot more direct power than it’d used to, with a lot less pushback to boot. Crown decrees had a lot more teeth, these days, and the Keeper had a great deal of latitude in ensuring they were upheld. Everyone and their sister had gone after the appointment, beginning the charm offensive the moment I was crowned. The only ones who’d stayed out of the fray were the Deoraithe, and I’d almost asked Kegan to send me a competent cousin just for that. Brandon Talbot and his tribe of old aristocrats had been the most ferocious, though the northern baronies had tried to muscle his people out – the fight between the powers in Laure and the distant northern nobles was an old one. A few eldermen in Laure had actually tried to bribe Ratface into putting in a good word for their candidate, banking on the Taghreb reputation for venality, and instead found themselves fined for the exact same sum and unceremoniously drummed out of office.

I picked a southerner, in the end, after tasking Baroness Kendall to find me a suitable one. After the massacre at Second Liesse, what had once been the duchy of the same name and even the region as a whole had been on the brink of collapse. It’d only been the reparations I obtained from the Empress and Hakram’s feverish work that kept the place from eating itself alive, and even now it was the most unstable part of my realm. A major city and over a hundred thousand people were gone form the heart of the south, it wasn’t something that could be healed in a year. Or even a decade. Binding whatever powers remained down there to the crown had been necessary, and my Governess-General managed to dig up a candidate that wouldn’t fuck up the duties that came with the appointment. Edith Westmore had once been a lady in her own right, before her liege lord took up arms in the Liesse Rebellion, and even after had remained a wealthy landowner. She had the reputation and the connections to be a capable Keeper of Seals, and though I wasn’t particularly fond of her as a person neither did she grate my nerves. It was no lifetime appointment, regardless.

Lady Edith was not here in my solar, not this afternoon anyway. I’d had the richly-panelled room furnished more to my tastes – which largely meant removing all the more ostentatious stuff and filling the new liquor cabinet to the brim – and these days I conducted most royal business in here. The comfortable surroundings helped allay the inevitable bouts of tediousness that seemed to accompany the work of making Callow into a halfway-functioning nation. My two companions at the table bathed by afternoon sun were the two members of my council I saw most often: Governess-General Anne Kendall and Lord Treasurer Hasan Qara. Who still insisted on being called Ratface, though he’d come to embrace the sobriquet of Bastard Lord as well. He got a kick of how much it horrified Praesi envoys.

“We’ve another petition from Hedges,” Anne said, shuffling parchments. “On the subject of tariffs in Laure and Southpool.”

The silver-haired woman glanced delicately at my treasurer after speaking. Ratface seemed distinctly unamused, though the irritation was not directed at Kendall.

“They’re trying to flood the markets with wool,” the Taghreb told me. “They have entire warehouses going to waste, the Jacks confirmed it.”

‘The Jacks’ was a very fancy title for my ever-growing web of thieves, smugglers, spies and sundry informants. It was nowhere as unified and well-organized as the appellation implied, with Aisha’s network of kinsmen in Praes, Ratface’s guildsmen and Thief’s friend s being different organizations entirely. Adjutant oversaw the whole mess of disparate reports and pieced it together into a coherent picture before bringing it to me. As for the name, well, it was known in some circles that the Guild of Thieves was now in my pay. Mutterings at my court about lowly knaves entering the crown’s service had been frequent in early days, and Vivienne had amused herself by picking a fucking pun she knew I’d despise but still have to use frequently – knave was another name for a jack, in Callowan card decks. Of all my companions, Thief was the one whose sense of humour always ended up screwing me some way or another.

“They would eat at their own profits if they did,” Kendall frowned. “Compared to selling to the crown they would be making a loss.”

“We’re not buying as much anymore,” I noted. “South’s mostly settled, all the notable tent cities are clothed and fed.”

“It’s a farsighted ploy,” Ratface told us. “They’re not after immediate profit here, they’re trying to put the local guilds out of business. After they’ve cornered the market, they can start slowly raising prices. Thalassina tried the same thing with the spice trade under Nefarious, it nearly started a war with Nok.”

“If they spent half as much time seeing to their own as they do thinking up ways to fuck with me, the north would be a godsdamned paradise,” I said through gritted teeth.

Baroness Kendall cleared her throat.

“Though I cannot speak as to the mercantile effects,” she said, “from a diplomatic perspective we have already done much to antagonize Hedges. A concession might be in order.”

“I prevented them from fleecing desperate refugees, Anne,” I flatly replied. “I didn’t exactly piss in their morning porridge.”

“All they see is expected gold never reaching their coffers,” my Governess-General said. “And I must remind you that our grasp on the region is still feeble. Fear will only get us so far.”

Fear was what had gotten us anything at all, I thought. I had no illusions about the loyalty of those two holdout baronies. I doubted they’d truly join the fold within my lifetime. Even confirming nearly all their old privileges – the right to mint their own coin being the largest abolished – and leaving their holdings untouched they still wanted more. Aristocrats . My growing exposure to the lot of them had done nothing to improve my opinion of the breed, save for a few exceptions.

“Quotas,” I finally said. “Enough they can get a foothold, not enough they can eat the whole cake. And make it clear to the right people that I expect positions on having observing Legion officers attached to their armies to... change accordingly.”

Kendall inclined her head, the touch of the sun on her locks rather fetching as she did. For a woman her age she remained strikingly beautiful.

“I’ll have a proposal drafted,” Ratface said. “Now, I know we’ve spoken of this before but...”

I grimaced, fairly sure I knew what was coming.

“There is too much Imperial coinage circulating in Callow, Catherine,” he said. “We need to start buying it up.”

Were I not Named, I might never have noticed the slight crease on the Governess-General’s brow when she heard Ratface refer to me by my given name. She and I had once been more familiar as well, but that had gone up in smoke since my coronation. Anne Kendall was a patriot to the bone: it didn’t matter how I’d gotten my crown, now that I wore it I was to be treated as loftily as any Fairfax.

“You’re my treasurer,” I sighed. “You know damn well we don’t have the funds for that. And the Empress might see it as provocation, which we really can’t afford at the moment.”

A year of regular reports had made it painfully clear to me that while Praesi troops might no longer garrison my cities or Praesi lords rule them, Praesi influence was far from gone. I’d spent so much time paying attentions to borders and armies that I’d never considered the Wasteland would still have a leash in the form of coin and commerce. Trade with Procer had pretty much ended after the Conquest, and trade to Mercantis had been dominated by Imperial governors. The wealth came from the east, these days, and there was precious little I could do about that at the moment. Not when it was the Tower’s gold that had rebuilt an entire third of my realm. I’d had to make concessions to ensure that materialized, too. We’d been keeping Callow afloat for the last year by gouging the High Lords scrabbling for grain through trade permits and set prices, but the Tower had been exempted from both. To an extent, anyway. I’d insisted on keeping large reserves in anticipation of the crusade.

“So long as nearly half the coinage in Callow is from the Imperial Mint, the Tower can break the realm’s coffers at will,” Ratface said. “All the Empress needs to do is devalue her currency and the south goes up in flames. It’s a knife at our throat, Catherine. I understand the Hellhound is riding you about funding for the army, but another thousand men will make no difference if we can’t pay those soldiers.”

“Our own coin is slowly displacing the others,” Baroness Kendall pointed out. “Patience might be the wisest answer.”

The Taghreb shook his head.

“We’re replacing old Callowan coinages,” he said. “We barely touched the Wasteland portion. The Carrion Lord spent decades making certain Callow was dependent on Imperial coin for trade, it is not work that can be undone in a few years’ span. Not unless we plan and invest.”

“There has to be an alternative to just taking the Empress’ gold off the streets by emptying our coffers, Ratface,” I said. “That’d be as good as raising a banner in her eyes. There would be immediate retaliation.”

The handsome man wrinkled his nose, rather unbecomingly.

“Using Mercantis as a third party, perhaps,” he finally said. “It would be slower and costlier, and still have us vulnerable to foreign influence.”

I sighed.

“Draft-“

“A proposal, yes,” he finished amusedly. “Ah, the joys of queenship.”

“Don’t you fucking start,” I muttered. “Between this and learning all those godsdamned Proceran languages my eyes are going to fall off.”

Baroness Kendall delicately cleared her throat.

“Not to add undue burden, but there is one last petition,” she said.

“Go on,” I grunted. “As long as it’s not our man in Vale whining about granary distribution again.”

“Officials have presented a formal request that the court return to the use of the Alban calendar,” she told me.

I snorted.

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” I said. “The Legions all use –“

I heard the movement behind the door before the knock sounded. My ears pricked. Man, late thirties, fine health. He smelled of anxiousness, though well short of fear.

“Enter,” I called out before he’d finished knocking.

I felt the gaze of the other two on me. Ah. I really needed to stop doing that. It did tend to make people uncomfortable. It was a servant, who I did not recognize though the livery made it clear he was one of the palace staff.

“Your Majesty,” he greeted me, bowing low before offering shallower bows to the others.

He’d been slightly reluctant when it came to Ratface’s turn, I noted. There’d been a lot of that since the moment I first appointed the Taghreb. I raised an expectant eyebrow at him.

“There is word from, uh, the Observatory,” the man said. “Your presence has been requested. The Lord Hierophant allegedly spoke of a ‘major phenomenon’.”

Translation: Masego had summoned me while, again, forgetting you weren’t actually supposed to summon queens. I didn’t really mind, but his brutal lack of regard for etiquette did seem to unsettle the servants whenever they came in contact with it. I rose to my feet, pushing my seat back.

“We’ll reconvene in an hour to finish this,” I told the other two.

“You speak so queenly, these days,” Ratface grinned. “I haven’t seen you spit on the ground in months.”

“Yeah, well, I own all the carpets now,” I muttered.

We made our courtesies, some more courteously than others, and then I dismissed the servant who seemed intent on accompanying me. I knew the way to the Observatory: I’d paid for the damned thing to be built out of an uninhabited wing of the palace. I wasn’t keeping a mistress, or a husband for that matter, so luxurious rooms reserved for one had been more than a little unnecessary. It wasn’t a long walk, but I lengthened my stride out of impatience. Still took the time to greet the servants and officials I came across, though. Actually learning all the names was a daydream given their sheer number, but if I could get at least half right it’d be a start. Better than Archer, anyway, who just called them whatever she felt like at the time. Getting this damned thing built had been strolling right into a series of rows with most my closest advisors, Juniper and Ratface the worst of them. My former Supply Tribune had been appalled at the costs involved, especially since some materials had to be brought directly from the Wasteland, while the Hellhound had bluntly told me that for the same amount of coin we could arm and armour over a thousand men and that’d be a lot more useful in the long run. It was rare enough for the two of them to agree on anything that I’d seriously reconsidered my commitment.

It’d still been built, in the end, and Masego had proved that his work had value beyond gold or steel. Without the Observatory at least three heroes would have slipped into Callow unseen, and the results of that could have been disastrous.

I felt the outer wards long before I arrived at the end of the corridor. As the only way in or out of the Observatory, it was now the most scrupulously protected part of the palace. The full line of legionaries guarding the corridor saluted as I went by, and I nodded back. Hakram’s people, these. The amount of soldiers and bureaucrats under Adjutant’s direct command had steadily increased along with his responsibilities. My blood was keyed into the outer wards, which were more trap than boundary, and so I got to the bronze gates with only a mild headache to show for it. I rapped my knuckles against the metal, careful to moderate my strength. There was still a dent left from the one time I’d forgotten. The bronze doors opened after a few heartbeats, and behind them stood a dark-skinned woman. She hastily knelt. Fadila Mbafeno had been one of Akua’s minions once, before I spared her at Hierophant’s request. She’d since served as an assistant in his mage’s tower, and now effectively ran the Observatory. On parchment Masego’s word was law here, so long as I did not contradict him, but his utter disinterest in the logistics of the place meant all the responsibilities were in the Soninke mage’s hands.

I disliked her, though not enough to do anything about it, but I would not deny she was extremely competent. Diabolist had always picked the cream of the crop, when it came to minions. Not that it’d ever stopped her from sacrificing them at the drop of a hat.

“Your Majesty,” Fadila said. “I invite you within.”

Nothing changed, visibly at least. There was a subtle current of power beneath her words, but even trying to feel it out would disperse it. I knew better than to think that’d been an empty sentence, though. I still vividly remembered the searing pain that had followed trying to pass the threshold without explicit permission.

“Rise,” I said, and strode by her.

Passing the threshold was not painful, per se. It was more like being squeezed through a very narrow gap, a temporary constriction of my being. Once inside the room proper there was a sense of relief, but I knew from experience it would be short-lasting. A bigger cage was still a cage. The inner Observatory was warded up something fierce, some of those defences specifically against fae. They were deeply unpleasant for me, but I’d deal with the discomfort if it meant Larat couldn’t ever set foot in here. Falida rose as bid, and followed three full steps behind me a little to the left. Wasteland etiquette, I thought sardonically, though in all fairness Callow had its fair share of little quirks as well. What had once been a full wing of the royal palace had been ripped out of even load-bearing walls, discreet arcs instead supporting the weight of the domed ceiling now. It was a single massive room and awake with quiet activity. Circling at the feet of the walls a boardwalk of granite made an outer ring, linked to pebbled paths that made up the spokes of a giant wheel from a bird’s eye view. Within those spaces pools of dark water lay still, save for when mages stirred them to life with whispered spells. Scrying pools, particularly powerful ones.

Getting the mages to keep them manned had been difficult, since the Army of Callow was already short on spellcasters, and ultimately I’d had to draft a few competent officers then draw heavily upon the now-disbanded Guild of Hedges. Getting Masego to teach those middling sorcerers how to scry properly had been a rough conversation, but he’d ultimately conceded than an empty Observatory would rather defeat the point of raising it in the first place. The legal status of the sorcerers had been a thorny matter to handle even after they were trained. They could not part of the Army of Callow or the Legions of Terror, as Juniper was still a general in the Empress’ employ as well as my marshal and that would give Malicia a degree of influence over them. I’d not wanted to give the court any sway over them either, but placing them under my direct authority would meant the moment Hakram and I went on campaign they fell in a legal morass. I had to be careful about things like that, these days. Taking the crown had brought nearly as many complications as it had solutions. As an awkward compromise they’d been made into a guild, approved by my seal, the head of which was Masego. In his absence it was Fadila who ran things as his appointed second, with just enough independence she could do whatever needed to be done while the fact that the Observatory was the crown’s property meant Anne Kendall had enough authority to step in if things got out of hand.

I pushed aside the thoughts as I tread one of the pebbled paths to the centre of the room, where Masego awaited. A second smaller ring of granite had been laid there, but it could hardly be seen. From the dark waters grew a massive alder tree whose roots spread into every pool and whose summit rose to touch the ceiling of painted runes and night sky. There was nothing natural about it, from the overly pale bark to the almost crimson leaves. Growing from the trunk a handful of branches formed a structure halfway between a bed and a seat, and before it a depression in the trunk made room for an item pulsing with power. It didn’t look like much to the naked eye, a wide bowl of baked clay whose supports were shaped like men and devils supporting the rim. It’d taken Archer the better part of a month to find it and get it out of the ruins of Liesse, but I’d never seriously considered leaving the scrying artefact of the Sahelians among the wreck no matter the difficulties. Once Akua’s discreet trump card, it was now the heart of the Observatory. In the wooden seat before it, Masego was laying down and looking half-asleep. I could see his pupils moving beneath the black eyecloth, but aside from that Hierophant was eerily still.

He’d lost weight again, I saw as I got closer. Even now that Fadila was under strict instructions to make sure he ate he still spent most hours of the days and night in that seat and rarely moved unless he was forced to. I almost hesitated to touch him, for he tended to be confused for a bit when wrenched out of his scrying. The decision was made for me, in the end. The branches above rustled, and someone casually tossed a sloppily sculpted wooden duck at his forehead. He wrenched back to Creation with a yelp as Archer emerged from the foliage dangling upside down.

“Evening, Cat,” she grinned. “Congratulations, you’re getting invaded.”

I considered this, then smiled back.

“Evening, Indrani,” I said, and wrenched her down to splash noisily in a pool.

Eyes turning to Masego, who looked only half-here even now, I sighed.

“Tell me everything,” I ordered.

Chapter 2: Alarm

“In conclusion, the court recognizes the desertion of the sentient tiger army raised by Dread Emperor Sorcerous as sufficient precedent to rule that tapirs can, in fact, commit treason but that lack of sentience bars them from laying claim to the Tower by right of usurpation.”
– Official transcript from the Trial of Unexpected Teeth, which resulted in the execution of the man-eating tapirs that devoured Dread Empress Atrocious

The mist had come out of the clay pot and formed a mirror-like surface in front of us without any need for visible prompting. Even as Archer loudly cussed me out and dragged herself out of the pool like a hissing wet cat, my eyes went to the images that had bloomed across solidified must. Massive was the first word that came to mind. Masego had somehow raised the perspective to high up in the sky, above the still-unfolding ritual, and only vague memories of how large that mountain range stood otherwise allowed to grasp the scale of what was being done. It was deceptively simple, at first look. Some kind of white fire was being used to carve a passage across the Whitecaps from the Principate to Callow. It was difficult to put a finger on the exact size of the passage from this perspective, but I’d gauge as broad enough for two large carriages to pass simultaneously without getting too close. Hierophant had taken the moments I spent looking at his scrying to gather himself. I could tell from the way his breath was steadying and his heartbeat calming.

“I will begin by clarifying this is a ritual and not the making of an artefact,” the blind mage said.

“Afternoon, Masego,” I said. “How are you doing? I’m doing great myself, thanks for asking.”

He cast me a dubious look.

“I would have thought that the obvious precursor to an invasion would spoil your mood,” he said.

“She’s being sarcastic, Zeze,” Archer said.

She got close enough to me before shaking off the wet that my entire left side was made dripping. She was a charmer, our Indrani.

“Ah,” Hierophant said. “Is that entirely necessary?”

I sighed, if only to prevent my sharpening worry from showing. A few months ago he would have caught that. Spending his days strapped to the Observatory’s central device looked like it might be unmaking years of progress. I needed to keep a closer eye on him, force him to talk with actual people once in a while. I knew Archer broke the wards protecting this place with chagrining regularity to come pester him, but that alone obviously wasn’t enough.

“Not an artefact, you said,” I said. “I thought those were pretty small by definition.”

“Liesse as rebuilt by Diabolist would be considered an artefact under most accepted definitions,” he noted. “It certainly served a sorcerous purpose.”

Mildly interesting, but not the kind of edification I was currently after.

“Ritual,” I repeated. “I was under the impression Procer doesn’t usually have the chops for those. You’ve been pretty dismissive about their mages whenever we discuss threat assessments.”

“Eh, the Lady says the same thing,” Archer said. “She always told us Proceran wizards are nothing to worry about unless they’re Named. Apparently their kind’s not real popular with the powers that be in the west.”

“The Principate has been consistently at least a generation behind the Empire in matters of sorcery for centuries,” Masego said, almost sneering. “No other nation has even half their number of hedge practitioners and even their ‘finest’ still ascribe to the Jaquinite theory of magic. It tells in their work here, Catherine. It is amateurish in everything but scale.”

I wrinkled my nose at the sight of the white flame burning through rock. It hadn’t moved in a while, I noted. Was something messing with our scrying?

“I was going to ask you when they’d be done, but they don’t seem to be moving,” I said.

“Performance issues,” Archer suggested. “I mean, if they’re going to wave around a big fire dick it’s only fitting.”

Oh Gods, now that she’d put the image in my head I couldn’t unsee it. Fucking Hells, Indrani.

“That is planned,” Masego said vaguely. “And the reason is... ah, there we are.”

I raised an eyebrow and it kept rising when I saw half a mountain’s worth of snow and stone collapse into the flame. Avalanche. They’ll only start moving when they’re sure the passage wont be clogged , I thought.

“It is not fire,” Hierophant suddenly said. “They are... um, the structure seems based on a miracle? Fascinating .”

I whistled sharply.

“Focus, Zeze,” I said. “We’re at war.”

“And I have another wooden duck,” Archer added cheerfully.

He seemed a lot more concerned by Indrani’s announcement than mine, but then she’d been spending a lot of time with him. I doubted it was the first time a shitty wooden carving ended up bouncing off his forehead, knowing them both as I did.

“Dispersal of matter,” Hierophant said. “That is the nature of the working employed.”

“The passage smokes after they clear it,” I pointed out.

“Because they are sloppy,” he disdainfully said. “Their spell formula is inexact, thus the dispersal causes the release of heat. Had they done it properly their army could be walking behind the front but they’re Jaquinite s, Catherine. The man was a priest. I’m pleasantly surprised they didn’t just kneel down to pray the passage would happen on its own.”

“Let’s not even speak about that,” I grimaced. “With the amount of heroes they’ve assembled, I wouldn’t call that too much of a stretch to take place.”

“Praying,” Archer drawled. “By far the least interesting thing that can follow someone getting on their knees.”

I shot her a look. Indrani really needed a roll in the hay, didn’t she? My court was packed with attractive men and women around my eye these days – and Gods Below, that Talbot thought he was being subtle really was the most insulting part of that – so the fact that she hadn’t dragged anyone into her rooms yet was starting to warrant a conversation.

“They’ve mastered the basics of scrying, at least,” Masego conceded. “It’s why they’re forging a pass instead of a tunnel even if it risks avalanches.”

“Wait, I know that one,” I said. “Scrying doesn’t work underground. Or across tall obstacles.”

“An oversimplification on both counts,” Hierophant told me. “The Greyfang Range-“

“The Whitecaps,” I corrected him.

The glass orbs that were his eyes shifted under the cloth in what was likely the reflex of a blink without the physical ability to do one.

“That is not their name in Imperial atlases,” he said.

“The Empire doesn’t have a city next to them either,” I replied.

“That is not how atlases work, Catherine,” he plaintively said.

“I thought they were called the Parish,” Archer contributed, because never once in her life had she seen a fire without reaching for a jug of oil.

“That’s the Proceran name for them,” I grunted. One of them, anyway. “Whitecaps. Moving on.”

“There’s mushrooms called that,” Hierophant mutinously said under his breath.

“But not capitalized,” I pointed out.

If there was one thing to love about Masego, it was that he could easily be side tracked by technicalities. I was getting fairly good at that, these days. His expression brightened and he nodded. From the corner of my eye I saw Archer looking at me amusedly.

“The Whitecaps are a too broad a range to penetrate through blindly,” Hierophant said, picking up where I’d interrupted.

“Yeah, penetrating blindly never helps,” Indrani agreed, voice choked up.

“You’re bargaining for another visit to the pond,” I whispered at her.

“I’ll be good,” Archer whispered back, hands raised and her vulpine grin immediately betraying the lie.

“They’re adjusting with scrying,” Masgeo said, blithely unaware of the background chatter. “The entire array is a backwards mess, however. They likely have to communicate adjustments by voice .”

I consciously refrained from asking what the alterative to speaking was.

“Can you tell me when the ritual will be done?” I asked, then winced. “Never mind, don’t answer that. Can you tell me when you think the ritual will be done?”

Hierophant’s mouth closed over this initial answer, then he took a moment to consider.

“Assuming there are fewer than five avalanches,” he said. “And that the pool of accumulated power they’re using does not run out... Two days. Going into three. It depends on the amount of practitioners they’ve gathered. Serving as guide for so large a working will be exhausting. If they’ve fewer than three hundred mages some will begin to die or birth derangements before nightfall.”

I worried my lip. Worst case, two days. Actually crossing the passage would take them longer. A week before the first troops were in Callow? No, shorter if they used cavalry for the vanguard. Which I would, in their place. The Order of Broken Bells had swelled, but it was still just a fraction of the horse the Principate could bring to bear. Imperial spy reports and what the Jacks had managed to compile had the host waiting in Arans around fifty thousand strong. The commanders weren’t supposed to be anything too worrying, a Prince Milenan and his allies none of who had notable military achievements under their belt from the civil war. They were the First Prince’s primary opposition within Procer, though, so I suspected she would not be shy about spending their lives to damage my position. Even if I pulled together every part of my armies in Callow – which I couldn’t, not without leaving my borders with Praes and the Free Cities dangerously bare – the invaders still outnumber me a little less than two to one. I’d have what Juniper called a qualitative edge, considering most my soldiers were professionals while a lot of theirs would be levies, but the core of that army was principality troops. Varying shades of light cavalry and professional heavy infantry. Those would be a hard nut to crack, and that was without even considering the fucking battalion of heroes reports placed in the war camp. It would take me at least two days to have the Army of Callow ready for a march, and that was just the part in the permanent camps near Laure. Taking them through Arcadia was spinning the wheel, but we’d made tests. For that kind of distance, the average was eight days. Going as low as six and high as fifteen.

“I don’t suppose you could shut down the ritual?” I asked Masego.

He shook his head.

“They are not using their own sorcery to do this, Catherine,” he elaborated. “A receptacle was forged and what must be hundreds of practitioners poured their own magic into for years to create the reservoir they are now employing. It would be like trying to put out a bonfire by spitting on it.”

“And if I gave you every mage in Laure to work on a ritual?” I pressed.

He considered it seriously.

“No,” he finally said. “If we had caught their ritual before it began in earnest, perhaps, but no longer. Considering the distance it would be insufficient to do anything but slow it a few hours. And even that would come at great cost.”

“You’re going at this wrong,” Archer said. “Let them make their hole. After they’re spent, prevent them from using it.”

I looked at her suspiciously.

“You’re not usually this helpful,” I said.

“I’m a woman of many layers,” Indrani haughtily replied.

I had a fairly scathing comment to offer involving onions and how she should perhaps bathe more often but the grass was cut under my feet.

“You mean attacking them as they pass,” Hierophant said, tone musing. “That is a possibility. Triggering further avalanches from Laure is possible, with sufficient preparations.”

“You don’t sound enthused,” I said.

“While their practitioners are a backwards lot, I do not believe them to be actual imbeciles,” Masego said. “At least one of them was clever enough to conceive of this ritual.”

I frowned.

“You think they’ll have protections,” I guessed.

“If they do not disperse the wizards they have massed to carry this out, they have the ability to resist anything I would seriously consider using against them,” Hierophant said. “Three hundred blunderers with a heavy club are dangerous even to someone of my proficiency.”

Throwing bodies at the problem, huh. Well, the Principate had no lack of those to swear into service. It wasn’t an elegant solution, but I was living proof that sometimes hitting things really hard could be enough to pull through.

“They’ll have priests, too,” Archer said. “The robed rats are everywhere in Procer.”

Brothers and Sisters of the House of Light swore oaths that prevented them from taking lives, but there’d always been a lot of wiggling room left to interpret how that should be carried out. Priests were a historical staple of Callowan hosts, to shut down sorceries and heal wounded soldiers. And there were always a few to be found who were willing to make an exception about that whole no killing thing and repent afterwards. Turning miracles against an avalanche sent down by an Evil mage wouldn’t even require them to do some rhetorical footwork afterwards. And let’s not forget the House of Light in Procer is a different creature than the Callowan one. The Fairfaxes had always kept the House out of the crown’s affairs, but in Procer the priests were influential power brokers. It would be safe to assume they’d be involved, and that was the final nail in the coffin of considered magical intervention. If we couldn’t head them off at the pass, it’d have to be in the field. And odds were they’d get close to Harrow before I could get my army up north.

“Masego,” I said quietly, pitching my voice so none of the guild mages would overhear. “The Hell Egg up north, have you managed to find it?”

“I am still awaiting answer from the Tower about consulting the private histories,” the blind man replied.

My lips thinned. The Empress had been quite willing to share reports from the Eyes about the unfolding situation on Procer and beyond, but my people were being given polite brush-offs and non-answers when it came to pretty much everything else. I couldn’t tell whether that was pressure she was applying to bring me back under her thumb or that in her eyes I now only counted as something to be tossed at the crusade to blunt its advance. The former gave me room to deal, especially now that the invasion had begun. The latter would mean my situation was even more precarious than I currently believed it to be. Her people would be in touch soon enough, I reflected. Cold as the diplomatic exchanges had become, a Proceran offensive would thaw them a great deal. Especially since I doubted that the northern crusader army would be moving alone. Odds were the host in the south under Prince Papenheim was preparing for a run at the Vales. Black wouldn’t be easy meat, especially not with Scribe and Warlock at his side. But he was starkly outnumbered, and he’d be in no position to do anything but hold the valleys for months to come. At the moment, the Empress needed me.

“I thought Ratface was supposed to be some kind of bureaucratic wizard,” Archer said, eyeing me sideways.

She was sharper than Masego about these things, regardless of her vocal disinterest in matters of intrigue. I nodded discreetly and she grimaced. Yeah, I wasn’t happy either that it was quite possible instructions had come down from Malicia to make it much harder for me to locate the fucking demon that was supposed to be bound somewhere in northern Callow.

“Have you narrowed down what kind of a demon it is?” I tried.

“It cannot be Corruption,” Hierophant said. “That was my initial theory, when we last spoke of the subject in Marchford, but that particular entity has since been found and fought. It might very well be Absence, Catherine. That would be...”

“Balls,” Archer helpfully provided.

Masego frowned.

“Genitalia has nothing to-“

“Bad, it’d be bad,” I interrupted before this could turn into a full-blown squabble.

I clenched my fingers.

“I don’t like the shape of it,” I admitted. “That many Named, near a threat unaccounted for?”

It wasn’t a guarantee that a brawl with heroes would end up letting it loose, but the odds were high enough it couldn’t be discounted. But if catching the crusaders before they reached Harrow wasn’t an option, then the alternative was ceding most the barony before giving battle. I would much prefer not doing that, and not only because of the military implications of giving the enemy a fortified city to operate from. It wouldn’t look good within Callow either. People had been willing to tighten their belts if it was for rebuilding the kingdom and raising armies to defend it. If I was seen to have failed in either regard, there would be consequences. But if the choice is between that and rolling the dice with a demon... I needed to talk with Juniper. Archer and Hierophant were here with me in Laure and the last time I’d spoken with Thief she’d said she should be back within a few days, but Hakram was still in Vale trying to coax the refugees out of the tent cities and back behind stone walls. I might have to leave him behind when marching.

“Tell Fadila to keep a full roster tonight,” I told Masego. “I’ll need to speak to the baronies up north.”

And half a dozen other people, since Adjutant wasn’t there to do it for me.

“We getting ready for war, then?” Archer asked, and there was a pleased glint in her eyes.

“I’d prefer not to,” I said. “But the choice is out of my hands. Wrap up anything you have going on, Masego. When we go on the offensive you’re coming with us.”

He pouted. I blamed Indrani for teaching him that, it was surprisingly effective even now that his face had lost most of the baby fat.

“I’m not hearing anything otherwise,” I firmly told him. “Look on the bright side, Hierophant. Odds are you’ll be taking a close look at that passage soon enough.”

“There is that,” he conceded, but it was half-hearted.

I cast a look at Archer, who smiled back and wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. It was telling that I barely even noticed when she did that nowadays.

“If you run into Thief, send her my way,” I told her.

She waved in a manner that could vaguely be interpreted as agreement. About as good as I could expect. I clapped her on the shoulder, reminded Masego we were nearing supper time and made my exit. I had one last thing to do before mustering for war, after all. Tonight was the night for my little monthly chat with the enemy.

Cordelia Hasenbach had just begun her invasion of Callow, so we should have a few things to talk about.

Chapter 3: Chat

“I must say, Chancellor, you’ve become quite the conversationalist.”
– Dread Empress Maledicta II

The room had been a gaol, once upon a time. Not one the Fairfaxes ever owned up to having, but the ruling dynasty of Callow had not remained on the throne by being faint-hearted. Unlike the luxurious prison that was the Songbird’s Cage, this was a dark and ugly pit. Not the kind of place you sent someone if you ever expected them to come out. The late and unlamented Governor Mazus had apparently used it as dumping grounds for people he believed would cause more terror by being disappeared than known dead, and expanded what had once been a single pair of rooms to a large underground complex of seven. I’d had it sealed off before my coronation, and not a soul was allowed here now. Bare stone walls surrounded me, cleared of manacles, and the only ornament was the seat I’d brought down here myself. I closed the steel door behind me and froze it shut before taking a deep breath. Winter came easy.

It always did.

Ice crept across the walls hungrily, gaping maws of frost that devoured every nook and cranny until all that was left was a hall of glittering mirrors. It’d been as difficult as snapping a finger, and there was a part of me that delighted in using the might of my mantle. But then the world sharpened. Grew jagged. I could feel, with dim horror, everything that I was begin to calcify. To set in immovable stones. That would have been dangerous enough, but I was not merely fae. My title was Winter’s and Winter knew nothing as intimately as darkness and hunger. I sat down on the chair and forced myself to think as little as I could. It was almost cowardly, but I’d rather not have to confront the kind of thoughts that would surface if I pondered anything too deeply in this state. Gods, I could use a drink. The alcohol was one of the few things that blunted the edges of this. That made me feel like I was still human. But even if I’d been willing to embrace that crutch right now, I could not. Hakram had, before he left, exacted an oath from me.

Never while on campaign, or attending affairs of state . The oath was to end with our reunion, whenever that may be. Adjutant had expressed... worries to me in private, twice now. I’d been irritated, considering Indrani drank like a fish and no one ever lectured her , but he was right in that Archer wasn’t wearing a crown. Unlike me. The sharpness of the ache for a cup in my hand was whispering to me that Hakram might just have been right. He did have that nasty habit, didn’t he? I breathed in and out slowly, then reached for the power again. This had been an aspect, once. Fall. Now it was just a part of me, true as hair or toes. When it’d been crystallized into a single word it’d been stronger – no perhaps not that, simply more rigid – but whatever had been lost was more than made up by the breadth of what I could now achieve with this power. Before, I would never have been able to forge this half-world I was now painting over the room with brushstrokes of night. The threshold of my domain, the thought came, forged of instinct and inhuman certainty. I bit my lip, strong enough to draw blood.

Pain, that most human of sensations. It cleared out some of the ice and I let out a relieved breath. I had to see to myself before the First Prince graced me with her presence. That and play the card up my sleeve.

“I grant you leash,” I said, voice echoing. “I grant you eyes and ears, tongue and feet, at my sufferance.”

With a throaty chuckle Akua Sahelian’s shade stepped out of the Mantle of Woe. Even in this half-death, she remained beautiful. High cheekbones and perfectly styled eyebrows, her dress of red and gold tightly clinging to curves I could only envy. The only thing marring that beauty was the gaping bloody hole in her chest where I’d ripped out her heart.

“Freedom,” the Diabolist mused. “Limited, but then is that not true of all freedoms?”

“Now that I’ve let you out of the lamp,” I said, “for the first of my three wishes I would like peace for Calernia.”

She cast me a disapproving looks.

“You know very well that djinn do not grant wishes,” she said. “That is mere Callowan ignorance.”

“You make a terrible genie, Akua,” I told her. “I’m going to trade you for a lantern one of these days, you know? They’re about as useful and they don’t talk back.”

“Your insistence on levity is a mark of poor breeding, dearest,” she said. “You must overcome it.”

I had a few less than polite things to reply to that with, including a reminder that if she was so clever she wouldn’t have ended up sown into my collar, but it would have to wait. I could feel my guest arriving. The darkness shivered, and just like that the First Prince sat across from me. I’d not been sure that she’d bite when I sent Thief with the amulet I’d woven strands of my domain into, but to my pleasure she had. She was covered with so many miracles she almost glowed and she was very careful never to leave her seat, but she was here anyway. Hasenbach was not a reckless woman by nature, by my reckoning, but I knew exactly why she’d taken the risk to venture into even the outskirts of my domain: the Augur. How deeply that woman’s visions ran was still a subject of much speculation across the whole Empire, but I’d banked on her being able to tell I genuinely had no intention of turning this into a trap. I needed the First Prince too badly to ever consider taking her life, even if it’d been possible. There was a moment of silence, as the Proceran gathered her bearings. I said nothing, patiently waiting.

Her Most Serene Highness Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer, Prince of Rhenia and Princess of Salia, Warden of the West and Protector of the Realms of Man. Quite a mouthful of titles for a woman who was only twenty-six years old and had become the sovereign ruler of the largest – and arguably most powerful – nation on Calernia before the age of twenty. This was likely as close to meeting in person as we’d ever come, so as always I took a moment to study her. She was impeccably clothed in dark blue I’d been told was part of the heraldry of her home principality Rhenia, the dress rather conservative but still flattering to her frame. It made her shoulders look slimmer, I thought. Hasenbach was best known for her skill as a diplomat, but she’d been born with a warrior’s frame. Her long golden hair cascaded down her neck in perfect ringlets, needing no ornament but their own richness, but there was a discreet touch of golden eye shadow that made her blue eyes stand out even more vividly. On her brow was a circlet of white gold, tastefully understated considering the power it represented. I’d seen beautiful women in my day, some hauntingly so, and honestly would not count the First Prince among them. She was not plain, not exactly, but all the most striking parts of her appearance were careful artifice.

That did nothing to detract from her presence, even in this half-realm of mine. Though seated on a mere cushioned and sculpted chair, she radiated that... something. The unspoken pull that surrounded people like Black and Malicia, or even Juniper. That spark that made the weight they bore into something that dragged others into their orbit. No, she was not someone to ever underestimate. The more I learned about her ascension to the throne and the years that had followed, the warier I was becoming of her. The pit of vipers she ruled was as deadly as the Imperial court in many ways, and she’d retained rule of it without having a cudgel like Black to call on. She met my eyes, but did not speak. Akua softly laughed, walking around the First Prince’s silhouette with the grace of a cat before leaning her head over the Proceran’s shoulder.

“She will never speak first, my heart,” the shade of my most hated enemy said. “It would be improper, you see. Her people believe that First Prince is the greatest of all titles, and so she must never be first to offer courtesy.”

I inclined my head towards Hasenbach.

“Your Most Serene Highness,” I said, voice calm.

“Your Grace,” Cordelia Hasenbach replied.

The proper address was ‘Your Majesty’, though never once had she referred to me as such. The etiquette she employed recognized me as noble, though at best one of equal standing with any of the many princes of the Procer.

“Look at how her lip curls around the words, Catherine,” Akua laughed, moving around the unseeing First Prince to better study her. “She would prefer not to grant you them at all, but she must – and how it displeases her. To call you queen would be recognition of your legitimacy, and end to her crusade’s own. But to deny you any title at all would make any negotiation between you worthless.”

Akua rose, stretching languidly.

“And she needs you to keep speaking to her, my lovely,” the monster said silkily. “Oh yes. Even should you never come to terms, to be able to gauge you with her own eyes is priceless advantage.”

Diabolist had grown increasingly fond of using endearments with me, since I’d ripped out her heart and stolen her soul. Fucking Praesi. Fucking highborn, really.

“Let’s begin with the usual,” I said. “Terms?”

“Unchanged,” the First Prince replied. “Immediate abdication and disbanding of your armies. Your soldiery to undergo fair trial after the crusade. Yourself and no more than five of your comrades allowed exile without pursuit, under condition of never returning to Callow.”

I hummed, and idly reached for my pipe. I used the process of stuffing it with wakeleaf and striking a match as a deferral of answer to allow me to gather my thoughts. I’d half-expected Hasenbach to offer starker terms now that she’d struck the first blow and begun crossing into Callow catching me flat-footed.

“Do you feel that?” Akua murmured. “That is caution , dearest. She does not harden terms of surrender because she fears you. What you might do if cornered. Use that fear, Catherine. It is the sharpest prick of the mantle you claimed.”

I puffed at my pipe and let out a stream of smoke, making myself more comfortable in my seat.

“I’ll have to decline, for now,” I said.

Akua was useful, too useful to shove back into the box right now, but more for her perceptiveness than her advice. The terms remained unacceptable. Abdication would be a relief, to be honest, and something that was going to happen regardless if my plans came to fruition. But not like this. I couldn’t trust a crusader tribunal to pass sentence on the Praesi under my command, much less the greenskins. And that the First Prince and her allies would be deciding Callow’s fate without a single check on their decisions was the least acceptable part of it all.

“You are calmer than I expected,” Hasenbach said. “The dossiers we have of you led me to expect conversation of a harsher tone.”

Akua clucked her tongue.

“Do not let her turn this towards you, my heart,” she advised. “Any answer at all will be revealing in ways you cannot control. That is too dangerous a woman to be given the lay of your thoughts.”

I inclined my head, agreeing with Akua while masquerading it as acquiescence with the First Prince’s sentence.

“I’ve been reading about the Principate, lately,” I said. “About how it functions in practice.”

The First Prince smiled, as if she were sharing a drink with an old friend.

“Interesting,” she said. “And have you come to any conclusions?”

“It doesn’t,” I bluntly said. “Function, that is. The fault line in Procer’s foundation has been made exceedingly clear over the last twenty years.”

Not so much as a speck of emotion crossed the First Prince’s face. Akua laughed delightedly.

“See how her brow stiffened, Catherine?” she said. “That is anger, my lovely. The recognition that the Empress’ game was no great plot. That all her people ever needed to claw each other bloody was means and excuse. Feed that wroth. That is the only way for you to glimpse truth behind the mask.”

Praesi diplomacy, I was learning, was more like a pit fight with slightly pulled punches than anything I’d recognize. It was all about testing the other side, making them blink and then capitalizing on that weakness. That Akua could not recognize tussling like that with Cordelia godsdamned Hasenbach was a bad idea was a good reminder that for all her cleverness the Diabolist had heavy blinders. That was the rotten heart that always made the designs of the High Lords collapse: they could not ever conceive that they were sometimes in the inferior bargaining position. Fortunately, I’d learned that lesson early when I grew up with the Tower’s boot over my throat. No doubt I have blinders of my own , I thought. But if I knew they’d hardly be blinders, would they?

“Not overly surprising conclusion, given the manner in which you have ruled,” the First Prince said. “For all that your throne is in Laure, you have adopted many of the manners of the East.”

Ruled, I noted, not reigned. How carefully she always picked her words.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” I said. “I’m not touting the Tower as an alternative, or even how I’ve been running things. I just grafted Praesi bureaucracy to the court, and it’s a clunky solution. But I’ve gotten my hands on a history of the League Wars, and it’s not a pretty story.”

Akua clucked her tongue disapprovingly.

“This is the chorus of the losing side, dearest,” she chided me. “Beneath the dignity of one who triumphed over me.”

It was a small shift, but I saw Hasenbach’s eyes brighten with interest after I spoke. I’d been careful, during our little talks, to try to find common grounds. Something we could discuss and disagree over without it getting personal. So far, what had worked best was Proceran history. I wasn’t reading those books solely because I no longer needed to sleep, or even to get an idea of my opponent’s weaknesses.

“You refer to the Right of Iron,” she said. “I would, in fact, tend to agree with you in this matter. The prerogative of waging war without the agreement of the First Prince has been the source of much trouble over the centuries.”

“So why haven’t you tried to revoke it?” I asked, genuinely curious. “I know that’d have to go through the Highest Assembly and that means a vote, but just after your civil war people were sick enough of the killing you would have had a decent chance of pushing it through.”

“I considered this,” the First Prince admitted. “Yet in doing so, I would have created cohesive opposition to any further reform. Many of which are, as you have said, direly needed.”

“That opposition you’re talking about,” I said. “They’re the exact same people that spent nearly twenty years ravaging the Principate on Malicia’s pay.”

“A generalization,” Hasenbach said. “One with some shade of accuracy, I will concede, yet there is important difference in having been funded by the Empress and having sought to do her bidding.”

I acknowledged the point with a nod. From the corner of my eye I saw Akua meandering away from the First Prince, coming to stand at my back. Even knowing she was powerless, utterly at my mercy, having her behind me was raising the hair on my neck.

“What I’m wondering is – why listen to them at all?” I asked. “I saw the Imperial estimates for the remaining armies after the Battle of Aisne. There wasn’t a force in the Principate that could have stood against you, if you’d twisted their arms into backing your reforms. And I don’t mean the small ones, I mean everything .”

“You were taught,” Cordelia Hasenbach said, “by two of the most brutal tyrants in living memory. That is not your fault, though your embrace of their methods remains your sole responsibility. That is why your perspective on the subject is tainted. I did not attempt to make myself an absolute monarch because I believe such a manner of ruling to be dangerously flawed.”

“If you count civil wars, Procer’s been on the field more often than any other nation on Calernia,” I pointed. “That includes Praes , Your Highness.”

“You blame this on lack of centralized authority,” the First Prince said. “That is not entirely inaccurate, yet you miss the central tenet of the Principate: it is, unlike Praes, a nation built on consensus. The Highest Assembly is prone to squabbles, and inefficient. This I will not deny. That is because it is not an institution meant to empower the office of the First Prince, it is meant to check it. No single man or woman should ever be able to wield the full, unrestricted might of the Principate.”

“Now,” Akua whispered into my ear. “Now is when you slide the knife.”

I smiled pleasantly.

“Then why,” I asked, “is the host crossing into Callow made up almost entirely by your opposition in the Assembly?”

The shutters went down on the First Prince’s face, even as I pulled at my pipe and allowed smoke to stream out of my nostrils. This , I thought, moments like this. They’re why I let you out of the box, Akua. I had much to learn from Diabolist, when it came to this kind of game.

“She did not expect you to understand her intent,” Akua said, still at my side. “Watch the eyes, how she reconsiders the kind of threat you pose. She thought you a dull thug, a brute of a child with a stolen crown. Now she wonders if you’ve taken as much from these talks as she has, and it worries her.”

The shade laughed.

“Do not talk,” she said. “Let her silence damn her more the longer it stretches.”

I spat out another mouthful of smoke, studying the First Prince. When she finally spoke, her tone was perfectly calm.

“I am forced to wonder,” Hasenbach said, “what game it is you truly play, Catherine Foundling.”

“The only game I’ve ever ever played,” I said. “Keeping my people’s head above the waterline.”

“Yet you ally with monsters and murderers,” the First Prince said. “The very same whose fellows committed the single greatest massacre of Callowans since the days of Dread Empress Triumphant.”

“May she never return,” Akua murmured.

“I’m also talking with you,” I said. “The thing is, Your Highness, that right now the Tower’s my only possible bedfellow. I can’t take your crusade on my own.”

Not entirely true. Juniper was the opinion that if I was willing to let most of Callow burn while I struck deep in crusader territory, I might be able to force a draw by sheer dint of massacre. She’d played out the theory with her general staff. No part of that path was acceptable to me, though. I was not willing to pile up the bodies until no one was able to keep going. If I was ever forced to that, well... Better to abdicate. And to backstab Praes as brutally as I could beforehand, so that the crusade ended quickly and not in Callow.

“A villain ruling over Callow is not an acceptable outcome for this war,” the First Prince said.

“People I don’t trust in the slightest deciding what happens to Callow isn’t either,” I frankly replied. “If I have to cut a deal, I’d rather do it with you than Malicia. After Liesse... Well, if this is the best I can expect from the Empire, the Empire’s not an entity I can trust to uphold their part of a deal.”

“Trust has nothing do with it,” Akua dismissed. “You have power enough that the Empress cannot cross you lightly. Treaties are only ever gilding added to the deeper truth of power, dearest. This one does not consider you of sufficient might to treat with.”

“Trust,” Hasenbach said, her tone almost amused.

“Trust,” I echoed.

The First Prince smiled.

“Did you never pause to wonder, Your Grace, why the only powers willing to deal with you are monstrous?” she asked softly.

My jaw clenched.

“Did you never wonder if you belong amongst that number?”

My fingers tightened.

“Careful now,” Diabolist warned. “She goads you not by accident.”

The urge was there to lash out. To remind that sanctimonious fucking Proceran that her own hands were far from clean. She’d sent out her enemies for me to savage, and her reasons for starting this crusade weren’t nearly as squeaky clean as she’d like her allies to believe. She’d played the shadow game with Malicia for over a decade, too, and there’s wasn’t a person in Creation who’d manage to get through that without some mud on their shoes. Why were her killings less a sin than mine? Because she went to the House of Light for sermons and paid her alms? Because her intentions were some kind of nebulous greater good? Hells, so were mine. Instead I took a deep breath. Slowly, I raised my pipe and pulled at the dragonbone shaft. The wakeleaf no longer brought the sharp focus it once had, but the act itself was soothing.

“I have,” I admitted quietly, “utterly failed Callow.”

Whatever answer she’d expected, it had not been that. The flicker of surprise in her eyes did not lie. I felt Akua begin to speak, but I no longer had need of her services. All it took was an exertion of will and back into the collar she went. Blind and deaf and furious.

“After First Liesse, when the Ruling Council was formed,” I said. “No, even before that. When I did not answer Akua Sahelian being named governess with gathering an army and hanging her from the nearest tree. I betrayed everything I had set out to do the moment I allowed a woman I knew a cold butcher to be the steward of Callowan lives for the sake of political expediency.”

I’d had months, now, of sleepless nights. Of going back over everything I’d done. Thinking of the paths I could have taken that didn’t result in a hundred thousand of my people dead. And there had been so very many of them, hadn’t there?

“I fucked up the Ruling Council,” I acknowledged. “I had the leverage to make real changes, the same kind I’ve been saying I want to achieve since I was a girl, and instead I let a council stacked with High Lord cronies run Callow for me. And then got furious when they acted the same way Praesi always have, the moment I wasn’t there to make them afraid. I’ve been complicit through inaction or ignorance in every catastrophe that struck Callow since the moment I got power and did absolutely nothing with it.”

The First Prince watched me in silence, her face unreadable.

“I could make excuses,” I said. “That I was ill-prepared for that kind of authority. That I spent so much time and spilled so much blood getting on top I forgot why I wanted to be there in the first place. But that’d be hypocritical, wouldn’t it? I was given exactly what I clamoured for, and when I got it a city was turned into a graveyard. Hells, it’s on my fucking standard: justifications matter only to the just. I started out with the intention of burying anyone who tossed around sentences like that in a shallow grave, but now I’m the one having them sown on battle flags. Second Liesse made it clear that I’ve slowly crawled into being the kind of person I swore I was going to remove.”

“And yet,” Cordelia Hasenbach said, “you still wear the crown and muster your armies for war. Sentiment is only meaningful if followed by action. If your grief at all the woe you have caused changes nothing, it is merely self-pity.”

“I know exactly what I have to do, Hasenbach,” I said. “And letting you carve up Callow like side of pork isn’t part of it. Not when the people doing the carving have no real incentive to care for the realm under the knife.”

“Self-pity, then,” Hasenbach said. “You still believe you can win this war.”

“War,” I said, “is the very opposite of what I’m after.”

My pipe had finally gone out, I saw.

“We’ll talk again,” I told her, and the darkness collapsed.

I stayed in my seat for a long time, alone with my thoughts. When does a lesser evil simply become an evil? That was the line I needed to find, the one that could not be crossed. The moment where I became a greater wound than the one I was trying to prevent. I rose as the ice receded around me. It was going to be a long night.

They always were.

Chapter 4: Warpath

“I’m not saying all your closest friends are shapeshifting devils I sent to spy on you after having the originals murdered, but I’m certainly implying it very heavily.”
– Dread Emperor Traitorous, making small talk

“I think I might hate your people,” Juniper growled.

The Hellhound was sprawled in her seat instead of sitting ramrod straight, a visible mark of how exhausted her duties had left her. A cup of orcish brew in hand – which I’d been oath-bound to decline when offered – she looked like a particularly grumpy green cat. Normally I’d be alarmed by the highest military officer in the kingdom professing hatred of its inhabitants, but I’d learned to read Juniper in our years together. That was a ‘I can’t believe I have to deal with this shit’ growl, not a ‘I won’t need supper after I’m done with you’ growl.

“Not even a month ago you were praising the quality of the foot you’ve been drilling,” I pointed out.

“The soldiers are fine,” the Marshal of Callow said. “Better than fine, even. They’re taking to the formations better than I’d hoped, and they’ve got fire in the belly. But your fucking nobles, Catherine. Now was a bad time to pick to stop answering backtalk with gallows.”

“Talbot can’t be crawling up your ass,” I frowned. “We sent him on manoeuvre out of the city specifically so he wouldn’t be able to have his little meetings.”

“His Regals are still knocking at my door,” the orc said. “Foundling, if a single more hints at favours in exchange for an officer’s commission there’s going to be blood on the ground.”

Grandmaster Brandon Talbot was more than just the head of the Order of Broken Bells, these days: he was also one of the founders of the tight-knight group of former aristocrats that had formed into one of my court’s two major power blocs. They’d called themselves the Patriots, at first, but I’d made an idle comment to Talbot about how that reminded me of the Truebloods and that name had died an early death. Considering the most infamous member of the Truebloods now had her soul sown into my collar, I could see why he’d taken that as a pointed hint. The Queen’s Men were the counterweight, centred around Anne Kendall, but they had much fewer connections. A consequence of the fact that were made up mostly of guildsmen and aldermen.

The Regals weren’t nearly as much of a nuisance as the people the northern baronies had sent to Laure, but they were also much smarter about how they were going about gaining influence. Instead of naked power grabs through trade they were placing men in the bureaucracy that had grown out of the court centred in Laure. The problem was that, often, their candidate was the most competent to be had. None of the Regals still had noble titles or privileges, Black had seen to that after the Liesse Rebellion, but several were still wealthy landowners. And their kinsmen were educated , which I was coming to prize most of all. Keeping their influence in check while making sure the cogs of the bureaucracy didn’t get clogged with incompetence was like walking a tightrope. And it wasn’t like I could hand every appointment to Anne’s men instead, they were barely more trustworthy and they tended to heavily favour the interests of Laure and the guilds.

“They’re still under the impression they can just buy commands?” I asked, surprised.

Juniper bared her teeth savagely.

“Of course not,” she mocked. “They’re simply recommending candidates for fast-tracked officer training. Every one of them above the cut. Every one of them someone’s cousin or aunt.”

My frown deepened. That was still overstepping.

“You know you have my full backing in this,” I told her. “If there’s anyone being too insistent...”

“They don’t repeat, Catherine,” Juniper sighed. “They always send another envoy, another candidate. And they’re just important enough I can’t foist them off on Aisha.”

I grit my teeth. We were at war, now, the same war Juniper had been trying to prepare the kingdom for since she first got her baton. That she’d had to spend hours fending off ambitious Regals while trying to scrape together enough force to resist Procer was getting on my nerves more than a little bit. A measured expression of displeasure to these fine men and women was in order.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “But you know that’s not what I’m here for.”

She nodded soberly.

“We’ll be ready to march half a day before predicted,” the Hellhound said. “All we’re waiting on is the Broken Bells. Hakram’s provision office delivered the goods smooth as silk.”

“Twenty thousand in whole then,” I said, leaning back into my seat. “We’re still outnumbered raw, Juniper.”

Her lips split into a fanged grimace.

“If you’d not spent coin on shit like the Observatory-“

“We’d have heroes in the heartlands,” I interrupted flatly. “Consider it an investment to ensure we didn’t have to fight this war on more than one front.”

She conceded the argument with an ill-humoured grunt.

“I can’t answer for the heroes with the host, we don’t have a clear enough assessment of what they can do,” Juniper began.

“Thief should be back soon with what the Jacks managed to put together,” I said. “But the army?”

“We can take them,” the Hellhound said. “Don’t get me wrong, it’ll be bloody. But our army’s in a much better shape than theirs. As long as we can bring them to battle on an open field, I believe we can beat them. Which is why I wish you’d reconsider Harrow. I can’t promise anything for two to one and walls.”

“Orders already went out,” I reminded her. “Baroness Morley is emptying her stores and evacuating towards Hedges.”

“The Proceran supply chain will be a nightmare when they’ve crossed,” Juniper noted. “And without granaries and cattle to plunder they can’t live off the land. So, all things aside, I agree with you there’s a decent chance they’ll be forced to continue pushing south or start eating faster than they can bring food. But if they don’t everything goes out the window. I don’t like that our plan is centred around the enemy doing what we want them to.”

“There’s too much of a risk involved in fighting them near Harrow, Juniper,” I sighed. “Even if we could manage to get there in time, I won’t engage when there’s a Hell Egg unaccounted for in the region.”

The north was one of the few parts of Callow that hadn’t been devastated by the latest round of wars to hit the country. Not even a better strategic position was enough to have me take the risk of changing that.

“There’s too much politics in this war, Foundling,” my Marshal said. “Careful you miss the defeat in front of you for staring at the treaties on the horizon.”

“We can’t slaughter fifty thousand Procerans,” I flatly said. “Aside from the brutal bounding our manpower would take in achieving that, it’d be impossible to make peace with Hasenbach afterwards.”

“Hasenbach’s invading us,” the Hellhound retorted. “The high horse stops being that when you ride it to war. If she doesn’t want dead soldiers, she has no business sending them to the field.”

I knew that in speaking that she spoke as an orc. She had the bone-deep conviction that no one with a sword in hand had the right of complaining about death. And there was a lot about that way of looking at the world that appealed to me even now. But that was a seductive simplicity that’d become the kind of luxury I could no longer afford. If I offed half a hundred thousand Procerans, the Principate would be fighting this to the bitter end. The First Prince might very well get deposed if she suggested otherwise. I had to defeat the crusaders, force them out of Callow, but it couldn’t be a massacre. Assuming I could even deliver one of those, which was quite an assumption given the number of Named on the other side.

“I still think we should have gone ahead with Bonfire,” the orc spoke into the silence. “I understand why you refused, but-“

“Juniper,” I said quietly. “I love you like a sister. You’re one of the smartest women I’ve ever met. But trust me when I say that Bonfire would have been the end of us.”

It’d begun as an exercise for her general staff. How to win against the crusade without Callow ever seeing combat? The answer had been crude, vicious, and horrifyingly popular among my high-ranking officers. Even Callowans. Only greenskins had been more vocal in their approval than my people. It was simple enough: instead of waiting for Procer to muster, I was to take twenty thousand men and a full siege train through Arcadia and emerge on the upper northern edge of Procer’s coast. Then I’d burn my way south, city by city, until the Principate mustered an army to force me out. At which point I’d pass through Arcadia again, and emerge on the other side of the Principate. Rinse, repeat. Again and again until Procer collapsed from the inside. The death toll would have been... It didn’t bear thinking about. It’d been the support the plan had found that surprised me. Hells, Talbot had spoken in favour. He’d ‘mourned the loss of innocent lives, but if losses must be had better Proceran than Callowan.’ I’d stomped the notion out of high command and not been gentle about it. Aside from the sickening mass slaughters Bonfire entailed, it would have made Callow the foremost enemy of every Calernian nation. It had not escaped my notice that my ability to take hosts through Arcadia might be seen as as dangerous a weapon as the Diabolist’s gate-device, in its own way. I had to use it sparingly and responsibly or we’d all pay for it. The thought came, uneasily, that we might regardless of what I did.

“Your call to make, Warlord,” the orc acknowledged.

Silence lingered for a while afterwards, the two of us alone in her tent.

“Finally back at it,” the Hellhound finally mused, and there was something like savage glee shining in her eyes.

“We march West, once more,” I spoke in Mthethwa.

I was quoting an old verse Nauk loved. He’d spoken it years ago, before we left for the Liesse Rebellion.

“Waging the same old war,” Juniper finished, and she met my gaze.

Neither of us finished the verse, though we both knew the words.

Onwards to the fields of Callow,

Swift death and graves shallow.

—

It was past midnight when I finally allowed myself a break. There was only so much time I could spend learning Reitz without wanting to jump off the balcony I was currently leaning against. It was important I learn, though. I’d have interpreters with me on the field, but going to war with the Principate without even understanding their languages was a weakness tailored to cause blunders. Still, I’d never missed my old aspect of Learn more. Hells, it wasn’t like I’d been lazy when it came to learning languages. Aside from the Lower Miezan of my childhood I spoke four others well, though my Old Tongue was still admittedly sloppier than the rest. It was enough for tonight, I decided. Back to the histories after that. I’d gotten my hands on an Ashuran chronicle of the Humbling of Titans, the abortive and bloody war between Procer and the Titanomachy that had sown the seeds of hate between the nations that still held to this day. Writings from the Thalassocracy were slightly less inclined to paint Procer in a bad light than those of Praes or the Free Cities, though from what little I’d read there wasn’t much defensible about why and how the Principate had waged that war. I looked up at the stars and allowed the wind to stream across my face. It was a cool breeze, not that I’d notice unless I forced myself to.

“ Finally ,” Thief crowed from behind me.

I almost lashed out by reflex, Winter coiling in my veins, but I let out a steamy breath instead.

“That game’s gotten a lot more dangerous than it used to be,” I told her, voice sounding with just the hint of an echo.

Vivienne leaned against the railing next to me, blowing away an errant strand with a mischievous smile.

“Just like you to say that when I start winning,” she said.

“Welcome back, Thief,” I sighed, and put an arm around her shoulder in the distant cousin of a hug.

She only squirmed a little. Vivienne had never been a touchy sort but compared to, say, Masego she was neediness incarnate. I released her after a heartbeat, and pretended not to notice the slightly pleased smile on her face.

“So I hear we have a Proceran problem on the march,” she said.

“They won’t start moving until tomorrow, according to Masego,” I replied. “But you might say that, yes. I don’t suppose you have anything to tell me that’d make this loom a little shorter?”

“You want a report?” she asked, eyebrow rising.

“Nothing too detailed,” I said. “We’ll have a proper briefing with everyone at a sane hour. But give me the broad strokes.”

She hummed.

“Well, before we touch Procer, I have something from down south,” she said.

My gaze sharpened.

“The League?”

She nodded and I grimaced. I’d wanted a garrison in Dormer to keep that front under control, but Juniper had dug in her heels. The city was indefensible, she’d argued, without a fleet. And Callow had neither the gold, the sailors or the know-how to make one. She had a point about Dormer, especially after the fight with Summer had wrecked major parts of its defences that we’d only partly repaired. Coin, coin, coin. More relentless a foe than even Akua. The men had been sent to Vale instead, with only a handful of mages in Dormer to sound the alarm if it came to war. Which it was hard to say if it might. My attempt at diplomatic correspondence with the newly-elected Hierarch had yielded only a neatly-penned letter chastising me for being a foreign despot, which while very politely phrased was less than promising. On the other hand, merchant shipping up the Hwaerte had actually increased over the last few months if Ratface was to be believed. Not the sign of hostilities about to erupt.

“I have reason to believe that the League has no interest in Callow,” Thief said.

“And how good is that reason?” I asked.

“The Tyrant of Helike had one of the Jacks taken off the streets and brought to him so he could swear eternal friendship with you,” Vivienne bluntly said.

I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose, warding off the headache I knew wouldn’t come.

“The man,” I said slowly, “is notoriously mad. And treacherous. And, not to repeat myself but it bears mentioning, fucking insane .”

“Agreed,” Thief mildly replied. “He is also, as of last month, very discretely sending people into Waning Woods.”

My eyes flew open and I kept my mouth shut as I considered the implications of that. The Waning Woods could lead straight into southern Callow, true. But he didn’t need to go through there to make war on us. He had the fleets to just sail up the Hwaerte uncontested without any of the risks strolling through that hellscape of a forest entailed. Which meant he was considering that route to sidestep something else, and there was only one force I knew about that qualified. The Proceran army in the southern principality of Tenerife, sent there specifically to discourage League aggression.

“You’re sure?” I quietly pressed.

“There’s a decent chance that he allowed my people to see him sending his own in there,” Thief admitted. “It could be a plot to get us to lower our guards, but at this point does he really need us to lower our guard?”

No, I thought. Not with fifty thousand crusaders marching into Callow and an even larger host knocking at the front door in the Vales. There wasn’t a lot I could immediately do to drive him back if he just decided to invade without all the fanfare.

“That would change things,” I murmured. “If he pulls the trigger on that...”

“Looming shorter yet?” Vivienne teased.

“I’d kiss you, if you weren’t so painfully indifferent to women,” I replied with a smirk.

She coughed awkwardly. I had no intentions there whatsoever, but seeing her get jittery at the lightest of suggestions was always good for a laugh.

“Yes, well, Procer,” she muttered. “We’ve already had some talks about what’s waiting in Arans. As far as the Jacks can tell, there’s two real ringleaders in that crowd. The Procer part, anyway.”

“Prince Amadis Milenan of Iserre,” I said. “Princess Rozala Malanza of Aequitan. Milenan’s supposed to be the one holding most everyone else’s leash.”

“Don’t discount Malanza,” she warned me. “Politically she’d dependent on Milenan – her younger brother’s trying to sweet-talk Hasenbach into backing him – but she’s the one that’ll be leading the armies. Her mother fucked up so catastrophically during the civil war that she’s low on allies at the moment, but she’s the best commander in that army and they all know it. She’ll get a lot more influential in that circle when the swords come out.”

“And what do we know about her?” I frowned.

“Not much,” Thief reluctantly admitted. “She’s stayed off of the stage since taking her coronation. But I have somewhat reliable word that she’s one of the hardline expansionists in the Highest Assembly even if she’s quiet about it.”

“If she’s out of favour with Hasenbach, that reinforces the case the First Prince isn’t actually out to annex us,” I said.

“Hasenbach broke her mother’s bid for the throne and made her drink poison afterwards,” Thief hedged. “It might just be personal. Regardless, if the First Prince is out for land we both know she can’t admit that right know. It’d eat away at the crusade from the inside. Levant’s not mustering armies for the Principate to grow larger, and if they get even a hint that’s the plan...”

“I think she might genuinely be after only the Empire, Vivienne,” I admitted. “And if that’s really the case, she has a fucking point. Malicia fanned the civil war in her country for two decades. And there’s that other thing too.”

Stating out loud that the Empress had essentially given Diabolist free reign to do whatever she wanted so long as by the time the dust settled she had a weapon to frighten off the rest of Calernia would have been... dangerous. I’d already told the rest of the Woe this much, but not anyone else. Whether Hasenbach knew this was the case or she was just using Second Liesse to justify the Tenth Crusade, I could not know for sure. It wasn’t like I could ask the woman when we spoke, either, not while I was uncertain of what she knew and did not.

“I’ll applaud and toast her health, if she brings down the Tower,” Thief said. “But that is not a woman I want deciding what happens to my shit, Catherine. Even if we assume the best about her, she’s still got the Highest Assembly to answer to. And we’ve had long talks about the kind of people that have seats on that.”

“I’m not talking surrender,” I told Thief. “But you know how much there’s riding on Hasenbach being at least halfway reasonable.”

“That begs the question of how reasonable she’ll be allowed to be,” Vivienne replied flatly. “And that brings us back neatly to Amadis Milenan. I’ve confirmed he was in the know for the Liesse Rebellion.”

“We already knew Hasenbach would need a mandate to send that much silver across the border,” I said. “He’s the most influential man in Procer, it’s not really feasible for her to have kept him out of it.”

“What we didn’t know, at least until now, is that he argued strongly for a Proceran to be in command of the rebel forces,” Thief said. “The man likes his wine, and he’s not as careful about who might be listening as he should be. That said, there’s a two thousand denarii hole in the funds you allocated me.”

I stared at her incredulously.

“Two thousand ?”

“Yeah, well, even servants in that fucker’s palace are rich,” Vivienne muttered. “You wouldn’t believe how hard they were to bribe.”

Aside from a mournful thought about where I’d have to take that coin from to compensate, I came to grasp what she was getting at pretty quick.

“You think he wanted to be personally in command,” I said.

“Look, I know the Eyes think his ambition makes him usable to shake up Procer from the inside,” the dark-haired woman said. “But that’s Wasteland talk, Catherine. He’s a fucking snake and now we have precedent.”

Precedent for Prince Amadis Milenan to consider war in Callow as way to enable his bid for the throne of the Principate. Shit. That was a problem. I’d been banking on the commanders of the crusader host in the north being rational enough that after a series of minor field defeats they’d cut their losses and retreat back into Procer, if I gave them the space. But Milenan was in command, and if he saw this as his only good chance to dislodge Hasenbach? He might decide to gamble it all anyway, and that would force me to actually break his army. Which would fuck up all my long-term plans, to say the least.

“We’ll untangle that particular mess in full at the briefing,” I sighed. “What’ve you got on the heroes? None of this matters if they just splatter us across the countryside at the first scrap.”

“Wasn’t able to get all the Names,” Thief said. “But I do have a number for you: there’s fourteen of them.”

I let out a long breath. That was... a lot more than I’d hoped for. Given the reputation the Calamities still commanded, I’d thought most Named would be headed there for the offensive. Still fewer than they sent against Triumphant , I mused. So there’s that. Black had always told me that too many heroes in the same place might end up turning against them. That Creation would push some stories above others, and that those who ended up behind were much easier to kill. It made villains seem a lot stronger than they were when they killed a few, and incited sloppiness and overconfidence if they survived. The thing was, though, that those villains usually still died . That tended to happen when someone sent a battalion of Heavens-empowered hardened killers after someone’s head. I’d refined the Woe, over the last year. Turned them into a group eerily skilled at killing the heroes that came into Callow and refused my terms. But in those fights, we’d had either superior numbers or parity. On picked grounds, with enough time for me to prepare. None of that would apply up north.

“Most of them are green, and from all over Calernia,” Thief spoke into the silence. “Levant, the Free Cities, Ashur. Local Named, I guess you could call them. Not the kind you see at the head of an invasion.”

“Any from Procer?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Which brings me to the two I think we most need to watch out for,” Vivienne said. “The first is the Proceran, an Alamans. Laurence de Montfort, the Saint of Swords.”

“I think I’ve heard of her before,” I frowned.

“She got started killing some alchemist villain in western Procer under a transitional Name,” Thief said. “Nasty business. He was turning people into monsters. Then she killed the Prince of Valencis when she was in her twenties and no one’s quite sure why. She disappeared into the woodworks after that. There’s rumours she went up north, but mostly people say she was ‘perfecting her craft’ in a retreat from the earthly world.”

“She hasn’t done anything since?” I frowned.

“Dubious source, but I was told she stared down an army into marching around her hometown during the civil war,” Vivienne said. “Whatever the truth, she’s in her late sixties and she’s Hells on legs. Supposedly unbeatable with a sword, and she’s been known to cut through spells, wards and even once an actual miracle.”

“Well, that promises to be a fun evening,” I muttered.

That sounded a lot like Ranger, only with a Choir having her back, and wasn’t that stuff nightmares were made of?

“The other big club is Levantine,” Thief said. “The Grey Pilgrim, couldn’t dig up a name. This one... Well, the more I learn the more he scares me shitless.”

Thief wasn’t the bravest of my companions, but she wasn’t exactly faint of heart either. That she’d go this far was worth alarm.

“Priest Name?” I asked.

“Some kind of wandering monk, as far as I can tell,” Vivienne said. “He’s not, well, not like you. He’s not the one everyone attaches to. He’s the stranger in the night, and he’s been around for a while .”

“Heroes age,” I reminded her.

“And I’ve word of him going back at least sixty years under his current Name,” Thief bluntly replied. “Catherine, the man’s been everywhere. Every Levantine hero in the last forty years ran into him at some point, and in the Dominion if he said he felt like being king half the country would rise to put him on the throne. As long as he backs the crusade, there’s not a single hero from the Dominion that’ll flinch.”

“Influential and experienced, then,” I said, but honestly as far as direct threats went the Saint sounded a lot worse.

It also meant he couldn’t be killed if Levant was ever to be brought at the negotiating table. You couldn’t kill a people’s darling and then expect a nice peace treaty after, but I wasn’t sure I’d be given a choice there. Thief passed a hand through her hair, frustrated.

“I’m not explaining myself right,” she said. “Just – all right, think about it like this. Hero out on their first lark, meets a mysterious helpful stranger that gives advice and maybe teaches a trick. When’s the next time you see them?”

My fingers clenched.

“When that hero’s in over their head,” I said softly. “When the stranger appears out of nowhere and wipes the floor with the villain, enough that the hero can flee and prepare for the rematch.”

“Yeah,” Vivienne agreed grimly. “That’s the thing, Cat. He doesn’t always win, but I couldn’t find a single instance of when the Grey Pilgrim got into a fight and lost .”

Well. It was a good thing I didn’t need to sleep anymore, because that was the kind of thing that would keep a girl up at night.

Chapter 5: Interests

“Ruling is not unlike gardening, if all the weeds were heavily armed and plotting your demise.”
– Dread Empress Prudence the First, the ‘Frequently Vanquished’

After Thief was gone, I lingered in my solar and waited for the scrying I knew would come. Over the silent hours that followed, I found only my thoughts for company and the downwards spiral they so often took of late.

The thing with bad habits was that you rarely realized you had them until they came back to bite you in the ass. I’d had months since Second Liesse to try to map out where and why I’d failed, and as far as I could tell a lot of failures ran from the same source: I tended to react more than prevent. I could even see where that fracture line had been born, the moment I’d effectively been first among equals in Callow yet still went at everything thinking like the Squire. Looking back at that entire year, the picture wasn’t pretty. I’d recognized Diabolist as a threat, but taken only half-measures against her and badly underestimated the kind of damage she could cause if left alive. The moment I’d realized she was preparing a ritual, I should have taken the Fifteenth down south in full strength and crushed her without mercy. I hadn’t seen the fae coming at all, but neither had anyone else so on that particular mark I’d withhold the blame. When it had become clear I was dealing with an Arcadian invasion, though, I’d botched the affair again. I’d pulled it off, in the end, but only with Malicia’s help and after leaving the south in the hands of Summer for months.

I’d gone after armies, the visible threats, but I hadn’t aimed at the roots of the debacle tree until much too late in the campaign. There was an old saying in Callow about failure being the most apt of teachers. Considering how monumental my failures had been, I should have learned quite a bit.

Some conclusions had been evident. The coup by the Praesi elements of the Ruling Council still felt like a footnote in a much larger affair, but it’d brought one truth to the light of day: if I ruled, if I put on a crown, I gained ties I couldn’t neglect. The situation in Laure had only come to a head because I wasn’t there to scare them into line, but that was the problem wasn’t it? That I had to scare them into line. The Empire worked like that, but the Empire tore itself to pieces with depressing regularity and had antagonized the rest of Calernia badly enough that they’d had four crusades sent their way. Worse, the climbing of the Tower encouraged a sort of pervasive ugly thinking that bloodletting was healthy. A way of thought that Black and Malicia were wrestling with to this day. The thing was, the whole iron sharpens iron philosophy did not actually deliver on what it promised: that the most competent, dangerous and ambitious person would end up claiming the Tower. Praesi history made that much blatantly clear. A lot of the Dread Emperors and Empresses who were now remembered as little more than punchlines had actually been very good at a single thing: killing their rivals frequently and brutally enough that no one overthrew them. For a while, anyway.

It was a skill set, I had to concede that much. But it wasn’t one that necessarily translated to competent rule, even before you factored in the kind of infernal pacts those same Tyrants often made to come out on top and their later consequences. No, the more I read the more I was coming to the conclusion that there were two reasons Praes hadn’t collapsed onto itself: the High Lords and the other villains. The same families who’d formed the Truebloods under Malicia and caused so much trouble were the same that regularly overthrew Emperors, but they were also families who poured a lot of wealth and influence into keeping Praes together. None of them wanted to rule only part of the Empire, the next time one of their kinsmen claimed the crown. That their way to keep it all together usually involved copious amounts of killing, an assault on Callow or general tightening of the screws on greenskins was horrid from where I stood, but in their closed little circle made perfect sense. It wasn’t like anyone in Praes who wasn’t highborn mattered , in their eyes. And then there were the villains. Chancellor, Black Knight, Warlock. Those were the most frequent, but every century seemed to bring its own batch of ancillary Named like Captain, Assassin and Scribe. None of them had been, if the histories were to be believed, particularly pleasant people. But as long as black-tempered demigods – for the old breed of villains had been that, for all their many flaws – were watching the Empire, anyone trying to splinter Praes was running the risk of taking their attention from their own petty feuds and turning it to the nail currently standing out. That tended to end poorly for the nail in question.

Callow had none of these structures. The House of Fairfax and the the aristocrats had been the backbone of the kingdom’s rule before the Conquest, and they were now either thoroughly exterminated or gutted by a series of brutal wars and the purges that followed. At the moment the Kingdom of Callow had one thing keeping it together: me. And that was a really bad idea , as the Laure coup had made clear. Because if it was all on my shoulders, the moment I went out on campaign or was taken out of the field by a Named scrap for a while, it all began to crumble. I’d spent long nights with Hakram putting together a way to rule this country that would weather my absence without outright turning every office over to the Regals or the Queen’s Men. We’d done better than I could reasonably expect. Folding the old Praesi-built bureaucracy into the royal court had centralized power, yes, but more around Laure than myself. Most of it could function without me there to oversee it. And Ratface, Gods bless his cantankerous soul, had worked miracles where he could.

The Royal Mint in Marchford had put enough coin out there that the Tower no longer essentially decided the amount of currency we had to spare. Ratface was alarmed about he fact that the Empress still sat over massive reserves of precious metals accrued over two decades of peace and looting Callow, and that if she ever cut them loose the overflow of gold and silver would break the south and damage the rest of the kingdom. I couldn’t dismiss that worry out of hand, but Malicia was at war. I knew better than most the Empress wasn’t above putting an arrow in her foot if she thought it would lead to a long-term gain, but as long as she needed Callow functional enough to get in the crusade’s way I couldn’t see her pulling the trigger. It was still an awkward position: I could not and would not remain under the Tower’s thumb, but if I ever got too out of line Malicia would have to react and coin was one of the better ways she had of hurting me. And there were risks, of course, to an unstable and war-torn country starting to mint its own coin. It’d been patriotic sentiment more than trust that saw people embracing the new currency, and sentiment was a dangerous thing to use as foundation.

I was popular enough in Callow that at the moment there was no real chance of uprising, but I would have to be very careful to keep it that way. Thief had made it clear that up north I was considered to have picked up the worst of the Fairfaxes overreaches and the most grating Praesi methods, then made both them my reign’s central tenets. I had strong grip in central Callow, where a lot of people still saw me as the woman who’d given the boot to the most hated aspects of Praesi rule and taken the field repeatedly to keep the kingdom safe. In the south, though, it was a mixed bag. Hakram had overseen the feeding and settling of the refugees and that’d raised my reputation by extension, but Laure still loomed tall in everyone’s memories. It didn’t help that southerners tended to be more religious, as a rule, and that for all that my coronation had been at a Sister’s hands I was still very much a villain. Down there, I was backed only so long as every other alternative was measurably worse. At least Procer’s known involvement in the Liesse Rebellion had them almost as hated as Praes: the backlash in sentiment had only grown starker when rumours trickled in that the Tenth Crusade would be going through Callow. Conspiracies were being peddled that the First Prince had arranged it all to weaken the country enough it wouldn’t be able to fight back, and the way they were not waning but growing in popularity had the Empress’ signature all over it.

Her Dread Majesty had been quiet, of late, but it would be a blunder to believe that meant she wasn’t setting up the board for her later moves.

I’d begun to work on Callow too late, I knew. Less than a year of seeing to the country, when I had to both double the size of the army and rebuild a third of the realm? That Ratface had managed to find the coin for any of this was a testament to how ridiculously resourceful my former Supply Tribune was. I’d had to resign myself, in the end, to the truth that this was as much good as I could do before the swords came out. And there never really had been a doubt that the swords would come out, which was why I’d poured so much coin into the Jacks even when Juniper was howling in outrage. If I started to fight this war only when the armies began marching, I’d lose. It was as simple as that. Black had once told me that if I didn’t start acting instead of reacting I would rack up greater and greater disasters, and I cursed myself still for not having listened to him then. I would not make that mistake again, and that meant going in with both a plan and a notion of what my opponents were up to. I had my plan. It’d taken me months and more people brought in to put it together than I was truly comfortable with, but I had the the skeleton of the Liesse Accords on parchment. Now I just had to make sure everyone else in this mess was ready to sign them, and that was a different beast.

Malicia, I knew, never would agree. That meant Malicia had to go, sooner or later, and that put a particular tone to the fact that her spymistress was contacting me on the eve of my departure for the northern campaign.

The scrying basin lit up and I leaned over, watching my interlocutor closely. Ime looked older than when I’d last seen her. The lines on her face were deeper, and though her hair remained dark I suspected there was dye behind the absence of white locks. She was warier speaking to me than she’d once been, as she should be. Aisha’s kinsmen had dug up a few things about her when I asked. She’d been one of the Heir’s closest supporters, when Black had still been the Squire, and the only one to survive my teacher’s unsurprisingly thorough retribution as he rose to prominence. She’d been inserted at court under Dread Emperor Nefarious as a hidden ally for the then-concubine Malicia, and later served as the Empress’ most precious informant in Ater during the civil war. Anyone who could deceive a Chancellor and a panoply of Praesi highborn could not be taken lightly, so I was about as wary as she herself was looking.

“Your Majesty,” the spymistress greeted me.

Her face was small, on the stone basin I used for official scrying with the Tower, but remarkably detailed. Masego had done good work with the instrument.

“Lady Ime,” I replied, inclining my head.

“I bear word from Her Most Dreadful Majesty,” she said. “It has come to the Tower’s attention that you will be leaving for campaign with dawn.”

“As agreed, the defence of Callow is part of my responsibilities as tributary state of Praes,” I said. “Though reinforcing Black at the Vales is no longer feasible, I will be meeting Prince Milenan’s army in battle.”

“The prompt discharging of your obligation does you honour,” Ime said, though we both knew that to be empty words. I wasn’t doing any of this for the Empress’ sake. “The Tower has, however, instructions in the specifics of that discharge.”

Ah, and there we went. I know what you’re after this time, you old spider. I was about to be told, I suspected, that Amadis Milenan was to survive his little jaunt through the Whitecaps.

“It will be my pleasure, of course, to listen to such instructions,” I mildly replied.

I’d learned to choose my words more carefully, and not just because I had a fancy hat. Ime understood perfectly well the backdoor I’d allowed myself in this, but I’d not given her grounds enough to harden her language. We were still at the part of the game were my deep love and loyalty for the Empress was fantasy we both pretended to be fact.

“It has been decreed in the Tower’s interests that certain royals within the crusader host be spared the sword,” Ime said.

“Fascinating,” I smiled, wide and mirthless. “Shall I guess the names?”

“In deference to the current state of war, that will not be necessary,” the spymistress blandly replied. “There are only two: Prince Amadis Milenan of Iserre and Princess Rozala Malanza of Aequitan.”

The schemer and the general. Essentially the only two people that mattered in that army, aside from the heroes. I allowed the empty smile to lapse.

“And this... decree,” I said. “Does it bear the Tower’s seal? Or is it simply an instruction from Her Dread Majesty?”

How far are you willing to push this? Are you going to make it treason to disobey? That, at the moment, was the most important bit to find out. The line the Empress took on this would tell me quite a bit. Like, for example, if ignoring her would be followed by immediate reprisal. The last news from Aisha’s relatives had the Ashuran war fleet in the Tideless Isles, an obvious prelude to attacking Praesi shores, so I doubted any of the Legions would be marching west. I had a garrison in place at Summerholm to stop them cold if they did, anyway. But the kind of pressure she was willing to bring down would give me a glimpse of her timetable: when was she going to stop thinking of me as a disposable asset and instead consider me a threat to deal with? She only had two armies in place to ward off Procer, and Black wasn’t going anywhere now that Prince Papenheim was on the move. So tell me, Malicia, when is your play inside Procer going to make me irrelevant to the defence of your borders?

“A mere instruction,” Ime smiled charmingly. “Her Dread Majesty recognizes the realities of battle may prevent you from carrying out her intent.”

At least until the passage is secure, then , I thought. Now show me the knife, Tyrant.

“Of course, failing to achieve this may cast doubts about your ability amongst certain circles,” Ime continued. “As we are currently mustering for the defence of the coast, I regret to inform you that Her Dread Majesty lacks the men to enforce the safety of trade routes with Callow.”

So, the moneybag. Not unexpected. She wouldn’t do anything too overt, no. Wouldn’t even let her people be involved. She just needed to whisper in the ears of the right High Lords and the wolves would start going after my granaries and my traders while my army was on the wrong side of Callow to stop them. How typically Praesi that even when I was marching against an army that wanted her head on a pike she’d still threaten to shove sticks in my wheels. My fingers clenched. As always, the Empress toed the line skilfully. Escalation, but not enough it would cripple me or force heavy-handed retaliation on my part. I’d had a tutor in Praesi politics lately, though. One I despised, but Akua Sahelian knew the ways of the Wasteland the way only a monster born to its highest reaches could. Time to put what I’d learned to work. I’d spent months scrabbling for every way I knew to check Winter’s influence on my thoughts, well aware of how much of a liability it made me when I swam in the deeper waters, and one of the side-effects of that had been learning exactly how that influence rose when I reached for the mantle. Fear , I instructed myself. Fear but nothing else . I smiled, and let Winter coil through my veins.

Frost tinged the sides of the stone basin as Ime’s face went blank.

“Sabra Niri,” I said, tone caressing the words, and she shivered. “I was surprised, to learn of your kinship to the High Lord of Okoro.”

Her name had been learned, not given, and this made difference. It was still a foothold. Fear spread in her mind like a drop of ink in water. Thinned, yes, but contaminating every part of her. I could taste it, even through this thin link of sympathetic sorcery. I savoured it. I watched the curve of her neck, and considered snapping it. A little reminder to Malicia that threats were not inconsequential. Perhaps too brutal, I mused. Taking simply her sight would be sufficient. I could whisper through this working and shatter those pretty little orbs with a single word. Make bauble of them, perhaps. A bracelet for her to wear as a reminder of the costs of slighting me . Fear. Fear but nothing else . A weak, indecisive design. I balked at it. We would see.

“Have you ever heard the Wild Hunt ride, Sabra Niri?” I asked quietly.

It was a pretty mask of calm she wore, but it was a very thin and feeble one. It would be delightful to rip it off.

“I am not certain what you imply, Queen Catherine,” Ime said.

“It comes slowly, triptych unfolding,” I told her. “First you hear the horns. Distant, like-“

My voice was halfway other, the crack of glaciers and the stillness of fallen snow.

“- a promise, almost a whisper,” I said. “Then you hear the hooves, and that is when you know yourself hunted.”

She began to speak, but I clicked my tongue. Her lips closed and she swallowed loudly.

“The last thing you hear, Sabra Niri, is the laughter,” I murmured. “It is sport to them, you see. Like a deer that can scream and oh, how they enjoy the screams.”

“The Hunt is under your command,” Ime said. “To send them after citizens of the Empire would be rebellion.”

“Citizens?” I mused. “No. Animals . Animals are what they would pursue.”

I turned my gaze on her.

“Wherever they might be,” I softly spoke. “Whoever might shield them. They would... disappear. As if by the hand of a god.”

I smiled and showed my teeth, knew them sharper than a human’s should be. Hunger made fangs wherever it spread.

“Shall we speak of gods, Sabra Niri?” I asked.

“The Wasteland is not without learning in this matter,” she replied.

“Then perhaps it should it should pay heed to these old lessons,” I said. “I wish you sweet dreams, Sabra Niri. And a kindness, for the one you once offered – running never helps, but it is still better than being caught .”

I cut the strings of the the spell, before I could talk myself into claiming her tongue for the arrogance of having threatened me . The sheer gall of that insect – I breathed in and out, slowly. Fear. Fear and nothing else. I’d stayed within the bounds. I spent half an hour alone and unmoving in the solar afterwards, letting the influence of Winter ebb. It was worse than the chats with Hasenbach, because this time I’d leaned in willingly. That made a difference. When I embraced it of my own free will it was always slower to recede. Gods, I wanted a drink. But the way my hand refused to move told me the oath considered me on campaign already. It’d been playing with munitions, letting Winter out, but that was the entire point. So long as Malicia believed me unstable, willing to escalate starkly at the first offence, she would be wary of starting her usual games. Except it’s not pretending if I really am that volatile, is it? I clenched my fingers. I couldn’t stay queen, not in the long term. Not when I had that lurking thing in the back of my soul and no real solution to leash it. But the only person I could feasibly abdicate to was Anne Kendall, and Thief was sure she didn’t currently have the backing to stay on the throne if I put her there. Which I couldn’t do, anyway, not without starting a war with the Tower and likely Black as well. For now, I had to stay. Under all the checks I could manage without crippling the kingdom’s rebuilding. Fuck, I missed Hakram. It was always easier when he was around, and once more I regretted sending anyone else to Vale would have slowed necessary work by months.

Dawn found me looking through glass panels, an open manuscript on my knees. We’d be moving out soon, to fight a war against unbeatable men in a battle where I had to refrain from spilling my enemy’s blood. Whether they be gods or kings or all the armies in Creation.

Well, the Heavens were certainly attempting to deliver.

Chapter 6: Hedges

“Irritant’s Law: inevitable doom is a finite resource, and becomes mere doom when split between multiple heroic bands. Nemeses should never simultaneously engage a single villain.”
– Extract from ‘The Axiom Appendix’, multiple contributors

I sat at a table across from Baron Henry Darlington of Hedges and Baroness Ainsley Morley of Harrow, shared a smile with them and wondered which one of them would be the first to try to sell me out to the crusaders.

I knew for a fact that Procer had approached the both of them long before a hole was punched through the Whitecaps. Hasenbach’s people were good, but the Observatory was better and no one had any real idea yet of exactly what it could do. You couldn’t counter something you didn’t know about, as I had learned the hard way. I’d been keeping a close eye on these two, through both the Jacks and sorcerous means, and even though Morley was the one who’d just had to flee her own city my bet was on Darlington being the one to try for a deal. He was the older of the two, in his late forties, and though he’d had a reputation as a knight of some skill in his youth his belly made it clear he’d traded swords for mutton chops a long time ago. Morley, the Jacks had informed me, was in her thirties but had inherited the barony from her father only a year before the Liesse Rebellion. Her lands were larger than Darlington’s but her personal holdings smaller and the rest split among vassals who’d been rather unruly after her ascension. If the betrayal came from the Harrow contingent, I’d wager that it would be from one of her sworn lords and not Morley herself. Both of them were being very cordial as we shared a drink – water for me, that tricky little oath – but they were also quite bad at hiding how surprised they were I’d reached Hedges so quickly.

Seven days through Arcadia, and my twenty thousand strong Army of Callow began marching out into the pastures to the south of the city. The Observatory had confirmed that the crusaders were only starting to come out on the Callowan side of the passage through the Whitecaps. Slower than expected, but then our estimates had been based on Legion marching speeds. Revised downwards, of course, but apparently not quite enough. There’d been some alarm when we popped out of the woodworks, but I’d been one of the first out the fairy gate and to be blunt if we’d meant to take Hedges there wasn’t shit either of them could have done about it. The city was more of a glorified town, and its defences were laughable. The curtain wall was a short and worn-down compared to almost every other city in Callow, since the north had never really faced the threat of Praesi invasions. Their enemies had been each other, which involved more cattle-theft than sieges even in the old days before unification, and on rare occasion Daoine. The Deoraithe were not prone to expansion, but before they were brought into the fold by Eleanor Fairfax they’d not been above the occasional raid or punitive expedition to express displeasure at the royal family in Laure.

“I’m impressed by how quickly you got your people out, Baroness,” I told Morley. “And how thoroughly.”

There was a slight tinge of discomfort in their eyes at the reminder that I knew exactly what was going on in their lands and they had no real idea how. Darlington cleared his throat.

“Perhaps prematurely, Your Majesty, if you’ll forgive my saying so. It seems to me it might have been possible to contest Harrow.”

I took that more as an indication that he’d rather pitched battles not take place at even the outskirts of his lands than sympathy for Morley, but then he’d gotten on my nerves often enough I wasn’t inclined to think well of him. I sipped at my cup.

“They’ve moved slower than anticipated,” I conceded. “There are, however, concerns you might not be considering. Do you both know what a Hell Egg is?”

Morley paled but Darlington was unmoved.

“Some Praesi devilry, no doubt,” he said.

“It’s true then,” Baroness Ainsley said quietly. “The Lost Standard, it actually exists?”

“I have it on good authority it’s in the lands around Harrow,” I told her. “But my attempts to locate it have been fruitless for now.”

Darlington was lost, and by the look on his face that was not a state of affairs he was willing to tolerate for long.

“And what Wasteland tale is this?” he said. “I did not take you for a superstitious sort, Your Majesty.”

“Considering the Diabolist used one of those very standards against me at Marchford, superstition is perhaps the wrong term,” I very mildly said.

It was rather delightful to watch it sink in. It was a well-told tale what I’d faced in the defence of what was now my personal holding.

“There’s a demon in the north?” he hissed.

“My father told me that Triumphant left old madness behind her, when I was a child,” Morley said. “I thought it a legend, but are these not times where old stories breathe again?”

“I won’t fight heroes on grounds where releasing a demon is a risk,” I told them frankly. “The moment the crusaders forged a beachhead near Harrow, it became indefensible. I’m sorry for what that puts your people through, Baroness, but-”

The woman shook her head.

“No, Your Majesty,” she said. “Nothing was lost but pride and coin. If anything, I must thank you sincerely for your prudence. I would rather see my coffers emptied than my people...”

She trailed off, and I didn’t finish that sentence for her. Where demons were concerned, the least said was always the better.

“They’re my people too,” I said quietly. “I would rather not fight this war at all, but diplomatic resolution has been refused.”

“ Procer ,” Morley said feelingly.

And though I suspected Darlington wished me dead at least once a day, even his lip curled in distaste at the mention of the Principate. We did like our grudges, us Callowans, and Procer had earned more than a few. That passing moment of common feeling did nothing to blind me to the very real possibility that one or both of these two would try to sell me down the river before the month was out.

“I would offer my men for the battle, Your Majesty,” Morley finally said.

“It’d be a pleasure to fold your horse under the Broken Bells,” I told her. “I’ll send Grandmaster Talbot your way. But if you mean to send foot as well, I’ll need Legion officers overseeing. Marshal Juniper will not agree otherwise.”

The latter was a little sketchy, under current Callowan law, but Juniper was the highest officer in the Army of Callow and theoretically had the same broad authority that the Shining Princes and ruling Fairfaxes had once held in war time. This particular request, though, had consistently seen me stonewalled by the same two nobles in front of me. Even after amending the request to having observing Legion officers it had remained a sticking point. Baroness Kendall had argued the matter wasn’t worth forcing, given the limited amount of men these two could bring, and she’d had a point. Better not to have them at all than have them only as unreliable addition.

“That will not be an issue,” Baroness Ainsley grimly said.

Some of my surprise must have shown on my face, because she offered a rueful smile.

“Morleys have held Harrow for three hundred years, Your Majesty,” she said. “I will not surrender my lands to some prancing Proceran shit without a fight.”

“We’ll be glad to have you,” I said.

That’d been... unexpected. And, though I’d like to think better of her, was enough of a change it raised my suspicions. Still, it wouldn’t do to look a gift horse in the mouth too openly.

“They sent an envoy,” Morley suddenly said.

My eyes sharpened as I studied her. She looked embarrassed but determined.

“The Procerans, they sent an envoy,” she said. “To offer terms.”

Baron Darlington had gone very, very still. I drank a mouthful of water then calmly set down the cup.

“Good ones, I hope?”

She snorted.

“I would be allowed to keep my lands,” she said. “A marriage to one of our betters would be arranged for one of my children as well. They wanted Henrietta, which was rather telling. They’re more interested in us taking their names than the other way around.”

“Let me guess,” I drawled. “You were to join with the army and pass information. Maybe change sides halfway through a battle?”

“They were slightly more circumspect,” the baroness said. “But the implications ran along those lines. They... it was a way to weather the storm, Your Majesty.”

I watched her closely. She’d not agreed, no. She wouldn’t have spoken up otherwise. But she’d not chased them out either. I’d already known that, but I was surprised she was willing to share. You dislike me , I thought. We both know that. But in the end for all that you see me an evil I am Callowan evil and that still matters, doesn’t it?

“Treason,” Darlington said thickly. “How horrid. It is mother’s milk to the men of Procer, we have always known this.”

“I do not hang women for entertaining envoys,” I softly said. “And would rather have honest, open opposition than a snake in the grass. Hasenbach will make offers again. She needs to, because she knows it is madness to try to hold Callow by force while warring with the Wasteland. But make no mistake, she needs to hold Callow. And we all know Procer does not easily relinquish lands it takes.”

Morley nodded slowly. She was not a handsome woman, and the stark relief on her face did her no favours.

“My duties prevent me from lingering,” I told them, and slowly rose to my feet. “Baron Darlington, an officer from the general staff will seek audience to discuss our supply lines.”

“They will find me a welcoming host, Your Majesty,” the man said, rising to his feet as well.

I nodded at Morley, then paused. I looked into Darlington’s eyes.

“A redheaded man,” I stated, “with a Liessen accent. He stayed two days.”

The man’s face went bloodless.

“Always assume I know,” I gently said.

I left only utter silence in my wake.

—

I’d decided, when first stumbling upon this particular wall, that it was too low to be meant as a defence. And too far from the city besides, though the low hill overlooking the outskirts of Hedges would have been good grounds to raise a guard tower. Most likely it’d been used to keep cattle penned in, though by the looks of it years had passed since it’d last fulfilled that purpose. With the cool evening breeze and the view, it made a pleasant enough place to sit as I awaited the people I’d sent for. This was my first visit this far up north, and to be honest the entire region seemed rather bare to me. Green and brown fields made muddy by the melting snows spread as far as the eye could see, touched by only sparse thickets of trees and the occasional low slope. Hedges itself was a far cry from the large cities of the south. Larger than Dormer in overall size, perhaps, but most that space was empty and the city itself was visibly poorer. No paved streets, here, only mud tracks. And fewer stone houses than any other Callowan city I’d seen, most of them wooden structures with straw rooftops. Aside from the run-down curtain wall that sloppily circled outer Hedges, there were no real fortifications to speak of. Even the baron’s keep was only a glorified hill with towers and a hall.

I puffed at my pipe and blew the smoke into the wind, watching twilight catch up to the Army of Callow encamped behind me. Cooking fires were already lit and the tents raised, a series of palisades preparing the soldiers for an attack unlikely to come this early. Juniper had insisted on full fortifications, though privately she’d told me it was more to drill the men in the raising of them than out of true worry got an enemy strike. A plume of wakeleaf streamed further and further away until it thinned out of existence, and I felt a smile quirk my lips. I’d have to give him this, even if my senses had only grown sharper he was still giving it a worthy effort.

“The mud gives you away,” I said. “Should have tried it without boots.”

“I have very delicate feet, Your Majestic Queenship,” Special Tribune Robber cheerfully lied, rising from his crouched position beneath the hill’s angled slope.

I hid the spasm of grief that passed through me when I looked at him. Robber was fifteen, now. Most goblins didn’t make it past thirty-five, and past thirty they began to swiftly go decrepit. I’d always known at as a villain, if I didn’t get killed, I’d likely outlive most my closest friends in the Fifteenth. Looking at the thickening eyebrow ridges and the fresh wrinkles around his mouth, I was imposed a fresh reminder that the goblins among my companions would be the first to go. Pickler wasn’t showing either of those marks, but then she was from a matron line. Those were supposed to be almost a breed apart. I waited until he was plopped at my side, swinging his legs like a greenish murderous child, to reply.

“You know, lying to your monarch is technically treason,” I informed him.

“I heard if you commit it enough time it cancels out,” Robber mused. “I should probably keep doing it, just to be on the safe side.”

“That’s the kind of talk that’ll get busted back to Lesser Lesser Footrest,” I said, eyebrow quirking.

“Oh come on,” he whined. “Where am I going to find another sworn enemy’s father to murder?”

“Well, if anyone can it’s going to be you,” I snorted.

I inhaled the smoke as he remained silent, though never still. It was something I’d learned to notice about goblins: they always seemed to be moving, even if only slightly. Like they were afraid they’d drop dead if they stopped.

“We’re about to start having informational issues,” I finally told him. “Too many priests and heroes with the Procerans, and that’ll screw with scrying. Even the Observatory’s.”

He grinned, wide and vicious.

“Are we still pretending that thing’s just a pretty bunch of scrying pools?” he asked. “’cause the Catherine Foundling I know doesn’t shell out that much gold for anything she can’t swing at an enemy.”

I smiled thinly but did not reply. The little discovery Masego had made that he called absolute positioning was potentially one of the nastiest tricks up my sleeve, but it was one I intended to sit on as long as possible. The moment I used it I would grow sharply as a threat in everyone’s eyes. I couldn’t afford that, not until I had all my pieces in place.

“We can narrow down their positions with the negatives,” I said. “But we can’t go in with sparse eyes against an army that large. How are the mages we assigned you?”

“They’re coming along nicely,” Robber said. “They don’t even scream anymore when they wake up with a knife to the throat in the middle of the night.”

“Don’t break my mages, Robber,” I sighed. “You know we don’t have any to spare.”

“You do me grave injustice,” he mourned. “I’m teaching them important life lessons, like ‘crying never helps’ and ‘sleeping deep is sleeping dead’.”

“You’re not getting new ones if you screw these ones up,” I warned him. “There’s nothing left from the Hedge Guild to draft.”

“It’s my Gods-given duty to educate tender-hearted Callowans like them,” he righteously told me. “Speaking of, I heard this thing about northerners. Is it true they-“

“Every single joke about northerners and sheep has also been made about goblins and goats,” I warned him.

“Calumny,” he protested. “That hardly ever happens unless the goat is shaved and painted green.”

I rolled my eyes.

“All right, if you’re comfortable enough fucking around then they won’t be an issue,” I said. “Juniper will put scouts on the field, but I want a set of eyes deep behind enemy lines. You’ve just volunteered for that duty.”

“I am the most dutiful goblin ever born,” Robber agreed, clearly pleased. “Tell me we’re not just skulking, though. It’s been a while since my people stabbed anything, they’re getting restless.”

“I’m keeping you as a dagger,” I said. “That means low profile until I use you.”

He blew his tongue at me, which was mildly unsettling considering it was pitch black.

“Boo,” he said. “Boo Catherine boo.”

“Have Captain Borer write you up for insolence,” I ordered. “The exceedingly well-document fact that you are a filthy wretch aside, we both know sending you to roam when there’s a crew of heroes on the loose is like feeding a wolf meat scraps.”

“They can’t kill us if they don’t fight us,” he shrugged.

“I thought you’d say that,” I grunted. “But I have worries, and Juniper shares them. So we’re assigning you a partner.”

“Tell me it’s Larat,” he begged. “The man is like a goblin that was fed particularly violent rocks.”

Wait, could goblins actually eat – no, Catherine, never go down the Robber rabbit hole. There are no answers at the bottom, only headaches and befuddlement.

“No,” I replied. “She’s actually coming up right now.”

Yellow eyes flicked downhill and then I was given the opportunity to delight in the vicious little bastard actually looking uneasy.

“ Gods no,” he said. “That’s sadistic even for you, Queenie.”

“Evening Cat,” Archer grinned. “And you too, Robert.”

“You know that’s not my name,” the goblin hissed.

“I’m very sorry, Bobber,” Indrani said. “I swear.”

“You can’t send her with us,” Robber said. “She bit off Akua’s head!”

I blinked.

“She did what now?” I warily asked.

Robber looked shifty, which considering he could skulk in broad daylight without trying was an almost miraculous achievement.

“I’m not saying it happened, but it’s possible a betting ring technically illegal under Legions regs just spontaneously emerged,” he said.

“Akua was a scorpion,” Archer cheerfully informed me.

“Not just a scorpion, you brute, she was a purebred Wasteland Rattler,” the goblin insisted. “And her full name was Akua Sahedon’t.”

“You bit off a scorpion’s head,” I enunciated slowly, looking at Indrani.

She shrugged.

“The Lady always said it’s important to establish the pecking order early in a relationship,” she replied. “Wouldn’t you agree, Borer?”

“That’s someone else,” Robber muttered peevishly. “And I had a month’s pay riding on Akua killing Willie Angels.”

So my sappers were importing no doubt massively oversized Wasteland scorpions, naming them after old opponents of mine and pitting them in death fights. I truly wished I could say that was the worst thing I’d ever caught them doing, but this was a bad time to start lying to myself.

“I’m going to pretend I never heard this,” I decided out loud. “Mostly because, well, Hakram’s not around and I ’ m sure as Hells not filing a report about giant scorpions if I can avoid it. As your beloved queen, I order you to pretend to get along when I’m within hearing range. There, I fixed it.”

“I love it when she gets all authoritative,” Archer told the goblin.

“I hope you also enjoy scorpions in your bedding,” he whispered back at her. “Akua had babies, before you callously murdered her.”

“See, he’s already offering me snacks,” Indrani smiled. “Herbert and I are great friends, Catherine. Just the best.”

I closed my eyes and wished very hard they would disappear, but when I opened them they were obstinately still there. One of these days, that was going to work and they were all going to be sorry.

“Robber, get your people ready,” I ordered. “You’re leaving in half a bell. Archer...”

“No need, I’ve already prepared supplies,” Indrani replied, hoisting up what was quite clearly a wineskin full of – by the smell of it – hard liquor.

“Just don’t forget your bow,” I sighed.

Gods go with them, though hopefully not the ones Above. The kind if work I had in mind for these two would be frowned upon, upstairs.

Chapter 7: Snares

“Petty thieves hang, the great wear crowns.”
– Proceran saying

“We’re being baited,” Juniper announced.

We’d cut loose the general staff for this particular meeting, at my insistence. The Arcadian Campaign had taught me that while the broader officer councils had their uses they also devoured time and focus that would be better spent on other matters. The Hellhound was my Marshal of Callow now, she had the clout to run those however she liked without my being at the table to back her up. There were advantages to formal rank and not leading an awkward coalition I had only nominal authority over. Only the bare bones of a council were in attendance, the people that would have direct relevance, and that meant three aside from me: Juniper herself, Thief and Grandmaster Talbot. I preferred to cut that latter out of these little evenings when it came to politics, but on campaign was a different beast. I could not have the head of my horse ignorant of the larger realities at work.

“That’s the theory, anyway,” Thief hedged. “There’s a few unprovable assumptions at work.”

“May I assume we are speaking of the Proceran vanguard?” Brandon Talbot asked.

“We are,” I confirmed. “The report you haven’t gotten to read yet states that, as of midmorning, five thousand Proceran horse has invested Harrow.”

The Grandmaster’s eyes narrowed. We’d given ground to the crusaders knowing they would take or pass through the city on their way south, but Talbot was a clever sort. He’d noticed, as the rest of us had, what the reports didn’t mention. Which was anything but a detachment of horse sent far ahead of the still-lumbering Proceran army.

“The Jacks could not get into the city itself, mind you,” Vivienne said. “But I had knots of people out in the country and they say the riders came alone. The crusader army is at least two days behind.”

Talbot smiled ruefully.

“Five thousand light horse,” he said. “We have number parity with the Order, and the strength of the Woe and the Hunt besides. Should we play it carefully, we could wipe out a significant part of their cavalry before it comes to a pitched battle.”

“We’re being baited,” Juniper repeated.

“Too good to be true, isn’t?” I agreed darkly. “I think we need to reassess how much of a threat Princess Malanza actually is. I didn’t expect that kind of sophistication from a Proceran commander, given the nature of the trap.”

The Principate was famous for rarely fielding Named, unlike Praes and Callow who usually had at least a handful on each side when the blades came out. And while it was an assumption, like Thief had reminded us, I was willing to put hand to flame that if we gated into Harrow we’d be walking straight into a carefully arranged heroic kill zone.

“Assuming this is her notion,” Talbot frowned.

“It’s not Milenan,” I said. “We know exactly what he’s up to, as it happens.”

The Grandmaster raised an inquisitive eyebrow, though he knew better than to request information he might not be cleared to know. I cast a look at Vivienne and nodded.

“Prince Amadis Milenan had a previously unknown agent within Hedges,” she said. “We know that now, because this morning the woman attempted to discretely get in touch with Baron Darlington.”

Talbot grit his teeth.

“He always did fancy himself ruler of the north,” the aristocrat unkindly said.

“We allowed it to happen,” Thief said. “While watching, of course, but we wanted to know exactly what he was after.”

“Land,” I bluntly said. “Land is what he’s after, as it turns out. Prince Milenan is already gathering support for the divvying up of Callow, and he seems to believe Darlington is the key to the north.”

“The man’s making a lot of promises, for someone without a field victory to his name,” Juniper growled.

Brandon Talbot, for all that his meddling got on my nerves, was not slow-witted. He understood what we were driving at without need for an explicit statement.

“Darlington’s been promised the north as his own principality under the First Prince,” he deduced, visibly appalled.

“Mostly right,” Vivienne said. “There’s a prior change of throne involved in that promise coming true. Amadis is a little more openly ambitious than we’d previously assumed.”

And he was gathering allies for his bid. I’d let Talbot into the loop for the Darlington play, but for now there was no need to tell him that Prince Milenan was also sending men towards the Silver Lake as quickly as they could ride. The Observatory had picked them out two days ago, and I agreed with Thief’s assessment of their ultimate destination: Daoine. The crusaders were trying to get Duchess Kegan on their side before moving south. I could see why he’d assume there was room to negotiate there: the last time Callow had come under Proceran occupation, the Duchy of Daoine had remained out of the fray in exchange for concessions and effective independence. They’d even fielded armies alongside Procer’s, when the Empire began the Sixty Years War by trying to invade occupied Callow. Both Praes and the Old Kingdom had come out of that ruinous war on the brink of collapse, but Daoine had gotten off light. It always did. House Ismail had a well-earned reputation for knowing when to strike its banners and cut its losses. Unfortunately for Milenan, I’d cut a deal there long before he’d thought of opening negotiations.

“Regardless of all that, I think we can safely discard the possibility that the crusaders don’t know about the fairy gates and the Hunt,” I said. “The trap doesn’t work otherwise.”

Without cutting through Arcadia, it would take my men weeks to get close enough to Harrow for a battle. Long after the rest of the crusader army caught up to the vanguard.

“And that puts a lot of their behaviour up until now in question,” Juniper grunted. “I’m having a hard time reconciling a general clever enough for this kind of snare and one who’d willingly take her army through a bottleneck – especially one she knows we might have been able to seize the end of.”

To be frank, trying to hold a narrow pass against a company of heroes would have been godsdamned ugly work. But I had the Named and the trump cards to be able to make a solid try at it, and if we did manage to hold then the entire invasion plan collapsed. Which meant, most likely, that we’d missed something.

“If this trap is not Malanza’s own notion,” Talbot tried. “Then your estimation of her competence might be...”

“Believe me,” I interrupted quietly. “I’d love to have an idiot in charge on the other side. But that’s genuinely not feasible, not with Hasenbach running the show in Procer. She doesn’t want this army to do too well, but she’s still banking on a victory. That means whoever holds the reins of the soldiers knows what they’re doing.”

“Without alleging incompetence, the information they’re using might be imperfect,” Thief said. “There’s not a lot of reliable witnesses outside our most loyal for how quickly we can move through gates. She might have been under the impression that even by Arcadia you wouldn’t be able to arrive in time to hold the pass.”

“If we’re lucky, that’s the case,” Juniper said.

“If we’re not – and let’s be honest, when have we been that lucky? – I think we have to proceed under the assumption that they’re sitting on something that would have blown us away at the pass,” I said.

“Proceran sorcery is nothing like the Wasteland’s,” Talbot said.

“Sorcery is the least of our troubles,” I said. “This is a crusade . The Choirs aren’t shy about stacking the deck even when it’s just skirmishes between Named. For something of this magnitude they’ll have taken out the good silver.”

That saw grim looks bloom across the table, with good reason. No one had forgotten the kind of threat the Lone Swordsman had been able to cause in Liesse with just a few days and a singe angelic feather. And Masego tells me Contrition isn’t exactly head of the pack when it comes to the Choirs , I thought . If Judgement or Mercy gets involved, this will be a whole lot nastier .

“It goes without saying we have to reassess a lot of our engagement doctrine,” Juniper announced bluntly. “Which is why I think we need to dust off Headsman.”

“It’s not going to look good abroad if we pull the trigger on that,” I grimaced.

“I made it clear when we killed the plan that I considered it a measured and reasonable response,” Talbot noted. “The Dread Empire has signed no treaties barring the targeting of officers, and while the Principate has they’ve never enforced the terms unless it suited them.”

“If we want a seat at the table by the end of this, people, we can’t act like Praes,” I reminded them. “There’s a reason we didn’t spend the last year scrabbling for every destructive artefact and ritual we could get our hands on. We start using shit like the Dark Days protocols and the only peace we’re getting is after one side has been pounded into dust.”

“No one’s dumping alchemy into rivers,” the Hellhound said. “We’re talking two hundred dead at most, including projected collaterals.”

“We made those projections before we knew how many heroes there’d be on the other side,” I pointed out. “I’m not refusing out of hand, Juniper, but if we start using assassination campaigns then we get a reputation that might cost us more in the long term than we gain in the short term.”

“If you have another way to shake them before battle, I’m listening,” she said. “Look, I don’t give a damn about the politics of this. I’ll own that. But I think the hole we fall in if we lose is a lot deeper than the one we dig with Headsman.”

She wasn’t wrong about that, even if I didn’t like it. Hasenbach would have absolutely no interest in negotiating the kind of peace I was after if she had me on the ropes.

“Talk with Kegan,” I finally said. “She was never eager, and it’s not a given she’ll still be willing. There’s risks involved for her people. If she agrees, though, start laying the groundwork. But we’re not going through with it until I give the word.”

“Chances of success improve significantly if we don’t wait,” Thief said, tone mild. “Especially given the amount of heroes they’ve got floating around.”

“It also kills every other option than pitched battle to get the crusaders out of Callow,” I flatly replied. “I’m not committing to that unless I have no other choice.”

“As you say,” Vivienne shrugged. “That still leaves our little problem in Harrow.”

“I realize we’re dealing with a trap,” Talbot said. “That said, Your Majesty, if we don’t thin their horse soon we’re going to have trouble.”

I raised an eyebrow at Juniper in silent invitation.

“He’s right,” she admitted. “If Malanza moves against us with the meat of her host and peels off a few thousand horsemen just before, the only assets we have to check them are assets we’re going to need in that battle.”

“What kind of damage are we looking at?” I grimaced.

“If Darlington flips, or even just stays out of the way, they’ve got free rein until Southpool,” the Hellhound said. “If they move quick enough, they could possibly hit central Callow before Adjutant manages to force a battle. Our forces just aren’t deployed to block raiding parties coming from up north. Even if I pull the garrison from Vale tonight, there’s no guarantee it’ll get there in time.”

“We have watchers on Darlington,” I told her. “He’s not changing sides anytime soon.”

“I understand we are worrying about the devastation the riders could cause in the countryside,” Talbot said slowly. “Yet it occurs to me there is another possible target for a detachment. The Red Flower Vales.”

I almost dismissed him out of hand. A few thousand horse wasn’t going to worry Black in the slightest, considering the kind of forces he had at hand. On the other hand, what if they didn’t fight Black?

“The supply lines,” I said.

“It would be risky,” the Grandmaster said. “Hostile territory, and they’ll be within our scrying net – though they might not know about that yet, at least not for certain. But the Carrion Lord is already heavily outnumbered, Your Majesty. Can he afford to detach the men to keep his supply lines clear?”

“He’s been stacking food, munitions and steel for almost a year now,” I said, but it was half-hearted.

“We lose the Vales, our entire defence collapses,” Juniper said. “We have contingencies in case they lose, Catherine, but none of them involved fighting up here at the same time. None of us saw the passage coming.”

Shit. I hadn’t thought of that. Which was exactly the point of these councils, I supposed.

“Juniper, I know this is a lot to ask but I need...”

“You need me to get close enough that if this is Malanza’s intent she will send off the horse, then avoid battle until you’ve dealt with the threat,” the orc said.

“Is it possible?” I asked.

“You did not appoint me Marshal of Callow because I look good in furs,” the Hellhound grinned, slow and savage. “You will have the margin you need.”

I’d made a few good decisions, over the years, but none that’d paid off quite as much as offering her that draw back at the War College. I smiled gratefully at her, not that she seemed particularly moved by that gratitude.

“There is one last matter to address,” Vivienne said.

I nodded.

“Prince Milenan attempted to arrange a meeting with Baron Darlington through his envoy,” I said. “That means I’ll be away from the army for a while.”

“I don’t follow,” Talbot frowned.

“He wants to talk to a Callowan?” I smiled thinly. “Well, he’s going to get his wish. It’s about time we had a closer look at the opposition.”

—

It took three weeks for the meeting to become feasible. Three weeks where we watched the crusader host slowly move south, camp at Harrow for a few days and then resuming the march when it become clear my own army wouldn’t march to meet it. They were still at least a month of march away from Hedges, at their current pace, but we wouldn’t be letting them get that deep into Callow unchallenged. The border between the baronies was the battlefield Juniper had picked, and I’d seen no reason to gainsay her on that. We had scouts out on the green to find us the kind of field that would best play up our advantages, but for now the location was still in the air. It’d been tempting to grab and interrogate Prince Milenan’s envoy, for a plethora of reasons. The strongest among them that if Milenan hadn’t known about the pass – and we were reasonably sure he hadn’t – then he’d sent that envoy months ago and trusted her judgement enough she would have been able to negotiate in his name without being in contact afterwards. Plenipotentiary authority was not something Procerans gave lightly, and she would have been a treasure trove of information. But that would have been giving the game too early, so instead Baron Henry Darlington was given strict instructions and arranged the meeting where and when I wanted it.

He wasn’t going himself, of course. The envoy had not requested as much, understanding that with my army camped outside his city his absence would not go unnoticed. Instead he’d sent his nephew, an anointed knight who stood fourth in the line of succession for Hedges and was young enough to be unmarried. The other diplomats were people Thief had gauged we had enough leverage over they wouldn’t speak up, including a small escort. Of which I was part, riding a still-living horse for the first time in quite a while. The possibility of heroic presence had meant it was necessary for me to take some additional precautions, but those wouldn’t come out of the woodworks unless blades left the scabbard. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. We were fewer than twenty all in all, and dawn found us out in the wet plains waiting for the other side to arrive. The nephew – Julian Darlington – had insisted we get a fire started for cooking before the Procerans came and I’d declined to speak against it.

I sat on a hollow log I’d dragged by the fire, surrounded by men too visibly scared of me to attempt conversation. I didn’t particularly mind, since I was in not in a talkative mood myself. Milenan’s envoys arrived half a bell later, riding in on tall steeds. I raised an eyebrow at the Darlington nephew and he hurried to raise the truce banner as we all got to our feet. The anointed knight stood behind a pair of guards but positioned himself clearly as the leader for our side while the Procerans approached. I watched them as discretely as I could. The one in the gilded armour seemed in charge, and from the looks of his nose I could guess why. The Jacks had gotten their hands on a few sketches of Amadis Milenan’s likeness, and the resemblance was noticeable. A kinsman, then. The Prince of Iserre was taking this seriously. Most the others were soldiers, with only one woman bearing a scrivener’s kit over her back. Only one man wore entirely unadorned clothes, a loose grey robe that seemed almost a priest’s garment. I kept my face schooled into mild boredom.

If that wasn’t the Grey Pilgrim, I’d eat my hand.

Julian Darlington greeted them warily, and was answered by the man who confirmed himself to be highborn – and a Milenan, too. Likely a cousin or a close branch family. Elaborate courtesies were offered by the Proceran side while the Callowans offered stilted greetings in return. It wasn’t long before they got to the meat of the meeting, as I suspected neither of them were comfortable speaking in the open like this. The Proceran envoy and Darlington strode off away from the rest, standing side by side and speaking in low voices. No matter. I could hear them well enough from where I was, back sitting on the log as the soldiers all stood down.

“-the duty of all children of the Heavens to deliver their fellows from the tyranny of the Tower’s get, of course. Still, there are practical necessities to be addressed.”

“May I?”

The Grey Pilgrim stood before me, hand gesturing at the log.

“By all means,” I replied.

Did he know? It shouldn’t be the case. I was wearing leathers and mail with a Callowan-forged longsword, nothing out of the ordinary for a retainer. And without drawing on Winter or him actively looking for it, he shouldn’t be able to tell I bore a mantle. Assuming he didn’t have some sort of trick that allowed him to see through those things, anyway. Something I was less certain of by the moment. The old man gingerly sat at my side, warming his hands by the fire. It was my first time seeing a Levantine, and I had to admit they really did look like the cousins of Taghreb. This one was darker in skin, though, his face tanned and leathery. But the limpid blue eyes were sharp, and for someone as old as he allegedly was he displayed surprising vitality. The few tufts of white hair on his head made a makeshift crown, but his face was either hairless or very closely shaved.

“Nothing quite like a fire on a cool morning, is there?” he sighed.

“One of the little pleasures in life,” I agreed.

Or it had been, before Second Liesse. Nowadays neither heat nor cold made much of a difference.

“The truce banner,” the Grey Pilgrim said mildly. “Is it genuine?”

My fingers clenched. So much for being unnoticed. And he’s distracting me from overhearing what his people are saying to mine . I’d have to let that go, irritating as it was. This was the more important conversion of the two.

“It holds,” I said.

“There have been rumours you care little for such arrangements,” he noted.

I grimaced. Three Hills, when I’d had the Exiled Prince shot.

“I was younger, then,” I said. “And no banner was raised.”

He hummed, and did not disagree.

“Then your friends in Arcadia will not be joining us?” he politely asked.

Well, shit. So much for that remaining quiet.

“No unless that is made necessary,” I replied.

“It won’t,” the Grey Pilgrim said, with bedrock certainty. “Shall we have a talk then, Catherine Foundling?”

My eyes narrowed.

“We’re about due,” I agreed.

Chapter 8: Dialogue

“That is the secret to a peaceful court, Chancellor. Regularly having the High Lords for dinner.”
– Dread Empress Sanguinia I, the Gourmet

“This is quite refreshing,” I admitted. “My experience with your side doesn’t involve a lot of talking. Or at least none that didn’t end with blades drawn.”

The Grey Pilgrim didn’t seem particularly offended, but then he’d never lost that vaguely serene look since I’d first had glimpse of him. Might be part of his Name. Or just the result of having seen shit that would turn my hair white. No one made profession of kickin villains in the teeth for over six decades without having stumbled over some old horrors.

“There are few interlocutors worth speaking to, on... ‘your side’, as you so delicately put it,” the old man replied. “One cannot bargain with madmen and minions.”

“Yet here we are, talking,” I said. “Should I take that as a compliment?”

He laughed quietly.

“If you wish,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Though I will not deny that Winter’s shadow looming in your soul is cause for worry, you have displayed noticeable restraint. I am not in the habit of seeking conflict when other roads are open.”

Couldn’t say the same, so I wouldn’t. Just because I’d learned that killing often caused as many problems as it solved didn’t mean I no longer recognized that there were fights worth picking. I should know, I’d yet to manage a godsdamned year as a Named where I wasn’t up to my neck in enemies.

“Funny thing to say, for a man marching with an invading army,” I noted. “If envoys were sent to achieve diplomatic resolution, they never made it to Laure.”

“And this surprises you?” he asked, seeming genuinely curious. “You have hacked your way through every opposition set before you, and twice now slighted the Heavens through their ordained servants. There are few, mundane or Bestowed, who believe you can be reasoned with.”

Bestowed. I raised an eyebrow. Another word for Named, I’d assume, but from the almost reverent way he’d spoken it there might be religious implications. More worrying was the fact that he knew how my little tiff with the Stalwart Paladin had ended. There shouldn’t have been any remaining witnesses to that aside those who wore gaudy wings.

“Look at the graves I’ve left behind,” I said. “What do they all have in common?”

The Exiled Prince, Page, the Lone Swordsman and his band, Diabolist. The pattern there was far from a puzzle.

“They were threats to the Kingdom of Callow,” the old man said. “Or at least what you perceive that should be.”

That last qualifier didn’t escape my notice, but I reluctantly let it go. Heroes would be heroes.

“And so that’s the question,” I said. “What is your merry band of comrades after? Somehow I’m guessing Proceran interests aren’t why you signed on with this crusade.”

“The Empire crafted a doomsday weapon that would have held all of Calernia hostage to the Tower’s whims,” he mildly said.

“Weapon’s broken,” I said calmly. “So’s the one who made it. You’re still invading.”

“The capacity to create another remains,” he pointed out.

I hummed.

“All right,” I said. “Fine. If that’s all then let’s get this done. Bring your army south, I’ll take the lot of you through Arcadia and bring you out on the outskirts of Ater. You can level the Tower and put to the sword every mage in Praes who has the know-how and inclination to make another Liesse. Hells, ask nicely and I’ll lend a hand.”

He blinked, and the serenity fractured.

“You are not lying,” he said, sounding baffled.

“Pilgrim, you think I approve of any of this shit?” I flatly said. “It’s my people who got bled for that weapon. I signed on with Evil to personally put a knife through the eye of anyone intending to pull this kind of play on Callow, among other things. You want to bring down the Tower on Malicia’s head? After last year, you can be my guest.”

“And your mentor in the Vales?” he pressed.

“Was the one who broke the weapon in the first place,” I said. “Someone’s going to need to settle Praes after the bloodletting, and if you have a better candidate I’m all ears.”

He opened his mouth and I raised my hand to signal he should let me finish.

“I don’t mean forever,” I said. “But if you approach Black with an offer that gives him say... ten years? A solid decade to make Praes into the kind of nation that’ll no longer piss in the continental porridge every generation, before he abdicates, I think you’ll be surprised by the answer you’ll get. Even if heroic supervision is part of the terms.”

His eyes narrowed.

“You genuinely believe this of the Carrion Lord,” he said.

It wasn’t a question. Chalk one up to the man having a truth-telling ability , I thought.

“With all due respect,” I said, “I know him a lot better than you do. If he wanted a crown, he’d be wearing one right now. That’s not what he’s after. And as long as he gets what he wants, everything else is expendable – including personal power.”

“This is... an unexpected offer,” the Pilgrim admitted.

“It’s one I’m willing to swear binding oath over,” I bluntly told him. “The only real question is whether or not you can get Procer to turn around if I do.”

“There are other considerations,” the old man said.

I smiled thinly.

“Like a gaggle of princes wanting to carve Callow into their own little fiefdoms?” I said. “I’m honestly disappointed, Pilgrim. You’re willing to kill your way through Callow so that likes of Amadis fucking Milenan gets his way?”

“I have been courteous to you, child,” the Pilgrim spoke curtly. “A grace that should be returned equally. Has is truly escaped your notice how much of a threat you are?”

“Which of us is invading the other’s country again?” I asked, then bit my tongue.

Losing my temper here would bring no gain.

“I... apologize,” I said through gritted teeth. “Much of this tries my patience.”

He nodded silently, the serenity back on his face.

“You are Queen of Callow,” he said. “You are also a villain.”

“Fucking Hells, am I tired of hearing that,” I replied, anger immediately flaring again. So much for restraint. “I didn’t sign on with the side that tosses around demons out of great sympathy for their philosophy, Pilgrim. I did it because I could not find a single other working alternative. Where was this coalition of yours, twenty years ago? Where were all these upstanding heroes during the Conquest? You don’t get to throw it in my face that I’m an evil when Evil was the only game in town. I may have failed spectacularly, but the other choices were either a doomed rebellion or just lying down and taking it. Callow crowned me because it’s desperate, and it got this desperate because help never came .”

“Simply by being who you are, you darken Creation,” the Grey Pilgrim replied calmly.

My fingers clenched, but he raised his hand to prevent the harsh reply on the tip of my tongue. Courtesy for courtesy, huh. I didn’t like it, but I was willing to bend my neck that far.

“This is not a condemnation, it is a fact,” the old man said. “You rule in Callow. Your story is its story. Already, I suspect, you will have seen the effects of this. Your people becoming warped by your presence, old traits grown more vicious or acute. Whether you realize it or not, you are slowly turning your home towards the Gods Below. If you rule long enough, the Kingdom of Callow will sever its allegiance to Above.”

But if losses must be had, better Proceran than Callowan , Brandon Talbot had said. Giving his approval to the slaughter of thousands. The chance the hero might have a point cooled my temper, but only so much.

“And that justifies killing people who still pray at the House of Light right now?” I replied. “Even assuming you’re right – and I’m taking this with a grain of salt – if all the Heavens have to offer is a slaughter then, honestly, fuck the Heavens.”

“Think, Black Queen,” the Pilgrim grimly said “Beyond your anger and grudges, think . Of what it really means for all of Calernia if a nation as pivotal as Callow turns to Evil. Already, to be a hero is to be the corpse that will hold the dam in the face of the flood. If the Kingdom turns, the fragile balance of this continent breaks. Procer weakens. The Chain of Hunger and the Dead King will tear into its flesh, and when it dies darkness will spread across the land.”

“What I’m getting from this,” I coldly replied, “is that that keeping the Principate propped up – no matter what it does – matters more than the lives of innocents. If that’s the argument your side is making, then you might just be praying in the wrong direction.”

“All of this rests on the fact that it is you who rules,” the old man said.

“And if I abdicate, can you guarantee that Callow will be left untouched?” I asked. “Will you swear on your Gods that if Procer tries to annex it, you will turn your sword on whoever is trying? Or even that you’ll stay out of my way and let me take care of them?”

“I do not rule Procer,” the Grey Pilgrim softly said. “And if I take the field against them, too many would follow. It would birth a war as dangerous as this one, in many ways.”

I smiled bitterly.

“The terms I offered you have so many concessions in them I’d probably have to fight a civil war to enforce them,” I frankly told him. “If even that isn’t enough, then I think we can dispense with the pretence that there was ever anything but conflict on the table.”

“And so now we are enemies, confirmed,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “And you may unleash your arsenal of horrors with peace of mind.”

I shook my head.

“That isn’t the kind of war I’m going to be fighting,” I said. “I’ve been down that road before. If I escalate, so do you. The thing is, you and I, we get to crawl out of those ruins. ‘cause someone Above or Below decided we mattered enough. That courtesy isn’t extended to nearly everyone on Calernia though, is it?”

I scoffed.

“Oh, I won’t pretend I’m not sitting on some nasty stuff. So are you. But even if I used it, even if I won, what would that accomplish? I bleed Procer into a truce, but that truce doesn’t survive me. All that does is kick the next war thirty years down the line. Nothing is solved . I’m tired of seeing Callow turned into the battlefield of Calernia, Pilgrim. So are Callowans.”

“Heed an old man’s advice, Catherine Foundling,” the Pilgrim said tiredly. “The world can only be healed so much.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said. “My teacher dedicated his entire life to breaking this game, but that’s a reflection of his flaw – he can’t conceive a world where he doesn’t win. I’m willing to settle for the lesser prize. What I can’t break, I would regulate .”

“Some might construe such a boast as blasphemy,” the old man said.

“Aren’t you tired of killing kids because they’re sworn to the wrong side?” I asked quietly. “I know I am, and you’ve been at this for a lot longer.”

“There is not a single life I’ve taken I have not regretted,” the Grey Pilgrim sighed. “No matter the deeds to their name. To inflict death is to end the possibility of redemption, and that is the greatest gift the Gods have granted us.”

“It doesn’t need to be like this,” I said. “We’re the dogs in the pit, but what does that ever really accomplish? One bleeds, another dies, and then they release another hound. The pit’s still there even if one side gets a winning streak.”

“Some of those hounds have gone rabid,” the Pilgrim said. “I grieve their deaths, but I will not allow them to bite children.”

“And those should be put down,” I agreed flatly. “But we don’t need wars for that. We just need rules that both sides are willing to enforce.”

“An agreement,” he slowly said. “Such a thing would be without precedent. And there are many who would balk.”

“Every single Named is a highly dangerous weapon, in their own way,” I said. “Any unwilling to accept constraints placed on their actions have no business wielding that kind of power in the first place. And before you ask, I do not exclude myself or any ally of mine from that statement.”

He studied me silently.

“For such a thing to hold, there would be need for trust where none exists,” he said.

“Then we begin with something smaller,” I said. “Rules of engagement, for your host and mine. Would you be able to enforce these?”

“Within limits,” he said. “I am not without influence and the Saint’s reputation has its uses.”

“If you don’t sack cities, neither will I,” I offered.

He nodded.

“Agreed,” he said. “Innocents should not be made to suffer. You must refrain from using demons.”

“I’ll swear to that, if you refrain from calling on angels,” I said.

He frowned.

“The nature of those interventions is different,” he said. “The Choirs are not a blight, their purpose is to aid in the rectification of wrongs.”

“There kind of r ectification they would have offered at Liesse when the Lone Swordsman reached for Contrition was a wrong itself,” I flatly told him. “It was ugly as the things the Empire pulls. And that’s besides the point, anyway: if you use something of that scale, then I have to deploy an equivalent or you’re just going to walk right through us.”

“The Choirs have been known to extend hand when defeat looms,” the Pilgrim told me. “There is difference between call and offer.”

“You think your side’s the only one afraid of dying?” I said. “Calling demons is probably the single worst thing a person can do, objectively speaking, but it feels a lot more acceptable when the alternative is getting stabbed in the throat. We can’t prevent escalation if your bargaining position is that we fold but you don’t.”

The old man stayed silent for a long while.

“I will concede,” he finally said, “if you swear away devils as well.”

No great loss for me there. I’d never approved of using those either.

“Done,” I grunted. “As a gesture of goodwill, I’ll add a warning. There’s a demon from Dread Empress Triumphant’s day bound somewhere in the vicinity of Harrow. My people believe it might be one of Absence.”

“A Hell Egg, after all these years?” he said, brow rising. “I thought none remained within Callow.”

“Would that this were true,” I ruefully said. “I don’t know exactly where it is, or what keeps it bound. Odds are it’s an old Legion standard but I can’t guarantee it.”

He inclined his head in thanks.

“I will discuss this with the others,” the Pilgrim said. “If we can slay it, we will.”

“So long as you keep the fight contained ,” I sharply said. “If a chunk of the north suddenly no longer exists, I’ll consider that a breach of terms.”

“If have fought their like before,” the old man said. “It is ugly strife, but there are ways about it.”

I didn’t like the risks involved in this, but then I wasn’t all that happy about that unlit sharper staying buried near Harrow either. If they could kill it without making a mess I wasn’t going to complain. If.

“I want prisoners well treated, even Praesi and greenskins,” I said. “Neither beaten, tortured nor otherwise harmed. I’ll extend the same treatment to anyone I capture. I’m also willing to arrange regular prisoner exchanges when the campaign allows.”

“There are evils I have been forced to make peace with,” the Pilgrim said with iron in his voice. “Torture is not one of them. You may be certain I will allow no such thing so long as I draw breath. The matter of exchanges, however, will have to be discussed with the Princess of Aequitan. Answer will be given before battle.”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure Malanza would bite but it was worth a try. Morality aside, I needed my officers much more badly than she did hers. If she cottoned on to that she might just decide to sit on them. On the other hand, the Procerans tended to make officers of their relatives. They might want the assurance of being traded back if they got captured. We’d see.

“No killing of anyone offering surrender,” I proposed.

“So long as that surrender is genuine, and no attempt at treachery is made,” he countered.

I grimaced but nodded. Fair enough. I’d need to ride my sappers hard about the treachery clause in case they ever got captured. They did like to offer ‘surrender’ in time for the enemy to walk into a field of buried munitions.

“Those are the terms I have to offer, at the moment,” I said. “Unless you have anything to add?”

“No,” he said, after a moment. “This will serve.”

He sighed.

“You are right, you know,” he said quietly.

I had a few pithy responses to offer, but I kept my mouth shut. And to think they said I couldn’t do diplomacy.

“It is shameful, that Callow was left under occupation for so long,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “That we only ride to relieve in in fear of what your coronation represents.”

Limpid blue eyes looked up at the morning sky.

“This does not absolve you,” he said. “But there is truth in what you say. We stand burdened with the guilt of inaction. For that alone, I grieve that it must come to blood. You are the sin of our indolence returned to haunt us.”

“I don’t want to fight you at all,” I said. “But I will not bend my neck to the kind of ending you peddle.”

He sighed.

“We will try to slay you, on the field,” he said. “Even I. Much suffering can be avoided by your death, however tragic that ending.”

“Suffering is the nature of human condition,” I said. “We are what we do with that. I choose to give it a purpose.”

“It does not sound,” he gently said, “like I am the one you are trying to convince.”

“None of that, now,” I said, wagging my finger. “You want to fight for a side that’s not exactly driven snow? Fine. Disappointing, but that’s the world we live in. But you don’t get to pull the grandfatherly act afterwards.”

He smiled sadly.

“Am I not allowed to grieve the sight of a child who mutilated her own soul trying to make a better world?” he asked.

I flinched. That struck closer to home than I would have liked.

“I am my mistakes too,” I said. “Not just my victories. And I knew going in that power comes at a cost. No one gets to eat the first course then balk at the bill. Grieve all you want, but someone recently told me that grief without corresponding action is meaningless. That applies to both sides of the fence, I’d think.”

“All your plans,” he said. “They are dust, if you do not survive to attempt them. All that would be left is the costs.”

“Isn’t that always how it is?” I tiredly replied. “There’s a reason it goes ‘change the world or die trying ’.”

And on that cheerful note my first talk with the opposition concluded.

Court I

“Ruling is to promise a man a boat and his brother the river while owning neither.”
– Kind Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

“This Liessen business is fucking unacceptable, Brandon,” the woman said, fist pounding the table.

Grandmaster Brandon Talbot of the Order of Broken Bells, arguably the second most influential officer in the Army of Callow after the Marshal herself, hid his displeasure with the ease of long practice. Though he understood Lady Julienne’s outrage, and indeed shared it himself, theatrics such as these would get them absolutely nowhere.

“This reeks of Kendall’s doing,” Samuel Farron said. “She’s been gathering the malcontents under her banner, and now she’ll get an entire duchy to hand out piecemeal.”

The man was the oldest among them, and though his grandfather had been only a baron in the days before the Conquest he was perhaps the most influential of the Regals – who boasted men and women of greater lines, not the least Brandon himself. What his line had lost in title, they had reclaimed in wealth and alliances. This did nothing to make him any more likeable, no matter how useful he might be: Samuel Farron had learned the unfortunate lesson that he was always right, and grew indignant whenever Creation had the gall to disagree with that state of affairs.

“Chewing off Brandon’s ear gets us nowhere, my friends,” Valerie Hadley calmly intervened. “You have all read the proposed arrangements. I suspect this comes from higher up than the Governess-General.”

The unspoken shadow of the queen brought silence, however short, and Brandon nodded his thanks at the woman who had just spoken. House Hadley had been middling retainers to the Marquesses of Vale once, little more than jumped up landed knights, but of all the Regals it was Valerie Hadley that Brandon most enjoyed working with. The calm competence married to stark humility was refreshing, considering some of the egos he must corral. Her seat in this council of the greatest of the Regals came more because she was the only person of note from Vale to have joined them than because of her skills, unfortunately. Something Farron was not above reminding her of whenever they disagreed, which was frequently.

“The queen’s not used to thinking in terms of land,” Samuel replied flatly. “She was a damned penniless orphan for most her life. This is Anne Kendall trying to fuck us, and anyone who’s not a fool can see it.”

“Clearly I am a fool, then,” Hadley said. “For the fact that land grants would in large part go to retiring legionaries does not strike as a ploy of the Queen’s Men.”

“Greenskin and Praesi owning Callowan land, this is what the court had simmering,” Lady Julienne sharply said. “I held my tongue when the queen settled goblins in Marchford, Brandon, because it is her demesne and you raised no objection. But this? This goes too far.”

I held my tongue because objecting would have served no purpose but irritating Her Majesty , Brandon thought. And because the Snake Eater Tribe brought us both badly needed coin and a workforce capable of making siege weapons without relying on the Tower’s charity. Neither thought had it made it more palatable that lands by House Talbot for over five hundred years were now infested with skulking vermin, but the Grandmaster had learned early that the queen’s tolerance for protest only stretched so far.

“Lodging protest through the court is not possible,” Brandon sighed.

None of them were supposed to have even seen the proposal they were now discussing, though a concerned citizen had written a copy from memory and sent it to them. Someone would be sent to the gallows before the day was done, if Catherine Foundling believed her own court was leaking documents under seal.

“We can express our displeasure through intermediaries,” Samuel Farron said. “Nothing touching us directly.”

“If we do we’ll be swimming in Jacks before the next bell,” Lady Julienne grunted. “I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of finding my good bottles open and my papers slightly askew.”

Brandon grimaced. He had already expressed to Lady Thief his misgivings about these little reminders to the Regals that they were being watched, but the Named had only been amused. It’s good for fine folk such as you to be reminded about the consequences of wickedness , she’d said. His favourite hunting knife had disappeared the same night, though Lord Deadhand had later returned it with a seemingly sincere apology.

“We can’t do nothing , Julienne,” Farron barked. “I will not watch silently as Callow is handed away piece by piece to foreigners and toadies.”

“He’s right,” Valerie Hadley reluctantly said. “Her Majesty’s open favour already emboldens the Queen’s Men. If we stay our hand on so large a matter, we will suffer defections.”

“Favoured or not, the queen has been... pragmatic on the issue of Baroness Kendall’s supporters,” Brandon reminded them. “One of ours leads the city guard in Summerholm, and we hold the docks in Southpool. My attempts to broach the matter of the governorship in Denier have not been rebuffed, either. I question the wisdom of surrendering a gain so close to our hand for what promises to be a losing battle.”

“So she hasn’t outright handed the keys to the kingdom to some southern collaborator,” Lady Julienne snorted. “Must we must praise Her Majesty for this? She’s still having her Taghreb dig into our coffers.”

Considering none but Brandon at this table was not a landowner of more than comfortable means, the Bastard Lord’s property taxes had gotten stuck in the throat of most Regals. That the baronies in the north had been spared the sword by virtue of still being true nobles had only added insult to injury. It’d been bad enough there had been talk of arranging the Taghreb’s disappearance, but Brandon had been uncompromising in squashing such scheming. Her Majesty was viciously protective of any she considered friends, and striking at a man who’d followed her since her early days as the Squire was a recipe for every Regal in Callow swinging from a noose. And that was assuming the mood did not take her to make another example, as she had of the sorcerers sworn to the Diabolist. Brandon had ridden down the Road of Woe, before they took the corpses down. He still shivered at the memory of bloodied corpses propped up as milestones as far as the eye could see. None of the other Regals had been on the Arcadian Campaign, or Second Liesse. They did not know the kind of monstrosity the queen was willing to unleash when she believed herself threated.

“She’s shutting us out of the army too,” Samuel Farron growled. “I’m getting tired of having fine officers refused by a fucking greenskin .”

“We cannot try to force that,” Hadley said. “You should know this by now, Samuel. I’m not happy nearly all the senior officers are former Legion either, but she won the throne with the Fifteenth at her back. If we try to wedge ourselves into that, we chance Her Majesty seeing it as an attack.”

“A certain level of intrigue will be tolerated, that much has been made clear,” Brandon said. “But let it always remain polite and lawful. Let us not forget the ending of that... ill-considered attempt to bribe the Lord Treasurer.”

The queen’s mercy in that matter had almost been cruel, he thought. The fines had ruined the eldermen financially and the mark of the throne’s wroth had ensured they would never hold a position of influence ever again. Considering the rising influence of officials in Laure, having been kicked off the boat just as the tide began to lift it must have stung even worse than the gallows.

“Petty Laure officials,” Farron scoffed. “Mudfoots with no sophistication. That game is played with favours, not coin. We just need to find out what the orc is truly after and she’ll bargain like everyone else.”

Brandon Talbot had campaigned with Marshal Juniper twice now, and he suspected on most days what the Hellhound desired most was Samuel Farron’s guts on her plate. It was not worth the expense of his influence to try to end an initiative that might yield some success, however. Down the line it could be suggested to the queen that reverses in other matters might be reconciled by some... strategic appointments in the Army of Callow. Having candidates already on the record would only strengthen their position. Already Brandon’s freedom to do as he saw fit with the Broken Bells had been expanded greatly, so it was not a matter without precedent.

“We’re certain that Her Majesty raising a new Duke of Liesse is out of question?” Hadley pressed. “I know inquiries were made, but we never petitioned the court.”

The queen had to be talked out of striking down the titles to the northern baronies , Brandon thought. No duchy will be raised in her lifetime, my friend. That one is a lost cause.

“Given the involvement of Lord Adjutant’s new offices with the refugees, I suspect it would come too close to curtailing the crown’s power to be even seriously considered,” Talbot admitted. “And while I share your disdain for this notion of turning the entire Duchy of Liesse into freeholds, we must admit that the region had been well taken in hand.”

Grain, tents and clothes had begun flowing south within hours of the queen’s coronation. The Deadhand was nothing if not efficient, that much must be conceded. That about nine in ten refugees had so far survived winter in the face of cold and starvation was nearly miraculous. Even if that miracle had been woven from Praesi gold.

“They screwed Old Darlington out of making a killing with his wool, too,” Lady Julienne smiled coldly. “Always a pleasure to see we are not lowest in the queen’s esteem.”

“There is only so much distinction between bottom-feeders,” Valerie Hadley said. “We have shown restraint, Brandon, but our gains remain limited. I am not fool enough to talk rebellion, but something must be done.”

There was a thread of frustration in the woman’s voice, and the Grandmaster sympathized. He felt it too. Yet he also knew that what they considered stewardship of Callow earned by right and blood was seen by Her Majesty as infuriating arrogance. Now that peace had returned, however fleeting, the queen had ceased putting the heads of all opposition on pikes. Farron and Lady Julienne saw this as their ruler softening, but Brandon knew better. The Queen of Callow was trying to outgrow the savage teachings of her eastern mentors and return Callow to what it should be, but all she did she did with an eye on the looming war with Procer. Disagreement would be tolerated, but anything construed as obstructionism would see the blades come out.

“We are only worth appeasing so long as we are more useful than troublesome, my friends,” Brandon quietly said. “We should all remember that, before raising our voices too loud. Catherine Foundling is not a Fairfax. She will not balk at sending the Jacks to abduct us in the middle of the night, if she deems it necessary.”

“Then she shouldn’t be-“ Farron began, but Hadley smacker her palm against the table.

“Let us not drift too far from the subject at hand,” the woman said. “Brandon, by your continuing calm I take it you have a notion as to how we should proceed?”

“Tolerance continues so long as we remain within set bounds,” Brandon said. “Let us wok within these bounds, then. Anne Kendall is no friend of ours, but there is one that stands above even the Queen’s Council. One who takes no sides.”

The others watched him with considering eyes.

“I will talk,” Brandon Talbot said, “with Hakram Deadhand.”

—

There were too few hours in a day. Hakram had, on one of those rare instances where Archer managed to drag Masego away from supervising he building of the Observatory, asked Hierophant if it was feasible to work in Arcadia to get around the span of time. He’d said yes, then added so many qualifiers to that agreement the conversation became unintelligible. Unfortunate. Instead he’d gotten to explore the limits of how little sleep he could live on before becoming sloppy. The orc poured himself a cup of aragh and shuffled through the piles on parchment on his oaken desk.

“Drinking on the job, Hakram?” Ratface teased. “How irresponsible of you.”

The orc growled, not that it scared the fucking Taghreb. The former quartermaster had not become any less of a pest now that some Callowan honorary address had been tacked on to his name.

“Can’t drink with Catherine anymore,” he admitted. “I’m trying to wean her off.”

Amusement slid off the Lord Treasurer’s face.

“I know she’s traded wine for liquor since Liesse, but I was under the impression Named couldn’t get drunk unless they wanted to,” the man said.

“Her body’s all fucked,” Hakram said. “The warlock’s get wants to write a treatise about it, which should tell you everything. I think it takes the edge off Winter, though. And there’s not much else that accomplishes that.”

“We never talked about what went down in the city,” Ratface slowly said. “But what bits I dug up hint it was... bad.”

“Malicia crossed a line,” Hakram said. “And the Black Knight broke her trust. The second of those cut a lot deeper.”

“There is an old story, I believe, about scorpions and trust,” Ratface murmured.

More than one, as it happened. The one they told in Callow was charmingly moral, a warning about men’s nature and how they followed it even at their own expense. The Praesi tale was not a warning but a lesson: the scorpion swam to the shore, after stinging the frog. Never assume weakness, never trust anyone with your back. Like most Praesi stories it idolized cleverness and treachery without addressing the inherent stupidity of killing someone willing to help you.

“We’ve all had mentors,” Hakram said. “Smart doesn’t come into it.”

“Let us hope Procer ties up that loose end, then,” the Taghreb said. “We cannot afford to be stung twice.”

The orc drank from the cup, savouring the muted burn down his throat, and rolled his shoulders.

“All right, spit it out,” Adjutant said. “What are you after, Lord Treasurer?”

The olive-skinned man cast a dubious glance at the sheaths of parchment and opened scrolls that covered nearly every surface of Hakram’s solar.

“If I asked you for a report, would you even be able to find it?” he snorted.

“Finding’s a specialty of mine,” the orc replied with a fanged grin. “Now spare me the dancing around.”

The Taghreb sighed.

“This cannot be put to ink,” he said.

Hakram’s hairless brows rose. The Jacks were being forced to keep much off parchment out of fear of Imperial infiltration – particularly Vivienne’s people since there was a decent choice the Eyes didn’t know who those were, unlike most their other spies – but Ratface did not often bring anything off the record.

“Your guildsmen or the friends in low places?” Adjutant asked.

Ratface shook his head.

“I had drinks with Pickler, a few nights ago,” he said.

The orc’s chin lowered, a hint of fangs revealed. With the Fifteenth being folded into the Army of Callow he hadn’t seen much of the old crew lately, since the Hellhound was running them ragged. Pickler had it worst than most, trying to form a halfway decent expanded sapper corps out of Marchford goblins who’d never set foot at the College. That had seen her journeying back and forth to the settlement the Snake Eater Tribe had founded in Marchford, out of the tunnels the giant devil snake Catherine killed had dug. The rent the tribe offered had been badly needed income and goblin manpower was a balm now that the Empress had ended their recruiting rights in Praes – and therefore both the Steppes and the Eyries. They were a complication as well, though. Even on their best behaviour goblins tended to piss off humans, which was the last thing Callow needed at the moment, but there had also been... larger implications. The tribe currently had no proper Matron. It was ruled by a pack of matron-attendants until that could be settled, but if there was anyone out there who made Praesi looking like amateur dabblers at backstabbing it was female goblins. There was a reason for the lack of Matron, as he understood it.

Pickler’s mother, the Matron of the High Ridge Tribe, intended for her daughter to retire from the Legions and lead the only goblin tribe living outside of the Grey Eyries.

Hakram suspected the amount of murder and backroom dealing that must have gone on for other Matrons to accept that was horrifying. Pickler had an edge over any candidate, admittedly, because of her close working relationship to the highest reaches of Callow. No other goblin would get half as much sufferance from Catherine. On the other hand, the Senior Sapper had run away to the War College exactly to be spared this kind of position. What Adjutant knew of goblin politics was sparse, mostly cobbled together form bitter comments Robber made when in his cups, but he’d gathered that Pickler was essentially the goblin equivalent of a High Lady’s daughter. If she’d stayed with High Ridge she’d be a matron-attendant by now, murdering her fellows in preparation for succeeding her mother. Apparently Matron Wither had decided to secure a tribe for her eldest daughter no matter how far she ran away. You could run from honours, but you couldn’t run from blood. All orcs knew that, true as they knew their own breath.

“If they try to force her retirement just before a crusade there’s going to be blood,” Hakram grimly said.

“If that were the angle, I’d be less worried,” Ratface murmured. “She was dragged into a meeting with the matron-attendants, where she was interrogated about Cat’s intentions for the Empire if she ends up on top when the dust settles.”

Hakram’s breath caught. Did they know about the Accords? They’d just begun drafting them, it shouldn’t be possible. If the Matrons knew then the Dread Empress might, and if Malicia learned about those...

“Some people might consider that treason,” the orc said.

The Taghreb met his eyes squarely.

“I know her too, Hakram,” he said. “She doesn’t forgive things like Liesse. The Empress didn’t make that doomsday weapon, but it doesn’t take a High Lord to figure out she made a grab for it. There’s a reason the Black Knight hasn’t set foot in Praes since the battle.”

There was much more to that than his old friend knew, but that was not knowledge to idly spread around.

“They’re smelling weakness,” the orc gravelled. “With the Carrion Lord estranged and Callow garrisoning borders, they think the Empress is on the way out.”

“No deal was offered,” Ratface cautioned. “People who underestimate Her Dread Majesty tend to turn up dead and the Matrons didn’t last this long by being reckless. They’re opportunists at heart.”

“She hates them, Ratface,” Hakram bluntly said. “She’s fine with goblins, but the Matrons everything she despises about highborn incarnate. And I agree with her, frankly. They’re snakes, and they’ll bite us just as surely as they will the Empress if it gets them what they want.”

“I am Taghreb,” Ratface smiled coldly. “Bastard, but still Taghreb. We know the Matrons better than any of you, the dangers of getting into bed with them. But we don’t have to get into bed with them. We just have to promise to stay out of it.”

The orc grit his teeth.

“There’s already too many moving parts in the Tenth Crusade,” he finally said. “A goblin rebellion on top of it is tossing a sharper into the fire.”

“Think on it,” Ratface said. “Talk to her. But we can’t dally for too long, if we’re making overtures.”

The Taghreb rose to his feet.

“A sharper’s only ever trouble if you’re the one it’s tossed at,” the Lord Treasurer said quietly.

Hakram grimaced. Ratface had never taken sapper courses, so he might not know that one sharper in twenty blew before ever making it into Imperial supply stores.

Adjutant did, and he thought the metaphor more apt for it.

Interlude: Crusaders

“There is no absolute virtue to peace. To avoid war out of petty fear is the exact same moral failure as waging war in name of it.”
– Clément Merovins, fourth First Prince of Procer

“They’re up to something,” Princess Rozala of Aequitan said.

She had, that very morning, received a second report on enemy movements that baffled her. Unlike Amadis, who already saw their victory as writ in the sky and was positioning to benefit from the aftermath, the only daughter of Aenor of Aequitan had made deep study of their enemy. Oh, the Prince of Iserre was not a fool. Ambitious beyond reason, perhaps, but no imbecile. He’d be much easier to deal with if he were. Yet he only ever saw war as the pursuit of political advantage through steel, and that blinded him to the nature of the foe before them. Rozala was an Arlesite of ancient line, and her kind were as distinguished with the sword as they were with verse. Her people had fought and fought well in almost every major war since the founding of the Principate, and the Malanzas had been famed as generals long before they rose to royalty. Which was why this ‘Army of Callow’ worried her. The Legions of Terror, in their current incarnation, were admittedly one of the finest military machines on Calernia – second in lethality perhaps only to the army of Helike, though much more numerous. Yet that was not what she was facing: more than half the Army of Callow was foot from that same kingdom, and more worryingly under the Black Queen’s banner rode knight s.

Prince Papenheim had taught her mother a bloody lesson in the dangers of engaging heavy cavalry with light, at the Battle of Aisne. Rozala had no intention of repeating the mistakes that forced Aenor of Aequitan to drink mandrake extract. She had seen the aftermath of the Regal Kindness, and it was neither of those things.

“Praesi are known to have a certain low cunning,” Prince Arnaud of Cantal mused. “No doubt they’ve some sort of parlour trick in the works.”

Rozala eyed the middle-aged man with open distaste. The man was the living justification of every prejudice about Alamans arrogance, and she would have disliked him for that even if her agents had not learned about his... proclivities. She was no Lycaonese prude, but someone taking a knife to that man’s cock would have been a boon to Creation.

“We underestimate the Empire at our own risk,” Princess Adeline of Orne sharply replied.

Rozala inclined her head in thanks and the other young woman offered the ghost of a smile in return. Adeline had already hinted that she was not so securely under Amadis’ thumb as the prince seemed to believe, through subtle intermediaries. Of all the royals to have crossed the Stairway, the Princess of Aequitan was fondest of this one. Adeline had ruled Orne for less than a year now, ascending to the throne after the assassination of her brother at the hands of what was speculated to be the Assassin himself. The princess understood the dangers of tangling with the Tower better than most. She also despised the First Prince to the bone. The Augur had, after all, not seen fit to give warning about her beloved brother’s coming death. Cordelia Hasenbach, they were learning, could kill simply by staying silent.

“It is unseemly for women of your standing to quake at the coming of the Carrion Lord’s bastard,” Prince Arnaud sneered.

Rozala’s lips thinned. There were persistent rumours that the Black Queen was the villain’s illegitimate daughter, though she put no more stock in those than the speculation she was some distant Fairfax spared after the Conquest and reared in secret over the decades that followed.

“It is unseemly for a ‘man’ of your standing to be such a relentless jackass, Arnaud,” Princess Adeline replied with a lightness that belied the anger beneath it. “But you don’t hear us snipe about it, do you?”

Rozala sighed almost inaudibly. The Princess of Orne needed to learn to leash her temper, else they would eat her alive in the Highest Assembly. An ally this easy to bait was more liability than grace. She would have intervened to soothe the tempers, but Amadis finally decided to grace them with his presence. He was not, she saw, alone. The kindly wizened face of the Grey Pilgrim was a welcome addition to this council, but the other silhouette flanking the Prince of Iserre was not. Laurence de Montfort was short and skinny, for so infamous a woman, and her creased cheeks were showing the mottled spots of creeping age. They did nothing to detract from the austere presence of the Saint of Swords. The Princess of Aequitan stiffened, though she forced her shoulders to loosen before anyone could notice. Not royalty could ever be comfortable in the presence of the Regicide.

“I do hope my lateness caused no offence,” Amadis Milenan affably smiled. “It occurred to me that an infusion of wisdom to this council would benefit us all, hence my company.”

The smile was a little too broad, Rozala decided, to be entirely truthful. Had the heroes strong-armed him into inviting them along? They had certainly begun wielding their influence more strongly since the crossing. For all that the Saint was the one who brought sharp discomfort, it had been the Grey Pilgrim that brought terms back from the failed attempt at diplomacy in the south. The man was much more influential than his easy manners suggested.

“We are honoured to be offered seat at his table,” the Pilgrim smiled, inclining his head.

“Honoured, yes,” the Saint drawled, a hard smile splitting her face.

The Regicide had been exceedingly clear about her low esteem for royalty as a whole, which cast interesting light to the rumours she’d once been the lover of Klaus Papenheim. It would take someone with stomach as steady as the Iron Prince’s to bed that one, Rozala silently conceded. For all they knew all there was down there was more swords, though for a Lycaonese that might just be spice in the wine.

“No offence at all,” Prince Arnaud smiled brightly. “We always welcome the advice of those Chosen by the Heavens.”

Rozala hid her derisive snort behind a sip of wine as the heroes and their glorious leader took their seats.

“Princess Rozala was expressing worries about Praesi scheming,” Princess Adeline spoke up.

More to break the heavy silence than anything else, the ruler of Aequitan suspected. She did not grudge her the distraction.

“Ah,” the Grey Pilgrim smiled gently. “Always a subject worthy of interest, yet I would caution you that it is not Praesi we face. It would be a mistake, Your Graces, to believe the army to the south anything but Callowan.”

Rozala disliked the notion of taking military advice from priestly vagrant, however high his repute, but the circumstances warranted prudence. It was a villain that led the Army of Callow, and she knew little of their breed compared to the old man.

“Callowan she may be, but her throne was built on sand,” Amadis languidly added. “Her grasp on the kingdom remains shallow. Duchess Kegan Iarsmai has already replied to my envoys.”

Rozala hid her surprise. For all of Amadis’ swagger, she’d fully expected the House of Iarsmai to remain aloof from the crusade until a clear winner could be discerned. The Prince of Iserre’s smile broadened as he looked at her, the unspoken gloating ringing loud.

“Though she will not declare for us openly at the moment, she was willing to send a detachment of the Watch to join our forces,” Amadis revealed. “They’ve already begun to sail across the Silver Lake, and I expect they will swell our ranks in time for battle.”

The Arlesite princess frowned, displeased she’d been cut out of negotiations involving military matters.

“And how many of the Watch did she pledge?” she asked.

“A full thousand,” Amadis said. “Easily worth thrice that number, if the old histories are to be believed.”

And what did you have to promise that Deoraithe fox to get them, I wonder ? Rozala thought. Amadis Milenan had been rather generous of late in partitioning the kingdom he expected her to conquer for him.

“You really should have been smacked more often as a child, Amadis,” the Saint of Swords idly said. “Gods know a few bruises would have done wonders for your character.”

The silence in the tent was so absolute it was nearly palpable. Rozala smothered a very unseemly grin.

“Pardon?” the Prince of Iserre coldly said.

“You heard me just fine, you repulsive little wart,” Laurence de Montfort said. “Kegan Iarsmai fought a campaign with the Black Queen less than a year ago and you think that, what? Your viper tongue befuddled a Duchess of Daoine ? That house was putting Praesi heads on pikes back when your ancestors were shitting in their own huts. She’s playing you like a spectacularly dim fiddle.”

Amadis Milenan’s face purpled with fury. It was unlikely, Rozala mused with dark delight, that anyone had insulted him this bluntly even once in his life. The Grey Pilgrim cleared his throat.

“Laurence,” he reproached.

The Saint of Swords sighed.

“Fine,” she said. “The honourable Prince of Iserre is displaying the intellectual faculties of an averagely dim fiddle.”

The Grey Pilgrim looked pained.

“What my blunt-spoken friend means, Your Grace,” he intervened, “is that Catherine Foundling belongs to a very specific breed of villainy. The nature of her Bestowal is what my people call a thresher . One who separates the wheat from the chaff. She will earn great enmity, but also great loyalty. And she has fought by the side of Duchess Kegan before, against common foe.”

Rozala was honest enough to admit that watching the Prince of Iserre having to swallow his cold fury to avoid beginning a feud with heroes was making her evening. Perhaps even her month.

“The Duchess bargained well,” the prince stiffly said. “And extracted great concessions in rights and territory. The Queen of Callow has naught to offer of equivalent value.”

So, land had been sold. Rozala wondered how far he’d gone. Had Laure been offered up? Denieralmost certainly, it was the old dagger the Fairfaxes had kept pointed at Daoine’s belly in case the Deoraithe began talking of independence again. The Princess of Aequitan quietly cleared her throat, gaining everyone’d attention.

“I’ll be blunt,” she said. “The Black Queen should scare everyone in this tent. She has displayed surprising restraint so far, but this is the same woman who crucified a few hundred mages after the Doom to make a point. We are cornering her, and she has a reputation for baring her fangs when cornered.”

Rozala sipped at her wine, drawing out her point in a reminder that in matters military it was her word that counted most.

“We marched out believing she’d come after the first bait we set out,” she continued. “The failure of the trap at Harrow makes it very clear we were wrong in our assessment. And that is without considering she not only knew about the overtures to Baron Darlington, but turned that debacle into an offer of her own. I expected she scares the Duchess a lot more than we do, at the moment. Any contribution from her is suspect.”

I’m not going to let you forget the Darlington failure any time soon, Amadis , she thought, smiling at the Prince of Iserre. So much for the north rising up behind the Black Queen.

“Making terms with the Enemy is always a fucking blunder,” the Saint of Swords said. “Mark my words, the moment she feels the noose tightening the usual horrors are coming out. You should have smoked her then and there.”

“She spoke truth, Laurence,” the Grey Pilgrim stated, and there was iron beneath the mildness. “Do not gainsay me on this. I find it deeply shameful that any of us would hesitate at an opportunity to lessen the bloodbath, no matter the provenance.”

“You’ve always been soft, Tariq,” the Saint said. “The only thing I agree on with this band of clucking hens is that the east is in need of a good cleansing. The rot will only spread if we spare the flame. We go in half-hearted, and you know we’ll have to come back in twenty years. Assuming we’re still around.”

Something pale and cold roiled in the Grey Pilgrim’s eyes. Rozala felt the taste of a storm against the roof of her mouth. It unsettled her enough she spared no irritation for having been called a hen.

“You should know better,” the hero quietly said, “than to question how far I will go to spare this world pain. You, of all people.”

The old woman looked uncomfortable, then chastised. Rozala’s eyes sharpened with interest. Of all the Named gathered under the banner of her army, these two were known to be first among equals. That they would quarrel at all had interesting implications. Until now, the politics of the heroes had been utterly opaque to her save for the fact that the other Levantines took the Pilgrim’s words as sacred writ. All of the Named had resisted attempts to induce them into a deeper relationship so far, but if this rift before her was exploitable there were... possibilities to keep in mind. Known ties to a Chosen would silence her brother’s ambitions for good, no matter his schemes.

“Apologies,” the Saint finally said. “You know my temper.”

“Like a bear with a bad tooth,” the Pilgrim fondly said, patting her hand. “Already forgotten. We are all worried about the young ones in the south.”

Princess Adeline cleared her throat daintily.

“Apologies, Chosen,” she said. “But if I may ask, are you speaking of the heroes marching for the Vales?”

“I was under the impression the remaining Calamities were expected to fold,” Rozala added warily.

If the Red Flower Vales held, their position up north became exceedingly precarious. Their supply lines would be effectively impossible to maintain as soon as they passed Hedges, and the First Prince had indicated she would be displeased if the crusaders turned to foraging in Callow. The Arlesite princess wasn’t going to starve her army out of fear of offending Hasenbach, but she’d also rather avoid kicking that nest of wasps for a while still.

“In matters of might, the Carrion Lord is outmatched,” the Pilgrim agreed. “So, we suspect, is the Warlock.”

The Saint snorted inelegantly.

“The Witch is from Brocelian Forest,” she said. “What she learned, she learned from the Gigantes. And that lot ruled the roost while the Praesi were still busy figuring what cocks are for. She’ll pulp his ass across the valley floor, if they go spell for spell.”

“Young Hanno has already fought the Black Knight once,” the Pilgrim smiled. “He will not repeat previous mistakes. Yet the opponents are villains grown old, and this is a rare thing for a reason. It will not be an easy victory.”

“The man is one of Ranger’s toys,” the Saint conceded. “And that ornery old bitch plays rough. He won’t go down without making a mess.”

The Levantine flicked an amused glance at his companion, but did not comment.

“We thank you for your guidance,” Prince Amadis said calmly. “Yet I fear we have strayed from the purpose of this council. Princess Malanza was expressing worries, I believe?”

Rozala nodded.

“It’s clear that the Black Queen is expecting to give battle on the outskirts of the Barony of Hedges,” she said. “But I’ve been getting reports of her splitting up her host, and that honestly baffles me. We outnumber her by more than two to one. She should be the one attempting defeat in detail, not the one offering me that opportunity on a silver platter.”

“She is barely more than a child,” Prince Arnaud shrugged. “Blunders are to be expected.”

And there went the only Alamans royalty in the tent, breaking his silence to offer idiocy.

“She’s a girl that never lost a battle,” Prince Amadis warned. “In matters of statecraft poor judgement is to be expected, but she is not unskilled at war.”

“She could have gotten arrogant,” Rozala admitted. “It’s not uncommon in undefeated commanders, and that she was confident enough to offer limiting rules of engagement when so heavily outnumbered is telling. But I imagine the Exiled Prince and the Summer Court told themselves much the same right before she ripped out their guts.”

“Though her nature is undeniably warped,” the Grey Pilgrim said, “she struck me as remarkably clear-sighted in some regards. Not a woman prone to blind mistakes.”

“There’s a whole city of dead Callowans that begs to disagree,” the Saint drawled.

“It is not only the children of the Heavens that can learn from their mistakes,” the Pilgrim chided her. “She will be wary of being burned in that manner again.”

“Perhaps she intends to gather her forces through the fairy gates,” Princess Adeline suggested.

“We know there’s a delay for journeying through Arcadia,” Rozala replied, shaking her head. “And she can only take one host at a time. There are three columns marching towards us. Even if she timed it perfectly, she’d still have a third of her army in the wrong place when the battle begins. Which, to put it bluntly, she cannot afford if she wants even a shadow of a chance of winning.”

“We know the Wild Hunt is sworn to her,” Prince Arnaud said. “Perhaps she can make multiple gates.”

“I can’t dismiss that possibility out of hand,” the Princess of Aequitan agreed. “But that still begs the question of why she’d split her forces in the first place. She has to know we’ll be expecting gates to appear at our flanks and back when we engage. There would be no element of surprise, and that is half the advantage to be had with them. And if our foot moves quickly enough towards the gates, we could even keep her penned inside Arcadia. It is risking disaster for no gain I can discern.”

“That is worrying,” the Grey Pilgrim admitted. “I must see to the children, Your Graces, but I will seek guidance from Above on the matter. Perhaps a meaning to this can be divined.”

Rozala hid her surprise. She’d been under the impression that future-telling was rare even among heroes, and often too vague to be of any practical use. The Augur was rumoured to be speaking in tongues half the time, and that Hasenbach was constantly struggling to turn her attention to threats instead of weather patterns. If the Grey Pilgrim could truly discern the workings of Fate, however, this was major advantage. It was irritating that such a thing would only now be revealed, but then Rozala was hardly in a position to chide the man for it.

“We will look forward to hearing your wisdom, Chosen,” the Princess of Aequitan said.

The man rose, and bowed deep. He cast a look at the Saint, who smiled but shook her head. Rozala schooled her face into calm. She had an inkling that what would follow would not be pleasant. Silence followed in the wake of the departing Pilgrim, until the Saint of Swords sighed.

“He’s a good man, you know,” Laurence de Montfort said. “Likes to see the best in people.”

“A-“ Prince Arnaud began, but he was interrupted.

The Saint raked her fingers across the table, leaving deep gouges in the wood that no mortal fingers could have made. The sound was deafening, an ugly grind of steel.

“Shut the fuck up, you insignificant toady,” the Saint said. “Now, Tariq chooses to believe in your moral fibre but I know better. I know the wickedness that you crave, that sweet whisper of earthly power. There are some among you, even now, that believe holy war can be made tool of ambition.”

The old woman smiled at them, cold and terrible and utterly indifferent to their survival.

“You will not disappoint this nice old man,” she said. “You will keep to the terms, and not seek to work around them. And if you seek otherwise?”

The Saint barked out a harsh laugh.

“You might be under the delusion that the consequences of ripping you animals to pieces would give me pause,” she mused. “Discard that notion, princelings. The only people I answer to are up Above, and they exactly what you are made of.”

Laurence de Montfort rose to her feet, shrugging.

“Think of me as the angel on your shoulders,” she suggested. “You know, the one that says ‘be Good, my children, or I will fucking dine on your entrails like an orc .”

The Saint of Swords smiled at them, wagging a finger.

“I think we have an understanding, don’t we?”

No one nodded.

No one needed to.

Chapter 9: Grand Pas

“Casualties are a consequence of properly employed tactics, not the intent. To merely bludgeon away is to reduce the conduct of war to arithmetic.”
– Theodosius the Unconquered, Tyrant of Helike

Hakram had once told me about an old orc proverb: even a child can devour a bear, one mouthful at a time. Apart from reminding me that most orc sayings tended to involved blood or death in some way – and that orcs apparently weren’t afraid to eat things with even larger teeth than they, to absolutely no one’s surprise – it’d struck something of a chord at the time. As a rule, I’d tended to be the underdog in fights since becoming the Squire and never had that been truer than when my waltz with the Tenth Crusade began. Fifty thousand Proceran soldiers had come through the pass, and though Juniper had been dismissive about the quality of most that host she’d cautioned that numbers had a weight of their own. Even if we traded soldiers at a rate of one to three, halfway through that battle my army would collapse as an effective fighting force while the Procerans just got started with deploying their reserves. From a strict military perspective, we couldn’t afford the casualties that thoroughly shattering the crusader army would cost us. From a political perspective, if took the gloves off I’d effectively kill any chance of Callow retaining its independence in the long term.

We had to beat Princess Malanza without beating her too badly, without losing too many men or resorting to any of our uglier tricks.

The Hellhound had complained of having her hands tied often and loudly, if in private, but under all that barking there’d been a visible thread of pleasure. She might have hated that politics played any part in this campaign, but I suspected she enjoyed the challenge of having restricted tools. It was forcing her to think beyond her traditional methods, to put the steel trap of a mind under all the glaring at work. We’d begun planning our battle before we ever entered Arcadia, refining it with every fresh report from the Jacks and the Observatory. The Unconquered had famously said that grand designs in war were a thing of vanity, but to us they were even more than that: with the number of heroes the other side was fielding, any plan too complicated was essentially guaranteed to fail. As long as there was even one critical component that had to succeed, that specific time and place would be crawling with angry, literally Heavens-sent foreigners out to fuck up our day. We couldn’t reiterate the old traps we’d used in Three Hills and Marchford: no matter how clever the bait, if we closed the teeth we’d find that steel gauntlet beat fangs.

So we hadn’t made a plan, not exactly.

It could be argued to be a dozen of them, instead, or even just a general operational doctrine. If having a pivot meant we lost, then we had to either avoid pivots entirely or make them impossible to reach. And we had the means for that, for all our other flaws. That was our real trump card, when it came down to it: the fairy gates. Or more specifically, the mobility they lent my troops. I doubted they understood everything I could do with those, or even that I wasn’t the only one who could make them: the Wild Hunt could open its own, if it was led by Larat. So far I’d used Arcadia to cut down time on long journeys, but that was only the surface use. Closer to the enemy I could still use them to disappear an army into thin air and reappear close by quicker than was physically possible. Just because I’d not used the gates for short journeys didn’t mean I couldn’t . The first step had been splitting the Army of Callow into three columns. Two of six thousand, and one of nine and chance – the largest one was the central one as well, and fielded all of Baroness Ainsley’s reinforcements. The two armies on the wings had split from the central host, moving east and west.

We’d set out the silver, now were were going to eat the bear one bite at a time.

The crusading army was large. It had nearly twelve thousand horse to my own mere five thousand. It had priests and wizards and heroes. It was also slow . We’d only realized how slow it really was when it crossed the northern passage, and carefully confirmed it over the weeks since. Of that fifty thousand men, more than a third was levies. Men and women in the prime of their life, certainly, and in good shape. But farming and marching were different kinds of labour, especially when weighed down by arms and armour. The Hellhound had described our conflict as two hounds with a chain around their neck, sallying out to fight in the place where both our chains allowed us to reach. The anchor on our side was Hedges. We couldn’t allow them to take the city, since it opened them a direct path into the heartlands of Callow. The anchor on theirs was their supply line. Snaking across the Whitecaps, the wagon caravans moved day and night to bring enough food across that the crusaders wouldn’t run out of foodstuffs before they reached a place where they could take local supplies – either by sacking granaries or foraging the countryside. But the passage was narrow, and they had fifty thousand bellies to feed. The foodstuffs from Procer were slowing the rate they were burning through their reserves at, but it wasn’t stopping it.

If our strengths were insufficient to carry the day, Juniper had said, then we had to play to the enemy’s weaknesses. And the two that were exploitable were the sluggish pace and sprawling supply lines. Now, Malanza had already proved she was no fool. She had to know it would be child’s play for me to take the Order of Broken Bells out and hit the pass up north while she was still too far to prevent me from putting everything to the torch and leave a small garrison behind to make sure the river stayed dammed. We believed she’d gambled on her having enough supplies to reach Hedges even if we did, which meant she’d be picking up the pace soon to force a battle there. Taking a swing at our anchor to force us to be where she needed us to be, essentially. Except instead of facing the single host manning walls she must have expected to see arrayed before her, she now had three field armies to contend with. And those armies were moving closer to hers, making a loose half-circle so she’d be blundering into encirclement if she didn’t break us apart.

“And now we find out what kind of a commander Malanza is,” Juniper said.

The two of us had remained with the central army, the beating heart of the net we’d cast over the region. The crusader army was too far in the distance for us to see even the fire smoke. Seven days away, by our estimate. We’d been prudent in case she had the means to make them pick up the pace. Scrying had allowed the western and eastern army to keep the same distance on the sides.

“The Jacks finally confirmed the Watch linked up with them two days ago,” I said. “Kegan is keeping her part of the bargain.”

“They won’t be trusted,” the orc grunted. “Not if what you told me about the Grey Pilgrim is true.”

“They don’t need to be trusted,” I reminded her. “They just need to be there.”

I’d sent instruction down to Hakram to kick up a fuss at the border with Daoine to add some weight to the gambit, but my hopes were not high. Procer, unlike the Empire and I, did not have the benefit of having mages capable of scrying within Callow. Which meant information travelled back to Malanza and to the First Prince with a considerable delay compared to us. They might not even learn about Adjutant’s agitation in time for it to matter, but the possibility still existed and that was enough to warrant the attempt at disinformation.

“So, what’s your guess?” I asked after a moment of silence.

“She either splits her forces to engage us separately or she goes straight for the head of the snake,” Juniper said. “There’s risks to splitting. She’s not sure how quick we can redeploy and our foot’s usually better than hers. Smaller armies make that count more.”

“So you think she’s headed for us,” I said.

“It’s what I’d do, if I were her,” the Hellhound said. “Otherwise she’s engaging on terms we dictated. She swings at us, though, and she can assume we’ll pull down our other two armies to reinforce us. She still gets the battle she needs.”

“We can’t give her open field all the way down to Harrow,” I conceded.

“The woman has been having too leisurely a march so far, Foundling,” Juniper sharply grinned. “Time to kick the hive. First blow tonight.”

I nodded slowly.

“East or west?” I asked.

“Sending your vicious little minion to the east first loses us at least four days,” she grunted. “West, has to be. I don’t want to give her a breather or too much time to think.”

“I’ll talk to Larat,” I said. “The Hunt’s been raring to get off the leash.”

“Lots of that going around,” Juniper said, a tad drily.

I frowned at her.

“You’re going somewhere with this, I take it?” I said.

Juniper spat to the side.

“Don’t take this wrong, Catherine, but you’ve lost the taste for it,” she said. “Any fool can see that.”

“I’m not sure what you’re saying,” I admitted. “That I’m trying to stab people less? Juniper, saying fuck it and chewing through the opposition no matter the consequences is what got us in this mess in the first place. We’re not playing with the kind of stakes where mistakes can be afforded anymore. One slip is all it takes to tumble down on our heads.”

“You put on a crown so you have to play Wasteland games,” the Hellhound grunted. “I don’t like it, but I get it. But a year ago, Foundling, you would have been licking your chops at the thought of a battle like we’re planning. You were hungry for it. Now you’re just...”

“Tired,” I finished quietly. “Tired and afraid.”

“It’s not pretty to look at, Catherine,” my Marshal said. “Now’s not the time for the fire to go out. The enemy’s at the gate and going at them half-hearted is going to get a lot of people killed.”

My fingers clenched, then slowly unclenched. If Juniper was willing to say this much, she’d been sitting on it for some time. And she wouldn’t be the only one of my officers thinking it.

“When I was nine, I think, I was sent to the market by the orphanage matron to pick up our meat for the month,” I told her. “When I got there, I saw the butcher getting roughed up by city guard. They wanted him to join one of the guilds, so Mazus would get his cut.”

“So Imperial Governors were shit to your people,” the orc shrugged. “Not exactly a revelation, Foundling.”

Compassion had never been one of Juniper’s strengths.

“I stood there,” I told her. “I knew, bone-deep, that there wasn’t a fucking thing I could do about it. So I just watched.”

Juniper bared her teeth.

“You have the fangs now, Catherine,” she said. “Keeping them pearly white means nothing’s changed.”

“I used to believe that,” I admitted. “You know who broke that fight up? Legionaries. A pair of orcs. They beat the guards badly enough one had to be carried away. I think that’s when I decided, before I really knew it, that I was going to join the Legions. So one day I’d be the one handing the beatings instead of just standing there .”

“So why the fuck are we giving Procer a pass for invading, then?” Juniper growled. “Those princes, those heroes. It’s like we’re worrying more about keeping them alive than our own soldiers. No one put a knife to their throat to make them cross that pass, Catherine. Banner went up in Salia and they signed on. I’m not preaching devilry at you – that sort of blow always comes back around. But we have all these nasty tricks we’re just sitting on, and I can’t think of a good reason why. So Procer gets pissy if we kill their boys? They’re already riding on a godsdamned crusade. Burn them all, and the First Prince too. I’ll say this for the Empress, at least when she screws us she doesn’t expect us to apologize for it.”

“You’re still angry I shut down Bonfire,” I said, and it was not a guess.

“I love it, you know,” Juniper grinned unpleasantly, all teeth and malice. “Having this unholy mess up north and still having to beat the opposition with my hands tied. Ain’t no one ever fought a war like that before. We will be remembered . But you know how we got all these fancy titles? ‘cause we were willing to go as far as we needed to. We brawled in the mud to get up here, Catherine, and suddenly we’re too good for it? We’re going soft. And soft ends up in the cooking pot, sooner or later.”

“That’s the thing, Juniper,” I said quietly. “This is the strongest I’ve ever been. I have armies, wealth, a kingdom. I have the Woe, sharpened fighting heroes. I have the Wild Hunt and the last good claim on Winter. Even in wildest dreams as a kid I never thought I’d get this much power.”

I bit my lip.

“I thought that was enough ,” I told the orc. “Having the biggest stick. That once you had that, everything else fell into place. But while I was using that stick to whack the opposition, running all around Callow, an entire city went dark.”

Juniper opened her mouth, but I gestured for her to let me keep speaking.

“No,” I said. “Really think about it. An entire city . More than a hundred thousand people, Hellhound. Because we were good and we were strong and we got cocky. There is an entire part of a kingdom gone forever because I thought being feared and powerful would see us through. It didn’t. It won’t now, either.”

“You can’t let Liesse fil your shadow, Catherine,” Juniper said, almost kindly. “Wasteland get always fucks the world. It’s the only trick they have.”

“I have to, Juniper,” I said. “I’ve walked out ruins still breathing again and again, so I stopped thinking we could lose. But we did lose, last year. We killed and got killed, and all we had to show for it at the end was a mass grave.”

“We killed Diabolist,” the orc said. “We shut the door on the Fae.”

“We beat them,” I said. “That’s not a victory. We just stopped them from making the larger mess they had it in them to make.”

“Then you learned the wrong lesson,” Juniper said. “And we should have pulled the trigger on Bonfire the moment the army was halfway ready. We’re still fighting their kind of war, Catherine.”

“No,” I said, and ice crept into the tone. “They think that, no doubt. Some of your officers might think that too. But make no mistake, this is my play from opening to curtains. I’ll negotiate with the other side, because it gets me better results than crushing them outright. Because peace is a better path to what I want than setting cities aflame. But I still have it, Hellhound. The urge to just step on them . The victory I’m after simply happens to require more than corpses.”

The Marshal of Callow studied me for a long time, before giving a sharp nod.

“So long as it’s not squeamishness,” she finally said.

I looked up at the afternoon sky, the spring sun that failed to warm me.

“You’re right, about the fear,” I said. “I am afraid. That was the hardest learning, that power doesn’t solve anything, it just... broadens the scope. Raises the stakes. I got on top of the pedestal, and now that I’ve had a good look around what I’m seeing is making me want to flinch.”

I was not blind to the gathering storm. The Empress was feeling cornered, and she’d already proven the kind of measures she was willing to take if she thought survival was at stake. Black had holed up in the Vales for winter, cut from his old anchors, and in a way that made him more dangerous than he’d used to be. When he came out swinging, and he would, there was no telling who he’d be swinging at. The Free Cities were a pot about to boil over, led by two madmen whose intent was anyone’s guess. And the whole muster of the West was gathering, preparing to hit Callow in waves. And in the middle of it all, I had to break the ugly story that had ground both Callow and Praes under the wheel for millennia.

“Fear’s good,” Juniper said. “Fear is blood and life. But it’s too late to flinch, Warlord.”

“I know,” I murmured. “And so we got to war again.”

We parted ways after that, and began our work. The thing was, what we were doing wasn’t rewriting the book. The tactics at work were old ones, used by armies for centuries. On the other hand, none of those armies had had fairy gates to work with. All it took was asking Hierophant to scry our western commander – the freshly-promoted General Nauk, as it happened. And so after nightfall, the six thousand men of the western army disappeared from the field. They reappeared three days of march behind the crusading host, and the wolf riders that had once been General Istrid’s began to raid their way up the Proceran supply line. They took cattle and grain, poultry and bread, but left the men who surrendered untouched. Didn’t even take them prisoner. Juniper’s notion, that, not sentimentality. Leaving them behind mean more mouths for Malanza to feed. The Princess of Aequitan sent twelve thousand men north to bring Nauk to battle, mostly horse and fantassins, but by the time they arrived the army was long gone. It reappeared to the west a few days later. That’s right, Malanza. Now you know for sure I have two gate-makers. So let’s find out if your heroes can discern where they are, shall we? The hive had been duly kicked.

Now we got to see what came screaming out.

Chapter 10: Allegro

“There are no reserves, you fool, only second waves!”
– Isabella the Mad, only general to have ever defeated Theodosius the Unconquered on the field

“They’re about to split, Boss,” Robber said.

He was standing too close to the scrying bowl, which made his face look a lot larger than it should be and was just kind of distressing to see in general. Thief cleared her throat.

“We need numbers and direction,” she said.

There was the sound of struggle, a yelp and then Robber was pushed aside. Indrani grinned at us through the bowl and I sighed before she even began speaking.

“This camp is just crawling with heroes, Cat,” Archer said. “Dunno if you were aware, but they’ve got at least one mageling. Zeze’s going to have competition.”

“And how would you know that,” I slowly said. “You were under orders to stay out of sight.”

“I got eagle eyes,” she proudly said.

From behind her I heard Robber snort.

“It’s true, Boss,” he said. “I saw the eagle she took them from. Wasn’t pretty.”

Indrani pouted.

“You ruined it, Blaster,” she complained. “I was going to work up to the reveal after she got snippy.”

I was too wary to be amused by the thought of Archer attacking the local wildlife, sadly.

“Tell me you stayed out of sight,” I said.

The other Named rolled her eyes.

“I was good,” she said. “Used an aspect at a distance, they never saw me.”

“We don’t know if they have anyone able to detect that,” I told her harshly. “Now there’s a chance they know you’re out there.”

“They’re not Praesi,” Vivienne said mildly. “I won’t call this anything but reckless, but unless they were on the lookout for her already the chances she triggered a ward are negligible.”

I ignored her.

“Quiet, Archer,” I said. “ Quiet is what I asked you for.”

“It’s what you got,” she dismissed. “That was over a day ago, if they thought someone was out there they would have sent heroes after us by now.”

“Let’s hope for that,” I grunted. “But we’re now assuming you, at least, were made.”

“It’s just twelve heroes,” Archer shrugged. “Nothing to worry about. Worse comes to worse, I shoot a few in the eye and run away.”

Strange, it hadn’t occurred to me before now that the muster of heroes on the other side was essentially a tenth and two officers. I had been tired, and there’d been a few days a while back where I’d had vicious headaches. Must have been the lack of sleep having unforeseen consequences. We were all feeling the pressure: even Vivienne and Masego had been out of sorts.

“Don’t engage, just run,” I told her. “And get Robber back in here, unless you can tell me about their troop movements.”

“She can’t,” the goblin piped up from a distance. “She was roaring drunk at the time.”

“Barely tipsy,” Archer blatantly lied. “But this is beneath me, so Jasper can handle it.”

She moved aside, and an irritated-looking Robber filled the bowl again.

“Best we can tell, Malanza’s splitting her army half and half,” he told us. “Same for the heroes, though that’s harder to be sure. They’ve got their own little camp aside from the army.”

I grimaced. Juniper had told me that if the crusaders separated their army they were unlikely to send a host after each of my own. It’d whittle down their numbers by too much, enough that if we went to reinforce a single army we’d have them outnumbered at that particular battle. Evidently Princess Malanza intended to have numerical superiority wherever she engaged regardless of reinforcements.

“And where are they headed?” Thief asked.

“This is guesswork,” Robber warned. “But by the way they’re shifting their supplies, I’d say centre and west. There’s a few days left before they’ll be ready to move.”

Vivienne let out a breath and my face darkened. So they could tell where our gate-makers were. I’d sent Larat and the Hunt to General Hune in the east, after Nauk had struck the supply lines from the west, in an attempt to keep the shell game going. It was possible the Proceran princess had gotten lucky with a guess – her odds weren’t bad, half and half since it was a given the centre had to stay mobile – but she did not strike me as the type leaving things to luck. Which meant there was a hero who could sniff out our gates, or at least the assets who made them.

“All right, good work,” I said. “Anything else to report?”

“They’re keeping a close eye on the Watch,” the Special Tribune said. “There’s a hero on them at all times, and the two old timers visited a while back. Not sure what happened, but no fighting aftewards. They didn’t relax the surveillance either, though.”

My lips quirked. We’d known going in that the odds of a truth-teller being along with the crusade were high, and we’d planned accordingly. None of the Watch were aware of what side they were actually on, and I’d made sure Kegan planted false rumours in her commanders that the heroes could chew over. The secret order was known only to one of her mages, and even the specifics of it were nothing too suspicious on the surface: all the mage had to do was check for a signal in the sky at a specific hour, and scry after seeing it. That, and note the position of officer tents. It would be quite enough.

“No need to worry about that,” I told Robber. “Keep your people ready, Special Tribune. We’ll have work for you soon enough.”

“Looking forward to it,” the goblin said, baring needle-like teeth.

The spell died, and after a last glimmer of sorcery the scrying bowl was filled with mere water again. Vivienne drummed the table lightly, though given the sensitivity of my hearing she might as well have been pounding away.

“I know,” I said. “We need to make a decision about Headsman.”

Thief smiled mirthlessly.

“I know you worry about the fallout, and not just because enemy officers will be put to the sword,” she noted. “We’d be revealing another trick the crusaders don’t know about.”

“But,” I said.

“The means it would be carried out might be different, but Procer is not unfamiliar with the use of assassination to influence warfare,” Vivienne said. “Catherine, they murder each other over grazing rights disputes – and I’m not exaggerating there, the sister of the Prince of Orne was poisoned over that not even eight years ago. We are fighting off an invasion.”

“You know what we need to achieve,” I reminded her.

“Hasenbach at the table, without blots on our war record that would make her people unseat her if she negotiated with us,” she agreed. “But considering the woman sent all her opposition into the mind grinder that is you, I doubt she’ll balk at treating with us after ‘mere’ peasant officers are killed.”

The last part she spoke with distaste, as much for the phrasing as the people it applied to – not the officers, no, but the handful of nobles who considered them so very expendable. Not that I could talk, I’d admit. Headsman had been designed as an operation that would shake the crusader army without getting half the High Assembly howling for our blood. I was, in my own way, considering them just as expendable. The thought tasted bitter, but I did not deny it. Lying to myself had become a lot more dangerous since I’d let Winter in.

“If we pull the trigger on it, we have to act now,” I admitted.

“There is a chance their host will later reunite,” Thief said.

“If we fuck up,” I bluntly replied. “We want them split, it makes them manageable. The only way we have all their major officers together again is if we blunder. Besides you’ve already told me the longer we wait the higher the chances this fails.”

“It’s a judgement call,” Vivienne said. “I don’t envy you the decision, but it is yours to make.”

I watched her as she brushed back her hair. It’d gotten longer, though still quite a ways were left to go until it reached the length of mine. Her blue-grey eyes were untroubled, which I envied more than a little. Every day seemed to add another few pounds to what was already balancing on my shoulders. I chewed over what she’d said, but not the decision she’d brought to the fore. More the fact that she’d laid it at my feet, instead. When we’d begun, Vivienne had made it clear she was only sticking around so long as she thought I was the best game in town for Callow. And now here we were, planning how to turn back an invasion together.

“You seem amused,” she said.

“Just thinking about how far we’ve come,” I honestly said. “Can you imagine us having this conversation two years ago?”

She laughed, a little bitterly.

“It was a simpler world I lived in, two years ago,” Vivienne Dartwick admitted. “The lines in the sand were visible.”

“And now?” I asked quietly.

“Now I wonder,” Thief said, and her lips set in a hard line. “In your service, I have been part of ugly things. No two ways about that. But nowadays I look at the rest of Calernia, and all I see is vultures. You are flawed, I know that even if you’ve grown on me. But you’re also the only one who seems to care about any of this. There are twelve heroes on Calernian soil, Catherine, and every single one of them is a pawn to Proceran ambition. It is the reason they came in the first place. I thought... I thought better . Of all of us.”

“They’re not responsible for the Conquest,” I murmured. “For Malicia’s cold-blooded ruthlessness, or what came of Black playing his game with the Heavens. They get no pass from me for their own actions, but I will not blame them for that.”

“I’ve studied them, Catherine,” Thief said. “And the histories as well. When Callow as being invaded, Ashur was fighting for supremacy of the Samite Gulf. The princes of Procer were so far gone they preferred fighting civil war to taking up arms against Praes ascendant. Half the Dominion was fighting border skirmishes over trade rights, without a care of what happened beyond their borders. And the heroes... well, they had their own struggles, the ones that were already born. Yet none so great they should not have been set aside to fight against the fucking theft of an entire kingdom. It is infuriating, that it took them twenty years to suddenly find their principles . Can they really be called that, if they only surface when convenient? It reeks of pretext instead, and my tolerance for those has grown thin.”

Your people grown warped by your presence , the Grey Pilgrim had said. Old traits grown more vicious and acute. I could not tell if Vivienne had come to speak those words because she had seen the face of the enemy and felt only disgust, or because of something more insidious. A spreading influence I was unaware of. I had asked nothing of the Gods Below, since taking my Name, but I would have been a fool to believe they gained nothing from empowering me . Does it not matter in the slightest what I do? I wondered. I’d always dismissed the talk of heroes as mere religious prattle, the kind of empty sermons the House of Light garnished its true power with. But if there was truth to it, if I was a blight on Creation just by standing on the side of Below however loosely... That was the thing, wasn’t it? I was expected to take on faith the words of people trying to kill me. Or to follow the sayings of sacred texts that had been used as tools of ambition as often as not. There were no easy truths to find. All I had was what I knew, and it was always too little.

“I do not mean this as excuse of the Empire,” Vivienne softly said. “I have learned of the people within it, that they are not as wretched as I once believed. But the High Lords and the Tower, that entire edifice of bloody misery? It must be brought down. There is not other choice, because we cannot tame a dog gone rabid. But I will not mistake the horrors of one side for the virtues of the other.”

“It was easier, wasn’t it?” I said whimsically. “When we thought right and wrong had a colour code?”

Thief put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed, a rare gesture of affection.

“I will not thank you, for opening my eyes to that,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “But I understand now, why you are who you are. Why anyone would look at the sky and curse. There is a point where it is no longer about right and wrong, isn’t there? Where it’s about doing something, anything , to avoid falling in that same old pit.”

Her fingers clenched, her eyes hardened.

“They don’t get to walk over us, to kill us, just because some fucking angel handed down a mandate,” she hissed. “They don’t get to avoid the responsibility of that choice. Or the consequences.”

Villain , I thought. There was only one side that spoke this way, and didn’t pray to Above.

“Black told me, once, that Fate it the coward’s way out,” I murmured. “The abdication of personal responsibility. I hate him a little bit, for still being right after all these years.”

She snorted.

“We might still lose, you know,” Thief said. “That’s the part that gets me. No matter how prepared we are, it might not be enough.”

“Could be,” I agreed. “But then we do the same thing villains have always done, when their plans fall apart.”

“And what’s that?”

“You get up,” I said. “You spit out the blood in your mouth, and you try again.”

We stayed sitting there for a long time, the two of us in front of a bowl gone fallow.

“We proceed with Headsman,” I finally said, breaking the silence. “Tell Masego to prepare. And send word to Kegan. The Deoraithe are to cross the river.”

“I will,” Thief replied. “And me?”

“I’ll open the gate as soon as Hierophant does the numbers,” I said. “This is going to be... delicate.”

“Isn’t it always?” Vivienne smiled.

—

It’d been some time since I had worn my full regalia – if it could be called that.

Full plate from head to toe, with chain shirt and aketon beneath. I’d considered this heavy, once, enough that it restricted my mobility. Nowadays I barely noticed it. I wore the helmet Hakram had gifted me, the hinged thing of steel with the black iron crown set atop it. My shield lay hanging on Zombie the Third’s flank as it idly picked at grass it could not actually digest, but my longsword was clasped tight to my flank on the sword-belt. The satchel at my side held munitions, though not standard issue. Robber had tinkered away before his departure. The Mantle of Woe streamed down my back, its bright colours muted in the shade of a moonless night. There was a weight to wearing all of this, and not only a physical one. Black Queen, they called me, but it was not a Name. It might have been, before my teacher broke Liesse and himself with it, but the story had died and the path with it. It would have been a lie, though, to still call myself the Squire. No one did anymore. I could still feel the bare bones of that Name, some days, but the flesh and muscle over them was Winter’s. Whatever I’d done in Liesse, when I had broken Masego’s scaffolding, it had ended my tenure. I had no aspects anymore, only the power that my mantle lent me. Even what I’d ripped from Akua, what had once been Call, it was... different now. By taking it I had come to own it, and that opened doors I’d never even dreamed of.

I rolled a dark wooden whistle between my steel-clad fingers, feeling it pulse with had once been the Diabolist’s power. To be fae, and I had touched the face of that, was to cease seeing the difference between principle and object as more than thin boundary. I’d experimented with that power, under Hierophant’s supervision, and the whistle had been one of the greater successes. It was an aspect made matter. Certain limitations had not been escaped, and some had even increased – anyone could use the whistle, yes, but Take had been theft of a finite bundle of power. The whistle could only be used once, since I’d yet to figure out how to partition uses. It would, however, work with the full strength of that aspect.

“A worthy trinket, for the Queen of the Hunt,” Larat said.

I glanced at him. Of all the fae sworn to me, he was the only one willing to bring his mount close to mine. In the early days after receiving their oaths, I’d had to... establish a pecking order. Some of them had been under the impression that entering my service was only a means to enter Creation unrestricted, and that now they’d entered they could play as they wished. My eyes turned to the dark-haired woman at the back of the pack, who shivered when she noticed me watching her. She’d been of Summer, before. It had not stopped her from trying to make sport of a full tavern of people in Laure, weaving glamour into their minds so they could play out a tragedy for her where real blood was spilled. Thief had been tracking all of them, so I’d intervened before any damage was done. I’d taken power to call her to heel, though, and drawing that deep had coloured my reaction. There were only two fingers to her left hand, now. I’d made her eat the rest.

No one had tested me since, at least.

“Won’t see use tonight,” I said, and flicked my wrist.

The whistle disappeared into nothingness, returning to Winter.

“Such leashes you inflict upon your might,” the former Prince of Nightfall sighed. “You could take so much more. And you have yet to bestow.”

I grimaced.

“I’m not going to hand out mantles to anyone, Larat,” I said. “Much less you.”

He laughed, cold and crisp.

“I have no more need of titles, save that which is owed,” he said. “But you are Queen of Winter, Catherine Foundling. No queen can be forever without a court.”

“You must take me for a complete idiot,” I mused. “Bad enough I have it whispering in the back of my mind, I’m not going to spread that influence.”

“Ah, but there are such benefits to bestowal,” Larat smiled. “Freedom from the chains of entropy among them. How many of those you love are you willing to lose to age, before bending your neck?”

My fingers clenched. Was he implying that if I titled Robber or any other of the goblins... No, I could not begin down that road. Bad enough I’d had speculations about what the Council of Matrons might be considering back in the Wasteland, if I ended up granting a sliver of Winter to Robber there would be blood .

“I am no stranger to sacrifice,” I replied shortly.

“So you say,” the Huntsman languidly shrugged. “We have all the time in the world to find out, don’t we?”

I eyed him darkly.

“Even for a treacherous lieutenant, you’re a little much,” I told him.

He scoffed.

“Am I a mortal, to deny my own nature?” he replied. “I am Fae, my queen: be it fair or foul, I will never be less than I am. I will be monster and schemer, hound and prince, but not once untrue through any of it. Deception lies in the eye of the other, not in one’s own blood.”

“That was very inspiring,” I drawled. “Doesn’t make me want to stab you just to be on the safe side any less, but lovely little speech. Really. If I still had functioning tear ducts I might shed a tear.”

“Tears will be shed when you feel them,” Larat told me. “Your mistake is in trying to quantify, to place rules where there is only will.”

That, more than his tirade, had me shivering. Because it rang true. Place rules where there is only will. I looked away. Masego had continued to study my body, and the more I learned the more unsettled I became. He’d told me since the beginning that my flesh and blood was a construct, now, that there was nothing natural about it. To learn that I no longer sweated had been no horrifying revelation, but that while I might breathe out of habit I no longer needed to? There was a reason my liquor cabinet was well-stocked.

“You’re sure we’re close enough?” I asked.

Larat sighed.

“Your meddling practitioner tries to regulate that which is beyond regulation,” he said. “My queen, there is only the story. All else is beneath your notice.”

Yeah, that was less than reassuring. I felt the power bloom in the distance, and turned Zombie around so I could have a better look. Red lights in the night sky, to tall and bright they must have been visible even down in Laure.

“Ready yourselves,” I called out the Hunt. “You know the rules.”

There was sparse laughter, but many eager grins. I did not have to wait long before it came. I’d expected it to be different, even though I’d not really known what to expect. Like a gate, maybe, or a spell. All I felt was a window, just at the corner of my vision.

“The Wild Hunt rides tonight,” the fae who’d once been the Prince of Nightfall laughed. “Raise your banners, damned souls. Sound the horns and loose the hounds. Let us make sport under moonless night .”

I stepped through, bridging thought and act without embracing either. The water-filled bowl shattered as we crossed through it, a reflection made truth. Wind whipped at the inside of the tent as Zombie neighed, the terrified Deoraithe mage at my feet turning white. Every Callowan knew that scrying near the Waning Woods was like sending an invitation to the Wild Hunt.

We had accepted it.

Chapter 11: Ballon

“You might say that they’ll never see me coming.”
-Dread Empress Malevolent II, announcing the raising of her invisible army

“ Your Majesty ?” the Deoraithe mage stuttered out.

I leaned down and gently touched his forehead with an armoured finger.

“Don’t resist,” I said. “It’ll be uncomfortable, but not painful.”

Unless he tried to fight me, but in this case the fear that trailed me as much as my cape saw to the matter. The man went rigid as a board. I breathed out mist and Winter crept through my veins. His soul wriggled under the tight grip of my will, as I rifled through vague memories. He had, I thought, a well-organized mind. Shame about the panic tinging it. I found what I needed anyway, the locations of the officer tent’s he’d found as he’d been told.

“You were thorough,” I said, withdrawing my finger. “Well done.”

The fifty riders of the Hunt were too many for so small a tent, and one of the fae casually blew it away with a flick of the wrist before it could tangle the banners. Midnight was no bar to my sight, and what I saw around us was the Watch responding to our sudden arrival with flawless professionalism. Ah, the things I could do with an army’s worth of these. It was almost tempting to hollow out Kegan’s soul, tie puppet strings to the remnants and take them all for my own. I bit my lip until it bled, the flare of pain helping me focus. I reached for my saddlebag, taking out the seal of House Iarsmai I’d asked Kegan to send me months ago. I tossed it into the mage’s hands.

“Validate this,” I ordered.

The man shivered, though I was unsure why. I’d been very polite so far. Murmuring in the mage tongue he traced the tall dead oak on the seal with his fingers, gasping when it glimmered green.

“It’s real,” he said.

Unsheathing my sword, I flicked the blade behind me after gauging the surroundings. Creation folded unto itself, the fairy gate opening thirty feet wide and just as tall. I tied off the threads, giving it a finite lifespan. One of the newer Winter tricks in my arsenal.

“By the authority granted to me by Duchess Kegan Iarsmai, I order the Watch to immediately withdraw,” I called out. “And quick about it, I don’t have the time to hold your hand. You have half an hour before the gate closes.”

Zombie was chomping at the bit, which admittedly was better than chomping at grass I’d probably need to have a goblin dig out of her later. I took a moment to calm myself, then dug into the memories I’d glimpsed. Reorienting myself was the hardest part of figuring it all out, since none of the unconscious markers the mage had used were markers I was familiar with. Masego and I had figured out a way around that through the Observatory with the card I’d been keeping up my – heavily armoured – sleeve, but I was without the benefit of Hierophant tonight. My mind struggled with the discrepancies, until I let through another sliver of Winter and there was a sensation like a spike through my forehead. No pain, though, only terrifyingly clear understanding.

“Riders of the Hunt,” I called out.

All fifty of them turned to me as one with unnatural smoothness.

“Follow,” I laughed. “Tonight we ride.”

“ Finally ,” Larat hissed, blade in hand. “Sound the horns. Let them hear us coming.”

Banners were raised, not of silk or cloth but crow’s feathers and shadow. Shining coldly like a raven’s eye. A fae with hair like spun gold touched the horn to her lips, and doom screamed across the night. I spurred on Zombie, and felt her devour the distance easily as I guided us by memories not my own. The Watch parted for us, already preparing to retreat, and we fell unto the unprepared camp of the crusaders like hungry wolves. Men shouted out in Chantant, known to me regardless of sight. The heat of them could be felt on the tip of my tongue, the fear that set their hearts aflutter thundering in my ears. It pleased me. It was slaughter, wherever we rode. Men half-dressed and half-awake were torn apart by sword and spear and darker things: hounds of air and darkness, called forth by the horns. I wielded the monster like a knife as my thoughts cooled. The Alamans army closest to us had kept the tents of their officers together and I made them pay for that mistake. Before the hounds even reached them the soldiers I raised my hand and choked them with rings of ice and shade, a dozen dead in a heartbeat. Smiling, I leaned forward.

“Up,” I ordered. “ Kill .”

Corpses with broken necks and ugly marks around their throats rose up as the Hunt passed through. Screams followed in our wake. We would begin, I decided, with the outer ring. Princess Malanza’s own host was closer to the centre, but I would let her people feel it coming. Know what was prowling the night for them. We carved our way out of the Alamans army camp, scything through the company of fantassins that tried to form up in our way. Men and women were trampled by horses, terror blooming again in the wake of death as the corpses rose and chaos spread.

“You will go no further,” a man’s voice announced calmly.

I cocked my head to the side. No fear in this one. And such power . Young but scarred, his voice had echoed of faraway Levant. A large man with a war hammer hoisted over his shoulder, burdened with heavy plate. I neither slowed nor ceased, Zombie galloping straight at him. The hero hefted his war hammer and struck with impossible swiftness, aiming to shatter the legs of my mount. With a cold laugh I guided my horse and her wings unfolded, leaping tall above the man as the Hunt streamed around him seamlessly. We rode even as the man screamed of our cowardice, ever onwards. I had not come here to be waylaid by petty sidekicks. The camps had come alive and our prey was moving. It became slower work, picking off officers who’d joined their companies. Frustratingly slow. The riders slaked their blood on those that could be found instead. No surrender was offered and no mercy granted.

Then the sky came down on our heads.

Instinct allowed me to guide Zombie away from the worst of it, but wet earth sprayed over us as a massive gouge split the ground open. Even as it began to rain mud, a woman walked out of the mess. Old, I thought. Neither tall nor short, and she wore no armour aside from a cuirass over long cloth robes. In her hand was a simple sword of oiled steel, and she was rolling her wrists to limber them.

“Saint of Swords,” I said, voice echoing with the howl of blizzards.

“Black Queen,” the old woman said, light tapping the flat of the blade against her shoulder. “Nice of you to visit.”

My will spread, weaving glamour across the sky according to borrowed memories.

“Go,” I told the Hunt. “Fulfil my purpose.”

“Stay,” the Saint grinned. “Die screaming.”

She swung again, and this time I grasped what was being wielded. Not an aspect or a spell. Nothing like the Lone Swordsman’s power or the Gallant Brigand’s. No, I’d only seen this once before: when Ranger had considered killing me seriously enough I’d felt myself die. When the Saint of Swords attacked, she did so with the sharpened intent to kill us. She had hardened her willpower so much that Creation counted no difference between her will and truth, the air howling as it cut itself apart. I drew deep and laughed, ice crashing against the blow with a gargantuan cracking sound. Shards sprayed everywhere as the Hunt obeyed, hounds and riders streaming out in every direction but that of the coming fight. I leapt off Zombie and set her aflight. Her wings made her too valuable to risk here.

“Winter, is it?” the Saint of Swords mused, strolling forward. “Never had that before. Try to make it entertaining.”

“You will make,” I said, “very useful artefacts.”

A quiet voice in the back of my mind howled, screaming that revealing any unknown capacity to the enemy was sheer stupidity. I could not seem to care. It had felt... right to chastise her that way. We closed the distance as one, swords bared. I feinted to the side but she slapped it away contemptuously, a half-step bringing her into my guard and without missing a beat she cut my throat. Red gushed out, but it was more Winter than blood – an exertion of will was all it took to heal the wound. I spat out the blood in my mouth, making distance between us.

“Regenerators,” the Saint sighed. “You never bother to learn how to fight properly, with a crutch like that. Sloppy.”

The nonchalance tasted fouler in my mouth than the blood, called for utter destruction in answer, but I breathed out and smoothed the edges growing ragged. I attacked again, low and quick. Parry, but when she closed in again I was ready: a spear of shadow formed out of my free hand and tore towards her. Snorting, the heroine raked her bare fingers down and tore through the darkness like wet parchment. In the heartbeat where I hesitated, she struck quick as a viper – aiming to cut off my head in full, this time. I ducked under by the barest of margins but she kicked me in the face, and as I rocked back she struck again. My parry was effortlessly turned, blade twisting around to carve through my wrist like it was butter. I pivoted, caught the hand still holding the blade with my other pne and forced it back on even as I avoided a thrust that would have gone through my eye if I’d been a moment slower. Winter flared and the pieces reattached, my fingers twitching as the power skittered through them.

“I can see it,” the Saint mused. “Take the crippling to avoid the killing. There’s a hint of Ranger in there, however diluted. A bastard’s bastard.”

I rolled my shoulders as she watched me indifferently.

“Again,” I said.

“Change of plans,” the old woman smiled.

The spell struck me from the side like than fist of an angry god. I felt my flesh melt off, my blood boil – until I opened the floodgates, and shot out of the fire storm as my face peeled off flake by flake. That had stung .

“Reinforcements, my dear lady,” a man’s voice drawled. “Though you seem to need them not.”

My eyes flicked to the side. Three of them. Short man with a leather coat and a casting rod must have been responsible for the flame. An olive-skinned woman with two knives and a red-painted face started walking towards me, while the last was unarmed. Priest, I decided, looking at his ornate robes. Attrition was no longer feasible if they had a healer. On the other hand, now it was four on one. My odds had just gotten a lot better.

“Well,” I grinned, my teeth grown sharp. “Now it’s a party. Have at it, heroes.”

“How uncouth,” the man in leather said, wrinkling his nose.

When the fire came again, erupting in a cone from the rod, I flicked away. Two Knives closed in from the side as the Saint was forced to go around the spell. Eyes following the arms, I let the knife-wielder commit to a cut from the left before half-stepping out of the way, hand snaking up to catch the extended wrist and snapping it. There was a scream, but I slapped her open mouth and filled with ice. She began choking until Light bloomed and melted it. It even streaked down to unsnap the wrist. No matter, I was already past her.

“Damnation,” the spellcaster cursed, seeing me close the distance in the blink of an eye.

A sphere of what looked like liquid flame formed around him, but what was fire to me? I gathered power and struck at it, ripping off a chunk of the protective sphere to get at the terrified man beneath. Instinct warned me and I listened. Leaping above the flames, I narrowly avoided being run through by the Saint – though, twisting halfway up the arcing jump, I shaped a spike of rime and sent it howling after Two Knives. The heroine flickered, as if she’d been an illusion all this time, and what should have torn through her abdomen instead put a hole in the ground twenty feet behind her. Displacement? Useful trick. Too useful to be anything but an aspect. I landed in a crouch.

“Keep away from her, kids,” the Saint ordered. “She’s a few years ahead of what you can handle.”

My eyes flicked to the sky. Of the five glamoured markers I had placed, three were left. I’d have to play with these a little longer, lest they pursue the Hunt. I grimaced. I’d drawn on Winter enough already that anything more was going to starkly affect my judgement instead of just reinforce bad instincts. Until the markers are gone , I told myself. Then retreat . I drew deep, and this time when the Saint struck at me I drowned the world in ice. Massive spinning blades tore through the air and ground, though I felt them shatter within a heartbeat. The hound had teeth. No matter. The creature with Two Knives had retreated to protect the thing that wielded Light, but the spellcaster was vulnerable. I wove around balls of flame effortlessly, parted a burning wall with a flick of my sword and found the human behind it staring back defiantly. It had gathered sorcery before it, a hundred hanging needles that burned the very air around them.

“Dodge that ,” the human hissed, and they flew.

Laughing, I formed a gate that swallowed them into Arcadia and closed it just as swiftly. The human was casting again, and I could feel death coming. Light, from the side, and something more dangerous from the hound. I shaped glamour with but a thought, mine own silhouette striving for the spellacasrer as I leapt up shrouded in nothingness. The illusion was broken by a beam of Light, but the hound had caught the scent: even as I landed atop a ring of shade, she cut a wound into the air and ran atop it towards me. I broke the ring and fell as the other humans finally saw through the glamour, slow things that they were. Abandoning the spellcaster, I made for the Light-bearer and its protector. The knife-wielding thing shouted out a word in some foreign tongue that tasted of spice and blood, charging me with blinding speed. Ah, the arrogance of mortals. Gracefully, I stepped around the blow and simply left my sword in her way. It carved through her shoulder, blood spraying as the arm fell to the ground. I took a modified sharper from the satchel and shoved it into the stump, triggering the mechanism inside with a shard of ice. The detonation broke bone and tossed her away even as the Light-wielder shot another brilliant beam at me. My free hand caught it, fingers beginning to melt away, and I forced it to careen aside.

It had slowed me. The gout of flame I avoided with a mere half-step even as my fingers grew back, but the Saint struck harder. Holding the wound she had carved in the sky like a massive blade, she scythed through the side of me. I was quick enough it went through my shoulder instead of my head. In a heartbeat, arm and leg and flank were pulped. Winter hissed in fury, and they began to coalesce anew in ice.

“Not regeneration,” the Saint frowned. “Creationally fixed body. Just pour power until it remakes itself. You’ve turned yourself into proper abomination, girl. If there’s still any of you left in there.”

“Irritating,” I noted, voice echoing with the death of embers.

“Beat it, kids,” the hound ordered. “This one’s going to take a lot of killing before she goes down.”

Already the Light-wielder was fixing the creature I had mangled. The hound was an irritant, she must be dealt with before the rest was tended to. I seized threads of glamour and sent them into her mind, but they... broke. That was no soul. It was a sword, and somehow more.

“You hold dominion,” I said.

“Only over the one thing,” the Saint grinned. “But that’s usually enough.”

My eyes flicked to the sky. Another glamoured marker had vanished. Only one left now. And when it did, I would... I frowned. It was hard to remember. The hound took advantage of my distraction, striking anew. I let instinct guide me and steel rang against steel. She batted aside my guard but the spike of frost I shot at her throat forced her to turn her follow-through blow into a parry as I returned on the offensive. Cut high, swept away, but I turned with it and lunged at her back. She caught the tip between two fingers and twisted , the steel shattering. Frost filled the break as I withdrew, tasting her movements in the air. The footing gave her away. Or so I had thought: what should have been a strike at my arm was a slide forward instead, and when I tried a head-butt she met me with her own. We hit halfway through, neither hurt until she raked her fingers across my chest plate and cut through still boiling-hot steel. I let Winter loose, screaming cold winds blowing the both of us back. Some part of me insisted I look at the sky. The rest wanted to carve open that insolent hound and add her entrails to my cape. One was more pleasing than the other.

“Let us test it, then,” I smiled. “The mettle of our domains.”

Darkness fell, and came cold with it. The world fell away. Yet under an ink-black sky stood the Saint of Swords, radiant and unruffled. Unimpressed. I inhaled the scent of it, puzzled.

“Your dominion,” I said. “It is not projected. Only within.”

“Took me a decade of hard killing to get that down,” the hound replied. “But there’s always a fight to be found in Procer, if you know where to look.”

My frown deepened and the cold focused on her, but all it did was cool the blade. It had been forged of great fires, I thought. What coldness I had to offer was insufficient.

“Gods, I’m going to feel this one in the joints,” the Saint grunted.

She had no sword in hand, when she took her stance. I grit my teeth and poured all of my domain into her, but slowed was not stopped. She swung, and the light was blinding. Something... not broke, but it was wounded. Damaged. As I screamed the night fled, and I found myself kneeling over grounds rent asunder by our fight. Returned to Creation. The heroine was panting. Shit , I thought. What the fuck was that? I was feeling like myself again, but I was also feeling my heart beat. Like it actually mattered, like I was human again. The last marker was gone, I saw. And I sure as Hells wasn’t sticking around to take another of whatever in that’d been. Seizing reins gone frail, I called back the Hunt. Fewer than anticipated answered my call, but I realized with ugly surprise it was not rebellion I was dealing with. The heroes must have killed some of them. At least ten were gone, maybe more.

I legged it. No two ways about it, I made like a proper villain and fled the field. The heroine tried to follow and almost caught me around the corner behind a tent, scything straight through with another of those not-blows, but Zombie answered my call and landed just behind. We took flight even as the old woman cursed and carved another wound into the air, immediately running on it after me. Yeah, fuck that. I wasn’t picking a second fight with a Named who could shrug off my full domain. I opened the gate in the sky even higher, seeing the Hunt take flight behind me, and went straight through into Arcadia. I didn’t even stop there, flying Zombie far from the entrance. The Saint, thank the Gods, did not follow. I learned why when another four of the Hunt disappeared from the back of my mind.

I could not help but be thankful she’d chosen to whittle away at my trump card instead of trying to go after me. It might have been possible to trap her in here, but that smelled of the Saint cutting her way back out at the worst possible moment down the line. The Hunt gathered to me, having lost a few feathers, but Headsman had been a success. Not without losses, but I wasn’t entirely opposed to the Hunt being thinned out before they inevitably stabbed me in the back. Larat was the first to address me after I landed, drenched in blood from head to toe. Someone was in a good mood.

“A victory, my queen,” he said.

I looked up at the Arcadian sky and smiled. Sure, it’d been that. But more importantly, it had been a very good distraction. After all, the very moment I’d opened the gate for the Watch someone had come through. And while we were busy being loud and visible?

Thief had been on the prowl.

“All right, saddle up,” I called out. “We need to find the Watch contingent before retreating.”

We needed to hurry. The sooner we got back to camp, the sooner I could ask Hierophant why my skin was capable of bruising again.

Chapter 12: Cambré

“In a finite world, one’s gain (victory, large cave) inevitably means loss (dead female, enemy grows) for another. There can be no peace (looking away, knife already in a corpse) when the very nature of Creation is contest (not enough meat, talking).”
– Extract from a theorized translation of ‘Remnant and Ruin’, one of the few goblin texts ever obtained

“This should not be possible,” Masego said, sounding obscurely pleased.

He was in a good mood, though I did not share it. The frequency at which I ended up lying on table while he fiddled with my guts and soul was quite frankly depressing. At least this time I had pants on, only my upper body bare.

“We keep this up for another year,” I said, “and you’ll have seen me naked more often than Kilian ever did.”

The dark-skinned mage sighed, glass eyes rolling inside the sockets. Ugh. Full turn, that would never be not creepy even glimpsed only through an eye cloth.

“Your insistence I ‘buy you dinner first’ is absurd,” Hierophant said. “The only food available here is Legion rations, which you already own. I think. My attention might have waned when we had that afternoon where you explained to us how kingdoms worked.”

Ah, that’d been a Hells of an affair. The afternoon session of ‘We Are In Charge Now And Why That Matters’ had not been a favourite of the Woe, since the two people who actually needed the explanations had been less than interested in actually hearing them.

“Sometimes, Zeze, I feel like you only want me for my body,” I drawled.

“Ridiculous,” he sniffed. “Your soul is far more interesting. Your physiology is worth two treatises at most, it is unlikely to be a reproducible phenomenon.”

“Get me candles and wine, at least,” I suggested. “It just doesn’t feel special otherwise.”

“I thought you didn’t drink wine any –” Masego frowned. “Wait, is this another sex thing I don’t know about?”

For someone raised by a personification of desire, he could be surprisingly innocent. No, maybe not innocent. That implied he’d been sheltered, which I really doubted was the case. Ignorance born of disinterest. His blind spots were usually willing and damnably stubborn.

“Masego, I’m offended you would even imply that. Get your mind out of the gutter,” I chided him, smothering a grin.

He looked mighty suspicious, but did not argue. He’d learned the hard way not to engage on this particular battlefield. I cleared my throat.

“So what’s the damage?” I asked.

His brow creased.

“You’re changing the subject,” he muttered. “You always do that when you were lying just before.”

“Calling me a liar is technically treason, you know,” I pointed out.

“And that’s bad, in Callow,” he nodded slowly. “Even if you win.”

Yeah, Warlock and the incubus had not done wonders for his moral compass. It was a work in progress.

“So?” I pressed.

“The Saint of Swords appears to have, for lack of a better term, cut Winter itself,” Hierophant said.

“That much I’d guessed,” I said. “I mean, practically speaking, what does that mean? Because I was having a Winter fit before she beat me like a goblin stepchild, but after I was back to normal. More or less.”

“Temporary state of affairs,” Masego said. “If you were hoping to maintain your hold on the mantle without being subject to principle alienation, you were sadly mistaken.”

I coughed. I supposed it was too much to ask for that the Saint fuck up along the same lines as Akua had when she’d returned my full Name to me.

“I bruised, after the fight,” I told Hierophant. “It faded before I got back to camp, but it actually hurt for a while. That hasn’t happened since Liesse.”

“I’ve already told you she cut Winter,” Masego said, sounding befuddled. “The implications should be clear.”

“Oh, absolutely,” I lied. “But I need you to put it in layman’s terms so that I can explain it to other people. Like, say, if I needed to tell Archer about this.”

“She’s actually quite well-versed in arcane dialectics,” Masego noted. “Lady Ranger covered the workings of sorcery very well while teaching her to slay mages.”

I wrinkled my nose.

“Lucky her,” I said. “Black never went in depth.”

“Uncle Amadeus never did have what could be considered a proper method in this,” Hierophant shrugged. “As Father tells it, his approach has always been having a wide array of tools to employ against enemy weaknesses.”

Which only helped me so much, I thought. Unlike my teacher I did not have several decades of scrapping against all sorts of spellcasters under my belt. To avoid running into nasty surprises, I’d largely delegated that kind of fighting to Masego himself.

“Juniper, then,” I said.

The blind man bit his lip.

“I dislike using a metaphor, but so be it,” he said. “Think of your mantle as a cape. Much like your body itself, it is a fixed object in the eyes of Creation.”

“Which is why I can rebuild it from scratch when I lose parts,” I noted. “Which does happen more often than I’d liked.”

The mage’s head bobbed in agreement.

“The main difference being that your body is a shape, while your mantle is a pattern of power,” he said. “That power is, of course, finite. Not in the sense that using it spends it, but along the lines that the cape remains a cape – it does not grow or lessen, as a living thing would.”

“So she cut the cape,” I guessed.

“Essentially,” he admitted. “You might say she cut out a corner of the cape. The pattern itself being fixed, the rest of the power thinned itself as a whole to recreate that corner.”

My fingers clenched.

“Are you saying I have less to call on, now?” I said.

“Well, yes,” Masego frowned. “Which I believed impossible, as power does not simply disappear, but evidently in this case it has. It is not unprecedented for heroes to violate Creational laws that apply to everyone else, but this is rather blatant even by their standards.”

“She was a pretty straightforward old bat,” I grunted. “So why did I bruise?”

“In the absence of Winter’s full influence, Creation assumed you to be human again,” Masego said. “With all the consequences that apply.”

I rubbed my forehead, feeling a headache. That made it sound like my actual body was basically a trick played on Creation, which was exactly the kind of thing I’d been terrified of hearing for the last year. Fuck. I really wanted a stiff drink right now.

“So if she cuts me again in that manner,” I said. “There’ll be a window of opportunity where I’m mortal again?”

“You are still mortal,” Masego said. “In the sense that you can be killed, at least. I give decapitation a better than half chance of working, though for obvious reasons we cannot test this. You would, however, lose the ability to reform for a span of time. An increase in fragility, though passing.”

He didn’t sound too happy about being unable to experiment with the removal of my head from my body, but I’d learned to ignore it when he was being an ass by accident. I rose to a sitting position as Hierophant got up and began methodically putting away the silvery instruments he’d used to have a look inside me. I didn’t feel a great need to reach for my shirt, folded on a lower table to the side. Being half-naked in front of Masego was like baring my ass to a potted plant – there was no real interest on the other side.

“We’re getting close to the pivot for the campaign up here,” I told him, rolling my shoulders to limber them. “That means a pitched battle, and likely revealing our shared trick.”

Hierophant smiled.

“Good,” he said. “I’ve been itching to prove the theory.”

I grimaced. That proof was likely to kill a lot of people, but then there was only so far I was willing to go to preserve the lives of an invading army. Getting my own soldiers killed when I could avoid it wasn’t on the table.

“Before that, I’m going to need you to mess with their scrying,” I said. “We want them cut off from the Principate when they feel the pressure mounting.”

The dark-skinned man shrugged.

“It is possible to accomplish,” he said. “Their formulas are... rough-hewn. Easy enough to muddle. Yet doing so will require most my attention.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “We’ve got a few more days left until it comes to a fight, by Juniper’s reckoning.”

“I could simply use the connection to kill their practitioners,” Masego suggested. “It would require less sustained effort on my part.”

I breathed out slowly.

“Do it,” I said. “But spare at least five of them. I need them able to scry the Principate after the fight.”

“This ought to be amusing,” Hierophant chortled. “They’ve yet to properly master defensive wards against the law of sympathy.”

“Try not to be too brutal,” I sighed.

“An interesting limitation,” he decided. “I will take it into consideration.”

Well, at least he wasn’t going to draw it out for kicks. Wasn’t in his nature. That was really all I could ask for. I slid off the table and picked up my shirt, slipping it on as he finished his clean-up.

“I would wish you a good night,” Masego said. “But you don’t really sleep anymore, do you?”

“Might get some reading done,” I said. “Reitz is a pain to learn.”

“I am pleased you are expanding your horizons,” he said, patting my shoulder awkwardly.

I couldn’t help but smile. He really was trying, wasn’t he? I pushed back one of his tresses fondly and bade him goodnight. My tent felt emptier for his absence, and the books I had piled up in a corner were a less than attractive prospect no matter what I’d told Masego. There were only so many histories you could read until they all kind of blended together. With a battle on the horizon, Juniper would either be sleeping or planning – either way, not to be disturbed. Vivienne was still presumably making her way back from her little jaunt in the crusader camps and Indrani was both away and probably busy bullying Robber. Larat was, well, Larat . I dropped into the seat I’d once ‘liberated’ from a fae stronghold, savouring the decadent cushioning. It was a strange thing, feeling lonely in a war camp still thriving with activity even at this hour. I missed Hakram like one of my own limbs, the ache having only grown over time. It should perhaps worry me, I thought, how much I’d come to rely on him as a touchstone for my sanity. In the corner, draped over another seat, the Mantle of Woe waited silently.

“I grant you leash,” I murmured. “I grant you eyes and ears, tongue and feet, at my sufferance.”

Akua Sahelian strode out of her prison with unearthly grace, clad in red and gold. I kind of resented that even with a gaping hole in her chest she remained stunningly beautiful.

“It has been some time,” the Diabolist mused. “Longer than usual.”

“I’m not speaking with Hasenbach before things are settled on the field,” I said.

“Is that my only value to you, dearest?” she teased. “Another pair of eyes on your foe?”

“I’m not sure what you’re trying to accomplish with the pet names,” I noted. “It takes a little more than sweet talk and curves to get me going, Akua.”

She laughed, clear as bell. I really had to commend whoever had taught her that, it made her sound almost pleasant.

“You believe I am attempting to use the fact that you are twice bloomed?” she asked, looking genuinely curious.

Genuine meant nothing, with that one. She could make it sound like she actually believed the sky was yellow if she tried.

“Bisexual, Akua,” I said. “The word is bisexual . Seriously, what is it with Soninke and making everything sound like bad poetry?”

“Your own people have the unfortunate tendency of using simple terms for complicated matters,” she chided.

Fluidly, she sat in the seat across from mine. She didn’t actually need to, of course. She was little more than a soul, and the physical seat made no difference to her position. But villainy of the old breed did have a way of prizing style no matter the situation, I’d give them that.

“Darling, to have interest in mere gender is hopelessly rustic,” she sighed. “Power is the only valuable measure. The superior looks of my people are simply a reflection of our ability to have them. The true worth of them is implicit .”

“You’ll excuse me if I don’t take advice in that from the get of High Lords,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “As I understand it, your take on break ups usually involves poison.”

“For lesser lords, perhaps,” Akua spoke with open disdain. “It is gauche to use anything but a dagger if there was real affection. Poison is a political tool, Catherine. When employed within one’s direct circle, it represents a lack of faith in one’s abilities.”

“More ritualized murder from the Soninke crowd,” I drawled. “There’s a shocker.”

“You must learn to discern between enmity and dialogue, if you are ever to rule the Empire,” Akua said. “Your lowborn origins are not so much of a hindrance as you might think, but your Callowan roots mean you must never be anything but exquisite at the Great Game if you are to seen as more than a violent foreign thug.”

“I really don’t,” I snorted. “Want to rule the Empire, for one, but also need to learn what you’re talking about. Any culture that requires regular intervention by mass-murdering demigods to function doesn’t deserve to keep existing.”

“Then you declare war on the High Lords, my heart,” Akua said. “As your teacher once desired. There is nothing but horror awaiting you on that path.”

“There we go again,” I noted. “I’m not your anything, Sahelian. Except killer, I guess, I’ll own to that one. It did make my year.”

“What other heart can I claim, dearest?” the Diabolist smiled, lightly tapping the edge of her wound. “You have bound me and taken me into your service.”

“You’re a tool, Akua,” I bit out. “In all meanings of the word.”

“And you think this is ungainly in my eyes?” the Soninke laughed. “That is only your due as victor.”

It was an accomplishment, I decided, that even as a powerless shade she could still unsettle me. Best not to linger on the subject.

“Talk to me,” I said, “about goblins. You were aiming to be God-Queen Bitch of Calernia, you must have taken them into consideration when planning.”

The dark-skinned beauty studied me with a too-wide smile.

“They have approached you,” she said. “The Council of Matrons.”

“That’s overstating it a bit,” I said. “But inquiries were made, a few months ago.”

She folded her hands in her lap.

“And now you speak to me,” she mused. “Understandable. Among your most trusted, the two goblins are ignorant of the inner workings of the Tribes. Those that would know most are your two Taghreb, the bastard and the Bishara, yet their understanding will be... limited.”

“Yours will be too,” I said. “But you always had a way with digging out secrets, so you’re worth hearing out.”

“If you are to understand goblins, dearest, you must first grasp that their core nature is that of scavengers ,” Akua said. “Never have they risen in rebellion when the Empire was strong, and even in weakness they are patient.”

“They don’t fight armies if they avoid it, I already knew that,” I frowned. “Which, considering their size and fragility as a species, is kind of a given.”

“It runs deeper than this,” Diabolist said. “Goblins will eat anything because they can never assume they will be able to forcefully claim what they need. To be one of their lot is to know from birth that most other life on Creation is larger and stronger. That death is always around the corner. Morality is, to a goblin, at best a distant concern. Bare survival always comes first, and in its pursuit they will commit acts that would given even a High Lord pause.”

“Considering the neighbourhood, I can hardly blame them,” I said.

“You do not grasp my point,” Akua said. “The mindset is not a consequence of Praesi aggression. It does not ebb and flow with threats. It is the starting point of every single goblin ever born .”

“Yes,” I said patiently. “And Praesi think demons are a valid solution to, well, anything ever. My point is that they’re not being unreasonable in thinking that way.”

Akua smiled.

“You believe they’ve never dabbled in diabolism?” she said. “My dear, the Sahelians have known for decades that one of the primary ingredients in munitions is powdered devil. Our alchemists never managed to reproduce the process involved, but it is a certainty. Now, consider that goblinfire burns all things born of Creation. What do you think that recipe involves?”

My heart clenched.

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “They’re using demons? How would that even work?”

“My people have studied both alchemy and diabolism for over a millennium,” Akua said. “And we have absolutely no idea. Munitions are only created in the deepest tunnels, and those that take part in the process never see the light of day. There is a reason goblin mages are so rarely seen among the Legions: as a rule, they are sent below and never return.”

Well, shit. Had I been throwing around burning demon juice at my enemies this whole time? Fucking Hells, that was going to take a while to process. I leant back into my chair.

“All right,” I said. “So the Matrons are not to be trusted.”

“This does not mean that they cannot be used,” Akua said. “They never plot uprising unless they believe the Empire is on the verge of collapse, and that their own people might be drawn into the matter. This implies Malicia’s hold over the Tower is not so solid as one might believe. The Matrons would not risk fighting an Empire united behind its Tyrant.”

“Ashur sent a war fleet to seize the Tideless Isles,” I told the shade. “What few reports I’ve managed to get on that say they’re hitting anything near the coast that doesn’t have walls.”

“No a threat to be underestimated,” Akua agreed. “Yet as long as the cities hold, the might of the Empire is not overly affected. Mere foreign incursion would not be enough to move them. Has your teacher returned to Praes since our... lively debate?”

“You mean that time where you murdered a hundred thousand of my countrymen,” I said very mildly. “At which point I ripped out your fucking heart and Black wrecked your doomsday weapon.”

“Yes,” Diabolist lightly said. “That. Quite the eventful day. Whatever did happen to the wights, anyhow?”

I did not reply. I simply applied my will, and her hand rose up to plunge into the wound. I had her tear at her own insides, patiently listening to her wretched screaming as she clawed at herself. After a while, I withdrew my will.

“I tend to disapprove of torture,” I said. “But we’re all cutting corners these days, aren’t we?”

She stayed silent, panting.

“Your victims were released and buried,” I said. “Even if I’d somehow been able to stomach keeping them, half of Callow would have risen in rebellion at the news. Now, prove yourself useful. Black has not returned to Praes since I carved out your soul and made it clothing. What do you get from that?”

“There has been break between him and the Empress,” she got out. “She would have him killed if he returned, or at least that he believes this.”

“Unless they’re running a game,” I pointed out. “Getting the opposition out in the open to cut them down in one stroke.”

“If that were so,” Diabolist said, “the Matrons would not have approached you. They must have reason to believe the split is not feigned.”

Mhm. That made sense. And it meant that, down line, I might be able to find an ally of convenience within Praes.

“Back in the box, Akua,” I said. “And if you ever again speak so casually of what you’ve done, I’ll sit down with Masego to figure out if shades can lose limbs.”

I withdrew all I had granted her, and she vanished into thin air. I closed my eyes, tired in a way sleep could not remedy.

This battle wasn’t even done, and already I had to prepare for those that would follow.

Chapter 13: Élevé

“Civilized men disapprove of murder, of course. Unless it involves banners and great numbers: then it becomes one’s patriotic duty.”
– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

We knew Thief had succeeded days before she returned. The crusader host had begun a hard march south, at a harder pace than they’d ever taken before. Malanza was working her soldiers to exhaustion, and we knew exactly why: Vivienne had emptied their stores. Larat had gated General Hune and her army at their back once since then, to break the supply lines again, but they’d not even bothered to send an army to chase the ogre’s soldiers away. The implication was that the foodstuffs coming from Procer were too few and infrequent to feed the number of hungry mouths she now had to deal with, and Thief confirmed as much when she stumbled back into camp.

“Heroes were busy with you or your minions,” Vivienne said. “I had almost a full hour before someone noticed the stores were emptying.”

“They didn’t pursue?” I asked.

“They tried,” she shrugged. “But they had nothing that could see through my aspect, apparently. Or at least no Named that could and came close to me.”

And with that, the preparations for our battle were done. We had Princess Rozala Malanza’s army exactly where we wanted it: tired, undersupplied, and forced to march on Hedges or starve. There was serious debate among the general staff about retreating even further south to stretch those advantages out, but in the end we decided against it. Any further and we were entering the heartlands of the Barony of Hedges. Assuming we won the battle, some defeated soldiers would flee into the countryside and the last thing I wanted was a few thousand deserters ravaging the region out of desperation. The Army of Callow folded back into a single entity, with the addition of a thousand members of the Watch. That brought us to slightly over twenty-two thousand soldiers, in whole. Against over fifty thousand crusaders, twelve – perhaps eleven if I’d mangled Two Knives enough, but I wasn’t relying on that when they had healers – heroes and who the Hells knew how many priests. Enough that scrying the crusader host directly had been a wash for months, anyway, and given the sprawling stretch of their war camps it had to be a least a few hundreds. My side boasted a few sharp knives as well, at least: Hierophant, well-trained mage lines, five thousand of the finest heavy cavalry on Calernia and Pickler’s vicious war engines.

The first enemy banners came in sight midmorning.

Yellow striped across red, with three white lions. That was the Prince of Orne’s own, if memory served, and the lesser banners beneath it kept to those same three colours. In the Principate, the heraldry of lesser nobles beneath a prince had use of only that’s prince’s palette. That led to an orgy of improvisation, most of it patently absurd to look at – like the red lion with a yellow pig in its mouth set on white I first saw not a half-hour later. The vanguard was pure Alamans. First came the horse, with rich armour and richer pennants, then a mass of five thousand fantassins. I’d not forgotten the lecture had given me on Proceran soldiery. Most their armies were levies raised and kept only for the length of the latest war, poorly equipped and barely trained. Vulnerable to shock tactics, why was why Procerans tended to put such an emphasis on light cavalry. Peasants with shitty spears tended run when a wedge of glittering charged at them. The second kind of soldiery was the one before me: fantassins. Former levies who’d lost everything in the wars or gained a taste for the soldier’s life, and now served in companies of their own making – though usually on the take from one prince or another. Leather and mail armour, wooden shields and longswords. Most of them were also carrying javelins, though, and that was more worrying. A well-thrown javelin would punch through a Legion regular’s mail if it came from close enough.

The last was principality troops, the personal armies of the many royals of Procer. Heavy infantry, mostly sword and board soldiers though their shields were lighter and smaller than Legion standard issue. They also had archer companies, which might get nasty. Legion crossbowmen tended to shoot further and stronger than any archer not using longbows, but I had relatively few of them and the rate of fire for a properly-trained archer was better. Juniper had raised crossbow companies when forging the Army of Callow, but in skirmished like that numbers often carried the day and those wouldn’t be on our side. The last principality soldiers were the cavalry. Light horse, most of them, since only the Lycaonese relied on heavy charges and there were none among the opposition. Our last count had the opposing cavalry at almost eleven thousand, more than double the Order of Broken Bells. Baroness Ainsley’s two hundred knights did little to even the odds, though they were still welcome.

The enemy vanguard stayed a mile away, not even remotely inviting an engagement. I wasn’t surprised. We’d waited for the crusader here for a day, and Juniper had my army at work the entire time. Field fortifications had been raised, trenches dug and siege engines set over low hills of beaten earth. Attacking us in our entrenchments without numerical superiority was suicide. Not that it prevented a few hundred enemy horse from parading out of crossbow range, banners waving in the breeze. Juniper sent out the Watch to clear them out, and they retreated after the first volley – which, sadly, killed no more than a dozen.

“Trying to gauge longbow range, you think?” I mused, eyes flicking to the Hellhound.

I was astride Zombie while the stood by her command table, surrounded by her staff. Easy for her to do, I thought bitterly. If I was on the ground, I wouldn’t even see beyond our reserves. Everyone was so fucking tall, it was really unacceptable.

“They should already have a notion,” the orc growled. “Not like it’s changed much in the last few hundred years. No, they were just arrogant little pups out to posture.”

And they’d lost half a line of their buddies for it. And that’s why you don’t let nobles run an army , I thought. Or at least not Proceran nobles. The Old Kingdom had done fairly well relying on its own.

“I dislike just leaving them out there,” I noted, gesturing at the five thousand infantry in the distance.

“Bait,” Juniper said. “There’ll be heroes, I bet. And if we sent enough soldiers to swat them away, we’ll weaken the fortifications for when the real army arrives. Let them come.”

I sighed. She was probably right. It didn’t make any more pleasant to stew in the sun while the crusaders lumbered towards our battle. By noon, the amount of cavalry in the distance had doubled. The spread of colours among banners had expanded. Blue, black, green. Wyverns and dragons and horses. Our own were less... exotic. The Fifteenth’s banner still flew, with my own personal heraldry besides it: scales, with the sword and the crown. The Order of Broken Bells had its own as well, but aside from that the only departure was the flock of starlings on blue that belonged to House Morley of Harrow. The infantry swelled as the hours passed, and before Noon Bell was at an end the enemy had fully arrived. I puffed at my pipe, watching the mass of shining steel ahead. There weren’t as many on the field today as there’d been at Second Liesse, but there were more soldiers . It was going to be a very different kind of battle.

“You think they’ll open with Named?” Juniper asked.

I shook my head.

“They’ve got veterans on the other side,” I said. “Heroes that have been around for long enough to know you don’t open with Named. The first will come out the moment we start winning on one side of the field.”

It would take careful managing, we both knew. Heroes could not be left alone. Most of them would scythe straight through even hardened infantry and their mere presence could turn a rout into a stubborn line of defence. On the other hand, my side didn’t have the numbers to hammer down every hero that popped up. In a contest of Named, I was short more than a few. And Thief hardly counted, considering she wasn’t a fighter. Hierophant and I could punch pretty hard, but on the other hand if our army started needing us to win then it became essentially guaranteed that some hero would cut us down. Best case, we’d be driven off the field, but best case wasn’t something to count on when there was the Saint and the Pilgrim on the other side.

“Priority’s teasing out whatever they intended to use as the northern passage if we blocked them,” I said. “That’s too dangerous an unknown to allow Malanza to keep sitting on it.”

I’d gotten an oath about the opposition not calling on angels, but the Pilgrim would never have agreed to that if his crew didn’t have other weapons to wield. With Praesi, it was the sorcerers you had to worry about. With the Procerans, though? My money was on the priests. I leaned forward, watching the crusaders in the distance, and frowned. Was that? Yeah, no two ways about it. They were moving carts and pitching tents.

“They’re making camp,” I told Juniper.

The orc snorted.

“How prudent of them,” she said. “Malanza must think there’d a decent chance it’ll take more than a day to exterminate us. I doubt she’ll be going for attrition with her boys’ stomachs going empty, but she’ll be generous in trading soldiers.”

“ Our camp is the largest concentration of foodstuffs between here and Hedges,” I said. “If she’s desperate...”

“She knows we can gate out if it gets to that,” Juniper replied, shaking her head. “No, this is just her hedging her bets. We’ll see the first skirmishers moving out within the hour, mark my words.”

The Hellhound, for once, was proved wrong. She’d not misread the military, as it happened, but the political. A party of four riders under truce banner rode out, stopping halfway between our camps. I went to meet them. I could have brought Juniper and Hierophant, or even Baroness Ainsley as the ranking noble with the army, but that would just be posturing. On this field, I was the one making decisions for my side. Zombie trotted out cheerfully, the sun pounding down at us until I sat in the saddle across from the crusader delegation. There were some familiar faces there. The Saint and the Pilgrim, though they were at the back. The old woman discreetly sliced her finger across her throat when I glanced at her. Charming. The Grey Pilgrim inclined his head in greeting and I did the same, before taking in the other two. The man was much older than the woman, at least late forties. Prince Amadis Milenan, at a guess. To my surprise, he was good-looking. I’d expected some caricature of a Chancellor, but instead what I got was very well-groomed older man with fair hair and a chiselled jaw. The other – Princess Rozala Manlanza, most likely – was maybe a few years older than me. Dark eyes and darker curls, with the kind of wicked easy smile that belonged more on Laure tavern girl than foreign royalty.

“Afternoon,” I said. “I’d say welcome to Callow, but I see you’ve already made yourself at home.”

I punctuated with a nod at the army behind them.

“Queen Catherine,” the older man said, bowing ever so slightly. “I am Prince Amadis Milenan of Iserre.”

“So I’d guessed,” I said. “I already know the two greyhairs in the back. Should I assume the curvy one measuring me up is Princess Malanza?”

“Are you trying to seduce your way out of this, Black Queen?” the woman in question asked, sounding amused.

“Unfortunately I have a strict non-invading Callow clause for people I let into my bed,” I said. “I’ll take that as a yes, by the way. You took your sweet time getting here, Malanza.”

“My supplies inexplicably disappeared into thin air,” the princess drawled. “Slowed us down some. I don’t suppose you’d happen to know where they went?”

“Must have been rats,” I said sympathetically. “Callow’s had a vermin problem, these last few months.”

“What a coincidence,” Malanza said. “We’ve come to remedy that very issue.”

Shit. Now I kind of liked her. I’d probably feel a least a little bad about putting her head on a pike down the line. Prince Amadis cleared his throat.

“I must implore you to excuse the uncouthness of my general,” he said. “The prospect of battle wearies her, as it does all of us.”

“I’m not a stickler on etiquette,” I smiled. “Trying to sell chunks of Callow, though? That does get on my nerves a bit.”

Not a trace of dismay passed on the princes’ face, though I knew he couldn’t be pleased about the Watch turning on him. Duchess Kegan had been less than impressed by the man, as it happened. He’d promised her both Laure and Denier when she’d pushed, which she’d taken as meaning he would have double-crossed her the moment he could.

“Preparing for peace is hardly treachery,” Amadis said. “You are outnumbered in both Named and men, Queen Catherine. Let us not spill blood unreasonably. I have terms of surrender to offer, should you be willing.”

I glanced at the Grey Pilgrim, whose serenity was unruffled by this. Did they seriously expect to fold now ?

“You would have to abdicate, naturally,” the Prince of Iserre said. “But I would title you Princess of the Blessed Isle, and grant you the eastern half of the lands currently in the rule of the governorship of Summerholm.”

“Huh,” I said. “And you heroes would respect those terms?”

“We would,” the Grey Pilgrim said, sending the Saint a quelling look when it looked like she’d speak up.

“It this the part,” I mused, “where I’m supposed to be thankful about you trying to make me your marcher lord at the frontier with Praes ? Let’s not even touch the part where you’re carving up Callow between your supporters, because then I’ll lose my fucking temper and we’re under a truce banner.”

“You cannot win this war,” Prince Amadis sharply said. “This must be obvious by now.”

“Malanza’s face is blank,” I said, pointing at the princess. “That’s because she’s trying not to smile. That should tell you more or less what I think of your offer. Now, here’s mine.”

I let out a long breath.

“Go home,” I said. “I’ll even provide enough supplies you don’t starve on the way out, though you’ll have to pay for them and there’ll be a ‘I shouldn’t have fucking invaded another country’ markup. You’ll find nothing here but death, so just go home and settle your pissing match with Hasenbach out of my homeland. If you cross the passage, I will not pursue.”

I glanced at the princess of Aequitan.

“That holds for after someone runs him through,” I told her. “Leave, and you will not be harassed on the way out. I don’t particularly want to fight this war, Malanza. It ends the moment you let it.”

“Are you threatening me under peace banner?” Prince Amadis Milenan calmly said.

“I’m telling you I’m about to stop being nice about this,” I told him. “I’ve bent over backwards to limit the damage, but if it comes to a battle a lot of people are going to die for very stupid reasons. And to be blunt, they’ll be yours more than mine. We could avoid that entirely and both be better off.”

“This is a crusade, Catherine Foundling,” the Saint of Swords said. “Not a petty invasion. You do not make truce with holy war.”

“There’s no point in talking to you, Saint,” I sighed. “You’re Ranger with a shiny coat of paint and a socially acceptable pretext for killing.”

The old woman’s face darkened.

“You’re going to lose a hand for that,” she said.

“Amateur,” I dismissed. “I’ve spent years dealing with Wastelanders, you second-rate bully. You think you’ve got a single threat that can shake me? I used to answer to a woman who uses a fucking demon as a gatekeeper has an entire hallway of forever screaming heads. Your notion is bad is her starting point .”

I barrelled on before she could reply.

“I’ll keep to the terms I agreed on with the Grey Pilgrim,” I said. “Where are we falling on prisoner exchanges?”

“No guarantees,” Malanza said. “Should there be worthwhile trades to make, you will be approached under banner.”

Translation: she was sitting on any men of mine she caught unless I got my hands on someone high up enough the ladder it would be politically inconvenient to leave there.

“There doesn’t have to be a battle,” the Saint said. “You and me, girl. Here and now. We settle it the old way.”

I glanced at her skeptically.

“Last time we scrapped you beat me like a rented mule,” I said. “I’m not getting anywhere near you without a mage company and half a dozen ballistas. Pass.”

“Cowardice is an ugly thing,” the old woman smiled.

“The chorus of the side with the bigger swords,” I shrugged. “If that’s all, I have an army to lead.”

“Such generous terms of surrender will not be offered again,” Prince Amadis warned.

“I’m feeling generous too, Proceran,” I smiled. “So when I sent your head on a pike back to Salia, your soul won’t be bound to it.”

And on this particularly diplomatic note, I spurred Zombie away and returned to my host.

Within the hour, skirmishers on both sides advanced.

Chapter 14: Arabesque

“So spoke His Dread Majesty in the wake of battle, even as the High Lords praised him: ‘Speak not flattering untruths. Another such victory and I will rule an empire of ghosts.’”
– Extract from ‘Commentaries on the Campaigns of Dread Emperor Terribilis the Second’

It began.

When Juniper had sent our skirmishers out, we’d been able to scrape together four thousand including the Watch. Crossbowmen, human and goblins, with one thousand deadly Deoraithe longbowmen at the back – when the enemy began returning fire, these were the ones I wanted the lightest casualties for. They were too useful and too few to waste on opening exchanges. Malanza sent forward nine fucking thousand men, and we were pretty sure that wasn’t even all she could field. The opposition apparently had much the same thought as we’d had, because the first wave to come in longbow range wasn’t principality troops: it was levies. I sucked in a breath, eyes making them out perfectly regardless of distance. Men too old and too young, with hunting bows instead of the kind of weapons a battlefield required. Some even had slings, which Juniper noted out loud some Arlesite principalities were known for. The Watch nocked, drew and fired without a word. At least a hundred levies died in the first mass volley as the Proceran skirmishers advanced, closing range. Conscripted peasants taking arrows so that the personal forces of princes would not. The sight of it had me gritting my teeth.

“It’s sound tactics, no matter how much you glare,” Juniper said. “Gets the people who can properly return fire in range without losses.”

“I know,” I said, fingers clenching. “I know it is.”

But how many kids and greybeards who’d just died had actually wanted to be on this field? I couldn’t know for sure, but Principate rulers had full right of conscription as their Gods-given birth right. They didn’t even to justify it, not like nobles had in the Old Kingdom – where only foreign invasion had granted that temporary privilege to aristocrats. The sickening thing was that many of them probably did want to be there. Because priests and princes had told them this was a holy war instead of Hasenbach trying to kill two problems with one stone or Amadis and his cronies making a play for the throne. I wasn’t so much a hypocrite as to damn them for it. I was well aware that the main reason my own army fielded only enlisted was that I’d had neither the funds nor equipment to raise and keep the amount of soldiers a general conscription would have brought. My fingers remained clenched anyway. Making decisions where part of my forces were openly deemed more expendable than others hadn’t grown any more pleasant with time, that unspoken admission that some lives were worth more than others.

“More kids than I’d thought,” my Marshal said after a moment, eyeing the enemy through a scrying bowl. “That’s interesting. Either she’s sounding out whether we’ll flinch at killing those, or they came closer than we thought to scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

“Hasenbach’s problem is a surplus of fantassins, not a lack,” I said.

“These aren’t fantassins, Catherine, they’re levies,” the Hellhound said. “Those boys we’re putting holes in look like they should be working fields and trades, not fighting in a war.”

I frowned.

“You think they’re having manpower issues?” I sceptically said. “So far, between the three armies, they’re fielding about one hundred and twenty thousand men. Their population can take that. We know that for a fact, you’ve read the same reports I have.”

“On parchment, maybe,” Juniper grunted. “But looking at them now I have to wonder. The civil war hurt the south pretty bad and they didn’t even have a full decade to recover. The north was spared, but it has to keep soldiers on the walls to deal with the ratlings. We might need to consider the possibility that Hasenbach didn’t forge her Grand Alliance just to keep her borders secure. That she might have needed the troops as well, and that if she loses enough soldiers some parts of Procer will collapse.”

My reflex was to disagree, but I forced myself to stop and think. There was some sense in that. The First Prince’s issue with fantassins was that she had several armies’ worth of them floating around without a war to fight or skills to ply in peace time. I’d taken that as meaning she had manpower to toss into the flames, but that was not necessarily be true. It might not be a surplus of people so much as surplus of the wrong kind of people. If Juniper was right and killing levies meant scything through the same men and women who should be keeping Procer functioning... Well, there was a chance that down the line principalities would have bow out of the crusade because they literally could not afford more losses. Which was a mixed blessing. Parts of the Principate withdrawing would ease off the pressure on Callow, but it might also lead to internal instability in Procer itself. Which, in some ways, would be helpful. Procer, if eating at itself, wasn’t mucking around in my homeland. But it also gave Black and Malicia a much freer hand, which was almost as dangerous. And if the instability takes Hasenbach off the throne... Honestly, I wasn’t fundamentally opposed to that. The chances of the next First Prince or Princess being as dangerous as Cordelia Hasenbach were fairly slim. On the other hand, I knew Hasenbach. I’d made a study of her, we had a personal relationship. Whoever replaced her would be an unknown and that carried risks.

There were already too many of those in this war, and wind picking up a third of the way through the tightrope was bad news all around.

While I’d been wrestling with the thoughts, the skirmish had turned bloody. We had range and rate of fire on the enemy, but they outnumbered my people by more than twice over. The first half hour was a one-sided massacre. Between the Watch and the crank crossbows, we carved a red swath through the levies. But then the professional soldiers of the the enemy got in range to shoot back, and I stirred uneasily atop Zombie when I saw wooden shafts begin raining down. Goblins were a smaller target than humans and my men were spread out loosely according to Legion doctrine, while the enemy remained in tight packs. That helped some, keeping the exchange of lives at about parity even with the lopsided numbers. The hard truth, though, was that Malazanza could afford to trade her entire skirmishing contingent for mine and walk away with a strategic victory.

“Juniper,” I said.

“Another two volleys, Foundling,” the Hellhound said.

“We’re barely denting the principality troops,” I sharply replied.

“Levies we kill now aren’t covering the first wave against our palisades,” the Marshal of Callow replied. “It’s a worthwhile trade.”

Another two volleys, like she had said, and then the horns sounded the retreat. The Watch, I saw, had not lost so much as a single man. When the enemy had advanced, they’d retreated equally and kept killing all the while without missing a beat. If Ratface’s discreet following of Deoraithe spending over the last year had not made it clear how ridiculously expensive training and arming them was, I would have been livid with envy. As it was, I was merely very jealous. The enemy skirmishers had little stomach for pursuit. They’d killed and wounded nearly a thousand of my crossbowmen, but at three times the cost – and most of those dead, not just bleeding. Juniper’s order to withdraw was coming just ahead of the point in the cold lay of arithmetic where the skirmish would become costlier than it was useful.

“Marshal,” one of her aides spoke up. “Enemy cavalry is moving.”

My eyes flicked to the side. Malanza had been traditional in the arraignment of her forces. Three thick waves of infantry in the centre, with four thousand cavalry on each side and another four thousand in reserve at the back with what looked like a few thousand principality troops. A hard-hitting reserve that she could pour into whatever breach her foot managed to make. The cavalry contingents on both sides were on the move, though. Riding ahead of the crusader host, converging on my skirmishers from the flanks. Only at a trot for now, but when they got close enough they’d charge.

“Probe?” I asked the Hellhound.

“If they don’t hurry the fuck up, our soldiers are back well within siege range before the horse gets anywhere close,” Juniper said. “That’d be... costly, for her. They might be trying to bait out the Broken Bells.”

“Talbot could hit one of the flanks hard and withdraw before her foot gets there, or even the other cavalry wing,” I noted. “This seems like...”

Trumpets sounded from the other side, and after a few moments of milling around the enemy skirmishers began to pursue.

“That’s,” I began, but closed my mouth.

What the Hells was Malanza up to? She had to know that if her archers got in killing range of our trebuchets and ballistas it’d be a godsdamned massacre. Even if her cavalry hit at the same time. We’d lose crossbowmen, sure, but a heavy formation of advancing enemies would be a sapper’s wet dream. And she’d lose twice as many soldiers when her people broke and fled, especially if the Broken Bells sallied to hit them on the way out.

“Juniper?” I tried.

The orc did not respond. She’d gone utterly still, eyes fixed on the approaching enemy. She barely even breathed or blinked.

“Her infantry isn’t moving,” Juniper said.

“I can see that,” I replied flatly.

The meat of Princess Malanza’s infantry had yet to move, still standing in the distance.

“Her infantry isn’t moving,” the Hellhound slowly said, “because it doesn’t need to.”

Which made no sense to me. Not with the forces the enemy had set in motion. Cavalry and skirmishers, this close to our engines?

“Full retreat,” Juniper barked at the closest horn blower. “Break formation.”

The officer blinked, then sounded the calls. I did not know the orc’s reasons yet, but I did know better than to gainsay her instincts when it came to battle. The crossbowmen scattered and legged it as the Watch ceased firing and put their supernatural swiftness to full work. What was the play here? Already the Deoraithe were in siege range, and the goblins among the crossbowmen weren’t that far behind. The greenskins could scuttle quick as spiders no matter the terrain. It’s not about the forces, then , I decided. They still matter, but only as part of a larger tactic. Something was missing, and that thought was a familiar one. Juniper and I both had it before, when wondering why Rozala Malanza would try to take her army through a narrow passage my men could hold the end of. And the conclusion, I remembered as my blood ran cold, was that she’d had something up her sleeve we didn’t know about.

Three heartbeats later we learned.

From the beginning, we’d dismissed the notion that the crusaders would use their priests the same way we did mages, for sorcerous artillery and shock tactics. Brother and sisters of the House of Light were not supposed to take the lives of others. We’d theorized there would be some willing to break those vows, and that they would be a threat to deal with. But aside from this, we’d believed the priests would be a purely defensive and support asset. Our failure, Rozala Malanza taught us, had been one of imagination. Ahead of the retreating Watch, panes of light bloomed. At least forty feet tall, though thin. A fence , I realized. They are fencing them in. Pane after pane formed, boxing in our retreating skirmishers in the span of time it’d take me to light a pipe. An opening was left, at the back. Where the enemy bowmen paused and put their formation in order, as on both sides of them the Proceran cavalry began to charge.

“Tell Pickler to fire at will,” Juniper barked at the closest mage.

The message passed and the twenty heavy ballistas fired their stones. The first volley hit the fence at a high angle, and the stones broke without even visibly affecting it. The trebuchets threw their load in the moment that followed, arcing high over the fence straight at the enemy archers. They never reached the crusaders. More fences formed over their heads. Some rocks shattered, others bounced off. The broken remnants remained on the light, as if it were a physical thing. I gestured for another mage to attend me.

“Get me Hierophant,” I said.

The rectangular silver mirror in the man’s hands shivered after he got out his incantation, revealing Masego’s face. He was currently with the mage lines, and already I regretted not having him at my side.

“Hierophant,” I said. “You see the fences?”

“Miracle work,” he said. “Interesting use of priestly powers.”

“Shut them down,” I said. “ Now .”

He nodded, and after a shiver all the mirror showed was my own reflection. My fingers clenched as I watched the first volley from the Proceran bowmen hit my skirmishers, all on the left wing. They’re concentrating their volleys, I thought . Annihilation tactics. They did not intend to leave any survivors. My soldiers returned a ragged volley of their own, save for the Watch. Throwing hooks above the fences, the Deoraithe found physical purchase and began to climb. I had hope, for a moment. Until the fences above the Proceran archers angled to drop the remaining stones harmlessly in front of the crusaders and disappeared. They shortly after reappeared above the fences keeping my skirmishers boxed in, cutting cleanly through ropes and hooks. Fuck. The colder, calm part of me noted that they’d had to dismiss some fences to add them elsewhere. That implied there was a limited amount they could make. Commanded by Masego, my mage lines gave answer. Seven massive spears of lightning began to form above our fortifications, strengthening with every heartbeat.

“Pickler,” Juniper growled behind me, standing in front of a scrying bowl. “I want continuous fire on those archers. Don’t stop even if it doesn’t go through.”

On the other side of the field, sorcery flared up.

Hierophant had torn through their mages for two days before they stopped trying to scry, and it has cost them at least twenty practitioners. They had easily ten times that many left, though, and Archer had confirmed at least one of the heroes looked wizardly. If it came to a sorcerous pissing match, I would still bet on my own men. They’d been taught rituals by Hierophant, and more than a third were both Praesi and Legion-trained. Procer was a magical backwater, if it came to trading blows they should come out on the losing side. Which was, I saw as the enemy sorcery took shape, why Malanza had ordered them to do nothing of the sort. Praesi magical shields tended to be translucent and tinged blue, when not entirely transparent. The Proceran equivalent was opaque and yellow. Four layers came down in front of the fences even as the spears of lightning shot out. My mages were better, as I had thought. All four layers broke under the screaming storm of lightning. But by the time the sorcery reached the fences it had been weakened enough they merely shuddered under the impact. Layered defence, the cold part of me noted. Clever. The rest of me bit my lip until it bled, as I realized the crusaders were just going to slug it out like this again and again until all my skirmishers were dead.

“Juniper,” I called out, the orc turning to meet my gaze. “Broken Bells?”

She cursed virulently in Kharsum but nodded. The horns sent out our five thousand knights into the fray, palisades opening to let them stream out. Would it be enough? No, I already knew. It wouldn’t. But it might lower the damage of this from disaster to wound. Talbot had his knights form into a wedge the moment they had the room, galloping out to the left to hit half the enemy cavalry even as Pickler’s engines hammered the fences above the crusader archers repeatedly. They held anyways. I knew better than to get my hopes up, and my pessimism was rewarded when the forward sides of the fences keeping my skirmishers contained winked out. They reappeared in a long diagonal in front of the advancing Broken Bells and my fingers clenched once more. Not a single of the knights died, but the length of the fence was unbreakable and forced them to take the long way around. Keeping them away long enough that the enemy horse would reach my skirmishers unimpeded. With a mixture of grief and pride, I saw that my crossbowmen were in formation and returning fire. They took the losses from the enemy archers, ignoring them for a hard volley into the tip of both Proceran cavalry contingents. Horses fell and screamed, men went down. The charge continued. The remainder of the Watch split in half, heading for the edges of the fences on both sides.

Masego, I knew, would not take lightly that he had been thwarted even once. The lack of lightning spears forming in the sky to answer the yellow shields that had come down a second time heralded that he would have gotten... creative, and when my old friend unleashed his wrath he did methodically. A jagged shard of red light bloomed and struck the first shield. The yellow sorcery shattered, but the shard remained. Another shard formed, and struck the back of the first shard like a hammer on a chisel. The second shield broke. It was working, but too slow. The Watch was getting away but the Proceran cavalry hit my skirmishers and it was a massacre. They tore through the first three ranks like wet parchment before the momentum was even slightly slowed. Another shard formed and the third shield broke when it hit – and then the fourth shield as well, a heartbeat later. They were accumulating strength, I grasped. The light fence shuddered but held. In the handful of heartbeats before the fourth shard formed and hit, at least a thousand of my men died as I watched in silence. When the light finally broke it was too late for them to even run. The riders were already among them.

“Pickler,” Juniper said quietly. “All ballistas are to fire into the cavalry. Keep the trebuchets on the the archers.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. The orc’s face was grim as she met my gaze. The siege engines, we both knew, would kill our crossbowmen as well as the cavalry. But those men had been dead the moment the Proceran horse reached them, the cold part of me assessed. This way, at least, the ranks furthest back could be salvaged. The salvo pulped soldiers and horses alike when it hit. Theirs and mine both. I felt wintry, vicious rage well up in my veins. For a moment I indulged the wind-like whispers and the poisonous comfort they brought, but then I dragged my mind back to clarity. Pickler managed another handful of hits on the enemy horse, but less than a hundred died from them. They were already retreating and cavalry was hard to hit with mostly static engines. Especially when fences bloomed to cover their retreat, as Malanza smoothly arranged. My surviving men fled back to the palisade. We had sent four thousand onto the field, Juniper and I.

A bare thousand returned, more than half of it Watch.

“We have,” Juniper spoke into the graveyard silence of the general staff, “underestimated Princess Malanza.”

In the distance, trumpets sounded again and the Proceran infantry began to advance as the forces that had engaged pulled back. In front of them, seven lone silhouettes took the lead. Good , I coldly thought.

I was in a killing mood.

Chapter 15: Bravura

“And so my reign ends as it began, with fewer allies than stab wounds.”
– Alleged last words of Dread Emperor Pernicious, the Imperiled

“Tell me about those fences,” I said.

Hierophant had gained back a few pounds, enough that his thinned frame looked full again. How he’d managed that on army rations I had no idea, but the mystery was not a fresh one: he’d gone through both the Rebellion and the Arcadian Campaign without losing weight. I’d been half-convinced that it was a self-perception anchored deep enough that his Name enforced it, until he’d wasted away in the Observatory. He’d still come a long way from the bespectacled boy I’d once known. These days he looked, well, dangerous . There might have been little muscle to his frame, but he stood tall – taller than me, but then who didn’t? – and the long trinket-woven braids going down his back leant him a certain panache. The black eye cloth covering his glass eyes matched the permanently dishevelled black robes that were the only thing he bothered to wear anymore, not that he’d even been prone to indulging in fashionable clothes. The power he now so casually wielded clung to him even when unused, half-felt wisps of sorcery never quite gone. Masego had been perhaps the most destructive of my companions even back when he’d been the Apprentice, but he’d rarely seemed anything but awkward and a little pedantic when he wasn’t casting. Now, though? He looked like the kind of sorcerer you didn’t walk away from fighting. It suited him.

“A lecture on the nature of priestly power is out of the question, I suppose,” the dark-skinned man sighed.

“Ask me again when an army isn’t marching towards us,” I said.

“That’s almost never,” he muttered under his breath. “Very well. Though weaker – diluted, according to some theories – than the Light we have seen heroes wield, the essential nature of priest miracles is the same. That is the stuff these fences were made of.”

“Can it kill soldiers?” I asked.

“No,” he shook his head. “As a reflection of oaths taken, the miracle should not be able to hurt anything living.”

Well, that was something. From the way the fences had cut straight through hooks and rope, I’d have to assume it could wreck armour and fortifications if they hit at the right angle. That was... problematic. We’d raised the palisades in the first place because we needed them as an equalizer for crusader numbers. If they could just cut them down at will, that measure was gone.

“Next time the priests try the fences, can you just hit them directly to interrupt?” I asked.

Reluctantly, the mage shook his head.

“Mass sorcery at great distance needs a scrying tangent to be aimed properly,” he said. “Unless it is fired blindly. Priests, as you well now, disrupt scrying.”

So, unless Malanza blundered by putting all her priests in our field of vision and clustered together smothering the fences in the crib wasn’t an option. This just kept getting better, didn’t it?

“Then we need to have an immediate answer ready for when they do appear,” I said flatly. “I’ll need you with me for the brawl, so the mage lines will have to handle it.”

I flicked a questioning glance at him at that, inviting him to pass judgement. I heard his left eye twist inside his skull towards me, but he did not reply. Right, subtle cues. Not his strength.

“ Can they handle it?” I asked.

“They can cast the Ripper without me,” Masego agreed, and elaborated when my eyebrow rose. “The red light constructs we used for the second exchange.”

“That’s...” I sighed. “I need a little more than that, Masego. Would wards work?”

“Against miracles, they are mostly useless,” Hierophant noted. “The spectrums are too different, there is little overlap. We would have a great deal more success targeting their mages.”

“Priests wouldn’t screw with that?” I frowned.

“Unlikely,” he said. “Remember the precision they formed those shields with, and at such distance. That cannot be obtained without scrying or other means of relayed direct sight. Having priests among them would make that impossible, implying the mages stand alone. I’ll add that whoever designed that strategy has a keen understanding of all forces involved, which is quite rare even among Praesi. Rather impressive.”

So either they had a very skilled wizard on the other side, or the Grey Pilgrim had contributed to Malanza’s battle plans. I hoped it was the latter, because the enemy had enough advantages already without having someone even remotely in Masego’s league to field.

“Order them to target the mages first,” I finally said. “The fences will be trouble enough on their own, we can’t afford for wizards to give them additional staying power. Inform Juniper’s staff I gave the order, too, I don’t want them in the dark.”

The blind man nodded, idly tracing a circle of silver light in the air with a fingertip and inserting a scrying spell within. I looked on in interest for a moment, since that was definitely a new trick. I’d been under the impression there needed to be a physical anchor for scrying, but apparently Hierophant had figured out a cheat. I left him to it, leaning my elbows against the top of the palisade. The two of us were on a wooden walkway, between two rising slopes where Pickler’s repeating scorpions would be pushed up when the enemy got close enough. We had thirty of those overall, a massive amount of siege weaponry even by Legion standards. It meant we were light on combat sappers, since those same soldiers had to attend the engines instead, but sharpers and charges weren’t going to win us this battle. Not against fifty thousand hero-led Procerans. And, speaking of the devils. The crusader host had lumbered forward, its three infantry waves advancing slowly as the cavalry wings retreated to cover their flanks. In front of the first wave, though, the same seven silhouettes I’d glimpsed earlier were pulling ahead. Heroes. Three sword and board, I noted. Men and woman. Another I recognized from a previous fight, the same priest who’d engaged me as backup for the Saint. No sign of Two Knives or the red-robed mage, but I knew better than to assume a vicious crippling had been enough to keep the heroine I’d mangled out of the fight.

Hopefully she’d already had all three of her aspects, because if she hadn’t she’d likely popped one out since designed to screw me over. Clearing out the heroes that had come into Callow over the winter had taught me that a hero having an undefined aspect just meant that the Heavens had the means to teach their hatchet men a trick to counter one of my own. They were rarely subtle about it, too, which was kind of insulting. It would have been polite to be less obvious in their attempts to stack the fight for their side. Of the last remaining three heroes, I recognized another. The man with the hammer I’d ignored when riding with the Hunt. The other two were unknowns: one muscly, barefooted woman with a staff that could mean she was either a sort of priest or fighter. And a boy that could not have been older than sixteen, with a greatsword propped over his shoulder that was nearly as tall as he was. And didn’t wear a helmet, because of course he fucking didn’t.

“It is done,” Masego said, coming to stand by my side again.

I nodded slowly.

“You remember our training?” I asked.

“Healers die first,” he recited dutifully. “Then practitioners, then I must constrain the enemy to ease your task or prevent outside intervention.”

“It doesn’t look like they have a mage with them, but that just means they’re holding the man back in reserve,” I said. “Watch for that. And if the Saint of Swords ever tries to close distance with you...”

“Flee,” he completed. “I must never let her be closer than ninety feet.”

“And that’s the conservative estimate,” I grunted. “She didn’t even use an aspect to smack me around, Masego. She starts getting serious, don’t think in victory terms. Escape and containment, while we gather massive enough a response to force her back.”

“You sound sceptical of our ability to kill her,” Hierophant noted, sounding surprise.

My fingers clenched.

“I am,” I admitted. “We’re good, Zeze. Better than good. But her and the Pilgrim? They have decades of experience and accumulated power on us, and their Gods aren’t shy about putting a finger to the scale. Don’t think of it as us tumbling Summer again, because against Summer we had levers and rules. We’re the green heroes taking a swing at your father and Black, in this story. We get cocky for even a moment and...”

I did not elaborate.

“Heads, pikes, the usual,” Masego said. “I shall endeavour prudence.”

We stayed in comfortable silence after that, watching the enemy advance.

“I think that I dislike them,” he finally said, after a long moment. “These crusaders.”

I snorted.

“Well, they are at war with us,” I said.

The mage shrugged.

“So were Summer and Akua Sahelian, yet I never could must much antipathy,” Masego said. “Even towards the Exiled Prince and his mercenaries. They were only creatures acting as their nature demanded, and that is a blameless thing.”

“Is it really?” I murmured. “Just because something comes naturally to you doesn’t make it right.”

“A very Callowan view,” Hierophant said. “Your people seek to overlay Creation with a notion of objective morality, which always struck me as rather absurd. If the teachings of any of the Gods were fully correct, Creation would not exist at all. It is, after all, a debate.”

“The Gods can say whatever they like,” I muttered. “The truest thing Black ever said to me was that, in the end, only we are responsible for our choices. Taking marching orders from Above or Below is just abdicating the rights your own life. The Book of All Things has this lovely little verse about that, you know. Choice. But is it really that if the only two answers are already picked out for you?”

“Free will,” Masego smiled. “You always did obsess over that. I’m not certain such a thing can truly exist, Catherine, not in a world that was created .”

“You’re the one who wants to open up Creation to see how it works,” I pointed out. “When you were in a fugue, after becoming Hierophant, you said something I still remember. The godhead is a trick of perspective .”

“I believe it still,” he admitted. “Now more than ever, as I have seen what became of you. How Winter’s mantle alienated you from mortal existence. To think as a God, I suspect, is to be a God.”

“And you’ll try to get there,” I said. “Seems meaningless, if it’s not your choice.”

“Perhaps I was simply meant to attempt it,” Masego mused. “Because it is my nature to do so.”

“Does it really matter?” I asked. “Whether or not that was writ in you from the start. All we can do is act.”

“Perhaps not,” he murmured. “And so I find myself disliking these crusaders.”

“They killed a lot of my men,” I said quietly, fingers forming a fist. “And we’re only just getting started.”

“Death is death,” Masego dismissed. “But the way you carry yourself now, as if they put stones on your shoulder? This I hold against them.”

I bumped my hip against his side affectionately, then leant against his shoulder. He allowed it without comment, which was as close as he’d ever come to openly returning the affection. I’d never quite get him, would I? How in the same sentence he could display both kindness and utter apathy.

“It’s going to be a long war,” I whispered.

“And we will win it,” Hierophant said with bedrock certainty.

“And what has you so sure of that?”

He laughed quietly.

“Perhaps it is simply my nature,” he said. “Go now, Catherine. Go and follow your own.”

I moved away. Closing my eyes, I breathed in and out. Seven heroes, huh? Time to see if we could thin that herd a bit.

Opening my eyes, I unsheathed my sword and leapt down.

—

When fighting a group heroic Named, Black had once told me, two manners of adversaries could be found. The first was a proper heroic band. Should that be the case, coordination and weaving of skill should be expected. Against a band, either dispose of the healer first or place an instantly lethal blow against the leader figure. That would allow me to either inflict attrition or break coherence. The second kind of adversary was a mere grouping of heroes. No leader, no teamwork beyond the obvious, limited coordination. Rarer , my teacher had assessed. Mostly seen in large scale continental wars or when an overwhelmingly powerful villain emerges, like Triumphant or the Dead King. I was neither the most dreadful of empresses nor the ancient abomination that lurked within Keter, but here I was anyway. Fighting seven heroes as the host of Procer advanced behind them. They had been ordered to be be prudent, I grasped. Three advanced towards me: one sword and board, the war hammer and the greatsword. Behind them stood the barefoot staff-wielder, and further back the last two with shields were flanking the healer. This isn’t about power , I thought. Power is the crutch of Named. Clarity and skill will win ever time.

“I don’t suppose,” I said, “that we’ll have a round of introductions?”

The hammer-wielder chuckled.

“What worth are those to the dead?” he replied.

“That,” I said, “will make for a very ironic tombstone.”

I let them strike first. The pair with the large weapons went for the flanks as the shield-bearer slowed to box me in. Eyes on him, I let my senses bloom. No Winter, just the inherent abilities that came with my body being a fucking construct. The mantle would remain inert as long as possible, since I was pretty sure the real reason the Saint and the Pilgrim had yet to show was that they were trying to bait out a Winter trance so I wouldn’t think of retreat when they did arrive. The hammer went for my legs, and not even a heartbeat later the greatsword whistled towards my torso. Board arcs both, that they could readjust if I went forward. I did not. The thing with large weapons was that, once you’d committed to a blow, there was a heartbeat where it was very difficult to move. Where the muscles were busy dragging that large chunk of steel around. I moved towards the greatsword, adjusting to the arc and ducking under at the last moment. The boy wielding it grunted, shifted his footing and swung backward at the height of my hips. Without missing a beat I slid under, letting a hammer blow pass through the air where I’d been, and in a crouch passed behind the hero as my blade whipped out. His greaves did not cover the back of his leg. I rose smoothly from the slide as he was forced to kneel down, his tendons cleanly cut. Light bloomed inside the wound.

There was a heartbeat where I could have thrust the tip of my sword through the unprotected back of his neck, but I knew better. The sword and board man was already rushing me, shield angled up as he swung his blade. I did not parry, instead throwing myself on the shield and rolling over it, landing behind him. It threw his footing, and when the hammer-wielder tried to whack me I smoothly kicked the back of the the shield-wielder’s knee and pushed his back. The hammer struck him in the shoulder, shattering steel like it was chalk. A curse, a scream, but I had more important matters to deal with. The first reserve was about to cut into the dance. The barefoot woman was stalking towards me, centre of mass supernaturally steady as she did. Ugh. Not a caster or a monk, then, a brawler. Wood or not, if that staff hit me I suspected I wouldn’t enjoy it. Light bloomed, and the shield-wielder’s broken shoulder snapped back into place. Without looking, I could feel all the moving parts. Hammer man was rushing my back, weapon already hoisted. Greatsword boy was going around to my left, warier now that he’d had a taste. And the one with the staff was smiling serenely as she advanced. I spat to the side.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s have another go.”

I waited until sorcery bloomed in the distance to move. A whirlwind of flame erupted around the healer and his bodyguards, though before my view was blocked I saw light flare on the shield of one of the heroes. No kill there, but it should keep them busy for a bit. Masego was only getting started anyway. Hammer-wielder struck first. I knew the angle of it without looking and half-stepped out of the arc, but the man laughed.

“ Broaden ,” he said.

The war hammer tripled in size, and there was no avoiding all of that. My shoulder was clipped and it fucked with my footing, keeping me in place just long enough for the greatsword boy to strike.

“ Pierce ,” a woman’s voice spoke from behind me.

Power howled. Ah, they were trying to bury me through concentrated might. Shame they’d not trained together sufficiently. It was a tricky thing, to keep myself in the way of both the thrusting staff point and the greatsword until the last moment. A handhold of ice formed just above my free hand I used it to hoist my whole body up, letting the golden-wreathed wooden staff impact the greatsword. It broke like it was made of porcelain, but I didn’t get to enjoy that for long. The hammer-wielder was still on my ass, smashing down with his oversized chunk of metal as if the weight hadn’t changed along with the size. I dropped the handhold, and the fall bought me a heartbeat as the swing followed me down. It was enough. I rolled to the side as the ground shook and chunks of wet soil went up in the air. The staff-wielder’s naked foot caught me in my armoured chin but I felt the godsdamned steel bend under the impact as it sent me rolling. Fuck. That was one was dangerous, not because she was more competent but because she was quicker and quick was what my survival depended on.

The storm of fire winked out as I got back on my feet, all four heroes in the fray rushing me. A glance told me the healer and his protectors were completely untouched, but a moment later spikes of lightning began hammering down on their position one after another and just like that we were back in business. I watched my enemies approach, their angles and their speeds. Greatsword boy, I noted with amusement, was wielding the remaining half of his weapon like some sort of oversized cleaver. He didn’t look all that happy about it. I circled slightly to the right, putting the hammer man between myself and the staff-wielder. And that meant... Ah, there you are. Sword and board feinted high and I took him up on it. Even as he flicked his blade down towards my throat, I turned my parry into a swing towards the side of his neck. His shield went up, and that killed his field of vision. Greatsword hero had to get close, now that he’d lost his reach, and it was not his specialty. I flicked to the side and caught his extended wrist, twisting his sharply so he was forced to stand in the way of sword and board’s attack.

“ Resist ,” the boy hissed out.

Light spread across him in the blink of an eye and I dropped him before it could touch my fingers. The other hero’s blade bounced off unceremoniously. While the younger one tried to pivot so he was facing me again, I followed his movement smoothly and lunged at sword and board’s throat while he withdrew. The shield came to knock away the blade again, but that hadn’t been what he needed to watch out for. My wrist flicked, a knife dropped into my armoured palm and I rammed it through his eye from the open angle. Behind him I heard the hammer-wielder curse, since he didn’t have a clear shot at me. Even as the hero I’d knifed dropped and began twitching death throes, my ears flicked. I hastily backpedalled as the staff-wielder leapt over the fight, landing where my shoulders had been a moment before. The wood whipped out, and my hasty parry was poorly angled. It went straight through my guard, denting my plate and tossing me away for the second time. Well, at least one was down and the healer still busy. Unless he could – no, I wasn’t even going to finish that thought. I dragged myself upright and smiled at the barefoot woman.

“Round three?” I offered.

Her staff rose. I almost missed it, because it wasn’t flashy. It was just a low ripple, a murmur of power. But my senses were no longer a mortal’s, so my eyes flicked to the hero I’d killed. At his side knelt an old man in grey robes, who gently took out the knife. He then passed a hand over the bloodied face, murmuring a prayer. The hero’s eyes opened and he let out a ragged gasp. There was no longer any wound on his face. The Grey Pilgrim rose to his feet gingerly, and offered me a rueful smile.

“Round three,” he agreed.

Chapter 16: Pirouette

“When the abyss stares back, wave. Offer refreshments. Being impolite to the abyss is never a good idea.”
-Dread Emperor Malevolent I, the Unhallowed

“Oh, come on ,” I complained. “I know I don’t have a lot of room to argue about healing, but that knife was tickling the back of his skull. Even I wouldn’t walk that off so easily, and my body is basically lies and mirrors.”

There was some shuffling from the opposition, either because of the reminder I’d just killed one of their crew or because grievances at how fucking ridiculous their powers were weren’t what they’d been expecting. If they’d been waiting for despair, they were out of luck. Not that I was particularly pleased my work had been literally waved away by the Pilgrim, but that the heroes would be almost absurdly hard to put down wasn’t exactly a surprise. The Heavens had already thrown their second-raters at me and I’d chewed straight through them over winter. They were done fucking around.

“You could still surrender,” the Grey Pilgrim offered.

Instead I sighed and tapped the side of my helmet. The sliver of power was enough to activate the dormant rune.

“Spell formula stable,” Masego said. “No divine interference.”

“Confirmed resurrection,” I said. “Pilgrim’s come out to play.”

Thief had warned me that last-moment rescues were his specialty so it wasn’t coming out of the blue, though after actually landing that blow I’d expected the hero to actually stay down afterwards. At least the first part was going more or less according to plan. Smacking around the greenhorns some had forced one of the real monsters to intervene before I dug a little too deep and Winter took the helm. I almost felt like shivering at the idea of facing the Grey Pilgrim when in a state of mind where monologues felt like a good idea. Akua might have been right that playing it up for Creation added some hurt to the swings, but there was a reason I was wearing her as a cloak accessory instead of the other way around.

“Noted,” Hierophant replied. “First contingency beginning.”

“Skip straight to second,” I grunted. “I think we underestimated how much trouble the old man would be.”

Which was a Hells of a thing to say, considering we’d planned for him being in the same wheelhouse as Warlock. But if I was reading this right, swinging his miracle dick around wasn’t the Pilgrim’s game. He was more a metaphorical full hand on the scales than the kind of Named that tossed around burning mountains. And that’s only eight out of twelve accounted for , I thought. Saint and at least one mage are still waiting in the wings.

“Understood,” Hierophant said. “Sunrise Final is-”

Power flared, and his words cut out. I glanced at the Grey Pilgrim, whose staff was wreathed in light.

“Rude,” I said. “You could have let him finish. Regardless, I’m reconsidering my stance on single combat. Theoretically, if I agree, do I get to pick my opponent?”

I met the stare of the man I’d stabbed and winked on the same side my knife had gone through. He flinched.

“She is temporizing while her ally prepares his strike,” the Grey Pilgrim told the other heroes. “Prepare yourselves, children. After that blow is weathered is the moment to strike.”

Gods, but I hated fighting smart opponents. Banter would have kept William and his crew busy for a few minutes, at least. It didn’t matter, in the end, because I hadn’t spent the last year busying myself sorely with the affairs of rule. While they’d been assembling their armies and heroes, I’d been training the Woe. And the one amongst them I’d spent most time on was Masego, hammering in the basics of battle that he’d once ignored in favour of simply smashing everything in sight with sorcery. The first thing I’d taught him? A well-worn adage from Theodosius the Unconquered himself. Swiftness is the lifeblood of war. Before the heroes could further prepare, Hierophant struck. Dawn rose from a sun unknown to Creation, the terrible heart of Summer shining down on the cluster of heroes. Even from where I stood, the heat was overwhelming. Wind picked up even as the Named before me winked out of sight, swallowed by scorching light. The Princess of High Noon had been one of our most vicious enemies to deal with, but we had gained much from her defeat: even this pale imitation of her power made mockery of the kind of sorcery we usually called on.

Within the blaze, a star was born. Shining atop the Grey Pilgrim’s staff as he stood unruffled, his loose robes untouched by wind or heat.

“As there was first light, there will be last,” the old man said. “Under radiant star was the first of mankind born, and it will shine long after our time is past. Transient we, yet unbowed by the passing. I refuse your verdict, usher of mysteries.”

With a thunderous clap, the blaze was parted. A corridor opened, leading straight to me, and the heroes rushed down. I rolled my shoulder. Half the knockout punch was delivered, I was my responsibility to take care of the second half. The barefoot staff-wielder was first across, blindingly fast. Behind came the usual triumvirate: greatsword, war hammer, sword and board. Not the same as before, for the latter. Apparently coming that close to dying had shaken the man, because it was now another. The sorcery came down around me, too close to a ward for comfort. I grimaced. I’d have to suffer through, at least until the time to withdraw came. Stance wide, I raised my guard and waited for the first of the hunting hounds. She thrust high, towards my throat. Batted aside, but she was better with her weapon than I was with mine – a spin was all it took for her to be smashing down at my pauldron. I took it. The steel shattered like clay, but the impact wasn’t strong enough to screw with my own blow. It carved a wound across her cheek, narrowly missing the nose. I got in close to sucker punch her belly, but she parried the blow and I was forced to step back to avoid having my ribcage caved in. Light bloomed on her cheek, the healer’s work.

It healed nothing.

Masego had fought demons at Second Liesse. One of them had been a demon of Order, what Praesi called a Beast of Hierarchy. Their essence, as I understood it, was a perversion of laws. Hierophant had learned to mimic that, to a a very limited extent. Inside my killing grounds one law had been established: Light had no effect. The barefoot woman withdrew before I could exploit her surprise, damnably well-trained, and then I had to deal with the second wave. Greatsword – what was left of that weapon, anyway – went for the left side. Hammer for the right, the fresh sword and board keeping me boxed in. I almost smiled. They’d had a limited amount of training together and it was showing: that made it the second time they were trying that tactic on me. Last time I’d gone for one of the sides, and they weren’t idiots: they were expecting as much. Instead I barrelled forward. The hero’s shield bashed forward to keep me in place for the others to hit, but they’d learned the wrong lesson from the last time. It wasn’t that I couldn’t break their formation, just that I hadn’t chosen to. My armoured fist hit the shield and it dented, the man wielding it crying in pain as it broke his fingers behind it. It was a good opening to slice his throat, but the other two were at my back so there was no time. I ran into him, the two of us falling to the ground as weapons whistled behind me.

Instinct led me to throw myself to the side instead of wrestling on the ground. It saved my life. Summer’s dawn had not only been broken by the Pilgrim, it had been wielded: he shaped it into a beam and threw it at me. His aim was perfectly angled, enough that it didn’t touch sword and board when he stayed on the ground. Behind me, earth exploded in desiccated chunks. Time was running out: I couldn’t engage four heroes and the old man simultaneously, that’d just get me killed. I’d have to get aggressive then.

“They damaged the Light,” the barefoot woman said in heavily accented Lower Miezan. “Careful.”

It was the right move, telling her comrades healing mistakes was no longer an option. It was also the wrong one, because for a heartbeat they were surprised. I shot back towards the boy with the wrecked greatsword, ducking under a swing and catching the wrist. Hammer-wielder would have smacked me away, aiming for my hips, but a flex of the legs had me putting my feet on the boy’s chest while the hammer passed under me. For a heartbeat I was vulnerable, and that had the staff-wielder on my ass. Not quick enough, for once, I thought. My thighs tightened, and using the boy’s own chest as a counterweight I ripped his arm off. There was a spray of blood and an anguished scream as I fell into a roll, the staff smashing down where I’d been a heartbeat before. Left with a bleeding arm wielding the remains of a greatsword in my free hand, I threw it in the hammer-wielder’s face before he could aim another strike. He was horrified enough to take a hand off the hammer to push it aside, and that was a mistake. I landed the roll on my feet, angled my stance and smoothly rose. My blade thrust in an upwards diagonal into his throat. He opened his mouth, trying to gurgle out a word – aspect, probably – but I smacked the pommel and the sword went straight through his spine. It was an uglier death than a clean decapitation.

“ Enough ,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

He pointed his staff at me and a star came to life. The beam hit a pane of force three heartbeats before it would have incinerated me, both of them exploding deafeningly. Gods bless Hierophant. Sword and board was getting back on his feet, greatsword boy still screaming about his missing arm – seriously, what a wimp, I lost limbs all the time and you didn’t hear me yelling about it – and staff-wielder was... back on me. Godsdamnit. I threw myself to the side, swiped at her feet and got treated to a kick in the face for it. While I was rocking back she flowed into a thrust at my throat. Ah, experience. She’d gone for that too often, I’d expected it this time. I caught the tip of the staff with my hand, feeling the steel give and the palm bones break, but I kept my grip on it while I slashed at her throat and she tried to withdraw for a parry. Blood spilled on the ground. Two down, though it was anybody’s guess for how long.

“ Sever .”

Masego’s miracle vanished. So did my sword, my hand up to the wrist and the armour over it. Fuck. I backpedalled hastily as the Saint entered the fray.

“Aspect already?” I said.

My hand formed again, though much slower than it should have. And it remained ice instead of looking like flesh. That was a problem.

“Your little mage’s trick was impressive,” the Saint of Swords said. “But time to wrap this up, if we want it over before sundown.”

The lack of sword was more a problem than the severed limb, ice or not. A flick of the wrist had a knife falling into my palm, but that was rather cold comfort against this particular monster.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ve been thinking on how to beat you anyway, Saint.”

The Grey Pilgrim, apparently uninterested in banter, sent another fucking star at me. Hierophant, bless his soul, split it in four and forced it to shoot in four different directions.

“Have you?” the old woman drawled. “This ought to be interesting.”

I could not help but notice none of the heroes I’d put down were getting the resurrection treatment. Was it just comprehensive healing at the last moment, then? Too little to go on to be sure.

“One swing,” I said. “If you can take that, I’m probably out of luck.”

The heroine laughed.

“Well,” she grinned. “Give it your best shot.”

Ice formed a sword blade out of my knife as I shifted my grip. Steadying my stance, I allowed the power of Winter to gather in me. Motes of blue emanated from my frame. To my surprise, the Saint actually bothered to get into a stance of her own. Huh, she was taking me seriously. That was kind of flattering.

“Welp,” I said, and run away.

I legged it as fast as I could, which was very considering my mantle. They really must have taken me for a complete idiot, if they’d thought I’d stick around to fight a crew of heroes and the two old beasts. I heard the air howl behind me as the heroine cussed me out in Chantant, leaping onto a platform of shade to get out of the way. I tapped the side of my helmet as I leapt back down, running as fast as I could towards the relative safety of the palisade.

“Masego,” I said. “I need you to-“

“ Dodge ,” he screamed through the spell.

I threw myself to the side, and idly reflected that the smoking wound in the ground to my left could easily have been my corpse. Lovely.

“Mage lines on her,” I continued. “Artillery too. Gods, everything we can throw.”

The sharp tang of lightning filled the air as what must have been no less than thirty feet behind me exploded in a screaming storm. I did not look back.

“She just ran through that,” Hierophant said through the spell, sounding somewhat offended by the notion.

Engaging the heroes far away from the fortifications had seemed like a good idea at the time, but I was perhaps coming to realize it might have been a tactical mistake. The air howled again and I leapt onto an angled platform, immediately leaping onto another to remain above ground. Where there was now a hole. Shit. A handful of Pickler’s engines began firing, but I wasn’t holding my breath for scorpion bolts stopping that one. I heard the screaming wind of another strike coming my way and shaped a platform, but it was immediately hit by a beam of light. Fucking Pilgrim . I had to reach for Winter and slap down half a ton of ice behind me, not that it stopped the Saint for more than a heartbeat. I gave part of my attention to the little bundle in the back of my head that was Zombie, ordering her to take flight and guiding her towards me.

“I’m not hearing her anymore,” I said through the link.

“Put wards around her,” Masego replied stiffly. “Can’t talk, she’s cutting them as fast as-“

The spell cut out again. Fucking Pilgrim . My damnably short legs devoured the remaining yards as quickly as they could. Seriously, you’d think Winter would have the decency to give me another few inches when rebuilding my body from scratch. Fine. I’d cope. I should get there without – don’t you fucking dare blow it now, Foundling . Naturally, the Heavens rewarded my hubris by a neat little box of yellow opaque shields appearing around me. No rescue was incoming from my mage lines: the moment those had appeared, I’d felt sorcery bloom in the distance and shoot towards enemy lines. I was regretting the tactical decision of aiming my casters at the enemy’s, right about now. I opened the floodgates, let Winter course through my veins and smashed through the shield in front of me the exact samemoment the Saint of Swords scythed through the one at my back.

“Seriously, what does it take to put you down?” I called out.

“ More than you’ve got ,” the old woman hissed.

I was on the move before I even began speaking, but not quite fast enough. I lost my left leg up to my knee before I could dodge, though by the time I came out of a roll it had formed again. Fuck, I was digging into Winter way more than I’d wanted to this early in the fight. We’d have to use our trick as soon as I got back, even if that made it less effective than it could be. I leapt up onto a platform, a beam of light hitting a pane of force that blew them both up again a heartbeat later. I decided then and there Masego was getting a raise. Which shouldn’t be hard, considering I wasn’t paying him. The Saint carved through the platform, and my other leg that still had armour on it, but I was already in motion and I landed on Zombie’s saddle. Awkwardly enough I almost fell, which would have been a very humiliating way to die, but my mount flew up and finally we made it out of the Saint’s range. For now, anyway. Already she was cutting the sky to run up that same cut.

“Masego,” I said, tapping the side of my helmet. “Get all our godsdamned mages to hit the target I’m marking.”

There was no reply, because the spell was cut – fucking Pilgrim – so I’d have to hope he heard me. Weaving glamour into a glaring red arrow pointing at the Saint even as she moved, I guided Zombie into a sharply angled descent towards the palisade. Darkness formed into an orb above the Saint, and a heartbeat later a smaller beam shot out of it to hit the location I was indicating. To my vocal disgust, she somehow parried the fucking darkness. Gods Below, what was it going to take? After scorpions reoriented to fire on her, the Saint finally withdrew. I knew better than to believe that would be for long. She’d be back with the first wave of crusaders, which shouldn’t be long. I’d been a little too busy fighting for my life to notice, but enemy archers had gotten close enough to the palisade to begin firing and the infantry wasn’t far behind them. Zombie landed at Masego’s side and I got off, slapping her rump as thanks for saving my own. She whinnied, which I definitely hadn’t told her to do, and smugly trotted away.

It was telling that, at this point in my life, even my undead horse was sassing me.

“Hey, Zeze,” I panted. “We having fun yet?”

“I’ve contained demons with the Ivory Globe,” he replied, panting as well. “ Demons , Catherine. She just cut out a door and kicked it open.”

“Yeah, we’re not going to be fighting her head on any time soon,” I snorted. “Not unless we have a mountain range at hand to collapse, anyway.”

His glass eyes flicked down to my bare feet, the movement visible even through cloth.

“What happened to you boots?”

I gestured vaguely backwards.

“Oh, they’re somewhere back there,” I said. “Along with what used to be my legs.”

He snorted.

“One of those days, is it?” he said.

“Well, at least I don’t have to bluff an angel,” I mused. “So there’s that.”

We shared a smile.

“You ever see what happened to the heroes I killed?” I asked.

“They were not resurrected, last I saw,” Masego said. “I suspect what the Grey Pilgrim uses is merely a much more powerful version of priestly healing, not true resurrection. Which seems logical, as that is usually the province of purely healer Named.”

And the old man definitely wasn’t that. His little light show had carried quite the punch. I adjusted my cloak around my shoulders, which did little to hide the fact that I was barefoot in the middle of an active battlefield. The crusaders were bringing ladders to the fore, I saw. If there was ever a time it was now.

“Our turn,” I told Masego.

The blind mage smiled, and a whispered incantation had a water-filled bowl appearing in the palm of his hand. He’d not made it, of course. Materializing something even this small would likely kill him. It’d been brought out of a personal dimension, if I had to guess. Within the carved wooden bowl was dark water, the same that could be found within the pools of the Observatory.

“Let’s hope this works,” I said, glancing at the enemy army. “We’re in the shit otherwise.”

“The formula is-”he began.

I interrupted him by plunging my hand into the water. I went straight through, but did not reach the bottom of the bowl. My eyes fluttered closed as Masego whispered soothingly in the arcane tongue. Absolute positioning, he’d called this. I could feel my mind... expand. Beyond a perspective a mortal could bear, but I was hardly that anymore was I? One spike of painful clarity after another went through my forehead as I saw them whole. Calernia. Arcadia. The juxtaposition of them.

One end , Masego’s voice whispered into my ear.

I knew it well, that place. I’d fought there twice, once against the Duke of Violent Squalls and the second time against the Diabolist. The Fields of Wend. A depthless lake filled with moving glaciers, sprawling as far as my not-eyes could see.

And another , Masego reminded me.

I could see the battlefield before us, from above. The armoured multitudes advancing towards palisades, like toy soldiers on the ground. Devices of wood and metal firing bolts into men, the shining silhouettes advancing with the host. So many of them.

Align , Masego whispered.

And so I did. Gates, I called them, but that was the barest understanding of what they were. There were no words in any tongue I knew to express it, but instinct bridged the gap. In the sky above the army of crusaders, a circle a mile wide opened.

Through it poured a lake atop their heads.

Interlude: Kaleidoscope

“Spoken like a man I’ll have raised from the dead just to execute a second time.”
– Dread Emperor Malignant III

They’d meant to make a lake, but that was not what Juniper was looking down at. After the flow was cut the currents had slowed to a crawl, then settled, and what had once been a plain was now cold marshlands. Dotted by a handful of glaciers, for now, but eventually those would melt. Not in time for the battle to be affected , the Marshal of Callow decided. The massive chunks of ice could be relied on to block field of sight, but they should not be taken as a more than temporary cover. Not with the calibre of Named on the other side. With the sun beginning to set down, the marsh was empty save for shallow waters and corpses or not. Earlier in the day she’d sent the Watch to harass crusaders trying to fish out survivors, but she’d had to call them back when the heroes took the field again. Juniper licked her fangs behind closed lips, the ridge inside her mouth allowing easy access to clean. She’d been told by Aisha that the way it made the mouths of orcs look to human – too broad, too prominent, almost animal-like – was one of the reasons so many of them assumed her people were thoughtless brutes. It was, her old friend had said, an unconscious judgement. The Hellhound did not mind. There’d been many judgements made today, some more harmful than mere human stupidity.

She still remembered the moment she saw the gate open in the sky. The primal awe the sight had shaken her with, that reminder that she was a very small creature in a very large world. That there were entities striding amongst mortals that could flatten them with but a word or a gesture. It’d been difficult to gauge how many Procerans died the moment the water hit them. At least two thousand, she suspected. The gate had not been so high up in the air that gravity would turn it into some divine blow, but the sheer weight of the mass of liquid made that largely irrelevant. A hammer flattened an ant even if you were barely swinging it. All that power, wielded by a shifty sorcerer and barefoot woman who’d murdered a demigod. That’d always been Catherine’s walk, hadn’t it? The fine line between absurd and terrifying. A single moment and the entire lay of the battle had changed. Proceran advance had immediately collapsed, thousands fleeing the sweeping tidal wave pointlessly. The died anyway, drowning in armour. Another few thousand were still lying at the bottom of the marsh.

The crusaders had been struck with horror, but there were people on the other side who’d mastered their panic. Within two heartbeats, mage fire and white-hot heavenly flame had erupted in the centre of the cascading waters. Tons of liquid turned to scalding vapour, but the edges had kept pouring down. Slowed but not stopped. When the first glacier went through, it was split in two by the fires and further broken apart by what Juniper was fairly certain had been the Saint of Swords merely swinging her blade. It’d limited the damage caused by the massive ice structures, but then they’d been swept by the current too and began crushing everything in their way. Another two heartbeats and fences of light formed themselves across the portal to keep the water in, as the heavenly flames winked out. It hadn’t been enough. They lasted barely a heartbeat before shattering under the weight. From beginning to end, the entire affair lasted for eleven heartbeats.

Then the Grey Pilgrim struck.

It had defied easy description, and not only because anyone looking directly at it went blind in the aftermath. There’d been... a star, perhaps that was the only way to put it. Only instead of a distant radiant light it had been a knife . It carved through an edge of the portal, and the whole thing shuddered. Then it went straight through the other side and the sky blew up. A ring of power spread for miles, boiling hot rain falling across the battlefield for the better part of an hour afterwards. The fairy gate was broken, though now there was a strange circle-shaped glimmer above both armies. Juniper had not been pleased, at the time, but neither had she been furious. The gate had not been meant to be kept open for much longer anyway. Her mistake, she now realized, had been thinking in terms of mortal war. Her Warlord’s spell had taken the day away from that mould, and price had to be paid for such great power. Especially when that power was broken by a foe. There is a reason the Carrion Lord does not unleash the Warlock at the beginning of every battle , she thought. And now we learn it the hard way. The exercise of a villain’s power always left them vulnerable, and the backlash for this unmaking had been particularly brutal.

Catherine was not dead, they were fairly certain. Juniper had mages drag her out of sight and examine her the moment after she collapsed. But she was unconscious and... dreaming. The orc had been told that the queen’s body was now made of the stuff of the fae, but she had not truly grasped what that meant until she watched Catherine Foundling’s body shift around like a puzzle box. Square blocs of flesh erupted her chest, short spikes bent bone and muscle in every direction and Juniper had grown nauseous watching her commander’s face melt down to the skull and reform with an eerie keening sound. She still felt ill thinking about it. Orcs were flesh and bone, instinct and feeling. There was almost nothing of any of that left in Catherine. What had struck Hierophant had been subtler. They’d thought him fine at first, as he remained standing where he’d been. Only when he’d not replied to a question had the soldiers noticed that he was perfectly still. No longer even breathing. There was now a permanent rotation of two mages by the man’s bedsides weaving spell to mimic what his lungs had ceased doing. His heart still beat, at least. Neither of the two had woken up in the three hours since the Pilgrim had attacked them.

That left the Army of Callow very, very vulnerable.

So far there had been no attempt at a heroic assault, but there was no telling how long that would last. An issue compounded by the fact that none of Juniper’s mages could tell her when the two most powerful members of the Woe would wake, if they ever did. The army’s fortifications had withstood the waters well at least. The wards held, and the only place the palisade broke was on the left flank when a smaller glacier chunk hit the wall. Mages had been able to keep that contained with shields, enough that the entire battle line didn’t flood. It had been rebuilt since. Was this what you feared, Catherine, when you forbade Bonfire? Part of Juniper still believed that plan had been the best chance at a winnable war they’d had, but now she was being forced to admit there was more to wars with Named than tactics and strategy. It was a bitter pill to swallow to admit that she’d had a weakness in her thinking, but now that she knew of it she must fix it lest she make mistakes in the future. Juniper spat into the shallow waters filling the ditch before the palisade, then turned around. She was in overall command, now. And there were things to be done, the first of them having a conversation with a woman she despised.

For once, the Thief was easy to find. The thin woman was lounging outside the tent where the remainder of the Woe slumbered uneasily, propped up in a folding chair and sipping at a silver flask. Juniper sniffed out the scent. Brandy. Even her taste in alcohol was shit.

“Marshal,” the Thief drawled. “I had a feeling you’d be coming.”

And still she drank, Juniper sneered. Vivienne might have grown on the Warlord and the rest of the Woe, but the Hellhound had never taken to her and never would. The Thief was the worst parts of her people crammed together in a single arrogant frame. The orc had learned to set aside most the dislike of Callowans she’d been taught as a child, admitting to herself that they were no worse than the Soninke save perhaps for the occasional petty moralizing. But this one, she was a reminder of why it’d taken the orc so long to like Catherine. She was hollow in the bone. Orcs and goblins understood, without ever needing to be taught, that the heart of the world was kin and clan. The Legions had taught Juniper that kin did not necessarily mean blood, or clan her own people, and it was that shared understanding that had brought her close to Aisha – who had, herself, been forced to learn to divorce the loyalties of her childhood from those that were truly deserved. The Taghreb were perhaps the closest thing humans could come to reasonable. They understood tethers. Soninke, like Callowans, had no such loyalty in them. Instead they worshipped at some abstract altar of principle, a mortal-made god of meaninglessness. Climbing the Tower, saving the Kingdom: there was little difference save in petty details. The years had taught Juniper that though the people might be fools, individuals need not be. That the things she found so disgusting gathered mostly at the top.

But Vivienne Dartwick was the incarnation of everything she despised about Callow.

An admitted thief, one who took but did not contribute. Were she an orc, she’d have ended up in a cooking pot by now. And while she professed high ideals, unlike Catherine she didn’t even have the decency to bleed for them. The Thief was not a fighter, only a parasite. Like a tick she had nestled over new warmth when her previous host died. And had made herself useful enough since that she could not simply be carved up and eaten like she so richly deserved. Just looking at her made Juniper want to bare her fangs. The antipathy, she knew, was shared. The occasional contemptuous looks shot behind Catherine’s back made that eminently clear, though they were both professional enough that they worked together without trouble. Or had, anyway, when Catherine was awake. Without her between them the Hellhound had a feeling the knives would finally come out.

“War council is to be held,” Juniper growled. “You will attend.”

The Thief’s brow rose, almost mockingly.

“I am not a member of the Army of Callow,” she said.

“You’re a spymistress,” the orc said. “A hoarder of secrets. Now is the time to spit them out.”

“I know quite a bit that you don’t, Marshal,” the wretch agreed with an easy smile. “But little of import to the battle. Which seems, regardless, not in the process of being waged.”

Juniper’s blood ran hot, but she ground her fangs. She would not be baited so easily.

“We do not know when she will wake up,” the Hellhound said.

“Which makes most planning irrelevant,” Thief replied. “Without Catherine and Masego, we lack the teeth to go on the offensive. Plan your defence, Marshal. You do not need me standing at your table as a prop displaying your influence to do so.”

That the tick would so familiarly refer to people she’d once sought to kill had the orc’s fury spiking. She knew hat humans did not have the same understanding of blood feuds, but that insolent girl should be in pieces . Already once a traitor, she would turn again. It was only a matter of time.

“So instead of having some use, you’ll just sit there and get drunk,” Juniper scathingly said. “What a Named you are. I’d get as much use out of a fucking tavern girl.”

“Do you often fuck tavern girls, Marshal Juniper?” the woman asked smilingly. “My word, I had no idea. Still, this is a little bawdy for idle conversation don’t you think?”

Juniper’s fists clenched. Without ever moving, the Named had changed from a lounging wastrel to an amused aristocrat. She was making an effort to be be infuriating.

“I will remain here,” the Thief said, “and watch over them. If you do not believe there are agents of Malicia in this host, you are a bloody fool. My hours are better spent keeping an eye out for a knife than repeating numbers you already know for an audience of officers.”

There was much that Juniper wanted to reply. That having her at the council would allay fears, serve as a display of unity. That a fucking spymistress had no right to gainsay the orders of the Marshal of Callow, especially not on campaign. But there was no point, so she held her tongue. Turning around without another word, she left.

She had a battle to win, with or without help.

—

Rozala slumped into her seat, exhausted beyond belief. Night had only just fallen, but she knew the work would continue through the dark and unto dawn. In the first few hours, when chaos and panic had spread across the host, she’d desperately struggled to restore order. There was a very real chance the crusaders would have routed, if not for the heroes. They’d walked among the soldiers, helping and healing and soothing away fear. The Princess of Aequitan was still sure at least thousand levies would disappear overnight. After the tides stopped and the scalding rain ceased, the reports had begun coming in. Even now it was hard to tell how many had died, over less time than it took to boil a kettle of water. Early estimates were at nine thousand dead and at least half that out of the fight.

Rozala Malanza closed her eyes, and dealt with the truth that she had just commanded the most disastrous military offensive in living memory.

And the battle had begun so well. The Heavenly Fences had allowed her to trample nearly a seventh of the enemy army within the first hour, badly crippling the enemy’s ranged abilities: without the crossbowmen, the casualties involved in taking the palisades from the Army of Callow would have been greatly lowered. The siege engines would have taken their due, yes, but the Fences would have limited the damage. It would have been a rough affair, no two ways about it, but most definitely a battle she could win. And Rozala had made plans to hit hard and fast enough at least part of the enemy’s supplies could be seized before they retreated through a gate. Enough that starvation could be kept at bay at least a sliver of the way to Hedges. Now there was most a mile of frozen marshland between her army and the enemy’s, and her men were two days away from beginning to boil grass to have something to fill their stomachs. There was a very real chance she would have to order horses butchered, if it came to that, and she could already heal the other royals howling about their expensive war horses getting the axe to feed mere peasants.

The dark-haired princess shivered. Part of it was that she was still drenched and cold: after the first reports, she’d handed the reins to her officers and gone with the rank and file to drag survivors and wounded out of the water. It was the least of what she owed for today’s debacle. The other princes and princesses and followed suit, even Prince Arnaud who she doubted had ever done a hard day’s work in his life. It’d been a given they would, after word spread she’d gone out personally. They couldn’t be seen to care less about the soldiers, could they? The thought was uncharitable, but not necessarily untrue. Rozala’s mother had always taught her that command was her right, but also her responsibility. A general who spent lives frivolously was just a butcher, and the Malanzas were no such thing. Ambitious, perhaps, but their roots were that of ancient and famous generals. Her distant ancestor Lorenzo Malanza had been the one to conquer the northern half of the Dominion of Levant for First Prince Charles Merovins. His splendid victory at Tartessos was the subject of song to this day. And she had shamed that memory, she thought with a grimace. By her failure, but also the other reason her hands were trembling.

Gods, she’d been so small. And no great beauty either, with that strong nose and those razor-sharp cheekbones. She’d talked like a sloppy commoner, all insults and insinuations where the situation demanded poise. And Rozala had not been able to hold back, trading verbal blow for blow with the same nonchalant woman who had just dropped half a lake from the sky . The knowledge of how easily the Black Queen could have killed any of them had the heroes not accompanied the delegation would haunt her thoughts for years to come. What kind of a woman could do something like that, just speak a word and nigh-instantly slaughter thousands? The princess was not unfamiliar with war, but this was... something else. A titan stepping on ants. She did not blame those who would desert in the night. And now she understood the fervour in the First Prince’s eyes, when she spoke of the evils in the east. Rozala reached for the bottle of eau-de-vie she’d sent for, breaking etiquette by pouring her own cup and downing it in a single gulp. The liquor warmed her enough that she did not send a servant for a blanket. Neither did she change out of the wet clothing, though. Let her visitors remember where she had spent her hours.

The Grey Pilgrim was the first to arrive. Rozala rose to her feet, and bowed with genuine respect. The old Levantine had saved hundreds of lives after personally destroying the Black Queen’s weapon, wreathed in Light as he spread warmth and healing wherever he went. The former had been the most important of the two. How many would that have lost to the deathly cold, if not for the pulses of heat?

“Chosen,” the princess said. “I am in your debt for your toil. Any boon in my power to grant is yours to claim.”

A dangerous thing to offer Named, she knew, but looking at the exhausted old man who looked like was folding into himself Rozala did not hesitate. He had saved lives in her care, and Malanzas did not leave debts unpaid. The Pilgrim looked at her through eyes gone rheumy and clasped her hand with wrinkled fingers.

“You owe me nothing, child,” he whispered. “Would that I could have done more.”

“Through winter and summer, my word stands,” Rozala formally replied in the old Arlesite oath. “So long as the Heavens watch and Creation withstands.”

Whether he ever asked the favour of her or not was irrelevant. She would not allow kindness to go unanswered. The hero smiled sadly.

“This is not the first or last tragedy this war will bring,” he said. “Steel yourself, Rozala Malanza. The worst is yet to come.”

“A prophecy, Chosen?” Rozala asked.

“An old man’s intuition,” the Grey Pilgrim said, shaking his head. “Darkness grows. I fear greater evils than Catherine Foundling are yet to come.”

The dark-haired princess’ blood ran cold. Worse than the monster who’d faced half a dozen Chosen on her own and brought down the sky? She could think of few greater evils in existence, save for the Tower itself and the Kingdom of the Dead. Neither thought was comforting.

“I hear your guidance,” Rozala said, bowing her head in thanks.

“May I?” the hero asked.

Uncertain what he meant, the princess nodded in agreement regardless. The glimmer of light was barely visible, but warmth washed over her. Permeated every part of her body, chasing away cold and weariness and fear. Like she was sixteen again, fearless and ready to rise against Hasenbach to avenge her mother.

“It will be a long night,” the Pilgrim said, panting lightly.

She helped the elder into a seat afterwards, seeing his legs shake, and broke etiquette again to pour him a glass of liquor and press it into his hand. Chuckling ruefully, the Levantine sipped at it. He made a face.

“Eau-de-vie,” he said. “The things you Alamans drink. Ah, what I would not do for a good pear brandy. It always tastes like Alava.”

One of the great cities of the Dominion, Rozala recalled, nestled among tall hills. Famous for its orchards and its herds. It had held on a decade longer than the rest of Levant when the Principate invaded, and even after the city was besieged the inhabitants preferred to burn it and flee into the hills rather than live under Proceran rule.

“Your birthplace, Chosen?” she asked, returning to her seat.

“Levante is where I drew my first breath,” the old man replied. “But Alava is where I grew ton manhood. It is where I will die as well, if the Heavens ever allow these old bones to rest.”

“Creation will be lessened for the loss,” the princess said, and to her surprise found she meant every word.

“Creation will go on,” the Pilgrim smiled tiredly. “We are never quite so important as we like to think.”

She would have enjoyed quiet conversation with the man a while longer, but it was not to be. Prince Amadis Milenan strode into the tent, his embroidered tunic pristine and his hair perfectly coiffed. It was not enough to hide the tightness around his eyes. Behind him was a short man in a leather coat that went down to his knees, covering loose trousers and shirt of coloured silk. The Rogue Sorcerer, as he called himself. Of the Chosen, it was him Rozala knew best: they had spent long hours together planning the battle and his role in it as leader of the wizards. She had found him genteel and polite, surprisingly so for a man whose Name implied a certain uncouthness. The princess began to rise, but Amadis held out his hand.

“No need,” the Prince of Iserre said. “Not after this kind of day.”

The princess hid her surprise. She’d half-expected that after today’s debacle he would seek to undermine her position with recriminations. He still might, regardless of this unexpected olive branch, so her guard would remain up.

“Princess Malanza,” the Rogue Sorcerer greeted her, inclining his head before taking a seat.

“Chosen,” she replied, just as courteously.

Amadis let out a long breath after sitting down, a long moment passing before he spoke.

“This was,” he said, “not the way we had anticipated this battle would go.”

An understatement if there ever was one, Rozala thought. The use of we did not escape her attention. Blame was not being put solely on her shoulders.

“The failure was mine,” she said anyway.

“We’d prepared for many things, Your Grace,” the Rogue quietly said. “But the sky opening up to drop a lake was beyond our predictions. There is no fault in this, save in believing that our opponent would not be so monstrous.”

“I agree,” Amadis said calmly. “I cast no doubts on your competence, Rozala. Your initial success is proof enough of it. There will be no talk of removing you from command.”

The Princess of Aequitan inclined her head in silent thanks. Did this shake you enough you are taking this seriously Amadis? she thought. Or are you simply keeping me at the head of the host to scapegoat if the situation further worsens? No matter. For now, it was still her battle to fight.

“I must begin, then, with a delicate question,” she said. “This... gate. Should we expect another if we attempt a second offensive?”

If so, this campaign was over. Rozala would not throw away half a hundred thousand lives for pride, even if refusing to do so ruined her. They had learned the enemy’s trick, but the enemy would have learned theirs as well. There was no guarantee the Pilgrim would twice succeed in breaking the gate. The two Chosen traded glances.

“That is a complicated question,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “Against most other villains, I would say that forceful shattering of the gate might actually kill them. The amount of power and involvement in crafting such a thing is staggering, and the break would lead to vicious backlash.”

“Yet Catherine Foundling is not merely a villain,” the Pilgrim said. “She is a titled Duchess of Winter. Perhaps the last fae of that realm, if I interpret the Augur’s words correctly. She is no longer human, in a sense. What would destroy the likes of the Warlock or the Carrion Lord might not affect her at all. Her nature has grown other.”

“We have seen neither the Black Queen nor the Hierophant since the battle,” Prince Amadis noted. “To be frank, I was expecting an Imperial offensive while we were in disarray. We might very well have lost the battle if one had followed.”

“I’ll concede that much,” Rozala said. “Yet there might have been other limitations at work. I am no scholar of sorcery, but it occurs to me that such a great blow – even if it had not been shattered – might have incapacitated the two of them for some time. The duration, however, is beyond my ability to theorize. We may very well be facing another gate come morning.”

“We’ll know it’s coming, this time,” the Rogue Sorcerer darkly said. “It’s not impossible to contain the flow until the gate itself can be broken, though I’ll admit it’ll be difficult.”

The princess put her hands in her lap, resisting the urge to brush back her hair.

“There are too many uncertainties,” she said. “I am reluctant to commit to an assault when everyone I send might be drowned. And that is without addressing the difficulties of an assault. Wading through the marshlands will be difficult, and it might be weeks before the soil drinks the water whole. That means having to march around it, and likely splitting the host in two.”

“A probing attack come morning, perhaps,” Prince Amadis suggested.

Even a probe could see a few thousand men die screaming to find out the answer to a simple question , Rozala thought. The alternative, however, was retreat. Through hostile land, while so low on supplies they were barely worth mentioning at all. The Black Queen had offered to provide food for a march back, but there was no guarantee that offer would still hold after today. And if it did not, the amount of men she’d lose to a small-scale offensive would be a pittance compared to what hunger would kill. That was without even considering the reports that the Duchess Kegan’s army was crossing the river far to the north. The numbers there were said to be over ten thousand, and the Deoraithe were infamous for their skill at la petite guerre . Harassment and ambushes, without ever giving battle.

“This is not the kind of decision that can be lightly made,” the Princess of Aequitan said. “And not without knowing all the facts. I must recommend we send an envoy to their camp to find out if the queen’s terms still hold.”

Amadis’ lips thinned in displeasure.

“Surely you’re not suggesting retreat,” he said.

“I am reluctant to even consider it,” Rozala admitted. “Yet if the Black Queen is unharmed and the terms hold, it may be that we have no other choice. We cannot dally. Time works against us more than they.”

“I would accompany your envoy, if you permit,” the Grey Pilgrim said, breaking his silence.

He looked half-asleep, even now. The princess kept her scepticism away from her face. Had the Chosen not tried to take the villain’s life but a few hours ago? Still, she did not pretend to understand the ways of Named. For their sort, attempted killing might be no great enmity. The Prince of Iserre watched everyone at the table silently, then slowly nodded.

“Envoy will be sent,” he agreed. “And to speak with only the Black Queen, so her state may be assessed. Should she prove incapacitated, however...”

Princess Rozala grimly smiled.

“Then we will settle the score in full,” she said.

Malanzas, after all, did not leave debts unpaid.

Interlude: Kaleidoscope II

“Fear is the mother of character. Without it we remain children until death.”
-Queen Elizabeth Alban of Callow

Vivienne had once spent a few days running a shell game in the streets of Southpool, when she’d still been an apprentice under the Guild. It hadn’t been about the coin, for she could have made a hundred times the coppers from burgling a single noble house. Her teacher had teased her about it, calling her a petty hustler instead of a thief, but what she’d learned had been well worth a few sardonic comments. Confidence tricks were about sleight of hand, but also about reading the other side. Gauging how much of a taste you had to give them before the fleecing, how much you could squeeze out of them before things got ugly. She’d learned more about diplomacy over those three lazy days than through years of lessons. It was why she’d pressed to be the one sent to speak with the Proceran envoys, that and the undeniable fact that if Marshal Juniper went instead it would be a bloody disaster. The orc had a place as one of the larger cogs in the kingdom’s machinery, but she was useless in all matters not military. That the Marshal of Callow seemed under the impression that her judgement off the battlefield should ever be seriously considered was just a mark of the greenskin’s arrogance.

A child that screamed ‘kill them all and eat them’ every time you glanced at them would be about as useful.

Thief had been forced to lean on the open trust Catherine had shown her in the past to be nominated, and the heavy-handedness had won her no friends in the general staff – which essentially ran the camp while Cat slumbered. The usual deference shown to Named by mundane apparently thinned when said Named had been late to join the cause. Callowans listened to her, and her role as spymistress of the kingdom meant she had most everyone’s ear, but there were few of her countrymen high up in the ranks save for Grandmaster Talbot. For all that the rank and file of the Army of Callow drew increasingly from her people, the senior officers were still largely from from the three legions Catherine had brought to her banner. Vivienne saw no need to take issue with that. Officers died and retired, and the Legions promoted strictly from within the ranks. Her countrymen would keep rising up the ladder until ‘Army of Callow’ was more than a name. Any halfway decent thief knew that patience was as useful a tool as action, and Vivienne was a better thief than most. More importantly, after securing her role she’d had free hand to deal with the envoys as she wished.

First off, there would be no talk of allowing them into the camp. Let them remain outside under their banner with the morning sun pounding down. They’d shown up around Morning Bell, so Vivienne had let them stew outside for another hour. There was no guarantee she would manage to fool the opposition, and the longer they stayed there the better the chances of Catherine or Masego waking up. She’d not dared to let them wait longer than that. If she did, it might be recognized as the temporizing it was. An hour should just be taken as an insult instead of betraying the relative weakness of the Callowan position. She’d gone out alone to meet them, afterwards. Vivienne knew she could master her own body language if she concentrated, but anyone else was a risk. The two men were still standing when she arrived, and discreetly she studied them as she drew near. One was obvious, the wrinkly old man they knew as the Grey Pilgrim. The other was known to her as well, as it turned out. The distinct nose marked him as a relative of Prince Amadis Milenan and the long curly locks were distinctive enough she recognized them from a sketch her Jacks had obtained. Jacques Milenan, a younger cousin to the Prince of Iserre. His mother was... from an Alamans royal line, though she could not recall which one at the moment. The man was supposed to be high in Milenan’s council. Which meant they were taking this seriously.

While she’d assessed them, they’d assessed her. The Pilgrim’s face was perfectly calm, a mask she suspected he’d worn for so long there had come to be some truth to it. Vivienne knew something of pretending to be someone for long enough the deception grew roots and leaves. Thief swaggered forward, producing her flask and pulling at the brandy inside. She sloppily wiped her mouth after and silently used her aspect to trade the flask for an identical one that was the same drink, only heavily watered. Now she just had to let her breath do the lying, and they’d assume her to be less sober than she truly was. The Wandering Bard had taught her the uses of fooling others into thinking you an incompetent drunk.

“Greetings,” the Proceran said, inclining his head. “I am-“

“Jacques Milenan,” Thief interrupted lightly. “I know who you are, crusader.”

“And you are the Thief,” the Pilgrim said calmly.

He was leaning on his staff, Vivienne noted as she approached. Genuine tiredness or a ploy?

“That’s me,” she chuckled, making sure the breeze carried the smell of brandy.

She drank from the switched flask. The mundane envoy did not quite manage to hide his disdain.

“Request was made to treat with the Black Queen herself,” the Pilgrim said.

“That’s funny,” Thief said. “That you think you’re still in a position to make demands, I mean. I was under the impression a fifth of your army got wiped and you were one week away from beginning to dabble with cannibalism.”

“Has the queen refused to receive us, then?” the Pilgrim asked.

“Your side sends some spare kinsman and a man who tried to kill her, then expect Catherine to come out to make small talk?” Vivienne snorted. “I thought high-handed arrogance was a Proceran specialty, Pilgrim.”

“If you will not treat in good will, there is no need to treat at all,” the Milenan said flatly.

She shrugged.

“So walk,” she said. “How much good will do you think you’ve earned , princeling? You invade our kingdom, attempt murder of our anointed queen and all the while plan to carve up our lands to dispense as favours. If every last one of you dies drowning, I will not shed a damned tear over it.”

The old man’s eyes narrowed. Not because of her words, at least not exactly. Because he’d been able to tell she was speaking the truth. He’d not expected a former heroine, if she’d ever truly been that, to say as much. The very reason Vivienne had said it: she needed to confirm whether or not he could still discern truth from lies, and the sentence was incendiary enough it should garner reaction. Good . She had confirmed it. Bad . He still had the ability, even when visibly tired. That complicated things, not that she’d expected the Heavens to provide relief. She wasn’t hanging with a crowd on their good side, nowadays.

“Negotiations with a lieutenant would not be binding,” the Pilgrim said.

“I can speak with my queen’s authority,” Vivienne said, and it was technically true.

She watched the hero closely as she spoke, trying to find out if that would register as lie. She’d never actually said that Catherine had given her mandate today, and in theory it wasn’t impossible for the Queen of Callow to grant this particular authority to her one day. The old man’s face remained unmoving, but that told her nothing. He was too clever to be caught through a visible tell twice.

“My instructions,” Jacques Milenan said, “are to treat with none but the Black Queen herself.”

“Black Queen’s not coming out for the likes of you,” Thief said, another technical truth. “Come back with your cousin or Princess Malanza and the matter will be reconsidered.”

If that worked, it might get them through the morning before the enemy realized a game was afoot. If it didn’t, well, all they had was suspicions. They had to be wary of a repeat of yesterday.

“This is not how proper diplomacy is conducted,” the Proceran stiffly said.

Vivienne toasted him with her flask.

“You’ll note my Name is not ‘the Diplomat’,” she replied, and took another pull.

She could feel the Pilgrim’s eyes on her. Searching, measuring.

“Then I would request audience with the queen personally,” the old man said.

“Unless you’ve suddenly gained a principality or right of command over the host, your function here is purely decorative,” Thief replied. “As far as I’m concerned you have no right to make that request.”

The hero sighed.

“I am willing to provide healing to wounded in exchange for the audience,” he said.

“Chosen,” the Proceran said. “Surely you cannot be serious.”

Thief drank from the flask again so her face would not be visible to read. This... Would Catherine and Masego qualify as wounded? She was not certain they would. And if they didn’t, she would be revealing their state for no gain. It would also mean taking the man at his word, which she hesitated to do. She’d ran with William’s crew long enough to know some of the more pragmatic heroes had notions about whether promises made to the Enemy needed to be kept. On the other hand, if those two could be healed most of the army’s problems went away. That, she decided, was worth the risk. The flask left her lips.

“An oath to the Heavens,” she said. “Of my own wording.”

“No,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

“Fine,” she conceded, idly waving her drink. “We can word it together.”

“You misunderstand me, child,” the old man said. “There will be no healing.”

“No audience either, then,” she shrugged. “We’ll expect an answer within the hour about whether or not Prince Milenan or Princess Malanza will be coming.”

“That will not happen either,” the Pilgrim said calmly. “You have betrayed yourself.”

Vivienne’s heartbeat quickened, but she kept her face smiling.

“Have I?” she drawled. “Then, by all means, take another swing. After you’re driven back, expect the cost of supplies to rise accordingly.”

The old man met her eyes with equanimity.

“You were a heroine, once,” he said.

“And just like that, you lost my interest,” Thief said. “See you around, gentlemen. I’d recommend your backers check on the state of their coffers before ordering an offensive. My heart would just weep if the price of retreat was destitution.”

And with that last lie ringing in the air, she turned and swaggered away. Shit . She’d been had. She’d put a good face on it, but on someone like the Grey Pilgrim the odds of it fooling him were depressingly low. Fuck.

Time to see how well they could bluff with an empty hand, then.

—

“She will be incapacitated,” Tariq said. “Not dead, for the Thief still had hope, but the Black Queen was hurt by the shattering of the gate.”

Princess Rozala considered the matter with due seriousness, to his approval. The young woman had been robbed of true morals by her uprising, but her mother had instilled her with a sense of honour and duty that allowed some small sliver of them to remain. She was forgiven this, for the fault was not her own. Children could not help what they were taught. Tariq held great hopes that the horrors of this war and the others to come would allow her to grow into the woman she could have been. It was a small thing, in this sea of darkness, but every speck of light drove back the night. It did not matter that the candle was small or passing, only that it burned. It was good to remember old wisdom, in days like these. The well-worn truths helped bring perspective to it all. Creation was imperfect, and would be until its very last breath. All the Heavens required of their children was to leave it a little brighter than they had found it . A hundred thousand pebbles make a tower, one piece at a time.

“Then we resume our offensive,” Princess Rozala said quietly. “Gods forgive us all, if we are wrong.”

The old man stilled his tongue as the Princess of Aequitan began discussing marching orders, watching the men and women at the table. These four, two princes and two princesses, were the mortal heart of this crusade. Or at least the part of it here in the north. Prince Amadis Milenan held the most sway, and it was to him the First Prince had granted command, but the Iserran had become almost self-effacing since the butchery of yesterday. He deferred to the general of the host in all things, and in him Tariq read both fear and cunning. The possibility of defeat, before thought absurd, had shaken him. Yet he was also subtly inviting Princess Rozala to overstep her authority, to further isolate herself from the other royals of the host by giving unpopular orders. Even now that he had glimpsed the abyss, the man schemed. The rot went deep in this one. Though we be flawed instruments, we may yet serve greater purpose , the Pilgrim chided himself. Imperfection was not sin but the very design of the Gods. Salvation without temptation was meaningless. The failure of a man to recognize his weakness should be met with pity and not blame.

The other two royals were smaller flames to these two, he would admit. Princess Adeline of Orne was young in a way that had little to do with age, and still bleeding from her brother’s death. He grieved with her for the loss, though he’d not known the man. The wake of his passing was recommendation enough for his nature. The princess sought alliance with Princess Rozala, and Tariq read admiration in Adeline’s heart when she gazed at the other woman. There could be friendship forged there, if trust bloomed, and they would both be happier for it. The Pilgrim half-smiled. Perhaps a helping hand could be leant to the matter. The last was Prince Arnaud of Cantal, and what the old man glimpsed there had surprised him. Laurence was a creature of pure instinct, having spent her lifetime blurring the boundary between thought and act, and her intuition was a sharp thing. Yet the Pilgrim had doubted her, when she’d said that one was the most dangerous of the lot. No longer so now that he had gazed within. All that lay there was patience and the utter absence of emotion. Tariq watched as the man blustered, speaking foolishly of sweeping advance, and how all the others dismissed him in their eyes. Even Prince Amadis, who thought himself the cleverest of them all.

All the others had warmed to Tariq, after Laurence acted as offensively in councils as she could. Offered him trust, treated him as the man of reason holding back the reckless Saint of Swords. All of them save Prince Arnaud of Cantal.

“I trust the Chosen will participate in the assault?” Prince Amadis asked.

Face never betraying that his attention had waned, the Pilgrim nodded.

“I have already spoken with Laurence,” he said. “Save for the Rogue Sorcerer and the Forsworn Healer, we will split with the armies and fight with the soldiers.”

Queen Catherine had brutalized the children, but not beyond repair. Antoine’s arm had been reattached, and another greatsword found for him to wield. With the coming of dawn, Tariq had been able to Forgive the death of Mansurin. The young man, displaying the famous fortitude of the Champion lines, had only been spurred to greater zeal by his stay Above. Little Sidonia, with her laughing eyes and quick wit, would have to remain under shroud of preservation until tomorrow. The Pilgrim still ached at the memory of seeing the young heroes reaped like wheat as he was held back by the Hierophant. He and Laurence had known that the best chance to spare lives was to slay the Black Queen early in the battle, and that to draw her out the children were the one bait she would not refuse. He regretted it still. Resurrection left a scar on the soul, always. No one could be ripped from the embrace of the Gods without finding Creation and faded and brutish place for the rest of their days, even if the memory of the Heavens was withheld. The Pilgrim excused himself as the council ended, paying due courtesies before returning to his own.

He found Laurence standing by the marshlands madness had made, repeatedly taking her sword an inch out of the sheath and sliding it back down. She was uneasy, then. Tariq came to stand by her side but did not speak. She would do so herself, when she was ready.

“I don’t like this,” the Saint finally said. “Feels wrong.”

He did not contradict her. Though Tariq had been granted insights, they were into the souls of mortals. Laurence de Montfort’s strength had come differently. Her sword had reached the Heavens, and by touching the divine with steel she had attained a sensitivity to the lay of Creation he had never seen the equal of in all his years. If she was troubled, there was reason for it.

“She may rise,” the Pilgrim said. “The shape of it is there. Wounded or unconscious, those she loves besieged, she may return to offer salvation at the darkest hour.”

“And that’s not a villain’s story, Tariq,” the woman grunted. “She’s hard to predict, and that’ll get people killed. You’re sure about what you saw?”

The Grey Pilgrim let out a tired breath.

“What Catherine Foundling craves above all is peace,” he murmured. “On chosen terms, perhaps, but peace nonetheless.”

His heart had broken a little to see it. That even though she had butchered all that she was, the little girl within was still desperately grasping at the light she’d once glimpsed Above.

“She killed thousands,” Laurence said. “And she’ll kill more, if she squeaks away here. Compassion’s not my wheelhouse, but whoever made her into what she is deserves a slow and painful death. She’s been twisted. No one sane would ever do what she did to her own soul.”

The child herself, the Pilgrim suspected, would be infuriated to hear someone speak of her that way. Her embrace of her own mistakes rivalled any flagellant’s.

“It is going to be a long war,” Tariq whispered, the weight of the years heavy on his shoulders.

“Longer for us than most,” Laurence replied, barking out a laugh. “We’ll be part of the five, old friend. You can be sure of it. I already feel the pull.”

The Pilgrim looked up at mockingly sunny skies. There would be a time, after the war turned here and the Red Flower Vales broke, where the Heavens would assemble their sharpest blade. The ancient forms would be observed. Five heroes, sent into the breach to quell the howling dark. Young Hanno would lead them, for the Seraphim had shaped him to the duty. As for the faces of the others, they could only guess. That charming young Valiant Champion was likely, as she’d followed the White Knight before. And there would have to be a practitioner. The most powerful of these was the Witch of the Woods, should she survive her confrontation with the Warlock. And the two of us , the Pilgrim added silently. Relics of an age already past, dusted off one last time. There was always a price to pay, to end the rise of Evil. Tariq hoped it was the two of them instead of young lives cut down before their prime.

“She’ll be there too,” Tariq said. “She always is.”

“Surprised she hasn’t dropped in yet,” the Saint admitted. “But it doesn’t smell like a brewery, and that’s fairly telling.”

“That worries me as much as your unease,” the Pilgrim said. “For if she has not yet appeared...”

“The worse is yet to come,” Laurence finished. “There’s a cheerful thought.”

She sighed and stretched her limbs.

“Well, no point putting it off,” she said. “Let’s go kill some people.”

So spoke Saint of Swords. The Regicide, to the Principate. The Smiling Iron, to the Chain of Hunger. The Fool-That-Cut-Nothing, to no one still living.

“Let’s put an end to this war,” he replied. “Before it gets worse.”

So spoke the Grey Pilgrim, whose names were too many to number. Fleet-foot and Patient Hand, the Kindly Stranger and the Peregrine.

Silence followed and legends went to war.

Interlude: Kaleidoscope III

“The meaning of the exercise of war is the destruction of your foe’s ability to wage it. ‘Victory’ does not exist as an independent entity; it is merely the manifestation of the enemy’s defeat.”
– Extract from ‘Considerations on Warfare’ by Marshal Grem One-Eye

It would come down to steel and blood. The Thief had failed, not that Juniper held much hope for success. The woman was not as clever a liar as she believed, and the enemy was cunning. Much as she disliked the former heroine, the orc refrained from spending a quarter hour verbally ripping her to pieces. She had more important duties to see to, now that near forty thousand crusaders and their heroic hired killers were on the march. Heroes, huh. Much like knights, Juniper had never thought much of them. All a knight could claim to be was a killer on a horse. The rest was pageantry. And heroes, well, the Hellhound had never cared for the smell of hypocrisy. ‘The Heavens told me to do it’ did not qualify as a valid excuse under Legion regulations, and those were the closest thing to fair laws Creation had ever seen as far as she was concerned.

“She bought us a few hours, at least,” Aisha said.

The two of them were alone in the tent, at least until the rest of the general staff arrived. Juniper cast a look at the Taghreb, eyes lingering on soft skin of her bare wrists. Such delicate appearance, for such a dangerous woman. The urge to sink her teeth into the warm veins warred with the urge to feel the softness with her own rough hands. The orc cleared her throat.

“For all the good it’s done,” she said. “We’re in for a red day.”

The olive-skinned Staff Tribune flicked her an amused glance.

“The Fifteenth’s eternal motto,” she teased.

The orc did not allow the laughter in those bright eyes to distract her.

“We have a choice to make,” she growled. “Static or moving.”

Princess Malanza was splitting her host in half, roughly fifteen thousand on each side of the marshlands advancing in thick columns. It’d been too much to hope for the crusaders would try going through the water. It didn’t take Grem One-Eye to see that’d mean easy targets for Juniper’s engines, and Rozala Malanza had already proved she was no fool.

“Legion doctrine dictates retreat to a hardened position, when met with superior force,” Aisha said.

Their current position was as hardened as field fortifications could allow, so the traditional call would be remaining behind the palisades and preparing for a hard fight. It meant, though, surrendering the initiative to the enemy. And the Hellhound had been burned playing number games with this foe before. She was wary of a repeat.

“We could have local superiority, if we sent enough men to hit a single column,” Juniper said. “And possibly break that side before the other one gets anywhere close.”

“Without heroes on the field, it would be risky,” the Taghreb said. “With them, it nears wishful thinking.”

Her Warlord had picked a fucking bad time to take a nap, that much was undeniable. Were there even half as many heroes, Juniper would not hesitate to strike anyway. Twelve, though, was too many for her tastes. Even if all they did was prop up morale wherever they stood it might be enough to tip the balance. If the Saint of Swords or the Grey Pilgrim happened to be with either army, massacre was the word that came to mind.

“We let them march without contest, and by afternoon we’ll be surrounded and up to our neck in Named,” Juniper said. “Even if we don’t give battle, we have to slow them down.”

“We have munitions,” Aisha pointed out.

They’d both known that, but the point of this conversation was not her friend pushing for a plan. The back and forth allowed Juniper to sharpen her own thoughts, using Aisha’s words as a grindstone.

“There’s a thought,” the Hellhound mused. “Not as a weapon, but as ground denial. Plaster one flank with goblinfire and hit the other column with our full muster.”

“We’d be leaving our camp exposed,” the Staff Tribune said. “We risk a wipe if they have a way to cross the marshlands or get around the goblinfire.”

“They’re leaving their own exposed,” Juniper noted. “They’ve got at most a few thousand soldiers there that’re fighting fit. And they’re serving as Malanza’s strategic reserve. Which means this isn’t just testing our defence, she’s aiming for a full victory.”

“Assuming they know our queen is incapacitated, they might be under the impression they need to hurry before she awakens,” Aisha said.

“That has sense,” Juniper said. “And if true, it means the enemy is committed . They will not withdraw because of losses.”

“Malanza’s not been shy about trading casualties so far,” the Taghreb shrugged. “This is not fresh observation.”

Juniper shook her head.

“No,” she replied. “It is. If you’re right then static defence is not an option. They’ll not retreat with sundown no matter how many we kill, just send wave after wave against the palisades through the night. They’re in it to the death, and that means the only way we make it through this is by forcing a retreat.”

Aisha’s eyes narrowed.

“And the only thing that would make Princess Malanza call one is the risk of a defeat so major her army would not recover from it,” the Staff Tribune said.

“Which we can’t inflict by force of arms,” the Hellhound said. “Or by Named superiority.”

That meant the effect had to be obtained indirectly, through strategic means. Juniper licked her chops hungrily. It was a puzzle. One where the slightest misstep would doom her army and likely Callow with it.

Gods, she’d missed this.

—

Captain Pierre Dulac squinted into the sun. The Callowans were fucking crazier than he’d thought, because he was looking at a force of at least four thousand. The Brabantine had served in the army of Prince Arnaud for a decade and a half now – loyalty to the principality of one’s birth was all well and good, but the Cantalins paid better – and fought in four of the Great War’s largest pitched battles. He’d been known to make the boast that he’d killed someone from every principality in Procer, after a few drinks, and for all he knew it might even be true. He had, to put it bluntly, gotten a handle on the waging of war. No fantassin lived long enough to make it to his current rank if they didn’t, much less rise to command of a free company as he had. Which was why he was surprised the enemy had abandoned perfectly good palisades and the cover of their war machines to sally out against the column he was the vanguard of. Spitting out the ball of redleaf he’d been sucking on all morning, the captain slowed his march so his second would catch up. Pierre often led from the front when on the march, though he’d gotten old enough he left the sword-waving to younger sorts when battle started.

“Captain,” Lieutenant Francesca, better known as Belle, greeted him.

The southerner was a massive beast of a woman, built like an ox and hairy as one. Some Lycaonese fuck had taken off the tip of her nose with a blade at the Battle of Aisne, which only added to the gruesome spectacle that was her. Not a nice woman. She was quick to use the knife and cheated at dice. But the men were fucking terrified of her, and that had uses.

“Tell me my leaves didn’t go bad, Belle,” he said. “I’m not hallucinating that army, am I?

“I see them,” the lieutenant grunted.

“Fuck,” Pierre feelingly said. “I was hoping they’d stay holed up and we could trick another company into leading the first wave.”

“Callowans,” the woman shrugged. “Hicks one and all. You want to send a messenger to the prince to ask for orders?”

The captain grimaced. He’d rather not if he could avoid it. Their column was following the western bank of that creepy magic swamp, from a bird’s eye view, and unlike the other army they had no cavalry backing them. Princess Malanza had gone to command the host with horse, like a good little Arlesite trying to win wars one charge at a time, and that left Prince Arnaud and Princess Adeline sharing command over this column. Pierre didn’t know shit about the Princess of Orne, but everyone and their sister knew Prince Arnaud was a proper twat. He was a twat who paid well and on time, so Pierre’s company remained in his service, but the fantassin wasn’t eager at the notion of following the military wisdom of the Prince of Cantal. Like all princes, he wasn’t known to send his retinue into the breach when there were spare fantassins lying around. Better to take a look on their own terms, the captain figured, without any ‘inspired’ instructions about when they could retreat.

“Rustle up the last ten men who pissed you off, Belle,” Pierre Dulac said. “We’re going to have a closer look at whatever they’re cooking up.”

—

Tribune Abigail of Summerholm should have known someone was out to fuck her when she got offered the promotion after Akua’s Folly. Sure the pay increase was nice, and word had got around she’d been in the frontlines during both the Arcadian Campaign and Second Liesse – which made it really easy to trick strapping young lads from home into her bed, if they were as dumb as they were pretty. Plenty of those floating around, it was the type that made shit life choices just like her and enrolled in the Army of Callow. On the other hand, she’d been transferred from the command of General Hune to that of General Nauk. The godsdamned Princekiller himself. The orc looked like a torch had eaten half his face, and acted like he was going to eat half Creation to even that out. Of course they’d put her under the command of the one man in the Army of Callow who was guaranteed to be sent over and over again into the worst possible messes. Abigail had bought a sack of leeches in Laure and paid someone to drop them in Tribune Ashan’s bedding when no one was looking.

That fucker was the one who’d recommended her for promotion.

Worst of all, her cohort was green as grass. Oh, sure, the Hellhounds had drilled them to collapse and taken everyone through a brutal gauntlet of field manoeuvres and war games. But they’d not looked death in the eye properly until yesterday and this was already beginning to shape into a worst fucking mess than Akua’s Folly, which was really saying something. Three thousand dead legionaries within the first hour, because the priests on the other side had found some loophole in the Book of All Things. See if I ever give alms to the godsdamned House of Light again , the tribune grimly thought. Could have been her down there, if the Hellhound had decided on different tactics. The Black Queen had seen their priestly fuckery and raised them mass slaughter, which had been good for morale. Until rumours she’d been wounded by the spell began circulating, anyway. Another rumour had immediately started going around that it was a trick and she was baiting the crusaders, but Abigail could recognize the work of the Jacks when she heard it. The Queen of Callow was having her beauty sleep while the enemy marched. Rank hath its privileges.

“Tribune,” someone spoke from behind her.

Abigail spat and turned to look at Captain Krolem. The orc was standing stiffly, broad arms visibly itching to salute. It’d taken her a while to wean him off that. Fresh meat from the Steppes, this one, passed through a recruiting camp in the Fields and now a proper loyal subject of the crown of Callow. Now that the Tower had forbidden recruitment in Praes, his sort was rarer addition.

“I’m listening,” she said. “But if it’s the fucking sappers again-”

“It isn’t, ma’am,” the orc assured her. “Our outer line reports enemy movement.”

“So they have eyes,” Abigail noted. “Definitely picked the right people for the watch.”

“Aside from the column,” the orc clarified. “A single tenth of Procerans. Scouts, we believe.”

Ah, shit . Her cohort was far ahead of where the sappers were plotting whatever Marshal Juniper had sent them here to do, but she had instructions from the Princekiller to stomp hard on any crusaders coming to have a look. General Nauk had made it clear his forces would not be retreating until the sappers were ready, and someone out to kill Abigail had decided it was a great idea for her cohort to be out on the front lines. At least she wasn’t the poor bastard whose cohort was stuck next to the creepy murder swamp full of dead people to anchor the flank. Hells of a silver lining.

“Send out a line,” she told the captain. “And since I’m in such a giving mood, they can eat whoever they kill.”

“Kind of you, ma’am,” Krolem replied, sounding absolutely serious.

Of course he was. Tribune Abigail worried her lip and stared at the column in the distance. An hour, maybe, before the enemy was in engagement range. They’d been waiting out here for two. Maybe the Heavens would smile on her for once, and the sappers would be done soon. She looked up at the sunny sky, grimacing.

“Come on, you assholes,” she said. “I got to sermons thrice a year, that’s gotta count for something.”

—

“Only four thousand, Your Graces,” Pierre said, bowing again.

He wasn’t sure if etiquette required it, but with royals it was always better to be on the safe side. The Princess of Orne had turned out to be young and easy on the eyes, not that he allowed himself to look. That was a good way to end up blinded. Neither she nor Prince Arnaud had bothered to dismount from their horses to receive his report after he was ushered into the presence of greatness. He was pretty sure each horse was worth at least ten times the war chest he’d accumulated after over a decade of soldiering. They were, he grimly thought, probably better fed too. His company had bought food and kept a hidden stash since, because relying on the largesse of princes was a good way to end up starving, but even their own reserves were beginning to run out. The horses, he could not help but notice, looked perfectly healthy. Better a prince’s mount than a peasant, eh?

“And you did not approach close enough to ascertain what they were doing there,” Prince Arnaud of Cantal said, pawing at his wisps of a beard.

The disapproval was clear, as was the implied question of why he had not. Somehow the fantassin doubted that the answer of ‘the orcs they sent out looked a little too eager’ would earn him much favour here. He cleared his throat.

“As my men and I had already come close enough to see their formation, I judged it more important to return and make sure that knowledge was brought to you,” he lied.

It was one thing to kill for Prince Arnaud’s silver, another to die for it. The man didn’t pay that well.

“Prudent,” the Princess of Orne said, tone neutral. “And what can you tell us about their formation?”

“They’re digging in, Your Grace,” Pierre said, bowing again. “There was no reserve, but there were troops detached on their flank to prevent easy encirclement. It looked like they were preparing to fight.”

Princess Adeline frowned.

“With four thousand?” she said. “We’ve more than thrice that number.”

The captain had not been addressed directly, and so decided not risk speaking up.

“Were there many mages, Captain?” Prince Arnaud asked him.

“Not on the front lines, Your Grace,” Pierre replied. “I cannot speak for further back.”

“It seems a rather obvious trap,” the Princess of Orne mused.

“They might be a mere sacrifice to slow us down,” Prince Arnaud said.

“Or a feint by the Callowans,” the other royal said. “Trying to give us pause without any true threat.”

“We can simply smash through,” Prince Arnaud said lightly. “Why even bother with battle order, against such feeble opposition?”

Pierre winced. Going in half-cocked against the bastard child of the Legions of Terror would get a lot of people killed before numbers won the day. The captain had never fought legionaries before, but he’d heard stories.

“Let us not blunder at this late hour, Arnaud,” the Princess of Orne coldly said. “A careful approach is needed. We give battle only when properly arrayed.”

“if you insist,” Prince Arnaud indifferently said. “Fuss, if you feel the need. The Principate will prevail regardless.”

Pierre Dulac silently wondered when they going to remember they had not dismissed him. And, perhaps, if it was time to politely inquire whether the Princess of Orne was still hiring.

—

Princess Rozala Malanza watched the enemy host through her mother’s old Baalite eye, the clever arrangement of lenses within the wooden tube allowing her to study in detail even at a distance. Ashurans demanded a fortune for every single one of these, but the imitations from Nicae were of much shoddier quality. That the Thalassocracy would remain so tight-fisted over a device they had not even invented themselves – it came from across the Tyrian Sea – was typical of that grasping gaggle of merchants and sailors.

“More than twelve thousand,” she said.

“They mean to give battle?” Prince Amadis frowned. “Would it not have been a superior notion to do so from atop the palisades?”

“Maybe,” the Princess of Aequitan hedged. “The Legions of Terror are known for their skill at sieges, but this is the Black Queen’s army. They made their reputation on pitched battles.”

“Then why even raise them?” the Prince of Iserre murmured.

“Something’s changed,” Rozala said. “Their general has a plan.”

“One would assume,” Amadis drily replied. “I don’t suppose you could hazard a guess as to the nature of that plan?”

The dark-haired princess frowned. The enemy should have perhaps nineteen thousand soldiers left. Assuming at least two thousand had been left to guard the baggage train, the soldiers in front of them represented around three quarters of the Army of Callow. That left a rough quarter unaccounted for, a fact that was making her uneasy. The enemy could not hope to hold back the other column with those numbers, they’d be encircled and slaughtered to the last. And, to be frank, if defeat in detail was to be attempted it was Adeline’s host that should have been the target. Rozala had stripped it of cavalry specifically to tempt such a blunder since the Saint of Swords was with that army.

“They could be attempting to delay us until sundown,” Rozala finally said. “To prevent us from encircling their camp, counting on my being reluctant to conduct war after dark.”

“You do not sound convinced,” the Prince of Iserre observed.

“It would be the first major mistake by their commander,” she said. “I was taught it is a rule of war that when a skilled enemy makes an obvious mistake it is no such thing.”

“It may no longer be the same commander,” Prince Amadis said. “Their Marshal would hold authority, in the Black Queen’s absence.”

“Juniper of the Red Shields,” Rozala muttered. “Hasenbach’s reports did not mark her a fool. She is alleged to be one of the finest graduates of their War College.”

“A skilled second does not necessarily mean a skilled first,” the man replied. “I will not question you in matters of war, but what seems like foolishness might simply be youth and desperation.”

She might be young but she’s fought just as many battles as the rest of us , the princess thought. Yet the Princess of Aequitan could not remember a single of these where the incipient Black Queen was not holding overall command. It was a plausible explanation that Amadis had offered. Yet she still felt as if she was being invited to make a mistake. It was irksome she could not quite put it into words. It was... an alignment. Rozala knew that dwindling supplies were forcing her to be aggressive. She’d only risked splitting the host in two because heroes accompanied both halves, and there should be no villains left to fight them. The Wild Hunt might strike unexpectedly, so she’d left soldiers to guard her camp and wounded, but everything else she had to field was on the march. Her armies were moving in strength, but there was a certain fragility to that strength. All of this together was bringing muted dread she could not explain.

“We wait,” she finally said. “The other column has orders to signal if they engage the enemy or find their path unobstructed. We will proceed when we receive either.”

An hour passed with two armies eyeing each other across the field until sorcery rose into the sky. Three red streams. Princess Adeline was attacking an enemy force.

The choice was out of her hands, then. She could not allow the army before her the possibility of disengaging or reinforcing the other side of the marsh.

—

Watching the streaks of red in the sky from her open tent, Juniper allowed the reports spoke to her to go unanswered. The enemy on the left flank was moving to engage Nauk. The enemy on the right was moving to tie up the army she’d put in front of them. She looked down at the map on the table, the figurines she had set down.

“That,” she murmured through her fangs, “was a mistake.”

The Hellhound smiled, and in her mind’s eye she loosed the arrow.

Interlude: Kaleidoscope IV

“And so Dread Emperor Irritant addressed the heroes thus: Lo and behold, I fear not your burning Light, for I am already on fire.”
– Extract from Volume IX of the official Imperial Chronicles

Abigail was beginning to reconsider her position on tanning being an acceptable vocation. Sure, the smell was horrible and they made you live outside city walls. Pay wasn’t that good, and good luck trying to get anywhere without joining a guild that’d squeeze you on fees. On the other hand, she mused, the average tanner did not usually have to deal with fifteen thousand angry crusaders howling for their blood . I probably shouldn’t have gotten sauced and insulted the entire family before leaving , she decided. Now even if I come crawling on my knees they’ll make me marry a cousin before taking me back.

“I just can’t do it,” Tribune Abigail of Summerholm sighed. “They all look like ferrets.”

“Ma’am?” Captain Krolem asked.

“We have to win this one, Captain,” she told the orc solemnly. “There’s a lot riding on it.”

“For the honour of the Black Queen,” the orc growled approvingly.

“Yes,” Abigail lied. “That is exactly what I meant.”

The queen could stab her way to an honourable reputation on her own, as far as the woman was concerned, but telling greenskins shit like that was never good politics. It wasn’t quite as bad as someone badmouthing the Carrion Lord – or, as this was known within the Army of Callow, suicide by stupidity – but orcs tended to be touchy about Queen Catherine’s reputation. She’d had drinks with a Taghreb once who’d explained it to her, and what she’d gotten out of the man was that greenskins had a great big cultural boner for people that were good at killing. And Hells, no one ever said the Black Queen didn’t have a talent for that.

“Rotation, Captain Krolem,” she said, eyes scanning her frontline. “We’re tiring.”

The Hellhound had, in her great wisdom, decided that the four thousand men under Nauk Princekiller were enough to kick an entire enemy column in the balls. The tribune wasn’t all that fond of the Marshal of Callow, who was rumoured to eat people who got sloppy with kit maintenance, but she had to concede this wasn’t going as fucking horribly wrong as she’d expected when the enemy had advanced. For one, compared to Summer fae and wights the levies were godsdamned pushovers. It was incredibly refreshing to fight people that didn’t keep attacking after you hacked an arm off. Captain Krolem sounded the whistle around his neck and the twenty soldiers at the front of her cohort withdrew, a fresh line taking their place. The crusaders didn’t have fancy manoeuvres like that. When they got tired they just died, thank the Gods. Her eyes flicked to the sides and she grimaced.

The crusaders had wasted the better part of an hour getting in battle formations before attacking, but what had struck her as unnecessary wariness was beginning to pay off. Sure, they were failing to breach the shield wall, but the flank to the west was a problem. General Nauk had left a full kabili of one thousand floating out there to prevent easy flanking, but the crusaders had the numbers to keep going around even after engaging those. The only reason the host hadn’t been enveloped yet was... A horn sounded, and Abigail kissed her mailed fist in thanks to the Gods Above. Retreat to the next line, at last. It was the third time the general called for one, and they gave more ground every time. Abigail figured at some point the entire army would just fucking leg it, and it couldn’t come soon enough.

“In good order, soldiers,” she called out. “Anyone falls out of line and I’ll drown them in the marsh myself.”

It was going well, she thought. Better than she could have reasonably hoped for.

“NAMED,” a legionary called out.

It fucking figured.

—

It was like trying to break a stone with a wooden hammer, Captain Pierre Dulac thought as he strode over the corpses of his fellow fantassins. It left a mark, but the hammer tended to break and considering his company was the hammer of this tortured metaphor this was not a pleasant state of affairs. The Brabantine had heard stories about the Legions of Terror, how they’d swept aside the armies of Callow effortlessly, but he’d always believed them to be exaggerated. They’d had twenty years to swell, after all, and he was not unacquainted with how evenings at taverns made yarns grow ever more vivid. After the first time he’d lost thirty of his finest trying to break through the enemy shield wall, however, he’d had to swallow his old opinions. The heathens fought as hard as the devils they bargained with. Horns sounded in the distance and the Army of Callow moved as a single living creature, retreating at a measured pace as balls of flame bloomed in the sky and began raining down on Proceran lines.

Pierre put his shield over his head and knelt, waiting for the rain to pass. A man to his left was a little too slow to bring up his own shield and sorcerous flame struck his face, searing flesh and muscle in the blink of an eye. The fantassin squinted. New recruit, he was pretty sure, some Segovian second son who’d enrolled to seek his fortune. The poor fucker should have listened, when his mother told him fortune was a fickle bitch.

“On your feet, men of Procer,” a voice rang out.

The captain obeyed before he even realized what he was doing. The man who’d spoke was tall, and his accent in Chantant was heavy with the thick syllables of a native Levantine. Armoured in silver, with a shield polished until it shone like a mirror and a sword that was more radiance than steel, the Chosen could be felt even from ten feet away. Like a pulse, a whisper of power bestowed by the Godss.

“The enemy retreats,” the hero said. “We must pursue. The Heavens will it.”

“The Heavens will it,” Pierre replied in a fervent whisper.

He would have formed the wings with his fingers, had he not been holding sword and shield. With the end of the wave of fire, advance towards the retreating legionaries was left unbarred. His company formed ranks and advanced, the Chosen at their head, and they shouted defiance. The humans and greenskins on the other side watched them in silence from behind their shield wall, grimly professional. No levies, these. The difference between soldiers trained and soldiers conscripted had been written across the field today.

“Do not be afraid,” the Chosen called out. “Their dark queen is wounded and they stand bereft of her protection. This battle will be won by faith and courage.”

“Company, charge,” the captain screamed. “Honour to the Wreath!”

Shouts gave answer, the oaths of half a dozen principalities sounding where no banners stood.

“Double pay to anyone who stabs the shiny fucker,” a woman’s voice called out from the other side.

Pierre blinked, but had not time to spare for surprise as a moment later his shield hit the enemy’s. A massive orc, who smashed him back with brute force. The fantassin had not survive the Great War without picking up a few tricks, though. He went low and stabbed up, finding flesh, and the greenskin howled in rage. Squaring up behind his shield the captain let the creature’s violent death throes bounce off wood and iron, pushing forward before the legionary behind this one could fill the gap. Along the line his men were like wave hitting a cliff, save for where the Chosen led. Legionaries were smacked down like insolent children, and those that tried to force back the hero found a sliver blur carving through their flesh. The fantassin rocked back as a Callowan went shield to shield with him but dug his feet. Gritting his teeth, he had to retreat when the legionary to that one’s right stabbed forward with his sword. Another of his men took his place, and he joined the pressing throng to look for a better opening.

“Scatter,” a voice too deep to be human shouted.

Pierre found his gaze moving to the side, attracted by sudden movement where the Chosen was fighting. The legionaries who’d been surrounding the man retreated swiftly, and a moment later lightning struck. The Brabantine’s blood quickened and he blinked away the bright light, relieved when he saw the hero stood unmarried with his shield up. Lightning scarred the earth around him. A trail of red went up in the sky above, some sort of munitions, and the captain grimaced. That did not bode well. A spike of flame formed above the Chosen and hammered down at him, but the mirror-like shield shone blindingly and the fire blew back into the sky. The second spike, though, shook the Chosen’s stance. The third drove him back. The fourth nailed him into the ground. Pierre hurried towards the grounds, not sure what he could do but knowing he had to try. The fifth spike formed... and went out. Snuffed like a candle. By the Chosen’s side a wrinkled old woman stood, glaring up with a sword in hand. The Regicide, Pierre understood with trembling hands. The fantassin hurried and helped the other Chosen back to his feet as the Saint of Swords casually carved through half a dozen legionaries with a single swing.

“What part of careful advance did you not understand, kid?” the Regicide said. “This is a battlefield, not your sister’s wedding. Going in with your dick out won’t get you fucked the fun way.”

Pierre would never be so foolish to admit this out loud, but he felt a little cheated that the first sentence he’d heard the Chosen of the Heavens speak involved mention of dicks. It was perhaps less radiantly heroic than he’d expected.

“I apologize for my failure, Honoured Elder,” the Chosen still leaning on him gasped.

“Apologize by not forcing me to drag my ass here again,” the old woman snorted. “Steady this flank, sorcerers are focusing on the right.”

The Saint glanced at Pierre, who blanched, and nodded approvingly at him before moving out in a blur. In the distance, horns sounded again and the legionaries began to retreat. The hole the Chosen had carved into the lines had already reformed seamlessly, and the fantassing let the hero he’d been holding up steady his own footing.

“Again, Captain,” the man said. “The Heavens will it.”

“The Heavens will it,” Captain Pierre Dulac agreed.

—

Well, at least she was still alive. Tribune Abigail rubbed at her left eye again, pretty sure she was going to have to get that looked at by a mage. She’d made the mistake of looking at the fucking hero when he made his pretty little shield shine and she’d had to deal with persistent black spots ever since. General Nauk had finally sounded what should be the last retreat before they got the Hells out of here, so her odds of surviving the day were looking sunny. She’d also gotten through a visit by the Saint of Swords without losing any limbs, which had her in a good mood. Named were like lightning: the odds of them striking at the same place in the battle line twice were pretty low once they left. She’d lost a quarter of her cohort when the shiny fucker had led a charge, and not even calling for heavy mage support had gotten rid of the bastard, but they were approaching the low earth slope the sappers had raised and that was probably a good sign. She hoped. It wasn’t like tribunes were high up enough the ladder to be in the loop for whatever secret plans were unfolding. The crusaders were pressing on all sides, but the measured pace of the retreat had continued to prevent encirclement.

Still, thank the Gods the enemy didn’t have cavalry.

Abigail squinted at the enemy, to her dismay finding out that the hero from earlier was still leading the pursuit. Fuck. She’d really been hoping that would end up being someone else’s problem. Her cohort still had two tracers to send up to request mage intervention, but for the heavy stuff the mage lines could only hit one place at a time. If her signal went into the sky and they were already busy, the enemy Named was going to fuck them up.

“At least they don’t fly,” Abigail mused out loud. “So there’s that.”

“Ma’am?” Captain Krolem asked.

He tended to do that a lot. It was a little unsettling for an orc his size to turn into an eager page whenever she spoke.

“Keep us at pace, Captain,” she said. “I’m just thinking.”

“May I ask about what?” the greenskin said.

“Comparing this to the Arcadian Campaign,” she said. “Didn’t fight much at Five Armies and One, but this is about as bad as Dormer.”

The orc looked at her eagerly.

“Is it true you ripped out a fae’s throat with your teeth?” he said.

Oh Gods, the rumours kept getting worse.

“I stabbed it,” she denied. “Blood just sprayed into my mouth.”

Because she’d been screaming at the top of her lungs in terror at the time, then nearly choked to death as the fae kept trying to knife her.

“Drinking the blood of your enemy is an honourable thing,” Krolem assured her.

Burning Hells, she’d never get used to orcs. Sometimes they were almost like people, then they said shit like that.

“Eyes on the enemy, Captain,” she said, retreating from the line of conversation.

Speaking of retreats, her cohort was nearing the position they’d been ordered to stop at. The beginning of the earthen slope snaking across the field. Abigail glanced at it and frowned. Wasn’t high or angled starkly enough to serve as proper field fortifications. What had the sappers been doing? Looking further back, she saw the packs of goblins standing in companies. No longer digging. Was this the sum of the plan, raising a second-rate hill? It was impressively long, sure, but all it meant was that her soldiers were going to be killed with the high ground. Pressing through the ranks to get to her, one of her lieutenants was making her way with an urgent look on her face. Tribune Abigail went to meet her half-way after leaving Krolem in command.

“Ma’am,” the dark-haired Callowan saluted.

“Report,” she ordered.

She’d sent the officer to have a look at what the goblins were up to, in case it ended up blowing up in her face.

“Tunnels, ma’am,” the lieutenant got out. “They dug tunnels.”

Abigail frowned.

“To where?”

The lieutenant gestured forward.

“In that direction,” she said. “I couldn’t tell how far, but at least beyond our position.”

The tribune wiped sweat off her brow, though she was pretty sure she’d smudged dirt more than wiped wetness. Tunnels, huh. What for? Her cohort finished falling back in good order moments later, and she got her answer. The ground shook with muted explosions, snaking across the field until a chunk of the battlefield went up in the air. The Callowan almost fell, but caught herself at the last minute. Dirt began to fall like rain maybe a third into the Proceran host, and her brows rose. That would have killed a few hundred, but it wouldn’t stop them. It’d dug some kind of trench in the ground, she saw, pretty deep and wide. Not exactly a knock out-blow, though. Then the water from the marshlands began pouring into the trench and Abigail of Summerholm breathed in sharply. A river . The Hellhound had dug a river in the middle of an active battlefield, too broad and deep for easy crossing. And now a third of the Proceran host was stuck on the wrong side of it. Horns sounded, but the call was different this time. It’d been on of the first she learned, when going through officer training.

All companies advance.

—

“Left flank, tracer just went up,” the human officer said.

General Nauk of the Waxing Moons did not reply, idly chewing on a finger. He’d had one of his aides drag a corpse out of the swamp. Bloated corpse wasn’t his favourite, but it beat rations and the water made the flesh easy to tear off the normally tricky finger bones.

“Use the Spikes,” Legate Jwahir said. “And keep hammering, the Marshal handed down orders to try a kill on any hero on our side of the river.”

Juniper of the Red Shields. The Hellhound. They had been friends once, he thought. He could remember parts of that. Enmity too, but that only to be expected. Nauk was certain he had not been a very good orc, even before Summer burned away most of what he was. Licking the last scrap of flesh and skin off the tip of the finger bone, the general swallowed. Eyes on the battlefield before him, he savoured the taste of meat and blood as he watched Proceran lines waver. The crusader left flank was attempting to salvage the situation by circling around, but he’d put most his heavies in the kabili standing in their way. It had meant more casualties for the regulars under heroic pressure, but that was necessary. He did not have enough men to be able to afford coddling.

“Jwahir,” he growled.

“Sir?” the Taghreb answered, turning to him.

“Burn them,” he said. “We’re not lingering, not with heroes on the prowl.”

His legate looked like she wanted to argue, but he stared at her calmly until she flinched and gave the order. Calm came easily, these days. Balance for all the things that did not. The old killing urge was muted, the Red Rage burned away. Instead now he had this vicious spasm of violence never too far from his hands. That and the hollowness, but he had grown used to that. There was satisfaction to be found in his work, as close to pleasure as it got. General Nauk watched as clusters of green flames exploded in the ranks of the crusaders on the wrong side of the river, picking at the flesh between his fangs with the finger bone. The screams were soothing, almost as good as listening to the spasm. He’d keep his troops in place long enough the Procerans could not escape, then pull back to the camp as instructed. Heroes could still bleed them, and if a commander on the other side managed to restore order long enough to start sending soldiers around the river – which only went on for so long, time had forced limits – defeat could still happen. The world shivered.

“Sir,” Jwahir said.

“I see it, Legate,” he grunted.

A pair of heroes were hacking at the river with great spurts of Light, trying to collapse a ford. He snorted, dimly amused. Might work, but it’d take too long. Even if they didn’t get exhausted before the end, the amount of men they’d be able to spare a burning death would be minimal. Dark eyes, one dead and one living, turned to the crusader camp even though it was too far to see. Soon that would go up in flames as well. Special Tribune Robber would be starting fires there, green and otherwise. Nauk felt like she should dislike the goblin, though he hardly remembered why. Something about a woman? Felt childish. And now he was hungry again. His fangs crushed the finger bones and he sucked at the marrow within, swallowing shards with it before licking his chops clean and tossing away the remains. A great ripping sound sounded in the distance, and the orc jolted in surprise. There was a wound in the sky, a woman running on it. Past the enemy lines, past the goblinfire, past his own men. Nauk’s brow creased.

“Scry our mages,” he ordered the Callowan officer. “The rest of you, go away.”

Legate Jwahir’s lips thinned.

“Sir-”she began.

Nauk unsheathed his sword.

“Disobeying a superior officer’s order had clear consequences, Legate,” he said. “The army now goes in full retreat. You hold command until told otherwise.”

The woman paled. The orc did not pay much attention as the mage officer placed the scrying bowl in front of him on a tripod and the rest cleared out. His eyes were on the old woman running across the sky. Heading towards him. She flicked her sword, carving another rippling wound and sliding down until she landed in front of him.

“You’d be the general, then,” the Saint of Swords said.

Nauk tapped the flat of his blade against the scrying bowl’s edge.

“Spike,” he ordered.

Flame hammered down a moment later and the world became a sea of fire as he laughed. Ah, that’d felt good. The impact had knocked him off his feet, but he rose.

“Again,” he called out.

The heroine carved apart the flames that bloomed above them both, glaring at him. Another cluster was born and they both went down. Fire licked at his hands and the Princekiller hacked out a cough. She wouldn’t die that easily. But neither would he. He’d felt harsher flames than this. Still did, whenever he closed his eyes. Through the smoke a shape burst out, but he was quick enough the cut that would have taken his throat cut through his ruin of a cheek instead. Barely felt it. The old woman eyed him contemptuously, raised her blade once more and then hurriedly backpedalled when a long knife scythed through where her throat had been a heartbeat earlier.

“So,” Archer said, blades twirling in her hands in a display of unnecessary dramatics, “Is it me or you’ve gotten a little crazier?”

Nauk hacked out a laugh.

“Try to get me a slice, will you?” he said. “Never had heroine before.”

“That wasn’t a no,” the woman drawled amusedly.

“You’re one of Ranger’s,” the Saint of Swords interrupted.

“And you’re...” Archer began. “Shit, I could have sworn I knew. Sorry, I really wasn’t paying attention during that briefing. Catherine was wearing this very flattering tunic and I was hammered like you-”

The heroine struck, but Archer danced around the blow and forced her back with a slash that would have gone across her eyes.

“Go for a walk, Nauk,” the brown-skinned woman said, as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “I don’t think she’s happy about your setting her minions on fire. Go figure. Some people just take things too personally.”

“Flank meat,” General Nauk suggested. “Or cheek. Tender pieces.”

“Gross,” the Named said, wrinkling her nose. “And I’ve been stealing goblin bedding for like a month, so I know gross.”

The orc snorted, and fled to the sound of Archer beginning to expound on the virtue of royal liquor cabinets with breakable locks as the heroine tried to kill her.

—

Princess Rozala clenched her fingers until the knuckled turned white around the reins. They had been so very, very close to utter and complete victory. She’d followed the classics perfectly. A first wave of levies to tire out the enemy infantry, followed by fantassin companies across the line while princely retinues struck at weak points. She’d tied down the enemy cavalry with a portion of her own, the sent the rest to circle around to hit the back of the Army of Callow while she thinned she extended the line of her left flank. The enemy mages had been more than a match for her priests, but the struggle had occupied the both of them and left her foe with no real check for the Chosen. Who’d torn into the shield wall with remarkable alacrity, constantly forcing the opposing commander to reinforce breaches with fresh troops. Within the first half hour of the battle, victory was in the air. Wherever Named struck, the Army of Callow bled men like a leaking barrel. Then her circling cavalry had struck, and found a thin line of scorpions awaiting them. She’d almost laughed at the sight. The wave of bolts tore bloody swaths, but it could not stop thousands of horseman on the charge.

Then they’d fired again, barely a heartbeat having passed.

The tip of her cavalry wedges disintegrated. Men and horses died like flies as the scorpions damnably kept firing . The losses promised to be brutal, but as her horsemen spread out and began to close distance she bit down on her fury and made her peace with the trade. A higher cost than she would have wished, but victory was coming nonetheless. Then the goblins had wheeled out some shoddy-looking slings, and packed munitions began to blow away whole chunks of cavalry. Her people were valiant, many of them hardened veterans from the Great War. It took them sixty heartbeats to break, and what should have been a triumph tipped towards a draw. The Callowan knights, though outnumbered, broke through the cavalry she’d sent against them after an hour of hard fighting. Losses on both sides were... steep. One of the few comforts of the day, that over a third of the enemy’s cavalry had died before her own fled the field. Without the Chosen it might very well have been a defeat. The enemy commander turned those vicious scorpions against her fantassins, revealing that in addition to being repeating they could also be swiftly moved by oxen.

Then the Grey Pilgrim had taken the field and radiant light carved through the engines like a heavenly stroke. The enemy commander ordered a retreat soon after and the legionaries withdrew in good orders, bleeding men to heroes and skirmishers they had no answer to. But the knights of Callow threatened to charge them, and Princess Rozala had no choice but to order a temporary withdrawal while she sent some officers to force back steel in the spine of her horse. After another hour she was gathered in good order again, and ready to order another assault. With the scorpions destroyed, her foe would break. The the sky streaked with sorcery across the march, and she learned that the other column was in full retreat. But a half hour later, another signal touched the sky. Her camp had come under attack. Soon after the flames grew tall enough she could see them even from this far out. Princess Rozala had fought a battle, today, against twelve thousand men. She’d slain near a third of that army, at the price of perhaps five thousand dead of her own. Yet if she pressed the assault now, without the other column, she might very well be assaulting a fortified position with numerical inferiority. Gritting her teeth, she ordered a retreat back to camp.

One night. One night of rest in whatever was left of her camp, and then with dawn she would dispose with all strategic subtlety. She would muster her entire host, and hammer at the enemy until they broke.

—

Vivienne woke to the sound of someone pouring wine. She had a knife in hand before her eyes opened, and she was halfway out of her chair when a chuckle gave her pause. Thief stilled her heartbeat, meeting the former Prince of Nightfall’s lone good eye. The fae had a cup of wine in hand, sitting at the edge of Catherine’s bed. There were four mages in the tent and over thirty of her Jacks outside, yet not a single one of them had raised the alarm. The Callowan eyed the mages, who had neither noticed her waking nor Larat’s presence.

“Where have you been?” she croaked out, voice still-half asleep.

The sound broke whatever glamour had kept the mages from noticing what was going on. Their eyes widened in alarm, but Vivienne’s hand rose and they shut their mouths.

“Around,” the fae drawled.

Instinct warred in the woman. Part of her wanted to dismiss the mages, since this might be a conversation best kept private. Another part of her was very much aware the nonchalant fae could kill her with a flick of the hand and Catherine was not awake to hold his leash. The mages might be her only chance of survival, if the fae felt inclined to violence.

“Every word spoken in this tent is under seal,” Thief told the mages, choosing self-preservation with a bitter taste in the mouth.

“Precious,” Larat smiled.

“We fought a battle, today,” Thief sharply told him.

“And won it, I hear,” the fae replied. “Or at least avoided loss, which is victory enough for the likes of you.”

“She’ll have your hide, for staying out of it,” Vivienne said, forcing calm.

“I take no orders from mortals,” the fae sneered.

The implication that Catherine was not one of those hung heavy in the air. Thief’s lips thinned. It might even be true, to an extent.

“Then why have you reappeared?” she asked.

The one-eyed fae idly set down his cup on the bedside table and rose to his feet.

“Perhaps I’ve decided to dispose of my shackles,” he suggested. “Or merely to hack away at dead wood.”

The way he smiled at her when speaking the latter sentence sent a shiver up her spine.

“Doubtful,” Thief said. “There’s no Hell horrible enough for what would happen to you if you did, and we’re both aware of it. That’s not the game you’re playing.”

Larat shrugged languidly, leaning against a dresser.

“Perhaps I am simply waiting,” he said.

Vivienne frowned.

“For what ?” she pressed.

There was a gasp and Thief wheeled about. One of the mages was staring at the bed, where Catherine was... well, her body was no longer shuffling around. The woman flicked a glance at the fae, who was smiling thinly. Amused. After a long moment, the Queen of Callow’s eyes opened and she let out a ragged sound. Rising to a sitting position on her bed, she rubbed the bridge of her nose.

“Well,” Catherine Foundling rasped. “That was a thing.”

“Oh thank the Gods,” Vivienne whispered.

Then Larat plunged his blade into her throat. Thief froze in utter surprise, but Catherine did not. She slapped the fae across the face, breaking his chin and teeth, and got on her feet. She took out the sword and her throat reformed within a heartbeat. Larat began to get up, but Cat kicked him back down and kept her bare foot on his chest. The fae began to laugh.

“Already?” the Queen of Callow said, and glanced at the mages still in the tent. “Bind him.”

She reached for the cup of wine on the bedside table, then after a sigh withdrew the fingers. Thief’s fingers clenched.

“ Hold ,” she said.

The mages looked at her in surprise.

“And in wickedness doth Evil sow the seeds of its own defeat,” Vivienne quoted, meeting Catherine’s eyes.

The queen rolled her eyes.

“For barren is the womb, and certain the fall,” she replied.

Is was, Thief knew, the correct second half of the verse from the Book of All Things. It was also not the correct answer to this phrase. It should have been the punchline to a truly filthy joke about sailors and holes in the hull she’d learned while a waitress in Laure.

“Hello, Akua,” Vivienne said.

The Queen of Callow’s face went blank and immediately a long spear of ice formed from her extended hand, the point resting on the sleeping Hierophant’s throat.

“None of you,” Akua Sahelian said through Catherine’s lips, “are to move or make a sound.”

The mages went still. Larat was still laughing.

“You won’t,” Thief said.

“I assure you,” Diabolist said, “the survival of this man is of middling import to me.”

“You won’t,” Thief repeated, “for the same reason you didn’t drink from that cup. You’re still bound by the oaths her body took.”

Akua’s eyes narrowed and her wrist flexed, but did not otherwise move.

“Clever girl,” Catherine’s lips said. “She took an oath not to harm any of you.”

“Moonlight,” Thief said, and the body froze.

Passing a hand through her hair, Vivienne felt her stomach drop. This, she thought, had just gotten a great deal more complicated.

“Bind her,” she ordered the mages.

Larat, she noted, was still quietly laughing.

Court II

“Salvation is ever an act of violence, be it within or without.”
– Dread Emperor Reprobate the First

The Woe, Brandon Talbot had learned, had some very peculiar oddities. Queen Catherine’s disdain for luxuries was infamous – and had made her popular in some quarters, when it’d spread she’d sold off some of the more ostentatious Praesi inheritances to invest the sum in the army – but each of her companions has their... unusual habits. Lady Thief, he knew, could shift from displaying the manners of a noble of the old blood to those of a mocking thug in a heartbeat. And the least said about her tendency to steal for sport the better. The Archer was, by all reports, a dissolute hard-drinking brute. Yet she could also quote the classics in three languages, and seemed to be the only person in the Kingdom of Callow that could hold a conversation with the Hierophant on the subject of sorcery. Brandon would have preferred a life where he’d never heard the Lay of Lothian’s Passing strategically quoted to be perverted into a ribald comment about the skills of fair-haired men in bed, but that’d she’d done it in flawless High Miezan was rather impressive. The language was, after all, long dead. The Lord Hierophant was perhaps the least unsettling, in that he reminded Brandon of the stories once told of the Wizards of the West. Absent-minded, prone to discourse few others could understand and blatantly disinterested in anything even remotely connected to statecraft.

He also held conversations while looking at his interlocutors through the back of his head with magical eyes, which was a little less traditional.

Hakram of the Howling Wolves, the Lord Adjutant, had embraced a different sort of oddity. The even-tempered orc was, by objective study, the second most powerful individual in Callow. The queen had made it clear that when he spoke it was with her full authority, and though he lacked an official title besides his Name he had a seat on sessions of the Queen’s Council whenever he so wished. He stood higher in the court’s hierarchy than either the Governess-General or the Lord Treasurer, and if so inclined could have claimed the traditional luxurious office and rooms of either. Instead, the greenskin passed his hours in the cramped and crooked room that had once belonged to King Robert’s personal scribe. Brandon had never once seen the man that the Army of Callow openly considered the heir-apparent to Catherine Foundling either turn his back to the door or allow his axe to be further than hand’s reach. The Grandmaster’s allies had been incensed, when they’d first learned that the army would back the orc as heir if anything happened to the Her Majesty. He was, after all, a greenskin . And it would have been a lie to say that the Regals had not been attempting to position themselves for ascension should the luck of the battlefield turn against the queen.

Only the fact that the Deadhead had shown no interest in rule and that Anne Kendall was almost as unpalatable an alternative had prevented the situation from escalating. That, and Brandon’s harsh and continued reminders that any attempt to remove the orc from power would be met by brutal and unrelenting violence from Her Majesty. The Grandmaster dismissed the thoughts from his mind, schooling his face into serene pleasantness as he bowed to the orc. Hakram Deadhand, after all, outranked him in both military and courtly ranks.

“Grandmaster Talbot,” the orc gravelled, shuffling parchments aside. “Take a seat.”

The bow had been returned with a simple nod, one that matched the requirements of etiquette under the assumption that the man was of equal standing to sitting members of the Queen’s Council. Humility at work, though with an unspoken edge. Brandon claimed the chair across the parchment-covered desk, eyes flicking to the movement as the Adjutant used a paring knife to work on the tip of a quill. The orc had unusual finesse, for one with such large fingers.

“I thank you for the audience, Lord Adjutant,” Brandon replied. “I know your duties stretch your hours.”

The greenskin’s maw flicked open, revealing a swift flash of fangs in what could have either been threat or amusement. The Callowan had not made study enough of orcs to be able to tell, thought perhaps he should. For all that the Regals saw him as the authority on the newborn Foundling dynasty and its greats, that was more a reflection on the little exposure they’d had to the key members of the regime than of his own deep understanding.

“No rest for the wicked,” the Adjutant said. “Well. Should we pretend I don’t know why you requested this talk, or will we skip the usual song and dance?”

The tone was mild, as if the orc did not care either way. There was no impatience there, Brandon grasped. The Deadhand was perfectly willing to... indulge in the demands of their rank, as if they were some children’s game. The unspoken dismissal of centuries of established etiquette rankled, but did not surprise. None of the most powerful people in Callow these days had risen to rank by observing the proper niceties. Smoothing away the wrinkle of irritation, Brandon forced a smile.

“I am not opposed to bluntness on occasion,” the Callowan aristocrat said. “Campaign has taught me the virtues of it even in civil matters.”

The reminder that Brandon Talbot had fought unflinchingly for the queen on fields foreign and domestic both would not be askew, here. Now that the blades had been temporarily sheathed, his Regals were too often treated as the enemy for his tastes. The orc’s hairless brows twitched, the thick ridges of skin in movement implying mirth. As expected, the unspoken part had not been lost on him.

“Thief’s people will be combing through the court for whoever talked,” the Adjutant said. “Catherine was understandably furious that something under seal was leaked.”

Brandon kept his face calm, though worry spiked. The Jacks were skilful and thorough: it was only a matter of time until the culprit was found. After that, the only thing awaiting was the noose.

“There would be no need for any of this,” the Grandmaster said, “if any of my people were kept appraised of large developments.”

“I reminded her as much,” the orc bluntly admitted. “But you’ve also managed to cast into doubt every single appointment your people achieved. The Governess-General was pushing for a general dismissal, and it took me the better part of an hour to get that off the table.”

Under the desk, the dark-haired man’s fist clenched. He’d warned them, he had. That the moment the Regals became the enemy in Her Majesty’s eyes, she would strike thoroughly and without mercy. Having Kendall whispering in her ear would only make her less forgiving. And we can’t even claim that such a measure would result in civil war , he thought. The Regals were influential, that much was undeniable, but they did not enjoy the kind of support that the Queen’s Men or the queen herself did with the lower and merchant classes. Their power was one of tradition and wealth. At court, it made them strong. But no city would rise in rebellion if the Regals were purged from civil appointments, and the threat of gold only held when the other side did not have the men to take that gold if they wanted to.

“Your moderating influence is appreciated,” the aristocrat stiffly said, inclining his head.

“Don’t take it as a sign of approval,” the orc said. “Your clique is beginning to overstep. If removing it didn’t mean handing over the run of the kingdom to the Queen’s Men, I would have let you hang from your own noose.”

Brutal but honest. That was the reputation Lord Deadhand had, in matters such as these. While more open to compromise than the rest of the queen’s most trusted, the orc’s willingness to be diplomatic only went so far. Yet he remained aloof from the partisan politics of the court, and as a voice of reason that made him priceless – as did the fact that he had the queen’s ear more than anyone else. Brandon calmed his breathing. He was not insulted by the bluntness, because that bluntness had not been meant an insult: the Adjutant was merely clarifying his position so no confusion would ensue in the following conversation. The Callowan, swallowing years of lessons on the subject of proper behaviour, decided to follow suit. The Woe, it should not be forgot, had been mostly paupers and vagrants before their rise to power. Their appreciation for directness had deep roots, and could be used.

“It is appreciated regardless,” Brandon said. “To be frank, my people have been restless for some time. This planned partition of Liesse is only the droplet threatening to tip the cup. I hope I will not offend by pointing out that the Regals have been thrown scraps from the high table, and then expected to remain docile and quiet for that privilege.”

The greenskin’s dark eyes studied him silently. As always, the Callowan made an effort not to glance at the hand of bones that was resting atop the desk.

“Then I’ll be frank as well,” the orc replied, fangs bared for longer than previously before they were hidden behind the lips. “Your people have not proven loyal or useful enough to get the kind of appointments you’re pushing for.”

“And Kendall’s are?” Brandon flatly asked.

“No,” the Adjutant said. “We’re well aware they look to the Governess-General for instructions. But they also know that they’ll be tossed out the moment your Regals gain influence, and it’s keeping them in line. As a hanging sword, your people have proved usable. But the accompanying agitation is proving more trouble than that lever is worth, and I will not defend unreliable actors.”

Which , the aristocrat thought, you now suspect we might be considering we’re willing to have our people pass information under seal. It was infuriating, because if any of the Regals were on the Queen’s Council there would have been no such ploy. As long as Talbot’s allies knew they had a voice at the table, they would have been worried about losing accumulated influence by stepping out of line. But they did not have a seat, so more desperate means had to be used to remain relevant. And using those means disqualifies us in Her Majesty’s eyes from having a seat in the first place . It was a vicious circle, without any obvious solution but allowing what influence the Regals had to wane and hope the queen looked well upon them for it. Certain loss for uncertain gain. It was a solution that, if Brandon was to be honest with himself, he would not even attempt to put forward at a council. Not least because he did not truly believe in it himself.

“If we are removed,” the Grandmaster said, “the balance of power in the kingdom collapses.”

“Yes,” the orc agreed. “And so Catherine told me to report this conversation directly to her, instead of having Hierophant dig through the brains of your allies for a name. This is the part, Brandon Talbot, where you make your case for the continued usefulness of the Regals.”

The man’s blood ran cold. He’d sought this meeting to arrange for compromise and concessions, but he’d been reading the lay of the land wrong. His people were not the only ones running out of patience. The orc’s broad and ugly face was serene, but the warning ran clear. If he reported to the queen that there was nothing salvageable about the situation, it would not be dismissals that followed. It would be the Jacks taking people in the middle of the night never to be seen again. And Governess-General Anne Kendall would be the sole truly Callowan voice to decide the kingdom’s legacy. The roof of his mouth was dry.

“You would lose the Order of Broken Bells,” Brandon said.

The orc frowned.

“I presume this is not the threat it sounds like,” he said.

The aristocrat shook his head.

“Knights,” he said, “do not grow on trees. They are raised through rigorous training. Through learned traditions. And by allowing the existence of families that can afford to equip and support one of their own with the accoutrements of knighthood. Guildsmen and eldermen have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to replace us in this regard.”

“A mark in your favour,” the Adjutant said. “In the short term. It is not sufficient to make the unruliness of your people a pill sweet enough to swallow.”

It took a conscious effort not to react visibly. Careful now, Brandon. This is the knife’s edge. The Grandmaster knew, without needing to question it, that the Regals were necessary to the kingdom. He simply needed to make the queen see it as he did, and there lay the thorn. Marriage alliances ? No, that was a dead end. To be worth wedding in the eyes of foreigners his fellows would need titles the queen refused to bestow. And marriage alliances both within Callow and into other nations would form power blocs Her Majesty would frown upon. Military officers? It had already been made clear that the Army of Callow was barred to nobility save if it rose through the ranks after enrolling in the lowest ranks – an unacceptable condition to most his allies, who would not tolerate their kin taking orders from Praesi and peasants. Ties to the House of Light? This one, he suspected, might even be a mark against them. The queen’s dealings with the priests would be much eased if she was the only possible interlocutor. He was going about this the wrong way, Brandon realized. Why were his people needed , from the perspective of Her Majesty? From three heartbeats he met the calm stare of the Deadhand, until the answer finally came.

“Ability,” he said.

“Talented officials we can’t trust or use are more danger than boon,” the orc stated flatly.

“Lord Adjutant,” Brandon said. “In all of Callow, how many guildsmen and eldermen do you believe are actually literate? Or familiar with more than basic arithmetic?”

“The upper ranks of every major city and holding,” the Deadhand said.

“Let us be generous and assume half these individuals can be spared from their current responsibilities for court and civil appointments,” the Grandmaster said. “That is a very shallow pool.”

The orc’s eyes narrowed in thought.

“You believe the Queen’s Men are running out of competent candidates,” he gravelled.

“Education, the sort that is required for the bureaucracy you are raising, is expensive,” Brandon said. “The amount of such taught individuals that can be taken from their existing occupations is limited, if you want to avoid harming the kingdom. The only group that can consistently afford to provide these people are the Regals. No one else has the tradition, the learning and the coin. Do you believe it coincidence, that the Praesi purges focused on the nobility? It was not only to quell rebellion. It was to make Callow dependent on the Empire for able rule.”

“A dependency that needs to be excised if the kingdom is to remain independent,” the Adjutant finished mildly. “You are aware, I believe, of Catherine’s opinion on rule by right of birth. What you describe could be considered informal return to aristocracy.”

“There will always be wealthy men and women,” Brandon calmly replied. “This cannot and should not be avoided. Without the ancient privileges of titled nobles checking her actions, the queen maintains supremacy by right of unquestioned appointment and dismissal. What worth is there in robbing yourself of talent for empty antipathy?”

The orc’s fangs flicked into view for a heartbeat before being sheathed again.

“Well argued,” the Deadhand said.

Brandon inclined his head in thanks, mostly to hide the relief on his face.

“All of this, of course, is contingent on the Regals moderating their actions,” the Adjutant added calmly.

The Grandmaster’s jaw clenched. He had come seeking concession, and would be leaving forced to promise them instead.

“I understand your worries,” Lord Hakram said. “Command without success is a stone around your neck. A promise to you, then: get your house in order, and the partition of Liesse will be a matter reopened to debate.”

Brandon met the greenskin’s eyes, finding only patience and calculation there.

“It will do,” he replied.

Gods, it would have to.

—

Lady Julienne tightened the cloak around her. She’d had to sneak out of her own home in servant’s livery with her face hidden, like a sneak thief. It was mortifying, but she was not in a position to refuse instructions when given. She was being held by the throat, and the slightest flick of the wrist could see her neck snapped. The tavern she’d been told to enter had no sign hanging above the door, the sure sign of miserliness and filth awaiting, and the smell of piss wafted from the nearly alley. She’d not even entered and already she was nauseous. The inside was barely better. A disgusting dirt floor lay at the bottom of a single large common room with a wooden counter at the back. A few tables with ramshackle benches took up most of it, with a pair of alcoves made of hanging cloth flanking each side. Left side, last alcove. That was what the message had said. The aristocrat hurried there, dismayed at the filth her riding boots was being stained with. Within awaited a woman, seated on a seat without even a cushion by a low table that was nothing more than a wheel on likely stolen pavestones. She doubted the owner of this tavern had ever paid taxes in their entire life.

“Should I order a tankard?” the Thief asked, smiling thinly.

“That will not be necessary,” Lady Julienne stiffly replied.

She took the seat across, certain she was going to need to have the cloak burned after she returned to her mansion. The Named seemed indifferent to her reply, drinking deeply from a tankard of dark and thick ale. Disgusting .

“Business, then,” the other woman drawled. “How’s your knitting circle coming along?”

The aristocrat frowned, glancing meaningfully at the common room. It was only half full, with perhaps two dozen people pouring trash down their throats, but speaking of private matters in the open was pure foolishness.

“Oh, you don’t need to worry about,” the Thief said.

“With due respect,” Lady Julienne began.

The Named rolled her eyes and sharply whistled. Without a word, every single person in the room rose to their feet and walked out the door. Including the bald, one-eyed man she presumed to be the owner by the looks of the ragged apron he wore. The sight of it had her blood running cold. Not a single one had hesitated, or spoken a word. Even the drinks were still on the table.

“I own everyone in this street, one way or another,” the Thief cheerfully said, but her eyes remained cold. “Even you, Julienne Guilford. Now tell me about the Regals.”

“I did as you bid,” she replied darkly. “Whenever Talbot is elsewhere I encourage Farron to take harder lines, and when we hold council I stand by him whenever it is not suspicious.”

“And our dear friend Samuel Farron,” the monster said. “He’s still intent on his little coup?”

“He still wants to oust Talbot, yes,” Lady Julienne said. “His support is not broad enough, but it is growing.”

“Good,” the Thief nodded. “You’re going to continue supporting him. Gather all the hardliners behind him. Every last one, no matter what bribes or cajoling it takes.”

“I know what you’re doing,” the aristocrat hissed. “You’re setting him up. Forging a pretext for a purge.”

“Come now, don’t be absurd,” the villain chuckled. “We already have one of those. The moment your clique got their hands on a matter under seal, there was going to be blood. That one is on your heads, not ours.”

“This is murder,” Lady Julien accused.

“No,” the Named replied. “Murder’s what I want to ask you about. Tell me about Valerie Hadley.”

“Brandon Talbot’s steadiest ally in council,” the aristocrat said. “She argues for moderation and seeking the queen’s favour, as a rule.”

“That’s interesting,” the Thief mused. “Since she’s been moving around large sums of gold she shouldn’t have without visibly purchasing anything. When Farron went on about having Ratface killed, what was her stance?”

Lady Julienne frowned, scouring her memory.

“She did not speak on the subject of Lord Qara’s assassination,” she finally said. “It was Grandmaster Talbot that went on a tirade against.”

“You’re going to pay very close attention to who she talks to,” the other woman ordered. “Especially if she’d been in contact with foreigners.”

“Half the Queen’s Council is foreigners,” Lady Julienne sneered.

“That’s an interesting hill for you to make a stand on, Julienne,” the Thief noted. “If you’d extended that beautiful patriotism to foreign money , we might not be having this conversation.”

“I didn’t know,” the aristocrat protested. “They presented themselves as-“

“Guild-certified merchants, I’m well aware,” the blue-eyed woman shrugged. “Shame that was a Proceran front, and you ended up both in debt and guilty of high treason. Funny how these things go, isn’t it?”

“I am no traitor,” Lady Julienne insisted. “My only fault is being fooled.”

“One of your several faults was telling Cordelia Hasenbach about the state of the smithies in Vale in great detail,” the Thief corrected. “Which allowed her to learn we were funding them, which in turn allowed her to deduce the Tower’s been tight-fisted with equipment. Congratulations, you’ve passed information about the war readiness of the Army of Callow to a nation about to invade us.”

The noble had thought the terms of her deal with the merchants were perhaps too lenient, and so been compliant when a very reasonable request about information on Vale blacksmiths had come. Her interlocutors were debating opening a smithy of their own, she’d been told. That one mistake was all it had taken for the monsters to take hold of her.

“I erred, perhaps,” Lady Julienne darkly said. “But that is a lesser sin in the face of your actions.”

“People keep telling me there’s only of those,” the blue-eye woman drawled. “It’s called defeat, allegedly.”

The aristocrat’s fingers clenched.

“I know who you are, Vivienne Dartwick,” Lady Julienne said. “Your house is still respected, in the right circles. You shame it by being the servant of butchery.”

The Named drank from her tankard, then lightly set it down.

“You ever gardened, Julienne?” she asked.

Warily, the noblewoman shook her head.

“Neither have I,” the Thief mused. “Not the kind of dirt I like to have under my nails. My father, though? He loved it. Wouldn’t hear of hiring a gardener, spent hours kneeling in dirt. There was this one tree he loved most of all, a gift from my mother. One morning, I found him in our garden. And to my surprise, he was taking a hatchet to that tree. I asked him why, and do you know what he told me?”

Lady Julienne shook her head again. The monster smiled.

“Sometimes,” the Thief said. “The healthiest thing for a tree is to prune it.”

Interlude: Kaleidoscope V

“The final disappointment of heroism is to find that a just war was, in the end, just a war.”
– Theodore Langman, Wizard of the West

Ink and parchment would see the day recorded as a victory, but Juniper of the Red Shields knew better. Despite her best efforts, the Army of Callow had reached the threshold where even the slightest losses began to affect combat efficiency. The loss of the crossbowmen on the first day had already crippled the host’s ability to wage open battle, but the second day’s losses had been a mere hour away from catastrophe. Twenty-two thousand soldiers had come to these plains, and now less than fifteen thousand remained fighting fit. The mage lines had nearly burned themselves out fixing minor injuries, an ugly choice to make. The Hellhound had broken Legion triage doctrine, which emphasised keeping as many legionaries alive as possible, in favour of getting as many men able to fight as possible. The deeply wounded had been allowed to die, or put out of their misery when requested. It burned her, the knowledge that the other side would have no such decision to make. Priests were a larger logistical advantage than she’d believed they would be.

The Marshal of Callow set aside the thought temporarily, though it never strayed far. There were decisions to make tonight in the dark and they would be no more pleasant than those of the day. She entered the tent without a word, the pair of legionaries guarding it saluting as she passed.

“If you’re here to cheer me up, you should have left the armour behind,” Archer drawled.

The orc did not bother to humour the Named’s coarseness with an answer, instead looking her up calmly. Lady Ranger’s pupil had done away with the woven scarf that usually covered the lower half of her face, along with the cloak and coat she insisted on wearing even now that spring had come. It bared skin, but despite the other woman’s finest attempts at a suggestive pose there was nothing seductive to be found. She was a mass of bruises and cuts, a red scar going up her cheek and across her left eye, through the eyebrow.

“She beat you like a drum,” Juniper stated.

Archer’s nose wrinkled.

“Got a few shots in myself,” she denied. “Pretty sure I broke her shoulder, near the end.”

“It will have been fixed within the hour,” the Hellhound said. “They have a healer among their Named.”

“You asked me to cover Nauk’s retreat,” the ochre-skinned woman shrugged. “Mission accomplished. Now where’s my seraglio of doe-eyed Taghreb beauties and oiled-up Soninke manservants?”

“Lodge a request with my supply tribune,” Juniper blandly replied. “I’ll have it fast-tracked.”

“We are the least decadent Evil side I’ve ever heard of,” Archer whined. “Who does a girl have to stab, to get fresh dates and a fan-waving pretty boy?”

“The Empress, one assumes,” the Hellhound grunted. “Will you be able to fight tomorrow?”

“If you’re going to use me for my body, you could at least make it enjoyable,” the Named snorted.

Engaging with this one, Juniper knew from experience, was akin to giving a stone that initial push down a hill. She let silence do the talking.

“Not confident about taking on the greybeards,” Archer admitted. “I could handle a few round with the side-pieces, but the Saint’s gotten used to my forms and the best I can manage with the Pilgrim is a shooting war.”

The orc’s lips pressed tightly, revealing dismay. That limited their options sharply. Already the loss of most of Pickler’s repeating scorpions and all of the Spitters had taken a tool out of her available arsenal, but if Archer couldn’t even be counted on to check either of the prime threats? It might still be possible to win, if she defended cleverly enough. But even if she did, the ruin inflicted on the other side would be matched by the devastation of her own host. Should the Army of Callow take even another four thousand casualties – a very conservative estimate of minimal losses considering enemy numbers and Named – then it was done for the year as anything but a second-rate defensive force. The recruiting camps in central Callow would continue providing a trickle of freshly-trained companies, but that covered only mainline infantry. Sappers, mages, knights. Neither of these could be so easily replaced, and without them it would be exceedingly difficult for the Army of Callow to handle the numerically superior forces the Tenth Crusade would inevitably send their way.

“Rest up,” Juniper finally said. “We’ll need you tomorrow.”

Archer leaned back in her seat, eyes for a single heartbeat bereft of the usual mocking indolence.

“Hellhound,” she said. “The Saint? I might have gotten a handle on her weakness.”

The orc paused, meeting the gaze of the Named.

“She never used an aspect,” Archer said. “And her cuts, it looks like she’s tossing them around carelessly but there’s always a purpose to it. Either as a deterrent, to allow her to move quickly or to put down an opponent hard before they can fight back.”

Juniper chewed over that.

“I’ve had very few reports of her using the cuts against soldiers,” the Hellhound finally said.

“She’d been fighting for over an hour when we scrapped,” Archer murmured. “And she never used any of the fancier tricks Catherine mentioned she has up her sleeve. I think she physically couldn’t .”

“She has limited amount of power, then,” Juniper deduced.

The other woman shook her head.

“I think she’d old,” Archer replied. “And that using tricks and aspects takes a toll on her body. She doesn’t fight your boys because, even if she kills a thousand, after that she’s emptied her tankard. It’s why she’s not the tip of the spear, she only comes out to remove problems.”

The Marshal of Callow inclined her head in silent thanks. It would not tip the balance of the battle, but it was great contribution nonetheless. So far, the Saint and the Pilgrim had acted as invincible forces of nature wherever they arrived, only ever checked by other Named. Juniper already suspected that the Grey Pilgrim could only intervene when others were threatened – else why only take the field when the repeating scorpions had already struck? – but now there might be a vulnerability to exploit in the other monster as well. The Hellhound offered a simple nod before leaving the tent, mind already returning to the decisions ahead. Which, to her irritation, she would have to consult another before making. The Thief was easy enough to find. It had been hours since she’d first settled in front of the camp fire she now stared into. Juniper claimed a log by her side, displeased she had to share a fire with the likes of this one.

“We need to retreat,” the Hellhound bluntly said, eschewing greetings.

“You know we cannot,” Thief replied just as bluntly. “If the Principate keeps a foothold on this side of the Whitecaps, there will be no truce to be had.”

“There’ll be no truce if the Army of Callow is wrecked either,” Juniper growled. “Which is the best outcome to be counted on if we fight tomorrow.”

“Duchess Kegan-“ the other woman began.

“Is half a month away, at the earliest,” the orc interrupted. “And not to be relied on if the tide looks like it’s turning against us. The Watch contingent in our ranks is a blade that cuts both ways.”

“The duchess will not lightly go back on her word,” Thief said.

Juniper frowned. The Named spoke as if she knew something the orc did not.

“What are the odds of Malanza following us, if we retreat to Hedges?” the Callowan asked.

“Slim to none,” the Hellhound replied. “We just torched their last supplies. They can last a little longer by butchering their horses, but by my count they’ll be starving for at least a week before they get to the fortress. They’ll know they can’t win a battle in that state. If we withdraw, I am certain they’ll fall back to Harrow and disband part of the host while sending for supplies.”

“Which leaves half of northern Callow occupied,” Thief said. “I am no student of strategy, but I can assure you that is a diplomatic and political defeat that will cripple us.”

“The moment we get Catherine back, we can link up with the Deoraithe by gate and drive them entirely out of Callow,” Juniper replied. “They’d have a few months in the region at most.”

“It is still too long,” the woman tiredly said. “Depending on the outcome at the Red Flower Vales, the Empress might backstab us during that period. And if public perception is that Catherine cannot defend Callowan borders, much of the crown’s support vanishes. Riots, at the very least. Possibly small-scale rebellion. That divides our manpower, and I assure you we will not be allowed to put back the army together after it has been split. No major player save perhaps the Carrion Lord would see our strength preserved as being in their interest.”

“If Lord Black wins-“ Juniper began.

The Thief spat into the flames.

“Then it is a certainty that the Empire will sabotage us,” she said. “From Malicia’s perspective, a Proceran foothold in the north is a leash on both the Carrion Lord and Callow. Neither can turn against the Wasteland while the kingdom is in danger of falling to the next offensive. She’ll want us strong enough we can bleed the crusade, but weak enough we have no negotiating leverage.”

“If we fight tomorrow, the army’s done for the war,” Juniper honestly said. “At most, if we force them to retreat all the way back to Procer, with the Deoraithe backing us we can hold our end of the passage. Any offensive operations became a fantasy until our next three training cycles are done, and that’s at least a year. Longer, for sappers, and we drained the pool dry for both mages and knights.”

The Thief hesitated.

“Perhaps a partial retreat?” she ventured. “Followed by a counteroffensive when they are unaware.”

“Without the gates we don’t move nearly as swiftly as before,” the orc refused, shaking her head. “I’ve already considered it. Might soften them up a bit to let them starve, but it won’t make enough of a difference with heroes in the ranks. We still bleed too much.”

The Callowan brushed back her hair, then grimaced.

“You are telling me that either path has a decent chance of taking us out of the war,” she said. “That there are no good choices to make.”

“Only bad ones,” Juniper agreed. “And among those, there’s one we haven’t discussed.”

The Named stiffened, the fire’s flickering light revealing cold fury.

“You can’t be serious,” she hissed.

“You have a way to shut her down,” the Hellhound said, and it wasn’t a question.

Thief’s eyes grew cold.

“A heavy assumption,” she replied.

“I’ve known Catherine longer than you,” Juniper said, baring her fangs. “She didn’t even trust her Name, and her mantle is a great deal more dangerous. She would have contingencies in place, and within the Woe you’re the only she considers to have a moral compass.”

“I will not allow Akua Sahelian to walk free,” the Thief hissed. “Much less to wage war.”

“Then this conversation is over,” the Marshal of Callow said unflinchingly. “I refuse to a fight a battle tomorrow in the current circumstances. We’ll take our chances with a retreat.”

“How could you possibly trust her with any kind of power?” the Callowan said.

“She’s a Praesi of the old breed,” the Hellhound said. “In front of her is the Tenth Crusade. Blood will tell. Trust has nothing to do with it.”

“If she gets loose, she’ll turn on us,” Thief said. “Without a second thought.”

“You have your leash, and we still have Archer,” Juniper calmly said. “Sahelian is a coward at heart, and she plays the game according to the old rules. That makes her predictable. She will not make a move unless she is certain she can slip the noose.”

“The Callowan half of the army would defect, if they ever knew,” the woman said.

“If they ever knew,” Juniper repeated softly.

She had won the argument and they both knew it.

—

Akua Sahelian wore Catherine’s body seemingly without the slightest awkwardness. Sitting with her legs crossed, stripped of anything but a loose tunic, the Diabolist opened her eyes when Vivienne entered the tent. The glow of the wards keeping her contained was the only light there was to be had, weaving strange and moving shadows over the panes of cloth.

“Vivienne,” Sahelian smiled with lips not her own. “I’d expected another bell before you came to terms with the necessity. Your perspective has broadened since I last had you studied.”

Thief dragged a seat and dropped it in front of the butcher, dropping down into it without even the pretence of elegance. Idly flipping a knife her aspect had dropped into her palm, she watched the Diabolist silently. Were she not uncertain of the effect it would have on Catherine, she would have already ordered Sahelian’s soul to be ripped apart piece by piece.

“Think you have it all figured out, do you?” Thief said.

Catherine’s body inclined its head with an understated grace its true owner had never quite managed.

“Though your hostility is understandable, it is unnecessary,” Diabolist said. “We serve the same mistress, after all.”

“Eclipse,” Vivienne said. “Rip out your left eye.”

Over a month of late evenings had been spent wording the contingency oaths. Possession by the Diabolist had not been the issue they’d expected – Catherine’s fears had been centred around Winter making her lose perspective – but the conditions were cleared by this state of affairs regardless. Thief had reason to genuinely believe Catherine’s judgement was impaired by an external factor, which allowed her to call on the first three oaths. Sahelian smiled even as her fingers dug behind her eyeball, ripping it out. Vivienne noted with satisfaction the smile had grown a little stiff during. She could still feel pain, then.

“Try to play me again and I’ll have to get inventive,” Thief said even as the eye reformed.

“Noted,” the Diabolist replied, inclining her head. “You have a use for me, or at least the power this body holds.”

“I do,” she said. “You’re going to kill crusaders.”

“A most enjoyable task,” Sahelian smiled.

“Eclipse,” Vivienne said. “Rip out your left eye.”

She waited until the eye had reformed before speaking again.

“That one,” she said, “was just because you pissed me off.”

The fucking smile never went away.

“I expect there will be heroic opposition,” the Diabolist said.

“There should be at least ten left, maybe more,” Thief replied. “Most dangerous are the Saint of Swords and the Grey Pilgrim.”

The Queen of Callow’s body hummed and cocked its head to the side. The gesture was so Catherine that Vivienne almost ordered Sahelian to rip out her eye again.

“Not unworthy opponents,” Diabolist said. “I will prevail regardless.”

“You are not to cause a massacre,” Thief said. “After inflicting no more than six thousand casualties, you are to retreat.”

Sahelian’s smile turned sharp.

“Restraint,” she drawled. “How quaint. You miss an opportunity.”

“Eclipse,” Vivienne said. “Rip out your left eye.”

The Diabolist’s breath grew ragged, in the aftermath. She continued speaking anyway.

“You need the crusaders dead,” Sahelian said. “Yet you also require Catherine’s reputation to be unsullied when negotiating a truce. Allow me, then, to bloody my hands. I will make it clear to the heroes that this her body is not currently her own.”

“You don’t know shit about the current political situation,” Thief said.

“I know you cannot fight a war against Procer while unseating the Empress,” the Diabolist said. “What follows is a mere exercise of logic.”

We can’t negotiate with the heroes if they think Catherine is a sharper than can go off at any time , Vivienne thought. Sahelian had not grown beyond the causes of her failure. She still looked at all the nations of Calernia with the belief that sooner or later she would war against them all. Peace stretching further than a temporary truce never entered her calculations.

“You will pretend to be Catherine,” Thief said. “And stick to the limits I have already outlined. In addition, you may not slay the Grey Pilgrim.”

“Even if this body is at risk of permanent destruction?” the Diabolist probed.

“Eclipse,” Vivienne said. “Rip out your left eye.”

This time she flinched, to the Callowan’s satisfaction.

“Don’t attempt to make a loophole again,” Thief said. “Not even then. Flee instead.”

Sahelian softly laughed.

“And what,” Thief asked, “has you so happy?”

Catherine’s dark eyes met her own.

“Do you believe in redemption, Vivienne Dartwick?”

The Callowan shivered.

“There’s nothing in you to redeem,” Thief said. “You are a thing pretending to be human.”

“My people,” Akua Sahelian murmured, “do not put much stock in it either. But I have pondered this matter deeply, of late. Perhaps there is some worth to be found in it.”

The moment I have a speck of leverage, I will convince Catherine to break any semblance of thought in you , Vivienne thought. You are too dangerous a loose end to allow, and you should have forever disappeared after Liesse. There is no place left in this world for you.

“How hard could it be possibly be,” the Diabolist mused. “Acting heroically, that is.”

Vivienne rose to her feet.

“You will ‘awaken’ slightly before dawn,” she said. “Prepare yourself.”

“I look forward to our fruitful alliance, then, my trusted comrade,” Sahelian grinned.

The aristocrat clenched her fingers. That wasn’t her grin. She had no right to wear it.

“Eclipse,” Vivienne said. “Rip out your left eye, seven times in a row.”

She left the tent to the sound of muffled screaming.

—

Prince Amadis Milenan had only managed to sleep after drinking half a thimble of poppy brew, and even then he’d woken long before dawn. The trembling in his hands tempted him to indulge a second time during the darkened hours, but his father had always warned him off reliance on medicine. Many a great ruler had been unmade by growing too fond of a particular vice, when age or exhaustion weakened their resolve. He would not follow in that mistake. Instead he sent for inks and parchment, splaying them over his scribing desk and lighting a pair of oil lamps. The lines of the first illustration were botched by the shaking of his fingers, but the longer he forced himself to concentrate on the matter the steadier his hands became. It was a thorny issue to work these failures seamlessly into the greater design, but he’d had a taste for this sort of diversion since he’d been a boy and when the quill scratched the last of the blue on the parchment he found himself satisfied with the illustration. Not his finest work, but neither would he be ashamed of having it displayed before peers.

He’d sketched a view of Lake Pavin in the traditional Alamans manuscript style, that sprawling expanse of deep blue touching stony shores. He’d done so from memory, drawing on the beautiful summer he’d spent in Cleves as a young man. Having met his wife there had left him with a lingering fondness for the beautiful principality that had occasionally been politically inconvenient. Jonquille still occasionally teased him for being softer on the land of her birth than she was herself, to the amusement of their children. He rather missed her, at the moment. Her discerning judgement and sharp temper, the way she could soother him without ever saying a word. His father had been furious he’d betrothed himself to a girl from a largely insignificant branch family, but never once had Amadis regretted it. He’d paid for the sentimentality in the years that followed, even risked disinheritance in favour of his younger brother, but those were all passing things. The partnership had endured far longer than the grievances. The thought that he might never see her again was a sobering one.

He penned a missive for his wife beneath the illustration, strangely uneasy, and blew on the elegant cursive quoting the couplet by Drunken Berilion he’d botched declaiming at her on their first meeting. She’d recited it back at him properly with laughing eyes, and neither had looked back since. The prince sent for a footman to have it set with the diplomatic correspondence, a mild abuse of prerogative near every royal in the host had indulged in at least once. Even Arnaud, that old sot, liked to write to his bastard son. His worries having ebbed, the Prince of Iserre watched the sun begin to dawn as he ate his frugal breakfast. The most extravagant of his personal foodstuffs he’d had distributed to his men in a gesture of good will, though he’d kept enough there was no risk of either he or his personal household starving. He remained silent as his manservant removed the empty plate, contemplating the coming day. Twice now, his host had waged battle against the Army of Callow. Twice they had been driven back, at great cost. Prince Papenheim’s army would be facing that infamous old monster the Black Knight in the Vales, and the costs of that victory would not be slight. That thread woven with his own losses inked a picture he misliked.

The armies of the Dominion would enter the Principate soon enough, a Principate weakened by war. Prince Cordelia might put her faith in the alliances she had bargained for, but an alliance of victors was like a hearth in summer. The diminished and defeated found no friends, only hungry dogs. All of this, unfolding because a handful of children with an army refused to be defeated. No matter. Princess Rozala believed that this day’s fighting would end it all, though the price would be heavy. All could be remedied, once victory was attained. Trumpets sounded in the camp, and Amadis raised an eyebrow. It was not yet dawn, after all. Malanza was displaying unseemly haste. Then they sounded again, urgently, and his blood ran cold. This was not the call to rise.

It was the call to battle .

Interlude: Kaleidoscope VI

“You can have the throne when I’m done with it, which will be never.”
– Dread Emperor Revenant, initiating the First War of the Dead

Rozala had only felt it once before, throughout the whole of her life. That limpid clarity that was perfect understanding, the crystallization of thought and moment into a single flawless shard. She’d been a child, last time, and her mother had kissed her brow before sending her out of the hall. She’d remained alone on the ancient throne of Aequitain, a cup of poison in hand. In that moment, as the oak doors closed behind her, Rozala Malanza had known that she would take Cordelia Hasenbach’s head or die trying. Known it in a way deeper than she knew her breath or the flow of her blood, felt that certainty become part of her soul. Now, standing at the centre of a storm of shouting men and bared steel, she learned something else.

She had overestimated her own cleverness.

It was a bitter lesson. She’d learned the ways of war since she’d been a young girl, been taught them so deeply her grasp on the Ebb and the Flow had paid for it. There were perhaps a handful of generals in all of Procer that were finer commanders than her, and all had decades of experience that in time she would come to match. The Iron Prince, she’d fancied, had been the only one who could match her own discernment in matters of battle. And Klaus Papenheim was old, stepping closing to death’s threshold every year. As the blue-eyed dead advanced in utter silence, Rozala Malanza realized that the waters of the world were deep and her understanding of them shallow. What had seemed like cleverness days ago might very well cost her this day, this battle, this campaign and perhaps even this crusade.

That the dead would rise was no great surprise. There were reports of the Black Queen having raised them for purpose of war in the past, and though the Army of Callow lacked Wasteland mages it would have been naïve of her to expect complete ignorance of necromancy. And so, even after the Queen of Callow was laid low, Princess Rozala had laid a trap. She’d crafted it carefully, drawing on the knowledge of the Rogue Sorcerer and the Grey Pilgrim. Even if the Black Queen woke, as the Pilgrim had hinted she might should defeat loom tall over the Callowans, Catherine Foundling had limits to the power she could draw. Great workings such as raising a mile of marshlands’ worth of dead would exhaust and weaken her. And so, patiently, she had ordered preparations. Rozala had no lack of priests and Chosen, and if there was one truth to be had about water it was that it could be blessed .

It would have been a beautiful counterstroke. The moment the Black Queen invested her power into the dead, heroes and priests would have gathered together to bless it and the touch of holy would have broken both the host of undead and the villain raising them. Two birds taken with the same stone, turning the Enemy’s arrogance into just demise. And so when the alarms had rung and the call to battle trumpeted, when she first received report that blue-eyed undead were rising from the marsh to attack the camp she had smiled. She might, after all, have just won the battle. Then the priests and the Chosen sallied out, carving an island of Light by the shore until they could finish their holy blessing, and when the ripple of pale shivered across the surface of the water triumph coursed through her veins.

Until the moment she saw the dead were still advancing, and Rozala Malanza was struck by terrible clarity.

The dead were coming. Thousands of them, leashed to the Black Queen’s will. It was possible for her host to successfully defend, even if caught by surprise and still half-asleep. With the Chosen holding the shore until enough soldiers could be assembled, it was possible to weather the storm. Unless the crusaders were forced to defend on two fronts. The Princess of Aequitan swallowed her fear and despair, soothing her mind. It was not yet done. If the Chosen managed to slay the Black Queen, the tide could be turned.

“Gather the men from Orne and Cantal,” Princess Rozala barked, her raised voice stilling the chaos. “We are, I believe, about to be attacked by the Army of Callow.”

She did not look to the shores, where the Named were gathering. The Pilgrim and the Saint would understand the situation without need for her to send a messenger.

It was as all on their shoulders now.

—

Christophe raised his shield and the undead’s blow glanced off the polished silver. The creatures were slow, for all that the Rogue Sorcerer had been astonished by them. The man’s insistence that they’d been raised through the pure power of Winter instead of a Damned’s fell abilities or even necromancy seemed to make little difference when it came to meeting them on the field. Flicking his wrist, he separated the abomination’s head from its body and the corpse dropped to the ground. The blue eyes winked out a moment later and he settled his stance. The wave was at an end, though already more were rising from the tepid waters. The Mirror Knight feared no Evil, yet he misliked the lay of this battle. His fellow Chosen were too few to hold the whole shore, and there were dangers in standing alone against the horde. Kallia had lost an arm to a dead crusader but a half-hour past, the thing clutching at her body until the munitions within detonated. Goblin devilry, the mark of a degenerate breed. The scuttling greenskins were without honour. The Forsworn Healer had reattached the arm and healed the wound, but the Painted Knife had been shaken. He could not blame her. Unlike him, she’d fought the monster up close. Christophe would never forget the sight of the Black Queen laughingly tearing apart an entire band of heroes almost by herself. She’d ripped out their lives like errant weeds, making a game of their struggle. Antoine, his young Alamans brother-in-arms, was still plagued by nightmares from having his arm torn out and tossed in Mansurin’s face as a distraction .

Yesterday had been almost worse. Christophe had come within a hair’s breadth of death leading the fantassins in their advance, saved only by the intervention of the Regicide. A second time he had felt the Cold Lady’s breath on his neck, when the Callowans had plied wicked sorcery and made river where there was once solid ground. He’d been on the wrong side of it, surrounded by the enemy, and prepared for his last stand when death suddenly bloomed in green flames. The impotence of it had been what stung the worst. Men and monsters he could meet sword in hand, but how did one fight fire ? Soldiers he’d spilled blood with, comrades under the Heavens, had died screaming while the power he’d been bestowed by Above proved useless to save anyone. He was the Mirror Knight, granted his armaments by the spirits of the Old Lake after he passed their harsh trials. His power was the reflection of Evil against Evil, the conception of the snake biting its own tail. Yet he’d crawled away shamefully from the blazing green, fished out of the waters by a soldier after almost drowning in his flight. The Enemy had failed to scar his body, but the remembrance of that shame would leave mark on his soul until he drew his last breath.

Not all had been so lucky that dishonour was the price exacted. Mansurin’s second death had taken him beyond even the Grey Pilgrim’s reach.

Christophe chased away the thought and let the light of day wash over him. He drew strength from it, from the Dawn that was one of his aspects. He rose with the morning sun, tiredness and uncertainty leaking out of his body. The Elfin Dames had shaped him in this, granted him the boon that with every dawn his soul would rise – and never retreat. The Mirror Knight had once been a thin and sickly child, but the passing of the years had made him a warrior beyond mortal capacity. It was a slight thing, but every morning saw him a little stronger. A little faster. A little more enduring. Another decade of this, the Regicide had told him, and he would be beyond even her ability to match. Perfect within and without, as the Heavens meant him to be. His strength reaching its peak and a sliver beyond, he waded into the shallow waters and scattered the marching dead. He scythed limbs and shattered skulls, his silver blade breaking steel and the dead flesh beneath. He retreated only when none were left to stand against him, soiled water dripping from his greaves. The whistle caught him by surprise, and he turned so his helm would allow him sight.

“Mirror,” the Vagrant Spear said in broken Tolesian. “We gather. Take head of queen.”

The Arlesite tongue was not his most fluent, but he had made some study of it during his years defending the convent. Sidonia, as the other Chosen insisted they all call her in private, seemed unruffled by the darkness besieging them. Christophe admired this greatly, as she had been returned from the side of the Gods Above for nary an hour. The Pilgrim’s power had breathed life back into her still body so recently, yet she returned to their holy struggle without hesitation. The strength of her resolve was worthy of praise. No all the Grey Pilgrim had returned had been so unflinching in their devotion. There was no trace of daze and confusion in her eyes, only certainty, and the Mirror Knight wrestled with the strange thing that was attraction towards a Levantine. Had his vows not forbidden it... He cleared his throat, cheeks flashing with embarassment.

“Are we to leave our fellow crusaders to stem the tide alone?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Great Elder say, battle won only when queen dead,” she replied. “Strike strong. Avenge dead.”

Reluctantly, the Chosen withdrew. Already crusaders were forming in proper ranks behind him, priests mingling amongst them. Holy flames would not burn as bright as they should against these queer undead, but burn they would regardless. It would have to be enough, until the Black Queen was slain. Christophe saluted the brave soldiers with deep respect, and there was a flicker of guilt within when they responded in kind. He knew this was retreat with purpose, but it still felt wrong to leave them to stand alone. He followed Sidonia, who led him surefooted to the gathering of Chosen further down the shore. The Knight was the last summoned, he saw. The others greeted him, grim but resolute. The Saint of Blades stood apart from the rest, lazily carving through undead without even relying on her Name, while the rest of the Chosen clustered around the Grey Pilgrim.

Some he knew by name, others only by Name. Kallia, face painted in a fresh coat of red as she held her twin knives, stood besides young Antoine. The Blade of Mercy had his greatsword propped up on his shoulder, eyes gleaming white as he drew on the Light to slay his fears. The Forsworn Healer had his eyes closed as he mastered the pain of feeling so many deaths bloom around him. The Silent Guardian, tongue forever stilled by her oaths, kept her shield close even with her sword sheathed. Christophe had shared a shameful escape with her, yesterday, and their eyes met with unspoken understanding. Never again . The Myrmidon, garbed in bronze and faith, was sharing quiet words with the Rogue Sorcerer. Often these two kept to themselves, as the Sorcerer was one of the few Chosen that could speak her obscure Free Cities dialect. This was the sum whole of the Chosen of the Heavens in this blighted place. Mansurin and François had been taken by the green fire, never to grace Creation again. Christophe sheathed his blade and formed the wings against his breastplate, commending the souls of the lost to the Gods. They had served unflinchingly to the end, and deserved endless felicity for it on the Other Side.

“Hear me,” the Grey Pilgrim said, and a ripple went through all of them.

None dared disobey, when the Peregrine spoke. The Mirror Knight felt a thrum of excitement. When had such a gathering of the Good last taken place? Blessed souls were a rarity in the lands of his birth, and like him often served their purpose in isolation. The Tenth Crusade had gathered them all for greater design, and they would see it through. The Heavens will it .

“We go now to make war on the Black Queen,” the old man said. “We were twelve, once, but no longer. Do not forget this. As the Heavens protect us, the Gods Below look well upon her – for she serves their purpose, however unwilling. Victory is not assured, for we now venture in her realm of death and ice.”

The elder Levantine smiled sadly at them.

“There is no glory in this,” he warned them. “Bards may write songs, one day, and chronicles sing your praises, but this is earthly luster. We march in the spirit of sacrifice, to bring light into the dark. Do not look ahead or behind, only to each other. There is no salvation to be found save at the hands your comrades.”

Christophe kept himself from frowning. This was far from the exaltation that he had expected, and suspected they all needed.

“Stand with pride, nonetheless,” the Pilgrim softly said. “You came here of your own will, proving yourself worthy of all that was bestowed upon you. Much has been demanded, yet nothing is promised but duty fulfilled. Stand proud, children. We are the torch taken into the night, and though our flame is passing today we burn bright .”

The Mirror Knight shivered. He felt it, just like the others. The eyes of the Heavens on them. That sacred thing that made them who they were. The trance was broken by a cleared throat, to his vexation.

“All right, kids,” the Saint of Swords said, idly decapitating another undead. “We’re going after the tiger in her own lair, so expect this fight to be a notch above anything you’ve been in before. This is the third dawn, and she’s fresh returned: she will be at her peak and out for blood. Guardian, you’re to cover Forsworn against anything she tosses out.”

The silent woman nodded, edging closer to the healer.

“Myrmidon, you’re sticking by Rogue,” the Saint added. “If she hits you, buy him time to retreat and hold her in place until we can flank.”

The old woman looked upon the rest of them with a hard smile.

“Knife, Vagrant and Blade,” she said. “You’re our knife. Stay out of it until Tariq gives the signal. As for you, Mirror...”

The old woman’s grin had Christophe uneasy, though the light of dawn pushed the failing away soon enough.

“You’re with me,” she said. “We’re claiming the first dance.”

The Chosen nodded gravely. If he could save the lives of others by enduring pain, there was no real choice to be made. His power had granted him the ability to withstand much.

“Steel yourselves,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “It begins.”

The old man struck the ground with his staff, and the marsh parted .

Standing tall, the Chosen advanced.

—

Kallia’s heart grew steadier the longer they walked. The Painted Knife adjusted her stride so would not leave the shorter Vagrant Spear behind, silently hinting the Blade of Mercy should follow suit. The boy was taller than either of them, regardless of his youth. He’d have to be, to lug around that chunk of steel he called a weapon.

“There will be honour to be found today, strife-sister,” Sidonia murmured in Lunara when she caught up. “Worthy strife to offer the Blood.”

Kallia almost rolled her eyes. Alavans . The hill people were a ferocious lot, but they did clutch the old traditions a little too tightly for her tastes. She was from Levante, herself, which was a true great city instead of a remote valley of orchards and cattle fences. No one could deny the people of Alava were great warriors – their city was the home of the Champion’s Blood, after all – but Sidonia wasn’t someone she’d ever be able to discuss the latest songs from faraway Smyrna with, or even the latest couplets from the Hidden Poets of the old city. Still, she found her mood lifted by her fellow Levantine’s eagerness. In times of strife, it was heartening to remember the old ways.

“I’m not of any of the lines, Sidonia,” she reminded her comrade. “Either greater or lesser.”

The records of the Holy Seljun had shown that there had once been a Knife of Night a century past, who shared purpose with her, yet the man had never had children and so had spawned no lesser line to be added to the families of the Blood. Should Kallia ever have children of her own her line would be added to the rolls, but she had never been hungry for that honour. Only the greater lines won more than empty titles and emptier privileges from being recognized, as was only fitting for the descendants – in Blood or Bestowal – of the five heroes that had founded the Dominion.

“We Spears have timid boasts,” the other woman shrugged. “It will be good, to add this strife to our histories. We stand too deep in the shadow of the Champion lines.”

Not so deep, Kallia thought, now that Mansurin had been felled. He’d been born to the thinnest of the lesser Champion lines, but he had been descendent in Blood. His death was worthy of grief, but not unexpected. The descendants of the most fruitful of the founders of Levant were many and often Bestowed, but were known to die as often as they were empowered. None of those lines had ever learned fear, or the virtues of retreat in the face of the Enemy. The Painted Knife still felt awe at the remembrance of her meeting with the Valiant Champion, months ago. The woman was no descendant in Blood, but she had inherited the full Bestowal of her line’s founder. This was a rare thing, considered omen of great strife. Not, Kallia thought, that there was not even greater rarity ahead. Her eyes lingered on the crooked shoulders of the Grey Pilgrim as her hand unconsciously reached for the pouch of red paint at her side. She’d almost drawn the Mark of Mercy out of habit. And, she would admit to herself, wonder. The Great Elder was full inheritor in Blood and Bestowal of the ancient Grey Pilgrim that had been the first Seljun of Levant. Royalty beyond royalty, no matter what lesser kin now held the earthly title in Levante. More than that, he’d saved her life. Years ago, when that Spirit if Vengeance –

“Eyes ahead,” the Blade of Mercy spoke in Chantant. “We are nearing.”

Kallia’s mastery of the Proceran tongue was better than Sidonia’s, but both understood him perfectly. Her instinct was to move closer to the boy, stand shoulder-to-shoulder against the threat, but she could not – he needed room, to swing around that greatsword of his. The Painted Knife flicked a careful glance at the walls of water flanking them on both sides. After the Saint of Swords dispatched the first few undead to wander out effortlessly, the probing assaults had ceased. Their march had been unhindered; the path of mud they strode across leading to a tall glacier ahead. The Levantine stared at the mass of ice, still unused to the sight. These lands were strange ones. She had never seen snow nor ice before crossing the Stairway and glimpsing the tall peaks of the Parish, but now she had seen too much of it for her tastes. All the Bestowed grew tense when the enemy came within sight, save for the Great Elder and the Saint. It settled Kallia’s nerves some to see them so calm. They were a mighty pair, no lesser than the foe ahead. The Black Queen, she saw, was patiently awaiting them.

The Painted Knife’s fingers clenched around the hilt of her blades when she took in the full sight. The glacier had been turned into a blasphemous challenge to the Heavens, sculpted by eldritch power to nestle a great throne upon which the Enemy was seated. No, not seated. She was lounging, almost mockingly, with a long dragonbone pipe in hand. The Black Queen blew out a stream of smoke, eyeing them nonchalantly. The Bestowed slowed, spreading out as the Saint had ordered. Kallia felt Sidonia let out a delighted breath.

“Now that,” the Vagrant Spear murmured, making the Mark of Valor with shaking fingers, “is a worthy foe. Honoured Gods, a thousand singing praises for offering a great struggle to this humble one. Blood spilled on these holy grounds I dedicate to your name, my unworthy life placed on the scales of your judgement.”

Naturally, the Alavans was excited by the sight of this. She should have known better than to expect wariness from a Heavens-maddened lover of war. The Blade of Mercy glanced at them.

“Prayer,” Kallia explained in Chantant.

The boy looked approving. It was probably for the best he did not know about Levantine battle prayers. Whatever chatter had bloomed was whisked out then the Great Elder strode to the forefront, passing even the Saint of the Blades and the Mirror Knight.

“Child,” he said, tone appalled. “What have you done to yourself?”

Sidonia shuffled impatiently. She did not know Lower Miezan, and so had no understanding of the conversation taking place.

“What needed to be done,” the Black Queen calmly replied. “My side doesn’t get to walk away clean, Pilgrim. I see you’ve been tossing around resurrections like they’re godsdamned solstice treats, too. Charming. Not going to have any long-term ramifications at all.”

The monster paused, then leaned forward.

“Did that register as a lie?” she grinned. “It didn’t, did it? Have a good think about that one next time you try to sleep, Pilgrim.”

“Surrender,” the Great Elder said. “Abdicate. It is not too late.”

“You missing the part where I’m currently winning the battle?” the Black Queen drawled. “Hells, it’s not too late for you either. Terms were offered and they hold. Take your army and go home. This doesn’t need to turn into a Named pissing contest.”

“You would argue this, after slaying thousands?” the Pilgrim asked.

“I feel like we might need to revisit the concept of foreign invasion,” the villain noted. “Specifically the part where it has fucking consequences . Like, you know, people dying. You’d think that one would be a given, but apparently you’re slow learners. Wahwah, my attempt to conquer a – sort of – sovereign nation wasn’t met with flowers and a godsdamned parade. It’s almost like we’re not happy about the whole thing. Go figure.”

“And you think your reign a better alternative?” the Grey Pilgrim asked calmly.

“Hells, Pilgrim, I was born to rule,” the Black Queen replied with a toothy grin. “But I’ll settle for getting you fucks out of my backyard, this once. Any takers?”

The monster’s gaze swept across the crowd of Bestowed as she idly emptied her pipe and put it away within her cloak. The only answer was Light blooming and weapons raised.

“Ah, well,” the Black Queen mused. “Pissing contest it is, then.”

—

If Akua had always known heroism was this entertaining, she would have begun dabbling years ago. A hook of Light lashed out at her as the healer Named shaped the heavenly power and tore through her throne, but she’d already been moving when the working had just begun. Landing in a crouch atop her glacier, she unsheathed her sword and tapped it pensively against her armoured leg. It was unfortunate that the deception required her to remain in dearest Catherine’s garments, as they were admittedly horrid, but needs must. The body was wonderfully responsive, and though without the Gift the mantle allowed her powers not fundamentally different. Tainted with Winter, perhaps, but that was no great trouble for her. Her angry little overlord had, as usual, allowed herself to fear her own power to such extent it crippled her when instead she should have been learning to master the influence. One never quite escaped one’s origins, it seemed. A shame Catherine was disinclined to take lessons from her in such matters.

Akua Sahelian was no stranger to otherworldly influences, and so she embraced Winter eagerly.

The mantle howled through her veins, and eyeing the healer and his grim little sentinel she flicked her wrist. Her glacial throne, a useful mass of ice she had chosen as her seat for purposes both practical and theatrical, twisted sharply and speared forward. The Saint of Swords shattered it within a heartbeat, sword clearing the scabbard, but Akua was unmoved. Ice remained ice, even when broken to pieces. An exertion of will transmuted the shards into cold mist and it fell over the pair of heroes like a blanket. Beneath her a man with a mirror-like shield was climbing the glacier with unseemly haste. And was that sorcery she felt? What familiar taste. A pilum of concentrated yellow flame tore towards her, and she raised a contemptuous eyebrow. The Half-Hornet, truly? How provincial. No one she knew would be caught dead using that in a serious battle.

She leapt down, feet landing on the climbing hero’s head, and measured the angle so the only corrective action the spell formula allowed for would fall well short of her. The sorcery hit the glacier with a thunderous crash, splitting it in two. Ugh, he’d even overcharged it. It was like watching a grown woman improperly dose last season’s poison. Movement flicked at the edge of her vision and Akua’s boot came down to smash the helmet beneath her, forcing the hero down and allowing her to avoid the Saint’s blow by less than an inch. The tips of Catherine’s pathetically unadorned crown were shaved cleanly off. The sorceress threw herself to the side, sliding down the falling glacier as streaks of light further shattered what had been a very tasteful throne, in her opinion. A piece of the crown fell at her side, and once more Akua mourned Catherine had not even been willing to add some sapphires to it. They were only moderately costly to import through Mercantis, and they would have fit a Queen of Winter perfectly. A triad of heroes, two of them Levantines by the skin tone, charged towards her as she caught her footing at the edge of the slope. The pair still shrouded in mist, she noted, were beginning to disperse it.

That just wouldn’t do.

Akua flicked her wrist and turned the mist they’d inhaled to ice again, clogging up their throats and lungs. Transmutation, she noted approvingly, came particularly easy to the mantle. Likely a consequence of the ever-fluid nature of the fae, or that these waters had come from Arcadia in the first place. The triad closed in, an inexplicably barefoot woman serving as the tip of the wedge.

“Glory in strife,” the beggar screamed out in Lunara.

Did Catherine know any Levantine tongues? Most likely not. Still, a responding battle cry was in order. It was the heroic thing to do. Something about Callow? Akua pondered her understanding of Catherine’s temper. I am angry , the sorceress decided, because I am disappointed as I have mystifyingly failed to grasp that the Heavens prefer their pawns powerful yet rather dim. I must now protect the venerable sanctity of farms and countless peasants everywhere, as I am very concerned with their fate even though they are ignorant and full of lice.

“Fuck off and die,” Akua called back, tinting her voice with wroth.

There. Crass more than witty, but Catherine did tend to walk that line. Entirely disinclined to engage three Heavens-empowered hardened killers with only a sword and dubious moral grounds in hand, she retreated into the waters and let them envelop her fully. Breathing was not necessary to this body, after all, and she could feel her foes where eyesight failed. She took a moment to touch the marching dead with her mind, noting with approval that though after the heroes claimed her attention she’d only succeeded in making them mindlessly advance and attack, they were bleeding the crusaders. Slowly but surely. She’d been rather displeased at the haste the enemy approached her with, as she’d been amusing herself by redeploying Catherine’s old goblin tricks against fresh opposition. A heartbeat later, the water surrounding her blew away as the Saint’s blow forced the marsh to recede.

“There you are,” the unseemly old woman grinned.

“Dodge,” Akua replied with a friendly smile, greatly enjoying herself.

Two massive blocks of ice formed into the waters on each side, their mass smashing forward and sending the tide hurtling back towards both of them. The wicked enemy of all things Callowan blinked in surprise, but alas it was not to be. Starlight stolen and made a streak cut towards the sorceress, evaporating the water and prompting a frown. This was not mere heavenly lightshow: it was the principle of untainted radiance directly from firmament, made into a weapon. Such a thing could be interrupted by workings, but it would take nothing less than a miracle to usurp or reshape it. Fortunately, she was not without answer. The gate opened before her, a perfect circle pressing back the fabric of Creation, and Akua carefully threaded the needle. Difficult, on such short notice, yet not impossible to a practitioner of her skill. Orienting the gate properly, she wove will into forming the corresponding exit behind the trifling Proceran who’d tried to hit her with childish sorcery. The radiance hit him in the back before he could react, though to Akua’s displeasure it did no harm. The Pilgrim could control his working to a truly despicable extent. Tying off the two gates so she could not be made to suffer the backlash of their breaking, the sorceress condensed a platform of ice to leap off of before the Saint could bisect her.

She landed smoothly atop the water on a foothold of ice, moving towards the flank of the assembled heroes before the old cutter could catch up with her. The enemy seemed puzzled, she saw, by her refusal to engage them on their own terms. Had Catherine truly traded blows with them up close? The sorcerers almost wrinkled her nose. Waving about swords was the business of people who failed to murder demigods for power. Perhaps it was time to make that exceedingly clear to the opposition. Winter burning gloriously through her frame, Akua Sahelian shaped the full power of the mantle. Half a mile of marshlands turned to ice as she remained standing on an elegant pillar, the surrounding waters disappearing as they froze and gathered into a monumental ball of frost hovering over the heroes. The Saint was running on now solid ground, sword flashing to carve a groove through both Creation and the pillar, but the sorceress merely cocked an eyebrow. Even severed, the upper part of the pillar remained unmoving in the air. Fire and starlight shattered the mass of ice, but the heroes were gravely mistaken if they thought this was a mere foot to stomp on them with. A flick of the wrist had the ice transmuting back into water and falling into a shower over the Named.

Another flick had it freezing again, and they were buried in falling ice.

“Come now,” Akua said. “This is as obvious an opening as you’ll get.”

The Saint of Swords was a wizened old killer, with an impressive reputation. She was not, however, invincible. Even as she turned around in an instinctive parry, the old woman took the arrow in the shoulder as the Archer finally made her presence known. The sorceress felt the trembling heat of the wounded heroine, and Winter demanded her screaming death. She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mind, will lashing out to take the mantle by the throat and choke it. The urges receded ever so slightly. More dangerous than she’d believed, this influence. The principle alienation was similar in nature to the bleed from binding an ancient devil, but unlike the latter it did not recede after the moment of binding. Akua leapt down from the pillar, power lashing out to smash both broken halves on the Saint. The heroine flickered with Light and it pulsed in a perfect ring around her. Aspect, the sorceress decided. Weak enough it could likely be used more than once, which would be difficult to deal with. No matter, there were more tempting prey. Akua felt mild revulsion at the term her thought had ended by, to her surprise.

She did not have the time to linger on the matter, as the heroes had escaped her little greeting gift. Light broke through the ice, once, twice, and then in an eruption of steam the entire structure vanished. The second-rate wizard’s doing, she suspected. For a heartbeat she mused leaving the battle entirely, going to lead the dead personally, but found she could not. It would mean leaving Archer on her own, something she could not accept. The notion displeased her, even. The sorceress’ brow creased. This was not coincidence. She could feel her mind even struggling to consider the subject, which was telling. Feeling the Saint pivot to cut through a second arrow, Akua moved towards the other heroes as she fought the influence.

“Oh,” she murmured to herself after a moment. “My dear, that is exquisitely done.”

The sorceress had slipped her bindings by snatching an errant piece of Winter and making it her own. Through it she’d opened a path to the greater mantle that she’d eventually managed to crawl through, entirely so when she found no opposition awaiting. In her current state, it would be impossible for her to claim this body if Catherine disallowed it. The discrepancy in will and power was overwhelming. Yet using the sliver of Winter, Akua had succeeded in stabilizing the construct she now inhabited and claiming use of the full mantle – which she’d drawn on, this entire fight. The path going both ways, the mantle itself was now influencing her. Which had seemed a minor concern, until she realized that Catherine Foundling had bound her very soul into its fabric. The more Akua drew on the mantle, the more she called back the body’s true owner . I had wondered, as to why you never had Hierophant lay deeper bindings on me , the sorceress thought . It never truly mattered, did it? You left yourself a backdoor. She could not help but approve. Perhaps some mundane sorts would have been horrified, but Akua had first ripped out her own soul to use as a tool as the tender age of thirteen. Ruthlessness turned against yourself could be a very useful tool, if properly employed. In matters of self-mutilation for the sake of advancement, she must admit Catherine Foundling had few rivals. Eyeing the spreading steam, Akua made a decision. Struggling against this was pointless, and might be taken as treachery she did not intend.

“Let it not be said, my Empress, that I did not offer service leal and true,” Akua Sahelian mused.

She called on Winter again, the fullness of the mantle, and kept digging deeper until her vision blurred. Her reward did not take long to be delivered.

Back into the box, Diabolist.

Darkness came, yet Akua smiled.

A useful tool, after all, was never allowed to rest for long.

Chapter 17: Contingent

“Peace is little more than the reognition that the reasons for which war was undertaken are no longer relevant.”
– Dread Emperor Benevolent the First

I came back to myself with a roiling sea of Winter at my fingertips.

Fucking Hells, Akua . The trap I’d set that ultimately brought me back had required that the Diabolist or another entity to essentially go mad with power for it to work in the first place, but this was still beyond my predictions. Even with oaths binding her and Vivienne holding a leash, what I saw beneath me was a dark reminder of the quantity of power that could be thrown around without breaking the letter of the limitations I’d imposed. Half of the lake I’d dumped over the head of the crusaders with Masego’s help had apparently been used to smash the heroes, though I saw no corpses to show for the effort. Not that one of those would necessarily mean the end of it, with the Pilgrim around. Five contingencies, and this had been the one to work. I could not help but be pissed that even after all that planning in the end it’d come down to Akua making a mistake, however baited that mistake had been. Hierophant was nowhere in sight, so he was probably incapacitated. That was one down. Thief’s secret set of oaths must not have been sufficient to call me back from that... unpleasant journey, which made two. I’d not woken up to a sword through my back, so Larat hadn’t worked out either – but then that had always been the chanciest of the five. The oath forced on the fae had been comprehensive, but with that sort of creature it was hard to make one completely water-tight. He’d failed, either on purpose or not. I’d have to get the details out of him, but regardless that made three.

As for the last trick, well, it had very specific requirements. I wasn’t surprised it hadn’t gotten me out, though I’d need to have Hierophant take a look at the overlay as soon as possible. We were pretty sure it wouldn’t kill me if it triggered by accident, but there were always risks in turning yourself into living munitions.

I held the power in check, barely, as my gaze swept the battlefield. Ten heroes, looking ragged but unbowed. The Saint had taken an arrow, which meant Indrani was up and about. A relief, that. The rest were clustered together, protecting the Pilgrim and the wizard I’d scrapped with that one time. The thousand little bundles in the back of my mind made it clear Akua had indulged in a spot of necromancy, which brought mixed feelings. For all that Masego insisted there was nothing inherently bad about that kind of sorcery, after Second Liesse I had my doubts. Maybe there were applications that weren’t inherently horrid, but no one seemed to be actually using those. On the other hand, if the undead were getting chopped up that meant fewer of my soldiers were dying. I could appreciate the results, even if the means had me more than a little uncomfortable. I’d take a closer look a those later. For now, I was juggling the difficulty of maintaining the ice beneath my feet that kept me on the surface of this eerie marsh while simultaneously trying not to blow up either myself or my surroundings with the power Diabolist had drawn. My grip was beginning to slip, so action was in order. Senses no mortal could have were in full extension, telling me of the humidity in the air and the spread of both water and ice in my surroundings.

I dumped the power into the water beneath me, flash-freezing it with a loud snap as I continued spreading and shaping the working. The glacier formed at a mind-boggling pace, water rippling around it, and I closed my eyes to focus. Getting the paddles of the waterwheel all the same size was difficult, though it grew easier the more power I shed. I could have made it larger, not that it wasn’t already massive, but just a structure of ice wasn’t what I had in mind. Fingers clenching, I severed the platform I stood on from the wheel and lashed out with my will. Slowly, the wheel began to turn. The waters churned. I continued dumping power into the movement, accelerating it, and the tide of soiled water raged towards the heroes with a roar. Fuck it , I thought, and tossed the wheel at them too. We were past subtlety at this point. Eyes flicking towards the Saint, I sighed as she carved herself a path above the current and stood atop the arc. That’d been too much to hope for, I supposed. An arrow whistled at her and I took advantage of the opening Archer had just gifted me to move further away as I riffled through the bundles in the back of my mind until I could find Zombie. Good girl that she was, she’d been waiting on the edge of the marshlands. She seemed pleased by my summons, taking flight with haste.

I wasn’t sure what Akua’s plan had been but it hardly mattered. While it looked like she might have been getting the better of the fight with the heroes, fighting them at all was a mistake as far as I was concerned. Even if I killed a few they’d still get me in the end. In the distance I heard a gargantuan crack as the ice wheel fractured into pieces merrily carried by the currents, heroes having climbed atop them. That, as it happened, was an opening I’d left on purpose. I drew on Winter, feeling it whisper lovingly in my ears, and shattered the wheel shards. That dumped the heroes back into the water, though the fucking wizard made some kind of ring of fire that evaporated a safe place for them to gather and regroup. Saint was back on the offensive, making her way to me, but I wasn’t having any of that. Zombie made a low pass and I leapt atop her saddle, fingers slipping into her mane to anchor me while I got my feet in the stirrups. We went high after that, the undead horse’s wings beating hard as we ascended. My cloak was wet, I only then noticed. Like I’d been swimming. What the fuck had Akua been up to? No, not the time. By the height of the sun it was morning still, and promising to be a warm day. Not a cloud in sight. My mount gliding slowly, I took a look at the broader situation unfolding across the field.

The undead were shambling forward into a defensive Proceran line near what must have been a shore, before most the water in the marsh was used as ammunition in the Named brawl below me. The dead were not making an impressive showing. They seemed to have some semblance of intelligence, but there was no real coordination. They went in waves and shattered on the formations of fantassins and the priests accompanying them. Still, casualties were slowly mounting. I suspected the first few waves must have been wiped almost without losses, but now the crusaders were tiring and beginning to make mistakes. There was, to my surprise, another front to the battle. The Army of Callow was out in force, though there were a lot fewer of them than I’d expected. Had Juniper left men to guard the camp? Regardless, if she was leading this engagement she was being rather conservative in her command. Mages on both sides were trading spells at a pace, but aside from a long shield wall of regulars pressing against crusader lines there was no other real fighting going on. She’s not fighting to win , I thought, frowning as I watched the Order of the Broken Bell manoeuver on the flank to draw away enemy cavalry without ever engaging. She’s delaying and tying down men while incurring as few casualties as possible .

That was unlike the Hellhound, who tended to go for the throat whenever she could. Which meant she was relying on the dead to do the heavy lifting – and by extension had relied on Akua . That was a desperate measure if I’d ever seen one. The situation must be worse than it looked on the surface. The moment the front holding back the dead collapsed the battle was good as won, barring heroic intervention, but at the current pace that might take hours. My brow tightened as I scanned the battlefield for any hint of the Wild Hunt’s presence, but they were nowhere in sight. Had the fae sat on their asses the entire time I’d been gone? Fuck. It was a solid assumption there’d been a battle while I was gone, and without the fae the Army of Callow would have been fighting Named with only Legion mages to back them up, while the enemy had wizards and priests both. It must have been a fucking slaughter. Were the men I saw below all that was left of our host? There were what, maybe thirteen or fourteen thousand there? The Procerans looked like they’d taken a beating too, lost at least another few thousand since I’d dropped the lake on them, but Malanza could afford those losses a lot more than we could. She was throwing away levies and fantassins, not professional soldiers.

While I’d been taking my look around, the heroes had gotten their shit together. A beam of radiant light – fucking Pilgrim – tore up towards me, followed by a swarm of little balls of flame that looked liquid. I led Zombie into a deep dive to shake the projectiles. Archer could take care of herself, I decided. She was probably half a mile away and picking her targets carefully, in no danger of being swarmed by the enemy. Just in case I wove a glamour into large streaks of yellow and red indicating she should disengage even as I spurred Zombie to head towards the shore battle line. I whistled loudly as my mount’s hooves swept just above the water. It was not long before I had my answer. Loyal dogs that they were, the Wild Hunt came as summoned. There was an eldritch glimmer on the surface of the water at my side before Larat came riding out in full armour, sword in hand and grinning broadly. Even as his horse kept pace with mine, the rest of the Hunt emerged in our wake.

“Your Majesty,” the one-eyed fae greeted me. “Was your journey a fruitful one?”

“We’re going to have a talk about that, you little weasel,” I darkly said. “But it’ll have to wait. I have work for the lot of you.”

“We await your will eagerly,” the raven-haired man replied.

“Ignore the heroes unless they attack you,” I ordered. “See those Proceran formations ahead?”

My sword helpfully pointed out the Proceran defensive line.

“Their fear and desperation wafts most pleasantly to my nostrils,” Larat informed me.

They did to mine as well, and Winter grew hungry for the banquet, but I forced myself to focus.

“Break them,” I said. “Killing’s not the objective, the Hunt is to concentrate on shattering their lines.”

“Tasteless meat,” the one-eye fae complained.

“That sounds like the talk of a man hungry for fingers,” I noted very mildly.

The bastard laughed.

“Your will be done, Sovereign of Moonless Nights,” he smiled.

“It better, for your sake,” I smiled back cheerfully. “Because you seem to have fucked around in my absence, and we’re going to have a nice chat about that.”

I didn’t even allow him to respond, pulling Zombie up and willing one of her wing beats to splash water in his face. Let him try to look all elegant and sinister with muck everywhere. I absently tugged on the reins to lead my mount towards the crusaders, but my mind was elsewhere. I needed to keep the heroes busy for a while, there was no telling what they’d get up to unattended. I reached for the dead, grimacing after a moment. Ordering them one by one would take too long. I thinned my will and cast it broadly, grabbing a rough thousand still roving around. Pain spiked through my forehead. Too much feedback. I grit my teeth and ordered them to assault the heroes before withdrawing my will. They weren’t going to win that fight – a band of tired and encircled heroes fighting back to back against a relentless tide of undead? It had victory written all over it – but it should keep them out of my hair for a while. I tasted the warmth of the enemy Named, trying to get a sense of their readiness, and my fingers clenched. There should be ten. There were only eight. Where had they – no, it wasn’t even worth asking. They would be at the very worst possible place for me.

Guarding Rozala Malanza.

I allowed myself a moment to contemplate the unpleasantness that was fighting people both stronger than me and certain to be where I least wanted them to be before pressing down against Zombie’s back. She neighed and angled for descent as we flew towards the back of the Proceran lines. A handful of archers loosed arrows upwards, but I was too far and too swift for them to have any real chance of hitting me. Unfortunately, mages were bullshit and evidently I was both recognizable and a favoured target. Panes of opaque yellow force formed around me in an airtight box, but they were in above their heads this time. When it came to power, pound for pound, there were only a few people in Calernia who could beat me if I put my back into it. A lance of ice and shade formed around my hand and Zombie dove down. There was a heartbeat of resistance when the tip of the lance met the sorcery, then they both shattered and we flew through as my cloak trailed behind me. With a target painted on us so blatantly, it was no surprise I had to lead Zombie into a desperate roll to avoid being incinerated by a beam of light. It caught the edge of my cloak, leaving it singed and smoking. Fucking Pilgrim. It was supposed to be resistant to magic, wasn’t it?

He was down there, as I’d suspected. Leaning on his staff, the Saint of Swords by his side and waiting patiently for me to gain enough momentum I wouldn’t be able to pull out of the dive when she struck. Malanza was behind them, and as the air whistled around me I got a glimpse of her face. Fear, yes, but much more anger. I had to respect that she remained on her horse and unmoving even as my descent quickened. Her officers were not so brave, scattering to the winds. I’d have to play this one precisely, if I wanted to avoid getting skewered in the process of landing. Fortunately, I was spending increasingly large amounts of my life either falling from things or being thrown off of them. I’d become a fair hand at it. I drew on Winter and shaped it, tossing ahead of me a spear of mist that detonated into a cloud. Throwing myself off Zombie, I ordered her to peel off even as my relationship with gravity took a sharp turn downwards. This, I mused, had seemed a better idea before I’d gone through with it. The timing held. A cut dispersed the mist, missing Zombie by a mere inch. Then the Saint struck again and I cursed.

I threw ice at the cut, saving my hide just long enough for my feet to land on wet earth. Mud sucked at my boots and both my knees snapped, but they were reforming before I even stood. The Saint of Swords was lazily advancing, the Pilgrim pointed his staff and Malanza looked like she really wanted to be pretty much anywhere else.

“Truce,” I called out. “I’m here to talk.”

“I’m not seeing a banner,” the Saint noted.

Really ? She was such a godsdamned asshole. I flicked my fingers and wove one out of glamour, but she pointedly did not look at it.

“I don’t want to fight you,” I insisted.

“So don’t,” she suggested. “Angle your neck a little to the side, it’ll be a cleaner cut.”

She was closing distance, which I knew from experience would result in my getting chopped up painfully and repeatedly.

“Pilgrim,” I tried, looking behind her. “This can end right now .”

“Gods forgive me,” the old man said. “But you are right. It will.”

“The battle is lost,” I said. “Your lines by the shore are collapsing as we speak. Even if you force me to flee, none of that changes.”

“Armies are armies,” the Saint shrugged. “Named are Named. More than one way to win a war.”

One step away from striking range, now. And the moment she got there we entered the wheel of pain, where every spoke was me losing a limb and trying very hard not to scream. The bundle of instincts that were not my own was licking its chops, hungry for the fight. To crush my enemies and savour their screams. The rest insisted I make some distance, because this was about to get ugly. I unsheathed my sword. This isn’t going to work , I thought, but I had to try anyway. My fingers came loose and I dropped the blade.

“Unarmed,” I said. “Under truce banner.”

“You’re a weapon unto yourself,” the Saint of Swords snorted, and stepped forward.

From the corner of my eye I saw implacable light bloom at the tip of the Grey Pilgrim’s staff. If I got hit by that, I suspected the consequences would be much more unpleasant than a sword wound. Nothing friendly felt the way that power did.

“Stop.”

I’d been reaching for Winter, but stayed my hand. That was not the Pilgrim’s voice, and certainly not the Saint’s. Rozala Malanza took off her helmet, sweat-soaked curls falling across her face.

“You want to talk, Black Queen,” she said. “So talk.”

“You fucking yellow-bellied-” the Saint began.

“I am the ranking general of this army, Regicide,” the Princess of Aequitan coldy replied. “I take no orders from you. Slay me or stay your tongue.”

By the looks of her, the heroine was feeling inclined towards the second. The light winked out on the Pilgrim’s staff.

“Laurence,” he said. “She cannot easily retreat. If talks fail, we will strike.”

That wasn’t how fucking truce talks were supposed to work, but then I’d not exactly respected the usual etiquette either. Disinclined as I was to give them a full pass, I would at least recognize they had some wiggling room when it came interpretation. The heroes were a distraction here, I decided. The one who mattered was the princess watching me with hard eyes.

“Battle’s over, Malanza,” I said. “Let’s end it before any more people die pointlessly.”

“I was assured you could not open your deathly gate again without the Hierophant,” the Proceran said flatly. “He is not here. The battle is not yet lost.”

“So maybe you wreck my army,” I said. “Even if you manage that, yours gets wrecked in the process as well. And you can be sure enough of my people survive to run that we can defend Hedges against what you have left. Logistically, you’re done . You don’t have the supplies or the men for a successful offensive into Callow.”

“If we take your supplies-”she began.

“Not happening. I gave standing orders to burn what we can’t carry, if we lose,” I interrupted brusquely.

Her eyes flicked to the Pilgrim, and reluctantly the old man nodded. The Saint’s already grim expression darkened further.

“I will not surrender to the likes of you,” the princess snarled.

My fingers clenched.

“Gods Below, what will it take ?” I hissed. “Do I have to murder ever last Proceran on this field before negotiations can be had? Are you really so unwilling to consider not invading you’ll let dozens of thousands starve ?”

“Your doing,” Malanza hissed back. “You steal our supplies, harass us and then claim affront at our desperation? You are the architect of this madness, Catherine Foundling.”

Winter whispered in my ear, urging me to rip apart the righteous little shit who had the gall to pretend she was the victim here while leading a fucking invasion army. My fingers dug into my palm until steel gave and flesh beneath it, blood dripping on the ground. The Saint’s stance shifted ever so slightly. Breathe in, breathe out. Pride was a liability. Anger an unhelpful bias. Be cold , I told myself. Be clear. Be a creature of logic, because logic is what gets you through this. Everything else is distracting noise. I thought of pale green eyes, and lessons I had not yet outgrown.

“Then do not surrender,” I said calmly. “Sound a withdrawal. My side will do the same. We can discuss terms for your retreat from Callow when our people aren’t dying.”

“And allow hunger to do your work for you?” the princess retorted.

“I’d be putting down an army of the dead as a gesture of good will, Malanza,” I said. “My concession is greater than yours.”

Her face remained unmoved by the statement, but she was silent for a moment.

“Supplies for the night,” she said. “Food, water and tents. Delivered after we tend to the wounded.”

I forced myself to consider the counter-offer calmly. Would those make enough of a difference I should bargain down? Vivienne still had their old foodstuffs in her metaphorical pocket, so it shouldn’t lead to logistical issues for the Army of Callow if I shelled thse out. It would still mean that the enemy, while not fresh, would at least have full bellies. They’d be closer to fighting fit. If negotiations broke down afterwards – no, wrong way to think about it. If we had a night to spare, odds were I’d be able to get Hierophant back up. My comparative advantage was greater, even with the undead tossed aside.

“They’ll be added to your bill,” I said.

The princess opened her mouth.

“Flat cost,” I added. “No surcharge.”

Her mouth closed. Grudgingly, she nodded. We both knew that if negotiations failed any talk of coin would become academic anyway.

“Truce until negotiations come at an end,” I said. “First session held at noon tomorrow.”

“Granted,” Malanza replied.

My eyes flicked to the Named at her sides.

“That includes heroes,” I said.

“I take no orders from mortal rulers,” the Saint flatly said.

I ignored her. She was irrelevant in this, unless she was willing to fight the entire Army of Callow on her own. Even if she got the rest of the heroes to back her, it wouldn’t be enough.

“You can’t seriously expect me to feed and shelter your army while we’re under attack by your allies,” I told Malanza.

The Proceran looked like she’d swallowed a lemon.

“I will formally renounce alliance with any hero resuming hostilities while we are under truce,” she said. “I can do no more.”

It’d be enough, I decided. Might even be better if the Saint attacked after that, we’d get a clean shot at her without making a diplomatic mess.

“I strike bargain under these terms,” I said.

I got my gauntlet off and offered my hand. Revulsion flickering across her face, the princess spat on the ground.

“I strike bargain under these terms,” she replied. “Get out of my sight, Black Queen.”

I supposed we were past courtesy, at this point. It’d never been my strong suit anyway. I crouched to pick up my sword and sheathed it, keeping an eye on the furious Saint as I did. She turned and walked away. The Pilgrim sought to meet my eyes, studying me a pensive frown, but I was done with him. Zombie landed moments later, a handful of arrows having sprouted in her flank since I’d last seen her. The enemy archers had been busy. It still took half an hour before the battle came entirely at an end, the last of the dead dropping into the mud like a stringless puppet, but it ended.

None of this felt like a victory, but at least it wasn’t a defeat.

Chapter 18: Cradle

“Seven battles I won on my feet, and lost the war sitting at a table.”
– Periander Theodosian, Tyrant of Helike, after the founding of the League of Free Cities

“Six hundred and thirty-two dead,” Juniper said. “Our edge has been scraped raw , Catherine.”

I was really beginning to regret that oath to Hakram, because a bottle of aragh right now would do wonders for my peace of mind. I’d guessed it was bad, when I’d taken a look from the sky, but I hadn’t understood quite how bad it had really gotten. I leaned back into my seat and passed a hand through my mess of a hair.

“You did better than I could have hoped,” I admitted. “Considering what the other side was fielding, it’s a miracle it went this well.”

Miracle was the wrong word, I decided a moment later. It was short-changing Juniper. While I’d been traipsing about the magical wonderland of Winter, the Hellhound had been dancing on the edge against an army about twice the size led by heroes. That she’d not just lasted the day but actually inflicted a defeat was a reminder that Juniper of the Red Shields did not need a Name to be one of the sharpest knives in my arsenal.

“The casualties are trouble, but there’s worse,” the Hellhound grunted. “We’re near out of munitions, and without accord with the Tower the moment our stores run dry we lose one of our heaviest advantages.”

“Goblinfire?” I asked.

“Enough for one last blaze, but not a large one,” my Marshal replied. “We’re entirely out of demolition charges. Sappers still have a decent stock of combat munitions, but you know how fast we go through those when they’re properly used.”

Even if I hadn’t been taught the logistics of that at the College, Ratface’s constant reminders that a protracted campaign would see us run dry halfway through would have served that purpose. Once again, Malicia managed to fucks us without ever needing to do anything but say no. The Snake Eater Tribe that had settled near Marchford had made it clear it could not produce munitions, which meant the vicious old crones in the Grey Eyries had a monopoly. It was illegal under Imperial law for anyone but the Tower to possess munitions, not that it would have stopped me if I had a solid way to get them into Callow. I didn’t, and there were watchful eyes at the border just in case I felt like trying anyway.

“I heard we took a hit on siege engines,” I ventured.

Which was a polite way to say that Pickler had spent exactly three heartbeats welcoming me back before beginning to rant about the Grey Pilgrim apparently wrecking her lovelies. I’d taken that to mean the repeating scorpions, and while I did not share the slightly unsettling affection my Senior Sapper had for her creations the loss of them was still a heavy blow. They were one of our major force equalizers.

“Two repeating scorpions left, no Spitters,” Juniper said. “We’ve still got our full count of ballistas and trebuchets, but they’ve already proven they can make those irrelevant with their fences.”

As our skirmishing contingent consisted of pretty much only the Watch, that left the mages lines as our only effective long-range option. Which wasn’t saying much, considering they’d have to deal with both wizards and priests on the other side. They’d be spending most their time on defence and damage control, not going on the offensive.

“Don’t count on the mages,” the Hellhound warned. “We’ve been running them ragged for two days, fighting and healing. A lot of them are on the edge of burning out.”

I sighed, fingers drumming against the arms of the chair.

“You’re telling me we can’t have another battle,” I said.

“Not if you want to have a force capable of fighting afterwards,” Juniper bluntly said. “Four to six months of recruiting and refit, and we’ll be able to campaign again. Anything else is scrapping the host.”

“Well,” I said. “That adds a certain spice to the negotiations, doesn’t it?”

The orc grunted in amusement, and I allowed myself a moment of envy as she drank a mouthful of wine. My own cup was, sadly, water. Which I didn’t need anymore, or particularly enjoy.

“Had a good look when we engaged this morning,” Juniper said. “They’re on their last rope too. Without their officers they’ve had to rely on fantassins for frontline command, and we bloodied those repeatedly. Levies got bled bad, and the principality troops were always few. Most of their soldiers are fantassins, now, and mercenaries won’t be eager for another go.”

“They’ve got heroes, Juniper,” I reminded her. “Morale’s not ever going to be an issue for them.”

“You say that, but we know for a fact they had runners after the first gate trick,” the Hellhound said. “Kegan’s already caught a few up north, trying to flee back to the passage.”

“The meat of them will stay,” I said. “Still, worth keeping in mind at least half their host is gone. Gods, fifty thousand. I still have a hard time believe we held against that.”

“Wouldn’t have, without the gate,” the orc said. “Though that wasn’t without costs.”

I couldn’t call it luck, not with the amount of contingencies I’d had waiting, but I couldn’t deny it’d turned into a gamble in the end. I’d been so sure that if we kept the positioning aligned for only a short while... No point in whining. They had used their abilities, as I had mine. A mistake had been made, all I could do was learn from it. That particular tool wasn’t going to be put away entirely, but the restrictions on where and how it could be used had to be adjusted.

“It all rests on diplomacy, then,” I said.

“Your speciality, infamously,” Juniper said, rather drily.

I hadn’t even been back for a full day and already my underlings were ragging on me. I flipped her off, feeling the weight on my shoulders lighten the slightest bit. It just wouldn’t feel like home without the sarcasm. I groaned and rose to my feet.

“Best I get started on Masego,” I sighed. “It could take the entire night, if it gets tricky.”

“Don’t linger,” the Hellhound said. “This all falls apart if you’re not at the table. He’s not going anywhere.”

I nodded. Much as I disliked the thought of leaving my friend under any longer than I had to, as long as he was in no danger of death there were higher priorities. Having him at the table with me, even if he was blatantly bored with the proceedings, would get a point across. But uncertainty would have to do, if it took too long. I clasped Juniper’s shoulder in farewell, but paused when I felt her hand take mine. She tightened her grip, face half-hidden by her fur-like dark hair.

“Good to have you back,” Juniper got out, looking away. “It’s not the same without you.”

I embrace her, awkwardly given our respective sizes, but after that I couldn’t not.

“We’re still in it, Juniper,” I murmured. “Bloodied but on our feet.”

She shook me off, but only after a moment.

“Go away, Foundling,” she growled, sounding embarrassed. “And don’t let me catch you sleeping through a battle again. It’s horrible for our reputation.”

“Yes ma’am,” I replied amusedly.

She looked highly insulted by how sloppy my farewell salute was, and the good mood clung to me all the way back to Masego’s tent. I’d know she was there without ever taking a look. People had a warmth to them that I had learned to discern. Orcs were warmer than humans, as a rule, and goblins almost feverish to my senses. Archer burned warmer than any of them. My mantle stirred, tasting the sheer vitality in the air with relish. Indrani looked, at first glance, perfectly relaxed. She’d moved the folding chair she was was on so she could rest her bare feet on Masego’s guts and was casually chipping away at a chunk of wood with a knife. The carving looked like the beginning of a fox to me, but given her dubious artistic skills that meant very little. Her body was perfectly loose and at a rest, but the eyes gave it away. It wasn’t the restlessness of a woman who couldn’t wait to move I saw there. It was the silent frustration of someone who had a problem in front of them but no way to do anything about it. Shaving off another sliver of wood, Archer flicked it at Masego’s face to join a growing pile and offered me a wan smile.

“Cat,” she said. “Wondered when you’d come.”

Part of me wanted to simply get what I’d come here to do done as soon as possible, but instead I claimed a chair and dropped it by her side. Boots resting on the edge of the bed instead of Hierophant himself, since I was a good and loyal friend, I made myself comfortable.

“Had to talk with Juniper,” I told her. “Get the lay of the land.”

She hummed, knife deftly twisting in her grip so she could change the angle she was carving at. How someone so good with knives could be so terrible at sculpting, I had no idea.

“We’re fucked, but so is the other side, so we’re all showing teeth and pretending it’s a smile,” Indrani said. “That about it?”

I snorted.

“More or less,” I conceded.

A sliver fell to the ground. The tent was silent, save for Masego’s spell-induced breathing and the quiet whisper of steel on wood.

“He’s going to be all right,” I said quietly.

“Is he?” Archer said quietly. “Not so sure about that.”

I turned to glance at her and found her face aloof.

“You’re angry,” I said.

“Angry’s not the right word,” the other woman replied. “I get angry, I cut a throat. This is something else.”

I folded my arms around my chest, feeling defensive but not quite sure why.

“Vexed?” I said.

Her smile was thin.

“A cousin of that, I reckon,” Archer said. “I understand the Lady a little better, now. Wish I didn’t.”

“Thought you had a pretty good handle on her already,” I said.

“As much as anyone can,” Indrani shrugged. “But I did always wonder, why Refuge? Not like she enjoys running it. If it was just about the fights, she could have found those as a Calamity. They have a regular hero body count. And she still talks about your teacher like she’s in love with him, or as close to that as she can be.”

“But now you know,” I said.

“I do,” Archer agreed. “Put an arrow in that hard old biddy the Saint, this morning. Walking back to camp, after you gave the signal, I had a thought.”

I remained silent, watching her.

“Catherine, don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t really care about any of this,” Indrani sighed, waving the knife around. “It was a good laugh when you put on that crown, and the scraps keep coming. Got no complaints about that. But they’re just enemies not... my enemies, you get me?”

“It doesn’t feel like your fight,” I quietly said.

“You’re my friend,” she said. “So’re the others, even Vivienne though she’s usually a twat about it. It’s not that I mind giving a hand, and I’m pretty sure we’ve still got legendary fights ahead of us. But it doesn’t quite scratch the itch.”

“Because it’s not your story,” I murmured.

“It’s yours,” Indrani agreed. “And there’s something to being part of this. The Woe, or whatever you want to call it. I found something here I didn’t know I wanted, back in Refuge. But I get the Lady, now, and why she left. Because this isn’t something I was meant to do, just something I’m doing.”

My throat clenched.

“You were always upfront about it,” I said. “That you’d leave eventually.”

“Stop looking like I kicked your unicorn,” she sighed. “No one’s abandoning you. I’m not Ranger, Cat. I want to see it through to the end, to see what’s at the end. I don’t have that... it’s hard to put into words. She’s old, you know, in a way I don’t think we can really understand.”

“I never got a hard number on her age,” I admitted. “At least two hundred, but that’s only rumours.”

Archer’s knife stilled, tapping against the side of the possible fox.

“It’s the half-elf thing,” she said. “You go in knowing the people you meet will be dust before you even hit your prime, and there’s a part of you that doesn’t grow roots. Because you know it’s going to pass.”

I thought of the man whose name we’d avoided saying, of a quiet conversation the two of us had had long before I loved or hated him. They never understand , he’d told me, so very tiredly. Even if they love you, they never quite understand . In this, as in so many things, I was still the bearer of his legacy.

“You look sad,” Indrani said suddenly, and I found her eyes on me. “It’s been a long time, since I’ve seen you so human.”

The gentleness she’d said it with made it so much worse.

“I only ever seem to be,” I murmured, “when I’m at my worst.”

If It’d been Hakram at my side, he would have offered comfort. Masego would have given an explanation, brought reason into it. Vivienne... I still hesitated to be that open with her. The nature of our relationship had set boundaries. You could not bare your soul to the person you’d entrusted the means to kill you with, should it prove necessary. Indrani didn’t say anything, though, because unlike the others she understood that some truths simply stayed with you. Like a scar, or a limp you barely even noticed.

“You ever miss her?” I asked.

“It’s different, for us,” Archer replied hesitatingly. “She’s not my...”

Mother , I did not say. I knew a thing or two about words it cost to speak out loud.

“Isn’t she?” I gently said.

Indrani laughed, but the mockery in it was not meant for me.

“It’s deeper than that,” she said. “She didn’t tuck me in at night, Cat, she taught me a way to live. I didn’t want someone holding my hand. Or maybe I did, fuck – I was a kid and I was scared. But she gave me what I needed instead. Being able to stand on my own feet.”

“It’s not a weakness, you know,” I said. “Loving her for that.”

Archer scoffed, looking away. I left it at that.

“You ever miss him?” she asked.

My smile was a bitter one.

“I shouldn’t,” I said.

It was admission enough. My friend suddenly snorted, jolting in remembrance.

“I had a talk with him once, after Marchford,” Indrani admitted. “I was curious after hearing so many stories so I sought him out.”

“You never told me about that,” I said.

“Didn’t think it mattered,” she shrugged. “I was going to challenge him to a spar, but he had this look...”

I chuckled.

“Like before you even entered the room he’d figured out three ways to kill you,” I said.

She grinned, and it had her hazelnut eyes alight. She was most beautiful, I thought, in fleeting moments. Indrani was easy on the eyes yet not so striking it took the breath away, without the scarf, but now and then there would be a moment and it was the only thing you could think about.

“Yeah, that,” she agreed. “Couldn’t find the nerve. We had tea, we talked about Refuge a bit and then about the battle against the demon.”

She paused.

“And then after that, mild as you please, he smiled all nice and said that if I ever attacked you again he’d have me drowned,” she added.

I blinked in confusion for a moment, before I remembered the first time I’d ever met Indrani. She’d burst out of a window without warning at the manor in Marchford, then slapped me around along with Hakram and Masego. While I was still freshly wounded from a fight with devils, no less. Gods, I’d completely forgotten about that. Archer cleared her throat.

“What I mean is, I think he does,” she said. “Or did.”

Love me, she meant. In his own way.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “He can put it in a box when he acts. It’s not that I don’t think it’s genuine, it’s just...”

“How can it be enough, if it can fit in a box?” she said.

I nodded.

“I think I can handle caring,” I admitted. “As long as it also fits in a box.”

Because it was one thing, to have this tangle of gratitude and affection within me that refused to go away, but it was another to let it dictate my actions. There was a chance, however slight, that I could get to the end without killing him. But there was a greater chance I couldn’t, and when the time came I could not allow myself to hesitate. Not going against a man who wouldn’t.

“You ever wonder if getting older just makes us more like them?” Archer asked, looking upwards at the ceiling of the tent. “Different roads, maybe, but going to the same place.”

My boot scraped against the edge of the bed uneasily.

“I think we can learn from them without becoming them,” I replied. “Or maybe I just want to, because the alternative scares me. Not sure it can really be called faith, when I’m more afraid of being wrong than believing I’m right.”

“They wouldn’t have called a truce,” Indrani decided after a moment. “They would have found a way to kill every last one of them.”

My fingers clenched, then slowly unclenched.

“I’m not so sure they would have been wrong to do that,” I confessed.

I could feel her surprise without turning.

“Thought you are all about victory in peace, these days,” Archer noted. “Peace after a lot of killing, sure, but making nice still being the end of the road.”

“If I’d listened to Juniper and gone with Bonfire,” I said. “A third of my army wouldn’t be dead right now.”

“You just got done sleeping off your last big move,” she shrugged. “Not sure if it was the right call to pass on the Hellhound’s plan, but I can’t say for sure it was the wrong one either. Neither can you, unless you know things you’re not telling me.”

“So I keep telling myself,” I said. “But so far, all my plan’s gotten done is a lot of bleeding by people my duty is to not have bleeding. And it might fail, Indrani. That’s the thorn on the stem. I need the other side to be willing to make a deal, and I’m less certain of that being a real possibility by the day. I thought Pilgrim was someone I could work with, but after this morning... They’re not interested in both sides getting what they want, because if we get our way even a little bit they see it as a defeat.”

“So beat them,” Archer said. “Crush them so brutally they’re not thinking about winning, just surviving. They’ll take terms then.”

I laughed harshly.

“Gods, I want to,” I admitted. “It might not be easier, but it’d be simpler . If all I had to care about was coming out on top and what it takes to get there. And that’s the hypocrisy of it. Because as much as I rail against them, what I’m after is utter victory as well. It just involves make treaties instead of invading another country.”

“I’m still not hearing a reason not to step on them,” Indrani said, frowning.

“Because Triumphant took ten years to conquer all of Calernia and five years to lose it,” I said. “Just being strong isn’t enough, because if strength is all that keeps the peace then the moment you falter it’s gone . And we all falter, eventually. You can’t dance for decades without ever missing a step. I used to think Malicia lost sight of that, when she tried to get her hands on the doomsday weapon, but now I’m not so sure. After Second Liesse I told myself she’d put herself in the corner on her own. That by fanning the flames when Procer had its civil war she ensured sooner or later there’d be a reckoning, and then made it so much worse by trying to get the weapon. Now, though, I think I get where she was coming from. She thinks the only way they’ll ever negotiate with her is if the alternative is annihilation. No uncertainty, no room for a turnaround. Just...”

I snapped my fingers.

“Gone.”

“We rebuilding the fortress o’doom, then?” Archer asked. “I was under the impression we didn’t care for it.”

“Before I told Juniper to raise the army,” I said. “Before I let everyone off the leash to rebuild Callow and get it on war footing, I drew a line for myself. That’d I’d only keep fighting so long as what I led to wasn’t worse than surrendering to the crusade. Because if I can’t even believe that much, I’m the problem more than them.”

“No to the fortress o’doom, then,” Indrani snorted. “I think? It can be hard to tell with you.”

“If it takes Hellgates to make what I’m doing work, then it isn’t worth doing,” I replied. “The thing that gets me is, what I hate most about the heroes? I do it too. I’m furious that they think they should win just because they won’t compromise, but when have I ever done the same when I had the power not to?”

And I couldn’t just dismiss that. Because getting angry about them being stubborn didn’t hold, when I was just as stubborn. I could believe they were wrong, but I couldn’t just dismiss their right to disagree with me. The fury that burned whenever they cast their righteousness in my face was childish. I’d spent years telling my enemies that blame was pointless, that it didn’t change anything. That it was whining to demand the world be as you thought it should instead of how it truly was. It’d been my answer, when facing Vivienne in Laure, and I would not renounce it now. The servants of the Gods Above had powers my decisions had barred from me, but that was my own doing. I did not surrender the right to restrain and work around these powers whenever I could, but I could not honestly call it unfair . When had fair ever mattered? That I had to refrain from using powers I had gained because they were harmful of dangerous in no way meant my enemies had limit themselves the same way. If I could not win with this state of affairs, that was on my head. There could be no such thing as cheating when none of this was a game. And Gods forgive me, but I’d known it would be like this when I took up the knife.

“Winner takes all,” Archer said. “The law older than laws.”

“I could probably end the war in about a year,” I admitted. “If I hit Black’s army in the back while it’s defending against the crusaders, then help them move against Praes. There’d be a lot of death before it was over, taking Praesi cities, and probably just as much in purges afterwards. I’m not sure, though, that it won’t result in fewer corpses than my way. I genuinely can’t tell . If I threw it all away, if I rolled over for Hasenbach... Fuck, Callow wouldn’t be independent but I broke William’s neck because I believe the sign on the banner is less important than the people under it. I’m not after the same things I was when I started, not anymore. The amount of corpses on the ground at the end isn’t all that matters.”

“Never did get why you worry so much about people,” Indrani said. “Vivienne’s all about the good ol’ motherland and getting even, but she was upper crust before she learned wandering hands. She’s got a stake in that game. You? You’re an orphan, Cat. Never left Laure before Black took you in, if Hakram is to be believed. Why do you give two shits if this country burns? Not like it ever did anything for you. A chunk of it still hates your guts, and considering you sure as Hells don’t enjoy ruling it you’re going through a lot of trouble to keep doing just that.”

More than once I’d reflected that Archer had a lot in common with orcs, when it came to the way she looked at the world. I’d been wrong, though. Oh, they both liked blood on the floor and they measured most things through strength. But orcs had... loyalties. Not in the way I’d been taught to have them, but they were there. Follow the warlord, protect the clan, uphold what an orc should be. Indrani had none of that. If she was loyal to anything, it was herself. A betrayal, to her, would be forcing herself to do something she didn’t want to do. Pretending to be something else than she was. Black and I were creatures fettered to outcomes, if not means. Archer, and Ranger as well I suspected, could not conceive a world where fetters could be anything but a sin. The only thing Indrani had it in her to truly hate was being restrained.

“I thought I could fix it,” I quietly said. “I looked around me and thought that, if I had the power all those other people had, I wouldn’t make their mistakes. I’d use it the way it should be used. That it would be better .”

Archer studied me silently.

“And do you still?”

I made and broke the Liesse Rebellion , I thought. I bargained with fae as my people died around me, failed the responsibilities I had claimed so grandly a city was blotted out from Creation along with a hundred thousand souls. I am leading this land to make war on half the continent while the rest plots my demise.

“I’m not good enough a liar,” I said, “to make myself believe that.”

“So leave,” Indrani said. “Take your cloak and your sword, wake Masego and convince Vivienne. You have a way with her. We can be out of the kingdom before dawn.”

“Do you think we’re good people, Indrani?” I asked.

“Good people is what we pretend to be, when we’re more afraid of consequences than we are hungry or jealous,” Archer replied without hesitation. “When the living is soft and someone else takes the pain for you. It always, always falls away when you walk through fire – and we’ve been in too many blazes to still be wearing that face.”

“Right and wrong are less important than works or not,” I mused. “That’s what I was taught. And it fit, you know? Because mercy’s the privilege of the powerful. The House of Light can speak the pretty sentiments because by following them it wins. Black never followed his philosophy to its logical conclusion, though, because it’s not about logic for him. Not really. If the Heavens always win, why should anyone ever pick another side?”

“Gold, pretty boys, the power to fry anyone getting on your nerves,” Indrani suggested. “Angels tend to be pricks, too. You’re being all philosophical about this, but that’s just you. Most people don’t think that deep about it.”

“The Empire of the last twenty years was probably the most reasonable Evil has ever been on this continent,” I said. “It still involved exploiting an occupied country and habitual assassination. I don’t think it was worse than other current nations, not objectively. But if the best Evil can do is acceptably awful, then some things have to be reconsidered. The Pilgrim said I’m leading everyone down the cliff just by being in charge, and just because he’s trying to kill me doesn’t mean he’s wrong .”

“So stab the Empress,” Archer nonchalantly said, like it was just an afternoon’s work. “Climb the Tower and, you know, don’t do any of that.”

“That’s exactly what Diabolist is trying to get me to do,” I murmured. “But I think it’s a trap, Indrani. Because I’ll have to get worse to stay on top in Praes. Below wins, and just because I’d hang the Heavens if I could doesn’t meant I trust the opposition any. And whoever puts a knife in me, a few decades down the line, takes up the old banner with the scales having tilted their way. Pilgrim’s right about that too. There’s going to be consequences to all of this that won’t come out for decades, and if I ignore that I’m fucking over a lot more people than I’m trying to save.”

“You made part of this mess, can’t deny that,” Indrani said. “Promises too, to people you like. I won’t pretend breaking would be pleasant. But this is larger and older than us, Cat. It’s the Game of the Gods. Not playing is as close to victory as you’ll ever get.”

“If was a heroine,” I said, “I’d tell you to have a war you need two sides.”

“That ship sailed when you fucked over the Hashmallim, I’m pretty sure,” Archer said.

I laughed ruefully, shaking my head.

“The last time I felt like I had a grasp on any of this was when I killed the Lone Swordsman,” I admitted. “Ever since it’s been like swimming in the dark. I know I saw a shore on the other side, but the night is young and I’m getting tired. The longer I’m at it, the more I doubt I’ll ever get to land.”

“And what’s our shore?” Indrani asked.

“I call them,” I softly said, “the Liesse Accords.”

“They worth the swim?” Archer said, eyebrow quirking.

“They’re why I still have a crown on,” I replied. “Because for them to work, someone needs to enforce them from this side.”

“So we fight,” she said.

“So we fight,” I echoed.

Silence lingered between us, almost restful.

“I’m not sure I do,” I murmured. “Care. If I did, why would I need so many rules?”

“Same reason anyone has rules,” Indrani replied, with kindness like a knife. “Fear.”

I knew better, these days, than to argue with the truth. I rose to my feet and leaned over Masego, forcing away her feet and brushing the wooden slivers off his face.

“Wake me with dawn,” I told her.

She nodded silently, blade beginning to chip at wood again. I laid my hand on Hierophant’s head and breathed in, seizing his dream.

I never felt myself breathe out.

Chapter 19: Recovery

“To seek to ascertain the worth of even a single a soul through morality is to force unnecessary mysticism onto a simple matter. As in all things, supply and demand determine the price.”
– Extract from “Bought and Sold”, a collection of the teachings of the Merchant Prince Irenos, founder of Mercantis

“I’ll admit it,” I said. “I was expecting a library.”

My previous trips into dreamland had not led me to expect a great deal of nuance in the matter, though admittedly that’d been my own mind. Might just be that Masego was a little less straightforward in his way of looking at the world. The lack of swamp and shambling horde certainly implied as much. Instead Hierophant’s dream was order gone mad. A pane of crystal under my feet, tethered to the centre of the massive structure by a long length of gold, kept me aloft. Unfortunately that did little to put my old fear of heights from rearing up its head. It was one thing to leap down from the sky when I knew my legs would unbreak themselves within moments, another to have only a thin sheet of crystal being the only thing keeping me from falling into endless void.

“Fucking Hells, Masego,” I muttered. “Would it have killed you to put up a railing?”

Aside from the very real possibility of falling down forever, I had to concede there was a strange beauty to what I saw. It reminded me, in a way, of the depiction of astral spheres I’d once seen in Black’s mansion in Ater. Though, instead of circling the sun the way mages had along ago proven Creation did, everything here was circling the sphere of shivering translucent flame held within a deep basin of gold. From it spanned long tubes of gold holding up lesser spheres all wildly different. Crystal and frost, roiling wind and swarms of small silver constructs. My own platform, like all the others, circled around the central sphere with a slow and measured ticking sound. I could glimpse gears and cranks beneath the basin that kept it all moving along. I shivered, though there was no wind here. Perhaps because there was no wind. There was something subtly wrong about what lay before me, though I would not deny its eerie splendour. It was not a perspective, the way the cold machinery behind Black’s eyes could be understood. It was...

“A way of understanding Creation,” I finished out loud.

My voice felt dim and there was no echo. The void swallowed it all. My platform kept moving, and I shook myself out of the fugue. Odds were that I’d be able to find Masego within the sphere at the heart of this. I looked down at the gold support beam and winced. It was round, after all. If I slipped after making my way down... Well, I wasn’t sure what the consequences of falling into the void would be, but considering Hierophant’s mind was bound to have some very nasty defences I suspected it would not be pleasant. Not that my own little journey into Winter dreamland had been a treat. My fingers clenched. Don’t think about it , I told myself. Winter had been trying to grind me down, by lingering on the remembrance I was only playing its game.

“So shimmying across that beam is a bit of a stretch,” I decided. “That leaves trying to move from sphere to sphere.”

I turned my gaze to the moving structures. While I couldn’t discern the exact pattern yet – some beams extended at specific sections of the rotation, while others withdrew – I could at least grasp the likely length of the beams. And, more importantly, if one was ever going to come close enough for me to leap across. One, two, three – no, just two, that last one was moving back without warning and staying there. It’d have to do. I considered allowing a full rotation to take place just so I’d avoid running into any surprises, but there were no guarantees the pattern would remain the same every time. And, by the looks of it, this was going to take a while. Not all spheres were rotating at the same speed, but mine was fairly slow. Hard to properly measure time and distance in here, but I’d guess at least two hours for a full turn? Leaping uncertainly would be a risk, but so would be waiting that long when I was uncertain of the relative time flows in here and outside.

“I understand you’re a man of deep and complex thought, Zeze, but you’re not making this easy,” I sighed. “You know what’s the worst people have to deal with, in my mind? Condescension Queen and Lady Backstab. And that one endless horde of dead trying to kill them, but let’s be honest – that’s not exactly out of our wheelhouse.”

I’d kind of expected one or both of the twins to materialize and mouth off after that, but I remained alone. Shame. Probably could have made rope out of intestines, maybe used bones for a hook. I paused.

“I’m not being unnecessarily gruesome there,” I defensively told the void. “I don’t know how to make rope out of hair, and to be solid enough to hold my weight skin would have to be tanned first.”

Nothingness did not answer. Pointedly so, I felt.

“Well, fuck you too,” I muttered.

It wasn’t murder if they were projections of your unconscious mind, I comforted myself. Probably. I’d never looked up if the Empire had laws on the subject. Testing the platform beneath me, to my distaste I found it rather slippery. That was not going to be pleasant. I tried to see if Winter was willing to get involved, but I was reaching for nothing. No, I thought. Not nothing. It was just distant . Interesting, but it wasn’t helping me in the slightest at the moment. The first outer sphere passed close after I spent half an eternity dawdling in the middle of nowhere, but I let that one pass. The sphere was wind and barely contained. Too much of a risk. The second rotated close after the rest of eternity passed me by, and I winced. Fire. Silver flames that flickered without a sound. Well, it wasn’t going to be pleasant if I stumbled into those but it was still better than falling. The boots on my feet were old, nothing like those I now wore though I vaguely recalled having owned that pair before being apprenticed to Black. The wiggle room for my toes was nice, but the softness of used leather less so. I had to balance my weight carefully when I took a running start.

“Nonononono-” I valiantly screamed, realizing with horror halfway through the leap that the sphere was withdrawing.

I had no power to call on, no mantle or Name that could save my hide at the last moment. The stark understanding of my helplessness brought back something I’d begun to forget – fear. Not the dim worry for events yet to come that haunted my every hour since I’d taken the crown, but the colder thing that was having to look death in the eyes. I twisted forward, and my fingers caught the edge of the platform. My life was not owed to my own merits. The sphere had just withdrawn only slightly.

“Oh Hells,” I panted, forcing my other hand to clench so the trembling would stop while I brought it up to clasp the platform’s edge.

I felt sweat drenching my back, another sensation I’d near forgotten. My palms were growing moist as well, and that was a lot worrying since they were the only thing between me and falling.

“Godsdamnit, Masego,” I said. “Godsfucking-“

I took a deep breath, then pulled myself up with grunt of effort. It was awkward, and my palm slipped when I got my leg over the ledge. I ended up falling awkwardly on the side, rolling in panic towards the fire to avoid the fall. Wait, had there really been enough –

The Conjurer was an utter fool, yet somehow he still lived despite Masego’s best efforts. His lips twisted into a sneer and he traced Form and Force, weaving the formula his words shaped through them. Air clustered into three arithmetically perfect spheres and shot forward, though in his irritation he had allowed the proper angle to/

Seven full months had he studied the theory. It was the simplest working he knew, transmutation of power into heat and light, yet his every deviation from the original formula to craft his own had resulted in failure. The numbers were perfect, he knew it, but somehow the spell would not/

“We’re not bleeding people, Apprentice,” she said accusingly. “We’re not that desperate.” He blinked, more out of sheer affront than surprise. What kind of a blunderer did she take him for? He opened his mouth to snap/

– I rolled out of the silver flames, my body shivering. That had felt... I patted my own stomach, reassured to find it flat. For a moment there’d been a disconnect and I’d expected to find otherwise. I closed my eyes and laid there for a moment before slapping my own face with an open palm. The sting snapped me out of it and I dragged myself into a crouch.

“Memories?” I murmured, glancing at the sphere.

Maybe. I’d felt genuinely nettled throughout all three glimpses. The third time had even been directed at myself, which was giving me a headache since his recollection of that conversation was a lot more vivid than my own. There’d been a common thread. It might be the same for every sphere, a sort of archive. Gods, his mind was so weird. I was starting to feel a lot better about the murder swamp in my own. I shook myself out of the trance. The rotation had continued while I was elsewhere, and for longer than I’d thought. I couldn’t even see the crystal platform I’d started on anymore. Still, screwed as that had been I was in a much better position now. There were twice as many spheres circling close to this one than there’d been for the last, and I picked on that looked like an orb of pure white marble for my second leap. There was no nasty halfway surprise this time. Time was hard to gauge, in here, but by my fourth leap I felt like I’d made some decent progress. I was more than halfway through, though difficulties had come with the advance. This close to the centre of the structure the spheres moved a lot quicker. And, I saw with a frown, the platforms around them were smaller. Not a lot of room for mistakes there.

I bid my time, reluctantly, until I picked one out whose rotation seemed steady and the sphere on it not too dangerous. A slower one passed by, but I wasn’t going anywhere near something that looked like a hole of darkness sucking in everything if I could help it. A constantly moving jigsaw of ivory wasn’t honestly much better, I’d admit to myself, but at this point there was only so much pickiness I could afford. With another heroically shrill scream I leapt, and it went perfectly. Angle and swiftness, all aligned as they should be. Then my boot touched the crystal, and with a sinking feeling I realized it was rough instead of smooth. Which wouldn’t have been much of a problem if I’d adjusted my stance before jumping. I had not. I stumbled with all the grace of cart rolling down a hill, my forehead going into-

He did not understand why the orc kept seeking his company, though as long as he came with a shatranj board Masego would not refuse the company. Campaigning, much as Father had implied, was a dull thing to suffer through. It was only when Hakram sat across him, sliding open the shutters holding the pieces, that he realized he’d been awaiting Adjutant. That he had no ceased his dissection earlier because there was nothing more to learn from the subject, but because he’d been looking forward to their evening game. “White?” Hakram offered and/

“It’s a sprite,” Archer said, shaking the glass bottle. He’d known at a glance, of course, and the angry buzzing of the lesser spirit indicated displeasure at the rough handling. “I am not unfamiliar with them,” Masego replied. “They are quite common in western Callow.” The strange woman chuckled, tossing the bottle into his lap. He hastily grabbed it. “Magelight’s supposed to be hard on the eyes,” Archer said. “If you’re going to keep reading after dark, use that instead.” He started in surprise. Had she caught it for him? Why would she/

“They were the rooms of the Wizards of the West, you know,” Thief said, leaning against the threshold. Masego did not quite succeed at hiding his start. She’d emerged without warning, as was her wont. Not even Summer’s light cast a shadow on her aspect. His eyes swept across the room, finding only furniture and a bath in the Soninke manner. “There is no trace of their presence,” he informed the woman. She shrugged. “Figured as much,” Thief said. “But there’s old stories about the location making it easier to align with ‘otherworldly powers’. Thought you might want to have a look.” The tone was defensive, he was certain. It held all the right markers. Did/

My face was less than an inch away from shifting ivory as I balanced uneasily on my feet. The roof of my mouth was dry. I licked my lips, retreating half a step. That’d been much more intense than the last. More nuanced as well. I’d felt the confusion shifting to understanding like it was my own. I still remembered what it felt like, people’s faces being so hard to read. Was that how he felt all the time? I’d thought he was uncomfortable with touching because it was the way Warlock had raised him, but that hadn’t been the way at all. I just... hadn’t known what the touching was for, and I’d hesitated to act until I could correctly identify the reason. It’d been like living a world full of masks, so very few of which I could read. Slowly I calmed down. Touching my face helped, the touch of my own fingers on my own flesh. I didn’t even bother to assess how much time had passed, since I already knew I wouldn’t like the answer. The spheres moved, but I waited patiently for my openings. Another two leaps, and as I stood besides a sphere of lightning-infused amber I timed my last one.

I’d underestimated how massive the central sphere truly was. At least as large as the royal palace in Laure, and the gold basin that held it was even larger. The trembling translucent flame in front of me was unlike the other globes I’d encountered. It was not full, only a thin barrier. Through it I could make out lights and shapes, some still and others in movement. Steeling myself, I marched through. Heat licked at my skin, ignoring my clothes, but there was no rush of foreign memories. Inside the sphere, as I had thought, Masego awaited. He was far from the only thing in there. Constellations of instruments of all kinds filled the firmament of this place, gold and silver and obsidian and a hundred other tools – some I had seen before, others never even imagined existed. They all clustered around Hierophant, who stood with his back to me as he studied something I could not make out.

“Distraction,” Masego said absent-mindedly. “Kill it.”

The only other living entity in the sphere moved. I looked back at my own face, my twin snorting and unsheathing her sword. Not my twin, I thought. She didn’t wear the same clothes as me, neither in this place nor back in Creation. She wore the same plate I had that day when we fought the Princess of High Noon, and her smile was too broad to be entirely human. It was a caricature of daring and insolence, not something lips could actually do.

“Masego,” I called out.

“Ah, apologies,” he replied patiently. “ Please kill it.”

Flicker.

The other Catherine was no longer that. Archer idly nocked an arrow, the boundary between her scarf and her face blurred. Her appearance was even stranger than my not-twin’s had been. She was less detailed, like a rough painting of herself. It was when the string went as furthest back as it could that she sharpened, and in that moment she was stunning . The hungry gleam in the eyes, the easy arrogance in her stance. She wasn’t more beautiful than the real Indrani was, but there was an intensity to her that I’d never seen in Archer. Like she was leaving an indelible mark on this moment. The surprise of it slowed me down, and throwing myself to the ground did not help quite enough. The arrow went through my chest and I grunted in pain.

Flicker.

Adjutant slowly spun his axe as he advanced towards me. More statue than orc, all that he was set in stone. The weight of his presence was feather-light, at first, but the longer it was there the heavier it bore down on me. He bared fangs of carved bone as too-clever eyes followed my rising to my feet. The eyes were the most expressive part of this statue of Hakram, inhumanly perceptive. As if they were the only living part of him. I broke the arrow’s shaft, biting my lip to avoid screaming.

“Hakram,” I said. “Don’t do it.”

He kept advancing.

“Hakram,” I barked. “I order you to desist.”

Still advancing. Fuck.

“Masego,” I screamed, and then not-Hakram was upon me.

The moment he struck, he was a statue no longer. He turned into flesh and blood, strength uncoiling like a trebuchet released. I tried to catch his wrist, but I might as well have been wrestling that trebuchet. He smashed me into the ground effortlessly, painfully jarring the arrowhead still in my chest.

“Zeze,” I yelled. “Don’t you-“

“Wait,” Masego said.

The entity froze, axe a hair’s breadth away from my throat. Hierophant turned, and I grimaced at the sight. No blindfold on his face, i here. Hollow burnt-out sockets studied me, balls of Summer flame hovering within.

“I know you,” he said.

“Catherine,” I reminded him. “Your friend.”

He frowned. His face blurred, then became calm again.

“Are you quite certain?” he asked.

Shit. He doesn’t remember anything that’s in the spheres outside, does he? I had no idea how much of the man I knew was standing in front of me.

“Masego, you need to wake up,” I said. “I came here to get you back.”

“Don’t be absurd,” he chided me. “There is so much left to study.”

He gestured towards the thing his body had been hiding and my eyes widened. It was a sphere like those outside, though much smaller. The ball of Light was wriggling violently, a wound in it kept open by silver pincers.

“It is much clearer, without the noise,” Hierophant told me. “We are making great progress.”

I forced a smile.

“That’s good,” I said. “Tell me more about that. I want to see. But I’ll need to get up, for that, and there’s a blade at my throat.”

Flicker.

I saw Thief’s face, for a heartbeat, and then the entity was gone. Masego was gesturing.

“Come, come,” he said. “You’re familiar with the Ligurian theory of magic, of course.”

I got up, hand on my throat.

“Of course,” I lied. “It’s my favourite.”

He offered a beaming smile. His face blurred and he was calm again.

“You’re not trying to trick me, are you?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I hastily replied. “I uh, just really hate the Jaquinite theory.”

Gods, I really should have listened more closely when he talked about that. Was being an occasionally shitty friend going to get me killed? That’d be fitting piece of irony.

“As you should,” Hierophant sniffed. “Procerans. Their idea of a proper formula is to get down on their knees and pray .”

“Just the worst,” I agreed, slowly coming closer.

He gestured again for me to stand by his side.

“Now, the Gigantes do shroud their sorcery behind unnecessary claptrap,” he lectured. “But I believe Gharan the Wise was correct when he theorized they are the eldest race on Calernia to have developed a comprehensive method for use of the Gift.”

“Only makes sense,” I said.

I was close enough to knife him, now, but would that actually help? Academic question anyway, I didn’t have a knife and not-Thief could be anywhere. I glanced at the sphere he was inviting me to watch, and my vision swam. I could almost make out something. A memory, though I didn’t live it like the others. Marchford. Night, with hundreds of columns of fire moving according to my will. A ritual repurposed, my first real stride towards understanding the deeper mysteries of High Arcana. I closed my eyes.

“You were the Apprentice, then,” I said.

“Just a title,” he dismissed. “As milestone that denotes understanding reached, but of little practical worth.”

“You’re not anymore, though,” I said. “You’re the Hierophant. How did that happen?”

A little heavy-handed, but I had a lot of detachment to bludgeon through here. Subtle wasn’t going to work. Masego smiled. His face blurred. He was furious.

“Distraction,” he said. “Unimportant.”

“Name transition isn’t important?” I probed. “How often have you seen that phenomenon?”

His face blurred, returned to calm. I’d survive to hear a reply, then. Apparently improving one’s vocabulary really was a life-saving skill, who knew?

“Not enough,” he said. “But it is all contaminated. Too much bias. Not enough left to examine after removal.”

“Oh, that’s all right then,” I shrugged.

He nodded, pleased at my agreement.

“Difficult research isn’t for everyone,” I continued. “I’m sure someone will eventually get around to explaining it to you.”

His face darkened.

“I do not need to depend on the findings of others,” he said.

“Obviously you have to,” I said. “I mean, you’re just not capable enough to study it with the bias intact. You’ve said it yourself, it’s too much.”

I would have felt a lot worse about trying to trick him in this state if he hadn’t ordered me shot moments ago. Hierophant dismissed the sphere of Light with a wave of the hand, and reached out. Plucking out a distant sphere of water in a way that should not have been physically possible, he set it in front of us.

“It can be done,” he insisted. “Simply a matter of discipline.”

“I look forward to your findings, then,” I smiled.

His face blurred, and remained that way.

“You interfere with the process,” he said in an utterly flat voice.

“I would never,” I said and snatched his hand, forcing it into the sphere.

White light, blinding. A knife going through my back.

“No,” Hierophant’s voice barked. “No, go away . Catherine?”

I dropped down on my knees. Was that blood in my mouth? Fuck, it was just a stabbing. Thief was nowhere that good at killing people, I called bullshit. The spots went away and I looked at Masego’s mortified face.

“Hey, Zeze,” I grunted. “Been a while.”

“Cat,” he murmured. “You’re – no, doesn’t matter. I can end it.”

His fingers threaded through mine, softly, and as he squeezed we woke.

Chapter 20: Onset

“Proceran promises should be treated like stew: unless you know every ingredient, best not swallow.”
– King Charles Fairfax of Callow, the Rightfully Wary

Archer’s elbow was pressing into my eye. I blinked and craned back my neck before she could smack me again, turning in the bed. I carefully extracted myself from the pile of limbs over me, careful not to wake either of them. It was easier than I’d thought, since somewhat unsurprisingly Indrani was hogging the covers. Masego was laying back with his face towards the ceiling, still like he’d been put to rest in a coffin instead of passing out by my side when we came back from his mind. The eye cloth had been tugged down at some point, baring an eerie glass eye and partly covering one of his cheeks. I wrinkled my nose. Archer reeked of yesterday’s fighting, so clearly she’d not bothered to clean up before piling on top of us. She murmured in her sleep in a tongue I’d didn’t recognize, then promptly spread her legs where I’d been before. She was not, I noted with amusement, granting Masego any more room in the process. If anything she was coming closer to edging him off the bed.

I’d not taken off my tunic before falling asleep last night – and it still surprised me I’d felt the need to sleep at all – but I sat to pull on my boots. I splashed my face with the water basin more out of habit than any real need, the tepid liquid doing nothing to wake me up. A dreamless night, huh. Been a while since I’d had one of those. I made my way out of the tent quietly, stretching my frame when the sun bore down on me. If felt rested . Like I’d been tired and no longer was. It was a small pleasure I allowed myself a moment to properly savour. The Army of Callow’s camp was only beginning to wake, dawn fresh to the sky, and I wouldn’t truly be needed for at least an hour. If Hakram were around there’d be a meal waiting for me somewhere, along with the night’s reports, but he was very far away. Last I’d heard he was bringing the latest recruits up Quicksilver River, intending to link up with Kegan’s host before joining us.

The camp fire closest to my tent was deserted save for a single person, tending to a kettle hung over the flames. I didn’t need to look twice to recognize Vivienne. She did not turn, though I was certain she’d heard me approach, instead putting down a pair of cups on a flat stone and reaching for the kettle. I raised an eyebrow. The twin bells set on silver made it pretty clear where she’d gotten those. Had she nabbed old Fairfax dinner sets? I smothered a fond smile. Of course she had. Why would even bother to ask? I dropped down at her side, glimpsing the leaves inside the cups. Tea, though not the Praesi stuff. Smelled... Ashuran, maybe? Wasn’t the stuff Aisha got imported from across the Tyrian Sea anyway. Wordlessly, she poured the boiling water into them without spilling a drop. I claimed one, inhaling the scent. I tended to enjoy that more than the drink itself.

“I hope that was part of the tenth,” I said. “If there’s silver missing, the palace seneschal is going to be pissed.”

Thief smiled, using a long spoon of silver to stir her tea.

“Stealing from the palace is a hanging offence,” she said.

“Not since we revoked Mazus’ decrees,” I objected. “It’s a whipping and a fine now, I think?”

“As Her Majesty says,” Vivienne drawled.

She’d never actually denied it, had she? I sighed.

“All right,” I said. “You were waiting for me. Out with it.”

“We’ll be sitting with the Procerans at noon,” she replied before taking a sip from her cup. “Addressing our diplomatic approach is in order.”

I hummed, inhaling the fragrant steam again.

“Our strategic objectives are still more or less the same as when we started to march,” I said. “We need them on the other side of the passage, and to stay there long enough we have breathing room to refit while we prepare our next move. Coin too, if possible. I doubt they’ll agree to actualt war indemnities, so we’ll have to get that through the supplies if we get it at all.”

“I’ve been in contact with the Observatory,” Vivienne said. “The situation abroad is evolving.”

“The Dominion’s armies should be in southern Procer, by now,” I said. “But I’m guessing there’s more to tell.”

“Klaus Papenheim has finally begun his offensive in the Red Flower Vales,” my spymistress said. “No word as to the results of the first battles yet, but the Carrion Lord seems to be holding.”

I grimaced.

“He’d better,” I said. “If the crusaders punch through, our army’s in no shape to take them on.”

“I’ve also had word from Praes, though the news is a fortnight old,” Vivienne said. “Nok was sacked by the Ashuran war fleet.”

I let out a low whistle. I wasn’t exactly pleased at the loss of life that’d be involved there, but it was an impressive achievement for the Thalassocracy nonetheless. Praesi cities were layered with centuries of wards and sorcery, not to mention the pack of horrors the aristocrats kept bound in the basement for rainy days. I’d known the Ashurans weren’t exactly pushovers, considering they had the largest fleet in Calernia, but most their wars had been fought at sea. Last large-scale engagement I could recall they’d fought on land was when they’d landed armies to help Levant rise against the Principate, and it’d been the incipient Dominion that’d done the heavy lifting there.

“They withdrew after?” I asked.

“Set half the city on fire in the process, after looting it,” Vivienne said. “The Wasteland legions arrived two days too late to help with the defence. The Empress is taking a beating at court over it. Thalassina’s threatened to rebel if they don’t get a Legion garrison. “

“Whoever’s in charge of the fleet isn’t a fool,” I mused. “Nok’s the easiest target in the Empire, relatively speaking. They spent most their history under the thumb of one city or another. It’s nowhere as crucial to Praes as Thalassina, but they made the Tower bleed. All the wolves will be drawn out by the scent of it.”

“I would not wager that the Empress is too preoccupied to sabotage us if she so wishes,” Thief said. “But the real pivot remains the battle in the Vales.”

“You think Milenan and Malanza will want to stretch the diplomacy out until they know the outcome down south,” I frowned.

“If the Carrion Lord is driven back, their negotiating position significantly improves,” Vivienne noted. “If he wins, they are no longer sole bearers of the shame of defeat should they make bargain with us. From their perspective, delay has no drawback.”

“Except for starving,” I said.

She nodded, sipping at her cup.

“I would expect Prince Milenant to state the ongoing continuation of yesterday’s arrangement is a condition for continuing to negotiate,” Vivienne said. “Something along the lines of coercion souring the process of peacemaking.”

“I’ve got no reason to – ah,” I said. “They’ll fold early on something major, then argue I’m negotiating in bad faith if I’m not willing to agree.”

“Precisely,” she said.

“We’re not even peacemaking, not really,” I sighed. “They don’t have the authority to call off the Tenth Crusade. The most we can get is a very narrow truce that doesn’t violate the letter of Proceran laws on contributing to crusades.”

“It would be reputational disaster for them to agree to even that much without something to show for their retreat,” Vivienne said. “We’ll need to give them something.”

“I can’t move on them having a presence on our side of the passage,” I stated flatly. “You know very well how much trouble that’d be for us.”

She shook her head.

“Their ambitions to expand into Callow are checked, for the moment,” she said. “I find it dubious they will attempt to overturn that state of affairs given their weak position. What they need, Catherine, is a way to save face. A way to accept terms that will not make them pariahs in the Highest Assembly.”

“Reputation, huh,” I mused.

I drank from the tea, though its pleasant fragrance did not extend to the taste in my mouth. Whether it was eating or drinking, the enjoyable parts of it were mostly gone.

“The way I see it, what they’re most afraid of back home is Hasenbach,” I finally said. “It’s horrible for their reputation to make a deal with me, but won’t see them overthrown. The First Prince, though, she’ll toss their asses out in the cold if she has half an excuse.”

“It would greatly consolidate her hold on Procer if the largest opposition bloc was publicly disgraced,” Vivienne agreed. “Your point?”

“We hand them a way to kick the mess upstairs,” I said, eyes narrowing as I stared into the flames. “Like you said, they don’t have the authority to negotiate for the entire crusade. Just themselves. So if they’re presented with something they can’t accept or refuse without Hasenbach...”

“It is her reputation at stake, not theirs,” Vivienne mused.

I set down the cup.

“I think it’s time we brought Aisha in on this,” I said. “Unless you became fluent in Proceran legalities since we last spoke.”

She rolled her eyes. That was a no, then. With a groan, I got up. Time to get to work.

—

Seven tenths of diplomacy, as far as I could tell, was bickering over symbolic or largely irrelevant details. We wasted a full hour trading envoys with the crusaders just to the order the issues would be addressed in. That and the language that would be used for the negotiations. They pushed for Chantant, but I was having none of that. My knowledge of it wasn’t good enough for easy conversation, and I wasn’t using a translator for something this important when nearly all the opposite royalty could speak Lower Miezan without trouble. I folded on it being their pavilion and tables we met at, then conceded to their proposal of only twenty attendants in exchange for picking the tongue andthe first issue. At least Aisha managed to horse-trade the give on attendants for a limitation on the number of attending heroes. Five was more than I wanted, but there was no realistic chance of the Pilgrim and his sharpest knives not being at the table. All of the Woe save for Hakram would be attending, regardless, so I wasn’t feeling overly cornered when it came to the balance of Named power.

My delegation ended up split more or less half and half between Praesi and Callowans. For my homeland the two heavyweights were Grandmaster Brandon Talbot and Baroness Ainsley Morley of – currently occupied – Harrow. I wasn’t eager to involve the latter, since she was not a well-known quantity, but it wasn’t feasible not to. She was the ranking noble in my army and her holdings would be a point of negotiation. Even if it wouldn’t have been a grave insult to keep her away from the table, I would have involved her. Baroness Ainsley had already proved she wanted to look after her people. She deserved a seat, no matter my personal misgivings. On the Praesi side, the most important were Marshal Juniper of Callow and Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara. The latter had picked out everyone else in our delegation save for the Woe, keeping the balance between provenances while digging out the scribes and learned officers that served as the closest thing the Kingdom of Callow currently had to trained diplomats.

The Proceran delegation was, in comparison, a gallery of royalty. Prince Amadis and Princess Rozala had always been a given, but there were a full six crowned heads in attendance. Thief provided names and sparse details quietly. Prince Arnaud of Cantal, by reputation a loudmouthed idiot. Princess Adeline of Orne, whose brother and predecessor had been killed at Black’s orders. Prince Alejandro of Segovia, who’d publicly broken with his mother’s old alliance with Hasenbach. Prince Louis of Creusens, allegedly so badly in debt to Amadis he couldn’t even take a piss without the older man’s permission. Save for the heroes, the other attendants were all kinsmen to one royal or another. It was the Named I studied most closely. The Grey Pilgrim’s face was the usual serene mask but there were younger heroes with him. The sorcerer I’d fought before, which formal introductions revealed to be Rogue Sorcerer. A woman bearing sword and board and watching me unblinkingly was introduced as the Silent Guardian, while the woman with the red face paint I’d once cut the arm of was the Painted Knife. The last was the Forsworn Healer, and I frowned at the sight of him.

No Saint. That was only half a relief. If she was here, she’d be trouble but I’d at least know where she was for sure. I glanced at the heroes, frown deepening. Silent Guardian to hold me, Painted Knife to check Thief and the Sorcerer to delay Masego. The Healer to keep them going, and the Pilgrim to tip the scales. The five heroes had been chosen so they’d be able to hold up against the Woe in a fight. But if they think it’s going to turn to violence, why is the Saint not here?

“... and Her Majesty, Queen Catherine of Callow, First of Her Name,” Aisha finished, and I offered a polite nod to the Procerans watching me.

There’d been a Catherine Alban that served as queen regent for her son, actually, but by Callowan tradition that did not count as reigning precedent. Prince Amadis took a seat first. At the centre of his side of the table, before I did. The etiquette of that was against him – as the ruling sovereign of a nation, I had the highest status here and none should be seated before me. I didn’t feel particularly insulted, on a personal level, but it was an insult. Offered right after the introductions. While I was less than invested in etiquette, I was invested in this negotiation not being a complete shitshow. So, as Prince Amadis leaned back into his seat, I met his eyes. Silence stretched under the silken pavilion. Slowly, I cocked an eyebrow.

“I was under the impression Arlesites were a mannerly people,” I said, then waited a beat. “Your Grace.”

I let another moment pass before sitting down and gesturing for my entire delegation to do the same, regardless of the higher status of the royals on the other side.

“You have a reputation for preferring familiar manners, Your Majesty,” the Prince of Iserre smiled. “I apologize if offense was taken.”

I did not think it a coincidence that familiarity breeds contempt was a common saying in both our homelands. Procerans had a reputation for being able to speak flowery flattery while meaning the opposite that was apparently well-earned.

“With friends, certainly,” I smiled back as the Proceran delegation sat in proper order. “Are we friends now, Prince Amadis?”

“Rulers sharing an alignment of interests, mayhaps,” the older man said, his Lower Miezan without trace of accent. “Yet is that not the cradle of all great friendships?”

I inclined my head, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. I flicked a glance at the heroes, which were all seated at the left edge of the table save for the Pilgrim. He was at Malanza’s side, between her and the Prince of Cantal. Aisha made up my right side, Thief my left. Rank had not been the prime consideration in those arrangements.

“Before beginning, I believe it necessary for the nature of the involvement of your Named to be clarified,” I said.

Aisha’s notion. Prince Amadis had been introduced as the head of the Proceran delegation, as we’d expected, but the status of the heroes today was vague. Legally speaking, anyway. Several of them weren’t even Proceran, and those that were should have no authority to speak of if this was considered a negotiation between Proceran royalty and the Queen of Callow. If it was a conference between representatives of the Tenth Crusade and a villain queen, however, that was a whole other matter. My Staff Tribune had predicted it would be the latter and not the former – otherwise they’d have no legal authority to stand on without the permission of the First Prince and the other sovereigns at the head of the crusade.

“The Chosen have graced us with their presence in an advisory role,” Prince Amadis replied.

Good , I thought. Then it was the Prince of Iserre and his fellows I had to settle with, not representatives of the Heavens. We had, at least, the legal prerequisites for any treaty made here to be binding. Not that it assured the deal would be respected. Aisha had reluctantly informed me that the most prominent precedent for treaties between Procerans and an Evil polity was attempts at deals with the Kingdom of the Dead – which were broken by either side as often as not. There were treaties with Helike as well, but none relevant since the League of Free Cities had been founded. It would be shaky grounds to try using those as a yardstick. I nodded at Aisha, who bowed deep in her seat and addressed the table with a graceful smile.

“We would now open formal negotiations between the Kingdom of Callow and the lawful leadership of the invading army currently standing on its sovereign territory,” she said.

There were too many people for me to watch them all, so I kept my gaze on the two I knew best: Amadis and Rozala. The Prince of Iserre’s friendly smile did not waver in the slightest, but Malanza’s brow twitched. Not pleased. The language as presented by Aisha treated the crusaders coming here like any other foreign invasion, the kind the Principate had tried for centuries with various degrees of success. It stripped the Procerans of the handy excuse of ‘the Heavens told me to’, which might allow them to wiggle out some responsibility for their actions. They weren’t going to accept that, of course. But now the bargaining started. Prince Amadis glanced at one of his diplomats, the middle-aged man bowing just as deep before responding.

“We cannot treat in good faith under these terms,” the man replied. “We can, however open formal negotiations between the Praesi vassal state of Callow and the mandated expeditionary force of Her Most Serene Highness Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer.”

Not presenting themselves as crusaders, but still as being here on Hasenbach’s orders. I kept a frown off my face. They knew we weren’t going to accept Callow being termed as a vassal state, since they’d effectively be making a deal with the Tower by intermediary if we did. I was fairly sure they could break any terms made if ordered to do so by the First Prince, if it unfolded like that, since the Highest Assembly had formally passed a motion to declare a crusade against Praes and a vassal state would be considered within the scope of that. It went back and forth for a while, until something like a compromise was reached: negotiations were now being held between the Queen in Callow and the mandated expeditionary force of the First Prince. Aisha had tried for Queen of Callow, but they’d gotten out of that by pointing out that unless the Highest Assembly passed a motion or Hasenbach recognized it by decree, they couldn’t legally recognize Callow as a sovereign state with me as its ruler.

Legitimacy was the issue here. My only claim to the throne was conquest, really, and even that was a little iffy. As it stood the treaty would still be binding, theoretically speaking, but it was made with me as an entity and not Callow itself. It became worthless ink if someone put my head on a pike. Thief flicked me an unsurprised look after, having predicted the implication of the other part of the terms. The Procerans, by presenting themselves as an expeditionary force, were paving the grounds for any bill incurred over supplies to be sent to Hasenbach’s court instead of coming out of their own pockets. I sincerely doubted that Cordelia would flip me so much as a copper if anything less than an oath to the Heavens was involved, so we’d have to get creative about getting the coin if we were going to get any at all. Still, that they were trying to extricate from this at all meant they were taking the process seriously. A good sign, after that tumultuous opening. I caught the subtle movement of Prince Amadis’ hand before anyone else on my side.

“The delegation recognizes the Chosen known as the Grey Pilgrim, formal advisor to the Prince of Iserre,” the middle-aged diplomat announced.

The old man rose to his feet.

“I seek clarification from the Queen in Callow,” he said calmly, “on matters of intent.”

I looked up and fought back a sigh.

Wasn’t it traditional that things had to at least go well for the villain before the tables were turned?

Chapter 21: Tug-of-War

“Invading Callow is much like drunkenly playing dice: the odds are never as good as you believe, and you know you’ve reached bottom when snake eyes are involved.”
– Dread Emperor Malevolent III, the Pithy

I pricked my ears, gauging the enemy. Most of the Proceran delegation had either skipped a beat or seen their pulse quicken when the Pilgrim rose to his feet. That was telling. Since it was dubious anyone that high up in the Proceran pecking order was faint of heart, the implication was that this particular play had been kept close to the chest. There were only four who’d not had a physical reaction of fear or surprise: Prince Amadis, Princess Rozala, Prince Arnaud and the middle-aged diplomat who’d been the mouthpiece for the opposition so far. The first two were only to be expected, and the last a given, but the third? That was interesting. Arnaud of Cantal did not strike me as the kind of man the other two royals would keep deep in their confidence. Has he found out on his own? If he was spying on the leaders of the northern crusade, that was a possible angle for Thief to exploit. Turning him seemed unlikely, but if his spying apparatus could be infiltrated... Something to discuss with her later. I made a note to have Vivienne dig deeper into the man, as there was apparently more to him than his reputation. The Grey Pilgrim’s words were followed by heavy silence and I did not hurry to respond.

This, I knew, was the beginning of the deeper game. The war behind the war, where Named would claw at each other like animals to get the morsels of narrative they needed for the final victory. The thing was, as it stood, I was winning that fight. I’d repeatedly made overtures for peace, brought up whenever I could that the enemy was invading my homeland for mostly petty reasons and avoided – as much as feasible – falling into the kind of villainous stand that would get me winning in the short term and killed in the long one. As long as this remained a negotiation between mortals, for mortal motives, I came out ahead. Sure, they were a better hand at diplomacy and likely I’d end up unable to capitalize on several of my advantages. But that was fine, in the greater scheme of things, so long as I walked out of this pavilion with some gains and my narrative intact. There were earthly logistics to this, and Black had made an entire career out of proving those could win a war regardless of the subtler workings of Creation, but I was confident that as long as I held my ground story-wise I’d emerge in a position to begin the sequence of events that’d get me to my objective.

Which meant that I had to avoid engaging the Pilgrim as much as I could. I had a knack for stories, twisting them and using them. It came naturally to me. But the opposition had actually lived through hundreds of them. The experience gap between us was overwhelming, and that was without even taking into consideration whatever tricks the Heavens were sure to have bestowed upon him to make sure he’d keep coming out ahead. I could not confidently state I would win against the Grey Pilgrim, so my safest path was not to fight him at all. Ironically, my sharpest tool in ensuring that was something I generally had little patience for: etiquette. Instead of replying to the old Levantine, I leaned towards Aisha.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said. “But isn’t it a severe breach of decorum for someone without a formal role in negotiations to directly address a queen?”

The lovely Taghreb’s lips quirked.

“That is so,” she said, pitching her voice so it would be heard by all. “Under Tower law, such a transgression is punishable by flaying of the left hand and foot.”

Several of the Procerans’ hearts quivered.

“It has been the stance of your delegation to advance the Queen in Callow as an entity separate from the Tower’s rule,” the Pilgrim said, face serene. “Was this a misrepresentation?”

I did one the things I hated most in the world: I kept my fucking mouth shut. The moment I got involved the narrative was back in play. Lose , I told myself . Let him win the small things, so long as you get what you came for.

“Observations on the nature of Praesi law are no admission of anything else,” Thief coldly noted. “To pretend otherwise is disingenuous, and might be taken as an attempt to sink honest negotiations. Is that the intent of the Proceran delegation?”

I sat straighter in my chair. Thief was one of the Woe, and the Woe were under me. Would anything coming out of her mouth contribute to the tapestry the Pilgrim was trying to weave? Not if I contradicted her, I suspected, but if I was remaining silent... Best to stay on the safe side. Picking out a sliver of Winter, I formed a ring around her index on the hand beneath the table and squeezed it lightly. She inclined her head slightly to the left, acknowledging my warning as I allowed the construct to dissipate.

“A curious thing, that seeking clarity would be taken as offence,” the Pilgrim said. “Regardless, there is precedent.”

The Proceran mouthpiece bowed again.

“As far as the year seventy-four, Chosen recognized as titled advisors have been allowed to address to the Highest Assembly directly,” the man said. “As far one hundred and eleven, the same have been granted right of involvement with negotiations held with foreign powers.”

Seventy-four, huh. That was the year eight hundred ninety, by the Imperial calendar – Procerans begun theirs after the founding of the Principate, which had only taken place a year after Triumphant’s fall. Considering the current Imperial year was thirteen hundred and twenty-seven, that was not a young precedent. It shouldn’t matter, though, and if I’d picked up on that, Aisha should have as well. Living up to my expectation, the Staff Tribune advanced where we remained silent.

“Proceran custom is not universally binding,” she pointed out. “There is no such precedent for our delegation. Regardless, right of involvement would not equate right of interrogation .”

The middle-aged diplomat smothered a smile. A mistake had been made.

“Queen Eleanor Fairfax granted privilege to voice thoughts and questions freely to the contemporary Wizard of the West, after her coronation,” the man said. “This is a matter of public record. That privilege has been maintained through every known Choosing since.”

I kept my face rigid. Was that true? It might very well be. Records were sparse about the Old Kingdom, nowadays, save those that related to mundane matters – where the Empire’s rule tended to come out as a more prosperous, if also more tyrannical, alternative. My teacher had been thorough in taking the knife to anything that could feasibly become fodder for a hero’s rise, and knowledge about past Wizards of the West would have been high on that list of proscriptions. Except he wouldn’t have been able expunge Proceran records, not in depth anyway. The man’s heartbeat was steady, which could be an indication he was telling the truth – or merely that he was a very good liar.

“The Proceran delegation has not recognized ours as being representative of the Kingdom of Callow,” Grandmaster Talbot said, cool voice cutting clearly through the hesitation. “Only of the Queen in Callow, making such precedent irrelevant. Which it would be even if otherwise, unless by some labyrinthine exercise of reason an equivalence between the attempted murderer of Queen Catherine and the ancient servants of the now-extinct House Fairfax was established. Which it was not.”

Brandon fucking Talbot, I thought, smothering a grin. Riding in lance high at the last moment, proper knight that he was.

“Lack of recognition for Proceran law endangers the entire process of treaty-making,” the middle-aged diplomat warned.

“Forceful imposition of foreign customs on the same process is not a standard this delegation is willing to establish,” Aisha replied pleasantly. “We do not recognize the attempt to establish precedent by the Proceran delegation, and move the first issue on the program should now be addressed.”

“Is this to be who you truly are, Catherine Foundling?” the Grey Pilgrim said, soft voice carrying across the pavilion. “A villain hiding behind petty excuses, unwilling to even speak with those you deem foes?”

My fingers clenched. The fucker. He had a lot of nerves saying that, after he’d tacitly allowed the Saint to try to kill me under a godsdamned truce banner. I leaned forward to – let him win the small things, so long as you get what you came for . My teeth came down and I bit off my tongue, knowing I would not be able to keep silent otherwise. If Masego’s weakness was the need for utter precision, then mine was the inability to just keep my fucking mouth shut. Blood filled my mouth as Winter lazily coursed through my veins, repairing the self-inflicted damage. I swallowed as discretely as I could. The violent urge to respond was not gone, but the immediacy had ebbed. I kept my eyes on Prince Amadis, who was eyeing me with a mixture of disgust and fascination. I bared reddened teeth at him, watching his muscles clench to suppress a flinch.

“Shall we proceed, Your Grace?” I asked.

He inclined his head by a fraction. Good. I’d weathered the first blow, but if I knew anything about patterns that was the first of three. I would have to remain wary. Aisha had thought it odd that the Procerans had not fought back harder on the terms of truce and retreat being the first subject addressed, but now we knew why. They’d intended on flipping the table before it even came to that. Now, though, they were stuck actually discussing it. Withdrawal from the Tenth Crusade for the royals had never been in the cards, much as it irked me. For them to put their seal to a treaty binding them to that would be high treason and sustained heresy under Proceran law. One of the ancient First Princes had passed that motion through the Highest Assembly, after a few Arlesite principalities dropped out of one of the crusades against the Kingdom of the Dead. Their agitations in the south while the rest of the Principate was busy dying up north had been so deeply despised by the surviving princes they’d been willing to limit their own prerogatives to see the deserters punished. No, our wiggle room was narrower than that. The first opening was that, technically speaking, the Tenth Crusade had been declared on Praes. It would be damaging to their reputation to make a deal with me, but not actually illegal.

The second was that I wasn’t asking for peace, only a truce. The terms we were after were eighteen months where none of the signatories or soldiers under their command could enter Callow, which was where we first got shafted by the premises agreed on. They managed to have it defined as ‘the lands under the rule of the Queen in Callow’, which gave them some flexibility. The moment a part of the kingdom renounced my rule, it was fair game again and they could get involved without breaking the letter of the agreement. Or, and I was just guessing here, if a disavowed heroine like the Saint just happened cut my head off – well, it would be convenient coincidence that there were no longer any lands under the rule of the Queen in Callow, wouldn’t it? I was going to have to watch my back very, very carefully in the coming months. Eve more so than usual. Aisha began bargaining forthree years of truce and slowly allowed herself to be whittled down to fourteen months, though at least she got a concession out of it. The fantassins across the field were in the employment of the princes and princesses attending, but that was a matter of contract. Those could be released, at which point the terms would no longer apply to them. Horse-trading for six months less of truce, Aisha managed to extract they’d sign the treaty as well. None of the companies would be able to just sign up with the Iron Prince’s host instead.

A goodwill clause forbidding the fantassins to simply disband their companies and reform under a different name was written in, because even I had seen that loophole coming. It was when we moved to the second subject, supplies, that Thief’s predictions came true and they began their attempt to fuck us in earnest. You’d think they’d at least provide dinner first. Bad form, Amadis. Going at it with only wine made it look like they thought we were easy.

“As a sign of good faith, we would require that the Army of Callow continue to provide supplies while negotiations are ongoing, at the previously agreed cost,” Prince Amadis requested, meeting my eyes directly.

It wasn’t the first time they’d tried that. Fairly early on they’d narrowed in on the fact that my diplomatic training was lacking compared to Aisha’s or Talbot’s, and since they’d tried to get me involved as much as possible. Best way for them to do that was to ditch the mouthpiece and let the Prince of Iserre do the talking: he had enough status that etiquette dictated I couldn’t just foist the thing off to Aisha if he spoke to me directly. It was a play on their part, we both knew that. But it also left me with no real reason to call them out, and if these talks imploded because I’d walked out without a damned good reason? That was the story of a villain queen so arrogant she was willing to starve dozens of thousands for perceived insults. It did not bode well for me. This was going to be a pivot, I knew that and the Pilgrim most definitely did. It meant every word spoken today had weight . I’d be eroding at my own gains if I pulled out now, and even if it likely wouldn’t be enough to flip the entire story the opposition didn’t need that, strictly speaking. Just my position being weakened would make it much easier to kill me. Was this the second blow? No, the confrontation was too indirect. The Pilgrim had made himself the speaker for Above, it wasn’t something that could be handed to Amadis like a plate of pastries.

“While we are not willing to make that concession, we share your worry on the appearance of coercion,” I blandly replied.

Meaning it wouldn’t look good if it appeared we were negotiating with a loaded crossbow pointed at their balls, though we were both aware there were plenty crossbows today to go around. The Jacks had confirmed Hasenbach had her own scrying-capable mages in play, called the Order of the Red Lion. We also knew, from Masego, that they were at least a decade behind Praesi spell formulas when it came to that, which meant they couldn’t do relays and their range was limited: they could chain the reports manually, but that was tricky business. Hierophant’s best guess for the crusaders getting news from the battle at the Red Flower Vales was a delay of two days. Knowing Black, he was very unlikely to gamble it all on the first day. He’d stretch it out through series of fortifications, made even more efficient by the narrow valleys and steep slopes of the Vales. That provided us with some room to manoeuver.

“We are willing to immediately provide three days’ worth of supplies, at the agreed on cost, to prevent that misunderstanding,” I continued calmly.

Prince Amadis’ heartbeat quickened. Anger. Yeah, you princely shit. We saw that one coming. There was still risk involved, should Papenheim somehow win an immediate and crushing victory – or, more probably, if Black decided a strategic retreat out of the Vales was the correct decision – but odds were the crusaders would have to make the deal without knowing the outcome. They really wanted to avoid that, of course. But outright feeding them for three days yanked away their pretext to push for better terms. They could still delay until the days were past, but then we’d be the ones with grounds to protest bad faith. And we both know Kegan is coming. Your window of opportunity is narrow. If they failed to make terms before the Deoraithe arrived, their bargaining position took a hit. Juniper had urged me to send Larat to fetch Kegan’s host, and I’d already made up my mind to agree if we didn’t walk out with a deal by the day’s end. It was a naked threat, sure, and before the meeting began I’d worried about souring the process by resorting to it. But they were aready pushing back pretty hard, and if they were stretching things out on purpose threats were not a line I was unwilling to cross.

“The gesture is appreciated,” Amadis said evenly. “However, I worry this could be misconstrued as impropriety. Rumours of bribery would damage the reputation of all involved.”

My eyes narrowed. We were making the crusaders pay for the supplies, it was hardly a fucking bribe. Princes were touchy about their reputation, though, so while it wasn’t a good reason it was a halfway plausible one. And it wasn’t a reply we anticipated, though we should have. I glanced at Aisha, but she could be no help. Fuck. There was probably a way out of this, but I couldn’t think of one at the moment.

“We can table the matter for the moment,” I conceded grudgingly.

“As you say,” the Prince of Iserre replied, the hint of a smile on his lips as he inclined his head.

Aisha bowed in her seat, then addressed the table.

“We now address the third subject on the program,” the Supply Tribune said, “as requested by the Callowan delegation. Provenance and direction of promised coin.”

In other words, who was going to foot the bill for the supplies they were getting. That was going to be one of the trickier bits, Vivienne had told me. The Procerans were going to try to pass it all to Hasenbach, but we might have a way around that. For ‘practical reasons’ we were going to suggest they provide the coin themselves, though it would be framed as a loan on the part of the First Prince towards them. Our turn to screw them over the negotiation premises, for this one. As an expeditionary force of the First Prince, they had legal grounds to agree to that – if they were Hasenbach’s mandated minions, anything falling under war reparations was ultimately her responsibility to pay for. Aisha had noted some of them might consider it a worthwhile trade off to have the First Prince owe them money, since by leveraging that debt they might avoid political retaliation for a retreat. Thief had been more dubious, arguing that they’d balk since Cordelia might manage to get out of paying them anything back. It was going to come down to finesse.

“The delegation recognizes the Chosen known as the Grey Pilgrim, formal advisor to the Prince of Iserre,” the mouthpiece intoned.

Well, shit. We were halfway through the list now, so in retrospective I should have seen it coming.

“In matter of direction, I seek clarification,” the Pilgrim said. “The Principate of Procer is currently at war with the Dread Empire of Praes. As it could be considered treason for any coin paid through this treaty to come to gild Imperial coffers through either commerce or tribute, a question must first be addressed. Does the Queen in Callow intend to pursue formal independence from the Tower?”

I closed my eyes and thought. Why would he care about the gold? Coin didn’t mean shit to heroes. No, he had a reason to ask this that shaped a story. Independence from the Tower . Callow already was independent, effectively speaking, but there’d been no open break. Malicia and I knew it was just a matter of time, but the current fiction it wasn’t was useful for us both. If it was discarded, what was the result? Most likely, Malicia had to declare I was in rebellion even if she did nothing immediate about it. That was the part that had me wary, though. She couldn’t do anything about it right now, not with Ashur marauding the coasts and a city freshly sacked. So why would the old man be after that? Pilgrim might not know about Nok, though , I mused. No, wrong way to think about this. If this was a political play it’d be the Procerans doing the talking. Since it was the Pilgrim, he was leaning on the pivot for some reason. Malicia declared me a rebel. What did that mean, in the greater scheme of things? Ah, shit. Evil turns on Evil . That was his play. And it was a story old as the First Dawn, too, so if I caught even the hem of it in my fingers it was going to drag me through seventy fucking Hells. Stories repeated so often they were considered self-evident truths had a way of pushing themselves to the fore no matter what the people involved wanted.

All right, then. What could I do to avoid the pitfall?

Couldn’t argue there was no need to have the talk, this time, since that could be taken as me trying to frame the Procerans for treason. It’d turn this from truce talks to ‘Evil queen lays a cunning trap’, and that fucked everything up. I couldn’t lie in front of the Pilgrim, he’d see through it and that got me back in the deep even if ‘the Heavens told me it was untrue’ might not hold up too well as a negotiating position. Flatly admitting I was going to just led me to a different problem, so that was straight out. Could I maybe keep this contained, force an oath whatever was spoken on the subject wouldn’t get out of this pavilion? No , I decided. I didn’t have enough of a leg to stand on, and it wasn’t like the Procerans would jump for joy at the prospect of being oath-bound to someone holding a fae mantle . If you can’t dodge, attack , I thought. Instead of avoiding his story, what story could I make? Liberating rebel wouldn’t hold, not while I was wearing a crown. I’d only ever managed to squeak into heroic Roles when the opposition was... less than flexible, anyway. Treacherous lieutenant to Malicia? I could fit the boots, but it wouldn’t get me anywhere I wanted to be. Praesi stories would just make it worse, as a rule, so it had to be either Callowan or old and worn enough it was up for grabs by anyone.

Unless... Akua . She’d been on her own idea of good behaviour since Second Liesse, which had taken a while for me to puzzle out. She should have been scheming to get out, and to be frank she probably was, but she was also very much trying to be useful. To get out of the box more often, in part, but there were deeper reasons. I had beaten her, or at least she believed as much. According to the sack full of razor blades that was Praesi philosophy, that meant she was my follower now. That was an old story, and though the Wasteland had practically turned it into a religion it wasn’t just a Wasteland favourite. Or Evil’s in general. Early crew of heroes runs into a seeming enemy they fight out of misunderstanding, then fall together either facing a common foe or when the misunderstanding is finally cleared. Everyone’s friends, some cackling villain gets stabbed in unison and the Heavens pat everyone’s ass approvingly. Hells, that was more or less how Archer had ended up joining the Woe now that I thought about it. So I needed to be metaphorical Archer, fighting the crusaders out of a silly misunderstanding somehow involving three bloody days of battle and at least thirty thousand dead.

I am a crusader , I thought. What did I want? To fuck over the Wasteland, a sentiment I wasn’t exactly unsympathetic to. Kill Catherine Foundling, since she’s an abomination and also an asshole who keeps killing our guys. How did I cease being the asshole who kept killing their guys? Well, maybe if they stopped trying to kill m- no, not productive. Plenty of heroes were guy-killing assholes, I reminded myself, in and of itself it wasn’t a deal breaker. Larger perspective. Looking down from Above, what was happening in Callow? Praes is still in charge , I thought. The borders, the separate laws and the coinage wouldn’t matter to something like the Hashmallim. A villain was still on the throne, the former apprentice of the Black Knight. My army was more than half Callowan, these days, but I still had a detachment of mass-murdering Praesi household troops and the greenskins. Goblins had an unfortunate propensity for stabbing, and orcs did eat people. Wasn’t even that large a part of their diet, and it wasn’t like they ate people alive – it was illegal, if nothing else – but even occasional corpse-eating did tend to disqualify people from standing on the shiny side of the fence. As far as Above was concerned, I was a Dread Empress wearing the Queen of Blades’ clothes.

But I was in charge in their eyes, wasn’t I? The legalities we’d been quibbling about all day didn’t mean dust in the eyes of the Gods. That was the whole reason to remove me, wasn’t it? A villainous ruler for Callow was bad for business, regardless of the earthly practicalities involved. Which meant that if I made a choice, Above took that as a choice for all of Callow. There was an opening there. If I pulled the rug out from under the heroes, it worked for the entire kingdom. My eyes narrowed. I didn’t have to stop being a – unfairly characterized, I believed – murderous asshole. I just had to be their murderous asshole. Metaphorically speaking. Probably. And the way to achieve that... what was the name of Cordelia’s Friendly League of Upstanding Nations again? Ah, right. I cleared my throat, meeting the Grey Pilgrim’s eyes with a grin that was all teeth.

“To answer your question,” I said, “I intend to seek signatory status with the Grand Alliance within the year.”

Pandemonium erupted, the Pilgrim’s face went blank and my grin only got wider.

Chapter 22: Trip

“A war fought and won for the wrong reasons, under the wrong cause, can be a greater threat to the Praes than simple defeat. Maleficent the First spoke of villains raising their own gallows, but failed to add that the killing stroke in a hanging comes from the height of the drop.”
– Extract from ‘The Death of the Age of Wonders’, a treatise by Dread Empress Malicia

“Preposterous,” Prince Arnaud of Cantal blustered.

He wasn’t the only one to speak up in the aftermath of that particular trebuchet stone being lobbed, but he was by far the loudest. And his heartbeat had not changed in the slightest, though his face was the very picture of angry befuddlement. All right, that one bore watching. I’d never met anyone this good at acting outside of the High Lords and maybe a handful of Named. I leaned back into my seat and riffled through my cloak pockets until I had my pipe in hand. The small satchel of wakeleaf parted under my fingers and I poured the contents into the chamber. I had a few matches, but also a quicker way. I coughed until Masego turned his attention from the book he was not-so-discretely reading under the table to me. I tapped the side of the pipe he’d gifted me with a finger. Scoffing, he flicked his wrist and fire bloomed within the chamber.

“Thank you, Lord Hierophant,” I drawled. “As for the many statements of the Proceran delegation, I’ll point you to the Chosen known as the Grey Pilgrim. A truth-teller of great skill, as I understand it.”

The gaze of everyone in the pavilion moved to the old man, still standing and devoid of expression. That’s right, I thought. I’m not lying. I didn’t have to. I very much doubted the Grand Alliance would just hand me a tankard and invite me to sit at the table, but even a refusal would need more than just Hasenbach involved. The Ashurans would have to put the question through committees, unless their quasi-king Magon Hadast intervened, and more importantly the Dominion would have to go through the Majilis. Their inept, bickering and deeply divided equivalent to the Highest Assembly. The entire process could take months even for a refusal. And if they accepted? Well, it wasn’t like I wasn’t intending to make deals with all of them eventually. It was a necessary component to the Liesse Accords being adopted. It was a different approach than I’d intended, but so long as it worked what did I care?

“The Queen in Callow did not speak a lie,” the Pilgrim flatly said.

I’d been a bit too much to swallow to tell them outright I was telling the truth, apparently. Nice to know even the Peregrine could be petty.

“This is a trick,” Princess Adeline of Orne insisted. “You are one of the Damned.”

Fancy Proceran talk for villain, I took it. The Chosen and the Damned, huh. Somehow I suspected a lot of foreign heroes who ended up fighting against Procer also ended up, by pure coincidence of course, painted with damnation brush. I breathed in the smoke, then allowed it to billow upwards with my exhale.

“And?” I said. “I already offered the Pilgrim passage through Arcadia if your army was willing to assault Praes directly. I’m not exactly unwilling to kick in the Empire’s teeth, Princess, and I was under the impression that was exactly what the Tenth Crusade was about. Or are there other concerns I don’t know about?”

My smile turned a little colder at that. She did not flinch, but her heartbeat quickened in fear. The taste of it was just as intoxicating as the wine I was oathbound not to drink. Brave soul, that one, but out of her depth today. She wasn’t in on the game the Pilgrim was playing. Prince Amadis began to speak, but the Pilgrim hastily cleared his throat to stay the man’s tongue. Wouldn’t do to have the mortals fuck up your scheme, would it?

“As a vassal state of the Tower-” the old man began.

“Is the Proceran delegation turning back on the premises of this negotiation?” Aisha interrupted smilingly. “You are addressing the Queen in Callow, Grey Pilgrim, by mutual agreement.”

I beamed at the lovely tribune. Ah, Aisha. Always quick on the uptake, wasn’t she? If it didn’t have ‘terrible idea’ written all over it in red ink, it would be tempting to give her a whirl.

“Over twenty thousand men were butchered by the Army of Callow,” Malanza spoke up. “You expect us to ignore this?”

“All a misunderstanding, evidently,” I replied calmly. “I believed your expeditionary force to be an attempt at invasion. I regret what came from it, but you must understand that Callowans have a chequered history with armies crossing our borders after using massive sorcerous rituals.”

There was a muted sound as Brandon Talbot choked on his tongue. The implied comparison to the Dread Empire ruffled more than a few feathers on the other side of the table, but they couldn’t exactly deny the bird’s eye view of it. Hasenbach’s burning of a passage was admittedly more grounded than your average Dread Emperor’s crowning disaster, but the similarities were there.

“Your alleged intent to seek alignment with the Grand Alliance is irrelevant to the negotiations being held today,” the Pilgrim said.

I glanced at Aisha. I was pulling one on him so far but it wouldn’t do to get cocky. The more we conversed the higher the chances he turned the tables.

“That is inaccurate,” the Taghreb aristocrat replied. “As is would be unlawful to be a signatory of the Alliance while paying any form of tribute to the Tower, providing this statement served the purpose of answering your question.”

So , I mused, watching Amadis across the table even though he was not the object of my thoughts. You going to keep fighting this one, Pilgrim, or give ground and rally for the third? I’d cut the grass under his feet by presenting myself as a possible ally, right in the wake of a bloody battle that saw no clear winner. He couldn’t work the ‘heroes with their back up against the wall’ story angle with a foundation that weak, not while the Procerans were fed and under truce. ‘Evil turns on Evil’ had been his move, but I should have tiptoed around the pitfall by stating in front of a truth-teller that I was willing to slap some red crosses onto the armour of the Army of Callow and fight the Good fight. That’d make me the one prick in every heroic band that crossed lines for the Greater Good, if it worked. The Lone Swordsman of continental coalitions, if you would. Two for two, so far. Parry and riposte. But we both know it’s the third one that matters, don’t we ? I puff at my pipe, allowing the wakeleaf to fill my lungs. The old man was studying me in silence, but I did not meet his eyes.

“The clarification was sufficient,” Pilgrim finally said, and sat down.

Cutting his losses, I presumed, since I was no longer willing to engage. I remained silent as negotiations picked up again through intermediaries. The Procerans made an argument that reparations were not needed if this was all an accident, but Aisha turned it around by noting that the sale of supplies was a different matter entirely. That the terms of the truce specifically did not prevent them from entering Praes took the wind out of their sails, since they had to maintain the pretence that their ‘expeditionary force’ wasn’t an army meant to invade Callow – if they strayed from that, they were entering a nightmarish quagmire of war reparations and official apologies none of them could really afford back in Procer. My attention began to wane as the hours passed, tediously taking us to Afternoon Bell, but I forced myself to follow everything closely. I could not afford to be taken unawares when the Pilgrim intervened again. Yet none of the heroes spoke so much as a word, and I grew tenser the longer the sword remained hanging over my head. My side got its way when it came to terms of payment for the supplies, though the Procerans bargained down to only needing to pay a quarter of the total sum directly out of their pockets even if it was framed as a loan from Hasenbach to them. Odds were the First Prince would flip them the finger and that quarter was all I’d ever see, but considering I was essentially selling them back their own supplies I’d take it anyway. Even just having the documents would give me something to use when I had to treat with Hasenbach herself down the line.

The diplomatic claptrap continued, polite verbal fencing back and forth across the table. The crusaders tried to fuck us over what land was actually recognized as ‘under the rule of the Queen in Callow’, and to my distaste got the better of it. I couldn’t exactly make the argument that the Red Flower Vales were mine when they were factually in the hands of the Legions of Terror, and that meant the northern crusade could move against Black down there without breaking our terms. It’d be months before they even got out of Callow, I told myself. And it would take even more time for them to recover and march on the Vales. By then Black would either have won or lost against Papenheim. If he’d won, I’d have to trust that he could hold the valleys regardless. I couldn’t afford for him not to. And if he lost, well, the northern crusade would still be forbidden to go further than the Vales until the truce ran out. At that point I’d have more immediate problems anyway. We weren’t halfway to Evening Bell and there was only a single issue that hadn’t been addressed, guarantees for the treaty – though we’d have to double back to the supplies since that one had been kicked down the slope by Prince Amadis. It was beginning to look like we’d walk out of the pavilion with an actual agreement before nightfall, which had me wary.

The Procerans could have delayed much more than they had. We’d expected them to, as long as the battle for the Vales was undecided. This was going well, which meant I was about to have my knuckles rapped. Except the Pilgrim didn’t get up. It was the mouthpiece that addressed the subject, and my fingers clenched under the table. This wasn’t going to be straightforward negotiations, since it was about the mechanisms that would be enforcing the treaty. I wanted oaths to the Heavens out of everyone involved, witnessed by a hero, but Aisha had pretty bluntly informed me that wasn’t going to happen even if I offered to make an oath of my own. Our best guess was that they’d push for something along the lines of the agreement being made public so anyone breaking it would have their reputation tarnished. We wouldn’t accept that, since they might very well get away with breaking a treaty with a villain with praise for being clever in screwing over the enemy instead of any backlash for dealing in bad faith. The compromise we’d be working for was material value being left behind as guarantee, as well as staggered departure for the Proceran host so we’d have a knife at their throat if they tried to double-cross us. Breaking a promise to the bearer of a fae mantle would come back to haunt them, anyway, so this was mostly a precaution to account for any outside solution we didn’t know about.

Except after Aisha proposed my terms – as a starting position to be bargained down from, to my chagrin – the Procerans didn’t offer what we’d expected.

“As a sign of good faith, we are willing to offer a royal hostage,” the middle-aged diplomat said. “We would, however, require an accompanying observer and a guarantee of safety for both.”

That had to be the Pilgrim’s play, but I wasn’t seeing it. There wasn’t a good angle to use with the supplies deal, at least none that I could see, and after that there was nothing left to negotiate about. All right, then, royal hostage. What could he do with that? Assassinate the hostage after I took custody of them, so this entire treaty was ripped in half. If Malicia had made me an offer like this, it would be what I expected. Except that this wasn’t the way Pilgrim did things. Sure, he’d basically put his seal on the Saint offing me under a – glamoured, I had to concede that much – truce banner, but that plan didn’t fit with the way he’d approached this so far. Letting me die for the greater good was one thing, and he’d been pretty upfront that was essentially his intent when we first sat down for our fireside chat. But murder? No, that was going against the grain. He could be banking on either one of my people fucking up or Praes being out for blood, though. Not outright bloodying his hand, but shaping the situation so it would unfold the way he needed it to. That I could buy.

Except I’d have the hostage neck deep in wards in the safest place I could find, and Malicia wanted to use Amadis’ gaggle of expansionists to make a mess in Procer. That wasn’t to say if she decided it would be useful to weaken me she wouldn’t assassinate royalty that wasn’t Malanza or Milenan, the two she’d ordered me not to kill. But unless she had Assassin to call on, which I was almost certain she didn’t, she’d have a very hard time pulling this off. I had the fucking Hierophant designing my defences, these days, and the Guild of Assassins in my pocket. It wasn’t impossible but it would require a significant investment of resources at a juncture when her backyard was already on fire. Pilgrim might not know a High Lord’s seat got sacked and the court is up in arms about it, though, I mused. Lack of information? No, I could never assume that. Not with the Augur on the other side, and the pile of aspects the heroes had to draw from. Hells, it wasn’t even off the table that one of them had a godsdamned angel whispering secrets in their ear. In what circumstances was giving me a royal hostage the correct move, assuming they didn’t get killed?

If he wanted this treaty to work.

Was it that simple? That’d been treating him like an unmovable enemy when he was actually willing to work with me? No. Be cold. Be clear. Be a creature of logic, because the moment you allow your judgement to be affected is the moment you lose. My understanding of the Pilgrim, as based in fact, was that he was no more inclined to compromise than I. I desperately wanted someone on the other side to be willing to work with me, so I was painting what I wanted to see on the canvas. If he’d allowed this, it was because he saw a path to victory through it. And I couldn’t discern what he wanted to accomplish from my point of view, so I would have to adopt his. I am the Pilgrim , I thought. I have seen dozens if not hundreds of the villains, and I am apt at reading them. My truth-telling abilities may run deeper than that. How did I trick Catherine Foundling, if I understood what she was after? She wanted the treaty to succeed, so – no, mistake. That was the shatranj board on the ground, not the one he was trying to win on. The villain queen has wiggled out of my plan to pit her against other villains by trying to make herself into the suspect ally on the side of the Tenth Crusade. That is an issue, since it makes her difficult to assault. But she took a stance, and every stance has vulnerabilities. What is hers? She is behaving like an ally, looking down from Above.

How much effort would it actually take, to enforce that?

My grip loosened under the table. So that was it. I’d already done it to myself accidentally with the Lone Swordsman, back in the day: the Pilgrim’s play was a redemption story. It didn’t matter that I was in charge of Callow, if I was no longer a villain. Sure, most redemption stories ended in death. Sacrifice to make up for previous sins and all that, passing the torch to someone that had the same heroism but less blood on their hands. That was just spice in the wine, though, since it got him all the benefits of Callow not longer heading down the cliff without having to deal the issues inherent in keeping me around after my bloody history. In a way, this could be considered an elegantly subtle assassination attempt. The Grey Pilgrim or someone he handpicked according to his understanding of me would be the observer in the Proceran terms, and then all he had to do was wait and let the story do the heavy lifting. I laughed softly, ignoring the odd looks it got me. Gods, I’d underestimated him. He was playing me on the earthly board to win on the story one. Callow, of which I was queen, needed the truce for practical reasons. I needed the truce because it was a first step in getting the Accords signed. And so I would accept, knowing he was trying to kill me through it.

I admired the calculated methods Black used to kill heroes. I’d learned from them, emulated the techniques when dealing with the heroes who came into Callow. In that same distant way, I could admire what the Pilgrim had done here. My teacher was a villain, so he came at it from the perspective that the stories would get him killed. So he avoided them. The Grey Pilgrim was a hero, so he came at it from the perspective that the stories would get him what he wanted. So he leant into them. From an objective perspective, even if this was very likely meant to kill me, I could only commend how well I was being played. He’d read what I wanted, and was giving it to me in a way that led to his victory. And even deeper than that, he must know that even if I saw through this I’d feel bound to accept. Because I wasn’t Black. I was not a pupil of martyrdom, but I did believe there were things worth dying for. If I paid my dues in blood to the Gods Above, Callow would avoid the slaughter marching towards it. All it required me to do was smile, accept, and kiss the knife that would slit my throat. You have found the thing I most want in the world, and used it to kill me .

There wasn’t a fucking devil in existence that could have played it better.

“And the identity of the hostage and observer?” I asked, breaking in before Aisha could pursue the matter.

“As the leader of this host, it is my duty to serve as the hostage,” Prince Amadis Milenan said, inclining his head towards me.

And it was no doubt a fortunate coincidence that this honourable sacrifice would make him the hero who’d gone into the wolf’s den for the sake of his men instead of the ambitious fuckup who’d pissed away over twenty thousand men trying annex Callow. The other royals would return to Procer, where Hasenbach wouldn’t be able to blame them – Prince Amadis, after all, was the official leader of the army. And the man himself would be out of the First Prince’s reach to punish, not that she’d be able to after he’d become a hostage to save his men. He’d come out of this smelling like roses, a tragic figure who had fallen prey to the wickedness of the Black Queen. Meanwhile his allies in Procer would be building the altar of his legend so when he returned it would be to the praise of the thousands instead of blackened by inglorious defeat. Burning Hells. Even when I won, with these people, they still didn’t lose. Both sides getting their way had felt like a better principle before I’d had to look the truth of it in the eye.

“And I volunteer myself as the observer,” the Grey Pilgrim added calmly.

I didn’t humour him with a reply. We already knew my answer. I leaned towards Aisha.

“I’m going to agree to this,” I whispered in her ear. “Use it to extract concessions over supplies. You’ll find them more flexible than anticipated.”

Her dark eyes were troubled, but she was a Wastelander through and through. Her face became a mask and she did not argue with me in front of the enemy. I leaned back and my eyes turned to the Pilgrim. I was past pretending this wasn’t his game.

“I’ll accept these terms,” I said. “I believe we’re done here?”

The old man inclined his head.

“So we are,” he replied.

I rose to my feet, flicking a glance at Prince Amadis.

“Aisha Bishara speaks with my full authority,” I said. “She will finish these negotiations in my name.”

It was not proper etiquette, but I did not have it in me to stay seated and smile across the table from a man who’d just arranged my death, however beautifully. I offered the bare necessities of courtesy before leaving, Thief trailing behind me with worried eyes. Hierophant only noticed what was happening when I was halfway out the pavilion, then got up and left without even the semblance of an explanation. I halted and looked up at the descending sun, after I exited the conference. The Pilgrim thought he’d won. But he didn’t understand quite what I was after, did he? That for the Accords to work, there was a need for someone enforcing them from the side of Evil. Or maybe he did, and didn’t believe it would make a difference. In the end, a mistake had been made today.

Whether it was his or mine, only time would tell.

Interlude: Red The Flowers

“Red the flowers, red the crown
Red this day of bleak renown
How soon they forgot Eleanor
Along every oath they swore

Red the flowers, red the wreath
Red the sword that left the sheath
Now a king lies dead on the grass
Taught the vows of princes pass

Red the flowers, red the grave
Red the biers of knights so brave
They who thrice rode and died
Under banners of olden pride

Red the flowers, red the right
Red the fires this day will light
For every slight there is a price
Ours will be long and paid twice.”

-‘Red The Flowers’, a Callowan rebel song written in the wake of the Proceran occupation of Callow

It had been some time since Amadeus had last inhaled the scent of carnage. The dawn of the third day brought with it strong winds and burning sun: the corpses were rotting in the heat, the smell of them carried to the third line of fortifications in the southern valley. The Iron Prince had ordered a halt to the offensive with nightfall, the crusaders setting camp among the ruined walls and bastion they’d spent the day taking at such great cost. Papenheim was not fresh to the art of war: he knew better than to engage a Praesi army under cover of dark. Especially one that’d had most a year to raise siege engines goblins would field and aim perfectly when the crusaders stumbled along blindly with torches and holy flames. Grem stood by his side atop the tower known as the southern half of the Bloody Twins, the unusually slender orc towering two feet above him. Marshal Grem One-Eye spat over the wall, staring at the enemy stirring in the distance.

“They’re not wasting time,” the orc said. “Papenheim wants to bludgeon through as quick as possible, looks like. You were right about that much.”

Amadeus remained silent, for the moment. Grem had been of the opinion that there’d be probing attacks to weather but no serious offensive until the armies of Levant arrived to reinforce the Iron Prince’s sixty thousand Procerans. The initial span of the war had leant credence to the orc’s prediction, but after the crusaders up north passed through the Stairway the old Lycaonese had begun his march in earnest. There were political considerations at work, the Black Knight suspected. Cordelia Hasenbach had called this crusade and assembled the alliance, but mistrust still reigned between Procer and its temporary allies. Even just the impression that she intended to bleed Levant instead of her own armies would raise the spectre of suspicion within the Grand Alliance. The old fear of Proceran expansionism haunted her regime still. Amadeus could sympathize. Past Dread Emperors had burned all the Empire’s diplomatic bridges so thoroughly most ruins were still actively smouldering. It had taken Alaya more than two decades to craft a rapprochement with Ashur, and it’d still all gone up in flames after only a few months of diplomatic correspondence between Hasenbach and Magon Hadast.

“I’m not so certain he’s fully committed,” Amadeus finally replied. “The First Prince needs blood on the floor to show her allies, but Papenheim has not been careless in his advance. He’s willing to trade but not outright sacrifice.”

“Thinning our numbers is the best way for them to win this,” Grem conceded. “They’ve certainly got the levies to throw away.”

The legions garrisoning the Red Flower Vales numbered six. Twenty-four thousand men in full. The First under Grem was holding the southern passage along with Mok’s Third and Sacker’s Ninth. Marshal Ranker and her Fourth were leading the defence of the northern valleys, commanding the freshly-rebuilt Twelfth and Nekheb’s Tenth. That last legion they’d had to employ sparingly. General Catastrophe, as they were fondly called by their living soldiers, fielded a legion of undead captained by necromancers. But even alone the dragon was a force to reckon with. Combined with foot soldiers they could torch along the enemy at no great loss? Nekheb could turn around a battle, if well deployed. They were also, unfortunately, very vulnerable to heroes. Dragonslaying was an old heroic staple, and there was at least one hero on the opposite side with an archery-related Name. Wanton use would only result in the death of one of their primary assets.

“We’ve been light on losses so far,” Amadeus noted. “And we still hold three of the five defensive lines in both passes. It cost them at least seven thousand to get this far in.”

“Less,” Grem replied. “If our effectiveness estimates on their priests is solid, anyway. We’ll need to start deploying our contingencies today to blunt their momentum.”

Amadeus looked at the glittering wall of steel forming in the distance, brow creasing.

“You hold command,” he said. “I am here in an advisory role.”

The orc barked out a laugh.

“Meddling’s in your blood, Amadeus,” he said. “You can’t help it.”

“And yet my role remains advisory,” the Black Knight mildly replied. “I would caution you that sending Warlock onto the field before the enemy revealed their own Named casters will have consequences, but the the choice is ultimately yours.”

Marshal Grem One-Eye half-squinted at the enemy, then cracked his neck. When they’d been young, the orc had done it purely for the satisfaction. Now his bones creaked and bent with age, the one enemy neither of them could defeat on the field.

“We’ve got a few tricks to deploy before ol’ Red Skies gets off his arse,” Grem decided. “Let’s see how they like the taste of those.”

Amadeus inhaled the scent of it again. Blood and rotting flesh, shit and steel and a hundred other small things drowned out by them. It was still thin, for now.

It would grow stronger before the day was done.

—

Klaus had been raised to the old military dictum of never assaulting a fortress unless you had three times the enemy’s number. Back in the Empire the first Terribilis had noted in his Ars Tactica that twice the number was sufficient if you had spellcaster superiority, but that was a worthless piece of advice for anyone but the Praesi. You couldn’t go up against the Dread Empire and expect your spellslingers to be up to snuff. Much, as he had discovered over the last two days, like you couldn’t expect dwarven siege weapons to be a match for goblin engineering. The first day had been opened by an artillery duel and his host had not come out the better for it. The Empire’s trebuchets and ballistas fired further and swifter than the catapults and trebuchets bought from the Kingdom Under, and the knock-off scorpions brought by the Arlesites had been about useful as tits on a sparrow. Not a single one of the them had survived long enough to come into firing range. If the old general had twice as many men he could have swept through one line of defence after another, taking the losses as he went. But as things stood? If he went it half-cocked, less than a third of his army would emerge from the meat grinder to set foot in Callow.

The outer walls in both valleys were old Proceran fortifications taken by the Kingdom of Callow the last time the border principalities botched an invasion of the Vales, later repurposed to serve as defensive lines facing the other way. They were, essentially, piles of stone twenty feet high with steeply sloped hills behind them the Praesi had set their engines on. No bastions, no towers, nothing more elaborate than stones piled up high with mortar holding them together. One-Eye and the Carrion Lord had defended it with a bare few hundred, regulars and sappers, so he’d launched an escalade under cover of the artillery duel. Within the first half-hour of the offensive he’d lost over two thousand soldiers. Sappers lobbed their munitions onto the ladders, killing as many with the fall as the explosions, while crossbow volleys fired straight into tightly-packed ranks earned swaths of dead. They’d taken the damned walls, of course. Fortifications that bare couldn’t be held against his numbers, and he’d half-expected the enemy would let him have them uncontested. Instead the Praesi had defended for less than an hour, taken maybe three dozen casualties and retreated with all their engines intact. That’d set the tone for the second day.

Another four thousand gone to take the kind of defences you saw in your average Lycaonese border town. Low walls and towers, a single central bastion. He’d sent the heroes in with the first wave, with massed mage support, and run into a godsdamned wall. The fortifications were warded so thoroughly nothing he had could crack them in the slightest, and the grounds fifty feet from the foot of the walls were seeded what Praesi called lily fields. Hidden pits with spikes at the bottom. The assault’s momentum shattered, Legion mages began torching everything in sight and the entire attack would have collapsed if not for a Chosen called the Fortunate Fool. Klaus had considered the man essentially useless, considering he had truck with more herbs than your average alchemist, but the hero had stumbled his way onto a safe path through the lily field by sheer happenstance. The other Chosen rallied the levies and led an assault on the walls in the southern valley. None of the Damned had come out to meet them, at least, something he’d been assured was a consequence of the White Knight and the Witch of the Woods refraining from entering the fray.

It’d taken most of the day to force the Praesi back in both valleys. He’d called a halt after that, well aware his men did not have the stomach to march into whatever nastiness the Carrion Lord had awaiting. Or the ability to match goblin nightsight: all torches and priestly glows would accomplish was mark targets for the enemy siege. Now the third dawn had come, and steel would be bared again. The defensive line ahead would be the beginning of the real fight, he knew. On both sides, though at different lengths from a bird’s eye view, the valleys narrowed into passes flanked by cliffs. Those natural defences had been the seat of Callowan fortresses for centuries, the rock Proceran offensives broke on. The Bloody Twins, Alamans called them. Massive towers forty feet high sitting atop slopes at an angle of almost sixty degrees. There were dirt paths leading up, but they were not wide. Forcing the Twins was going to be ugly business, but it had to be done. They were the high point of both valleys, the terrain going down towards Callow after them. Claiming the high ground would allow Klaus’ fucking engines to finally start being more than expensive targets, and with the fortresses still awaiting ahead he’d need every advantage he could get.

Klaus swatted Ratbiter absent-mindedly to keep him from chewing away at the red marigolds that grew everywhere in the valleys, and were allegedly responsible for their name. They were said to have been gold, once upon a time, but had since grown red from all the blood spilled on these grounds over the centuries.

“De Guison,” he called out, and the mageling snapped to attention. “Contact the northern front. We’re beginning our attacks.”

The man made a three-act play out of obeying a simple order, but the old general’s attention had already left him. He gestured for his personal hornblower to sound the offensive and eyed the grounds he needed to take before getting to the southern Twin. Almost four hundred yards of more or less flat grounds, before getting at the foot of the slope. Then another half hundred, marching up one of the continent’s most viciously designed natural fortresses. He was going to lose thousands just on the approach, and that’d be if the Praesi had no surprised awaiting. He knew better than to expect that. There was a reason he’d ordered for the Fortunate Fool to run ahead of the first ranks, the silly-looking idiot in silks taking point so good soldiers need not die. His instincts had been correct, he discovered shortly.

The Chosen walked over innocuous-looking grounds and was blown high into the sky by an explosion about a hundred yards from the bottom of the slope, landing on his back a dozen feet forward. Where he blew up again. Under Klaus’ sceptical gaze, five explosions were chained in a row until the man arrived halfway through the evidently mined field. He got up, looking a little charred, and patted himself in panic to put out the flames on his chest. The Prince of Hannoven was familiar with the effects of Praesi demolition charges, and he silently reassessed how bloody difficult this Chosen would be to actually put down. A few streaks of lightning shot down from atop the Twin but the Fortunate Fool ducked them by a series of very coincidental trips and falls, before waddling back to the Proceran lines and loudly claiming victory. Klaus now had a basic notion of enemy mage range and the concentration of buried charges. The assault proper could begin.

“Priests forward,” he ordered his standard-bearer. “Sweep for the munitions.”

The robed brothers and sisters of the House of Light strode forward as ordered, and it was but a few moments before streaks of light began hammering at the ground in an advancing wave. The growing narrowness of the valley here ran to their advantage, for once. Less territory to cover. Munitions detonated in plumes of earth and smoke one after another, destroying the traps at the unfortunate cost of breaking up the terrain. Advance would be even more difficult. The enemy waited patiently for them to finish, silhouettes atop the tower unmoving. The murder holes and larger openings for scorpions were bristling with steel, a promise of death yet to come.

“Mages and engines, forward,” Klaus told his standard-bearer. “Our vanguard is to prepare for advance on my signal.”

Never get into a siege with Praesi , he’d once told his niece. He still believed it, though he had no other choice. The Legions of Terror as forged by the Reforms were one of the finest war machines on the continent, and in this series of valleys he couldn’t even use the major advantage his people had over the Empire. Cavalry. Instead he was forced to play to the enemy’s strengths, to his distaste, and because of it this was not so much war as a slugging match of piled corpses. Dragged forward, the catapults were set down and panes of opaque yellow light formed to protect them.

The third battle for the Vales began.

—

“We are witnessing,” Grem gravely said, “the birth of a Proceran combined arms doctrine.”

Amadeus hummed in agreement.

“It was only a matter of time,” he said. “We showed the effectiveness of it during the Conquest. The Principate was too preoccupied with the civil war to catch up, but they’ve had time to breathe since Hasenbach took power. She gave her uncle free hand to reform the Principate’s war doctrine, and Papenheim is no fool. Catherine faced much the same tactics up north.”

The old orc grunted unhappily.

“If she’d listened to Istrid’s daughter and gone ahead with Bonfire, she wouldn’t have had to,” he said. “It was a solid plan. Would have taken Procer out of the war, and without the Principate the crusade collapses.”

It was a natural consequence of his former apprentice having folded two legions into her Army of Callow that Amadeus had gained plethora eyes and ears among her officer corps. The Duni had mostly used these to keep abreast of her war strategy and arrange his own accordingly. Scribe’s agents in her army, on the other hand, had been waging a war with Alaya’s own spies in the ranks. He’d preferred passing information to her amusingly-named Jacks rather than carrying out the killings through his own proxies, though on occasion more direct intervention had been needed. He was quite pleased, in fact, with how quickly and solidly her network of spies and assassins had grown. The Thief was proving skilled at the art, though it would be years before the Jacks were in the same league as Alaya’s agents or Eudokia’s. Penetration in depth was difficult to achieve with such limited time and coin.

“It would have painted a target on her neck for every single hero on the continent,” Amadeus replied. “The choice was correct.”

“They’re already out for her blood, Amadeus,” Grem grunted. “It’s a crusade, not a petty border dispute.”

“The difference is in being a target or the target,” the green-eyed man said. “No villain can survive the amount of heroic focus Bonfire would have brought. The initial stages would have been a success, but within a few months a band of heroes specifically geared towards killing her would have been grown or assembled.”

“A few months would have been enough to cleave Procer in half,” Grem said.

“Perhaps,” Amadeus shrugged. “But it would have signed her death warrant. She is cleverer than that.”

The hint of pride in his voice at that, he did not suppress. His old friend caught it easily enough.

“She stabbed you, Black,” he growled. “Don’t wave that away as youthful enthusiasm, because we certainly haven’t.”

Eudokia, to his occasional headache, had made that abundantly clear. He’d had to outright order her not to take revenge.

“One who rears a tiger should not complain of stripes,” Amadeus quoted in Mtethwa.

“Your tiger put on a crown and raised an army after stealing three legions,” Grem growled in Kharsum. “We’re past stripes.”

“My tiger beat back an army twice the size of hers strengthened by the two most famous living heroes on Calernia,” the dark-haired man laughed. “Three legions, one of which was always hers, is a paltry price to pay for that.”

“She’s going to turn on the Empire, Black,” the Marshal warned. “We all know it.”

Amadeus leaned against the crenelation as ballistas fired around them, hammering at the shields protecting the Proceran engines. The stones those were lobbing at the tower bounced off harmlessly or shattered. Wekesa had found it an amusing irony that the warding scheme he’d used here was a variation of a Callowan work. The very same that had once protected the walls of Liesse, dispersal of impact across the entire structure. The crusaders could fire at the Twin for months without making a dent, if they did not focus their fire.

“Is the Empire as it currently standsso worthy of survival?” the Black Knight murmured. “I think not. If it cannot adapt, then let it perish. Out of the ashes we will raise something other than a snake devouring its own tail, shattering the world with its throes as it seeks to sate empty hunger.”

“Dangerous words,” Grem said.

“Yet here you stand,” Amadeus said. “Without ever having obeyed your summons back to Ater.”

“It’s illegal to order a Marshal back from an active war front without evidence of treason,” the orc said.

The Duni turned green eyes to his old friend, brow quirking. The orc looked away.

“She won her games,” Grem One-Eye finally said. “But she still played them.”

They left it at that, eyes returning to the unfolding battle. Papenheim had learned over the last two days the price of an infantry advance on Legion-held fortifications, even with dwarven engines providing cover, but he had little other choice than to repeat the previous performance. He could not starve out the defenders, nor did he have another path than the Vales to march through. The old bottleneck that had kept Procer at bay for centuries was bleeding it once more. Grem ordered for mage fire to be held as the crusader vanguard advanced, passing the engines and charging towards the slope. A handful of heroes were at the front, but Amadeus saw no need to intervene. They’d likely be able to shatter the tower gates if they made it there, but there was the rub. If. The orc that was the highest-ranked officer in the Legions of Terror waited until the enemy was fully committed before ordering the mages to send the signal. Up on the mountaintops, faraway, there was an explosion. Months of work by sappers, all for this single moment. Amadeus counted seventy-nine heartbeats before the water began pouring down from the very discreet channel carved into the mountainside.

There was a deep mountain lake, far out of sight. Digging a tunnel through hard rock and corking it with a dike had been a wonder of goblin engineering. He’d been quite amused, hearing that Catherine had dropped a fae lake atop her enemies up north. What the sappers had devised was not so different. The stream of water, quickened by the slopes, hit the outer edge of the Proceran lines. A few were killed by the sheer weight and momentum, but the real damage came from the spread of water sweeping away everything it touched. And continuing, at that same steady pace. Mages moved their shields to contain the situation, struggling to find the the location the water was pouring from – it was hidden by an illusory ward. All they achieved, in the end, was to contain the flood until the pressure grew beyond the ability of their hodgepodge spell formulas to weather. Priests intervened as well, weaving fences of light, but they were not sufficiently organized to form a comprehensive wall. The water went around it. Surprise, Amadeus mused, was the most dangerous weapon in any army’s arsenal. Still, it would not be long before heroes intervened now. There was a flare of Light from Papenheim’s camp moments later, and the illusory ward broke. The fences and shields immediately shifted to block off the opening.

“Send the second signal,” Grem ordered their signal mage.

A streak of red light splashed across the sky, and twenty heartbeats later another explosion sounded. A chunk of the mountainside broke open and water began pouring again. A plan with a single point of failure, after all, was no plan at all.

“The bouquets?” Amadeus asked.

“As soon as they shift,” Grem replied, eyeing the battlefield. “Lukran, tell the sappers I don’t want a single Proceran engine on the field to survive this engagement. They’re naked as babes in the woods.”

Left shieldess, the dwarven machinery was methodically broken down by the goblin-manned ballistas as the Proceran mages and priests refocused their efforts towards the more immediate threat of water. They split, much as Grem had predicted when the general staff had planned this. The mages shielded one entrance, the priests the other. Amadeus personally would have focused on swiftness instead of optimal impact, with heroic intervention being in the cards, but he trusted the orc’s instincts.

“Bouquets,” Grem ordered with a feral smile.

Sorcery flared as the mages lines wove tendrils of air, each hooked to a heavy wooden barrel. Within moments a hundred of them snaked through the sky, coming to rest above the mages and priests. The spells petered out and the barrels fell. Hasty tongues of holy flame and sundry spells shot up to intercept them, but there were too many targets to handle. Many of them were duds filled with rocks, regardless. Others simple munitions. Of the hundred barrels, sixty-three fell with impact by Amadeus’ count. Twenty-one of those were a mixture of smokers and sharpers, and exploded with billowing poisonous smoke. Twelve were filled with goblinfire, and the battlefield turned into a hellish green landscape in the blink of an eye. The mages and the priests broke, no longer able to hold back the waters, and the streams began to pour out again. Prince Klaus Papenheim had sent eight thousand levies and fantassins as his vanguard, with fourteen mixed catapults and trebuchets to cover them. No engine survived. Fewer than two thousand infantry did.

When night fell over the Vales, it was to the flickering of green flames on still water.

—

“Report,” Klaus ordered, exhaustion bare in his voice as he sat slumped in his seat.

Princess Mathilda of Neustria was pushing forty these days. It never surprised him to see it. He remembered Mati as the rambunctious child that had been close as kin with his sister, a mischievous devil in mail skirts that never laughed as brightly as when she was shattering ratling skulls with that monster of a mace she wielded. Neustrians as a rule kept a closer eye on the happenings down south and had been known to twine their lines with those of Brus and Lyonis on occasion – unlike most Lycaonese royalty, who’d sneer at such thinning of the blood – but Mati had never been one to have an interest in courtly games. It was an old compact of the Four Houses that soldiers from the the southernmost Lycaonese principalities would reinforce the walls and fortresses at the border when the thaw came and warbands went on the march, but Mathilda had never been one for half-measures. Every year since her crowning, she’d taken all soldiers not garrisoning the border with Brus to fight the Plague as soon as spring arrived. Klaus did not consider her an exceptional tactician or strategist, but her the sight of her distinctive green armour on the front had a way of lighting a fire in men’s bellies. Lycaonese had a well-worn love for royalty that led from the front. The princess’ face was streaked with dirt and her short red locks pressed with sweat against her face.

“They dropped the mountain on us, Klaus,” the Princess of Neustria told him in Reitz. “The fucking mountain .”

Klaus leaned forward.

“The Warlock took the field?”

She shook her head.

“We think it was munitions,” Mathilda said. “Wasn’t sorcery, the mages say, and there were explosions. They must have mined the side through tunnels. I sent in my vanguard and the entire cliffside toppled down on it like some titan’s flyswatter.”

“Gods Above,” the Iron Prince croaked out.

“That bloody dragon made a pass right after, blew fire straight through my priests,” she said, passing a tired hand over her face. “The Silver Huntress put a magic arrow in one of its wings, but it’s the only wound it took. It’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Casualties?” Klaus asked.

“Maybe two thousand dead, twice as many wounded,” the princess sighed. “What’s left of my priests is getting the wounded back on their feet.”

“They went straight after our priests and casters,” the Prince of Hannoven said. “They’re trying to cripple those before a decisive engagement.”

“They’re doing well at it, too,” Mathilda said. “And I don’t need to tell you morale went down the drain. There’ll be no volunteers for the vanguard tomorrow, I can tell you that much. Doesn’t help that our two alleged heavyweights have been sitting pretty this whole time.”

“Chosen logic,” Klaus said. “They say the Sovereign of Red Skies and the the Carrion Lord will remain out of the battle so long as they do the same.”

“The other Chosen are bloody useless,” the Princess of Neustria bluntly replied. “Oh, they’re a pretty sight leading the charge. That Levantine girl, the Champion? She’s been at the front of every offensive. But we’re swinging at mist, Klaus. They can be as good at killing Praesi as they want, we’re not fighting Praesi. We’re fighting falling mountains, and the Champion’s no use there. We need the Witch and the Heavens’ hatchet man.”

The Lycaonese balked at the notion of needing Chosen to win his battles for him, but there was also truth in this so he held his tongue. Outside, in the distance, water still burned green. Seven days and seven nights, that was said to be the lifespan of goblinfire. Unless he was willing to send his soldiers wading hip-deep in a lake topped by a hell of alchemy, there would be no more offensives in the southern valley. The Praesi would shift their forces accordingly, reinforcing the northern Twin, and there would be no chance breaking through there against the full muster of the Empire’s finest.

“Then we will have them,” Prince Klaus Papenheim. “Even if I must drag them to the front myself.”

—

Hanno had died twenty-one times since morning.

He’d used his aspect in a similar manner before, but those had been shallow readings. The seeking of similarity so he could draw on the experience of his predecessors to make up for his own shortcomings. Never before had he sought lives and memories purely to learn how to kill a man. His enemy had made it difficult, nonetheless. Heroes rarely survived their first encounter with the Black Knight, and those that did were usually engaged by other Calamities on the second meeting. He’d found a single instance, the Rebel Knight, who’d bared her sword at the man twice. Three years after the Conquest, a hidden bastard child of a branch line of House Fairfax who’d inherited the same Name as Eleanor Fairfax herself. Flight after the first engagement had bought her an hour before the Black Knight caught up and slew her in her wounded exhaustion. Some other lives had taught him near nothing of use, like the Merry Brawler – the knife through the back of the neck that’d killed him only served as a reminder that the Carrion Lord preferred to kill without any struggle if he could. The Unconquered Champion had yielded the greatest amount of information. The Levantine hero had trapped his foe in his domain and teased out more tricks than any other before or after him, in large part because five mortal wounds had been needed before the man died.

Memory by memory, death by death, Hanno had woven together a whole. Sitting with his eyes closed in a tent muted from all noise by Antigone, his sword in his lap, he had studied the many murders of the Black Knight. The man had limitations. Hanno had almost thought otherwise, after their duel in Nicae, but he now saw his mistake. When recalling the skills of his predecessors his plunge had been too shallow. Mere versatility was not sufficient to kill the Carrion Lord, not when he only brought to the fore part of the skills called on. That was, the White Knight now understood, playing the villain’s own preferred game. The Black Knight was himself a jack-of-all-trades, facing him with a similar approach would only lead to the victory of the older man’s greater experience. The method had been incorrect, and so he had adjusted. Studied the swordsmanship the villain had learned from the Lady of the Lake, the weaknesses of that tutelage. And, upon finding them, Hanno had spent hours seeking the right combination of lives that would allow him to capitalize on those weaknesses. Three would be required: the Flawless Fencer, the Lance of Light and the Barehanded Pugilist.

The sequence was adaptable to the villain’s own approach, but the result would ultimately be the same. He’d sought a handful of other lives to draw on as contingencies, should tactics he’d seen employed through other eyes be employed again, and another pair as escape and disengaging sets. Night had fallen, when he emerged from the trance, and he remained seated. Tired down to his bones and struggling to master the lingering echoes of the lives he’d dug so deep into. He would need rest before he was ready to fight. The tent’s flap parted and a masked of painted stone topped by long dark tresses stared at him. Antigone, still wearing the face the Gigantes had bestowed upon her. Hanno suspected that of all the host around him, only he understood the significance of that. The favour of the Titans was not lightly earned, and no less terrible than their wroth.

“Hanno,” the Witch of the Woods said, her words from no language known to man and yet perfectly understood. “The Champion wishes to speak with you.”

The Gift of Tongues never ceased to invoke wonder in him when so displayed. No man or creature that could understand the spoken word would ever fail to understand his friend.

“I am done,” the White Knight said, voice rough with disuse. “Come in, both of you.”

The inside of his tent was bare save for a bed of straw and his armour, and so he had no earthly comforts to offer either women as they entered. Neither seemed to mind. Antigone disdained any life but that of the wilds, and Rafaella’s cheer had already proved undaunted in the face of greater discomforts. The Witch’s long cloak-tunic pooled around her as she sat gracefully, surrounding herself in coarse green cloth that revealed only sandal-clad feet. Rafaella, on the other hand, slumped down in a cacophony of shuddering armour. The Valiant’s Champion snarling badger helm was dropped into the dirt as she shook free the long braid going halfway down her back, her tanned face split in a grin. She was not wearing, for once, the wolf fur cloak she’d claimed from someone that was no wolf at all.

“Have good day, yes?” the Champion said.

Hanno inclined his head.

“I am ready,” he said.

“Good,” Rafaella hummed. “My day, up and down. Easterners drop mountain on me. Tried to fight it, went not so good.”

Hanno glanced at Antigone, her green eyes finding his own through the mask.

“The Legions detonated a cliffside onto the Proceran advance,” she said.

The White Knight’s fingers clenched. His work had been necessary, but he grieved that it had allowed the Carrion Lord to weave the deaths of so many through his inaction.

“Then dragon came,” the Champion continued, sounding noticeably more pleased. “Went on dwarf machine, told soldier: ‘Bald Procer man, I stand on machine. Throw me at dragon.’”

Hanno’s brow rose.

“I take it he did not,” he half-asked.

Rafaella sighed.

“He said ‘no, stupid savage, if I do this it kill you’. I say ‘maybe if I feeble Procer soldier like you, but am glorious champion of Levant’.”

The tanned woman scratched her chin thoughtfully.

“Bald Procer man not happy about that,” she mused. “Left and did not reply. Think he complain to tall red princess about it.”

The Ashuran snorted. Proceran royalty had avoided him like the plague after the first time he’d been called upon to render judgement in a dispute and a cousin of the the Prince of Orense had been judged as unfit for continued existence by the Seraphim. Oddly enough it had warmed some of the Lycaonese to his presence, though the true gain of the affair had been the end of the insistent invitations to share cups of wine by the rest. He doubted any of what Rafaella had mentioned would be brought to him as a dispute to arbitrate.

“The Warlock still waits,” Antigone said. “The Carrion Lord with him. None of our companions ever reached them.”

“They were not all meant for this war,” Hanno quietly replied. “For many it is beyond the scope of their Fate, bound as they are elsewhere to other works. They must be careful, lest sudden death find them. The Grey Pilgrim is not with us to forgive such mistakes.”

Rafaella discreetly traced a sign on her leg at the mention of the Peregrine, expression sobering. To see her act bashful when they’d first met the man had been an almost frightening experience.

“You ready now, yes?” the Champion asked. “Time for fight.”

“At dawn,” Hanno replied calmly. “The fourth day is the beginning.”

“ Finally ,” the Witch of the Woods murmured.

Hanno of Arwad breathed out slowly. The sentence had already been given.

It must now be carried out, at last.

Interlude: Sing We Of Rage

“Sing we of rage,
In Tower and field
Of this dying age
That will not yield

Sing we of steel,
Forged in the east
As turns the wheel
And carrion feast

Sing we of empire,
For which we bled
Of flickering fire
Now all but dead

Sing we of foe,
Of victories won
And that first woe
Tyranny of the sun

Sing we of ruin,
As again we tread
West, ever pursuing
Fate writ in dread.”

– ‘The Tyranny of the Sun’, a Praesi song written in the latter stages of the Sixty Years War. Banned by decree of Dread Emperor Nihilis.

Wekesa eyed the sculpted mancala board with a frown, sipping at a chilled Aksum red. The handful of stone seeds in his hand rustled as he flicked his wrist, counting those already sown on the board. Dark eyes moved to Eudokia, whose calm visage betrayed nothing.

“There’s two missing,” he noted.

Scribe’s face displayed only wounded indignation.

“I am insulted, Wekesa, that you would resort to such implications simply because you are afraid to lose,” she gravely told him.

“This is senet all over again,” he sighed.

In all fairness, he’d been the one to start enchanting dice. Though in his defence, Amadeus had never once played without trying to sneak in a loaded pair and Eudokia had a knack for making pieces disappear when no one was looking no matter what they played. Hye had tended to ‘accidentally’ flip the board when it became clear she was losing – even when he spelled them stuck to the table, which rather eliminated plausible deniability for the half-elf. The only one of them who’d ever actually followed the rules had been Sabah, and... Wekesa’s face darkened. The passing months had done little to bury the grief of that. A friendship four decades long could not be so easily let go of. Not when her killer still breathed.

“Calm, Wekesa,” Scribe quietly said. “Nothing was forgot. Nothing was forgiven.”

The dark-skinned man waved his hand in dismissal. He was not Amadeus, to sink into himself at the first sight of anything that would disrupt his composure. He would mourn his old friend properly, and no part of that involved forcing his grief into a box to be addressed only when convenient. He drank deeply from his cup of wine, setting it down. The shiver down his spine that came from someone crossing the wards informed him of Black’s arrival before the man strode in sight. Amadeus’ eyes studied the board, then crinkled in amusement. Ignoring the Warlock’s languid invitation to sit, he leant over it and snorted, a finger flicking at the latest seed Wekesa had sown.

“Someone’s in trouble,” the pale man lightly said.

Warlock inspected the board again, and unsurprisingly found one of the empty houses now held a seed. That smug bastard.

“You’re not even playing,” the mage complained.

“It’s sad how sore of a loser he is, isn’t?” Amadeus told Eudokia with a saddened sigh.

“Hardly becoming of the famous Sovereign of Red Skies,” Scribe agreed solemnly.

“You won’t get away with this, you perfidious dwarves,” Wekesa said. “There will be retribution.”

The allegedly dignified Black Knight smothered a grin and finally sat down at their side while Warlock began to put away the stone seeds before he could be conned any further. Eudokia’s protests that they had a bottle riding on this and the act was a clear concession went superbly ignored. He wasn’t letting those two cheat him out of another prize piece from his cellar. ‘Loshe would have his hide if they grabbed another bottle from Kahtan, the current High Lady was curtailing the sales to better hike up the prices. The two savages didn’t even enjoy the vintages, anyway, they just loved robbing him blind. He’d nearly cursed Amadeus to lose all taste when he’d seen the man drink a forty-year-old Okoro red with cabbage and mutton . In the first Sanguinia’s day that would have been a hanging offence, and was a little cannibalism from the Tower really such a high price to pay for proper stewardship of taste? Good and loyal friend that he was, unfortunately, Wekesa still offered Amadeus a cup. The green-eyed man declined, as he usually did when there was a battle on the horizon. Warlock had always considered that a peculiar habit, considering the effects of alcohol could easily be burnt out of the body by any competent Named.

“Onto the sordid business of war, I take it,” Wekesa sighed.

“Dawn is an hour away,” Amadeus replied. “It has been long enough, and yesterday was a severe defeat for the crusade. The real threats will come out today.”

“Your request has been ready for near a month,” the sorcerer shrugged. “The array as well. I foresee no trouble there.”

“I have no worry of that,” his old friend said. “I came to speak of the Witch of the Woods.”

“Of which we know precious little,” Wekesa pointed out, though his gaze flicked to Scribe.

She shook her head.

“As far as we know she has spent most her life in the Foloi forest, which is beyond our reach,” she said. “Attempting to gather intelligence in Gigantes territory is an exercise in futility. They kill everything that crosses the border without warning. All the Eyes have been able to gather is second-hand, overheard conversations. And even these are rare, save for the unreliable.”

The Warlock sipped at his wine, unmoved. It would not be the first time they faced a heroine whose history was essentially a blank slate. It did make the killing more troublesome, but not overwhelmingly so.

“If she was truly taught by Gigantes spellsingers, she will be using Ligurian formulas,” Wekesa said. “I’ll concede that for greater workings they are without match, but they lack the flexibility and breadth of Trismegistan sorcery.”

“Those greater workings are my exact worry,” Amadeus said. “I remember my histories, Wekesa. The last time spellsingers fought with a Named Praesi sorcerer, plains large as half of Callow were turned into the Titan’s Pond.”

“I am hardly Triumphant,” Warlock chuckled. “And the Witch is no true spellsinger. She has not spent a few hundred years accumulating power and perfecting her craft. There will be collateral damage, to be sure, but I did not toil for months on our warding schemes to protect your armies from dwarven toys.”

Black inclined his head in concession, but his eyes were not in agreement.

“I would not bind your hands on your first encounter with an unknown quantity,” he said.

“Yet,” Wekesa said.

“We cannot afford the losses that large escalation might entail,” Amadeus said. “I won’t bar you from using sorcery falling under Red Skies protocol, but I’d ask that you keep in mind the possible consequences of it.”

The dark-skinned mage finished his cup, rather irked that such good vintage must be treated in so cavalier a manner. War truly was hell, he mused. Setting down the silver, he offered his friends a mild smile.

“I will attempt coddling, then,” Wekesa conceded. “Let us see how long that lasts. And what will you be doing while I get my hands dirty?”

“Settling a philosophical question, in a manner of speaking,” he said.

Warlock raised an eyebrow.

“And what would that question be?”

Amadeus smiled that old smile of the damned, the one that had been the ruin of realms and the death of armies. A madman’s smile.

“Can a man cheat providence at dice?”

—

The army had risen in hushed silence, but Hanno could feel the thrum of excitement going through the soldiers. Yesterday’s defeat had put fear in the hearts, yes, but also thirst for retribution. The vicious schemes of the Praesi had given birth to the old wroth that was always the fall of Evil, that burning determination that came from witnessing the senseless destruction sown by the Enemy. Yet they are not so senseless, these monsters , the White Knight thought. That they were abominations could not be denied, the paramount fiends of this era, but Hanno had studied the Carrion Lord. The man’s actions followed his own barren sense of integrity, though no one sane would truly apply that word to the works of the Black Knight. It made him dangerous in a way that few villains the White Knight had witnessed could be. No less mad than the Emperors of old, perhaps, but there was cold method to the madness. Hanno had learned the hard way that underestimating the Calamities on the field would only lead to death. He thought of the sisters he would never hear again, snatched out of Creation before they had truly lived. We give you nothing , the Seraphim had promised as they anointed him. We take everything . As in all things, they had spoken truth.

Antigone stood crouched on the ground, watching the burning waters. Pyres of green flames that were birthed beneath the surface and spread from there, unheeding of the laws that bound true fire. There was nothing in the world, they said, that goblinfire could not burn. Some priests in Procer had called the substance the distillation of unholy hunger, the sins of the East made into liquid flame. The impossibly massive wolf that the Witch’s mount and mother both was lying on the ground, her muzzle resting on her paws as she warily watched the heroine she had raised weave sorcery. Lykaia, her name was. Hanno had expected the Champion to started eyeing her as pelt and trophy the moment they first met, but to his surprise Rafaella had swiftly taken to the wolf-mother. The opposite was also true, Antigone assured him, though it could be hard to tell. Lykaia’s notion of mothering occasionally involved being batted around by massive paws, though in all honesty the Champion seemed to rather enjoy that. Perhaps he should have anticipated that Rafaella would be utterly delighted at the opportunity of wrestling with a she-wolf larger than most houses. Antigone sliced across her palm with a stone knife and pressed the blood into the earth. Hanno felt the shiver of power scatter around them, massive and then gone.

Lykaia whined until Antigone sighed and presented her bleeding hand for the she-wolf to lick, almost nudging the Witch off her feet with an affectionate nuzzle he suspected was a reminder to take better care of herself. Wiping away the slobber covering not only her hand but most her arm – though, Hanno noted, the wound already seemed to be closing – the Witch of the Woods bowed her head to him by the slightest fraction. She did not move like a human. She was a beast of the forest, at times, but at others he could only see the Gigantes in her. Chin tucked in, if hidden by the mask, crown of the head made slightly lower than his . Respect-deference-accomplishment. The giants could express broader nuances of relation and hierarchy in a single gesture that the land of his birth could with millennia of tiered citizenship. Hanno kept his back straight and tilted his face slightly to the left without moving his neck. Praise-gratitude-companionship. He was careful not to move too far left, lest he imply subordination on his part. By the mores of the Gigantes, what he had offered was already intimate warmth. Antigone’s head straightened into neutrality, though slowly enough the implication lay she was pleased with his response.

“It is done,” the Witch said. “When you are ready.”

Hanno breathed out, watching the spread of burning green before him. He unsheathed the sword at his hip, mere steel forged at the hands of men. The lance strapped on his back would remain there until it was needed.

“Now,” the White Knight said.

Antigone stomped her feet on the ground, where her blood still lingered, and Creation howled. She did not control it, not the way a spellsinger would have. The Witch had not spent centuries permeating her body with the light of moons and stars, woven a second soul out of sunlight or aligned herself with the celestial spheres. She could not sing hymns to the world and make it dance to her will. Instead the power of her aspect flared, and for a moment she was one with the fabric of Creation. A single cord sounded where she had spilled blood, and the vibration reverberated beyond mortal understanding. The winds stirred the burning lake and quickened until a whirlwind of water and fire was birthed, emptying the grounds where so many had died yesterday. The Praesi’s own murderous alchemy, turned against them as it went howling towards the tower men called the Bloody Twin. Hanno of Arward began his advance, endless ranks of crusaders behind him, as sorcery bloomed ahead.

—

“Okeanos Risen,” Wekesa said, reluctantly impressed. “Using an unseemly shortcut, but still nothing to sneer at.”

Especially on freshwater. He’d never heard of Gigantes using this particular working away from the sea. Ashurans, when they’d still been Baalites in more than name, had learned the hard way that attempting to invade the Titanomachy from the water only resulted in the sharks growing fat. There was no audience atop the tower for him to expound at, as Amadeus had ordered room be cleared for him to work undisturbed, but speaking his thoughts aloud did tend to bring a sense of satisfaction to his work. He’d gotten into the habit when teaching Masego, as it helped his son understand his conclusions if he was privy to the thoughts that led to them. It was unfortunate that Masego still lingered at Foundling’s side, though Wekesa had made his peace with it. Much of his enmity for the girl had ebbed since she’d thrown away her apprenticeship to Amadeus and ceased being a dagger at his throat simply by existing. Eudokia was furious that process had involved their old friend being stabbed, but Warlock was not particular bothered. Not since he’d noticed that Black’s agelessness had taken a tint of youth in the aftermath. She’d offered his first and oldest friend a second lease on life by her actions, and he considered that to settle the balance of the threat she’d once posed.

She’d still have to die, of course. Alaya would insist on it as soon as the politics of the act became acceptable. It would make a bit of a mess, but those two would bind their wounds and entwine their fates anew after enough time had passed. They always did, no matter what shallow wounds they managed to inflict on the other’s pride. Perhaps it was in order that he suggest Amadeus spend a few years in Refuge, after the dust settled. It would do wonders for both his mood and Hye’s – Wekesa was of the opinion she’d cease gallivanting around the continent picking fights with gods for a bit if she found her lover returned to her bed. Alaya would be miffed at losing her right hand to a ‘vapidly murderous vagrant’, as she’d once described Ranger to him, but Wekesa was rather miffed at her himself. This whole Liesse affair had been gauche in many ways, including the implied insult to him. That she’d never approached him about building such a doomsday device implied she’d believed he would refuse her and go straight to Amadeus. It was a disregard of the trust he’d thought there was between them. He was not inflicted with Eudokia’s blinders, to believe Black should be crowned. Alaya was better fit to rule Praes, and more apt to deliver the peace and quiet that was his preferred state of affairs.

Warlock had no intention of spending the next two decades of his life breaking millennia-old wards, banishing demons and immolating every practitioner in the Wasteland with a modicum of talent for theoretical research. Which was the very likely consequence of a reform-inclined Duni climbing the Tower. That killing one of his few friends as a prerequisite only made the notion more unpalatable, as did his suspicion that Amadeus crowned would find everything admirable about him devoured by the demands of the throne. Shaking the thought, Wekesa waited for the whirlwind to properly and come within the preferred action range of his prepared answers. The addition of goblinfire to the assault was a clever improvisation on the part of the enemy, and did indeed complicate matters of containment. The alchemical flames would begin devouring any solid ward upon contact, and a working of this strength could not be easily be contained with a flawed warding scheme. That was not to say, of course, that there was nothing he could do. Screens of sorcery bloomed before him as he observed the strings of power that had initiated and now maintained the whirlwind. Examining the formula directly was not a real possibility at this range, but he could glean from understanding of it from the observable phenomenon.

The central element was clearly a Creational cascade, the signature element of Ligurian sorcery. A controlled released of power into the world that accumulated ever-deeper orders of effect. The main difference with records of Gigantes sorcery was that there seemed to be no guiding element at play, no ‘song’ – though that was merely a mundane and narrow term for what was in reality an exquisitely complicated verbal control technique. Interesting. Ligurian sorcery required the caster to have a deep understanding of Creation’s workings that Praesi would call High Arcana, though the way Gigantes understood the world in a fundamentally different manner meant there was little overlap with Praesi High Arcana and the Titanomachy’s preceding equivalent. The implication here being that the Witch of the Woods, though taught by the Gigantes, did not share their inherent understanding. Aspect-based bridging, most likely, relying on her Name to expand the capacity of her mind. Aspects did tend to be passing, however, and that would explain the lack of so-called song: the Witch had glimpsed the web when calling on her power, but had not kept that understanding afterwards. Once loosed, her control on her spells was either thin or non-existent.

“How kind of you, my dear,” Warlock murmured, “to gift me a whirlwind.”

Runes formed around his wrists as he set boundaries in the area the winds were about to enter, weaving the forces that would attempt to modify rather than disperse. A hundred feet from the tower, the working fell into his ward and without a word Wekesa activated it. The first part was elementary: he stretched the spinning upwards, thinning the board whirlwind into a much taller pillar-like structure. From there, effect was easier. The forces were dispersed where they had once been concentrated. He flattened the pillar into a sphere and tossed back the burning water and winds in the direction of the advancing enemy army.

“Do try to make this interesting, child,” Warlock said.

Power flared, and this time he was able to watch the cascade unfolding. It was beautiful, he thought, in the way only the very highest of sorcery could be. A single mind touching a facet of the godhead through will and knowledge. The burning sphere shivered and winked out, leaving nothing behind. His eyes narrowed. Matter could not simply vanish, and there had been absolutely nothing left behind – not even air, as the absence had drawn it in. The cascade had not been a physical effect, which meant...

“The Riddle of Kreios,” he said softly. “Now that is a memory I will have to extract and study.”

The Witch of the Woods had inflicted the passing of time inside boundaries, which was masterfully absurd. One of the great riddles of sorcery was that there was no such thing as time – it was a sapient construct, a recognition of entropy – yet there was a force that could only be called this that could be manipulated by magic. The Witch had enveloped the sphere inside folded time until the goblinfire devoured everything within, a beautiful parry. Had she called on Kronia’s Sickle instead the alchemy would have attempted to devour the time actively quelling it but Kreios relied in the conceptual passing of time, not destruction through it. An important distinction, one that had crafted an envelope instead of an attack: she’d let the goblinfire itself do the work, an elegant solution. And one made possible only by his actions. If he’d not gathered the goblinfire together and she’d employed the Riddle, entire parts of this mountain range would have vanished – and likely parts of her army with it. No mere spell-slinging savage, this one.

“Let us test the depths of your knowledge, then,” the Sovereign of Red Skies grinned, and runes burned around his wrists.

—

Hanno led the assault without looking at the sorcerer’s duel echoing across the valleys. He would trust in Antigone, that she was the match of the Warlock and would allow no harm to come to them. He’d acted to ensure that much, by sending all other heroes to the northern valley. With only he and the Witch present, Creation’s grooves would not be filled with a plethora different stories that all weakened each other by allowing none to be come into the fullness of being. The Witch of the Woods would fight the Warlock. The White Knight would fight the Black Knight. The clarity of this would be as dangerous a blade as the one in his hand. In the Twin above engines and crossbows spewed death at the advancing crusaders, checked only by the shields of mages and the fences of priests. Praesi sorceries lashed at them both, tearing holes that were filled with steel and stone with eerie coordination. It did not matter. With him at their head, the crusaders roared and advanced. Sword bright with the Light, the White Knight pushed through storms of fire and clouds of poison. They dispersed like mist under the sun. Darkness fell in a rain of needles, men they pierced convulsing in violent throes, but Hanno screamed his challenge and they shattered like glass.

“Carrion Lord,” he yelled as in the sky above lightning fought spinning lights. “ I summon you, Black Knight .”

His words rang like a thunderclap across the valley. A gauntlet thrown, and not easily refused. Not without consequences greater than whispers of cowardice. A duel of champions for Above and Below was an ancient thing, and not disdained without earning the same disdain from the Gods. The gates of barded steel and iron at the foot of the tower slowly opened. Out came a silhouette riding a dead horse. His plate was simple and worn, his lance a thing of blackened steel and the sword at his hip goblin-wrought steel. As he rode a dark cloak streamed behind him. The helm, as always, hid his face save for eerie green eyes and hints of pallid skin. Bringing up his shield, the Black Knight moved as the gates closed in his wake. Hanno felt it, the cold thing behind the flesh. The cogs of steel ever-turning. His power was faint, even fainter than on their last encounter, but the taste of it had not changed. The presence of two aspects wreathed the man like two ravens on his shoulders, urging the villain to Lead and to Conquer. An old monster drenched in blood, come at his summons.

“It ends today,” the White Knight said.

The monster cocked his head to the side.

“Uninspired,” he replied, and the lance descended.

Lives flooded through Hanno’s mind and he chose the first he had prepared: the Lance of Light. His Name took his reflexes, his training, and replaced them with another man’s. The Knight went deeper still, until his eyes no longer felt as his own, and only then did the Light boil out of him. The radiant mount pawed at the grounds, scorching them, and his lance rose to match the abominations. Hanno was no jouster but Felix Caen, Duke of Liesse, had been the glory of Callow’s knighthood long before he led the doomed charge in the East that earned him his Name. The stance came easy to him as breathing and he watched the Black Knight lead his mount to face him. There should have been a hush over the battlefield, but no quarter was offered or given. The Legions still spewed death from the tower, though their crossbows and engines were alien to him. No less, he thought, should be expected from Praesi. There was no honour to the Wasteland, nothing but barren hatred to be found past the Blessed Isle.

“Come, slave of the Tower,” the Lance of Light laughed. “Breaker of heroes. Come and die.”

The mounts charged, death flying around them, and it was all wrong. It should have been an olive-skinned southerner, a vicious lady of the Hungering Sands with lips like fresh blood, not this pale leech before him. He would crush the thing anyway. Already the Lance could see the sequence, the alignment of men and horse, the way the tip of his lance would go through the throat. Then the man’s shield went down, hand hidden, and the Lance of Light spurred his horse. Death, death was offered to him and he would deliver it in the name of House Alban. Then the Praesi threw himself off his horse at the last moment.

A heartbeat later, as the Lance passed by it, it exploded.

Hanno landed on his back, breath stolen from him and smouldering. He hastily rose to his feet and found the Black Knight awaiting him with the flat his sword resting on his shoulder.

“That remains a surprisingly effective trick,” the monster mused. “I really should send her a thank you note.”

The White Knight frowned. He was talking. Bantering, instead of pressing advantage. Pale green eyes flicked to him.

“Shall we get on with it?” the Carrion Lord drawled. “There is a war on, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“You,” Hanno said. “What have you done?”

“Blown up a rather expensive horse,” the Black Knight said. “With the dark and wicked spell of wick and cheap matches. My coffers aren’t what they used to be. Tremble, White Knight, for my power is truly boundless within reasonable limits.”

The White Knight bared his sword, and let the Flawless Fencer flow into him. His stance changed. Sofia of Nicae had always been heavyset, nothing like the slender girls whose beauty was praised by the men, but she did not mind. Her only true love was the blade. This one was well-fitter to her hand, the weight of it perfect for her craft, and she closed the distance with anticipation thrumming in her veins. Praesi, this man, but she’d killed that ilk before. Bands of them had kept roving the Free Cities for years after the Dread Empress was unceremoniously thrown back into the sea by the coalition. It was not as satisfying to slay those as Ashurans, but it would keep her sated until supper. The foe was a sword-and-board man, and not half-bad. He danced properly when she struck, his parry technically perfect and riposte appropriately vicious. She elegantly turned it downwards, then struck across the throat. Ah, just a little too slow. She was off her form today. She circled around him, letting the slope weaken his stance, and offered a feint towards the eye. The shield went up, she closed the distance even as he struck and spun with him as he adjusted. Elbow to the back of the head, then she dropped under his answering swing and hit his helm with the pommel of her blade.

The man worked through the pain, but his stance was broken. She drew blood at the juncture of his elbow, slid around the shield bash and hacked down on the extended fingers of his blade hand. She hummed approvingly when he decided he’d rather lose two fingers than the grip on his sword, then rewarded his courage by kicking his knee and forcing him down. He swung where she would have been, were she an idiot, but instead she kicked dirt into his face. Then, as he struggled with that, she kicked his chin and laid him down hard. Time to end this, then. The Flawless Fencer vanished back into the flood and the White Knight clasped his sword.

“You are not him,” Hanno said.

“A question almost theological in nature,” the thing noted. “Nefarious did have a certain knack for blasphemy.”

“This is a trick,” the White Knight hissed. “You shy from judgement.”

“Shall I give you a lesson, child?” the abomination said. “I so rarely get to monologue, but this is fortunate happenstance. You see, whatever I tell you will not matter. Not in the slightest. You are, by your nature, incapable of learning what I would teach. If you did it would destroy what a more poetic man might call your soul.”

Hanno grabbed him by the throat, raised him up. The thing laughed.

“What have you done?”

“Agency, boy,” the abomination said, sounding amused. “You have discarded yours like a petty bauble and never once considered the cost . Blind faith is such tempting notion, isn’t it? Being able to believe in an answer, in a force, without ever questioning it. Certainty and blindness. I have always wondered at the difference.”

“Where are you?”

“Ah, already better,” the thing said approvingly. “But your true question is – why did you ever think I was here? And so the circle closes, and we return to the matter of faith.”

He could have squeezed, snapped the neck, but he needed to know. To understand the trap so he could break it.

“The answer, of course, is providence,” the abomination said. “You are here because that elusive golden luck of heroes told you I would be here to face you. And I am, in a sense. That is the rub, you see, when one relies on something one does not fully understand. If you do not know the rules, you do not know how they can be cheated .”

“You cannot cheat the Heavens,” Hanno snarled.

“Ah, but providence is a different matter,” the villain said. “It is a force, you see, not an intelligence. It cannot reason. If the greater part of what is me is here before you, well, that is the guidance it will provide. Never warning you that a mind and a body are very different things until it is much, much too late.”

And just like that it fell into place.

“You are in the other valley,” the White Knight said.

“Praesi, Hanno, have so many flaws,” the abomination mused. “Sometimes it seems as if it is all we have. Yet there is one among them that I always believed to be a virtue, in its own way. All it takes is the faintest hope we will get away with it, and we will sit across even the Gods, smile and lie .”

“There is nowhere I will not reach you,” Hanno replied quietly.

He dropped the abomination, and it did not even attempt to rise. Its lips quirked into a smile, thin and narrow and vicious. A blade-smile.

“Do enjoy your victory, White Knight,” he said.

When Hanno’s blade cut through his neck, the body already had empty eyes.

—

Amadeus of the Green Stretch breathed out. After a moment he rose to his feet. The sounds of battle could be heard at the bottom of the northern Twin, heroes and crusaders having reached the gate and struggling to break it. Ranker was behind him, looking to the back of the tower, and without a word he went to join her. Both of them stared down.

“Is it done?” the old goblin asked.

“They are both committed,” the green-eyed man replied. “My death was the agreed-on signal. Warlock will cover the retreat.”

“Then now is our part,” the Marshal of Praes said.

“So it is,” the Black Knight agreed.

They looked down at the two legions that had moved to the northern passage overnight, swelling the ranks of the three already under Ranker’s command. Amadeus bared his sword, raising it high. The responding clamour drowned out the world.

“Well, old friend,” he murmured. “I think it’s about time we went on the offensive, don’t you think?”

Interlude: Lest Dawn Fail

“The moon rose, midnight eye
Serenaded by the owl’s cry
In Hannoven the arrows fly

Hold the wall, lest dawn fail

No southern song for your ear
No pretty lass or merry cheer
For you only night and spear

Hold the wall, lest dawn fail

Come rats and king of dead
Legions dark, and darkly led
What is a grave if not a bed?

Hold the wall, lest dawn fail

Quell the tremor in your hand
Keep to no fear of the damned
They came ere, and yet we stand

So we’ll hold the wall,
Lest dawn fail.”

– Lycaonese folk song, origins unknown, dated before annexation by the Principate

“Walk me through it,” Marshal Ranker of the Hungry Dog tribe said.

She still thought of herself by that name, though her tribe was decades dead. She’d slain it with her own two hands, conscripting every male of fighting fit and taking them up north to throw her lot with the rebels of the civil war that enthroned Malicia. The matron-attendants, women and children had been split among other tribes according to ties of kinship, the ancient records of the Hungry Dogs sent down into the dark beneath the Eyries to add to the ever-swelling chronicles of the fallen and the failures. The Black Knight flicked those eerie green eyes at her, unreadable.

“You were briefed on the plan before we followed it,” he reminded her. “You saw it unfold.”

He spoke Lower Miezan with that slight burr to his voice that was the mark of Callowans and Duni both, one of the thousand reasons Wastelands used to look down on the pale-skinned westerners.

“I know the plan as it was told us,” the old goblin said. “That is the surface. Tell me the underpinnings, how it was woven together.”

It was a guilty pleasure of hers, to tease out the inner workings of her old friend’s mind. The cold method in it was like poppy to her kind, cunning viciousness put to murderous purpose. Had he been born of her people, Ranker would have killed anyone with the slightest claim on him and made the man her consort. There were still matrons in the Eyries that whispered he was utterly wasted on humans , a species whose idea of thought was laughable at the best of times. Broad-teeth monkeys who stumbled through Creation blindly, never a moment of their lives aware of how fragile and vulnerable they were until the Gobbler swallowed them whole. Amadeus, though? Oh, he ever slept with one eye open. A frail creature surrounded by a sprawling world of hostile demigods, he was the closest that misbegotten species would ever get to whelping one of her people.

“Is there a point?” the dark-haired man mused. “Already it has ended.”

“There is always a point,” she said, and bared her yellow teeth at him. “I learn, you learn. All rise.”

His own words, these last few, thrown back into his lap. One of their very fist conversations, years before she sacrificed her reign to earn yet greater victory. The glint in his eyes turned amused. That would not have been enough to ply him, in the old days, but Captain was lost and Scribe currently set to other purpose. He would speak. The urge was there for all villains, and she was providing him a culvert that did not endanger him or his designs. The threats had passed with the coming of night, though dawn would bring them anew.

“There were three forces to reckon with, in this scheme of mine,” the Black Knight said. “The first was the heroes in the northern valley.”

Nine slayers sworn under the Heavens, leading the assault of the crusaders. The Legions had protocols to face these, but not in so great a number. Though far from invincible, they were a mighty force.

“Great power on the march,” Ranker said.

“At the time, significant only as an accumulation of strength,” the green-eyed man noted. “By gathering together without a single unifying story, they stripped themselves of Above’s protection. They made themselves fallible .”

“But remained a significant force,” she probed.

“That is so,” he agreed. “And they would have become truly dangerous if they were allowed to turn into the rear guard for the retreating army of Procer. Nine heroes, facing the horde? Most would have perished, but at the cost of thousands on our part. Therefore, they had to be dispersed.”

“Costly to achieve through force of arms,” Ranker commented.

“Ah, but this was no heroic band,” the Black Knight said. “Simply an assembly of heroes. And so, in the absence of a clearly dominant Named or a unifying threat, they developed a point of failure: lack of chain of command. Without central authority giving orders, the heroes had to rely on their personal judgement when presented with a choice. Judgement that was shaped by wildly different origins and cultures. There would be no unified response. To disperse the cluster of heroes, then, we needed only present them with a decision.”

“The Tenth,” Ranker smiled.

—

“O Great Destroyer,” Legate Obasi said, kneeling at his general’s feet. “The time has come to strike.”

The ancient creature known as Nekheb let out a sigh, nearly sending him tumbling down the slope. Scales like midnight and eyes of gold that stood tall as a horse, the dragon was one of the living wonders of Creation. Magic made flesh, holiest of all the children of the Gods.

“I was just getting comfortable,” General Catastrophe said, wiggling in its nest of melted stone. “It can wait until tomorrow.”

Obasi had learned to understand the mood of his draconic master and winced at the tone. In court such a visible betrayal of his thoughts would have been disgraceful, but Holy Nekheb had never bothered to learn to read the faces of men. It was beneath them, admittedly. The dark-skinned legate still panicked at the idea that his general might decide to slumber then and there. It might be for mere hours, but there was no guarantee. After the Conquest the ancient creature had slumbered for seven months on the Blessed Isles and eaten anyone trying to wake it. The Soninke’s predecessor had been stuck in the very uncomfortable position of needing to explain that to the Tower.

“The scheme of the Carrion Lord is in need or your greatness, O Peerless Ancient,” Obasi tried. “Without your grace, the might of the Empire can only fail today.”

The massive dragon clicked its teeth unhappily.

“This is true,” they conceded. “You are all idiot hatchlings.”

Legate Obasi prostrated himself, sincerely hoping no rivulet of liquid rock would make it down to him while he did.

“Your discernment is without rival, O Mighty One,” he said. “Yet have the men of Procer not defied your greatness? Only yesterday, did one of their own not attempt to slay you?”

The dragon’s nostrils flared.

“An archer,” it rumbled. “I hate archers. They’re worse than sea snakes, though not nearly as clever. You speak true, minion-thing. I name you one of my heralds for the worth of your advice.”

This made it the third instance this year the legate was granted this boon. Holy Nekheb had some difficulty telling apart humans, he had come to suspect. Or simply did not care enough to try. Obasi stayed prostrated as long as he could, though he had to hastily crawl away when the dragon rose to its feet and spread its wings. The master took flight without further deigning to engage in conversation and the legate hurried towards the rest of the officer cabal. The other necromancers looked as exhausted as he did, even though they’d inhaled one strengthening concoction after another during the night on the march. The Carrion Lord had sent the Tenth Legion into mountains that separated the valleys north and south, and only a mere bell ago had they reached their destination. Beneath the cliff they stood atop fortifications could be glimpsed, walls and towers and some peasant bastion. No living host could had taken the hard paths through ravines and harsh slopes the Tenth Legion had marched through in the dark, but theirs was not the strength of the living. Only a mere three hundred of their legion drew breath, and they’d been the ones to trail behind as the undead advanced silently. Obasi gestured for one of the corpses to bend and sat on its armoured back, catching his breath.

“The Great Master takes the field,” he said.

“They were in a mood?” Legate Kalaman asked.

“Settling down for a nap,” Obasi sighed.

They shared a grimaced.

“Well, the crusaders will know we’re here soon enough,” Kalaman said, brushing back her dark tresses. “Best we get the dead moving before they send the rear guard after us.”

The sorcerers huddled together and wove their magic, taking the reins of the army spread across the mountains.Silently, inexorably, Legion X Horribilis began to climb down the cliffs.

Towards the lightly-guarded enemy camp.

—

“Some would stay,” the Black Knight said. “But few. Undead and a dragon would by the lure of promised victory. The Procerans would shortly panic, realizing they had lost their camp and risked encirclement.”

Ranker sucked at her teeth, pleased at the cunning involved. That part had unfolded exactly as he said. Of the nine heroes leading the host, only four had remained when Nekheb appeared behind the crusaders and displayed his wroth. The rest had hurried back to kill the draconic general before it could slaughter the entire rear guard. The gates of the Twin had opened when they were too far to easily return, and out had poured the Legions of Terror. The sortie had run straight into the four heroes and been stopped cold as the four Named scythed through legionaries like ripe wheat. Impressive, but ultimately doomed. It took five mage lines assembled for ritual to drive them back, but back they were driven. From there, the steel wrote the song. Veteran legions under Grem’s personal command hammered through the levies at the front until they broke and fled, collapsing the lines of fantassins behind them. The actual casualties the Procerans took, by Ranker’s reckoning, were fairly light for a rout. Two, maybe three thousand. It was the enemy commander that salvaged the mess, riding down with her Neustrian cavalry to put iron in southern spines. The moment the front was stable she ordered a full retreat, the Legions in close pursuit.

The rest of the morning was spent breaking a sequence of holding actions by the Procerans as the crusaders tossed away men trying to slow the Legions. Heroes swelled those ranks more often than not, but they were offered the greatest of all insults: irrelevance. They stood proud and powerful, unbroken by the steel of the Legions. Yet the men died around them as they did, and they could not hold back an army by themselves. It was unfortunate that heroic presence meant the trade of lives involved always sharply in favour of the Procerans, but it was the trade of casualties for a tactical advantage and so had remained acceptable in Ranker’s eyes. More so because, all the while, the Tenth Legion had been forming at their back. Nekheb allowed itself to be chased away when the heroes arrived spoiling for a fight, but by then nearly three thousand undead were on the ground. The heroes engaged as reinforcements continued to climb down, preventing further advance but little else. They were still fighting when the first ranks of the Proceran retreat arrived shortly after Noon Bell.

“Winning the battle was not the objective,” Ranker said.

“Not at that juncture,” Amadeus agreed. “There was a temptation, I will not deny. With the Tenth in the camp, there was no real chance for the crusaders to man the fortifications. Which were built to face the opposite direction of our advance, regardless. If I’d taken the field myself and we’d pressed the advantage, we would have slain a great many of them.”

“You didn’t,” Ranker said.

“Because it would have been committing too early,” Black said. “The second force to reckon with had not yet been neutralized. It would have left us exposed if we’d acted without considering her.”

“The Witch of the Woods,” the old goblin said.

—

The tower had cracked, like wet clay left too long under the sun. Wekesa still felt dismay at the memory. It had been purely kinetic force, that much he’d ascertained, but there had been no record of such a working in the Tower’s scrolls and his study of the creational cascade had failed to divine anything useful. He’d tied the tower’s protective wards into the the flanking mountains after the first blow, but all that had achieved was the powdering of at least half a ton of stone when the Witch struck again. There’d been few legionaries left inside, by then, but those that remained were instantly pulped by the impact. Warlock had been wary enough he’d moved out of the tower towards the mountains, and it was the only reason he wasn’t dead. The Procerans had swarmed the broken tower, afterwards, but most of the legion that’d defended it had already retreated. It was all he’d promised Amadeus, and he gave it no more thought after that. That pair of spells had heralded the escalation of the duel into a higher realm of arcana, and the failure of his defence had forced him to go on the offensive.

More than an hour had passed since then, Wekesa thought, and he idly adjusted the bubble of force around him to dampen sound as the peak to his left exploded.

Illusions were allowing him to keep one step ahead. The girl had a working that allowed her to see through them – Dion’s Gaze, he recognized – but she had to abandon her offensive to find him every time she used it. She’d followed him into the mountains, and now they could fight without concern for their surroundings. A storm brewed in the sky above them, this one not of his making. He could feel it strengthening, the lightning concentrating in a killing stroke she would cast down when she found him. Her casual shattering of mountaintops was an attempt to flush him out, though an unsuccessful one so far. Wekesa had been biding his time thinning boundaries to place his own killing blow, allowing her the run of the range. There was advantage in making her act in the open, as he now intended to demonstrate. With the storm now nearing its peak, the conditions had become acceptable.

“ Imbricate ,” he said.

Seven-hundredth and twenty-second Hell. A hellscape of unending sprawling tempests, bereft of all devils save those who crawled beneath the earth. His thoughts burned as he oversaw the alignment, blood thrumming with sorcery, until Hell and Creation snapped into place. It had been wise precaution to mute sound, Warlock decided, for the howl of wind was deafening. Lightning thundered down, hundreds of strands, and flashing lights danced across the peaks. The roar of avalanches by the dozens devoured the rest of the song and he laughed, runes shining around his wrists as he wove the lightning into spears and struck at the Witch. The murderous child took it in stride, force spinning around her and making a wheel of the power he sent at her. She released it when his strikes ebbed, released a ring of pure lightning that shattered another two peaks. As he rode the storm, so did she. Discarding any notion of digging him out of his hole, she called on the Helian Sun and parted the storm with dawn’s coming. Scorching light burned all in sight, but destruction was an old friend to Wekesa. He knew it better than her.

“ Reflect ,” he hissed.

His mind spun, sights in the thousands flooding it, until he found the realm he’d sought. The most beautiful of his tricks, the one truest to the essence of sorcery. A lie told Creation: that its lay was as that of the Hell he had sought, as if they were perfect reflection. No great toil of alignment here, only the barest of efforts as he matched the realms. The sky went crimson, great shapes forming in depths that did not exist within Creation, and hellflire began to rain. The Witch would learn today why men had named him Sovereign of Red Skies.

—

“The landslides cost us more than them,” Ranker said.

Amadeus conceded the point with an inclination of the head. As well he should. The last word from the Ninth was that Sacker had lost over seven hundred to an avalanche. While a mile away from the duel of the mages. Her entire rear guard swallowed by rocks, along with more than a few engines. In the northern valley, the costs had been no less steep. The mage officers of the Tenth had still been in the mountains when the two Named had begun slinging their spells, and half of them had been lost making their escape even as the battle around the Proceran camp erupted. The matron had forgot quite how terrifying Warlock could be, when let loose, but for all that terror the Witch had been every bit his match. And in their struggle, they had wrecked the Vales beyond recognition. The southern Twin was buried in stone along with most the valley before it, while a stray lance of lightning had hit the peak above the northern one, making half the mountain collapse atop it. That alone would not have cut retreat entirely for the Legions, but then Warlock had begun throwing down mountains to replace those he’d broken and it had gotten much, much worse. Half a city’s worth of brimstone had tumbled down the slope of the northern valley after being batted aside contemptuously by the Witch of the Woods, and there was no going around that .

Even now they could not be certain of how much of the Vales had been wrecked by what was already being called the Waltz of Wroth. Both passes were now closed, that much was certain, but scrying across the broken mountain range had proved impossible and so no fresh report could be had from General Sacker. Assuming she was still alive.

“Only the third force remained in play, after that,” Black noted. “It was always going to be the most difficult to predict, as its nature was bound to be reactive. In a sense, Wekesa’s enthusiasm was a boon. It created an obvious opening, and the Heavens never can resist a spectacular entrance.”

“Militarily speaking, the entire notion was absurd,” Ranker said. “If one of my staff officers suggested such a thing, I would have them demoted back to the ranks.”

“That there would be intervention was a given,” Amadeus said. “We were, at that point, winning. The Tenth weakened when we lost the officers, but Nekheb was still looming and we had them bottled up.”

The Princess of Neustria had exerted herself all morning in the prevention of a rout, but when the battle around the camps unfolded she’d plunged back into the deeps. It was a simple question of room. There were only two gates allowing entry into the fortifications where the Procerans had placed their camp, and limited space within. It’d been impossible for her to get a significant portion of her host through before the Legions under Grem hit her back, and from there the beginnings of a massacre had taken place. The crusaders had trampled each other trying to flee Legion blades, and though heroes had attempted to hold the back Nekheb had kept them on the backfoot by making the occasional pass. Squeezed by the Praesi shield wall, drowning in crossbow fire and munitions, the Procerans had died in droves.

“The Champion was holding the line,” Amadeus mused. “Ah, the pretty bait that was. If I’d gone to kill her, before the hour was done I would have died.”

The third force had been the White Knight, riding through the broken mountains with every single horseman under Prince Kaus Papenheim charge the flank of the Legions at the darkest hour.

—

Grem heard them long before he saw them. His people knew that sound better than any other on Creation, the thunder of hooves. The doom of horde and clan, the mounted killers from the West. That these had sworn oaths to the First Prince instead of the King of Callow made little difference. The odds of there being a usable pass after Wekesa and the Witch smashed apart the mountains were infinitesimal, he knew, but the Heavens had worked with lesser numbers. He’d been warned, that there would be a hidden knife near the end. His warlord’s instincts had not dimmed with age. The Marshal of Praes glanced at the signal mage that had been his shadow all day.

“All mage lines for the Third,” he said, “are to send fireballs and echoes in the pass, try to collapse it. And get Mok started on contingency Misfortune.”

For any cavalry not led by a hero, this would have been an imbecile’s suicide. The source of the charge was a narrow break in the mountainside atop a rocky hill at an almost ninety degree angle, all of it leading straight into a dark upright crevasse. With the White Knight at the tip of the charge, all these damning details would mean was mild inconvenience. Sorcery flared and the opening was drowned in flame and booming sounds, but no avalanche took. It had been worth making sure. Grem One-Eye watched grimly as the flank of Mok’s legion pivoted to meet the coming enemy. Sappers ran ahead to sow the fields with caltrops as the two cohorts of trained pikemen formed in ranks. The ogre general’s men were no Ironsides, but they were a heavy infantry legion nonetheless. Regulars dragged to the fore spikes of iron or wood and hammered them in a line three deep according to the standard pattern, angling them so they would be aimed at the belly of the horses.

As a welcoming gift, a pair of sappers with munitions-loaded crossbows shot clay balls at the narrow opening and green flames took to the rock. Thin was the hope that this would stop the enemy, but all eventualities should be covered if the cost was appropriate and two spheres was cheap enough. Mages, crossbowmen and sappers formed up behind the pikemen in good order, ranks of regulars serving as shield. Ranker’s Fourth and the Twelfth had the front, so he could put his entire attention into this. The battle for the Vales would be won or lost here, and as Wekesa had so kindly deigned to drop a mountain down their only path of retreat there was no room left for mistakes. You have to let them win , Amadeus had said. The Heavens need their due, before we steal it, else another path will be taken. It might be his old friend was right, but Grem would not send men to die without doing his utmost to keep them alive.

The enemy appeared in a flash of blinding Light, evaporating the goblinfire-touched stone as the White Knight charged through. Behind him followed the mounted strength of Procer, pouring out like a stream of steel-clad death. He did not need to give orders in the matter of answer. Balls of flame bloomed across the ranks of the Third and hit the charging enemy, but Light burned and dispersed them like wisps of smoke. Crossbows fired in a perfect volley, and these drew some blood, but none touched the White Knight or the men behind him – as if the hand of some god steered away harm. The horsemen charged down the slope with unnatural grace, not a one stumbling over the harsh incline or jagged stones, and so the entered the killing field. The caltrops lasted a single heartbeat before the hero raised his blade high and a searing flame swept before him, clearing a path. The sappers fired their opening salvo, sharpers and brightsticks. It was like throwing an egg at a wall. Explosions that should have shredded men and horses instead merely singed them, the light that should have seared eyes into blindness was laughed off.

Horns sounded, deep and promising ruing. The horsemen took three volleys, before reaching Mok’s pikemen. Arrows and fire, the billowing poisonous clouds of smokers and the hard bark of sharpers killing less than thirty . This, Grem thought, was the face of the enemy. Of the Heavens putting their hand to the scale, making mockery of the strivings of men. For a single moment, as the pikemen clashed against the cavalry, it seemed like the legionaries would hold. It passed, pikes glancing off armour as the entire first rank of the cohorts were brutally trampled. In that first heartbeat, Grem One-Eye lost at least two hundred men. The relentless brutality of the carnage almost awed him. Horsemen continued to pour out of the passage and slowly the Third Legion began to bend. Like a man with a knife slid into the belly, groaning in pain. Now, Black , he thought. Now, damn you .

A roar older than even the coming of knights cowed the battlefield, and the orc grinned with all teeth bared. Orcs had never quite forgot that sound, even though the dragons that had once ruled the Steppes were long gone. Above, wreathed in the noonday sun, a madman was riding a dragon. And in the claws of that great beast was a massive chunk of stone, still dripping melted rock where it had been burned out. A silver arrow punched through the dragon’s wing, and as it screamed another buried into its flank, but still the glorious bastards flew and down went the stone. Dropped in front of the very opening from which horsemen poured, sealing it shut.

“First Legion,” Grem One-Eye roared. “Forward!”

Invicta was the cognomen bestowed upon his men by the Tower. Undefeated. They would not fail that name today.

—

“They managed to retreat anyway,” Ranker said.

The heroes, even after it all, had held long enough for a retreat. Only two of the nine had perished, the White Knight joining his fellows to escape. The horseman he had brought were not so lucky. Amadeus shrugged.

“There was only so much victory to be had,” he replied. “Papenheim came to us with sixty thousand men. He should now have slightly under forty.”

The Legions had bled as well, she thought. Twenty-four thousand had garrisoned the Red Flower Vales, when the Iron Prince came calling. Sixteenth thousand now camped on the western side of the passage the battle had been fought over. Sacker’s legion should still have the better part of it intact, but even so the losses had not been negligible. At least, she decided, five thousand in full. Against an army of mortals, the Vales could have been held against two hundred thousand until the end of time with the numbers they’d had. How starkly heroes turned the tide, even when checked by stratagem. Ranker shook her head, the two of them standing under a moonless night as exhausted legionaries slumbered in the distance. Too tired to even make cooking fires for what few rations they had.

“Has Warlock made contact?” she asked.

The Black Knight shook his head.

“He might be dead, Amadeus,” she said as gently as her people knew how.

The pale-skinned man shook his head again.

“I would know,” Amadeus simply said.

She left it at that, the two of them standing in silence. Grem’s tent, she saw even from so far away, was still lit. The orc did not know the meaning of rest, even in his old age.

“We have lost the Vales,” Ranker finally said.

Black laughed.

“There are no more Vales to be had,” he replied. “It will take months for the crusaders to dig through the collapse, even with sorcery. Not unless the Witch intervenes and if she does...”

“Warlock strikes,” Ranker murmured.

If he was still alive, of which there was no proof.

“If Hasenbach could so easily employ the Stairway ritual,” Black said, “she would not have stopped at a single passage through the Whitecaps. Multiple points of entry into Callow would have been a much greater strategic threat.”

That was true enough. The Black Queen’s army was strong and well-trained, but it also had limited numbers. She would have been forced to allow one of the invading armies free hand in Callow while she dealt with the other, which would have been disastrous on many levels.

“True as that might be, we’re still on the wrong side of the pass,” Ranker reminded him. “Our supply lines are cut, the full muster of Papenheim’s reunited army is less than a day away and our only paths for retreat involve months of marching through enemy territory.”

If they succeeded at giving the Iron Prince the slip, she thought, smashing the Proceran border army in the south and retreating through the lands of the League of Free Cities might be feasible. The alternative was heading for the Stairway, which was much less appealing even though the march would be much shorter. An army under Princess Rozala Malanza was retreating towards the pass, as of the last reports. The old goblin was not eager at the notion of forcing a narrow passage filled with hero-led Procerans.

“Are we?” the dark-haired man asked.

Ranker’s large eyes blinked.

“You see us as stranded, old friend,” Amadeus said. “I see us as freed . Callow is safeguarded for some time yet. No longer in need of our vigil.”

The goblin licked her lips.

“And we’re at the gate of the Principate’s heartlands,” she murmured.

“Come, Ranker,” the Black Knight grinned. “Let’s have a drink with Grem, and discuss our invasion of the Principate of Procer.”

Chapter 23: Recoup

“Take no comfort in that, hero. For though dawn ever comes, night ever does precede it.”
– Dread Empress Regalia II

“Well, this is a fine fucking mess,” I frowned.

The reports had been unfortunately delayed, mostly by the fact that the Red Flower Vales were apparently now the Red Flower Mountains. Only with brimstone instead of granite, because why would Warlock just make it a little bit worse when he could make thoroughly worse? If those things cracked open and devils started pouring out, I was going to be cross . That the current location of Masego’s father was still unknown did not improve the situation in the slightest, since it meant I had no idea whether he was still guarding the region or not.

“The passes are closed,” Hakram said. “Strategically, that is a victory. The only way into Callow is the northern passage, and it will be barred for at least six months.”

I flicked a glance at the tall orc, still basking in the satisfaction of having him by my side again. It never seemed quite as bad, when Adjutant was with me. He’d arrived only a few days after the peace conference, and remained with us as the Army of Callow escorted the crusaders back up north. It’d been a month since the Battle of the Camps now, since I’d snatched a peace from the butchery and put ink to what might quite possibly be my own death warrant. I shook my head and reached for the small silver thimble at my side, knocking back the brandy in a single swallow.

“I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean whatever the Hells he ’s up to.”

I touched the bottom of the thimble to the unfolded map occupying much of the desk we were sharing. The map itself was ours, but nothing else in this room was. This was the private solar of the Baroness of Harrow, who’d insisted we use it while we stayed in her keep. The liberation of her ancestral lands had apparently put me in her good books. That, or seeing me drop a lake on an army had made her reconsider her stance on royal taxation even though the Pilgrim had knocked me the fuck out after barely ten heartbeats. The silver thimble was touching the edge of the Principality of Bayeux, where news now a fortnight old had Black and his legions sacking towns for supplies on their march west.

“Well, at a glance,” Hakram drily said, “invading Procer.”

“With fifteen thousand men?” I sceptically said. “We’re not even sure he has siege with him. Even if he somehow starts taking cities without engines he can’t hold them.”

While on the surface the Tenth Crusade had tried to enter Callow and twice found the door shut on its fingers, the situation was a lot less promising than it appeared at first glance. The map held a handful of figurines standing for armies and their last reported locations, and the picture they painted was not pleasant. The three Proceran hosts we knew well: one down south in Tenerife guarding the border with the League, one marching out of northern Callow according to truce terms and the last, unfortunately, still camped in front of the Vales. Digging through the wreckage to reopen the pass. That alone would be bad, since the Jacks told me Papenheim should have between forty to fifty thousand soldiers under his command.

What was making it much, much worse was the Dominion of Levant was joining the fray. Half a year ago, Thief had passed me a report estimating they’d send an army about thirty thousand men. She’d been right, in a way. There was an army of that size marching to reinforce Papenheim. Unfortunately, there was also a second one by the shore of Lake Louvant – the massive lake in the centre of the Procer – currently preparing to embark on barges. Its destination was, allegedly, Salia. The seat of the First Prince, the capital of the Principate. And where Black would be headed if he continued to march in a straight line. At a guess, every single garrison in central Procer would be pulled together into a ramshackle army then swelled by the Levantines before they threw all of that at Black’s fifteen thousand. The result seemed fairly obvious, veteran legions or not.

“It is an unusual gamble, by my understanding of the man,” Adjutant conceded. “If those legions are lost, the Empire is crippled.”

“That’s a pretty way to put it,” I grunted. “More honest is that without those men on the field, Praes is left so bare even we could feasibly invade it.”

Odds weren’t good for a reverse of the Conquest, I’d admit. I was pretty sure I could break Malicia’s own legions on the field and seize most the countryside, but taking Praesi cities would be impossible without breaking my army. What I could do might still be enough for her reign to collapse, though, and that made it slightly tempting. Or would have, anyway, if there wasn’t a decent chance that by the time Papenheim’s army was done digging I’d be facing a host of eighty thousand men invading my kingdom. There was, to be blunt, no way the Army of Callow could beat them if they had heroes on their side, which they most certainly would. Not after the losses we’d taken at the Battle of the Camps.

“It may be safe to assume, then, that he does not intend to lose those men,” Hakram said.

“If he’d at least gotten Papenheim to chase him I’d sleep better at night, but the man stayed ,” I sighed. “I mean, Gods, I see the strategic sense in it. The damage Black can actually do is limited, and if Callow falls the crusade is half-won. It’s still a damned cold call to make, though, basically writing off the heartlands of his own country.”

“We do not have a monopoly on ruthlessness,” the orc reminded me.

“It’d be a simpler war if we did,” I said. “But we have to face the facts, I suppose. Let’s be conservative and say it takes them four months to make a passage through the wreck. By that time, the Levantines will have reinforced them. They’ll invade together.”

The orc leaned over and filled my thimble for the second time this evening – he’d quietly claimed control of the bottle, perhaps for the best – before tending to his own.

“The Army of Callow will have largely recovered by then,” he said. “And Duchess Kegan has reinforced us.”

“The Deoraithe need to hold the northern passage, otherwise there’s a decent chance our truce gets shredded and the princes turn back,” I bluntly said. “It’s one thing to trust them with a sword in hand, another if the passage is left empty. No, down south we’ll be on our own.”

Hakram raised his sliver thimble.

“Dust and misfortune,” he said in Mthethwa.

I clinked mine against his.

“Doom pass you twice,” I replied, finishing the old Soninke toast and tossing back the brandy.

The harsh burn – Gods, this was rough stuff even by my standards – went down my throat pleasurably. I set the silver down.

“We’re not winning that battle,” I admitted. “Not against those numbers.”

“Then we seek an alternative,” Adjutant serenely said.

Not a hint of doubt there to be found. It felt like spring water for my soul. I snorted, and got to my feet.

“Not tonight,” I said. “It can wait until tomorrow. Get the others, I need to spend a few hours looking at something that’s not a godsdamned report in Vivienne’s chickenscratch.”

“By your command, Your Majesty,” Hakram drily replied.

He’d mouthed off, I noted, but took the bottle without my needing to tell him. Truly a prince among men, my Adjutant.

—

“You’re mad,” Archer said. “I knew you’d be mad. See, Zeze, it’s just like I told you.”

Hierophant frowned, smoothing his robes.

“You did not,” he noted. “You said, to be exact: ‘Trust me, Masego, she’ll love it. This will have no consequences whatsoever.’”

I eyed the dark-skinned mage with chagrin.

“And you believed her?” I asked.

“Trust is the foundation of a healthy friendship,” he told me. “I’ve acquired a book on the subject. Very informative.”

Hakram smothered a laugh by faking a coughing fit. Naturally, I elbowed him in the stomach. Questioningly. Considering how often I did that to him, he’d learned to tell apart the nuances.

“It’s actually a religious text from one of those love cults in southern Ashur,” the orc whispered, leaning towards me. “You know, the Face of Love folks? The real payoff is when he’ll get to those illustrated parts in the middle. Most lurid thing I’ve ever seen.”

“If he starts talking about sex rituals, you’ll be the one to clean up that mess,” I hissed back in a low voice. “I’ll use a royal decree if I have to.”

“It’s too far from Harrow to Baroness Ainsley’s personal property,” Vivienne considered out loud. “A household knight’s, maybe?”

“Hey, for all we know they’re already dead,” Indrani offered. “So no harm done, right?”

What had once been a lovely garden with stone benches and tasteful statues continued to burn down. A firepit with an entire stag roasting on a spit – another crime right there, I mused, we didn’t have hunting rights in the barony – had been dug in the heart of what’d previously been an elegant bed of flowers. I raised a finger, then put it down.

“All right, before I crack the whip I have to know,” I said. “I get why the pit is on fire, although Masego using hellfame seems like both horrible overkill and a good way to spoil the meat. But why are the trees on fire?”

“Zeze and I had a philosophical argument,” Indrani explained. “He’s a terribly sore loser.”

My gaze turned to Hierophant, who looked vaguely embarrassed.

“She dropped a branch on me,” he admitted. “And she’s quite good at avoiding fireballs.”

My brow rose.

“That’s seven trees, Masego,” I patiently said.

“I am the best at dodging,” Archer boasted without an ounce of shame in her body.

I closed my eyes and counted to five, then opened them.

“All right,” I said. “First, after we’re done here the two of you are going to rebuild this.”

“That’s fair,” Indrani said.

She had the look in her eyes of a woman fully prepared to lounge with a drink in hand while Masego did all the work.

“By hand,” I added. “Not a drop of magic involved.”

“Vivi, how would you like to be Queen of Callow?” Archer said without missing a beat. “I have ever been a sworn enemy of tyranny in all its forms.”

“Please,” Thief drawled. “Who’d be fool enough to want to rule this mess?”

Thank you, Vivienne , I thought, for your unflinching loyalty and support. Really warms the cockles of my heart in these trying times.

“You can’t be serious,” Masego said, glaring at me. “ Manual labour ?”

He spoke those words, I mused, in much the same tone other people spoke about raising the dead or your average black-hearted betrayal.

“You have hands, Zeze,” I said. “What do you think they’re for?”

“Oh, that was a mistake,” Hakram muttered.

Hierophant’s back straightened.

“According to the writings of Seljan Banu-” he began.

“According to the writings of Catherine Foundling, you’re doing it,” I interrupted flatly. “And the material costs are coming out of both your pay, split equally.”

“You don’t even pay us!” Archer protested.

I blinked in surprise.

“Of course I do,” I said. “All of you have been gathering general’s pay since Second Liesse. Indrani, you have a vault in Laure. I handed you the key myself, remember?”

“Yeah, but it was empty,” Archer said. “I thought you were just yanking my chain.”

“Fadila assures me I’ve been paid punctually,” Masego contributed hesitantly.

Indrani cast him a discrete look at the mention of his assistant.

“Mine was full, last I saw,” Hakram agreed.

Slowly, I turned to Thief. Who looked the very picture of maidenly innocence. I’ve seen you stab people, Dartwick , I thought. Pretty incompetently, but still. Try harder.

“Vivienne,” I said very mildly. “Have you been secretly robbing one of your beloved comrades for almost a year now?”

The dark-haired woman batted her eyes in lovely confusion.

“Masego’s book said that earthly possessions only distract from the holy principle of eternal love,” she said. “How could I let them burden such a dear friend?”

Archer let out a delighted cackle that would likely terrified any birds around into flight if the fire had not already done so. At first I was pleased they weren’t brawling in a garden they’d already set on fire, but then I frowned.

“Wait, Indrani, how have you been paying for your tavern crawls all this time?” I asked.

“I haven’t ,” she cheerfully replied.

“They send the bills directly to the palace,” Hakram told me. “It’s under ‘sundry expenses’ in the treasury books.”

“I thought that was, like, bribes and stuff,” I faintly said.

The orc hummed.

“Well, I mean, from a certain point of view...”

I snatched the bottle out of his hands, a tithe for his perfidious treachery.

“All right, you incompetent gaggle of vandals,” I said. “Someone put out those trees. And get me a skewer of that stag, I want to find out how it tastes when you use hellfire to roast it.”

As it turned out, genuinely awful. By that time, though, we were too drunk to mind.

—

I found myself glaring blearily at the moon.

I’d rested my eyes for some time but never actually fallen asleep. Most the others had, though. Masego was seated on the ground, lying against a toppled stone bench. He was snoring very daintily, which brought the shadow of a smile to my face. Indrani’s feet were on his lap, occasionally kicking his legs as she moved in her sleep. She’d made a pillow out of her cloak, indifferent to the chill of the night. Vivienne was draped in actual sheets, which appeared to be mine and from the palace to boot by the cloth of gold bordering them and the embroidered heraldry. She was utterly still in her sleep, and unlike the others I could feel she was only a sudden movement away from waking. I’d not brought cloak of my own, since the one I usually wore did have the soul of a foe inconveniently attached to it. Besides, I hardly minded the cold these days. I’d remained close to Hakram, but instead of a comfort the warmth that emanated from him had me feeling restless.

“Awake?” Adjutant said, moving slightly aside.

Ugh, he’d been a comfortable mattress even if he was way too warm. How dare he.

“Wasn’t quite asleep,” I said. “Just not thinking. Closest I get to slumber, some nights.”

“You should try anyway,” he said. “You’re always better, afterwards. More human.”

“Since when do you think so well of humans?” I snorted.

“They’ve grown on me over the years,” he gravelled.

“The opposite, for me,” I admitted, more honestly than I’d meant to.

“Not them you were glaring at,” Hakram pointed out.

I hummed.

“I still feel like destroying the moon, whenever I look at it too long,” I said. “I know it’s irrational, but it’s like having as stone in my boot. The boot in this terrible metaphor being my soul, probably? Let’s be honest, it’s not the worse thing that tattered old mess has been compared to.”

“Who knows?” he said. “It might be for the best if you do. There’s an old Praesi story about Dread Emperor Sorcerous having bound his soul to it, that he’s still scheming his final escape from death.”

“There’s a distressing amount of Tyrants with stories like that,” I noted. “We’re going to have to get around to cleaning up all those loose ends some day.”

“Probably just a story,” Hakram shrugged. “He was one of the better ones, anyway. Made a place for the shamans at his court, treated them with respect.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Didn’t he also try the sentient tiger army?”

“The Tower’s tried worse over the centuries,” he mused. “If he’d gotten the tigers to pay taxes afterwards, it might even have counted as a gain.”

That surprised a laugh out of me.

“Imagine having all that power,” I said. “And using it for a godsdamned tiger army . The more Praesi histories I read the less I understand the Empire.”

“Funny thing, power,” Adjutant gravelled. “Never quite as straightforward as you’d think.”

“Preaching to the choir there,” I said. “Used to think that if I could blow up a fortress with a snap of my fingers it would all be so much simpler. Now I can, and so very few of my problems can be solved by that.”

The orc shuffled against the bench.

“The Clans have few written histories,” he said. “Oral tradition is how we pass it all down.”

“Miezans did a number on your people, yeah,” I said. “I remember. They had that nasty habit when conquering places.”

“There was a great repository of scrolls in the lands of the Broken Antlers Horde, or so I was taught as a child,” Hakram murmured. “They put it to the torch. I suppose they had reason to, from where they stood.”

“The reasons of conquerors tend to be acceptable only to them,” I said.

In this, I spoke as Callowan.

“Not that,” Hakram said. “The scrolls, most of them were parchment. Human skin.”

I blinked in surprise.

“Your ancestors were certainly a charming bunch,” I said.

“They were what they were,” Adjutant said. “The tragedy, I think, is that we only remember the worst of them. The excesses. We were more, in the dawn of days. And when they ripped out the heart of us they made it so that we could never be that again.”

“It’s getting better, though, isn’t it?” I said. “I remember when I first joined the College. Seeing orcs read and write and talk, like...”

I hesitated.

“Like we were a people whole, and not the hissing shade of our heyday,” Hakram finished gently. “There is something taking shape, Catherine, that is true enough. But it is not what we once were. No more than Callow under your rule is the Callow of the old Alban kings.”

“That’s an old refrain, Hakram,” I said. “The same the Trueblood sang, and the rebels in Liesse. We only remember the golden parts of the good old days. They had their failings too. You can’t look at our own failures and match them to barely remembered victories. The comparison is false.”

“Oh, we were a terrible enough people in those days,” the orc murmured. “Glorious too, at times, but terrible always. But I was speaking of old stories. There is one I remember, that the old raiders past their prime would tell us when the snows kept us in our tents. It is a conversation, between the Warlord Gazog and her son. One of many, though few are remembered. We call it the Riddle of Power, learned from an ancient stele.”

I closed my eyes, leaning back against the stone.

“Tell me,” I said.

He remained silent for a moment, gathering his memories, and when he spoke it was in Kharsum cadenced.

“After her spear had broken and she had grown fat and grey from the tributes of mankind’s kings, Old Gazog took her young son to the great gathering of the thaw, where many clans assembled to trade and prepare the making of war,” he said. “With cups of blood-brew they sat beneath their banner in silence until the sun had passed. Under the dark sky, Old Gazog spoke this: my son, you have witnessed the multitude of our people before you. Young and old, warrior and chieftain, lorekeeper and bronzesmith. I ask you now, where lies power among them?”

Hakram’s voice lightened, as if he were a young boy of his kind.

“Honoured Mother, her son said. This is no riddle, for the answers has always been thus: it lies with chieftain and warlord, for their power is command over all. Old Gazog laughed, her teeth grown soft from many victories. Foolish son, she said. If their power comes from command, then how can their command come from power? How mighty is a chieftain, without obedience given?”

Adjutant clicked his fangs, and his were not soft at all.

“Old Gazog’s son pondered this, and saw her wisdom. In this he was enlightened, and so answered once more. Honoured Mother, he said, power then lies with the lorekeepers. For they hold much wisdom and learning, cunning and law, and in teaching it does their power manifest. Foolish son, she said. What is wisdom, without hand to carry it? Was it a word, without ear to hear it? But wind, and wind is no mother of glory.”

The orc’s voice grew rough.

“Honoured Mother you speak true, her son said,” Hakram said. “The birth of empire is bronze, and so power lies with the bronzesmiths for they alone know the secrets of fire and forge. They hold in their palm the source of war, and only in war can glory be found. Foolish son, said Old Gazog. You learn nothing. The whelping of fire is as wisdom, worthless without hand to wield it. Would a hoard of a thousand axe-blades bear the name of empire?”

He paused and I heard him lick his lips.

“Old Gazog’s son grew wroth, for he did not know of his foolishness. Hateful Mother, he said. You speak many words, yet deny all save the hand. Is this your wisdom, that an empire is naught but swing of blade? All the peoples of the world know this, and there can be no further learning of it. Foolish son, she said. Be silent if you cannot be wise. There is terrible truth beneath the riddle of power, and it I will reveal it to you now.”

Hakram went silent. I did not open my eyes.

“And?” I asked. “What did she say?”

The orc laughed harshly.

“No one knows,” he told me. “You see, the Miezans broke the stele.”

I heard him look up at the sky.

“Sometimes,” Hakram Deadhand said softly, “I think that a truer answer than what was written.”

Chapter 24: Invitation (Redux)

“The enemy of my enemy is second on the list.”
– Dread Empress Vindictive III

“Is it contained?”

I didn’t bother with greetings, knowing the manners would be lost on Masego anyway. The dark-skinned mage nodded, not even noticing the abruptness of my tone.

“It did not struggle against imprisonment,” Hierophant said. “Nor has is sought to escape binding since.”

The two of us walked towards the sparse woods where the creature had been trapped inside wards without wasting time. Night had just fallen, which was a small mercy. It meant there’d be fewer witnesses. Already the scout line who’d found it approaching Harrow had been sworn to secrecy, but there was no telling if anyone else had come across it. as the exact path it’d taken to get here was still a mystery. More worryingly, the Observatory hadn’t seen it and it was meant to pick up on exactly this kind of stuff. I was not great student of sorcery, but even to me the implications were visible. Whoever had sent the thing was a mage of very great skill, and there were only a few of those around. And even fewer among those who’d lower themselves to raising the dead, much less this... particular kind.

“You’re sure it wasn’t an attack?” I asked for the third time.

Masego’s brow creased.

“Certainty of unknown intent is, by definition, impossible,” he said peevishly. “My current theory , based on initial observation, is that this was not an attack. It is not armed, and was not crafted with combat in mind – or at least no form of combat I can recognize.”

“It doesn’t need to swing blades to be dangerous, Masego,” I said. “It just needs to carry a magic plague and take a dip in the water reservoirs.”

“Don’t be obtuse, Catherine,” he sighed. “Plague-bearing was one of the first threats I assessed it for. There is no trace. It has, if anything, been stripped out of everything but the barest necessities for functionality. It does carry an enchanted object, but that object has no harmful properties.”

I frowned.

“Is that how it slipped the Observatory’s sight?” I asked.

“I do not believe so,” Hierophant said. “I’ve made preliminary studies, and found that its presence in Creation seems dimmed , somehow. Like a shadow under sorcerous sight. It was not invisible to the Observatory so much as exceedingly difficult to find if not specifically looked for.”

“We need to fix that weakness,” I flatly said. “If this could be done once, it can be done again. We’re relying on the Observatory to keep one step ahead of threats, and I’m not pleased someone already found a way to fool it. You told me it’d be years before someone found a counter.”

“I told you it would be three to five years before the Empire found a counter, barring my father’s sustained intervention,” the blind man corrected. “This is not Imperial work.”

We were going to have a longer conversation about this down the line, but I allowed silence to take hold as we finally got deep enough in the woods that the creature was in sight. Surrounded by layers on layers of translucent force with glowing runes inscribed, the undead creature was utterly still. Hakram, in full armour with his axe in hand, was keeping an eye on it. Indrani was out in the field to make sure there wasn’t another wandering the countryside, and Vivienne combing the keep for infiltration we might have missed. It wasn’t a person I was looking at, though it might once have been. The upper body and face was of a pale-skinned man’s, but that was where the normality ended. There was a pair of segment, almost insect-like arms coming out of the creature’s back, with hooks at the tip. Made for climbing, I thought. Had it crossed the Whitecaps without taking a pass? The body parts beneath the torso were harder to make out. The entire creature had been covered in a ragged cloak when the goblins first saw it, though it had fallen off the upper body since, and what I could glimpse through the cloth was eight spider-like legs of bone and necrotized flesh folded close to the torso. It was, I grimaced, the kind of abomination you’d expect to be dumped out in the Wasteland after an Emperor climbed the Tower and cleared out the basement of their predecessor’s experiments. There were no visible weapons save for the claws, not that it needed any.

“You’re sure this isn’t of your father’s making?” I said.

“I could perhaps reproduce the design in two months, he in one,” Masego noted. “The material parts of it anyway. What makes it truly fascinating work is the guiding intelligence, since there is barely any. Every ounce of metaphorical fat has been trimmed. It is, I will admit, one of the most magnificently efficient necromantic constructs I have ever seen.”

I cursed.

“All right, so either a high-tier necromancer has just come out of the woodworks,” I said. “Or we’re dealing with something much, much worse.”

The Dead King. Fucking Hells. It wasn’t like the situation had been going so well the Heavens needed to drop another dead cat in my lap. Assuming this was their work, anyway, and not a play by the Pricks Below.

“Catherine,” Hakram said suddenly, breaking me out of my thoughts before a proper rant could take hold. “It’s moving.”

My eyes flicked at the creature, which had risen on two bone appendages and was peering at me from the edge of the wards.

“Well,” I muttered. “That’s pretty lively for a dead cat.”

Masego glanced at me and opened his mouth but I silenced him with a raised hand. I felt him twitch, the mutter something under his breath about there being no feline components. The undead stared at me for a solid twenty heartbeats before opening its mouth.

“I offer greetings to the Black Queen of Callow,” the creature said. “Your renown has been heard far and wide, bringing the attention that is your due. I bear invitation from the King of the Dead, who offers safe passage to Keter. In the face of Above’s wroth, the champions of Below must either face demise alone or overturn the wheel of fate in coming striving.”

I waited just in case it had anything to add and in a manner of speaking it did. The jaws unhinged and a serpent-like black tongue came out, offering up what looked like a circular seal of pure obsidian.

“The enchanted object it was carrying,” Masego said. “It holds... instructions. A sliver of knowledge accessible through touch.”

I stared at the obsidian seal and decided it was too early in the year to start making decisions that blatantly terrible. I wasn’t getting anywhere near that until Masego had spent a few days checking it out, and even then I wasn’t touching it if it could be at all avoided.

“I hear the King of the Dead’s invitation,” I said. “But seek clarification on the nature of it.”

The tongue snapped back in. The undead began speaking again, but it was just repeating the exact same message. Masego’s glass eyes were staring at it, his head cocked to the side.

“Hierophant?” I probed.

“The trigger for the actions was your presence,” he said. “The message is not spoken consciously so much as woven into what passes for the construct’s mind. It cannot reason or reply, only repeat.”

“My presence,” I repeated slowly.

“Winter, more specifically,” he said. “I’ll need a closer look to find out the decision threshold, but I suspect Larat would not have been able to fool it into speaking.”

Hakram had come to stand at my side while we spoke, warily eyeing the undead.

“Cat,” he gravelled. “If the Dead King knew enough to bespell for that...”

“He has a much better idea of what’s going on outside his kingdom than we thought,” I finished grimly. “Shit.”

Masego cleared his throat.

“Why are we displeased?” he said. “My interest in diplomacy is inexistent, but this seems to me like an offer of alliance. Are we not under siege by the crusaders?”

“We are,” I said.

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“But there’s a saying back home about Praesi bearing gifts, and I think it might just apply here,” I said.

Hakram loomed tall at my side, baring his fangs at the creature.

“I’ll get the others,” he said. “The solar?”

I nodded and stood silently as he left, watching the creature as it began to speak the message again.

“You have an hour to study it,” I finally told Masego. “Don’t break it, we don’t know if there’d be consequences. After the hour’s done, I want you in the solar with everyone else.”

An eager smile split Hierophant’s face in two.

“Thank you, Catherine,” he murmured. “This will be most interesting .”

I walked away without a word, pretty sure I didn’t want to see what would follow.

—

There were six of us in Baroness Ainsley’s solar, enough that it felt full without being outright cramped. The piles of parchment that followed Adjutant like a curse had been dumped unceremoniously on the ground so that the only thing on the table was a detailed map of Calernia – along with a handful of goblets. Mine was still half-filled with aragh, but I’d refrained from downing it whole after Hakram sent me a quelling look. Fine, be that way , I thought mulishly . It’s not like I was just essentially offered an alliance by the oldest and most dangerous abomination in Calernian history. If there was ever a godsdamned reason to drink... Masego was already looking bored and we hadn’t even begun. He’d hinted his time could be better spent studying the envoy the very moment he’d walked into the solar, and had been sulking ever since I’d told him it would have to wait. It would have been kind of cute, if he wasn’t essentially pouting because I’d told him he couldn’t go elbows-deep in dead flesh. Archer was keeping him attentive – and twitching – by idly tearing up the pages of a book I was pretty sure she’d gotten for this very purpose. Vivienne and Juniper had pointedly sat as far as each other from possible, to my irritation. I was not unaware they were less than fond of each other, but until now they’d been a lot subtler about it. Something must have happened while I was taking my lovely Winter nap, but neither of them was talking. Hakram was, as usual, an oasis of calm competence in the middle of the mess that was our lives. He’d transcribed the Dead King’s message from memory and provided it for the others to read. I cleared my throat.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get this started. Before we get to unpacking anything else, Thief can provide a reminder of how fucked we’re looking at the moment.”

Vivienne shot me an amused look before leaning over the table.

“As most of you are aware,” she said, “there is a knife at Callow’s throat.”

She tapped the map right at the feet of the sculpted spearman figurine on the western side of the former Red Flower Vales.

“Prince Klaus Papenheim, the First Prince’s foremost general, is digging his way though the wrecked passes as we speak,” Thief said. “He has between forty and fifty thousand men under his command, and we estimate that within four months he will be reinforced by an army of thirty thousand Levantines.”

“With the way Cat’s looking like she’s sucking on a lemon that personally murdered her father, I’m guessing he’s preparing an invasion,” Indrani commented.

She sounded at best mildly interested, but I’d take what I could get.

“By the time the Levantines arrive, we believe they’ll have dug out a usable passage,” Thief said. “Which is to say, in about four months we’lle be facing an offensive of at least seventy thousand soldiers led by several heroic bands.”

“That’s bad,” Archer mused. “Zeze, doesn’t that sound bad?”

“I suppose,” Hierophant shrugged. “Can’t we make a truce with those as well?”

“I’m not opposed to the notion,” I admitted. “But we don’t have the men to force another draw, and we’re not dealing with Amadis Milenan here. Papenheim is the First Prince’s uncle and the most decorated general in Procer, he’s not going to flinch if we bloody him a bit. He’ll stick it out until only one of us is left standing, and the odds aren’t looking great for that being us.”

“A truce in the Vales might lead to the political collapse of the Tenth Crusade,” Hakram said. “And likely the end of his niece’s reign with it. Negotiation is not a plausible option as things stand.”

“I could kill the First Prince,” Indrani suggested.

“The Tower’s been trying to do that for over twenty years,” I told her. “She has a future-telling Named, the Augur, watching for attempts. If Black is to be believed the Augur protects Papenheim as well, so removing him isn’t on the table either.”

“Ugh, seers,” Archer complained. “They take all the fun out of it.”

Juniper growled, cutting through the whining.

“Tactics won’t get us out of this,” she said. “We need strategic leverage. Either reinforcements that make holding the Vales feasible, or someone to put pressure on the Principate so it can’t afford to leave those seventy thousand men at the border.”

The orc marshal drummed her thick fingers against the map.

“The Army of Callow will be, barely, in fighting fit if our timeline for the invasion holds,” she said. “But another major battle will take us right back out of the war, won or lost, and this time for much longer. We’re bleeding veterans and irreplaceables. To be blunt, if we want fight again then we need a force to split casualties with. Much better would be not fighting at all.”

“So, now we take a hard look at our options,” I said. “The name of the game tonight being: is there literally any other option that the Dead King?”

“I could go to Refuge,” Archer offered. “Most pupils will be gone, especially the heroes – last I heard Silver signed up with the White Knight – but there’s bound to be one or two left I can beat into joining. Lady Ranger probably won’t care enough to get involved.”

I worried my lip with my teeth.

“Even by gate, it’d take most entire preparation time to get there and back,” I finally said. “I wouldn’t sneer at more Named, but I doubt they’ll be enough to turn the tide unless some real powerhouses have been keeping quiet.”

“They probably wouldn’t be frontline material,” Indrani admitted. “Beastmaster might qualify with the right mount, but he’s not a pushover I can bully and he doesn’t really give a shit about anything going on outside the Waning Woods. Also tends to disappear for months at a time, so he might not be there at all. Concocter’s the only one I can be sure will be there, but her thing is potions and she uses ingredients from the woods for most her brews.”

“We’ll table that for now, then,” I said. “Anyone else?”

“Mercenaries,” Juniper said. “Diabolist hired men through Mercantis twice. I know the treasury’s tight but better some debt than the kingdom lost.”

“That well’s run dry,” Vivienne said, shaking her head. “All the larger companies are already under contract in the League, and even if we snap up all the smaller ones that’d be at most two or three thousand soldiers. Extremely unreliable ones. All the reputable mercenaries are already in someone’s pay.”

“Speaking of the League,” I said, raising an eyebrow at Thief.

“The Hierarch’s still not willing to sit at the table,” Vivienne replied. “The only saving grace is that Procer is also apparently full of wicked foreign oligarchs so they’re equally out of luck there. The Tyrant of Helike is willing in theory, but he also says he loves Hierarch ‘like the father he had and then murdered’ so he won’t cut a deal behind his leader’s back. Not sure we should even if he agrees, to be honest. Aside from how astonishingly prone to backstabbing the man is, poaching a member of the League might get the rest of it coming after us in retaliation.”

Masego cleared his throat, and I glanced at him in surprise. I’d not actually expected him to contribute to this part of the council.

“Is there a reason we cannot simply contact Uncle Amadeus?” he asked. “He has legions with him, as I understand it, and we could spirit them away through gates.”

I felt Juniper’s eyes on me. She agreed with the notion, I knew. She’d already made that very clear in private.

“I’m not willing to do that until I know what game he’s playing, and he hasn’t been forthcoming,” I said. “For all I know the moment we come to pick him up we’ll be heading into a pitched battle with half of Procer. I won’t consider him an enemy right now – Hells, he pretty much scrapped a legion’s worth of men to defend my borders – but it’s a long walk from that to trusting him.”

Masego’s glass eyes turned to gaze at me, the power of Summer within burning.

“We will come to his aid if he is cornered,” Hierophant said, and it wasn’t a question. “I do not ask you to fight a battle for his sake, but he at least should be rescued.”

I clenched my fingers under the table.

“If he’s in danger of death,” I said. “I didn’t force him to take his army in the heartlands of Procer, Masego. And I doubt he would have done it without a plan, which we know nothing about.”

There was a tense moment, then the Soninke nodded.

“He rarely does anything without one,” Hierophant conceded.

Indrani tore another page from the book on her lap and he twitched in irritation. Smiling broadly, Archer looked at me.

“The Empress’ supposed to be in charge, right?” she said. “Seems like we could drop this whole mess into her lap.”

“We can’t,” Vivienne and I simultaneously said.

I snorted, then gesture for her to continue.

“It would break the terms of our truce with the northern crusaders to do so,” Thief said. “Praes is already under siege by the Thalassocracy, regardless. It has no legions to spare.”

“Deoraithe aren’t our solution either, before anyone mentions them,” I added. “Kegan’s army will be holding the passage. Even if we had another way to keep that closed, she’s been pretty blunt in telling me she’s not taking her army into a meat grinder down in the Vales. She’s willing to help, but there’s limits.”

There was a long moment of silence around the table, the stares of most going to the map and the last few forces unaccounted for.

“The Chain of Hunger,” Juniper said, enumerating them. “The Kingdom of the Dead. The Everdark.”

Well, at least they were taking this seriously enough no one had brought the elves. Not that there were even in Creation at the moment. There were still tucked away in some inaccessible corner of Arcadia according to the few Imperial reports Malicia still sent our way.

“The Grey Pilgrim is highly influential in Levant,” Vivienne said. “There might be an angle there as well.”

“Pilgrim’s running his own game,” I quietly replied. “Nothing we have to offer is better than the irons he already has in the fire.”

She fixed me with a long searching look before nodding. We were, I suspected, going to have a conversation about that.

“The ratlings do not seem like a promising avenue,” Hakram said. “Imperial chronicles imply they have no understanding of diplomacy.”

He’d been rather quiet so far, but then he tended to be in councils like these. He’d always preferred to let others do the talking, to work behind the stage so things got done after decisions had emerged.

“It has been theorized only the youngest among them and a very small number of the truly old,” Masego noted. “It is, at least, a matter of record that even after Triumphant slaughtered over nine tenths of their population they offered no surrender. She withdrew after burning everything down and salting the ashes, as I recall.”

Only Hakram and Juniper pressed their knuckle to their forehead at the mention of the name, I noticed, though they both managed not to speak the words.

“Shame,” Indrani said. “The Lady says their Ancient Ones are just large brutes, but the Horned Lords are supposed to be hard fuckers. We could use a few of those.”

“If we assault Lycaonese territories and lay waste to border defences, it might be possible to bait an attack from the Chain even without prior negotiation,” Vivienne said. “They send warbands south every spring, there should already be many on the march.”

“At least half the armies of Rhenia and Hannoven are still up there manning the walls,” Juniper said. “It won’t be a milk run, I can promise you that. Lycaonese die hard. Losses are guaranteed, and I’m not hearing any certainty they’ll have to deal with worse than a few warbands after.”

“We need as stronger foundation going forward,” Hakram calmly agreed. “That plan would rely on too many unknowns.”

“The drow?” Vivienne said, sounding less than enthusiastic.

“We don’t know a lot about them,” I said. “Archer?”

“Lady Ranger tried to hunt the Priestess of Night, a century back I think? They messed with the tunnels so she couldn’t find a way to their cities,” Indrani shrugged. “Haven’t got much else on them.”

“We know they have no unified central rule,” Adjutant said. “That would make them difficult to treat with, much less mobilize. And there are records sixty years old that speak of a drow raiding party wielding weapons of iron instead of steel.”

“I don’t care if they’re using bones,” I grunted. “As long as there’s enough of them to worry Hasenbach.”

“Even assuming they can be assembled and gated within a sennight of your arrival, the Vales would be too far to return in time,” Juniper said. “That means an offensive in Procer, then, and we’d need of a functional army for that to have any degree of success. Nothing we’ve heard leads me to believe they have one.”

“Might be one of the few places susceptible to the Foundling charm though,” Archer said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“The Foundling charm?” I warily asked.

The ochre-skinned woman grinned.

“You know, killing the people in charge until someone willing to listen gets promoted,” she said. “The Tenets of Night are all about stabbing to get on top, you’d blend right in.”

It was an effort not to sigh.

“Might take a lot of killing to get anywhere, though,” Archer mused. “Better to take me to Refuge instead.”

I grimaced and passed a hand through my tangled hair.

“Well,” I said. “I suppose we’re going to have to talk about the Dead King, then.”

Court III

“Power is a blanket that never covers quite as much as you need it to.”
– Queen Matilda the Elder of Callow

Vivienne had learned to enjoy prowling the nights of Laure, though Callow’s capital city would never be as dear to her as Southpool. Back home, in the serpentine alleys of fat brick houses where she’d first learned her trade, she could orient herself without a thought. It had come naturally, an instinct birthed out of thrill and theft. Navigating Laure’s cluster of disparate districts, in comparison, had been an acquired taste. Much like ale, and as the drink she’d once thought little more than bitter brew it had artlessly become a part of her life she no longer bothered to question. She liked the Lakeside District most of all, even though years of stifling rule under Governor Mazus were only now beginning to be recovered from. The docks there different from the quiet piers of Southpool that became barred every night: here activity thrummed even after dark. The taverns were part of it, for every drink peddler unable or unwilling to afford guild membership had opened some grimy temple there for sailors and the destitute to frequent. But it was more than that: Laure never truly slept, least of all here. The royal palace might be the heart of the city, but as far as Vivienne was concerned it was Lakeside that held the soul.

Even in the dark barges came to rest against the long rickety docks of the Regalian, officially a customs house said to be built from what part of the remains of a Praesi flying fortress had not been claimed by House Alban. Less officially, it was the spring well of everything in Laure that shied away from the eyes of the law. The place was beautiful, in its own way. Youths from Denier or Southpool coming to trying their luck in the capital disembarked with nothing but the clothes on their backs, smugglers paid their dues to the Guild of Smugglers to avoid having their cargo inspected – unaware that a cut of the coin ended up in Ratface’s treasury regardless – and even fishermen out late to try part of the lake without competition from the guild of their trade and its ancient rights. It was alive in a way that the cleaner parts of the district weren’t. The Colonnade and its worn statues of the seven first Alban rulers had been kept clean and quiet by men with cudgels since the aftermath of the Conquest, when the stone anchorage had been the closed demesne of the Praesi and their favourite Callowan cronies.

The Whitestone District reminded her of that stilted place, Vivienne decided as she moved from rooftop to rooftop in silence. Oh, it was easy on the eyes. Wide sprawling avenues holding noble manors and beautiful guildhalls. Gardens every few intersections, paid for by the contributions of those that owned property in the district. The locals did enjoy being separate from the rest of Laure. They’d had their own watch as well, once upon a time, though Catherine had disbanded it after her coronation with a look in her eyes that was all savage glee. Sometimes Vivienne forgot the Queen of Callow had been a nobody orphan but a few years ago, and one used to being stepped on by foreign and homebred lords alike. She had not forgotten a single slight from those days, the Black Queen. As was their people’s way. Thief slid down a tiled roof onto a warding wall, then leapt across onto a rain gutter and rode it down to someone’s darkened garden.

She did not need to travel this way, not truly. A single flash of the queen’s seal and there was not a gate in the city that would be barred to her, nor a watchman that would dare disobey her orders. But there was a part of Vivienne that would never be comfortable with the power that came from her status. The Woe, she knew, were highborn in a way that highborn themselves could only dream of being. Close companions to the queen, and Named. No land or riches came from holding one of those, but they brought authority in a way that neither could. It was a gilded cage. Though, praise where it was due, none of the Woe had been taken in by it. Hierophant rarely left the still half-built Observatory if he had to, Archer spent more time Lakeside than in the palace and Adjutant spent his hours putting out fires across the kingdom. As for Catherine, well, she had no love for the crown. The frank admission by the Queen of Callow that she’d abdicate in a heartbeat if it didn’t carry the risk of collapsing the country had been a great reassurance to Vivienne. Second Liesse had... changed Catherine in many ways. Made her more cautious, more prone to avoiding confrontation. The weight of a hundred thousand souls lost was still bearing down on her shoulders.

Caution, though, did not mean lethargy. They had been watching. Waiting. Measuring. And now that Lady Valerie Hadley had tipped her hand, Thief had been freed to act. The Valewoman’s mansion was not truly her own, Vivienne had learned. The Hadleys had not been wealthy enough to rank a house in the single most expensive district in the Kingdom of Callow, and even within the Marquisate of Vale had not been considered among the influential houses. Landed knights, kept afloat by the rent of their few fields to farmers. Some connections to the – once-disbanded by the Black Knight but now reinstated by his very pupil – Guild of Smiths had been rumoured, but nothing definite. Lady Hadley had been gifted the low wall Vivienne was currently climbing and the house beyond it by Baron Richard of Holden, two years before the Liesse Rebellion and the subsequent crucifixion of the man when it failed. For services rendered , the deed had said. The Eyes of the Empire had two scrolls on the matter, and she’d been in their sights as a possible rebel element ever since – even though she’d spent the Liesse Rebellion in Laure, never taking arms with the rebels.

Vivienne had wondered, ever since the name came across her desk, whether she was an agent for a foreign power. It would have been an explanation for the quantity of coin she’d begun moving around last month. Yet there was no evidence of collusion with the Principate or the Tower. It had been venturing down the rabbit hole Brandon Talbot had emerged from that shed some light on the mystery. Valerie Hadley had discretely hidden a handful of the knights that came out of the woodworks to found the Broken Bells for half a decade, at her own expense. That the Baron of Holden had seen fit to reward her for it had interesting implications – he must have been part of the conspiracy that kept Callowan chivalry alive under the occupation – though given the death of the man and the end of his line’s rule they were now largely irrelevant. It’d been telling, though. Hadley had kept knights hidden and funded at a time where such a thing would have landed her on a table with Praesi mages dissecting her memories before summary execution if she were caught. She was either patriotic or hard to frighten. Perhaps both, Vivienne had eventually decided. It would explain how this night had come to be.

Midnight Bell had already passed, but there were still lamps lit in the gallery that overlooked the small pond and garden below. Thief was amused by her glimpse of the tall open windows that made up most of the wall. She was fairly certain Governor Mazus has once taxed properties according to the height and length of windows, and given the multitude of those in the mansion perhaps there was an explanation to be found about why Baron Richard had been so willing to cede the deed of his beautiful mansion to a stranger. Thief crept across the grass silently and melded into the shadows at the base of the wall as a household guard passed through the garden. She could have used her aspect to avoid the need entirely, but relying on the arcane was a good way to get sloppy. And sloppy thieves die young, here and everywhere. The climb was easy. Decorative bas-reliefs made for easy footholds and there were plenty vines and shadows to hide in when the next guard passed. Thief’s silhouette stood wreathed in moonlight for a heartbeat when she crouched on the windowsill, but when a breeze set the curtains to moving and Hadley glanced to the side she was already gone.

Lady Valerie, she saw, was alone at the high table with ledgers and household papers. A mostly full carafe of wine sat to the side, alongside a cup. That simplified matters a great deal. Hide , Vivienne thought. Steps barely even a whisper, she stood behind the woman and fished out a little parchment satchel. The pale powder within sunk into the cup of wine without a sound, leaving no trace. Praesi had a way with alchemies of all kinds, it had to be said. Thief poured double the dose, as Hadley did not strike her like a heavy drinker. It was only after the Valewoman drank from the cup that Vivienne pulled out the seat to her left, allowing her aspect to ebb. Valerie Hadley cursed and reached for the knife at her hip, fumbling with the sheath, and Thief dropped into the sinfully comfortable chair with a sigh of pleasure.

“Good evening, Lady Valerie,” she said.

The words stilled the woman, though her eyes were still touched by fear.

“Lady Thief,” she replied, voice thick with that slow Valean drawl. “The queen’s own Left Hand. I suppose I should feel flattered.”

Vivienne smiled. She was, at least, not one of that particularly despicable breed of plotters that flinched and mewled when their schemes were brought to light.

“Feel free, if that is your preference,” she shrugged. “We were overdue a conversation, don’t you think?”

“And they said the queen would be no tyrant,” Hadley said darkly. “That she might have been taught by a monster, but that in the end blood would win out. So much for that . Am I to disappear into a dark cell now, Vivienne Dartwick?”

“No. No, there will be none of that,” Thief softly said. “I am here because I wanted to hear you speak. Look you in the eyes myself. It is a weakness, I suppose, but to be Named is to have your flaws swell along the rest of you.”

“I have done nothing wrong,” Lady Hadley said. “You know this as well as I.”

“If you’d taken Proceran coin, I would hold you in contempt,” Vivienne admitted. “I would outright despise you, if it had been the Tower’s instead. But your little conspiracy was Callowan, from beginning to end, wasn’t it? A handful of lords and ladies gave you coin, but most came from common folk. No conspirators they, only men and women afraid of what this land has become.”

“A kingdom is more than crown and court,” the woman replied. “How many despise the Black Queen’s rule, I wonder? Mere hundreds were enough to pay the price and some, but I suspect could have found thousand more.”

“It’s not Catherine you bought the death of,” Thief said. “It was Hakram. Clever of you, given how deeply he is needed. Even cleverer to avoid the Guild of Assassins and reach out for Praesi killers. The Jacks are near blind in the Wasteland.”

“You found out anyway,” Hadley smiled bitterly.

“The coin is what caught our attention, but that was inevitable,” Vivienne noted. “It would not have been enough to warrant action, as you no doubt believed. Hanging you on such thin grounds would have tarred Catherine’s reputation. But your hired killers paid the Guild of Smugglers to cross the border, the fools, and that allowed us to unravel the whole thread.”

“I did not choose him for being an orc,” Lady Valerie said. “Let that be known. It is a disgrace for one of his kind to hold high office in Callow, but hardly warrants murder. No, I soiled my hands because without him the Black Queen would finally need to rely on us . Her own people. How foul a truth, that it would take so large an absence before she even pondered that.”

“I’ve thought the same, on occasion,” Vivienne admitted. “The Kingdom of Callow is born anew, and yet the highest offices are nearly all held by foreigners. Loyal to Catherine first and foremost, without any genuine love for the land they rule in her name.”

“Then you understand why this is necessary,” the woman said, leaning forward. “This is a farce, Thief. Kendall stacks the court and the officers with merchants and eldermen that will never gainsay her, cowed by her high birth and favour with the queen. The very Queen’s Council has a single Callowan sitting on it and half the south will be parcelled away to legionaries? It is madness. It cannot go on. Better we suffer retaliation for the Deadhand’s death than do nothing. Sacrifices had to be made.”

“It won’t happen,” Vivienne said quietly.

“The Adjutant’s death?” Hadley chuckled without humour. “Obviously.”

“No,” Thief replied. “Liesse being partitioned. It was never going to happen, you see. I leaked a false document to someone I knew the Regals had cultivated.”

Blood drained from the other woman’s face.

“I would have done without even that,” Vivienne noted. “I wanted to falsify the entire accusation and finish it all months ago, but I suppose Catherine needed to be sure . That they really would go that far in their disregard.”

“This is murder,” Lady Valerie said coldly. “Cold-blooded, calculated murder.”

“Is it?” Thief mused. “It relied on the actors involved being willing to cross the line on their own. At no point was coercion involved. That was, to my understanding, the entire point of it. As for you, Hadley, you tried to wield a knife. The moment the hand touches the handle, one must we willing to suffer the consequences.”

“How eager you are to excuse tyranny,” the other woman snarled. “You are the willing servant of this kingdom’s woe. I hope you drown with the rest of us, when all accounts are finally settled.”

“The funny thing is that I’m trying to achieve exactly what you want,” Vivienne said. “Putting Callowans in high office. Kendall is... unreliable, in my eyes. Willing to rebel yes, but also willing to bend with the wind. The Regals are much less prone to that flaw. But you had all these others flaws, you see. They had to be fixed before an argument in your favour could be made.”

“You try to tame us like a pet,” Hadley mocked. “How many will you slaughter, before we bow deep enough for your tastes?”

“Your radicals were already dead,” Thief shrugged. “They were too large a vulnerability. We couldn’t risk the Tower or the First Prince agitating through them when the armies are at the borders. Hakram argued for acquiring leverage instead of a thinning, but there was only so much of that to be found. Better to be sure.”

“Weeping Heavens,” Lady Valerie hoarsely whispered. “You own Julienne. You’ve had her gather every true patriot behind Farron so they can be slain in a single stroke.”

“For months now,” Vivienne agreed quietly. “Of course, we won’t be the ones throwing accusations. There’d be too much doubt. But before the night is over, Grandmaster Brandon Talbot will come across evidence of the conspiracy. There was some argument about whether leaking a matter under seal was enough, but I won that round. The entire faction will be implicated in your assassination plot. We expect Talbot will bring the evidence of it to the palace within the hour. He’ll request a purge himself, and who would doubt the very founder of the Regals if he says there’s rot in the flesh?”

The Valewoman spat to the side.

“You use a good man for ugly purpose,” she hissed.

“We use all sorts, Hadley,” Thief said. “One might argue that is our tell-tale mark. Lady Julienne will sadly be jailed for a time, but eventually manage to squeak away from the fallout with a mere fine due to lack of evidence. And after the remaining Regals gain in prominence, securing the withdrawal of the Liesse proposal, she will stand a lightning rod for any emerging rebellious elements. We learned from the Empire, you see. Best to lead your own opposition if you can.”

“How well you have learned the ways of the Enemy,” Lady Valerie sneered. “You masquerade as its better while using the same means towards the same ends.”

“I’m starting to understand it, just a little bit,” Vivienne murmured. “Why she got so angry when we talked. Because there’s a reason I’m on this side, Hadley, and it’s not because I somehow enjoy killing my own people – no matter how misguided they might be. But the Woe? We’re small fish in a very large pond. And if you can’t even handle us, how could you possibly handle the the Empress and the First Prince? All the while you get all righteous about what we do, but if we actually gave you the rein you’d drop this entire kingdom in the fucking deep end within the month. Sure, we’re the godsdamned Enemy. You get to have that. That doesn’t mean you’re somehow fit to rule.”

Hadley laughed harshly.

“And who are you trying to convince, villain?” she said. “All this talking, yet beneath all I see is blood spilled out of fear. You know you forge your own doom with every action.”

“Doom is our business, Lady Valerie,” Vivienne said. “We know it more intimately than you ever could. And as for blood, well...”

Thief smiled coldly.

“I was told, you see, that sacrifices had to be made. So they have been.”

A heartbeat later, Lady Valerie Hadley slumped down onto the table. It was impressive, that willpower had allowed her to last that long. She wasn’t dead, of course. No, killing one of the foremost Regals in her own home would endanger all of this. But she would sleep like the dead, unable to wake up for at least a day. By which time she would be in a cell, unable to escape and awaiting her trial. Thief snatched the carafe and drank deep. She wiped her mouth, after, knowing her fingers came away stained as if by blood.

“Long live Callow,” Vivienne Dartwick murmured. “And Gods forgive us all.”

Chapter 25: Edge

“My dear Betrayer, I resent this accusation of selling you out to the heroes. No coin changed hands, it was really more of a bartering.”
– Dread Emperor Traitorous

“I shouldn’t need to bring up the grave consequences that would of dealing with that entity in any way,” Vivienne noted calmly.

Maybe a little too calmly, I thought. She wasn’t angry – I’d learned to read that in her – but she was... weary, maybe. Like she was seeing the same lay of the land I did, and was horrified at what might come of it.

“Heh,” Indrani said. “ Grave consequences. You know, because he’s the Dead –”

“Masego,” I interrupted. “Would you please smack her?”

“Do I get to pick where?” Archer leered.

There was a pause.

“No,” Hierophant replied pensively, and tried to slap the back of her head.

He ended up caught in a wristlock instead, and the two of them toppled to the floor when he called on sorcery to try to toss her away. The two of them fell wriggling as Indrani tried to get on top – no surprise there , I mused – and the council was forced off the road until Hakram rose to his feet, grabbed a water pitcher with a sigh and upended it on them both. Archer yelped, Masego looked peeved and I turned the droplets freezing cold out of petty spite.

“Back in your seats,” I ordered.

I looked away even as Masego evaporated the water on his robes, pretending deafness when Archer asked him to to the same for her. Juniper growled, which got both their attentions. Both of you could kill her with barely any effort , I thought amusedly. But all she needs to do is growl a bit, and you straighten your backs .

“Militarily speaking, cooperation with the Kingdom of the Dead would be both boon and threat,” the Hellhound said. “Its armies have been strong enough to weather five crusades: there’s no way the Proceran borders can hold if he comes out in force.”

“Which would leave us with a fresh liability,” Hakram said calmly, seated again. “Namely, that the Dead King would be out in force.”

“Forget armies,” Thief said flatly. “If it becomes known we struck a pact with the Hidden Horror there is not a nation on Calernia that will be willing to treat with us. The cost of that absurdly dangerous alliance would be that we are made pariahs forevermore. I cannot stress this enough: even the summoning of demons would go over better. The only person to have ever struck alliance with the Dead King was Dread Empress Triumphant at the peak of her power. That will be the precedent everyone sees us through, from that point on.”

“We’re already fucking pariahs, Thief,” Juniper grunted. “I won’t pretend working with the Horror would be pastries and flower crowns, but let’s be honest: what would we actually lose ?”

“Any semblance of legitimacy, for one,” Vivienne hissed.

“I do not speak in endorsement,” Hakram said mildly, cutting through before it could escalate. “But Juniper is not incorrect. We are in varying states of hostility with the Empire, the Principate, the Dominion and the Thalassocracy. The League has already refused to negotiate with us, twice. It may be that situation will change in the future, but it has not yet. As it stands the costs of this decision would not be a direct loss, only the denial of possible change.”

“Eh, no need to trumpet it around anyway. We could just be secret allies,” Archer said. “Doesn’t the old guard love that kind of stuff? He’d probably go for it.”

I sipped at my aragh, leaning back into my chair. Indrani wasn’t wrong.

“There’s more than a few steps between alignment – however temporary – and alliance,” I finally said. “Ideally, we would use the King as a distraction with full deniability. I don’t think anyone in this room wants him to actually win in any measurable manner. If he can launch a failed invasion that takes the pressure off Callow, though, that might be a notion worth entertaining.”

“If the dead cross the lakes into northern Procer, it will be butchery,” Vivienne said coldly. “Hannoven might be able to resist, heavily fortified as it is, but Cleves and Hainaut? They’ll break, Catherine. You know this. Hundreds of thousands murdered and made into abominations. Akua’s Folly, forged anew half a dozen times.”

“It would be,” I said slowly. “If they were taken by surprise.”

There was a long moment of silence in the room.

“Are you proposing,” Juniper gravelled, “that we double-cross the Dead King?”

“I mean,” I hedged, “I wouldn’t put it exactly like that.”

“That means yes,” Masego helpfully informed Archer in a whisper. “It’s the Callowan uprising. She doesn’t like to admit to betrayal.”

The Hellhound opened her mouth then closed it, licking her lips. Solemnly, she reached for the bottle of aragh and poured until her cup was nearly overflowing.

“If you would elaborate, please,” Thief said quietly.

“So we have a nice chat with Trismegistus,” I said. “Shake hands, kiss his dead babies – let’s not kid ourselves, he’s bound to have a few of those – and plan an offensive. We leak the plan to Procer at least a month ahead, enough time so they can evacuate everything. We time it correctly and Malanza’s army will be in a position to march north to fight a delaying action until the rest of the crusaders can reinforce her.”

Juniper choked on her drink.

“Hasenbach would have to send most her armies to hold the north,” Hakram said quietly. “And suddenly we gain a great deal of leverage. The Army of Callow could easily strike her back and collapse her supply lines. Or, if she makes peace with us, ferry her armies through Arcadia before either Cleves or Hainaut is entirely overrun.”

“There would still be a great many deaths,” Vivienne said, but she was hesitating.

“No civilians, though,” I said. “Soldiers. Loss of property as well, but I’m less than sympathetic to the monetary plight of princes trying to invade my homeland. We can limit the terms of engagement for the Dead King as part of our deal.”

“That will no longer hold the moment we betray him,” Thief reminded me.

“We can delay that until Procer’s in a position to give a good fight,” I said.

“It should be remembered,” Hakram said. “That if it ever comes out we were involved in the matter, we’ll be discarding every scrap of goodwill we have so far accumulated through our restraint.”

“We’ll deny it. Not like they’ll have proof, so it’ll be the Hidden Horror’s word against ours if he even bothers to say anything. And, to be blunt, Juniper’s not wrong. Goodwill hasn’t cut it so far,” I admitted. “And I think we could get a lot of it back by throwing in with the crusade against the Kingdom of the Dead, even if it comes to that. If it takes leverage to get things done, Hakram, I’m willing to go that far.”

“I don’t like it,” Vivienne said. “This... scheme is not as bad as I first thought it would be, but playing with fire doesn’t do the danger of it justice.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “And I think we can all agree this is a last ditch plan, not the first arrow out of the quiver. I’d much rather cut a deal with Hasenbach herself or the Pilgrim if I can, and I intend to try that as soon as this council is done. But if they’re not game, then I think we have to seriously consider this.”

I met her eyes unflinchingly, and saw the war taking place behind them. Between the patriot and the decent woman. Better than anyone else in this room, she knew how dangerous the army standing on the other side of the Vales would be to Callow. Thief had always been lukewarm about making treaties with Procer, reminding me there was a reason Red The Flowers was a popular song in the country to this day. On the other hand, she was not a killer. She had killed, to be sure, and arranged the death of others. But it was not in her nature, and unlike me she’d never grown used to it. Making common cause with something like the Dead King, no matter how false the premises, ran against the grain for her. There was a reason it was to her I’d handed the means to kill me. Of all the Woe, she was the only one I could trust to pull the trigger if it came down to it. Her moral compass wasn’t exactly pristine. I knew that. She was, after all, a thief. And capable of dark things to keep Callow whole. But she’d yet to lose that spark of decency that none of my other friends could truly claim to have. Not even Hakram, for all that I loved him more than any other. The moment passed, and I did not need to wait to know which part of her had won. The repugnance on her face made it clear enough.

“Before this plan is seriously entertained, there is a great deal to address,” Thief said.

Your people becoming warped by your presence , the Grey Pilgrim had said. Old traits grown more vicious and acute. Was I slowly breaking down my own contingency? I shivered in a way that had nothing to do with cold.

“Agreed,” Hakram said. “Namely, why the invitation at all?”

Juniper set down her cup and it rang empty against the table. She wiped her mouth.

“That’s had me wondering,” the Hellhound said. “It doesn’t seem like he’d need us, at first glance. Out of all his possible allies the gates make us arguably the most immediately useful for an offensive in Procer, but our strategic value is limited.”

I glanced at the two bickerers in the back, since this part of the conversation was exactly why they were here. Masego as our expert in all thins arcane, one who’d had access to Tower archives to boot, and Archer as the pupil of one of the few people who was known to have entered the Kingdom of the Dead and returned.

“I can tell you a few things about how Keter is run, and the lay of the city,” Indrani said. “But not much more than that. The Lady speaks fondly of him, but that’s not surprising – he’s probably one of the few entities kicking around she can’t kill.”

Less than useful. I glanced at Hierophant, who was frowning.

“The only precedent I can think of for the Dead King making alliance is Dread Empress Triumphant,” he said. “He was not her equal, but neither was he her vassal. During none of the crusades directed at his realm did he seek Praesi assistance.”

“He’s launched offensives into Procer before,” Juniper said. “We have records of the battles. But they always seemed more like large-scale raids to me. Cities were sacked more to grab people than to grab territory, and I can’t recall an instance he went deeper south than northern Brabant.”

“ Three Hundred Years Against the Dark , Amalia Holtzen,” Hakram murmured. “I have read the volumes as well, and always found the mentions of his presence with the armies to be somewhat dubious. Nowhere as powerful as a necromancer of his purported strength should be. Chronicles are the crusades are hard to get by, for us, but in those he’s said to have fought heroes. There can be no comparison between the power displayed there and in Holtzen’s volumes.”

“He can raise Named with some of their power still attached,” Archer said suddenly. “The Lady’s fought a few.”

I blinked at Indrani. Was she implying that Ranger took walks into a poisonous undead-infested wasteland just so she could scrap with – I forced myself not to think about that too deeply. Ranger was fucking insane, trying to figure her out would lead me nowhere.

“You’re implying he hasn’t led his armies in person since Triumphant,” I said, eyeing the others.

“Father has long suspected he cannot easily leave the Hell he rules,” Masego noted. “Though the scarcity of solid information on the entity prevents this from being proper theory. The Tower has suppressed most writings ascribed to Trismesgitus since Dread Emperor Revenant was overthrown.”

His brow creased, after that, but he said nothing.

“Hierophant?” I pressed.

“It would-“ he began, then stopped and sighed. “There have been always been rumours of some High Lords having records of the Secret Wars that Dread Empress Maleficent the Second never managed to erase.”

“The what?” Indrani said, leaning forward.

“Bunch of Emperors tried to invade the Dead King’s personal hellscape through hell,” I told her. “Malicia mentioned them to me once. It went about as well as you’d expect. Maleficent the Second loosed a bunch of demons to erase the whole mess, since it was bad enough Ater itself was about to be invaded.”

“That would have been...” Thief said slowly. “Well, I doubt there’s a word harsh enough for it.”

“Yeah, there’s a reason Imperial histories aren’t bedside reading,” I said. “Unless you enjoy vivid nightmares, anyway. I think I get what you’re trying to avoid saying, Masego. If any Praesi city has those records, it’ll be Wolof.”

The dark-skinned mage inclined his head in agreement.

“It has always been the heart of sorcery in the Wasteland,” he said.

I thumbed the collar of my cloak. Where the soul of the former heiress to Wolof was currently kept in captivity.

“Diabolist might know more, then,” I sighed.

“She doesn’t deserve to get out again,” Vivienne said darkly.

“It’ be a simpler world,” I said, “if people always got what they deserved.”

I breathed out slowly.

“I grant you leash,” I said. “I grant you eyes and ears, tongue and feet, at my sufferance.”

Akua Sahelian made her entrance with the languid grace of a cat at play. My eyes narrowed immediately. There should have been hole in her chest where I’d ripped out her heart with my bare hands, but she stood intact before me. More than that. No dress of red and gold clung to her form: she wore instead a long gown of trailing darkness, jewels of pure frost glittering around her neck.

“Your Dread Majesty,” Diabolist bowed, smiling pleasingly.

“Huh,” Archer said. “Even dead she’s still a looker.”

I blinked, eyes turning to Indrani.

“You can see her?” I hissed.

Masego inhaled sharply.

“Anchor,” he said, sounding reluctantly impressed. “You made your own prison into an anchor . That is impressive.”

“A compliment from a practitioner of your skill is worth hearing,” Akua said, inclining her head in respect.

“Yes, Cat,” Archer contributed helpfully. “We can see her.”

I glanced at Vivienne, whose fists had tightened so harshly the knuckles were turning white. Still and silent, she was glaring at Diabolist.

“Akua,” I said flatly. “Explain.”

“She devoured part of the mantle, I would say, and wove herself into its very fabric,” Masego said before she could reply.

“An accurate assumption,” Diabolist agreed.

“And so now you’re... healed?” I guessed.

“Bandaged might be more accurate a term,” she suggested.

“With Winter,” I murmured. “Interesting.”

I drummed my fingers against the table and exerted my will. Her hand rose, her eyes widened in surprise and she began choking herself.

“That seems unnecessary,” Masego said as the sound of rough strangulation filled the room.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do that before,” I replied without looking at him.

My eyes were still on Akua.

“Nothing without a price, eh Diabolist?” I said calmly. “You’ve given me a much deeper hold, with that little trick.”

“She cannot die through this,” Hierophant sighed. “Only feel pain, which a caster of her calibre would have long learned to ignore.”

I released my hold and her hand fell as she weakly caught her breath.

“I’ve not grown any fonder of surprises, Akua,” I noted. “You’re rapidly heading towards a place where your occasional usefulness is inferior to the risk you pose. I shouldn’t need to tell you the consequences of that, should it come to pass.”

Diabolist bowed deeply.

“Your chastisement has been heard,” she said.

“Might want to do that again, just to be sure,” Thief said, smiling viciously.

“If you want to tear out butterfly wings, do it on your own time,” Juniper grunted. “Sahelian, do you have knowledge of the Dead King?”

“I have made study of him as a worthy example,” Akua replied. “The horrors he has wrought are second to none.”

“What does he want?” Hakram asked plainly. “As an entity, what is he after?”

The dark-skinned beauty – Archer, much as it pained me to admit it, wasn’t wrong about that part – cocked her head to the side. Thief’s fingers clenched even tighter.

“I am bereft of context,” Diabolist said. “And so cannot make accurate assessment. A creature whose existence has covered the span of millennia cannot be summarized in a single sentence.”

Eyes went to me. No one was going to release information to the shade without my say so.

“He’s invited Cat to Keter to discuss an alliance or something like that,” Indrani said, picking at her fingernails.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. Of course she would. Archer wasn’t one to keep her mouth shut around a pretty anything, much less about things she barely cared about.

“How interesting,” Akua Sahelian drawled, and there was a glimmer of something wicked in her eyes. “I suspect that what Trismegistus seeks is a return of the favour. An invitation.”

I exerted my will and she slapped herself across the face.

“Once more,” I said, “only without the smug cryptic boasting.”

“You used to have a better sense of humour,” Diabolist sighed.

I raised an eyebrow and eyed her hand. She got on with it.

“This is supposition, I must warn,” Akua said. “In matters Trismegistan, certainty is scarce luxury. It is known to my bloodline that the Dead King took the field to lead his armies during the Secret Wars. An event without reflection in his many petty wars with the Principate.”

I studied her.

“You’re implying there’s conditions to him being able to leave his personal hell,” I finally said.

“Indeed,” Akua agreed. “When crusades laid siege to his realm he took the field to humble the Heavens, yet never when he sought to break Procer. If, indeed, he ever sought such a thing at all. This absence might have been taken a weakness of contentment with what he has already achieved, if he had not also fought the Legions across a dozen hellscapes in person. I believe that asymmetry in action to be indicative of a... restraint. A leash, if you would.”

There was a spark of humour in her dark eyes when she spoke that last sentence looking at me.

“He was allied with Triumphant, during her conquest of the continent,” Hakram said quietly. “Histories have always seen that as Evil standing with Evil. But considering this...”

“It might have been a condition,” I finished. “To let him out at all.”

“That sounds,” Indrani grinned, “like leverage .”

Chapter 26: Plunge

“If war is to be understood as the pursuit of statecraft through violence, then the Principate is a failure as a nation: the Highest Assembly has proved chronically incapable of either agreeing on or seeing through a single ambition through the undertaking of warfare.”
– Extract from ‘The Ruin of Empire, or, A Call to Reform of the Highest Assembly’ by Princess Eliza of Salamans

It would have to be Cordelia Hasenbach first. The odds were not in my favour – but when had they last been, truth be told? – yet if this could be settled without the involvement of the Pilgrim it would be infinitely preferable. Now more than ever, every interaction with the Peregrine would carry dangers beyond the obvious. A single careless conversation could see me stripped of power or afflicted with opinions just slightly to the side of my own. For all that the Gods Below were the ones with the reputation for manipulation, I’d come to suspect the reason Above wasn’t saddled with the same was just that they were better at it. Evil tended to drop the bottom of how far you were willing to compromise and allow you to dig ever deeper on your own when the consequences came calling. Even the most deluded villain, I thought, must have hade one glimmer of cold clarity when they realized they’d brought it all on themselves by crossing that one line they wouldn’t have before. Above, though? It dealt in the guise of conscience. A whisper urging you to be the person you could be, if you were just a little better . It didn’t seem so terrible a thing, until you found that first choice seamlessly leading you into the next and the next and the one after that. Pilgrim had called Evil the edge of the cliff, once, but if that was true then Good was the tired metaphor of the slippery slope. Once you started going down, you had no more control over where you were headed than a cart rolling down a hill.

The revulsion that welled in me at that notion was an old friend, and not one I was willing to part from. Black had gotten to me young enough that the thought of having my choice taken away from me brought only bone-deep disgust, even for the worst of them.

The cool darkness of my domain soothed the sharpness of the emotions as it filled the room. There would be no shade whispering advice in my ear tonight. Akua already knew too much of my plans for comfort, and though Masego assured me it was possible to learn to make her invisible to the sight of others again it would take me days to properly master the trick. Days I could not afford: an entire month would go by before my opportunity to speak with the First Prince came again. Hasenbach came out of the dark glowing with the weight of miracles in the dozens, her dark blue dress touched by long golden curls. The understated circlet of pale gold on her brow found no match on my side: I wore no regalia tonight, nothing but the worn tunic and boots of a soldier on campaign. It was a truer glimpse of who I was than jewels and gold, though it did lack the expected formality. The First Prince took a moment to gather her bearings, though it was noticeably shorter than the last time. She was getting used to it, or at least getting better at faking situational awareness. I didn’t bother with the usual duel of silence that tended to precede our conversations.

“Your Most Serene Highness,” I greeted her.

“Your Grace,” Cordelia Hasenbach replied.

I hesitated, and in that heartbeat she took the lead.

“It has been some time since we last conversed,” the First Prince said.

“I saw no need to waste either our evenings by engaging before there was resolution to the battle,” I replied. “There has been, and now here I am.”

“It would have been courteous to notify me of this intent,” Hasenbach chided me.

“War is the graveyard of courtesies,” I said in Chantant, quoting one of her predecessors.

“Julienne Merovins never truly spoke those words,” she noted in Lower Miezan, sounding somewhat amused. “It was a courtier under the reign of her successor, and the bon mot was only attributed to her fifty years after her death by a family historian.”

“It always feels snappier when it comes from someone who wore a crown,” I shrugged. “Harder to tell with Dread Emperors, though, since so many of them really were that insane.”

“Praes does tend to straddle the line between laughable and appalling,” the First Prince said. “A tragedy for us all, that these last few decades have seen it settle firmly on the latter.”

“Lots of tragedies going around, these days,” I smiled thinly. “One might argue we’re both in the business of making those.”

Cool eyes considered me in silence.

“Shall we empty the proverbial bag before speaking with purpose then, Your Grace?” Hasenbach said. “I suppose you must have recriminations to utter, if only for your personal satisfaction.”

“I left personal at the door,” I replied. “It has no place in this conversation. Looking backwards just means stepping blind. I’m here, First Prince, because I want to cut a deal. The rest is noise.”

“You have shown fondness for that measure, of late,” the blonde said mildly. “Your bargain with my subjects was a particularly vicious breed of mercy.”

I frowned.

“I spared lives,” I said. “Thousands of them. Your own people’s lives, it is worth remembering.”

“You removed from the campaign for several months a force that would have been too costly to destroy by violence,” the First Prince said. “It was cleverly done, and I can respect the achievement, but let us not pretend you meant to save men you attempted to drown mere days earlier.”

“That working would have been limited, and only inflicted enough casualties to force a retreat,” I said.

She did not quirk a brow, though I got the impression she very much wanted to.

“An easy assurance to make, after the attempt was foiled,” she said.

I forced my fingers to unclench and breathed out slowly. Temper, Catherine, temper.

“I have taken great pains, Your Highness, to display moderation in how I’ve waged this war,” I said flatly. “At no small cost of my own. There is a point where doubt becomes denial.”

“It has not gone unnoticed,” Hasenbach conceded, to my surprise. “You must understand, however, that you are a villain. Deception is the trade of your kind. There is a chance, however slight, that you are genuine in your intentions. Yet precedent remains a stone around your neck, as it has been around mine.”

“I’ve wrecked a third of my army to prove goodwill,” I said bluntly. “Against the advice of most my generals, it should be said. I have to ask, in your eyes what would actually prove I mean what I say?”

“Abdication,” the First Prince replied without hesitation.

“That,” I said flatly, “is the kind of demand you get to make if you’re winning. You are not. I’m offering a treaty, not serving you Callow on a silver platter.”

“Your ‘offer’ has made its way to Salia,” Hasenbach said. “Bringing our hosts to Ater through Arcadia, if I am not mistaken. A process that assumes you will not merely strand those armies in a realm of hostile fae.”

“I’m willing to swear oaths I won’t,” I told her.

“Which would yet leave the Tenth Crusade almost completely dependent on you for supplies, while its hosts bleed their strength against Praesi cities,” the First Prince said. “Assuming the occupation of the Empire can be successful under those circumstances, the war still ends with you in a fine position to massacre the weakened armies of Procer and Levant after you spent several years raising armies in peace.”

“A possibility that can be warded off,” I said calmly, “if I am a signatory of the Grand Alliance. You should have received the scroll by now.”

The Warden of the West studied me expressionlessly.

“A well-penned request, observing every requirement as set out by the current treaties,” Hasenbach said. “My compliments to Vivienne Dartwick.”

It’d actually been Black that sent us a horrifyingly thorough transcript, but I saw no need to disabuse her of the assumption.

“In case you were wondering, it’s genuine,” I said.

“I assumed as much,” the First Prince smiled. “It would, after all, involve suspension of all military action between members and subject any matters of conflict to neutral arbitrage.”

“And also involve a declaration of war on the Dread Empire,” I pointed out. “Which means Callow won’t be preparing to backstab you, it’ll be on the front with your own armies. I’m even willing to take the Blessed Isle from Malicia and hold it while your soldiers make their way east as a sign of goodwill.”

“You are being deliberately obtuse,” Hasenbach said. “I have already informed you that a villain ruling Callow is not an acceptable outcome for this crusade.”

“I’ve been told more than once it’s bad form in a negotiation for your starting position to be your only position,” I said. “A bargain does tend to involve actual bargaining, Your Highness.”

The other woman’s eyes went cold.

“You are a warlord, Catherine Foundling,” she said, pronunciation excruciatingly precise. “Your reign was built on catastrophe and butchery, and has been maintained by the same. You are not the Queen of Callow, or even the Queen in Callow. The only claim for rule you have is that of steel, and with every passing month that claim weakens. You believe I am being undiplomatic, evidently.”

She paused and her lips thinned.

“That I must even pretend you have the right to speak for the souls under your yoke is a concession greater than any you have right to ask of me,” the First Prince said. “Even a usurper would be more palatable: you have merely ridden from one field of corpses to another, waiting and swelling in might from the deaths of your own people until none were left to gainsay your crowning. Well, here we are now. Consider yourself gainsaid , Black Queen.”

Calm , I thought, as Winter raged. Calm. Insults don’t matter, if you get what you want.

“And is that the stance of every signatory of the Grand Alliance?” I asked with forced politeness.

“There is not a ruler among us who will tolerate your remaining on the throne,” Hasenbach coldly said.

I breathed out. Calm. Yelling is for children.

“Abdication within ten years of the signature,” I replied instead of screaming. “With the understanding that other nations will have no say in the succession, in exchange for which I will give assurance it won’t be another villain.”

I saw her visibly master her anger and that had me frowning. A diplomat that practiced, having a fit? It irked me I couldn’t read her heartbeat, because I was beginning to realize I might just have been played. The scathing rant had felt genuine, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been used as a way to pressure me. Pressure me into giving something I’d been willing to give, sure, but what I’d intended to use as a bargaining chip for further concessions had just been put on the table just to keep negotiations going. Fuck. Horrid as the thought was, I wished I’d had Akua along for the ride.

“Abdication immediately following the end of the crusade,” Hasenbach said. “And binding oaths on both it and the matter of succession.”

“Five years, regardless of the crusade ending or not,” I countered. “I’ll need time to settle matters so the succession is stable. Agreed on the oaths.”

There was a beat of silence.

“An accommodation might be possible,” the First Prince finally said.

I kept my face blank even as relief welled up. Of thank the fucking Gods. I had not been looking forward to trying my hand with the Dead King. Ignoring an invitation from the Hidden Horror would likely have consequences, but I was an old hand at lesser evils.

“A truce until it’s reached, then,” I said. “Including your uncle ending digging operations in the Vales.”

“A passage there will be necessary to the prosecution of the war,” Hasenbach said.

“In can gate his entire army across the Vales in less than a week, if you don’t trust me to get them all the way to Praes,” I replied flatly. “Keeping him pointed at my belly can’t be considered anything but coercion.”

“You are being coerced,” the First Prince frankly replied. “That is the very reason we are having this conversation.”

I watched her, the strongly-cast face and the patience painted upon it.

“There is a very real chance,” I said slowly so she knew I wasn’t being flippant, “that agreeing to what you just said will lead to civil war in Callow. It will be seen as annexation, or at the very least effective vassalage. You badly underestimate how hated your people are in the kingdom.”

“You have asked me to consider you as the ruler of Callow,” Hasenbach said. “Rule, then. Exert your authority to prevent the unrest.”

Gods, she was serious.

“No,” I said. “I’ve made significant concessions. You want the pass open? Give me more than your word to work with. Withdraw the army, make the truce public. I’ll have Hierophant work on a ritual to clear the wreckage, to be used when the treaties have been signed. Otherwise, this is starting to look a lot like I’m baring my neck for the knife.”

“I am the First Prince of Procer, not a petty tyrant,” Hasenbach replied tightly. “I do not go back on my word once given.”

“And I am Callowan,” I snapped. “We have more than few songs about the worth of Proceran promises. You’re asking me to extend a lot of trust. Do the same damned thing.”

“You are overestimating the strength of your bargaining position,” she warned me.

“So are you,” I barked. “You sent two armies after me, and they both got whipped out of Callow . You have Black in your heartlands with four legions and you’d rather argue with me about not putting a knife at my throat than deal with it?”

“I have near every hero on the continent and thrice his number containing him,” Hasenbach said. “His survival is a matter of months, if not weeks.”

“So this is what it looks like,” I said quietly. “An intelligent woman making a very grave mistake.”

“Oh, spare me the heaps of praise for the murderer,” she said. “He is a skilled general and an effective killer. He is not invincible.”

“You are about to get mauled,” I said, appalled. “I don’t even know what he’s up to, but I know that. Sure as day. Gods Below, what about how this crusade has been unfolding could possibly make you this arrogant ?”

“Posturing will yield nothing,” the First Prince said.

“I know what you’re trying to do, Cordelia,” I said. “You think than in a month we’ll be speaking again and I’ll have to bend my neck a little lower. Brinksmanship. I need you to believe me, because I’m begging here, that it’s not what’s going to happen. I cannot gamble this entire kingdom’s fate, start a civil war, on grounds so thin. I’m already cornered. This is as low as I go.”

“Six months ago,” she said softly, “you might have said the same. And yet here we are.”

I closed my eyes. Should I? Give her even that small assurance I was holding out for? It’d be seen as a capitulation because, to be honest, it was. There’d be riots, and at least half the Army of Callow would desert. Thief might actually kill me. She trusted Procer even less than me. Hells, she might be right to if it came to that. There were good reasons I had those contingencies in place. I opened my eyes.

“One last time,” I said. “Don’t do this. We could avoid so much death – beyond the politics and the interests and the schemes, that has to count for something.”

“Appeals to emotion,” she said, not unkindly, “are the last resort of one without argument.”

I stared at her for a long time.

“I think,” I said quietly, “that this conversation is going to haunt the both of us, in years to come.”

She hesitated for a moment.

“I am not without sympathy,” she said. “But there is more at stake than you know.”

It wasn’t an opening. Gods, I wished it was, but there was no invitation to negotiate again in the way she was looking at me.

“Woe to us both, then, Cordelia Hasenbach,” I said.

I ripped away the darkness and rose to my feet. One last try, before I went into the devil’s lair.

—

There were guards around the Pilgrim’s tent, a full line. I dismissed them as gently as my mood allowed, which by the way the Taghreb lieutenant paled wasn’t very. A few months ago, I thought, I would probably have been frosting everything around me. The old man was awake, even this late at night, and seated at a writing desk with a mage lamp atop it. He was penning something, I saw, on a scroll. That had me curious, however reluctantly. He wasn’t allowed letters even as an observer, so what was he writing?

“Pilgrim,” I said, lingering at the entrance of the tent. “May I?”

“Catherine,” he replied with a kindly smile. “By all means.”

I strode into the tent and moved a folding chair from his bedside to face him across the writing desk. He saw my glance at the scroll and chuckled.

“Your Marshal asked me to provide my recollections of the Battle of the Camps,” he said. “As much as can be revealed in my position. I believe she may be penning a history of the last few years.”

Juniper’s ‘Commentaries’, inspired by the second Terribilis’. I’d known about that, and that Aisha apparently kept memoirs of her own though she was very noncommittal about ever showing them to me. I supposed someone should be keeping records, since I sure as Hells wasn’t.

“I’m surprised you’re willing to contribute,” I admitted.

“I have always thought it a great disservice to all, that histories are so often written by the victors,” the hero said. “Much could be avoided by having a broader perspective. If an old man’s recollections can be of any help I am glad to provide it.”

That was the trouble with the Pilgrim, I thought. He would say those wise, beautiful things and seem to genuinely believe them. But then I’d find him on the battlefield, wielding miracles like a knife for a cause that was as empty as it got. There might be a good man, somewhere in there. I wanted to believe that. But that man answered to the Heavens before anything else. And if I could hold it against Black that he could love me but still set it aside, then I could hold it against this stranger that his pretty ideals only mattered as long as the Heavens agreed they were convenient. They weren’t really principles if they were always discarded at the first frown from Above, were they?

“You seem in a pensive mood, tonight,” the Pilgrim said.

I weighed the risks, for a moment, then took the plunge.

“I’ve just had a very exhausting conversation with the First Prince,” I said. “So I’d like to be blunt, if you don’t mind, because I don’t have a lot of coyness left in me.”

He didn’t seem surprised by the revelation that I had a way to talk directly with Hasenbach, but that meant less than nothing. The Peregrine wasn’t someone I’d want to play cards against.

“You attempted to make peace,” he said.

I smiled thinly.

“I very nearly did,” I said. “But then she pushed just a little further than I can go. And I know, Gods I know , that maybe she wasn’t out to screw me and everyone in this kingdom. That the other choices I can make are so much worse they’re indefensible.”

I met his eyes.

“I’m willing to take leaps of faith with people, Pilgrim,” I said honestly. “I have before, and I will again. But not with the Heavens. Because you don’t negotiate with Above, you obey . And I don’t think Cordelia Hasenbach holds the reins of what she unleashed nearly as tightly as she thought she would.”

“And so now you come to me,” the old man said. “With a request.”

“Do something,” I asked quietly. “Intervene. Offer to arbitrate. Thief tells me you could be king of Levant with a snap of your fingers, if you felt like it. You have influence to wield.”

“Seljun,” he said calmly. “We do not have kings, in Levant. And there is a reason I do not sit the Tattered Throne, Catherine. Your Good Kings have done well by Callow, but the Dominion... It is a different land. It would end the honour duels, the forays into the wilds, but it would be a call . To the kind of war best left in the past.”

“I’m not saying usurp your ruler,” I said. “But Gods, you’re not nobody . If you make a truce with me Levant will fall in line. That’ll force Hasenbach to reconsider.”

“It would break the Tenth Crusade,” he gently said.

“So do it behind closed doors,” I said, frustration mounting. “You’re trying to shove redemption down my throat, and don’t bother denying it. Fine. I’ll fucking lean in, even if it’ll probably get me killed. Just act . I’ll kiss the hem, quote the Book. All you need to speak up and thousands don’t have to die.”

“It would smother in the crib,” the Grey Pilgrim said sadly, “what is perhaps the last chance for peace in our time.”

“I’m offering peace,” I hissed.

“Peace on your terms would unseat the First Prince,” he said. “She has spent years forging an alliance with Levant, fighting her Assembly tooth and nail every step of the way. For that same ally to twist her arm into making a pact with one of the most famous villains alive would see her removed within the month. And everything she seeks to accomplish vanish with her.”

A long moment passed and the only sound in the tent was his steady heartbeat.

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “If you’d said the Heavens were using their veto, I would have been furious. I won’t pretend otherwise. But at least I wouldn’t be disappointed.”

He opened his mouth but Winter flared like half a world howling for blood and he closed it.

“No, disappointed is too mild a word,” I said, voice barren of any speck of warmth. “This, Pilgrim, is worthy of contempt .”

“The treaties she has made and would deepen will end wars in the west,” the old man said. “Callow restored and Praes humbled will allow Calernia to finally turn towards the true face of the Enemy. The King of the Dead. The Chain of Hunger.”

“It’s funny,” I said, smiling mirthlessly. “How it’s never the lot of you that have to make the sacrifices. Us, this entire fucking kingdom since the dawn of time? Well, that’s just how things have to be. Someone needs to take care of Praes so the rest of the continent can kill itself in peace. But then someone else has to do the bleeding, for once, and suddenly there’s all these considerations.”

“This is not fair,” the old man said. “Nor it is just. I will not pretend otherwise, child. But I will not offer you succour at the price of Cordelia Hasenbach’s dream. It is too great a good to be slain in this manner.”

“So we burn again, for the greater good of everyone else,” I laughed harshly.

I rose to my feet.

“You know, when I make decisions like that, they call me a monster,” I said, meeting his eyes without smothering a single ember of the fury I felt. “So why do you get a pass?”

“I will suffer the price of this, in time,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Service is no absolution.”

He looked old and tired and sad. But so did a lot of people, and they didn’t sign death warrants for dozens of thousands. I was out of sympathy to offer for the likes of him. I had no pithy comment to offer, no cutting parting remark. I left the tent before I could talk myself into murdering him in cold blood. I needed to talk to Hierophant.

We were, after all, going to Keter.

Chapter 27: Into Dusk

“The existence of death is the first lie we are taught. There is little difference between a corpse and a man, save the journey of the soul. They who learn to slip this noose find the threshold of apotheosis, for in the denial of passing they have taken themselves beyond the yoke of fate.”
– Translation of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness, widely attributed to the young Dead King

I’d almost expected an army to be waiting on the other side when I opened the gate into Arcadia, but it seemed my bag of unwelcome complications was full at the moment. And to think, it’d only taken war with half the continent and every hero the Heavens could put together before we’d reached that point! Sadly, I was not unaware that the moment I started believing we’d reached the bottom of the barrel some Choir would pop in, yell surprise in a monotone and reveal there was a false bottom below leading into another barrel entirely.

“What’s the word they have in the Free Cities, for the snake that eats its own tail?” I asked Hakram.

“Ouroboros,” he replied, hairless brow cocking.

There it was. In summary, my life was a veritable ouroboros of bad decisions feeding into increasingly horrible messes. I had to own up to at least that much, headed as we were towards what might just be the worst decision yet.

“You’re brooding,” Adjutant said.

“I don’t brood,” I replied without missing a beat.

He rolled his eyes.

“You are looking thoughtfully into the distance, a melancholy air on your face,” he said.

“I’m a complicated woman, Hakram,” I said. “You can’t begin to grasp the depths of my ponderings.”

Archer snorted ahead of us. Unkindly so, I decided.

“Like you can talk, Indrani,” I sneered. “You’re about as complex as a rock.”

“Geology is a broad and complicated field of study, actually,” Masego said.

Archer preened.

“See?” she said. “Even Zeze agrees I’m a woman of many facets. Unlike some others that won’t be mentioned.”

She turned to grin at me.

“Oh, things are going badly,” she mocked in a high-pitched voice. “Better stab my way out of it. But stabbing is bad, for some inexplicable reason. What a difficult dilemma.”

I flipped her off.

“Don’t expect silver at the end of the trip, wench,” I said. “Mouthy guides don’t get handouts.”

“That’d be very inconsiderate of you, Catherine,” Vivienne mused. “She’s been such a peach so far. I’ll hold onto the coin for her, if you’d like.”

“You’ve already robbed the treasury once, Thief,” I replied flatly. “Try something fresh, for Below’s sake.”

It was pretty inevitable that a journey this, well, boring would see us turn to bickering to pass the time. Hierophant had been rather miffed that we’d kept the supplies to a bare minimum, since it meant he couldn’t spell himself atop a horse and crack open a book while we guided his mount. It’d taken three days before he stopped dropping hints this was all very uncivilized. The Woe’s only tagalong was my trusty Zombie the Third, and she at least wasn’t complaining about carrying most our supplies in her saddle-bags. It was a dark day indeed when the dead flying unicorn was the most trustworthy of my companions. I glanced up and sighed when I saw the sun was only beginning to reach afternoon height. We had hours left before making camp.

“We’ll reach the outskirts of Winter by nightfall,” Indrani suddenly said. “I know this place.”

I followed her gaze and found a mound of earth covered in dead grass, maybe half a mile away. We hadn’t seen any structures in days, not since we’d passed the demesne of the Count of False Blooming. Three weeks since we’d left Callow, and only now was the throb in the back of my mind that indicated the location of our path out beginning to feel measurably closer.

“I don’t think this is really Winter anymore,” I said quietly.

Hierophant, who’d been trailing behind and repeatedly weaving cooling spells around himself so he wouldn’t sweat for the exercise, put a spring to his step so he could catch up.

“You perceive our surroundings as different, even though they do not appear to be,” he said.

I chewed over that for a while before speaking.

“Before I could feel...” I grasped for the word. “Currents, in this place. Skade felt much different from the Summer territories we campaigned on. Archer says we’re supposed to be in Winter, but it doesn’t feel anything like that to me.”

“The wedding of the king and queen of Arcadia might have affected the very nature of this realm, then,” Masego murmured. “Interesting. If the effect is permanent, centuries of research on the fae might become useless.”

“The less anyone has to do with fae, the better,” I said, not unaware of the irony involved.

“Unfortunate that we do not have the time to study the phenomenon in depth,” Hierophant said. “Your word alone is not enough. You are ignorant and possibly under influence.”

Archer smothered a laugh and Hakram went suspiciously still, like he was trying not to smile. I looked at Masego for a long beat. It’d been said so mildly I knew it wasn’t actually an insult, but sometimes I did hope someone would eventually manage to badger some tact into him.

“That was insulting, Masego,” Vivienne called out from Zombie’s other side.

“Was it?” Hierophant said, glass eyes flicking to the side. “But it was all true.”

I patted his shoulder gently.

“We don’t call people ignorant, Masego,” I told him.

“But the overwhelming majority of them are,” he said, aghast.

“And I could spit in your morning tea, but I don’t,” I said. “Because refraining from doing that makes interacting more agreeable.”

He looked less than convinced.

“If they are never informed of their ignorance, how will they be made aware of the need to remedy it?” he pointed out, evidently believing this was reasonable.

“Remember our heroic battle cry, Zeze,” Indrani called out.

His expression cleared.

“Ah,” he mused. “Lies and violence. I understand.”

He turned to me and offered a beaming smile.

“You are well-read and conversant in magical theory, Catherine,” he said. “Well done.”

Hakram let out a sound that aimed to be a giggle but came out like a dozen angry cats being ground between millstones. I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“Thank you, Masego,” I said, reaching for calm.

He nodded, pleased, and trotted ahead to speak with Archer.

“I am well-read,” I complained at Hakram in a low voice.

“Compared to him?” the orc chuckled. “There’s libraries that would feel inadequate.”

Yeah, fair enough. It wasn’t like there weren’t gaps in Masego’s knowledge, but it was hard to beat personal tutoring by an incubus that preceded the Empire and a sorcerer that cut open Creation to find out how it worked.

“I find it interesting, though,” Hakram murmured. “What you said, about it feeling different.”

I glanced at him, silently inviting the orc to elaborate.

“Have you noticed?” Adjutant said. “The further we stray from ‘Winter’ territory, the less... alive the landscape become.”

“Winter’s never exactly been a field of flowers,” I pointed out.

He conceded that with an inclination of the head, but did not further agree.

“The mound Indrani used as a marker,” he said. “There was dead grass upon it.”

“And?”

“Does it look to you like it was killed by snow?” he said.

Frowning, I took a closer look. When snows in Callow melted, the grass below came out yellow or green. From what little I’d seen anyway, I didn’t usually campaign in winter and I’d been raised in the city until nearly seventeen. The grass above the mound, though was... grey. I did not feel dead of natural causes. My fingers drummed against my side absent-mindedly.

“Warlock once told Malicia that Arcadia has a degree of symmetry with Creation,” I said.

“So you’ve told me,” Adjutant agreed.

“That doesn’t make any sense, Hakram,” I said quietly. “I mean, fitting journeys through Arcadia with a bird’s eye view of Calernia is pretty much impossible but we shouldn’t be anywhere close to the Kingdom of the Dead. Maybe halfway through the Proceran leg of the trip.”

“There is much we do not understand about the Dead King,” the orc said. “It is known he ruled a great kingdom, once but there is hardly any mention of it in the histories.”

“Because it was ancient ,” I said sceptically. “And it’s not that unusual. No one knows what Ater’s original name was, or even the name of the kingdom centred around it. That’s what happens when people fuck around with demons.”

I’d been taught at the orphanage the reason for the existence of the ‘Nameless Kingdom’ was likely a demon of Absence, or that the Miezans had used a Censure after facing entrenched resistance. The latter theory wasn’t all that popular, since they were known to have use that only a handful of times across the entire lifespan of their empire.

“There are Callowan and Praesi oral histories contemporary to what would have been the Dead King’s predecessors,” Hakram said. “Yet no mention of a great power in the north.”

Which didn’t mean all that much, since back in those days most current nations didn’t even exist and those that had were pretty much unrecognizable when compared to what they now were. But he did have a point, kind of.

“So you think that he, what?” I said. “Shunted off parts of the kingdom into Arcadia?”

“The elves have done the same with the Golden Bloom twice now,” Adjutant said. “It is not impossible. A sorcerer capable of conquering a hell would certainly be capable of achieving as much.”

“If he was active outside his kingdom and his hell, someone would have heard of it by now,” I said. “I doubt he could gain a foothold in Arcadia without going to war with the courts, anyway. And that would have made waves.”

“It would now, certainly,” Hakram said. “Sorcery has been refined for centuries, states capable of sparing attention outside their borders and immediate threats have emerged. When most the continent wielded stone axes, however? A different story.”

Shit. That might actually be true. If it had all turned into myth millennia ago, whatever stories would have existed about it might have grown so different and twisted they were useless as a cornerstone.

“Lots of ifs,” I finally said.

“We will find out soon enough,” Hakram said. “But there are few entities in existence we should be warier of underestimating than the Hidden Horror.”

And on that cheerful note, we joined the others.

—

“So,” I said. “Anyone else have a bad feeling about this?”
“Yes,” Hakram bluntly said.

“Haven’t had a good one in years,” Vivienne admitted.

The other two minions ignored me. Indrani’s eyes were bright and excited, her stance coiled like she could barely keep herself from running forward. Masego, on the other hand, had gone eerily still aside from his hands and eyes. Which all moved from rune to rune traced in the air, as he let out little noises of surprise or delight whenever one of the colours or shapes changed.

I decided to leave him at it a little longer, eyes turning back to the eerie sight displayed before me. It was a kingdom. Or, at least, the shattered remnants of one. I had not chosen that word lightly: it was not a whole but a collection broken shards left wherever they fell, dropped by the hand of some unknowable god. Some shards seemed like they fit together – for half a mile a lake’s shoreline could be seen, with fishermen dragging their boats out under the noon sun – but others were almost painfully disparate. I saw a city street lead into a dark forest, a river flow out of a crowded fair and those were the least of it. In the distance I glimpsed warriors fighting in the pitch black darkness of a plain, next to the almost idyllic view of the sun rising over a peaceful farm.

“Indrani?” I said.

“No fucking idea, Catherine,” she said with relish. “I don’t even think the Lady has seen this before. She would have mentioned it for sure.”

Less than reassuring. Either this place was hidden a lot better than it seemed, or even the likes of Ranger preferred to avoid it.

“I’ll get the obvious out first,” I said. “This looks like the Kingdom of the Dead. Before, well, the last part of that.”

“It could be ancient Procer,” Hakram noted. “It too has large lakes. So does Callow, for that matter.”

“No it isn’t,” Vivienne quietly said. “Look as far as out as you can see, slightly to the left of the centre.”

I squinted before seeing what she was speaking of. It was city. Much too small to be Ater, but it begged for the comparison anyway because at the heart of it jutted a tall spire of dark stone. Atop it was a smaller globe, hovering in the air, and I’d seen that illustration before in books.

“Keter,” I said. “Crown of the Dead.”

“Inaccurate,” Hierophant said. “This is, for lack of a better term, an echo.”

His lips were twitching into a delighted smile, as if he couldn’t believe his luck.

“And what does that mean exactly?” I asked.

“Reverberation,” he said, sounding awed. “An event touched Creation that was so great and momentous it forced reflection within Arcadia. This has fascinating implications, Catherine. There have been few rituals so powerful in Calernian history, but the Diabolist’s working at Second Liesse could be considered in the same league. There might very well be an echo of that battle somewhere in this realm.”

My fists clenched. So there was a repeat of one of the darkest failures to my name to be found somewhere around? Charming.

“Can it hurt us?” I asked.

“I cannot speak with certainty,” Hierophant said.

“Guess,” I flatly ordered him.

He looked irritated.

“I can theorize,” he stressed pointedly, “that we are in such misalignment with the echo we cannot physically interact with it. With the proper spells perhaps sound could be obtained, but touch or smell are much more difficult. It would take weeks of rituals.”

“Which we won’t be doing,” I said.

“ Cat ,” Archer complained. “Think about it. There’s bound to be heroes and villains there. We could fight people that had been dead for millennia!”

“Maybe on the way back,” I lied.

She pouted.

“Masego, how is this possible at all?” Hakram asked. “I was under the impression that Arcadia spanned the whole of Creation as a mirror of sorts. Was the Dead King so powerful all the world shook from his transgression?”

Hierophant clicked his tongue.

“That is a misunderstanding,” he said. “Consider Arcadia as a single object being looked upon by an infinity of perspectives. To every one, it is a different realm. Across the Tyrian Sea, it likely has completely different name and seems inhabited by completely different entities. Even the marriage of Winter and Summer is contained within the span of our gaze only, unlikely to have tremors beyond. It is so with this echo as well. Something that was momentous on our understanding of the world is not necessarily so elsewhere.”

“And so Triumphant wept, for she ruled but a fraction of the world and knew it to be vast beyond her reckoning,” Vivienne quoted softly. “We are not so important as we like to believe.”

“We can debate the philosophical implications of this later,” I said. “I’m fairly certain our gate out is in not-Keter. Masego, you’re sure that if we walk through a battlefield we won’t get stabbed?”

“From our perspective, all of this is akin to light painting smoke,” Hierophant said. “We will pass through as if they were ghosts.”

He paused.

“Some ghosts,” he clarified. “There is actually a very board spectrum of-“

“And forward we go,” I interrupted cheerfully. “I’m not sure I trust my ice to get us through the water parts, so we’re talking the long way around through-“

I paused, glancing to the right.

“A town burning plague victims,” I finished with a sigh. “Charming. Let’s get a move on, I’m not spending any more nights in this place than I have to.”

That didn’t turn out to be a problem, as it happened. Arcadia had a night and day, though sometimes they weren’t matches everywhere, but this place obeyed different rules entirely. Every shard seemed to have a lifespan before it returned to the beginning, and most that took place during day or night remained so. There seemed to be no rule or reason to the few shards that lasted longer. We marched through an entirely empty green field for three days and nights as if it were entirely natural, then pushed through a similarly empty mountain pass where the same bird began to swoop down in the same manner every quarter hour. Hierophant found a way to allow us earshot after half a week, though the sounds came muted. Unsurprisingly, Indrani pushed for us to pass through as many battlefields as possible. We took a break to the side of a pitched battle between a few hundred soldiers decked in iron screaming as they charged down a hill and half as many soldiers wearing obsidian and copper breastplates. The howlers were winning even though the opposition had a handful of mages. Those to be seen were a joke compared to even Legion mages: it took clusters of four or five chanting for a while to toss around the kind of lightning bolts my senior mage officers sent down without breaking a sweat. I sat down and watched the killing as the other ate.

“I recognize some of what they’re saying,” Hakram told me, standing by my side with the remains of his jerky in hand.

“The obsidian guys?” I said.

He shook his head.

“The iron men,” he replied. “Some of what they’re screaming has common roots with Reitz.”

The Lycaonese tongue, spoken only in the mountainous northwestern stretch of Procer.

“That’s four times we run into them fighting the others,” I noted. “And they win more often than not.”

“An invasion?” Adjutant said.

“Maybe,” I frowned. “We haven’t seen them hit anything larger than a village yet, so raids are more likely.”

We ran into our first real city shard two days later. Masego had been getting progressively more irritated by his inability to explain why we could pass through buildings and people but not mountains or hills, but we stumbled unto something that perked him up. Inside a towering house of bricks we found a circle of twelve men and women standing by a wide basin of granite and spilling blood inside from their arms. The oldest among them, a withered old crone, chanted incantations in a language none of us knew that were repeated by the rest. I allowed a half hour break, if only to get him in a better mood. Hierophant in a mood was pleasant for no one.

“Early scrying,” he told us, kneeling by the ghostly ritual. “It is Trismegistan in nature, that much can be known by the cadence, but they use no runic stabilizers at all. It is primitive, I’ll grant you, but the sheer skill involved... Even Father could not use so complicated a formula purely by voice.”

We moved on before long. We were all getting restless, the eerie scenes beginning to take a toll, but none more so than Archer. The longer it went on, the more often she started taking walks after we set camp. It was a bad idea, in my eyes. We knew too little about the dangers of this place to wander aimlessly. But more than any of us Indrani had the wanderlust, and I could see how remaining within the dotted lines was getting her temper closer to the surface. I extracted a promise for her not to leave for too long, and left it at that. I’d expected that if any trouble found us it would be through her, but I ended up choking on my words. It was Masego that wandered away without a word, face pale. It surprised me, considering the shard we were travelling through was a battle. One with precious little sorcery involved. The iron men were fighting the soldiers of obsidian again, by far the largest engagement we’d seen. At least two thousand on each side, and the obsidian soldiers were taking a beating. In large part, I saw, because of the empty circle at the heart of the field. Two silhouettes were duelling there. A middle-aged woman with a crown of iron, wielding a heavy mace of stone. Against her fought a man in a tunic of shimmering copper, wearing a circlet of gold-linked rubies. His iron sword was broken in a parry, and then the iron-crowned queen pulped his skull on the grass.

It was there I found Masego. He wasn’t looking at the fighting, at the circle of screaming soldiers from both sides surrounding the duel. No, he stood slightly beyond that. His form dispersing a soldier. He was looking at pale-skinned man in furs, chest mostly bare and his neck covered with necklaces of iron and silver. The stranger Hierophant was staring at was beautiful, I decided. One of the most striking men I’d ever seen. It was like someone had ripped out the fantasy of a warrior consort and given it flesh.

“Masego?” I called out.

He did not answer. I hurried to his side, laying my hand on his shoulder.

“Are you in danger?” I asked.

Mutely Hierophant shook his head. After a long moment he spoke.

“That,” he said, pointing at the man, “is my father.”

Chapter 28: Archaic

“An offer to ‘kneel or die’ would be insincere, Matrons. Deny me and your corpses will be made to kneel anyway, as I have a chorus of your children scream a cheerful tune.”
– Dread Emperor Nihilis I, the Tanner, negotiating the end of the Fourth Goblin Rebellion

I had a mildly amusing comment about Warlock’s unexpected longevity and lack of tan on the tip of my tongue, but I smothered it without missing a beat. Masego, looking at what most likely his second father – the incubus known to me as Tikoloshe – had cast to his face I’d never seen before. He looked betrayed . I squeezed his shoulder comfortingly, even though I didn’t know the reason for his grief, and did not bother to ask whether or not he was certain of the incubus’ identity. Hierophant was not in the habit of make assertions unless he was certain of them.

“Why?” Masego murmured. “He knows I’ve been trying to piece it all together for years. Gods, what practitioner from the Wasteland hasn’t? He was there. He saw it with his own eyes.”

He hadn’t raised his voice, and in a way that worried me more. Anger I knew well, and how to soothe it. Whatever... this was, I was poorly equipped to handle it.

“He might have been trying to protect you,” I ventured.

His hand whipped out and a streak of flame tore through half a dozen soldiers, burning bright blue.

“I am not a child, Catherine,” he hissed, “I do not need to be coddled. Refusal I could forgive, but to force ignorance upon me? As if I was some meddling hedge mage about to blow his fingers off. As if I was incapable of grasping my own limits.”

I heard Hakram stepping lightly behind us, having finally caught up, but without turning I raised my hand and signalled for him to withdraw. More people would only be adding oil to an already volatile brew.

“We don’t know for sure he saw whatever ritual wrecked Keter,” I said. “He could have been dispersed before that.”

“Don’t try to appease me,” he said, turning to me with a burning glare whose radiance singed the eye cloth over it. “Papa has never been dispersed. His consciousness has been uninterrupted for millennia without a single return to the original shapelessness. His contract ended or he succeeded at slipping the leash.”

“Either of which could have happened before the ritual,” I pointed out.

“He wouldn’t have just left, even then,” Masego yelled, to my honest surprise. “He’s a deterministic being, Catherine. It would have gone against his nature to flee for a position of influence. Devils like being in Creation. It is the only place they can truly learn.”

My knowledge of theology had never been all that deep and what I did remember was a little rusty, but I was fairly sure determinism was more or less another word for predestination. Which wasn’t all that popular a teaching, in Callow, though it had some adherents in the southern parts of it. Mostly priests.

“You mean he wouldn’t have been able to choose otherwise,” I slowly said.

Normally even half an admission of ignorance would have been enough to bait him into a lecture. It was telling that he didn’t even attempt one, only frowning in irritation instead.

“You don’t understand,” he said.

I kept my face and voice calm.

“If he didn’t have a choice then,” I said carefully, “he might not have had a choice in not telling you either.”

“You don’t understand, you fool,” Masego sharply repeated. “I have desired to know the answers here for years. It is in Papa’s nature to satisfy desires, and his binding should allow him to do so for our entire family within limits. That contract is one of the single most complex pieces of sorcery in existence, Catherine, Father spent decades crafting the closest to the ability to make choices a devil can possibly have. Which means either Father forbade him to speak to me, or...”

“He doesn’t see you as family,” I quietly said.

“I’m not sure which would be worse,” the blind man weakly said. “That Father would bend his will against everything he taught me just to keep me in the dark, or that Papa never once though of me as-“

His voice broke. I winced, sliding an arm around his shoulders and tugging him close. It was awkward hugging him, since he was noticeable taller than me and just stood there like a dead fish.

“Come on,” I murmured. “There’s a lot we still don’t know, Masego. Don’t come to conclusions too early.”

Slowly, he came to rest his forehead on my shoulder. Gods, the angle must have been Hells on his neck.

“He might have been faking this entire time,” he muttered into my tunic. “Since the moment I was adopted. My first memories. Just playing the role, for Father’s pleasure.”

I’d always thought that Warlock and Tikoloshe had done a decent job of raising Masego, for Praesi anyway. He’d had a golden childhood that taught him to love learning, no real difficulties to face and if he hadn’t come out of it with the sharpest moral compass in the world, well – there was only so much you could expect from Wastelanders. It was hard for me to understand something like having your entire childhood put to the question. The orphanage had not encouraged sentimentality. But I could understand, just a little bit, having your trust put on the chopping block. He wasn’t the only one with a complicated relationship with a Calamity. Masego withdrew eventually, tiring of my hands rubbing his back soothingly. His face was dry, of course. The day that saw him gain Summer eyes had cauterized his tear ducts as well.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said through gritted teeth, smoothing his robes. “They can hide secrets from me, but they cannot prevent me from learning on my own.”

“You want to continue looking at his,” I guessed, eyes turning to the battle still unfolding around us.

Now that the ruby-crowned king was dead, it had turned into a rout for the obsidian soldiers I assumed were ancient Keterans.

“Yes,” Masego said with forced calm. “Tell Indrani the duel here is between two Named. That should hold her interest enough she does not chomp at the bit.”

I grimaced. Fair enough. I didn’t really want to spend any longer here than we had to, but if it got his head in order I’d compromise. There was a part of me, that whispering voice that never really went away, that noted this was perhaps the best occasion I would ever get to turn Hierophant against Warlock. To get him firmly on my side before the day of reckoning I knew deep in my bones was over the horizon came upon us. All I had to do was ruthlessly exploit the grief of one of my closest friends in the world. It would be for his own good, too. When the dust settled at the end of the Tenth Crusade, there was a real chance that close ties to Praes and the Calamities might get Masego killed. After Akua’s Folly there would be wariness about powerful sorcerer Named, but if he had a war record of fighting against the Empire... I clenched my fingers and snapped that voice’s neck before burying it in a shallow grave. I was not above manipulating Masego. I would own up to that. But if I did, it would only ever be to help him. Not to rip away all his ties but those that kept him at my side.

“I’ll speak to the others,” I said quietly. “Don’t do anything dangerous. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”

He did not answer, light already blooming around his fingers as his face hardened and he began tracing runes. I took that for the dismissal it was.

—

“He’s been at it for at least twelve hours straight,” Hakram said.

The worry in his tone was subtle enough a stranger wouldn’t have caught it. It was plain as day to me. The two of us stood at the edge of our makeshift camp – raised far enough from the main engagement that at the peak of the battle the war cries wouldn’t wake us – and watched Masego’s lone silhouette. He’d not eaten since he began. Indrani had tried to bring him bread and water, but she’d run into a transparent pane of power she’d not been able to break through. Her screaming had gone unnoticed as well. He’d killed the sound from outside the boundary, was my guess.

“He hasn’t even sat down once,” I grimaced. “And he’s been using sorcery the entire time. Named or not, he should be about to collapse.”

“We’ll pick him up when he does,” the orc sighed. “Put him in Zombie and get away from here while he’s unconscious. This is unhealthy.”

“He’s always been prone to obsession,” I admitted. “We all are, but he’s further down that slope than any of us.”

“This is different, Cat,” Hakram said. “If he begins a trance when studying spellcraft, we can ease him out of it after a few hours. Even Thief knows how, and she’s known him the shortest. But putting up wards to keep us out? He’s never gone that deep before.”

“Family fucks you up,” I said. “So I’ve heard, anyway.”

“We’re what he has,” the orc told me. “His fathers let him loose after he joined us, and you’ve heard the same stories I have. They were always highly permissive, even when he was a child. If we don’t keep him at an even keel, there’s no one else.”

I passed a hand through my hair tiredly.

“You know comfort’s not my strong point,” I admitted.

“He doesn’t need a friend,” Hakram replied. “He needs someone to tell him it’s enough. A figure of authority.”

I glanced at the tall orc uncomfortably.

“That’s not really how I’ve run the Woe,” I said.

“And you were right to do so,” Adjutant said. “A heavier hand would have alienated Archer and Thief before they joined us. But Hierophant is Praesi. He was raised by the Calamities, Catherine. He understands, instinctively, that in a band of Named there is someone who gives orders. That is you.”

“It’s one thing to give orders on a battlefield, Hakram,” I said sharply. “It’s another to pull strings off of it, in private matters. I won’t pretend we’re equals in all things, but I try not to tell any of you how to live your lives unless I can’t avoid it.”

The orc’s dark eyes flicked at Masego’s lonely silhouette.

“And does he look to you,” he said calmly, “like he benefits from this restraint?”

I grit my teeth.

“You’re not tools , Hakram,” I said. “I won’t shape all of you into something more useful to me. That’s not a road I’ll wander down, ever.”

“There is a difference between intervening for our sakes and self-serving manipulation,” he gravelled. “You pretend not to know this, because asserting the authority you were given of us makes you uncomfortable. That is one of the most selfish, disparaging things I’ve ever seen you do. Do you think we swore oaths and made pacts because we were swindled? That you tricked us into putting faith in you? Are you the only one of us that can extend trust?”

“That’s not what I said,” I replied.

“Words are nothing,” the orc said. “Actions speak louder, and the decision not to act is an act of itself.”

My fingers clenched and I glared at Adjutant.

“And my judgement’s always worked out so well, has it?” I hissed. “I carry an entire funeral procession of blunders behind me, Hakram. One of the most recent got a hundred thousand people kill, and we’re heading towards a place where I might just top that.”

“We all sat there, in the room,” the orc said. “We heard the same arguments. We know the same truths, and the plan they spawned. Yet here we all are, travelling with you. Did you somehow enslave us without my noticing? All of us chose to be one of the Woe, Catherine, knowing full well what that meant. Our hands have not been forced.”

I always hated arguing with Hakram. He was so infuriatingly calm and reasonable.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll tell him to cut it out.”

Adjutant raised his hand to stop me.

“Do not bury this,” he said. “Pretend it was the argument of a single instance and move forward as before. I care nothing for your crown, Warlord. Or whose apprentice you were. I put my trust in you , as did the others. You do all disservice by acting as if it was a mistake to do so.”

My lips thinned and I met his eyes. He’d only ever called me by the old orc title when it was a matter of utter seriousness we spoke of. Which meant he’d been sitting on this for a while, waiting for the right moment to bring it up. Reluctantly, I nodded. His hand went down, and I strode for Masego’s one-mage lightshow. I felt the wards even though I couldn’t see them. My fingers trailed across their surface, transparent sorcery forming wherever my hand touched. I rapped my knuckles once, but it was like hitting a solid wall. I heard Indrani turn towards me in the distance, but did not look. Breaking the wards might hurt Masego, so I’d have to show a little moderation. I seized Winter, wove its power into a maul of ice tall as I was and grasped the handle. I squared my footing more out of habit than true need: the construct was light as a feather to me. I smashed it into the ward once, twice, thrice before Hierophant finally stopped tracing runes long enough to look at me. Dropping the maul, I gestured for him to end the ward. He shook his head.

“Now,” I said flatly.

He flinched. He tapped a sequence among the runes hovering around him and a door opened before me, made visible by the transparent power that formed the cadre of it. I walked in, dismissing the maul with a flick of the wrist.

“Catherine,” he said. “I’m not hungry. There’s no need to-“

“You’ve been at this for twelve hours, Masego,” I said. “It’s done. You rest, you eat, and then we discuss our next move.”

“Not now,” Hierophant said, “Not when I’m so close .”

“To what?” I replied, eyebrow rising.

“Walking the true span of the echo,” he told me. “Not true interaction, no, but the full witnessing of it. As if I were truly there.”

I glanced sceptically at the ghostly battle.

“And?” I said. “What does this gain you?”

“This isn’t an illusion, Catherine,” he said. “It’s a reflection of the state of Creation at specific points in time. The echo of an individual includes all that individual knew then. If I can carve out that knowledge and translate it into a form I can understand-”

“You’ll learn a lot,” I interrupted. “That’s fine. You want to work on that project? I’ve got no objection. But you do it right. You sleep, you eat, you talk with the people who love you. And you do it at a rate that doesn’t make a wreck out of you. There’ll be more interesting shards deeper in anyway.”

“It would only be a few more hours,” he said.

“Then it won’t matter where those are spent, will it?” I patiently said. “Or is there something specific to this shard that makes it easier to work with?”

He looked away. So there wasn’t. I took him by the arm and dragged him until he began walking on his own.

“Come on,” I said. “And while you’re at it, you’re apologizing to Indrani.”

He frowned at me.

“What for?” he asked.

“That, for one,” I grimly said.

Godsdamnit Hakram. It’d be easier to be angry at him if he wasn’t right so often.

—

We moved forward, to everyone but Masego’s relief. The five of us had taken to talking as we passed through the landscapes, trying to piece together the story unfolding. It was made more difficult by our inability to tell the sequence the shards took place in, which even Hierophant admitted he was unable to discern. That spawned the game of ‘tell me how Keter fell’, which allowed us to whittle away the hours as we walked. We tried, one at a time, to piece together what we’d seen into a coherent sequence.

“All right, bear with me on this one,” Indrani announced.

I sighed at the sight of the silver flask in her hand. It was barely noon – probably – but I was less appalled by the drinking than by the fact that she seemed to have an endless supply of booze. Where the Hells was she keeping it all? If Thief had been holding the liquor, she wouldn’t offer it up nearly that often.

“Do we have a choice?” Vivienne drily asked.

“Don’t you drag theology into this, Dartwick,” Archer drawled. “Anyway, this is how Keter fell. So there was a witch queen with a nice big mace, but she was a woman with needs . So she hit up the King of Keter and she made the bedroom eyes, but he was weird about it. You know, have her the brush off. So then-“

“No,” I said.

“No,” Hakram agreed.

“Gods no,” Vivienne muttered.

“Seems unlikely,” Masego conceded.

“You’re all joyless,” Indrani complained. “Mine had everything. A lovers’ spat, sex and violence and revenge. It was going to be worthy of song.”

“For mouthing off after your turn was ended, you get skipped next go around,” Vivienne noted.

Archer muttered something sounding pretty insulting under her breath, though I didn’t recognize the language.

“Hakram?” I said.

“This is how Keter fell,” Adjutant gravelled. “There was a plague in the borderlands of the kingdom that took a great toll. The queen of the iron men saw weakness and struck with raids, only to find the soldiers of Keter weak. She assembled more men and invaded the kingdom, forcing battle and slaying the king on the field.”

We’d seen more and more plague shards over the last two days, so he might actually be right. Only towns and villages so far, though, we’d found no city being afflicted. The battles were becoming more frequent as well, though few were as large as the one where Masego had found his father. After a few days passed Hierophant was forced to admit that a mere few hours before his breakthrough had been an optimistic assessment. He still spent most of his downtime working on his ‘witnessing’, but we’d all gotten used to hearing he was going to finish it any moment now. We saw our first Keteran victories, most of them won through sorcery. The sorcerers gathered in small cabals and struck with rituals, the brutality of them increasing the farther we went in. Lightning and fire were traded for spells that boiled blood or broke minds, and once or twice we even saw the Keterans fielding devils of their own.

Small numbers, and not particularly impressive specimens. Closer to imps than the Wasteland’s favoured meat shields the akalibsa and walin-falme . Hierophant dismissed those we saw as being from some of the easiest Hells to reach, and noted that diabolism as a branch of sorcery was one of the magical disciplines that benefitted the most from the passing of years. It had taken centuries for the Praesi to accumulate names to call on and to learn the secrets of the most useful Hells, the line of every High Lord building on the knowledge earned by the previous generation. His assessment was that diabolism had not been a favoured sorcery of the Keterans, but that in their desperation they were turning to cheap solutions to turn the tide – like barely sentient devils that could be bound through simple shedding of blood.

“His successor, Trismegistus, found his kingdom on the verge of breaking as the iron men pushed further in,” Hakram continued. “Rather than face defeat, he unleashed devils and turned the remainder of his people into undead to bring revenge unto the invaders.”

He got a vote of agreement from everyone save a pouting Indrani, which was just enough to bar him from getting a swig of the bottle of aragh Thief had pulled out. Archer was a sore loser. Adjutant’s story was the most believable so far, though the rest of us moved around the mosaic tiles again and again in order to see if something else fit better. We realized the underlying mistake the day after, when we encountered the most striking shard yet. We’d assumed we had all the necessary tiles to tell the story, you see. We were disabused of that notion when we found the first landscape out of Keter itself. It was the funeral of the king we’d watch die, his body tastefully covered by a shroud so the pulped head could not be seen by those attending. Among those present in the great crypt where the entombment took place was the young man I was fairly sure became the Dead King. Not because of anything he did, but because of who was talking to him. The face I didn’t recognize, I’d admit. But the shoddy lute and the flask? Those I’d recognize anywhere.

They belonged to the Wandering Bard.

Chapter 29: Sixth

“Don’t be absurd, Black Knight. It would have been called treason if I’d lost – this is merely succession.”
– Dread Emperor Vile the First

It was a striking scene.

The crypt itself was the part worthiest of awe, I decided. The arched ceiling was covered in silver set with glittering jewels where stars would have been on the night sky. There was no light within save for their shine and a ring of bound sprites serving as magelights. The fallen king was being set down in a tomb with his likeness sculpted atop the lid, men and women wearing copper circlets on their brows lowering him gently. There were low whispers in a smattering of tongues I did not know, but the funeral was a hushed affair. I did not linger to watch when the orations began after the lid was shut, instead approaching the sight that had set my blood running cold. The Wandering Bard looked prettier than I’d ever seen her. Tanned and full of life, she wore red and silver robes instead of the usual stained leathers. The lute was set across her lap in the shadowed alcove where she sat, and she pulled at her flask between exchanges with the young man standing next to her. Him I took my time studying. How often did one get to have a glimpse of the Dead King before he earned that Name?

I’d expected him to be darkly handsome or strikingly ugly, but he was nothing of the sort. Pale, even compared to the other Keterans, but not near corpse-like the way Black was. More like a scholar who did not see much of the sun. He had bushy eyebrows and full lips set on an unremarkable face, the only striking part of him the light brown eyes that looked almost golden in the magelight glow. He looked like a scholar, I thought. One only an inch taller than me, though few of the Keterans were tall. No real muscle to his frame, though his hands were surprisingly calloused. The copper circle on his brow was even more slender than those I’d seen on the other royals. A mark of status? Perhaps. The others had looked older, they might be higher in the line of succession. Or he might have been from another branch of the royal family. Hard to tell when I knew nothing about how the kingdom was ruled. Even without understanding the words he spoke, I found his voice compelling. Calm and deep, it felt almost soothing. It was hard to tell much about intonation in a foreign language – everything spoken in Kharsum sounded like a threat, for example – but he did not seem worried or surprised by the Bard’s presence.

Had he known her? Had she been involved in the fall of Keter from the beginning?

“You’re sure it’s her?” Hakram quietly asked.

I’d been so lost in contemplation I hadn’t even heard the orc approaching. I nodded without a word.

“The lute and the flask,” I said. “It’s her.”

“They both look different than at Summerholm,” Adjutant said.

I blinked and glanced back at the Bard. He was right, I realized with a start. The flask was still of that same strange curved shape, but instead of old scuffed iron it was freshly-polished copper. The lute was not of the same wood, this one paler, and the strings looked different. Animal tendons of some sort.

“The substance changed,” I murmured. “But the shape hasn’t. There’s something to that.”

“Named tend to have symbols and artefacts associated to them,” Hakram noted. “Save for the Carrion Lord, though the loss seems to have been made up in epithets. The lute and flask could be hers.”

“Malicia warned me they’d moved the Bard to the Empire’s official kill list, after the war in the Free Cities,” I said. “I thought Black was talking her up too much because she pulled one over him but I’m starting to see his point, if she’s had her fingers plucking strings this far back.”

“We don’t know for certain her consciousness has been uninterrupted all this time,” Adjutant cautioned.

“You read the transcripts Black sent us,” I grunted. “Hells, I’ve had you lug around the threat assessment he had delivered to the palace – half a book’s worth of scrolls, in records and theories. She made references to events long before she popped out of the woodworks as Aoede of Nicae. That’s at least two or three incarnations. It’s an assumption to say she’s been at it this whole time, sure, but it’s not a bad one.”

“Yes,” Hakram agreed quietly. “And the voluntary sharing of that secret worries me, Cat. It would have been a sharp blade, if kept hidden. Why did she not keep the knife in the dark?”

Yeah, there was that. If there was a meddling face-changing immortal wandering around the continent, why had no one ever written anything about it? Names tended to grow stronger – if also more restrictive – the more stories were associated with them. She would have had thousands of years to build herself up into something pretty much untouchable. And even if s he wanted to keep quiet and stay behind the curtains, it struck me as dubious that every single hero she’d helped had kept quiet about. Over the years, there was bound to have at least one blabbermouth that fucked up. Unless Above ordered them to keep quiet , I frowned. That was... plausible. Didn’t explain why no Dread Emperor had ever tried to get out the word there was an opponent on the field of that calibre, after being beaten or figuring it out. I was smelling a rat her.

“That,” I slowly said, “is a very good question. If she’s been underfoot this whole time and no one was onto her, why did she let that out of the bag now ? What changed?”

The tall orc by my side considered the two legends speaking before us and clicked his teeth in discomfort.

“I suspect,” Hakram said, “that knowledge of their words would bring more questions than answers.”

“This is too big to walk past,” I told him. “Masego will have his hours. Tell the others we’re setting camp.”

I stayed there a while longer, watching the Wandering Bard laugh at something Calernia’s incipient greatest monster had said. I shivered at the sight. I felt like they were sharing a joke that no one else could understand.

I was really coming to hate that feeling.

—

“We cannot linger for too long, Catherine,” Vivienne said. “I understand the draw of learning such a secret, but it will not help Callow withstand invasion.”

I drank from the skin. Tough our supplies were beginning to run thin, at least there was no need to worry about going without water. I could fill the skin with ice with only a thought, then leave it to melt as the hours passed. Indrani had badgered me until I used the eldritch and fearsome powers of Winter to cool her wine, to no one’s surprise. The indignity was somewhat alleviated by the fact that the first thing Juniper had ever told me after I claimed my mantle was that my ability to freeze thing would ease strain on supplies for the Fifteenth. No one but Masego seemed to treat my usurpation of a demigod’s power as anything but a source of free ice and entertainment unless I was actively killing people with it.

“We’re putting all our bets on the Dead King, Vivienne,” I disagreed. “An entity we know next to nothing about. We’re carrying the finest offer our diplomats were able to put together, but we’re still going into this blind .”

“Whatever he might have been while living, millennia have passed,” the dark-haired woman replied. “Any understanding gained would be highly dated.”

“Undead can’t change nearly as much as the living,” I pointed out. “I’m guessing a lot will still apply.”

“We trade guesswork for hours, then,” Thief said flatly. “This is a gamble, let us not pretend otherwise. The decision was made on the assumption we would know little about our interlocutor. We might be able to change that, if Masego pulls through. To an extent. But we all agreed on the initial premise for a reason. Time is our most dangerous enemy, at the moment.”

“I’m not saying we should spend a sennight here,” I said. “But a few days? The payoff is worth the delay.”

“If there is one,” Vivienne sighed.

I looked at her closely. Of all the Woe she was probably the one who’d dealt with the restlessness of our journey the best. Even Hakram, island of calm that he was, happened to have a vague look of chagrin on his face now and then – like he was expecting to have work to do and was kind of irked he didn’t. Thief had been quiet, so far, almost subdued. But she’d refrained from pulling my metaphorical pigtails like Archer did and kept her eye on the horizon unlike Hierophant. The irritation now coming across clear had me wondering if she’d just been hiding it better than the others. She was certainly the hardest to read of the Woe. For others that crown might have belonged to Adjutant, but I knew him like I knew my own limbs.

“You’re worried,” I said.

She sent me a look that implied less than complimentary things about my intellect.

“Not just the usual stuff,” I dismissed. “This is about all of us leaving.”

“The Grey Pilgrim is unsupervised,” she said.

“The Pilgrim is under house arrest, allowed to speak only with goblins and Prince Amadis,” I replied bluntly. “If he can turn Robber to Good, I’d argue he actually deserves to win this war.”

“It feels like negligence not to keep a closer eye on them,” Vivienne sighed.

Most of the time, with Thief, the trick to understand her was not to listen to what she said. It might have been because of her Name, but she tended to go obliquely at matters. The only way to get a good read on what she had cooking behind the forehead, if she wasn’t willing to outright state it, was to figuring out the reasons behind what she said. In this case, she was speaking of Callow but I suspected Callow itself wasn’t the point.

“You’ve been cut off from the Jacks,” I said suddenly.

She looked away. Ah. There it was. Possibly beyond even me, Vivienne Dartwick was the individual in the Kingdom of Callow with the most information at her fingertips. Hakram was the one piecing together the reports from her Jacks, the Dark Guilds under Ratface and Aisha’s web of relatives to send up the most important reports to me, but that was more administrative than a matter of authority. I just didn’t have the time to read it all and see to my other duties as well, not even now that I no longer slept. But Thief had access to all of it as well, and as the head of my net of informants she wielded the power to send agents to unearth any secrets she wanted. It must have been like an itch she couldn’t scratch, being removed from the centre of the web to go traipsing around Arcadia.

“I understand the necessity of committing to this,” Vivienne said. “And the risks that bringing any but Named into Keter would have carried, along the vulnerability of leaving only one of us behind. But we are blind to all the happenings in Creation until the matter is dealt with.”

It’d be exceedingly difficult to scry back home from Keter, admittedly. Unlike Malicia and Black I didn’t have decades’ worth of mages trained in scrying to create relays all over the continent that delivered reports within hours. My limited number had to be placed very strategically, and had largely focused on Praes and Procer. Moving it all around so we could get in touch with the Observatory around the natural barriers surrounding Callow wouldn’t be impossible, but it would screw up our eyes abroad for months. Months where we could hardly afford to be blind to movements within the borders of our most dangerous neighbours. Not something to use except in case of dire emergency.

“It’s not a gamble if we’re in control the whole time,” I told her gently.

“I know,” she said, passing a frustrated hand through her short hair.

I’d thought the cut a little too rough, when we first met, but it had grown on me since. Long hair on Vivienne would have felt odd now.

“We are taking so many risks, Catherine,” she said quietly. “And every one of them seems reasonable when the decision is made, but I look back and wonder if what we have built is a house of cards.”

“It does feel like everyone is out for our blood, doesn’t it?” I chuckled bitterly. “Gods, we know we’re at the end of the rope when the Hidden Horror is the best ally on the table.”

“That is a too great a decision for us to really understand the scope of its consequences quite yet, I think,” Vivienne said. “It is the small things that worry me.”

The glanced she flicked at the collar of my cloak was all she needed to say. I did not immediately reply. The two of us sat on the granite tomb of some dead queen and watched Hierophant weave his runes in the distance. He’d been at it for half a bell, now, and the breakthrough he’d been speculating about was nowhere in sight.

“She could accelerate his work,” I said, keeping my eyes on Hierophant. “Masego tells me that the doomsday fortress had similarities to the Greater Breach at Keter. There’s not a lot of more knowledgeable mages to be found, either.”

I did not need to speak the name of the woman in question. We both knew who I was speaking of.

“She,” Vivienne said with admirable evenness, “has not been punished.”

My brow rose.

“I ripped out her heart and bound her soul to the cloak,” I replied. “I’ll admit it hasn’t exactly turned out to be eternal screaming torment, but at the very least it’s imprisonment with a dab of torture.”

“Yet now she plies her powers in your service,” Thief said. “Safeguarded from all her former enemies. She has made herself useful, and so the leash loosens. How long, Catherine, before practicality pries open the door entirely?”

“I haven’t forgotten Liesse,” I said coldly.

“Peace,” the other woman said, hand rising. “I helped you draft the Accords, Catherine. I’ve seen that look in your eyes when you think yourself alone and you remember the breadth of the massacre. I know the failure shames you still. I’ve seen your fury at the architect of the massacre.”

“I’m not sure what you’re saying,” I admitted.

Aside from effectively admitting she sometimes spied on me unseen, but I’d honestly considered that to be a given. The notion of privacy was something I’d resigned myself to having lost even before an invisible sneak thief joined the Woe.

“I told you once, that Akua Sahelian treading Creation again was a line,” Vivienne said. “One desperate hour after another, we have walked past it.”

I grimaced. I could have made an argument that back then we’d been speaking about the soul she put in the infant as her resurgence plan, or even that all I’d ever allowed to pull at the leash was a soul, but it would have been dishonest. I had allowed Diabolist a foothold back in Creation, like it or not.

“You want me to destroy the soul,” I guessed.

Vivienne laughed, something vicious glinting in her blue-grey eyes. It was a little fucked up, I admitted to myself, that it made her look more attractive to me. Not that I expected anything to ever come of it. Thief was so painfully straight I could have used her as a ruler.

“I have learned,” she said, “the uses of pragmatism. No, let her continue to exist. Let her out, even. She has uses, and the hour has only grown more desperate. Another face will even make Indrani less of a pest for a while.”

“But,” I said.

“For small slights, long prices,” Vivienne Dartwick said harshly. “Let Akua Sahelian see the light and taste freedom. Let her believe she has slipped the noose, so long as she remains of use.”

Thief’s fingers clenched.

“But there will be a day where the world we made no longer has place for her,” Vivienne said. “When we have faced all the horrors before us. And on that day, when she has glimpsed victory?”

Vivienne met my eyes and there was something in them that gave even Winter pause.

“Snuff her out, Catherine,” she said. “Slowly. Painfully. Excruciatingly aware of what is being taken from her.”

I shivered, both out of respect at the viciousness of what she was proposing and a little bit of arousal. Gods, it was a tragedy she only rode stallion. I pushed that guilty thought aside and gave the moment the seriousness it was due. Should I hesitate at effectively letting our Akua with the intent to murder how down the line? Gods, that I even had to ask. I would have seen no nuance there to be had, when I’d been seventeen. But I hadn’t had a kingdom on my shoulders, back then. And I hadn’t looked Akua Sahelian in the eyes as she told me nonchalantly she was going to slaughter a hundred thousand innocents to use as fodder for her ambition. Putting a knife in her back wasn’t somehow made moral by Diabolist being a mass murderer, but it was the kind of petty evil I had made my tools of trade. Fair dealing and mercy were no longer things that applied to people willing to butcher an entire city for their purposes.

“It could be years,” I warned her. “Before we’re out of opponents. We could die before that, too.”

“I know,” Vivienne said. “Let her follow us in death, if that is our lot. Otherwise my words stand.”

I spat in my palm and offered it up. Thief was not the kind of maidenly flower who balked at spit, aristocrat or not, so she did the same without hesitation.

“Bargain struck,” I said, and we clasped hands.

“Bargain struck,” she echoed.

We rose. I spoke the words, and Akua Sahelian walked the world again.

—

I had two of the finest mages of our generation working on a solution, and yet half a day later here I was: standing with a scowl on my face, being told nothing I wanted to hear. Hierophant at least had the decency to look as frustrated as I felt. Akua’s lips were just slightly quirked, not enough for it to qualify as a smile but enough to reveal how pleased she was to be out of the box and talking magic with one of the few people in existence she’d consider a peer.

“The issue has been the same since you interrupted me,” Masego said, a touch accusingly. “I have yet to succeed in accounting for the disparity in alignment.”

“We can hear what they say now,” I pointed out. “You managed touch for a little bit yesterday.”

“The formula was a dead end,” Diabolist said. “The runes involved would have disrupted further addition. Consider them an ore that spoiled the alloy.”

It kind of pissed me off that my dead rival was better at explaining sorcery to me without sounding condescending than one of my closest friends.

“But you were aligned,” I pressed.

“Not in the right manner,” Masego irritably said.

“The difference was not unlike reading of a river on parchment while seeking to swim in one,” Akua smiled. “Result was achieved, but along a different path than desired.”

Yeah, still pissing me off. I suspected that was going to happen a lot.

“It might be that this is impossible to achieve within the bounds of Trismegistan sorcery,” Hierophant said. “We’ve been speaking of different perspectives, but most of them are so glaringly fallible or unusable by humans my studies of the subject have been shallow.”

“We only have so much time to spend here,” I reluctantly admitted.

“You demand the miraculous on the schedule of the shoddy,” Masego muttered, then paused.

His saw his glass eyes turn to peer behind him while the rest of his body remained still.

“Could it be that simple?” he said.

“You’ve dealt with miracles before,” I encouraged.

“I’ve vivisected and employed parts of them,” he corrected absent-mindedly. “But the gap is one of understanding, and I have a mechanism at hand to correct that failing.”

I felt him gather power without ever chanting or drawing a rune. Not shaping it for a spell, I thought. Drawing it into himself. I opened my mouth to ask, but Akua discretely shook her head.

“A mystery,” Hierophant muttered to himself. “In the technical sense. Foolish, foolish. I saw, when in transitioned. Quantification is anathema to higher sorceries.”

His hand shot out and he clasped my wrist.

“Yes,” he grinned. “They will not deny me, be they Gods or fathers. I will Witness .”

A ripple passed across the world, and what it left behind was no longer an echo.

Chapter 30: Witness

“There is only one lesson to be learned from shatranj: no matter who wins the game, the pieces return to the same box.”
– Dread Emperor Benevolent the First

I’d never been in crypt before but it smelled about what I’d expected. Cool, wet stone and a little like dust. The scent was heavy and cloying, but it wasn’t the reason I felt rattled. I almost withdrew my wrist from Masego’s grasp before realizing that might get me expelled from... whatever this was and froze instead. Splendidly uncaring of my wariness, Hierophant let my wrist go the moment after. I looked around. Still here. I’d say that was good to know, but I understood next to nothing about what was going on. That was an unpleasantly familiar feeling, truth be told.

“Masego,” I whispered. “Can they see us?”

We were on the outskirts of the crowd but there were a few attendants close by near a sculpted ramp leading upwards. If they could see us, we’d stick out like sore thumbs. Neither of us could pass Keteran by skin tone alone, much less if clothes were brought into it. Hierophant shook his head.

“We can only subtract from this, not add,” he mused.

That loosened some of the tension in my shoulders, so I allowed myself to take a slower look around. We were at the beginning of the shard, by my reckoning. Most of the grievers were still filing in, and it’d be about half an hour before they king’s corpse was brought in. Less than that before the Bard walked in from a place not within the shard and sat down next to Trismegistus, though. Two of the attendants a little higher up, veiled young women, spoke in a low voice. I frowned.

“They’re still speaking Keteran,” I said.

Masego turned to me, lips curving in a sharp smile.

“Subtraction, Catherine,” he said, “does not preclude acquisition.”

My brow rose.

“You can ransack their brains,” I said.

“Don’t be absurd,” he replied. “The actual brain matter is long gone. I can appropriate an echo of their consciousness, including working knowledge of their language.”

I blinked in surprise.

“Wait, that’s something you can do?” I said. “You can dig out an entire dialect from someone’s head and put it in someone else’s?”

That would have been damned useful to know. Wouldn’t have had to spend so many evenings trying to learn Chantant if there was a shortcut like that. Without Learn to help me along, I’d come to the realization that my talent for languages was average at best and that the most widespread language in Procer was a horrid chore to learn. So many fucking exceptions and whoever had decided that plurals for masculine and feminine names – or even that there should be any of those – deserved to be drawn and quartered. If it’d been a possibility to lift that knowledge out of the heads of criminals, with consent and a reduced sentence dangled in exchange, I would have taken it.

“Theoretically speaking,” Masego agreed. “Of course a living mind is much more complex to excise information from than what can be found in this imprint. Likely the extraction would break the source entirely, what would be obtained would be contaminated with connected gibberish and the bestowal itself drive the recipient mad. Human minds were not meant to process that much knowledge instantly.”

I grimaced. Yeah, it figured. Should have known that if this was a feasible shortcut, Warlock would have cut open a few ‘expendables’ and the Calamities would be fluent in every single Calernian language.

“But you can do it here safely,” I pressed.

He eyed me amusedly, which was a pretty ghastly sight considering his glass eyes.

“For myself, I can rely on my aspect to handle the worst of the backlash,” he noted. “I will have severe migraines for weeks or months before it has all been processed, but I have herbs to alleviate this.”

“And me?” I said, already expecting the worst.

“ Human minds were not meant to process that much knowledge instantly,” he reminded me gently. “You have regularly employed powers beyond human capacity to understand, and indicted by the principle alienation that ensued. It will be no more unpleasant than when we employed absolute alignment together.”

So a bunch of spikes through the forehead. Lovely.

“I’ll cope,” I sighed. “Work your magic, magic man.”

“Must you call me that?” he asked.

“Be grateful Indrani’s not here, or she’d start hinting about magic fingers,” I replied without missing a beat.

She wouldn’t even be wrong, to be honest. My time with Kilian had taught me that the jokes about mages having clever fingers were well founded.

“Silver lining,” he muttered. “The attendants will do for our purposes, I suppose.”

I glanced at the two young women.

“A question,” I said. “Can you extract from the Trismegistus and the Bard?”

He nodded slowly.

“Broader, more complex minds will be more difficult to work with,” he warned. “But in principle, yes. I must caution, however, that was is taken will be removed from the echo permanently. After the extraction, the actors will be... impaired, for lack of a better term.”

“We’d be fucking with the imprint,” I summarized.

“Fucking is not a term that applies to this subject,” he sighed.

“It’s a term with surprisingly broad applications, Zeze,” I said righteously. “You should expand your horizons.”

Huh, so he could glare with glass eyes without resorting to a light show. Nice to know. The work took too long. We were only halfway through the span of the shard, but the Bard was long gone and Trismegistus remained far from the other grievers for the rest of it. We used the time to get more comfortable with our sudden knowledge of Keteran. Or, as it was actually called, Ashkaran. After he broke the first attendant – a chunk of her face was now missing, like it’d been vaporized – and shoved a blue bubble into my forehead, I’d felt a rush. Like my mind was a cup being filled beyond capacity, until the cup shattered and Winter flooded my veins. It’d been... strangely pleasant. Like cracking your neck after a long day’s work. Hierophant’s own acquisition had seen him go still for a solid thirty heartbeats, and his face had been twitching in and out of a wince ever since. He admitted in a low voice that the aspect had not warded off backlash as much as he’d anticipated.

I would have spared him some sympathy but I was still busy wrestling with the fact that I had servant gossip a few millennia out of date rattling around the back of my mind. I was less interested in who had been sleeping with who in the royal kitchens, or the speculation that the... head household servant for halls and commoner rooms – there was no Lower Miezan word that carried the same breadth of implications – had been getting cheaper candles and pocketing the savings.

“You know,” I said out loud, “for all those rumours about chambermaids being saucy this is surprisingly tame stuff. You hear filthier in taverns.”

“Maybe the sort you frequent,” Masego muttered. “There’s a reason I refuse to go drinking with you and Archer. Last time I saw a rat.”

I snorted. Yeah, maybe Dockside had been a bit much for Hierophant. He liked things clean, and that part of Laure was anything but. We split to see if there was anything interesting to dig up, and to my surprise there was. A surprising amount of information could be obtained from overhearing idle conversation, if there was enough of it. For one, I confirmed that the people with the copper circlets were royalty. Sons and daughters of the dead king, whose name had been Iakim. The oldest child was the heir to the kingship of Sephirah, which I assumed to be the name of the ancient Keteran kingdom. The title of that heir, Zekiah, wasn’t prince. Not exactly. The term was more like lesser king, and by the sound of it Zekiah had shared rule of the kingdom with his father for years now. Of Trismegistus, or whatever his true name was, I heard nothing. The nobles, or at least the man and women bearing titles I assumed to be something like nobility, among the crowd did not speak of him. Apart from the entombment, the favourite subject appeared to be the war with the ‘People of the Wolf’.

Aside from the usual accusations of savagery and wickedness that always sprouted on both sides of any war, the rumour of cannibalism was often repeated. That and transforming into giant man-eating wolves, but I had my doubts about that one. I’d seen no hint of a power like it when passing through the battle shards. No one seems particularly worried about the war, though, not even after King Iakim’s death. The People of the Wolf were apparently no match for walls of stone, and the ‘Conclave’ had finally agreed to enter the war. From context, those seemed to be mages. Had the lack of effectiveness of mages we’d seen so far come from the fact they were just amateurs? Could be. It wasn’t what I’d come here to find out, though, so when the shard began again I found Masego and headed towards the upper alcoves where I knew the Dead King and the Bard would come to talk.

“Heard anything interesting?” I asked.

“Some blame the plague for the war,” he told me, though he didn’t sound all that interested. “They say it was the deaths in the outlying villages that attracted the wolfmen.”

I cocked my head to the side. I’d chalk that one up for Hakram’s tale of the fall of Keter.

“Is wolfmen how you’d translate it?” I said. “It struck me more as-”

“Ah, capitalized,” he breathed out. “I see. Formal address, which would be spoken ‘People of the Wolf’. Difficult to know which of us is correct without seeing the term written, of course.”

“I can’t read it,” I told him. “The girl was illiterate.”

“I have some semblance of the knowledge,” Masego frowned, then winced as his headache flared. “I cut too narrowly, it seems. I cannot quite remember it.”

I patted his shoulder.

“Don’t get a migraine,” I ordered. “I need you sharp for the important part.”

We were both standing, when Trismegistus strode up the ramp and came to rest by a pillar. He looked calm, in the magelight, and did not visibly react when the Wandering Bard slipped through the darkness and plopped herself down in the alcove to his side. She put down the lute on her lap and chuckled.

“There’s nothing quite like looking down at one’s work, is there?” she said.

Her Ashkaran was flawless and without accent, as if she was a native speaker. Trismegistus did not look at her.

“Intercessor,” he said. “I wondered if you would come.”

“Intercessor,” the Bard repeated amusedly. “Not the worst thing I’ve been called. Heard a thing or two, have you?”

The young man glanced at her, mildly curious, before returning his gaze to the ceremony unfolding below.

“You were companion to Nasseh the Great, when he fought for the submission of the twelve cities,” Trismegistus idly said. “You were at Queen Sadassa’s side as well, during the worst of the Wars of the Rat. Fortune and misfortune both draw you like carrion.”

“And which do you think you are, I wonder?” the Bard mused. “So few of them even remember you exist, Neshamah. How horrified they would be, to learn what the prodigal son has wrought.”

Neshamah , I thought, fingers clenching. I finally had a name.

“You come in the service of Those Above, then,” the man said, and he sounded almost bored. “Tedious.”

“Below has already blessed you quite enough, my friend,” the Bard shrugged. “You don’t need the nudge. But I’m not here to put sticks in your wheels, if that is your worry. Too late for that. Maybe if I’d had a few years to shape your opposition, but you played it well enough I had no openings. And I already burned my fingers tossing those bones with odds like this with the giants.”

Neshamah finally turned to face her.

“You have my attention,” he said. “If not intervention, what is your purpose here?”

“I suppose you could call it curiosity,” she said. “I’m starting to understand how little I understand, you see. So I seek knowledge. About how they make people like you. I won’t solve the riddle with the tools they gave me, so it seems I must learn craftsmanship of my own. Which takes me to you. You’re not impossible, my friend, but you are unlikely. Your father did not look Below when he earned his Blessing. But you did, at an age where most children worry about the nature of supper. Was it your mother’s death? Ugly affair all around, I’ve been told.”

The man smiled.

“You think it kindness to offer me an excuse,” Neshamah said. “But it is an insult, Intercessor. There is nothing in what I have wrought that deserves excusing.”

“The plague alone killed hundreds,” the Bard said. “That will grow to thousands, when the cities begin to be touched.”

“And?” he patiently asked.

“Your people bleed for power,” the Bard said. “But only ever themselves. You would break cities in the name a plan that will not bloom for years yet.”

“I destroy flesh that will destroy itself in time,” he said. “There is no theft in this, Intercessor. It is mere movement of the soul as was ordained, only now given proper purpose.”

The Bard hummed, then pulled at her flask.

“The drow didn’t teach you this,” she decided. “The Twilight Sages conisder death the only sin, they would be appalled by what you speak of. Most tribes beyond the lakes can barely even use sorcery and their allegiances change with the seasons. Was it the Chitterers? I genuinely believe the Gods made them out of whatever was left after the rest of Creation was done. Shoddy craftsmanship, that lot.”

“And still you believe I must have been taught,” Neshamah said. “As if my actions were not the only lucid answer to the truth of this world. There are none closer in any lands to the Gods, Intercessor, so tell me this – why must we die at all? Why were we shaped with such inherent imperfection?”

“Because the Garden was a failure,” the Bard easily replied. “Immortals always fall into closed circles. There are no answers to be had from them.”

“You grasp too little and too much,” the man said. “The Splendid are bound to repetition because they are feared, Intercessor. Because with the span of eternity before them, they might learn beyond what they were meant to learn were they not so tightly constrained. And so mortality is the answer to the deeper question: how do they loosen the bindings without birthing their own usurpers?”

Neshamah smiled, his golden brown eyes aglow.

“Why, by cursing their work with decay,” he chuckled. “By ensuring the banner can only be carried for so long by any one soul before it is recalled at their feet.”

“Below’s favour comes with the end of aging,” the Bard said.

“Blessing from it also calls the blessed to strife in all things,” the man dismissed. “It is a curse of unmaking as certain as that of age.”

“Yet you took a Blessing as well,” she said. “And you’ve birthed no small amount of strife. The People of the Wolf, the southern cities, even your father – all dancing to your tune, every death another stone for your tower.”

“Is this judgement I discern?” Neshamah drawled. “You must have been human once, Intercessor. Do you not recall the urgings of one’s blood? I forced nothing. They do as they will, by their own choosing. All the forces of this war precede me. My forbear slew that of the Witch Queen, and so enmity was birthed between our peoples. Blessings of opposite bent set her against my father to the death, leading to the night of his passing. And war? Ah, war is but the accumulation of a thousand choices. Beyond the guiding hand of any single man. All I have done, Intercessor, was hitch my chariot to a falling star.”

“Oh, I won’t ever forget my first face,” the Bard murmured. “Or the first few after that, when I evened the scales of the debt. I leave judgement to the Tribunal, my friend. To every force its purpose, and that is not mine.”

“We must seem like golems to you,” the man said wonderingly. “Our incantations written by the hands of Gods instead of men, yet not so different peering down from your perch. Eyeless things toiling for purpose we cannot understand.”

“One day, maybe,” she said. “When I will have grown used to dying. Until then I still weep for what we do to ourselves, without needing a single nudge.”

“I have pondered, since I first learned of you,” Neshamah said. “Whether or not your service is willing.”

“They make us better, when we listen,” the Bard said. “Even yours. It is a terrible thing you will do, but no less great for it.”

“Yet you seek to escape your purpose,” the man said.

“I have,” she said lightly, “always loved a good story.”

“What a clever jest,” Neshamah mused. “That there are none to seek intercession for the Intercessor.”

The Wandering Bard laughed. Like he was her friend, and not a monster who was scheming to destroy a kingdom and a half for his ambition. I shivered at the sight of it, for the second time. For reasons darker and deeper than the first.

“Pity, from you ?” she said. “People never do cease to surprise me. I look forward to your ending, King of Death.”

“O ye of little faith,” the man who would be the Dead King smiled.

The Bard pulled at the flask again, saluting him jauntily, and sashayed away without another word. I did not follow her. She’d disappear, stepping into an alcove and vanishing into thin air. I stood there in silence for a very long time, watching the man that would become the Dead King look down at his father’s burial. Masego, for once, sensed there was no place for conversation.

“Take us out,” I said quietly.

“I have not extracted from either of them,” Hierophant said hesitatingly.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “We’re done for the day.”

“Catherine?” he asked, but it was more worry than question.

“Take us out, Masego,” I said. “It looks like I need to prepare to fight an entirely different kind of war.”

Chapter 31: Spectation

“You’re a masterful schemer, it’s true. Let’s see if that helps any in the alligator pit..”
– Dread Empress Malignant I, holding court

They all knew me well enough to leave me alone with my thoughts as I tried to get a handle on what I’d learned. Well, maybe not Diabolist, but she was better at picking up on those things than any of the others. I occupied my hands with mindless work, taking a whetstone to my sword even though it was quite sharp enough already. In the grander scheme of things, Catherine, I’m the petty warlord of a backwater kingdom. Black had told me that once, a long time ago. We’d been speaking about the gnomes, and he’d been putting in perspective the truth that a second-rate power in Calernia would be considered less than dust in the greater world beyond this continent. I was learning now that we were all pieces in a greater game even here. There was no other real way to understand the conversation between the two abominations, one still learning and the other emergent. The Bard had been considered old even in the days of Sephirah’s fall. Gods, how long had she been around?

I did not consider myself all that inclined to fear my enemies, admittedly sometimes even when I should have. But as the whetstone slid against the edge, I admitted to myself that for the first time in ages I was genuinely afraid of an opponent. Heroes, even those who could tread all over me, I could cope with. There were ways around power, around the laws of the Heavens. They could be tricked and twisted. But something like the Wandering Bard? She might have set in motion the sequence of events that would lead to my death decades before I was even born. If Black was to be believed, she could not be killed and even if she somehow was anyway she’d only return with a different face. There was no telling what she knew or how she knew it. There was no telling where she was and what she was up to. How could an entity like that be beaten? The sharp song of stone on steel held no answers, soothing as it was.

I’d believed that I understood the game unfolding across Calernia. That I could guess, if not know, the motives and intents of the other players. The Tenth Crusade, the Empire and the League: the three powers on the board, as far as the nations of mankind went. My attempts at seeing through the Dead King were now revealed to have been little more than presumption, but light had been shed on more than that mistake alone. There was more going on behind the crusade than faith and ambition. Hasenbach might have refused my terms because of political considerations, as I’d previously believed, or she might have been moved by a whisper in her ear years ago that only now clicked into place. I could no longer trust any of the actors to act according to the rules I’d believed they obeyed, because I’d been blind to half the war even as I fought it. Which now took me to the very place I’d been struggling to avoid since I took the crown: I had to take measures to insure the survival of Callow while in the dark about the objectives of all the other forces in play.

Fuck, for all I knew the Bard was interceding in my favour. I’d had strokes of bad luck, sure, but exceedingly good one as well. I wasn’t unaware that Black had been arranging things quietly in the background so that opportunities would land in my lap ever since I became his apprentice, but there were things beyond his ability to arrange. The Bard had been in the thick of it, at Liesse, when I gained back the aspect I lost and snatched a resurrection out of angelic hands. Had she been beaten there, or had that restoration been the purpose all along? Hells, had she pulled strings for me to win just so I’d fuck up with Akua the following year and Second Liesse got the Tenth Crusade going? I could go mad, trying to find the hand of the Wandering Bard behind every turning point of the last few years. But then could I really afford not to look for it? If I kept my eyes closed, I’d lose. Or whatever else she had in mind for me.

She’d admitted to the Dead King that he’d been too clever in his scheme for her to be able to crush him, but that’d been centuries and centuries ago. When she was still learning her Role. I had to face the possibility that even if I made all the right choices I might still end up broken because the Bard had shaped the choices I’d be able to make so she couldn’t possibly lose. I felt shards of stone pass through my fingers, and noticed with a sigh that I’d crushed the whetstone without even meaning to. That was my only one, too, I’d have to borrow Hakram’s from now on. I picked up my scabbard with a sigh and sheathed the longsword. So much for any of this calming me. There were no easy answers to be had. No plan to form out of thin air. Should we even finish the journey to Keter? I had a better notion of what I’d be letting out, now, and it was so much worse than I’d expected.

I would not have flinched at making a deal with a cunning undead Dread Emperor with a little more foresight, but Neshamah was something else. He’d been arranging the death of realms at a time where most the continent could barely use sorcery – and he’d had millennia to plot his next moves. I very much doubted that the man I’d seen would call it quits after breaking the Kingdom of Sephirah and conquering his hell. There would be more. And I had been sent an envoy, I thought, because he had deemed I could be useful for that purpose. My fingers clenched, then slowly unclenched. I’d get nowhere, stewing in my own thoughts like this. The pot had been freshly steered, and I was too close to the matter regardless. I’d speak with the others after my head was cleared. Besides, for once under the restlessness I felt the call of exhaustion. Not physical, though. The boon of knowledge from Masego seemed to have tired me out mentally.

I dragged myself back to camp, waved away the concern of the others and crawled under the covers by the fireside. I’d still be just as fucked tomorrow, so forcing myself to go through the song and dance now did not appeal.

Sleep found me swiftly.

—

I woke to the sound of soft voice, after too short a rest. The orations and murmurs of the shard could not be heard, which meant our ‘night’ was in full swing. My mind still felt sluggish but at least I was no longer wandering from one idle thought to the next, treading the same hopeless circle. I kept my eyes closed and my breathing even, at first out of laziness but the reason was swift to change: the people speaking were Thief and Diabolist. Neither seemed aware I was now awake.

“- no longer need to sleep,” Akua said. “You need not burden yourself, I can keep watch alone.”

Thief chuckled.

“And you believe you’re trusted enough for that, Sahelian?” she said. “I never took you for such a hopeful soul.”

“To keep quiet in the face of danger would be utterly mindless treachery,” Diabolist said. “I am, after all, dependent on Catherine to walk the world.”

“Unless someone else takes the cloak,” Vivienne said.

“I have use to the Woe,” Akua said. “Use enough I was allowed this larger cage. There is no guarantee another bearer would have such purpose for me. A poor gamble to make.”

“You seem to think you can talk your way into a semblance of trust, Wastelander,” Thief snorted. “Best you discard that notion early. It will be less irritating for all involved.”

“Fascinating,” Diabolist murmured. “Your distaste of me has not ebbed in the slightest, and still here I am. Yet you’ve been charged with the duty of being Catherine’s conscience, which means she would not have eased the leash without your permission.”

“Her Majesty, to you,” Thief bit out. “Sweet nothings and Praesi titles won’t get you anywhere with us, Sahelian. We all remember what you are.”

“Liesse,” Akua mused. “The sum of all I am, in your eyes. You might not be wrong to think so. It was the pivot to who I am today.”

“The greatest butcher of our time,” Vivienne said.

“From a highborn, that would have been a compliment,” Akua said, a smile in her voice. “Not so here, of course. I imagine that is how you’ve made peace with the nature of the demand I be brutally snuffed out when my usefulness ends.”

It was an effort not to stiffen. Named senses would have given me away to Vivienne for sure, though I wasn’t sure how Diabolist functioned in that way.

“Not my call to make, that,” Thief shrugged. “I’m the spymistress, not the queen.”

“A poor parry,” Diabolist chided. “You already know I suspect the inner workings of the Woe and your role within them. It would have been more effective to feign conflict between you and Catherine over the matter, allowing her to position herself as my salvation while you bayed for blood.”

There was a long moment of silence.

“You’re so caught up in your Praesi games you don’t even see your blinders,” Vivienne sighed, and she sounded fairly convincing to me. “Must be the old madness. You certainly don’t sound like a woman who thinks she has a sword hanging over her head.”

Akua laughed softly.

“My dear Thief,” she said. “If I cannot carve a path to survival with such early forewarning, I deserve to be destroyed. That is the measure by which I am to be weighed. I’ve always found it amusing to hear your people speak of the Wasteland’s ways as ‘blinders’, truth be told. As if bereft of them we would then see Creation as you do. Do you truly believe Callowans to be the only lucid people in the world?”

“My tutors taught me that’s called a false equivalence,” Vivienne said conversationally. “The pretence that the obvious failings in the customs of a people that slaughter each other and their neighbours for sport every other decade are somehow the same as the flaws in the customs of Callow. We’re not perfect, of course. But I’d rather deal with the fucking elves than you and your fellows, Sahelian. The long-ears might be murderous assholes, but at least they stay in their forest. Your people make your problems everyone one else’s problems too.”

“So they did teach you rhetoric,” Akua said. “Good, this would have been quite boring otherwise. You would have served as poor moral compass, were you unable to argue.”

“There’s that most sacred of villainous traditions at work,” Thief said cuttingly. “Cutting one’s losses and bailing from the fight.”

“You speak as if you were not a villain yourself,” Diabolist said.

“I am what I am,” Vivienne shrugged. “Do you expect anguish and conflict out of me? I believe in the decisions that led me here. I would make them again. If all it takes to be estranged from the Heavens is refusing annihilation and submission, then I have no use for the Gods Above.”

“You would be surprised,” Akua said, “at the number of Empresses that spoke those very same words.”

“You’re trying to draw parallels,” Thief said, growing irritated. “I don’t know why, and frankly I don’t care. Might be some old eastern monster was just like me, though I very much doubt it. So what? There’s no angle there for you to get mercy from me, Sahelian. Your little talk about redemption is absurd: there is nothing redeemable about what you did and what you are. Your execution has been stayed. That is as much of a victory as you will ever win, Diabolist. Look that truth in the eyes. Wallow in it. That fear is the least of what you are owed.”

“The true nature of a woman,” Akua said amusedly, “is only ever revealed after she has been prodded. It is an interesting circle, the Woe. Your role in it has been the hardest to grasp.”

“Has it?” Vivienne said. “And to think they said you were clever. Lost a few feathers up there along with your heart, I see.”

“Oh, you are the spymistress of the Kingdom of Callow,” Diabolist dismissed. “It is no secret. But that is a function, not a role.”

“Am I in for a story about how Praesi understand namelore so well?” Thief drawled. “Clearly, we should all take advice from the people who have been one stabbing away from brutal civil war from the moment their empire was first spawned. Please, magical wise spirit, share the secrets about continent-burning instability with me. I have so much to learn from you.”

“Since you insist,” Diabolist agreed with pleasure so perfect-sounding it just had to be fake. “The Deadhand is the least complicated. His people have been carefully pruned by the Tower into being a soldier caste for the Empire over a hundred reigns, and as the culmination of that edifice he serves as the right hand of a powerful warlord.”

“Hakram is the least complicated of us,” Vivienne said slowly. “Hakram. Your insights are truly far-reaching, Diabolist. Reaching in the wrong direction, sure, but that can’t possibly be a first for you.”

“I cast no aspersions on the man himself,” Akua noted. “I merely state that his Name and Role are no deep secret. Hierophant, however, was an unexpected variable. Apprentices have transitioned into Names other than Warlock before, but usually when both are living simultaneously a succession through murder is the outcome.”

“An awkward but kind and sweet man with no interest in power did not end up murdering his relatively loving father for said power,” Thief said. “However will we solve this confounding mystery, Sahelian? I just don’t know.”

“There is no known precedent to his Name,” Akua continued without missing a beat, and I was reluctantly impressed by her ability to just plow through that level of scathing sarcasm. “Consequently the core tenet of it had to be understood from the man himself. Fascinating as his upbringing was to study, the pivot seems to have occurred after he met Catherine. It was the calibre of the opposition that forged him, you see. Choirs and demigods. There was need for one who could understand and oppose those entities, and so the Hierophant came to be.”

“You’re forgetting demons and a highborn murderous witch with delusions of grandeur,” Thief helpfully provided. “Admittedly the witch only ever seemed good at killing innocents and spending her subordinates like copper at a fair, so she might not qualify as true opposition .”

“The Archer did seem like an odd fit, at first,” Diabolist mused. “No real fetters to Catherine’s ideals or expectation of comradeship as shared inheritors to the legacy of the Calamities. Ranger, infamously, left the Calamities on the eve of the Conquest. And pupils of the Lady of Lake have a reputation for being incapable of playing nice with others, be they heroes or villains. It could not merely be the fighting that drew her – there is no lack of foes near Refuge.”

“It’s almost entertaining how much thought you’re giving to the actions of a woman whose notion of a plan is dumping all her rations in a well and filling her bag with identical cheap booze flasks so she won’t run dry,” Vivienne said. “But by all means, tell me everything about the intricate considerations that are behind Indrani joining a band of people that allow her to drink, fight and sleep around as much as she wants. It ought to be enlightening.”

Wait, was that why Archer never seemed to run out? Fucking Hells, I’d been wondering why she was being such a magpie about taking food from Masego’s plate recently.

“Peers not in direct competition,” Akua said. “That was what the Archer found. A luxury previously beyond her reach. And from her addition the Woe gained both an executioner and a field Named capable of independent action for long stretches, which they sorely needed. Hers is the thinnest bond by far, and I do not expect it to keep her bound past the end of the crusade.”

“And that leaves me,” Vivienne lightly said, though there was an edge beneath. “Don’t disappoint now, sagely collar genie. What has your profound discernment taught you of my hidden nature? I’ll go first: deep down, I always wanted to be a shoemaker. Shoes are the foundation on which rests civilization, Diabolist. We are literally barefoot without them. You ever think about that, in between ruminations about how you tried to conquer the world and got your heart ripped out instead? Food for thought.”

“You were a late addition,” the shade said. “And in some ways the most interesting. You were, after all, previously a heroine. I should have realized which the wind was blowing when she succeeding at turning one of Above’s own, in retrospective. The weight on the scales had grown too uneven, for all my labours. But we were speaking of you, Vivienne Dartwick.”

“Thief,” the Callowan hissed. “There’s only a few people that get to use that name. Don’t ever count on being one of them.”

“Thief indeed,” Akua said. “Not, for all your skills, an assassin. That was what first drew my interest. Archer filled that purpose, to some extent, but you seemed a more apt candidate. Yet your knives did not grow bloody after your turning, nor your Name change to reflect it.”

I heard Vivienne go still as stone. Diabolist had touched something there, though I didn’t know what.

“Looking back, the void you filled seems more obvious,” the shade mused. “You are Callowan. The only one of the Woe who shares Catherine’s ideals to any deep extent, as Adjutant would likely adapt without true challenge to a change in her priorities. After she seized Winter’s mantle in full, you became the measuring stick. It was simplification to call you a moral compass, I will confess. You are not a particularly moral woman, Thief. But you do love your homeland, and have kept some of the qualms you were taught as a child. You are a restraint, and through your function as spymistress a provider of choices. In some ways, one might argue your perspective is the crucible through which Catherine remakes herself every time she is confronted with greater strife.”

“You know,” Vivienne said, “I used to wonder why you were playing the tamed hound nowadays. Oh, you’re bound. That’s part of it. But you have to know that all the playacting and sweet whispers you’ve been up to are not strictly necessary. Being useful and not actively offensive to everything we stand for would have gotten you this far anyway. But that last tirade of yours? It says a lot more about you than me. Because it’s about Catherine more than me or the Woe. And it has to be, doesn’t it Akua? Because you ended up in the box, and there has to be a reason for that. She has to be special in some way to have beaten you, otherwise you just couldn’t stand it .”

“I lost, my dear Thief, because I prepared for a battle against my rival and faced instead her power wielded by the Black Knight,” Akua said softly. “The mistake in this was mine, and I do not deny it. And still, at the height of my wrath, I fought to a standstill a coalition of all Callowan arms of note and every Imperial army west of the Blessed Isle. Led by three Calamities and the full muster of the Woe. My fall was just, for every fall is just. But it would be a mistake to think Liesse is the origin of the laurels on her brow. That victory was hers alone in that she was the last woman standing.”

“So you’re trying to make her the Empress,” Vivienne mused. “Because it’s fine to have lost, if she was fated to climb the Tower all along. You were a necessary part of the story. You mattered . And who knows, maybe you’ll manage to be Chancellor if you play the game well enough.”

“She will climb the Tower, Thief,” Diabolist said with iron certainty. “She cannot stomach any of the remaining claimants and will not suffer to leave Praes to its own devices. You speak of fate as some invisible force, but it is a simpler thing: fate is character. And it is in hers to cut deep into her bones for her ambitions.”

Thief laughed.

“She’s not in charge because she’s been chosen, Sahelian,” Vivienne said. “Gods, certainly not because she’s chosen either. Or even because she has power, for that matter.”

“Is it the power of love, then?” Akua said, a touch drily.

“There’s plenty of people who care about Callow,” Thief said. “And if I learned anything from the Woe, it’s that caring doesn’t fill granaries or run a court. She’s certainly in the right place at the right time with the right amount of power to get things moving, but that’s not really what matters. See, the thing is that she acts . Sometimes those actions are mistake, like going after the fae and leaving you to plot under your rock in Liesse. But, most of the time, she improves things. Just by a little bit. And she draws other people who act with her. You think that’s some unearthly trait, like she’s some force of nature, but that’s Wasteland talk. The Tower’s the centre of the world for you, and the most important person in the world is the one that climbs it.”

The other Callowan paused.

“Except she’s not,” Vivienne said. “The exemplar of whatever fucked up Praesi virtues you want to sing about, that is. She’s kind of petty, her temper’s foul and if Hakram hadn’t stepped in she’d probably be a drunk. She ogles every pretty face that shows up even if they’re our enemies, and she cannot for the life of her shut the Hells up even when she really needs to. She’s not unique or irreplaceable, but even if you think otherwise that doesn’t really matter – because she’s part of something greater than her. She’s just the rock that started the avalanche, Sahelian, and she did that by doing the most Callowan thing there is: after the invasion is done, you get up and get back to work. Others will come to help you, because a kingdom’s people and not banners .”

None of this was exactly singing my praises, but then that wasn’t Vivienne’s wheelhouse. She’d gotten the part that mattered, anyway. That we weren’t supposed to stay in charge forever, that we were just a stopgap until Callow could handle itself on its own. The purpose wasn’t to rule, it was to hammer away at Calernia until it was in a place where there was no need for someone like me.

“You think that’ll make her Empress,” she laughed. “You’re thinking of her like some sort of tormented saint that’ll take up the burden of keeping the lot of you in line for the greater good. You want to know what Praes is, for us? Another mess to clean up. Like the Tenth Crusade and the Dead King and the heroes. You’re not owed anything. You’re not different or unique, just another line on a long list. And that’s your fate, Diabolist. That’s your fucking character .”

Akua stayed silent for a long time.

“It is a pretty world you speak of,” she finally said. “We will see, in time, which one of us is right.”

The silence spread again, and though I could not hear the shade move I suspected she was looking away.

“Good performance,” Thief suddenly said. “But, Diabolist, if this is all of it I’m honestly disappointed. Was that really the whole ploy? I mean, Merciful Gods, you’ve used this one before. If this were a fairgrounds play I’d catcall and ask for my coppers back.”

“Pardon me?” Akua said, voice painted with genuine surprise.

“Trust,” Vivienne mused. “That’s what fucks you every time. Like, for example, believing I’d be so ashamed about ordering you to rip your eye out repeatedly I’d never mention it to anyone. I did, Sahelian. And you know what she told me? That it makes no difference, if the same thing reforms repeatedly. Pain doesn’t increase in the slightest.”

“I don’t follow,” Diabolist said.

“You panted and you screamed,” Thief said. “You pretended it hurt, because it made me feel like I’d accomplished something while you were actually getting your way. You ‘lost’ so I’d lower my guard. Like you did just now. Getting into an argument then throwing it, just so you’d be less of a threat in my eyes. Chastened little Akua, reconsidering her choices. Gods, you really are a snake.”

“If I had done such a thing,” Diabolist said, tone even. “What purpose would telling me you are aware serve?”

“I’m surprised you don’t know,” Vivienne Dartwick lightly said. “I get to see you pretend you’re not furious. Sweet dreams, Sahelian. Our little chat’s over until the next time you need your chain yanked.”

Chapter 32: Kernel

“Match the smile but watch the knife.”
– Soninke saying

The precarious balance the Woe had struck travelling through the echoes together was gone. Within an hour of Masego going into the imprint and harvesting what he could from the Bard and the Dead King that much had been made plain. Thief kept close to Akua’s shade, always in earshot, but had fallen into a sullen silence. Archer stabbed our most recent addition through the throat the very moment she attempted to strike conversation, laughing delightedly when the body reformed like mist after she withdrew the blade. I denied her suggestion that Diabolist be made to run ahead of the rest of us and used as target practice, though I was honestly tempted after what I’d overheard last night. There was no point in coddling a snake, true, but mistreating a dangerous and bound entity led to a particular kind of story and not one that ended well for any of us. Hierophant was still feeling the aftermath of stealing an entire language from Arcadia so he walked on his own regularly drinking from some herbal mixture he’d put together. Archer, thankfully, was leaving him alone. She had a talent for discerning between being a pest and being genuinely unpleasant.

That left only silence or Adjutant and I, for Diabolist to make conversation, and I got the impression that after so long in the box Akua was actually quite eager to talk with people. Which led to my finding out something quite interesting: Hakram made Diabolist uncomfortable. Not so much that it showed on her face, but I’d been looking at her closely and when conversing with my right hand she was just slightly off. There was no trace of the easy grace she’d used to run circles around Thief to be found, and while she didn’t blunder either I suspected it was because she was being exceedingly careful. I was slightly amused by that, but mostly curious. She could have been faking, of course. That was always a possibility with Akua Sahelian, the footnote added to her every single action and behaviour. But I was pretty sure she wasn’t, and that had me thinking about the reasons she’d feel that way. Was she racist? It’d been my impression that by Trueblood standards she was actually pretty tolerant. Which translated to looking down on everyone not a Trueblood more or less equally, with maybe a dash of additional contempt added because greenskins were just so uncivilized .

Assuming it wasn’t simply the spectacle of an orc being articulate and calm that had her on the back foot, there might be an angle there. Vivienne had her number in some ways and Archer was usually too willful to influence meaningfully, but Masego enjoyed talking magic with peers enough it could become an issue if left unchecked. It’d already led him to argue for the sparing of the woman who now ran the Observatory for him, and though I doubted he’d go on a similar limb for Diabolist of all people I couldn’t dismiss the possibility he’d grow somewhat fond of her over time. There were similarities to the way they’d been raised. His only objections about mass murder tended to be either on a professional basis – human sacrifice was an amateur’s crutch, he’d always argued – or because it would displease me . Considerate of him, but not exactly a solid foundation either way. It was a load off my shoulders that Adjutant looked like he’d be able to handle her. I’d long grown to rely on Hakram tidying it all up behind me, a pair of eyes that picked up on all the details I missed. It was fitting that it him who brought up the matter when we paused for a meal around noon.

“We’ll need to change her appearance,” Adjutant said, head inclining towards Diabolist. “A few people will see through it regardless, but it can’t be openly known she is now in our employ.”

“That would not be unwise,” Akua agreed. “Your subjects have reason to be less than fond of me, and my presence would not help your reputation abroad.”

Understatement of the decade, that. It would have been unproductive to maker her choke herself again, I reminded myself.

“I’m not sure how well glamour would work without something physical to be anchored on,” I frowned. “I can weave illusions without one, but I do need to concentrate. It’s not a long-term solution or even a reliable one.”

“I have become part of your mantle, dear heart,” Akua said with a pleasant smile. “Changing my looks through it should not be all that difficult.”

I mulled on that. It was true that she was no longer just bound to the Mantle of Woe. I’d known that the moment I summoned her before beginning our journey. My influence over her shade had grown stronger, broader in scope than simple hold and release. I breathed out and focused, Winter slithering through my veins like whispering smoke. I looked her into the eyes, those brown orbs so dark they were nearly black, and... withdrew what made them. Or at least the thinnest surface of it. Akua blinked, eyes now completely white and without either iris or pupil. I swallowed a flinch. That’d been a little more than I was aiming for. Thief made her way to us, cocking her head to the side.

“Fae,” she said. “Give her the appearance of a fae. You’re known to have dealings with them, it’s the most plausible story we have.”

“And not,” Akua mused, “entirely untrue. As all the finest lies are.”

I was unsettled by the idea of moulding another person – even if their soul was all that was left – like clay, but I pushed that down. Diabolist was already almost inhumanly beautiful, the result of centuries of Wasteland highborn breeding, so twisting her into something fae-like was not as much effort as I’d thought. Larger eyes, the way most fae had, and coloured a vivid scarlet like the dresses she used to wear. Long dark hair, the tresses going down her back, and her already high cheekbones were shaped into a face that was just a little too long and finely boned to be human. I would have made her shorter, if only for the novelty of having someone not towering over me around, but I’d never met a fae that was short. Instead I elongated her, for lack of a better term.

“Fewer curves,” Thief said, fixing me with a steady look.

I sneered back. I didn’t ogle all my enemies. And despicable person or not, it would have been a deplorable waste to make Diabolist stick-thin. I did adjust her to her taller height, but left it at that.

“Pointed ears,” Hakram suggested.

Difficult to mould, but not impossible. It still took longer than the rest of her face put together. I watched Diabolist as I did, for even a hint she was uncomfortable at what was taking place. People with good looks tended to be attached to them, in my experience, and more than that for Named most of all appearances mattered. There was a reason Black still looked in his early twenties and my hair had remained the same length since I became the Squire. Our perceptions of ourselves made us fixed points, to an extent, in one of the subtler rebellions against Above a villain was made of. But she remained indifferent. Like her face was no real importance. It might actually be, I finally decided. Akua was Praesi to the bone, and the highborn of the Wasteland saw everything as a tool – even their own appearances.

“I don’t feel like I’m working with a set amount of clay here,” I admitted uneasily after finishing. “I could make her tall as an ogre without trouble, and she certainly wasn’t that large to begin with. Isn’t there an original law about that? ‘Something cannot be made of nothing’.”

“It would not apply,” Diabolist lightly said. “You draw on Winter as the substance of my being. One does not dry an ocean by removing a droplet from it.”

That was less than reassuring, though her tone had seemingly been aiming for that. Thief assessed her with a frank gaze, the most practiced of us as disguising herself.

“It would pass muster, for most,” she said. “The voice has to go, though. It’s too recognizable.”

“I’m not sure how to do that,” I admitted. “She’s a shade, so is she really speaking with her throat and chords?”

“It is a mere property, now,” Akua said. “No different than colouring or height. Twisting it only requires the appropriate exertion of will.”

Well that was just helpful of her, I thought drily. Unfortunately none of this had come with a manual so I spent almost half an hour struggling in vain before calling for Masego. He was irked at being called away from his almost-nap with a cool cloth on his forehead, but what was being done interested him enough the mood passed quickly. He held my metaphorical hand through the process and we’d made Diabolist’s voice lower and throatier within moments. It would do, for now. I could have tinkered more, but the simple fact that I could tinker with someone’s appearance was raising the hair on the back of my neck. That level of control was... No one should have that. Certainly not me. We got moving again afterwards: the centre of the shattered kingdom was close now, we could all feel it.

I doubted I would enjoy what I’d find there.

—

Shard by shard, the fall of Sephirah was coming together. We spent most of a day journeying through plague-ridden cities and losing battles, watching desperation grown on the Sephiran side. I could understand why the nobles at the funeral had been dismissive of the chances of the People of the Wolf: though decked out in iron, their warriors were helpless before tall walls as most Sephiran cities boasted. They seemed more like a pack of raiding tribes than a true army, without siege weapons or any notion of supplies. If they could not ransack granaries, they went hungry. There’d been a mention of an organization of mages at the funeral, the Conclave, and Hierophant grew excited when he finally saw them in action. They were certainly a notch above the early practitioners we’d seen: the few Sephiran victories we saw had them playing a central role. Rituals seemed to be their specialty, nothing like the fireballs and lightning bolts that were the bread and butter of the Legions.

The boiled the ground under enemy soldiers, snatched the air out of their lungs and even drew storms towards the invading host. It was not, unfortunately, nearly enough. They were too few, less than two hundred, and not unmatched besides. The People of the Wolf were led by their Named queen, and she broke their rituals whenever she took the field. She had mages of her own, if few and seemingly all from the same tribe, and though they used little offensive sorcery they seemed to have a knack for calming and dispersing rituals. The sacking of a great city – for the times, anyway, it was barely the size of Dormer – was the turning point. There were piles of burning plague victims outside the walls, and when the invaders arrived they scaled the walls in the dark of night and slaughtered the beleaguered defenders. It got vicious after that, on both sides. The People of the Wolf began having a semblance of a baggage train from the sheer amount of plunder they were dragging along, which slowed them down, but their numbers kept swelling.

Repeated and richly rewarded victory had drawn more tribes to the war. That was my guess, anyway, because the warriors no longer all spoke the language that Hakram had told me shared root with Reitz. The dead king’s eldest son wore the crown for some time, with one of his sisters as the lesser queen sharing his reign, but we watched the Witch Queen feed him to wolves after she broke his army beneath city walls and captured him. That was when Neshamah began appearing along with the Conclave. Not often, but whenever he did the Sephiran mages always won the day. And their rituals were always a little more vicious every time. One battle where the defenders were particularly outnumbered led to the first use of necromancy we’d seen, the dead rising to make up the odds. It was far from the last instance we came across.

“Their manner of rule is not without merits,” Akua said as we watched yet another coronation in the royal hall unfold beneath us from a balcony. “Though it would never function as intended in Praes.”

The entire story was unfolding over what had to be at least a decade, I’d come to realize. Possibly more. The royals I’d first seen at the entombment were all growing older my more than a few years.

“It’s not just primogeniture,” I said. “The lesser king beneath the ruling one isn’t always the next oldest in the family.”

“They are the favourite or closest ally of the ruler, I suspect,” Diabolist said. “The purpose behind the practice is quite clear regardless. The successor is allowed to entrench themselves in the court and kingdom so that any war of succession would result in their crushing victory. A cunning enough method to keep such matters stable in an era where they were anything but.”

“We haven’t seen them fighting each other yet,” I agreed. “But they’re going through kings like a basket of pastries. Not much entrenchment going on there.”

“The Dead King is positioning himself,” she smiled. “He is the youngest, yes? And was long gone from the kingdom. He must earn enough acclaim to be seen as the worthiest candidate for the lesser crown even though his ties to the others are weak. Once the succession reaches a sibling without sufficient support, they will inevitably appoint him beneath them to benefit from his repute.”

I didn’t reply immediately, eyeing my companion in silence instead. It was still jarring to hear the different voice and see the difference appearance, but that was a passing thing. No, what had be uncomfortable was how easy talking with Akua was. She was, well, surprisingly pleasant company. I could have done without the occasional endearments, but the more I spoke with her the more it became clear she wasn’t a raving lunatic. I’d known that, of course. That she was just twisted in a way that couldn’t be undone, not actively mad. But living with that truth in front of me was different than knowing it in this abstract. If she were not responsible for the single greatest loss of Callowan life since Dread Empress Triumphant, I might actually have caught myself liking her once in a while. It was made worse by her usefulness. Thief had been tutored as a noble’s child, even if her father had lost his title after the Conquest, but like me she’d always felt more comfortable in the streets than sitting down at a writing desk. Diabolist had been raised as heiress to Wolof, and though she was mother to half a dozen atrocities I could not deny she understood the halls of power in a way none of the Woe did.

Her words to Thief still echoed in my mind, sometimes. That she’d fought the better part of the armies of two nations to a standstill, led by eight Named. Her methods had been disgusting, and I would not forgive or forget them. But she had done it regardless, and cornered as I was by the Empress and the First Prince I could not deny there were things I could learn from the monster on my leash.

“He succeeded,” I finally said. “We know that. But I’m not certain how. He’s forging a reputation as the savior of the kingdom, but at some point he must have gotten the lesser crown or even the one above. If Sephirah kept losing even then, as it must have if they got desperate enough to resort to a Greater Breach, how did he remain king? A reputation like that has to be maintained or they’ll turn on your twice as hard.”

As it happened, I knew a thing or two about that. The Black Queen would only reign so long as she was not seen to bleed.

“You still think like a Callowan, dearest,” Akua said. “Even before the Conquest, the kingdom of your birth had been a single entity with largely static borders for centuries. The loss of even outer provinces would have been felt a slight by all the rest. These Sephirans, however, are less than a century from the days of their unification. The royal army fights for the realm entire, certainly, but we have seen that the armies of their twelve cities are not willing to bleed for their sisters.”

I frowned, following down the path she’d set out for me.

“It’s all expendable,” I finally said. “Except for Keter itself. That one city’s all he really needs. The rest is willingly on the chopping block, because it allows him to accumulate power for his ritual without damaging his powerbase enough it unseats him. Merciless Gods. That’s brutal even by Wasteland standards.”

“Many usurpations of the Tower has been executed through Callowan swords,” Akua said. “It is an old trick. Evidently older than I had believed. I will confess surprise, however, as to the Dead King’s chosen method of ascension.”

I flicked a glance at her.

“He’s building up to a massive ritual by bleeding everyone else,” I said. “That’s the classic Praesi play, Akua. You can’t crack open a history of the Empire without finding an instance.”

She dismissed that with a graceful movement of the wrist.

“It matters, my dear, that his path to that ritual is so indirect,” Diabolist said. “He did not usurp the crown, though opportunities must have abounded. The fullness of his influence seems to be his unspoken prominence among this Conclave and his popularity with the masses. He is not wielding his own might to seize authority, but instead relying on outside pressures to propel him to that desired summit.”

I considered that. On one hand, he was using others as tools to place himself in power. On the other, those people weren’t true accomplices. There was no plotting cabal backing him that we’d seen, and even his influence with the Conclave was odd. He was teaching them sorcery, that much was clear, and leading them to slowly dip their toe in darker waters. But he wasn’t turning them into his own personal circle of sorcerers. Hierophant had been the one to first say the way necromancy was being introduced was odd, but Diabolist had agreed. Neshamah knew a lot more than he was teaching them, and what he did teach them didn’t seem like he was offering a true education. Even within the purview of necromancy there is a great deal of latitude in structure and variance , Masego had said. Some of those rituals are near completely unrelated. I’d had a growing suspicion for a while that winning victories wasn’t the point of the corpse-raising at all. And if the ends were unimportant, it was the means that mattered. And it could not be forgotten that beyond necromancy, there was another set of means at play – the scheme he was using to rise. Most notable in that it put a crown on his brow without conflict. Without breaking the mores of the Sephirans.

“He’s not after the quickest or most effective way to rise,” I said.

Akua’s scarlet eyes turned to me.

“Then what is he after?” she asked.

“The one that leaves no openings,” I grimly replied.

I ended our conversation there, without gracing her with an explanation. Akua Sahelian was not someone I ever intended on telling of what Masego and I had witnessed.

—

The centre of the maze was the birth of apocalypse. I’d known it was coming, but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of Keter’s final hours. It was, I had to admit, a great city. Almost as large as Laure, which was astounding for a people that could not even forge iron. Tall walls of blocks of stone without mortar hid away most of the insides, though Indrani told us they were a pittance compared to the walls now encircling Keter. The capital of the Kingdom of Sephirah stood on a low plateau that formed a dais of sorts over the surrounding plains. There were abandoned mining pits scattered across it, and cobbled stone roads leading to four great gates of bronze facing the four directions. Copper shone in the dying afternoon last, covering the roofs of the great houses surrounding the central great tower looking down on the city, but none of us spared much thought for the beauty of it. The horror of the unfolding battle saw to that.

How many invaders were there? Easily over ten thousand, and not all of them from the People of the Wolf. Banners decorated with animal skulls and skins formed a sea beneath the walls, the host of what must have been half of what would become Procer assembled to take the last of the twelve cities of Sephirah. The invaders were dying in droves, but the city was slowly edging towards a loss. Sorcery crackled, weaving storms and raising the dead, but the tribal mages tore through the spells and bestowed enchantments upon the assaulting warriors that allowed them to climb the walls without thought to their weight. We were witnessing the death of a nation, and in the sky above twilight was growing crimson.

We headed deeper in. That was where the gate out would be, I knew instinctively. Indrani threw a grappling hook over the walls and eagerly began to climb, but I drew on Winter instead and formed a narrow set of stairs that the others took even as she catcalled. Ghostly warriors of both sides dying around us, we ascended into the city. Fear hung in the streets, thick and lingering. Doors were barred, prayers and weeping sounding everywhere we tread.

“The Hall of the Dead,” Archer said, pointing to the tall tower ahead after catching up. “What it’s called now, anyway.”

The city around the tower was deserted. All those beautiful mansions, and not a soul in sight. It was inside we found our ending. The chanting could be heard as we walked through the labyrinthine corridors, only growing louder as we got closer to the royal hall where we’d seen so many get crowned. Files of kneeling mages spread out from that centre like tentacles, each singing the same incantation in unison. There would be consequences to missing a step, we learned. One young girl mispronounced a syllable and let out a blood-curdling scream as her body withered, leaving a husk of a corpse behind.

“Fucking Hells,” Indrani murmured.

“Workings this powerful leave little room for mistakes,” Hierophant noted, eyeing the corpse with interest.

We reached the hall as the ritual neared its end, the chanting growing quicker. We’d seen this place before, many a time. A throne room richly decorated with banners of the twelve cities and statues of copper. There was no throne here today, nothing save for a tall sculpted arc of obsidian and the man standing before it. Neshamah was no longer young. He was closely-shaven and his hair was messy, and even now there was no trace of great Evil in him. No sunken eyes and horrid sneer: only calm, patient expectation. We advanced in silence until we could hear our own footsteps echo. Not a whisper to be heard. Then the Dead King spoke, and the shard ended. In the blank emptiness that enveloped us, we heard a woman’s soft laughter.

My hand rose, the gate opened where the arc of obsidian had once stood and into Keter we went.

Chapter 33: Keter

“And so Triumphant said: ‘Tremble, for I am not yet content.'”
– Extract from the Scroll of Dominion, twenty-fourth of the Secret Histories of Praes

My boots scuffed the stone and a poisonously warm breeze caressed my face. I strode forward, leaving room for the others to pass behind me, and resisted the urge to drop my hand to my sword. Gods, this place was a nightmare. Though it was in the royal hall we had crossed, we’d evidently emerged outside the bounds of Keter. More precisely, on one of the four stone ramps leading into the city across the gaping maws of a chasm. It was dark for miles, down there, before flickering flames cast a light deep in the depths. The sound of the wind against the man-made cliffs was eerily akin to a dirge. I turned my eyes ahead instead of peering into the madness, but found only more of the same. Indrani had warned me that the walls of the Crown of the Dead were absurdly tall, but even then I had not expected the likes of what I saw. Jutting out of the sharp drop at the edge of the cliffs, the ramparts must have been at least a thirty yards high at the lowest point. No part of the city behind could be seen from out here, save for the spire of dark stone stretching out into the sky – and the orb of hellfire that hovered atop it, an indistinct silhouette shifting within.

This was not a city made for the living.

“Godsdamn,” Archer said, letting out a whistle. “I know he’s just a pile of scheming Evil bones, but you’ve got to respect his style. That’s as doom-like as a fortress of doom gets.”

“Drawbridges would have been more tactically sound,” Adjutant said.

I glanced at him and found Hakram was unmoved by the sight of millennia of darkness and arrogance made into a city. In some undefinable way, it was so very much like him to take his first look at the Crown of the Dead and immediately start criticising its defensive layout. Any moment now he would mention that the artillery firing lanes could be improved by further overlap, or that the barbican was overly crenellated.

“I would wager that, to the likes of the Dead King, every bridge is a drawbridge if given sufficient attention,” Diabolist spoke amusedly.

Ugh, Akua. She was not supposed to actually be kind of funny.

“Are we not meant to be honoured guests?” Hierophant said. “Making us stand outside his gates is poor manners.”

Like he was one to talk about those. Still, as if magically summoned by Masego’s complaining, our ‘hosts’ came out of the woodworks. From beyond the gate chilling howls were heard, and then the flap of great wings. Dozens of... not dragons, but perhaps the bastard child of them, took flight. Wyverns, though made of bone and leather with radiant red eyes. Each one as large as a house.

“Thief,” I said. “The seal.”

Vivienne flourished her wrist, palm becoming filled with the obsidian circle that had come along the Dead King’s message. She tossed it at me, and though I snatched it out of the air without trouble I gave her a hard look. What if I hadn’t been paying attention, and it’d tumbled off the edge of the bridge? How fucked would we have been, this deep in the Kingdom of the Dead without our proof of invitation? Regardless, the wyverns passed over us without trouble as I raised the seal above my head. The flock parted in both directions, diving below the stone bridge and passing under. With perfect timing, they came back up and landed simultaneously on the edge of both sides. The leathery wings folded back, and ahead of us the tall gates of steel began to open.

“An honour guard,” Akua said. “How mannerly of him.”

A show of force as well, though I didn’t need for her to remind of that to be aware. Though I knew, objectively speaking, that the Dead King would not have invited us for the sole purpose of murdering strangers I could not quite manage indifference was we passed in front of the perfectly still wyverns. Their eyes, I felt, followed us wherever we went. It was a pittance compared to the welcome that awaited us beyond the gates. The closer we came, the greater the chill going up my spine. Indrani had told me everything Ranger had taught her about Keter, in particular the kinds of undead that dwelled within. There were, she’d said, three kinds. The Bones, the Binds and the Revenants. The Bones were undead as I knew them, raised corpses little more intelligent than dogs when left to their own purposes. Most were ancient enough they were nothing but skeletons wearing armour. The Dead King, Archer told me, could seize control of those at any time. The Binds were corpses with souls bound to them, as sapient as humans. They were the captains and servants of the Kingdom of the Dead. The third kind, the Revenants, were a breed apart. Named stolen from the grave, keeping a shadow of the power they’d once wielded while living.

The Dead King was a kind of his own, she’d added. Without equivalent or easy description.

What awaited us beyond the gates was an honour guard beyond the ability of mortals to assemble. The avenues of Keter were filled to the brim with silent dead, bearing arms and armour spanning centuries. Bronze helms in the ancient Baalite style, iron breastplates as were long borne by the Lycaonese and more than a few longswords of the distinctive Vale make of Callow. Banners from half the continent were stirred by the warm breeze, though none stood as tall as that of the Kingdom of the Dead: ten silver stars, set in a perfect circle around a pale crown. By the regal crown you will know him , the old verse went. His horse is the death of men, his voice the fall of night and he strives doom unto all the world. Villains drew epithets, myself among them, but none quite as many as the Dead King. We advanced, six of us surrounded by silence and blasphemy. The very instant was passed the threshold, thousands of dead kneeled in unison. I shivered. There had been a single mind at work behind it. In the avenue ahead of us, the dead parted to allow a pale man followed by six palanquins to pass through. I could hear his heartbeat and my eyes lingered on his approaching silhouette before my fingers clenched at the sight of the first palanquin.

Four dead carried it, but it was the drapery falling down the side that drew my attention. Black silk, embroidered with heraldry. A set of silver scales, balancing a crown and a sword. The sword weighed heavier. The words embroidered beneath I did not need to read. He is not blind , I thought. He was never blind. Whether the Dead King had imprisoners himself into his personal hell or not, he knew of the affairs of Calernia outside it. And in much greater depth than my worst predictions had anticipated. The pale-skinned man was the only living soul in sight, and memorable for reasons more than that. Raven tresses went down his back, his body perfectly proportioned as if he were more sculpture than man. He had, I thought as he came closer, warm and kind eyes. Given the surroundings, that only added to the horror of it. The stranger came before us and slowly knelt.

“In the name of the Crown, I greet you,” he said in flawless Lower Miezan. “Black Queen, Tyrant of Callow, the King of Death extends his hospitality to your august presence and that of our attendants.”

There was a slight accent to his voice, but not one I recognized.

“We accept this hospitality with the gratitude it is due,” I replied. “Rise.”

“I cannot, for my purpose is not yet discharged,” the man said, pressing his head to the stone. “As gift of welcoming, the Crown bestows my existence upon you.”

My lips thinned. Had I just been handed a slave? No, now was not the time to make a mess. If the Dead King knew enough of Calernian affairs to know the motto on my banner, he had to know how repulsive a Callowan would find slavery. Was this a test?

“The gift is accepted in the spirit it was given,” I said. “Rise, now.”

The man did so, gracefully.

“My face name is Athal, Great Majesty,” he said. “I have been instructed to serve as your host for the duration of your stay.”

“We have a guest-gift to offer the Dead King,” I said calmly. “Though that can wait until audience is granted. Until then, we would see our quarters. It has been a long journey.”

“The Silent Palace has been prepared for your pleasure,” Athal said, bowing low. “If you would deign to enter the palanquins, honoured ones?”

“Very civilized, not making us walk,” Masego noted approvingly. “We should see about obtaining those in Laure.”

I deigned, or at least began to. I paused when I finally took a closer look at the dead bearing my litter. No mere skeletons in armour, these. Their flesh was dead but well-preserved, their faces still human and their finery fit for royalty. Which they very well might be: crowns had been nailed to each of their heads.

“If it please you, Great Majesty,” Athal said, coming at my side. “As a sign of respect, the Crown had put worthy souls to your service. You look upon-”

“Princes,” I interrupted quietly, “Princes and princesses of Procer.”

“That is so,” the man agreed. “Prince Mateo Osuna of Aequitan and his twin sister Princess Nicoleda. Princess Clemente Milenan of Iserre. Prince Friedrich Hasenbach of Rhenia. Their tongues have been sown as penance, and crowns put to their brow as a reminder of the follies of arrogance.”

They all came from principalities that had been pivotal in the war against Callow one way or another. At a guess Rozala Malanza’s own bloodline was too young to the throne of Aequitan to have a representative, so they’d drawn from the one that ruled before it. Merciless Gods. The statement here was more alarming than the show of force surrounding us, in some ways. That Neshamah had hordes of dead was well known, but this was both a reminder that he’d broken more than a few princes in his time and that he knew exactly who my opponents were. The Dead King was making a point. I got on the palanquin in silence, and allowed dead royalty to carry me to the Silent Palace.

—

The accommodations lived up to the name. We’d gone through the streets of Keter, passing a multitude of dead of all stripes, until we neared the infamous Hall of the Dead. I’d seen this district before, in the echoes. It had been where the powerful of Sephirah once lived in their copper-roofed mansions. Those were long gone, replaced instead by a circle of sprawling palaces surrounding the demon-tipped central tower. The Silent Palace was a strange wonder of architecture, six interlocked rings of different heights in marble black and white. Zombie had followed us with our affairs, though our personal packs had been taken by unsmiling dead, and the moment we entered the first hall white-robed servants knelt gracefully before seeing to all our bags. Every single one of them was alive, and no older than twenty. Athal followed me like a shadow, as I as watched the servants divest Zombie of her saddlebags I half-turned towards him.

“I did not think there would be so many living in Keter,” I said.

The man had been both talkative and helpful, so far, and apparently genuinely believed I owned him now. Though the thought was repellent and there was trap written all over this ‘gif’t, I could at least hit him up for some low understanding of this place.

“We are none of us from Keter, Great Majesty,” Athal said, bowing low. “All of us chose to become Hosts upon our coming of age, learning the trade of that choice. It is a rare thing for our service to be called upon, and a great honour.”

My eyes narrowed.

“You were born in Hell,” I said.

“A strange thing to call the Serenity, honoured one,” the man murmured. “It is the world beyond our guardians that is most deserving of that ugly term.”

“You’ve been outside the Kingdom of the Dead?” I asked, surprised.

“I have not. Yet we are not ignorant of the nightmare called Calernia, Great Majesty,” Athal gently said. “The Journeymen return with the tales of their time in your brutish world every season, sacrificing their first life so that we may learn through them. It is a most noble duty. If not for my facility with languages, I may very well have chosen to serve as one of their number.”

Hosts. Journeymen. The Dead King is breeding people in his Hell for chosen tasks , I realized with fresh horror. There’d always been rumours that he had human farms to swell his numbers with fresh dead somewhere in his hellscape, but I’d assumed it would be through regular reapings. No , I thought. He has taught them it is an honour . Everything they know passes through his hands – by the time he’s raised them up to the age of culling, they must actually volunteer. I should have known better. The kind of man who’d plot the death of a kingdom and a half to obtain immortality with the Bard after his hide the whole time would not have made so elementary a mistake. He didn’t treat his cattle like they were that. No, he’d tend to them lovingly and reap the benefits of that kindness again and again over the span of centuries. He must have shaped all their customs from the cradle, I thought. An entire realm turned to the sole purpose of strengthening him without forging heroes in the process.

“And these Journeymen,” I said slowly. “They’ve told you of how the rest of the continent sees the Kingdom of the Dead?”

Athal seemed amused.

“Are we to put faith in the words of those that slaughter each other for sport?” he asked. “There is no war in the Serenity, Great Majesty. No murder or sickness or any of the brutalities outsiders inflict on each other. We are born and raised to the loving embrace of the Crown, and repay that kindness when our first lives have passed. It is the least of that which is due.”

“And the devils?” I asked.

“Beasts of burden,” Athal said, sounding surprised. “Save for those of the Writhing Palace, were none trespass.”

That, I decided, did not sound like a place I ever wanted to visit.

“You’re aware the Kingdom of the Dead has attacked other nations before,” I tried.

“The Procerans,” the dark-haired man agreed. “A warlike folk that have attempted to destroy the Serenity many a time, assembling coalitions of blind hatred. Are you not yourself come to Keter to seek help against their depredations, Great Majesty?”

Well, he had me there. I was also fully intending to throw the Dead King under the cart at the first opportunity, after carefully ensuring his leash was loosened but not loose, but that was best kept quiet. Assuming Neshama had not already deduced as much, which was looking increasingly likely. And still he had invited me. Why? I needed to figure out his game before meeting him, or I might just come out of that conversation having birthed an atrocity greater than Akua’s Folly.

“So why is this place called the Silent Palace, anyway?” I said, changing the subject with all my usual elegance.

“It is so named for it had remained closed and untouched since its last and only guest,” Athal explained. “You would know her as the Dread Empress Triumphant.”

No ‘may she never return’, huh? I supposed this particular crowd had different ideas about the kind of person she’d been. I was a little unsettled at the very real possibility that the last person to sleep in the bed I’d end up in tonight was the worst monster to ever come out of Praes. Hopefully they’d changed the sheets since, because I wouldn’t dismiss out of hand the possibility she’d gotten demon all over them during her stay.

“Any notion of when we’ll be granted audience?” I asked him.

“If it please you, it has been said that tomorrow’s dusk would be auspicious time,” Athal replied.

“It pleases me,” I said, a tad drily.

I regretted it immediately. It was unkind, to mock a man so obviously twisted even if the manner of it was fairly gentle. It sometimes occurred to me that I wouldn’t like myself very much, if I met me as a stranger. That I’d ended up stabbing one of the doppelgangers in my soul seemed less and less a coincidence as I grew older.

“Then it shall be so, Great Majesty,” the man bowed.

Zombie had been divested of her saddlebags and I allowed her to be guided away by a white-robed servant without protest. Odds were there was a stable in here somewhere, and it wasn’t like I’d ever have a hard time finding her. The rest of the Woe had been led to their own chambers, save for Akua who’d denied her servant. She made her way towards me instead and my brow rose. I supposed she didn’t really need rooms of her own, now that I thought about it, but she was in for a hard awakening if she thought she could haunt my own. Athal flinched when she approached and knelt at her feet.

“There’s no need for that,” I said slowly, crouching to help him back up.

“I mean no slight, Great Majesty,” he said, still looking down. “It is simply that I have never hosted one of the Splendid before. I was not taught the proper manners.”

“Splendid, am I?” Akua drawled. “Well, I’ve often thought so myself.”

That might have amused me, if the man wasn’t so obviously frightened.

“She’s just an attendant,” I reassured him. “No need to worry about her.”

Diabolist’s scarlet eyes flicked to the man and her face softened.

“You gave no offence, Host,” she said. “And your manners, though not lacking, offered honours underserved. Treat me as any of the others and you will find your actions faultless.”

Customary annotation: she was, of course, likely faking this. It was good to remind myself of that, lest my impression of her improve. Praesi highborn were not usually kind to servants, whenever they remembered their existence, and Akua Sahelia had sent people dearer to her than a stranger to their deaths without batting an eye.

“I heed your words, honoured one,” Athal murmured.

“You needed something?” I asked flatly.

She folded her hand into her sleeves.

“Mere assurance over minor matters,” she said, smiling at Athal. “I was told that our movements within Keter would not be restricted, save for the Hall of the Dead. Did the servant err in telling me this?”

“It is not so, Splendid,” the dark-haired man said.

I eyed Akua curiously.

“The Lord Hierophant has expressed interest in sightseeing such a glorious city,” she said.

Ah. Well, it wasn’t like I’d brought Masego with the expectation that he’d be useful in the negotiations. He was here to ease our way through Arcadia, and as one of my larger cudgels in case things went south.

“Have Archer go with him,” I ordered Akua. “And tell them to be back before nightfall.”

I should not have to impose a curfew on a grown man and woman, but I most definitely did have to when it came to that pair. Indrani wasn’t someone I’d usually consider or employ as a restraining influence, but she knew the dangers of the Keter better than any of us. She’d pull him away if his nose led him somewhere they shouldn’t go. If wandering around kept them occupied while I prepared for tomorrow with the others, I’d count it a victory.

It was all about the standards, really.

“By your will, Black Queen,” Diabolist smiled, bowing.

Lower than what Praesi court etiquette dictated, even if she considered me a ruling Dread Empress. She was being careful about maintaining the illusion of her change of appearance, which I couldn’t help but approve of.

“All right, Athal,” I sighed as she walked away. “Take me to my rooms.”

“By your will, Great Majesty,” he said, bowing as well.

I detected a hint of amusement in his voice. I could grow fond of that one, I decided. I allowed him to lead me deeper into the palace before clearing my throat.

“So, about those sheets,” I began.

Chapter 34: Abyss

“You could gather the stuff of all the Hells and still find less Evil within than lies in the soul of a single man. The worst monsters are always those that chose to be.”
– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

“So,” I said, “before we get into it. What are the odds that Athal is our good friend the Hidden Horror wearing someone’s face?”

I couldn’t exactly say I suspected that because it was what I’d do – though if Masego was to be believed, I was technically wearing a people cloak courtesy of Winter at all times – but come on. Of course the friendly servant ‘gifted’ to me was going to be a trap. Sure, it was possible Neshamah considered himself above those kind of shell games. People who murdered kingdoms for power did tend to have very particular notions about their importance and what they would lower themselves to do. On the other hand, it was becoming painfully clear that we had no fucking idea what the Dead King was really up to.

“I find it unlikely,” Akua said.

The Woe and the murderer – the one not part of the Woe, I supposed it was necessary to clarify – weren’t nearly enough to fill out the absurdly large bedchamber that had been given to me. It was larger than the entire Rat’s Nest had been, and furnished so richly if Robber had been around I might have considered looking away while he got sticky fingers. Pawning the stuff in Mercantis could have probably earned me enough to equip a few hundred legionaries.

“Possession would be difficult, if not outright impossible,” Masego conceded. “Bespelling the man for control is a different matter. It is not impossible anything his senses come across will be extracted and sifted through afterwards.”

“I hear one for mind control and soul cutting,” I said, putting a jaunty tone to my rising horror. “Anyone else feeling like putting their silver at work?”

“I bet he put some kind of fucked up devil bug in the man’s brain,” Archer mused. “You know, one he can look through?”

“One reason I’m glad I don’t really sleep anymore, straight into the pot,” I added, openly sickened. “I’m waiting on the rest of the gallery for counteroffers.”

“I’d be surprised if there weren’t enchantments everywhere taking our conversations straight to the Dead King,” Vivienne noted. “Athal himself might simply be a red herring.”

My eyes flicked to Hierophant, who shrugged.

“There are no active wards I recognize, save those surrounding the city and the Hall of the Dead,” he said. “Though everything in Keter seems touched by sorcery to an extent. The protections I set around us should be sufficient to prevent eavesdropping, or at least very difficult to breach without my awareness.”

“Reasonable paranoia, making three,” I sighed. “Hakram?”

“Negotiations in good faith,” Adjutant said calmly.

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“Playing the long odds, I see,” Akua said amusedly.

The orc’s hand rose to still the incoming tide of responses.

“We assume it a matter of course the Dead King is intent on crossing us,” he said. “I would ask you this, however: does he truly need to?”

“From an objective perspective?” I said. “Probably not. He can get what he wants out of us fair and square. That said, he’s a villain. ‘Need’ takes a different shade when it comes to those.”

“Yet we are not dealing with Diabolist, it’s true,” Vivienne slowly said.

I looked at Akua from the corner of my eye. She did not seem offended in the slightest. She might not even have been listening, scarlet eyes still thoughtfully considering Hakram.

“I do not advocate for blind trust, or even trust at all,” Adjutant said. “But let us not dismiss the possibility of forthright dealings from the onset, either. Salting the grounds prematurely is not to our advantage.”

“He’d bleed us all in a heartbeat, if it got him anything useful,” I pointed out.

“Is this not a recurrent trait in all our allies?” Masego asked, bemused.

It was a little depressing that I couldn’t really deny that.

“Point taken,” I conceded, passing a hand through my hair. “Which neatly takes us to our next point of order. Today’s lecture: what we want from the Dead King, why, and what we’re willing to give in exchange.”

Hierophant raised his hand. I eyed him darkly. Had he even ever sat in classroom?

“Yes, Masego,” I said.

“Is this a mandatory lecture?” he politely asked.

Archer smothered her convulsive laughter into Hakram’s shoulder, the wretch.

“Yes,” I patiently said. “Yes it is.”

The blind sorcerer looked a little miffed, but I pressed on before he could get it into his head to argue.

“For those of you who forgot, or weren’t paying attention,” I said, glancing pointedly at Indrani whose lips were still twitching, “Callow is about to have around eighty thousand Proceran and Levantines soldiers led by heroes invading through the Red Flower Vales. We need them, very badly, to be headed elsewhere instead.”

“Arguable,” Diabolist noted.

“Akua Sahelian, arguing that slaughter is the solution,” I said. “We are all blindsided by this turn of events.”

I bit my tongue afterwards then forced myself to look at the others in turn. We’d begun light-heartedly, and it was my own fault.

“I know levity is how we’ve kept our heads on straight,” I quietly said. “As much as Named can have those, anyway. But this is serious. We’re at a crossroads, and ahead are dead ends all around. The crusaders are in it to the hilt, and there’s no compromise to be had with them. Callow’s on the chopping block for the coming world order and we’re out of allies and alternatives – except for the Dead King. This is the deep end. So please, let’s act like the situation is as grim as it is.”

That sobered the room. I didn’t particularly enjoy doing it – it kept the pressure off my shoulders to treat it as laughable, even when we were all deadly serious. But I could not stomach making it a game even on the surface when things had gotten this undeniably bad.

“The Dead King is our counterweight,” Adjutant said, breaking the silence and continuing my thoughts. “If he breaches Proceran borders up north, the armies at our gate will be either thinned or entirely recalled to deal with him.”

I nodded my thanks to him.

“That said, we don’t want him to actually take Procer,” I said. “Aside from the horrifying loss of life that would entail, we’d be trading the hound at our door for a much larger tiger. So we need him to be enough of a threat the Tenth Crusade turns north, but not so strong the First Prince can’t win. I believe that’s possible to accomplish, for two reasons.”

“The heroes,” Akua said.

I nodded in agreement.

“The Heavens have already assembled their footsoldiers,” I said. “They’re on the field and spoiling for a fight. Crusades have reached Keter before, so we know the Dead King’s not invincible when there’s enough Named thrown at him. Baited out of the Kingdom of the Dead, he might be vulnerable in a way he isn’t while in his seat of power. That’ll draw them like carrion does flies. It’s an objectively better victory for Above to get rid of Neshamah than to topple us – the folks upstairs will push for it.”

“And our leverage,” Vivienne finished.

“To our understanding, the Dead King is stuck in his ‘Serenity’ unless he’s either attacked or invited out,” I said, inclining my head towards her. “Our current working assumption is that we’ve been called here because we can provide that invitation and we’ve been judged sufficiently desperate to actually go through with it.”

Which, in all fairness, we were. The only person in the room not already in on the plan to a full extent studied me intently before speaking up.

“You intend to add clauses to that invitation,” Akua said, eyes hooded. “Not obvious ones from an outside perspective, lest the First Prince find them out and consider herself to have options other than war against the dead. Limitation of strength? No, without a full assessment of his forces that would be too risky. Ah. Territorial boundaries .”

My fingers clenched. I knew there were few people out there who were both clever enough and knew me well enough to get to the conclusion so easily. It still worried me how little time it had taken Diabolist to see through me.

“Three principalities,” I said. “Hannoven, Cleves and Hainaut. That would be the enforced limit of his invasion. Hannoven is fortified enough it will be hard to take, and as Klaus Papenheim’s own territory it will strike bone with both the First Prince and her foremost general if it comes under siege. The other two principalities would give the Dead King foothold across the lakes, and so rally every Alamans of high birth in the Principate to the war. He’s dangerous enough a neighbour with natural boundaries in the way.”

“Preferably, we would want those principalities empty of civilians when the Kingdom of the Dead advances,” Hakram said. “Their armies retreating as well, to strike back in strength when reinforced by the crusader hosts. Once war erupts up north, the balance of power of the Tenth Crusade shifts enough we have room to manoeuver.”

“Sounds like a clever piece of diplomacy,” Indrani shrugged. “But you’re not dealing with some prick of a prince, Cat. You sure the Hidden Horror is going to be willing to put ink to that deal? To put oath to it?”

“Our game’s crooked,” I admitted frankly. “But as far as we know, it’s also the only game in town. He’d make appreciable gains through this deal, even if he went in expecting us to betray him. It’s not the finest offer he’ll ever get, but it’s the one on the table. And if he wanted to stay behind his walls, well, he wouldn’t have sent an envoy in the first place.”

Akua stirred.

“A warning, if you would,” she said.

I glanced at her and nodded.

“All of this rests on uncertain foundations,” Diabolist said. “Namely, that invitation his needed for him to escape his Hell. This is speculation, not established fact.”

“I’m aware,” I bluntly said.

“Then follow the thought to its logical conclusion,” Akua said. “If no invitation is needed and he still sent an envoy to you, what is the Dead King truly after?”

“We’re going into guesswork,” I noted. “And blind guesswork, at that.”

“If you try to ascertain objectives purely from his perspective, yes,” Diabolist said. “But that is not the full sum of the information we have. He sent for you , specifically. You are not the first cornered villain, Catherine. Yet you warranted an envoy where others did not. We can garner some knowledge from studying what sets you apart from other villains.”

I met her gaze, unblinking.

“And what would that be?” I said.

“Two facts seem most important,” Akua said. “First, you are now the crowned and recognized head of a traditionally Good kingdom. Ensuring you remain in power might represent a chance to tip the scales of the Game of the Gods on Calernia.”

There was a cheerful thought. The Pilgrim had bought into the notion, anyway, so there might be something there. We had no indication that the Dead King’s game relied on the balance of power, however, so the grounds were shaky.

“And second?” I asked.

“You are Queen of Winter in all but name,” Diabolist said. “Fae are sworn to you. You are capable of granting titles and assembling a court.”

Adjutant’s brow creased.

“Titles,” Hakram gravelled. “It’s about the titles, if Winter is relevant at all. If you start handing them out, our potential strength escalates faster than anyone else can match. All the heroes capable of fighting are already out there, and the crusade still hasn’t broken through. The Heavens are currently winning, but not by wide enough a margin to hold up. They would have to put a full hand to the scales to compensate, and if they do...”

“Below gets to do the same,” Vivienne quietly said. “It’d start a vicious circle. The Heavens push again, Below matches, and all the while the fire spreads. Winter’s the match to tinder. If Arcadia really was the sketch for Creation, then bringing Winter into this is like stealing the pieces of an earlier match to play in the most recent game.”

“I haven’t been granting anyone titles,” I flatly said. “Precisely to avoid this kind of complication.”

“If you did, however,” Akua said. “What entity is arguably the most powerful on the side of Evil?”

We all knew the answer to that. An argument might have been made for Praes, back in Triumphant’s day, but that era had passed.

“So if it all goes up in flames, he’s likely to be involved when Below makes its play,” I completed grimly. “He’d want to put his finger to the pulse before it comes to that, and have assurances in place for when the arrows start flying.”

“Indeed,” Diabolist smiled pleasantly. “Which is quite the interesting development, don’t you think? Whatever the truth of his intent, we have something that is desired. What we succeed at making of that is all that matters.”

Gods forgive me but in that moment, even after all she’d done, I was glad she was out of the box.

—

The white-robed servants came to help us prepare for the audience several hours before twilight, but I dismissed mine. Hakram was quite enough for me. It was soothing, to have him help me into my armour. A ritual just for the two of us. The carapace of steel grew steadily around me, until all that was left to add was the cloak around my shoulders and the crowned helmet that had already needed reforging several times. I only put them on after the others were readied, the Woe in the fullness of their regalia. There was sense of solemnity to it. Archer’s ceremonial garments were not significantly different from her usual, merely trading her usual leathers and silver mail for ones we’d had tailored for her in Laure, but it was oddly nostalgic to see her with the face covered by a hood and scarf again. Hierophant was all flowing black robes and silken eye cloth, somehow turning the simplicity of it into a statement of might. Adjutant and I were steel from head to toe, a frank admission of the nature of what we wrought. It was Thief that was barely recognizable. Her short hair had been styled and coiffed, going from haphazard to carefully arranged, and her prowling leathers were traded for Callowan court garb: a dark green overcoat bordered in brocade, over a long high-necked white tunic going to her knees. Soft and well-polished boots went up to her calves, with only a simple sheathed knife at her hip serving as a reminder of her Name. Diabolist remained as I had made her, somehow wearing her ghostly garments as if she’d been born to them.

Athal was our guide to the Hall of the Dead, along with several others Hosts. The pale man was subdued today. Not cowed, but well aware of the gravity of his duties. It was not often one was granted audience with the Hidden Horror. The inside of the spire was not as I remembered from the shards, everything within having shifted. Dimly, I could trace the pattern of our journey in my head. It all revolved around the royal hall now. The heart of the tower, where the portal and the man who’d made it awaited us. The antechamber to that hallowed place seemed filled with statues, at first glance, but a second revealed otherwise. The fifty silhouettes standing still were not stone or the remembrance of kings.

“Revenants,” Archer said, and none of us replied.

Heroes , I thought. Dead heroes, and perhaps villains as well. Ripped out of whatever ancient age they had fallen, still garbed in the armaments of their defeat. Men and women of every stripes, knights and sages and wizards. An honour guard that none but the Dead King could boast. We passed them by in uneasy silence. Athal bowed low as we stood before the bronze gates of the hall.

“We part ways here, Great Majesty,” he said. “What lies within is not for the likes of me. May you find all that you seek, and leave a friend to the Serenity.”

I nodded at him, then took a deep breath. A memory flicked back to the front of my mind, quick and silver-bright. Too clear for a mortal mind. A thumb running up my cheek as the lesser god smiled

“You are in need of a reminder, Catherine Foundling, of the difference between bravery and ignorance,” I murmured to myself, with a bitter smile.

Another king, that one, that I had only ever beaten on his own terms. Something to keep in mind when facing the king ahead.

The bronze gates opened, and we went forward to meet with the King of Death.

“Her Majesty Queen Catherine Foundling, Tyrant of Callow, Sovereign of Moonless Night, the Black Queen.”

The announcement rang loud and clear in the hall as I advanced, coming from a dead man’s throat. The others were announced behind me. Lord Hierophant, Lord Adjutant, Lady Archer, Lady Thief. The Shade of Splendour. The words washed over me, made faraway by what I witnessed. No portal there, not today. A tall dais with a throne of bones, with a long table set before it. From the tall rafters hung banners from all the great hosts of Calernia. Old and faded. Some still keeking of blood long turned to dust. Yet the greatest of all banners hung behind the throne, the deep purple of the Kingdom of the Dead’s heraldry set with crown and stars. None of it mattered, compared to the thing that sat the throne. It was a man, or perhaps just the mockery of one. Not living yet not dead, so thin bones could be made out through the parchment-thin skin. Pale locks of hair tumbled down messily, reaching down to the elaborate purple robes decorated with gold chains and riotous jewels that together twice earned a mortal king’s ransom. The thing was sprawled lazily, the ancient crown of Sephirah on its brow, watching us with sunken yellow eyes. A curtain of power hung between us and it, unseen but thick against the roof of my mouth. Illusion . The Dead King was not within the hall. It was not Neshamah’s body I was seeing, either. Not his first one anyway.

“I greet you, Black Queen,” the abomination said in a rippling voice. “And confirm by my own tongue extension of hospitality to you and yours.”

I bowed my head.

“We are duly grateful of the offered courtesy, Your Majesty,” I replied. “And offer guest-gift as a sign of our own.”

Hakram strode forward, face serene. It had been trouble, finding something that was a worthy gift yet easy to carry through Arcadia. So many of the things that would have pleased the monster would have been dangerous to us. In the end, it’d been Ratface that came through. He knew people that know some people in Mercantis, and for a cost that made me wince they’d nabbed something of worth from an auction. Adjutant removed the silken veil from the cushion he carried, revealing a small shard of black stone.

“A piece of the Tower as it once stood, before twice being cast down,” Hakram announced.

A white-robed attendant, this one without a heartbeat, came forward to take the cushion from his hands. It was offered to the Dead King, who took it in hand and studied it with a thin-lipped smile.

“A sliver of greatness,” he said. “And a reminder of frailty. A worthy gift, Black Queen.”

I bowed my head in silence. He set the stone back down on the cushion, and it was spirited away by the servant as he returned those wicked yellow eyes to us.

“Sit,” the Dead King invited. “You are my guests, after all. It would not do for you to remain standing. Would you partake of my table?”

“We would be honoured to do so,” I lied.

“I am pleased to hear it,” the thing that had once been Neshamah said. “We have much to speak of, and it would make me uneasy to do so while your throats are dry.”

I forced a smile.

“I confess,” I said, “that your invitation roused great curiosity in me. Talk is much welcome.”

“And yet you wonder, what are we to speak of?” the abomination chuckled. “Allow me to shed light.”

Yellow eyes met mine.

“We must speak of that most ancient trade of kings, Black Queen,” the Dead King said. “ War .”

Chapter 35: Stroll

“Seventeen: always agree when offered to share in the rule of the world by a villain. The three to four heartbeats of sheer surprise that will earn you are a golden opportunity to kill them before it comes to a monologue.”
– ‘Two Hundred Heroic Axioms’, author unknown

The Dead King kept a good table, for a corpse.

It was a little surreal that after that last bit of dramatics we were expected to have a meal, but wasn’t that diplomacy? Vivid theatre, followed by long stretches of tediousness. There were half a dozen kind of spiced meats on the table I didn’t recognized but tasted delicious, with the only dark mark on the affair that it was apparently expected that undead attendants would cut my meal for me. I dug in with reluctant enthusiasm, since it was unlikely I’d get to eat this fine a meal for months yet. The cooks at the palace had been weaned off the more complicated fare they’d learned from Mazus and the Fairfaxes and gently guided into making the simpler fare I liked better – if it used to squawk and had since been roasted, odds were I’d enjoy it – but they seemed to have taken that as a challenge to put all their efforts into dessert. Which, well, I had not found it in myself to deny. Masego had a sweet tooth as well, and blueberry tarts were one of the few plates that were never at risk of coming back full when sent into the Observatory. I laid off the wine, though out of politeness I took a few sips. It still tasted like ash to me, as all lesser spirits had since I fully claimed my mantle. Setting down the silvers, I politely dabbed away the bit of sauce on my lips with the provided cloth and leaned back into my seat. Meal time with the Woe tended to be a riotous affair, but not today.

Trading barbs with the Dead King as audience would have been a little too much even for Archer. The abomination sitting the throne waited patiently, by all appearances pleased with how quick we’d been to dig in. I caught his eye, purely by happenstance, and when I faced those yellow orbs the throne room went dark. Sighing, I put down the cloth.

It’d been about time for something to go wrong, hadn’t it?

A quick look around told me I was no longer sitting in the throne room. This was the pitch black of nothingness, not deep shadow. The cloth had disappeared into the dark the moment it left my fingers, and the table had followed suit the moment I took my eyes off of it. The only visible thing around was a standing man, and my brow rose when I took him in. The throne-sitting corpse had not been the Neshamah of millennia ago. This, however, was. Pale and mess-haired, with those thick eyebrows and calloused hands. Closely-shaven as he had been when I’d last glimpsed him, a heartbeat before he wrought the doom of Keter.

“There is no need for alarm,” the Dead King spoke in Ashkaran.

I forced a frown in my face.

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” I said.

No amusement bloomed on his face. He did not strike me as offended by the lie, either – if he even knew it was one. What had been spoken was simply put away behind those golden-brown eyes, to be studied at his leisure.

“My apologies, then,” he replied in Lower Miezan. “Would you walk with me, Black Queen?”

I rose to my feet, swallowing a snort when the greatest abomination ever born to Calernia chivalrously offered me his arm. In for a copper , I mused. I looped my arm into his and allowed him to lead me through the nothingness.

“I judged a private conversation to be in order, before negotiations began,” the Dead King said. “As reparations for the imposition, the least I can offer is an interesting sight to accompany it.”

The darkness bled out. It was like watching a painting in reverse, I thought. Instead of splashed of colour being put to canvas, strokes of black were removed and bared the sights beneath. He’d not lied, at least, about it being interesting . The two of us stood dozens of miles in the air, watching the slaughter that took place below. It was a siege, or at least an assault part of one. Surrounding a Keter near identical to the one I’d seen in Creation, hundreds of thousands gathered beneath colourful banners to take a run at the walls. My eyes lingered on the few heraldries I recognized. Most of them Proceran, but a few Callowan ones as well. The bells of House Fairfax startled a finger clenching out of me. That banner had not flown in the wind since the Conquest.

“Sixth or Seventh?” I asked.

There could be no doubt, after all, that it was a crusade beneath me.

“Sixth,” Neshamah replied. “The depths of that failure led to the birth of the Seventh, in many ways. The Choir of Contrition is hard of learning.”

“My own encounters have left me less than fond,” I said. “The first hero I fought was sworn to them.”

“The Lone Swordsman,” the Dead King drawled. “Ah, those pesky Hashmallim. All those centuries and they still believe the right sword in the right hands can accomplish anything. Their string of failures had made them increasingly heavy-handed. Mercy is the the Choir to watch, for subtlety.”

“And Judgement?” I probed.

“That sword only ever clears the scabbard when something needs to die,” the abomination smiled. “No coincidence, that the current White Knight is one of theirs. The Heavens have pressing need of blood on the ground, and the man will serve to herd the others towards the fated abattoir.”

“They can be beaten,” I said, watching a wooden ramp collapse under stone thrown from the walls.

Hundreds fell to their screaming deaths in the pit below.

“In a manner of speaking,” the Dead King said. “Praesi have slain and tricked them into falling, as have I. Yet the Choirs stand, for their existence is fixed. A dead angel does not detract from the whole. It remains as it ever was.”

“They have to play by the rules,” I said.

“Oh yes,” Neshamah murmured. “And they will pay for that, in time. That delightful child in Helike wove a trap for them right under the Intercessor’s nose. I expect the end of that play to be nothing less than magnificent .”

The Tyrant, he meant. I forced myself not to stiffen. I’d expected him to take a swing soon, either a Procer or whatever nation was limping heaviest at the time. This was a hint there was another game afoot, though. And I doubted it had been offered lightly.

“He’s offered me eternal friendship,” I said, hoping to shake a little more loose.

The abomination grinned.

“To me as well,” he said. “And the rats, though they ate his envoy. I confess I quite enjoy his sense of humour.”

The Tyrant of Helike was mad, this was well-known. I was starting to wonder if it was perhaps too well-known. Behaviour could seem erratic without actually being so, when you failed to grasp what someone was truly after.

“But I digress,” the Dead King dismissed. “We did not take this stroll to speak of the League of Free Cities. It appears we have a common foe, Black Queen.”

“Procer,” I said. “I would have preferred not to fight them at all, but Hasenbach left me little choice.”

“She is an interesting one, their First Prince,” Neshamah said. “A shame that her understanding of what a crusade is was so lacking, but it is too late to leave the saddle once the lion is ridden. She must follow through or break the Principate for a few generations.”

“A matter of some interest to you, I imagine,” I said.

“Come now, my young friend,” the Dead King laughed. “Do you take me for such a fool I would want the Principate to fall ?”

“Without Procer there’s little left to contain you,” I pointed out. “The Dominion and the League might manage to salvage parts of the south and Callow would hold the passes to the east, but you’d be trading a single mighty opponent for several weaker ones.”

“I could bring ruin to them,” the Dead King mildly said. “Drown the Lycaonese in death, devour every field and city from the Tomb to Salia. I could have done this when they were grown fragile from their war of succession, and none would have been able to stand against me. Yet I did not.”

“Because it’d have hung a sword over your head,” I said.

“Not immediately,” Neshamah mused. “They would have allowed me to glory in it for some time. Lovingly tended to my legend, my thousands years of darkness – or, more likely, my few centuries. They would have been willing to pay that price twice over, to have me bare my neck.”

“And yet here I am,” I said. “Invited to speak of war. Because there’d be two heads but only one sword. It’s how you survived Triumphant, isn’t it?”

“She was a great woman,” the Dead King fondly said. “There was a clarity to her that I’d never seen the likes of. But you misunderstand my intent. I do not seek to use you. My war on stillness will not be waged in so half-hearted a manner. This is merely a welcome, Catherine Foundling.”

“To what?” I asked.

“That most rarefied of societies,” he laughed. “We few immortals.”

“I can die,” I flatly said.

“So can I,” the Dead King said. “So can she. And there have been others before, who came close yet passed in the end. But I have great hopes for you, Black Queen. You have crawled through the cracks in a most fascinating way – never before have I seen anyone reach apotheosis by accident .”

I bit my tongue before I could deny him. He was wrong. Had to be. I’d carved away at myself piece by piece and put a mantle over the remains, but I was hardly a god. Even a lesser one. If that delusion made him civil and open to negotiation, however, he could keep it.

“She,” I said instead. “The Wandering Bard.”

“The Name changes,” he said. “The faces as well, swift as seasons. The Role has not. Intercessor she was and will remain.”

“She’s got her hands all over this war,” I said. “She was in Callow, before it all went to shit. In the League too, before the shockwaves of that rippled across the continent. I know better than to believe she won’t pop out again.”

“She encountered a nasty little setback in the south,” Neshamah said. “And has remained... discreet, since. But do not believe her absent because she is not before your eyes. She has as many irons as there are fires.”

I bit my lip. Should I? It was a risk. But when would I ever have an occasion like this again to speak with one of the few entities that might have a decent grasp of her? The Wandering Bard was a shadow cast on everything I had been trying to accomplish.

“What is she after?” I asked. “I used to think it was destroying what was made of Praes, but this is too much. Too large. She didn’t need a crusade to accomplish that.”

“I thought I understood her, once,” the Dead King pensively said. “Then she ruined me with a smile on her lips. A dozen times again did the two of us dance that dance, and yet even now she remains inscrutable in her intent. Know her to be your foe, and that in this game of ours there is nothing more dangerous than allowing the others to grasp your heart’s desire.”

“But I should trust you,” I said. “Because Evil is one big happy family, give or take the occasional knife in the back.”

He laughed.

“Never trust me,” he advised. “Or anyone else. Those are the last remnants of who you once were seeking to shackle you. You will betray me, if we make bargain. Or I will betray you. That is the nature of things.”

His arm left mine and he smiled gently.

“I need you to understand, Catherine, that none of it should be taken a slight,” Neshamah told me. “That even if you wound me most grievously, there is nothing to bar you from seeking me out for alliance in centuries to come. That if rip out the heart of you, it is not a declaration of war: it is simply a single tide in a very old sea, and in time it will pass. All things do, in the end. Save for us.”

“You do not sound like a man who wants to make an alliance,” I said.

“Yet I will listen to your offers, and accept them should they suit,” the Dead King said. “I am in no hurry. Neither are you, though you have yet to grasp that truth.”

He patted my hands affectionately.

“You are about to begin a journey, Catherine Foundling. They will hound you,” Neshamah said, “to the ends of Creation. No matter where you flee, no matter how you plead and bargain and reason. They will scour the impurities from you until all that is left is the devil they feared all along. And when you rise from that grave of ash, crawling through blood and smoke?”

He smiled.

“I will be waiting on the other side.”

I swallowed, though my mouth was dry.

“The day is yet young,” the Hidden Horror said, looking down at the slaughter that once took place beneath his walls. “Let us return, and speak of earthly treaties.”

A drop of darkness touched the world, and like ink in water is spread. It was mere moments, before I sat before the table again. The meat on my plate was still warm.

My hands were trembling, and I could not bring myself to believe it was not warranted.

—

I watched moonlight wash over the Crown of the Dead in silence. We’d spoken with the Dead King for more than an hour after the meal was finished, but I’d been unable to concentrate as much as I should. Hakram had done most of the talking, presenting our offer and terms of alliance. Nothing I hadn’t known before. I’d provide the invitation out of his Hell, in exchange for limits on how much he could swallow. No promises of assistance in the defence of Callow required, none offered in his battles against the Tenth Crusade – though I’d left the door open for further dealings there. I did not intend to ever cross that threshold, but the pretence that I might should be enticement in its own way. Neshamah was, after all, preying on my desperation. He would suck that teat try if he could. No accord had been reached. The Hidden Horror told us the offer was worth considering, and that he would do so with due diligence. We were to meet again tomorrow at twilight, for further discussion of the proposed treaties. It was not a refusal, at least. I suspected that if the Dead King had been uninterested in the terms he would have made that clear without stringing us along, but that was just a feeling. As Akua had pointed out afterwards, the longer we remained in Keter the better his bargaining position became.

If we stayed here long enough, there’d be no time for further preparation of Callow.

That should have weighed on me. The possibility that this dark gambit would come to nothing, and I’d walk from Keter with nothing to show for it. But it wasn’t what my mind was lingering on. To him, all the treaties in the world were nothing but play-acting. I’d gotten a glimpse of what Neshamah believed Creation was, and it was nothing that a makeshift bargain could truly change. The kingdoms, the armies, the borders – they were just ink on maps. The Pilgrim was willing to let Callow burn if it meant the Grand Alliance turned its swords to the Kingdom of the Dead, but the abomination had never once been worried about that. Gods, he didn’t even need to fight them did he? He could just wait them out. Let the petty feuds of mortals tear apart that ambitious edifice. A century or two of keeping to his borders meant nothing to a creature like that. As long as the Serenity kept churning out soldiers, kept growing within the hellscape, he would pull further ahead. Because his realm doesn’t fight itself, while Calernia is a tinder box no matter the era. And that was the entity I meant to use for my purposes. It scared me, that he’d outright said he wouldn’t much care if I did. Because it meant that all of this was a passing distraction to him. Nothing that really mattered.

The flare of the match drove back the dark, for a moment, until I flicked it away. The wakeleaf in my pipe brought a sharp taste to my mouth when I inhaled, pouring away when I spat out a stream of smoke. The highest ring of the Silent Palace offered a beautiful view of the madness below. Wyverns passed the skies, silent save for the batting of wings, while in quiet streets the dead marched in blind patrols. Athal had brought me to the balcony when I’d asked for a view, and I’d remained here ever since. My hands itched for a bottle, but I’d forced myself to indulge other vices. I could think of few things more foolish than getting drunk in Keter, much as it would have relieved me. Hakram had already come and gone, getting me to eat from a plate when I did not truly need to and then sitting in silence. Offering wordlessly to listen, if I wanted to talk. I had not taken him up on it, for once. Neither Indrani nor Masego had come up. They tended to avoid me, when I was in a mood. Vivienne had passed to discuss the treaties for a half hour, and left when she realized my mind was only halfway there. It was time, I supposed, for the sixth to make an appearance.

Akua Sahelian was a sight, under moonlight, and how I’d shaped her had little to do with it. She’d had a touch of the eerie even before the changes, that too-perfect look Praesi highborn had bred into their lines. Soninke more than Taghreb, true, but the difference was less than you’d think. Aisha was from a family long past its glory, and she was still worth more than a passing look. Diabolist’s grown of silver and blue bunched up around her body as she leant against the balustrade by my side. I drew from the pipe and blew the mouthful of smoke out.

“And here you are,” I said. “The proverbial devil on my shoulder.”

“Is that to be my purpose?” Akua mused. “Let us spin wicked weaves, then. You lack not for enemies to entrap.”

“You’ve got games afoot,” I said. “I knew you would when I let you out. But I am not in the mood for them tonight, Sahelian.”

“No,” she said softly. “Evidently not. You spoke with the Dead King, without our knowledge.”

My fingers tightened against the dragonbone shaft. I forced them to loosen.

“I did,” I admitted.

“Such a creature can foster madness with but a sentence, when speaking to the weak-minded,” she told me. “I would not put stock in what it peddled.”

“An interesting thought,” I said. “Since a lot of what it peddled sounded like Praesi rhetoric.”

“We have our exalted,” Akua said. “Triumphant, Traitorous. The Maleficents and the Terribilises. Yet there is reason we do not hallow Trismegistus’ name so. Terror and awe are not treasured bedfellow among my kind. Our favourite gods are those that bleed.”

“God, huh,” I mused. “I keep hearing people throw that word around. Been guilty of that as well. But to this day I’m not sure what it means.”

“There are those that would say the term is a mere recognition of power,” the shade said.

I inhaled the smoke, filling my lungs before releasing.

“And you?”

“A fulcrum, perhaps,” Akua said. “Nothing more or less than the point on which levers pivot. The weight of it is to be respected, but not held sacred.”

“Except for the ones that get capitalized,” I said.

“Oh,” Diabolist said quietly, “not even those. When Below taught us of holy betrayal, it did not hold itself separate. It might be the single truest form of worship, to betray even our patrons.”

There was a deep and abiding madness to the Wasteland, I thought. It had sunk into the bones of that land, mottled the souls of the people that dwelled within it. And still, part of me sung to hear the words. The unrelenting defiance in the face of even the Gods. Praes had shaped Callow as much as the other way around. In that tight embrace of need and hatred, we had each served as the crucible of the other. Diabolist would betray even the Gods, if she rose from that betrayal, and she was in so many ways the personification of the worst and the best of her homeland. I thought of John Farrier and his hard eyes, long lost to Summer’s fire. Of Brandon Talbot, who would ride for Callow under any banner he could. Even of William, that tragedy of good intentions. Would you hold a grudge against even the Gods? I knew the answer to that, sure as my own heartbeat. To small slights, long prices.

There were none in this world or any that stood exempt from my people’s rancour.

“You put up a fight,” I suddenly said.

Scarlet eyes turned to me.

“What you did, Akua, it’s not something I’ll ever forgive,” I murmured. “You showed me that, you know? That even as heroine I would have had no truck with absolution.”

“It should not be forgiven,” Diabolist said. “What are you, if you were wrong in this? That hatred should be stoked and kept burning, lest you forget the lessons it taught you.”

I smiled ruefully.

“But you put up a fight,” I said. “Against odds I’d flinch at. Against people that scare me still, for all the power I’ve gained. If there is any part of you that I can respect, it’s that you might have been a monster but you were never once a coward.”

“One of my ancestor once said that the spurs to greatness are never gentle,” Akua said, sounding almost whimsical. “Mother often repeated that to me, when I balked at my sharper lessons.”

“Did you really?” I asked. “Balk. Even once.”

“I had a cradle-sister,” Diabolist said. “One who shared my wet nurse. She was also charged with taking my canings until I reached an age where healing sorcery would not hamper my growth, but that was a rare enough occurrence. Her name was Zain. Common as dirt. I loved her, I suppose, in a way that children love those who so thoughtlessly love them back.”

It was horrifying, deep down, that nothing of what had been spoken came as a surprise to me.

“When I was eight years old, Mother took me to the deepest chamber of the old labyrinths and put a stone knife in my hand,” Akua said. “Zain lay prone on the altar, mind clouded by potions. Yet she was aware enough to know my face and reach out to me. She was scared, you see. Shivering like a doe. She was right to.”

“You killed her,” I said.

“My affection made her a valuable offering,” the shade replied. “I had to be slapped twice before I cut her throat, and even then my reluctance made the wound a shallow one.”

Akua laughed softly.

“That was the part I regretted most, in later years,” she said. “She would have bled out twice as quickly, had my hand been steady. That was my mother’s lesson, dear heart. Hesitation is never a virtue: faltering is only ever the mother of agony.”

“Your mother was a monster,” I quietly said.

“Mother was a failure,” Akua said amusedly. “A far greater sin, in her eyes and mine.”

I pulled at pipe again, standing silent under the insolent radiance of the moon.

“How much of that was a lie?” I finally asked.

“Not a word,” Diabolist said. “Why bother, when the truth serves my purposes?”

“It doesn’t change anything,” I said. “You still are who you are. You still made the choices that you did.”

“Oh, that was not my intent,” Diabolist said. “The most important part of this tale is the moral, as your people are so fond of having.”

The shade smiled.

“Do not hesitate, dearest Catherine,” Akua Sahelian said. “If you are to cut the world, it is best to have a steady hand.”

Chapter 36: Enchère

“I’ve found that nothing quite sets the tone for council like strangling a courtier with my bare hands just before we begin.”
– Dread Emperor Venal

I stared down at the unfurled scroll, a frown creasing my brow. When Athal had shown up along our communal breakfast with a scroll in hand I’d expected him to be bearing the Dead King’s counteroffer. Instead, what I’d gotten was a neatly-penned report about how the world had gone on without me while we journeyed to Keter. I popped a blueberry in my mouth. That it most likely came from hell did not make it taste any less sweet. Swallowing, I wiped my fingers on the tablecloth.

“How old is this?” I asked.

The dark-haired man bowed.

“If it please you, Great Majesty, the last of what is written took place eight days ago as of this morning,” he replied.

“Well,” I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “ Fuck seems like the most appropriate reaction to that basket of stupid.”

“Catherine?” Vivienne said, from her place across the table.

I pushed the scroll across, almost toppling a pitcher of fresh milk over it before Hakram leant over to catch it. I sent him a thankful look.

“Word from Callow?” Indrani asked, half a side of pork making her cheeks bulge.

“Swallow, you godsdamned savage,” I said. “And something like that. Can someone tell me what the ‘Lanterns’ are, exactly? I think I got it from context but I’d rather be sure.”

“The Levantine equivalent to the House of Light,” Adjutant said.

Archer snorted, then finally swallowed.

“Yeah, sure,” she said. “If to become an anointed brother you had to wrestle a basilisk. They don’t have abbeys so much as warrior lodges. If they get old enough they go into the Brocelian to fight monsters until one finally beats them.”

Across the table, Vivienne flinched.

“Merciless Gods,” she said. “What was she thinking?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Not Hasenbach’s greatest moment.”

I glanced at Masego, who did not glance back. He turned a page, blindly groping for what he probably believed to be a cup of tea but was actually a pot of cream. Well, he’d notice after drinking. Probably.

“Are we to be kept in suspense?” Akua drily asked.

“I’ve been declared Arch-heretic of the East,” I said. “By a conclave of the House of Light in Procer, the aforementioned Lanterns and a delegation of Speakers from Ashur.”

“A worthy achievement,” Diabolist praised. “This is the first I hear of the title being granted to one who has not climbed the Tower.”

“It’s a feudal disaster is what it is,” Thief said. “It means that any oaths sworn to her are dissolved by holy writ and that any who follow her are ‘estranged from the light of the Heavens’.”

“I didn’t think the First Prince would go this far just to break my truce with the northern crusade,” I admitted. “Or that she had this much influence over the priests, to be honest.”

“She should not have,” Adjutant said. “The House is highly influential in Proceran politics, and pushes back hard when attempts are made to twist its arm. Several wars were fought over it, if I remember correctly.”

“The three Liturgical Wars,” Akua said. “One of the rare Proceran squabbles to involve even the Lycaonese. The last member of House Merovins’ bloodline was slain during... the second, perhaps? I confess my Principate histories are not as comprehensive as they could be.”

“Oh fuck ,” Vivienne suddenly said.

I’d told her it was the most appropriate reaction, hadn’t I?

“Laure?” I asked.

She nodded, slumping into her seat.

“I can’t even begin to parse the implications of that,” she said.

“This is getting quite tedious,” Akua noted.

“You might remember the priests back in Salia declared me an abomination, after First Liesse,” I told the shade. “That whole resurrection affair got stuck in their throats.”

The dark-skinned monster was not slow on the uptake, for all her other glaring flaws.

“You were crowned by a representative of the House of Light, in Laure,” she said.

“I was.”

“They’ve branded heretics all involved in the matter,” Diabolist said, and it wasn’t a guess.

“If they’d just tarred my name it wouldn’t have been too bad,” I said. “They tried something similar with Henry Landless after occupying Callow, though without foreigners signing on. But they accused Callowan priesthood of heresy. They really shouldn’t have done that.”

“We so declare the following,” Vivienne read out loud. “That all who took part in the seventy-third conclave of Salia are guilty, of: perverse service to earthly powers, false righteousness for earthly purpose and, declaration of godless sanctions.”

“That first one,” Archer decided, “will be the title of my memoirs. I feel it really captures the spirit of what I’m about.”

We decided in turn, as a family and also Akua, to pretend she had remained silent.

“All three of those are lesser heresies,” Hakram gravelled. “That’s situation’s going to get worse at a brisk pace.”

“It did,” I grimly added. “The House in Laure also retroactively declared every hero to have tread Callowan grounds to be graceless. That’s not so much protesting the verdict as setting fire to the courthouse.”

“Graceless,” Diabolist mused. “As in ‘walk without the grace of the Heavens’, I presume?”

I nodded with a grimace. That verse was from the Book of All Things, when speaking of villains who cloaked themselves in righteousness when seeing to their ‘dark purposes’. You shall know them from the true children of Above, for they walk without the grace of the Heavens. The House of Light in Laure had essentially just declared over ten heroes to be villains in disguise. And then announced as much at every street corner of the largest city of the kingdom.

“They kept their shit together in Dormer, at least,” Vivienne sighed. “They lodged a protest and want to appeal the conclave’s decisions.”

“Thief, rioters torched the House of Light in Vale when the priests refused to speak out,” I said pointedly. “This is not a situation under control. Juniper’s going to have to declare martial law, if she hasn’t already.”

“The House in Summerholm upheld Laure’s declaration,” Thief said, sounding appalled as her eyes reached the end of the scroll. “Gods. Denier’s going to fold as well, Cat, you know that. You’re popular with the merchants and the priests that far east hate it even when the crown tells that what to preach. And the only reason Marchford hasn’t declared already is that it’ll take a while for the news to reach there.”

“I have no idea what Hasenbach was thinking,” I admitted. “The northern army’s in no shape to take the passage from Kegan even if it turns around. She’s setting fire to the diplomatic options for no real gain I can see.”

“You’re assuming she is behind this,” Akua said.

“If a clever opponent makes a foolish mistake,” Hakram added, “it is either not a mistake or not that opponent’s doing.”

Grem One-Eye had written that, I recalled. In one of his treatises, when talking about how even a well-led army could blunder when the field officers were poorly trained.

“That would imply she’s lost control of the going-ons in her own capital,” Vivienne replied skeptically.

A shame that her understanding of what a crusade is was so lacking, but it is too late to leave the saddle once the lion is ridden. That was what the Dead King had said, when we’d spoken of Cordelia Hasenbach.

“They might be right,” I said.

Thief turned to me, curious.

“If this was just the House in Procer I’d agree with you, but with the Lanterns and the Speakers?” I said. “No. She can’t have that many hooks inside nations that were hostile to Procer until so recently. I think that Hasenbach might be losing her grip on parts of the Grand Alliance.”

And wasn’t that enough to have me dreading? Because Cordelia Hasenbach had, for all her brutal idealism, a pragmatic streak. The castles she wanted to built were down here, not up in the clouds. But if she was no longer leading the beast by the nose, then who was now in charge? Her refusal to offer even the slightest concession when we’d last spoken was starting to be cast in a different light. Her position was nowhere as assured as I’d believed. I clenched my fingers, then slowly unclenched them. Didn’t matter, did it?

The mess was still in my lap, I had to deal with it.

“The Empress is going to throw a banquet, when she hears,” Vivienne sighed. “Any possible bridges to the west just went up in smoke.”

“Nok did too,” I reminded her. “She’s not exactly doing great at keeping her head above the water either. Black’s wandering the countryside up to Gods know what, Warlock’s nowhere to be seen and her coasts are burning. Not a great year for either of us.”

A man cleared his throat. With a start, I realized Athal had been standing to the side this entire time. My mind whipped back, going over what we’d said with a fine comb. Had there been anything in there I’d truly hate for the Dead King to know? No, I realized after a moment. ‘Bridges to the west’ had unfortunate implications, but I doubted Neshamah was unaware I would have cut a deal with Procer instead of coming to him if I could.

“Do you have further use for me, Great Majesty?” he asked.

“I don’t,” I said. “Offer my thanks to the Dead King for his gift, Athal.”

“I will do so promptly, honoured one,” and with one last bow he left.

I popped another blueberry into my mouth. There was a clatter, like someone dropped a ceramic pot on the table.

“This is cream ,” Masego said, highly offended. “Why did none of you say anything?”

Well, I mused, at least the wait until my second talk with the Hidden Horror would not be absent of entertainment.

–

The Hall of the Dead grew no less intimidating with repeat visits. The honour guard of Revenants had the same faces as the last time at least, so it was possible that fifty dead Named was the sum of his forces. On the other hand, it was a little too neat of a number and it wasn’t like he’d have fewer than what we’d seen. I kept the thought off my face as we were welcomed into the throne room and Neshamah graciously invited us to be seated once more. No offer of a meal, this time, and it was easy to see why. Neat stacks of parchments awaited us at the table.

“Your proposal was a worthy one, Black Queen,” the Dead King said. “Yet it needed... expansion. These are the terms I would offer instead. Take however long is necessary to familiarize yourself, I will take no offence.”

I traded a subtle look with Thief. Yeah, he could have sent us those earlier. He’d meant for us to be as little prepared as possible, and to go over them in an unfamiliar place. The throne room of ancient Sepharah was not a location that invited careful reading, though ironically enough I could think of few places where paying attention to the exact wording would be more important. The Woe sat after I did, and with a nod at Neshamah I took a look at his proposal. A single paragraph of beautifully calligraphied Lower Miezan in, I was already blinking in surprise. I’d offered him the run of three principalities. Not even halfway into the first sheet of parchment, I was being asked for eight . All existing Lycaonese lands were included, and in addition to Cleves and Hainaut as I’d already put on the table he was also asking for Lyonis and Brus. Which would give him foothold on the opposite shores of the Tomb and the Grave, but also neatly encircle Lake Pavin. More worryingly, if he took all of Lyonis it meant his southern border was Salia. The capital of Procer.

Surprise only continuing to sink in, I thumbed through the other parchments. The alliance would be required to be announced publically. The invitation need be extended to him for at least one hundred years and – well, shit. He wanted me to occupy two principalities myself, Bayeux and Orne. The very principalities facing the two passes out of the Red Flower Vales. Last time that territory had been under Callowan rule was the days of the Queen of Blades, and even then they’d been tributaries more than vassals. Hakram was paying closer attention to the details, I saw, and I left him to it. I turned to the Dead King.

“Your Majesty,” I said.

“Black Queen,” the yellow-eyed thing replied lightly.

“This is a significant expansion of the terms offered,” I said. “Which surprises me, given how amenable you seemed to the initial proposal.”

“I was,” the Hidden Horror agreed. “But then I was made a better offer.”

The world slowed, and all I heard was the quickening of my pulse. A better offer. Who – no, that wasn’t even a question worth asking was it?

“Dread Empress Malicia,” I said, voice eerily calm.

“Has been an honoured guest of mine for some time,” the Dead King said. “She also has an interest in securing an alliance, though I found it unsporting to never give you such a chance. You currently look at a transcript of her latest offer, save for the addition of the occupation of Proceran territory. That is a boon I offer you myself.”

It was no such thing, I thought. He wanted me to take a bite out of Procer so their attention would be divided when the day of reckoning came. And to ensure that no deal would be possible to make with Hasenbach or her replacement, since I’d have outright occupied part of their realm. Something that would be difficult for Malicia to achieve, since she’d need to reconquer Callow before getting anywhere near the Principate – and to do all of that while at odds with her finest generals.

“A bidding war,” Akua said thoughtfully, the first time she had even spoken in this hall.

“I prefer to think of it as an auction,” the Dead King replied. “With the face of Calernia in our time as the prize.”

I let out a long breath, forced myself to smile.

“An intriguing offer,” I said. “Might we be allowed to discuss it between ourselves before giving you an answer?”

“By all means,” Neshamah smiled. “Should you require light to be shed on any point, my Hosts are at your service. They were made aware of my intent.”

I rose to my feet, feeling like a dozen pounds of lead were tied to them. I bowed exactly as low as was required. Shooting a quelling look at Archer, who looked about to speak, I gestured for the others to follow me out.

We’d been had, but here was not the place to rage about it.

—

Vivienne slapped down her pile of parchments on the table the moment the wards went up.

“That fucker ,” she snarled. “So much for ‘negotiations in good faith’, Hakram.”

I spent a moment wondering whether I was responsible for the fact that my closest companions could be so cavalier as to call the likes of the Dead King ‘that fucker’ while shuffling uneasily under the silent pressure of Masego’s sorcery. Being under that had not become any more pleasant with the passing of time. The itch was already under my skin, bringing restlessness with it. Whatever it was I had become, it was not meant to be contained . My eyes flicked to Ajutant, who had ignored Thief’s jibe to bring our finest map of Calernia to the table. He methodically set aside the parchments to spread it completely, then set down iron figurines at the borders the Dead King’s last proposal had outlined.

“A lot of land to evacuate, even with forewarning,” Archer noted, dragging a chair to the table.

The ugly scraping sound of wood against stone made me want to rip her hair out, but that was an almost daily occurrence with Indrani.

“Around a third of the Principate, in sum,” Akua noted. “Though the Lycaonese territories are the poorest and least populated by a wide margin. Archer’s warning is somewhat inaccurate, however. Keter’s advance will not be immediate or uncontested: it is not impossible for mass displacement to occur before the principalities fall.”

“It would mean several million refugees,” Hakram said calmly. “Hunger, sickness and weather will slay them by the thousands.”

“We’d get two principalities out of the deal, though,” Archer said cheerfully. “That’s nice of him. Good change of pace from the whole defence thing we’ve been on about. Would be pleasant to let them worry about us instead the other way around, for once.”

“We’re in no position to take or hold those lands, Indrani,” Vivienne said flatly. “And the moment we announced publically that we’re allying with the Kingdom of the Dead, half of Callow turns on us. Malicia has us beat there. The Wasteland might get worried if she announces that, but it won’t revolt .”

“It should not be impossible to remove that part if we compensate with other coin,” Hakram said. “Brabant, or perhaps Arans? The latter would significantly enlarge his border with the Golden Bloom. The elves might not take kindly to that.”

“It would also mean direct border with his expanded realm, if we take Bayeux ourselves,” Akua said. “Salia itself would be a superior bid. Let him lose a few hordes besieging the heart of Procer.”

“Or we could leave,” Hierophant said, voice slicing through the conversation.

They all turned to look at him. Slowly I took out my pipe and ripped a satchel to stuff it.

“I’ve already learned enough from perusing the city to study for decades,” Masego shrugged. “And there are more echoes to be harvested while we return. If the terms are not to our satisfaction, why do we not simply go?”

I caught his eye and looked down meaningfully at my pipe. With a sigh, he flicked his wrist and a flash of flame saw to it.

“We need a counterweight, Masego,” Vivienne said tiredly. “The crusade rolls through Callow otherwise. I don’t like that we’re playing his game, but we’re low on choices.”

“Must we?” Akua said.

My eyes turned to her, and she inclined her head.

“Let Malicia unleash the Hidden Horror,” she said. “She is a rival here, yet not necessarily a foe. She would desire the Dead King rampant no more than us. Giving ground here allows us to achieve our purpose – an invasion of Procer by the Kingdom of the Dead – without wounding our reputation the way making that pact ourselves would. On the other hand, a bidding war hurts both our positions. We would need to make greater and greater concessions, with the Dead King the only true victor of that strife.”

“We will not,” Hakram said calmly.

As he should. Of all of them, he knew me best. I inhaled the wakeleaf and blew it out, earning the odd sight of smoke going through Akua’s body.

“We will not,” I agreed. “We don’t know what terms Malicia would end up giving, but I am quite certain they won’t involve anything aimed at limiting casualties.”

“She’s right about part of it, Cat,” Thief said, sounding pained at the admission. “We can’t keep escalating our offers. We’ll end up selling out half the continent and it won’t even come in sight of the Empire’s bottom line.”

“Go a step deeper, Vivienne,” I said. “Look at how Malicia has been behaving since the crusade began. How has she been acting ?”

“She hasn’t,” Hakram said, eyes sharpening.

Akua softly laughed.

“Poisoning the river when owning a well,” she mused in Mtethwa. “She does play an exquisite game, doesn’t she?”

“She let Callow bleed against the crusaders, but not to weaken the crusade like we thought,” I said. “She was weakening us . The same way she let Black bleed his loyalist legions. The point was never to deal with the Tenth Crusade, it was to cripple her internal threats enough she can handle them herself. Because it didn’t really matter to her, whether the passage or the Vales fell. It was never going to be the front she fought this war on.”

“The Dead King,” Thief said quietly. “The Dead King is her army.”

“We could bargain for a year and she’d still go deeper,” I said. “Because this is her play. This is the force she needs on the field.”

“That might be true,” Vivienne said. “But it is no solution.”

“Our offer doesn’t change,” I said calmly. “And like so many troubled young souls before us, we will let scripture guide our hands.”

“There’s stuff in the Book of All Things about this?” Archer said, leaning forward. “Damn. Maybe I should read it.”

“It’s a Wasteland foe we face,” I said. “So it’s that most sacred of Wasteland traditions we’ll turn to.”

I spat out a mouthful of smoke, let it wreath my face as I smiled.

“I speak, of course, of regicide.”

Chapter 37: Offing

“Callowans as a people can be summed up by the fact that, before the Uncivil Wars had even come to a close, it’d become a common boast among the populace that the Black Queen had not even spent a sennight in Keter before having several counts of arson and murder to her name.”
– Extract from the personal memoirs of Lady Aisha Bishara

Follow the food. So went Thief’s advice.

That Malicia or a flesh puppet were in the city was a given: Neshamah wouldn’t bother to seriously negotiate with a High Lord. It would have been like a man having to keep a serious face while making a pact with mutton chop, in his eyes. I’d personally been of the opinion that it was a near certainty that the puppet would be the one in Keter, since the Empress leaving the Tower unattended for more than a few weeks was a recipe for usurpation. Akua, however, had made it clear that with the right precautions it was possible for Malicia to be here in person while a puppet held the Tower for her. She was not the kind of Empress that had a strong presence outside Ater: apparently even by imperial standards she didn’t leave her seat of power often. It made sense, in a way. Malicia wasn’t a fighter, and for decades she’d had Black to send after messes sword in hand. Her almost cripplingly-focused talents were in rule and intrigue, and they were most effectively wielded from the Imperial court. Diabolist noted that the court at the Tower wasn’t necessarily the centre of power in a Tyrant’s reign – Terribilis II had barely held one and distributed most its traditional authority to Ater’s bureaucracy. Malicia, however, had inherited a festering snake pit of a court from her predecessor Nefarious and then promptly encouraged the most murderous leanings of the highborn by rewarding the victorious in those struggles with riches and influence.

That, however, had been decades ago. Before the Conquest or my birth. Now that Malicia had spent years removing the aristocrats from the bureaucracy and Black had unceremoniously drummed them out of the Legions, her hold on Ater and the Tower was extremely hard to shake. She could afford to let the High Lords break their teeth on her power base while she placed most her attention on the negotiations in Keter. Akua even speculated that she might be baiting out would-be usurpers in order to have them out in the open when she returned home with a Keteran alliance. That turnaround was likely to see their own families turn on those ambitious few, neatly decapitating any nascent opposition without her having to lift a finger. It certainly sounded like Malicia, I had to admit. A plan with several ancillary benefits unfolding quietly while her enemies swung at mist. Regardless, it’d been a priority to find out whether we were dealing with the actual Empress or a puppet. From a narrow perspective, it didn’t matter which it was if we managed to slaughter them all anyway: the result would still be us with the only bidder at the Dead King’s auction. Looking at it more broadly, though, the difference was major. For one, if I killed Malicia in the flesh I’d be gaining a ‘legitimate’ claim to the Tower.

Kill the Empress, be the Empress: that was the law of the Wasteland. If you managed to scatter all the other carrion birds pecking at the corpse, anyway. Getting involved in the flaming tar pit that was your average Praesi succession was the least of what I needed right now, and pretty high on my list of ‘things I would prefer never to have to deal with’. Malicia would have to go if the Liesse Accords were going to be implemented properly and I couldn’t deny that the longer she had to scheme the more dangerous she became, but as long as the Empress lived there was a lid on the Wasteland jar of crazy. Much like Cordelia Hasenbach, she wasn’t someone I liked facing but she remained very much preferable to whoever would step up if she was removed from power. I wouldn’t put it beyond a High Lord trying to climb the Tower to take a swing at me as their foremost ‘rival’ even while the Empire was being attacked by Ashur. Particularly if their lands were far enough from the sea. There were dozens of examples in the histories to be found of Praesi cheerfully emptying a whole quiver into their foot just like that. On the other hand, taking Malicia prisoner just wasn’t feasible. Not in Keter . And for all that Praesi ambition could end up biting me, there was also a decent chance that instead the Empire would collapse into civil war as every prominent highborn tried to claim the Tower. I couldn’t even dismiss the possibility that the legions in the Wasteland would try to proclaim Black as Dread Emperor and fill mass graves with whoever objected to that.

I didn’t relish the loss of life it would involve, but if Praes was clawing at itself it wasn’t looking at Callow. It might be a risk worth taking.

“So I’ve got a report for you,” Archer announced, strolling through the wards.

She had a bottle in hand, I noted. That was definitely not what I had sent her out for.

“If you blew off reconnaissance to get drunk, there will be consequences,” I mildly said.

“I would never,” Indrani assured me. “I just happened to find a cellar while on my very serious fact-finding mission, and it would have been criminally negligent of me not to investigate.”

“Was it locked?” I sighed.

“Is it really a lock if it breaks?” Archer mused. “That’s a question for the philosophers, Catherine. We’re straying off topic.”

So I’d need to offer Athal an apology, then. Hakram’s suggestion that we just make a scroll template with blank spaces to fill in with the latest thing she’d done was becoming increasingly tempting.

“This is what we call Atalantian baptismal, Cat,” Indrani seriously told me, putting the bottle on the table. “I’ve heard that if an entire glass is drunk in a single sitting, it will outright kill a man.”

“I’m considering killing as well, at the moment,” I informed her.

“That would be a grave miscarriage of justice,” Indrani told me. “Since I found it inside the only other palace that has servants in it.”

My eyes narrowed. I’d asked the Dead King for further time to debate his offer before our next conversation and sent both Archer and Thief out find the tracks of any Imperial presence in the city. Follow the food, Vivienne had said. Malicia’s delegation would need to eat, would be offered all the trapping of hospitality as the honoured guests that they were. That left traces, in a city where the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants were walking corpses. I set aside the pile of scrolls that held our now-irrelevant bargaining position and dragged out the rough sketch of the palaces surrounding the Hall of the Dead I’d asked Masego to make. There were five in whole, forming a circle interrupted by the same number of avenues going into the city-fortress. The Silent Palace, our own, was slightly to the left of the gates into the Hall.

“Which one?” I asked.

Indrani jabbed her finger onto the parchment. Slightly to the right, on the opposite side of the black stone spire.

“The Threefold Reflection,” I said.

Athal had helpfully provided the names of every existing palace when I’d casually asked as much, feigning idle curiosity. The dark-haired man had also revealed there were old sorceries protecting each of them, though he hadn’t gone into detail. Not all that surprising. This whole city was a fortress, not even the guesthouses would be toothless.

“The place is... unsettling,” Archer said, grabbing the seat across from me. “The layout is wrong. Hallways lead where they shouldn’t: I went through the same threshold twice and ended up in different places both times. I’d call it a maze, but you can map out a maze. There’s wizardly bullshit at play here I think might rule that out.”

“Did you find out how many people are in the delegation?” I asked.

“I kept out of sight,” she said, shaking her head. “Got a look at one of them, though. Tall man in steel plate, silent. Black iron mask over his face.”

I nodded.

“I’ve seen those before,” I said. “They’re called Sentinels. The personal guard of whoever holds the Tower, though there’s enough they count more as a personal army. Supposedly spells and potions keep them unconditionally loyal.”

“Might be we have ourselves the real Empress, then,” Indrani said.

“They’re exactly the kind of guards a puppet would bring as well,” I said. “Won’t talk, can’t betray and they probably have triggers inside their body that’ll kill them if someone tries to grab and extract.”

“Would they obey a puppet, though?” Archer asked.

“I have no idea,” I admitted after a moment. “But I know who we can ask.”

I exerted my will and tugged at Akua’s leash, gently. There was resistance. I tugged a second time, and when I did not feel her moving towards me I rolled my eyes and simply dragged her here. The shade poured out of the wall about thirty heartbeats later and only then did I loosen my grip. Diabolist was grimacing.

“That,” she said, “was exceedingly unpleasant. And I barely had time to bid my farewells.”

“Do it again,” Indrani grinned.

I ignored her.

“Would Sentinels obey a flesh simulacrum the Empress occasionally takes over?” I asked.

Akua’s brow rose.

“If instructed to, certainly,” she said. “Authority over them can be even granted by certain court titles, it is not held sorely by the Tyrant.”

“Not a tie breaker, then,” I told Indrani.

“Was that the sum total of your inquiry?” Diabolist asked, sounding a little miffed. “I was having a conversation of some import.”

“Tell me about it,” I invited, repressing a grin.

Occasionally yanking Akua’s chain had lost none of the satisfaction even after the novelty faded.

“We will be expected to meet with the Dead King two days from now, at twilight,” Akua said. “Excuses can be stretched no further.”

I drummed my fingers against the table as Archer cracked open the bottle from – Atalante, was it? Strange, I remembered reading somewhere they were the religious ones in the League. The House of Light tended to frown on drinking to excess. The Callowan one, anyway, for all I knew it was different down there.

“So that’s our window,” I said. “Two days. Hopefully Thief has more to add, because we’re low on information at the moment and I don’t relish the thought of attempting an assassination half blind in Keter of all places.”

Whether or not Vivienne had anything to say remained a mystery for several hours after that. Hakram returned before too long, having exhausted the few points I’d sent him to seek clarification on with the Hosts to keep up the pretence of ongoing debate on our part. I went for a walk after that, in part to clear my mind but mostly so I get away from those fucking wards. I knew why we’d had Masego put it up, but it didn’t make staying under them any more pleasant. I decided to get something useful done while I was out and about, so I moved towards the highest circles of the Silent Palace to get a look at the terrain between us and this Threefold Reflection the Empress allegedly resided in. The layout of this place was all interlocked circles so getting oriented was easy, but I’d failed to grasp the varying heights. The circle furthest out was one of the lowest, the rooftop almost a terrace. From the flat black marble I could get a good look at the broad open space that separated the palaces from the Hall of the Dead, but little else. There were, I noted, patrols now. There’d been a few of those before that I remembered, but nowhere as large or frequent. Was Neshamah tightening his watch? You told me Malicia was here and that she was at odds with me , I thought. Considering that little talk we had the day before about how betrayal is a passing thing, that was as good as an invitation to kill her.

Evidently, that didn’t mean he would make it easy for me. This was a test of sorts, I decided. I doubted that breaching the laws of hospitality would rank in even the worst hundred of the sins to the Dead King’s name, but he’d keep the pretence. He might not actively obstruct me, but unless I remained discreet there would be consequences. That didn’t bode well. The Woe had many talents, but discretion was not usually counted among them – though that was in large part my own fault, it had to be said. I could barely make out the edge of the Threefold Reflection from the side of the Hall of the Dead, but I’d meant to get a good look and this told me less than nothing. Casting a look at the grounds below, freshly-scrubbed paving stones, I shrugged and leapt. I’d gone without armour for the day, so my knees barely bent when I landed. Cloak fluttering around me, I nodded at the approaching patrol as they turned to me. Archer had told me of the breeds of dead there were to be found in the city, but there were no differences to my senses. They all felt like little balls of will working a corpse, and though some might feel stronger it was not a certain thing. For one, the officers were supposed to be the Binds – those with souls and real intelligence – but the presence for some of the officer-armoured dead were almost entirely faded.

I’d have to rely on sight to tell them apart, and sight could be tricked.

“Just going for a walk,” I told them.

A corpse in a lovely sculpted iron breastplate and conical helmet nodded.

“If you require escort, Great Majesty, it can be provided,” he offered.

“Won’t be necessary,” I said. “Though I thank you for the courtesy.”

They resumed their patrol without a word, offering polite nods when they passed me by. How long had that one been dead, I wondered? I could be centuries. I’d glimpsed flesh beneath the helm, but that meant nothing. Necromancy could preserve that near indefinitely. Strolling as casually as a girl could with a sword at her hip and a cloak embroidered with the banners of her defeated foes could – not all that casually, I felt safe in assuming – I passed by the palace separating mine from the Threefold Reflection. It was the largest of those I’d seen, and the Silent Palace dwarfed the one in Laure. The Garden of Crowns, Athal had called it. Wasn’t seeing a lot of those, but the garden part seemed accurate. Instead of a single massive construction, this one was a display of smaller pavilions lost in a beautiful sprawl of stone and greenery. The beauty was somewhat spoiled by the fact that the trees and grass seemed to sprout directly from granite, but that might just have been me. It was empty, or so I thought. Then I caught sight of a silhouette seated under a shaded living oak arbour, looking down at a crystal-clear pond. Man, not a woman. Creation had not seen fit to have me run into Malicia, then. Torn between moving on towards the Threefold Reflection and having a closer look at this oddity, I eventually went for the oddity. The palace wasn’t going anywhere.

I tread softly on the pebble paths that winded through the greenery, keeping an eye on the stranger. Too pale to be Soninke or Taghreb. Either an outside acquisition by the Empress, or entirely unrelated to her. I confirmed the second thought when I came close enough my otherworldly senses picked up on what lied within the man: power. Not a Name, no. That kind of power had a peculiar taste to it, life and weight and something like inevitability. What I felt from him was cousin to that, or perhaps just the remains of it. Like words engraved in stone left unreadable by time and tide you could still barely make out some letters from. Revenant , I thought. Indrani had told me they kept a shade of what they’d once been after their raising. The dead man did not react even when I’d come well within earshot for a mortal, staring silently into the pond. I could make out shapes in the water, fish and water lilies. The way light caught on them allowed me to realize they were not living things but sculpted and painted stone. I put aside the mild discomfort I felt at the sight and studied the man closer. Late forties, or so he’d been before his death. A crown of white hair came in sparse tufts, and the beginnings of beard could be seen on his jaw. His clothes were rich drapery, though the colour had faded with the centuries, and there was a sword on his lap. None of this mattered half as much as the brooch on his chest: a tasteful little twist of silver with two golden ornaments on it.

Bells.

“There is no need to stand there, child,” the Revenant said. “It is not my pond, nor my ruinous light that shines down upon it.”

I swallowed.

“You’re a Fairfax,” I blurted out, and immediately cringed.

Catherine Silvertongue struck again. The Revenant turned to study me, pale brown eyes surprised.

“King Edward of Callow,” he said. “And you are Deoraithe. A daughter of House Iarsmai?”

It had to be an Edward, didn’t it? Callow had those like the Principate had its never-ending gaggle of First Prince Louis – too many to know by rote save for the numbers at the end. Suddenly I was glad I hadn’t worn a crown. It would have felt tasteless in front of a Fairfax of the old blood. When he’d spoken that title it had been with that muted ripple of power, the one that said it hadn’t merely been a title for him.

“Just a foundling,” I replied, shaking my head.

“Named, then,” he sagely said, and with a courtly gesture invited me to sit.

I settled into the stone seat by his own, tongue-tied.

“Would that be Edward the Fifth?” I said, desperately trying to remember which of those had gotten themselves killed while crusading.

“The Seventh,” the king chided. “You will know my daughter Mary, at least. She was but three when I was claimed, she must be the longest-reigning monarch Callow has ever seen.”

Oh shit . He was talking about Mary the Songbird. That entire reign had been a mess: the Marquess of Vale had fought a short but bloody civil war to seize the regency and refused to give it up even after she came of age. He’d kept her imprisoned in the Songbird’s Cage until one of her cousins rebelled and overthrew him. She didn’t survive the assault on Laure, smothered with a pillow by her captor before the palace could be breached. There were at least half a dozen songs and plays about the tragedy. Her cousin took the crown, after, and all House Lerness of Vale hung save for the children.

“I have heard of her,” I diplomatically said. “I’m sorry to tell you that House Fairfax is gone. As far as I know, the last member of it died during a Praesi invasion over twenty years ago.”

The man chuckled.

“It was dead long before that, girl,” he said. “I share not a drop of blood with the famous Eleonor. My forbear merely kept the name to justify her rule after her husband had the poor taste of dying before getting her with child.”

I blinked. Yolanda the Wicked, that. Scholars centuries later still debated or not whether she’d been a villain or just extremely unpopular. Some argued she’d been demonized because of her Proceran origins and that she’d had lawful claim to rule, even though her children did not. The other side tended to point out she’d had the rest of House Fairfax murdered to ensure said children did in fact succeed her. This felt like a history lesson, until I remembered I was sitting next to breathing history. Well, moving anyway.

“Catherine Foundling,” I introduced myself, since girl and child were starting to get on my nerves.

“I would welcome you to these grounds, Catherine Foundling, but there is no welcome to be had in this earthly pit of devils,” King Edward said.

I nodded my thanks, for lack of a better answer.

“If I may ask, Your Majesty,” I said. “You seem...”

“Lucid?” the dead man smile. “The Abomination’s little jest. Most of my fellows are of more taciturn bent. You see, when he came for me I told him that even in the face of eternity I would spit on him and all his works.”

My fingers clenched. Evidently, Neshamah had decided to test the truth of that.

“Do not look so appalled,” the king gently said. “I will yet have the last laugh over that dark creature, even if I must wait until the Last Dusk for it. Though I am bound to serve in this place it is only a passing thing.”

“So you’re the guardian of this,” I probed, hand moving to vaguely encompass our surroundings.

“In a manner of speaking,” King Edward said. “This is the Garden of Crowns, young Foundling. None serve here who were not royalty while they drew breath. The power once bestowed on me by Above has merely earned the role of the sword guarding this palace.”

My eyes narrowed.

“So there’s a former Named guarding all five palaces,” I said.

“Indeed,” he agreed. “Though the Abomination changes the watchers at a whim. The Bloody Sword once kept vigil over the that unpleasant pyramid beyond the Garden, but has since been replaced. Other than I, the only one who has remained for more than a century is the Thief of Stars.”

“Oh?” I said, blood running cold. “And where does he guard?”

“She,” he corrected. “The Silent Palace. It amused the Abomination to bind her there, as she attempted to rob it whilst living.”

So we’d had a heroine with a talent for discretion breathing down our neck the entire time without a single one of us noticing. Lovely. This assassination plot was already getting off to a great start.

“You display great curiosity as to the nature of this pit,” King Edward said calmly. “I will not inquire as to your purpose, as I would be bound to then speak it. But you are born of Callow, are you not?”

“I am,” I warily agreed.

“It has been a very long time,” he said quietly, “since I have spoken to one of my people. And I have worried, over the years. We warred with the Principate mere decades before they came, beggars at my door , asking for our swords to march north for their sake. Yet I know the gratitude of princes is an ephemeral thing. And to the east, the Enemy ever lurks. You spoke of an invasion?”

The snarl in his voice when he spoke of Procer had a warm feeling in my belly, I wouldn’t deny it. I’d run out of patience with them as well, it was reassuring to know I was in good company there. Unfortunately, I had few good tales to tell him.

“We call it the Conquest,” I said. “They won at the Fields of Streges and swept over the Callow. Until recently we were under occupation.”

“That patch of grass has been watered by more armies than rainstorms,” King Edward ruefully said. “It does not matter. The beast swells fat with the meat of us but it ever chokes on our bones. There will be another Eleonor, sooner or later.”

I didn’t know how to tell him that none had come. That if she’d ever been born, the closest thing I had to a father had cut her throat before her name could be known. That I might the closest thing to her we had, and wasn’t that a horrifying thought?

“We’re under siege,” I said. “The Tenth Crusade marches right through us and attempts at peace have failed. The princes of Procer wants to carve us up and I am unsure how far up that desire runs.”

“Procerans are always hungry,” King Edwards said darkly. “And when that hunger leads them to the brink, they weep for others to pay the dues in their stead. Hold the Vales, young Foundling. And watch the Blessed Isle for a Wasteland knife.”

I bleakly laughed. How could I tell him that the ruling Dread Empress was out for my blood, trying to crush me underfoot, and that she was still the closest thing I had to an ally at the moment? The dead man idly brushed his fingers against his brooch, then spoke up hesitatingly.

“It is unseemly to ask, I know,” he said. “Yet, my daughter...”

I thought of pale green eyes, and the kindest lie I’d ever been told. That it wouldn’t get easier.

“She is still,” I said with a smile, “spoken of in song.”

The naked relief on his face only made it worse.

“She would have loved that,” he said with a quirk of the lips. “She had a lovely singing voice, my Mary. And she was good, even as a child. Kind . That is a rare thing in a ruler. There is a place for harshness, but kindness is the mother of prosperity.”

I nodded slowly. I couldn’t stand to stay here any longer, next to the man I’d lied to and his long-dead memories, so slowly I rose to my feet.

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Your Majesty,” I said, bowing.

“Don’t,” he said. “I am not a fool, young Catherine.”

He smiled, like we shared a secret.

“The first Albans were seneschals of Laure long before they were kings,” he told me. “And Eleonor, for all her virtues, was born a mere knightess. There is no shame in one’s birth. We are what we bring into this world, not what brought us into it.”

He rose as well, and touched my wrist.

“Stand tall, Queen Catherine,” King Edward the Seventh told me. “Stand proud. We have been broken before, humbled and rent asunder. We have crawled through the blood of our kin and suffered the yoke of tyrants. It does not matter. We do not yield, we do not bend even when the sky comes tumbling down on our heads. Keep your grudges close, child, and never forget them. We are Callowans, and for every slight there is a price.”

Ours will be long , the song went, and paid twice .

Woe on us all, but if the Gods demanded my home be ashes then the Gods would burn.

Fatalism I

“There is enough room to fit the entire span of Creation between the Heavens and the mouths of priests.”
– Antoine Merovins, twenty-second First Prince of Procer

It’d been the Battle of the Camps that started the fire.

Cordelia, in retrospect, could see how it had all unfolded. If the army under Amadis Milenan had been defeated by mortal arms it might have been possible to smother the first flames before they caught, but the Black Queen had not deigned to offer that opportunity. The Prince of Iserre could have been ruined in the High Assembly if he’d blundered and lost dozens of thousands on some Callowan field to a superior general, but who could castigate him for deaths borne from the sky opening over his army? You might as well blame a man for a storm or an earthquake. Milenan had then made pacts with the Callowans and promptly surrendered himself into their hands as a guarantor of that truce. He was a folk hero in Alamans lands, now. The selfless prince who had put his life in the hands of the savages to spare his soldiers a slow and painful death. A true exemplar of Proceran noblesse oblige . His royal confederates had not even waited until they returned to the Principate before beginning to lionize the man through letters and songs. Even rats could man a ship, when the alternative was sinking.

There could be no serious effort to place the blame on the Grey Pilgrim, either, even if he had been the informal leader of the Chosen with the northern host. Aside from the Levantine hero’s own leave of absence as a hostage in Laure, it would have hollowed the Grand Alliance from within to besmirch the reputation the Dominion’s favourite son. Alienated quite a few heroes as well, and not only those that shared his origins. Every report Cordelia had received about the short assembly of every Chosen before they split between armies had hammered home the implication that the White Knight might be the presumptive leader of the heroes of the Tenth Crusade but that the Peregrine was highly influential. Mobilizing Chosen was like herding cats at the best of times, and the First Prince felt ill at the notion of having to do so after having publicly disgraced their communal kindly grandfather. In the face of earthly powers, the heroes tended to close ranks: they would see this as an outright attack.

In the end, no one could be blamed – which meant everyone was to blame. Especially the Black Queen and her cadre of wicked fae and perfidious villains, served willingly by her armies of Callowan heretics, but there’d been no lack of fault thrown about within the Principate. Most of it had been laid at her feet. She was losing grip on the princes, she’d said. After all, her own subjects had preferred making truce with the Black Queen to fighting until the end. The Levantines had snickered in the beards, making sly comments about the worth of Proceran soldiery. Cordelia had spent many a sleepless night containing the damage, making pacts across the entire eastern belt of principalities to ensure the retreating army would be supplied and reinforced on its march south to join her uncle in waging war against the Carrion Lord. It had all come to nothing, as not even a fortnight passed before the news of the bloody draw at the Red Flower Vales reached Salia.

In terms of fighting forces, the battle had been costly yet no great wound. Military superiority had been maintained by a wide enough margin the remaining armies of the Black Knight could be ground to dust on an open field. In matters of reputation, however? It had been a crippling blow. Uncle Klaus’ repute would not be so fragile a single reversal would upend it, but the Lycaonese had enemies in the south. Like poison in the wine the rumours had spread that the Iron Prince had grown doddering in his old age. That Cordelia had known of his senility yet ignored in an attempt to bring glory to her kin. It had been a crack in her pedestal, and now the jackals had bared their teeth. The coalition of royalty that had seen her rise to the throne, Lycaonese and northern Alamans, had remained loyal. But the the edges of her majority in the Highest Assembly had frayed. The tipping point had been one of the harshest arguments she’d had with her uncle that she could remember. She’d wanted him to split the army at the Vales and send half of it in pursuit of the Carrion Lord’s legions, but he had flatly refused. Bayeux would burn, he’d said, and perhaps Aisne as well – but then the Praesi would find themselves surrounded and crushed. By remaining at the Vales he was forcing Callow to remain on the defensive and readying the snatch the initiative as soon as the passes were cleared.

In matters of military strategy, Cordelia trusted none more than Klaus Papenheim. Yet he was failing to see the broader canvas in which he took action: the Prince of Bayeux had signified that his vote could no longer be counted on the very evening he’d learned that his principality would see no reinforcements. His kinswoman in Aisne put forward a motion of protest in the Assembly the following day, and though it was defeated it could be understood from the public denunciation that her vote would no longer be for sale at further sessions. In the wake of that blow, like carrion to carnage, the self-proclaimed Kingdom of Callow had sent formal request to join the Grand Alliance.

The feeding frenzy that ensued was a heinous thing.

It’d been impossible to keep it quiet. Half a dozen Ashuran committees would be presented with the papers, and it was a certainty at least one of the sitters among them would have a loose tongue – and that was without even considering the Levantines, whose lords and ladies argued about even their own state secrets in broad daylight. The viciousness of the rhetoric that followed surprised even the First Prince, who had once believed she knew the worst the Assembly had to peddle. The Arlesites principalities had been lukewarm at the notion, many more concerned by the massing armies of the League than any matters Callowan, but the Alamans? Three different princes spent half an Assembly session railing at the heresy inherent in treating with a woman the House of Light had declared abomination. War on Callow must be prosecuted to the last holdout, every trace of Evil scoured from that backwards kingdom even if it took torches to see the business done. A choice had to be made, then, in how Cordelia would spend her influence. She could either make quiet concessions and assurances behind closed doors so that no coalition of princes numerous enough to unseat her formed, or she could call in every favour she’d accumulated since her crowning to have the proposal shoved through the Highest Assembly’s throat.

She’d been teetering on the brink of a decision, when Catherine Foundling called on her. That hard-eyed young woman bearing a mantle of power with eerie nonchalance, speaking of peace and treaties and alliances even as she raised thousands from the dead and split the sky asunder with her wrath. The greatest warlord of their age, with a string of impossible victories to her name – against her own people, yes, but also the Wasteland and the legendary hosts of the fae. She’d murdered a god, it was whispered. She had tricked a Choir into resurrecting her, laughed in the face of the mercy it offered. It took will, Cordelia knew, to deny even the shadow of the Heavens. That smiling girl in faded plate had borne the full weight of their hatred and walked away whole . Her madness must be one beyond measure. What kind of titanic arrogance did it take for a young girl to believe she knew better than even the Gods? And yet when she had sat across Cordelia in that strange shadowed world, she had made a reasonable offer. Abdication, if on her own terms. Alliance against the Empire, for assurances of Callowan independence. And so the First Prince had hesitated.

Then reality had come calling, of course. It was a tempting offer, as devils were wont to provide, but it would shatter the Grand Alliance. The Dominion’s highborn would never brook such a compromise willingly, and twisting their arm into accepting it would make it certain Levant would withdraw from the Alliance the moment the Tenth Crusade ended. The Thalassocracy might agree, as Magon Hadast misliked having his finest war fleets abroad while Nicae stirred near his belly, but it was no sure thing. And if Cordelia accepted the Callowan offer, backed it in the Highest Assembly and proposed it to the Grand Alliance only for it to be spurned by her own allies? She would be unseated within the month. For a moment she dared to walk the line anyway, to try to secure such an overwhelming diplomatic triumph that not a soul would be able to deny she had won the war with words instead of swords. It failed, of course. Foundling trusted her no more than Cordelia trusted the other woman, and seemed to have grown more reluctant to slay her people since the Liesse Rebellion – even if such a sacrifice would ultimately result in a lesser loss of lives. It had been the correct choice, she knew.

And still, sometimes, she thought of the cold bleakness in the Black Queen’s eye. Of the woeful oath she’d spoken. She did not sleep well, on those nights, if she slept at all. Her attendants had grown skilful at masking the circles around her eyes with powders, and brews by the palace alchemists kept her sharp when rest eluded her. Cordelia felt a well of gratitude for her handmaidens, smiling at the envoys she was sharing tea with. They would have pounced on even the smallest hint of weakness. Ashurans of the sixth citizenship tier were notoriously cutthroat.

“The matter of partition will need to be addressed in writing sooner or later, Your Most Serene Highness,” the tanned young man said.

Ahirom Seneqart, his name was. He was a frequent patron of the pleasure house nearest to the palace, and quite loquacious after sharing a bed with nubile young men. Never less than two. A man of great appetites, this one. Cordelia, as the ruling Princess of Salia, had naturally inherited the ancient web of informants that counted every madam and bawd in the capital. It was ancient Proceran custom to sift through the pillow-talk of foreign envoys to better outwit them.

“You are most correct, Sitter Ahirom,” the First Prince said.

No coquettish smile for this one. His tastes ran exclusively to the other sex, if his spending habits were any indication. Instead she sipped daintily at her cup – an Ashuran leaf from Smyrna, as a courtesy – before setting down the porcelain.

“Yet it strikes me as premature to set in stone such terms before the end of the crusade has come in sight,” she continued. “I have long admired the methods of the people of Ashur, who ever choose steady deliberation over hasty mistakes.”

“The people of Ashur have deliberated over this matter, First Prince,” Ahirom’s grim-faced companion replied. “The conclusion is being presented to you.”

The other speaker for the committee assigned the task of overseeing the Thalassocracy’s actions within the Grand Alliance. A woman, this one, and in Cordelia’s opinion quite the incompetent. Sitter Adonia had quite the imposing presence, tall and well-proportioned with long dark hair going down to the small of her back. She’d been a fleet commander of some renown, before rising two tiers in the wake of her crushing of a small armada of corsairs form the Tideless Isle. Quite good with a cutlass, allegedly, but in matters of diplomacy she was the proverbial stone hitting the glass house. She’d been appointed to the committee as a voice for the fleets, Cordelia reminded herself. She was not meant to be a proper envoy, merely the eyes of Ashur’s soldiery in the Grand Alliance.

“It was my understanding that Thalassina has yet to be breached,” Cordelia said, keeping her pleasant smile. “And that High Admiral Hadast’s glorious victory at Nok was followed by a withdrawal.”

A polite way to remind the jackals that requesting that the Wasteland’s only two ports be ceded to Ashur after the conquest of the Empire was somewhat laughable considering the Ashurans had yet to establish any significant presence on the ground. The raids from the coast had to be costing Malicia quite a bit, but they were only that – costly. The Empire still had nearly all its legions in the field, and the sack of Nok had evidently failed to trigger a war of usurpation.

“Let me be clearer,” Sitter Adonia said bluntly. “There will be no repeat of the crusader kingdoms. That method of dismantling Praes has failed. The Thalassocracy agrees with the Dominion’s proposal of forced deportation. When this is implemented, it is only natural for Ashur to inherit the coastal lands of Praes. No other are fit to hold them.”

Cordelia sipped at her tea in silence, eyeing Sitter Ahirom and his uncomfortable look. The implication that the other two signatories of the Grand Alliance would force Procer to agree to certain terms after the Tenth Crusade was impolitical to speak, even if it might be true in essence. Sitter Adonia had failed to mention, naturally, that the Levantines were not all behind that deportation proposal. A significant portion of the Majilis was arguing for the more moderate position of Praes being purged of its aristocracy and portioned into small Alliance protectorates. A few were arguing for outright massacre, but they had yet to gain any real support. Thank the Gods for that.

“My fellow sitter meant no slight, Most Serene Highness,” Sitter Ahirom said, smiling embarrassedly. “Ashur remains committed to all treaties signed, and would never seek to influence the decisions of the Alliance in an unseemly manner. We merely request that the Principate begin to consider the shape of the crusade’s aftermath.”

“A most reasonable request,” Cordelia mildly said. “Yet a full session of the Highest Assembly is not feasible to call with so many princes and princesses warring far from Salia. A treaty of this magnitude would require more than two thirds of the Assembly to be present and acquiescent, without any surrogate casting. You may rest assured, however, that I will raise the matter with the appropriate parties to prepare the grounds.”

“There’s no need to play coy, First Prince,” Sitter Adonia sneered. “We understand how these matters proceed. The committee is willing to recommend to Magon Hadast that the Red Flower Vales, along with Ankou and all attendant lands, be recognized as a natural extension of the Principate.”

It had been a very long time, Cordelia thought, since anyone had tried to bribe her with such open contempt. Setting aside that any occupation of Callowan land would turn into a brutal grind of constant banditry and rebellions – they were, for the Heavens’ sake, a people that prided themselves on inheriting grudges from generation to generation – Cordelia had absolutely no intention of annexing any part of Callow. Would she split it into several kingdoms? Absolutely. It was necessary to ensure that the Black Queen’s surviving partisans would not be able to mount any significant bid for power until her memory had faded among the populace and could no longer serve as an effective rallying cry. There were already separatist currents within the region, anyway. The northern baronies were near a kingdom of their own, the Duchy of Daoine was independent even when it bothered to pretend otherwise, and most the south had remained under aristocratic rule until mere years ago: the people there, unlike those who’d lived for decades under Imperial governors, had never entirely abandoned the old Callowan way of life. In the face of the insolent sitter’s gaffe, Cordelia allowed displeasure to touch her face for the first time since they’d begun this audience. She cocked an eyebrow and glanced at the other Ashuran.

“An interesting position,” she said, a mite coldly, “for the Thalassocracy to take. I am not in the habit of carelessly disposing of lands, nor do I take kindly to attempted bribes .”

The man looked like he’d plunged his hand into a brazier, and the look her sent at his colleague promised a hard conversation.

“My fellow sitter misspoke, Most Serene Highness,” he said. “It appears the coldness of these lands had inflicted her with some manner of fever. Please forget anything that was said.”

“I am saddened to hear that the weather has left Sitter Adonia indisposed,” Cordelia said pleasantly. “Perhaps she should be allowed to rest, I simply could not bear to be responsible for the ill-health of a treasured ally.”

The woman looked furious, but after locking eyes with the other envoy she bit her tongue.

“We would not impose on your patience any longer, First Prince,” the man said. “Yet before we take our leave, might I raise a small matter?”

Cordelia debated instructing them to pass the request along to one of her officials as a polite chiding for the utter lack of manners Adonia had offered, but after a moment decided against it. Best to have Sitter Ahirom owe her a small favour instead. He was more malleable clay than most among his committee, and holding the debt without ever calling it in would make him more hesitant to contradict her in sessions where the Levantines were in attendance.

“It would be my pleasure,” she said, demurely inclining her head.

Ahirom’s smile was rueful. He knew very well what he’d just surrendered.

“A delegation of Speakers from the homeland has recently arrived in the city,” he said, if she hadn’t known they were coming months before they ever came in sight of Salia. “They mean to consult with the House of Light on some matter of theology. Might I trouble you for the throne’s permission?”

The blonde Lycaonese brought the teacup to her lips, mind spinning. This was, in truth, something of an offered courtesy. She did not have the authority to forbid Proceran priests from holding council with the Ashuran cultists. Yet granting official permission would change the nature of the sessions held. It might become an official conclave, however unlikely such an affair was to take place – the Speakers were mystics prone to speaking in riddles, and had no patience for the many scriptures and theologies of the House of Light. In truth, the council would take place whatever she said. Best to give sanction, and in hosting the event on palace grounds ensure she had eyes and ears at the proceedings. If they turned to one of the many Salian cathedrals instead, inserting agents would be a tricky affair to accomplish without ruffling the feathers of the priests.

“You have it, of course,” Cordelia smiled. “It is but a small matter, Sitter Ahirom. I will naturally arrange accommodations, for I would not slight the famous sage-priests of Ashur.”

She set the affair aside, after the sitter left. She would keep an eye on the proceedings to ensure that whatever priestly squabble emerge did not threaten to spill over into Grand Alliance, but there were more pressing matters to see to. The Levantines were making noises about it being a breach of terms for their hosts to protect Proceran lands instead of taking the war to the Wasteland, ignoring the fact that they’d been asked to march on a Praesi army led by the Empress’ two finest generals, and she needed to convince the Princess of Tenerife she still had the full support of the throne without committing any more troops to the border with the League. Agnes sent for her just before nightfall. Cordelia did not hurry in a manner that would be unseemly, but immediately set aside any duties that were not essential. The moon was out when she joined her cousin in the palace gardens.

“Woe, Cordelia,” the Augur said. “Woe to the north and to the south. Sit and listen, before it is too late.”

Chapter 38: All According To (Redux)

“It is said that on the eve of the Maddened Fields, the Tyrant Theodosius consulted with the many Delosi soothsayers among his host. He asked them if he would find victory or defeat, should he give battle at dawn as he intended. The Delosi squabbled among themselves for hours, until the eldest among them looked the Tyrant in the eyes and spoke his answer: Yes.”
– Extract from ‘The Banquet of Follies, or, A Comprehensive History of the First League War’ by Prince Alexandre of Lyonis

I woke up, which was somewhat worrying considering I did not remember going to sleep. My fingers clasped the knife under my pillow even as my eyes opened, and with all the stunning majesty owed to my rank came flailing out of the sheets half naked with a blade in hand. It was somewhat embarrassing when I found myself completely alone in my palatial bedroom. Making a very dignified cape out of my bedsheets I took a wary look around and found nothing unusual – ah, save for one detail. There was sphere of misty ice on the stone table still strewn with papers we’d been using for planning. That hadn’t been there... Shit, what was the last thing I could remember? Walking out of the Garden of Crowns, then I drew a blank. And my head was pounding, had I gotten drunk last night? Hells, could I still have hangovers? It’d be just like Winter to take out half the fun of drinking and leave me with the worst part, but I couldn’t think of another time I’d had such a brutal headache. I’d had them once in a blue moon before I became the Squire and the Gods saw fit to relieve me of my monthlies – one of the few things for which I might actually owe thanks to Below for – but even then they’d been rare.

Had I been in a fight, then? I carefully checked my head for wounds and found no obvious ones. I did, however, stumble across what appeared to be granite coming out of the spot where my spine joined my skull. I swore on the fucking Hells, if Archer had gotten me wasted and talked me into some kind of pissing contest, oh Gods no it couldn’t be that. The stone didn’t wiggle at all when I pressed on it but I could feel it going deep into my head. Some kind of cylinder? Yeah, not even Indrani would have been on board for that. I dropped my nifty cape but kept the knife, because this was still Keter. Padding softly across the floor I neared the frozen sphere and immediately notice this was my own work. For one, it was much colder than ice was supposed to be. And though the surface was misting and weeping, there was no puddle of water around it as there would be if it’d been melting for a few hours. That had fae bullshit written all over it. I leant over and wiped away the surface, eyes narrowing when I found there were objects inside. Cards, by the looks of it. Three of them, over each other with room in between. I couldn’t quite make out the one furthest in, so I picked up the globe to turn it over.

It remained stuck to the table, as if nailed to it. Frowning, I tugged harder only to hastily stop when I heard a crack from the stone supports beneath. I checked under and found the base of the table had a sharp little fissure going through it. Shit, I thought, setting down the knife. Maybe if I pretended it’d never happened Athal would be too polite to point it out. I decided not to patch it up with ice, since it’d essentially be admitting I was responsible and the kingdom’s coffers were running low even without having to pay for whatever fortune an antique Keteran table was worth. So, the sphere had been made so it couldn’t be removed. Presumably, there was another way to get at the cards. I was already started on bad ideas for the days, so I might as well try to shove my hand in and see what happened.

“Gods that’s cold,” I hissed, as my fingers went straight in.

I fished the top card out and shook out the wetness, which apparently wasn’t making the ink on it run. Was that from Indrani’s deck? The Page of Cups stared back with his little smirk, but the interesting part was what’d been written on the card. No one else in the Woe had cursive this horrid, so it was clearly my own.

It was you.

So, I’d screwed with my own mind instead of having it done to me. That was... good?

Ask about Isabella’s deception. Don’t force the cards, you savage.

Ah, Past Catherine had evidently decided to be a smug bitch about this. Fuck her and her cryptic riddles. I flipped the card and found another few words.

Skein. Thief of – that was probably meant to be a star, but I wasn’t exactly an artist. Shoddy work, Past Catherine, you could have asked Hakram for help. And, to end it, Spellblade.

Named, evidently. The Thief was supposed to be keeping an eye on this very palace, though if I’d encountered her since King Edward’s warning I had no memory of it. I did not even need to know what this plan was to already know it was terrible.

PS, fuck you Future Catherine stars are hard to draw.

I’d have to ask Masego how feasible it was to arrange a ritual so I could go back and deck myself in the face. Who knew, maybe I already had and that was why she was being such a cranky asshole about the whole thing. I got the other two cards out, but they were encased in black ice. Bearing my worst enemy’s instructions in mind, I didn’t try to force them open. The working seemed to be have been tied off, anyway. The power within the ice was slowly trickling away, though one of them would run out long before the other. I left them on the table and got dressed. I’d helpfully – wait, no, that was too neatly folded so probably Hakram – left clothes atop the dresser last night. A green and silver tunic, with trousers of the same make. My plate was nowhere in sight, but what looked like Indrani’s spare set of chain mail was waiting next to my boots. That was... unusual. The time where a full suit of plate had slowed me down had ended around when I’d become strong enough to accidentally break tables. Which I had not in this particular place, for the record. Archer was taking the fall for that if anyone asked. I clasped the Mantle of Woe around my shoulders and idly ran a metaphorical chain that bound Diabolist to it, finding it already taut. She was nowhere close, then, and given the lack of windows in my room following the chain’s direction told me nothing about where she’d gone.

I was among the first to wake, but not the first. Vivienne was already glaring down at a cup of tea, a half-finished pastry in her plate. No servants in sight, though the table was bursting with a morning banquet. I touched the cards in the inner pocket of my cloak, right beneath my pipe and wakeleaf stash, and plopped myself down next to her.

“So, I don’t know if you’re aware,” I said, reaching for what looked like fresh bread. “But I think we tried to get clever right last night.”

“There was playing card nailed to my bedpost when I woke up,” Thief admitted. “It told me to look in my bag when Hakram joins us.”

“Can you, uh, remember anything from yesterday afternoon or after?” I asked.

She eyed me cautiously.

“Skein,” she said. “Prophecy by spun thread. It’s all I was told I could say.”

“So there’s a seer on the board,” I mused.

That did explain why apparently whatever the plan was it had to be kept secret even from us. Maybe they could only predict through conscious decisions? Black had theorized that was the Augur’s weakness, in Procer. Also that she didn’t always control what she saw, but that tended to be a staple of oracle Names. What the Gods believed was important and what mortals did were not necessarily the same thing.

“If I asked you about Isabella’s deception, would it mean anything to you?” I asked.

Vivienne’s brow rose.

“Nothing,” she said.

Way to be specific, Past Catherine. I’d finished buttering my bread and was struggling to drip honey on it without spilling when Masego joined us. My eyes widened when he came in sight, which was mildly ironic considering the reason they did: one of the glass orbs that served as his own was missing.

“Hierophant,” I delicately said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but-”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Masego grunted.

He reached for the pot of tea, missing it by half an inch. Huh. I had wondered about his depth perception nowadays. Vivienne kindly poured him a cup and he settled into his seat, casting half a baleful glare at the world.

“So, can you see through the missing-“

He muttered in the arcane tongue and my breakfast caught fire. That twat, I’d just gotten it the way I liked it. I put out the flames with a twist of Winter, but now it was all soggy and disgusting.

“Fine, be that way,” I said. “I was just worrying for you.”

“I know where you stash your wakeleaf,” he warned me.

That was a grave threat, and with the elegance of a tried diplomat I changed the subject.

“I don’t suppose anyone knows where Diabolist is,” I asked.

“No idea,” Vivienne admitted. “Masego?”

“I am going to drink this cup of tea,” Hierophant announced. “And greatly savour the accompanying silence. Shatter that dream at your peril.”

Vivienne discretely covered her face before I could catch her smiling, wily veteran that she was. Hierophant finished his cup in the quiet, broken only when Hakram finally joined us.

“Isabella’s deception,” I said as he strolled into the hall. “Ring a bell?”

“Good morning, Catherine,” he said amusedly.

“Don’t you give me lip,” I said. “We can’t know who came up with this mess, but we can be sure we wouldn’t have gone ahead without your agreement. As far as I’m concerned, this is entirely on you until proven otherwise.”

“She’s taking to the works of queenship rather well, isn’t she?” Vivienne told the orc.

“Give it a few years and my Name will become the Scapegoat,” Hakram gravelled. “It does ring a bell, Cat. It refers to Isabella the Mad’s scheme when she fought Theodosius as the Maddened Fields.”

I finished buttering my second bit of bread, casting a wary eye at Hierophant.

“I’m listening,” I said. “Elaborate.”

“Theodosius was said to have soothsayers, or more likely a great deal of spies,” Adjutant continued, grabbing a seat at my side. “So General Isabella secretly gave her commanders wildly differing plans to carry out during the battle. She turned it into an axiom, when she wrote her book after retirement. ‘The heart of warfare is deception. Therefore, the generals who can deceive even themselves are invincible.’”

I sighed. So we were now taking operational advice from a woman whose moniker was the Mad . Lovely. What were the odds that there were actually several plans and most of them were false? Godsdamned me. I glanced at Vivienne, who was hiding away something in her palm with her other hand. Right, she’d been told to take out a card from her ‘bag’ when Hakram arrived, hadn’t she? She crumpled the card.

“Now,” she said.

Hierophant rose to his feet without warning, and flared with power as he barked an incantation. There were six doors to the dining hall. Every single one of them closed, glimmering with light.

“Domain, Catherine,” he said.

I bit into my bread. Didn’t get much out of the taste and even less nourishment, but the texture was nice. Melted in the mouth. Even as I chewed, I opened the floodgates and Winter came out to play. The darkness fell like a curtain over all the world. I felt the small bundles of warmth that were the Woe as everything froze with an ugly snapping sound, and herded the worst of it away from them. They still shivered. Our visitor was granted no such protection. Flesh hardened, bones shattered and the Thief of Stars went still. She spoke not a word, but in the darkness above a constellation of stars was birthed. The King’s Crown, I thought. Back home they said it was an auspicious sign for the rulers of Callow. I swallowed and waited. Was it an aspect? Probably. Or at least the remnants of one. But in the end a thief was a thief, and I was the Sovereign of Moonless Night. I had all the time in the world, here. A dozen eternities passed, and one by one the stars winked out.

Winter devoured everything, given enough time.

When the darkness left, the Revenant was revealed to our sight. Shivering, Masego wove binding sorceries around her through hushed whispers as I eyed the frozen remnants of my breakfast with distaste. So much for that. Within my cloak one of the cards shattered, the casing’s unmaking accelerated by the touch of my domain. I took it out, and found my writing spread across the Four of Pentacles.

Do you have the Thief?

There were two bundles of words beneath the question.

Yes, Zeze breaks first rune.

No, find Archer.

I flipped it and found a single word on the other side.

Lark.

Enlightening stuff, Past Catherine. Good work, you riddling bag of crazy. What the hells had I learned about the Skein that made this elaborate a plan seem like a good idea? Everything I’d been taught about scheming screamed that multiple steps were a recipe for failure.

“I woke up with a list of questions on the Six of Swords,” Hakram said. “I assume she is the one I need to ask.”

I put back the card and frowned. Well, it wasn’t like interrogating one of us would help. We’d screwed with our own memories.

“Masego, you need to break the first rune,” I said.

Hierophant’s lone eye swivelled towards me.

“The artefact in your head,” he said. “I had wondered the purpose of it. Everyone else has a spell instead, but I suppose you would not so easily be enchanted.”

“We shoved a magic stone into my skull,” I said, quite uncomfortable at the notion. “Oh Gods. That won’t have any ill-effects, will it?”

“Your brain is mostly decorative,” Hierophant assured me.

“Could have told you that ,” Vivienne murmured.

I was going to start keeping count of her instances of sedition, I decided. Probably not a list, since she’d absolutely steal it, but there had to be a way.

“Just don’t blow up my skull, Zeze,” I sighed. “I’m not sure it’d grow back.”

His lips thinned.

“If you’d just let me-“

“We have a rule, Masego,” I said patiently. “What is that rule?”

“We don’t vivisect friends,” he muttered mulishly. “Even when we could learn the most interesting things from it.”

He padded over and without any warning placed his palm against the back of my head.

“Oh,” he said. “That is skilfully-”

–

“There’s a Revenant overseeing every palace,” I told the others. “If my source is to be believed, ours is the Thief of Stars.”

“That is a much snappier Name than Vivi’s,” Indrani noted. “Have we considered trading in? This outfit needs fresh blood. Corpse. Eh, you know what I mean.”

I met Hakram’s eyes across the table. Idly, he shuffled Archer’s deck of cards though the game they’d played before Thief and I returned was long abandoned.

“Nothing we can do about that,” I said. “Especially if the Skein really is guiding all of them.”

I very carefully did not begin to ponder how we might catch her, even though she would need to be at least temporarily removed from the board if we were to have any chance of success. Chaos was our only best tool here. To cheat an oracle, you had to cheat yourself. We would need a touchstone, but also a way to multiply and scatter the possible trails. And, to tip it all over, a blindfolded blade. I turned to Diabolist.

“Akua,” I said. “I never thought I’d say this, but I need you to scheme.”

The smile on her lips was less than reassuring.

–

“-Catherine,” Vivienne said.

My eyes rolled back into their proper place.

“I’m here,” I said, brushing away her hand. “This is... going according to plan, maybe? I think Hakram needs to ask her the questions. She’s part of this, one way or another.”

“You’ll need to unfreeze her mouth first,” Adjutant said.

I rolled my shoulder, more out of habit than need, and turned my gaze to the Thief of Stars. Like King Edward she looked almost alive. Quite a bit younger than him, too. Tanned, leathery skin and sun-bleached blond hair in a single tress going down her back. I did not recognize the cut or cloth of her short-sleeved tunic, though admittedly that meant little. Exerting my will, I freed her jaws and tongue without a word.

“You people are the worst,” the Thief of Stars said in garbled Chantant.

Ugh, Proceran. Just my luck.

“Still fresh and exciting to us,” Vivienne drawled in Lower Miezan. “Hakram?”

Looming over her small form, the orc cleared his throat.

“What does Threefold Reflection mean?” he asked.

“If I were not bound, I would have taken your eyes by now,” the Revenant conversationally said. “It’s one thing to be bound here, another to suffer your tender attentions twice . I do have my pride.”

My eyes narrowed.

“We’ve done this before,” I said.

“I can see why you’re the leader,” she said. “Your wits are truly peerless.”

“Masego,” I said. “I’m not sure how to phrase this delicately, but-“

Without replying he traced a pair of runes out of red light and the Thief of Stars hissed.

“You little Wasteland twat,” she said.

“Compelling truth is not objectively possible by sorcery,” Hierophant said. “But this should compel her to answer and forbid her from consciously speaking something she knows to be false.”

“What does Threefold Reflection mean?” Hakram patiently repeated.

“There are three overlain palaces,” the Revenant snarled. “The thresholds meld.”

“How many Praesi delegates are there?” Adjutant continued.

“Forty-three,” she said.

“Where is Archer of the Woe?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Why had he asked that? No, the important part was why that’d been a question. If we’d needed to know where Indrani was right now, it’d be written on a card. So that couldn’t be the point. If us having that information wasn’t the point, then most likely the question was meant to establish she didn’t have that information either. That must matter, to some extent. Did the Skein need that knowledge to predict us? The memory Masego had freed had involved thinking we needed a touchstone. Archer wasn’t who I’d pick for something like that, but maybe that was the point. Akua’s still missing , I thought. Too many parts were still unknown to have a proper guess.

“Is the Empress currently within the Threefold Reflection?” Hakram asked.

“Yes,” the Thief of Stars said. “Gods, you could at least change the questions.”

I hummed. So, same questions. We’d meant for us to have the same information we got from her last time. So we’d make the same plan out of them? That was a chancy roll of the dice.

“That was all the questions,” Adjutant told us. “It seems unwise to simply leave her here, if we are to act now.”

“That one’s mine to solve,” Thief noted. “No card, mind you, but it’s the obvious solution.”

She got up and laid a hand on the Revenant’s arm. Nothing happened. Vivienne sighed.

“ Hold ,” she said.

While the sight of the undead vanishing was interesting in its own way, it was Hakram’s body-wide twitch that took my attention. He winced, and I recognized from the look on his face the signs of a dawning headache.

“Well, I know what we need to do,” he said. “We’re going to find Athal, and then we’re going to start a fire.”

Chapter 39: Hakram’s Plan

“My dear prince, why would I settle for merely being on the right side of history when I could be on all sides of it instead?”
– Extract from the minutes of the Conference of the Blessed Isle, between the Shining Prince Harry Alban and Dread Emperor Traitorous

Black had once told me that people could get used to nearly anything, if it happened regularly for long enough. It’d been while we were having one of our evening lessons in Ater, talking of the many reasons why there’d never been a serious attempt by the Tower to forbid diabolism across the Wasteland. It was one of those little truths he enjoyed that seemed vague but ended up relevant surprisingly often. To demonstrate: arson. No matter what rumours Robber kept spreading, I didn’t actually enjoy setting things on fire. Sure, it was one of the most frequently used tools in my arsenal even if it did have the nasty tendency of collateral damage. But it wasn’t, like, my first resort. There’d even been a time where’d I’d been somewhat conflicted at the notion of dropping goblinfire on the head of the latest Named, army, entity – I supposed with the Tenth Crusade in full swing I was due to add ‘continental coalition’ to the list – that was after my head on a pike. Not without reason, either. When you tossed a match onto goblinfire, the closest thing there was to control available was damage control. Sadly, as I helped Vivienne pour oil on a wooden frame, I was forced to admit that I had gotten used to arson. It was just one of those things. I still wasn’t an advocate of tactically setting fire to things, mind you, unlike your average sapper. I was, if anything, lukewarm to the notion.

“You look like you’re trying to convince yourself of something very hard,” Thief noted.

“I’m just saying it’s disingenuous to call me a pyromaniac when I have actual pyromaniacs in my employ,” I told her. “It trivializes the word to use it like that. Is that really so hard to understand?”

The other woman cocked an eyebrow.

“I’m going to pretend you never said that,” she informed me. “And hope Hakram fixes whatever is wrong with your...”

She paused.

“... everything,” she finally said. “What’s wrong with your everything.”

“Just pour the godsdamned oil,” I sighed. “I still don’t understand why we can’t just have Masego wizard it, but let’s be generous and assume there’s a reason.”

Setting fire to a palace that was mostly marble was fairly tricky, but we had it mostly under control. The walls might be stone, but the largest rooms all had crisscrossing wooden beams beneath the rafters to hang tapestries and decorations from. Vivienne had climbed her way up, but I wasn’t in the mood for wall-climbing in chain mail so instead I’d reached for Winter and spread a ramp of ice that took me there. Hakram had insisted that there be at least three different sources for the fire, so we’d rinsed and repeated twice before seeing to this particular dining hall. We’d yet to run into a single white-robed servant, which was a little odd. Had we told them to clear out last night? It wasn’t like our breakfast table would have appeared out of thin air. Thief emptied the remnants of her jug and wiped her hands on her leathers, disappearing the empty receptacle without a word. I didn’t know if there was a limit to how much her ‘bag’ could hold, but if there was she’d never spoken of it. Considering she’d once dropped a fleet of barges in the way of the Fifteenth, I supposed it would take a truly spectacular amount of knick-knacks to take up all of that space. And that was without even considering that at some point she’d stolen the sun.

“It’s done,” she said, eyeing her still-wet fingers with irritation.

“We’ll still need to actually light them,” I noted.

“Athal first, allegedly,” she said, and without any ceremony leapt down to the floor.

She managed that landing in perfect silence, to my mild envy. If I did that it’d sound like I was running around with a dozen rings of keys. I slid down the ramp smoothly, though in truth that had more to do with my shaping of the ice than any skill on my part. Hard to fall down the stairs when you controlled where they were. The ramp shattered into shards behind me and I brushed off a few pieces from my shoulder.

“Think Hakram found him yet?” I asked.

“He’s got the aspect for it,” Vivienne shrugged. “I’m more interested in why we’re starting a fire in the first place.”

“Smoke will be visible from outside,” I said. “Could be to draw the patrols.”

“We could have moved quietly instead,” the dark-haired thief pointed out.

“Not so sure about that,” I mused. “Mind you, we can sort of manage quiet. But against a seer? As long as the patrols are out there, a single message is all it takes for them to be in our way.”

“That assumes they’re all coming into the palace,” Vivienne said. “The Binds, at least, are sapient. It would be an elementary mistake.”

“We don’t really know how they function, Vivienne,” I pointed out. “It might be that the Dead King gave them the order to check on disturbances and they literally can’t disobey him regardless of context.”

“Guesswork will only take us in circles,” she sighed. “Let’s find Hakram. One assumes he knows the next step in this cavalcade of merriment.”

We ran into Hierophant first, as it happened. He’d been weaving spells at the other two bonfires, just small spurts of flame that’d get the blaze started after long enough had passed. His mood had not improved since breakfast, and he merely grunted at us on his way to the hall we’d just left.

“Nice to see you too, Zeze,” I called out as he cleared the corner.

I wasn’t a fool. I’d waited until he could no longer aim easily at my wakeleaf. Not even fifteen minutes we found Hakram navigating the corridors with Athal at his side, the dark-haired Host looking rather harried. Had he been sleeping?

“Great Majesty, honoured guest,” the man greeted us, bowing low. “I was told you had need of my services?”

“It will wait until Hierophant has joined us,” Adjutant gravelled.

I did not gainsay him, since I had no idea where we were going from here.

“I have a question or two for you, until then,” I told the pale man. “Did we happen to speak last night?”

He blinked in surprised.

“Indeed, Great Majesty,” he said. “You were wondering as to the steps the Crown took to assure your safety within these walls.”

Well, that was ominous.

“Anything in, uh, particular?” I probed.

“You were quite curious as to the nature of the measures that would be taken in the face of a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or a fire,” Athal told me. “Do you not remember this, honoured one?”

“I’ve had a lot on my mind,” I muttered.

Most of which I did not remember, apparently. So the fire had a payoff beyond just serving as a distraction, probably. Before I could think of a way to delicately ask what, in a pure hypothetical, would happen if the Silent Palace caught fire, Hierophant joined us. Masego took one look at us, hid his hand behind his back, and I felt a small flare of sorcery.

“Lord Hierophant,” Athal said, bowing once more.

“The palace caught fire, Host,” he said.

The dark-haired servant blinked.

“ How ?” he asked, aghast. “ When ?”

I clapped him on the shoulder.

“Listen,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. Those sound like details above our pay grade.”

“Are you not a queen, Great Majesty?” he said in a strangled voice.

“And, as a queen, I’m deciding this is above my pay grade,” I sagely said. “Obviously we can’t stay in a palace that’s on fire. That’d be dangerous. So were are we headed, my good man?”

“There is a passage to outside,” Athal said. “I will lead you through it, if it please you.”

He sounded a little dazed. Well, I didn’t blame him. Lots of that going around today. I checked on the last card in my cloak, but the ice casing had yet to melt. Blindly forward it was, then. The Host led us deeper into the palace until we reached the end of a corridor with two opposite-leading doors. Instead of taking one of them, Athal took out a small knife from his sleeve and cut his palm open before smearing his blood on the wall. Even as runes lit up I rose an eyebrow. Why did people always go for the palm? It made it so much harder to hold things afterwards, and it wasn’t like hand blood was better than forearm blood or anything. What had previously appeared to be a wall vanished into nothingness, leaving only the blood-red runes hanging in the air for a few moments before they vanished as well. Masego let out a noise that implied he now felt like sticking around and having a closer look so I discretely kicked him in the shin.

“There was no need for that,” he whispered.

“Maybe not,” I replied just as low. “But someone screwed with my breakfast this morning so I’m all moody now.”

He half-glared at me, which to be frank was more amusing than intimidating.

“If you would follow me, honoured guests,” Athal said.

The threshold led into what appeared to be a dark tunnel, though the moment the Host stepped within magelights began to light in sequence. By the look of them, we were headed down. Thief went still at my side.

“I forgot something in my rooms,” she announced. “Go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

I cast her a look but she shook her head. So it’d been nothing she could share.

“Honoured one,” the dark-haired man said. “Please do not. The guards will be arriving soon, and smother the flames long before anything within your rooms can be lost.”

I blinked and Thief was gone.

“She’s hard of hearing,” I told Athal. “And not very bright. Also, frequently mutinous. I’m going to start a ledger.”

The last part had no bearing on the situation, but I felt like it needed to be said for posterity’s sake.

“I must find her,” the Host gravely said. “It would be a grave breach of hospitality if-“

“Oh, look,” I said. “Adjutant is sick.”

There was a heartbeat of silence. Hakram coughed into his fist.

“I am,” he loyally said.

“It’s the fire,” I told Athal. “Orcs are notoriously afraid of it. We have to get him out of here before it gets worse.”

I felt Masego twitch and shot him a glare. Now is not the time to be a pedant, Zeze. Do not contradict my blatant lies.

“I feel faint,” the orc added dutifully. “Like a dove. A dove that is sick.”

Way to sell it, Hakram. Glad to have you on the team.

“We must make haste, then,” Athal said.

He looked like he very much wanted to express scepticism but was too polite to do as much. Ah, the joys of diplomacy. We followed him as he briskly led us into the tunnel, and I pretended not to hear Masego mutter no they are not under his breath. The entire passage felt drenched in sorcery to my senses, heavily enough I could barely sense the magelights when I stood next to them. The Host apparently knew the way by rote, as when a crossroads appeared he led us down the left corridor without hesitation. All right, so Thief was going after something. She’d been necessary to the first part of this mess because we’d needed her to put the Thief of Stars into her bag – she’d also given Masego the signal to close the doors, but we could have given that card to anyone. Diabolist and Archer were still out there up to the Gods knew what, and since there’d been no instructions to seek them most likely the next part could be accomplished by Adjutant, Hierophant and myself alone. The Empress was still inside her palace, so that was likely where we should be headed when we emerged from this. Alone? Ah, that mighe have been the whole point of Thief splitting off: that Athal would have to go after her, leaving us to our own devices after opening the passage.

The thing was, a plan with this many moving parts wasn’t going to work. I should have known that last night, but I’d gone ahead with it anyway – which either meant the plan wasn’t supposed to work, or that I was missing something. All pithy Imperial quotes about planning aside, there were too many points of failure for even the sections of this I was presuming had worked as intended. What if the Thief of Stars had taken a card, or added a fake one? To play the rebel’s advocate, it might be that the Revenant wasn’t supposed to meddle in our affairs. Only listen in on our conversations. But that was quite the mighty if , and it was making a lot of assumptions about the agency of all involved. It had to be about the Skein, one way or another. Why else screw with our own memories? Thief had called what they did ‘prophecy by spun thread’.

I’d mentally considered the enemy Revenant to be an oracle, but it didn’t quite sound right. No seer was omniscient, even those who also bore a Name, and the source of their visions tended to give a hint about their limitations. For example, as a heroine the Augur most likely took her cues from Above. I had a nifty little booklet from Black that was half speculation half observation on the nature of her abilities, which were terrifyingly broad in scope but also as fatally flawed as those of any other Named. The Eyes were convinced her limit was that she could only foresee things that were already in motion – or, as my teacher had put it, initiated decisions chains . It was why the Empire’s once-frequent assassination attempts on the First Prince and some of the most key supporters of her regime had always failed. So the Empire had managed to catch diplomatic couriers and even the odd tactical coup by leaving agents in place with no instructions except taking advantage of presented opportunities. Except it wasn’t actually that clean-cut, because there’d been an attempt on the First Prince’s life that fell under those characteristics two months after Second Liesse and it had failed. Black had amended the theory to note that it was feasible the Augur could make two kinds of prophecies.

The first would be those she got handed by Above, about whatever Above cared at that time. Those were likely to be significantly more detailed, but also significantly rarer. The Heavens couldn’t repeatedly put their finger to the scales like that without enabling the opposition to do the same – and more than that, the Augur was only one of many tools. They wouldn’t send her a flock of eagles or whatever she read the future through when whatever that prediction was about could be handled just as well by a hero they’d sent in to take care of it. If the likes of Black and Malicia had been handing out prophecies to their people, I had no doubt that trusted underling or not there would have been predictions given anyway. Just to be sure. But heroes were already supposed to win, weren’t they? Unless that loss was part of the story, meant to pay off down the line. And the whole point of the wager known as Creation was that the Gods didn’t know which of them would win their pissing contest. Black had a whole half-page of scribbles going on about how the Augur could likely read ‘Fate’ as seen by the Heavens but couldn’t go beyond those bounds, making heroes a blind spot of sorts, but in my opinion it was simpler than that: the Augur’s Role was that of a coordinator. She got the message out so troops would stand at the right place at the right time, but she wasn’t supposed to actually guarantee a victory.

She couldn’t, I suspected. If the game was that blatantly rigged, Below would have whelped out an oracle of their own to check her by now. Above had to toe the line.

The second kind of prophecies would be those she sought out herself. It was on record that the Augur had wielded visions to help her cousin the First Prince win that same title on the battlefield against the other contenders in the Proceran civil war. It was dubious the Heavens have much of a shit about Procerans slaughtering each other – if they had, a hero would have popped out to take care of the mess – so the Augur herself had likely sought out those visions. And that was the interesting part, because then she was acting as a person and not a messenger – which meant she was fallible. Odds were that was when the decision chain limit came into play, but that was too low a bar. She couldn’t be impossibly hard to interpret, since she was capable of passing coherent military information along to the Iron Prince that was usable for campaigning. That left the oldest of mortal failings: she only had one set of eyes, metaphorical or not. If she had to seek out the vision about something, it followed she couldn’t see all things at all times. And that meant she could be fooled, if she was looking at the wrong unfolding plot. It wasn’t a flawless solution, as Black had written in his notes.

If the failure was too large in scope, she’d likely receive one of the first kind of visions to make up for it. Coordinator, yes, but perhaps also a safeguard.

Sadly, I did not have one of foremost namelore experts alive and an Empire’s worth of informants to help me puzzle out how the Skein’s future-telling abilities worked. We had something of an idea, evidently, because Vivienne had given me a hint earlier. How we’d learned that was impossible to puzzle out at the moment, so I’d set the question aside to pick at later. What I wanted to know, as a stepping stone, was whether the Skein had been a hero or a villain while alive – or even one of those Named that floated somewhere in between, cast into one Role or the other depending on the story they came in touch with. Neutral was the wrong word for it: there could be no such thing as neutrality in the Game of the Gods. Even objecting to the rules was to take a side, in its own way. I was jarred out of my thoughts when we finally reached the end of the passage, Athal smearing blood on solid stone to open it up once more. We emerged into daylight, the four of us blinking until we’d acclimated again.

I glanced around curiously. We weren’t on the wide avenues surrounding the Hall of the Dead. No, this was the base of a rampart. The innermost set of it, right before the ring of palaces. Near the outer edge of the Garden of Crowns, though I could see our target from where we stood. The Threefold Reflection, as King Edward had implied, was a pyramid of faded white stone that held so much sorcery it was almost visible to the naked eye.

“Guards will soon come to guide you to a temporary resting place,” the dark-haired Host informed us. “I must return to find the Lady Thief, but I implore you to remain here until your escorts arrive.”

I smiled and put my hand over my heart.

“On my teacher’s honour,” I said.

A flicker of amusement passed through the man’s eyes. Yeah, I wouldn’t have bought that in his place either.

“May your hours be fruitful, Great Majesty,” Athal said, and after a bow went back into the dark.

The three of us stood there for a moment, and eventually I cleared my throat.

“Hakram?” I asked.

“My health has improved, thank you,” the orc drily said.

I rolled my eyes.

“I assume you remember the plan,” I said.

“I do,” Adjutant agreed. “I must proceed alone. The pyramid has three gates, leading into three different intertwined palaces. You are to take the western gate, while I take the southern one.”

“We’re splitting up,” I slowly said. “Oh Hells. This just keeps getting better.”

“Look on the bright side, Cat,” Adjutant grinned, ivory fangs bared. “How can they foil our master plan if even we don’t know our master plan?”

I much preferred, I decided, being on the other side of that brand of quips.

Chapter 40: Vivienne’s Plan

“A battle is, in my experience, a handful of hours where one of two generals proceeds to destroy his own army while the other simply happens to be there.”
– Prince Fernando of Salamans

For anyone to come up with the underlying principles of the Threefold Reflection and to then decide someone should live in there required an impressive amount of dementia, so in a sense it made sense that Neshamah had built the damned thing. I’d seen drawing of the pyramids that could be found in northern Praes – Wolof, in particular, was known for them – but this one was of a decidedly different bent. Stone instead of mud, for a start, but where the Soninke works tended to be broad and gently sloped this one was tall and unpleasantly angular. I suspected if the monuments were going to have anything in common, it was the amount of bodies buried beneath them. Akua had been vague about the rituals that still took place by the city she’d once been in line to inherit, but Masego had been disturbingly informative about the most infamous atrocities associated with the place. It took a particular kind of people to decide it was a going idea to sacrifice a few thousand people to make something called a ‘plague cauldron’. The only reason I was pretty sure Diabolist had never been taken down there to murder puppies as a kid was that after the whole ‘murder your childhood friend’ party it’d feel like a bit of a let-down.

I pulled the Mantle of Woe closer around my shoulders after running a metaphysical finger down the chain binding Akua. Still pulled taut. Wherever she was, it wasn’t anywhere close. After Hakram informed us we were meant to split the group in two to take different doors – the western gate for Masego and I, while it was the southern one for him – we’d wasted no time dawdling around. A trail of smoke going up into the sky of Keter made it plain that our work there had not been discreet, which I assumed to be the point. Hierophant was not in a chatty mood as we passed through the colonnades surrounding the pyramid proper at a brisk pace. Whether it was our piecemeal fiasco of a plan or the loss of an eye that had him in a tiff I didn’t know, but either way I couldn’t blame him. There was much I despised about what I’d become through Winter, but I would feel... naked without the eldritch senses of my constructed body. I’d come to take what they told me for granted: tasting heat and fear, hearing beyond that even of a Named. That muted sense I had of the intents of others, which straddled the line between sorcerous boon and a flood of details put together I would never have noticed without Winter. All that, and I was only a bastard child of Arcadia.

No wonder the fae had reputation for exquisite machinations, if they had all these senses and more: it was like being the only person in a pitch-black room that could see in the dark.

“Our gate,” Hierophant said, breaking our stretch of silence.

I nodded slowly. It’d been too much to hope, I supposed, that it would be wide open for us. Instead the two slabs of sun-drenched stone remained tightly shut, which was admittedly something of a problem.

“I’m guessing hammering through isn’t an option,” I half-guessed.

“We have no hammer,” Masego reminded me gently. “And even should we employ sorcery, it would be loud and difficult to open this through force.”

Figured. It wasn’t like the Dead King bothered to build on anything but titanic scale.

“Maybe there’s a magic word,” I suggested.

The dark-skinned man inclined his head in concession.

“Neshamah,” he tried.

Nothing. Yeah, I supposed it would be a little like a Callowan wizard using ‘revenge’ as the key to a magic door. There probably had been at least one that embarrassingly lame in the past, but it wasn’t common practice.

“Could you-“ I began, but he raised his hand.

“Quiet,” he murmured.

His brow creased, and after a moment he traced a rune against his temple. A dot of light came out, and in a streak came before the both of us. It changed into an illusionary card, the Eight of Wands, and on the projection a few words in Old Miezan were written. I winced. I’d never paid as close attention as I should to those lessons – I’d had a deal with another girl where I traded her translations for my history essays – and I was horribly rusty besides.

“Translation?” I asked.

“Sparrow,” Masego said. “And I am instructing myself to remove the third rune from your artefact.”

“That’s skipping one,” I noted. “Last time was the first.”

“It occurs to me,” Hierophant, “that the confusion here might be the purpose instead of a mistake.”

Yeah, I’d come to that conclusion myself a while back. I wouldn’t work off anything this messy and complex if I had a feasible alternative, which once more took me back to the soothsaying Revenant awaiting us inside: the Skein. I was starting to get the impression we were not playing shatranj with the oracle so much as tossing handfuls of pebbles at the board and hoping one ended up tipping over the king.

“That aside,” I said. “Did you engrave a card into your own head?”

“Several,” Masego replied. “It seems wiser than keeping them at hand, where they could be witnessed. Aunt Eudokia always told me that treason is the one thing one should leave no paper trail for.”

That might be true, but it didn’t make him any less of a show-off.

“All right, Zeze,” I said. “Magic fingers it is.”

With a put-upon sigh he rested his palm against the back of my head and-

–

“The palace isn’t a maze,” Vivienne said, elbows on the table. “Not in the traditional sense. There’s a chamber at the centre with a guiding artefact.”

Akua got it before any of us, which did not strike me as odd. Masego might boast a broader base of sorcerous knowledge, but these kind of traps were as milk and honey to Praesi highborn.

“Three palaces, reflections in overlap,” she said. “The artefact is able to decide which threshold connects to which across the span entire.”

“It looks like three wheels on a stick,” the other Callowan said. “With pieces of twine hanging through, tying places together.”

The look on Masego’s face at the revelation was pure avarice. Godsdamnit. His mild magpie tendencies when it came to artefacts had only increased since we’d technically robbed the Sahelians of their most precious artefact. In our defence, Akua had been in the box and it’d been just lying there. Finders keepers, right?

“You found the room at the centre,” Hakram said, cutting at the heart of the matter.

Vivienne nodded.

“More accurately, I was allowed to,” she said.

“You ran into the guarding Revenant,” I guessed.

“He’s called the Skein,” the dark-haired woman said. “And before getting deeper into that, I have a few questions for our foreign experts. What can you tell me about ratlings?”

Indrani set down her cup, looking interested for the first time in a while.

“The species?” she said. “Nothing too deep. Lycaonese call them ‘the Plague’ because they never stop being hungry. Just like a disease, they’ll wipe out everything even if it starves them down the line.”

“Said hunger has been speculated to be caused by their unusual physiology,” Masego added. “They never cease growing. They are birthed as bipedal rodents smaller than humans, and have no theoretical check on how large they can be save for each other. The Chain of Hunger is so named because ratlings will promptly devour each other when there are no other sources of immediate sustenance. Father believes the entire species is a kind of strange Demiurgian phenomenon of unknown purpose.”

My eyes turned to Akua, who’d been standing a little outside of the Woe’s circle this entire time.

“Wolofite records agree with the Lord Warlock,” she said. “There are scrolls dating back to Triumphant’s campaign in the region that speak of a time in the life of their kind called the ‘metamorphosis’, where ratlings will transition from bipedal beings of observed sapience into the animalistic large creatures called the Ancient Ones. The few of those beings that manage to consume enough quickly enough while in that state are speculated to undergo a second metamorphosis into the elusive Horned Lords of lore.”

“Those Horned Lords,” Vivienne said. “Back on two feet, about sixty feet high, antler-like pairs spouting from the head, capable of human speech?”

“That’s how the the Lady described them,” Indrani slowly said. “Save for the antlers.”

“Well,” Vivienne smiled ruefully. “We have something of a problem, then.”

–

“- Burning Hells,” I exhaled. “Horned Lord, Hierophant. There’s one of those with seer powers sitting pretty in the middle of the pyramid just waiting to fuck with us through a maze-making control artefact.”

“A ratling?” Masego mused. “Unusual. I suppose the Kingdom of the Dead does have a border with their kind. Do you have the magic word for the gates?”

I sighed.

“Apparently that wasn’t judged a high priority,” I said. “What had you reaching for the card, anyway? Any help coming from there?”

“I was instructed not to tell,” Hierophant replied absent-mindedly. “I suppose attempting to jostle the wards open is in order, lacking alternative.”

“That’s feasible?” I asked.

“Quickly?” he said. “No. But a few hours of protracted study should do the trick. It won’t take more than half a day.”

“We’re in a bit of a hurry,” I said. “... I think.”

“This is not the kind of miracle I am proficient with, Catherine,” he replied peevishly.

Bickering would have been a nice way to let off the steam, but a notion reached the surface of my mind, quicksilver-swift.

“Sparrow,” I spoke at the gate.

The heartbeat of silence that followed echoed with unspoken mockery. Ah, well, it’d been worth a try.

“Sparrow,” Masego said as well, only in Ashkaran.

Without a sound, the stone slabs withdrew into the threshold.

“I would have thought of that eventually,” I said, not the defensive in the slightest.

“I note you did not give a precise time limit for that statement,” the one-eyed mage said.

If I stepped on his foot going into the Threefold Reflection, well, no one could prove it wasn’t an accident.

—

I’d considered it a safe assumption that the creepy dimensionally layered murder pyramid would look like a dusty crypt inside, but apparently I’d done the Dead King disservice: it was actually pretty pleasant in here. Sunlight, fresh air, and the decorations were both tasteful and welcoming. The unfortunate part was that ‘here’ was becoming a vaguer term every time we turned a corner of passed a door.

“Left,” Hierophant decided.

“We literally just took a right,” I said.

“In another palace, yes,” Masego agreed. “This is... not that one.”

After spending a solid sixty heartbeats in awe of the fact that it was natural sunlight and not torches or magelights that lit up the entrance hall of the Threefold Reflection – I’d checked out for most of the ensuing mutterings about ‘fixed temporal sliver’ and ‘redistribution arrays’ – he’d gotten his shit together and begun to serve as my personal navigator. Since the entire place was a madman’s nightmare of wards and thresholds, it was possible for him to follow along the metaphorical dotted lines of the wards and get a bare bones idea of the layout of the palace. Took him a little bit and required concentration, but it was reliable. Unfortunately, it was also useless: the image he got from that trick was only a single layer of the reflection, which meant the moment we left that layer we were lost again. And he couldn’t see the whole pyramid with that trick, either, which had bitten us in the ass swiftly. We were probably past the outer reaches of the palace, but the gates we’d come in through were nowhere in sight. Which went some way in explaining why it’d been so easy to get in, I supposed.

It was inside the palace that the Skein would find us easiest to contain. So why had we wandered in blindly? This was Hakram’s plan we were following, and as far as I could see it could only end in failure. More than that, we were wasting precious time. Malicia and her minions might already be out of the pyramid for all I knew.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” I said, then winced at the accidental pun.

I looked up at the ceiling.

“Skein, right?” I said. “I’m assuming you’re listening, because let’s be honest – if I were in your place, I’d want a good look at the people I was screwing with. Don’t suppose we could cut out the whole maze thing and have a civilized conversation instead?”

No answer.

“Cat,” Masego said quietly.

He was gesturing towards a door we’d passed earlier, and my brow rose. The room behind that threshold – a cosy little antechamber with fainting couches – had gone dark. An invitation? Only one way to find out. I made sure Hierophant was right next to me when I passed the threshold, as I had this entire time. The last thing I wanted was to get separated from my erstwhile navigator. My reflexes were quick, but not quite quick enough not to fall. Winter came eagerly when called and a platform of ice formed beneath my feet, though I almost slid off it when I had to bend over to catch Masego by the scruff of the neck.

“Impressive workmanship,” Hierophant noted, lone eye looking down through his own body.

I glanced as well, and forced myself to count up to ten in silence. A spike pit. And actual fucking pit filled with sharp metal spikes. There were even faded skeletons at the bottom, which was really the spine in the wine as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t like they hadn’t had literal centuries to clean that up, I just knew they’d left them there as a statement.

“A simple no would have sufficed,” I complained, looking upwards.

There was solid ground on the other side of the pit, and with a careful flex of my legs I leapt up here. No threshold there, at least. Jumping from pit to pit would have been a bit much even by fucking Keteran standards. I dropped Masego back on his feet fairly awkwardly, given that I was holding him by the neck and he had a few feet on me.

“Quiet bubble,” I ordered.

The ward went up, and we tried to position ourselves in a way that would make it difficult to read our lips. Changed to speaking Kharsum as well, it wasn’t nearly as well known as Lower Miezan or the other Imperial languages.

“This isn’t working,” I told Hierophant. “We need a change of tactics. Your source that you can’t talk about, can they be any help?”

“I assume they already would have intervened if they could,” Masego said.

Was that implying the conversation went only one way, or was I reading too much into it? That was the pain in this plan – well, one of them – I never could be sure whether I was supposed to try to figure out something or not. I shifted on my feet, though not because of what he’d said. His silence ward wasn’t the same he’d used when we were inside the Silent Palace, it had no physical component to it. Not that it had helped in the slightest against the Thief of Stars that we knew of. It wasn’t a sound so much as a moving of air that I caught, a difference in pressure. My hand snapped out and I caught a wriggling form by throat as I smoothly unsheathed my sword.

“Morning, Catherine,” Vivienne said, snapping into sight.

I dropped her with a sigh.

“I could have stabbed you, Thief,” I said.

“My aspect is the only reason we managed to run into each other,” she said. “He shunts me off at will otherwise. If I remain hidden in his vision of the future, he cannot predict where I am. It is no absolute. The rest of the gambit was presuming you’d irritate the Skein enough for him to send you here eventually.”

I raised an eyebrow at both things being implied – first, that Hide could ward her from whatever means the Skein used to see us. Second, that she’d expected us to end up here.

“This was planned,” I said.

“Sparrow,” she replied in Kharsum. “Owl done, we on my tack now.”

Her hold on the language was bare bones, but Hakram had taught her enough we could have a functional conversation. My eyes narrowed. The second card had the word Lark written on the back, without an explanation. I’d taken it to mean an adventure or a bit of fun, because Past Catherine had a terrible sense of humour, but it was also a kind of bird wasn’t it? Owl didn’t ring a bell in the slightest, but it might be there were at least three plans unfolding. And Vivienne had told us we were now on ‘her tack’. Skein. Prophecy by spun thread. One set of eyes . Were we... Gods, that would mean building at least three interconnected towers. The sheer complexity of that – we did have Akua, though. Who was still missing. And the first rune-bound memory had me considering the need for a touchstone, which might very well be her. It was a good thing I almost never got headaches these days, I decided.

“Where do we go from here?” I asked. “Your aspect can’t cover all three of us.”

“Not need to,” Vivienne smiled thinly. “We hunted Malicia presently. Now by, the Skein have her on way out here.”

“By now,” I corrected.

She rolled her eyes.

“He can still move us between the layers so we never run into her,” I said.

“Before answer. Object limits has,” she said. “Can not bridge same layer. Can not go nowhere.”

“How do you know this?” Masego asked.

“Skein,” she said. “Flaw. Single speaker, must. Memory back.”

Monologue , I thought. She’d met the ratling before, that much I’d already suspected, but this explained quite a bit. He must have been a villain while alive. Which still begged the question of why the Dead King had put someone in charge of the Threefold Reflection he had to know would give us a solution to the riddle if pressed. He could have put a hero instead, and they might not have been as skilled at using the artefact but they wouldn’t have talked either. It felt like he was willingly giving us an opportunity to kill Malicia if we were sharp enough, and while that fit with my suspicions this was a test it also had me wary. Guessing at the Hidden Horror’s motives was a dangerous game at the best of times, which these were most definitely not.

“That’s useful and all, but how do we find Malicia through the shunts?” I asked.

“No go layer,” she smiled. “Centre artefact. I saw.”

She tapped Masego’s belly.

“Extract,” she said.

And she tapped mine.

“Gate,” she continued. “No inside. Cold iron protect. Close.”

I frowned.

“Then why didn’t we gate directly from the Silent Palace?” I asked.

“You can’t thread through different pieces of fabric,” Masego said. “I would presume that chamber to be removed from Creation. This layer, however, is directly connected.”

Then why hadn’t we done that the moment we entered the pyramid? Why leave a necessary piece of information, the location of the central chamber, solely in the hand of – I winced at the sudden spike of pain from my forehead.

“Second rune is flaring,” Hierophant murmured.

So we hadn’t. Masego and I had just never thought of it, and Vivienne being here was a contingency. She must have entered through a place that guaranteed she’d be here to wait for us – evidently she’d found it the first time she came here, she must have moved the exact same way. What if the Skein had never sent us here and we’d never thought of it? Mhm. There might be other contingencies, then. Hakram was now unaccounted for as well as the other two. And I still had a card encased. Fine, then, maybe we’d been surprisingly cautious in our recklessness. I clenched my fingers and reached for Winter.

Time to pay the Skein a visit.

Chapter 41: Akua’s Plan

“Note: though ‘fell down the stairs’ is common fate for Praesi highborn, further study demonstrate this is not nearly as lethal as the records would imply. It took, on average, five repeats to reliably kill someone in this manner. The tiger pit remains most practical.”
– Dread Emperor Malignant II, the Particularly Petty

I honestly wasn’t sure this was Arcadia.

It didn’t make sense for us to have ended up elsewhere, since it wasn’t like a fae mantle was a key to the infinity of dimensions in existence, but this didn’t look like Arcadia in the slightest. Or at least no part of it I’d ever seen. There was a sky, though grey and with no obvious source of light hanging, and ground to walk on. Which was where it got unusual, because it wasn’t earth our feet were on. Or even stone. It was some sort of hard black material that felt like softer obsidian. I could handle that much, truth be told, but the shifting shapes of the same material around us were where I drew the line.

“Go into Arcadia, she said,” I mused. “It’ll be a shortcut, she said.”

“I never actually said that,” Thief muttered back.

Without us ever moving an inch what had been the sky above our heads now seemed perpendicular to where we stood, like we’d moved from the ground to standing glued on the side of a house looking upwards. I closed my eyes and opened them, which got me situated again but also had me gritting my teeth. Because I could have sworn I was now standing on the ground, but the sky was to my left and what had been the ground before was now a massive wall. One that was slowly disassembling into smaller blocks, shifting into staggeringly large structures.

“Creational laws run particularly thin here,” Hierophant noted, standing at my side like nothing was wrong. “Arcadia always did have the tendency to work on say-so, but gravity here seems purely a matter of perspective.”

“A geometry trap,” I complained. “That’s just great.”

My tutors had said I’d regret not taking those lessons more seriously.

“Shall we proceed?” Masego suggested.

“You’re sure this is Arcadia?” I asked.

“I have valid reasons to believe so,” he replied. “Do you not feel the nascent gate at the end?”

“I do,” I said. “It’s far on the other side of the... ground. Wall. You know what I mean.”

“Clutter,” Vivienne helpfully contributed, pointing there.

Clutter was about right. There were stairs, not all of them making sense at the angle I currently stood on, but also a myriad other structures: columns and bridges, towers and plateaus and things I’d never seen before. Not too far away I could see a spiral of blocks that only made sense if you went up with a certain perspective and down with another.

“I’m guessing that’s the way, through,” I sighed. “Let’s get a move on.”

We began our walk through insanity, taking a diagonal bridge across nothingness that put us on... top? Top seemed about right, of things. I leapt down at what was the foundation of a tower going the wrong way, landing smoothly. Vivienne followed a heartbeat later.

“I hesitate to ask,” she said. “But what exactly ensures that we don’t fall off, Masego?”

He managed a crouch landing, but would have tripped if I didn’t catch him by the shoulder.

“Strictly speaking,” he said, “nothing.”

I would not get vertigo on solid ground, I told myself. Gods, I would not get vertigo on solid ground.

“Reality could be said to function by the fiat of the Gods, in large part,” Hierophant continued. “This particular place seems to extend that privilege to anyone within it.”

“I should have stolen more grappling hooks,” Vivienne muttered under her breath.

We moved on to a vaguely sinister promenade of black columns, which went some way in quieting the instincts in the back of my head screaming I was about to fall and die, but then we took stairs that went down through the ground and the shift of perspective had me under the impression I was hanging from the basement of this nightmare through only my feet.

“Remember when the worst we had to worry about was William stabbing things with an angel feather?” I said. “And Vivienne hilariously failing to knife Hakram.”

“Not all of us took so well to killing as you,” Thief replied defensively.

I wondered what it said about us as a group that we frequently ragged on Vivienne failing to murder my closest friend in the world. Even Akua got it on it, these days, and for an unrepentant monster she had a scathing way with sarcasm. Masego patted Thief’s shoulder.

“It’s all right, Vivienne,” he consoled her. “No one thinks less of you for it. You’re very good at other crimes.”

“I – you – thank you, Masego,” she finally got out, soundly defeated.

Truly, of all the terrible sorceries at Hierophant’s command the most dangerous was his occasional bouts of disarming sincerity. Aside from headaches and the occasional existential crisis, this little detour into the worst of wonderlands did not prove to be a major hindrance. Slowed us down some, but less than I would have expected. The shifting structures were fairly accommodating. It was maybe half an hour before we got in sight of where I knew the still unformed exit gate to be awaiting us. Atop a massive cube of blocks, which meant I had to leap onto the side and think very hard about why I wouldn’t slide off the way common sense dictated I would. Masego had absolutely no trouble with it, the fucker. He’d taken to this place like a fish to water. I got off my knees, having learned from our earlier travels to shield my face so it wouldn’t stack straight into the new ‘ground’.

“Straight across, then we shift plane again,” Hierophant said. “This was quite the interesting interlude. Would it be incriminating to thank the Dead King for widening my horizons, do you think?”

“Yes,” I replied immediately.

“Very,” Vivienne added.

“That’s a shame,” the one-eyed mage murmured. “Perhaps just a gift, then. I would not want to be an ingrate.”

“He’s the immemorial undead overlord of a hellscape and a half, Zeze,” I said. “I don’t think fresh apple bread and decent wine are ever really in order with him.”

“Maybe the soul of a minor irritant, bound to an ironically chosen household object,” he mused. “I still have a book on Imperial court etiquette somewhere, there are customs to things like this.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” I lied. “For now, let’s-“

The ground opened up beneath us. No, it parted. Like waves, hollowing out the thick of what had been a cube and forming an eggshell ceiling above us from the blocks. The broad ramp that emerged led straight to where I could feel the portal awaiting to be born. With the small hitch of there being man sitting on a throne to the right of it, legs crossed.

“And it was going so well,” Vivienne said.

I winced.

“We’ve had talks about saying things like that, Thief,” I said.

“Well, he’s already there,” she said. “How could it-“

I covered her mouth with my hand.

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” I growled. “Hierophant, assume hostile.”

“I always do when you’re there,” he cheerfully replied.

That’d been perhaps a little too honest for comfort,t but I couldn’t deny the general accuracy of the assessment. I released Vivienne and took point, hand on the pommel of my sword. Thief to the side, Hierophant in the back with room to manoeuver. Fae eyes meant I did not have to wait for anything as pedestrian as actually being closer before having a better look at the stranger. It was not human. Pale and thin and angular, like it’d been cut out of marble to look like a human with a too-large chisel. Whether it was a man or a woman I could not tell, or even if the label would apply. It wore a long sleeved-shirt of white satin, trousers of the same and had not bothered with boots. Its eyes were narrow and dark, and I found nothing but scorn within when they met my own. It was the ears that gave it away: long and sharp. Almost triangular at the tip.

“Elf,” I quietly said.

Vivienne inhaled sharply. Masego did not waste his breath on an answer, immediately beginning to layer protective spells around himself. Was it a Revenant? I had no heartbeat I could hear, but that might be normal with elves for all I knew. If it was this deep in Keter, even through Arcadia, then I’d assume it was undead until proven otherwise. The elf did not move even as we approached. Was negotiation an option?

“Good morning,” I said.

It stared at us, completely still. I kind of hoped deep down that it was just an intimidating corpse and we’d have a good chuckle about it afterwards, but I doubted my luck was that good. I could see no weapon in its hand or anywhere near. Close quarters fighter?

“Don’t mean to interrupt,” I said with a winning smile. “But we’re lost, and I was hoping to ask for directions.”

The elf rose to its feet, still silent. Its hand snapped out, and before I could get so much as a get word out there was a rip . For a heartbeat I thought it was tearing away at the fabric of this half-world but it wasn’t that, not exactly. Like it was ripping away an invisible screen, it tore out the gate I had yet to make. Dropping it on the ground afterwards, it eyed us patiently. I could no longer feel the way out of this place.

Not to be overly dramatic, but that was something of a problem.

“I take it that’s a no,” I said. “We’ll, uh, just be on our way then.”

A ring of golden flames formed around the elf’s hands and burned with blinding brightness until they... solidified. Formed into a long single-edge sword of what I might have thought to be simple bronze, had I not seen its making.

“Spellblade,” I grimaced. “That was a little more literal than I’d expected.”

“You may kill yourself now,” the Revenant told us in a voice utterly devoid of inflection. “It will spare me the filth.”

All heart, this one.

“Would you consider us to ‘proper fucked’ at the moment?” Thief asked lightly.

“Well, if you want to get all technical about it,” I muttered back.

She passed behind me, and after moving my hand pressed what felt like a card into it. There was a thin covering of ice over it, and a sliver of will was all it took to shatter it. Another exertion had three reflective pieces of ice growing on my armour at the proper angles, and I took a look at what was written on it without ever taking my eyes fully off the Spellblade. On the Queen of Wands two bundles of writing awaited.

Skein.

Not the most pressing danger at the moment, but whatever.

Don’t. If Hakram is there, Swan. If not, Dove.

Fucking Hells, how many plans did we have?

Spellblade.

That was more like it. Past Catherine better astound me with her wisdom and foresight.

If Masego is there, Buzzard. If not, good luck.

I was officially not astounded by Past Catherine’s wisdom and foresight. I flipped the card and found nothing on the back, so I crushed it.

“What was the trigger for that?” I asked Vivienne.

“Your handwriting, ‘when proper fucked’,” she replied. “Note it was not if .”

“Buzzard,” I replied. “Zeze?”

“A kind of bird,” he kindly supplied. “Although...”

His fingers twitched and the word appeared in red letters in front of him.

The elf swung and in that exact same moment I lost an arm.

It’d been instinct that had me putting my arm in front of Hierophant. A vague sense of danger. The red letters vanished like smoke, four layers of wards on Masego broke like glass and he was violently thrown back even as my sword arm dropped to the ground. I’d formed another blade out of ice before my arm was done reforming and immediately made for the enemy. Thief had disappeared, thank the Gods. She wasn’t cut out for brawls like this.

“You should have obeyed,” the Revenant said tonelessly. “Irritating.”

They swung again, almost casually, and when the instinct flared I ducked down without hesitation. The slope broke behind me even as my body bent forward while I ran down. Fuck, how had the Revenant done that? There’d been no flare or sorcery or anything, it’d felt like a perfectly normal swing of the sword. It stepped to the side, and impossibly that took it right to my left. Distance warping, maybe? It couldn’t be teleportation, the sheer amount of power those spells required was insane. The first swing down towards my torso I followed. My footing shifted, I spun to the side and it was just out of the trajectory. Then the elf moved again, a lateral cut, and that one even my eyes failed to see. I had just enough time to guess at where the hit would land and cover myself in ice before I was blown away by a hundred horses kicking me together. The elf was behind me even while I sailed through the air, having simply stepped there, and I was entirely done with this. Winter howled.

A dozen spears of ice shot out of my back, avoided and parried without fail, but I twisted around and my feet landed on the platform I’d woven. I filled the space beneath me with ice and leapt down into it, passing through it like mist. I felt the edges shatter beneath a blow as I did and wove glamour even as I rolled out of the way. Two doppelganger spun out of me and I left another behind in a crouch as I mimicked the stance of the others. The elf ripped through the last of the ice with a single hand, then simply struck the illusion left behind. Golden flames ate at my mail and I was smashed into the ground, biting my lip so I wouldn’t scream. It was above me again a moment later, the entire glamour broken, and with a fluid shift of grip it came down towards the still burning wound on my chest point first.

“Fine,” I grunted. “Be like that.”

It wasn’t like my organs actually mattered anymore. The sword went right through me, puncturing the blocks beneath. My hand clasped the burning spell blade, reforming my fingers as quickly as they turned to ashes, and I opened the floodgates. Ice and shade ate at the bronze-like material, spreading across it lightning-quick, and the elf abandoned the blade. A step had it withdrawing where it had first begun, silver light forming in rings around its hand. Change of weapon, huh? I wasn’t allowing that so easily. Ice crept across the ground, encasing my feet, but all it took was a thought and it was dragging me along faster than I could have moved on my own. Two heartbeats and I was on him, just as the light turned into a blade.

“Three truths do I now reveal,” Hierophant said.

The elf flicked the blade backwards and I ducked, feeling something powerful scythe through where my upper body had been. I extended forward, every muscle bending, and the pommel of my sword struck its chest. There was a sound like a crack of thunder, but it remained unmoved.

“First, that which I see is the mask worn by void,” Hierophant said.

The elf kneed me in the belly, but I caught it with my free hand and ate the vicious impact with a grunt. It kicked me upwards into the air, blade already swinging, but I formed a handhold of ice and used it to kick its smug fucking face. It barely even noticed, until ice spikes grew beneath my foot. It angled its head back, just out of range, but with a twist of will I had them shoot out. While it ducked beneath I wove more ice out of the handhold and made it hammer my back so I’d smash into the Revenant. The silver blade flicked towards me, tearing through the ice I set in its path effortlessly, and with gritted teeth I formed a tentacle out of the ice trail behind me and had it drag me out of the way. The elf straightened up even as I landed.

“Second, in a world that is nothing there can be no partition,” Hierophant said.

Change of tactics. Slugging it up close wasn’t going my way. I stomped down and thick mist billowed forward in a tide. No doubt it could see through that, but so far it hadn’t used more than one trick at a time. That should allow me to make a dent, if executed well. If felt the elf move through my working, and in that moment I struck. I opened a gate, right through its torso. If felt its skin shiver, but it was still whole. Countered, but now I’ve got you. I grasped the mist, sucked into into a spike, and hammered at the silver blade with it. It felt like... light. No, more than that. I felt fury well up in me, unbidden. Moonlight . Mist turned to shade and ate away at the blade like a drop of ink in water. It was trying to burn me out, but I had the fucking power to spare. I brute forced it, Winter coursing through my veins, until the blade shattered.

“Third, if all is one then to master a grain of sand is to master all of Creation,” Hierophant said.

“Enough,” the elf said.

“Agreed,” I smiled, and filled its goddamn mouth with ice.

It stiffened for a moment, and before it could finish cheating its way out of that I was on the Revenant. My sword carved into its side, shattering its way through the spine. There was a shiver of power, and if I’d been half a second slower I’d be dead. I stumbled back onto the ice, unseeing. The forward half of my body was just... gone. Winter was sluggish to react, as if shocked by the depth of what it had to reform. My eyes came back just in time to see a silver blade about to punch right through my forehead.

“Mine,” Thief said, and snatched death and moonlight both.

She was gone the moment the word was finished. The elf grabbed me by the throat, but my mind was elsewhere. If half my body could just be formed out of Winter, what was I really? Lies and mirrors and the stubborn belief I was still a person. Maybe it was time to leave that delusion behind. I was a construct, and what had been made could be unmade . My flesh turned to mist around its fingers and I slipped out of its grasp before it could crush my windpipe. I heard Masego begin to speak and backed away.

“And so I act,” Hierophant spoke conversationally, “wielding a blade of absence for higher purpose.”

The ground shifted. Blocks collided against the Revenant, ripped out of the floor, and within that ever-growing cage it was forced into the air. There was another shiver, the shell disappearing as if by writ of some ancient god, but more filled the gap. That was as good an opening as I’d get. My instinct was to strike, but I’d not come here for a brawl. This was just a distraction. I remembered where the gate had first been ripped out, and with a steady exhaled made another one.

It opened into nothing.

“This is not great,” I admitted.

I closed it with a flick of the wrist. Masego made his way to my side, panting, as the elf kept wrecking his ritual above us. That wasn’t going to last much longer, it was going through blocks quicker than they gathered now that most the surface was gone.

“I think I lost the thread,” I told Masego. “What can you do?”

He grimaced.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “We’ve never-“

The gate opened again. Thief appeared at my side.

“Catherine?” she asked, sounding surprised.

“That wasn’t me,” I said.

A head popped through the opening.

“Do hurry,” Akua Sahelian said with a pleasant smile.

Chapter 42: The Skein’s Plan

“Chaos is a ladder, Chancellor. It never goes quite where you need it to, and the rise is always more graceful than the descent.”
– Dread Emperor Perfidious

Like proper villains, we put a magic gate between ourselves and the consequences of our actions before silently agreeing to pretend none of it had taken place. The Woe had taken to that part of villainy better than any other, truth be told. Probably didn’t help that I was the closest thing Archer had to an authority figure in her life that wasn’t Ranger , or that Hierophant had been raised to believe that repercussions were a thing that happened to people who didn’t have family dinners involving the full roster of the Calamities. Seriously. I would be dishonest not to acknowledge that having Black cleaning up behind me for year hadn’t, uh, encouraged me to display a perhaps disproportional amount of recklessness in my actions. But even at my worst there’d been an amount of calculation involved in those risks. In contrast, Thief had at some point robbed a Legion pay convoy and somehow expected to get away with it, while Diabolist had gone out of her way to personally piss off every single living villain with a higher body count than her. Well, before Liesse anyway. She’d murdered her way to the top of that list quick enough. It was telling that the closest thing we had to a steady hand around was Adjutant, and he’d rather famously gotten into a slugging match with a demon.

Gods, was Juniper the voice of sanity? She ate people, for fuck’s sake. Well, corpses anyway, and she hadn’t done it in a while that I knew of, but still .

“I have so many questions,” I told Akua the moment the gate closed.

“Flammable and inflammable mean the same thing,” she replied without missing a beat.

I paused.

“What?” I managed.

“I noticed you’ve been misusing the latter,” Diabolist said with a beaming smile. “The word is actually derived from the Old Miezan verb inflammare , which means ‘to set on fire’.”

Masego let out a noise of approval, the filthy traitor. Of course of all the Woe’s habits the one Akua had to pick up was giving me lip in the middle of delicate life-and-death situations. ‘Closing ranks in front of outsiders’ had been too much to hope for, I supposed, but Merciless Gods I would have settled for ‘prone to collateral damage we can’t afford to pay for’. It wasn’t like she didn’t have a history. I made the decision that choking my only current source of insight on what was happening was unwise, which I thought was very queenly of me.

“Where are we?” I patiently asked.

“Before the gate to the central chamber,” Akua said, inviting me to look behind her with an elegant gesture.

If you’d one sinister rune-engraved stone gate, you’d seen them all. This one was ridiculously large, but given the alleged size of the Skein that wasn’t a surprise. Besides, this one didn’t even have a terrifying face-shaped demon bound inside. Strictly small time compared to the Tower, that somehow-standing pile of horrors. I considered my next question carefully.

“How?” I finally said. “Just...”

I gestured to encompass Creation.

“ How ?”

“As a part of your mantle, she can draw on Winter to an extent if so allowed,” Masego said.

“Yes, yes, we all knew that,” I lied. “Not need to state the obvious, Masego. But here precisely?”

“The chain,” Akua simply said.

Which bound her to me, or more accurately the Mantle of Woe, and to an extent Winter itself. That explained how she’d been able to open a gate towards my location, anyway. How had she even gotten here in the first place? The whole point of the Threefold Reflection was that it could be turned into an unsolvable maze at the drop of a hat.

“You used Winter, to make your gates,” the shade reminded me. “Your works were known to me.”

Setting aside the headache-inducing implications of that for later, I frowned. So she’d seen where I was planning to get out of Arcadia and gone there. Which told me why she was here, but not how she’d gotten there in the first place. I eyed her warily, since the question had been implied, but she did not speak again. More secrets. Exactly what we needed, at the moment.

“My eye, if you would,” Masego stiffly asked.

Akua sketched a bow and produced the glass orb with a flourish of the wrist. My frown deepened.

“You’ve been running the ritual this whole time,” I said. “He could see through his eye, you through his, and you sent him instructions through it.”

“Cards,” she agreed. “As I was instructed, though I did not always know the reasons why.”

I passed a hand through my hair. Which, as I immediately remembered, had been formed out of Winter smoke and mirrors mere moments ago. There was no sweat matting the strands even after my extortions, which I was almost thankful for. The inhumanity of that was almost comforting, compared to the reminder that any sweat I’d feel would be a lie I told myself and my will enforced.

“We’re on Buzzard, I take it,” I said.

She nodded. I eyed the stone door.

“So now?” I probed.

“We enter,” Diabolist said. “After the sixth rune in your head is disabled.”

Skipping a few there, huh. That aside, Vivienne’s card had given me the eloquent instructions of ‘don’t’ when it came to the Skein, so it was worth asking her if-

“And Thief is gone,” I said. “Please tell me someone else saw her get out of Arcadia.”

Masego finished putting back his eye in the appropriate burnt-out socket, yet another reason to be thankful eating was now optional for me, and straightened up.

“I did as well,” he said. “Though she disappeared within moments.”

“And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning?” I asked.

“I assumed there was a reason,” he replied.

Yeah, that was today in a sentence wasn’t it? Could hardly rake him over coals for that.

“Romance my brain, Zeze,” I ordered with a sigh. “Let’s get this cart back on the road before it catches fire. Again.”

His hand rose, and immediate-

–

“He reads stories,” Vivienne said.

“We can as well,” Masego pointed out.

I intervened before that could turn into a proper bicker.

“So we come at him with a plan, he’ll have seen it from beginning to end,” I said.

“Essentially,” she said, after flicking an irritated glance at the blind mage. “Though the interesting implication is that he can only ‘read’ a single story at a time. It is possible to fool him.”

“Multiple schemes will be required,” Akua mused. “With a degree of bridging between them. It would be ideal to begin on a scheme and move into another before the Skein can arrange for a point of failure.”

“That means someone has to know enough of them to lead us to change tacks at critical moment,” I noted. “Considering you can’t really fight, Diabolist, it’ll have to be you.”

“She’ll need to be fooled as well,” Hakram spoke up. “Given more plans than we’ll actually use and kept in the dark about which few options are really on the table.”

“Go random,” Indrani advised. “That always fucks with oracles.”

Akua nodded in agreement.

“The rest of you will need to be kept ignorant of large swaths of what is planned,” she added after. “Lest the moment you begin a plan the enemy be made aware of it.”

“Masego, you can do memory blocks right?” I asked.

He nodded.

“An easy enough enchantment for all save you and Diabolist,” he said. “Conditional triggers can be woven in, though no more than one per ‘block’. Too high a degree of sophistication risks permanence, the human mind is a complex device.”

“I don’t like how complicated this is getting,” I admitted. “But once you’re wet, there’s no reason not to swim.”

“I don’t follow,” Masego said, brow creasing.

“We don’t leave him to guess between a handful of plans,” I said grimly. “We drown him in them.”

–

-ly. Rude.

“So this is a stupid plan, but it’s stupid on purpose,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “That’s comforting. You know, except for the part where we fail and die horribly.”

“I was hoping we would avoid that,” Hierophant gravely said.

“Yeah, well, you know what the Dead King put up on the gates into this place,” I replied. “Fine, it’s too late to run anyway. Akua, you got anything to add?”

She bowed smoothly.

“I was ordered,” she said, “to fight as an extension of you, should it come to swords.”

“Well, it’s not like today has been a cornucopia of good decisions so far,” I mused. “So what the Hells, let’s give it a whirl. Zeze, get the door would you?”

With a deep grinding sound, the stone slabs parted.

“This is the part where I praise his efficiency,” Akua announced. “Because misunderstandings and incompetent assessments are humorous.”

Was it wrong that the one of the most horrifying things about the mass-murdering maddened shade of my former rival was that she was trying to develop a functional sense of humour? If so, Black had shown a lot more foresight than I’d thought back in that alley.

“In we go,” I said, warily eyeing the darkness within. “Before I start debating whether it’d have been more reassuring to blow our way through.”

Robber was, inarguably, a horrible influence. The ground wasn’t stone, I knew that just from the feel of it under my boots. It wasn’t even flat. It crunched. Didn’t even need to glance down, the sound was easy enough to recognize: bones. Charming. The inside was pitch black save for a single well of light illuminating the artefact Thief had spoken of: three layered wooden wheels on a stick, with pieces of string joining them haphazardly. She’d not mentioned, however, that every wheel was about as broad as I was tall. Hierophant followed behind me, and the grinding sound told me that-

“Yeah, so that ’s not happening,” I noted.

Ice bloomed in the way of the closing stone doors, shattering for the first few inches but eventually forcing them to a halt as I kept pouring power into the working. I was already standing inside a massive dark cavern filled with bones, there was no way I was letting the Skein keep us stuck inside. Speaking of, there was no sign of the Revenant.

“At least he’s not waiting on a throne,” I mused. “Those fights never seem to go well for us.”

There were tall curved rib bones from something definitely not human serving as a sort of antechamber leading to the wheels, but that screamed ‘trap’ even more than the rest of this room.

“Hierophant?” I prompted.

“We can use them,” Masego replied. “I can already glimpse them. Deep, but simple.”

Good to know. Still didn’t tell me where the Hells the undead rat was.

“Oh what a stroke of luck,” I loudly said. “The Skein isn’t here. I guess we’ll just walk towards those wheels and-“

Sword clearing the scabbard in a heartbeat, I stabbed the bones beneath my feet and poured the howling might of Winter into the mess. Frost crept through the mass of bones, and my eyebrow rose when I realized how deep it actually went under us. At least sixty, seventy feet. Not trace of the Skein though.

“Catherine,” Akua said.

I sighed.

“He’s above us, isn’t he?” I said.

The answer wasn’t so much laughter as it was the quiet rumbling of the storm. A massive shape leapt down and bones were sent flying in every direction while I smoothly rose and fell into a guard. Hierophant, prudently, came to stand behind me. Diabolist was at my shoulder know, and all I felt from her was a hunter’s patience. Furred body bending over the wheels and cutting through the light, the Skein watched us with a leering grin. He was large as Thief had said, but her short description had not done the Revenant justice. Thick dark fur covered a body that was almost humanoid, save for the long wormlike tail that came from its lower back, but it was the head that was discomforting to look at. We call their kind ratlings, but looking at that rotting leather it was a snake I thought of. The pale golden eyes with deep red gouges under them only deepened the impression. The two pairs of bone-like antlers ripping through the top of its head were wickedly sharp, even after what must have been centuries. A Horned Lord. Even Ranger considered the likes of that difficult to deal with, and when we’d come across that woman in Arcadia I’d felt like she could murder the lot of us in the span of a single breath. Not an opponent I should take lightly. Not an opponent I should fight at all, if I could help it. Sadly, my mouth disagreed.

“So can we knock off the theatrics?” I asked. “Because, let’s be honest here, Akua’s probably more Evil than you are and if I told her to fetch my slippers she’d do it.”

The creature’s dry red tongue licked at fangs half the size of me.

“Take the wheel, lead the Empress to the orc,” the Skein said, then cocked his head to the side. “Or. The Empress escapes, yet dies to a blade of stolen moonlight. Two paths.”

“Well, I’m glad someone knows the plan,” I mused. “Would you care to monologue about how we’re going to fail?”

The Revenant laughed.

“Then you strike,” he said. “Or. She strikes with you. Or. You flee. Tricky little things, skittering around, but you entered the maze. You did. Surrendered too many paths. No end remaining is fortunate.”

I reached for the last card inside my cloak and my fingers came away wet. My hand rose.

“Just give me a moment,” I asked.

The ancient abomination stilled. I got the sense he was somewhat taken aback. Last card, huh. I slipped it out and angled it so the light well the Revenant was across would make it clearer. The Queen of Swords.

You have an invisible crossbow.

Written diagonally, across the whole thing. I flipped it. Nothing on the other side. Seriously, Past Catherine? That was the entire message? She might as well have just drawn herself flipping me the bird. What an asshole.

“Catherine?” Masego probed.

“If you were hoping for a solution,” I said. “That was not it.”

“It was pointless,” the Skein said. “Seventeen stories? Pretty little tales, but you always end up here. No matter the path, the destination is the same.”

Seventeen. Gods. There wasn’t enough alcohol in all of Keter to justify that, and even worse I was pretty sure we’d planned this sober.

“Look,” I said. “I’m with you on this one. This whole thing has been a debacle from start to finish, and the person responsible should be buried alive. We’re on the same side, here.”

The Revenant stilled again. Evidently, this was not unfolding as expected.

“You did this,” he tried.

“That can’t be, I don’t remember it,” I immediately denied.

I’d fought enough Praesi to know that sufficiently high station and blatant lies could get you out of nearly anything, if you played your cards right.

“We should look into it together,” I told him. “Have you considered we might be getting framed? I’m just saying, this is a horrible plan. I could do better. It just doesn’t add up.”

“Does this actually ever work?” I heard Akua ask Masego in a whisper.

There was a beat.

“It got us into Skade,” he eventually conceded.

“Are you trying to lie to an oracle?” the Skein said, by the sound of it genuinely offended.

“I would never dare lie to you,” I lied. “You’re obviously a... rat-person of highly discerning judgement. If you just get Malicia in here, I’m sure we can straighten all of this out.”

“It’s like watching a demon get loose,” Akua murmured. “You know you should run, but you just have to look.”

“You want me to bring the Empress here,” the Revenant said. “The Empress that you are trying to kill.”

“That’s completely unrelated,” I said, proceeding forward with greatly unwarranted assurance. “And hearsay besides. I’m as loyal to the Tower as any Praesi.”

Assuming said Praesi was highborn, anyway.

“Did you truly expect this to succeed?” the Skein eventually asked.

“I’ve rolled the dice on worse odds,” I admitted, perhaps a little too honestly.

While that was not a high point by any definition of the term, it definitely went downhill from there.

—

I’d learned several things today. First, elves were bullshit even when they were dead. I wasn’t unaware that I didn’t have a lot of room to talk when it came to recovering from wounds, but who the Hells just decided they were all right and had Creation agree like a drunker singer? Second, when the Lady of the Lake called a breed of foe ‘hard fuckers’ she meant ‘how would someone even kill that thing if it wasn’t already dead?’. I was now on my eighth sword, and beginning to appreciate why heroes always got handed some nifty legendary blade before they were sent into the meat grinder. I might as well have been trying to breach a wall swinging at it with a salmon. And, not, I grimly thought, even a large one. That was, sadly, not even in the top ten of my current problems. The Skein’s jaw hung unhinged, gaping wide, and it closed only when the last of the darkness had been swallowed into it. There went my domain.

Which he had eaten, because that was a thing that could be done.

“It comes,” Akua whispered into my ear.

Thank you, helpful collar fairy, I acidly thought. If I’d wanted a running fucking commentary, I’d have asked Black for a talking sword. I leapt onto a platform even as the Skein’s bare fist collided with the bones beneath where I’d stood, immediately leaping onto another before the swing of his tail could catch me. I’d learned the hard way that I couldn’t take a hit from the Revenant without spending precious moments rebuilding whatever passed for my spine these days.

“Burn,” Hierophant said.

Ribbons of golden flame streaked across the dark cavern, folding around one of the Skein’s limbs, but he turned and casually sucked the fire into his open maw. The breath that spread was putrid, like something left to rot for so long the rot was all that was left. The Horned Lord flicked at glance at Masego, who stood atop a ring of bones surrounded by a pale globe of light, and without warning moved . Fuck. I took a running leap off my platform, then as the fall quickened my momentum called on my domain again. The brushstrokes of night came but twice before the Revenant lazily struck down right through them. The darkness dispersed like smoke and then the backlash hit. My eyes froze in their sockets, then shattered, and with a hoarse scream I dropped out of my controlled fall into a pile of bones.

“Move,” Akua said.

I rolled to the side without thinking, and a massive impact close to me had me spinning back in the air. I reached for my face – was that a rib going through my cheek? – and forced the eyes to form quicker. Vision returned just in time to see the massive handful of claws headed my way. Flick of the wrist and ice sprouted on them, forming a long staff I caught by the side, and then the tail smashed me into the wall of this accursed place. There went my spine again. There really was not getting used to that, was there? I heard Masego bark out something in the mage tongue and dropped listlessly to the ground. Diabolist was there, red eyes and pleasant smile, helping me up.

“There was mention of fighting together,” I said after spitting out a few of my teeth.

Akua Sahelian offered me her hand.

“Shall we?” she said.

Gods help me, but I took it.

Chapter 43: Masego’s Plan

“Kings and shepherds fit in the same cook pot.”
– Orc saying

It was a difficult to describe. The power was still mine; it just wasn’t shaped by my own hands. I could still feel it, span the ebb and flow and cuts, but the will behind was Akua Sahelian’s. For the first thirty heartbeats it was horribly distracting, to fight while I had this... second line of thought going on in the back of my head, but soon enough I learned to ignore it. The need for control had always been the lid on the powers I’d stolen from Winter, hadn’t it? It was a lesser surrender, the act of allowing Diabolist some manner of rule over it, but it was still a step towards that place I yet shied away from. Neshamah had called it apotheosis, and mused it to be the result of happenstance. I was not so certain, but I knew than if I reached the world I looked back to would be a very different place.

Winter sunk into the sea of bones like a great tree’s roots, tainting and binding and made into pattern impossibly perfect by another’s will.

My mind had brushed against the flow, and though it kept existing bereft of my attention my gaze no longer gave it clear definition. Like watching without eyes , I thought. It was not the kind of thought a human would understand. That I did, instinctively so, was certain to have a price down the line. I exhaled, sword in hand, and watched the Skein’s muscles pull and shift. He was a dead thing, in the end, and Winter knew much of death. The Revenant was not of my own raising, but there was an... affinity there, now that I knew to look for it. Not a door into usurpation – in those eldritch struggles knowledge was always paramount, and compared to the likes of the Dead King I was a babe in the woods – but the ratling was not untouchable. Like me, he was a construct.

Those could always be broken, with the rights tools.

The muscle weaves beneath shoulder contracted, bent and though the Revenant angled his body to hide the tail I felt it shift. In, out. My breath came steady, an illusion imposed on myself for reassurance. Pretty ritual that it was, it served its purpose. The Skein struck with inhuman swiftness, clawed hand shattering the remains like toys as it passed where I had been but moments earlier. No longer. What difference was there, between the ice I shaped and the stuff of my own body? Beneath the surface, absolutely nothing. The twin spider-like limbs that ripped out of the back of my plate and shifted to see me land on the Skein’s extended arm made that bitter admission impossible to deny. Muscles shifted beneath me, the sweep of the tail abandoned as the Skein prioritized shaking me off. Lower leg inclined, and it followed that – there it went, the dip, but his very nature made me an oracle’s bastard child.

Steel would do nothing against the ratling’s eldritch hide and fur, but steel was just one of many tools at my fingertips. I tugged out a string of my domain, shaped it into a hook and carved into the Revenant’s flesh even as he made to throw me off. It did all the work itself: the momentum had me swinging around his side, the hook of darkness slicing into his skin as I descended. The Skein let did not let out a sound. Did he even feel pain? No matter. I’d take him apart piece by piece, if that was what it took. I hung from the hook under his belly and hoisted myself up, spider legs born anew to hold me as I began climbing back up the side.

Power reflected into itself, a hall of mirrors containing a conflagration until it came out roaring like the great beasts of the First Dawn. Claws and fangs and wings and most of all eyes that were entirely Akua Sahelian’s.

There disconnect between seeing the working unfold through Diabolist and my own body’s senses hearing the thousands of bones come together with strings of shade and ice, rising a behemoth of a drake that collided against the Skein with a thunderous crash. Too many ears. Too many eyes. The spider limbs cracked and broke until I grit my teeth and forced them to shape anew.

“The whole world is the altar of the profane, both seeing and unseeing.”

Hierophant’s words rang loud and clear, though the undertone was made uncomfortably inhuman by the protective globe of ivory-like power protecting him. The Skein ripped through the neck of Diabolist’s drake, devouring the power within, but I could feel her laugh and let loose the endless depths of Winter into his maw. I swung myself around with the limbs, landing on his lower back, and wrenched out the hook. A failure in imagination, this particular tool. Limited by my own thinking. I stole away more of my domain, gave it more useful shape. The arc of the bow was smooth, the string indistinguishable from it. The hook changed, shaped by a thought, and I anchored it somewhere hands could not reach. The Skein moved before I could loose. Abandoning the drake, he turned and massive fangs shone in half-light. There’d been the hint of a hint in the way his muscles moved. The ice limbs dug under the punctured hide and folded into themselves then outwards, impossibly lengthened, until I hung high in the air and away from his snapping jaws. With a hard grin, I loosed my arrow.

“Under this theology of disbelief, the scales bear the weight of nothingness and the the sum of all that is, finding them equal and equivalent.”

Like a spool unwinding, my domain followed in the arrow’s wake. The Skein ducked, impossibly knowing of the trajectory, but a flicker of will was all it took the have the projectile tearing downwards and straight into the crook of his neck. I have you now, Horned Lord. I reached and grabbed the other end of the thread, night-stuff coiling around my fingers, and dismissed the limbs. He would have moved before I dropped onto his back, but the fur glistened with cold and Diabolist emerged from it in glimmering ice.

“You drank too deep,” Akua Sahelian chided, smiling in that same fearless way she had when she’d pitted her madness alone against the full might of the East.

Ice formed in restraining shackles around the Skein’s limbs, and though he broke through them that moment was all it took for me to land. I shifted, spread my legs and pulled even as the arrowhead became an ugly root of darkness within its flesh. He fought me for a moment, but then the Revenant bent and I crouched to forced the other end of the thread into the flesh of his lower back. It spread without hesitation, forcing the whole creature’s body into a warped arc as he failed to break the strength of my domain manifest.

“My hand is the sword of truth, denying the rot of entropy: ‘lo and behold, the shade of Ruin falls upon you.”

A shiver went through me as sorcery filled the entire cavern. I had felt the likes of this before, once. For a quick, fleeting moment. When Black had spoken a single word and wrecked Liesse like a castle of glass, a madman’s will shattering all that displeased his sight. Hierophant had stolen an aspect, or at least an aspect’s cast, and now wielded it like a hammer against the Revenant that sought to break us. The Skein screamed, this time. Limbs and flesh smashed, breaking apart from the inside and through the yell the ratling hissed a word.

“ Spool .”

I frowned, what/

I stood on the bones again, Akua helping me up, but her hand left mine quickly and she turned a burning glare on the Skein. The remnants of her drake were still lying half-broken, reeking of Winter, Masego was back under his Ivory Globe and my domain was whole. So was the Revenant, not a mark on him. All our successes erased in a heartbeat.

“Again,” the Skein leered. “Teach me all your tricks, crawling things.”

We hadn’t even managed to kill it last time. And he’d still unmade it all, easy a waving a hand. Gods, how many times could he call on that aspect? Three, ten? As many times as he wanted?

“Interesting,” Hierophant said. “You did not break the march of time so much as sever causality. Prune away events from a sequence that still theoretically exists.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let’s find out how many lives a rat can have.”

“Our minds were left untouched,” Diabolist noted. “As was his. In broader Creation such a working would have shattered him upon the wheel, from all the cascade of innumerable events affected. The aspect was bastardized, made contingent to this place.”

“It is a good cage,” the Skein said. “You will not leave it.”

“So we’re playing shatranj,” I said. “Across possibilities he can ‘spool’ back at any time.”

“Alas,” Masego said, tone amused, and the Ivory Globe winked out. “A mistake was made.”

“You fail,” the Skein told him. “Here? You always fail, again and again.”

“You are not the only one who can learn,” Hierophant said, and his glass eyes burned bright beneath the cloth. “And all you have earned from this is further Ruin .”

I’d seen a lot of aspects over the last few years. Become familiar enough with the gifts of Named that I could be considered a discerning judge. William’s Rise had been like a wellspring of harsh light from within, hollowing out his insides but removing every wound inflicted. Black’s Destroy was like a bolt fired at Creation, a wilful removal of what my teacher wanted gone. Akua’s Bind had been little more than an acknowledgement of her nature, the thirst for control deepened and formalized by the touch of the Gods. This was different. Masego had come into his Name standing defiant in the face of a sun that was not a sun, a godly thing that defied the laws of Creation and human comprehension, and it had shaped what he’d become. Usher of Mysteries, Vivisector of Miracles . Witness had been the outgrowth of the former, perhaps, but now I was seeing the latter and it was a terrible thing to behold.

Aspects were act, not simply a word, because they were an exercise of will. A piece of you made into a blade and turned against Creation. This, then, was intimate part of Masego. Of the man he was turning into, and there was cause for worry in it. To ruin something was no small thing: it was to destroy and devastate it irreparably. The Skein had spoken five letters and wiped away all we had wrought.

Masego replied with four and the world shattered .

The cavern came apart at the seams. Entire chunks of it split from the rest, drifting into black nothingness as unmoored ships, and like spider webs the destruction spread across all the Revenant’s realm. Akua and I stood together as the bones beneath us began to spill into nothing, incomprehensibly coming back around to fall from the ceiling in another shard. My will extended into the ice I’d used to keep the gates open, and found they were still there. We were not ruined along the rest of this, then, not necessarily. The Skein moved, and in a myriad other shards did the same. Hierophant stood alone on his pile of bones, wreathed in ribbons of sorcery so thick it was visible to the eye, his smile almost innocently joyful. Wait had, the – my eyes flicked back and with muted horror I watched the platform on which the wheels stood slowly begin to topple into a streak of dark. I would not make it in time. It was not physically possible to... I inhaled and ice bloomed.

“Diabolist,” I ordered.

The moment the glimmering silhouette finished taking shape, Akua was within it, having swum there through Winter. She reached down and snatched the edge of the highest wheel. The ice that made her up began to crack under the massive weight and from the corner of my eye I saw the Skein move towards her in a dozen different shards. He couldn’t kill her through the shell, so it must be the artefact he was aiming for. I could not allow that, if any part of this was to be salvaged. Diabolist’s will was ruling the ice construct, but what was that to me? I seized the reins and let Winter loose: it grew and swelled, a hunched apelike thing that tossed the wheels towards me like they were feather-light. A heartbeat later the Revenant tore through my creation, but I’d already ceased paying attention. A third of the way to me the artefact moved from a shard facing me to one in the far back and I leapt through the void. Flicker. Wrong shard. I was by Masego’s side.

“Hierophant,” I barked. “Contain the rat.”

The dark-skinned man laughed almost drunkenly and brushed back his sleeves. Hands extended, he snapped his wrists together. Two shards collided in a spray of bones that obeyed no sense in where it went and fell, but two Revenant reflections went opposite ways and the undead screamed. It would do. Flicker. I crossed into another shard, almost tripping on a massive half-buried skull, and watched the wheels continue to arc down in the opposite direction. Which meant nothing, but – I made three shells of ice, eyeballing it, yet the artefact still collided entered a fourth. The Skein snatched them before they could bounce, and with a fanged grin leant over the edge of the shard to throw them down into the void. I learned from my mistake, this time. I formed the silhouette directly on the surface of the artefact and broadened it with rough strokes. Akua did not not need a reminder to seize it. Or instructions in how to operate the massive wings I had shaped.

That lasted until the Skein opened his maw and wisps of Winter were sucked out of the construct, leaving it no more than ice with a shade within. He could take it out as fast as I could pour it, I was pretty sure, so instead of wasting power I went for an alternative. I leapt into the void, gallantly suppressing the scream boiling out of my throat.

Fragments spread across places and times yet linked, always linked, for Winter was a single entity and the void’s touch could be bridged. A thousands hands moved.

Akua had gone for numbers, I thought, and even as I fell into the dark I saw limbs, skeletons and even skulls move under Winter’s writ, biting and grasping at the Skein. I found the wheels at last. Hurtling down into the nothing that would lead somewhere else. My body is an illusion , I told myself. I closed my eyes, let distractions fall away.

“My body is an illusion,” I insisted.

Just glamour, and anything I had seen I could glamour. Wings or iridescent blue ripped out of my back, long and ephemeral. It was like moving a limb, if that limb had been wounded for months and I was only getting used to it moving again. Angling my fall was easy enough. I collided with the wheels, setting my feet on the middle rung, and tried to convince myself that weight was an illusion as well.

“Sulia never cared about weight,” I said. “ It does not apply to me .”

The wings didn’t change. But instead of slowing, my descent stopped. And then slowly, painfully, we started rising.

“ Spool ,” the Skein said.

I screamed in frustration and/

I was back on the shard where I’d begun, damn him.

“Did you think it would always work?” Hierophant laughed. “There is nothing I have seen you can take from me. Witness .”

What was he/

I tightened my grip on the wheels, swinging them over the edge of the closest shard with a grunt. The Skein in most shards strangely looked like he’d taken to wearing armour, covered in a sea of remains that fruitlessly bit and clawed at his hide. Diabolist was trying to slow and blind him, with only mixed success. I glanced to the side, dragging the artefact further over the ledge, and froze when I saw myself standing near the gate, utterly furious. And again, in another shard, getting crushed by the Skein’s clawed hands as he seized the wheels. Was I even the real one? No, the existential crisis could wait until later. I needed to get this to Masego so we could get out of here and find Malicia. I raised the wheels over my head and legged it. I couldn’t even tell where this shard was related to the others, much less when: bones and void weren’t exactly trail markers. I leapt across the nearest shard – flicker – and cursed as soon as I landed. The Skein was in this one, fighting... me. And our earlier work and been done anew, with the ratling bound by a string of my domain, forced into that painful stretched. The other Catherine glanced at me, then shrugged and began forming a massive spike of darkness above the Skein’s head.

My own domain ebbed in answer.

Was she... Eye on the prize, Catherine. I made my way around the Revenant’s desperate death throes and leapt. Flicker. This one was empty, save for aimlessly angry bones animated by Diabolist. My fists tightened around the artefact. I could keep this up for hours and still be lost.

“Hierophant,” I called out. “Chart me a path.”

A dot of blue light formed ahead of me then peeled off. Good enough. I followed as swiftly as I could, until it crossed into another shard. Flicker. Empty as well, except the Skein suddenly turned around in another shards and passed into this one. The Revenant loomed as tall as ever, though the smaller shard was forcing him to be careful where he stepped.

“I see you,” the ratling hissed.

The dot of blue light wheeled to the left and crossed into another shard. Less than helpful, that, since unlike it I had to worry about the giant rat. See me, huh. Akua had seemed able to work through Winter in multiple shards, so theoretically... I sunk into my own mind, forcing myself to consider angles, then bent Winter to my will. Across a dozen shards mirrors formed, reflecting the light from the pit into the Skein’s eyes – which he was already covering, aware that with so many mirrors I’d covered near every angle he could look away to. Fucking oracles. It bought me a heartbeat where I ran for it, wheels over my head, but he swung blindly and with his size there was almost no need to aim. I managed a leap on a platform before I was swept away, but then the tail struck and even even tossing half a tower’s worth of ice in the way only slowed it down. A repeat would be the end of this unfortunate magical adventure.

Following light like a current, through as many mirrors as there could be, and weaving power into the reflections. A dozen arrows loosed.

Akua used my work to craft her own, abandoning the undead to taint the light coming from the mirrors with concentrated cold. The Skein slowed, until he shook it off, but it was just long enough for me to manage the leap. The tail swung behind me, hitting only air. Flicker. Masego stood ahead of me, tracing runes that resonated like a gong and drove back the Skein when he attempted to cross behind me.

“Take it,” I said, and tossed the wheels toward him.

It skidded across bones, and would have toppled him outright if he didn’t hastily trace another rune to slow it down to a halt.

“Our entry gate,” I said. “Make it lead to Malicia.”

He wasted no time on backtalk, ripping away a string and tying it to the central axis as I cast a look around. The rat was trying to sneak through the back, but there would be none of that on my watch. I took the whole of my domain, ripping it away from three other Catherines trying to use it, and shaped it into a bolt that shot right at the Revenant as he leapt. It caught him in the chest, tearing through bone and flesh. Both it and the bolt fell into the void, and only then did I allow the others to play with my –our – domain again. A quick look told me Masego had tied the thread to a place on the lowest wheel, which was our signal to get the Hells out of here.

“Akua, back to me,” I said, and yanked her.

I staggered at the impact, which was so much heavier than usual, but then she was at my shoulder again if looking none too pleased at the manhandling. She looked up, and her face fell.

“Catherine,” she said, and her hand rose.

She shaped Winter, but it was too little and too late. The Skein fell down from above, shattering the wheels with a massive paw.

“You lose,” the Revenant crowed.

The ground broke beneath our feet, and after that there was only the fall.

Chapter 44: Catherine’s Plan

“From the example of the claimant Desolate we can learn this: no scheme is so perfect that it is invulnerable to the utter idiocy of an opponent.”
-Extract from an untitled historical commentary on the War of Thirteen Tyrants and One, by the Imperial Concubine Alaya of the Green Stretch

There was only the void to keep track of now, at least. Wings burst out of my back and with a swift beat had me spinning sideways: I caught Masego by the collar, though he kept wriggling uncomfortably. If this had been freefall back in Creation, the howl of the wind would have forced me to raise my voice. No such troubles plagued our descent into nothingness, a silver lining on a situation I knew to be bad but vaguely suspected was much, much worse.

“Can you get us out of here?” I asked, wings beating behind me to keep us aloft.

Diabolist was nothing more than a shade on my back, kept there by the fact I willed it so. Whatever weight she’d had earlier, it was gone now.

“There is no here,” Hierophant replied. “We are in between places that exist, within the contained entity that was the central chamber.”

“And can you get us out of that ?” I hissed.

“It is an egg, Catherine,” he said. “We are within. If you want to leave...”

Crack the shell , I thought. Easier said than done: if that’d been on the table since the beginning, there would have been much less planning needed. Could’ve burst straight into the Skein’s lair, seized the wheels and assassinated Malicia. Of course, we had eventually burst into that lair. It hadn’t gone what one might call ‘well’, or to be honest anywhere near that neighbourhood. After the elven Revenant I’d thought that Neshamah’s guardians were dangerous yet not beyond our ability to handle. I’d just been roughly disabused of that notion. Even Masego picking up his second aspect had barely managed to get the situation under control long enough for the rat to screw us over again.

“Where do I hit?” I asked Hierophant.

The heart of our working relationship, laid bare.

“Anywhere,” he laughed.

I blew out a cold breath and allowed Winter to slither through my veins. Our exertions fighting the Skein had not tired it. It felt, if anything, even more eager than before. I was beginning to grasp the secret at the heart of the fae, slowly but surely: their power delighted in use, rewarded it. I’d inherited that without the tight constraints of a role in the colourful but uncompromising tapestry that had once governed the entire realm of faerie. Before the King of Winter hoodwinked me into killing and freeing him with the same sentence, anyway. Who knew what the face of Arcadia was, now that its ever-feuding courts had become one? I felt Akua’s not-eyed follow the shape of the power I was shaping, but she did not take part. She had not spoken a word since my last summons, I only now noticed.

“Diabolist?” I said.

“I am reaching the limit,” the shade murmured through tight lips.

I glanced back, the light of my translucent wings casting her scarlet eyes almost purple to my sight.

“Of what?” I asked.

“How much principle alienation I can take for you,” Diabolist said. “My thoughts already grow... stilted. Forced down unproductive paths.”

I blinked in surprise. Shit. It was true I’d been tossing around Winter like rarely before and my mind remained mostly my own, but I’d not... There’d been a lot of sweet talk about apotheosis, of late. Foolishly enough, I’d assumed that I’d somehow outgrown my old troubles. Not so, evidently. How had Akua even – ah, the chain. Had to be. This entire time, she’d been taking the plunge so I would remain mostly clear-headed. I could only admire her capacity to master her own thoughts in the face of Winter influence, if her limit was only now reached. My tongue burned with a half a dozen questions but they would have to wait for later. There were no physical markers for me to hit around here, so I didn’t bother with anything too precise. Ice and shadow, woven into a spike that spun and elongated into something closer to a massive javelin. I shaped it carefully, and only when I was satisfied with the flawlessness of the working did I let it loose. For a heartbeat, I hit nothing. The javelin kept moving through nothingness unimpeded, is momentum undaunted by the distance.

Then I hit a wall, or something close to it.

Like an arrow hitting stone my working did little more than leave a mark on the surface, but there was an unmistakable notch of damage on the surface of the nothingness in front of us. Winter’s span was a difficult thing to measure, for my mantle obeyed no rules but its own and sometimes not even that, but I had put much of myself into the javelin. Enough that, with Akua no longer serving as my filter, I could feel the creep of influence at the edge of my mind. Still indistinct whispers, for now. They would grow louder, I knew, until there was no difference between them and my own thoughts. Hammering through wasn’t going to work. I’d come out of here spouting monologues, if not worse, and I wouldn’t catch Malicia acting like the very same people she’d arranged the deaths of for decades over a nice cup of wine. I wasn’t ready to call this a wash yet, and embracing the fullness of Winter was more or less that.

“Hierophant, I need you to pry that open,” I said.

Masego frowned.

“Platform,” he said.

Reluctantly, I snatched another wisp of Winter and crafted one beneath him before dropping his collar. He landed on his feet, if not particularly gracefully, but that wasn’t what drew my attention. I could smell the sorcery on him. I always could, really, and given the amount of protective enchantments he layered on himself whenever we went into battle this should not be a surprise. But there was something different, this time. The magic was curving beneath his skin, deep into his body. My eyes narrowed and traced the shape of them with my mind, like a blind girl trying to see the face of another with my fingers. Some of that sorcery was going straight into his heart, keeping the blood pumping steadily. More was stiffening muscles, like those of his lower back. Keeping him standing up straight. And there were two little pinpricks, going into smaller glands above his kidneys. Forcing them to keep functioning, for whatever eldritch purpose. My studies of anatomy had largely been aimed towards killing or more recreational affairs, but I could recognize the sight of a man tinkering with his own body to keep it going when it was falling apart. He’d used powerful sorceries, today. Birthed an aspect, and used another. Back when I’d been the Squire and just that, even calling on a single such power would have wiped me out. A long overdue reminder that Masego, like the rest of the Woe, was still very much human. With all the messy, unpleasant parts that involved.

I kept my mouth shut anyway as he began to trace runes.

If I’d been a better friend, a better person, I might have taken the burden off his shoulders. Valiantly declared that we would find another way, that I’d take care of it somehow. But I was just me, and it was too late for last-hour gambits. I needed Malicia dead, and I needed it done soon . I’d have to trust that Masego would not irreparably hurt himself, and let him bleed for my objectives. Isn’t it funny? I thought. How the higher you rise, the more power comes into the shape of others suffering for you. I was not smiling. But what was the worth of that, if I still kept silent?

“I can turn a scuffmark into a hole,” Hierophant finally said. “That is, I’m afraid, the limit of what I can do. You will have to address the rest of the matter.”

I nodded.

“Do it,” I ordered.

He attacked the mark I’d left with what looked like twin thin needles of light, but to my senses felt more like a chisel and a hammer. One was heavier than the other, using the weaker one to pry open the wall. Masego’s breath quickened, and I felt some of the spells on his body weaken. Like Diabolist, he was nearing his limit. The Woe were powerful, for our age. More than we had any right to. But if we could not hurt our enemy badly in the initial stretch of the fight, as a group we had a tendency to begin slowly losing. Too many shortcuts. Too many advances with weak foundations. We had rushed to power, and it’d made us fragile. I dismissed the thought, and sharpened my will like a blade as Hierophant finished making that final breach. A small one, less than an inch wide. But I could feel Creation behind it, and an opening was all I’d needed. I called on my domain, the night-realm within, and before it could fall over us like a curtain I wove the smallest sliver through the breach. Gave us a path into Creation.

Night followed.

My wings died behind me as I tread soft snow, the starless sky above spreading out forever. Masego stumbled and shivered as he joined me, but I guided away the worst of the cold with a thought and offered him an arm to lean on. I’d already asked too much of him today. Akua did not appear: she’d always been there. I simply had not acknowledged her presence, or so it felt like. And it was not her fae guise she wore, either. In here, I looked upon the same Diabolist I had fought in Liesse. Tall and splendid, all aristocratic arrogance and careless disdain. In here, all we had done to hide her true face fell away. Unlike Hierophant, she was not burdened by the touch of my kingdom of moonless night. She looked up at the pitch-black firmament and smiled, as if I’d taken her to a tea shop with a charming decor instead of the last remaining hold of the Winter Court. She hummed quietly, lips quirking. I knew that song.

Parts of it, anyway.

“The second is the longest, they said

You will walk under the restless dead

The hanged all crooning from the gallows –

To join them and rest in the shadows.”

Her voice was soft, and the pitch of the tune perfect.

“Diabolist,” I sharply said.

She turned to me, still smiling.

“Come, dearest heart,” Akua said, eyes alight with savage glee. “Let us speak to the Empress of succession .”

My fingers clenched. I still remembered the conversation she’d had with Thief, not so long ago. She’d thrown the argument, as Vivienne had suspected, but the girl who’d once been Heiress never spoke with a single purpose to her words. Had she known I was a wake and listening, even then? Maybe. Or perhaps she was addressing that inscrutable audience that always listened, the unseen hand of fate that always sought to curb us to its purpose. She wanted me to be Empress. She wanted, perhaps, to be my Chancellor. And she thought Malicia’s death would be the birth of that story. Damnably, she might be right. I hoped, against my better judgement, that is was the flesh simulacrum of the Empress that awaited us. I was already in too many knife-fights with fate to pick yet another.

“Follow,” I said, and tugged Masego along.

I left no trace on the snow, and neither did Akua. She had become a creature of this place, by hook and crook. It was Hierophant, sagging and increasingly drenched in cold sweat, that needed the help. I propped him up until the itch in the back of my head had grown too much to ignore. I could feel it, the... depression in this place. As if the supports beneath my domain were uneven and it had sagged. I closed my eyes and withdrew it all. A sea unleashed, slowly siphoned back into my too-small frame, until the touch of the sun was on my face and my eyes fluttered open. We were back in the Threefold Reflection, at last. Green light fell down over us like a shower from a sun pit towering high above, kept functional through all hours of the day by a cunning set of mirrors. This was a salon, by the looks of it, with long resting couches and low tables filling most the place. There were half a dozen doors out of the room, likely meant for servants more than the guests.

“The palace still seems... whole,” I said.

“I would assume the three layers to be completely separate now,” Akua replied. “This felt like Creation to you, yes? Likely this the the original Threefold Reflection that was built before the dimensional overlay was set.”

“So no more shunting,” I said. “Good news. Much as I hate to ask, what plan are we on now?”

Diabolist laughed.

“I’m afraid there is none left,” she said. “None that I can remember, at least. This particular sequence of events was entirely unforeseen.”

Shoddy planning, that. Given how frequently we fucked it all up, not counting that as an option was just bad form on our part.

“You two are done fighting for the day,” I finally said.

“I am still conscious,” Masego muttered.

“Takes a little more than that to be qualified for a throw down with the Empress’ finest,” I replied

Assuming we even found them.

“Diabolist, I’m going to find us a way out,” I said. “Try to find the others and prepare for the worst.”

“I would be of use to you, when facing Malicia,” the shade replied.

“You should be more careful about what songs you sing,” I replied flatly.

Masego’s glass eyes moved from one of us to the other, his face bemused.

“What songs?” he asked.

I met Akua’s now-scarlet eyes and found a thread of amusement in there. That song... The Girl Who Climbed The Tower, Black had called it. There were still many things about it I didn’t understand. I’d first heard Robber humming it, but when I’d eventually asked him about it years later he’d admitted he recalled singing an entirely different song. It was not for everyone’s ears, it seemed.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him, then glanced up.

I could roll the dice with trying to find a way out of the pyramid on foot, but that carried risks. There might still be traps, even without the wheels being a factor. This would do. Window was probably warded, but then I still had the traditional Foundling skeleton key of punching things really hard. Wisps of Winter coalesced behind me, translucent wings coming into being, and I shot up quick as an arrow. My fist smashed into the green glass with my full weight behind it, but I let out a yelp when it bounced off harmlessly and I hit the damned thing like a bird hitting a window. Godsdamnit. Down below, I heard Masego cough out a pained laugh. The glass was set in that pale stone I recognized from outside, with discreet carved runes connecting them. Fine, I could work with that. Wings batting behind me unconsciously, I formed my fingers into a wedge and struck at the stone. I’d aimed well beneath the runes, so I ripped my way through without too much trouble. After that it was just a matter of digging around the boundaries, until I tossed down a stone-encircled glass pane and flew up through the opening. I landed under the noon sun of Keter, while in the distance the plume of smoke from the fires we’d set began to disperse. They’d put out the fires, then.

Look down into the pit, I saw the other two awaiting me. Akua could make her own way up, but Masego would need a little help. Another sliver of Winter had a thick rope of shadow slithering down the pit. Hierophant eyed it sceptically, until an exertion of my will had it tying around his waist. I dragged him up, hoist by hoist, careful not to go too quickly and smash him into the walls. My fingers closed around the back of his neck, and with all the gentleness I could manage I took him out and put him down. Gods, it was like trying not to hurt a baby bird. People were so fragile. The three of us stood under true Creation sunlight for the first time in too long, Akua and I pristine but Masego the picture of exhaustion. He’d lost weight, but there was quite a bit of difference between shedding the pounds – unhealthy as his manner of doing it had been – and being in good shape. We were maybe halfway up the southern slope of the pyramid, facing the Garden of Crowns and the edge of the Silent Palace. The gardens and colonnades below showed no sign of Malicia, but then I’d not expected that to be so easy.

“We have an escape route in case this all blows up in our face,” I half-stated, half-asked.

My eyes were on Akua, making it clear who was meant to answer.

“That is correct,” she replied. “Though it was expected that true disaster would force is to flee through Arcadia.”

“Then fall back there,” I said. “The others will know the way?”

“By now, all their memory blocks should have ended,” she replied.

Good enough, given that I couldn’t afford going around fetching everyone. Adjutant I might be able to find, but who the Hells knew where Archer was? Thief was the last out in the wilds, and to be honest there was no chance of me finding her in the city if she didn’t want to be found.

“Be safe, you two,” I said, and grimaced immediately.

I was painfully aware that the words being spoken in Keter made them even more a platitude than usual. There was no safety here, only the Dead King’s whimsical sufferance.

“That seems unlikely,” Masego noted. “But I shall attempt it nonetheless.”

I squeezed his shoulder before sending him off. It would be slow work for him to descend the pyramid’s slope, but hardly impossible. Diabolist could handle herself, and the steady look I gave her before she left made it clear she was supposed to ease his exhaustion as much as possible. All that was left now was to somehow find Malicia, crush her defences and taker her life. All without breaching the unspoken rules the Dead King had set about what would constitute breaking his hospitality. I doubted Neshamah would truly mind a spot of murder even in his personal backyard, but that wasn’t how this worked: I had to maintain a certain level of deniability. Which wasn’t looking great, considering the closest thing I had to a plan at the moment was ‘murder in broad daylight’. The Skein and the Spellblade should no longer be a part of this, at least. The Revenants would remain stuck in their little kingdoms. That left the Empress’ own personal guard.

The Sentinels hardly scared me, at the end of the day. Well-trained or not, they were only soldiers. But there was a more than decent chance she’d have Wasteland mages with her, and that was a different story entirely. I’d killed more than a few of those, over the last few years, but that’d been before I’d become... this. Wards mattered to me a lot more than they used to, and I wasn’t meeting a cluster of casters in the middle of a chaotic battlefield: these sorcerers would likely have been told everything the Empress knew about what I could and couldn’t do, including vulnerabilities. Black had made a career out of killing enemies much stronger than him with careful planning and preparation. I did not intend to end up on the wrong side of his teachings. Power clapped in the distance, a quick spike followed by smaller workings. I cocked my head. Northern slope of the pyramid, maybe a little further. A trap? Maybe. Or a distraction. But I couldn’t afford not to look, could I?

With gritted teeth, I set out for my little talk with the Dread Empress of Praes.

Chapter 45: Ambush

“As the Bellerophans had not redrawn their war maps in over a century, their expedition against Penthes instead began with the sack of three outlying Delosi towns, one of which was walled and whose watchmen rebuffed the assault of the army. The Republic ultimately withdrew a month later after capturing a Stygian trade caravan carrying a handful Penthesian goods, announcing the unequivocal success of its punitive expedition to the great confusion of the Exarch of Penthes, who was still mustering her army over three hundred miles to the north.”
– Extract from ‘A Pack of Squabbles, or, A History of Internal League Warfare’ by Prince Alexandre of Lyonis

If it was a distraction, then it was a good one – not that I’d expected any less from Malicia. Boots scraping against the faded stone, I crouched at the edge of the pyramid’s slope and studied the silhouettes below. Twenty-one, all in all. Ten faceless and genderless soldiers in steel with masks of black wrought iron, the Tower’s own personal guard. The Sentinels, I’d been taught was their name. I was unsure of how hard a fight they’d be able to give me, but they were not a young Praesi institution. If even half the the hundred Tyrants who’d once commanded them had bothered to teach them a nasty trick or two, they would not be easy meat. The silent guard formed a ring of steel, broad tower shields up as they protected the remaining delegates. Those, I thought, would be the source of the real trouble if there was trouble to be had. Of the eleven remaining strangers only two wore armour and it was clearly ceremonial. Not unlike the colourful scales I’d known Diabolist to wear before she claimed that very Name. Those two were Soninke, men and too flawless to look upon to be anything but Wasteland highborn.

I dismissed them anyway. The warlocks would be the real threat here, not swordsmen no matter their skill. And there were mages among the delegates, I could tell as much at a glance. None of the other Praesi wore a weapon heavier than a long dagger, and though their robes were an ornate riot of vivid silks the colours were not enough to hide the discreet shimmer of runes woven into the fabric. Defensive enchantments, though without Masego around I had no real way to know of their purpose. What I did know was that while silk was one of the fabrics most apt to imbibe magic without spoiling, there was only so much sorcery any fabric could take. Against another sorcerer, defensive enchantments were a significant advantage. Against me, it’d be trying to hold back the sea with a wooden bucket. I’ll still have to hit them hard , I thought. Smaller wisps of Winter will just be ignored, if I’m to strike at them it’ll have to be by surprise and with overwhelming force. Admittedly my favourite kind of fights, on the rare occasions I managed to have them.

One person stood out from the rest, and the sight of her had me tightening my grip on the pommel of my sword. The woman was Soninke and young. No more than twenty, by the looks of her, and though she was of plain appearance every other delegate around her behaved like sunflowers turning towards the sun. Her dress was tastefully understated, as was the silver jewellery adorning her neck and wrists, but there was no mistaking who that was. I wasn’t Malicia in the flesh, or more accurately it was but not her flesh. A simulacrum, then. I felt a sharp edge of relief at the confirmation of what I’d always believed to be the most likely reality. And yet part of me was disappointed as well. There would have been chaos, in slaying the true Malicia, but opportunity as well. If I’d been able to force a war of succession on the Empire without getting embroiled myself... No point in whining about it. It was what it was, and in this case the presence of a mere flesh puppet might be a blessing. Said puppet was awake and alert, I saw, and with good reason.

It had just almost died.

I’d arrived too late to see it happen, but just from the lay of the Praesi I could get an idea of what had taken place. Just as they’d left the Threefold Reflection through the nearest gate and taken the avenue into the tall colonnade they now occupied, someone had taken a shot at the Empress. The shimmering panes of light around the flesh puppet told me exactly why it’d failed, and pointed at the most likely suspect for the attempt: Thief. It couldn’t be Archer. She had arrows that’d go right through most sorceries, and even if she’d failed to make a kill at a distance she would have closed in and carved away at the Sentinels. Adjutant had not aspect that would work for a quiet ambush, and I’d just left behind the remaining two. No, it had to be Thief. The Skein had hinted, back in his lair, that she might try to kill Malicia with the same blade of moonlight she’d stolen from the Spellblade. That was my guess: she’d approached under cover of her aspect, placed her shot and immediately retreated when it failed to breach the Empress’ protections. I couldn’t be sure whether that failure was because the Praesi wards were particularly strong or because the tool employed had not been a good fit, and that was worrying.

They hadn’t seen me, at least for now. I’d not woven glamour over myself yet, afraid some of the mages would be sensitive enough to such powers it would effectively announced my presence even if they couldn’t see through it. The moment the delegation caught scent of me, my bet was that they’d turtle up behind heavy wards and make enough of a racket that the Dead King’s people would have to come and take a look. If that was allowed to happen, the game was done. Pushing any further would break the unspoken boundaries Neshamah had placed on this little lark of ours. Was Thief still around? My guts said yes, but I couldn’t count on it. She might still be acting according to a plan I didn’t know. Which was the point of all this, I supposed. We’d filled the Skein’s sight with so many of those there’d been no telling where the rest of the Woe were or what they were up to. At the unfortunate cost of my being kept in the dark concerning those matters as well. I set aside the thoughts for now, eyes one the Praesi delegates. They were on the defensive for now, the Sentinels using the cover of the colonnade to form a decent holding position while the mages layered enchantments, but they’d get moving soon.

If I were in Malicia’s shoes, right now, I’d be worrying more about Archer than Thief. The longer she remained in the open, the higher the risks she got an unexpected arrow through the throat. If I wanted to have a decent swing at the Empress, I needed to be close by the time they set out. Which left me with the task of moving unseen next to a cluster of highly-trained, professionally paranoid and recently ambushed Wastelanders. While wearing armour. In broad daylight. With no real cover to speak of the moment I left the upper reaches of the pyramid. This was not a recipe for success no matter how you looked at it, but at least I was wearing mail instead of plate. Pretty weak, as far as silver linings went, but I’d take what I could get.

Pulling the Mantle of Woe tight around me, since it was colourful but at least not actively shining under the sun, I began to make my way down. Obliquely, or as close to that as was possible. There were open grounds between the colonnade and the end of the Threefold Reflection proper, and crossing those unseen was a fool’s errand. No, the longer I thought about it the more obvious it got I’d have to roll the dice on my ability to predict where the Praesi would be headed and lay my ambush there.

There were only so many places they could go, I mused as I moved from stone to stone. There was another palace up ahead, but I wouldn’t put my money on them going for it. There’d be another Revenant inside, certainly, but it didn’t look like the most... hospitable of places. The fluid obsidian structures were unpleasant to look at in some primal way, though it was the outlying decorations that would give the Praesi pause. Small channels had been dug into the stone in arcane symbols, lit up by what appeared to be liquid flame. The palace flicked with shifting shadows even under sunlight. If they went through there, I’d kill them all. They’d be forced to take narrow fire-walled paths with plenty of cover for me to ambush from. Unless the Revenant was already in place and ready to intervene, the outlying parts of that palace would be a perfect killing floor for me. Malicia herself wasn’t a military tactician of any renown, but she was hardly a fool. It’d be one of the other two paths she took.

The first would be a gambit on her part. The colonnade and almost temple-like promenade surrounding the pyramid did have a path going around towards the open plaza where the Hall of the Dead and a horde of minions would be awaiting. If the Empress made it there safely, she was out of the woods. I couldn’t snatch her out of the Dead King’s grasp without screwing all of this up. On the other hand, I was rather hoping that was the option she’d take. I was already near to the last third of the pyramid, and all it’d take was dipping out of the sight around the corner for me to slip ahead of her party in the colonnade. I’d already begun angling my descent to be a step ahead if that was the choice she made. Malicia had to know, however, that it was a mostly open space and most the Woe were still on the prowl. Forget Thief, but if Archer came across her there’d be blood on the floor. Quickest path to safety, but arguably the most dangerous.

The second path was a retreat. Not back into the Threefold Reflection – though that was possible, if exceedingly foolish – but towards the lower rungs of Keter. We were all in the highest ring at the moment, surrounded by the same rampart Athal had taken me to earlier through the secret passage. The Empress could head for those walls, and from there either count on the Dead King’s soldiers being there and providing protection or journey further down and away from the area she knew the Woe was roaming. I’d had the advantage of height over her earlier, so I already knew there were no undead on the ramparts at the moment. Indeed, their absence was quite glaring. Neshamah was quite pointedly looking away, in a manner of speaking. Malicia wouldn’t necessarily know that, though. The Crown of the Dead screwed badly with scrying rituals, so it wasn’t like she could have a look through a bowl. If she went with that choice, she was keeping the game afoot. As long as she wasn’t surrounded by undead soldiers, she remained a target no matter how far down she fled. I wasn’t all that familiar with the rest of the city, though, so we’d both be going into that blind.

I’d reached one of the pyramid’s four spines when the Praesi moved out. Peeking around the corner, I grinned nastily as I watched the delegation head towards the central plaza at a brisk pace. She’d bet it all on a quick resolution, then. I could work with that. I picked up the pace as well, dropping down on the ground long before they were in sight of the turn. Fingers drumming against my sheath, I eyed the spot where the ambush would have to take place: right after the turn, with a clear line of sight to the path leading to the plaza. The columns were but a few feet apart and joined by a low wall on the outer half of the colonnade, though the half facing the pyramid was without. The turn was angled too circular for me to be able to hide in the bend, sadly, but there was another detail to this construction: a ceiling. Barded with criss-crossing beams of copper, the angular stone roof was held up by the columns. The ceiling itself was filled, but there was room between the long stretch of stone supported by those same columns and the roof itself. Not much, but then for once my size might come in as actually useful. A few years ago, the notion of hanging from a ceiling like a fucking bat to swoop down on my enemies would have struck me as absurd, especially if I was wearing armour. Now, though? It wasn’t like my arms could get tired anymore.

It’d have to be around the turn, otherwise the moment the enemy approached they’d just see me hanging there. That’d turn awkward real quick, leading to questions like ‘why did you think that would work?’ or even worse, small talk. I wasn’t emotionally prepared to make polite conversation with the Empress while murder-hanging from a ceiling. I hoisted myself up the low wall and frowned up at the column. There was distinct lack of good handholds, but using Winter would be tipping my hand and I needed to hurry before the enemy arrived. With all the grace of a one-legged squirrel, I hugged the column and shimmied my way up. It was easier up there: I caught one of the copper beams and left the column, effortlessly dragging my hole body up and spreading my legs to gain more traction from other beams. My free hand went into collection my cloak, which was now hanging like a shitty tapestry, and just kind of bunching it up over my stomach before I pulled myself close to the ceiling. There, that should do. I was kind of hoping Thief wasn’t around, because if she saw me I’d never live this down. I heard the footsteps, then their words.

“The Dead King’s enchantments make it impossible to use proper sensory spells,” a woman’s voice sighed in Mtethwa. “My apologies, Your Dread Majesty. My abilities are lacking.”

“I hardly expected you to be the Hidden Horror’s superior in matters of spellcraft, Lady Olinga,” the flesh puppet replied. “Already your wards proved your worth by sparing me the Thief’s ambush.”

“She may well still be lurking about,” a man warned. “And the Adjutant will have found a way out of the illusions by now. We must hurry.”

“Any faster will disrupt the wards,” Lady Olinga peevishly replied. “It already took me decades to train them to be able to maintain it while moving.”

“The Warlock can-“

“I am not the Warlock,” the Soninke cut through. “Nor even the Hierophant. Do ask miracles of me, Galadan, when you can barely use High Arcana yourself.”

“We will proceed at the current pace,” Not-Malicia said, and I could almost hear the soothing smile. “Peace, my friends. This interlude soon comes at an end.”

Well, she wasn’t wrong about that. More worryingly, I was hearing the Empress and the highborn moving but not a single Sentinel footstep. Spelled gear, had to be. And there was no telling what calibre either. Enchanted artefacts weren’t as rare in Praes as they were in Callow, but even in the Wasteland it was the petty stuff that wasn’t kept within powerful families. Magic made into enchantment waned over time, so for anything to last for more than a few years it had to be an extremely powerful mage – or ritual – that had first made the artefact. The lesser stuff had to be empowered anew pretty regularly, and most mages saw that kind of repeat labour as beneath them. Which meant finding another practitioner to take care of it, certainly easier in Praes than my homeland, but artefacts only worked perfectly for the mages who’d first made them. After that, every set of hands they passed through made them a little shoddier until they broke down. Of course, then you got the stuff out of myth. Which tended to be either like the Lone Swordsman’s, a feather from an angel that’d made intense eye contact with Creational laws until they backed away uncomfortably, or your average legendary stuff. Which had both been crafted by the kind of sorcerer or Named that came around once a century and been made out of materials with inherent magical properties that kept the enchantments going indefinitely. All stuff that was rare, difficult to obtain and horribly, horribly expensive. Archer’s longbow was probably worth a pair of large palaces in Procer, if she ever tried to pawn it in Mercantis, and it wasn’t even quite up to snuff compared to some of the stuff out there.

Now, if they were from anywhere else, I’d dismiss the thought of the Sentinels having even one piece of such gear out of hand. Personal guards or not, they wouldn’t rank that kind of ridiculous expense. They were, unfortunately, from the Dread Empire of Praes. When a nation got a line of three emperors that picked Profligate as a reigning name, terrible monetary decisions were only to be expected. And that was without thinking of the gaggle of practitioner Tyrants that’d held the Tower with just as many Warlocks serving beneath them, few of which had ever held qualms about a little mass murder and assorted bankruptcy if it got in the way of their latest idea. Even then, there couldn’t be too many of it. Enough to equip ten guards, though. Would Malicia risk that kind of precious equipment by bringing it to Keter? My guts said yes. She wasn’t a mage herself, and like the Calamities she’d never shown a great deal of respect for artefacts that were relevant only on the tactical level. I could easily see her kitting out her handpicked Sentinels in the good stuff both as a show of force for the Dead King and for that little additional sliver of safety abroad.

Which meant I couldn’t just ignore the soldiers, as I’d intended to previously. They might have stuff that could hurt fae – no, knowing Malicia they definitely had stuff that hurt fae. Still, the sorcerers remained the greater threat. Fighters, even dangerous ones, I could kill my way through. If I got stuck behind a ward, there was no getting out. I held my breath, lips thinning when I realized my lungs never began to burn. Yet another comforting illusion that would not withstand scrutiny. Eyes wide open I waited for the Praesi to approach. Artefact-bearers or not, the Sentinels still wore those fucking stupid masks. They couldn’t easily look up, and their peripheral vision was shit. I’d let them pass me before dropping down and take out as many mages as I could in the first strike. Without a sound a pair of steel-clad soldiers passed under me, and then – shit .

I dropped down before the streak of lightning could tear through my belly. Had that come out of an opal? Did I have to start worrying about the jewellery on people’s clothes now? The Sentinels were on me before the others could so much as exclaim in surprise, swords swinging. Sorcery flared behind them, the mages taking action, and I knew without a doubt that if I got stuck in a brawl with the soldiers this was headed downhill. Never give mages time to cast . I breathed out, and ripped away another illusion. I stepped through the sword blows, the mist that was now my torso billowing as their blades went through. One step, two, three and then I was among the mages. Solid, I ordered my body. My blade ripped through a Taghreb’s throat and the panes of light around Malicia dimmed, her eyes widening in fear and surprise. I tugged out a string of my domain, shaped it and let it loose with a flick of the wrist. The javelin of night-stuff flew perfectly, puncturing the sorcerous protection and...

Breaking an illusion.

Fuck. A ward closed around me a heartbeat later and I found myself surrounded by very displeased Praesi. With a sigh I rose from my half-crouch, adjusted my cloak and offered the delegation a winning smile. I did not get a single one in response, which might have something to do with the man bleeding out on the ground a mere foot behind me.

“Well,” I muttered. “This is a little awkward.”

I reached for Winter but found my will couldn’t quite make it. That, I mused, was not a promising start to these negotiations.

Chapter 46: Possibly A Plan

“To declare an assertion of the People untrue is unlawful, even if it was retroactively asserted by vote to be untrue, at which point referring to it as either true or untrue is equally unlawful.”
– Bellerophan formal codex of laws, circa 1321 A.D.

The transparent bubble around me was solid, as I found out with a swift strike of what must have been at least my fifteenth sword of the day. I was pretty sure the one made out of goblin steel was still with the Spellblade, since I’d never actually picked it up. Over the span of a single heartbeat the Praesi delegation’s entire body language had shifted. Where before the illusion had been the centre of their attention, they now all faced the taller of the two men wearing ceremonial armour. I’d expected another illusion to break and Malicia’s flesh puppet to be revealed but then the stranger smiled and I realized I was already looking at it. Shit, she’d never said she was limited to using women as puppets had she?

“Catherine,” the Empress greeted me in a pleasant baritone. “You’ve made quite the entrance.”

I coughed.

“Would you believe I was just cleaning my sword and my hand slipped?” I tried.

Not so much as a twitch from anyone. Tough crowd.

“Worth a shot,” I shrugged.

“So much for the cunning Black Queen,” a robe-clad man sneered.

From the voice, it was the one called Galadan. His interlocutor had pointedly not used a noble titled when bickering with him, so odds were he was just a talented practitioner snatched young and groomed by one of the powerful houses.

“Galadan, was it?” I said slowly, lips quirking as the name echoed with the taste of Winter. “I’ll remember that.”

There were days where my reputation was like a stone around my neck, making what should have been the simplest matters a brutal grind where my best intentions were turned to dross no matter what I tried. But there were days, as well, where the balance swung the other way. I was standing alone and surrounded, bound by a ward I’d wager had been crafted specifically to deal with me, and I had nothing left to bare at the man but teeth. Galadan still flinched . Malicia chuckled lightly at the sight.

“One does not lightly taunt a tiger, even caged,” she chided her subordinate. “There is no need for uncouthness, Queen in Callow. Threats this early in the conversation strike me as in poor taste.”

I should go alone with the beat, of course, dance that highborn dance of manners and double-speak and bladed implications. But we’d done that for a year now, the both of us, and the more I learned about what she’d been up all the whole to the more I realized how deeply I’d been played. She’d let me bleed my kingdom, my armies, my people against her enemies while she plotted to unleash the Dead King. I would not condemn her for desperation, not when it had driven me to the same madness, but there had been calculation behind her despair. She would let the demon out of the box only when Callow had seen the wilfulness beaten out of it by the Tenth Crusade, and not a moment before. It’d make me a hypocrite to talk about the wickedness of making pact with the Hidden Horror, but I was not unreasonable in the fury I felt at the knowledge that she’d intended to bleed me out for her advantage.

I spat to the side.

“You know me,” I grinned toothily. “Proper savage, I am. That’s how they raise us in the provinces.”

Malicia sighed.

“There is no need for such antagonism,” she said. “You have attempted to murder me, certainly, but that is a small thing. Expected, in many ways. We had a confluence of interests at the last hour of Liesse, and may have one currently as well. It is neither of us that most benefits from this squabble.”

“You funded Liesse,” I replied calmly. “Enabled it. You were, to use that most damning word, complicit .”

“And yet,” the Dread Empress of Praes said, “when presented with the finished weapon you agreed with me on the necessity of its existence. Our present situation is not so different.”

I had come to regret it, over the months that followed that nightmare, that I had even for a moment agreed with Malicia. That I’d been able to set aside the pile of bodies the doomsday fortress had been raised from for the golden lie of the peace it might be able to force. I’d often thought of pragmatism as the highest of all virtues, since I’d become the Squire. So many time I’d crossed blades with heroes and villains who were so wrapped up in what they might be able to make of the world that they were unwilling to face the reality of what it was. But I’d learned. It was a virtue, when properly used, but to embrace it at the exclusion of all else was to become Black. Cunning, victorious and brutally efficient. Dead inside too, though, more means than man. The kind of person that brought only ruin wherever they went.

“And so the devil complains the other devil is tricking us both,” I laughed. “Quite the assertion, when you’ve already escalated the offer beyond what either of us can afford.”

“The Principate is an existential threat to us both,” the Empress said. “That is fact, not speculation. So long as Procer is not dismantled, even victory tomorrow would only result in the same war erupting anew in twenty years. You are quite aware of this, or you would not have requested signatory status with the Grand Alliance.”

“Hasenbach isn’t the one whose ships are burning your coasts,” I pointed out. “And Levant’s on the march. Bit more to this than the First Prince having a go at the East.”

“Ashur will seek separate peace the moment the Grand Alliance collapses,” Malicia patiently said. “It will be costly to settle, but the Empire is the wealthiest it has been in several generations. The Dominion is willing to fight under the cross, but to defend Procer? Even if they are cajoled into it and somehow manage victory, they will have no stomach for pressing with another war after turning back the Dead King.”

“It’s an interesting sell that you’re making between the lines,” I noted. “Instead of your shield protecting the western flank with the Principate, you’re trying to talk me into being the same for your western flank with the Dead King . What a favour you’re granting me. I have to praise the audacity, if nothing else.”

“Let us not quibble over details,” Malicia flatly said. “You meant to release him yourself. If betrayal in the terms is your worry, I am willing to grant you the right to read the final treaties and sit at the signing.”

“I meant to loose him only on the northernmost edges of Procer,” I sharply replied. “Where the damage inflicted could be kept to a strict minimum and he’d have to defend narrow beachheads against the entire Tenth Crusade. You, on the other hand, are handing him almost a third of the continent’s most densely populated farmland on a silver platter. I don’t care how good your binding oaths are, if he manages to swallow that big a prize the rest of Calernia is fucked. Including me, including you . You can’t possibly be so desperate you can’t see that.”

“There is quite the difference between recognizing someone’s rights to territory and the other party being able to seize it,” the Empress said. “Some principalities will fall, I expect. Not enough. And what remains of Procer will be embroiled in permanent bloody warfare to the north, a grind on the resources of both participants.”

“See, I would have bought that before I saw Keter with my own eyes,” I told her. “Saw the kind of tools the Dead King has at his disposal. I’m telling you, and Gods I would love it if you actually took me to my word for once, he has a fucking legion of monsters to unleash. He’s been sitting pretty on this for millennia, Malicia, picking up every strong Named he came across and adding them to his arsenal. Procer can barely handle me, and that’s with the hand of the Heavens so far up their asses you can see the fingers wiggling between the teeth. They are not capable of handling what he’ll send marching.”

“Evil,” the Empress replied serenely, “does not win wars. That is a law of nature, true as sunrise or the moving of the tides. You have inherited Amadeus’ most dangerous delusion in believing otherwise. He could empty all the Howling Hells and it would not matter one bit. The only way to eke out a victory, Catherine, is not to fight .”

“And how’s that been working out for you?” I harshly asked.

“My armies are intact,” Malicia smiled. “I have avoided loss of any significant industry or resources and maintained my hold on all my core territories. Your need to war with every foe in sight, on the other hand, has broken your only host, brought several outlying regions of Callow to the brink of rebellion and left you exceedingly vulnerable to attack from every single other state on the continent.”

“You know,” I mused, “we usually get that speech from the west instead of the east. Oh, Callow’s on fire but my lands are fine. You must be a bunch of blunderers. Forgetting, of course, that the only reason the princes of Procer aren’t bickering over who gets the nicer parts of your fucking capital is that my people bled at the borders to drive them back.”

“You expect my sympathy for the costs of defending your own lands?” the Empress said, tone mildly sardonic.

“You know,” I said, “that’s fair. It really is. It’s not like my armies gives a damn about the Wasteland. But then you don’t get to parade the success of your masterful ‘strategy’ either, Malicia, when the only thing that makes it work is that my kingdom’s in the way of an invasion. You haven’t played everyone like a fiddle. You didn’t raise a godsdamned hand even when the Ashurans started sacking your cities. All you did was read a fucking map and take a bet on human nature.”

She laughed in my face, an older man’s rich and riotous laughter.

“Indeed, I truly am a fool for having achieved all my desired outcomes without any true cost to myself,” she said. “However will I live this down?”

“No cost?” I said. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Your little episode in Liesse cost you quite a bit, didn’t it? More than half the Legions. Your finest generals, and probably the person dearest to you in the world. All of Callow, too. How’s it feel, Alaya, to join the roster of empresses who pissed away a kingdom out of pride?”

The flesh puppet turned dark eyes on me.

“One of your better attempts,” she noted. “Given two or three decades, you might survive a month at court without someone cleaning up behind you. Evidently, you are disinclined to cooperate even when it is to our common advantage. Let us part ways, then.”

I went for Winter again. Still just out of the reach of my fingertips. The harder I set my will to it, though, the more I felt like there might be some give. Was the ward pitting willpower against willpower? There were four warlocks keeping this going that I could see, and Wasteland mages were taught from the cradle that Creation was theirs to master. That didn’t breed weak wills, though sometimes brittle ones. I might be able to pull that off, given long enough, but it wasn’t a certainty. And I’d be up to my neck in Sentinels before then. I shifted my stance, wrist slowly rotating as I flicked the last of the blood off my sword.

“This the part where you have your little toy soldiers try me?” I casually said. “Should be interesting to see if they can kill me.”

“You are a skilled swordswoman,” a Taghreb mage snorted. “Yet not so skilled as that.”

“You mistake me,” I smiled. “Even if your pack of silent hounds hacks me to pieces, will I actually die ?”

That gave them pause.

“Lost half my face and torso, not even an hour ago,” I said. “A Named elf did that with one of the dangerous aspects I’ve ever seen. You think you can swing harder than that? I’m genuinely curious, what do you have to throw at me that’ll keep me down for the count?”

“Cold iron,” Galadan hissed.

I snorted.

“That’s cute,” I said. “My own crown is made of that, you mouthy second-rater. But, Hells, give it a shot. It’s not like my way to the throne hasn’t been paved by the bodies of Wastelanders who just knew they had my number.”

I straightened, gaze sweeping across the Praesi delegation.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” I said with a savage grin, “which brave soul wants to be the first example I make today?”

Silence was my answer, and when I inhaled the fear that had swelled up under their calm faces I could not be sure whether it was me or Winter that delighted in it. The spell was broken by a slow clap. Malicia’s simulacrum was smiling.

“You truly do have a talent for this,” she said. “Beyond even what you were taught. Still, you have ever been slow to learn. Did I not tell you, Catherine? To win, it is best not to fight at all.”

The puppet glanced at her subordinates.

“The ward anchors will remain here,” she said. “The rest of us will proceed to the Hall of the Dead and resume negotiation.”

The man’s face turned to me, and inclined Malicia inclined his head by a fraction.

“A good day to you, Black Queen,” she said. “May you survive the consequences of what you have wrought.”

The smiled turned mirthless.

“After all,” she finished, “I still have a use for you.”

Oooh, that’d been cold . Had to grant her the due for that, and I knew cold better than most. I gathered my will and smashed it against the ward like a hammer, but the give wasn’t nearly strong enough. If she managed to get out of here, this was done. And like she’d said, Neshamah would be displeased. Or perhaps disappointed, which seemed like a much more dangerous state of affairs. I couldn’t reach my mantle, and the bubble might as well have been stone. Stone before I’d gotten said mantle, anyway, it was a lot less trouble these days. I still had knives up my sleeves, thanks to Pickler’s cunning little contraptions, but if my sword couldn’t cut it against the bubble neither would they. The Praesi gathered to move out, the Sentinels making a protective ring around the remaining delegates and the Empress. My fingers clenched. I had no weapon, no power that would work until it was too late. Well, except my fucking ‘invisible crossbow’, thank you Past Catherine. Wait, yes , my invisible crossbow. I didn’t physically have one – I’d checked earlier, patted myself down – but it might be a metaphor. Or maybe the sight of me making an ass of myself was a signal for Archer to start shooting, which seemed a lot more likely.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” I called out.

The Empress turned.

“And why is that?” she said.

Ah, humouring me. Nearly always a mistake.

“I’ll have to kill you with my secret weapon,” I replied.

“Is that so?” she said.

“Evidently,” I drawled, “you are disinclined to cooperate. Let us part ways, then.”

I brought up my invisible crossbow and fired it right into her throat.

At which point nothing happened.

“I was expecting the Archer to ambush us,” Malicia said after a moment.

“Wards prepared?” I asked.

“Several,” she replied.

“The plan had a few kinks to work out,” I admitted.

If I’d been more prone to assigning sentimentality to the Empress , I would have believed her to be somewhat embarrassed on my behalf. Well, it’d make two of us. At least years of Indrani’s company had more or less made me immune to shame and public embarrassment. Mercifully, the Dread Empress of Praes set out again without taking a moment out of her day to mock me. All right then, back to forcing my way through the ward and then having a spot of diplomatic murder. I pressed my will against the bubble again, and kept the pressure up. I was gaining ground, inch by inch, but it was taking too godsdamned long.

The arrow took Galadan right in the knee.

The mage fell with a scream as my eyes widened in surprise. Had there been some sort of protective enchantment on him, like there’d been on the Exiled Prince? Why else would Archer aim for the knee? Unless...

“Oh, fucking Hells,” I sighed. “She’s drunk, isn’t she?”

Had she seriously been so wasted she’d missed both the signal and her mark? Gods, I didn’t even know Named could get that drunk.

“Fighting retreat,” Malicia ordered, tone perfectly even.

“Archer,” I yelled. “The mages around me. Ignore the Empress.”

I found fear in the eye of the warlock closest to me when I met them, and redoubled my efforts to break through. Except that no other arrow came. Was this a plan of some sort? Befuddlement distracted me long enough I lost a few inches to the mages, and I threw myself back into it with gritted teeth. She and I would have a talk about this, when – the second arrow clipped the shoulder of a mage to the side of the bubble, drawing blood and a scream but nothing else. I gained back the inches I’d lost, but that was all. Gods, how drunk was she? No, she’d have burned it out of her body by now with her Name. Indrani might capricious, but she was also incredibly vain about her marksmanship. After missing her first shot she’d have sobered herself up. I came to the conclusion a heartbeat before the Empress announced it out loud to her escorts. This had never been Archer. This was Thief who’d stolen a bow and arrows at some point, and the shots were missing because no one had ever taught her to use the godsdamned thing properly .

“Thief, just stab the bastards,” I yelled angrily.

Her ruse – passing for Archer – had slowed down the Praesi advance some but not nearly enough. She should have gone for the mages since the start, though charitably I’d assume she’d been trying to make time for me to break out of the bubble. I slammed my will against the ward, to no avail. This was infuriating. If I’d still had an aspect I could have ripped through that like wet parchment. But with the mantle’s power had come the mantle’s weaknesses. Although, I’d learned necromancy when I was still... No, my tie to Zombie still existed but it was muted. I couldn’t control her through it. Neither could I summon the arguably more dangerous dead thing at my beck and call, Akua Sahelian. It was like the bubble was shutting me out of Winter and essentially everything outside of the bubble itself. I was pretty sure I could still manipulate what was in here, but my body couldn’t shift without Winter to handle the changes and, and I still had a bit of Winter in here didn’t I? I glanced down at my sword. I’d gone through over a dozen of those fighting the Skein, just making another one out of ice every time the last one shattered. It’d become so natural I barely ever thought of it anymore. I grimaced. Didn’t really help, though. I could make an ice javelin out of that, but that was no better than a sword and I doubted anything aside from my domain would put a hole in the ward.

Thief flickered into sight, stabbing into the back of the man whose eyes I’d met earlier, but even though she drew blood a streak of lighting caught her in the side and smashed her to the ground. An illusion broke, and a fifth spellcaster flicked her wrist as she whispered in the mage tongue. The lightning kept roiling and Vivienne screamed as she twisted on the ground.

“Flee,” I hissed. “ Go .”

Except she couldn’t, and I didn’t have the tools to... My fingers clenched. I gathered my will, sent it into my sword and broke it apart. I ripped from the ice the stuff of Winter, and from it wove one of the few things that never left my body. A small dark whistle, pulsing with power not my own. Power I’d stolen from a hated foe. Bringing it to my cold lips, I blew out and the power vanished. It broke into fine powder. Not a sound had been made. It wasn’t that kind of whistle. It wasn’t that kind of call .

“She’s summoning something,” the sorceress that still poured lightning into Vivienne called out.

“We need every single one of us,” the man who’d been stabbed replied in Mtethwa. “She’s a monster.”

The blade went through the back of his head, coming out of his month in a downpour of blood. Larat clicked his tongue disapprovingly.

“Now now, man-thing,” he chided. “That’s just no way to speak about your superiors.”

The rest of the Wild Hunt tore out of Arcadia behind him, and with a wild scream I finally shattered the ward. Finally.

My turn .

Chapter 47: Culmination

“Do not call a man loyal who still draws breath.”
-Dread Emperor Terribilis II

There’d be no replacing the whistle, and I’d long ago resolved to keep it for a particularly black day, but there’d be no replacing Thief either. I stood by my decision. What had once been Akua’s aspect had yanked the entirety of the Wild Hunt through Keter’s wards and whatever other nasty surprises Neshamah had awaiting people trying to reach his city through otherworldly means, unharmed. I’d address the Wild Hunt in a moment, though. I had a set of scales to even first. The sorceress who’d been breaking Thief apart had hastily ended her spell when the fae came out of nothingness, then panicked when I broke the ward. The remaining three casters that’d been keeping me imprisoned staggered at the backlash, and in that moment I acted. One step, the sorceress raised a hand towards me. Two steps, her lips began to form a syllable in the mage tongue. Three steps, my fingers clasper her wrist and with a sharp squeeze I shattered every bone. Face paling, she mastered the pain and got the first word of her incantation out. Four steps, I pivoted and my elbow ploughed into her throat. The windpipe was crushed instantly, and as she choked and fell I straightened and gently set my hands against her temples.

One simple twist, and the neck broke with a crack.

“Thief, get out of here,” I called out calmly. “Hear me now, Rider of the Hunt: no prisoners.”

That was the kind of feast the Wild Hunt lived for, and they wasted no time digging in. Larat had hacked through the heads of two of my former jailors within a heartbeat of my finishing the order, grinning nastily, and the rest of them charged with wild hoots as they fell upon Malicia and her men. Vivienne tried to get up but her limbs were shaking too badly. I cursed under my breath – I might be able to walk off mage lightning, these days, but my companions were another story – and strode over to help her up.

“Will you be able to escape on your own?” I softly asked.

“Just give me a moment,” she rasped. “I still feel like my skin is on fire.”

She was burned badly, skin charred in strange patterns all over her body where the lightning had struck, and for a Named she’d always been on the fragile side of the scale. Not for the first time, I mourned that none of my powers were geared towards healing in the slightest. But Thief was wounded, not crippled, and I trusted she had the will to press on after the worst of it passed. Letting out a laboured breath, she pushed me away.

“Kill the Empress,” she said. “I’ll live.”

She’d do more than that, if I had anything to say about it. The moment Masego had healed her back up to fighting fit, I was going to teach her to hold her own in a fight if it was the last thing I did. For too long I’d waved the matter away, dismissed as largely unimportant since she wouldn’t be fighting on the frontlines anyway. That’d been naïve, and in retrospective a very dangerous kind of arrogance. We wouldn’t always get to dictate the nature of our fights with our ever-rising count of enemies. Today had been a harsh reminder that Vivienne’s lack of skills with arms wasn’t just fuel for verbal roughhousing, it was a dangerous liability.

“Keep out of sight,” I ordered, keeping the thoughts away from my face.

The entire aside couldn’t have taken more than a few moments, yet in that span the skirmish had already turned into a siege in miniature. The last of my surviving jailors was dead, his corpse impaled atop the lance of a dark-skinned fae who carried it along like some sort of gruesome trophy. Yet the Empress’ people had responded to the appearance of the fae with the steady hands of veteran killers. Colourful curtains of light had been spawned, overlapping and forming a sort of six-cornered shield over the entire delegation, and still a pair of Malicia’s warlocks were casting. The Hunt had not laid idle, of course. It tested the defences, but found blades and spears could not breach it, nor could the fae sorceries at their disposal. I recognized the wards, or part of them at least. Akua had used similar ones, called them ‘revolving wards’. A common innovation of her and her father’s, crafted to deal with the powerful but terribly direct sorceries of the Summer Court. I was less than surprised Malicia’s people had gotten their hands on the ward schematics, or adapted them to her purposes. And yet I was not worried, because one fact stood above all: the Praesi were defending, but they were no longer moving. No matter how tall the walls, fortresses always fell. Larat joined me as I strode towards the front, blade dripping with blood.

“A most pleasant excursion, my queen,” he mused. “Shall we give the dead a taste of our mettle as well, after these vagrants have been cleared out?”

“We’re not picking a fight with the Dead King,” I flatly said. “He makes sport of the kind of people that bled you when we assaulted the Proceran camp. Behave, Hunstman.”

“I always do,” Larat assured me with a too-wide smile. “My fellow riders are chipping away at this lovely turtle shell, one sliver at a time. Patience will deliver us the promised deaths.”

“Let’s see if I can quicken that,” I replied.

The Empress had holed up behind a fortress, hadn’t she? I could batter away at it, sure enough, but Black had always told me that the most dangerous of all siege weapons was a mule carrying gold and a promise. I cast a look at the Empress’ people, looking for a weak link. None to be found, sadly. They were all calm confidence incarnate. Didn’t matter, though. The masks were pretty enough, but I could smell fear’s dark stirrings beneath them. The Wild Hunt parted for me, and standing before the Praesi I cleared my throat.

“The first three to surrender get to keep their lives,” I announced. “Excluding Malicia. I’ll swear binding oath to it, with an agreed-upon phrasing.”

None replied, but I saw eyes narrow. Yeah, that was sounding quite tempting at the moment wasn’t it? Praesi loyalty was something of a contradictory term.

“An empty offer,” the Empress said. “She cannot breach the wards. Regardless, there would be immediate consequences to such a decision.”

The Sentinels stirred to drive the point home. She’d not accused me of lying, because she wasn’t a fool: these were mostly practitioners, so they knew I had enough fae in me I couldn’t break an oath even if I wanted to. As long as the phrasing held, which was on them, they’d be spared. So instead she was playing on fear and pride. For once, the battlegrounds were familiar to the both of us.

“You thought that about the last set of wards,” I said. “Look behind me. There’s a few corpses telling you otherwise. Sure, she could turn the Sentinels on you, but the moment the bubble is down she’ll have bigger problems than you. Is she really going to attempt an execution when she’s up to her neck in the likes of this guy?”

I pointed a thumb a Larat. The fae who’d once been the Prince of Nightfall idly touched the blood on his sword and brought it to his lips, licking it off with relish. As far as I knew he didn’t, uh, actually drink blood so that was purely to fuck with their heads. Good show, my treacherous lieutenant.

“This is not my true body,” Malicia reminded them.

She did not need elaborate on the possible consequences of betraying a still-living Empress. There was an entire hall of forever-screaming heads in the Tower that served as a constant reminder. And still, the pair of warlocks who’d been casting had stopped. Momentum was on my side.

“Sure, she rules for now,” I said. “How long is that going to last? She’s yet to win a battle and most her army’s deserted to other banners. Spend a year or two in Mercantis, wait it out, and you can come back to the Tower to make nice with her successor able to boast you turned on her. Hells, if you’ve got issues with Mercantis I’ll find you something to do in Callow. I’ve always a need for mages, and the pay will be generous. I’m sure most of you have respect for Malicia. It’s not unearned.”

I paused and smiled thinly.

“Are you really willing to die defending that hill, though? Because if I have to breach this ward myself, I’ll not be in the mood for easy deaths.”

“I would keep a few as playthings, my queen,” Larat added cheerfully. “It has been ages, since we’ve had proper entertainment.”

I shrugged, watching the faces of the Praesi.

“My mercy has a time limit, ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “Now’s not the moment for hesitation.”

I met Malicia’s eyes calmly. There was no appreciation for what I’d done there to be found, not when it was turned against her. The Empress paid lip service to the treasured Wasteland principle of ‘iron sharpens iron’, but when it came down to it she never settled for anything less than a victory. No matter how long that victory took to snatch. If it was Callowans I was dealing with, one of them would have cursed and folded. But I was dealing with Praesi, a people that had turned betrayal into art back when most of Calernia still used iron. One of the curtains vanished, and a Soninke in robes ran for it. That first betrayal was the collapse of the dam, no one wanting to be the soul that didn’t qualify as one of the first three, and within a heartbeat all the curtains of light save one were gone. A loyalist, how quaint.

“Kill,” I ordered the Hunt.

I had no intention of offering any of them safe harbour in Callow, and they really should have extracted the oath before turning on Malicia. They’d feared the Sentinels both too much and not enough. The Empress stood tall and proud in a man’s body even as it all went to the Hells around her. I advanced, slowly but surely. The Tower’s personal guards held the fae back, long enough that one of the traitors turned her cloak again and began reinforcing the ward, but a silver arrow took her through the throat and that was the end of that. The Sentinels began to break. Their armour held against even fae armaments, and their blades scythed down a handful of fairies, but lances and swords and arrows found weaknesses and exploited them ruthlessly. The fleeing Praesi were ridden down mercilessly, until all that remained standing was the Empress and a single sweating mage. I suspected the Hunt could have torn through that ward easy as turning a hand, but it had been left to me by the twisted fae understanding of respect.

“I wonder,” I said, looking Malicia’s simulacrum in the eyes, “if I can reach you in Ater through this puppet of flesh. Shall we find out?”

She met my gaze unflinching.

“No,” she replied, and the simulacrum dropped.

Ah. Well, that also worked. The last living Praesi turned fearful eyes on me.

“I surrender,” she said.

Then the arrow took her in the throat. A perfect arc, one I hadn’t seen coming until the last moment and that had sailed right through the last ward unhindered. She was dead before she hit the floor, the light curtain vanished.

“And once again, Archer saves the day,” Indrani called out from above.

She was standing on the lower reaches of the pyramid, posing triumphantly bow in hand. Before addressing that – and Gods, was I going to address that – I walked over to Malicia’s living but insensate simulacrum. My boot came down, pulping the skull, and then again over the throat since it usually paid to be thorough. I’d have to clean my boots later, I mused, or the stench would be horrible.

“Indrani, get your ass down here,” I screamed.

I turned to look around for Thief, but she was nowhere in sight.

“Vivienne,” I said. “Still here?”

The other Callowan winked back into sight, still looking half-dead from her hiding place behind a column.

“Good,” I said. “Collect all the corpses. I don’t want to risk any surprises. And strip away the Sentinel armour, please. It can take fae blades, it must be worth a fortune.”

I would have felt worse about looting the dead if Praes hadn’t looted Callow for two decades without a care in the world. I’d call it reparations and leave it at that. Thief weakly nodded, and I left her to the grisly work as Archer pranced her way down her perch. She saluted when she approached, using the wrong hand for a legionary’s salute and the wrong angle for a Callowan formal greeting.

“Ready to report, Your Queenliness,” she announced.

“Where the Hells have you been?” I asked flatly.

“Doing what you told me to,” she mused. “Which was, and I quote ‘take a walk and do whatever comes naturally’.”

I closed my eyes, pained on a metaphysical level. So she’d been the hidden knife I remembered thinking about in one of those unlocked memories. We must have gambled that without an actual plan about her involvement, she couldn’t be predicted by the Skein. Which made sense, but had pretty badly failed. Starting the fire was two birds with one stones , I thought. The smoke trail had been bound to get her attention and get her to come running.

“If you spent the entire time drinking and just now shot that woman, I’m docking your pay,” I told her as I opened my eyes.

“Hey,” she protested. “I did lots of stuff that wasn’t drinking. She’s my fourth kill of the day. Well, third and a half really.”

“Tell me you didn’t assault the Dead King’s patrol,” I asked.

“Nah, they never got close to me,” she said. “But while you lot were busy throwing down with the giant rat, the Praesi tried to pull a fast one. At least I think so. Two Sentinels carried out some sleeping woman earlier, so I took care of it.”

My brows rose.

“Was it a simulacrum?” I asked. “The woman, I mean.”

“Dunno what that is,” Archer cheerfully lied. “But if it was, it’s double dead. Cut off the head after just to be sure, as is our crew’s policy.”

Damnably, I could not refute that. The brains and bone shards all over my boot made it impossible.

“I think I’m supposed to congratulate you on a job well done,” I said after a moment.

“Oh, it was a labour of love,” she dismissed. “But do praise me. Loudly and elaborately.”

I did not reply, and allowed the silence to stretch.

“You wench,” Archer accused me.

“Namecalling is beneath us,” I gravely said.

She flipped me the finger and I smiled.

“You got any idea what we’re supposed to do now?” she finally asked.

“I think that –” I paused when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. “Hey, you. Give Thief that corpse.”

The dark-skinned fae I’d seen carrying around a dead Praesi on a lance earlier looked quite displeased at the order.

“He’s not dead yet,” the Rider replied.

“Then finish him off and hand him over,” I patiently said.

“It was my kill,” the fae protested.

“If I have to come over there to settle this, I’m going to make you sit on that fucking lance,” I grimly replied.

With ill-grace, the fae ripped out the Praesi’s throat and dropped him on Vivienne’s feet. I’d have to remember to ask Larat the Rider’s name later. That kind of discipline case was best nipped in the bud. I turned back to Archer, who looked rather amused.

“Right, so I think we’re supposed to gather at our escape route,” I said. “That’s where Hierophant and Diabolist will be, anyway. Did you run into Adjutant?”

“On my way here,” Archer replied. “That was also where he was headed, though I don’t know what that location is.”

“Neither do I,” I admitted. “But Thief should. We’ll move out after she’s taken all the corpses.”

“I love it when you talk dirty to me,” Indrani said, waggling eyebrows.

Ugh, the wench.

—

Vivienne was well enough to walk at a decent pace without my support by the time we reached our ‘escape route’, which turned out to be the front of the Silent Palace. The fires had long been put out, but the place was still crawling with undead. Masego was having a pleasant cup of tea at an iron table, a full service having been put out for Akua and Hakram as well. Athal, to my surprise, was seated at the edge of the table as well though unlike the others he was silent. I heard snippets of conversation from the other side of the plaza, snorting when I realized they were having a very civilized debate about the influence of sorcery on the development of the early Dread Empire. Hakram was actually winning, by the sounds of it, which was just delightful in so many ways. Our advance, three Named surrounded by the honour guard of the entire Wild Hunt, hardly went unnoticed. Neshamah’s armies gave us no trouble, which I took to be a good sign. We might have gotten away with murder. Well, murders technically. But it was really the one that mattered. Although, since Archer had killed a puppet as well... I’d never really thought, growing up in Laure, that I would one day have a mental debate about whether you could kill the same person twice. Truly, villainy had expanded my horizons.

“Catherine,” Masego greeted me, then glanced at my boots. “You seem to have had an eventful day.”

He seemed much better than the last time I’d seen him. The sweat and pallor was gone, though the impression of frailty was not.

“We ran into the Empress,” I lightly said. “She’d fallen down some stairs.”

Athal’s head lowered, hiding his expression.

“What an unfortunate accident,” Akua mildly said.

“Indeed,” Hakram agreed. “We can only hope the Dead King will be not be too affected by that tragedy to resume negotiations.”

I grunted in agreement, dropping into an iron chair on the other side of the table. Vivienne and Indrani followed suit.

“Found Thief for you,” I told Athal. “Sorry we didn’t stick around for the guards, but I was sure I’d seen her skulking about.”

The dark-haired man bowed to me, then offered me a smile.

“It was no trouble, Great Majesty” he said. “I had to interrupt the search myself, as I was given other instructions.”

“Oh?” I said. “Anything interesting?”

“Ensuring no bedroom was touched by the flames,” he replied. “Though I was told that should you wish for different accommodations this can be arranged.”

“We’ll be fine,” I said.

“He would not participate in our debate,” Masego said, almost complaining.

“It’s always awkward to enter a conversation after it’s already begun,” Hakram said, immediately pushing aside the unspoken reprimand.

Unlike Hierophant, he understood the weight of our words towards the servant the Dead King had ‘gifted’ me. The Wild Hunt settled around us as an honour guard of sorts, valiantly ignoring the pretty salacious jokes Indrani was making about fae flexibility and its many possible applications. I’d been about to reach for a cup of tea myself, when Athal suddenly left his chair to kneel and press his forehead against the floor. I looked to the direction he was facing and my eyes widened. A single undead was approaching, which was unusual in and of itself. But what worried me a lot more was the massive... pressure I could feel coming off what looked like a perfectly normal Keteran foot soldier.

It looked like the Dead King had come to visit.

Interlude: Empires

“Spring brings southern weddings and northern burials.”
– Lycaonese saying

“I am grieved to hear of your disappointment,” Athal said, inclining his head.

The smile on the Black Queen’s face was a rueful one, tinted with self-mockery. There were times when the ruler of Callow could be difficult to read, such as when she was in the throes of Winter, but under the noonday sun she was an open book.

“Negotiations can fail,” the dark-haired woman replied. “I knew it was one of the possible outcomes even before I learned there’d be opposition.”

Athal found dismay, in the cast of her face, yet relief as well. The notion of striking bargain in Keter had never sat well with her, had it? Her defeat also brought solace: the knowledge she had toiled greatly to secure alliance, even though she had come short, and that none of the consequences of this day would be lain at her feet in years to come.

“I am sure accommodations will be reached eventually,” the dark-haired man said. “No matter is ever set in stone.”

“Now you sound like him,” the Black Queen said, rolling her eyes. “I can realize when I’ve been outbid. Malicia was always going to be willing to go that extra mile I’d balk at. We’ll see in a year whether the Dead King feels like riding a different horse.”

The Crown had hinted at later arrangements, then. Interesting, considering the depth of the treaties involved. It would have been useful to learn more, but it was not Athal’s place to inquire. He was only a servant, after all.

“As you say, Great Majesty,” he agreed. “Might I inquire as to when we will depart?”

The Black Queen’s brow rose.

“We?” she echoed.

Athal inclined his head again.

“I was gifted to you upon your arrival to the city,” he gently reminded her. “It is only natural, as your property, that you would now dispose of my days as you see fit.”

She did not quite succeed at hiding the flicker of anger and disgust that crossed her face. The Callowan had a deep and abiding distaste for slavery, as most of Calernia professed to share. It was largely a pretence, of course. Ashurans worked foreign prisoners to death in their mines and fields, having ‘bought the span of the sentence’ from other nations. Half the Free Cities either practiced slavery openly or through a very thin veil, and across large swaths of Procer the sacred rights of commoners as championed by the House of Light were more aspiration that fact. As for Praes, well, the hatred for the practice learned at Miezan hands had rarely given pause to Tyrants who needed greenskin ‘tribute labour’ to carry out their grand enterprises. Even the old Kingdom of Callow had not been above occasionally clapping chains on captured legionaries and putting them to work. It was a genuine thing in the Black Queen, however, a charming sort of naiveté for one who had risen to wear a crown.

“I’m freeing you as of right now,” the young woman said, and clapped his shoulder gently. “That should be within my rights, I think. And you’re certainly welcome to tag along, if you want.”

Athal allowed hesitation to touch his face.

“And where would we be headed, Great Majesty?” he asked.

“Callow,” she said. “Back home.”

That’d been a lie, he thought. The tells were there, though much harder to pick up on than before. There must have been more to her short conversation with the herald of the Crown than a mere dismissal.

“It would be my honour to follow you,” Athal said, fear and reluctance trembling artfully.

The Black Queen sighed.

“I’m not going to make you, Athal,” she said patiently. “I genuinely think you’ll be better off with us, but I can see why you wouldn’t want to leave and I’m not going to force you. I meant it, when I said you’re free. You can decide for yourself.”

The dark-haired man looked away and towards the floor, pose submissive. Following her would be disastrous and he had no intention whatsoever of doing so, yet it would be impolite to outright dismiss her good intentions without the pretence of silent debate. After a few moments, he met her eyes.

“This is my world, Great Majesty,” Athal admitted. “I would not leave it.”

The dark-haired woman looked saddened but not surprised.

“I guessed that’d be your answer,” she said. “You were a kind and pleasant host, Athal. I hope you’ll be treated as you deserve here.”

The dark-haired man smiled.

“Of this, I have no doubt,” he said.

Her answering smile was slightly stiff, for she clearly thought him a slave in all but name.

“Then this if farewell, Athal the Host,” Catherine Foundling said, cool dark eyes taking him in. “May we meet as friends, one day.”

“Peace be on you, Great Majesty,” Athal quietly replied.

She did not linger after that last goodbye, cleanly cutting ties. Not so prone as attachments as she’d once been believed to be, then. Rule of Callow might very well gave fostered that in her: once could not meet a hundred different faces a day and remain caring of all of them. Athal was a good host and a polite servant, and so remained standing until she’d mounted her dead horse and began leading her party towards the gates of Keter. A handful of the Splendid cast lingering gazes at his form, yet none acted or spoke a word. The Black Queen had disciplined them into at least the semblance of civility and obedience, though it would only ever be that. The likes of them could not change their nature, sooner or later it would tell. Even after the last of them was gone from sight, Athal remained standing there in silence. Quietly observed by a thousand dead eyes.

Then, calmly, Dread Empress Malicia emerged from the bundle in her mind that was her impersonation of a Keteran servant and became herself again.

“Quite the interesting day,” she murmured, adjusting the white robes her simulacrum had been provided.

The Empress had never enjoyed wearing a man’s body, nor would she grow used to it. The flesh construct was much less sensitive than a true human would be, of course – Nefarious had discovered early in his research that to build the receptacle otherwise would make the experience quite overwhelming – but the overall sensation was still quite alienating. Malicia usually wore a woman not merely to draw the eye away from the fact that gender was no consideration to the ritual. Shifting from her true body to another several consecutive times had been quite exhausting, but it should not be of dramatic import. The negotiations with the Dead King were at an end, after all, with only formalities remaining. Having come out the victor out of her little tussle with Catherine had proved her to be the worthiest interlocutor for the Hidden Horror. The Empress cast a haughty glance at an approaching undead, allowing it to kneel before her without comment.

“Your Dread Majesty,” it said. “The Crown is now ready to receive you.”

“That would be agreeable,” Malicia said. “You may escort me.”

The Dread Empress used the length of the walk to put herself in order. There would be need, over the coming days, to reconsider the events of the day with Ime and her finest practitioners in attendance. Much had been revealed in the way Catherine attempted her assassination, likely more than the younger woman had intended to offer. For one, Malicia now had a much clearer account of the combat capacity of the Woe. The Adjutant was no great threat on his own and the Thief almost laughably easy to handle, yet the Hierophant needed reassessment. In sheer amount of destructive power at his disposal, he was leagues above what Wekesa had been able to unleash at the same age. He was also much less well-rounded than a young Warlock, and quite easier to exhaust. It was useful to know what the young man could likely be captured if it proved necessary even if Wekesa did not deign to intervene. Killing him had never been on the table, as Warlock would never forgive her for it. Enough of Malicia’s attention remained on her surroundings that she did not need a reminder to emerge from her thoughts when she neared the throne room of the Hall of the Dead. Acknowledging her escort’s introduction with a simple glance, she strode forward.

“Elegantly done,” the Dead King said, eschewing greetings for praise.

The Hidden Horror lounged on his throne nonchalantly, radiating power without needing to move a single finger. Malicia had never been cowed by the display: she had lived in the Tower for decades now. She slept a mere handful of floors from centuries of the worst of her people’s madness contained by wards and steel.

“I was allowed the opportunity to weave as I would,” the Empress replied with a smile.

It had still been too close to her liking. Malicia had not expected for her contingency body to be found as well, Archer of the Woe having been marauding about the city instead of joining her companions in fighting the Dead King’s guardians. Still, she’d been granted advantages. A guise that would make her adjacent to her opponent’s deepest council, liberty to prepare however she deemed necessary for months before Catherine’s arrival. Crafting the personality of ‘Athal’ had been the work of long hours enabled only by the Hidden Horror’s willingness to allow her to interrogate his Hosts.

“She’s still young,” the Dead King mused. “In need of greater tempering. She should have killed every living soul in the city just to be certain. It will be a good lesson for her.”

“As you say,” Malicia smiled.

She believed the old monster had not ever meant for Catherine to succeed here. The point of the exercise, she suspected, had been to mould the young woman through conflict. Handpicked opponents in very specific locales to bring about a certain... enlightenment. It had not escaped Malicia’s notice that Catherine could not turn to mist as she wished. The capacity had always been there, of course, but the mentality had not. The Black Queen was being guided towards a path. Though the Empress would make alliance with the Dead King today, she knew better than to think it any sort of friendship. It was quite likely that even as they made pact, the Hidden Horror had lit a sharper and tossed back into Callow. Measures would need to be taken, beyond even those she had already set in motion. It was rather worrying that the other woman would not be immediately returning to Callow, as Malicia had predicted she would. The Black Queen still believe she had cards to play.

“Shall we deal with the formalities?” the Dead King offered.

“Let us,” the Empress agreed.

Before the day was done, she would have an alliance signed in blood.

—

“By all means,” Cordelia Hasenbach said with frigid politeness,” do explain to me how sixteen thousand vagabonds succeeded in sacking the largest cities of Cantal, including the capital . I await what will no doubt be an enlightening answer.”

The First Prince knew she should moderate her tone when speaking the to the handful of men and women who’d been commanding the defence of the Principate’s heartlands. Anger was rarely constructive, only to be used as a demonstration of displeasure when facing a soft position. If anger bared could not change the decision being made, there was no purpose in displaying it. Yet, looking at the five officers before her, the blonde ruler could not bring herself to lessen the ice in her voice. These fools had, while assuring her every step of the way that the legions under the Black Knight were being herded and encircled, somehow allowed a foreign army to burn a swath of destruction through every Cantalese region of logistical import unimpeded.

“Your Most Serene Highness, I will not deny we have failed you,” the oldest among the officers admitted.

Diego Altraste, a highly-recommended captain from Valencis she’d granted the command of all available hosts in the heartlands to. Moustachioed, eloquent and boisterous, as Arlesite men so often were, yet he now sat subdued.

“The recognition of that is noted, yet no the reason for this council,” Cordelia said, forcing a semblance of clam into her tone. “Cantal has been crippled for a decade, my captains, by a force I was told was quite contained. How did this come to be?”

“We cannot be blamed,” a young woman protested. “The easterners are resorting to impious powers, it is not properly conducted warfare.”

Captain Lehmer was, to the First Prince’s private disappointment, Lycaonese by birth. She should have known better that to expect properly conducted warfare from the Enemy.

“I wonder then, captain,” Cordelia replied softly, “where the blame should be laid?”

There was heavy silence at that. Altraste cleared his throat.

“We failed to anticipate the change in their operational tempo,” the Valencian said. “Overnight and without warning, they began to cover three day’s marching distance in a single night. We’d planned the movement of our forces according to the previous order, and so were caught flat-footed.”

“And have we found the reason for this sudden change?” Cordelia asked.

“Nothing concrete,” an old man with a heavy Alamans accent said. “We lack eyes within the legions. But I have a theory. The Black Knight ceased participating in fighting engagements after they sped up, so I believe it to be an aspect of his Damnation. Using it this much likely exhausts the man extraordinarily.”

Alphonse de Saliverne had been commander of the Salian garrison for over forty years now, and though he was only a passable field commander Cordelia held his learning in great esteem. His words had weight.

“They’re also listening in on everything the mages send by scrying,” Altraste added reluctantly, as wary of her reaction. “The Order has become something of a liability, Your Highness, even when speaking in coded languages. They’ve danced too neatly around our delaying forces for it to be coincidence.”

The Order of the Red Lion had been Cordelia’s own notion, and raised by her own decree. The man was being cautious not to offend even while trying to point out a crippling weakness. She could appreciate his discretion in the matter.

“Keep using them,” the First Prince said. “As a red herring. If we must resume instructions sent by horse, so be it. They cannot be allowed to continue their march.”

“That will be difficult,” Captain Alphonse replied. “As of the last report, they are headed towards Iserre. The southern reinforcements from Levant could be sent to meet them, but if they break cities at the pace they have so far most of northern Iserre will be lost before battle can be given.”

“Prince Amadis stripped the principality clean of soldiers and weapons,” Altraste added. “There are too few fighting men to raise a proper levy, much less arm it.”

“Iserre cannot be allowed to burn,” Cordelia said, tone forcefully even.

It would be a disaster, and not only because one of the few principalities left largely untouched by the Proceran civil war would be put to the torch. The Carrion Lord was wielding his army as a political knife, it’d become clear. Bayeux had been spared the kind of destruction visited on Cantal, and she knew very well why. The Black Knight was, for the eyes of all Procer, brutalizing the lands of her opposition in the Highest Assembly. Worse, he was doing so after her own uncle had allowed him to march without pursuit. The ploy was obvious, of course. There were few in the Principate that would truly believe her to be in collusion with the likes of the Carrion Lord. It was, however, a very good excuse for any prince and princess wishing to turn on her to do so. Amadis Milenan had been lionized a martyr for his voluntary exile in Callow, and if his lands were put to the torch in his absence... Cordelia’s popularity had reached an apex, after the declaration of the Tenth Crusade, but it was now melting like snow in the sun. That she would be forced to abdicate remained unlikely, but it was no longer a possibility she could outright dismiss. A servant in her line’s own livery and not the palace’s came to stand behind her, presence announced without a word. The First Prince angled her head towards him in an unspoken invitation.

“The evening is upon us, Your Most Serene Highness,” the man murmured.

The Lycaonese’s eyes flicked to the tall panes of glass overlooking Salia that led to her council room’s balcony. The sun was beginning to set, and she had appointment to keep. The First Prince turned her gaze to her assembled captains.

“I will require that a plan for the defence of Iserre be formulated,” she ordered. “A particular eye being cast on the need to preserve as much of the principality as feasible. Do not hesitate to request any manner of men or resources. You will have the full weight of my authority behind you.”

It galled her that she might have to trade favours and dent the treasury in the defence of the ancestral holdings of Amadis Milenan, yet beyond the ugly political requirements she had a duty to the Iserrans. They were her subjects, like any other, and not to be held at fault for the plotting of their anointed ruler. The First Prince spent longer than strictly required to take her leave with courtesy, carefully soothing any feathers her earlier anger might have ruffled. Already she regretted the loss of control. Her handmaidens undressed her and then helped her into her formal regalia as she perused the latest word out of Callow. The Black Queen and the Woe had left the kingdom, that much had been confirmed. Where they had headed, however, was still a guessing game. Cordelia had previously suspected that she would join up the with the Black Knight and use the man as a way to damage the Principate while preserving her own forces, yet it had not come to pass. Most likely, she had gone to treat with the League of Free Cities. The First Prince could not be certain, as the Tyrant of Helike had thoroughly purged most of her spies and paid informants in the upper rungs of the region, yet there were few other alliances left for her to seek. Agnes had been quite clear that doom was gathering south, and the League’s intentions were damnably opaque.

Three hours after sunset, Cordelia sat in the hidden room she’d had arranged for this sole purpose. Behind her seat the trinket sent by the Black Queen awaited the touch of the warlord’s eldritch power to take them both into that world of shadows. The First Prince found her centre, allowing calm to take hold of her, and waited until the holy artefacts provided by the House of Light began to burn. Night fell over the room easy as the snap of fingers, suddenly and entirely. It took a moment for the First Prince to reorient herself in this dismaying realm, eyes falling on the Black Queen facing her. The coolness of this place had her glad regal wear in even southern Procer preferred long sleeves. Catherine Foundling was not beautiful, she’d always thought. Some might call her striking, but Cordelia found her features too sharp and sullen for it. It was her eyes that softened her mien, surprisingly expressive brown orbs set in a tanned face. As always, the would-be Queen of Callow disdained the trappings of the title she claimed to wear unremarkable plate.

“Hasenbach,” the Black Queen said. “We need to talk.”

The First Prince considered her opposite with cool eyes. This lack of courtesy should not go unremarked upon. Though this was an informal conference, Cordelia disliked the pretence of friendship between them that would allow such language.

“Have your courtesies left you entirely?” the First Prince asked.

A smile flickered across the other woman’s face, gone in a heartbeat. The Lycaonese had read no fewer than seven assessments of Catherine Foundling gathered from hearsay, observation and old acquaintances. They had been of little use in understanding the Black Queen’s personality. The girl she’d been before becoming the Squire had been smothered swiftly by the Black Knight’s tutelage, and the callous warlord that’d fought in the Liesse Rebellion and Akua’s Folly had never sat across from Cordelia either. The Doom of Liesse had cast a deep shadow on the other woman, Cordelia felt, and changed in sundry ways. Still, some similarities remained. Foundling respected strength above all, like most warlords, though unlike most of those she responded well to confrontation. She enjoyed ‘spirit’, even in her foes. Her temper was also quite easy to provoke, which had allowed Cordelia to prod her along desired paths in the past.

“I’ve had a long few days,” the Black Queen said. “So let’s just pretend I danced the dance and move on, because this is me doing you a favour and I’m done smiling all pretty.”

The First Prince forced her face to remain perfectly still. Revealing irritation would serve no purpose, at the moment.

“A favour,” she said instead. “You make a strange foe, it must be said.”

“You’re amused,” Foundling shrugged, misreading her entirely. “That’s about to go away real quick. Congratulations, First Prince: the Dead King’s about to invade.”

Cordelia’s blood went cold. She studied the Callowan carefully, looking for signs of dishonesty. She found none.

“You have made a pact with the Hidden Horror,” the First Prince said, voice cold and cutting.

“Not me,” the Black Queen replied. “Malicia.”

The Empress? It was possible, Cordelia thought, the Tower was certainly desperate enough, yet-

“Well, I suppose we’re done here,” Founding casually said. “We’re still at war, after all. Good luck, try not to screw it up for all of us.”

The warlord raised her hand, as if to dismiss the darkness, and the blonde woman’s fingers tightened against the arms of her chair until they turned white.

“Wait,” she said.

The utterance had been much too desperate for her tastes, yet she couldn’t simply let Foundling end it there. She needed to know more or thousand would die. The Black Queen eyed her the way a wolf eyes a limping deer.

“You know, I was trying to think of a reason for it earlier,” Foundling said. “To give you more than a warning, I mean. Then I realized I genuinely couldn’t . I’m not rejoicing at the loss of lives, mind you, but at the end of the day you’re trying to fucking invade me even as we speak.”

“A victorious Dead King would turn his eyes on you,” Cordelia said, regaining her calm.

As long as the conversation continued, she could convince the other woman.

“Your eyes are on me right now , Cordelia,” the Black Queen noted. “You expect me to lend a hand to people trying to conquer my homeland? Good night.”

Her hand rose again but the First Prince knew that for the tactic it was. Foundling was attempting a bargain, now that there was another enemy on the field.

“Are you truly willing to mother the slaughter of thousands out of petty arrogance?” Cordelia accused.

The other woman’s eyes went cold.

“There is more at stake,” she replied softly, “than you know.”

The irony was sharp, her own word thrown back at her. The Lycaonese drew back in fury, but something in the Black Queen’s eyes gave her pause. For all that Catherine Foundling ruled with Wasteland methods, in that moment Cordelia was not looking at the Black Knight’s pupil or Malicia’s mistake. She was looking at raw Callowan spite, coursing deep and dark. For small slight, long prices.

“He will devour all of us,” the First Prince said.

“Aye, maybe he will,” the Black Queen said. “So we’ll speak again, after your people do some of the bleeding for a change.”

“This will not be forgot,” Cordelia said coldly.

“I would hope not,” Catherine Foundling replied with a hard smile. “A last word of warning, Your Most Serene Highness. If your uncle’s army is still digging at the end of the month, there will be consequences. I’ve yet to run out of lakes to drop.”

The darkness went away, and the First Prince of Procer was left with nothing but fury and fear. Doom to the north , Agnes had said.

She was never wrong.

—

Neshamah’s foot scuffed the stone.

Such a slight sound, barely more than a whisper. He’d not heard it in a very, very long time. Obsidian hummed behind him as the Dead King tread Creation once more. He inhaled, though this body hardly had need for it. Sorceries millennia old lent him sense of smell, or close enough. The scent of cool stone and dust was a pleasing thing. Hearing had been much easier to reproduce, a staple of undeath even in his lifetime, and his was sharper than a mortal’s. The sound of a bottle being uncorked drifted to his ear, and he turned towards it without the slightest hint of surprise. This was more than expected. It had been awaited .

“Going for a walk, old friend?” the Intercessor grinned, toasting him with a bottle.

He paid no heed to her current guise. She had worn many a face, over the centuries. Enough he could no longer remember them all, or the names paired with them. It made no difference. She was as he was, more essence than form.

“It has been too long,” he said, voice pensive. “The Serenity remains a lacking imitation. There is a... taste to Creation. A skilled pupil I may be, yet a pupil still.”

She drank deep, as had always been her game. He’d caught her, once, back when the upstarts Miezans had still fancied themselves more than guests on the shores. Carved her open, ever careful to avoid even the semblance of fatality, to see what lay inside. She’d mocked him even as the tongs kept open her ribcage and he studied her organs, perplexed by their lifelikeness. He had learned little from the study, never even confirming whether she truly grew drunk. If her body was a construct, it was so perfect one there was no telling the difference.

“You have your games even from your hiding hole,” the Intercessor laughed. “Quite the entertainment, this time.”

Neshamah strode forward, enjoying the pressure of a word he could not simply shape as he wished. There was resistance here. A will more paramount than his own.

“Were you watching?” he teased.

A little jest, just between the two of them. She was always watching.

“It was oddly nostalgic,” the Intercessor mused. “You know, watching you meddle with forces beyond your comprehension. You haven’t been that reckless since... your fourth century, I’d say? That delightful scuffle with the rats.”

“I was young,” Neshamah fondly remembered. “And still believed plagues to be valid method. You were quite severe in chiding me, I recall.”

“Lines had to be drawn, we were still establishing the rules,” the Intercessor smiled. “Both of us played rougher back then.”

“You certainly were not shy in setting the elves after me,” Neshamah said. “That was rather unwarranted.”

“You were being greedy,” the Intercessor said, wagging a finger. “Two Hells? I don’t think so. Besides, that was as much about that old mule in the Bloom as it was about you. He needed a sharp lesson about who not to trifle with, and your taking his only son got the point across.”

“The Spellblade has been a delightful diversion, admittedly,” Neshamah conceded.

“You even set him on dear Cat,” she said. “Thoughtful of you.”

She drank again, under the Dead King’s yellow gaze. Ah, she was miffed. She would be.

“I did look into her,” he said. “She’s no work of yours, which I found fascinating.”

“We don’t all work with ponds, Neshamah,” the Intercessor said. “There’s a lot more moving parts out here than in your little walled garden.”

“And yet you have not snuffed her out,” he mused. “Oh, you made attempts. Yet I know your work. It was not her throat you truly sought to cut.”

“Flipped the story on her several times,” she said. “She takes to it like a fish. I’m impressed. She’s no great thinker, mind you, but her instincts are sharp. It’d be more trouble than it’s worth to rid myself of her. She’s the kind you let burn out on their own.”

The thing shaped like a woman paused, ever theatrical.

“Or at least so I thought. You’re making me reconsider.”

“I wonder,” Neshamah murmured. “It this meant to tempt me to invest more only to then yank the rug, or is this trickery to make me abandon an opening?”

The Intercessor grinned wide and sharp over the bottle’s rim.

“Wanna roll the dice?” she offered. “I promise not to cheat this time.”

“You say that every time,” the Dead King reminded her laughingly. “No, old friend, you will not goad more out of me. I have allowed her to glimpse the threshold. She will rise or fall of her own merit.”

“You’ve been so wary, since Triumphant,” the Intercessor complained.

“And yet here I am,” Neshamah replied easily. “Returned to Creation. Let us not pretend you did not nudge that story along.”

“What can I say?” she shrugged. “I’ve been missing your company.”

“Such a sentimental creature,” the Dead King sighed, then his eyes turned sharp. “S what am I to be this time, Intercessor? The hammer or the anvil?”

She drank deep, throat bobbing as the red wine ran down her chin. She dropped the bottle afterwards, let it bounce off the stone and spill the rest.

“All right,” she said cheerfully, “so stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but there’s a joke from Levant I just love . So three princes – one Arlesite, one Alamans and one Lycaonese – and the Dead King walk into a tavern, looking for a hot meal. So the tavern keeper apologizes, says he’s out and his last bowl of stew went to the woman in the corner with her baby, maybe they can get it off of her. So the Arlesite prince, he walks up to her, and says ‘Good woman, I will duel you for this stew’. She refuses, because really fuck Arlesites. So then the Alamans prince walks up to her and says ‘Good woman, as your rightful liege I deserve this stew more than you, hand it over’. She refuses, because she paid her taxes so she doesn’t owe shit to no one. So then the Lycaonese prince walks over, looks at the Dead King – that’s you! – and goes all grim. He says ‘I’m fine with starving, so long as the Dead King doesn’t get the stew’. Then the Dead King walks up and says ‘You guys can fight over the stew, I’ll just-”

“Eat the baby,” Neshamah finished, purely for the pleasure of denying her the climax.

The ancient monster pouted.

“So you do know it,” she said. “Should have told me at the start, I got way into it.”

“I assume,” the Dead King said, “that this atrocity – and I do not use this word lightly, believe me – of a story had a purpose?”

The Intercessor grinned.

“Of course,” she said, wine red as blood trickling down her chin. “ Eat the baby , King of Death. Just this once, I’ll allow it.”

Chapter 48: Shadows

“A passable plan done in a day will nearly always beat an exquisite scheme requiring a month.”
– Dread Empress Regalia II

Truth be told, I’d never been enamoured with the thought of travelling. Even if I’d never become Black’s apprentice I would have left Laure eventually – I’d has plans to attend the War College, what felt like half a lifetime ago – but unlike some of the other girls at the orphanage my heartbeat had never quickened at the notion of journeying across Calernia. There’d been this girl I’d shared a room with, Gods, what’d been her name? Emily, maybe. Something that sounded like that. She’d found work at a street stall near the market just so she could buy a rough map of the continent and plan her travels when she came of age. She’d stolen the only volume of Anabas the Ashuran’s travelogues the orphanage had and read it so often the pages had been worn out. That’d never been for me. Having a gander at the most beautiful parts of southern Callow had been appealing, and I’d had vague plans to visit the Duchy of Daoine for as long as I could remember, but my interest in foreign vistas had always been limited.

And yet here I was now, camping with a few companions by the shore of a lake I doubted any human had seen in centuries. Few Praesi maps gave name to the body of water to the northeast of the Kingdom of the Dead, but the Procerans called it the Chalice. There was likely a story there, but not one I knew. It was beautiful, I had to the admit. The poisonous fumes that hung over the Dead King’s lands did not reach this far north, leaving me with unimpeded sight of a misty lake with sapphire-blue waters. The beach was pebbles of pale and grey, with the rare splash of colour breaking the mould. The winds were restless, here, and the dawning evening pleasantly cool. Even at noon, when the day was warmest most of the Woe wore cloaks. Unlike me they did not welcome to the touch of the cold. I palmed a stone and sent it skidding across the waters, the final plop surprisingly loud to my ears.

Hakram had dug a fire pit earlier and Indrani was now making some sort of sordid stew out of the fish she’d caught with her bare hands, standing hip-deep in the waters. It felt oddly domestic to watch them bicker around the flames, arguing about how much salt should go in a meal. Vivienne was napping right through it, huddled inside a pile of blankets close enough to the fire to feel the warmth of the flames. The last two had less carefree matters to attend to. I’d asked Masego to reach out to the Observatory the moment my little chat with Cordelia Hasenbach came to an end, but even with Akua as a helper the preparations had taken some time. He’d warned me the ritual had high chances of failure. Though the Whitecaps weren’t in the way, up here, the distance was massive. It’d taken three attempts before he succeeded mid-afternoon. Fadila had been there, luckily enough, though what she’d had to tell us had taken the wind right out of me. She only knew so much, though, so I’d ordered the Observatory to serve as a relay for another ritual at dusk. Juniper would know more.

I glanced at the tall tower of ice I’d formed to speak with the First Prince, which now served as the seat of Hierophant’s rituals. I could feel the ebb and flow of sorcery within, though it’d not reached that palpable crescendo of active scrying. I tossed another stone and let the sound of Indrani slapping Hakram with a ladle – clearly stolen from the royal kitchens by Vivienne, as it was pure silver and there was a suspicious hole where the Fairfax heraldry would be – until he submitted to her demands of another pinch of salt. It was calming. I was in great need of that, right now. The sun was dipping into the lake with a riot of red and gold, when Akua came for me. She said nothing, scarlet eyes hooded. She’d grown better at reading my moods, when idle talk would grate on my nerves instead of provide appreciated distraction. I passed the others on the way to the ice, waving a hand when Indrani called out, and found Masego crouched on the ground.

“Catherine,” he said without turning. “I believe we’ve stabilized the formula properly. There should be no more troubles.”

“Good work,” I said.

“They’ll be able to feel that as far south as Keter, at least, if they are keeping an eye out,” he reminded me.

“Let them,” I grunted. “Scry, Masego.”

He did not comment any further, tracing a few runes out of light that set the entire array glowing. I ran my fingers across the back of the seat I’d carved myself out of ice before sitting down. A look was enough to dismiss Akua, though Masego remained close. If the ritual had issues, I expected him to intervene. At the centre of the array lay a dark wooden bowl filled with dark waters taken from the Observatory’s own pools. A sympathetic connection, I thought, and silently praised myself for remembering the fancy terms. We’d improved somewhat on the usual spell, Hierophant having me weave Winter as he required. When Fadila’s face appeared in the bowl, it did in the mirrors surrounding me as well.

“Your Majesty,” she said, bowing.

“Mbafeno,” I mildly replied. “Any issues on your end?”

“Marshal Juniper awaits you,” she replied. “Shall I proceed?”

“By all means,” I said.

Her face rippled, then vanished, and a heartbeat later I was facing the Hellhound’s tired gaze. Juniper looked like she’d been put through a ringer. If half of what Fadila had said, that might very well be the case.

“Juniper,” I said. “Been a while.”

“Foundling,” she gravelled. “I have a dozen fires to put out, so let’s skip the courtesies.”

I almost replied with a sardonic lovely to see you too , but if the situation was as serious as I believed it was no time for banter.

“I had a talk with Fadila Mbafeno earlier today,” I said. “But she’s constrained to the palace, so most of it was hearsay. I’ll need a full report.”

The orc nodded.

“The Empire just fucked us hard,” Juniper bluntly said. “I can’t actually prove it’s them, but it has that Wasteland reek.”

I grimaced. That’d been Fadila’s opinion as well, but I’d hoped she might be wrong.

“How bad was it?” I asked.

“Every member of the King’s Council is dead,” she said. “Around a third of your court officials. It was a godsdamned massacre.”

My fingers clenched.

“Ratface?” I quietly asked.

She shook her head mutely.

“Knife to the back of the neck,” she said. “He wouldn’t have felt a thing.”

I closed my eyes. There was a cold, measured part of me that was furious I’d been robbed of a skilled Lord Treasurer for who I had no real replacement. The rest of me grieved the death of a boy I’d known since we were seventeen, children playing war games in the Tower’s shadow. Ratface had been with me since the beginning, since Rat Company. He’d been a friend, one of the few I had left. I inhaled, place the tempest of grief and wrath in a box and set it aside. I opened my eyes, calmed.

“Anne Kendall?” I asked.

“First to go,” Juniper said. “We think she was one of the primary targets.”

And there went the woman I’d considered my most likely successor to the queenship of Callow. I was slightly appalled that my first thought at hearing the death of Baroness Anne confirmed was how it’d complicate the line of succession, but I would not shy away from the facts. Anne Kendall had been a kind soul, a skilled ruler and if not a friend someone I had deep respect for. A patriot, of that rare breed that put the needs of her people above her own. And she’d been, informally, the closest thing to an acceptable successor I had at my court. Malicia – and this was her work, of that I had no doubt, for it’d been a crippling blow to Callow in too many ways not to be – had ordered her killed just to weaken my position. Fury flared, but I mastered myself. Anger is the death of reason. You need a lucid mind to survive, now.

“Merciless Gods,” I finally said. “Who holds Laure?”

“The got the legate I sent to command the garrison and all his staff,” Juniper said. “The highest-ranking officer in the city was a Senior Tribune by the name of Abigail. At a guess, they missed her because she was on leave. She’s been on the rolls since the Arcadian Campaign, fought under Nauk at the Battle of the Camps.”

I frowned.

“I know of her,” I said. “She used to serve under Hune, has a Summerholm accent. She’s got a handle on the situation?”

“People went to the streets after your court declared martial law,” Juniper replied. “So she had the palace cellars emptied and every winesink in the city do the same on the crown’s coin.”

“She got rioters drunk ?” I hissed.

“Drunk enough they weren’t able to riot,” the Hellhound said. “She didn’t have the men to enforce the decree, Catherine, and spilling blood would have been like lighting a sharper. She made the best possible decision, even if she overstepped her authority. I’ll state that for the record, if I have to.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“Fuck it, as long as it worked,” I finally said. “How quick can you have a senior officer in the city?”

“At least a month,” Juniper said. “We’re camped close to Ankou, at the moment, in talks with General Sacker’s legion.”

I drummed my fingers pensively.

“Promote her to legate, then,” I said. “Field promotion, to be confirmed at a later date. She’s in charge of Laure until I can send one of the Woe to take over.”

“I’ll pass it along,” the orc said.

Good. It’d been an unorthodox method, but then that was the kind of thinking the Army of Callow encouraged. If she had the mettle for higher rank, she’d get to keep it. Gods knew I was always in desperate need of fresh talent.

“Did they manage to assassinate within the army?” I asked.

“They tried,” Juniper said. “Had agents in the ranks, one made it as high as tribune. The Jacks caught most of them. The rest got knifed before they could do any real damage. Lord Black sends his regards.”

I chewed on that, split between relief at my teacher still being on my corner and displeasure as the fact he’d infiltrated the Army of Callow deeply enough his people were comfortable fighting Eyes of the Empire.

“You got his people?” I asked.

“They’re under arrest,” Juniper said. “None resisted, so I used a light touch. Only soft interrogations.”

“Try to get anything they know about Malicia’s people,” I said. “I’ll authorize release back to Black if they work with us.”

The orc nodded.

“Ranker has expressed willingness to work with us,” she told me.

The first bit of good news today, that.

“Her legion got mauled at the Vales,” I said.

“She’s got more than half in fighting fit,” Juniper replied. “More importantly, she’s willing to trade goblin munitions for supplies. Including goblinfire.”

“Get your hands on anything you can,” I ordered. “Had she said anything about the Empress?”

“Said politics don’t concern her, since she’s part of an Imperial expedition army under the direct command of the Black Knight,” my Marshal grunted. “She’d got no intention of heading east, and she’d publicly turned away messengers from the Tower.”

“Malicia’s still sending diplomats through Callow?” I frowned.

“Not anymore,” Juniper said. “It got bloody, Catherine. When word about Laure got out, fresh off that proclamation from Salia? They butchered any Praesi they could get their hands on. We lost legionaries that were on leave.”

Fuck. The last thing I needed was Callowans taking swings at the Army of Callow.

“The Tower hasn’t formally declared war, has it?” I asked.

“Not a word from the Empress,” she said. “But we’re having Praesi troubles anyway.”

“The High Lords can’t possibly be fools enough to pick a fight now ,” I said.

“Worse,” the orc replied. “We have refugees coming through the Blessed Isle. Ashur’s torching the coast and the sack of Nok displaced thousands. The Wasteland’s already rationing, so they’re moving west where the food is.”

“How many?” I grimly asked.

“Two, three thousand for now,” the Marshal of Callow said. “Mostly families. There’ll Eyes and assassins among them though, that’s a certainty. Farmers have been forcing them to remain near the Isle, by force if need be.”

So Malicia was dumping her refugee troubles on me. I supposed from her perspective there was no loss to be had. Either I slaughtered them and became even more reviled in Praes, or I allowed them to stay and had to divert time and resources to force order onto the mess.

“We can’t allow them to go deeper into Callow,” I said.

“If we don’t get them out soon, the numbers will keep growing,” Juniper said. “And it’s only a matter of time until they get hungry and desperate enough to steal from farmers who won’t stand for it. When steel comes out it’ll get ugly fast .”

“Our only host close enough is the Summerholm garrison,” I said. “And that’s the key to our entire eastern defence. If she’s baiting it out to ambush it...”

“I know,” the Hellhound growled. “Her belly’s unprotected, but so is ours. She’s short on legions, but she could order the High Lords of the interior to send their household troops.”

The worst part was that I knew exactly what Malicia was doing, but there was no easy solution. She’d shaken Callow just as the Dead King got loose to prevent me from intervening in the war with Procer, and now she was trying to tie down my forces with the least possible effort on her part. If she’d sent an army into Callow, she’d had to feed and fund it. To commit men. Instead she’d mutilated the administration of the kingdom, then dropped a mess at the border on my lap. If I wanted to retaliate, I’d have to venture into the Wasteland. Where every major city was a fortress heavily warded and filled with horrors and it was impossible to live off the land. Hells, she could probably raid my godsdamned supply lines to fill her own granaries. I would have called it utter idiocy to provoke the Kingdom of Callow when she was already fighting a losing war with the Thalassocracy, but I knew my army was in no state for a protracted eastern campaign. I needed it elsewhere, and I needed it to be making up for the losses of the Battle of the Camps. If I acted, I risked incurring a major loss for no real gain. If I did not act, on the other hand, I would keep paying for it.

I was too furious to be admiring.

“Pull back all the people in the Fields to Summerholm,” I finally said. “Have them bring every bag of grain and herd of cattle back with them while they do. The refugees won’t keep coming if there’s nothing to be had.”

“And if they head towards Summerholm?” Juniper asked.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” I said. “They’re refugees, not a legion marching column. It’ll take months.”

“That’s a stopgap,” she said. “Not a fix.”

“A stopgap is what we need, right now,” I said. “I’ll send Thief back to Callow to take control of the situation.”

Juniper’s broad face grimaced.

“You’re not coming back?” she asked.

“We need an army,” I said. “The Dead King dealt with Malicia instead, so I’m getting us another.”

“The drow,” the Hellhound said.

“The drow,” I agreed softly. “We’re out of alternatives, Juniper. The Principate is about to be hit hard from the north, which at least will buy us time. I need Callow stable, and the army in fighting fit. That falls on you and Thief. I’ll return as swiftly as possible with reinforcements.”

“There’s good news on that front, at least,” Juniper announced. “We’re drowning in volunteers.”

I blinked.

“Even after I was named Arch-heretic of the East?” I said.

“That’s what got it started,” the orc said. “Half of Ankou’s been to our camp to enrol, Catherine. And after the assassinations in Laure it was like a damned fire was lit. There’s formed Royal Guard coming from as far as Holden to enrol, and there’s entire convoys on the roads coming towards training camps. Half a year, Warlord. Give me half a year and I’ll have you an army that’ll shake this fucking continent.”

I exhaled softly. They’d cornered us, hadn’t they? The Procerans and the Praesi. And the harder they struck, the harder my countrymen would dig their heels.

“Good,” I said. “I don’t care if you have to empty every treasure vault in Callow, Juniper, I want them armed and trained. The fights around the corner are going to be like nothing we’ve seen before.”

The orc grinned toothily.

“It’ll be my pleasure,” she said. “That would have been pleasant note to end on, but I have two more messes to pass you.”

I sighed.

“I’m listening,” I said. “Wait, shit, Prince Amadis and the Pilgrim. Are they...”

“No assassin went after them,” Juniper said. “But the Pilgrim’s a third mess, looked at a certain way. He legged it and left the prince behind. We haven’t seen sign of him since the killings.”

Shit. Yeah, it made sense. I wasn’t there for him to work on, and when we’d last spoken it had been with harsh words. The old man wouldn’t sit pretty in Laure while the Dead King was on the move. Even if he was so inclined, the Heavens wouldn’t let him.

“That’s a breach of our truce terms,” I said.

“The Hells can we do about it?” the Hellhound said. “Kill Milenan? It gets us nothing.”

Much as it irritated me, she was right. The northern crusaders were out of the passage and they’d likely be headed upwards to delay the Dead King. I did not want to do anything that might affect that decision, not right now anyway.

“Keep him under our thumb,” I finally said. “We’ll settle accounts with the Peregrine another day. What’s the first disaster?”

“Don’t know if it’s that,” Juniper said. “But diplomacy’s not my wheelhouse. The Snake Eater Tribe sent volunteers to enrol, but there was an envoy with them. She says she’s coming on the behalf of the Council of Matrons.”

Well, shit. It wasn’t the first time the ruthless old bats made discreet overtures to me. Back before we’d purged the worst of the Regals they matron-attendants that rule the Snake Eater Tribe had interrogated Pickler about what intention I might have for Praes, if I ended up on the winning side of a war with the Empire. There’d been no offer, back then. Malicia had yet to bleed enough the Matrons would consider her easy meat. I suspected that with the Ashurans running rampant across the coast and Black strolling around the Principate with half the Legions of Terror, that’d begun to change.

“What do they want?” I warily asked.

“She wouldn’t tell me everything,” Juniper replied. “Said she’d deal only with you. But I was given a taste, probably to bring you to the table. The Council of Matrons is offering to begin negotiations over the sale of goblin munitions to the Kingdom of Callow.”

My fingers clenched. That was very, very dangerous talk. The Tribes were bound by treaty to sell those only to the Tower, and it wasn’t the kind of clause that got a slap on the wrist when broken: it’d be called rebellion, if it got out. Even possession of goblin munitions was illegal in Praes. Highborn would have their entire direct family executed if they were caught with a stash.

“Fuck me,” I said quietly. “They’re preparing to rebel, aren’t they?”

“Who the Hells ever knows, with goblins?” the orc grunted. “Does look like it, though. We both know it’s been a long time coming.”

“And they won’t talk with anyone other than me?” I pressed.

“That’s what the envoy told me,” Juniper said.

Godsdamnit. I couldn’t afford to head to Callow right now, no matter how sweet the prize.

“I’ll give Thief full authority to negotiate in my name,” I said. “If that’s not enough, they’ll have to wait.”

The orc nodded.

“The second thing,” she said. “It’s the Warlock.”

“He’s in Callow?” I said, eyed widening.

“He was,” Juniper replied. “Long gone by now. He left a message for Hierophant.”

“And what would that be?” I flatly asked.

“To head to Thalassina immediately,” the orc said. “There’s a situation coming to head, and he wants his son there yesterday.”

The string of curses I let out at that was foul enough even the Hellhound winced.

Chapter 49: Wrangle

“Forty-two: should a disagreement lead one of the party to leave, you should expect combat within the week as you will either be captured to be rescued by the departed or the opposite. Let it happen, as a common enemy will heal all internal disputes and you can share a good laugh over the corpse of your nemesis’ dead lieutenant.”
– Two Hundred Heroic Axioms, author unknown

We were pretending it was a spirited debate. It wasn’t. These were the bitterest arguments I’d had with the Woe so far, and currently I wasn’t winning either of them. Figured. War on two fronts was never a good idea, but it didn’t look like I was going to have a choice about it.

“It’s a trap, Masego,” I said. “You know that as well as I do.”

“My father would not harm me,” the blind man replied evenly.

“I’m not saying he’ll knife you,” I said. “I’m saying that if you set foot in the Empire, there’s no fucking way Malicia’s letting you leave regardless of what Warlock says. Assuming he doesn’t agree with her in the first place. He and I aren’t exactly bosom friends, Zeze: we came a heartbeat away from drawing on each other last year.”

“Were I still the Apprentice, your objection would have merit,” Masego said. “That is no longer the case. Nothing short of my father’s full wroth would stop me, and he will not go that far even for the Empress.”

My fingers clenched. Then my flank got hit while I was still engaged.

“I’m not going,” Vivienne flatly said. “You need me here, especially if you’re going into the Everdark.”

I shot her a glare.

“We’ll continue that conversation in a moment,” I told her.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Because you’re going to lose your argument with Hierophant, and when you do you’ll dig your heels in about this. You hate to lose, Catherine. We settle this now, when you’re still reasonable.”

“There’s nothing to argue about, Thief,” I said with forced calm. “It has to be you.”

“I am a spymistress,” Vivienne replied. “Not a ruler. Send Adjutant instead, it is clearly the appropriate response.”

“No,” Hakram quietly said, looming tall at my back. “It can’t be me. Vivienne, think about this for a moment. Whoever is sent back will need the highest authority possible to settle affairs without trouble. You know what that means.”

The dark-haired woman frowned.

“That’s irrelevant,” she said. “Hakram, I admit without qualms that in matters of rule you are my superior. I will not achieve half as much as you given the same mandate.”

“It’s not irrelevant,” I darkly said. “It’s unpleasant to talk about and it’s unfair, but it’s true anyway: If I appoint an orc regent of Callow in my absence, there will be riots. Maybe even rebellions.”

Indrani didn’t want anything to do with this mess, thank the Gods, and I wasn’t giving Diabolist this close a look into the inner workings of the Woe so I’d sent her to keep Archer entertained. This would have been much, much worse if there’d been an audience.

“Hakram is broadly known to be your second in command,” Vivienne said. “And respected by many. His authority would be observed even without the regency. Your court has been butchered, Catherine, it needs to be rebuilt before the chaos spreads any further. That is not my wheelhouse, it’s his. ”

“You know whoever I send needs the fucking title, Thief,” I hissed. “Stop being obtuse. I’ve been away from the kingdom for months, the person taking charge needs the legitimacy behind them or it’ll start coming apart at the seams.”

“Then appoint him Governor-General,” Vivienne said. “It carries enough power that-”

“That would make the highest authorities in matters both civil and military greenskins,” Hakram broke in calmly. “We are not dealing with a blank slate or arithmetic empty of emotion. I may be an organizer of some skill, but that is immaterial. The amount of resistance I would face would be much larger than yours. You argument is only correct if stripped of context.”

“I can’t handle all the balls you have up in the air, Catherine,” Vivienne said, voice rising. “You need the entire kingdom’s granaries reorganized, you need to get massive amounts of steel to arm all those soldiers the Hellhound is recruiting, you need someone to steady the treasury and rebuild the King’s Council and – Gods, do I need to go on? I can’t handle all of this, not while also running the Jacks. Hakram could. His entire Role is about taking care of loose ends.”

The thing was, she had a point. I knew she’d been very careful not to use the reason she was being so aggressive about this, of course. She didn’t want me around Diabolist without her keeping an eye on it. Not, I suspected, because she thought I would suddenly forgive Akua Sahelian for her sins. She knew me better than that. But she saw Diabolist as a weed, and thought it was her duty to burn out any attempt to grow roots. I forced myself to set that aside, and address what she’d actually been saying. Which, unfortunately, wasn’t untrue. I trusted Vivienne to run the Jacks and to undertake some other discreet matters, but it was a fact I’d never dropped so much responsibility in her lap before. She’d had the education of a minor noble as a child, even though her family no longer formally held title, but that would only take her so far. What she did remember, she would be out of practice at. And we don’t have forever , I thought.

Procer would be occupied with the Dead King for the foreseeable future, but there was no guarantee part of the crusader host would not try Callowan borders again if it saw weakness. The Dominion still had two armies on the field, and the League’s intentions were opaque to me. My instinct had been that the Tyrant of Helike and his madman of a Hierarch would be taking a swing at the Principate, but that’d been while it was still the dominant force on the board. With Keter on the march, the League might be feeling adventurous enough to aim for other territories. And that was without even considering Malicia, who sure as Hells wouldn’t let me bind the wounds of Callow in peace. If Warlock was in Thalassina and cooking up something dangerous enough he wanted Masego to lend a hand, then the Ashurans were about to get a very nasty surprise. That left me the only direct threat at the Wasteland’s gated: the Empress wasn’t going to stop after a few assassinations. She was only getting started. And the only person I trust to lead the Jacks in hampering her plans is Thief.

Vivienne was leagues above Hakram, when it came to shadow games. My second was skilled at sifting through what our informants brought us and digging out the nuggets most important, but he didn’t quite have the knack when it came to actually using the Jacks for more than spying. I needed someone to start a knife fight, and Adjutant wasn’t the man for the job. But Vivienne wasn’t the woman for the rest of it, was she? She wasn’t wrong about that. If I forced too many duties upon her, she’d only end up failing at what she was actually good at. Which left me only one way through the mess. I knew what I needed to do was poor tactics, but it still needed to be done.

“You’re right,” I admitted, and there was a glint of triumph in Vivienne’s eyes. “Hakram will go with you. For the sake of appearances you’ll still be named Regent.”

And there went the glint.

“No,” they said, more or less at the same time.

I cast a look at Masego, who seemed mildly irritated our own chat was left unfinished but unwilling to press the matter. He would be. Knowing him, he was probably mentally organizing his arguments without listening to a word of what went on between the rest of us.

“Catherine, you can’t go into the Everdark with so weak an escort,” Hakram gravelled. “This is madness. The drow are infamously violent and treacherous.”

I kept my face blank. He’d never... There was a first time for everything, I told myself. It didn’t matter. I had an argument to win and getting emotional about it wasn’t going to help.

“I’ll have Archer and Diabolist,” I said. “It’s enough. I’m not going to war with them, I’m going to secure an alliance.”

“And who will handle the diplomacy, then?” Vivienne harshly said. “Indrani? You? Or will you allow the butcher of Liesse to speak in Callow’s name?”

“Better we dispense with the drow entirely than risk you going into their realm with so light a force,” the orc said. “They would be a useful addition, but they are not crucial and results are uncertain. Not worth the dangers.”

“It was one thing to put all our coin on the Army of Callow when we had the leash on the Dead King, however laughably feeble that leash was,” I replied. “It’s another when Malicia’s the one who let him out, on unknown terms. There will be battles, Hakram, and there’s only so many Callowans of fighting fit. Only so many we can afford to lose . We need someone to share the casulaties with, or it won’t matter that we have good farmland: there won’t be enough people left to till it. If you have another candidate for alliance, I’m all ears.”

“You did not answer me,” Vivienne said.

“Because what you said was pointless, Thief,” I said. “I would prefer Diabolist to serve as an adviser, but if I need to let her do the talking then that’s what going to happen. I know you don’t like it. I don’t either. But there’s no point in letting her out of the box if we don’t actually use her.”

“There’s a difference between using and trusting,” Thief hissed.

“ Enough ,” I said, voice rippling with power.

Not Speaking, no, I was not that far gone. I hoped I would never be. Vivienne flinched, and Hakram looked chastened for reasons beyond the obvious. He usually brought his objections to me in private, and I thought he might already be regretting this. He should have known it would sting he’d side openly with Thief in an argument, even if he disagreed with me.

“Callow was just crippled,” I said. “You can both argue all you want, that is a godsdamned fact. And we all know the Empress is far from done. Now, the two of you can disagree with me heading into the Everdark with only Archer and a mass-murdering spectre for company, but at the end of the day I have to be the one to go and someone needs to fix the mess back home. Vivienne, you argued you couldn’t do it alone. You’re right. Hakram goes too.”

“He could-” Thief began, but I raised my hand.

“No, he can’t,” I said. “I’ve heard your issues with this plan. I have answered them and made a decision. Unless you have something new to add, the only question left if whether or not you’ll obey when I make this an order.”

Hakram stirred uneasily.

“You’re the one who gave me the speech about needing to assert authority,” I told him. “I just have. I won’t deny the risks. But you can’t deny that Callow needs the two of you to get back on its feet, either.”

The orc licked his chops.

“The drow are a gambit,” he said. “Promise me you will treat them as one. Do not carry your anger over the failure in Keter into this, Catherine. We can survive without them. If the situation spins out of control...”

“Hakram,” Vivienne cried out, sounding betrayed. “You know she won’t listen if it’s just me. Gods Above, stick the damned course.”

“There is no perfect solution,” the orc said, turning to her. “We take the risks we have to. It’s not the choice I would have made, but I’m not the one making the choices. Neither are you.”

“I won’t bet it all on a long shot,” I told Adjutant. “There’s a limit to how long I’m willing to stay there as well. But I believe it’s worth trying.”

He nodded, though his discomfort was still plain on his face. I turned to Vivienne, who was worrying her lip.

“I could refuse to go, even if you make it an order,” she said.

She could. The Woe were not sworn to me, save for Hakram, and his oath was not one between queen and subject. It was a deeply personal thing, and not one I would sully by equating with simple obedience. There were few things I still considered sacred, but what the two of us had said on that hill beneath moonlight was one of them. No, for all that I was Queen of Callow I would not call Thief my subject. She was, like most the Woe, my companion. When she deferred to me, it was out of trust and respect. Not because a sister from the House of Light had put a chunk of metal on my head and spoken a few dusty words. Forcing her hand here would shatter the fragile trust the two of us had built since we’d made our pact in Laure. I would have to convince her.

“You’re making this about me,” I said. “That is beneath us both.”

“This is about your decision,” Vivienne replied, frowning. “Not your character.”

“My decision shouldn’t matter to you,” I told her. “The question you should be asking is this: is it better for Callow if I accompany Catherine or if I return?”

Her eyes narrowed.

“You are the queen of said kingdom, in case you forgot,” she said.

“I’m a warlord who got oil smeared on her forehead,” I replied bluntly. “I’m useful to the kingdom, it’s true. There would be consequences if I died. If. I’m not exactly easy to kill these days, Vivienne. And while it’s possible my heading into the Everdark without you will end up biting our home in the ass, it’s a certainty that if you don’t return some of our people will bleed for it. Hakram will have too many duties on his plate, as you pointed out. He won’t be able to use the Jacks like you would.”

“You can’t leverage Callow against me, Catherine,” Vivienne said, sounding resentful.

“You didn’t join up because you liked the look of me,” I said quietly. “There was a reason, and you were quite blunt about it. I’m not using a damned thing, Viv. I’m reminding you what we’re actually about. It’s easy to forget, in the thick of it. I know that well.”

The expression on her face was an ugly one, but she did not contradict me. She spat to the side, after a moment.

“Fine,” she said. “Damn you, but fine. I’ll go. Don’t make me regret it.”

I let out a relieved breath. If that hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t have had anything else to trot out. Tired in a way that was nothing physical, I turned my eyes to Masego.

“You two can leave us,” I said without turning.

“Catherine,” Hakram tried.

“It’s been a while,” I mildly said, “since I’ve had to repeat myself so often.”

His fangs clicked together, but he didn’t say anything more. Hierophant had been sitting silent this whole time, growing increasingly impatient.

“Quite finished?” he said.

“Yes,” I replied without a hint of apology.

I gathered myself together for another verbal brawl.

“I spent most of your squabbling mustering arguments,” Masego admitted frankly. “I have several, some grounded in fact others in my personal opinion. It took me some time before I realized it was unnecessary to do so. I do not need your permission to go.”

“You need my gate, if you want to get there before the year’s over,” I replied.

“If necessary I will summon and bind a fae of sufficient rank to serve as a gate-maker,” he said without hesitation. “Though I would be disappointed by the pettiness of your choice.”

I grimaced. He’d be right to be. It was easy to simply think of the Woe as my companions, my closest friends, and leave it at that. The truth was a little more complex. The ties binding them to me were different for all, and though that’d never brought conflict until now I could admit that’d been mostly luck on my part. It’d been going to happen sooner or later. Masego and Indrani were not invested in my fight the way the other two were. For the latter it was an entertaining enough diversion, and she liked me enough to carouse away the ‘boring’ parts, but for all that Archer was arguably the least tightly bound to me she also had few other calls on her time. She wanted to travel, one day, but she was in no hurry. Masego had first joined the Fifteenth because he believed it would allow him to witness sights nothing else would, and in this we had delivered. He truly liked us, I was sure of that. Even Vivienne, who’d come late to the band. But his first and paramount love would always be sorcery. After that came family, and though some days I suspected we were half-that in his eyes his fathers had been entrenched in that position for much longer.

If Warlock sent for him, as the man had, Masego would go. Because even after that sting of that betrayal revealed by the echoes of the fall of Keter, he loved the man deeply. I’d almost considered not passing along the message, truth be told. He might not have heard it when I spoke with Juniper, as he’d not been so close. But that would be a betrayal, what was left of my principles had whispered. But he would learn eventually, and it would cost you, a colder part of me had noted.

“I won’t withhold a gate no matter your choice,” I sighed. “I didn’t mean that, and I apologize for implying it.”

“Apology accepted,” he said, nodding politely. “Though the choice has already been made. This a formality I will entertain until you have made your peace with that.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“For future reference,” I said. “When you’re humouring people to avoid hurting their feelings, it’s best to avoid telling them that.”

The dark-skinned man frowned.

“That’s rather backwards,” he noted. “Would their feelings not be more likely to be hurt if they believed at the start they had a real chance of success?”

“That’s – you know what, we can finish that conversation at another time,” I sighed. “Masego, I know you have reasons to want to go.”

“I do not care in the slightest for the fate of Thalassina,” Hierophant said. “Some ritual components of use come from the city, but none irreplaceable. It is my understanding that the Ashurans are your enemy as well, however, so out of politeness I will kill as many as I can before taking my leave.”

“And that’s appreciated, believe me,” I said. “But I need you with me, not on the other side of the continent. If half of what I’ve heard about the drow is true, your presence would make talks go a lot more smoothly.”

Having a mage capable of flattening a mountain in attendance tended to make people a great deal more civil.

“You are quite skilled at terrifying people into obedience,” Masego said, and he sounded like he believed it was a compliment. “My presence seems like it would be helpful, but necessary is overstating the case.”

“The grand total of what I know about the drow is four pages from Surley’s first volume of Realms of Calernia ,” I told him. “I’d be going in blind, without you.”

“There is little I have read on the subject that Diabolist has not,” he said. “And much of the reverse that is true.”

This wasn’t going to work. I needed a different angle.

“You won’t be safe in Praes,” I said. “I’m essentially at war with the Empress and you’re my most dangerous sorcerous asset.”

“Malicia cannot lay a hand on me without incurring my father’s enmity,” Masego said. “Which I do not believe she wishes to happen, as he would kill her brutally.”

“She could still-”

“Catherine,” Masego said gently. “I know you would prefer I remain at your side. I am not displeased by this. Yet there is nothing down your current path that matters more to me than getting answers from my fathers. We are not debating. I am awaiting your final silence.”

And there it was. I wondered if this should feel like a betrayal, because it didn’t. Hakram siding with Vivienne had, and it was still a pebble in my metaphorical boot to remember it, but this... It would be like getting angry at a fish for swimming. Masego would always do what he wanted. It was the way he’d been raised: essentially untouchable in a nest of scheming and murder, people bending over backwards to curry his favour or accommodate him. In a way, he was no less highborn than Diabolist. He’d had all the privileges of the old blood with none of the duties, and still the heart of him was pure Wasteland. His desires would always come first, and it was unthinkable to him that they would not. I passed a tired hand through my hair.

Chapter 50: Partings

“There is no poison more potent than hatred made silent.”
– Arlesite saying

I twisted my boot sharply, feeling fingers breaking under the steel. The fae cried out in pain, though I was less than impressed by how whiny she was being: I got broken fingers all the time, I could tell when someone was being overly dramatic about it.

“So Larat tells me you go by Lughlyn, these days,” I conversationally said. “And that you were the Lady of Bright Meadows once. That’s Summer, isn’t it?”

The thing that was once the Prince of Nightfall was looking at us with a lazy smile, sitting on an overturned stone. The rest of the Wild Hunt was watching us with varying degrees of interest, and more than a few vicious smirks. Just because hey rode together didn’t mean they were particularly affectionate.

“It was indeed of Summer, Sovereign,” one of the fae called out. “As proud a knight of the Court as there ever was.”

Good, they were getting involved. Public torture and humiliation had a way of drawing them in, admittedly, even when it was one of theirs doing the screaming. I’d had more than taking a firm stance with a discipline case in mind when I’d begun this, so their attention was more than welcome. I dug my heel into her palm and there was another sickening snap followed by a hoarse scream.

“So, would anyone care to tell me why Lughlyn is currently on the ground?” I said, opening the proceedings to the gallery.

I glanced at the dark-skinned fae wriggling on the stony shore. She’d come to my attention more than once, of late. First by picking a fight with Vivienne when she’d been on corpse-scavenging duty, and more recently when she’d decided to open her mouth after being given orders.

“She protested her sworn duties,” another fae called out.

“That’s right,” I said, smiling thinly.

“I would never ,” Lughlyn gasped. “Sovereign, I was merely-“

“Are we now goatherds, to ferry your mortal cattle?” Larat quoted softly. “Ah, Lughlyn. So much pride, so little sense. It was always a guilty pleasure to flay that off of you one layer at a time.”

The one-eyed prince of the fae might be first among equals of the Hunt, but he was no caring warden of their welfare. He delighted in pouring oil over the flames whenever he could, and today he’d been handed an opportunity to indulge his darker leanings.

“Now, our good friend is beneath my boot because she happened to be loudest hen in the henhouse,” I casually continued. “So she’s going to have a bad day, because of that. But we’re long overdue another conversation, aren’t we?”

Larat laughed, bright and merry and utterly unrepentant.

“Stand tall, Riders of the Hunt,” he called out. “We must now be called to account for our many sins. Our queen is a demanding one.”

“My fashionably treacherous lieutenant has it right,” I said, grinding down on Lughlyn’s hand for punctuation. “Any of you remember the Battle of the Camps?”

“We fought under your banner that day, and slew many,” one of the fae said.

“So you did,” I mused. “When I woke up. Until then you just... watched. As those in my service died.”

Keeping the Hunt in line required a very careful mixture of violence and patience, with a sprinkle of unpredictability added to the brew at the last moment. I’d been lax in making them drink it, after the campaign up north began, and my men had ended up paying for that during the parts of the battle where I was dreaming of death. I’d added a little more violence than usual to make it more bitter a draught this time, as they very much deserved it.

“We were given no orders by your Hellhound,” one of the fae said.

Ah, finally one whose name I knew.

“Because the lot of you remained out of sight, Seldred,” I said. “Now, would any of you care to guess if I’m pleased by that?”

Heel. Lughlyn screamed.

“You would have us shepherd mortals,” another fae said, her voice lilting with distaste.

“From now on, in my absence, you will answer to others,” I said smilingly. “Thief, first, and if she is not there it will be to Marshal Juniper.”

“No oaths bind us to mortal writ,” Seldred said, fingers stroking his beard.

I took my boot off the dark-skinned fae’s hand.

“Lughlyn, would you care to earn a modicum of mercy?” I said.

“By your will, Sovereign,” she croaked out.

“Kill Seldred,” I ordered.

The other fae’s eyes widened. A heartbeat later and they were already going at each other like rabid hounds. Lughlyn was wounded, but she was also desperate and Seldred had been taken aback by the sudden turn. It evened out. Silver blades sounded against each other in furious fighting, until one of them slumped headless to the ground. Lughlyn stood panting and bloodied, a long wound scarring her torso where the other fae’s blade had gone through her mail. I strode up to her, feeling the eyes of every fae on me, and laid a hand on the laceration. Winter flowed through my veins and poured into her, the blood freezing with a snap and the wound slowly closing as my will was ordering to.

“Now, I don’t consider this a case of me disciplining you,” I told the Hunt. “The dead are dead, and you’re useful enough I won’t take your heads on a whim. This is a warning, my lovelies. About the dangers of toeing the line with me.”

I patted Lughlyn’s belly gently.

“You can be on my good side,” I said, then jutted a thumb at Seldred’s corpse. “Or you can join him. There is no middle ground, and I have no use for defective instruments.”

“So spoke the Queen of the Hunt,” Larat said, voice carrying without ever rising. “So we shall remember.”

I inclined my head towards the one-eyed fae as the others echoes him softly.

“You have you orders,” I told Larat.

“They will be obeyed,” he promised with a sharp grin, “most carefully.”

I cast a last look at the Hunt. A simple public execution would not have cowed them, not in the same way this had. Death they were no stranger to. But being made a spectacle of, so casually? Oh, that would cut pride as well as flesh and those kind of wounds were much more dangerous to fae. They were creatures that feared humiliation more than pain, in many ways.

“Don’t look so pleased, One-Eye,” I said. “I’m holding you responsible for whatever they get up to, when I’m not there to take a look.”

If anything, that broadened his smile.

“You are taking delightfully well to cruelty, my queen,” he said. “This lark has been even more entertaining than anticipated.”

Well, that was the Larat for you: never more disconcerting than when he doled out praise. I kept my face calm.

“Open the gate,” I said. “I have farewells to make.”

He rose and bowed with feline grace. It was a short stroll from the beach to the Woe’s camp, and I noted with approval that while I’d been sorting out the Hunt the three leaving had finished packing up all their affairs. Indrani was poking at the fire with a piece of driftwood, and shot me a wounded look when I joined them.

“Did you just have a fairy pit fight without me, Cat?” she said. “Because that would be extremely inconsiderate, and I expected better from you.”

“I was just making a point,” I dismissed, then threw her a bone. “I promise if I ever arrange some kind of sordid Arcadian death tournament you’ll get an invitation.”

The brown-skinned woman looked thoughtful.

“Maybe next year?” she mused. “I mean, they’ll start being more trouble than use at some point and if you have to get rid of them...”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” I muttered.

The others looked on in amusement, at least most of them. Much as I hated seeing them leave, there was no point in delaying any longer. I reached Hakram first, the tall orc towering over me in his burnt plate.

“Cat,” he gravelled. “About yesterday-”

I shook my head.

“Water under the bridge,” I said. “I already felt under siege, so I took deeper offence than I should have.”

“No,” Hakram said, shaking his head. “You were right to be displeased. We debate in private, when we differ. One front.”

I clasped his forearm, in the legionary’s salute, and after a moment he did the same.

“I won’t part with you on bad terms,” I told him gently. “Bad enough I won’t see you for months. It’d done and buried, let’s leave it at that.”

He let out a sigh that sounded closer to a kettle’s whistle.

“Done and buried,” he echoed.

I squeezed his arm.

“I’m leaving you with the roughest work again,” I said. “I’m sorry, Hakram. It always seems to end up that way.”

He offered a flash of ivory fangs in response.

“At least this way I won’t have to decipher that war crime you call cursive before passing instructions along,” he teased. “Silver lining, Cat.”

I chuckled, already missing him before he’d even left my sight.

“Don’t slack on your training,” I said. “You won’t have Indrani and I to keep you sharp anymore.”

“My bones are deeply grateful for it,” he snorted, and pulled me into a hug.

My chin still didn’t reach his shoulder, but I’d learned where to place my head over the years. The embrace loosened after too short a while. From the corner of my eye I caught Indrani tugging at Masego’s robes and messing up his braids, fingers looking for every excuse to linger. Hakram’s gaze joined mine, and he let out a thoughtful rumble.

“I didn’t think that would last,” I admitted quietly.

“She gets bored easily,” the orc agreed. “But she was stubborn even before she started rubbing elbows with Callowans.”

“Have you...” I said, trailing off.

Talked with either of them about it , I left unspoken.

“Last time I tried she defenestrated me and called it awareness training,” he muttered. “That one’s all yours, Cat.”

Well, it’d been a while since I’d last strolled across a field full of buried munitions. I was due another fool’s errand.

“Fair travels, Hakram of the Howling Wolves,” I said.

“May victory slight your foes, Catherine Foundling,” he replied softly.

We broke away, and Vivienne filled the gap within moments. Her face was hard to read, but her heartbeat was steady. If she was angry still, it was an anger mastered.

“Vivienne,” I said, hesitant. “I know you’re not happy about this.”

For a long moment, she stayed silent.

“I know the end of that story,” she finally said, discretely glancing at Akua. “You gave an oath. I worry of the journey there, but I’ll make my peace with the path knowing the destination is certain.”

“It’s going to get better, you know,” I said. “Sooner or later we’ll reach daylight.”

She smiled ruefully.

“Will we?” she said. “It doesn’t matter. I can be angry with Catherine Foundling but see the sense in what the Queen of Callow has said. They are different people, in the end.”

“I don’t want to split with things unspoken,” I insisted. “Leaving to fester-”

“Enough, Catherine,” the dark-haired woman said. “You got your way. I’ve spoken my piece, and you heard what I did not speak. Keep it in mind, before threading fingers with the Folly’s own architect. Necessity is a fickle mistress, and we’ve learned the dangers of swift gains that sow far losses.”

I bit down on my answer. This was as good as it was going to get, and opening the wound again would only make it worse. It left a bitter taste in the mouth, but what part of ruling didn’t?

“Be careful,” I told her instead. “And be wary.”

“I always am,” Vivienne Dartwick smiled. “Try not to slip up in the Everdark, would you? Fighting fire with fire tends to end up burn everything down.”

“You know me,” I lightly said. “A diplomat without peer, I am.”

“Well phrased,” she noted, amusement bleeding through. “Until next time, Cat.”

I nodded back. Indrani had finally let Masego go free, so I caught him by the arm as Thief and Archer fell into the ritual of insults and petty slights that was their way of saying goodbye.

“Zeze,” I said.

“Catherine,” he said, sounding bemused. “Please don’t touch the braids.”

My fingers twitched. It was an almost physical need to screw with them now that he’d told me not to.

“As a sign of my deep and abiding love for you,” I said. “This once I won’t.”

“What a merciful queen you are,” he drily said.

“That’s what they say,” I agreed without missing a beat. “I know I’ve already told you, but don’t forget-“

“Trust no one in Praes,” Masego said patiently. “Not even Father. We’ve had this conversation before.”

“I guess we have,” I sighed.

Asking him to stay one last time would change nothing and sour the farewell, so I forced down the urge.

“Be careful not to provoke anyone you are not capable of killing,” he instructed me gently. “And if you can get your hands on any arcane tomes...”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I smiled.

“Good,” he said, visibly pleased.

He sobered a heartbeat later.

“Take care of Indrani,” he said. “I believe she might be upset.”

She knows you’re heading into the tiger’s den , I thought. And without any guarantees, this time, or one of us to watch your back.

“I will,” I said, searching his face for any sign that he might suspect...

Well, I wasn’t sure what exactly. I wouldn’t know until I got her drunk enough to talk. But it was a sharper with a lit fuse, and the lack of awareness I got from him was probably the only thing that’d kept it from blowing so far.

“I’ll leave messages with the Observatory as soon as feasible,” he promised. “Stay alive, Catherine. I would be cross if you failed in this.”

“Well, you’ve always been a soft touch,” I smiled.

When I pulled him close he stayed stiff for only a moment before gingerly putting his hands on my shoulders. Gods, he was so horribly awkward at times. That thought should not be as fond as it was. We withdrew and I left him to pick up his bags, joining the other two where they awaited. All three of them headed towards the Hunt, already mounted, and I met Larat’s eyes before he opened the gate. He inclined his head. We had an understanding, he and I, about the kind of ugly things I would do if any of them were hurt on his watch. Indrani sidled up to me and we watched them pass into Arcadia, standing there in silence until the gate closed and the last wisp of power was gone.

“So,” Archer said. “What now?”

“We set out tomorrow,” I said. “Tonight, though? I distinctly remember you saying something about a drink called Atalantian baptismal you stole a bottle of.”

Indrani grinned.

“Now there’s exemplary leadership at work,” she said.

Duty could wait until tomorrow, for once.

—

I dropped the bowl in the pile of dishes we’d have to wash in the lake later, having scraped off the last of the stew. I tossed the spoon after it.

“I didn’t think you’d be this good a cook,” I admitted.

Indrani snorted, sprawled against a stone she’d covered with blankets.

“You’re such a city girl,” she said. “You think I had people to cook for me, back in Refuge? Ranger passed along camp recipes, but she wasn’t the one who tended the pots. There was a pecking order.”

“I was under the impression it had grown into a respectable settlement,” Akua said, sounding mildly surprised.

She was on the other side of the fire, scarlet eyes luminous in the darkness. Diabolist hadn’t touched the stew herself: she was capable of touch, nowadays, but she required nothing to eat. Neither did I, but on occasion it was a pleasant distraction.

“Sure, by numbers,” Indrani said, pouring herself a drink of the Dead King’s finest rotgut. “But it’s not a village, Sahelian. It’s just a large camp that exists because the Lady killed the beasts that used to live there. We get traders, now and then, and the dwarves peddle things but it’s everyone for themselves.”

“Yeah, she didn’t strike me as the ruling kind of woman,” I muttered. “Not a lot of patience there.”

“Good thing, too,” Indrani said, handing me a cup. “Otherwise who’d cook, you? You’re shit with a pot and everyone knows Callowan food is disgusting.”

“I’ve seen you tear into apple bread like it murdered your parents,” I drily replied.

“Well, desserts are fine,” she conceded. “But your beer is basically dirt water and there’s not a single inn in the kingdom that can do mutton right.”

“It’s true,” Akua noted. “Callowans are infamous for being ignorant of spices and drowning their plates in that horrible Laurean sauce.”

“I’m not taking culinary trash talk from a drunken vagrant and a woman whose people think poison is actual seasoning,” I replied defensively.

“That fucking sauce is basically poison too, let’s be honest,” Indrani muttered.

Best avoid getting too deep into that fight, I decided. Both of them were much better travelled than me, so they had depth of argument I couldn’t match. Not that there was anything wrong with solden sauce, unless you were some kind of fancy noble. Thankfully, it was easy to distract half of my opposition: I raised my cup and with a cheer Indrani met my toast. The baptismal went down like a cup of goblinfire, and that was coming from someone who could barely get drunk anymore. Indrani had to be burning out some of the effects with her Name, no one had that good of a liver.

“Oh, that’s the good stuff,” Indrani rasped out. “You sure you don’t want a cup, Ghost of Bad Decisions?”

“It would not affect me,” Akua replied, unruffled by the latest mildly insulting nickname she’d been given. “Truth be told, even before my... current state of affairs, I rarely drank. Enough to prove I’d obtained the correct antidote, but it was never my sin of choice.”

“Ugh, nothing worse than a villain that won’t drink,” Indrani complained. “I thought Praesi were all about living it up. I bet you were all chaste and demure, too.”

“Hardly,” the shade replied, sounding amused. “I had my own affairs, though given my station they required a degree of discretion.”

Indrani topped up my cup and I the way I felt light-headed had nothing to do with the drink. Not yet, anyway. Gods, did she intend to gossip with Akua Sahelian ? This was surreal even by my standards, and I’d turned into fucking mist this week.

“Come on,” she goaded. “Don’t hold out on us now, Murder Bitch. We’re just getting to the juicy stuff.”

“I actually spent the night with Fasili, not long before the battle at Liesse,” Akua shrugged.

“Fasili Mirembe?” I said, brow rising. “Hells, you have terrible taste.”

“He was not unskilled, if that is your worry,” the shade smirked.

Ugh. He’d had a permanent sneer on his face. Not bad looking, since he’d been highborn and the Wasteland did breed for looks, but the notion of him naked was enough to have me wince. Also, now that I thought of it...

“We killed him, didn’t we?” I frowned.

“Robber shot him in the back,” Indrani agreed. “He still has the skull. We used it when re-enacting Valerian Betrayed, just before the Battle of the Camps heated up. Sappers make a terrible chorus, for the record. Can’t reach a proper low note for the life of them.”

Well, if Robber’s bunch were badly running plays then at least they weren’t running illegal scorpion fights. Probably. I hoped.

“Woe to the defeated, as always,” Akua said, tone sardonic.

She didn’t seem all that broken up about it, but then this was Diabolist. The only person I’d ever seen her care a whit about was her father, and we’d shot him too. I drank from my cup, and watched as Indrani began working on her fourth. We’d reach drunk waters soon enough, by my reckoning. That stuff hit damnably fast.

“Akua, begin the watch,” I said, flicking a glance at her.

Indrani laughed.

“She can stay,” she said. “I know what you want to rake me over coals about. Surprised it took you this long, to be honest. Besides, Collar Fairy’s part of the crew now isn’t she?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I said. “We have an understanding.”

“A slightly longer leash, as long as I behave and prove of use,” Akua said, rather matter-of-fact. “Not an unusual arrangement, by my people’s standards.”

“You sure?” I pressed Archer.

She waved my objection away carelessly.

“Please, Cat,” she said. “Her whole thing is reading people. You think she hasn’t figured it out if you picked up on it?”

I sighed. She wasn’t wrong about that, I’d concede.

“Your affections for Lord Masego,” the shade calmly said. “I did not believe the matter to be a secretive one, I must admit.”

“Hey,” Indrani said mulishly. “Let’s not get all... formal about this. It’s just a thing. That is there.”

“It’s not a crime,” I said. “To have, uh, feelings.”

“I can’t believe the killer ghost is handling this better than you are,” she said, sounding amused.

“I don’t really get it,” I admitted. “But I don’t have to. I just don’t want you to get hurt trying to get something I’m not sure can be had.”

“I know he’s not interested in bedplay, Cat,” Indrani snorted. “Come on. Last time he saw me shirtless he asked if I needed healing.”

I winced. Yeah, that sounded like him all right. Part of it was that had had a hard time reading cues, but I was pretty sure that when he got close enough to people he started just dismissing the possibility of the cue being there at all. He’d been raised in Praes, so he could at least pretend to be better at social things than he was with strangers, but in closed company he tended to drop the pretence and outright admit when he wasn’t sure about something. Which was heart warming, in a way, because it meant he trusted us. It also meant he could get a little rough around the edges since he didn’t bother to hold back.

“He has no interest in men either, if it is any comfort,” Akua said. “I tried to place such agents in his bed after he joined the Fifteenth, to no avail.”

I was not surprised in the slightest that she’d tried to honeypot the Woe, to be honest. I was lucky that back then it’d been Masego and Hakram she could go after, and neither was really the seducible type. Well, Hakram was apparently really easy to seduce, but not to get to stick around afterwards. Juniper kept calling him a word in Kharsum I was pretty sure meant ‘easy’ in a highly unflattering way after she had a few drinks.

“Huh,” Indrani mused. “I mean, I assumed, but that’s nice to know.”

“So you’re not unaware that it’s not his wheelhouse,” I delicately said. “And still?”

“Never really met anyone like him before,” she admitted. “Dangerous but without the edges. It’s soothing. And he’s earnest, Cat. How many people do you know are willing to just be like that? I just...”

Really like him , I completed for her. Yeah, I’d been there once or twice. Usually to my disappointment when I got to know the person in question better, but she’d gone about this the other way around. I put an arm around her, tugged her a little closer. She immediately leaned in and bit my neck, because even while venting she remained a wild animal, and I had to slap her belly several times to get her to stop. She laughed quietly after withdrawing.

“I’m not in love, you tart, so don’t get all worried about this,” Indrani said. “It won’t be trouble. I don’t even think he’s noticed.”

At least a little, he has , I thought. He wouldn’t have asked me to take care of her if he hadn’t.

“Of course, I’m not the only one who’s lusting stupidly,” she mused.

“Let’s not go there,” I said, frowning.

“Come on,” Indrani grinned. “I have a running bet with Hakram about how many times a day you’ll give Vivi the eye.”

Hakram, that gossipy bitch. If I found out there was a betting pool, there would be dire consequences.

“It’s just been a while,” I said. “Don’t read into it.”

Indrani leaned back against her stone.

“Right, you’ve had an empty bed since you called it quits with your redhead,” she said. “We’ll find you something back in Callow, don’t worry about it. Or maybe some drow will fit the bill. Winter Leftovers, what do drow look like?”

“Grey-skinned,” Akua said. “Humanoid. Usually of thin frame, even the women, though there is much larger appearance variance between genders than for ogres or elves.”

“I honestly couldn’t tell whether or not the Spellblade was a man or a woman,” I admitted, eager to latch on to the change of subject.

“There is no relation between drow and elves, mind you,” the shade noted. “I’ve read the former take the sobriquet of ‘dark elves’ quite badly, given that of the two they are the race truly native to Calernia.”

Indrani was warm against my side, and pleasant now that she’d stopped biting like a rabid badger. We’d just scratched the surface with our little talk, I was well aware of that. I wasn’t the only one who’d been keeping an empty bed for the last year, and it was a much larger change for her than I. But now was not the time to press, so I allowed the chatter about the people I would seek out to wash over me. I was still uncertain of how we’d find the drow in the first place, much less plumb the depths of the Everdark, a niggling worry in the back of my head. We only had so much time to spare. As it happened, it was an empty worry.

It was them who found us.

Fatalism II

“What is it if not sorcery, that I can tax a single belltower in Salia and set half a dozen cities ablaze?”
– First Princess Anaïs of Cantal, referring to the incident that began the First Liturgical War. Later became the Proceran shorthand of ‘Salian belltower’, referring to a small act carrying disastrous consequences.

As a girl Cordelia had made a deep study of ruling, knowing that she would day inherit Rhenia and intending to serve her people as best she could. Her few journeys south had made her feel the limits of Lycaonese wisdom acutely, and so she had sought answer beyond the traditions of her people: not to simply discard the lessons of her forbears, but to pair them with the learning of other realms. She had looked far, in acquiring tomes. There was little literature of worth out of Callow, save for Jehan the Wise’s sharply-tongued memoirs, but the the Free Cities and the Thalassocracy had borne greater fruit. The Ashurans had led a remarkably stable state for centuries in the face of episodic warfare with Nicae and its allies, and their admittedly dry records were worth the reading if one could stomach the tediousness of the minutia. The islanders, however, had few lessons to offer beyond those touching on the establishment and maintenance of a strong bureaucracy. In matters of ruling philosophy, they either parroted the faraway Baalite Hegemony’s onw sages or lapsed into the mysticism particular to their national cult. The League, on the other hand, was a treasure trove of learning and scholarship.

Of contradictions also, though that was only to be expected of such a fractious people. The asekretis of Delos had bled rivers of ink on the subject of the ideal state, attempting myriad reforms as opposing factions of the ruling Secretariat came to power, and from both failures and success there had been much to learn. Cordelia had modelled the examinations now necessary to enter civil service in Salia on those required to rise higher in the Secretariat, and found them more than adequate a method to root out the highborn parasites who’d infested the city and replace with previously unknown talents. From faraway Penthes, ever bickering with its two closest neighbours and stirring uneasy in the Empire’s shadow, she had learned the value of leveraging gold and treaties where force of arms would fail. By the most famous Tyrants of Helike, Theodosius and his always ambitious brood, Cordelia was taught the art of sowing dissent and fear to humble greater opponents.

She considered herself to have first crossed a line when she’d obtained Praesi works, all of which were illegal to possess within the Principate.

Yet there had been wisdom in those as well. Not in the rants and rambles of the most colourful foolsto climb the Tower, but in the likes of the first Dread Emperor Terribilis and Dread Empress Maleficent the Second. It would only be years later, after she was crowned Prince of Rhenia, that her reach grew long enough to acquire more recent Praesi works. Dread Empress Malicia’s treatise ‘The Death of the Age of Wonders’ had cost her a fortune and over sixty dead to acquire a mere incomplete transcription, and what she’d found had been a chilling read. It’d been a lucid, strategic look at the historical failures of the Dread Empire followed by laying out foreign policy that would prevent such disasters from happening again. The suggested rapprochement with Ashur had been the greatest danger among those put to ink, and the cause of many a sleepless night after Cordelia became First Prince. To her dismay, the Prince of Rhenia had found that much the Empress deemed the path to a better Praes was eerily similar to what she herself intended for the Lycaonese principalities. Strengthened internal trade, central oversight of crucial resources, the establishment of common institutions that would make old regional conflicts irrelevant.

The Evil now dwelling in the Tower was unlike any the Principate had faced before, she’d then understood. She had learned what she could from the enemy, and kept those lessons close. Even in those days she’d known there would be a reckoning with the East.

When she’d grown old enough to undertake the diplomatic missions her mother had always disdained and largely allowed to lapse under her reign, Cordelia had immersed herself in the teachings of broader Procer. There was an old and proud contempt for southern squabbling, among her people, and Lycaonese as a rule paid little heed to the ways of the Alamans and the Arlesites. What did the debates of the Highest Assembly matter to them, they argued, when no matter the ruler no soldiers ever marched north to help hold the passes against the dead and the rats? There was truth in that, but also bitterness that blinded. Beyond the complex tapestry of marriage alliances and shifting interests, Cordelia had found the the heart of Procer’s art of rule had been birthed by two books. The first, and oldest, was the work of Sister Salienta of the House of Light. Once royalty in Salamans, after taking her vows she had spent years penning her life’s work, the Faith of Crowns . One hundred and three pages over which the former princess had attempted to lay out the duties and responsibilities of one ruling over others as a child of the Heavens. It was beautiful prose, in truth, and thought at times it was more liturgy than practical it had very much been intended as manual for blessed rule.

Salienta had been the first to argue that the Right of Iron, the ancient prerogative by which the princes of Procer could war as they wished, was no simple allowance: that regardless of permission, only a just war should ever be waged. She’d spoken of the right of those who toiled over land to own it, of the unholy greed behind taxes serving to enrich instead of serve. It’d been highly contentious at the time, but after open endorsement by the House of Light it had grown wildly popular and the book had since grown to permeate political discourse in Procer. Cordelia herself had drawn on the Faith of Crowns when declaring the Tenth Crusade, qualifying it as a just war according to the third definition laid out by Salienta. Still, as much as the writings had resonated with her it was what had come from them she’d studied closest. How, in essence, the royalty of Procer had found ways to follow its instructions to the letter while violating their spirit. The manufacture of ‘just cause’ to enable wars of expansion, allowing common folk to own the land yet to keep it only for a fee, the complex array of moral pretexts to justify often gouging taxes.

Salienta’s work had always been closely linked with the power of the House of Light, and so in a way it was no surprise that its first written rebuttal was offered after the last of the Liturgical Wars came to a close. None had ever claimed authorship of the small work simply titled On Rule , yet it was an open secret in Procer that its father was Prince Bastien of Arans, the same man who later became the very first of his homeland to be elected First Prince of Procer. Where the Faith of Crowns had been a religious and moral guide to dominion, On Rule was a dispassionate study of the acquisition and preservation of power. To this day, it was considered impious to a copy of the book, for within it Prince Bastien baldly observed that the House of Light was an earthly force like any other, with interests and obligations, and should be treated no differently. The book pragmatically advised that guile and treachery were functional tools, if sparsely used, and that it was usually better to be a victor of ill-repute than a saintly cadaver. Going even further, it argued that moral law was a matter different from a ruler’s interests and on occasion even opposed to them. There were few princes and princess in Procer who would admit to having such a volume.

Cordelia had never met any royalty south of Neustria who did not.

Therein lay the dichotomy at the heart of the Principate, she’d thought, and she was hardly the first. To have Salienta’s tongue and Bastien’s hand , the saying went. Spoken like an insult, an implicit accusation of hypocrisy, yet it was observed more scrupulously than many laws among Alamans and Arlesites. And herself as well, she was honest enough to admit. There was beauty in the Faith of Crowns , but it was no shield for the vicious intrigues that thrived in the Highest Assembly. As the years passed, however, the blue-eyed prince had come to look at the treatises differently. Less as exercises of philosophy and more as inheritances from different eras of Procer. One where the House of Light had been entwined with the ruling class of the realm, another where it had stood rival and opponent. Since the year On Rule had been written, the nature of the pillars holding up the Principate had shifted. Though in many ways the victors of the Liturgical Wars, the priests had been estranged from the halls of power just as the once-powerful mages had been. They had kept their wealth, their ancient rights, but their foes had not forgotten the dangers of allowing the House too much influence and so slowly uprooted it from the tallest peaks of Proceran authority. Cordelia had scrupulously observed this habit, save in one matter.

That mistake, she thought, was now coming home to roost.

“Someone organized this,” the First Prince of Procer spoke with deliberate calm. “Of that there can be no doubt. The last recorded conclave involving the full priesthoods of the west dates to Triumphant’s conquest, gentlemen. This is not happenstance .”

Three men shared her solar, this morning, none of them younger than fifty. All were Alamans whose tenure as the heads of the informal triumvirate of largest Proceran spy networks preceded her second crowning. Her eyes lingered on Louis de Sartrons, a skeleton of a man with rapacious features and a bald head. As far as the Principate’s records were concerned, he was a middling official in the lower ranks of Salia’s diplomatic service. In truth man was the highest patron of the Circle of Thorns, an ancient cabal of Salian officials whose charge was to run the foreign spies of Procer. The Circle had a long tradition of abstaining from politics, providing unflinching service no matter who sat the highest throne of Procer: at the height of the Great War, before it had been clear Cordelia would triumph, the man across from her had provided regular briefings to all major contenders without playing favourites. The blonde did not particularly like him, but she could respect his dedication and sharp competence. The depths of his failure in this particular instance was made deeper disappointment for it.

“We were blindsided,” the old man admitted in a rasp. “I’ve had my people in the Thalassocracy and the Dominion scrambling for answers, but as far as we can tell there is no Ashuran committee behind it and we all know the Majilis has not held session in months. Or even informal council, for that matter. It could be the Seljun, Your Highness, but his position remains weak. He should not have the pull or coin to arrange something so far-reaching.”

The Seljun of Levant carried a dozen fantastical titles, though the only one that truly mattered to Levantines themselves was the last: First of the Pilgrim’s Blood. Direct descent from the most revered of the Dominion’s ancient founders made the ruling line of Levant effectively sacrosanct to its people, but that respect did not historically extend to lords and ladies obeying a Seljun’s instructions beyond half-hearted lip service, if even that. The current figurehead ruler of the Dominion, the Most Holy Wazim Isbili, was impotent even by the standards of his predecessors. He was an unlikely culprit in this, Cordelia was inclined to agree. If there was a foreign agent at work, she suspected it would be a committee buried somewhere in the convoluted maze the Ashurans called a government. Still, the failure now at her door was not the Circle of Thorns’ alone. Cordelia’s gaze shifted to Balthazar Serigny, a hirsute bear of a man with a thick black beard and eyebrows almost defiantly large. Balthazar the Bastard, as his subordinates often called him without a speck of fondness, was former fantassin of common birth who’d ruthlessly risen to the top of the Silver Letters by blackmailing and discrediting his every rival.

He’d thrived there, unsurprisingly, as the Silver Letters were a vicious band of thieves and murderers who’d been skilled enough at the work that over a century ago they became the left hand of the rulers of Procer. The Cordelia’s most recent predecessors had used them to keep an eye on the unrulier princes and occasionally sow internal dissent when a faction in the Highest Assembly grew dangerous, though she herself employed them as knives only to remove Eyes of the Empire. Of this shadowy triumvirate, it was Serigny she had the worst relation with. Unlike the Circle, the Silver Letters had taken sides during the Great War and several times tried to assassinate members of her inner circle on Constance of Aisne’s behalf. She’d given serious thought to having him hanged after taking the throne, but it would have antagonized the web of informants she now needed the most to remain in power. Instead she’d made it clear he was on a very thin leash, and that he would immediately begin training the successor she had chosen for him.

“It’s not us, First Prince,” Balthazar the Bastard grunted, unmoved by the unspoken reproach. “I’ve shaken every tree in the Highest Assembly and nothing fell out. The Lanterns almost caused a diplomatic accident when they passed through Orense, so they weren’t expected in the slightest. Been keeping an eye on our own temple rats ever since, but they’re closing ranks. Not a peep out of the priests. They’ve got a hand in this, sure as day.”

“There hasn’t been a word out of the House because your pack of thugs was caught out, you blundering fool,” Simon de Gorgeault hissed. “Do you know how many pointed questions I’ve had to answer?”

The man was in his seventies, closely-cropped silver hair topping an angular face that had been a poor fit when he’d still been named Simone but a reputably popular one after the oversight was corrected. He was a lay brother of the House of Light, and unlike the other two men the organization he oversaw was only one foot in the shadows. The Holy Society was more informal channel to the leadership of the House of Light than true web of spies, an association of nobleborn lay brothers and sisters who facilitated dialogue with the throne and occasionally passed along whispers the priests did not prove willing to surrender on their own. He was diplomat as much as he was a spymaster, and Cordelia had sometimes wondered where the man’s loyalty truly lay. He’d been in her service for only a few years, while his friendships in the House were decades old.

“I have some questions of my own, Brother Simon,” the First Prince said. “It is somewhat offensive that before arranging a conclave the House would not reach out to me.”

The silver-haired man grimaced.

“I’ve told them as much myself,” he said. “Yet it appears they consider this to be a religious matter, not a political one, and so consider the throne’s involvement to be unnecessary.”

“Which begs the question of what exactly that matter is, Simon,” Louis de Satrons’ reedy voice mused. “It’s customary for a conclave to be proclaimed openly and the subject of debate announced beforehand.”

The leader of the Holy Society sucked at a loose tooth, as if hesitant.

“I am told this is to be a closed session,” Brother Simon said. “By the request of a Chosen.”

Cordelia stilled. One of the heroes? The Chosen had no formal authority over any priesthood, save for those come of it, yet it would be a lie to say they had no influence. And yet none of the Chosen had caused ripples, when they had first gathered in Procer at the eve of the crusade’s first assaults.

“Which one?” the First Prince coldly asked.

“I was refused that knowledge,” the silver-haired man admitted. “And warned any meddling by the throne would be severely censured by all participants.”

The House of Light could be handled, Cordelia thought, and the Speakers were more mystics than political force, but the Lanterns? The Levantine priesthood considered strife to be a holy duty. If prodded too harshly, they would bare blades without hesitation. That would be utter disaster, the kind of diplomatic incident that could begin a breakdown of the Grand Alliance if it was not carefully handled.

“We will set that offered slight aside for now,” she said. “What is the to be the subject of the closed session?”

“Heresy,” Brother Simon said. “As pertaining to Callow.”

Cordelia did not close her eyes or sigh. She was better-mannered than that, and showing weakness in front of these men would bring no good. The temptation remained there, however, even as her mind raced. A lesser conclave in Salia had already declared Catherine Foundling to be an abomination in the eyes of the Heavens for perverting the sacred act of resurrection for the purposes of Below. This was not a minor thing, yet it carried no true legal consequences and was essentially empty censure unless the declaration was also adopted by the House of Light in Callow. Which it had not been.

Unlike its Proceran cousin, the priesthood of Callow was no monolith of shared practices and beliefs. Distant regions of the kingdom stubbornly denied the leadership of the influential cohort of priests in Laure, who had seen said influence sharply decline with the end of House Fairfax. In the latter years of the imperial occupation, the priesthood of the southern half of Callow had effectively become a separate entity from the rest. The Doom of Liesse had shattered that state of affairs, however, leaving behind disparate packs of clergy preaching stances on the Black Queen that were just as disparate. The centre had largely fallen behind her reign, and parts of the east as well – Marchford heart and soul, as she remained wildly popular there, Summerholm more reluctantly and she was mostly spoken of there as a preferable alternative to Praes. The rest was lukewarm of opinion, though many priests in the south had involved themselves with Hakram Deadhand’s care of the refugee tent cities.

Proceran priesthood often spoke of its eastern counterpart as a backwards cousin, considering its refusal to bestow titles to its own greater than Brother or Sister as archaic and its insistence to rely only on the Book of All Things as scripture as rather misguided. Callowan priests were ever quick to remind their western cousins that their practiced dated back to the founding of the kingdom, when the Principate had been nothing but a mess of warring tribes, and did not shy from sharp reminders that faith could only be tainted by involvement in earthly matters. Still, save for the occasional minor squabble the relationship between the priesthoods had been largely cordial over the last two centuries. It helped, Cordelia, had often thought, that Callowans priests were often more interested in arguing with each other than foreigners. Off-hand, she could think of only one thing that would make them band together.

Foreign meddling.

“Dread Empress Malicia is Arch-heretic of the East,” the First Prince carefully said. “Only one person can carry such censure at a time.”

“She is presumptive Arch-heretic, as the woman who holds the Tower,” Brother Simon corrected. “In the absence of a formal declaration, the matter is not writ in stone. And even if it was, the decision of a Proceran lesser conclave would be overturned by a true conclave’s own proclamation.”

The man was not a fool. He’d immediately understood the first measure she would turn to in order to prevent the blunder: rustling up enough Proceran priests to declare the Empress the current Arch-heretic, preventing the same title from being granted to the Black Queen.

“Atalante is a renowned stronghold of faith in the Gods Above,” Cordelia said. “Could such a debate be delayed until representatives from its priesthood arrive?”

They would have to travel by land, the Lycaonese thought, likely through Tenerife. The ruling princess of that principality was a close and trusted ally, who could be counted on to arrange gentle delays. If the First Prince was able to slow down the proceedings, the conclave could still be persuaded to turn aside from this mistake.

“That matter was already settled by secret ballot,” Brother Simon said ruefully. “As the Hierarch of the League is of Bellerophon, a city long in the service of Below, it was determined that the priests of Atalante should be considered lapsing in the faith. The same holds for Delos and Nicae, much less Penthes – which all known to be suborned by the Empire.”

No word was spoken of the Titanomachy, yet Cordelia knew better than to try that particular avenue. Levant had ancestral ties to the Gigantes, while the giants still slew every Proceran to approach their lands. Any approach there by a First Prince would carry great dangers.

“Then the House of Light in Callow should be sent for,” Cordelia said, struggling to sound calm. “To justify its anointing of the warlord Catherine Foundling.”

“That cannot be,” the silver-haired man said quietly. “For I am told the priesthood of Callow is to stand judgement as well, for that very blasphemy.”

Her worst fears in this, confirmed.

“Brother Simon, this is a grave blunder,” the First Prince quietly said. “There are better ways to return Callow to the embrace of the Heavens. This will be seen as an attack, a spiteful blow in the wake of defeats on the field.”

The man stiffened like an angry cat.

“We speak of holy conclave, Your Most Serene Highness,” he woodenly replied. “Servants of the Heavens do not concern themselves with the sentiments of mundane powers, only that their acts are just in the eyes of Above.”

What is this, if not an act of mundane purpose? Cordelia thought. She could not treat with the Black Queen, if she was condemned a heretic by every signatory of the Grand Alliance. Worse, there would be no treating with Callow . The pattern of history there would cut too close to home. After the Fourth Crusade, when a young Principate had turned on Callow after being unceremoniously thrown out of the Wasteland by Dread Emperor Terribilis the Second, there had been attempts to crown one the the slain king’s children as a puppet to ease occupation until the pretence could be safely discarded. Juliana Fairfax had instead cut her own throat at her own coronation, immediately after declaring her rebelling cousin as heir. King Henry Fairfax the Landless had promptly been declared to be Damned by a lesser conclave in Salia, a plot that was deeply reviled in Callow to this day. The recipe here was different, yet too many ingredients were the same: a young ruler who’d fought Praes with distinction, heavy defeat followed by a Salian proclamation of heresy and the perceived collusion of priesthood with an invading force. That the Lanterns and the Speakers joined their voiced to the conclave would change little, she thought. How many Callowans had ever seen an Ashuran or Levantine? The kingdom had been closed, under Praes, and now the only living memory of either people was as a Proceran ally. Even those who despised the Black Queen’s reign would have to bow to popular sentiment and fall in line, lest they be accused of collusion with the Principate. And worse yet...

Woe, Cordelia. Woe to the north and to the south.

“I must urgently address the conclave, Brother Simon,” the First Prince said.

The old man frowned.

“That would be difficult to arrange,” he said.

“Allow me to be perfectly clear,” Cordelia Hasenbach said. “It matters not to me how many favours you must call upon, how many bridges must be burned and quiet threats made. This is no longer a question of diplomacy. It is now a question of survival.”

Brother Simon’s face smoothed out, though not before she read scepticism in the cast of it.

“I understand that the Callowan question of of import to the throne,” he slowly said.

He paused to choose his words carefully, and as as backhanded reminder of who answered to the other Cordelia smoothly placed answer to a reply unfinished.

“There is more to this than the affairs of Callow,” the First Prince said. “See it done, Brother Simon. By evening tomorrow. Or choose the abbey to which you will retire, after designating a successor less prone to dithering.”

She would not allow the Kingdom of Callow to be driven into the arms of Below. She could not.

Not after Agnes had told her the Dead King would be on the march by winter solstice.

Chapter 51: First Impressions

“All serve, by whip or by writ.”
– Inscription carved above the entrance to Stygia’s Magisterium

The game made no sense, and I definitely wasn’t saying that just because I was losing. I fanned my face with my cards, trading hard stares with Indrani and Akua. Sadly, though the former was already drunk she was also drunk enough she misremembered her cards half the time. That made trying to read her an exercise in pointlessness. I’d already lost two laundry chores to her because she’d been under the impression that a set of four cards in the same suit was actually a bad hand. My eyes narrowed as I studied her stupidly grinning face. Unless that was what she wanted me to think. Was she faking being drunker than she was?

“Your values will not grow from staring at Archer,” Diabolist mildly said.

I scoffed at her. The wily ass had just tricked me out of two firewood chores after letting Indrani raise the bid through the roof when she had the most horrible hand we’d seen all night. I was beginning to suspect I was being had by the both of them complicitly.

“This is a stupid game,” I said. “No wonder it’s from the Wasteland.”

“Oooh, she’s got no trumps then,” Indrani drawled. “She only gets that ornery when she knows she’s going to lose the round.”

I raised my chin haughtily, above the petty squabbles of the lesser folk around me. I would win or lose as a dignified Queen of Callow. Probably lose, I admitted to myself, since I had two Knaves but no same-suit card to match them, making them worth a pittance of ten points even paired. The Three of Cups stared back back at my face mockingly, promising I would be washing the dishes of these traitorous wenches until the end of days.

“No draw,” I said, eager to get my beating over with instead of worsening the costs. “Settle.”

“Shit,” Indrani said, and slapped her five cards down onto the stone.

Two from the suit of Swords, but only a four and six, and no matches which meant I’d so far managed to pull a surprise upset. Diabolist gracefully added her own to the pile. The Knaves of Cups and Coins, with... shit, equivalent values for the rest. This was going to get ugly. I hastily slapped down my own hand then withdrew by half an inch.

“Succession,” I said, and tried to slap my fingers back on the pile of cards before anyone else could.

Akua’s fingers almost slid under mine in time, but at the last moment she stopped and a wondrous wonderland of no longer having to traipse around this fucking godforsaken countryside for dead wood presented itself to my eyes. Then Indrani’s knife went through my hand, technically touching the cards first and winning succession. There was a heartbeat of silence.

“Archer,” I said patiently. “Is there a knife through my hand?”

She mused over that, then met my eyes.

“No,” she told me. “’tis but an illusion.”

Naturally, I decked her in the face. Not full strength, but hard enough she went flying with a deeply satisfying yelp. Sighing, I drew the knife out of my hand and allowed Winter to knit the flesh back together. Holding it by the tip I pointed it accusingly at Diabolist.

“You could have said something,” I complained.

“I debated saying ‘watch out, she has a knife’,” Akua acknowledged. “But really, that could apply to any of us.”

I kind of missed the days when the shade of my hated enemy had stuck to creepy intimate endearments instead of outright sassing me. Horrifying as the thought was, the Woe might have been a bad influence on Diabolist.

“That’s going to bruise, you know,” Archer called out.

“Be grateful I didn’t aim for the spire, you wanton savage,” I yelled back.

We’d crossed the Chalice, that quiet lake to the northeast of Keter, and yesterday arrived near what could be considered the outskirts of the Everdark. The tall snow-capped peaks shared their name with the realm of the drow, though in truth their kind occupied only parts of it and all of those underground. This was one of the few parts of Calernia where digging too deep wouldn’t unleash a sea of angry dwarves, though drow could hardly be considered a better outcome. There were not gates into the Everdark anymore, Indrani had told me. Millennia ago there had been, massive always-open panes of bronze that led into a hollowed out mountain at the heart of drow holdings, but those were long abandoned and Ranger had allegedly found the inside of the mountain collapsed when she’d tried her luck there. We’d have to try our hand with the Warrens instead. A pretty name, that, for what was a much less glorious reality: the Warrens were no great structure, only a sprawling mess of dank tunnels leading underground. Many were collapsed or leading to dead ends, and there were no surface markers indicating their presence. The only people who knew their locations for sure were the drow who still used them, sending roving bands of raiders and slavers to the surface.

Those enterprising souls were not known for having a lot of success in those depredations. Ages ago, before the Golden Bloom had been seized by the elves, the now-broken kingdom of the Deoraithe had occasionally been troubled by them. Now, though? The surface paths led them into three dead ends: the Kingdom of the Dead, the Golden Bloom and the Chain of Hunger. None of these were known to be welcoming locales to outsiders. Once every few decades it was said a cunning and careful warband managed to slip through dwarven tunnels or other secret paths to reach northern Procer – or much more rarely, northern Callow – but even fewer of those who made it there succeeding at returning home. What little was known of the Everdark these days was learned through exiles, which were rare and tended to settle in Mercantis exclusively. Diabolist had hired a few of them as mercenaries, when she’d gone on her mass-murdering spree, and told me since she’d been rather unimpressed by the quality of their soldiery. Regardless, this was now the second day we were on the hunt for any path into the Warrens and we had nothing to show for it. Indrani had been told of a way down by Lady Ranger, and we’d begun there yesterday, but unsurprisingly it’d been brought down.

It was also marked with blood-red runes, that from what Akua could piece together were a warning about ‘the Destroyer’ having hunted there. Ranger had evidently proved as charming as one would expect. Dusting herself off, Indrani rose to her feet and shook away the bits of stone stuck everywhere in her clothes. She strolled back to the fire easily, maintaining the pretence nothing had happened with an admirable amount of conceit. She plopped herself back down and stretched like a lazing cat.

“Next round, then,” she said. “I believe I won the succession, so Cat didn’t get shit. Hand me my knife, would you?”

I eyed her sceptically.

“Do you promise not to stab me again?” I said.

“And I as well,” Akua smoothly tacked on.

We both ignored her.

“I mean,” Indrani hedged. “Define stab.”

“Archer,” I firmly said.

“It’s not like it doesn’t grow back,” she quibbled. “Also, I know you got all pissy last time, but you know I’m right about the mystery stew. Technically, since anything we cut would grow back, if we used it-“

“We’re not going to cut off my fingers and put them into the stew so you don’t have to hunt rabbits anymore, Archer,” I hissed. “It’s not happening.”

“Ironic,” Akua mused, “that cannibalism only became matter of debate after the Adjutant departed.”

“A good queen would be willing to bleed for her people,” Indrani solemnly said. “I’m disappointed in you, Catherine.”

“I know you’re doing this just to rile me up,” I said, eyes narrowing. “You know what? Fine. I bet you wouldn’t even do it. If I cut off my thumb right now , ‘Drani, you going to eat it?”

There was a beat of silence.

“Two firewood chores she doesn’t,” Diabolist announced.

Those were mine. That utter wretch.

“I’m a little full right now,” Archer said.

I let out a mocking humph.

“So let’s go with a little finger instead,” she finished.

I spun her knife around, catching it by the hilt.

“You wouldn’t,” I said.

“Hey, use your own,” she protested. “I don’t want to get fae stuff all over it.”

“You just stabbed me, you ass,” I yelled.

“I mean, you can’t prove that,” Indrani mused. “Akua’s more or less dead, so in Callow she can’t be a witness in a trial. It’s your word against mine.”

“I’m going to break your knife,” I told her bluntly.

“Don’t, it has great sentimental value,” she objected. “I think I killed a guy for it.”

“To clarify,” Diabolist said. “Did you kill him because you wanted the knife, or did you kill him and then want the knife?”

Indrani stroked her chin thoughtfully.

“Yes,” she replied.

I laid a delicate finger on the tip of the blade, still holding the hilt, and made eye contact with my rebellious minion.

“I will send you back to Laure in chunks,” Indrani seriously promised.

“At least they won’t be used in stew,” I replied just as seriously.

I caught her wrist when she tried to wrestle me down, but she half-leapt at me and we went tumbling into the rocks. I dropped the knife to free my hand, but she slammed her arse into my belly before I could push down her shoulder. I flipped us around, and tumbling towards a slope we went. In between having a faceful of Indrani’s clothes in my face, I glimpsed Akua discreetly pawing through the deck of cards. I repressed a sigh. She was stacking it, wasn’t she? A hard bump against the ground jostled me out of my despair, and I wiggled so Indrani wouldn’t manage to tie my wrists together with her scarf. She was a fair hand at brawling, but then so was I did have the advantage of being able to lift her with a single hand if I needed to. I tugged at her leg and elbowed her in the stomach, climbing on top and forcing her into a bed of pebbles. Rustle, rustle. No footsteps, but grass parting under feet.

“Oh, I get it,” Indrani smirked. “Give me a moment.”

She tugged down the neckline of her shirt and thrust out her admittedly shapely tits.

“I’m ready,” Indrani announced theatrically. “Ravish me, Black Queen. I am powerless before your might.”

“Archer, now is-“ I began.

“I get it,” she winked. “Hey, Shady Business! Go for a walk or something. My legendary charms have finally overwhelmed her.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, almost as irritated by the pun as the interruption.

Her brow rose, a salacious grin splitting her face.

“Good news, Fae Maiden,” she announced. “You’re back in the game. Lose the top first, I’ve been pretty curious.”

“We’re about to have company,” I spoke in Kharsum, offering Indrani a flirtatious smile to keep up the pretence for watching eyes.

“ Yeah we are,” Indrani said, wiggling her eyebrows, but the moment I loosened my grip she began reaching for one of the sundry knives always on her.

They were creeping through the stones now. The slope to the left, leading to a narrow ledge skirting the flank of a rock spire. There’d been a stretchof sparse grass beneath it, I remembered. Not much green, though. They have to be more than a few if they made that much noise going sneaking through. I inhaled, yet there was no fear in the wind. I could almost discern heartbeats, but they were too muted to tell apart. Sorcery, or some natural trait? I got up, turning my back to where they were approaching from, and offered a hand to Archer.

“We doing this or what?” she grinned.

“Go easy on me,” I said. “My back’s still aching.”

The sound of a cord being pulled taut was the opening salvo of the dance. I tore away from Archer, blade already half-formed in my hand, and sped forward without missing a beat. I did not need to speak orders to the others. Both Akua and Indrani had been in enough scrapes, either at my side or not, to need no instructions when blades came out. My first drow sighting was little more than a glimpse of silvery eyes set in an angular grey face flanked by strips of obsidian: a heartbeat later the enemy had vanished, pressing itself against the dead angle of the slope. An arrow went flying from above, arced perfectly towards Akua’s silhouette by the fire, but when it went through her chest all that happened was the shattering of ice. She was long gone.

“Archer, handle above,” I called out. “I want prisoners.”

“Spoilsport,” she yelled back, landing in a roll that scattered her beddings as she grabbed her longbow.

I’d keep the ones down here busy, trying to limit the damage. I could hear faint heartbeats down the slope, just out of my sight, and they had quickened. They were waiting for me, to spring attacks in that moment where my eyes would be seeking them out and they would have me right in their sights. If I’d still been the Squire, that might have scored them a wound. Now, though? With a flick of the wrist I formed four monoliths of ice in the air above where they should be lying in wait and allowed them to drop. There were murmured sentences in a language I did not know, but it seemed they had no parry. The working flushed them out, seven of them scrambling away from the falling ice. Warriors, one and all, or at least drow in good shape wearing armour. The sight if it was strange to me, after fighting the soldiery of the west. No steel there, no plate or mail: small strips of obsidian fell down to their knees in a thick layer, kept together by barely visible strips of leather. My eyes were sharp enough to find the discreet runes carved onto the pieces, though I knew not their meaning or purpose. There were few differences among them. None looked terribly older than the others – were they human, I would have believed none older than their late twenties – and I could hardly even tell them apart. The helms, though, had some slight variations. All of them were thin incomplete circles of obsidian closely keeping to the frame of their faces, keeping hair out and going all the way down to the beginning of angular chins. From that dark glass, caps of leather descended towards the back of their necks, set with small round stones, save for one drow. The lower part of that one’s cap had a line of long dark feathers tickling down to its back.

Well, the one with the fancy hat tended to be the one in charge. It would do.

While I’d been sifting through the sight of them, they’d recovered from the surprise. Before the ice even hit the ground one of them tossed an iron-tipped javelin at me, though from the corner of my eye I caught another danger. The archer had come out and fired another arrow. I could hear Archer pulling at her own bow, though, so I instead I focused my attention on the javelin. It was well-thrown, aimed right at the centre of my chest. It was also laughably slow to my senses after the kind of fights I’d picked of late. I snatched it out of the air by the shaft and pivoted, throwing it back at the same drow twice as fast. To my surprise, it did not duck. Instead its entire body flickered, shadows swallowing it whole, and it fell into a pool of darkness that stretched and slithered across the stony ground only to reform a dozen feet to the side into the same person. Well, that was a new trick.

“Surrender,” I called out.

I realized just after that I’d forgotten about the arrow, musing it wouldn’t exactly set the right tone if the moment after demanding surrender I got shot. As it happened, Archer pulled through.

“Trick shot,” she crowed.

Her own arrow tore through the fletching of the one the drow had fired, sending it spinning away from me, and it continued at a sharp angle upwards. The sound of obsidian shattering and a pained grunt followed. The one with the fancy hat spoke something in drow tongue, and they all scattered into the shadows. Literally. Lines of darkness spread out, too many for me to follow them all. They had not, unfortunately for them, accounted for Diabolist. The scent of blooming ice filled the air as she formed a construct right to the side of a fleeing drow, fingers of frost ripping the warrior out of the shadowy tendril by the throat. To my approval, she’d gone for Fancy Hat.

“We have your leader,” I called out. “Drop your weapons or she’ll snap his neck.”

Fancy Hat tried to flicker away again, but I wasn’t having any of that. I flicked my wrist and a band of shadow tightened around its throat, keeping him in Akua’s tender embrace as the flicker... failed, for lack of a better word. A javelin punched through the warrior’s chest a heartbeat later, tearing at Diabolist’s construct behind it. Right, drow. Infamously not the most loyal of companions. If that’d been the only one that could speak Lower Miezan, I was going to be pissed .

“All right, the hard way it is,” I grunted.

The kickback from my running start shattered the ground beneath it, and a heartbeat later I was in the midst of them. One pooled into shadows, but an arrow nailed it and it flickered back into drow form with a leg pierced through, hissing in pain. I handled the rest as gently as I could. Spikes of shadow nailed one to the ground, another was sent to think about what he’d done in a bubble of ice and I shaped my sword into a spear for the third, throwing it straight through its foot when it tried to flicker away. There’d been eight in whole, and with one dead and two clipped by Archer that left... two. One was legging it back towards the grass. I let it run – might learn the way into the Warrens from it, assuming that was how they’d all come to the surface. The last stared at me with wide eyes and dropped its curved obsidian blade, slowly kneeling and putting its hands behind its neck.

“Diabolist, containment,” I ordered.

An exertion of will had wings coming out of my back and I rose up, following behind the runner. It saw me, and flickered. Clicking my tongue disapprovingly against the roof of my mouth, I went down into a dive. No more running, then. Too much a risk of losing it if it stuck to that form. I wasn’t even halfway caught up when the drow emerged from the dark tendril, grey skin gone pale, and began to run away on foot. So it’s exhausting to remain like that , I thought. I wasn’t surprised. There was no such thing as power without a cost. I swooped down like a hawk, boots landing on its shoulders, and it folded without a fight. A bit too much, actually. Its head hit a stone at a bad angle, and with a sharp breath I knelt by its side to check if it was still alive. My fingers went to the jugular, but there was no heartbeat to found there. Drow were only so similar to humans, then. I formed a flat piece of ice and put it before its mouth, tension leaving my shoulders when the surface fogged. Its forehead was bleeding and its eyes closed, but it wasn’t dead yet. I swung the body over my shoulder and walked back to the skirmish field, finding the others had gathered the drow together in my absence. Most were bleeding, though we’d avoided outright lethal wounds. Even a lesser one could kill if you bled long enough, though, so the offer of wounds tended might be leverage we could use. I dropped the unconscious drow to the side of the others.

“All accounted for,” Diabolist said.

I nodded. Archer rested her elbow on my shoulder, eyeing our prisoners with a deeply unimpressed look on her face.

“Was that trick really all they had?” she said. “I’m feeling a little shafted, not gonna lie.”

“You can’t use the kind of opponents we’ve had recently as measuring stick,” I said. “We’ve been scrapping with some of the scariest people on the continent.”

“They could have brought a mage, at least,” she complained.

“Night’s young,” I replied, shrugging her elbow off me. “There could be others.”

None of the drow were speaking, or even meeting my eyes. They remained kneeling and looking down, what little I could see of their faces resigned. They think we’re going to kill or enslave them , I realized.

“Do any of you understand this language?” I asked in Lower Miezan.

No answer.

“Do you speak Mtethwa?” I tried in the eponymous tongue.

“Why would anyone want to speak that if they didn’t have to?” Indrani mused.

I glanced at Diabolist.

“You wouldn’t happen to...”

“Speak Crepuscular?” she finished. “I do not. For much the same reason I do not speak cockroach.”

“I’m disappointed in your tutors, Akua,” I informed her.

“Indeed,” Diabolist drily replied. “How dare they fail to teach me a language spoken only by a race that has not been seen in the Empire for centuries, whose influence in the broader continent is so insignificant some scholars do not mention them in the latest histories at all.”

“Yes,” I agreed without missing a beat. “It was very inconsiderate of all of you.”

“Hey, disappointments,” Indrani called out in passable Chantant. “Do any of you understand me enough to be shamed by my scorn?”

Three of them stiffened. I grinned, and not pleasantly.

“Would you look at that,” I murmured in the same language. “It’s finally paid off. All of you who understand me, get up. We’re going to have a nice, civilized chat.”

Indrani choked on her tongue at that, which did not reassure them in the slightest.

Chapter 52: Finesse

“No, see, you’ll profit as well. All you need is to convince five others of contributing coin and when they do you’ll get a part of their own contribution. It’ll all work out, I promise.”
– Dread Emperor Irritant, the Oddly Successful, convincing High Lords to invest in the construction of ritual pyramid outside Ater

Even after having done arguably worse things, I’d never warmed to torture. I’d once had an interesting conversation with Black about it, where he’d been somewhat equivocal but overall inclined to agree with me. Torture, he’d noted, tended to be unreliable. Some people folded the moment you pulled out their fingernails, sure, but those with a little more staying power would need a great deal of violence before they started talking. And at that point, how could you tell whether they were saying something because they thought you wanted to hear it or because it was actually true? Some heroes side-stepped the whole issue by having truth-telling abilities, but that was bullshit divine intervention – you couldn’t reproduce those results with spells, not with any degree of reliability. I tended to get by on my increased senses, since fae eyes and fae ears were much harder to trick than their human equivalent, as I now suspected the Lone Swordsman once had. William hadn’t gotten a pat on the back from Above and glaring lights appearing whenever someone fibbed at him, he’d had to rely on Name senses to read the opposition. He’d been quite good at it, in retrospective.

I’d had to mutilate my own soul to get better at that trick than he was, so for once good ol’ Willy had me beat from the grave.

I stared down at the drow kneeling in front me, frowning. There’d been three who’d stiffened when Indrani had spoken in Chantant, and we’d separated those from the rest of the prisoners immediately. I’d then shaped Winter into a thick spire of ice hollow on the inside and ordered the first prisoner brought in. Akua was at my side, as she likely had more experience at this kind of thing than any of us. Indrani had been curious but I wanted someone keeping an eye on the rest of the drow. A flick of the wrist shaped a rough bench of frost and I sat down, eyes never leaving the still-silent prisoner. Diabolist had stripped it of its helmet, revealing bone-white hair cut so short I could almost see the skin beneath. I would have preferred the obsidian armour off as well, but there were no obvious clasps to it: I suspected it was like a mail shirt, put on with another person’s help.

“We know you understand us,” I said.

The drow did not react. Denial? Possibly. Or resignation.

“Akua, raise its head,” I ordered.

Diabolist knelt by the prisoner’s side, forcing the chin upwards so the drow would have to meet my eyes. It resisted, but only half-heartedly. The eyes were not as silvery as I’d thought. The sclera was white as a human’s would be, though noticeably larger, but it was the iris that caught my attention. It was not entirely silver: there were strands of the colour to be found, more visible than the rest, but the base was a dull brown. Some sort of sorcerous blowback? The black pupil at the centre was uncomfortably shaped, more oval than circle, and I’d yet to see a single drow blink. In a way, it was more troubling to look at their kind than a fae – the fairies were inhuman, with only the barest varnish of similarity, but the drow was close enough to human that the discomfort was felt more steeply.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

Silence. There was fear in the air now. I drummed my fingers against my leg, then sighed.

“ Answer me ,” I Spoke.

The prisoner’s face twitched into a pained rictus. It was fighting the command, proving to have stronger will than most. It was not enough.

“No one,” it hissed, voice dim. “Nothing.”

Diabolist rose to her feet and the drow stubbornly went back to looking down.

“Blind it,” Akua suggested evenly. “Rip out the eyes and toss it back out bleeding in sight of the others.”

“There’s no need for that,” I said.

This one looked unwilling to provide useful answers even when its arm was being twisted, so we’d try the others before seeing if it was necessary to resume the proceedings a little more sharply. Diabolist wasn’t wrong that a dollop of fear would be useful, but she was also proving that even as a shade she had that horrid Wasteland disregard for people. I would not resort to knives without exhausting every other possibility first. I’d gotten an idea of the drow’s voice, from that unwilling reply, enough for glamour. Illusions did not come naturally to me, as even now they required more focus than I was typically able to spare when in a fight, but I had the time to weave it properly tonight. A small sphere of shining light formed over my open palm and the drow breathed in sharply when a decent approximation of its voice began screaming hoarsely into the night. I kept the glamour going for thirty heartbeats, then ended it with a harsh snap. Akua’s scarlet eyes followed me as I dismissed the sphere and spun glamour again, resting a hand atop the drow’s head: a heartbeat later half its face appeared brutally scorched to the naked eye, nose cut off and one eye left a bloody empty socket.

“Sleep,” I ordered, and forced a sliver of Winter into its shaken mind.

It dropped without a sound.

“Drag it outside,” I ordered Diabolist. “In sight of the others. Then get me another.”

“By your will,” the shade said, and smoothly bowed.

I flicked my wrist and shaped one last glamour. An eye, this one, though since I’d never actually seen a drow eye out of an eye socket I had to improvise to an extent. Akua came back quicker than I’d expected, the fresh prisoner moving gracefully into the room. I was pretty sure I recognized this one. It’d been the one who actually surrendered when things went to shit for their warband. Still, it wouldn’t do to leave the point half-made. I popped the glamoured eye into my mouth and chewed, smiling pleasantly at the new arrival. Its lips thinned, darkening to a deeper bloodless grey.

“That will not be necessary,” the drow said in perfect Chantant.

I swallowed. So did the prisoner.

“Well, this is promising,” I mused. “Diabolist, make our friend a seat.”

Ice bloomed and a block spun into existence. It was, I noted, with mild amusement, closer to the ground than my own seat. Praesi, huh. The drow’s silvery eyes lingered on the sorcery before it took a seat. The silver strands were much deeper, in this one. I could see almost nothing of the original green. They were also... less vivid than those of the previous prisoner. Interesting.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Ivah,” it replied. “Of no sigil.”

“I’m Catherine Foundling,” I said. “Lately Queen of Callow, though I’ve picked up a few other titles over the years.”

“I greet you humbly, Lately Queen,” Ivah said.

I resisted the urge to close my eyes. I was going to let that one go, for the sake of avoiding the awkwardness of a correction this early into the talk.

“Just to make sure I’m addressing you properly,” I said. “Would you happen to be a boy drow or a girl drow?”

Ivah blinked, silver fluttering behind long lashes. Not because it needed to, I suspected. It was a conscious expression of surprise.

“I am no longer Mighty,” it replied.

“That, uh, was not the question,” I said.

“If you were human,” Diabolist said. “Which gender would you consider yourself to be?”

Ivah looked a little uncomfortable.

“Cattle has no gender,” it said, sounding apologetic.

“As a Callowan, I can tell you that’s frankly terrible way to approach animal husbandry,” I noted. “But let’s keep moving. You were... Mighty, is that right?”

“When still named Dimas, I was third under Zapohar and a rylleh in my own right,” Ivah said. “What stands beyond you was toppled and disgraced, harvested of all but a sip of Night and sent to die in the Burning Lands as final mockery.”

My eyes narrowed. I lacked context for most of that, but there was one part I had guesses about. I tapped the side of my eye.

“The silver,” I said. “Yours is dulled. It’s this Night that caused it in the first place?”

“That is so,” Ivah sadly agreed.

“Your people are said to pay obeisance to the Tenets of Night,” Diabolist said, standing at my back. “The matter is linked, I take it.”

“All is one,” Ivah gravely said, touching its lips with two fingers. “All is strife. The worthy will rise.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” I told Akua in Kharsum. “It’s one thing for them to have some sort of cult paying dues to Below, but that silver in its eyes is no illusion.”

“The drow mercenaries I hired were not capable of the shadow flicker,” Akua noted in the same. “Perhaps the power ebbs away from the Everdark?”

“That lot outside is bottom-feeders, Diabolist,” I murmured. “And still they were capable of a trick most Named wouldn’t sneer at. There’s something wrong here. If their lower ranks are this strong there’s no way they’d be a ruin of an empire as they supposedly are.”

“Unless,” Akua said calmly, “that very power is the cause of ruin.”

My brow rose. That was possible, yes. Were they all fighting of this Night so ferociously they’d broken their own realm?

“Ivah,” I said. “The other drow outside, were they also Mighty once?”

The prisoner smiled thinly.

“None of us are drow, Lately Queen,” it said. “Had we returned in glory, perhaps once more, but this is disgrace heaped upon disgrace.”

So that was just going to keep happening, huh. Lovely.

“I thought Mighty was a gender,” I said.

“Mighty are ,” Ivah stiffly said. “We are not, no longer. Most of them never were. They fought under no sigils, nor knew the favour of cabals. Meat for harvest.”

“Mighty are people,” Akua suggested in Kharsum. “And so those not Mighty, by definition, are not. Natural nobility, it would seem. Power earned or lost blade in hand.”

“It’s madness, Akua,” I grunted. “If the only way people can ever amount to anything in a society is by killing, that’s all they’ll ever...”

I trailed off. Well. Yeah, I supposed that would collapse an empire. There would be a need to dig deeper into that nightmare of a culture later, but first there were immediate matters to be addressed.

“Do you know a way into the Warrens?” I asked the prisoner.

“The path we took was also meant for our return,” Ivah warily said. “The marks on our feathers allow for passage through the Gloom, twice.”

“Your feathers,” I repeated carefully, then leant forward to flick a finger on one of the strips of obsidian making up its armour. “Those?”

“It is so,” the drow agreed.

“What is the Gloom?” Akua probed.

“The gate into the realm of the Mighty,” Ivah said. “Only those marked may leave, or enter.”

“Indrani told us that when Ranger tried to get into the Everdark she got stuck in the tunnels,” I told Akua in Kharsum. “Some kind of warded labyrinth, sounds like.”

“We’ve enough at hand to salvage keys for ourselves,” Diabolist said. “Though I would suggest we keep one guide to learn how to use it.”

“I’m not going to just execute prisoners, Akua,” I peevishly said.

“Those unable to speak Chantant are useless to us,” she pointed out.

“It’s not a question of usefulness,” I said. “ We don’t execute prisoners .”

“Dearest, I understand that mercy is a useful tool,” she assured me. “I do not dismiss it. Yet for it to have worth in the eyes of the enemy, there need be a cultural value assigned to it. There is no indication it is so with the drow.”

“This isn’t about the drow, Akua,” I said. “It’s about us not putting holes in people who’ve surrendered. I’ve got no issue with killing on the field, and I’ve made my peace with assassinations when there’s no other way to avoid making a mess. This is different. They’re no real threat to us.”

“They are blades we must then keep an eye on,” Diabolist said. “Perhaps you and I are proof to such slights, but Archer is not. Nothing we have seen leads me to believe they will honour their surrender the moment the threat of death is lifted.”

“If they break that understanding, after being made aware it exists, then they can be killed,” I patiently told her. “That’s how keeping prisoners of war works, Akua.”

“The warband sought to slay or enslave us, and gave no warning before striking,” the shade reminded me. “They have not earned such treatment. This is an unnecessary risk.”

“It’d be easier to kill everyone, Diabolist,” I said steadily. “It always is. But when you behave like that, you end up living in the fucking Wasteland. Is this the simplest way to do things? No. But it’s how we do it, because if we don’t act civilized then people don’t act civilized with us.”

Scarlet eyes flicked to the prisoner facing me. Ivah’s eyes were watching us carefully, unable to understand the words but not beyond following the tones.

“Will they?” she wondered. “Act civilized, even if we offer them such civility.”

“It was always one of your worst habits,” I coldly said, “to burn bridges without ever trying to cross them. It may not work. We’ll never know unless we try .”

Diabolist languidly shrugged.

“I offer only perspective,” she said. “The decision was always yours.”

“It’s been made,” I flatly said.

I turned away from the shade, and cleared my throat.

“Ivah,” I said. “I want you to guide us through the Warrens.”

The drow’s face fell.

“The passage leads to the holdings of the Kodrog,” it said carefully. “The Mighty of that sigil are said to be among the strongest of the outer rings.”

“Stronger than the sigil you used to fight under?” I asked.

“The Zapohar once ruled a whole district of Great Parun,” Ivah proudly said. “Our Mighty claimed seats on no less than five cabals. The Kodrog would have been broken in an hour’s passing, facing our wroth.”

It grimaced.

“Their wroth, now,” the prisoner corrected sadly.

“Parun was one of the great cities of the drow, before their empire broke apart,” Akua told me in Kharsum. “Though not the capital, which I recall to be named Tvarigu.”

“I’d guess the more powerful tribes – sigils, I suppose – live in the old cities,” I replied. “Not sure what the cabals are, though. Some sort of alliance? Their Mighty seem to be able to belong to both at the same time.”

“Warrior lodges, perhaps,” the shade mused. “Or an association of influential aristocrats. It is hardly unprecedented.”

I’d ask our songbird later.

“We can handle the Kodrog,” I told Ivah. “I’d rather avoid a fight if I can, but if I can’t I assure you they’re not going to stop us. We’re looking to speak to, uh, your most powerful sigils. The people that make the real decisions for the Everdark.”

“You speak of the entire realm of the Mighty,” Ivah said questioningly.

I nodded.

“There is no such thing, Lately Queen,” Ivah told me. “No cabal has ever claimed to influence more than two cities, and the Hour of Twilight was massacred by its rivals a century past.”

“All right, let me put it another way,” I said. “Is there anyone at all that if they speak, everyone in the Everdark will listen?”

“ Sve of Night,” the drow said in a hushed whisper, touching its lips again.

“The Priestess of Night,” Akua said, chancing a guess at the unfamiliar Crepuscular term.

“That is cattle-term,” Ivah reproachfully said. “The Sve is Mighty.”

Ah. That shed light, in a manner of speaking. So a Mighty was not male or female or anything else, they were just Mighty. Priestess was a female term, in Chantant, so the implication would be insulting to the drow. I’d keep that in mind for future reference. No need to give insult to the people I’d come to bargain with.

“And if the Sve gives an order, the Mighty will obey?” I pressed.

“The Sve has already given order,” Ivah. “It is the truth of us, embraced.”

“If the Sve says the drow are going to war,” I patiently tried. “Would people listen?”

Ivah’s face creased, folds in the skin appearing that no human could mimic.

“It may be so,” the prisoner said. “The Sve does not speak, yet if the silence was broken all would hear of it.”

“Then that’s where we’re headed,” I said. “To have a chat with the Sve.”

The drow shivered.

“Holy Tvarigu is forbidden,” it told us. “Ancient and powerful sigils guard the paths to it.”

“I can be convincing. I’m known as a diplomat of great skill, on the surface,” I lied.

Akua was too self-controlled to snort, but the way she folded her arms together told me everything she thought about that mild reframing of that slight exaggeration.

“It would be better to be slain,” Ivah softly said. “There are things worse than death.”

Well, I hadn’t expected the locals to be friendly from the start. Gods, when had anyone ever been?

“Tell you what,” I said. “Get us into the realm of the Mighty, past the Gloom, and when we’re there we’ll change guides for the next stretch of the journey. You’ll be free to go.”

The drow’s strange eyes narrowed.

“You would speak oath to this?” it asked.

“I would,” I said. “And there are forces beyond your understanding that make me keep to those, when I care to give them.”

Ivah hesitated.

“I would be slain, even free,” it admitted. “I return bereft of Night, failing the terms of my exile.”

Diabolist leaned forward.

“Tell me, Ivah,” she said. “You spoke of the Night being harvested. From the living, as was done to you, but can this also be done to the dead?”

“That is so,” the drow said.

“We have a corpse,” she told me in Kharsum.

The one she’d held, who’d been killed by his own warriors. An easy enough concession.

“Do you need to have killed the person yourself to do the harvest?” I asked.

Ivah shook its head.

“Due can be bestowed,” the drow said. “It is rare, yet not unknown.”

“There was a warrior with feathers on their helmet,” I said. “If you harvested them, would that fix your problem?”

“Tiarom was first in power among the warband,” Ivah said, sounding rather eager. “There would be enough to no longer walk as meat, though it would leave me well short of Mighty.”

“That sounds like a yes,” I said.

I offered my hand.

“Ivah of no sigil,” I said. “Should you take us past the Gloom and into the Everdark, I swear to return your freedom to you. We will part ways there without enmity or demand.”

The drow looked at my hand curiously, then back at my eyes.

“You’re supposed to clasp it,” I informed it.

“Strange ways,” the drow murmured, but without further fumbling we shook on it.

I rose to my feet, stretching out.

“All right, let’s get this done,” I said. “Akua, see to the rest of the warband.”

“Healing is no power of Winter,” she reminded me.

“You’re telling me tending wounds wasn’t something your tutors went over?” I replied, eyebrow raised.

“I will do what I can, if that is your wish,” she conceded. “Though I promise no miracles.”

“Never considered those to be in your wheelhouse,” I drily replied. “Come, Ivah. I’m getting curious as to this harvest of yours.”

The silver-eyed warrior followed without a word. Indrani was carving away at a peace of wood, when I came out, sitting on a stone and watching the others.

“Fruitful talks?” she called out.

“You might say that,” I replied. “Wanna see something I assume will be highly gruesome?”

“Do I ever,” she enthusiastically replied.

“Come with me, then,” I said. “Where’d you leave the corpse?”

She blinked.

“Was I supposed to pick that up?” she asked.

“Where it died, then,” I snorted.

It was a short stroll down the slope to where Fancy Hat – Tiarom, apparently – had found himself on the bad end of drow politics. The body was drenched with half-melted ice from Akua’s construct, but otherwise untouched.

“Are we corpse-robbing?” Inrdani mused. “I thought we had, like, moral objections to that.”

“I’m putting this under religious exemption,” I told her. “Ivah, it’s all yours.”

“Many thanks, Lately Queen,” the drow murmured, bowing.

It dragged the body further away from the wetness even as I felt Archer stiffen.

“Did they just-“

“Don’t you say a fucking word,” I hissed.

“Oh, that’s making it into my next chat with Hakram for sure ,” Indrani crowed.

I valiantly ignored her, instead putting the full weight of my attention on Ivah and its ‘harvest’. Kneeling at the dead body’s side, the drow closed the corpse’s eyes before leaning over. I could barely make out whispers in Crepuscular, low and rhythmic. Then the dead drow... shivered. Liquid tendrils of darkness ripped out of the body, leaving bloody holes behind, and they slithered up Ivah’s arm beneath the armour. The living drow exhaled. You are what you take , a woman’s voice whispered in my ear, in no tongue I knew.

Ivah’s eyes shone deep silver before dimming again, and I learned that this magical adventure was going to be a little more complicated than I’d like.

Chapter 53: Gloom

“I am ever amused to hear men speak of senseless violence. What is violence, if not the failure of reason? One might as well bemoan the wetness of water.”
– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

“So what are we doing with the spares?” Indrani asked.

It was bluntly put, as was her wont, but she wasn’t wrong to ask the question. Ivah, after being further questioned, had been pretty clear: the only way for someone to pass through the Gloom was with the obsidian ‘feathers’ the drow were wearing. We’d had a corpse already, so one of us was covered. Two more prisoners had to be stripped of their armour to make sure we’d pass without trouble, though, and that left the issue of what we’d now be doing with them.

“We can’t take them into the Gloom,” I said. “Ivah was vague – I think it doesn’t actually know a lot on the subject – but the implication was that we’d just ‘lose’ them the way Ranger got lost.”

It was still night, though now dawn was a great deal closer. While Akua saw to the wounded, I’d told Indrani she should catch a nap. We’d be moving out as soon as she was rested, since I saw no point in idling around the surface any longer now that we had a guide. I softly inhaled the lingering scent coming from the cup of tea in my hand. Actually drinking it was nothing to write home about, but the smell was strangely pleasant. I’d though nothing of it, at first, but now that it’d become a habit I was realizing I’d seen something like this before. The fae in Skade had taken delight in small, ephemeral things too. A lot more than in the physical pleasures I’d once preferred.

“So that’d be releasing them, pretty much,” Indrani mused. “I take it we have some issues with that.”

“They came to the surface to slave and kill,” I said. “It’d be irresponsible to simply let them loose after capturing them.”

My friend shrugged, hazelnut eyes tinted with indifference. She’d yet to slip on her leather coat, or even her mail, wearing instead thick grey cloth cut close to her form. The only touch of panache to the drab attire was the dark linen scarf hanging from her neck, some kind of weave allegedly particular to Mercantis. It was certainly finer than anything I’d seen come out of Callowan weaver shops, and I knew it could be used to breathe through noxious fumes if she needed it to. It was one of the few possessions I’d ever seen Indrani care for, save for her bow. I’d gathered from idle talk that both were gifts from Ranger.

“So kill them,” she said. “We never flinched at that before. Crucified a bunch of Praesi after Second Liesse, didn’t you? Those you didn’t make into your most expendable soldiers.”

“They were all complicit in mass slaughter,” I told her. “And it was the mages I had crucified, those who had a direct hand in the killing of innocents. This is different.”

Killing Malicia’s minion who’d tried to surrender came much closer to the line, in my eyes, but it’d been a trick played on an enemy. It felt like a step closer to becoming someone I cared little for to have played it in the first place, but I could swallow my discomfort.

“They’re slavers, Cat,” Indrani mildly said. “Kill them all, let the Gods sort it out.”

“Their entire civilization practices slavery, as I understand it,” I reminded her. “Should I murder my way through the whole lot?”

“Their entire civilization didn’t pull blades on us,” she said. “They did.”

“Then we’re killing them for pulling blades, not being slavers,” I pointed out.

“Sure,” Indrani said. “Let’s kill them for that, then. I’ll do it myself, if you’re feeling contrary.”

“My point was that we don’t do that,” I said.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered. “Cat, what else can we do? You don’t want to release them and we can’t keep them. There’s not a lot left, is there?”

No, I grimly thought. There wasn’t.

“Let them settle it the drow way, then,” Indrani suddenly said. “You’re being all lawful, so let them follow their own damned laws.”

“They don’t have laws, Archer,” I replied in a low voice. “They seem to murder each other at the drop of a hat.”

She met my eyes, the deep tan of her skin seeming even deeper under cover of dark.

“You need to make a decision,” Indrani said, “about why we’re going into the Everdark. Because if you’re going down there to murder bigwigs until their people are terrified into playing nice, I’m on board. They have it coming, let them choke on it. But if you’re just going down there for an army, Catherine, there’s going to be darker lines to cross than this.”

I grimaced, then looked away. Once more, she was not wrong. I’d known going in that this would be ugly business. My conversation with Ivah had only lent weight to the notion. It was an odd thing to hear a person seeming otherwise perfectly reasonable to dismiss the rest of the continent as cattle and preach the virtues of cold-blooded murder without a hint of irony. Even the Praesi kept a veil over that, twisting the act into some kind of wicked art. The drow had spoke of killing without reason as if there was no need for pretext or justification, and I suspected it had not been one of the stronger Mighty. Those at the top of the pyramid would have swum through a sea of blood to get there, and it was them I’d need to make pacts with. Them and the Priestess of Night, who was the very architect of this bloody misery.

“I can’t fix an entire empire,” I admitted tiredly. “I can barely even handle Callow, and that’s with a second born for the work.”

“Then we don’t pretend,” Indrani said calmly. “We don’t go in half-baked, posturing like we’re liberators. Because that’s how we lose, Catherine – by straying from what we’re actually after. Don’t swing for the toes if you want to cut a throat.”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“Even letting them settle it by their laws,” I said quietly. “It’s just posturing, isn’t it? Foisting the dirty work onto them. The blood would still be on my hands, only with cowardice added to it.”

“Responsibility’s a bed of thorns,” Indrani said. “You keep lying down and then getting surprised at the bleeding. It’s not on you to save every stranger you meet. Especially if they don’t want to be saved.”

“Is it really too much to ask,” I murmured, “that we get to behave like decent souls, for once?”

“There’s a lot of those, at the feet of Above,” my friend said. “They don’t tend to stick around long down here.”

Maybe I was a coward, because when I gave the order it was for drow to settle it among themselves. The fought, until two were dead. The most heavily wounded, though they might have survived if they’d not been slain. Their Night was harvested by their killers as I watched in silence.

But we put on the dead men’s armour, and went into deeps.

—

I’d not been sure what to expect when we entered the Warrens. The Everdark was supposed to be a wreck, nowadays, its people fighting over faded glories they no longer knew how to restore. On the other hand, a lot of those tunnels should date back to when the drow had been more than a pack of backstabbers living in ruins of their own making. There wasn’t a lot known about the days when the drow had been a power to reckon with: what records dated to when the era was theorized to have taken place were sparse and didn’t tend to extend much further than whatever nascent city they’d been written in. In the echo Masego and I had eavesdropped on, the Wandering Bard had mentioned something called the Twilight Sages. That they’d ‘considered death the only sin’. That didn’t exactly sound like pacifism, but it was a long way from the drow encountered now. The territory of the Everdark on the surface was smaller than Callow’s, and nearly all of it mountainous, but then that didn’t mean much: they were a subterranean people, like the dwarves and once upon a time the goblins. Their holdings would have been measured in depth more than in length or breadth.

The Warrens ended up being tunnels. Just that. Not particularly well-maintained ones, damp and cold and occasionally half-collapsed, but they weren’t strewn with bones or filled with packs of monsters. I kept pace with Ivah, at the head of our little band, and the drow led us forward unerringly from tunnel to tunnel. It’d already been a few hours and I could honestly see no difference between the paths we’d taken at the occasional crossroads and those we had not. We were going deeper, that much I’d felt. But there were no markers, no signs our guide could be drawing on.

“How long before we enter the Gloom?” I asked.

Ivah flicked a silver glance at me.

“We already have,” it replied.

My brow rose. I’d not felt so much as a speck of power. I was particularly sensitive to wards, nowadays, so the passing of a threshold should have been noticeable.

“I can see no difference between when we first entered and now,” I admitted.

“Nor will you, Queen,” it said. “We bear feathers. There is no Gloom for us.”

“So if we didn’t have the feathers,” I said. “We... wouldn’t have seen the tunnels?”

“We would see others,” Ivah said. “Leading nowhere.”

That didn’t sound like a ward. More like a domain, honestly, though it was a terrifying thought there could be an entity out there powerful enough to keep a domain going for centuries.

“It seems too easy to cross,” I said.

“The nerezim have pierced through before,” Ivah said. “Never for long. They rip ore from the stone and leave, do not linger.”

“You mean the dwarves,” I said.

“That is so,” Ivah agreed. “They have slain Mighty with great machines of steel. They are not cattle.”

“Because they killed drow,” I frowned.

My guide shook its head, rueful smile baring sharp white canines.

“Because to them, it is us who are cattle,” Ivah said. “One does not fight nerezim . One survives them, hiding until their purpose is fulfilled and they leave once more.”

Well, it was almost heartening to know the Kingdom Under had everyone as terrified underground as they did on the surface. I’d begun to suspect that the Gloom had been placed to make sure the madness of the Everdark remained contained, but now another candidate had emerged: it might just be a sorcerous moat to keep the dwarves at bay. The Kingdom Under was not known to tolerate rivals underground, as the ancient exodus of the goblins tribes to the surface had made abundantly clear. I let the conversation lapse after that, though boredom saw me speak again when the journey through the tunnels continued to stretch on.

“You said you used to be a rylleh,” I said. “What is that, exactly?”

“Dimas was rylleh,” Ivah replied. “What you look upon never was.”

“And what did it mean, when Dimas was rylleh?” I asked.

“To earn this honour, one must know twelve Secrets and slay another rylleh,” Ivah said. “Even then, it is worthier to hold than to claim. Many do not last long.”

I hummed.

“And Dimas?” I probed. “How long did they last?”

“A hundred years and three,” Ivah proudly said. “Many tried to claim its Secrets, for Dimas knew the three glorious arts of killing.”

My eyes narrowed. First at the revelation that my guide was over a century old. Scholars argued about how long drow could physically live, but most ascribed them a lifespan no longer than a human’s. Apparently that was incorrect. More importantly, there’d been an implication to what Ivah said.

“Dimas knew these arts,” I slowly said. “Ivah does not?”

The drow eyed me with surprise.

“Night was taken from Dimas, save the last sip,” it said. “Tiarom knew no Secrets, and so none were learned from the harvest.”

“You make it sound like there is more to the Night than the shadow tricks,” I said.

“That is so,” Ivah said, then touched its lips. “Shapeless and shaped, encompassing all. The worthy take. The worthy rise.”

It’s knowledge too , I realized.

“Those three glorious arts of killing, what are they?” I asked.

“Spear and blade and bow,” Ivah said. “Dimas harvested many, to learn them whole. It was great accomplishment.”

I breathed in sharply. So by killing someone who knew one of those Secrets they could just become a master swordsman instantly? That was insane . You couldn’t just create knowledge out of nothing, that wasn’t the way Creation worked. Unless it’s the same knowledge , I thought. Passed from killer to killer, since times immemorial. Were they just passing around the same few learnings, one corpse at a time?

“Ivah,” I quietly said. “Can someone add to the Night?”

“That is poor choice,” the drow amusedly said. “What worth is there in empowering Mighty by one’s death?”

“If a drow learned to make steel,” I said. “And someone killed and harvested them. Would they know how to make steel?”

“Weapon-making is a powerful Secret,” Ivah acknowledged. “The Ysengral hoard it mercilessly, and Ysengral itself hunts for the finest whispers.”

So anytime someone learned anything useful they were murdered for it. Gods. No wonder they lived in ruins. If someone tried to restore them they’d probably get stabbed for the knowledge of how they wanted to do it.

“Is Ysengral a sigil or a Mighty?” I asked, slightly confused.

“A sigil is a Mighty,” Ivah told me, tone implying I was a little slow.

“So Dimas’ old sigil, Zapohar...” I prodded.

“Zapohar is Mighty, of great influence in the cabal of the Silent Song,” the drow said. “Though forced out of Great Perun, the Zapohar are first of the inner ring. Many fear them.”

“And was that how Dimas ended?” I asked. “Fighting for the Zapohar?”

“Dimas grew fat and lazy,” Ivah bitterly said. “Forgot that many coveted its Secrets. That which broke it was worthier to hold them, and now stands second under Zapohar.”

So backstabbed by an ambitious colleague, not beaten by an outsider. And still it seemed to feel some sort of pride for the Zapohar, instead of hatred towards the sigil that had seen it laid low. That smacked of Wasteland morals to me, the way Praesi highborn claimed that hatred and enmity were unrelated matters. It seemed a touchy subject, regardless, so I didn’t press any further. There’d been something else I was curious about, anyway.

“Tell me about the Kodrog,” I said. “We’re heading into their territory, right?”

“They lurk near the Gloom, unfit for the strife of the inner ring,” Ivah said with open disdain. “Kodrog’s Night was thinned by the Mighty Soln, three hundred years past. It fled to the outer rings and has not returned.”

“Soln didn’t kill it?” I asked.

“Kodrog is said to know whispers from the Secret of Many Lives,” the drow informed me. “A single death was not enough, though it lost much Night in defeat.”

“I thought you said the Kodrog were strong,” I pointed out.

“To meat,” Ivah said. “To drow. To the least of the Mighty. Not to great sigils. It will crush you like an insect, Queen, but that is different matter.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” I mildly said. “Is it the Kodrog that gave you all your feathers?”

The drow shook its head.

“I journeyed to Great Mokosh under brand of disgrace, to be granted this last chance,” Ivah said. “There the Sukkla discharge holy duty, having been granted sigil from the Sve of Night itself. Any can claim feathers, if they know the tongues of the Burning Lands and despair enough to try striding them.”

“So it’s a holy duty, to try the Burning Lands,” I said. “Why?”

Ivah touched its lips once more.

“It serves the purpose of the Night,” it said.

Oh, that did not sound all that pleasant.

“Killing cattle,” I said. “Taking it. What does it do for you?”

“The Night grows,” Ivah smiled. “To do such sacred act would redeem any disgrace.”

“I want to be perfectly clear, here,” I said. “If you kill humans, or any other race. It grows the Night?”

“That is so,” the drow reverently said. “All is one. All is strife. The worthy rise.”

I sucked at my lip.

“Killing undead,” I said. “Would it also grow the Night?”

The drow paled.

“Speak not of the Hidden Horror,” Ivah whispered. “For its crown is dawn, and that pale light is the end of all things. Only the mad would enter the eye of the Host of Death.”

“It does, doesn’t it,” I said. “The necromancy that keeps its army walking, you can claim it for the Night.”

“I say no more,” Ivah insisted. “It sees all. It hears all.”

Well, Neshamah had clearly paid these people a visit at some point after his ritual. The drow were a murderous bunch, they shouldn’t be so scared unless the Dead King had spanked them roughly after being provoked. I honestly wasn’t sure to root for there. Still, I was pleased to have learned that. If the undead had been of no worth to the drow’s societal murder pyramid it would have been much, much harder to gain any ground there. Ivah had been pretty high up the ladder at some point, by the sound of it, but he’d still been someone’s minion. The people on the notch above might be less terrified at the idea of a fight with Keter, if they were offered the right incentives. I had a few notions about what those mighty be, though the offer I knew would be most tempting was one I very much wanted to avoid.

“Let’s talk about the Kodrog, then,” I said. “I’m looking for practical information. Number of Mighty, which is known for what. How many fighters to they have, what are their defences like?”

I’d come with the intent to negotiate, but I might have actually found a place where my propensity to stab before making an offer would be considered reasonable. If I could get through without killing, I would. But if blades came out, well, it wouldn’t be the first time I walked over a few corpses to get where I needed to be. Ivah had unfortunately little to share, since it’d been ushered through Kodrog territory into the Gloom after copious mockery and a few beatings, but little was better than nothing. By the sounds of it, there were a few thousand drow scattered across several large caverns but only a small part of those were considered fit to fight. Even fewer of those would be Mighty, which I’d mentally put in the same league as half a company of Watch. Dangerous, if you took them lightly, but rather killable. If Archer hung at the back taking care of those with fancy Secrets, Diabolist and I could handle the brawlers. Unlike on the surface, I didn’t intend to take prisoners here. Wouldn’t run down anyone fleeing either, but if they became an obstacle capture wouldn’t be the objective.

It took us three days to leave the Gloom. Over the last stretch of the journey the tunnels changed from rough bare stone to something more ornate. Base-relief was carved on every surface, even the floor and ceiling, though the sculptures under our feet were covered by moss and dirt. It was my first look at anything the drow had made, and to my utter lack of surprise pretty much everything depicted was their kind sallying out to the surface and winning glorious battles before returning to the Everdark covered in glory, riches and slaves. There were also depictions of single combat between drow champions, though oddly enough they did not seem to be to the death. The loser was made servant of the winner, carrying their spear and quiver. Honour duels? Those were supposed to be common in Levant. The Northern Steppes as well, though orcs didn’t stop until one of the fighters was dead and dinner. The last step was a threshold carved into the tunnel, though one without gates, and there we found fresh signs of life. Symbols had been painted in blood over them, which Ivah informed me promised sundry torments to all venturing in the holdings of Mighty Kodrog.

“We now reach the realm of the Mighty, Queen,” our guide told us.

I nodded.

“Bargain was struck,” I said evenly. “We part ways now, if you wish, with no enmity or further demands.”

The drow hesitated.

“I walk with you a little longer,” it said. “Until we reach the ring of stones.”

The Kodrog apparently held the remains of an old border fortress, which barred the entrance to their territory proper. It was probably as deep as Ivah could go without being openly associated with us.

“Follow behind, then,” I said. “Archer, Diabolist – look sharp.”

“Oh Gods, finally ,” Indrani whined.

I took the lead through the threshold, tough my advanced faltered after a single step. The others trailed in after me as I stood there in silence, ignoring the words they spoke. Well, we’d found the Kodrog. The cavern I’d entered was twice as large as the throne room in Laure, its uneven ceiling a natural dome. It could have fit at least a thousand comfortably, which I knew for a fact because it currently did.

The floor was covered with dead drow, thick as a carpet.

“Shit,” I finally cursed. “I’d better not get blamed for this.”

Chapter 54: Scavenger

“One hundred and ninety-three: should your nemesis offer you a wager, a truce or delay for the first time always accept it. Villains with a fated heroic match have reached the peak of their power, whereas you and your companions can only grow.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

“That’s a lot of dead bodies,” Indrani noted. “Like, battlefield a lot, not ‘the Woe has a bad day’ a lot.”

I ignored the attempt at humour. In someone else I might have attributed it to needing to cover up shock, but Archer didn’t get those kinds of shivers. The benefits of being raised in a part of the world where every day a single misstep could get you killed by a raging monster-hunting lunatic. It was an uncomfortable truth that’d I’d gotten somewhat used to the sight of corpses as well, though not quite to my companion’s extent. The drow who’d scuttled in behind us had gone still as statues, stricken by either terror or awe. I left them behind and waded into the pool of death. I knelt in lukewarm blood and guts, flipping over the nearest body to have a better look at it.

I immediately withdrew my hand.

“Cat?” Indrani probed, catching up to me.

“There’s still Night in those,” I said.

I knew that because I’d felt the eldritch power react to my own. Not an attack or an attempt to meld, but... almost like the darkness had been licking my hand . Like it recognizes something larger and meaner, and tries to make friends. I shivered, and it’d been a long time since any kind of cold had caused me to do that. The dead drow was badly mangled. The face had been smashed in, skull crushed through the eye socket, but it had an earlier wound. A bloody hole in its chest, near the centre. I stuck my fingers in there again, ignoring the feeling the Night eagerly pressing against Winter, and popped open the ribcage to have a closer look. There was an organ in there that looked somewhat similar to a human heart, though it had way too many veins coming out of it and it stood deeper in the body – almost next to the spine, which at least was easily recognizable in shape. It was more grey than white, though, and oddly granular.

“That’s going to be a pain to wash,” Indrani commented, glancing at my now blood-drenched clothes.

“It was a crossbow bolt that did this,” I said. “Look at the indent. It’s similar to what Legion-issue makes on humans. Didn’t go deep enough, so whoever did this had to finish them up close.”

For all her many flaws, Archer had deep knowledge of the ways of murdering at a distance. When she turned her attention to the wound I was indicating her eyes narrowed.

“That’s a much bigger mark than the crossbows Robber’s minions used would have made,” she said. “Bigger bolt, and much stronger impact. Honestly, it looks like it should have gone straight through.”

Which would require much more force, if the head of the bolt was larger. Whoever had done this they had significantly better crossbows than the Legions of Terror fielded – when it came to the power of a shot, at least. Hard to tell the rate of fire from a single corpse.

“That points a damning finger already,” I said.

The Dread Empire was hardly the only nation that fielded crossbowmen, though they did field the largest amount by a significant margin. I could honestly think of no Calernian power that wouldn’t have crossbows in a field army, save for the Chain of Hunger. But Praes used a goblin crank model that was a significant improvement on what the likes of Procer and the old kingdom used. Better rate of fire, better range, better impact. Whoever had done this used a superior model, and I couldn’t think of any power that could boast of one. Not on the surface, anyway. Indrani leaned forward, jostling the corpse from my grasp, and then leaned back with a frown on her face. She was looking at the eye wound, the one that’d broken the skull.

“Yeah, you’re right,” she said. “Look at the angle. Hammer – and it’s absolutely a hammer that did this – came down all wrong for someone of the same height. That’s dwarf work, unless there’s another bunch of murderous little people running around the region.”

I dropped the dead drow entirely, slowly rising to my feet. For a butcher’s yard, this place smelled nothing like rotting flesh and blood. There was that coppery scent wafting around, but aside from that? Another physical oddity for this already strange race. My gaze swept across the slaughter, looking for the lay of it. Some bodies had obviously been dragged and dropped, but others had been left where they fell and from those I could try to piece together the events that had preceded our arrival.

“First volley hit them by surprise,” Indrani said, come up at my side. “Look at the bodies there. Too many of them are face down, they were shot in the back.”

I followed her pointed finger. The corpses were as she’d said, but that was not what drew my attention. The crossbows would have been fired from a passage leading roughly to my current left, but I could see it winding closer to my back. That should lead to either the Gloom itself or a cavern very close to it. Ivah had said that the dwarves sometimes pierced trough the Gloom, sending an expedition through to mine or claim other sources of wealth.

“Then the second volley went straight into the crowd, right there,” Indrani mused, finger moving towards a handful of dead bodies closer to the centre. “That’s interesting. You’ll know what kind of tactics that is even better than me.”

“Panic,” I said. “They were inciting a panic, so the drow would try to flee instead of fight back. Which means...”

Our two gazes swept towards the right side of the cavern, where the other passage out could be seen. It was broader than the other one, would likely allow for twenty through at a time. The corpses near it were piled almost hip-high, not a single one coming closer than twenty feet of the passage.

“There was another force waiting there,” I said. “So they’re numerous enough to afford splitting up at least, assuming there’s a single dwarven expedition at work here.”

“They did it cold and methodical,” Indrani grunted. “I’d guess they let the panic sink in before moving in the second force, so the drow wouldn’t get desperate too early.”

“It was mean to be a massacre since the beginning,” I softly agreed. “They never intended to leave anyone alive.”

“There’s more. Look around. No structures in here, Cat,” she pointed out. “Nowhere to huddle in, not even the beginnings of a camp site. So why were there at least a thousand drow in the middle of fucking nowhere?”

“You think the dwarves slaughtered the entire tribe,” I said. “Sigil, whatever.”

“Whatever they’re up to, it doesn’t involve leaving survivors,” Indrani shrugged. “This lot didn’t give much a fight, by the looks of it. I’d bet they were bottom feeders who fled another battle and got cleaned up before the dwarves moved on.”

“That’s monstrous,” I said, appalled. “I understand hitting those who can fight back, but civilians? Gods, Archer, I wouldn’t be surprised if we found children in the piles should we look for them.”

“There’s a sense to it,” she replied. “Hard sense, mind you, but still sense. Leave a bunch of Night-bearing corpses behind and the survivors will eat that. Possibly make trouble on the way out. No one can harvest if there’ s no one left.”

“Fucking Hells,” I said. “Is there a single place on Creation where we’re not going to find atrocities if we scratch the varnish a bit?”

“This whole fucking place is an atrocity, Cat,” Indrani dismissed. “All the dwarves did was heap another ugly day onto the pile.”

My finger clenched. Her utter lack of sympathy for the drow was not without reason. But there was a difference between holding the responsible to account and shrugging off massacres. I’d wrestled with this before, when I had to make choices about the Empire. How many people in Praes could really be called at fault for the many sins of the High Lords? Farmers and shopkeepers did not get a voice in the run of the world, no matter whose banner they lived under. For every drow calling themselves Mighty and heedlessly partaking in the slaughter, how many thousands were just meat ?

“Enough,” I said. “We’ve got too many worries for me to be angry with you.”

The other Named shrugged.

“Sure,” she said. “We might consider this a useful turn, if not a good one. We need to get deeper, right? If we follow in the wake of the dwarves I expect we’ll have an easier way of it than on our own.”

“We don’t know why they’re here,” I reminded her. “Or even were they’re headed.”

Indrani gestured down at the slaughter beneath us.

“That’s not the opening move of someone after a few rubies, Cat,” she said. “They’re leaving no one behind, so it follows they’re gonna be in the Everdark long enough they’re worrying someone might raise a banner here before they return.”

I reluctantly nodded. Not because I agreed following the dwarven expedition was our best bet, but to concede she was right about the logistics. The drow were terrified of the Kingdom Under, evidently with good reason, but this brutal a massacre wasn’t something that would go unanswered. Even a rat bared its fangs when cornered. The entire affair reeked of calculated risk.

“This complicates things,” I finally sighed. “It might be easier to find friends here, if the drow are under attack, but the price...”

“We’re not picking a fight with the Kingdom Under,” Indrani flatly said. “Not even the Lady does that. You kill a single dwarf and they won’t send a complaint, they’ll sink cities underground and slaughter everyone remotely involved. Maybe their relatives just to be sure. It doesn’t matter if by some miracle you manage to beat the army they send, Catherine. They’ll keep sending them, just get across the point that you don’t fuck with the dwarves .”

I glanced at her, surprised. I didn’t disagree with what she’d said – odds were that if the Queen of Callow killed a dwarf then Laure would be a ruin before winter arrived – but I was taken aback by how vehement Archer was being about it. She’d always been, well, fearless. Occasionally to the point of foolishness, though that was not unusual for any of the Woe. Including myself. I’d been under the impression few dwarves ever came to Refuge, even though it probably the surface entity with the closest ties to the Kingdom Under. Save maybe Mercantis, but that was famously strictly business as all the relationships of the City of Bought and Sold tended to be.

“You won’t get an argument from me,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “You got more on your plate, anyway.”

“How’s that?” I frowned.

Archer pointed down at the pond of corpses.

“That’s a lot of Night, Cat,” she said. “Even if they were all nobodies, that’s a great many nobodies. You just going to leave that lying there?”

I’d been trying not to think about that, all the while knowing I would have to soon enough. I wasn’t sure if I could devour the Night myself, but I did have Diabolist with me. If there was anyone would could tutor me in the basics of eldritch cannibalism it was Akua Sahelian. That’d still involve eating power from a source I only poorly understood, unaware of the possible long-term consequences. If Ivah had been upfront about what the Night was, then this could represent an extremely useful addition to my arsenal. I’d been running into old monsters more and more, of late. Older heroes, yes, but there was also the fact that the Dead King would be fielding an entire battalion of the most dangerous Named he’d been able to get his hands on. Having a much shallower bag of tricks than the opposition had cost me, in my last few fights, and I didn’t have the time or the kind of opponents available that’d allow me to play catch up. Drawing on the ancestral knowledge of an entire race would, to be frank, be the perfect solution. That was the most obvious reason not to go through with this.

It was too good a solution, too perfect. Like it’d been handpicked for my problems. Mundane coincidence was not unknown to Creation – the Gods were not behind every stroke of fortune or disaster, even for Named – but this crucial a coincidence? No. It wasn’t happenstance. I would go as far as to say I was inclined to believe this was a bid from Below . Look at what you could get, if you start acting like a proper villain. My last talk with the Dead King had involved a warning about the offers that would come knocking at my door. About the kind of stories that would be offered to me. I had not forgot it, even though it had been the least ominous part of what was spoken.

“No,” I finally said. “I can’t. It’s too useful.”

“Tell me you’re not drinking dead drow juice,” Indrani said. “You don’t know where it’s been, Cat, it could be full of diseases.”

“Not me,” I said, glancing back at the rest of our band.

The drow had gathered themselves while the two of us had been examining the massacre. None of them came within even spitting distance of the corpses, though, and from the looks of it one of them had thrown up against the cavern wall. Diabolist was still with them, though her eyes remained on the bodies. She was too well-taught to let her face betray her deepest thoughts, but the blankness of her expression was a hint in and of itself.

“Shit, you feeding them to Dubious Witch?” Indrani muttered. “Vivi’s going to have a fit when she learns.”

I waded back to dry land, boots trailing blood all over the stone. The drow visibly shrunk on themselves while Akua withdrew her gaze from the massacre’s aftermath to meet my eyes.

“Catherine,” she greeted me. “Have your deliberations come to an end?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I said. “ Akua Sahelian, I forbid you to partake in Night .”

Diabolist shivered as my order sunk into the heart of her being, words writ into law. She threw me a reproachful glance, after gathering her bearings.

“I would not have so blundered, dear heart,” she said. “Such power would not come without trappings or demands. I am more discerning in my usurpations.”

“Then this shouldn’t be a problem,” I replied flatly.

She could argue all she wanted that she wouldn’t have done it, it was bad form to give an alcoholic the keys to a liquor shop. Even when they told you they didn’t like the bottles on the shelves.

“As you say,” Diabolist murmured, bowing her head.

I turned to the drow. I’d gotten used to them over our journey, well enough I no longer had trouble telling them apart. Ivah was the only one who talked regularly, even among each other. The former guide shifted uneasily when my gaze came to rest on it.

“Ivah,” I said. “Are you still set on us parting ways?”

Silver eyes narrowed.

“I am reconsidering this matter, Queen,” it said.

“Good,” I smiled. “Then I have a bargain for you. I still need a guide to Holy Tvarigu, or at least someone who can take me to the path that leads there. If you’re willing to be that guide, I can offer safety on the way there.”

I paused, then glanced at the corpses behind me.

“There would be other benefits, were you so inclined,” I added.

The drow’s face creased in thought.

“You would grant me right to harvest all of them?” it probed.

“So long as you can do it in a reasonable amount of time,” I said. “I want to get a move on as soon as possible. I don’t suppose it’s possible to take all of the Night at once?”

“There are rites to do this,” Ivah admitted. “Yet I know them not. It could take more than hours to finish this. The act of harvest is tiring.”

“If I may intervene?” Akua asked.

I nodded at her.

“If simply gathering the Night is the issue,” she said. “I believe we can be of assistance.”

“You can drain all those dry?” I said, jutting a thumb at the dead.

“The power itches to be held,” Diabolist said. “It would not fight us in this.”

“And contamination?” I pressed.

I got the impression the shade had to hold back from rolling her eyes.

“I have struck bargains with demons and devils most ancient,” Akua said. “This is ancient work, to be sure, and strong. It is also incredibly simplistic. I am no green warlock, drunk on the success of binding an imp.”

“Gods, you sound like Masego only two parts more Evil,” I muttered. “Fine, I didn’t mean to impugn your talent at short-sightedly endangering the very fabric of Creation to try winning battles you ended up losing anyway on account of being kind of a fuckup.”

I heard Archer choke behind me.

“That was unnecessary,” Diabolist said, sounding genuinely miffed.

“Don’t know about that,” Indrani mused. “ I got a laugh out of it.”

Ivah’s eyes were moving from one of us to the other in sequence as we spoke, face visibly split between fear and befuddlement. I suspected the Mighty weren’t keen on banter with their underlings. What little I knew implied they were pretty direct about having their displeasure felt, though in all fairness that made me the pot mouthing off at their kettle.

“The terms stand, with the addition that we’ll help you gather Night at least this once,” I told the drow.

Ivah did not need to mull over it much longer.

“I would accept your bargain, then,” it said.

I nodded, pleased.

“Give me a moment to phrase the oath,” I said.

“That will not be necessary, Queen,” Ivah said.

My brow rose. Trust already? We’d only struck one bargain, and I’d needed it for urgent purpose. The silver-eyed guide smiled thinly, reading my surprise.

“This will make me drow again,” it said. “Drow neither give nor take oaths.”

“That’s rather inconvenient,” I frankly replied.

Would it try to betray us the moment it had a bit of power under the belt? I wasn’t overly worried about it hurting us, Secrets or no Secrets, but it’d be a pain to have to find another guide so soon after empowering the last one. A closer eye needed to be kept on it, then. I gave Diabolist a meaningful glance, getting the slightest of nods in response.

“Let’s get this done,” I said. “Akua, I’m getting the impression that improvising here would be a bad idea.”

“Your discernment remains impeccable,” Diabolist said, without a hint of irony.

I smothered a grin. The diabolism quip had actually gotten under her skin, which was just delightful.

“If I may?” she said, extending her hand towards me.

I nodded and she made contact with the bare skin of my neck. It felt... like when we’d fought together against the Skein, but softer. Access granted but not power. Her thoughts bloomed right under my fingertips, little whispers of knowledge and intent.

“Extend your will,” she murmured.

I closed my eyes. I could feel the Night wriggling in the bodies. She’d been right to say it was itching to be held: it responded eagerly to even the slightest of approaches. My mind covered the whole of the cavern – close to the perception that emerged when others entered my domain, but somehow incomplete. There was no inherent understanding here. I was blindly groping my way.

“Call it,” Akua said.

To me , I ordered. The Night slithered out of the corpses like a tide of snakes, eating through dead flesh. It hesitated, but I lashed it with my will and called it closer. It became easier the more I exerted myself, as if I’d overcome its hesitation. I spun it into a sphere until it grew larger than a person, then told it to contract. When I opened my eyes, there was only a pinprick of darkness hovering in the air before me.

“Ivah,” I said. “Now.”

The drow approached and bowed towards the Night, beginning cadenced whispers, but they fell away from my ears. I was looking into the small piece of darkness, and seeing beyond it. Through it.

I was not the only one looking.

There was a face, but I could only make out the barest contours because of the eyes: deep and perfect silver, they were glaring harshly in otherwise absolute darkness.

Splendid , a woman’s voice spoke into my ear.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Ah, perhaps not. Merely usurper. What an unusual creature you are.

I could feel her mind scuttling across my own, like a spider on glass. Feeling out the shape of it, tasting the power. It went both ways. Her soul, her mantle was no thick bundle of power. It was an impossibly large web of the thinnest possible strings, spread out so far and wide I could scarcely comprehend it.

“You’re not the Night,” I said. “I can feel you too, Named.”

I sensed you tread the Gloom with stolen feathers. Felt you come to me, purpose on your lips.

“Sve of Night,” I whispered. “I seek audience with you.”

So take it , the woman laughed. What stays your hand?

“You’re under attack,” I said.

All is strife. The Tenets will hold, or they will break. Only the worthy rise.

“Then you’re willing to talk,” I tried. “We need to-”

All paths lead to Tvarigu. I await you beyond the reach of dawn.

Silver light shone, blinding, and for a heartbeat I thought I saw her whole. A colossal silhouette, limbs outstretched and shivering in pain. Then I saw only the cavern and the concerned looks of my companions.

“Fuck,” I said feelingly. “This just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?”

Chapter 55: Outskirts

“Over the month I spent in Atalante I witnessed no fewer than two hundred debates take place under the gaze of the pale statues of the Temple of Manifold Truths, for the people of the city delight in such exercises of rhetoric as those of Stygia delight in bloodsport. The subjects varied from the purpose of mankind to the proper shape of apples, though the true wonder of the place was that I do not believe a single speaker left the Temple believing they had been wrong.”
– Extract from ‘Horrors and Wonders’, famed travelogue of Anabas the Ashuran

I’d come across more than my fair share of impressive fortifications, over the years. Summerholm, the river-straddling Gate of the East. Liesse, whose walls had been old and half-abandoned yet still holding sorcery powerful enough to give pause to the full might of the Summer Court. Ater, the Dread Empire’s own capital, with towering walls and massive gates that had held strong under the Tower’s shadow for millennia. Keter, Crown of the Dead, a haunting spire of rock beholden to no laws but the Dead King’s that had turned back crusade after crusade. This, though? This was laughable. There were fortifications in northern Callow, a region that had not known the touch of war for a hundred years before Procer created the passage, that were greater than this. When Ivah had called the ‘fortress’ at the edge of Kodrog territory a ring of stones, I’d thought it half-poetry. Daoine and the eastern stretches of Callow boasted old fortifications called the same thing, ancient broken-down forts used in wars that predated the unification of the kingdom and peace with the Deaoraithe. Many of them had been made into the heart of small towns and villages, the hill-forts used as a guild hall or minor noble’s seat. What I was looking at right now was not that: it was a literal ring of stones.

A few narrow tunnels had led us out of the butcher’s yard and into what had once been the lands of the Kodrog, our first approach into another large cavern almost intimidating. There were no corpses to be found, but thrice we came across trails of blood on the stone where dead drow had been dragged. The way into the great cavern was through an angle slope, narrow as the tunnel that had led us there, and part of me noted that this was a natural chokepoint. Easily defendable with a company of crossbowmen and some half-way decent infantry. The ancient drow apparently agreed, for mere feet beyond the end of the slope the ring of stones stood. The sight of it had me raising an eyebrow in skepticism. It wasn’t indefensible, really. The slabs of granite making a loose circle of upright stones could serve as a curtain wall of sorts. Or they would have been able to, without the large gap in the slabs just to the side. Anyone could just... walk right in. That wasn’t a fortification so much as a decoration. The dwarves had apparently been of the same opinion, because they’d wasted no time filling it with corpses.

I’d had dinner with Baroness Anne Kendal, after ascending to the throne, and over pheasant she’d praised me for how quickly I’d reacted to Akua unleashing devils at First Liesse. Said that most would have been stricken with terror, and that my swift decision to ‘conscript’ everyone in the city had saved dozens of thousands of lives. I’d not quite had the heart to tell her by then I’d bared blades at things scarier than mere devils. When I came knocking at the gates of Liesse with the Fifteenth, even my legionaries no longer flinched in the face of the hosts of Hell. Masego had called it horror fatigue. The way some people beheld so much terror their standards shifted and sights that would have once horrified them grew mundane. It was apparently a common phenomenon among Praesi sorcerers. On occasion it led to diseases of the mind, he’d noted, when mages witnessed so many terrors that it was the mundane matters of the rest of the world that grew eldritch to their eyes. I wondered if I was inching towards that, one slaughtering yard at a time, because the aftermath of brutality no longer stirred any great feeling in me.

Most the corpses in the fort had not been slain there. There were tracks leading to tall piles beneath the stones, and even taller ones inside the circle. If there had been marks of fighting there, they were now buried in death. I heard Archer come towards me as I stood a handful of feet from the piled dead within the embrace of raised stones.

“The trail leads north,” Indrani said.

I nodded.

“Did it betray anything about their numbers?” I asked.

“Hundreds, at least,” she shrugged. “Hard to tell the difference between those and thousands on stone grounds. There’s tracks though, from carts or something else on wheels. Heavy things, I’m pretty sure even the wheels are metal.”

My fingers clenched, then unclenched. It had always helped me think, but there was too little to go on here to make any real deductions. It might be carts to carry whatever they’d come for back to the Kingdom Under. They could be supply wagons. They could be machines of war, as Ivah had said the dwarves sometimes used to slay the Mighty. Hells, it could be all of that. We wouldn’t know for sure unless we took a look with our own eyes, and that struck me as a bad idea for all sorts of reasons. I glanced at Indrani.

“Do we know what’s north?” I said.

“Ivah says it’s the core territories of the Kodrog,” she replied. “We’re still in the outskirts of the outer rings. I’ll be at least a few days of travel before we reach the first ruins.”

Piecing together the lay of the Everdark from what my guide was very willing to share had been difficult, even though Ivah was trying its best. The drow considered too many things to be self-evident to be a proper informant. The outer rings, as far as I could tell, were the drow territories outside the loose web of underground cities that had once made up their empire. Those were the harshest battlegrounds of their people, and a gathering place for the strongest Sigils and cabals. The inner ring, singular, was vaguer in what it covered. From context, it seemed to mean all the territories between the old cities. There the tribes that’d been forced out of the cities fought against each other, murdering their way to enough power to try to get a foot in a city again. The cities were where the strongest of the Mighty gathered, Ivah had said, but the inner ring was where a Sigil could be wiped out in a night. Those that fled that underground sea of carnage eked out a living in the outer rings, but pickings were sparse out here. It was uncommon for a Sigil that bolted to the outskirts to make a comeback, even if they bided their time for a few decades.

Holy Tvarigu was at the centre of the madness, the handful of paths leading to it guarded by powerful Sigils who were said to rival those of the cities. We’d need to gather strength and support, before trying those.

“There’s one last thing,” Indrani said. “I found black blood.”

My eyes narrowed. That meant a Mighty. Ivah had been clear that the more Night a drow held, the deeper the changes to their body. I had no reason to distrust that: after reaping the harvest of the cavern it had visibly changed.

“Show me,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “It’s not far. Want to grab our favourite scavenger in case there’s a survivor?”

“Might be for the best,” I agreed.

And still she did not move. I cocked an eyebrow.

“Archer?”

Her lips thinned.

“You all right, Cat?” she asked. “You’ve been looking at dead bodies for a while. And not that long ago you were hearing voices.”

“Just the one,” I sighed. “And that was the Priestess of Night, I’m sure of it.”

“I’m sure you believe that,” Indrani delicately said.

“I’m not quite that far gone,” I reassured her. “Anyways, I’m not going morbid on you. I was actually wondering why they’re not burning the bodies. Wouldn’t it make more sense?”

“Not a lot of firewood down here,” she replied. “And you need that or oil to get a good pyre started.”

“I really doubt the dwarves ready to commit mass slaughter without tallying proper supplies,” I said. “If they’re really killing everyone to make sure there can be no harvest, it’d be logical to burn the dead. Can’t claim Night from ashes, I don’t think.”

“If they’re as prepared as you say, they’ll have a reason for it,” Indrani pointed out. “I try not to spend too much time figuring out why dwarves do what dwarves do. You’ll only end up with a headache and an empty purse by trying.”

“We’re missing something,” I told her. “I’m not gonna go digging in corpses to find out – we don’t have the time to spare – but it’s worth asking questions.”

“Somehow I doubt our little band of murderers is going to have a good explanation for you,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Come on, let’s grab our minion. We’re wasting daylight, even if we can’t see it.”

The rest of our company wasn’t far. I’d learned why the drow were so afraid of coming close to the corpses, after a little chat with Ivah. It’d said it wasn’t the death that scared most of them. It was all the Night that waited there to be taken. By beating them down, we’d established ourselves as higher on the pecking order. Drow who eyed Night ripe for harvest when stronger drow were around tended to end up killed just to make sure there’d be no trouble. Diabolist was keeping an eye on the prisoners, but Ivah was visibly itching to have a look at the corpses. It didn’t consider itself strong enough to just harvest the Night no matter what we said, then. Good. As long as it was afraid of us, it’d uphold its part of the bargain with no qualms.

“Ivah,” I called out. “With us. Archer has found a Mighty’s blood trail.”

“I follow, Queen,” the silver-eyed creature smoothly replied.

Its eyes were brighter, now, but that was the least of the changes. Where before it had been stooped by days of travel with limited supplies and little sleep, now its back was ramrod straight and its stride had grown assured. The skin was still pale grey, but now and then from the corner of my eyes I could have sworn I saw small arcane patterns of Night shine on its bare arms. I suspected there’d been other changes less obvious, though it was hard to gauge something like senses and reflexes without actually testing them. The rest of the cavern beyond the ring of stones was a great deal less bloody. There were trails and footsteps on the dust and dirt, but little else. A handful of leather tents and fire pits skirted the edge of the walls, not enough to shelter more than a few hundred drow. There was at least twice that in dead inside the fort, which meant the corpses had likely been gathered from other tunnels and caverns. Three passages out could be found. Two heading north, side-to-side, and one towards the east. It was that last one Indrani led us towards.

Unlike the last stretch of tunnels out of the Gloom, these were not carved or sculpted. Apparently even when the realm of the drow had still been worth such a name, this had been considered the edge of nowhere. We passed through a small cave half-filled by ponds of water, though they’d all been fouled by dirt and blood, and only found what Indrani had mentioned after another stretch of winding tunnel. There was a naked body, which she hadn’t mentioned, but it was easy to see why. It was a ruined wisp of a cadaver: the head had been pulped, but the rest was a ruin without needing wounding. It looked like it’d been exsanguinated, drained of all fluids and insides until all that was left was paper-thin grey skin and hollow bones. In other news, drow did have genitalia no matter how they called themselves: this one had a cock, though it was as much a shrivelled husk as the rest of it. Black blood and brain fluids formed a blasphemous halo around the wreck of the head, but that wasn’t the interesting part. From the body another trail came. There were bits of blood in it, but also some sort of transparent fluid gone dry. A sticky, stinking trail led from the corpse deeper into the passage ahead.

“Another twenty feet of crawling, then whatever came out got on its feet,” Indrani said. “From there it’s just drip. Haven’t touched the body yet, figured you’d want the honours.”

“Kind of you,” I drily said. “Ivah, anything to say?”

“This is not known to me,” the drow admitted. “Though none but Mighty would have blood so dark.”

Less than helpful. I knelt by the body, gingerly raising it. Immediately my eyebrows climbed up. The entire back was messed up, like something had ripped its way out forcefully. Almost no blood, though. At a guess, whatever had left the trail was responsible.

“Looks like our friend here had one last trick up their sleeve,” I said. “Ivah, you mentioned something called the Secret of Many Lives to me once. Would this be what it looks like in action?”

“I have never witnessed this with my own eyes,” the drow said. “Only heard rumours. Yet if this is true, we look upon the body of Mighty Kodrog. Or one who slew them and claimed the whispers.”

“Let’s find out,” I grimly said.

I left the body there. There was no Night in it, and I wasn’t sure I should let Ivah harvest it even if there was. We set out again, though the trip was amusingly short. Maybe sixty feet further, after the trail of dried fluids had ended, another corpse was waiting. Its head had been pulped as well. There was another trail, and we didn’t stop to check the body before following this time. Apparently the dwarves hunting Kodrog has lost patience, because when we found the next body not even twenty feet further around a corner it was thoroughly demolished. No flesh or bone had been left untouched, the remains more smear than corpse. And still a trail crawled away from it. I heard a rasping breath, further ahead. Had the hunters missed the last rebirth?

“There’s something still breathing,” I announced, and pressed on at a pace.

Indrani snorted.

“Yeah, not surprised,” she said. “Look at the fluids, Cat. It didn’t crawl away, it was dragged.”

Honestly the trail looked to me exactly like the others, but she was the tracker and I was the city girl. Regardless, we did not make the survivor wait long. I almost winced at the sight, after we stumbled across it. This particular body was no husk like the others, though it might wish otherwise. The naked drow had been nailed to the tunnels’ wall with iron spikes through the shoulders and calves, limbs flopping listlessly. The drow’s eyes were closed, but I could hear it breathe just fine. It was still rather improbably alive. Ivah breathed in sharply, and earned a curious look for it.

“This is Mighty Kodrog itself,” my guide said. “The wound splitting the lip in half, it is famed. The blade of the Mighty Soln caused it.”

There was a rather nasty scar and chunk of missing flesh parting the drow’s lower lip in half. More interesting were the nigh-invisible patterns of Night covered Kodrog’s face, surrounding the closed eyes like they were some sort of spider web. It looked like a tattoo of arcane symbols I was unfamiliar with, though a very faint one. Apparently the repeated rebirths had weakened the Mighty considerably.

“It’s unconscious,” I said. “Let’s drag it back to camp, see if we can wake it up there.”

“You’re going to have to handle the spikes,” Indrani said. “That’s solid rock they were hammered into. Not sure I could pull them out.”

I grimaced but got to work. The difficult part was doing it carefully enough I wouldn’t rip up Kodrog’s body, not taking them out, and greyish blood began pouring out the moment they were removed. No longer black, huh. Someone had had a rough week. I froze the wounds shut, which was about as much as I knew of healing, and hoisted the drow over my shoulder when it became clear the pain wasn’t enough to wake it up. Ivah was looking at me carrying a Mighty like a bag of potatoes like it didn’t know whether it should be amused or appalled. The walk back was quicker, though I was careful not to jostle the goods. In part because I didn’t want to worsen the bleeding, in part because when strangers dangled their dangly parts against me I preferred fewer gaping wounds being involved. A rustle when through the prisoners when we returned bearing our newest addition, a few whispered words in Crepuscular being traded. Kodrog was the only word I recognized. I lowered said burden to the floor carefully and smiled at Akua, who’d silently approached.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” I cheerfully said.

“Joy,” Diabolist drawled. “More half-dead drow. My favourite. I expect you want me to attend to it?”

“If anyone’s going to know what happened here, it’s that one,” I said. “I need it capable of talking.”

“That much I can promise,” the shade noted. “How long it will remain that way is more chancy a matter.”

“Do what you can,” I said.

“Ugh, does that leave me on guard duty?” Indrani asked. “Because that’s really tedious. You won’t even let me make them fight.”

“I’m sure Ivah can inform them of the consequences of acting out,” I said, casting an eye as said drow.

It nodded slowly.

“Find me in what direction the dwarves went,” I told Archer. “Try to find out numbers, or anything more than we have. If you run into any of them...”

“Stay out of sight, head back immediately,” she said. “I’ve got it. How long you giving me?”

I chewed my lip.

“We’ll need a while for the interrogation,” I said, watching Akua begin to remove the ice I’d shut the wounds with. “We might as well make camp here. A few hours, at least, but careful not to get lost.”

“I never once in my life got lost,” Indrani assured me.

“Last month you told me you’d been sober your whole life,” I noted. “You really should start picking better lies.”

“That sounds like a horrible way to live,” Indrani said.

I rolled my eyes.

“Just don’t get killed,” I said. “Or start another war. Gods know we already have a net surplus of those, and the year’s not even over.”

She waved me away in a less than reassuring gesture, but she adjusted her bow against her shoulder and got moving towards the north-leading passages. She might give me backtalk the way sparrows flew, but I knew I could trust her to pull through when I needed her. I had few worries about her reconnaissance.

“Now would be a good time to inform your fellows we’re camping,” I told Ivah. “They’re free to scavenge tents and necessities, though they are not to touch the Night.”

“As you say, Queen,” the drow nodded.

I watched it walk over to the others, then returned my attention to Akua. I dropped down next to the body in a seat, watching her work Winter into dying flesh. There was Night in this one, though unlike the one in the corpses it was not reaching for me. Neither was it hostile, though. It was just there. A tool in someone’s hand, firmly grasped.

“How’s it looking?” I asked.

“More than halfway into the grave,” Diabolist said. “Which eases my work a great deal.”

I didn’t need to ask her why. What instincts my mantle had granted me made me aware that Winter held dominion over death and decay, among other things. I’d dabbled in necromancy as the Squire, but I remained an amateur at the art. When Akua had ridden my body, she’d raised an army of dead Procerans without even using a ritual.

“It’s a recurring pattern, with you,” the shade said. “That you use and demand others use powers in way that seem ill-suited to them.”

“Power’s a tool,” I said, repeating someone else’s words. “The only limit to its use is your own cleverness.”

“Spare me the Carrion Lord’s lessons, if you would,” Akua said. “I have heard them before. My point stands. Even as the Squire your use of your limited necromantic abilities was admittedly inspired. Never before had I seen someone kill their own flesh to better wield it.”

“Desperation is a sharp teacher,” I grunted.

“So it is,” Diabolist mildly said. “Still, you extend this philosophy beyond the boundaries I expected.”

I scoffed.

“How’s that?”

“This entire enterprise, dearest,” Akua said. “To be frank, I am still somewhat at a loss as to why we now tread the passages of the Everdark.”

“You were there when the decision was made,” I reminded her. “I –”

“Need an army, yes,” she interrupted. “Surely that is not all of it? I surmised this to be the excuse you gave to mask deeper purpose.”

“I don’t lie when holding council with the Woe, Akua,” I said. “Even when you’re there.”

Scarlet eyes considered me skeptically.

“Then you truly came to gather a host of drow?” she said. “That seems ill-advised.”

I frowned at the casual dismissal. Still, I’d let her out of the box for a reason. She had a better grasp on the corridors of power than any of the Woe, and if she had something to say it was worth hearing. Not necessarily heeding, but at the very least listening to.

“You’re aware of our military situation,” I said.

“I am, to an extent,” she agreed. “The Battle of the Camps thinned the ranks overmuch, which led you to seek the Dead King in the first place. There was need for the hosts of Procer to be sent elsewhere and bled. This has already been achieved, Catherine, by the Empress’ own pact.”

“Look deeper,” I said. “What’s the thing that keeps Callow afloat?”

“Farming,” she replied without missing a beat. “I do not disagree with you on the implication, my dear. Your kingdom has weathered a large-scale rebellion, the invasion of the Courts and my own works. If the Army of Callow recruits as heavily as it must to be more than a border garrison, there will be lack of field hands come harvest. Which would have consequences more disastrous in Callow than most realms, admittedly, as it boasts little but fertile fields.”

My own works , she’d said. Almost nonchalantly. Three words for over a hundred thousand souls. The urge was there to simply tear her in half. Pop her head with a squeeze of my fingers, have Winter itself devour her from the inside. I pulsed with the need of it . And you feared I might grow attached, Vivienne, I thought. That I might come to see her as more than the useful devil on my shoulder. I mastered myself, kept the flare of rage away from my face. Not even a slight cooling of the air betrayed it. I’d learned the ways of my mantle well. It would not do to punish her for this, no. Best she keep speaking those words, those barbed reminders of who it was I had murdered into my service.

“Then you know why I need another force on the field,” I said. “One that can take the losses I can’t afford.”

“There are others you might have sought,” Akua noted. “Lord Black still fields legions, and his fondness for you is well-known.”

“Black’s running a game in Procer,” I said. “I don’t know what it is yet, because I don’t know what he’s really after. If he intended to depose Malicia, his opening was just after Second Liesse. He went to the Vales instead, prepared for the crusade. He had most of a year, Diabolist. To plan and plot. It’s not happenstance that the Vales were collapsed and he’s wandering the heartlands of the Principate. He’s trying to accomplish something. The Gods only know what it is, if even that. I’m not getting in the middle of that mess without a very good reason.”

“You have ties to the sole Court of Arcadia,” Diabolist noted. “Bargain might have been struck there.”

“You think that’s better than the drow?” I snorted. “Last time I went for a spin with the King of Winter, I got taken for a ride. I doubt I’ve learned enough in the last year to turn that around, and you can be sure that any pact made with Arcadia will result in the fae having a permanent foothold on Creation. I might as well start calling on fucking demons – those are easier to put away after you let them loose.”

“The Dread Empire-”

“Was a possibility I considered,” I interrupted flatly. “Of course, to get my hands on any of its armies I’d need to climb the Tower and make it stick. Which means I’ll likely have to assault a few of the most heavily fortified cities on the continent with my already mangled forces. Possibly fight Malicia’s loyalist Legions as well. Losses are certain, and even if I win I inherit a mess. Ashur’s still sacking the coasts, Akua. I can’t call myself Empress and just... leave them to it. Not to mention the dangers inherent to killing the person that let the Dead King out. Could mean he has to retreat, which would fuck over a now even more wounded Callow. We’d have to go back and negotiate, assuming he’s even willing. Or it could mean he’s loose with absolutely no leash on him .”

“I believe you underestimate the amount of support a bid for the Tower would find in the Wasteland,” Diabolist said. “There are promises that could see many flock to your banner.”

“Oh, I know all about those kinds of promises,” I murmured. “There are some prices even I balk at paying. I will not wade into a snake pit just to try turning the snakes on my foes, Akua. I have no intention of ever ruling Praes.”

“You may not have a choice,” Diabolist mildly said. “Though I shall let the matter lie. It will come to your door without any need for my advocacy.”

“You should hope not,” I replied. “If Praes is made my problem, I will not be gentle in how I solve it. Should we go over our other options? The League won’t talk with me if the Hierarch won’t, and the man is both mad and stubborn as a mule. The Chain of Hunger cannot be treated with to any real degree, the elves would shoot any envoy of mine on sight and the closest thing the Gigantes have to an ally – Levant – is currently at war with me. You think I’m stalking these fucking tunnels because I want to? I need the men and there is no one else .”

The last sentence came out in a hiss, almost like a wound lanced of pus.

“I understand,” Akua said.

“No, you don’t,” I replied. “I drew a line in the sand, after my coronation. That if all I could accomplish was make a ruin out of Callow, I would melt the godsdamned crown and go into exile. Or walk to the gallows, if that was what it took. The crusade was always going to come, there was nothing I could do about that. But now, Diabolist, even if my armies win the coming battles the kingdom is fucked. We were already a bad summer away from widespread food shortages, when I left. How do you think it will go if the fields are empty at harvest? Either this works, or I’m done. I capitulate, do whatever is necessary for Hasenbach to offer terms that aren’t complete subjugation and kill as many problems as I can before I die.”

“You are what keeps this together, Catherine,” Akua warned me. “If you abdicate, the kingdom collapses into anarchy. Malicia will likely invade and even the League might be swayed by such a tempting feast. Do you think Callow can weather the Dead King without you?”

“The question isn’t ‘will it bad?’,” I said. “Of course it’ll be awful. Even if I clean up every loose end I can before going, it’ll be a shitshow. The question that needs to be asked is ‘will it be worse if I’m wearing the crown?’.”

“The only reason Callow was more than a waypoint on Cordelia’s way to Ater is that your power gave the Principate pause,” Diabolist said. “This is... navel-gazing in the worst of ways. Do you think you are responsible for every disaster to plague your homeland?”

“They happened on my watch,” I said. “I had a responsibility. If I’d fucking bled you like a pig at Liesse, no matter the consequences to me, a hundred thousand people would be alive today. Winter went after Marchford because it was my demesne. Summer torched a third of the south to match Winter. And the Liesse Rebellion... well, you weren’t the only person I should have killed then and let’s leave it at that.”

“It is absurd to pretend to you did not mitigate the damage inflicted,” Akua flatly said. “You dispersed the Courts yourself. To clarify, you drove back forces as older than the First Dawn at the mere cost of a few leagues of burned land . Who else could have brought the invasions to an end at even twice that cost? And let us not pretend to you were the only possible pawn for Winter’s king. The Courts did not emerge in Praes, where bargains would have been eagerly taken, or fractious Procer or the squabbling lands of the Dominion. Why, I wonder? It is almost as if Callow was easiest prey, the most vulnerable locale. You ended the Liesse Rebellion on lenient terms, your mere existence enough to soften the stances of both the Carrion Lord and the Empress against those who raised banner against the Tower. Not a matter in which either would otherwise have been prone to so mild a response. Had you not been on the field at Second Liesse, I would very likely have slain your teacher and triumphed. You seem under the misapprehension that the rest of the continent fights over Callow because you bear the crown. That is disingenuous. Callow suffers because it is weak . Because greater powers can afford to make it a tool to expunge their own troubles. The Principate, the Empire, half the heroes that flocked to the Tenth Crusade. Do you truly believe your kingdom, even under a villainous queen, is greater threat to Good and Calernia than the Kingdom of the Dead? Than the Chain of Hunger?”

“There’s a balance of power,” I said. “The Grey Pilgrim admitted as much.”

“Indeed,” Akua sneered. “The Principate cannot afford too many powers sworn to Evil at its borders, is it? Yet you could have been made friend, through the right treaties. Can the same be said of the Hidden Horror? Yet is is Callow that was marched upon, and Praes beyond it. Because if the First Prince had called for a crusade against Keter, none would have answered. Because against the Kingdom of the Dead the Principate did not believe it could win, and Callow was weaker .”

“You stated the very reason,” I grimly smiled. “Against Keter, she did not believe she could win. And so the strategic reality was that a villainous queen in Callow was unacceptable. You’re also dismissing the fact that it was your own fucking doomsday fortress, built on a massacre of my countrymen it is worth remembering, that served as the rallying cry for this mess.”

“I will not defend what I did,” Akua said. “There is nothing defensible about failure, and my means were abhorrent to you. Yet I will remind you that Procer loomed at the gate long before my works took place. I served as an excuse, it is true. And for my sins judge me as you will, for that is your right and privilege as victor. Yet even had you slain me long before, excuse would have been found sooner or later – Praes ruling Callow was no more acceptable than your bearing a crown, after all. You are a justification, Catherine. You are not a motive . At best, you were ancillary to the reasons forces went into motion.”

“I could have gone the other way,” I said. “I was made an offer, in Liesse. If I’d signed up with the Heavens-”

“You would have been slain, fallen upon by the full roster of the Calamities and your own allies,” she said. “The Black Knight, deeming your existence a failed experiment, would have set to ensuring Callow was incapable of rising in rebellion when Procer came calling. I need not remind you of the manner of methodical butchery your teacher is capable of.”

“So that’s your fine wisdom?” I mocked. “Thousands died under your watch but it’s all right, because thousands would have died either way?”

“Yourself and the Woe, the Fifteenth you assembled painstakingly,” Akua said. “All of these are the only reason anyone of import on this continent considers Callow worth treating with . Gods Below, Catherine, do you think without your casting a long shadow the Empress would have waited this long to act? That the Carrion Lord would not have excised treason out of your kingdom? The First Prince may claim to despise all you stand for, yet she stills speaks with you. Because you wield power, warrant fear, and this means the land you rule over are more than a subject to squabble over after someone wins the war. Without the might you have assembled, the only Callow that exists is that which other powers allow to exist. Is this the sorrow you mull over late into the night? That your acts, though bloody, have made your homeland actor instead of spoils ?”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “If I’d never taken Callow in hand, heroes could have risen. They have before, with reliability that borders on law.”

“The same heroes the Empire repeatedly smothered in the crib for decades before your birth?” Diabolist gently said. “Or perhaps foreign heroes, from the same nations now marching on you.”

“It’s better to be Proceran vassals than a wasteland, Akua,” I tiredly replied. “And despite my best efforts we seem to be headed that way.”

“I know few things about your people, and much I thought known has been proven false,” the shade said. “Yet how many of them would agree with what you just spoke?”

“A crowd has only one voice, and no wisdom to utter,” I quoted. “My people aren’t always right, especially when pride is on the line.”

“And so now your argument is that you know better,” Akua said. “That you should make the choices for them. Yet you deplore having done that very thing. With some defeats to show for it, yet also admirable successes. What brave soul do you happen to use for comparison, then? I am curious what world-shaking sage would have steered Callow unfailingly, had you not been at the helm.”

“Asking for whoever would have risen not to have lost the second largest city in Callow is hardly unfair,” I barked back.

“You turn blind eye to the realities of the time,” Akua noted. “Another Named would not have benefitted from your relationship to the highest tiers of Praesi power. They would have been forced to rebel while under hunt of the Calamities, raising essentially the same army that was crushed by your teacher with perhaps a few additions. Likely, they would have needed to rely on help from the Principate to stay afloat, which would have begun the Tenth Crusade with Callow the midst of a bloody civil war instead of when its borders were garrisoned. It would have been a nonentity at the peace table afterwards. Perhaps I would have been slain by such a replacement, perhaps not. It is arguable at best if the resulting body count would not have been superior, and beyond debate that the destruction would have been more widespread. The Courts of the Fair Folk would then have found that deeply divided and damaged land much easier to make sport of than it was under your aegis, however flawed.”

“You don’t know any of that,” I said. “It’s speculation.”

“Which does not seem to be of import, when you castigate yourself,” the shade said. “Your usual hypocrisies leave a better taste in the mouth. You are not even alone in those, truth be told. The First Prince calls you a warlord, though she herself rose through war to the throne through the same means. Levant was warring against the Principate not even two years ago, and Ashur was happily trading with the Wasteland but months before the Tenth Crusade was declared. I am indifferent to the moralities of this, admittedly, but they seem to matter to you and it rather beggars belief that all these rivals must now be considered righteous merely because they march against you.”

“I’m not saying they deserve to win any of this,” I got out through gritted teeth. “I’m saying it’s self-defeating to fight them for the kingdom’s sake if the price of that fight is to break the fucking kingdom.”

“The Kingdom of Callow is already broken,” Akua frankly said. “You’ve succeeded at keeping it from falling apart entirely after evicting Praes, which is already impressive. Catherine, four years ago there was no kingdom. There were only the provinces, ruled by the edicts of the Carrion Lord. In that span, your pried your homeland out of the Empress’ grip with minimal destruction and forced a semblance of order onto a realm that was under occupation for several decades. All the while fending off repeated interventions from the two largest nations on the surface of Calernia. This strange expectation you have that anyone, including you, taking up the crown would lead to miracles is rather naïve. Nation-building is not the stuff of months, my dear, which is more or less what you managed to wrest away from more powerful and experienced rulers trying to deny you even that.”

“So I’m the lesser evil,” I bitterly smiled. “There’s a familiar tune. Been a while since it last managed to lull me to pleasant sleep.”

“It is most easy to fall short of a paragon of victory existing only in your thoughts,” Diabolist said. “You speak as if you believe you somehow hoodwinked an entire kingdom into following you.”

“I didn’t exactly ask for opinions before the coronation,” I said.

“And yet Callow did not rebel,” Akua mused. “The remaining highborn and your officials obey your orders. You have brought every Named of note in the kingdom into your service and called the guilds, even those calling themselves dark , to heel. Your army, which is now for the most part made of your countrymen, followed you into war willingly. You are not a Fairfax, it is true. Also largely irrelevant, as they are all dead. Considering the founder of that dynasty was a mere knight, a Named with a distinguished military record can hardly be considered lesser origin.”

“Eleanor Fairfax ascended to the throne by popular acclaim,” I flatly denied.

“She was a skilled and charismatic warlord with the power to make a claim on the throne and popular backing to press it,” she meaningfully said.

“Also the blessing of the Heavens,” I drily said. “I seem to be missing that part.”

“Now we argue theology,” Akua said. “Can no crown be worthy without affirmation from Above? I’ve yet to hear of Cordelia Hasenbach receiving this accolade. Strange that it would be required of you alone.”

“You’re ignoring the part where I’m a villain,” I said.

“You have devoured your own Name and taken Winter in its place,” she said. “You share foes with Below, perhaps sympathies with some who strive against Above. I have yet to hear you offer a single prayer to my Gods, Catherine. Even if it were so, the hypocrisy here would be a deep one indeed. Where is this outrage when a Tyrant rises in Helike? Stygia pays dues only in brimstone, and Bellerophon is a maddened altar of a city. And yet no crusade darkens their doorstep. A standard upheld only when convenient is no such thing: it is merely a tool.”

“It’s a pretty song you sing me,” I admitted. “That I am not always right, but just enough. That my enemies are no better.”

“And yet,” Diabolist said, “you believe not a word of it. Why?”

I thinly smiled.

“Because it was what I wanted to hear,” I said. “And you’re Akua Sahelian.”

It was two hours before Mighty Kodrog woke, and we spent every moment of them in silence.

Chapter 56: Knock Knock

“Best not to think too deeply, lest the dwarves take the thought.”
– Mercantian saying

The Mighty Kodrog had been granted a blanket to wear as a makeshift skirt, because I was a merciful captor, but that failed to detract from the fact that it still looked mostly dead. It’d tried to get up, after waking, but the old Foundling response of unpleasant-smile-and-knife-to-the-throat had put an end to that real quick. Ivah had joined us without even need for summons, and spent the last few moments conversing in Crepuscular with our latest addition.

“It is done, Queen,” the drow said.

Informing it that ‘Lately Queen’ wasn’t actually my title had ended the misunderstanding, though not soon enough Indrani hadn’t made it part of her vocabulary.

“It’s willing to share all it knows?” I asked, not hiding my surprise.

“That was not what we conversed of,” Ivah said, silver eyes blinking. “It is now agreed upon that the Mighty Kodrog is no longer so. It is named Bogdan, ispe of the lowest rung. The Kodrog are no more.”

Wait, had they really been talking about this the entire time? Gods, they quibbled about this stuff even more than Praesi did.

“Ispe,” I repeated slowly. “Is that higher or lower than rylleh?”

“Lowest of the Mighty, Queen,” Ivah said.

Well, the silver in its eyes was full but it was admittedly quite dull. I’d have to remember the terms, or see about getting a more comprehensive list at some point. Feeling my way up the Everdark’s ladder one corpse at a time might take a while.

“Fine,” I said. “Then ask our friend Bogdan about the dwarves. What does he know?”

Ivah spoke to the other in that strange, fluid tongue of theirs. It was hard to read tone in Crepuscular – I suspected even loud imprecations would just roll off the tongue like honey – but Bogdan’s body language was less difficult to get a feel of. It looked wary, but also less than worried. Was it under the impression it could kill us all and escape if it wanted to? My knife was no longer at its throat, but I could bury a few inches of steel into its throat before it blinked. I’d gotten used to my reputation helping things along, I mused, but it didn’t mean much down here.

“Bogdan requires the clothes of another and its pick of weapons before entertaining such exchange,” Ivah finally translated.

I eyed the Mighty Bogdan skeptically. It was kind of impressive it could look this self-assured a full step into the grave, but my patience had limits. I flicked a glance at Ivah.

“Ask it if it enjoys having all ten fingers,” I calmly said. “And remind it doesn’t need any of those to answer my questions.”

The drow slowly nodded, and passed that along. Bodgan’s lips quirked at an angle impossible in a human, as if its cheeks muscles were entirely different from ours. It replied softly.

“Bogdan says all you attempt to inflict to them will be returned tenfold,” Ivah said.

“Will it now?” I mused.

It was quicker than I’d thought. Bogdan had seen me set my knife back into Pickler’s clever little contraption, and it reached directly for the hidden sheath. It was not quite quick enough I didn’t catch its wrist, though, and it was all downhill from there. There was no need for a brawl: I just squeezed and the bones broke. The drow paled in pain and tried to roll away, but I put a thumb on its collarbone and pressed. The sickening crack that followed was almost drowned out by its scream. Almost. I dropped it back onto the ground.

“Ivah,” I mildly said. “Inform Bogdan that if I actually exerted myself, I could punch through its ribcage and spine without so much as scuffing my knuckles. Once that’s been established, tell our friend it has ten heartbeats to give me a reason not to do that. I’ll begin the count the moment you’re done translating.”

My guide flinched and hurriedly spoke.

“One,” I said.

Bogdan, eyes clouded with pain, looked at Ivah and then back to me.

“Two,” I said.

Ah, fear. There was a familiar scent. The drow spoke urgently at my translator.

“Bogdan is now willing to speak,” Ivah drily said.

“Its wisdom truly has no bounds,” I replied just as drily. “Ask about the dwarves.”

Back and forth they went, my guide going through what I presumed from the length to be a comprehensive gauntlet of questions. Ivah suddenly looked surprised, then spat to the side. It turned a trouble look towards me.

“None who were Kodrog remain,” it said. “The nerezim were many, and armed for war. They moved with slaughter for their purpose.”

“How many?” I asked. “Hundreds, thousands?”

“Bogdan knows not the whole number,” Ivah said. “Yet more than five thousand struck those who were Kodrog, and before that ruin came there was word that the Solya and the Mogrel were struck.”

My eyes narrowed.

“In sequence?” I said. “Or simultaneously?”

Ivah questioned the prisoner, receiving one word for answer.

“Same time,” it replied.

“Those two names you said were sigils as well?” I said.

“That is so,” Ivah agreed.

“Stronger or weaker than the Kodrog?”

My translator shrugged.

“Not much weaker or stronger,” it said. “The outer rings do not often spawn greatness.”

Assuming the dwarves had used the same amount of soldiers for each sigil, and that the force that’d hit the Kodrog was not the same as either of the other two, that meant around fifteen thousand dwarves. Shit . Archer was right, that didn’t sound like an expedition gone through the Gloom to empty a few mine shafts of precious metals and gems.

“Does it know why the dwarves came?” I frowned.

“The nerezim do not give reason,” Ivah delicately said. “Snake does not reason with mouse.”

I sighed. Yeah, a monologue neatly informing me of why there was a dwarven army marching into the depths of the Everdark had been a little too much to hope for. Still, they could have dropped a smug yet cryptic hint at least. Was that really too much to ask for?

“Does it know where they were headed, at least?” I said.

Back and forth, one that lasted longer than I’d anticipated. Bogdan might actually be of some real use then.

“Before Mighty Kodrog fled,” Ivah said, “it found that the nerezim were headed north. And while in flight, found tracks of others that did the same.”

“Towards the cities,” I said. “And the inner ring.”

My translator nodded silently. I drummed my fingers against my tigh. It could be what they were after was in a ruined city, or even the inner ring, and that was why they’d come with such a large host. The opposition would be stronger and entrenched, further in. But what could possibly be worth enough that sending at least fifteen thousand soldiers into this mess became warranted? That was too large an army for simple wealth, even if there was an old treasury buried somewhere. Artefacts, maybe? It was an open secret that dwarves stole those, let a few decades pass and traded them back to the surface as ‘wonders of dwarven blacksmithing’ after having slapped a fresh coat of paint over them. Still, fielding an army this side wasn’t cheap. I knew that painfully well. It would have to be a massively useful or precious artefact. Not impossible, and it might even be that the pit of snakes that was drow society had regressed enough it no longer knew how to use said artefact – which would make it even more tempting a prize.

That was worrying. Anything worth sending an army for would be dangerous even in the hands of a bumbler, and the dwarves were hardly that.

“Ivah,” I said. “Do you know of anything important close to the north? Old ruins, or a holy site?”

“The closest city is Great Lotow,” the drow replied. “Beyond it the Hallian ways lead to Great Strycht and Great Mokosh.”

That gave me nothing. I knew one of those names, from – wait, Mokosh ?

“Great Mokosh,” I said quietly. “That’s where you got your feathers, isn’t it?”

“That is so,” Ivah said.

“And you mentioned the sigil there was granted by the Sve of Night itself,” I slowly continued. “Is there a passage between it and Holy Tvarigu?”

“It is rumoured,” my guide admitted. “Yet none but the Sukkla know for certain, and they speak not of this.”

I might be going too deep with this one, since I doubted even fifteen thousand dwarves would be able to get to the Priestess of Night, much less killer. But there was a simpler explanation. Ivah had implied, when we’d spoken of it, that dwarven incursions were infrequent and tended to keep to the outskirts. Odds were that the method to pierce through the Gloom either required time to take place, or a non-negligible amount of resources to implement. Maybe it was wasn’t an artefact they were after. How much easier for the Kingdom Under would it be to take regulars bites out of the drow, if they had enough feathers to equip an entire army?

“How many feathers are there in Mokosh?” I said. “Is the number a secret?”

Ivah shook its head.

“It is holy duty, known to all,” it said. “At all times a thousand coats must exist, every one taken to the Burning Lands replaced. Never more or less.”

I frowned. Well, a thousand wasn’t nothing. And they could use them repeatedly, or try to make artefacts of their own that replicated the effect. But my theory had taken a blow there, no two ways about it. It could be a long-term investment, I told myself. Or I could be missing key information.

“Does our friend Bogdan have anything else to say?” I finally asked.

Ivah asked, and there was a quick exchange. My translator came out of it looking conflicted, and smelling slightly of fear.

“Mighty Bogdan offers to serve as your guide in my place, after harvesting the Night from my corpse,” it said.

“How kind of it,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “There’s no need to be afraid, Ivah. We made a deal and I intend to uphold it.”

“Your kindness is great,” it replied, bowing its head.

The fear was not wafting as strong, though it’d not disappeared entirely. Drow had trust issues that would make even Praesi raise an eyebrow. I rose to my feet, dusted off my shoulders. I’d come out of this with more questions than answers, but at least there’d been measurable progress. Hopefully Indrani would find something shedding light on this mess, though I wouldn’t count on it. It seemed likely we’d have to head deeper into the tunnels blind to the designs at play. The dwarves would likely clear the way, which was a mixed blessing. It’d limit the fighting, but I couldn’t ally with corpses. It was starting to look like my best bet was to head to Tvarigu, where the Priestess of Night would be waiting. If I could have stolen an army’s worth of drow without ever shaking hands with that particular devil I would have preferred it, but choices were running even thinner than usual.

“Inform Bogdan it is to behave itself,” I told Ivah. “If not, I have no qualms in doling out discipline as harsh as the situation requires. Diabolist will have a look at the broken bones, but I’m not inclined to offer too much comfort after that little interlude of ours.”

The drow bowed once more, and I left it to speak with the creature that had once been Mighty Kodrog. Gods, so many names and changing too quickly. That was going to be a pain to commit to memory. I’d have to go through Archer’s stuff and see if she had parchment and ink, it might help to make a bloody list. I had the time to kill anyway, we weren’t going anywhere until she returned. Two hour later, she did. To my surprise, she emerged from the same passage that had first led us into this cavern.

The surprises that followed were a lot less pleasant.

—

Archer looked exhausted, more than I ever remembered seeing her. She claimed a waterskin after dropping down on a vaguely flat stone, another surprising turn. She’d yet to run out of booze, after all. Scarf hanging loosely around her neck, she dropped her sweat-soaked leather coat to the side and fanned herself vigorously enough she could only be making the heat worse.

“Had to run,” she got out.

I blinked in surprise. The tunnels had so far varied between cool and outright cold. It’d take quite a bit to get her this sweaty.

“How long have you been running?” I said.

“At least an hour,” she grunted. “And we’ll need to get a move on too.”

“You found something,” Akua said.

“There’s that famous Sahelian cleverness,” Indrani replied. “Sharp eyes you got there. Or, well, soul bits that look like them. I’m still unclear on the fundamentals of what you are, Wasteland Waste.”

“Even Masego was pretty vague,” I said. “You sound like an hourglass just got flipped, Indrani. What did you find?”

She ceased drinking just long enough to pour the liquid all over head sweat-drenched hair, sighing in pleasure.

“Right,” she said, wiping her eyes clear, “So I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“Let’s start with the good news, for once,” I tried.

“The good news is that there’s only one bit of bad news,” she replied with a winning smile.

Akua closed her eyes, looking physically pained.

“I cannot believe I fell for that,” she muttered.

“What’s the bad news, Archer?” I sighed.

“I went looking for the dwarves ahead,” she said. “Didn’t run into them, but I found clearer tracks in one of the taverns. It’s not hundreds, Cat, I’d say they’re numbering between four and five thousand.”

“Our friend from earlier said as much,” I told her. “And mentioned than another two sigils got hit around the same time. I’m considering them a conservative fifteen, at the moment.”

“Shit,” Indrani said, scattering her wet hair. “Yeah, that makes sense considering what I found. So the thing was, I came across a tunnel going back towards the Gloom and it had a fresh trail on it. Oil spill, still wet.”

“So you followed it,” I said. “You came back same way we came in.”

“That wasn’t where the tunnel led,” she grimly replied. “Went straight through another slaughterhouse, only this one had been cleaned up. Neat piles of dead to the sides. Couldn’t figure out why until I went back all the way to the Gloom.”

“More are crossing,” Diabolist quietly said.

“You might say that,” Indrani grunted. “Interesting aside, if you were wondering how they go through the Gloom? Lamps, ladies. They’re going through in massive caravans carrying hundreds of them, like a giant snake of light. Pretty sure that’s where the oil was from, someone must have spilled some.”

“You got close,” I said, and it wasn’t a question.

“Stone’s throw,” she admitted. “Legged it when they started getting suspicious, but then I came across another crossing.”

My fingers clenched.

“How many?”

“I found six,” Indrani said. “But that was maybe an hour’s length of distance, walking quiet. There could be hundreds for all I know.”

“You think this is an invasion,” I said.

“I think the nice little corpse piles we keep finding were the vanguard’s work,” she said. “And now that a foothold’s been secured, the real army is coming through.”

“And that army’s marching towards us as we speak,” I finished.

Well... fuck seemed to mild a curse, for once. Assuming all three forces I was also assuming were five thousand each had crossed on a single caravan each, just the six Indrani had come across would mean thirty thousand.

“The lamps you saw,” Akua said. “What did the light look like?”

“Not like a candle,” Indrani said. “Sunlight, maybe? Whatever it was it felt warm as the literal Hells and I would know – I’ve visited a few on training trips. Didn’t work every time, though. One of the lamps further in went dark just before I left a place, and what must have been thousands in the distance just... vanished. The dwarves weren’t happy about that.”

I wished I could say I was surprised Ranger had taken her pupils into the Hells just to blood them, but it would have been a lie. She’d done it with Arcadia, after all, and it was about as dangerous a place even when invited.

“A detail of great importance, this,” Diabolist said. “The Gloom seems to have properties related to the night, and so therefore the classical element of the sun would be a natural foe.”

Wait, the godsdamned sun was a – yeah, next time I saw Masego I was definitely asking him for a list.

“This will be the result of an enchantment,” Akua continued. “And if it is meant to last an entire crossing uninterrupted, the materials will have to be symbolically linked to the concept. Brightwood would serve well, but deteriorate too quickly. And is exceedingly rare besides. I would hazard a guess that the frame of the lamps was gold?

“Wow, Akua,” Indrani drawled. “You sure did answer that question no one was asking like a champion. You truly are the bag of uselessness that keeps on giving.”

“No,” I said. “This is actually important, Archer. I know the dwarves are the richest nation on Calernia, but even they have limits on how much gold they can just whip out. You said the other material would deteriorate, Akua. The gold too?”

“More slowly,” she replied. “A few days, if the enchantments were laid very carefully. It should allow for a passage through the Gloom.”

“But not a return trip,” I said.

“Not unless the fuel itself is inherently magical-”

“Which would make this the single most expensive invasion in the history of Calernia,” I noted. “Though it might very well be regardless.”

“-and that would add large costs to an already costly device,” Akua finished, sounding mildly irritated by my interruption. “The lamps would be extremely delicate work, the slightest mistake or corruption making them useless. They would need to be constructed in a specialized workshop, preferably in a magically neutral environment. Neither repairs nor making of fresh replacements should be possible on this side of the Gloom. ”

“Still not seeing why this matters, even if you’re right,” Indrani said, ruffling her scarf.

“Because even lesser artefacts don’t grow on trees,” I said. “Particularly if they need gold to work. They have to have a limited quantity of those to draw from, and you said one of the tunnels went dark anyway. There’s risks of failure too. If it was that easy to mount an invasion they would have done it ages ago. This is a massive investment of resources, probably prepared over decades. They’ll have had to make a choice.”

“A larger number of troops to get across,” Akua said, completing my thought, “or setting aside lamps to maintain supply lines.”

“Keeping the lines open means leaving soldiers behind to guard them,” I said. “Who need rations too, and the broader the area to guard the more mouths there’d be to feed and the more soldiers taken from the main force. And let’s assume the crossing fails... one time out of ten, which seems on the low end to me. The price escalates the longer they keep at this. It’d be more practical so send one large army through with their own supplies, then let them live off the land until they got what they came for.”

“They sent the vanguard to clear the way, so the larger army can advance without wasting time on petty skirmishes,” Indrani guessed.

“The sigils of the region were exterminated quite thoroughly,” Diabolist noted. “Suppressing word of the invasion was likely an objective as well. It would allow the dwarves to penetrate deep into the Everdark before organized resistance is mounted.”

“This is going to be a shitshow,” Archer grimaced. “Living off the land here ? There’s barely enough for the drow to live on. Even if they manage to keep the ranks fed while they fight out there, they’ll have to march back through a place they stripped clean then risk the crossings again.”

“Did you see any of them carrying unlit lamps across?” Akua softly asked.

Indrani’s eyes narrowed. She shook her head. My fingers clenched.

“They don’t intend to leave,” I said, voicing everyone’s thoughts. “The army’s here to destroy whatever causes the Gloom, and then the rest of the Kingdom Under comes through to take the Everdark.”

And there we were, between the vanguard and the army. Well, I’d come here expecting a magical journey and I had certainly gotten one.

Curses were magic too.

Chapter 57: Betwixt

“Come now, my lords, you started this war knowing what I’m about.”
– Dread Empress Massacre the First

It was too large for a pond but much too small for a lake. A reservoir? Nah, I was pretty sure that implied spadework, which this clearly didn’t have. Pool, maybe. Regardless, it was a source of unsullied freshwater and it’d been almost a day since we’d run into one of those. Tactically redeploying in the opposite direction of an incoming army was thirsty work and the drow weren’t nearly as enduring as the rest of us, so it was probably time for a break. We’d need a bit to refill the skins, anyway, and if there was some kind of edible creature in there it’d be a nice change of pace from our increasingly stale rations. Indrani had taken to pouring brandy on hers, though in all honesty I wasn’t sure whether the taste was the actual reason for that.

“Half hour,” I called out, withdrawing the finger’s I’d been dipping into the waters. “Ivah, tell your fellows they’re responsible for rationing their water as well as filling the skins. They’re not dipping in ours a second time no matter how thirsty they get.”

I could make ice and let it melt into drinking water, sure, but at the moment we were keeping a low profile. I wasn’t sure whether the dwarves had some sort of device that would allow them to sense sorcery, but if they did I was pretty sure using Winter to any great extent would be like lighting a brightstick in a dark room. My mantle could do subtle, theoretically speaking, but it’d never been a specialty of mine and I wasn’t willing to gamble our remaining hidden on it. My guide nodded and addressed the rest of its kind in an even tone. Ever since the former Mighty Kodrog had been disciplined and I’d declined to let anyone harvest its Night and serve as a replacement guide, Ivah had gotten much more self-assured.

Akua had voiced opinion that since it’d functioned as a lieutenant to a violent and unpredictable entity for decades, it was falling back on those habits now that it was under my protection. Bogdan wasn’t too happy about that, but I’d ordered Diabolist to get the broken bones patched up and nothing more. The message had been received, from the way it was now behaving much more carefully. I got up from my crouch and sighed. Our pace was being slowed down by the drow more than I’d like, but there was little I could do about it and leaving them behind wasn’t on the table. If they weren’t in my custody, they’d be in that of the dwarves. Indrani was at my side a heartbeat later, footsteps so soft I’d barely heard them.

“They’re getting near the end of their rope,” she observed. “Might want to give them a full hour instead, stretch out the last gasps.”

“We’re already crawling at a snail’s pace,” I grunted back. “You’ve said it yourself, we’re probably a little more than a day ahead of the dwarven army.”

“Guesswork,” Indrani reminded me.

“Guesswork based on the messengers you’ve seen going back and forth,” I replied. “We’re not swinging in the dark here.”

She opened her mouth, but I raised my hand.

“If what passes your lips is a pun, Archer, I will drown you myself,” I threatened.

There was a pause.

“Fill my skins,” she offered, sounding very casual. “I’ll take a look ahead, see if I can rustle up anything.”

“Ivah says we’re nearing the edge of the outer rings,” I told her. “If the vanguard is going to dig in and wait for reinforcements, it’ll be soon. The odds of running into the army have significantly increased.”

“If they dig in, it’s our opportunity to go around them,” Indrani countered. “Best we know as soon as possible and plan accordingly.”

I mulled over that. She had a point. Half the reason she wanted to go for a wander was likely that she was starting to feel like she had a leash around her neck – I’d asked her to cut back how far she went on her exploratory trips – but she was right on the nose about the vanguard digging in. My bet, at the moment, was that when they got close to the first strong drow position they’d set up and wait for proper assault troops. If we went around them while their eyes were on the local sigil, there were decent odds we could make it through without getting noticed.

“Do it,” I finally said, taking the mostly empty water skin in her hands. “As usual-”

“Tread lightly, steel stays in the sheath,” she finished, rolling her eyes. “At this rate you’re going to get that tattooed on my arse.”

“I assumed something deeply tasteless was already taking up the space,” I replied without missing a beat.

“Hey, my arse is extremely tasteful,” she protested.

“You’re confusing words again,” I airily said. “What you’re looking for is tawdry .”

She flipped me off, I mimed drowning her in the pool and with the traditional rites complete we parted ways. I watched her saunter away, though with the leather coat on there wasn’t much to look at, and absent-mindedly tossed up the skin before snatching it out of the air. The drow were going about their business visibly exhausted, and to my quiet amusement Mighty Bogdan seemed to have no earthly idea how to fill up a skin. I was too entertained by its struggles to seriously consider offering help. Akua was kneeling by the pool as well, though her skin – which she didn’t need, or use – was full. She was staring at the far wall, unmoving. A few steps took me to her side, and in a blatant abused of my queenly prerogatives I threw Archer’s skin at her shoulder.

“There,” I said. “Since you seem in need of something to keep your hands busy.”

The shade picked up the leathery folds between two fingers, somehow managing a full monologue’s worth of disdain without speaking a word.

“It smells like aragh,” she said.

“So does Archer, half the time,” I shrugged. “What deep thoughts did I take you away from, Diabolist?”

“I was pondering,” she said, “the nature of this invasion.”

“The term is usually pretty self-explanatory,” I noted, only half-serious.

“Context, Catherine,” she chided. “This was a significant investment of resources, even for the Kingdom Under. The kind that would have to be prepared over the span of decades, requiring specialized labour otherwise in high demand and significant preparations of logistics.”

“And you’re wondering why they’d bother, given that the Everdark is a mess of collapsing tunnels filled with violent lunatics,” I said. “I mean, there’s the obvious answer. Drow don’t mine much, as far as we can tell. Lots of wealth to claim once they take over the place.”

“Over time, the investment made could be recovered tenfold,” Akua agreed. “Yet we both know that kind of long term planning in the highest reaches of a nation is a rarity. The expense would have to be justified in the face of more immediate uses for that coin giving more obvious benefit.”

“It’s rare on the surface,” I said. “Where sinking that much of your treasury into anything makes you weak elsewhere and your rivals will take advantage of it. What rivals do they have left, down here? They can afford to take the long view. Hells, they live longer than humans too. This could just be the life’s work of some highly influential dwarf.”

How long dwarves actually lived remained a matter of bitter and divisive scholarly debate, a matter not helped by the fact that their kind lied profusely about the matter whenever they ventured to the surface. Theories ranged from a few hundred years to a couple thousand, though most scholars agreed it was under five hundred. Considering people weren’t even sure how dwarves reproduced, lifespan uncertainty was no surprise.

“And yet the invasion only takes place now,” Diabolist said.

I could have replied that there was precedent for the Kingdom Under evicting other underground nations to the surface largely out of principle – the goblins were testament to that – but that would rather be missing the point, wouldn’t it? Dates for the goblin exodus were vague, since the Tribes rarely gave straight answers to anything unless there was a blade at their throat, but it was a fact it preceded the Miezan occupation of Praes. Which meant at least a millennium and a half ago. If the entire point of this was to remove a rival power, however comparatively weak that rival was, then they’d taken quite a while to get around to finishing the work.

“Might be it was just that one tedious chore they never got around to doing,” I mused. “They polished off the rest of the list over the centuries, now they’re out of excuses not to massacre the neighbours.”

“Overdue spring cleaning,” Akua mildly said. “This is your theory for what drives the fate of two nations?”

“You got anything better?” I said.

“Let us assume,” the shade said, “that the Everdark’s continued sovereignty is the result of dwarven incapacity instead of unwillingness .”

“Which is a wild guess on your part,” I said.

“One that aligns with other facts,” Diabolist said. “Regardless, it is fact that there was a dwarven contingent on the surface during the Liesse Rebellion.”

“Mercenaries,” I said. “That’s not exactly unheard of. They also took the first bribe offered to leave.”

“Because their purpose was not to make war, but to assess the situation,” Akua suggested.

“They already do that through Mercantis, supposedly,” I said. “Everyone sells information about everyone else in exchange for crumbs about what’s happening down here. Why send soldiers?”

“A host of dwarven infantry would represent a significant force,” she said. “One which would be worthy of courting by surface powers, as the Carrion Lord did. As the Callowan rebels did, and the First Prince behind them.”

My eyes narrowed.

“So you think the point was to gauge how invested all the players were in the rebellion and the wars that would follow it,” I said. “They shouldn’t need to go that far, Akua. Who the Hells would be stupid enough to pick a fight with the Kingdom Under? They’ll be selling cheap weapons to at least half the nations involved in any scuffle. There’s a reason the Principate can throw massed levies at us without going bankrupt.”

“Dread Empress Triumphant, may she never return-”

“Forced them to pay tribute, sure,” I interrupted, rolling my eyes. “Once, after she flooded a few of their tunnels with demons. Didn’t stop them from funding and arming a continent’s worth of rebellions against her a few years later, did it? They just threw gold at her so she’d fuck off and then paid for other humans to actually put her down. Let’s not pretend it was more than a headache for them.”

“That is still precedent for a surface power proving troublesome to dwarven interests,” Akua insisted. “A cautious assessment of the situation was therefore made, yielding the answer that the largest surface powers were preparing for large scale and long term warfare.”

“After which they did nothing,” I said. “That was years ago, and they’re only moving now. I doubt it would take them that long to mobilize.”

“Indeed,” the shade agreed in a murmur. “They acted only after a much more recent development.”

It wasn’t the Tenth Crusade. There had, after all, been nine predecessors to it. But if her argument was about a power on the move that usually remained put...

“How would they know about the Dead King?” I frowned. “It’s not like he sent them a letter. We don’t even known how he’ll go about participating in the war, and we were guests in Keter not that long ago.”

“The Kingdom Under has borders with the Kingdom of the Dead,” Akua said.

“Which are, famously, tunnels they drowned in lava and molten metal until there was nothing left moving,” I said.

“Your argument is that the preeminent power on Calernia has no way to observe the going-ons at its most dangerous border,” Akua mildly said.

I grimaced. Yeah, fair point.

“So they see him pull back his undead for a push on the surface,” I mused, following the thread. “And take that as an open invitation to march on the Everdark. Why? That’s still thin, Akua. If they’re that worried about the Dead King, why take the risk at all? It’s not like the drow are a threat to them.”

“So I wondered,” Diabolist admitted. “If neither wealth nor pride are the reason, then why? It cannot be room for expansion, they could simply layer deeper. Such a large undertaking could hardly be made without sanction from the highest powerbrokers of dwarven authority. That implies, to me, a strategic motive.”

“Hard to guess at those when no one knows their exact borders,” I said.

She nodded in agreement. I narrowed my eyes at her.

“But you have a theory anyway,” I said.

“After your distant kin settled in what is now the Duchy of Daoine,” she said, “the largest threat to them was greenskin raids. Yet they did not strike directly at the clans, instead raising the Wall. Why?”

Because only an idiot would try to take the Steppes. The Miezans had done it, sure, but they’d had a whole arsenal of advantages no one on Calernia could boast of having and there’d actually been orc cities to target back then. Which wa no longer the case: even after the Reforms, the Clans had remained nomadic. Rulers of Daoine could and had cleared out belligerent clans near the Greenskin Marches but there’d never been a serious effort to conquer the Steppes. The orcs would just retreat deeper in and the Deoraithe armies would have to settle in for winter in hip-deep snow with nothing to live off of and a lot of angry orcs on the prowl. Which , I thought , is Akua’s point .

“Containment,” I slowly said. “Ratlings don’t lair deep, so they’d have a free hand under the Chain of Hunger. You think they know they can’t take the Dead King, so they’re trying to bottle him up instead. And for the encirclement to be complete the drow need to go.”

“Should any significant drow presence remain in the region, the fortresses maintaining that encirclement would suffer sporadic assault,” Akua said. “To make the sealing easily sustainable-”

“They need the drow gone,” I quietly said. “Dead or far, far away.”

We filled our skins in silence, after that. It was a fragile house of cards that she’d built one sentence at a time, and all it’d take for it to crumple was a single assumption proved false. But it sounded like a distinct possibility. That was always the problem, with Akua. She was a skilled speaker, one that could spin a decent story out of nearly anything given long enough . But if she’s right... Either the drow drove back the dwarves – and reckless as I was, I wouldn’t t put gold on that – or there’d be a an entire race of vagrants needing greener pastures to move to.

That, I thought, sounded like an opportunity to me.

—

Archer had returned without any fanfare, before the hour of rest she’d talked me into was even over. We stood to the side of the others, speaking quietly in tongues they would not know.

“This place is about to be a war zone, Cat.” Indrani said.

“You found the dwarven vanguard, then,” I guessed.

She brushed back her hair, lashes fluttering over hazelnut eyes as she did. Her longcoat was open, revealing the silvery mail beneath, but she wore the metal as nonchalantly as if it were cloth.

“Part of it, anyway,” she confirmed. “If there used to be three forces of five thousand like you guessed, that’s no longer the case. There were at least eight thousand preparing to give battle.”

“That’s too large a force of a single cavern,” I said.

“Not if it’s a huge godsdamned cavern,” Indrani snorted. “It’s at least the size of Laure. There were a bunch of lichen and mushroom farms down there, I think it might have been some kind of food centre. Water too, the largest body we’ve come across so far.”

“I was under the impression we were still a few days away from the closest city,” I said.

“”Dunno about a city, but there were a pack of drow there for sure,” she said. “Cavern’s a drop from our current height – the dwarves found another way down, I must have missed it – and near the back there’s some sort of massive stalagmite melding into the wall that the locals carved into.”

“Walls?” I asked.

“Nah, nothing like that,” Indrani replied, shaking her head. “It’s like some sort of spiral ramp going up. Pretty sure it’s flat at the top, but my vantage points was sloppy. The whole thing might be hollow, for all I know. There were tents going all the way to the top.”

“That’s defensible against even heavy infantry,” I said. “If the ramps are narrow enough.”

“Our short friends were setting up a bunch of weird siege engines,” she said. “Infantry’s not all the drow are up against.”

Eight thousand, huh. That was more than half of what I currently believed the dwarven vanguard to number, which was promising but still meant seven thousand should be traipsing around the tunnels unaccounted for. Fighting underground like this would be different from the kind of wars I was familiar with. With tunnels it would be much easier to defend than attack, as a rule, particularly if the defender had powerful champions capable of holding a narrow area against superior numbers. On the other hand, without an open field flanking operations became a very different kind of enterprise. No plains down here, no way to see an enemy detachment until they were right on top of you. If I were the dwarves, I’d station hardened troops on the flanks to keep an eye out while I was moving against a fortified drow position. Assuming high-ranking Mighty were as dangerous as even just green Named bent towards combat, a single one slipping through defensive lines was enough to make a costly mess. I chewed on my lip thoughtfully.

“I don’t suppose you took a look at the adjacent tunnels?” I asked.

“Not in depth,” Indrani said. “Glanced down a few, though, and I got the impression most of them curve towards the large cavern.”

A chokepoint? It’d explain while the dwarves were willing to slow their advance to take it. Ivah’s knowledge of the region was sadly limited, as it’d only crossed it the once and under the understanding it was to move towards the Gloom as quickly as possible. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kingdom Under had maps, though, and good ones. It was tempting to try to get my hands on one even with the risks inherent to crossing dwarvenkind.

“They’re going to have the flanking tunnels under guard,” I finally said. “So far they’ve been careful to allow no runners. They’ll have the entire place sealed up.”

“That’s my guess,” Indrani agreed. “So what’s the plan, Your Queenlyness? We trying to shimmy through while they’re busy under a touch of the ol’ glamour?”

“We still don’t know if they can pick up on my using Winter,” I said.

“We do know they have eyes, Cat,” she replied. “I’m not fancying our chances of sneaking through a dwarven blockade without a little fae juice to help things along, and you know we can’t wait this out. The real army’s not far behind.”

I hummed, not disagreeing or agreeing.

“So we have to place a bet,” I said. “If you were a dwarf and you had devices that could pick up on sneaks – a pretty basic precaution, given who you’re invading – where would you put them? With the main force, or the flankers?”

“If I were a dwarf, I’d be massively rich and drunk all the time with a city’s worth of naked servants catering to my every twisted need,” Indrani mused.

“If you were a dwarf, but not a complete waste of a person,” I tried. “I know you don’t have a lot of experience with that, but use your imagination.”

She half-heartedly gestured for me to go hang myself.

“Would make sense for the shortstacks to keep the trinkets on the sides,” she finally said. “The stalagmite’s pretty fucking surrounded. But that’s assuming they don’t have enough devices to have them everywhere. And that they have those at all.”

“If they do have them everywhere, we’re screwed anyway,” I noted. “Best we can do is play the odds assuming they don’t.”

“So you want to take a stroll through an active battlefield,” Indrani snorted. “With a pack of unruly drow, a self-absorbed spectre and yours truly. That’s not one of our better plans, Cat, and that should not be a hard hill to climb given how we got into Skade.”

“Worked, didn’t it?” I said. “We played to our strengths-”

“Blatant lies,” she helpfully provided.

“- and their weaknesses,” I finished.

“Expecting sense of us?” she suggested.

“Unorthodox approaches,” I righteously corrected. “It’ll be dangerous, I don’t deny that, but then so is every other option on the table. I think this is the least stupid risk we can take. Unless you happen to have a better idea?”

“Aside from digging our own way through, not really,” Indrani mused. “And we’d need Winter for that anyway. Shovels alone wouldn’t cut it, and since Vivi left we don’t even have those anymore.”

I sighed and passed a hand through my hair.

“Well, let’s get moving then,” I said. “If this was a mistake, best to know it today.”

“Hey, look on the bright side,” she smiled. “If this is a horrible blunder that’s going to get all of us killed, then at least I won’t survive to give you shit about it.”

There was a silver lining, I mused. Shame it was on a cloud raining fire and brimstone, but that was life for you wasn’t it? Sometimes you just had to put on your good boots, bring out your sword and kill your way to the top of the flying fortress before you got to see daylight.

The last few years of my existence would have been a lot more pleasant if that were actually a metaphor.

Chapter 58: Quiet

“May the Heavens strike me down if I lie. Again.”
– Dread Emperor Abominable, the Thrice-Struck

No one in living memory had seen a dwarven army take the field, not on the surface anyway. Even with all the dangers swirling around us I’d been looking forward to that part. Since becoming the Squire I’d scrapped either with or to the side of most the famous militaries: the Legions of Terror, the Spears of Stygia, Helikean exiles, both fae Courts. My own people in rebellion, Akua’s host of old breed Praesi. The Tenth Crusade too, though in all fairness I’d seen neither hide nor hair of soldiers that weren’t Proceran in the northern campaign. There was little left to account for. The other cities of the League were hardly known for their soldiery – apparently Bellerophon didn’t even have career officers, which just boggled the mind – and Ashur was primarily a naval power. The Dead King and the Chain of Hunger were the last two contenders, since the elves didn’t really fight wars. I’d be facing the former sooner or later, and the latter was allegedly more horde than host. With the drow having proved to be a pack of squabbling assholes bleeding themselves over the right to be Creation’s ricketiest demigods, the only force of note that remained was the Kingdom Under. Juniper, I thought, would have given her right hand to stand in my shoes right at this moment.

Indrani had led us to the same perch she’d used on earlier trip, and for all that it felt overly exposed it did give us a perfect view of what took place below. She hadn’t been overselling the size of the cavern, I quickly found out. Large as Laure might, if anything, be an understatement. There were a lot more people in Callow’s capital, of course. Maybe half the cavern was taken up by a lake, which to my mild interest revealed itself to be another food source for the locals. There were fish farms, walled in with stones, and what I was pretty sure was crab traps though the creatures writhing inside didn’t look like any crab I’d seen before. Most of the rest was ‘farmland’. Raised stones covered with thick lichen, mushrooms patches and what looked like some strange cousin of potatoes wherever the dirt was thick enough. Most of that was now occupied by the dwarven vanguard. The only drow holdout was the massive stalagmite in the back that Indrani had mentioned, though she hadn’t done the sight of it justice with her short description.

At the base, it was about as thick as fortress. Archer had labelled the path up as a spiral, but the angle was too sharp for the term to really fit. It zig-zagged across the sides of the stalagmite with precision too defined to be anything but manmade, the parts of the path that passed between the stone spire and the wall of the cavern effectively tunnels. There’d been tents there before, but they’d been flattened or taken away by the drow awaiting the assault. Which was coming soon, there were no two ways about it. I could tell as much just by the way the army had been positioned. At the bottom of the stalagmite a force of three thousand was standing patiently, and I’d almost let out a whistle at my first good look. Dwarves were known for their heavy infantry as well as their lethal contraptions, but these soldiers went a step further than I’d expected. It was like looking at walking barrels of steel. It was plate, in the sense that their armour wasn’t mail, but layered so thickly no a spot of dwarf could be seen underneath. Not even the famous beards: the helmets bore face-covering masks that ended in a sculpted steel beard where I assumed their actual beards lay protected. The weight of that should be too heavy for even the famously physically strong dwarves to be able to move in, so while there were no runes to be seen on the surface I assumed some had been inscribed beneath. To a dwarf, they bore long halberds with steel shafts that weighed enough even Hakram would have difficulty swinging one around.

They’re weren’t infantry so much as a company of walking battering rams.

The five thousand remaining dwarves were less heavily armoured, at least. Three divisions of a thousand each wore ornate but otherwise unremarkable plate, with square shields and war hammers. They all had crossbows on their back. I was classifying them as regulars in my mind, though in anyone else’s army they would be heavies. The last thousand was... interesting. The most lightly armoured of the lot, with only steel cuirasses over leather and plumed helmets that left the faces bare. They attended to the three dozen war machines the vanguard had set up in a crescent facing the stalagmite. If Juniper would have given a hand to see the battle, then Pickler would have eaten her firstborn to get a good peek at those. About half the machines looked to be some kind of fat steel ballistas raised on wheeled platforms. Not even the rope was, well, rope. It looked to be some kind of woven metal chord. There were wagons full of spherical projectiles next to them, two per ballista. The remaining half of the engines was hard to classify. The basic shape was like an onager’s, more or less small and portable catapults. What a scorpion was to a ballista, though my sappers would string me up for making so broad a comparison. The similarity ended at the shape, though. The steel base had been nailed to the floor with spikes almost as large as the engine itself, and instead of spheres to throw the already-loaded projectiles looked like elongated battering rams in a metal I did not recognize.

I wasn’t sure what those were meant for, but I doubted the drow would enjoy it.

The last of the dwarves were maybe two hundred, including what I was pretty sure was their command staff. Their armour was closest to that of the regulars, but lined with enough precious stones to steady Callow’s treasury for a good year. Unlike the grunts they were mounted. No horses, though. Best way I could put it was the unholy offspring of a lizard and an insect: the creatures were scaled and their reptilian heads had an impressive set of fangs, but their legs numbered six and were strangely segmented. They had three claws at the end of those, though they looked like they’d been blunted. Those officers were only around four dozen in number, and the remainder was unlike any other troops I’d seen so far. They wore heavy cuirasses and mail beneath them, but no helmet and both hair and beard were almost obsessively braided. Their weapons were not standardized, ranging from greatsword to some kind of chain with spiked weights at the end, but the eye-catching part was the trophies dangling down their bodies. Skulls and claws, stingers and broken weapons. Indrani caught me looking and leaned closer.

“Deed-seekers,” she whispered. “Met of few in Refuge. They’re after things they’re not supposed to get according to other dwarves, so they’re trying to earn enough glory that they become worthy of getting them. Some came up to hunt in the Waning Woods. Heard others go through the gate in Levant to have a tussle with the stuff in the woods there.”

“They any good?” I whispered back.

“Ran across one who broke his hammer on a manticore’s horns so he beat it to death with his bare hands,” she said. “And I’m not talking a juvenile, the thing was fully grown. They’re pretty hardcore. Polite for dwarves, though. Those I met knew surface tongues and they were willing to pay for guides.”

“So crazy of the dangerous kind,” I grunted. “Just what we needed.”

The conversation ended there and for good reason: the dwarves were on the move. There was no horn, no trumpet or warning. The ballistas just shot their first volley and the battle began. The projectiles, round orbs of steel, smacked into the upper reaches of the stalagmite. They’d been denied a better target: the drow were holing up out of sight. Rock shattered under steel and the whole spire shook. My brow rose at the sight. Those hit a lot harder than anything my goblins had ever cooked up.

“Flushing out the drow, you think?” Indrani said.

“If that stalagmite is solid rock, it’ll take them a while to make a dent even with strong engines,” I said.

Twenty heartbeats later the second volley hit, hitting the same places with impressive accuracy. The drow remained in hiding, which I honestly couldn’t fault them for. Between the crossbows and the siege if they made a stand anywhere in the open they’d get slaughtered. Their best shot was to make the dwarves come to them and hold a narrow passage hidden away from the engines. Alas for the locals, it was not to be. Three volleys later the entire stalagmite cracked . I could see the fracture going through the side, jagged and large enough to be easily visible even from where Indrani and I were laying on the floor. The entire top third of the spire had been cracked, at least on the side facing the dwarves. Had the thing been hollow? Maybe. Still, crack or not the weight of that upper third was keeping it in place. My eyes moved to the second kind of engines, anticipating there would be answer to that. My instincts had been correct. The almost-onagers were being seen to, long steel chains being attached to the back of the ram-like projectiles. The chains led to matching cranked wheels, already nailed into the ground.

“They’re going to pull the damned thing down,” I murmured. “Gods.”

How? Even if they put dwarves to work the crank, they shouldn’t be strong enough to apply sufficient pressure. The rams flew and sunk into the stone like a knife through butter, shivering after coming to a rest. There’d been sorcery at work, I thought. Blades unfolding inside to give greater grip? Impossible to tell. Anyhow, my first question got an answer moments later. Only a single dwarf attended to each crank, but the moment they laid hands on them the wheels lit up with runes. Not even thirty heartbeats later, the whole upper third of the spire came toppling down. They’d angled it to it fell into the water instead of on their own troops, though the great splash wet a few of them anyway. My eyes narrowed as I returned my attention to the stalagmite. It was hollow. The drow inside were swarming like a hive that’d just gotten kicked. The angle of steel ballistas was adjusted, projectiles from the second wagons loaded, and the volley arced up moments later. The spheres were stone this time, not steel. I did not wait long to learn why: at the summit of their arc, just above the hollow, they burst. Burning rain fell down, reaping a harvest of screams and death.

“Lava,” I quietly said. “That was fucking lava.”

“I mean, it’s not like they’re ever going to run out,” Indrani mused. “I can see the logic behind it.”

“Don’t you try to make it sound like it’s reasonable to shoot magic lava stones at people, Archer,” I hissed. “Who even does that?”

“The dwarves, evidently,” she said.

Sadly, throttling her might have given away our position so it would have to wait. Our time to move was fast approaching, though. The moment the dwarven infantry engaged we’d be trying our luck at sneaking through. Our exit tunnel had already been picked out, and we had a route across that wouldn’t take us too close to the fighting. The drow had been on the defensive so far, but since it’d become clear that the dwarves had no intention to climb up and the alternative was remaining inside a hole that’d slowly get filled with molten rock they were finally coming out. It was the first time I was having a look at a drow force that wasn’t already a pile of corpses, so they earned my full attention. This is not a professional army , was my first thought. Even Proceran levies had officers and an order of battle, but the drow? This was a tribe of warriors, with not a single soldiers among it. I could make out the hierarchy by the way they were equipped. No steel to be found on any of them, but there were tiers of a sort. The lowest of the low wore skins and leathers, armed with spears and blades. I winced when I noticed some of those blades were bone . That wouldn’t even scratch the dwarven armour.

Higher up the ladder, and fewer in number, there were drow in obsidian and stone. The equipment was not uniform, some of them having what I’d consider decent armour while others wore essentially the same as the first batch only with dangling bits of stronger material over it. Their weapons were mostly iron, of passable make. They’d at least manage to leave a mark on the enemy before being slaughtered. The last and rarest were those I assumed to be Mighty. Only a dozen of them, but they stood out starkly from the rest. Garbed in long flowing robes of Night with shifting plaques of iron in it, they moved swift as arrows through the charging crowd. Spears were the only armament they seemed to wield, with what I was pretty sure were sharpened ruby heads. Wasn’t sure how that would measure up to steel, though I did remember rubies were supposed to be one of the harder gemstones. The whole muster of the sigil was maybe two thousand. They’d get brutalized when they got to the bottom of the spire and engaged the dwarven heavy infantry, but the dwarves seemed disinclined to allow even that.

One of the mounted officers brought a horn to his lips, the first signal of the battle, and the deep call got the regulars moving. The square shields were set down to cover their bodies, crossbows taken out and the proverbial fish in the barrel got that same proverbial end. It was a relief to see that their firing rate was lesser than that of my legionaries. The range, though, was at least double. I would not want to fight those on an open field. The bolts scythed through the drow as they kept charging down the ramp, though only for the lesser warriors. The rest melded into the shadow-state when they saw the volleys approach. The ballistas had never ceased firing, slowly emptying the wagons of projectiles. Lava kept raining down into the hollow spire. The screams hadn’t ended either, and I was fairly sure the only warriors in the cavern were the ones charging to their doom. It would have been interesting to see how Mighty fared against dwarven infantry, but I didn’t intend to stick around until the final clean up. Their attention should be on the drow, for now, and that was our way out. I elbowed Archer and gestured towards our back. She nodded and we crawled out of sight before rising. The others were a short ways back, Akua keeping an eye on them.

They’d been waiting on us, and there was little need for conversation when time finally came to move. The plan was fairly simple. Indrani had the rope and hook to allow us to climb down to the floor of the cavern below, and the drow should have no issue managing it. The only thing up in the air was whether or not our friends would pick up on my use of Winter, and there was no real way to know that without trying it. Glamour shouldn’t draw as much attention as more direct uses, so it was as calculated a risk as we could take. I returned back to the edge, and with a deep breath allowed Winter to slither through my veins. I kept it simple, erasing our presence to the senses – I wasn’t sure whether the dwarven mounts could smell us at a distance, but I wasn’t about to take the risk. The working wasn’t too complicated, but it would take concentration to keep it going. The moment it settled, I glanced down at the battle. The dwarves had not stirred, which was promising. I gestured for the others to begin climbing down.

It was a tense half-hour before everyone made it to the cavern floor, shimmying down before Archer tugged back her rope. I’d not been certain whether or not I could keep the glamour going while having to focus on going down the rope, so an alternative solution had been required. The working should take care of the sound, and that was the important part. I glanced down and shrugged. Only thirty feet or so. I’d fallen down worse before. I leapt. Wings would make this much easier, admittedly, but they would require drawing deeper on my mantle. Besides, I mused even as the ground came ever closer, I’d been meaning to find out something. If I could turn myself into outright mist, finer manipulations should be possible as well. I landed on the stone in a crouch, having meddled with my legs, and found mixed results. Strengthening my knees had succeeded at making sure they wouldn’t break, which had been my main objective. Sadly, it’d also torn up whatever smoke and mirrors passed for my leg muscles these days. Half a win, I decided, adjusting my cloak where the fall had put it in disarray. The muscles were already reforming. Next time I’d have to see if I could make the entire legs solid without rupturing my insides above them.

The others clustered around me without a word. I’d made it clear that the closest to me they stood, the easiest it was to keep up the glamour. Our way through was still open, thank the Gods. Dwarven forces had been placed to prevent the drow in the spire from escaping, not occupy the whole cavern, which was too large for that regardless. It meant that if we kept close to the wall on the left side, we avoided coming close to the battle. In a strange and silent pilgrimage we tread through moss and mushrooms until we were hugging the wall and began our way through. My control was not fine enough to erase our footsteps, I’d warned them. It took longer to go through while avoiding leaving visible marks on the ground, but there was no other option. I’d never kept a working going this long before, and now I knew why I’d unconsciously avoided it: the longer I did the more I could feel Winter’s influence creeping into my mind, even if I was drawing no deeper on my power. Fortunately, Akua was there for me to shunt the influence into. It was almost tenser to stalk through unseen than take part in the fighting, I thought. Battle I knew well, but this? It wasn’t my wheelhouse. It took us most an hour to get across, and by then there was not a single living drow left.

I’d not had a good look at the last of the fighting, but the dwarven heavy infantry hadn’t been shaken by the doomed charge of the Mighty in the slightest. The regulars had gone up the slope afterwards, into the hollow part, and soon after the screams had gone silent. There’d never been a chance the drow would win this, and the outer rings were supposed to be the weakest part of the Everdark, but if this was a sign of what was to come... Well, I didn’t fancy the chances of the drow as a whole to turn back this invasion. I allowed the thought to fade as we neared our chosen tunnel. Archer hadn’t had a chance to take a look inside, but she’d noted it was the most lightly guarded. Ivah had gone through one close to it, on its way to the Gloom, and assured us that after another large abandoned cavern it led into a mess of small paths. Enough that it would be more or less impossible to keep an eye on all of them. It was a detour, taking us to the northeast when the quicker route would have been straight north, but a few additional days were well worth keeping out of sight. I was an old hand at disaster, by now, so my nerves grew more ragged as we neared the exit. If this was going to fail, it was going to fail now.

There were dwarves near the tunnel, but only a small company. Less than a hundred. It was my first time coming this close to their kind, but I did not slow to take a better look. Distractions were the enemy of this not-fight. I did note they were regulars, however. Those in layered armour might not be too common. More importantly, they were dawdling near the tunnel and not blocking the exit. We passed them by, step by step. I felt a dim spike of fear when a pair began talking loudly in some dwarven tongue, but they began brawling not long after and I let out a relieved breath. My shoulders loosened as we left them behind, allowing myself a strangled laugh. I wasn’t a fool, of course. I wouldn’t drop the glamour until we were much further in. But it looked like – no, I wasn’t going to finish that fucking thought. Never count the chickens, Catherine, even when they’re hatched. The Gods will shove them back in the fucking eggs just to spite you. Being absolutely still in the middle of the metaphorical woods, we pressed on. Archer took the lead, Ivah at her side, and they took us through a handful of short passages in quick succession. It was maybe another quarter hour until we reached the large cavern Ivah had mentioned.

Abandoned was something of a misnomer, as it was currently full of dwarves. Slightly more problematic was the way my glamour was ripped apart before we even entered. Runes shone on the tunell walls, panes of force fell down around us and dwarven yells sounded in the distance. I looked up angrily.

“Can I really not have a single chicken?” I complained. “You tight-fisted assholes.”

Chapter 59: Audience

“Note: bottling up the power of friendship cannot be achieved by bottling up friends. Must pursue further trials, perhaps prior liquefaction diluted the substance.”
– Extract from the journal of Dread Emperor Malignant II

So, runic trap. Just what my day had been needing. I ran a palm across the transparent pane of force and found it solid. A sharp rap of the knuckles told me it was probably breakable, if I exerted myself. This wasn’t a ward so much a magical pit trap, although one we’d strolled right into.

“Cat,” Indrani hissed. “Now’s a good time to do the Winter thing.”

Was it, though? The panes didn’t mute sound, so I could hear the dwarves running towards us. It was hard to tell their numbers, with all that armour jostling, but I’d wager at least a hundred. I could most likely shatter the back of the trap and leg it with the others back into the tunnels. Except we’d have a dwarven company hot on our heels, the alarm would spread and there was a non-negligible chance we’d end up in more or less the same situation in half an hour, only with having attempted to escape added to our first impression.

“We’re going to talk to them,” I finally said.

“Or you could open a godsdamned portal and get us out of here,” Indrani said. “Like, now.”

“To where?” I said. “Either we go blind, which seems like a very bad idea underground, or we go back. Where the army is.”

“Or we could stay in Arcadia for a bit, until they’re gone,” she said.

“The gate out would lead us back here,” Diabolist said. “I do not believe it likely they will leave this place unguarded after the traps were triggered.”

“Archer, they’ll be curious enough about our presence they’ll want to interrogate us,” I said. “If it really does go to shit, I’ll grab everyone and leg it into Arcadia. But I want to try to talk to them first, at least.”

I caught movement form the corner of my eye, but it wasn’t dwarves. The drow accompanying us had gone still, when the runes shone, but the conversation between the three of us had gotten their attention. We’d been speaking Lower Miezan, so not even Ivah should be able to understand us, but if they were guessing from the tones that might not matters. One of the drow we’d caught on surface said something in Crepuscular, addressing Ivah, who nodded and then turned silver eyes to me.

“They would like weapons, Queen, since we are to fight,” my guide said in Chantant.

“We won’t be fighting them,” I replied in the same. “I’m going to speak with whoever leads them.”

“Nerezim do not negotiate, Queen,” Ivah flatly said. “They take what they want and kill all in their way.”

“It is,” I told the drow. “I am queen of a kingdom, on the surface, and powerful enough they will not seek my enmity for no reason.”

“This is not true of us,” it said. “We will be slain.”

“You’re my prisoners,” I said “Until release or judgement, you are under my protection.”

“They will not care,” Ivah insisted.

“Ivah, you seem under the impression any you have a voice in this decision,” I said. “You do not. It has been made.”

“They will not accept this,” the drow warily said.

“They are free to contest my judgement, of course,” I said. “Though the consequences of that have already been stated.”

Ivah grimaced and turned to speak, but before it could even do that the Mighty Kodrog – no, Bogdan now – made its move. The drow pushed one of its fellow prisoners away and reached for the longknife at Archer’s hip. Apparently after failing with me, it had come under the impression it would have better luck with my companions. Archer gave him the knife, in a manner of speaking. It was only a lending, though, and she clamly withdrew it from the eye socket with a flick of the wrist. The other drow stepped back. Great, now I was going to meet the dwarves with a fucking corpse on the floor. Although, considering their record so far, that might actually raise their opinion of us.

“Tell them this,” I addressed Ivah. “They can die now, or take a chance on the future. There is no middle ground, and I’ve no more attention to spare on this. Akua, if any of them tries to escape kill it.”

“Any?” Diabolist asked.

I met Ivah’s eyes.

“Any,” I confirmed.

My statement that I had no more attention to dole out had not been theatrics: the dwarves were now close enough I could make out the individual steps. They did not come from deeper inside the cavern. The company of a hundred that spread out in front of the trap had been posted near the outer wall, to the left of the tunnel’s exit. Regulars again, I noted, and since now the dance had come to end I finally spared a moment to study dwarvenkind from up close. I’d pictured them as short, stocky humans but evidently that’d been a failure of imagination. There were basic similarities: eyes, nose, brow, lips. But they were the same more in principle than practice. Their skin was so rough and craggy, enough it looked more like some beast’s rough hide. The old tale that dwarves were born when a dwarf ate stones for a year and then spat out a baby fully-formed came to mind. Their eyes were almost too large for those thick faces, with coloured sclera and no irises. Owl-like , I thought, though they had eyelashes. Their strands of hair were visibly larger and thicker than a human’s, their noses flat and broad. The tallest of the lot stood at five feet, though they were much broader of shoulder than any race I’d come across save orcs. The dwarves spread out facing us, shields and hammers at the ready.

“Good evening,” I smiled.

A few of them spoke in dwarvish, rough accents flowing back and forth quickly, and there was a sparse wave of laughter. One of the dwarves elbowed his way to the front, attired differently from the rest. The armour was much like the one the engineers had worn, back in the other cavern, a cuirass on leather. Said cuirass was covered with runes, though, which I didn’t remember the others being. The dwarf, sporting a thick black beard thrice bound by rings of bronze showing runes of their own, frowned at me and laid a bare palm on the transparent pane. His frown deepened and he barked something in his language at the other dwarves.

“I don’t supposed you speak Lower Miezan,” I said.

His eyes, a ring of deep gold around a pitch-black pupil, moved to my face.

“You,” he said in that very language, though the accent was nearly unintelligible. “Human.”

“Close enough,” I agreed.

He pointed at the drow behind me, finger lingering on the corpse.

“ Kraksun ,” he said. “Why?”

“Prisoners,” I said.

He turned back to the others and spoke again. One of the dwarves spoke loudly and the entire company shook with laughter. I got the impression that what he’d said was complimentary to neither humans nor drow. Another dwarf, this one’s beard russet, raised a baton of stone and silence took hold. He spoke at the one wearing runes, who shrugged and turned back to me.

“You,” he said. “Prisoner.”

“I want to talk with your leader,” I said, enunciating slowly.

A dwarf left the ranks of the others, bearing a bag of woven reeds, and dropped it to the side of my interlocutor. Who promptly opened it, and took out a pair of rune-inscribed shackles. They weren’t linked by chains, I noted.

“Wear,” the black-bearded dwarf said.

“I want to talk with your leader,” I repeated, forcing patience.

The dwarf rolled his eyes, the size of those making it rather eerie to behold, but he spoke to the one with the baton. Who replied with a single word. Yeah, that one needed no translation. I sighed and rolled my shoulders before plunging my hand through the pane of force and ripping out a chunk. The black-bearded dwarf drew back in surprise, the soldiers moved forward and I smiled once more.

“I want to talk with your leader,” I said one last time, looking at the russet-bearded one.

His eyes flicked at the trap I’d casually ripped open, then back to me. He barked something at our interpreter.

“Who you?” the dwarf asked.

“The Queen of Callow,” I said.

The dwarf looked skeptical. He pointed a finger upwards.

“Callow,” he repeated slowly.

“Yes,” I said.

“Angry horse people,” he said, even more skeptically.

Well, that was one way to describe us. His eyes dipped down to note what I assumed to be my current lack of horse. What, did he just expect all Callowans to be mounted at all times?

“Of which I am queen,” I agreed.

He translated at the russet beard who snorted. He gestured a knock against his temple, the meaning of which I felt safe assuming. Then he shrugged and added something else. Blackbeard turned back to me.

“Speak to Herald,” he said. “But.”

He presented the shackles again. I mulled on that, eventually jutting a thumb towards the people behind me.

“Mine,” I said. “Safe. No touch.”

The dwarf spat on the floor.

“No touch,” he agreed. “Herald choose.”

It was a start. I offered my wrists to the shackles, and the dwarf leaned forward to clasp them closed. The runes – nothing like those I knew, sharper and much more complicated – shone and I felt a binding form. Ah, meant to seal sorcery. Or at least have an effect when someone called on them. Were they assuming I was a mage? It was a flip of the coin whether or not Winter would be affected by those. My ability to call on it was uninhibited, so far. I looked back at my companions.

“Negotiations will proceed,” I said. “Cooperate.”

Archer looked quite displeased, but Diabolist simply nodded. She was the first to come forward when the dwarf presented another pair of shackles, sharing a meaningful look with me afterwards. They weren’t affecting her either, then. Good to know. The drow came forward one after another, each of them moving delicately as if they feared the slightest sudden move would get them killed. They might not be wrong about that, I reflected. It had not escaped my notice than when the drow came forward some of the soldiers discretely put up their crossbows. Indrani was the last, and she shot me a glare.

“We could have legged it,” she said in Kharsum.

“We still might,” I replied in the same. “Day’s not over.”

She put forward her wrists, and with that last clasping we were all officially prisoners. Blackbeard drew a circle on the transparent wall then pressed his palm against the rune that formed inside it. It came down without a sound. From the corner of my eye, I’d glimpsed Akua watching him work eagerly. Never one to lose an opportunity, was she? The soldiers swarmed us after that, though at least they put away their weapons first. I was guided forward in a surprisingly gentle manner, though I stopped when I heard Indrani raise her voice.

“No you don’t,” she hissed.

One of the dwarves was tugging at her bow, eyes half-closed. I looked for Blackbeard was he’d melded into the crowd. Another dwarf raised his hammer when Indrani pushed away the one trying to get at her bow, speaking loudly. Every dwarf around us turned.

“Archer,” I called out.

She turned to me.

“Cat, they want to take-”

“I know,” I said. “Let them.”

“You know they keep shit like this,” she said. “And the Lady will kill me if I lose it.”

“I’ll get it back,” I said. “I promise.”

“You’d better,” she growled.

Lips thinning in anger, she took out her bow and shoved it forcefully in the dwarf’s arms. The soldier almost toppled, looking furious, though his companions laughed. Another one was eyeing the sword at my hip, so I smiled blandly and took it out. Hammers rose again, but I presented it by the hilt. The dwarf blinked, but took it anyway. If it’d been goblin steel I might have felt a pang, but this was just a sliver of Winter. I could recall it to my mantle at will, what did I care who held it? We were taken deep into the cavern in a procession, surrounded by soldiers. The vanguard, I saw, had made camp here. Tents of cloth that were charmingly small dotted the place, while makeshift ramparts of piled stones had been raised around siege engines and supply wagons. At the centre of the camp I glimpsed a large dais of stone, a high seat upon it. Anyone important enough to warrant that was worth talking with, I mused. The first hiccup arrived when I was taken toward that dais but the others were not. I stopped, to the displeasure of the dwarf escorting me. I pointed at Akua.

“She comes with me,” I said.

The dwarf made a face, blatantly not understanding a word I’d said and rather displeased I was talking at all. He tugged at my wrist, but it would take more than a pushy dwarf to move if I did not want to be moved. My escort barked out in his language until Blackbeard returned.

“Why you not move,” he asked impatiently.

I pointed at Akua again.

“She’s coming with me,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Prisoner,” he said.

“She’s my handmaiden,” I lied.

The dwarf blinked, looking confused. Didn’t know that word, huh?

“My herald,” I said.

Blackbeard frowned.

“You human,” he pointed out.

Was he implying no human could possibly be important to have a herald? Good to know the High Lords had a superior even in matters of bloody-minded arrogance.

“Human queen,” I reminded him.

He still looked unconvinced, but must have decided arguing wasn’t worth the trouble. An order had Diabolist taken aside from the others and brought to me.

“Your Majesty,” Akua said, bowing to me.

Quick on the uptake, Diabolist. Sometimes in the wrong way, but there was a reason I wanted her with me when speaking with whatever fancy beard was in charge. We were escorted the rest of the way to the dais without any further trouble. The seat was facing the other way, so it was the dais itself that earned a second glance. Roughly hewn stone, and I was pretty sure a single piece. Handhold were carved into the sides. Had they carried this here? Lots of trouble for a seat. We were brought in front of the high chair, where a full two hundred of those heavy soldiers from earlier was waiting in silent stillness. The seat, I could not help but notice, was empty. I glanced at Blackbeard.

“... am I supposed to talk to the chair?” I asked.

Big eyes stared me down without a word.

“That’s a no, then,” I muttered. “I’ll wait.”

Not long after the rows of soldiers parted for a pair of dwarves, which seemed promising to me. The first was the tallest dwarf I’d seen so far, and the first without any armour. He wore cloth, dyed a green so dark it was nearly black, though I didn’t recognize the style or the cut. It was wrapped and knotted in layers over layers, heavy enough it might actually slow an arrow. His beard was dyed as well, in the same colour, and his eyes matched. The hair was black, though, long and braided. The staff in his hand was crooked thing of wood with trinkets of some strange metal hanging off the end, softly chiming as he walked. The other was one of those Archer had called deed-seekers , and his chest was so thickly covered in skulls the armour could not be seen beneath. Some of those were human, I noted, but most too large for that. I even glimpsed dragonbone among the multitude, though that struck me as the result of grave robbing rather than fighting. There were few dragons left on Calernia, and the death of one would have resounded across the continent. Blonde of beard and hair, his face was covered with either an exceedingly thick black tattoo or pristine face paint. The shape was a rat’s head and fangs, though the horns sprouting out made it clear it was not just any ratling. The two of them came to stand before the dais, though they did not touch it, and the deed-seeker cleared his throat.

“Chantant?” he asked in that same language.

I wiggled my palm.

“Lower Miezan?” I tried.

The dwarf nodded.

“You stand before the Herald of the Deeps,” he announced. “Name yourself.”

Akua replied without any need for prompting on my part.

“I introduce Her Majesty Catherine Foundling, Queen of Callow and Sovereign of Moonless Nights,” she said, sketching a bow.

The deed-seeker cocked his head to the side.

“I am Balasi, Seeker of Deeds,” he said. “I will translate for the Herald. You may kneel.”

I smiled amicably.

“I do not kneel,” I said. “My attendant will do so out of respect.”

Akua elegantly did so under the emotionless eyes of the dwarves, rising just as fluidly. Balasi turned a bronze gaze to Blackbeard, who still stood at my side, and spoke in their language. The dwarf replied in length, then paused and quickly tacked on something. The Herald’s lips quirked in amusement, Balasi laughed outright.

“I feel like I’ve heard that one before,” I noted.

The deed-seeker inclined his head.

“Even a lizard can eat a tadpole,” he said.

My brow rose.

“Guess you had to be there,” I said.

Which I had been. I did not smile.

“It loses in the translation,” Balasi said. “The words... even an idiot can bully a dimwit?”

Ah, charming. We were going to get along great, I could just feel it.

“I take it the dimwits are the drow,” I said.

“You have taken some of the kraksun prisoner,” he acknowledged. “A matter of great hilarity to us.”

“I did notice you haven’t bothered, so far,” I said.

The dwarf bared his teeth.

“Only children pet vermin,” he said.

About what I’d expected out of them, though it was still jarring to hear it spoken out loud. The casual dismissal of an entire race as pests . Not that the drow are any better , I thought. There was little difference between cattle and vermin, when it came down to it. The Herald spoke softly, addressing his translator, who then turned to us.

“His Eminence would know why you have come to the Everdark,” he said.

My instinct was to answer, to establish some kind of relationship, but this was diplomacy and not an evening at the tavern. If I fielded all the questions myself, I was implying myself to be on the same level as the Herald’s translator. Which was something I needed to avoid, if I wanted to be considered an interlocutor and not a curiosity. I held my tongue and let Diabolist speak in my stead. It was, after all, why she was here.

“Her Majesty sought to raise an army of drow to war against her enemies on the surface,” Akua said. “We were unaware that the Kingdom Under intended to invade when we began our journey.”

“You are aware now,” Balasi said. “You will be allowed to depart unmolested. Your prisoners will remain, as they may know useful information.”

“A decision perhaps premature,” Akua replied. “It seems our interests may have fallen in alignment.”

The deed-seeker fixed her with a steady look.

“Callow intends to meddle in the affairs of the Kingdom Under?” he said, very mildly.

“Callow is willing to pursue its interest so long as they do not contradict those of the King Under the Mountain,” she smoothly replied. “We would consult with you to ensure such an unfortunate turn of events will not come to be.”

“You’re not human,” Balasi thoughtfully said. “Some sort of spirit, bound in service. The kingdom you claim to come from is not known for such pacts.”

“The world ever changes, Seeker Balasi,” Akua smiled. “New eras demand new methods, lest we be left in the dust.”

“You’re a long way from home, Callowans,” the dwarf said. “Stumbling into matters beyond your understanding. To presume to even speak of them is a dangerous kind of arrogance.”

“You are correct, Seeker,” the shade said. “We are a long way from home. With little love for those who dwell here, and a mind open to fresh opportunities. It would be a sad thing to turn a blind eye to mutual profits without good motive.”

I left her to it, my eyes drawn to the Herald’s staff. The trinkets, in particular. It was a subtle thing, but there was power to them. They were no simple decoration. My eyes narrowed. Not, not the trinkets themselves. Something inside them, bound.

“The shackles do not bind you,” the Herald of the Deeps said in perfect Lower Miezan.

The other two went silent as I met those eldritch green eyes. I called on a sliver of Winter and tore off one of the shackles like it was made of parchment, runes struggling impotently.

“They do not,” I agreed.

“You are not human,” the Herald said.

“I was,” I replied. “Then I murdered a demigod and stole his power.”

“And so you come to the Everdark,” the dwarf said. “Seeking yet more.”

“I have a great many enemies,” I said. “Enough it might be said we share a few.”

The Herald smiled, slow and mean.

“I offer hospitality to you, Queen of Callow,” he said. “Let us eat, drink, and talk of murdering gods.”

Well, now they were speaking my language.

Chapter 60: Profiteers

“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is lynched.”
– Praesi saying

Since my crowning I’d found it necessary to occasionally entertain ‘people of import’. It wasn’t something I particularly enjoyed, but a shared meal and a bottle of wine was a decent way to take a good look at what influential individuals of Callow were up to. Most of the time it’d been members of the Queen’s Council or envoys from my governors, more rarely emissaries from the northern baronies. Those dinners tended to be calm affairs, where more importance was placed on the conversation than the food. I rather preferred the dwarven take on it, all things told. After nibbling at rations for weeks, a slab of ribs lathered in sauce with a goblet of some kind of pitch-black liquor that smelled like berries and kicked like a mule were a delightful change of pace. The Herald had made a point out of being the one to offer them, even if another dwarf brought the plates, which I guessed to be some point of dwarven etiquette. The table was granite and low even by my standards, though it’d clearly been crafted with burlier types in mind: Akua and I didn’t even come close to filling our side of it.

The Herald and his interpreter – not that he needed one, as it turned out – had dug into their own plates without any mannerly pretences. I followed suit, rather enjoying the meat even though I did not recognize it. The liquor was a treat though, I’d own to that much. Diabolist was more interested in the fine make of the cutlery we were using than the meal, though she made sure to eat and drink enough no insult would be taken. The dwarves polished off their plates at admirable speed, knocking back the liquor all the while, and it was not long before all were finished. There’d been no attempt at conversation while the plates were on the table, not from their side anyway. I’d followed suit, in no great hurry, and Akua had followed my example. Soldiers took away the plates when we were done, bringing bowls of tepid water to the table where the dwarves soaked their fingers clean before wiping on cloths. My brows rose. They were a strangely clean people, for a race that dwelled in dirt. Still, I imitated them and saw with mild disappointment that our cups and bottle were taken away.

“Diplomacy cannot be had over such mild drinks, Queen Catherine,” Balasi told me amusedly, having noticed my look. “It would be unseemly.”

“Your people have an enlightened sense of etiquette, Seeker,” I replied. “The liquor, may I ask what it is called?”

“Black kasi,” the dwarf said. “I will part with a bottle as gift, should these talks be fruitful.”

It’d been a long time since a bribe that baldly offered had tempted me even a little, I mused.

“The stakes have been raised,” I drily replied.

Soldiers returned with four small wooden bowls and set them down before each of us. I studied mine curiously: oak, if I was not mistaken. Old and rough, never varnished or sculpted. A heavy glass bottle was brought, and the dwarven soldier bearing it very carefully poured maybe half a cup’s worth of liquid into each bowl. It looked like wine, I thought, but vapour wafted off the surface and it was very clearly near boiling. I glanced at Balasi and found him staring at his own bowl reverently.

“It must be allowed to seep,” he told me. “These bowls have never seen other purpose than the cradling of sudra , and so the taste of old toasts mixes with the new.”

“I’m honoured,” I said, inclining my head.

“As it should be,” the Herald said. “No such bottle has ever left the Kingdom Under. I doubt more than a dozen of your kind ever tasted sudra , much less properly served.”

It was utterly wasted on me, considering my tastes in drink had moved from ‘decent table wine’ to ‘nearly flammable’ since I’d taken up my mantle. It might be undiplomatic to say as much, though, and I was curious about the taste. I inclined my head again, a little deeper this time. The Herald of the Deeps responded in kind.

“You were introduced as Queen of Callow,” the green-eyed dwarf said. “Yet your second name is Foundling, not Fairfax.”

“There are no more Fairfaxes,” I said. “They were slain to the last, when the Dread Empire of Praes conquered Callow. I am first and only of my line.”

“A worthy purpose, that will have earned no small burden,” Balasi said approvingly.

The Herald turned amused eyes on him, then back to me.

“You will have to forgive my old friend,” he said. “He is quite the radical, even for a seeker of deeds.”

“No offence was taken,” I said. “There was none to be found, in my eyes.”

“I have told you before, delein ,” the deed-seeker snorted. “The ways of their kind may be chaotic, but they are not without merit.”

“To each thing born, purpose and burden,” the Herald chided. “What you seek as correction is mere revelation. Our truth is absolute.”

I was missing too much context to be able to truly follow that exchange, but some guesses could be hazarded. Purpose and burden, huh. There was a weight to that, one familiar to me . Name and Role . Indrani had said that the deed-seeker were trying to win something other dwarves thought they weren’t supposed to have. Considering their way of going about it was to hunt the most dangerous creatures around, their behaviour might just be an attempt to raise their ‘purpose’ by first raising their ‘burden’. Interesting, and worth keeping in mind, but not ultimately why I was seated here with them.

“From your question I take it you’re not too familiar with surface affairs,” I said.

“They are neither my charge nor concern,” the Herald said. “Balasi is more knowledgeable of such affairs, though it has been some time since he last journeyed upwards.”

“Last I heard, Praes was trying to invade your people and getting smacked around for the presumption,” the deed-seeker said. “Queen Moirin was ruling, I believe.”

Queen Moiren, he likely meant. The grandmother of Good King Robert, the Fairfax who’d died on the Fields of Streges failing to turn back the Conquest. Anything they knew of the surface dated back at least a hundred years, then.

“Callow was conquered, and under my aegis was made independent again,” I said. “We are now at war with most the great powers of the surface, three of which have declared a crusade on Praes and would break my homeland on their march to the Tower.”

“And so you come to the Everdark in your hour of need,” Balasi said. “You must truly be desperate, to seek anything but corpses from the kraksun .”

“I’ve knocked at every other door,” I said. “The Dead King is on the march, now, and there are no limits to his hunger. This is no time to be squeamish about one’s allies.”

“The kraksun will flee, or perish,” the Herald of the Deeps said, and he spoke it not as promise or prophecy but as mere fact.

As if there could be no doubt. Gods, maybe there wasn’t. What little I knew of these people was enough to have me very, very wary – and they were just the vanguard.

“Such an outcome may very well be inevitable,” Akua said. “Yet the path by which it is reached remains shadowed, does it not? There is little purpose in entertaining us otherwise.”

Balasi cast a look at me.

“You allow your spirit a great deal of freedom,” he said.

“She has her uses,” I mildly replied. “And considering the costs of her service, she will be worked until she breaks.”

Diabolist bowed her head at me, without the slightest hint of displeasure on her face. It could be true, I thought. The right of the victor, she’d called it. It could also be a lie, and I would never know until the end. My very own viper, always dangerous no matter how tight the leash.

“How much do you know of this ruin of a realm, Queen Catherine?” the Herald asked.

I hesitated. Admitting ignorance here might see me hoodwinked. Dwarves were infamously disinclined to fair bargains. On the other hand, pretending to be an expert where I was not was just as dangerous in its own way. These were not people to trifle with.

“Little in most matters, yet I have glimpsed deep in some,” I finally said. “My power is both kin and foe to the Priestess of Night’s, in some eldritch way.”

The green-eyed dwarf nodded slowly.

“I have long studied their kind,” he said. “Seven wars we fought against them, two of them lost. Yet we won the last three, and the lands of their ancient colonies were swallowed in the Ninth Expansion. The echo of the last defeat saw them collapse, hiding behind the Gloom and turning their knives on each other. They are a pale imitation of what they once were.”

“A ruin of a realm,” I softly agreed. “And the spider at the centre of the web lies waiting in Tvarigu.”

“She is more monster than woman now,” Balasi said. “She devoured the Twilight Sages, it is said, and made them into the first of the Night. She has only grown since: her hand is on every knife, her lips wet with every red bite.”

“A creature without purpose,” the Herald said, and there was hatred in his voice. “A burden on all her kind. You surface people quibble over devils and books, but the Sve Noc is breathing blasphemy. Voices were raised, when we warred against the goblins, and Ishti’s Bargain extended as mercy. Yet there was only silence in the Deep Places, when call was made for war on the Everdark.”

“I have known little but war since I was sixteen,” I quietly said. “And so I know this: annihilation is a costly enterprise. To break an enemy is one thing, to destroy it wholesale another.”

“Yet annihilation is the only path, so long as the Sve Noc draws breath,” Balasi said. “Many will die, for this purpose. It will take decades to scatter the greatest of the Mighty and lay siege to Tvarigu itself, perhaps as long as a century. We will not have that.”

“The King of Death has turned his eyes to the wars of the surface,” the Herald said. “Yet we have seen this before. It never lasts. The dead will return to the depths soon enough.”

The green-eyed dwarf leaned in.

“The Gloom must fall,” the Herald of the Deeps said. “You fled forward, I think, without seeing our host. It is not only that, Queen of Callow. We have brought artisans and tenders, masons and runescribes. Families as well as soldiers.”

My fingers clenched under the table.

“You intend to settle the outer rings,” Akua said in my stead. “To raise fortress-cities from which you can fight the war against the drow even after the Dead King returns.”

“A long and bleak exile, for hundreds of thousands,” Balasi said. “None who felt this to be their purpose expect to see their kin for many years. The Fourteenth Expansion will be a treacherous one.”

“Yet if someone killed the Priestess of Night,” I said. “The Gloom would end. No exile, no hard decades of war severed from home.”

“Slayers have been sent before,” the Herald said. “As far as we known, none lived to reach the inner ring.”

“Yet you have taken kraksun prisoner,” Balasi said. “Used them. A dwarf would be attacked on sight. A human, of sufficient power? That would be different matter.”

I took a moment to let the implications of that sink in. Not that they wanted me to traipse through the Everdark and murder yet another demigod for their advantage – that much I’d expected – but the sheer scope of what they were undertaking. Hundreds of thousands , Seeker Balasi had said. That was all of eastern Callow, I thought. All those people sent marching across some sorcerous barrier not out of fear or desperation, but because the empire of the dwarves had deemed it strategic necessity to destroy the drow. What kind of empire could do that? The sum whole of the Tenth Crusade, which had three great nations joined, could barely muster two hundred thousand soldiers. I’d read as a child that the Kingdom Under likely spanned two thirds of Calernia underground: that to the east it reached the heartlands of Praes, to the south it touched the upper half of the Dominion. To the west a gate was rumoured to exist in the coastal principality of Brus, though one scarcely used, and the Kingdom of the Dead had long been thought to be the northern border of the dwarven kingdom. I was no longer certain that was the case, to be honest.

I’d read the words stating all that, ink on parchment, but never really understood them until now. Black had once called the Kingdom Under the only Calernian nation that could be considered more than a regional power. I’d not disbelieved him, I’d had no reason to, but neither had I truly taken the words to heart. Mighty as the dwarves were, they were barely Calernian in the end. Their presence was lightly felt, more an adjacent existence one must avoid provoking than a nation we shared borders with. I supposed that was true, in a way – could an ant really have a border with a giant? And while the great nations of the surface had been tearing each other to shreds for yards of land or points of principles, the Kingdom Under had grown so great it could afford to send a few hundred thousand soldiers and settlers into the dark for a mere gamble. A possibly century-long roll of the dice that would shatter a people’s spine over the knee of the King Under the Mountain if it worked. I wasn’t a nobody, I knew. I’d done things that would be remembered in histories. In sheer power, there were only a handful of people on the continent that could be called my equal and even fewer my superior.

All of that was dust in the eyes of the people I was speaking with. It was worth remembering that much, before I tried to strike a pact.

“I supposed most queens would find it beneath their dignity to play the assassin for a foreign power,” I finally said. “Fortunately, I have no such qualms. You need the Sve Nocte removed and the Gloom lifted. I believe I can deliver this.”

“Then we now speak of terms,” the Herald said. “You will want payment, for this service.”

“I will,” I said. “Before that is discussed, forgive my ignorance but I am uncertain of what your title means. Does it carry the authority to make such a deal?”

Balasi’s face turned stormy and he pulled at his beard, but the Herald quelled him with a look.

“I am the Herald of the Deeps,” the green-eyed dwarf said, and his voice rang with power. “Promises I make will be observed by all who call themselves dwarves.”

I could taste the power in the air, the sharp tang of it. My eyes narrowed. Named , I thought. That man is Named. Until now there had not been so much as a mote of spillover, which was worth noting. I hadn’t seen that kind of control since Black. The dwarf was either a religious or cultural figure of some sort, from the sounds of it. Some kind of priest? Curious as I was, it was not necessary to delve too deep in the ways of the dwarves to make a deal. Asking questions now would only distract from that.

“Understood,” I simply said. “Shade?”

Akua leaned in over the table. She knew what I needed, right now, and would be better at bargaining for it. Soldiers were the most direly needed. Drow would have made for useful shock troops but if I could field a few thousand dwarves instead? It was a clearly superior outcome. There was precedent for their kind warring on the surface, though only as mercenaries. After that, my desires were split between diplomatic pressure and gold. An infusion of gold would get Callow through the worst of the current troubles, at least in some respects. Trade with the League of Free Cities had not ceased, and Mercantis never closed its shores to anyone: what my kingdom lacked and could not make could be bought, if we had the coin. On the other hand, a quiet word from the Kingdom Under to any of the powers might solve a lot of my troubles. Even something as simple as declaring the Kingdom of Callow under protection for two years would free my hands to do so much. If I could actually rebuild in peace instead of sinking all the treasury into the army... No doubt the Empress would continue striking through deniable means, but Thief was becoming better hand at the shadow games with every passing month. Breathing room would be godsent, and I could ask for starker price than that.

“Her Majesty came to the Everdark to obtain an army,” Diabolist said. “As the days of the kraksun seem numbered, we will need to secure another source of soldiery.”

Seeker Balasi smiled.

“You can have right of recruitment among them,” he said. “Any you can take into your service will be spared, so long as they depart.”

That was a broad promise, I thought. If I managed to sway even a third of the drow, were they really willing to let them go? I supposed it made sense, from their perspective. So long as they left the Everdark, they were no longer a dwarven problem.

“A right we possess, strictly speaking,” Akua politely replied. “As you made it clear you have no intention of pursuit beyond the span of the Fourteenth Expansion. Dwarves have served as mercenaries before, this would not be significantly different.”

“It is against decree to war on the surface when the Kingdom Under seeks expansion,” the Herald said replied. “You will find no purchase here.”

The deed-seeker frowned, then spoke to his fellow dwarf in their tongue. They traded a few sentences, then Balasi cleared his throat.

“While not in official capacity, I could speak to a few of my fellows,” he offered. “Should you deliver, we could seek deeds in your wars.”

“And how many of your fellows could we count on, Seeker?” Akua asked.

“Two, three hundred,” Balasi said.

“Not a significant enough force, I take it,” the shade asked me in Mtethwa.

“I already have enough monsters up my sleeves,” I honestly replied. “What I need is solid foot to give the vultures pause. Three hundred wouldn’t make Hasenbach or the Dead King think twice.”

“Their deaths could be leveraged into greater dwarven involvement,” she suggested.

“We’d also have to answer for that,” I grunted. “Pass.”

“Then we return to recruiting from the drow,” Akua said. “Shall I press coin or influence?”

“Coin first,” I decided. “Best we stand on our own, if we can have that that. But try to get protection if you can. Doesn’t matter if it’s short so long as we can call in the favour when we need it.”

It would have been polite to call diplomacy what followed, but I knew haggling when I saw it. That Akua was arguing the murder of a lesser god was not cheap instead of loudly exclaiming fresh fish for silver was highway robbery did not make the substance of what took place any different. It was a delicate line to walk for Diabolist. We were useful to the dwarves, but not necessary – there was only so far she could push. I’d learned to put a leash on my temper, over the years, but I was still glad she was the one doing the talking. Balasi was near-openly trying to screw us, first suggesting a loan to the Kingdom of Callow instead of outright payment. As was always the way with these things, what was hammered out was a compromise no one was truly happy with. The treasury in Laure would be getting enough coin that Juniper should be able to raise the Army of Callow as she saw fit without picking clean every last copper, though after the expenses of feeding the southern refugees through the winter I suspected we’d have a rather tight belt when spring came around.

Though Akua pushed hard for a degree of open support from the dwarves, the Herald personally killed the notion. What we got was a little more abstract, though in some ways just as useful: for the next five years, sale of weapons to any nation at war with the Kingdom of Callow would end. I would dearly like to see Cordelia Hasenbach try to raise half the countryside of Procer without a steady supply of cheap dwarven armaments. Unlike Praes, Procer had no large set of forges and smithies directly under the authority of the ruler: her options without the Kingdom Under propping up the war effort were few and rather unpalatable. Our right of recruitment from the drow was confirmed, under condition that they left the Everdark without fighting. It was at least two hours before everything was settled, Diabolist arranging for the payments and announcements being carried out through Mercantis as swiftly as possible. We ended as we began, drinks in hand: at the Herald’s careful instruction we raised the wooden bowls and drank deep of the sudra . It was smooth all the way down, I thought, yet no sweeter for it. There was a faint aftertaste that was almost coppery. Like blood.

A fitting drink for this pact, then.

Chapter 61: Remonstration

“Beware those who peddle sweet truths, for that which cleanses is rarely gentle.”
– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

I tossed the bow and Indrani snatched it out of the air. She ran her hand down the length, checking it for damages, and only after she’d made certain it was in pristine condition did she turn her eyes to me.

“How much did it cost you?” she asked.

“Not a copper,” I said. “Restitution was tacked onto to a larger bargain.”

“We’re going on a hunt, then,” she smiled. “It was about damned time. We’ve been creeping around for too long.”

I wasn’t all that surprised she’d caught on to the nature of my pact with the dwarves without being briefed. I had precious little to offer the Kingdom Under save for the work of my blade. I’d sent Diabolist to gather our drow while attending to Indrani myself, though that situation felt like trouble brewing. Leaving the prisoners behind wasn’t on the table: the dwarves might interrogate them before breaking their skulls and throwing them on the nearest corpse pile, neither part of which I wanted to come about. Taking them with us on the further journey was trouble too, though. They’d know I’d talked with the dwarves, and there was no guaranteed they wouldn’t open their mouths whenever we ran into a drow powerful enough it could give me a challenge. I was currently inclined to let them go after pulling ahead of the army by a day or two. They could live and die on their own merits, after that. Ivah was the only one I had plans for, though I was still hesitating over pulling that particular trigger.

My mistakes had larger consequences than they used to, and nowadays there was no one to clean up behind me.

The prisoners were awaiting us at the edge of the camp, Diabolist standing among their number while a few companies of dwarven regulars kept an eye on the proceedings. More out of principle than fear, I thought. The shackles had already been removed but still the drow looked uneasy, as if they expected the slaughter to begin any moment. The way some of the soldiers were very casually playing with their crossbows wasn’t helping matters, and from the way grins split their beards the dwarves knew exactly what they were doing. I did not bother to offer our escorts any farewells before leaving. Goodbyes had already been traded with the two dwarves that mattered in the vanguard, and none of the other had done anything to deserve the courtesy. To the contrary, one might argue. Ivah had carefully remained close to me from the moment I arrived, and did not give distance until we’d left the large cavern. We went through another two dwarven chokepoints before finally leaving the territory they controlled, and only then did any of the drow let out a breath of relief.

We took our first break around an hour later, when they began to tire. Where before the prisoners had offered only fear, there was now a touch of reverence in their eyes – towards me, mostly, but Akua as well. From their point of view, we’d walked into the jaws of the wolf and gotten off without so much as a scratch to show for it. They might not know why, but they could not argue with the results. Our guide approached me while the others rested.

“You spoke truth, Queen,” Ivah said, and smoothly knelt. “For the offence of doubting your word, I present myself for judgement.”

I tore off a chunk of dried beef and popped it into my mouth, chewing as I considered the drow kneeling before me. Even on its knees, it was of a height with me sitting. Already I was missing the dwarves and their much more reasonable proportions. I could dismiss this out of hand, I thought. I’d often done this with my doubters in the past, especially when they had good reasons to doubt me. Those who had come into my service had done so after I’d proven myself, shown I could achieve results. This, though, this was different. I wasn’t dealing with a human or an orc, not even a goblin. My grasp on drow culture was still weak, but I suspected that if I made it clear doubting me came without consequences then I was giving an open invitation to do so again. Akua had been just right enough I couldn’t outright dismiss her, when she’d said it was worthless to offer people mercy when mercy had no worth in their eyes. I swallowed the last of the meat, then wiped my fingers on my legs. Measured response, I thought. My hand lashed out, swift as a snake, and the sharp tips of ice I’d formed at the end of the fingers raked across Ivah’s right cheek. Four bloody clawmarks began dripping blood.

The drow did not flinch.

“A reminder,” I said. “When the doubt next comes. You may consider the matter settled.”

Ivah rose on shaky legs, and I dismissed it with a wave of the hand after telling it Diabolist would see to the marks. Indrani slid next to me barely a heartbeat later. She’d been pretty blatantly eavesdropping, though I’d seen no need to stop her. She pressed a skin into my hands, and I did not need to take a sniff to know it wasn’t water. Her breath made that clear enough.

“So what’s the plan?” Archer asked.

“We go to Holy Tvarigu,” I said. “And have a pleasant chat with the Priestess of Night.”

“Seems to me like we’ll need to have a bunch of pleasant chats to get there in the first place,” she mused.

“You and I are pleasantly chatty people, by reputation,” I said.

“It’ll be a load off my back for us to return to the basics,” she admitted. “But you’ve got the look.”

I glanced at her, finding her halfway between amused and annoyed.

“The look?”

“The one that says you’re tripping all over your morals again,” Indrani said. “It’s led us to some beautiful scraps, mind you, but never before a long spot of hemming and hawing.”

“What do you care?” I said.

She blinked in surprised and I passed a hand through my hair.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “But this isn’t us, ‘Drani. We don’t have those talks. Did Hakram put you up to this?”

“Vivienne asked that I keep an eye out,” she said. “On account of your last advisor around being ‘Ol Portal Dazzle. Worries were had that if you got in a bad place our little friend would be eager to give you a push over the edge.”

“I haven’t talked to her about this,” I said. “I don’t intend to, either.”

“So talk to me,” Archer said. “I’m here, and mostly sober.”

“Do you actually give a shit about any of this?” I bluntly asked. “I’m not saying this to be an ass to you. You never have before.”

“I do give a shit about you, Catherine,” she sighed. “Even when you’re being an utter wench to me. You think I’m down here for the scenery?”

I bit my tongue. Taking out my mood on Indrani would be underserved, even if she was pushing me and she damn well knew it.

“Why are you down here?” I finally asked.

“Because that’s where we went,” she slowly replied, eyeing me dubiously. “How hard was the stuff the dwarves gave you?”

So that was how she wanted to play it, huh. Dumb. Usually I’d leave it at that, play it off with a quip or an insult. It was the way we worked, leaving things unspoken. But Gods, I was tiring of that. Of just... letting things go.

“You take orders from me, sometimes,” I said. “But I’ve never considered you my subordinate. If you’d chosen to go back to Callow with the others, there wasn’t anything I could have done about it.”

“Hells, Catherine,” she sighed. “Do we really need to do this?”

“Don’t we?” I said. “Indrani, there’s maybe ten people in all of Creation I can genuinely call my friends and I can barely claim to understand half of them. I keep leading you into one ugly mess after another, and for some of you I understand. Vivienne’s in this for the kingdom, and Hakram... Hakram believes. In this, whatever it’s become, even when I don’t. I’m not trying to throw stones at you, Archer. There’s just some days where I honestly wonder why you bother.”

“It’s not enough that you’re my friends?” she asked.

“If that’s your answer,” I said, “and I mean your real answer – not us laughing this off and never mentioning it again – I’ll take it. But I don’t want either of us to survive the other and look back in twenty years regretting we were too proud to actually have an honest talk.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“So, Ratface finally sunk in,” she said, not unkindly. “Was worried it might happen. You took it too well when we learned.”

I flinched.

“Cat, he-”

“I used him,” I said, with terrible calm. “He was my friend, and I used him until it got him killed. It’s... Fuck , Indrani. He still had so much left to do. Who does she take next, Aisha? Juniper?”

How many people do I need to lose before I’m just a raving monster who just happens to lack a Tower to rave from? The utter selfishness of that thought shamed me. They’d killed him and still I’d somehow made it all about me.

“We’re not going to die that easily,” Indrani said.

“We’re not invincible , Archer,” I hissed. “We just got savagely beaten by a dead elf and a giant rat, and those were the toys of what’s waiting. All we got to show for it was Malicia taking home a victory once more, and fresh off that she took the knife to Ratface. We’re in this mess and I can’t protect any of you. You have to-”

“Have a reason we’re here,” she finished quietly. “Something worth the risks.”

“You’d be fine without me,” I tiredly said. “Maybe even better off. I’m a fool for saying that, because I need you more than I can put into words, but it’s the damned truth. You can leave this at any time and none of my enemies will follow. And let’s not pretend they’re not my enemies, Indrani. We both know they’re not really yours.”

“Sure they are,” Indrani replied.

“The moment you leave back for Refuge, Malicia and the crusaders forget you ever existed,” I said. “That’s not arguable, that’s a fact.”

She flicked my forehead. I reared back, more in surprise than pain.

“That’s the problem with you, Cat,” she said. “You say these sweet things, sometimes, but you still can’t quite get out of your head. Refuge’s not my home, it’s a place I lived in for a while. The Lady being there is the only reason it exists and the only reason I ever went. You have this... loyalty for Callow. I don’t really get it, the place is war-torn shithole, but if it’s a madness then most of your people have it too. I don’t have that for Refuge, or really anyone in it. There’s nothing to go back to.”

“You could travel,” I said. “That what you really want, isn’t it?”

She laughed, harshly.

“Gods, I can’t get angry,” Indrani said. “It’s infuriating but that’s why it works – because you’re such a fucking idiot it can’t possibly be manipulation. You think I want to leave without somewhere to get back to, Catherine?”

“You could-”

“Shut up,” Archer interrupted. “For once in your life, just shut up and listen. You’re right when you say you don’t understand us, because you somehow missed who you opened your home to. Do you know why Hunter was afraid of me, when I came to fetch him? Because I used to beat him in the yard. Bad enough he’d bruise for weeks even as a Named. Not because I hated him or because we had a grudge, but because seeing it happen put a twinkle in Lady Ranger’s eye. I would have slit his godsdamned throat, if it had done the same. I fought everyone there was to fight in Refuge until I could crush them underfoot, and then I went out into the Waning Woods to find harder opponents. I don’t need a cause. I don’t need a reason. Every time I come out on top, I prove that I deserve this. That I’m not a fucking charity case, some curiosity she picked up in Mercantis along with whatever artefact took her fancy that year.”

“I’m not her,” I said.

“No,” she replied. “You’re not. I trounced your ass the first time we met just so I could prove I was better than the Black Knight’s pupil and somehow that just... never became an issue. I thought you were some kind weakling, at first, too afraid for revenge or a rematch. But then you picked a fight with a demon and its minions, not because you thought you could win but because you wouldn’t accept losing.”

“That’s not a virtue,” I said. “And that kind of thinking has gotten a lot of people killed.”

“You keep your eye on the horizon, always have,” she said. “Makes it that you always end up missing what you actually do . You opened your home to me. Your family. Shit, Cat, we might make fun of you but there’s no one that doubts you’d murder your way through a kingdom for one of us. And you just handed that freely, asking nothing. Not even an oath. And now you’re surprised we’re willing to kill for it?”

“That’s not what I meant to do,” I quietly said.

“It wouldn’t work if it was,” she smiled mirthlessly. “It’s like you don’t realize who it is you took in. You think Masego asks himself whether people should be killed because he cares about Callowan justice? You found a kid who couldn’t talk to others without a chart and you told him he wasn’t mad or strange, that he was right and clever and worth something beyond his magic. Vivienne was so desperate to do something that mattered she joined a rebellion of people she didn’t like or trust in a place where those have the life expectancy of a fly. She fought you, stole from you, and instead of slitting her throat you gave her your trust and told her what she wanted to hear the most: that she’s a decent person and that she can make a difference . Hakram used to wonder why he even got up in the morning, Catherine. He was barely even a person. Now he’s got such searing purpose his own Name made it that he doesn’t need to sleep.”

“That was all them,” I thought. “I didn’t change anything. I’m not owed-”

“You try to be good,” Indrani said. “Or at least decent. So you’ve got this idea that all of us were, before you came along. That you dirty us by making us fight, that you’re somehow imposing on who we’d be otherwise. Set that aside, because it only ever existed in your head. You took in wild animals, fed them and gave them a place by the fire. Loved them, in your own terrible way.”

Shadowed eyes met mine, the glint in them a savage thing.

“None of us forgot the years out in the wilds, Catherine,” she said, baring her teeth. “It was cold and dark and lonely, and if we have to make a graveyard of half this fucking continent to never go there again then that’s what we’ll do .”

I did not reply, because after that what could I possibly say? Archer snatched the skin back from me and rose to her feet.

“Gods,” she grimaced. “I can’t believe you made me do that. Where’s Hakram when you need him?”

“Indrani,” I said. “I-”

“Don’t,” she curtly said. “I have no idea what you’re wrestling with, right now, but I’ll say this: you’ve been running scared since Second Liesse. We’ve all seen how it stayed with you, but grieving is one thing and this is another. If you let it bury you, then you’ve failed those people twice instead of once.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“An occasionally halfway-clever woman once told me she didn’t win battles because she was the Squire,” Indrani said. “Or because she had tricks and fancy mantle. You’re afraid of what’s coming? Then do what you need to and stand with your back straight. Let them take a swing. See where it gets them.”

She strode away without another word, already guzzling away at the skin as if liquor could wash away the embarrassment reddening her cheeks. I stayed there sitting in silence for who knows how long, never taking a breath. It had warmed me, what she’d told me. But it terrified me as well, and not only because of her own words. Your people becoming warped by your presence , the Grey Pilgrim had said, old traits grown more vicious and acute. I wanted to deny him, as or all his kindly appearance he was a man very much trying to kill me.

And yet.

Archer believed all the hard edges in my companions had been there long before they came across me. That it was circumstance making them come out, not some deeper sinister influence. She might be right. Was is not, in a way, supremely arrogant to decide I was responsible for who they were and what they were willing to do? Masego had been raised by a villain and and a devil, Archer by cold-eyed thrill killer and Hakram was an orc – his people’s bouts of savagery filled the pages of history books. Vivienne had been the Thief before ever hearing I existed, and had walked that narrow line between Good and Evil for most her life. Her stolen riches had never gone to feed orphans or the destitute: she’d been settling a grudge. A deeply Callowan thing to do, but if nothing else the last few years had brought out in sharp relief that my people’s penchant for vengeance was not necessarily a thing of the Heavens.

The old voice in the back of my head gave answer soon enough. It would be easy, wouldn’t it, to eschew responsibility for all of this? To let the comforting words wash over me, to share the burden of all the woe that had come to pass. But I’d seen it with my own eyes, decent men arguing for Bonfire. A little word that meant that slaughter of thousands of innocents simply to prevent Procer from sallying out against me. The excuses came swift and plentiful, that withholding that assault had led to the Battle of the Camps and the deaths of thousand anyway. That it was my enemies who had sought the war, not I. Justifications always came aplenty. I still felt a shiver of discomfort, when I realized at some point I’d become the kind of woman that would sow justifications matter only to the just on her own banner. What a vicious joke that’d turned out to be: even while espousing the words, had I ever really stopped telling myself what I was doing was necessary? I’d clutched that whisper tight and led my soldiers, my people, into one war after another.

The Queen of Summer had called us a woe unto all we would behold, and I felt that to be the most savage kind of prophecy: the one that called not on unearthly sight but simple recognition of character. Who was I, to take such grand decisions? Not even twenty-one, taught too little and haunted by grave mistakes. What right did I have to make decrees that might resound for centuries after my death? The fear was paralyzing, that I might botch the matter badly enough a dozen generations might pay for it. I was a drunkard playing dice with the fight of nations, compared to my enemies. I’d be damned for the disaster, and rightly. And yet, I thought with a dark smile, would I not also be damned for doing nothing at all? Maybe Black was right and I’d never been meant for grace at all, for the righteous choices of a hero’s story. Maybe I’d always been who I’d told myself I had become, a deeper truth laid bare by power. Because in the end, if there was only damnation I would rather be damned out of error than fear.

And that left only one thing to do, didn’t it?

I found Ivah standing along, the red marks of the blood I’d spilled dried on its cheek. It rose when I approached, but I waved that away. We settled down comfortably, out of anyone’s earshot.

“It is my understanding,” I said, “that you seek power. To redress what was done to you, to rise above where you once stood.”

“That is so, Queen,” Ivah said, silver bright in its eyes.

“Then I believe,” I said, “it might be time for us to make deal.”

Winter whispered in my ear, promises and imprecations, the distant howl of blizzard parted by the deep crack of great glaciers.

I let it.

Interlude: Queen’s Gambit, Offered

“Do I even need to give the order?”
– Dread Empress Massacre

“Mobility is how they have survived, Your Most Serene Highness,” General Altraste said. “We have easily five times their number on the field, but divided and constantly forced to march in different directions. The moment the Legions are trapped we have won the battle.”

The man’s long and elaborate mustache moved distractingly as he spoke, though Cordelia forced herself to ignore it. Diego Altraste had duly embraced the Arlesite practice of turning his facial hair into a spectacle, keeping it waxed and curved with near-religious dedication. The First Prince had always thought the custom made men look like buffoons, though it would not be diplomatic to voice as much. Her court in Salia had scrupulously observed the latest fervours of southern nobility, as it would have been too easy to dismiss her as a barbarous Lycaonese otherwise. She herself rarely partook. A First Prince set fashion, they did not bow to it. Watching dainty Alamans ladies weave their hair into Rhenian war braids after she’d adopted the style for a few months had been a rare source of amusement in a year that had provided precious little of that.

“I am aware of the numbers, general,” she replied. “And of how they have failed to lead to victories, no matter how oft repeated to me.”

“I understand you are displeased by the fall of Lutes,” the man delicately said.

Quite the understatement, that. Iserre’s northern border was not a heavily armed one, as its ruling family’s relations with Cantal had been more than cordial for decades. Their lines had intertwined so often it was a popular jest in Procer that to split the difference between the royalty of Cantal and Iserre one would need a very sharp knife. The Carrion’s Lord descent into the Principality of Iserre had only one sharp obstacle, the old fortress-town of Lutes. A remnant of the days when ancient Arlesite tribes had pushed deep into Alamans territory, Lutes was a spit of rock with tall wall and taller towers. One that boasted fewer than ten thousand souls, but unlike most of Iserre the town had been garrisoned. Bandits had tried to take it more than once in the past, and so Prince Amadis had found it prudent to station troops there after the Great War. Disaffected fantassins were but a hungry day away from banditry, after all, and there’d been quite a few of them in Procer after Cordelia ascended the throne.

None of the First Prince’s commanders had kept to the illusion that Lutes would hold indefinitely, but there had been an expectation that it would slow down Praesi advance into Iserre. Perhaps long enough for the Levantine reinforcing army to make shore southwards enough it would be able to reinforce the gathering forces in the capital of Iserre, preventing its loss to the Legions. Instead the town had fallen literally overnight. The Carrion Lord had struck bargain with bandits, who’d infiltrated the fortress and opened the gates to his forces after night fell in exchange for the lion’s share of the loot. The defenders were caught unawares and half-asleep, bloody massacre ensued and when dawn rose the Legions of Terror were marching south once more. Worse, the fact that the Black Knight had kept to his terms with the bandits had spread across the entire region. The temptation of treachery would only deepen, and the Silver Letters were not responding near swiftly enough for her tastes.

“I know little of matters of war,” Cordelia said. “Yet it occurs to me that with the fall of that fortress, we have effectively lost the northern half of the principality. They cannot occupy it, of course, but more importantly we cannot defend it. And now you come to me with a scheme that involves abandoning yet another city to the enemy.”

That this conversation even needed to be had was infuriating. A mere sixteen thousand men had escaped the Red Flower Vales to wage war on the greatest nation of Calernia’s surface and yet the last four months had brought only word of defeat after defeat. Exiled vagabonds were burning a swath through the heartlands of Procer, which was a disaster in too many ways to count. Cordelia knew better than anyone how fragile the Principate truly was, at the moment. The land had not yet truly recovered from two decades of civil war, though she’d had few other choice than to wage yet another conflict – it would have been near-impossible to rebuild if the mass of fantassins left from the Great War were still there to agitate. Cantal being made a ruin had been a heavy blow, and if Iserre was put to the torch as well would mean starvation in the south-east come winter. The bloody Praesi were burning every granary they couldn’t carry, after all, years of accumulated grain going up into smoke.

The most aggravating part was, she thought, that she still had armies to field but that she could not send them after the Black Knight. Now that Catherine Foundling had made it clear the Dead King’s assault was imminent and not months away, the host under Uncle Klaus had to hurry north at the expense of all else. The northern invasion force under Princess Malanza was already marching towards Cleves, but the woman had made it clear that the Callowan campaign had left the army a wreck. The Black Queen had apparently assassinated almost every professional officer in it, then butchered her way through a significant portion of the most reputable fantassin companies. Malanza had described her host as having more generals than lieutenants , and the First Prince did not need to be a seasoned veteran to understand the dangers of that. If Malanza held tall walls, she might weather the storm long enough for Uncle Klaus to arrive. If she did not make it to Cleves swiftly enough, the shores of the Tomb would fall and the Dead King would gain solid foothold in Procer.

The last significant Proceran force was guarding the border with the League of Free Cities, and it could not be moved. The political consequences of that would be dire enough – if Cordelia could no longer offer protection the Princess of Tenerife would seek another patron and further damage the First Prince’s position in the Highest Assembly – but the strategic ones were worse. The League had yet to declare war, but it had mustered its armies. The moment the twenty thousand soldiers in Tenerife left the south became wide open to invasion. She’d attempted correspondence with the Hierarch to probe intentions and six months past the man had finally deigned to reply. Cordelia almost wished he hadn’t. The missive had been three pages long, most of which castigating the notion of inherited rule as Wicked Tyranny, Procer itself as A Rapacious Pack Of Foreign Oligarchs and her suggestion of formal truce talks as Treason Against The Will Of The People. Which people in particular, she’d noted, he had not specified. He’d at least recognized her title of First Prince, as it was the result of an election.

The Tyrant of Helike had sent a secret missive along the other letter, swearing eternal friendship and making assurances that he’d increased the size of Helike’s army twofold as a ‘purely defensive measure’. He went on writing of his deep regrets for the recent civil war in the League, which he was apparently trying to cast himself as mournful of after single-handedly starting and winning. The First Prince had not known until then it was possible for someone’s calligraphy to come across as blatantly insincere, but her horizons had since been expanded.

“Your Highness,” General Altraste said, “may I be frank?”

“I expect all my officers to offer me truth, no matter how unpalatable,” Cordelia replied, and meant it.

“If we try to defend the city with every force at our disposal, we may very well still lose it,” he said. “And that defeat would be the end of Iserre. I will not pretend the plan I offer is pleasant to behold: it will require ugly sacrifice. But if we do not cut the rot before it spreads, it is not only Iserre we risk losing.”

Cordelia did not answer. She looked out the windows instead, watched Salia below her. The tall bell towers of the many churches, the mansions and palaces of royalty. The people still filling every nook and cranny of the largest city on Calernia when autumn was painting leaves red and gold. She thought of a cold night in Rhenia, when she’d been seven and come across her mother drinking alone in the hall. Mother had still been half a goddess in her eyes, back then, implacable and undaunted. She’d asked her why she looked so sad. Sometimes survival is an ugly affair, my sweet , Mother had told her. It would be years until she learned that her mother had just ordered a pass collapsed and every village beyond it abandoned to the ratlings. Too many soldiers had gone to Hannoven to aid in turning back the warbands come with spring thaw. Hundreds of Rhenians had been left to die to tooth and claw, abandoned in the cold. The thousands that would have died had the ratling made it through the pass were spared.

“Do what needs to be done, general,” Cordelia Hasenbach quietly said.

—

“Interesting,” Amadeus said.

The others insisted on treating him like he was made of glass, yet for all that his body had become pale and sickly his mind had not dulled. Spreading an aspect across sixteen thousand soldiers – closer to fifteen now, he corrected – exhausted him to the extent he could barely stand, most days. Being carried like on a litter an invalid had been a private humiliation, though he was not one to let petty pride get in the way of necessity. He was currently more useful as a logistical asset than a field one. Still, the sweat and shivers had been an unpleasant surprise. He’d not known sickness in a very long time, and this was perhaps as close as a Named could come to it.

“We won’t get to plunder a waystation twice,” Scribe said. “The Circle of Thorns is recalling all assets in the region and the Silver Letters are withdrawing everything but observers.”

Those two organizations were, respectively, the foreign and domestic intelligence apparatuses of the Principate. The Silver Letters occasionally also dabbled in assassination or a spot of sabotage in the past, though under Hasenbach they’re curtailed those activities to Praesi agents only. He had great respect for the Circle of Thorns, personally. They were one of the most skillful and well-funded spy networks in the history of Calernia, and had been pursuing Procer’s interests abroad with regular success for centuries. It also operated with only middling oversight from the throne: even at the height of the Proceran civil war, the Eyes of the Empire had been forced to fight them tooth and nail for every success in the Free Cities. Their information was, as a rule, reliable and delivered to the appropriate individuals in a timely manner. The Silver Letters, on the other hand, had been made sport of by Imperial agents for decades. They had connections with the gutter and the servants as well as the ruthlessness to properly use them, but they lacked the professional training and arcane tools the Eyes of the Empire had gained since Alaya climbed the Tower. Their internal squables had been exploited by Scribe’s agents with relish, though only ever through careful intermediaries – they despised the Eyes to the bone.

“It does not matter,” Amadeus finally said. “From what we have learned we can deduce more, and sooner or later we will succeed at getting our hands on royal correspondence.”

The household guard of Cantal had burned their ruler’s personal papers when it became evident the capital would fall, which was good and clever service yet somewhat inconvenient to the Black Knight. He’d personally commended the captain responsible and offered the man an officer’s commission in the Legions, though sadly he’d refused. Out of respect he’d allowed the captain poison instead of the blade, though the execution had been a given. Amadeus was fond of talent, yet not so fond he would leave it in the service of his foes. Grem strode into the tent moments later, parting the flap and letting in the scent of smoke and blood. Two villages had been sacked today, though legionaries had only ever marched on one. It remained a matter of great amusement to Amadeus that the Proceran campaign was yielding a greater harvest of traitors than the civil war in Praes ever had.

There was reason to it, of course. The fresh auxiliaries gained by his host were bandits who’d been at odds with local authorities long before he ever came, and who intended to melt back into the countryside with their loot the moment the Legions left. His army was seen as a passing storm here, an opportunity to be exploited. When he’d fought to put Alaya on the throne it had been with the stated intent to crush every significant Praesi power block underfoot and have them remain in that state for the foreseeable future. That he’d been a Duni backed largely by orcs and goblins in the initial stretch of the war had only added to the perception that Alaya’s supporters were hungry outsiders that would throw away all old privileges and influences in order to rise. Few Praesi of authority had been willing to lend their aid to a faction so estranged from traditional avenues of power, not until it became exceedingly clear it would win the war.

“Heard you found the letters of some Proceran spies,” Grem said, striding towards a seat.

The one-eyed orc glanced at him first, lips thinning in dismay. Amadeus kept his irritation off his face. He was exhausted, not dying.

“A waystation belonging to the Circle of Thorns,” Eudokia specified. “The letters were meant to be carried to Salia at least a week back, but our advance disrupted the journey.”

“News from abroad, then,” Grem grunted. “Shame. Knowing what the Silver Letters are up to would be a great deal more useful. That’s twice we ran into bandit groups fighting over succession, now, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

“Damage control by Hasenbach, most likely,” Amadeus agreed. “Yet their correspondence has been... enlightening. Klaus Papenheim is on the march.”

The orc’s hairless brows rose.

“He’s finally willing to chase us?” he said. “I didn’t think his niece’s position in the Assembly was that weak. Would Iserre falling really unseat her?”

“He’s marching north, old friend,” Amadeus said. “The letters also mentioned that an eye needed to be kept on the Stairway in case Duchess Kegan decided to raid into Arans. It was deemed unlikely – and I agree – but the implication that there was need of a watch at all is telling.”

“It means Malanza’s not going to be holding the pass from their end,” Grem said. “That’s their two largest field armies on the move.”

He paused.

“ Shit ,” he finally said. “You’re sure?”

“We are,” Eudokia said.

“Then the entire north is about to be hip-deep in dead men,” Grem bluntly said. “I can’t think of another reason for Hasenbach to pull out. The Iron Prince only let us burn our way through the heartlands without lifting a finger because he judged toppling Callow as quick as possible was how the war would be turned around. He wouldn’t leave the Vales if he had any another choice, not after committing for so long.”

“That is my assessment as well,” Amadeus said. “And it means our horizons have just expanded a great deal.”

“Hainaut’s the longer coast, and it’s a maze of cliffs and passes,” Grem continued, thinking out loud. “No, Malanza won’t head there. Your apprentice ripped through her officers, that army’s running on fumes and fantassins. If it’s spread out for coastal defence half of it will bolt when the Dead King comes out. She’ll head for Cleves. It’s where Keter aims for, whenever they try to land a force, and it’s fortified almost as heavily as a Callowan city. She’ll count on the walls to hold the army together and wait until Papenheim makes it north to contest Hainaut.”

“Both those forces will not return south for years,” the Black Knight said. “That leaves them conscripts and Levantines. The army in Tenerife is unlikely to budge so long as the League doesn’t declare for anyone.”

“The Dominions has two field armies of thirty thousand,” Grem said. “I’m not worried around the one going around the lakes through Salamans, it’s not going to pursue unless we tweak their nose. But if we scrap with the one that just made shore, this campaign is finished.”

Amadeus had, in a rare flight of fancy, called this war an invasion when speaking to Ranker. It was not, practically speaking. No territory taken had been held, and this entire affair could more accurately be termed a large-scale raid. One pursued in a manner that would shake the First Prince’s position in the Highest Assembly while also aiming to damage the Principate’s ability to wage war past winter, but those were deeper strategic pursuits. Tactically, the Legions of Terror were behaving as a roving force avoiding field battles and attacking only soft positions. Raiders, by any definition. That the countryside and cities had been emptied by the massive conscription preceding the Tenth Crusade allowed Amadeus’ army to draw on its comprehensive siege experience to breach and sack cities a more traditional force would avoid, but that ability should not be mistaken for actual fighting strength. If the Legions engaged a Levantine army outnumbering them twofold, even a victory would be so costly his forces would be effectively knocked out of the war. That would be the beginning of a death spiral, Amadeus knew: without the strength necessary to forage his army would begin to starve, further slowing and weakening it until even thinned city garrisons would be enough to stamp it out.

“We know for a fact they’ve slowed down to a crawl,” Scribe said. “Even if they began a forced march tonight we should be able to take the city of Iserre and withdraw before they arrive.”

“It’s a tempting target,” Amadeus noted. “The food stores would keep us fed through winter easily and the treasury would allow us to significantly expand the ranks of our auxiliaries. Prince Milenan’s capital was spared by the civil war: it’s one of the wealthiest cities in Procer at the moment.”

“My very point,” Grem said. “If it’s that good a prize, why is Hasenbach botching its defence so badly?”

“I suspect it is beyond her control,” Scribe said. “The Dominion has expressed doubt that the terms of alliance signed cover the defence of Procer itself.”

“They can’t seriously expect that to hold up,” the orc growled. “They’d be stabbing an ally in broad daylight. If they screw another crusader in the middle of a crusade their reputation is dust .”

“Eudokia is of the opinion that they’re shaking down the First Prince for concessions,” Amadeus said. “Letting Iserre burn would make her fold quick enough, no matter her objections.”

The orc’s sole eye turned to him.

“And you?”

“Six months ago, the Ashuran committee liaising with the Grand Alliance formally requested access to the Thalassocracy’s most accurate maps of Praes as well as the tally of trade goods compiled by its merchant captains,” Amadeus said. “There can be no doubt that the signatories are already debating how best to partition Praes after the crusade. There are also known proponents of the extermination of all humans within Imperial borders in the Dominion’s upper ranks, though they remain a loud minority for now. They still represent a significant portion of the Levantine armies we are facing at this very moment, which grants them leverage. The First Prince is currently losing control of the Highest Assembly, desperately in need of reinforcements to face both us and the Dead King and it’s an open secret she fought against the results of the conclave in Salia and lost. If Levant was ever going to turn the screws on her for concessions, now is the time. All the stars are aligned.”

“Queen Catherine is also still unaccounted for,” Scribe said. “In a way she’s the most immediate threat of all. She could appear on the outskirts of Salia with the entire Army of Callow, and even if the Augur warns Hasenbach in advance her armies cannot magically cross half of Procer to arrive in time. Every single plan they make has to take that under consideration.”

“They can fight a better war than this,” Marshal Grem One-Eye said. “I won’t deny anything you said, but you both know I’m speaking the truth. There’s the scent of hubris in the air, Black. I don’t like it.”

“So there is,” Amadeus murmured. “I suppose there’s only one question left to ask, then.”

“And what’s that?” the orc said, eye narrowed.

“Shall we roll the dice one more time, old friend?” the Carrion Lord smiled, slow and thin and utterly cold.

Fatalism III

“I fear the man of one book, even if that book is about the pastoral habits of the common Callowan cow. Have you ever looked into the eyes of a cow? They are a depthless abyss of cold nihilism.”
– King Edward IV of Callow, the Sufficiently Paranoid

In the days before the founding of the Principate, Salia had been little more than the ancient tribal grounds of the Merovins. Though rich in game and copper – mined, one no longer admitted in polite company, by slaves from rival Alamans tribes – it’d been a modest village of less than five thousand. The Merovins were known as hunters and warriors, not farmers, and had preferred to raise lodges in now-cut forests rather than gather in a city-fortress as the Arlesites to the south had practiced since times immemorial. That it’d been chosen as the seat of the council that founded the Principate had been due to a potent mixture of luck and politicking by Clothor Merovins. Salia had been well placed to host the armies returned victorious from the First Crusade and the fall of Triumphant, and had represented something of a compromised between the already-squabbling factions of Alamans chiefs and Arlesites kings who both desired the council closer to their own holdings. It was a famous story that Clothor had sold all his possessions, down to his last pair of boots, to bribe the recalcitrant into agreeing.

Like so many stories on which the foundation of realms were built, it was a lie. Clothor had been one of the wealthiest men in the not-yet-Principate, having discretely stolen the Callowan tributes meant for Dread Empress Triumphant that were getting readied when the continent-wide rebellion against her reign began. Still, there was a grain of truth to the story: the man had near-beggared himself buying alliances with lavish gifts and promises, though he had kept his boots. And still Cantal had nearly been chosen at the site instead. It would be a very difference Principate that now stood, Cordelia thought, if the chieftess of Cantal had succeeded at her own intrigues. But Clothor had been both wilier and the better speaker, going on to win the contest and then the crown itself: the very first of the First Princes of Procer. One of his very first orders had been to raise what was now the Chamber of Assembly on the grounds where the celebrated council had taken place, and it was surrounded by those centuries of history that Cordelia Hasenbach now sat.

Salia was now the largest city of Calernia: when winter came around and the labouring manants who’d toiled on the fields throughout spring and summer flocked to city with their seasonal wages, near nine hundred thousand souls dwelled within the boundaries of Procer’s capital. The city had been turned into a work of art by First Princes and Princesses, spires and churches and sprawling gardens – some of those meant only for winter, even, built so that the frost and snow themselves would become adornments. There was ugliness as well, entire districts of huts where the peasants took sick and died in their own wastes while the wealthy partook in exotic banquets mere miles away. And yet Cordelia had found she loved Salia, for all its flaws, with the same depth she loved the Rhenia of her birth. It was a city unlike any other on the continent, the ever-beating heart of an empire that risen from nothing to stand above all realms that saw the sun. Where else could one find Arlesite poet-duellists declaiming in contest with Alamans lay brothers in gardens that depicted different acts of a play with every season? Or grim-faced Lycaonese veterans trading drinks and war stories with fantassins who’d served in wars halfway across the continent?

The wealth of Salia was in the people, not the coin or the facades, and it was a rare day where the First Prince of Procer did not wake humbled that they had been placed in her care.

Yet in that sprawling, glorious and riotous mess there was one place of utter stillness. One that had not changed since the savage days of Procer’s founding, where it had been hard men and women wearing furs and stolen riches – never without a blade, even when bathing – who had changed the world: the Chamber of Assembly, seat of the Highest Assembly of the Principate. The walls were naught but whitewashed limestone, the rafters were ancient oak that creaked when touched and the chamber had carried a faint scent of wood smoke ever since the palace around it caught fire during the second Liturgical War. A halfway-skillful merchant would own finer hall than this after a decade’s work, and yet never once had the royalty of Procer asked the chamber should be built anew or replaced. For within there stood twenty-four thrones, none younger than six centuries. One for every principality in the realm, dragged from all over the Principate to stand forever in this room. Princes and princesses ruled from palaces all over Procer, but there was only one Chamber and one Highest Assembly: the words spoken in this smoky hall resounded to every corner of Calernia.

Cordelia’s own seat was the same that had been set by Clothor Merovins himself. A spit of grey granite polished by the waters of the lake it’d been dredged from, without even a back to lean against. Cunning Clothor was said to have mourned before all that he’d emptied his treasury so deeply bestowing gifts upon his allies he could not even afford to have a proper throne carved. The blonde prince rather admired the man who’d been her earliest predecessor. A great warlord, yes, but one of the rare examples of that breed who’d understood the worth of the softer ways of statecraft. Many kings and chiefs came to that council with thrones that now stood before her, gilded and set with jewels or made of enchanted stones and rare trees from the Waning Woods. Yet Clothor Merovins’ humble spit of granite was the only one that stood on a dais, an inch higher than all the others. In truth, two seats in the chamber rightfully belonged to Cordelia. The same she now sat, and another far to the back.

One of the triplet thrones of Rhenia, Hannoven and Bremen, famously carved from the same pale chalkstone on which First Princess Frederonne Merovins had wed the Prince of Hannoven, sealing her conquest of the Lycaonese principalities by twining bloodlines. Her own father had died assaulting the walls of Rhenia, where even after the fall of every other Lycaonese principality the hosts had held out with desperate defiance, but Frederonne had shown enough foresight to predict that fighting the Lycaonese to the bitter end would leave her own people to defend against the Plague and the Dead in their stead. Cordelia’s Rhenian throne was covered by a silk banner displaying the Hasenbach heraldry of crowned bronze mountain peak on deep blue, signifying that she had named no sworn delegate and still held the voting rights for the principality. The technical matter was complex, and relied on the legal fiction that she was two different people: the Prince of Rhenia, her birthright, and the Princess of Salia which was a title bound to the greater one of First Prince. Before the last of the Merovins died the principality of Salia had been its own realm and remained under their rule even when one not of their bloodline was First Prince, though the ruler of Procer had right of administration over the city, by custom.

It had been over a hundred years since then, however, and Cordelia had come to benefit from the additional vote and attendant legalities more than she’d ever expected she would.

“The assembly recognizes l’assermenté for Prince Amadis Milenan of Iserre,” the Master of Orders announced, thickly-accented Lycaonese voice perfectly pronouncing the Old Chantant term.

The white-haired Master was one of her own Rhenians, one with a talent for languages she’d put into place within a month of ascending the throne. In this battlefield of courtesies and ceremonies, there were few advantages more precious than an arbiter of ceremonies entirely loyal to her. Cordelia’s eyes blue eyes flicked at the sworn delegate of Iserre, one of Prince Amadis’ seemingly never-ending parade of kinsmen of middling talent. Olivier Milenan was young, barely in his twenties, and handsome in much the same way as his very distant uncle. Not the sharpest of intriguers, this one, though hardly slow. She suspected he’d been chosen by Amadis largely because while of princely blood Olivier’s branch of the family was impoverished and so the sum entire of his fortunes rested on the goodwill of his crowned kinsman. This one would not cross his uncle, lest he got back to rotting in the gutted mansion where he’d been raised in utter obscurity. Rising to his feet, Olivier Milenan straightened his back.

“By ancient oath, I speak only the words of my prince and none other,” he said.

“You were heard by these hallowed grounds,” the Master of Orders replied. “Let no lie mar your tongue, no heresy your soul and may the Heavens grant you righteous purpose in this exchange of words.”

Every individual in the chamber save those two repeated the sentences with practiced cadence. As First Prince, Cordelia was exempt from such proceedings. As Prince of Rhenia, she was not. Other royals were few in attendance, in this particular session. The rulers Creusens, Orense and Valencis had graced the capital with their presence, as well as her old ally the Prince of Brus, yet every other was a sworn delegate. It mattered little: their instructions would be royal, if not their bearing.

“My countrymen,” Olivier Milenan spoke, his voice well-trained and pleasant to the ear, “I stand before you today to speak of grave matters. The Principate has upheld its duties to Creation and undertaken the waging of just war against the wicked crowns of the East, yet in doing so a heavy price has been exacted. While our armies manoeuvre and quibble, Dread Empress Malicia’s hungriest hound pillages and rapes his way through our realm heedlessly. Already Cantal has suffered such depredations, and now my own native Iserre seems destined for the same savage fate.”

It had not taken long, Cordelia mused, for the first instruction of the Master of Orders to be disregarded – let no lie mar your tongue . The Carrion Lord’s horde of murderous vagrants might be looting everything granary in sight, but they at least observed their own regulations: rapists and murderers were hung. The man’s rhetorical flourishes were not of great import, though what would follow them was. The First Prince had already deduced the gist of the motion the man would present. She had, after all, a letter addressed to a bastard among her papers. It was the number of those willing to support the motion that truly mattered. This was the first formal session held since the defeats in Callow, though half a dozen informal ones had taken place. The important difference between the two was that in a formal session, any motion put to the First Prince would enter the public records. Including the votes and if her personal Right of Refusal was used afterwards. That she would be driven to that was unlikely, as she should still have enough support they would fail to secure a majority, but it was possible for her and her allies to be forced to vote in a manner that would damage their reputation with the people . If you have the votes to corner me, Milenan , she thought. Do you?

“Our cities are empty, our fortresses gather dust,” Olivier orated, voice resounding. “Why? Because we have sent our soldiers to war, observing the decree of our anointed First Prince. Do not mistake this for intriguing, my friends, for none stand more loyal to Her Most Serene Highness than the braves of Iserre. I merely weep for the fate of my people, who must wither and die even as their valiantly crusading cousins stand leashed and impotent mere weeks of march away. Where is the Iron Prince, I ask you? What right does the Prince of Hannoven have to part kin from besieged kin by such cruel decree?”

There were murmurs of approval at that. Uncle Klaus had never been popular down south, in part because he’d led her armies in their crushing of theirs yet also because he himself made no mystery that he held most of them in contempt. His decision – though it had been presented as hers – to let the Legions of Terror march into Procer without pursuit had only deepened the enmity. The sworn delegate from Bremen loudly spat on the floor, scarred face purple with anger, much to the distaste of the closest southerners. Uncle Klaus had carried her crippled cousin back through five leagues of marshlands under ratling pursuit after a skirmish went south, Cordelia knew. If blades were allowed into the chamber, she might very well have drawn. The Iron Prince was misliked here, but he was fiercely loved by his own people.

“The Prince of Iserre asks not for glory or reward, though for this realm he has greatly bled,” Olivier said. “He only asks for loyalty to be repaid in kind, and the heart of Procer to be protected from the foul works of the Praesi. Iserre motions for a formal petition to be presented to the First Prince, requesting that the army under the command of Prince Klaus Papenheim be tasked with the defense of Procer itself.”

Cordelia kept her face unruffled. The choice of a petition petition had been a clever trick of procedure, she had to admit, and one that’d surprised her. Milenan was within his rights to make a direct request to the First Prince, though not a demand – the Principate had joined a crusade, which meant she had supreme authority over all armed men and any attempting to wrest it from her would be committing treason. Would that her opponents were such fools. If it had been a direct request, every delegate and royal casting their vote in favour of it would be effectively declaring they had lost faith in her ability to prosecute this war. In the middle of a crusade, that would be costly to their popularity at home as the people’s mood had grown distinctly vengeful. A petition to request, on the other hand, would produce a formal document open to any attending sitter’s signature that would be presented to her after the session. The vote over the motion itself would not be added to the record, keeping the implicit rebuke to her entirely private.

It was clever in the sense that it allowed principalities neither in her camp nor Prince Amadis’ to express their dissatisfaction: they could back the motion to have the petition, then withhold their signature on the document. Young Olivier had been busy in his uncle’s service, she realized, and moreso than she had thought. He’d never have presented the motion if he did not believe it would pass. And when that petition is made passed along to every prince in Procer, Cordelia thought, which we both know you will do, the unity of your uncle’s own faction will be brought in contrast with my own dying alliances. With a single act he was forcing her to publicly deny a petition that would be very popular in certain parts of her realm, wounded her prestige in the Highest Assembly and signaled to fence-sitters it might be time to place their coin on the horse pulling ahead. Alamans intrigue at is finest, this: three birds with a single stone, all headed for the thrower’s own kitchen. How best to strangle this, then, before the blow caused a bruise?

“The assembly recognizes l’assermentée for Prince Arnaud Brogloise of Cantal,” the Master of Orders announced.

The sworn delegate, her dress and apparel perfect to the extent that even Cordelia could only be admiring, inclined her head respectfully before speaking.

“The Prince of Cantal seconds the motion to petition the First Prince, and moves for immediate vote over it,” she simply said.

Striking swift, was it? They had succeeded at arranging this under her nose, but assuming victory could be won by simple haste was rather bold of them. The Master of Orders glanced at her and she cleared her throat. His eyes went down to her lap, where he found her hands folded primly.

“The assembly recognizes the Prince of Rhenia,” he smoothly said.

There was a ripple at that. The three Lycaonese in the back wore open smiles, and her old comrade Prince Frederic of Brus was leaning forward eagerly.

“The Principality of Rhenia thirds the presented motion,” she smiled calmly. “Moreover, it requests for both the vote and preceding address to be entered into the formal public record.”

A glint of amusement passed in the Master of Orders’ rheumy eyes.

“As per law, such a request can only be granted by the First Prince of Procer,” he said. “I now put the question to Her Most Serene Highness, First Prince of Procer, Princess of Salia.”

Cordelia inclined her head.

“I grant the request,” she simply said.

The blonde prince felt every eye in the room turn to her. Faces had blanked, eyes gone thoughtfully. Even Olivier Amadis had been visibly taken aback before mastering himself and was now staring at her warily. Wonder now, boy , she thought. What I know that you do not. Uncle Klaus was preparing for a march north even as session was held, after all. Let the record show Amadis Milenan’s own nephew dragging his name through the mud even as the Iron Prince gathered supplies for his march to turn back the Dead King. Let every single one of these vultures be named as the handful that would abandon all of northern Procer to salvage their granaries. Scrape me raw if you dare, Milenan. I am willing to lose a little skin if in exchange I can have you and your fellows flayed in song in every tavern from Rhenia to Tenerife by the year’s end. The men who sold Procer. It has a ring to it, does it not? She met the boy eyes and smiled pleasantly.

“Shall we proceed with the vote?” she asked.

Her gaze swept the rest of the room . And now we find out what worth are the bargains you made, Olivier. Will they stick with you, when they smell a trap? There is no one in this room unware that he who rides the Ebb must beware of the Flow. Her prompting added to the sworn delegate from Cantal’s had made it inevitable vote would immediately follow before any further discussion could be had. The Master of Orders called on the thrones in sequence, and it was an effort for Cordelia’s face not to grow grim. Most of the supporters were expected. Iserre, Cantal, Orne, Creusens, Segovia and Aequitan. Prince Amadis and his closest supporters, those who had been defeated at the Battle of the Camps and were well aware that if the Iserran cause sunk they would soon follow it into the depths. Bayeux she’d expected as well, as parts of its countryside had been torched by the Carrion Lord. Orense, however, was an unpleasant surprise. She had saved its evidently ingrate prince from brutal Levantine raids barely more than a year ago. How quickly gratitude turned to naught. The sworn delegate from Valencis hesitated before abstaining, which was telling. If not for her ploy that would have been another vote in favour. Eight in favour, out of twenty four votes, and it could very easily have been nine. How many others had simply hidden their late change of heart more skillfully?

The motion failed, and she had scored a wound that would not show for months yet, but she could feel the wind turning. The matter of the coming conclave needed to be squashed, lest today’s abstentions become tomorrow’s knives.

—

Cordelia was not one to easily discard etiquette. Rules were the birthing bed of civilization: common foundation could only be found when people agreed on the most essential standards of behaviour. Etiquette was merely the regulation of relationships between individuals, and while it could be used to oppress it could also be used to free. Rules always cut both ways

Yet if there was one particular set she could grind into dust, it was the stringent courtesies governing audience between the Holies and the First Prince of Procer. It was a throwback of the Liturgical Wars, one no ruler of Procer had every felt quite secure enough to revisit. She was ushered into the Starlit Cloister by a handful of sisters who had taken vows of silence, her personal guard forced to remain outside, and led to a private garden. There she was guided in removing her dress and regalia before submitting to hour-long ablutions that left her without a single speck of artifice. Even her hair was unbraided, made to course down her shoulders without the slightest of stylings. It was wearing a white shift unflattering to her Hasenbach frame and barefoot that a brother finally sought her out, bowing low before informing her she was to be received.

The entire process was said to be symbolic, a stripping of earthly trappings before she could be allowed to speak with souls untainted by such matters. Cordelia herself was of the opinion that the point of the exercise was to humble the ruler of Procer and disarray them before taking them into the very seat of power of the Holies. It was a gauntlet of rather unsubtle pressure, and one she resented. The Holies, after all, were a purely Proceran notion: an assembly of the leading priests of the House of Light’s basilicas and cathedrals, with a smatter of administrators and highborn lay people added to the mixture. Still, unpleasant as this was it was a necessary unpleasantness. While the Holies might not wield authority in any official sense – their very existence was informal, and the requirements for counting among their number opaque to any outside of the House of Light – their influence assured that anything they agreed on would miraculously become policy shortly afterwards.

They must be convinced, at all costs.

The corpulent brother guiding her did so through a handful of sunlit corridors before pausing before a thick oaken gate. He bowed once more, observing the required angle perfectly, and left without a word. Cordelia allowed herself the weakness of a moment’s rest to gather her bearings. She silently marshalled her arguments, brought to mind faces and names and associated interests. They could be moved, as all men could be moved. Through the wood she heard a spatter of female laughter and the sound of cup being dropped, brow rising in response. Her hand rose to the heavy iron ring on the door, knocking thrice before pulling. The absence of a footpad to serve that purpose in her stead was yet another petty little test for any seeking audience. The door creaked open, and immediately Cordelia’s face stilled. She’d had audience with the Holies only once before, shortly before her coronation, and this was not the ornate hall where she had then been received.

It was instead a cramped arched dining room, filled with only a long table and a handful of seats. In the back a woman was leaning her seat so far back half the legs were off the floor, feet resting atop the table. She was old, skin creased and her forehead mottled with spots under a braid of stark white hair. The eyes, though, the eyes were sharp. Dark and patient.

“Good evening, Your Highness,” the Saint of Swords nonchalantly call out.

Her mind spun. She’d set out aiming to find out which of the Chosen had demanded the conclave, and already she had her answer. She absent-mindedly noted a handful of details in quick succession – there were two cups, not one, and one had been toppled. It’d spilled liquor all over the table. The other goblet was in the hands of the heroine, inclined at an angle that allowed her to recognize water within. They were alone in the room, the only other door behind the Saint, and the chandeliers casting light allowed moving shadows to be cast into the corners.

“Laurence de Montfort,” Cordelia calmly replied, inclining her head by the barest of fractions. “An unexpected pleasure. I was led to believe I would be addressing the Holies.”

“I sent them away for a walk,” the heroine still known in Procer as the Regicide shrugged. “This is a talk for adults, not squabbling children.”

Most royalty in her position, Cordelia thought, would be wondering if they were about to be carved up. She knew better. There were matters in which the First Prince did not trust the judgement of her uncle – tax policy, trade, putting his seal to a budget that did not overwhelmingly favour the army – but he was a very sharp judge of character. A hard woman , he’d said of the Saint, but she always means well. The blonde prince claimed a seat at the opposite end of the table without waiting for an invitation. The Chosen was not the host, here, only another guest.

“I take it this conclave is your work,” Cordelia said, settling down and forcing herself to ignore the unpleasant itch of her shift against her skin. “Should I expect the Grey Pilgrim to join us as well?”

“Tariq’s busy skinning of the many cats making a racket in your backyard,” the old woman dismissed. “I’ll be following him as soon as this business is finished.”

“And what business would that be, exactly?” she asked. “Your reputation does not mention an interest in statecraft.”

The Saint of Swords set down her cup on the table, then dragged her legs down. Her chair returned to the stone floor with a sharp clack.

“I find I am disappointed in you, Cordelia Hasenbach,” the Regicide said. “You’re promising in a lot of ways, I won’t deny. You’re taking a hatchet to the rot, however politely, and you’ve been herding the crowned wolves well enough. But this? You should know better. You’re Lycaonese. You know the Enemy’s face.”

Cordelia cocked her head to the side, keeping the pretence of calm in truth rapidly leaving her.

“Not merely the conclave,” she deduced. “It is your own notion to have the Black Queen named Arch-heretic of the East.”

The old woman grinned harshly.

“They were eager enough, truth be told,” the Saint said. “Just needed a little push. That I needed to give it at all is what got me in such a meddling mood. You’re flinching, Hasenbach. You’ve been down here too long, the iron’s beginning to rust.”

The First Prince’s lips thinned. It had been a very long time since she’d been offered such blatant disrespect.

“You know less than you think,” she said.

“‘Ol King Bones is stirring, you mean,” the Chosen replied.

Cordelia’s fingers tightened in her lap, a rare lapse of control on her part. How did she know? Had the Heavens whispered the secret in her ear? No, it did not matter. If she did know, why would she act so recklessly?

“You should be aware, then, that further prosecuting the war against Callow is unwise,” the First Prince said. “War on two fronts is foolish at the best of times. War on two fronts when one is the Kingdom of the Dead is lunacy . We cannot start a life and death struggle with the Black Queen when the marching dead gather north. It will be the ruin of the Principate, Saint. No amount of miracles can make hosts fight two battles simultaneously.”

“You mean,” Laurence de Montfort said softly, “to make truce with the Enemy. Listen to yourself, girl. Your ancestors would cut your bloody throat for this.”

“My ancestors were guarding a handful of passes and crossings,” Cordelia sharply replied. “I am charged with the entirety of Procer, and my failure would mean the slaughter of millions. I would rather be censured by the blind dead than watch the risen kind butcher half the Principate. You are gambling with the lives of more people than you have ever seen, Saint. What worth will your soft sentences be, when the Army of Callow falls on our flank and Keter devours the rest?”

“You don’t understand what this is, do you?” the Saint smiled. “This is not the War of the Grand Alliance or the second invasion of Callow. It’s the Tenth Crusade . You slapped the gauntlet down, girl, and now Below’s picking it up. There is no compromise to be had anymore, no subtle manoeuvering. You declared war on the Hellgods, and the sword will not return to the sheath until one side falls.”

“A crusade can be waged intelligently,” the First Prince said. “It must, or it will fail like those before it.”

“That’s where you misunderstand,” the Saint amiably said. “You think all of this...”

Her hand moved to encompass their surroundings.

“Is inviolable,” she continued. “It’s an understandable weakness. You rule here, after all, and love for your people is no sin. But everything dies, Cordelia Hasenbach. Even empires.”

The blond woman paled.

“This is treason,” she coldly said. “As good as a confession you seek the destruction of the Principate.”

“This whole damned house is rotten to the bone , girl,” the Saint said. “You’ve toiled and troubled and fought like lion, but it’ll die with you. You know that already, deep down. Maybe the Principate was what it should be, ages ago, but it has not been in a very long time. It’s greed and power and lies, hungry wars and treachery made into the mortar of palaces. The sickness is all it knows, now.”

“You are mad,” Cordelia spoke in a hushed whisper. “Gods Above, your mind has gone and you would take all of us with it.”

“Oh, we’ll bleed,” the Saint mused. “We’ll lose badly , at first. And then we’ll claw our way back up, inch by inch. Evil always wins at the start, but it’s us who owns the conclusion. And from the ruins something better will rise. This empire’s already a corpse, but we’ll send it off with a pyre glorious enough it’ll redeem the old faults.”

“I will have you arrested,” the First Prince of Procer said. “I will have you killed, if that is what it takes.”

“You just worry about getting the armies marching,” Laurence de Montfort dismissed. “Odds are I won’t survive the scrap, but that’s all right. It’s a good war to die in. It’ll be the crusade that settles it, you see: too many old monsters came crawling out on both sides. Won’t be the kind of losses a side can recover from.”

“You are not listening to a word I say,” Cordelia whispered, aghast.

The Saint of Swords rose to her feet jauntily. The First Prince’s muscles clenched, though she managed to flinch when the Chosen approached her. The old woman clapped her shoulder.

“Keep your chin up, girl,” she said. “Sacrifice is always ugly business, but we’ll come through in the end. To rise from the ashes, there needs to be a fire first.”

The Saint of Swords strolled out, boots slapping against the stone, and the sound of the door closing behind her was the death cry of an era.

Interlude: Zwischenzug

“Of course I fear my friends. If they did not scare me, why befriend them at all?”
– Dread Empress Prudence the First, the Frequently Vanquished

When dawn came to Laure it found Vivienne Dartwick already awake. She’d slept only fitfully on her too-soft bed, the sparse hours of rest broken by regular reports from her Jacks. Now that she’d returned to the capital she was like the spider returned to her web, her thieves and spies passing forward a river of whispers she had not understood how badly she missed before she could drink from it again. It’d been two months since she had last spoken with Catherine, time and distance watering her wine. She still believed most of what she’d said, but the dire state of affairs here had forced her to admit her queen had not been wrong in her predictions: neither she nor Adjutant had been able to afford a full night’s sleep since they stepped out of Arcadia. The orc was a work horse like no one she had ever met, yet she knew that if he’d been forced to handle the Jacks as well as the rest he would have buckled under the weight.

Sunlight passed through the open panes of her window as she sat in silence, two scrolls unfurled before her. Neither were pleasant news. Dread Empress Malicia had sent a diplomatic envoy under truce banner and the man was reported to be riding for Laure with all possible haste. His affairs had been looked through, and he carried no letter or instructions. Whatever the Empress wanted to be said would be spoke in person. Reluctantly, Vivienne had passed along orders for the envoy to be allowed use of courier horses and escorted by soldiers from the Summerholm garrison. The second scroll was a matter beyond her own purview to settle. After refugees began pouring into Callow through the Blessed Isle, Catherine had ordered for the farmers of the eastern fields to withdraw back to Summerholm with their grain and cattle. There had been concerns that if the city garrison sallied out to force the refugees back into the Empire it would be walking into a Praesi ambush.

The farmers and villagers closest to Summerholm had obeyed. Those closer to Praesi borders, however, were digging in their heels. They were refusing their abandon their possessions to the inevitable looting from the refugees but lacked the means to carry them westward, and so they’d refused to leave entirely. Already there had been strife between Callowans and refugees, and over a dozen deaths. It would only get worse, Vivienne knew. More refugees would come, and some would carry weapons. Callowan farmers would empty their cellars of dusty old spears and swords to fight for their land and property, and the killings would escalate. The Praesi were sure exploit the mounting fears and either arm or send troops to help their countrymen. Vivienne’s own countrymen would die, and not a damned thing would be done about it. Marshal Juniper, she knew, would be adamant it was not worth risking the garrison to protect farmers who’d refused to obey a royal decree.

There was only one man in the kingdom who could force her, and Hakram Deadhand was not known to smile upon those who disobeyed his mistress.

Vivienne passed a hand through her hair, noting it was beginning to grow long again. She’d need to have it cut soon enough, and it sent a private pang of fear in her that this was the case. The thief had worked with quite a few Named, since the Liesse Rebellion, and she had not known any of them to have such issues. The largest physical change she’d seen in someone with a Role was Masego’s noticeable loss of weight after the Observatory was raised – and given that the man had often forgotten to eat unless Indrani saw to it, the explanation was clear. The Hierophant had been wasting away chasing his visions, his thinning had been as much a reflection of that as his lack of meals. What did it mean, that her hair still grew and she tired almost as easily as when she’d been young? She’d never observed the same in any of the Named she’d known. The thought that she might lose her aspects, or even her Name itself, had been the fodder of persistent nightmares.

She was already dead weight as a Named, what would she be without even that?

Vivienne forced herself to breathe in and breathe out slowly, the old calming trick her thief master had taught her when he first took her roof-hopping. Yet she could only think of the pain, oh the pain when the lightning had coursed through her body. Of the searing green heat that engulfed her under the cold gaze of the Duke of Green Orchards. Of the flames that had licked at her body hungrily in the depths of the Doom of Liesse, cracking the gums of her teeth and scorching her tongue. A parade of pain, and what did she have but failures to contrast them with? How many of my victories were truly mine? Her hand was trembling with the answer, and the knowledge that followed – all of her defeats had been of her own making. Vivienne snarled and formed a fist with trembling fingers, hitting at the table.

“I will catch up,” she whispered, knuckles throbbing with pain. “I will .”

She breathed in, breathed out. The tremors had not left, but lazing about would not chase them away. She had had yet another losing fight to pick. She left the scrolls behind and left her rooms, grabbing the first palace servant she came across and ordering him to pass the message that Marshal Juniper was summoned to a council in the formal room at Morning Bell. Vivienne had no intention of spending time trading barbed words with the Hellhound as would inevitably ensue if she went herself to seek out the recently-arrived Marshal of Callow. The other whose attendance would be required, though, she would fetch herself. They’d not traded words in three days save through correspondences, their differing duties and long hours precluding the shared meals that Catherine insisted on the Woe having when she was there to enforce it. Honestly compelled the thief to admit she would not have taken occasion to have one even if there had been one. She’d warmed to some of the Woe more than she had ever thought she would. Masego and Indrani she even counted as friends of a sort, a notion that would have appalled her a few years ago.

She had no such conflicting feelings over Hakram Deadhand.

Adjutant was not difficult to find. The cramped and crooked room that had once belonged to some royal scribe was the orc’s office, and he did not leave it unless he was needed for council or court. He must sleep in there, if he even slept. The only distraction the Jacks had found he indulged in were occasional visits from his subordinate Captain Tordis. The other orc’s presence, when not required by reports, was followed by the door being locked and the captain emerging with her hair ruffled and her neck red around an hour afterwards. No other such visitors had been noted, which ran against Adjutant’s reputation for promiscuity. Vivienne suspected her was simply too tired and busy to chase skirts, even those made of mail. The door to the officer was cracked open, light filtering from inside. Neither candles, as Callowans preferred to use, not the finicky magelights the Praesi were so fond of. A handful of common sprites in bottles, spread around the room. Vivienne found the soft glow of them almost soothing as she rapped her knuckle against the door before opening it entirely. The orc was leaning over his desk, brows creased as he moved his quill against parchment with almost unnatural precision. He finished penning his sentence and blew the ink dry before looking up.

“Thief,” Adjutant said, nodding in welcome. “Didn’t think you’d still be up.”

“It will be Morning Bell within an hour,” Vivienne replied, then gestured at the seat across him. “May I?”

“Go ahead,” he replied, sounding surprised. “Gods, morning already? I could have sworn it was barely half a bell past midnight.”

The thief carefully picked up the handful of parchment sheaths left to pile on the seat, glimpsing a grain reserve tally left mostly open among them, and set them down on the floor. She dropped down into the chair, already wary. She forced herself not to look at his hand of bones, to not remember the sensation of it wrapping around her throat and squeezing .

“You look tired,” Deadhand gently said, fangs clicking inside his maw. “Don’t work yourself to death.”

“You’re hardly one to talk,” Vivienne said, painting a smile.

The kindly visage of the concerned friend, the shoulder all the Woe could lean on. That was to be his face today, then. It was one of many. Catherine’s dutiful steward and second, smoothing away every wrinkle. The laughing accomplice, trading jibes and jabs with the lowliest of soldiers. The terrifying giant of muscle and steel, roaring as he tore apart foes with fang and axe. The soft-spoken, cold-eyed thing that had told her mild as milk he would snap her neck if she even considered treachery. Which is your real face? Are any of them true? She did not look at the bones. Dead the hand and dead the man , the song went. She could not put it out of her head.

“I’ve set an hour or two aside for the purpose next month,” he drily said. “I take it there’s a reason for the pleasure of your company?”

“I’ve word from the Jacks,” she said. “The situation east is worsening and something needs to be done before it comes to a head. I’ve called a council with Marshal Juniper.”

“Hopefully Aisha will have gotten some tea into her before she arrives,” Adjutant grimaced, baring teeth like ivory knives.

She’d seen them rip into throats, more than once. Gobble down blood and flesh greedily like it was the finest of delicacies. The quickening in her pulse she kept away from her eyes, having learned from Akua Sahelian’s example. Diabolist had not quite managed to hide how wary she was of the orc, and though the shade’s discomfiture would usually have put a smile on her face Vivienne had been too dismayed to be sharing any opinion with the Butcher of Liesse to take any joy from it. Snakes know one another , she’d thought back then. Akua Sahelian was studying the Woe carefully, forging herself into a person they would allow themselves to like, but she’d found another had struck long before her. No wonder the shade feared him: she’d found a man whose face was as changeable as her own patiently watching her. And unlike Diabolist, Vivienne doubted there was anyone alive who knew what Hakram Deadhand truly wanted. The orc leaned back into his seat, rolling his shoulders and loudly cracking his neck with a little exhale of pleasure.

“I could eat,” Adjutant said. “Probably should, too. Care to join me on a trip to the kitchens?”

“I already ate,” she lied without batting an eye. “Though don’t let me stop you.”

She could think of few things she desired less than watching that maw at work from across a mere table’s width.

“You should get something warm in you,” the orc advised, rising to his feet. “You look like death warmed over. Indrani forgot some of her tea leaves in her room, I believe. I’ll ask a servant to brew you a pot for the council. Formal room?”

Vivienne agreed with a silent nod. She was not surprised he’d noticed her fondness for Indrani’s brews. Those dark eyes missed nothing and forgot even less. They parted ways two corridors further down, and she could not leave soon enough.

—

“So the farmers with spears are fighting the refugees with knives,” Marshal Juniper grunted. “There’s a surprise: there’d a damned reason they were recalled to Summerholm. The sole ingredient in that stew is desperation.”

Staff Tribune Bishara had not, in fact, gotten some tea into the Hellhound before she arrived. The orc’s particularly fine mood stood testament to this fact. The Marshal of Callow was of the opinion that she should be overseeing the training camps filled with fresh recruits from all across the kingdom, not cooling her heels at the capital, and had spared no pains in expression that opinion to all those even remotely involved. Adjutant was taking her spleen with at least the semblance of good humour. The constant gruff whining scraped Vivienne’s nerves raw, especially when paired with the outcome she already knew was in motion.

“The farmers are defending their lands from looters,” she sharply replied. “As is their right.”

“Starving looters,” Deadhand mildly said. “I doubt there’s any great enmity or deep scheme to it. They’re cold and hungry people, not a marauding army.”

“Leave this alone long enough, and that’s exactly what it’ll turn into,” Vivienne warned. “Blood has been spilled. They’ll band together for the safety in numbers, and so will Callowans to deal with it. By the turn of the month it will be skirmishes all across the river banks.”

“There wouldn’t be corpses on the floor if they’d obeyed Foundling’s fucking decree,” Marshal Juniper bluntly said. “Which was meant to avoid this very outcome, if you’ll remember. Last I checked someone had crowned her Queen of Callow. I’m no jurist, but I was under the impression ignoring royal decrees was some kind of treason.”

She’s Queen of Callow, not some eastern tyrant or a damned greenskin warlord , Vivienne thought, fingers tightening under the table. Our rulers know there’s limits to what they can order and reasonably expect to have obeyed. It was a losing fight, as she’d known from the start. Neither of these two bore any love for the land they’d been charged with ruling, or the people born to it.

“There’s no need to go quite that far,” Adjutant said. “As Thief noted, all their actions save for ignoring the recall are legal under Callowan law. It would be a mistake to paint all that followed with the same brush as that initial mistake.”

Deadhand the diplomat, now: half the friend, half the officer. Vivienne had not wanted the responsibility of the regency of Callow and found the burden of it suffocating, but the way the title seemed to be left at the door in their eyes remained galling. The difference between the authority in name and the authority in truth had grown to worry her, not for what it was but for what it might become. Catherine had come to the throne lawlessly, but that lawlessness could not keep lest the kingdom come apart at the seams. A few years of this , she thought, and it will be one law for those with swords and another for those without. If that came to be, the kingdom would burst like an overripe fruit without even need for an invasion. Callowans had long been under Imperial rule, but they were beginning to wake to the old freedoms. Hatred of Procer and Praes was keeping the peace for now, yet how long would that last?

“A decree’s a decree,” Marshal Juniper growled. “We start making excuses for everyone and this falls apart.”

“If you start hanging farmers for defending their land, excuses will be the last of your worries,” the thief coldly said. “They are not beast of burdens, to be browbeaten into the latest whim and whipped if they do not immediately obey.”

The orc’s maw opened, baring a row of sharp fangs. Vivienne forced her shoulders to loosen, affecting nonchalance. Perhaps even contempt. Show her fear, give her an inch, and it will be the end of you , she thought.

“You brought this to us,” Adjutant spoke before the other could. “And I’m glad you did. Have you already thought of a measure to remedy the issue?”

Always so smooth, so measured. Too perfect. It made her skin crawl. It was no mystery, why she could not make herself trust this one while she’d come to rely on a Praesi warlock and a vicious pupil of the Lady of the Lake. Masego cannot curb his tongue nor his face and Indrani has never been anything but brutally honest of her indifference to the suffering of others.

“The reason for their recalcitrance to leave is simple,” she said. “They will not abandon their possessions to looters but lack any method of bringing them west of they leave. If the means are provided, the matter will be largely settled.”

“Not much road in that region, save for the Imperial highway,” Marshal Juniper said, eyes narrowing. “You can’t just requisition merchant wagons from Summerholm, the axles will break in rough country.”

“The garrison of Summerholm has a large complement Legion-issue supply carts,” Vivienne said. “All reinforced with good steel.”

“No,” the Hellhound immediately said. “That’s out of the question. I will not allow military equipment to be doled out to farmers. Anyone could seize them.”

“I did not mean for them to be spelled away into the countryside miraculously,” she replied scathingly. “The garrison would be escorting the carts. The presence of soldiers will put an end to the skirmishes immediately, which should quicken the process enough the risks will be minimal.”

“You must have been struck on the ear in Keter,” Marshal Juniper growled. “I just gave you your answer. If I’m unwilling to risk carts why would you think I’m willing to risk the force holding the east?”

“It does not hold the east,” Vivienne said through gritted teeth, “it watches from tall walls as the entire eastern stretch slowly goes up in blood and flames.”

“All it takes is for Aksum or a pack of lesser lordships to see the garrison coming and we could lose the entire garrison to an ambush,” the Hellhound said slowly, as if addressing an idiot. “They have mages, Dartwick. They have household troops and devils. The Empire’s interior has been left entirely untouched by the Ashuran raids, they’re fresh and at full strength. If the garrison force is gone, they can push forward to Summerholm and there’s fuck all we can do about it. Half my army is spread across training camps and the rest guarding the Vales. If the enemy move quick enough, we could actually lose Summerholm itself. Walls mean nothing without men on them. All of this, for a pack of bloody farmers who refused a direct order and are now facing the eminently predictable consequences of that refusal.”

“Not your army, Hellhound,” the thief said softly. “The Army of Callow . Sworn to protect its people, not just turn back invasions or war abroad.”

“I know the godsdamned name,” Marshal Juniper snarled. “The queen of the place put me in charge of it. You sure you want to have a pissing contest over that? I don’t think you’ll like the results.”

“Enough,” Adjutant said.

The voice rang with power. Not quite Speaking, Vivienne thought, yet not too far from it. She’d never mastered that trick herself, but she’d seen Catherine employ it. Felt the ripples shudder through everyone, the air heavy like just before a storm struck. The Black Queen rarely used the tool, but when she did the casual display of power was always terrifying. The way she could snatch the will of anyone in earshot as easy as snapping her fingers, bludgeoning them into obedience with weight and power. Adjutant did not have the talent, and for that Vivienne thanked whatever Gods were listening. It was already terrifying enough to remember he’d been able to fight her before even claiming his Name. Every single conversation they held was tinted by the knowledge that the orc was now in the fullness of his power, capable of tearing apart lords of the fae. He could rip out her throat with but a moment’s effort and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.

“This bickering helps no one,” Deadhand said. “Juniper, there is a difference between having a rough tongue and pouring scorn. One is your character. The other has no place in this room, or in conversation with people who outrank you.”

The Hellhound lips thinned.

“There was no-”

Adjutant barked out a sentence in Kharsum, too swift and heavily accented for her to understand most of it. The words for oil and fires stood out, and the Marshal of Callow closed her maw with a loud click of fangs. She no longer spoke. Vivienne’s eyes remained on the other orc, wondering if she should be expressing her warm gratitude for Deadhand deigning to step in. She found little of that in her heart. The Hellhound’s open hostility was nothing new, and this did absolutely nothing to mend it.

“Juniper isn’t wrong about the risks,” Adjutant finally said, voice calm again.

Another losing fight lost , Vivienne bitterly thought. They did not trust her or her judgement. The worst part of it was that she could see why they did not. What had she achieved with the Jacks that required a Name, that could not be done by another spymistress? How had she proved herself the equal of the infamous Black Queen or dauntless Archer, of an orc celebrated in song or a mage who spat in the eye of lesser gods? She’d been enemies with these two, not so long ago. And even then it’d been William who took the hand now made of bones, while she’d been tossed through a window like a sack of radishes by an offhand spell. I do not belong here, she thought, the warm memories of laughter by the fire seeming so far away. She did not belong at this table, arguing over the fate of her people and losing inch by inch. She’d joined Catherine for more than this, hadn’t she? For something beyond Imperial rule, and there was no mistaking what this was. It might be orcs speaking, but the words were the harsh teaching of the War College – the Carrion Lord’s own.

Vivienne had not turned her cloak to keep living under the laws of the Black Knight. She tried, even now, to keep her eyes ahead. On the Liesse Accords, that single piece dream that could not be called anything but a good for the world. The lone and lonely light in this ugly sea of grey. Yet the Accord were far on the horizon, and the tide was drowning her now.

“We’ll need to amend the operational plan,” Adjutant said. “Leave some of the garrison behind and keep what we send out in a tight cluster with the Wild Hunt ready to gate them out if the Empire mobilizes.”

Vivienne’s heart skipped a beat. It was what she’d wanted to hear. What was his angle, here? What did he gain by this? What does he gain by the Liesse Accords , the old whisper came, that he would champion them so ardently?

“The Hunt is the key to our defence, Hakram,” Marshal Juniper said. “If the League or Procer strikes-”

“If,” Deadhand repeated. “A possibility. Is it a fact that we’re losing people now, Juniper.”

“I don’t like it,” the Hellhound said. “It leaves us fragile.”

“You don’t have to like it,” Adjutant said. “It’s an order. Now, Thief. I believe we have a map of the region somewhere around here for proper planning, but I’d like your thoughts on how we should go about the evacuation. I’m leaning towards a circular sweep, but you’ve people on the ground and I don’t.”

Vivienne Dartwick leaned forward and spoke, the council stretching for over an hour before the bare bones of a plan had been laid down and a recess was called until they’d all looked into the proper records and logistics.

The patient watchfulness in the orc’s eyes never left for a moment, and she never ceased to look for it.

Interlude: Giuoco Pianissimo

“He who trusts no one finds only enemies.”
– Callowan saying

Back when he’d been an unblooded boy in the middle of nowhere, Hakram had occasionally indulged in a game of his own devising. Tower-raising , he’d called it. It’d been a simple thing, at first, more an exercise in fantasy than anything deep. Three piles of ten coloured stones, each led by a lord or a lady, and to win one of them must accumulate twenty stones and so raise their tower. For a stone to be taken from a pile, two other lords must agree on the theft and who received the stone. Hakram had amused himself with elaborate intrigues, a web of vivid alliances and betrayals explaining every acquisition. He’d only ever played alone, in the Steppes, and never once finished a game: no rational alliance could ever last long enough for a winner to emerge, after all. His mother had mistaken his hours staring at rocks as an interest in things spiritual, and so urged him to seek apprenticeship under the shaman of the Howling Wolves clan. He lacked the gift of sorcery, true, but it was rare among orcs and not all rites and rituals required the touch. Most shamans could not actually light a torch without flint and tinder, no matter what was pretended in front of outsiders.

He’d had no reason to refuse her, and the half-hearted attempt had taught him some interesting tricks and stories before he was gently sent back to train with the other warrior younglings. Hakram had not forgot the game, though, and after he was sent to the War College he spared the odd hour for refining it now and then. Rules had been added. Ways to gift a stone as a bribe to break an alliance or make one, promises that could not be broken and even a way to destroy one’s own stones to apply pressure. And still, not a game finished. Not even to one’s loss, after losing became a technical possibility. Perhaps it was because he was the only player, he’d thought, and so roped a few humans gullible or ignorant enough to believe it was an old orc game into playing with him. He’d lost coin keeping the drinks coming without any success to show for it. Hakram had first met Robber, he still recalled fondly, when the goblin had found him playing while on watch in a war game and called him a fool before baldly stealing an entire pile.

“It’s not clever as you think it is,” the other cadet had said. “There’s no kingdom without borders, my splendidly ugly and dim-witted friend. Why are they alone building their tower?”

And so, over the months that followed, they’d tinkered with the game together. It had become an experiment for the two of them, one of the few thing that could truly keep his interest throughout the dreariness of the War College. First they’d added another pile of ten stones and called it Callow, from which any of the lords and ladies could take a stone. It’d not ended the stalemate, for as soon as one player pulled ahead the other two allied to steal away what he’d stolen. There’s a fitting metaphor for this glorious empire of ours , Robber had mused after a particularly well-watered evening. No crab will ever let another leave the bucket before it does. Perhaps the issue was that Callow could be taken from with no consequence, Hakram had decided. And so he’d added one more rule: if no tower was raised in thirty turns, the wrathful Callowans would come and hang all three lords. It’d been a naïve thought, in retrospective, and Robber had been right to mock it. Neither of them ever came across a player who would rather another win than all three lose. It’d been Ratface who’d solved the riddle and given the game its final form.

“Your problem,” the Taghreb had opined, “is that you two are too honest. Everything’s out in the open, the rules are identical for everyone. It’s a shit game for the same reason any halfway decent military strategist will laugh if you tell them shatranj is a good metaphor for war.”

Robber had been mortally wounded by the assertion of honesty, and promptly demanded a duel to avenge the impugnable dishonour of goblinkind. Ratface’s immediate denial had been met by threats he would be first up against the wall when the Great Goblin Conspiracy took action, but even as those two bickered Hakram had amended the rules one last time. Three lords, with uneven piles. One with ten stones, one with eight, one with six. Their stones would remain hidden until they won or lost, and so cold mathematics were diluted with skill at the oldest of Praesi arts: the lie. Even then, most games ended in threefold loss and bitter recriminations. But now and then, oh so rarely, someone managed to raise their tower. Hakram had come into the habit of playing a game at least once a month, afterwards, fascinated by the little details that meant difference between victory and defeat. No one had ever won twice in a row, for example, for one victory meant the specter of suspicion would remain on the victor for a long while.

Aisha, back when she’d still shared a bed with Ratface and so often spent evenings drinking with Rat Company, was the only person he’d ever seen win beginning with six stones. She’d bided her time and kept the game going until everyone was too drunk to remember properly, then bargained her count up until she could steal a victory from the Callow stones. Hakram still thought of those evenings in Ater sometimes, of the reek of smoke and cheap drinks in that winesink they’d whiled away so many hours in. Now Ratface was dead, his grave bought and paid for by the same Empress they’d once served, and he’d spoken to neither Robber nor Aisha in the better part of a year. The game remained, though the last he had played it was years ago. In one of those little ironies of life, it had been the day before he met Catherine. He’d lost along with a roaring-drunk Nauk and an indifferent Pickler.

Callow had taken them all.

He’d put the rules to ink, not long before the Woe left for Keter, and the scroll had been left to wait somewhere in the methodical chaos that was his office ever since. Hakram had mused of writing memoirs, once in a while, as he knew Juniper and Aisha were doing. Juniper’s were more commentary and chronicle of these Uncivil Wars , as the campaigns from the Liesse Rebellion onwards were beginning to be called by scholars, but then she’d always disdained everything but the military side of matters. There were days Adjutant thought he owed to all that came after him to pen a history of what was taking shape here that was true to the beliefs of the few making the decisions. On others he thought, rather ruefully, that such a work would be the very same kind of manuscript his duties would require him to order burned as a threat to the kingdom’s peace. And so instead he found himself, now that he’d been able to wrestle an hour away from his work, penning a short monograph on the subject of tower-raising that was about both much more and much less.

The foundation of the game , he’d written, is the manipulation of incomplete knowledge . It is possible to win with only loose grip of the arithmetic, so long as one’s understanding of their opponents runs contrastingly deep.

He’d come to see much through that lens in the last few years. It was not, he thought, an unfair way to sum up the way the fractious nations of Calernia were behaving. The rising towers differed in nature and appearance, the stones were made of a hundred different abstract details, but the underlying exchanges obeyed the same overarching rule: for someone to measurably benefit, someone else must lose. Cordelia Hasenbach had birthed the Tenth Crusade by promising benefits to all its participants, leaving unspoken that those benefits would have to be taken from Callow and Praes. Having failed to achieve that plunder, her Grand Alliance was now clawing at itself over their own stones. The Empire remained overlord of Callow only so long as it provided protection by other marauding powers who would take from it. Yet prominent elements of Praes had acted in a hostile manner at Second Liesse, with the tacit allowance of the Empress, and so Callow had pressed for independence. He still believed Malicia had made a reasonable decision in some ways, for if she had succeeded in securing the Diabolist’s doomsday weapon she would have made herself too costly a target to plunder.

From that position, all that would have been required of her was to wait for the lack of benefits to break apart the Grand Alliance.

And yet she’d failed, for she had not accounted for the fact that a game was a game and people were people. One could be philosophically correct while being wrong in practice, as she had been when she’d estimated neither the Black Knight nor Catherine would turn on her after the Doom of Liesse. He and Catherine had fallen for the same mistake, Hakram thought, when they’d predicted that military defeats within certain bounds would both force and allow the First Prince to come to the negotiating table. We did not account for the heroes , he thought. We did not account for the priests and the Heavens and the hand behind the hands. And so the desperate alliances that were the heart of tower-raising had followed, reaching out for the bargain offered by Keter for counterbalance against Proceran intransigence. Which had failed, for the Empress had much less to lose and so could afford to offer better terms. And so Catherine left for the Everdark, intent on making miracle out of misfortune. She might succeed. She was, after all, never more dangerous than when no one believed she could possibly triumph. Or she might not.

If that were the case, what he and Vivienne Dartwick were building in Callow would be the sum total of their assets. He was forced to act with incomplete knowledge, and that ignorance dictated harsh terms: if this was all there was, defeat here of any kind was unacceptable. When Catherine returned, this machine must be well-oiled with every cog in a pristine state. Hakram set aside his quill, suddenly having lost taste for further writing. He blew dry the ink on the mostly-empty parchment and rolled it up before sliding it into a sheath. It would keep. There were matters that might not, Thief most immediate among them. The orc draped cloths over the bottled sprites that cast the light in his office, knowing it would lull them to sleep and so offer brighter glow when he returned. Not common knowledge, that. It was a secret Masego had nonchalantly shared, forgetting as he always did that there were perhaps ten individuals more learned than him on all of Calernia and that hundreds would cheerfully commit murder just to have a look at his most casual set of notes.

There was a guard waiting outside the door, one of his own. Sergeant Audun, who was broad and covered with tattoos like all adults of the Frost Tread clan. He had the almost-black skin common in the furthest reaches of the Lesser Steppes, where the isolation had prevented the old bloodlines and customs from thinning.

“Sergeant,” Hakram greeted him in Kharsum. “Where is she?”

“Sir,” Audun acknowledged, keeping his lips tight over his fangs in deference. “Last report had her headed for the Docks. As per orders, we did not tail her out of the palace.”

Adjutant nodded and clapped his shoulder before heading out. Tordis kept suggesting that they send a few goblins out to shadow Thief whenever she went into the city, officially to make her easier to reach in case there was sudden council to be had. There was no point to even trying, in Hakram’s eyes: in a city, Thief was impossible to find unless she wanted to be found. Assigning her a shadow she would inevitably catch on to would only be tossing another ingredient in what was already turning out to be a dangerous brew. The orc knew the tavern that was her favourite haunt, deep in Guild of Thieves territory, and even if she was not already there she’d hear of his coming long before he got there. Long enough that she’d show up to meet with him, if she was so inclined, though of that there was no guarantee. With Catherine away the pretence of amity had given its death rattle. He would still go. At worse, he’d have a pint of terrible beer and leave one of her Jacks a message before returning to the palace. Not the way he would have preferred to spend what promised to be his only resftul hour for the next few days, but preferences were always the first thing headed for the altar when the going got hard.

He declined an escort when heading out. Malicia’s assassins had already emptied their quiver, and there would be few who could truly be a threat to him even if she had not. He almost wished they would try him, in truth. Laure was swimming with Jacks, and further hacking away at the Empire’s roster of hired killers would be a long-term boon. He drew gazes when passing through the Whitestone, as much from legionaries as from the locals. Anyone able to afford one of the district’s mansions would know him by name and description, if not necessarily by sight. Further into the city, though, the nature of the gazes changed. Hakram was not known well enough that Callowans would tell him apart from other orcs by sight, not with gloves covering his hands and his burnt plate still in the palace. Unlike Catherine and Indrani, whose Names were an invisible bonfire drawing the eye wherever they stood, his own was a muted thing. Noticeable enough, when it left the sheath, but it had not. The reception he got was, to his perpetual surprise, rather cordial. Now that the last legions in the kingdom had been folded into the Army of Callow, even greenskins who had never served in the Fifteenth found the locals had thawed to their presence.

The same could not be said for Soninke and Taghreb. The freshly-promoted Legate Abigail had passed down the order that all Wasteland legionaries on leave must carry clear indicating mark of their service in the Army of Callow, which had prevented angry killings in the streets after Malicia massacred a third of the royal court, but a handful of altercations had forced her to go even further and order such legionaries to move only in tenths and avoid certain parts of the capital entirely. Enterprising Callowan merchants had made a killing by setting up stalls of drinks and food near the army’s camps, allowing the soldiers a taste of the luxuries without risking their neck. The orc’s lips split in amusement, baring the slightest hint of fangs. It was a rare thing for his kind to be more popular in these parts than humans, even humans from the Wasteland. He passed by a cart near the edge of Mathilda’s District – known as the Usurper’s Quarter to the locals – and found his steps slowing when he caught scent of the grilled rabbit skewers on it.

It was a ramshackle thing, not even painted as such Callowan carts usually were, and he absent-mindedly noted it was unlikely its owner had paid the proper dues to whatever guild held the rights to sales on these streets. The dark-haired man running it had done well regardless, he thought, for two thirds of the cart were empty and the grease stains left behind made it clear it’d not begun the day that way. Hakram made his way to the skewers and reached for the handful of coins he carried, mostly coppers. The dark-haired man smiled.

“Afternoon. You Legion?” he asked, his Liessen accent thick.

Refugee, most likely , the orc decided. Good to see some of them were making their way without needing to rely on the grain handouts.

“Fifteenth,” Hakram agreed. “Since the raising. How much for one?”

The man hesitated, and there was movement behind the cart. The orc’s head cocked to the side as a little boy no older than nine popped out, fair-haired and not resembling the other human in the slightest.

“Hi,” the little creature grinned.

Meat , the lizard voice in the back of his head said. Soft, small, bones easy to crack and get at the marrow . He ignored it, as all orcs who left the Steppes were taught to. He’d learned well enough there was only silence around his comrades, but it was always harder with strangers. His people had been given rules by the Black Knight and then his successor, and they were good rules. The kind that ran against instinct but helped you grow further. You can eat foes, you can eat the dead, but you must not touch any other. Still, he knew the impulse would never entirely go away. The rules were taught, but the impulse came with the blood. Orcs had to learn discipline, he thought, make it as much a part of them as the blood. Or they would forever remain beasts of the steppes, good only for death dealt and received.

“Hello,” Hakram replied gently, keeping his fangs behind his lips.

“Albert, get back behind the cart,” the man sighed.

“But it’s boring ,” the boy whined.

He was unceremoniously dragged back by his collar and the cart-owner offered the orc an apologetic glance. He picked out a skewer and handed it.

“On the house,” he said. “They’ve been out for a while anyway.”

Hakram inclined his head in thanks.

“Much appreciated,” he said, thick gloved fingers closing around the wooden stick holding the bits of meat together.

“My husband went to enroll last month,” the Liessen admitted. “Ended up sent to the training camp near Ankou.”

“General Hune’s,” the orc said. “He’ll do well there, especially if he can read and write. There’s a pressing need for officers.”

“We could use the pay,” the man ruefully said. “The only decent rents in this city are Dockside, and even with the Guild of Thieves keeping order that’s no place to raise a child.”

“You seem to be doing well enough,” Hakram said, eyes lingering on the cart before withdrawing.

He popped a bit of savoury meat into his mouth, swallowing it without chewing. Ah, nothing but salt and rabbit. He did enjoy Callowan cooking. Unlike the Praesi they didn’t drown every dish with spices, you could still taste the meat.

“No telling how long that’ll last,” the Liessen replied. “Word is Legate Abigail, bless her soul, told the guilds to take it easy on the streets for a while. The guards don’t enforce permits as heavily as they used to. But now the Lord Adjutant’s back in the capital, so it’ll be out of her hands. No one’s sure when the hammer will come down.”

“I’ve noticed she’s popular in these parts,” Hakram said, mildly amused at receiving a confession concerning himself.

“She got Laure through the troubles after the Night of Knives,” the merchant said. “And without swords coming out or riots wrecking half the city. Mind you, I’m not cussing out the army. They do good work, and I saw in the camps down south how bad it might get if they didn’t keep the peace. But there’s something reassuring about having one of ours in charge, you know?”

“Lady Thief holds the regency in the queen’s absence,” the orc pointed out.

The man rolled his eyes.

“You don’t spend much time in taverns, do you?” he said. “The old crown it got split in two, one part green and the other one too. It’s not a mystery who runs the kingdom with the Black Queen gone abroad to scare the shit out of Procer.”

It was not to Hakram. Giving Vivienne the regency had been, from the beginning and Catherine’s open admission, been a way to avoid the perception greenskins now ruled Callow. Thief did not want the duties, and Adjutant honestly did not believe she would fare well bearing their burden. That the man in the street knew it as well, however, was not a pleasant surprise. We keep underestimating these people , he thought. Malicia and Hasenbach have, to their ugly surprise, but we do as well and we should know better.

“She’ll be back,” the orc said, still too taken aback to muster better response.

“Aye, she will,” the Liessen said. “And maybe she’ll drop a lake on the western borders, this time. Let them try to invade across that .”

“We can only hope,” Hakram drily said.

“Ah, but I shouldn’t blabber,” the man said. “Don’t let me keep you. It tastes best while still warm.”

“Thanks again,” Adjutant said, inclining his head.

He stepped back onto the street, already mentally adding another entry to his never-ending tally. There might be others like this one, who’d trade on the streets instead of eating on the crown’s dime if they could. Getting the guilds to waive their dues even as a temporary measure would be like ripping out teeth, and sure to unsettle a city still uneasy, but there were ways around it. The House of Light in Laure had full coffers, according to the Jacks, having entirely recovered from their scarce years under Imperial rule. If they could be talked into paying the dues for merchants as an act of strategic charity, the guilds might even lower their demanded cut out of deference for the priests. Yet another council would be required, he thought tiredly, and with people prone to the kind of squabbling that would make Thief and Juniper seem like beloved sisters. The boy popped out to wave him goodbye and Hakram waved back, waiting until he was out of sight to gobble half the skewer and lick his chops. His good mood did not last, for even as he chewed he was forced to admit the Thief situation was worse than he’d previously believed. If a wander down the streets had him hearing the rumour, how often would the spymistress of Callow have heard it?

Even a small wound could go bad, if salt kept being rubbed into it, and this one was not small. Pride always bit the hardest and Vivienne Dartwick had no lack of that. Sundown was beginning when Hakram finally reached the signless tavern that was Thief’s favourite sink, and he’d been feeling eyes on the back of his head for at least half an hour. The Jacks had picked him out and their mistress would have been informed of his coming arrival. She was waiting inside when he entered, tucked away in a little alcove with a tankard in hand and her feet propped up on a chair. As always, she forced herself to not look at his bone hand – even covered – so blatantly she might as well have been staring. The orc lumbered over slowly, making sure to keep the skeletal limb always in her field of sight and moving slowly. He’d noticed it got even worse, when he hid it away from her eyes.

“Adjutant,” Thief drawled. “Heard you were looking for me.”

He sat down, the wooden frame creaking under him, and nodded.

“I was. Let’s have a talk, you and I,” Hakram gravelled. “An honest one, for once.”

The flare of wariness she poorly hid was not auspicious beginning, but he had no choice. It could not be put off any longer. He needed to be sure they were raising the same tower, for decisions had to be made.

In the game, as in all things, it was always better to be the betrayer than the betrayed.

Interlude: Zwischenzug II

“In the East they say that doubt is the death of men, but I have seen the end of the forking path and reply this: so is certainty, only for others.”
– Theodore Langman, Wizard of the West

Panic blanked Vivienne’s mind, for a heartbeat. Her fingers clutched the tankard so tightly she felt like it should break. Was this it, then? The conversation that took place before the Deadhand snatched the life out of her? I can run , she thought. But that would be declaring treason, or close enough, and they would hunt her like an animal. How many of the Jacks would stay loyal, if there was a price on her head? Some, but not enough. The guildsmen who’d once answered to Ratface and she’d begun to fold into her own web would turn their cloak without batting an eye. She was still Queen of Thieves until someone took the stolen crown from her, but that was more custom than law and Catherine had put the fear of her in their bones. Some would sell her out, if the alternative was crossing the Black Queen’s right hand. She’d sent all her people away before Deadhand arrived, anyway, leaving the two of them alone with the hearth crackling in the corner. The thief forced herself to drink down some ale, heart still beating against her eardrums. She would, could not fall to pieces so easily. Let’s have a talk, you and I , the orc had said. He’d phrased it like it was an offer, like there was a decision to make.

They both knew there wasn’t.

“Honesty, is it?” she said, affecting a drawl. “I did not know you traded in such luxuries, Adjutant. Ambitious of you.”

He did not smile. Unsure where to look – coldly assessing eyes, lips hiding fangs or that damned hand even when hidden under a glove – she drank again instead.

“Do you know,” Hakram Deadhand mildly said, “I can’t remember the last time I was genuinely scared. I’ve been afraid for us, in fights, but actual terror? No, not even when the Queen of Summer came down. I can’t imagine what it would be like, living with that sword always hanging over your head. Colouring every sight and scent, creeping into every corner of me.”

Vivienne set down her tankard, slowly and carefully.

“To be afraid of something,” she said, “you have to care about something first.”

And do you? Did he care about a single thing in all of Creation? Sometimes she thought he loved Catherine, though not in a way that would lead to courtship. The Woe were so often like sunflowers, turning to remain facing the burning glare hung up in their common sky, and of them Hakram Deadhand had been the first. The kind of love, perhaps, that a drowning man would have for the shore. But even that could not be the sum whole of anyone, and how could she trust in the words of a creature that treated every moment like one on the stage? Vivienne was not sure which truth would be more dangerous: that there was something buried deep beneath, or that there truly was nothing at all. The orc inclined his head, thoughtful. The gesture and accompanying visage was not common to his kind, the thief had known enough orcs to be certain of that. It was learned. Presented consciously to her eyes.

“I have been thinking of a game, lately,” Deadhand said. “I will spare you the details, for they are largely irrelevant to this conversation, but there is one part of it I have been struggling with.”

The thief maintained a pleasant smile, letting him speak without interruption though her mind was wheeling. A game? It was questions she had expected, not some delicate metaphor.

“Trust,” Adjutant said. “That is the one element I could never quite figure out. The game cannot be won without the players hiding their thoughts, yet it cannot truly advance without trust either. I’ve tried to make a study of why it fails or emerges but found no success. The same answers rarely apply twice.”

“A matter best left to philosophers, perhaps,” Vivienne said, too wary to venture blindly into this. “Or theologians, I suppose. Faith and trust have much in common.”

“Do they?” the orc curiously asked. “It is my understanding you were raised to the House of Light, but I never learned its teachings in any depth. My people, not unlike the Praesi, see prayer more as bargain than oblation.”

And there it was, the itch in the wound. Not the religious matters, but the part he had casually mentioned. My people. The Praesi. As if they were two different things entirely. Perhaps they were, Vivienne thought. She’d entertained the thought often enough in the past. Why would the first orc Named in centuries subordinate himself to a human from a land that was traditional plunder and raiding grounds to his own kind? Oh, his Name lent itself well to obedience. But even if he’d ended up the Shepherd he could have returned to the Steppes and lived like a king until his death. Where was his gain, she had wondered? Her answer had been that by staying at Catherine’s side, he could do more than his people than by returning to his desolate home or remaining in true Imperial service. Cat had been, by then, as good as queen of Callow even if there had been the thin pretence of a ruling council. If the Empire was broken apart from the inside, if the Clans were supported by a Callowan sovereign whose closest friend was an orc... And yet there’d been no trace of the steps that should precede that.

There was no greenskin faction at court. There’d been, as far as she knew, no suggestions of diplomacy with the clans of the Steppes or with the powerful officers of his kind in the Legions of Terror. Even when it came to the Army of Callow, he’d been one of the main proponents of investing in training Callowan officers rather than simply relying on the veterans acquired from the wounded legions who’d joined after Second Liesse. His game was not an obvious one. The assertion that he could be driven by personal ambition was laughable. Deadhand could have taken any seat on the queen’s council with but a whisper in Catherine’s ear, and to be frank even without any formal title he’d held authority so broad and absolute some actual kings would have envied it. How much higher could he rise without holding a crown of his own? Yet Adjutant held no noble title, no lands, no significant military force of his own. He could commandeers most of these, but he had not cultivated personal loyalties or gathered supporters – even when it would have been almost childishly easy to do so. He was, in essence, the perfect loyal right hand.

That degree of apparent flawlessness in anyone would have made Vivienne’s skin crawl, but in so skilled an actor it was more than just alarming . As the silence stretched the thief realized she’d allowed the conversation to lapse, and cleared her throat.

“I’m not the best person to explain it,” she said. “I never had much interest in priestly matters.”

“And yet you fought by the side of a man touched by the Choir of Contrition,” the orc said. “Something few priests can boast of. Callowans are a study in contradiction, sometimes. You’ve birthed as many heroes as the Praesi have villains, but rare is the song sung in your taverns that praises angels or Heavens. Always the kingdom, always rebellion and revenge and old scores settled.”

“How often have your people been the invaded instead of the invaders, Adjutant?” Vivienne softly asked. “Curse not walls of your own raising.”

“Aye,” he said. “We have done that. Yet I find it fascinating, the faces nation will paint over faceless Gods. Praesi hold their Gods Below to be peerless schemers, for that is their favoured art. Goblins call the whole lot the Gobbler, a single crawling thing that will one day devour the same Creation it spewed out. Death is the only certainty they embrace as a race.”

“And orcs?” Vivienne asked.

“Below is just what they teach us to call them in the Wasteland,” Deadhand said. “We know them as the Hungry Gods . We’ve had our lesser idols, as all other peoples have. But that altar was the first and remains the greatest.”

“Kings and shepherds fit the same cookpot,” Vivienne quoted, tongue stumbling over the rough syllables of Kharsum.

She was the only one of the Woe who did not speak it fluently. Catherine had been raised in an orphanage and Indrani in the middle of the fucking woods, and still they’d been surprised she did not speak orcish. As if it was a given that everyone should.

“Have you ever seen an orc go without meat for long, Thief?” Adjutant said. “An experiment was made by some Soninke lord called Ehioze, a few centuries back, so the process is well documented. He grabbed three hundred orcs in their prime, who’d committed one of those crimes that is only ever a crime when the Praesi need fresh bodies, and locked them up for study.”

The thief’s eyes narrowed. She did not reply.

“For the first month, it’s barely noticeable at all,” Deadhand continued. “We’ll get irritable, aggressive. Slower in thought. Then at the beginning of the second month, skin will grow tight and muscles melt away. Our bodies start eating themselves alive. By the middle of the third month, we are no longer able to tell faces apart. It’s all a thick, red, pulsing haze .”

Her fingers tightened under the table, not that she remembered putting her hands there.

“Ehioze was a dutiful scholar,” the orc mildly said. “Just starving them would not have been enough. He sequestered parts of the three hundred and studied how different manners of feeding would affect the process. He suggested afterwards that it was possible to keep orcs at the beginning of the middle state, before muscles start going, if they are fed two pounds of meat a month along with higher quantity of other provisions. It’s true, as it happens. I know this because his suggestions were used as the standard orc rations in the Legions up until the Reforms. They called it Ehioze’s Measure .”

“They wanted you able to fight,” Vivienne said.

“But not think,” Deadhand finished softly. “Or we might just question why it was never Praesi that faced the charges of your knights.”

“I imagine there’s quite a few orcs in the Legions, even in the Army of Callow, who have grandfathers and grandmothers that lived under the measure,” she said.

He nodded. Not wary, never wary, for that was to be her curse and not his.

“There’s another part to that tale, Adjutant,” the thief said. “One you forgot to tell. You see, there’s quite a few Callowans in the army who have kin that got eaten by orcs. Not even thirty years ago. What the Wasteland did to your people is a horror. What they went on to do to mine is a fucking horror as well, and one does not expunge the other.”

“I know that too, Thief,” Deadhand said. “You asked, in your own roundabout manner, what it is I care about. I have answers you won’t care to hear, but this one you will. I care about seeing a world where, when I tell this story, the woman on the other side of the table can’t reply the way you did. Where we’re more than hunting hounds for those who measured our starvation .”

And there it was. Everything she had feared – hoped? It was such a blurry line, some days – he would say. The confession that he meant to use Callowan lives to secure orc interests. How long would it be, until Catherine’s fanged Chancellor whispered the right words to have her war for the independence of the Steppes? And yet... He has not prepared for this , she thought. The orc was meticulous to a fault, so where was his spadework? Where were the correspondences and the deals, the alliances made in the dark? Where were the mouthpieces for this ugliest of crusades? Part of her wanted to dismiss all the absences as him simply biding his time, but it rang false. It was fear giving answer, and Vivienne despised how seductive those whispers were. She was willing to fear for her life, for her home, but what was she if terror was the sum whole of her? Just another prisoner, yet another Callowan who’d never quite left the days of Imperial occupation. The moment she ceased looking for the truth, she was lost.

“And yet you are here,” she said. “In Laure. Working for a kingdom you love not, when you could be raising banner among the clans of your kind. Why ?”

“Of all of the Woe,” Deadhand calmly said, “you should understand that best. I could raise rebel flag, I could give the Tower a war it would remember for a very long time. I might even win it and cast down that peerless tribute to murder. But what would that accomplish, Thief? The head bearing the crown changes, the world moves on and two hundred years from now we’ll be right back where we started. You don’t cure a sickness by fighting the symptoms. You go after the root, or it will linger until death.”

“The Liesse Accords,” Vivienne said.

“The Liesse Accords,” the orc agreed. “They will not come to be unless we take a hatchet to everything that holds up Praes, beyond repair. And under those rules, that agreement of nations, we change things. Not a dynasty’s name or a few battles won or borders on a map. We truly change things .”

It was perhaps the only argument he could have brought forward that would have appeased her without appeasing her too much. A perfect balance struck. The thief could feel the hair on the back of her neck rising. There were devils in the deepest Hells that did not have half as silver a tongue as Hakram Deadhand.

“And so, I now worry of you,” Adjutant said.

“I have been more ardent a defender of them than any of us,” Vivienne harshly replied.

“So you have,” the orc easily conceded. “And that surprised me, for while Callow will benefit they are not tailored for the primary benefit of the kingdom – and it is Callowans that will bleed to have it signed.”

She’d run with heroes once, the thief remembered. Men and women who’d carried the broken pieces of their old lives with them just as the Woe did, and some nights she wondered how deep the differences truly were. And then there were moments like this, where the killer across from her was surprised that she would embrace salvation extending further than her own little corner of Creation. Like it was expected that the lines on the map delimited the border between people and foes and there could be nothing between. William had been a monster too, in his own way, and Vivienne had neither forgotten not forgiven what might have taken place in Liesse without Catherine’s intervention. Rare was the day where she did not curse herself for having hesitated, having quibbled. Having allowed it to happen without raising a fucking hand. But even William would never have been surprised by someone trying to do good for the sake of doing good . I discarded those hesitations , she thought, and threw in my lot with the Woe . I made a bet on Catherine, and within the year a hundred thousand innocents were dead.

“I can hate the princes of Procer, for their rapaciousness,” she said. “I can hate those who allow themselves to take arms for a morally bankrupt cause and the heroes who would see us burn for a point of philosophy. I can do all that, and not hate the people under them.”

“And yet there is an imbalance, isn’t there?” Adjutant quietly said. “It is not equal care. Who you hesitate, if the choice was between a Callowan life and a Proceran one?”

“And that makes me a villain?” she hissed, and immediately regretted it.

Panic flared. Was this going to be it, then? The moment where he reached across the table and snapped her neck like kindling?

“You are afraid,” Deadhand noted. “There is no need. You have not spoken anything I did not already suspect. And that is my worry, Vivienne. Because deep down you still believe, you still act , like you’re the same girl who was at the Lone Swordsman’s side. You are not.”

“And so to keep my throat uncut I must kiss the feet of the Gods Below,” she said. “Is that it? Shall I eat a baby to prove my dedication to the cause ?”

“Your life is in no danger,” Deadhand calmly said.

She laughed, right in his face.

“Is that so?” she mocked. “Why, because Catherine would be cross if you killed me? It would pass. She needs you too badly, and you’ll be able to tell her you tried before I so regrettably forced your hand.”

“Your murder would be seen as a greenskin coup, regardless of context,” Adjutant said. “So if you cannot believe in my own intentions, at least believe in the practicalities involved.”

“Spot on, Deadhand,” she snarled. “There’s nothing quite as reassuring as hearing one’s death would be politically inconvenient.”

“So that’s the kernel,” the orc said, sounding surprised. “You do not believe you have worth.”

She flinched. That had cut too close to home for comfort. The orc’s brow creased.

“You stole a sun,” he slowly said. “And were instrumental in the killing of several of our most dangerous opponents.”

“You do have a talent for the exact,” Vivienne said, “Instrumental is precisely the right word.”

An instrument, wielded by sharper minds and quicker hands. A bundle of aspects to be used as a surgical tool, perhaps sometimes a discreet pair of eyes. You are all Named , she thought . I am an artefact that breathes. And the moment she strayed from that function, what came but defeat? By the Grey Pilgrim, by fae, by a single Praesi mage . Lightning coursing through her veins, not delivered by some ancient power but a single woman with a speck of sorcery to her. The humiliation of it only deepened the echoes of the pain across her body.

“War is not your Role, Thief,” Deadhand said. “Forcing the matter will only result in failure.”

“Then what is my damned Role, Adjutant?” she asked quietly. “Because there’s no need for a thief, here, and what else can I be used for? I do not rule, I do not lead armies, my judgement is background drone to decisions of import even when Catherine is here. Is that all? Am I just the forced voice of morality that must be sweet-talked before we take yet another plunge. Gods, I am tired of being an obstacle instead of a speaker.”

The orc considered that in silence.

“Trust,” he said, sounding almost amused. “Always trust. I would offer you a bargain, Vivienne Dartwick.”

The deal or the grave, she thought. So it finally came to that, Catherine’s little helper tidying up all the loose ends.

“You’re right,” Adjutant said. “You never spoke the accusation, yet you are right. I have no great love for this kingdom. I see what it takes from her, from all of us, and I wonder how it could be worth it.”

The orc’s eyes met hers squarely.

“So teach me,” he said. “Why I should care for it. Show me.”

“I can’t squeeze tears out of a stone, Hakram,” she tiredly replied.

He nodded, as if he had come to a decision.

“There is nothing I can say that will convince you,” Deadhand said. “You are not wrong. Even oaths are just words.”

The orc methodically took off his gloves, one after the other. Flesh first, and the scuttling bone. He brought up the skeletal fingers.

“Your knife, please,” he said.

Vivienne’s pulse quickened. Slowly she palmed her blade, eyes remaining peeled on his face, and she saw only cold determination there. Gods forgive me, she thought. Hide . The hand remained there, his eyes on hers. Hide , she thought again, panic mounting. She could touch the aspect but it refused to bloom. It was like trying to catch smoke. Gently, the orc took the knife from her sweaty, shaking hand.

“I made a promise to you, once,” Adjutant said. “One I have come to regret.”

The tip of the blade touched the bone hand with a soft clink, artfully moved to allow it from his grip.

“Only blood can wash away bad blood,” he said. “Our peoples have that in common. I should not have forgot it.”

The knife came down, hard enough to shake the table beneath, and carved into the orc’s only flesh wrist. Blood spurted as Vivienne’s blade scraped across bones, fear and astonishment taking hold of her.

“Adjutant, what-”

“My word is of no worth to you,” Hakram Deadhand calmly interrupted her, face pale and taught with pain. “That is not unwise. Amends must be made. So when you next doubt your value, I want you to remember this: when the choice came, I judged you well worth a hand.”

The orc’s wrist pressed down, bone shattered and Adjutant’s black blood crept across the table as his hand came fully severed.

Interlude: Giuoco Pianissimio II

“A man could sift through all of Creation and never find so much as a speck of this elusive thing called the greater good. Like all the most dangerous altars, it is entirely of our own raising.”
– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

“It looks like you shoved the stump in a fire,” Fadila Mbafeno sighed.

That was, in fact, exactly what Hakram had done. Blood loss could kill even Named, and while pushing a fresh stump into a hearth fire until the flesh cauterized had been excruciatingly painful it’d still been better than dying in a ratty Laure tavern. Masego’s assistant – and nominal head of the Observatory in his absence – had promptly answered the summons after he returned to the palace, and begun to work on healing his wound without quibbling. There were other mages in the capital, of course, and many priests. But Fadila was Praesi, and that had decided his choice of healer. The Soninke had been raised to understand the value of discretion and not inquiring in the affairs of one’s social superiors. The dark-skinned woman leaned closer with a silvery scalpel in hand, cutting slightly into the burned flesh at the end of his stump. No pain, he noted, though that might simply be because he’d grown light-headed enough he no longer felt it. The blade came away red and the sorceress washed it in a bowl of clear water before wiping with a cloth.

“I’ll need to cut away the burnt flesh before healing the damage beneath,” she informed him. “Healing is not my specialty and burns are trickier than most wounds. Pouring magic into scorched flesh tends to have... unpredictable results.”

“Do as you see fit,” Adjutant gravelled. “I will defer to your judgement.”

She nodded in appreciation.

“You’ve lost a large amount of blood,” Fadila added. “I’d recommend poultry, fish and red meat – which are staples of your people’s diets, regardless. Orcs lack the most the issues involved in human blood transfusions, so it’s certainly possible if you want to accelerate recovery, but my understanding is that local mores frown upon those kinds of rituals.”

“It won’t be necessary,” Hakram simply said.

The full consequences of his actions must be played out, lest the gesture be robbed of some of its weight. She did not question his answer, as she had not lingered on the subject of reattaching the hand after he’d declined. The Soninke passed her knife under open flame to cleanse it, and then set to the methodical business of prying away the burnt flesh on his stump before healing it. The spell she used for that purpose, he did not recognize. The sorceress used no incantation, and the shape and colour of the magic were different than that used by the Legions of Terror. The pain returned quick enough, a deep ugly throb, and Hakram only then realized she’d discretely numbed his nerves before her early examination. Kind of the Lady Mbafeno, he thought. The title occasionally tossed in the foreigner’s direction by servants and court officials was a source of mild amusement to him, he could privately admit. It was a Callowan courtesy title, one that would likely have gotten her killed if she’d claimed it while still in the employ of a Wasteland patron – it would have denoted the kind of ambitions Praesi aristocrats disliked finding in their subordinates.

Fadila Mbafeno had, after all, once been mfuasa to the Sahelians. Servant blood, it meant, a distinction between commoners and those retainers directly in the service of the nobility. Hakram had studied her background in some detail, as it happened. After Masego had snatched her from the gallows and placed her in his service, Catherine had rather bluntly told the orc that if Fadila was a risk she would be getting into an ‘accident’ as soon as feasible. The investigation had led to an interesting look at Praesi customs, particularly pertaining mages. Sorcery and political power had been intertwined in the Wasteland since long before the Miezans ever made shore on Calernia, in Praes more than any other region. The lords high and low had bred sorcery into their lines with methodical precision, bringing talented mages into the fold whenever it seemed like the blood thinned, but those were ultimately limited arrangements. Both Soninke and Taghreb saw more mages born than any other human ethnicity on the continent, which meant it was effectively impossible for the nobles to keep the practice of sorcery entirely within their own ranks.

Adjutant had read the appropriate treatises, back in the College, and so he was aware that most people born with the Gift either never realized they had it or died young after an uncontrolled or untrained use of sorcery. Another significant portion had too little talent to be able to practice sorcery beyond a few tricks without extensive tutoring, though when born to wealthy families such types made up the backbone of alchemists and academics in the Empire. It was the smaller portion that had a Gift strong enough for ritual or combat sorcery that had the High Lords and their vassals regularly sifting through their subjects. The treatment those ‘lucky’ few received varied from region to region. Taghreb, as a rule, treated them like a sort of lesser nobility and created mage lines within their territories that could be called on when there was need for war or marriage. Soninke, as in most things, proved too complex to easily generalize. The policies of Okoro and Nok tended towards bringing agreeable mages into the fold as mfuasa and those judged unreliable forced into service with the local noble’s household troops. The stubborn and the runners disappeared.

Aksum was the most traditionally hard-line, with any mages not leashed or wedded unceremoniously slain before they could become an issue. Akua Sahelian’s own father, famously, had been born with enough talent he could be a threat even as a servant and no spare relative to wed him to. He’d had to flee the region with killers after him, finding refuge in Wolof. The line to which Fadila had once been sworn to, and the last of the great Soninke cities. Wolof was a centre of sorcery rival to Ater itself, and had remained so for millennia by investing heavily in raising and training mages. It was well known to ‘acquire’ mages from other regions in difficult situations, but Fadila had been born in the city and so fallen under the aegis of its internal policies. Like all children with promising magical talent, she’d been taken from her family while young, the parents being offered a lump sum as redress for the loss of a child, and trained at the High Lady’s expense until she reached the age of twelve. Young mages who made it that far – not a given, the mortality rate was one in three – were assigned permanent service to either the Sahelians or one of their vassal families, a highly politicked process that the ruling family of Wolof used to both reward and slight their subordinates.

The loyal got rising talents, the troublesome only the dregs.

Fadila herself had been judged of sufficient prowess to enter the service of the Sahelians themselves, and cultivated as mfuasa to the family. She’d known Diabolist socially but never been in her personal circle, and been considered a likely fit for a teaching or research position after she spent a decade or two fighting as a combat mage for her masters. Her talent as both a ritualist and a theoretician had been noted in Praesi circles – she’d made some waves after proving it was possible to forge a weak artificial sympathetic link in scrying tools – and that reputation was likely the reason Diabolist had picked her as a retainer when she set out to engineer the Doom of Liesse. The amount of work required in turning an entire city into a runic array would have been massive, and she was a natural fit for Akua Sahelian to delegate the lesser tasks to. It was fortunate, Hakram often thought, that she’d been snatched from Diabolist’s service before she could serve that purpose. How much faster would the Doom of Liesse have come, with such a helper?

“There,” Fadila said, placing her silver knife back into the water. “That is as much as I can do. Should you change your mind about reattaching the hand, it will be necessary to cut off a sliver of the stump and a degree of functionality will be lost. In case you were unaware, limb reattachment attempted more than ten hours after the loss has at most a one in four chance of success. I can’t speak for what Lord Hierophant would be capable of, naturally, or even Callowan priests. Their methods are largely beyond my understanding.”

“Duly noted,” Hakram replied, gaze turning to the stump.

His dead flesh had been carved off, piece by piece, and instead thin green skin now covered his wrist. Almost thin as a human’s, he thought, though it would thicken in time.

“Be careful with it, it’s fragile even by human standards,” the sorceress said. “As it happens, the flesh reached full saturation during the process. I won’t be able to touch it again for at least two days, and after that only minor touch-ups. It would be ideal if you could avoid puncturing the skin for a full month.”

“I’ll be careful with it,” Adjutant said, and blinked.

He’d been trying to move fingers that no longer existed, he realized. That would be an adjustment.

“Thank you, Lady Mbafeno,” he finally said. “That will be all.”

“It was my pleasure, Lord Adjutant,” she respectfully replied.

She gathered her affairs and bowed before leaving. She might not have seen the Wasteland in years now, but the manners remained with her. The angle of the bow had been the one court etiquette dictated as required for a High Lord of Praes. Though he found himself in a thoughtful mood, Hakram did not linger in the private room he’d requisitioned for the treatment. This business, after all, was not quite done. His conversation with Thief had been interrupted by the woman’s obvious horror at his actions, worsened when he addressed the bleeding with cauterization through the tavern’s hearth fire. That was not entirely unexpected. He’d given it better than half odds they would have to take recess while the wound was properly seen to, when deciding his course of action. Hakram usually slept in his office, whenever he could spare time for slumber, but he did have personal rooms of his own in the palace. Amusingly enough, they had once been those of the queen consorts of Callow – he was not certain whether Catherine was unaware of the fact or simply indifferent, though an alternative might be that she knew and it was actually her sardonic sense of humour at work. Regardless, they were the rooms closest to her own. He’d been rather touched by the implications of that, though he still used them only rarely.

Thief would not come to him in his office, he knew. It was, in her eyes, the seat of his power. It was also where he kept his axe, and Vivienne preferred him unarmed when she could stomach to see him at all. A place where he could be expected to go but where his presence was lightly felt would be the most appropriate setting for the last part of their exchange, and so the orc did not waste time dawdling before heading for his quarters. He’d felt eyes on him the moment he passed the threshold of the healing room and twice more while on his way, and so it was no surprise that Thief awaited him inside when he opened the door. Her informants must have been tracking him all the way to here. The personal quarters of the queen consorts of Callow had been luxurious even before Laure and its royal palace fell under the rule of Wastelanders whose own nobility was known to be ostentatious to almost absurd extents. The orc had stripped away most of the decorations, though the furniture itself had been of very good make and so remained intact. The only luxury he’d occasionally partaken in was the large balcony outside overlooking a garden, the closest to a spot of green he’d been able to find in this city. It was there that Thief was awaiting.

She looked small and thin, sitting on an open windowsill and bathed in moonlight. Even for a human. Catherine was shorter, but like her teacher she had enough presence it was barely noticeable when looking at her. Vivienne Dartwick’s hair had grown longer, he noticed once more. Hakram did not allow his eyes to linger – his attention would only have worsened whatever issue lay behind that fact – but he’d noticed when it first began. Before the departure for Keter, and for it to have been noticeable even back then it must have started slightly earlier. Namelore was a muddle of imprecisions and exceptions, he knew, but where there was an effect there would be a cause. If, as Catherine insisted, the appearance of a Named was a reflection of how they saw themselves then such changes in Thief were a warning sign as to her mental state. Worrying, considering her influence and formal charge over the only spy network Callow possessed. Vivienne would not need to rebel to damage the kingdom, only withhold key information at a crucial moment. Or, more likely in his eyes, simply leave . The hole that would make would be a crippling blow to a kingdom that’d effectively begun being raised from the ground up a mere two years ago.

“Adjutant,” she said, flicking a glance at him. “At least you had enough sense to see a mage.”

“I would have survived it,” he simply said.

Moving slowly, he came at her side. Large as the open window was, there would be no accommodating the both of them if he wished to sit with her. Instead he simply rested his elbows on the windowsill, leaning forward. Though he did not turn to watch, he felt her eyes looking down at the stump. Good. There had been, he’d realized early, no real chance any words from his lips could sway her. She distrusted him too much. Catherine could have a fireside chat with a stranger for half an hour and have the come out willing to murder in her name, but that had never been one of his talents. He could ease and turn currents, but not birth them. It was important for a Named to recognize their limitations, he believed. The costs of arrogance were so much higher for them than anyone else. Knowing that, Hakram had been forced to make a decision. Simply allowing things to unfold as they were was not to be seriously considered. The longer Thief was allowed to consolidate her power – and she already was, by bringing the informants who’d once answered to Ratface under her banner – the costlier her defection or betrayal would become. It might have been possible to draw the matter out until Catherine returned, if he’d had a precise notion of when she would, but he did not. That left killing her before she became an issue or finding a way to stem her doubts.

“The very devise of the Woe,” Thief murmured, eyes leaving his absent hand. “ We will survive . It smacks more of desperation than valour.”

“Valour is the game of the winning side,” Hakram replied. “If you can afford to worry about appearances, it’s not a war to the death. We’ve known precious little else.”

“There comes a time when those excuses grow thin, Adjutant,” she said. “I was taught as a child that dark circumstances are a test of character. That the righteous rise above, that the wicked sink .”

“I was taught as a child that killing a man for a goat was glorious affair, if done on an open field,” he said. “We are more than our first lessons. We have to, or we’ll only ever be what our ancestors were before us.”

“There is worth in old lessons,” Thief said. “In old wisdom.”

“If they were so wise,” Hakram mildly said, “why did we inherit such a debacle of a world from them?”

She went still.

“Those ways kept Callow free for millennia,” she said.

“They failed, in the end,” the orc said, not unkindly.

“To the Carrion Lord,” Thief replied. “How often does Praes spawn a man like that? Calamity was the right name for his band. The kind of catastrophe born once a few centuries.”

“Even before him, this kingdom was the battlefield of the continent,” Hakram said. “Praes invaded every other decade, Procer whenever the stars were right. How often has this land truly known peace?”

“We have brought many things to Callow, Hakram Deadhand,” the Thief soberly said. “ Peace was not one of them.”

“I am told,” he said, “that births are rarely gentle affairs.”

“And what are we birthing?” she said. “There has been more martial law than actual law, over the last two years. We’ve assassinated and hanged, sacrificed thousands to make deals and still we tremble in the Tower’s shadow. At what point, Adjutant, does a justification become an excuse?”

“We have also fed the starving,” Hakram said. “Sheltered the lost. We’ve built a kingdom and reclaimed its border. The good may not erase the bad, but the bad does not erase the good.”

“And yet I wonder,” Thief said. “Could others have done what we did, without the costs? Without compromising who they were?”

“If there were such people out there, they have not come,” Hakram said. “You compare yourself to ghosts of your own making.”

“We’re not the best, but we’re what there is,” she bitterly said. “I’ve said that myself. To others, and while facing the mirror. That too grows thin with the repeating. Gods, if those people had come I have to ask – would we have killed them? Did we , before they ever came into themselves?”

“If they could not face us-”

“They couldn’t face Malicia,” Thief sharply said. “Or Cordelia Hasenbach, or her heroes, or the Carrion Lord. I know, Gods damn you. I know. And I know, too, that I might as well be shouting into the void when I say this but it needs to be said anyway: we are not the lesser evil. Not anymore, when we seek to make pacts with the fucking Dead King and move armies like pieces on a board for diplomatic gains. The only difference between us and the old evils is that we’re newer at this game and nowhere as good. That isn’t a distinction to be proud of.”

And there was the rub, for Hakram had known this kind of talk before and never put much stock in it. He’d spoken with Juniper, once, and I her own blunt way she’d laid bare the heart of it. Callowans looked at knights and saw chivalry, honour and all those other virtues. Orcs looked at knights and saw killers on horses. Vivienne had championed causes, one after the other, that had been put aside in the name of necessity. Yet they were not unworthy, none of them. She felt discarded and ignored because, frankly, she had been. Her only victories had come by the planning of others, used as a cog in a greater machinery. Hakram rather enjoyed such a role. It was what he’d been taught, what he was good at. But he stood certain of his worth outside that boundary, and Vivienne Dartwick did not.

They had to start listening to her.

Not because they would lose her if they did not, but because she was right – or at least not entirely wrong. They’d all flocked to Catherine’s banner because they liked the world she wanted to make, that she made just by being who she was. And Thief, in her own way, was perhaps the most ardent partisan of that. Because she would stick by that vision even when Catherine did not, even if it made her the only objector in a council. An obstacle instead of a speaker, as she’d put it herself. How many of those councils had been true debates, instead of a confirmation of a decision already made? Too few , Adjutant thought. Too few for what we want to be. He could feel her eyes returned to his stump, and knew the bargain had been worth it. The lessons had been learned well . Are we not all your students, Catherine? In our own winding ways. You taught us that there is always a way through, if we’re willing to bleed. Words would not convince Thief, but now every time doubt came she could look at the stump and know, know beyond doubt, that she had been judged worthy.

More useful a thing than a handful of fingers.

“So tell me,” Adjutant said. “How we can be different.”

Her gaze met his, hesitant. Fearing. Assessing. Hope was always a most tempting cup to drink from, even when you knew the chalice might be poisoned.

Vivienne Dartwick spoke, under pale moonlight, and Hakram Deadhand listened.

Interlude: Queen’s Gambit, Declined

“Fifty-nine: it is always better to interrupt a plan than carry one out. Your finest successes will always be the failures of your enemy.”
-‘Two Hundred Heroic Axioms’, author unknown

“You’re in a damned fine mood, for a man who can barely stand,” Ranker muttered.

Most would not have been to pick up on it, Amadeus thought, but the goblin marshal had been his friend for a very long time. Longer than the common understanding of goblin lifespan should allow for, but that was one of the subjects they did not speak of. Ranker had a right to her secrets, as he did his. The Black Knight tightened the woolen blanket draped over his frame, looking up at the night sky with the barest trace of a smile on his face.

“It’s nostalgic, isn’t it?” he said. “The few of us huddling in the dark, surrounded by a realm that would kill us all.”

His detached force numbered two thousand, with Marshal Ranker in overall command as her sappers and scouts would be more valuable to their purposes than regulars or heavies. Cooking fires had been judged too much of a liability to be allowed even after a days of marching under his aspect that should have left any would-be pursuers in the dust: the legionaries had dropped their kits and made their beds on rough ground, not even bothering to raise fortifications beforehand. Ranker’s decision, and one he’d approved of. Their pace was already taking the soldiers dangerously close to their breaking point, aspect or not.

“It hasn’t been like this since the civil war,” Ranker conceded. “The Conquest was orderly campaign, nothing like this one. Feels like we’re making it up as we’re going along.”

“Planning too deep will be seen through by the Augur,” Amadeus reminded her. “We stay a step ahead so long as we make short-term decisions backed by superior pace.”

It was a little more complex than that, in practice. Thrice now the First Prince’s fresh mage order had passed along auguries of where his legions would be headed, though their very interception meant that they were effectively worthless. Prediction and prophecy were different matters, after all. The former was very much avoidable, if known, while the latter tended to be like a sandpit: the harder you struggled, the swifter you drowned. Even those could be broken, of course. Prophecy was only ever the writ of one side of the Great Game, and if outcomes were so absolute there would be no need for Creation at all – according to the Book of All Things, anyway. Still, even the predictions of the Augur were an exceedingly dangerous tool for the opposition. Considering how sparsely it had been used and the recent revelations as to the forces stirring up north, Amadeus suspected that if the Dead King had not been on the move and requiring the soothsayer’s attentions this campaign would have been much more troublesome.

“I’m aware,” she flatly replied. “And I have some fond memories of the old days, do not misunderstand me. But back then we were still young. To our places, to our powers, to our stories. It’s been a long time since we were any of that.”

“ Sing we of foe ,” he softly hummed. “ Of victories won, and that first woe, tyranny of the sun .”

“You know I hate that song, Amadeus,” Ranker grunted. “It’s the anthem of old defeats, a ballad of ruin.”

“It was a cold, clear look at what we were when it was written,” the Black Knight said. “We are no longer that, yet I suspect we never truly outgrew the sentiment.”

Like a poisonous old friend, it had been clutched tight even as the fangs sunk in and venom spread. The Tyranny of the Sun , for the most famous verse of the song was the title as well, had been written near the end of the Sixty Years War. Arguably the most brutal slugging match between two sovereign powers in the history of Calernia, and it had left both Callow and Praes smoking ruins in its aftermath, peace coming largely because neither side was still capable of continuing the war. Dread Emperor Nihilis had retreated to the Blessed Isle with his armies and ended it without ever signing formal treaty, but he’d died failing to rebuild the Empire and a hundred years of murderous mediocrity had followed until Praes recovered enough to embark in its disastrous waging of the Secret Wars. In some ways he suspected the Sixty Years War had been more traumatic an experience to Praesi culture than the collapse of Triumphant’s empire a century and a half earlier. Triumphant had known success before meeting her doom. The parade of Emperors and Empresses who’d waged war on Callow for sixty years had known much of the latter and little of the former.

“We,” the goblin chuckled. “There’s a word growing thinner by the year. We are exiles in more way than one, Amadeus. You saw to that after Akua’s Folly.”

“It is not the first time I’ve been told I should have tried to climb the Tower,” the man shrugged. “It will not be the last, I expect. It would have been a self-defeating enterprise to wage civil war in the Wasteland with Procer assembling its armies just across the border.”

“The Clans would have come out for you,” Ranker said. “Most likely the Tribes as well. The Matrons smell weakness, Black, and there’s only ever one way they react to that.”

“I can think of few things more foolish than to underestimate Alaya,” he quietly said. “Even now. She’s never been one to act without a plan, and that we do not understand her moves should be source of fear and not contempt.”

“Odds are she’s the one who made a pact with the Dead King,” Ranker said.

“It could have been Catherine as well,” Amadeus frankly admitted. “She thrives in chaotic situations. It’s led her to the bad habit of creating them knowing it improves her chances of victory even if it significantly increases collateral damage as well.”

“The Black Queen,” the goblin mused. “There’s another trash fire of a situation. One you’ve stepped lightly around.”

“The Conquest was a way to achieve objectives,” Amadeus said. “The annexation was ultimately a consequence, not the purpose itself. I hardly mind surrendering unnecessary gains if the actual objectives are met through the gesture.”

“The arithmetic holds,” Ranker sighed. “It always does with you. But there’s more to this than the numbers, old friend. We made an order of things, and now it’s crumbling.”

“And now you wonder what will replace it,” Amadeus said. “And if in that new order, we will still have a place.”

“Some might say it’s too early to start thinking about after the war,” she said. “You and I know better. No point in even seeking a victory if when achieved it leads nowhere.”

“A better world,” the Black Knight murmured, looking up a stars that were not those he’d been born under. “Oh, I have wondered. What it might mean, what it would look like.”

“We made one,” Ranker said. “It’s on fire now.”

“And who set the flames?” he smiled. “Cordelia Hasenbach. Catherine Foundling. Kairos Theodosian. Children, in our eyes. Yet is it not the right of the younger generation to look at the work of that which came before it and judge it insufficient ?”

“So they’re right, and we’ll be swept away like dust by the new age,” Ranker said, sounding distinctly unimpressed.

“I still do not believe,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch murmured, “that I am wrong. That our methods, our works, are to be so easily discarded. If these younglings want to prove themselves worthy of shaping the world, well...”

He bared his teeth.

“Let them come,” he said. “Let them earn it. If they can surpass us, then the sin is ours.”

“And if they can’t?” Ranker asked.

“Then they fall into line, or face destruction, and we fight one last great war,” he said. “The one that will matter .”

The two of them remained silent for a long time, seated at the edge of the camp. In the distance, the barest glimpse of the town of Saudant could be made out. Just a lakeside township, one of hundreds in the region. Amadeus doubted the name of it would be remembered as more than a footnote in histories, for no battle would take place there even if he’d been wrong. Under the light of the stars, the Black Knight pondered Providence and the coward’s wager that was Fate. He did not sleep, even tired as he had become.

With dawn he would know if he had once more cheated the Heavens at dice.

—

Gauthier Legrand had served as ranking captain of the guard of Iserre for thirty years now. He’d served Prince Merlaux before Prince Amadis ascended the throne and been appointed to his title by the old prince, but there’d been no talk of having him replaced even when the young prince took over and began inserting his own partisans in posts of influence. This he attributed to the fact that he’d carried out his work steadily and honestly, avoiding court politics and the intrigues intrinsic to any of Procer’s royal seats. He was not unaware that his occasional bluntness and refusal to earn favours by offering plum positions to the kin of the influential had led some to consider him simple, though the more polite phrased it as him having ‘a soldier’s spirit’. Gauthier did not mind. As long as they considered him an idiot they would not attempt to involve him in their little schemes, and he rather preferred it that way. Iserre had only grown larger and wealthier under Prince Amadis, but that rise had come with the troubles inevitably associated with a city expanding. Maintaining order and the rule of law was toil without end, especially in a land where both could change face at the whims of the ruling prince.

Amadis had done well by the city, he’d always thought, and the principality as well. Their prince had kept them out of the worst of the Great War with cunning diplomacy and duly reaped the benefits of Iserre’s rising prominence when the steel returned to the sheath. Old Prince Merlaux had shown a better touch with the commons, that much was true, but his son was a much more able administrator. The guard’s funding had swelled under Amadis, and their equipment was now match for many of the fantassin companies out there making a trade of war. It’d seemed an unquestionable boon at the time, but now Captain Gauthier was forced to question. Not a state of affairs to his liking. The principality was under assault by wicked Easterners from the Wasteland, and to everyone’s dismay the general levies that had preceded Prince Amadis going on campaign had bled the land dry of men in fighting fit. Iserre itself was the capital of the eponymous principality, and so had kept a garrison of two thousand professional soldiers, but the guard’s equipment was only marginally inferior and it numbered five thousand.

In principle the defence of the city was the responsibility of the commander of that garrison, Antonine Milenan. In practice, their leader was middle-aged drunk whose entire experience with martial life was a span of three years with a fantassin company that had never left Iserran borders during the Great War. She had, allegedly, commanded a victorious skirmish against bandits. Rumour had it they’d actually been terrified refugees from Salamans but that in her drunken rage she’d refused to see a difference. There was a reason that Antonine had not been given a command in the crusading host, and Gauthier supposed that a few months ago giving her command of a garrison that would never see combat had seemed a discreet way to set aside a cumbersome relative for his prince. Now that the Wastelanders had come, however, it meant that the woman had been quietly placed under guard in the palace where she could make no trouble. An unfortunate measure prompted by a well-lubricated evening where she’d decided to order the garrison of Iserre to sally out and ‘disperse the foreign rabble on the field’.

And so Captain Gauthier Legrand now led the defence of Iserre.

The responsibility alone would have been difficult to bear, but as the effective commander he’d been the one to receive the secret orders from the First Prince of Procer. Penned by a scribe, most likely, and the content would have been decided by her officers – Hasenbach was a well-known oddity, a Lycaonese with little taste or affinity for war. Gauthier saw the cold sense in the letter he’d been delivered. With only two thousand soldiers, his guardsmen and whatever peasantry he could arm and send to stand on the walls his defence of Iserre was a risky enterprise. The easterners might be impious demon-worshippers, but the Legions of Terror were known to be one of the finest armies on the continent and their generals were of high renown. The captain knew himself to be no great tactician, and hardly a soldier besides. He had dwarven engines on the walls, due to his prince’s foresight, but few and few men trained to use them. The devices were well-known to be finicky and prone to breaking anyway, rarely lasting more than five years under regular use. Rough handling might see a few unmade before they could even be properly put to work.

And yet here he was, reading a report stating the Legions were but a day’s march away and considering treason.

There were no two ways about it, disobeying the First Prince’s orders would be high treason. The Principate had declared a crusade, her authority in military matters was absolute. Gauthier was not a soldier, which in different times might have provided him a way out, but as the commander of the city’s defence he was charged to obey any and all orders bearing the seal of Cordelia Hasenbach. The actual text of those was delicate and regretful, but the heart of it a brutal thing: after short defence on the walls, he was to draw the Praesi inside Iserre and set the city on fire around them. His troops were then to evacuate and join the relief forces sent by the Dominion, to fall upon the easterners while they were freshly bloodied. Iserre, as of Prince Milenan’s last royal census, counted over a hundred thousand souls between its walls. Gauthier knew it was more than that, perhaps as much a ten thousand more who were foreigners and so unrecorded or too estranged from the law to want their presence noted in anything as official as a census.

He would not be allowed to evacuate them. Their panic, the letter noted, would prevent the Praesi from pulling out their forces in time by clogging up the streets.

He wrestled with the decision throughout the night. Handpicked men discretely prepared the blazes, for he did not give the order now it would be too late afterwards, and when dawn came Iserre had been turned into a pyre. It was the arithmetic of it that stayed with him. There were, according to reports, perhaps fifteen thousand easterners and not even half that many bandits with them. A host of twenty thousand at most. And his orders were to burn alive five times that many to wound the Praesi. He would be damned in the eyes of the Gods, if he did this. Yet how many more would die in towns and villages, if he did not? Not merely in Iserre, but all over the realm. Duty and faith tugged him different ways. Midmorning saw a Praesi envoy reached the city. The offer made was as brutal as the orders of the First Prince: should Iserre surrender its granaries and treasury, the city would be spared a sack. If it resisted, all armed inside the walls would be put to the sword. Gauthier rode out himself to speak with the envoy, to the gaze of Evil with his own eyes.

The thing across him was green of skin, one of those creatures they called orc. A barbarous monster that ate human flesh and lived only for blood and rapine. There was nothing in its eyes but hunger, Gauthier saw. A small woman with ink-stained hands and the colouring of the Free Cities stood by its side, though she remained silent. Some kind of servant, he suspected.

“The terms will remain as offered,” the orc said. “Negotiation is not on the table.”

“You’re a long way from home, greenskin,” Gauthier said. “Fighting the wars of humans.”

“We go,” the envoy said, “where the banner goes.”

“Your banner has come to the Principality of Iserre, Gods take you all,” the captain said. “We do not bow to foreigners. We do not bow to servants of the Hellgods . If you want your fucking loot, come and take it.”

“A respectable choice,” the orc said. “But you may come to regret it.”

“Tell your masters this is Procer, not one of their slave cities,” he spat out. “Test our walls at your peril. We were there, when the Tower fell. We will be again.”

The words, though defiant, were as ashes in his mouth as he rode back to Iserre. He’d just ensured the city he’d spent his entire life guarding would either suffer fire or a bloody sack. The Legions of Terror arrived past noon, and he watched them spread out from atop the walls. Dwarven engines stolen from other cities and armories were brought to the fore, their shapes changed by the devious goblins – which rumour said were dwarves corrupted into foul form by the touch of the Gods Below. The easterners and their traitor auxiliaries built their camps and only began bombardment under cover of nightfall. The city’s walls had been rebuilt fully early in the Great War, and so they suffered but did not break. Gauthier feared not the stones, only the assault of the steel-clad soldiers. Two more days passed, with only one breach to show for it – quickly filled by sacks of sand and gravel at his order – but time was running out. The assault would come soon, he knew, and the decision he must make with it. Duty or good? Gods forgive him, but as the fourth night fell Captain Gauthier made his decision. Better he be known a traitor than a butcher. When the assault came, he would empty the city and ride to Salia for his trial.

Then dawn came, and with first light came the realization that the Praesi were gone .

—

“Steady,” Amadeus ordered. “I want no incidents.”

The town of Saudant’s entire defending force had been a sum of thirty militiamen, who immediately folded when they realized how heavily outnumbered they were. There’d been actual soldiers behind them, though, who had fought: the Levantines had left four hundred soldiers to guard the fleet of barges that had ferried them across the lakes at the heart of Procer. None had surrendered, even when such an outcome was offered on rather lenient terms, and five barges had been lost to fire and fighting before they could be eradicated. A regrettable loss, but Amadeus had burned ships himself not a day later. The barges had carried thirty thousand Dominion infantry, while he would at most move twenty thousand soldiers himself. Having no intention of leaving Procer with any ships after he passed, the surplus had been put to the torch.

The sailors and captains to which they belonged had been furious, but they were not armed and so in no position to contest his orders. The First Prince had assembled this fleet by requisitioning merchant trade, not building warships, and considering piracy was night-inexistent in Proceran waters the merchant sailors had rarely carried anything larger than a knife. They were also less than eager to die for the sake of the Lycaonese ruling Salia who’d pressed them into service, which meant his assurances that the sailors would be released unharmed after ferrying his own troops where he wished had been received with more gratitude than hostility. Amadeus had taken pains to be accommodating with them, as Praesi were poor sailor as a rule and the Legions largely unfit for sailing ships. Some Thalassinans in the ranks had middling experience at sea, but too few and those few had too little practical experience to properly captain barges. It might be possible to proceed without the sailors, but only at a snail’s pace – which would rather defeat the purpose of acquiring the fleet in the first place.

The legionaries he’d called out after nodded at his order, moderating the language they used when speaking at the locals loading the ships. Finding out there were still supplies in the town meant for the already-departed Levantine army had been a pleasant surprise, implying he’d caught the very end of the enemy supply train without meaning to do so. He was not a fool, of course, and so he’d checked the grain and foodstuffs for poison. Hasenbach might have grown desperate enough for such a stratagem, even if the Levantines were not. None had been found, and he’d been pleased enough at the discovery to dole out a portion to the inhabitants of Saudant as incentive to load the rest more quickly. Barely more than a thousand people overall, and so easily appeased by the notion of being assured of plentiful stories throughout winter. Sadly the general levy by the prince of Iserre had meant few capable of hard labour remained, but he’d assigned a few legionary companies to help matters along.

Leaving the docks – and the friendly shore around them, where lack of space had dictated most barges would actually end up – Amadeus found Ranker awaiting him at the nearby tavern he’d appropriated as temporary headquarters.

“They have fishing boats,” the goblin marshal informed him immediately. “At least a dozen.”

“Not enough to ferry a significant amount of men,” the Black Knight noted. “Sinking them brings little profit and antagonizes the locals. Leave them be.”

“At least order them beach for a few weeks,” Ranker said. “Otherwise some enterprising soul might try to find out where we’re headed.”

He nodded after a moment, though in truth he doubted their destination would be much of a mystery. Even if the Augur did not divine it, the strategic situation would make it obvious. By now Grem and Scribe should have lifted their ‘siege’ of Iserre, having remained there long enough to draw in whatever forces had been sent to relieve it. They’d hurry towards the nearest shore, where the fleet Amadeus has just seized would be awaiting them. From there, they could leave their pursuers to stew impotently on the wrong side of the Principate while they struck at easier targets.

“Have you decided where we’ll be headed, after?” Ranker asked.

“Still a matter of debate,” Amadeus admitted. “Segovia would allow us to finalize our savaging of the First Prince’s opposition, properly damaging her position.”

“But you’re thinking of Salia,” the goblin said knowingly.

“We can’t take the capital,” he said, stating the obvious. “Even arming a third of that hive would allow her to drown us in numbers. But if we torch our way through its outlying territories, the sheer loss of prestige might see her unseated.”

“Grem will call it risky,” Ranker predicted. “I don’t disagree.”

“And so it remains a matter of debate,” the Black Knight said. “We will discuss in depth when reunited with him and Eudokia.”

There was a beat, during which the goblin studied him thoughtfully and openly.

“It’s been two days since you last used an aspect,” she said. “I expected you to be in better shape by now.”

“I drew deeper than I have in decades,” he candidly admitted. “And you know my well is shallower than most. I expect within a fortnight I’ll have recuperated.”

She nodded, after a beat.

“Gods, at least it worked,” she sighed. “I half-expected a band of heroes to be awaiting.”

“There are over a hundred thousand souls in Iserre,” Amadeus said, avoiding even the slightest hint of smugness. “Souls at risk of slaughter, if left unprotected. So long as we were willing to carry out that ugly work, it was possible to dictate where the heroic intervention would take place. I expect Grem found the place swarming with their like. It would have been a beacon lit for every sword of the Heavens not gone north to fight the Dead King.”

“There’s no need to get smug,” Ranker told him, eyes squinting.

Alas, sometimes there was no winning a battle. By the fourth day, they’d departed the charming little town of Saudant on surprisingly good terms with the locals. Legionaries were spread too thinly across the fleet for Amadeus’ tastes, but there were enough mages along that any sailors with notions of patriotic resistance would be forced into restraint by their more fearful fellows. The fleet made good pace, for the first three days.

Then the sickness started.

It showed in the sailors first. Fever, sweat, weakness of the limbs and after twelve hours they were dead. Amadeus ordered any with the symptoms thrown overboard as soon as he first saw the disease. It was too clean and too sudden: there had been no sign at all before the fevers, the sailors being in perfect health. It was not a natural disease. Reluctantly, he ordered every Proceran sailor disposed of after the first legionary showed symptoms. It was too late, by then.

On the sixth day, Amadeus of the Green Stretch found he was the only person left alive of the entire fleet.

—

Tariq let out a panting breath when the last of the victims died.

There were Choirs, he knew, that treated their relationships with heroes as a sort of subjugation. The Hashmallim of Contrition, in particular, were known to be heavy-handed – though to this day he was uncertain whether it was because they bestowed upon only the desperate, or because such was their nature. As a young man, the Pilgrim had found that the Choir of Mercy demanded nothing of him. He’d simply been found to be of a like mind with the Ophanim, and so found them at his side. As if they had been there all along. They were more like old friends than patrons, never far from his thoughts. Always there with a whisper of comfort in hard times, a reassurance when the world seemed dark. They shared, after all, the same mandate.

The alleviation of suffering.

Tariq had no longer been a young man when he’d understood the frightful depths of that simple sentence. He’d thought, as mortals often did, that angels saw through his eyes. Understood his thoughts, his beliefs and his choices. The first, he thought, was perhaps true. The rest was not. The Ophanim were absolute, in nature and mandate. There were no shades to their perspectives, and while they might fondly tolerate them in one sworn to the Choir of Mercy that indulgence should never be confused for approval . The Grey Pilgrim had first understood this when he’d smothered his young nephew in his sleep, knowing the boy was charismatic enough to unite the Dominion and lead to war against Procer. He’d tried, first, to reason with him. To show him the pursuit of old grudges through blood could not redeem a single thing.

The young never listened, he’d learned. And so old fools like him had to smooth out the sharp edges of Creation.

Praesi, he’d been told, believed that Good only came in certain shapes. That it must obey strict boundaries and rules, that it must rely on little tricks like Providence or angelic intervention. An understandable misunderstanding. For all that the raving Tyrants who climbed the Tower liked to style themselves anathema to all children of the Heavens, they’d rarely fought opponents beyond Callow – where heroism was so deeply linked to war that a villain waging one was now seen as good. Praesi had learned to bury and defeat a certain breed of stories, after millennia of butting heads against them. But oh, that was such a shallow understanding. The world was large, and so few ever saw more than a speck of it. There were as many stories as there were peoples, and to build one’s understanding on but a fraction was to raise a tower on quicksand. The Black Knight, Tariq thought, was not a stupid man. But he’d been arrogant enough to think he saw all the rules of his world, and arrogance was ever the death of villains.

Crafting the plague had been easy as snapping his fingers, and mayhaps that was the most distressing part of it. The Enemy delighted in displaying its power, raising massive contraptions or weaving elaborate schemes to praise its own cunning and cleverness. Like it was the only side capable of doing those things, like it wasn’t a choice to turn away from the unsightly means of the Gods Below. The Grey Pilgrim could have birthed diseases and disasters that would raise the hair on the Warlock’s neck, if he so wished. But power had to used responsibly, turned to moral purpose, else it could only ever be a form of tyranny. And so Tariq had wept, and asked for the guidance of the Ophanim to create a disease that would undo the Black Knight and all his murderous designs. It was not so far removed from healing, to make someone’s body turn on itself. To allow it to spread had required learning deeper than his, but as always the Choir had provided.

At a small price, a reminder of what he wrought. He would feel the agony of all taken by the disease.

He’d come to Saudant a stranger on a dark night, and seeded this foul miracle in a single man before taking his leave. Ten days and ten nights it would wait, before beginning to kill. That the Black Knight would come to the sleepy little town had never been in doubt. By the man’s perspective, heroes could only go to Iserre. He was making sport of decency by forcing their hand with a threat before stealing away a fleet to spread even more death. Where was it written , Tariq had thought then, that Evil will have monopoly on ruthlessness? He’d awaited close, with Laurence and four other heroes for company. Far enough such a small party would not be noticed, close enough he could ensure none of the sick would leave Saudant and spread the sickness to the rest of Procer. The Praesi had came, the Praesi had gone, and he’d followed in their wake. Laurence, in her own kind way, had offered to purge the town for him. He’d refused, and offered the Last Mercy himself.

This would be his own sin, from beginning to end.

They followed the villain after, taking fishing boats. No need for anything a gaudy as a barge, when they were only a handful. It was not difficult to find the Black Knight. He was at the centre of a fleet of dead men, a ring of ships adrift in the lake. Tariq was the first to climb aboard, though Laurence was not far behind, and they found him awaiting on the deck. Standing straight-backed, armoured in old plate without having bothered with a helmet. He watched them approach in silence, pale green eyes emotionless.

“We finally meet, Black Knight,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

The man did not reply. He was eyeing the others, gaze lingering on armaments and armour. Guessing at Names, guessing at powers. Already planning the span of his last stand. Yet Tariq felt no power coming from him, no presence. As if his Name had been snuffed out. It might very well have been, the old man thought. The Gods Below reserved only one fate for a lame horse.

“Surrender,” the Pilgrim said. “This will not end well for you.”

“It was never going to end well,” the green-eye man smiled. “That was rather the point.”

His sword cleared the scabbard with a ringing sound.

“Let’s see,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch said, “if I can at least leave a mark.”

Chapter 62: Impulse

“I don’t care if they’ve been training, it’s only been two months. What could they possibly have learned that would threaten me?”
– Dread Empress Sinistra IV, the Erroneous

“The Mighty Berelun is willing to allow passage, but only for a tithe,” Ivah translated.

The Mighty Berelun was full of shit, I decided. That it had accepted an envoy instead of sending a warband the moment we entered its territory had been an auspicious start, especially when it’d proposed one of the large caverns of the region as a meeting place. The Mighty, I had learned, preferred to lay their ambushes in small passages where they could best leverage their superior speed and reflexes without the risk of being swarmed by ‘lesser’ drow. Sadly, it looked like this was going to be a repeat of our aborted talks with the Purka Sigil. The cavern surrounding us might have been broad and high-ceilinged, but there were discreet little paths on an upper level where I could hear drow scuttling around like rats. Berelun had been smart enough to listen to the rumours already making their way through the outer ring but not quite smart enough to decide picking a fight wouldn’t be in its favour. I was almost insulted by how few it had mobilized for the ambush: by the sounds of it, there couldn’t be more than twenty.

Most of those would be ispe, the lowest rung of the Mighty. In practice, those were fighters with a handful of interesting tricks but none of the dangerous Secrets out there. As dangerous in melee as your average fae soldier, if much less mobile for the lack of wings. They were the kind of enterprising souls that joined up with a sigil as much for the protection as because the quickest way for them to grow in power was to slay and harvest other ispe – either those of an enemy sigil or that of their own. Mighty Berelun itself had prudently shown up with an escort, a pair of rylleh. Ivah’s old rank, and one I’d begun to understand was higher up the ladder than my guide had previously implied. Rylleh were the drow just beneath whatever drow the sigil was named after, called the sigil-holder, and considered the most likely contenders to eventually run through their leader and take the clan for themselves. They were also usually the heavy hitters in a sigil apart from the chief, which meant Berelun was taking us seriously. It would not have brought both its most dangerous rivals and strongest fighters to meet with us on the ground floor otherwise.

That had seemed promising, until I’d heard the ambush setting up.

“What kind of tithe?” I asked.

I had no intention of paying anything of the sort, but stringing this out a little longer would allow for a cleaner resolution. As if prompted by my thought, my ears caught the sound of a blade slicing open a throat. There was a muted gurgle and a body was quietly lowered to the ground. One down. Ivah addressed the Mighty in Crepuscular and I kept my eyes on its own. Deep, perfect silver set in a dark grey face that looked like it’d been carved with a knife. Berelun was larger than most drow I’d seen, broad-shouldered and heavily muscled. The obsidian blade strapped to its back could not be called anything but a greatsword.

“One in ten of your sigil, my queen,” Ivah said. “With no fewer than six ispe among them.”

My sigil, huh. That was one way to call the gathering throng of the desperate and the ambitious Akua was keeping an eye on. Two thousand, by now, though we were still thin on Mighty. Few of those were willing to take my bargain when it was extended. I’d already made my peace with the fact that we’d have to grow our own pack through harvest, and truth be told that might make them slightly more reliable in the long term. Another gurgle above, another drop. Berelun had dispersed its ambushers to make sure they’d be able to fire from all angles, looked like. It would have been decent tactics if I hadn’t seen it coming. But I had, and their isolation meant they were easy prey for my own hunter on the prowl.

“Ivah,” I said. “Ask the Mighty Berelun if it heard what took place between us and the Purka.”

My guide’s deep blue eyes crinkled in amusement, but it nodded. The exchange of words was swift, but not so swift that I did not hear another two throats cut.

“The Mighty knows of the destruction that was delivered unto the Purka,” Ivah said. “It cautions you not to believe the Berelun to be weak or lacking in cunning. It says tithe will be paid, one way or another, and that pretending otherwise is foolish.”

“So it thinks I’m speaking a threat,” I mused. “When I was, in fact, delivering a warning. They might have been sloppier about their ambush, but the plan was quite similar.”

Fifth death, then a pause. The sixth and seventh were nearly simultaneous. She was having fun with it, if she was getting that fancy.

“Is there to be fighting then, my queen?” Ivah asked, sounding less than worried.

“Eventually,” I agreed. “Let’s keep stringing them along for a bit longer. Quibble over the numbers, make it look like I’m considering the offer.”

“By your will,” the drow agreed, head inclining in deference.

By my final count, there were eighteen ispe who’d been hiding upstairs. My eyes remained on Berelun all the while, and I saw it getting increasingly impatient as moments passed. Not because of the negotiations, I thought. We both knew those were going nowhere. Most likely it was awaiting a signal before attacking and growing restless because it wasn’t coming. After thirty heartbeats passed without another throat being cut, I elected to call down the curtains on the farce. Ivah was in the middle of a sentence, but paused when I raised my hand.

“I will offer them the same terms I offered the Purka,” I said. “And the Trovod, and the Hilaron. They can kneel and take oaths, be granted power as you have been. Their forces will be folded into mine. Or they can be unmade. There will be no middle ground.”

“They will refuse,” Ivah said.

“I expect they will,” I replied. “So here’s a gift to help them understand the situation – Archer!”

My voice sounded loud and clear in the cavern. A moment later there was a mocking cackle and Indrani kicked down a drow’s corpse from the upper levels. The throat was still bleeding, and after the cadaver landed with a dull thump blood pooled around it. Berelun and its bodyguards stilled, eyes moving back and forth. Ivah spoke to them, slow and cadenced. I’d heard enough Crepuscular I could begin to make out individual words, and knew the meaning of a few, but even spoken so slowly the language was difficult. Unlike any other I’d been taught on the surface. No matter: I’d set Diabolist to learning it, and when she was done I’d rip the knowledge out of her mind.

“The Mighty Berelun refuses your offer,” Ivah said. “And demands your submission. I’ve also been offered admittance as fourth under the Sigil, should I turn on you.”

“Well, it’s a tempting offer,” I drawled. “Have you duly considered it?”

“Alas for the Mighty Berelun,” the drow said, “I much prefer being your Lord of Silent Steps.”

The title rippled in the air, after being spoken, and Ivah no longer seemed to be Ivah at all. I could feel the shard of Winter in its soul, the way it spread through its veins with every breath and intertwined with the Night. It was not fae, but oh how close it had become. And all it’d taken was will and oaths, traded in the dark. Berelun caught on to the fact that negotiations had come to an end, ripping its obsidian greatsword free from leather bindings, and the attending rylleh followed suit. A steel-tipped spear to the left, a long ornate stone knife to the right.

“The usual arrangement stands,” I calmly said. “Anything you kill is yours. The rest goes to auction.”

The curved obsidian sword the Lord of Silent Steps had wrested from the corpse of the Mighty Trovod left its sheath with a pretty little flourish.

“May my hunt be fruitful, then,” Ivah grinned. “I yet hunger.”

Without another word, it vanished. Glamour, which of all the fae arts the drow seemed to take to the easiest. There were ways to use the Night not too dissimilar. I turned my eyes to the Berelun, whose earlier condifence had been shaken by the open use of power they did not recognize. It would be the least of their surprises today, I thought. They opened the dance with what I’d come to call the Hunter’s Triangle. It was a tactic Mighty seemed to favour when facing an entity they suspected to be stronger than themselves but not by too broad a margin. Berelun itself advanced fluidly, greatsword raised above its head, while the other two flickered and dissolved into shadow. They would slither across the ground to flank me on both sides from the back while their chief kept my attention, all going for crippling blows instead of an outright kill. It was a tactic meant to get me slow and bleeding, not take my head. Drow fighting tactics were heavily influenced by the fact that the one amongst them to make the kill had the best claim to the body and Night therein. In single combat they immediately went for the kill, but when in a group they tended to go for the legs or the arms first.

The two rylleh flickered back into silhouettes with admirable timing. It was easy to see the three of them had fought opponents together before: the coordination was impeccable. The spear, knife and greatsword struck within a heartbeat of each other. They passed through mist, dispersing chunks of my body, and only then did I act. I returned to entirely solid form and my hand snatched the extended arm of the spear-wielder. My physical strength might have grown beyond natural boundaries but laws of momentum still applied to my action, which had required an adjustment I was only now beginning to get a handle on. My footing shifted, my torso pivoted and I swung the drow at Berelun’s head. Silver eyes widened in surprise and I merely clenched my fingers before releasing the rylleh’s wrist, crushing the bones in my grip. The last drow had kept its wits, and flickered back into a pool of shadow before I could strike it. Scoffing, I shaped and released a spike of ice that nailed the tendrils and forced the drow to flicker back into a silhouette. Wounded to boot, as the spike had gone through its leg, but Night flowed into the wound and the ice was forced out as the flesh beneath reformed. Neat trick, that one, but I’d seen it before. I backhanded the rylleh and sent it tumbling away, turning in time to see the other two drow extricate themselves and rise to their feet.

“Come now,” I said. “Show me a few Secrets worth stealing.”

Berelun snarled something in Crepuscular, the other grimly nodding. The Night pulsed and a supernatural darkness fell over me.

“Disappointing,” I said. “Hilaron did it right at the start and it was much more effective.”

The working was anchored around my neck, not a veil of darkness but a bubble meant entirely to blind me. It required flesh to be anchored to, however. I stepped back, feeling myself... slip. Grow vague and muted. The mist thickened back into myself one step removed from the now-pointless bubble, revealing the sight of the two of them slithering along the floor in shadow-form. Irritated, I smashed my boot down. The ground shook, stone splintered and the two of them were thrown out in drow-shape. I saw fear in the rylleh’s silvery eyes as it realized what its chief had not. This was not a fight, not for me. It was a spar through which I was mastering the use my mantle. This entire cursed ruin of an empire was. The last drow had already gotten back on its feet, but it had other troubles. The Lord of Silent Steps had cut through the muscles on the back of its knee, and was now weaving one glamour after another to keep it striking at illusions while it methodically ruined its arms and legs.

The Night, it had once told me, felt deeper when taken with an enemy’s last breath.

Berelun snarled once more and I rolled my eyes. It had yet to impress me. Six tendrils of shadow rose from its back, each forming a few fingers at the end that took obsidian knives to wield, and with its sword raised high it came for me again. The other drow actually bothered to be interesting, flickering into shadow-form but remaining a silhouette. That was a new one, and worth exploring. I formed a blade of ice and set out against the rylleh, ignoring Berelun. The shadowed drow shot forward, and only then did I notice the shadow had extended to its spear as well. Promising. I ducked under the tip of the spear and scythed through its ankles, but parted only shadow that reformed anew the moment my blade passed. It spun and smashed the butt of its spear against my armour, hitting above where my spine was. An exertion of will had frost keeping it stuck and when I turned the weapon was snatched out of its grasp. Curious, I plunged my sword through its throat and left it there. The drow panicked, wrenching it out, and my brow rose. Behind me I heard Berelun howl in pain when Archer’s arrow took him in the back of the knee. Simply because she hadn’t deigned to come down did not mean she was not keeping an eye on the proceedings.

I caught the rylleh’s left shoulder but the shadows wriggled out of my grasp and it kicked me in the stomach. My plate took the blow without trouble and I frowned, punching it in the face. It rocked back, though with no visible damage. Shadows are constantly moving and distributing any impact or cutting force across the entire body, so anything that doesn’t last is ineffective , I thought. On the flipside anything that lasted would do a lot more damage than it should. Too flawed a trick to be worth replicating, I assessed. The ice blade still in its hand turned to mist and formed again as a collar around its neck, tightening with but a thought. I left it to choke, returning my attention to Berelun. The Mighty was bound to have a few Secrets it’d yet to pull out. Archer’s arrow had gone straight through the knee, steel tip coming out bloody, and it appeared that pain was enough to get rid of the shadow tendrils it’s been wielding earlier. No great loss there. I could already do the same thing, more or less.

“So,” I meaningfully said. “Bleeding and desperate. Now’s about time to pull out the fancy tricks, don’t you think?”

It replied in Crepuscular.

“I don’t speak that,” I said, and shot a spear of ice at it to hurry things along.

It dodged effortlessly. Drow with that much Night swimming around their bodies had reflexes far beyond anything a human could muster even on their best day – even the Watch. I closed the distance, noting it’d ceased retreating and learning why a heartbeat later. Shadows roiled across its entire body and sprouted in seemingly solid spikes.

“Seen it before,” I sighed.

I hardened my hand to be solid as stone and struck at the spikes, shattering them and sending the drow reeling back. Berelun’s face was the picture of pained surprise, but it gathered its bearings long enough for one more trick. Night dripped down its body in thick rivulets, then shot out like arrows. One would have gone through my chest, but that was seen to with a half-step to the side. Yet the Night was hovering in the air all around us, I saw, forming some kind of spotty dome. Berelun smirked and stabbed its sword into the closest spot of Night. To my surprise, it came out behind me and carved into my plate. I moved forward, ensuring it wouldn’t bite too deep, but that’d been rather unexpected. I felt it safe to assume a blow could come out of any chunk of Night, which left him quite a few angles to attack from. Interesting . I wove glamour over myself, leaving my illusion weaving around blows even as I left the makeshift dome myself, and reached for Winter. Perfectly reproducing this was probably beyond my ability. Maybe by using my domain I could do something similar, assuming the Night really was Sve Noc’s own domain manifest, but it would require too much concentration to be worth it. If I was to wield my domain in combat there were better alternatives.

Using purely Winter, thought? This was a trick worth stealing.

I went about it methodically, since it was my first time. I formed frost at regular intervals around it on the ground in a loose circle, slight marks I could strengthen with barely a thought. Making frost marks that hung in the air proved trickier, until I started weaving them the same way I did platforms. Not trying to hang them up on something that did not exist, but interposing them between layers of Creation. Even then, I saw with mild irritation that the moment I tried using one of the hovering marks again it fell. The sound of frost breaking on stone caught Berelun’s attention, and its eyes widened in fear and surprise when it saw the other marks. Time to wrap this up, then. I let Winter loose, shunting off the alienation into the others who drew on the stuff of my mantle – Diabolist, as always, but now Ivah as well. Spears of pure ice shot out from over thirty directions, puncturing Mighty Berelun’s body like a rag doll. I withdrew them with a flick of the wrist, forcing them back into the initial marks, and the drow dropped to the floor listlessly.

Then an arrow went through the back of its neck, because Archer had a horrid sense of humour.

“That one was mine,” she called out from above.

I gestured obscenely at her, earning only laughter in response. A glance told me that the rylleh I’d left a collar on had choked to death and Ivah was already harvesting the other’s Night, kneeling over the dying body. Indrani came down, leaping from handhold to handhold on the cavern wall like some sort of demented grasshopper before landing in an unnecessarily elaborate roll.

“Diplomacy’s a lot simpler than I used to think, Cat,” Archer noted. “I’m finally getting the hang of it.”

I sighed.

“Keep an eye on the corpses,” I said. “Ivah will stay with you. We’re moving in on the Berelun camp after Akua’s people pick up the bodies for an auction.”

“Sure, sure,” she dismissed. “Look on the bright side, this isn’t the kind of neighbourhood where people will ask questions if they run into us standing over a bunch of corpses.”

I refused to dignify that with a response and left them with dead drow, beginning the trek back to what their kind had taken to calling my sigil. The auction would delay us by an hour or two, but no more. We’d crafted the system with our time constraints in mind.

It’d been Diabolist’s idea. There’d been no issue at first, as the first sigil we’d run into was the Trovod. Ivah, fresh off its title as my first Lord of Winter, had single-handedly slaughtered the sigil’s upper ranks and harvested all of them. It’d later admitted that even the sigil-holder would barely have qualified as a rylleh outside of the outer rings and it’d been more an execution than a battle. The two hundred meat – nisi , in Crepuscular – who’d belonged to the drow of the Trovod had been eager to follow us even before I made clear that the dwarves would be close behind. Nisi that were not under a sigil were fair game for any drow looking to accumulate a bit of Night, and all it would take was a single Mighty coming across them for a massacre to ensue. At best they might end up taken by another sigil and any among them with useful skills harvested. But then we’d run into Purka territory, and those had been tougher meat. Ivah had partaken, but eventually admitted it no longer gained much out of harvesting Night from lower rungs of the Mighty like the ispe. To continue feeding it the corpses would not significantly improve its combat capacity.

That revelation came right on the back of the fact I now had about one thousand nisi who wanted to follow us on our journey, along with a smaller contingent of two hundred dzulu – meaning person, more or less – which was what drow were called when they had enough Night to no longer be meat but not enough to qualify as even the lowest of the Mighty. Most of the dzulu were smart enough to surrender when people still covered with the blood of their overlords strolled into their camp, but they tended to be the ones that chafed under my rules the most. The prohibition on killing each other in particular: now that the old order was gone, they believed it was their chance to rise. I’d been inclined to just cut them loose, but Akua had talked me out of it. She’d pointed out that the nisi were largely incapable of fighting, but that the dzulu usually knew their way around a weapon. If I was to recruit an army in the Everdark, it would not be from the Mighty or the nisi. It’d be from the hungry dzulu, who’d be willing to take oaths in exchange for enough Night to no longer be arrow fodder. They’d spent long enough near the corridors of power to be willing to do quite a bit if the deal allowed them to walk those corridors in their own right.

And so we had created the auction.

We took the corpses of the Mighty and allowed any and all to bid for the right to harvest their Night. Akua had been inclined to limit bidding rights to the dzulu so that a warrior class would be created quickly, but I’d been of a different opinion. The nisi were, in my eyes, the closest thing to sane people that could be found among the drow. Most of them had spent their lives being slaves in all but name and while they paid lip service to the ways of the Everdark their hearts weren’t really in it. It was hard to love customs that saw you used a tools and beasts of burdens, killed at a whim. I’d rather have slightly less effective soldiers that weren’t ardent partisans of methaphysical cannibalism. What would be bid, however, had never been in doubt. Coin would be useful, if I could bring it back to Callow, but drow society ran on barter and somewhat communal slave labour – nisi were the property of the sigil as a whole, not individuals, but what they made was distributed at the discretion of the sigil-holder. There were precious few easy riches to be had, down here, and unlike the dwarves I didn’t have a legion of workers to mine every shaft full of metals and precious stones we came across. I’d not come to the Everdark for wealth anyway. I’d come here for an army, and so the bidding was done with oaths . Years in my service, enforced by blood and Winter. I was willing to empower the drow if it was on my terms. Two more sigils, I thought as I made my way through the tunnels, only two more sigils and we’d have enough numbers.

Then we’d hit the city of Lotow, and the boulder would start rolling down the hill.

Chapter 63: Initiation

“Blood sacrifice is such an ugly term. I prefer to think of it a ‘blood redistribution’, a thriving new form of Imperial enterprise.”
– Dread Empress Sinistra II, the Coy

“One hundred and sixty years, subjected to the full breadth of lesser and greater oaths,” Akua said.

The nisi at her side, a one-eyed drow named Centon, repeated her words in Crepuscular loudly enough all those assembled below would hear them. Nearly seven hundred drow were seated respectfully on their knees, packed tightly on the cavern floor, but they were the most orderly crowd I’d ever seen. That many humans in a room would carry out hushed conversations among each other, even if there was a devil looking over them, and neither orcs nor goblins were very different. Goblins, in fact, might try to talk with the bloody devil. Not a single one of the drow had so much as let out a grunt except when bidding. The difference here, I thought, was cultural. Most surface people had an expectation they would not have their throat cut on a whim, while drow had lived their whole lives under a different set of unspoken rules. Life was the cheapest form of currency in the Everdark. Centon’s words were not followed by another bid, though in truth I’d not expected one. One hundred and sixty years was fairly high for a rylleh. A sigil-holder’s corpse could easily fetch as much as five centuries, but then it came with the understanding that a drow harvesting that much Night should easily be capable of living that long.

Diabolist and I both knew why the bidding for lesser corpses had risen. After it’d been made clear that titles like the one bestowed upon Ivah would only ever be considered for people who’d fought under me and sworn the full breadth of oaths, interest in even the lesser Mighty had significantly increased. The most ambitious among the dzulu wanted to be worth bringing along for the fight when we hit Great Lotow, judging the comprehensive oaths an acceptable shackle if it could lead to that greater ultimate payoff. The Lord of Silent Steps had made something of an impression when it’d gone through the upper ranks of the Trovod like a hot knife through butter, and the lingering tales of that had led to regular polite inquiries on the subject of titles from both dzulu and the occasional nisi.

“Then Sekoran may rise to take the oaths, and this auction has come to an end,” Akua said, after the silence continued for a full sixty heartbeats. “You may disperse.”

Centon translated her words, and without a sound the drow below us knelt forward until their foreheads touched the floor. Not one rose before the winner – named Sekoran, apparently – was climbing up. They left in orderly files after that, neither jostling nor hurrying. Even though I’d made it clear that as far as I was concerned all of their kind were equal under my rules, the nisi still allowed the dzulu to leave ahead of them while expressing deference through tilts of the head lowering their gaze to the floor and presenting their neck. It meant, Akua had told me, that the nisi in question were offering their life and Night for harvest should their social superior wish it. Mostly a courtesy, as nisi were communal property of the sigil and not to be touched unless allowed by the sigil-holder, but here in the outer rings those customs were more loosely kept to. When the difference in power between rylleh and sigil-holder was thin, order tended to break down and killing nisi was often used as statement of rising or descending influence. The drow, I’d learned, made the Praesi fondness intrigue and blood sport look positively mild in comparison. Sekoran climbed up the rocky outcropping that’d served as our seat for the auction with poorly-hidden eagerness.

It was young, though it was hard to tell with drow. Sekoran did lack the kind of agelessly young look most Mighty had, though, its features still soft and lacking the harsh angles of a mature drow. The lifespan of their species was a headache and a half to understand. It was known that those who held no Night save that which they were born to would live exactly sixty years, much too clear-cut a lifespan to be natural. They called it the Three Faces: drow reached maturity at twenty and began their decline at forty, their bodies breaking down over those last twenty years until death took them at the exact age of sixty. Dzulu, like Sekoran’s silver-touched eyes betrayed he was, could expect to live over a hundred years old. It was unheard of for even the lowest of the Mighty to die of old age, but some of the worst monsters in the inner ring were alleged to have lived over a millenium. The kid bowed after finishing the climb, first towards me then towards Akua. It allowed Centon to speak to it with contemptuous patience, though more than once I caught it glancing at the banner at my side while the nisi spoke. It’d made an impression, as it’d been meant to.

Drow did not take oaths, or make them, and so a few of the first dzulu to secure a corpse in the auction had treated their word a little too lightly. Three, to be precise. They’d tried to slay other drow under my banner, or hurt them. Their hideously twisted and frozen corpses had been hung from the long metal pole at my side, dangling softly back and forth. I’d not had to lift so much as a finger to see them die. The oaths had seen to that, the sliver of Winter I’d put inside them devouring their bodies from the inside the moment they acted in a manner breaking their word. The Night they’d taken was still there, stirring as they dangled.

They’d started taking the oaths seriously after that.

“It is ready for the ceremony,” Akua said, breaking me out of my thoughts.

I glanced at the shade and nodded. She’d helped me with both the ritual and the wording of the oaths, putting her extensive experience with diabolism to slightly more acceptable use. As a sorcerous discipline, diabolism was as much about wordcraft as it was rituals: a binding could be technically flawless and still turn out to be completely worthless if there was a loophole in the protections it carried. There was a reason Praesi preferred summoning lesser devils when they could get away with it: the risks rose sharply when the devil was capable of thought. I’d agreed that making the oaths in Lower Miezan would be to our advantage, since neither of us mastered Crespuscular well enough to be able to understand all the nuances – or, to be frank, trusted any of our translators enough to let them shape the oaths in our stead. Centon would translate the words as well as it could, but the oaths and answers would be in my own native tongue. The ritual tools involved were, to Akua’s open despair, rather crude and simple. A sharp obsidian knife, unadorned save for the leather grip, and a rough bowl of sandstone. More than once I’d caught her complaining under her breath that only a Callowan would ‘try to subvert an entire civilization with kitchen utilities’, but she’d get over it.

Or not, I didn’t care either way. Her continued genteel horror was always good for a laugh.

The ceremony, if it could even be called that, was rather simple. I sliced the knife across my palm – normally I’d consider that horribly inconvenient, but my unusual physiology allowed me such dramatic liberties – and let the blood flow into the bowl. I handed the knife to Akua, who then passed it on to Sekoran. It followed suit, cutting too deep in its eagerness. There was no need to slide a piece of Winter into the mixture. My blood itself, I’d been forced to admit, was the stuff of Winter manifest.

“Sekoran of the Everdark, under this name and any name you have ever borne or will ever bear I bind you by these oaths,” I said. “May they hold true for one hundred and sixty years, lest the power now bestowed devour you whole.”

“I so swear,” Sekoran spoke in heavily accented Lower Miezan after Centon translated for it.

“You will never slay nor harm nor hinder any in the service of the Sovereign of Moonless Nights, or dwelling within Callow, save in your own defence or the pursuit of its laws,” I said.

“I so swear.”

“For the duration of one hundred and sixty years, you will follow the orders of the Sovereign of Moonless Nights without intent to subvert or pervert the spirit in which they were given,” I said.

“I so swear.”

There were sixteen lesser oaths, all in all, and we moved through them briskly. Most of them were practical boundaries I needed to set before turning loose the murderous drow equivalent of the Watch on the surface for my campaigns. There would be no rape or wanton slaughter, protection of civilians would be enforced by magical oath and standards of decent behaviour thrust upon them. Akua had called it forging a facsimile of Callowan honour through threat of death. I called it refusing to create another batch of fae nobility if they weren’t bound to behave the way nobility supposedly did. The greater oaths were only three, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call them my contingencies . Black had taught me that there was always a point of failure hidden away in even the most stringent of plans, something unseen and unexpected that would come back to bite you at the worst possible time. Given the scope of what I was undertaking here, the sting of that bite would be equivalently brutal. If – when – this turned south on me, I needed levers to either sideline or end them. Fortunately, this time I was not negotiating with the most powerful woman on the continent while she was arguably at the height of her power. I was dealing with eager, desperate drow who craved what I had to offer so badly they could taste it.

The kind of people willing to make dangerous bargains.

“Until death, you will obey and enforce any and all terms of the Liesse Accords,” I said.

“I so swear.”

“The Sovereign of Moonless Night will once name a foe you must fight until it and all it commands is utterly destroyed,” I said.

“I so swear.”

“The Sovereign of Moonless Night will have right to ask one boon of you, to be carried out at all costs, and that right if unused can be passed down to others at its discretion,” I said.

“I so swear.”

Help, long-term plan, insurance . It was not fool-proof, but it was the best the finest diabolist of my generation had been able to help me craft.

“Then Sekoran of the Everdark is granted right to the corpse bargained for, and all Night held therein,” I said. “By this compact we are now bound, and will remain bound.”

The young drow shivered, and it had nothing to do with the coolness of the cavern air. There’d been power in the air, power running through its veins. Through mine as well. I glanced at Centon and nodded. The nisi spoke in Crepuscular, and guided the other drow towards the rylleh’s corpse. Akua lingered, to my complete lack of surprise.

“Diabolist,” I evenly said. “Report.”

She sat at my side without need for an invitation.

“The food situation is out of control,” Akua said. “We can last two more days, three if we ration even the children.”

“We’ll be seizing the Berelun reserve today,” I said.

“And the Berelun themselves with it,” she pointed out. “The speed at which we accrue bellies to fill vastly outstrips the quantity of food we’re acquiring.”

I nodded slowly. She wasn’t wrong.

“I expect you’re leading to a suggestion,” I said.

“You were intent on hitting another two sigils before moving against Great Lotow,” Diabolist said. “We cannot afford that. Perhaps one, if what passes for their granaries is large enough.”

“We’re still weak,” I said.

“Our drow contingent will not be the cause of victory or defeat in Lotow, let us not pretend otherwise,” she said. “A few more Mighty sworn to you will not make a significant difference either way.”

Time and empty bellies. Along with coin, they were the enemies that most often imposed on my plans.

“Agreed,” I sighed. “I’ll send Archer to see if the Delen are more inclined to fighting than fleeing, we can decide from there.”

“Sensible,” she conceded with a nod. “As for the situation in the camp, it remains... fluid.”

“Rarely a good word, when passing Praesi lips,” I said.

She seemed amused by that, and did not deny it.

“The nisi remain cautiously grateful for the rules of behaviour you have imposed, though skeptical it will last,” Akua said. “The situation with the dzulu, however, is fast reaching boiling point. The auction has worked, to an extent, but I would expect betrayals in the camp from ambitious elements the moment we run into solid opposition.”

“You have names?” I asked.

“I am in the process of gathering them,” Diabolist said. “Which remains difficult, as I lack eyes to watch on my behalf. I must rely almost entirely on rumours and observation of social currents – observations, I will remind you, made without appropriate cultural context.”

“Still angling for your little death squad, I see,” I said.

“There is no nation or large-scale organization on Calernia that does not have individuals charged with internal surveillance,” Akua said. “Including Callow under your reign, Catherine. Drow being notably more fractious than humans, to establish such a measure is mere common sense. We both know the longer we wait the larger this will become and the harder it will be to track would-be traitors. It must be done, and done quickly.”

“Not to revisit our last argument, but I still don’t trust dzulu to keep an eye on their own kind,” I frankly replied. “And for them to have right of life and death inside the camp would carry obvious dangers.”

“I have come to understand and somewhat agree with your perspective in this,” Diabolist said. “Which is why I would amend my previous request. I would like ten ispe corpses from the next... acquisition to be set aside for raising nisi of my own picking. They can be charged with the duty, after being subjected to a strict set of oaths.”

“That’ll take the wind out of the next auction,” I said.

“It will also make it clear that there is more than one way to rise in your service,” Akua said. “A useful tool, if the notion is properly conveyed.”

I clenched my fingers, then slowly unclenched them. She was right about the risks of leading a pack of drow without anyone charged with keeping an eye on them. Knives pointed at our back weren’t just likely at this rate, they were inevitable.

“Agreed for the corpses,” I said. “We’ll discuss the hierarchy of that fresh batch of spies and assassins after the Berelun have been brought into the fold.”

I was disinclined to let Akua Sahelian head what would effectively be my equivalent of the Jacks down here, but I might not have another choice. Ivah was another possible candidate, but I might need it on the frontlines and my leash on Diabolist was arguably tighter. In the end I could dislike it all I wanted but who else was there?

“One last subject, if you would,” Akua said.

Evidently she’d noticed my attention was waning.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“I would ask for one more ispe to be set aside,” she said. “For Centon to harvest.”

“Your assistant,” I frowned. “It should have enough status from that position alone, and I can’t think of another reason why you’d want to empower it.”

“It is being treated as a nisi favoured by one of higher status, not an individual to be respected outside that very narrow boundary,” Akua noted. “The casual disrespect it is still offered grates me and hinders its work besides. Status as one of the lesser Mighty would neatly remedy that.”

And also allow her to sink deeper hooks into the rest of the drow through Centon, a notion I was much less pleased about. Keeping Diabolist useful without giving her too much power was ever a delicate balancing act.

“If you were serious about promoting for reasons other than martial talent, you will hardly find a better candidate,” Akua said. “It was careful enough to hide it held the Secret of Lower Miezan for more than twenty years.”

“No one’s born with a full Secret,” I grunted. “Not even literacy, and that’s the most common there is. It whet its blade a few times to complete that.”

“You might as well chide a Praesi for diabolism,” she replied amusedly.

My brow rose.

“How’s your heart, Akua?” I said.

“Ever in your hand, dearest, in more ways than one,” she smoothly replied.

I rolled my eyes.

“I’ll see if I can spare an ispe, but that’s unlikely until Lotow,” I said. “Make do until then.”

“By your will, my queen,” she said.

“Because that’s not getting old,” I muttered.

I rose to my feet. Time to finish cleaning up the Berelun, then. Archer would be getting restless by now.

—

“You’re angry,” Indrani said. “It told Ivah you’d be angry.”

“First off, I very much doubt that,” I replied.

“That’s fair,” she mused. “I mean, I was lying.”

“Yours is the laziest, sloppiest form of treachery I have ever countered,” I said. “I can’t believe that’s a mark in your favour, but Gods help me it is. Anyhow, I’m not angry. Surprised? No, surprised is too weak a word. Befuddled .”

“I mean, you left us alone without supervision so when you really think about it who’s really at fault?” Indrani said.

There was a pause.

“You. You are that fault. That was what I was implying,” she revealed.

“I left you two alone for two hours and a half tops, Archer,” I complained. “How the Hells did you end up ‘accidentally’ taking over another sigil?”

What the Berelun called their stronghold was, practically speaking, a plateau inside a tall cavern with a passage through drilled under it. To reach the part where the drow had actually lived – the top of the plateau, more specifically a knot of descending stalactites and stalagmites that’d fused into some sort of stone tree around which all the Berelun tents and structures were centered – would normally have required climbing a sheer cliff, but there were benefits to being made of smoke and mirrors. Like growing wings at will. When I’d first realized that Archer and Ivah had proceeded ahead of me I’d expected to find the stronghold cleared of the last Mighty and terrified drow awaiting instructions. The second part of that, at least, had come true. The first had not, since I was currently looking at around thirty Mighty of varying ranks kneeling on the stone with their hands behind their necks.

“There’s a very good explanation for that,” Indrani assured me.

My brow rose, and I gestured for her to speak. Silence persisted.

“I can’t think of a believable lie,” she admitted after a moment.

“Have you considered giving me an actual truthful accounting?” I suggested.

“What is this, a bloody House of Light?” she complained, then her eyes brightened. “Although, if you’re willing to wear ripped up sister robes I’m more than willing to give you my confessions .”

“Just give me your godsdamned report, Archer,” I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose.

“Fine,” she pouted. “So I was, like, making small talk with Ivah while surrounded by corpses.”

“As one does,” I said.

“Right? We never go anywhere without there being corpses around, we should work on that,” she said. “Anyways, it was all like ‘Archer, you peerless beauty whose charm has moved me, I’m going to brag so you become interested me’.”

“Classic Ivah,” I agreed.

“And so it mentioned that Bere-whatever tried to convince it to stab you,” Indrani said. “Offered it fourth place in the local pecking order.”

Probably the only accurate part of what she’d reported so far, though I would not hold out hope for that trend to continue.

“So then, I was like all ‘Ivah, please, don’t be so obvious it’s just embarrassing’. But then I figured – wait, fourth? That’s pretty high up. Burley-whatever brought two rylleh with a bunch of mooks and Ivah hadn’t done much to show power at that point. Unless it was real bare back on the home front, Shirley-whatever was full of it when it made that promise.”

The worst part, I thought, was that she was perfectly aware that the name of the sigil and sigil-holder had been Berelun. She was yanking my chain. I knew that. She knew I knew that. And I knew that she knew I knew that. Yet if I actually corrected her I would lose, and that was just unacceptable.

“So you went on a walk,” I prompted.

“Well, technically you said to keep an eye on the corpses and the corpses were gone by then,” Indrani said. “So really you have only yourself to blame.”

“Oh I wouldn’t worry about that,” I grunted. “There’s plenty of blame to go around.”

“Look, when we found the Troubadours they were already under attack by this other bunch of drow,” Indrani protested. “So you know, I defended the innocent. As is my custom.”

“I don’t suppose you bothered to learn the context for all this,” I tried.

“I knew you’d say that,” she crowed. “So I wrote it down.”

She pulled back her coat and mail sleeve, revealing red scribbles. I blinked.

“Archer, is that blood ?”

“Which do we run into more often down here: dead bodies or inkwells?” she pointed out. “It’s like you don’t even think, sometimes. Anyways, here it is. The Dubious-”

Delen, I mentally corrected, which was the nearest sigil to this tone.

“- have been all warlike recently, and slapped the Henries in the face in a skirmish a while back, a defeat bad enough that it cleaned up most of their Mighty.”

Had we really gone from ‘Bere-whatever’ to ‘Henries’ in the span of thirty heartbeats? I was in dire need of a way to exact pretty revenge on Indrani, it was the only language she truly understood.

“When they heard the Henries were moving out to speak with us, they decided it was a good time to attack,” Indrani continued. “But they’re blind and their timing is shit-”

The stronghold of the Berelun was difficult to access and finding out precisely when they’d gone to ambush me was difficult, I mentally translated.

“- so they were only just getting started when me and Ivah showed up,” she said.

“Ivah and I,” I said. “You ignorant wench.”

She flipped me off. My gaze returned to the kneeling drow, who’d been watching us talk back and forth very carefully.

“And you what, killed enough of them that the rest gave up?” I asked.

“We protected the innocent until surrender ensued,” Indrani proudly replied, then spoiled the way she’d kept her face straight through that by badly winking.

“Fuck it,” I sighed. “We’ll offer them the usual ‘oath or sword’ bargain then loot everything before we get back on the road.”

“Yes sir, your queenliness ma’am,” Archer grinned. “We decided on where we’re headed, then?”

“Great Lotow,” I told her. “I hope you’re in a fighting mood, because we’re about to declare war on an entire civilization.”

The smile she gave me at that was terrifying in more ways than one, but at least she was on my side.

The drow wouldn’t be so lucky.

Chapter 64: Momentum

“When in doubt, attack. When doubtless, attack as well.”
– Bastien de Hauteville, Proceran general

Great Lotow was nothing like I’d expected.

All I’d seen of the drow so far was raised stones and the occasional clever exploitation of natural features, and so my expectations had been rather low before I took my first look at one of their ‘cities’. I’d believed it would be a few half-ruined structures and perhaps a surviving set of walls, but the Lotow I was looking upon served as a reminder that the Everdark had once been an empire in its own right. I’d thought of the term city in the Callowan sense, a gathering of houses and streets with marketplaces and maybe a decent set of ramparts. But that was a surface way of looking at things, wasn’t it? Up there, cities were built in breadth. Spreading when the population rose. The drow had instead built in depth, in a way that would have been impossible in the land of my birth.

Great Lotow was built in levels, that was the easiest way to describe it. The heart of the city was a massive pit with a spire of stone in the centre, from base to summit large as a small fortress. From that tree radiates branch-like bridges leading to districts carved directly into the rock across the chasm, their sizes variable. Closer to the bottom I could glimpse districts large as Summerholm itself serving as farms and lakes, while closer to the centre the holes in the rock were more like neighbourhoods of carved houses. At its peak, I thought, Lotow must have had several hundred thousand drow living in it. Now, though, most of it was abandoned. Some of the bridges linking the spire to the sides had been broken and though some were replaced by rope bridges made of some kind of pale weed many more had simply been left gaping, the districts they led to now empty ruins.

It was a moving sight, I would admit. The structure of the city alone would have been impressive, but the ancient drow had made of Lotow a work of art. There was hardly a wall or floor that was not filled by a mosaic or bas-relief, stalactites and stalagmites had been carved into painted statues of drow and animals. Entire spans of ceiling had been set with coloured stones and gems to create a sky, and there were tall steles showing spindly sentences in Crepuscular reciting old stories and ballads where my people would have placed street signs instead. Ivah had told me that last detail was an old drow custom: streets had once been known by the never-mentioned titles of the written work on the stele, every drow expected to be well-taught enough to know it at a glance.

Now, though, those old stories were painted over with blood red runes to mark where territories began and ended. Metal and precious stones had been ripped out of statues and mosaics, carvings older than Callow left to erode under the depredations of elements and time. Stone houses that collapsed were not raised anew but covered with skins and leathers as half-tents while ancient temples and mansions lay cracked open, their heavy stones used to make walls of piled rock. And still, after centuries and millennia, Great Lotow endured. Long winding aqueducts rival to any of Miezan make descended along the sides of the pit and provided water to cisterns and fountains, sewers unlike I’d ever seen sent filth towards the lower farms without overflowing or clogging after what must have been centuries of disrepair. There was no city like this in Callow, I thought. Not even in Praes, who had been under Miezan occupation and so benefitted from that empire’s fondness for great civil works. Great Lotow would have been the crown jewel of any surface nation, the envy of the continent.

Down here, it was just one more decaying corpse in the pile. It was a sorrowful sort of awe that I felt. Would we have raised cities like this, if we were not always at war? I wondered. Callow had little to boast of save for cathedrals and fortresses. The bridges linking Summerholm were a wonder, to be sure, but a Miezan one. Sometimes I could see why the rest of Calernia called us backwards peasants. We were so much less than we could have been. Praes too, I thought. There was so much potential in the Empire, if it would just cease devouring itself every other decade. So much knowledge and skill, always turned to acts of self-immolation that took chunks of the continent along with it.

“You’re being quiet,” Indrani said.

“It’s a lot to take in,” I replied.

“Eh,” my friend shrugged. “After Keter the bar’s been raised. Gonna take more than pretty ruins to impress me.”

“We walk through the grave of an empire,” I murmured. “That’s worth a moment of contemplation.”

“Oh, there’s still people down there,” Indrani mused. “For now. I don’t see this lot surviving a firm assault from the dwarves, if we don’t get them moving.”

There were still drow, it was true. A mere pittance compared to what Lotow must have kept in olden days, but our new acquisitions form the departed Delen Sigil had estimated twenty thousand people here and I believed that was a conservative number. The larger sigils reigned close to the bottom, where the old farms could be kept going and so allow for more nisi to be held, but that didn’t necessarily mean the deeper sigils were the most powerful. Mighty Delen and its tribe had been intending to have a go at claiming territory on the outskirts of Lotow within the decade, and so interrogation had wielded more information than I’d expected. The central spire – called an overly-long word meaning ‘column’ in Crepuscular – wasn’t the territory of any single sigil, as whoever held it would have a massive advantage over rivals, but the rest of the inhabited city had been carved up between the ten sigils that inhabited it. The weakest, and the one we’d go after first, was the Urulan Sigil. They’d once ruled a few of the central districts, but after being evicted by a stronger sigil they’d moved upwards and devoured the sigil that had previously ruled the part of Lotow called the Crossroads.

If the city was a cylinder from which districts sprouted, then the Crossroads was the circle atop that cylinder, connected through the central Column by four broad bridges. Nearly every tunnel in the region led to the Crossroads, including the one where we currently stood, though the Hallian ways that had once been the highways of the drow empire were linked to Lotow’s bottom level instead. Which was unfortunate, since I intended to go through those. The Crossroads were arguably the city’s second most important strategic point, but highly unpopular territory for a sigil to hold: since near every tunnel led to them, any ambitious sigil trying to get into the Lotow scrap would begin by taking a swing at whoever held them. Word was that a sigil holding them could expect slow and steady decline through constant conflict until either a sigil of the outer ring managed to mount a strong enough assault or a sigil on the losing side of a conflict deeper down moved up and evicted the latest occupants – much as the Urulan themselves had done.

Sadly, the Urulan Sigil had been force to migrate less than twenty years ago. They might be a wreck compared to any of the deeper sigils, but they would have maintained enough strength they’d make any of the fights I’d picked in the Everdark so far look like child’s play.

“The city will be tricky to assault,” I finally said.

“Gotta take the Crossroads before we go at it seriously,” Indrani noted, squinting down. “That’ll be ugly fighting, mark my words.”

I did not disagree. Though that section of the city was a single ring going around the edges of the pit holding the Column, it wasn’t flat grounds. Large rectangular halls were tightly clustered, with small streets and broader avenues between them. Easy to defend, to force the attacker in a bottleneck.

“We’ll have to split our force in two,” I said. “Sweep the ring from both sides. I’ll need you to lead one of the assaults.”

She shot me a curious look.

“Who am I getting as a lieutenant, Diabolist or Ivah?”

“You get Akua,” I grunted. “I imagine I’ll need a translator more than you.”

“Sure,” she snorted. “Let’s pretend that’s true. We certain we want no one keeping an eye on the bridges?”

That was the large risk here, I thought. The odds that a deeper sigil would be willing to send its Mighty against an attacker it hadn’t properly looked over were low – sigils prone to taking those kinds of gambles didn’t tend to last long. They weren’t non-existent, however, and it might change the situation if they learned that it was a human leading the charge. Still, I couldn’t afford to let the Urulan run or concentrate their forces. But can I afford to be flanked halfway through? Not really, no. After Archer had ‘acquired’ the Delen Sigil and we’d gathered the people from both them and the Berelun, our numbers had doubled: a little over four thousand drow were now under my banner. Of those, I counted three hundred and change dzulu and twenty-three Mighty of varying ranks. It wasn’t a small force, by the standards of the outer ring, but all the real players down here were either in a city or the inner ring. We wouldn’t be fighting dregs, this time. If we ended up going against two real sigils at the same time...

“Fair point,” I said. “Change of plans. I want you to sweep a quarter of the ring, then stop in front of the bridge and keep an eye on what’s happening.”

“To put arrows in the curious and the runners, if there happen to be any,” Indrani sighed. “Ugh, I always get the shit jobs.”

“You’d get bored scything through dzulu,” I countered. “Besides, feel free to take shot from your perch at anything getting in my way.”

“Slightly better,” she conceded.

The two of us remained standing there for a while, strangers in this broken land looking down at a once-great city. I would have called the moment solemn, if not for the fact that Indrani was pulling at a flask of liquor. She sighed in satisfaction, then rolled her shoulders.

“All right,” Archer said. “We doing this or what?”

“Don’t get yourself killed,” I reminded her, meeting hazelnut eyes with my own.

“Never have before,” Indrani drawled. “So, you know, if we go purely by precedent it only makes sense that I’m immortal.”

While pushing her over the tunnel’s edge would have been deeply satisfying, we did have a battle to win. I settled for freezing her flask solid instead, grinning at the muttered imprecations that followed.

—

Steel-clad boots hit the ground, and I slowed long enough to have a look at my warriors – and they were definitely that, not a soldier among them. One hundred dzulu, moving like large hunting cats with their spears and swords in hand, barely a dozen shields among them. Thirteen Mighty, most of them ispe with only a single jawor and a pair of freshly-harvested rylleh to serve as heavy hitters. My Lord of Silent Steps led the pack from the front, and they slowed along with me without a word.

“Ivah,” I said. “Translate. The old terms apply: nisi are not to be touched save in self-defence, surrenders are to be accepted and observed. Anyone they kill, they can take. Corpses of my own making go to auction, and I will personally execute any who reaps their Night.”

Not exactly the most inspirational of speeches, but then with drow I’d found it more important to lay down rules than tug at heartstrings. They had precious few of either, and the latter was beyond my ability to fix. The words were repeated in Crepuscular, and within a heartbeat of the sentence ending the first shot of the battle for Great Lotow was fired. A javelin, thrown from a rooftop maybe half a hundred feet ahead. Aimed towards me, which meant either it was a warning to the drow or they’d already caught on to the fact I was running things. I could have simply stepped aside – it was aimed at my centre of mass, well-thrown but barely any better than a mundane human could have – but sometimes it was necessary to make an impression and... set the tone. I let it arc downwards, and at the last moment caught the shaft. Less than an inch stood between the sharp stone tip and my plate. Casually, I spun the javelin around between my fingers and gripped it correctly. One step, lowering my body, then rising up I threw the javelin back.

It, uh, wasn’t something I was trained in. I had better aim and certainly more body strength than I’d used to, but that didn’t translate to skill. It flew like a damned crossbow bolt, in a straight line, and was easily dodged by the silhouette on the rooftop. Still, at least no other projectile had followed. It was a start. I flicked my wrist, forming a blade of frost, and advanced.

“Forward,” I ordered, Ivah translating a heartbeat afterwards.

Archer would begin her own sweep the moment we engaged the enemy properly, so all I had to worry about was the world in front of me. I went down the slope at a pace, and entered the avenue briskly. Already the Urulan had prepared a reception. A dozen dzulu led by a drow roiling with Night – Mighty, and stronger than ispe – were spread out in a loose crescent with with Mighty at the tip. I’d missed this, I realized. The simplicity of it. Enemies ahead, allies behind. No tricky little shades of morality, no debate over right and necessity. It was like I’d been whisked back to the Pit and its much less complicated time. I felt a savage grin split my lips, and for the first time in ages I could savour the air in my lungs. The glorious burn of it, illusion that it was. I’d keep it going as long as I could. I darted forward, dashing around another javelin and closing the distance in mere heartbeats. The Mighty yelled and Night flared, the sound reverberating, but instead of ducking I plunged into it. My eardrums burst and reformed in the same moment, and the last I saw of that drow was the look of utter surprise on its face when my sword carved through its throat.

The dzulu immediately began retreating, faces gone pale, but I was having none of that. I moved faster than them, and the first I caught before it could even turn to strike me. My hand went through its back and I snapped its spine, withdrawing bloodied fingers. The next struck at me with spear, but I let the stone tip bounce off my plate and slapped its cheek hard enough the neck broke. The third tried to parry my strike, but while the blades were at the right angle the difference in strength made it pointless. Its arm was forced down, and a flick of the wrist had its head rolling on the floor. My own drow joined the fray eagerly, falling on the survivors like wolves on the fold, but I pressed on. I’d not come here to make sport of dzulu. Archer would be going to the right, so my charge was to sweep by the left. Already yells were sounding in the distance, the Urulan gathering for war, but I did not intend to give them the opportunity of mustering a proper resistance. Through halls and houses I strode, ears sharp, and caught my first ambusher. Atop one of those long halls, pressed closely against the roof. Laughing, I struck at the wall and tore through the stone. It rose, alarmed, and I leapt up.

Just a dzulu, I saw, eyes barely touched with silver. Disappointed, I snatched it by the neck before it could bring up its weapon and tossed it further down the avenue. It hit stone with a loud squelch, head pulped. I leapt back down, noting my forces were beginning to catch up. The first enemies had been too heavily outnumbered to put up a real fight. I took the lead, moving down the avenue. We hadn’t even taken a fifth of the circle yet, but I found the resistance to have been too lukewarm. Someone had sent expendable to probe out strength while they prepared a response. My instincts proved right maybe sixty heartbeats later, when I found the length of the ring had been walled up. Thin walls of hide held by a framework of glue and stone, but they were decent makeshift fortifications to block off the streets and avenues. Atop the roofs drow with bows and javelins were awaiting, while the streets behind the hide blocks slowly filled with reinforcements. The first chokepoint to break, then. They’d made a kill zone at ground level – the hide panels were likely movable to let through their own warriors – so I’d go at it from a different angle.

I leapt back up on the nearest rooftop and broke into a run. Best to soften up this lot before my drow ran into them. Arrows and javelins streaked the air, which bothered me little – they were loud and slow and my body was mist whenever I wished. They might as well have been shooting at a ghost. I closed the distance and then streaks of Night began lashing out towards me, which was more dangerous. I suspected the mist trick would fail against sorcery, and this was as close as drow could get to magic. There were, by the looks of it, seven casters. I could take the hits and barrel through, most likely, but the knowledge that my body was exceedingly difficult to permanently damage nowadays had not whisked away Black’s earliest lessons. Never take a blow unless you have to, much less if you do not know what it will do. A platform served as anchor for the push that sent me to crash into the house beneath which the archers and casters were standing. Momentum alone would not get me through that wall, even in plate, so instead I formed a spike of ice at an angle and caught it with my free hand. A spin had me leaping back upwards, the looks on the faces of the drow when I came of height with them most amusing. Another platform – just in time to avoid a second set of Night streaks – had me landing in a roll among them.

The dzulu, for that was what most of them were, scattered immediately. I didn’t have the time to go through them one at a time, so I dipped into Winter and let loose a working. The rings of sharp ice spears formed around my abdomen, lingering for a moment before shooting out. Blood, screams and shredded flesh followed in their wake. I had to throw myself to the side when looked like a snake made of Night ran through where I’d been a heartbeat earlier, jaws snapping. Another two follow suit, keeping me dancing, and to my distaste a streak of Night clipped me on the shoulder as I landed in a roll. It went straight through the plate, though at an angle that meant it hit air instead of flesh after punching through. Seven casters, I found, the only ones not dead or running. The snakes were coming out of their bellies, coiling and releasing at their will, while the other four drow were shooting shorter bursts to keep me from closing distance. Irritating. If they were Mighty, which was likely, they weren’t far up the ranks. I didn’t have time to waste on these when the real threats were still on the loose.

I sidestepped another streak, ducked under a snake and exerted my will. The drow guiding the snake found its throat filled with ice and began clawing at its skin impotently. I caught another snake-charmer and one of the shooters before being forced to move again. Darting around a snaked extended sharply like an arrow shot I ran forward, rolling under another streak of Night and responding with a collar of ice around the second drow’s neck that tightened and immediately choked it. They’d needed the numbers to keep me busy, they realized too late as I carved through the throat of the last snake-charmer. The remaining two tried to make a run for it but I pursued, shaping my sword into a spear and tossing it in the first’s back. The last survivor leapt down from the roof and I sighed. Its throat filled with ice a moment later and it dropped. The whole of it could not had taken more than seventy heartbeats, and now my own sigil was assaulting the barricades. I casually formed an anvil of ice and dropped it on the nearest hide wall to make an easy point of entry. I supposed I could clear out the dzulu a bit to make it easier on my warriors.

Then the roof under my feet turned into Night, and the Mighty of the Urulan Sigil entered the fray.

Chapter 65: Impact

“‘lo and behold, I have brought peace to the Empire.”
– Dread Empress Massacre, after ordering the Burning of Okoro

Three things happened in swift succession.

The first was that I formed a handhold of ice to hoist myself up. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I stayed standing in the middle of a blanket of Night, but it was unlikely to be pleasant. The second was that, even as my fingers closed around the handhold, it began vibrating and exploded with a scream. The third thing, unfortunately, was that I fell back into that same blanket of Night spread over the roof. Feet first, which turned out to be a stroke of luck. The moment they made contact with the Night they... dissolved, like they’d been dropped in acid. I dimmed my mind, turning into mist, and slithered away towards the edge of the roof. It was difficult to think, in that state, and my situational awareness was shit – as was made clear by the fact that I neither saw nor heard coming the spear of Night that caught me in the side. Or as close to a side as I could have, while made of mist. The second unpleasant surprise of the day – night? – unfolded as the spear forced me back into solid form where it struck and sent my human-like silhouette to go tumbling over the side. Into a pack of dzulu, though that didn’t prove to be much of a problem.

Night spread over the street with a soft whisper and they dissolved screaming even as I fell.

I formed a spike of ice jutting out of a house’s sidewall and landed on it for exactly a heartbeat before it broke with a scream, but it’d been enough to allow me to situate myself. A pair of translucent blue wings ripped out of my back and I flew upwards, finally getting a look at the drow that’d ambushed me. There were three, all holding so much Night within their thin frames they darkened their surroundings just by being there: the air around them looked like near-invisible wisps of smoke was spreading through it. The two on the sides looked like they could have been twins, their deep grey skin and whip-like faces identical save for the crescent scars they had on opposite cheeks. Their eyes were pure silver, save for the black pupils. Long curved blades in hand, they watched me rise with identical bored expressions. If those two were strong, holding enough Night to fill a pond, then the drow between them was a lake. Taller than either of them, its faces was covered with thick burned flesh in a horrid mask that denied even the appearance of lips. There was no trace of anything but silver in its eyes, the pupils merely a darker shade of it.

“Urulan?” I called out.

“Cattle,” it mildly replied in Crepuscular.

Well, that took care of the introductions. I’d go out on a limb and say the flankers were rylleh, because with that much power they could hardly be anything else. Mighty Urulan wielded a long staff of glass, and without bothered with any more banter pointed it at me. Droplets of Night formed around me in a ring-like pattern, rippling with power, and I definitely wasn’t sticking around to find out what that did. I’d already noticed that the flesh dissolved by the earlier blanket had taken longer than usual to reform after I’d returned to physical form, and that’d been the opening volley. It could be it’d opened with its strongest trick, true. But when had I ever been that lucky? The wings folded against my back and I dropped like a stone, which didn’t help nearly as much as I’d wished. The Night droplets rippled, and every single one of them lanced out with a beam of the same stuff downwards. The firing angle had been well-judged: I’d be falling right into the thickest knot of beams if I didn’t act. My wings spread again, but I held back a curse when they both began vibrating and broke a heartbeat later. Neither the rylleh had moved, but their silver eyes shone brighter. Time to improvise, then. Mist-form wasn’t getting me out of this, so the time for delicate works was over.

I formed a large cube of ice under me, feeling Winter’s influence begin to creep and promptly shunting it off, and even as the beams of Night tore into the frost I parted it around my falling form to go straight through. A whisper came to my ears, the sound of another Night blanket forming below me, and the cube began to vibrate. Distraction first, I thought. I ripped out a chunk of ice from the bottom of the cube with an exertion will, transmuted it into mist and sent it slithering to the left. The ice ceased vibrating a pair of Night spears shot out, and there was my opening. I fell under the itself-falling cube as the beams of Night shot through it, muscles tightening as I caught it with a grunt and tossed the entire thing at the drow. I couldn’t spare the time to look if I’d made impact, instead forming wings again and plunging into a somewhat-controlled descent that had me landing in front of the three drow. And, most importantly, away from the Night blanket. They’d already shown me it did not discriminate in its effect, they shouldn’t be able to use it when I closed distance.

By the time my bare feet hit the ground – my boots were sadly gone for the foreseeable future, again – all that was left of the ice I’d thrown was a rain of mist and shards. I’d not even seen how they’d gotten rid of it. With me in the open, the earlier distraction had come to an end: all three drow had their eyes on me. The rylleh first , I thought. Urulan would be less dangerous without the backup. I darted towards the left one, body centre low, and made it three feet forward before they unleashed their arsenal. Darkness fell like a curtain, robbing me of my sight, but my ears still worked just fine. It was the only reason I heard the low whistling sound of Night on the move, dropping to the floor and feeling something scythe just above my body. I rolled forward just in time to avoid the spike of Night that came down in the other working’s wake, letting out a sharp breath. If they’d timed that just a little better, I would have taken it right in the spine. Another step saw me coming out of the curtain of darkness, which was no comfort as I saw my foes for only a heartbeat before a whisper sounded and a globe of Night began forming around me.

If that was the acid trick again...

I realized, dimly, that if this went through entirely I might actually die. I’d treated the Everdark like a training exercise, sometimes almost a game, but I’d been swimming in the shallows of this sea. There were monsters in the deeps that would make these look like imps. I close my eyes and let Winter loose. Frost formed all over my body, rapidly thickening and then shooting out. They had a globe of Night, I had a globe of ice. In a pissing contest of raw power, I’d bet on me every time. The Night ate into the ice but I kept pouring out Winter, its delighted laughter sounding softly in my ears. At first it devoured quicker than I made, but I dug in my heels and truly let loose. It became even, and I felt my blood turn cold as I dug even deeper. Like skin bursting for being filled too much, the globe of Night came apart under the pressure of the ice and I launched out through the opening I’d made. For a moment I hung in the air, seeing two curved swords rising to point at me and Urulan itself leisurely leaning on its staff. I shaped an ice javelin and threw it at the sigil-holder, just quick enough to loose it before shackles of Night formed around my wrists and ankles. I turned to mist, or at least tried to. The Night shackles thickened and nothing happened. Urulan gently tapped its staff against the ground and the javelin shattered into mist, the rylleh moving as it did.

Their stances were perfect, muscles coiling as they simultaneously thrust their blades into my sides. They went through the plate, bit into flesh, and then I felt my organs began to vibrate. I grit my teeth and hardened my insides, but that actually made it worse: it was like a sharper full of metal scraps went off in there. Everything was shredded, and chunks of my ribs and flesh splattered the floor as they withdrew their swords. Urulan pointed its staff at me, and tissue already knitting itself back together stopped. Stupid , I thought. Stupid, stupid . I’d already known there were drow who could heal themselves like I did, but I’d never entered my mind that the Mighty could have tricks that would inhibit my own ability. They just needed to keep taking me apart, and sooner or later they’d get me into a state I wouldn’t walk away from.

Then an arrow went through my left wrist, breaking the shackle holding it on the way, and I promised myself I was going to kiss Indrani next time I saw her.

“My turn,” I growled.

My mangled wrist flicked, forming a blade of ice, and I carved through my other shackled wrist before offering my ankles the same courtesy. The rylleh wreathed their blades with Night and stabbed into my open torso, pinning me down with what felt like a similar trick, but they really should have gone for the arms. I caught the flat of one sword and ice crept up it, shattering three fingers before the rylleh dropped it and retreated. There was a whisper and another globe of Night began forming around me, which given my current lack of feet was something of an issue. So I took care of it, forming feet out of ice and throwing myself out of the jaws of death. The second rylleh was not so lucky, and died screaming as it dissolved inside. I picked its blade out of my ribs, dropping it down, and finally my torso began putting itself back together. I stomped down and mist billowed out, covering all three of us, though not before I noticed the rylleh who’d lost fingers had already regrown them. Still, I’d learned another weakness to the Night-acid trick. When it began forming, it could not be stopped. Urulan would not have lost one of its lieutenants otherwise.

I shed off the last of my ice-forged feet and padded softly on the stone, feeling the drow through their warmth where my eyes found no purchase. The sigil-holder had only barely moved – it’d retreated a bit, nothing more – but the rylleh was circling around me. Could they sense Winter, as I could sense the Night? The powers were not so different. No, I decided. They would already have struck otherwise. Their senses might be sharper than those of other drow, though, so I’d have to be careful. I’d begin with Urulan’s last helper. I crept forward quietly, circling it as it believed it was circling me, and only struck when facing its back. I could use mist, I had learned, if it was of my own making. It was just another facet of my mantle. And so I condensed it into ice over the rylleh’s body, spooking it enough it dropped down into a puddle of shadow – and that was when I struck. A spear of ice forced it back into drow-form, and by then I was upon it. That transient moment where it stopped being shadow and started being a drow again? They were nearly blind during that, having to reorient all their senses. I didn’t give it the time: my blade went through its throat, severed the spine, and I ripped off the head afterwards just to make sure it wouldn’t heal. Amusingly enough, it did. Both separate parts closed up with fresh skin, though it remained quite dead.

Urulan spoke a single word in Crepuscular, and just like that I was back in the deep end.

I’d wondered why it was being so prudent, after being so aggressive since the start. Because it was preparing a major working, as it turned out. The mist had robbed my enemies of their sight, but it had also given the drow materials to work with – something I only realized was a very bad idea when my own mist began burning at my flesh. It’d turned the whole fucking thing into acid, hadn’t it? My eyes were the first thing to go, but I could feel the mist eating at me all over. Worst, I couldn’t just reform my way through it: the Night slowed that down, and the acid was eating at me quicker than I healed. This was worse than fighting Praesi mages, I thought. Those might be able to make wards, but they weren’t nearly this quick or vicious. Considering Urulan had likely been at this for centuries it only made sense, but that absent-minded consideration did nothing to help me out of my current predicament. Hardening my flesh, which was difficult when not contained to smaller body parts, did little to stop the problem. Slowed it some, but not enough to turn the tide. Gritting my teeth, I turned into mist myself but was forced back into human-form not even a heartbeat later. With fresh acid burns all over to show for it.

Fuck. Right, if I couldn’t flee it then I had to move it. I’d lost all of my plate by now, which was infuriating but not as much as the fact that most my face muscles were bare and falling apart. I was melting like snow in summer sun. I formed of ice a large windmill and set it to spinning, which drew back the mist closest to me and bought me a moment until Urulan clapped down its staff and broke it without a word. Still, thinned was good enough for what I’d intended. Wings ripped out of my back for the third time today and I rose out of the mist. The problem, now, was that I was literally flying blind with someone waiting to take a shot at me. I couldn’t just keep rising, that’d be painting a target on my back, so I zig-zagged erratically as my face slowly grew back. Even if I got hit, I thought, by the time I got back on my feet I’d be ready to fight again. Unfortunately, Urulan agreed. The sound of mist billowing forward came to my ears, and I realized it was pursuing me with the cloud. All right, desperate measures then. I flipped directions and went crashing straight towards the ground, hoping to... ah, there it was, a rooftop. My blood and flesh made a mess on the tiles, but I punched my way through and landed in a sprawl below.

Screams, people running away. Nisi? They hadn’t tried to fight anyway. I wildly sprayed ice where I’d crashed through and crouched close to the floor. I just needed to wait this out, I thought, though every passing moment where the mist hadn’t caught up was ratcheting up the tension in my frame. My eyes finally formed again, and I let out a relieved sigh. I’d made it. Through the ice-patched hole in the roof I could see the acid mist was surrounding the building, which was my first warning sign. Urulan wouldn’t have bothered unless it intended to flush me out. Night flared above me, a beacon to my eldritch senses, and I cursed under my breath. It wasn’t just going to flush me out, it was going to shattered the damned thing and drown me in acid again. I wouldn’t be able to dodge that. I had to convince it to strike elsewhere instead. I wove glamour, two separate workings. I sent an image of myself through the ice, wreathed in a blue halo that would serve as cheap explanation why she wasn’t melting. Too cheap, too obvious. A look to the side revealed there was an open door to my left, with five corpses where the nisi had tried to flee and been caught by the mist instead. Through there I sent another illusion of me, this one discreet and melding with the shadows. Almost invisible. She ran for the other on the other side of the street.

It evaporated a moment after she entered in a burst of Night that shook the entire Crossroads and collapsed the wall of the house I was really in.

The glamour had been dispersed by the hit, and I dispersed the one above as well. Crouching low behind loose stones, I wove one last glamour: my own skeleton, slowly growing back its flesh. Spikes of Night fell down around it in a circle and there was a swell of power. Biting my lip, I slowed the regeneration to a crawl in the glamour. I wasn’t sure if that had been what the trick was intended for, but I’d have to guess. Urulan approached slowly, its glass staff pointed at my fake body and quietly I formed a sword. I waited until it was standing over my illusion, staff raised, before I attacked. Had it been its senses or a discrepancy in effect that tipped it off? I might never know, but when I was a mere ten feet away the sigil-holder turned and cast a silvery gaze towards me. We were done with the posturing, and so I struck. Step forward, feint low to the left and then a spin – its staff my sword and I smiled. It went away quickly, when the staff did not break and its arm did not lower. I was, I could feel, slightly stronger. But not enough to hammer it back, and then the staff rippled . My sword blew up, shredding a few fingers with it, and the tip of the staff hit me in the stomach.

I rocked back and it struck upwards smoothly, breaking my chin before whipping back down and going for a thrust into my throat. I spun on myself, feeling the staff pass a hair’s breadth from my neck, and formed another blade to swing at its extended shoulder. It spun with me, as if the two of us were dancing, and fluidly stepped away when my strike at reached the apex of its arc. The tip of the staff lightly touched the sword, and just like that it fucking blew up again. The fingers I’d just bloody grew back were shredded again, to my mounting irritation. I made a third blade along with what was clearly more than my third set of fingers of the fight. Irksome as this was, it was likely better than what would happen if Urulan pulled the same trick on my actual body. The drow spoke something in a language other than Crepuscular, sounding amused, but I didn’t recognize the language. It sounded close to Reitz, but the vowels were even more of a debacle. Some older form, maybe? Some Secrets floating around the Night were much older than the current Calernia. Most of them, actually.

“Didn’t catch that,” I said, and attacked.

I didn’t start with a feint, this time. It was clearly a better fighter than I was, the only way I’d win was by cheating. I angled my sword for its throat and swung with brute force and speed. It withdrew just out of reach, bending backwards, and then bent forward. One hand came off the staff to tap my side and I had to bite back the scream. It’d found a vein, and was pouring the Night-acid in it. I did the only reasonable thing, and froze my own blood so stop it from spreading. It caught the wrist of my sword hand and forced it to continue the arc as it drew back the staff to better bring it down.

“Mistake,” I calmly said.

I turned the wrist it held to mist, and wrenched it out. The wisp of wrist moved under my will, slithering up its nostril and sinking into the brains behind them. All it took after that was a twist of will, and I shredded what lay inside its skull. Mighty Urulan dropped the ground, and I stood panting. I’d didn’t bother recover the flesh I’d turned into mist, making another hand instead. Didn’t want the old one back, after where it’d been. My flank still felt like it’d been lit on fire, but I carved out the infection and breathed a sigh of relief. It was only then, covered in blood both my own and that of my enemies, that I realized I’d been naked ever since the acid mist trick. I’d just been too angry to notice, and it wasn’t like I felt the cold anyways. I looked down at the drow’s corpse and shrugged. Might as well steal its clothes before I cut its head off, then.

Throwing Mighty Urulan’s severed head in the middle of its own warriors ought to have a slight effect on enemy morale.

Chapter 66: Tremors

“It is a small-minded man who needs a reason to create a ritual that would crash the moon into Creation.”
– Dread Emperor Malignant III, before his death and second reign as Dread Emperor Revenant

The Urulan Sigil broke within an hour of its chief dying at my hands.

It was a valuable lessons as to how I should handle drow in the future. Decapitating a Proceran or Praesi army, for example, wouldn’t necessarily take them out of the fight. The Legions, after the Reforms anyway, had been built with the notion in mind that the highest-ranking officers were natural targets for heroes or resistance fighters. Redundancies and a clear order of succession for the chain of command had been set into their framework. Princes of Procer, on the other hand, might be the undisputed rulers of their hosts but they also tended to delegate the practicalities of campaigning to trained career officers. In both cases, putting the head of the army’s leader on a pike would be damaging in many ways but not outright scatter that same army. Sigils weren’t armies, though, they were tribes kept together only by the strength of the sigil-holder. When I’d tossed Urulan’s severed head into the middle of the battle, the glue keeping the sigil together had crumbled. Their kind, when it came down to it, let their actions be dictated by the invisible balance of martial strength. If the attacker was capable of killing the sigil-holder, odds were that the individual who’d done it was capable of wiping out the rest of the sigil on their own. Best to bargain, if possible, or flee if it was not.

Unsurprisingly it was the Mighty that kept fighting the longest. Dzulu could afford surrender more easily, knowing that they weren’t worth harvesting to the enemy’s upper ranks and that whoever was in charge there would always be a need for warriors to send into the meat grinder. What did they care under which sigil it happened? Drow did not fight for plunder in the way that most tribes and clans would, not exactly. To amount to anything they needed Night, and war was certainly the easiest way to accumulate that – but when there was a clear winner, doubling down on a losing fight was not to their advantage. Mighty, on the other hand, knew they’d be hunted and harvested after a defeat. Used as spoils instead of coin or food. Surrender might be feasible if assurances were made, but that was not custom. Drow, for obvious reasons, preferred to raise the strength of their own Mighty rather than bring into the fold those defeated. I was part of a broader trend in their ways, one I was only now beginning to really grasp: as far as the drow were concerned, maybe nine tenths of their own kind were essentially irrelevant. Matters of life and death were settled by a handful of Mighty on both sides, with dzulu and nisi serving as tools and ornaments to whoever came out on top.

What that meant, practically speaking, was that the moment Mighty Urulan died this stopped being a battle and started being clean-up. It could still have turned south on us, if we hadn’t been careful. The Urulan had outnumbered us three to one in Mighty and if they managed to cull my own numbers the idea of continued resistance might have taken hold. Corpses would have been harvested, fresh demigods raised and sent after our ‘champions’. Our saving grace, in this case, was Ivah. My Lord of Silent Steps had no real interest in fighting minions, and had gone after the enemy’s Mighty relentlessly. It would have been one thing if those had been allowed to gather together, but instead they’d found themselves ambushed and taken out one by one by a titled drow who was no stranger to these kinds of fights. Archer’s sweep on the other side had met with only cursory resistance before she stopped as ordered. When it became clear neither she nor her escorts were inclined to advance any further, the forces sent out to meet her had doubled back to meet my own assault. Too late, however, to turn the tides. Their sigil-holder was already dead.

A few had tried her flank anyway, but after the second time she shot a jawor in the throat the moment it left cover their enthusiasm had mysteriously waned.

I spent the rest of the battle watching over my forces like a hen watching her chicks, not exactly holding their hand but ensuring that if they got in over their heads I could swiftly step on the opposition. To my surprise, even when we began taking sections of the Crossroads holding mostly nisi I never found the need to call my warband to order. My Mighty were oath-bound to decency, but the dzulu were not. Still, it had been made clear to them that wanton slaughter would not be allowed, or rape – though apparently that latter crime was near unheard of among drow, who treated sex as more a chore than a pleasure and rarely bothered unless they were nisi – and in the end they did not test my laws. I wondered if they would have pulled at the leash, had I not personally slain Urulan and its strongest rylleh. My general distaste for what passed as drow nature whispered yes, but I might be doing them injustice. I held no illusions about the moral fibre of a people whose main occupation was murder, but there was something about them that brought old words from Black to mind . If you have the ability to accomplish something, it is your right to do so. I hadn’t understood back then how deep a look into him that little sentence offered, or how close to the same Praesi philosophy he disdained it was in practice.

But there was a ring to it, an underlying sense that I saw mirrored in the way drow thought. The pragmatic monsters who’d shaped the woman I was today – and the plural was not a mistake for Malicia had been a teacher too, if not a willing or gentle one – kept to a faith worshipping only ability, the capacity to carry out one’s will. That was a face given to their beliefs by the complicated games of the surface, though, where every little act was part of a broader war of growing sophistication. Down here the varnish of civilization had been stripped off, and the face given to that god was rawer: power. Just power. If you were strong enough, your rules were the only rules there were and they would not be questioned or disobeyed unless someone stronger than you contradicted them. I might be ordering them to act in ways that broke their customs, but as long as I remained the larger monster those orders would be observed for that, too, was custom. And perhaps deeper one than the rest.

“So is it me or do you always get all silent and philosophical after a big fight?” Indrani mused.

She swaggered in, her coat flecked with blood and a satisfied smile on her face. For someone who disdained the trappings of civilization, Archer had taken well to battles. Grown to enjoy them more than I’d thought, her sense of what victory being so personal it should not lend itself well to a clash of armies. A reminder, I mused, that people could continue to surprise even when you believed you had the measure of them.

“I never liked this part,” I admitted as she came to stand beside me. “The clean-up. When the blades are out and shields collide I can almost feel what the songs sing of, but the aftermath spoils it. The return to the bare realities of what took place.”

It’d barely qualified as a skirmish, by the numbers. More soldiers had been involved in the war game that’d won me command of the Fifteenth, and arguably much more complex tactics. How many people had actually fought today? Five hundred, maybe. And of those less than a hundred had actually had an impact on the outcome. There were not even two hundred dead in the aking of the Crossroads, though the way their corpses had been dragged and laid down in rows along the largest avenue made it seem more than it should. Most those bodies were already bereft of Night, their killers have wasted no time claiming their due, but enough remained that the auction to come would be the largest yet. Indrani sighed.

“It does get on my nerves, that the best parts of you are also the most irritating,” she said.

I snorted and left it at that, the two of us sharing a rare moment of comfortable silence. She tended to fill those religiously, almost as if she were afraid of the absence of noise, and so I savoured the rare respite.

“Should I ask why you’re wearing clothes too large for you?” she finally asked.

“No,” I grunted.

“Well, the pants are tight enough they make your arse look amazing ,” Indrani said. “But the whole long sleeves thing makes you look like a Mercantis trader.”

“You know what, I’ll take it,” I said. “Still going to need to change before speaking with whoever comes up, though.”

“Talk with Diabolist first, maybe,” she said. “It’s not like she’s wearing real clothes, but she is disappointingly not naked all the time.”

Thank the Gods for that. Indrani would never get anything done if Akua’s admittedly impressive assets were permanently on display.

“I will,” I replied. “Not right now, though. She’s still taking count of our acquisitions.”

“Of course she is,” Indrani drawled. “It’s almost like she’s maneuvering herself into being the obvious pick for who ends up stuck watching over the drow when we get back upstairs.”

It was easy to forget, sometimes, that Archer’s lack of manners was more choice than inability. In some ways she was as sharp as Hakram when it came to reading social currents.

“She can manoeuvre all she wants, she’s not getting the job,” I said. “I’m still debating who’ll oversee when I’m not around, but she’s not in the running.”

“Vivienne?” Indrani suggested.

“She doesn’t have the right edges,” I reluctantly admitted. “They’ll challenge her. I’m considering Larat.”

“Now there’s a real philosophical question,” Indrani drawled. “How many treacherous lieutenants it too many treacherous lieutenants?”

“One, but we make do with what we have,” I sighed.

“We make do with what we have,” Indrani repeated grimly, squinting forward in a poor imitation of a frown.

“I don’t sound like that,” I protested.

She hunched her shoulders and raised her chin, trying for noble sorrow but mostly looking like she had stomach cramps.

“I beat up empires but I’m real conflicted about it,” Indrani declared. “A fairy queen named my crew the Woe because I’m so tragic and misunderstood.”

“Screw you,” I grinned. “You’re part of it too.”

“I once finished the last of the stew even if I don’t really need to eat, because I’m just the worst ,” Indrani solemnly added.

It surprised a splash of laughter out of me, and once it started it didn’t stop. The two of us ended up standing there like fools, sniggering at nothing much at all. It was a released I hadn’t known I needed, and I could not help but be grateful for it. I’d thought before that Indrani was most beautiful in fleeting moments, when the part of her that was more glorious alive than anyone I’d ever known came to the surface and it was all you could see. I’d not been wrong, I decided. Strange as it was, she more attractive to me now – laughter glinting in hazelnut eyes, slightly breathless and making sport of all the world – than she would have been half-naked on my bed wearing little but lace.

“I did make a promise, while fighting Urulan,” I teased.

“Oh?” she said. “What-”

My hand slipped around her waist, beneath the coat, and she allowed herself to be dipped down. Her eyes wide, I watched her lips part and leaned down to kiss her. She tasted, I thought, like spices – but soon enough all I could think of was the hungry heat of her lips against mine, the way our teeth clicked together awkwardly before she teased me with her tongue. She threaded her fingers into my hair, forcing me closer, and when we finally parted she was flushed and out of breath.

“Gods,” she said, “you are so short .”

Naturally, I dropped her. She fell into a sprawl with a loud yelp, perfectly capable of landing on her feet but never one to allow practicalities to get in the way of theatrics. I wiped my lips, then shrugged.

“There, promise fulfilled,” I mused. “Back to work.”

“ Really ?” she whined. “You’re going to get me all worked up and then just leave?”

“I’m sure you’ll get over it,” I grinned, and turned my back to her.

She cursed me loudly as I sauntered away, feeling more human than I had in a very long time.

—

I found Diabolist seated like the queen of an industrious grey-skinned hive, drow gravitating to her and Centon for translated instructions before darting away to carry out her bidding. They were getting in the habit of obeying her, I saw. Not the Mighty – they saw her, I suspected, more as an obstacle to climb than a superior – but the nascent pack of dzulu officers and supervisors had grown used to taking her orders. They saw little of me, on a daily basisl. Primly perched on a flat stone, Akua was a vision in her long dress of silver and blue. While high-necked and seemingly conservative, her clothes were cut to be rather flattering to her frame: they suggested rather than revealed, but the suggestion was not mild. Scarlet eyes remained on me as I strolled at her side, plopping myself down next to her. I glanced at Centon.

“Dismissed,” I said in Lower Miezan. “All of you.”

The nisi, though that status might just be remedied to today, bowed low and repeated the order in Crepuscular. Within five heartbeats we were entirely alone in the avenue.

“Catherine,” Diabolist greeted me. “Another victory for your tally.”

“It was the opening measure,” I replied. “The real pivot comes when the deeper sigils decide on their response.”

“There have been scouts,” she noted. “No Mighty yet.”

“It’s coming,” I said. “They can’t afford an unknown her for long, not when we control the top floor of the Column.”

“As you say,” Akua murmured, inclining her head. “I had the privilege of witnessing your duel with Mighty Urulan, from a distance.”

I hummed.

“And you have thoughts,” I said.

So did I, and I was curious to see if they aligned.

“If I may speak frankly?” Diabolist said.

“Never too late to start,” I drawled.

“Yes, yes, very clever,” she sighed. “I have begun to worry, Catherine. Urulan was perhaps in the twenty strongest drow of Great Lotow, and likely close to the bottom of that division. It fought... better than I expected. You came close to death more than once.”

“It was a wakeup call,” I softly agreed. “We haven’t been taking them seriously enough, have we? Lotow’s not one of the big cities when it comes down to it. There’s leviathans lurking ahead.”

“You have grown used to being able to walk away from wounds that would kill even Named,” Akua said. “And so developed what I can only call sloppy habits. I’ve heard descriptions of your encounters with heroes at the Battle of the Camps, the Saint in particular, and cannot help but think this is a trend and not an instance.”

“In that, we are in agreement,” I said.

Some of the fights I’d been in, lately... Black would weep to see them. I’d always been more inclined towards brawling than finesse, but I was starting to realize there was a reason my teacher had never seen his relative lack of power compared to his predecessors as a weakness. When you had a good enough hammer, everything started looking like a nail. That was a lot more likely to get you killed than lack of juice. I’d begun to rely on abilities that I should only ever use as a last result, and at some point I was going to run into someone who’d kill me for it.

“You use only the thinnest slice of what Winter is capable of,” Diabolist said. “Perhaps exploration in depth is in order.”

“You want me to fight like you,” I smiled. “Distance, control, never committing.”

“Not your usual fare, I know,” she said. “But you are no longer the Squire in any significant sense. Your repertoire has expanded.”

“Tricks are useful,” I admitted. “And I do need to learn how to use the kind of great workings you threw around when riding my mantle. But you’re wrong about the rest.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“You intend to take the opposite path,” Akua said.

“The basics,” I mused. “I’ve been neglecting those, since I took my mantle. Thinking it was all right to get into fights because I’m hard enough to win them. But many of those should never have been fights at all.”

“Fight no battle save that which you must, for war is best won away from the field,” Diabolist quoted thoughtfully.

“Theodosius?” I asked.

“Terribilis the First,” she replied. “You intend... contingencies for the coming meeting with the drow, then.”

“They’re useful things, contingencies,” I muttered, looking up at the bare stone of the cavern ceiling.

It was about time, I decided. The opening was there.

“Marker,” I said. “It’s time for us to have one of our regular little chats, Akua.”

“Is it?” Diabolist said. “I cannot recall-”

She paused. Her face went blank and I smiled ruefully.

“ I compel you to answer my questions and do so truthfully and completely ,” I Spoke.

The shade shivered, the order sinking into her.

“We have done this before,” Diabolist said.

“We have,” I murmured. “Have you walled off any memories or knowledge, or considered doing so?”

“I have not,” Akua replied.

“Do you have any hole or holes in your memories?”

“I do not,” she said, then cocked her head to the side. “I do not. Oh my, you have been thorough.”

I had. I’d known from the start that I wouldn’t outplay her with words, she’d always been better at that. But I had other ways to even the scales.

“Have you plotted or acted against my interests?” I asked.

“I have not,” she replied, sounding amused.

“What are your current short-term and long-term objectives?”

“I seek to prove myself as necessary to the running of your sigil,” she said. “And in doing so, remain undeniably useful so long as you have use for the drow. My only long-term objective is survival.”

“How do you intend to secure your survival?”

Her lips thinned. She never enjoyed that one.

“I must first learn the exact wording of the oath I believe you gave Thief, to see if it can be escaped through a technicality,” Akua said. “I must then prove myself invaluable to your own objectives so that you will allow me to do so. I must be reconciled to Vivienne Dartwick, or she must be removed from the situation. If the wording if without flaw, I will seek to obtain a manner of resurrection that preserves most of what I am.”

Nothing new, then. Good.

“Have you manipulated the greater or lesser oaths, or both, so that you can exploit them in any way?” I asked.

“I have not,” she said.

The same answer as every time I’d asked the question, but it was worth checking to be sure.

“Do you know why I insisted the oaths be sworn to the Sovereign of Moonless Nights?”

“I do not,” she said.

Ah, too broad.

“Do you have theories as to why I did?” I asked.

“I do,” Diabolist drawled. “Shall save us the time and elaborate?”

I ignored her. If not prompted, she could lie.

“What are these theories?”

“I believe you intend to divert yourself or your mantle in the future, and so dissociated oath-keeping from your personal identity,” she said. “I am not certain if the beneficiary would be an object or an individual, but suspect it will be the former Prince of Nightfall.”

Wrong, but she didn’t have to know that.

“Is there any other part of my soul you would like me to bare?” Akua asked. “You must have other questions.”

I had to keep it short – too long and the risks increased she might notice – and I usually used my last question to make sure she hadn’t picked up on anything. I could do that tomorrow, though, at no great loss. And there were some things I’d gown curious about.

“Why do you flirt with me?”

She laughed, full-throated.

“I know you have difficulty remaining emotionally uninvolved when in a sexual relationship, and you have a known weakness for powerful women,” she said. “I also believe that contact between us would temporarily allow me to regain full physical senses, which is promising as I find you attractive enough sex would not be unpleasant.”

I waited for a moment.

“It also infuriates Thief when she overhears,” Akua added reluctantly, forced by the order. “Which I deeply enjoy.”

“That might be the most human I’ve ever seen you act,” I said.

She languidly shrugged.

“And now?”

“From and including the word ‘marker’ I spoke earlier today, you will remember this conversation as idle chatter from the moment this sentence ends ,” I Spoke.

Her form rippled and a heartbeat passed.

“Amusing as this was, I believe there might be more pressing matters at hand,” Diabolist said.

“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s talk contingencies, then.”

Still under control for now.

I’d ask again tomorrow.

Chapter 67: Breakthrough

“With great madness comes great possibility.”
– Dread Emperor Malevolent I, the Unhallowed

It took three hours before the first envoy showed up, requesting the name of the sigil that had displaced the Urulan and politely inquiring as to its intentions. Some poor dzulu bastard who’d obviously been sent because it was expendable. It wasn’t allowed entrance into the Crossroads, not that it was eager, and I sent Ivah to meet it halfway through one of the bridges instead. Our diplomatic approach, if it could be called that, was rather simple: I wanted a meeting with the nine remaining sigil-holders in Great Lotow. In exchange I would provide information about a great common threat approaching, which Ivah had been instructed to make sound properly dire while remaining light on the details. Given the scope of the dwarven invasion, that was hardly difficult. Decapitating Mighty Urulan had earned me the attention of the city’s power-brokers, but I hadn’t made enough of an impression I could simply browbeat them into following me. To get an audience, I needed a gift.

A warning about the dwarves invading ought to do the trick.

The sigil that first approached us was the Slaus, who held the territory directly below the Crossroads. They’d been on decent terms with the Urulan, who usually had higher priorities than raiding their downstairs neighbours, but their envoy made it clear they weren’t all that broken up about a replacement having taken up residence. A stronger cork atop the bottle that was Great Lotow was a good thing, in their eyes, since weak Crossroads meant an open door for raids into their own territory. The dzulu provided names along a bare – and probably highly biased – lay of the land to my Lord of Silent Steps even as Akua and I settled the auction. The report I was given afterwards was illuminating, though I’d already known some parts of it from earlier interrogations. Aside from my own sigil, there were nine others in Lotow. The Slaus Sigil, my new ‘friends’, were fighting to rule the upper levels against the Kanya and Losle. Along with the Urulan, those three sigils had made up the ‘weaker’ tribes forced closer to the top of the city and denied the room and resources of better districts.

There were two sigils at the very bottom, the Orelik and the Vasyl, who were the largest of the city and had tacitly been allowed to monopolize the larger farms and lakes so long as they kept trading with the others: the balance there was a delicate one, where other sigils kept them weak enough they couldn’t refuse but didn’t want to damage them so badly the food would stop coming. That left four sigils to squabble over what had once been the core districts of Great Lotow: Sagas, Nodoi, Soln and Zarkan. From what I understood they’d been at war for the better part of a millennium and played out enough heroic alliances and wicked betrayals to fill a dozen epics, taking and losing territory to each other with every passing year. All four raided other sigils, but usually only to strengthen themselves against their adversaries in the centre. The rest of the city enabled the centuries-old feuds cheerfully, well aware that if one ever became strong enough to devour the others the remainder of Lotow would follow in short order.

Mighty Soln was a name I’d heard before, actually. It was the same drow who’d famously beaten the now-dead Kodrog so bad it had fled into the outer ring, where it’d had the misfortune of running into the dwarves and then myself. Soln was the most promising of the city’s Mighty, in my eyes, as it had a reputation for fair dealings. Which mostly meant it formally broke alliances before turning on its former allies, but that was already a cut above the rest. Willingness to make bargains in the first place was what I needed the most.

“I believe a cabal is the way to unite these Mighty under your banner, my queen,” Ivah said. “Outright subjugation would be long and costly enterprise, given our current strength.”

It had changed again, I thought. There was no trace of the original green or the grown silver in its deep blue eyes, but that was the least of the changes. My Lord of Silent Steps was still tall and blade-thin, but there was a sense of strength to its frame that’d previously been absent. Fae could be skinny as a goblin and still be strong enough to wrestle down an ox, and the bestowal of the title had brought that power to Ivah. That unspoken impression that its body was a disguise, that physical abilities were estranged from its flesh. It walked upon Creation like something not born of it, a transient guest. Its presence had bloomed to my senses, though I’d expected nothing less when I’d offered it the harvesting of Mighty Urulan. I had need of a strong right hand among the drow, and it had proved useful enough to deserve the reward. There were risks to that, but benefits as well.

If it came to a fight again, it’d be my side that fielded Urulan’s tricks.

“A cabal,” I repeated. “Those are a kind of warrior honour societies, no?”

“It is a nuanced matter,” the Lord of Silent Steps said. “In olden days cabals were formed along the twelve purposes and three duties, but this practice has been abandoned by all save the most traditional of my kind. There are cabals that, as you say, are honour and recognition. Only Mighty of renown are invited to them, and their name swells from the joining. Yet this is no longer the accepted custom.”

“Which is?” I prompted.

Ivah hesitated. I’d give it a pass on that, I thought, since I was pretty much asking it to summarize what was beginning to sound like a fairly complex matter simply enough an outsider like me could understand it

“One might say a cabal is a compact of Mighty who share a single desire,” the drow finally said. “This desire can be near anything, my queen. The legendary Red Hunt formed when Mighty undertook the annihilation of the Fagran Sigil. The Hour of Twilight was raised when the strongest of Great Albenrak desired the conquest of Great Telarun – and a hundred cabals were born to sow the seeds of the Hour’s own destruction. The Old Vigil guards the temples and libraries that once belonged to the Sages, while the Wayfarers still keep the northern Hylian ways open for all who would travel them.”

“Mighty but not sigils,” I slowly said. “It’s on an individual basis. If a sigil-holder’s part of a cabal, it doesn’t meant the entire sigil is.”

Ivah nodded.

“A cabal may hold individuals of many different sigils, some at war with each other, and so long as they act in the fulfilling of the compact they will not turn on each other,” the drow said. “It is a separate matter, not to be spoken of.”

Which did explain, at least in part, why the Everdark didn’t currently consist of half a dozen lesser gods sitting in their own city with the rest of the race long gone. If a sigil started pissing off all its neighbours, half the region’s Mighty would form a cabal and put it down together. Gains had to be weighed against the risk of backlash.

“It would not surprise me, for example, if many of Lotow’s Mighty were part of a cabal ensuring the farms of the bottom levels remain unspoiled,” Ivah elaborated.

“So we make our own cabal,” I said. “One that desires evacuation in the face of the dwarves.”

“Mighty are proud creatures,” Ivah said without a hint of irony. “Stating it differently would be more palatable.”

I snorted.

“I suppose calling ourselves the Get Out Ahead Of The Dwarves Cabal wouldn’t be all that impressive,” I said. “We are, let’s say... seeking out Sve Noc for instructions on how to answer the nerezim threat.”

“That would be acceptable,” Ivah noted. “The Sve speaks only when it wishes, but this is a great crisis. Custom can be bent.”

“And you think that’ll be good enough an offer they’ll take it?” I asked.

“The upper sigils, perhaps,” the drow said. “They will know that if a cabal is formed for the defence of Lotow against nerezim encroachment, its first act will be to devour them to strengthen ahead of the battle. I do not believe the others will enter your service.”

“And if I make the taking of oaths a requirement to entering the cabal?”

“None will bend,” the Lord bluntly said. “Exile would be more acceptable an alternative. Cabals to answer the threat can be formed without us, regardless. We will be seen as useful addition yet no requirement.”

Yeah, about what I’d expected. Even with a bearded apocalypse at their doorstep the drow would have issues with my rules. My sigil was just a droplet in the sea of the Everdark, and even in a border city like Great Lotow we weren’t the biggest stallion in the pen.

“We’ll try anyway,” I said.

Ivah’s blue eyes watched me closely.

“And if we fail?” the Lord of Silent Steps asked.

“Then I beat them with a stick,” I said. “And ask again, much less politely.”

—

It was not an auspicious beginning that I couldn’t even get every sigil-holder in the city to attend. The Losle refused to show if the Nodoi did, and the Zarkan boldly required both a tithe of dzulu from my ranks and an alliance against the Soln if they were to deign attending. Both the bottom sigils suggested in strong terms that the meeting should be held near their territory, at the lowest level of the Column, which essentially everyone else made clear was unacceptable. I chose the Nodoi over the Losle – the latter were angry they kept being raided by the former, which was reasonable, but the Nodoi were stronger and I needed them more – while Archer returned the Zarkan envoy to its sigil by throwing off the bridge in their territory’s direction after it got unruly. Seven out of nine would have to do, and I’d never seriously considered following the suggestion of the bottom sigils. Aside from how unpalatable that’d be to everyone else, it would screw with my contingency. Not make it impossible, no, but it would mean a significant increase in collateral damage if things went south.

Envoys went back and forth for most of a day until the cats were finally herded. It might not have taken as long if the spurned sigils hadn’t started ambushing them, but Mighty Soln seized the central levels of the Column for a few hours and guaranteed safe passage. I sent a polite message of thanks, it replied with a hint that the courtesy could be returned more materially and so I sent it back a single word: nerezim . I was not above playing favourites in the slightest if it any of them were willing to behave halfway-decently. It was about an hour before the meeting that Ivah came to me with a problem that hadn’t thought was one. If you are to stand among them as sigil-holder, my queen, you must have a sigil , it informed me. Though some of my drow had taken to calling our band a sigil, it was true I’d never really considered it that. I wasn’t a drow myself, and had no intention of remaining their equivalent of a noble when we left the Everdark. But Ivah insisted, saying it would be disrespectful to arrive without the proper apparel and would lower my prestige in the eyes of the others. I gave in, not willing to dig in my heels over something this minor.

There was a slight issue, in the sense that a sigil’s, well, sigil was usually the name of the sigil-holder in stylized Crepuscular with the colour of the cloth it was on denoting a creed. Black for the seeking of Night, red for ambition, different shades of blue for those espousing specific virtues and Ivah might have gone on describing for an hour if I hadn’t interrupted. The closest equivalent to ‘Catherine’ in Crepuscular was apparently Katarin, the symbols making it up possible to accentuate to mean either ‘elegant snake’ or ‘delicate dark pearl’. I was rather glad Archer wasn’t around to hear the second one, though Akua got rather smirky regardless. ‘Foundling’ had no real equivalent, though after conversing for a while like two deaf people shouting across the language divide I got the sounds and meaning of it in Lower Miezan understood. Losara , Ivah finally said. The characters of it meaning ‘lost and found’, and when drawn on the dirt resembling a tree with twin incomplete circles under the branches. Painted in silver over purple cloth, which symbolized seeking a higher purpose.

The irony amused me. Upwards was where I meant for them to go, after all.

A nisi with some aptitude for painting that hadn’t been slain for the talent was rustled up and a sigil produced, barely dry by the time I set out alone. I had need of Diabolist and Archer elsewhere, and given the nature of my plans bringing a retinue would be a waste. Besides, the agreement was for a meeting between only myself and the sigil-holders. A solid third of the debate through envoys had been settling on a language for the conversation, which had ended up being Chantant. It got stuck in my throat that odds were good people had been killed so all the sigil-holders would be fluent in the Proceran tongue when they arrived, but Indrani’s words had stayed with me. I’d not come here to save the drow from themselves. I wasn’t sure if I could. Or even if I should. I came to the Mighty of Great Lotow without my cloak, draped instead in the cloth of my sigil over my clothes. The glamour I wore had been anchored in a stone I’d made myself swallow, carefully crafted over hours to be flawless. There was no room for mistakes today.

The meeting was to be held in the Column, my first venture into the dead heart of this ruined city. The structure itself was a broad pentagon, every side measuring exactly sixty-five feet and seven inches. Given the Column’s ridiculous height – it had to make up most of a mile – simply stacking stones wouldn’t have been enough for it to hold up. The ancient drow hadn’t done that, anyway: masonry was a different business when you lived underground. The Column itself was the remains of what had once been solid ground before a pit was excavated around it, further reinforced by five spines of some red metal going all the way up and a plethora of bridges linking it to the surrounding districts. I’d actually thought the metal was just rust steel, when I first took a look at it, but it was oily to the touch and perfectly preserved. If not for my suspicions it was the main thing holding up the structure, I would have ripped out a few chunks to bring back home to Callow: I’d never seen an alloy like it, and if it could survive a few centuries without regular touch-ups it was heads and shoulders above anything my people had ever used.

The inside was surprisingly elaborate. Most everything that could be pried or hammered off had been, including entire spans of mosaics and anything even remotely shiny but every single floor was a book in Crepuscular, beautiful curved characters spreading out in rows and swirls. Historical chronicles and stories, songs and poems and every written thing that made up the lifeblood of a culture. It was a stark contrast to the stumps left behind by stolen statues, the dusty holes of ripped out mosaics and the spider webs woven into the complicated arrays of dead magelights and absent mirrors that must have once cast light all over the Column floors. The structure had not been the administrative centre of Great Lotow, or its religious one – temples and palaces were in the middle districts – but it had been the heart of the old city. I walked through empty marketplaces and riots of now-dry fountains, gardens of dust and the wrecked stands of what must have once been a public playhouse. It was the grave of an ancient people, still haunted by the last remnants of it. I allowed myself awe, but not too much. Past glories were a little thing in the face of breathing dangers.

Having Masego along for the calculations would have been preferable, but admittedly Diabolist was no slouch when it came to numbers. She’d counted the bridges, figured out the weight and given me the correct floor. I hoped, anyway. There would be no second chance if she was wrong. Ten floors deep, that was the sweet spot, but I’d had to compromise and go to the eleventh. Most levels of the Column had multiple access points aside from the two sets of spiraling stairs every single one boasted, but the eleventh floor had once served as a court where lesser offences were settled. There were no bridges leading to it, and the heart of the floor was a large courtroom whose only point of entrance and exit was a set of massive stone doors. Given the temptation of ambushing this large a concentration of Mighty in one place, this floor had been judged the most fitting place for a meeting. Time was fluid in the Everdark, not in the way that it was in Arcadia but because there were so few devices that measured it. No bells, down here, and so I was not overly surprised I’d been the last to arrive. I’d taken my time to ensure as much, after all.

The doors were slightly ajar, just enough a single person could pass through, and seven Mighty seated on high thrones beyond them. For all that power swam around them like currents, I could not help but think they looked like children. There were nineteen seats set against the walls, and the sight of the sigil-holder failing to claim even half of them made it seem like they were just kids wearing the regalia of adults. Playacting at empire in a pile of ruins. None rose when I entered, remaining seated on the thrones of stones where they had draped their sigil’s banner. Without a word I leaned forward and clasped the red metal rings set into the stone doors, closing them shut behind me with a clap as my bones creaked under the weight. Seven pairs of eyes studied me in silence as I wiped my now dust-coated hands on my pants and strolled forward. I didn’t overthinking my sitting position, simply claiming the throne to the left of the doors and putting my banner over it.

“Losara,” one of the Mighty said. “And so we finally have a name.”

The Chantant it had spoken in was a strange mixture of Crepuscular pronunciation and an ancient Alamans way of speaking, but still perfectly understandable for all that. I eyed the banner behind the speaker, having memorized the names going with the symbols. Orelik, I thought, recognizing the swirly fish-like pattern. One of the two bottom sigils, those that held the farms. It was the first fat drow I’d ever seen and the sight was jarring. The loose hide tunic failed to hide the folds of grey skin, though its pure silver eyes served as reminder that fat or not it was accomplished in the art of killing.

“ Mighty Losara, you bloated old slug,” another drow replied. “Urulan would speak to that truth, if it still spoke.”

Its symbol looked like eyes over three fangs: Slaus, my downstairs neighbours. That sigil had the most skin in this game, as they were both sharing a border with me and the next in line if an outside threat came muscling in. I settled into my throne, comfortable allowing the byplay to go on without me. Which it did, hissed sentences in Crepuscular starting to go back and forth as the Mighty began what sounded like an old and bitter argument. They were interrupted by the sound of stone shattering. The Mighty who’d struck its throne and powdered a chunk of it rose to its feet, face twisted in irritation. The sigil behind it was one I easily identified, as I’d paid particular attention to it: a ring of swords, with an open mouth in the centre.

“You spend the time of your betters frivolously,” Mighty Soln said. “Be silent .”

Both the other drow looked furious, but they did not argue. I cleared my throat.

“If we’re quite done,” I said, eyebrow rising, and none gainsaid me. “You came here because I promised information. As it pertains to the conversation I wish to have afterwards, I’ll begin by laying it out in full.”

Silver eyes all turned to me, and I shifted in my throne. The fucking thing had been carved for someone Hakram’s height, not mine, and so my legs were dangling off of it like I was a kid in her father’s seat. It was adding insult to injury that I knew for a fact I fit in dwarven seats just fine.

“As of two months ago,” I said, “the nerezim have begun an invasion of the Everdark.”

You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed.

“Allow me to be perfectly clear,” I said. “I did not misspeak. This is not an expedition, it is an invasion . At least a hundred thousand soldiers came through the Gloom, their vanguard led by a Named. They bring with them civilians because they intend to stay. Even as we speak most of the outer ring has fallen into their hands. They aim for nothing less than the extermination of your kind.”

One of the Mighty scoffed. It sigil looked like a wall broken through. Sagas , I thought, one of the strong sigils in the centre.

“Burning words,” Mighty Sagas said. “Yet what proof do you bring?”

“I have witnesses, if my word is not sufficient,” I said. “They saw the vanguard with their own eyes. Saw it slaughter an entire sigil of the outer ring.”

“I doubt not the word,” Mighty Orelik said. “It has been delivered. You have done service, human, and may now leave.”

“That won’t be happening,” I mildly said.

“Do you think aping our ways gives you seat here?” the drow hissed. “You are interloper, not guest. Know your-”

“Be silent, Orelik,” Mighty Soln said softly. “If I must ask you a third time, there will not be a fourth.”

The first Mighty opened its mouth, but Soln rose from its seat and the lips closed. I nodded in appreciation, though got only indifference in response.

“I came here today to propose the founding of a cabal,” I said. “Not to defend Great Lotow, for it is already lost. It was the moment the nerezim crossed the Gloom in force. But to seek out Sve Noc and ask instruction.”

One of the Mighty snorted. Nodoi, I saw, the last of the central sigils in attendance. I needed those the most, if I was to make any progress at all.

“The Sve speaks when it wishes,” Mighty Nodoi said. “That is custom. To request words is to beg for a curse.”

Mighty Slaus sneered.

“Are we inner ring darkskins, to prattle of tradition?” it replied. “Mighty Losara speaks sense. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.”

I would have been more moved by the support if I hadn’t known it sprang from the fact that the Slaus would be on the chopping block the moment the central sigils decided to band together to defend the city. It was less belief in my solution that bade it to speak than the urge of self-preservation.

“Do we know when the nerezim will strike?” one of the Mighty said, staring at me.

Vasyl, the symbol said. The other bottom sigil, and noticeably less hostile than the Orelik so far.

“At least two weeks,” I said. “Perhaps more, if they spread their forces to completely clear out the outer rings.”

“Then this is no time for quibbling,” Mighty Vasyl grimly said. “Defences must be seen to, or the city abandoned. There is no middle path.”

“I’ll be frank,” I said. “You can’t hold Lotow. They’ll bring down the city on your heads and drown the districts in molten stone without ever engaging. They have the engines for it. This is not a war like those you know. They will not harvest or take prisoners: their intent is to claim the Everdark without any of you in it.”

“You know nothing, child,” Mighty Orelik sneered. “We have fought wars, turned back the Hylian Dogs when they tested our borders. You-”

“- have commanded armies larger in number than this entire city,” I flatly replied. “I’ve slain heroes and tricked fae, walked the streets of Keter as a guest and pried life out of the hands of the Hashmallim. You’re just a rat in a hole, Orelik, and if you try my patience once more I swear on all the Gods I will feed you your own fucking limbs.”

It flinched, and murmurs spread across the room. They might not know much about fae or heroes, down here, but the mention of the Dead King’s capital had made an impact. Him they remembered.

“It is said you make even Mighty take oaths,” Mighty Soln said, voice cutting through the whispers.

“I have rules,” I said. “They bring power as well as bindings. Many have thought this a worthy trade.”

“And these rules,” Soln said. “Will you seek to impose them on any that join this nameless cabal of yours?”

I rose to my feet, hand going through through my clothes and taking out a parchment scroll. I tossed it at the Mighty Soln, who easily snatched it out of the air.

“I will,” I said. “These are the oaths, written in Crepuscular, though they will have to be sworn in my own native tongue.”

The drow unfolded it, silver eyes studying the contents, and didn’t even get halfway through before it snorted and tossed the scroll at Mighty Vasyl.

“This is subjugation, not alliance,” Mighty Soln said

“They are standards of behaviour,” I replied calmly, “enforced by my mantle.”

That did nothing to move it, so I moved on to the larger audience when I kept speaking.

“Are none of you tempted by the thought of an alliance that you know will hold?” I said. “That will lead to no betrayal, for going back on the oaths means death. How much could you actually accomplish, if you were not always watching your back for knives?”

“A cabal is a worthy idea,” Mighty Soln said. “Yet this is not a cabal, Losara. It is... queenship , your kind call it.”

“It would make me warlord,” I said. “Until the war is over. An extraordinary measure for an extraordinary crisis.”

Mighty Vasyl had passed the scroll to Mighty Nodoi, who outright laughed.

“You give terms like a victor,” it said. “You are not. This is overreach. To obey your orders without fail? Madness. Arrogant madness.”

“You’ve overplayed your strength, child,” Mighty Orelik said.

This time no one chided it.

“I’m sad to hear you believe that,” I said. “Should I consider this to be a refusal for all of you?”

“Obedience is not our way,” Mighty Slaus said. “The terms must be changed.”

Mighty Soln laughed.

“Look into its eyes, Slaus,” it said. “Do you see compromise there? No, this was not request. It was an order.”

Slowly, I sat back down on my throne.

“Is there nothing,” I asked, “that I can do to change your minds?”

“If you seek the terms of a victor,” Mighty Soln said, “ prove yourself one .”

The challenge rang loud and clear in the room. There was only agreement on the faces of the others, and so I tugged at the chains that bound Akua to me. Our signal.

“I considered that,” I admitted. “But what would be the point? I’ve no need of corpses and chaos. It’s you I want. The whole lot of you.”

The Column shivered under our feet and every single Mighty had left their throne within a heartbeat.

“Ambush,” Mighty Orelik said. “Your last mistake, human.”

“I’m not going to fight you,” I calmly said. “That would be wasteful, and I was taught better than that. This is a... counterargument.”

The sound of stone shattering sounded in the distance, and half the Mighty began boiling with Night. It was pointless. The moment the shiver had been felt the gate had opened. Akua and I were not without cleverness, and so we’d planned to have it unfold right under the ceiling of the floor below. Unfelt until it cut through the walls, and by then it’d be too late. The bridges had snapped under the weight, and the Mighty that would have fought me found their footing failing as we began to impossibly fall. The conclusion was appropriately impressive: our chunk of the Column hit the ground with a massive impact, and the gate sliced right under the ceiling above us as it closed. I fell from my throne, ankle bone snapping from the bad angle, but forced myself to rise.

Midday sun shone down on us, bring a cold breeze with it.

“What have you done?” Mighty Nodoi howled.

“Welcome,” I calmly said, “to Arcadia.”

“This is not the Everdark,” Mighty Soln said, tone confounded.

“No,” I smiled. “And if you ever want to return there, well, you have the scroll. All it’ll take is a few oaths.”

“You will not survive this,” Mighty Orelik screamed.

“I will return tomorrow,” I said, ignoring it, “to see if any of you have reconsidered. Try not to die.”

Without bothering with goodbyes, I abandoned the glamoured drow corpse I’d been controlling and left them to stand alone in the outskirts of Winter.

Interlude: Heretics

“It is common practice among the lower classes of Praes, who lack surnames, to name their children after themselves in the hopes of confounding any devils coming to collect on debts.”
– Extract from “Horrors and Wonders”, famed travelogue of Anabas the Ashuran

Masego had not missed court.

At least this was not Ater, where a formal session would be held in the Tower with corresponding pageantry, but Thalassina was wealthy enough its ruler was near as indulgent. The floating fountains and illusory interior garden were proof enough of that. High Lord Idriss Kebdana was, he’d been told, an old ally of the Empress. Two years ago that would have made him Masego’s ally as well, but things had since changed. Catherine and Malicia were enemies now, and he’d already had to give thought as to how he would attack the Tower’s vicious set of protections when that enmity finally led to blows. He’d considered killing High Lord Idriss, since he was already here anyway, but he was a guest. It was apparently very different to kill someone on the battlefield compared to killing them in their bed – which was irksome since practically speaking the end result was the same – so he’d eventually decided against it. Still, he’d made a note of the weaknesses in the city’s wards. If the Army of Callow ever had to assault Thalassina, he was confident he could collapse the central array with the right ritual.

“A glass, Lord Hierophant?”

His eyes moved under the cloth to study the pair who’d approached him. Twins. Soninke, or close enough: native Thalassinians tended to be mixed blood, taking in appearance after the last infusion from either side. The man had the Gift, and heavily enchanted robes. An utter waste, he thought with disdain as he took them in. Silk might be costly and take well to sorcery, but it also dispersed it at an unusually high rate. The Yan Tei supposedly had their ways around that, but secrets from across the Tyrian Sea were not easily obtained. Those robes would require regular maintenance just to keep up... warmth, shifting patterns of gold and a lesser illusion anchored in the man’s face? What a waste of the art. Three different workings in this difficult a material: they were throwing away a skilled mage’s time just by owning it. The woman of the pair was offering him a delicate transparent glass filled with wine. His eyes narrowed in on it, finding no poison within. Unusual. They put poison in everything at events like this.

“That won’t be necessary,” Masego replied.

He belatedly remembered to add a slight inclination of the head as thanks, as was polite.

“I would have thought you eager to taste a proper Wasteland vintage, after your years abroad,” the man said with a friendly smile.

“I usually can’t tell where wine is from,” he admitted. “Not without alchemical tools.”

They both laughed, which surprised him. Had someone told a joke? He should pay closer attention to the conversation then. The woman laid a hand on her brother’s arm and leaned forward as she laughed, the elaborate straps of her dress shifting. It was a strange apparel, he thought. Thalassina was known for its seaside breeze, would she not get cold walking outside attired in this way? Maybe it was a dress meant purely for receptions like these.

“Still, it must be pleasing to have returned home,” the woman said. “The provinces are not known for their... comforts.”

She was leaning forward again. Must have a bad back.

“I usually sleep in the Observatory,” Masego noted. “So I wouldn’t know.”

“Ah, the famous Observatory. I have heard much of it, lately,” the man smiled. “Your own work, it is not? Would it be indiscreet to ask how it functions?”

The blind man cocked his head to the side.

“Have you read Serebano’s ten volumes on scrying?” he asked.

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“I have not,” the man said.

“Then there would be no point in telling you,” Masego replied. “You lack the necessary grounding to understand the basic underlying tenets.”

The man’s smile grew stiff, though his twin seemed amused.

“Then I will obtain copies, my lord, and perhaps we can pursue that discussion at a later date,” the other mage said.

“If you’d like,” Masego said. “Although I’ve been told I should kill anyone who tries to figure it out without permission, so that seems counter-productive of you.”

“Is that so?” the male twin blandly said.

His face had gone blank. Ah, I offended him , the mage realized. It must have been that he’d made it clear the man was ignorant. His friends kept telling him it was impolite to do that, though they might as well ask him to stop remarking that the sea was wet. Ignorance was everywhere.

“I am told you’ve never visited Thalassina properly,” the female twin said.

Masego wondered if it was too late to ask for their names. It probably was. Father had provided him a list with names and descriptions, but he’d needed something to wipe an acid stain and he hadn’t felt like getting up to fetch a cloth. That might have been a tactical mistake of sorts, he reluctantly conceded. In his experience, if you asked people their name after conversing with them for more than four sentences they tended to get angry.

“I am uncertain what you mean by properly,” he said. “But I have only ever seen a few streets and parts of this palace.”

“There is much I could show you, then,” she replied smilingly. “It would be a grave sin if I never offered to escort you to the seastone walls or the corals.”

He was uncertain what religion had to do with sightseeing, but Thalassinians were known for their strange practices.

“If my work allows,” he said.

By reputation, the corals were rather beautiful. Also filled with old wards and traps for any seeking invasion through the sea, which to be frank interested him rather more.

“My sisters knows the city well as any native,” the other twin said encouragingly. “And I’ve no doubt the company of your own kind will be a balm after your time amongst the savages.”

“Most legionaries are actually well-behaved,” Masego noted. “And I spent little time with them regardless.”

They laughed again, to his growing confusion. He went over the spoken words carefully. His own kind? He’d thought they meant humans, which was rather odd since as far as he knew the Army of Callow was human in majority. Assuming they were not idiots, which he almost never did in situations such as these, they might have meant ‘his kind’ as Praesi instead. Oh. Was he supposed to be feeling patriotic since the Empire was at war? But then he was technically at war with it, since his friends were, so the logic was not sound. Baffling.

“You meant Callowans,” he tried.

“I suppose some are barely civilized,” the male twin mused. “They did spend a few decades under our rule, after all. And they are now led by the Carrion’s Lord castoff, no doubt thanking all their Gods for her Praesi education.”

“I was not aware my uncle had cast off anything,” Masego noted. “Except scruples, but he’s always insisted he was born without those.”

Which had led to a thoroughly wasted evening when he’d been nine and trying to find those in his anatomy charts, worried Uncle Amadeus was missing an organ. The woman smiled over the rim of her cup.

“There is no need to be coy, my lord,” she said. “We have kin in the capital. The breach between the two is common knowledge in the right circles.”

Who had Uncle Amadeus been arguing with recently? The Empress, he remembered, but that hardly fit the rest of the conversation. Did they mean Catherine?

“It must have been tedious to humour the fools,” the man drawled. “Yet you did benefit: an unprecedented Name. Your foresight is to be praised.”

Oh, they’d been insulting his friends the whole time. Maybe. He should check to be certain, Hakram had noted it was important.

“By the fools, you mean the Woe,” he asked.

“What greater fools are there?” the woman laughed.

So now the list. They were nobles, since no one else would be allowed here. They weren’t visibly being forced to speak to him. There’d be no collateral damage to innocents. Was it legal? Probably. Callow had some kind of treason law about insulting the queen, didn’t it? It counted.

“Right,” Hierophant smiled, and raised his hand. “ Boil .”

Casting without proper incantation had become much easier since his transition, save when he was molding miracles. As a rule Trismegistan sorcery put greater emphasis on precise manipulation of magical energies than the use of mediums like incantations and runes – they were a crutch to visualize and measure, not a requirement – but that same precision made it difficult to actually dispense with those mediums. The acceptable margin of error before collapse in a Trismegistan spell formula was barely a tenth of what it would be in a Petronian equivalent or, Gods forbid, a Jaquinite one. As a result Trismegistan sorcery usually produced superior results for inferior costs while serving the same purpose, but also required greater skill and longer practice from of the mage using it. The portion of practitioners that could transcend those limitations was small, and even among those such transcendence was usually reserved for a few especially well-studied formulas. It was possible to lower the bar so badly any blunderer could tinker with the spell, of course, as the Legions had done with their own arcane roster. But only at the expense of every single boon save flexibility.

Fortunately, Masego’s sensitivity to the forces he manipulated through his will had greatly increased since transition. He’d initially been disinclined to rely on anything as fallible as senses when using magic, but he’d overcome that reluctance after proving he could reproduce that sensitivity through adjusted measuring tools. Indeed, he’d since come to theorize that aside from magical capacity – one’s inborn talent to use sorcery – there might be a second, more discreet aspect to the Gift. Sensitivity to those same energies, which he’d ventured on parchment might be what distinguished mages capable of using High Arcana from those who could not even after a lifetime of dedicated study. It might even finally solve the mystery of why the Taghreb produced fewer mages than Soninke stock but a proportionally higher amount of mages capable of using the higher mysteries. Many Taghreb lines had twined with creatures, after all, wich were said to have a natural grasp of magic humans did not. The paired screams of the twins as their blood boiled in their veins and began to waft out through their eyes and nostrils shook him out of his thoughts. Ah, yes, that was still happening.

The spell had been crude, its formula still fresh and untested, but being able to affect blood without a sympathetic link or a ritual whose sheer power would make the matter irrelevant was excitingly new grounds for him. He paid close attention to the rate at which their blood evaporated, committing the numbers to memory, and was rather irked when they both only died after ten heartbeats. Much too long, it meant part of the heat was being dispersed into the broader body. He’d have to scrap the entire containment vector, and since that was tied into almost every part of the formula that effectively meant scrapping the entire spell and starting from scratch.

“Masego.”

Papa’s tone was chiding, and there had been a time where that would have given Hierophant pause. Before Keter. Before he’d seen Tikoloshe walk the grounds of what had become the single most significant magical phenomenon in Calernian history without speaking a single word of it to his son. Much had been cast into doubt by that revelation. If Papa had been human there might have been uncertainty about his motivations, but unlike humans devils were... direct. Unequivocal in what drove them. There were only two reasons that Tikoloshe would have failed to fulfill Masego’s desire when he so easily could, and both were ugly things. So which are you, father – a stranger or a slave? Either was betrayal, if owned by different pair of hands.

“Father,” he simply replied.

“That was unwise,” Tikoloshe said, eyeing the corpses.

Masego frowned.

“It would have been better to test the spell on animals beforehand,” he conceded. “But pigs are expensive and the physiological differences really are rather minor.”

Whispers spread across the hall in the wake of his words. No doubt they were agreeing with him. Apes were even better for experimentation, admittedly, but those could only be obtained from across the Tyrian Sea and they were ridiculously costly to import. Even the small ones that didn’t know any tricks. He’d asked around. Well, asked Vivienne to, which was basically the same thing. Papa sighed. More than a few nobles flushed at the sight.

“That is not what I meant,” he said. “You should apologize to High Lord Idriss for disrupting his reception.”

Masego’s brow rose. Wasn’t it already enough that he hadn’t killed the man? He’d been very courteous so far.

“Will he apologize for them insulting my friends?” he asked peevishly.

“He is not responsible for their words,” Tikoloshe said.

“Then it has nothing to do with him” Masego said.

“Mas-”

“ Enough ,” Hierophant hissed. “Father asked for my help and so I came, but my patience is running thin. I agreed to lend my time, not waste it. There is work to do, and none of it takes place here.”

He could be at the Obervatory right now, plumbing the depths of a hundred Hells. He could be with Catherine, taking apart drow sorcery and learning from ancient secrets. He could be picking at the minds of the Wild Hunt to understand what set them apart from the other fae but no, instead he was at court, talking with blind children who – Masego took a deep breath. He would not get angry. Not over this, when the true source of his anger was other. He would be fair, and hold only the responsible to account. They’d shown him. It was better when the world worked that way. And when it didn’t? You just had to make it.

“Enjoy court, Father,” he said through gritted teeth. “I am done with it.”

—

Wekesa watch his son stride away in a swirl of dark robes, leaving silence behind him. A few heartbeats and then whispers bloomed, even as servants took away the corpses of the Serali twins. Their father was stuck halfway between terrified and furious, his little gamble to curry favour having proved rather costly. But this was court, in the end, and so the conversations moved on. Lord Hajal Serali’s blunder would be the talk of the city for a few weeks and that would be the end of it. The man was not so influential as to risk taking revenge on a Named, not unless Alaya tacitly allowed it. Which she would not. Warlock had set this as a condition with his old friend before sending for Masego. So long as certain boundaries were observed, the Eyes would disappear anyone even considering raising a hand at his son. Tikoloshe returned to his side, and decades of marriage told him his husband was feeling rather irritated even if his face betrayed none of it. The two of them were given a wide berth after they reunited, the implicit courtesy nothing less than his due. He and his son were the only thing that stood between Thalassina and a sack, after all. Idriss might get snippy about the dead bodies, but he would not forget that.

Wekesa was not above simply leaving if he felt like it, and had made that much abundantly clear.

He was here on Alaya’s behalf, not the High Lord’s, and she knew better than to ask to tedious a favour of him. Wekesa had not thrown away his hours teaching imbeciles when Amadeus had requested it, and he would not do the same fighting this chore of war if he had to watch for knives aimed at his family’s back. Not even for a single battle, however interesting in nature. If Procer and its crusading fellow insisted on testing the Wasteland he’d discipline them appropriately, but what did he care if Nok and Thalassina burned? He had no laboratories or correspondents in either: there was nothing to defend. If Kahtan or Okoro were on the line it would be a different story, but they were too far inland to be threatened by Ashuran raids. Tikoloshe came to stand by his side, almost close enough to touch, and Wekesa idly brushed his fingers against the rune-carved jewels on his belt. The contamination ward bubbled out a heartbeat later.

“He used to be such an obedient child,” his husband mourned.

“He’s an adult now,” Wekesa said. “With the opinions of one. He won’t always agree with us. He’s no longer the little boy that used to chase the hem of our robes.”

The incubus made a moue. It was a wonder, Warlock thought, that even after all these years the sight of that could cause a low stir of desire in his belly. He’d never taken another lover after wedding his husband – how could any mortal man be half as good in bed as a creature born of desire itself? – and still it amazed him he’d never felt the need to seek a partner outside their marriage. It wasn’t like Tikoloshe would have minded, though he’d certainly gotten more possessive over the years. Love, Wekesa thought, was a strange thing. For what else could it be he felt, when other desires failed to move him?

“In public, ‘Kesa?” Tikoloshe said, sounding flattered.

“It’s nothing they’ve not speculated about,” he replied, sliding a hand around his husband’s firm waist and bringing him close for a kiss.

There was little chaste about it, but they did not linger.

“You’re attempting to distract me,” Tikoloshe sighed. “It won’t work. This is more than growing up, Wekesa. He is angry with us. Which one I cannot tell, but-”

“I know,” Warlock admitted. “And while I mislike Foundling, she has done wonders to keep him even-keeled. He would not act so sullen without a reason.”

Amadeus’ apprentice might be a little twerp as arrogant as she was ignorant, but she’d done right by his son. He’d seriously considered asking Alaya to keep her alive just for how she benefited Masego, but the situation was too far gone. It’d become a mess between her and Amadeus, and while those were rare they also tended to get exceedingly nasty. He should have adopted some orphan years ago and settled the paternal urge , Wekesa thought. More than once he’d hinted fatherhood might do his friend some good. He and Alaya acted like they were married half the time, a shared child would only have served to channel that tension more productively.

“Then he’s learned something that angered him,” Tikoloshe said. “While he was abroad.”

And there was the trouble, for while Wekesa knew neither of them had been perfect fathers he was genuinely surprise anything he’d done would wound his son this way. He should have spent more time with Masego when he was younger, instead of studying. That was one of his great regrets, for he’d not truly understood back then that those days would never come again. All those he cared about, save for his husband, were Named. He’d gotten in the habit of treating long partings as being of little import. Yet where would his son have learned to resent this? None of the Woe were close to their parents according to the reports, save for the Thief, and her father hadn’t even known she was moonlighting as an apprentice to a member of the Guild of Thieves. Trust and closeness could be different matters, true, but it was still baffling.

“I cannot think of what would have led to this,” Warlock admitted.

“He’s been to Keter,” Tikoloshe murmured.

“That matter is long buried,” Wekesa frowned.

“The Dead King-”

“Would not deign to indulge in games with a mortal mage, however talented,” Warlock flatly stated.

“Then it might have been the journey,” his husband replied.

Wekesa did not contradict him. The reflection of Keter in Arcadia must be highly perilous, but he knew little of it. Hye had passed through there once, but getting anything useful out of her was near impossible. It wasn’t that she lied. That would have been of some use, as even boasts and exaggerations would hold a kernel of truth. No, it was the opposite: she was concise to the point of uselessness. I walked through Arcadia and then cut my way out and then I beat up dead people all the way to Hell. That was the whole sum of how she’d described her experience assaulting Keter through the realm of the fae, to Warlock’s despair. Trying to tease more information out of her inevitably ran into the wall of Ranger genuinely believing she’d given him all she needed to and getting irritated if he implied otherwise.

“Perhaps a conversation is in order,” Wekesa finally said.

“Perhaps,” his husband gently mocked.

He grimaced. It would be a delicate matter to approach, even more so if it proved to be a correct guess. Warlock was not unaware that decades of being able to dictate on what terms he interacted with almost everyone else had atrophied some his former social finesse. On the other side of the room, Lady Gharim dropped to the floor screaming and clawing at her face. Her veins had turned dark, thick with rot. Sloppy spellwork.

“People,” the Warlock said loudly enough his voice could be heard by all attendees, “should be aware of their own limitations.”

His gaze lingered on the dead woman, who might still be alive if she hadn’t tried her hand at an eavesdropping spell. Contamination wards were not forgiving.

“I believe we will take our leave, High Lord Idriss,” Tikoloshe smiled. “And let that particular reminder linger in our absence.”

The hall was silent, at least for now. Whispers would resume as soon as they left.

It was not the first death of the night, and it would not be the last.

Interlude: Dreadful

“And so Sinistra said: ‘What we cannot grow we will take by dread, and damnation on all who deny this.'”
– Extract from the Scroll of Misfortunes, thirteenth of the Secret Histories of Praes

The Windless Salon was an indulgence.

Not hers, originally, but that of Dread Emperor Sorcerous. The infamous warlock-emperor had been fond of ambitious experiments demonstrating the superiority of Praesi sorcery over all others. His in particular, and he’d never been shy about denting the treasury for his latest fancy. The Salon was one of his earlier projects: an entire floor of the Tower, well above the clouds, made into a single room. The stones of the walls and ceiling were enchanted to make it seem as if it were entirely outdoors, revealing a staggeringly beautiful view in every direction. Nefarious had despised it, for he’d spent the better part of a decade trying to puzzle out its secrets with only failures to show for it. In truth, few save for Sorcerous himself had ever used the Windless Salon. Alaya and her predecessors misliked allowing the lords and ladies of Praes access this far up the Tower, and there was no lack of other wonders within the walls to strike a particular tone when receiving guests. The Empress had, instead, turned Sorcerous’ costly vanity into an office of sorts.

The seats and sofas had been removed, saved for her own luxurious cushioned armchair, and the ornate banquet tables had been replaced by two bureaus and a writing desk. Access here was restricted to those she’d given token to, and with good reason. The transparent walls of the Windless Salon had been adorned with a maze of secrets and faces. Painted mosaics representing every Praesi noble of import hung over apparent air, tiles written over in chalk noting their latest schemes and objectives and alliances. Lines had been drawn to connect conspirators and foes, weaving a tapestry of treacheries and interests that spanned the whole of her empire. It was not all exact, of course. Believing this to be untouchable sanctum merely because she had the minds of everyone with access searched at random intervals would have been arrogance. The tiles were incomplete, sometimes incorrect information added to fool a would-be spy. The only complete and truthful version was in Alaya’s own mind.

Years of practice meant she had only to close her eyes to see the whole of it, but there was something oddly soothing about seeing the Wasteland’s plotting laid bare against the backdrop of Ater’s sky. In the last few years, a fresh section had been birthed. A small cluster of names under a chalk-drawn crown. Such a small representation for a handful of people who’d shaken the foundations of Calernia. A half-full cup of wine in hand, Dread Empress Malicia allowed her gaze to linger on the foremost individuals of the Kingdom of Callow. Some names were followed by only sparse writing. Hakram of the Howling Wolves, the Adjutant, remained opaque in intent and motivation despite her best efforts. It was tempting to study the Woe through the lens of what she knew the Calamities to be, but it would be an overly simplistic view. Oh, most of them had ties to the old guard: Masego was Wekesa’s own son, the Archer had been the favourite pupil of that rabid dog in Refuge and Catherine had been the only apprentice Amadeus ever took. The Adjutant himself was often dismissed as Captain’s legacy in green, which had always amused Malicia greatly.

The boy had more in common with Scribe than he’d ever had with still-mourned Sabah, and even that was overly simplified. His Name, as far as she could tell, had been shaped since inception to serve as shield and empowerment to Catherine Foundling’s own role. The Woe were not their predecessors, and that was a shame: Alaya had spent decades learning how best to work with and around the Calamities. Dealing with a younger and cruder version of them would have been mercifully easy. No, instead she’d been forced to learn to navigate an entirely different river of desires and drives. Changeable things, these, especially in individuals so young. The girl who was now called the Black Queen had little in common with the child who’d chased Black’s shadow as his Squire. Still, she’d begun to understand the lay of them. Where pressure could be applied for the correct effect. Vivienne Dartwick was the weakest link. Archer had been the obvious guess, but much like Hye the girl was simply too apathetic to be influenced. It was hard to leverage someone who cared about nothing save a few earthly pleasures that essentially any major city on the surface of Calernia could provide.

Thief, however? She was a Callowan nationalist, the kind that kingdom bred by the thousands. That was an old foe to Praesi, one made almost predictable – though no less dangerous for it. People like Vivienne Dartwick had broken Wasteland invasions for a millennium and a half with only two major failures to show for their toil. Patriotism was a set of blinders, Malicia would not speak otherwise, but however narrow the perspective it had proven exceedingly skilled at frustrating Praesi efforts. Fortunately, central tenets of it ran contrary to the kind of nation Catherine was trying to build. The Black Queen had failed to realize, she often thought, how deeply she’d taken after Praesi culture. Callowans tended to think of their own ethnic group and their nation at the same thing, unlike Praesi. The Dread Empire had, since the Declaration, been made up of disparate and often opposed forces. Guiding the refugees from the sack of Nok into Callowan territory had been killing two birds with one stone, in that light.

It eased the pressure of Malicia’s own granaries by displacing individuals who would have turned to banditry or rioting if left unfed while simultaneously forcing onto Callow a problem that could not be solved with a sword. Well, she conceded, that was untrue. If Thief and Adjutant had sent in soldiers to slaughter every refugee crossing into the kingdom’s territory the flow would have abruptly stopped and there was precious little the Empress could have done about it without loosening her leash on the High Lords – which would be ill-advised, at this juncture. On the other hand, if the Woe were truly that ruthless this would be an entirely different situation. As things stood, Vivienne Dartwick must be chewing on the fundamental conflict between doing something good, namely not slaughtering desperate peasants, and seeing the immediate costs that good action imposed on her countrymen. It would fester, Alaya thought. In her and in the farmers displaced at Catherine’s orders. The Black Queen might think of her land as more than the territory of tribes-made-kingdom, but few in even her closest circle shared that view.

The seed had been sown and conflict would grow from it. Enough, Alaya had judged, that it would weaken the fabric of the kingdom without collapsing it. At some point a compromise would be forged that pleased no one, slowly dragging back Catherine Foundling to the position Malicia preferred her in: that of an unpopular but unopposed necessary evil. If that strife could be carried to the heart of the Woe, so much the better. That band of children had already proved they could unmake the designs of empires, if allowed to run rampant. It was a private delight of the Empress that the results of her offensive must have Cordelia Hasenbach a throbbing ulcer.

“And yet,” Dread Empress Malicia said, eyeing the walls that were not there.

She sipped at her wine. Beneath Catherine Foundling’s own face, a blank space had been made. It was not that the girl’s designs were unknown: Malicia was thoroughly well-informed of what was unfolding in the kingdom, despite Amadeus’ best efforts. But there was a question, she thought, that must weigh heavy on the mind of every ruler on this continent.

Where the Hells was the Black Queen?

Callow might be somewhat stable, but it was one bad winter away from effective collapse. If Alaya ordered most royal granaries torched, starvation would afflict half the realm after the snows came. And yet, fresh off her failure in Keter, Catherine had disappeared into thin air. The Adjutant and the Thief had been sent back to Laure to settle affairs, but neither had the legitimacy to truly keep things under control. Was it mere negligence? Alaya was self-aware enough to acknowledge she disliked the girl on a personal level, and so was inclined to match perceived mistakes with personality flaws. Yet the Black Queen had proved surprisingly adept at the diplomatic game. Blackmailing the northern crusaders into leaving under treaty instead of risking extermination had been inspired, as had been the request to join the Grand Alliance. Had the First Prince’s grasp on Procer been stronger when the offer was made, Hasenbach might actually have gone for it. Not without losing a few feathers in the process, but the First Prince had already proved capable of cold pragmatism when the situation demanded it.

It wouldn’t have mattered, in the end. The Dead King would have upended the board regardless. Yet the skill was there, however raw, and it meant the girl had learned . If she was capable of shaping a military campaign so it would lead to the kind of peace she desired, she should be able to recognize Callow without her was a house of cards. Something had forced her to seek another path, and the only true contender for that was what had taken place in Keter. The Black Queen was, at heart, still a soldier. In times of trouble, she would reach out for military force. It was the solution she was best versed in. Her options, however, would be few. The League would refuse out of hand, as the Hierarch was the mad puppet of the Tyrant of Helike – who’d sent her a lovely letter professing eternal friendship but was a man made from a mould rather familiar to Praesi. The Everdark was a mess of primitive warring tribes, effectively impossible to mobilize quickly and highly unpalatable allies regardless, which left only two real options: the Kingdom Under and the fae. Malicia had been made aware that the dwarves were in yet another expansion phase, meaning they would refuse to get involved with surface affairs.

That left the sole remaining Court of Arcadia, to which the Black Queen already had ties.

There was a very real chance, Alaya admitted to herself, that within the next six months a horde of fae would come pouring out of gates after Catherine struck bargain with them. It was madness, of course. Giving their kind stronger foothold on Creation was a blunder all living souls would pay for. But fighting fire with fire was Catherine’s signature, and the Dead King’s entrance in the melee might very well have been enough to quiet her doubts. Of all the nations currently involved in the Tenth Crusade it was the Empire that would find it easiest to defend against such an incursion, given its heavily warded cities and high number of skilled mages, but Praes was already under assault by the Ashurans. Deep raids into the Wasteland that left the forces of the High Lords untouched could become a catastrophe, and there was no doubt the Black Queen’s advisors were learned enough of Praesi affairs to know this even if she herself might not be fully aware. Thalassina, then, had become the crucible on which her reign would be decided. If Ashur could be removed from the equation, an attack on the Empire became a very different affair. Wekesa and his son’s preparations were of the highest import.

It might be necessary to arrange a failure to protect Hierophant from vengeful nobles after it took place, even if the consequences would be dire. She’d mull on it. She was fond of the young man, personally, and had found him a breath of fresh air on the few occasions they’d met. He was also, unfortunately, one of the most dangerous war assets of the Kingdom of Callow. A compromise might be possible through Warlock, she thought, who’d certainly prefer his only son be imprisoned for a few years rather than involved in a brutal knife-fight between the Woe and the Empire where death was a real possibility. Wekesa had made it clear he was willing to break a few pots if it meant return to normality would follow. Like her, he knew that disposing of contentious elements would lead to recriminations in the short-term and reconciliation after the storm had passed. It would be the ugliest disagreement they’d had, and one that would taint their relationship for decades, but Alaya was nothing if not patient.

There was no knock on the door. Anyone requiring such announcement would have died to the wards in the hallway. The sound of the steps, though, could allow Malicia to discern the identity of her visitor. The four servants allowed access here had different strides, as did the sole other person with a token.

“Ime,” the Empress said, greeting her guest without turning. “An unexpected pleasure.”

He spymistress observed the niceties, coming before her to kneel before rising. Not quite as fluidly as she used to, Alaya noticed with grief that half-surprised her. Ime had grown old, though her body’s appearance did not betray it. Yet rituals could only accomplish so much, and eventually a cloth stretched too far would snap. It might be twenty years yet before that happened, but it was as inevitable as the sun rising.

“My Empress,” Ime said.

She remained standing. There was no other seat here, entirely by design. None save her should be encouraged to linger.

“I take it there has been a fresh report from the Eyes,” Malicia said, brow quirking.

Her little retreats into the Windless Salon were, while not exactly forbidden from interruption, not to be lightly trespassed on.

“Our agents in the Principate managed to get urgent news through the scrying relays,” the spymistress said, then hesitated. “Lord Black’s legions are in full retreat through lands they’ve already pillaged. The Dominion’s armies are in pursuit.”

Alaya hid her surprise. She’d believed she’d grasped Maddie’s intent when she’d seen what principalities he was targeting – namely, the loudest opposition to Hasenbach in the Highest Assembly. But he should have been heading south or across the lakes, not doubling back. It was the hesitation that gave it away.

“Ime,” Alaya said quietly. “Tell me.”

“We’re not sure what happened,” the spymistress admitted. “But there’s a town full of corpses where he allegedly stole the Proceran fleet and there’s been orders out of Salia to reclaim the barges.”

Her mouth, she found, had gone dry.

“He won’t have stolen a fleet alone,” Alaya said. “The legionaries with him?”

“The orders from Salia did not mention opposition,” Ime grimaced.

Her stomach clenched.

“I don’t believe he’s dead, Malicia,” her spymistress softly said. “I know it’s not much, but Hasenbach has sent people to speak with the shopkeepers on the central avenue of Salia.”

Alaya’s lips tightened. Her teeth clenched to tightly it felt like they would shatter.

“A parade for the heroes,” she forced out. “Celebrating his death.”

“A triumph,” Ime countered. “As the Miezans once held. Displaying a foe taken prisoner. He would make for a very useful hostage. He has influence with every single force on their eastern front.”

“Do not,” Malicia quietly said, “coddle me.”

“This is my professional opinion,” her spymistress assured her. “They have to know that outright killing him would get the Ranger to come out swinging.”

She grit her teeth. Unpleasant as it was to her, it was not untrue. The question was if they’d care , given the number of heroes on the field. Hye was dangerous but she was not invincible and her draw with the Queen of Summer had caused her heavy wounds she’d yet to recuperate from.

“Mobilize the Eyes in strength,” Alaya said. “I want answers.”

Ime’s lips thinned.

“My Empress, moving so openly would-”

“I don’t care if we have to out every agent in that misbegotten fucking hole they call a country,” Alaya hissed. “ Find out if he’s alive. ”

Ime nodded slowly and the Empress forced her hands into her lap, where her fingers could not be seen to tremble.

“And pass this along to Wekesa,” she added tiredly.

Ime hesitated once more. Alaya’s fury spiked, though she mastered it.

“He might leave Thalassina,” she said.

“If Maddie’s...” she began, then faltered. “Warlock would know. They have arrangements. And he’d know I kept it from him. Besides, whether it is revenge or rescue he will not act until Scribe contacts him. Keep an eye on that, she may know something we don’t.”

“I will,” Ime said.

A heartbeat passed.

“And yet here you stand,” Malicia said.

“We must prepare,” Ime said, “for all eventualities. If he is truly dead, the balance with Callow has shifted. If he has been captured, perhaps some matters should be considered with a fresh eye.”

Calm , she thought. A pond without a single ripple, so they only ever see their own reflection.

“The Callowan situation has changed already, simply with what you’ve told me,” Malicia said. “Get in touch with our envoy in Laure. The full terms of my pact with Keter are to be revealed.”

“The initial plan,” her spymistress carefully said, “was to wait until the Black Queen’s return.”

“It also relied on him being a restraining influence against the notion of war on the Empire,” Malicia said. “That can no longer be counted on. We need a new guarantee that she won’t gate in and burn a few miles of farmland to the ground every time she’s provoked.”

Ime nodded.

“I know you might be reluctant to explore the full spread of options, if he has been captured,” she said. “But it is my duty to speak.”

“Then do so,” Malicia flatly said.

“If he’s jailed in Salia, it might be best to simply leave him there,” Ime said. “Temporarily, at least. It would be an opportunity to bring his legions back into the fold, and he can be freed after the situation in the Wasteland is made less volatile.”

Malicia forced herself to consider it with cold eyes. While the legions who’d followed Amadeus to the borders and turned back the invasion at the Vales were not exactly in rebellion, it was undeniable they’d acted against her intent. She’d long known that if there ever came a day when call was made on the loyalties of the old guard, it would not be her most of them chose. The urge had always been there to dismiss the issue as a mere theoretical, but a Dread Empress of Praes could not afford that kind of hopeful thinking. She’d had measures in place for decades, telling herself it would no matter if she never used them. She still had not, and would not unless she had no other choice. Yet much could be accomplished by the more mundane leverage was speaking of – presented with a fait accompli after his release, Black would likely be forced to abandoned his most recent designs. Dangerous as he could be, without an army he was just a man.

“No,” Alaya said.

“My Empress-”

“I will not repeat myself,” she said. “The risks are too high he’ll be executed if he’s allowed to remain in their grasp for long. He is to be freed at first opportunity.”

“You are not thinking about this clearly, Malicia,” Ime softly said. “I know you feel like you owe him. I do as well. But there comes a time when debts have to be weighed. A life spared – or saved – is not a life owed.”

The laughter that ripped out of her throat was not kind.

“Is that what you think this is?” Alaya mockingly said. “He spared your life after you helped butcher his kin with the Heir’s, and because he withheld the blade you understand us.”

The spymistress grew stiff in her stance, but did not disagree.

“I wish this were about something as petty as debt,” Alaya murmured, knowing it a lie. “How easy that would be.”

How could she tell this familiar stranger that they had been one for so long some days she could hardly tell where she began and he ended? Maybe debt could have been the sum of them, if after the civil war he had treated her a figurehead – as was well within his power. If he’d proved himself yet another cage, this one gentler than the last but no less a prison for it. But he’d understood, that it was not comfort or a furious avenger she craved. Kindness, consolation, all the sweets words their tongue could offer. Those things she could have measured and paid back in full. But instead she’d been offered something priceless: a world of endless paths, and someone to walk them with her. Debt ? She might as well try to weigh the worth the breath in her lungs, the blood in her veins. She was not Catherine Foundling, to carve out pieces of her own soul at a whim.

“I have you orders, Lady Ime,” Malicia spoke into the silence that followed. “See to them.”

Her spymistress was not so gauche as to show even the slightest hint of disapproval after being dismissed, though there was no doubt it was there. It did not matter. She had been taught better than to overreach.

“Your Most Dreadful Majesty,” Ime said, bowing low.

Her steps whispered out of the room, leaving the Dread Empress of Praes alone with her thoughts. Her carefully woven surroundings seemed mockery now, a reminder that no matter how orderly she made her world chaos would always crawl in through the cracks.

“I warned you,” Alaya spoke into the empty salon. “Gods, I warned you. That it was not sustainable, that one day you would make a mistake and that’d be all it took.”

And yet she had not acted on it. Because he’d been so sure, because it would have killed the heart of him to be made to sit at her feet. Caged. And he’d won, hadn’t he? Again and again and again. As so she’d not spoken the words. She should have. Better to wound him than to sit on the other side of the continent, wondering if his corpse was floating face down in some foreign lake. Mistake , she thought. It was too bitter a word to be called rueful.

“We will survive,” said Dread Empress Malicia, First of Her Name. “You and me and the others. This empire we raised. We will survive this, as we have all other dooms.”

But if Cordelia Hasenbach and her pack of pale-clad killers had done it? Oh, she was not seventeen anymore. She was not bleeding from the mouth, incapable of rising as the Sentinels nailed her father to the floor.

If they’d killed him, Alaya would give him an empire for a pyre.

Interlude: Apostates

“There is greater power in severing than binding, in releasing than capturing. The most fundamental act of will is to cut.”
-Translation from the Kabbalis Book of Darkness, widely attributed to the young Dead King

Thalassina was old.

Some scholars believed it to be the first Praesi city, though Wekesa’s own studies had hinted at Kahtan holding the title instead – the three oases of its site had been a natural draw on the nearby Taghreb tribes of the Devouring Sands. Still, it had undeniably existed longer than Ater or Wolof which in these modern days tended to be considered the two greatest cities of the Empire even though Thalassina’s population was near the double of Wolof’s: three hundred thousand inhabitants, give or take a few thousand. The city’s fortunes tended to rise and fall with the state of the sea trade that was its lifeblood. It was almost absurdly wealthy when there was peace with Ashur and the League, growing fat off tariffs on grain and luxuries imported from foreign shores. When the ships ceased coming, however, its revenues dwindled and the large population became a stone around its ruler’s neck. As it was the Empire’s primary sea port, Emperors and Empresses had meddled with its ruling line’s affairs more than they had any other’s. Most of that meddling had proved to be costly blunders. Thrice there’d been attempts to raise an Imperial Fleet, two swatted down by the Ashurans sailing in to torch everything and the last made a failure by one of the foremost captains rebelling and going pirate. On occasion, however, reasonable notions had emerged.

Shatha’s Maze was one of that rare breed.

Named after the ancient Warlock who’d built it, it’d been raised at the order of Dread Empress Maleficent the Second. She had prudently assessed that the victory she’d won against the Thalassocracy at sea had forged a very fragile peace, and that improving the defences of Thalassina before hostilities resumed was necessary. She’d set her Warlock to the task, opening up the treasury without qualms at one of the high historical points of Praesi wealth. The Maze was therefore unsurprisingly rather extravagant, but also one of the finest ward-based defensive arrays Wekesa ever had the privilege to witness. It had only failed twice over the last six hundred years, both times to treachery instead of superior sorcery. Naturally, knowing this, the first thing he’d requested of High Lord Idriss was a thorough purge of any uncertain elements in the city followed by heavy restriction of who would have access to the Maze from now on. The ruler of Thalassina had taken the opportunity to thin the ranks of his vassals with imperial permission eagerly, and though Wekesa suspected most of the dead had been rivals and not liabilities as long as the liabilities were dead he hardly cared. With that preventative measure taken care of, he’d sat down with his husband and his son to plan how they would turn a defensive ward array into a death trap.

It was a fascinating problem. Shatha’s Maze warded the waters to miles out of the city, except of course it didn’t: it was, after all, one of fundamentals limits of sorcery that wards could not be made over water. Shatha’s solution had been to anchor the workings in corals, artificially raised to crest over even the tallest waves. The Maze was not a single array, though it might seem like it at first glance. It was over three hundred small, self-contained wards extending only over their coral tower. The ancient Warlock had been brilliant, Wekesa would admit. Aware that she could not cover the waves with sorcery, she’d made it instead so that the effect would come from people looking upon her works. Some wards confused perception, leading ships to crash into spikes of rock beneath the surface. Others attacked minds directly by sowing madness and uncontrollable fury into all who saw them. Yet more contained direct sorcerous effects like flame and lightning, triggered by will or proximity. The full lay of the Maze was known only to a few, though he’d obtained a version when agreeing to Alaya’s favour. It had been illuminating, teaching him that sufficient time and manpower could create what was effectively an array with no single element linked to another. There was, naturally, a catch. Thalassina was a trade port: it needed foreign ships to be capable of passing through in peace time.

Shatha’s Maze needed to be activated, from twin underground facilities dug beneath the banks the adjoining coasts. The rituals involved were both long and expensive, as they essentially required three hundred separate ward empowerments done in quick succession. The Kebdana had been rulers of the Thalassina for the better part of five centuries and so ensured that they had a contingent of powerful and well-educated mages ready at all times to carry out that onerous duty, but those practitioners were unfortunately highly specialized because of it. Useless when it came to the kind of theoretical legwork needed to design a ritual meant repurpose the Maze, and Wekesa had neither the time nor the inclination to educate them. So be it. They’d chosen to waste their Gift on being beasts of burden, he would treat them as such. With Masego and Tikoloshe at his side, he hardly needed the help anyway. His son was arguably the finest magical theorist of his generation, now that Akua Sahelian was dead, and his husband had at least three millennia of first-hand observation of sorcery to call on. Even a devil as ancient as ‘Loshe had difficult proving truly creative, but his treasure trove of knowledge was priceless.

With such aides he should have no trouble, or so theory went. The practicalities proved to be slightly different.

“Sueton was a hack,” Masego insisted. “Barely half his experiments are reproducible.”

“This particular phenomenon is one of them,” Wekesa replied flatly.

“Under controlled circumstances,” his son objected. “If his results are this shoddy, the theoretical framework behind them can only be called flawed. There’s no guarantee the explosions will cascade if we can’t accurately predict the nature of the release.”

“Petronian sorcery has a degree of unpredictability,” Tikoloshe noted. “Not a subtle folk, the Miezans. Never prone to using a dagger when a spot of genocide would work.”

“We cannot use Trismegistan formulae for this large a spell,” Warlock said. “The precision required is beyond our workforce, and to be blunt we lack the power.”

“Then make a master array and feed it with secondary rituals,” Masego said. “If we begin accumulating power now and centre it on our own manipulation, Trismegistan sorcery remains feasible.”

“That’d require at least six straight hours of direction on both our parts,” Wekesa said, frowning as he calculated. “With absolutely no margin of error either individually or in concert. That’s even riskier than going Petronian.”

“It puts the possibility of failure in our hands instead of leaving Creation to roll the dice,” his son grunted. “That can only be called an improvement on that abomination you call a plan.”

“Perhaps a more diplomatic word could have been chosen, Masego,” Tikoloshe chided.

His son’s beautiful glass eyes swivelled under the eye cloth, brow raising.

“A thing that causes distrust or hatred,” Masego quoted. “That is the definition. I assure you, it earned both from me.”

“Redundancies,” Wekesa said, ignoring the salvo. “If your issue is with the unpredictability, we set several triggers. It will make it difficult to predict the exact sequence, but-”

“- it won’t matter if their fleet is deep enough in the Maze,” his son finished thoughtfully. “Perfection is the enemy of functionality.”

Wekesa blinked in surprise. Where had he learned that ?

“This all rests on the Ashurans being unable to interrupt your little game,” Tikoloshe reminded them. “They will have hundreds of mages trained from the cradle.”

“Trained in Sabrathan sorcery,” Wekesa said, the sneer implied.

Oh, there was no denying that the Thalassocracy’s practitioners were the foremost in their fields. It was simply that those fields were so very narrow. The Gift was only cultivated two ways in Ashur: healers and ship mages. Ashuran mage-doctors could take the slightest ember of life and turn it into haleness, making Praesi attempts at healing look like the fumbling of children. Their sailing-mages could quiet storms or craft them, steal sunken ships from the depths and ride the tides. Yet outside that particular set of specialties, they were rank amateurs. Unlike Praesi they’d never outgrown the sorceries taught them by their forebears across the Tyrian Sea. They refined but did not innovate, in large part because the Sabrathan theory of magic was so badly antiquated. Victory was the mother of stagnation, and after wiping out the Miezans in the Licerian Wars the Baalite Hegemony had gone from triumph to triumph. Embracing stagnation just as deeply as the empire they’d overthrown. They’d not been forced to revisit the foundations of their sorcery for centuries, after the rest of the world had moved on. No, Wekesa thought little of Sabrathan magic. Or of any other that emphasized something as mundane as natural talent over skill and intellect.

“Narrow in scope, yet no less effective for it,” Masego said. “A hundred oxen cannot raise a pen but they can trample it.”

“At best they’ll be able to save a third of the fleet by submerging it,” Warlock flatly said. “Most of their practitioners lack the ability to use the spells, and their methods are ill-suited to rituals.”

“They could interrupt the sequence by detonating parts of it in advance with their own sorcery,” Tikoloshe said. “It has been done before.”

“Then we harden the wards from the outside, thin them on the inside,” Wekesa said. “It will be tedious, but as an additional safeguard it will serve well enough.”

“Someone will need to be among the corals,” Masego disagreed. “To start the sequence again if it stalls. Your schematic works in principle, but only if the possibility of Ashuran intervention is removed.”

Warlock’s lips tightened. He was not wrong. Much as he held Ashuran sorcery in contempt, dismissing it outright would be a blunder. There were no heroes here to muddle the mixture, but mortal ingenuity could be just as dangerous. The trap could not be sprung twice, it would wreck the Maze. Which meant if too few Ashuran ships were sunk, Thalassina was stripped of its finest defence while the enemy remained on the prowl. Alaya had made it clear that if the city fell there would be major unrest in the Empire. Nok being put to the torch was one thing, its ruler was by far the least influential of the High Lords and a former Trueblood besides. If the Dread Empress of Praes failed to shield even her oldest allies, however, there would be waves. Much as Wekesa despised the notion of having to stay in this city to protect idiots, he despised even more the prospect of having to put down a rebellion against the Tower.

“Agreed,” he finally said.

“Good,” Masego said. “I’ll require some accommodations on my perch, which I assume will need the permission of High Lord Idriss before being made.”

“No,” Tikoloshe immediately said, before Wekesa could speak the word himself. “Absolutely not.”

His son cocked his head to the side.

“Father is the best fit to oversee the ritual from the city,” he pointed out. “It is primarily his design. What follows is obvious.”

“The risks are much higher out there,” Warlock said. “If the sequence fails-”

“- I will handle the matter,” Masego interrupted. “If you believe your plan to be sound, any risks posed to me are irrelevant. If you do not believe your plan to be sound, this conversation is an exercise in pointlessness.”

“You are perfectly capable of overseeing the ritual yourself,” Wekesa said. “There is no need to discuss this further.”

“I am capable,” his son agreed. “But I am not the most capable. Logically speaking-”

“ Enough ,” Warlock bellowed. “I will not allow you to stand in the middle of a fucking Ashuran fleet while we turn centuries-old wards into munitions. You are staying in the city, and that’s the last we’ll speak of this.”

Heat spread across the room, carrying the faint scent of brimstone. His temper had loosened his hold. Slowly, Masego straightened in his chair. He’s almost as tall as I am , Wekesa realized with muted surprise. Grown slender from his stay abroad, though his long braids and the trinkets woven into them made him seem larger. Robes stark black, eyes veiled, he looked like a stranger. A man grown instead of a boy.

“There has been quite enough of not speaking, I would think,” Hierophant coldly said. “And my patience has officially run out .”

—

They did not react to his words, not visibly at least.

But Masego felt the weight of what he’d spoken fall over the room and was glad of it. He’d hoped they would tell him themselves. That he wouldn’t need to drag it out of them, that maybe they had a good reason . He’d grown, since leaving to fight in the Liesse Rebellion. Learned so much about himself and Creation around him, so much the revelations had carried him beyond the Name of Apprentice. If they’d recognized that, acted on it... It wouldn’t have bound the wounds, no. Not entirely. But it would have mattered. Been measured on the scales of the betrayal. Instead here he was, expected to sit and pretend like they’d not lied to him his whole life. No, worse than a lie. They had hidden the truth after raising him to seek it above all else. What possible justification could there be for that?

“Masego,” Papa said cautiously, “I do not know what-”

“You know,” Masego said. “Or suspect, at least. I have been to Keter, fathers. And oh, the things I witnessed on that journey. The secrets I glimpsed.”

“The Dead King lies,” Father calmly said.

His eyes were dark mirrors, revealing nothing.

“So do you,” Hierophant hissed. “He, at least, does not pretend otherwise.”

“You don’t understand,” Papa sighed.

“A common consequence of being kept in the dark,” Masego harshly replied.

“The dark,” Father murmured. “The right term, used incorrectly. You were kept from the dark, my son.”

“There is nothing in this world to fear save ignorance,” the blind mage said. “You taught me this, once. The lesson should have been tailored to your deeds, if you did not want to be called to account for them.”

Father leaned back into his seat, then drummed his fingers against the tables.

“What do you think death is, Masego?” he asked.

“Religion, now,” the younger man snorted. “The resort of those without answers of their own.”

“Let us speak of two Dread Emperors,” the Warlock said. “One called Malignant, third of the name. The other called Revenant.”

“The same man,” Masego said. “Famously so.”

Malignant the Third had killed himself through ritual and risen from the grave a year later, dethroning his successor and reigning again under the name of Dread Emperor Revenant. There’d been some rebellion when it’d become clear he intended on reigning forever, the first of the Wars of the Dead. He vaguely remembered Revenant being used as the basis for the legal argument that later excluded undead from claiming the Tower, though there’d been some other barely more interesting wars in between.

“I knew both,” Papa said. “And believe this to be untrue.”

He watched the incubus, looking for a lie and finding none. But they were both much better liars than he’d thought, weren’t they?

“What came back shared much with Malignant,” Papa continued. “Memories, thoughts, opinions. It was also fundamentally other . It was... a tracing of the man. A prefect imitation, yet still only that. An imitation.”

“An interesting matter,” Masego said. “Yet utterly irrelevant to this conversation.”

“No. No it isn’t,” Father quietly said. “Because in one of the deepest vaults beneath the Tower, there is the most complete version of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness in existence. A third of the full text, and not contiguous. And it was there Malignant learned the foundations of the ritual that turned him into Revenant.”

His fingers clenched. All these years, the knowledge had been there. In his father’s memories, yes, but also written on parchment . And they’d kept it from him. The oldest, most important instance of apotheosis in the history of the continent and they’d hidden it away. His teeth clicked together so strongly his mouth almost bled.

“If you were under the impression this helped your case,” Masego replied in a furious whisper, “allow me to disabuse you of that notion.”

“You would have embraced the teachings,” Papa said. “No matter what we said.”

His Name flared, like a morning sun, sheer power wafting from his frame like smoke.

“And so Father bound you not to speak of it,” he hissed. “So much for free will.”

“I did not,” Warlock said.

“Liar,” Masego spat out. “You should not have taught me diabolism if you wanted to maintain that pretence. Papa is driven by desire . He had answers I wanted, what could possibly silence him except a binding?”

Gods, how many other hidden bindings were there? Had Father forced love as well? How could he tell if a single thing he’d seen or heard or felt was genuine? Had Papa baked because he enjoyed it, or because there was a rule that made him? The most sophisticated set of oaths in existence bound the incubus, decades in the making. Free will made by mortal cleverness, they’d called it. Could you really call it that, if there were exceptions ?

“A greater desire,” Tikoloshe said. “Of my own.”

Hierophant bitterly laughed.

“Did you want me ignorant so badly?”

“I wanted to keep my son alive,” Papa softly said. “Even if it hurt him. Even he hated me for it.”

Masego flinched.

“You can’t just-”

“You should have noticed by now,” Father said, tone calm and even. “I’m told you’ve studied her physiology in depth, both physical and metaphysical. The signs must be there.”

“No,” Masego said.

“Catherine Foundling died at Second Liesse,” the Warlock gently said. “What walked out of that fortress is an impression of the young woman made on the fabric of Winter, no more and no less. I’m sorry, Masego. I really am. I know you liked her. But even if the Black Queen believes she’s the same person, she is not. Amadeus didn’t realize it either, he doesn’t have the learning. But he described what happened in the city to me. There can be no doubt.”

“We hurt you,” Papa said. “And for that, I will apologize. But not regret. Not if you are still alive to be hurt.”

He didn’t want to think about it, but he couldn’t not. He’d been told a theory and so it must be considered. He had observed a certain stiffness in thought in Catherine, an inability to deviate from goals even if it meant employing means she would have once dismissed out of hand. Believed it, back then, to be a consequence of the mantle becoming one with her soul – it would retain certain properties, which would be made inherent to her. It had been a reasonable theory. Or it could be that the imprint on Winter was limited in nature, and that the creature playing at being Catherine was incapable of deviating from it. He’d already known that her body was a construct, proved it.

Was her mind as well?

“Oh, child,” Father sadly said. “It will pass. The first one is always the worst. But you do yourself no service by denying the truth.”

Masego could no longer close his eyes. The closest he could come was to cease paying attention to what he saw. It was not a release. An effort of will was still required, and he abandoned the attempt after a moment.

“No,” he said.

“Masego, I understand you don’t want to-”

“This is not sentiment,” Hierophant said. “I disagree with you on rational grounds. Even if what you say is true, it is irrelevant. She remains the same individual.”

“You know that to be untrue,” Father said.

“I am not the same person I was this morning,” Hierophant said. “I have learned and changed. I am still Masego.”

“The degree of change is different,” the Warlock flatly said.

“And how does one decide on the appropriate degree?” he replied. “If I removed all my memories from age five to fifteen, I would behave differently. A part of what makes me would be absent, and yet I would still consider myself to be the same person. Assuming your theory is correct, the changes she went through are lesser than this. It is, therefore, irrelevant.”

“You’re being willfully-”

“Furthermore,” Hierophant said, raising his voice. “If your theory is incorrect, you both kept me ignorant out of petty fear.”

“Petty?” Papa repeated softly, and there was a rare thread of anger in his voice.

“I am no great scholar of niceties,” he replied. “But even I know an apology that is not apologetic rings empty.”

“Consider it withdrawn, then,” Papa tonelessly said.

His heart clenched, but he would not bend in this.

“You could have told me,” Masego said. “What you believe, why I shouldn’t do it. But you didn’t. You made the choice for me.”

“That’s what parents do, Masego,” Father said.

He swallowed.

“I love you,” he said. “Both of you. But I disagree. You didn’t learn anything, you just... flinched. And apotheosis is not for the faint of heart.”

“There are journeys,” Father said, “that you can never finish. Because the person that left is not the same that arrives.”

“There is nothing in this world to fear save ignorance,” Masego replied, eyes burning bright. “And whatever may come, I will not flinch .”

Interlude: Apogee

“It is a bitter truth that in trying to escape the flaws of our parents we inevitably inherit the worst of them.”
– King Pater of Callow, the Unheeding

After they entered the second month of hard labour and sleepless nights, Wekesa jested that if he were a god he’s snap his fingers and put them all out of their misery. Neither his husband nor his son graced him with even a perfunctory chuckle, which he found rather cold-blooded of them. Warlock had hoped that even disagreements, after being aired, would lance the wound festering in his family but it had been... overly optimistic of him. Tikoloshe was still furious that Masego had spurned his good intentions so fully, and their son had made it exceedingly clear that he’d be leaving Praes the moment the city was safeguarded and did not intend to return for many years. There’d been no talking him out of that, or even a way to broach the subject of the Black Queen again. His boy had learned to keep his own council, and while the way he’d grown stirred some embers of paternal pride in Wekesa it was also highly inconvenient. Message came from Ater within the first month, word of the war in the west.

It was not good news.

“He’s not dead,” Warlock told Alaya’s envoy. “I am certain. Beyond that I cannot tell. Wherever he is cannot be scried even through his blood.”

Which meant he was either underground or, more likely, in the presence of priests or heroes. It had slowed the work in Thalassina by a whole week to craft a ritual that would scry even through such distance and natural barriers, setting up relays and contingencies, but there’d been no question of doing otherwise. The silver of Amadeus’ soul in his possession was still called to the remainder of it somewhere in Creation, but aside from determining death that measure was essentially worthless. His old friend’s soul might not even still be inside his body, he knew, though that breed of meddling was rare among heroes. The Saint of Swords might be capable, though. Hye had told him, years ago, that Laurence de Montfort had grown skilled enough to rip a soul from its body with a swing of her sword. Was that what they’d wrought on Amadeus? Was he now a shivering shade in a bottle sealed by some priest’s power? Tikoloshe chided him for the thought.

“You are casting fear as fact,” his husband said.

“We’re not dealing with shepherd boys and rebels anymore,” Wekesa murmured. “I’ve heard things about the Pilgrim, ‘Loshe. The Saint might be the executioner for Above, but he’s something rather more dangerous than that. He... smooths away wrinkles. His is a thinking man’s Role.”

“Scribe will find out the truth of it, and the Empress will put her weight behind the retrieval,” Tikoloshe said. “Worrying any further is without purpose.”

“I could leave,” Wekesa said. “Head out right now.”

“And do what?” his husband gently asked. “Traipse around the Proceran countryside with target painted on your back?”

Warlock sighed. Tikoloshe was right, of course. Moving prematurely was just asking to get into a fight with whatever heroes had not gone north to prepare against the Dead King.

“Gods, why would he wander around the Principate like that?” Wekesa bit out. “We’re not twenty anymore, the wind’s no longer at our back. And there’s at least half a dozen Choirs embroiled in this mess, he was bound to run into someone he couldn’t cope with.”

“Making virtues of one’s flaws does not mean those flaws are gone,” his husband delicately replied.

Warlock sighed and left it at that. The two of them had never gotten along. Amadeus remained, even after over forty years, of the opinion that Tikoloshe was an unnecessary risk that should have long been dispensed with permanently. He was polite enough not to mention it anymore, but the years had not changed his position by an inch. ‘Loshe had frankly admitted that the sheer bleak intensity of Amadeus’ desires, coupled with utter disregard for the incubus’ existence, made him uncomfortable just to be in the presence of. Like putting fingers over a candle: tolerable for a pass, but painful if continued. Masego spent several hours conferring with his comrades in Laure when he was told the news, weaving some particularly vicious protections on his scrying spell. Woe unto whoever tested those, Wekesa had mused. There’d be a few more dead Eyes in the city by the time that conversation was over. Not his issue, regardless. While he recognized that Alaya had right to try eavesdropping on the conversation, his son also had right to privacy. The victor of that skirmish would be theirs to determine, and he saw no need to intervene so long as no harsh feelings were incurred on either side.

They returned to the work with renewed vigor afterwards, but as the weeks passed tensions never fully put to rest reared their ugly heads again. It was not unexpected, truthfully. Long hours of mentally exhausting work with little rest or company save each other – Masego had bluntly refused to attend court again – made small irritations seem large, and when the bottle was uncorked there was no preventing the spill. It was darkly amusing, Wekesa thought, that it was an attempted olive branch from Tikoloshe that’d been the spark to light the fire. His husband made an offer to discuss his time in the Kingdom of Sephirah, should Masego promise not to delve in that branch of research afterwards. Warlock had given it even odds that it would lead to either the beginning of reconciliation or a blowout, but his predictions proved inaccurate. In both cases, he’d believed the impetus would come from their son.

“That won’t be necessary,” Masego simply said.

The three of them had gone to the Maze with dawn, and it was now midmorning. Both mages hung from their spits of coral by leather harnesses, their engraving tools made to hover by their side by a quaint little Taghrebi spell. Tikoloshe was perched atop Wekesa’s own coral, comfortably seated and keeping an eye on their work for mistakes. All of them were under illusion, naturally. High Lord Idriss might have purged the city, but Warlock would not rely on the man’s work when his family’s safety was at stake. Their modifications to Shatha’s Maze would remain hidden until the very last moment.

“It is not the Book of Darkness,” Tikoloshe conceded. “Yet my remembrance is likely more than you’ll ever learn otherwise.”

“I would not be moved even if you offered the Tower’s own text,” Masego replied, placing back his carving knife into the floating set and picking up a chisel.

“Surely you don’t mean to bargain with the Dead King,” Tikoloshe frowned.

“Unnecessary,” their son said. “I’ve already harvested sufficient knowledge from his echoes.”

“Pardon me,” Wekesa said. “Did you say his echoes ?”

“His apotheosis left a reflection in Arcadia, yes,” Masego replied absent-mindedly. “I took from him twice, at a pivot and later from his final moments as mortal. Vivienne was displeased about the delay on our trip back, admittedly, but the Hunt would not move without all of us.”

There was a soft sound as he angled the chisel against an accumulation rune, bringing down his hammer to connect it with the fresh additions. The only sound for a long moment was the waves around them.

“You stole memories from the Dead King’s reflection,” Tikoloshe quietly summarized. “Child, have you gone mad?”

“Debatable,” Masego mused. “I am not certain if operating on a different set of logic should truly be called that.”

“Don’t you give me lip like this is some trifle,” ‘Loshe snarled. “Get rid of them this instant. It’s an infection .”

It went downhill from there. Wekesa could not stay out of it, for he shared some of his husband’s worries in this, but he could not serve as a mediator if he was also arguing. That proved to be a mistake. Tikoloshe had become emotional. That never worked well with their son. It was bad enough they ceased working for the day, walking back to the shore in fuming silence. Warlock ran into a wall when he tried to tease out details during the afternoon, Masego stubbornly refusing to speak more of the matter. Against his better judgement, he offered his son a concession: he’d get to participate in the ritual from inside the Maze instead of the city, if the subject was opened again. It worked, or close enough. Masego remained vague on details, but it was clear his son could probably transcribe half the Kabbalis Book of Darkness from memory if he were so inclined – and that was the least of it. It was not the diluted knowledge put to ink he’d gotten his hands on but the thoughts of the Dead King himself. Secrets known only to one, until now.

“Take it out,” his husband said later that night, when they were alone in their room. “By force if need be.”

“I’m not going to fight him, ‘Loshe,” Wekesa replied with genuine surprise. “Obviously we need to reconsider our approach, but-”

“You don’t get it,” Tikoloshe said quietly. “It’s a trap. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve seen the lay of it over the years and...”

“You’ve never spoken of this before,” Warlock softly said.

“I don’t know for sure,” his husband repeated. “And it was never an issue, with the mere fragments of his work Praesi possess. But I think he’s been killed before, ‘Kesa. The Dead King. With that many heroes having fought him over the years? At least once, one will have slain him.”

Wekesa was not without cleverness, and he’d been married to the man for a very long time. The implication was not difficult to divine.

“You think the Book is a lure,” he said. “And anyone that follows its teachings deep enough...”

“He can inhabit different bodies, he could even as a mortal,” Tikoloshe said. “But how useful would it really be to wear some farmer’s skin? No, he’d need mages. Talented, ambitious, well-trained in the use of their powers. And to ensure they made their way to him, seeds were sown.”

“Never the complete book, because then they might realize the purpose of it,” Warlock murmured. “There’d be risks, ‘Loshe. If Amadeus is right about the Wandering Bard-”

“Black isn’t even a hundred years old ,” his husband hissed. “And he thinks he can grasp the nature something like the Bard? Last time he followed that conceit Sabah was killed. Do we need to lose our son to his pride as well?”

“Peace,” Wekesa said. “You’ve said it yourself, this is only a theory.”

“I will not gamble with his safety, Wekesa, hear me well,” Tikoloshe said. “Not when the stakes are this high.”

“If I raise my hand against him, we lose him for good,” he replied. “Think about this clearly.”

“We lose him deeper still, if we do nothing,” his husband said.

Gods, what a mess this had become. Maybe if memories were modified... No, he’d find out eventually. Masego had been taught to assess the state of his own mind before he’d even reached puberty, he’d notice sooner or later. It was only pushing the issue back by a few months or years. Part of him insisted this was only a theory, but he could not refrain from considering it. ‘Loshe would not be this incensed if he did not genuinely believe in what he’d said, and he knew better than to dismiss the thoughts of his husband out of hand. It would be easier if he was wrong, but he could not put weight on something simply because it would be more convenient were it false.

“Tell me everything you know about this,” Wekesa said. “Every single detail, no matter how insignificant.”

Tikoloshe’s eyes met his.

“And if you agree I’m right?”

Warlock grimaced, but went on.

“Alaya has made inquiries about putting him under house arrest until this Callowan mess is over with,” Wekesa admitted. “I might have to take her up on them, until we’ve found a permanent solution.”

“After the Ashurans are dispersed, then,” Tikoloshe said.

Warlock reluctantly nodded. He’d need at least that long to prepare, if it was to be painless.

—

It’d been easier when Catherine had been there to provide ice. Winter-forged substance had a keen affinity to scrying spells, especially those involving the Observatory. Less than surprising, given that she’d provided quite a bit of the power involved in the raising of it. Without her around, Masego had been forced to rely on the more traditional methods of a water-filled bowl. The link was rather solid, given the distances and likely interferences involved, which warmed his heart. His work in Laure had proved fruitful. The waters shivered and a pair of silhouettes greeted him, both familiar. They must have been standing in front of one of the pools, he thought. Hakram looked exhausted, his face tight and the ridges around his eyes standing out – the orc equivalent of dark circles in a human. Vivienne, on the other hand, was flushed with good health. She’d grown out her hair, Masego noted. It suited her, made her seem almost regal.

“Hierophant,” Hakram said, showing just enough teeth to be respectful.

There was a pause as Masego’s eyes took in all of him.

“You seem to be missing a hand,” the mage observed.

Vivienne snorted.

“Literally the first thing,” she said. “I told you he’d skip right over greetings.”

“Already was when we last spoke, the bowl simply did not show it. And I still have the one,” Hakram told him, ignoring the Callowan. “It serves well enough.”

“Two would objectively serve better,” he pointed out.

“If we’re to have this conversation, it will be in person,” the orc said. “And over drinks.”

Ah, one of those complicated matters then. It should prove a learning experience.

“Youève made contact days before I next expected you,” Masego said. “I take it something happened?”

“You could say that,” Vivienne grimaced. “The Empress’ envoy sung us a pretty song, and we need to pick your brains over it.”

“I do not know much of singing,” he admitted.

“I mean-” she sighed. “Never mind. Look, we were made privy to the full content of Malicia’s pact with the Dead King.”

“Does it matter?” Masego asked, mildly surprised. “I was under the impression we would oppose both regardless of the technicalities involved.”

“I believed that as well,” Hakram gravelled. “Before he finished speaking. She effectively sold out most of Calernia.”

“Which seems ill-mannered, considering she does not own it,” Masego offered.

“The definition of ‘most’ is what matters, as it happens,” Vivienne said. “There’s a clause that exempts Praes and Callow from his attentions.”

“Which is good,” he tried.

“Somewhat,” she said. “Unfortunately, it only applies so long as she’s alive.”

Huh. Which was not good, because Catherine had admitted some months ago she would most likely have to kill the Empress before the war was over.

“We’ve asked some of our mages, but it’s not their specialty,” Hakram said. “We need to confirm – is it theoretically possible for a magical contract to have a clause like that?”

“It is exceedingly dangerous, but yes,” Masego replied.

“ Shit ,” Vivienne said, with feeling.

“I do not see the issue,” he admitted. “Considering we were planning war against the Dead King regardless we have lost nothing.”

“She’s kept it secret for now, but it’s likely she’ll make the terms openly known when she judges the situation ripe for it,” Hakram said. “That’s going to make a mess.”

Masego’s brows rose. Would it? He failed to see how.

“Public opinion, Zeze,” Vivienne said. “It’d be bad enough if we came out on Procer’s side after they took a swing at us, but if on top of that we have a guarantee Callow will stay safe? War will be highly unpopular. Even war against Praes, if the Empress stays quiet from now on, and she’s too clever not to.”

Ah, politics. Hardly his specialty.

“If you could provide me the exact terms, I’ll study them for weaknesses,” he offered.

“We will,” Hakram said. “But there might not be a point. There’s no guarantee she gave us the real phrasing. And if she has, she’ll have had every good diabolist in her employ look it over first.”

“I have time during the evenings,” Masego shrugged. “And without my library and my laboratory, only so much to spend it on.”

“There’s nothing to lose in trying, at least,” Hakram said.

He nodded.

“If I may ask, do you have news of Uncle Amadeus?”

Vivienne wiggled her hand in a manner that presumably had meaning, though he was not certain what it was.

“Getting word from the Jacks quickly has been harder since the Vales were shut,” she said. “The best I can give you is that Hasenbach’s agents from her internal spy network are out in force in Salia. Turning over every vaguely suspicious stone. I’ve had to recall quite a few of my people.”

She frowned.

“Still, if she’s cleaning up the capital that thoroughly it adds weight to the Empress’ take in my eyes,” she continued. “They might be bringing in the Carrion Lord for a good spot of jeering and rock-throwing. Gods know he’s been hated like poison there ever since he started setting fire to everything.”

It was a relief to hear it, and Masego felt a knot in his shoulders loosen. He’d lost enough family to wars already. If Uncle Amadeus had followed Aunt Sabah into the grave so quickly... No, it couldn’t be allowed to happen.

“Which is worrying,” Hakram said. “They have to know if he’s kept prisoner there will be rescue attempts. If he’s not dead it is for a reason.”

“It does not matter what they want,” Hierophant calmly said. “They will not keep him. Catherine will agree with me on this. So will Father and the Empress. We will lack no resources for the rescue.”

“My precise worry,” Hakram replied. “Procer cannot afford war on two fronts if one of those fronts is Keter. To execute Lord Black and break his legions makes sense, but to capture him? I can think of only one reason for that.”

It took a moment, but he came to the conclusion.

“Bait,” Masego slowly said.

“It neatly takes care of what they fear most about Cat, namely her ability to gate anywhere with an army,” Vivienne said.

“More than that,” Hakram said. “They’ll be dragging the Woe and the remaining Calamities onto their chosen grounds. The full villainy of the east where they want it, when they want it. They’re clearing house before turning their full efforts to the north.”

“It has the Peregrine’s fingers all over it,” Vivienne darkly said. “The man’s dangerous enough on the field, but if he has a few months to prepare? It’s going to get ugly, Masego.”

“She’ll have a plan,” he said. “She always does.”

“Well, we haven’t run out of lakes yet,” Vivienne half-smiled. “So there’s always that.”

Masego’s lips quirked in answer.

“Still no word from her?” he asked.

“None,” Hakram said. “But she’d have returned by now if she wasn’t making gains, it’s been near five months.”

Or she could be dead , Masego thought but did not say. Precious little was known of what would await their friend in the Everdark.

“And on your front?” Vivienne asked. “No sign of the Ashuran fleet?”

“They’ve either found countermeasures to scrying or they keep priests on their ships,” he said. “It makes finding their whereabouts difficult. The raids have not ceased, but Father says they’d have to be fools to give that obvious a sign they were about to strike. There’s no telling when they’ll attack until they’re visible from the coast.”

“I’ll spare no tears for that lot if you manage to bruise them,” she said. “But be careful, Zeze. Don’t risk yourself for a Praesi city.”

He decided, diplomatically, not to mention his agreed-on position when the Ashurans would come.

“And it’s going well with your fathers?” Hakram asked. “I know what you found in Arcadia shook you.”

“It has been... difficult,” Masego admitted. “There have been arguments.”

Vivienne’s eyes went sharp.

“Do you need a way out?”

He shook his head.

“I suppose you could call it a religious disagreement,” he said.

“Coming from the average Praesi, that would worry me,” Hakram mildly said. “Coming from you, I will confess to something sharper.”

“It will pass,” Masego said. “They simply need to accept I will not forever live on their terms.”

His friend shared a look, but did not comment. He licked his lips.

“Hakram,” he said. “Before Catherine left...”

He trailed off.

“Yes?” the orc encouraged.

The mage folded his arms together.

“No,” he finally said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Adjutant’s keen eyes appraised him.

“Are you certain?”

“Faith,” Masego mused. “It is had or it is not. There is no middle ground.”

“So I’ve heard,” Vivienne murmured, eyeing the orc at her side.

“Then let’s cut this short before the Empress succeeds at listening in,” Hakram said. “I’ll scry you again in an hour with the text we’ve received, Masego.”

“I will be here,” he honestly replied.

A round of farewells, and then he was looking down at simple water. A strange sadness lingered in the room, and he turned towards Indrani to comment on it before realizing she was not here. Masego frowned, brushing back a braid. It was not the first time he’d made the mistake, and he was growing increasingly uncomfortable over it. The sooner he was rid of this city and its trouble, the better.

In the end, however, it would be another month before the Ashurans attacked.

Ye Mighty

“Alas, though your jest was cutting this axe is even sharper.”
– Dread Emperor Vindictive

The Lord of Silent Steps was in a pensive mood.

That was only right, as Ivah’idimas’iyanya’ajolig had found much to ponder of late. Being cast out of the Zapohar and forced to seek salvation in the Burning Lands had been meant as humiliation piled onto death, not mercy, and yet... here it was. Still alive, though months had passed. It was a strange thing to outlive one’s despair, and stranger still to pass beyond it. Such a matter required contemplation, the guidance of the whispers in the Night, but now when Ivah sought those murmurs known to all of the Firstborn it found only laughter. Full-throated and loud in the complete silence that surrounded it, a clarion call of mockery. And so Ivah of the Losara Sigil knew itself then to be damned, bound forever to the endless white plain it saw when it closed its eyes. It was all it dreamed of, now. Treading a boundless field of snow under a night that knew no moon or stars, leaving neither footstep nor sound as it marched on nowhere. Never tiring, never ceasing. Chasing a cold void forever out of reach.

It was terrifying – and yet it also soothed, like nothing it had ever known.

Clarity was required, and so clarity was sought. Losara Queen was beyond granting such a boon unto the likes of Ivah, for the queen was more akin to a deluge than a person – sweeping all it came cross, drowning them in the depths of itself. One could not bargain with the tides, only obey or perish. Yet there were others, slayers of Mighty that followed in the wake of the flood, and first among them stood the Mighty Archer. It did not claim to be rylleh, yet acted every inch of it regardless. It was presumptuous for the likes of Ivah to approach a superior unbid, though it did regardless as there was great need. It was sprawled against broken pillars, feet propped up close to the flames of a fire as it roasted cuts of silin meat over the flames. The sight of it made Ivah uncomfortable, for it was very unnatural. Humans, it was well known, ate only herbs and stones – as a learned Mighty, Ivah knew the stones were eaten not for sustenance but to help digestion – and became struck with terror when away from the light of the sun. The Mighty Archer must have blood from another race, for there could be no other explanation.

The Firstborn knelt facing the Mighty, arms and hands angled so that it could be seen it held no weapons. The human’s strange coloured eyes flicked to it, curious.

“Great Mighty,” Ivah said. “I would have guidance in matters of damnation.”

“Oh boy,” Mighty Archer sighed. “I am nowhere drunk enough for this.”

Boy. This was cattle-term, yes? Was the Mighty implying such worries as he had expressed were only fit for cattle? Ah, it was reminding Ivah of the ancient text ‘Seven Husks of the Moon’, which stated that the pursuit of Night was holy act and therefore no ill could come of it. The Lord of Silent Steps slowly nodded. Mighty Archer was truly learned, to know of this.

“Yet in estrangement from the Night, do we not lose our purpose?” Ivah asked.

“Where’s fucking Hakram when you need him?” Mighty Archer said. “Look, Ivah, you’ve got the wrong woman for this kind of talk. Purpose isn’t really my thing.”

Ivah blinked.

“Should purpose not be sought?” it asked.

“Take it from me, sweetling, the big picture stuff is better left to the worriers of this outfit,” Mighty Archer said. “You and me, we’re sword arms. It doesn’t have to be complicated for us.”

The Lord cocked its head to the side.

“Then our purpose is the purpose of Losara Queen,” it said. “For it can see what we cannot.”

“Now you’re getting it,” Mighty Archer encouraged. “Sure we’ve got our rough edges, but this is a pretty good band as these things go. We’ve even done proper villain stuff, which should tickle your Evil pickle. Abducted a princess the once, and we even stole the sun a while back.”

The Firstborn choked.

“Mighty Archer, I would have understanding,” Ivah said. “By speaking the sun, do you mean light?”

“Nah, it was the actual sun,” the Mighty replied, scratching its chin. “Thief swiped it from that princess we kidnapped. Although we couldn’t find a way to pawn the damned thing and Summer ended up stealing it back, so I guess that one should be called a wash. We did ego-murder the two highest entities of fae royalty not long after, though, so all in all we came out ahead.”

The Lord of Silent Steps swallowed, mouth gone dry.

“Is it not the power of the Splendid that we wield?” it asked.

“That kind of shit doesn’t just lie around, Ivah,” Mighty Archer chided. “We had to murder, like, at least five royals to steal it. And the one duke, but I think that was just Cat making a point. Good times.”

“It is said the eldest of the Splendid are as gods made into flesh,” Ivah said.

The Mighty leaned forward and speared a cut of meat with its knife, bringing it to its lip and biting with relish. It chewed and swallowed, only then answering.

“So you wonder how we’re still alive,” Mighty Archer mused. “You’re not wrong to ask. The Queen of Summer could have splattered us all over the ground without even sweating. But only if we’d fought her dumb, Ivah. If we’d gone brawling. So we didn’t.”

The knife was pointed at the Firstborn, steel glinting under the fire’s light.

“It’s why your Sve Noc is screwed,” the Mighty continued. “Your entire people, really. If some of you were solemn Above-fellators you might have a shot, but this is a villain scrap. You won’t get a story for armour or a last moment save from some meddling Choir. This is about who’s willing to do the darkest shit to win.”

“I do not understand,” Ivah admitted.

“It means our enemies down here are trying to fight fire with oil,” the monster grinned, baring teeth. “Hells, I’m no gentle flower but the other two? We’ve got the Doom of Liesse and the woman that put her down on our roster. I pity the fuckers who try to escalate against that .”

Ivah saw it then: flickering red, embers and flame. On the steel, on the eyes, on the ivory teeth. Scarlet like blood and ruin, a glimmer of what was to come.

“So don’t you worry about damnation, Ivah,” the Mighty Archer said. “Because there’s a lot worse than that coming for the people in our way.”

She bit into the meat with sharp teeth, juice flowing down her chin, and Ivah prostrated itself before leaving as quickly as it possibly could. It had found answers, and become all the more troubled for them. The Lord of Silent Steps dreamt again, that night, but it was not of the endless white plain. It remembered terrible oaths spoken as it knelt in blood, drowning in an ocean of frost as its veins turned to ice and terrifying stillness claimed the world. And power, too, sister to that which it knew and yet so different. So hungry , a beast that could devour all of Creation and still covet more. Clarity still eluded it when it woke. And so Ivah sought the other creature that strode in the wake of the flood, the shade with scarlet eyes that burned so cold. It never slept, and in the early hours before most the sigil woke the Lord of Silent Steps found it waiting in the depths of the Crossroads. Beneath them Great Lotow was quiet, cowed.

Still quaking in the aftermath of the hour where the greatest sigil-holders of the city had been taken away without a trace.

The Mighty Shade was as a silhouette glimpsed in mist: transient, ephemeral and always treacherous. It sang of death to Ivah’s senses, something ripped from the embrace of the grave and made to serve beyond it. Looking upon it was... difficult, now. Before it had been a shade of the dead given power and purpose, but since Ivah had taken oaths it sometimes saw beyond the façade. There were moments where it did not see scarlet eyes and scarlet robes but a corpse with rotting dark skin, a bloody wound where its heart should be. The urge to kneel in its presence was overwhelming, battering away at the Firstborn’s mind. Ivah might be Mighty, but it was mightier still. The Lord of Silent Steps waited in silence, standing besides it.

“You may approach, Ivah,” the Mighty Shade said.

It did so, and knelt with the appropriate demonstration of weakness.

“Speak.”

“Great Mighty,” Ivah said. “I would have guidance in matters of damnation.”

It laughed, as if delighted, and the Lord of Silent Steps shivered. The sound was a caress on its soul, the fingers trailing having nails like knives.

“My very trade, once upon a time,” the Mighty Shade mused. “This ought to prove amusing. Do continue.”

“I stand estranged from the Night,” Ivah said. “Without purpose understood. This perplexes me.”

The shade smiled, for a flicker a corpse’s ugly rictus before it became smooth flesh again.

“It is natural to feel adrift after finding a new mistress,” the Mighty Shade said. “It is Ivah that fears what it does not understand. You are no longer that person. Accepting this will grant you clarity.”

The Firstborn was no fool, and so did not ask who it was now instead. Such questions had power, in both asking and answering, and it would not so easily grant it to the smiling death thing.

“Clever little drow,” the Mighty Shade murmured. “She does have an eye for talent, doesn’t she? You’ll do quite nicely.”

“Great Mighty,” Ivah said. “I have sworn oaths and given service, but these things are not purpose. Fetters without sentence are senseless.”

The shade’s gaze burned scarlet, until it became sunken gold on desiccated skin. Ivah hid its disgust.

“So they are,” the Mighty Shade said. “I will tell you, little drow, a story about two deaths.”

The Lord of Silent Steps almost flinched.

“There was once a land of many kings and queens,” the dead thing said. “They were proud and powerful, ruling over river, rock and sand. Many were their wonders, for they knew terrible secrets and flinched not at the cost of great works. For many years they warred, on each other and great realms abroad, and iron did sharpen iron.”

The shade smiled dreamily.

“Then a storm shook the sea, and blew a single broken ship to their shores,” the Mighty Shade said. “On it were strange and foolish men, lost and mad with thirst. These creatures were treated as curiosities, taught the tongues of the kingdoms and made to tell tales of their faraway home. They could have been snuffed out, my dear Ivah, as easy as snapping one’s fingers.”

The dead thing snapped its own, then laughed.

“They were spared, for they spoke of trade and wealth and fresh wonders brought to the kings and queens,” the shade revealed. “And so another ship was built in a city of corals, and sent back.”

The Mighty Shade fell silent.

“They returned, in time,” the Mighty eventually said. “With many ships. Many men. And though they did bring wonders, they were wonders of war and great slaughter did come of it.”

The dead thing leaned forward.

“And yet they could have been shattered like clay, Ivah,” the shade whispered. “Had the kings and queens put aside their hatreds and seen what was to come. Instead they warred on each other still, thinking to use the strangers to settle their grudges. Cities fell, one after another, and when finally the doom was understood it was too late. The strange men clapped irons onto those once-proud rulers, for theirs was a war of chains.”

The Mighty Shade shook itself, as if waking from a dream.

“This they called empire,” the dead thing said. “They made a wasteland and called it peace, knowing not what they wrought. It would be many years, before the irons were broken. And even now their weight is felt, for inheritance is a manner of remembrance.”

The Mighty looked upon Ivah, calm and depthless.

“Do you understand the meaning of this story, little drow?” it asked.

“The worthy take,” the Lord of Silent Steps softly said. “The worthy rise.”

“You reach the threshold of understanding,” the Mighty Shade said. “Kind soul that I am, I will guide you across. The first death is in the story told. The second is in the story grasped. Purpose will follow.”

“Many kingdoms died, in your words,” Ivah said.

“One death,” the shade said, “in many parts. There is reflection.”

When understanding finally came, it was not gentle.

“Our ship came,” the Lord of Silent Steps said. “Bearing three strangers.”

“It’s too late now, you poor creature,” the dead thing murmured. “You invited us in. You would have purpose? It has already been granted to you.”

Its smile was cold.

“Ours is the business of empire,” the shade said. “And what a peace we will make, dearest Ivah. Oh, I think they will remember this one for a very long time.”

“I am not estranged from the Night,” the Firstborn croaked. “I make war against it.”

“Tremble, ye Mighty, for a new age is upon you,” the death thing laughed. “I was a slow learner in this, little drow, but I have learned. Iron is brittle. It breaks, no matter how sharp. So let us make something new instead, yes?”

Ivah’s shoulder shook.

“Rise, Lord of Silent Steps,” the shade ordered. “Our queen grows impatient. Today we take Lotow, and you have a role to play.”

Night was beyond Ivah’s reach, but the hunger was not.

—

The bridge was broken.

It was an old break, unlike that which he had earlier passed. The bridges linking the Crossroads to the Column had shattered when the eldritch gate had devoured part of it, yet the lay of them could be tread if one was careful. Ivah had been, leaping across chasms with a lightness beyond mortal ken and landing without a sound. An entire floor of Great Lotow’s heart had been whisked away, leaving the Column above it to fall. It had partly shattered under the impact, and remained angled. Apt to tumble down if force was exerted. No doubt the sigils at the bottom were living in terror of this happening, shivering in their holes as they hid from the precarious balance above. Ivah cared little, having passed like a ghost through the wreck before descending to heights untouched by the wreck. Down into the centre of the city, where the most powerful of the sigils dwelled. Three of them were without their sigil-holder, but one had refused to the call for council. Mighty Zarkan had demanded tithe and alliance against a rival for price of attendance, and been duly refused: the Queen of Lost and Found did not brook such bargains.

No doubt the Mighty had puffed with arrogance upon learning of the council’s outcome, praising itself for its foresight in avoiding doom. Had. For another gate had been wrought this morning, and it had been a sharp lesson. The Zarkan Sigil held three districts, Ivah had been told, that had once been the residences of the wealthy and powerful of Great Lotow. These districts would have been raised with wells and gardens, making them worthy prizes to take and hold. Ivah now stood before the largest of the three, and looked upon the wreckage with calm eye. The traces of Losara Queen’s working could still be seen in the deep gouges around the mouth of the district were the edges of the gate had cut. The territory of Mighty Zarkan had been sealed shut for exactly the quarter of an hour. From the outside, anyway. The gate had spewed out a flood of icy waters that tore through the district mercilessly, drowning or crushing the slow and smashing houses and temples alike as if they were kindling. Corpses could still be seen among the rubble on the other side of the broken bridge, left to waft Night without harvesting.

The Zarkan were too terrified of a repeat to risk coming out of the highest places of their territory.

Ivah waited, standing in the open. They would see it, and come to bargain. It was not long before Mighty Zarkan made its way to the other half of the bridge, and the Firstborn studied it curiously. It was tall and proud, strong in Night and little marked by the killings that would have seen it rise. In the air, Ivah tasted fear. It wondered if it should feel kinship for this one, some sense of belonging that would stand against the oaths and purpose it had taken. And yet all it found was contempt. What a petty creature Zarkan was, shrouded in terror even as it painted courage over its face. Blind, lost, humbled by forces beyond its understanding. Did it regret now the demands it had made? No, Ivah thought, it would not. That was not the way of the Mighty. The worthy took, the worthy rose. The only sin was death, for death was failure, and Zarkan still lived. What was there to regret? And when finally the doom was understood, it was too late. The Firstborn would squabble themselves into nothingness. The nerezim would slaughter them with wonders of war, or they would be broken into Losara Queen’s service. Grief was due, it thought, but it did not come. Ivah had slain many in its time, harvested their worth and made it its own. It had not grieved then, had it?

“And now we do the same,” the Lord of Silent Steps murmured, “to the Everdark itself.”

Mighty Zarkan struck the foot of its spear against stone, demanding attention as soon as it arrived.

“Mighty Ivah,” the sigil-holder said. “Rylleh to cattle. Speak your fill.”

Ivah hummed, cocked its head to the side.

“Lord,” it corrected, feeling out the foreign word. “Lord Ivah.”

The other Firstborn spat into the deeps.

“You wear meaningless words for your sigil,” Zarkan said. “Shame on you.”

“What would happen,” the Lord of Silent Steps said, “if the gate was kept for a full hours?”

Mighty Zarkan stilled.

“Would you drown, Zarkan?” Ivah smiled. “No matter. When the gate finally closes, you will stand utterly alone. A sigil of one. What a sight that would be.”

“Losara is weak,” the Mighty said. “It could barely slay Urulan.”

“Is the first among your rylleh in this district?” Ivah asked.

“Are you threatening me?” Zarkan hissed.

“No, then,” Ivah mused. “Good, it will simplify matters.”

Without another word, it turned and began to walk away.

“Wait,” Mighty Zarkan called out. “What do you want?”

Ivah turned. Fear was beginning to peek out from under the mask. How easily people came undone.

“Everything, Zarkan,” it said. “We want everything. And you will give it to us, because otherwise you will die.”

“I won’t take oaths,” the Mighty insisted.

“ Then you will die ,” Ivah barked, fury taking hold of it. “Eldest Night, do you not see? We have nothing to bargain with. You can tell yourself this is only a single city, that the further cabals will break the thrust, but you are missing the point. This is not war, it never was. It is grave robbing and we lost before they ever set foot here. You think Sve Noc will raise a finger to end this? They are following our rules. Giving us what we want, every step of the way.”

He laughed and the sound of it was brittle.

“I care not if you take the oaths, Zarkan,” Ivah said. “It changes nothing. Someone filled with your Night will do so in your stead after you are slain. They cannot lose, because there are no stakes for them. They can only gain.”

The Firstborn shook its head.

“We can only gain,” Ivah corrected softly. “For if the only sin is death, mine is the business of empire.”

“You speak madness,” Mighty Zarkan said, face gone pale.

“Peace,” the Lord of Silent Steps said. “I speak of peace, Zarkan.”

Interlude: Inheritance

“Dearest Edda, beloved daughter. I would offer you words of wisdom or comfort, but after a lifetime of ink I find my hands have finally taken leave of me. I have written of good and evil for many years, seeking truths, but in the end I have no answers to offer. All I have, my heart, is a prayer. That you be kind. That you leave the world a little better than you found it and teach your children to do the same. And maybe, just maybe, one day we will be what we pretend we are.”
– Last will and testament of King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

Wekesa had fought three wars in his lifetime, and had slowly come to realize that the Tenth Crusade was nothing like the others.

There’d been so many skirmishes over the years he could hardly recall all of them, so many faces and names and defiant – or accusatory, or castigating, or a hundred different tones only ever hiding the same fear – speeches. Enough dead heroes to make a mansion of the corpses. There was no glory in it, Warlock had known from the start. How many of those young men and women had soft faces, barely into adolescence? Those fights had not been part of a war, though Amadeus fancied otherwise when he murmured of his old argument with the Heavens. It’d been... ratcatching, Wekesa often thought. Trapping and killing vermin before they could grow to be a true problem. Even using the word execution would have implied a sentence, an act of judgement. There’d been none, though. Nothing behind the slaying save the decision never to allow those rats to grow and spread. It sometimes amused Warlock that for all his old friend’s talk of the fundamental disparity between the lot of heroes and villains, when given the opportunity to deal out the same treatment he’d not hesitated for a moment.

It was not a deep argument, he knew. The differences were many. Amadeus’ high-minded distaste was for a perceived imbalance between what heroes and villains as a whole were allowed to achieve by their stories, not particular cases, and the Black Knight would likely argue that even similar actions would have different meanings when carried out by mortals instead of Gods. Wekesa could and had appreciated, even when they’d first met, that Amadeus was driven by what could be called a philosophical principle rather than mere lust for power. It’d been a refreshing change, after the then-Apprentice’s years spent rubbing elbows with the nobility of the Empire. It was a deplorably limited understanding of the world, perhaps, but a notch above what any of their contemporaries had been able to contemplate. In the end, though, it was still missing the forest for the trees. Seeking redress for scales uneven was still putting stock in the scale itself, when it was that thing’s very existence that should be questioned. There was no fixing Creation, Wekesa suspected.

And if by some miracle it was, the Gods would promptly break it again.

And so Warlock had put his energies where they rightly belonged: his research, his family and his friends. Disappearing into some remote locale to study in peace would have been short-sighted, unfortunately. An old monster alone in the mountains, meddling in things man was not meant to know? He would have been the proving grounds of a dozen heroes. Besides, keeping strong ties to Alaya and Amadeus’ empire had secured to old libraries and a steady source of income and materials. If that meant occasionally making an appearance at court, disciplining a few ambitious sorts and smothering nascent heroism when it sprouted? Well, it was a decent bargain. He did not regret making it, not even now. There’d been some frictions before the understanding was properly reached, of course. Amadeus had wanted him to found some sort of mage academy that’d supplant the teaching cadres of the High Lords, and not quite understood why Wekesa had refused. He’d tried to lower the years Warlock would have spent as headmaster of the institution, before Wekesa flatly told him there was nothing to compromise over. Warlock had helped to create this ‘modern empire’ of theirs because it mattered to them, not because he himself particularly cared about the state of Praes. The country could be an empty desert and it wouldn’t matter to him.

He’d fought the wars that saw them rise on personal grounds, not principled ones.

It was the worst argument they’d ever had and for that Wekesa blamed Hye, who’d left before the Conquest even ended, and managed to both cut Amadeus to the bone and leave him twice in love as before with the same sentence when she walked away. The wound had never entirely healed, and Warlock had ended up paying the price in a deadbeat Ranger’s stead. Typical of her, really. She never stuck around for the parts that weren’t thrilling, the sometimes tedious spadework of building and maintaining relationships. Tikoloshe had noted it was almost mythically hypocritical of him to blame someone for having bonds only on their own terms, but his husband was wrong. He’d put in the work, afterwards, to clean up the mess between himself and his oldest friend in the world. Hye, on the other hand, simply made do with visitations every few years that Amadeus came back from split halfway between longing and chagrin. Wekesa’s long-standing reservations about that arrangement had been the tide that carried him closer to Alaya, as it happened.

When they’d first met her in the Green Stretch all those years ago he’d not been as close as Amadeus to the woman who became Malicia: he and Sabah had shared the seat of designated third wheel as those two strange youths gravitated around each other, everything else falling to the wayside of their long conversations. Still, he’d found he well-educated for a peasant – her mother had been a tutor to a minor noble line, once – and as charming as she was intelligent. He’d considered her a close acquaintance, and been quite infuriated to hear she’d been unceremoniously abducted by the Sentinels because the waste of skin holding the Tower was hungry for seraglio beauties. It would be years before they met again, after bloodily climbing the ladder of influence, and when Wekesa next saw Alaya there were only shards of the girl she’d once been remaining. He’d grieved for that, but the woman she’d become had been fascinating. Broken, perhaps, but all the more brilliant for it. But there’d been a war on, soon enough, and though they’d fought for her claim his reasons for supporting it had been largely selfish. If Amadeus had been the one aiming for the throne, there would have been decades of war instead of years.

Praesi would have been violently disgusted at the notion of a Duni claiming the Tower, much less one inclined to eradicate the aristocracy.

In the years that followed, however, his opinion had shifted. Alaya was undeniably more fit to rule. She was Praesi in a way none of them were, understood the people she reigned over where Amadeus would have messily carved away at them until they were more to his liking. And though Malicia used the Calamities, she did so sparingly: she preferred to rule on her own merits, without other Named propping up her crown. She asked little of them save friendship and the rare favour. It was an ideal arrangement, in his eyes, and he’d frankly told her as much. The confluence in their opinions had only grown as the years passed, and while Amadeus busied himself with his Callowan projects Wekesa had spent long stretches in Ater for his research. Seen the harsh demands authority made of Alaya, and admitted to himself that Black would not have weathered them so well. The Tower... it magnified what you were. Your virtues, but also your flaws. Malicia had mastered hers, but the same influence would have made something ugly of Amadeus. Perverted his best qualities. Scribe disagreed, of course, but Eudokia had stark blinders. She’d only ever seen herself as a tool, Amadeus as worthy to use her, and so to use everyone else. There was no place for nuance in that perspective. That Sabah had never weighed in on the matter had been telling, he’d thought.

She was ever only so circumspect when coddling one of them.

And now Sabah was dead. Killed by some murderous vagrant from the Dominion at the behest of the Wandering Bard. Wekesa had wept for it, after. For the loss of such a beloved friend, for the hole she would leave in all of them with her absence. It’d not been the same since. Amadeus had become reckless while telling himself it was calculated risk, burning one bridge after another until it’d left him stranded in the middle of fucking Procer with heroic wolves baying at his heels. Alaya had been forced to become increasingly heavy-handed to keep it all from falling apart while simultaneously the particulars of the Woe prevented her from dealing with them as she legitimately should. Warlock had made it clear that Masego was off-limits, of course, but was increasingly coming to sympathize with her situation. Wekesa and Amadeus had dropped a mess into her lap and then heavily restricted her means to deal with threats not of her own making. It was unfair, and the private admission of that had done much to reconcile Warlock with the necessity of putting his son under house arrest for a few years.

As for the Black Queen, well, Warlock had washed his hands clean of that. He’d help Alaya deal with the aftermath by making it clear to Amadeus that Catherine Foundling had been dead for over a year now, but he wouldn’t have the imitation’s blood on his hands when his old friend returned. He could hardly serve as a mediator if he’d taken part in the matter in need of mediation.

It’d all grown so complicated, hadn’t it? This war was so different from all the others. The civil strife that had seen Alaya rise to the throne, the Conquest itself – they’d been of the same mould, in a way. They’d all been young or in their prime, and still making their mark on Creation. But now that mark was made, and they were being forced to defend it. They’d spread out too far, Wekesa often thought. Sabah had died thousands of mile away from the Wasteland, fighting over some League shithole they’d never seen before and likely never would again. Amadeus had been caught in Proceran heartlands while prosecuting a war that should have been the Black Queen’s by right. That there was a Black Queen at all was a reminder of how badly the Callowan situation had been blundered over, and for all that Wekesa sympathized with Alaya she’d hardly handled the Wasteland better. Akua Sahelian should have been abducted year ago, every bit of knowledge wrung out of her mind before she was butchered so thoroughly not even devils would be able to get their due from her. If Malicia had needed a doomsday weapon she should have asked him, not tried to get clever in house already visibly on fire.

And the damned fire had only spread since. Wekesa was not pleased he had to intervene, but who else was left? It’d have to be him. The Ashurans would be broken here, and afterwards he’d free Alaya’s hands to deal with the rest of the situation. Feelings would get hurts, cities would burn, but in the end the only people involved who mattered to him were pragmatists. There would be eternity to get over this little scuffle, as his friends had all the others before them.

It was a month full of long silences that passed before the Ashuran war fleet finally arrived. His son and husband remained at odds, though thankfully neither were the kind of men to trade barbs or seek out screaming matches. The work proceeded at a faster pace now that conversation had effectively died out. Wekesa occasionally felt a pang of regret at turning what was one of the greatest achievements of Praesi sorcery – in his own chosen field of study, to boot! – into what was effectively a pack of munitions, but he could think of no other way. Shatha’s Maze had been the main sea defence of the city for too long. There’d been centuries of opportunity for the Thalassocracy to study it, and though last time they’d struck at Thalassina it had been treachery that’d been their means of passing it that did not mean the Maze was unbreakable. That pack of greedy sailors wouldn’t be risking an assault at all, if that were the case, and Alaya was certain that they were coming. She still had agents in Ashuran ranks, though entire swaths of her network had been purged before the Thalassocracy declared war.

The ships came under cover of night.

That much had been expected. With scrying being blocked off, it was now watchtowers that served as the city’s first line of defence. Considering the nature of Ashuran sorcery, sailing at night even in treacherous waters was hardly difficult and afforded some element of surprise. What had not been expected was that the fleet moved under illusory cover as well. Some kind of sea mirage, Warlock found out, closer to natural phenomenon that Praesi illusions or fae glamour. Much harder to detect than either, though also likely much more difficult to maintain. That bought the invaders two days of unseen advance before they were caught out by a Thalassinan mage attempting to scry the weather ahead of their fleet and finding it impossible to do so. It alarmed High Lord Idriss enough that the man ordered a ritual strike at the area, calling down lightning from the sky, and though the sorcery impacted Ashuran defences harmlessly it did shatter the mirage. Ashur had stolen the initiative, and there was barely a day and a half to organize before they were on the city.

The work on the Maze was mostly finished, but not entirely. It would have to prove sufficient. Mass rituals by High Lord Idriss’ mages lent a finishing touch to the trap while allowing Warlock and his son to remain at full strength. Masego’s perch out in the corals was fully accommodated with defensive wards and the few creature comforts his son had requested, and he left for it half a day before the Ashurans arrived. The solemnity of the parting ease the tensions between them some, though not as much as Wekesa would have liked.

“I’d still be more comfortable with your father taking the position,” Tikoloshe admitted, smoothing away nonexistent wrinkles on their son’s robes.

“I see no need to revisit the matter,” Masego bluntly replied.

Wekesa discretely shook his head while meeting his husband’s eyes. Now was not the time.

“Be careful,” Warlock said. “They might be meddlers but there are a great many of them. If it gets out of hand, I’d rather you retreat and we fight over the city itself.”

“I’ve no intention of risking my life for Thalassina, I assure you,” Masego said.

He nodded in approval. In this, at least, he had his priorities straight. Wekesa hesitated, then pulled his son into a tight embrace. Masego stiffened but eventually returned it, their clutch on each other growing tight. There were no guarantees, in war. They both knew that all too well.

“Come back to us,” Warlock whispered.

“I will,” Masego whispered back, voice little more than croak. “You two stay safe as well. I know you’ll have walls in between, but rituals-”

“-are never a toy, always dangerous,” Wekesa finished softly.

One of the first lessons he’d taught his son. Magic was beautiful and wondrous, but it should never be taken lightly. Great mages had believed themselves to have mastered their powers fully, and always paid for that presumption. There were no exceptions. They released each other and Tikoloshe kissed both their son’s cheeks, fingers lingering on his shoulder. Masego was so thin , now.

“We’ll have a family supper tonight,” ‘Loshe said. “Just us. It’s been too long.”

Masego nodded before heading out for the docks, where a ship would await him. They both watched him leave, standing together.

“He will not be that tender with us again for a very long time,” Tikoloshe murmured.

Wekesa grimaced, but did not deny it. After today they’d have to bind his powers and take him into custody. He would not forgive them that for a very long time.

“Preparations are done,” Warlock said. “The rest we can worry about tomorrow.”

Work mercifully took away his mind from it all, for there was much still left to do. The set-up was not particular complex – Petronian sorcery was a straightforward as the Miezan’s who’d created it – but it was rather laborious. Two-way scrying panels were set up along the city’s outer battlements so that Wekesa would have good overview of the Maze and the Ashurans, then anchored in a crescent moon around him as the last touches were put to the circle of power where he’d direct the rituals from. That the defence was taking place on a High Lord’s dime meant the very finest materials had been acquired for this, obsidian from the Grey Eyries and Callowan limestone mixing with half a dozen other substances that put together could have easily bought a luxurious mansion in Ater. As Warlock sat at the heart of the array, four more circles were initiated. Every practitioner in the city had been pressed into service for the purpose, which was rather simple: they were to release sorcery into their attributed circle, where Wekesa would be able to take it and use it for his own purposes.

The recent labour of activating the wards of Shatha’s Maze had left too many mages exhausted and on the edge of burning out, sadly, which meant that to make up the losses two thousand criminals had to be slain and their life force provided instead. Wekesa disliked using such primitive means, but it could not be denied that the power resulting was pure and plentiful. If they’d had another week it could have been avoided, but as things stood he’d have to make his peace with it. It was late morning when the preparations were complete, and from that point forward Warlock sat with his eyes closed. Keeping mastery of four circles beyond his own while not actively using the power within required a great deal of concentration. Tikoloshe sat next to him, idly paging through a rather lurid Proceran romance, and though his husband remained silent his mere presence was soothing.

The Ashuran war fleet came into sight halfway past Noon Bell, and so finally the battle for Thalassina began.

It was said that the Thalassocracy had more war ships than the rest of Calernia put together, and it was easy to believe that while looking upon their fleet. More than three hundred ships, flying the colours of the Baalite Hegemony with the masked sun of Ashur set on them. It was not even the full muster of Ashuran might, Wekesa knew. There were still ships out raiding, and smaller defense fleet left to anchor in the Ashuran home isle.

“Around third of those are repurposed merchant ships,” Tikoloshe noted, his practiced eye picking up on the signs. “No ballistas on them, they’ll be serving as troop transports.”

“It won’t matter, if they never make shore,” Warlock replied.

Ashur took the offensive, as was only to be expected. By now they’d have realized that Shatha’s Maze had been activated, though they should still be unaware of the... modifications added to it. Wekesa kept the four pools of power close at hand. Two of those, he’d already decided, would be kept in reserve to detonate the Maze. Only one was necessary strictly, speaking, but best to be prudent. The other two were his to shape in answer to Ashuran assaults, however. After that he would have to draw on his own power, which would be difficult. His preferred field of study was useless on water, and his knowledge of Sabrathan sorcery was limited. There would be no turning the spells around here as he had done when duelling the Witch of the Woods. It would have been madness to attempt the same tactics against an army that he’d used against a single Named, regardless. One Gifted he could account for, no matter how talented, but hundreds on hundreds? There were too many variables, even if they resorted to rituals. The waters ahead of the war fleet rippled unnaturally, and Wekesa learned forward.

“So it begins,” the Sovereign of Red Skies murmured.

It was a ritual, that much was obvious. The limitations of their practitioners were fully displayed as massive amounts of sorcery sunk into the waves but moved only sluggishly: Ashuran mages were known used to working in concert.

“Strike?” Tikoloshe said.

Wekesa studied the sea’s surface. The ripples were gaining in strength, but not forward. Splitting to the sides? Ah. He smiled.

“They believe the defence is being directed from the underground facilities on the shore,” he said.

“We never took down the wards on them,” Tikoloshe noted. “There was no reason to.”

“Let them waste their first blow, then,” Warlock said.

It was an interesting working, he had to admit. Tendrils of water rose from the sea and began spinning like gargantuan drills, impacting the shore with thunderous crack and going straight through the rock. Quicker than simple water should, even rotating. A hardening effect, perhaps? He could see no trace of it, but there was only so much he could find out at this distance. If there’d been anyone underground, they would be dead by now. Eventually the Ashurans released their ritual, the water collapsing. It was either drunk by the earth or remained in large puddles, save for the parts that trickled back into the sea.

“And now they see there are no issues with the Maze,” Tikoloshe said. “Meaning it was either never overseen or they struck at nothing.”

“Even if they’d wiped out our mages most the wards would still be working,” Wekesa noted. “That cannot be their strategy whole.”

His statement proved to be correct when ritual began again. It had similar effect on the sea as the previous one, though Warlock noticed the sorcery was going broad instead of sinking deep. Interesting. Not tendrils this time, then.

“They’re going around it,” his husband suddenly said. “They don’t need tides if they can make their own wind, ‘Kesa. They’re going to spread sea over shore and bypass the Maze entirely.”

“They will try,” he shrugged, and reached for the first pool of power.

If the ritual was allowed to proceed and stretched out the waters on both sides it would be difficult to deal with – he’d either have to split the power and pit himself against the enemy on both sides simultaneously from a position of weakness or strike twice, which would waste his entire offensive power. Yet Wekesa still allowed them to pour sorcery into the sea. He had to make every strike count, to letting them get to the point of no return would be more efficient. Eventually he had to make a judgement call, being uncertain of the precise tipping point. Closing his eyes, Warlock shaped the power and released it. It came out as pure kinetic force, angled in a loose triangle and impacting the sea with all the strength he could put out. The dark-skinned man sighed as he opened his eyes and witnessed his work. It would have worked better as a Trismegistan formula, he had to admit. Still, even in this manner the strike was massive enough to begin a tidal wave and send it tumbling towards the Ashuran fleet. While the wave hid the enemy from his sight there must have been panic when the enemy mages realized they had to abandon their ritual after investing so heavily in it.

The backlash ought to kill more than a few.

“Something’s wrong,” Tikoloshe murmured.

Warlock’s brow rose. It was true the enemy were slow on the answer, but that could simply be the result of their mages fearing the backlash. And yet... He adjusted one of the scrying panels. Was part of the Ashuran fleet missing?

“They went into it,” he realized. “Underwater.”

Absurd, unless... The tidal wave slowed. Stopped to a standstill. And then it turned around .

“Merciless Gods,” Wekesa murmured. “Have they been using only half their mages this whole time?”

If that were true they wouldn’t be simple hundreds, they would be thousands. There shouldn’t be that many mages in the whole of Ashur.

“That’s a repurpose of structure, Wekesa,” his husband said. “Slow and horribly sloppy – they brute forced it, I’d wager – but it is. Which they shouldn’t be able to do.”

Sabrathan sorcery wouldn’t be able to handle a ritual that delicate and abstract, the mages would start losing control halfway through.

“Jaquinite,” he said. “That was Jaquinite sorcery. They have Procerans with them.”

Hells and Damnation. The Principate’s mages might be backwoods savages, but they were a lot more flexible than the Ashurans. The scope of rituals available to the opposition hadn’t just doubled, it was... Hard to calculate, and there were more pressing matters.

“They want to tear down the Maze,” Warlock hissed. “And get ships through to assault the remains from both sides.”

Which he could not allow, not when his son was in the middle. The wards around Masego should allow him to survive the tidal wave, but he’d be out there alone and surrounded. He reached for the second pool of power without hesitation. There was no time for subtlety: he made a wall of force and smashed it into the waters. The backlash had him flinching, and he felt his nose start bleeding. Fuck. The mages keeping the wave going weren’t powerful, but they were many. Slowly, his grip on the sorcery began to slip. It’d break, and then...

“ Link ,” he croaked out, blood in his mouth.

The relief was almost immediate. Thalassina had old wards anchored around it, and linking them to his working had taken the pressure off his will. The city itself groaned, parts of its walls shattering, but his workaround succeeded. While he no longer had control of the power he’d released, he did control the connection his aspect had forged. It was only cut when the tidal wave broke and collapsed back into the sea, and Warlock let out a long breath.

“My turn,” the Sovereign of Red Skies hissed.

He took a third pool of power in hand and let another aspect loose. Ships had been shattered and the Ashuran fleet put in disarray, and that was close enough for his purposes. Imbricate shivered across the length of Creation as he matched the sea to the nine-hundredth and thirty-third hell: the sea of blood. The waters began to turn red, bubbling and rising to a boil. It would not be long before the acidity began eating at the hulls. Halos of light bloomed over the ships, one after another. Tikoloshe shivered.

“Speakers,” the incubus murmured.

They were not fighting him, Warlock noted. The imbrication was proceeding without being hindered, and the ships were not unharmed. No, it felt like something else. A prayer? A call , he thought. Slowly, something answered. He saw it in his mind’s eye. It was not a face, it was too featureless for that. Of what it was made he could not tell, but the glare was blinding. Flesh smoking, Wekesa bared his teeth. He would not bow to priestly meddling. If some entity had come to trouble him, it best be prepared for the consequences. The imbrication he took in hand, abandoning the fleet, and lashed around the not-face.

“Come on, you wretched thing,” Warlock grinned nastily. “Let’s see how you fare on my own grounds.”

It sunk into the depths, the radiance slowly drowned by the sea of blood, and he laughed. Laughed until it evaporated in a storm of blood mist, the thing full and untouched. Not a face, he thought again. It was a mask. Heartbreakingly, impossibly perfect. He looked upon the visage of a god, and that god spoke.

BEGONE.

His bones creaked, his eyes burned and his teeth shattered. His husband was speaking but his ears were ringing. Blinding light came again, not of the creature’s making. He’d lost control of the last pool of power and it had gone wild, raw sorcery devouring all near it and shattering the ground. The mask’s lips opened to speak once more, a great weight settling on his shoulders.

“Shut up,” Hierophant said.

The thing rocked back.

“Seven pillars hold up the sky,” Hierophant sang, thrumming with power. “Four cardinals, one meridian.”

The pressure vanished and Warlock came back to himself. Through the panel he saw a mask of Light in the sky above the Maze, a terrible radiance surrounding his son. Masego stood alone on his spit of rock, black robes fluttering as he raised his palms. The warded corals around him began melting like snow in summer sun.

“The wheel unbroken, spokes are that not,” Hierophant said, voice resounding across the waters. “Thou shall not leave the circle.”

Wekesa closed his eyes just in time. It’d been only the smallest possible sliver of attention from Above, he realized. It could not be bound, not truly. But the attempted binding had forced it to retreat, and it had made its displeasure known beforehand. It had swatted down his son, shattered the coral and the wards alike. He was in the sea now, floating. Still alive. Warlock tried to rise but could not.

He was dying, and the Ashuran fleet advanced.

“No,” he got out. “Not like this. Not my son.”

Tikoloshe held him up, but his husband could not heal.

“I’ve paid my dues,” Warlock hissed. “A lifetime carrying the banner. I am owed. I am owed, do you hear me ?”

It came like a whisper, slithering across his body. Taking away the pain, leaving dull absence behind.

Below listened.

Below remembered, and paid the debt back in full.

Wekesa stood and knew what he must do. He’d been shown. A gurgled word had rows of runes appearing in the air, the most sophisticated binding on Creation, and with fingers like claws he ripped through them. Scattered the runes, broke the contract beyond repair.

“Wekesa?” his husband said.

“Go, Tikoloshe,” he said. “Run. Return home.”

His husband’s face, so handsome and untouched by time even after all these years, creased in a frown.

“No,” the incubus said.

“It will kill you,” Wekesa whispered. “It can’t. I can’t let it. There has never been a devil like you. There may never be again. You are unique .”

“So are you,” Tikoloshe said. “So is he.”

“Run,” Warlock snarled. “I order you.”

He laughed.

“And yet here I am,” the devil said. “I have been myself for a very long time, ‘Kesa.”

“Don’t waste it,” he implored. “After you’re dispersed...”

“What comes back will not be me,” Tikoloshe softly agreed. “A blank slate. Tabula rasa.”

The incubus looked up at the sky.

“I decide this,” he said, tone full of wonder. “Of my own free will.”

His smile was blinding as the sun.

“Isn’t that something?” Tikoloshe murmured.

Wekesa could feel it thinning in his fingers with every passing heartbeat. It would not be granted to him twice. And yet all he could look at was his husband’s eyes.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too,” Tikoloshe replied, and threaded their fingers together.

Wekesa looked up at the sun and breathed out. He thought of the others, suddenly. Sorry, old friends. I’ll be going on ahead, so it’ll be up to you to snuff the candles on your way out. I’ll be waiting with Sabah. He reached out for it then, what they’d shown him. The barest glimpse of the godhead, but oh so gloriously full.

“ Reflect ,” he whispered.

For a moment, for an eternity, Wekesa was unto a god.

He snapped his fingers and the world broke.

—

Hierophant woke up among a sea of corpses and driftwood.

He screamed, but did not flinch.

Chapter 68: Poised

“Obviously you can’t kill me now: your enmity is with the Dread Emperor of Praes, and I’ve already abdicated. I am now but a humble shoemaker, and what kind of hero slays a shoemaker?”
– Dread Emperor Irritant, the Oddly Successful. Later noted to have made surprisingly nice shoes during his three abdications.

“So is there, like, a branch of sorcery all about lakes?” I mused. “Because if I’m going to keep using variations on the same trick it feels like there should be.”

Akua’s brow arched, expressing a monologue’s worth of disdain without her speaking a single word.

“Lakeomancy,” I suggested. “Catherine Foundling, foremost lakeomancer of her age. I could get a stele done like the old emperors – you know, basically a whole monument’s worth of bragging.”

“It would be lacusomancy,” Diabolist sighed. “And there is no such thing. Even hydromancy is not a true discipline, properly speaking. Like most physical effects it falls under the broader aegis of manifestation.”

“That just means we’re pioneers, Akua,” I grinned. “Look at us, bravely exploring the many ways you can steal, drop or otherwise move lakes.”

“Stolen is something of a misnomer,” the shade noted, looking down. “We’ve only borrowed it, practically speaking.”

Well, she wasn’t wrong. Great Strycht had proved as much of a wonder as Great Lotow, in its own way. It was, well, the easiest way to put it was that it’d been a port. Not unlike Mercantis the city had been raised on a large island, though instead of a river it’d been a lake that surrounded it. A lake that was about as large as half of Daoine, which was rather impressive. Useful, too. It hadn’t been this large originally: the basin had been artificially deepened and broadened before tributary rivers were dug into the stone to feed it. Tunnels and waterfalls, some coming from underground sources but others from the surface peaks of the Everdark. Lake Strycht was the freshwater source for an entire third of the inner ring, feeding a complex array of canals and sluice gates that were constantly fought over by sigils. The city itself was a bloody mess – scraps between sigils had sunk entire chunks of what’d once been a single island, leaving some sort of demented urban archipelago instead – but it was full of old sigils and would have been horridly difficult to assault. Drow ships were pretty much either rafts or small woven reed boats relying on oars. We’d seized a few, but it would have taken weeks of constant back and forth to get even a small army across.

Besides, the good people of Strycht had made it clear that we were not only unwelcome but currently at the top of their ‘murder and harvest’ list. I’d sent a few of my lords – the Peerage, Akua had taken to calling them, and the name had kept – to make polite inquiries about holding a council to discuss the dwarven threat and the cabal founded to answer it. They’d, uh, not taken well to that. Long story short, Soln and its fellows had harvested a few Mighty in a spurt of traditional drow diplomacy before making a tactical retreat back. They’d made enough of an impression that all seven cabals dedicated to maintaining control of the waterways had been called upon. Strycht was going to be swimming in old monsters before the month was out, and until then they’d taken to raiding my sigil’s camps on the shore. The damage had been limited and we’d mostly come out on top due to sheer numbers and Winter fuckery, but after the initial probes they’d identified the weaknesses in our defences and begun concentrating on those. My sigil had taken the Hylian ways out of Lotow after stripping it clean of everything remotely food-adjacent and absorbed another six sigils on its way to Strycht, but while it’d massively swelled it was still a far cry from a real army. It was a confederation of tribes, if anything, bound to me by oaths and fear. Not exactly the kind of troops used to maintaining proper watch rosters and fielding patrols. So with the situation steadily worsening and the opposition refusing to talk, I’d decided a rebuttal was in order.

So I’d confiscated Lake Strycht.

It’d taken about two days to empty most of the basin even with two gates as large as we could make them. Taking every last drop had proved impossible: the tributaries kept feeding it and the basin wasn’t even so there’d been pockets of water remaining. Still, in my estimating about nine tenths of the initial lake had been shunted off into Arcadia. What had once been water was now a stinking marsh of mud clogged with drying weeds and fish. It was a good thing we’d never attempted a crossing, because when the lake ebbed low some creatures were revealed that even Praesi would flinch at. Some kind of massive oily octopi with barbed tentacles, blind pale lizards the size of houses and long eels with an inexplicable amount of teeth. Most the monsters had gone through the gates, those that didn’t either settling in the larger puddles or going wild as they died stripped of water. It’d been a display of power meant for the recalcitrant inside the city, now perched atop hills or small plateaus surrounded by mud, but it’d also been a form of diplomatic pressure. I’d just killed half a dozen rivers crucial to keeping an entire chunk of the inner ring from going thirsty and done a great deal more damage to Strycht itself.

That lake had been their granary. They lived off the creatures swimming in it, of the weeds and plants now dying for lack of irrigation. The city’s drow had wells and cisterns, but the population here was easily triple of Great Lotow. They’d beginning running out soon, and after that they’d be forced to sally out for puddle water with my Peerage waiting in ambush. The Mighty would be able to stick it out until reinforcements arrived, sure, but what about the rest? Nine tenths of their people were going start withering on the vine. Even if the cabals proved victorious against me in a few weeks, sigil-holders would lose most their sigils to thirst. And they had to know that even if they got my head on a pike, there’d been no guarantee of getting the lake back. How many years would it be until the tributaries filled back even half of Lake Strycht? So I’d sent a handful of my Peerage forward again, to revisit the subject of a council. I’d instructed Ivah to make it clear that if they really pushed me they might just get the lake back directly on top their heads, which ought to make at least a few of them reconsider. Once we had a foothold in the city, well, if the rest dug their heels in I wasn’t above ordering an assault. I’d glimpsed what my Peerage was capable of, during our passage through the ways.

I was glad of the oaths, because I wasn’t sure I could win the fight if it ever came to that.

“I don’t know about borrowed,” I said. “I’m considering keeping the lake, or at least a portion of it.”

The slight shift in Akua’s stance indicated surprise, though I knew better than to think she hadn’t allowed it consciously.

“There is no lack of usable geographic features in Arcadia,” Diabolist said. “Archer has brought forward the interesting notion of-”

“Yes, Indrani wants me to start dropping mountains,” I sighed. “I’m well aware.”

“There are also volcanoes in what was once Summer,” the shade reminded me. “Actually triggering an eruption when we need it would be significantly more difficult, but not outright impossible.”

“There’s basically everything in Arcadia, if you look long enough,” I grunted. “That’s not why I’m thinking of redeploying the lake.”

“Decoration?” Akua drily suggested. “I suppose it’s never too late to acquire taste, though I must warn you ‘monster-infested underground lake’ is rather passé . Very sixth century.”

Ugh, and she probably thought she was actually funny.

“Well,” I brightly replied, “as the foremost lakeomancer of my generation-”

“There is no such thing,” Diabolist insisted.

“- it occurs to me I’ve been mostly, um, dropping large bodies of water on people,” I said. “For tactical purposes.”

“As one does,” Akua agreed.

“It seems like a very narrow use of the ability,” I said. “When I have an entire region of Callow that, between you and Summer, was effectively ravaged.”

Scarlet eyes narrowed.

“You want to move the lake to Callow,” she said.

“I’d have to consult governors and landowners,” I noted. “And someone familiar with farming practices. But it occurs to me that Summer-torched land might benefit from fresh irrigation. Hells, there might even be enough fish left for actual fishing.”

“And you want to use a lake born of Creation. because moving an Arcadian body of water might very well have... unforeseen consequences,” Akua murmured. “Wise.”

I passed a hand through my hair.

“Look, there’s so many problems I can’t solve with killing,” I said. “So it might be time to consider other solutions. One of the reasons Praes has been such a murderous shitshow play of correspondingly shitty and murderous thespians is that the Wasteland is exactly as termed. If I take a lake from somewhere else and sell it to whoever’s holding the Tower, it could tip the balance the other way. The Empire wouldn’t start starving its way into an invasion every other decade.”

Horrifyingly enough, Diabolist was beaming .

“You want to steal pieces of Creation and auction them off to nations,” she said. “Dearest, this might be the first of your designs I can say I wholeheartedly endorse.”

“It’s not stealing,” I protested. “You can’t own a lake. I mean, legally yes and nobody better take mine, but when you think about it in a religious sense-”

“You are preaching to the choir, my heart,” Akua intervened. “Admittedly the choir is made of damned souls, but let us not pretend talented singers are usually headed for the Heavens.”

“Why am I talking to you about this?” I muttered. “Of course you’d be on board, this is basically Dread Empress Sinistra’s plan only with riches instead of hero-delivered death at the end.”

“It could be useful to mark some mountain peaks rich in ore, when we return to the surface,” Diabolist suggested. “Mercantis would pay a fortune for access to mines where there can be no dwarven claim. And Callow itself is famously poor in precious metals: acquiring a source of mintage would be quite useful.”

The worse part was that it wasn’t actually a bad idea. Gods knew my kingdom could use the coin and the mines both. What I hated most about Akua was how useful she could be when she put her mind to it, which was always.

“Something to consider in the future,” I said.

She studied me carefully.

“There is more,” she noted.

“Someone broke one of my cities last year,” I frostily replied.

“And so you have hordes of refugees in need of shelter,” Diabolist said, delicately avoiding the subject. “As well a myriad of standing structures about to be permanently vacated.”

Not to mention a treasury that’d effectively be a glorified war chest and granary until the Tenth Crusade ended, which meant no funds for the kind of reconstruction that southern Callow badly needed. Hakram had produced miracles in keeping the tent cities clothed and fed, but come winter things were going to get ugly. The Waning Woods were too far, and absurdly dangerous to take lumber from if you went any deeper than the very outskirts. I’d seen it coming, of course, and we’d set aside wood and coal for fires, but it wouldn’t last all the way through the cold season. And Great Strycht was now a pack of very nice stone districts set atop hills and plateaus, many of which would fit inside a gate. It’d be tricky to get them through without wrecking them, of course, but not impossible. And even ruins would make great building materials, if worse came to worse. There’d be more cities ahead, too. I’d be leading the drow to the surface and until I could settle them where I wanted them to be there’d be a need for something to host them, but it didn’t all have to be used for that.

It was a little ironic that I’d waited until Thief was gone to start thinking about stealing cities.

“There is merit to the notion,” Akua said. “And though you now seem intent on civilian use, there is another side to the coin. If you can take a fortress...”

I could just leave it in Arcadia for later, then plop it out as field fortifications while on campaign. Near instantly. Juniper might just forget to hate Diabolist to the bone for a few heartbeats, if she heard about this.

“They’re not heavy on fortifications so far,” I said. “I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”

“We’ve not yet penetrated deep into the inner ring,” she replied. “There may yet be opportunity.”

I didn’t disagree. If I could get my hands on even just a fort, it’d be a nasty surprise to pull on my foes down the line. Field battles against the Dead King would be a chancy gamble even if the entire Grand Alliance was mobilized, this kind of sudden upset might be able to turn the tide. The first time it was used, at least. Neshamah wasn’t the kind of enemy that’d fall for the same trick twice. We stood there for some time in silence, the mood shifting as the conversation ebbed. The sight of the cavern before us wasn’t something a few days could get me used to, I silently admitted. The sheer size of it was staggering. It had the length and breadth of a province, the walls so distant even my eyes found them hard to discern, but the ceiling was what awe me every time. It was uneven, betraying that this was no singular cave but hundreds of them carved into a single place by what must have been decades of hard labour. I’d never seen anything taller save for the Tower itself, and the Tower was millennia of Praesi madness made into edifice. What kind of people had the ancient drow been, to make this?

What had broken them so deeply they’d become a pack of rats scavenging their own ruins?

“Not even Keter is match for it in scope,” Akua softly said, gaze following mine. “Fitting, I suppose. The Crown of the Dead is a mere gate to the Dead King’s true realm, impressive as it is. This must have been one of the beating hearts of their empire.”

“Don’t you have a bureaucracy to run?” I said.

“Subordinates must be assessed,” she replied. “At my behest you granted Centon much power. If it proves incapable of discharging its duties without my constant supervision, replacement must be found.”

And by that we both knew she meant Centon would be harvested and another drow raised in its place. Not killed, I’d set down rules about that, but Night could be taken without killing. The disgrace would probably cut deeper than death, though. Ivah certainly hated speaking of how it’d come to have that name in the first place. It was cold-blooded of Diabolist, but then I expected nothing less from her. Your average Wasteland aristocrat made lizards look warm in comparison, and Akua Sahelian had remained on top of that pack for years.

“Sometimes I wonder what it takes to make someone like you,” I said. “But then I remember all I heard about your mother, and I stop wondering.”

Her lips quirked.

“And what exactly did you hear, dearest?” she asked.

“Black called her brilliant,” I said. “Said that she’d managed to survive Malicia’s rise while supporting her enemies with little loss of influence. He was wary of her.”

“High praise, coming from the Carrion Lord,” Akua noted. “Mother was a creature of nuances.”

“You must have hated her,” I said. “That story you told me about your friend. No child should have to live through that. Not even you.”

“I suppose I did,” the shade murmured. “But not in the way you mean. You – your people – marry personal hatreds with your actions in a way we are taught not to.”

“Praesi keep grudges too, Akua,” I said. “Take revenge. There’s an entire hall of screaming heads in the Tower speaking to the truth of that.”

“I do no explain myself well, I think,” Diabolist said. “I was raised to treat Akua Sahelian and the heiress to Wolof as different persons. I could hate, and take revenge, as the first. The second must be a creature suborned only to ambition. Those among my people who do not learn to separate one face from the other die young.”

“That’s absurd to me,” I admitted. “I can understand necessity dictating your actions. I leapt down that slope years ago. But you can’t just pretend it’s two different people, Akua. It’s still you. Your actions. I didn’t somehow fight the Diabolist and spare you. It’s all on your head, like it’s all on mine.”

“Perhaps in Callow that is true,” she mused. “But in the Wasteland? We must clasp hands with those who’ve slain our kin, stabbed our predecessors in the back, stolen riches and appointments. It is a necessary distinction, Catherine. We can make sport of each other, so long as it is that. We would all lose for the stripping of that veil.”

“Then shouldn’t you?” I said. “Lose, I mean. Your entire philosophy is that conflict breeds strength, yet I can’t call what you describe anything but fragile.”

She quietly laughed.

“How harsh a judgement you cast on my people,” she said. “Will you hold all others to the same standard? The severe Ashurans, strangling their own kind with a rope of rules and tiers. The quarrelsome Procerans, who war with all under the sun out of hungry ambition. And even your own, Catherine. How many teeth-clenching grudges has Callow followed to dark endings?”

“None of the others wound Creation bartering for power,” I said. “Or bleed thousands upon thousands in rituals. I have axes to grind with my enemies, Akua, but I know what they are. Where their limits lie.”

“Then the issue is of means, not philosophy,” Diabolist said. “And so for the greatest monster of all, you need look no further than your teacher. What limits does the Carrion Lord have?”

“And he, too, will be held to account,” I quietly said. “For what he has done and may yet do.”

“Ah,” Akua smiled. “And are these the words of Catherine Foundling or the Black Queen?”

“That’s my entire point,” I said. “They’re the same person. That’s what responsibility means.”

“And mine is that your decisions will always be a choice,” Diabolist said. “Between what the woman wants and what the queen requires.”

I waved a hand dismissively, tired of the argument. Her logic only held up because it was a closed circle.

“But since you asked,” Akua said, looking at the distant city. “I despised my mother. For what she did. For what she wanted from me. But it was Tasia Sahelian that was my enemy, and her I admired until the day she lost.”

“Because she was brilliant,” I said.

“Because she was everything I was taught to want,” she mused. “Powerful and cunning and every bit the match of our Empress.”

“Until she lost,” I said.

“I severed our relations before I could be dragged down with her,” Akua said. “But I would not call that revenge. It was not a matter between us but between the Diabolist and the High Lady of Wolof.”

“And do you regret it?” I asked. “Leaving her behind.”

I wasn’t sure, I thought, what I was looking for. Humanity, maybe. Some speck of a person who had more to her than Wasteland iron and villainy. But what would I even do with it, if it was found? There was no saving someone like Akua, and I did not want to try. A hundred thousand souls demanded otherwise. The shade’s face was distant, lost in her thoughts.

“I do,” Diabolist finally said. “What a strange thing that is.”

“She was a lot of things,” I said. “But your mother was one of them.”

“She was,” Akua Sahelian agreed.

Her lips quirked.

“I should have killed her myself, mother to daughter.”

Chapter 69: Peerage

“Traitorous’s Law: while redemption is the greatest victory one can achieve over a villain, to function it does require the villain to have at least a single redeemable quality.
Addendum: Yes, even if a Choir is involved.”
– Extract from ‘The Axiom Appendix’, multiple contributors

Some days I wondered what it said about me that I much preferred holding court down in the Everdark than back in Laure. Sure, odds were good that every single member of my Peerage – even Ivah – would turn on me in a heartbeat if their oaths allowed for it, but for all that there was a simplicity to the proceedings that I enjoyed. Callow’s royalty was known for a certain lack of pageantry compared to its much wealthier neighbours to the east and the west, but even that relative lack of ceremony could feel stifling at times. I’d spent most of my times prior to the crowning on one campaign or another, and while it was true that the Legions were strictly regulated I’d had the benefit of being a Named in a Praesi institution. Which had meant, more or less, that rules had only ever applied to me if someone higher in the Empire’s pecking order had decreed that they did. Considering Black had been the very definition of hands off and Malicia had largely considered me his problem early on, I’d been allowed to run free.

It might have been for the better if I hadn’t. I’d learned a lot from my teacher but in many ways my apprenticeship felt only half-finished. Though I had long disdained the kind of aristocratic someone like Akua brought to the table, I’d since felt the costs of lacking that kind of education. Dealing with Wastelanders and Procerans I’d often been on the backfoot while they turned etiquette and custom into armaments. Much as I hated to admit it, treating with Cordelia Hasenbach without Diabolist whispering in my ear all the while would have seen the First Prince playing me like a fiddle. She’d called me a warlord, in one of our little talks, and she had a point. On the surface that was a stone around my neck, but down here? It was the wind in my sail. I was dealing with other warlords, and even before I’d stolen Crepuscular from Akua’s mind I’d known how to speak the language of these people. Seated comfortably on a stone bench perched atop an inclined that less-than-subtly set my Peerage below me, I struck a match against my sleeve and lit my pipe.

My wakeleaf stash was running low, so I’d had to ration the vice, but there was no point in letting the herbs go to waste. I puffed at the sculpted dragonbone shaft, inhaling the smoke and letting it stream out of my nostrils with a pleased sigh. It was gladdening that Winter had not stripped me of all my petty pleasures.

“Evening,” I drawled. “I see none of you are missing, so I’ll take it that negotiations didn’t go too badly.”

My court of murderers offered up polite amusement at the admittedly weak jest. The Peerage now numbered eleven Mighty, every single one titled by Winter. Most of those had come from Great Lotow, reluctantly bending the knee after wandering around the outskirts of Arcadia for a while and finding no way out save the one I’d offered. Slaus and Sagas had been the first to fold, remaining where I’d left them and taking the oaths after a single day. The others trickled into my service over the following week as my sigil settled our other affairs in the city. Nodoi and Vasyl had held out for three and five days, respectively, finding no trouble living off the land but no way back to the Everdark either. By then I’d already bullied Losle and Zarkan into oath-taking after a few demonstrations of how dangerous living in places with only one entrance and exit could be when that space could be closed off by gate. Kanya and Soln had refused the longest, the full seven days, and they’d only changed their minds after Mighty Orelik vanished without a trace. Sooner or later, those treading the domain of the fae were found by them. Including Ivah, I’d left Great Lotow with nine titled lords. The last two we’d picked up on our way to Great Strycht, the sigil-holders of the Lovre and the Vadimyr.

Practically speaking, those sigils had been roving bandits and raiders living off whatever they could take from the weakest nearby territory. They’d had almost no supplies to throw into the pot, which had been something of an issue, but the sigils were also the most battle-hardened I had at my disposal. They’d had as many dzulu as nisi in their ranks, and according to Akua they were the tribes finding it easiest to live under my rules. It made sense to me: with low numbers, they simply hadn’t been able to afford the casual cruelties of larger and more established sigils. The other sigil-holders we’d come across on our way to Strycht had been less inclined to bend the knee when presented with overwhelming numbers, so they’d ended up feeding my nascent Peerage instead of joining it. Their lesser Mighty and dzulu had not been so obstinate, so they’d been folded into my own Losara Sigil where Ivah could keep an eye on them. It’d had the added benefit of swelling what could be considered my personal tribe larger than any of the others, always a good card to have in hand when dealing with other warlords.

“Reports, then,” I said. “Lord Soln?”

The Lord of Shallow Graves smiled, which was promising. I’d been careful not to play favourites with my Peerage, but I would privately admit that Soln was the Mighty who’d most grown on me. It had taken to its title better than any drow save Ivah, and its continued knack for producing results was a very large feather in its metaphorical cap.

“Talks with the Jindrich have been fruitful, Losara Queen,” it announced. “Mighty Jindrich is willing to take the oaths, in exchange for certain considerations.”

I puffed at my pipe, impressed but trying not to show it. The Jindrich weren’t top dog back in Strycht, but they were widely considered the runner-up to the sigil that was. In large part because Jindrich itself was apparently a fucking terrifying savage that went berserk when fighting other Mighty and sunk entire chunks of island in the throes of uncontrollable rage. I’d expected them to be holdouts, not in the first batch of collaborators. Letting out a stream of acrid smoke, I let out a pleased hum.

“Considerations?” I prompted.

“Jindrich territory holds the largest cisterns of Great Strycht,” Lord Soln elaborated. “This is well-known. They would outlast all others when thirst takes the city, and so cabal was forged among lesser sigils to take the water from them by force. Mighty Jindrich requests assistance in scattering the scavengers before oaths are taken.”

Ah, these charming drow. You could always count on them to turn on each other even when the enemy was at the gate.

“And Jindrich will fight at our side, when the time comes?” I asked.

“That is so, Losara Queen,” Lord Soln replied.

“Then the bargain is struck,” I said. “Centon?”

Akua’s secretary had been standing in my shadow all the while, stone tablet and chalk in hand, and approached when bid.

“My queen,” it murmured.

“Add five auction seats to the due of the Soln,” I ordered.

The auction system had not lasted long before needing revision, though we’d never expected it would. Considering we now had almost forty thousand drow on the march, allowing everyone to bid would have been difficult. The simple logistical difficulties of fitting that many people in a single cavern aside, I’d needed a carrot to keep my growing army happy. Oaths bound them regardless of preference, but willing soldiers tended to be a lot more useful than conscripts. The right to attend the auction of Night-filled corpses was now restricted to a smaller number of people, currently four hundred. My own Losara Sigil owned a quarter of that, most of it attributed by lottery so more than dzulu and Mighty might rise, but I’d given every sigil under my banner a certain number of seats and kept the last hundred as rewards to parcel out. Lord Soln would have the right to grant those seats to whoever it wished, both reinforcing its authority over its sigil and giving a reminder that the power’s ultimate source was the Queen of Lost and Found.

Diabolist might be a bloody viper but there was no denying how godsdamned useful she was.

“Honour was given,” Lord Soln said, inclining its head.

“The worthy rise,” I replied, the cadenced sentence in Crepuscular rolling off the tongue.

My gaze swept over the rest of the Peerage, and I could almost taste the anger and envy some displayed. But not directed at me , I thought. Not for now, anyway. It was an ugly little bit of irony that some of the Praesi practices I despised the most worked so well with the drow. Keeping the blades of my subordinates pointed at each other was an old Wasteland game I was beginning to be a fair hand at. But they will not fight each other , I reminded myself. The oaths have seen to that. The violence would be turned outwards, and put to my purposes.

“I await other fair news,” I said. “Lord Vadimyr?”

The most recent addition to the Peerage shook its head. Vadimyr had actually answered a few questions I had about drow and the nature of the titles I was handing out without meaning to. The Lord of Fading Echoes was, well, the owner of a womb. It had risen to prominence late, and birthed a child when it was nisi. I did not choose the titles I gave out when empowering my lords – Winter provided them – so it’d been interesting to learn that my mantle would likely never hand out a title of Lady to a drow. A matter of perception by the beholden, Akua had theorized, and in Masego’s absence I had no reason to gainsay her.

“Mighty Karmel founded a cabal with three others to share their water,” Lord Vadimyr said. “Together they may well last until the great cabals of the inner ring come to war against us, and so will not consider the taking of oaths.”

I nodded.

“Lord Slaus?” I tried.

“The fortune of Mighty Soln was my own curse,” the drow ruefully admitted. “For the Hushu are of the cabal besieging the Jindrich, and so have undertaken salvation by strife. They deny any other ending.”

Yeah, there were two sides to that coin. For every cornered sigil they’d be twice as many sigils cornering it, and those would be less than inclined to make a pact with an interloper like me. I suspected that if I allowed the internal skirmishes to play out I’d get a willing accomplice out of every major defeat, but I had constraints of my own to consider. My own camp might be fine when it came to water – I did have a lake to parcel out – but food was another story. I had over forty thousand drow to keep fed nowadays, and no supply train to speak of. Considering I’d refused foraging raids in favour of assimilating the same sigils we’d be pillaging, the state of our food reserves was essentially a downwards slope with the occasional uptick when we brought in a sigil. Of course that same sigil also brought additional bellies to fill, so the relief was short-lived and followed by even sharper descent. We had maybe another two weeks left in us before emergency rationing started, and after that maybe a third before the stores ran empty.

There’d been cattle in Great Lotow, great lizards and some sort of giant moles whose milk Indrani assured me was utterly disgusting, but Lotow was an outskirts city. The wealthy sigils with full stores were further in, and meanwhile we’d already butchered most of the lizards for meat. Several times, actually. The younger ones were smaller but they grew back body parts over several days as long as they didn’t lose too much flesh and die from the effort, which had strung out their use some. Strictly speaking I could afford a week of sitting on my thumbs before matters became urgent but it would be risky. We’d have to take Strycht and its entire stores immediately afterwards or risk circling the drain of our personal reserves while hammering down the last pockets of resistance. Archer had half-seriously noted that since corpses were currently our most common form of loot perhaps grey meat should be put on the table, but cannibalism was a little too far for me. Akua had noted that it was strictly taboo in drow culture regardless, as eating their own kind’s flesh was believed to cause rot in the soul and cause Night to seep out.

No, in my eyes were needed to take Great Strycht within the next few days. It’d give us enough of a margin that we’d keep our head above the water while resuming our march into the inner ring, racing ever more harshly against the bottom as we went. It wasn’t sustainable, but then it didn’t have to be: this was an exodus, not a conquest. Unfortunately that meant attacking soon, and that would be risky business without allies on the inside. Which proved to be in rather short supply, I discovered as the Peerage continued giving me their reports. There were a few offers to help against other sigils but not take oaths, in exchange for water, but the lords who’d held those talks admitted betrayal was more than likely the moment water was supplied. Lord Zarkan, who’d yet to bother hiding how much it despise my very existence, brought a second success with a minor sigil that’d apparently been evicted of its territory by a cabal and was now furious enough to turn its cloak. Five auction seats went to the Zarkan for the success, though that one did not thank me for them afterwards. Lord Nodoi had failed in talks with the Strycht sigil it’d approached but found another settled near the western sluice gate that was desperate enough to take the full oaths in exchange for survival. They were already on their way, and for that the Nodoi earned six seats.

It was Ivah’s own report that turned the mood grim, for it’d been sent not to bargain but to gain information.

“Over the last two days I took five Mighty from varying sigils,” the Lord of Silent Steps informed me. “As of an hour ago interrogation of four of them has been carried out. From this, two matters of import were discovered. The first is that we have drawn the attention of the Longstride Cabal.”

The drow were always eerily well-behaved, at least when I was present, so there was no ripple of murmurs as there would have been with humans. But several of the lords visibly stiffened, which for their kind was a glaring warning sign.

“This is certain?” Lord Vasyl pressed.

“Mighty Leslaw is of the Swooping Bat Cabal, of which a lesser member of the Longstride is also part,” Ivah said. “It is my understanding that is the path by which word of our arrival spread. When the cabals of Great Strycht put out the call to war, interest developed.”

“You’ll have to fill me in on the particulars of this Longstride Cabal,” I said.

Ivah grimaced.

“Hunters of hunters, my queen,” the Lord of Silent Steps said. “A great and ancient cabal.”

Lord Soln nodded, catching my eye.

“They fight only for the glory of the Night,” it added. “Only the sharpest blades are invited into the fold. They hold no territory, protect no temple: their only purpose is the death of those they deem worthy.”

So not so much dwarven deed-seekers as a bunch of Night-powered Ranger equivalents. That was just lovely.

“How many?” I asked.

“Two hundred,” Ivah said. “Never more nor less. One invited must take another’s place.”

By which it meant murder their predecessor. So I wasn’t just dealing with thrill-killers, I was dealing with a full cohort of hardened Mighty who’d either been dangerous enough to kill one of the old monsters or remained sharp enough to kill the young ones.

“How long before they’re mobilized?” I asked. “If they’re this picky about members, they have to be widely spread out.”

“It is hard to say, Losara Queen,” Lord Lovre told me. “For while they range far and wide, there are those among them who know the Secret of shadow-striding. That is the source of their name.”

“Shadow-striding,” I slowly repeated. “Is that what I think it is?”

The drow sharply grinned.

“Wherever there is shadow, their strides may take them,” Lord Lovre agreed. “It is a gift from the very hands of Sve Noc.”

“And this is instantaneous,” I said, disbelieving.

That sounded like teleportation through shadows, which was a bit much even if the Priestess of Night had her fingers in it. Even the Miezans had to sacrifice a city’s worth of captives to move their armies like that. Masego couldn’t fucking teleport, and I’d seen him order a Princess of Summer to go sit in the corner like a petulant child.

“Not so,” Lord Soln said. “It is a lengthening of stride. Not unlike the stories Mighty Archer speaks of your journeys in the Garden of the Splendid.”

So cutting corners, not snap-your-fingers-and-it’s-done. If the Gloom and the Night were really part of Sve Noc’s domain, as I’d come to suspect they were, shadow-striding might just be taking a shortcut through the original domain from which all the rest spawned. Or it might just be an improvement on the shadow-tendril trick almost every drow with Night could use, only with a difficult relationship with its father and something to prove. Regardless, that meant we were about to be up in our neck in veteran old guard killers.

“A week?” I tried.

“Less,” Ivah said. “My captive had no precise day, yet believed they would arrive before assault was made on Great Strycht.”

“They don’t know when we’re going to assault,” I pointed out.

“Speculation abounds,” my Lord of Silent Steps drily said. “Most common is the belief that within five days there will be battle.”

“So four days,” I frowned. “Give or take.”

This was starting to take shape, slowly but surely. This would be fought in waves. My army had to strike within a few days. The Longstride Cabal would arrive within four to hunt us for sport. The earliest reinforcements from the inner ring cabals would start arriving within a week. If I took Great Strycht before the Longstride arrived, I could lay an ambush for them. Which would pay off massively, if I could title even a few of those drow. The shadow-striding trick would allow us to spread exponentially fast, and we’d be able to eat up the reinforcements as they arrived. That would be a tipping point for this campaign, I thought. If I had a Peerage that large and powerful? We’d trample everything in our way towards Sve Noc, swelling with recruits as we did. On the other hand, if we botched the invasion of Strycht we were fucked for good. We’d lose strength in the attempt, and then we’d get hit by the Longstride and the reinforcements in quick succession. It had downwards spiral written all over it. Bold strokes would either win this or end this, depending on how it all fell out. Waiting was essentially giving up the game, and so not even worth considering.

“There is a second matter of import, Losara Queen,” Ivah reminded me.

I rolled my shoulder, reluctantly emerging from my line of thought.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“One of the prisoners I obtained was a jawor of the Rumena Sigil,” my Lord of Silent Steps said. “Privy to intent of Mighty Rumena itself.”

My brow rose. If the Jindrich were the runner-ups, then the Rumena were the local hegemons. Their sigil was twice the size of anybody else’s, their rylleh were said to be a pain to even sigil-holders and Mighty Rumena itself was rumoured to have died once, gotten rather angry about it and promptly gotten up with a severed spine to smash in the head of the offending Mighty. The only drow in Strycht it was even remotely wary of was Jindrich, and there was cabal essentially every other sigil-holder was part of whose entire purpose was making sure the Rumena didn’t eat everyone else. If it was making a move, it would have major consequences on how this battle unfolded.

“And?” I said.

“The many sigils of Great Strycht are turning on each other,” Ivah said. “Cabals have split, or been reforged to address more pressing concerns. There is opportunity in this.”

“It’s preparing to take a swing at claiming all of Strycht,” I said.

“Malcontent rylleh were approached, I am told,” Ivah smiled. “And the jawor I took was looking for weaknesses in the defences other sigils.”

I closed my eyes. This... It might work. If they struck hard and quick while other sigils were already fighting. If they kept the fighting out of sight until they’d harvested enough Night, they could just retreat for a day and let their Mighty digest what they took – after that they’d have enough power to bring to bear that even allied opposition wouldn’t matter. That was an additional beat to the dance ahead, and one I could use. If I had eyes in the right place. If I was careful and fast and lucky. I opened my eyes and brought the pipe back to my lips. The fire had gone out, since I’d put talking above smoking, but there was still some wakeleaf not entirely gone to ash. I took a match out of my cloak and struck it on my arm, puffing at the pipe until it lit up again. Waste not, want less. Meeting the eyes of my Peerage, I spat out a mouthful of smoke and let it curl around my face.

“Are any of you,” I smiled, “familiar with Irritant’s Law?”

Chapter 70: The Calm Before

“Own what you are, no matter how ugly the face of it. No lies are ever more dangerous to a villain than those they tell themselves.”
– Dread Emperor Benevolent

“So this is going to be the big one, I hear,” Indrani said.

It would have been inaccurate to call... this a habit. It didn’t happen regularly enough for that, given the demands on our time. But once in a while, when the silent clamour of a thousand duties and foes became too much, I found there was a fire in a nook tucked away from my army and that Archer was waiting there, feet propped up and bottle in hand. Ironic in a way, that a woman who’d been raised in a place called Refuge had become so apt at providing the same. Like all of Indrani’s kindnesses, the seemingly careless granting of them belied the keen perception behind their nature. I tended to think of Akua as the most skilled manipulator among us, capable of spinning exquisite lies at the merest prompt, but some days I wondered. Diabolist was known to get her way, by hook or crook, but I’d had different lessons from her. The most useful talent is that which no one knows you have , Black had once told me. Archer drank like a fish, was largely led by her whims and professed indifference as to much of what went on around her. The very last person, in a way, that you’d expect to nudge events the way she wanted them.

I forced the thought away. Suspicion, once entertained, was like a drop of ink in water. No matter how thinned, it would always cloud the brew. I did not have so many friends left that I could afford to start ascribing them hidden motives. The colder part of me noted that willing blindness led to dark surprises and that the duties of queenship demanded vigilance regardless of costs to myself, but for once I turned deaf ear to it. Trust had seen me through the storms so far, and though it had brought me some disappointments it had brought me wonders as well . In this, at least, I will indulge sentiment , I thought.

“The Battle of Great Strycht,” I agreed. “It will decide the campaign, if not the outcome of our entire stroll through the Everdark.”

“Sve Noc, huh,” Indrani mused. “She’s allowed us our fun so far, but that won’t last. It’s one thing to throw a rabid hound scraps when there’s a bear coming, another when the hound takes a hand.”

“We’ve observed the rules of her game,” I said. “What we wield, we took.”

“And that’ll matter why? This entire place reeks of Below, Cat,” she said, and raised a hand when I began to object. “I’m not talking about dusty shrines or red-slick altars. Not even about prayer, really. It’s the way this place was made. Kill and rise, kill and fall: every single drow spends their time either clawing for power or slowly dying.”

I studied her in the flickering light of the flames, the shadow cast by the twisted rock around us dancing across her face. Halfway between tattoos and feathers , I thought.

“You’re saying it doesn’t matter if they pray,” I frowned. “They pay the dues regardless.”

“I’m saying this entire place is a prayer,” Indrani quietly said. “And we both know whose it is.”

The Priestess of Night. Sve Noc. We’d not crossed paths since that last probing look at each other, but I knew she was everywhere down here. In every custom, every ritual. Maybe even every drow.

“That sounds,” I murmured, “like a recipe for apotheosis.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d considered that, truth be told. After crossing the Gloom and realizing the Everdark was a kingdom turned towards itself, ever only sending dregs to the surface, I’d wondered as to the purpose of that. An entire civilization whose foundations had been ripped away and replaced with codified murder and infighting – what sane person would want that? It might have made sense if the entire purpose was to cultivate demigods and send them out. I’d not forgotten my fight with Mighty Urulan, how what could only be considered a second-stringer by drow standards had batted me around and come close to killing me more than once. Me . I could, without too much arrogance, claim that among the Named of Calernia’s surface I ranked in the ten most dangerous. If the likes of Urulan had been sent to rampage across Procer or Callow, it would have been bloody mayhem. If a cohort of Mighty that powerful had gone? Half the heroes on the continent would have needed to mobilize to end them, and there’d be casualties. I could not deny that Sve Noc’s orchard of killers had grown some particularly murderous peaches. But they’d never been used , had they?

Night could be grown from harvesting other peoples, but when had real raiding parties last troubled Calernia? Long enough ago the Everdark was just a footnote in the histories of nations, either a pointed lesson in the dangers of following Below or the subject of casual contempt from more ‘successful’ villains. Which was madness, because if I’d led the army I currently commanded against Diabolist at Second Liesse we would have ripped her to shreds. Hells, unless the Lone Swordsman had a very good story at his back Urulan would have torn through the poor fucker in an hour’s work and gone for a drink afterwards. But Sve Noc had never sent her apostles out of her realm, and there had to be a reason for that. At first I’d wondered if it was as simple as where the Everdark was. Surrounded on three sides by the Golden Bloom, the Chain of Hunger and the Kingdom of the Dead. The ratlings were arguably the weakest of those powers, but even Triumphant at her peak hadn’t managed to exterminate them wholesale . And if there’s one thing out there I’d bet on against Mighty, it would be Horned Lords , I thought. Had the Gloom and the Night been raised as a moat and garrison?

The issue with that was the dwarves. It didn’t take a genius to guess that effectively surrendering the entire underground to a rival and highly expansionist power before wrecking your own capacity to wage war except through Name-imitations would have long term consequences . Sve Noc, assuming she really was behind all of this, had to have known the moment she put out the Gloom and Night the hourglass was flipped. The Kingdom Under would keep growing, keep expanding, and eventually they’d find a way through. At that point, well, it was only a matter of time until the drow were done. Even if they were beaten back the first time, the dwarves would keep coming with better methods and larger armies every time. Even just putting all the nisi they encountered to the sword would allow the dwarves to send their enemies into a downwards spiral while they swallowed their own losses with a shrug. Evidently Sve Noc’s game had worked for a few centuries, but she’d had to know it was a delaying measure and not a solution.

But it’d make sense, wouldn’t it? If the Gloom had been exactly that, a delay, and the Night was the actual solution. Centuries of willing sacrifice, swelling the invisible altar as the Priestess of Night remained cloistered in her temple and shaped her own ascension. It was one thing to fight a Named, but a god? Neshamah had called himself that, and he had broken enough crusades the claim couldn’t be summarily dismissed. If I was right, if Archer was right, then there was only one question left to ask. Was she ready ? Had the dwarves come too early, while she was still gathering her might? Or was this entire invasion a trap, the prelude to her ascension? There was no way to know, and I was not too proud to admit that scared me.

“We have no stories, down here,” I finally sighed. “I am not used to missing that.”

“I’m not so sure,” Indrani said. “We’ve had our share of coincidences, haven’t we?”

I cocked an eyebrow at her in silent invitation. Archer glanced at my now-empty cup and I willing offered it for filling. Drow liquor, this, called senna . Made from some sort of giant mushrooms and used to induce lucid dreaming when drunk in small quantities before sleep. It kicked like a mule and taste kind of like mud, but we were running out of surface booze so this was no time to get picky. The good stuff we’d want for celebration, assuming we live through this. I grimaced after knocking back half my cup. This was going to take some getting used to.

“Right, so coincidences,” she said. “We ran into Ivah pretty early. Good guide, former bigwig from an inner ring sigil, full of information. That’s one.”

I almost objected that we’d come fairly close to killing it during our introductory skirmish, but held my tongue. Almost was the domain of coincidence, I wouldn’t deny that.

“Then we snuck through between the dwarven vanguard and the main army,” Indrani continued. “If we’d been ahead of the vanguard, we would have run into entrenched drow before we had their measure. If we’d trailed behind the army, there would have been no one to take. That’s two.”

In the first instance we also wouldn’t have had the spectre of dwarven invasion to hold up as a banner when bringing in Mighty, which would have massively complicated the process. Much as I disliked what I was hearing, she had a point.

“And then when we run into the vanguard,” she said. “Which happens to be run by Named dwarf who can strike a deal with you in his people’s name. Three.”

“For all we know that’s common practice in dwarven armies,” I pointed out.

She clucked her tongue.

“Fine, I’ll withdraw that one,” she conceded. “And replace it by ‘we came into the Everdark specifically when the Kingdom Under was invading’.”

I winced. Yeah, that was a little harder to argue about.

“We can get lucky too,” I said.

“Sure we can,” Indrani said. “Once. Twice gets suspicious. Three times is a nudge.”

“We wouldn’t even be down here if we’d had alternatives,” I said. “Hasenbach wasn’t willing to deal, Keter got turned on us and the fae would have been... costly. More than we can afford.”

“Good timing, isn’t it?” Archer mildly said. “Stripped from all palatable options save for the Everdark, then thrown here when shit comes to a head.”

“No, I get what you’re implying,” I said. “We got nudged into this. I disagree because there were just too many moving parts, but even assuming you’re right I don’t see is what Below gains from this. If Sve Noc’s getting her god on, we’re the fly in the ointment. They lose a discount Dead King to what, improve my military situation? And you know where I want to settle the drow long-term, Indrani, it’d fuck up a good thing for them.”

“You’re still thinking with your crown, sweetcheeks,” Indrani said. “Lady Ranger used to limit how many her pupils could follow her on a hunt, did you know? Not because more of us would have been a problem, most of the time we were pretty decorative.”

“She made it a prize,” I frowned.

“And so we fought for it,” she agreed. “Kept us sharp, because there was a lot to gain from trailing her on those and nobody wanted to be left behind. Hells, Cat, you got your start in pit fights didn’t you? You should be able to feel when the audience is placing bets.”

I would deny her, but I still remembered the days before I’d become the Squire in full. When, even with Black’s accolade, I’d still been a claimant. We’d fought for a Name bound to Below, and Below had only wanted one person left standing when the dust settled. The similarities were there.

“They still lose out,” I said. “She could get her apotheosis and I could get desperate upstairs without allies. That’d be a win in their books.”

“Would it?” Indrani mused. “How long has she been at this play, Cat? Long enough even the dwarves ran out of other shit to conquer. That doesn’t sound like victory on the horizon to me, it sounds like somewhere somehow she fucked up. And you, well, when’s the last time you had a good kneel in front of the altar?”

“Black didn’t pray,” I said.

“Black toppled a hero-led kingdom and spent decades smothering heroic cribs,” Indrani said. “You, on the other hand? You meddle with the methods, but you’re also making deals with heroes and trying alliances with crusaders. You’re not exactly flag-bearer for the Hellgods.”

“And this gets me under the banner?” I replied, skeptical.

She shrugged.

“Look, I’m not going to weep for the Everdark,” she said. “It’s a fucking mess of murder and slavery and if you’d decided to drown the damned place instead I would have clapped your back and called it a good day’s work.”

Archer paused.

“But we’re crossing some lines, here,” she said. “This shit with the oaths? It’s the kind of thing the old madmen would have tried if they had the right tools. It’s a little to the north of slavery, I’ll give you that, but it’s in the same kingdom and we’re not exactly intending to make exceptions. They’re all going upstairs, aren’t they? Kids’n all. There’s going to be a lot of dead people for you to get an army, and a lot more when you actually use it.”

“The alternative is the dwarves slaughtering them wholesale,” I flatly replied.

“Sure,” Indrani said. “But that’s not why we’re doing it, is it? We came for an army and we’re doing what it takes to get one. I’ve got no issue with that, Cat, don’t get me wrong.”

She leaned forward, eyes alight with the reflection of fire.

“But let’s not pretend we’re not sending dues downstairs, by doing our do,” she softly said. “That’s the kind of lie that ends up costly down the line when someone calls you out on it.”

I winced and polished off the rest of my glass before extending my hand for a refill. She obliged without a word.

“I tried to make it fair,” I said. “But there had to be a punishment to breaking the terms, or they would never have followed them. I tried...”

The smile that split my lips was rather bitter.

“To make it a good thing,” I finished. “To set down rules that would make them better until they were on their own. But I’m using old arguments, aren’t I? The same every Proceran and Praesi who stole a chunk of Callow used. I’m civilizing the savages .”

Indrani gently nudged me with her elbow.

“They’re pretty fucking savage, no two ways around it,” she said. “But let’s keep this in mind, before we start using that trick elsewhere. I’d get over it, but I’m guessing you’re going to be chewing over this for a while.”

“What does it matter if I mourn it, when I do it anyway?” I muttered.

I might not be bosom friends with Cordelia Hasenbach, but she was right about that much. It meant nothing to weep at what I did if I kept on doing it. You can stop, or you can own it , I thought. Anything else is hypocrisy. But the thought of the drow loose on the surface, without rules to bind them? No, there was no brooking that. And so monster it is , I grimaced. I drank again, the foul brew spectacularly failing to grow on me. I extended my arm across Indrani’s lap for a top-off.

“So it’s a pit fight,” I sighed.

“Where there is coincidence, there is story,” Archer said. “Now, we know what happens if you come out on top.

Veins of Winter spreading into darkness, an entire kingdom oathbound.

“What happens if the ol’ girl does, though?” she mused. “That’s the part worth worrying about.”

“Dog eat dog,” I murmured. “That’s how Below works. If my belly’s full, I can shake the world. But if she’s the one who devours?”

I’d threaded Winter in Night and forced rules through it. It had come easy as breathing to me, even if the oaths themselves had required thought. Because I was the last of a court unmade, the Sovereign of Moonless Nights. I was that court, practically speaking. It’s wasn’t impossible to throw around the kind of workings I’d seen fae royalty employ, it just wasn’t possible without going fucking crazy. For now, anyway. How long before my Peerage grew enough the alienation no longer mattered? But there was a sea of power, somewhere in me, and if Sve Noc got her hands on that? No, apotheosis would not be an issue.

“She’ll make a play in Strycht,” I finally said. “If it’s my pivot, it’s also hers.”

Archer toasted to that, grinning.

“Lies and violence,” she offered.

“I’m not knocking to that,” I sneered.

“If you do, I have a gift,” Indrani tempted.

“Is it booze?” I asked. “Is booze the gift?”

“No,” she proudly announced.

“Then it’s you,” I said. “I’m not falling for that.”

“Please,” she snorted. “I’d ruin you for all others. Besides, I actually went and picked out something for you.”

“Stole,” I corrected. “You stole something you are now pawning off on me before you’re caught.”

“Well, Vivi’s not around,” Indrani mused. “So someone’s got to pick up the slack.”

I narrowed my eyes at her, reluctantly curious.

“To absent friends,” I said, meeting her toast.

She pouted but we drank on it. She went ruffling through her cloak afterwards, setting down her cup. It was a cozy little nook she’d found, barely large enough for two people, and so she’d set down a thick blanket in an incline and we’d both settled there close to the fire. It was comfortable, and the combined warmth of a friend and a camp fire was oddly soothing. I eyed her curiously as she kept going through her cloak, leathers pulling close on her frame. They were tight, though sadly not all that revealing. Good armour tended to be that way.

“There,” she exclaimed, and produced a bit of stone before pressing it into my palm.

No, not just stone I realized. It was a sculpture, though not a very elaborate one. I was admittedly not great connoisseur of the arts, but even to me the work seemed rather bare. Skilfully done, though, I conceded. The androgynous face of a long-haired drow occupied one side of it, the hair growing into the locks of the identical face on the other side. The eyes seemed little more than notches at first glance, but I could barely make out the contours of a character in Crepuscular in them. For one side it was ‘all’, for the other ‘night’. The bottom of the little sculpture had clearly been pried off by blade, I noted with mild amusement.

“... thank you?” I tried.

“Dunno if you noticed, but the deeper into the Everdark we go the more often it comes up,” Indrani said. “I asked Soln and apparently it represents Sve Noc.”

My brow rose. A two-faced goddess, huh? The term was considered an insult in both Praes and Callow. In my homeland for the implied accusation of hypocrisy, in the Wasteland for the implied single layer of deception. Probably not down here, though.

“What are you up to, I wonder?” I murmured, looking at the stone face.

“And I was going to say we’ve come so far,” Indrani said. “But there you are, talking at stone.”

“We were already hunting demigods when you joined up,” I replied.

“Sure, but back then we were dealing with everybody’s messes,” she said. “Now we’re everybody’s mess.”

“Truly, you are the great philosopher of our age,” I drily said.

She flipped me the finger.

“I do wonder what the rest are up to,” she admitted.

“We’re not doing that,” I said.

She eyed me with surprise.

“Night before the battle starts, going all reminiscing about the old days and what they might be doing?” I elaborated. “For shame, ‘Drani. You should know better.”

Archer went very quiet, all of a sudden, and her face was unreadable.

“I sometimes forget,” she said, “that you don’t realize it.”

By brow creased.

“Realize what?”

“That no one thinks like that, Catherine,” she said. “At least not all the time, like you do.”

“Black does,” I said.

“And he is an irredeemable madman,” Indrani murmured. “To think like you do, it takes... something. Stepping out of yourself, of who you are, and making a story of it. Like all the world is a stage. How strange it must be, to always act like there is an audience. I can hardly imagine the weight of it.”

My fingers clenched in my lap.

“You were something else long before the fae made a title of it, weren’t you?” she said. “Mad to the bone.”

“I don’t-” I tried, but what could I say to that?

What could anyone?

“It’s all right, Cat,” Indrani said, and patted my hand. “We’ve always known. Sometimes I just forget.”

Slowly, my fingers unclenched. She scuttled back and rested her head on my shoulder. It would have been easier for me, given I was the one a foot and a beard short of being a dwarf, but I didn’t protest. I leaned back against her, chin atop her head.

“It’s how we survive,” I finally said. “By watching out for it.”

“I know,” Indrani said. “But it’s all right, you know? To leave it at the door once in a while. Just for a few hours.”

“I’m not sure,” I quietly admitted, “that I remember how to do that anymore.”

There was a long pause and she raised her head, eyes meeting mine. It was slow. I could have leaned away and it would have been the end of it. We’d go back to drinking, and not speak of it again.

I did not lean away.

Her lips moved against mine and it was nothing like the kiss in Lotow. No awkward clicking of teeth, no surprise. Only the taste of liquor and smoke and hands so warm, claiming the nape of my neck as she slipped into my lap and dipped me back. My fingers slid under the edge of her leathers, cupping her arse, and if this was all an illusion it was one I was willing to believe. I came to myself flushed and hard of breathing, my hands pinned above my head as she pressed a kiss against the crook of my neck. Smirking, I could feel it against my skin. It was an effort of will to speak.

“‘Drani,” I said, lips bruised. “Masego. I don’t-”

Want to ruin something good , I thought, just because I want this.

She leaned back, hazelnut eyes considering.

“That is that,” she said. “This is this.”

Deft fingers unmade my belt and I guilty leaned into her touch.

“Just for tonight,” she assured me.

“Just for tonight,” I murmured, and gave in.

Chapter 71: Ozone

“A ruler must consider all necessary injuries before beginning to inflict them on an enemy, for through repeated opposition they will learn your virtues and your faults. Strike once, thoroughly.”
-Extract from the treatise “On Rule”, author unknown (widely believed to be Prince Bastien of Arans)

Nefarious’ own Dark Council had once held session in this room, though in practice it had been the Chancellor’s council and not the Emperor’s. Amadeus had sat at this table before, when nominally in the service of the Tower, but he much preferred the current circumstances. It was only the two of them here today, as if often was: only Tyrants losing their grip on Praes regularly called full sessions. Those who felt secure in their rule did not bother with the pretence of seeking the opinions of others.

“We can’t keep this up much longer, Maddie,” Alaya said. “The last time taxes ran this high for more than a few years Pernicious lost his throne.”

It would have been easy to engage on the basis of technicalities, Amadeus thought. Dread Emperor Pernicious’s reign had been plagued by constant rebellions for reasons broader in scope than mere tax rates: his attempt to raise a new capital replacing Ater in the heart of the Wasteland, his inability to keep a Chancellor loyal for more than a few months and his failure to take the Blessed Isle back from the Kingdom of Callow despite three sieges. Still, it would have been beneath the both of them to play that particular game. Allie would not have begun the conversation were there not a true threat looming out of sight. Not for the first time, Black wondered how many such messes might have been avoiding by putting the nobility of the Wasteland to the sword after the civil war.

“I understand the burden is most keenly felt by the most influential among them,” he delicately replied. “But the Reforms have produced tangible results, Allie. We’re building an army truly capable of winning the wars to come.”

She leaned back into her seat, and even after all these years that she allowed herself such weaknesses in front of him warmed his heart. She’d come in formal dress, today, but left behind her proper regalia. As in everything she did, there was deeper meaning to be found. Formal attire for matters of state, lack of crown to make it clear this was a discussion between partners.

“I know that,” Alaya said. “You know that. But in court, they can speak of the fortune being sunk into the Legions of Terror without conquest to show for it. The Truebloods are pushing for either immediate war or dismissal of the military taxes.”

“That would be disastrous,” Amadeus bluntly said.

“The amount of professional soldiers we’re fielding is nearly without precedent in Imperial history,” she mildly pointed out.

“It’s not about winning the battles, Allie,” he sighed. “Our core legions under Grem would have been capable of evicting the paladins from the Blessed Isle as early as two years ago. It’s the aftermath that’s the issue.”

“I understand you have worries about heroes,” Alaya frowned. “And I don’t agree in the slightest with the time table suggested by the High Lords. Yet I do have to wonder if your level of caution is actually warranted.”

“We can’t leave them banners to gather around during the occupation,” Amadeus said. “Not the Order of the White Hand, not the Fairfaxes, not even the knightly orders. It’s not a question about the practical power of those entities, it’s what they represent. The Principate had massive city garrisons during its own occupation and they changed nothing. As long as there was a Fairfax loose, Callow still had fight in it. From there it was a question of what would give first: Callowan stubbornness or Procer’s willingness to bleed.”

“One rarely takes the pot when betting against Callowan spite,” Allie conceded, tone darkly amused.

“We’re not just planning the war, Alaya,” Amadeus said. “We’re preparing for the peace afterwards, and moving before the pieces are in place for that is wasting the entire effort.”

“Concessions will have to be made,” Allie said. “I know you have your doubts about the Imperial governorship system-“

“It’s ripe for abuse,” he flatly said. “And abuse unmakes all of this. The rule we bring must be, if not just, then at least fair. I trust not Wasteland lords to know even the shadow of that.”

“Then I’ll wrangle a role as overseer for you,” Alaya told him. “If nothing else, we can use the limits we place to weed out the ambitious when they overstep.”

Amadeus rose to his feet, pushing the chair back.

“This is the moment where I agreed,” Black said, turning towards me. “The first mistake I made after the war, though it would not be the last.”

My feet were on solid ground. Stone, the Tower’s own. I scuffed my boot against it and flinched at the sound. It felt too real. I’d had Name visions before, but this was... different. I’d never had any agency in them before. I glanced back up and found him patiently watching me.

“Black, what is this?” I asked.

“Remonstration,” he said. “Old favours were called in.”

My fingers clenched. I did not like the sound of that in the slightest.

“What happened?”

“Unimportant,” he dismissed. “It is your latest campaign that we must speak of, Catherine.”

“You shouldn’t know I’m here,” I frowned.

“I know a lot of things I shouldn’t,” he smiled, but the trace of mirth vanished quick enough. “You head towards a debacle. I am ashamed you cannot see as much, for I must have failed you deeply for that not to be obvious.”

“I came here because everywhere else was a dead end,” I bitterly replied. “Even you, playing your games in Procer. How’d that turn out for you?”

“My flaws are many, but no excuse for yours,” Black chided. “This scheme is flawed. Oaths can be broken, and bereft of that why would any of them obey you?”

“It’s a blinking game,” I told him. “If the Heavens break the oaths, there’s a nation’s worth of drow loose in the middle of their backyard. They can’t afford that.”

“There is no win condition to your plan,” he bluntly said. “Only different ways you can lose or put off those losses. You cannot even claim a purpose for this army you’ll mass beyond the current wars.”

“That’s not true,” I bit back. “I know exactly where I’ll settle them.”

“And where would that be?” he skeptically replied. “Your kingdom would not survive the process.”

I paused. It was an effort to keep my face loose.

“It’s fated,” I said. “I doesn’t need to be me who does the heavy lifting.”

“Fate is a useful tool,” Black said, tone irritated, “but it does not-”

I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, interrupting him.

“So that’s what this is,” I mused.

His face blanked. He’d always been eerily pale, but as blood-red lips split into a fanged grin I saw he’d become pale as driven snow. Our surroundings broke apart, ripped away by howling winds – entire chunks of not-Tower whisked away by the raging blizzard. The two of us stood ankle-deep in the snow, facing each other. Above us there was only an endless pitch black night, unknowing of moon or stars. There was only one source of light in here: the burning blue eyes set in my teacher’s face.

“And so we resume the lesson,” he said, voice echoing of Winter.

His sword left the sheath with a quiet hiss and he advanced. Around us I felt other silhouettes rise and there we no need to look to know whose they were. It would be the Woe, at first. Then Juniper. Aisha. Ratface. Nauk. Robber. Pickler. Kilian. Everyone I’d ever shared a laugh with, everyone I’d ever given the smallest speck of affection to. Anyone I’d ever loved, no matter the manner of it. This was not an unfamiliar sight. While my armies struggled through the Battle of the Camps, Masego and I had been... otherwise occupied. I’d visited his own fever dream, taken him out of it. Mine though, I’d never spoke about. With good reason. They would come for me, swords high. They’d curse and scream and die and poison everything we’d ever shared with their last words. Then I’d stand alone, for a heartbeat.

And it would start again.

The backlash from our broken gate had entrapped Masego in his own desires. Mine, though, had ground away at me one murder at a time. Winter did enjoy matching its torments to the disposition of the tormented.

“It would be capable of doing this, it’s true,” I spoke out loud.

The raging winds drowned out my words to even my own ears, but that hardly mattered in here.

“But it would also have known about Black,” I calmly continued. “You could only reach old Name dreams, couldn’t you?”

I paused.

“No, more than that,” I corrected. “I’ve never had one of those with the Dark Council room featuring. You’re riding a vision I could have, if my Name took the fore. You can probably look at most of what I’ve dreamed before as well. But for the personalities, you had the bare bones that gives you with guesswork grafted on.”

The fakes ceased marching towards me and I took a deep breath before raising my hand. Will against will, that was all there was to it. I ripped away the veil and met my enemy’s eyes. Deep and perfect silver on pitch-black skin. The last time the glare of them had blinded me, but we were in my head now. My rules ran deeper than hers.

“I’ve gone rounds with demons and fae, Sve Noc,” I said. “If you want to fuck with my mind, best sharpen your game.”

The drow’s long hair flowed endlessly behind her, turning into gargantuan strands of Night the further they were from the silver light. She did not seem pleased.

Child , she said. Your arrogance beggars belief.

“Mine?” I laughed. “You think you get to win this because I’m close to your domain? I carry mine with me , Priestess. And you stepped in it of your own free will.”

Your doom comes , she said. You will drown in despair, alone and lost.

“And we got off to such a good start,” I drawled. “Whatever happened to ‘I await you in Tvarigu’?”

Sudden rage suffocated me. A wrath beyond understanding, beyond any single person’s capacity. I buckled under the weight of it, but there was something behind. Small, almost like a whimper. Fear, I thought. There was fear.

And wasn’t that interesting ?

“That wasn’t you,” I said.

Sve Noc snarled.

All is Night , she proclaimed.

“Which are you, I wonder?” I grinned, slow and mean. “The rider or the horse?”

She did not answer with words. The pressure should have crushed me. Would have, if this was her realm and not mine. But old words echoed and rippled, the whisper of a pair of crows surrounded by a sea of birds of paradise, and it washed over me like rain. It was not my truth, but I had partaken in it.

“Uninspired,” I said, and the dream shattered.

—

My eyes opened with perfect clarity, lacking the transition between sleep and not.

“That’s a little off-putting, I’ll admit,” Indrani sighed.

I wiggled out from under her arm, already missing the warmth, and sat up. The blanket slid down, baring the upper half of my body, but Archer didn’t even bother to leer. She just snuggled deeper into the covers, to my mild offence.

“Dare I ask?” I said.

“The heartbeat thing,” she elaborated. “I got used to the cool and skin and stopped noticing when it wasn’t there, but it started up the moment you woke up. How does that even work?”

“Fuck if I know,” I admitted, passing a hand through my tangled hair. “Zeze says it has nothing to do with pushing blood anymore, so it might just beat when I remember it should.”

The fire had gone out while we slept but that changed little for me. The sensation between different temperatures still came to me, it just... didn’t matter. It was more like a colour than a feeling. It wasn’t the same for Indrani, though, because my toes informed me she’d put on pants at some point I definitely remembered taking off. Among, uh, other things. I cleared my throat awkwardly. Indrani cranked open a bleary eye.

“You’re not gonna get all skittish about this, are you?” she said. “Considering how enthusiastic you-”

“I remember, yes,” I coughed. “It’d been a while, ‘Drani.”

She laughed musically.

“Yeah, well, it shows you’ve been mostly with women for a few years,” she said. “You’re a lot better than I thought you’d be at giving h-”

“If you keep dishing it out, it’ll burn out the embarrassment,” I tried.

She mulled over that for a moment.

“True,” she said. “I should probably ration it out.”

She finally deigned to rise, pushing herself up and stretching out like a lazy cat. Considering the blanket had completely fallen, that did rather interesting things to a frame I was now intimately familiar with. She caught me staring and grinned.

“Already?” she smugly said.

“Any port in a storm,” I sneered.

“Ouch,” she said, putting a hand over her heart. “That one drew blood, Cat.”

Not really, if her deeply amused tone was any indication. I rested my bare back against the stone and closed my eyes to wallow in this passing moment of peace. Soon enough I would have to arm myself for war and strike the first blow of the Battle of Great Strycht, but just for a little while I could enjoy this. The world outside our nook could remain a faraway abstract a little bit longer. If I’d done this with someone else I might have feared that it would change what lay between us, but not with Indrani. She had a rather cavalier attitude towards bedplay, as a rule, even if she’d largely refrained from indulging since becoming part of the Woe. That’d been a choice on her part, though. She was attractive, a well-known war hero and Named besides: if she’d actually sought out company, she wouldn’t have spent a single night alone since Second Liesse.

“And what great thoughts are we having?” Indrani said, sitting up at my side.

I opened my eyes and found her looking at me with fond amusement.

“I was wondering about the self-inflicted nature of your dry spell,” I admitted.

“Was trying something,” she shrugged. “Still on the fence about it. Besides, you’re one to talk. When we first met you could hardly keep your hands off the redhead.”

Kilian, I thought, but no pang of blurry regret came. It’d been a while since it had ceased to. It’d seemed so much more important when I was in the middle of it. But now my hours were filled bargaining with empires and waging desperate wars, when the stewardship of Callow did not swallow them whole, and the intensity had faded. It seemed such small thing, compared to what was behind me and what still lay ahead.

“It was new for me,” I admitted. “I’d never stuck that long with anyone before. Never wanted to, either.”

“Heartbreaker, were you?” Indrani snorted.

I shrugged.

“I knew I was going to leave someday,” I said. “So there was no point.”

“I can’t imagine you married,” she admitted. “Or even settled down.”

“I was kind of proposed to the once,” I mused.

She grinned.

“Now this I’ve got to hear,” Indrani said.

“I used to work at this tavern in Laure, the Rat’s Nest,” I said. “The owner hinted pretty heavily that if I married his son I’d inherit the place after he died.”

“Truly a love story for the ages,” Archer commented gravely.

“He was kind of an ass, and pretty busy ploughing our bard,” I noted. “Harrion didn’t push when I made it clear it wasn’t happening, he was a good sort. Now if Duncan Brech had gotten on his knees, my tender maidenly heart might have skipped a beat. That boy was fit like you wouldn’t believe.”

“And no one else has tried since?” Indrani said, sounding genuinely curious. “I thought popping out heirs was the queenly thing to do.”

“Talbot mentioned it once or twice,” I agreed. “And everyone influential with spare kin paraded a prospect at court. But I’ve no intention of staying on the throne, so why bother? I was only ever a temporary measure.”

The Foundling dynasty would be short-lived, which was probably for the best. If a successor bearing my name got into even half the messes I had, they’d be more curse than king.

“We children of dew and lightning,” Indrani murmured. “Transient and terrible in our passing.”

She did say beautiful things, sometimes, for all her cheerful crassness.

“Where’s it from?” I asked.

“Some poem the Lady taught me when I was kid, from far across the sea,” she said. “Her father loved it.”

“It’s a big world, isn’t it?” I said. “We’ve seen more than most on this continent, the two of us, and it’s still such a small fraction of it.”

“It’s not about how long we last, I don’t think,” Archer said. “Who could possibly live long enough to see it all? We just have to make the most of what we get.”

“We’re probably the first humans to walk the Everdark in a few centuries, if not more,” I offered.

“Oh, we’ll do a little more than just walk,” Indrani said, lips quirking.

The certainty in her voice forged a smile of my own, though it faded after a few moments.

“I dreamt, while I slept,” I said.

“Winter again?” she asked. “Hakram said whatever you’re seeing must be pretty fucking grim, if you’re not even willing to talk to him about it.”

“Yeah, well, Winter doesn’t do nice as a rule,” I muttered. “But it wasn’t that, at least not tonight. I got an important visitor.”

“No shit?” Archer said. “Our old buddy Sve Noc showed up? What did she want?”

“They, I think,” I said. “And I don’t mean it the way it’s usually meant for drow.”

“A two woman show,” she frowned. “Didn’t see that one coming. They tend to watch each other’s back the same way Praesi do – considering where to plunge the knife. Did she drop in for a bit of trash talk? It’s only traditional before villains throw down.”

“She wanted me to believe that real bad, by the end of it,” I said. “But she played tricks early on trying to get me to answer questions.”

“O Mighty Catherine, would you pretty please tell me your battle plans?” Indrani mocked in a high pitched voice.

“That I wouldn’t have minded,” I admitted. “It’d mean she thinks it could go either way. But what she was actually asking was where I intend to take the drow down the line, and I mislike the shape of that. It feels like she’s playing a different game.”

And Captain’s death was proof enough of how costly that sort of disconnect could be.

“We’re the outsiders here,” Archer said. “It was given we’d have to go in blind. But two heads, huh. Wonder how that came about.”

“I’m more interested in how it can be used,” I said. “The first one I spoke with had a fairly different take on this mess than the other.”

“Think there’s an angle there?” she asked.

I breathed out slowly.

“There was a story I used to love when I was a kid,” I said. “The orphanage was an Imperial institution, when it came down to it, and the tavern I worked that was heavy on Legion clientele. Neither was in the habit of peddling Callowan stories to impressionable young minds.”

I half-smiled, thinking of those days where the trifling had loomed so tall.

“But I got my hands on this old book at the Rat’s Nest,” I said. “Called Stirring Tales of Chivalry .”

“Was it all about lances and ladies?” Indrani asked, wiggling her eyebrows.

I rolled my eyes.

“It was water damaged, so most of it was just blurry ink – probably why the family never managed to pawn it,” I mused. “But there were a few stories in it that were readable, and one I must have read a hundred times. It was about this giant ogre, you see, that lived somewhere in the south of Callow. It had two heads and it could do magic, so even though knight after knight tried to slay it all that happened was that it made a house of their bones.”

“They call their city in the Wasteland the Hall of Skulls, right?” Indrani said. “It holds up.”

I imagined General Hune would have some issues with the story if she ever heard it, but then most my high-ranking officers would have problems with Callowan folk tales. They, uh, tended to get killed in them. To popular acclaim.

“So there’s these three knights that head out to slay it,” I said. “One’s strong, one’s quick, the last is clever.”

“Clever survives at the end,” Indrani immediately predicted.

“The last one listed always survives, you’re not impressing anyone,” I grunted. “Anyway, they go up to the ogre one after the other. Yes, bad tactics I know so don’t even start. Strong and quick get fried, because magic is perfidious and all that. Each of the ogre’s heads eats one of the dead.”

“I thought it was using the bones for its house,” Archer said.

“Look, I never said it was high literature,” I said. “Clever knight goes up, and then says ‘I surrender’, flatters them and says they’re invincible.”

“And then it asks which head is going to eat him after he dies,” Indrani said.

“Exactly,” I said. “The heads start arguing, the clever knight makes it worse, and eventually one head clubs the other in anger and they both die.”

“I thought it was a mage ogre,” she said.

“It also had a club,” I sighed.

“This is why people make fun of Callowan literature, Cat,” Indrani said, not unkindly.

“My point,” I said, valiantly pressing on, “is that creatures with two heads can be of two minds.”

There was a pause.

“Was that all?” Archer asked.

“There’s another version of it that I came across later,” I said.

“No doubt it will be as stirring as was promised by the title,” Indrani replied, smothering a smile.

“In that version, the third knight is a young Elizabeth Alban,” I said.

“The Queen of Blades herself,” she said. “She plies a clever trick as well?”

“No,” I said. “She straight up murders the ogre, because that’s what Elizabeth Alban does .”

That surprised a laugh out of her and so I left it at that. We shared a comfortable silence for a little while longer, until I could no longer even slightly justify lingering. Reluctantly I rose up, somewhat pleased she was finally taking the time to ogle my nakedness, and picked up my clothes. I shimmied on my trousers as she reached for her leathers and I was surprised by the muted intimacy of getting dressed together. It wasn’t domestic – the word would never feel anything but forced matched to Indrani – but it was a kind of closeness we’d never shared before. There was, I thought, nothing to regret about last night. Belts tightened, weapons at our hips, we left the dead fire behind us.

There was a war to wage.

Chapter 72: Outflow

“For though these armed men may carry banner and obey a prince, without justice they are only bandits.”
– Extract from “The Faith of Crowns”, by Sister Salienta

It’d be the first battle in a few years where I wouldn’t have Juniper to run my army for me. I hadn’t quite realized how much I’d come to rely on the Hellhound even before the blades were out, when it was all words and maps and trying to figure out how not to get your people killed. Not that map were all that reliable down here. I had four different tracings from mosaics, each contradicting each other on pretty major points and one insisting rather boldly that this entire cavern was actually three dozen miles to the west and I was sadly mistaken about what my eyes were seeing. I’d settled on having a chalk outline of the former islands and lakebed drawn on a slab of polished granite, well aware it would be imprecise and actual distances would be a guessing game. It’d been strange, though, looking down at a battlefield and not having Juniper leaning over at my side. Frowning over the latest imperfection in the war engine we’d raised together, muttering under her breath about Ratface being a tight-fisted twerp. She never would again, I realized with a start.

Ratface was dead.

There would be a reckoning for that, one day, I thought. It seemed a small sin when compared to all the many injuries levied unto Callow by the Empress, some likely to become actual legend in years to come, but it counted to me . As Diabolist might say, a hatred belonging the woman instead of the queen. Won’t matter if I don’t make it through this, I reminded myself. It wouldn’t either, I knew, if I survived in failure. Only victors ever got to truly settle their grudges. The grim thought called me the order. Perhaps, I decided as I studied the chalk battlefield, it was for the best that my marshal did not hold command for this one. Juniper’s art of war was one of discipline and manoeuvre, of bold tactics and vicious traps. It was the bastard child of the way the Legions of Terrors had won their wars, and for all that the faces of my legionaries had grown paler over the years the heart of it remained forged out of the Reforms. A core of well-trained infantry empowered by specialists, professional soldiers costly to train and equip but who could usually beat significantly larger enemy armies.

Like much of what Black had wrought, for the three Imperial marshals might have been deep contributors but there was no denying the central architect, it prized skill over power. It was almost more a set of tools a brilliant mind could use to produce spectacular results than a proper army – it was fortunate that there’d been so many promising generals to be found when the Reforms first took place, and in retrospective the number of them that wasn’t human did much to explain the sudden gains of greenskins and ogres in what had once been a very human institution. At least near the top. Few of the old Black Knights had balked at sending orcs and goblins into the meat grinder to the west when campaigns got going. It was a good model, I thought, though to maintain it in the long term Callow would have to build a War College of its own. Talented officers did not grow on trees. It had its limits, though. Procer had made that clear when it’d tossed a sea of conscripts at the two passes defending Callow and effectively accepted every trade in soldier’s lives, knowing they could afford the most spendthrift or rates and still come out the victor. The Legions, and even the Army of Callow, were armies built for a certain kind of war.

They would be lost, down here, so it was for the best Juniper was not here to go mad over the coming mess.

I would have liked to claim I had something as neat and pretty as a three-step scheme, that I’d read the opposition and would make them dance to my tune, but the unfortunate truth was that I was an outsider down here. Even now that I’d stolen Akua’s fluency in Crepuscular and I could read most runes as well as speak the tongue, a lot of what was taking place was beyond me. I didn’t have the Jacks and the Eyes feeding me reports of about who despised who and why, I didn’t have histories or supply assessments or even more than bare bones scout reports about enemy strength and position. The traitor sigils we’d approached had provided information, sure, but how much of it could really be relied on? They had objectives of their own which didn’t necessarily entail my own army coming out on top, no matter what they said, and without an easy way to independently confirm what they’d told me I’d had to make some choices half blind. At first, I’d tried to get as many solid numbers as I could and work from there. I had a good idea of what the Rumena Sigil could bring to the table, for example, because a lot of people in Strycht hated them and wanted them dead.

But then I’d tried to get a solid notion of what the Jindrich could field – the Rumena were the most powerful sigil by far, but there was a reason the Jindrich Sigil was the undisputed runner-up – but all that accomplished was making clear the scope of the problem. Mighty Jindrich’s envoy, fresh off the pact we’d made behind the back of the rest of the city, had informed me they had around one hundred and fifty Mighty of varying ranks they could bring into the fight when time came. We’d bribed three lesser sigils going thirsty with blocks of ice for information on the same subject, since ice was a lot easier to transport and didn’t require a highly visible fairy gate to deliver, and we’d gotten three different numbers between one and four hundred. Now, at the scale of the kind of battles I’d fought on the surface, a variation of a few hundred wouldn’t mean much. But down here? It’d made no sense to me. All the sigils had small territories, were bound to keep a vigilant eye on each other and constant raids should give them a good idea of enemy strength.

Diabolist figured it out first, because we had gotten some very precise out of those bribes that was the same over all three reports. Small details, like the first rylleh under Jindrich being able to shapeshift and the four shapes it could use, or that the third and fourth under Rumena usually fought as a pair. It wasn’t that the drow were shit at spying, I knew they weren’t. There was a Secret that was pretty close to fae glamour, after all, which was why Ivah had taken so well to it in the first place. It was just that, in fights between sigils, usually the only people that actually mattered to the outcome were the ten, fifteen strongest Mighty. Raids succeeded or failed depending on who was leading the attack and the defence. Why would anyone bother keeping track of how many dzulu there were when a single rylleh could tear through an entire cohort without even working up a sweat? We could and had gotten mostly reliable information on those particular individuals, but getting irritated that no one could give me good troop assessments was rather missing the point.

I wouldn’t win or lose the Battle of Great Strycht through dzulu and lesser Mighty, so instead of getting lost in a maze of unreliable reports I needed to focus on the aspects that would actually make me come out on top. Namely, that most of those people were at each other’s throats if not actively trying to kill each other even as I planned. When you looked at it through that lens, the situation was a lot less grim. For one, my own army was larger than the Rumena Sigil’s and I’d bet on my Peerage over their Mighty any day. My lords had lost nothing of their old prowess and gained much from Winter. Considering the Rumena were the most powerful tribe in Strycht, that meant I could expect that if it came to a slugging match I could come out on top against any one sigil – barring an unexpectedly powerful Mighty fucking up my day, which was admittedly quite possible. The crux of this, then, would be preventing the sigils of Strycht from actually unifying against me. Which wasn’t nearly as hard as it should have been, given that I was an eldritch invader of dubious purposes and origins. Unfortunately, there was also the Longstride Cabal to account for.

Two hundred of the most dangerous Mighty in the Everdark apt to pop out at any moment to come straight for my head, and probably the Peerage’s too for good measure. They weren’t here for territory or wealth, all they wanted was the glory of crushing me. Which meant negotiating with them in any way was effectively impossible unless I could punctuate my offer with ‘or you will immediately die’, and even then it might be a toss-up. I’d picked the brains of my lords for a little more on the Longstrides, wondering if the angle of promising them a battle at a designated time and place could get them off my back long enough to deal with the Strycht sigils. I’d gotten some pretty heart laughs in response, as my Peerage assumed that I was actually joking. Cultural divide, I decided. The whole glory in battle thing was tied pretty heavily to honour, back home, but in the Everdark was the word was only ever used in the sense meaning ‘respect’. The whole rules of behaviour part of drow culture had been pretty much ripped out and replaced with the Tenets of Night when Sve Noc decided it was time for a regime change... however long ago that’d been.

Since sidelining the Longstride Sigil wasn’t an option, I had to either secure the city before they arrived or make them part of the plan somehow.

The clean play was taking care of Strycht first. Ivah and my Peerage had found me the right tools to get that particular pile of dry burning, which would weaken the opposition before we struck and allow us to take it with moderate casualties before they realized what was happening. Give or take a few angry sigil-holders. Then before the Longstrides arrived we’d consolidate, harvest Night and title the willing before the enemy struck. Most my Peerage had been proponents of that course of action, betting on a proper ambush laid in Strycht to take care of the problem. I had issues with that plan, though. I’d taken enough cities in my time to know that soldiers walking through the streets wasn’t enough to actually establish control. That held twice as much for a place like the Everdark, where the nisi might not make the kind of mess an occupying force would have to deal with in Callow but millennia of tribal rule ensured there would be significant resistance among the drow ‘upper class’. In essence, anyone with a speck of power not under oath not to stab me in the back would the moment it looked like there was a chance it might pay off.

Wouldn’t be much of an issue if I did put everyone with a speck of power under oath, but practically speaking that’d take days we didn’t have. Establishing order after a battle always took longer than the fighting itself, and the margin of manoeuvre was thin enough as it was. I could have put the finest minds at my disposal to work on solving that – well, mind, Archer tended to solve her problems only one way – but there was a larger problem behind. Aside from the shaky foundations we’d be making our stand on, when the Longstride Cabal showed up we’d be the only enemy on the field. The totality of their efforts would be dedicated to killing me and wiping out my Peerage, with everything else a minor distraction at best. Sure, I could try to drown them in fresh recruits. Send every dzulu and Mighty I had after them, in warbands led by the Peerage, but casualties would be brutal. And when they converged on me, because they absolutely would, the kind of workings I’d need to pull out to stay alive would probably level Strycht and the people living in it. Evacuating the city in advance was certainly possible, but it’d also be hanging up a sign warning them of the ambush.

So either massive civilian death toll or the cohort of hardened killers drunk on Night came in forewarned. One I refused out of principle, the other had decent odds of leading to a rout.

Which brought us to the other option. That one had been cooking in the back of my head since I’d first gotten Ivah’s reports. The sigils in Great Strycht were, well, at each other’s throats to put it mildly. Starting a city-wide fight in there would be about as hard as starting a fire with a jug of oil and a torch in hand. Once hostilities erupted, there would be no banners and uniforms: only a lot of scared and angry drow attacking everything looking remotely like a threat. That was the thing with civil wars, wasn’t it? It was hard to tell who the enemy was. Sure, infighting within actual sigils would probably be minimal while they were in the middle of a battle. But cabals would split and even nominal allies would have to wonder what was going on and if the other ones were in on it. A very volatile mixture that could be made much worse with a few nudges, personified by a cheerfully murderous Indrani. For once, her ability to pick fights with anything sight could actually come in useful! Deep down I’d always known there would be a payoff for that eventually. This part, in and of itself, wasn’t significantly different from what an attempt to seize Strycht would be like.

Which was where the... interesting part came in. The Longstride Cabal, as my Peerage had noted, were not exactly the diplomatic kind of crew. Oh, to have survived this long they probably must have some degree of moderation. Otherwise another band of old monsters would have put them down by now. But while Great Strycht was further into the inner ring than say, Lotow, it was far from the heartlands. I tended to compare it to Marchford, in my mind. An important city, given the lake if loomed over, but not a major player – like Laure, Liesse and Vale had once been in Callow. The Longstrides could come in here and expect to be the biggest kids on the block because, well, they actually would be. Now, combine that with the way drow usually behaved whenever they stood even an inch over another drow and throw in that their cabal hunted powerful entities for sport? The moment someone gave them lip they’d answer with blades, and from there it would escalate. Sigil-holders would know what they were dealing with and likely withdraw if given the chance, but to be able to do that they’d need to have a clear idea of what was going on and the presence of mind to make that decision.

Both were pretty rare things, when in the middle of an all-out battle that would determine whether you and your tribe survived the night.

Akua had called it fighting fire with fire, when I’d put forward the notion, but I disagreed. That implied a degree of control we wouldn’t have after the blades came out. It was more like... fighting a battle by starting another half-dozen battles. I didn’t have to win, not exactly. I just had to lose less than everyone else. Just enough that I got to take home the prize when the dust settled. We’d used our last few days to put the pieces in motion for what Diabolist scathingly named Operation Damage Control, all coming to a head on the day we believed the Longstride Cabal would arrive. Spending the last night with Indrani should have cleared my mind, but instead when the hour came I had a fresh worry to chew over. I still believed that the plan, if it could be called that, would serve its purposes. There would be setbacks, but I still had cards up my sleeves. I hadn’t wasted my days since Great Lotow, or forgot the hard lesson the duel with Mighty Urulan had taught me. If I fought the same way I had since claiming my mantle, I would lose. Badly . Preparations had been made accordingly. But that wasn’t the worry, was it? There was only one thing I knew this morning I hadn’t last night.

Sve Noc would act. Not down the line, not through intermediaries. She’d strike, today and straight at me. If this really was a death match for Below’s favour, then the chosen would have to bleed. And that changed the nature of this battle, didn’t? I did not feel like a coincidence, that’s she’d shown her hand only this late. When the wheels were already turning and it was too late to stop them.

“A good morning to you, dearest.”

I did not turn or reply. Behind me the camp was stirring for war, preparing to march. Below me plains of half-dried mud stretched out all the way to the distant plateaus and hills of Great Strycht. My fingers drummed against the hilt of my sword, the gesture failing to settle me. Diabolist was not offended by my lack of reply, simply coming to stand by my side.

“Did you enjoy yourself, at least?” Akua drawled.

I glanced at her, eyebrow rising. Did she... Well, I supposed it hadn’t been the most discreet of trysts. Drow senses were shaper than those of humans, even those that weren’t Mighty, and the shade’s were sharper still.

“Sve Noc paid a visit to my dreams,” I said.

I had no intention of discussing how I spent my nights with Akua Sahelian. She was not the Scribe to my Calamities, part of us in her own way. I would not forget how she had come into my service, no matter how useful. Or how tiring. That was the part that surprised me, how tiring it could be to hate Diabolist. The Doom of Liesse was reminder enough, but sometimes it felt like I was flogging myself with the memory of it.

As, no doubt, she intended.

“Her purpose?” she asked.

Whatever whimsy there’d been was gone. She understood perhaps even better than me the seriousness of that.

“Information,” I said. “About what I’d do with the drow, if I led them out of the Everdark. About how I’d deal with the Heavens if they meddled.”

Scarlet eyes tightened.

“That such an entity would consider surrender is highly unlikely,” she said, pausing to allow me to contradict her.

Both assessing and fishing for fresh information with the same sentence. Fucking Praesi, I thought half-admiringly.

“She was definitely hostile,” I said. “And tried to overcompensate when I caught her out. All doom and damnation. But she slipped up – there’s two of them, I’m almost certain. And they’re not necessarily aligned in their opinions.”

“Now that is rather interesting,” Akua said. “I had previously assumed that her lack of action was the result of either rules or indifference. Power akin to a god’s does tend to come with the limitations of one.”

I raised a skeptical eyebrow at her.

“I got a pat on the back and a badge from that order’s grandmaster and I’m not feeling all that constrained,” I noted.

“You’ve only ever used a fraction of your power,” Diabolist said, and raised her hand to prevent me from replying to that. “For good reason, I am aware. The alienation would endanger you. Yet that is why such entities have seats of power, Catherine. The Dead King rules the Serenity. The Priestess of Night rules the Everdark, or close enough. There is a reason my ancestors raised pyramids to gather power, darling one. The summit stands on the steps, and is greater for it.”

“I do rule a kingdom, Akua,” I reminded her. “You know, little place between Praes and Procer? There was a coronation a while back, in between the constant fucking wars.”

“Ah, but do you rule it as Sovereign of Moonless Nights?” she said. “Hardly. Even the Wild Hunt are merely in your service, not true vassals. You bound neither the Woe nor the realm to your mantle.”

“Making Arcadia but worse out of my home isn’t exactly in the works, yes,” I flatly replied.

“And so you have not grown roots,” Diabolist said. “An apotheosis incomplete, so to speak. Did you not wonder why the Grey Pilgrim and his ilk are so desperate to remove you from the throne?”

“I’m a villain ruling Callow,” I said. “I don’t believe we need to revisit the whole Calernian balance of power argument, Gods know I’m tired of hearing about it.”

“The Carrion Lord ruled it for decades,” Akua said. “And, to be frank, the legitimacy of your rule is only marginally better.”

I frowned. It was a pretty sparse forest she was describing to me, and as a rule I tended to think I understood heroes better than she did. But she was a villain, in a way I’d never really been. From a people who’d been fighting heroes for centuries. She might not always be right, she often wasn’t, but once in a while her perspective did allow her to see things I didn’t.

“Roots,” I said. “That’s what you’re implying. The Peregrine worries about me growing roots in Callow.”

“It is one thing to slay a villainous queen of Callow,” Diabolist said. “Quite another to seek the destruction of the immortal Black Queen, the wintry personification of centuries of her people’s grudges. The first is a threat. The second is another Dead King, one whose armies can march through the realm of the fae . ”

“He knows,” I said, then hesitated. “Or at least suspects that I intend to abdicate.”

“And so you were handled with gloves,” Akua said. “Deals and stories, marching armies instead of a Choir unleashed. You ascribe this to the man being reasonable, but he is a hero . If that decision was made, it was made because he feared that cornering you would see you tumbling through the threshold of apotheosis complete.”

Or he could have been genuinely trying to limit the damages the country would suffer. If he had started calling on Choirs, I’d have needed to escalate accordingly. But when the pivot came , I thought, he backed Hasenbach . Backed the crusade victorious at all costs. He was willing to play within certain boundaries, but only so long as he’d win. The trouble with Akua was she would be convincing even if she was wrong, because she was a persuasive person period. I was unwilling to put any stock in it before I had Hakram and maybe Masego serving as advocated for the opposite thought.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “For now, the war is down here. And it’s Sve Noc we’re facing.”

“Part of her, at least,” Diabolist mused. “I wonder if the simplest answer is truly the correct one.”

“Simplest?”

“One is the pyramid,” Akua smiled. “The other standing atop it.”

A rider and a horse, I thought. I’d considered that as well.

“It would explain why we’re not fighting the Night,” I said. “Just something using it.”

“Strife, mother of a thousand opportunities,” she quoted in Mthethwa.

An old proverb I would have been able to name the home of even if she’d spoken it in Lower Miezan.

“I need you to do something for me,” I said.

She turned to face me completely. In Masego that would have been a notice I had his full attention, but with her I always had that. Even when she pretended otherwise.

“I had role given in the battle to come,” Akua said.

“I know,” I said. “But this is more important.”

“And what exactly do you need of me, dearest?” she asked.

There were a lot of ways I could have answered her. Some true, others euphemisms or a hundred different shades of flippant. It’d helped me over the years, the quips. Allowed me to make it a joke or a game, anything but a reality so often ugly. But if I was to let the monster off her leash, then she should be given her due.

“Folly,” I said.

Akua Sahelian smiled, and in that smile lay the promise of things great and terrible to behold.

Chapter 73: Feeder Bands

“The rat it bites the rat
On the tail, the tail, the tail
The rat it does grow fat
And swell, and swell, and swell
But a rat will bite the rat
On the tail, the tail, the tail
So we’ll sing the chain again.”
– “Growing Horns”, a Lycaonese nursery rhyme

The first blow struck in the Battle of Great Strycht was an illusion.

Glamour, to be precise, woven by my own will. I’d seen no need to waste strength by making it too elaborate, so it’d remained a simple streak of blue light high up in the ‘sky’. In of itself it did nothing, but it didn’t have to: it was a signal. If my army stepped into the city uninvited, we were the enemy. The ones everyone would be aiming at, and even the few sigils who’d struck pacts with us would think twice before coming out on our side. Whether it was to see if we could match the opposition or simply to bleed us a little first to have a better position after the battle didn’t matter, since I couldn’t afford those kinds of losses. No, I needed blades to already be out when we struck. Thankfully, Ivah had provided me with the means to ensure that. The Rumena Sigil, Gods bless their ambitious souls, had decided that the barbarians knocking at the gate was the right moment to make a play for the control of Great Strycht. My Lord of Silent Steps had learned as much after grabbing one of their lesser Mighty and interrogating it thoroughly. Not so thoroughly, though, that it had died from my lieutenant’s attentions.

So we’d made the songbird sing a second time, this time in front of the inner circle of the Jindrich Sigil. They’d been the natural targets for sowing dissension, and not just because they’d already made a deal with me. See, the Jindrich were the second most powerful sigil in the city. They’d opened negotiations because they were under attack by a cabal of lesser sigils going after their water reserves and agreed to take oaths under condition of those enemies being humbled, but they weren’t bound to me. Not really. It was an alliance of convenience for them, and those were not to be relied upon. But this changed things. As the second best, the Jindrich would have to be annihilated of the Rumena were ever to fully take over Great Strycht. More than that, we’d hinted that the sigils attacking them were doing so at the invitation of Mighty Rumena – which, for all I knew, could be true. It didn’t matter if it was false, though, because from the perspective of Mighty Jindrich it made sense and confirmed its worst suspicions. It was not hard to get people to believe the worst of each other when they’d been feuding cyclically for a few hundred years.

So my alliance had become a little less shaky, and I’d put it to work. The Rumena had been the kings of the island for a very long time, and never been all that nice about it: to the extent that there was technically a cabal including most everyone else dedicated to keeping them from devouring the rest of the city. That meant they had a lot of enemies, and that the Jindrich had... well, allies was a bit of a stretch. Sigils they’d fought with more than against for the sake of keeping the Rumena in check. Mighty Jindrich had reached out through envoys and warned them in advance of the plot, which was exactly what I’d needed. If my people had done that, it would have been taken as naked plot to incite civil war. Which, dues where they were due, it was. Coming from Mighty Jindrich, though? It had a reputation as an implacable berserker, not an intriguer. Put that together with our songbird, and you had all the necessary ingredients for a discreet coalition. Once it’d been assembled, the hard sell had been making it wait. Understandably, the drow preferred being on the offensive if there was going to be a battle: Mighty were no strangers to collateral damage, and they’d rather it happen on Rumena territory than theirs.

So Mighty Jindrich had ‘tricked’ me. It had assured its allies that it’d managed to convince me to send a force into the field to back them up, small enough the risks of it turning on them afterwards was minimal. But there was a catch. It’d only managed to wrangle that loan on a specific day. Namely, the one where the Longstride Cabal was suspected to be arriving – not that they knew that. The rest of the coalition had reluctantly agreed to the delay, weighing that my own people sharing the losses was worth the risk of discovery implicit to sitting on a plot like this for a few days. I was pretty sure that when the time came, Mighty Jidnrich would actually turn its coalition on us if it thought we’d been weakened enough to be beaten. That was fine, though, because I’d betrayed it first. Ivah had dug up from the prisoner that the Rumena had approached ambitious rylleh instead their target sigils and we’d helped clean up those leaks by providing the names we have. Not of the exact rylleh, sadly, since we didn’t have those – the prisoner hadn’t been that high up in the Rumena Sigil. But sigil names had been given and their sigil-holders had picked out the most likely treachery candidates for killing before they joined battle.

But we’d held two names back. Akua had removed them from the head of the prisoner just to be sure it wouldn’t sing an inconvenient song even if prompted. I’d been inclined to think that even if we did nothing the enemy would find out, but best to be sure. It was now a certainty the Rumena knew there was an attack coming, and that meant they’d be intercepting it on their own chosen grounds. And so an illusory streak of blue light got the first round of betrayals started even as my army moved out. It was the signal for the coalition to begin its attack, for the Rumena to begin their counter-attack and my own plans to begin.

The drow were a fair hand at betrayal, but I had the Fairy Godmother of Treachery in my service.

My drow set out in warbands, treading the half-dried lakebed quietly. Soldiers would have moved in formation, according to precise orders, but I had none. Only warriors, and those couldn’t be made into neat companies with designated officers. They’d move and fight as tribes, led into battle by the members of my Peerage. I’d studied the grounds for days and spoken with drow better learned in Everdark warfare than I, ultimately coming to the conclusion that there would be four different skirmishes that would dictate the outcome of this battle. Two would take place to the east, near the islands-turned plateaus of the Jindrich and the Hushu – respectively our main allies and the leaders of a cabal of four mid-tier sigils that’d remained aloof from the intrigues unfolding across the city. That sector would be the most volatile, since the two different skirmishes could easily turn into a single broader pitched battle if we weren’t careful. That the Hushu and their allies would get involved was a given, but on what side they would fall in this was anyone’s guess. Those fronts had been named, respectively, Spear and Dice.

One would take place to the north, in what had once been a lake-within-the-lake. The drow called it the Flowing Gardens, as it’d once been an entire district of small stone islets covered in sculptures and greenery. A place of leisure for the ancient drow, where pleasure ships had lazily drifted between enchanted metalwork that sung songs when touched by the breeze. It’d been centuries since those days, though, and now the Flowing Gardens were an eagerly fought-over battleground. The district had both water and food, after all, and the entire thing had been fed lakewater through a complex system of canals and sluice gates: holding those was a sign of power among sigils. My confiscating of Lake Strycht had lowered the waters within until the majority of the sections had become little more than large scummy ponds whose dirty waters were still fought over brutally by the minor sigils occupying the district and its outlying regions. Most members of my ‘allied’ coalition under Mighty Jindrich were from there, and my assessment was that the Rumena were going to hit them hard and early to keep them from assembling. Which would draw opportunists from the warlike sigils in the region, making it a beautifully chaotic mess. As a front, it’d been named for what it was going to turn into: a Pit.

The fourth and final front would be in the centre of the city. It would be the slowest to come into being, and at the start wouldn’t even exist. The Rumena Sigil’s territory was to the west, a five large and comparatively rich islands serving as the heartlands of their tribal possessions, but the fight would never get that far. The forces going after Mighty Rumena and its warriors after being freed from other fronts would pass through the central district of the city, since it was the quickest and easiest path, which meant that was where the ambush would be waiting. It was good grounds, I’d been told, for that kind of fighting. The centre of the city was filled with old temples and administrative complexes, set on a massive plain of solid rock. Every single building was separated from the others by deep grooves carved into the stone, more or less small canals, and the drying of Lake Strycht had turned the place into a labyrinth of bridges and corridors on three separate levels. A good spot for the Rumena to await an enemy force, after they’d devoured the sigils currently occupying it. It’d be hard to concentrate troops there, and either attacking Mighty would stick together and risk lesser warriors being casually wiped out or they’d separate and a hundred small duels would erupt on bridges and alleys.

We’d called that front the Woods.

I stood on a promontory as my army moved out, beginning the trek to the battles, and below me stood those that would lead them in battle. There’d been a fresh addition to my Peerage, a twelfth member. The Agus Sigil weren’t part of Strycht proper but they’d held territory close, and been half-mad with thirst when Lord Zarkan found them. Mighty Agus had not been difficult to talk into becoming Lord Agus, though it seemed uncomfortable with its new role and wary of the rest of the Peerage. With good reason, I thought. Before oaths were taken, most of those drow would have wiped out its sigil in an afternoon’s work and done so without batting an eye. It was the weakest of my lords, and knew it. The others did not share its mood, though. There was the scent of eagerness in the air, like they were itching for the fight. They probably were, I admitted to myself. Drow were not the kind of people to leave power unused after it was gained, and they had gained much from bargaining with me. I took a moment to gaze down at them in silence, wondering how many would survive the day.

“Today,” I stated, “we take Great Strycht.”

There were hard smiles at that, but no cheers. That was not the drow way.

“I won’t waste your time with a speech,” I said. “You all know what I’m about – we’ll be dancing on the edge until the last beat.”

I had their attention, though not because of any eloquence on my part. What came next was what they’d waited for all this while.

“And now what you actually want to know,” I smiled. “Lords Nodoi, Losle and Zarkan: yours is the Dice front.”

Zarkan was hard to read, because it hated my guts and that was usually the main thing to be found rather than anything more nuanced, but the others were easier. Relief. They knew their job would be mainly containment.

“Lords Slaus, Vasyl and Sagas, yours will be the Spear front.”

Nods, poorly-hidden surprise. Given that Mighty Jindrich would be there, the expectation had been that either Soln or Ivah would take the lead there. They were, after all, the two most powerful of my Peerage. And those I trusted the most, though that was not a hard hill to climb. I had other plans for those two, though.

“Lords Soln, Lovre, Vadimyr and Agus, you will be serving as our strategic reserve,” I said. “You’ll be hanging back for the initial stretch of the battle.”

Disappointment from Lovre and Vadimyr, I found. They’d been the most recent additions until Agus, and were eager to prove themselves in a battle that wasn’t waged against my own army. Agus was pleased, unsurprisingly. Soln, though? Soln understood. It knew I wasn’t finished speaking.

“For the duration of the fight, the three of you will be under the command of Lord Soln,” I said. “To be deployed as it judges necessary depending on how the fronts unfold. Unless I give an order otherwise, Soln’s words are good as mine.”

That they liked a lot less, save for Soln, since it was the closest I’d ever come to raising one of them above the others. They’d have to get used to it, I thought. This was not the last large-scale battle we’d fight, and some order would have to be forced onto our manner of warfare.

“Honour was given, Losara Queen,” the Lord of Shallow Graves smiled.

“You know my intent,” I simply said. “See it done.”

It wasn’t a coincidence I’d picked those four. Soln had the closest thing to battlefield acumen there was to be found in my pack of warlords while Lovre and Vadimry had led raiding sigils. Their Mighty were the most battle-hardened I had at my disposal, and the most used to fighting in a group. Agus would be a weak link wherever it was sent, but putting it on the roster would allow Soln to send warm bodies into a growing mess without committing my best troops.

“Lord Ivah,” I finally said.

“My queen,” the Lord of Silent Steps replied, inclining its head.

“You’ll be with Archer and myself,” I said. “We’re taking the Pit front.”

“By your will,” Ivah smoothly replied.

I gave them a last look.

“They’ll remember today,” I said. “What part of that story you end up being is up to you, my lords.”

They bowed, and to war we went.

—

They army marched together most of the way before splitting up front by front, sneaking through mud and reeds. We stayed out of sight, as much as could be done on largely open grounds, and my own sigil was the last to part with the reserve under Lord Soln. I came out of that journey pleasantly surprised. I’d never considered drow to be proper soldiery, but this kind of business was well suited to their skills and I’d underestimated them in some ways. Oh, I still winced at the idea of them in a shield wall. But the march we’d just done in an hour would have taken half a day for legionaries. Even dzulu could keep up a pace that would exhaust humans and orcs for hours without tiring, and they’d walked across mud like it was solid stone. Never a step missed, or a boot stuck in a mire. More interestingly, they’d done this so quietly I could hardly believe they were an army on the march. My Peerage would be a threat on the battlefield, but I was beginning to grasp how dangerous lesser Mighty and dzulu could be out of it. They climbed up slopes like spiders, leapt from stone to stone with the grace and easy of hunting cats.

How hard would they find it to climb a wall in the dead of night?

But those, I told myself, were thoughts for another day. Ivah guiding our warriors, we circled around the eastern fronts to get to ours unannounced. Going through the territories of sigils would have been quicker, but also risked skirmish. I did not want to start spending lives before we even got to the Flowing Gardens. The war had begun without us, it was plain to hear. The sounds of fighting carried across the void and echoed, making it hard to tell who was winning – if anyone at all – but it was too early in the day for anyone to be trying for knockout blows. For now the sigils would tentatively send out their lower ranks to probe the waters, hesitant to commit their most powerful Mighty until they had a better idea of what the opposition had brought. The main force of the Rumena should be busy taking over the central district, too, with only traitors and hunting bands out on most the other fronts. Save, I had guessed, the very front I was headed towards. Here they would want to break the core of the coalition early, before wind could touch its sails and they got a real battle on their hands. Still, with a little luck the fighting here would be limited between the two sides while the undecided local sigils watched on.

As it turned out, I was not going to get lucky.

My sigil crept through the mud quietly until we reached what now looked like a stone wall but must have once been the edge of a constructed island. Ivah had been ordered to lead us to the outermost edge of the district, close to one of the smaller sluice gates, and it had delivered. Its days spent marauding in the dark had given it a good notion of Great Strycht’s layout. I left my warriors at the bottom of the wall, going ahead with Archer and Ivah. The masonry here was fine and the stones polished by centuries of water, but I would have been able to climb this without too much trouble even before I’d become the Squire. We went up without a sound, Indrani disdaining my offer of a palm to jump off of in favour of a running leap. The top of the wall was a long rock pier, flanked by a structure where the sluice gate could be raised or closed, but it wasn’t either of those that drew our attention. The sound here hadn’t carried well, I decided, probably because all the sectioned parts and the ponds had broken it up. But now that we were up here, we had a decent look at the battle unfolding in the Flowing Gardens and it was a fucking mess.

“I’m counting at least eight sides,” Indrani murmured, kneeling behind a large stone cleat.

“More,” Ivah said. “Some sigils have yet to intervene. You can see their lookouts lurking at the edges of the fighting.”

It discretely pointed a finger and I followed the direction. Yeah, it was right. I could make out the silhouettes hiding within giant glowing ferns. I hesitated, just for a moment, because the place was a bloody nightmare. It was hard to tell where sigils began and where they ended: every islet was a melee, most fought between several sigils. There were two pairs of warbands going at each other with what had to be rylleh that I knew for a fact weren’t part of the coalition. They’d just... seen an opportunity, I supposed. The Rumena I could make out from the rest, mostly because they were slightly organized and winning most their fights. Either they’d come with some of their finest, I thought, or their lower ranks of Mighty were heads and shoulders above everyone else’s. It took me a few moments to figure out who was leading their expedition, since their forces were split. But near the southern edge of the Flowing Gardens there was a warband of maybe two hundred drow everyone was avoiding like the plague, and a triumvirate of Mighty positively reeking of Night that stood atop an islet while overlooking the mess. I got confirmation of my suspicions when one of them faced down and spoke at one of its warriors, a runner leaving immediately towards one of the detached Rumena warbands.

These were their officers, then.

“Archer,” I said. “Find a perch.”

“Gotcha,” she shrugged. “At will?”

“Try to draw in the bystanders,” I said. “Clip their lookouts, see if that gets them moving. After that...”

“Yes ma’am your queenliness,” she grinned.

She legged it, already stringing her bow as she went.

“Ivah, reach out to our beloved allies,” I said. “I don’t want to get in a brawling match with the people we’re supposed to be propping up.”

“As you say, Losara Queen,” the Lord of Silent Steps murmured. “And after?”

“Return to the sigil,” I said. “I’ll be busy making friends.”

That got a hard grin out of it, all teeth and malice. You learned that from us , I thought, and it almost troubled me. We were not teaching the drow kind lessons, and one that there would be a reckoning for that. It vanished into thin air, the glamour fine enough even I lost track of it, and slowly I rose to my feet. I looked down at my awaiting warriors, still at the foot of the wall.

“Over the top,” I ordered. “Forward, Losara Sigil.”

Even as they began to climb behind me, I cast an eye at the Rumena officers. Good, they hadn’t noticed me yet. Time to make my entrance. I let Winter loose and smiled, inhaling deep of the smell of blood and fear wafting from the battlefield.

Chapter 74: Eyewall

“My husband thought himself a cynic for believing that men so often race towards the bottom of the barrel. I found it charmingly idealistic that he believed there was a bottom at all.”
-Queen Yolanda of Callow, the Wicked (known as ‘the Stern’ in contemporary histories)

Leaving the gate open wasn’t an option, not really. The more my opposition saw that trick in action, the higher the chances they’d figure out how to counter it. Rubies to piglets there was some Night equivalent to the Pilgrim’s miraculous beam o’death, and I could not afford to be knocked out of the battle literally moments into it. I’d adjusted my tactics accordingly, and so after five heartbeats I closed the opening. Gravity and mass turned the water into a massive hammer blow coming down on the Rumena, but I wasn’t dealing with amateurs: of the three ‘officers’, two immediately fled in shadow form and the third was swallowed by a hulking shape of Night moments before the impact. Neither would have been a bad answer, if water was all I’d brought to the table. Instead I strung Winter and loosed it again, turning the entire ploughing mass into ice just as if fell on the drow. There’d been two hundred of them, when I’d opened the gate. The vast majority of that had been dzulu, and those died instantly when the water hit. The lesser Mighty were crushed by the ice, and the two officers who’d fled in shadow form found themselves stuck in it.

The last, though, I knew to be untouched. The Night construct had taken the impact without flinching, and was now tearing its way out. It’d been too much to hope for to take out the enemy commanders with the first blow even if it’d been a sneak attack. Didn’t mean I was going to make it easy on them, though. Even as my sigil flowed around me, heading into the fray without a single battle cry, I seized the reins of the ice I’d crafted and slapped my palms together. The entire construct contracted around the Night-shrouded drow at the centre and I felt its defense flinch. My lips stretched into a grim smile when I realized I’d forced the other two officers back into drow-form as a side effect, bloodying them in the process. There was another pulse of power and the Night-construct began pushing back. I could make this a slugging match, I thought, but that would be missing the point. I didn’t want to annihilate the Rumena, I wanted to drive them back to the central district after weakening them. Their sigil was, after all, a part of the force I intended to put between myself and the Longstride Cabal.

Another exertion of will had the ice collapsing into mist, a thick fog that would blind them for a while. Good enough that I could move on, I decided.

A quick glance told me that the Losara Sigil had added a fresh current to the mess in the Flowing Gardens but hardly affected the entire lay of the battle. At our angle of entry, we were taking the pressure off one of the coalition sigils – making a semi-stable line of battle on the northwestern side. I didn’t intend to meddle there, since Ivah had been ordered to return and drive away any Mighty that were too much for them to handle. No, I’d go make friends of my own. The half-dozen islets in the middle were so chaotic a melee I couldn’t even tell exactly who was fighting, but to the northeast a Rumena detachment was tearing through a mix of sigils both ‘neutral’ and allied. A good place to start. Wings of shining light burst out of my back and I took flight, rising above the mess to hurry things along. I went high to avoid distractions, but even then I still had to dive out of the way of a javelin roiling with Night some Mighty tossed in my direction. I could have batted it away, but why take the risk with a trick I didn’t know? My brow rose, however, when after arcing a dozen feet above me the javelin finished the curve and flew in my pursuit. Someone had it out for me, huh.

Evidently I’d made an impression.

I was quicker than the projectile, so I was less than worried, but I slowed my flight to allow it to catch up. Not close enough to hit, or even explode if that was how that was supposed to end, but close enough the Mighty controlling it might think it had a chance to clip me. I angled my flight downwards after reaching the battlegrounds I’d picked out, javelin howling behind me, and landed in a crouch. The two Mighty in front of me, who’d been hacking at each other with obsidian blades, paused and turned towards me.

“Surprise,” I said, and turned into mist.

I took solid form again half a dozen feet to the side, just in time to see the javelin strike them. It did not, to my surprise, explode. In the heartbeat where it hung in the air between them, tendrils of Night came boiling out and wrapped around to the Mighty. Almost instantly they were dragged into the projectile, leaving behind only half-finished screams. No trace of a corpse. Whoever had tossed that, I thought, wasn’t fucking around. I checked if there was another flying towards me just in case, but there was nothing coming so I pressed on. It wasn’t difficult to find the Rumena: I just had to follow the screaming and the runners. A crew of four stood in a loose diamond formation, steadily advancing through the opposition. I ran through the melee, drow parting around me cautiously, and leapt on the one at the front. Even as I swung my sword towards its throat I saw it begin to turn, surprise passing in its silver eyes, and I could tell exactly when it realized it wouldn’t be able to raise its own sword in time. And yet there was no fear to be found. I learned why a moment later, when the strike that should have carved through its throat instead shattered my blade. It’d been like throwing an egg at a wall, I thought.

It countered smoothly, blade coming down to hack between my shoulder and throat, but I kicked at its side and used the momentum to throw myself backwards. The tip of the iron blade came within an inch of my nose as I landed on my feet, and immediately I pushed forward. I couldn’t allow the four of them to strike in formation, it was bound to get messy. Shifting its footing skillfully the drow began a backswing. Unfortunately for it, I slid down between its leg and grabbed its left ankle as I did. Hoisting it up was easy as lifting a feather, and I rose even as the other three Rumena watched me with visible surprise.

“Look,” I said. “It’s just really hard finding a weapon that won’t break. Bear with it.”

“You-” the Mighty at the back started, Night blooming around its wrists, but it was interrupted.

I took my angrily flailing mace and smashed it into another drow. Bones crunched, though they snapped back into place with a hiss – jawor, then, since they had more than a single good trick – and the drow went flying. The other flanking Rumena tried to slide around and ram my back with a spear, but I caught my drow-weapon by the throat and used it as a loudly protesting shield. The spear pinged off like it’d hit steel, just in time for me to sidestep two hissing whips of Night wielded by the fourth. They snaked back around towards me, but I batted away their tips with my drow after releasing its throat. My mace screamed in pain as the Night punctured its flesh, dropping its sword. In a show of good drow sportsmanship, my disruption of the Rumena advance was followed by an opportunistic attack from other sigils. The left side of their force was swarmed by an angry sigil so thin on Mighty it must have taken a brutal beating before I arrived. Sadly, drow opportunism applied to everyone. An arrow flew at my back, the head of it glinting with shadow, and I had to pivot so my mace could take it in my place after I seized it by the crook of the neck. Heat licked at my fingers as the arrow failed to pierce through but dark flames charred the Mighty’s skin.

I was kind of impressed it hadn’t passed out yet.

My drow weapon was beginning to try wrestling my wrist into loosening, so our love affair had sadly come to an end. I crouched low and spread out my stance, heaving it in the same direction the arrow had come from. Halfway through it flicked into shadow-shape, but to my amusement our friend with the bow shot it and it fell to the ground with a scream. Well, no longer my problem for now. The Rumena had identified me as the person whose head needed to be on a pike before they got their footing back in this section, so I found myself swimming in Mighty soon enough. We played for a while, my frown deepening as we did. They were outclassed against me, but the longer I got them striking at each other by weaving into their midst the more I realized these were bottom feeders as far as Mighty went. Maybe there were a few jawor in there, but not a single rylleh. Most of those were ispe, the lowest kind of Mighty, with maybe a few pravnat – practically speaking those were just ispe showing promise, but drow were touchy about titles – thrown into the mix. But they’d been wrecking the opposition, and I could see why. My own sigil had ispe, and the Rumena Sigil’s made them look like bumbling amateurs. The fact that I’d yet to fight dzulu here was telling, too. I’d been told that the Rumena made up almost a third of Strycht on their own, but I hadn’t though they had quite that many Mighty to spare.

The quality of the opposition was going to be a problem, if these were their third-stringers.

As if to reinforce the point, I got a lesson in why Mighty Rumena had judged that three officers were enough to take care of this front. Three falling stars impacted the battlefield, less than a breath of delay between them, and as stone and drow went flying the Mighty I’d ambushed earlier made their entrance. Steam drifted off their frames as they rose in unison, unbothered by the fact that most casualties resulting from their landing had been of their own sigil. The Night construct from earlier flared, and I finally got a good look at it. It looked like stylized panther, though one vaguely humanoid and standing on it forelegs, and its eyes were empty socket. I could feel the power coming off of that, and to be frank I did not want to find out what’d happen if I got hit with it. The other two advanced with long tridents of bones held in loose grips, fanning out in a circle. I could fight them, I thought. The collateral damage from it would hurt their sigil more than anyone else’s. But I’d already accomplished what I’d come for, disrupting their success in this sector. There was little to gain from an all-out brawl with these three.

“Well put,” I said, “But if I may retort?”

I opened a gate behind me and retreated through it. The cold breeze of Arcadia scattered my hair as I strode across the waters of what had once been Lake Strycht, ice forming under my feet. I cast a look back to see if they were following, and to my pleasure they were. I quickened my steps as the followed in hot pursuit, one of them stretching out its shadow for the others to walk on as if it were a solid thing. The exit gate beckoned, and I called it open with a thought before leaping through. The one we’d entered through was already closing, so my pursuers wasted no time in following suit.

All four of us started falling, because why would I make the gate lead to the ground when I could fly ?

Wings burst out of my back again and I left for greener pastures as they fell impotently back to the floor, landing in the middle of the bloody central melee. None of them would die from it, but they’d be stuck in another fight they had no time for. Another arrow flew towards me, this one without Night woven into it, and I almost struck back blindly where it’d come from. Luckily I glanced first, and found it’d been Archer who’d fired the shot. Frowning, I crafted a platform of shadow under my feet and landed. Indrani was, rather unsurprisingly, surrounded by corpses. It’d take too long to make my way to her, so I closed my eyes and took a shortcut.

—

The corpse rose, the lingering warmth chased away by Winter coursing through the veins. Archer eyed me skeptically, nocking an arrow.

“Cat?” she asked.

I spat out a glob of blood and phlegm.

“You have my attention,” I croaked out.

“Left corner, three sigils massing,” she said. “Tickled their lookouts, but they’re playing the waiting game even under provocation. Should I start shooting leadership or do we leave them be?”

The dead drow’s neck was horridly stiff, but I forced it to turn with a snap and followed her pointed finger. Couldn’t make it out from here, I wasn’t high up enough, but from up in the sky it’d be no trouble.

“I’ll handle it,” I said. “You should- oh shit! ”

—

Height was no guarantee of safety, in a fight like this, even if my distraction lasted only a few moments. I didn’t see what broke my platform but it vaporized my right foot with it and I began falling again until my wings slowed it to a halt. Which was exactly what my enemies wanted, as it happened. If it’d been the three Rumena from earlier going after me that’d have been fair game, but it wasn’t: four Mighty from a sigil I was pretty sure I was theoretically allied with stood atop long pillars of Night and were forming a globe of the same around me.

“ Really ?” I said. “Fine. Have it your way.”

I snuffed out my wings, opened a gate under me and fell right through. Arcadian air howled around me and I crashed into the water, ripping open a gate under me. The sudden whirlpool drew me in and I fell along with a mass of water more or less over the sigils Archer had pointed out to me. Streaks of shadow immediately flew up but a flick of the wrist had the water around me turning into a large spike of ice I casually tossed into the midst of the gathering warriors. I landed among screams and fleeing dzulu, brushing off my shoulders. The sigil-holders would be on me soon, but my eyes were drawn to the corpses I’d just made. There was Night in them, though like with all dzulu not much of it, but it was fading. Going away, and I could quite say where. I tugged at the chain binding Diabolist to me, allowing her to see through my eyes. I felt the trace of her presence come, lingering only a few moments before disappearing. She tugged back one, a message received. Had she already known? Quite possible, if this was happening all over the city instead of just here. Then the Mighty were on me, and the time for musings had passed.

Three sigil-holders, each with a pair of rylleh backing them. Difficult to deal with, if I’d intended on fighting them. Instead I tossed a few spears of ice at them to get them riled up and began a retreat. They followed, and our merry chase began. I could have called the Flowing Gardens the stuff fairy dreams were made of, but I’d had fairy dreams – and this was much more surreal. We danced through canals where vines had grown thick and sprouted thorns and hooks, bursting through faded poems carved into stone. Tortured sculptures of bronze and obsidian sang dissonantly as shards of Night were tossed, stirred by the wind in their wake, and towering trees whose only produce were leaves red like blood shook as Mighty rode shadows in my pursuit. A sluice gate of oily metal was torn open like parchment as I leapt over it on translucent wings, the sigil-holder who’d done it looking like a creature of nightmare in the light of the glowing flowers and ferns it’d torn through in its haste. And everywhere we went, drow fought and ambushed and bled on stone and water. There were Hells, I thought, not even half as grim as this. I stoked their anger with darting strikes followed by vanishing into mist, clipping a few with ice spears to little more effect that mounting frustration on their part.

They didn’t realize what I was doing until we’d barrelled into the central melee, and by then it was too late.

It was such a mess down here that another few Mighty in the crowds hardly made a difference, the fight ebbing for a moment before forming anew around them, and just like that my job was done. The Rumena were losing here now, though the situation was slowly turning around as the warriors from the section I’d flipped earlier joined up with their fellows. It must have gone quite badly there after I’d left for them to outright abandon the fight. Good. The cauldron was near the boiling point, a little more and they’d be ready. In my absence, the Losara Sigil had pushed deep. Moving as a cordon along with our allies, it was moving slowly but surely towards this mess. Seeing my sigil’s symbol as war paint and adornment was surprisingly moving, but it ended up costly. By now, my identity was no mystery to the people I’d tangled with. And if they couldn’t pin me down themselves, then there was one way they could force a fight.

Three falling stars hit my sigil, and in the span of a single heartbeat I lost at least two hundred warriors.

Gone, in a shred of flesh and bone and stone dust. People it had taken me months to bind and empower, dead in the snap of a finger. I clenched my fingers, pushing down my fury. War could not be waged without losses. I rose in the sky and dived for them, deciding that gating close to them was too much of a risk. In the time it took me to arrive, I lost another hundred drow. The Rumena officers slaughtered them with contemptuous ease, be they dzulu or Mighty, and only ceased when I landed at their back. I rolled my shoulder, weaving a glamour without missing a beat.

“All right,” my illusion said. “You got me here. Now what?”

“The worthy take,” one of them said. “The worthy rise, Losara Queen.”

I circled around them, footsteps muted, but one of them must have had a trick to see through that because the two with bone tridents ignored my glamour and turned towards me. The Night construct erupted for a third time tonight, the blind panther roaring out, and they charged. There was, of course, one thing they hadn’t accounted for. The leftmost drow ducked under an arrow, batting it aside, but there’d been a second shot hidden in the curve of the first and that one took it in the throat. It gurgled, unsurprisingly still alive, but then its throat began burning green. Indrani had spent quite a while with Robber and his miscreants, hadn’t she? She’d been due a few new tricks. That one I immediately discounted as dead, flesh reknitting or not, and that left me two to deal with. Or it would have, if Ivah hadn’t cut into the dance. My Lord of Silent Steps moved with unnatural agility, waiting until the bone trident had struck out before... moving. The description failed to convey what had taken place, though. One moment it’d been standing in the way of the weapon, the next it’d been behind the Mighty and striking with its own glass staff. Afterimages followed a heartbeat later, revealing how it had moved and the whole affair reeked of Winter.

It’d skimmed the edge of Arcadia, I realized with a start.

Move along the boundary between it and Creation, steps silent and sudden until struck. Merciless Gods, I couldn’t do that. Was it the true face of its title? Or was it just better at using power, after its centuries as a rylleh? It’d didn’t matter, I thought, at least not right now. Its opponent was far from dead, even after taking the blow, and I still had one to contend with. The shaped Night pounced, carrying the drow within as if it were lodged in the belly, and if I’d not batted wings to hurry my retreat it would have hit me. As it was, the panther’s claws tore through the stone beneath us and it turned to face with as its tail swung. As suspected, I did not want to get touched by any part of this. The thing was, I couldn’t really afford a slugging match with a rylleh when I was supposed to be getting this cookpot off the fire. Not even an obviously powerful one. There was a part of me that found it only natural to get down in the mud and brawl, but I couldn’t afford to fight that way anymore. Not with the kind of opponents I had, these days.

I’d done it at the Battle of the Camps, and what had that gotten me? Nothing I’d done there had actually mattered until the gate had been opened, and the Saint of Swords had batted me around until I fled. Keter had been more of the same, struggling through one messy gambit after another while a dead elf and a Horned Lord made sport of my best efforts. All this had happened while the fucking Dead King as good as named me a peer, while he’d be able to handle those matters easy as picking apples. Not because he was more powerful, because terrifying as Neshamah was Winter’s abyss ran just as deep. But because he knew how to use that power, while I muddled along using only the barest portion of mine. Akua was better at using these powers than I was, and she didn’t even have a title. So what did I have that neither of them did? Because that was the question, wasn’t it? If I was going to sit at the same table as Sve Noc and the King of Death, then I needed to prove I had the qualifications to claim a seat. Catherine Foundling, the woman who brawled with rylleh and lost limbs by the dozens before finally putting it down, did not have those qualifications.

I looked at the Night construct, watched its legs bend as it prepared to pounced, and I shaped it in my mind. I’d never done it simultaneously before, but why couldn’t I? Maybe I wouldn’t have been able as the Squire, but the Squire was dead. Devoured by a harsher mantle. How many of my limitations , I thought, are self-inflicted? I could be mist or hard as steel, I could grow wings and walk away from the loss of half my body. Lies and mirrors, and what was this but a different kind of lie? The panther skimmed across the ground, unnaturally swift, and I let Winter flow into me. Fill my veins and my lungs, steal away my breath. I embraced it, as I had in Liesse, and formed what I had shaped in my mind’s eye. The first gate opened in front of the Night construct, and it slowed by a fraction as it prepared to leap over it. That was enough. Another two, caging it in a triangle. Another two, above and below. All of them leading to the bottom of the Fields of Wend, that depthless glacier lake at the very heart of Winter. How many miles of water were there in it? I didn’t know, not for sure. But water came out from all sides, and in a heartbeat Night and drow were crushed like a bug by the gargantuan pressure. I breathed out and the gates closed as one, leaving behind only water and flesh made into paste.

No, Catherine Foundling had no place at that table. But maybe the Black Queen did.

I looked back, found the battle had gone on uncaring of what’d just taken place. Just another current in the sea. It was time to get them moving, I thought. Soon enough the Rumena would have taken the central district, and the madness in Great Strycht needed to be brought to its climax. I couldn’t get all these drow moving with my own power, it was true. It’d take hours to go around killing every sigil-holder and asserting command, assuming it was even possible at all. But I’d been taught by a man who had been an artist in the ways or ruling through fear, and his lessons had not all gone to waste.

“Retreat,” I called out to my sigil. “As planned.”

I left them to the grisly business of disengaging from a furious melee while I reached for my power one last time. Terribilis the Second had once said that a threat was useless unless you’d previously committed the level of violence you were threatening to use. I didn’t agree, though, not exactly. It was useless if the level of violence you were threatening wasn’t believable, I’d say instead. And I’d stolen a lake in front of these people, used it as a weapon and bribe both. They would believe quite a bit, coming from me. Even as my sigil began fleeing towards the heart of Great Strycht, to the surprise of their foes, I wove a glamour. A gate facing upwards, and through it came a deafening rumble. Illusory molten stone flew out, landing on the muddy lakebed and the edge of the Flowing Gardens, smoke and lava following as the glamoured volcano erupted in full.

The Losara Sigil fled, and every godsdamned drow in the north followed close behind.

Chapter 75: The Eye

“There is more power in blood spilled willingly than unwillingly. The latter is simply a great deal easier to obtain.”
– Dread Emperor Sorcerous

I would have compared it to herding cats, but as far as I knew those didn’t take time in the middle of a rout to backstab allies or enemies, depending on who didn’t watch their back closely enough. Well, maybe Praesi cats. You never knew with Wastelanders. I kept the drow moving even after we’d cleared the area that was being affected by the ‘volcano’ by more or less stomping out any knot of bravery that formed. After the second time Mighty who tried to stand their ground and rally their warriors got a gate opened above their heads the message was received. I was sinking into Winter at a prodigious rate, no to ways around it, but nowadays I had more than just Akua to dump the principle alienation into. Twelve hardened former Mighty on top of Diabolist meant I could keep this up for quite a while without going all monologue-addicted, and if it came down to it I could try to disperse some of it into the drow who’d simply taken oaths. There were shards of Winter in them as well, after all, put there to enforce the terms. It didn’t quite feel like I’d be breaking our bargain if I did that, but somehow I suspected it was close enough I wouldn’t like the ensuing backlash. A desperate measure, if need be, but not to be used before that.

The front we’d named the Pit was effectively finished, the chaos within being poured into the dawning mess at the centre of Great Strycht, but while fighting there I’d taken my eye off the two fronts to the east. There were risks in that, which was I’d put Lord Soln in command of the reserve to hedge my bets. It had authority to intervene as it deemed necessary to keep the wagon on the road. It was about time to see how that’d worked out. I remained with the retreat until we reached the outskirts of the central district before putting Ivah and Archer in charge of the situation and dismissing the glamour and taking flight. The false sky of the cavern was mercifully unburdened by fighting, and the height allowed me to gauge how the situation was unfolding over the entire city. There’d been two battles planned in the east, fronts named Spear and Dice. The former I wasn’t overly worried about, since the Jindrich would be taking the lead there and their sigil-holder was infamously destructive. The latter was a different story, as it involved a cabal of four sigils informally led by the Hushu, which presumably weren’t in on any of the plots coming to a head. If they pushed into the other eastern front, that whole section of the city would become a massive melee I lacked the tools to properly handle.

Considering the ‘plan’ for the Battle of Great Strycht was to drive everyone and their genderless sibling into the centre before the Longstrides arrived, there was a lot riding on Lord Soln’s ability to cope with the situation.

What I took in from above was a mixed bag. The reinforcing Peerage I’d sent to back up the Jindrich had been enough to punch through the delaying force sent by the Rumena on the Spear front, by the looks of it. They were in full retreat, harassed by coalition and Peerage drow as they made for the centre. Considering the amount of Peers I’d sent east I was rather surprised it was harassment and not annihilation I was looking at, but the explanation was not difficult to find. The Hushu and their allies had taken the field and decided to be clever about it. Instead of launching a hard assault that would see my Peerage diverted from the pursuit to deal with the situation, they were marauding around the flanks and striking fast before withdrawing. The Peers and sigil-holders in command were hesitating, reluctant to allow the Rumena to retreat unimpeded when the Hushu attacks were so lukewarm. The three lords I’d assigned to that front had gone with the understanding that containment was their main objective, so they were tacitly allowing it to happen even if it thinned their ranks. Presumably judging that the overall losses would be greater if we fully engaged. The reserve under Lord Soln was closer to the centre, in an incline between two islands-turned-hills, and so hidden from view. There’d been four sigils assigned to the reserve, before hostilities erupted, but only two were still hidden down there: the Soln and the Agus, so at least the overall commander was there to answer my questions.

Instead of staying up there and drawing attention, I landed next to the reserve and dismissed my wings. The drow parted around me, many of them bowing as I passed, and I returned the gesture with a silent nod. The Lord of Shallow Graves awaited me with Lord Agus at its side, gravely listening to dzulu giving reports. The conversation died as I strode in, the two Peers inclining their heads in deference.

“Losara Queen,” Lord Soln said. “I heard word of your success to the north.”

“Drew in everyone I could and sent them running into the central melee,” I agreed. “I’m more interested in the situation around here. Have the Hushu and their cabal declared for a side?”

“Their own, presumably,” Lord Agus sighed.

“They attacked the coalition and the Rumena both,” Soln calmly replied. “Though with the retreat of the Rumena, we are now the only blood left to be shed.”

“I take it you’ve something in the works,” I said, glancing around pointedly.

There were, after all, two missing sigils.

“I sent the lords Lovre and Vadimyr to circle around Hushu positions,” Lord Soln agreed.

“That’ll open another front,” I pointed out. “Instead of push them into the centre, which is what we’re actually after.”

“So I said, Losara Queen,” Lord Agus muttered. “So I said.”

“I intend to launch an assault myself as they do, my queen,” Soln explained. “Along the ridges of the southeast.”

I frowned, trying to remember what I’d seen of the battlefield from above. It would make a corner connected to a line that led straight to the centre, more or less, if you counted the forces currently pursuing the Rumena. If I had to guess at the intent, it’d be forcing Hushu and friends to head towards the centre to avoid being assaulted from two sides. If we’d been fielding a disciplined army I would have given it decent odds of working out as Soln wanted, forcing movement through pressure, but as it was we’d be compounding a gamble with another gamble. And even if it works out, we’re wedging the Hushu and their allies in between the Losara Sigil and the rest of our forces , I thought. Considering my sigil had already taken harsh losses at the hands of the Rumena, if the Hushu went all-out against them they might outright collapse. That’d be... bad. Without my own forces out there to stoke the fire, there was a decent chance the ‘neutral’ sigils there would rally and retreat rather than remain participants in the bloody melee. Soln, I thought, had good instincts. But it was trying to fight with an army we didn’t have, and its core mistake was trying to maintain control over a situation that was already too chaotic to handle.

“How long ago did Lovre and Vadimyr set out?” I asked.

“Less than half an hour,” Lord Agus said.

“Right, so we’ve still got time to manoeuvre,” I frowned. “All right, here’s what we’ll do. The entire force holding back the Hushu and their cabal is to collapse immediately and flee towards the centre.”

The two drow stiffened with surprise.

“The casualties-” Lord Soln delicately began.

“Will sting, I know,” I said. “But your way is as likely to lead in a slugging match we can’t afford as it is to drive them to the centre. So instead of forcing them, we’ll bait them. That many sigils in a rout? They’ll come after them with everything they have, eager for the harvest.”

“And we are to simply look upon the situation and wait?” Lord Agus asked, with what I suspected to be a hopeful tone.

Not the fiercest of fighters, this one.

“No,” I said. “You two and the two sigils Lord Soln sent out are to attack them from behind once they’ve committed.”

I paused, meeting the Lord of Shallow Graves’ blue eyes.

“Lord Soln, force them into the centre,” I said. “With everything you have.”

The drow softly laughed.

“And I believed myself to be ruthless,” it said. “It will be as you say, Queen of Lost and Found.”

Lord Agus was a lot less sanguine about essentially throwing both our ‘allies’ and several of our sigils into a boiling broth, but kept its dismay largely off its face.

“Will you be accompanying us in this, Losara Queen?” it asked.

“Sadly, I suspect I’ll be needed elsewhere,” I said.

If only because the last thing I wanted was to be surrounded by my own warriors when the Longstride Cabal showed up.

“Do either of you know where Mighty Jindrich is?” I continued.

“The Rumena angered it enough it grew wroth before they were driven back,” Lord Soln said. “It was last seen heading out in their pursuit, its mind lost to rage.”

“Find the largest concentration of wreckage and corpses, it shall not be far,” Lord Agus noted.

“And Mighty Rumena?” I asked.

“Has yet to take the field against us,” Soln said. “Though there is word it might have participated in the taking of the central district. It is largely under that sigil’s control by now.”

“So the dance awaits me in the middle,” I mused. “Fitting. Lord Soln, I trust you’ll be able to carry out your orders here?”

“That much I can promise,” the Lord of Shallow Graves smiled.

“Then wade in their blood, my lord,” I said, and translucent wings burst out of my back.

I was thousands of miles away from any orc, but their traditional farewell had hardly ever been more appropriate. I shot back up into the sky and wasted no time before heading out towards the front we’d named the Woods. That district had been the centre of ancient Great Strycht in senses more numerous than the geographical one, even a swift glance made that clear. It was a labyrinth of temples and great halls, each its own little island surrounded by a deep canal and tied to others structures by curved bridges and arches of stone. The sheer vividness of it startled me, for until now I’d seen drow tastes run towards mostly colours grey and dark. Here though, strange and half-faded patterns of blue, red and white covered every surface. Orange and gold served as the colour of the sky in sprawling mosaics where the moon was depicted as a feathered wheel of white-tipped red, the stylized heads of snakes and drow gazing down at the bloodletting from every corner. The depredations of time and abandonment were easy to find, collapsed roofs not since repaired and broken walls serving as makeshift doors, but I was surprised to see some of the paints had been freshly touched up.

Some of those mosaics were splattered with greyish red, though, and that wasn’t paint.

A square tower with colourful turrets on the corners burst open at the base, and just like that I’d found Mighty Jindrich. The drow was massive, the largest of its kind I’d ever seen, and covered from head to toe in a featureless carapace of pure Night. I watched, reluctantly impressed, as its fingers sunk into the sides of the same tower it’d just ripped up and it repeatedly smashed the whole thing down on a pair of Mighty until there was nothing left but bloody paste. Then it tossed the whole thing into a temple and screamed monstrously before leaping into another fight. This was, I thought, my primary ally in this battle. I sure knew how to pick them. I was almost distracted enough that I didn’t see the javelin coming, but not quite. There were fires all over the district and trails of smoke going up into the sky, but as the projectile sailed through a large plume I caught sight of the stir it caused and dipped below with a bat of my wings. I raised a brow when I realized there was no hint of power in the toss, save in how far it’d been thrown, and that even if I’d not moved it would likely have missed me. Had some enterprising dzulu decided to bag queen and glory with the same throw?

I’d be sure to praise their guts, before the messy retaliatory murder.

I flew around the plume of smoke and found where it should have come from, eyes landing on a single drow standing atop one of the tallest towers in the district. That was strike one. Even far as I was I could make out the looks of it. It was, well, old. Its grey skin was deeply creased, its pitch-black veins visible through it and though tall it had grown visibly stooped. It held no weapon, attired in a strange belted tunic of obsidian rings. Almost like mail, I thought. Its hair was long and white, going down almost to its waist. That was strike two. Its dim silver eyes met mine all the way across the distance, as if it could see me just as well, and I could not feel a single speck of power from it. That was strike three, and so the drow might as well have ‘dangerous, take caution’ tattooed glaring red on its forehead. It did not attack a second time, simply waiting. Not an attack , I corrected. A way to grab my attention. My eyes dipped to the large cloth belt it wore, and the Crepuscular I read on that only confirmed what I was already suspecting. Wings narrowing behind me as I dove, I landed smoothly in front of the Mighty Rumena.

Mantle of Woe fluttering as I rose to my full height – which was, rather unfairly I felt, still shorter than the bent old drow – my wings folded behind me. I wasn’t dismissing those before I got a clear idea of what was taking place here. I’d read a lot of faces, in my time. I’d watched humanity slide off my teacher’s true face like water off clay, the utter blankness of fae bereft of stories. Shades of contempt by the dozen, angers both principled and personal, too many flavours of hatred to count. Irritation from creatures considering me an insolent child, pity from the likes of the Grey Pilgrim and even casual dismissal from the Saint of Swords. Mighty Rumena stood out from that multitude, because all there was in its gaze was attention. Pure and unfettered, as if the weight of it left no place for anything else. It was uncomfortable, to have someone take in all of me so deeply. It didn’t feel like scrutiny, and I realized the source of my unease a moment later. I’d seen that look in another pair of eyes: Masego’s, when he’d come into his aspect in Arcadia. When he’d witnessed it all with impossible clarity.

“Mighty Rumena,” I said. “Your invitation was received.”

“Losara Queen,” my foe simply greeted me.

It had a calm voice, I thought. Unruffled, unhurried. Like nothing could really affect it. It was old and powerful enough it might not even be wrong about that. It glanced down at the messy fighting below, the screams and blood and fire swallowing up the district.

“I remember this city,” Rumena said. “From when it was at its height. The jewel of the south, second only to Tvarigu in beauty. It brings me no pleasure to layer ruin over ruin.”

“And yet,” I said, “here we are.”

“There are only a few of us left, Losara,” the Mighty said. “Those who knew this land before Night fell upon it. In Strycht, Jindrich is the only other – and it was young when we lost the wars. Too young to understand the true depth of the loss.”

“But you weren’t,” I said.

If it wanted to talk while my designs unfolded, I had absolutely no objection to that. If we engaged it was going to be the kind of mess that’d make devils blush, and while my forces below weren’t winning exactly they were carrying out my plan perfectly. It was hard for them not to, when the entire plan was to create chaos and that was the natural state of the Everdark.

“I was a general, honoured twice for victories won in the Burning Lands by the Twilight Sages themselves,” Rumena said. “One of them, I think, against a people whose blood you hold. The look has little changed since those nights.”

My fingers tightened. It was implying it’d fought the Deoraithe, at some point, and there was a little problem with that: neither the Kingdom nor the later Duchy of Daoine had ever come under drow assault in recorded history. There was the Golden Bloom in the way, after all. Which meant I was talking to an entity claiming it’d been alive before the elves arrived on Calernia. Three thousand years old, I thought, at least. Gods. It might be the single oldest thing I’d ever met save for the Dead King.

“And now you’re a sigil-holder in the remnants of the old empire,” I said.

“My army followed me,” the Mighty said. “Already they were rylleh and jawor, though the titles had different meaning then. None of them survived the passing of the years. The Night is not a forgiving sacrament.”

Sacrament, I thought. Not just a domain, some Name’s power manifest. It’d always felt too large, hadn’t it? And I had wondered why no drow seemed to be born a mage. This whole time, had I really been looking at an entire people wielding Below’s equivalent of Light? Miracles of the darkness, purer in nature than even the stuff devils were made of.

“You saw it happen, then,” I said. “What Sve Noc did.”

“I knew one of the sisters,” Rumena said. “And now know her better still. She is in my blood, in my soul.”

Sisters? My eyes narrowed. And it’d called the Sve her . There was something significant about that, I thought. A detail I was missing.

“They broke you,” I said. “Your entire civilization.”

The drow shook its head.

“Not them,” Rumena said. “The Twilight Sages, in their wanton arrogance. How tall stood their pedestal and proud they were of it, until the nerezim cast them down. Only then did they regret the height.”

My blood ran cold. For a creature that old and powerful to call something wanton arrogance , how terrible must it be?

“What did they do?”

“They sought to kill death,” the Mighty said. “But leashed it instead. We were to live forever, you see. As gods. And we did, for a time.”

The old drow’s lips twisted into a bitter smile.

“Then we lost the wars,” Rumena said. “And while we raged and wailed of wealth lost, of glories unmade, the wise Sages knew terror. For the nerezim put entire cities to the sword, and our immortality narrowed . They had borrowed from what would never be. And with every defeat the debt grew closer to that moment where it could no longer be repaid.”

“They didn’t make you immortal,” I spoke slowly, piecing together what’d been laid out for me to find. “Did they? They stole years from children not yet born. That would never be, because their parents were slain by the dwarves.”

It was one of the fundamental laws of sorcery, wasn’t it? That you couldn’t make something out of nothing. I had not forgotten that glimpsed conversation between Neshamah and the Bard, where she’d implied the Twilight Sages had been mages.

“And so our end loomed, Losara Queen,” the Mighty said. “The balance dipped closer to irredeemable disaster with every fallen city. Until the two of them took action.”

“The sisters,” I said. “They made the Gloom. They made the Night. Before the point of no return was reached.”

There was a long moment of silence between us, as the sounds of the slaughter below drifted up to our ears.

“Before?” Mighty Rumena smiled. “O Queen of Lost and Found, did you not come here to rob a corpse?”

I shivered. The old creature laughed.

“Dead, every last one of us,” the drow said. “You thought Sve Noc the cause of our ruin, and you were wrong. You thought them the cure to our disease, and you were wrong again. Our most beloved betrayers did not save a single soul. They... delayed.”

“It makes no sense,” I said. “The Gloom yes, but the Night? It incited slaughter. If instead they’d encouraged childbirth, raised your population, you might have gotten out of it. You’ve had centuries to recover since those wars, you could have evened the scales.”

“You do not understand,” the Mighty said. “It was too late, Losara Queen. We were already dying . But those clever sisters, the wicked and the merciful, they struck a bargain.”

And I grasped it, then, what it was that I was being told.

“The Night is the only thing keeping any of you alive,” I whispered hoarsely. “And the slaughter isn’t a mistake or an unforeseen consequence, it’s the entire point. Every kill is a sacrifice. Willing. Eager, even. Merciless Gods, Archer was right – this entire realm is an altar.”

“The greatest in all of Creation,” Rumena said, ruinously proud. “Witness and weep, Losara, the glory of the Firstborn: we alone, of all peoples in the world, have cheated death twice .”

“But it couldn’t last,” I said. “You had to have known that. The dwarves were going to come sooner or later and it was all going to fall apart the moment they did.”

“The Night was not an answer,” the Mighty said. “But it could be understood as a question.”

And another part of the puzzle fell into place.

“Apotheosis,” I said. “Through brute force. Trying every possible application of power through hundreds of thousands of Mighty so that a path out could be found.”

And I had thought myself inelegant, for merely blundering my way into my mantle. The sisters were trying to force the lock by trying every possible key.

“Was it?” I asked. “Did they find a path?”

Pale silver eyes considered me calmly.

“Come now,” Rumena said. “Why would the Shrouded Gods grant such a boon, when our base terror kept their altars slick with blood?”

“So they failed,” I said. “Rumena, there’s another way. I can help with this. We don’t need to fight. Winter-”

I bit my tongue.

“You knew that already,” I finally said. “And you still struck.”

“You are right, Queen of Lost and Found,” the Mighty said. “You can help with this.”

As a sacrifice, one last to finally even the scales. And I’d been a good sport, hadn’t I? The Everdark entire might be an altar, but I’d consecrated Great Strycht with thousands of dead just so Sve Noc could properly open my throat over its ashes. Even as my alarm mounted, part of me could not help but admire the game of the Gods Below. They’d played their hand flawlessly, hadn’t they? It didn’t matter to them whether the drow rose from the dark as the Winter Court reborn in shadow, or if the Priestesses of Night devoured my mantle whole and unleashed madness on Creation as a two-faced goddess. No matter who won, they won as well. That was their way, I was beginning to understand. They didn’t move like Above, trying to force a victory in every fight. They only ever fought when they couldn’t lose.

“Why tell me any of this, if we’re going to fight?” I asked, warily backing away.

“To give them time to surround us,” Mighty Rumena said.

The roof exploded beneath our feet, and the Longstride Cabal entered the fray.

Chapter 76: Storm Surge

“Quite literally not what I was aiming for, but I can work with this.”
– Dread Empress Regalia II, as her flying fortress began falling on Laure

Why was it always explosions?

Everybody always tried to blow me up. Akua, Pilgrim, too many Summer fae to count. Even William, and he didn’t even have powers that made it easy for him – he’d used godsdamned munitions. Was there some manual you got when you became Named that set it out as a preferred tactic? Just once, for diversity’s sake, someone should start with fire. Or ice, or even bloody lightning. Sure I’d dabbled in the explosion method myself so some – viper tongues one and all – might call me a hypocrite for complaining, but in my defence this was reaching a point where I’d received a lot more explosions than I’d dealt out. Once more, this savage world of ours was proving to be deeply unjust at its core. I was probably going to be blamed for this too. This tower would prove to be some deeply holy place to the drow, and good ol’ Catherine Foundling would be charged with desecration of some fancy Night temple. It was getting as bad as the goblinfire, which for the record I didn’t use nearly as often as some people implied. Thinking of you, Hakram.

“Would, like, shadow snakes be too much to ask for?” I said. “Sure there’s a lot of phallic symbolism involved, but-”

A hole the size of a watermelon formed in my torso, scattering my organs in a shower of gore even as I fell. The Longstrides either had a very dark sense of humour or they weren’t the most stirring of conversationalists. There were six – no, seven, one was half-veiled by an illusion of Night – drow below and they went about their assault with calculated professionalism. The explosion that’d made an abstractly-patterned portrait of my insides all over the stone had blown me back towards the wall, where a blanket of shadow was already awaiting me. The acid trick again? Best not to test it out, I decided. My wings were smothered in strands of Night the moment they tried to move and take me out of freefall, but I had other options. The gate opened under me, and after a few heartbeats of falling through Arcadian sky I gated back out atop the now-roofless tower. Mighty Rumena was still perched at the edge of it, standing unruffled with its hands folded into obsidian-ringlet sleeves. I killed my wings and formed them out again, getting rid of the interfering Night, and landed on the opposite side with largely accidental grace.

“You seem irritated,” Rumena noted. “Is your attempted enslavement of my entire race proving too troublesome for your tastes?”

“That one was a fair shot,” I conceded. “Are you not taking part in this kill-a-queen festival?”

“Humans,” the Mighty sighed. “Such impatient creatures. All in due time, Losara Queen.”

I liked to think I wasn’t so much of a fool as to fall for the exact same trick twice in a row, so even as we spoke I’d started moving. Just because I’d found seven of the Longstrides so far didn’t meant that was all of them. The sudden attack had not been a pleasant surprise, but my plan was still working out at the moment – as made clear by the fact that I’d been ambushed by a small pack, not the full roster of two hundred. I learned why this particular lot had been the vanguard the moment I leapt down to temple’s roof a few dozen feet below and to the side, when they smoothly walked out of the shade cast by statues. In a loose circle of which I was the centre. I was going to get surrounded no matter where I went, wasn’t I? Shadow-striding, my Peerage had called it. I was kind of a pain I was no longer the only one on the field with an unfair mobility trick.

“So, you’re Longstride Cabal,” I said. “Are we not even going to have a round of introductions? Pretty rude of you, I have to say.”

I didn’t have eyes in the back of my head – although I could actually grow those, I’d found out, I still hadn’t figured out how to make them function properly – so I could only make out the appearance of the five relatively in front of me. Not unexpectedly, there was little common to their armaments and looks. Most of them were ageless in that way the Mighty were, but there was one looking even older than Rumena and one I’d have called a teenager if not for the too-sharp features. Spears, swords, one had a nifty steel hammer and there was even one wielding some kind of chain with sharp spikes at the end that had to be a nightmare to actually use in a fight. Armour varied from half-naked to a set of full plate in what I was pretty sure was rune-inscribed granite. Tactics were going to be tricky here: the weapons were probably the least dangerous thing about them, but if they still bothered to bring them into a battle it would be with the expectation they’d have some use. The one in plate, which also looked like it’d been made from grey leather left too long out in the sun, was the only one to reply.

“Full account of your deeds will be taken from a follower after the hunt has come to an end, Queen of Lost and Found,” the Mighty said. “There is no need to worry they will be forgot after your passing.”

“Not exactly what I was getting at,” I replied.

There was a soft sound near the back of the roof and I pivoted slightly so that section entered my peripheral vision. My brow rose: Rumena had joined us, making the leap down effortlessly. The Longstrides parted around it, allowing it to stand among the circle surrounding me. Allies? I hadn’t thought this lot, or even drow in general, the kind of people to stick to a pact past its immediate purpose being fulfilled.

“You are seen, Rumena Tomb-Maker,” the drow in plate said. “Out of respect for your past office, you will not be hunted this night. Depart without strife.”

Tomb-Maker, huh. That was the kind of epithet only people you didn’t want to fuck with ended up earning. The drow, stooped old creature that it was, straightened its back with a nasty crack.

“Make me,” Mighty Rumena said, voice utterly serene.

Damn. Sure, it’d baited me into a pretty bad situation and it was most likely after my head. But I couldn’t deny the old monster had class .

“Are you sure I can’t recruit you?” I felt compelled to ask. “I’ll be honest, I would spend good money to see you punch Saint in the face.”

“So be it,” plated-drow shrugged, flatly ignoring me. “Under auspices red I declare-”

“ Drown ,” I shamelessly interrupted, and ripped open my gates.

Three of them shaped like a dome going over all of us. Why not? I had nothing to fear from the waters. And I certainly didn’t owe them the courtesy of allowing them to finish whatever murderous ceremonial phrase they’d wanted to speak. It took three heartbeats for the mass of water to hit the rooftop, and by then I was the only one left on it. A thought had the gates closing as the temple under me collapsed, icy waters tearing through the roof with a thunderous crash, and the weight of it had me crushed against the ground beneath. It didn’t matter: I formed a globe of ice around myself and gated out heartbeats before some spike of Night ripped through where’d I’d been, leaving Arcadia to tread on the wet grounds outside the temple. I could have gone further out, but the whole point of using the lake-gates as an opening volley had been giving me materials easy to work with. A flick of the wrist had the lakewater turning into mist, billowing out and swallowing our surroundings. I pricked my ears, but could not hear a single one of them moving. Silencing their footsteps was too basic a use of Night for it to have been reasonable to hope otherwise, I conceded, but at least the mist would hinder their vision.

I felt Night flare above and looked up, quietly climbing a large hall’s roof to get a better angle, and what I found had me frowning. They’d put us in a box. Using the mist as delineation for the area, one of them had slapped down a rectangular box of roiling Night – with all nine of us presumably inside it. It should be useless, I thought, since I could gate out anytime. But the dawning itch on my skin told a different story. It felt like a ward, or at least something to the same effect. I kept moving, since staying in the same place for too long was bound to get me discovered and then surrounded in swift succession. I glamoured out the sound my footsteps, unwilling to rely on my own limited sneaking abilities to keep me out of trouble, and dropped in a low crouch when I heard the sound of stone shattering in the distance. I couldn’t see anyone, at the moment, so I carefully began heading into that direction to see what’d happened. Had Rumena and the Longstrides begun fighting? I got the answer before I finished making my way there, when a temple to my left was brutally flattened by another massive spike of Night. Ah, they weren’t fighting. They were methodically getting rid of anything I could use for cover.

If they kept this up, I’d end up on flat grounds with nothing to manoeuver around. After that, all they needed to do was get rid of the mist and it was all going to eagerly proceed downhill. Clever enemies were the worst, I thought.

Still, I wasn’t without an arsenal of my own. I reached for my domain – not to call it down, but to use the substance of it as a tool. One, two, three . I continued forging long chains ending in hooks out of Moonless Night, making them come out of my palms, until I had enough of them for every structure I could make out around me. After that it was only a matter of tossing them at the temples and towers and making the hooks sink into them. I broadened my stance, more out of habit than true need, and after grasping all the chains tightly began to turn. My muscles might be make-believe, nowadays, but the strength was real. With one snap after another I ripped out temples and towers, sometimes mere walls but on occasion the whole thing when the foundation was weak enough. With a grunt I put my whole body into it spinning the entire mass of ripped stone like a giant mace. I didn’t need to actually find the drow if I hit everything . Tearing through other structures slowed the momentum, but I kept spinning and so did my makeshift weapon. Had I hit any of them? Maybe, maybe not. I wouldn’t have been able to feel it if I had, given the weight difference. Given the nature of my improvised weapon it wasn’t hard for the drow to guess at my location – there were chains leading straight to it – and that was things got interesting.

Odds had always been low I’d actually kill one of them with the whirl. There’d been another reason for the move, and I showed as much when a pair of Longstrides emerged out of shadows and I picked two chained temples to send smashing down at them. Both dispersed, shadow-illusions broken by the impact, and it was from behind me they struck. One spear from the left, one from the right, and when I attempted to move forward out of their reach I found a large snake of Night striking out. Yeah, they’d definitely heard me complain. And they had a truly terrible sense of humour. I had only a heartbeat to react, my chained weapons too far to recall in time, so I dropped low. The spears and snake followed my descent flawlessly, but that moment of readjustment bought me just long enough to encase myself in ice. It shattered under the spear tips while the snake went straight though, but I’d left a hole at the bottom and turned into mist. I went back into human shape behind the snake, swinging a wall at it that caved in the shape and broke it apart. Night pulsed like a heartbeat on the other side of the mauled ice structure, and I backed away expecting an assault.

It wasn’t, I grasped a moment too late. It was a beacon.

The full seven Longstrides were on me in moments, shadow-striding into the scene. The chains were getting too unwieldy for our combat range, so I drew them back into my domain. Just in time for the enemy cabal to prove they’d come by their reputation honestly. The two fighting me hadn’t been going at it seriously, I realized. They were just pinning me down until the other hunters arrived – and when they did, the gloves came off. The sheer variety of Secrets caught me off-guard. One turned into a mass of shifting shadows not even remotely humanoid, tendrils and clawed limbs sprawling out. Another knelt and pressed a palm against the ground, Night spreading from it like a tide of rancid oil. One’s own shadow slithered out to connect to mine as another touched its shoulder, and immediately I felt my blood turn into a muddy sludge. A ball of shadows formed over my head, casting impossible stripes of darkness down around me, and drow flickered out of those like they were passages. The entire thing had taken, at most, two heartbeats from the moment they’d gathered here. I’d fought heroic bands that were not nearly that skilled at working together. Shit, I wasn’t sure the Calamities would be that good at it.

If this turned into a brawl I was dead. Winter or not, apotheosis or not.

“Let’s try it, then,” I said. “Your Night against mine.”

Darkness fell over all of us, my kingdom manifest – for I was Sovereign of Moonless Nights, and here even Mighty were but troublesome guests. Cold beyond cold enveloped the Longstrides, coating their bodies with frost as their feet bit into supernaturally pristine snow. Not a speck of light here, though it mattered not to my eyes. Something deeper than vision was my due in here. Their Secrets broke like kindling, hollowed out by Winter, but the drow did not flinch. I’d seen my domain make sport of sorcery and devils, turn men into trifles, yet the seven Longstrides shook it off with seemingly little effort. Even bereft of their Night they moved, weapons in hand, and fell upon me. I could feel my power slithering through my veins, pure and untethered, and words were on the tip of my tongue. I swallowed them, familiar by now with the touch of alienation. It was growing in me faster than I could shunt it off. With flawless timing the seven struck together, but before their blades could bite into me I bit into them . There was warmth at the heart of them, flickering candles, and with a pluck of my fingers I smothered the flames. One after another they dropped, puppets without strings.

“Oh, but we are far from done,” I murmured as the last fell. “I have a use for you.”

If I was forced to use my domain this early, then I would at least get the full value out of it. Silver eyes turned blue, a brilliant droplet spreading and devouring the irises whole. My Longstrides rose to their feet. There was still Night in them, but it was cowed. Tamed by the looming power of Winter holding primacy inside them. How many Secrets would they retain, I wondered? It would be interesting to find out when I sent them out to war. There were still one hundred and seventy three to add to my cohort of monsters, after all. The one wearing plate – Segur , my mind whispered – suddenly shivered. Surprise stilled my hand, just as I’d been about to shatter the domain and return to a marred Creation. It was no longer living, I’d killed it myself. So why did it feel cold?

“Glorious,” the corpse laughed. “Deeply, unspeakably glorious. You stole half the Garden from their hands, Losara. It is all there .”

Tendrils of silver spread through blue eyes, clawing back ownership.

“You have no power here, Sve Noc, save that which I grant you,” I said. “And I grant you nothing.”

Will against will, we struggled. I would have been crushed in an instant, were this Creation. But here she was trying to thread an ocean through the eye of a needle. I drove her back, inch by inch.

“But you did,” the corpse said. “You let me in. You gave me an anchor. And so I stand, within and without.”

Only the smallest sliver left. She was desperately trying to keep it in her grasp, but she did not belong here. I did not simply rule this place, it was me. My soul, or whatever was left of it, given shape. The dead drow turned to face me, the last pinprick of silver dying.

“Let it be one and the same,” Sve Noc laughed. “ All is Night .”

I won and lost in the same moment. Chased her away just as she struck. My world of moonless night screamed, a cut appearing in the endless sky. It spread quick as lightning, splitting the starless firmament in half, and I screamed along my domain at the inhuman pain of it. A touch like fingers whispered through the opening, grasping the sides, and like curtains being opened the sky was pulled back.

I stood kneeling, forced back to Creation, as the whole of Winter was unleashed upon Great Strycht.

It was merciful thing when the darkness took me.

—

I woke up in a monstrous amount of pain, shivering.

My eyes opened to a moonless sky and a scream ripped itself free of my throat. It was wrong, wrongwrong wrong . It should not be there. There was no ceiling behind it, only an endless void that was no longer mine. My limbs were numb from the heinous throbbing that had claimed every speck of my body, feeling nothing but the pain. My fingers clawed at the ground and it gave. Were they bleeding? It was like they’d been scraped raw. I forced myself to sit, but my arms were shaking and I fell back. I swallowed the scream, but my throat bulged and I found myself spewing on the ground. I had to crawl away not to drown in it, nothing but clear water leaving my mouth. But the taste of it... Gods, nothing tasted like that. It was like life leaving my wretched body. I was surrounded, I finally saw, by ice and snow. As if some divine blizzard had ripped through the city, sparing nothing. I could not hear a single living soul. I couldn’t... My body seized up and I twisted like a worm against the frost. I could hear only my own breath. I couldn’t hear faraway, not anymore. I could no longer sense the heat of living things, or see flawlessly in the dark. She’s taken all of it .

I was just Catherine Foundling, and might as well have been blind.

I could feel my heart beat, my real heart. My blood flow from my veins. I had never in my life felt so vulnerable as I did then, stripped of every bit of power I’d clawed my way into owning. Made just a bag of blood and meat, one wracked with feverous shivers. The pain was going away, replaced by a cold numbness, and that was when I realized I was dying. Gods, I was tired. I tried to crawl again but my leg flared with agony even through the numbness. My limp, I thought, almost drunkenly. My bad leg. The wound I’d cheated my way out of so many times, but it seemed that dance could only be danced for so long. I fought to keep my eyes open, but the entire world was forcing them to close. I had lost. Some part of me rebelled at the thought. The same voice that’d kept me going through butcheries and catastrophes, through every dark hour I’d ever faced. It shouted, but the sound was dim. Muted. Dying, like the rest of me. The thought came guilty, but it would not go away. It would be a relief, wouldn’t it? To sleep. To finally rest. I tried to think of Callow, but found nothing there to make me stand. I had brought so much destruction to my home, every day claiming I was saving it.

I’d given so much, without a single clean victory to show for it.

I wept into the snow, tears and dark laughter choking up my throat. Snot dripped down, to my visceral disgust. How long had it been, since I’d had snot ? The thought startled me by its inhumanity. I’d died long before today, perhaps that was the harsh truth of it. My eyes closing here would just be a formality, a final curtain. I buried my face in the cold and waited. No footsteps came. No sharp memory drifted to the surface of my fevered mind. No vision filled my unseeing gaze, some mentor or foe chiding me or raising me up. Not a single damned thing. I was dying, and the world answered with resounding silence. But we all died alone, didn’t we? That was the secret at the heart of Winter. I had worn grandiose plans in place of the regalia I disdained, and a single defeat was enough to shatter all of them. Was it like that with everyone? Or had I simply been building on sand all this time? There were no answers to be found, I knew. And the questions rang empty when I asked them. Would they mourn me? Some , I thought. Few , I admitted after. It would hurt the handful I’d found it in me to love, but that knowledge did not stir me as much as it should have. I was in pain as well, and for all that I had tried to be a better woman in the end my own pain mattered most to me. I’d stood for hours at the edge of the roof, as a child. Back at the orphanage. Because I’d been afraid of heights and hated it. Maybe there had been wisdom in that fear, I now thought. Maybe deep down I’d known there would always be that voice whispering taking the drop, oh so temptingly.

I waited and did not die. My face was warm again, I realized. I’d melted the snow enough I could breathe. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Even through the painful convulsions I laughed, until a spasm had my cheek lying against a snow.

“Do I have to do everything myself?” I croaked out.

I fell into another fit of laughter at that. The sound of it was ugly to my ears, but then everything was. Gods, this entire world had gone from a master’s work to a child’s scribble. It almost felt beneath me to stay in it. But no, they wouldn’t get to have that.

“That was your chance,” I said, to no one at all.

I was already dead, wasn’t I? Or close enough. A goddess had ripped open my soul and let the contents spill out. I was mortal as an insect, and there was no changing the ending striding towards me. I should have broken me, that knowledge. The inevitability of it. But it didn’t. It was liberating. There were no stakes now. Nothing left to lose. Whether I rose or not would make no difference. So why bother, a voice insisted.

“Why not?” I whispered.

My arms gave again. Twice I fell back into the same patch of ice, stuck there watching it until the pain ebbed low and I could stomach moving again. But I managed to sit the third time, and that felt like something. My bad leg folded like parchment when I tried to stand and the fall that followed had me weeping like a child for the ache, so instead I crawled in the snow until I reached a broken wall and slowly hoisted myself up. To my hilarity, there were only about four feet of wall left to prop myself against until I’d have to stand on my own.

I had crawled to the wrong fucking wall.

I was choking on a mouthful of laughter – and bile, I was still dying – while considering where I should crawl next when a silhouette walked out of the dark. I couldn’t make it out, at first, or hear it move. But eventually the face swam into focus and I found the pale silver eyes of Mighty Rumena watching me.

“Ah, finally,” I drawled, regally flopping my wrist at it. “I was getting bored. And crippled, but that one’s admittedly not your fault.”

Choosing my words with great care, I grinned and met its gaze.

“Take me to your leader,” I ordered.

Chapter 77: What Goes Around

“In trying to beat a fool at her own game, I have only made another.”
– Theodosius the Unconquered, after the Maddened Fields (apocryphal)

“Not to nitpick,” I said. “But being carried this way is doing great injury to the inherent dignity of a woman of my station.”

Mighty Rumena had, after sundry misadventures, hoisted me over its shoulder and was now lugging me around like a sack of cabbage. I got the distinct impression the old bastard was having a lot of fun with this.

“If I allow you to lean against me instead,” Rumena said. “Will you cease attempting to strangle me?”

The drow was a tyrant, truly. It was my Gods-given right as a Callowan to rebel against foreign powers regardless of context or feasibility.

“Yes,” I lied.

Mighty Rumena fluidly leapt over a canal, landing on the other side with barely a sound. It jostled my body enough I had to bite down on a scream.

“So,” I got out. “We doing this or what?”

“No,” the Mighty said. “I merely wanted to see if you would lie.”

That prick. I’d gotten my hopes up, thinking of looking for something sharp to stab it with instead of having another fruitless go at strangulation – my fingers were too shaky to have the requisite strength, and to be honest I wasn’t sure it actually needed to breathe.

“Fine,” I said. “Obviously you’re a man – drow, I mean – of deep cunning and perception. I’ll level with you, Rumena. I was going to try to murder you again.”

“I am aghast at this unexpected turn,” Mighty Rumena said.

Oh, so Crepuscular could do sarcasm. This was a day for revelations.

“Since murder doesn’t seem to be working out for me, I’ll try bribery,” I continued. “Betray... who is it you’re working for at the moment?”

I probably should have inquired as much before beginning the process, I mentally conceded. Hindsight was a harsh mistress, as the effective evisceration of my soul and mantle had made clear.

“Arguably my kind,” Rumena said. “Practically speaking, the youngest sister.”

“That the murderous one, or the one that’s basically suffered a few millennia of torture by Night?” I squinted.

“The former,” the Mighty replied.

“That’s fine then,” I mused. “So, betray her drow ass and I’ll give you half of Procer.”

“I know of no such place,” Rumena said.

“Right, it’s pretty recent as far as nations go,” I muttered. “Think the central chunk of western Calernia.”

“And you currently rule these lands?” the drow asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I mean, in a manner of speaking.”

Lies were, technically, one of those.

“Fertile fields?” the Mighty asked. “Peaceful neighbours?”

Well, half of that was true. There was that unfortunate thing about the Kingdom of the Dead and the Chain of Hunger bordering it, but nowhere was perfect.

“Absolutely,” I answered without missing a beat.

“You are a surprisingly terrible liar,” Mighty Rumena said, sounding impressed in the worst way. “How have you managed to survive this long?”

“Good officers, luck and the ability to walk off lost limbs,” I replied, more honestly than I’d meant to.

Of course, in a sense I hadn’t. Survived, that was. I’d died at First Liesse and then kind of again at the Doom. The whole Winter-eats-your-soul thing had felt in the general wheelhouse of dying, anyway.

“Luck always runs out,” Rumena said.

“What a deep philosopher you are,” I sighed. “Any more profound truths you’d like to share?”

“You warred against an entity older than the civilization that birthed you,” the Mighty said. “Wielding weapons in which it holds superior mastery, following a plan laughably straightforward and fielding armies which owed you no true loyalty. All this, and somehow you believed you would win.”

“Ouch,” I said, not particularly offended.

I’d already lost, what was there left to be offended about?

“We going somewhere with this?” I asked after a heartbeat of silence.

“Nowhere, evidently,” Mighty Rumena said.

The Secret of Scathing Retorts was unfathomably deadly, I mused. The half-blind pieces of meat that were now my eyes took in our surroundings as well as they could as the drow carried me through the ruins of Great Strycht – and there could be no word for it but ruins. Winter had blown through mercilessly, upending temples and halls like children’s toys. We must have still been in the central district when it found me, because our surroundings were vaguely familiar. They lay of the canals, at least, since the city looked like it’d been smashed to pieces by an irritated god. In a sense, it had been. It wasn’t hard to find the dead, though it certainly was to tell which side they’d belonged to. Frozen silhouettes of drow, many seized halfway through a motion, were scattered all over the district. Some had tried to run, I saw. It hadn’t done them any good.

“Is everyone in the city dead save the two of us?” I asked.

“You were not so powerful as that,” Mighty Rumena said. “Many of those who fought under your banner remained, before they were made to kneel. And Sve Noc preserved her own when the heart of you was ripped out.”

“Soul,” I corrected mildly. “The soul of me, Rumena. Come on, it’s not that complicated a concept.”

I was mildly surprised having that ripped open hadn’t killed me, but then maybe I shouldn’t be. Akua had walked around without hers for years before our little heart-to-hand. She’d also been soulless in another way entirely long before that, but that was a different story.

“Not complicated,” the Mighty slowly repeated. “Are you chiding me for considering the process of apotheosis a complex matter, Losara?”

“I mean, Praesi know about it,” I said. “How complex can it really be?”

“I will cherish the memory of our little talks, after your throat is slit,” Rumena said. “I believe you might be the single most aggressively ignorant creature I’ve ever encountered.”

I spat out a ball of phlegm and bile, aiming for its leg and missing narrowly. So, interesting information there. I was being carried to a sacrificial altar, which I’d already kind of suspected but hadn’t known for sure. Added to the bit about my former forces being ‘made to keel’, I now considered it a safe bet that Ol’ Sve herself had come down for a bit of ceremonial knifework. Strange she hadn’t killed them outright, though. Was it because she couldn’t, or because she had a better use for them? It’d be a splendid little bit of irony if she ended up using the framework of oaths I’d built as the model for the army she’d be taking to the surface.

“I’m flattered, really, but I’m not in the market for a nemesis,” I replied. “There’s probably a line and it’d be unfair to all those angry heroes for you to just skip ahead.”

“It is admirable that you refuse to compromise your principles even moments away from your unmaking,” the Mighty said.

“I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic right now,” I said. “And I think my hearing might be going, because there’s this weird screaming sound that-”

I paused, then swallowed. Oh, so my hearing wasn’t going. Nice to know. Slightly less nice was the patchwork of rippling Winter I was looking at. Ribbons of shimmering blue storming about uncontrolled, eating away at an obsidian tower like the King of Winter had suddenly said ‘fuck this building in particular’. My vision dimmed and I looked away blinking. It stayed dim, like a shadow had been cast over everything I saw.

“You could have told me I’d go blind looking at it,” I screamed through the ruckus.

Rumena made me wait until we’d left the immediate area before answering.

“Did you?” the drow curiously asked. “Interesting. It should have driven you mad as well, then, and you sound no less coherent than usual.”

“I think we hit the bottom of that barrel a few years back, buddy,” I said.

That had been a knot of pure Winter, I thought, and it had been running wild. The power had never done that while I held the mantle. The – I avoided thinking of the word, knowing it would send me into another episode – nothing above our heads was the same as my domain’s, so I’d assumed that Sve had devoured the whole thing. Or at least bound it somehow. But this was an interesting twist, wasn’t it? Even if was in her belly, it looked like she was having some issued with digestion.

“So, how strong is your boss’ stomach?” I casually asked.

“As strong as it takes,” Mighty Rumena soberly replied.

“Gods, is that what I sound like when I talk that way?” I asked. “Someone could have told me it made me sound like an asshole. I’d have stopped.”

“I assure you, there is no need to rely on specific sentences for that effect to be achieved,” the drow smoothly replied.

“So much sass, Rumena,” I grinned. “But was that uncertainty I detected? Someone’s worried Sve bit off more than she can chew.”

“A passing thing,” the Mighty said. “In a sense, much like you.”

Ah, and there it was. The reason it hadn’t just nonchalantly torn off my head back when it’d first found me choking on my death in the middle of a broken wreck. I was still of use somehow. A sacrifice to cement Sve Noc’s hold on my domain? I’d earned the mantle through murder, back in the old days of about two years ago. It might be that proper succession required the same deed by her hand.

“So, are we there yet?” I asked.

Rumena sighed, and I took perverse pride in the way I was managing to get under the skin of a creature a few millennia my senior. Unfortunately it then shook me on its shoulder, letting me slip back a little, and the fresh pull on my abdomen had me howling. The throbbing pain brought unwilling tears to my eyes, and to add insult to injury my throat began heaving. The droplet that tipped the cup was that even as I began spewing out clear water and bile the Mantle of Woe fell down over my face, smothering it all over my face. The Mighty left me like that for quite a while, until my stomach felt empty once more, and only drew me back up when left the district. The vomit-strewn cloak remained draped all over my face.

“That was genuinely cruel,” I rasped out.

“Possibly why I enjoyed it so much,” Mighty Rumena noted.

It was not far before our magic journey together came to an end, though of course I had no idea. The Mantle of Woe was still covering my face. I was carefully set down on solid ground, propped up against something that felt like stone. My legs didn’t pain me at all, which I took as the opposite of a good sign. I was metaphysically bleeding out. Rumena’s fingers closed around the hem of my cloak and pulled it back, finally revealing my surroundings to me. It was a hill of barren stone, one that must have once been an island. My Mighty friend was at my side, but we had other company: over a hundred drow were scattered around us, weapons in hand. The rest of the Longstrides? Without my otherworldly senses, I had no way to tell them apart from any other drow. Ahead of me lay a broke stele of obsidian, the symbols on it faded and the better part of it laid down as a makeshift altar. All of that paled, though, in comparison to the silhouette standing over it. A perfectly androgynous face larger than my entire body stared down at me, descending into a neck that melded with the robes of pure Night beneath it. Eyes of unbroken silver shone bright, but it was the hair that drew my attention. Long strands of darkness that went up into the nothing above like puppet strings.

“Sve Noc,” I said. “Good of you to finally show up.”

I cleared my throat, spat another bit of bile to the side.

“You may kneel,” I allowed.

There was a heartbeat of silence, and then I was drowning. Thick, cloying terror buried me – the kind I had not known in ages, that screamed so loud it drowned out every thought. It was a primal thing, old as the nights where mankind had first huddled around fires for fear of what prowled outside. It was, I thought, almost religious. I began laughing in delight.

“That’s the stuff,” I grinned, body shivering uncontrollably. “ Gods , you wouldn’t believe how long it’s been since I felt this much like a person.”

Did she think this would break me? She had ripped open my soul . There was not a godsdamned thing left to break. The sea around be ebbed, and still the tinkling pleasure of real emotion stayed in my every extremity.

“Alone and lost,” the Priestess of Night said. “As promised, Catherine Foundling.”

“Please,” I said, waving a shaking hand. “Call me ‘Your Majesty’.”

My half-blind eyes drifted around her... well body, was the closest word to it. And the revelations of the day continued, for there were threads in her robes that seemed more solid than others. Whatever she was doing, it wasn’t finished. Considering the altar in front of me, the shape of the conclusion was rather obvious.

“Queen of Nothing,” Sve Noc said. “And so no queen at all.”

“Am I?” I mused. “Then why bring me here at all?”

“Tools wear no crowns,” Sve Noc said.

“Clearly you’ve never met Cordelia,” I said. “From the fact that my throat has yet to be slit, I take it we’ve a little while still before we get to the good stuff?”

“Your doom is writ,” the creature said.

“Yes yes, very ominous,” I snorted. “Rumena, be a dear and find my pipe will you? No point it making this uncivilized.”

The Mighty had moved a few steps away from me while I traded barbs with its goddess, but not entirely left. It glanced at Sve and found no answer there – she seemed a little miffed by my refusal to take this seriously – so in the end it strode forward to rifle through my cloak pockets. I took the opportunity to clasp its ringlet tunic and wipe my face somewhat clear of vomit. You know, for appearances’ sake. Rumena stuffed my pipe half-heartedly and offered it. I clasped it between my teeth and leaned forward.

“A light?” I asked.

The drow’s fingers lit up with black flame and within moments the wakeleaf was burning. Black flame, really? Did every single application of Night have to colour appropriate? There was such a thing as taking an aesthetic too far. I breathed in the smoke with a shiver of pleasure, letting it stream out of my nostrils.

“ Oh ,” I murmured around the shaft. “So that’s what it used to taste like. I’d almost forgotten.”

To my utter delight, the little moan I let out after made Rumena visibly uncomfortable. I leaned back against my stone.

“I don’t suppose any of you folks have a decent bottle of wine?” I called out at the Longstrides. “It’s been ages since I could properly enjoy one of those.”

There was some confused shuffling, but no answer.

“And they call Callow a backwater,” I sighed. “You all make for terrible hosts.”

“No guest are you,” Sve Noc said. “A bird of misfortune, headed to grim ending.”

“Bold words, coming from a woman visibly fucking up her apotheosis,” I replied. “How’s Winter taste, Sve? A bit too much to swallow?”

It was a true shame Indrani wasn’t there to make a ribald joke out of that, I thought.

“All will be Night,” the Priestess thundered.

“You’re just a pile of disappointments, aren’t you?” I said. “At least Rumena knows its way around a phrase. You’re just yelling threats and platitudes. It’s pretty common with old monsters, you know? You haven’t talked like a person for too long, so you don’t know how anymore. Even Neshamah has touches of that.”

“You think to threaten me with the King of Death?” Sve Noc laughed. “You know nothing.”

I pulled at my pipe, eyes almost rolling into the back of my head at the pleasant sensation. I’d become so much less, but what I had left was so much more alive . Something as simple as the burn of smoke in my throat felt like the finest of wines.

“I know some things,” I retorted mildly, spewing out the smoke. “Like, for example, that Winter is a hard stallion to break in. It’s not really meant to give , you get me? It’s not flexible the way a Name is. Now, if I had to guess, you’re too far gone into whatever the fuck you actually are to worry about something as paltry as alienation. So the issue would be that you’re just as... static as the power you’re trying to eat. You can’t change to match it, like I did, so you can’t align either. You have to bludgeon it into obedience, and that’s proving a little trickier than you’d like.”

“Crawling, wretched thing,” Sve Noc said. “Still trying to escape your fate even now. Stripped of every ounce of stolen power, tumbling through death’s door.”

“Oh, Sve,” I said gently, a grin tugging at my lips. “You poor thing. It’s already too late. You see, this was all part of my plan.”

In the absence of an actual scheme, it seemed like I was going to have to bluff a living goddess. Odds were I was going to bite it regardless, but if I was going to die I was at least going to shit talk the opposition on my way out.

“Your deception is feeble,” the Priestess said. “Your plans are known to me.”

“Convenient, isn’t it?” I mused. “That you knew them all. That you crushed me so easily. Almost like I let you.”

“Mad and desperate,” Sve Noc said. “You resort to flimsy lies.”

I inhaled the smoke, closing my eyes, and let it out. The acrid tang stung my nose, beautifully so.

“Why so many warriors, Sve?” I asked, opening my eyes. “Witnesses, honour guard? Nah, this is best left quiet. Not the kind of knowledge you want floating out there. I think it’s a statement of power. A reminder of hopelessness, to break me down. But if that’s the case, why these warriors?”

I croaked out a laugh.

“If you really wanted to stick it to me,” I said, “you wouldn’t have used people you already owned body and soul. You would have had my own army standing in submissive silence. But you don’t.”

I met eyes of blinding silver and smiled.

“I wonder why that is?”

“They have knelt,” Sve Noc said.

“I think you broke them,” I said. “I think you hurt them. But that you don’t own them, not yet. Because this is still my soul, even splattered over the countryside, and you need a little something to take you over the top. Queen’s blood, queen’s death. A passing of the torch.”

I cackled.

“How does it feel, to fall short even after millennia of scheming?” I asked. “It stings , I bet.”

Gods forgive me, but I had missed this. Teetering at the brink of annihilation, knowing if I was struck down I would not rise again. Dancing with death bereft of anything but wits and lies, knowing the first mistake would also be the last. It was terrible and treacherous, the kind of recklessness that had left a trail of ruins in my wake, but Merciless Gods I had missed this . I’d grown dull, under the sway of my mantle, and now I felt sharp again. Maybe I was drunk on the feeling of my own mortality, on the truth that there was nothing left to lose, but I felt like myself again. Finally, just as life left my body.

“And all you fine Mighty,” I called out. “Will you just stand there like silent statues as your fates are thrown like dice? Do you not have a stake in this?”

“Be silent, Losara,” Mighty Rumena hissed.

“Come on, be someone,” I grinned. “Act. Sure, I would have made you servants. For the span of a cosmic breath and no more, but I’ll own to that. I never thought much of it, since that thing in front of me has already made slaves of you.”

“We are Mighty,” one of the Longstrides replied. “Your words are empty.”

“That might be true right now,” I said. “But will you still be, when she’s done eating Winter? Hells, I would have required service for a decade or two but her ? She’ll own you wholesale until the Last Dusk.”

Rumena struck me across the face, and the only thing I could think was that it’d just made a mistake. If it’d let me keep talking unworried that would have been one thing, but trying to silence me? That gave my words weight. And theirs was a path of betrayal, wasn’t it? They watched for the knife in everyone’s hand. Even their own goddess. I couldn’t make out what happened, but a moment later Rumena was thrown back and two silhouettes stood between it and me.

“Speak your piece, Losara,” one of them ordered.

“ Enough .”

They screamed, the two drow, and fell as Night ripped its way out of their bodies like smoke. The same happened all around me, every Longstride messily collapsing. The tall shape of Sve Noc drifted forward, tendrils of darkness wrapping around my body and dragging me to the altar. She was looming over me in a way that was not physical, her... presence enveloping me whole. As if I was being devoured.

“ Trickery is no match for real power ,” Sve Noc said.

“Then fear me, drow,” Akua Sahelian announced, “for I wield the power of friendship.”

I turned right in time for the shade, grinning gloriously with half her body emerging from my cloak, to bury her arm into my torso up to the elbow.

Chapter 78: Comes Around

“The finest summation of Traitorous’s reign I ever heard came from an illiterate peasant from the outskirts of Ater, who described it as follows: ‘Like watching a snake eat its own tail, only the tail was fake the snake was an angry badger and also you are poisoned.'”
– Introduction to ‘More Art Than Act’ by Hakim of Kahtan, the Haunted Scholar

And so the sound of my fragile mortal shell being ripped into signaled it was time for everyone’s favourite Wasteland game: backstab, help or both. Akua had grown on me, rather like the bubonic plague, so I was going to give her the benefit of the doubt and put my money on ‘both’. It was mildly surprising she’d stuck around at all, to be honest. I’d expected her to be halfway back to Praes by now, considering I’d lost my leash on her along with my soul. The unsettling sensation of fingers squeezing around my beating heart was coloured by the unspoken acknowledgement this was a dark mirror to Second Liesse’s ending. And to think they said Diabolist didn’t have a sense of humour. The sheer shock of being torn into this brutally and suddenly was tipping me right over the edge and straight into the grave, my vision dimming, but in the darkness power awaited. Not owned, no. Sve Noc’s victory had been too deep a cut for that. But Akua bestowed upon me a chord, an invisible string, and through it my fading senses expanded.

“Both it is,” I muttered. “Called it.”

Winter as an independent entity was dead. I knew that instantly and instinctively as my mind glimpsed the web of power spread over Great Strycht. There would be no restoration, it was too far gone for that. Sve Noc had clumsily melded Night and Winter where she could, though the merging was far from complete and my old mantle had reacted violently to the attempt. Knots of raging power had erupted all over the city, like too-large insects caught in a web of Night: wherever they stormed they weakened the weave around them. The Priestess had been hammering them into submission, I thought, one at a time. A time-consuming process, and a difficult one – like trying to smooth out wrinkles on steel. I could feel the gargantuan weight of her presence gripping one of the storms, fingers pulling out the threads one after another and releasing them accalmed. She had barely a sliver of her attention on me , I thought. Broken thing that I was, I’d been judged harmless and only a cursory eye had been kept on me. Bad form, that. It would remiss of me not to make her pay harshly for it.

“You forced her to act early,” Akua said.

Diabolist felt like she was at my side, but she couldn’t be. I wasn’t really anywhere, practically speaking. Just a ghost haunting the labyrinth, and her barely more than that. And yet if felt like her breath was whispering against my ear, like she was not even an inch away.

“So, the power of friendship,” I said. “Feels a bit ungrateful to say as much after such a touching interruption, but we’re not really friends. Acquaintances, at most, and that’s being generous.”

“You break my heart, dearest,” Diabolist drawled. “Again.”

“And I didn’t even need to punch through your ribcage first this time,” I replied, genuinely pleased. “I am getting better at this.”

“So is she,” Akua said.

She didn’t point – we were presences, not flesh – but like a feather’s touch her attention moved towards Sve Noc. My not-eyes followed.

“She wanted to bleed me after smoothing out all the knots,” I said. “Like a coronation.”

“Baptism in queen’s blood, yes,” Diabolist said. “Quite properly done, if a mite archaic. Queens are not as easy to acquire as they were in olden days.”

“But she doesn’t need it,” I said, feeling out the web with a thought. “She’s already winning, Akua. The Night is absorbing Winter, slowly but surely.”

“This situation should feel familiar, my heart,” she replied. “You are a claimant once more. The lesser one, certainly, but a claimant still.”

“For what?” I asked.

“That rather depends, I think, on which of you successfully presses her claim,” Akua said. “Before, I would have wagered it was sovereignty over night. But now... who knows?”

The shade laughed.

“Interesting times, dearest Catherine,” she said. “Interesting times indeed.”

“Interesting,” I repeated. “That’s a word for it. Especially considering I don’t see your hat anywhere in the ring. This was your chance to get back on top, Diabolist. There will not be another no matter the outcome.”

And if she hadn’t stepped in the game would have come to an end. I could still vaguely feel my body in the hands of Sve’s manifestation, but she’d yet to kill it. There’d be no point, I thought. What she needed on the altar was me , not a mangled empty corpse. If Akua had no chance of claiming this mess for herself I would have called this pragmatism, denying the Priestess her victory at the last moment, but she’d had other options. She could have fled, she could have fought. And yet here we were.

“Am I not in your service?” Akua said. “Bindings are formality, not essence.”

“Don’t waste our time,” I said. “She’s nearly done with the knot.”

I felt the shade press close to me, almost like an embrace, and I saw Akua Sahelian whole. Not the shade with the bloody hole in her chest, not the semblance of fae I’d turned her into. The same woman I’d met under the Name of Heiress, who’d schemed her way into becoming the Diabolist and vaingloriously raised her banners against the entire villainy of the East. Golden eyes set in a sculpted face, her long tresses falling in a curtain behind her. Adorned in a crimson gown set close against long legs, belted high on her waist in rubies and gold. She’d always been gorgeous. Even when I’d first met her, before I’d learned to truly hate her, I’d thought as much. This was not Akua as she was, but as she still saw herself, and I could not call her anything but the culmination of centuries of Wasteland breeding: as beautiful as she was terrible.

“I have grown tired,” she said, “of iron.”

“There’s no walking back the Folly,” I told her. “Not even for this. I’m one life, Akua. That’s the weight I have on the scales.”

“I consider myself something of a theologian,” she said. “And yet I still lack the answer to one question. Perhaps you can answer it for me. Which matters most, Catherine, when it comes to doing good – the conviction or the act?”

There was a beat of silence as the enormity of what she’d just said sunk in.

“You can’t be serious,” I said.

I was not sure whether to be amazed or appalled by what she was implying. Akua might be the single most amoral person I knew, which was saying something considering I was acquainted with the fucking King of Death. And she was talking of redemption? No, I realized. Not redemption. The conviction or the act , she’d said. I hated to even think it, but it fit with how she’d always done things. I used stories as an arsenal, taking up and discarding what was of use to me, but Akua? She rode them into the storm like a warhorse. It had killed her, in the end, the flying fortresses and the monologues. But before it had she’d matched an entire empire blow for blow.

“But I am,” she smiled. “I shall be, Catherine, the most terrifyingly heroic woman in the history of my kind. And in the end, together we will learn the answer to my question.”

“It’s not the Gods you have to convince,” I hissed. “It’s me.”

“Would you snuff me out for observing your own principles?” Akua asked. “I will do nothing but what you have demanded of me.”

“They won’t take you in,” I said. “You have to know that. You can’t fake being a good person.”

“I have learned much from you, darling one,” Akua Sahelian smiled. “I may fail, true. In my hour of judgement I may – most likely will – be unmade and cast into the deepest burning pits. But until then? Oh, what a glorious ride it will be.”

She spun away from me, presence parting in full.

“Now, my dear Catherine,” Diabolist said, and there was joyous laughter in her voice. “Shall we save some innocents ?”

I would have argued still. Done something, anything, to deny this. But the last string of Winter was untangled, made docile, and even as the Night spread through it Sve Noc finally turned her whole attention to us.

“ Clever little rats ,” the Priestess of Night said. “ You have earned death at my hand .”

It felt like the tide pulling back before the wave. Something unspeakably massive gathering before release, preparing to crush everything in its path. I called on all that I was, too, but I was no longer Sovereign of Moonless Nights. There were no bottomless depths of Winter to stand behind me, no stolen mantle to make me anything more than I was. In the face of a living deity, I stood a mere mortal – one with a claim, perhaps, but no less frail for it. If she crushed me here, I thought, would die. Unmade so thoroughly there might not be enough of me left for the afterlife. And so we began the dance one last time, for keeps. Winner got to be Queen Bitch of Night forevermore, a victory almost as terrible as defeat. I didn’t want it, I realized. I didn’t want to go back to the thing I’d turned into, that pale imitation of myself. A creature playacting at being a person, more a pack of lies and ambitions than anything remotely human. I’d feared alienation as the consequence of drawing on my mantle, all the while too far gone to realize I’d already estranged myself from everything that’d made me Catherine Foundling. Better to die than go back to it, I thought. To be nothing at all rather than be that . I closed my not-eyes.

“Mortal,” I whispered. “To the end, whatever that may be.”

A savage joy took hold of me, sweeter than wine, and I almost laughed. Even if it was doomed, even if all was lost – I would not go quietly into the night. I would go out kicking and screaming, making an unholy mess of it. Not-lips splitting into a grin, I took hold of what remained of my mind. If you are the sea, then I am a needle , I thought. Slender and piercing and too slight to catch. Hold and release, and then the impact of our wills shook the entire web. I went through like a needle through silk, and sunk into darkness. The pressure of it was crushing, a mind so much greater than my own bearing down, and I balked. I am stone , I thought. The pebble beneath the coursing river, smooth and unmoving. I crashed at the bottom, but there I remained. Unbroken. I could do this, I thought. I was so much less, but what I was could change. Adapt. She was too large to be able to do the same so easily. The sea withdrew and I let out a relieved breath. The web was frittering, I saw. Parts that had been calmed grew riotous as Sve Noc exerted herself against me. Winter was not so easily tamed.

“ Fumbling child ,” the Priestess of Night said. “ You but delay the inevitable .”

“Hells, Sve,” I grinned savagely. “That’s my life in a sentence.”

I had become unto stone, and so she became a chisel. She struck down, lumbering and unstoppable. She had become a chisel, and so I became wind: shapeless, coursing around the might of her. The chisel broke into a storm, taking hold of me, and so I became a bird. I rode the winds, and she turned into a hand. Fingers closed around me, but I was smoke and slipped through them. It was a game of riddles, where the first mistake would be the last. Smoke was inhaled by gaping maw, the maw escaped by a scuttling rat, the rat crushed by boot only for mud to stick at the bottom of the sole. Shape to shape we went, ever changing and never twice the same. I knew, instinctively, that repetition would be barred to me. Always forward, or there could be only death. I had become a snake, coiling around a narrow spike, when Sve Noc screamed. There was a flicker, and I saw her long-haired silhouette again – with Diabolist stabbing away at her neck, dagger in hand. Taking your eyes off the Praesi, huh. Always a mistake, that. Akua was swatted away angrily, her shape shattered by the sheer force of the blow, but I was already moving.

“I am a sword,” I murmured. “Sharp and merciless, I cut .”

My will struck out against hers and finally I drew blood. And here was the pit fight Archer had promised, I thought. Two beasts in a hole, tearing at each other. Devouring. I was to eat what I had carved out, grow stronger from it. Ascend through this hallowed cannibalism and strike again, until one of us had consumed the other whole. That was Below’s game, its promised and certain victory.

“Mortal, you meddling fucks,” I snarled. “To the end.”

I crawled into the gushing wound, spite warming me down to my petty core.

—

“It is forbidden, ‘Mina. The vigil must be held alone.”

The suddenness of the sound had me twitching. There had been the warm darkness of blood, until I crawled out dripping onto a floor of stone, and immediately the woman had spoken. I rose to my feet, eyes wary. It looked like a temple, that was my first thought. The ceiling was tall and curved, held up by arches and columns. The stone beneath me covered in strange scriptures similar to Crepuscular, but only in part. Older, I decided. What few words I understood among them seemed to be in the vein of astronomy, about celestial orbs and their movements. On all four sides arched thresholds led into nothing: I could glimpse a sea of lights below, and only then did I realized I was standing atop a tower. There were no stairs, no visible way into the room save the arches. Rich laughter drew my attention sharply, and my eyes moved to watch a pair of drow. Both young – truly young, not like the Mighty were – and long-haired, though their appearance was starkly sexless. One sat with her legs folded, in the centre of the room, while the other lounged against a pillar. She’d been the one to laugh.

“So many rules,” the drow called ‘Mina gently mocked. “Why apprentice to the Sages at all, if you intend on following all of them?”

Neither of their eyes were silver, I realized with a start. Both a deep amber, identical in every way. As if sisters. My blood thrummed with excitement. I’d been right, then. It was Sve Noc’s soul I had cut open, and it was her memories I’d crawled my way into. And if I got to the bottom, found the right path... My way out. The victory denied.

“We are the enemy of death,” the sitting drow replied, almost chiding. “It is great honour to be chosen to stand among those who hold back twilight.”

“Shrouded Gods, Andronike,” her sister said, rolling her eyes. “You could at least wait until after the ceremony to start with that. If I wanted to get preached at I’d prostrate at temple like a good little zealot.”

“There will be no ceremony at all, Komena, if you are caught up here,” Andronike sharply replied. “I will be sent home in disgrace and Mother-”

“- will have to take the war oath or be forever disgraced,” Komena interrupted. “I’ve heard that song before, sister. You say that like it’d be such a disaster. I’ll be taking the very same oath this year, and it’d be nice to have kin at my side.”

The other drow’s face softened.

“You know I would follow you,” she said. “If I had not been called to higher purpose.”

“All hail the mighty Twilight Sages,” Komena said, smile too serrated to be genuine. “May we forever kiss the hem of their robes.”

“I didn’t meant it like that, ‘Mina,” Andronike feebly said. “There is great honour in war service.”

“Just not quite as much as in this,” her sister said.

The other drow’s eyes tightened.

“You have the talent, Komena,” she said. “Our fathers both have sorcerer blood. Do not blame me simply because you never had the discipline to sharpen your skills.”

“Much good they will do you, these precious skills,” Komena said. “Cloistered in some hidden shrine, debating magic with crazed half-corpses. At least my lack of discipline will serve the Firstborn against our enemies.”

“Fetching human servants for the rylleh?” Andronike ridiculed. “Squabbling with the nerezim over some empty tunnel? How well you would serve our people.”

“How gladly you mock the same blades that keep our mines full, that keep the nerezim from making goblins of us,” her sister snarled. “At least we act , inglorious as our lot is. Provide for the Empire Ever Dark.”

“You talk like a colonist,” Andronike said, wrinkling her nose. “The King Under the Mountain will slay us all, every Firstborn must take the oath! There will be peace, sister, as there has been for over a century. War is only ever waged for petty glories.”

I coughed into my fist. Well, you couldn’t get them all right. Probably the single worst thing she could have gotten wrong, but in her defence she didn’t seem alone in her assumption. If the drow in charge had really all believed that it was no wonder the dwarves had wrecked them in the following wars. That did not sound like an empire ready for a hard fight. The two sisters continued to argue, but I let the noise wash over me. There was something... There it was again. A tremor. I knelt, wincing as my lame leg flared, and pressed my ear against the stone. It came again, louder, and my fingers clenched. Not a tremor, a footstep. And one getting closer. Time to move on, then, I’d learned all I could from this anyway. There was no obvious way out, I thought, save the one I’d rather not take. I breathed out and got up.

“Oh Gods, this better work,” I muttered, and took a running leap off the tower.

—

I thought I’d failed, at first, because I stood in utter darkness. But then there was movement, Komena sweeping out her arm and causing globes off glass to light all over the room. She’d gotten older, I saw. There was nasty scar on her neck, but it was the sharper features and braided hair that drew my attention. She wore armour, too: good steel mail, with pauldrons of sculpted obsidian. The sword at her hip was without a sheath and glinted cold blue. Enchanted, for sure. As she began unstrapping her armour I allowed my gaze to sweep our surroundings, reluctantly admitting that the woman who’d become Sve Noc had taste . And coin to burn, apparently, because much of the furniture in here was wood instead of stone and that was a rare thing in the Everdark. I froze when she did, only the noticing that there was someone seated in the corner. Who it was I could not tell for sure – though I had a decent guess – because they were masked and covered by a thick cloak. It was an ornate thing, the mask. Forged iron, the upper half of it a sun setting while the bottom was half the moon. Komena drew her sword without hesitation.

“I know not your intent, Sage, but I am a jawor of the Southern Army,” she coldly said. “I will not be disappeared so easily.”

The Twilight Sage slowly raised a hand and took off the mask, revealing the very pair of amber eyes I had expected. Andronike hesitated, worrying her lip.

“‘Mina,” she quietly said. “I know we did not part-”

The sword clattered against the ground, and I had to admit I was touched at the sight of Komena embracing her sister without the slightest hint of hesitation. The two drow remained like that for a long moment, and I saw their arms tightening against each other like they were afraid of letting go.

“‘Nike,” the younger sister said, after finally releasing the other. “Gods be kind. I have regretted many things since taking the oath, but none half as much as the last words we spoke.”

“I’m sorry, Komena,” Andronike whispered. “I was too proud to reach out, after. I have sown sorrow where there needed be none.”

The other drow touched her shoulder, almost shyly.

“It does not matter,” she said. “It could have been a hundred years instead of twenty, and still it would not matter. Heart of my heart.”

“Heart of my heart,” Andronike whispered back, voice shaky.

Komena shook herself, as if trying to wake. She smoothed out her already pristine armour out of nervousness.

“I am being a frightful host,” she said. “I have senna, if you would like a drink – or! I have this bottle of this drink they call wynneh , from the Burning Lands. Very exotic, you wouldn’t believe how many fingers I had to break to get it.”

Andronike took her sister’s hand and shook her head.

“Sit with me,” she asked. “This is... better spoken sober.”

Komena’s eyes tightened.

“You worry me, sister,” she said. “Are you in danger? I now striking a Sage is sacrilege, but I will not-”

“We are all in danger, I fear,” Andronike croaked. “‘Mina, what I want to tell you, it is a crime for me to speak it. Even if all you do is listen, they would-”

“Heart of my heart,” Komena said, voice like steel. “Your woe is my woe. No soul can change this.”

Her sister smiled, for just a moment, and it felt like dawn breaking over the room. Andronike tugged her down into a seat and they settled together while the Sage sister chose her words. The ritual , I thought. This is about the ritual when they tried to become immortals.

“They’re going to kill us all, ‘Mina,” Andronike murmured, sounding genuinely terrified. “The Sages, the elders among them – they’re afraid of dying. The alchemies work a little less every year and their minds have begun to fray. So they now plan a ritual.”

“A ritual,” Komena repeated slowly, trying to understand her sister’s fear.

And failing, though I thought she was a decent hand at hiding it.

“They will borrow from the years of every Firstborn yet to be,” the drow said. “They say they have it charted – they’ve used oracles, the old rites as well – but they’re wrong Komena. There are too many uncertainties.”

“There will be revolt, if this comes out,” Komena said face gone grim. “I can reach out to other officers-”

“You don’t understand,” Andronike said. “They are proud . They through it we will all be made immortal. With the turn of the red season they will announce it themselves.”

“But you don’t believe it will work,” the younger sister said.

“All it takes is a single mistake, and our entire people will pay for it,” the other drow replied, shaking her head. “There is always a mistake, ‘Mina. Always .”

Her sister slowly nodded, and I watched her thoughts flicker through her face. Hesitation, first, then reproach. And after that only determination, cold and relentless.

“So what,” Komena said, “are we going to do about it?”

Pivot, I thought. They were not Named, not yet, but that sentence and that moment were the beginning of a very dark road I already knew the end of.

“In that moment, I loved her more than I have ever loved anyone or anything.”

I froze. She’d not made a sound, until the moment she spoke. Not a breath, not whisper of foot on stone. I turned and there she was, standing at my side. The cloak I recognized, for she wore it in front of me as well, but there was no mask now. She had grown, I thought, beyond such petty symbols.

“Strange,” she said, head cocked to the side. “That even after all these years, I grieve that more than all the rest.”

“Andronike,” I said, meeting eyes of pure silver.

“Catherine Foundling,” the other half of Sve Noc greeted me calmly. “I believe you were looking for me.”

Chapter 79: As Above

“Hubris and wearing a helmet are not mutually exclusive. Here, allow me to demonstrate.”
– Dread Emperor Abominable, the Thrice-Struck

“I’ll be honest,” I said. “I kind of expected to get to the bottom of memory lane before we ran into each other. You, uh, took me by surprise.”

Andronike – Sve Noc’s slightly less unreasonable half, or at least that was the hope – did not lean into the feeble attempt at defusing the tension. Fine, I thought, be that way. We can be all grim about this, and not even mention that right now in a very real sense I’m inside your sister. There was room for an even filthier joke in there, and really where was Indrani when you needed her?

“I expected you to move from shadow to shadow until you reached Tvarigu,” the entity mildly replied. “Not to raise an army of slaves and declare war upon my entire race. This has been, one might say, a year for surprises.”

I was really taking a verbal beating on the whole slave thing tonight, huh. Was this what if felt like to be the Akua of a situation?

“Subtle has never been my strength,” I admitted. “It was a bad habit even before Winter filled my veins with pure ‘walk off dismemberment’ juice. Not sure I can shake it at this point.”

Or even that I should, to be honest. I’d run into one dead end after another since I started trying to play queenly games with my opponents. It wasn’t that I was awful at those – with the Woe at my back, I’d made sport of my opposition within Callow – so much that my enemies were just outright better at them. It was no excuse to cease learning, but on the other hand had it not been a kind of arrogance to believe that with so little schooling I could stand on equal footing with the likes of Hasenbach or Malicia when it came to their preferred methods? My own were brutish and clumsy things, but in the end I’d accomplished more with bastard ways than proper ones.

“It seems like tonight it is your flaw that will be doing the shaking, then,” Andronike indifferently commented.

“Night’s not over yet,” I said.

“Fascinating,” Sve Noc said, though she didn’t sound fascinated in the slightest. “Even knowing that my sister pursues you, you would still waste your time on idle banter. You are quite peculiar.”

My fingers clenched.

“You’re not stopping her,” I realized. “Or stopping mind-time, whatever the Hells this is . She’s still coming.”

“And will annihilate you the moment she finds you,” Andronike agreed. “It is inevitable. Even if you flee, eventually there will be nowhere left to run.”

“Could you not, uh,” I eloquently said, gesturing vaguely.

Silver eyes flicked at me, unamused.

“Why should I?” she replied.

The memory was still unfolding in front of us, the two sisters speaking conspiracy in hushed whispers, but that wasn’t the fire I needed to be paying attention to at the moment.

“I want to make a deal,” I said.

“So I assumed,” Andronike said. “That is usually the way, when one is staring defeat in the eye. What I wonder is why you’d presume I would be willing to indulge you.”

“This isn’t going to go like you think it is,” I said. “If she eats Winter-”

“The sum of your knowledge on this matter is animal instinct and second hand crumbs of understanding from the heir to over a millennium of abject failure,” Sve Noc cut in. “While your fumbling attempts to sow discord in ignorance might amuse another, I am not fond of such crude forms of humour.”

I grit my teeth.

“First off, Hierophant is a fucking treasure,” I said. “Sure he’s not perfect, but he’s kind and smart as a whip and he tries his best. Don’t shit talk my friends, it’s rude.”

Andronike simply stared at me, then shrugged.

“The hourglass is emptying,” she reminded me.

“I’ll be expecting an apology later,” I said, equally unmoved. “As for the other thing, it’s no secret I’m not the most learned in things sorcery. But you know what I do have a knack for? Stories. And we’re treading one right now, Andronike. You want to guess how it ends for the two of you?”

“This is puerile,” Sve Noc noted. “You are the one who sought me out for conversation.”

“It’s been a long my whole life,” I grunted. “Humour me.”

She did not reply. I sighed and was I about to prod the conversation forward when I felt the reason she’d not spoken up: a tremor shivering across the ground. The other half was catching up.

“We’ll finish this later,” I told her. “I need to strategically manoeuver out of here.”

There was no open stretch to leap down this time, which complicate things a bit, but the room was splayed before me in full. Including, luckily, the door. I hobbled forward, trying to spare my bad leg, and tugged it open before going into the dark.

—

“Come on,” I muttered, limping forward. “Give me what I need.”

There was no winning this with power, I knew. The moment I was caught I’d be swatted into oblivion, Andronike watching with mild interest as my soul was obliterated by her incensed sister. Even our thrilling little chase earlier had seen me on the defensive almost the entire time, only Akua’s intervention giving me an opening to strike. Even if I returned to the pit fight, even if I somehow managed to defy the odds and devour her before she devoured me, it would be an empty victory. I’d go right back to being an imitation of myself, only with a second kind of poison running through my veins. I needed to mold the situation so that at least half of Sve Noc wanted me to win, and so far on that front I was swinging at mist. I didn’t have good enough a grasp of what moved the sisters, and it wasn’t like idle chatter was going to get me here. Somehow I doubted the legendary power of stilted small talk would allow me to turn this around. Fortunately, I could skip the middle man and have a direct look at their – hers, maybe, for I was not sure if these were shared or purely Komena’s – memories. I’d been hoping for another pivot, hard decisions taken behind closed doors, but what I got instead was a battle.

The end of one anyway.

Komena was easy enough to pick out from the rest of the soldiers, as her pauldrons were a different set of sculpted obsidian but the rest of her armour had not changed. She was standing among a small band of drow officers, the lot of them idling behind another drow at the edge of a steep promontory overlooking a city. One I did not recognize, it bore saying. The signatures of drow architecture were there, the bridges and complicated segmentations in height, but it wasn’t anywhere I’d been before. This looked like a victory, I thought, yet the mood among the officers was grim. Unlike any other drow city I’d seen this one had walls – four interlocking sets of them, with tall bastions towering over – and beneath those there was a thick carpet of corpses. Many of them drow, but there was no small amount of dwarves to match them. Given that the city still stood and the likely invading dwarven army was nowhere in sight, the Empire Ever Dark was master of the field. Yet below in the winding city streets I could see soldiers retreating in haste, forcing aside panicking civilians to make their way out faster.

“Jakrin, Soliva,” the drow closest to the edge said. “Have your javelineers scatter the crowds of the outer district. The delay is dangerous.”

My eyebrows rose in surprise. I knew that voice. Not so long ago it’d been mocking me mercilessly. Under the helm and ornate armour it was difficult to have a look at the drow, but the voice did not lie: I was looking at a younger Mighty Rumena. Was that what it’d meant, when it had said it knew one of the sisters? Komena had actually served under it during the wars? Rumena’s orders drew no enthusiasm, but two officers peeled off to see to their ugly duty.

“The rest of you, see to your sigils,” Rumena said. “Prepare for the retreat north. Dismissed.”

The drow scattered without a word, all save for Komena. She strode forward instead, coming to stand at Rumena’s side, and I limped forward to flank it on the other side. The three of us looked down at the city eating itself alive, silent for a moment.

“Great General Who Shook The-” Komena began.

“Enough, rylleh,” Rumena tiredly replied. “Today I held command over the single greatest military disaster in the history of the Firstborn. Spare me the titles, they now have the ring of mockery.”

“It is not of your making, this war,” the woman who would become Sve Noc said. “I was there when you protested the deep raids. As were all the others.”

“It might not have been such a disaster, had we kept to the humans,” Rumena mused. “But they were too few, too far. We needed nerezim slaves if the hallowing was to happen in our lifetime.”

I let out a sharp breath. It’d been the drow that started the wars with the Kingdom Under? Deep raids, Komena had said, and all the greatest of Praesi horrors had been forged of human sacrifice. Gods, they were fool enough to attack the dwarves for ritual fodder , I realized.

“We had no idea, did we?” Komena murmured. “What they could bring to bear in their fullness of their wroth.”

Rumena stiffened, though not because of her words. It leaned forward, staring intently at the city, and I followed its gaze. It was gazing at some open-roofed temple. The structure was no great wonder, but its floor was glowing red and orange. No, not glowing. Melting. A massive creature with stone-like skin, horned and clawed, ripped free of the floor. Lava poured out in its wake, erupting like a fountain.

“I am told,” Rumena said, sounding darkly amused, “they use the creatures to heat their forges. They are not even soldiers, Komena. They are exterminating our kind with smithing tools .”

Red and orange bloomed over the city, smoke and screams filling the air, and I felt nauseated. Merciless Gods, was this the true face of dwarven warfare? No wonder the drow were still terrified of them after so many centuries. Still, interesting as this was it wasn’t getting me anywhere. Even as the two began discussing how much of their army they’d lose in the evacuation, I stepped forward over the edge of the cliff and embraced the fall.

—

“Now this is more like it,” I said.

The room was a barely-contained riot of scribbles. Every surface was covered with long equations in numerals I did not recognize and incantations in that near-Crepuscular I’d glimpsed in the first memory. There were piles of some strange string-like parchment scattered over what sparse stone furniture could be found, and Komena was going through one patiently.

“There,” she said, handing it to her sister. “The full transcription.”

Andronike took it absent-mindedly, a brush wet with red paint twirling between her fingers. On the wall in front of her scattered equations had red lines through them, others hasty corrections. The older sister finally glanced at the parchment she’d been given and frowned at what she found.

“It is as you said,” Andronike sighed. “It cannot be sacrifices. It would only worsen the gap.”

“It has to be the molten earth currents,” Komena said. “When we campaigned against the forest humans, they used the very land against us without relying on their own sorcery. The underlying principles should be the same. If the nerezim can master-”

“We are not the nerezim, ‘Mina,” her sister replied, sounding irritated. “In theory you are correct but it would take decades if not centuries of deep study before we could even begin to imitate their mastery.”

“We can’t wait forever, ‘Nike,” the other drow reminded her. “If you’re right, the tipping point was reached last year. The moment inertia ceases carrying us...”

“I know,” Andronike sighed. “ I know .”

The second instance had been whispered and on the wings of it all semblance of vitality left the Sage. She looked afraid, tired, and so terribly young. I could sympathize.

“They’re still settling our former colonies,” Komena said quietly. “But it won’t be long before they start advancing again. They’re refused the latest peace offerings.”

“We have greater worries than that,” Andronike murmured.

Her sister’s eyes narrowed.

“You said we should still have five years, before we start dying,” she said.

“And that has not changed,” the older sister replied. “But the Sages are terrified, ‘Mina. They know the consequences of so many lost lives, and they have found no remedy in our lore.”

“Then there is none to be found anywhere,” Komena said. “Who else is there?”

Her sister looked away.

“‘Nike,” Komena repeated slowly. “ Who else is there ?”

“They have,” the other drow said quietly, “sought the advice of the King in Keter.”

“Shrouded Gods,” Komena snarled. “Have they gone mad? That thing destroyed an entire human realm.”

“And survived,” Andronike said. “Conclusion was reached that our kind as a whole can no longer be preserved. Yet the eldest of the Sages believe that is no reason for them in particular to perish.”

“How many times can a single band of fools damn an entire race?” her sister cursed. “They have to die, heart of my heart. I know you hesitate but we can no longer mass support in the dark. We must strike before they do.”

“If we kill them before we have our remedy, we have slain the Firstborn through them,” Andronike said.

“Gods take them all,” Komena said, passing a hand through her long hair. “As if they hadn’t done enough damage already.”

Her sister paused. After a long moment, she put the parchment back onto the stone table and refreshed her brush with red paint from a pot. Striding forward under Komena’s bemused gaze, she slashed through another few equations and then from that drew lines leading towards a rare empty spot on the wall. On it she wrote a single word in ancient Crepuscular, and this one I knew well: Night.

“We had never considered it before then,” Andronike said. “Neither of us were all that pious, and the Shrouded Gods have even been a capricious lot.”

I didn’t freeze this time. I’d expected her to show up from the moment I’d realized this particular memory would actually be of use to me. She seemed fond, I noted, of standing at my side. As if we were companions, the two of us watching some play unfold together.

“You needed a miracle,” I said. “And the hour had grown too late to quibble as to the source of it.”

Sve Noc blinked in surprise.

“An apt summation,” she conceded. “We did not grasp the full consequences of the bargain, then. We still believed it was a cure we would wrangle.”

“But what you got was a stay of execution,” I said. “The Night keeps them alive only so long as you keep feeding it fresh sacrifices.”

“As a young girl the notion would have disgusted me,” Andronike said. “But we’d both lived through the wars by then. Still, it amuses me in retrospective that it was her who balked at the terms when they were given. She cared for our kind in a way I never truly understood.”

“Why tell me this?” I frowned.

She’d not exactly been forthcoming with details so far.

“You do not understand the scale on which we operate, Catherine Foundling,” Sve Noc chided me. “How intentions fade in the face of eternity. The unmaking is in the details, you see. Allow me an example. I was of the Sages, and so unlike other drow allowed to learn of their history. They were once a great boon to my kind.”

“The same crowd who doomed you once and then tried to have another go at it,” I skeptically replied.

“They were necromancers, at their inception,” Andronike faintly smiled. “Not for conquest, but for peace and learning. They called on the wisdom of our ancestors, allowing the spirits to speak through them. Death, in their eyes, was the only sin – for it robbed the living of the wisdom of those departed.”

I’d seen the later meaning of those words with my own eyes and it had little to do with that gentle sentiment. Justifications only matter to the just , I mockingly thought. Sometimes you looked back and wondered what kind of madness had moved your lips.

“You wonder why I burden you with such tedious history, no doubt,” Sve Noc said. “I lead to a question – you held great power for years, Catherine. What did you build with it?”

Silver eyes studied me.

“What shape will your creations take, after your passing?” she said.

My lips thinned. Legacy. She was speaking of legacy. And what would mine be? Some things transient, other less so. I had changed the face of rule in Callow, left the old nobility to lie in the grave Black had dug for it, but there was no guarantee it would remain there in the decades to come. Tradition had a stubborn pull on my people. The Army of Callow had learned the Wasteland ways of war, but that was Juniper’s work more than mine and without a War College of our own to keep the torch lit the reforms would die with our generation. I’d fought wars, and liked to think most had been worthy of being fought. But that was to preserve, was it not? It was standing still, not advancing. I’d tried to bind more than humans to the Kingdom of Callow, more than born Callowans as well, but the numbers were few. A single goblin tribe, a few legions’ worth of foreign soldiers and officers. Not enough, I suspected, to truly change the threads the Callowan tapestry was woven from. Unpleasant as the thought was, perhaps the most consequential change I had brought to my home was receiving the oaths of the Wild Hunt. And that will die with me. Andronike, I thought, had been inviting me to ponder how what I’d created would twist and turn with time.

Instead I’d found I had created little and less.

But there was one thing, I thought, that I would count as legacy if I could – though it was so very far from done. One dream I was trying to bring into the world.

“I imagine the Accords will grow warped, in time,” I said. “And yet I have faith that even in their worst incarnation they will be better than the current face of Calernia.”

“Faith,” half of Sve Noc said, “is ever a costly affair.”

“Is that how you live with this?” I asked. “You tell yourself you were had, you were beaten, and that’s all there is to it?”

“You should choose your words more carefully,” Andronike coldly said.

Ah, was that emotion peeking through? Finally we were getting somewhere.

“You seem under the impression I’m afraid of you,” I said. “Best discard that, it’ll make this easier on both of us.”

“Do you believe your little shade will save you?” Sve Noc said. “It has hidden well, but not flawlessly. Whatever her scheme it will end, and there will be no salvation through her bloody hands. Not half as clever as she thought herself to be, in the end.”

“Now, there’s a lot of harsh stuff to say about Akua Sahelian,” I said. “Believe me, I’ve covered a lot of that ground and I’m still discovering fresh pastures. But I’ll say one thing for her: even at her very worst, at least she wasn’t a spineless sack of whining like you.”

This, I reflected, was not my finest attempt at diplomacy. Well, too late to take it back so I might as well roll with it.

“Are you truly so arrogant as to believe I cannot destroy you here?” Andronike said.

“That’s beyond my control,” I shrugged. “You’re pretty much a goddess at this point, you could snuff me out like a candle at any point and there’s nothing I can do about it. But hey, not even an hour ago I lied down to die in the snow. As far as I’m concerned every moment from now on is an unexpected turnout, so if I’m about to be sent Below I might as well speak my mind first. You’re getting on my nerves, y’see, because behind all the bluster you’re a coward.”

“Your opinion is less than dust,” Sve Noc frigidly replied.

“So you got screwed by your deal with the Gods Below,” I said. “Surprise, who could possibly have seen that coming except literally anyone who ever read a history book not written by the violently mad. Still, I’m in no position to cast stones for bad bargains, given my record, so there you get a pass. Where you don’t is that over a thousand years have passed and the Everdark is still a murderous clusterfuck. If anything it’s gotten worse with the years.”

“It is as it must be to maintain the Night,” Andronike said. “Every grim beat of it.”

“And you’re proud of that?” I said. “Of maintaining this? It’s one thing to make a desperate mistake, but you’ve kept it going ever since.”

“Until today,” Sve Noc harshly replied. “Until you delivered yourself into our hands.”

“Can you not learn?” I hissed. “The Gods Below helped you into this mess in the first place and you’re still doing what they want .”

She rocked back in surprise.

“How do you think this goes for you, Andronike?” I pressed. “They throw two bears into pit, you come out with your teeth red and it’s all over? You do this, you give them the victory they want, and they own you all twice over. There’s no slipping a noose you tightened yourself.”

“The debt-” she began.

“- isn’t even the point,” I interrupted heatedly. “You think Winter is going to make things better? Its fae were almost as bad as devils, Andronike. Devils . Let that sink in for a moment. They’ll still have their hand up your ass, only this time it’s permanent instead of a ritual and you will never, ever be rid of it.”

“And being made into your pets is better?” she snarled. “An army of slaves to die for your cause, then sent away in some remote corner to rot when the usefulness has passed.”

“You’re right,” I said.

For the second time tonight, I took her by surprise.

“You’re absolutely right,” I admitted. “If I still bore my mantle I might be ranting about how it’s the lesser evil and at least with a leash on you’d be doing some good, but that’s honestly disgusting. So is what you made of your people, but it doesn’t excuse what I planned to do in the slightest. I was wrong, and it might mean dust to you but I apologize. I treated you like rabid animals in need of shackles instead of a people brutalized by circumstance and I can only be ashamed of it.”

“You are mad,” Andronike said.

There was an undertone of awe to the statement.

“I am angry ,” I correcting, baring a grin that was all teeth and defiance. “Truth is, Andronike, I’ve been angry all my life. At the Praesi for owning my people, at my people for being owned. At my father, for being so much less than he could be. At my friends, for even needing someone like me. At myself for the trail of smoking ruins I’ve left in my wake. At my enemies, for just refusing to listen . I’ve been angry for so long that without the anger there’d be nothing left of me. It’s who I am.”

I bitterly laughed.

“And most of all, I’m angry I never left the fucking Pit,” I told her. “Because you and I, we’re not saviours or monsters or anything half as grand – we’re the entertainment , Sve Noc. We take out our pain on each other and their tally moves with the groaning weight of the dead.”

“There is nothing else,” Andronike said.

“There is,” I quietly replied. “We don’t claw at each other like animals. We help each other out of the pit instead.”

Eyes met, silver to brown.

“They can’t play shatranj if the pieces don’t listen,” I told her. “So I could say I want to make a deal, but that’s the wrong way isn’t it? This isn’t a competition, it’s not about winning. There doesn’t need to be a loser.”

I offered her a hand.

“You have my help, if you want it,” I said. “And there are hardly words for how very badly I need yours.”

Slowly, her arm rose. Then she struck like snake and seized me by the throat.

Damnit Akua , I thought, you broke the power of friendship.

Chapter 80: So Below

“I speak today not for humble man-eating tapirs but instead for the most ambitious specimens their kind has ever known. Is it not the sacred duty of all Creation to seek to claim the Tower? How, then, could it have been a crime for these tapirs to follow this same dictate by devouring our late Emperor?”
– From official transcript from the Trial of Unexpected Teeth, opening speech of the defence

“What a silver tongue you have,” Andronike said. “But not quite silver enough. Your ignorance shows once more, Catherine Foundling.”

I tried to respond ‘when does it not?’, but I was currently being choked so it came out as more of a plaintive gurgle. So, this was how it ended: literally choking on my own words. Had to give her points for the irony, if nothing else.

“Allow me to educate you,” Sve Noc said, and threw me like a bloody rag doll.

Well, I thought, there’s a bright side to this. I’m currently not dead. Or at least not more than I was when this delightful interlude began. The slightly less bright side was that I was flying through flickering scenes, memories I could only glimpse the barest pieces of, and soon enough I would... Ah, there it is , I mused, managing to keep a semblance of mental calm as my leg snapped and my throat busied itself screaming. That utter asshole, I bet she’d aimed just so my bad leg would be the one getting the worst of the landing. I tumbled listlessly against the floor, my magical journey ending in the close acquaintance of my forehead and a stone wall. Still not dead, admittedly. I wouldn’t be in such an excruciating amount of pain if I was. My forehead was going to bruise, if I still had a body by the end of it. I moaned and flopped around until I was looking upwards, feeling out my knee and finding it only mostly broken. Could I still move on that? Maybe. There’d be a lot of howling involved, but it shouldn’t be impossible. I still stayed down for a while, lying uncomfortably on the floor.

In the distance people were dying.

“Educate me about that, would you?” I sighed. “Like I haven’t strolled through a dozen butcher’s yards.”

Might as well find out what had her tossing me around, I eventually decided. At this point I’d taken my swing and missed, I might as well die slightly less ignorant than usual. My good leg supported me as I forced myself up using the wall, taking a proper look around at my surroundings. Yet another drow city I’d never seen before, though I had a decent guess as to where we were: I was standing among a city-sized temple carved out of massive stalactites. The streets here were not interrupted by ‘canals’ that were effectively sheer drops, and hobbling to the edge of one told me there was an actual city below. If this wasn’t Holy Tvarigu, I’d eat my fingers... again? No, first time. I’d made other people – insofar as fae were people, anyway, – do it, but that hardly counted. I flinched at the vivid memory of it. Gods, I’d made people eat their hands . It’d seemed reasonable at the time, and damn me but I could still see the sense in it, but I couldn’t remember even hesitating for a moment. Not that hesitation would have made it better, I silently conceded. Cordelia Hasenbach’s passing comment had cut deeper than she knew.

What did regret matter, if it changed nothing?

The temple-city was strewn with corpses as far as I could see. Whatever battle had taken place here had ended, or at least near to it, and now this place was little more than a freshly-bloodied mausoleum. By Andronike’s passing mercy or a stroke of luck, I’d landed near the heart of the temple. I could only be thankful for that, I thought, as I eyed the mind-bogglingly complex web of stairways and bridges connecting everything. Some ways in front of me a wide staircase progressively narrowed in rising to meet a passage lightly sloped. On both sides it was flanked by a very short wall of painted stone topped by striking sculptures. It was a chain, I thought, as I began the painful climb. At the head of the stairs two androgynous drow of marble painted red and yellow roared out with curved blades in hand. From their back sprouted more drow in different colours, wielding whips and daggers, and facing those drow in hooded robes offered a supplicant’s kneel. The whirlwind of colours and faces and poses continued all the way to the end of the passage, where the heart of the temple-city awaited.

It took me far too long and far too many bouts of yelling to make it up the stairway, but the view when I did was almost worth it. Wouldn’t keep me alive, but that was probably asking too much. The riot of vivid pigments should have turned it ugly, but there was something almost hypnotic about the sight before me. More ziggurat than pyramid, though that failed to truly catch the essence of it: it was almost a stairway of giant steps, but a triangular mouth going all the way to the summit struck out from the rest of the structure – which was roofed, at that narrowest point, by some sort of cylindrical tiled pavilion. At the four cardinal directions pale or red stone made up the life and death of celestial orbs: sun on the rise and fall, moon ascendant and passing. It was like looking at a hundred rainbows made into stone and woven into a single tapestry. There was hardly a trace of such wonder left in what I’d seen of the Everdark. The thought shook me out of the trance and I resumed my advance. Halfway through the passage I finally noticed I’d not been alone for some time: hidden among the statues were drow, armed and armoured. They’d been so utterly still I’d never noticed. I continued limping until I entered the heart-temple, and there I found what Andronike had meant for me to find.

Inside were burned made of what must have been all precious materials in existence, from ivory to a massive hollowed out emerald, and every single one of them was wafting thick trails of scented smoke. At the centre of the shivering columns the two sisters were kneeling in front of simple carved piece of obsidian. A star map, by the looks of it. Andronike finished unfurling a large scroll filled with equations and incantations I’d already seen before, then passed her fingers over to smooth it out.

“Ready?” Komena asked.

“How could anyone be?” her sister replied. “Yet here we are.”

She breathed in loudly.

“We request audience,” Andronike said.

“We request bargain,” her sister said.

I hobbled forward with an expectant gaze, strangely eager to see the moment where they’d sold out their race with the best of intentions, but nothing happened at all. Stillness held the room.

“Damn me,” Andronike said with quiet horror. “I have killed us all.”

Her sister opened her mouth to answer, but was interrupted by an unholy ruckus. A dozen burners had been tipped over, by the sounds of it, and for a moment I thought it’d been me. But no – I turned, and there was someone in the middle of a set of spilled burners who’d quite evidently tripped on them. A drow, I saw. It rose hastily, pretending nothing had happened, and retched a little before slapping away the thick smoke.

“Gods,” the drow retched again. “That stuff is foul .”

Both sisters went still.

“O Shrouded God,” Komena said hesitantly, but the newcomer’s hand rose.

“Give me a moment, girls,” it rasped out.

It patted at its dirty robes and produced a flash of polished copper. My heart skipped a beat. The Wandering Bard uncorked her flask and took a deep drink, before gargling it and spitting out the liquor. The sisters traded an appalled look. A little less godly than they’d been aiming for, I supposed. The Bard took another swallow of liquor, wiped her mouth and went looking through the tipped burner before triumphantly snatching out a broken lute. Apparently she’d mistakenly spat some liquor on it, because with a shoddy attempt at discretion she began wiping at the wood with her sleeve.

“Good enough,” the Bard announced. “Right, so onto business.”

“You are no deity,” Komena flatly said.

“Well spotted,” Bard cheerfully replied. “And to think they told me you were the stupid one. For the purposes of this conversation, you might consider me an envoy of sorts.”

“You claim to speak for the Gods,” Andronike frowned.

“Oh, I wouldn’t go as far as that,” she said. “I’ve never been quite that much of a fool. But you called and here I am.”

“Are you a devil?” Komena pressed.

“Would it matter if I were?” the Bard shrugged. “Regardless, I hear the two of you are looking for a loan.”

The sisters stirred, Andronike picking up the scroll she’d unfurled.

“A miracle is what we would bargain for,” she said. “The specifics-”

“Are known to me,” Bard replied, waving the words away and accidentally sloshing some booze onto the floor.

One of the burners caught fire, and everyone delicately pretended it was not actually happening.

“Even the parts you got ambitious with,” she continued, lifting a finger off her flask to wag it chidingly. “Making it reusable? Now now, that’s trying to inflate the value. Just because you shove old skills and power into new heads doesn’t mean the following deaths are worth as much as the first.”

“We sought only to offer the finest possible tribute,” Komena baldly lied.

“I can’t believe I’m rooting for you right now,” I muttered.

Still, if the opposition was the Wandering Bard then ‘All is Night’ was most definitely the banner of the moment.

“More need than brains, huh,” Bard drawled. “No wonder you’re in good odour with the old crowd. Still, you two are a little late. They’ve been a lot more careful about where they put their money since Nessie ate the hand that fed him.”

“We offered all we have,” Andronike gravely said.

“Yeah, but you don’t have enough ,” the old thing said. “I’ll level with you two, since you seem slightly less awful than your average drow. This? This whole thing? It’s not anybody’s plan. No one thought you’d actually fuck up so badly you’d obliterate yourselves. The folks upstairs are watching like hawks, and the other side’s wondering if it’s worth it to intervene given the... costs of such direct action.”

“We offer fair bargain,” Komena insisted.

“Fair is for children,” the Bard said. “They’re not interested in it.”

“Yet here you are,” Andronike said, amber eyes narrowing.

“Killing the Sages and calling Below in the middle of their seat of power was a nice touch,” she replied. “Got you the audience and a consideration. But the terms are going to need to change a bit.”

“This is an exceedingly delicate arrangement,” Komena said. “We can’t simply-”

“You will,” the Wandering Bard gently said. “Or you’ll die, every last one of you.”

“Speak your terms,” Andronike replied.

It sounded like a surrender, because it was.

“‘Nike-” her younger sister began.

“We are in no position to negotiate,” the older drow tiredly said.

“Debt isn’t wiped,” the Bard spoke softly into the silence that followed. “The Night will keep you all alive, but you two will need to keep it going. And if you stop...”

The ancient entity grimaced.

“Well, they’re not above cutting their losses,” Bard said. “Let’s leave it at that.”

“Should we even bother to accept?” Komena harshly replied. “Or is even that formality unnecessary?”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” the Wandering Bard murmured. “There are some things worse than death, and what this will make of you is one.”

She drank once more, then offered a sharp grin.

“But we all know better, don’t we?” she said.

I’d known how it would end from the start. I’d seen what had become of the Everdark and the two sisters, after all. And still, watching the light dim in the eyes of the two true drow in the room, I felt my stomach drop. Was there a single horror in this continent’s history the Wandering Bard did not have a hand in? The thing was, I understood why they’d made this choice. It was uncomfortable to even think it, but if offered the same terms with my own people on the line I would very likely make the same choice. Passing a hand through my hair, I gingerly lowered myself down to the floor while leaning against a pillar. So which part of this had it been that Andronike wanted me to see? Even odds it was either the Bard’s very presence or that threatening little bit at the end. They’re not above cutting their losses , the Intercessor had said. Was a gentle way to speak of genocide. Was that what Andronike was afraid of? That the moment she and I made common cause, a snap of the fingers Below would destroy her entire race? But it shouldn’t work out like that , I thought with a frown. The Gods were, well, exactly that. All-powerful. They could probably end the Night and likely Winter itself. But there was a story unfolding, and if they did anything of the sort they’d be directly meddling.

They couldn’t do that without opening the door for Above to do the same, and the Heavens should be taking a brutal beating right about now. The Dead King was on the march, the last thing Below would want was Above getting a free swing at him.

“So it’s the Bard you wanted me to see,” I said, raising my voice.

“The Bard,” Sve Noc repeated, walking out from behind the pillar. “What a quaint name. We knew her as the Envoy.”

“Neshamah called her the Intercessor,” I said. “And I suppose if anyone’s got her number it’s him.”

“The King in Keter wears a crown of lies,” the silver-eyed drow replied. “No creature born of this land has ever been half as skilled at the art.”

She moved to lean against the pillar I was sitting back against, standing above in both the physical and metaphysical sense. Well, at least one of those was new.

“He’s her enemy,” I said. “Trusting him would be foolish, but he wants her to bleed. That much can be believed in.”

“Trust is always foolish,” Sve Noc smiled. “It is faith writ small, and almost as dangerous.”

“So did you throw me here for a game of riddles?” I drily replied. “Because I can roll with it. The more you make, the more you leave behind. What-”

“Footsteps,” the goddess said.

“I might not win this,” I reluctantly conceded. “I only know, like, five riddles and that one was the best.”

If we made this about bawdy jokes instead my years at the Rat’s Nest would finally pay off, though. Worth a try.

“A riddle of my own, then,” Sve Noc said. “Why share what can be taken in full?”

I frowned, twisting to look up at her.

“You’re not Andronike,” I said.

“I never said I was,” Komena calmly replied.

“I’ve been over this with your sister,” I said. “But what the Hells, maybe the second time’s the charm. Just give me a moment to think of an insult to get you angry before this gets going.”

“Your offer has been made known to me,” Sve Noc contemptuously said. “There is no need to reiterate. I was partial to the notion of immediately crushing you underfoot, but request has been made that you be allowed to speak your piece first.”

Well, wasn’t that promising. I gazed ahead, honestly at a loss as to where to begin, and only now noticed the memory had stopped. Frozen. Maybe it really was only Komena’s memories, I thought. She certainly seemed to have greater control of our surroundings than her sister had. My eyes lingered on the Wandering Bard, the flask halfway to her mouth as she opened her mouth.

“She can be beaten, you know,” I said.

“You have not,” Sve Noc said. “And yet would demand that we throw in our lot with you.”

“I haven’t, it’s true, but there’s a villain down south called the Tyrant,” I said. “I have it from two rather reliable sources that he screwed with her plans in a major way last year. It can be done.”

“I lacked fear, once,” Komena said. “As you so foolishly do. I have since been taught better.”

“I just heard a woman try to lie to what she knew to be envoy from the Gods,” I said. “ Brazenly so. She had a chance at getting her people out of this mess, I think.”

I smiled thinly.

“Now though?” I said. “You won’t even try. My opinion might be dross in your eyes, but I wonder what she’d think of you now.”

“Petty sentimentality,” she mused. “Is that truly the sum of what she brings, Andronike? This is what shook you?”

The other sister walked out from behind another pillar, this one in front of me. For terrifyingly ancient creatures, they did enjoy their petty theatrics.

“When have we last been called to account for our many sins, sister?” Andronike said. “There is worth in such a thing, even coming from her.”

“That last part was unnecessary,” I noted. “I mean, not wrong, but definitely unnecessary.”

“If you felt the need for a pet there are better choices,” Komena said, eyeing me darkly. “This one has been beaten too harshly to still be amusing.”

“I’m not even going to grace that with a response,” I indignantly said.

“A goddess has no interlocutors,” her sister said. “Only supplicants.”

“Judgement only has meaning coming from one worthy of casting it,” Komena said. “This one hardly qualifies.”

“I’m not going to claim I’m a saint,” I said. “And I’ve definitely crossed some lines, but-”

“Is this where you claim influence by your mantle once more?” the younger sister asked. “You could, at least, attempt a believable lie. ‘Nike, she’s not even held her half of the Garden for a decade. The drift would be negligible. It was still her . The only difference was that she had power enough to cow her foes.”

My fingers clenched. I didn’t want to believe that, and I wasn’t sure I did. But this was the Pilgrim all over again, wasn’t it? If there was anyone learned on the subject of mantles in Calernia, it would be the two of them. On the other hand, she’d already confessed she intended to kill me. Believable lies from enemies were a deadly thing.

“Humans are notoriously weak-minded,” Andronike replied. “Arguably the ease of their swaying is their defining characteristic as a species.”

I grit my teeth. Insulting as this was, I wasn’t exactly in a position to contradict her. I only had the one crossbow to wield and it was currently pointed straight at my foot.

“This didn’t have to get racist,” I still protested.

“Then let us see,” Komena said, ignoring my perfectly valid complaint, “the stuff Catherine Foundling is made of. Grant me the power, sister. I will not destroy her yet.”

Andronike considered me for a long moment, then inclined her head. My mind was racing at the implications. Angry Sve couldn’t kill me without Calm Sve’s say-so, then. Andronike owned the floodgate even in here.

“Done,” she said.

Komena pushed herself up and came to stand over me. Well, it wasn’t like I was capable of stopping her. Might as well do what I did best: mouth off to entities beyond my comprehension.

“Please be gentle,” I shyly said. “It’s my first-”

“No,” Sve Noc cut in.

What followed lived up to the word. Before the Battle of the Camps, I remembered, I had gone looking through a Deoraithe soldier’s mind for bits of useful information. If it had felt anything like this I owed the man apology and restitution. The sensation of cold fingers prying through my memories had me regretting the jest I’d just made. It was an intrusion, on some fundamental level, and there was no hiding anything from Sve Noc’s piercing gaze.

“There,” she said. “We begin with blood.”

For what he said and what he’d done, I’d decided he deserved to die – my hand had done the rest without any need for prompting. Edge parallel to the ground, slicing across the major arteries just like the butcher did it to pigs in the marketplace.

I gasped out weakly. She’d brought that to the fore, but her grasp had not slackened. I could still smell the blood in the air, the taste of the first life I’d ever taken. I could almost feel Black looking on, face unreadable.

“Humans killing humans,” Andronike commented. “Nothing of import.”

“A child arrogating powers beyond her due,” Komena contradicted her. “The birth of a recurring pattern. And see how quickly it comes again-”

I let what I’d just done sink in, closing my eyes. With a life spared, I’d just killed thousands. I’d just promised cities to fire and ruin, sown the seeds of a rebellion that would rip the land of my birth – the very same land I wanted to save – apart. But I’d also bought the war I needed. Damn me, but I’d bought the war I needed.

The Lone Swordsman, granted his life so that I may rise through the deaths it would bring. My throat clogged with old disgust. I’d never gotten over that quite as well as I liked to pretend. I’d just had darker things to my name, usurping the place of that early sin when it came to the litany of my regrets.

“Her own kind, thrown into the flames,” Komena said. “There are no similarities, Andronike, only lies she made herself swallow.”

“Not done without purpose,” I croaked. “Not for the sport of it. Because I thought it had to be done.”

“You were wrong,” the silver-eyed drow said.

“I was,” I got out. “And I will be again. But it still matters. If I stand judgement then judge me for all of it. Not just the parts that suit you.”

“Not desperation, sister,” Komena said, turning to address our audience. “It was ambition that held the knife. Best not forget that.”

“Not always,” Andronike said.

I couldn’t beat the monsters by being better than them. I’d never had that in me. Too much impatience, too much recklessness. That was all right, though. There was another way: be the bigger monster.

Akua on the Blessed Isle, a false victory. The two of us under moonlight, the beginnings of a dance that would see us both spinning for years. The moment I’d first admitted to myself I could live with being a monster if I still won.

“Pride,” Komena objected, shaking her head. “Refusal to lose even at the cost of principle. Must I bring out every example of this?”

The duel against the Duke of Violent Squalls, the Arcadian Campaign, Second Liesse. More recent, after that. The Battle of the Camps, Keter. The moment I bestowed a title on Ivah and bound it by oaths.

“Always another sliver shaven off,” Komena said. “Another compromise. How long would it take before we became the sacrifice?”

Andronike did not answer. She was, I thought, being convinced.

“This is most irregular.”

Both halves of Sve Noc jolted in surprise, and the younger sister’s grasp slackened for a moment before tightening twice as hard. I craned my neck to look at the source of the sound and winced.

“Finally you crawl out of your hole, shade,” Komena smiled. “I will enjoy this a great deal.”

Akua Sahelian stood among us, her scarlet dress flowing down to her feet, and managed to convey utter disdain without ever significantly moving her face.

“There are proper forms to observe, you grasping savages,” Diabolist scoffed. “This is not at all how a rigged trial is held. I see an accuser yet no defence – you can, and indeed should, bribe the defender, but you cannot dispense with the office entirely. It is simply not done.”

“Sister,” Komena began, but the other raised her hand.

“She is less dangerous here than out there, stirring trouble,” Andronike said.

“I find the shallowness of your understanding deeply offensive,” the shade retorted, wrinkling her nose. “ This is the finest your misbegotten race has to offer? Even the least of Tyrants would have made matching cutlery sets of you.”

“I know you think this is helping,” I began, then paused. “Wait, do you? Are you trying to help?”

“You test my patience, shade,” Andronike warned.

“You test mine, chattel,” Akua replied. “Even a devil is owed an advocate.”

Komena laughed mockingly.

“And you would be hers?” she said.

“Why,” Diabolist smiled, extending her arms, “I only want to see justice done. Shall we begin?”

There should be a rule, I decided, about last moment rescues not being allowed to make a situation worse.

Chapter 81: Only To The Just

“Thus the Gods granted us the second boon: beyond the veil of death lies a land of always plenty, which will only be open to the just.”
– The Book of All Things, fifth verse of the second hymn

Why was a trial taking place at all?

I kept my face expressionless even as the question consumed me. I knew why Akua would want one: given long enough, she could probably convince a circle it was actually a square. I also knew why Komena wanted one, or rather didn’t. She simply didn’t have the power to do anything about it at the moment. What was tripping me up, though, was why Andronike had boarded this ship. She’d already implied Diabolist might be troublesome if allowed to continue whatever folly she’d been up to out there, but that couldn’t possibly be enough of a reason to indulge this farce. I gave it better than even odds that Akua had come in here with an exit strategy, a way to flee if this turned sour on her, but why not simply hang me on a crook and temporarily devote their energies to taking care of the Diabolist issue before resuming? There was, I decided, a deeper game afoot. True to form, I was the only player involved unaware of the stakes and the rules. Could I feel out the shape of it by figuring out what the older sister was after? No, I decided after a short beat. Even now she was too hard to figure out. On the other hand, I knew Akua like few others. Her I might be able to use for the purpose. So, Diabolist , I thought. What are you actually up to?

“You claimed the role of defender,” Andronike said, silver eyes unblinking. “Proceed, shade.”

“As a titled noble of the Dread Empire of Praes, Catherine Foundling is owed trial before a jury of her peers,” Akua mused. “Yet I suppose you will have to do.”

The insult I immediately discarded as unimportant. She’d never been quite as above trash talk as she liked to pretend, a tendency that exposure to the Woe had only worsened. She was establishing my stature as a Praesi noblewoman – which technically was true, since Malicia had years ago titled me Lady of Marchford even though greater titles had since eclipsed that grant – but also recognizing that the older half of Sve Noc had right of judgement over me. One or both parts of that were useful to her purposes, I decided.

“There is no empire here save ours,” Komena denied bluntly. “Your laws and dues are of no worth.”

Thrust and parry , I frowned. Had it simply been an attempt to make Praesi laws apply to whatever the Hells this was turning into? She’d certainly be more familiar with them than anyone else here, and that opened the door to a multitude of exploitable technicalities. But it should have been fairly predictable that wouldn’t work, we had nowhere near enough leverage in this to make that hold. My eyes flicked to Andronike’s calm face. Arguably no leverage at all, I thought. And yet here we were. She was getting something out of this, something separate from the offer I’d extended. What? The answer to that question was the key to surviving this.

“Then you stand here in your role as shared rulers of the Everdark,” Diabolist said. “With all attendant duties and privileges.”

I knew that faintly indifferent tone of voice all too well. It was the same she’d used every time she was making sport of me before an audience of fellow Wasteland vultures. She’d laid a trap and Komena had fallen for it. Establishing stakes? If the sisters were here as rulers of their kind, the outcome of this might apply to all drow. Which meant that the outcome of this bad play mattered somehow, there’d be no point in pushing for this if it didn’t. I bit my lip. Why would it? We had no way of enforcing anything, the power disparity was to the point of the absurd. It would take something-

“Oh fuck me,” I murmured.

-something even stronger to do that. Like a story. Akua was trying to screw them the exact same way I’d screwed her at First Liesse. Except this time I was theoretically on her side and essentially blind as to the specifics of what she was trying to accomplish. The moment I opened my mouth to say anything I might very well be striking a match in a munitions warehouse.

“That is so,” Andronike replied without hesitation. “I stand in judgement over an invader.”

Think, Catherine. What does ‘Nike get out of this? Why does she play along? This ended either in my acquittal, which I suspected was what Akua might be going for, or in my conviction. Somehow I doubted Diabolist and Andronike were after the same outcome, which meant ‘Ol Silver was aiming for the noose. What would she get from it that choking me out earlier wouldn’t have accomplished?

“Good,” Diabolist smiled. “Now, I believe that assertion was made pride has been her sole master all these years. I would bring evidence to the contrary. Catherine, if I may?”

“Try not to make a mess,” I sighed.

“But that’s not why I’m making this decision. There are eight thousand innocents in Marchford, Juniper. I refuse to abandon them.”

Her grip was lighter, I’d give her that much. Maybe as a consequence the memory didn’t feel nearly as vivid, and it took me a moment to place it. War council of the Fifteenth, after the demon had slipped the leash in the hills south of Marchford. When my officers had been arguing for retreat west and abandonment of the city. I had not forgot, though, exactly who it was that’d loosed the demon in question. Hard to, when she was the same woman currently speaking in my defence.

“The Battle of Marchford,” Akua said. “A choice between pragmatic retreat and principled stand. This too, Sve Noc, is a pattern that must be recognized: holding to loyalties in the face of danger, even when inconvenient.”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. Yeah, she was definitely going for acquittal here. Which I supposed might mean being worthy of allying with? At least half of Sve Noc seemed aware there was a story in the works here, and so she might step carefully if Diabolist pulled this off, but even then I didn’t see the ‘wrong’ verdict holding up afterwards. Which might be what Akua is actually after , I frowned. Putting at our back a story of the sisters breaking their word, even if it was only implicitly given. It’d been a mistake in thinking to assume that the shade would be after the same thing I was, namely making allies with the pair. Akua Sahelian was a creature who only ever sought absolute endings, be they victories or defeats. And that meant, unfortunately, that putting all my coin on the madwoman trying to fool living gods wasn’t an option. I couldn’t just lie there like a dead fish and await salvation. Even if she managed to win, it would be the wrong damned sort of victory. Shit. That meant I’d have to handle her, Andronike and Komena at the same time. Each of them after something different and in at least one case what exactly remaining unclear to me. This was going to get trickier than I was equipped to handle.

“Laughable,” Komena said. “Is there a single teacher or benefactor she has not turned on?”

I gasped as she riffled through my memories none too gently. The images flickered in quick succession: putting a knife in Black, after the dust had settled on Second Liesse. Coronation in Laure, as good as open rebellion against Malicia. Standing before the Queen of Summer and the King of Winter, unmaking them both by giving them exactly what they wanted.

“All of which betrayed her first, in one manner or another,” Diabolist shrugged. “Can you show me a single instance where she was first to wield the knife?”

“And so she is indecisive as well as untrustworthy,” Komena mocked. “You dig ever deeper.”

“Now now,” Akua chided. “Personal attacks are the mark of failed argument. If you’ve no counterpoint to offer, such flailing only serves to shed further light on your incompetence.”

“A single instance taking place prior to the acquisition of her mantle,” Andronike said. “Your argument stands, shade, yet not as tall as you would wish. I require more recent decisions. You were yourself instrumental in the enslavement of many of my kind. The matter must be addressed.”

I drummed my fingers against my leg. There it was, the hint as to what she was after. Like I’d thought it, was conviction she wanted. So she was on her sister’s side. Whatever hesitation I’d sown was gone, they were back to riding the same horse. No , I suddenly thought. They aren’t. Komena might be serving as the attack hound, at the moment, but that wasn’t what she actually wanted. If given the power she’d strike us both down in an instant. Andronike’s road still ended in my death, presumably, but she wanted to carry out the full farce first. Make it about my being judged and then annihilated. The semblance of justice had some use to her. The whole thing still had the smell of sacrifice to it, but there was a difference between simple victory by strength and the hanging of a villain. The latter had a narrative behind it, and I could only see one use for that: she wanted to ride it against Winter. That was the only reason she’d humoured Diabolist, she wanted Fate to back her claim on my former mantle. And so finally I knew what everyone was after: Akua wanted to trick the sisters to their death, Komena wanted heads for her spikes and Andronike wanted me to walk to the altar willingly.

And I needed to outmanoeuver the three of them simultaneously, while prone and having my mind ransacked.

“Oaths were taken, this is true,” Diabolist said. “Yet willingly, in fair bargain.”

“Death or kneeling is no bargain,” Komena said. “It is conquest by another name. Most damningly of all, it is failed conquest. There is no victory to redeem the outrage.”

“Can one be made a slave twice over?” Akua denied. “Were the Firstborn not already owned?”

“Then the offence of theft is to be added to insult,” the younger sister replied.

“You concede, then, that the drow were and remain slaves,” Diabolist pressed.

Komena hesitated, smelling the trap. I could have taken the moment to try to unfold Akua’s latest trick, but there was no point to that. I wouldn’t get through this by following her lead. Two outcomes to a trial, conviction or acquittal. That it was rigged from the start mattered little, I thought, it was only playacting to strengthen a story. Could I break this, then? Refuse to recognize the authority of my judge? No, that’d only give Komena what she wanted. Heads, spikes, the usual. It irked me that the proceedings themselves were largely meaningless: it was all just squabbling for the right position in the eyes of the story. Diabolist and Andronike were fighting over the knife they both wanted to wield, the ‘being in the right’, but I suspected the moment it was clear Sve Noc would not get what she was after she’d discard the pretence and turn to violence. You’re still trying to win according to the rules, I remembered, when you should be trying to win despite them. Gods, it would be so much easier to be rid of him if his lessons were not so useful. Even now, years later and hundreds of miles away from anything he’d ever seen. As in so many things, Black had the right of it.

Nowhere this ‘trial’ would lead to suited me, and so there was no need for me to play along with it.

I closed my eyes and the talk washed over me. Komena walked back her first claim, terming her people as servants instead, and Akua argued that servants finding other employment was no crime. They went around in a circle, Sve Noc claiming the service was to Below and so meddling in the matter was blasphemy, Akua arguing that as a villain I was equally in Below’s service and so no blasphemy was had. The shade was better at this: they’d put up their soldier against my schemer. And while we were fresh off our wars with Above, they’d been stewing in a hole of their own making for millennia. We had the edge, by the slightest of margins. That edge just wasn’t being used for what I wanted. I croaked out a laugh, opening my eyes.

“Do you hear the sound, Andronike?” I said.

There was a pause in the argument.

“Catherine-” Akua began, but I shook my head.

I met her gaze. Trust me , I silently asked. I have taken us from one mess to another, and twice you’ve had to save my life tonight. Trust me anyway. Slowly the shade nodded. She had been my nemesis, once. There had been understanding in that as well as hatred.

“I hear a trial,” Andronike replied.

“Not me,” I mused. “It’s just this awful patter I can make out. Click click click. Claws and feet. Four crabs in a bucket.”

She eyed me in confusion.

“Ah, not familiar with those I take it,” I said. “They’re these-”

“I know what a crab is, Catherine Foundling,” Sve Noc flatly replied.

“They trap those, in the city I was born,” I said. “In cages, then they take them out and put them in buckets. Went swimming a few times when I was a kid, and once I came across this crabber. He’d taken them out of his cage and put them in one of those very buckets. I was surprised when I saw it was just a regular old one – no trick to it, not even a lid. So I went up to the man and asked why they didn’t just escape. You know what he said?”

The drow did not reply.

“A single crab would escape,” I smiled. “But when you have more than one? The moment it’s about to get out, the others will drag it back down .”

“This again,” Komena sneered. “Is there-”

“Now, all that’s left of this one is hunger and hubris,” I casually interrupted, jamming a thumb towards the younger drow. “I forgive her for it. And Akua, well, she was raised in a bucket even more vicious than this one. She’s still learning to let go of those blinders. You, though? I’m disappointed that at no point you figured out you could simply ask .”

“Would you like to confess?” Andronike calmly said.

“Click click click,” I replied. “You’re still acting like the only way you can win is if I lose. We both know that’s not true.”

“Apotheosis,” she said, “cannot be partitioned.”

“So that’s the pebble in your boot,” I snorted. “Gods, you think I want to be Queen Bitch of Night? There’s not a lot things I’m afraid of, but going back to the mantle is one. It was like having a sieve between me and Creation with only the ugly stuff going through.”

“It’s a trap, sister,” Komena said. “The shade will have its jaws unhinged, lurking behind us.”

“Akua Sahelian,” I said. “I order you to discard whatever you have wrought.”

“We can still triumph,” Diabolist quietly said, facing me in full.

“And that’s the kind of victory we all prefer, isn’t it?” I pensively said. “Complete. Mistress of the field, every opponent ground to dust.”

I flicked a glanced at where I’d ripped out her hear, then at the halves of Sve Noc.

“Look where it’s gotten us, thinking of compromise as weakness ,” I said. “A shade and half a corpse. The two cannibal goddesses of an endless butcher’s yard.”

“We are nothing like you,” Komena hissed.

“Look at us, you fucking fool,” I hissed back. “ Actually look at us . Is there a single one of us that isn’t a monumental failure? I carved open like a pig the only thing I’ve ever tried to save, again and again. Akua watched every single belief she held to burn to the ground around her before I ripped out her beating heart . And you two, Komena, Merciless Gods – even a monstrous thing like Wandering Bard pitied you for this.”

“And who are you to lecture us?” Andronike said. “Who are you, that your advice should be heeded? By your own lips an admitted derelict.”

“I’m not better than you,” I said. “That’s not what this is about. We could all debate body counts and ruins until the Last Dusk but what would that accomplish? One of us being the worst of the lot doesn’t change what’s on all our shoulders. Nothing does.”

“Desperate,” Komena scathingly said. “Running scared. This is no offer, it is terror gilded with false sentiment.”

“This is absurd,” I laughed. “We’re holding a trial over what, my worthiness ? I am a funeral procession of mistakes and horrors. We all are. Plunder my memories all you like for justifications or blemishes, it doesn’t make this any less of a sham. Sure, I’m a monster. What do you care?”

“And you would have us clasp hands in alliance with a monster,” Andronike said. “A strange argument you make.”

“Like you give a shit about humans dying,” I snorted. “Or even about my character, such as it is. I’m not asking you on a moonlit walk for a spot of kissing, Sve Noc, I’m offering you a power stolen through murder to help you cheat the death of your entire race. Again. Why are we still pretending my regrets or principles have any weight on these scales?”

“We would have no guarantees on their end,” Akua said, voice blanked of emotion. “No means to ensure they hold up their part.”

“It’s always the need for control that fucks us, isn’t it?” I mused. “It killed the very partnership that dug Praes out of the pit. You and me too, Diabolist. How much could we have avoided if instead of clawing at each other we’d sat down and talked ? How many tragedies would have never come to pass if we’d just bent our proud necks the slightest bit?”

I looked at the sisters.

“You think I’m a fool,” I said. “Fine. My record holds to it. But ask yourselves this: a century from now, while you watch the essence of Winter turn your people into animals despite your best efforts, will you not regret this even a little? That one moment where you could have done it differently?”

“Different is not better,” Komena said.

“It could be worse,” I agreed. “I won’t deny that. Devouring Winter is an agony assured, but this could turn out worse. It’s still a chance, though.”

I clenched my fingers then unclenched them.

“It’s an unknown,” I said. “It’s terrifying and dark and it could be the single worst thing any of us has ever done – but it’s not impossible to get out of a bucket. You need to own that, deep down. That if we’re the crabs we’re that because of fear and not because there was no other way.”

The silence that followed hung heavy over all of us. There was a song in it, I thought. Four monsters assembled in a room that wasn’t. Night twofold, harsh and serene. The Doom of Liesse and the Black Queen who slew her. The silver-eyed sisters were mirroring statues of stillness, not a hint as to their thoughts revealed. Andronike eventually let out a breath.

“It burns, doesn’t it?” she told her sister. “ Sincerity . I’d forgotten the taste of it.”

“Once more we come to the crossroads, heart of my heart,” Komena murmured. “I believed in you then. I believe in you now. But this?”

She shook her head.

“Beautiful words, Catherine Foundling,” she said. “Yet still only words. It was no kindness to any of us, letting you speak.”

My hands shook. Gambled and lost. All of it. Akua stirred but I leant back against the pillar. Fighting was pointless. I’d asked for a leap of faith from the faithless and received the inevitable from that arrogant roll of the dice.

“Asked,” I repeated in a murmur.

Hypocrite to end, was I? Demanding what I would not offer. Was compromise on my own terms even compromise at all, or just victory by another name? For all I’d said tonight, one thing had not changed: I had not learned to lose . I dragged myself up, biting my lip not to scream at the flare of pain.

“Hear me, Sve Noc,” I said. “Whatever claim I yet hold to Winter, I pass to you. My crown of Moonless Night, I lay at your feet. I stand before you without power or right to my name, mortal at your mercy.”

Two pairs of silver eyes widened. I could feel the crushing weight of them swelling, breaking the memory apart at the seams.

“Help me,” I asked, begged, prayed. “ Please .”

Night fell over me and I breathed my last desperate breath, clawing at the dark.

Chapter 82: Thrice Dead

“Now, luck it always turns. Nothing you can do about that. But that’s the trick, you see – wait long enough, and it turns all the way around.”
– Dread Emperor Irritant I, the Oddly Successful

The matron would be asleep by now, she’d hit the brandy pretty hard at dinner: this was as good an opportunity I’d get. I closed the book and snuffed out the stolen candle, ignoring Lydia’s theatrical sigh of vindication. I wasn’t sure whether she really had so delicate a constitution she couldn’t handle a bit of light when she was trying to sleep or whether it was just our shared dislike coming to the fore, but I could hardly care less. She’d leaned not to rat me out after I smeared her sheets with fish guts, if all I had to deal with was a little attitude I’d cope. I passed an affectionate hand over the worn cover of Serapin’s ‘The Licerian Wars’ and shoved it under my pillow, brushing away the few wax droppings on my sheets from the candle before stowing it away under my bed. One of my predecessors at the Laure House for Tragically Orphaned Girls had pried open room between the straw mattress and the wooden frame that was just large enough for it to fit. I slipped on my shoes and snuck out of the room, careful to close the door slowly enough the hinge wouldn’t squeak.

The orphanage was dark – every lantern and candle snuffed out the moment the matron went to sleep, to cut on costs – but I knew my way well. It wasn’t the first time I snuck out after curfew, though technically speaking I wouldn’t even been leaving the House for long. The front door was locked, but only the youngest girls in here didn’t know you could force the lock if you pushed at the right angle. I slipped into the street quiet as a mouse, closing the door behind me. I’d taken me a while to figure out how to get up to the roof, though it’d been made much easier after some stall merchant began putting up her folded stall next to the wall. She paid the matron coppers for it, which was a good deal as far as everyone was concerned. I suspected she might be less sanguine about the whole thing if she knew I regularly used her stall as a makeshift ladder. The tricky part was the leap to the left, where I had to catch the jutting masonry or hit the pavement after a hard fall. I turned out lucky tonight, catching it on first try even if my sweaty palms threatened to have me slip loose.

I hoisted myself over the edge of the roof with desperate haste, moist fingers scrabbling over the rough tiles as I rolled like a sack of cabbage until I was no longer at risk of falling. I remained there a moment, heart beating all too quickly, until I wiped my palms on my trousers and rose into a crouch. No point in standing tall – well, relatively speaking – until it was time. I headed towards the back of the orphanage, since that street wasn’t as busy. Not that Laure was after dark, these days. The city guard in this part of the city had started grabbing people out after sunset and putting them in a cell overnight for their own ‘safety’. It was an open secret a few silvers would get you out of the situation, which made the whole affair yet another tax in everything but name. Angry as the thought made me, Mazus and his cronies were far beyond my reach. And not why I was out tonight, regardless. I made it to the edge and stood up, clenching my fists. Gods, I was already shaking. I felt sick in my stomach and my legs were jelly. It wasn’t even that tall a drop, I knew, and still somehow it felt like a knife at my throat.

“Your hands are trembling.”

I yelped and jumped, would have fallen if the woman who’d spoken hadn’t caught my wrist at the last moment. Whoever she was she was tall and slender, though in the dark I couldn’t make out much of her face. Nothing, really, save for the eyes. A pale blue, almost silvery.

“I’m not a thief,” I hastily told the stranger. “I live here!”

“So I assumed,” the woman replied, and dragged me out of danger before withdrawing a few steps.

Shit, if this got out to the matron I was going to get it. Already I’d been caught trading essays with Julie, two strikes the same week would have my buttocks tanned for an hour.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be up here either,” I said. “So let’s just call this a wash for the both us, right? I’ll go, you’ll go. Ships in the night.”

“More ironic an offer than you know,” the stranger replied. “Sate my curiosity first. You are obviously terrified of heights. Why do you seek out the edge?”

I grimaced.

“Look, it’s not exactly illegal to do this,” I defensively replied.

Maybe. I wasn’t sure, and asking would have raised suspicions.

“I care little for such things,” the woman said. “You were asked a question, Catherine Foundling.”

Oh, this was bad. She knew my fucking name. It wasn’t like there were a lot of Deoraithe bastards in the House if she’d been intending on tattling, but that she actually knew my name was a bad sign all around. My teeth clenched and I reluctantly gave ground.

“It’s not about standing,” I said. “It’s about how long I can make myself stay.”

“Yet your fear has not ended, has it?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe I’ll always be afraid of it,” I said. “But that’s not what matters. Every time I come, I stay a little longer.”

“It gets easier?” the woman curiously asked.

“No,” I murmured. “But I get better at handling it. And one day I’ll get good enough it won’t matter if I’m afraid.”

There was a long moment of silence between us.

“Nature is not so easily overcome,” the stranger finally said.

I snorted.

“We’re people, aren’t we?” I said. “Not beasts. We can learn. It’s just hard and unpleasant and never as clear-cut as we’d like.”

“But will you?” the stranger asked.

—

Kilian was asleep. The public celebration after the Battle of Liesse had been subdued: there were too many dead people in the city for it to be otherwise. Heiress’ devils had slain hundreds before a shouted technicality had turned them irrelevant. Still, in the camps outside the city the Fifteenth had raucously feasted its latest victory. My evening with my lover had been a different sort of celebration, though. I’d died today, and that had lent an urgency to our bedplay that was harsher than our usual fare. She’d understood, though, that it was as much about being alive as it was about pleasure. Kilian knew me better than most, and in ways not even my closest friends did. Still, after she fell asleep I’d remained restless. I padded barefoot away from our bed and poured myself a cup of Vale summer wine, the sweet taste filling my mouth. I nursed the same glass for the better part of an hour, seated by the window. The night was warm, for this time of the year, and in the distance I could see the campfires of my legion. The candles lit suddenly, and that was my only warning Kilian had awakened. She sat up in the bed, face shrouded by shadows and her body only half-covered by the sheets.

“Still awake?” she asked.

“Can’t seem to close my eyes,” I admitted. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“These things happen,” she languidly shrugged.

For a moment, in the penumbra of the room, I thought her eyes were pale blue. It must have been a trick of the light.

“You died today,” Kilian continued quietly. “A little restlessness is to be expected.”

“All part of the plan,” I ruefully said. “Try as I might, I couldn’t find another way through.”

“There were risks,” she said. “If you had not succeeded as taking your resurrection from the Choir, there would have been no salvation.”

“But I did,” I replied, uneasily.

It had occurred to me that I’d not so much gamble with my life as thrown it away and then gambled on a resurrection. Recklessness ran in my veins, and in the heat of the moment it had all felt right, but in the cold light of the aftermath I was beginning to grasp how close I’d come to disaster.

“If you hadn’t,” Kilian softly asked, “would it have been worth it?”

I looked at her, blinking in surprise.

“If I’d failed?” I mused. “William would have turned us into Hashmallim puppets or Heiress would have killed everyone in the city. There was no room for mistakes.”

“I misspoke,” my lover said. “If it had all worked save for the resurrection, would that have been a fair price?”

It was, I thought, a sharp question but not an unworthy one. I’d schemed this with the notion in mind that I should be breathing by the end of it, but there would be fights ahead where I might not have that luxury. If the price for this had been that I’d disappear or return as some undead abomination, would I still have taken the bargain?

“There’s about a hundred thousand people in Liesse,” I eventually said. “More, with the soldiers that came to defend it. They’d be dead or worse, if I didn’t take the bargain anyway.”

“Cities can be rebuilt,” Kilian said. “Fresh children are born with every heartbeat.”

“But I only live once, is that it?” I smiled, looking out the window. “I appreciate the sentiment, I really do, but if all I wanted was to live I’d be a tradeswoman in Laure. Not the Squire.”

“There is a middle ground,” my lover chided, “between sacrifice and obscurity.”

“By taking up the knife, I signed away that kind of thinking,” I honestly replied. “The power’s not the point, Kilian, it’s just a way to handle the responsibilities. To take it but ignore why I did in the first place would make all of this meaningless.”

“A fair price, then,” Kilian mused, eyes hooded.

“Oh, the opposite of fair,” I softly disagreed. “One life against a hundred thousand? That’s a steal, by any account.”

“I do wonder,” she said, and I caught the glimmer of silver in her eyes, “how many times a blade can go through the crucible before breaking.”

—

“Victory should taste better than this,” I said.

Akua’s Folly lay before us in all its raging horror. Masego had warded the surroundings, but there was no hiding the mass of wights still haunting the ruins of Liesse. The bottle of aragh in my hand was no comfort, but at least it was something . Anything was better than stillness of the cold I’d used to forge myself anew. I held it up for Hakram to take, but he shook his head. He was impossibly hard to make it out in the dark of night, shrouded in a way my fae sight should have ignored. I was still new to this, though. There might be a trick to it. That I sometimes thought his eyes to be blue was evidence enough either the liquor had struck deep or I was using my not-eyes wrong.

“Two bottles are enough, I think,” the orc mildly said.

“A hundred wouldn’t be,” I shrugged. “But two will have to do. Ratface only has so many on hand, and it will be weeks before we reach a city.”

“We lingered here longer than I expected,” Hakram agreed. “I would have thought the morning after your conversation with the Carrion Lord would see us march.”

“There are still so many things to do,” I said. “And it’s only the start, isn’t it?”

“You have the power to make changes now,” the orc said. “Real changes. Necessary ones.”

“Do I?” I said. “I could drown bastion in ice with a snap of my fingers, but what does that accomplish? So few of our problems can be solved with strength.”

“Yet without it, we would have no right to change anything at all,” Adjutant said.

“It’s a pretty song,” I said. “But it rings false. Having a mantle isn’t power, Hakram. It’s just a bigger hammer. Gods, I was taught by a man claiming only a speck of what I hold and he terrorized half the continent for decades.”

“You are not him,” the orc shrugged.

“No,” I agreed in a murmur. “No I am not. He would have been appalled by the amount of shortcuts we’re going to take.”

“Results-”

“Will have diminishing returns,” I interrupted. “We don’t have the foundation. That’s the part that will fuck us. And it’s too late to raise it, so we’ll have to rely on strength to keep it all together. That makes us fragile in a way I can do nothing about.”

“I do not understand your meaning,” the orc admitted.

I passed a hand through my hair, except Masego had told me it wasn’t really hair anymore.

“The east and the west,” I said. “Procer and Praes. The people at the top, they’re not there just because they can swing a sword real hard, are they? Malicia and Black won their civil war, but they haven’t been knifed since because they have support . That’s where their power springs from. Cordelia Hasenbach has troubles with her princes, sure, but she’s also got a coalition behind her. The weight of customs and laws. Legitimacy, in a word. They all rose up the hard way.”

“So did we,” Adjutant replied, cocking his head to the side with eerie grace.

I snorted.

“Who’s behind us, Hakram?” I said “A handful of Callowan nobles, half-heartedly and for lack of better options. Our army. Malicia will turn on us son enough, and Black’s in the wind. We took too many shortcuts.”

“Your reputation has weight with the people,” the orc said.

“That’s not stable,” I said. “Because if a Fairfax makes an unpopular decision, they’re still a Fairfax. There’s unrest, but it holds together. I’m a godsdamned warlord. I mean, Hasenbach outright told me didn’t she? No one wants to deal with me because I’m essentially a Callowan Dread Empress in their eyes. This is the very thing that’ll come around to bite us after the Battle of the Camps: if fear and force and reputation are the pillars of my reign, the moment one of them comes tumbling down it all follows. And instead of recognizing that, admitting my limitations, I’ll double down and head for Keter of all places.”

“Tyrants are rulers as well, Catherine,” Hakram reminded me.

“And tyranny is the best I can manage, isn’t it?” I said. “Well-meaning, but still that. The thing is, by now I know I’m not good at this. I could barely handle the Ruling Council when it was stacked in my favour with Black standing behind me. And still a month from now I’m going to put on a crown.”

Hakram looked surprised at my words, for some reason.

“You would surrender authority entirely, then?” he asked.

“I should never have been queen,” I said. “At most a temporary regent while looking for a better candidate. There are things I’m good at, but ruling isn’t one of them. I should have put my effort to those instead and left the crown to someone suited for it.”

“And what it is that you’re good at, if not this?” Hakram pressed.

“Breaking things,” I said. “Facing the monsters so that the real work can take place behind me. I should have talked with Cordelia, I-”

My fingers clenched around the bottle.

“- I haven’t talked with Cordelia at all,” I said. “Not yet.”

“No,” Hakram said in someone else’s voice, “you had not.”

—

There were some who might have called this a triumph.

It’d been a victory beyond my rights to expect, anyway. Legions of enemy drow, some of the finest Mighty in the Everdark and even the two-faced goddess herself: they had come, and they had died. Great Strycht had died with them, along with too many drow to count. How many of the corpses down below belonged to nisi, I wondered? There were too many dead for most of them to be Mighty, or even dzulu. The way I’d killed Sve Noc... I frowned, unable to remember the details. I must still be digesting the Night, it would take some time before my mind was in order again. Still, the aftermath was clear enough. Streaks of Winter still running wild through a city older than the kingdom of my birth, warbands of roving blue-eyed dead led by my expanded Peerage stamping down the last of the resistance. I had exactly what I’d come for, didn’t I? An entire race made into an army, or close enough. All it had taken was massacre upon massacre upon massacre. If there was any justice in the world my hands would dyed scarlet red, but when had justice last made itself heard? No, down here there was only us – and justice was whatever we said it was.

Archer’s steps were light, but not so light that I did not hear or recognize them. Her gait was well-known to me. She stood at the edge by my side, not deigning to sit with her legs dangling in the void like I did. To think I’d been afraid of heights, once. Now I could grow wings with the slightest exertion of will – and there would be more tricks, when the whole of the Night was known to me. Millennia of slaughter in the dark, every ugly parcel made my own. I’d gained more than mere troops by coming to the Everdark.

“Still brooding, I see,” Indrani said.

I did not turn to meet her gaze.

“Contemplating consequences,” I said. “This was no small thing we did today.”

“That’s always the way,” Indrani dismissed. “There’s only one question that matters – now what?”

“Now they take the oaths,” I said. “The Mighty, anyway. I’m still debating how many of the dzulu should.”

“And we go home,” she wistfully said.

“No,” I replied, shaking my head. “I made them my responsibility, ‘Drani. All of them. I can’t just take my army and leave the rest to die by dwarf.”

“They can’t go to Callow, Catherine,” Indrani said. “It would end the kingdom to have that many foreign settlers.”

“That was never the plan,” I snorted. “Gods, Callow? It can barely even tolerate Praesi and greenskins that fought three campaigns to defend it. No, they need a home of their own.”

“Where?” Archer asked, and I raised an eyebrow at her voice.

It had echoed strangely. There were old magics in this place I had barely begun to understand – and perhaps never would.

“If we leave them in the mountains above this, they’ll starve,” I said. “You saw how they feed themselves – they need lakes, they need fields.”

“The Principate of Pracer,” Indrani said. “That’ll be difficult. How much of it could you even take, reasonably?”

“Are you drunk already?” I frowned. “Procer, you tart. And that’s a recipe for disaster, anyway. They’d be in constant war with the surviving princes, assuming the additional chaos doesn’t just collapse the place and allow the Dead King to roll through it. No, there’s only one place that can really work. If we play it right, we can even get most the continent to back us in the war.”

“Praes,” Archer guessed.

“Keter,” I contradicted. “The Kingdom of the Dead.”

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“That was in poor taste,” Indrani said.

“Think for a moment,” I said. “Neshamah just declared war on every Good nation on this continent. Even if the Grand Alliance could beat him – which, to be honest, I have my doubts about – Procer pretty much ends as a nation from the beating it’ll take in the process. And even if they do drive him back, as long as he’s not permanently dead what was accomplished? He’ll have lost a few dead heroes, a few undead armies. Nothing he can’t grow back given long enough. But this? It offers Cordelia another way. A long-term solution.”

I breathed out slowly.

“If the drow settle in the Kingdom of the Dead, they can be the lid on the bottle of awful that is the Dead King,” I said. “With the oaths, Procer doesn’t have to worry about invasion from the fresh Evil nation at its northern border. And if the drow thrive? All the better. A stronger cork means Neshamah will never be able to get out. Sold like this, if we come to the Grand Alliance when they’ve grown desperate? They’ll sign. Or they’ll split, because I don’t see the First Prince throwing away half her country no matter what her allies say.”

“It is a blighted, poisonous wasteland,” Indrani said.

“We have Hierophant,” I flatly said. “And the same mages that burned a fucking pass through the Whitecaps. The whole priesthood of the west, too. Hells, we do this the right way we might even get most the heroes on board. There have to be a few of them that aren’t useless at everything but killing. We can make the place livable, there’s no doubt. Besides, we camped up north and the land there was fine. It’s mostly the south and centre that are poisonous. ”

“But first we go to war,” Archer said.

“As little as we can,” I said. “We gate in, bring Black home no matter what he’s up to or wants – this is too delicate a situation to let him meddle. Then I go to Hasenbach with the Accords and the settlement plan. I’d rather not twist her arm if I can avoid, but I’ll sack cities if I have to. And after that, we make war on the King of Death. All the continent, if we can manage it, against Neshamah.”

“Ambitious,” Indrani mused.

I paused and turned.

“You’re not Archer,” I said. “She would have gotten bored halfway through that.”

“No,” Andronike said. “We are not.”

The two of them were standing at the edge, looking down at my... dream? Was I dreaming? I couldn’t remember going to sleep. The last thing I could remember, actually, was – Ibreathedmydesperatelastbreathclawingatthedark . I shivered. Night had fallen.

“Am I dead?” I softly asked.

“At the threshold,” Komena said. “Not quite through.”

“Then this was my last conversation,” I said. “Would have mouthed off more if I’d known.”

“Are you not going to beg?” Andronike said.

I laughed.

“Again?” I said. “The first time didn’t work, why would the second?”

“The nerezim are on the march,” Komena said. “You struck bargain with them.”

“I did,” I agreed. “Not that the oath would hold me anymore. We saw to that.”

“They cannot be defeated in battle,” the younger Sve Noc said. “We have seen this. They have... grown in the years since our last wars. Beyond even our ability.”

“Scary talk, coming from a goddess,” I murmured.

“And how would you meet this threat, Catherine Foundling?” Andronike asked.

I blinked.

“Me?” I said. “Who would you care what I think? You two rapscallions eviscerate me and took my stuff without too much trouble, give or take a few pleas.”

“You have proved to possess a form of low cunning,” Komena said.

“I’m dying, you know,” I chided. “You could at least be nice about it.”

“You evade,” Andronike said. “Cease.”

I waved a careless hand.

“Send an envoy to them,” I said. “My read on their whole invasion thing is that they’re not really interested in your holdings so much as they are in you not being there to trouble their backs. It’s the Dead King they want bottled up.”

Two pairs of silvery blue eyes remained fixed on me.

“Make a pact,” I said. “They give you long enough to evacuate, supplies to survive upstairs for a few months, and in exchange you go after the Kingdom of the Dead. Given that kind of an opportunity, they might even make a grab for the underground of Keter.”

“They have not proved amenable to peace offerings before,” Andronike said. “Attempts were made, I assure you.”

“Because they can’t settle the entire rim around the Kingdom of the Dead if there’s a chance their lines will collapse because you hit their back,” I pointed out. “If you go upstairs and southwest, not only is that threat gone but you’ve become their first line of defence against the Serenity. I don’t care how much they hate you, they’ll want to take that deal.”

They kept staring at me in silence.

“Dangerous,” Andronike said.

“Bold,” Komena disagreed. “Unorthodox . She was right, heart of my heart. We have grown stiff.”

“And it will get worse,” her sister murmured.

I rose to my feet.

“I take it this the end, then,” I said, looking up at the darkness above us. “Will you make it painless?”

“You should know better by now,” Komena idly said, circling around me.

“We have a use for you, Catherine Foundling,” Andronike continued, from the other side.

“If we are to return to the Burning Lands, we will need a guide.”

“A herald.”

“An anchor.”

“You offered an act of faith, Losara,” Sve Noc smiled. “It did not go unheard.”

Their eyes burned pale blue, almost silver.

“Rise, first among the priesthood of Night, and wake up .”

—

I opened my eyes, shivering with pain and gloriously mortal.

Interlude: Triptych

“Only one kind of war is ever just, that which is waged on the Enemy.”
– Extract from ‘ The Faith of Crowns’, by Sister Salienta

Harbour duty was the worst, always had been.

Ines had blown three months’ pay on the warmest cloak that could be found at market and still she was shivering like a dying calf. The prince had spread talk through the city that with the Kingdom of the Dead stirring awake those soldiers who guarded the harbour would see better pay, but like most princely promises it had come to nothing. Rumour had it the coin had gone into buying the service of every fantassin company left in the north instead, and much as she hated freezing by the docks Ines had to admit it might have been better investment. The Princess of Hainaut was doing the same, it was said, and the mercenary leanings of the fantassins had turned the whole affair into some sordid bidding war. Still, better to be here at home than to have gone south as some of the prince’s soldiers had. What word had come back from the crusade’s foray into the Kingdom of Callow was the stuff of nightmares. Strange devils riding to slaughter in the night, an endless horde of orcs and heretics that at the corpses of the fallen. Some more fanciful tales as well, of the Black Queen bringing down the sky on the head of the crusaders and making a lake of their blood. Whatever the truth of it, none of those who’d gone south had returned.

For once, she thought, being fresh to the prince’s service had been of some use. It also meant Ines was inevitably handed down the shit duties by her careerist noble officers, but cold fingers were better than the grave. She put a spring to her step after clearing Gertrude’s Tongue, hurrying towards the bonfire that awaited near the customs house. There she took off her leather gloves and pressed her palms close to the bronze bowl holding the flames, sighing at the warmth seeping into her bones. The pike she’d left to lean against her should had never seen use out of the training yard, and if the Heavens smiled on her it never would. Still, the silence of the night unsettled her. The winds that’d turned her earlier round into a ghastly affair had since died, leaving behind only eerie stillness. Cleves Harbour was lethargic on the best of days, the sporadic ship trade with Bremen and Lyonis the affair only of the prince and the very rich, but now even the fishermen had left. That lot had better read on what took place beneath the waters of the Tomb than anyone else, it was said. Those among them that did not learn to listen to the sound of danger were dragged into the depths by the foul creatures that were the only true rulers of the lake.

Some nights, Ines wondered why the prince even bothered to assign guards to the harbour. Empty as it was, even if some dead mean took it that would be no great loss. The royals who’d founded Cleves had been a farsighted lot: the harbour was not connected to the capital proper. The thin stripe of docks and shore was walled with an eye at keeping the enemy inside , not out, an unspoken admission that if the Dead King raided past the lake there would be no holding it against the Hidden Horror’s armies. The slope descending to the shore meant Ines could not even catch a glimpse of Cleves itself from where she now stood, not behind those tall walls, but that part she hardly minded. It would be the hour-long walk back to the barrack of the capital she was not looking forward to, especially since some enterprising noble lad had decided that the length of that trip should no longer be counted as part of guard duty’s duration. Ines’ only comfort was that if the fucking dead actually showed up, that prick was bound to end up on the bad side of an unfortunate crossbow accident. The lad should have worried less about getting commendations from up high and more about the many people in charge of sharp objects he’d made enemies of.

With an aggrieved sigh Ines put her gloves back on. She’d lingered around the fire as much as she could justify, if the next guard came up while she was still here she’d end up with another black mark on her record. Merciful Gods, though, it was a cold night. And not even winter solstice yet, it’d only get worse. She glanced to the side and upwards, at the slender tower overlooking the waters. She didn’t know who Mikhail had paid off to get that particular cushy duty – the guard tower had a bonfire up top, and a seat – but the man could certainly afford it. The Lycaonese immigrant ran a little business on the side, providing hard drink warming the bones to the guards that could afford it. Ines had always disdained the practice, but the thought of the long walk back to the city after her duty had her reconsidering for tonight. Once wasn’t going to hurt anyone, was it?

“You still up here, you filthy Bremen throwback?” she called out.

No answer. He must have been indulging in his own wares, which was bold of him. There were only so many times he could bribe his way out of the trouble that’d come down on his head if he was caught. Taking her pike in hand, Ines decided against taking the lack of answer as a sign from Above. The thought of a warm belly had grown on her with the consideration. She strode to the bottom of the tower, finding the door ajar. Sloppy of him, she frowned, even if he was drunk. The twisting stairs leading up to the top were just a brisk walk, but when she came there a cold seized her that the fire could do nothing about. Sergeant Mikhail was there: throat opened, blood all over his mail. Oh Gods , she thought. We’re under attack . She would have rung the bell the tower had been equipped with for this very reason, but the bloody thing was gone. Ripped off the metal hinges that had held it up. She leaned over the edge, casting her voice.

“Attack,” she screamed. “We’re under attack!”

There was no answer. She wasn’t loud enough, that was why they had the damned bells in the first place. For all she knew, she was the only soldier in the harbour left alive. That would make it her duty to run back to the city, wouldn’t it? So that they were warned. It wasn’t abandoning her fellows, it was doing her duty. Her hands trembled around the shaft of the pike.

“Damn it,” she whispered. “Damn it.”

She ran back down the stairs, heading for the nearest tower. There were ten in the harbour, they couldn’t have castrated all of them unseen. Her old boots slipped against the frost and she fell, but she grit her teeth and picked up her pike before picking herself up with it. Dodderer’s Height wasn’t far, and as the largest of the towers it’d have fielded more than a single sentinel. Old, fat ones one the edge of retiring from service but there was strength in numbers. She made it past the jutting empty warehouse that was the Prince of Cleves’ personal property and cleared the corner before she saw it. Five corpses, tossed down from the tower onto the pavement below. She glanced up, eyes squinting in the dark, but thank the Gods the bell was still there. Whoever’d done this had not yet ripped it out. Whoever had done this was likely still here, she then thought. Gloved fingers tightened around her pike, she grit her teeth and ran once more. Her attention had been on the tower, though. That was why she missed it.

The undead climbed out of the lakewater, glistening wet under starlight. Rivulets dripped down the bare skull under the ancient helm and it advanced without a word. Ines yelled out in fear, but she’d trained. Feet wide but steady, she struck out with her pike. It pierced through the rusty mail, going straight into the body, and for a moment she tasted triumph. Then the dead thing began pushing towards her through, embracing the impalement. She dropped the pike in ear, immediately cursing herself for it. But it was slower than her, she realized, so she ran for the tower instead of fighting. All she needed was to ring the bell. The door was ajar, she saw, and she slowed to avoid slipping on a patch of ice. Just in time to watch a pair of armoured skeletons walk out of the tower, swords in hand. Blocking the entrance.

“ No ,” she hissed.

What could she do? She didn’t even have a – the two undead were smashed to pieces by the same swing of a silvery sword. There was a man, tanned and wearing plate, who casually brought down a steel-clad boot to smash one of the skulls. The undead she’d fled from was tossed back into the lake by some giant shadow moving quick as lightning. For a moment Ines thought she glimpsed fur and fangs, but what wolf could possibly be so large?

“Ring the bell, soldier,” the man in plate said.

His eyes were wreathed with light, she saw as she faced him. No, with Light .

“Chosen,” she croaked out.

“Go,” he said. “Your courage tonight did not go unnoticed.”

“They’re all over the place,” Ines said. “If they’re here-”

“Cleves,” a woman’s voice said, “does not stand alone.”

A face of painted stone over a cloak, long tresses swinging behind. Another favoured child of the Heavens, she would put her hand to fire over it.

“It will be a long night,” the first Chosen said. “A long month after it, until Malanza arrives. But we will hold.”

“Ring the bell, soldier,” the masked Chosen said. “We will guard you. Tonight, the Dead King learns that dawn is not so easily snuffed out.”

Ines straightened her back. She was no proud Lycaonese, to find glory in dying spitting in the Enemy’s eye. Just some fool girl someone had shoved a pike in the hands of. But she’d been born in Cleves. The principality of her birth was a bloody mess, and she thought little of the man who ruled it, but that wasn’t the point. It was her home. This was Procer . They could lose to princes and princesses, they could lose to Arlesites and Lycaonese, but she’d be damned before a fucking undead abomination flew its banner over the city.

She took up a sword from a corpse and climbed to ring the bell.

—

Balasi was allowed into the tent by the sentinels without so much as a second glance.

It still surprised him, this. Had he tried the same with his lover’s rooms in Nenli he would have been met at sword point and taken to the city square for a public flogging. Here, though, the campaign had made the king’s laws grow lax. He might not be consort in name, but he was in deed and the soldiers acted accordingly. The seeker of deeds had since grown to suspect that this was one of the reason why Sargon had come forward to claim command over the Fourteenth Expansion. Back home their love would always be an illegal mismatch, but so far away from the Kingdom Under the rules had thinned. Sargon was not sleeping, as it happened. The Herald of the Deeps sat still as stone with his eyes closed as he sought council with the spirits bound to his staff. The Souls of Fire were known to hold wisdom, though a kind narrow in scope. Were they too clever the Kings Under the Mountains would have slaughtered them all, not bound them to the great forges. There would be need to dig deep again, after this land was claimed, to feed the fresh forges being raised. Many spirits would still lie asleep in their beds of molten rock, unknown to the kraksun .

“Delein,” Balasi quietly said. “There is need of you.”

Sargon’s eyes fluttered open.

“Balasi,” he murmured. “I was far gone, this time. What ails you?”

“Not me,” he replied. “All of us. And if that vein is true or hollow has yet to be known.”

“Speak,” the Herald of the Deeps frowned.

“Our borrowed knife has returned,” the dwarf said. “And would now speak with you.”

Sargon’s beard twitched in surprise.

“The Gloom still stands,” he said. “She cannot have been victorious. Are we certain it is the human, and not simply a Night-thing wearing her?”

“I laid eyes on her myself,” Balasi said. “She was stripped of power, but it is her. Unmistakeably.”

“And the cold spirit?” Sargon asked, leaning forward.

The seeker of deeds resisted the urge to roll his eyes. His lover had fancied the thing since their first meeting, considering adding it to his staff should the human queen be broken. Sargon had mastered the Greed in most aspects of his life, but not this: any interesting creature he encountered he desired for his staff of office.

“Changed, yet still existing,” he replied. “You can look upon it yourself when speaking with the human.”

“She is not that,” the Herald of the Deeps said. “You know this.”

“Was not, perhaps,” Balasi conceded. “I am no longer certain of that old truth.”

That piqued his lover’s interest, as he’d intended, and Sargon merely put on a coat before they made their way out. Officer had been ordered to settle the human and her spirit until they were ready to be met, and the two dwarves found them awaiting patiently by a low table. Black kasi had been served, and the Queen of Callow was drinking from her cup with a broad grin. Hairless of the face like so many of her kind, some feeble thing grown even feebler since their last meeting. It had not escaped his notice that she sat in a way that took the weight off one of her legs, as if it were wounded. Or that she’d limped visibly when coming to the camp. The spirit stood behind her, dark and silent. Its face had changed, grown more human. Scarlet eyes had become golden, though no less watchful for it. Sargon’s eyes lingered on it with interest, ever eager to get his hands on fresh curiosities.

“Herald,” the human said, inclining her head in shallow respect. “Seeker. Good to see you again.”

Balasi stood as Sargon sat across the table, only then doing the same. A mere seeker of deeds could not be seated at the same time as the Herald of the Deeps, he thought, bitterness so old and worn it was hardly even that anymore.

“You surprise me, Queen Catherine,” Sargon said. “I had not thought we would meet again until our bargain was fulfilled.”

And such an advantageous one it had been, Balasi thought. A paltry quantity of gold and a temporary cessation of arms sales to a few human nations, in exchange for a sword pointed at the heart of the Night. Sargon had struck it most willingly, knowing that even if defeated the human would drag many kraksun down with her.

“That still holds,” the human idly replied. “I’m here to settle some details, as it happens. The Gloom could be gone by the end of this conversation, if it is fruitful.”

The dwarf’s brow twitched. A bold claim, this. Sve Noc still lived, this was known. Was the human claiming she had bound the old monster to her will?

“Details,” Sargon repeated. “Such as?”

“An offer might be more accurate,” the human mused. “Sve Noc is willing to cede her current territory to the Kingdom Under, but concessions will have to be made.”

Balasi smoothly reached for the blade at his side. He’d let down his guard, when sensing the queen had been stripped of her power. Where before she had been an oppressive presence without even moving a finger, she now felt light as a feather. Nothing more than a mortal, he’d thought. So why do you feel more dangerous now than you did before, human?

“You were turned,” he said. “Made into their creature.”

The queen made that strange human sound of derision, all nose and doubt.

“I’m really more of an advisor,” she said. “We came to an arrangement, that’s all. Trust was extended, and part of that is letting me speak for them when it comes to you fine folk.”

“You no longer hold power,” the Herald of the Deeps said.

“I wield it instead,” the human said. “That’s quite enough, as far as I’m concerned.”

“You fed your purpose to them,” Sargon said, openly appalled.

“Purpose was shared,” Queen Catherine corrected. “As I would now share a proposition with you.”

“There can be no truce with the Night,” Balasi said.

“The Night is dead,” the human said. “At least the way you knew it. And I am here to speak diplomacy, not theology.”

“And what terms ,” Sargon scoffed, “would Sve Noc speak?”

She took out her pipe, taking her time to fill it with herbs. Snapping her wrist, she produced dark flames from the tip of her fingers to light it. It did not feel like sorcery to Balasi’s senses, and this was worrying. She puffed at the dragonbone – what a waste, he still thought, to make a pipe of that – and blew out a stream of smoke.

“Would you like,” Catherine Foundling cheerfully asked, “to make your two biggest problems go at war with each other?”

There was a moment of silence.

“I am listening,” the Herald of the Deeps said.

—

Friedrich Papenheim might have been a prince, in another life.

Of those who had both the name and the blood, he was the closest relation to the Iron Prince. He’d served as a trusted lieutenant to Klaus Papenheim for decades as a steward and commander, and few others were as high in the man’s council as he. But Old Klaus had made it known he intended to pass on Hannoven to his niece when he died, to make the principality as one with her own. Friedrich had resented this, on occasion, though always half-heartedly. It was hard to be truly bitter when one lost one’s inheritance to the likes of Cordelia Hasenbach. The first Lycaonese to ever rise as First Prince of Procer, the iron-willed daughter of the ancient lines of Papenheim and Hasenbach who’d made the entire south submit to her rule. No, if he was to be royalty but not prince there was none other he’d rather lose the throne to. It would be in good hands, when the time came. Tonight, though? Tonight Hannoven was in his own hands, and it was burning .

He’d kept to the old ways. As soon as it was known that the Dead King was stirring he’d expelled every southerner from the city and hung those that refused the order. Every village and town in sight of the waters had been emptied, the spring armories had been opened and the war horns sounded. Every man and woman of fighting age in the principality had been called to serve, to uphold the old oaths. The whispers had passed from mouth to ear, spreading across all of Hannoven. The dead are coming. Belt your swords, put on your armour, send your children south. The dead are coming. He’d never been half as proud to be Lycaonese as when he’d watched the full muster of his people spread out like a sea of steel beneath the walls of the city. The watchtowers by the Grave had found the Dead King’s host as it crossed, marching under the dark waters with the inevitability of an arrow in flight, but he was no fool to give the horde battle on open field. There could be no victory when every one of your dead turned to the service of the Enemy.

He’d sent riders to the other principalities, Rhenia and Bremen and Neustria. He trusted no sorcery to carry the word when the Hidden Horror itself strode the field. The allies of Hannoven were of the old blood too, and they’d smelled the death on the wind: they would not be caught with their trousers around their ankles like some goat-fucking Alamans. Their armies would already be assembled, and the moment the message arrived they’d sound their war horns to send for full service. But it would be weeks, months before the first reinforcements arrived. The city of his birth was a fortress like few others, but it would not hold forever. And so he’d made the cold choice, as he had been taught from the cradle. Those unfit to fight had begun the march for Bremen with everything they could carry. With them had gone half the muster of Hannoven. He’d sent the young, the skilled, the promising. The future of his principality. With him Friedrich had kept old soldiers past their prime, the greybeards and whitehairs who did not know whether it was winter cold or ratling fang that would slay them. And with those he had fought for Hannoven.

Fifteen thousand against the legions dark and darkly led. They taught the Dead King what kind of people got to grow old in these lands. The first wall they lost on the first day, and retreated after setting the houses aflame. They held the second wall for a week, until the dead sent a flock of winged drakes aflight. Wall by wall they have ground, but never without making the Enemy pay for it. The longer they held the longer the rest of the Lycaonese had to gather their armies, the longer the people of Hannoven could flee without pursuit. They fought for a month and seven nights, dying in the snow as a sea of dead lapped at the walls. Hundreds of thousands, centuries of corpses marching to bring death to all the world. In the end it came down to the Old Fortress, the solitary mountain that had been turned into a castle jutting out from the plains. The dead never paused in the assault, never tired: day and night they came in silent assault, the banner of the Dead King flying tall behind them. It mattered not, for behind Friedrich the banner of Hannoven flew. A single soldier on the wall, grey on blue. Beneath was writ the words thrown in the Enemy’s teeth since time immemorial: And Yet We Stand .

So they stood, and so they died.

Ground away into nothing by numbers and sorcery their few mages could not match. Dead things that had once been Chosen climbed the walls, the sky grew dark with falling of arrows and behind them drakes stolen from the grave spewed out clouds of poison that burned lungs and skin. Less than a thousand of them left now, and most of them wounded. They’d retreated to the Crown, the very highest point of the fortress that could only be accessed by a few narrow paths filled with murderholes. The dead had been met with streams of burning coals and thrown oil, dwarven engines roaring destruction down passages where there could be had no cover. The Chosen dead pushed through, after the horde withdrew, but they found the passages collapsing beneath them and spiked grids of steel awaiting them when they leapt. Now sorcerers that were little more than grinning skulls pounded away at the defences with foul magics, forcing the defenders to stay behind cover until the next wave of dead was ready for assault. Friedrich passed through the throng of wounded, clasping shoulders and trading grim boasts with what soldiers her had left.

Old men, old women. The last gasps of their generation, dying sword in hand. His eyes grew cloudy with pride. Death came to all, but tonight they would meet it as Lycaonese should. Holding the wall in the face of the Enemy, for the sake of all the world. Friedrich beard was already flecked with blood, and he dipped out of sight when he felt the cough came. It would not do for his soldiers to know he was dying. The wound he’d taken hammering a spike through the head of that last drake had only gotten worse. Poison, he suspected, though it made no difference. None of them would live to see dawn, poisoned or not. He wiped his lips clean of blood and returned to the battlements after the cough had passed. The pounding had stopped, he immediately noticed. The assault was coming. Captain Heiserech sought him out, her worn face seemingly amused.

“Commander,” she saluted. “The skulls want to talk. They sent some kind of giant dead. Think it might be ‘Ol Bones himself come to pay us a visit.”

“Has he now?” Friedrich grinned. “Well, let us see what the Dead King has to say.”

Maybe he’d ask for surrender. His people could certainly use the laugh. He wasn’t sure who started. It could have been anyone, or half a dozen at the same time. Only a few voices, at first, but more joined until the stone shook with sound.

“The moon rose, midnight eye
Serenaded by the owl’s cry
In Hannoven the arrows fly.”

The refrain came as a roar of defiance.

“Hold the wall, lest dawn fail.”

Friedrich Papenheim strode to the very edge of the battlements, where the passages had been broken, and found a horror awaiting on the other side of the drop. It was large as three men, wearing plate of bronze and steel that had been nailed to its frame. Its face could not be glimpsed behind the great helm, but the eyes could. Sunken yellow things, glinting with power. That might be the old bastard himself in the flesh, Friedrich thought. The song echoes from behind him, slipping into the wind.

“ No southern song for your ear
No pretty lass or merry cheer
For you only night and spear.”

“A Papenheim,” the Dead King mildly said. “I should have known. Your entire line is like a nail that refuses to be hammered.”

Friedrich could not deny the sliver of pride he felt at that. He was dying, but he would stand straight in the face of the Enemy. Even if his lungs throbbed with pain.

“In the name of Her Most Serene Highness Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer and Warden of the West, I bid you to crawl back into the hole that spawned you,” Friedrich said. “And to take your horde of damned with you, old thing.”

“I rather missed this city,” the Dead King said. “You make it harder to take every time, it keeps things interesting.”

“And when we chase you back into the dark, claiming it back, we’ll raise an eight wall,” the Lycaonese replied with bared teeth. “On it will be written: here lie those who broke the back of the Enemy and stand those who will again.”

“ Come rats and king of dead
Legions dark, and darkly led
What is a grave if not a bed?”

“You fought well,” the Hidden Horror said. “And so were owed the courtesy of this conversation. Should your soldiers wish to take their own lives instead of having them taken, I will allow them the right.”

“So that we may rise whole in your service?” he laughed. “I think not. We’ll burn, and you with us.”

“Once wolves,” the Dead King said, almost fondly, “always wolves. What soldiers you would have made, under my banner. Die proud, then, Papenheim. You were an irritation.”

“ Quell the tremor in your hand
Keep to no fear of the damned
They came ere, and yet we stand.”

The aging soldier smiled.

“We’ll be waiting for you at the passes, Dead King,” he promised. “With a proper Lycaonese welcome.”

“I would expect no less,” the Hidden Horror said.

He turned his back on the Enemy and returned to stand with the last of his soldiers, the words in the wind guiding him home.

“ So we’ll hold the wall,
Lest dawn fail.”

When the light of day found Hannoven, not a single living soul remained.

Epilogue

“By hook and crook we will all hang, High Lords, from a noose woven of our many loose ends. But cheer up: none are beyond salvation, not even the likes of us. Let us see, at long last, if we can turn back the tyranny of the sun.”
– Extract from the coronation speech of Dread Emperor Benevolent the First

Anaxares pricked his hand and cursed.

Damn needle. It must have been made in Penthes, as wantonly treacherous as the rest of those Wicked Foreign Oligarchs. He wiped off the droplet of blood and got back to the work of sewing back on the bottom of his shoe. Servants kept offering him increasingly perfidious boots, and he was certain the pair made of solid gold had been the result of what passed for the Tyrant’s sense of humour, but he’d continued pretending blindness long enough they’d eventually desisted. He would have preferred to go without shoes at all, if he could, as he’d not been granted the right to use the foreign product by a proper committee, but three days of bleeding feet had eventually dissuaded him. He’d bought an old pair with the last silvers from his begging bowl, but the march was using them sorely. Anaxares had grown to hate walking a great deal lately. He’d never done so much of it during his years as a diplomat, and never in a locale so insistently hostile. He’d heard a bush had eaten a soldier, last night, swallowed the man whole when he went to relieve himself. There was hardly a piece of the Waning Woods that was not out to kill everything it saw.

The Hierarch of the League of Free Cities finished sowing his shoes back together at the cost of only minor wounds, which sadly he could not even consider had been taken in service to the Republic. The People had cut him off, sent him adrift. Worse yet, their elected representatives sometimes requested his advice. His advice . As if he were not some wretched despot. He’d immediately reported the people involved to the nearest kanenas for treason against the Will Of The People, their horrid attempts to involve a duplicitous Named into the affairs of Glorious Bellerophon marking a dark day. Advice , Gods. A dark day indeed. He slipped on his shoes and began looking for an acceptable spot to dig a hole to sleep in. League dignitaries had alleged there was a tent he was meant to sleep in, but he’d closed his eyes and hummed until they went away. Sadly straying too far from the camp would see him encircled by heavily-armed soldiers keeping a vigil, so he’d have to stay within the bounds even though the very notion made his skin crawl. There was a patch of tepid, mostly dry earth far enough from a fire he wouldn’t be implicitly agreeing with its existence, and there Anaxares knelt and drew back his sleeves. He was out of silvers and so could not trade for a shovel, meaning he’d have to dig by hand.

It shouldn’t take more than a few hours, he thought.

“O Mighty Hierarch, Peerless Ruler of all the League and its people-”

“How dare you,” Anaxares snarled.

The Tyrant of Helike grinned, draped over a Proceran fainting couch held up by a gaggle of chittering gargoyles.

“I come bearing tribute to your greatness, O Sublime One,” Kairos Theodosian said, and ordered one of the gargoyles forward.

It presented Anaxares with a shovel. It was, he could not help but notice, made entirely of rubies. That monster.

“I will report this flagrant attempt of bribery to the proper authorities,” Hierarch said.

“Which are?” Tyrant said, leaning forward with interest.

“The Tyrant of Helike,” Anaxares reluctantly admitted.

“I expect he will he chide me most thoroughly,” the boy mused. “Rumour is he’s a real stickler about these things.”

“Why do you torment me so, Tyrant?” he sighed.

“Mostly habit, at this point,” Kairos confessed. “It’s like picking at a wound, once you start it’s nigh impossible to stop.”

“I will rise above this nonsense,” Hierarch said. “I must see to my bedding.”

“Did you notice that half the Bellerophan army is standing guard every night?” Tyrant cheerfully asked. “I think they mistook the Tolesian term for ten with the one meaning a thousand in their manual and they’ve been standing by the mistranslation ever since.”

Anaxares’ lips thinned, deeply offended at the insinuation that the Republic could ever make such a mistake. Even if they had, which they had not, it would have been a superior interpretation of the original text and inherently better by virtue of having been voted upon by the People. Naturally, as with all matters related to military texts, knowledge of what was voted upon would not have been held by the People as it was illegal for said knowledge to be held by any not having drawn the lot of soldiers. This was only right and proper. But he would not correct the Tyrant’s blatantly false assertions, it would only encourage the boy.

“Huh,” Kairos said. “I thought for sure that would do it. I suppose all that’s left is helping you dig your hole.”

Anaxares frowned.

“That would taint the work,” he gravely said.

Relying upon foreign labour – which was, by definition, the product of tyranny – without official sanction was treason.

“Then I’d pick up the pace then, if I were you,” the Tyrant grinned. “We’re about to hold a war council and at this point nobody still believes they’ll be able to get you into an actual tent.”

The Gods were fickle, and so when the other dignitaries arrived the hole was only ankle-deep. Anaxares sat in in regardless, threadbare cloak pooling around him. The usual despots had crawled out of their ivory towers, it seemed. A two-striped askretis from Delos’ Secretariat, a preached from Atalante laden with beads, the young Basileus of Nicae and his former colleague Magister Zoe of Stygia. The two grasping Exarchs of Penthes – they had not succeeded at assassinating or disgracing the other, and so now uneasily shared the mantle of Wanton Tyranny – and finally the dignified figure of Bellerophon’s senior, and incidentally only, general. Flanked by kanenas ready to execute him at the first sign of treasonous ambition, he noted with approval. The Delosi askretis broke the silence first, sending one of his scribes for ink and parchment.

“The meaning of your metaphor escapes me, Hierarch,” he said, eyeing the barely-visible hole curiously. “Could I trouble you to clarify it for the records?”

“It was not as wet as the ground further out,” Anaxares explained.

“Ah,” the askretis said, sounding enlightened. “And what does the ground stand for? The wetness?”

“Impiety, clearly,” the Atalantian preacher said, clutching her beads. “The Hierarch reminds us of the virtue of humility, chiding us for this vainglorious enterprise.”

“It is a hole,” Magister Zoe mildly said. “That he is going to sleep in. Like he has every other night so far.”

“How like a Stygian to grasp the obvious and only that,” the Delosi dignitary scathingly dismissed.

“And so I do declare this session of the war council of the League of Free Cities to have formally begun,” the Tyrant cheerfully said.

The crazed boy enjoyed these councils so much, Anaxares thought, largely because no one else did. He’d insisted they be held regularly with the full roster of League dignitaries.

“The Glorious Republic of Bellerophon,” the general started, and Hierarch murmured ‘First and Greatest of the Free Cities, May She Reign Forever’ along with him, “would like to formally protest the opening of hostilities in the Samite Gulf.”

“The record will show this,” the askretis promised with religious fervour.

“I’ll start bothering to listen to your people on the subject of fleets when you actually learn how to swim,” the Basileus of Nicae retorted.

Anaxares’ back straightened with indignation. This was calumny. The knowledge of how to swim had not been restricted in decades – has never been restricted or not, he immediately mentally corrected – though with good reason showing too much eagerness in learning the skill was considered suspicious.

“I’ve been led to believe this protest comes too late, regardless,” the Tyrant of Helike said.

The young ruler of Nicae grit his teeth.

“Allies,” he began, “do not spy on each other, Tyrant.”

“Spy?” Kairos said, putting a trembling hand over his heart. “Gods, I would never . We merely helped your messengers carry their messages.”

“Like anyone believes that,” the Basileus sneered.

“Anyhow,” Tyrant said, “as I was saying – my spies in the Nicaean ranks tell me the Ashuran fleet was taken by surprise while docked in Arwad and torched before the city itself was sacked.”

The ruler of Nicae scoffed.

“Our ships withdrew afterwards,” he added. “And are now blockading Smyrna. With the loss of their other fleet in the assault on Thalassina, the Ashurans are now effectively taken out of the war.”

“Would the Republic care to protest the blockade a well?” the Delosi dignitary asked.

“Instructions will be sought from the People,” the Bellerophan general stoutly replied.

And would be received, Anaxares thought, within the next six months after vote was held. Perhaps along with a suggested order of battle, if the message arrived when they’d entered the lands claimed by the Principate.

“That’s all well and good, but the Thalassocracy was never our true worry,” Magister Zoe opined. “Last we heard the armies of Levant were marching up Procer, in pursuit of the Carrion Lord. They’re the ones we’re at risk of encountering.”

“This was a glorious victory,” the Basileus insisted. “Simply because the Magisterium hardly contributed any ships you would-”

“You kicked the Ashurans while they were down, boy,” one of the Penthesian Exarchs said, rolling her eyes. “If the Praesi hadn’t slapped them around first we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“The foul empress Malicia struck a blow at all children of the Heavens, that day,” the Atalantian preacher said. “Let us not celebrate the death of those taken while serving holy purpose.”

“Bead-clutcher,” Magister Zoe mocked. “Where was this ambivalence when we planned the invasion of Procer?”

“There is no invasion,” Hierarch stated.

There was a moment of silence as all their gazes turned to him. Most of them, he realized, had forgotten he was even there.

“As the Principate of Procer is an assembly of grasping despots having forcefully seized land and authority from its inhabitants, legally speaking there can be no such thing as invasion of it,” he clarified.

“Hear hear,” the Tyrant grinned. “We are liberators , my friends. We undertake the gentle – kindly, even – business of liberating all those pretty Proceran cities. Certainly nothing so uncouth as invasion.”

Even true words sounded incorrect coming from the boy’s mouth, Anaxares thought. After that the council descended into the usual squabbles. The Penthesians wanted the armies of the League to march swifter through the Waning Woods, shaving days off the week remaining until they entered Iserre. Most other commanders disagreed on basis of such haste opening the soldiers to ambush by the creatures haunting the woods, though Magister Zoe was in agreement with the Exarchs and offered the slave phalanxes as vanguard. As usual, it came to nothing and the dignitaries retreated stewing in the same irritation they had brought with them. The Tyrant made a production of leaving the ruby shovel behind, but eventually followed suit. Anaxares remained in his hole, eyes closed. The visions came to his eyes and ears on the wind, unbidden and unwanted. He could only Receive them.

A blind boy treading through a dead city, carrying the deaths with him – lash and ladder, into ever deeper darkness. Armies gathering under mountains, a sea of banners snarling like wolves in the wind. The Augur sitting alone in a frosted garden, spoken whispers still echoing in her ears like a coiling snake. Death marching under water, darkening the sky in flocks, spreading like poison in a legion unending. A grinning woman in the dark smoking a pipe and gathering an army, seen only until pale blue eyes forced the vision to end. Bands of green things crawling out of tunnels swords in hands, silent in the night. A one-eyed orc and a woman dappled with ink, leading an army in flight. But most importantly of all, on some barren shore, a knight in white stood with his sword high. A killer who had taken lives, but never at his own behest. Behind him, looking through a coin, something unfathomable loomed. The Seraphim, Anaxares thought. The Choir of Judgement. The angels who had judged and slain people of the League.

The Hierarch smiled.

For that, they would be judged in turn.

—

Amadeus was bemused.

Upon realizing the depth of his mistake he’d expected swift death to follow, delivered by as many heroes as the opposition could scrape together for a spot of killing on the lake. Part of that had been correct. A band of Named had come after him, girded with Light and wearing the grim rictuses of individuals carrying out a necessary evil – always without the capital, of course, and preferably phrased as the ‘greater good’ instead. To his continued bafflement, however, they had yet to cut his throat. On one of the rare occasions where he was not put under enchantment to remain inert, mainly when it was deemed necessary that he be fed and allowed to relieve himself, he’d politely inquired to his captors about what kind of second-rate outfit they were running. Really, keeping him prisoner? It was asking for this story to be turned on them, considering the amount of loved ones he still had out there. Unless the Saint of Swords was intent on confessing her deep affections for him – unlikely, since she took great relish in punching him unconscious before enchantments were laid – it was likely someone in the opposition had decided to get clever about this.

Hearing out whatever funeral pyre of a plan was behind this ought to be good for a chuckle or two. He was awakened long enough for half-stale bread to be pressed into his hand, and he was left to eat it with the Saint of Swords standing behind him sword unsheathed. Though damnably hungry, Amadeus threw over his shoulder the stickiest crumbs he could find and smilingly excused it as an ancient Wasteland custom he could not eat without. Everyone knew Duni were an ignorant and superstitious lot, after all. Laurence de Montfort replied by clouting him over the ear, which he took as a moral victory. By the looks of their surroundings, they were still keeping to the countryside and avoiding roads and cities. The temperature had significantly cooled, though that could be the result of the turning season just as northwards travel.

“Drink,” the Grey Pilgrim said, pressing the gourd to his lips.

Amadeus did. He’d inhabited this body as Named for so long he’d lost the sense of how long it would take for him to become this thirsty under more natural circumstances, but he suspected at least six hours. After, though, he pursued his curiosity.

“You appear to be carrying me north,” he said. “And have been for... a fortnight, at least, likely more.”

“That is none of your concern,” the Pilgrim said, the Levantine roots subtly affecting his pronunciation of Lower Miezan.

Amadeus raised an eyebrow.

“Are you quite certain,” he said, “that you would not prefer to extol your plan to me in great detail?”

He didn’t even hear the blow coming. The Saint, he mused when they woke him the following day, did not have much of a sense of humour. He told her as much while picking at his daily bread.

“Think you’re funny, do you?” Laurence de Montfort sneered.

He was not, in fact, certain she was sneering. He was facing the wrong way and quite tightly bound, save for his forearms. But given the tone, he would allow himself to presume.

“I have my moments,” Amadeus mused. “I did hear this funny jest, from someone very dear to me. It was about this very arrogant woman who had her belly opened and crawled away holding in her guts.”

He paused.

“The punchline is that you’ll grow old and die, while Hye won’t,” he helpfully added.

He did not get to finish his bread that evening, by dint of being knocked unconscious. To his amusement, the following night it was another hero standing behind him. The Rogue Sorcerer, he thought, if the old reports of the Eyes had any accuracy to them. Likely the author of the enchantment that kept him slumbering as the others journeyed.

“I’ve been instructed to put you under spell of silence if you attempt to engage me in conversation,” the hero quietly told him.

“That seems unnecessary,” Amadeus said. “I am, after all, entirely at your power.”

“Pilgrim’s orders,” the Rogue Sorcerer said.

“That is unfortunate,” the dark-haired man said. “It is not too late to save your parents.”

No reply was given. Amadeus frowned, then yelled as loudly as he could. None of the heroes breaking their fast so much as glanced in his direction. Ah, already under the spell. He had neither heard nor felt the man cast. Interesting. He truly was bereft of even the smallest trace of his Name. He flicked a miffed glance at the ground.

“Before my last stand, truly?” he said. “I could have slain a few on my way down, you cheapskates.”

Four more evenings, and not once did the Grey Pilgrim do him the courtesy of a morality debate by the fireside. He could respect the professionalism involved, but it was really quite irksome. Three more after that, and once: the last awakening, to his surprise, was in the middle of the night. Someone had botched their enchantment, it seemed. Amadeus found himself quite tightly constrained: manacles on his feet, ropes on his legs, another set of manacles keeping his hands behind his back and what looked like an enchanted band of middle around his chest. Well, they wouldn’t take themselves off on their own. He quietly rolled around until his fingers clasped around a somewhat sharp rock, and he considered the manner in which this should be approached. He’d need to dislocate at least one of his arms, and likely a wrist as well. To slip the manacle he’d need blood to ease the way, and that meant cutting open a vein – though he’d need to be careful not to nick an artery, as he was rather troublingly fragile at the moment. Wound first, he decided. It’d be harder to be accurate with the stone if his arm was already dislocated. Shifting his fingers, be began digging the sharp edge into his skin.

“I’m curious,” the Wandering Bard said. “After you slip loose, assuming you can, then what?”

Amadeus sighed.

“Debate is still taking place,” he replied, “as to whether I should attempt to steal a horse or shove this humble stone through a hero’s eye socket.”

“Pretty sure Laurence can outrun a horse,” the Bard mused.

“ I can’t,” he quite reasonably pointed out. “Small steps... what happens to be your name, at the moment?”

“Marguerite of Baillons,” the Bard replied.

He snorted.

“Alamans, truly?” he said. “Were all the other bodies taken?”

“Hey, if I could pick I’d be a seven foot tall blonde with a miraculous rack and thighs like trees every single time,” the Bard said. “Now that was a spin of the wheel. They don’t make them like that in Levant anymore.”

He moved around, trying to sit, but found himself stuck on the ground. Most unpleasant. The Wandering Bard lent a helping hand, dragging him up, and he found himself looking at the abomination’s latest form. Slender and dark-haired, loose and going down her back. Smiling blue eyes and heart-shaped lips. A convincing facsimile of life, he would concede. The flask in her hand was already open, and her shoddy lute laying further down in the grass.

“Drink?” she offered.

“Most kind of you,” he agreed.

She poured the liquor down his throat until he raised his hand, swallowing a cough.

“Gods,” Amadeus got out. “Is that the horrid fermented cherry extract from Atalante?”

“It’s just the foulest thing, isn’t it?” she grinned. “It’s like it can’t decide whether it wants to be sweets or poison.”

“And to think they call me a monster,” he muttered. “I’ve never fed such torment to prisoners.”

“Another?” Marguerite offered.

“Might as well,” Amadeus said. “I’m not looking forward to opening that vein, this ought to take the edge off.”

Another spot of torture later his belly and throat had warmed, at the mere price of the taste of a violently misused orchard taking over his palate.

“So, you might be wondering why I’m here,” the Bard said.

“I’m rather more curious as to why none of your fellows have awakened,” he said. “Their senses should be sharper than that.”

“If they were going to wake, I wouldn’t be here,” Marguerite shrugged.

“Convenient,” Amadeus said.

“Eh,” she hedged. “I don’t need to tell you how tetchy providence can get. Even with loaded dice you have to roll.”

“I take it this a visit in your official capacity, then,” he said.

“Surprised, are we?” she grinned, revealing slightly crooked teeth.

“It was my theory that you could only work through Named,” Amadeus said. “I find it rather horrifying that you are evidently not so restricted.”

While the dark-haired main currently believed himself to be without power – and would comport himself as such – it remained only a theory. There were likely no greater expert on namelore alive than the Wandering Bard, insofar as she was that, and so her confirmation or denial would hold some weight. No overmuch, of course, as she was still a hostile entity. But it would be a useful entry to this running mental tally.

“Still fishing, huh?” Marguerite smiled. “That’s not Name so much as it is nature, I think. Needing a plan, always a plan, even if you’re screaming inside.”

“You praise me overmuch,” Amadeus said. “You have, after all, defeated –”

“Warlock’s dead,” the Wandering Bard said.

He paused. She might be lying. To hurt him, to cloud his... Amadeus breathed in, breathed out. It was set aside.

“Blew up a fleet going out, but that’s more than a fair trade,” Marguerite said. “Empire’s a real mess at the moment, since he vaporized the better part of Thalassina with his last hurrah. Your little friend up high’s going spare trying to keep it all together.”

“Yet you are here,” Amadeus said. “And not there, stoking the fires.”

“Catherine got herself killed again,” the Bard casually said. “And let me tell you, now that was a show. You don’t often see that calibre of foolishness slugging it out no holds barred.”

His fingers tightened. Breathe in, breathe out. Control. The moment he lost control, the creature would make use of him for whatever purpose she needed. It might be time to consider smashing his head into the ground until he fell unconscious.

“It’s fascinating, watching you take that paternal feeling by the throat and just...” Marguerite snapped her fingers, “There goes the neck. Back into the box it goes.”

The taunts were immaterial. Useful information could still be had. Amadeus put a tremor to his voice.

“She wouldn’t die that easily,” he said, making himself look away.

“Glancing away is the part Malicia taught you, isn’t it?” the Bard mused. “She’s good . Must have guessed the eyes would give up the game, it’s always the hardest part to master.”

The frightful depths of that thing’s perception were not to be underestimated, he mentally conceded. She was, after all, entirely right. Cold green eyes flicked back to study her face.

“You’re headed for Salia, in case you were wondering,” Marguerite said. “They’re keeping you in the countryside because Hasenbach knows they have you. She sent half a hundred companies out with orders to take you into custody.”

“Did she now?” Amadeus said.

“Second order is to cut off your head the moment they have you,” the Bard continued amusedly. “She’s not best pleased you’re not already decorating a pike. Tariq’s going to get an earful.”

He’d known there was a reason he liked the woman. She had a good head on her shoulders, to wish the opposite of him.

“I am to be paraded before the crowds, then,” he said.

“Nah, they’ll get a hero under illusion for that,” Marguerite said. “Saint’s gonna cut out your soul and have it bound to something, she insisted. They want bait, not to risk a rescue.”

Implying that, to the best of the Pilgrim’s knowledge, there were still villains in the East he could be considered bait for. He could not know whether or not Eudokia was still with the legions. If she’d judged it feasible he could be reacquired she would have left without a second thought, but in the absence of that Scribe would remain with Grem. Assassin was still in Ashur, presumably, and impossible to contact. That much had been necessary to ensure the Augur could not interfere. That left Catherine – allegedly dead, though that was admittedly not always enough to stop her – and perhaps Masego. Unless what the Bard has told me is false , he thought. Or what she has shared is true, and the Pilgrim does not know it.

Too many unknowns for a solid strategic assessment, and no real way to acquire the information he needed through reliable sources. If he had the means, if he could lead a message, if . What a bastard word to be curtailed by. Pushing aside the frustration, Amadeus forced himself to consider the conversation through broader perspective. It should not be taking place at all, he thought. He held no Name, commanded no armies and if she had spoken true the Calamities had largely ended as threat. Neither Eudokia nor Assassin could be counted on for independent action, and held highly limited direct martial value besides. His sole remaining worth was as a hostage, and that was not the Wandering Bard’s game.

Why, then, was she here?

“There’s one part of you that I actually like, did you know?” Marguerite said. “It’s also what I hate the most, but it does tend to be that way with villains.”

“I make a very good lentil soup,” Amadeus suggested.

Behind the pithy words he observed her carefully. Now they entered the field of revelations, the most dangerous part of this dangerous conversation.

“You don’t digest defeat,” the Bard said. “It doesn’t fill your belly, weigh you down. You dissect it, read the entrails like an augury, and then ask yourself – if I could do it again, how would I do it better ?”

He watched her in silence.

“Even now,” she murmured, “behind the eyes there’s a few cogs turning. What can I do? How should I do it? And they’ll only stop when you die.”

“Which,” Amadeus said, “looks to be rather soon.”

“Nah,” the Wandering Bard. “You don’t get to be a rallying cry. See, you paid your dues.”

His eyes narrowed.

“You’re no favourite son, it’s true,” she mused. “You never played the game the way you’re meant to. But you did kill the opposition and tip the scales. They wouldn’t cut you loose after that, it’s now how they do things.”

“I am,” Amadeus said, “no longer the Black Knight.”

“You don’t fit that groove anymore,” Marguerite said. “Powerless you ain’t, Maddie . You know what you are, deep down, you just think it’s beneath you.”

His fingers tightened under the knuckles were white.

“Claimant,” the Wandering Bard said. “You can have your second shot at it, you’re owed that. But if you really want it?”

She drank deep, then wiped her mouth.

“Well, there’s always a price isn’t there?” she shrugged. “So tell me, Amadeus of the Green Stretch...”

She smiled, crooked and wide under moonlight.

“What do you think is right?” she asked.

She leaned forward.

“How far are you willing to go, to see it done?”

He closed his eyes. She was gone a moment later when he opened them, without so much as a whisper. He was silent and still, for a very long time.

Mistake , he thought.

Peregrine II

“Peace is not a right, it is the privilege of those who have toiled to break the back of war.”
– King Albert Fairfax of Callow, the Thrice-Invaded

“You were gone for long, this time,” she said.

A few years ago Tariq’s pride might have been mildly stung by the fact that she could return to casual conversation so swiftly after an hour of rather delightful exertion in bed, but these days he knew better. His head fell back against the pillow, though he twisted around after to better be able to run a hand down the bare flank of his lover. She bit her lip at the sensation, to his pleasure, to her gazed turned amused when she caught his eyes lingering on the generous curve of her breasts.

“You will not distract me so easily,” Sintra Marave warned him. “I have learned of your wiles, Tariq of No Import.”

His name she spoke with a teasing lilt, as it had become something of a jest between them. It had become clear rather early on that his attempts at hiding his identity had been seen through near immediately: Sintra, he’d learned, regularly corresponded with his sister. From their first meeting she had suspected him. There were, he supposed, only so many haggard young men named Tariq wandering the countryside of Levant.

“I surrender before your keen insight, then,” Tariq grinned.

He did know better, now. Better than to think this was casual conversation at all, or that its initiation so soon after their pleasure-taking was slight to bedplay itself. Sintra would not still leave her balcony door unlocked whenever he returned to Alava was she displeased with their time together.

“So keen that I discern you travelled to the Free Cities,” the heiress to the Champion’s Blood said.

“Stygia,” he freely admitted. “Never before had I seen such a horrifying pit of human misery, and I walked the streets of Levante during the plague.”

“Famously,” Sintra drily said. “What took you to that nest of slavers?”

She shifted around in their bed – arrogance on his part, to think of it as that, and yet he could not help it – and rested her chin one her palm. While that did interesting things to the parts of her beneath said chin, Tariq valiantly maintained his concentration.

“There was a delegation headed to Arwad by ship,” he said. “One of their slaver ships struck it on the way there – by mistake, I believe, even Stygians are not usually so bold – and took captives before sinking it.”

Sintra’s brow rose.

“Junla Osena?” she said, surprised. “That was you ?”

“I followed the trail back to Stygia,” Tariq said. “Though I did not know anything of the ship save that it was Levantine when I came across it.”

His lover snorted out a laugh, her sweat-soaked and somewhat dishevelled braids swinging as she did.

“Only you,” Sintra fondly said, “would end up rescuing the third in line for Tartessos by accident. You do know she’s publicly broken her betrothal?”

The healer grimaced, rather embarrassed.

“I had heard,” he said, chagrined. “I did not mean to convey interest where there is none.”

Sintra chuckled, and for a moment he admired the ripple of the muscle in her arms. No frail poet, his lover. Warrior to the bone, born for the fight. Unlike the Lady Junla.

“Worried I’ll get jealous?” she teased.

Tariq sighed.

“Could you not be, at least a little?” he half-complained.

She smiled, but it was brittle.

“You know I cannot wed you,” Sintra said. “It would be-”

“- taken as a challenge to Yasa, I know,” he softly finished.

The heiress to Alava, trading promises with a man who’d once been proposed heir to the Tattered Throne? Regardless of the truth it would be seen as a war of succession in the making, the Champion’s Blood attempting to put a puppet of the Pilgrim’s Blood in power. The Dominion would split apart at the seams, lords and ladies taking up steel to place crown their favourite. Their fingers threaded, without him ever needing to think of it, and he glanced down at the sheets. Tariq had not taken another lover since the night she’d first smiled at him and mentioned her balcony wall could easily be scaled. Love was a word they had avoided, though it roared loud in their forced silences.

“You could come with me,” he said, not looking up.

Fingers caressed his cheek, surprisingly gentle for the roughness of the skin.

“You know I cannot,” Sintra repeated.

“You would not be the first Marave to prize adventure over the high seat,” he pointed out, and immediately felt guilty for it.

It was been ill-said, that. To ask her to leave her life, her rights behind her simply to be with him. How easy it was to speak of sacrifice, when you were not the one making it. A comforting hand fell on his shoulder. It was not Sintra’s, or any mortal’s. The fingers on his cheek feel and an apology was halfway out his lips when she tucked up his chin, dark eyes meeting his.

“If you were just a man, we’d be hunting chimeras in the Brocelian and sleeping in brambles under moonlight,” Sintra solemnly said. “Never believe otherwise. But you are not that, love. I called your rescue in Stygia an accident, but we both know it wasn’t that.”

Tariq’s lips tightened.

“I am a healer,” he insisted.

“When the levies broke in Malaga, you held back the sea for near an hour,” Sintra gently said. “There are some who still swear you cradled a star in your hands. A healer, perhaps, but also more than that.”

A Pilgrim, she did not say. The Grey Pilgrim. No matter the colour of the robes Tariq wore, dust always turned them grey. The whispers had told him that denial would change nothing. He might have hated them, had they not always taken him where he could do so much good . It was still bitter brew to swallow that he would have to do it alone. He dropped back onto the pillow, tired in more than body. They remained like that for a long time, the sounds of Alava at night sneaking in through the balcony door they’d been too preoccupied to properly close. He’d come to think of the city more as a home than Levante ever had been. Tariq had been a boy, back in the Old City. It was in Alava he had learned to truly leave that behind. Let them bury me here, when Above calls me home , he thought. In the shade of the pear trees beneath the balcony. A morbid thought, and he chased it away with softer words shared with Sintra. They half-fell asleep, after, but he woke before long. The whispers were back. East, he thought. They wanted him to head east. He clenched his fist and forced his eyes to close, though sleep did not return.

“They’re calling again, aren’t they?” Sintra suddenly whispered.

Her voice was still hoarse with sleep. He turned to kiss her brow.

“They can wait,” he whispered back.

It had been a long five months without seeing her. The Ophanim could hold their tongues until dawn, at least. Sintra rose, the sheets falling off of her torso, and smiled.

“Go,” she said.

“Sintra-” he started.

“Go,” she interrupted. “Honour your Blood, Tariq.”

He clenched his teeth.

“You will have a bed here, when you return,” Sintra said, then caught him by the nape of the neck and brought him into a bruising kiss.

The parted too soon, both panting.

“And you will return,” Sintra ordered. “That much I claim from you, by right of conquest. If the Choir of Mercy takes issue, let them try the might of the Champion’s Blood.”

The Ophanim murmured approvingly, to his mild distress.

“Conquest?” he croaked out.

She grinned.

“Do you truly think you were the pursuer in this, Tariq of No Import?”

—

Tariq was thirty one years old, when his mother died.

It had been thirteen years since he had last set foot in the city of Levante, and in truth it was unwise for him to return even now. His sister Yasa would not formally ascend to the Tattered Throne until the funerary games of the departed Seljun of Levant were ended, and in a way his presence here could still be taken as a challenge to her rights. He’d been prepared to linger on the outskirts of the region until the games had ended, but Yasa had written – he could almost hear the very mild tone she’d used when they were children and she thought he was being a fool – that she would send the army to drag him into the city tied like a hog if he did not come by himself. She robbed year from us, brother, with her fecklessness. I will not grant her a single day more. And so Tariq slipped back into the city where he’d been raised under cover of night, dark cloak covering the grey robes he had grown weary of fighting against. The city guards did not look twice, for the city was swelling fit to burst with those come to pay their last respects, and after passing the walls he let his feet guide him.

How easy it was to return to the old city, as if more than a decade had not passed. This was not home, had not been a in a long time, but it would have been a lie to say there was no fondness to be found. Tariq came across his first silver breastplate ten blocks away from the entrance to the palace, and nodded with approval at the vigilance. It did little to stop him from entering unseen, though. He’d walked paths more dire than this. Salia, where all of Levant were looked upon with suspicion, Mercantis as a wanted man and even Thalassina, where the slightest sign of Bestowal was a mark of death. He brushed his hands against the old wards the Grim Binder had put into place at the behest of her comrade the first Grey Pilgrim, feeling them part for him almost eagerly. There were few places in Levant who were not friend to what he’d inherited from his distant ancestor. He strode into the depths of the palace fleetfoot and unseen, letting chance guide him. It tended to favour him. Surprised flicked across his face when he found himself by his mother’s old bureau, candelight and magefire shining under the door. Tariq touched his lips, whispered open and touched the lock. Light glimmered over steel, and easy as that it was done.

He entered quietly, finding his only sister sitting at the broad oaken desk and methodically going through correspondence. Half-moon spectacles – of Ashuran make, he noted – rested loosely against her nose as she frowned downwards in thought. Tariq leaned against the doorway for a moment, taking in the sight of Yasa Isbili for the first time in thirteen years. They had traded letters, whenever they could be snuck in, but anything more would have been too risky. Her face had grown thicker, he thought. It suited her well, he thought, made her long braid seems less like some strange tail sprouting from the back of her head. There were lines on her face where there had once been none, but she seemed... vibrant. Like she’d finally reached where she had always been meant to stand. You have, Yasa , he thought. And they will remember you as the greatest Seljun we’ve had in centuries. Smiling, Tariq cleared his throat. She nearly jumped out of her skin, but her eyed widened when she took him in.

“Tariq,” she said, almost awed. “How did you- no, it doesn’t matter.”

She rose to her feet, pushing back her chair, and their strides met halfway. The siblings held each other close for a very long time, content to simply enjoy the luxury so long denied them. Yasa withdrew first, eyes misty. His were as well, and he clutched her forearm tight.

“Honoured Sister,” he smiled.

“None of that,” she replied, shaking her head. “Not from you, Tariq. Never from you.”

“I must,” the healer reminded her. “And I will kneel as well, come the games.”

“You’re the Grey Pilgrim, you idiot,” she snorted. “You don’t kneel to anyone.”

“To you, yes,” Tariq firmly maintained. “Until the message sinks in.”

She brushed back her braid.

“We can argue about that tomorrow,” she said ruefully. “I’m too glad to see you to muster proper indignation.”

“And up late, I see,” Tariq said. “Preparing still?”

“ That , at least, is over with,” Yasa grimly replied. “Letters from abroad are a relief, truth be told. News about so far away are more diversion than duty.”

The healer nodded knowingly.

“The Praesi civil war?” he guessed.

“When are they not?” she shrugged. “The committees in Ashur are betting the rebel calling himself Nefarious will win, though it shouldn’t affect trade. They say he has Callowan ambitions.”

“When do they not?” Tariq shrugged, a smile tugging at his lips.

Gods, it was still so easy to speak with her. As if they had never parted. The healer had never put as much stock in the Blood as most his people, but perhaps there was some truth to it. There was something running through his sister’s veins that was kin to him, and it was more than just red water. They sat, after that, together in that bureau they’d both been forbidden to enter as children. They traded stories of his travels for hers of the city and their family, hours passing by until dawn came. Tariq noted the dark circles around Yasa’s eyes with some guilt.

“May I?” he said, offering his hand.

“Yes?” she said, bemused.

The Light wreathed his hand, a small glimmer, and poured into her body. The rings disappeared, chasing away the tiredness, but Tariq’s eyes opened wide.

“Brother?” Yasa asked.

A broad grin split his face.

“You’re pregnant,” he said. “A boy.”

She let out a noise of shock at the sudden announcement, before relief and delight claimed her face. After all these years of trying, finally the Heavens had blessed her. Tariq was going to have a nephew and there was not a single thing in Creation that could spoil this day.

—

On the last day of the funerary games, the Grey Pilgrim knelt before his sister in front of every lord and lady in the Dominion of Levant.

When whispers began spread, he stared at them cold-eyed until there was not a damned sound in the room.

—

A fervour swept across the Dominion, after Yasa Isbili sat the Tattered Throne. For the first time since anyone could remember, there was more to the Majilis than bickering and backbiting. The Seljun was still young, the people said, and she had the fire in her belly that had driven the Pilgrim’s Blood to first wrest a nation out of the hands of the Principate. After every journey Tariq undertook, he passed through taverns and inns and let the rumours wash over him with a smile. The levies at Malaga were raised back properly , the people said. About time, and every great Blood put coin to it. To the Brocelian he went, guiding the Lanterns to purge a barrow-curse gone wild . The old rebel road is being paved anew, from Levante to Vaccei , the people said. The Majilis said they’ll raise waystations as well. To Nicae he went, scaring off the Shadow-eater long enough for the Thieftaker to learn his true face. They’re founding a school in Levante , the people said. Ashuran scholars will come teach.

Tariq came and went, and every time he returned his people were thriving a little more. It was as if the savage need for doing better Yasa had felt since they were children had trickled down to every last soul in Levant. Wildlands were being claimed, walls raised around towns and beasts driven away. Fields were tilled, mines dug and for the first time since he could remember he could see pride in the back of those calling themselves Levantines. Not an Ashuran protectorate, not Procer’s rebel principalities – it was as if the entire Dominion had woken up from a long slumber, finally remembering the defiant spirit that had seen it become a nation at all.

“I knew,” he told Sintra, three years after the coronation. “I always knew that she was born for this.”

His lover idly slapped his chest, though from the lack of bite to it she appeared to be amused.

“Are you really going to boast about Yasa being a fine Seljun even while we’re in bed?” she complained.

“My apologies, Lady Sintra,” Tariq grinned.

Her father had passed the high seat onto her last year, after finding the pain in his joints made it hard to hold his axe. The Ophanim had been merciful enough no whispers had come when they Lord of Alava had held his final feast before putting on his finest arms and armour, mounting his horse and riding into Brocelian Forest to kill the largest monster in there or die trying. The Lanterns had brought back word months later that he’d been found in the mouth of a mansion-sized manticore, having allowed it to bit him so he could drive his spear through the roof of its mouth. He’d stayed with her through the grief, though even at the worst she’d been fiercely proud of the last honour he had brought to their Blood. The Pilgrim had expected they would part for the last time, after that, but Sintra had instead baldly announced her younger brother as her heir and that she would only ever wed a man who brought her the head of every prince and princess in Procer. And so the balcony door remained unlocked, home remained home.

It was not the life he had seen for himself, as a child, but Tariq found to his surprise that he was happy. Even the Ophanim, whose presence he had once found unsettling, had become trusted and cherished friends. Partners more farsighted than he, helping him see where he needed to go before he knew he needed to be there. He still passed through Levante whenever he could, to see his sister and play with his young nephew. Izil was a riotous little joy, with all his mother’s cleverness already showing signs of sharing his father’s tall height and broad built. Seven years after her ascension to the Tattered Throne, Yasa Isbili took an arrow through the eye while riding down to harbour to greet Ashuran envoys. She was dead before she touched the ground. The Grey Pilgrim was in Helike, helping a young prince flee his murderous uncle.

Tariq never would manage to forgive himself for that.

—

Izil was dry-eyed, when Tariq elbowed aside the guards to enter his nephew’s room. Looking out the window, still as a statue. The long dark locks his mother had so often combed through affectionately were as listless as the boy himself, and those dark Isbili eyes had grown almost dull. The seven year old boy was clutching a toy pilgrim in his hands, the wooden figure’s paint worn thin from use. He did not even turn when Tariq entered the room. One of the guards followed inside, grimacing as he spoke.

“Revered Pilgrim, you cannot-”

“Where is his father?” the Grey Pilgrim calmly asked.

The guard winced.

“As he is under suspicion, Honoured Brother Bakri has order confined him to his quarters,” he said.

Tariq closed his eyes. Yasa had never worried of their younger brother, for all that his martial exploits had earned him repute. He’d never had a mind for the kind of wrangling the Majilis required, or even the more practical aspects of rule. This could be, he thought, Bakri simply making a mistake in his grief. Or it could be something else. Honoured Brother Bakri. As if Yasa’s child was not the rightful successor.

“Bakri Isbili is now confined to his quarters until I order otherwise,” the Grey Pilgrim mildly said. “My sister’s husband is to be freed immediately .”

Tariq opened his eyes and saw naked fear on the guard’s face. Angry, roiling Light had shaped in rings around his wrists, he realized.

“I gave you an order, son,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “See to it.”

The man slowly bowed.

“Revered Pilgrim,” he said. “Your will be done.”

Tariq gave him a nod, then closed the door behind him. The Light winked out and he knelt by his nephew’s side. The boy did not react.

“Izil,” he softly said, laying a hand on the child’s shoulder. “Can you hear me?”

His nephew flinched at the contact, but some semblance of awareness returned to his eyes.

“Uncle?” the boy whispered.

“It’s me,” Tariq whispered, stroking the boy’s hair gently. “Come back to us.”

His little mouth trembled.

“Uncle,” he mumbled. “Mother’s gone. She – they...”

“It’s all right, Izil,” he said, holding him close. “I’m here now. I won’t let anything happen to you, I swear.”

His nephew wept, and when Tariq found who was responsible for this stars would rain until nothing was left but ashes.

No whispers came.

Prologue

“A horse and fall was all it took
For every last to take the hook
Now the kitchen’s full of cooks,
And the pot it is boiling

Crown of this, crown of that
They all chase after the hat

Princess said she has a right
Princess said it’d be a fight
So princesses are all aflight,
And the pot it is boiling

Crown of this, crown of that
They all chase after the hat

The wheel spins us all around
Up and north, south and down
Ebb or flow, we’ll still drown,
And the pot it is boiling

Crown of this, crown of that
All of this for a hat,
While the pot it is boiling.”

-“Too Many Cooks”, a Proceran folk song written and grown popular during the civil war

The wolves were at the gate.

Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer, Prince of Rhenia and Princess of Salia, Warden of the same West that was currently burning to the ground, did not wonder when it had all gone wrong. She was not an unintelligent woman, and so believed she’d already identified the point of failure with accuracy: the moment where she’d assumed Keter would remain quiescent. She hadn’t, though, not truly. Cordelia had believed there might be an increase in raids coming from the Kingdom of the Dead, perhaps a tentative incursion into the Alamans lakelands. That was the very reason she’d forced through the Highest Assembly the very unpopular taxes that had funded the restoration of all major fortresses north of Brabant, that she’d taken only a meager portion of the armies of the lakeside Alamans principalities and her Lycaonese kinsmen. There would be burning, she’d thought, there would be bleeding. But the borders would hold until the grim business of pacifying the east was done and full attention could be turned to the evil that lay behind the walls of Keter. In a word, she had assumed the Hidden Horror was a fool.

There was a young man at her Salian court by the name of Gabriel, a commoner who’d had the benefit of an education in letters by the House of Light. He had, several years ago, penned an interesting treatise called Fulcrums of History . A repudiation of sorts to the looming presence of On Rule over Proceran politics at the highest rung. It argued, rather eloquently, that disaster came to empires by an accumulation of smaller factors that drained the life out of them instead of through failures of will or cleverness, as the author of On Rule had argued. It had been, Cordelia felt, an attempt to explain the resounding brutality of the civil war by a scholar who had been born in its aftermath. It had concluded by arguing that the solution to such degradation was ‘an injection of fresh vitality’, in this case personified by Cordelia herself leading the traditionally aloof Lycaonese south to force an end to the wars. The conclusion was not as well written as the rest, and largely flattery directed at her in hope of an appointment. He had obtained it, though the flattery had not been the reason. Anyone displaying the sharp insight of the earlier chapters could and should be used by her administration.

She thought of that treatise, sometimes. To apply the logic behind it to her current situation, for there had been a clear accumulation of factors over the last few years. Strength and coin spent influencing foreign wars in Callow and the League. Erosion of her authority over the Tenth Crusade, by both Proceran factionalism and the prominent role of the Chosen, followed by the bruising strategic defeats of the Battle of the Camps and the assault on Red Flower Vales. Once the cracks were there, they had only broadened. Tensions within the Great Alliance grew. The Levantines had been less than eager to defend the heartlands of the Principate, even against Wasteland legions. A trail of burnt cities and granaries from Bayeux to Iserre had been the consequence of that, further weakening her standing within the very alliance she had assembled. Further disaster struck at Thalassina, with the Warlock obliterating the better part of the Ashuran war fleets along with the city he’d come to defend. Worse, the Chosen had now decided to buck worldy authority entirely: the Saint of Swords had openly admitted Procer was to be the pyre birthing her better world , and now the Grey Pilgrim had refused her order to immediately slay the Black Knight instead of capturing him.

The heroes could no longer be relied on. They would, from now, oscillate between being useful but uncontrolled battlefield assets and major strategic liabilities. The rulers of Dominion of Levant, her nominal allies and comrades-in-arms, were now attempting to twist her arms for better concessions after a war they were currently losing . Magon Hadast and the Thalassocracy of Ashur, her sole remaining solid ally, had been inflicted two vicious setbacks in a row. The disaster at Thalassina could have been recovered from, but the League of Free Cities had smelled the blood in the air and finally sallied out. The League’s fleet – essentially the Nicaean fleet with what few ships the other seaside cities could spare – had torched the last war ships of Ashur and sacked the city behind them. The Thalassocracy had effectively been evicted from the sea, and in a matter of months the blockade around its island would start causing major food shortages. There was a very real possibility that Ashur would have to capitulate within the year, else it would simply wither on the vine. Worse, the Hierarch had sent out armies as well, the full muster of the League. Still, had even a losing battle been given by her southern army down in Tenerife, the situation would have been salvageable.

Instead her entire net of spies in the League had somehow missed that the entire host had gone into the Waning Woods, only managing to warn her the army had disappeared off the surface of Creation a week before it reappeared on the outskirts of the Principality of Iserre. Cordelia did not consider herself to be faint of heart, yet she almost shivered at the notion of taking an army through that murderous patch of trees. How much of their army had they lost, passing through? A tenth, a quarter? Half? There was not a single creature of flower in the Waning Woods that was not violently hostile to the existence of humans on Creation. Regardless of the... practicalities involved there, however, the southern Principate had now turned into a strategic nightmare. The First Prince was no great general but even she could see as much. The twenty-thousand strong army she’d stationed in Tenerife to avoid this very outcome was now marching north in all haste, but the map splayed in front of Cordelia betrayed a stark situation. Were the Alliance forces not staggered, not dispersed, they would have held the advantage. Instead it was bloody chaos.

The surviving Legions of Terror, bereft of the Carrion Lord but still under the command of the infamous Marshal Grem One-Eye, had fled into northern Iserre. Their supply situation, her generals assured her, would soon turn dangerous: they were marching through lands they’d already thoroughly pillaged on their way south. They were still around eighteen thousand hardened veterans, including a dragon, led by one of the finest military officers of the age. Behind them, split in two staggered armies, eighty thousand Levantines were in hot pursuit. If reunited, Cordelia believed they could crush the Praesi. But they were not, with a few weeks of distance between them and no way to join up without allowing the Legions to slip the noose. Behind the armies of the Dominion, the host of the League followed. Reports on their numbers fluctuated with every message: fifty thousand, forty, more than a hundred. A brave Iserran outrider had come close enough to find out some of the ‘soldiers’ were actually scarecrows held up by gargoyles, which had the reek of the Tyrant’s scheming. Far behind all these, her southern army of twenty thousand was exhausting its soldiers to collapse trying to arrive in time. The situation in the region was not impossible to salvage, but the dangers were obvious.

Cordelia was unwilling to gamble the fate of the Principate on such odds, and so she had taken action: she’d ordered general conscription in Salia. The bottom of the barrel was being scraped raw, but she’d put together twenty thousand levies. Had she further enforced the decree, or even broadened it to neighbouring principalities, she could have easily tripled that amount. There was, unfortunately, no point in doing so. There were no armaments for the conscripts to use, and dwarven representatives had flatly refused any further sale without even bothering to explain why. Giving reasons to humans was, presumably, beneath their dignity. This entire debacle had the ugly reek of Catherine Foundling’s meddling about it. If there was one saving grace to this entire debacle, it was that the Highest Assembly had finally understood how close to the edge the Principate had come: without even need for her prompting, the personal armies of every single royal not already at war had been sent to reinforce her levies. It would still be a month before the last arrived, but her twenty thousand would swell to forty and gain a bevy of princes and princesses along with badly needed professional officers. Strategic considerations now dictated that the moment this army was readied it was so be sent by ship down to the coast of Iserre, where it could reinforce the Levantines against the Praesi and link up with the others field armies before giving battle to the invading League of Free Cities. Cordelia had that very command drafted on parchment and staring back at her from the surface of her bureau, awaiting only her signature. The fair-haired woman watched her inkwell for a long, silent moment. She did not reach for the quill, instead rising to her feet.

The wolves were at the gate, but not only in war-torn Iserre. Woe, Cordelia. Woe to the north and to the south. Agnes’ words were branded into her mind, the constant reminder that if she made even a single mistake the Principate would end. The First Prince of Procer tread softly until she stood by the tall glass panes of her personal solar, a magnificent view of Salia spread out below her. Frost touched the glass, and the city as well. First snow had already come, though it had melted quickly enough under the sun. The next fall would remain a little longer, and so it would continue until a thorough blanket of pale was draped over the capital. Fingers larger than was considered fashionable in a courtier, much less royalty, pressed against the cold glass. A taste of the north, a taste of home. Rhenia would be as much ice as stone, by now, fresh sets of fortifications being made out of a mixture of frost and gravel. The winds at night would be so loud they’d drown out even the howling of the packs roving the mountains. Her lips tightened, her throat closed up. Pressed against her heart, beneath the Rhenian blue dress she wore, was the last letter her kinsman Friedrich Papenheim would ever write her. She’d had to excuse herself, when she first read it. It would not do to weep in front of even her most trusted.

“I should not,” she whispered against the window, her breath blooming in fog.

She did it anyway, once more. Trembling fingers claimed the parchment and she looked upon Friedrich’s rough scrawl of a calligraphy. He’d never thought much of letters, not that many of her people did, and the words were as rough as the man had been.

The dead are coming.
I sent the young south. We will hold as long we can.
I am sorry. I cannot do more.
Dawn is in your hands, Cordelia.
We will meet again come the last summer.

Her eyes burned with tears she did not allow herself to shed. Hannoven had fallen before she ever received the letter, the man who wrote it dead and ash. She’d loved Friedrich, she thought in the same way she still loved her uncle. Trust and comfort and bonds of blood sacred to them both. He could have been the heir to Hannoven, had Uncle Klaus not named her that, and a lesser man would have resented her for it. She still remembered when she’d been fourteen, the announcement fresh, and she’d met him for the first time since. He’d smiled, rough hands pressing a bracelet into her palm. Not a single dark glance, not a single harsh word. Only a slip of leather with ratling teeth affixed, all carved with old Lycaonese blessings. For luck , he’d smiled. In the years since then, Cordelia had bought and been gifted some of the finest jewelry in Procer. On all of Calernia, truly speaking. And still, under the dress at her coronation as First Prince of Procer, ratling teeth had dug into her wrist. Gold, gold could be found everywhere in the world. Freely given affection could not. The First Prince of Procer wiped her eyes, grateful she’d already done away with her cosmetics for the day. The letter was slid back against her heart, weighing more than parchment ever should.

Across the rest of Lycaonese lands, cities and towns and villages would empty. The old and the young would flee into the mountains, and the rest of her people would prepare for war. Ploughshares beat into swords, cutlery melted into spears. Tables would be hacked up for wooden shields and lovingly tended-to mail come down from mantles. The Enemy was coming and her people would march to meet it at the passes, as they had unflinchingly since the days the word Lycaonese first meant something. Cordelia fingers curled angrily against the glass. Impotently. They could not stand alone. They were brave and they were strong and they were more than anyone had the right to ask of them, but they could not stand alone against the endless hordes of the Dead King. They needed reinforcements, they needed the south to raise its banners and come stand with them. And it was her duty to see to that, wasn’t it? There had never been a First Prince of Lycaonese birth before her, and there might never be again. The Dead King had come to wage full war on the Principate of Procer for the first time since its founding, and only now did while a Hasenbach sat the throne. She owed it to her blood, to her home, to her honour to abandon all this southern madness and march north to stand against the horror that would devour all the world.

“And I am going to fail you,” she whispered brokenly.

Because victory south meant taking all that remained of the Grand Alliance to fight the Dead King. Because the Chosen had held Cleves until Princess Malanza’s army arrived to reinforce them and the principality still stood. Because Hainaut’s coast was swarming with the dead, but she had ordered her uncle to take it back instead of returning to fight for his own home. And mine . She’d met the eyes of man who’d been father to her since she was a girl, and told him that if he disobeyed her orders and marched his soldiers home instead she would have to order him seized for treason. There would be no coming back from that, she knew. She’d seen the lay of it in his face. But in the end, all four principalities of her people could be taken by the Enemy without much greater cost than soldiers and mines. If the Kingdom of the Dead broke into the heartlands of Procer, its already ravaged farmlands, the entire realm would starve through winter. Hunger would kill a hundredfold the work of soldiers. Because even alone, you will stand long enough to save the rest of Procer and the Alamans will not. She was abandoning everything she had ever loved for the sake of people who still called her a savage behind her back. Who mere months ago had been plotting to destroy her.

“Because we must,” Cordelia bitterly said.

Using the words of the line whose duty she was failing to justify that very failure. She was damned, just as the hard-eyed warlord in Callow had warned she would be. Let me be damned, then , she thought. The wolves were at the gate, gathering in ravening packs. Summer friends and bitter foes, a procession of the viperous and the apathetic. Heroes who would bring salvation with a torch, villains cloaked in murder and madness. Let them all come, baying for the end of Procer. If she had to war against all the world to save her people, she would. The Warden of the West walked to her desk, dipped the quill and signed the fucking order. Before it even dried she had another scroll unfolded, her feathered quill dancing across. Dredge it out , she wrote. Prepare it. Fire against fire. The Augur had found a path through, narrow as it was, and it began with a corpse that was not a corpse beneath the waters of the lake at the heart of Procer. The Ashurans, it was said, had called on a masked and hallowed presence at the Battle of Thalassina. Cordelia Hasenbach would call on a lot worse if she had to.

Dawn was in her hands, and she would not let it fail.

—

The Empire was dying a slow, messy death.

Alchemical concoctions had allowed Malicia to resist the call of sleep beyond what even her Name would allow, though she knew there would eventually be a price to pay for that. It was still necessary, for rare was the hour that must not be spent dragging her wayward realm back from the suicide it was so utterly intent on committing. It was grim, thankless work, moreso now than ever before: two blows had come in quick succession, and as a result her authority was thinning. Thalassina had, to her still raw grief, been the first. The woman named Alaya had wept over the loss of her old friend, when she’d heard the news. Wekesa had been dear to her in a way that very few people had ever matched or surpassed – only one, if she was to be honest with herself – and to lose him over what should have been such a simple matter... But while the Dread Empress of Praes could afford most luxuries known to Creation, time to mourn was not one of them. Not when Warlock’s last blaze of vengeful glory had wiped out a city of nearly one hundred and fifty thousand people, along with her realm’s largest and most prosperous sea port.

There were survivors, a meager thirty thousand or so. Whatever Wekesa had used affected them, for within a day of fleeing the city ruins they’d begun to wildly mutate. Eyes and cysts growing over skin, teeth turning to stone, even a case of hair turning into straw. Malicia ordered a quarantine for the refugees, uncertain if the affliction would spread, but it turned out pointless. Every last one of them was dead within a week, seemingly cooked from the inside by the fading remnants of Wekesa’s sorcery left inside them.

As far as her agents had been able to determine, there had been only a single survivor to that catastrophe: the Hierophant. Young Masego had been observed to walk out of the wreckage in ash-covered robes, and her attempts to contact the boy had not gone well. The first messengers she’d sent on foot, and once they came within a hundred yards of him their heads had simply caved in . She’d ordered scrying rituals, after that. Of the ten mages she’d used, only one had survived the backlash. Healers managed to stop the screaming before the vocal chords gave, though there would be no salvaging the eyes that had rotten and fallen out from their sockets. That survivor had babbled about a ‘sea of death’, not coherent enough for a more comprehensive report, and bitten through her tongue before the night was out. Necromancy had revealed the dead woman’s soul to be even more damaged than the corpse, which worried Malicia a great deal. Even Warlock at his peak had resorted to rituals and specialized tools to tinker with souls. His son evidently need not, and was shambling his way back to Callow through unknown means: he would frequently disappear for a few days at a time before her agents caught sight of him again, moving too quickly for it to be purely on foot.

There was going to be a reckoning in that, and the best she could hope for was that it would be Ashur that’d bear the cost of it.

Thalassina alone would have been a crisis. High Lord Idriss had been one of her closest political allies for decades, the wealth of his holdings and his remarkable breadth of indebted of great use in keeping the influence of Tasia Sahelian and the Truebloods at bay. Malicia had never counted the man a friend, but she had respected him and made good use of his ambitions. In the wake of the dissolution of the Truebloods and the marginalization of Wolof, whose latest High Lord she had bound to her too deeply for anything but complete subservience, she’d been preparing to set him up as the natural rival to the Moderates led by High Lady Abreha of Aksum. Competition over court appointments would have neatly neutered both of them and kept them busy while Malicia set to laying the groundwork for what the Empire was to become. Instead Idriss was gone, along with most of Thalassina, and Abreha Mirembe was now the second most powerful individual in Praes. The sack of Nok and the destruction of the only other seaport of the Wasteland had dealt crippling blows to Malicia’s prestige, which had already been steadily eroding under the constant Ashuran coastal raids.

From Wekesa’s death, she had inherited the stuff or rebellion: the Thalassocracy was no longer raiding, which allowed household troops and legions to withdraw, and doubts were now being raised as to her ability to successfully defend Praes. If not for her treaty with the Dead King, there would have been a coup attempt by now. As it was, overwhelming pressure was mounting at court for High Lady Abreha to be named her Chancellor. If she did not swiftly act to suppress dissent, the situation would grow out of control. Her most direct tool in this should have been the Legions of Terror, of course, but as things stood Malicia knew they could not be used. Sitting calmly in her seat at the table where the Dark Council was usually held, the Dread Empress of Praes watched the kneeling Soninke mage before her and idly tapped a finger against the wooden table’s surface. Ime stood at her side, her spymistress a shadow silent and still.

“It is confirmed, Your Most Dreadful Majesty,” the young man said. “Foramen has fallen.”

“Of that much I was aware,” Malicia sharply replied. “ Elaborate .”

“As of two days ago, a goblin army of imprecise size – at least ten thousand, less than fifty – attacked the city after sending a vanguard of infiltrators over what we now believe to be at least a month,” the imperial mage hastily said. “They attacked under cover of night, after having slain the watchmen on duty and opening the gates. The city was fully occupied by morning, after which the goblins seized control of the city wards and cut off our ability to scry.”

Not a single bit of news that Ime had not already brought her as of the morning the city was occupied. She truly had been too lax on the contingent of messenger mages directly sworn to the Tower, she thought. While their primary duty was to serve as couriers for orders, they’d also been granted funds to acquire and pass on local information from wherever they were posted. A way to keep a finger on the pulse of the Empire without ever leaving Ater. Yet if the best they could offer her was what half of Praes knew two days after Malicia learned of it, perhaps their funding needed to be reassessed.

“Do you have anything else to report?” the Empress mildly added.

The young mage hesitated.

“Rumours have begun to spread in Okoro and Kahtan that these foreign attacks are being used as a veiled knife by Your Most Dreadful Majesty to eliminate the High Lords entirely,” he finally said. “Our branch officers in these cities believe the whispers are too widespread to be of natural provenance.”

Malicia’s eyes narrowed the slightest bit. That was, in fact, fresh news. Perhaps mere discipline would suffice, then.

“You are dismissed,” she said.

The Imperial mage rose only to bow, and retreated from the room backwards with his eyes fixed on the floor. The Sentinels quietly closed the door behind him, and the Empress leaned back against her seat.

“Abreha prepares for a serious challenge, it seems,” Malicia said after a moment.

Ime finally stirred to movement, sliding into the seat at her left.

“It was inevitable the moment Thalassina happened,” the spymistress said. “Foramen just handed her the opportunity on a silver platter.”

They both knew why the rumours being spread were much more dangerous than they seemed at first glance. Ime’s agents had obtained greater detail of what had taken place in Foramen after it fell. High Lady Amina Banu had been skinned alive along with every other member of her line in the city before being drawn and quartered before the eyes of the entire city. Revenge for Dread Emperor Nihilis fashioning a leather cloak out from the hide of the matrons that refused to surrender when he crushed the Fourth Goblin Rebellion, or so they claimed. As the leaders of every single goblin rebellion in the last six hundred years had committed a variation of the same empty atrocity, Malicia could note that there had been a great deal more revenge taken than injury done. Unfortunately, the Banu of Foramen and the Kebdana of Thalassina had both been effectively ended as a bloodline. Oh, some distant relatives could be rustled up – the Banu in particular had been a tribe before a line, and were famously more a family thicket than tree – but that thorough an extermination would end them as political entities for generations. More than that, for the Kebdana. Foramen could be taken back, but it was dubious that Thalassina could ever be rebuilt given the toxicity of the former city’s emplacement.

Two High Lord lines centuries old destroyed in the span of a year. High Lady Abreha would find many willing ears, when she cast Malicia in the role of one trying to exterminate the highest rung of Wasteland aristocracy.

“She needs to die,” the Empress said. “And quickly.”

“The Eyes are already exploring possible avenues,” Ime replied without missing a beat. “Though she was a viciously paranoid old bat before taking a swing at the Tower, so the odds are not in our favour.”

Malicia closed her eyes, mind unfolding. Angles, angles, there were always angles. The knife that took the killing blow need not be hers.

“Her agents at court,” she said slowly. “Have they been preparing petition?”

“We’ve confirmed four,” Ime said. “I believe the one requesting that she be formally summoned to the Tower to answer for tax irregularities is the one she’ll truly back.”

Casting herself as being attacked by the throne while ensuring she was in Ater to gather support. Not the most inspired of opening moves, but then Abreha had always preferred boldness to elegance.

“Have our people change the text for one of the red herrings just before presentation,” Malicia ordered, opening her eyes. “High Lady Abreha will request a formal mandate and court title, for the sake of stabilizing Praes in the midst of war.”

“Overreach would give us an excuse to swat her around,” the spymistress reluctantly agreed.

“Swat?” Malicia smiled. “Nothing of the sort, Ime. How does one kill a lion without a spear?”

Her spymistress simply raised an eyebrow.

“Throw a cut of meat,” the Dread Empress of Praes said, “halfway between it and a bear.”

She drummer her fingers thoughtfully against the table.

“We will grant this petition, for we have great trust in the loyalty of dearest Abreha,” she lightly continued. “As the Blessed Isle is still formally an Imperial territory, granting governorship over it is my right. Given the unfortunate refugee situation, it is evident there is great need of a stabilizing influence there.”

Ime let out a low whistle.

“That gets her household troops at the Callowan border,” she noted. “And nobody else will want to get tangled up there, so support will cool down. The reaction in Laure is the real danger.”

“Have the regency informed that its protest over Praesi refugee incursions were duly noted, and I have appointed a governor to remedy the situation,” Malicia said. “Of course, High Lady Abreha’s mandate ends at the border. Should she provoke the Kingdom of Callow, it is not on the behalf of the Tower and any punishment doled out by the regency would not be taken as an act of war between our realms.”

“Should such a provocation be arranged?” Ime asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Prepare one,” the Empress said. “I will not pull the trigger unless it is made necessary.”

There was a beat of silence.

“My Empress,” the spymistress finally said.

“You have doubts,” Malicia noted.

“Callow just slapped us across the face,” Ime reminded her. “There was a signed royal decree recognizing the independence of the ‘Confederation of the Grey Eyries’ before the city had even fallen.”

With Catherine’s own signature, which the Empress suspected had by now been used more often by Hakram Deadhand than the woman herself.

“The Matrons must have reached out to them months ago. And it’s only a matter of time until barges carrying munitions and goblin steel start sailing across the Wasaliti to equip the Army of Callow. They’re effectively funding a rebellion against the Tower, though Gods only know how they got a loan from the dwarves.”

“Given Catherine’s continued absence, I imagine an amount of brutal murder was involved,” the Empress drily said. “Though that is ultimately irrelevant. The Legions of Terror will move to blockade Foramen. Neither munitions, steel nor gold will flow. The bargain will remain entirely ink.”

“We’re in no shape to fight against Callow,” Ime quietly said. “We are divided, bloodied and beset with a goblin rebellion.”

“Callow is in no shape to fight against us,” Malicia replied, and raised a hand before her spymistress could object. “Marshal Juniper has raised a significant army, but it cannot move east. If the Black Queen still somehow seeks alignment with the ailing Grand Alliance, it must participate in the campaign against the Dead King. If she seeks to kill Cordelia’s grand design instead, it will fall on Salia instead and decapitate the Principate by surprise. Both offensives would be of great scale, and she has neither the manpower nor the resources to engage in war on two fronts.”

Silence reigned for a moment after the mild tirade, the other woman refraining from contradicting her. Ime – Lindimi Sahelian, once, before she’d cast that name aside – was aging. No amount of potions, rituals or cosmetics could truly hide it anymore. Her skin was wrinkling, her body losing its spryness. Even a branch Sahelian could expect to live a few decades longer than the average Praesi, but time would catch up eventually. Part of Malicia grieved that. Part of Malicia had to begin considering a replacement. She read hesitation, on Ime’s face. No, not hesitation. Reluctance . There were very few subjects where she had not given her spymistress to speak her mind fully and openly. Not even Lindimi’s participation in the slaughter of Amadeus’ kin when still served the Heir was warded subject, though it was one to be approached with care.

“Say it,” Malicia ordered.

Ime’s lips thinned.

“You have not spoken to the Black Queen face to face since Akua’s Folly,” she slowly said. “I do not think you truly grasp the woman we’re dealing with anymore.”

“A crown will not change her nature,” the Empress said.

“What happened in Liesse did,” Ime replied. “She reminds me...”

Reluctance again.

“... she reminds me of Nefarious,” the spymistress finished quietly. “After the Wizard of the West broke his power. There’s a sickness in her, Malicia, and it has little kinship with reason.”

It had been many years, since Alaya had last thought of Dread Emperor Nefarious. In a way, that’d been a deeper victory than simply killing the wretched man – she had grown beyond him, the wounds and the fear and the pain. She’d not hidden from remembrance of him, she’d simply let him disappear into utter irrelevance.

“Winter can be predicted,” Malicia said. “Rooted as it is in what she once was.”

“She’s unstable,” Ime flatly said. “And I’m afraid of her. We all should be. She threw a bloody lake at the crusaders, and that was her being diplomatic . If that pretence is discarded, what will we be facing? You speak of armies, but I think of a mountain falling from the sky above Ater. Of Okoro drowned by an ocean unleashed. She’s not the Carrion Lord’s apprentice anymore, Malicia. She’d a vicious, angry thing bearing a fairy court’s worth of power and I deeply mislike the risk of us making her feel cornered. She may yet come out with teeth and claw, damning all else.”

Where was this fear a year ago? Yet the Empress knew the answer. It had not yet come to fruit, because a year ago Wekesa had still been alive and poorly inclined towards the Black Queen. How quickly slight wounds had turned to mortal ones, Malicia thought. Procer was being smothered by the armies of the dead, Ashur strangled by the fleets of the League and the hosts of Levant were embroiled in the mess that had been made of Iserre, headed for doom or crippling. All three nations sworn to end her, bleeding out in broad daylight. And yet Praes was dying as well, by wounds of its own making. The Matrons to the south, High Lady Abreha to the north. Legions she held only by the barest of leashes, one that could only be tugged by causing mutinous sentiment in the aftermath, and with the coming of winter the Imperial granaries would have to be opened lest there be food riots. The grain would run out, eventually. And to the far west, someone had taken Amadeus from her.

She was alone. There was no one else that would – that could – avoid disaster.

Left to scheme on their own, when the granaries ebbed low the High Lords would begin musing war on Callow to acquire its own reserves. The goblins would not end the border of their rebellion at Foramen unless they were made to. And the moment collapse seemed inevitable, some clans of orcs would begin eyeing the weakened lands to the south of the steppes for plunder as they had under the reign of her predecessor. Some would stay loyal, but all that would accomplish was civil war among the Clans. She had to avoid reaching the tipping point, whatever the cost. For if she succeeded? If she asserted true control once more? Then she had won this war, and all the wars that would follow. The Grand Alliance would break. The League of Free Cities would either collapse into squabbling or by trying to keep the Thalassocracy contained. And Callow would have a choice: uneasy alliance with the Tower, or standing alone against a Kingdom of the Dead that had just devoured most the west. It always came down to survival, didn’t it? Outlasting what you could not beat.

“I am,” Malicia said, “the ruler of Praes.”

“So you are,” Ime murmured.

“Let us teach them once more,” Dread Empress Malicia, First of Her Name, “precisely what that means .”

The Empire might be dying, but these lands were no stranger the walking dead.

—

Somewhere in eastern Iserre, under a full moon, a flicker of flame parted the night. It died quick enough, leaving behind only the cherry-red end of a lit pipe. The young woman holding it breathed in deep of smoke before blowing out a shoddy ring. Pearly white teeth were bared under moonlight, afterwards.

“Let’s try this again, shall we?” Catherine Foundling said.

Behind her, streaming out of an ink-black gate, a sea of raised sigils poured out in utter silence. Obsidian and iron, furs and mail, spears and swords and things stranger still.

For the first time in many years, the Empire Ever Dark was at war with something other than itself.

Chapter 1: Visitation

“Even a devil can be merciful once.”
– Callowan saying

The night was full of shadows and every last one answered to me.

Fairy gates had never been quite as precise an art as I would have liked, particularly when the needle was threaded half-blind, but these days I had more than Masego or Akua adding up the numbers for me. The sisters understood these matters in a way no mortal ever could, and considering it was their – ours, I supposed – army I was taking through Arcadia they’d not balked at charting the path for me. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Komena had complained about being a goddess, not a cartographer. I’d wholeheartedly agreed: after all, a cartographer would have given me an answer instead of petty whining. You’d think finishing apotheosis would have done something for her sense of humor, but instead I’d been given an indignant silent treatment for a few days. Which was fine by me, really. There was only so much croaking I could take from the damned birds they’d sent with me. The night-feathered crow on my left shoulder stirred in displeasure and I snorted.

“Fine, fake birds,” I said. “That better for you?”

Indrani cleared her throat, less dainty scoff and more middle-aged dockworker about to spit.

“Catherine, you’re talking to the crows again,” she said.

I shrugged.

“It’s fine as long as I don’t expect to hear them talk back, I think,” I noted.

“Caw,” the crow on my left shoulder drily said.

The word, not actual cawing, because Andronike had developed a taste for the sardonic since shaving off a sliver of her godhood and sending it if off with me.

“Wind’s real loud tonight,” I said, blithely pretending I hadn’t hear anything.

“Well,” Archer mused, “it is winter.”

And wasn’t it just? The heartlands of Procer were pretty as a painting, under moonlight. Open fields of driven snow, sparse trees trickling down icicles and the occasional game wandering through the frost. It said a lot about the drow, I thought, than an army of fifty thousand of them hadn’t scared off every beast for four miles around it. There’d been some childlike wonderment at first, when the grey-skinned host had first witnessed the world covered in white. Drow centuries old patting at the snow like they couldn’t quite believe their eyes, strangers as they were to a surface winter. I remembered that fondly, the innocence of it. There were some things that even millennia of constant bloodshed could not entirely erase. Tonight, though, there would be no wide-eyed fascination. The warriors I’d sent out had moved out across the snow like ghosts, melting back into the darkness they’d been born to.

Indrani had come to keep me company as I stood, watching the small town in the distance. My friend – we’d shared a bed more than once, by now, but lover ill fit what lay between us – was half a shadow herself, the hooded leather coat she wore over fine mail hiding her face away from the light of the moon. Now and then I could see her hand twitching slightly, the urge to reach for the large bow strapped to her back only barely repressed. Archer had never been one to shy away from a fight, which was the reason I hadn’t sent her out with the drow in the first place: corpses weren’t what I was after. Not tonight anyway. There were a few long years ahead of us, I knew, and there would be blood spilled before they came to a close. Whose , I thought, is the important question, isn’t it?

“What’s the place called again?” Indrani asked.

More out of need to fill the silence than true curiosity, I suspected.

“Trousseau,” I replied anyway.

Finding a hunter out in the plains had been a lucky stroke, and result in a vague notion of where we were in Procer. Somewhere in eastern Iserre, for one, which was what I’d been aiming for. Unfortunately said hunter had never gone all that far from her hometown, and had little news of what was currently taking place in the Principate. No map, either, but that much I’d expected. Those were damned expensive, and even halfway-accurate ones not usually in the hands of commoners.

“Bit of a shithole, to be honest,” Archer said.

Trousseau probably had no more than a thousand souls living in it, most of the time, but these were not that. War and conscription would have thinned the town. I’d decided to charitably attribute how run-down the place was to the removal of so many able hands, though odds were the place was poor enough it looked like this even on a good year. There were as many huts as houses, all huddled around a few streets that were more streaks of cold mud than anything, and what cattle could be seen held in pens around the town was thin and sickly. Though Indrani’s gaze had lingered on the ramshackle and no doubt bitingly cold huts, I’d been more interested in something that wasn’t there. Namely, walls. I honestly couldn’t think of a single town of a thousand in Callow that wouldn’t have at least a palisade up, or tall piles of stones without mortar. For my purpose of the night, however, that defencelessness was not unhelpful.

“If it were worth putting on a map, Black would probably have burnt it on his way south,” I said.

She hummed in agreement, and only spoke again a few heartbeats later.

“You think rumours about what’s happening to will have trickled into here?” Indrani asked, glancing at me.

“Worth a try,” I grimly said.

Archer’s footing shifted almost hesitantly, and I blinked in surprise when she put a comforting hand on my shoulder. I could almost feel the warmth of her through the cloak and doublet, and my heart beat a little faster. Not because of attraction, this time, though that was never far. That I could feel warmth at all was still a feeling I could only luxuriate in.

“We don’t know he’s in trouble,” she said.

“He should be back from Thalassina by now,” I replied. “And still we can’t make contact with the Observatory. Something happened.”

“He could be buried up the neck in some hidden library,” Indrani smiled. “Only to remember the rest of Creation still exists in a few months.”

The smile was slightly forced, I knew her well enough to tell. I wasn’t the only one worried about Masego and the resounding silence from Laure.

“Shouldn’t it be me comforting you, anyway?” I said.

“He can take care of himself,” Archer quietly said, though her eyes flicked east anyway.

I clasped her bare fingers with my gloved ones, squeezing tight, and she shot me an amused look before removing her hand. Where our conversation would have wandered after that would remain a mystery, for I felt a ripple in the Night headed our way. Mighty Rumena – crow-Komena pecked at my shoulder and I rolled my eyes – General Rumena, I mentally corrected, had not ceased in its attempts to sneak up on me even though not a single one had succeeded since I’d become First Under the Night. It was hard to pull a Night-trick on someone who had a finger on the pulse of that very power.

“So, the way you don’t leave footprints in the snow,” I called out. “Is that an illusion, or are you so feeble and delicate you’re light enough not to leave one?”

Grey fingertips appeared out thin air a few feet in front of me, coming down to tear away at a veil of Night and revealing the creased face of the ancient drow. Even stooped the bastard was taller than me, which unfair in so many ways, and ever since it’d been appointed to the command of the southern expedition it’d made a point of looming over me whenever it could.

“Many are the mysteries of the Night,” General Rumena vaguely replied.

I eyed him skeptically.

“So where’d we land on whether or not I have power of expulsion from the faith again?” I finally asked crow-Andronike.

“No,” she replied.

“Maybe,” crow-Komena said at the same time.

The two crow-shaped slivers of Sve Noc turned to glare at each other.

“There can be no-” crow-Andronike began.

“It is necessary that-” her sister interrupted.

I smothered a grin, though not quite well enough. Both turned their glares towards me. That was never going to get old, was it? A heartbeat later I was yelping as a pair of godly crows started flapping around my hair and pecking vengefully at my scalp, though I valiantly managed to shoo them away with only minimal loss of dignity. The two of them flew off, possibly off to torment some poor luckless rabbit. Made of Night as they were they hardly needed to eat, though that certainly hadn’t stopped them from toying with the animals they came across. Amusement bled out of me a moment later and I turned my eyes to Rumena.

“Report,” I ordered.

It did not bow, not that I’d expected it to.

“The town has been seized,” the old drow said.

“Casualties?” I asked.

“Seventeen wounded, no dead,” General Rumena mildly said. “Some stubborn souls insisted on resisting confinement.”

I chewed on my lip. Too much to hope for this to be entirely bloodless, I supposed. I’d tell Akua to have the wounds healed if she could. And if the people were willing to take healing from the likes of us which was less than certain.

“No priests?” I asked.

“None resided within. There is a moan-haste-ree to the north where servants of the Pale Gods hold court, but they only visit infrequently,” the old drow said.

“Monastery,” I corrected absent-mindedly. “Good, that would have complicated things.”

Priests tended to frown upon dark hordes beholden to eldritch horrors of the night strolling into their backyard, and I’d rather not cut one’s throat if I could avoid it.

“Send a sigil up to keep an eye on the monastery road,” I finally said. “No blunders tonight, Rumena.”

“Ah,” the general mildly said. “Will you be absenting yourself, then?”

To my side Indrani shook with a suppressed laugh, the filthy traitor.

“You just wait,” I grunted. “One of these days I’ll talk the damned crows into letting me write your holy book and there’ll be an entire hymn about how much of a prick you are.”

I began the trek towards Trousseau immediately, carefully refraining from hearing Rumena’s skepticism at my ability to rhyme on purpose even as Archer cheerfully waved him goodbye.

As usual, I was surrounded by insubordinate backtalk and wanton treachery.

—

There were a few houses near the centre of the town made of stone, but this wasn’t one of them. I approved, truth be told. From what I’d read, large towns and cities in the Alamans parts of Procer were usually governed by an official appointed by the ruling royal – quite often some toady or relative that could be counted on to keep the coin flowing towards the principality’s capital. On occasion, some wealthy landowner ended up in charge instead but given that those occasionally got ideas about who should be the local royalty that was rarer. In smaller towns and villages, though, a degree of freedom emerged. Someone needed to be in charge so the lawmen and the tax collectors would have an arm to twist, but the people were left to their own devices as to who should be picked. Trousseau should be small enough for that to apply, and that the town’s mayor was living in a wooden house instead of a stone one implied wealth hadn’t been why he was put in charge. Half a dozen drow bearing the mark of the Soln Sigil were keeping a sharp watch on the premise, and if the ripple I was feeling in the Night was any indication my old friend Lord Soln itself wasn’t far.

It had amused the Sisters to send what little remained of the army I’d once led against them on the southern expedition. I wasn’t complaining: the oaths binding us might have been broken, but they were quicker to obey my orders than most drow. The covenant under Winter had left marks that would not easily be erased. On another night I might have taken the time to flush out Soln from its hiding place and share a few words, but not this one. I had business to finish, and no inclination to delay it. As far as I was concerned, the quicker we moved on from here to undertake our campaign proper the better.

“Want me to come with?” Archer idly said.

I glanced at her, catching a glimpse of her hazelnut eyes under the hood. I read an expectation of boredom there, but still she had offered. I did not fight the flush of affection that brought out in me.

“No need,” I said. “Find something to entertain yourself, I’ll catch up.”

She smirked.

“Bound to be at least one tavern in this dump,” she mused.

“We pay for what we take,” I reminded her.

“Gods,” she muttered under her breath. “Between you and Akua I feel like I’ve joined the most ironic nunnery in Creation.”

I grinned and waved her off.

“Don’t get too drunk without me,” I said.

She grinned back, and promised not a thing. I watched her saunter away for a moment, coat swaying behind her, but before long my gaze had returned the door in front of me and the good mood drained. The two closest drow were looking at me from the corner of their eyes and I offered a nod.

“Restrict interruption to Peerage and my own people,” I spoke in Crepuscular.

“Losara Queen,” one murmured back, though both bowed.

I left it at that, and knocked at the door out of habit. There was a long beat of silence, before a male voice hesitantly bid me to enter. Ah , I thought. The last people to come in would not have been so polite. I pushed open the surprisingly well-oiled door and entered. A man was standing by a brazier, my eyes lingering only long enough to note he looked only in his mid-thirties before they pressed on to take in the rest of the house. One bed, shoddy as it was, but four cots. The table was old but well-maintained, and the roughly-hewn chairs struck me as of recent make. Not much else to see, aside from wooden shelves filled with foodstuffs. When my eyes returned to the man, his face had gone ashen. His hands were still above the flames, but now they were trembling. I wiped my snow-sodden boots on the straw by the door before offering a bland smile.

“I am told your name is Leon,” I said in Chantant. “And that you are mayor of Trousseau.”

The man drew back as if struck. It was almost comical, given that he stood at least two feet taller than me and was built like a sandy-haired ox. Almost.

“You’re the Black Queen,” Leon shakily said.

“And so introductions have been seen to,” I mildly said. “Take a seat.”

Something like anger flickered across the man’s face. Not someone used to be ordered around in his own home, was he? But even as his jaw squared, his eyes came to rest on the sword at my hip. Caution won out, and slowly he drew back a chair and sat down. Wiping my boots one last time, I limped across the floorboards and sat across from him. I could have drawn on the Night to chase away the pain for a time, but I disliked relying on that measure unless blades were out. I leaned back against the chair, the Mantle of Woe bunching up as I did, and calmly took off my leather gloves.

“I have questions to ask of you,” I said.

“I am the mayor of a half-empty town,” Leon replied. “What could I possibly know of import to a queen?”

His gaze was steady, I thought, and his back straight. But he’d not quite managed to hide his hands away from me, and I could see how tightly clenched his fingers were. Afraid, but trying not to show it. I wondered if he expected he’d be dead by the end of this conversation. My reputation in Procer had been less than gentle even before the entire fucking priesthood of the west had declared me Arch-heretic of the East.

“More than you think,” I said. “Peddlers come through, even in a deserted town. And peddlers carry rumours.”

“I put little stock in rumours,” the mayor replied. “And so know little of them.”

I glanced to the side, already knowing what I would find. The bed was large enough for two. Some of the cots were too small for adults. The man had a wife and children. All of which were currently under the guard of my drow in a previously house. When my gaze returned, Leon’s face had grown tight. The steady gaze was gone, replaced by desperate fear.

“No merchant has passed in months,” the Proceran said. “We are not a town with coin to spend. Those few of wealth have already left.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“For where?” I asked.

“Iserre,” he said. “Walls and safety.”

I leaned forward.

“Safety from what?” I pressed.

The man grit his teeth. I could see them war on his face, fear and principle. I was, to be honest, admiring his spine. How many of my countrymen would have it in them to even hesitate answering a question, if a villain of my repute was asking it? I’d not sat in conversation with a human other than Indrani in months, and in some ways this felt fresh to me. I could see the tremor in his arm, the beading sweat on his brow. This was not a drow, I thought. I understood the shape of this one’s thoughts, the milestones by which he saw the world.

“Heavens preserve me from the Enemy,” the mayor of Trousseau shakily said. “Still my tongue and ward my hand, that I may give it no succour nor relief.”

I slowly breathed out, studying him. I might have continued, if not for the knock on the door.

“Enter,” I said.

The door opened to reveal Akua Sahelian’s silhouette, and closed after she fluidly stepped in. I cocked an eyebrow, meeting her golden eyes, and she nodded. Good . She leaned back against the wall without a word and I turned to the mayor.

“Do you see the Heavens in this room, Leon?” I softly asked. “I don’t. There’s just us, and the consequences of our choices.”

“I will not sell out my home, Black Queen,” the large man said. “Not an inch, not a league.”

The fear had not left, I thought. And yet he’d said it anyway.

“I hold your family,” I said.

The tone was casual, as it discussing the weather. I had learned from Black that mildness could be much more disquieting than the most thunderous of wraths. Leon swallowed drily. I had not made threat, and would not need to. My name itself was a threat, these days.

“Even so,” he said, tone thick with grief. “Gods, even so.”

To do right, even if it cost you everything. That, at least, the Houses of Light on both sides of the border taught just the same. I thought of Amadis Milenan, then, and wondered what such a man had ever done to deserve a subject like this. Nothing. But then that was the whole point, wasn’t it? That the underserving so often ruled. That there could be more heroism found in a terrified man sitting across a monster and refusing to answer a question than in an empire’s worth of royal lines, or a legion of heroes.

“It’s a strange thing, fear, isn’t?” I said. “I have known those who rule by it. I have fought those who deny its very existence. And yet I have come no closer to understanding what splits the brave from the mad.”

I met his eyes with equanimity.

“But I do know one thing, Leon of Trousseau,” I said. “That knot in your stomach, right now? That part of you that keeps your back straight when death meets your gaze?”

I did not blink. Neither did he.

“That is the weight of the choice you made,” I said. “Remember it, in the years to come. Learn from it, grow from it. Because one of those days you might find someone else sitting on my side of the table – and unlike me, they might not admire what you chose.”

I pushed back the chair and rose to my feet, picking up my gloves and slipping them on. The mayor hesitated.

“That’s all?” he said.

I smiled, thin and mirthless.

“Do you know why we praise bravery, Leon?” I said.

He did not reply. Did not dare to, I supposed, when it seemed possible he might survive our little chat after all.

“Because it surpasses our baser nature,” Akua spoke from behind me, and I could feel the smile in her voice.

I could see the moment when the man understood, the anger and the sadness and the burning indignation.

“Someone talked,” I gently said. “Someone always talks.”

I limped back into the cold, and left him to sit in his silence.

Chapter 2: Stirrings

“Everything happens for a reason, and this time the reason is that I godsdamned said so.”
– Queen Elizabeth Alban of Callow

I let Akua trail behind me as we walked through the half-frozen mud.

Archer hadn’t been wrong, I thought, to call this place a shithole. But where she likely saw it as sloppiness on their part, a refusal to pull up their sleeves and improve their own lot, to me Trousseau reeked of desperation. Too many hard years, too many taxmen more interested in their tallies than what those cost to the people who made up the numbers. I didn’t like it, that she thought that way. I could admit that to myself. There were times where her indifference to the lot of others galled me deeply, because it ran against what I’d been raised to – that when it got dark outside, everyone was in it together. I’d learned, though, to follow that somewhat callous belief to its source. The Ranger. I’d loved the stories about Indrani’s mentor as a child, certainly more than those about the Calamities. After all she’d been absent for most the Conquest, and unlike the others she wasn’t Praesi. The last specks of that childhood fondness had waned when she’d answered an offer a help by nearly murdering me on a whim. What Black saw in her I didn’t know and doubted I would ever understand, but I could make my peace with that. What she’d done to Indrani, though? That was another story.

She’d taught Archer that her fate would only ever be defined by her own hands, and that I could only approve of, but she’d left the lesson half-finished. She’d never told my friend that she was exceptional, that not everybody could be like her. That sometimes people failed and gave up, and that didn’t make them unworthy in some way. Just tired and hurt and without an answer as to why they should keep trying. It was an easier way to live, I supposed. Looking a misery and believing it was the miserable solely responsible for it. Never aching at the sight. But I don’t think it’s a better one , I thought. Maybe it was unfair to blame the Lady of the Lake for passing down beliefs she seemed to genuinely hold to, but I wasn’t inclined to fairness when it came to the Ranger. She had her claws too deep in too many people I loved, and I could only think of the marks she’d left behind as wounds.

“I don’t suppose we have a destination in mind?” Akua mildly said.

She’d caught up to me while I was deep in thought. I could not help but notice from the corner of my eye that her dress of pale and gold was untouched by the mire we were passing through, or that she left no footprints. Not quite alive, not quite dead. As in so many things, Akua Sahelian was straddling the line.

“There’s a knot of drow further down the street,” I replied. “And I could only think of one reason so many would gather in one place.”

The shade kept to silence for a moment.

“She has been getting more rowdy, not less,” Akua finally said.

Even with the wind that had me wishing I’d wheedled a scarf out of the drow before leaving, her voice was perfectly heard. Couldn’t be sure whether that was just an oratory skill she’d picked up in Wolof or some kind of sorcerous trick, not that I cared all that much. Convenient was the word that came to mind more than anything else.

“We all cope in our own ways,” I replied. “It’ll run its course in due time.”

Indrani had come very close to dying, in the battle for Great Strycht. Not because of a Mighty, some glorious duel she would now be laughing about. When the Sisters had eviscerated my hold on Winter they’d flooded their city with frost. Archer had been out on the edges, when it happened, picking her targets and stirring up the pot. But she’d still been caught in the mess, and Winter unleashed was not something you just walked off. I suspected that in way the brush with death wasn’t what had unsettled her. She’d been riding that horse for years now, and enjoyed every moment of it. It had been that when death came knocking, the bow in her hand and the blades at her side couldn’t have done anything to stop it. The realization that sometimes a steady sword-arm wasn’t enough, even if you were clever and brave and burning with the need to leave a mark on the world.

“And if it doesn’t?” Akua said.

“Then we’ll deal with it,” I calmly replied. “All of us, together.”

The shade sighed.

“I don’t suppose that a reminder you’ve not spoken with our informant would be of any use before we get entangled in yet another drinking binge?” she asked.

I glanced at her amusedly.

“Are we pretending you can’t recite every answer they gave you verbatim?” I said.

“I can do the intonations as well,” Akua casually boasted.

“Of course you can,” I said, rolling my eyes.

I didn’t bother to knock when we got to the tavern, or at least what I assumed to be that. It was ratty enough it didn’t have a sign hung outside, though I did remember reading somewhere some parts of Procer had put a tax on that. I’d be in a better position to cast judgement on that if some Fairfax who’d seen drinking liquor as sinful and debasing behaviour hadn’t put up a bewildering array of punitive taxes on everything alcoholic not even a century ago. Still , I thought, eyeing the bare and windowless wall outside . At least the next king dismissed the measures. For all I knew, some prince out there was still lining his pockets with this sheer stupidity. The door was unlatched and the mangled carpet in front of it suffered the attentions of my boots for a moment before I entered. Calling what lay at the centre of the dirt floor a fire pit would have been overly generous, I thought, considering it wasn’t even lined with stone. The place was cramped in some fundamental way, from the narrow walls to the twisty tables. There was a room in the back which I deduced to be the owner’s sleeping place as well as the kitchen, insofar as this place could be said to have one of those.

Akua closed the door behind me, and already Indrani was waving us over. She’d shrugged off her coat and somehow divested herself of her mail, leaving her in dark green tunic and trousers whose tightness were quite flattering to her frame. I glanced back up and saw a smirk touching her lips, so she’d definitely caught that. Well , I admitted to myself, it wouldn’t be the first time. Or likely the last, honesty compelled me to admit. The return to mortality had left me with all sorts of hungers in need of sating, and I probably would have sought her out if she hadn’t done it first. I was only human after all, and even now that thought had a pleasurable ring to it. I shot a look around and found no trace of the tavern-keeper, turning to raise an eyebrow at Indrani.

“It got a little too much for the old man,” Archer languidly shrugged. “Got some of our minions to bring him somewhere for a lie-down.”

“You didn’t do anything, did you?” I asked, frowning even as I took off my gloves.

“Aside from empty a bottle in the short span of time since you’ve found this place,” Akua drily added.

My eyes found the cheap bottle of red she was referring to, along with her four still-full sisters lined up neatly to the side. One was already open. The shade passed me without a sound, sliding herself in a stool across the table Archer had claimed. I unclasped my cloak and followed suit, hesitating for the barest fraction of a moment before sitting on Akua’s side. The stool there struck me as marginally less likely to break if I moved around a bit.

“Just a bit too much agitation for him, I think,” Indrani told me. “What with the drow walking the surface again and the wicked minions of the Black Queen patronizing his humble establishment.”

Akua’s own comment got as a response a gesture that would have seen me spanked by the orphanage matron if I’d ever been caught doing it in public.

“Temporary eviction would have been necessary regardless,” the shade said. “If we are to discuss business on the premises, that is.”

“Aw, shit,” Archer complained, eyeing me balefully. “Really, Cat?”

“I’d rather do it in here with a fire and an open bottle than out there in the cold,” I shrugged.

“Fine,” she waved away. “But I’d like to lodge a formal protest.”

“Pass it along to my secretary,” I drily said. “Triplicate, standard form.”

Indrani turned her gaze to Akua.

“Sadly, as a mere spirit I cannot be handed such forms,” the shade blatantly lied. “They’d go right through me.”

“I liked you better before we taught you to be an ass,” Archer complained.

“No you didn’t,” Akua said, full lips quirking.

Indrani did not contradict her, and neither did I. After what had taken place in Great Strycht it was... difficult to distrust the Diabolist as much as I once had. I wouldn’t be taking my eye off her anytime soon, sure, but it was hard to forget that when we’d all reached the end Akua could have chosen to cut and run, and hadn’t. That meant something. Given that she was perhaps the most skilled liar I’d ever met, figuring out exactly what it meant was the trouble.

“So, someone folded,” I said, steering us towards safer waters. “How out of date is what they had to tell?”

“She has a relative in the monastery to the north she sees regularly,” Akua said. “And the sisters there are part of the general correspondence of the House of Light, regardless of their relative insignificance. The last direct letter is a month old, one could generously assume the news themselves two weeks older than that.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“That quick?” I said. “I thought we were in the middle of nowhere.”

“Two day’s ride away from the minor city of Rochelant, as it happens,” Diabolist corrected. “To the west. In a broader sense, we are skirting the eastern edge of the principality of Iserre.”

I drummed my fingers around the table, idly noting it kinda looked like someone had digested it for a bit before it’d ended up here.

“Closer to Callow than I thought we’d end up,” I said. “That brings up unpleasant questions, in retrospective.”

“Could just be that you traded Winter for crows, Cat,” Indrani said. “You and Zeze were screwing about with the stuff for everything, back when the Observatory was raised.”

“I was not given the opportunity to observe the arrangements in great detail,” Akua conceded pre-emptively. “However, I am intimately familiar with the artefact used at the centre of the array. It should not have been affected by our latest alliance and its...”

She paused, golden eyes taking me in.

“Metaphysical repercussions,” she settled on.

I snorted. How delicately put of her. I wasn’t truly beholden to the Sisters in any way that could be considered vassalage – that would have rather defeated the point of what I was supposed to be to them – but it remained a fact I’d thrown Winter under the horse and been handed a direct tap to what had become of the Night afterwards. The power was a lot more volatile, true, and tended to exhaust me physically in a way my mantle never had. On the other hand I’d stopped going raving mad whenever I reached a little too deep and I could enjoy hot soup again. In a lot of ways, I still believed I’d ended up on the better side of that evening.

“So why aren’t we able to reach Juniper, then?” I said.

“She’s finally succumbed to Hakram’s charms and the bedroom door is locked under pain of death,” Indrani suggested.

“Sabotage is a possibility,” Akua said, more practically. “The Empress will still have agents in Callow, and might prefer your communications crippled. As for why Sve Noc could not reach out directly-”

“I know, you’ve already said,” I waved away. “Masego warded that thing so ridiculously viciously not even they want to risk putting their fingers in it.”

I felt a well of pride at the fact that Hierophant had somehow put up defences around the Observatory so harsh even a pair of living goddesses were wary of attempting to force them, inconvenient as it was at the moment. And he’d done it while remaining within allocated funds, too, which was just another feather in his cap as far as I was concerned.

“Doesn’t seem like Malicia’s style,” I finally said. “If you’d said she was listening in I’d buy it, but breaking it entirely? She prefers appropriation to outright denial when she can swing it.”

“There are other possible culprits,” Akua said. “More with motive than means, but a few with both. The Dead King. The heroic segment of the Tenth Crusade. The royal court of Arcadia. Perhaps even the Wandering Bard.”

“That doesn’t really narrow it down, does it?” I grunted. “Still, I’d tend to scratch off the Bard from the list. Black’s pretty sure she can only meddle through Named, and those we sent back to Laure would know better than to get involved with her.”

“Ugh, you two are yammering on about who could ,” Indrani said, pouring herself another cup. “But that’s just means, and we got a lot of nasty surprises assuming we knew all about those. Maybe wonder about who would , instead? Whose kind of play is this?”

I eyed her cup with a raised eyebrow, and with a put-upon sigh she finally bothered to fill mine. And Akua’s, though I was still less than certain if drinking would actually do anything for the shade. I sipped at what turned out to be truly horrid concoction distantly related to wine while actually mulling over what Archer had said. Who would strike like this? The Grey Pilgrim came to mind. He had the brains for it, and the benefits would be obvious. With the Augur still telling Cordelia Hasenbach how the pieces were moving, we’d have lost our eye in the sky while the Tenth Crusade remained largely unaffected. Neshamah had the know-how, but it seemed a little light-handed for him. At the moment he’d have other cats to skin anyway: he should be hip-deep in angry Lycaonese right about now, and that lot didn’t know how to die easy. Assuming the Bard wasn’t involved, though assumptions were particularly dangerous when it came to that thing, that left the fae. And unless someone had fucked up real bad back home, they shouldn’t have a foothold in Creation that’d allow them to pull that kind of thing.

“The main benefit is confusion,” I finally said. “We’ll be moving blind out here, and unable to organize with Juniper.”

“Someone’s putting their bet on riding the chaos better than the rest,” Akua murmured.

A disquieting thought, considering for once it wasn’t me.

“The room’s pretty crowded this time,” Indrani said. “All it takes is a few punches thrown, and...”

She dropped her palm against the table, the clap ringing loudly in the empty tavern.

“In the spirit of that perspective,” Diabolist said, “perhaps one of the rumours I collected needs to be reassessed.”

I cocked an eyebrow invitingly while continuing to subject myself to the disaster Archer had obtained as table wine.

“We appear to be entering an all-out brawl between half the continent,” Akua said. “The legions Lord Black took into the Principate are currently in this very principality, and being pursued.”

My heartbeat quickened. No , I told myself. He’ll have a plan. He always does.

“By who?” Indrani asked, sounding surprised. “These are Conquest officers, you’re telling me Proceran scraps actually think they could win against them?”

“The armies of the Dominion of Levant,” the shade replied. “Though there’s been word of conscription in Salia, so they might not be alone.”

“That’s not half the continent,” I pointed out with a frown.

“The League of Free Cities appears to have joined the fray,” Diabolist said. “With a significant army, though the numbers put to it vary.”

I let out a low whistle.

“Are you telling me Tenerife has fallen?” I asked. “Because that’s not good news for us.”

The First Prince had sent twenty thousand soldiers to hold that border, and if the army had been slaughtered then that was twenty thousand men gone that’d have been rather useful up north. The drow exodus would strike like a hammer at the Dead King’s back when it arrived, but I knew better than to believe the Sisters had any chance of winning that war if the rest of Calernia didn’t get its shit together and move against him too.

“I cannot speak as to what happened to the army garrisoned there,” Akua said. “But I can tell you, however, that the League’s host is said to have emerged out of the Waning Woods without having given battle prior.”

I blinked in disbelief. Indrani, on the other hand, fell into a deep belly laugh. Gods, Vivienne had told me last year that the Tyrant of Helike had been sending agents into the region. Still, I’d assumed it was as way to infiltrate the heartlands of the Principate. Not march an army through the place.

“You’re actually serious, Shadehelian?” Archer got out, chin still quivering. “Someone was mad enough to take a bunch of soldiers through that?”

“Reportedly,” Akua said, unmoved by the hilarity. “One can only wonder at the losses taken. Regardless, the point of interest is that they emerged in Iserre specifically. And they seem intent on giving battle now.”

“That’s going to get messy,” I said, rapping my knuckles against the wood. “Unless Hakram and Vivienne birthed a diplomatic miracle while we were in the Everdark, which I’m not counting on. I really don’t want to start a war with the League.”

“And it ties in to Indrani’s earlier words,” Diabolist said. “There is another who prizes chaos as you do.”

My lips thinned.

“The Tyrant of Helike,” I said.

She nodded slowly.

“While aside from mounting confusion I can ascribe no direct benefit to such a measure being taken-”

“- for an old school madman like him, making everything messier might be benefit enough,” I grimly finished. “Shit. I don’t like having an army on the field without knowing where we stand with them.”

“Kind of the point, isn’t it?” Indrani shrugged.

I glanced at her, noticing we were now on the third bottle even though neither I nor Akua had finished our cups.

“The uncertainty, I mean,” Archer said. “It’s kind of like having a stranger pointing a crossbow at you while you’re in a swordfight. Every time they twitch your hackles go up, and the tension will grow until someone does something real stupid to get out of the situation.”

Akua’s position in her seat shifted by the barest amount. She was, I suspected, actually impressed. Now and then it was good to have a reminder that Indrani was a lot sharper than she liked to let on.

“So whoever’s leading that host is fucking with every other commander on the field just by being there,” I mused. “That does sound like the Tyrant from the reports. We sure the Hierarch is still alive? He seemed a lot more interested in telling me to hold elections than invading anyone.”

“Our informant is simply a relative, and the monastery rather minor,” Akua said. “There was only so much to be learned. I suspect the appointed ruler of Rochelant will be better informed.”

That still meant at least three days – drow moved fast, but not as fast as horses – of walking around Iserre with no godsdamned idea of what was going on around us. I didn’t enjoy the notion, but then I didn’t really have a better path to offer. Asking the Sisters to force the wards on the Observatory, assuming I could even talk them into it, was a lot more likely to result in that place collapsing or someone losing a finger than it was in an elightening conversation.

“Then that’s where we’re headed,” I said. “I’ll hash out the details with General Rumena. Indrani, you good to walk?”

“Am I ever not?” she drawled.

“You’d better be,” I warned. “Because I’m not staying in this town a moment longer than necessary. We all know what happens to the drow at dawn, I’m not losing moonlight I don’t have to.”

Archer smirked.

“Would you like to race me just in case, Cat?” she said.

I snorted.

“Please,” I said. “You’re pretty fast, but you can’t outrun a gate.”

I pushed back the chair and rose to my feet.

“Catherine,” Akua said quietly.

I glanced at her.

“You can come, I suppose,” I said. “Though why you’d want to talk with the crabby old bastard is beyond me.”

“Catherine,” Akua Sahelian gently said. “Sit down.”

My eyes narrowed, and I brushed back a lock of hair that somehow fallen free.

“There’s more,” I said.

“Cat, sit down,” Indrani said. “She wouldn’t ask without a reason.”

I felt a flicker of surprise at Archer’s comment, though maybe I shouldn’t have. I’d told her everything that had happened in Great Strycht, and the barbs she still traded with Akua had a lot less bite to them than they used to. Gingerly I sat back down, keeping the weight off my bad leg.

“Marshal Grem One-Eye is in command of the retreating Legions,” the shade said. “The Black Knight is believed to be dead.”

I picked up my gloves, fingers closing around the leather.

“So?” I said. “All that means is that some part of whatever the Hells he’s after involves people thinking that.”

“Not unless he was willing to sacrifice a full Legion detachment for that purpose,” Akua said.

The leather stared creaking and I looked back at my hands, finding them squeezing the gloves tight.

“Was a body shown?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Then he’s not dead,” I flatly said. “And someone is about to have a very bad day.”

“Catherine, the possibility has to be entertained,” she slowly said. “It would change the situation significantly.”

“It changes nothing. Because he’s not fucking dead ,” I snarled. “I’ll take his damned head off for not warning me he’d pull this, but he’s not going to get killed by some pissant hero in the middle of nowhere.”

The shade opened her mouth again, but Indrani raised a hand.

“Akua,” she said. “Best let that one go.”

She was humouring me, I realized. It stung that Archer of all people, who besides myself and Masego likely knew the most about my teacher, would so casually write him off. Angrily I pulled on my gloves.

“Finish your drinks,” I coldly said. “We’ll begin the march for Rochelant within the hour.”

Chapter 3: Orison

“My son, I offer you the greatest gift a ruler can give another: a widely reviled predecessor.”
– Extract from the infamous ‘Sensible Testament’ of Basilea Chrysanthe of Nicae

I’d used to love winter in Laure, as a child.

Sure, once in a while charcoal and firewood prices went up so the matron had to cut corners but as a rule I’d gotten to enjoy the snow in the streets while having a warm house awaiting me after. It took mere hours for the blanket of pale to turn to mush or soiled mess, but before time ran out there’d been a lot of fun to be had. We’d made a fort in the steps of the broken old hatcher’s house, once, and pitched snowballs at everyone passing for the better part of an afternoon. It’d ended when we’d accidentally caught some Taghreb legion mage instead of a Liessen merchant. Luckily enough the man had been more amused than angered, and instead of chewing us out he’d used sorcery to lift half the damned fort and dump it back on our heads. We’d all fled shrieking into the streets, soaked in snow and red-faced, while he laughed loudly. Gods, how old had I been? Seven, eight? I barely remembered anything from back then, nowadays, but that one memory of the sunny winter afternoon might as well have been seared into my eyes. The matron had remonstrated us pretty roughly for coming back to the orphanage drenched, but I was pretty sure she’d been hiding a smile.

It’d taken me a long time to realized how lucky I’d been, getting a childhood like that. Sure we had lessons and curfews and the occasional lean week, but Callowan orphanages had been funded by the Tower. The coin had kept coming, and we’d been protected in some abstract away. Everyone had known that the orphanages were the Black Knight’s own notion, and the shadow cast by my teacher’s displeasure had been as a giant’s back then. It’d been easier, hadn’t it? When it all seemed so large and simple, and all you had to do to change things was climb to the top. Foe and friend, victory and defeat. I’d picked up the knife that night believing myself clever enough to see through the pretence of black and white, but that’d just been scratching the surface. Sometimes thing happened that were too complicated, too far-reaching, to be called something as clear-cut as a victory or a defeat. Sometimes you could hate the people you most needed to clasp hands with and love those that would be most dangerous to your heart’s desire. My eyes flicked to a tall silhouette in the distance, treading the snow without a trace. She had her back to me, so there would be no glimpse of golden eyes, but there was no mistaking her for anyone else.

Sometimes you could grow fond of someone even if you couldn’t forgive them and never would.

I let out a steamy breath, watching the vapour rise up. That had me itching for my pipe, though I was equally reluctant to take off my gloves and reach under my cloak to indulge in my little vice. It was a cold night out, and it would be hours yet before dawn rose. I could have drawn on the Night to warm my bones, or more accurately chase away the cold, but some part of me twistedly enjoyed feeling the bite. Not so long ago it would have been nothing to be but another faded colour, another not-sensation washing up against the thing passing for my body. The moon above us was shrouded by the clouds, but light filtered through. Enough that I saw the crows streak across the darkness, feathered frames of Night batting their wings in utter silence. I dipped a finger into the power the Sisters had opened to me, sharpening my eyesight for a heartbeat, and caught a glimpse of crimson on the talons the pair. They’d killed tonight, then. If all they require for their altar is the occasional rabbit, I can make my peace with that. Their descent was almost a dive, but they failed to make me stumble when they landed on my shoulders. They’d kept back their talons, and made of Night as they were they weighed near nothing unless they particularly wished to. I tightened my cloak around my shoulders and cast a meaningful glance at the bevy of drow escorting me. The warriors bowed low and scattered across the snowy landscape.

“Rochelant,” Komena said, a strangely human voice leaving her crow’s throat.

“There will be blood,” Andronike said.

Wasn’t there always? Stainless victories were not in my nature.

“As little as possible,” I said. “We come for knowledge, not conquest.”

Crow-Komena’s laughter sounded like cawing, which we both knew she was doing on purpose.

“So speaks the roving catastrophe,” Andronike said.

I could have gone pithy in reply to that, but my mood had gone sour after the conversation in the tavern and the march in the cold had done nothing to improve it. I simply grunted back wordlessly.

“Fickle thing,” Komena chided. “Is this tossing of insults not what you told us to practice? Why do you now shy away?”

“I stand by what I said,” I replied. “You want to stay grounded? Talk with people in a way that isn’t prayer or orders. My friends were my anchor when I was deep in Winter.”

“Friendship,” Andronike said, sounding somewhat skeptical. “A human concept, not of the Firstborn. Kinship in interests is ever passing.”

“Yeah, I’m not exactly holding my breath you two starting to feel all warm and fuzzy inside,” I sighed. “This isn’t about that.”

“Imprecise,” Komena noted. “Elaborate.”

“Banter’s informal,” I said. “It puts you on equal footing with the other person, if only for the duration of that exchange. And for you two it’s even more important, because to be hallway decent at it there’s a lot of things you have to pick up on: the situation, the timing, what lines you can and can’t cross. It forces you to think like a person while you do it.”

“It will not change what we are,” Andronike said.

“None of us can do that,” I replied. “What we can do is make sure you still understand what a mortal is. That you don’t become so utterly removed from reality you march yourself off the cliff.”

There was a long moment of silence broken only by my boots creasing the snow.

“You are being sexually promiscuous with your subordinate, which is humorous for unclear reasons,” Komena tried.

I closed my eyes and counted to five. At least she’s trying , I told myself.

“We’ll, uh, keep working on that,” I muttered.

I flicked a glance at crow-Andronike, but she did not have another drow attempt at humour to throw my way. Well, either that my reaction to her sister had scared her off. The crow-shaped sliver of goddess turned towards me in indignation, much to my amusement. Yes, clearly she was beyond such petty feelings. No, I wasn’t thinking that just to appease her. I muffled my chuckle with my gloves. The slight ebb upwards in my mood disappeared the moment the distraction ended. I was in the dark, in more ways than one. And some of the things hidden from my view mattered more to me than others. I hesitated, fingers clenching and unclenching.

“Ask,” Andronike said.

“Since you ate Winter,” I said. “Your... abilities have grown.”

“Beyond your understanding,” Komena said. “Though that is not a high wall to clear.”

That’d actually been pretty decent, I noted. Insults came much easier to her than humour, which really wasn’t much of a surprise. I cleared my throat.

“Could you find out if someone is dead or not?” I quietly asked.

“Yes,” crow-Andronike said.

Ah, but would they?

“No,” crow-Komena said.

“I know there’d be risks,” I said.

“Of which you warned us yourself,” Andronike said.

“If you start swinging your apotheosis around on the surface, something a lot older and meaner is bound to start swinging back. That story doesn’t end well for you,” Komena said, pitching her voice in an eerily perfect mimicry of mine.

The leather gloves crinkled as I closed them into a fist.

“There are strategic reasons why the information would be important,” I said.

“Not enough to warrant the possibility of provoking an entity our match,” crow-Andronike said. “You know this.”

“Sentiment is unseemly,” crow-Komena said.

“Don’t do that,” I sharply said.

They stilled for a moment. They were not used, I thought, to being spoken to in this way. And we all knew that the part of their power they had sent with me was enough that they could kill me if they so wished – my best defence against it, after all, had been granted to me by their favour. But I would not hold my tongue. That was the whole point of my being named their herald, the First Under the Night: having someone that hadn’t been raised to worship them to argue with them, force them to reconsider what they believed. They might not always agree with me, and frequently did not. But entirely separate from our military alliance and the diplomatic authority they had granted me was the real foundation of our accord. A cat may look at a king , the old Callowan saying went. Though the unfortunate pun had me gritting my teeth, it was a decent way of putting it. It was my damned purpose to disagree with them without sweetening my words.

“There’s nothing wrong with feeling things,” I said. “You take that out and all you view is skewed. They’re not the only thing to take into consideration, often not even the most important, but they do matter. Logic alone leads you to ugly ends because you’re dealing with people, not statues. If you remove that element just to feel clear-sighted and superior, you’re going to shoot yourself in the foot repeatedly.”

“Your tone,” Andronike said.

“Is exactly what it should be,” I replied, unflinching. “If you are right and correct in your own view, make your argument. If all you can quibble about is my phrasing, maybe you should be thinking instead of trying to chide me.”

That didn’t please them, but then it wasn’t supposed to.

“You provided what you promised,” crow-Komena conceded. “Yet the refusal remains. Employ other means.”

I would, the moment I could. There was a storm taking shape in Iserre and I suspected Black would have a better idea than most of what it was really about. He was the only person I trusted who’d ever spoken with both the Hierarch and the Tyrant of Helike, strange as the nature of that trust could be. I trust people to act according to their nature , Malicia had once said. A Wasteland way of thinking, but there was truth to it. I remained alone with the crows-that-were-not-crows on the long march, buried in silence until dawn came.

—

“It is a dangerous weakness,” Akua said. “Though I suppose inevitable in some ways. Power never comes without a cost.”

The sun had begun passing the horizon, and with the light of morning something like a shiver had passed through fifty thousand drow. Tents had been hastily raised and my host hid away under them before dawn even finished. The sentinels forced to remain out in the sun did so after boiling water to make herbal concoctions that would keep the awake through the sudden wave of tiredness. Dawn, I had learned, was when Sve Noc’s power ebbed lowest. I would have assumed noon to be it, but Akua had offered a complicated explanation as to why that was not the case I’d failed to understand twice before I got her to simplify it into something comprehensible: dawn was the death of the night. As a metaphysical concept, that had more weight than the rest. For some reason that apparently required me to have read a lot of books I definitely had not before it became sound and evident logic. The tent she was keeping me company under was open at the font, but the thick linen walls did cut away at the worst of the wind nicely. It made the wait tolerable, though I was actually debating taking a nap.

“This is an inconvenient one,” I said.

“Surprisingly light,” Diabolist retorted. “They are still physically able, after all. Simple temporarily bereft of their access to the Night.”

“They’ll also be out like a light for a few hours,” I grunted. “That’s a recipe for a morning attack and you know it.”

The transition from night to dawn was taxing on drow bodies in a way that led to exhaustion, and effectively prevented the expeditionary force from being truly fighting fit for at least three to four hours. And they’d be tired for the rest of the day as well as being fragile little mortals if I didn’t leave them sleeping a little longer than that, though at least that I could push later in the day. It wasn’t like other armies didn’t have to sleep, of course. But having a fixed time for that was a liability, and there would be no keeping that under wraps forever. The moment we began operating near other armies, there’d be outriders and scouts on us at all times and much as I liked to insult Proceran royalty they were not above basic pattern recognition.

“Hence why joining forces with the Legions of Terror remains a priority,” Akua said. “Fifty thousand warriors led by Mighty able to operate flawless in the dark are nothing to scoff at, and a fortified camp held by legionaries would allow us to exploit that advantage relentlessly.”

“Until we have allies, it makes occupation of anything concrete difficult,” I reminded her. “Taking something at night will be easy enough. Holding it through the day another story.”

“Fortunate, then, that occupation is not our intent,” Akua serenely replied.

That and I still had a few cards to play if things got bad, though heroic presence would make the whole matter chancy. They tended to do that, as a rule. At least the Dead King should keeping a good chunk of them out of my hair for the foreseeable future. I cast a look back at my bed, which was essentially a pile of covers and inexplicably flat cushions, and finally gave up the notion of a lie-in. Maybe after I worked out some of the tension in my body. I rose with a grunt, curtly refusing Akua offered helping hand, and buckled my sheath back onto my belt.

“Who has the watch again?” I asked the shade.

“Lord Ivah,” she replied.

Ivah, huh. It’d been a while since we’d had a proper chat. Unlike some of the Peerage, who seemed discomforted by how easily they still obeyed me and so made themselves scarce, my old guide had remained at hand. Unfortunately it was also a pathfinder of some talent, and so often sent out ahead of the expeditionary army. Might as well take the occasion today, I didn’t know how long it would be until the next. Though was I was higher than General Rumena in the pecking order of the Empire Ever Dark, it was in charge of leading the expedition. While I could give orders and dismiss its own, the details of the duty rosters remained at its discretion. I could have intervened, but was reluctant to do as much without a better reason than liking having Ivah around. Akua followed me out of the tent and onto the camp wordlessly. After years of commanding legionaries, the sight of the mess around us had me wincing on the inside. The layout of this place was a bloody maze, all haphazard tents with no real thought given to quick deployment and no chance of a bloody palisade being raised. Rumena wasn’t a fool, so it’d been pretty thorough about putting sentinels in place during our vulnerable ours, but it’d admitted to me in private that it could not turn a gaggle of tribal sigils into the kind of army the Empire Ever Dark had once fielded with less than a month before the campaign began.

Assembling a functioning chain of command had been miracle enough, in my opinion, which should count for quite a bit considering I was now the foremost priestess of an entire race.

“Have you considered using a staff?” Akua suddenly asked.

She’d pulled slightly ahead of me, I only then noticed. I could go quicker, in all honesty, but I was in no real hurry and this pace was most comfortable.

“My limp’s not that bad,” I shrugged.

“It pains you,” the shade frowned.

“When it loses its novelty I’ll get herbs for that,” I replied. “That’s what my pipe was for in the first place.”

We turned around a cluster of tents, the smallness of the gap rather irritating to my eyes. She resumed the line of conversation afterwards.

“Unnecessary suffering is exactly that,” Akua said.

“I’m still fighting fit,” I said with irritation. “And if I need a little nimbleness, I’ll call on the Night to make it withdraw for a bit. I got the juice directly from Sve Noc, daylight won’t stop me.”

“It does significantly weaken you,” Diabolist retorted.

I rolled my eyes. So the kind of power I could call on went from terrifying to merely appalling after dawn. It was still more than I’d ever had to work with as the Squire by an almost absurd margin.

“Yet that was not my meaning,” Akua mildly continued. “I worry more about what embracing this implies of your mindset.”

I watched her from the corner of my eye, and she did not meet my gaze. Worry, huh. The words she chose were never an accident.

“Sometimes it’s a good thing,” I said. “To remember what it feels like for the people who don’t make pacts with gods.”

“I had thought you estranged with contrition, dearest,” she said, tone prickly.

“I won’t wallow,” I flatly replied. “But I won’t lose sight of it twice either. A lot of people are going to bleed before this is over, Akua.”

I brought up my fingers to block the sun from my eyes, feeling the shade studying me.

“Now and then it’s worth the sting to feel a part of what you’re going to dole out,” I finished quietly. “It’s be a kinder world, if we were all made to remember that.”

“Kindness,” Diabolist mused.

“Not a Praesi favourite, I know,” I drily said.

Not much grounds left to cover before we reached the edge of the camp. Already we were passing drow so wrapped up in cloth the only seen could be seen was their eyes, though those were sharp and peering at the horizon. Ivah should be somewhere within the small thicket of bare trees I could see ahead, by the feel of the presences in the Night. Even when bereft of the power, they still left an impression. I slowed when I realized Akua had stopped. She was looking at me with narrowed eyes. Ah. Irritated her, had I?

“Is that what you think?” she said.

Not irritation, I thought. Disappointment. Fancy that.

“Are you sure, Akua Sahelian,” I said softly, “that you want to get in an argument with me about the moral fabric of the Wasteland?”

“I had a great-uncle,” she said. “By the name of Thandiwe.”

My eyebrow rose.

“Fascinating,” I said.

“I found him to be, as a child,” Akua casually admitted. “He was, after all, stricken from family records.”

“Maybe he used the wrong fork during the cannibalism ritual,” I suggested.

Much as I disliked to admit, though, she had my attention.

“My mother would not speak of,” she said, “and so naturally I pursued the matter secretly.”

A half-smile quirked her lips.

“He was a sorcerer of great promise,” she said. “As is custom among our line, as a boy he was brought to the deepest part of the Maze of Kilns. There he was made to sacrifice one dear to him, and for months after remained silent.”

So it wasn’t just you , I thought. Had Tasia Sahelian been made to do the same by her own mother, I wondered? How far back did the wounding of their own children go, for it to have earned the name of tradition?

“The lesson was believed to have been taught,” Akua said. “And it was. One the eve of his sixteenth year, Thandiwe Sahelian stole several tomes and artefacts from the family vaults and fled to Mercantis, where he pawned them for a small fortune he used to make a home further south in Nicae.”

I snorted.

“I imagine that went over less than pleasantly in Wolof,” I said.

“Rage is an apt description,” she mused. “Which only worsened when he began to thrive after entering some sort of merchant consortium and became comfortably wealthy even by Praesi standards. Enough to seek the protection of the Basileus, which the Empire sought favourable trade terms with in those days.”

“Clever, then,” I said. “Though I’m wondering as to your point. The man sounds decent enough, but he left Praes.”

Akua inclined her head.

“And yet he was also a Sahelian,” she said, and even now there was an undertone of pride when she spoke the name. “The blood of the original murder, unhallowed from the cradle. I am told that he kept to the Gods Below even on that foreign shore.”

“He grew past his roots,” I said.

And I’m not so sure you have , I thought. She looked up at the morning sun, her silhouette wreathed in light for a heartbeat, and there was something about her smile that unsettled me.

“You have seen the worst of us,” the shade said. “And through that knowing taken our measure. But there is more, Catherine. We are not beyond kindness, not even the highborn. If even a Sahelian can have the taste for peace, there is yet something left to be kindled.”

“If you want to be known by more than the ugliest parts of you,” I said, “perhaps you should show them to the rest of the world. Maybe the capacity is there, Akua, but we don’t judge by capacity. It’s the choices you make that matter.”

“Ah,” she murmured. “And how many of those do we really have, in the end?”

One hundred thousand souls , I thought. That was a choice. It’s the weight on the balance by which you will be judged, and what could possibly even the scales? I cleared my throat, uncomfortable the lingering silence.

“Your great-uncle,” I said. “What happened to him, after?”

Golden eyes met mine.

“The old Basileus died. His successor refused the Empire’s terms outright,” she said. “And so my grandfather, a noted alchemist, took to his workshop. If he is so ashamed of his blood, I am told he said, let us relieve him of it.”

Neither of us blinked.

“Thandiwe Sahelian sweated out every drop of blood in his body within the year,” Akua said.

We finished the rest of the walk in silence.

Chapter 4: Reconnoiter

“I see how it is. We agree to single combat and of course you can still use your enchanted sword, but I bring a single massive flying fortress and suddenly it’s ‘treachery’ and ‘against the spirit of the agreement’.”
– Dread Emperor Perfidious

Ivah wore my colours painted on its face, as did the drow around it.

Silver on purple, a tree with twin incomplete circles under the branches. The Lord of Silent Steps – though the power of that title had waned in weight with the devouring of Winter itself – still stood tall and blade-thin, pale grey features split by vivid eyes that split the difference between silver and blue. The long overcoat and scarf it wore was flattering to its frame, though the face still remained so profoundly inhuman in some ways I could not help but find it unsettling. The drow had been made from a fundamentally different mold than humans, for all the superficial similarities. The colours the first member of my Peerage wore were unsettling in a different way, though, a reminder that as far as the Empire Ever Dark was concerned I still remained the ruler of the Losara Sigil and a member in good standing of the Sisters-blessed cabal making up the southern expedition. That I had left Ivah to rule and refrained from exercising that theoretical authority since we’d left the Everdark seemed to matter little in the eyes of the Firstborn. There seemed to be an assumption that as First Under the Night I simply found it beneath me to meddle too deeply in earthly affairs. The drow knelt when Akua and I arrived, conversation having died out before we even entered the thicket of trees.

“Well, you look slightly less pissy than before,” Archer announced.

I squinted at my friend in confusion.

“Why are you hanging upside down?” I asked.

Indrani was currently hanging off a branch by the mere edge of her boots, scarf and coat rumpled by the merciless grasp of gravity. None of the drow seemed to think there was anything unusual about this, a sure sign they’d been subjected to her presence for much too long.

“It helps me think,” Archer sagely replied.

I flicked a glance at the drow and they rose back to their feet.

“You don’t have to pretend she’s funny, you know,” I told them. “Deep down, she also knows that she isn’t.”

“It is not my place to comment on the wisdom of Mighty Archer,” Ivah replied.

There was a beat.

“Should it be granted to me,” the Lord of Silent Steps added.

I smothered a grin. Taking well-deserved potshots at Indrani was the sole common ground between all peoples of Calernia. I’d bet even the Dead King would yank her chain if given the opportunity. Archer let out a strangled noise of protest, trying to swat at the drow’s head, but instead got tangled in her own coat and began swinging precariously. We all pretended not to see Akua whisper something under her breath just before the branch Indrani was hanging off of suddenly broke and she fell with a yelp.

“All quiet this morning, I take it?” I asked Ivah.

I kept my eyes on it, though even through this careful precaution I could not help but hear Indrani muttering imprecations in half a dozen different languages. For a heartbeat I missed Masego so vividly my heart twanged. It should have been him, forcing her down the tree after she pulled at his metaphorical pigtails one time too many. I hid the sudden shift in my mood as best I could, forcing a smile as I faced Ivah.

“We appear to be alone in the region,” the drow acknowledged. “No runner left from Trousseau after we departed, and so one might presume our presence is still currently unknown.”

With the Sisters swatting aside everything remotely like scrying headed in our direction, it might not be wrong. I wouldn’t presume, though. Not with Above having so much skin in this race, and Choirs having grown so loose-lipped over the last few years.

“We’ll see,” I replied. “It’d be and advantage to remain in the woodworks until we strike, but rumours could have a use as well. It’ll depend on where the others armies are relative to us.”

I’d rather avoid a battle in Iserre if I could, given that ever corpse made here was a warm body that couldn’t be thrown at the Dead King, but given some of the players involved I might not have much of a choice about it. I fully intended on evacuating the Legions of Terror that my teacher had led into Procer, after all. Which I imagined would be a less than popular notion with some people, given that they’d been merrily burning their way through the heartlands of the Principate until recently.

“Cat,” Archer said.

I rolled my eyes, continuing to face Ivah.

“You’ve seen the lay of the land on the way to Rochelant,” I said. “Will it by bloody ice and snow all the way?”

“ Cat ,” Archer repeated, and this time her tone commanded my attention.

I pivoted slightly only to realize she wasn’t even looking at me. Her eyes were peeled on the horizon, to the south. I couldn’t see anything there, but then I was no longer Named. That hardly meant I was without tricks, though. I pulled at the Night, untangling a cool thread and sinking it into my eyes. It took a few blinks to adjust, but after that I could see just as well as Archer. I let out a breath of surprise when I caught sight of what she had. Riders , I thought. Nine of them, on tall grey horses with long manes and tails. The soldiers on them were in light armour, though sets swaddled in thick furs and heavy cloth hats. Those were spears at the side, I noted, not lances. And they had blades but no shields.

“Akua?” I said.

“Levantine,” Diabolist replied. “Though without colours visible I cannot not tell you from which region.”

“Well now,” I murmured. “Isn’t that interesting.”

The armies of the Dominion of Levant should be making their way through southern and central Iserre right about now, if the rumours were to be believed. Hot on the heels of Marshal Grem’s legions. So what were outriders doing this far out to the east of the principality? They were still about a mile and a half out, but these were flat plains so the chance they hadn’t seen the massive army of fifty thousand drow encamped was negligible. They were riding closer, though. Most likely trying to get a read on whose camp this was, which would be difficult to make out from that far out.

“I have questions for them,” I said.

I felt Indrani’s smile without needing to look at her.

“Thought you might,” she said.

I cocked my head to the side, still studying them. With the sun out and the imprecisions inherent to a working at that distance, trapping them would carry risks. Best to tinker with the odds a bit first.

“Archer,” I said. “Kill the horses.”

A good longbow, the kind the Deoraithe used, could have a range of about four hundred yards. Effective killing range should be about half that. Legion-issue crank crossbows, the finest on the continent, could reach three hundred and fifty yards and could be expected to score kills at around one hundred and fifty. I had just casually asked Indrani to kill nine horses in motion at over ten times that distance, and the grin on her face told me she did not doubt for a moment she could do it. I watched with fascination as Archer strung the almost comically large longbow she usually kept on her back. It’d been crafted in the Waning Woods, I knew, from some sort of magical tree. Then additional enchantments had been laid on it. Back in the old days, Nauk had once tried to draw the string back and nearly broken his arm trying. That the most physically powerful mundane orc I’d ever met couldn’t even get that string to move an inch told me everything I needed to know about the absurd amount of tension there was to her bow.

The thing was, I thought as I watched her work, was that most of this was Indrani. Oh, I felt the whisper of power than was an aspect invoked. See . But that just allowed Archer to wield the kind of eyesight and foresight the woman who’d taught her to shoot would have by simple virtue of her elven blood. The strength to pull the string came in part from her Name, which up close and personal allowed to he slug it out with the likes of Adjutant and titled fae. But if Hakram, or I for that matter, had been granted the exact same strength and sight we wouldn’t have been able to make those shots. The skills, the part that couldn’t be replicated? That was all Indrani. Years upon years of nocking and releasing until her fingers bled, until the movements became such a natural part of her there no longer needed to be thought involved. Indrani could and had made a bloody mess of most everything that came up to her when she had her longknives in hand. But it was when she had that bow in her hand that something about her thrummed , that it all came together and I remembered that Archer was more than just a name.

It was Name, and she held it for a reason.

Eyes fixed ahead, she breathed out and like poetry in motion she drew and released. Not a single movement wasted, not a single pause. It was almost hypnotic to watch, like waves on the sea – there was no pause or separation to any of the process. Nine arrows flew, a smirk tugged at her lips and before the projectiles even reached their apex I reached for the Night. My eyes were on the Levantines and I felt talons dig into my shoulders, the Sisters with me even if their crow-forms were not. Whispers sounding in my ear, I held my will into shape and forced the Night to match it. And then waited, watching the riders as the arrows struck home. The first hit between the eyes of the lead horse, sinking straight into the skull and killing it instantly. The ninth arrow went straight through the eye of the horse even as the rider began to realize its companions had been attacked. For every arrow to claim a kill had taken perhaps a single heartbeat, from beginning to end.

Sometimes I forgot how terrifying the people at my side really were.

“And now, for the next trick,” I said.

Under the Levantines the ground turned to ink-like darkness, growing from a single small mark to a broad circle. The Sisters held my hand, guiding the needle as I threaded it through the fabric of Creation, and when the gate opened every one of the outriders fell through it. If they’d still been on their horses, alert instead of trying not to be crushed by their own fallen mounts, the process might have been slow enough for them to flee it. Night had won over Winter, in the end, and so dawn had its costs. As it was, though? I let the Sisters guide my hand once more and another gate bloomed in front of our group. Seven heartbeats later, nine riders and their dead horses tumbled through. One was screaming in terror at the fall through the sky of Arcadia he had just escaped, though that ended when he felt an obsidian spear-tip pressing against his throat. He swallowed loudly as my sigil surrounded the lot of them.

“Good morning,” I smiled brightly. “I thought we might have a little chat, just you and me and all these heavily armed people surrounding you.”

My gaze swept across the soldiers, most of which were still in shock. Some had pulled muscles or broken limbs on arrival, the poor fucker to the rightmost having his horse right over his leg. Yeah, that was shattered for sure. It was only when I saw the uncomprehending gazes taking me in that I realized the slight strategic mistake I had not accounted for. I looked at Indrani and Akua.

“I don’t suppose either of you speaks any of the Levantine languages?” I grimaced.

Twin shakes of the head. So no Lunara, Ceseo and what was the third one again? Couldn’t remember at the moment. Well, it hardly mattered anyway. I couldn’t speak or understand any of them. I’d been meaning to get around to learning some tradertalk, which tended to be understood everywhere in southern Calernia, but I’d had higher priorities as of late.

“What I understand of Lunara is insufficient, but outriders sent to operate in the Principate’s heartlands should have at least one individual fluent in a Proceran tongue,” Akua pointed out. “If only to speak with the local inhabitants. I have some knowledge of tradertalk that could be of use, in the unlikely event this is not true.”

My eyebrow rose. Made sense, and worth a shot regardless.

“Any of you speak Chantant?” I asked in said tongue.

“Who the fuck are you people?” a middle-aged mustachioed man growled back.

It was a very impressive mustache, I mentally conceded. It was refusing to be cowed by the scarf meant to cover it, defiantly peeking out over the edge.

“And there were go,” I smiled, shifting to Crepuscular. “Ivah, go wake up General Rumena if it’s asleep and bring it back here. We appear to have gotten our hands on fresh intelligence.”

“By your will, Losara Queen,” my Lord of Silent Steps bowed.

I nodded back fondly, watching it move out swiftly to carry my orders. I turned back to the Levantines.

“Surrender your weapons,” I said, back on Chantant. “And remain seated on the ground. You are now joint prisoners of the Empire Ever Dark and the Kingdom of Callow.”

That’d been a calculated move. I hadn’t truly needed to bring Callow into it, or mention the freshly revived name of the ancient drow empire – which, given that the region was still known as the Everdark, meant didn’t take any real brilliance to be able to put together the identity of the grey-skinned warriors surrounding the prisoners. It told me something useful, though: everyone who stilled or went pale could understand the language I was speaking. Out of the nine, four gave a visible reaction. One did not, save for moving back to learn against a tree, but the calculating look in his eyes told me he’d not missed a thing. This one’s already thinking of how to get out of this mess , I decided. There were no visible marks of rank on any of them, but I’d guess he was an officer. Clever sorts could be useful, if inclined to talk, but they could also screw up an interrogation pretty badly if allowed to speak up. Best to separate these before we got into it.

“You’re the Black Queen,” the maybe-officer suddenly said.

In Chantant, too. Interesting.

“In the flesh,” I replied, the irony known to few quirking my lips.

The statement had been the offered opening of a conversation, if I was reading this right, but I remained disinclined to allow the prisoners to know what the others had and had not said. People were always more inclined to fold if they believed someone already had.

“Bring them back to camp after taking the weapons,” I ordered the drow. “Leave the one who just spoke behind.”

I cleared my throat before addressing the Levantines.

“You were told to surrender your weapons,” I said. “They will now be collected. Resist and you will be subjected to force. Obey and you will be treated fairly. I will not warn you twice.”

They were soldiers, I thought, but also sworn to a crusade. A warning wouldn’t be enough for all of them. One of the outriders tried to reach for his scabbard and got a spear through the palm for it, which had another screaming and struggling until one my warriors decked him in the mouth. Maybe-officer did not resist. I let the drow of my sigil escort the prisoners without a look and gestured at those who remained to step back. It was sunny morning out, the air was crisp and I met the gaze of the Levantine prisoner without blinking.

“Name, rank?” I asked.

“Wasim of Tartessos. I am second in this band,” he replied.

Tartessos was... the second northernmost city in Levant, if I remembered correctly, which was for some inexplicable reason built on the edge of the Brocelian Forest. I’d read in some history that the people from there were known to be hardy and ruthless, which considering the boiling cauldron of beasts they lived next to only made sense. I heard Archer unstring her bow before moving to lean against a tree, likely already starting to get bored and paying only the barest necessary attention to this. Diabolist, though, had been studying this Wasim the whole time in silence. I could trust her to pick on anything I’d miss.

“You are an outrider,” I said. “In the service of the Dominion?”

“I gave oath to the Lord of Malaga when there was a call to arms,” Wasim said. “By the will of the Holy Seljun, he holds command of half the forces of Levant.”

“Implying there is no unified command for the armies of the Dominion,” Akua noted in Crepuscular. “That could be of use. Levantine nobility rules its lands with only the barest homage paid to their Seljun, so their leaders might chafe at taking orders from anyone else.”

I inclined my head in acknowledgement, never taking my eyes off the prisoner.

“Where are the Lord of Malaga and his army, at the moment?” I asked.

How much are you really willing to tell me when I’ve made no threat?

“Marching for the capital of Iserre,” he replied.

“Lying,” Diabolist said.

I sighed.

“And we were doing so well, until that,” I said. “You struck me as a clever man, Wasim of Tartessos.”

I flicked my wrist at Archer. A heartbeat later a longknife was buried up to the hilt into the tree Wasim was lying back against. Less than an inch away from his jugular. I met his eyes squarely.

“Clever men don’t make the same mistake twice, do they?” I asked.

The soldier swallowed loudly.

“They do not,” he hastily agreed.

“Where are the Lord of Malaga and his army?” I mildly repeated.

“When I was sent out, they were preparing to take a defensive position to the southwest of here,” Wasim said. “Near the town of Maleims.”

“To defend against who, exactly?” I frowned.

“The League of Free Cities,” he said. “They march against the Tenth Crusade, led by the Tyrant of Helike and their madman Hierarch.”

My frown deepened. I’d been under the impression the forces of the League were much further south. They were either moving much more quickly than should be possible for a sizable army, or I’d been misinformed.

“Could be a detached force instead of the main host,” Archer suggested in Lower Miezan.

She’d regained a semblance of interest in this, it seemed. Probably because she’d gotten to throw a blade at someone.

“They came from the Waning Woods,” I said. “That means they don’t have a supply train. If they start splitting forces, either they split their limited foodstuffs as well or the detachment starts foraging.”

And there wasn’t much to live off of in this region. Sure they could start sacking towns and small cities for their reserves but even then the Legions of Terror had pretty much picked clean most of the principality. You couldn’t take much food from people already only the verge of starvation. It could just be a bad decision someone up the chain of command had done – either incompetence or lack of information – but that didn’t smell right to me. If they were that incompetent and ill-informed, they wouldn’t have made it through the Waning Woods in the first place.

“If we assume the League force was sent out with sufficient supplies, then something prompted that investment of resources,” I finally said. “Something we don’t know about, but the League’s generals do.”

“Wasim,” Akua said. “Was your band of outriders sent out with specific purpose?”

The Levantine man grimaced.

“We were to investigate rumours,” he said.

“Of?”

“Skirmishes between two armies,” Wasim admitted. “Legionaries and the League.”

I traded a look with Akua. There was no way, we both knew, that the legions under Marshal Grem could be this far east. But there was another army on the continent that fielded legionaries.

So what the Hells was the Army of Callow doing out here, and why the Hells was the League of Free Cities fighting it?

Chapter 5: Consult

“I inherited not an empire but a house on fire: fall in line, lest we all burn.”
– First Princess Éloïse of Aequitan

There were few things as frustrating as looking at something you knew how to do, had done, and yet did not understand in the slightest. The half-page of equations and formulas that I’d gotten Akua to write down for me was exactly that, when it came down to it. A practical, measurable representation of what I did when I ‘threaded the needle’ through Creation when making a gate. It’d been gibberish, the first time I glanced at it, but at least I’d thought I knew why. To put it bluntly, I lacked the tools to make the tools that’d give me a chance of making the tools that would allow to comprehend what was going on. More than nine tenths of mages were incapable of using High Arcana or even comprehending the principles behind it, after all, so considering I did not have even the slightest trace of the Gift I’d never exactly been in the running. These were numbers, though, so there had to be at least part of them I could grasp. Something that’d allow me to run on more than instinct and power, because neither of those were truly mine when it came down to it and I’d not forgotten my old lessons. Borrowed power always turned on its user.

So I’d buckled down, put away the wine and tried to figure this out from the bottom. The very basics of Trismegistan sorcery, which Diabolist assured unlike most theories of magic out there at least had mostly observable underlying principles. I didn’t have a library to ransack, sure, but I had the most viciously distinguished Sahelian in a few centuries around to pick the brains of and two literal goddesses on my shoulders. Both of which had been practitioners of high skill, before they got desperate enough to call on Below. It... wasn’t going very well. Not because my tutors were incompetent, they weren’t. Much as it pained me to admit it, Akua was better at explaining the magical in mundane terms than Masego had ever been and likely ever would be. As for the Sisters, they could literally show me what they meant. I just didn’t have the knack for this. It didn’t come naturally to me the way the sword and stories had. Even languages, and Gods knew I’d learned quite a few of those by now, were easier to get a handle on. Not easy at all, sure, but if I put in the work even without the crutch of the first aspect I’d ever earned I could make visible progress.

This, though? I’d finally memorized the classical table of elements and most the relationships involved, but aside from a refresher in all things arithmetic I’d not gotten much out of these new studies. Being able to name the limits of sorcery and a handful of fundamental laws didn’t mean I understood them, not truly. I could name past examples of those limits being hit but it was damnably hard to extrapolate as to how other practitioners might hit them in the future. Like having a phrasebook for a foreign tongue, then being asked to write a philosophical essay in it. So much of sorcery was about context, years of learning and studies, and I simply didn’t have that. I wasn’t sure I ever would, to be blunt, or that trying to obtain it was the best use of my time. Practically speaking, I got more out of a spar with Archer than I did of an hour learning about ritual theory. I passed a hand through my hair – it was unbound, for once – and sighed. The unpleasant truth was that if I’d started these studies years ago, just after becoming the Squire, I might be getting somewhere useful by now. Instead I was stuck depending on the advice and understanding of others.

That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, I thought. Not all the time. But I’d walked into some nasty messes lately by sheer arrogant ignorance, and I couldn’t count on my friends to pull me out of them every time. Not with the kind of opposition there was out there. There were some heroes I’d survive blundering against, but that didn’t hold for all of them. And the heroes were almost a second thought, compared to the ancient thing that was marching south at the head of undead hordes. I gathered the handful of parchments splayed across my low table and slipped them back into my saddlebag, closing the clasp. I’d been circling the same few paragraphs for the better part of an hour now, there’d be no progress made today. Besides, I’d begun another project. The Everdark had been a wake-up call in a lot of ways: about how I’d been fighting, about who I should be fighting. And there, like in sorcery, ignorance and recklessness had begun to cost me quite a bit. If I was to get involved in the wars scouring the Principate – and I was, it was the only possible way I could see of getting the Liesse Accords signed – then I couldn’t just go in like a drunk brawler and swing at everything in sight.

The Dead King was on the march, and that changed everything.

I couldn’t keep dropping geographical features on armies when I’d be needing those same armies to take the field against Keter before long. Not only was I weakening the same Grand Alliance I needed to keep from collapsing, there was a very real risk that everyone I killed down here would get up and start fighting for the other side at some point. Burning the dead would greatly limit the spectrum of necromancy that could be used on them, Diabolist had assured me, but not prevent the magic entirely from being used. Even a mass grave filled with ashes could be a threat if the Hidden Horror got his hands on it. Diplomacy would be the preferable option here, but I’d tried that before and my knuckles were starting to bleed from the amount of times the door had been slammed on them. I’d been named Arch-heretic of the East, and while back in Callow that’d been met with indignant riots the title would weigh a lot more in the eyes of the western half of Calernia. That I’d effectively been made the head of the drow religion would only make it worse, and there would be no keeping that under wraps for long. The only way I’d get the other nations to sit at the table was if they no longer believed they could really win against me without losing everything else.

Which meant I was going to have to kill some very powerful people before the year was out.

The Grey Pilgrim couldn’t be one, because if I killed him then the Dominion wouldn’t stop before either was I buried in pieces or their country was a heap of cinders. I’d made my peace with that. While not someone I’d ever trust, he was someone I could work with. The Saint, though? I’d need her head on a pike before I got anywhere. Considering I had serious doubts even dropping an entire mountain on that old monster would kill her, I needed to prepare something that would. The voice in the back of my head that sounded like my father kept reminding me that relying on an artefact was the kind of foolishness that got villains killed, but that wasn’t what I was doing. Not exactly. I was crafting a tool, in the same way a goblin alchemist would craft munitions. My sword and scabbard had been propped up against my table when I took them off my belt, and I leaned over to grasp them now. No goblin steel blade, this, or shard of Winter given shape. I’d made a request of Sve Noc before we left the Everdark, when my strategy had begun to take shape, and it had been fulfilled.

The scabbard was carved obsidian, a tale writ in runes of some fool girl who’d made an accord with sister-goddesses. The characters were twined around something else, a declaration of intent: Losara Queen, First Under the Night . There was power in putting truth to stone, especially when you had been part of the story told. The blade within the sheath had not left it since the first rest, the only visible part being the long handle of onyx and amethyst. I’d learned the uses of those stones well, in the last few months. One to ingest power, the other to facilitate communion and connection to the divine. Closing my fingers around the handle I closed my eyes as well, breathing in deep. The Night slithered through my veins, answering the call, and I felt the weight of the crows on my shoulders. They approved, these quarrelsome goddesses of mine. That was not nearly as reassuring as they believed it to be. I focused, clearing my thoughts and-

-and the folds of my tent were unceremoniously pushed open.

“The Queen of Callow alone in her tent, ‘handling her sword’,” Archer mused. “There’s definitely a joke in there.”

I bit back an irritated reply, eyes fluttering open. The Night turned to smoke, leaving me, but there would be time enough later. Every hour I could spare, in fact.

“I assume you came in for a reason?” I said.

“There’s word from our scouts on Rochelant, so Rumena wants to see you,” she replied.

I grunted in answer, rolling my shoulder questioningly. The pop that eventually ensued served as a reminder that sitting on the ground for a few hours had actual physical consequences these days. I put my hand against the table to push myself up before pausing under Archer’s bemused gaze. I chewed on my lip, then called on the Night again. Darkness gathered around the sword and scabbard like flies to honey, for a moment emptying the inside of my tent from every speck of shadow. I heard Komena laughing in my ear, before she leant her hand to the shaping: making power stable and solid was always more difficult than just seizing it. I leaned on the long, crooked staff of ebony now in my hand to drag myself up to me feet. Indrani’s hazelnut eyes were studying me curiously.

“Gonna tell me what that was about?” she lightly asked.

“There’s no point in having advisors,” I said, “if I don’t occasionally take their advice.”

“Ooh, cryptic ,” she praised.

“Well, I am a priestess,” I drawled back. “You may now guide me to my humble flock, wench.”

She grinned.

“You know, in Alamans romances that have very nice illustrations of what Wicked Priestesses of Evil should wear,” Archer informed me.

I rolled my eyes and pulled ahead of her. She was still trying to convince to wear clothes that in this weather would get me frostbite in very inconvenient parts when we got to the mouthy old drow’s tent, but that was where the easy mood died. Rumena Tomb-Maker had looked unflappable even when throwing gauntlets down simultaneously at the feet of both the Longstride Cabal’s most dangerous Mighty and myself at the peak of my mastery over Winter. That it now looked somewhat disturbed while looking at the map of Procer we’d taken from our Levantine prisoners was not a good sign. Akua was already lounging in the back of the tent, which was deserted save the two of them. Less than surprising, given that it was still daylight out and most drow hadn’t yet emerged from their dawn-induced slumber. The general barely glanced at the staff I was leaning on, but I felt Diabolist’s gaze linger. I did not meet her eyes, instead limping to sit across from the old drow who had greeted me with a mere nod. Archer unceremoniously dropped down at my side, though given the flask that’d mysteriously appeared in her hand I doubted she’d be paying much attention to the proceedings.

“Report,” I simply said.

“Lord Ivah has returned from Rochelant,” Rumena said. “The city is already under occupation.”

My brow rose, and my wariness as well. Humans stepping on other humans wouldn’t wrinkle the Tomb-Maker’s brow, which meant there was more to this.

“By who?” I asked.

Akua cleared her throat.

“While Lord Ivah was not familiar with the banners being flown, it offered detailed descriptions,” the shade said. “Two emblems are being flown: that of the Hierarch of the League of Free Cities and the personal heraldry of the Theodosians of Helike.”

I started in surprise.

“I thought the Hierarch had refused a banner?” I said.

“He did,” Akua amusedly replied. “It is blank cloth, and so even more easily recognizable than heraldry from a distance.”

I mulled over that. The Hierarch’s personal banner would be flown regardless of his actual presence, given that he was in theory the supreme commander of the military forces of the League, so that didn’t give us much. Neither did the Tyrant’s family colours being up there, unfortunately. The villain was essentially a sack full of wet and angry cats made into a person, so schemes were only to be expected. None of this, though, explained why Rumena was feeling unsettled.

“There’s more,” I stated, and it was not a question.

“As there were no armies encamped outside the walls and no visible watch in place, Lord Ivah infiltrated the city,” Rumena said. “The humans within appear to have gone mad.”

“Define mad,” I said.

Akua stepped in.

“There appears to be a revolt taking place,” she said. “Citizens are forming tribunals and killing officials and prominent individuals after public trials, under the supervision of Helikean soldiers.”

I blinked.

“Supervision,” I repeated slowly. “They’re not being forced?”

“Lord Ivah reported feeling the urge to join these ‘trials’,” General Rumena said. “And that the urge grew stronger the longer it remained within. This is... unusual. Though this took place under the glare of the sun, such influence over our kind has no precedent to my knowledge.”

I felt talons digging painfully into my shoulders and winced. The Sisters weren’t pleased that someone might be meddling with minds of one of their own, even one who’d chosen to swear itself to my service.

“Aspect, you think?” I asked Akua.

“Hard to tell without taking a closer look,” she admitted. “Large-scale manipulation of minds by ritual is not unprecedented – Dread Emperor Imperious once compelled an entire army to suicide – but the Carrion Lord’s scuffle with the forces of Helike should have killed a significant portion of their most skilled practitioners. I am not certain they could accomplish such a working anymore. Not directly.”

She paused.

“There is, of course, another path possible,” Diabolist said. “Binding an entity capable of such influence would require fewer mages, though it would carry significant risks.”

I closed my eyes and counted to ten.

“Tell me someone didn’t summon a fucking demon in the middle of a continental brawl,” I asked.

“Someone didn’t summon a fucking demon in the middle of a continental brawl,” Indrani eagerly replied, the slightest of slurs to her voice.

I ignored that, for all our sakes.

“Akua?” I pressed.

“In other times I would wager only the full Stygian Magisterium capable of that tier of diabolism,” the shade finally said. “But the Tyrant of Helike has proved... surprisingly well-informed. I would not dismiss the possibility out of hand.”

I clenched my fingers into a fist until the knuckles paled. Of all the violently idiotic things to do. If a demon got loose with this many armies in the region, the damage could be... Staggering. We could lose the entire centre of Procer in a month, if it went wrong, and by the time the dust settled the final contest over who owned Calernia would between demon-corrupted puppets and the armies of the dead. Where were the fucking heroes when you actually needed them? A whole warband was willing to show up for the Battle of the Camps but this somehow did not require their attention? I forced myself to calm down. Angry thinking was sloppy thinking. We didn’t know for sure it was a demon. It could be an aspect or a ritual, or half a hundred tricks I’d never heard about. We’d plan for the worse, but I wouldn’t allow myself to get stuck in the perspective it was necessarily what was taking place.

“All right,” I said, letting out a long breath. “Our approach needs to be adjusted.”

“How so?” General Rumena asked.

“If this is the Tyrant screwing with Procer with sorcery or his Name, we let it go,” I reluctantly said. “I’m not starting a war with the League over this, ugly as that reality is.”

“If our assumption is correct and the ‘legionaries’ the League were seen skirmishing with are truly the Army of Callow, we might already be at war with them,” Akua pointed out.

“We don’t know for sure,” I said. “It fits, and my instinct is that Juniper’s out there, but I’m not going to act based on just that. It could be deserters from Marshal Grem’s army, or a raiding force he sent out. It could be a scheme, if someone knew we were coming, to bait us into starting that very war. And even if was Juniper, we don’t know the context of those skirmishes – and note they were that, skirmishes. Not a field battle.”

“You do not believe that, not truly,” the shade said.

“My beliefs are irrelevant,” I sharply replied. “There’s too much at stake here for hasty decisions, and too much we just don’t know . Someone out there set up this game, Diabolist, and until we know who that is I’m not picking any fights I don’t have to.”

Silence reigned after that, and Akua simply inclined her head in deference.

“And if it isn’t?” Archer nonchalantly asked. “Magic or an aspect, I mean.”

I put a hand on the low table, feeling the cool polished surface against the warmth of my flesh.

“Containment,” I softly said. “Observation. Then, if necessary, we purge everyone inside.”

I would not allow a demon to run rampant this close to so many armies and Named. I would not allow the Tyrant to wield that dangerous a tool when both those things were so close, as that might even more dangerous. If the city could not be saved, then I would see it burned to the ground. It was the closest thing to mercy I could still offer. The Liesse Accords would ban the summoning of demons any circumstances, I thought with irritation, not that it meant anything until they were signed. Allowable Use of Non-Creational Entities, And Circumstances Therein . There was an entire section of the treaty dedicated to this stuff. Considering what it had to say about angels it wouldn’t be all that popular with some people, but then others would be less than pleased about the parts pertaining to devils.

I did not mind beginning to enforce the sheerest common sense onto this continent at swordpoint before signatures had been put to the Accords, if it proved necessary.

“Then you would have us prepare for battle,” General Rumena said, tone neutral.

“You have your orders, Tomb-Maker,” I said.

There was a whisper of power in the tent, and the phantom weight of the crows on my shoulders. The old drow took in the sight of the Sisters manifest and immediately bowed its head.

“By your will, First Under the Night,” it replied. “I will begin preparations immediately.”

The weight was gone, quick as it had come, and I let the general leave the tent without further comment. My eyes moved to the map on the table, the small stones that had been placed on it. We were a day’s march from Rochelant and whatever awaited us there, now. There’d be answers soon enough.

“If it is not a demon,” Akua suddenly said, breaking through the silence. “If the Kingdom of Callow is not at war with the League... Then there might be an opportunity awaiting.”

I picked up the black stone representing our army and spun it idly between my fingers. My gaze remained on the inked borders and cities of the Principate of Procer. On the few coloured stones marking the forces we knew about. The two armies of the Dominion, the rumoured Proceran relief force coming from Salia. The most likely current operating theatre of the legions under Marshal Grem. Where we’d believed the armies of the League to be, though that would need reassessment. And far to the south, the duped border army of the First Prince desperately hurrying back towards tactical relevance. The thorough interrogation of the Levantine outriders had wielded more information than anticipated, even if a lot of it was rumours.

“You want to make a deal with the Tyrant of Helike,” Indrani guffawed. “Because that’s going to end well.”

“An alignment between Callow and the League alone would force the Grand Alliance to the peace table,” the shade pointed out. “The addition of the Empire Ever Dark further tips the balance. We would be as much of an existential threat as the Dead King, in some aspects. The alignment need not last forever for concessions to be extracted.”

There was a pattern somewhere in there, I thought. Oh, it looked like sheer bloody chaos at first glance but I’d fought wars before and something about this was raising my hackles. Someone had helped this storm to brew, and that meant someone would benefit from it. Malicia had once told me that when beginning a scheme, one must first consider the desired outcome. She was a lot better at this game than I’d ever be, but I could derive some use from that lesson: what did the players in Iserre want? The Grand Alliance wanted to crush the invasion as swiftly as possible before sending all its forces north. The Legions of Terror, if their march upwards was any indication, wanted to use the northern passage to retreat towards Callow. The League was the entity hardest to predict. It had two heads, the Hierarch and the Tyrant, and it was unclear who was really holding the reins of the horse. If anyone is at all. If they’d wanted territorial gains, I thought, they would not have come this far north so early. It would have been sounder sense to smash the Proceran border army in Tenerife then quickly move to occupy a few southern principalities while the Principate was forced to deal with other threats in the heartlands. Instead they’d joined the complicated dance taking place in Iserre.

“See, the problem with that is that at some point we’re at a table with the Tyrant,” Indrani said. “That’s basically throwing jugs of oil at a bonfire, Akua. He’s gonna fuck someone before that conference is done, and it might just be us.”

Remove the League forces from Iserre, and what did you get? Eighteen thousand veterans under Grem, my own southern expedition of fifty thousand and possibly a portion of the Army of Callow. All of which would join up into a single force when faced with external foes. Against that, a relief army from Salia that should be at least thirty thousand to be worth throwing into the mess. Eighty thousand split in two from the Dominion. And maybe, though to be honest the chances weren’t great, that army of twenty thousand from Tenerife would make it in time to participate. I doubted anyone from the League would have been able to predict the kind of army I’d come back with, but then they might have just been betting blind on my coming back with some kind of force. East against West, to paint in broad strokes, the Grand Alliance had us beat in numbers. We’d have better soldiery, though, and unless the heroes stepped in we’d have the only Named on the field. If truce couldn’t be reached there would be a clash on a massive scale, and one of those coalitions would come out of it shattered. Put back the League onto the field, though, and suddenly the difference was obvious. Like Indrani had mused days ago, neither coalition could commit to that kind of a clash because both ran a risk the Tyrant would come swinging at their back when they were occupied.

This, I decided, couldn’t be the Hierarch’s game. Unless the man was hiding deep cunning and political acumen behind the rambling letters and had been playing some of the finest minds on the continent – and also me – like fiddles then this wasn’t his doing. It would be the Tyrant of Helike, moving through him. No one can make a deal with the League, because the madman ruling it will refuse to make one out of principle , I thought. And the Tyrant, if the Eyes of the Empire were to be believed, had been the one to arrange for the Hierarch to be elected in the first place. That did not feel like a coincidence. I closed my palm over the stone I’d been twirling, then absent-mindedly knocked it against the surface of the table.

“But if you’re trying to prevent one side from being crippled,” I murmured. “Then why are you stirring the pot?”

If the objective was to keep the East and the West from bloodying each other to the extent that no one would be able to stand against the Dead King, it would run against the grain to keep shoving chaos into Iserre. Which he was absolutely doing, if the situation in Rochelant was what it sounded like. Unless you really don’t give a shit about the war , I thought. Because the war is just a way for you to get at something so it doesn’t matter who wins it, so long as they don’t win it too early. But if that was really the case...

“Catherine?” Akua said.

My head rose. I hadn’t realized until now, but silence had fallen over the tent.

“Call Rumena back,” I ordered. “There won’t be a demon in Rochelant. I’ll be heading to the city with a small escort, while the army under it needs to be moving elsewhere. And fast .”

“And what will be doing there?” Indrani asked.

It had never even occurred to her, I thought affectionately, that she would not be coming.

“Paying a visit to my eternal friend,” I said. “To find out what it is exactly he needs so badly from Cordelia Hasenbach.”

Chapter 6: Furor

“The words of one sage are wisdom, the words of a hundred a riot.”
– Atalantian saying

What was it with Proceran cities and looking kind of shoddy?

Rochelant at least had bothered to put up walls at some point in its history, which the Callowan in me could not help but approve of, but those miserable piles of mud and stone looked like they hadn’t seen a day’s maintenance in the last century. I wouldn’t need sorcery to knock those over, just a sapper with a few tools and a pile of firewood. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but stare at the size of the place – come winter, and we were definitely there, there must have been at least twenty something thousand people living in there. Rochelant was a goblin’s dream playground, all wooden thatched houses and narrow alleys, but by Proceran standards this was considered a small city. There would be a handful of those in Iserre alone, with the eponymous capital being significantly larger. Sometimes it boggled the mind how many people actually lived within the borders of the Principate. Sure, these were the heartlands and by far the most densely populated part of the realm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the total population of Procer beat that of Callow and Praes put together. But the behemoth is quarrelsome, and slow to wake , I thought. That’d been the sole saving grace of the Principate’s bordering nations since the crowning of the founding First Prince. Yet both those flaws would have to be fixed, if the war up north was to be won.

There was a reason I would have peace as set by the Liesse Accords or no peace at all. Procer resurgent, purged of all its weaknesses, might be almost as dangerous to Calernia as the Dead King himself. Cordelia Hasenbach did not strike me as particularly ambitious when it came to acquiring new territories directly – her game had always been a diplomatic in outcome, when she was the one leading the dance – but there was no guarantee her successor would be so inclined. I wasn’t going to bloody Callow and its allies just to enable the latest imperial expansion of the ‘Wardens of the West’, as the rulers of this realm so arrogantly titled themselves.

“Ivah wasn’t making it up,” Archer mused. “They really haven’t bothered to put up sentries. Bold, I’ve gotta say.”

The walls were only about a dozen feet high and I had doubts they were thick enough to resist even a single good hit from a trebuchet, but the part Indrani had focused on was perhaps the most important: there was not a soul patrolling atop them. Or guarding the city gates, which were as wide open as such a narrow gap allowed. The snowy dirt road leading to them had been use recently, though. There were hoof marks leading into the countryside, so whoever held command in there was fielding at least some patrols. I pulled at the reins of Zombie the Fourth, though the dead horse I’d spared form ending up in a drow cookpot to serve as my undead mount instead showed no reaction to the gesture. Necromancy, insofar as I was truly doing that – and Akua had expressed her doubts on the subject many a time – had gotten a little rougher since I’d traded in Winter for Night. Whatever strange spark of intelligence my good little abomination Zombie the Third still held wherever she was – unnecessarily – grazing at grass was absent from my new mount. The Sisters insisted this was a consequence of my raw handling of Night, but I disagreed. There’d been something to Winter that was missing in the Night, even after the latter had devoured the former. Crow-Andronike stirred on my shoulder, displeased, but did not take up the argument. It was probably for the best that her sister had remained with the southern expedition, because she most definitely would have.

“The smoke means chimneys and fires are still being used,” Akua noted from my other side. “In large enough amount it cannot be solely the soldiers of the League doing so. That implies some degree of coherent thought remains to the inhabitants.”

“Not a demon, probably, unless it is,” Indrani summed up.

Diabolist looked deeply pained at the phrasing, but did not disagree. I smothered a smile and urged Zombie forward with a twist of will. The company of drow around us was heavy on Lords, at General Rumena’s insistence, though to be fair I hadn’t bothered to argue. Ivah, Soln, Sagas and Vadymir: the majority of my surviving Peerage was trailing the three of us, with around four dozen rylleh of mixed sigils following behind them in turn. As long as the moon was out, the power at my back was the equivalent of fielding a small army. In power, anyway, and that was always tricky business. All that was necessary for them to turn into a mere fifty drow was the right ward or miracle. They’d been predators among predators, down in the Everdark, but where the Firstborn had been shedding their own blood for millennia up here the war had two sides. For all their centuries of fighting and deep wells of Night, I often wondered how well my Peerage would truly stack up against a well-trained hero. We’ll have to find out, eventually , I grimly thought. I shook off the thought and turned by attention back to the present.

The closer we got to the city, the more I became convinced there were eyes on us. There was not a soul immediately through the gates, which made that rather interesting. Andronike’s sliver of godhood on my shoulder should be quite enough to make a wreck of any attempt to scry us, implying something was actually watching us directly.

“Archer?” I murmured.

Even under the hood and cloth I saw her brow creasing.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Indrani said. “But I’m guessing if these people can’t even put together the coin for decent walls they shouldn’t have enough to put up gargoyles on them.”

Akua stilled.

“Helikeans are fond of animating stone,” the shade said. “Though admittedly they’ve rarely succeeded at anything larger than a dog.”

Now that I knew what to look for, I could make out the small silhouettes that’d wedged themselves into holes and fissures. Imp-like sculptures of rough stone, some with the heads of dogs and others more lizardlike. Many had wings, though not all. I’d missed them at first look, I thought, because none of them were moving even the slightest bit. Not even the eyes.

“No sentries, huh,” I said. “Looks like our good friend the Tyrant is a little more careful than he lets on.”

Ivah slid up to me, head already bowed, but I waved away the apology before it could be spoken. It’d been the kind of detail someone unused to having to consider what people could and could not afford – in essence, not a drow – might have missed. Living in massive ornate ruins could be a blind spot of sorts, and both Ivah and its scouts had spent their whole lives living in the remnants of their old empire. Interesting, though, that the mistake would fit so well. Had the Tyrant gotten lucky, or was there more to it? Regardless, it seemed that my army’s last visit to Rochelant might not have been as discreet as we’d previously thought. The Tyrant of Helike, I suspected, would be waiting for us.

“You’ll know next time,” I simply told Ivah. “Mistakes are to be expected. It doesn’t matter, so long as you learn from them.”

“As you say, Losara Queen,” the Lord of Silent Steps murmured back.

With a bow it retreated, just in time for us to enter Rochelant in lockstep. The gate above us was arched, and I felt petty satisfaction at noting that my earlier prediction of poor wall depth proved entirely accurate. The muddy road into the city ahead of us was probably the closest thing to an avenue there was to be found in here. Broad enough for a cart to go through, anyway, which had probably been the measure it was built on.

“Akua,” I simply said.

Diabolist met my eyes, inclined her head and as we passed in the shade cast by a house she vanished into thin air. She had her instructions already. My arguably finest expert in sorcery would be taking a look at the influence taking hold of Rochelant, though she was to retreat and return to me the moment she started feeling it herself.

“It is here,” Andronike spoke from my shoulder. “Like waves lapping at the shore. There is a source further in.”

“Not feeling anything,” Indrani noted.

“For which we give thanks to the Night,” I mildly replied.

I had no intention of walking into a place like this without one of my crow-goddesses serving as a shield.

“My thoughts exactly. Hail the Sisters, all that good stuff,” Archer snorted.

She’d never been one to meet a deity and not debate whether to try to stab it, I recognized with a sigh.

“We head for the source,” I told the drow. “Andronike?”

“None may hide from me after dusk,” the crow claimed.

That might even be true, as I immediately felt a pull in the Night guiding me forward through the streets. Given how narrow they were, the drow had to spread out over rooftops to keep even a semblance of formation. They did so in utter silence, ethereal silhouettes in the moonlight that left no mark and bore no weight. We’d left the main road behind, and with that any semblance of this city not being a nightmarish mess of cramped alleys. Tough sometimes it was so tight that Archer couldn’t even stay at my side, our journey through was informative in some ways. There were still people inside the houses, though not nearly as many as there should be this late out. The sounds in the distance told me that Ivah’s report of ‘tribunals’ had not been idle chatter: I could hear shouting in Chantant, the bay of a mob out for a good hanging. The first trial we came across was on the steps of a House of Light, and the sight of a roiling mob of nearly a hundred had me ordering my horse to a halt. The Procerans did not pay us the slightest attention, though the other foreigners did. Watching on passively from a distance, a dozen soldiers in scale armour were standing apart from the crowd. Sword and board men, the lot of them, though the mail beneath the scales going down to their knees was a style of armour known to me. Helikean, though these men-at-arms were missing the javelins their lot was reputed to bear.

The Tyrant’s soldiers looked at us, but before long returned their attention to the citizens. So you knew we were coming , I thought. Or your orders are not to care about outsiders coming in. Gaze returning to the Procerans, I tried to parse out the mixed shouts of Chantant and Tolesian they were using interchangeably and found only mixed success. The man they were attempting to hold a tribunal over was obvious, a brother from the House of Light wearing what had once been very nice robes now ripped and dirtied. Accusations bribery and withheld healing were tossed at him, but my interest lay in the fact that there were other priests among the crowd. Shouting with the others, red-faced and thirsty for blood. Whatever was animating these people, even priesthood was no opponent for it.

“They’re not resorting to violence yet,” I noted out loud.

“That robe didn’t rip itself,” Archer replied.

Yes, but she was missing the point. For all the anger and fervour stirring up the crowd, they were not simply tearing the accused apart. The process was rough and loud, but accusations were being laid and witnesses called. Some law, I suspected, was being obeyed. But whose? It was certainly not the laws of Iserre, or even those few that held for the entire Principate. We stayed long enough to see the crowd begin voting on the seven among them that would make up the tribunal and pass the sentence, though I did not remain to witness what would be the inevitable conclusion. There were already headless corpses staining the front of the House that told me the nature of it. The Helikean soldiers parted wordlessly for us when I rode past them, Archer at my side. None of them caught sight of the shadows following me by way of the rooftops. Three more of these trials we encountered as I let the Night guide me further into Rochelant, each headed for grim ending.

“There’s something in the air here,” Indrani grunted as we passed the third.

“Blood,” I flatly replied.

I glanced to the side as she pulled back her hood a fraction, revealing troubled hazelnut eyes.

“This almost feels like a domain, Cat,” she said. “Only wrong. Winter was cruel, but it was... clear. This has a fever to it, a sickness. Whatever’s at the centre of this, it is mad .”

I shivered, fingers closing tightly around my ebony staff. I’d heard what she did not say. It was mad, and so it was dangerous – and we were head towards it.

“And still we advance,” I said.

Stillness held for a moment.

“Well,” Archer said, pulling down her hood. “Not like we ever let good sense get in the way before.”

I sent Zombie forward, knowing there was a grain of truth to that. Andronike’s talons dug into my shoulder as we made our way out of the alley not long after, a sign we’d reached the source of this bloody dream. The clamour could be heard long before I saw anything with my own eyes, the wave of sound that was hundreds of people talking and screaming and moving. Before us stood what was likely a marketplace, though packed full with citizens as it was that could only remain a guess. Men and women were standing in line in the back, up against a tavern, and I watched as the one in front was dragged to the side and beheaded before the parted corpse was dragged away out of sight. Immediately the tribunal that’d passed the sentence returned to the mob, and voting began on who would make up the next as the second in line in the back was brought to the front. This was it, I thought. Even with the crow goddess on my shoulder shielding me from the worst of this, I could feel something rippling in the air. A steady pulse like a heartbeat. Leaning on the height temporarily granted to me by my horse, I followed the sensation to its source.

There was a table to the side of the proceedings, more a pile of crates than anything else, and at is sat a single man. Tanned in the way of the Free Cities, he was dressed like a beggar in worn robes too loose on his frame. Which was thin, though not the thinness of the heathy. He looked like he’d had too many lean meals, or perhaps like the fire in those grey eyes had eaten away at his body from the inside. The Hierarch of the League of Free Cities, for this could not be anyone else, was middle-aged and balding. His eyebrows were thick and bushy, both they and his sparse beard warring between white streaks and dark brown. One of his boots, I could not help but notice, had been so poorly sown back on the sole was coming off at the front. I looked at him, saw him scribbling on a clay tablet while intently following the proceedings, and felt the slightest bit of fear. He looked like no one, I thought. But coming from his body like an invisible current was some deep and terrible power the touch of which could be felt over all of Rochelant. It was not reaching into my mind, not yet, but it felt as if raising my hand would allow me to feel the unseen ripples.

“That’s an aspect,” Indrani said, voice hushed. “ Gods , how can that be an aspect?”

“Andronike?” I asked.

The crow-goddess did not reply for a long moment, until I turned my head to look at her. If a bird could look uncomfortable, I saw, it would be something like this.

“This is... difficult,” Andronike said, voice tight. “The pull is strong.”

My fingers clenched.

“You’re having a hard time fighting him,” I croaked. “What the Hells is this, Andronike? He’s Named, not...”

“Faith,” the crow got out. “This is faith, Catherine Foundling. Pure unadulterated belief, untainted by doubt or hesitation. It sings , and the world sings back.”

“Faith in what?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Andronike hissed. “A snake eating its own tail. It is bleak madness screamed by endless throats, and it would stand tribunal over the Gods themselves.”

I swallowed. And the Tyrant of Helike was using this man as a pawn ?

“We need to leave,” Archer said. “We’re not ready for this. Not without Masego.”

I breathed in, breathed out. Fear was the death of reason. None of the reasons I had come here had changed. If anything, the depths of the man I was still looking at made it more important to get a handle on what the League was after. I allowed my staff to slip my fingers and hit the frozen ground. Calling on a breath’s worth of Night, I used to support to get off my horse. Indrani sucked in a breath.

“Cat, this is a trap,” she said.

“And still I advance,” I ruefully smiled. “Andronike, safeguard them.”

The crow left my shoulder, a few flaps of her wings landing her atop the head of the eerily-still Zombie.

“It will sing to you, First Under the Night,” the goddess warned.

“Ah, but that’s the trick,” I told her, baring my teeth. “You can’t go mad twice , o goddess of Night.”

Limping against my staff, I slipped into the crowd. The sound and power beat at my eardrums like a ram, in some way intertwined, and it took me by surprise hard enough some man almost elbowed me off my feet. I grit my teeth and shoved back with my staff. It should have stung, but the man was too busy screaming his vote in Chantant to notice. Going straight through would see me trampled, I decided, so I made my way to the edge instead and began circling around. The pounding in my ears was relentless. Again and again it came as I stumbled around half-blind, until I could almost make out words. Almost. I caught my breath against a half-fallen stall, and only then gathered enough attention to notice the woman staring at me. She was, it was almost too absurd to think, aggressively nondescript. There was a muted look to her face, as if her thoughts were halfway elsewhere, though as she narrowed her eyes I felt something brush against my mind.

Somewhere very far away, Sve Noc bared their teeth in displeasure.

The stranger paled, eyes turning bloodshot, and clutched her forehead as scarlet began dripping out of her nostrils. Shouldn’t have done that , I thought. In there be monsters, my friend. I immediately felt dozens of stares settle on me, but I ignored them and began the journey again. Not far, now, and where the Hierarch was seated a gap had formed in the crowd. I pushed the last woman out of the way, though I froze just after. I could have sworn I’d hear someone whisper in my ear, though the words had been indistinct. My fingers clutched the staff and I drew comfort from the sensation of the Night within, letting out a deep breath and putting myself together. The Named, I saw, had not so much as glanced at me. Neither did he bother when I stepped around the makeshift table until I stood behind him. I glanced down at the words being scribbled on the clay tablet with a stone stylet. That wasn’t Chantant, I noted. I didn’t recognize the language, although at one of the words was very close to the Mtethwa for ‘protest’ so it might be tradertalk. The second Maleficent had held the region under her grasp for long enough there’d been some bleed into the local tongue, I’d read.

“Will anyone but you actually be able to read those?” I said in Chantant.

I’d meant to speak lightly, but my voice came out rough instead. The Hierarch finally paused in his writing, turning to look at me. There was something calm, almost resigned, to the stare. As if nothing of Creation could truly ruffle his feathers.

“Irrelevant,” the Hierarch replied in the same, tone chiding. “Transcripts must be kept of trials held.”

I blinked. Huh. Not the answer I’d expected. The power battering at my mind was weakening, I felt, slowly but surely. Did the aspect require concentration?

“I am-”

“You have the look of a foreign tyrant,” the Hierarch accused.

“Back home it’s called regular tyranny, though,” I replied, and immediately bit my tongue.

I’d really thought I was done with the whole taunting dangerous, powerful madmen thing but apparently old habits died hard. The Hierarch’s brow furrowed as he seemed to seriously mull over that. The battering ram slowed even further.

“That seems logical,” he muttered. “It should be passed on to the Republic for consideration.”

Then he turned those dark eyes back on me.

“You do not deny the charge of tyranny?” he pressed.

“You already laid out your stance in our correspondence,” I said.

He seemed vaguely surprised, then thoughtful.

“You are Cordelia Hasenbach,” the man stated, half-questioningly.

A moment passed, while I was genuinely at a loss for words. Ah , I thought. So this is why the Tyrant thinks he can make a pawn of you. For a heartbeat I debated actually pretending I was the First Prince just to see if I could make some trouble for her, but discarded the notion just as quick. Best not to roll dice when they had teeth and a noted fondness for biting.

“Catherine Foundling,” I replied. “Queen of Callow.”

If he felt embarrassed about the mistake, he didn’t show it in the slightest.

“There’s no such thing,” he told me sternly.

“Queens or Catherine Foundling?” I said. “Because one of those debates is a lot more philosophical than I’m equipped to handle.”

Behind us the clamour of the crowd had quieted some, but by the sounds of it the trials hadn’t stopped. Neither had the aspect, I thought, at least not entirely. But what had been a trumpet earlier was a murmur now, and that I could handle while keeping most of my wits about me.

“Aristocracy Is A Festering Wound Upon The People,” Anaxares of Bellerophon gravely informed me. “May Hail Strike It Repeatedly For A Thousand Years.”

That seemed a little excessive. There shouldn’t be much left to hail on after the first century.

“Preaching to the Choir there,” I said. “I’ve never fought a war against someone who didn’t have some sort of title.”

“Yet you are a queen,” he said, blithely ignoring his previous assertion there was no such thing.

“For the moment,” I shrugged. “I intend to abdicate when it’s feasible.”

“So your kind always claims,” the Hierarch said, eyes turning flinty. “Give me the right, they say, give me the laws and the swords. I will keep you safe until the storm has passed. And service becomes rule, rule becomes tyranny until lovingly the yoke is fastened around our necks.”

Like the hammer on the anvil, the ram against the gate, the dull pounding of his power began to sound in the distance. Slow. Swelling. Implacable. But I would not be cowed that easily.

“Is this why the League has gone to war?” I asked. “To end crowns?”

There wasn’t a single thing that changed about him, I thought. He was still a skeleton of a man in ill-fitting robes, a scarecrow with a scowl. Not a single thing had changed, and yet... If I strained the ear, I could hear the chorus. The howls of the mob. Chains ripped apart, palaces toppled and bones being crushed. Torches starting a fire that would spread across the world. A song of revolt, of rebellion. I could feel it, like warm wine running through my veins. It was harsh and unforgiving, but oh how glorious it was. How easy it would have been to partake of it and let that warmth swallow me whole.

“We are all of us free or we are none of us free,” the Hierarch of the League of Free Cities said, voice like steel. “There is no middle ground. And for the lashes struck at our back, all will be called to account – if gallows must be raised for devils and angels alike, so be it .”

I almost, out of sheer contrariness, pointed out that devils did not die but only disperse . But would they really, if it was this man passing the sentence? Suddenly I was not so certain. My mistake, I thought, had been trying to think of him as either a terror or a fool. Fear had dogged me, wading through his aspect, but it had retreated as we spoke. As the man proved to be so uninterested in his surrounding as to be lost. I’d allowed the cadenced little phrases, the obvious mistakes and ignorance, to lull me into believing him... adrift. Living in his own world. But Black had warned me about people like this, hadn’t he? About Named who did not see Creation as it was but how it should be. Men and women who embraced their vision so deeply they bent the world around them to match it. My mistake, I thought once more, had been to believe he must be only one of the two. He was not.

The Tyrant of Helike had not sharpened this blade so carefully to cut a mortal empire, I decided. There was a broader game unfolding.

“It’s a pretty dream,” I said. “A pretty speech. But you ended it before you got to the end – the part where you declare war on the rest of the continent for those same pretty things, and it eats you alive. It’s not a fight you’re going to win, Hierarch.”

The man’s lips quirked, his face serene save for the scorn.

“War against Calernia,” he said amusedly. “As if tearing down masters was the same thing as warring on their slaves. You betray yourself, tyrant. You think I wage war on them?”

The stylus flicked at the crowd of Procerans. The axe went up, the axe went down. Another dead man, dragged into the alley.

“The old faceless thing bade me to choose a side,” the Hierarch said. “And at long last, I have.”

My eyes narrowed. The old faceless thing. There weren’t a lot of entities out there that would fit that epithet. Anaxares of Bellerophon smiled, crooked teeth bared.

“You think us outnumbered?” he said. “How many of us are there, tyrant, and how many of you ?”

I could have wounded him, then. Not with a blade – here and now, even if he did not lift a finger, I did not think that would end well for me – but with words. A reminder that he marched with slavers and monsters, that his own League would turn on him in due time. That he should get his own fucking house in order before tossing stones at mine. Or maybe that power would fail him, in the end, and that like the city-state that spawned him his road would end in blood and whimpering. But there would be a place and a time for that, and it was not tonight.

I had seen the sword, and must now see its wielder.

“It’s a lovely song,” I said instead. “But it’s always easier to break than to make.”

The Hierarch’s gaze returned to the trial, where the accused was being dragged to the fore.

“There will be one for you as well, one day,” he said.

“But not tonight,” I said.

“Not tonight,” he softly agreed.

I left as the man bent back over his tablet, hand moving anew to write words only he could read.

It was past time I had a chat with the other madman in this city.

Chapter 7: Fellowship

“Fool me once and it’d best be fatal, for my reply certainly will be.”
– Dread Emperor Vindictive II

“What the fuck was that?” Archer hissed.

They hadn’t fled the marketplace, of course, because big important bird-goddesses like Andronike couldn’t possibly flee – I yelped and slapped her away. If the damned Sisters kept pecking at my head like this I was going to go bald at some point. Fine, they had redeployed away from the mob and the madman feeding it. I looked down at the fist bunching up my cloak in the front, which was Indrani’s.

“You’ll have to be a little more specific,” I said.

She scrutinized my face for a moment, before grimacing and releasing me.

“Well, if you can be a heel you probably still own your mind,” she said. “That was stupid, Catherine. We weren’t even near the crowd and we could still feel it when he got pissed.”

“It was necessary,” I said, brushing down the folds of my cloak.

“Don’t you start with that speech,” Archer growled. “If I got a copper for every time you talked about necessity-”

“You still wouldn’t be able to afford your drinking habits,” I drily interrupted.

The look on her face was thunderous, so I smoothed away the humour from my expression.

“I’m serious,” I said. “I needed to take the measure of him. When someone lets a lion loose in the pen, you don’t pretend it’s not happening – not unless you’re ready to lose the whole flock.”

“That’s what we have Vivi for,” Indrani insisted. “The Jacks-”

“Would have been in that crowd, hollering for blood,” I flatly replied. “You know that. It was a calculated risk, Archer. Since when do –”

I bit down on my tongue. I knew exactly since when she’d started taking issued with those. I was in no danger of ever forgetting the sight of Indrani half-devoured by frost, only hanging on to life by a thread – and, I had recently learned, the preservative properties of ice according to the classical table of elements.

“Finish,” Indrani quietly said.

“Not a conversation we should be having in the middle of an alley in a city under occupation,” I evaded.

“ Finish ,” Indrani repeated, coldly.

“Even Akua is worried, Archer,” I said. “I know you like to handle things on your own, but it’s not getting better.”

“I’m fine,” she told me forcefully. “Or is disagreeing with you a sign of cowardice now?”

“I didn’t say that,” I replied.

A year ago we wouldn’t have been having this conversation, I thought. But then a year ago there’d been fewer defeats to our name, fewer close calls and wounds that would never quite heal. An emotion I couldn’t quite recognize twisted her face, until she winced.

“It doesn’t matter if we’re in an alley, Catherine,” Archer finally said, taking a step back. “Because there’s nothing to talk about.”

I wondered if she even noticed how her fingers were twitching towards the strap at her side where she usually kept a flask. Probably not , I decided. I knew from personal experience that we tended to be blind to the methods we used to bury our fears until they were pointed out to us. Her way, at least, I was familiar with. Some nights I wondered if I might have disappeared all the way at the bottom of the bottle after Second Liesse, if Hakram hadn’t dragged me back. I hesitated under moonlight, a reply on the tip of my tongue. I’d had a talk with Diabolist once, about her mother. About the difference between a person and their title, the way Praesi considered them entirely different entities. I still disagreed with what she’d said, the painful contortion of personhood her people had to put themselves through just to live with what they did to each other, but sometimes I could also see a grain of truth to it. The woman in me wanted to find a quiet place, a safe one, and try to soothe what was eating at one of my closest friends in the world. Even if it meant leaving Rochelant. But the queen knew there was still work to be done tonight, that this business was only half-done, and that what lay within Indrani would keep until morning. The queen won, in the end.

Didn’t she always?

“This isn’t done,” I told Indrani.

“It is for tonight,” she replied.

Getting back atop Zombie’s saddle had the taste of defeat to it. Wouldn’t be the last of those, before this was all done and over with. We pressed on deeper into the city, Named and priestess and a crow-that-wasn’t surrounded by a pack of silent killers.

A kinsman of sorts awaited us.

—

The place the Tyrant of Helike chose for his lair served as my first glimpse into the man’s mind. There would have been a few places in Rochelant royalty could claim to maintain a semblance of comfort: the official quarters of the appointed ruler of the city, the mansions of the influential and the wealthy, a House of Light to empty and desecrate. Instead, Kairos Theodosian had settled in the shop of a middling money changer. Someone whose very trade was the exchange of one currency for another. The entire city block was crawling with soldiers and much more discreet gargoyles, what must have once been a largely unimportant street turned into the heart of the League’s occupation of Rochelant. There was no military sense to the location, I thought. It was poorly placed to deploy troops or send messengers, not to mention surrounded by very flammable shops. No prestige to such a choice, either, as money changing was not a profession of particularly good repute. This was a villain making a jest that quite possibly no one would ever get, in defiance of more practical choices, simply because he could. My teacher’s lessons, I decided, would not be of great use here. The Tyrant was one face of the coin he’d spent a lifetime melting down so the metal could be put to better use.

Black did not make deals with people like this, did not negotiate. He killed them as quickly as he could to limit the collateral damage, then ripped out what had spawned them root and stem so he wouldn’t have to come back and do it again a decade down the line. That wasn’t an option for me, so I’d have to handle the madman a different way. I led Zombie in a canter down the street, rows of men-at-arms armed to the teeth watching me carefully. Idly pretending to brush back my hair, I gestured for the drow following from the rooftops to stay back. I didn’t know what kind of the defences the Tyrant would have prepared, to know I was coming with the likes of Andronike perched on my shoulder and still feel comfortable allowing me into Rochelant, but it was best not to test them. Archer and the crow-goddess I kept at my side, until a mounted officer approached us at the very edge of the defensive perimeter. She kept her sword sheathed at her side, though by the look on her face she would have preferred otherwise. I halted my horse without needing to be told, my companions following suit.

“Queen Catherine,” she called out in crisp Lower Miezan.

“That would be me,” I said. “And you are?”

“General Basilia,” she said. “You were expected. Safe passage is granted to you by the writ of the Tyrant of Helike.”

Her gaze flicked to Indrani and Andronike.

“To you alone,” she meaningfully said.

“Catherine,” Archer said under her breath. “This is-”

“He needs me alive and on the field,” I mildly replied. “It’s not that kind of trap.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” she insisted.

“Certainty is a luxury I can rarely afford,” I said. “If it goes south, gloat all you’d like. Andronike?”

“Not beyond my reach,” the crow stated, eyeing the changing house.

“Good enough,” I grunted.

Zombie resumed his advance and I entered the dragon’s lair. General Basilia cast me a dark glance as I passed her. Someone wasn’t happy I was being allowed in, evidently. Wasn’t sure why she was being so ornery – I’d had the man her Tyrant had usurped the throne from shot back when I was still the Squire. Surely that should earn me some measure of fondness? Apparently not , I drily thought, feeling her gaze remaining on my back as I rode forward. The heavy and layered wards I could feel washing over my skin with a distinct tingle made it clear that distrust truly was the order of the night. The soldiers parted with silent discipline until I reached the steps of the changing house, leaning on my staff to dismount with a muted curse. A man-at-arms came up to take Zombie’s reins, but I clicked my tongue in disapproval.

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” I said. “He bites.”

A twist of will had my dead horse baring his teeth. The soldier stepped back, a glimmer of fear in her eyes. I’d spent long enough idling, though, so up I went the worn steps and through the already-open door. The inside was lit up with torches and magelights, which almost surprised me. I’d half-expected some innocent soul to be serving as fuel instead. A sweeping glance was enough to give me an idea of the inside: a large common room for trade to be held, with a counter at the back in front of twin doors leading to backrooms. A few tapestries in the manner of the Free Cities had been hung on the walls – most of them about Theodosius the Unconquered – but the room had been largely stripped bare. It only made the fresh additions more glaring: two rows of twisted little gargoyles, some bearing trumpets, were wiggling around and chattering like vermin. Between them a red carpet had been set, leading up to a throne literally resting on the back of a foursome of pitiful-looking gargoyles.

On it was the Tyrant of Helike, Kairos Theodosian.

So frail , I thought. Curly dark brown hair and olive skin made his ancestry clear, but these were by far the least striking parts of the villain. One of his eyes was deep red, as if blood had seeped into it, and his sickly frame looked like it could be blown over by a stiff breeze. Opulent robes in rich purple, covered in part by a long strip of cloth of gold draped over the front, boasted broad sleeves but not quite broad enough to hide that the arm he kept covered was trembling. No crown was set on his brow, but he was casually toying with an ivory scepter ending in a golden roaring lion’s head. I could feel the enchantments wafting off of it even from the other side of the room. The Tyrant took one look at me, good eye widening, and convulsed. For a heartbeat I was worried that the Night had somehow hurt him, but the convulsion erupted into raucous, heartfelt laughter. I blinked, taken aback. I flicked a glance at the nearest gargoyle but it just put out its tongue at me. I discretely kicked it while the Tyrant kept laughing his guts out. Eventually the villain got himself under control, wiping tears out of his eyes with trembling hands.

“Oh, that is a fine jest indeed,” he said, then peeked at the floor. “You never disappoint.”

I cleared my throat.

“I don’t suppose you’d care to share,” I said.

The Tyrant smiled at me in the way of man for whom smiles came easy and meant little.

“You are so short,” Kairos Theodosian said. “It is quite delightful.”

He was a good liar, I decided, but I’d known better. Just by looking at me he’d learned something, and I had no idea what. I set that aside for later consideration.

“Bet I could beat you in a footrace, though,” I said.

The smile broadened into a grin and he sprawled unceremoniously across his throne. Which was, I was only now noticing, outrageously gaudy. And I’d been in the Tower, I damn well knew what gaudy looked like.

“A pair of crowned cripples running through the streets,” he cheerfully mused. “If we charged for seats we could make a killing.”

Suddenly he twitched.

“Ah,” he said. “But where are my manners? Courtiers, announce our guest.”

To my horrified fascination, the trumpet-bearing gargoyles raised their instrument and began blowing into it. Which had mixed results, since assuming they even had lungs they would be made of stone. And that most didn’t have lips. After the musical atrocity ended in a whimper, the Tyrant raised his hand regally.

“Black Queen, I welcome you to my humble court,” he announced.

“The honour is mine, Lord Tyrant,” I deadpanned.

“Please, take a seat,” the villain waved away airily.

A waddling gargoyle carrying a plush cushioned seat above its head made its way across the carpet, setting it at my back and bowing with a chittering sound before running away.

“Much appreciated,” I said.

I eyed the seat skeptically. No obvious sorcery to be found. I prodded the cushion with my seat, but it did not seem to be filled with rusty razorblades or poisonous snakes. I glanced back at the Tyrant and found him looking at my staff quite intently. Well, only one way to find out for sure. I settled down and found it a little worn, but otherwise not prone to treacherously turning on me. It was a relief for my bad leg to be seated after this long riding, and I let out a little sigh of comfort.

“I wonder,” the Tyrant of Helike nonchalantly said, “if you’d consider telling me who that’s meant to kill.”

I met his gaze, and wondered if it was just my imagination or the red eye had gotten a little redder.

“No idea what you’re talking about,” I lied.

He chuckled.

“A staff is a sword is a prayer,” the Tyrant grinned. “It’s clever little bit of work. More patient than your reputation would imply.”

I shrugged, keeping away from my face how wary his too-perceptive eyes were making me.

“Well, I did find religion recently,” I said. “I’m told it can be a calming influence.”

“You seem well on your way to beating people to death with it,” he praised.

“You’re one to talk,” I smiled. “Your man down the road’s a lot more dangerous that Night on a stick. I don’t suppose you’d tell me who that’s meant to kill?”

The Tyrant pouted.

“That’d take all the fun out of this,” he said. “And why even bother, if we’re not having a good time?”

“Huh,” I said. “Black must have really wanted to kill you.”

“There’s no need to be so oblique about it,” the Tyrant amusedly said. “He’s alive and in the hands of the Grey Pilgrim. Somewhere in Iserre, last I heard. The man is of little interest to me.”

I had been aiming to wheedle information out of him after broaching the subject, true enough. My eyes narrowed. So why was he offering it to me so freely? Even as I forced myself to remain focused, my pulse quickened. He was alive. Gods, he was alive. I’d known he would be, but it was still a weight off my shoulders. Unless this is cruelty , I thought. Unless he’s lying. I kept my voice steady.

“It’s a little disquieting, being on the other side of the chaos for once,” I said.

“I am but a humble servant of my Lord Hierarch,” the Tyrant piously assured me. “And you need not worry, I would not lie to such a close and beloved friend.”

“I would never doubt you,” I lied. “I think of you as a brother, really.”

Did he know I was an orphan? By the way his lips quirked, yes, he most definitely did.

“As your friend,” I said. “I wondered if you would answer a question for me.”

“Always,” the Tyrant swore, hand over heart.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Are we at war?” I asked. “I’ve been hearing troubling rumours about League soldiers and legionaries.”

“Alas, there have been some slight misunderstandings,” the Tyrant sighed. “Your Marshal of Callow seems to have mistaken our curiosity for a fully armed battalion trying to assassinate her.”

“Mistakes happen,” I said, keeping my voice calm.

It took an effort of will not to clutch my staff so hard it creaked. He’d tried to kill Juniper, the smug little monster. Or he’s trying to put me off-balance , I thought. The Theodosian had a lazy smile on his face, but his eyes had never left me. I had no control here, no real leverage to use against him. That was the misstep, I decided. Trying to remain in control. There would be no winning that sort of game against the likes of the Tyrant of Helike.

“I see only one solution,” I said.

“Do you?” he said, smile expectant.

I smiled back, broad and friendly and just a little bit guileless.

“Would you like to secretly be allies?” I offered.

The smallest flicker of surprise on his face, gone before it could even be fully seen, was the herald of scoring my first blood of the night. His answering grin was gleefully malicious. See? I might have been with only women for the last few years, but I still knew what men liked – you know, shady military alliances that would be discarded at the earliest convenience in favour of wanton betrayal. He twirled his scepter thoughtfully, though that did little to hide the eagerness on his face.

“As your friend,” Kairos Theodosian said. “I feel like I should warn you that rumours have long existed – patently untrue, I assure you – that I am a treacherous blackguard, if you’ll forgive my language.”

I painted surprise over my face.

“You?” I faintly said. “That seems rather unjust. I mean, I had your nephew shot and he seemed like the real villain to me.”

“I did hear about that,” the Tyrant mused. “Wasn’t it under truce banner?”

It hadn’t been, strictly speaking, not that the rumours ever bothered about that.

“In my defence,” I said, “he did call me a witch.”

He seemed amused.

“Oh, Dorian,” the villain fondly said. “You always did have more lungs than wits.”

“I can see why that would make you hesitate, though,” I mused. “So let me reassure you, I have absolutely no intention of sharing our secret treaty with the First Prince to try to force her hand into allying with me and crushing you utterly.”

He let out a loud cackle, arm shaking uncontrollably under his robes.

“Are you lying?” the Tyrant of Helike grinned, revealing a curved stretch of pearly teeth.

I leaned forward.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Am I?”

A heartbeat passed.

“I can’t tell,” he said, sounding deeply pleased.

“A sound foundation for military alliance,” I said.

“The only kind worth making,” the villain cheerfully agreed. “A bargain made, then, Black Queen.”

He gently tapped his scepter against his chin.

“I suppose,” the Tyrant said, “that I should ask you who we’ve allied against.”

I leaned back.

“Intercession, you might say,” I said.

His brow rose.

“Well now,” he murmured. “Someone’s been digging up secrets.”

“Calernia’s full of graves a little more shallow than they should be,” I replied. “And I’ve heard the two of you have scores to settle.”

“She has quite the game afoot,” the Tyrant told me. “Even I know only part of it.”

“I’ve quite a few glimpses of things she’s been up to,” I said, “but no bird’s eye view, so to speak.”

“That sounds,” the villain said, “like a trade worth making.”

I smiled. Dangerous as it might be to tell this man anything he didn’t know, I needed the semblance of a handle on what the Wandering Bard was up to more than words could properly express. Everyone else on the board I could make out at least vague objectives for, but the Intercessor? She was still in many ways an unknown, and one with too many irons in the fire to be left to her own devices. I might not trust the Tyrant of Helike a single drop, but as far as I knew he was the only man alive who’d ever pulled one over the Bard. If anyone could be of use to me, it was him.

“Ah, but before we begin horse-trading,” he said. “As my most trusted ally, I have a suggestion to offer you. If I may, Black Queen?”

“Call me Catherine,” I said. “And by all means.”

“You must call me Kairos, then,” the Tyrant said. “Before you leap into the loving embrace of our dear Cordelia Hasenbach, I would have a look at her little scheme down south. You are not the only one robbing graves, in a manner of speaking.”

“Curious,” I evenly said.

“Something’s being dredged out of Lake Artoise,” Kairos confided, “that might of interest to you.”

“And why would that be?” I asked.

“One does not make war on the same enemy for decades without learning some of their bad habits, Catherine,” the Tyrant said.

That was unfortunate, as I could only think of one person the First Prince had crossed blades with for that long. More worryingly, the most recent mistake I could put to Dread Empress Malicia’s name was the Doom of Liesse. If Cordelia Hasenbach was intent on going down the same road this war was about to get much, much worse. Not that I’d take Kairos’ word for this. Like the fate of my teacher, it was another truth I needed to get my hands on. I fished out my pipe and stuffed it under the Tyrant’s disapproving stare, black flame licking at my fingers just long enough to light it. I shook my hand to get rid of the lingering heat, then inhaled deep. The wakeleaf warmed my throat, and I made myself comfortable. I spewed out a stream of acrid smoke as Kairos wrinkled his nose in distaste.

“Now,” I smiled. “I believe there was some talk of horse-trading.”

When the eye went deeper red, this time, there was no question of whether or not it was my imagination.

Chapter 8: Veracity

“A pleasant lie finds more ears than a sharp truth.”
– Proceran saying

“Seriously?” I said. “I mean, I know you’re with the old guard about this stuff but this is pretty on the nose.”

“The classics became such for a reason,” Kairos stiffly replied.

He sounded a little miffed, I noted.

“I bet you even have a speech, don’t you?” I mused. “Some tortured extended metaphor about the nature of Creation and our role in it.”

The Tyrant of Helike glared at me woefully.

“This rook represents the inherent emptiness of moral philosophy,” I suggested. “Maybe mention something about how Good is prone to stagnation and therefore fundamentally inferior.”

“Do you even know how to play?” he challenged.

I glanced downwards at the shatranj board a pair of his little twisted gargoyles had brought. I picked up a footman and wiggled it a bit.

“This moves diagonally, right?” I beamed.

His eyes closed, even the red one.

“You pain me, Catherine Foundling,” Kairos said. “You pain me deeply .”

I hummed thoughtfully, then took advantage of his distraction to turn the board around. The poor gargoyles it was resting atop squeaked in dismay, though they didn’t flinch.

“I’ll take black,” I said.

I discreetly pocketed the footman from the white side of the board I’d not for a moment intended to give back. His eyes opened just a moment too late to catch me red-handed.

“This is most improper,” the villain protested.

“They don’t call me the White Queen,” I pointed out.

“Are you so bound by what others think of you?” Kairos gallantly tried.

“Point for effort,” I said. “But I’ve had better.”

I opened the game most illegally by pushing forward a footman.

“I had something for this,” the Tyrant muttered. “Give me a moment.”

He didn’t even bother to comment on my open cheating before moving up a knight. Well, it wasn’t like I was going to stop anyway. I was passable at shatranj, but years of being punitively demolished at the game by Vivienne and Hakram had made me aware of my limitations. Vivienne in particular liked to allow me to think I could win before methodically flogging the conceit out of me.

“Weren’t we horse-trading?” I reminded him.

I pulled at my pipe and breathed out, letting the cloud of scented smoke waft up. Another footman went up, propping up my centre. The Tyrant let out a little noise of agreement, then snapped his fingers.

“Exactly,” he agreed. “Imagine, if you would, that you were a deity.”

“Not my cup of tea,” I drily replied.

“Evidently,” Kairos mused, too-sharp eyes flicking across me. “Yet humour me.”

“Done,” I said.

He was being a little too slow to move, so I moved again. The Tyrant of Helike raised an eyebrow, and I painted embarrassed surprise over my face. Like I’d thought he’d already taken his turn, which was clearly the only reason I would keep going on. I withdrew the footman with a contrite smile, but only one square of the two it had moved.

“As a deity,” the Tyrant said, moving up a footman to contest the centre, “though of unfathomable power you find yourself limited. Unlike the likes of us, who can command – Catherine, why is one of my footmen missing?”

“Desertion is an inevitable part of war,” I sagely replied. “So, we can move every piece but the Gods can’t. That the gist of it?”

“You’re taking all the enjoyment out of this,” Kairos complained.

“That is my favourite part,” I revealed.

One of my knights went up, my opponent staring with suspicion at the legal movement. That was fine, I wasn’t going to nudge it up until he was distracted anyway.

“Consider that perhaps one piece in ten can be moved,” the Tyrant said. “Exceptional pieces, to be sure, or at least made to be so. Yet they must be sufficient to both carry out your godly intent and influence the other pieces, which sadly move largely according to their own petty desires.”

A few moves in quick succession as we traded footmen in the centre and I moved up my priest under cover of pretending to put away the pieces I’d taken.

“That sounds like you don’t believe the House of Light is a faithful servant of the Heavens in this earthly world,” I chided. “Which would be heresy , Kairos. For shame.”

“Ah, and so you touch upon the second limitation,” the Tyrant said. “That these disobedient pieces not only have the gall to not directly answer your desires, but they also dare to influence the pieces that do .”

“As a goddess, I am most displeased by this,” I blandly said.

“As well you should be,” Kairos agreed. “Bloody chaos, not at all the orderly matter you had envisioned. Sadly, direct intervention would be costly in more ways than can be easily understood. A more... elegant solution is required.”

“Someone who can dole out the nudges I cannot,” I said.

“The proverbial finger on the scales,” the Tyrant of Helike smiled. “Of course, such an entity would need to be constrained. It is a tool, after all. It would not do for it to get ideas .”

“Bindings,” I said.

The left side of the board was turning into something of a debacle for me, I saw. My dear friend was a fair hand at the game, and I was now down a priest. That was fine, since as the defender of all things Evil I could boast of a certain talent at necromancy – a reasonable explanation for why said priest had mysteriously reappeared on the right side of the board. And all it’d taken was kicking a gargoyle so it would yelp and my opponent would look.

“Three things she always keeps,” Kairos Theodosian lightly said. “She speaks, she sees and she knows stories.”

He eyed my returned priest with a degree of skepticism, forcing me to withdraw it from the board. Time for contingencies, then. My fingers closed around the stolen white footman under my cloak, allowing Night to seep inside drip by drip.

“There’s two sides to a coin,” I said.

The Tyrant conceded to that with a slight inclination of the head.

“Three things she always flees,” he said. “Promised death, direct touch and her heart’s desire.”

Truth, I decided, though cloaked in vagueness. Some things I’d already known – Black had put her in the face of certain death thrice, during the Liesse Rebellion, and she’d been forced to withdraw for a time – other’s I’d only suspected. If ‘direct touch’ really stood for an inability to directly intervene, anyway. It might go a little further than that, though. Vivienne had once mentioned to me she’d never seen the Bard take a wound she was not directly responsible for receiving. As interesting as the Tyrant’s words were was the fact he could speak them at all. Where had he learned all this? Back when I’d still had him on the list of possible invaders of Callow I’d gone through what records the Eyes of the Empire had on him, and Helike as a whole. There’d been persistent rumours that something was kept under that city-state’s palace with oracular abilities, but with the rumour came the restriction of only one question possible. I could think of half a dozen ways to get around that, sure, but if Helike had unrestrained access to that potent a tool they wouldn’t be one of the powers in the League. They would be the League, their banner flying above every rampart in the region.

“Fleeing her heart’s desire,” I casually repeated. “You almost make the role sound like a punishment.”

The Tyrant smiled.

“I have a theory,” he said. “You see, for someone to truly make a mess on this board, they would need certain qualities. Perception, affinity, knowledge. A combination thereof. You understand my meaning, yes?”

“An awareness of patterns,” I said.

“Exactly so,” Kairos replied. “And, plague as I am by a suspicious nature, it occurred to me that these qualities are as rare as they are useful. That neither Above nor Below are prone to waste in such regards.”

My fingers stilled over the rook I’d been about to take in hand. Eyes flicking back up, I studied his face.

“An elegant solution, you called it,” I softly said.

Poison made into remedy. A trap inherent to the lay of Creation. It made, I thought, a horrifying amount of sense.

“Were someone qualified to be trouble,” he echoed. “They would be most qualified to quell it.”

I moved up the rook, took a knight I’d been careful to strip of protection.

“And interesting theory,” I said. “Though we strayed from our purpose. Should such an entity exist, what would it want ?”

Kairos’ eyes came to rest on me, unblinking.

“Horse-trading, Catherine,” he said. “Not horse- giving .”

My pipe held nothing but ashes, by now, so I leaned back to empty it on the head of one of the gargoyles. I could have garbed what I had to say in vagueness and a touch of the cryptic, but he’d win out if we played that game. No, best to cough up my part in a way that benefitted me as well. There was as much to learn from questions asked as secrets offered.

“She knew the Dead King while he was still mortal,” I said, after stowing away my pipe. “And watched his rise with great interest, from as close as she could.”

The Tyrant’s lips quirked.

“And what was she looking for?” he asked.

Interesting, I thought. Kairos had understood my meaning earlier when I’d mentioned intercession , and the only individual I’d ever heard call the Bard the ‘Intercessor’ was Neshamah. Considering the Dead King had mentioned the Tyrant had reached out to him when we’d spoken in Keter last year, I’d assumed the information came from there. But it seemed he wasn’t fully aware of the history between those two, if that question was any indication. Not that I could reasonably assume I was, but odds were I knew more about than that most. Including even this damnably well-informed man, looked like.

“How villains are made,” I said.

He was good, I thought, but that red eye gave it away. The triumph he was feeling, like something he’d suspected for years had just been confirmed. So, my eternal friend had encountered an application of that knowledge at some point. I’d heard that entire conversation, including the parts I hadn’t mentioned, so I had a suspicion as to what was important here . I won’t solve the riddle with the tools they gave me, so it seems I must learn craftsmanship of my own, the Bard had said. Her methods were her own, no gift from the Gods. Which meant she was capable of making mistakes. I thought of the madman down in the city, silently recording trials, and wondered if I had not just discovered a very important piece. Kairos had arranged the election of the Hierarch. Kairos had dealt a defeat to the Wandering Bard.

That did not feel like a coincidence.

“Your turn,” I said.

I was talking about more than the game, as we both knew.

“War is a messy business,” the Tyrant of Helike casually said. “Not at all a precise tool. Of course, it is not without its uses. Sometimes when you need something dead, where a dagger will not do a landslide will serve.”

Which begged the question, of course, of what exactly the Wandering Bard had failed to see stabbed. This couldn’t be about the Calamities, it wouldn’t make sense. They might have been a successful outlier in sustained victory for Evil, insofar as my father really cared about waving the banner, but getting rid of them couldn’t be the point of this. I didn’t doubt for a moment that she’d branded Black in the Free Cities just as harshly as I had branded the Lone Swordsman that fateful night in Summerholm, but there would have been no need for a crusade to hammer that nail fully in. The Doom of Liesse had killed the trust between Black and Malicia, which made it just a matter of time until the partnership keeping Praes together collapsed. She didn’t need to start a war, or a Grand Alliance, to send the Dread Empire scuttling back to the old ways.

“A lot of people get killed in landslides,” I noted.

“Losses are losses,” Kairos waved away. “I suppose it would be more apt to compare it to a fire being lit. One can do quite a bit with a fire, if one can guide where it burns.”

My brow furrowed, and I barely paid attention to the move I made on the board. If he was implying the Bard had either started – or, more likely, fed and sped up – a continental war to clean up loose ends, then she’d have a finger on both sides. An argument could be made that by screwing with Black she’d given the East a push, since through him she could get at both Malicia and myself. That sounded horribly risky and requiring an amount of insight and foresight that should be fucking impossible, but we were dealing with an entity that even the Dead King claimed to have never won against. I had to at least consider the possibility. It was where she was guiding the Tenth Crusade through that I was having trouble to understand. The Grey Pilgrim had influence in Levant, sure. But the foremost Ashuran hero was the White Knight, who as far as I knew had no real ties to the ruling class of the Thalassocracy. And arguably the most powerful Proceran hero was the Saint of Swords, someone I very much doubted Cordelia fucking Hasenbach would take political advice from. Which made the whole theory fall apart, since the First Prince was the mortar of the Grand Alliance and by far, even now, the most powerful member. And since we were operating under the assumption the Bard couldn’t just walk up to someone not Named and pull the strings, this put all the rest into question.

“Incomplete,” I said. “At the very heart.”

Kairos smiled, and it twisted his face into something barely human.

“She has a cousin, Catherine,” he reminded me.

My fingers clenched. The Augur. Shit, I can’t believe I forgot about the Augur. That was a very dangerous angle. It should be hard to manipulate an oracle, but then what we knew about the Augur’s power – and the Bard’s, for that matter – was limited. Even information about Agnes Hasenbach herself was thin on the ground. It was known, however, that her crowned cousin trusted her a great deal. Why wouldn’t she? The Augur had helped her win the civil war that put her on the throne in the first place. Still, it didn’t mean that the First Prince was in the Wandering Bard’s pocket. Not even close. But it did mean that the Intercessor could get the right words at the right time to end up in Cordelia Hasenbach’s ears. I met the Tyrant’s eyes and found open amusement in them. He was well aware that even if I went to the First Prince with this she’d just see it as me poisoning the well on one of her most effective advisers. A kinswoman, to boot. And you’re pleased, you little shit, because you know that means actually allying with Hasenbach just got a whole lot more risky, I thought.

“Assuming you’re right,” I said, refraining from voicing ‘and not feeding me a well-crafted lie to make this war even more bloody than it already is’, “then a lot of effort has been expended. She has been visible in way she can’t often have been before.”

If she meddled this heavily every few decades, there would be damned records of it. That implied something was forcing her hand here and now, or she was after something worth the risks. The moment word that something like the Wandering Bard was out there pulling strings, a lot of her influence waned. And these weren’t the days of the Kingdom of Sephirah anymore: cleaning up all mentions of her wouldn’t be as easy as it would have been back then. Not unless she had some divinely-gifted aspect for that specific purpose, but I very much doubted that. Sparse as they were, there were records of her existence. Black had found some, and myself others.

“Indeed,” Kairos said. “What makes this age different, I wonder?”

There was no answer following, just me losing my last priest to an unwise trade.

“Yeah yeah, trading and not gifting,” I sighed.

I paused, drumming my fingers on the side of the board. What could I get out of him, by telling him this one?

“On at least one instance, she struck a bargain on the behalf of Below,” I finally said.

His brow rose, and I got the impression he was distinctly unimpressed.

“The bargain was not struck with Named,” I added quietly.

My eyes were on his red one, awaiting a reaction, but I found none. His lips quirked into a smile and I got the distinct impression I’d been played. Had the glint of triumph earlier been a fake out? To hide a lie when I caught it, or to take away my attention this very moment – when something he actually minded me knowing was on the table? Tricky bastard , I thought. Getting a read on him was like trying to paint on smoke. That’d been a risk from the start, though, I conceded. It was the questions that were telling the tale here.

“How was she summoned?” the Tyrant pleasantly asked.

Gotcha , I thought. He hadn’t know that was possible, then. Because this wasn’t about specifics – we both knew that even if I’d learn the specifics of the ritual the Sisters had used to reach out to Below I wouldn’t share them with him – it was about fresh risk introduced to already existing plans. He needed to know if some pious, desperate soul out there could call out to Above and get the Intercessor a foothold instead. Which meant whatever he was up to, the Wandering Bard could still fuck it up if she got an in. So is that why you’ve been sticking to the Hierarch like a leech? I thought. He’s not just your sword, he’s your shield as well?

“She was not sent for,” I said. “She was sent. Audience was bought and paid: desperation, blood and need.”

His good eye narrowed.

“And?” he pressed.

“There was a lot to lose,” I said. “You could call it weight .”

Somehow I doubted everyone who slaughtered a priesthood in their own seat of power and prayed got a personal visit from the Bard with terms to offer. Below, the Intercessor had as good as admitted, didn’t want to lose the entire Everdark to a catastrophic blunder by the Twilight Sages. I tossed him that last part as a bone, a reassurance of sorts. It’d take more than a Proceran prince losing his holdings to get the Bard an angle. Of course, with our good friend Neshamah on the march the stakes for our little scuffle had been raised rather high. The Tyrant wasn’t out of the woods yet, and so I smiled pleasantly at him.

“You dropped this, by the way,” I suddenly said.

I tossed him back the footman I’d stolen before the game even began. To my surprise he failed to catch it, and it bounced off his chin and down on the floor. He eyed me with displeasure, and while he bent to pick it up I casually switched the places of my last rook and my queen. That ought to stave off kingtip for a few more turns.

“This has been invested with power to explode,” Kairos amusedly accused when he straightened again.

Ah, so he could sense that. Good to know. The Night wasn’t exactly subtle stuff, but that he could discern the intent I put to it wasn’t something I’d been entirely certain of.

“I’m offended you would even say that,” I said, hand over heart. “I gave this back to you because of my deep and abiding belief in fair play.”

“You really are terrible at this game,” the Tyrant of Helike noted. “I can’t believe even after so much cheating you’re losing this badly.”

“It’s part of the metaphor,” I lied. “Like the whole horse thing.”

“Elegantly done,” Kairos praised. “I believe we were speculating as to the bounty worth the risks being taken.”

I did not reply, half-debating reaching for my pipe again as I watched him.

“There is one element singular to our little war,” the Tyrant idly continued. “A common friend, I believe.”

The Dead King, was it? Wasn’t sure I bought that. Oh, an argument could be made. After the series of disasters that had been the crusades headed into the Kingdom of the Dead, it might have been easier to assemble a coalition of that sort if it was initially headed for Praes instead. But it didn’t fit with Neshamah’s methods. It wasn’t like there’d never before been chaos south of the lakes for him to take advantage of. The Hidden Horror was still kicking around through careful application of the epithet’s first part.

“And?” I said, echoing his earlier rejoinder.

“Quite the stage, isn’t it?” Kairos said. “A crusade turned to the Tower. The might of the west spent, but not broken. The east eating itself alive, to various degrees. Our friend comes rather late to the banquet.”

So that was his story, then. Neshamah had come out to play because he’d been invited, as he had been in the days of Dread Empress Triumphant. The invitation meant he wasn’t the Enemy but instead an enemy. This little continental waltz of death was the Intercessor finally tying up her oldest loose end, having set out her finest bait to draw him out. It was neat and tidy notion, so naturally I distrusted it. It wasn’t that I would but it beyond the Wandering Bard to have engineered this butchery over several decades – if not more – just to put down the King in Keter. I had no doubts she’d be capable of it, whether morally or in actual capacity. But the story felt wrong to me. The Intercessor striking out after the arguably most prominent champion of Below, Kairos beginning his scheme with the Hierarch to kill or cripple her before she could. Sure, that would end up counted as a win for the old crowd. Procer devoured, the arbiter of the godly pissing contest losing an eye in the grand old tradition of Evil and what Good nations managed to survive the wreck would be eclipsed by the Below-aligned powers remaining on Calernia. That was the thing, though.

This was too simple a game.

Which meant the Tyrant of Helike had fed me secrets, armed me with just enough to interfere, and now intended to loose me into the middle of all these delicate plans being laid down. It also meant he was lying to me, or close enough, but I couldn’t find it in me to be offended by that. Might as well blame a fish for swimming.

“Interesting,” I said.

Then I shrugged and tipped my king. It was, after all, just a game. And I’d already gotten what I came from. The Tyrant watched me with a smile as I rose to my feet, leaning on my staff.

“I expect I’ll be seeing you soon,” I said.

“How could I disappoint my closest ally?” Kairos replied.

I only took a few steps before turning, mostly on a whim.

“What would actually happen,” I asked, “if you won?”

The Tyrant laughed, the sound of it strangely honest.

“Ah, Catherine, that’s the entire point,” Kairos Theodosian smiled. “ Finding out .”

I waited until I’d left the changing house to snap my fingers. Enough Night had been fed to the piece for the entire set to be shattered in the explosion. I supposed that, in a way, it could be considered my rebuttal.

If the game got out of hand, I wasn’t above breaking the board.

Peregrine III

“Pilgrim of grey;
Fleet-foot, dusk-clad, the wanderer,
His stride rebellion and stirring ember
In his grasp the light of a morning star
Tattered his throne, tattered his war.”

– Extract from the ‘Anthem of Smoke’, widely considered the founding epic of the Dominion of Levant

Tariq’s sole remaining brother had not aged well.

Bakri had boasted a warrior’s build in his youth, and made good use of it to bring glory to their shared blood. Decades had passed since then, however, and what had once been hard muscle turned to fat and aching bones. Though the Grey Pilgrim was thirty eight years old, he knew himself to look in his early thirties. Bakri was two years younger, but at a glance would have seemed eldest among them. The thick beard of his brother was usually combed and oiled, but being confined to his quarters had apparently robbed the man of the desire for such sophistication. The dark hair was hoarse and wild, Bakri’s eyes the red of one who had not slept a full night in too long. Tariq did not wait for an invitation to sit after the door was closed behind him, instead leaning against the doorframe as he watched his brother pour himself wine from a bronze carafe.

“Brother,” Bakri greeted him. “Finally you make time for me. Should I be kneeling in thanks?”

Tariq did not reply. He stood there, in silence, and wondered what it was about thrones that made men go mad.

“Am I to beg for my life, Pilgrim ?” Bakri snarled. “Is this your justice I’ve heard so much of?”

The Ophanim were silent. Had been, since Tariq had first entertained the thought of using his gifts in anger. For that silence he thought less of them. He might have been changed by his Bestowal, but blood still ran through his vein. There were things beyond the purview of mercy. Still, the loss of the whispers was keenly felt. Without their guidance, he felt half-blind. They had known much, and shared freely. Now all he had to call on was his eyes and his wits.

“Just get it over with, Tariq,” his brother tiredly said. “You need someone to hang for this and you’ve chosen me. What point is there in making game of it first?”

“You did not act,” the Grey Pilgrim finally said, “like an innocent man.”

“And that is enough to make me guilty?” Bakri mocked.

No, Tariq admitted to himself. It was not. Confining Yasa’s husband and isolating their nephew was the blatant premise to a grab for the Tattered Throne, but it was no proof that Bakri had a hand in their sister’s death. All it was testimony to was ambition and poor character.

“You always did love her best,” his brother bitterly said, drinking deep of his wine.

He wiped a trickle away from his chin.

“And she you,” Bakri continued. “There was never any room for anyone else.”

“I loved her best,” Tariq said softly, “because she was the best of us.”

“Mother was a fucking vulture of a woman,” his brother smiled thinly. “But at least she never played favourites in her disregard. You two, though? You threw us the scraps of what you held for each other and expected your feet licked for it. I didn’t kill her, Tariq. But I will not weep for a woman I shared only blood with.”

It was a stranger he was looking at, the Pilgrim understood. A man he barely knew. A few childhood memories were no compass to the roiling sea of bitterness and frustration that stood before him. For the first time in many years, he felt adrift. Unable to tell truth from lie, black from white. He could not see into the soul of men: like everyone else he was groping blindly in the dark, hoping he would not stumble into a chasm.

“Our nephew, Bakri,” he said. “Caged and left to fade. Yasa’s son. Does even that really mean so little to you?”

The other man sneered.

“You sanctimonious prick,” he said. “You traipse around the world following stories, and now you’ve gone and convinced yourself that’s the truth of Creation. Like there’s never been killing within the Blood. Like a bit of red in the veins means we really owe each other all the oaths we break. Look around you, Pilgrim.”

Bakri opened his arms, jeering.

“Did you really think meaning well was enough?” he said. “That it stopped being a throne because the first man to hold it was a hero? This isn’t one of your pretty adventures, it doesn’t end with everyone smiling and coming home. Sometimes it ends with a Seljun being a little too good and getting an arrow in the fucking throat for it. We don’t all get to leave when we feel like it, Tariq. Some of us have to live where the Heavens don’t look too closely.”

For a moment, he thought of killing his brother. It would be easy as making a fist. Light would lash out, burn through the man’s throat, and that would be the end of it. But that was anger, that was blood. It was the same ugliness in Bakri’s voice, only with greater power behind it. Please , Tariq thought, closing his eyes. Help me. Sometimes, all you could do to beat back the night was light a candle. Please , he prayed, help me see. That I might do more than add suffering to suffering, injustice to injustice, grief to grief. He prayed, and was answered.

The Grey Pilgrim opened his eyes and knew it was his gift to Behold the truth of was what hiddem.

He saw in his sole remaining sibling fear and rage, and ambition like poison. Grief, too, however slight. But deep beneath it all he saw guilt. A hand offered and taken.

“Tell me,” Tariq said, voice like stone and steel. “ Tell me who you sold our sister to, Bakri .”

After that he saw fear, mostly.

It did not stay his hand.

—

When the lords and ladies of the Dominion came to Levante for his sister’s funeral games, the city felt as if a shroud had fallen over it. Until the first of them had arrived he had spent his hours with Izil, keeping the fragile flame remaining in his nephew from dying out, but when the greats of Levant arrived Tariq was forced to leave the boy’s side. There would be an election in the Majilis, when the games came to a close, and there was only one result he would brook. Yasa’s son would be the Holy Seljun, his father holding regency until the boy came of age. Yet for all that none denied him audience, and instead made great pageantry of receiving him, the answers he received were evasive. These people, he thought, had professed loyalty to Yasa. Followed her with eagerness, with pride. And together with her they had served Levant well. And yet now the loyalty had waned, replaced by guarded eyes and cautious tongues. What had been granted to the mother would not be inherited by the son.

“They’re afraid, Tariq,” Sintra told him.

That much he had known. He could not fail to see it, now that his eyes had been opened by Above. He had stolen a moment with his lover in a tucked away corner of the old city, where none would see them. Much as he would have preferred to speak only between Tariq and Sintra, they were not only that. The Grey Pilgrim and the Lady of Alava need speak as well.

“Bakri died at my hand,” Tariq acknowledged.

“Died?” Sintra murmured. “There were only cinders left. That is more than death. And for all that, fear is not what the act earned you. You passed judgement as the Grey Pilgrim, and none would deny your right to end a traitor. It is those that clasped hands with Bakri that still tongues.”

“I am the only man alive to have heard his confession,” the Pilgrim flatly stated.

“We’re not fools, Tariq,” Sintra sighed. “Your brother might have greased a few palms in the harbour, but it was not one of ours who loosed the arrow. There are only two who could have given the order, and neither is to be trifled with.”

“Procer,” he said. “Ashur.”

He turned to look upon the love of his life as the silence lingered, and what he beheld filled him with pride. There was iron in this daughter of the Champion’s Blood. Fear as well, but it did not bend her spine as it did so many others he has spoken to.

“Which was it?” Sintra quietly asked.

That was the question, he knew, plaguing the thoughts of every person of influence in Levant. Was it their protectors in the Thalassocracy that had seen a Dominion resurgent, less eager to take instructions from committees on an island across the water, and acted to smother the insolence before it could grow further? Or was it the covetous packs of royalty past the Red Snake Wall who had struck the blow, wary of a Levant that would not retreat at the mere hint of the First Prince’s displeasure? Neither were enemies anyone could truly afford.

“The Prince of Orense,” Tariq finally told her. “Bakri believed it was with the tacit permission of the First Prince himself.”

Sintra let out a sharp breath.

“Prince Alejandro Trastanes,” she murmured. “Do they plan to invade?”

“No,” he replied just as quietly. “It was a petty thing, Sintra. That is, perhaps, the most absurd part of it. We have silver veins of our own, now, and no longer rely on his for coinage. His treasury thinned as a result. Worse, he foresaw that the Ashurans would rather use our silver than his for their own mints.”

Bakri was to declare those very veins as having run out, after a few years, and quietly the old sales would have resumed. The Levantine silver would have gone to the treasury of the Seljun instead of the mints in Levant and Ashur. A stupid, petty waste. And for that Yasa had died.

“There are some who’ll say electing Izil to the Tattered Throne would be sending a message,” his lover said. “That we will not desist.”

“That we will not bow to fear,” Tariq mused. “I can see how this would not be popular, as so many of us wish to do so.”

“They’ve never been shy about sending knives south,” Sintra darkly said. “They know Ashur will only stir against invasion. And that’s always been the unspoken guarantee from Salia hasn’t it? Do not be a threat, and you will not be troubled. We became a threat. Trouble found us.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tariq said. “When the games end, Izil will stand before the Majilis as candidate for the Tattered Throne.”

“You don’t have the votes,” his lover told him. “One of Bakri’s children will be raised, it is almost a certainty.”

“You misunderstand,” he said. “They are bowing, Sintra, to fear.”

“And?” she frowned.

“When Izil stands, I will stand with him,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

He met her eyes, and smiled thinly.

“Alejandro Trastanes is very far away. I am here .”

Nine days later, Izil Isbili was unanimously elected the Holy Seljun of Levant. His uncle stood in silence behind the seven-year-old boy as the votes were cast into the large brass cup, but for once the pale stones meaning support made no sound as they fell.

The cup, after all, was already filled with the ashes of Bakri Isbili.

The following dawn, Tariq began marching north.

—

Orense was prosperous.

The principality as well, he had seen while treading the roads and fields, but the capital of the principality stood above the rest in that regard. Traders from all over southern Calernia could be found haggling in the streets in a smattering of tongues, be it the fluid tradertalk of the Free Cities or the elegant Ceseo of the southern Dominion. Colourful cloths and elegant furs, ripe fruit and vivid painted slates: the markets of Orense were a thriving throng, a centre of commerce. And among them, all was traded for the silver of Prince Alejandro Trastanes’ mines. It was the fortune of the Trastanes line to own these, it was said, but also that of it subjects. The city would not attract so many if not for the remarkable purity and quantity of its ore. Tariq had not known it was possible to hate the bounty of the earth before then, but he had learned. Pieces of metal glinting in the sun could take a life months of riding away, even if they were not spent for the purpose. All they needed to do was exist and men would do horrors for the purpose of owning them, or keeping them, or even ensuring other did not have them.

He had spent most his life shielding people little different than these from the wickedness of the world. Divested himself of the right to be bound to his lover in the eyes of any but each other, of having a home for more than a summer’s length and even of half the name he had been born to. And yet, blind to anything but the coins that saw the wheels of their existence keep turning, they had killed his sister. Tariq could not hate them for that. No, he could. He would not allow himself to. He had made sacrifices, but not with the expectation of reward. That exceptions would be made for him and those he loved. If a good act was done only at the condition of recompense, then it was not that – it was a mere transaction made with the Heavens. Yet it would have been dishonest to say it did not infuriate him, deep down, that Yasa had died and it was not so much as a ripple in the sea that was Creation. All were as specks of dust, in the eyes of Above. All were as the entire world, in the eyes of Above. The Lanterns had long taught this and Tariq knew more of the truths of the Heavens than most, but never before had he been forced to look that particular truth in the eye.

For days he walked the streets of Orense, taking the measure of the people and through them their ruler. Prince Alejandro was well-liked, he learned. The man leant the weight of his name and influence to the charitable enterprises of the House of Light, and after a string of sicknesses had ordered the sewers beneath the capital fully cleaned out for the first time in many years – at his own expense, without raising taxes to fill his coffers afterwards. He paid his watchmen and soldiers well, better than his mother had, and always on time. The prince favoured the merchants of his land above others, but did not do so egregiously and did not use the livelihood of others as means in his disagreements with other royalty. Some said that he spent too much time in Salia, at the court of the First Prince, but others argued that Orense had benefited from his influence there. There were less flattering rumours, of paramours entertained even though he was wed and duels fought for frivolous purposes, but these were old and looked upon with a forgiving eye.

Tariq was not certain what he had truly expected. Few men presented themselves as devils, even when keeping covenant with their kind, and it was said Arlesites were more attached than most to their repute. It still filled him with dismay, that priests from the House of Light could sing the praises of a man who had ordered murder. The people could be fooled, and often were. Yet he had believed, in some way, that those wielding the light of the Heavens would not be so easily taken in. It took him days, forcing himself not to act before having fully seen what there was to see, before he admitted to himself that perhaps the people of Orense had not been fooled at all. That the prince did behave well towards them. That the priests did not condemn the man because they had not been given reason to. It was a strange thing, coming to the understanding that a man could be both wicked and kind. That one did not chase away the other and claim the whole of the person. Strange and displeasing.

After twelve days, Tariq had assuaged his conscience and he set out once more. For a man of his talents, it was merely tedious to slip into the towering palace that belonged to the Trastanes. Even without the guidance of the Ophanim neither soldiers nor watchmen caught sight of him moving under cover of night, and the sorceries pervading the grounds were no true bar. The nature of the wards was sister to miracles, in some arcane way, and there were few even among the Bestowed who understood miracles as Tariq did. Whispers opened cracks to creep through, Light blooming and fading as he passed through gardens and climbed a tall trellis. From there he reached a balcony, a brush of fingers unmaking the locks and allowing him to enter unseen the private study of the Prince of Orense. Tariq closed the doors behind him, and settled in a fashionable sofa to wait until the man arrived. Servants came first, to put the study in order and leave a tray of fragrant tea and assorted spice cookies, but he moved where they were not looking and so they did no see him.

The Grey Pilgrim was sipping at a perfectly-brewed cup of Thalassinian black leaf when the man who ordered the murder of his sister entered the study. He waited in silence until the prince sat at his beautiful redwood desk and reached for a cup that was not there. Calmly, he set down the tea.

“Alejandro Trastanes,” Tariq said. “There will be no point to shouting.”

His advice was ignored, unsurprisingly. The Prince of Orense was still in good shape, for a man his age, though Tariq ruefully admitted to himself that the royal was likely younger than himself. The healer was no longer so young as to be able to casually pass such a judgement. Once shouting proved fruitless, the man drew a thin blade.

“You will not find me easy meat, assassin,” Prince Alejandro snarled in Tolesian,

“Not assassin,” Tariq calmly corrected in the same. “Pilgrim.”

From the beginning he had beheld what lay at the heart of the man, fear and pride and anger, but not he saw the second of the first of these begin devouring the others. The tipping point, he thought, was when Alejandro Trastanes realized he was alone in a room with a Bestowed whose sister he’d recently had murdered. The man was not without bravery, but few among even the most crazed of villains would care to try odds such as those. And this was no villain, no champion of Below. Only a man, with all the evil banality of that stature.

“You know not what trouble you borrow, Levantine,” the prince said.

How mundane it was now, to see through bluster. Neither tone nor posturing could hide the cold fear spreading through the soul of the man. Tariq wondered if he should enjoy the sight of that, for he found he did not. Even Yasa’s death was not enough to whet his appetite for cruelty, it seemed. He almost wished that it had been. It would make the accusations Bakri had laid at his feet echo slightly less.

“Sit down,” Tariq said.

“And then?” the prince asked.

Hope, the slightest bit of it.

“We will have a conversation,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “And when it ends, I will kill you.”

Chapter 9: Patient Knives

“No man is an island, Chancellor. We’ve tried the ritual, the result is mostly screams.”
– Dread Emperor Malignant III

We were an hour out of Rochelant when Akua returned to my side. The night was still young – I knew that better than most – so we’d not wasted moonlight by lingering on the outskirts of the city until she finished. The sooner we caught up to my drow army the better, as far as I was concerned. Still, after she returned in a whisper of power on frost I called a halt. My Peerage took the following dismissal gracefully, and why wouldn’t it? They’d not stood in my deeper councils even when I was still their sole mistress, not even Ivah. It would have been convenient if there’d been a log or rock to sit on as we spoke, but Creation did not seem in an indulging mood tonight. At least getting off the damned horse for a moment was a relief to my calves and arse. I’d forgotten how irksome the cramps coming with long rides could be, when you weren’t used to horsemanship. Winter had seen to those, before, and my Name taken off the edge before that. Gods, at least it wasn’t as bad as the return of my monthlies. The surprise had been more than slightly unpleasant, when I’d had my first moon blood in years down in the Everdark. That Archer evidently found my discomfort hilarious had been no help at all.

I stretched my legs out carefully, leaning on my staff, and my ‘war council’ assembled around me. A bird, an archer and the shade of a dead woman. There’d probably been Dread Emperors in the old days that had more reliable-seeming councils than mine, and wasn’t that a troubling thought? The shade bowed with exquisite precision, but neither crow-Andronike nor Archer took it upon themselves to add even a semblance of ceremony to the affair. A sad day indeed, when the Doom of Liesse was the best behaved of my companions.

“Lay it on me,” I said.

Usually that would have prompted a dirty joke from Indrani – whose occasional evening in my bed had done absolutely nothing to curb the racy comments of, to my mixed amusement and despair – but tonight she kept her mouth shut. I had to force myself not to look at her. This was not the place, now was not the time. The thought felt like a betrayal of sorts, true as it was. The people in the stories threw aside little details like this in the name of friendship all the time, didn’t they? It’d been a long time since my story had been that clean or pretty, though, and sometimes I doubted it ever had been.

“There are at least eight thousand Helikean soldiers in Rochelant, though no more than twelve thousand,” Diabolist reported. “No soldiery from any other of the Free Cities could be found.”

I chewed on that for a moment. Old reports from the civil war in the League had the total muster of Helike at twenty thousand, but that army had sieged three cities since and stormed two of those three. The Tyrant might have recruited since, of course, but green troops wouldn’t have the discipline I’d noticed in the soldiers holding Rochelant. And they’d marched through the Waning Woods a few months back, anyway, so further losses were to be expected. Assuming the Tyrant hadn’t stripped Helike itself bare, inside that little Proceran city was the majority of the army his city-state could field. Considering Kairos Theodosian was the presumed general of the League’s united armies, that held interesting implications. Who was giving out orders, if not him? Whatever reports I’d read about the League’s military commanders were likely out of date by now, but unless someone had been hiding a very skilled general under a rock there should be no one of staggering competence. The other reputable professional army in their region was the Stygian slave phalanx, but while the Spears of Stygia had officers their orders ultimately came down from the ruling Magisterium of that city. Powerful warlocks, but not necessarily the most able of generals.

“The League’s going to be a fucking mess if it gives battle unless the Tyrant returns,” I bluntly said. “Which he shows absolutely no sign of doing right now.”

“Good news, then,” Archer shrugged. “Either they’ll be thrashed or they’ll stand back and let us settle the mess.”

I frowned, not so sure about that. Kairos wouldn’t be crippling his own army this early in the dance, it was his most valuable avenue of pressure on everyone else. If anything, he’d want to preserve its strength while the Grand Alliance and my own hodgepodge coalition bloodied each other for a bit. If he held command of the only mostly intact host on the field, everyone else would have to step carefully around him. On the other hand, if I was reading him right, he couldn’t just stay out of the melee either. He had to prove to be some sort of threat, if his way to victory involved both himself and the First Prince at the same negotiation table. The Hierarch was a forest fire in the making, sure, but the man alone wouldn’t be enough to have the likes of Cordelia Hasenbach flinching. Unless he stops haunting small cities and stirs up larger pots , I mused. Which would be difficult to implement, since the Hierarch should need to be in whatever city he stirred and the Helikeans didn’t have fairy gates to quicken their advance. As far as I knew, anyway.

“We’ll see,” I finally said. “Akua, you studied the Hierarch’s... pull?”

Diabolist nodded, face calm but gaze visibly unsettled.

“I am nearly certain this was an aspect,” she said. “And absolutely certain this was not the result of using some entity bound and bargained with.”

Archer spat into the snow, and I shared the sentiment.

“No one gets that strong a boon from their Name without a cost,” I said. “It’s not a city-killer he’s wielding, not exactly, but it’s almost as bad. William had to put his life on the scales and call down a bloody Choir to attempt something in the same league.”

“Contrition’s touch was stronger than this, practically speaking,” Akua dispassionately noted. “Closer to absolute in its effect, a result of the Choir’s own nature. The Hierarch’s influence seems to be closer to a nudge than a decree – I would wager it relied on grievances already existing.”

“Useful, but not what I’m asking you about,” I said.

Diabolist inclined her head in concession, then hesitated.

“This is not fact, only supposition,” she warned.

I simply cocked an eyebrow. Her suppositions were usually rather solid, as they should be. Even before I’d ripped out her soul and bound it to Winter, broadening her horizons, she’d had an education in matters eldritch that likely less than a dozen people on Calernia could boast of surpassing. And even then, not in every subject.

“The nature of the aspect might be extremely situational,” Akua said. “That is usually the case with more powerful aspects – either that or they are outright uncontrolled.”

My lips thinned. Uncontrolled did seem possible, since I doubted Anaxares of Bellerophon had done much experimenting with his abilities. But when I’d spoken with him, the pull had lessened while he engaged with me. Until I’d irked him, anyway. Reaction to emotions, maybe? That was hardly unusual with Named.

“Situational,” I repeated, implicitly inviting her to elaborate.

“I saw more of the city than either of you, I believe,” Akua said. “It struck me that, aside from the tribunals, there seemed to be no unnaturally-driven actions taking place.”

Archer snorted out a laugh.

“So his trick is only good at making trials?” she said. “Takes all sorts, I suppose.”

I was a lot less amused. Considering Kairos was the hand behind the Hierarch, I didn’t believe for a moment that even an aspect so narrow couldn’t be used to birth a hellish mess. There were a lot of important people – important entities, even – that would leave a disaster in their wake if they ended up getting behead by an alleyway tribunal. By now I was nearly certain the First Prince’s neck wasn’t what the Tyrant was after, but if I entertained the notion that it was for a moment? Using the right pivot, civil war could be sown in the Principate just as the Dead King started making gains up north. There was no need to expand on what kind of a disaster that would be for the rest of the continent.

“Judgement,” I said, honing in on what I considered the important kernel. “You think his aspect is bound to the concept. Stronger when he’s standing in judgement, or inciting others to do the same.”

Akua nodded.

“I am not certain how much you know of Bellerophon,” she delicately said.

Unlike Masego, she was usually more diplomatic than to outright call me ignorant to my face.

“They rule by popular vote and appoint officials by drawing lots,” I replied. “Terrible at war, though their city-state is too much trouble for anyone to want to seriously attempt annexation. They hate Penthes to the bone and they’ve got some sort of mage order that suppresses internal rebellions. Like to execute each other a lot, so I can see where the Hierarch gets it from.”

I knew more than that, but little relevant to our conversation. It was mostly anecdotes from histories which as a rule tended to take an amused, tolerant and slightly condescending view of the city. Good for a laugh, but not people to take too seriously. The rest of the League seemed content to leave them to their own devices in their dirt-poor holdings, only intervening for a cursory slap on the wrist when they agitated at the borders.

“It was not a city my education covered in great detail,” Akua admitted.

Which was pretty damning, since the Sahelians would have gone out of their way to thoroughly brief her on any nation of importance.

“That said, there is one detail to their democracy that my tutors found of interest,” Diabolist continued. “While it well-known that all citizens of Bellerophon have the right to cast a vote in the city’s popular assembly, not so that the Gods Below have one as well.”

I cocked an eyebrow, reluctantly amused.

“One vote,” I said. “For the whole lot of them?”

“Indeed,” Akua replied, without a speck of humour to her voice. “A droll detail, in most situations, though the Hierarch’s abilities change matters. You see, this makes the Gods Below honorary citizens of Bellerophon according to their own laws.”

A heartbeat passed.

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “They think their laws apply to the Gods?”

“Half of them, anyway,” Indrani snickered. “Wonder if they ever took the bastards to court?”

“Archer,” I hissed. “ Think about this. The Hierarch’s mad as can be, but he believes in that tripe. Believes it hard enough it ripples across a whole city – and he’s under the impression he has a right to put even Gods on trial.”

I bit my lip, glancing at Akua.

“If he made an attempt,” I said. “What would happen?”

The shade looked dismayed.

“I have no idea,” she admitted. “There has never been a precedent as far as I know.”

Ah, Catherine, that’s the entire point , Kairos Theodosian told me. Finding out. Would he turn on Below like that? He might, I grimly admitted to myself. Akua herself had told me that when the Hellgods had taught the Wasteland about ‘sacred betrayal’ they hadn’t excluded themselves from the chain of treachery. I had no reason to believe their teachings in Helike ran along different lines. And if the man truly bought into Evil, he might not even see it as a betrayal. Or rather, he’d think about betrayal very differently: a holy thing, an act of worship. Which didn’t mean in the slightest that the Gods Below wouldn’t answer it by making a crater wherever the offence was given. The size of that possible crater, though, was the part worrying me most. A city, a province, a realm? A continent ? It was one thing to make a play of the alleged purpose of Creation, as the Liesse Accords were meant to but quite, another to take a swing at the Gods who’d actually created the world. I wasn’t opposed to the act in principle, to be honest, but if all it took to end Above and Below was a pair of bold madmen we’d be long rid of them.

“Well, there’s a new name on the list,” I finally said.

“Which one?” Archer drily asked.

“The one with the people we need a solid plan to kill,” I said. “Akua, I want a record of everything you observed of the Hierarch and his abilities. We’ll start from there. He might be like Malicia, a Named with little combat weight. That hardly means he’ll be easy to kill, but at least he’s away from his seat of power. That ought to make it possible, at least.”

Unless , I suddenly thought, he’s carrying his damned seat of power with him . Did he just need to be near a mob, any mob? Was his aspect really that versatile, for all its apparent narrowness? I set that consideration aside for the moment. We wouldn’t get a proper assault plan done standing out here in the cold anyway, and preferably I’d want more than just us contributing to it. It’d be best if the full Woe could be involved, it’d rather broaden the toolbox we could call on to get it done. This was still speculation anyway, I reminded myself. It might be the Tyrant and the Hierarch would settle for some lesser madness behind the headsman’s axe they’d be swinging. But expecting the worst was only good sense, at this point, and you could never have too many plans to kill dangerous madmen. Oh Gods, I was starting to sound like Black. Which reminded me...

“I’ll see it done,” Diabolist replied with a nod.

“Speaking of dangerous madmen,” I said. “Black’s still alive according to the Tyrant.”

My two companions held their tongue, but I caught them sharing a look.

“ Yes , he could be lying,” I sharply said. “But Kairos also mentioned him to be a prisoner of the Grey Pilgrim, which strikes me more as an attempt to send me after the man than dangled false hope.”

“It could be both,” Indrani bluntly said.

“We know there’s no heroes with the Levantine armies,” I pointed out. “Which, if the Pilgrim was in Iserre to intervene in this fight, is where he would attach himself. If he’s actually in the principality – and the Tyrant wouldn’t send me on wild goose chase when he could send me into actual danger instead – then there’s a reason for it. Escorting a dangerous prisoner to Salia would fit. Unless either of you has a better explanation?”

“Speculating with this little information is rather pointless,” Akua said. “The Pilgrim’s schemes run deep.”

I was a little impressed that she, of all people, had the gall to say that about someone else.

“Still not sure why the old man wouldn’t just slit the Carrion Lord’s throat, to be honest,” Indrani said. “Not like he’s been shy about that sort of thing until now.”

“Bait,” Diabolist suggested.

“We’re already here,” Archer snorted. “We have to be, to get anything done. I guess he could be after the other Calamities, but why borrow a torch when the house is on fire?”

I couldn’t disagree, though I really wished it were otherwise. Especially if the Pilgrim was actually headed for Salia, which was the only destination making sense if they were traipsing through Iserre. Sure the Principate’s capital was massive and well-defended, but it was also the most populated city on Calernia bar none. Somehow I doubted Warlock would care all that much if he had to incinerate a few hundred thousand people to get my teacher out of a cell, but in principle the Grey Pilgrim was supposed to care. I supposed a funeral pyre of dead innocents by the thousands might set in stone the story of those who’d committed such a massacre being righteously slain by heroes, but that was a damned dark way of going after an end that could be reached through other methods.

“Indrani,” I hesitantly asked. “If he was killed, how would the Lady of the Lake react?”

She grimaced under her hood.

“Can’t be sure,” she said. “Odds are she’d cut whoever wielded the knife, at least, but she’s not his keeper. If he sailed his ship into the reefs on his own, and it sounds like he did, she might not see reason to take revenge. She’s not a Calamity anymore, Cat. She didn’t go after the heroine that killed Captain either.”

That might have been because she considered the remaining Calamities to have a better claim to that death, I had privately thought, but if anyone would know the truth of this it was Archer. It irritated me a little that the Ranger could band with people for years and then leave those bonds behind when it suited her, but then she’d not struck me as a woman dripping with tender sentiments.

“Which leaves diplomatic leverage,” Akua said. “The Empress’ deep fondness for her right hand is no secret. Neither, to be frank, is your own attachment. Hostage-taking to secure the left flank of the Principate while war is waged against the Kingdom of the Dead would be a gamble, but if successful then well worth the costs. And if a single individual could be used for that purpose, it would be the Black Knight.”

“He burned through quite a chunk of the Proceran heartlands not a year ago,” Indrani whistled, sounding impressed. “If Hasenbach thought up that scheme, she’s got ice in the veins and no lack of nerve. Her people are going to be howling for his head.”

The First Prince did have both, I silently conceded. And this was the best explanation I’d heard so far, assuming this wasn’t actually Black’s plan and we were all swinging at mist – which I wasn’t quite ready to discard as a possibility yet.

“We’ll find out sooner or later,” I said. “Regardless, if the Pilgrim is in the region you should know what that means.”

Akua’s face was the picture of serenity, but she did not speak and that was telling. Indrani had been with me for longer, though, so she followed the thought to the conclusion.

“We’ll run into the old man at some point,” she mused. “And with blades out, most likely.”

“Vivienne figured out one of the quirks to his Name,” I said. “We confirmed it at the Battle of the Camps – to put up his stronger stuff, likely to avoid getting killed, he needs to intervene on someone’s behalf. Assuming we manage to assemble all our forces in the field before we run into him, the weak link is obvious.”

Andronike, still on my shoulders and interested enough in the proceedings not to interrupt so far, stirred with displeasure at the thought yet unexpressed. That made it, I told her silently, no less true.

“The drow,” Akua said. “The consequences of dawn are a dangerously exploitable weakness.”

“If he knocks out the southern expedition we lose a lot of fighting power,” I said. “The Legions have held ground against him before – at a cost, but we held. If he wants to cripple us, he’ll be going after the drow.”

“That means he’ll take the offensive,” Archer mused. “Or at least, his soldiers will. That way he has people to save.”

And it might just be that the more people in peril there were, the greater the power granted to save them would be. He’d been no pushover at the Battle of the Camps, when he got going. Considering the amount of troops running around Iserre that was not a pleasant notion to entertain.

“He’s a tricky sort,” I said. “But his arsenal isn’t endless and we’re not without backing of our own. If he strays too far from his Name we can slap that down. I’ll pit Night against Light any day, when we’ve got our lovely goddesses along on the field.”

“Aspects, then,” Indrani frowned.

“He’s not going to blast an entire drow army into oblivion in a storm of Light,” I agreed. “I don’t care how much miracle wine the Gods make him drink, no one can stomach that kind of power without burning out. So he’ll hit us where it hurts, with something he’s personally strong in. And back at the Battle of the Camps, when he got all miraculous on us he was using a very specific kind of light.”

“We cannot kill him without ending chances of any diplomatic agreement with Levant,” Diabolist reminded me.

“No,” I agreed. “So that’s not what we’ll go after. The opposition isn’t the only side with miracles, these days, even though ours need to be bought and paid for.”

I met the shade’s golden eyes.

“Make me a well, Akua Sahelian,” I ordered. “I don’t care how many Mighty you have to rope in, get it done and quick .”

Diabolist flicked a glance at the silver of godhood on my shoulder, but found nothing there to fear. She wouldn’t, I thought. After all, Andronike’s crowing laughter was echoing in the back of my head with no sign of ceasing. She would be amused by that, I supposed. There was a degree of irony to my plan being, in essence, the first teaching of the Sisters. I rolled my other shoulder, limbering the muscles in an attempt to distract from the dull of throb of my bad leg. The staff could only help so much.

“All right, that’s enough for now,” I said. “Let’s get moving, I want to cover as much ground as possible before dawn catches us. If I’m not wrong, we’ll be joining General Rumena just in time to kick the hornet’s nest.”

“That’s why good boots are important,” Indrani laughed.

I was gladdened her mood had shifted, though I had to wonder how long that’d last.

“Also crushing one’s enemies,” Akua seriously said, then paused. “For justice, of course.”

I rolled my eyes and left them to it, heading back to my horse. I slipped onto the saddle, then waited for the sounds of their bickering to fade as they pulled ahead.

“Andronike,” I said. “If I needed you to look south for something...”

“Not until my sister is at my side,” the crow said. “Something clouds my sight.”

Yet another reason to reunite with the southern expedition as fast as possible, I thought, spurring on Zombie to catch up with the others.

If Cordelia Hasenbach had gone grave-digging, I needed to know what she was digging for .

Chapter 10: Capture

“The key to popular reign is to blame the previous ruler for your every blunder and claim ownership of their every success, while avoiding the opposite. As a sign of my abiding love for you, my son, I have simplified this process by leaving you to inherit only a large amount of blunders.”
– Extract from the infamous ‘Sensible Testament’ of Basilea Chrysanthe of Nicae

We ran into the scouting party about half a bell before noon. Fifteen drow all wrapped up in furs, covering the grounds with admirable speed even though in the light of day they must feel half-blind. We saw them before they saw us, as this was a long way from the Everdark and it was a hard business keeping out of Archer’s sight while on open field. I urged Zombie to pull ahead, leaving my Peerage and companions to catch up. I did not call on Night to sharpen my gaze, disinclined to begin exhausting my body when there might very well be trouble ahead. General Rumena was a veteran, though the host it commanded now had little to do with the once-professional armies of the Empire Ever Dark. More importantly, I’d sat on its councils when it tossed duties and responsibilities at sigils like one would toss a bone to a hungry dog. Aside from the weary contempt for the Mighty under its command it did not hide quite well enough, I’d taken note of how it usually disposed its scouts and lookouts.

We weren’t close enough to have run into spotters keeping an eye on the back of the southern expedition, and these weren’t spread out enough to hold that duty besides. They weren’t numerous enough for a full-on scouting party, though, and that was what had me riding hard. Fifteen was plenty enough to have good odds the band wouldn’t miss anything moving, and few enough they’d be able to travel fast. No a scouting party, no. But if I had to canvass a fairly broad region for a small group, I’d send one or two dozen of those groups in staggered order to get the job done. General Rumena, it seemed, was looking for us. Hailing the drow confirmed as much. They’d been sent by the Tomb-Maker with the suggestion that my group hurry, since events to our south were unfolding at an even quicker pace than I’d wagered they would. An attempt to infiltrate the camp had been made last night, and prisoners taken.

I bid the scouts – dzulu one and all, by the looks of them, from the Brezlej Sigil – to spread out and recall the other bands, waiting just long enough for the rest of my escort to catch up. Akua and Indrani were the only ones in my company both curious and willing to ask answers of me. I indulged them willingly enough.

“The hornets are already out of the nest,” I told. “Someone tried Rumena’s camp. I’ll be riding full tilt, I need eyes on this as soon as possible.”

“We could gate,” Diabolist suggested.

“I’m not lighting up a beacon of our location for everyone looking,” I said, shaking my head. “Archer, don’t spend your strength too much trying to keep up. If there’s trouble I’ll want you at the tip of the spear.”

She slowly nodded and my gaze moved to Akua.

“My orders for you haven’t changed,” I said. “It’ll have to wait until nightfall, but prepare the necessities.”

“It will remove the Mighty of use from the field for days,” Diabolist said. “It might be more sensible for me to serve on the field until the situation is less... delicate.”

She was useful in a scrap, true enough. I still turned her down without a moment’s hesitation.

“Make me a well,” I calmly said. “That is your priority, bar none. There’s no point in deploying you to wipe out a few companies if a week later we’re caught unprepared by heroes and lose a hundred times that number. If you’ve time on your hands, assemble a schedule for the Mighty who will contribute. Take measurements, give me options. If you’ve still hours to waste after that, consult with the Sisters. We’ll get only one shot at this, Diabolist: if we miss it’s going to cost us something fierce.”

She didn’t argue any further after that. I suspected she rather wanted to, though there was no trace of it on her face, but she knew well enough by now not to push when my heels were fully dug in. Not that she knew why they were dug. I’d shared a lot of my suspicions with my companions, during our journey to catch up to the army, but not all of them. There were some I’d rather keep to myself until I had more information to go on. I rode on after that, straight south as the Brezlej scouts had told me. I kept to a quicker pace than them, on my latest Zombie, though that should be no surprise. I kept to a quicker pace than even riders whose skill made a mockery of mine simply because my horse would never tire. I was willing to damage the corpse a bit, if it got me there faster. It was a little past Afternoon Bell when I found the southern expedition’s army. On the way I’d run into another band of scouts, which I sent out with the same duty as the Brezlej, and then three successive screens of lookouts. Rumena had tightened the watch now that we’d entered troubled waters, I noted with approval.

Andronike had flown away in silence long before I got anywhere near here, and I couldn’t feel either her or her sister in the labyrinth of tents. There was a pulse I could barely make out further south, though. It sang to me, cool and comforting like a good night’s sleep come autumn. I rode into the camp, noting this late most drow had wakened, and ran my gaze along Rumena’s layout. It was a lost cause to get the southern expedition of the Empire Ever Dark to behave anything like a proper legion, with a carefully laid out camp and raised palisades before sundown, but since I’d left my general had forced some form of structure onto the chaos. Sigils raised their tents together, by the looks of it, with the larger ones on the edge of the broad circle the entire lot of them formed and the smaller ones filling that outline. Two clear paths, one facing north and the other south, had been cleared out – though I noted while riding down the northern one that it was hardly straight. Wobbly was a generous assessment, but it was already better than the utter lack of arrangements the drow had kept to until now.

Mighty Brezlej met me in advance, introducing itself as the appointed islne-ravce . It meant ‘keeper under the glare of the sun’, more or less, if I’d understood the emphases correctly. I took that to mean commander of the watch when it was daylight. Broadly muscled, short and a little thick around the waist the Mighty was strikingly unusual for a drow but I had no time to spare on the matter. I was informed that General Rumena was currently at a forward position, preparing a detachment to take the nearby town of Lancevilliers if it proved necessary.

“I was told there was an attempt to enter the camp,” I said, staring down from atop my mount.

“That is so, Losara Queen,” Mighty Brezlej agreed. “Twelve enemies, nine of which still live. They have been separated and we identified the one we believe to be the leader.”

“You’ve interrogated them?” I asked.

“Though questions were asked, they have refused to answer them,” the drow said. “It was spoken under Night that they should not be touched.”

Brezlej murmured prayers under its breath after saying the last sentence, under my steady stare. Well, at least Rumena wasn’t getting up to the torture of prisoners of war while my back was turned. Still, ‘spoken under Night’. That meant one of the Sisters had meddled, which was unusual to say the least. Who’d be important enough for them to speak? Maybe some bold Proceran royal with spirit but little brains to match had decided to gild the family name by taking a look at the foreigners, I mused. Prince Amadis was a cunning enough intriguer, but the Principate’s royal bloodlines tended to be large and many-branched. If a tree bore enough apples, one of them was bound to be inbred enough to try sneaking up on drow at night. I ordered Mighty Brezlej to prepare a full report of the ways the situation had changed in my absence, and to send the Mighty Archer directly to me should she arrive. I would, meanwhile, be having a chat with the officer among our catches of the night.

Drow, sadly, were not used to taking prisoners – it was simply not the way they were used to waging warfare. Night was best harvested from corpses, and when it wasn’t the insult was meant to be dealt to a living foe sent back into the wilds as a sign of contempt. That meant they had little experience holding captives, or raising structures to keep them. So far tents had been the makeshift solution, with the isolated prisoners tightly bound inside, but that wouldn’t work forever. It was all well and good when we only had a few, but if a few companies laid down their arms we just wouldn’t have enough spare tents to keep them. Four Soln dzulu were keeping guard at the corners of the tent where the officer awaited, looking bleary-eyed but attentive, and I met their deep bows with a nod before parting the flap and going in. I froze in surprise. Hanging down from the wooden frame holding up the dome-like tent of leather and linen, a small form was sleeping. I recognized regulation-issue undershirt, the skinny frame it was on and even the cast of the face covered in part by a too-large blindfold. Robber , I almost said, but then stopped. The leather and rope bindings were too loose to really keep someone from a race as flexible as his in place. And given goblin hearing, my entrance should have wakened him. So why was he still pretending to be asleep? A torturer wouldn’t-

I rubbed the bridge of my nose and forced down a sigh. It was a good thing I hadn’t walked further into the tent. Leaning against my staff, I crouched down to take a better look. Robber did not stir, but I felt him tense. Took me a bit, but I found what I was looking for. A thin, dull metal wire covered by snow leading up to a hook cleverly set into a sharper, barely peeking out from a pile of furs. No doubt the other end of the wire, which I couldn’t see, was anchored solidly and the wire itself tensed for a hair-trigger. One step on it and the sharper would blow, then he’d pop out of the bindings while the enemy was stunned. Knife to the throat, and off he went to try his hand at a getaway. Drow clearly needed better schooling in looking for hidden armaments, I decided, if they’d missed both a knife and a sharper trap while stripping him. I pushed myself back to my feet, then carefully picked my angle and positioned my staff. With a quick hand I lobbed the sharper through an opening in the tent flap, calling out scatter in Crepuscular, and turned even as it blew in the muddy snow outside. I was a little impressed he tried to knife me without even taking off the blindfold or fully slipping the bindings, I’d admit. My Special Tribune had been keeping sharp. Not sharp enough I didn’t catch the wrist under the hand holding a slender blade, though.

“The wire’s new,” I mused. “Won’t shine under light like the old stuff would, and something must have been done to make it more sensitive. Pickler’s been busy, I see.”

I grinned even as Robber went stiff as a board. I took a moment to yell out at the guards not to come in.

“Boss?” he hissed out.

“I’m not seeing a salute, Special Tribune,” I mildly said. “Do you really want to find out what’s below Lesser Lesser Footrest?”

The knife immediately went over his heart, which was the closest to an actual salute he’d given me in years, and deft green fingers hiked up his blindfold.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Special Tribune Robber said, large yellow eyes blinking. “It really is you. Wait, you could be an impostor. Tell me something only Catherine Foundling would know: what is my official salary as Lesser Footrest?”

“That I don’t let Indrani put ribbons in your hair, you adorable little princess,” I drawled.

“I don’t even have hair,” he complained. “And you know she’d glue on really coarse stuff just to spite me.”

For all that he was leaning into the exchange, I did not miss the way his eyes flicked towards my bad leg and then towards my chest. Since I was pretty sure he wasn’t looking at my tits – not that there’d been much to look at – that meant he was checking if I breathed.

“Leg’s back,” I agreeably told him. “So’s the more-than-decorative breathing.”

“There’s actual colour to your cheeks, Boss,” Robber bluntly said. “Like being out in the cold did something.”

“That’s a long story,” I said.

“Did you murder another demigod?” he mused. “Does doing that twice, like, cancel it out?”

“Oh, stop hanging like a bloody gargoyle and put that knife away,” I sighed.

My eyes narrowed as I remembered Mighty Brezlej’s full summary of how he’d ended up here, though. I waited until he’d deftly landed in the snow and taken off the blindfold before pressing the subject.

“You tried to infiltrate the camp with just a tenth,” I stated.

His mouth parted to reveal a short flash of hungry, needle-like teeth.

“That what the greyskins told you?” he said. “We only tried the outer perimeter, not the camp. Then it was all sorcery everywhere, and Sergeant Slicker’s flesh melted off his bones. Another two of my crew reached for blades and they had holes in the head before they could draw.”

I grimaced.

“Gods, Robber, what took you to even try?” I said. “Hakram and Vivienne knew where I was headed – it should have been envoys sent, not scouts.”

“We didn’t even know it was the drow,” Robber admitted. “Just an army and not a small one. And there’s been, uh, instructions from up top even if we run into the greys.”

“Instructions,” I repeated blandly.

He grimaced.

“We couldn’t know if you were still alive, Boss,” he said. “And if you were, that it’d be you in charge. And even if you looked in charge, that it was really you .”

He paused, then squinted at me.

“You are in charge, yeah?” he asked.

“Some,” I said. “It’s an alliance with limits to it. But I’ve got the ear of the people running the show, you might say.”

“Thank the fucking Gods,” Robber muttered. “That you’re back more than for the greys, I mean. This campaign is turning into a bastard mess, Boss. It’ll be good to have your hand holding the reins again.”

“Then you’ll have answers,” I flatly said. “About what Juniper’s doing campaignin here in the first place. I distinctly remember leaving my army on the other side of the Whitecaps.”

His lips quirked, sharp and mean.

“Well, Lady-Regent Dartwick got invited by our good friend the Prince of Iserre to ‘clear out bandits and foreign agents from his lands’, y’see,” Robber told me.

My brow rose. I honestly couldn’t imagine Vivienne willing to risk the Army of Callow at the say so of a Proceran prince, which likely meant Prince Amadis’ arm had been twisted until he gave said invitation. Might not be Thief’s notion at all, I decided. Hakram? What would he think we could gain from intervening here?

“What are we using Amadis as a pretence for?” I bluntly asked.

“Taking out the Carrion’s Lord legions from here with a semblance of clean, the way I hear it,” my Special Tribune said. “They were on the edge of a wipe, and no one wanted that. Plan was to prop him Amadis as a banner to force Procer to give us room, pop in, pick up Ol’ One-Eye and his people then then pop out.”

“By fairy gate,” I slowly said.

Which meant either Masego was back, with a titled fae bound, or the Wild Hunt had not been freed of its oaths when Winter ended up in the Night’s belly. That was a relief, to be frank. I was bound by oath to Larat aside from the Hunt’s own terms – seven crowns and one, still to be delivered – but I’d not been sure that would be enough. The sooner I could have a good look at the fae the better.

“Yeah, the Hunt’s been all darling since you sent them back,” Robber said. “Which is suspicious as all Hells, if you ask me, but apparently putting that to verse and having a choir sing it to Marshal Juniper is ‘reprehensible’ and ‘a flagrant breach of regulations’. I mean, it was only the middle of the night.”

I smothered the smile, though not quite quickly enough for him to miss it. The humour waned, though, when I remembered what we were speaking about.

“But you’re still here,” I said, stating the obvious. “What happened?”

“We gated in just fine,” the goblin said. “Ran into a League force two days in, but after they missed taking the Hellhound’s head they mostly kept their distance. Made contact with Marshal Grem when the scrying block shut down for a bit-”

“The scrying block,” I said. “Wait, more important – you can still scry sometimes?”

“It’s like rolling dice,” Robber said. “Kilian says the block is something massive already using the sky, but once in a while it looks elsewhere – then there’s a short window where we can use the old rituals. And I do mean the old ones, Boss. Dunno if you noticed, but the Observatory went the way of an orc with the key to a liquor shop. No one can get it do to anything, and when we left Callow the pools were starting to evaporate.”

I clenched my fingers. Shit. Someone had definitely targeted us, then. If it were just Iserre being screwed with I could put that to a ritual or miracle we ended stumbling into, but the Observatory wouldn’t get in that bad a way if someone hadn’t aimed for it. And just like that, Kairos was back in the running for the prick most likely to be responsible. It seemed very much like his kind of play – he might have planned the ritual in Iserre first, then gone after the Observatory because it’d allow my forces to bypass it. If there was anyone who wanted everyone in this principality blind, right now, it was the Tyrant of Helike.

“Marshal Grem,” I said, setting that trail of thought aside for now. “He’s also still in Iserre?”

“We tried to pull him out,” the goblin told me. “The Levantines were starting to catch up when we arrived, too close to risk it, so the Hellhound had us gate in between their armies to force them to retreat. And it worked fine – the Legions gained a few days of lead while the Dominion got really angry at us being there. But then we tried to gate out, and on the other side was a godsdamned sea of boiling pitch.”

My fingers tightened around my staff.

“That doesn’t sound like Arcadia,” I said.

“Best we can tell, it was one of the Hells,” Robber snorted. “No one went in to check, you know, on account of the sea of boiling pitch .”

“And it’s all been leading there since?” I asked.

“Worse,” the goblin said. “It changes. Mostly Hells, so far, but once in a blue moon we get Arcadia again – not that we can travel it, since no one’s sure we’d be able to leave after entering. Hakram ordered an end to the attempts after we almost let out a horde of devils into the camp.”

“What has Masego said?” I frowned.

“ Shit ,” Robber said, eyeing me warily. “You haven’t heard.”

My stomach dropped.

“Tell me,” I ordered.

“The Lord Warlock blew up Thalassina sky high trying to hold it against Ashur, himself included,” the goblin told me. “Place is a graveyard, even those that fled got some sort of magic sickness and cacked it.”

“Masego?” I softly asked.

“Word from Praes is the warlock’s get made it out,” Robber said.

I let out a shaky breath. Thank whatever Gods were listening for that.

“Empress had people looking for him, anyway,” he continued. “No one knows where he is though. I know Deadhand and the general staff kept something about him under seal just before we gated for Procer, but I haven’t managed to ferret it out yet.”

“We’ll find him,” I grimly said.

His fathers were dead and he’d likely fled through the Wasteland alone with Malicia’s agents hounding him every step of the way. He must be a wreck of grief and exhaustion, I thought. I didn’t like this talk of magic sickness at all, either, considering he must not have been far from Thalassina when this all happened. I reluctantly forced myself to focus on more immediate concerns. There was little I could do for him right now, much as I hated to admit it.

“Juniper’s stuck between the Levantine armies, then,” I said. “Is she close? For that matter, is Marshal Grem backing her?”

Robber’s wide eyes thinned with sudden alarm.

“I never reported back,” he said. “Boss, we have a problem. If Nauk still thinks your greys are a Proceran army, then he won’t leave his dug-in positions. Which means you’re about to lose a quarter of the Army of Callow.”

Well, I darkly thought, it had been that kind of a week so far. Why stop now?

Chapter 11: Forced March

“A hundred battles, even victories, will always lose you the war.”
– Theodosius the Unconquered, Tyrant of Helike

When I’d been told that General Rumena was at a forward position, in my mind’s eye I’d envisioned a Legion outpost: neat palisade with a dry moat in front, raised tower to serve as a better vantage point. Stone for everything instead, if it was meant to be a long-term outpost and funds allowed. I should have known better, by now, to expect more than a pack of tents and heavy screens of scouts.

“Your people are sloppy, Boss,” Robber said. “Nettles me a bit they caught my boys at all.”

The tone had been casual and the words mild, which was a telltale sign he was considering knifing a few drow to even scales the goblin way – which was to say, inflicting twice as many wounds as you’d received and then rubbing dirt in to make sure infection took. I might have taken it as face value, the posturing and the easy cutting lines, if I hadn’t seen him raw after losing people right before the beginning of the Battle of Three Hills. For all that Robber liked to put himself up as a goblin’s goblin, much like me he’d never quite learned how to make losses stop bruising. Juniper had always disapproved of that. Soldiers died, and it should not be taken lightly or misused but that was the nature of being a soldier. She’d always had the knack for keeping it distant. There were some people who had that in them, I supposed – Hakram did, and once upon a time Ratface had as well. Akua acted as if she belonged among those, but sometimes I did wonder. Is that who you are, or what you trained yourself to be? I didn’t turn around to look at him where he sat side-saddle on my horse, all bunched up behind me, but I pitched my voice to be well understood.

“I’m not happy some of ours got killed, Robber,” I said. “But there will be none of that. Like it or not, you came in quiet and ran into a watch that acted exactly as a watch should.”

“They don’t see so well in the day, though,” the goblin mildly said.

“About as well as humans,” I said, then dipped my tone towards a warning. “And I could warn you they’ve got entities behind them the sun doesn’t blind but I won’t have to, will I? Because I gave you an order .”

His teeth clicked softly as his mouth shut. He wasn’t happy about this – neither was I, even though I knew the fault did not lie on the side of the drow – but he knew better than to push. Legionaries baring blades on drow was the very last thing I needed right now. As Special Tribune, the goblin had the standing to sit in on most war councils: he knew better than most how precarious the situation was for the Army of Callow right now. Juniper had done well, in all fairness. Being stuck between two hostile armies that together made up near the double of your forces was no easy mess to squeak out of, if the enemy generals weren’t fools. And they were not, in this case. But her carefully laid plans had failed to account for one of the madmen on the stage, and now a crippling blow was coming. If we didn’t move fast enough to prevent it, anyway, which was the opposite of my intention. We’d get there in time even if I had to march the drow until they collapsed. I had absolutely no intention of losing ten thousand legionaries and the general that was the finest vanguard in Callow bar none.

There’d been a time where I would have been more effusive in describing Nauk, but the man under assault to the south wasn’t the same one I’d shared meals and fires with. If anything, the occasional similarities made the whole situation more disturbing – they put in relief everything that had changed when the Warlock had ‘healed’ him. I might not have to stay this way , I thought. Hope was always dangerous, but the thought refused to leave me. Warlock, for all his power and learning, had been a mage. Healing was an academic matter to them, a thing of physicality and measured energies. Most of what Summer’s fire had taken from Nauk was not anything the Sovereign of the Red Skies could bring back. I was no mage, and the more I learned the more I realized the endless depths of what I did not know. But these days I had goddesses at my back, and miracles in my hands. What sorcery had failed to return might not be beyond the reach of the Night. Winter had been match for Summer, hadn’t it? And Winter had been consumed. But hope was dangerous, and so I had kept my own council.

I rode into the camp at a brisk pace, having barely slowed from the gallop that brought me there, and ignored Robber’s malicious cackle at the splashes of muddy snow that drenched warriors too slow in getting out of my way. There was no missing where General Rumena itself would be: at the heart of the camp, within a tall pavilion, twin heartbeats of power whispered to me. The Sisters had known of my coming for some time, though conversation was difficult if we strayed too far from each other. They should have felt the urgency of my purpose, though, and Komena at least had served as a high-ranking officer many years ago. Between her and Rumena, I was not beyond hope that the six sigils whose banners I’d spied had prepared for immediate advance upon my arrival. I reined in Zombie with a thought when we arrived in front of the pavilion, sending a shiver of Night down my bad leg to make leaping down into the snow tolerable. It would ache later, I knew, but what patience I had left was better spent on other matters. Special Tribune Robber followed suit in his freshly-cleaned leathers and mail, shortsword at his side and crossbow at his back. The sapper’s bag hanging off his other side was still full, the drow not having bothered to paw at the munitions after making sure there were no maps or papers.

The goblin swaggered at my side as I entered the tent, baring his needle-like teeth at every warrior eyeing him. Well, he wasn’t one of the candidates I’d had in mind when I’d considered how to establish friendly ties between Callowan forces and the southern expedition. Maybe I should even consider this a good thing, I mused. The sooner the drow learned that trifling with goblins tended to end up in bear traps and mocking laughter the better, and who could get that point across faster than Robber? The war council awaiting me inside had few familiar faces aside from Rumena’s, as it turned out. Mighty Jindrich was the only one I knew even remotely – he’d apparently survived the mess in Great Strycht largely on account of being too angry to die – though names were hardly impossible to know considering their sigils spelled them out. Room had been left at the low table of obsidian and granite for me to join them down on the carpet, but instead of moving to do so I cast a look around. In the shadows of the upper pavilion I caught sight of a pair of crows. Their dark eyes rested on me, but they did not speak either in thoughts or words. The Sisters, it seemed, were currently disinclined to meddle. From the corner of my eye I caught Robber looking exactly where I was, though from the way his gaze swept over the goddesses without slowing I suspected he’d not been allowed to glimpse anything.

“General Rumena,” I greeted, leaning on my staff. “Many Mighty. At my side stands Special Tribune Robber, an officer in my service. He will be seated with us for this conversation.”

A few of the Mighty seemed displeased, but they stowed that away when my stare moved towards them. There was a reluctant bit of shuffling about until room for two was made. The sole goblin present’s amused smirk was a nearly physical thing. He might not speak Crepuscular, but he knew how to read a room.

“Losara Queen, First Under the Night,” General Rumena pleasantly greeted me in Crepuscular. “And... company. Please, claim seat at this table.”

“Our nice drow friends invited you to sit, Robber,” I translated in a mild tone. “And you’re going to be nice to them in return, aren’t you?”

“I will offer them every diplomatic courtesy you’ve taught me, Boss,” he smoothly agreed.

Well, there had to be at least one or two of those. Right? Not willing to take the plunge of thinking too deep about that, I sat myself down at the table and silently declined an offer of rodleva . While a few of the drow were sipping at polished cups of the brownish, warm mixture I’d never taken to it. That it involved butter made from the milk of a creature that looked cousin to a lizard would have put me off even if the liquid didn’t smell like cheese sent to the gallows and left for a week under the sun. Given the finer nose of goblins, no doubt Robber was taking it as torture.

“I won’t waste time on idle talk, given the situation,” I said. “I’ve had a fresh report from the Special Tribune including the location of an army in my service that it less than a day’s march from here. I assume our scouts have already found it?”

Rumena inclined its head.

“That and more,” it replied. “There is a force of horse-riders in the area that has been hunting our warriors.”

I frowned. If the Dominion already had cavalry this far behind Nauk’s back, his situation was worse than I’d been given to understand.

“Levantines?” I said.

“They do not bear the sigils as drawn by the Mighty Shade,” Rumena said.

Akua had used charcoal and skins to draw everything she remembered of Levantine heraldry, which was largely the great bloodlines but still much better than the previous nothing we’d had. I flicked at a glance at Robber, who was currently engaged in a staring contest with a very pleased Mighty Jindrich.

“Special Tribune,” I said. “When you left, did the Dominion have cavalry at the army’s back?”

The goblin let out a whistling breath.

“No,” he said. “But it might not be them, Your Majestic Terribleness. The riders, did they have bows?”

I almost translated for Rumena, until I remembered it spoke Lower Miezan just fine. It nodded when I met its eyes.

“Helike cataphracts,” I said. “ Shit .”

I’d had a conversation with Juniper, once, about which Calernian cavalry was the finest. It’d been the knights of Callow in my eyes, of course, and the Hellhound had conceded that on open field and charging that was the case. She’d noted, though, that there was one other mounted force on the continent that would be able to take my countrymen apart. Helikean kataphractoi were more lightly armoured, as a rule, and unlike Callowan horse rarely used lances. They were, however, exceedingly well-trained in the use of curved bows meant to be used while mounted. There’d been no war between the League and Callow that would see the two forces conflict, and Helike as a city-state certainly couldn’t afford to field as many cataphracts as there’d been knights in the heyday of Callowan chivalric orders. But with matched numbers, Juniper had been of the opinion that given room to manoeuvre the Helikean horsemen would be able to slowly whittle away at Callowan heavy horse while taking minimal losses. And considering no other army on Calernia fielded mounted archers, there was no mistaking these for anyone else no matter the banner.

“Let me guess,” I sighed. “Less than four thousand overall, no infantry with them?”

“That is so,” General Rumena agreed.

Well, there was the rest of the Tyrant’s army. I’d suspected it wasn’t the full muster back in Rochelant, but I’d expected what remained to stay with the the League’s armies. Silly me, not anticipating Kairos would send his city’s entire cavalry contingent to stir up the pot as much as physically possible.

“All the more reason to link up with General Nauk’s forces,” I finally said. “If we want to drive them off on foot, we’ll need Callowan crossbow companies.”

Come night, it was true, a few packs of Mighty could probably tear through the Tyrant’s horsemen. But then somehow I doubted they’d risk that. They’d raid during the day, harass the expedition and retreat before a counterattack could be mounted. The drow didn’t have proper companies, after all, they had tribes. Some of those had archers and javelinmen, but getting a cohesive volley fired at the cataphracts would take too long – unless we took all the archers out of their sigils and made companies of them, which would be difficult. Not even a year ago most of these people had been at each other’s throats, and they weren’t used to taking commands from anyone but their own Mighty. Who’d be quite infuriated at having their warriors taken from their command, besides. I could see it done, of course. I had the Sisters at my back and General Rumena commanded respect from all but the most stubborn. But they weren’t trained to fight this way, and I was wary of eroding my goddess-given authority by using it too much. It was one thing to follow a high priestess to war against the contemptible surface peoples after the enterprise was blessed by the Night itself, another to remain all nice and supportive when said high priestess started chipping away at your subordinates. Proof, I supposed, that not even open divine favour was enough to get me out of fucking politics.

I needed the Mighty supportive, if I was to get steer this war to the right kind of ending.

“How soon can we set out?” I asked.

“Seven pridnis ,” Genera Rumena replied without missing a beat. “Though we number only six thousand, Losara Queen. Fighting under pale light will carry risks.”

About two hours, I thought. We still had most of the afternoon until the sun set, but we wouldn’t get there today so that wasn’t what he meant. Our destination was past the town of Lancevilliers to the south. Even accounting for the second wind the drow would get after nightfall, the lethargy coming with dawn meant we wouldn’t be able to both arrive at Nauk’s position in Sarcella and be in fighting fit before at least Noon Bell. Unless I used a gate, which would get us there in hours but also light up the destination for anyone looking. I wasn’t ready for the Saint and the Pilgrim quite yet – if I drew them to that battle, I might just end up losing more than just the ten thousand under Nauk.

“We’ll have to regardless,” I said. “I ordered Mighty Breznej to send reinforcements our way before leaving, but we can’t afford to wait for them. Send back runner with an order to catch up as fast as they can, with a warning about the Helikeans.”

In a silent flutter the crows landed on my shoulders, and there was no further talk after that. Open divine favour, I mused, did have its perks.

—

We got to Lancevilliers before nightfall, not that it made much of a difference. The town was half-empty and there was no one in there remotely inclined to get in the way of an army. I would have preferred to avoid Proceran eyes entirely, but even a snowed-in road made for a quicker march than the countryside. I left behind a hundred drow led by Mighty Sudone to – gently , I made very clear – interrogate the locals for anything they might now. The southern expedition itself had standing orders not to a lay a hand on anyone but soldiers unless they were attacked, and to refrain from looting. The first one had been a hard sell, though the second surprisingly not. The Firstborn were amusingly skeptical that anything of human make could ever rival the works of their own kind, and centuries of barter economy meant they put little stock in silver and gold. Furniture and furs turned out to be the main temptations: both wood and furred creatures were a rarity underground. I’d leaned on Rumena to allow for supply requests to be lodged with the Mighty when it came to furs, given the weather, but for the furniture I had no sympathy. We weren’t going to start dragging around nice Alamans bureaux anytime soon, no matter how nice they looked in tents. I’d also laid down a rule against rape, though that’d mostly been a formality. Drow hardly even slept with their own kind, sexual interest in humans was nonexistent.

Ivah had once informed me that its kind considered the most visible characteristics associated with men and women – beards, breasts – to be somewhat vulgar. It had said that in a tone implying it was paying me a compliment, which when I’d grasped why had achieved something of the opposite effect. Sadly, Archer had yet to tire of talking about it.

Our pace significantly quickened after dusk, even dzulu moving at a pace Robber found impressive. Well he’d compared them to goblins, anyway, which in his eyes probably counted as a compliment. Not many non-goblins would agree, I suspected. Mighty Sudone and its hundred caught up a few hours in, bearing wild rumours but nothing of any real use. I used our time to brief General Rumena and its cadre of sigil-holders on the military happenings of the last few months in Iserre as related to me by Robber. How the Army of Callow had ended up stuck between two hosts of forty thousand Levantines I covered only the broad strokes of, focusing on their current inability to gate out. What had followed was, in essence, my marshal trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the enemy commanders and partially succeeding. The Dominion had moved to crush Juniper, the army to the north throwing a delaying force in the way of Grem’s legions before sending the rest of its number after her own forty thousand legionaries. The southern Levantines had not bothered with such subtlety, marching in full battle array towards the Army of Callow. The idea was, by the looks of it, to end the Callowan army before turning against the other forces in the principality: Grem and the League. The Hellhound wasn’t that easy to end, though. She’d decisively marched south and forced a minor battle against the lower Levantine army before she could be stuck in a pincer.

Reluctant to risk an all-out battle before the northern reinforcement arrived and their numbers grew overwhelming, the southern Levantines had given ground after the day’s battle. My soldiers did have something of a reputation, when it came to facing rough odds – and the Levantines had not boasted that. Juniper had then split the Army of Callow into four columns of ten thousand and fled under cover of night. Two columns had gone eastwards, to slip around the northern Levantines, while the remaining two had gone westwards and made sure they were loud about it. One of those columns was under General Nauk, the other General Bagram. The latter had taken a moment to place – he was an orc, once General Istrid’s second-in-command. Until recently he’d been tasked with holding Summerholm, but evidently he was moving up in the world. Nauk had been tasked with baiting the southern Levantines into following him, while General Bagram was to serve as reserve and guard his back in case the northern army wanted to try assaulting the western columns. It was classic Juniper, I thought when Robber first told me about it. Depending on enemy action, she could redeploy and put the hurt to them however she wanted.

If the northern Levantines went after the Hellhound’s two columns, she only had to keep them marching until Grem’s force could hit them in the back and the pincer manoeuvre became Callow’s. If they continued marching to join up with their southern comrades, the four columns would escape the noose and join up with Grem’s host. If the southern Levantines went after Nauk and Bagram, they’d be led in a merry chase until Juniper and Grem came down south together to relieve the western columns. If they marched east or north, instead, once again the four columns escaped disaster and linked up in northern Iserre. It’d seemed to work, at first. The last Robber had heard of the eastern columns, they had the northern Levantines after them. The problem had come when Nauk’s column was hit from the back even as the southern Levantines came after them. Helikean cavalry had ambushed his rearguard, slowing his advance just long enough for the Levantines to gain grounds and begin their own cavalry raids. Messages from General Bagram had ceased, presumably because cataphracts were killing the messengers, anf his column had never come to reinforce Nauk’s. What followed was a ragged retreat, eventually tumbling into the minor city of Sarcella which fell to the column without a fight.

Sarcella had no walls, most its people had fled because of the roving armies in the region and the city garrison had apparently ‘retreated towards a more defensible position’ the moment they saw an enemy host approaching. Knowing he was in a bad position, Nauk had raised field fortifications in Sarcella and held the grounds against a probing attack by a Levantine vanguard of around sixteen thousand – which didn’t want to commit to more before the full forty thousand were there. He’d planned to start the retreat once more after forcing an opening, but rumours of a large force marching towards his back had forced him to delay and send scouts lest he blunder into a battle he could not win. Said force was my drow, which was biting irony. Taking reinforcements for foes might very well see a quarter of the Army of Callow slain in the heartlands of Procer.

There were still things unaccounted for. No one knew where the Hells the column under General Bagram was. I doubted even Helike cataphracts could tie down two forces over twice their size, but the Tyrant might have more tricks up his sleeve. I’d been inclined to think that between reports of my drow army – an unknown – and the kataphractoi it might just be that General Bagram had written off Nauk’s column as done for and begun full retreat, but Robber had given me the first bit of good news in a while when explaining why that was unlikely. Adjutant was with the column, nominally as an observer but in fact because he was keeping an eye on the two western columns. Tyrant or not, I’d put my faith in Hakram coming through. If he wasn’t backing up Nauk there was a good reason for it. That, or he was on his way already. Gods, let it be the second. Even assuming Nauk’s forces hadn’t been mauled too badly holding Sarcella against a second assault, I was only bringing six thousand drow as reinforcements. And one goblin, I supposed. None of us could be sure whether or not the entire Dominion force of forty thousand had arrived yet, or if it was still only the vanguard, but if it had... Well, under the light of day the Firstborn were disorganized light infantry with poor armour and disparate weaponry. Six thousand of those in addition to what remained of Nauk’s army might not be enough to see us through to the night and the accompanying swing of the balance.

Dawn cost us four hours, to my seething impatience, but I used the time to nap and get my hands on a decent steel longsword. I’d fed my sword-within-the-staff throughout the night, but I had no intention of using it yet. I could wield it as a staff, but polearms were hardly my specialty and I was a lot more fragile than I used to be. Best to put the odds on my side in every way. We moved out the moment it was physically possible to, and by Morning Bell we could see Sarcella.

It was hard to miss it, what with the way it was on fire.

Chapter 12: Relief

“After Isabella the Mad was appointed to the command of the hosts of Procer to turn back the forces of the Tyrant Theodosius, the First Prince asked of her when she expected the war to be brought to a successful conclusion. ‘It should take,’ she famously replied, ‘about a hundred battles.'”
– Extract from ‘The Banquet of Follies, or, A Comprehensive History of the First League War’ by Prince Alexandre of Lyonis

It was around half an hour before Noon Bell that we got close enough to Sarcella to get a decent idea of what was happening inside. Well, aside from the fire. That one had been pretty obvious even from miles away, which in my surprisingly extensive experience of setting fire to things wasn’t a good sign for the people in the area. As it turned out the city of Sarcella itself was, well, almost offensively Proceran. How anyone could bother to shell out coin for an elaborate ring of ogre-tall statues and arches around their city but not a proper curtain wall was beyond me. Oh, sure, whoever that tall bald man in furs with a sword was might be nicer to look at on a sunny day, but that was the kind of thinking that got you invaded by the Legions of Terror. The damned things were granite, too, which I vaguely remembered being one of the cheaper stones floating around Principate markets. Bastards hadn’t even been able to afford marble or limestone, had they? There was still a tax on granite back from the days of House Fairfax, I was pretty sure, though it wouldn’t have been applied in over forty years – trade with Procer had understandably hit something of a low point after the Conquest. I supposed the saving grace of the whole affair was that granite statues would at least take more than a single glancing trebuchet shot before breaking.

Still, for all that at least Sarcella was slightly more defensible than I’d expected. It’d been raised on a few lazily-sloped hills, so there was some incline to work with, and unlike the flammable nightmare maze that had been Rochelant this city had a few paved and relatively straight avenues for troop deployment. Some parts of the outer city had houses of wood and stone clustered so tightly together they were impassable, a wall in fact if not in name. I couldn’t quite get a look at the furthest reaches of Sarcella, but it looked like it’d been the same parts of it burning for most of our march: with a little luck, the flames had run into row stone houses or a ditch of some sort. I really hoped it’d been accident, to be honest, because if it wasn’t odds were it’d been Nauk giving the order and if that was the case I might be responsible in a broader, metaphysical sense. Well, it was my army, but aside from that I doubted Rat Company officers had been so prone to tactical arson before they’d come under my command. Aside from Robber, anyway, who in these matters did not count since he was both a goblin and a sapper – the moment he’d chosen that career track at the War College he’d grown beyond saving. Regardless, most of the southeastern corner of the city was a hellscape of flames and smoke but it wasn’t spreading much further out. Which had done absolutely nothing to prevent the inhabitants of Sarcella from fleeing in a panic.

That was even more obvious than the fire, in a way, because the Procerans were crowding the road out Sarcella like a massive flock of startled birds. There were at least five or six thousand civilians streaming out of the city, with more behind, and they were moving at a slug’s pace. Few of them had carts to carry their possessions, and those that did got stuck on the muddy road out more often than not. The overwhelming majority were carrying everything they could of what they owned in bags or tied on their backs, a roiling exodus of people and goods. Some were even dragging furniture, with a least one very nice armoire put on planks and dragged by two middle-aged men. Probably the most expensive thing they owned, I mused. The river of fleeing Procerans filled the road in full, moving forward sluggishly, and as my gaze lingered on the armoire I realized why they’d been allowed to drag even furniture out of the danger. General Rumena caught up to me after I reined in my horse ahead of the first fleeing civilians, our six thousand warriors still further behind.

“This is madness,” the old drow said, eyes contemptuous as it watched the civilians. “Why was this allowed to happen?”

“Because Nauk’s tactical acumen has improved,” I replied. “Watch the city’s sides, Tomb-Maker.”

He caught what I had quickly enough. Levantine light cavalry out in the snow, at least a thousand on either side. Not massing for an assault, at the moment – if I had to guess, there’d be crossbows and spikes awaiting them at every street large enough for a charge. But if I were the enemy commander, I’d keep them there to force those crossbow companies into remaining there where they weren’t shooting at my soldiers. Maybe strengthen the cavalry numbers when things got heated on the main front enough that a simultaneous charge on both sides could serve as the killing blow for the entire Callowan army. Having to watch both sides as well as the city’s back, where the avenues where the largest and most open, would have been a waste of soldiers. So I was thinking Nauk had encouraged the Procerans to flee with their possessions, neatly filling that space with scared civilians the Levantines couldn’t ride down without starting the kind of major diplomatic incident that’d send cracks going down the Great Alliance. I was honestly impressed with my general. He’d never been a fool, but his cleverness had always been a military one. It now seemed his thinking had expanded to other theatres. Unfortunately, at the moment his clever trick was also preventing us from reinforcing him quickly. I weighed down my options in silence.

I could probably scatter the crowd with some application of Night, but should I? That’d be leaving a hole in Nauk’s defensive perimeter, most likely. There’d be enough of a risk I’d have to leave drow behind to hold that territory, and considering the size of those cavalry contingents it would have to be at least two thousand warriors. Light horse or not the Firstborn just weren’t used to facing down cavalry charges, and they lacked the bows, pikes and discipline to be naturals at turning them back. Slipping in through one of the flanks would take longer, though. Maybe an hour or so, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to take that risk without a better notion of how the fight for the city was going. There was no point in arriving neatly if the delay cost us the battle. And that the fight was going, there was no doubt about that – I could make out the command horns and the faint sound of screams and steel even from where I sat. There was nothing quite as catastrophically loud as a hard battle, was there? Clenching my fingers, I spit to the side.

“Rumena, pick out two thousand warriors,” I said.

“Will you be spitting on them as well, First Under the Night?” the old drow drily asked.

“That one’s a bit of a stretch,” I replied without missing a beat. “Careful with those, you know your back’s not what it used to be.”

“At least one of us should live to reach old age,” Rumena smoothly retorted.

Damn it. Was it really too much to ask to get the last word against it even once? The fact that my bloody goddesses were quite literally crowing in the back of my head at this most recent of defeats only made it worse. My eyes flicked ahead. It wouldn’t be long before the first fleeing Procerans arrived in shouting distance, but I’d have the drow at my side before it came to that. I yelled at Rumena to fetch me Robber while it was at it, watching it stroll away to carry out my orders. I looked up at the noon sky, that vast spread of blue without a single cloud to temper the glare of the sun. It was good fighting weather, I thought. Mild for a winter day, and the snow might thaw a bit if it kept up. Twin shadows flickered into sight, gliding down with lazy grace, and I turned my eyes back to the Procerans as the crow-shaped slivers of godhood landed on my shoulders. They ran their metaphysical fingers down the spine of my thoughts, partaking of my intent.

“First time I ever saw Black use the trick, I wasn’t sure it was one,” I mused. “The second time, though? I promise myself I’d make it my own one day.”

“Not a subtle tool,” Andronike said.

“Yet versatile,” Komena opined.

We left it at that, for now. General Rumena came back holding a wiggling Robber by the scruff of the neck – impressive, considering it was day and my Special Tribune still had his armour on – before offering him up like some kind of furious green cat.

“Get on,” I said, cutting in before the goblin could complain. “There’s a war on, Tribune. Rumena, tell our warriors to stick close to me and not spread out.”

“As in all things your guidance is paramount, Losara Queen,” it replied.

I detected the faintest hint of sarcasm in that, due to my unparalleled courtly sentivities.

“Wait, you speak Lower Miezan?” Robber hissed out. “You prick, you pretended you-”

I cleared my throat, and with ill-grace the goblin scampered onto the back of my mount. I patiently watched until my six thousand drow formed into a rough column. The vanguard of the fleeing civilians had finally noticed our presence and distant shouts in Chantant and Tolesian sounded. Some angry, some curious, some afraid. I could have tried to engage, but to be frank I didn’t have the time to be gentle about this.

“Follow,” I called in Crepuscular.

My staff of ebony rose, and I reached for the Night. The Sisters helped me shape it, refine my intent and cut away the impurities until all that was left was fear . I felt Robber stiffen behind me, then almost defiantly loosen his limbs and grip. Zombie started at a gallop without further ado and the drow followed behind me.

With screams of blind terror, the inhabitants of Sarcella parted like the sea.

It was a simple enough working that maintaining it wasn’t too much of a strain, especially with the guidance of the Sisters, but I was noticeably tired by the time we reached the tall arch that was the broadest entrance into the city. There’d been a few incidents making our way down the road, civilians who reacted to even supernatural terror with aggression, but they were beaten down and thrown to the side without any deaths involved. One drow was nicked by a wildly flailing sausage knife and was loudly mocked by the rest of its sigil for the rest of the walk, but that was the closest thing to a casualty we incurred. To my approval, the sight of my army approaching by the largest road into the city was met with hastily assembled palisade and at least half a hundred crossbows. From atop my horse I could even see messengers running further in to ask for reinforcements. I rode up ahead of the drow, allowing the fear to die and my shoulders to loosen. I felt like I’d run a footrace – in a metaphysical instance where both my legs were still in good shape, it should be said – but I was tired and not exhausted. Tired I could work with. It was old hand to me. The Sisters took flight before we were hailed, more interested in taking a look at the killing than staying around for the formalities.

“Close enough, stranger,” an officer called out from atop the palisade. “Identify yourself. This city has been seized by the Kingdom of Callow, in the name of Her Majesty Catherine Foundling – are you friend or foe to her?”

I cocked my head to the side. A mop of blond hair could be made out from under the helmet, and that was definitely a Liessen accent tainting the hail spoken in very shaky Chantant.

“Yes, Boss,” Robber murmured, sounding utterly delighted. “Are you friend or foe to Her Majesty ? I think a case can be made for both. Tough call to make, really.”

“You’re talking to her, lieutenant,” I called back in Lower Miezan. “Split those palisades and take me to General Nauk.”

“Come off it,” the Liessen laughed. “You’re way too short. If you’re the bloody Black Queen then I’m Empress of Procer.”

Blowing up the palisade was not an acceptable response, I reminded myself. It was my palisade, technically speaking, so it was doubly beneath me to do so. Robber shook convulsively behind me, trying not to cackle out loud. There was some talk coming from out of sight, behind the palisade, then a goblin’s head popped over the edge. I squinted. I’d seen that one before, though I couldn’t put a name to the face. He was one of Robber’s officers.

“Captain Borer,” the ingrate gargoyle behind me provided, still snickering.

“Open the way immediately,” the goblin ordered. “Your Majesty, welcome back.”

I inclined my head in thanks. The Empress of Procer turned white as a sheet. I barked out orders in Crepuscular for the drow to follow me in good order, then put Zombie to a trot as the wooden fortifications were dragged open. Captain Borer, unlike his commanding officer, snapped a textbook-perfect salute when I approached. There were less than a hundred soldiers here, most of them crossbowmen, though I suspected with the runners I’d seen move out earlier that was about to change. I glanced at the still-pale Liessen lieutenant, who’d joined the throng of officers gathering around me, and cocked an eyebrow.

“Your Highness,” I drily said. “What a surprise to find you here.”

He forced out a shaky laugh, but ended up choking on it for trying to swallow nervously while keeping it up.

“Who’s in command here?” I asked.

There were lieutenants and sergeants here, but no one any higher up the ladder. Unusual.

“That would be me, Your Majesty,” Captain Borer replied. “I am the sole captain of this front.”

Not a good sign , I thought. Not only was the goblin a sapper, he was part of Robber’s cohort – which was detached from the usual chain of command, by my personal authority. Sappers were usually passed over in favour of the closest same-rank officer when it came to combined commands, which was hinting at a severe officer shortage.

“You’re relieved, Captain,” I said. “Behind me are foreign troops from the Empire Ever Dark, to be considered auxiliaries for the duration of this battle. They’ll be holding the area in your place. Robber?”

The goblin leapt down with unnatural agility, landing with a flourish.

“Boss?” he asked.

“Gather your full cohort, then join me wherever the general staff has set up,” I ordered. “Captain Borer, I’ll need you to appoint a liaison to the drow. At their head is General Rumena, who’ll be advancing deeper into the city with four thousand infantry. Have it led at a location allowing for easy deployment to the fronts.”

“I’ll see it done, ma’am,” the goblin saluted.

There was a shudder of whispers through the assembled officers, looks were cast at the grey-skinned warriors still advancing towards the arch. The drow in the front ranks were looking back, looking distinctly unimpressed by the first human city most them had encountered.

“Merciful Gods,” a tall, dark-haired man with sergeant stripes said. “ Drow . I thought they were stories.”

“Stories start from something, sergeant,” I amusedly said. “And our friends came out from the Everdark to fight on our side. Do pass the word along that they can be rather touchy, though. It’d be best if a little distance was kept.”

The stares I got at that made me rather uncomfortable. It was just a handful of officers, I thought, already part of my army anyway. And still I wondered if there’d be as much awe on their faces, if they knew how badly botched and misguided my journey into the Everdark truly had been. I doubted it. All they saw was old stories with strange weapons and eerie eyes come to swell our ranks. Shaking my head, I dismissed the thought.

“I’ll need someone to guide me to the general staff,” I said. “Is General Nauk holding command from there, or has he gone to the front?”

The awe was gone, whisked away in a heartbeat.

“Ma’am,” Captain Borer quietly said. “General Nauk no longer holds command. He was killed last night when the assault began. Legate Abigail is the current commanding officer.”

I was in front of my soldiers, I couldn’t show weakness. And still I closed my eyes. Breathe in, breathe out. Control. You can grieve when the city’s no longer burning, when your people are no longer fighting. He’d not been the same man I had called my friend, but I’d come to hope... Hope is always dangerous , I remembered . My eyes opened and my voice came out calm.

“I will need a guide, regardless,” I said. “Let’s get to it.”

I pulled my hood over my head, then Zombie impatiently stepped into the avenue and away from my officers. Thirty heartbeats later, I had my guide and I rode the city with dried eyes.

Pittance that it was, it was all I could afford to spare.

—

The high command for what I’d been informed was currently being called the ‘Third Army’ – presumably Juniper’s four separate columns each having been granted such a number – was clearly buckling under the weight of its responsibilities. It’d been a mansion, once, though clearly a wealthy merchant’s and not a noble’s as it was near the heart of Sarcella and not one of the more rarefied quarters. The location had been well-chosen, close to most of the arteries of the city and so easy to get messages to and from. I was ushered through a parade of wide eyes and gasps, until I reached what must have been the war room. It was at the very highest of the mansion, with broad windows overlooking the parts of the city either currently fought over or burning down. My attention, though, lingered on the fact that there were too few people here. A few aides, a few messengers, mages and hornblowers. But the actual officers? Less than ten. There were more tables loaded with scrolls and maps than there were people above the rank of tribune in here, which was stark statement as to the state of the Third Army. The presumed commanders saluted tiredly when I entered, obviously warned in advance, but I noticed the gaze of several brighten at the sight of me. I offered a smile, and turned to the only person in the room wearing a legate’s insignia.

Legate Abigail, I realized with a start, was younger than me. Barely twenty, by the looks of her. I’d come across her once or twice before Akua’s Folly, and later Juniper mentioned her to me before as the woman who’d drowned the incipient riots in Laure through strategic use of the royal palace’s cellars. She’d had a field promotion to legate after that, so she’d have the authority to keep the capital in order, but I was surprised the Hellhound had chosen to confirm the promotion afterwards. At most I’d expected her to move up from senior tribune to commander, after an actual legate relieved her. Were we really that hard up for high-ranking officers? I set aside the worry for now, looking over the younger woman discretely. Her black hair was slightly longer than Legion regulations allowed, but acceptably so for a foreign campaign. Sunburnt cheeks, watery blue eyes and a delicate nose. She had dark rings around her eyes like she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in much too long, quite visibly exhausted. She was taller than me, I noted, but then who wasn’t?

“Your Majesty,” the legate croaked out in that thick Summerholm accent. “Gods, am I glad to see you.”

The general staff around her really was absurdly sparse, and what remained was in rough shape. There was a senior mage – Soninke, it’d be years before any Callowan was fit for that command – with a face whose rosiness betrayed recent mage healing and a staff tribune missing her right arm up to the elbow, but that was it. No senior sapper, no kachera or supply tribune. Two commanders, and one large orc tribune, but that was no proper general staff. What the Hells had happened here?

“Legate Abigail,” I replied with a nod. “Our drow allies found Special Tribune Robber’s tenth, and I hurried a march here with a first wave of six thousand reinforcements. I’m beginning to suspect the situation is worse than what was described to me.”

A few mirthless smiles bloomed at that.

“It’s a bloody mess, Your Majesty,” Legate Abigail said. “General Nauk swatted their first probe on Sarcella and the vanguard drew back, so we figured they were waiting for the rest of the army. But then they attacked last night, completely out of the blue. We think some noble showed up, riled them up for it.”

“Are you saying Nauk and the rest of his senior officers were lost on the frontlines?” I frowned.

“Them Dominion priests hit a meeting of the general staff,” she replied. “Lanterns, I think they’re called. One moment it’s night, then it’s bloody Light everywhere and most the room is dead. I was looking into a supply discrepancy so they didn’t get me and Oakes-”

“Legate Oakes,” the orc at her side provided in a gravelling voice.

“-Legate Oakes was walking the perimeter, so he didn’t get hit either,” Legate Abigail seamlessly adjusted.

I hid my amusement at the interaction, and the habitual ease it had come with.

“You’re senior to this Legate Oakes?” I asked.

“By a day, ma’am,” the woman ruefully replied. “Marshal Juniper said we were to serve under General Nauk and Legate Jwahir for proper blooding.”

She paused.

“I guess we did get that, in the end,” she darkly said.

Well, wasn’t this a mess. It wasn’t like I had another commander to pull out of my sleeve – Rumena was arguably the most veteran, but it had not familiarity with Legion tactics and was needed to keep the drow orderly besides – so she’d have to do. I could take command myself, sure, but if this was as bad as it sounded like I’d be needed in the thick of it.

“Then you’ve just received a field promotion, General Abigail,” I grimly replied. “Congratulations. Now tell me how deep into the dark we are and, while we’re at it, why the Hells this city is on fire.”

Interlude: Beheld I

“Necessity’s children are sometimes clever but always bloody.”
– Queen Yolanda of Callow, the Wicked (known as ‘the Stern’ in contemporary histories)

Godsdamnit, somehow she’d still ended up stuck in charge.

Legate – no, General now, because clearly someone Above was out to get her – Abigail had counted her blessings when she’d gotten word the Black Queen had come out of nowhere to save the day. The queen could take command, and she could go back to being as far as physically possible from the fighting while also not being expected to make any decisions that actually mattered. That was the trap, Abigail darkly thought. They lured you up the ranks with the promise of better pay and less people shooting arrows at you, until you got dragged so high you had to watch out for the noose instead. And she knew damn well what field promotion meant, thank you very much. It meant ‘do the work, Abigail, but we’ll only pay you what your last rank offered, and also best not fuck up or the Hellhound will eat your liver’. But she couldn’t exactly say any of that out loud, so General Abigail smiled all pretty for the very dangerous woman holding a staff that made people panic if they looked at it too long.

“I’m honoured, Your Majesty,” she lied.

Queen Catherine’s lips twitched the slightest bit. Abigail hid her flinch well. Could the Black Queen actually read thoughts and look into souls? Surely that was just a rumour. Still, best not to risk it and change the subject. You never knew with Named.

“The fire wasn’t our fault,” Abigail immediately said. “Wasn’t us who started it, either. I swear. The Lanterns ran out of the city after hitting the general staff and our people went after them. The chase ended up going through a grocer’s shop and there wasn’t no food in there, but there were candles and oil jugs.”

The Black Queen arched an eyebrow, saying nothing.

“It wasn’t us,” Abigail insisted. “I have five official reports showing it was some big Levant woman who broke into the room and tipped over the candles. We can’t be blamed for this, we even tried to stop the spread!”

Catherine Foundling’s lips twitched once more, and she patted the Abigail’s shoulder with open sympathy. She tried not to tremble at the touch. You were always less likely to get your blood frozen solid if you smiled.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” the queen mused. “But I’ve been saying that for years, and no one ever believes me.”

The – temporary, if she had anything to say about it – general paled a little at the notion that she could end up getting a reputation like the Black Queen’s. Abigail had been in Summerholm when entire quarters burned green because the Squire needed to flush out a hero. Hells, she’d never have been dumb enough to enroll in the Legions if her family home and shop hadn’t been part of the cinders. Too late to bail now, though, she admitted to herself. She wasn’t sure if even temporary generals were allowed to retire. Maybe she could get herself thrown out, she mused. Might be time to consider getting ‘accidentally’ pregnant. The queen’s amusement passed quick enough, and Abigail straightened her back to look like she hadn’t been thinking of what was technically an attempt at desertion.

“How many Lanterns struck?” Her Majesty asked.

“We believe twenty,” Abigail said, comforted to be back on practical matters. “Twelve managed to escape the city, most of them killed while running.”

Only one of them had died during the attack, though it’d been a Hells of a kill. The Callowan wouldn’t forget the sight of Nauk Princekiller’s fangs having snapped straight through the neck of a priest anytime soon. Not when Light had melted his plate before he even got moving, drips of molten metal leaving a trail of how he’d leapt for the kill even dying. The general had been a bloodthirsty bastard, no two ways about it, but no one had ever called him a coward. Her thoughts stalled. General Nauk was supposed to be an old friend of the queen’s wasn’t he? From the War College, and the early Fifteenth. Abigail really hoped the Black Queen didn’t ask about the body, since she’d have to admit there was no splitting the corpse from the melted armour and no fire at hand would burn hot enough for both – the matter had been put aside for now, since there were more important things to take care of. It was odd, Abigail though, that something mattering to her mostly because it’d gotten the three veteran Legates that should be standing in her shoes right now killed could actually be tragic to someone else. Especially to the likes of the Black Queen, who had burned and buried dozens of thousands. Even monsters had friends though, she supposed.

“Is a second strike by them likely?” Her Majesty asked.

The Queen of Callow was staring at the battle map even as she spoke, dark eyes tracing the lay of the cohorts and fortified choke points. Abigail had done what she could. There’d been no keeping the Belles Portes quarter after the disorder of a decapitated general staff had allowed the Dominion to take the bridges and secure a foothold behind them, but she’d had houses collapsed on the outskirts of the quarter and kept them contained in there by her own jesha of two thousand until a better defence could be assembled. The Levantines had since driven the Third Army back to the outskirts of Beaumontant quarter and mounted a push that took Couteau D’Or, pretty much claiming the entire middle-southern and south-western partss of Sarcella. Since then it’d been a nasty slugging match, since the Dominion had run into the raised defences and goblin traps she’d ordered set up at that line.

The two fronts had quieted some, but that was just preparation for a serious assault in Abigail’s opinion. And if the next one passed her defensive lines? The Third Army was fucked, to put it bluntly. She’d been forced to send the reserves to the frontlines to slow down the fall of Beaumontant until the sappers were done, and with companies still stuck keeping an eye on the cavalry to the city’s sides there just weren’t enough soldiers left to take back grounds if they were lost to Levant. If the lines broke, it was all downhill from there. Or that’d been the situation an hour ago, anyway, Abigail of Summerholm thought with a hard smile. Now the Black Queen was back, so it was time for lakes to start dropping. It took Krolem clearing his throat to realize she still hadn’t answered the question Her Majesty had asked.

“We, uh, don’t believe so,” Abigail hastily said. “Senior Mage Dastardly has trip wards in place she believes will warn us if they do, but our priests say if they try anything that large again so soon they’ll burn out.”

The Queen of Callow blinked in surprise and tore her gaze away from the map. It was a pretty human gesture for some immortal evil-fae thing, Abigail decided. With the long, unbound brown hair and the lightly coloured cheeks, Catherine Foundling looked more like a young woman who hadn’t slept in a while than the infamous victor of Second Liesse and the Battle of the Camps.

“Our priests,” Her Majesty repeated. “We have priests , now?”

It was the temporary general’s turn to be surprised. Had she really not heard?

“The House of Light split after it came out what you did in Keter, Your Majesty,” Abigail said.

The Black Queen’s face went blank as a wax mask. The Summerholm girl pressed on with haste.

“After it was outed you went to the Crown of the Dead to kill the Dread Empress and prevent her making a deal, they called for a Callowan conclave,” she said. “They split over whether or not to name the entire Tenth Crusade graceless. About two thirds went against, but the Salian conclave’s decrees were declared heresy by unanimous vote. Wasn’t enough for some, though: the last third walked out and pronounced the Tenth Crusade to be godless Proceran intrigue. Nowadays they call themselves the ‘House Insurgent’, Your Majesty. Hundreds enrolled in the army as healers.”

For a moment the silence in the room was thick as oil, then the Queen of Callow glanced to the side. There was a half-empty bottle of wine at the edge of the table, leftovers from when Abigail had taken pity on Dastardly’s pain at having an entire cheek and eye grown back. It was her last bottle from Callow, too. The Black Queen grabbed it, sniffed at the rim and visibly brightened before taking a long swallow. A little sigh of pleasure followed.

“Oh, that’s the stuff,” Queen Catherine muttered. “Been way too long.”

She shook her head, afterwards, and got back to business. So no one’s going to die , Abigail mused. That’s nice. Tanners didn’t have to worry about things like that, she knew. No, Abigail, she thought, think of the ferret-faced cousins. Stick the course, how long can we really be at war anyway?

“Well,” the queen said. “You’ve had an interesting year, I see. We’ll set that aside for now, General Abigail. Your reserves aren’t marked on the map, how many have you held back?”

“They, uh, are, Your Majesty,” Abigail replied.

She leaned over and tapped her finger near the five cohorts holding the grounds between the fire and the edge of Beaumontant quarter. There was nothing held back because the reserves were on the front. The queen grimaced.

“I was afraid of that,” she said. “That’s going to get messy. These, are they paved roads or bridges?”

The Black Queen was pointing at the four grey streaks representing the bridges going into Belles Portes, and Abigail told her as much.

“How broad is the river?” Her Majesty asked.

“At the bridges, around twenty five feet,” the temporary general said. “It’s broader further west, going towards the source. Stays about the same going east, though a mile downriver it’ll start splitting and narrowing.”

The queen frowned at the map pensively. Abigail cleared her throat.

“If you’re thinking of using munitions on it, ma’am, we’ve already tried,” she said. “General Nauk had our sappers take a look, wanted to use that to repulse the first attack. It’s frozen too deep, though, took an entire cart of demolition charges and it didn’t spread all that far.”

“Munitions aren’t what I have in mind,” the Queen of Callow calmly replied. “General, if we hold until sundown our retreat is assured. Cracking the river will buy us that breathing room, but only if you can push the enemy out of the city first. We need a moat, not an obstruction.”

Abigail tried to think of a very polite, professional way of saying that this couldn’t be done but it wasn’t her fault. While she was considering what would work best, the Black Queen pressed on.

“I’ll be taking five hundred drow and Special Tribune Robber’s cohort with me,” Her Majesty continued in that same even tone, eyes remaining peeled on the parchment. “That grants you three thousand and a half fresh warriors to break the deadlock.”

“They’re dug in good, ma’am,” General Abigail said. “Unless the drow can scale walls barehanded-”

“They can,” Catherine Foundling casually said, like it was nothing out of the ordinary. “While light infantry and currently no more physically able than humans, they have extensive training in raiding tactics. I’d suggest you send a number of them here-”

The Queen of Callow’s finger tapped the boundary line between Beaumontant and Couteau D’Or, which by Abigail’s reckoning was a line of tightly-packed merchant homes facing outwards.

“- to split the Levantines up, then thin your right flank to reinforce your left,” she mused. “A hard assault on this ‘Couteau D’Or’ quarter will have them packed tight in the open when they draw back into Beaumontant, and a few sapper companies can bloody them into retreat from there.”

General Abigail squinted down. The right flank had better hard defences, it was true – she’d had a guild house’s lower level barred and turned the flat rooftop into a shooting galley for her crossbowmen – and it would hold against attack for a while even if thinned. With the recommended distraction and enough forces moved to bolster an assault on the left flank, this could possibly work. That’d still leave a pack of very angry Levantines with their blood up holding Belles Portes, though, and that quarter was the door to Sarcella. As long as the Dominion had their foothold there they’d keep bringing in troops. If the Levantines mounted a hard counterattack after the Third Army had left its defensive positions, the quarters it had taken might be just as soon taken back – and it wouldn’t stop there, Abigail knew. With the kind of losses that the assaults would bring, the Third Army might end up driven out of Sarcella entirely. That’d be the end of them, with the Levantine cavalry hacking them to pieces as they retreated into the plains.

“That’s only workable if the river is cracked,” General Abigail finally said. “And unless you intend on taking less than a thousand light infantry out onto plains where the Dominion fields at least that much in cavalry, to get to the river you’d need to go through Belles Portes – which we can’t take, until the river is cracked.”

The Black Queen smiled, thin and sharp and just a little mad.

“There’s another way through, as it happens,” she said.

Abigail followed where the gloved finger was pointing on the map. She choked.

“That’s the part that’s on fire, Your Majesty,” she said.

“So it is,” Catherine Foundling cheerfully said. “Get ready for the offensive, general. I’ll want it beginning within an hour.”

The Black Queen patted her shoulder once more and limped out of the war room, humming what Abigail was pretty sure was the opening notes of the Lord of the Silver Spears . She was also, the leader of – temporary leader, Abigail corrected – of the Third Army noted, still holding that half-empty bottle of Vale summer wine.

“Tribune Krolem,” she whispered. “I need you to looking into something.”

The orc leaned forward eagerly.

“Find out who you can lodge a protest to, if the Queen of Callow steals your wine,” General Abigail said.

—

The cattle-dwelling reeked.

Everything about the Burning Lands was mad, Mighty Jindrich decided. This land had never truly known order, not even in the days before the Tenets of Night, and while the Firstborn sought enlightenment through sacred strife – the worthy take, the worthy rise – the cattle had grown fat and insolent for that absence. The Mighty bared its teeth at small eyes peeking through a shuttered window, pleased at the squeak that sounded from inside the house. The shutters were wood, Mighty Jindrich saw. Most the house as well. How disgustingly decadent, that these Prokeren could afford to make a city mostly of wood. Even sigils of the Inner Ring were not so wealthy: it had taken an effort not to beat the cattle that had found it fit to burn wood, of all things. The Tomb-Maker had said that the Prokeren owned many forests, and that even if they allowed their wooden houses to rot and break they could afford to make new ones. Madness, waste and madness. Mighty Jindrich might have taken from the cattle what it knew not how to appreciate, had the First Under the Night not forbidden it.

The sigil-holder of the Jindrich let its eyes stray from the cattle-things trembling in their dwellings, instead turning to Losara Queen. Honour had been given, when the First Under the Night had picked Jindrich and many of its sigil to accompany it into battle. More so than could be truly grasped, for Losara Queen was the voice of the Night and so honour given by it was honour given by the Night itself. What more esteemed accolade could there be? The presence of the gobberin marred the situation some, but not so much that it grew beyond enjoyment. The green creatures were not true cattle, having many years ago warred against the nerezim with great fury and viciousness. They were being made to bear strange packs and drag carts, but no beasts of burden they. The leader of the pack, this Robber, it had spirit. If Losara Queen was to have servants from the Burning Lands, worse stock could be drawn from than a being that would mock Mighty at their own table. The pack following the Robber was just as dauntless, and already Losara Queen had ordered warriors of the Jindrich and the Cohort to sheath their blades thrice. This was pleasing, for sharing purpose with the weak and cowardly made for a weak cabal.

Mighty Jindrich threw back its head and hollered when their promised destination was reached, the sharp calls sounding out in defiance of the pale light. Its sigil answered in kind, approaching the heat and smoke of the blaze storming ahead without a speck of fear. The Mighty strode forward, elbowing some gobberin wearing strips on its shoulders and laughingly slapping aside the knife it pulled. The First Under the Night stood first before the blaze, as well it should. Even in the pale light of the sun Losara’s silhouette seemed shaded, soot and ash falling at its feet as it watched the flickering flame. Jindrich bowed respectfully before approaching. It had bargained with this holy one when it was still but a strange curiosity, a creature borne by these lands yet capable of slaying Mighty. It’d also intended to betray Losara as soon as the Rumena were dealt with, as was only fitting. Since then, Mighty Jindrich had been taught the extent of its foolishness. What could a Mighty hope to do, against the very herald of Sve Noc? Some ill-made things calling themselves Firstborn still murmured of Losara Queen being human , but this was crass ignorance. What human could possibly bear Sve Noc on its shoulders, speak for the Tenets?

No, Losara Queen was the get of Night itself. It would return the Firstborn to these lands and wrest a realm out of the hands of the Pale Gods, usher the Empire Ever Dark born anew. And Mighty Jindrich would be there to share in that glorious thing, drenched in the blood of those that dared to test the Tenets of Night.

“Losara Queen, we stand ready for war-making,” Jindrich said. “We will tread this blaze, should you wish it so.”

The holy one smiled, white teeth flashing like ivory in shade.

“Miracles don’t come cheap, Jindrich,” the First Under the Night said. “And there are only so many I can bear. Fortunately, I have something almost as dangerous to wield.”

The Mighty smiled, pleased at the sharing of wisdom.

“What may this be, Losara Queen?”

The holy one’s eyes crinkled in amusement, and it inclined its head behind them.

“Madmen, Jindrich,” the First Under the Night said. “Never underestimate what a few of those can accomplish when told something is impossible .”

Behind them the gobberin had opened begun empty the carts, to work with wood and steel to raising strange wooden structures and nail them solid. Skins reeking of vinegar were taken out from the bags, and boxes of snow prepared. Long staves of metal and wood, some with broom-like endings and others not, were prepared and made wet with a strange concoction kept in bottles.

“Prepare yourself, Mighty Jindrich,” Losara Queen said. “We’ll pass where the blaze is weakest, but to hesitate is death.”

“It was ever thus,” it laughed, and raised its fist to the sky.

All is Night , Mighty Jindrich yelled out, and its sigil echoed in kind. For a moment, it thought, that prophecy drowned out even the roar of the fire.

—

“I missed this,” Special Tribune Robber admitted.

There’d been some good laughs, since the Boss had gone underground to take over yet another nest of vipers in order to throw it at one of the other nests of vipers. He’d gotten to hunt Imperial agents in the streets like animals with the Guild of Assassins, stuck it to the Matrons while negotiating for munitions in Thief’s name and even gotten to see what happened when you sent back a High Lady’s threatening envoy by trebuchet. There’d been deaths, too, but no anyone he cared too much about. Well, Hakram had somehow managed to lose another hand but sad at was Robber was looking forward to the truly legendary amount of sarcasm the Boss would inflict him over it so it could be called a draw. Pickler was still both mind-blowingly lovely and completely out of reach, especially when putting shady dwarven gold to nefarious purposes, but that was just the way of life. Robber of the Rock Breaker Tribe, also known as the Lesser Footrest to Her Majesty the Queen of Callow, had started to figure he’d seen it all. He’d been to more places most goblins ever would, killed people in most of them and participate in the strategic arson of not one but several cities. He was no longer young, by his people’s standards, and he’d wondered if it might not be time to start thinking about a glorious death.

Then the Boss had come back, and she was as superbly mad as ever.

She’d left as some sort of bastardly immortal fae thing and come back breathing and smelling like a mortal, with an army of bloodthirsty treacherous magical dark elves she’d somehow become a religious figure for if he’d picked up on the chatter right. And she was going to use them to wage war on half the continent, so she could make it sign some sort of treaty then use that to attack the Hidden Horror as a united front. She also had in stand a blackwood staff that felt to his senses like some sort of silent, monstrously large predator and she was talking shit to some possibly god-like crows that no one but her seemed to be able to look at directly for more than a fraction of a heartbeat at a time. Robber had been close to those things for hours, and even avoiding to look at them he’d since been plagued with some of the most horrifying nightmares of his life. Gods, it was just like coming home. And now she’d decided that the best way to use tactical surprise was to attack through where no one had positioned troops, which had happened because the place in question was on fire. So he’d casually been informed that his cohort was to build several examples of a lighter siege turtle so that she could stuff seven hundred soldiers in them and run through a city fire, in order to crack a frozen river. All the while and enemy army and several larger cavalry contingents were on the prowl.

No one did crazy like the Boss. There was a reason goblins volunteered to enroll in the Army of Callow, and it wasn’t the Hellhound’s winning personality.

“You know, sometimes I wonder if there’s something in the water back in the Grey Eyries,” Catherine Foundling drawled. “It’d explain a lot about goblins. Isn’t lead supposed to make people go mad? How likely is it that there’s some in your wells?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’ve only ever drunk the blood of my enemies,” Robber shamelessly lied.

“That sounds rather unsanitary,” the Boss said. “Zeze says there’s all sort of humours in that.”

The inside of the modified siege turtle was stiflingly hot, even with all the preparations. Skins soaked in vinegar and water, boxes of snow to cool the air coming from the slight openings above and poles coming out of the shuttered panels that allowed enterprising drow to push down anything still on fire that came too close. Beneath the bottom rim, still-burning embers could be swept with broom-like poles when they were layered too thickly or skins of water used to put out open flames – though the smoke and vapour from that was wicked, and had already scalded a few unwary goblins. Each of the shells allowed for fifty people to hide under, fourteen brave turtles having tried the blaze. One had been struck by a falling beam barely twenty feet in, and less than ten of those inside had managed to crawl screaming back to the safety of outside the fire. The outer ring was the most dangerous part, though, they’d know that from the start. The fire had begun somewhere deeper in, and spread out more or less in a circle depending on where stone and space obstacles could be found. Past that part there’d been progressively less flame and more smoulder, though that hardly meant there was no danger. More than once the lack of air or the heat of what was left to breathe had made soldiers pass out.

The lucky ones fell inside the shell when there were enough in shape left to carry them. The others were left behind for the fire to take. The Boss had made it clear she couldn’t start calling on her tricks without putting the river work at risk, and there was no point in trying this at all if she exhausted herself trying to keep everyone alive. Another turtle was lost when its warriors misjudged what they were stepping on under the ash layer and got themselves over red-hot stone, a chunk of the drow immediately dropping with screams as their thinner boots got torched through and the turtle fell for lack of enough people holding it up. The structure turned into an oven within moments, and the four survivors only lasted long enough to make it out in the open – which wasn’t any more survivable than inside. Robber had been blessed enough to share a shell with the Boss herself, and she’d been utterly nonplussed the whole way through. Her face had darkened every time a turtle was lost, but they’d pressed on anyway. Everyone inside was sweating like a pig, including her. Robber watched the Queen of Callow pat down her cloak while hobbling forward and cleared his throat.

“Looking for something?” he asked.

In front of them a pair of drow shifted the panels open, knocking down a wooden wall half-devoured by flames and almost entirely blackened. The panels closed, and the turtle came forward. Soon they’d reach the last crucible, the second part of the outer ring – and after that, out onto the snow.

“Would you happen to have matches on you?” the Boss casually asked.

“Sure,” Robber snickered, reaching for his sapper’s bag.

Sadly all the munitions delicate in the face of heat had to be removed, but he still had a few goods left to peddle. Including a set of pinewood matches, which he handed to his queen. She let out a noise of appreciation then shoved her staff into the crook of her arm, produced from her cloak an already stuffed pipe and struck the match. Within moments it was lit, filling the turtle with the acrid scent of wakeleaf. She carelessly dropped the match on the ground, where it fell on embers and almost instantly began burning up.

“That is cruel ,” Robber admiringly said.

And yet when he flicked his eyes, he caught most the drow smothering grins. Gods, they actually enjoyed the Boss being like that didn’t they? Kind of an asshole, and utterly indifferent to the fact that they were strolling through a bonfire of a city if it got in the way of her petty pleasures.

“I waited until we were on the last stretch,” the Black Queen defended herself.

She added something in the drow tongue afterwards, and the drow roared and sped up. Robber was pretty sure, by the tone, that it was along the lines of ‘put your back into it, I haven’t got all day’. After that it wasn’t long until through the thin openings made into the wood he was able to glimpse the silhouettes of tall granite statues, and a mostly open way to there. Which was for the best, given that some of his minions were starting to slow down and only kept from passing out by biting their lips bloody. There was a sudden crash behind, and the Boss called out in drow tongue: the porters at the back opened the shutters there, revealing a large wooden plank had scythed through the middle of the turtle right behind them. Catherine breathed in sharply at the sight, then cast a look in front. Not out of the woods yet , Robber thought. Another call in drow-tongue. The shutters were shut and the advance resumed. Eleven turtles made it out onto the snow, out of the fourteen who’d set out.

There were some, Robber thought, who’d call that a miracle.

Interlude: Beheld II

“A good sword will find a use, or make one.”
– Levantine saying

This was to be an iron day, Captain Elvera could feel it in her bones.

Twenty years she’d served as an officer under the Lord of Tartessos, then a further eight under his daughter the Lady Aquiline – and before that she’d been part of a Brocelian band, as both spearwoman and striker. It was the last of those experiences she drew on now, trusting the instincts that had seen her survive iron days ranging from chimeras maddened to an entire flock of ensorcelled drakes. Something nasty was about to come for the army that had been under her command until yersterday’s dusk, and they were not prepared. Elvera might be old and slow, these days, but she’d seen more bloodshed than the rest of this army of pups put together. They thought a few honour feuds and sanctioned hunts had them prepared for war, but it had not. The Army of Callow had spent most of a night and day making that viciously clear to anyone with eyes to see. It was just her luck that Razin Tanja, of the Binder’s Blood, had been stuck with blindness for want of glory. Just a fucking boy , she thought, not without bitterness. Some eighteen summers youth who saw a way to hallow his already hallowed line in sending soldiers charging to their deaths at Callowan hands.

Bones creaking as they would not have twenty years ago, the captain walked the streets of Beaumontant quarter with her twenty sworn swords at her side. A trail of smoke from the east, the quarter still aflame even now, marred the blue sky like stroke of charcoal. Under it the soldiers of the Dominion of Levant clustered behind thick planks of wood and half-broken houses, never daring to look across the divide for long. Callowan crossbowmen had proved to be mercilessly accurate from their distant perch, the sallow-eyed goblins never hesitating to put a bolt in any soldier out of cover for too long. Elvera saw no need to tempt such a fate by advancing too close, having already taken a good look when she led the assault that failed there that very morning. While red-clad legionaries had slowly retreated under the charge of the armsmen of Malaga and Tartessos, the damnable Callowan sappers had torn down two streets’ worth of structures and raised palisades between the houses standing behind – leaving an open killing field of stone and wood trapped with blasphemous munitions and vicious steel traps. Elvera had lost three hundred men trying to force a way through before she called a retreat under crossbow volleys and spellfire.

The Callowans knew war, these days, in a way few soldiers of her homeland did. Captain Elvera was old enough to have fought in the Sepulcher War, when the Barrow Lord rose from the depths of Brocelian Forest and struck out with his host of bespelled beasts, barrow-spirits and Blood traitors. She’d taken a hammer blow to the arm that never quite healed right dragging Lord Romeran away from the onslaught, and for that earned both captain’s rank and the suit of plate she still wore – enameled with the colours of the Slayer’s Blood, a rare honour. She’d even fought in the thick of it at River’s Bent, holding the shore sword in hand until the Bestowed slew the Barrow Lord in honourable combat and the Peregrine freed his soul from its earthly prison. That’d been war, but Levant had not known its like in the many years since. The Kingdom of Callow had and its soldiers carried those hard lessons with them. There’d been rumours, of course, fanciful tales that made it even as far as Tartessos – of fairies riding on wings of flame, of a city aflight and spewing out armies of ravenous dead, of a gate opened into the very Hells that unleashed endless hordes of devils. Elvera had not put much trust in these, knowing how stories grew with telling and miles, but now she wondered.

The captain had breached shield walls, under morning light, and seen under the helms more than just Callowans. Greenskins and Wastelanders standing elbow to elbow with warriors born to the Kingdom of Knights, striving and killing and dying together. Singing those harsh, bitter songs the Callowans were so fond of. Ten thousand of these without a speck of horse, their commanders slain by the Lanterns in the dark of night, had turned what should have been a rout into a bloody and costly stalemate. There was spine in that army, Captain Elvera thought, perhaps more so than in her own. She’d seen too many green boys and girls empty their stomachs in the mud when they came across the butcher’s yard in Belles Portes quarter, where the wounded and dying had been brought for what healing could be had. The stink of shit, death and bile had not sickened Elvera’s nostrils in many years, but at least she had known it before. The eager young captains and their just as young warriors had not, and it had made them flinch. Not that Razin Tanja, heir to Malaga, had been moved by the wails and spilled entrails. No, the boy was already ordering preparations for another push against Callowan defences.

The Tartessian slowed her walk when she reached the outskirts of Beaumontant, near the streets leading into Couteau D’Or. The Tanja boy would be holding council with captains there, but she was in no mood for exhortations and castigations from some pup of a southern Blood. Instead she spoke with the soldiers she’d led into the jaws of the jackal that very morning, preparing them for what was to come. Those officers had broken their bones on Callowan defences earlier, and so were more willing to listen to an old woman’s advice than most. They gathered around her, the sworn swords of captains that were attending to the noble boy who’d taken command from her.

“A simple shield wall will get your people killed,” Captain Elvera said. “The sappers prepared the grounds to break up tight formations, and their mages will use fire to batter at what holds.”

“It’s the traps that have been bleeding us the worst, Red Ella,” a middle-aged man with a heavy Malagan accent replied. “They’ve sown caltrops everywhere and the spikes go straight through leather soles.”

Elvera let the use of her old sobriquet pass without comment. She wasn’t so long in the tooth as not to slap the insolence out of a soldier’s mouth if need be, but these officers had never known the sobriquet as the insult it’d been meant to be – just a name other old soldiers called her by, when the ale was plentiful.

“Better those than the buried explosions,” a young girl in heavy scale grunted. “Those’ll shred a man up to the waist, and sharp pieces shoot out to carve at those near. I’ll call anyone a fool who says we’ve seen the last of those.”

If they had the mages or the war hounds of the Lord of Malaga’s host with them, the Callowan killing field could have been taken apart slowly but surely. But the vanguard had been ordered to attack without them, and so soldiers would die instead. Dark as the thought was, there was nothing Elvera could do about this and she would not further darken a dark day by speaking ill of the boy commanding this host. Even if he was a glory-thirsting Blood throwback from the least reputable of the founding lines. Command of the army had already been taken from her, she would not take an axe to morale or risk being sent away from the front by speaking out of turn.

“I’ll speak plain,” she said. “Whoever you send in front will likely die. We’ll have to bridge the gap with corpses before we can get to them with blades. Split in smaller bands with shields above the heads and move fast, that ought to thin the costs. But make no mistake, this will get bloody.”

The talk did not please them, though they had expected no salvation from her. Elvera had made no mystery of it that she thought it foolishness to attack the dug-in Army of Callow inside a city with so slight a numerical advantage. Even without walls. If they’d had a three or four thousand warriors more then encirclement and assault would have been a sound scheme, but they did not.

“We should wait for the Lord’s army,” a voice called out from the back.

There were mutters of agreement. For all that the captains were attending to Razin Tanja, they were not all so certain of his scheme to press the attack and this had bled into the lower ranks. The Malagan captains would follow one of their native Blood through Crown and Tower, but there were Tartessos captains as well – furious still at her removal from command – and those captains who had answered the call of the Holy Seljun, not the Lord of Malaga. The latter of these would not easy throw aside the notion of a patron meant to inherit a title, but neither would they destroy their own companies without concrete promises made. The boy’s initial strokes of brilliance had earned him some renown, it was true. Using Proceran smugglers who knew of secret tunnels into Sarcella to bring a war-party of Lanterns into the city and kill the enemy commanders had been inspired, Elvara would freely admit, and not a risk she would have taken in his place. Lanterns were powerful, but few and precious. Striking at Belles Portes while the Callowans were in disarray had been good sense, and if not for a sudden enemy delaying action might well have won the city.

Pressing now , though, when the enemy was ready and waiting? The heir to Malaga was making his inexperience plain for all the captains to see, and it would win him no friends. And yet this kind of talk would not do at all, for an army without a leader was just a mob bearing arms.

“We have bled the Army of Callow harshly with our attack,” Captain Elvara replied. “Let none gainsay this. That is worthy feat, and with wisdom we may yet accrue greater honours.”

If her plate was not enchanted, she would have died in the heartbeat that followed. The barbed javelin struck at the hollow of her throat, where only a leather collar protected her, but Elvara had years ago paid a binder to make the material strong as iron. The bone tip of the javelin broke, though it still took her breath. Even in her surprise the old captain followed her instincts and ducked behind a fence – just in time to avoid an adeptly thrown sling stone that would have caved in her forehead.

“Attack,” she roared out. “Back to your soldiers! Tartessos, follow my lead.”

A score of officers were already dead by the time she finished speaking, and a few of her sworn swords with them. More were slain trying to flee, though the clever broke into houses to avoid that fate. Elvera risked a glance over the edge of the fence and caught sight only of grey-skinned silhouettes in furs stalking across rooftops before another javelin had her ducking back down. They were seizing the roofs between Beaumontant and Couteau D’Or, she realized with dismay. That’d be throwing away soldiers unless it was the prelude to a strike on one of those quarters, which meant that in defiance of all common sense the Army of Callow was back on the attack. Cursing under her breath, the old soldier prepared to make a run for it. Someone needed to get the Tanja boy out of the way before he got himself killed and the army’s spirits dropped into the pit, and who else save her was there? It was going to be an iron day, she’d felt it hours ago, and now that the iron had been in the fire long enough it’d grown red and burning.

Captain Elvera traced the Mark of Mercy with wrinkled hands, then steeled herself and ran out of cover.

—

Edgar was kicked awake, none too gently, and blearily rolled over.

“I was just resting my eyes, I was,” he immediately claimed.

A heartbeat later he remembered he’d been allowed his rest, captain’s orders, and his fear turned to resentment. The legionary pushed himself up, leaning against the wall, and began to glare at the source of his pain. Just as quick, resentment turned back to fear.

“Get up,” Sergeant Hadda grinned, baring twin rows of fangs. “The war’s back on, boy.”

Edgar counted himself lucky that after the hard fighting of the night and morning he’d been exhausted enough to pass out in his armour, aches in the back or not. Sergeant Hadda was not the kind of officer you ever wanted to keep waiting when she gave an order. He fumbled for his sword-belt under the orc’s amused gaze, and after slipping it back on ended up going through the pile of straw that’d been his bedding in order to find the helmet he could have sworn he’d set down to his left. The old sergeant took pity on him eventually, pointing it out, and Edgar hastily brushed aside the last of the straw inside before slamming it on.

“Thought we were pulled back until Afternoon Bell, sarge,” he said, warily eyeing her as he pulled the clasp together.

Depending on the orc’s mood, questions would either lead to pretty heavy-handed mockery or a fount of useful information. A sergeant was low as an officer could be, in the Army of Callow, but Hadda been in the Legions of Terror long before she took oath under Queen Catherine so she had all sorts of old friends in places. She tended to know more about what was going on than even Captain Pickering, to the man’s frustration.

“Everyone’s called back to the fronts,” Sergeant Hadda said. “Including us poor, exhausted souls. We’re about to teach Dominion meat why you don’t pick fights with the Legions.”

Like a lot of soldiers who’d been in the legions that were brought into the fold after Second Liesse, Hadda tended to speak of the Legions and the Army of Callow as the same thing. As far as they were concerned, Edgar had been told, the Black Queen was the Carrion Lord’s anointed successor so there was no distinction to be drawn. As a proper Laure boy he’d found that to be a mite unpatriotic, but then he supposed greenskins were new to the fold. Hadda had been good to him, anyway, for all the rough edges. She’d looked out for her tenth, taught them the little things like ‘don’t gamble with goblins’, ‘not all Soninke are warlocks’ and ‘if you fight a Taghreb the entire family comes after you’.

“Merciful Gods,” Edgar muttered. “Everyone said Legate Abigail was planning a retreat, not an assault.”

It’d been a shame the Princekiller got killed by them heretic Dominion priests, but he’d thought it nice that a Callowan was leading the Third Army now. It’d been a point pride, when he’d talked with other Laure enlisted. Sure enough the Legate was from Summerholm, and the folks from the Gate of the East tended to be prickly and proud as cats, but they’d all agreed Summerholm stock was good at warring. And Legate Abigail was a true veteran, he’d heard, from the days of the Fifteenth – she’d fought in the Arcadian Campaign and at Akua’s Folly. Heavens willing, she might end up confirmed by Marshal Juniper as the general of the Third Army if they all got out of Sarcella alive. Sergeant Hadda’s scarred, leathery face split into a nasty little grin.

“ General Abigail, now,” the orc said. “But that’s not the real treat of the day. Put some spring to your step, legionary – the Black Queen’s back, so we’re about to turn this fucking battle around.”

Edgar let out a low whistle. It was always a mixed bag, hearing about Queen Catherine. She’d filled a lot of graves since she’d appeared during the Liesse Rebellion, and no small amount of them had been Callowan ones. But she’d also smashed to pieces all the scavengers that came after the Kingdom, after she wrested it out of the Tower’s hand, and it was hard not to take pride in that. Edgar still remembered the sharp satisfaction he’d felt after hearing them sorcerers who’d done the Doom of Liesse had gotten crucified one and all. The queen might be a bit of tyrant, but the Fairfaxes hadn’t been all sweetness and light either. Sometimes you needed a hard hand to get it done, like Jehan the Wise hanging seven princes and one. But all that was back home, and before the fucking Procerans had declared her Arch-heretic of the East. The Principate tried the Vales and it tried the north, and when it got whipped like a dog it pulled the same trick it had in the old days. The Callowan House had called it ‘perverse service to earthly powers’, and that sounded about right to him.

Aye, there might be a time where the Black Queen got a little too black and Edgar found himself joining the rebel cause. But if the fucking Procerans thought their fucking princes and their fucking priests could unseat an anointed queen of Callow then they were in for a rude awakening. Maybe this time they should hang fourteen princes and two, and then another one too for Old King Selwin they’d done in at the Red Flower Vales. Edgar kept to the Heavens, as all Callowans should, but he kept to the long price as well and this one had been a very long time coming. One of these days they’d get around to evening the scales with the Wasteland too, for the Night of Knives and older slights as well, but that could wait some. The greenskins had been done in by the Tower too, bastards as they could be, and they should get their due along with the rest. Edgar did not mind at all the notion of sharing a fire with someone like Sergeant Hadda where the Tower used to stand. He didn’t speak out none of that, of course. He was just a legionary, so he ate his slop with the rest of the tenth and joined up with the rest of the cohort to march up to the outskirts of Couteau D’Or quarter. He’d been worried, when going to sleep, that they might all get caught in the city and killed. Edgar wasn’t worried anymore, though.

Say what you would about the Black Queen, she’d never lost a battle.

He clutched that knowledge tight as the cohorts gathered behind the defences, ranks and ranks of legionaries in red. It was all right to be afraid, he knew. On the other side of the killing grounds there would be warriors waiting, and Edgar had seen enough of his fellows die to learn that being clever or good with a sword wasn’t always enough to save you. He’d seen better fighters than him die because they’d been a little too slow raising their shield, because they’d slipped in the mud or even just because they’d been on watch when the Helike cataphracts struck. You couldn’t own that, you couldn’t force it: it was in the hands of the Gods Above. But he wasn’t just Edgar of Laure, a boy in armour in the third rank from the front. He was a legionary in the Third Army of the Kingdom of Callow, and in this strange city in this strange land they were going to win . He could feel it, and the others felt it too. It was in the air, the harsh taste of retribution in the making. He could see in the eyes of the orcs, burning red. He could see it in the way the soldiers from Laure and Ankou, from Vale and Summerholm, they were all standing like they wanted to lean forward. And the Wastelanders they had it as well, the Taghreb and the Soninke, with their calm faces and their hard eyes – like they knew how this would end and they were already savouring it.

He didn’t know who started singing, but Edgar did not hesitate to join his voice to it. There were times when the old rebel songs, the likes of Here They Come Again and Red The Flowers , they were what needed to be called out. But here, slowly beginning to advance against the soldiers of the Dominion? They’d give the Black Queen her due, just the once, for this song was hers and no one else’s. The tune of In Dread Crowned swelled up, as crossbow bolts flew and legionaries raised their shields. Step, step, step: the beat was in his bones, the rhythm of it. They advanced through the flat grounds, arrows and stones harmlessly glancing off. Edgar unsheathed his blade, smelling the scent of magic unleashed.

“Be they high or resplendent our oaths stand taller still
And in the west do quiet lie graves we have yet to fill-“

Balls of flame detonated against the enemy, and the Third Army charged into the chaos with a roar.

—

It was madness.

The Callowans were on their last rope and everybody knew it, but they might have held on to some part of the city until nightfall and spared themselves slaughter if they’d remained in their hiding holes instead of sallied out. Razin did not know whether to be delighted or infuriated they had not. He’d had plans in the making to land another crushing blow, and had been talking the most recalcitrant captains around to backing it: another push against Callowan lines accompanied with cavalry raids on the side, all to mask another strike by the Lanterns against the high command of the heretics. There would be no recovering from that , discipline or no. The war leader of the Lanterns had been most willing to send her warrior-priests into the fray, and the heir to Malaga had been slowly squeezing the Tartessos captains into silence when the damned Callowans struck instead. Some few thousand grey-skinned devils had been summoned and sent to disrupt his positions in Beaumontant and Couteau D’Or, though too few to truly be a threat. He’d immediately ordered them chased out from the rooftops they were skulking on, loyal captains heeding his calls and arranging for archers and slingers to disperse the abominations, but no sooner had the exchanges began that the Army of Callow attacked. It had been... grisly.

Razin Tanja was of the Grim Binder’s line and inherited her famous poise even if he had not been graced with her equally famed sorceries, so he’d not let the horror of it reach his face. But it would be a long time before her forgot the sight of it: those implacable rows of steel shields advancing in tight formations, heretics of all stripes singing their strange songs as they slew. The way crossbow bolts had fallen like summer rain, punching through all but the finest scale and plate. Foul eastern magics of flame and lightning arcing over ranks to blacken stone and sweep aside men like kindling. All the while whistles were sounded by their calm-faced officers, calling lines of legionaries forward or back like it was a parade ground and not as hellish a fight as this city could stomach. The strange devils had waited until Razin’s soldiers were on the backfoot before leaping down the rooftops and fiercely charging into the men of Levant, and that’d tipped the vase over the table’s edge. A rout had followed, Razin himself only escaping unscathed because that old dog of the Resafa, the one they called Red Ella, had him seized by her sworn swords before ordering them so slay any warriors impeding their way out.

Beaumontant was no safer, he’d soon learned. The Callowans had begun an offensive there as well, and the streets were packed tight with soldiers whose captains had died in Couteau D’Or or were still struggling to reach their companies. The chaos reached its apex when the Army of Callow reached the outskirts of Beaumontant from the side of Couteau D’Or as well, having wrought great slaughter. Panic spread at the realization that the Dominion’s force was now surrounded on three sides: on two of them red-bladed Callowans, and the third the blaze the heretics had started trying to kill the Lanterns during their retreat. Only behind them, in Belles Portes, did the Dominion still hold ground. But many of the wounded had been set there, for lack of an easy way to carry them out of the city after the assaults of the night and morning, and the makeshift infirmaries made did it difficult to get reinforcements through. It’d been a disaster in the making even before the Army of Callow began tossing its munitions – and Razin swore would see those declared blasphemy by Lanterns and House if it was the last thing he did – into the disorganized soldiers.

The second rout was even bloodier than the first. The heir to Malaga left the city in haste, passing the duty of holding Belles Portes to the doddering Captain Elvera in his absence, and went to stir up the rest of the army. The Callowans had struck a hard blow, he would give them that, but with that vain gesture they had doomed themselves. Their legionaries would be exhausted, their mages on the edge of burning out and their stocks of munitions running low. This had been a harder-earned victory than Razin would have preferred, but it would be a victory nonetheless. Father would forgive his impetuousness in seizing command of the vanguard without permission if he returned with the destruction of a Callowan army to honour their Blood. The wounded would be brought out onto the plains, to rest in the army’s camp, and then he would muster the might of Levant to crush these heretics. There were still seven thousand kept in reserve, and order would be sent to the riders probing the east and west to strike when given the proper signal. Razin was about to send summons to the Lanterns, to offer them the privilege of leading the counterattack at his side, when he was accosted by one of his lesser captains.

“Honoured Son, there is trouble,” the old man said after a cursory bow.

His mail was old and the leather lacking luster, which betrayed the nature of his soldiery where lack of an accent failed to provide. One of the captains who had answered the call of the Holy Seljun, not the lords and ladies of Levant. Razin forced himself to be courteous and offer back a nod of respectful acknowledgement. He already knew that after this battle was won the captains from Tartessos would seek to sully his name, and that support from those unsworn would do much to help his reputation. If all but the captains of Lady Aquiline sang his praises, the condemnations of her soldiers would be seen for the base defamation that they were.

“Have our captains of the horse sent word?” he asked.

“No, it was our camp watch,” the man said. “An enemy force has emerged from the southeast of the city.”

It took a moment for Razin to grasp what was being said, and just as long to fully disbelieve it.

“Through the fire ?” he said. “Have the men been drinking?”

“I thought the same, and so sent trusted armsmen of my own to look,” the old captain replied, but shook his head. “The Callowans passed through using strange wooden engines covered in skins. There truly is a force of nearly six hundred, goblins and devils. They are led by a human, however.”

“A warlock from the East,” Razin frowned. “It would explain the appearance of these grey-skinned devils. The mage must be slain, it might make the abominations still in the city turn on the enemy.”

The old captain hesitated.

“Honoured Son, this I did not see with my own eyes,” he cautioned.

Razin almost gestured impatiently, before remembering himself, and so instead forced a smile.

“Speak, captain,” he encouraged.

“Some of my men say the human wore a cloak,” the old man said. “One of black cloth, but with strips of many colours.”

Razin Tanja of the Binder’s Blood paled. There was only one villain known in this age to wear such a strange garment.

“Ashen Gods,” the boy croaked. “Gather your men, captain. Gather everyone . We must slay the Black Queen before she pulls her foul tricks.”

Fear pulsed in his blood, but as Razin had his servants saddle his horse he found there was excitement buried deep beneath. If he could kill the black-hearted Queen of Callow, it might just break the back of her armies for good and sent the lot of them scuttling back across their borders. What an honour to the Blood that would be. It would not do to be reckless, he reminded himself: he was of the Binder’s line, not the Champion’s. He gathered two thousand men before setting out, the rest assembling behind with orders to catch up, and horns were sounded for the captains of the horse in the eastern plains to join battle as well. Razin was informed that the Lanterns were already gone to the fight for Sarcella, but messengers would fetch them. Better to share the glory than make a bold corpse. The Black Queen’s goblins and abominations had already slain a few brave outriders, by the looks of it, but the march of her warband was otherwise unimpeded. Captains riding at his side, summoned in haste, Razin watched the few hundred fools keep advancing even in the face of his superior force.

“It may be a distraction,” one of his officers mused. “Just some Callowan forced into a cloak, meant to delay us reinforcing the city.”

“Or she has gone mad in her arrogance, as her ilk often does,” Razin idly replied. “Perhaps she thinks her warriors will be enough to defeat us.”

“We so sure they won’t be?” another captain said. “I mean no disrespect, Honoured Son, but we’ve all heard the rumours about the Battle of the Camps. The sky falling, the dead rising with blue eyes and fairies riding across water...”

There were calls of cowardice, which Razin tacitly allowed to quiet the naysayer through shame. The heir to Malaga would put no stock in such stories, especially not ones so fanciful. First the tale was that the Black Queen had warred against the fae, now that they warred for her? Powerful necromancer as the villain might be, she could not raise corpses that did not exist. As for this tale of the sky being brought down, it could be no work of hers. Perhaps some Wasteland ritual she simply claimed to be her own effort, the scale of it inflated with every telling. Procerans always excused their defeats by making giants out of gargoyles, it was well-known. A splatter of laughter spread across the captains, commanding Razin’s immediate attention. It was not directed at him or the yellow-bellied naysayer, he saw, but at the Black Queen’s foolishness. She’d called a halt and now her warriors were spreading out in a circle around her, taking up defensive positions.

“Mad indeed,” one of the captains mocked. “Shall we order a charge, Honoured Son?”

Razin’s eyes narrowed at the sight of her. The cloak was well-known, but never before had he heard of the Queen of Callow wielding a crooked black staff. Especially not one so... unsettling to look at. Perhaps she did have a trick left to pull.

“Battle lines,” Razin Tanja ordered instead. “Our force will take the centre. Send word to the captains behind us that they are to split and flank the Black Queen’s warriors.”

He glanced into the distance, where the thousand cavalry he’d sent out at dawn was slowly making its way. Yes, this would do. No matter the dark magic, near seven thousand footsoldiers of Levant followed by a cavalry charge at the back would be enough to end this. Razin would not lead from the front, just in case, and allow one of these eager captains the honour instead. It mattered not who slew the goblins and devils, so long as the heir to Malaga was part of the warriors who slew the villain queen. The soldiers spread out as ordered, battle-prayers on their lips, and the assault promptly began. Razin remained with the second wave of the centre, listening to the hurried march of the rest of the troops behind him. Stride after stride the warriors closed the distance, and he watched victory in the making with bright eyes. The grey-skinned devils tightened their lines in front of the villain, the bloody goblins taking cover behind them, but it was the Black Queen he was staring at. Loose hair unbound and toyed with by the wind, she was staring at his soldiers and leaning against her long staff. Eventually she looked up, and Razin followed her gaze. There were shadows in the sky, two of them. Crows , he realized with a start. Corpses would draw carrion, but these were no such birds and flew with graceful purpose. They dove, and like twin blot of night landed on the Black Queen’s shoulders.

There was something surreal about the sight, he thought. The smiling, slim woman whose hair cascaded behind her, the cloak of story around her. Those ink-black and terrible crows on her shoulders, feathered out of shadows. Razin watched the crooked staff rise, then fall with a thunderous crash. Shadows whispered across the snow, until the sound of cracks scuttling across a river drowned out even that.

Razin Tanja of the Binder’s Blood had just sent the better part of two thousand men to drown, and in that stroke he had lost the Battle of Sarcella.

Chapter 13: Following

“It is fortunate that virtue is its own reward, as it does not tend to accrue others.”
– Theodore Langman, Wizard of the West

The world had become as an oil painting and the Night was boiling in my veins.

Goddesses on dark wings claimed my shoulders, insolent shards of darkness refusing the ascendancy of the afternoon sun, and they said nothing. They didn’t need to. The expectation bloomed in the back of my mind like a swelling river: I’d offered them faith before they ever named me priestess, but now they required that purpose of me. Night still ran deep in the veins of the drow, however changed its nature, but none of their ancient favourites had been granted my office. First Under the Night , I thought. To others it might speak of supremacy, some perilous boast of standing closer to these quarrelsome goddesses than any other, but I knew better. I was first in that I was charged with the treading of unbroken grounds, as much a scream ringing into a dark tunnel as a priestess bearing their mandate. I was to stumble for them, make the mistakes and pay the costs so that my successors would not. These were still fair terms, by my reckoning. Alliance and the means to carry out my designs, for what I had freely given before they formally claimed it. But if they expected reverence of me, respect more than had been earned, then they would be disappointed.

“I never took well to prayer,” I murmured. “Either the secret whispers for help or the worn-down words they taught us to recite in the House. So I won’t offer you that.”

The sun above was searing, blinding. Fire from above none of us were meant to look in the eye. I breathed out and let the wind thread its fingers through my hair. The power came easy to me. It was holding it that was the trouble, for it was as temperamental as its mistresses: I’d ruled Winter, by the scavenger’s virtue of being last to hold sway over it, but the Night was not my domain. If I wanted the crows to smile upon me, I would have to swing them as sweet a song as I had it in me to sing.

“But that’s not what we’re about, is it?” I said. “The three of us. If you wanted someone who’d know your pretty rituals, you had thousands to raise. If you wanted devotion, or unquestioning faith, there just as plenty. You went through my mind mercilessly, that night, so you know exactly what you picked.”

My eyes left the sky and fell to the charging Levantines. Thousands in mail and leather and scales, steel blades and hide shields. Their faces painted with vivid strokes of colour, as true a language as the spoken tongues of their faraway land. They were close now, treading river grounds. I had chosen the broadest bent of the water for this, instead of where my armies had once tried to shatter winter’s work with the cleverness of the Grey Eyries. I raised my staff and let the darkness pulse with me.

“Here’s my prayer, Goddesses of Night,” I savagely smiled. “The three of us, together – let’s break something .”

Komena’s raucous, delighted laughter sounded in my ears even as the bottom of my staff struck the snow-covered ice. The oldest sister might see further, weave and scheme with cold judgement, but the younger one was my kindred in some ways. Even the span of millennia had not entirely faded the remembrance of what it felt like, shattering arrogance and host with the same single stroke. The soldier-goddess leaned into my intent more strongly than her sister, harsh and domineering where Andronike was skillful and subtle. The Night spread with a whisper before sinking its claws in the iced river, rending it mercilessly. Cracks tore open the frozen grounds, cold water sloshed out and hundreds of screams filled the air. Komena roughly withdrew her will from mine, leaving me gasping and leaning on my staff for reasons deeper than a bad leg. My sight swam, the glare of the sun failing to pierce through, and I had just enough presence left to hear Robber hesitantly stepping towards me. I warded him off with a raised hand. Gods, I thought. I felt like throwing up, like my veins were about to boil and melt. I’d never wielded a miracle this large during the light of day, and I wouldn’t do it again anytime soon if I had my way.

“Boss?” Robber called out.

“Took a bit out of me, that’s all,” I croaked out.

Too many breaths passed before I was myself again, but with eyes no longer rebelling I steadied my back spat to the side. The river had become a deep grave, I saw. There were chunks of ice floating in the water, but among them bodies were strewn. Fewer than had died, though that was no mystery: those with weightier armour had sunk straight to the bottom. The floaters had been savaged by broken ice. Some Levantines were still swimming and screaming, but I had little worry of survival. Taking a swim this deep into winter was as sure as death sentence as a swinging sword, unless some priest intervened. My last memories of the charge were vague, almost dreamlike – there were consequences, to calling upon that much Night and the aid of a goddess – but now I could more accurately assess numbers. Around two thousand had sallied out towards my little company, and less than half that died. Their mistake had been going into battle order, I mused. That’d broadened their line, turning the loss of a few hundred into something closer to a thousand. There were still a mass of soldiers mobilizing behind the survivors of the ill-fated assault, almost the full Levantine reserve, but I had no fear of that. They were on the wrong side of the river, after all.

The cavalry in the distance that had been heading for us earlier has slowed, and there seemed to be argument between its officers. They were on our bank, sure, but then they’d just watched me turn around a mile of ice into a deathtrap. And there’d be no reinforcements, if they tried their luck. I suspected they would be disinclined to find out if I had anymore tricks up my sleeves, which was for the best. I might actually fall unconscious, if I attempted to use the Night again, and not necessarily after I’d let loose a miracle. I wouldn’t risk it, not when anything capable of hurting the horsemen would be just as capable of ravaging my own soldiers if lashing out uncontrollably.

“That one wants your head on a pike,” Robber said, calling my attention back to the footsoldiers.

Or close enough. On the other bank, a rider stood surrounded by panicking captains. A young man, in beautiful plate that must have cost a fortune. He couldn’t even be twenty, I thought, though the ferocious-looking facepaint of iron grey and crimson made it hard to determine. He was looking at me with hatred and fear. The enemy’s commander?

“Might be able to end him with a volley,” my Special Tribune offered. “Best not to let snakes grow longer fangs.”

“So young,” I quietly said.

“You were younger, when you took your first command,” Robber shrugged.

Seventeen, and so sure I was ready to mend my little corner of the world. Gods, how lucky had I been to have the likes of Juniper and Hakram at my side? All of Rat Company, really, and those others handpicked by then then-legate Hellhound as well. But it wasn’t luck at all, was it? I suddenly thought. Heroes might have providence to furnish them with the tools of victory, but I’d had something of my own just as valuable. A patient man with green eyes, lending his weight where mine did not suffice and pulling a thousand strings to ease my way forward – so many of them I could not believe I’d found half, even after all these years.

“We learned our lessons quick,” I said. “We had to.”

Not always the right ones, I knew, but we had learned. We still did. The moment you stopped, Creation buried you.

“He’ll remember today, Boss,” Robber said. “You can count on that. And next time he comes swinging, he’ll be wiser about it.”

The warning was clear. It ran against goblin nature, to let a threat escape. And there’d been promise in this one, if he’d really been in command. Going for the general staff was a tactic that would have worked against almost any army on Calernia. He’d run into Grem One-Eye and Black’s reforms instead, the forced redundancies shaped by the knowledge that you couldn’t count on high command surviving a battle if heroes were on the loose, but the Dominion had never fought the modern Legions of Terror so the mistake was understandable. Pressing the offensive, as he’d obviously meant to, had not been unsound either. It would have been costly, but if General Abigail’s defences broken on even one front her army would have collapsed in short order. If he’d been slightly luckier, if I’d arrived a day later, he might very well have broken the Third Army completely. If you’d had maybe another ten years of seasoning , I thought. If you’d been trained better, learned to temper the bold with some patience... He could be a general of some talent, one day. No Juniper, mind you, but thankfully there were very few generals of that skill around. And if I gave him those ten years, one day the hate I saw might be turned on me with a wiser hand to wield it.

“Let him go,” I said.

Yellow eyes considered me carefully.

“This isn’t a victory, Robber,” I sighed, gesturing at the river full of dead. “It’s a waste.”

“Not like you to weep for the enemy,” the goblin said.

“Weep?” I mused. “No, hardly that. But every corpse we make today is a gap in the ranks when we turn to the Dead King.”

I sighed, then glanced aside. In the distance, I saw the cavalry had decided to ride around the river and return to the camp. Good.

“Come on,” I said. “Time to head back. General Abigail should be wrapping up inside the city.”

I began limping back to Sarcella, leaving ice and death behind. The hateful stare of the boy I’d spared followed my back, but what of it?

He wouldn’t be the first, or the last.

—

With the enemy riders away, there was no need to risk anything as foolish as trying the blaze a second time. Most the turtles were wrecked beyond use, anyway, and while Belles Portes had been under assault when we moved out I judged my forces too weak for a strike at the back of the Levantines still holding it. We took the long way around, the threat of the horsemen having removed itself, and long was no exaggeration. Though my drow tread snow like stone and goblins could scuttle through anything, I was exhausted beyond words and very much limping. It turned out that victory outpaced us: when we reached the eastern side of Sarcella, we were greeted by rowdy cheers. Word of the river’s break had spread faster than I could walk, and more besides. The cohort positioned to hold the eastern streets crowded us to deliver accolades, or at least tried to – I sent Robber ahead to have a quiet word with the captain about not approaching the drow. They looked a little stunned by the welcome, nonetheless, almost like children seeing the sea for the first time. The Everdark did not breed the kind of comradeship that the Legions and my armies used as mortar. Mighty Jindrich was strutting like a peacock and its sigil followed suit, which amused my legionaries to no end.

I left them to it, and took aside the orc captain in command of the cohort. The news were better than I had expected. General Abigail, it seemed, had vigorously prosecuted her offensive and then taken a gamble as well. She’d recalled the two thousand drow I’d left holding the north of the city and sent them to climb the ring of statues and arches around the city, to suddenly drop down at the back of the Levantines in Belles Portes. That’d neatly cut off both the bridges that still allowed a trickle of Dominion reinforcements to come through and the last way out of the force inside Sarcella. The enemy commander, facing annihilation, had been forced to surrender. I suspected the casualty rate for the drow who’d taken the climb and been forced to fight Levantines on both sides was a lot less sunny than the official version implied, but regardless I did not disapprove. Simply by ending the fighting early, General Abigail had likely significantly lowered overall casualties. The wary-eyed Callowan I’d promoted to the head of the Third Army had accepted the surrender as soon as it was offered, and Sarcella was now entirely ours. For now, anyway. There were still Dominion soldiers beyond the bridges, and the losses we’d taken during the offensive must not have been mild.

But it was only a few hours until sundown, now, so I had no fear of what was ahead.

After we advanced deeper into the city I sent Mighty Jindrich and its warriors back to the rest of the drow with a message to General Rumena, ordering it to pull back to the now-unguarded north of the city and away from the rest of the Third Army. It’d cover our bases, just in case, but that was only a side benefit. The longer my army and the Firstborn remained in close quarters, the higher the chances of blood being spilled rose – especially if I wasn’t there to supervise. The survivors of Robber’s cohort I relieved with my compliments, free to sleep or whatever no-doubt-against-regulations activity they got up to when they weren’t on duty. Robber himself wanted to stay at my side, but I had something else in mind and so refused.

“You keeping me away from the Dominion prisoners, Boss?” he pouted.

It was even odds, I mused whether or not he knew that make him look like a particularly horrid gargoyle. The amusement the sight caused was slight, though, and did not linger long. It wasn’t amusing at all, what I needed of him.

“No,” I softly said. “I need you to find out what happened to Nauk’s body. If they’ve burned it yet, if they had time for a Legion burial.”

The pout vanished, leaving behind a grim visage of wrinkled green skin. They’d had a complicated relationship, those two: adversarial and often petty, tainted by their largely one-sided competition for Pickler’s attentions, but there’d also been more to it than that. It’s been a comfortable kind of dislike, the kind so old and well-worn it had some kinship to friendship. And beyond that, Nauk had been Rat Company. He’d been with us from the start, the War College and those heady first days of the Fifteenth. That mattered, to those who’d been there. There weren’t as many of us left as I’d like.

“I’ll see to it,” Robber said, and for once his voice was completely serious.

“Please,” I said. “If the body’s still there...”

“I’ll arrange something, and send for you,” the goblin said.

It wasn’t a sweet parting, but this wasn’t sweet business. I ran into officers sent by General Abigail on my way to the Third Army’s headquarters, and learned the surrendered Levantine captains were being kept in the repurpose goal of Sarcella closer to the north, under heavy guard. The Dominion soldiers themselves had been disarmed, and while under watch had been provided healing by priests of the House Insurgent. I made my way to the headquarters as quick as I could, my leg was aching like someone had shoved an iron spike through. It was an effort not to visibly tremble from exhaustion, now that the miracle’s wake had fully settled over my shoulders, but I couldn’t show weakness in front of my soldiers. At least my shoulders were bare, now. The crows had left when I began the trek back to Sarcella earlier, presumably to look for fresh amusements. In this city full of corpses and ash I had no doubt they’d find something to their tastes. The merchant’s mansion that served as the location of the Third Army’s high command was a great deal fuller than the last time I’d swung by. It was surrounded by legionaries, and even inside soldiers were aplenty. The mood was celebratory, but while I offered smiles I did not linger. I was too tired to keep up the pretence of haleness for long, and I still had duties to discharge.

I made my way up to the war council room, finding what remained of Nauk’s general staff there and surrounding his successor. The general was the first to notice my arrival, rising up her seat looking like she would very much love to be halfway through a good night’s sleep right now. I could sympathize.

“Your Majesty,” she greeted me.

Huh, she’d done the salute perfectly even this exhausted. Whoever had drilled her at the recruitment camp must have left quite the impression.

“General,” I replied. “And all of you – you should be proud of what you’ve accomplished today. You went above and beyond my expectations.”

I was unsurprised to notice it was the orcs who were most pleased by that, demurely flashing fangs in a signal of humility.

“There will be another war council later, but for now I’ll need the room,” I calmly said. “I must speak with your general.”

Being sent out didn’t seem to dent their good mood all that much, and I smiled to take the sting out anyway. It wasn’t long before we had the room to ourselves, though I waited until footsteps could no longer be heard. General Abigail, I noted, seemed to be willing to look anywhere in the room except at me. I wondered whether she was always jumpy as a cat, or whether it was the result of days of march under harassment followed by battles and a spectacular assassination of her direct colleagues. She was a cagey one, this Abigail of Summerholm. Her eyes never quite stopped moving, as if always looking for a threat, and I’d yet to see her let her guard down entirely once even this far behind our defence lines. I would have thought her generally inclined to prudence, but the way she’d used the drow in the battle ran against that impression.

I’d been solid thinking, if risky, and raised my opinion of her as a tactician. It would have been safer to stick to a steady push, but overall casualties would have been higher by the time the dust settled. Add that to the clever trick she’d pulled using civilians to guard the back of Sarcella, and I had to admit she was one of the more promising commanders who’d risen over the last few years. Not yet enough to remain a general, maybe, but she had the potential to get there after a bit of blooding. Which Juniper had assigned her under Nauk to get, I remembered with a touch of rue. It seemed the Hellhound and I were sharing an opinion without needing to share a room. I dragged myself to one of the seats at the table and plopped myself down, brutally suppressing a sigh, and invited her to do the same. She did after the barest of hesitations.

“You did well today,” I said. “The river trick would have meant nothing if you hadn’t pushed them out beforehand.”

The black-haired woman forced a smile and a nod while muttering her thanks. I didn’t begrudge her that in the slightest. She’d sent quite a few of her soldiers to die, today, legionaries and officers she likely knew quite well. It never quite felt like a victory, when the butcher’s bill came in, did it?

“You’ll be remaining in command of the Third Army until we join up with the other columns,” I told her. “Possibly until we make contact with Marshal Juniper, if there’s no suitable replacement for you.”

She winced.

“Ma’am, I’m not sure that’s a wise decision,” Abigail said. “I went up the ranks fast, and I didn’t go through the War College. All I got was the officer training in the camps, and it didn’t cover a general’s duties.”

My lips quirked.

“If a few years at the College were enough to make a general, my life would be much easier,” I said. “I’ll be handling the drow, and a few other forms of trouble as well. I can’t run the Third Army as well. You’ve acquitted yourself well, and you have the instincts for it. It’ll have to do.”

Her face fell, and once more I was struck with how young she was. I wasn’t all that older, truth be told, but it’d been a long time since I’d felt my true age. Gods, were we ever really that young? We must have been, when we fought in the Liesse Rebellion. I wondered if we’d looked as fragile to old generals like Istrid and Sacker back then as Abigail now looked to me.

“A lot of people could die, if I make a mistake,” she muttered. “That would be on my head.”

Doubt , I thought. She wasn’t so difficult to read that I could not pick up on it. And resentment at being thrust into this role . Both things could turn out dangerous, if allowed to fester. A lighter touch would be needed here, or maybe a personal one. There were times when twisting the arm was in order, but not here. An entirely unwilling general was of no use to me, and likely a liability to the soldiers she’d be commanding. Doubt and resentment, huh. I was no stranger to either, and in my experience they tended to have a common source in fear. We’d begin there. Propping up my staff against the table, I leaned back into my seat.

“In my first serious fight, I was beaten within an inch of my life by a procession of strangers and afterwards eviscerated by the Lone Swordsman,” I told her quietly. “I still have the scar from where he opened me up. I was close enough to death I managed to use necromancy to get myself moving.”

The other woman’s eyes widened, with both surprise and disgust. The latter was at necromancy – most of my countrymen still considered the practice disgusting and dangerous – but the former was not. It wasn’t common knowledge, how badly William had trounced me during the first part of our encounter. I watched curiosity seep in after the words sunk in, so I pressed on while the iron was hot.

“I ended up kicking him off the ramparts and into the Hwaerte, after catching him by surprise,” I said, “but it was a very, very close thing. There are some who’d call it fate, the way it all turned out. I tend to think of it as luck.”

“You were Named, even then,” General Abigail said.

Like that said it all, explained everything. I supposed it might, to someone who’d never slipped into a Role. It was a lot more eye-catching the way some of us scythed through soldiers like wheat stalks than the way a single story misstep might kill you in truth an entire year before the blade actually opened your throat.

“I was green,” I corrected. “Scrappy, good at some parts of what I did, but dangerously arrogant in my approach and I nearly died choking on a floor for it. But it did teach me a valuable lesson.”

I smiled mirthlessly.

“You’ll get eviscerated too, Abigail,” I said, and she didn’t quite manage to hide her flinch. “Not literally as I was, but one day you’ll make a mistake and it’ll be costly. You can’t avoid that day, no one can. And it’s good that you’re afraid of it.”

I met her eyes, brown to blue.

“Take that fear and use it,” I said. “To make yourself think . About how it could go wrong, what you could do to avoid it or survive it. And from there you plan so that you don’t end up in that pit in the first place. You do that well enough, and you’ll push back the day some.”

I paused, just a heartbeat.

“It’ll still come,” I frankly said. “It comes for everyone, Abigail. But if you can ward it off for a year or two, you’ll still have done better than half the generals on Calernia.”

A grimace split the other woman’s face.

“I could have been a tanner,” General Abigail mournfully said. “No one ever expects anything from those.”

“I served drinks in a tavern for years,” I told her, reluctantly amused. “And I ended up with a crown on my head. You’re getting off light.”

She paled, which made her sun-tanned cheeks look rather blotchy, but gathered herself with remarkable alacrity.

“I don’t suppose I am dismissed for rest, now,” she cautiously ventured.

I snorted.

“There’s no rest for the wicked, General Abigail,” I said. “Find us a bottle of wine and come back. We’ll be going over the orders you’ve given since you took command of the Third Army, and why you gave them.”

The black-haired woman let out a sound that might have been a whimper. I raised an eyebrow and she rose to find us something to drink, while I let out a sigh at the relief that was no longer standing on my bad leg.

Much like her I’d rather be sleeping, but if she was to be the first Callowan general in my army then she needed to be taught .

Chapter 14: Expedience

“The art of negotiation is, in essence, convincing the other side of the table that you are very reluctant to part with the house full of rats while they are in dire need of it.”
– Prince Louis of Brabant, later eighth First Prince of Procer

I woke up an hour before nightfall.

It was one of the more useful oddities caused by my association with the Sisters, that I could in some eldritch way feel the approach of dawn and dusk. I still had the taste of a passable Harrow red in my mouth from the talks I’d had with Abigail, the same sort of patient decision dissection I’d learned from Black and the War College. She seems willing to learn, at least , I thought as I groaned and forced myself to keep my eyes open. Exhaustion was lingering alongside the wine, and the handful of hours of sleep I’d squeezed in were nowhere enough to get me back on my feet. I drew on the Night a lick, not to wield it but to let the sensation of holding it pass through my frame. Like sticking your hand in a bucket of cool water, it woke me right up. I could probably rustle up some minor miracles now, I decided. It no longer felt like I’d melt myself from the inside if I did. That was instinct talking, but like it or not I’d had more experience drawing on eldritch powers than most people ever cared to go through. My instinct were rather well-informed, when it came to things like this. Getting my bad leg over the edge of the legion cot I’d claimed, I allowed myself the luxury of grimacing at the sensation. No one to put up a front for, right now.

I’d kept a shirt on in deference to the weather, but my fingers found themselves sliding under to find an old friend. The scar the Penitent’s Blade had left still naked across my torso, nowadays more pale than pink but never to disappear. A testament to the costs of what had seemed like a victory, that night in Summerholm. The Lone Swordsman spared and branded with purpose, loosed like an arrow to start the rebellion that would see me rise up the ranks. A necessary evil, I’d told myself. What was one more wound on Callow, when it was already bleeding from imperial rule? When that wound would lead to a mending. I could only be grimly amused at how disgusted I’d felt by Black ordering three death row prisoners slain so blood magic could be worked to save my life. In a sense, I’d done the same thing on a much grander scale before he ever gave the order. I withdrew my fingers and tugged down my shirt. It was done, and there was no unmaking it. I was strangely glad for Sve Noc’s returning of the scar when they struck me back down to mortal coil. What was I, really, without the reminders on my skin of what my choices had wrought?

I got up with a hiss of pain and hobbled to a chair to have something to lean against when putting my trousers back on. It made me miss Indrani, in a strange way, and Hakram as well. It was different with my lover when she helped me with my clothes, sensual in a way that would be blasphemous to associate with Adjutant, but I wasn’t sure I could honestly say there wasn’t more intimacy in having Adjutant help me with my armour than in the woman I shared a bed with buttoning up my trousers. The business of dressing myself was finished with only minimal pain, and I grabbed the Mantle of Woe on the way out. It settled on my shoulders comfortably, the worn dark cloth warm against my back even as the outside boasted a riotous mix of colours all speaking of a foe beaten. There was a metaphor in there, I idly thought. Black’s sombre gift whole but only out of sight, the visible sown over by all the fields I’d bared my blade on. Amusing as the thought was, I set it aside. Staff in hand, cloak streaming behind me, I got back to work.

The abandoned mansion I’d claimed as my resting place was swarming with drow and legionaries eyeing each other with wariness. I caught sight of a black eye on a young Callowan boy and a carefully cradled wrist for a Miklaya Sigil warrior, which prompted a sigh. The drow had never been taught to play nice with others, and my own people could be... touchy. At least whoever’d drawn up the roster had been farsighted enough not to assign greenskins. Goblins would carry the grudge until it could be answered for more safely, but it someone socked an orc in the face there was going to be blood on the floor before all was said and done. There was a tribune in command and I wasted no time in getting news from her. The city was still quiet and the Dominion hadn’t tried an offensive since their last beating. An envoy from the Levantine camp had been sent, but they were being made to wait. General Abigail was ‘planning the coming march’, which no doubt meant she was sleeping like a log. Special Tribune Robber had come for me, but declined to wake me up when he learned I was out of it. The last I took most notice of, and asked the tribune to send someone to fetch him.

“Will you be here, ma’am?” the Soninke officer politely asked. “Or should I message for him to be sent elsewhere?’

“The Dominion captains are being held separately from their warriors, right?” I frowned.

“As per Leg – as per the Army of Callow’s protocol, Your Majesty,” she hastily adjusted.

The tribune looked afraid she’d offended by her lapse. Early thirties, at a glance, so odds weren’t bad she’d been one of Istrid’s or Orim’s before Second Liesse. Fresh to my service, after decades in the Legions.

“Calm down, Tribune,” I reassured. “I know well how much we’ve borrowed from the Legions. The Army of Callow as it now stands could not exist without them and all they taught us.”

That took the edge off the fear, and she nodded in nervous agreement. I hummed, considering my options.

“I’ll be headed to speak with our Levantine prisoners,” I said. “I’ll need a guide. Have it passed to Robber he should join me there.”

It was done with brisk efficiency, and I was provided an escort of legionaries to head out. The drow would have done the same, but a few words in Crepuscular had them headed back to General Rumena instead. I wasn’t having the wander around a crowded city full of humans if I could help it. As it turned out the captains of Levant were being held in Sarcella’s own gaol, a nice little touch of irony. The tribune in charge of the legionaries keeping an eye on our guests was well-informed of them, and told me what I’d wanted to know: we had , in fact, captured the captain commanding their holding action in Belles Portes earlier. She’d taken a sword the shoulder while fighting, but accepted healing by the priests of the House Insurgent and was now merely tired. It would do: after all, so was I. A cell better fit for holding thieves than what had to be one of the highest officers in the enemy vanguard awaited me, cramped and bare save for a rough bench and a chamber pot. Some kind soul have found her a blanket, which seemed for the best considering that she was apparently quite old. Built like an orc and obviously in fighting fit, true, but there was only white left to her hair. One of the legionaries at my side unlocked the cell while the other brought out a folding chair for me to sit on. I sure as Hells wasn’t standing any more today unless I had to. The Levantine rose to her feet before the door was even open, and I greeted her with a sharp nod.

“Captain Elvera, I believe,” I spoke in Chantant.

Her face tightened. I thanked the orc who’d brought in my chair and eased myself into it before dismissing my pair of escorts. The door remained open, and the Levantine’s blue eyes studied the sight before warily returning to me.

“Yes,” she replied. “You are the Black Queen.”

He accent was thick enough the words were near unintelligible, and she spoke very slowly. My officers had already established she spoke no Lower Miezan, though, so it was about as clearly as this conversation could be held.

“I am,” I agreed. “I am here to discuss the logistics of your surrender.”

Her brow creased, and I repeated more slowly after changing ‘logistics’ for ‘details’. She nodded.

“Your general promised no killing of prisoners,” Captain Elvera said. “Or torture.”

“I will hold to that,” I said.

The issue here was that, according to Abigail, we had the better part of three thousand Dominion warriors on our hands. Stripping them of armaments and dispersing them in Sarcella meant they were unlikely to be an immediate problem, but that changed nothing about the long-term noose around our neck they’d be. The Third Army was decently supplied still, but dragging that many prisoners around would eat into the reserves at a harsh rate. And while the southern expedition still had piles of dwarf-provided rations as well as what had been brought from the Everdark, the Herald of the Deeps had made it clear the Kingdom Under would only supply the drow exodus headed towards the Dead King. Any force sent south was on its own. Add on top of it all that the drow had no facilities to hold prisoners, that the Third Army had been bloodied raw by fighting and that we need to move quickly before this turned sour on us? We couldn’t keep the Levantines, it was as simple as that. Even if my general hadn’t offered them their lives with the terms I would not have countenanced a massacre of prisoners of war, but neither could I just let them loose with a slap on the wrist.

“I cannot simply release you to fight me in a few weeks,” I bluntly said.

“Captains will have ransom,” Captain Elvera said. “If I am sent out to camp, I will gather coin to buy freedom of as many soldiers as I can. Then return as prisoner. I will give oath.”

Even if coin was enough to move me, I could not trust you to deliver it. Your own priesthood had me declared Arch-heretic of the East , I thought . You have a holy justification to consider all oaths made to me as null and void. I had not been well-inclined towards the Lantern because of that, even before some of their own had killed Nauk. I breathed out slowly. I would not stoke the embers of anger I felt at that. He’d been a general, and this was war. I had struck similar enough blows in the past, and would perhaps do it again. But this is the wrong war, not the one we should be fighting, and for that stupidity you killed my friend. What was left of him, anyway. I forcefully pushed the thought aside. I would not add waste to waste, simply to even scales that could not be evened by blood.

“Coin is not what I want,” I said. “You have offered me an oath, Captain Elvera. There are some of your people who would say those mean nothing, when offered to me.”

The old woman’s face darkened.

“I am not Blood,” she stiffly said. “But not a dog. Even oath to devil should be kept. I have honour, even if Hells do not.”

I studied her closely as she spoke. The indignation was genuine enough, I decided. And those of the Dominion did have a reputation for being straightforward, as concerned with honour and reputation as the Arlesite princes they so often squabbled with. But the reputation ascribed to a people living so far away from mine meant very little, in the end. It was like calling all orcs bloodthirsty savages, or all Callowans obsessed with grudges. Having a warrior’s build and displaying valour on the field did not necessarily mean she was not deceitful.

“And you have the authority to speak for all the prisoners currently in my hands?” I pressed.

She nodded after taking some time to parse out my words. I’d spoken a little too fast.

“Then we can bargain for release,” I said. “I want an oath from you.”

Her wizened face hardened.

“I will not fight against Levant,” Captain Elvera said. “Better death.”

I shook my head, almost amused. I supposed I did have a reputation for making old enemies fight my fresher ones.

“None of the prisoners are to make war against me or my allies for three months,” I said. “I want your oath on this.”

The old woman looked wary.

“That is all?” she asked. “No ransom?”

From you, yes , I thought. But I’ve every intent of selling your freedom twice. I have an envoy from the camp waiting, and concessions you cannot give me. I refrained from smiling, well aware that a villain offering lenient terms with one of those would in all likelihood be taken as a trap.

“That is all,” I said.

I’d considered keeping their arms and armour, but what point was there? It would slow us down on the march, and in six months it would be a lot more useful in their hands than filling my army’s supply carts. Captain Elvera watched me in silence for a long time.

“Why?” she finally asked.

“You are under the command of the Lord of Malaga,” I said.

She made a disgruntled noise.

“I serve Tartessos,” the old woman said. “Lady Aquiline fights with him.”

Akua had been right in her assessment, I mused. The Dominion’s armies were not without internal squabbles. That’s what happens when nobles command instead of officers with a clear chain of command.

“Then take this message back to her, and to him,” I said, and my eyes hardened. “There is only one war that matters, and it is being fought up north. Not here. I come with an offer of peace for the Grand Alliance.”

I paused, waiting to make sure she’d understood me well. She nodded, eyes hooded.

“If you refuse that peace, I will have to fight you,” I said. “And I will not have the luxury to be nice about it, because we are running out of time.”

I coldly smiled.

“So take my peace,” I said. “Or we’ll have to do this the hard way.”

Silence filled the cell.

“Threat,” Captain Elvera said.

“Promise,” I corrected.

Leaning on my staff, I rose to my feet.

“You have my terms,” I said. “I will leave you to consider them. Tell the guards when you make your decision.”

The old woman hesitated.

“Agreed,” she said. “I will give oath, and message.”

I left Sarcella’s gaol not long after, with the first of the two oaths I wanted, and Captain Elvera’s cell was locked anew.

—

Robber was waiting for me outside, lounging atop a wrecked street stall and looking oddly vulnerable without his armour. The shadows were lengthening outside, like they were slowly devouring the world, and in the back of my mind I knew we were not long before twilight began in earnest. I limped through the snow, my earlier escort of legionaries resuming their duties before I gestured for them to stay back for this. The goblin nimbly leapt down and I caught sight of a few glints of steel scattered over his body. Hidden knives, I thought, or other murderous accoutrements. He didn’t salute, and his yellow eyes were without the usual malicious glee.

“And?” I asked.

“He wasn’t burned,” Robber replied. “His corpse... It’s bad, Catherine. They melted his plate with Light. It’s cooled down since, but you’d need to butcher the flesh to get him out. If we’re giving him a Legion funeral, we’ll need more than just the usual pyre.”

My fingers clenched around my staff. Molten steel, Gods. What an agonizing death that must have been. Summer’s flames had changed him, and Warlock’s sorcery failed to bring back the orc I’d known, but he’d still felt pain. And there’d been enough of the Nauk who’d been my friend left that I felt a clench of rage. The Lanterns had done this. Killing, killing I could stomach. Had to. It was war, and if I ordered deaths I must be able to withstand them as well. But this was... He’d deserved better than that. I closed my eyes, and thought of the night after Three Hills. Green flames taking Nilin, who had been a traitor but beloved by many of us even after that. And now his closest friend was following him. I’d never told Nauk, that his second and good-as-brother had been passing information to Akua. I’d made the decision he was better off not knowing. How presumptuous that felt, now that he was dead.

“The part of the city that’s on fire, it’s almost out?” I said, eyes still closed.

“Near enough,” Robber said. “Took all of the quarter they call Lanteria and some of the outskirts, but the firebreaks contained it and it’s dying out.”

I let out a misty breath and opened my eyes. The shadows had grown longer still.

“Speak with General Abigail,” I said. “We’ll be holding a Legion funeral for all our losses in Sarcella tonight. Work out watch rosters so that as many people as possible can attend. I’ll speak to the drow myself.”

Yellow eyes considered me, though the question went unasked.

“What else can we still give him?” I whispered. “Or any of them. It’s a fool war, but they died fighting it. They’ll have a pyre and the only kind of farewell we learned.”

He inclined his head in approval, then hesitated.

“He went out hard, you know,” Robber said. “Fangs red.”

I breathed out shakily.

“He was Rat Company,” I replied. “How else could he have gone?”

We parted ways, knowing we’d next meet to burn a friend. My legionaries followed me into the city in silence. In the end, all my grief could be was screaming in the dark: a harsh cry, followed by silence ringing of absence.

I had tricks to ply, and duty did not make exceptions for funerals.

—

We’d won the day, or close enough, and that meant I could dictate terms.

To an extent, anyway. Asking for more than I was costing them might see the Levantines write-off their own with cold eyes. They wouldn’t know how badly I didn’t want to be keeping prisoners, so it would at least look like I was the one with the good cards in hand. Much as I’d prefer not to be fighting the Levantines at all, I wouldn’t delude myself into thinking they in any way shared that sentiment. The enemy commander would be out to screw me as badly as he could, while clawing his way back into possession of the troops I’d captured. I could play that game, truly, and win it a lot easier than he could. A word on my part would have the Tomb-Maker leading a party of Mighty to assault the Dominion camp after night fell, and unless the Pilgrim was hiding in a tent in there that would lead to a bloody massacre. But I would not compound waste with yet more of it, not even if my enemy was itching for that very tussle. No, neither corpses nor coin could be my aim here. There was going to be a battle in Iserre, soon enough, and I needed to get all my munitions in place before someone dropped a torch: this would be a part of it, nothing more and nothing less.

The Levantine envoy was a middle-aged man with a fine mustache and stripes of blue and green crisscrossing his face, speaking Lower Miezan with an elegant polish. He got to use it just long enough for me to send him back to camp with an offer for the enemy commander to meet on the bridges in front of Sarcella. He left under protest, which I ignored with the ease of someone who’d been pushing paperwork on Hakram for years, and I gauged how long was reasonable to wait before getting atop Zombie and making for the bridges. The boy would come, if it was still the one I’d seen during the day that was in charge. No one with eyes that raw would pass on an opportunity to confront someone who’d bled them. My escort was tripled in size when I informed the Third Army of what I intended, but I paid it little attention. Belles Portes quarter was entirely ours, now, and it led directly to the bridges going over the river. I’d not specified which one, so on a whim I picked the leftmost one – and ordered my legionaries to remain behind. I wondered what it said about my reputation that none of the officers looked pleased, but none actually argued.

My dead horse’s hooves cut against the icy stone, sharp sounds like flint being struck. The day’s warmth was fleeing the coming of night, and the wind was picking up. Far in the distance the sun was drowning in a sea of purple and red, tinting the snowy fields with enough blood and ichor for a thousand wars. My mount eased advancing, halfway through the bridge, and my staff struck stone with a dull sound. I could hear crows, in the distance, though there was nothing godly about those. Just beasts, drawn by the day’s corpses. I stuffed my pipe carefully, and passed a palm over the wakeleaf with just a hint of Night. Inhale and exhale, and then I watched smoke rise up into the sky as I waited for the boy who wanted my head to come treat with me.

It was not long. Riders came, five hundred armed to the teeth and a few among them who reeked of something anathema to the Night. Lanterns, I assumed. Those I allowed my gaze to linger on, taking in the faces painted in black and white and wondering which one had killed Nauk. If it had been only one, or a working of several. Argument erupted, but in the end youth and pride won out. Razin Tanja, of the Grim Binder’s Blood. That was the name our prisoners had given. Soldiers were soldiers, in the end: offer warm food and booze, and there was always one in a company willing to sell out their own mother. The boy rode up, on his beautiful white horse wearing his beautiful red and grey plate. The patterns of paint on his face had changed from earlier, now mere stripes of iron and blood on the cheeks. It revealed handsome enough features, sharp-boned but bearing the kind of edge you wanted to run a hand against. What little I could see of his hair was a dark brown, but most was hidden by a tall helmet bearing red feathers. The sword at his hip, I could not help but note, had a very pretty wrought steel pattern to it. Swirls and vines, in a vaguely arcane pattern. No leather bands over it, though. It would get slippery if he got blood all over it, become an unwieldy ornament – and wasn’t that nobility put in a sentence? He reined in his horse at the foot of the bridge, just close enough we could talk without shouting. There was a banner in the colours of his paint, held by a clever wooden contraption on his back, that jutted up above even his plumage.

“You begged audience of me, Black Queen,” Razin Tanja announced. “Speak your piece.”

I pulled at my pipe and said nothing, only breathing out. The smoke went up and I admired the play of light and shadows on it.

“Is this a riddle?” the boy said through gritted teeth. “Are you making a game of me?’

The anger was out, pouring out of every pore. It could be useful, anger. It’d gotten me through some very bad scraps, and should mine ever go out I figured there wouldn’t be much left of me. But there was a trick to it: you had to learn when to keep it sheathed. It was like a sword, if you just swung it around night and day it would grow dull. You would grow dull, and someone who’d learned the trick would cut out your throat. Tanja was letting his anger dull him, right now. I’d let him keep swinging as long as he wanted, because behind that anger there was fear and shame. The longer he swung and hit nothing, the more harshly those would bite.

“Have you become a mute, villain?” the noble sneered. “Or is it fear of my father’s army that stills your tongue?”

Another stream of smoke, and then finally I replied.

“It stings, doesn’t it?” I mildly said. “Knowing that after all this, all you have to threaten me with is your father’s shadow.”

His fingers tightened into fists, his face flushed.

“A single battle does not win a war,” Razin Tanja said. “Tricks will not save you twice.”

I hummed, considering him.

“I’m not going to threaten you,” I decided. “There’s no point, is there? When you have enough hate, it becomes a kind of courage. Madness, too, but that line’s always been thinner than people like to admit.”

“I will not be condescended to by a heretic,” the boy snarled. “If you have called this meeting only to mock me-”

“You mock yourself,” I gently said, “by pretending today did not happen. It did. Learn from it, or die in a ditch somewhere blaming everything but yourself. But that’s not my burden to bear, Tanja, and I’ve no inclination to try. You’re here because I hold your people, and you want them back.”

“There are treaties pertaining to the treatment of war prisoners,” he said. “To break them would-”

“See the Grand Alliance declare war on me?” I drily said. “Perhaps lead your priesthood to declare me something of a heretic, even.”

There was a moment of embarrassed silence.

“That’s the problem with turning the screws early,” I said. “It doesn’t leave much room for escalation.”

“I will offer the appropriate ransom for the captains,” Razin Tanja said.

He was reaching, and knew it. The tinge of desperation in his voice was making that much clear. Ah , I thought. We both know you fucked up today, but it looks like you might actually be held accountable for it. I wondered if it’d be his father, or the other noble Captain Elvera answered to. Are you worrying you’ll be the sacrificial lamb to make peace between Malaga and Tartessos after your mess cost everyone steeply? Victory had a thousand fathers and mothers, but defeat did tend to be attributed to a single pair of hands. I wondered if he might actually be killed over this. Levant kept to Good, it was said, but it was rough country. I might have more leverage than anticipated, then.

“I’ve no interest in coin,” I said. “What I want from you is an oath.”

“An oath?” he said. “I will not serve Below, villain, in this life or any other.”

“I’ve not asked you to,” I said. “You hold command of the vanguard, Razin Tanja. It will stay camped outside Sarcella for three days and three nights – on this I require your oath.”

“And you would return the captains, for this?” the boy pressed.

The wakeleaf filled my throat and lungs, burning pleasantly. It left me tingling when it passed my lips.

“I’ll return every Levantine soldier captured today, including officers,” I replied.

“Agreed,” he immediately said.

He had absolutely no intention of keeping his word, did he? I sighed. After dealing with Praesi and fae, the Levantine was almost painfully transparent.

“I’ll want the oath made to the Heavens and on the honour of your Blood,” I coldly said. “Made in front of every remaining captain in your army.”

“You dare question my honour?” he replied, puffing up.

“You test my patience,” I calmly said, as if we were discussing the weather. “Do not mistake my restraint for vulnerability. If there is no fair bargain to be made , I will put your fucking head on a pike and use it as a warning for your replacement.”

Hate and fear, I mused, watching the war in his eyes. The sun was more dead than dying, by now, and I think that was what settled it – the shadows winning out, the same kind that I’d wielded to drown his soldiers even under afternoon sun.

“You will pay for this, Black Queen,” Razin Tanja said. “All of it. The Heavens will see to it that your horrors are given answer.”

I grinned around my pipe, face wreathed in smoke.

“They’ll take their swing,” I said. “Watch. See where it gets them .”

Night fell before I got my oath, but I did get it.

Chapter 15: Bereavement

“To two deaths we are born: the first in the flesh, the second in the memories of those left behind.”
– Sherehazad the Seer, Taghreb poet

The Lanteria quarter would burn twice, that’d been my decree.

It was a good thing Sarcella was mostly abandoned by now, or it might have been necessary to expel people from their homes to get our hands on enough lumber for the pyres. As it was, the Third Army’s sappers only had to tear down empty homes to raise the night’s work: heaps of wood large and tall enough for near six thousand corpses to be consigned to burning on them. Not all the dead bodies would be legionaries – not even most, as the addition of the priests from the House Insurgent had done much to improve the survivability of our wounded – but the soldiers of Levant would share in the farewell. I wasn’t leaving a few thousand corpses lying around when the Dead King was on the loose, no matter how far from the battlefield he was supposed to be. I watched in silence, pipe in my mouth, as companies of goblins methodically cleared out a space in the burn-out quarter and filled it with long rectangular piles of wood. They looked almost like giants’ graves, I thought, though the bodies would be laid to rest over and not under. There’d been talk of requisitioning oil and charcoal from the locals to help the blaze burn hot enough, but I’d put a stop to that.

There was no need for it, when I had Mighty under my command.

It was already night out when the strange procession began. Carts and stretchers bearing the dead, some covered with the thin bashfulness of a sheet. Some, but not all: there were too many dead, too few sheets of cloth. I’d heard a story once, back in Laure, about the elaborate funeral processions of the Fairfaxes. How the dead kings and queens were taken through the streets of the capital on a bier of bronze and iron as the bells rang in unison, until all the people of Laure had seen the remains with their own eyes. It’d take hours, the heads of the knightly orders and every other Fairfax walking along the cadaver as the people threw red carnations before them. The same flowers that grew in long swaths by the shores of the Silver Lake, though some said it was tradition as a nod to Selwin Fairfax’s death in the Red Flower Vales. The procession would end where it had begun, at the palace, and the ruler would be buried in the crypts below. A Fairfax is dead, a Fairfax reigns , the people would say, and the world would go on. No one threw flowers for my dead soldiers in the distance below, nor the Levantines so far away from home. Instead they had ash and embers, and the blackened husk of a district that might have been beautiful before we came to it.

The burial of kings and queens took the coin of a thousand soldiers’, and so a thousand soldiers were buried without a sound. That’d always been the way of the world, hadn’t it? The small died quiet, the great with theatre and oration – as unequal a bargain in death as it had been in life. It was a morose line of thought, but it paired well with my mood. The drow that had become my second shadows when shadow claimed the sky stood half-hidden and still as statues, not even stirring when the ashen path was stirred by careful footsteps. I’d not summoned General Abigail, though neither was I surprised she’d come to me. The latest arrangements I had made would cause most to cock an eyebrow. I didn’t turn to look at her, and repressed my amusement when I heard the Summerholm girl curse under her breath before climbing up. The two story house I’d claimed as my perch was now little more than a twisted up stone floor held up by load-bearing walls that let the wind through, but there was a path to take if you looked properly. I wouldn’t have made it up without a smudge of Night to chase away the pain in my leg, but with the coming of darkness miracles had come back to me through the turn of that astral tide.

There was a dull thump and louder cursing as the general of my army slipped halfway up and fell down on her ass, so I took pity on her and called out in Crepuscular. Mighty Miklaya leapt down and picked up the loudly protesting Callowan by the back of her neck before leaping up to my side and dropping her like a sack of cabbage. I nodded my thanks to it, and after a bow it vanished into the dark without a trace.

“They weren’t anywhere near that sprightly earlier, the pricks,” General Abigail muttered.

I turned to look at her and picked up on exactly when she remembered who she was on her belly in front of, complaining about allies. Abigail blanched and skittered up with the horrified haste of a cat near a goblin cookpot, saluting promptly. I wondered if she was aware that her armour now had tracks of soot all over it.

“General,” I said. “Sit.”

My pipe had long run out, though I was now officially out of herbs to stuff it with anyway. Robber had more important duties than to find me wakeleaf at the moment, though I’d send him out on the prowl before we left Sarcella. It was either that or actually trying the dried underground lake algae that Ivah had suggested, and I wasn’t nearly desperate enough to go for that. I suspected that drow tasted, well, tastes very differently than humans. It was the only reasonable explanation for some of the things they subjected themselves to eating and drinking.

“Your Majesty,” General Abigail said. “I’m not sure that’s, uh, entirely appropriate.”

I glanced at her amusedly. Court etiquette while on campaign? Besides, field promotion or not holding the title of general put her among the ten highest military officers in the kingdom. Technically she even outranked Grandmaster Brandon Talbot, though she wouldn’t have the authority to give him orders in most situations.

“I could make it a royal decree, if you’d prefer,” I said.

“Please don’t,” she said, then a heartbeat passed. “... Your Majesty.”

Very warily she sat at the edge of the floor as I had, legs dangling. My eyes returned to the procession of corpses, noting it had turned from a flood to a trickle. The preparations would be finished soon enough. I felt her hesitating at my side, but didn’t come to the rescue. If she was to continue working closely with me she’d have to find it in her to actually ask me questions without prompting.

“Ma’am, I meant to ask,” General Abigail said. “About the redeployments you ordered...”

It was enough of a step forward to deserve reward, I decided.

“You think they leave us vulnerable, now that the prisoners are being returned,” I completed.

She cleared her throat.

“I don’t mean to impugn the abilities of our allies,” she said. “But there’s a lot of Dominion grunts out there, and our captures marched back with their weapons. If they hit us by surprise when almost the entire army’s at the funeral, three thousand drow won’t cut it. They’ll catch us with our trousers down.”

Not an unwarranted assumption, for someone who didn’t know the Firstborn like I did.

“I did extract oaths from both Captain Elvera and the highborn boy that commands the vanguard,” I said.

General Abigail began to spit over the edge, before remembering once more that I was there and hastily stopping. I politely pretended not to notice the choke and coughing fit that ensued.

“My Da always said anyone that makes more than you do is probably out to get you,” Abigail solemnly said. “Double so for anyone not from Summerholm, triple if they’re Wasteland get.”

There was another pause, followed by an almost physical spike of fear.

“That wouldn’t mean you, Your Majesty,” she hurriedly said. “You’re a – I mean, everyone knows – he’s just an old drunk, didn’t mean nothing.”

I pondered that. I didn’t get a salary from the Tower anymore – Malicia was such a cheapskate, I’d only rebelled and tried to kill her the once – so in a sense I didn’t make more than my general. Unless you counted taxes and tariffs, or the kingdom’s treasury. I doubted telling her as much would actually help any, though, so I discarded the diversion.

“Razin Tanja might go back on his oath, even after what he swore it on,” I agreed. “He could be desperate enough he’d roll the dice on a victory washing his slate clean. Captain Elvera, I’m not so sure. Honour matters a lot more when it’s your own on the line instead of someone else’s.”

“Honour didn’t stop them from sneaking in at night and offing our general staff,” General Abigail bluntly said. “Beg your pardon, ma’am, but what do some Levant muckabouts know about anything like honour? They were quick enough to roll over for Procer and join up, after all that hard talk about them being deathly foes.”

“Akua’s Folly scared a lot of people,” I mildly said. “And honour doesn’t mean abandoning solid tactics.”

And they had been that, regardless of the personal cost to me. The other Callowan shuffled uncomfortably.

“Aren’t they your enemy, Your Majesty?” she asked.

Your , I thought. Interesting choice of words, and more telling than she probably realized. More so than the unspoken assumption: if they’re your enemy, why are you defending them?

“They won’t always be our enemy,” I said. “And even if they were sworn to stay one, it serves us nothing to lower them in our eyes. The moment you dismiss an opponent outright you stop understanding them. That’s dangerous thing, in our position.”

I threw her a bone after the lecture, wondering if Black had once done the same for me. If so he’d done it skillfully enough I hadn’t noticed.

“Most the three thousand drow are decoration,” I told her. “Defending bridges, like they are? I could have sent only two to stand guard with much the same effect. I just decided to temper the temptation for our friend Razin.”

General Abigail went still. I was pleased she picked up on the implications of that so quickly.

“Named?” she said. “Or just warlocks?”

“Priests, in a way,” I mused. “Though the kind even Lanterns wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.”

The other woman breathed out sharply. I doubted she would be the last, when the scope of what the Might could do became clearer.

“How many of those are there, ma’am?” she croaked out.

“An empire’s worth,” I said.

And sometimes I fear even that might not be enough, for what’s to come , I thought.

“You and I – Callowans – we were taught to fear the monsters on the other side of the river,” I mused. “The hordes and the sorceries and the things that go out after dark.”

I clapped her shoulder, ignoring the flinch.

“But not this time, Abigail,” I said. “Tonight, you see, we’re looking at the river from the other side.”

I felt my honour guard of drow stir through the Night. People were approaching us, and not a moment too soon. I dragged myself up after reaching for my staff, turning to my shivering general.

“Time to go,” I said. “The dead have waited long enough.”

—

Once lit, the torches turned the darkened wreckage of Lanteria into a sea of fireflies.

It’d been some time since I last stood for a vigil. There’d been others after the one that followed Three Hills, grim heaps of ash made across Callow wherever my armies fought and died. Marchford, where the grim necessity of killing everyone touched by Corruption had made it even uglier business than usual. Liesse and Arcadia, Dormer and the blood-soaked fields of the Folly. Far north, after the Battle of the Camps. Had there even been a year, since I first gained command, without some of mine being given to the flame? Sometimes it felt like I’d been at war from the moment I had taken up Black’s knife, without ever a moment to catch my breath. But this wasn’t about me, not really. I owned a part of it, but so did every single of the almost eight thousand legionaries and officers standing in Lanteria. So did the Levantines across the river, though they might not see it that way. We’d bared our blades and wrecked all around us, each convinced that we were right, necessary, that the other side was damned and blind. I almost smiled at the thought. Had anyone ever gone to war believing they were in the wrong? I could not help but wonder at the people who’d once lived in this city, and watched it torn apart by foreign armies engaged in a war first started by a woman far away in Salia. They should not be forgot, even if they were my enemy’s people and not mine.

They too tread the same grounds that had my leg throbbing, whispering with every limping step: do not forget, that this was never a game. Do not forget, that you make mistakes. Do not forget, that there must be more than ruin. Do not forget.

These weren’t drow, so the crowd below spoke in murmurs that lapped at the platform the sappers had raised. I did not stand alone on it, did not have that gall when I’d come so late to the battle for Sarcella. General Abigail stood at my right side, cheeks reddened by the old Callowan remedy for chilly nights. She cut a good figure, in her polished armour freshly marked with the wings of a general glimmering in the glow of the magelights surrounding us. Bareheaded, her black locks brought out the sharp blue of her eyes. Spreading out from her right, the surviving general staff stood with us as well: the last remaining legate, a heavyset man by the name of Oakes, her Senior Mage and Staff Tribune. At my left I kept Robber and Mighty Jindrich, the latter of which was looking at the proceedings with strangely innocent fascination. Never before, I thought, must it have seen so many torches. The purpose of this had been as strange to it as its fascination was to me: drow did not have funerals the way the people of the surface did, not since the coming of Sve Noc. Corpses were just rotting meat that could not be eaten, nothing to be given any particular attention beyond disposal to avoid diseases. I’d waited long enough, I eventually decided. All the torches that would be lit already were.

I raised my staff, and a single horn was sounded by an officer below. The sound echoed across the district, and left silence in its wake. I’d been offered sorcerous help by the Third Army’s mages, but I had no need of it: the Night coiled in my veins, and when I spoke it was in a voice that resounded across all of Lanteria quarter.

“The first time I met Nauk of the Waxing Moons clan,” I said, “he called me dead weight and I nearly slugged him in the face.”

The officers standing next to me looked appalled, save for Robber who was grinning like a gleeful imp, but a ripple went through the crowd. There were greenskins who’d laughed outright, and many more soldiers who looked like they were feeling guilty about smiling at a funeral.

“It wasn’t even half a year after that the Fifteenth Legion was raised,” I continued. “And by then it didn’t even occur to me he wouldn’t be part of it. That was the kind of man he was, long before he put an arrow in a prince and got another name out of it.”

Grief and guilt, hand in hand. For the friend I was burying, in a way, for the second time. For what had remained of that friend in my general and I’d cravenly looked away from. Another regret for the list that would never, could never, be expiated. It always seemed like there were more pressing things to see to, didn’t it? Until the bells rang and you realized it’d become too late.

“He was brave,” I thoughtfully said. “We always say that, about those we bury, but he truly was. Kind, to those he owed kindness to, and always cannier than he let on. But most of all, when I remember him, I remember that the same night we met he marched most of a mile on a broken leg without a word of complaint. It’s a small thing, but it stands for more. There was not an ounce of give in him.”

My voice turned rueful.

“But then I speak to nothing you don’t already know, do I? Everything Nauk Princekiller had to give, you have made a part of you.”

My lips quirked, because this was a fool’s war but how could I not be proud of how they had fought it?

“The Third Army marched across the span of Iserre, pursued by fourfold its number and ambushed by Helike’s finest,” I said. “Yet when I found Sarcella, your banner flew. They rode you down, they burned you out, they stormed every single wall you raised – and the Third Army did not break.”

The last part rung louder like a rest, almost deserving of echo. There was a sea of faces splayed out below me: old and young, Praesi and Callowans and greenskins. Old Legion veterans come under fresh banner to ply the same harsh trade, youths who’d put on the armour with that burning need to do something that would matter . Some had joined for coin, some for purpose, some for having nowhere else to go. Some had put on the mail for their country, and among those there were hard-eyed Soninke and Taghreb who I thought might yet make that country after they went home with a blade in hand. Once you’d drunk from the cup of defiance the taste was not easily forgot, and they had all drunk deep. How many of them had sung on the march to Dormer, I wondered, joined their voices to that chilling song Nauk had penned? I had taken the armies of the east and told them they were owed better, that they could do better, and they had believed me.

Since that day they had been sharpened on bloody fields every bit the match of the Conquest’s, marched victorious through a gauntlet of horrors. And they’d done it without High Lords, without Dukes and Baronesses, without any of the old banners above their heads. One day those soldiers would go home, and those who would be their masters would not find them so easily bent to the old order. I’ve borrowed the strength of an empire and the godhead behind it, bared it at my foes like a blade , I thought, and some fools will tremble at that alone. But you, all of you. Oh, how they would tremble if they could look at you now. What you are and might yet do. In the golden glow of the torches they all seemed tinted by the same dye, as if they had shared some strange rite that left the same mark on all of them. Maybe they had, this lone column in the snow surrounded by foes. I saw all that and one thing more, a reflection of what I felt in my bones when looking at them: pride .

“I could praise you,” I said. “But what could I possibly speak that would ring louder than your record? Instead, I will say there are faces here that I recognize.”

It was true. More greenskins and Praesi than Callowans, who had come later to my campaigns, but more than a few of those as well. Legionaries and officers both, some who’d been under Nauk as far back as Three Hills.

“From the two thousand that charged Summer, at Five Armies and One,” I said. “From the first into the breach, at Dormer. From those who took the hellgate at the Doom of Liesse. From the Battle of the Camps, holding against three to one and hero’s wroth.”

I laughed.

“Have you ever fought a battle where you were not meant to lose?”

Laughter answered, harsh and grim and heartbreakingly proud.

“In the crucible of the Conquest,” I said, “names were granted to honour the greatest deeds of Legions. Cognomen , they are called. You have gone through crucible harsher still, and so this honour is long overdue.”

My voice rose.

“You are the Third Army of the Kingdom of Callow,” I proclaimed. “You have been the vanguard of our every victory, never once flinching nor breaking – and for that I name you dauntless .”

For a moment there was only silence, and my stomach dropped, but then roar drowned out everything. Thousands of throats screaming out into the night, a chorus of stomping feet and blades striking shields. Dauntless, I thought, letting the sea of noise wash over me. That had been impulse, but I did not regret it. I would see it put to the rolls, and I would see Nauk’s name written as the first general to command it. It was the only kind of grave marker he would have cared for, I suspected. The Third Army howled its approval, long and loud, and when the sound thinned General Abigail’s own tribune approached me with a torch, passing it to my hand. For the pyre, I knew. It was my right, as Queen of Callow, to throw the first one.

“We’ll all put friends to the flame tonight,” I said. “And there will be others, on other fields. So weep for the lost, but know that I can promise you this: in the end, they will remember us.”

I wanted to throw the torch. For the friend I’d loved, the memories I would still clutch now that he was gone. But this wasn’t about me, not really. I owned a part of it, but so did every single one of them. So instead I limped to Abigail and passed her the torch.

“Send them home, General,” I said.

Blue eyes met mine, unreadable, and slowly she nodded.

The torch flew, and the sea of fireflies followed.

Chapter 16: Adverse

“Let neither queen nor prince rule over our dominion: for while crowns may devour honour, one’s blood is not so easily gainsaid.”
-Farah Isbili of the Pilgrim’s Blood, second Holy Seljun of Levant

Midnight Bell came and went.

Part of me itched to leave this place, to watch Sarcella disappear in the distance and let Nauk sleep in his tomb of ash. The rest knew that it would be absurd to ask that my beleaguered Third Army begin a night march after a hard day’s fighting. Even if I’d been willing to push them that far, logistics would have forbidden it. We had wounded still hovering between life and death, equipment to mend or replace. At least another dozen crucial preparations that must be undertaken before we left, if the advance was to be organized in the slightest instead of a rout in a vaguely appropriate direction. Truth be told I should be sleeping myself, but with the night a second wind had come to me that made it unlikely I’d be able to slumber even if I tried. The drow were the same, nocturnal in a way they would never have truly understood in that sunless ruined empire of theirs. It wasn’t anymore, of course. Theirs. My bargain with the Herald of the Deeps had seen to that and more. The lowering of the Gloom and a fallen realm, in exchange for the chance at a fresh one. In practice, supplies for the massive exodus marching on the Dead King’s northern borders along with departure unmolested from the old Empire Ever Dark. Unmolested if on reasonable schedule, anyway. The dwarves had made it clear that lingering would be taken as a breach of the terms.

There was slightly more to it, another bargain made with a dying foe to strike together against one at the peak of its unlife, but that would have to wait. The Kingdom Under would not lift a finger until the rest of us had died in drove for its advantage, and not send a single soldier past the line of its interests. It didn’t matter, though. If well-timed, our last arrangement could be made into a very effective blow. And be used as highly usefu; diplomatic leverage with the First Prince, I admitted to myself. This couldn’t be won by slapping everyone in the face until they agreed to my terms, that’d make the Liesse Accords barely worth the parchment they were written on. I had to make it in everyone’s interests to sign. There would be nations that’d never even consider it – the Dread Empire, the Kingdom of the Dead – but the one I worried most about was the Dominion of Levant. I was beginning to understand, slowly, exactly how much Names meant to their people. How essential they’d been made to the fabric of their ruling class because of the way they lent legitimacy. I didn’t and wouldn’t have the kind of clout or justification to uproot that entirely, which would force me to rely on someone I really rather wouldn’t: the Grey Pilgrim. Not only could I not kill the old hero, as the consequence of that would be a nearly Callowan degree of spite, I had to get him to back the Accords.

It wasn’t impossible. But in all likelihood it was going to come at an unpleasant price.

My legionaries were long gone by now, save for a handful of weary sappers keeping an eye on the pyres to make sure nothing got out of hand. It was no longer mortal flame burning the wood and bodies, which at least allowed them to see something interesting for their trouble. A funeral pyre, after all, wasn’t just about burning wood and flesh: it had to see to the bones as well. Save for some specific kinds of sorcerous flame and the much riskier goblinfire, there wasn’t much that could do that for human and greenskin ossature. Legion custom was to grind the bones after the rest was ash and spread them on the battlefield, should time allow. It was one of those grim duties that soldiers didn’t like to talk about, and usually ended up passed on to sappers or whatever company had last irked the commanding officer. There wouldn’t be any need for that tonight, though. From the beginning it’d been clear that we might not even have enough wood to burn all the flesh, not without hacking apart another section of the city entirely, but mundane flame was not my full arsenal. I’d put my restless Mighty to work. Flames icy-blue and pitch-black had lit up the night, spreading through the pyres, and behind those I’d ordered something more discreet. Uses of Night, acidic and corrosive, that would see to it no bones were left come dawn. It would have been horrifying for soldiers, I knew, to wake in daylight and see the gnarled and darkened bones of those they’d fought to the side of strewn across the remains of the pyres. So instead the dead burned black and blue, and a little else too.

It was still watching that eerie spectacle that General Rumena found me. Not that the old drow would have encountered great difficulty in that: I was surrounded by an honour guard of Firstborn that might have been good as invisible to humans but was a glaring sign for those of their kind. Resting on a half-broken bench of stone, back against a soot-slashed oaken door delivered there by my drow, I kept my gaze on the flames even as it came to stand by my side. The ancient creature tread light as a feather, and I could feel a flicker of Night under its skin that would make it nothing but a shadow among shadows to the naked eye.

“They did not attack,” General Rumena said.

On my lap a sword of obsidian sat sheathed, and my hand had been tight around it– filling the artefact, slowly, with the purposeful Night I would unleash when the time came – but at that obvious announcement my fingers began drumming against the sheath. It did not reply, tacitly inviting it to elaborate.

“The Dominion leader called for assembly of its captains when those captured were returned,” the old drow continued. “They have been at this ever since. Debate is loud and bitter. Blades were drawn at least once, and not sheathed before reddened.”

I knew better than to ask how it knew that. After nightfall, with the Sisters flying somewhere above? I was almost surprised I wasn’t getting a full transcript of the conversations.

“Not unexpected,” I said.

The general said nothing, though I felt its presence pulse in the Night. Surprise, maybe? Hard to tell, drow felt emotions so differently than humans and this strange... sense of mine was highly imprecise anyway. I could measure impact but not grasp its nature, and guessing at the thoughts of the Firstborn was always chancy business.

“You’ve never been shy before, Tomb-Maker,” I said. “Out with it.”

“It was my understanding that you meant for the Dominion cattle to try the city,” Rumena replied. “So as to slaughter them with pretence of mercy. Is this not a disappointment?”

I leaned against the door that had been made into the back of this makeshift throne of mine, cloak held tight against my frame to ward off the creeping cold. The blue and black flames still danced in the distance, the silhouettes of the few goblins out there lending the sight the appearance of some strange tribal ritual.

“I have a friend who’s no stranger to thievery,” I said. “She did a lot of learning with unsavoury crowds, in all manners of theft. One of them is called confidence tricks.”

“Humans have exceedingly little to be confident about,” the Tomb-Maker noted. “What manner of trickery is it?”

“Usually, it’s a lie that preys on the greed or credulity of someone to get coin from them,” I said. “But Vivienne, she once told me that in her home those tricks were split in two kinds: dapple and pearl. After horse coats, she said.”

Rumena’s silver-blue stare stayed on me, and it did not speak.

“A dappled horse,” I said, “is one that’s flecked pale and grey. Those are the tricks that prey on the naïve, Rumena, and her guild frowned if those were used on anyone save nobles and foreigners.”

Neither of which, I thought, most Callowans had been inclined to weep over during the decades of Praesi rule.

“The other kind, though, the pearls?” I said. “It’s a kind of horse that’s pale all over. Those tricks prey on greed, and they were fair game on anyone. The unspoken part of that, Rumena, is that if someone acts wickedly there’s no shame in doing them the same turn. A pearl trick doesn’t work at all, if the mark acts decent.”

“A pearl trick,” the old drow repeated. “As you played on the Dominion cattle.”

I nodded slowly.

“They gave oaths,” I said. “If they keep them, no one bleeds. And they’ve proved they can learn, that they can be trusted in the war up north. But if they break their oaths...”

“There is no shame,” Rumena thoughtfully said, “in doing them a wicked turn.”

A strange notion to it, no doubt. The drow did not think it shameful in the slightest to turn on each other over without a reason – or, rather, being stronger than the other was enough of a reason in and of itself. But it wasn’t the way things worked, up here, and if they were going to stay among us they needed to learn. It mattered, how you went about things. I’d learned that much too late in my rise, believing what counted was that you got there at all. And the moment I’d begun extending a hand outside the borders of Callow I’d run into one closed door after another. Best they learn from my mistakes, as the Sisters meant them to.

“You are pleased, then,” the general said. “That they are holding to their oaths.”

Silence stretched. I looked at the flames, and thought of the orc burning among them who I had called my friend.

“Am I?” I murmured, wondering. “Ask me again come morning, Tomb-Maker.”

I tightened the Mantle of Woe around me once more, and was still looking at the fire when Rumena left.

—

I slept fitfully, never leaving my seat, and it could not have been more than an hour or two when someone’s approach had me immediately awake. A drow – it’d been the ripple in the Night that warned me – though not one of the sigil-holders. By the looks of the paint on its face it was of the Svatuk Sigil, higher than dzulu but low in the pecking order of the Mighty. A messenger, then. The thickly-muscled drow bowed, silver tresses sweeping down as it did, and only straightened when I flicked my wrist in permission. Exhaustion was lingering in my bones, but my mind was mostly awake and that was what mattered.

“Losara Queen,” the drow said. “I bring word from the General Rumena.”

“Then speak,” I said.

“Our reinforcements have arrived, under the command of Lord Ivah,” the Firstborn said. “Twelve thousand, now in sight of this cattle-city. A warband came ahead, led by the Mighty Archer.”

Indrani had caught up as soon as she could, looked like. Must have tired herself out hurrying regardless of my request that she not – though I supposed my taking the drow vanguard ahead without a word had invalidated that in her eyes. My grip closed around the ebony staff propped up at my side and I dragged myself up, catching the sheathed sword on my lap before it could fall and fastening it on my belt with fingers made clumsy by the cold.

“Is that the whole of the words you carry?” I asked.

“The Tomb-Maker says that the pot of the Dominion no longer seems in risk of tipping,” the drow said. “Both pillars still live.”

The strife in the camp had come at an end, then. Hard to know whether the blades coming out earlier had been over Razin Tanja’s ill-fated offensive and the ensuing losses, or an attempt at oath-breaking that was ended steel in hand. Both he and Captain Elvera were apparently still alive, regardless, so whatever the truth they’d come to a truce. I suspected that the moment the sharper would blow was when the rest of the forty-thousand strong army arrived, including Tanja’s lordly father and the lady Captain Elvera answered to. Didn’t intend to stick around to watch that from up close, though: I’d already sown the seeds of discord with the oaths, I’d let them either grow into something thornier or die out on their own. Having two of the four most powerful nobles in the Dominion at each other’s throats instead of pursuing my armies would be damned useful, but pushing too hard risked them banding against me instead. We’d see if Akua’s suspicions about the fragility of the Levantine command structure bore out.

“Good,” I said. “Tell it to keep watching until the Third Army is rested enough to relieve the sigils.”

“By your will, First Under the Night,” the drow replied, bowing again.

I considered sending it after Archer to tell her to meet me, but ultimately discarded the notion and left it slink back to its duties. If Indrani was in Sarcella there was no need to look for her: she’d be finding me soon enough. I should probably be looking for somewhere comfortable to talk instead, since it had occurred to me we had a conversation long overdue. Two, I then thought, considering what Robber had told me about Masego. Claiming the mansion that’d been turned into the Third Army’s headquarters for a chat with Indrani struck me as something of an abuse of my authority, when so much of this city was already empty, so instead I hobbled my way towards Beaumontant quarter. Much of the district had seen heavy fighting, but it was only around the edges that it’d gotten brutal enough houses and shops were brought down. Deeper in there was only mud and blood marring the snow, and the fresher tracks of legionaries on sentry duty. There wasn’t a soul to be seen in here, not a Proceran one anyway. There were a few drow out there on the rooftops, and my own honour guard of Firstborn was dogging my shadow, but aside from that the streets were eerily empty.

The fighting had long driven out anyone who lived here, which considering the empty plains out there and the roving armies in Iserre likely meant hunger or cold would kill most of the civilians who’d fled and not made it to a city to take refuge in. I forcefully set the thought aside, as there was nothing I could do for them. Even if Black hadn’t put the principality’s granaries to the torch on his way south, the war would have made it a lean year – after he had, the death warrant of thousands had effectively been signed months before the first snow fell. Twice over, with their ruler being a prisoner in Callow. Winter and starvation would strike much harsher a blow to the heartlands than Legion blades could have, dealing out death in that atrociously efficient way my father had always preferred. I could almost imagine the cogs turning behind his eyes as he measured how best to cripple the Principate with the limited amount of resources at his disposal. The thought was not fond. There were some things that could not be admired, even if skillfully done.

I found a halfway decent tavern and decided to settle myself in there for Indrani to find me. I didn’t bother glancing at the sign hung outside before touching the locked door and pressing Night into the lock. It clicked open, and a gesture had my guards staying outside as I entered the cold common room. Closing the door behind me, I set myself to making it somewhat inhabitable. A flicker of power had dark flames roaring in the fireplace, without lumber to feed them, though after digging around for some time I found a bundle of charcoal to toss in there and the flames turned mundane in nature. The place had been mostly stripped clean by the owners when they left, but from the back I rustled up a jug of wine bad enough it’d been used to prop up a shelf and a pair of torches already partially burnt. Those went up on the walls, and the room had warmed enough for me to take off my cloak and try my luck with the wine – no cups left, so straight from the jug – when Indrani arrived. Pulling down her hood and lowering her scarf, she hastily slammed the door shut and turned to me with a raised eyebrow.

“Well, this is oddly domestic,” Archer mused.

“I even made your favourite,” I drily replied, holding up the jug. “Wine.”

“Ah, just like my mother used to make,” she breathily said.

It didn’t stop her from tossing her cloak at my head before worming into a seat, but by now that was only to be expected. I slapped it aside, then ducked under the gloves that followed with practiced ease. They fell close to me, so in theory I could have picked them up, but she was never going to learn to stop throwing things at me if I did that every time. She wasn’t going to learn anyway, I grimly admitted to myself, but that wasn’t any more of a reason to do it.

“So,” Archer said, deftly stealing the jug from my hand. “I see part of this place burned down.”

“It was already on fire when I arrived,” I replied, a tad defensively.

She grinned over a mouthful of wine, then passed it back after swallowing.

“It figures that after holding it in so well at Rochelant you’d have to cut loose,” she sagely said.

“It was Levantine priests that started it,” I insisted.

“Priests that, in your heretical wickedness, you ensorcelled to start the fire on your behalf,” Indrani said. “That’s twice as bad, Catherine. Heresy and arson. Maybe even heretical arson, we’d have to ask someone about the theology of that.”

“No one’s going to buy that,” I said, sounding a lot more confident than I felt.

“You’re right,” she conceded. “You’ll just get blamed without any of the frills added on.”

I drank from the jug and sighed. She might be yanking my chain, but that didn’t necessarily mean she was wrong. Best to change the subject before I lost any more feathers.

“Ivah came with you?” I asked.

She smugly smiled at my pivot, the wretch.

“It’s about an hour behind,” Indrani said. “Sent a few Mighty with me to speak with either you or Rumena about where the sigils can set up to sleep.”

Rumena could see to that, I thought. Later I’d need to speak with it and Abigail about lodgings and supplies but it could wait for a few hours still. Odds were the reinforcements would be put up in the northern quarters with the rest of my drow: it wasn’t like we’d be running out of room anytime soon.

“Good,” I said, handing back the wine.

No two ways about this, so I just went in sword bared.

“There’s news about Masego,” I said.

The jug stopped halfway to her lips. Something like fear passed through her hazelnut eyes, though it was mastered swiftly.

“You wouldn’t be so calm if he was dead,” Archer decided. “Missing or hurt?”

Her voice was even, but the kind of even you could see the strain of maintaining.

“Missing,” I said. “Maybe hurt as well. The battle at Thalassina went south, ‘Drani. His father blew up most of the city and the aftermath was bad enough even those who fled died from the sorcery he called down. We know Masego survived and left, but not much more than that.”

Her face tightened.

“The Empress is after him?” she asked.

“Was,” I said. “He made it out of the Wasteland heading west. No one’s been able to track him since. Nauk might have known more, apparently the army’s high command had a closed council before leaving Callow, but he was dead when I arrived.”

This time it was me who kept my voice steady. It came easier now that we’d had the Legion burial. The worst and rawest of the grief I had already voiced, and pangs that’d follow were not so consuming.

“Shit,” Indrani softly said. “I hadn’t heard, Cat. I’m sorry.”

“It’s done,” I said. “Picking at his grave serves no purpose.”

“Don’t do that,” she said, shaking her head. “I know you hoped that with the Night-”

My fingers clenched.

“It’s done ,” I repeated, harshly.

She met my gaze, not cowed in the slightest.

“You can’t lock grief in a trunk and open it back up when you’ve got the time, Catherine,” she said. “That’s not how people work.”

It’s how Black works , I thought. But then so was the way thousands would die starving across Iserre before winter ended, wasn’t it? So I bit my tongue, and let a moment pass before replying.

“I just put his body to the flame, Indrani,” I finally said, sounding as tired as I felt. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

To that she nodded, and did not pursue. I passed a hand through my hair watching her drink from the jug belatedly. At this rate we’d run out of wine before we ran out of words.

“There’s another army under Hakram that shouldn’t be too far,” I said, returning to the thrust of the conversation. “Adjutant will know more.”

“So we find Hakram first, then make our plans,” Archer mused. “It’s a start.”

I inclined my head in agreement, taking back the jug when offered. She rose to her feet a heartbeat later and stretched out with a groan. Named or not, she’d been on the move for long enough it’d take a toll.

“Well, night’s still young,” she said. “I hear Robber’s in town, and I’d say it’s been too long since someone woke him up by throwing him off a roof. Let’s see what can be done about that.”

I set the jug on the table softly enough it barely made a sound.

“Indrani, sit down,” I said.

She eyed me up, then cocked an eyebrow salaciously.

“I guess we’ve got time to visit one of the rooms first,” she said. “There even any sheets left in there? Wait, don’t say anything. It’ll be a surprise.”

“Indrani,” I repeated quietly, “ sit down .”

The amusement slid off her face, just like that. It’d been forced then. She was skilled enough at the pretence I honestly hadn’t been certain.

“A friend is dead,” she said calmly. “So I was going to hold my tongue. But are you sure you want to do this, Catherine, after you just dropped me and Sahelian to charge into yet another danger ?”

“Let’s,” I said.

Before I was even finished speaking, she punched me in the face.

Chapter 17: Cloaks

“Trust in yourself and no other is violence upon all the world. Trust in others and not yourself is violence upon the soul.”
– Eudokia the Oft-Abducted, Basilea of Nicae

It’d been a while since someone had decked me in the face and I’d actually felt it. Indrani wasn’t an amateur, so instead of landing a glancing blow her knuckles buried themselves into my jaw and I was jarred off my feet. The throb of pain began before I would have hit the ground, if I had – instead my arm snapped out and my staff smacked into my open palm. Years of training in the yard made that enough I was able to turn the tumble into a step back. An agonizing one, as my bad leg was less than pleased by the sudden movement and I’d not numbed it with Night before moving. Straightening my back, I turned back to my friend and casually raised an eyebrow.

“That stung a bit,” I admitted. “Are we actually going to talk now, or do I need to tie you up first?”

Indrani’s eyes hardened. Not at the threat, though – we used those on each other at least once a day with utter nonchalance. Something about my tone had raised her hackles even further up. Silvery mail glittering in the fire’s light, she clenched her fingers into fists before forcing herself to breathe out.

“You don’t even realize it, do you?” Archer said. “A year ago, you would have caught that. Snapped my arm twice on the way there if you felt like it.”

“We’re not a year ago,” I said.

I did not bother to inject regret I did not feel into those words. The Night was not panacea to all my ills, but to rid myself of Winter’s costs I would have settled for much, much less at my fingertips.

“I know that,” Indrani said. “So why the fuck are you acting like you are?”

Fear. Under the anger, the indignation, it was fear lay at the heart of that reaction. I didn’t tell her to calm down, I knew better than that. We had too much in common, and nothing had ever excited my anger quite like being told I had no right to it. This was a wound to lance, not hole to patch over. So I’d give her what she needed to get the venom out.

“I took necessary risks,” I calmly said. “Not without reason, or out of pride. If I’d waited longer the Third Army might have been lost.”

“ Then you should have lost it ,” Archer hissed. “How many of these gambles do you really think you can win, Catherine? Nine out of ten, ninety-nine out of a hundred? At the rate you’re taking them we’ll find out soon enough.”

“I won’t leave any of mine to die if I can do something about it,” I said. “You’ve known that since the day we met, ‘Drani. Marchford wasn’t a battle I was forced to fight. It was one that needed to be fought.”

Archer’s hand lashed out and the jug of wine flew, shattering against the wall with a wet sound. The last mouthfuls of wine there’d been left spilled down in red rivulets.

“Was walking up to a Named whose aspect scared even Sve Noc needed as well?” Indrani harshly asked. “Or putting yourself at the Tyrant’s mercy, not even an hour after? You’re still going around like if you lose a limb it’ll grow back, but it won’t. You can’t jump down every pit you find and tell yourself you’re strong enough to crawl out after, Catherine. You’re not strong enough anymore .”

We were having, I thought, a very different conversation from the one she thought we were. If Vivienne was a creature of the unspoken, the unsaid, then Indrani was one of shrouding aggression. You could get a much better read on her fears through what she reproached others than what few crumbs she willingly offered up about herself. I no longer had Winter, and so these days I was a great deal more fragile. That was half of the circle, here, and only that. The other half was Indrani’s shivering near-death in a mausoleum of ice that she could have done absolutely nothing to get out of, if she hadn’t been helped. Help, that thing her savage beast of a mother had taught her was always weakness. Thread that with the knowledge that there was nothing she could have done to avoid that position except not being there, not fighting, and you got a rope tight enough for Archer to hang herself with. She could rage and accuse all she wanted: all I saw and hear was my friend choking slowly, now that she’d been stripped of the flawed foundations she’d once stood on.

“It was never a game, love,” I gently said. “I’m sorry you had to learn it that way.”

She laughed, brittle and sharp.

“No, don’t you think that’ll work,” Indrani said, stepping up to the table. “You don’t get to play the sage’s role when you just marched a pile of wet kindling through a burning district. You don’t get to tell me it’s not a game when you still act like it is. Who the fuck do you think you are , Catherine?”

“Tell me,” I said.

There was barely a flicker of her Name’s power before she put her bare fist through the table. Wood splintered and flew, the entire thing collapsed under the sheer weight of the blow.

“That’s your skull, if you run into the Saint on your next lark,” she conversationally said. “So don’t pretend this is a favour you’re doing me, that you’re letting me rage on your shoulder until my blood’s cooled. Because this is real, Catherine, so you’ll give me a godsdamned answer.”

She brushed a few splinters off her hand before pointing an accusing finger down at the wreck. None of the prickly pieces, I idly noticed, had broken her skin.

“Who do you think you are?” Indrani repeated, in that same deceptively calm tone. “Some favoured child of Below, somehow exempted from dying when you get in over your head? Because Triumphant thought she was that, had an actual Name still and terrible armies besides, and she still fucking died.”

She shrugged.

“Is it the Black Knight’s legacy you think make you invincible?” she asked. “Where is he now, Catherine? And let’s not pretend you didn’t pick and choose what you learned at his knee. If the authentic article got had, what makes you think the bastard get will make it through unscathed?”

I matched her gaze without flinching as she advanced, carelessly kicking aside the broken table between us.

“Or is it just that you alone of all the world were born under a victorious star,” Indrani said, distance closing between us. “Fate’s got plans for you, eh? Catherine Foundling can bleed, can scar and lose limbs, but she can never fucking die.”

She leaned in, ochre-brown face mere inches from mine. I could almost feel her breath against my lips.

“Where was that victorious star down in the Everdark, then?” she asked. “When Sve Noc had your neck in their grip and a little twist was all it would have taken to bring an end to the road? All but for the mercy of goddesses, and you had no right to expect mercy of those two.”

Indrani bared her teeth.

“Answer me,” she demanded in a snarl.

I caught her wrist when she raised her arm to push me back. The staff I left there, and it stood still as if perfectly balanced.

“I don’t have any of those things,” I told her quietly. “You know that too. One day I’ll be a little too slow, or not clever enough, or it’ll just be a... bad day. And I’ll die. Just like that. It’s always been the end of this story. And there’s no guarantee I’ll complete my work before that day catches up to me.”

Archer ripped her wrist free from my fingers, cradling it with her other hand like my touch had been enough to burn her skin. She took a step back, though I doubted she even realized it.

“You can’t expect us to care when you treat your life like Creation’s kitchen rag,” Indrani said. “I might as well get attached to a mayfly.”

“If I was always careful,” I said. “If I was all prudence and planning, hiding behind my people and leaving every battle to be fought pass me by – if I did all those things, Indrani, would we even be having this conversation?”

I saw the moment where the part I’d not been cruel enough to speak sunk in. If I was all that, would you even care about me in the first place? She flinched, and it brought me no joy, but to bind a wound it must first be cleaned. And this particular one had been left to fester for much too long already. That, more than all the rest, shamed me. Because I’d known it would hurt more for the waiting, and I’d chosen other needs over it anyway. A queen would not have felt guilt, I thought, for choosing queenship’s duties over family. But it wasn’t the queen that reached out to Indrani just to have the hand batted away.

“That’s not fair,” Archer said.

“That doesn’t make it any less true,” I gently said. “You don’t get to define the people you care about.”

I thought of green eyes, and of the starving realm around me. No, it was never quite so easy as that, was it? That lesson had been long and harsh in the learning, but I had learned it nonetheless. This time when I reached out she allowed me to take her elbow, and it was like that simple touch had cut the strings out of her. Her legs folded and with a grimace of pain I slowed our fall until we were both slouching on the ground, sitting like children surrounded by the remains of their tantrum. And we were, I thought. Children still, in some many ways. We’d been taught at the knee of Calamities, and those teachings had made us sharper than our years should allow – but for all that, no older than our years. Perhaps even younger than those, truth be told, for the stuff of the women we’d become had been thinned in places so it could be used to strengthen others. With my arms wrapped tight around her, I could not shy away from the truth that for all we had done we were still so very small.

“We can’t keep doing this, Cat,” Indrani tiredly said, resting her chin against my shoulder. “If we’re all born with a single yarn of luck to spin, we used up ours too young. On too many stupid fucking fights that we learned too late we shouldn’t have fought. We’re bare, now. And the worst monsters still lie ahead.”

“It’s all right to be afraid,” I whispered into her ear.

She tried to pull away, but I kept my grip tight and she understood the unspoken – if she used the strength of her Name, I would use that of the Night. Neither of us, I thought, were quite ready to allow those powers foothold in this moment.

“I used to think my first fight with William was when I really got it,” I said. “I know better now. I woke up bleeding out, gutted like a fish, but I became the Squire. It was all still in the game, even that. He had his angel’s feather, and providence. But I had instincts, and something better than golden luck.”

Indrani breathed out shallowly.

“So when was it?” she whispered.

“The day I woke up, Black hung about fifty people,” I whispered back. “Made sure I saw. A lot of what happened that afternoon took me years to really deal with. But I still think of them sometimes, even after all the darker days there’s been since. Because I looked them in the eyes, and what looked back was the truth that it was larger than me. That I was just a small part of it, even with all that was already meant for me.”

I smiled bleakly, remembering the utter silence in the Court of Swords and twice the sound of necks snapping. Two rows and two drops, dead briskly to the gallows.

“It was never a game to them,” I said. “They just died, because... they were caught, I suppose, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the reasons behind that were years older, and those reasons caused by some even more ancient – links in a chain no one can see more than a few pieces of. So they died not knowing, because of something larger than them.”

Indrani chuckled darkly.

“That’s your lesson?” she said. “That one day we’ll die too, blind and lost and not really understanding why?”

“Everybody else does,” I murmured. “Why should we be different? We have powers and clever tricks, but how different does that really make us?”

I let out a breathy laugh.

“That’s the thing. The first time a story happens, it’s not a story at all. If it comes again we tell ourselves it’s become something else, but it hasn’t. Not really. People bleed just as red the twelfth time as the first. The tears and the deaths don’t become any less real , ‘Drani. The courage doesn’t matter less because some corpse in a grave made the same stand a hundred years before and won.”

She leaned back, still in my embrace, and looked at my face questioningly.

“We’re Named,” Archer said. “That makes it different.”

But it doesn’t , I thought. We’ve seen it, you and I. That when all there is holding up the choice is a story and the prediction of victory, the story fails . Because if all you do is pretend, go through the motions, then you’ve already lost what could have made it a victory in the first place.

“A choice is a choice,” I replied, shaking my head. “Black cloak, white cloak – that’s the game, thinking the cloak says it all. That the choices are already made for you.”

“It’s a pretty thought,” Indrani said. “But it won’t keep any of us alive.”

“Nothing will,” I smiled. “But that’s the point, isn’t it? What do we do with that?”

I met her eyes, once more.

“Be afraid,” I said. “I am, Indrani. All the time. Be afraid, then make your choices.”

Her fingers balled up against my side, clutching at the cloth.

“And that’s who you are, the choices you make,” I murmured. “Not your Name. Not your mother. Not where you were born or what they made you do.”

“It might not be enough,” she softly said. “Just making the choice.”

I nodded, because I wouldn’t lie to her.

“It might not be,” I agreed, just as softly. “And for all that, there’s only one thing that matters.”

I threaded my fingers into hers, warmth against warmth. Oh, there were few prices I would not have been willing to pay to get that back – and Winter’s fade was not one of them.

“Who do you want to be?” I asked.

She did not answer, for a very long time, and when she unthreaded our fingers it felt like failure. There were some things that couldn’t be fixed with words, I thought, no matter how earnest. But then she leaned forward and rested her chin against my shoulder again.

“I don’t know,” Indrani said.

Her hands returned to my sides, fingers digging in too tight. It would have been petty to wince. What I’d done to her tonight had been brutal enough in some ways that even noticing this felt miserly of me.

“I don’t know,” she repeated after yet more silence. “But not this .”

“Then we’ll find out,” I said. “Together, all of us.”

She nodded against me. A pause, as I felt her consider whether to keep speaking or not.

“I think I might hate you a little,” Indrani finally said.

My throat tightened but I would not argue or beg. It was fair, and her right. I nodded back against the crook of her neck, staying there and breathing in the scent of leather and steel and warm skin.

“I never learned how to do this gently,” I admitted, the apology hanging between us. “Some nights I’m not sure I learned to do it at all.”

“That I could forgive,” she said, then hesitated.

She sighed.

“Will,” she corrected, firmly. “Will forgive.”

“Then?”

“You took a part of me,” she softly said. “By being who you are, you took it in hand. Claimed it. And I won’t get it back even if I try.”

I felt her tighten against me, like a bowstring gone taut.

“It’s a little like being a prisoner, isn’t it?” she said. “Loving someone.”

Indrani laughed, and at my silence the tension in her shoulders loosened.

“Every time we speak raw, I understand the Lady a little better,” she said. “Why she left . I wonder if that was what she figured out: that if she lingered, she’d end up never leaving at all.”

She wasn’t speaking of being in love with me. That would have been... it wasn’t who we were, to each other. Skin didn’t change that, I knew it for certain since the months we’d taken to that kind of intimacy. Wasn’t sure she could be like that, even with how she looked at Masego – though much of what lay there was still veiled to me, it was true. Sometimes I wasn’t sure I had it in me either, to be like that. I thought of Kilian and what had been shared there. What hadn’t, too. Even now the compromises that would have kept us tied were nothing less than abhorrent to me. Not a brew I would ever be willing to drink. How strange it was that you could care so much for someone and yet find them to be such a stranger in the end. No, it wasn’t that kind of love. But for the two of us, I wondered if what she was speaking of wasn’t more precious. She’d called the Woe wild animals, once, that I’d let into my home. She’d done it while castigating me for being unable to see past my part of our story – but she’d done the same, in her own way. Assuming that there’d been anything to me but plans before I met them. Like I’d not been just as much of a stray, starved for everything they had to give. Being in love, it was a fickle thing. Fragile. And skin only ever meant what you let it. I’d never felt either of those things in a way I wasn’t willing to lose. I closed my eyes, letting Indrani’s warmth seep into me.

This, I was not willing to lose. Not with her, not with any of the others.

“Sometimes I think you’re trying to die,” she said, the words shaking me out of my thoughts. “Second Liesse... well, you’re not running from it anymore. But I figure you might be running towards it instead, and that’s not much better.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said.

“You won’t,” Indrani said, and it wasn’t a question. “You don’t have that right, if you do this to us.”

“‘Drani, I’m not trying to get myself killed,” I said. “I –”

“Your leg,” she said. “The limp. You telling me Sve Noc couldn’t have fixed that?”

I bit back on my first answer. Flippancy was less than this, than either of us, deserved. There were ways, not so different from the ones Black had once offered me. But none of them led to places I wanted to go.

“That’s different,” I said.

“It’s a weakness,” Indrani said. “And I don’t mean because it slows you down. You think you need the pangs to keep you grounded, I’m guessing.”

My fingers clenched.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “That sounds about right. There’s nothing noble about that, Cat. It’s just pain, it has no value .”

“I can still fight,” I said. “And it forces me to think , Indrani. Before I act, how I’ll act. To no longer jump in every pit, trusting I’m strong enough I’ll be able to crawl out afterwards.”

The echo of her own words had her smiling, I could feel it from the way she shifted against my shoulder.

“If you trusted yourself, you wouldn’t need it,” she said.

“Maybe I don’t,” I murmured.

“Is that really,” Indrani said, “who you want to be?”

I didn’t have an answer to that. She didn’t ask for one, either. We stayed there in silence, and for once let the world go on spinning without us.

It wouldn’t last, but what did?

Interlude: Congregation I

“Eighty-four: the only sensible solution to a maze is to not enter the maze.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

His son’s back was already a raw, bloody wound but Akil Tanja did not allow his arm to slow or weaken. Lady Aquiline was watching with those cold Slayer eyes, and would take even the slightest hint of mercy as an excuse to cast doubt on the validity of the punishment. The five-tailed whip – Blood’s Scourge, men called it, one tail for every founding line – no longer ripped wounds when it struck Razin’s back. All there was to be ripped open had been, by now: the Lord of Malaga only sent blood spraying, coating his own arms and face. Only three more, now, until the last had sounded. Fifty one in total. Ten for the Pilgrim and ten for the Champion, those who stood closest to dawn. Ten for the Binder and ten for the Slayer, bloody hands joined in prayer. Ten for the Brigand, warring alone, and one more after that to atone. With each old verse his hand struck again, until at last it was done. Razin remained kneeling in the snow before the eyes of every captain in the host, half-naked and bleeding. Akil’s eldest son had not wept nor screamed, and for that the Lord of Malaga felt a twinge of pride. That he’d remained conscious as well spoke well of his mettle, for the lord had seen older and harsher been break under the scourge.

Much had been lost, failing to take the streets of Sarcella waiting on the other side of the river, but perhaps some things gained as well. Razin could learn, if he lived, and through the savagery that’d just ended the Lord of Malaga had ensured he would. He glanced the Lady of Tartessos, standing surrounded by a ring of steel-clad captains, and she inclined her head in concession after matching his gaze. The undeniable harshness of the flogging had ensured she could not further contest the affair, as he’d meant it to. The Lord of Malaga, Akil Tanja of the Grim Binder’s Blood, raised the bloodied scourge he’d tormented his heir with to the sky and a hush fell over the assembly.

“Fault was incurred straying from the light of the Heavens, and from that light no succour will be given,” he called out. “Through the flow of ancient blood, let this dishonour be washed away.”

Shouts of approval came from Akil’s own captains, for Razin’s grit in suffering the scourge had redeemed him partly in their eyes, but from the officers of Tartessos there came only cold silence. Those captains sworn to Holy Seljun – in practice, to no one at all – offered only sparse cheers. Too many of their fellows had taken hard losses fighting the Army of Callow for them to be willing to lean towards Malaga over Tartessos openly. Akil passed the red-slick whip to his attendant and resisted the urge to wipe his son’s blood from his hands. Razin, brave to the end, tried to rise to his feet and walk away on his own terms. But pain and blood loss had robbed him of the strength and he immediately stumbled. The Lord of Malaga quickened forward just in time to catch him, resting his heir’s arm on his shoulder and holding him up.

“Father,” Razin croaked. “I-”

“Silence,” Akil ordered. “Rest.”

He passed on his son to his sworn swords, knowing they would lead him away to a tent far from prying eyes. Honour and law dictated that no priest could tend to wounds inflicted by Blood’s Scourge, and no doubt Lady Aquiline would keep watch on Razin to see if either was bent to ensure his son lived. In this, at least, she had been outplayed. Akil had in his service a binder who had studied with the mage-healers of Ashur, and there was no dictate concerning the works of sorcery. An invitation would be made for one of Lady Aquiline’s own sworn men to observe the proceedings, to ensure she could not even strike through rumours without dishonouring herself. Akil watched his son being carried away and mourned for the fool of a boy. He had other children, some who like him had been born with the Gift and so held true chance to inherit the Bestowal of their honoured ancestor the Grim Binder. Yet he’d named Razin heir over them even if he was blind to sorcery, or rather because of it. His eldest son felt that absence sorely, and it had lit a flame in him to always seek to achieve more. No other of his get shared that fire, no matter their other talents. But the need to prove himself had made the boy exceed both his authority and capacity, in Sarcella. The scars that would mar his back for the rest of his life might be the lesson he’d needed never to do so lightly again.

Or the failure might break him, and the Lord of Malaga would have to look to a new heir.

“He was not without courage.”

Lady Aquiline Osena, of the Silent Slayer’s Blood, strode past his sworn swords without a second look and stood by Akil’s side to cast a cool gaze at the same boy she’d tried to have killed today. The Osena were reputed to be a taciturn lot though Aquiline had the forked tongue of snake when she put it to use, which was often. The cleverness of a serpent as well. Before the assembly of captains she’d feigned mercy and offered for Razin to be punished only by the rod, pretending it mercy when it was either scheme or murder. Three blows by a wooden rod would have been the due of every captain in the host, if Akil had not instead grit his teeth and himself requested the Blood’s Scourge. The captains of Tartessos would have beaten him half to death by themselves, regardless of his private entreaties. And the consequence of making those entreaties to his own captains and those sworn only to the Holy Seljun would have been... dangerous. Forbidding his own officers from striking blows would have been the same as saying the lives of Tartessos soldiers were worth more than theirs, and the unaligned captains would have required either heavy bribes or rough intimidation to agree. The choice would have been, in the end, between effectively surrendering command of the army to Lady Aquiline or letting his son be beaten to death in broad daylight.

And now the same woman who’d schemed this would bandy words with him, when Razin’s blood still flecked his father’s beard.

“My tolerance has limits, Osena,” Akil harshly replied.

“As does mine,” Lady Aquiline said, tone cold as ice. “Your whelp lost near four thousand soldiers flailing at the Third Army and nearly got my right hand killed after stealing the command from her. Do not pretend this is of my doing, Tanja. The boy should have died for this outrage and the thorny oaths he passed on to us.”

In Levant, it was an old story that the enmity between the lines of the Silent Slayer and the Grim Binder found its source in the hatred those two great heroines had held for each other. Some even said that hatred came from their struggle over the affections of the first Grey Pilgrim, though Akil did personally believe that piece of the tale. The truth was that the bad blood came from over a century of fighting over who should own the lucrative orchards and mines in the valley of Lusia, which was located at the edge of the dominions of both Malaga and Tartessos. The last time there’d been longer than a few months without an honour feud being fought over the valley was under Yasa Isbili’s reign, and in those days Akil’s grandfather had been young. The Lord of Malaga had not been please to know his own soldiery would fight alongside Lady Aquiline’s, but there’d been no other choice. The Marave of Alava took orders from no one, those fucking blustering madmen of the Champion’s Blood, and the feuds between the Ifriqui of Vaccei and the Osena of Tartessos made those of his own line look like playful tussles. The Brigand’s Blood saw no dishonour in poison or ambush, as Lady Aquiline’s two younger brothers had learned the hard way.

“Honour was restored,” the Lord of Malaga briskly dismissed. “Why do you seek me out, Aquiline?”

“Trouble,” the hard-eyed woman replied. “I have word from further south.”

“Then speak it,” Akil said.

The Lady of Tartessos gave their surroundings and meaningful glance, and Akil conceded the point with a nod. To his own tent they moved, leaving swords sworn to either idling in the snow. He made certain to formally offer her hospitality and have her accept it, lest honour allow her to use any words spoken here to her advantage.

“There was a battle in southern Iserre,” Aquiline said, once the rituals were seen to. “Hasenbach’s twenty thousand marching up from Tenerife met the Spears of Stygia on the field.”

Ill news and boon ones, all at once. Akil had never counted on Procerans fools enough to be duped by the League to truly be of use in the battles to come, and that the Stygian phalanx was not following his army was pleasing to hear. Slaves they might me, but the Spears of Stygia had a daunting reputation. If the First Prince’s southern army had been crushed however, the situation in Iserre was fast worsening

“Whose victory?” he asked.

“Draw,” Lady Aquiline said. “The phalanx bloodied the fantassins but Arlesite cavalry routed Stygia’s skirmishers and struck at the back of the Spears. They both limped away with losses but in good order.”

Akil would have asked her how she knew this, if he considered it even remotely likely she would tell him. The amount of detail offered was impressive, nonetheless.

“Where are they limping to ?” the Lord of Malaga said.

“And there is the trouble,” she said. “The Procerans are now two weeks’ march behind us. They broke through the Stygian defence.”

Akil did not believe that any more than she truly did, by her tone. Procerans were not unskilled at war, for all that his people liked to diminish the worth of their blades. Their foot was match for any of Levant’s save perhaps heavy armsmen led by Blood, and as a rule their cavalry made sport of the Dominion’s if not outnumbered. Which Procerans very rarely were. They were hardly helpless babes, even facing Spears of Stygia, but cracking the slave-phalanxes would have been a bloody toil for anyone. If the twenty-thousand had been in shape for an orderly march this soon, either the Heavens had smiled or the Stygians had let them pass.

“The Tyrant,” he said, “is about to turn on us.”

This was not unexpected, for the Bestowed ruler of Helike was a dangerous lunatic, but the swiftness of that betrayal was inconvenient. The secret missives detailing the movements of the League’s armies and the assistance of the Helikean cataphracts in hunting down the Army of Callow had been well worth what was given in return – reports on the situation in Salia and the war against the Dead King – but it now seemed the offered ‘secret alliance’ was to come to an end. Of the bargain being revealed, Akil had little worry. He would not have accepted it otherwise. The Tyrant of Helike was breaking the most fundamental of the League’s laws by treating with foreign powers, as it was the sole prerogative of his Hierarch. His own allies would turn on him like hungry dogs, if it came out: he’d been at war with most of them a year ago, and that kind of slaughter was not easily forgot.

“We had our bargain’s worth,” Lady Aquiline said. “We’ve avoided battle with the League and the cataphracts slowed the Callowan columns. If my second had been left to her command, the Third Army would still be contained in Sarcella instead of days away and –”

“Enough,” Akil said. “Razin acted dishonourably, and for that was scourged. But if you intend to insist your Captain Elvera would have beaten the Black Queen , we will settle that claim blades in hand.”

The Lady of Tartessos smiled sharply.

“Can the Binder’s Blood afford another disgrace so soon?” she said, hand falling to the pommel of her blade.

Akil was unimpressed. She might be over a decade younger, but he was no steel-swinger to be made less by such a thing: he was a binder, first and foremost, from the line of greatest practitioner of that art there ever was. Age was power gained, not lost.

“Test me, Slayer whelp,” he smiled back, just as sharp. “See what comes of it.”

“A poor host, to offer threat,” Aquiline mocked.

“A poor guest, to give me cause,” he said.

A moment passed, and if not for the laws of hospitality he thought she might have drawn on him. But honour demanded truce, and so truce held.

“We cannot pursue the Callowans,” Lady Aquiline stiffly said. “We must first extricate the Procerans, lest the League kill them all.”

Neither of them had seen the need to plainly speak what they suspected. If the twenty-thousand soldiers of the Principate had been allowed to pass, it was so that the armies of the League of Free Cities could encircle all the other hosts marching across Iserre. Such a strategy would have been weakened, if the Proceran host remained behind it and able to strike at its back.

“I would not test the Black Queen without Bestowed at my side, regardless,” Akil admitted. “The Peregrine himself sent warning of her power.”

The Lady of Tartessos discreetly made the Mark of Mercy with her fingers, as he did, for while she might be vicious wretch even she knew the respect due to the living breath of the Pilgrim’s Blood. Even out on the outskirts of the Brocelian Forest it was known that the man who should be the Holy Seljun of Levant was not the one sitting the Tattered Throne.

“Then battle is delayed,” Lady Aquiline stated. “Lord Marave must contain the remainder of the Callowans up north and join with the reinforcements from Salia. After we’ve secured our own Procerans we can all of us together force a decisive clash.”

In northern Iserre, Akil Tanja of the Binder’s Blood thought. It would end in the furthest reaches of the principality, near the border with Cantal.

“Soon,” the Lord of Malaga said.

“Soon,” the Lady of Tartessos agreed.

—

The sun was setting over the battlefield, and the Army of Callow was once more victorious.

Parts of it, more accurately, Marshal Juniper thought. The First and Second Army had been reunited under her overall command, along with the Order of the Broken Bells, but the other two columns she’d sent off had yet to arrive. Fortunately, the Legions of Terror under Marshal Grem had bolstered her numbers to the extent that the forty-thousand strong of the Lord of Alava would be reluctant to clash with their allied commands. And this Lord Marave had been, at first, which made the last fortnight of continuous skirmishes rather interesting. In the distance, barely visible now that sunlight was dying a slow death, Levantine archers and slingers were withdrawing in good order. So were the companies of crossbows and regulars that the Hellhound had tasked with simply driving them back, knowing by now there was no point in trying to force a larger battle with the Dominion army. One day out of three, over the last two weeks, the Levantines had aggressively initiated a skirmish and refused to withdraw unless either heavy casualties or a large deployment by the Legions and the Army forced them into retreat.

The Levantine cavalry had attempted a few raids, at the start, before Marshal Grem nailed them with a munition-sown field and Juniper wiped out half their exposed skirmishers with a swift charge of the Order of the Broken Bells. Since that blow the Dominion riders had remained to guard the flanks of their skirmishers. Until today. Grandmaster Talbot had sallied out to turn back a charge that very nearly caught Juniper’s supply train by surprise – she now suspected the Levantines had used a last night’s snow storm to sneak a few hundred horse ahead of her army and hidden it behind low hills until she approached. In practice there’d been little fighting, for the moment the knights of Callow hit the Levantine horse it had scattered without giving much of a fight. But getting the columns in marching order afterwards had taken most of the afternoon, which she suspected was what Lord Marave had been willing to trade around a hundred cavalry for. This was not a strategy of attrition, she’d made the calculations. In both skirmishes and cavalry clashes, her force came out ahead in casualties by a moderate but noticeable margin. Which meant, she thought, that the Dominion was willing to bleed to slow her down.

Interesting , she thought once more.

The orc began the short trek war council tent she’d left to have a look at the battlefield herself, knowing she would be awaited inside. Banners flew above the cloth pavilion, more than there would have been a year ago. Catherine’s own, the silver balance on black that soldiers had taken to calling the Crown and Sword . Yet also the cracked bronze bells of the Order, and the gold Miezan numerals set on Fairfax blue of the First and Second Army. Lone among those, like a crow among birds, Lord Black’s personal banner flew the wind. Sheer dark, not a speck of anything else. It was telling, Juniper had thought, that alongside their own banners the Legions in Procer flew the Carrion Lord’s and not the Tower’s. The inside of the pavilion was warmed by braziers and illuminated by magelights, and for now emptied of the usual swarm of officers that would usually buzz around seeing to one task or another. Inside were seated two people, at the long table covered with the map of central Procer, the only other two who could be considered alongside her to have a real say in how this campaign was conducted now that the Deadhand had gone with the Fourth Army.

Marshal Grem One-Eye glanced up at her entrance and inclined his head the slightest bit. No a tooth bared, of course. As Marshal of Callow she was a peer, not an inferior or a superior, and Grem was famously disinclined to the kind of subtle posturing many of her kind fell into when jostling for dominance among assembly of equals. Mother had spent years trying to get a snarl out of him and never got more than a rare disapproving flash of fangs, Juniper remembered, and the pang of sorrow lingered beyond the span she allowed the memory. The other’s eyes remained on the map, the Lady-Regent of Callow frowning as she tried to match words on a letter to some marked location in Iserre. Vivienne Dartwick brushed back a long lock of hair and sighed, the royal seal of the Kingdom of Callow that hung from her neck moving as she did. Juniper moved the chair across the table from her and lowered her frame into it, ignoring the moaning creaks of the wood.

“Milenan must be using a different name than the one our own maps use,” the Lady-Regent said. “Otherwise it makes no sense.”

“Proceran cartography is famously imprecise,” Marshal Grem said.

“Particularly on the subject of borders,” Dartwick drily commented.

The other orc’s lips quirked, though Juniper was less than amused herself. Dartwick might be convinced she could squeeze Prince Amadis Milenan for information as long as the right prize was dangled, but the Hellhound had doubts on how reliable what they got out of him would be.

“I take it the walk cleared your mind,” the Lady-Regent suddenly said, looking up.

“It did,” the Hellhound grunted. “I don’t think this is about our columns anymore.”

One-Eye leaned forward with interest, but it wasn’t him Juniper needed to sell on this. Vivienne Dartwick was the one with the last word, these days, much as it irked the orc to even think it. The fact that Adjutant had looked to the Callowan for the final word when Juniper had come forward with the proposal for the Proceran campaign had driven that nail in hard and loud – whatever it was that’d lost the Deadhand yet another hand, it had changed things. And not just, the Hellhound thought, that she was nearly certain Dartwick no longer had a Name.

“Then what is it about?” the Lady-Regent asked, eyes considering.

“This isn’t attrition,” Juniper said. “They’re not winning that fight, not at the casualty rates we’re trading.”

“They’re exhausting us,” Marshal Grem noted. “The Legions have been on campaign for most a year now, even for veterans morale is fraying. And a lot of your soldiers are green, Marshal Juniper. They won’t hold up as well as Levantine foot under that kind of pressure. It might not matter they have less soldiers, if they have more in fighting fit.”

“I considered that,” she said. “And there is a sense to it – delay giving battle until they’ve brought us to the brink, and engage only after my other two columns have been dismantled by their other army.”

“But,” Dartwick said.

“They’re taking too many risks,” Juniper said. “That strike with the cavalry, today? That was an escalation in recklessness. I believe we’ll see the pattern hold up the longer they’re in pursuit.”

“The only gain from that was slowing us,” Marshal Grem calmly said.

There was a pause.

“You believe there’s a Proceran army headed our way,” One-Eye concluded. “Through Cantal, most likely, descending toward us following the lakes. We’re being softened up before they pincer us.”

“I believe they want to win the war in Iserre before the Grand Alliance moves north as a whole,” Juniper said. “And to do that they need to force a decisive battle, soon.”

“The Tyrant of Helike passed information indicating that most of the principality of Hainaut has fallen to the Dead King,” Dartwick frowned. “And the Lycaonese are steadily losing ground.”

The boy-king of Helike had been willing to cut a deal offering quite a bit of useful information, after failing to kill Juniper. Mostly useful in how to remain out of the path of the League’s armies, but the latest reports out of Salia and the war against the Dead King were of some importance. That he’d asked for detailed assessments of the Proceran and Levantine armies in exchange had been judged an acceptable price by Dartwick, and Juniper agreed. Anything making him more inclined to attack the Great Alliance than them was of some benefit.

“Procer can’t afford a long war down here,” Juniper agreed. “Attrition, defeat in detail – they’ll take too much time. If they’re not done here within two months, there’s a decent they lose the northern Principate. So they need us crushed, quick.”

“And large enough an army to intimidate the League into a truce, if not a treaty,” the Lady-Regent murmured.

Marshal Grem peered down at the map, and his face tightened.

“Not one decisive battle,” he gravelled. “Two. They smash us up north, smash General Bagram and the Princekiller further south and then link up to face the League.”

“We can’t keep marching north, then,” Juniper said. “We’re giving them exactly what they want.”

“Then what do you suggest?” Dartwick said, head cocking to the side.

Marshal Grem One-Eye grinned.

“We march back south,” he said. “And find out who’ll blink first, between us and the First Prince.”

Peregrine IV

“Justice is not the end of a road, the closing of a tale. One cannot be just, one can only act justly: it is a struggle from cradle to grave, not a prize seized and kept.”
– Daphne of the Homilies, best known for ending hereditary rule in Atalante

“You are not, I think, an evil man,” Tariq pensively said. “I have seen those among your peers who have allowed desire to master all else, and you fall well short of that depravity.”

Prince Alejandro Trastanes of Orense hid his fury well, though it was a paltry effort in the face of the sight the Gods had granted the Grey Pilgrim. Tariq was still learning the subtleties of the aspect despair had led him towards, the answer to his frightened prayer. To behold the truth of someone was not as paging through a manuscript, all to be found laid out in neat calligraphy. It was more akin to exposing a raw nerve, seeing what made it tense and flinch. Deeper natures could be learned from such a thing, the needs and beliefs that drove men like men drove carts, but to grasp truths less primal his own wit was needed. The Prince of Orense, for example, did not feel fury untainted. It was woven along the thread of pride, both arrogant and earned. Alejandro Trastanes was furious, Tariq decided, because a man he considered his inferior was passing judgement over him.

“Yet,” Tariq continued, “it cannot be denied that you have done an evil thing.”

Regret tightened in the man’s soul, but it was threaded too deep with fear to be genuine. It was the regret of one caught and facing consequence, not any true repentance. Pride pushed aside the rest, hand in hand with something more resolute.

“Good things as well,” the Prince of Orense said. “No true judgement, that which ignores all there is to be judged.”

Tariq had thought there would be only rage in him, facing the man who had ordered the murder of his sister. Something burning and righteous, a flame that would only gut out when the blot on Creation was harshly erased. Instead he found himself hesitant, as if on the edge of a precipice tall and windy. Like there should be consideration where before he had believed there would only be verdict. The Choir of Mercy spoke not a whisper, had not since his last brother had gone from traitor to ash. The Ophanim watched, always did, but now they kept their own council. The choices were his to make, the consequences his to discern. Is this disappointment, old friends , he wondered, or is it respect?

“You speak as if justice is a scale,” Tariq said. “The good of a man weighed against the bad, an arithmetic of choices.”

Alejandro Trastanes had set down the sword he had bared in surprise, when finding the intruder in his sanctum, and the Pilgrim had placed the now-empty cup of Praesi tea he’d taken by its side. The fragrance of the dark leaves from faraway Thalassina wafted up still, filling the small study with its scent. A single pot of that tea, Tariq knew, was worth a week of meals for a small family. That was the kind luxury the lean man across the desk was accustomed to, thinking it so natural it was not worthy of acknowledgement. Power held and kept for so long it was no longer questioned. Prince Alejandro thumbed the pendant hanging from his neck, the copper rose that held almost-unreadable inscriptions on the petals. Beware of war, for in waging it to earthly purpose you have lost the war waged within your soul. Famous words, these. Written by the renowned holy woman Sister Salienta in her work ‘The Faith of Crowns’.

“Is it not, Pilgrim?” the dark-eyed prince said. “Why else would the Heavens wait until death to part the wheat from the chaff? The sum of a man cannot be a single act, worthy or wicked.”

—

Izil Isbili, Holy Seljun of Levant, was eight years old.

The listlessness in the boy’s dark eyes had waned, after he was returned to his father. It took months of kindness and safety, of his uncle standing by his bed as the nightmares of sudden arrows and gasping deaths woke him screaming, until Tariq’s nephew became a child again. And the something more, for the Blood ran true. Tariq had beheld in silence as fire spread where there before had been a hole in the shape of Yasa, grief turning to the burning will to act . To do more than hold a title and officiate the debates of the great of Levant, to set out into the world unbent in the face of fear. Tariq beheld, and knew that in the precise moment where anguish was transmuted to resolve Izil had never more been his mother’s son. It was a second chance, the Pilgrim thought, a mercy bestowed upon him by the Heavens. His sister given back to him in that small, frail body moved by something greater than itself. And so Tariq stayed in Levante, where is heart had died and been born again.

He watched as his nephew sunk his teeth into his lessons with ferocious tenacity. Numbers and letters, every line of Blood and their greatest deeds. The routes of trade by sea and land, the beasts that still roamed the rough countryside of the Dominion or laired in its deep forests. Languages, more than even Tariq himself knew. The Three Sisters – Lunara, Ceseo, Murcadan – but also Tolesian and Chantant, Ashur’s High Tyrian and the tradertongue of the Free Cities. All these Izil Isbili attacked with a fervour that belied his age, and what others at first dismissed as a child’s fancy turned to admiration when the passing of months did nothing to fray it. At the age of nine the lessons of ink and word were portioned to leave room for those of steel, and there Tariq asked favour: in blade and warfare, his nephew’s tutor would be the Lady of Malaga herself. Sintra left her holdings in the hand of her brother and heir, and his heart sang almost as much for her presence at his side as it did for the sight of her teaching Izil how to swing a sword. The trite, mundane evil of mankind had robbed the world of Yasa Isbili, of all that she might have accomplished. Of all that she had to give to the land she had so deeply loved.

The Grey Pilgrim could think of no greater answer to that sin than helping her son do it all in her place.

—

“You speak of the soul as a ledger to balance,” Tariq said. “Like an evil can be excused, if there is an act of greater good to match it against. But every act matters. Each is judged, each is held up to the teachings of the Heavens. Holding to virtue nine choices out of ten does not make the tenth any less of a sin.”

Alejandro Trastanes laughed, the bark of it quiet but fierce.

“You speak as one of the Chosen,” the prince said. “One in a thousand times a thousand. How many mortals match your exacting standards, I must wonder? I am not exceptional , Pilgrim, in any sense of the word. I have been done ill, and done ill in turn – as those before me have, and those after will.”

“Is the wickedness of others an excuse for our own, then?” Tariq said. “Once upon a time the Empress Triumphant lived, and evils greater than any before her did she enact. Are all we born since that day to live lawless for it? Should our forebears have wallowed in vice and submission, instead of casting down the Tower?”

“You take my meaning to the absurd,” the prince said. “I did not walk under the same skies as the Empress Most Dread, and cannot speak to what I might have done then. I can speak as a prince among princes, born in this day. Did you not say, Chosen, that you have seen those among my peers mastered by desire and made vile for it?”

Tariq nodded, for he had. Crowned heads and those of their blood, having grown to see the span of their authority as a fence to break instead of a boundary to dread. Those who drunk of privilege so deeply they became intoxicated with the exemption of consequence to their actions.

“Why then, Grey Pilgrim, do you sit in my study and not theirs?” the Prince of Orense said.

—

Izil Isbili, Holy Seljun of Levant, was ten years old.

He’d sprouted like a weed, over the last year, and there was fond jest in the old city that never before had a Seljun needed ceremonial garb so quickly adjusted in size. Not even the almost legendarily fat Jarin Isbili, who by the age of thirty would have broken the back of a horse simply by mounting it. Tariq nephew was also patiently teaching a girl mere months younger than him how to properly place her feet to accurately loose an arrow. The Pilgrim watched it unfold, leaning against the edge of the balcony overlooking the palace’s archery yard, and smiled at the sight. Sintra chuckled, similarly amused.

“Do you think he’s figured out she damn well knows how to shoot a bow, by now?” his lover asked.

Tariq glanced at the woman at his side, and could not help but see more than his lover – there was also the Lady Marave, ruler of Alava, and it was her niece speaking with his nephew below. The daughter of her brother and heir. Now that Izil was growing older, what might have once been children at play held other implications. Sintra’s niece was not the only girl of similar age brought to Levante since the turn of the year, and none of them had been more than two degrees from one of the ruling lines of the Dominion. Word had spread that his sister’s talents had flowered again in her son, and this time few of the mighty in Levant did not want blood tie to the boat they thought would rise with the tide.

“He has,” Tariq said, looking away. “He’ll be seeing how outrageous he can make the lesson before she visibly reacts.”

Sintra snorted approvingly.

“That’ll teach the girl,” she said. “She’s of the Champion’s line, not some delicate flower in need of hand-holding.”

He inclined his head, neither in agreement nor disagreement. Whatever Sintra’s niece might have intended, she was interrupted by a throng of other children. Many of them girls, meant for the same purpose, but there were boys as well. Two Tanja cousins from Malaga, a main line Ifriqui from Vaccei, even the youngest brother of the ruling Osena in Tartessos. Two dozen children, all in all, some from minor Blood but all from an old line. The jostled and the laughed and they argued, but all of them turned towards his nephew like sunflowers following the sun. He could already see it in them, the beginning of true kinship. And now that Sintra’s niece was among the lot, an old path was taking shape. Champion, Binder, Slayer, Brigand, Pilgrim. The founding lines of the Dominion, coalescing around an Isbili.

Izil’s reign would be many things, Tariq suspected, but banal would not be one of them.

—

“I am here,” the Pilgrim said, “because you ordered the murder of my sister.”

The prince’s surprise was obvious. He had, Tariq saw, expected denial and obfuscation. Or perhaps some sort of justification for twining mortal kinship with an act that would see the powers of a Bestowed put to use. The healer saw no need for any such convolution, for the truth was plain and even if it had been unworthy he would not have balked from it. It was, however, not unworthy in the slightest.

“Then this is vengeance,” Prince Alejandro said. “And not justice, for all your pretence otherwise.”

“You have ordered the murder of another child of the Heavens,” Tariq mildly said. “You are now being put to judgement for this act. Where, prince, is the injustice?”

“You are no impartial judge,” the Prince of Orense said.

“The act is writ in you,” the Pilgrim said. “Confession was given as to the means and motive. The truth is clear as cloudless sky. There is no partiality to be had .”

“That you are here at all is partial,” the other man hissed. “Are there no greater evils to be seen to than a man with blood on his hands? Are there not thousands in Procer alone who have done what I have done, and more of it still?”

“And this,” Tariq said, “excuses your act?”

“You chose me,” Alejandro Trastanes insisted. “Is that just, Pilgrim? That what brought you here is a brother’s wroth, yet you would force on me a Chosen’s fatal decree?”

“I chose the evil that was wrought,” Tariq said. “And that evil brought me to you, demanding reckoning. You are not underserving , Alejandro Trastanes.”

—

Izil Isbili, Holy Seljun of Levant, was twelve years old.

Too serious for a child, Tariq often thought, but then was this not so often the way for tragedy’s get? Joy did not come easy to Izil, though neither was it unknown to him. Curiosity came more often, and when the line of teacher and pupil did not stand between them his nephew sometimes sought out his company for talk of faraway places. Of the Heavens and the Gods Above they did not speak, for Tariq would not force such harsh truths on one so young. It was not all harshness, the Pilgrim knew. There was kindness and warmth, too, a patience to the grace that was offered to all the souls of Creation. But Good could not be only that, lest Evil triumph over it, and fool he might be but he still he hoped Izil might never have to embrace that axiom. Not if Tariq remained at his side, as he should have Yasa’s. Once the Pilgrim had been blind to the ugliness that cornered his kin even as he journeyed across Calernia to ward off the same taint, but he would not repeat his mistake. The Ophanim had answered that choice with only silence, but he knew they did not disapprove.

They were waiting, patient in the giving of their grace.

The summer night was lazing on towards dawn when his nephew knocked at his door. Tariq’s sleep had long been light, so it was with messy robes with sharp mind that he ushered in Izil. The boy’s eyes were surrounded by dark circles, and the older man wondered if his nephew had not begun to push himself too hard. His mother had been the same, once upon a time, that light in her almost furious that there was so much to learn and so little time to learn it. That hours would need to be wasted on something as empty as sleep. The Pilgrim’s calloused hand tucked back an errant curl of hair on Izil’s brow. They both pretended his nephew did not lean into the touch. The same way they pretended Izil did not sometimes look at him in a way that whispered father , and at Sintra with an even more hesitant mother . There were too many knots unseen to it, too many things unresolved. All grieved Yasa Isbili still, and Izil’s true father still lived. But the boy had grown to resent the man’s powerlessness, Tariq had beheld it unfold. And shameful as it was, neither he nor Sintra had turned away the affection so quietly offered.

They would never have children, the two of them. Yet sometimes, when he watched his lover teach Izil the swordsman’s stance from the balcony, he could almost close his eyes and... It was a shameful thing, but Tariq had not pulled away from it as perhaps he should have.

“Sleep is not without purpose, Izil,” Tariq gently chided. “The books will still be there come morn.”

His nephew’s dark eyes – Yasa’s eyes, Isbili eyes – flicked down, but in the boy he saw the truth that his assumption had been mistaken.

“Nightmares,” Tariq stated, and withdrew his hand. “I will make us tea, then.”

The Ashuran leaves were bitter on the tongue, though he had always been partial to the taste. His nephew was not, and so he now kept a small pot of honey in his rooms. It was not long before the water was boiled and poured into ornate clay cups Tari had been gifted by a grateful merchant in Nicae, what felt like a lifetime ago. While he set himself to the work, his nephew had wandered onto the balcony and the stained glass doors to it lay open. The Pilgrim joined his nephew outside, and pressed the warm cup into the boy’s hands. They stood there for some time, waiting for the tea to cool they watched the distant sea. A storm was brewing, very far away.

“You have been to Procer, uncle,” Izil said.

“I have,” Tariq agreed. “Many a time, when I wandered still. It is a strange land, in many ways. Its people are capable of both great sacrifices and great odiousness, and it is not always a different soul that holds this capacity.”

“They made us slaves, once upon a time,” Izil softly said, eyes on the dawning storm. “Took everything that we were, until we took it back with blood.”

“All those that did the taking are long passed, nephew,” Tariq quietly replied. “We do disservice to the living by warring in the name of the dead.”

“Are they?” Izil said, turning with a hard stare. “Gone, truly?”

The Grey Pilgrim met his eyes, and said nothing.

“It doesn’t matter,” the Holy Seljun of Levant suddenly said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re dead, uncle, because their children are just like them. Blood told. The only difference between the princes that took Levant and those that rule now is that there’s a wall in the way. And walls don’t protect from everything, do they?”

“Someone told you,” Tariq said.

“Of course someone told me,” Izil tiredly replied. “I am to rule, one day. They all curry favour.”

“Mercy,” he said, “can be a cold thing to behold. But it must be offered, nonetheless.”

“Why?” his nephew said. “We might as well be tossing silvers into the sea, uncle. They do not learn . They do not change . They take because they think themselves stronger, that no one will ever call them to account.”

“It’s not about them, Izil,” Tariq said. “It’s about us. Who we are willing to be, when the choice stands before us.”

“They didn’t give Mother a choice,” Izil hissed, eyes reddening. “They just shot her.”

The weeping took him, after that, and Tariq cradled his nephew’s small frame as the sobs made it shake. He would only understand it years later, that you cannot truly look at someone when you hold them so closely.

—

Tariq’s hand was already raised, when the door flew open. It was not soldiers with swords bared that entered. That would not have seen him release the Light as he did. No, it was laughing children. A girl and boy, neither older than seven, both dark-haired and bearing clever green eyes.

“Papa,” the girl said. “Gorja said that-”

“She’s lying,” the boy insisted.

Neither of them even noticed him sitting across from their father, a bare sword and a pot of tea between them. Their mother – tall and shapely, fair-haired – followed behind, looking as put-upon as amused. Prince Alejandro had gone still as a statue, and Tariq did not need to look to know the terror that had seized him.

“ Caridon ,” the mother began in Tolesian, “It appears that-”

She froze at the sight of them, at the blankness of her husband’s face.

“Children,” she said, voice tight. “Your father is entertaining a guest.”

Their eyes only turned to Tariq then, and he smiled gently. They both looked dubious at his presence, perhaps skeptical that their princely father would entertain one as obviously travel-worn as he. They were mannerly enough not to speak their thoughts.

“I will speak with you all later,” Prince Alejandro said, his tone admirably calm. “But you must leave me to attend to this matter first.”

“Come along,” the Princess of Orense said, tone brisk as she tugged back her children.

The boy protested, and her fingers clenched like claws when she forcefully dragged him out. Tariq rose to close the doors himself, as they had not.

“My family, Pilgrim,” the prince said. “They are not – they did not know.”

A lie, Tariq beheld it immediately. He must have spoken of the matter with his wife.

“I am not the murderer in this room,” the Pilgrim said. “They have nothing to fear from me.”

Prince Alejandro’s answering smile was bleak.

“Not yet, no,” he said.

And that, more than anything else spoken tonight, gave Tariq pause.

“The girl,” he murmured. “She is eldest?”

“My heir,” the prince agreed, just as quietly.

He could see it, Tariq thought, as clearly as if the Ophanim had granted him the vision. The shape of this, sculpted by ineffable hands. In Levante, the son of a slain mother. In Orense, the daughter of a slain father. Between them a wroth that no fear no reason would abate, and the sea of corpses it would lead to. War between Levant and Procer, and how it would pull in all the rest. Ashur, wary of its protectorate again being swallowed by the greatest power of Calernia, would strike out. In the League of Free Cities war would bloom sure as the coming of dawn, from the opportunities or the mere debate over whether they should be taken or allowed to pass. It would spiral outwards, a madness that would make a hundred thousand orphans out of the unbending hatred laying between two. Tariq would not stay his hand because Alejandro Trastanes had a family that loved him. It changed nothing. But neither could he raise his hand in the service of unnecessary suffering.

“You will abdicate,” the Grey Pilgrim said, and soft as the words were they rang with the steel of a decree. “And spend the rest of your life as a lay brother in the House of Light.”

The Prince of Orense shivered.

“That is just,” the man who’d murdered Yasa said.

“No, it isn’t,” Tariq sadly said.

But it was not the Choir of Justice that he was sworn to.

—

Izil Isbili, Holy Seljun of Levant, was fifteen years old.

With the turn of dawn he would be sixteen and rule the Dominion of Levant in truth. For many years he had prepared for this day, Tariq knew. Promises had been made, both in the realm and beyond it. Grand designs had been patiently awaited, and among them lay the taking of war to the north. Years of argument had done nothing to change this, or change the choice of those who would go to war at the side of Izil Isbili. And so the Grey Pilgrim tread the quiet halls of the palace, in the dark of night, and into his nephew’s rooms did he creep. He wept as he pressed the pillow over the boy’s face, but his hand did not fail. He would despise himself for this, Tariq knew, until the day he died. But he despised unnecessary suffering even more. The Ophanim laid their hand on his shoulder, afterwards, in comfort. Their saddened whispers broke the silence of many years with a chorus of grief.

But none called him wrong .

Some Recent Changes

Hey!

Some of you who had a look at the comments section last night will already be aware, but there’s going be some changes to the Patreon for the Guide and so in all likelihood to the update rate of the coming month (if not longer). There’s a minor update as well, regarding PayPal. All of this is detailed below.

In essence, the current rate of three chapters a week and the monthly extra chapter has turned out to be a full-time writing job. I can’t maintain that and take contracts on the side, not while keeping up quality on both sides. Since I’ve no intention of stopping to write the Guide, I’ve had to push upwards the Patreon goal for three updates a week. It’s not significantly higher than what the very generous people on the platform are currently sending me, but it’s enough to make a difference to my own finances.

Chances are the new goal won’t be met for this month, which will mean return to two updates a week for March. Chapters under that schedule would be coming out on Wednesday and Friday.

A while back in the comments it was pointed out to me that some people prefer PayPal to Patreon when making donations, and at long last that’s been seen to. In the side menu, just under the Patreon tab, there’s now one that links to PayPal as well. Feel free to send however much you like, anything is appreciated – though I understand very well that it’s not everyone who can afford to contribute. (To clarify, PayPal donations will count towards the month’s donation goal.)

Regardless of all this, I want to take a moment to tell you all how happy I am that the Guide has ended up with the readership and online community it has. It’s been a pleasure to write the books, so I hope they’ve been a pleasure to read – and that you’ll stick with me until the end of the series.

March Updates

So, this was pretty unexpected. I can’t thank those of you who chipped on Patreon enough, it was heartwarming – and more than a little flattering – to see the goal met in less than 48 hours.

As it turns out I misunderstood the way the platform charges: the beat of a few days between the first and the transfer is to allow for people to decline, new patrons aren’t added. The total seen on the Guide’s page is for the next month.

That didn’t end up mattering, though, as the PayPal donations pretty much covered the gap anyway. Special mention to Charles Paige, who by the sum sent I’m guessing just looked at what was missing from the goal and sent that.

In summary, we’re staying on three weekly updates for March. Chapter will be up after midnight, as usual, and once more thanks to everyone for their support!

Interlude: Congregation II

“What do you mean, they ‘went around the maze’? Do you have any idea how much it cost us to build that?”
– Dread Empress Malignant I

They weren’t even halfway through Brabant when Hasenbach’s envoys found them. For all that there were rumours of some strange disruption of scrying down south in Iserre, Princess Rozala Malanza noted that the First Prince’s clever mages had no such trouble outside of it – they would not have been so swiftly found otherwise. Not that they’d been trying to hide, but what did that matter when hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees were fleeing south from the armies of the Dead King? Reluctant as the Princess of Aequitan had been to strip so much as a single soldier from the defence of Cleves, there’d been no choice but to ride south with an escort of well-armed horsemen. The sea of people forced away by the advance of the dead were starving and terrified, and Rozala knew well that those with nothing to lose might be willing to take a chance on well-dressed and well-fed travellers. It would have been something of a farce for the three royals heading south to survive the horrors of the war in Cleves only to die to some starveling with frostbite and a hoe. Still, dark as the situation was in Brabant – and no mistake, it was nothing less than grim – it was pleasant dream compared to the war to the north.

Or perhaps it was the other way around, Rozala thought, stirring the contents her goblet with a thin copper rod. Perhaps it was the months she had spent fighting in Cleves that were the nightmare. Gritting her teeth, the dark-haired princess forced her hand to cease shaking and drank the full goblet of brandy tinged with poppy tea. It should calm her enough, she thought, that tonight she would not need to resort to a Hannoven drowse to fall asleep – namely, sleeping with her ear to the floor to be assured she would wake in time if the dead and the damned were digging up from below. The Gods were merciful enough that she had time to begin feeling the effects and put away her affairs before her bodyguard announced Louis. The Prince of Creusens looked as bone-tired as she felt, but he offered her a wan smile and sat by the shutters with her when invited. His eyes flicked to the half-open scroll left on the small table between them, too polite to be caught staring.

“So it was you they wanted,” Prince Louis Rohanon said.

There was no mistaking the broken seal of the First Prince, but instead of replying Rozala unfolded the scroll a little further and let her comrade glimpse the seal that went unbroken at the bottom of the text. The Highest Assembly’s. In time of war Cordelia Hasenbach’s word was law, in affairs military, but having her order seconded by a motion of the Assembly meant disobeying it would have Rozala legally committing treason. She’d be stripped of her title as Princess of Aequitan as well as her rights in the Highest Assembly without any recourse, the vote considered as having already been taken through the initial motion seconding the order. Louis’ eyes narrowed, and his shoulder twitched. The Prince of Creusens was not cut from warrior’s cloth: he was both shorter than her and thinly muscled, with delicate hands. Dark-haired and soft-cheeked, he looked more scholar than soldier. Yet he was also clever, of good sense, and perhaps one of few decent men wearing a crown she had met. The tragedy of his life had been inheriting a principality ravaged by the Great War and finding that the only man willing to loan him the coin to heal it was Amadis Milenan.

The scope of the debt was reputed to be massive, and Louis had admitted to her in confidence it was unlikely to be fully repaid in his lifetime. Amadis had offered to write off a part of the sum should Louis lead soldiers in his support during the Tenth Crusade, and once the horse had been hitched to the cart it had seen the Prince of Creusens dragged through horrors all the way up to Cleves. And back, now, but it seemed they were to walk into a different sort of danger. Louis’ shoulder twitched again, and he let out a frustrated breath. Giving in, the prince glanced quickly at the door to confirm it was closed and behind him to be certain there was no one between him and the wall. Three heartbeats after looking, his shoulder began twitching again. Rozala could not think less of him him for this – she’d not been in the bastion, when the ghouls had slipped through murder holes and begun slaughtering sleeping soldiers. Prince Louis Rohanon had been, and he was as uncomfortable without his back to the wall as she would be without skin touching the floor. It’d been the breach at Sautefort, for her.

No one had grasped until too late that the dead would not care about tunneling under water.

“I have been named to the supreme command of an army being assembled in Cantal,” Rozala said. “By the shores of Lake Artoise. Forty thousand soldiers, perhaps more.”

Louis’s eyes brightened.

“Reinforcements?” he asked.

“Not to Cleves,” she replied. “I’ve been ordered by Her Most Serene Highness to reinforce the Dominion’s armies and break the foreign armies in Iserre.”

“Praesi,” the Prince of Creusens bit out angrily. “Callowans. That’s not the war , Rozala.”

“The League as well,” the Princess of Aequitan reminded him.

“We should be making peace with all of them,” Louis said.

“I don’t disagree,” Rozala admitted. “But the seals are there, Louis.”

“Let’s see her enforce that , in the middle of the Dead King’s wroth,” he said. “Madness.”

Yet the truth was, Rozala knew, theat neither of them were all that popular at the moment. The attempt by Prince Amadis’ supporters – among which they both numbered – to force the Klaus Papenheim’s armies to chase after the Carrion Lord had been made known to all of Procer. It’d been framed, no doubt by Cordelia Hasenbach herself, as petty intrigue by the lot of them to attack the elected First Prince while she was sending her own kin to fight the Kingdom of the Dead. In the northern half Procer, save for Cleves where many of them had fought, they were not just a figure of mockery but villains outright despised. If they rebelled, and to refuse the First Prince’s order was exactly that, they would not find many allies. More than that, Rozala feared what even the smallest stir of civil war might do to the Principate at the juncture.

“I will go,” the Princess of Aequitan said. “Gods forgive me, but I will go. Adeline and Prince Gaspard should be able to hold for now.”

“Then I go with you,” Louis said.

She inclined her head, too thankful to words to properly convey it. Louis had not fought with his blade, in Cleves, but he had been her steward and seneschal. His ink and orders had been a thousand times more valuable than one more blade would have been.

“We ought to tell Arnaud as well,” the prince added. “Last I saw he was drinking himself into a stupor across the street, but he has an iron liver. Odds are he’s still awake.”

Rozala’s lips thinned. Prince Arnaud of Cantal was a rapist, perhaps worse, and an arrogant fool. There was no hiding from that. But none who’d been to Cleves, none of those who’d fought that endless tide of dead smashing against icy shores, would ever be the same again. And Arnaud Brogloise might be filth, but he was filth that’d held the fort at Langueroche alone with his retinue for three days and three nights. He’d fought on foot at the gates, and held long enough for a town of three thousand to flee south. Arnaud knew the stakes.

“Would you fetch him?” Rozala asked.

Louis nodded, poorly hiding his relief at no longer sitting with an unknown at his back. She’d have the table moved for when the three of them sat, the dark-haired princess decided, so he would not be afflicted again. She closed her eyes, for a moment, and felt like cursing. Fighting the Army of Callow or the Legions was not why the three of them had come south. Once upon a time they might have ridden south to scheme how to unseat Hasenbach, but since Cleves? No, not that. They’d come to exhaust their treasuries raising every company they could, contracting every fantassin and emptying every smithy in their lands before they rode back north. Rozala’s fingers clenched against the chair as she flinched at a sound that was not there. She was weeks away from the onslaught, now, and still she could hear the sounds in every silence.

The desperate screams of the dying as winged abominations spewed out fire and venom. The biting crackle of dark sorceries as they tore through steel and flesh. And that patient, relentless beat: forward, forward, always forward went the armies of the dead. Without pause or respite or the slightest speck of mercy. The levies and fantassins of Prince Gaspard of Cleves had died like flies in the face of the Enemy, even with Chosen holding the line at the capital’s port. When Rozala had arrived with the remains of the army salvaged from the Callowan debacle, she’d found the city of Cleves besieged by a sea of shambling darkness. Yet on the wall, a man had stood with a sword like the coming of dawn.

The White Knight had held the line until reinforcements came, defying all odds.

Three months Princess Rozala had shared command of the defence of Cleves with Prince Gaspard. Three months of an endless span of fresh horrors. Swarms of dead rats scuttling up through the sewers to devour wounded soldiers in their beds, rains of poison and acid, great abominations made from the bones of the thousands serving as moving siege towers that spewed out lesser dead over the walls. Three month of burning your comrades lest they rise again and turn on you, of battles that lasted through entire night and day for the dead simply never tired . But oh, they had taught the monsters the mettle of Procer.

They’d fought on rocky slopes and crawled through freezing mud, they’d sallied out in the howling winds and challenged the Dead King for every scrap of stone and snow. The White Knight and the Witch broke an entire fortress driving back a pack of dead Chosen, until their shore of the Tomb flew only the pennants of Procer. Thousands and thousands had perished for that, clawing at the dark in choking despair, but now along the shores of Cleves forts were being raised by the hands of bloodied veterans and smithies burned through the night to forge the swords that would be bared when the next wave came.

And the front in Cleves, Rozala well knew, had been the easiest.

At Twilight’s Pass the hosts of the Lycaonese had fought three battles in two days against the horde trying to force its way out of Hannoven. The same evening, soldiers said, had seen the coronation of three of the Reitzenberg: Prince Manfred of Bremen died of a poisoned arrow leading an assault to take back the furthest fortress of the pass, passing his crown to his eldest daughter and telling her to continue the charge unflinching before drenching himself in oil and taking up a torch. She’d passed it to her younger sister after losing half her torso to sorcery, and that sister in turn passed it to now-prince Otto Reitzenberg when she took a spear in the belly scaling the wall and fell thirty feet in armour.

The youngest of Manfred Reitzenberg’s children carried the charge to the end with that blood-soaked iron crown on his head, took back the fortress and held it for half a day before a dead Chosen brought down the walls and forced him to retreat further into the pass. This, Princess Rozala had been told, was the closest thing the Lycaonese had seen to a victory since they’d begun the fight. And still their people headed to Twilight’s Pass, streams and rivers of soldiers wearing old mail and iron-tipped spears. Through the ice and the winds they went to make the same old stand in that same old pass, as they had for centuries. The Princess of Aequitan had mocked these people for their brutishness and lack of manners, once upon a time, for their rough linens and bare-bone homes.

The shame of that remembrance burned her like acid.

In Hainaut, Princess Julienne Volignac lost the entire coast to the dead before the Iron Prince arrived to relieve her. Too long a coast, too few men to defend it and the craggy hills of northern Hainaut made it difficult to march large forces – or defend against many small forces, as the Dead King had sent. When Klaus Papenheim took command he fortified the outskirts of the crags and began clawing them back from the Enemy, battle by battle, but with the shores of the Tomb in enemy hands there was no end to the undead that could cross the lake. The city of Hainaut itself fell to a sudden offensive that broke through the defence lines two months in, and the Iron Prince was said to have taken a wound at the battle.

Princess Julienne herself died charging the dead with her personal guard of three thousand horsemen to buy the time for her people to flee the horde. Her sister Beatrice claimed the crown over the dead princess’ too-young sons and swore oath before the entire army that as long as single Volignac remained the Dead King would get nothing of Hainaut but ash and steel. The fight had soon turned desperate after the dead reached the flatlands, for they were harder to defend, but Prince Etienne of Brabant bankrupted himself arming every soul of fighting age in his principality and marched them north to ward off the collapse.

The north of the Principate was fighting for its right to exist with every bitter dawn, and she would not fail it. So Princess Rozala Malanza would hurry south and win the war they shouldn’t be fighting, so they could have a chance at winning the one they had no choice to fight.

—

If even one other royal requested a private meeting with Princess Rozala Malanza only to reveal they’d been secretly corresponding with the Tyrant of Helike, she was going to send the head of everyone who had back to Salia in a basket. When she’d arrived to the sprawling camp by the shores of Lake Artoise, what the dark-haired princess had found there was enough to make her blood boil. The more than forty thousand soldiers, half levies and the rest principality troops, she much approved of. It was the royalty coming with the finer soldiers that had her furious. The First Prince, evidently, has tossed every single prince and princess she could find at the army in order to accrue the largest host possible.

The result was a labyrinth of intrigue and petty bickering: including Rozala herself and her two princely comrades from Cleves, there were no less than seven anointed rulers assembled in the camp. Hasenbach’s orders had preceded her so there was no contest of her command of the army, but what she encountered was much worse: one at a time, three fools sought her out to proudly inform her of their foolishness. Princess Leonor of Valencis, Princess Bertille of Lange, Prince Rodrigo of Orense. All of which had been trading information with Kairos Theodosian of Helike.

That Rodrigo Trastanes would number among them she’d took a personal insult, for the man was a political ally. He too was one of Amadis Milenan’s pack of open supporters, having turned on his benefactor the First Prince last year. The three who’d been dropped on the head enough to make a bargain with the Tyrant of Helike and approach her with the secret she’d stripped of command and sent Louis to keep an eye on, as her appointed second in the army. Rozala would not trust anyone who’d thought it clever to trade information on the location of the Dominion armies in exchange for the same on the Army of Callow and the allied Legions. Not with a command, not with a seat at her council, not with a fucking chamber pot.

That still left Princess Sophie of Lyonis, who the First Prince had quite openly sent there to ensure that Rozala did not take the army and march on Salia to depose her. The ruler of Lyonis was the First Prince’s creature body and soul, having murdered her own brother at the Battle of Aisne when he’d tried to betray Hasenbach. For that she’d been rewarded with the crown of Lyonis over her three elder siblings, and remained viciously loyal to the First Prince ever since. The sole comfort of this was that the woman was not incompetent, or a stranger to war. Rozala had no true choice about having Princess Sophie in her council, but she was proving of some use as the mouthpiece of Hasenbach and so recipient of the First Prince’s answers.

As in, for example, why it had become so difficult to obtain weaponry and armour in Procer these days.

“You’re certain the dwarves won’t sell even if we triple the standing price?” Princess Rozala pressed.

The fair-haired Princess of Lyonis shook her head.

“They won’t entertain any offer, regardless of the contents,” Princess Sophie said. “The First Prince has confirmed it. It was made understood to her that further insistence would be not be taken well.”

Rozala almost cursed. The unfortunate truth was that, beyond equipping their own personal troops and keeping an armory that’d provide for perhaps the same amount of armed levies, few Proceran royalty bothered to accumulate armaments. What point was there, when it was possible to hire already-armed fantassin companies instead? If the situation was truly dire for a princess, an order of armaments to the Kingdom Under would provide what was needed as promptly as it could be brought by road from the closest dwarven gate. The Great War had lasted decades and seen a prodigious amount of cheap steel floating around the Principate, to be sure, but much of it had ended up in the hands of already-fighting fantassin companies or since been lost on foreign fields – Callow or the Free Cities. Smiths could not work without metal to work with, and it’d gotten bad enough in some parts of the Principate that the Prince of Orense had privately admitted to her he now had more silver than steel left in his principality. The existing mines simply could not keep up with the rising demand.

“We can fight two, maybe three battles before our levies are left to wave sticks and shout imprecations,” Princess Rozala grimly said. “Gods, do the dwarves want us to break in front of the Dead King?”

The Princess of Lyonis eyed her thoughfully from the other side of the table. If it’d been more than the two of them in the tent, Rozala thought, the conversation would have ended there. But it was only them and maps and mostly-untouched cups of wine, so Princess Sophie broke her silence.

“Her Highness believes it might the work of the Black Queen,” she said. “To make our war effort unsustainable.”

The Princess of Aequitan felt her fingers clench into fists. She breathed out only after a moment, forcing herself to approach it with cold eye.

“She’s a monster,” Rozala said. “But not one without reason. She’ll want us crippled by Keter, not outright devoured.”

“That is the First Prince’s opinion as well,” Princess Sophie agreed. “Yet there is a possibility we must contemplate: that she struck the bargain with the dwarves blindly, and that she may not return from her journey for months yet. If ever.”

Rozala winced. That would be disastrous. It wasn’t that the Principate wouldn’t be able to wean itself from reliance on the dwarves eventually. It was that it would take years for the mines and foundries to be raised to what was needed, as well as cost a fortune. Procer had neither the years nor the coin required for such an ambitious undertaking on hand.

“Then we make truce with Callow,” Princess Rozala said. “I’ve made my peace with fighting the League, Princess Sophie. The Tyrant has been meddling in our affairs so extensively the Free Cities are out to either take most the south or feed us to Keter. But Callow? We cannot afford that fight, not with the vultures already circling us.”

“An offer of truce was extended by the Lady-Regent Dartwick,” the other princess said. “Including withdrawal of the Army of Callow through the northern pass.”

Rozala leaned forward eagerly.

“And?” she said.

“It comes at the cost of allowing the Legions of Terror to retreat with them,” Princess Sophie admitted. “The overture was declined.”

“You can’t be serious,” the Princess of Aequitan hissed. “I don’t care if they butchered half of the heartlands, send the bastards out .”

“We’ve confirmed that if the offer is accepted, there will be rebellion within the month,” Sophie said. “It is a certainty.”

Rozala almost cursed her out for speaking in absolutes where there could be none, but stilled her tongue at the last moment. Hasenbach, for all her flaws, would not lightly abandon her own native Rhenia to the dead – and that was what she was doing, so long as armies remained fighting south. Which meant she was certain, and there was only one way that could be true.

“The Augur?” Rozala asked.

The other princess nodded.

“You are not to speak of this to anyone,” she warned.

The ruler of Aequitan almost rolled her eyes. That Sophie had not been meant for the throne of Lyonis was sometimes quite evident. It was quite gauche in such a situation to speak the words. They were simply understood , between well-bred women.

“How bad?” Rozala asked, morbidly curious.

“Most of the eastern principalities beneath Brabant,” the Princess of Lyonis said.

Which would collapse half the Principate, the dark-haired princess thought. Those lands were the most-populated and some of the wealthiest in Procer. Or they had been, before the Black Knight led his legionaries to take them to the torch and the sword. If a peasant revolt sparked there the situation would spiral out of control swiftly. Especially if some prince or princess saw an opportunity to seize the throne while any force that could stop them was stuck fighting up north.

“You’ve never fought the Army of Callow,” Rozala finally said. “So you might not understand exactly what it is you’re asking of me. I cannot crush their host without massive losses, Sophie. They’re hardened disciplined killers that believe in their cause.”

“That has been understood,” the Princess of Lyonis said. “Which is why your true instructions were not put to writing.”

Rozala Malanza leaned back, brows raising, and waited.

“Win a battle, Princess Rozala,” the other woman said. “And if the Callowans and the Praesi should manage to escape in good order towards the passage, afterwards? It is unfortunate, but the League’s presence would not allow you to pursue.”

So, Rozala was to clasp hands with the Dominion to give the enemy a black eye before letting them slink away. It sat ill with her to toss away the lives of soldiers – badly needed soldiers – for a play in the Ebb and the Flow, but if the alternative was rebellion then she’d swallow her tongue and do what needed to be done. However many died there, it would be a drop in the ocean compared to what would take place if the heartlands broke behind the defensive lines to the north. She drained the rest of her cup, and set to the business of getting her soldiers fed and marching.

—

In peace time it would have been against the laws of the Principate for an army to be mustered in the lands of a prince at the orders of the First Prince without the right being first granted by said prince in front of the Highest Assembly, but these were not peaceful times. Besides, it was in Cantal they were camped and the prince of this land was among her commanders. Prince Arnaud did not balk at providing what supplies he could. It was not as much as Rozala would have liked, but that was understandable given the damage done by the Legions of Terror. More surprisingly, he did so without any of the complaining the Princess of Aequitan had expected. Out of gratitude she began extending him invitation to the war councils that had previously been restricted to Princess Sophie and Louis. To her further surprise, aside from the occasional bout of arrogant bragging he proved to be rather useful. The prince knew his own lands well, and did not balk at emptying his own purse or armouries to strengthen the army. Rozala only understood exactly what was taking place when Prince Louis approached her as she rode ahead of the columns, a mere week away from the Iserran border.

“Rozala,” he greeted her calmly, dipping his head.

The Princess of Aequitan slowed her horse – he was not as skilled a rider, and might struggle to keep to her pace – and returned the courtesy.

“Louis,” she fondly replied. “I see you’ve settled the fools well enough to be able to afford a speck of freedom.”

“A prince’s labour is never done,” he drily replied.

That glint of amusement in his russet eyes Rozala would admit, if only to herself, made him attractive in a mischievous sort of way. It was not a thought she could allow herself to entertain. He might be a widower, and she unmarried, but the interests of their principalities were often opposed. To dally without any deeper commitment would cause dangerous scandal, and there could be no true privacy in a war camp.

“Ours certainly is not,” the Princess of Aequitan sighed. “I had counted myself fortunate, that we might never fight the Army of Callow again.”

“Ours are not fortunate years,” Louis said, tone dark, but shook his head afterwards. “Still, we do what we can. It to speak of that I have come.”

Rozala cocked her head to the side, silently inviting him to speak. After so many hours shared they had become more than passing familiar with each other’s mannerisms.

“When do you intend to begin inviting the Prince of Orense to the expanded council?” he asked frankly. “Any longer and the slight will grow too deep, he will become much harder to budge.”

Her brow rose.

“I had not meant to invite him at all,” Rozala admitted. “His dealings with the Tyrant make me wary of his judgement and reluctant to hear any advice from his lips.”

“You don’t need to actually take the advice,” Louis patiently said. “When did Amadis ever take ours? It’s simply a matter of binding him to you. You cannot afford to throw Segovia away if you are to cleanly take the reins. The blunder should make him eager to redeem himself, if anything.”

The Princess of Aequitan almost informed him she had no need of Rodrigo of Orense to run a brothel, much less an army, before she grasped what he actually meant. It was not the army she was leading that Louis was speaking of. He was under the impression that, in Amadis Milenan’s absence, she was usurping leadership of the alliance the Prince of Iserre had assembled. Through those eyes, Rozala thought, the sudden solicitude of Prince Arnaud took a much different meaning. He was currying her favour, much as he had once done Milenan’s. For a moment she thought of telling Louis this was not her meaning at all, but her tongue did not move. If she was perceived to have faltered halfway through a coup, her ‘supporters’ would turn on her without hesitation. And had she not only aligned herself with the Prince of Iserre for lack of other allies in the first place? More than that the man had not gone north, fought in Cleves or Hainaut or Twilight’s Pass. If the Callowans released him, would he truly understand? And if they don’t release him at all , her mind whispered, who would you trust to take the place of primacy in your stead?

“I am not Amadis Milenan,” she finally said, meeting Louis’ eyes. “I intend to take good advice, when it is given.”

“Then invite Prince Rodrigo to council tonight,” the Prince of Creusens said. “And I will begin to approach the other two who disgraced themselves.”

“Amadis never convinced them to back him,” Rozala said.

Leonor of Valencis had been friendly, but firm in her refusal of closer ties. Valencis and her own Aequitan had warred frequently, over the centuries, but just as often struck close alliances. Princess Leonor was, if she remembered correctly, a cousin in the fourth degree of blood. The ruler of Valencis had been a tacit supporter of Rozala’s mother when she’d made a bid for the throne during the Great War, though after the defeat at Aisne distance had been made between their courts to avoid incurring Cordelia Hasenbach’s ire. Princess Bertille of Lange was dependent on Salia for much of her principality’s trade – and therefore at the mercy of the First Prince’s displeasure – but she’d never outright entered the fold of the First Prince’s loyalists. She had a reputation for being cold-blooded and of mercenary nature even by Alamans standards. Amadis had simply never found a price that moved her, Rozala had often thought.

“But you are not Amadis Milenan,” Louis Rohanon replied, lips quirking. “I will see you at council, Princess Rozala.”

He dipped his head again, slightly lower than the first time, and left her to her thoughts.

—

Eight days later, headed into Iserre, the army began to hear fanciful rumours from refugees. Most of them about an army of dark ghosts that left no tracks and spoke no words.

Five days after that, the army began to hear rather less fanciful rumours about a clash between the Army of Callow and a Dominion army. The Callowans and the Wasteland allies fled south, refugees said.

Three days after that, Rozala Malanza found forty thousand Levantine camped on the snowy plains and waiting for her. She rode ahead to meet with their commander, the Lord of Alava, and begin planning the shared offensive.

The moment she truly knew it all had gone to the Hells was when she found the Grey Pilgrim waiting alongside him.

Interlude: Congregation III

“We sowers of ruin, straight-backed and proud,
Told them arrant, and arrantly kept our vow:
‘No bargain is there, between hunter and flock;
No peace between the rabbit and the hawk.’

We sowers of ruin, reaped all that was sown,
For as Mieza’s sons toppled our waning thrones,
They arrant said: ‘no bargain now, o lords of war,
For no peace can be, between spear and boar.’

We sowers of ruin, the reapers that were reapt,
Sing the elder song still, for we must not forget:
No bargain is there, between hunter and flock,
No peace can there be, between lash and orc.”
– “Ruin, Sown”, a spoken verse in Kharsum attributed to Yngvild Bittertongue, chieftess of the Red Shields

Lord Yannu Marave of the Champion’s Blood felt his scalp prickle. The last time the Lord of Alava’s instincts had been screaming this loudly, he’d come within a breath of having his crush skulled by a culebron whose scales he’d failed to notice among the leaves of the Brocelian. Yannu had been a young fool, back then, but raised his shield on impulse and so avoided dying to a whip of the tail so strong it put hammer blows to shame. He could not help but wonder if there was not kinship between the dangers of then and now. A fool was once more about to step on the tail a hidden serpent and die for that mistake. That he now stood at the heart of a great army instead of journeying alone into the deeper barrow-woods to bring honourable deeds to his Blood made little difference. As Yannu’s station had risen, so had the dangers accompanying it.

“They’re camped here,” Moro of the Brigand’s Blood said, tapping his finger. “On the other shore of the river.”

The heir to Vaccei had gained a few fresh scars, fighting at his mother’s side against the Marshals. What had already been a hard face on a hard man was now frightful to behold, the red marks left by goblin steel running jagged through the umber-brown and basil-green face paint of his line. The effect was strikingly attractive, though Yannu was careful not to let his gaze linger. He was over a decade older than the other man, after all.

“The river’s called the Odelle,” Princess Rozala Malanza noted, frowning as she bent over the table to have a closer look. “As I recall, the source is further east and the depth shallow. It’ll be frozen over.”

The Princess of Aequitan had been a pleasant surprise, the Lord of Alava thought. No Alamans intriguer, that one, but a hardened Arlesite commander who had already fought the greater of their foes on the field not so long ago. Wild rumours still spread about what had taken place as the Battle of the Camps, but not so wild that the Peregrine had not confirmed some of the lot. The Black Queen, if she had truly returned, would be a fearsome enemy. The part of Yannu that belonged to the Champion’s Blood was eager at the thought of measuring his prowess against hers. The part that was the Lord of Alava was wary instead, for it had fought against the Marshals for months and learned they had sharp talons indeed.

“If they have ended their march, then they must believe their eastern columns are close to joining them,” Yannu said. “We may be facing as many as sixty thousand eastern legionaries, along with however many there are of these grey ghosts.”

“Between our hosts, we have eighty thousand,” Princess Rozala said. “And if Lord Tanja makes his way as swiftly as promised with Her Highness’ southern army, that’s another sixty thousand hitting them from the other side of the river.”

“Likely double the enemy’s numbers, unless the Black Queen is somehow fielding an army that leaves no tracks in the snow,” Moro of the Brigand’s Blood said.

Word from Sarcella and Akil Tanja put these grey devil-ghosts at less than twenty thousand strong, though it was said some could wield strange sorceries. Yet they were also said to be no stronger than men, blade in hand, and just as mortal. Poorly armed as well, more tribes than companies.

“We should strike at the Hellhound’s camp before the rest of her divisions arrive,” Princess Malanza said. “Best for all of us we face that army without Catherine Foundling in it.”

“There would be great honour in taking the Black Queen’s life,” Moro told her bluntly.

The look in the younger man’s eyes spoke of esteem lowered for shying away from a worthy struggle. Yannu would withhold judgement instead. The Peregrine and the Regicide had promised they would take the field against the Arch-heretic of the East should she bare her blade, but the Lord of Alava still remembered the stories from the rise of the Barrow Lord. The warring of Bestowed was never kind to their lesser, and the Black Queen was said to be one of the greatest living villains. Even in death she might wreak great slaughter.

“The lucky ones died when the lake fell on their heads, at the Camps,” Princess Rozala said, tone calm yet not less sharp for it. “Those that drowned, though? It wasn’t as quick. They had long enough to realize there would be nothing to save them.”

The dark-haired princess smiled pleasantly.

“Which would you prefer to happen when you turn comes, Levantine?” she asked.

The heir to Vaccei twitched, no doubt reaching for one of the many poisoned blades on his person, but the Arlesite’s hand was already on the pommel of her sword. It was never very far from it, Yannu had noticed, and she seemed uncomfortable when it was.

“Enough,” he said. “Moro, you would bare a blade on an ally when the Peregrine is among us?”

The man’s lips pressed together in disquiet, as well they should. The Pilgrim might not be at this council, but the incarnate soul of Levant had made it clear as rain to all of them that his blessing had been given to the Grand Alliance. To dishonour the living inheritor in Blood and Bestowal of the Dominion’s father would be... Even should the Peregrine not take Moro’s life, the sheer weight of the shame might see the man slice open his own throat.

“There is nothing to be gained from threats, Princess Rozala,” Yannu said, eyes then moving to the Proceran. “We are to fight side by side on this field and more to come.”

“Apologies, Moro,” the dark-haired woman curtly said, dipping her head.

The heir to Vaccei returned the courtesy, just as curtly. It was for the best that Lady Itima had not been the one given slight to, for the Lady of Vaccei would not have left it at that.

“I stand by my words nonetheless,” the Princess of Aequitan said. “We must strike now, before they gather.”

“I am reluctant to engage without our full might,” Yannu admitted. “The armies of the League are marching towards us, Princess. If they are to try our flank while we face the Marshals then I would have all our soldiery arrayed against the enemy.”

Rozala had, amusingly enough, inquired if the Tyrant of Helike had sent envoys to make a bargain with Yannu’s host not long after she joined her army with the Lord of Alava’s. He’d replied that was indeed the case, and that those envoys could easily be found: the corpses, after all, were still hanging from the personal banner of the Lady of Vaccei. Lady Itima’s line had faithfully kept to the hatred the Vengeful Brigand had held against foreigners, and not hesitated to slaughter any sworn to the likes of Kairos Theodosian.

“If we get them to retreat from their camp, we can seize it and close ranks with Lord Tanja’s force there before the League arrives,” Princess Rozala suggested.

“Or their returning columns could find us engaged assaulting a fortified camp and spring an ambush before Tanja is close enough to reinforce,” Yannu pointed out with a frown.

Her insistence puzzled him, for she should well know that the Marshals were capable of plying nasty tricks against opponents made sloppy by haste. Had she not fought the Hellhound herself and come out the lesser captain? The Lord of Alava had lost hundreds to a vicious charge of Callowan knights before learning to keep his own horse close to his skirmishers, and would not go after his foe so brashly again.

“If we lose the initiative we risk this entire campaign stretching out for months,” the dark-haired princess reminded him, sounding frustrated.

There it is , the Lord of Alava thought. It had been a rare occasion for all the great captains of the allied armies to hold common council, for both Malanza and he were aware that old enmities would see blades bared should close company be kept. Yet on the two occasions it had, Yannu had studied the princes and princess of Procer. Seen the difference, the subtle currents that ran among them. That Princess Rozala was first among equals was clear, beyond even her right of command, and that the Princess of Lyonis was her appointed warden was just as clear. What had been more interesting, to Yannu of the Champion’s Blood, was that even within the Princess of Aequitan’s faithful there was more subtle division. The princes of Creusens and Cantal were closer in her trust than any other, and both of those men had... telltale marks. Louis of Creusens had pulled a knife without hesitating on a servant when she’d approached him from behind, halfway to her neck before he stopped himself. Arnaud of Cantal spoke loudly and often, but sometimes also fell into long silences where he moved not a finger. As for Rozala Malanza herself, Yannu had noticed when seated she never crossed her legs. She wore leather boots, and always kept their thin soles squarely against the ground. Like she was feeling for tremors.

All three of these, the Lord of Alava had been told, had gone north to the Principality of Cleves to fight against the armies of the Dead King.

“I was told that the lines in Cleves held,” Yannu said, watching the Proceran closely.

Princess Rozala’s jaw clenched.

“When the sea pulls back before the coming wave crashes, the shore has not held ,” she replied. “We bought a month, Lord Marave, maybe two. Our defences will break sure as summer’s turn if we wait longer than that. You have not...”

Yannu saw her lips moved in a whisper, counting out in Tolesian. Only after reaching twelve did she resume speaking.

“In Callow I fought fae and dead and villain’s wroth,” the Princess of Aequitan finally said, voice tight. “Believe me when I say that was a child at play . The Dead King comes for us all, Yannu of the Champion’s Blood. And every day we waste warring against mortals the Enemy gains a deeper foothold.”

Eyes hard, the dark-haired princess matched him gaze for gaze.

“I’ve had to claw back that shore from the Hidden Horror’s clutches once before,” she said. “Gods have mercy, but I do not know if there are enough soldiers left in Procer to do so a second time.”

It wasn’t the determination he saw in those dark eyes that moved the Lord of Alava. He has seen will in others, and smashed it to bloody pieces when it stood in his way. Mortals failed, mortals broke: a moment of resolution was just that, a moment. It always passed, and more often than not pain and steel hurried that passing. Neither was it the fear, for fear was an old friend to him. Yannu’s Blood was meant to strive for fearlessness, for the same reckless courage that was the Valiant Champion’s mark, but he had never forgot that day in the Brocelian where a splintered shield might have been a splintered skull. Audacity without patience, without watchfulness, was just another way of being frivolous with lives. Fear was the voice that kept your eyes open when bravery became arrogance, and he would not part from his even for a chance at Bestowal. No, it was the heartfelt belief Rozala Malanza had for her own words. She genuinely believed that the bell might toll for the Principate if they lingered here too long in Iserre.

“Then we march to battle,” Lord Yannu of the Champion’s Blood conceded.

“It’ll be ten days to reach the camp,” Moro said, stirring from his silence with hooded eyes. “If we hurry.”

“Then we hurry,” Princess Rozala grimly replied.

—

They had been, Hakram had to admit, shrewdly outmanoeuvered.

Juniper’s dispersion scheme had been solid, and it had certainly worked for the initial stretch of the march. The Third Army had baited the Lord Tanja’s host towards the east while the Fourth followed along parallel lines further north in Iserre, both keeping lines of communication open and keeping watch for a sudden march south by Lord Marave’s army. What messengers the Fourth Army had been able to receive from the Hellhound’s own two columns headed westwards had told them that the Levantine army under Lord Marave was pursuing them while leaving Marsha Grem and his legions to gather themselves. Until then, all had proceeded according to Juniper’s predictions: all she had to do was join with the Legions of Terror and force the Levantines back with a minor battle, to create a gap. Then the Third and Fourth Army were to shake off their own pursuit by Lord Tanja and hurry through that gap, assembling the entire allied force together. From there they could begin a fighting retreat to the northern passage, where the garrison under Duchess Kegan of Daoine would be awaiting them.

The opinion of the general staff had been that, considering the League of Free cities was invading from the south and the Dead King hitting northern Procer in force, the Legions and the Army of Callow would not even be hounded all the way through the retreat north. After the Grand Alliance saved face by ‘driving out the eastern invaders’, they’d been predicted to focus their efforts on containing the League of Free Cities while sending everything they could spare north. It would have been a campaign cleverly salvaged from the unexpected blow of losing the fairy gates when already committed deep in Procer, one fought with minimal losses while cleanly getting out the majority of the Legions of Terror under Marsha Grem.

Instead, the Fourth Army suddenly found its ability to send messengers north to coordinate with the Hellhound cut when a detachment of Helike kataphractoi began roving north of it. The messengers south sent to warn Nauk and the Third Army about League interference never made it, and were found with arrows in their corpses by General Bagram’s scouts. Adjutant had pushed for the Fourth Army to immediately move south and join with Nauk before marching north together, and the Fourth’s general agreed. One day into the march, however, a messenger form Juniper stumbled bloody into the camp with cataphracts in close pursuit. The First and Second Armies, the man said, had been taken by surprise and scattered when the Grey Pilgrim joined with Lord Marave and struck with miracles. The messenger had been an old subordinate’s of General Bagram’s, and the seals were in order. Gritting his teeth, Hakram had backed the decision to hurry and relieve Juniper – without a cohesive army to gather around, the legionaries of the First and Second would be hunted down like animals by the Levantine cavalry, scattered across the plains and vulnerable.

Seven days in, the messenger began bleeding out of the eyes and choked on his own tongue. The priests from the House Insurgent saw nothing wrong with him besides the obvious, but the ranking Senior Mage did when the corpse was dissected. A small stone inscribed with runes was dislodged from where it’d been ebbed at the bottom of the man’s spine, and examination under ritual confirmed the magic involved was illusory in nature. One of the few Soninke among the mage cadres eventually noted the runes had patterns in common with Stygian sorcery, and then it all fell together. They’d been had, the messenger was some poor bastard the Tyrant of Helike’s men had captured and tinkered with the memories of discretely enough neither priests nor mages had caught it until too late. A few years back, Adjutant thought to himself, the trick wouldn’t have worked. But the Army of Callow had expanded wildly beyond its capacity to field experienced mages, and the native Callowan practitioners that’d been brought in to try to remedy that were amateurs compared to Praesi warlocks. And Stygia’s Magisterium, as the success of the deception made clear.

Debate raged among the general staff of the Fourth Army, after that, for most of an evening. Some argued that if the purpose of the ruse had been to isolate the Third Army, it likely had been already destroyed by now. A strike by the cataphracts would likely slow down Nauk’s ten thousand enough that the Levantines would surround and destroy them utterly. Those same officers argued that marching south now would essentially mean throwing away another quarter of the Army of Callow for Levant and Helike to defeat in detail. Others suggested that it was the Fourth Army itself that was the target, and the ploy’s true nature was that the northern Levantines had let the Hellhound go and were instead marching south to pincer the Third and Fourth while Helike kept them all blind. Some even theorized that First and Second Armies truly had been broken, and this was all the Tyrant’s trick to lead them to dismiss the notion and hurry south while the rest of the Army of Callow was annihilated. It was bloody chaos, and not for the first time Hakram wondered at how young their highest rung of officers was.

The veterans brought in from the Legions that’d joined after Second Liesse were keeping it all functional, but there were too many officers who’d gone only through rough training camps before taking up their commission. But General Bagram was no greenhorn, and neither was Hakram himself. The debate ended with the decision to link up with the Third before the situation was further assessed, though careful scouting would be necessary in case the Third Army truly was destroyed and it was a Levantine force south of them. The Fourth Army moved out in good order, and a mere three days in ran into a Helike ambush. Somehow they’d avoided three lines of scouts, and that smacked to Adjutant of either sorcery or Named interference, but the result was brutal no matter the means employed. Three hundred dead, twice that many wounded, and the kataphractoi retreated with less than a score casualties on their side. The entire Fourth Army was boiling with fury at the humiliation, but it was only the first of many assaults to come. On its entire march back the way it’d been tricked marching, the army was relentlessly harassed by Helike. Night and day assaults, at irregular intervals, and in the end General Bagram had to order a fortified camp raised every evening or risk losing entire companies.

It was slowing them down even further, forcing them to end the march earlier in the day and exhausting the legionaries for the effort. Hakram suspected that might very well be the point, and by now was halfway convinced Nauk would be either up to his elbow in Levantines or days dead by the time they arrived to reinforce the Third. If any of it was even left. The anger of that stayed with him, and chased away the need for even what little sleep his body still required. His hours he spent either in talks with the general staff or out on watch with the legionaries. It was maybe halfway to Midnight Bell that he saw the glint of armoured riders in the distance, before even goblins caught it, and he immediately sounded the alarm.

“Shit,” Captain Mower cursed, peeking over the edge of the palisade, then added a very absent-minded ‘sir’.

The old goblin saw the same thing, and did not gainsay Adjutant when he ordered for crossbow companies to be brought to the fore. And half-companies of regulars too. The cataphracts had yet to try a charge, but that did not meant they would refrain if they saw an opportunity.

“So, what’s it going to be tonight,” Hakram said, teeth clinking softly. “Fire or exhaustion?”

“Bet you it’s fire, sir,” Captain Mower said. “Been too long since they tried those pitch arrows.”

The goblin spoke the word ‘pitch’ with the kind of utter disdain that would make a High Lord proud. He was a scout officer, not a sapper, but in Hakramès experience that’d never stopped Eyrie get from looking down at the unprofessional savagery of people not using proper goblin munitions for this kind of work.

“They gain more to less risk by forcing us to wake in the middle of the night then hitting us during the day at peak exhaustion,” Adjutant said. “The surprise with the scorpions killed a few dozen last time they got close to the palisade.”

“They won’t fall for that twice,” Captain Mower sighed. “Almost makes me miss Akua’s Folly, at least the wights weren’t mounted.”

“I’d even settle for Dormer,” Hakram gravelled. “And the bloody fae could fly.”

“That’s the Black Queen’s service for you,” the goblin grinned. “It ain’t the Army of Callow if we’re not fucked a different way every time.”

There was a ring of inexplicable cheers from the rest of the line at that, as the captain had raised his voice to carry. Catherine’s popularity with goblinkind never ceased to unnerve him. Robber had once told him it was because she was ‘the closest thing a human can get to a Matron, but you know the fun kind of Matron not the other kind, and it sort of helps she’d probably murder the other Matrons given a chance, although let’s be honest so would the other Matrons’. It’d been surprisingly coherent, given how much drink his friend had in him by that point. Not that Robber ever answered these kinds of questions by anything other than blatant lies unless he’d been plied with liquor and petty crime first. Pickler wasn’t any more of a help, as he’d been the one to inform her of the phenomenon in the first place. She’d never noticed.

“Well now, that’s new,” Captain Mower suddenly said.

Hakram’s attention snapped back to the present. Behind him the thin stripe of regulars was already standing at attention while the crossbow companies formed up behind them and checked their gear. That much was to be expected: they’d had a harder teacher than mere drills to get them to do it all quick and clean. What wasn’t expected was the way the Helike cataphracts had stopped about a hundred yards away from the palisade. They were – wait, that wasn’t a Helikean. There was a rider between the enemy and the camp, alone. Adjutant’s heart stirred, but what brought it home was the sudden shouts of surprise coming from deeper into the camp. A wooden post was snapped out of the frozen ground and alarm sounded again as long wings began beating. A frankly chilling whinny sounded into the night and Zombie the Third took flight, the wooden post she’d been tied to swinging under her hanging by the bridle.

“Not new at all, Captain,” Hakram Deadhand grinned, all teeth and malice. “ She’s back .”

Chapter 18: Fable

“Some acts only have to be committed once to afterwards echo a threat in your every silence.”
– Dread Empress Massacre the First

The Tyrant’s soldiers were killing my people.

The cataphracts, when I’d caught sight of them from miles away, had been forming up for a night raid. This was war, I reminded myself. Besides, for all my talk of alliances and bargains with Kairos he remained as much a foe as a friend. No doubt some scheme was afoot, one that involved prodding the Fourth Army into moving some way or other for deeper purpose. Skirmishes against the Levantines, maybe, or to make certain the Fourth did not encounter one of the League’s forces. The cataphracts were harassing my legionaries, as they had the Third’s, not pulling knives and engaging in struggle to the death. This was no different than Malicia testing the eastern borders of Callow with refugees and warbands, like a villainous cat taking its claws to something to see how it reacted. It would be wisest to chide the Helikean cavalry, slap them on the wrist and send them off to trouble someone else. They’d cased their raid when I intervened, hadn’t they? Just the sight of a lone rider had put the charge of sundry four thousand kataphractoi to an end, and as I my valiant Zombie the Fourth cantered forward their ranks bent inwards. They were following orders, obeying one of those fearsome madmen Helikeans had idolized for centuries. I told myself all this, as I bid my mount to stop, and it was enough to stay my hand. Then my mind whispered: the Tyrant’s soldiers are killing your people.

My fingers clenched, leather gloves creaking. The Mantle of Woe trailing behind me, stirred by the night’s breeze, I watched as a pack of officers under Helike’s own banner rode to the fore of the host. Five of them, in weather-beaten armour, blades sheathed at their sides. Their conical, crested helms boasted red ceremonial feathers that jutted like a splash of blood, and beneath the rim of the steel cap two curved strips of steel demarcated their eyes. From those a shawl of mail descended to their chests, the lead officer among them unclasping hers to reveal a scarred mouth.

“Black Queen,” the Helikean said in accented Lower Miezan, “I-”

“Kneel,” I softly interrupted.

In the silence the followed the word rang like a thunderclap. There was a pause, the breeze raking its unseen fingers on the carpet of snow between us. The officers assembled behind her mouthpiece bridled at the order. Their leader raised a hand.

“We serve the Tyrant of Helike,” the woman replied. “And bend before none other.”

My staff rose, and with a thunderous snap I brought it down against the wintry ground. The order I had not spoken sounded across the Night like rippling decree, and under the crescent moon’s smile the veil we had approached under was ripped away. The banner-sigils jutted out like the masts of a ship in the utterly still sea of Firstborn, fluttering in low murmurs. Red and black and blue, crisscrossed by strokes of silver and gold. Among them two stood higher than all the rest. Ochre inlaid with gold, a rainflower in bloom. Rumena . Purple cut by silver, a tree bearing twin circles unfinished. Losara. Twenty thousand drow stood like statues around Helike’s riders, grey skin touched with the colours of their sigils. Fear ripped through the steel-clad killers sworn to the Tyrant, like a sudden and brutal shiver.

“Kneel,” I softly said, “or Gods be my witness, I’ll kill you all.”

Shapes slid across my face, two crows far above gliding far above passing between the moon’s cast and my silhouette. Casting razor-sharp shadows as the Sisters smiled against my neck, Andronike humming in approval. She had not forgot the nightmare made of Rochelant, and held no love for those what would serve its maniacal architect. I found their leader’s pale eyes, circled by steel, and saw fear spread through them like ink in water. The words that followed were hurried out, and beneath my notice, even as the soldiers began to dismount.

Under crescent moon four thousand kataphractoi knelt in the snow.

“You will stay knelt,” I said. “Until I tell you to rise.”

Zombie heeded my will and turned around, leaving at an unhurried trot. I left them with their knees to the ground, and went to bring my Fourth Army back into the fold.

—

The cheers began sounding from the palisade when I came within ninety yards. Behind the wooden fortifications the Fourth Army’s camp had lit up with fire and fervour both, like an anthill boiling over. Torches lit up, and the wall facing me was pulled open. Within seventy yards I could make out the twin rows of soldiers assembling to make an avenue of steel leading deeper into the Fourth’s camp. When I reached sixty yards, a winged shape descended from the sky and landed before me in a geyser of snow. And... wood? What was a post doing – Zombie the Third, bright blue eyes shining with glee, whinnied loudly and trotted up to my side. My lips quirked and I ran my gloved hand down her mane.

“Hello, girl,” I murmured. “Missed me, did you?”

The winged horse I had... acquired from the Summer Court through technically blasphemous means sauntered around my current mount, turning around the back and coming close to affectionately brush against my good leg.

“You are a good girl,” I praised, patting her neck. “Unless you’ve been eating corpses again, we had a talk about that.”

Zombie the Third neighed, I thought, perhaps a little guiltily. Godsdamnit, I’d told Hakram just because it was occasionally appropriate behaviour for orcs didn’t meant he could let my horse do it. The look she cast at Zombie the Fourth – who was a pure necromantic construct, and so about as sentient as his saddle – was less than friendly, too. I cocked an eyebrow.

“Come on,” I said, patting her one last time for the road. “We’re headed to camp. Just let me take care of that.”

There’d been a wooden post tied to her bridle, so I leaned forward to unmake the knot and let it drop. Flanked by my own mount, I resumed my advance. The Fourth Army wasn’t one of my old commands, not at its source. It had few officers from the original Fifteenth Legion, and while it’d picked up a few spare tribunes from General Afolabi’s now-disbanded Twelfth the general staff had actually been from General Istrid’s Sixth, the Ironsides – including the general himself, Bagram. But that was officers, I thought as I approached the open gates. The Fourth Army’s bones, not the meat. In the rows and rows of faces most I saw were young and Callowan. Recruits joined before the Tenth Crusade began, or in the months I’d spent in the Everdark. Those who’d never known my armies as part of the Empire even in name. Maybe that was why, when I crossed the gates, swords were bared and raised in salute. A steel avenue, that old honour granted to the kings and queens of Callow.

“HAIL!”

The word sounded defiantly into the night as my soldiers welcomed me home. Once upon a time, I thought as the sound washed over me, it would have been only knights allowed to stand among those rows. But the times are changing. Head high, cloak trialing behind me, I rode to the end of the alley under the eyes of thousands. At the end, two orcs awaited. One I knew from the few conversations we’d had during and after he brought the Sixth into the Army of Callow, General Bagram. The other had me smiling: Gods, it felt like a century since I’d last seen Hakram. He was still stupidly tall and large, like the Heavens had given an old oak leave to walk around. His hand of bone went without glove, in winter and summer both, but his other – wait, what? I wasn’t sure what baffled me more, that he’d somehow lost yet another hand or that he’d not bothered replacing it. I brought Zombie to a halt, his sister matching him, and met Adjutant’s dark eyes with mine before cocking an eyebrow.

“You know, one is understandable,” I said. “Happens to the best of us. But two? That’s just careless, Hakram. It’s not like you have any more spares.”

“I suppose my clapping days are over,” Adjutant thoughtfully replied. “And I never did take to the theatre.”

There was a pause.

“You made the same damned joke the last time you lost a hand, didn’t you?” I sighed.

“It’s funnier this time,” he told me. “You know, because I’m running out of hands to lose.”

Something like a sob of hysterical laughter almost ripped out of my throat, but aware of the eyes on us I kept it locked inside. I still burned with the need to actually hug the bastard, who was showing just enough fang from one side of the mouth to be implying either a taunt or mockery. A moment later I cleared my throat and inclined my head at Bagram.

“General,” I greeted him.

“Your Majesty,” he gravelled back, offering a legionary’s salute. “The Fourth Army is yours.”

I glanced back and saw the legionaries still standing with their swords raised. I supposed it was. Zombie moved under my will, turning to face them in full, and my staff rose almost of its own accord. Blades began beating against shield, a ruckus to wake even the dead, and cheers sounded with them. I glanced meaningfully at Hakram, and after dismounting I clapped General Bagram’s shoulder and leaned close to tell him I needed to confer with Adjutant. I was led not far from there, to what I recognized to be Hakram’s old campaign tent. I followed in the orc, limping at a pace. The inside was sparse, as usual, save for the inevitable piles of scrolls that followed Adjutant like a faithful pack of hounds. Still, it was warm and well-lit so it would do. I’d barely passed the folds when I was swept up in arms like tree trunks, hoisted up off my feet. I laughed and hugged the bastard back, though I slapped his shoulder for the indignity inherent to holding me up like I was some little lamb.

“It’s good to see you,” I admitted, when finally the brute put me down.

“You as well, Catherine,” he rumbled out. “It has been much, much too long.”

“I hear that,” I muttered.

“Unexpected that you would find us, but decidedly not unwelcome,” Hakram said. “The apparitions on the field outside, are they who I think they are?”

“Drow,” I confirmed. “Though they call themselves the Firstborn – no, don’t ask, it’s a lot more complex than I feel like getting into.”

The orc hacked out a pleased laugh.

“You brought the drow to the surface,” Hakram said, grinning. “First time they came up in force in centuries. Gods be sated, you actually did it – and so many. There must be at least fifteen thousand out there.”

“Twenty,” I corrected. “The entire expedition in Iserre is fifty thousand strong, though they have their issues. They’re headed your way, should be there before dawn. The Third Army got caught down in Sarcella by the Dominion, but they made it out after losing some skin. They’re with the rest of the drow.”

“The Priestess of Night is our ally, then?” Adjutant asked.

“They’re called Sve Noc,” I said. “And they’re, well, goddesses. More or less.”

“You made an alliance with goddesses ,” Hakram said.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said. “You’re talking to the current high priestess of Night. Alliance was made, with some strings, but the fifty thousand are here to back us.”

Hakram’s brow rose.

“The high priestess,” he repeated. “Of drow religion. A religion of drow. Presumably for drow. Which, unless I am mistaken, you are not.”

“That’s the one,” I lightly replied.

“What happened to the last high priestess?” he asked.

“There wasn’t one.”

“And you talked goddesses into this how?”

“I asked real nice,” I smiled winningly. “The trick was doing it twice.”

“Cat, did you pull a knife on goddesses?” Adjutant sighed.

“Of course not,” I replied, offended and technically even saying the truth.

The orc stared at me, saying nothing.

“We have an understanding,” I said, a tad defensively. “You wouldn’t understand, you’re not religious.”

“I’m not going to touch that without a bottle on the table and half a day to waste,” Hakram muttered.

I snorted.

“You’re one to talk,” I said. “What happened to your hand? Tell me you weren’t just struck with a sharp and urgent need for symmetry.”

“Necessary sacrifice,” Adjutant said. “You’ll understand when you meet with Vivienne.”

My brow rose.

“Most likely, yes,” I said. “But you’re going to tell me anyway.”

Flash of teeth, which I identified as implying sheepishness.

“It’ll be a long conversation,” Hakram said.

I studied him closely. I could press further, but it wasn’t needed as far as I knew. And if it was, I trusted he would have told me.

“It’ll wait for that bottle with half a day, then,” I said. “Talk to me about Masego. I know everything Robber knows, but he said you’d have more.”

“He knows more than someone of his rank should, though that is nothing new,” Adjutant said. “If you’re looking for a location, we do not have it. He was seen in the fields west of the Blessed Isle, but we haven’t caught sight of him said.”

I frowned.

“But?”

“Before we took the gate into Arcadia,” Hakram said. “There was a report through the Observatory – the last we ever got. Liesse is gone.”

“The ruins?” I said. “They were destroyed?”

“Gone,” the orc said. “As in moved. And we don’t know how, or where.”

My reflex was to reply that was impossible, especially given the ridiculously vicious wards I’d had put around the still very much dangerous ruins, but then I remembered who had put those up specifically.

“You think he took the city somehow,” I said.

“I think he’s not in his right mind, since Thalassina,” Hakram grimaced. “And that he got his hands on the broken shards of the single most dangerous magical weapon this continent has seen since Triumphant’s day. For what purpose, I can only guess.”

Well, fuck . This was still salvageable, I had Akua around and she’d know how that monstrosity worked better than anyone – she was, after all, its architect. But until we got a read on how Masego was moving around, this was a sword hanging above someone’s head. Whose there was no real way to know, if the disaster at Thalassina had affected Hierophant’s mind somehow.

“We need to find him,” I said. “ Quickly . Do you have any idea what happened to the Observatory?”

“Nothing concrete, same as the gates going wild. We’ve got a dozen running theories, but the mages keep poking holes in each other’s,” Adjutant admitted. “About a third of them insist it’s to do with the way scrying is blocked in Iserre, the rest are in agreement they are entirely different problems with no relation.”

It was, I thought, grim irony that the person most likely to give us an answer about what was going on was the one we needed the Observatory to look for.

“I’ll see what Akua can figure out, but she’ll only have so much time to spare,” I said. “I have her working on something else.”

He nodded.

“Archer’s safe?”

“Working through some things,” I said. “It got... bad down there, Hakram. She had a close call.”

I could see his chops move as he ran his tongue against his fangs, the cogs in his head turning as he weighed whether or not now was the right time to ask.

“Bottle and half a day,” Adjutant finally echoed.

I conceded with a nod.

“We need to talk with General Bagram,” I said. “Lay down some ground rules about the drow, prepare for the Third’s arrival. I’ll want to know about the state of the Fourth, too.”

“He’ll be waiting,” Hakram said.

“Then let’s go,” I sighed. “We’re wasting moonlight.”

“You have four thousand surrendered cataphracts outside, Catherine,” he reminded me. “The situation needs seeing to.”

“Not surrendered,” I said. “I neither offered nor asked. They’re considering their sins, that’s all.”

Adjutant’s dark eyes scrutinized my face.

“You’re thinking of killing them,” the orc said.

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“Some,” I admitted. “If I let them go today, they’re a blade back in the Tyrant’s armory tomorrow.”

“Are we to break entirely with the League, then?” he asked.

I grimaced.

“No,” I admitted. “There are some interests in alignment.”

“Then you cannot commit slaughter,” Hakram said.

“Unless you have a lot more supplies than the Third, we can’t keep them prisoner either,” I flatly said. “Four thousand men and four thousand horses. I suppose we could butcher the horses for meat, but the soldiers? Given what’s out there, we don’t have the manpower for the guards or the food to spare. Not without shaving it much too close for comfort.”

“I fought those riders, Catherine,” Adjutant said. “So did the Fourth. And I can assure you, there is no love between us. Not even the fondness of respected foes. But we cannot butcher prisoners of war.”

“Butchery? Slight and price, Hakram. One for one,” I said. “You have lists of dead, lost to their attacks. So did the Third. I will not let this go unanswered .”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Hakram said.

The orc let out a long breath.

“I could tell you that this would set a dangerous precedent,” Adjutant said. “That we must be taken as law-abiding actors, if the Liesse Accords are to be signed and held. I could even say that a massacre tonight will be matched by the Tyrant when opportunity comes for him, and we both know it will.”

“But,” I said.

My closest friend in the world looked me in the eye.

“Weren’t we better than this, when we started?” Hakram softly asked.

I did not answer him on the way to General Bagram’s tent. I still had not, after those talks were done, when I headed back into the snows.

—

They’d stayed kneeling.

A few had tried to run, deciding to die gloriously with a blade in hand, and their pulped flesh had been splattered across the snow by the Mighty among my host. The rest had remained knelt in the cold and the dark, waiting for the judgement that was to fall upon their heads. They shivered and trembled, for the wind had not grown gentler in my absence, but even as their legs had begun to ache and their fingers had grown rigid for the chill the cataphracts of Helike had endured. Some portion admired them for it, but it was not so large that it was not drowned out by the anger still fuming in my bones. And even that admiration was tainted, for valour in the service of the likes of Kairos Theodosian could only be abused. The Firstborn parted for me without a word as I tread across the snows, come to meet the five officers who had meant to bargain with me. They had withstood their wait, I found, and softly five feathery streaks of red still rose and fell with the breath of the soldiers. My staff touched the ground with measured beat as I limped to them, and when I halted I felt their gazes turn to me. It was the leader among them I turned my own eye to, the woman who’d spoken.

“Your name?” I asked.

“Pallas,” she said. “I am a general of Helike.”

Letting the agony skitter across my leg, I leaned against my staff and knelt to match her height. I glimpsed vivid pale eyes that lingered between grey and blue, set on a tanned face that was younger than I had thought. Not so young she had not lived, I thought, and not so young that she should not have known better.

“Nine hundred and thirty two,” I said. “That is how many of my men yours have killed, between the tallies of the Third and the Fourth.”

“They fought well,” Pallas simply said. “And bravely.”

“They died bravely too,” I said, tone sharpening.

I saw in her face, then, the expectance of the blow. Of sudden and merciless death.

“I had thought to kill that many of you,” I pensively said. “And then another as well, for the remembrance.”

“You would take us all instead, then?” Pallas calmly asked. “If that is so, we will not die kneeling. Vainglorious be our pride, Black Queen, we are kataphractoi of Helike. We do not meet slaughter meekly.”

Cataphracts of Helike, I thought. Legionaries of Praes, knights of Callow, fantassins of Procer. The names changed, and the lands matched to them, but in the end it wasn’t it the same defiant promise? We are people , it said. You can kill us, but you cannot make us less than that. Funny, wasn’t it? How you could offer soldiers praise and a title and they’d make of it something to make the world quake. Not the kind of funny that made you smile, but funny nonetheless.

“No,” I said. “The man that serves as my better nature waits in camp, and though his kind knows little of mercy he asked it of me all the same.”

“Mercy,” General Pallas told me, “will not change our oaths.”

In that moment I was no longer looking at a woman kneeling in the snow: it was Helike’s own grim visage looking back at me, that ancient city-state that had fought Praes and Procer at their peaks and walked away unbowed. And it had done so on the back of men and women just like the one facing me. Iron-wrought souls gathered to a Tyrant’s banner, the victors of a hundred fields.

“We serve a Theodosian, Queen of Callow,” Pallas of Helike said, “We do not flinch from doom nor grave, under that banner – or anything else .”

I could take that certainty from you , I thought, easy as breathing. Of all my teachers the one who knew least of fear cowed all of Callow with it, and I have since witnessed sights that would have him pale. And part of me wanted to, because nine hundred and thirty two legionaries were dead at their hands. And perhaps these cataphracts were brave and skilled and loyal, but they were treating death as a game while dancing to the Tyrant’s tune – and even now remained proud of that truth. I wouldn’t even need to speak a word in Crepuscular, to see it all done: under the moon’s gaze, when it came to weaving power not even the Tomb-Maker was my match in raw strength. A mere four thousand, kneeling? It would be, as I had thought, easy as breathing. And that gave me pause, because my leg stung and I still remembered the sky opening at the Battle of the Camps and sending down death at impotent Procerans. Some nights I wondered if part of the reason my father had refrained from embracing the paths to power that were a villain’s due was because he was afraid of what he might do with it. The kind of person it made you, to look at four thousand soldiers and know that your own hand could slay them in the span of a breath. The kind of person it made you, to go through with it. Hadn’t it always been the tragedy of Creation that might ever went to the people least deserving of it? That I could not change, not truly. But I could, at least, act like I was not the Dead King incipient. Like I still remembered what it was like, to laugh and breathe and hurt – what it meant, to snuff out those same things.

“There was once a man, to the far east,” I quietly told Pallas. “He was a killer among killers, and among that red number there were none more loathsome. So when he claimed the Tower, Foul was the title he took. Third of his name, and last.”

I smiled.

“In the Wasteland they remember him a vainglorious failure, for when he led his armies west the Kingdom of Daoine crushed them all and sent his limbless body back to Ater, along with the head of ever highborn in his host,” I said. “Of his duel with the Commander of the Watch and the valour that saw the Deoraithe prevail I could tell you much, but what would it mean to you?”

I tapped my fingers against my staff, hearing the steady beat of do not forget along with the pulsing pain of my leg.

“It is the years after I’ll tell you a story about,” I said. “You see, Foul did not long survive his return. His successor cared nothing for the man, but there were rules to observe. Two bounties were offered. The first for the head of any Commander, only once claimed in the history of Praes. The second, though? It was for two fingers.”

I leaned closer, voice almost a whisper.

“The one that came after was titled Vile , and of that epiteth proved well-deserving, but for all that he was not without cleverness,” I said. “It was longbows on a wall, that broke his predecessor and so he put coin to unmaking the first of these two. For four centuries following, anyone bringing back the severed index and middle fingers of a Deoraithe was rewarded in gold.”

Pallas of Helike went very, very still.

“Yeah, I figured you’d understand,” I said. “You’re an archer yourself. But a snip of the knife and all that skill, all those years... up in smoke. Can’t pull back the string without those, can you?”

“And this,” General Pallas replied, “is the span of your mercy ?”

“I never claimed my kind of tyranny to be deserving of capital letter,” I said. “So you’ll keep the fingers, Pallas. But they will be broken, by your own hands, and with them I take every fucking thing that allows you to call yourself kataphraktoi .”

The woman’s eyes widened in surprise and anger.

“You cannot-” she began.

“Be silent,” I hissed. “You ride around slaying my soldiers and abetting a madman’s madness when the King of Death is sinking his teeth in the world. You do not get to be indignant, Pallas of Helike. You’re a worm in the flesh, and if neither you nor your master can be trusted not to act as the ushers of the end times then you will have to be disciplined .”

I rose to my feet, leaning on ebony, and glared down.

“You came here as cataphracts,” I said. “And here will stay your horses and arms and armour. Not a single one of you will leave this place with as much as a butter knife.”

Breathing out, I met pale eyes and let the slightest part of the fury I still felt slip into my gaze.

“Walk back to your Theodosian, General Pallas,” I said. “And give him warning from the Black Queen – if he ever pulls anything like this on my people again, there’s room for another soul on my cloak.”

In the sky far above crows cawed, the sound of it eerily like laughter.

Chapter 19: Precedent

“The evening before a battle is like an entire nation breathing in. Only morning will tell if what comes out is acclaim or lamentation.”
– King Albert Fairfax of Callow, the Thrice-Invaded

“Liability almost seems like too mild a word,” Hakram said.

The words were not voiced as blame or complaint, but as a simple statement of fact. Adjutant was assessing a weakness, nothing more. I’d known him for long enough by now to take it was it was, and in truth Indrani probably had as well. It didn’t stop her from snatching his handless arm and twisting it behind his back, forcing a heavily muscled orc over a foot taller than her to bend over in pain. The sight of it was rather absurd: Hakram was on the tall side even for his kind, and his shoulders were broader than any human I’d met. Between the set of plate he wore like it was made of feathers, the knife-like fangs and the bone hand Adjutant looked like he should be able to snap her in half. And yet I wasn’t even sure he was faking it, when he struggled against Archer’s tight and sudden grip.

“I think you meant to say ‘Archer, you peerless beauty whose appeal is known even to orcs, thank you for bringing me this nice army and saving my whinging orc ass’,” Indrani said.

There was a pause.

“I guess Cat helped,” she conceded. “And Akua was there, probably.”

“Such lavish praise,” Diabolist drawled. “Do cease, Archer, or I will be most terribly embarrassed.”

The shade’s night-black dress rippled down to her feet, legs crossed elegantly as she ignored the laws of Creation and somehow managed to lounge gracefully in a Legion-issue folding chair. The neckline was low, though not overly revealing of the curves below, and held up only on one shoulder by some sort of cloth strap circling around her neck. The saffron yellow trim along it stretched down casually, bringing attention to the long slit revealing a portion of her leg. Now and then I could feel Akua’s amused golden eyes on me, almost daring me to look. Diabolist looked like sin, which I was not unconvinced might be what she was actually metaphysically made of these days. Still, this was a great deal les subtle than usual: she usually only resorted to this kind of jabbing when she was irritated, so clearly being cut out of the happenings in Sarcella so she could concentrate on building my well still had her ticked off. She’d get over it, I decided, and did not look at the smooth dark skin a dainty twitch of her foot was further revealing.

“You’re not going to let my arm go unless I repeat it, are you?” Adjutant sighed.

“Guess,” Indrani smiled, all batting her eyelashes with a coquettish smile.

Being a merciful woman by nature, I allowed Hakram the dignity of pretending not to hear while he offered his full surrender. I was still looking at the same thing he’d been, the fifty thousand drow outside that dawn had chased back into their tents for exhausted slumber. General Rumena had agreed that we needed to keep at least a tenth of the warriors awake during the daybreak exhaustion, as relying entirely on the Army of Callow for protection would be risky, but the logistics of that were proving tricky. We had to put up full sigils for the duty, as mixing warriors from different ones would cause no end of trouble, but it was seen as a punishment duty. Sigil-holders were duelling each other to make other drow’s sigils hold watch instead, and though the Sisters had long backed my order that drow were not to kill each other over Night while in my army ‘first blood’ was another story. The sigil-holder for the Kuresnik was the weakest of their kind in the southern expedition, and its sigil had been forced to hold watch seven days in a row before the matter was brought to me.

The Kuresnik Sigil had been quite literally falling apart under the strain, the first proof we’d had that keeping drow awake through the early hours repeatedly would have physical consequences. Many of the dzulu had taken sick, becoming extremely sensitive to light, and some of the Mighty had found their powers weakened even after nightfall. Dawn-sickness , the Firstborn were calling it now. Rumena had stepped in to handle the problem, but ending the duelling entirely had proved impossible even for it. Though respected, the Tomb-Maker remained a first among equals and not someone wielding the kind of largely uncontested authority a general would in the Legions or the Army of Callow. I’d eventually lost my patience and told sigil-holders that if they intended on pursuing this, it would be by my rules. Matches were now arranged by random draw between pairs of sigil-holders, and I’d informed them I would personally rip the Night out of anyone who tried to further debate the outcome after it was settled. And of anyone trying to pull this shit over watches when there were enemy within marching distance. Mighty Radenbog had seemed dubious of my ability to enforce this, when I made the announcement, so I left it to spend three days without so much as a speck of Night to call on.

After losing two toes to frostbite it was duly humbled when I returned its power.

“Now that Archer has ceased browbeating the Lord Adjutant, perhaps we could attend to more pressing matters?” Akua suggested in a sweet voice.

“That’s Lady Archer to you, Bad Faith Wraith,” Indrani replied, tone amused instead of heated.

That detail hadn’t escaped Hakram’s notice, I saw when I turned back to my informal council. I could almost hear the readjustments taking place behind that calm face, the questions the orc would keep a lid on until it was just the two of us.

“Akua’s not wrong,” I said. “We have a few hours until the drow can resume march, and at least two of them will have to be spent with the generals of the Third and Fourth getting everything in order. I want us with a clear course of action before that.”

Letting the tent’s flaps drop, I retreated back into the warmth and claimed a folding chair for myself. My staff remained propped up the cloth wall, its surface seemingly hazy for the closeness with the coal brazier close to hit. I accepted a cup of wine when Akua offered it, pleasantly surprised to find it Vale summer wine at the first sip. I inclined my head at her in thanks and she smirked back, raising her own cup. Indrani preferred plopping herself down atop the table to her folding chair, predictably, and Hakram remained standing. Like an officer giving report, I couldn’t help but think.

“We’re moving to link up with Juniper’s columns,” I said. “That much is not up to debate. But I need some context.”

I met Hakram’s gaze with a raised eyebrow.

“As in, specifically, what the Hells you and Vivienne were thinking marching most the Army of Callow into this mess,” I said. “Why not just you and the Hunt, Hakram? You don’t need forty thousand legionaries for an extraction.”

“We had situations on our hands,” Adjutant said. “We were going to have to come for the stranded Legions regardless, but complications grew quickly.”

That they’d come for the legionaries Black had led into Procer I had no true issue with, as he’d well know. Aside from the utter waste of lives involved in letting the Dominion and the Principate run down some of the finest soldiers and commanders on Calernia on the eve of all-out war with Keter, there’d been other considerations. Like the fact that the Army of Callow had brought into its fold two of the old school Legions after Second Liesse, and that many of those officers had friends and kin in the stranded army. At the very least, mass discontent and desertions would have come of us doing nothing. Add to that the fact I’d personally given my word to Juniper that I’d intervene if it went bad for them, and it would have potentially made for a very ugly brew if Vivienne and Hakram had left Marshal Grem and his armies to die. On the other hand, there was a difference between putting together a rescue operation and fielding what had to be the majority of the Army of Callow in the middle of Proceran territory.

“Malicia is on the move,” Akua softly said, “is she not?”

It did not sound like a guess, but then it never did with her.

“Indirectly,” Hakram said. “High Lady Abreha of Aksum has been named the Imperial Governess of the Blessed Isle, and tasked with handling the refugee situation.”

I frowned. I’d spoken with this particular highborn once before, after First Liesse. She’s offered to back my petition to establish a ruling council over Callow if I killed the other Trueblood hostages I’d taken from then-Heiress Akua, immediately turning on her supposed allies when it became clear I had the upper hand. She’d later become the head of the so-called ‘Moderates’, after Malicia began methodically dismantling the Truebloods. The old Soninke was treacherous and no doubt just as dangerous as anyone capable of claiming a High Ladyship of Praes but I’d not considered her anything to be truly worried about. The Empress should be stepping on her as hard as she could, and while Aksum would still have mostly untouched household troops the High Lady Abreha did not have a reputation for military talent.

“Thalassina was vaporized, which means the Kebdana are done as a political entity in Praes for at least one generation,” Akua mused. “Yet that would not be enough to make Abreha Mirembe a true threat. Which has fallen, Okoro or Foramen?”

There was a slight twitch to Hakram’s jaw, the only visible hint coming through that he was impressed. He shouldn’t be so surprised, I thought. Diabolist had been raised to drink and breathe Wasteland politics at the very highest level from the moment her monster of a mother had her set down in a cradle. It wasn’t something anyone else on our side would be able to ever truly understand, at least not the way she did. Behind the golden eyes there were decades of learning about the tapestry of enmities and alliances that tied together the Dread Empire’s aristocracy, pieces of knowledge that no one but those born to that hallowed birth would ever be made privy too. Adjutant would have to face the same truth I had, about Akua Sahelian: damned as she was beyond all redemption, she was terrifyingly useful.

“Foramen,” Hakram said, eye on me and not Diabolist. “You tasked me to negotiate access to munitions and goblin steel, Catherine, and I have. The Kingdom of Callow has recognized the sovereignty of the Confederation of the Grey Eyries, including over the formerly Praesi city of Foramen.”

I let out a low whistle.

“So the Matrons actually raised the rebel flag,” I said. “I thought they’d wait until the very end, hedge their bets.”

“We loaned them gold and armaments to incite them,” Adjutant admitted. “Vivienne and I believed it was necessary to implement a containment strategy on Praes, after Malicia’s wave of assassinations last year.”

“The dwarven gold,” I said, coming to the obvious conclusion. “So you did get it.”

“Accounts were made open to us in Mercantis,” he agreed. “We put them to good use. Our loans to the Matrons will be repaid in the good we want from them, namely their steel and munitions.”

I nodded. Risky business, but it made a mess for Malicia to handle instead of the other way around for once. Besides, we needed the munitions if the Army of Callow’s war doctrine – which took much from the Legions of Terror’s own – was to remain fully usable. Without them, my entire sapper corps essentially lost its teeth.

“So why does Foramen falling make High Lady Abreha a problem for us?” I asked, flicking a glance at Akua.

“The goblins will have slaughtered every Banu they could get their hands on, which means two great families of Praes were destroyed in quick succession,” Diabolist elaborated. “That will worry the others. Nok was sacked, and that will shake the faith of its High Lord in the Empress’ authority. With Wolof in the hands of my dear cousin Sargon, which Malicia should own body and soul – perhaps even literally – and High Lady Takisha of Kahtan now sharing a border with the Matrons... Arguably, High Lady Abreha is now the second most powerful woman in Praes. Her holdings are untouched, her troops fresh, and her influence at its very apex. In olden times, this would be enough to make her the Chancellor.”

“So Malicia sent her to the Blessed Isle, hoping she’d be trouble for us instead of her,” I frowned.

“I would wager the intent to be cornering High Lady Abreha into acting against Callow and having her killed by our hand,” Akua said, then dipped her head at Hakram. “I assume she reached out privately to Lady-Regent Dartwick with assurances that any such actions on Abreha’s part would be against her own instructions?”

Hakram bared his fangs.

“And if we kill her, there will be no retribution,” the orc said, tacitly agreeing to all she’d said.

I closed my eyes for a moment, putting it together. Then why had the Army of Callow come west instead of east, given that we now had an ambitious and dangerous High Lady at the eastern border? I didn’t believe Hakram or Vivienne fools enough to strip Summerholm of its garrison for this, or that Juniper would have agreed to them doing so in the first, so at least the gate into central Callow would hold even if it was attacked by surprise. But what was the long-term solution to this mess that would be found in Iserre? They were coming for Grem One-Eye, after all, and – well, that would do it.

“You want to use the Legions of Terror loyal to Black as a bulwark between us and Malicia,” I suddenly said, opening my eyes. “Grem and his legions to be put up on the Blessed Isle, I’m thinking, with a neat supply arrangement the crown would handle the grain part of.”

“And more,” Hakram said. “I have been speaking with the Clans willing to take my envoys. There are some who still remember the Steppes nearly bucked the Tower’s rule, when Nefarious still reigned.”

“Ah,” Akua breathed out, sounding delighted. “Grem One-Eye, the orc who might have become the first Warlord since the Miezan occupation had he not entered the Carrion’s Lord service instead. You mean to encircle the Wasteland with greenskin realms, one of them unified behind the only orc alive that might feasibly be accepted as lord over all the clans.”

It wasn’t, I decide, that she enjoyed the thought of Praes losing such a significant part of its territory. She simply admired the elegant viciousness of the plan, surrounding a foe with a net of allied nations by calling on ties that Malicia had no claim to supersede.

“Vivienne’s notion,” Adjutant said. “She’s working on Marshal Grem, though unless the Black Knight dies we’re unlikely to convince him.”

“So we can settle the entire eastern border, if it goes well,” I said. “Which leaves us free to rebuild Callow in peace, and strike deals with the Grand Alliance. That’s still what puzzles me, Hakram. Why so large a force here?”

“’cause they’re twisting Cordelia’s arm,” Indrani drawled. “That about right, Deadhand?”

Her casual tone cut through the conversation, a sudden reminder that for all that she’d remained quiet and seemingly bored out of her skull until now she’d been paying attention. And as usual, she cut straight at the heart of the matter.

“You were gonna have to send some soldiers through anyway to get the Legions moving,” Archer continued, “and would you look at that, it was going to be pretty close to Salia. Enough that she’d have to worry about a gate opening right at her doorstep, if you felt like being hard. So you thought, why not lean on the First Prince a bit?”

I stared at Hakram, who looked rather abashed. Or hungry. It’d been a while since I’d had to decipher the nuances of orc expressions.

“Two birds with a single stone,” he conceded in a deep rumble. “It was to be a quick campaign, with perhaps a few skirmishes to blood our fresh recruits. Vivienne would offer a truce to the First Prince, conditional on surrendering the Legions to our custody, and along the implied threat of our presence we’d offer to return Prince Amadis to her. The Grand Alliance’s armies would be free to move north unimpeded, and at your return you would find our borders secure and a blooded army ready to fight against the Dead King. We would have a strong position to push for the Liesse Accords in exchange for our assistance.”

“And Black?” I asked, tone mild.

“Not in Proceran hands, as far as we know,” Adjutant said. “And heroes are not so easily bargained with.”

It’d been a neat, tidy plan that resolved most of Callow’s issues in a single stroke. Malicia would be forced on the backfoot, the border at the Blessed Isle put in the hands of a famous general personally loyal to my father who’d already once ignored formal summons from the Empress and the Army of Callow’s dangerously green soldiers would get a taste of campaigning in preparation for the horror that would be the war against Keter. It’d been even cleverer than they thought, as Cordelia Hasenbach making a truce with Callow would have allowed her to start buying armaments from the dwarves again. The First Prince must be worrying about that, right about now. Given the amount of cheap steel their civil war would had brought to the surface the Proceran armies should be in no danger of running out of armaments anytime soon, but Hasenbach was far-sighted enough she’d realize she could not fight a long-term war against the Dead King without outside forges propping Procer up. She had three choices, broadly speaking: Callow, the League of Free Cities or the Kingdom Under. Given that two of them were barred as long as she was at war with me and the Tyrant was pulling the strings of the third? She’d see the writing on the wall. It’d been a solid plan, I had to give them that.

Only now instead of what they’d planned, the Army of Callow was split in half within Iserre while Proceran and Levantine armies surrounded it, having no way to take a fairy gate out until I got to it. We’d lost soldiers, the Grand Alliance had lost soldiers, and while all this chaos spread the Tyrant of Helike had been orchestrating his own schemes for his still-inscrutable purpose. Somewhere in the countryside my father was in the hands of the Grey Pilgrim, who would be drawn to any decisive battle between my armies and the Alliance’s sure as dusk’s coming. Add to that the way Masego had gone missing after witnessing sorcery horrifying enough to level most a city and a war fleet, promptly gotten his hands on the ruins of Liesse – quite possibly the most dangerous magical weapon of our age – and that he must be too hurt or confused to reach out to any of the Woe. This, I thought, was going to be a bloody mayhem of sprawling death and treachery. The kind that determined the path a continent was going to take in the years that followed.

“Well,” I finally said. “This is going to get a little tricky.”

“This is going to get a little tricky,” Indrani cheerfully repeated. “Now there ‘s the title of your memoirs, Cat.”

“I’ve always been partial to ‘it got worse’,” Hakram offered, the filthy traitor.

“Murder ensued,” Akua tastefully suggested.

I glared but she just stared back at me, all smirking and insolence.

“You’re all useless,” I complained.

“Hakram’s memoirs,” Indrani grinned.

I gestured obscenely at her, which only had her chortling harder. Finally remembering I’d had a cup of wine on the table during this entire conversation, I snatched it and watered my parched throat. Gods, I’d missed actually being able to enjoy things.

“All right, then,” I said. “Let’s try to make a plan that doesn’t end up dooming the entire continent.”

“Cheers,” Akua Sahelian smiled, raising her glass in answer.

Chapter 20: Bearings

“It is best to count one’s fingers after shaking hands with Praesi.”
– Queen Rowena Alban of Callow

I’d never gotten the full story behind that scarf. Indrani almost never took it off, with the notable exception of when she was naked and otherwise occupied, and she’d been evasive about it when I’d asked. The weave was unusual, finer and tighter than I’d ever seen of Callowan cloth, but save for that there was nothing exceptional about the grey and green scarf. It was from Mercantis, she’d said, and a gift from the Ranger. The first thing she’d ever owned. Aside from those bare bones Indrani had never spoken a word of the matter and I knew better than to push. I was not without little pieces of my own, stolen moments and memories I would rather not have put under the scrutiny of another no matter how dear to me they were. Worn as the cloth was, it seemed one of the few possessions Archer actually cared for along with her monster of a longbow. That she was a wanderer to the bone was plain enough to see, standing before me with the sum of her earthly belongings as she was. Blades, bow, a leather satchel and the clothes on her back. She neither needed nor particularly wanted more than that. A strange thought, to me. I’d not acquired a taste for luxury even after taking the crown, but having a place of my own – a home – and some comforts in it had always seemed natural. Something everyone would want.

I supposed I’d just have to make those rooms a little larger, for whenever my vagrant of a friend came back.

“Snow’s crisp,” Indrani said. “Wind’s calm. Good night for a stroll.”

“I’d tell you to be careful,” I said, “but somehow I don’t see that happening.”

Tugging down her scarf to flash an admittedly roguish smile, Archer winked at me. This was not, I decided, in the least reassuring.

“I’ll be the very soul of prudence,” she lied.

Leaving me to stand leaning on my staff, she quickly darted across the snow to take Hakram’s shoulder in hand. Half a hug, a rough display of affection.

“Keep an eye on them, Hakram,” she said, without a hint of irony. “You know how careless they get without me around to chaperone.”

Adjutant leaned down to gently knock his forehead against her own. Neck angled a little to the side, I noted, as to allow for Indrani to rip open his throat with her fangs were she an orc. A display of trust and kinship, the kind orcs usually reserved for their close family.

“If you die, I’ve staked a claim on your bow,” he told her.

That startled a laugh out of her, along with jeering about how he was supposed to shoot anything when he kept dropping hands all over the place. Akua was standing a little to the side of them, high-collared dress of pale and gold sweeping down to her feet. For all the apparent slenderness of the cloth, she was unaffected by the chill of the night. Indrani clapped her shoulder amicably, which the shade allowed with a fondly tolerant smile.

“You know, since I’m leaving-” Archer began.

Diabolist sighed.

“Fine,” she conceded. “Look your fill.”

Indrani’s brow rose in surprise, then she grinned eagerly. Did I even want to know? A heartbeat passed, and Akua did not move.

“You’re still wearing clothes,” Archer pointed out, sounding a little cheated.

“According to certain interpretations of Trismegistan theory, I am in fact naked at all times,” the shade drily replied.

“Praesi treachery,” Indrani cursed.

Adjutant’s silhouette loomed tall at my side, the orc calmly studying the scene. Lingering on the smile that came easy to Archer’s lips, the almost mellow way Diabolist stood even when so close to her. The last time he’d seen the two of them together, I thought, Indrani had suggested firing arrows at Akua for sport. Before the Everdark , I thought, but that was only part of it. Before Great Strycht , in truth, and the choices made there. Hakram had not been part of those dark hours, and might not understand the ties they had forged. Vivienne, I considered, almost certainly would not. The musings were set aside when Archer finished her usual ritual of taunts and insults with Diabolist, nonchalantly returning to me. She hesitated and I went rifling through my cloak, fingers emerging tightened around a silver flask I tossed at her. Nimbly snatching it out of the air, she cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Iserran brandy,” I lied.

It was, in fact, the foulest-tasting belt of drow senna I’d been able to get my hands on. Hopefully she’d choke on the muddy taste of the mushroom-made liquor while expecting a smooth Proceran distillate. That ought to teach her covers were not to be hogged when it was this cold out and your queen was very much mortal again.

“But I didn’t get you anything,” she pouted, putting away the flask even as she did.

“That’s quite-”

I could have struggled and perhaps even blocked her, but when she put a hand on my waist and dipped me backwards I decided to allow Indrani her way. The kiss was rough, though in a way she knew I liked, and the warmth of her was stirring.

“There,” she said, after withdrawing.

I coughed to hide my breath was a little uneven.

“There,” I very eloquently agreed.

Her hand remained on my shoulder and she met my eyes, this time with serious mien.

“I’ll find him, Cat,” Indrani said. “Bring him home in one piece.”

I nodded, just as serious.

“If one of us can, it’s you,” I replied. “I’ll be expecting the both of you back.”

“You’ve gotten so demanding since they put a crown on your head,” Indrani snorted.

This time we parted for good, and with a casual wave of the hand at all of us she began her trek into the snow. Under the last sliver of the warning moon I watched her leave to recover Masego. Hakram and Akua came to stand at my sides, flanking me in shared silence until finally I breathed out.

“Come on,” I said. “Adjutant, I want to show you something.”

I glanced at Diabolist, who nodded back. Good, it was about time I had a close look at the well I’d charged her to gather.

—

I could feel the slow, constant pulse of the Night even from over fifty feet away.

Akua had put up comprehensive layers of wards around the tent, but that much accumulated power could never be entirely hidden. To me, who stood First Under the Night, it was like feeling a warm whisper of wind against my skin. Diabolist’s eyes looked brighter, her body more... tangible the closer we came, but it was Hakram’s reaction that interested me. He was the only one of the three of us who truly still bore a Name, after all. I could see in the way he straightened his back and free his hand from encumbrance that he was feeling something , at least. He met my gaze uneasily.

“There’s a scent in the air,” he gravelled. “Like coolness and dark.”

“Sharp nose,” Diabolist said, and she ushered us into her workshop.

I’d only been in here once before, at the start, and when the well had barely even taken shape. This was rather more advanced, I thought. Field conditions were no friend to the kind of precision work mages of Akua and Masego’s favoured at the exclusion of almost all else, but Diabolist had made do on the road. The ground beneath the tent was bereft of snow and had been glassed by a Mighty’s flame to be perfectly level. The shade glared at us when we entered until we rid our boots of the worst of the snow, and she went through a pack to retrieve cloths for us to wipe them entirely clean afterwards. Akua herself almost danced to the side of the artefact she was constructing, steps light and elated like a girl at her first summer fair. Adjutant’s eyes remained peeled on the well for a long moment, until he let out a shuddering breath.

“What,” he said, “exactly is that?”

“Our answer to the Grey Pilgrim,” I said.

In a sardonic bit of humour Akua had actually built it to look like a wishing well, though one held up above the floor by four curved supports of lead. Lead, I had learned from my recent studies, held strong properties of stability and grounding if never touched by fire. Held up by those supports was a disc of polished onyx, and from that bottom rose the shape of a well. Shards of obsidian bound together by thin strands of copper – there was, allegedly, no better metal for bridging – made up a glittering octagon, though several large swaths of the side were still empty. Above the well itself, two slender pillars of amethyst-studded copper held up a quaint little angled roof. The roof itself was made of the same obsidian-and-copper assembly as the well, though compared to the octagon the progress made in filling it was farther along. Unsurprising: every shard from the well contained the full exertion of a Mighty’s Night from dusk till dawn, but the roof held only the same by sigil-holders.

“At this pace, the main body will be finished within seven nights,” Diabolist said. “The upper receptacles-”

“Roof,” I drily said. “She means roof.”

“- will take within twenty to thirty nights,” she finished, as if I had never spoken. “Though the artefact itself will be functional after the upper receptacles are half-filled, which will be achieved two dawns from now.”

“Won’t be as strong, though,” I said.

“Which would only be an issue if you meant to directly oppose a foe’s miracles,” Akua said.

Hakram stepped forward hesitantly, boots crisply sounding against the floor. He leaned over the roof, thickly-ridged brow knotting.

“I recognize some of this,” he said. “Praesi sorcery.”

Diabolist let out a pleased little noise.

“Indeed,” she said. “The underlying structure is Trismegistan, of course, though I required some... consultation with Sve Noc before I could properly account for the properties of the Night.”

“And what does it do ?” Adjutant asked.

I began moving forward, then suddenly stopped. My staff had begun to pulse, the Night I had woven within beckoned by Akua’s much more complex creation. Unwilling to risk the power still sleeping inside, I propped it up against the side of the tent and limped forward instead. Hakram extended an arm without a word, and I gratefully leaned on it. Fingers tracing the obsidian of the roof, I drew his attention to three symbols in Crepuscular carved on the frame. They reappeared in the patterns, over and over again.

“Years ago, when we were still kids playing war games in the Tower’s shadow, I had a talk with Kilian,” I said. “I told her that Juniper was actually predictable, in a way, because if she had all the information she nearly always made the right choice.”

I smiled, almost melancholy at the memory of those simpler days.

“Presumptuous of me to say, as she proved in swift order, but I learned to temper the principle,” I said. “But for this? Oh, I know how they’re going to swing at us. They tipped their hand at the Battle of the Camps, Hakram. They have one tool that could really cripple us, so it’s a near-certainty it’ll be used.”

“And so you prepared an answer,” Adjutant said.

I ran my thumb against the three symbols. One did not need to know Crepuscular, to glimpse their meaning, for the written language of the drow could sometimes be of obvious meanings. The sun rampant, the sun halved, the sun veiled.

“So we prepared an answer,” I softly agreed.

We left Akua to her toil, after that, filling a well I hoped would not be needed. Yet, as with the sword I had been leaning on in the shape of a staff, I was not certain I would have a choice.

Waste of wastes, but what else could I do?

—

Marching across Iserre with an army of near seventy thousand, even if fifty thousand of those were drow, was not a quick or quiet affair. The Fourth and Third had been put through twin ringers of constant pursuit and assault, and to be frank both had been reaching the end of their rope. Yet I couldn’t afford to slacken our march, either, as drow scouts began reporting that the Levantine army we’d fought the vanguard of at Sarcella was on our tail. Still more than a week behind us, but the reason for that delay became clear when reports of banners not of the Dominion emerged: they’d had Principate reinforcements. Either southern levies hastily put together, or more dangerously the border army of twenty-thousand the First Prince had garrisoned in Tenerife to discourage incursion by the League. Which meant Kairos and his allies had let the lot of them through, because they shouldn’t have had the strength to push back a determined League force. If it truly was Hasenbach’s southern army, that was bad news indeed. Those would be professional soldiers, in majority, that the First Prince had judged would be able to either slow or turn back an invasion by the entire League of Free Cities. They wouldn’t be pushovers, or peasants with spears.

The forced halt of several hours every dawn further complicated our advance, as it needed to be compensated for by marching after nightfall if we didn’t want to lose almost a third of the day’s march. The Firstborn significantly quickened after dusk, of course, but my legionaries most definitely did not. The disjointed peaks made planning awkward, especially as I was wary of simply sending a significant drow force ahead: we were headed into contested grounds, now. A force of five thousand Firstborn caught just after dawn by Levantine or Proceran cavalry would be severely bled, and sending a legionary escort with them would defeat the entire purpose of the exercise. There was no obvious fix to the issue, and none of my three current generals – Abigail, Bagram, Rumena – suggested a feasible alternative. We’d just have to awkwardly force our way forward as fast as we could, hoping we’d get to Juniper before the opposition did.

It was a mere six days after the Fourth was brought back into the fold that we ran into our first enemy outriders.

“Proceran,” General Bagram opined. “Alamans, at a guess. The Arlesites tend to carry javelins.”

Adjutant grunted in agreement. The Fourth had taken the front, today, so it was them who’d sent for me when riders were seen on the horizon. The two of them were on foot, which given that I was seated atop Zombie meant for once I towered taller than either of them.

“That’s at least sixty horsemen,” I noted, shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand. “Screening company, you think?”

“Seems likely,” Bagram said. “Finally good news, eh?”

I nodded thoughtfully. The riders were to our northwest, and if they’d been sent there to watch four our advance it meant we were getting close to Juniper’s position. It also meant, though, that the northern armies of the Dominion and Procer were close enough to the Hellhound that were keeping an eye out for sudden reinforcements to her position. So we’re not the only ones at your gate, Juniper , I thought.

“No point in sending foot after them,” Adjutant said. “They’d be long gone by the time any legionary got there.”

“So we don’t send legionaries,” I replied. “One of you get a message to General Rumena, I want the Losara Sigil to send a warband in pursuit immediately.”

“Even light foot won’t catch up to horse,” General Bagram told me as delicately as an orc could, which wasn’t very.

I forced down the sharp swell of irritation.

“No, General Bagram, during the day it will not,” I flatly said. “Should the horsemen rest at night, however, the Firstborn might very well catch them by surprise if they begin pursuing right now.”

I must not have hidden my annoyance completely, because Bagram saluted and promptly volunteered to speak with Rumena himself. He wasn’t a bad commander, I knew. More experienced than any of my Rat Company officers, he’d been the second of General Istrid for decades and effectively run her general staff while she fought on the frontlines. But he wasn’t one of mine: he was one of Black’s people, in some deep manner. From Black’s crop of soldiers shaped by my teacher’s own decades of war. Bagram would not trust my judgement the way Juniper or Nauk would have. I was, in his eyes, still very much the Carrion’s Lord apprentice. A promising successor but not my teacher’s equal.

“The temper’s back, at least,” Hakram amusedly said.

I glared at him.

“He might as well have called me an idiot,” I retorted.

“He’s fresh to your service,” Adjutant said. “And a hint of fang will be good for your relationship. Bagram was second to Istrid Knightsbane, a hard look won’t offend him.”

I grunted, somewhat mollified.

“It’s better now,” Adjutant pensively said. “When your hackles go up, it’s still you . Not Winter hunger with a Foundling shape to it.”

I glanced away.

“That was me too, Hakram,” I said. “Just with large enough a hammer everything looked like a nail.”

“It was you on a dark day that never quite passed,” the orc disagreed, head shaking in slight disagreement. “And whispers in your ear. You handled it better than most would have, but the marks were there.”

“You never said anything,” I frowned.

“You were drinking aragh like water, at the start,” Hakram said. “But you got it under control after some prodding. That meant you weren’t frozen, just slowed. I was willing to wait.”

My fingers clenched.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have,” I said.

“It didn’t make you worse, Catherine,” Adjutant said. “Jagged edges, true, but those weren’t sunny days. Jagged kept a lot of people breathing.”

“Killed just as many,” I said.

Adjutant turned to me, the glare of the sun casting shadows like scar across his leathery face. The dark, deep-set eyes were as serene as I’d always known them to be.

“You did what needed doing,” Hakram Deadhand said. “It wasn’t all pretty, and most won’t thank you for it. But you kept Callow standing until it could stand, and even with Winter in your soul it was a peace you strove for.”

He bared a thin stripe of ivory fangs, chidingly.

“It’s a gentle sort of tyranny, by my reckoning, that you would name the worst of you,” he said.

I released the grip on my reins, slowly.

“It’s a little uncanny, sometimes,” I said. “The way you always know what to say.”

His fangs clicked amusedly.

“That is who we are,” Adjutant simply said.

I stroked Zombie’s mane and spurred her slightly, enough that she danced to the side and my leg grazed his side. We stayed there for a while, watching the riders on the horizon, until he spoke up again.

“So,” he said. “Archer?”

I cocked my head to the side.

“I know there’s a risk in sending her after Masego when there’s heroes on the prowl, to the both of us, but-”

“You are letting her leave to return with a victory,” Hakram interrupted in a rumbling voice, “and sending a trusted and powerful Named after what could be a disastrous trouble. I’m well aware, Cat. As you are that I wasn’t asking about that at all.”

I cleared my throat.

“Surprised you waited this long to ask,” I said.

“Wasn’t entirely sure until the farewell display,” the orc admitted. “You two have always been...”

Yeah, he didn’t really need to elaborate on that. For both our sakes, really.

“It’s a thing,” I said. “That is happening. On occasion.”

“But not,” Hakram said, “too frequently?”

“We’re not involved, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said.

“Ah,” he hummed. “Unusual, for you.”

He didn’t ask the question, only leaving the door open to elaborate if I felt like it. Gods, I’d missed him.

“I’m in the middle of a continent-wide war,” I eventually said. “Romance isn’t exactly a priority.”

“But,” Hakram said.

“Might be something I want eventually,” I shrugged. “Won’t be anytime soon, or with her. We know where we stand, and regardless there’s the... Masego situation.”

“That’s been hard to get a read on,” the orc said.

“Like watching denial and obliviousness waltz,” I snorted. “Though I have to wonder how much of those there really are, when it comes down to it.”

Masego had his habits, but he wasn’t exactly blind. Mostly he missed cues, or misread the reasons for things – I suspected his upbringing hadn’t helped, both because of the men who’d raised him and the environment they’d raised him in. I could hardly think of a more terrifyingly frustrating place for a boy who’d had difficulty understanding others than Praesi aristocratic circles. When it came to the Woe he tended to catch onto things fairly well, and ask when he thought he was missing something. And he’d asked me to take care of Indrani before leaving for Thalassina, noting her to be upset. As for Indrani, well, what she said and what she thought weren’t always the same thing. Especially when it came to what she considered shamefully soft attachments, like admitting she loved people who loved her. Fucking Ranger , I uncharitably thought.

“I don’t think it would be an issue if we kept doing this after we’re all back together,” I finally added.

Hakram bowed his head in agreement.

“Tell me you’re not sleeping with the other one, at least,” he gravelled.

I choked.

“Akua?” I protested. “ Gods no. I mean, don’t get me wrong, just look at her-”

“You often do,” the orc said. “Though I don’t see the appeal, to be honest. She’s dangerous, I suppose, but all soft and fleshy.”

“Those can, uh, be good things,” I muttered. “But she’s still Akua, Hakram.”

“I am aware,” Adjutant said. “But I wonder if that means the same thing it used to, Cat. For you, at least, and perhaps Indrani.”

“This the softer predecessor of the crucible Vivienne is going to put me through?” I said, a tad sharply.

The orc shook his head.

“I wasn’t down there,” he said. “You will have reasons for this, though you haven’t shared them. I want to know where we stand with her, that’s all.”

Silence reigned, for a long moment.

“I am no longer bound by the oath to kill her,” I acknowledged.

“But,” Hakram said.

“One hundred thousand souls,” I said. “There has to be a price for that.”

He slowly nodded.

“Until then, she is to be Akua,” the orc murmured. “Not the Doom of Liesse.”

I did not reply. I did not need to.

—

Before dawn, Ivah came back with four survivors from the Proceran outriders. We were two days’ march away from Juniper, which was pleasing.

The enemy had beaten us there, which was not.

Chapter 21: Intervention

“ Even madmen can win at dice .”
– Callowan saying

General Abigail rode poorly, though that was hardly a surprise. Most of my army was no better. Given that it was in majority Callowan, that was somewhat shameful: my people had once held a reputation for breeding the finest war horses on Calernia and riding them into battle with distinguished record. That’d been before the Conquest, though. A lot of Old Kingdom noble families had preferred butchering their own herds to turning them over to the Tower, and Black famously almost had an uprising on his hands when he moved to obtain horses from the mostly-untouched south of the kingdom. It was one of the few times my teacher had actually backed down. In practice, the old expectation that anyone of means as well as anyone of high birth would be able to ride with a lance had died out under the decades of occupation. A large part of what had birthed that custom in the first place was gone, namely the need for a large pool of trained mounted soldiers to fill the ranks should the Wasteland invade, but in my eyes the real culprit had been the lack of such mounts to be had.

What few war horses had remained were either closely kept by the last of the Callowan aristocracy or by law set aside for the use of the Legions of Terror – in specific the Thirteenth, which had been raised from Callowan bandits and rebels in the first place. Ratface had once told me, years ago, that for the smugglers who could pull it off selling a horse was about as profitable as selling the equivalent weight in spices. Wasteland aristocrats were willing to pay ludicrous sums for a purebred Liesse charger or even a dappled Vale courser. That’d been the thought, anyway, that the old herds and ways were gone. There’d been some satisfaction in the fact the knightly orders might be lost but at least they weren’t under Praesi banners, the kind of bittersweet victory that’d been rare after the Conquest and so even more dearly savoured. But then the Order the Broken Bells had crawled out of the chaos of the Arcadian Campaign, and given time it might spread that knowledge again. A pretty, thought, though in the present it wasn’t making either mounts or skilled riders appear out of thin air.

“Ghastly beasts, I’ll tell no lie,” Abigail of Summerholm muttered, eyeing her mount with distrust. “Bit unnatural, if you ask me.”

The horses I’d confiscated from the four thousand kataphraktoi numbered more than that. Less than military wisdom would have dictated a field force of cavalry should take with them, but six thousand horses was nothing to sneer at. Hakram had speculated that considering they weren’t moving with a remount for every cataphract they might just have a field camp somewhere in Iserre where the rest were being kept, but we’d had no time to look into it. Out of sheer practicality we’d already had to butcher a thousand of those no doubt very expensive mounts, which at least had put the orcs of the Third and Fourth in a rather good mood – fresh meat was a delicacy, out on campaign. But we’d also more than enough left for what might be considered luxury, namely mounting large contingents of messengers and officers. The matter was further complicated by the fact that horses not specifically trained out of it tended to panic around greenskins, but the humans in the general staffs had gained mount at least.

“You get used to it,” I said. “Though it’s been some time since I last rode a living mount, I’ll admit.”

I fondly stroked the rough coat of Zombie the Fifth and received a pleased exhale from the Helikean horse in reply. Zombie the Third was currently being punished by dragging a cart, which looked rather absurd for a winged horse and I knew she very much despised doing. The crime she was atoning for was that this morning I’d found someone had caved in the head, ribs and spine of Zombie the Fourth. She’d tried to look innocent, the wretch, but unless there was another hooved creature in my army jealous of my attentions then I had my culprit. Apparently you could take the Winter necromancy out of the fae horse, but actually you couldn’t and it would keep that vicious temperament forever.

“If you try to shake me off again I’ll have you made into boots,” General Abigail whispered, glaring at her horse and apparently under the impression I couldn’t hear her. “You know what? That’s your name now. Boots. How do you like that, Boots ?”

Boots proceeded forward at an indifferent trot and I cleared my throat. The black-haired woman paled, reminded of my presence.

“I, uh, agree Your Majesty,” she hastily said.

I sighed. She hadn’t listened to what I was said in the slightest, had she?

“Oh, good,” I airily replied, offering her a smile. “Then I expect it’ll be done within the hour.”

I enjoyed the panic that seeped into her eyes a little too much.

“Is that,” she tried, “customary?”

Trying to find out what she’d agreed to by context. My long experience of pretending I already knew things while getting Masego to explain them allowed me to see through her admittedly pretty translucent wiles.

“In Ashur, I’d assume,” I gravely said.

“Yes,” she slowly said. “That is... well-known.”

“You can tell Adjutant you’re in need of our maritime charts for the Tyrian Sea,” I continued. “Gods be with you, Admiral Abigail.”

She let out a little whimper, which she tried to pass off as a cough. Then she stilled.

“We don’t have a border with the Tyrian Sea,” she realized. “Or a fleet.”

“Which will lend you the element of surprise,” I mused.

“Queens aren’t supposed to have people on,” General Abigail plaintively said.

I hid my smile by looking away.

“Call it royal prerogative,” I replied, then took mercy on her and changed the subject. “What do you think of your new officers?”

“The transfers from the Fourth are all old hands from the Legions,” the blue-eyed woman said. “To be entirely honest they didn’t need much settling, Your Majesty. And Legate Samid could do my job better than me, if you let him.”

Legate Samid served for fifteen years under General Afolabi, a Wasteland aristocrat, and first enrolled in the Legions at the beginning of Black’s tenure as the captain of Malicia’s armies , I thought. His loyalties are rather more complex than yours, my dear.

“Then learn from him,” I said. “And take his advice, when it has good sense.”

I’d ignored the implied offer to step down from her generalship and resume her legate duties, as I had the last five times she’d indirectly broached the subject. And would keep doing. Talented Callowan candidates for a general’s mantle didn’t grow on trees, much less those with no ties to any of the factions in my court. An abdication was a tricky matter even when a dynasty was stable, and considering mine consisted of me and a tumultuous reign of less than five years I hardly qualified. A popular Callowan general with a distinguished war record and no real ambition for power would go a long way in stabilizing what would follow in my wake. I set aside the thought for now. It was too early to tell if Abigail of Summerholm could really be used in that manner, and pushing too hard too fast would only spoil the broth.

“I won’t know the first thing about fighting heroes, ma’am,” General Abigail said.

“I’ve killed more than a few and I barely do,” I shrugged. “Besides, ideally we won’t be killing anyone.”

“That’s, uh, not the sentiment I expected to hear,” the black-haired general said.

“Any corpse we make down here is one less warm body to throw at the Dead King, Abigail,” I said. “And heroes, well, we’ll need more than a few of those to drive the Hidden Horror back into hiding.”

“Into hiding,” she slowly said. “Not to kill.”

“You ever seen a god die, General Abigail?” I said.

She shivered.

“Can’t say I have, ma’am,” she replied, lips tight.

“Neither have I,” I said, “but I suspect it would be messy business. Best we know our limitations, and not bargain for more than we can deliver.”

“I hear that,” General Abigail muttered.

About time to segue into more personal matters, I mused. I’d taken to digging into her past, when the opportunity rose, though what I’d learned was as amusing as it was appalling. Inquiried about her family had let to ‘My Ma brewed, and what Pa didn’t drink we sold .’ An open-ended question about why she’d enrolled had led to ‘Our place in Summerholm burned down, and all respect Your Majesty but have you ever smelled a tannery? ‘ I’d been about to ask about the orc tribune – Krolem, his name was, I’d had Hakram look into him – that she brought with her everywhere when movement caught my attention at the corner of my eye. Enemy outriders? No, I saw as I squinted, some of our own scouts. The Third Army was at the head of the column for the day’s march, and with my personal banner being raised along with its own the scout officers were likely to head here for their first report. I’d not expected anything from them for some time, to be honest. Our best guess had Juniper’s camp half a day away, further west along the frozen river we were following.

“Unusual,” I said.

The general followed my gaze, but said nothing.

“Come on,” I decided. “We’re headed to the front of the column.”

I spurred Zombie the Fifth forward, peeling off from the side of the Third Army and outpacing the marching legionaries. Abigail followed more slowly, hissing curses at her uncooperative mount I pretended not to hear. It wasn’t a full scouting line, I saw as I approached. Only a tenth, all goblins, with the line’s sergeant among them. Whatever they saw , I thought , it was urgent enough they backtracked. I reined in my horse a dozen feet ahead of the front of my column, slowing him to a trot to remain ahead as the goblins approached. Abigail arrived just before they did, legs so tight against her saddle I winced to think of the cramps she’d have tonight. The sergeant – stringy, small and more yellow than green, the ritual scarring around her lips lending her a grisly touch – came forward and saluted.

“Your Majesty,” she said. “Sergeant Hurdler, reporting.”

“At ease, sergeant,” I replied.

I glanced at Abigail and saw she’d mostly composed herself. Good enough.

“You’re back earlier than expected,” I said. “Your report?”

“Whatever we got out of the Procerans, it was inaccurate,” the goblin said. “The Hellhound’s camp is about half a bell ahead, and when Lieutenant Reeler sent us back battle was already being given.”

Shit , I thought. There were hills to the west of us, split in the middle by the river our maps called the Odelle. Not all that tall, but enough they’d cut our line of sight. It makes sense , I grimly conceded. Juniper would want hills on one of her flanks if she could, knowing she’d be outnumbered in a battle.

“Battle,” I said. “Elaborate, sergeant.”

“Marshal Juniper raised a fortified camp on both sides of the river banks,” Hurdler said. “An army of Levantines and Procerans was assaulting the northern bank, last I saw.”

“Which was?” I pressed.

“A little over an hour,” the goblin said. “We could see from the taller hills.”

Fuck. I’d bet on Juniper against most generals, and on Grem One-Eye against the few left, but they wouldn’t just be fighting mortals. There would be heroes, and if what Hakram had told me about Vivienne was true then Juniper wouldn’t have any Named to pit against them. The Pilgrim alone might be driven back by the Wild Hunt, but the Saint? Laurence de Montfort had already proved she could savage the lot of them singlehandedly. Our Proceran prisoners had told us about cavalry skirmishes and ambushes, not a pitched battle over the camp. The enemy had moved quicker than we’d anticipated. My fingers clenched and I leaned back against my saddle, turning my face to the sky. I whistled, loudly.

“Ma’am?” Sergeant Hurdler said.

“Pass your report along to General Bagram and Lord Adjutant immediately,” I told her. “Dismissed, sergeant.”

She saluted, and left dragging along her exhausted scouts.

“General Abigail,” I said.

The blue-eyed Callowan was watching me warily.

“Your Majesty,” she replied.

“The Third Army is to march on those hills as quickly as you can make it,” I said, the staff in my grasp twirling to point at the slopes to the west. “You’re to fly the Third’s banner from the tallest hills. Send a messenger to Bagram, and fly the Fourth’s as well.”

“And General Bagram is to follow?” she asked.

“Pass this along to Hakram: Five Armies and One,” I said.

“That’s all?” Abigail blinked.

“It’s enough,” I amusedly replied.

“And you, ma’am?” she asked.

I glanced up, and saw exactly what I’d been waiting for.

“I’ll be going ahead,” I said.

In a splash of snow, Zombie the Third landed right in front of me. Wings still unfolded, she celebrated her release from punishment with a smug little canter. I gesture for one of the legionaries in the front rank to approach, some beardless boy who looked almost too small for his armour. I passed him my living mount’s reins and instructed him to lead it back to our supply train, but paused when I caught the sun glinting off his helm.

“Your name?” I asked.

“Edgar, ma’am,” he replied, sounding too young and too awed. “Of Laure.”

“Are you?” I smiled, and flicked a glance at Abigail. “Good, it wouldn’t do to have the Summerholm folk take all the glory. I’ll be needing to borrow your helmet, Edgar.”

The boy’s eyes widened in surprise, but he fumbled at the clasps and held it up like an offering. I set it under my arm, pulling my loose hair back into a ponytail with the leather tongue I still carried in my cloak. The legionary helmet settled on my head with a comfortingly familiar weight. I winked at Edgar.

“Last time I was on a field and royalty went without one of those, I had them shot,” I said.

The boy choked, and I grinned before limping to Zombie’s side, waiting until she’d folded her wings to hoist myself atop her. I turned to Abigail.

“See to it he gets another before battle, would you?” I told her, dipping my head towards the kid.

“I will,” General Abigail nodded. “Should I be asked your intent, Your Majesty, what should I say?”

I mulled over that as my mount spread her wings.

“I’m going to make a point, General,” I said. “Tactfully.”

I spurred on my winged mount and she raced ahead, leaping up and rising to the beat of long wings. We rose and rose and rose, high into the sky, until the sun was warming my bones and I judged the height was sufficient. The time for quiet was over, I thought. Night flooded my veins, sluggish under the glare of day, but it was enough to rip open an inky-black gate into Arcadia. Below us, as it happened. We dove through the gate into the realm of the fae. Sunny skies awaited us on the other side, the Summer sun’s disapproving light upon us, but what did we care? There was only the endless blue firmament and the descent, Zombie responding to the nudges of my knees and adjusting the angle so we would tumble through the destination I could feel in the back of my mind.

I pressed close against her back, cloak trailing behind me, and squinted against the howling air. My staff of ebony I clutched tightly, until I could feel the point the needle was to emerge from the cloth. Beneath us was spread out a fortress, banners of neither Court I had known raised tall over pale walls, and cries sounded at our approach. The tallest tower, I saw, was our gate out. The very summit. I grimaced. Well, too late to hesitate. Down, down, down, until I could almost make out the faces of the fae jousting in the courtyard below, laden with silks and elaborate armaments. My staff rose and sluggishly the gate out ripped itself open atop the tower. We plunged through narrowly, and in the beat that followed found ourselves diving through fresh skies.

The cool air of Procer whistled around me as the gate closed, and we joined the battle unfolding below.

It was a bloody mess that I witness sprawling out beneath me. I’d been afraid that the northern Levantines and Principate reinforcements had somehow managed to steal a march, but by the looks of it they hadn’t. Not exactly. In the distance I could see columns of soldiers heading south, spread out like glittering snakes of steel. This was a vanguard, not the full host. That’d be reassuring, though, if Juniper actually looked to be winning . The Army of Callow and the Legions under Marshal Grem had raised a fortified camp across the two banks of the frozen River Odelle, not only palisades but earthen ramparts and even platforms for their siege engines. The northern part of that camp, however, was a wreck. What must have been flat grounds once was now a disaster of collapsed tunnels, the outskirts of which were being fought over by legionaries and Levantine foot. The Hellhound had dug under her own camp, I thought. It would have taken goblins to do this much damage so swiftly. Odds were she’d meant to bait the enemy into the northern bank and then collapse it on them, possibly with munitions thrown in to make it a crippling blow. Something had gone wrong, though, because among the havoc I saw more of our dead than the enemy’s.

Our side was stuck in fighting retreat to the southern bank fortifications, but the legionaries were getting the bad end of that scrap – on uneven grounds, the lightly-armored Levantines were proving much more effective. Many of them carried javelins, I saw, and those were death on even good armour when properly thrown. Even when not, they turned shields useless by sticking in them. It wasn’t the kind of fight the reformed Legions of Terror had been built for, and the Army of Callow was daughter to that institution. The Order of Broken Bells was out on the left flank, but too far out: they’d been baited into pursuing lighter Levantine cavalry, by the looks of it. But it was on the right that disaster loomed. Proceran horse, a force at least seven thousand strong and advancing at a trot. I’d put my hand to fire it’d held back until now, and I could see why: if it charged down the Odelle, as it was moving to do, it would neatly cut the retreat of the legionaries fighting their way out of the wreckage. There’d been palisades put over the ice, Juniper wasn’t an amateur, but they’d been shattered beyond repair by something and sappers were struggling to raise fresh ones. They wouldn’t make it in time, I assessed. Not something solid enough to resist a hard charge by seven thousand hardened Proceran mounted killers.

Someone had hit my side exactly where they needed to for this to turn into a debacle, and I had my suspicions as to who. I wasn’t seeing the Pilgrim or the Saint anywhere but that hardly meant they weren’t there. Yet this could still be salvaged, I decided. If the legionaries in the wreckage didn’t get cut off, most of them should make it to the southern bank and then the siege engines would stop the enemy advance cold. Which meant that seven thousand horse had to be turned back. I worried my lip but pressed my knees against Zombie’s side and she angled her glide down to land ahead of the Proceran cavalry. Making the fairy gates hadn’t put me out of commission, but I wasn’t exactly fresh anymore either. I wouldn’t be able to pull a second Sarcella today, of that much I was certain, even if heroes decided not to interfere. Calling on a few vicious Night tricks might slow down the enemy, but I’d burn out long before I could make a real dent in seven thousand horsemen.

Five hundred feet before the enemy, Zombie’s hooves skimmed the surface of the cold field and left long spouts of snow like wings as she landed. I watched the Proceran banners trail in the breeze far ahead of me, vivid coloured stripes flying high above rows and rows of steel-clad soldiers. Some of those I had seen on the pages of ancient volumes. The red lion of Valencis, the strange green dragonfly of Lange. Other symbols I did not: a long-haired maiden clutching bow and arrows, a bronze wheel atop a pale column.

Four hundred feet.

One I had seen before with my own eyes, I realized, and not so long ago: a scarlet salamander on flaxen bed, the arms of Aequitan. The detail startled a laugh out of me. An old acquaintance was among them, then. Borrowed helm glinting in the sun, I twirled my staff and leaned forward. No miracle of Night came. Instead, using the length of ebony wood I traced a line in the snow ahead of me.

Three hundred feet.

Watching seven thousand killers ride towards me with no sign of slowing, I did the only reasonable thing left to me and went looking through my cloak. I snapped my wrist, black flame flickered, and I pulled at my pipe. I inhaled the wakeleaf with a little sigh of pleasure and breathed out a long stream of smoke.

Two hundred feet.

I grinned, broad and sharp and just a little mad. Now, the thing was, if it came to a scrap they might just kill me. They knew that. I knew that. Yet here I was, unmoving.

One hundred feet.

Catherine Foundling, out of breath and out of her depth, would be swept aside with a warlike shout. They weren’t facing that girl, though, were they? They were facing the Black Queen, the warlord who’d slain fae and bound them to her service. The monster who’d brought down the sky at the Battle of the Camps, faced a band of heroes alone and raised a lake’s worth of dead. They were facing every dark rumour I’d ever had put to my name, after watching me dive out of a pitch-black portal on a dead fae horse. And sure, odds were I was mad. Gone the way of the Old Tyrants, drunk on power.

But, a little voice would be whispering, what if I wasn’t ?

I grinned, and smoked my pipe.

Fifty feet.

They flinched first.

Chapter 22: Standoffs

“One hundred sixty nine: any companion volunteering to stay behind and hold off a superior enemy will be guaranteed success, twice over if having already taken a mortal wound.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

It was like watching the sea split.

Even at the measured pace they’d been keeping fifty feet was too close for them to outright end the charge. There were seven thousand of them, and though they weren’t tightly packed those kinds of numbers had weight and momentum – that was what made cavalry charged so dangerous in the first place. No, stopping wasn’t in the cards, so instead the Proceran wheeled to the sides. It was beautiful display of horsemanship, the kind of skill I might have applauded were it not the work of soldiers still intent on killing mine. I kept a calm eye on the proceedings to see if any of the riders were crossing the line I’d traced in the snow, but whoever had called them back had pulled the leash in full: as if held back by an invisible wall, the stream of riders spread out on the sides but never crossed. I pulled at my pipe calmly, studying the enemy and running a mental tally of who might be in command. This lot should have been sent south by Hasenbach herself, but with her uncle and most her fellow Lycaonese up north fighting the Dead King she might not have had a competent loyalist to appoint at the head of the army.

Princess Rozala Malanza was a possible candidate, assuming the results of the Battle of the Camps hadn’t tarred her reputation as a general in the Principate, but she was one of Amadis Milenan’s supporters. If she held command, it meant that the situation up in Salia had gotten rather interesting . No, odds were it was one of the western princes or princesses that held the run of the host. I’d seen the banner for Lange flying, and that was possible, but more likely it’d been the rulers of Brus or Lyonis – both long-standing Hasenbach supporters – that held primacy. I’d find out soon enough, I supposed, because someone had given the order to hold back. I spat out a mouthful of grey smoke and adjusted my helm slightly so that the sun wouldn’t shine into my eyes. It was a nice day out, more cool than cold and nearly windless. The many plumes of smoke rising from the wrecked camp where Juniper’s trap had failed made the lack of breeze obvious, and I allowed myself a glance in that direction. The bitter fighting retreat of my forces had not ceased in the slightest: if anything, the Levantine foot was going after my soldiers even more aggressively than before.

The enemy ranks parted to let through a heavily-armed party of thirty, and though the faces of the royals coming to were still hidden to my eyes the three banners above them were not. The salamander of Aequitan was there, which meant Malanza herself was part of the delegation, but hers was the only heraldry I knew for certain of the three. The long-haired maiden clutching a bow and arrows I vaguely remembered to be from northern Procer, though which principality I couldn’t say. The green eagle perched on a crescent might be the arms of Cantal and therefore another old acquaintance – Prince Arnaud of Cantal had been at the Battle of the Camps – but I was pretty sure there was another principality that had a green hawk clutching a crescent moon for heraldry, and I did not trust myself to tell the difference. The Principate’s royal heraldries were a labyrinth at the best of times, and prone to changing along with the branches of the ruling families that held the seat. I got my answer before long, though, when the cavalry escort parted to allow three royals through. Would you look at that, it really is Prince Arnaud , I mused. This was getting rather nostalgic, wasn’t it?

Dark-haired and dark-eyed as Arlesites often were, Princess Rozala had little changed since we last met. Physically, anyway, I thought. There was no easy smile on her lips today, and the way she held herself even on the horse... Like there was nowhere that was entirely safe. I’d seen that before, in old soldiers. In Black too, who’d lived his entire life knowing he was one misstep away from death at heroic hands. You weren’t like at the peace talks after the Camps, Malanza , I thought. This was fresher, and I could think of only one war that’d leave so deep a mark so quickly. She’d fought up north, then. Prince Arnaud was still an unimpressive middle-aged specimen of Alamans royalty, though he appeared to have added a little muscle to his plump frame since we’d last met. Wouldn’t do to dismiss this one, I told myself. He’d stuck out to me as bearing watching during the truce talks, feigning emotions he did not feel very convincingly. The last of three was a woman I’d never seen before, fair-haired and blue-eyed. Older than Rozala but younger than Arnaud, with a soldier’s bearing and a narrow but handsome face. No great beauty, unlike Malanza whose curves and long curls would be well worth a second look in a different situation, but emanating a sort of robust health that was pleasing to the eye.

Rather interestingly, it was Princess Rozala that rode ahead of the other two. They reined in their horses a mere ten feet in front of me, riders bearing their banners behind them as the rest of their escort held tight on the sides.

“Black Queen,” the Princess of Aequitan said, tone grim. “It really is you.”

“In the flesh,” I replied. “It’s been some time, Malanza. I see you’ve still keeping Arnaud around, for some godsforsaken reason. Who’s the fresh face?”

The Prince of Cantal, who I’d so casually referred to, purpled with anger. I no longer had the senses of a fae to listen to his heartbeat, and calling on the Night might be taken as a hostile act, so I could only wonder if it was yet another piece of theatre on his part.

“Now see here, you filth Damned-” the prince snarled.

“Arnaud,” Princess Rozala said, tone sharp.

The man forced himself to calm, and I kept my face blank to hide my interest. Prince Amadis was still in the custody of Callow, last I heard. In his absence had someone else taken up the reins of his little cabal of crowned malcontents?

“I am Princess Sophie Louvroy of Lyonis,” the stranger blandly said. “You are, I believe, the self-proclaimed Queen of Callow.”

“Ah,” I hummed. “So, you’re the minder the First Prince set on ol’ Rozala. Should I be addressing you for the rest of this conversation, or is she actually allowed to speak for herself?”

“A petty and transparent scheme, as befits your reputation,” Princess Sophie coldly replied.

She twitched, though, like she’d wanted to glance at Princess Rozala but caught herself before she could. There were military types – and the Princess of Lyonis seemed too comfortable in armour not to be one of those – that were also subtle diplomats, but it looked like Sophie Louvroy wasn’t one of them. Good to know.

“You’ve refrained from attacking us, Foundling,” Princess Rozala said. “The courtesy has been returned. Evidently you want to talk, so talk. I’ve no time to waste on insults and posturing.”

I studied her for a moment, the tanned face visible through the raised visor of her elaborate helm. The fresh pink scar on her cheek, too rough to have been caused by a blade. Her armour was freshly polished, I saw, but it had blemishes now it’d not had at the Camps. She was worn , and the visible signs of it were the shallowest part.

“Withdraw,” I said. “And I will not pursue.”

“ Pursue ?” Princess Sophie hissed indignantly. “You are one woman-”

I ignored her, meeting Malanza’s eyes instead.

“We’ve been at this crossroads before, Rozala,” I said.

“So we have,” the other woman softly agreed. “But this is not Callow, Catherine Foundling. We did not seek this war.”

“Then let it end,” I said. “Those in my service who brought the sword to Procer, I will chastise appropriately. I don’t want to fight this battle, Rozala Malanza. But trust me, neither do you.”

“And we’re to take you word for this?” Princess Sophie mocked. “You, a-”

“Sophie,” I said, tone nonchalant. “If you interrupt this conversation one more time, I may very well lose patience and relieve you of your tongue.”

The fair-haired woman blanched, then reddened, and though she opened her mouth I stared at her calmly. In silence. A heartbeat passed, then another. Her mouth closed and I returned my gaze to Malanza.

“The Legions of Terror put half the heartlands to the torch,” Princess Rozala said. “That cannot go unanswered , Foundling. Break ties with them and the Army of Callow will be allowed to leave Procer unhindered. On this I give you my word.”

“You know I’m not going to give you that,” I said. “I offer you this instead: allow them to leave in my charge. They will be, from that moment onwards, my responsibility. I give you my word that should any of them attempt to enter Procer again, save at the invitation of the First Prince, I’ll see everyone involved hanged.”

“We could kill you right now,” Prince Arnaud said, voice grown cool for all the earlier heat. “Do you truly think yourself so powerful you could turn back so many horsemen, Damned? You overestimate your bargaining position.”

I cocked my head to the side and looked at the man. Eventually, I tapped the bottom of my staff against the line I’d drawn in the snow.

“Cross it, then,” I simply said.

I could see him considering it. It was in the way his legs shifted, like he was preparing to spur his horse forward. His fingers were inching towards the sword at his hip. Teeth worrying the dragonbone shaft of my pipe, I inhaled the wakeleaf and let it burn pleasantly at my throat. I exhaled, and Prince Arnaud grit his teeth but did not try me. It was the calm that was doing it, I dimly realized. Even more than the power they had seen me wield with their own eyes, the more they watched me fail to be cowed the more I could feel them grow unsettled. Thinking I knew something they didn’t, that I still had some card up my sleeve. I wondered if this was how Black had felt, making the armies of the Liesse Rebellion melt away like summer snow with nothing but a few tricks and the weight of his reputation.

“Malanza,” Princess Sophie whispered, “the longer we wait-”

“I know,” Princess Rozala crossly replied.

The longer they waited, the more of my legionaries retreated back to the safety of the southern camp. The more their chance to score a decisive victory slipped away.

“Where did you go, Black Queen?” the Princess of Aequitan suddenly asked. “For nigh a year you were gone.”

“I went into the darkness, Rozala,” I said. “And what I found there followed me out.”

“The Everdark,” she said, lips thinning.

“Withdraw,” I gently repeated. “And I will not pursue.”

“It cannot go unanswered, Foundling,” she wearily told me. “There would be... consequences.”

I looked up into the sky, at the burning glare of the sun.

“There would be consequences to forcing my hand as well,” I said, and returned my gaze to her. “A truce, for today. And tomorrow we will see if for once the costs can be paid with ink and gold instead of blood, for that last currency we can ill-afford.”

“It might come to a fight tomorrow regardless,” the Princess of Aequitan said. “So why should I hold my blade today, when the advantage lies with us?”

“Did you ever read about the old crusades, Rozala?” I idly asked.

“Prince Gontrand’s five volumes of ‘Empyrean Wars’ were part of my readings as a child,” Rozala frowned.

“Never read those,” I said. “See, my own education pulled a little to the east. What I got instead was the ‘Commentaries on the Campaigns of Terribilis the Second’, and there’s part that stayed with me. I thought about it, after Akua’s Folly. After the Camps too. It’s written that in the wake of the victory that broke the Fourth Crusade, on the shores of the Wasaliti, the High Lords sang Terribilis’ praises and called him the greatest general Praes had ever seen. He lost his temper with them, and here’s what he said-”

I cleared my throat.

“Another such victory and I will rule an empire of ghosts,” I recited.

Silence followed in the wake of my words.

“Now,” I quietly said, “you might win if we fought. Or maybe I’ll end up the victor of the field. But either way, Malanza, we’ll both be losing. You should know that, if you’ve been where I think you have.”

“What would you know of ghosts, Catherine Foundling?” the princess hoarsely replied.

“Enough I don’t want to fight today,” I said.

Her armoured hands closed around her reins as her lips trembled with a heady mixture of fear and rage.

“Princess Sophie, sound the retreat,” Rozala said, voice rough.

The Princess of Lyonis drew back as if stung, narrow face filling with surprise and indignation.

“Princess Rozala-”

“Merciful Gods, Louvroy, just sound the fucking retreat,” the Princess of Aequitan seethed. “She’s a monster and half mad besides, but she’s right. How many soldiers are you willing to throw away putting her down? One thousand, two, three? Our entire horse ?”

I dipped my head, if not in thanks then in respect.

“Spare me, you carrion thing,” Princess Rozala snarled. “This is not the respect of worthy opponents, and do not mistake this for some sort of arrangement. You’ve merely contrived to make yourself into the least of great evils yet one more time.”

Seizing her reins, she turned aside her horse.

“You will be seen to, Black Queen,” the Princess of Aequitan called out. “There will be a day where all sins will be called to account.”

Might be , I thought. But it won’t be today, or by the likes of you . I waited there, atop my horse, until the trumpets sounded. The cavalry was pulling back, almost embarrassedly, but it was to the fighting in the wreckage that my eyes turned. They did not listen, at first. They were Levantines, and this was a Proceran command. But the trumpets sounded again, insistently, and finally the call was heeded. Just like that, the battle came to a close. For now, I thought. The rest of their host was still marching towards this dawning nightmare, and even more were following behind the army I’d led here. This was far from over, and it was with that tired thought that I began the ride to the soldiers I’d just saved.

—

When I’d found the Third Army, I’d been welcomed with relief. When I’d reunited with the Fourth, it had been to a queen’s honours. What awaited me at the camp on the southern bank of the Odelle was entirely different, however. Oh, there were cheers. The ramparts of wood and beaten earth were filled with legionaries from the First and the Second, and they greeted my return with a deafening roar. But as I guided Zombie up the ramp that led into the camp proper and the gates were opened, I noticed that the escort awaiting me inside was not among the cheering throng. My eye ran quickly over their number – forty of them, more than should be needed for a mere escort if neither Juniper nor Vivienne were able to come themselves – and then lingered on the number of lightly armoured soldiers among them. Mages, fifteen of them, and I did not think it coincidence that there were five ogres among the remaining soldiers. Robber had mentioned there were instructions in case of my return, I remembered. To make certain I was me, and not some puppet of whatever I’d found below. It was not an unsound precaution, but I still felt my temper rise.

I’d just faced down an army of Proceran cavalry without even a fucking sword at my hip and this was my welcome home? An army we shouldn’t even be fighting, I thought with mounting anger, and two of the three people responsible for that particular bout of foolishness had been the ones to send me this escort . My mount slowed as I approached the two lines of soldiers awaiting me, and I raised an eyebrow when I recognized one among them – though she was hardly a soldier, truth be told.

“General Hune,” I said. “I see at least one of this army’s commanders found it in them to greet me in person.”

The thick plate on the ogre made her look more a steel fortress than a person, but she’d not worn her helm – the effect was almost comical, like a tuft of person over a siege engine. Hune Egeldotir’s face had not grown any less brutish, at first look, though neither had her eyes lost that look of patient cleverness. She didn’t look like she’d aged a day since we’d first met, though given the rumoured lifespan of her kind that should not have surprised me.

“Your Majesty,” Hune replied, her voice still surprisingly delicate for her size. “Welcome back.”

“Welcome indeed,” I flatly said, glancing at the rest of the party.

“Orders, ma’am,” the ogre said, though she did not sound apologetic in the slightest.

It would be, I thought, only be sensible to go along with this. To let the finest mages the army had on hand confirm I was not in fact a possessed shell before I was allowed the privilege of speaking to the Lady-Regent of Callow and the Marshal of the same. My fingers twitched. If I protested, I wondered where the legionaries around me would fall. There were a lot of Callowans among them, I thought. More than there would have been a few years ago, though with Vivienne as regent that loyalty might not be as clear-cut as I believed.

“Orders,” I repeated, tone pensive. “Funny thing, those.”

I hardened my voice.

“General Hune, kneel.”

The command rang, though my voice was not raised. It didn’t need to be. The ogre stilled, and I could see the shiver go through the rest of the soldiers she’d brought with her. All around us, the cheering began to peter out as legionaries realized something was afoot.

“Your Majesty-” Hune began.

“I have you an order, general,” I softly said.

She looked at me, and whatever she found there she knew better than to argue with. Like a tall oak breaking, the ogre knelt in the muddy snow. I glanced at the legionaries that’d come with her, the uneasy mages and tensing soldiers.

“Disperse,” I coldly said.

I didn’t bother to look if they’d obeyed, though the sound of hasty footsteps told me that had. I pressed my knees against Zombie and she tread forward, until I bid her to stop by Hune’s still-kneeling form.

“Get up, Hune,” I said. “And the next time one of them tries to give you an order like this, remember who you swore an oath to.”

The ogre rose to her feet, and though there was anger glittering in those eyes there was something else as well. I’d been content to leave the reins of the Army of Callow largely in Juniper’s hands, so far. Perhaps now and then, though, a reminder of who it was they served might not go amiss.

“I will not forget, Your Majesty,” General Hune said.

I glanced at her, almost amused at the boldness.

“Then come along,” I said. “I mean to have a frank conversation with the Lady-Regent and the Marshal.”

The glint in the ogre’s eyes told me that while she might not be all that fond of me, she’d not forgotten who had put her in this situation either. We made our way through the fortified camp, Hune taking the lead as she knew the lay of it, but with legionaries moving out of our way it was not long until we arrived before a tall pavilion. The banners besides it, I saw, included my own. I did not dismount. There was a guard of soldiers around, a full line.

“You are relieved, legionaries,” I said.

The lieutenant among them – an orc – glanced at Hune and my irritation spiked.

“If I need to repeat an order one more time,” I said, “there will be need a need for gallows today.”

“Ma’am,” the lieutenant got out in a croak, hastily saluting.

Under my cold stare the rest of them scrammed with him.

“General,” I said. “If you would?”

The ogre raised the flaps open for me and I rode in without even needing to lower my head. She looked surprised when I gestured for her to follow me in. The pavilion was still full of officers. Juniper’s full general staff was there, along with a few others. An old orc with a black band over an eye and two aides at his side needed no introduction, but Vivienne I almost did not recognize. She’d grown out her hair, and no longer wore leathers. There must have been around twenty people inside the pavilion, when I entered, but a heartbeat later you could have heard a pin drop. Juniper was first to react.

“Hune, what did you-”

“Juniper, if you still want to have a marshal’s baton by the end of this conversation you will sit down and shut up,” I calmly said.

The orc flinched like I’d struck her.

“This is-”

“On your oath, Hellhound,” I snarled in Kharsum, “you will be silent .”

She swallowed, loudly. I glanced at Marshal Grem One-Eye, whose face was a study in neutrality.

“A pleasure to meet you, Marshal,” I said. “We will speak later.”

“Well met, Black Queen,” the old orc gravelled.

A dip of the head was offered, respect but not submission, and he took the hint. His aides followed him, so I turned my eyes on the other officers. Those, at least, were mine. Aisha was studying me with a blank face, I saw, and had a hand on Juniper’s arm.

“Out,” I said, inclining my head.

“Catherine, this is not-”

Vivienne’s voice, the tone almost forcefully calming, had me clenching my fingers again. Zombie felt my legs tighten and whinnied angrily.

“Your regency is at an end, Vivienne Dartwick,” I said. “Put the seal on the table.”

The general staff had left the tent before the seal clattered against wood. Vivienne was looking at me like she’d never seen me before.

“General Hune, take a seat,” I said. “Depending on the outcome of this conversation you might in command of the Army of Callow by the end of the day.”

“You can’t be serious,” Vivienne said.

“Nauk is dead,” I said. “I’ve had to personally save the Third Army from encirclement and annihilation. The Fourth was bled savagely by Helike while essentially marching back and forth across the same patch of Iserre. Today, I found you engaged in a pitched battle with a Grand Alliance army – that is, a force that should be three months to the north preventing the fucking Dead King from rolling over Procer .”

My voice had risen, but I forced out a breath to calm myself.

“To add insult to injury,” I evenly said. “You were losing that battle to the extent that I had to personally step in and settle the matter. Now, I would have preferred to have this conversation with Adjutant there to speak as well and no enemy army within a day’s march. Your little stunt outside, however, has officially made me lose patience.”

My staff hit the ground beneath us with a hard thump. Both of them drew back.

“Now,” I calmly said, “do explain to me why either of you should still be trusted to make decisions about anything other than what you’ll have for dinner.”

Chapter 23: Readjustment

“The price of dominion is the halving of one’s grasp, for a ruler may hold a crown or hand but never both.”
– Julienne Merovins, tenth First Princess of Procer

I’d dismounted, eventually, mainly because my leg was starting to twinge again. A chair would be easier on it, though it was a great deal harder for me to glare down at people without a horse under me. My anger had cooled some after the initial remonstration, but it was far from gone – part of me was seething, and though I knew only part of the blame lay with the two women seated across from me they were not exempt from being called to account. Not when, to my knowledge, there was not a single part of this ill-considered western campaign that wasn’t a spectacular disaster in some way.

“For my defeats I offer no excuse,” Marshal Juniper said, tone rough.

This was the most cowed I’d ever seen her act, and with damned good reason. I trusted the supreme commander of my armies, even now. I did trust her judgement less than I would have a year ago, however. The thing was, what she had done – what Hakram and Vivienne had done with her – it couldn’t simply be settled with a calm word and a reminder to be careful. Not when my delaying my return from the Everdark for as little as a month might have seen the Army of Callow either slaughtered or ended as a fighting force. The Third lost, as it likely would have been without my intervention, meant the Fourth was alone and blind to the east. Add onto this that they’d been getting hammered by the mere vanguard of the Grand Alliance host before I arrived today? The decisions taken by my foremost commander had nearly led to the end of the armies she was commanding. For the political aspects of this howling mess I would not hold her to account, but the military ones? They were very much her purview.

“I’m not interested in your falling on your sword, Marshal,” I flatly said. “I’ve already spoken with Adjutant, so I have an understanding of the deployments made and the reasons for them. Splitting the columns was risky, but tactically sound. Before that, gating in between the Dominion forces was an equally sound manoeuvre. If, once more, risky .”

My voice hardened at the last word, and though she did not flinch she did stiffen. In all our years together, I’d never once before chewed out the Hellhound like this. We’d had disagreements, the most animated of them over Bonfire and later the conduct of the campaign in northern Callow, but they’d been only that. Disagreements. For the most part I’d allowed her the run of the Fifteenth and later the Army of Callow, usually only intervening for reasons that weren’t strictly military in nature. For all the oaths and the fact that I wore the crown, our relationship had been as close to one of equals as circumstances allowed. Right now, though? This was not Catherine talking to Juniper. This was the Black Queen speaking to the Marshal of Callow, and I reasons to be furious.

“A defeat, or several, is not something that needs excusing,” I said. “To expect a flawless record would be absurd, especially given the calibre of our opposition. But I am currently looking at a series of tactically solid steps that led towards the greatest strategic disaster of our tenure together, and that needs an explanation.”

I tapped my fingers against the table.

“Why is the Army of Callow fighting in Iserre, Marshal?” I asked.

“Your Majesty-”

Vivienne’s interruption once again had my temper flaring. I glanced at her, still finding the sight of her milkmaid’s braid surprising, and arched an eyebrow. The visible disconnect between the woman I’d left behind and the one I was looking at made it easier to rein in my irritation, though only by so much.

“Do you speak for Marshal Juniper now, Vivienne?” I calmly asked.

Her lips thinned.

“This campaign was not decided by her alone,” she said. “I also bear a responsibility.”

“You are not Marshal of Callow,” I said, calling on my thinning reserves of patience. “A graduate of the War College, a trained strategist or indeed a military officer at all. For the diplomatic aspects of this debacle, the main responsibility lies with you and Hakram. I am well aware of that. This is not the diplomatic aspect.”

My eyes flicked back to Juniper.

“Well?” I said. “ Should Vivienne be a part of this conversation, Marshal?”

“No, Warlord,” Juniper replied, chin rising. “She should not.”

I dipped my head in approval. At the very least she was owning the fuckup instead of trying to spread around the responsibility, though whether that was out of persisting dislike for Vivienne or a personal sense of honour I couldn’t be sure. My silence was taken as the invitation to speak that it was.

“It was necessary to evacuate the Legions of Terror,” Juniper said.

I nodded in acknowledgement.

“They fought at the Vales,” I said. “A debt was owed. How did this translate to your finding sense in deploying forty thousand legionaries through magical means of ingress and egress in the single most Name-infested region of this continent?”

“I did not believe any force below twenty thousand would prove a sufficient deterrent,” the orc said. “I can’t speak to the politics involved, but the size of the force was meant to ensure no battle would actually take place even if heroes spurred armies to move in time.”

“Then why forty and not twenty?” I said, frowning.

“Because there was no telling when you would return,” Juniper admitted. “And that meant if the northern Principate broke, we might have to occupy the Principality of Arans to prevent the Dead King from holding one side of the northern passage into Callow.”

The Stairway, I thought. Which should currently be defended by the army of Duchess Kegan, but only from the Callowan end of the pass. Considering the Principality of Hainaut was all that stood between the armies of the dead and Arans, her worry wasn’t unfounded.

“Adjutant didn’t mention this,” I said.

“The situation was still theoretical,” the Hellhound said. “We’d have a gap of at least two months between leaving Callow by Arcadia and arriving in Iserre, possibly more, which effectively killed our capacity to occupy Arans in time if the front in Hainaut broke. Committing twenty thousand soldiers – two divisions – and the Wild Hunt was splitting the forces in a manner that made it impossible to exert our strength correctly.”

I breathed out, forced myself to consider the logic in what she was saying.

“Even if you sent the two remaining divisions north before leaving, they’d arrive late and be dependent on Duchess Kegan’s army to manage occupation of Arans,” I finally said. “Which, without me at the helm, she might not be inclined to give. On the other hand, having the full four divisions with the Hunt meant if the strike proved necessary you could march in force immediately and entrust the Deoraithe with the supply line from the other side.”

“That was my reasoning,” Juniper agreed.

“And Adjutant was not informed of your theory because?”

“Because he had nothing to contribute to the planning,” the Hellhound bluntly said. “And I wanted the plans ready for implementation if things went to shit after he and the Lady-Regent tried to make a truce with Procer.”

I let a few heartbeats pass to see if she had anything to add, but she did not.

“General Hune,” I said without turning. “Anything to add?”

“Two months before our departure for Iserre, the general staffs for all four divisions were assigned a tactical exercise called Citadel,” the ogre evenly said. “While no direct mention of Procer or Arans was made, it involved rapidly occupying a foreign territory with limited forces. Priority was placed on fortifying it against an outside assault even while occupation took place.”

Essentially confirming Juniper hadn’t woven this entire Arans thing out of thin air, though I’d not been all that inclined to believe that in the first place.

“Noted,” I said.

I drummed my fingers against the tabletop, resisting the urge to hum. This was still a massive fuckup, I thought, but at least Juniper had actual reasons for having brought the Army of Callow this far out. Were they sufficient, in my eyes? I wasn’t sure, to be honest, and I shouldn’t be passing judgement on that until I had all the information at my disposal instead of a simple debrief. The Hellhound’s actions as still almost ended the Kingdom of Callow as a military power for at least a decade, and she’d proved to be imprudent repeatedly. On the other hand, every risk she’d taken was at least calculated and overall dictated by what could only be called a desperate fucking times.

“Marshal Juniper, in your own opinion where exactly was the blunder made?” I finally asked.

“When I ordered the army to gate in between the two Dominion forces,” she replied without missing a beat. “To be sound, that manoeuvre depended on certain access to gates when leaving. It was a blunder to assume that would be the case.”

She wasn’t changing her stance as to the necessity of fielding the four divisions of the army, I noted, which meant the Hellhound still believed it’d been the right call given what she’d known at the time. On the other hand, she wasn’t trying to excuse herself by saying it would have been impossible to anticipate the gates would start going wild when they did, or that scrying would be made impossible by something still unknown.

“And do you believe Adjutant the Lady-Regent interfered with how you would have planned this campaign otherwise?” I asked.

She mulled over that, for a moment.

“No more than you would have, Warlord,” Juniper said.

Fair enough, I thought.

“You’re not stripped from command,” I finally sighed. “As of now, General Hune is confirmed as the senior among the generals in the Army of Callow.”

A warning, essentially, that if she blundered this badly again then the ogre would be handed the marshal’s baton.

“When the situation in Iserre is resolved,” I continued, “a tribunal of senior officers will be convened to assess whether or not the decisions you took in this campaign warrant charges of incompetence or reckless use of authority. Their verdict will decide whether or not you are demoted back to general.”

“Understood,” the Marshal of Callow rasped.

“Good,” I said. “I’ll be perfectly clear: I have no intention of being involved with this tribunal beyond ordering it convened. This is not personal , Juniper. This isn’t happening because I am angry with an old friend, or appalled by what your decisions almost led to. But if the Army of Callow is ever to be more than just my personal warband, then its members need to be accountable for what they do.”

She nodded, but her face was unreadable. I did not know whether or not she believed me.

“None of this can hold until it’s been confirmed you’re actually Catherine Foundling,” Vivienne said, face resolutely set.

She hadn’t reached for a knife, and idly I wondered if she still carried any. Probably. Losing her Name did not mean she’d lost her skills, simply that there wasn’t quite as much weight behind them.

“Yes,” I said, smile turning hard. “Let’s talk about that.”

My fingers clenched.

“What the Hells were the two of you thinking?” I hissed out. “A pair of lines, fifteen mages? All of this led by General Hune, who is well-known to be aloof from me? Did you even pause to consider what it looked like?”

I glanced at the ogre in question, inclining my head to convey no offence was meant. She replied with the same, visibly unaffected. It was, after all, nothing but the truth.

“Precautions had to be taken,” Vivienne said, though she winced. “You’ve agreed on those in the past, Your Majesty.”

“If I’d actually been a puppet what would have happened?” I harshly asked her. “I would have splattered them across the ground, accused the two of you a fomenting a coup and I’d have your head on pikes within the hour. What could fifteen legion mages have done, Vivienne? Unless you’ve recruited practitioners capable of High Arcana in the last year, little more than scream before they died.”

“They were chosen for their capacity to check on your identity,” Juniper said. “A ritual-”

“Could have been done in private, away from the eyes of the troops,” I spoke through gritted teeth. “If I was willing to cooperate – and I will be, once this fucking conversation is over – then there was no need to play out what looked like an arrest. If I wasn’t, if I was an impostor or a puppet, exactly what difference would forty soldiers have made?”

There was a long moment of silence in the tent.

“I was aware you had no head or liking for politics when I named you Marshal, Juniper,” I said. “This, though? You should have grasped this without need for explanation. What would have happened, even if I’d been taken away without fighting and not reappeared? How many legionaries would have believed I was an impostor, after seeing me turn away the Proceran horse?”

I paused, forcing myself to breathe out and calm.

“We’re not eighteen anymore,” I said. “There’s no one to clean up our mistakes for us. You’re the highest ranked military officer in the kingdom, when you don’t consider the ramifications of your orders there are consequence s.”

I turned to the other reckless gambler, almost at a loss for words.

“As for you, Vivienne, do I even need to say anything?” I tiredly said.

She looked away. That was answer enough.

“Marshal Juniper, General Hune,” I sighed. “You may resume your duties. Within the hour the hills to the west will be occupied by the Third Army, while the Fourth and fifty thousand drow auxiliaries move to the northwest to pressure the Grand Alliance’s army.”

Assuming Hakram had understood me correctly, whoever held command of the enemy army was going to have a hard choice to make. Either they’d allow an enemy force with numerical superiority and two entrenched positions – this camp and the hills General Abigail was marching on – to begin encircling them before the battle continued, or they’d have to withdraw further north and surrender any advantage they’d gained today. My bet was on the enemy retreating, given that they had reinforcements following behind us, but if Princess Rozala and the Dominion commander wanted to get into a slugging match even after my warning then the Army of Callow and the Legions needed to be readied for the fight. Juniper nodded, and rose to offer a salute. Hune settled for a nod, which given the respective sizes of herself and the pavilion was probably for the best.

“Marshal?” I called out as she began heading out.

“Ma’am?” Juniper gravelled.

“Have the appropriate mages prepare the ritual,” I said. “Discretely. Leave an officer outside this tent to guide me there when I’ve finished.”

“Understood,” the Marshal of Callow said, and left without another word.

I wondered, with a pang, if what had been said here today had just ended one of the last few friendships I had. If a relationship it’d taken years to build had just been put to the torch and we would be returning to the distant formality of the first months of the Fifteenth. Perhaps not, I thought. Orcs tended to handle reprimands like these better than humans, and she’d not named me her warlord lightly. But something would change, I knew, and it might not ever entirely return to the way it used to be. And Juniper, of the two I had chewed out, was likely to take this the best. Akua’s words about the conflict between the needs of the queen and the woman lingered at the edge of my thoughts, but they were too bitter for me to be willing to acknowledge them.

“I suppose now is to be my turn,” Vivienne Dartwick said. “Was it a kindness or a bad omen, that you dismissed the others first?”

I finally allowed myself a good look at her. What had once been short dark hair was now elaborately put together in a milkmaid braid that circle twice atop her bangs, reminiscent of a summer fair crown. The blue-grey eyes had not changed, I thought, but something about the cast of her face had. She seemed... older. Like she had grown in the year I’d seen her. The old leathers had been traded in for a long-sleeved pale blouse, conservative in cut but still baring most of her shoulders. It led into high-waist wine red skirts, though beneath I’d earlier glimpsed more practical leggings and boots. An engraved silver ring on her hand was the only visible adornment she’d bothered with, save for the royal seal of Callow I’d earlier ordered her to set down. Vivienne hadn’t grown any more beautiful, since we’d last seen each other – she was still barely taller than I, and of rather similar frame. But there was something subtly matured about the way she carried herself. My eyes flicked to the seal still on the table, and for a moment I regretted ordering her to put her down. Her regency had come to an end the moment I’d returned, truth be told, but the manner of making that clear need not be so humiliating. On the other hand, Vivienne , I thought, what choice did you give me?

“I didn’t want it to be like this,” I said. “But here we are. I have questions.”

“Duchess Kegan is now Governess-General,” she said. “And was granted broad if temporary authority in my absence, though I kept the regency title proper until today.”

“Adjutant already told me,” I said. “Kegan was the best of the choices you had. Baroness Ainsley being Keeper of the Seals stacks the council towards nobles too much for my tastes, but I’ll concede there wasn’t anyone else with both the pull and the competence.”

“The recognition of the Confederation of the Grey Eyries-”

“Was within your authority as Lady-Regent, and something I can stomach,” I calmly said. “The Matrons are vicious monsters, but also a thorn in Malicia’s side and willing to sell us goods we badly need. The scheme to make a king of Grem One-Eye was overly ambitious, to my eye, but not offensively so. Arranging for him to hold the Blessed Isle with Black’s own legions was inspired, and I wholeheartedly approve.”

“This is not,” Vivienne murmured, “the way I expected this conversation to go.”

“I’m not going to ignore the significant achievements to your name because you angered me,” I mildly replied. “You did very well with the regency. Until, at least, you decided to allow this atrocious blunder of a campaign. Then you deepened the mistake by accompanying the army personally. So I suppose my questions is this – what, exactly, did you think this mess was going to accomplish?”

She smiled, at tad bitterly.

“And my answer determines whether I remain one of the Woe,” she said.

“Don’t give me that,” I sharply said. “Whimpering in self-pity is beneath the both of us. You were given power and authority, Vivienne. I’m asking you to explain your how you used them, not throwing a tantrum. Given the messes I’ve had to clean up, this is an exceedingly measured response.”

“You didn’t deny it,” she said.

“You think fucking up means you’re not one of us?” I said.

“Doesn’t it?” Vivienne replied, eyes unreadable.

“The lot of you didn’t cut my throat after the Doom of Liesse,” I said. “Why would you think this is any different? We can lose, Vivienne. But we have to learn. We have to own it. And we have to face the fucking consequences, because otherwise we’ll just keep doing it . And it’s more important than my feelings, or yours, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”

In the lucid, terrifying moment that followed those words I realized this might be how it’d started for Black. Looking at a mess and knowing that loving those responsible was one thing but exempting them from consequence another . Is that how you learned? To put it in a box and only let it out when the necessary callousness was over with.

“So tell me,” I said, repeating myself with the sudden taste of ash in my mouth. “What did you think this was going to accomplish?”

She talked, I listened, and with careful patient cruelty I hardened her to avoid making the same mistakes twice. We walked to the ritual together, afterwards, and some part of me was almost disgusted at the glints of gratitude and respect I caught in her gaze when she looked at me. Like I’d not, as lovingly as callously, burned her with shame and bound her with affection so that Vivienne Dartwick would be one step closer to the woman I needed her to be.

I was, in the end, my father’s daughter.

Chapter 24: Theft

“Wisdom is a tower built of failure and rue.”
– Ashuran saying

It wasn’t even an hour before the Third Army’s banners hung above the hills that were now to my east instead of west.

“Like kicking an anthill,” Vivienne said, eyes gazing far ahead.

She wasn’t wrong. We were looking at the same thing, I thought, but my sight was better than hers. A sliver of Night had seen to that. General Abigail had grasped my meaning deeper than Id thought, it seemed. I’d told her to fly the Fourth Army’s banner as well as her own for a reason, namely to imply much greater numbers in the hills than there actually were. The Summerholm girl had gone a step further than what I’d instructed and thinned her lines to an almost reckless extent: from the perspective of the Alliance soldiers in the plains below, it must look like there were at least twenty thousand fresh soldiers anchoring our left flank. Actually fighting with lines so thin would be disastrous, but it was a calculated risk. Even if the enemy suddenly marched on her she should have just enough time to redeploy before the fight began.

“Hakram’s force will be revealed soon enough,” I said. “That ought to pressure them into a full withdrawal.”

“Wouldn’t it have been quicker to send the entire host into the hills?” Vivienne asked.

Her tone was curious, not critical, and the expectation in her voice that she would be answered was almost as irritating as it was pleasing. Barely a quarter bell had passed since I’d chewed her out, and already she was back on old footing. I was glad of the confidence, I really was, and well aware it was petty of me to be irked that my displeasure hadn’t left deeper marks. But Vivienne had once called me petty when speaking to Akua, unaware I was listening in, and like a lot of what she’d said that night there’d been more than a grain of truth to it.

“It would have,” I agreed. “On the other hand, it also risked a standoff. They’d have been left to mass their entire army largely in peace, and we to establish a common line facing them. Two large coalition armies looking at each other over a fence, hands on swords. A lit sharper if I ever saw one. No, I want them to retreat. To give us space.”

And the flanking manoeuvre by General Rumena and General Bagram, under the steady hand of Adjutant, should do the trick. When I’d been up in the sky riding Zombie, I’d had a decent look at the enemy forces on the march as well as those already fighting. The western army – the mixed Dominion and Procer force that Princess Rozala was part of – had been marching on Juniper form the north, which had logistical implications. Iserre had been stripped bare of anything edible, which meant Malanza and her allies were running on what supplies they could either carry with them or get flowing from further north. Given the size of the western army, which at a glance I’d put at more than sixty thousand strong, without a steady flow of foodstuffs they’d start burning through their stocks at a prodigious rate. The amount of men might have been manageable, but the horses? I very much doubted they could afford to keep that many war horses for long without fresh supplies coming in. Besides, the northern campaign had taught me much of how Procer handled it supply trains. In a word, badly. It came from the way their armies were put together, in my opinion, more than any inferiority of intellect compared to the architects of the Reforms in Praes.

Instead of a unified army directly under the Tower – or, these days, me – Proceran forces were raised from the personal troops of rulers, hired fantassins and mass levies. The personal troops were trained, equipped and fed by the prince who fielded them, which was a costly thing even in peace time. That meant, as a rule, that princes and princesses of Procer had kept personal armies around the same size as those of the Old Kingdom’s nobles while being both significantly richer and ruling lands both larger and more heavily populated. Proceran logistics, as they currently stood, were well-versed in keeping forces that size fed and well-equipped. The rub came when the armies grew larger, which meant bringing in fantassins or levies. The mercenary companies were usually only hired for as long as they were needed then cut loose, meaning there’d never been a need to develop a system to feed larger forces for long. As for the levies, well, like everywhere else in the world they were handed the bare minimum in food and arms before being sent into the grinder. Those larger armies were usually fighting on enemy territory, too, where ‘foraging’ – a pretty word for armed robbery – could be used to fill up the stocks.

In this particular case though, the western army was stuck in a principality already picked clean and a whole chunk of foreign Levantine troops whose personal supplies had to be running dangerously low after chasing Grem and Juniper for so long. When Hakram appeared further north with a large force, threatening to cut off their supply lines, they’d be forced to either prepare for battle or withdraw. Considering we’d have them both half-encircled and severely outnumbered, battle would not be an attractive choice. Unless heroes were involved, I thought. Which they very well might be. For all the earthly considerations pointing at why fighting us here would be a terrible idea, there was a reason I’d ordered Juniper to prepare for a fight.

“Diplomacy, then,” Vivienne said, breaking my long silence.

“In a manner of speaking,” I grunted. “Princess Rozala made it clear her side wants the heads of the Legions on spikes. That’s not happening, so I’ll be removing the issue from the table: come nightfall, if they’ve withdrawn then our entire coalition is gating out of here.”

“Tactical offence, to allow for a strategic defence,” she mused.

She half-turned to me, the azure blue cloak she’d donned when leaving the pavilion tight around her shoulders.

“And you’re not afraid without the blade at their throat they won’t consider bargaining?” Vivienne asked. “The truce offer I extended to Hasenbach was refused even when it looked like we had the advantage in Iserre.”

“I think with us reappearing somewhere in Arans, with supplied coming in through the northern passage and a comfortably defensible position, the First Prince will have to consider how far she can afford to push us,” I frankly said. “More importantly, with us gone and the two Grand Alliance armies in Iserre within a week’s march of each other the League is either going to retreat or take a beating.”

“Both would be dangerous to Procer,” Vivienne noted. “A retreat means they have to keep armies south to pursue. A victory on the field might prove more costly than the war to the north can afford.”

“If Kairos intended to collapse Procer, he would have already done it,” I said. “He wouldn’t have come through the Waning Woods, either. The League armies would have battered through Hasenbach’s border army in Tenerife and begun occupying southern principalities. Feasibly they could have occupied Tenerife and Salamans without getting much more of a fight, then dug in for the long term. After that...”

“All it’d take was raids into the bordering principalities for those royals to try withdrawing their troops from the north and march back to defend their lands,” Vivienne softly agreed. “If Hasenbach tried to go after them through the Highest Assembly, it might lead to civil war. If she did nothing, the Dead King would likely eat the north.”

“Instead he surprised us all and marched out of the Waning Woods to cut into this dance,” I said. “No, he’s after something from the mess in Iserre and it’s not hammering nails in the Principate’s coffin.”

“It would not be territorial concessions, or anything monetary,” Vivienne frowned. “There would have been better, easier ways to force those.”

“He’s a villain of the old breed,” I said. “Ink on parchment isn’t what he’s after. I met with him, in Rochelant, and he hinted Hasenbach has been dredging something dangerous out of Lake Artoise.”

“He is a liar, as you reminded me rather sharply,” she said.

I’d not been pleased to hear she’d been trading information with Kairos, to say the last. It was one thing to do what I had, haggle an alliance of convenience against the Wandering Bard after trading secrets. It was another entirely to pass him detailed assessments of the Dominion’s armies, even if the payment was useful word out of Salia and the north. While I’d understood that the Jacks were still too young an organization to have penetrated deep into Procer, and certainly to have a way to pass along regular reports given the mess the Principate was in right now, relying on the Tyrant for anything meant you were getting played. If I had to guess, he’d making little deals like that with everyone he could: offering piece for piece, and ensuring he alone had a bird’s eye view of what was taking place in Iserre. I was finding it worrisome Kairos had been interested in details about the Dominion armies, too. It could be another layer of deception, sure, but it might also mean he believed he would be fighting them in the future. Or that he was selling that information to the Dead King, I acknowledged with a grimace. There weren’t a lot of things I’d put past Kairos Theodosian.

“Oh, there’s something happening there,” I said. “That much I don’t doubt. But I don’t necessarily think it’s whatever trouble she’s brewing that interests him. Or even her in particular, to be honest – this campaign, the First Prince herself, I think they’re means to an end.”

“That end being?” Vivienne asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “But if he’s willing to launch an entire invasion in the middle of war against Keter just to get leverage on Cordelia Hasenbach, it’s not going to be a trifle.”

“The man needs to die,” Vivienne said. “The Hierarch as well. They’re too unpredictable, Catherine. If they start swinging at the wrong moment, the consequences could be... wide-reaching, to say the least.”

“I’m sure Cordelia thinks the same thing,” I said. “And that’s why he’s made himself so very costly to remove from the board.”

Strategic offence, I thought with rueful amusement, paired with tactical defence. Mad or not, I had to concede that the villain king of Helike was viciously cunning. The more the western and eastern coalitions fought without him being involved, the more reluctant they grew to engage his fresher forces. The only way out of that downwards spiral, as far as I could see, was to withdraw my forces from Iserre and let him face the storm he’d stirred without my standing shield for him. In the distance I could see Malanza’s vanguard fully withdrawing from the battlefield. Even the Levantine horse that’d baited the Order of Broken Bells into chasing them all the way to irrelevance had pulled away, and now Grandmaster Talbot’s knights were sheepishly riding back to camp. I’d let Juniper handle the reprimand for that, I decided. It had been her battle, even if she’d been losing it. It’d also make it clear to the high officers that she still held command even after my taking her to task.

“You haven’t asked,” Vivienne suddenly said.

“Asked what?” I replied.

“If I still have a Name,” she said.

I glanced at her.

“I know you don’t,” I said. “Yours had a subtle weight, but even that is gone.”

“Then you haven’t asked why,” she said, then blue-grey eyes narrowed. “Unless Adjutant told you.”

“He didn’t,” I told her. “Or even explain why someone’s going to end up calling him Hakram Handless, for that matter.”

“And you’re not worried in the slightest?” Vivienne asked, tone inscrutable. “Gods, even just curious?”

“It’s a strange horse to ride, a Name,” I said. “Black said it was willpower that got you on the saddle, and I don’t entirely disagree with him, but I think that’s only part of it.”

I looked into the distance, at the Alliance host retreating into the second part of the trap I’d laid. It was a kindness that was due, not to look at her while speaking this.

“It’s a recognition that you’re trying to do something,” I said. “William wanted to kill his way out of Praesi rule. Akua wanted to bind everyone else. Indrani wants to pass through life unhindered. Whatever it is you’re after the Name makes you better at doing it, I won’t argue that. But you don’t get a Name unless you’re already good at it, Vivienne.”

I cleared my throat.

“So I’ll answer the question you didn’t ask: no, you’re not getting tossed out on your ass because you can’t steal the sun anymore. That’s a trick. The important parts came before you were the Thief, and that hasn’t gone anywhere.”

Vivienne let out a shuddering breath.

“How is it,” she quietly said, “that you always know exactly the right thing to say?”

The urge was there to pull away with levity, draw attention to my admittedly chequered diplomatic record, but I didn’t follow it. It would have been cheapening the sincerity of the moment, and wouldn’t that defeat the point of having it in the first place? So instead I said nothing, for lack of anything to say, and let silence stretch.

“The Empire killed my mother,” she murmured. “Did you know that?”

My fingers clenched.

“Not for sure,” I said. “But I suspected.”

The moment I’d learned her last name was Dartwick, looking into her past had become a great deal easier. Out of courtesy I’d not dug too deep, but I’d had a look anyway. Her father had been a baron before the Conquest, vassal to the Count of Southpool but her family had remained rather obscure in the years that followed. There’d been a bit of interest in her father after he was widowed, before the man made it clear he would not remarry, but it’d died down quick after he did. That’d gotten me curious enough to look into the mother, and my brow had risen when I found out she’d died in a hunting accident not long after the Conquest. It could have been an actual accident, I knew. But in the early days of Praesi occupation, more than a few Imperial governors had arranged ‘hunting accidents’ when they were inclined to discretely put down rebellious elements.

“I say the Empire, Catherine, because it makes no difference who gave the order,” Vivienne admitted. “The decision came from Governor Chuma, though he’s long dead. Some might say it was in truth her fault, for joining a rebel cabal. That she knew the risks. Others might argue that whatever hired hand did it was the killer in every sense. But it’s never quite that simple, is it?”

I stayed silent. The question had not been meant for me to answer.

“I think I understood that even as a child,” Vivienne pensively said. “That is was larger than just my mother and the governor. That it was about Praes, what it was doing to us. The way it was doing it to us. Chuma, you see, he was one of the light-handed governors. Didn’t hang whole families, only the rebels themselves. The rest got off with a fine .”

Different Imperial governors, I thought, had taught us different lessons. Vivienne had been taught that we were cattle, to be sheared when laden and beaten when unruly. Less than human, in the Empire’s eyes, but not to be hurt without reason. Mazus, though, Mazus had not been interested in such a civilized arrangement. He’d been a looter in silk clothes, a noble in nothing but the ugliest ways that word could be meant. From him I’d learned that no one in power would ever be fair unless you made them. Vivienne had tried to claw back some pride with her thefts. I’d tried to murder my way into authority with a sword.

“I started stealing to even the scales, though I knew coin would never be the right measure for that,” she said. “I kept stealing because they deserved it. Because every time I took from them they got a taste of loss. Of what they were doing to all of us.”

“And then they warned you off,” I said.

“Assassin,” she acknowledged. “A small cut on my father’s throat, and I stayed my hand. But he’d passed when William raised the banner and the anger was still in my stomach.”

“And it isn’t anymore?” I quietly asked.

“You killed him,” Vivienne said, evading the question. “But what did that change? They’d been killing us for years before I was ever born. Truth be told I think it was Laure that did it.”

“When we spoke,” I said. “In the palace.”

“It wasn’t the words, Catherine,” she said. “You can have a silver tongue, now and then, but I did not trust you an inch back then. It was how tired you were. I’d seen you go from victory to victory, but that night you didn’t act like you were winning.”

“I wasn’t,” I frankly said. “And there were greater disasters on the horizon.”

“You were fighting for Callow,” Vivienne acknowledged. “But that was the detail that took me so long time to understand even after joining. We weren’t talking about the same thing when using that word. Because for you it also meant the Fifteenth. It mean the goblin tribe in Marchford. It meant everyone willing to live under the laws, to pay their taxes and stand on the wall when the horn sounds.”

“They are Callowans, Vivienne,” I said. “I won’t ignore what was the best of us, in the old days, but we can’t just-”

She raised her hand to interrupt me.

“I know,” she said. “I know, Catherine. And that’s what killed it. Because I would look at Hakram, at Masego and Ratface and especially the goblins and I would wait for them to be the enemy. Because they’d always been, because that was what the Conquest meant. But then they kept faith, Cat. They died, and they died for you but not just that. Also because they were serving something they believed in. And that scared me, because if they weren’t the enemy then what had I been fighting all these years?”

The Tower , I wanted to say. The High Lords . What made all of us this way, heroes and villains and the ever-spreading graveyard between. But this wasn’t my moment, it was hers, and so I kept to silence once more.

“My Name was already thinning by then,” Vivienne said. “Sometimes it wouldn’t work as it used to. Sometimes I couldn’t feel it at all. And when my hair began to grow again, I was terrified. Because if I wasn’t even the Thief anymore, then what use was I?”

I saw her fingers clench.

“I nearly did some very foolish things,” she said. “But Hakram cut off his hand, and if nothing else that stayed mine. And it forced me to see, Catherine, because in the months following that night I did the most good for my homeland I ever have and not a single speck of it involved theft.”

She let out a breathless laugh, though it was more mockery of herself than mirth.

“I wasn’t angry anymore, Cat,” she said. “Or at least, not at the same people or for the same reasons. Mostly I was afraid. And the more I tried to pretend I was still fifteen and collecting my mother’s dues from something that no longer existed, the more I missed the point: that I was a child, when I became the Thief, and it was a child’s anger I was still heeding.”

I watched her and found regret painted on her face, though a soft and thoughtful manner of it.

“But you weren’t a child anymore,” I said.

“And so I was no longer the Thief,” Vivienne softly agreed. “Because I’ve learned that just taking from the enemy won’t change anything. That we’ll need more than that, to change the world, and that’s what I want to do most of all.”

And so the Name had died, I thought, along with the indignation that’d birthed it. It might be that something else would come of that, but she would never again be the Thief. The girl who had become her no longer existed: she’d been outgrown by the woman standing at my side. Vivienne Dartwick’s eyes were clear, I saw, and her back straight. In the afternoon’s light, cloaked in blue and hair braided like a fair crown, she seemed almost regal. I hoped, truly, that no Name came of this. The Liesse Accords, as written, would bar any and all Named from being rulers. And it was early days yet, I knew that, and it was not a decision to be made in haste.

But Vivienne Dartwick had just talked herself into being the foremost heiress-candidate to the throne of Callow.

Chapter 25: Dead Ends

“And so the First Under the Night came across a portal where great danger might lurk, and upon witnessing it halted and sought the council of Sve Noc. ‘O Night,’ said the First, ‘what wisdom do you offer?’ And so the Young Night answered thus: ‘Try a foot first.'”
– Extract from the ‘Parables of the Lost and Found’, disputed Firstborn religious text

Shit , I thought to myself, this is going too well.

“- the Alliance army has effectively withdrawn, and is making camp for the night,” the officer continued. “They have recalled everything but scouts, as far as our own can see.”

I’d told Vivienne what I wanted out of the manoeuvres, namely forcing the western coalition to give me just enough room that I could gate my armies away from this mess. It was starting to look like I’d be getting exactly that, which was highly suspicious. Reports had begun to come into the pavilion over the afternoon, everything going according to plan. First the opposition drew back, then General Bagram threatened their supply lines further north and they outright retreated. Had any of the crusader commander taken the Fourth Army’s distant presence as an immediate threat and charged? No. Had the drow been ambushed by some unforeseen sun-based sorcery kept in store just for this day? No. Had some hero assassinated half the general staff of one of my divisions? No. This was going off without a hitch, which meant it wasn’t and the Gods were about to dump a sackful of angry badgers on my plans.

“Your Majesty?”

“It’s always badgers, you know,” I complained. “It never goes a little badly, its’s always ‘oh no, there’s goblinfire burning the city’ or ‘oh no, the Praesi summoned a bunch of devils again’ or even ‘oh no, half the continent thinks a crusade would be just the thing’. Would it really be too much to ask for a mishap instead of a catastrophe once in a while? Like, ‘oh no, we’re out of the good wine, but that’s fine we’ve got this pretty decent bottle instead we’ll just drink that’.”

There was a long moment of silence in the pavilion.

“So, double watch and not single,” Marshal Juniper said, sounding vaguely embarrassed of me.

“Don’t you give me that, Hellhound,” I grunted. “You know I’m right. Matter of fact-”

I went looking through my cloak before realizing I was not, in fact, carrying anything that could remotely be used as coin. Arguably the main drow currency was murder – although, given how much obsidian they always seemed to carry around maybe in practice it was that – and it wasn’t like anyone had handed me a purse full of golden aurelii since I’d come back to the surface.

“Hakram,” I said, extending arm with my palm up.

I didn’t even bother to look, nor him to argue. Two heartbeats later I was slapping coins against the table, more specifically –

“- silver ?” I said, turning to glare at Adjutant. “You cheapskate. That’s old Marchford coinage, too, it’s basically worth nothing nowadays.”

“Thought we’d get rid of it while in Procer,” the orc shamelessly admitted.

“Ugh,” I said. “Fine then. Juniper, I’m betting these eight silvers that when you send a rider out on the field they’ll run into a scout on the way back with urgent news.”

“To clarify, they’re silvers only in the nominal sense,” Adjutant helpfully added. “Their actual worth is closer to-”

“You believe we’re about to be ambushed,” Marshal Grem interrupted in a rasp.

The old orc was an interesting sight, I’d admit. The cloth covering the missing eye his epithet promised was nothing out of the ordinary, simple black linen with the First Legion’s symbol embroidered in gold. It was the Marshal himself I found interesting: neither as tall as Hakram nor as broad as Nauk had been, the sight of his frame in Legion armour brought to mind an old tree – all dry and corded, but likely to be nasty if pushed. He was, it would not do to forget, more than just one of the finest military officers in the Empire: he was also an old man who’d been born before the Clans were bound so tightly to the reformed Legions of Terror. Back in the days where the orc clans had preferred raiding each other and on occasion the Praesi to taking the Tower’s gold and serving in the ranks. For his clan to have been as prominent as it’d reputedly been, he must have seen some brutal fighting. And that was before he joined up with Black, through a civil war and the Conquest , I thought. There was a dangerous man, behind that red-brown eye. Simply because my teacher’s latest scheme had backfired on the Legions did not mean the orc was helpless.

“I believe this has proceeded perfectly when we know for a fact there’s heroes nearby,” I replied. “One way or another, this is about to get ugly.”

“Battle?” he asked, tone calm.

There was no doubt in his eyes, like what I had said was a statement of fact. I almost shivered at the sight of it, the old general waiting to dissect my instincts like an augur would a bird. How many times had Black stood in my place, lending his paranoia’s edge to a finer commander’s plans?

“Not tonight,” I said. “We’re too close to sundown. But they’ll spring a surprise on us, you can count on that .”

“Then it might be best to issue the recall for the Fourth Army early,” Marshal Grem said. “And allow the ‘Firstborn’ to handle the defences as our divisions withdraw through Arcadia.”

I flicked a glance at Juniper, who after a beat nodded.

“Do it,” I said. “Adjutant-”

“I sent one of mine to have a look,” Hakram gravelled. “We’ll know soon.”

I didn’t quite manage to set aside the nagging feeling that we were about to get screwed, but we still managed to get some business done in the stretch that followed. We needed to hash out supply arrangements for Marshal Grem’s legions beyond this particular Iserran mess, and I had no intention of forever feeding the legionaries unless they proved of some use to me – either garrisoning the Blessed Isle or participating in the war against the Dead King. If they wanted to wait out the war until Black died or returned, it would not be through the grace of Callowan granaries. One-Eye hinted pretty bluntly – still, it was something of a novelty to see an orc hint at all – that private talks between he and I should be held on the subject, and I was wondering whether to push for either Hakram or Vivienne or both to be in the room instead when a legionary stumbled back into the pavilion. He saluted at me first, so he was one of mine and not the Legions, but his eyes flicked at Adjutant after. One of Hakram’s helping hand, then.

“Report,” I ordered.

“Your Majesty,” the legionary replied, saluting once more. “While the enemy’s forces have not redeployed, they have sent a party out in the plains towards us.”

My fingers clenched.

“How many?” Juniper asked. “Horse or foot?”

“Two or four,” I said, tone calm.

The legionary’s eyes widened.

“Two, Your Majesty,” he agreed.

“And they’ll be raising a tent, the smug pricks,” I said.

Something like fear passed in the soldier’s eyes.

“It is so, Your Majesty,” he said.

“Black Queen?” Marshal Grem rasped, tone inquisitive.

“One is the Grey Pilgrim,” I said. “I’m guessing the other’s the Saint of Swords, though he might have traded in for younger muscle. Well, fuck .”

The last word I said feelingly, as it looked like all my preparations had gone up in smoke.

“They raised a tent, soldier?” Adjutant said. “You are certain?”

“Yes sir,” the legionary nodded. “One of those Proceran pavilions, the ones they use to receive people.”

“We’re not gating anywhere, looks like,” I cursed. “Let’s find out why at least. Adjutant, have a space cleared for an attempt. With contingencies.”

My second nodded, and after a few nods of respect spread around left to see my will done.

“An explanation would be appreciated,” Juniper growled. “For those of us who aren’t Named.”

“The Pilgrim is under the impression we’ll be talking soon,” I said. “Considering I’m very much planning on getting the Hells out of here by Arcadia if it’s possible, that means he knows something we don’t about why that’s not possible. It’s his whole thing, Juniper, being wise and and all-knowing. In practice I’d guess he’s got some ties to a Choir, maybe some limited foresight. Not that he’d be a fool without, mind you, but he’s certainly got an edge. Either way, by putting up that tent he’s making a point.”

“Posturing,” Vivienne said. “That is to say, preparing for negotiations.”

“How kind of our friend Tariq to be willing to talk,” I said, tone gone sardonic. “Why, he might even be willing to consider peace as a personal favour to us. Entirely unrelated to the fact that he’s currently losing, no doubt. It will be our privilege, nay, our blessing to be allowed to make a truce with the side of the Heavens.”

“Manifold thanks to the Gods Above,” Vivienne agreed without missing a beat. “Who have ever protected and preserved us, praise be. We may have to raise a new cathedral in Laure as an expression of our gratitude.”

“I take it,” Marshal Grem said, “that you are less than fond of this hero.”

“Well, he’s only tried to kill me twice so far,” I mused. “So I guess that still puts him somewhere between Saint and Malicia, relationship-wise.”

“Wait, what’s the left extremity of that line?” Vivienne frowned. “It can’t be the Saint, we’ve barely fought her.”

“I think it’s still William,” I mused. “He tried to kill me every single time we met, I’m pretty sure. I mean, so did a few others but mostly ’cause they didn’t get to meet me twice.”

“That feels underwhelming,” she said. “He couldn’t even ruin a city without Contrition holding his hand, second rate at best. Really, they shouldn’t even make the list if they haven’t tried to murder you through use of an astral sphere.”

“Eh, I think Pilgrim’s star-thing is more like a metaphor,” I said. “That’d only leave High Noon Delight and Queen The-Sky-Is-A-Reasonable-Weapon from Summer. Two’s not a list. Besides, if we’re opening the floor to metaphors then Willy’s murder-sword thing kind of looked like moonlight.”

“Didn’t the Page have a similar trick?” Vivienne asked. “You mentioned it a while back.”

“Oh man , I’d almost forgotten about her,” I admitted with a hum. “When I think about Three Hills it’s always Nauk popping the Exiled Prince in the throat that comes to mind.”

Bambambam. Marshal Juniper smashed her sheathed sword against the table one last time, for emphasis, and then cleared her throat with a growl.

“Orders, Your Majesty,” she said.

“At the moment?” I said. “Everyone is to remain in a defensive posture, as they’ve already been ordered to. We won’t know more until I’ve tried a gate, which Hakram is securing grounds for me to do as we speak.”

I drummed my fingers against the table.

“I’d recommend for the two of you to prepare a plan of action for the eventuality of being forced to march out of Iserre,” I said. “Or being forced to give battle here, either against the current army or the entire Grand Alliance field force.”

“You don’t intend to participate?” Marshal Grem asked.

“The skeleton I’ll leave to the two of you,” I shrugged. “I need to see some birds about something, and if that doesn’t work I’ll have to beat Larat until answers come out. Might take a while, it’s mostly lies and arrogance in there.”

“Understood,” One-Eye said, apparently unruffled.

Merciless Gods, what kind of insanity had my father put this one through that he wouldn’t even blink at that? I shot him an assessing look, but let it go for now.

“You coming?” I asked Vivienne.

“The birds,” she said. “From underground?”

“Those are the ones,” I agreed. “They’re perfectly safe.”

Vivienne’s brow rose.

“Probably safe,” I corrected.

The brow stayed up.

“To me,” I specified.

“I shall stay and provide a political perspective to these unfolding campaign plans,” Vivienne Dartwick serenely said.

“You do that,” I snorted, then glanced at the Marshals. “Until later, then.”

A dip of the head for me, salutes for them, and on my way I went.

—

It was still the better part of an hour before dusk when the Sisters came to me.

I could have tried the gate before then, of course, and very nearly did – though it would tire me to make the attempt, it was nothing that second wind coming with nightfall wouldn’t carry me through. Still, I was... wary. I’d not forgotten what Robber had told me, the tale of gates into Arcadia opening into the Hells instead or simply wildly out of course. Adjutant had done well in arranging for me a wide courtyard now surrounded by basic wards, but if devils started pouring out those wouldn’t be enough. I might be, even on my own, but best to exercise a little patience if it lowered the risks. The crow-shaped slivers of godhood sliced into the glare of the sun like knives, their unnaturally graceful flight taking them in twin spirals until they claimed my shoulders in unison. Perfect unison, I’d realized. Not even the fraction of a moment in delay. That kind of precision was unsettling, as no doubt they’d meant it to be.

“I have a problem,” I said, leaning on my staff.

“A servant of the Pale Gods,” crow-Komena said with relish. “ Finally .”

“See, I don’t believe it’s actually him that’s the trouble here,” I said. “Well, not this particular trouble anyway. He’s definitely some other sorts.”

“You believe the ways into Arcadia to have been wounded,” crow-Andronike said. “Amusing, that you’d believe what frustrated some errant Splendid would be a threat to us.”

“Now that ,” I said, “is the kind of talk that ends up with gods in boxes. Or cut up for parts. Or, you know, made to scamper away in disgrace by a hero. You’ve been down there for a long time, O Goddesses of Night. Here be monsters, and some of them were born to make sport of those like you.”

I could feel their roiling anger, not that it cowed me in the slightest. My very purpose in their service was to pull them back when they were about to make a mistake like this. Twirling the ebony staff lightly, I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth.

“So, let’s try this again,” I said. “I have a problem. Some hero with friends upstairs believes I won’t be able to gate out of here. In your opinion, how dangerous would it be to try opening one right now?”

“The taste of the boundary has not changed,” Komena said. “You worry for nothing.”

“It would not, if the change were coming from without,” Andronike noted.

My brow rose.

“So, if there’s a mess it’s more likely to be coming from Arcadia?” I asked.

“A more precise explanation would be well beyond your understanding,” Komena said.

It was surprising, I mused, how quickly one got used to being condescended to by a bird. I lowered my staff, tip touching nothing at all.

“So, a quick look is in order,” I said.

Night flooded my veins, abrupt and eager to answer my call. The gate ripped through Creation easily, to my surprise – and that of the Sisters, I felt. I’d felt this before, in Marchford. When Akua’s demon had weakened the fabric of Creation enough that it was made easier for the Winter Court to raid through. It’d not been like that when I gated earlier, I thought.

“This is unusual,” Andronike said.

I felt it too, even as the ink-black gate opened before me. Eyes, unfathomably large, gazing at me. The surface of the gate was like liquid obsidian, though without a single ripple, and I hesitated. I held back, leaning on my staff.

“Thoughts?” I said.

“Try a foot first,” Komena drolly suggested.

“Oh, we think we’re funny now do we?” I muttered. “Mark my words, that one’s going into the holy book.”

Godly advice, my ass, I thought. Still, wasn’t like there was another choice was it? I breathed out and stepped through. The rippling sensation was replaced by howling winds as my feet stumbled over Arcadia’s grounds. Blinded and deafened by what must have been half a hurricane, I called on the Night and let Andronike’s steady hand guide my will: a bubble of stillness bloomed around us, sudden and absolute. Breathing out, I put my cloak in order and finally took a good look around me. This was Arcadia, I was certain of it. The... sensation was the same. Which made what I was looking at all the more worrisome.

“That is not the work of fae,” Komena croaked.

“No,” I murmured, “I don’t think so either.”

Before us spread out a wasteland to make the heart of Praes flinch. Choking black dust billowing in a great storms as streaks of lightning erupted wherever they wished, striking at the ground with thundering claps. The noise of it all was deafening, even inside the bubble of stillness. I could see fractures of glowing red snaking across the ground, and liquid fire bubbling out when currents unseen made the heat rise in great geysers. The sky above us was an endless shifting tapestry of darkened clouds, with malevolent pale lights lurking behind them. This had been Arcadia, I thought, before someone broke it beyond repair.

“No,” Andronike said, disagreeing with my thought. “To the very point it can tolerate breaking, and not a step more.”

In the distance I could see the great storms strengthening, until what looked like the eye of the madness: a great hidden shape, the dark winds whirling around it masking the true appearance of what lay there.

“This was done on purpose,” I murmured. “And you felt it too, didn’t you? How easy it was to open the gate here.”

The Sisters did not speak the approval, though a hint of pressure against my thoughts served as acknowledgement. It was almost secondary, now, that I wouldn’t be able to evacuate my armies through Arcadia – as if I’d not lose every damned soldier, trying to march them through here. I suspected now that if I tried to open a gate leading to anywhere I’d still end up here, as if all the paths now led to this place. In a sense, I thought, they probably were. Something, or someone, had damaged this chunk of Arcadia to pry it loose from the rest. And now, if I was not mistaken, this wretched placed was slowly dropping down into Creation.

“We are seen ,” Komena suddenly hissed.

Behind me, the still-open gate shuddered. Well, shit. I wouldn’t be using that one to leave anyway, but it looked like we’d drawn the attention of something I’d rather not be in the eyes of.

“What is it that’s here,” I urgently pressed. “Before going back we have-”

The gate broke. The inky power it was made of shattered , and the shards started slinking through the dusty ground – towards that hidden shape in the distance, I judged.

“Tell me,” I hissed at Sve Noc. “Is it the Dead King, or-”

An eardrum-breaking shriek tore through this nightmare of a realm, then four grinding cacophonies in interweaving succession. Almost like rusty metal being pulled apart, but the truth of it was much worse: in that storm-cloud covered sky, burning red circles formed. Out of them winged creatures poured, swarms and swarms of them, weaving in and out of the horrid winds. Hellgates. Temporary and unstable, but hellgates nonetheless.

“- or Hierophant,” I finished, shivering. “ Fuck .”

“We need to leave,” Andronike said. “The gate, First Under the Night.”

“There’s something happening,” I said. “Look, under the hellgates.”

Some glittering array of runes formed in a circle, at twice the height of a man, though looking upon them cut at my eyes in an almost physical way. I thought I glimpsed something ghostly at the centre of the runes, but it was there for only a moment – and then the massive detonation that followed blew me off my feet, ripping right through the miracle. I landed in a sprawl of dust, cawing crows stumbling with me, and didn’t ignore the Sisters twice. The gate ripped open in front of me, though to my horror something fought me for control of it. A will pitched against my own, though that was no person’s. It felt more like one of the fae, though one of royal title at least . The goddesses slid their will along mine, and that bought us just long enough to drop through the bloody fairy gate. I dropped on the ground maybe three feet to the left of where I’d entered the other gate, covered in dust and lightly smoking.

“Well,” I murmured, looking up at the setting sun. “That’s going to be a problem.”

Chapter 26: Civility

“No plan is beyond dreading the sound of a match being struck.”
– Dread Emperor Reprobate the First

“You could change,” Hakram gently suggested, “into something that’s not still smoking.”

I patted at my cloak absent-mindedly, irritated that even after three rounds of that there still seemed to be smoke wafting up somehow. My face was caked in dust and soot, so Adjutant was being fairly light-handed by just talking about clothes, but to the Hells with it. Who was I trying to impress on the other side, by not arriving dressed like a grimy goblin and smelling of dark sorceries? That lot had already declared me Arch-heretic of the East, the only way to go was up. A sharp whistle had Zombie trotting to my side instead a spoken answer and Hakram sighed.

“I take it you won’t be washing either,” the orc said.

“Got it in one,” I cheerfully replied. “Now, we’re just waiting on-”

Leaning against my staff, I pushed myself atop my docilely waiting mount. I settled comfortably onto the saddle, the length of ebony in my hand spinning gracefully the once before I brought it to rest against her neck.

“- a message,” I finished. “After that we’ll be going to have a nice polite chat with people who may or may not want to murder us.”

“Is Vivienne coming along?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Not for this, considering what it might come to,” I said. “And even with you I’m hesitating.”

I glanced at his latest mislaid limb.

“You still any good in a fight, Adjutant?” I asked, tone serious.

He’d known me long enough not to be offended by a question most orcs would have drawn steel over, knowing it was genuine.

“I only need one hand for an axe,” Hakram simply replied.

I nodded in acknowledgement, and neither of us saw any need to belabour the subject any further. In the same way that he’d trusted I asked my question without derision, I would trust him not to be letting pride do the talking when he’d answered it. Dusk was mere moments away, but even in that spreading gloom the winged silhouettes of the Sisters were blots of deeper darkness. It would have been convenient to use them as messengers, but I’d not even bothered to ask – Komena might be somewhat amused by the insolence of it, but Andronike certainly would not. I got cawed at quite enough already without trying to use goddesses as carrier pigeons. The word I’d been waiting on came back on foot, in the shape of Lord Ivah. It knelt before my horse, head rising only at my silent inquisitive glance.

“It was arranged, Losara Queen,” the drow said. “The order was received.”

“Good,” I said. “On your feet, Ivah, and back to the sigil. We might have a long night ahead of us.”

“One can only hope, First Under the Night,” the Lord of Silent Steps smiled.

It heeded the dismissal without tarrying any further, leaving no footstep and making no sound as it vanished into the depths of the camp. Adjutant had visibly been busying himself tying two bundles to the sides of my mount, but it would have been a mistake to believe that meant he’d not been closely paying attention to everything taking place by him.

“Drow are hard to read,” Hakram said. “But this one seems bound more tightly to you than the others.”

“It was first among my Peerage, in trust if not necessarily in might,” I said. “The distinction remains even past the death of the titles they bore.”

“Loyal?” the orc asked me, head cocking to the side.

“To me?” I smiled. “More than some of its fellows are comfortable with, I think. But their true loyalty goes to something I merely stand for. Best not to forget that, when making demands of them.”

“And what demands will be made of them tonight?” he asked.

I hummed.

“The order I sent was a contingency,” I said. “Best you don’t know of it for deniability’s sake. But if the Saint of Swords is there, Adjutant, I’ll be making a play.”

“For?”

“The thing they have that I most want,” I said.

I could see in the tightening of his brow that Hakram was forcing himself not to ask more questions even as we made out of the camp. He wouldn’t be pressing more over the scheme hanging in wait, so odds were he was simply still curious about the drow. It had a fond smile quirking my lips, though I hid it away. Akua had taken to the culture of the Firstborn only insofar as it involved the levers of power and other exploitable angles, Indrani had learned what pertained to her own interests and little else. Hakram, though, was fascinated by drow culture in a manner that went well beyond the immediately useful or relevant aspects of it. It was odd seeing them through that fresh set of eyes, having them taken in as strange and exotic when they were neither to me. I’d indulge him for an hour or two later, though if he intended to make a treatise on the subject I was definitely letting him pick at Ivah’s brains instead. I’d refused the legionary escort Juniper had offered when I’d told her I would be headed for talks with the Pilgrim and his latest round of minions, along with Vivienne’s suggestion of an honour guard of knights. They both had their instructions in case this ended with someone killing me, which I considered to be unlikely but would be arrogant to be presume impossible .

It was not a long walk, to where our enemies were waiting for us, and it was opens ground every step of the way.

The pavilion was held up by two poles, thick canvas painted green and gold descending from there in a roughly rectangular shape. The entrance, flanked as it was by truce banners, had been tied open just enough to reveal four silhouettes within without letting out the heat from inside. All of them seated at a table, with raised braziers providing warmth in the waning light of day. Hakram and I did not hurry, allowing the shadows to lengthen with our approach. Crusted with dust and ash, I must have looked to have been tarred to better match the dark: the sight of me, at least, brought a sliver of almost indulgent amusement from the goddesses still circling above. Sve Noc descended on dark wings twofold in the exact moment day turned to night, and they claimed my shoulders as perch without a word. We were close enough to the pavilion I could make out the faces of most within. Rozala Malanza, face drawn and tired after the day’s battle but no less grimly cast for it. The Grey Pilgrim himself was no surprise, for he would have been drawn to a day like this sure as flies to fresh corpses.

The sight that had my pulse quickening, however, was the Saint of Swords: Laurence de Montfort’s crooked frame and wrinkled face were unmistakeable. Well, it seemed I was going to be playing with fire after all. The fourth and last was a man looking to be in his early forties I knew not, though I could hazard a guess. He was built like an orc, tall and broad and thickly muscled. Add to that the deep tan and the good chance he was the commander of the Levantine part of the army, and odds were this was the Lord of Alava. One of the Champion’s Blood, as they were called, though it was my understanding that the heroine who’d killed Captain was not kin to the actual blood descendants of that ancient hero. The two mortal rulers were fresh additions, not in attendance when I’d gotten my first report of this tent being raised. The Pilgrim must have sent for them before I even departed the camp with Adjutant. The hero was laying it on thick, I decided with a frown. That particular point had already been made when he first had the pavilion put up. This reeked of overcompensation to me, and that was not something I’d usually associate with an old hand like Tariq. Regardless, I had no intention of being pulled into his rhythm.

“Here,” I suddenly said.

Zombie stride came to a sudden stop maybe forty feet away from the pavilion, and I stroked her mane affectionately even as Hakram followed suit. With a hard shove I planted my staff in the snow, and Adjutant mirrored the gesture with the truce banner he’d been marching under. Without a word it was made clear to the other side I would not be humouring them with a single step further. Komena cawed approvingly from my shoulder, never one to pass the occasion to stick it to someone even through ceremony. It was almost amusing watching the ripple of dismay that passed through the enemy when they realized that they’d have to leave their nice warm tent to come speak with the Black Queen. A small gesture, perhaps, but so had been their own intention in making me crawl to their table and domain before speaking to them. I intended to make it clear from the beginning, which side it was between us that came closest to being considered the supplicant . They filed out one by one, and I had to suppress a grin when I saw the Saint had gotten stuck with the duty of carrying out a brazier. Seeing the woman who might just be the most dangerous killer in the service Heavens being used for manual labour warmed the petty cockles of my heart. The Grey Pilgrim took the lead, those simples grey robes that should prove no match for the cold all he’d bothered to wear. Malanza and the Levantine let him stand in front, an implicit endorsement of his primacy, while the Saint put down the brazier near them with ill-grace.

“Queen Catherine,” the Pilgrim said, “we-”

The touch was light as a feather, for the first fraction of a moment. People often said they could feel a weight to the gaze of others, when it was on them, a sort of sense for the attention – and this was the same, in a way. The crow-goddesses on my shoulders stirred, and the touch was torn through by their will like a hand through cobwebs. It came back, a little stronger, and from a myriad angles. Komena’s wings spread in irritation: the night shivered around us, and only then did the attention withdraw .

“Tariq,” I interrupted in Chantant, tone harsh. “If you don’t tell your owners to keep their grubby little fingers to themselves, I might just decide to take offence to their behaviour.”

Like tossing a stone in a pond, I got to see the ripples from that. Princess Rozala was surprised, and a little confused. The Levantine looked... angry enough to draw steel, but hiding it much better than I would have guessed. Good ol’ Laurence had a hand on her sword, ornery cutthroat that she was. It was for the best, I mused, that the scheme I had in mind required me to get under the skin of most these people.

“Pardon?” the Grey Pilgrim said, what looked like genuine surprise on his face.

Andronike cawed on my right shoulder, though the true meaning she simply wove into my mind as a thought.

“Mercy, huh,” I said. “That’d be the Ophanim, if I remember my theology right.”

I leaned forward, peering at the Grey Pilgrim and not.

“Are you listening through him, you meddlesome old things?” I asked. “Try that again and I swear I’ll take a few feathers for my cloak.”

Hakram, bless his soul, had always been quick to follow through on my plays.

“This could be taken as an assault under truce banner,” the orc gravelled. “What exactly is your meaning in arranging this, Princess Malanza?”

The Princess of Aequitan’s face betrayed irritation, before she mastered it and it became a pleasantly smiling mask.

“This is a misunderstanding, Lord Adjutant,” she said.

“They’re lying,” the Saint of Swords said. “It wasn’t an attack, only gazing.”

Years of rubbing elbows with Praesi ensured the flash of satisfaction I felt never made it to my face. Laurence was always going to be the weak point, here: she was powerful, unused to having to measure her words and hated me to the bone. Like a lot of people who’d been the strongest in their surroundings for years on years, she’d not had to really answer to anyone for too long. That led to sloppy habits.

“So by your own admission the Choir of Mercy attempted to look into my mind,” I coldly said.

Rozala’s face tightened almost imperceptibly. She might not have a sense for stories, this once, but she could recognize a diplomatic blunder when she heard one.

“The Saint of Swords does not speak for us,” the princess said. “As I said, Black Queen, this is a misunderstanding. Let us put it behind us and-”

Suddenly, Andronike began laughing in the back of my mind. A heartbeat later I heard Tariq flinch, and from the crow-goddesses I felt only vicious satisfaction.

“Gods, child, what have you done to yourself?” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Those things on your shoulder... those are no crows. How many times can you sell your soul?”

Had he tried to gaze at them using an aspect? I almost pitied him if he had. The foundations of apotheosis for these two had been millennia of hateful murder, and the mortar had been Winter freely given – look at one of those raw would have been painful, but the two? Still, I ignored him and kept my eyes on Malanza instead. She was the angle I needed to exploit right now. The Levantine, who’d still not been introduced, was watching this unfold with wary eyes but not apparent inclination to step in.

“Your delegation has now assaulted me, accused me of lying over said assault and is now trying to lecture me like a misbehaving child,” I mildly said. “Explain to me, Rozala Malanza, why I should not simply leave .”

“Perhaps a recess is in order,” the Levantine said, speaking up for the first time. “An hour, setting terms through intermediaries to avoid this strife.”

His tone was calm, and his Chantant only lightly accented. What he was suggesting had a decent chance of succeeding, which was why I couldn’t allow it to happen. This needed to have a very specific shape to it, if I didn’t want it to end with a sword running through my guts.

“There has been no evidence that your side is willing to negotiate in good faith,” Hakram said, tone just as calm. “A recess would change nothing. It is an explanation that is required.”

“I am Yannu Marave, Lord of Alava and first among the Champion’s Blood,” the Levantine said. “I give my word that no assault was meant, to the best of my knowledge.”

Cool-headed, I thought. That was unfortunate. Why couldn’t I have gotten your average brash Dominion swordarm in attendance instead? Hells, the boy in Sarcella had been from a legacy of mages and he’d been nowhere this even-keeled.

“Perhaps the two of you had diplomatic intentions,” I conceded, adjusting the angle of the thrust. “If that’s the case, we may proceed without their presence. It has certainly been nothing but a distraction so far.”

The earlier anger returned to his eyes. There we go , I thought.

“The Peregrine will always have a voice in the councils of Levant,” Lord Yannu replied, tone grown cool.

Now we were getting somewhere. He’d taken a position, I could take offence to it rightfully and walk away from this without having been ‘the villain breaking negotiations on purpose’, which was rarely a situation that ended well for said villain.

“Foundling, this is getting out of hand,” Princess Rozala said, with forced calm. “As Lord Yannu suggested, a recess would be best.”

“She’s breaking this down on purpose,” the Saint said, and spat to the side. “The Enemy always schemes, Malanza, you should have learned that by now.”

And it was true, I thought, but by saying it she’d given me exactly what I needed.

“That’s quite enough,” I said, allowing anger to seep into my voice. “We’re done here. If neither you nor the Pilgrim can keep your hound on a tighter leash, Malanza, we’ll settle this on the field.”

Now, there was the gambit. But I’d been fairly sure the moving parts would come together just right. With the Sisters disallowing whatever it was that allowed the Pilgrim to look into people, he should be on the backfoot. Experience, for once, would work against him: when you used a tool for several decades, suddenly losing it required an adjustment. Even the finest swordman in Creation would need time to adapt after being forced in his first fistfight in sixty years. Time which I’d been careful not to give the Pilgrim, so to speak. Now, Malanza had to answer for two heroes neither of which she had any real authority over, and she was not great diplomat in the first place. That I’d be able to work around her when the chaos set in was a given. The only unknown had been the Lord Yannu, but even though he’d given me trouble most of Levant came with a usable handle: the Grey Pilgrim himself. Even the implication he was to be dismissed had been enough to harden the Levantine’s position. Now, I had passable reason to leave in a huff. And I’d repeatedly slighted the Saint this whole time, when odds were she’d be opposed to this kind of conference in the first place. I was leaving with the promise of waging a battle that would be dangerous for her side, in her eyes likely succeeding at whatever scheme I’d been intent on. So, after I took my reins in hand and began to tug at them to turn Zombie around, I prepared to find out whether my gambit was going to pay off.

A flicker of movement from Saint, and just like that I had them .

“Laurence,” the Pilgrim yelled, “don’t-”

I wouldn’t be able to avoid that, I thought even as steps almost faster than I could follow had the Saint of Swords standing in front of Zombie and swinging her blade at my throat. But then I’d known I wouldn’t be able to, and taken precautions well in advance. As the steel made it a bare inch from my throat, ruffling Komena’s feathers lightly as it passed, Laurence de Montfort was decked in the face.

She went tumbling across the snow, spewing out blood and even a tooth, while Rumena the Tomb-Maker followed.

The Grey Pilgrim’s hands blazed with light, but a heartbeat later I had my staff in hand and pointed at him.

“You make a move, Tariq, and I’ll drop you,” I said, tone perfectly calm.

He hesitated, even as the two mortals on his side reached for their blades in delayed reaction to this unholy mess, and that was quite enough for General Rumena to see my will done. The Saint of Swords landed on her feet, but the ground beneath her turned into boiling shadow and her leap up as she raised her sword once more had her land in the grasp of the old drow. Who closed its fingers around her throat, and squeezed lightly once. Her hand went down at the clear signal that the drow could have killed her but would refrain if she ceased moving. In a fair fight, I suspected the Saint would kill it after some trouble. In an ambush, as I’d arranged in a sense, it might be a little more even. But my weapon here wasn’t Rumena’s own might, so much as the fact that the Saint of Swords was a heroine who’d just attacked someone leaving peaceful negotiations held under truce banner. There wasn’t a single fucking story that would get her out of this, so long as I was careful.

“I’ve had better fights from jawor ,” the Tomb-Maker scathingly assessed in Chantant. “This cattle is blind and easily provoked, Losara Queen. How has it survived so long in the Burning Lands?”

I couldn’t prove that Rumena had worked on its mastery of Chantant purely to be able to slag its opponents verbally, but I had very deep suspicions.

“Catherine,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “You cannot-”

“Your Majesty,” I idly corrected. “I am going to ask you questions now, Pilgrim, and if you don’t answer them quickly and truthfully then General Rumena will execute the attempted murderer of the Queen of Callow.”

“Queen Catherine,” Princess Rozala tried, but she wasn’t part of this right now and so I simply ignored her.

“Do you have Amadeus of the Green Stretch as a prisoner?” I asked the Pilgrim.

“Yes,” Tariq said.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“At camp, under restraints.”

“Is he alive and unharmed?

“Yes,” Tariq said.

“Is he in his right mind?” I pressed.

“As far as I know,” the Pilgrim said.

“Good,” I smiled. “Fetch him, right now. I’ll trade him for your murderous little friend.”

The Grey Pilgrim remained silent for a long moment.

“Laurence is one of the few living heroes who might be capable of slaying the Dead King,” he said. “More than that, of killing him permanently. You could be dooming the continent by killing her.”

I met his eyes and smiled.

“General Rumena,” I said. “Squeeze a little tighter.”

“Merciful Gods, Foundling, this is madness,” Princess Rozala yelled. “You can’t extort us-”

“Your delegation just tried to murder me under truce banner, Malanza,” I snapped. “You should be licking my boots in fucking gratitude that a prisoner is all I’m demanding to let it go.”

“The Carrion Lord torched entire principalities,” the Princess of Aequitan snapped back. “How many thousands of dead innocents are on his head? And you think you can just ask for him back?”

“Black’s the only way Praes doesn’t collapse and take a third of the continent down with it,” I said through gritted teeth. “So take your damned objections and choke on them, Malanza, because he might be a monster but he’s mine and he’s still needed.”

“Don’t do it, Tariq,” the Saint called out. “Let them have me and then slit the bastard’s throat. No truce with the Enemy.”

“Tighter still, Rumena,” I coldly ordered. “Pilgrim, an answer. You won’t wait me into a story that turns this around.”

“If you kill her,” Tariq said, “I’ll kill him.”

“You’ve kept him alive so far for a reason,” I countered without missing a beat. “While I have no pressing reason to keep de Montfort breathing save for this trade. Try again.”

“You are gambling with matters beyond your understanding,” the Pilgrim said, sounding frustrated.

“If even a single one of you had taken any of the deals I offered we wouldn’t be standing here tonight,” I told him without a shred of sympathy. “Instead you get this and you get me. You were warned, Pilgrim. My terms were given, do we have a bargain?”

“He’s killing her,” Pilgrim said, eyes flicking to the Saint.

“Best hurry then,” I harshly replied.

“I only have the body,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “The soul was removed.”

“By who?” I snarled.

He didn’t answer, and that was answer enough. The fucking Saint of Swords.

“Where’s the soul?” I asked.

“I do not know,” the Pilgrim replied, then glanced at the Saint again. “If Laurence dies, Catherine, we have no accord.”

“General Rumena, loosen your grip slightly,” I reluctantly said. “And you must be hard of hearing, Pilgrim – it’s Your Majesty . How can you now know where the soul is?”

“I entrusted it to the Rogue Sorcerer,” Tariq said. “And sent him into hiding.”

“Why?” I hissed.

“So that the Black Knight’s body could be publicly slain while his soul remains usable as leverage,” the Pilgrim said.

“Have the body delivered, then,” I coldly said. “It’ll serve for a start.”

“And Laurence?” the Pilgrim pressed.

I glanced at her, at the naked hatred on her face. Before this she had despised me mostly in principle, I thought, but now? Now it was personal. She’d be after my neck from the moment she was let loose.

“You can have her back, once I have the body,” I finally said.

My eyes turned to the princess and the lord, who looked deeply uncomfortable with what had taken place – as much with the Regicide’s actions as the fact it looked like I was coming out on top, I thought.

“So,” I said. “I suppose we have some time to kill before I get the body. Let’s have us a peace conference, then.”

Chapter 27: Overtures

“You should listen to the devil on your shoulder, my friend. I had it nailed onto there for a reason.”
– Dread Emperor Abominable, the Thrice-Struck

It went like this: the opposition insisted they could not hold diplomatic talks while one of their own was being held up by the throat. In response, I somewhat politely cast aspersions on their grasp of matters such as reality and remembering who’d tried to kill me under truce banner literally moments ago , then told them it’d be rather absurd to stand there in silence while the Grey Pilgrim went to fetch my teacher’s unconscious body. I spoke the word ‘unconscious’ with a heavy wink, because what was a little borderline necromancy between ‘friends’? Lord Yannu promptly told me talks couldn’t be had without the Peregrine, who in turn suggested that his word was enough for me to order General Rumena to release his personal Heaven-endorsed attack hound. He would then join my conversation with Malanza and the other Levantine.

“That’s an interesting suggestion, Tariq,” I smiled politely, showing a great deal of teeth. “Especially since it implies I still hold your word to be of any worth at all.”

“Mind your tongue, villain,” the Lord of Alava hissed. “To cast doubt on the honour of the Pilgrim’s Blood is to insult the Dominion of Levant itself.”

“Will the Grey Pilgrim be surrendering himself into my custody immediately, then?” I pointedly asked. “Honour might be at least in part satisfied by that.”

There was a moment of pained silence, though from certain quarters there’d been understandably no surprise. After all, Princess Rozala had been in the tent when the treaties were first drafted and signed while the Grey Pilgrim had been an actual guarantor of the terms as well as part of them.

“You overreach, Black Queen,” Lord Yannu said. “Such demands are beyond your ability to enforce, to say little of your right to them.”

“My right ?” I curtly repeated. “Did they not tell you, Lord Yannu, that I have written treatises signed by both your Peregrine and the Prince of Iserre to this nature? Treatises including terms that placed the Pilgrim in the Kingdom of Callow’s hands for a time as hostage, and that your honourable Peregrine instead fled my capital in the night last year? Oaths and promises were broken, and he’s since shown no willingness to make reparations for this or even acknowledge it happened.”

“There was greater need for me elsewhere,” the Grey Pilgrim replied. “Duties whose call was keener than what had been arranged.”

“The oaths were inconvenient, so you broke them,” I translated with a beaming smile. “But that’s all right, because I’m just a villain after all. Charming.”

“I would make amends, Black Queen,” the Pilgrim offered.

“Sure,” I replied without hesitation, “surrender yourself, right now. You’ll be put to trial according to Callowan law and dealt with accordingly.”

“I cannot do this,” Tariq said, “so long as you lead an army against the Grand Alliance.”

“Ah,” I mused. “It was a platitude, then, and your word remains dust to me. Let us discard this notion of my putting faith in the promises of a man who does not afford anyone else the same courtesy and move on, shall we?”

None of them liked that, but Malanza steered the conversation away from the fact that both she and the Pilgrim had already broken terms of a bargain made with me before they lost any more feathers. The arrangements ended up being kicked down the line: talks would end until I’d received the body and released the Saint, then resume with the Grey Pilgrim in attendance. A waste of time, in my eyes, so I turned my gaze on Princess Rozala instead.

“I’m willing to bargain with you without them in attendance,” I bluntly said. “You strike me as the most trustworthy of the three, at the moment, though admittedly that doesn’t mean all that much.”

The Princess of Aequitan hesitated, while in the back of my mind I gauged her situation. There were more Dominion soldiers than Proceran ones in the western coalition army she was fighting with, so it wasn’t a given that she had the most clout in whatever power-sharing arrangement made up that host’s command. On the other hand, if she was here then it was with the First Prince’s backing and this remained the Principate of Procer: she had legitimacy the other two did not, being foreigners.

“We can speak,” Princess Rozala said, “while other matters are seen to.”

The large Lord of Alava stirred, face openly displeased, but the princess raised a hand in appeasement.

“I will not negotiate, or offer terms,” the dark-haired woman said. “Only speak. Diplomacy can take place when all are in attendance.”

The Grey Pilgrim spoke softly, in a language I did not know – a Levantine tongue, most likely, since Lord Yannu seemed to have no trouble understanding it. They conferred softly, and I watched Princess Rozala from the corner of my eyes. She seemed as much in the dark about what was being said as I, and not particularly pleased about it. Adjutant leaned in closer.

“Murcadan, I think,” the orc whispered in Kharsum. “Spoken mostly around the region of Alava city. I’m not surprised Rozala wouldn’t know it, it’s their least widespread tongue.”

I slowly nodded. Might be true that the language had never seemed worth learning for the Princess of Aequitan. Although her principality was deep to the south of Procer and closer to the Dominion than any other foreign nation, Ceseo or Lunara would have been more useful picks if she meant to dabble in learning something of narrower use than tradertalk. Whatever the truth of it, the side conference between the Levantines did not take long. Quiet words were exchanged with Princess Rozala herself, and there must have been agreement as the Pilgrim sought my eyes once more and when denied that withdrew without another word. Lord Yannu inquired to the practical aspects of the trade, namely how the unconscious body would be carried, so I glanced meaningfully at Hakram. Adjutant moved to speak with the Levantine aristocrat, leaving Princess Rozala Malanza to speak with me alone. Well, not exactly: Komena drew her talons against my shoulder for a moment before lazily flapping away to perch herself on the shoulder of her favourite, General Rumena. The old drow showed no sign of tiring from holding up the Saint of Swords by the throat, and overall had seemed rather unimpressed by her glaring even before half of Sve Noc claimed its shoulder. The crow taking flight drew Malanza’s attention to the one still on my shoulder, though she couldn’t seem to gaze at Andronike directly.

“I wouldn’t recommending looking at either too close,” I said.

“Demons,” Princess Rozala said, lips tightening into a line.

Andronike let out loud gurgling caws that might have been taken as laughter, and certainly rang of mockery.

“Sve Noc,” I corrected. “Or their attention, anyway. No summons these, Rozala Malanza, bound and bargained for. Though if that makes you fear them less, I’ll count you a fool for it.”

The Proceran princess studied me for a moment, dark eyes inscrutable.

“What does it mean?” she asked. “Sve Noc.”

“It means your learning is shallow, Rozala Malanza, while this world’s roots run deep,” Andronike spoke in perfect Chantant from my shoulder. “It will be amusing, to see how little of you the adjustment allows to remain. Already the cracks are showing, aren’t they?”

The Princess of Aequitan turned ghastly pale.

“It will take more than brandy and poppy leaves for the digging to stop,” the goddess on my shoulder laughed. “Hands and picks and tireless flesh, pulling aside the –”

“Andronike,” I calmly said. “Enough.”

“The clever little things would turn on you in a heartbeat, my herald, if they believed they would triumph in that strife,” she said. “In their wanton arrogance they prance about, blind to their utter fragility .”

“Are we not all fragile, in your eyes?” I retorted.

“Some more than others,” Andronike said, but left it at that.

Wings spreading, the crow-goddess took flight and left me to face a shaken Princess of Aequitan. Her tanned visage had turned ashen, and a tremor was running down her arm. Not, I noted, the one that clutched the handle of her sword.

“What is that thing , Black Queen?” Princess Rozala croaked.

“Desperate measures made altar,” I said. “Apotheosis is not a gentle affair, and they were not gentle before it.”

“Riddles,” she accused.

“I’ve given you truths,” I shrugged. “What you make of them, in the end, is not my concern. I am not your keeper, or for that matter your empire’s.”

That last sentence had blood returning to her face, and iron returned to her spine. I studied Rozala Malanza under the gentle light of the moon, waited as she put herself back together. It was absurd, I thought, to think of her as young when she was older than me. But she couldn’t even be thirty, and it struck me that in different times she would have been considered much too young for the importance of the duties thrust upon her. As Hasenbach’s commander in Iserre, she was arguably on par with the Iron Prince in authority within the ever-fluid military hierarchy of Procer. Perhaps even higher. Young and worn before her time , I thought. The chorus of our age.

“Procer is on the verge of collapse,” Princess Rozala told me.

I hid my surprise at the fact that she’d outright admit that. The blood was in the water for anyone to see, and here in Iserre there were ingredients enough to cook the death of empire, but there was still life in the beast.

“In different circumstances, I might have celebrated that,” I frankly said. “Not, however, today.”

“You cannot afford for the lines up north to break, Black Queen,” the princess told me, tone cool. “Too many of the refugees south would die, the sheer amount of corpses to be raised would effectively make the Dead King unstoppable.”

Gods, I wished . Unstoppable was the prelude to some adolescent in colourful clothes bringing down the flying fortress, or inexplicably stabbing a villain’s soul. Unfortunately, I doubted Neshamah would make any mistake so easily exploitable by the Heavens and their chosen.

“I didn’t come to Iserre to fight any of you,” I pointed out. “I’m extracting my forces.”

“Do so,” the princess said. “You will not be hindered.”

“Including the Legions of Terror,” I flatly said.

“That,” Princess Rozala said, “cannot be allowed to happen.”

I already had a biting reply on the tip of my tongue when I forced myself to bite it instead, eyes narrowing as I looked closer at the dark-haired Arlesite. She wasn’t being high-handed, I thought, or refusing to recognize the realities of her situation. There wasn’t defiance or righteous anger on her face, only a sort of tired resignation. Rozala Malanza was essentially telling me, without outright speaking the word, that if the Legions left with my forces there would be dire consequences for the Principate.

“How bad?” I asked.

“Bad,” she replied, tone grim.

“I can’t give them to you,” I frankly told her. “I won’t backstab an ally and it’d make a bloody mess for me besides.”

“If you were to escape with them,” Princess Rozala delicately said, “after being defeated, that would be a different story. Or so I am told.”

My fingers tightened around my reins and Zombie whinnied.

“That’s not a small favour you’re asking,” I said. “Or a harmless one.”

It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that a great deal of my legitimacy – insofar as I had any – as the Queen of Callow came from my largely uninterrupted string of battlefield victories. I’d had political defeats aplenty, and strategic drubbings more than once, but even the worst of my days commanding an army could be argued to be at least draws. As the First Prince had once put it I was a warlord, and those only rules so long as they kept winning . It’d also put me in a weaker position when pushing for the Liesse Accords, coming from the cold as an already beaten foe instead of a victor, and that was without even getting in the practical aspects of being ‘defeated’. Even if I were willing to waste soldiers over such theatre, which I honestly wasn’t sure I was, this would be a risky business even if I trusted the opposition well. Which I did not. Malanza wasn’t unreasonable, but a year ago she’d been invading my homeland and she’d never bothered to hide the despised me personally. That left the Levantines, which as long as the Pilgrim was around couldn’t be trusted to do anything but what he ‘advised’. How could I be sure that halfway through the withdrawal of my forces they wouldn’t try to turn the face victory into a real one?

“I do not have room to negotiate, Black Queen,” Princess Rozala murmured. “I would prefer if I did, but what do I have to bargain with save doom and despair?”

“I’d be taking on heavy risks,” I reminded her. “On the account of people who are still my enemies.”

“There is a greater enemy still,” she told me, eyes serious. “ The Enemy, and he comes for us all.”

“I’m not unaware of that,” I patiently said. “It’s not that I’m unwilling to avoid setting fire to what’s left of Procer, Malanza. It’s that I’m not convinced if I try to help you your fellows won’t stick a knife in my back halfway through.”

She grimaced.

“I don’t suppose,” she said, “that my word of honour as the Princess of Aequitan would mean anything to you.”

“More than nothing,” I finally said. “But it only matters if you’re in command of the army on the other side of this field, and I don’t believe that’s the case.”

“I hold supreme command over all armies of the Principate in Iserre,” she said.

“And the Levantines?”

“This half their forces answers to Lord Yannu, for the most part,” Rozala said. “We make plans by council.”

“Then you can’t speak for the army,” I said, not unkindly. “If the Grey Pilgrim asked the man to turn cannibal he actually might. Turning on a villain? That wouldn’t even merit hesitation.”

“You need to set aside your grudge against the Chosen, Foundling,” the other woman told me. “Though I understand he broke faith with you, it was a shallow betrayal.”

“He disappeared to hunt down my mentor, whose soulless body I’ve just had to trade for,” I flatly said. “He’d didn’t leave to take a nice stroll down a promenade, Malanza.”

“The Carrion Lord killed thousand on the field, and dozens of thousands through the burning of them,” the Princess of Aequitan spoke evenly. “I can only grieve the Peregrine did not simply slit the man’s throat instead of resorting to such theatrics.”

I could have argued this, truth be told. There was no denying Black was a monster, but he hadn’t decided to torch his way through the Proceran heartlands for the pleasure of it on a sunny morning where he’d had nothing else planned. It’d been a calculated attack at the manpower and stability of an enemy nation who’d been in the process of invading my homeland and his. While I wouldn’t defend his actions, or the validity of his methods even if they appeared to be working – to everyone’s loss – he’d not committed that atrocity in a vacuum. It’d be a direct response to the Tenth Crusade, whose stated goal was the destruction of Praes. Black’s policy had been to avoid war against Procer for decades before I’d known him, and it seemed rather rich of all these righteous folk to go out of their way declare war on one of the most infamous monsters of our age and then be appalled and surprised when he behaved monstrously. If you shoved your fingers in a brazier, at the very least you should expect to get burned. On the other hand, I was disinclined to defend an atrocity I didn’t believe in and was currently screwing all of us over. Let her talk: if that was all she did, I had no issue with it. The talk was hardly undeserved.

“My point is that he’s not ever going to consider promises binding, Malanza,” I said. “Not if they get in the way of what he believes needs to be done.”

“That is rather reassuring to me,” the princess said. “Considering he’s one of the most decent men I’ve met.”

“I’m not going to argue whether the Pilgrim’s anything with you,” I flatly said. “But you can, at least, recognize why I’d hesitated to trust in him given his history of both breaking oaths and attempting to kill me.”

“Make your peace with it,” Princess Rozala said, rather unmoved.

It occurred to me, then, that from the Princess of Aequitan’s perspective I was angry over simply our battlefield encounters and the Pilgrim’s escape from Liesse. She did not know that I’d good as begged the man to make any path but going to Keter feasible only to be turned down. Or that his wriggling into a role through the treaty after the Camps had essentially been an attempt to get me killed through a redemption story, after having spent that entire diplomatic conference trying to manoeuvre me into a story that’d get me either slain or sidelined. I wondered if she’d believe me, should I tell her. Likely not. Part of that I suspected only Named could truly understand, and then not even all of that rarefied breed. As for the rest, why would the Black Queen’s word be taken for anything? No, I was simply expected to take the word of my fucking betters while everyone dragged my own through the mud. I pushed down the sharp flare of anger I felt at that. It would be of no use to me here.

“There’s more there than you know,” I finally said. “I am not unwilling to bargain with him, but trust him blindly when the stakes are so high? No.”

“You would refuse without even giving reason?” Malanza said.

“Where’d you learn what would happen if the Legions were allowed to walk?” I replied.

She didn’t answer. Yeah, we all had our little secrets. Might be the Augur, I figured, but other things as well. Tariq had Mercy whispering in his hear, it seemed, and I wouldn’t write off the possibility that Tyrant had offered some sort of deal – or made of threat – either.

“Trust is a funny thing, isn’t?” I murmured.

I considered, for a moment, telling her about what was taking shape in Arcadia. It’d be a danger to her side as well, I figured, though not an immediate one. I knew I should tell her, because if it came out later that I had known a catastrophe was forming there and said nothing there would a price to pay in many ways. But there’d been hellgates, in that broken place. And what I believed might have been High Arcana. It was possible for it to be the work of the Dead King, who had been known to use both these things, but that wasn’t where the shape of this story – Masego missing, Liesse disappeared, everything coming to a head in Iserre – was leading. If I told any of the crusaders that knowledge would make it to the Grey Pilgrim. And more dangerously to the Saint of Swords, who I’d just humiliated and used as coin in a bargain, who I’d have to release before too long lest this situation be turned on me. If Laurence de Montfort learned that the Hierophant was meddling with these kinds of forces, she’d have a pretext to kill him. And I did not doubt for a single fucking moment that she’d try. Would she succeed? I honestly wasn’t sure.

But I was certain I wasn’t willing to gamble with Masego’s life, so I kept my mouth shut.

“There’s no point in holding talks over this, is there?” I finally said. “Not unless you’re willing to offer me hostages and other forms of safeguard, which you won’t be.”

“You know the appearances of that would make it impossible,” Princess Rozala calmly replied.

“Then we appear to have nothing left to speak about,” I said. “I’ll be marching my armies out of Iserre, Malanza.”

I met her eyes, smiling ruefully.

“I’d suggest you get yours out of my way, for all our sakes.”

Chapter 28: Acts

“Despise not the treacherous but instead the weak, for while both serve the same purpose where treachery requires skill and daring weakness requires only mediocrity.”
– Dread Emperor Vile the First

It didn’t look like he was sleeping.

That disturbed me almost more than the rest. Amadeus of the Green Stretch was still alive, by the measure of most people. The signs of life were certainly there: breath, heartbeat, warmth. So it should have looked like he was sleeping, but it didn’t. It looked like someone had just... torn out his consciousness and a body had been left behind. Its physical functions went on but having known the man – loved him, in our own misshapen way – I couldn’t call this breathing corpse anything but the remains of him. His soul could be anywhere, by now, and combing through Procer for it brought to mind that old metaphor about the needle and the haystack.

In this case, though, the needle was a top-notch Named mage and the haystack was both hostile and on fire. I’d tell Vivienne to have the Jacks watching, and I was considering passing on what I’d learned to Malicia. She was my enemy, true, and he’d both defied and disobeyed her. Yet I suspected she’d sacrifice quite a bit to bring back to Ater and might even be willing to cooperate with me to see his soul snatched back from the heroes. I only barely grasped the nature of the ties that bound Black and Malicia, but I did not doubt the depth of them. Neither would have been quite so intensely furious at the other after Akua’s Folly if there’d not been trust to break.

Was it not an irony of sorts that I was now relying on the architect of that same folly for answers? The shade of the Diabolist had only bothered with a cursory examination of Black’s physical state before turning her attention to more eldritch matters. She was a healer of some talent, I knew, but it was more a result of Akua being skilled at branches of sorcery that required knowledge of anatomy and biology than out of any true affinity for the healing arts. Like Masego, she was more chirurgeon than physician. It was typical of Praesi to be more interested in the cutting of things than the mending of them. Fingers resting on my teacher’s forehead, Akua was frowning with her eyes closed.

I could feel the quiet lapping of Night at his body, and perhaps I should have been studying her methods to learn from them what I could. Instead, though, my gaze remain on his face. He was bearded, now. It was uncomfortable to look at, though more for the sloppiness of the growth than the threads of grey within. Black had always been cleanly to a fault, austere in all his affairs but always well put-together. His hair was still dark, for the most part, but it’d grown longer and like the beard grey was now touching it. It was... distressing to see. Like a chip on a blade you’d believed forever smooth.

“Barbaric,” Akua suddenly said, both hand and Night withdrawing.

Golden eyes had fluttered open, and she was looking down at Black’s body with patrician disdain.

“Elaborate,” I said.

“This was not even sorcery, dearest,” Akua said, wrinkling her nose. “The work of that ignorant little savage the Saint of Swords, I would wager. It was the metaphysical equivalent of attempting field surgery while eyeballing the affair with a two-handed sword that was most definitely not cleaned beforehand.”

“Elaborate usefully,” I specified, hiding my dismay.

The body was alive, for all the lack of driving intellect within, but had it been damaged irreparably? I was intending to snatch the soul back when opportunity arose, to put it back in this very shell of flesh, but if that wasn’t possible we’d have to get... inventive.

“The severing between body and soul itself was clean and sharply made,” Akua said. “But near every other aspect was botched. It was done too abruptly, for one, and so in a damaging manner. Which means there will be some disconnect between the soul and body even should they be reunited, possibly permanent. Memory loss is likely as well, though proper rituals can mitigate that aspect and it is likely to be minor in nature.”

“Shit,” I muttered. “Masego cut up my soul a bunch of times and it was never this bad. Why is this so different?”

The look she sent me was offended on Masego’s behalf, I thought, but also on hers and possibly even mine for having asked what she evidently considered to be a highly plebeian question.

“Laurence the Montfort is a murderous vagrant swinging a butcher’s knife at matters she only dimly understands,” Akua said. “The Hierophant was taught by the Lord Warlock himself from the cradle, and even in those days likely could be counted as one of the ten most learned Trismegistan practitioners on Calernia. You are comparing a mangy attack hound to one of the finest mages alive.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “But what I want to know is if the Saint purposefully made this sloppy or if it was just the only way she knew how to do it?”

Diabolist mulled over that for a moment.

“Though I hate to dismiss the possibility of incompetent wickedness in our opposition,” she finally said, “I believe this might genuinely have been the most clear-cut separation she could accomplish given the means at her disposal.”

So, the Saint had been a bad chirurgeon but not necessarily a malicious one. I supposed the distinction had been academic, anyway. I would have remembered malice directed at my father when he was helpless and prisoner, but in and of itself it would not have moved me to either kill or spare her. That decision, in a way, would be making itself. If the Saint acted against me or mine even one more time, I’d get her head on a pike. If she was reined in by her allies, then I’d swallow my spite and let her be pointed at the Dead King instead.

“Noted,” I said. “Which brings us to our next trick – can you track the soul using his body?”

“I cannot,” Akua immediately replied.

My eyebrow rose.

“The reasons why are twofold,” she told me. “The first is that, as I’ve already told you, the severing itself was keenly made. The... sympathy between body and soul that would remain in most circumstances is near entirely absent here.”

“Near,” I said.

She inclined her head, conceding the point.

“Which brings me to the second reason, namely that I’ve already attempted to do this and found my workings frustrated,” Akua said. “Someone is occluding the soul from sight and search, and doing so with surprising skill.”

“The Pilgrim mentioned he passed on the soul to the Rogue Sorcerer,” I said. “Who I sadly know little about, save that he often uses fire sorcery when fighting.”

“Given that the workings on his end were surprisingly apt at gainsaying Night and its miraculous nature, I would wager her him Proceran or Proceran-taught,” she told me. “Jaquinite sorcery would be uniquely suited to the thwarting of the miraculous, being inspired of miracles itself.”

My lips quirked into a mirthless smile. What a helpful coincidence that a Named mage from the theory of magic most suited at hiding from my means of pursuit would be sent off with what I was looking before I even returned to the surface. Fucking Heavens. It might genuinely have been a coincidence, for all I knew, but given the opposition I was inclined to gesture obscenely at the sky just on principle.

“So what can you do?” I asked.

“Establish a ritual array for resonance,” Akua said. “It will be imprecise and require a great deal of power, but when employed the ritual should reveal if the soul is close.”

“Define close,” I said.

“A radius of seven leagues,” she said. “Though that broad it will simply reveal if the soul is within that area. For more precise results, the radius would have to be significantly lowered.”

Seven leagues, I thought, forcing myself to visualize it. It wasn’t nothing, though I would have preferred larger if there was to be an investment of Night in every attempt. The haystack had been made into smaller bundles, I supposed, but it’d not gotten smaller in any real sense.

“Prepare the ritual array and make me an estimate of the kind of power it’d require,” I finally said. “When you have the time, Akua. This is not as high a priority as our immediate threats.”

It surprised me that even looking at Black the words were not difficult to speak. I’d thought, I supposed, that looking at him in the flesh there would be a sudden sprout of sentimentality that’d have me hesitating between taking risks to pursue this and taking a more pragmatic approach. I cocked my head to the side, gazing at the pale skin of my teacher, and found that aside from a faint tinge of guilt the decision hadn’t brought anything out of me. And the guilt, truth be told, came more from how the decision had barely needed to me made than from the making of it. But then you’d understand, wouldn’t you? I thought, looking at the not-sleeping man . That there are larger things at stake than you and I.

“You seem wistful,” Akua softly said.

“I don’t know what that means,” I lied, “you don’t need to impress me with your fancy Wasteland words, Akua, I-”

“Playing the fool did not work even when I considered you to be one,” the shade said. “Why would it now?”

I shrugged my shoulders, as if to say it’d been worth a try. I could have simply left the tent, I thought, but that would have felt too much like a retreat and I’d had enough of that for the evening. After my private talks with Princess Rozala had made it clear there was no real chance of an accord being reached, I’d simply waited until Black’s body was delivered to my people before taking my leave. My warning to her had been blunt, but then we were rather past subtle intrigues weren’t we? The day and night had been exhausting in a way that had nothing to do with the physical, and seeing Black with a gaping hole where everything that made him who he was should be hadn’t helped my mood in the slightest.

“You must hate him like poison,” I eventually said. “Are you remaining civil as a courtesy to me?”

I didn’t like to think of Second Liesse – or the Doom of the same, as some called it, though my own people most often named it Akua’s Folly – but on that dark day I’d been allowed a glimpse into the nature of Akua Sahelian. Not through the madness she’d wielded like a blade, or the the victories she claimed over me, but when I had seen her flinched. She had bound me, title and Name both, and the binding could not lie: when Akua saw her father die before her eyes, it had wounded her. The body of the architect of that death now laid on a cot before us, yet not so much as a flicker of hatred had touched her face in all the time she’d been in the tent.

“Hate,” Akua repeated, tone pensive. “I can see why you would believe so.”

I glanced at her and found golden eyes watching the Carrion Lord’s chest rise and drop at its own steady pace.

“Are you claiming you don’t?” I asked.

“I suppose I might kill him, given reason,” the shade said. “Though that would differ from duty only by the tinge of satisfaction that it would bring, like an old mistake finally blotted out.”

“I was there, Akua,” I said. “I know what it did to you, when-”

She turned to me with burning eyes, and my tongue halted.

“My father’s death was the writ of many hands,” she said. “His, it is true, but others as well. The goblins who fired the crossbows. Your own, for serving as distraction while he was taken. But most of all, the fault is mine.”

She looked way.

“I waged war on villains, and did not sufficiently safeguard that which was precious to me,” Akua said. “I am the mother of that murder in every way that matters.”

“There’s sense to that,” I replied. “Logic, even.”

My eyes stayed on her.

“And not a trace of the grief I saw then,” I finished.

She turned to meet my gaze, and for once there was anger not mastered or leashed in the cast of her face.

“What is it you want from me, Catherine?” the shade asked bitingly. “Tears? Lamentations? Or is it pain that you demand?”

“Yes,” I said. “I want you to be in pain.”

She flinched back at that like I’d slapped her. Before a heartbeat had even passed, she was smiling and amused and her body beginning to angle so it would display her curves more prominently. I admired how well she’d been trained almost half as much as I utterly despised it.

“While I’ve certainly heard you prefer the rougher forms, I-”

Her tone was light, suggestive, there was a slight emphasis on heard that implied she might actually have heard Archer and I spending a night together – which was possible, tents weren’t exactly the finest way to keep something quiet – and she’d changed tack blindingly quick. I ignored it.

“If you’re in pain,” I continued, “if you can feel pain, I means you value things. People. That you begin to understand things other than yourself have value.”

“I have always known that,” Akua said. “Your take on Praesi values, my heart, remains simplistic for all that we have spoken of the subject.”

“Intellectually you assign value to other people,” I corrected. “For their usefulness, potential, the pleasure or amusement they can bring you. But that’s still thinking of them as assets. As objects. But if their loss pains you, Akua, they were more than an object to you.”

“Should I weep, then?” the shade harshly replied. “Should I wail and beat my chest, swear revenge on all those who can be revenged upon? Should I burn half the world to assuage my grief, make Creation pay the long price ?”

The Callowan term she spoke derisively, but I could hear it was forced. It had screwed my countrymen, over the years, the need to see grudges settled. But it also appealed to that vicious, childish part of us that wanted to answer pain with pain. Hurt those who’d hurt you. And anyone who’d ever grieved had heard that song, sung to one beat or another.

“Would you like to?” I asked her softly. “Weep. Wail. Bury him with no honours of mine, but what you can offer from daughter to father.”

“And what would you know of that, Catherine?” Akua said, sounding tired.

My eyes flicked back to the body laid out in front of us.

“I know,” I said, “that sometimes you grieve more what could have happened than what did.”

Akua did not answer. The silence hung heavy in the air, broken by only two people breathing. The shade among us had no such need.

“He shouldn’t have been born in Praes,” Akua said. “He’d be angry with me for saying that, but anywhere else on the continent they would have let him read in peace and deep down that was all he ever wanted. But in the Wasteland, when the Gift flowers so strongly there are expectations .”

“He was powerful, I’m told,” I said. “Like few others.”

“Like many others,” Akua softly denied. “But he was clever and found angles others did not even consider. But he was not of the old blood, so his fate was death or patronage. He could have been husband to my mother, you know. He had the talent for it and if he’d tried to establish a presence at her court he would at least have been made a formal consort. But it wasn’t in his nature, Catherine, to see magic as a tool for power. To him it wasn’t just the Gift, it was a gift.”

“He’s the one who taught you,” I said.

“I suppose he did,” Diabolist murmured. “Though it was never a lesson in the way my tutors would have made it. He was... sharing something he loved with me. Helping me understand it so we could wonder at it together. It made a difference. I could not help but love it as well, when it was something that was ours .”

I envied her that. The memories she must be peering at with that faraway gaze, the hours she’d gotten to spend with her father that hadn’t been just lessons. Getting to know him as more than a teacher and a guiding hand.

“I loved him,” Akua suddenly admitted. “But, in the end, not as much as I loved what my mother taught me to reach for.”

She chuckled barrenly.

“So how could I dare weep, dearest one, when I chose that ambition over him?” she said.

“Because you miss him,” I softly replied. “Even so, you miss him.”

I heard her move and found her leaning forward. Chin against her raised palms, long hair cascading down her back. I couldn’t see her eyes or her face, but the tension in her shoulders was open.

“I do not think this is a kindness you offer me, Catherine,” she said, tone ambiguous.

“It’s not about kindness or cruelty,” I said. “It’s about being whole, more than just the parts that’re useful.”

Silence, as she mulled over my words.

“Why?”

A dangerous question, that, for it was being asked by a dangerous woman. Akua Sahelian was bound to me still, and had been shorn from Winter by virtue of there no longer being such a thing. But my leashes on her had frayed as well. The Night was not mine, and though I could stripped her of her power that would have left her nothing but a shade. Powerless. It should have been a matter carefully weighed, the absence of many safeguards Winter had allowed against Akua being divested of her claws. It hadn’t been, though, not after Great Strycht. Because she’d said some things about doing good that night that I didn’t believe she truly understood the implications of. Because once you embraced a principle, you didn’t get to pick and choose where it worked and did not.

“Because, now and then, I forget who you are,” I said.

What matters more , Akua Sahelian had asked of me once, the conviction or the act? I still had no answer to that, no iron-bound truth to offer. But she had made her choice, and it betrayed her own belief.

“It won’t matter,” Diabolist said, “for you are, my darling, Callowan to the bone. It will kill me or it will kill you, but in the end all debts will be paid.”

“So it will,” I agreed quietly. “Did I not swear to you, once, that no place in Creation would safeguard you from me?”

“That,” Akua fondly said, “and a fate that would have men trembling in a thousand years.”

Praesi , I thought and did so less than affectionately. Would else would take a ruinous oath as a tender remembrance?

“And you’ll have that,” I mused. “It’s owed. But I’ll make you into a person first. Because there’s no meaning to passing judgement on the Diabolist – she’s just a villain. That’s the sum whole of her.”

“Yet you still do not believe there is difference between the Diabolist and Akua Sahelian,” the shade said, cocking her head to the side. “I am bemused, dear heart.”

“I’m going to claw back a person from what they made of you, Akua,” I calmly said. “And then, at the end of our road, we will have justice.”

“And I will submit myself to this decree,” she said, sounding amused. “You seem implacably certain of that.”

“It is borrowed certainty,” I said. “But certainty still.”

“I am all ears, Catherine Foundling,” she drawled.

“What matters more,” I asked, “between the conviction and the act?”

“The act,” Akua Sahelian said.

She had not hesitated a moment and so I smiled.

“How long have you been acting like one of us, Akua?” I simply asked.

No answer followed, not after and not when I left the tent.

Inexorable

“Courage and cowardice fill the same grave, but earn different eulogy.”
– Lycaonese saying

Otto Reitzenberg’s crown sat ill on his brow, and always would. On it weighed the three deaths that had carried him through the gates of Sternlerin fortress: his father and sisters, every one of them a better and braver soul than he. They had perished at the Enemy’s hand, and with every death further down the line of succession the crown was passed until it sat on his brow. Sat laden with the weight of those who should have led their people instead. Sometimes he thought he could hear them in the wind. Father’s rasping laughter, his throat never quite recovered from the poison on the ratling spear. Gude’s calm and steady drone, never moved to haste by fear nor displeasure. Elsa’s thundering wraths and kindnesses, neither any less terrible than the other. The Enemy had come for the House of Reintzenberg, that day, and spared only the runt of the litter. For the blood he carried on his brow his people had named him Otto Redcrown, and in his hands the heavy charge of turning back the tide of the Dead had been left.

He was not that charge’s equal.

“Come now, Reitzenberg,” the other man drawl, “no need to look so grim. The situation’s markedly improved since this morning.”

The Prince of Bremen scowled at his companion, unamused by the attempted levity. Prince Frederic Goethal was the very personification of every mocking tale shared around fires about the Alamans – covered in silks and ribbons, his long flaxen hair cascading down in ringlets all the way to his shoulders and usually drunk well before noon. The Prince of Brus was also the only ruler from south of Neustria to have sent so much as a single sword to join the defence of Lycaonese lands. And it was more than a sword the man had ridden with: near the entire army of Brus had made for Twilight’s Pass under the prince. Frederic was, Otto believed, both a finer soldier and a finer tactician than the Prince of Bremen himself. Yet he was also as prone to preening as the colourful azure and crimson kingfisher that was the banner of the House of Goethal. The juxtaposition of the two was disconcerting, made more so by the fact that the man was barely twenty and boyish in looks besides.

“I do not see how, Prince Frederic,” Otto said. “For one, this appears to be a dragon.”

The long stretch of mountain passes, valleys and narrow ridges popularly known as Twilight’s Pass had several choke points, the jagged pits of Volsaga being the latest they had been forced to defend. Volsaga Fortress itself, raised on a narrow strip between two sharp cliffs, had held for a fortnight as the dead massed their hosts under cover of constant, grinding assaults. It might have held for another fortnight, Prince Otto thought, if not for the Dead King unleashing the skeletal horror he’d just referred to. The gargantuan dragonlike thing had torn through the outer walls, ignoring like arrows and stone like they were summer rain, and scattered the defenders as the lesser dead poured in. Now it was curled around a low peak that loomed above the path into the fortress, forbidding attempt to claw it back from the dead.

“’twas a dragon, perhaps,” Prince Frederic mused. “It is now quite dead, one assumes.”

“We pulled back in time,” Otto grunted, ignoring the other man’s words. “We’ll save maybe half the companies we’d committed to the fortress. That is still a heavy loss. It will be a fighting retreat until Graueletter, too, and that abomination is bound to pursue.”

“The dwarven ballistae seemed to have only irritated it, alas,” the Prince of Brus conceded. “Though given the weather in this parts, it is a miracle the things work at all.”

“How, then,” Prince Otto patiently said, “has our situation improved since morn?”

“I would think that obvious, Reitzenberg,” Prince Frederic said, and elegantly flicked his wrist upwards.

The Lycaonese prince glance upwards, and saw little more than the sky. There were none of the corpse-drakes, at least, which he supposed was a small mercy. Both archers and slingers were beginning run out of projectiles, and it would be days before the next supply convoy.

“I see nothing,” Otto admitted.

“The sun has finally deigned to arrive, my friend,” Prince Frederic cheerfully said. “We will, at least, perish slightly thawed.”

A convulsive chuckle tore free of Otto’s throat before he could help himself. It’d been a dark jest, but then Lycaonese humour was not renowned for its lightness. The Prince of Brus took a moment to push back his long curls, then glanced curiously to their side. The Farewell Stones were a striking sight, Otto would admit. The steles of granite carved straight from the stone went on for most of a mile along the mountain path, most of them with a large iron peg hammered through. Some were empty, others rusting, but in every last one a farewell in iron had once been made. It was not a monument the way southerners would know it, but to his people it held great meaning.

“I’ll confess never to have heard of this shrine,” the Prince of Brus said. “May I ask what it stands for? It does not seem dedicated to the Heavens, at least in no way I understand.”

“It is not,” Otto replied. “My people call them the Farewell Stones, and they are no hymn to Above. They are... a vow, I suppose. Oft renewed, never fulfilled.”

“A Lycaonese custom, then,” Frederic Goethal said, eyes curious.

“This place, Volsaga,” Otto slowly explained. “It is halfway through Twilight’s Pass, and the easiest path through it. Armies have marched here since before the days of the Iron Kings, when we were tribes held together only by fear of the dark.”

The Alamans prince listened attentively, his face twisting with fascination.

“When we come through here, to march against the Plague or the Dead,” Prince Otto said. “We make a farewell in the stone. Before going to war, we leave it as an oath.”

“The spikes of iron,” Prince Frederic murmured, glancing at the long stretch of them. “There must be hundreds, and the rust... Some of them are mere traces, now.”

“We have done this,” Otto Reitzenberg said, “for many hundred years. Every time knowing it might be the last. That this war could be the one that breaks us and lets the Enemy devour us all.”

“But there is always a fresh farewell,” the other man said, tone thoughtful.

Otto nodded, pleased her understood.

“When the farewells reach the end of the steles,” the Prince of Bremen said, “those at the beginning have faded. So it has been, so it will be.”

Otto turned to his sworn swords and curtly gestured. They came forward with a large fold of leather and opened it before the two royals. Inside was a large peg of iron, and another of his soldiers offered a steel-tipped hammer to accompany it. The Alamans prince smiled in understanding, eyes sweeping to the stele closest to them. Empty, save for some last traces of rust deep inside.

“You are to add your own farewell, I take it,” Prince Frederic said.

“We,” Otto Redcrown said.

The other man studied him closely.

“How many Alamans have given farewell here, Otto Reitzenberg?” he quietly asked.

“After today,” Otto said, “there will be one.”

The Prince of Brus paled, as if slapped.

“There is no need to-” he began, then bit his lip and when he resumed speaking his voice was hoarse. “There should be no reward for this, Prince Otto. Not for simply joining the battle when you’ve all had to bid farewell to these passes for centuries.”

The Prince of Bremen shook his head, for after all the other royal did not understand him. Did not understand this.

“We are not better,” Otto said. “We too have murdered and schemed, Frederic Goethal. We have warred on our own and on southerners for greed or lust for power. There is naught in our bones that sets us apart from the stuff of other men.”

The last of the House of Reitzenberg straightened his back and took the iron peg he was being offered.

“It is the choice that matters,” Prince Otto Redcrown said. “Of marching through the pass. Of leaving shelter behind so that you may shelter others.”

The hammer was pressed into the hands of the Prince of Brus by a gruffly insistent armsman, and the fair-haired Alamans finally took it. There was no disapproval in the eyes of the soldiers sworn to Bremen, as Prince Frederic prepared to hammer in the peg that Otto was holding in place. There would be none from the soldiers of Hannoven, either, or Rhenia and Neustria. Why would there be? When the call had sounded, when the Dead had crossed the lakes, only one prince had come north. The name of Frederic Goethal would be remembered in these lands so long as Lycaonese held them. The hammer came down, claiming three strokes before iron nestled deep into rock. Otto clapped the shoulder of the other prince, after.

“We retreat to Graueletter,” the Prince of Bremen gruffly said.

“No,” Prince Frederic quietly replied. “No, not quite yet. You northerners are not the only ones with their pride.”

The flaxen-haired man whistled sharply and there was a cheer from the slope below, as the two thousand horsemen that were his persona retinue raised their banners. The Prince of Brus sent for his horse and deftly mounted the saddle, claiming a long lance from his page.

“The fortress is lost, Prince Frederic,” Otto told the man.

“That may be,” the man smiled, “but you were not wrong, in saying the beast will pursue us during the retreat. Many will die, should it not be slain.”

“Charging the path is a fool’s errand,” Prince Otto bluntly said. “It will kill you all.”

“So we will do no such thing, my friend,” Prince Frederic replied. “See the low peak where it looms, and the slope above it.”

The Prince of Bremen flicked a look, only to confirm what he already knew.

“It is sheer enough to be called a cliff and not a slope,” he said.

“We shall be most careful not to tumble, then,” Frederic Goethal grinned, looking for all the world like an impish boy. “Worry not, Reitzenberg. We will return victorious, should we return at all.”

“It is folly,” Otto said.

“I am a Goethal of Brus, my friend,” the prince said. “ I Dare are the words of my blood, and to them I will keep. Prepare the retreat. We guests must meanwhile earn our keep.”

The Prince of Brus rode away to join his retinue, and Otto stood on the heights above them spellbound. They were a colourful lot, these Alamans horsemen, a riot of silks in red and blue trailing behind their polished scale like fairy wings in the kingfisher’s colours. Pages saw to their riders, and to the cheers of the soldiers offered up thin glasses of what Otto thought might be crystal. Pure crystal, exquisitely shaped and filled with red wine. Prince Frederic took up his own and led his mount to the fore of the retinue before raising his glass.

“Ladies and gentlemen – to Procer, and Her Most Serene Highness,” he toasted.

As one, the soldiers toasted and drank. Not the full glass, the Lycaonese saw, but a mere sip of it.

“To our hosts.”

The Alamans drank.

“To the kingfisher, may we never shame it,” Prince Frederic said.

A cheer followed, and another sip. The Prince of Brus’ horse arched impatiently, though even one-handed the man reined it in effortlessly. He laughed, loud and bright.

“To doom, and glorious death,” he bellowed.

Madmen that they were, every single one of the Alamans flung their glasses against the ground. Crystal shattered, red wine spilled like blood, and behind Prince Frederic Goethal the riders followed. A fortune had been broken on stone in a moment of pique. Otto Redcrown watched as they rode up the mountain paths, disappearing in a crown of mists and stone. There was nothing he could do but arrange the retreat and wait, ordering bowmen companies forward to cover the retreat of the last soldiers escaping the fortress. The dragon of bones stirred at the sight, though it did not yet deign to intervene. There was still fighting taking place in the fortress courtyards behind it as the dead overwhelmed the last of the trapped defenders, and it lazily watched until nothing but the dead remained. Mere moments after, two thousand Alamans crested over the mountain path overlooking the abomination’s perch.

Otto’s fingers tightened as he saw them slow as they reached the edge of the slope, that steeply inclined bare rock precipitously tumbling down towards the skeletal horror that still remained perched over the path. The kingfisher banner rose glittering under the sun, blue and red and glittering gold, and two thousand lances were lowered as the cavalry thundered down the slope. To doom and glorious death Prince Frederic had summoned them, and the Alamans joined him laughing and singing their summer songs as they charged, silks trailing behind them like ephemeral wings. The beast only saw them too late, and like a pack of bright-clad wolves they tore at it. Tore at it and died. Leathery wings were ripped, but their beating still shattered horsemen and horses alike. Claws tore through armour and lace just as easily, maw crushed men and mount in a single screaming snap. But the madmen did not flinch or flee or withdraw. With hungry tenacity they carved up the abomination, ’til limbs had been rent and bones broken.

Until the Prince of Brus himself shattered the skull with a hammer, and the eldritch lights in the monster’s eyeholes were snuffed out. The man raised it high above his head and the cheer from the army was deafening, defiant. A sliver of light brought to a dark day. Of the two thousand horsemen that sallied out, six hundred returned.

Easily thrice that many soldiers might have been lost in the retreat, if they had not gone.

—

There was going to be a snowstorm tonight.

Captain Bernhardt had learned to tell the signs: wind grew restless, and colder, but you could still taste the heaviness in the air. It’d be a rough watch for whoever served after dusk, even more so for the rationing he’d had to place on braziers. Charcoal and stones were running low, and the promised supplies from Bremen had never arrived. In the captains’ private opinion, it was a toss-up whether it was the Enemy’s warbands who were responsible or the ugly truth that there were only so many supplies to go around and half a dozen forces that needed them more than his own. Not that the territory Bernhardt had been ordered to hold was without importance: Hocheben Heights sloped down from the southern peaks of the Kaltwend, a broad plateau that stretched all the way to the rocky shores of Lake Pavin. It was a lock on the hard spit of land that stood between the Grave and the tributary river to Lake Pavin, heights overlooking lowlands now crawling with the dead and damned. There were only a few paths up the sheer cliffs, though, and he’d ordered them collapsed the moment he took command. The dead had only half-heartedly tried the climb a dozen times since, and been duly driven back. He could understand why commanders might send the wood and grain to Twilight’s Pass or the Rhenian Gates instead, where every hour saw a fresh swarm of horrors unleashed.

It didn’t make the nights any warmer for his soldiers, though.

The fair-haired captain mused loosening the rationing for the duration of the snowfall as he tread the icy stones of Emil’s Displeasure, the long stretch of fortifications jutting from the edge of the plateau. The watchtowers were few, for this high up they were hardly needed, but Prince Emil Papenheim had not been skinflint in seeing to the defence of Hocheben. Stone parapets with punctured arrow slits oversaw the drop, and further back thick oaken trap doors led to the dug-in sections Hannoven soldiers fondly called the Emilzorn : tunnels leading to lower in the cliff side, through which ice-soaked trees and massive stones could be rolled down to fall at any force trying to climb up. Bernhardt had found the two hundred men and women left in Hocheben by the Iron Prince to be priceless, after coming to take command at the order of now-dead Prince Manfred Reiztenberg. His three thousand soldiers were mostly Neustrians, as was he, and they’d never had to fight for the heights in their lifetime. The old garrison knew the paths, knew the defences, and Bernhardt had made sure to make their own captain his second. You couldn’t trust a Hannoven woman to crack a smile even at her own wedding, famously, but what Captain Elpeth lacked in humour she more than made up in ability to kill things.

Bernhardt tightened his furs around his shoulders as he passed the third and last watchtower, slowing his steps by the brazier tucked away behind it. The three soldiers out on watch looked up guiltily as his arrival, well aware at least one of them should be up on the tower at the mercy of the evening wind.

“Captain,” the oldest among them began. “We-”

“Up,” Bernhardt interrupted in a rasp. “Now, and I will pretend I saw nothing. Don’t let it happen again.”

The older man saluted, the spear but clacking against the cold stone beneath, and Bernhardt watched him hurry back to his post. The other two might have looked abashed, he thought, though it was hard to tell with the padded cheeks of the helmets hiding away so much of their faces.

“It will snow tonight,” he told them. “Keep a careful eye out. The Enemy does not shiver or sleep.”

“We will, sir,” the youngest solemnly said.

Gods, he thought, she couldn’t have been older than sixteen by the sound of her voice. The lock of red hair that’d slid out from under the rim of her helm was moving with the wind. No older than Bernhardt’s own oldest daughter, which he’d seen off with the family coat of mail and his dead wife’s sword. Seen off to march with Prince Manfred’s host to hold Twilight’s Pass against the Dead King, along with most the Neustrian volunteers. Fredda could be dead, for all he knew. Word from the fighting at the pass had been sparse, but what he’d heard had been enough to chill his blood.

“I’ll take you at your word, soldier,” Bernhardt said, tone softening.

It was a whim that drove him to stand at the battlements, to take a look over the edge into the howling winds. Far below bare trees and evergreens stood half-buried in snow, until a frozen river cut them off, and it was the sight of that river that raised his hackles. A large patch of ice was cracked . He could see no dead moving below among the trees, and yet...

“Sound the horns,” he ordered. “All steel to the walls.”

“Sir?” the girl asked.

“ Now ,” he barked.

It was instinct, he knew, but there was something wrong. Captain Bernhardt stepped back and went looking through the sparse supply cache at the watchtower’s side, until he found what he was looking for: a long torch, ending in a tightly-tied cloth soaked with oil. He plunged it into the brazier, waiting until it caught fire before stepping back to the edge of the battlements. Atop the watchtower the call to arms sounded, sharp and echoing across the heights. Steadying his hand, the captain tossed the lit torch over the edge of the cliff. For five, ten heartbeats he thought he’d made a fool of himself and utter relief swelled. Then the torch hit something that wasn’t there, and after a sound like a broken mirror a hulking shape flickered into sight.

“Gods stand with us,” he whispered.

It was no simple dead, but instead a great abomination. A misshapen thing made of men’s bones and stretched out leather, shaped as some long-clawed bear with an overripe belly scaling the cliff. It must have been almost two hundred feet tall and half as large. Empty eye sockets turned to look at him, and with a keening sound the abomination leapt up.

“Spears at the ready,” Captain Bernhardt ordered, hastily backing away from the edge.

Two sets of bones claws closed around the battlements, grinding against the stone, as behind Bernhard the first reinforcing company spread out. Shafts of wood with tips of iron or steel dipped forward. The fair-haired Neustrian bared his sword, cursing himself for having left his shield at the barracks when setting out. The abomination’s massive head came out, all leather and bone and blind malevolence. It opened its mouth, jaws unhinging, and with horror Bernhardt realized that the monster was not the whole of it: climbing relentlessly out of the dead thing’s belly were sure-footed corpses, armed and armoured. It was a siege tower, he realized, the likes of which only the Dead King could possibly craft. And a precursor to all-out assault. They might hold here, he thought, but how many others like this were climbing up the cliff unseen? The captain found the eye of a soldier at the front of the spear wall.

“You,” he said. “Go, and tell Captain Elpeth what you saw here. She has command.”

The young man opened his mouth to protest, but Bernhardt would not argue and so ignored him.

“Volunteers,” he called out. “Ten of you, with me. Let us give Keter its fucking due .”

In front of them the abomination was spewing out its dead progeny, corpse after corpse forming a foothold, but ten brave souls came to his side. They used the old way, knowing full well what it meant. Three large urns of pitch, three torches, the rest to serve as the arrow in flight. The girl was one, that soldier with the errant red tuft.

“Go back, kid,” he said. “Let another old hand take your torch.”

Dark eyes met his.

“Hanne,” she said, tone hard. “My name is Hanne, and I am Lycaonese .”

The rebuke was hard as the voice. No older than his own Fredda, the captain thought. What kinds of fathers were we, to raise daughters like these? It was a bitter kind of pride, but pride nonetheless. Grip tight around his sword, Bernhard nodded.

“Steady then, Hanne,” he rasped. “Remember that the flame is what matters.”

She let out a shivering breath, nodding.

“Though mountains crack, and ice will thaw,” Hanne said.

Bernhardt of Neustria let out a spout of laughter like a spasm and nodded, taking the lead. Behind him the volunteers fell into formation

“Though mountains crack, and ice will thaw,” he called out.

Spears cracked down against the stone, a defiant snap.

“Though walls will fall, to tooth and claw,” the captain screamed, voice rising.

Eleven against the assembling dead, and still they charged. Sword in hand Bernhardt hacked at the bronze-clad corpse before him, elbowing the dead aside and burying himself in their line. At his side the other swords fought like the mad, pushing in and knowing there would be no going back.

“Though stars will fade, and shadow spread,” Bernhardt screamed, and they screamed with him.

Three of the volunteers were dead already, taken by axe and spear, but the dead had not expected so fierce an assault by so few and for a heartbeat he stood before the beasts’ open maw with no foe before him. His sword he dropped, snatching a torch from one of his fallen instead and the girl, Hanne, pushed at his side even as he took an axe in the ribs. The gap in the enemy surprise had bought them was already closing.

“On the heights we stood, with iron red,” she whispered, teeth clenched.

Torches were touched to pitch – one, two, three.

Into the beast they leapt, screaming defiance, and from the inside it burned.

The Hocheben Heights held halfway to dawn, and the surviving garrison retreated in good order.

Chapter 29: Retrospect

“My son, the Helikeans insist it is better to live a day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep but as in so many things they are missing the point. Lions commonly live a decade and a half, sheep slightly less. It is not them you must emulate but instead the common tortoise, a wise creature that achieves very little but will do so for a very long time. This is the ideal state of politics.”
– Extract from the infamous ‘Sensible Testament’ of Basilea Chrysanthe of Nicae

We got three days’ march before Creation turned on us.

It was always going to, I’d known that deep down – there’d been too many moving parts sent to spin within the bounds of Iserre for my armies to be allowed to escape the grounds so easily. But I’d expected, and planned for, the Heavens putting their fingers to the scale through the local crop of heroes. My contingencies had been built to kill or cripple enemy Named, killing as few actual soldiers as was possible. If there was to be a confrontation, my thought had been, best it be contained to Named and army strength on all sides be preserved. Given that we now outnumbered the western coalition army by a fair margin, that shouldn’t have been too difficult. The enemy fielded less than eighty thousand on their side, though they had us almost hilariously outnumbered in all matters cavalry. In comparison my own coalition had taken beatings but overall no dramatic losses, and that left us on rather healthy grounds: a little over twenty thousand veterans from the Legions of Terror, around thirty seven thousand legionaries of the Army of Callow and my largely intact fifty thousand drow. One hundred thousand and ten in total, more or less, so we had the enemy not only beaten in numbers but arguably in quality of soldiery as well.

It’d been the assessment of the Marshals that the enemy was unlikely to seek a pitched battle, and I’d concurred. It wasn’t that it’d be impossible for the enemy to win, should they attack. If they hit us during the hours after dawn we’d be down most the drow and they’d regain temporary superiority in numbers, which might allow them to swing this around if they bled us bad enough before the Firstborn were back on their feet. It was that the costs of such a victory would be horrific, to put it bluntly. Losses would be massive on both sides, and with Princess Rozala having a seat in those war councils there’d be at least one voice to remind them that if I felt my people were being forced into a corner the gloves would come off. Whether or not we were correct in guessing the enemy’s thoughts, their actions at least were correctly predicted: as the eastern coalition began a march to the northeast, out of Iserre and towards Cantal, the western coalition shadowed our advance but did not engage. Not even in skirmishes, to my mild surprise. I’d expected cavalry raids and Levantine light foot to try out screening forces, but the enemy made a point of never engaging in bloodshed.

Some of our soldiers considered this a good sign, and talk in the camps was that we might just walk back to Callow without drawing swords. Juniper had been scornful of the rumours, and passed down instructions to stamp them out, but myself I’d been rather impressed there were still any optimists left in my armies. You’d think they would have gotten themselves killed by now, just by dint of odds. Regardless, my own expectations remained dark and so when the first sign of trouble arrived I was validated instead of disappointing. It was on the fourth morning, about an hour before the Firstborn would be able to shake off dawn torpor, that a chunk of Creation half a mile wide shattered like glass in front of my armies.

“That,” Vivienne slowly said, “looks like a gate.”

It did, I thought, and that was not good news. The two of us had been riding to the Third Army’s camp, when Creations began creaking, so it was only a short ride to General Abigail’s command to order a runner being sent for ‘Advisor Kivule’. I half expected a comment from Vivienne at that, but found her face to be largely indifferent. She caught me looking, though, and raised an eyebrow.

“I’m not a fool, Catherine,” she said. “In Masego’s absence, she’s the finest magical expert we have. It would be wasteful not to make use of her.”

“Haven’t said a thing,” I replied, raising a hand in protest.

I declined the escort the Third Army offered, as well as the offer to accompany me that General Abigail offered while poorly hiding a cringe. She hid her relief at my refusal just as poorly, to Vivienne’s subtle amusement. We rode together towards the break and all the while she was suppressing a smile.

“That one’s in no danger of being tempted into reckless adventures, at least,” Vivienne finally drawled.

“I find the lack of ambition refreshing,” I admitted. “The boldest step she’s taken so far is discreetly inquiring if service months under a field promotion still count towards earning a general’s retirement pension.”

The other Callowan choked, swallowing her laughter.

“Well?” she asked, tone hoarse with suppressed hilarity. “Does it, Your Majesty?”

“Figured I’d throw her a bone,” I mused. “It’s not like she’s getting a general’s salary at the moment anyway.”

We might have continued quite a while in that vein if the approach of the breach hadn’t killed any semblance of amusement. We’d ridden close enough that I could make out what laid behind the filmy, gauze-like surface of the breach: a barren wasteland of howling dust storms I’d visited before. Frowning, I noted that the opening seemed to lead to a place different than the one I’d stood at. The great whirlwinds with streaks of lightning and the earth cracking open into geysers of flame were miles and miles away.

“ Shit ,” I feelingly said. “This is happening a lot quicker than I thought it would.”

Vivienne rode closer, as her sight was not as good as mine, and had grown pale by the time I caught up with her. I almost turned to acknowledge what I felt arriving behind me, but the breach itself was currently of greater interest,

“You told us it was slowly coming into alignment with Creation,” the dark-haired woman said. “That it might take months.”

“That’s what Sve Noc told me,” I told her. “And I had no reason to believe they were wrong.”

“They were not,” Advisor Kivule said.

Her presence in the Night meant her arrival was no surprise to me, but I was pleased to note that Vivienne either had grown better at hiding her surprise or she’d also somehow noticed. ‘Advisor Kivule’ was dressed entirely in black, her closely cut dress covering going from the hollow of her throat to her boots, and neither her face nor her hair were visible under the elaborate veils and half-hat she wore. That I had bound Akua Sahelian to my cloak after Second Liesse was rumoured, but there might be unrest if it came out I was not allowing her to walk about without chains. The false name and attire wouldn’t fool anyone already suspecting her identity, but given the kind of entities I’d bound to my service in the past Vivienne had assured me that the most popular rumours had nothing to do with Diabolist. Apparently she was either a drow sorceress I’d stolen from underground – never mind that they’d seen actual Firstborn and that as a species they distinctly lacked curves – or a fae I’d seduced into making oaths to me. The slightly uncomfortable way Vivienne had spoken the word ‘seduced’ made it clear what kind of seduction was being referred to, which was actually rather flattering – it did imply, after all, that I was skilled enough in bed to bedazzle one of the fae.

“Cryptic,” Vivienne commented. “If you’d care to elaborate?”

“The unpleasant vista that can be seen on the other side is not aligned with Creation,” Akua replied. “In this, Sve Noc were entirely correct in assessing the time. Though I cannot be certain as to what caused this phenomenon, I can hazard an informed guess.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“You described High Arcana runes and a detonation taking place while you visited, Catherine,” the shade said. “Repeated impacts of that nature might reverberate across the boundary between Arcadia and Creation, creating temporary breaches.”

“So whoever-” Masego, most likely “-is behind the mess on the other side, they’re swing hard enough at the wall between us and them that tiles are shattering,” I frowned.

“A more accurate metaphor would be a sword striking at a pond,” Akua suggested. “The initial strike will leave a mark, in this case being the breach you see before us, before creational laws make the water return where force chase it from – in this case, the boundary pressure eventually closing this breach.”

“At least there’s not a permanent gate into Arcadia in the middle of Procer,” Vivienne said. “Somehow I doubt Hasenbach would be too pleased about that.”

“Wasn’t us,” I replied out of reflex. “And if it was you can’t prove it, so in a philosophical sense it isn’t.”

There was a moment of embarrassed silence as the other two women looked at me. I grimaced.

“Well,” I spoke into the quiet, a tad defensive. “Given our history, I might as well start practicing the official response early.”

“Inadequate,” Akua said.

“Sloppy,” Vivienne said, almost simultaneously.

They didn’t turn to glare at each other, though given how much of a point they were making of not doing that they might as well have for all the difference it made. The irritation from Vivi was likely genuine, but rubies to piglets that Akua was just having fun yanking her chain. It would be a much greater challenge, I thought, to wean her off pettiness than it would be to wean her off of Evil. Who could say I’d not learned to pick my battles?

“Glad we’re all in agreement,” I drily said. “I need practical details here, o advisor. When’s this thing going to disappear? Can we expect others to appear, and if so how often?”

“Less than a bell,” the shade replied, which had me sighing.

Four hours, in the winter season, was no small portion of the daylight hours already shortened by the forced slumber of the Firstborn after dawn. We’d have to march around the damned thing.

“As for your second question, there are two possibilities,” Akua said. “The first is that we are looking at the initial breach, in which case we might have days before a second instance – though the occurrences will quicken as the process advances.”

“And the second?” I asked, bracing myself.

“This is not the first breach,” Akua said. “And they have simply been occurring in different parts of Iserre, for an unknown amount of time. We could be looking at hours instead of days for the apparition rate.”

“Diabolist,” Vivienne said. “What happens when the rate is so close as to be instantaneous?”

“In metaphysical terms, a repurposed chunk of Arcadia will made into a half-realm straddling the boundary between it and Creation,” the shade said.

“And in physical terms?” I asked.

“I don’t believe this has ever been accomplished before,” Akua Sahelian cheerfully admitted. “And so I’ve no authoritative answer to give, darling dearest. It ought to be interesting to find out whether we are simply to be obliterated by the initial bridging or the process will closer to the forging of a permanent domain with tendrils reaching in both realms.”

Certain death or probably death, then. There was a cheery thought. I closed my eyes, let all I’d learned sink in. I’d come across more than a dozen moving parts since I’d walked out the gate bringing me to Iserre, but this was it – the pivot, the fulcrum, the culmination of all this bloody mayhem. Had the Tyrant planned this far? No, I decided. No one was that good, not even the Neshamah, and for all his brilliance Kairos Theodosian was no King of Death. Now, in matters of war and politics I could grasp how we had come to this cliff’s edge. The Grand Alliance could not and would not yield, neither could I and all the while violent madmen rode the carriage that was the League of Free Cities down ever slope they could find. But what was the story here? There was one, of that there could be no doubt. There were too many Named in Iserre, too many crowns and too many secrets for there not to be a tale in the works. If it were merely the western and eastern coalitions clashing, we would have the heroic and the villainous and the usual tragedies in black and white.

The League’s presence muddled that, however. It was no longer so clear-cut, and after the unfolding calamity in Arcadia was brought into the mix the waters became even muddier. Kairos wants to play a trick , I thought. I want to forge a peace and wield it like a blade. I could only guess at Masego’s intent, but he could not be in his right mind. That would make him, I thought, a danger or an obstacle. The sword hanging above all our heads but not someone who would influence the shape beyond that. Now, I knew what Princess Rozala wanted but she wasn’t the champion for her side was she? It was the Grey Pilgrim that would bear that mantle and I wasn’t really sure what the old man wanted. He should have killed Black, I thought. It would have made more sense to do that if peace was what he was after. I would have been utterly furious, true enough, but if they’d killed him while he was in the middle of burning Procer I would have had to swallow my anger. Instead he’d given me reason to... To twist arms so that I could get him back, I thought, and my blood cooled. I’d heard rumours about Black being dead or captured even in hamlets, it was a given that the moment I came to Iserre I’d hear about it.

So when I’d first encountered the Pilgrim and the Saint, I’d baited her and tricked him to go after something he’d known for certain I would want. And I’d won a victory. Oh, it hadn’t been given to me, but narratively speaking I’d received a written invitation to take it. And I won from it the body without the soul, the part that actually makes Black dangerous to them. It’d been bait, and I’d taken it. A victory, I thought once more. Could it actually be that simple? I wasn’t Named, not anymore, but I was the high priestess of Night and the weight of the roles I still played might be enough. And there had been growing similarities, hadn’t there? I’d slipped into them without even noticing. I now bore a staff and no sword, I called on miracles to aid and protect rather than attack. I had godlings whispering in my ears, companions at my side. I was eldest in influence among the priesthood and Named of a coalition of nations, and an unequaled religious figure in one of them. I had made myself and been made into the patchwork-cloaked opposite of the pilgrim in grey, one step at a time. And now I’d claimed a win over one that might be called my rival. This, I thought, felt like a pattern of three. One I had initiated as a villain, and with a victory.

I knew well what followed: draw and then finally defeat.

Now, if I were the Grey Pilgrim, why would I go this far out of my way to kill Catherine Foundling? Because the Choir of Mercy told me to, I immediately thought but just as quickly dismissed. If Tariq were simply a murderous errand boy for the Ophanim he’d be a great deal less dangerous. No, if he was doing this and had invested so much time into doing it when the Dead King was devouring the north then it was for a reason – not necessarily one I’d considered good or decent, but one that would seem those to him. My eyes blinked open and I found my companions both staring at me in silence.

“I am the Grey Pilgrim,” I said. “Why, of all the threats currently on the board, do I need to have a story-forged knife either at or in the Black Queen’s throat?”

“The fairy gates,” Vivienne replied, cocking her head to the side. “They can either make or break the war to the north. The ability needs to be either solidly secured or removed so it can’t be a threat.”

Which made sense, I thought, if I grasped the timing of it correctly. Black had been captured while I was in the Everdark, which meant the Dead King had either been mustering his armies or already on the march. The Pilgrim ended a strategic offensive that had a real risk of starving half the Principate into collapse if left unchecked while simultaneously acquiring leverage on both Malicia and myself. Snip with the soul and not only did he keep that leverage but he prepared a pattern of three. The degree of foresight that’d require was frightening, to be honest, and I suspected beyond even a hero in bed with a Choir. On the other hand, I wouldn’t put it beyond the Grey Pilgrim to do all this as a contingency . Ending a threat while expanding the tools at his disposal? Yeah, that might fit. He’d know he was exposing himself to my tearing through a gate and appearing behind him at some point down the line – rescuing my teacher would have quite the weight behind it – but cutting out the soul would muddle up that story and I suspected he could do quite a bit with the ability to predict where I’d appear when coming for the soul. Was that really all it was, though? The gates had simply made me too potentially dangerous not to pull a knife on? Considering the man had looked into my soul a few times, he must have known that I’d rather avoid war if I could. I glanced at Diabolist, whose gaze remained hidden behind her veils.

“Because it is the only certain way of killing you,” the shade calmly said, “and Calernia cannot survive a second Dead King.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. It seemed an absurd claim, for all the talk of apotheosis that had preceded my descent into the Everdark. Yet I trusted Akua’s intellect, if less so her judgement. She wouldn’t have said that without careful consideration. I thought back to my fights with the heroes, when the Tenth Crusade had come knocking. I’d dropped a lake on the enemy, to be sure, but it wasn’t worse than what the likes of the Warlock and possibly the Witch of the Wilds could have done with a little preparation. Although, arguably the lack of preparation needed on my part made it – no, this was all missing the point. Feasible way of killing me, Akua had said. That brought different perspective. Sure, I’d been repeatedly slapped around by the Saint of Swords and she’d shrugged off the worst of what Winter could bring to bear, but I’d usually accomplished what I came for while going around her before retreating. The Pilgrim himself had seen me tear through a band of heroes while fumbling with the barest fraction of my mantle had been able to do. If I’d known half the tricks at the Battle of the Camps that I’d known in the Everdark, I honestly doubted anyone but the Pilgrim or the Saint would have been able to put a scratch on me. And those two, I realized, were the oldest and perhaps most powerful heroes on the continent.

Shit.

The thought that the man could have conceived of me as a nascent Dead King was ludicrous, he’d been able to see into my fucking soul . I wasn’t... Gods, I’d done some dark things and not always for reasons as good as I would have wished but there were lines I’d always refused to cross. That I would have kept to. This can’t be personal , I told myself, and put aside the horrifying thought that a truth teller might have genuinely believed I had the potential to become the likes of Neshamah. Stepping out of myself, I looked at the story of Catherine Foundling through the Grey Pilgrim’s eyes. The past was largely irrelevant, I decided, save perhaps for a note that I’d been taught by the Black Knight and would likely draw on his manners and methods. What mattered was that I’d come into a Name as the manifestation of what Tariq had called the sin of our indolence returned to haunt us , the first time we’d ever spoken. That was important, that informed what I considered the Black Queen to be. She was a form of retribution by Creation, by the story, for a failure on the side of Good. Catherine Foundling, as an entity, was inherently dangerous to the Heavens. Still, as the Pilgrim I didn’t like killing unless the situation required it and I did not yet know if it did. I should, at least, meet with this Black Queen.

What did I find when I did? Offers of truce, offers to reduce the dangers for everyone, but also a mutilated soul. And Winter encroaching on the remnants, essentially a standing temptation by a power older than Creation and by nature prone to contaminating mortal minds. I make the reasonable offer of this very dangerous person abdicating the crown and allowing others settle the kingdom she’s slowly turning to Evil by simple virtue of ruling it, but mortal considerations prevent her from accepting. This is a good sign, because it means she still has good intentions. This is a bad sign, because her attachment to Callow is the kind of narrative leverage Below will use in a heartbeat to make a full monster of her. So I make a bargain about keeping the damage under control with the Black Queen, hoping that after a clean military defeat she’ll be forced to reconsider the earlier offer. On the other hand, we have to be very careful not to push her so far she’ll sink into Winter and become the kind of mess that gobbles up armies before it’s put down. It’s a delicate dance, but I’ve been at this game for a very long time and I have the Saint of Swords as a contingency. Then the Battle of the Camps happens.

A full band of heroes fails to kill the Black Queen, then the Saint fails after them, and the gate trick kills a few thousand people in less time than it takes to drink a cup of tea. Then the backlash makes her fall into some sort of state – Diabolist taking the reins of the body, though I might not know that – and she faces down the entire heroic contingent simultaneously before snapping out of the fugue state and forcing a truce on the battlefield. Catherine Foundling has now proved dangerous, exceedingly hard to kill and mentally unstable. Given that she’s running around with an entire fairy court’s worth of power, good intentions or not she needs to be removed. The peace conference achieves that, more or less: the terms ensure I’ll be around her, able to find a weakness or guide her into a redemption story that’ll either kill her or turn her to good purpose in the service of the Heavens. The Tenth Crusade is repulsed in the Vales as well, but that’s all right because the Black Queen is the key to settling Callow and she hasn’t gone anywhere. But then the Iron Prince along my native Levant prepare for a second invasion through the Vales, and she comes seeking help. This is a very, very dangerous moment. If I do not help her, I’ve thrown away the story the deaths at the Battle of the Camps bought me. If I do help her, on the other hand, I might be destroying the same Grand Alliance that will be the same power bloc necessary to put her down if she gets out of control.

Cordelia Hasenbach’s dream ensures peace in the west, forced restoration of Callow to Good and a unified front against the long-term term Evil threats I’ve spent my entire life fighting. Catherine Foundling is a young villain-trained queen with expansionist neighbours and access to power that dehumanizes her the more she uses it – the story of that descent into atrocity practically writes itself. The choice is only hard to make in the sentimental sense, and I’ve been doing this too long to allow sentimentality much of a weight. Only, after that, instead of running back to Praes or making Callow into some kind of nation-fortress while I discretely look for an acceptable successor, she leaves . I don’t know where she’s going, but there’s nowhere that’s not a disaster. Keter, to the Dead King? Arcadia, where she can bargain with fae? To the Everdark, where not even the Ophanim can easily look? If she went to the Tyrant of Helike that might be a relief, but months pass and she doesn’t appear in the League. This is a problem, because a half-taught girl with that mantle is one thing but whatever the fae or the Dead King might make of her is a very different sort of trouble. Then Keter begins invading the north, and the game changes: no oath I took means a thing when the survival of Calernia might be at stake. So I leave, and set to shaping a story that allows me to put her down by any means necessary should she return as a true villainous Queen of Winter.

I breathed out, and it was almost jarring to think of me as myself again. The plunge had been deep and exhausting, but it’d also been necessary. Both Vivienne and Akua had been right, in their own way. Whether I came back as a monster or remained the same, the Pilgrim benefitted from having a story-wrought knife at my throat. If I was to be the Grand Alliance’s gate-maker, I could either be bargained with nicely or with the reminder that a promised victory might kill me. If I was the... Queen of Moonless Night, for lack of a better name, he needed to kill me and fast or it might mean the end of the western nations. The thing was, stepping out of myself, I could finally see why he’d consider me that much of a threat. Because I did have the means , didn’t I?

To tread the same path as Dread Empress Triumphant.

It wouldn’t even be all that hard because the pieces were all already there, waiting to be picked up. Already I had Callowans in legionary armour and the a knightly order under my banner. The Duchess of Daoine had sworn oaths to me, and service of her armies, and from the Empire I had already stolen three legions and come to Iserre claiming more. And I could do a great deal more than that: bringing Black into the ranks of the Mighty would forge me a monster of a general who finally had the power to match his wits. I lacked mages, so while Procer bled to hold back the dead I could force the submission of the already-fracturing Praes and bring the finest sorcerers and warlocks of the continent into my forces. Malicia could kneel or be buried with the Tower, and once the rest of the east was unified the goblins would make a deal and the orcs would fall into that nascent empire naturally – I’d have Hakram, Black, and Grem One-Eye in my service, how could they not? And then we could turn west and take the gloves off. I had Hierophant and the ruins of the fortress-artefact of Liesse. I had the Wild Hunt and ties with the ruling court of Arcadia, I had the high priesthood of Night and alliance with Sve Noc themselves. Oh, he was right to be afraid I thought.

If every other choice was taken from me, it might still come to that.

“I came back,” I mused as I looked up at the sky, “reeking of millennial ritual murder and fresh apotheosis, with slivers of living godhood perched on my shoulders and a sworn army of drow. I’ve effectively confirmed his every fear.”

“He will come for you,” Akua said. “I expect that to a man like him there is not a single act that would be immoral when taken in the prevention of a second Dead King’s rise.”

She was, I grimly thought, probably right.

“So we reach out,” Vivienne said. “Make it clear that you are no such thing and offer reassurances.”

“He’ll still want a draw for the pattern of three,” I grimaced. “Just in case.”

“So what do we do?” she asked. “Because this isn’t looking good, Catherine. If what I’ve heard about how he caught the Black Knight is true, he’s not a man we want to make desperate.”

I clenched my fingers and unclenched them, looking at the gate. Kairos wants to play a trick. I want to forge a peace and wield it like a blade. Tariq wants to make sure no one can end the world, or at least our little corner of it. They key would be beyond the gate, I decided. Where I already suspected the armies of the League would be marching through, and perhaps even the other Grand Alliance army as well.

“Now I know what everyone wants,” I said. “So I just need to figure out how to win without making everyone else lose.”

Chapter 30: Weaver; Woven

“Just as planned.”
-Inscription on the front gates of the mausoleum of Dread Emperor Traitorous

The locals called them ‘Mavian prayers’.

Centuries ago, before these were lands of princes and plots, what was now called Iserre had been the cradle of a war between the Arlesite regales of the south and the proud Alamans chieftains of the heartlands. The few respectable books written on the subject in that era – penned by Atalante or Stygian scholars, when not by Ashuran officials – agreed that the Arlesites had been on the winning side more often than not. The current lay of Iserre itself spoke to those victories: though many of its people spoke Chantant, it was Tolesian that was the most common tongue and Arlesite customs that were most kept to. The land has been won by the aggressive southerners leading warbands out of their stone keeps, Alamans tribesmen slowly forced out of their ancestral holdings by a thousand lost skirmishes. Those old tribes must have had a hundred names, but as a tapestry of tightly-knit kin and cultures they’d been colloquially known as the Mavii . And though eventually forced into flight further north, these Mavii had left behind the marks of what had once been a powerful and wealthy confederacy. The so-called ‘Mavian prayers’ were more common sight in northern Iserre, it was true, but even in the rest it was not uncommon to see long rows of grey raised stones sketching out some symbol or meaning now long lost.

Iserrans now insisted those stones had been raised as prayers to the Gods Above, each representing a passage from the Book of All Things, but the Wasteland books I’d read on the subject of Procer had expressed a great deal of skepticism on the subject. For one, the Alamans had not kept to the House of Light as it was now known. Every tribe had elected priests and kept faith to the Hallowed, as in those days they’d called the Heavens, but personal worship of great spirits and angels nominally beholding to them had been just as prominent. Some of these spirits, I now suspected, had not been lesser gods or remnants of wilder ages but instead wandering lords and ladies of Arcadia. The suspicion had grown from the shapes I glimpsed of these raised stones, how they had been pleasing to my eye in some ineffable manner even now that I’d broken ties to Winter. It had been good as confirmed, however, when I’d found this particular ‘prayer’. It was a barrow, or a tumulus as those were called in Procer, though one larger than any I’d ever heard of in Callow and crowned by a strange pattern of great stones. Three concentric rings, the stones of them interlocking to give the illusion of a full and complete circle when one stood at the foot of the barrow.

Standing at the centre of it, I’d felt a whisper of the sensation that had once filled me when shaping gates into Arcadia with the strength of Winter. This had been a thinning of boundary once, I thought, a place enshrined in some eldritch manner. Whatever power had coursed through these grounds vital and vivid in olden days had long died out, but it had left behind a taste of itself. Like a desiccated ancient riverbed, I decided. I could have run my fingers along the traces of the old currents carved into what was now stone and dry sand, charted their shapes and guessed at the intents, but there would be no bringing back the old waters. The world had moved on, the stars were no longer aligned. Whatever patron the Mavii had once bargained with had abandoned the game for fresher ones. Still, there was something about the place that appealed to me. It would serve for what I intended.

“There,” I said, idly pointing with my staff. “Gently.”

The four legionaries awkwardly moved to the side. All were orcs and warrior-fit, so the large table they were moving might as well have been a sack of feathers, but amusingly enough they were having to be careful of not wrecking the table instead of labouring under the weight of it. They set it down in the snow with a muted crunch and I met their salutes with a nod before they retreated to the bottom of the barrow. Where more work would await them, for it was a veritable procession that was setting up my headquarters at the heart of this Mavian prayer. Chairs and smaller tables, along with precious maps and a library’s worth of scrolls and reports. A writing desk, with quills and ink and all wax for seals. Last of all, the same sinfully comfortable armchair I’d stolen from the Count of Old Oak a few years back. Hakram had proved, as always, that he was a prince among men when he’d revealed he’d had that little piece of furniture brought along for the Proceran campaign. It’d been kept with Juniper in the First Army, whose supply train was the largest, but now that all four of the divisions of the Army of Callow were reunited I had wonderful cushions to sink in once more. Vivienne wandered in with the last of the additions, seemingly amused at the burrow I’d had assembled.

“And when it starts snowing or raining, shall you bravely retreat?” she drawled.

Leaning against one of the tall stones, long skirts swishing against her boots as she tread through the snows, Vivienne looked like some noble’s daughter gone on a ride more than the former Lady-Regent of Callow. The pales shades of her blouse and dress made the laughter in those blue-grey eyes seem lighter, somehow, more innocent. Or perhaps simply less weighed upon , I thought.

“I’ve already had the outskirts of the barrow warded by our mages,” I said. “For wind and quiet.”

“One of Masego’s patterns?” she asked, idly pushing off the stone.

“Yeah, though I’m told they can’t get it to work the way he said it should,” I noted. “He has a very unique definition of ‘elementary knowledge’, our Zeze.”

That some of our senior legion mages had outright admitted the scrolls Hierophant had left on the subject of warding might as well be gibberish had served as a fresh reminder that I’d been dealing with some of the finest mages on the continent since becoming a villain and I that I should temper my expectations accordingly. The rituals he’d taught my mages lines in the days of the Fifteenth had since become the standards large-scale sorceries of the Army of Callow, but not all of them could be used without him guiding the casting and there was no real replacement for Masego to be had. Talented mages were costly and time-consuming to raise, and unlike the Wasteland I didn’t have centuries of teaching methods and arcane knowledge to dole out to raise any even should I find talented individuals – which I couldn’t , because unlike Praesi I didn’t have well-trained agents out there looking for the signs of young children with the Gift. Add onto that the fact that the Legions of Terror had picked clean the most obvious magical talents in the kingdom after the Conquest, and it was no wonder that so few of my mages were of Callowan stock.

“And for the wet wrath of the Heavens?” Vivienne idly asked, leaning over one of the tables to have a look at the scrolls stacked on it.

“I dabbled,” I shrugged.

It was one of the more abstract uses of Night I’d resorted to, which had been interesting in its own way. Spinning threads of a miracle I had seen before – the bubble of stillness the Sisters had forged around me when we’d tried to gate out of Iserre – I’d crafted a sort of intangible roof and bound it to the stones. Komena had perched herself atop one long enough to call the work ‘clumsily-executed but clever in principle’, which was the closest she’d ever come to complimenting something I did with the Night. Vivienne hummed, and pursued it no further.

“So,” she said. “Are you going to tell me why you’ve called a halt to the march and ordered the Hellhound to establish a fortified camp?”

Leaning on my staff, I began slowly limping around the edge of the raised stones. It was a fascinating thing, the way the interlocked slabs allowed me to glimpse down at odd angles. Revealing the sight of my armies camped below, raising palisades and digging ditches.

“Because we’ll be fighting a battle soon,” I said. “And there’s no point in running around until we know we can win it.”

“How do you know we’ll be fighting a battle?” Vivienne asked, brow furrowing not in disbelief but in curiosity.

Wondering what she’d missed that I had not, how she could remedy that failure when the chance next came. It had not escaped me that she’d taken my tongue-lashing differently than Juniper. My Marshal had judged the fault to be in herself, and so that the mending of it must come from herself as well – Juniper had turned back to books and discussions with other commanders, the familiar whetstones of her mind. Her art of war had been found insufficient, and so she would better it until this was no longer the case. Vivienne, though, had been harder to gauge. She was... learning, if there was any word that could be used for it. Looking at the successes of others like she was trying to squeeze out the essence of them to make it her own. It was a little unnerving, at times, and at others frustrating. Mostly for me, when I found the whisper of my instincts a hard thing to explain.

“Because we are headed to a pivot,” I said, “and this... isn’t enough. Our army and the Pilgrim’s, that’s too small a scale compared to the magnitude of power gathered. It might be that it starts with simply us, but it won’t stay that way.”

“Because the story,” she slowly said, “requires more than simply us and the Pilgrim. Yet you have fought battles before where-”

I raised a hand to interrupt her.

“The breaches, Vivienne,” I said. “They make a lot possible and therefore those things will happen – because once the groove is there, the possibilities will flow into it like water.”

I cleared my throat.

“We can have that talk later in more detail,” I added. “Council won’t be for hours yet and I don’t want to have repeat myself.”

She nodded.

“I should see to the Jacks, anyway,” Vivienne said. “Adjutant’s coming to join you?”

“Eventually,” I said. “I’ve sent him to get me a proper suit of plate fitted.”

“It has been odd to see you limping about without one,” she admitted.

I snorted and waved her away. As she walked away I propped up my staff against the side of my armchair and lowered myself onto it with a sigh of pleasure. I sat facing rings of stones with an unobstructed view, tables at my sides groaning with the documents I’d sent for. It wasn’t long before I caught the slight sound of leather on snow, my only advance warning that I once more had company.

“You have the supplies?” I called out.

“And you claim you don’t have the fae hearing anymore,” Robber complained. “Bullshit’s what I say.”

My minion popped into sight, leaning against the left arm of my chair. I was rather impressed he’d made it that far without my picking up on it even when I’d known he would be coming.

“You’re just getting old,” I mocked, because it was always a bad idea to give so much as an inch to a goblin.

He should be around sixteen now, I thought. Goblins rarely made it beyond forty, and that was for the better bloodlines – of which Robber was not, and that was setting aside the harsh lifestyle of service in my armies. Thirty was likely when his body would start breaking down, barring rituals to stretch out his lifespan, and at that thought I suddenly regretted the quip.

“You’re telling me,” the Special Tribune complained. “Only cowards make it to fifteen, but I just can’t seem to croak. I’ve had to make my peace with the fundamental truth of this world, Cat: I am simply too good to die .”

I smothered my grin, the earlier regret chased away as quickly as it’d come.

“A heavy burden to bear,” I solemnly agreed. “I know it well.”

He eyed me rather skeptically.

“Didn’t you die that one time?” he asked.

“I think I’m on three now,” I muttered. “It’s not one of my better habits.”

He snickered.

“No wonder you sent me after these, then,” he said.

I had sent off Special Tribune Robber on a most important errand, and as I pawed through the knapsack he’d brought me as tribute I had to concede he’d done his duty well. Two bottles of Vale summer wine were set on the table to my right while I squirrelled away the satchels of wakeleaf into the many pockets of my cloak. Save for one, which went to stuff my pipe. Passing my palm over the herbs had them lit with the slightest touch of Night, and I inhaled with pleasure before lying back in my seat.

“All right,” I said. “Serve as my hands.”

“I figure Archer might object,” the little wretch cackled.

“You might notice I didn’t send for a footrest,” I warned him.

He hurriedly made elaborate apologies that coincidentally happened to insult Indrani more often than not, but I put him to work. Against three stones, three sheets of parchment were put up: one for the Grey Pilgrim, the Tyrant of Helike and the Black Queen. Robber skittered around with ink as I dictated to him, his handwriting godsawful but honestly not that much worse than mine.

“The Pilgrim wants a draw with the Black Queen,” I said. “The Pilgrim wants to preserve the Grand Alliance armies. The Pilgrim wants Procer at war on only one front.”

Robber’s sloppy drawing of the Peregrine as bearing a heavy mustache and a crooked nose was physically inaccurate, but in the interests of morale I allowed the misrepresentation.

“The Tyrant wants leverage on the First Prince,” I said. “The Tyrant wants the means to position the Hierarch. The Tyrant wants there to be no victor in Iserre.”

Kairos’ illustration had him either bearing horns or with his head on fire, it was hard to tell, and I was fairly certain that his arms ended in fingers and not crablike pincers. Still, I decided it wouldn’t do to infringe on the vision of so accomplished an artist.

“You going to tell me what you’re after now?” Robber asked, sounding genuinely curious.

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “It matters what they think I’m after, because that’s what they’ll plan according to. We’re not the only ones scheming here – if we plan assuming that everyone else will be passive we’ll just be wasting ink.”

“So what do they think we’re after?” the goblin said.

“The Black Queen wants to preserve her armies,” I said. “The Black Queen wants leverage over the Grand Alliance. The Black Queen wants the soul of the Carrion Lord.”

Which were all things I did want, but not necessarily in the manner they’d think I did. I wanted Black back not to make him my foremost general or use him against Malicia, but because he was my father in all but name and I’d not allow his fucking soul to be snuffed out by the blind machinations of the Pilgrim. I wanted leverage over the Grand Alliance not to force treaties advantageous to me but instead to get everyone at the table for the Liesse Accords: the intent wasn’t hostile, and to be blunt if there were other ways of getting there I’d much prefer using those. As for the preservation of my armies, while it was true whether that assertion came back to bite them or not would depend on how well they’d assessed my degree of ruthlessness. I didn’t want to get any of my soldiers killed if I could avoid it, but that didn’t mean I’d shy from battle either if it was the best means to get what I wanted. Sadly, I was dealing with the Peregrine and a madman who’d tricked the likes of the Wandering Bard. I’d assume, at least in principle, that they had a decent read on my personality.

“And now one more parchment,” I said. “The pitfalls we have to avoid, how we’d lose.”

“Folding on those wouldn’t be losing?” Robber asked, skeptical.

Nimble fingers flicked ‘my’ parchment, though mercifully there was no representation of me sketched aside from a hastily filled-in crown.

“It’d be a defeat, certainly,” I said. “But put that parchment above the others, because botching any of those would be the defeat.”

It went above Kairos, and to my amusement the goblin had to drag a chair and climb it so he could both hang it and write on it. Dipping the quill in an inkpot, he turned to me with an expectant look.

“The Grey Pilgrim cannot die,” I said.

Inconvenient as that line was, it needed to be drawn. If Tariq died and we’d killed him, a death feud was struck with Levant. If Tariq died and the League killed him, eighty thousand Levantine troops would be marching east instead of west. If Tariq died by accident, well, likely I’d get blamed somehow. I pulled at my pipe and spat out a mouthful of smoke.

“The western and eastern coalitions cannot lose more than a fifth of their forces,” I said.

He let out a low whistle at that. The quill scratched, though his gaze kept flicking back to me curiously. I sighed, and explained after another drag of wakeleaf was released.

“For us, a fifth would be about twenty thousand dead,” I said. “For them it’d be somewhere between fifteen to thirty, depending on whether or not they can merge their armies before the fight. If either of us loses more than that, we’re crippled as a field army for at least several months. We can’t afford that, given the situation up north.”

“And the League?” he asked.

“Can’t be considered reliable in any sense so long as the Hierarch and the Tyrant are running it,” I said. “Preserving its armies isn’t a priority – to be honest, I’d feel safer if we carved away them by at least a fifth.”

I drummed my fingers against the arm of my seat, staring at the fresh ink on the parchment. I worried my lip thoughtfully and only after a long silence did I speak.

“The Grey Pilgrim cannot have get a draw against the Black Queen,” I finally said.

I could not, in the end, trust him with that kind of power over me. Not even for the sake of making an alliance. Robber finished the words with a flourish, as if a twist of the wrist could make his calligraphy look anything other than cramped and sickly. I had not exactly picked the most able of scribes.

“Finished?” Robber asked.

I nodded. He scuttled down, quite blatantly pilfering the quill and inkpot before putting away the chair.

“And now?”

“Now,” I murmured, “I think .”

The parchments, those tidy little triumvirates of desires and pitfalls, hung in front of me but I did not need to look at them. Putting them up had served the purpose I’d had it done for, allowing me to place it all together as a structure instead of a series of abstractions. I closed my eyes, let it all fall together.

“I can leave, Boss,” Robber quietly offered.

“Don’t,” I said, chewing on my pipe. “We’re going to play a game, you and I.”

“Ominous,” the goblin praised.

The wakeleaf burned my throat, filled my lungs, and for a moment I felt a strange joy go through me like a spasm. I was enjoying this, I realized. This feeling, like my mind was full to burst and empty at the same time. Like I’d been filled with jagged edges, glittering pieces of madness and brilliance and that there was a solution to the crawling chaos, a twisting and winding formula that would bind it all to my will. I breathed out, smoke and heat leaving my lips, and smiled. Eyes fluttering open, I snatched the staff and hobbled to the parchment-bearing stones with feverish energy.

“Now,” I said, “to a layman’s eye, it might seem we’re in a spot of trouble.”

“If have a few of those, if you need spares,” Robber offered.

“But if you look at it closely, we have angles,” I continued. “For example, though the Tyrant will stab anyone who looks about to win in the back he is in fact our ally .”

The goblin choked.

“What was that, Boss?” he said. “I can’t believe I heard it right.”

I knocked the butt of my pipe against barely-dry ink under the drawn caricature of the Tyrant.

“Kairos can’t accomplish what he wants if there’s no truce,” I said. “Think about it, Robber – if his whole reason for getting into this war is getting leverage on Cordelia, then he needs room to actually use that leverage. He can’t do that from Iserre while openly at war with her. If blunt coercion was all he needed he could have gone after her armies to force her hand, but he didn’t. You know what that tells us?”

Robber’s eyes narrowed in thought.

“The cripple’s not willing to hand this war to the Dead King,” my Special Tribune said. “He’ll duck and weave, but these are matron games – a knife here and there before we all sit smiling.”

“Aye,” I said. “And one thing more: he needs me at that table, the wretched little bastard. If I don’t agree to truce talks then all his schemes are dust. He can’t make a separate peace with Cordelia, not when he’s trying to twist her arm. He needs to be the kingmaker in this threesome of ours, not the sole enemy, and that means having all of us at the same conference where he can play us off each other.”

“What’s he mean to use the Hierarch for, anyway?” Robber asked.

“I’m not sure yet, but it doesn’t matter right now,” I said. “What does is the fact that the moment I try to push for a peace conference he’ll back me to the hilt regardless of all other considerations. See, no victor in Iserre is only important for him insofar as it’ll affect the conference that follows the fight here. Balance of power and all that. But if I make it clear that the only way he gets that conference is walking my line, you know what follows.”

“He walks, like it or not,” the goblin finished. “He’s our borrowed knife.”

“So he is,” I grinned. “Now Tariq, Tariq’s what Black would be if someone ripped out the part of his mind that itches to fix things and shoved a Choir in there instead. If a situation goes south on Tariq, he won’t double down or throw a fit: he’ll measure the risks, and if there’s no worth to the strife he’ll cut his losses and prepare for the next round.”

“Hate to tell you, Boss, but the situation hasn’t gone south on him yet,” Robber reminded me.

“It doesn’t need to, that’s the beauty of it,” I told him.

I spun on myself, lightly tapping the Pilgrim’s parchment with my staff.

“See, the only thing in there I can’t allow is the draw,” I said. “He wants to preserve the Grand Alliance armies? So do I. He wants Procer to be able to turn north? So do I. To get what I want out of this, I don’t actually need to screw him out of most of what he wants.”

“As I’ve been given to understand,” the Special Tribune mused, “he also wants to slug you in the story real bad, so to speak. And he’s really a bastard kin of the Carrion Lord, he’ll have schemes afoot and blood that’s lizard-cold.”

“Ah, and so we get to the tricky part,” I conceded. “If I walked up to the Grey Pilgrim right now and offered him everything he wants save for the draw, he’d refuse. But that’s not because he’s a fanatic, Robber, although he is. He’s not your average screaming, barn-burning zealot: he’s the exemplar of the long view. The Pilgrim is what the Heavens use to make sure the forest fire doesn’t become like, well, the last few years essentially.”

“He’ll come after you quiet and sudden, Boss,” Robber said. “And you’re good at the second, but the first famously ain’t your wheelhouse.”

“You’re missing the point,” I said. “He’s the broad view hero, Robber. They don’t have another one of those, it’s the entire reason he’s so influential in the first place. Fighting him at all is a mistake. The key to handling Tariq is twisting his arm in that same broad view: making it clear to him that if he actually takes a swing at me, the costs will make even a success so utterly ruinous it’ll defeat the entire purpose. And the moment he knows that...”

“He takes the wins he can,” the goblin said. “And cuts his losses on the rest, drawing back for the next round.”

I drew back myself, coincidentally, emptying the ashes of my pipe onto the snow and gazing at the loose constellation of sentences.

“You know, Robber, there’s a story back home that in the old days there was an Alban king who went mad,” I said. “Thought he was made of feathers, so he ordered all the palace windows nailed shut and all the doors closed. Wouldn’t even take off his cloak, since he was convinced without it the slightest breeze would disperse him into a million tufts.”

“So he ‘fell down some stairs’ and an ambitious daughter succeeded him?” Robber snickered.

“He was an Alban, even if mad,” I chided. “No, they suffered his whims intent on waiting him out. Until one day a window broke in a storm, and he dropped his cloak in fright but did not dissolve. The old king, the morning after, summoned the court and announced he realized now he had been mad and was cured of his madness.”

“That’s distastefully uplifting,” Robber opined.

“Story’s not over,” I said. “You see, the king had realized he was not made of feathers. He simply had a coat of them, for he was in fact a bird.”

The goblin grinned.

“So what happened to him?” he asked.

“Oh, they settled him down,” I said. “But a few weeks later he climbed the highest tower in the palace and leapt down to take flight.”

“Did he?” Robber asked.

“We have a saying about it,” I smiled. “A king can fly-”

I shrugged.

“-but not for long.”

Amused, the Special Tribune bared needle-like fangs in approval.

“See, the thing is,” I murmured. “I always thought that he must have deep down known he was mad. Because if he hadn’t known, if he’d really believe that with all his heart...”

I chuckled.

“Now and then, Creation has been known to grant the mad a pair of wings,” I said.

“So what’s your Callowan folk wisdom leading to, Boss?” Robber asked.

“Let’s find out, my dear minion,” I said, “if we are mad enough to fly.”

Chapter 31: Fall or Flight

“In boldness find salvation, for stillness is the herald of death.”
– Princess Beatriz of Salamans, most famous for turning her trial for high treason by the Highest Assembly into election to the office of First Princess

“I need you to write three letters for me,” I told Hakram.

Three letters: one was a knife, one was a bet and one was a lie. Wielding those like the sword and board that had once been my favoured armaments, I would win or lose before the week was out. Comfortably settled in my perch atop the barrow of a people long scattered to the winds, I poured myself a cup of wine and kept a steady eye on Hakram. The writing desk I’d had hoisted up here had not been built with orcs in mind, that much was evident. My second was broader than the wooden frame, and could not lean his armoured elbows against it without the whole thing starting to groan like a dying calf. It was a rather amusing sight, the tall orc bent over the desk with a long quill in one hand and looking for all the world like he could be lifting the whole thing with the other. The oil lamp atop the frame was an island of tangible flickering warmth in the surrounding glow of the magelights that had been brought here and hung from the raised stones. The sight of the Mavian prayer wreathed in that pale halo was an eerie one, a reminder that once upon a time fae had tread these grounds and made bargains with those who had raised this strange work. It felt fitting, in a way, for like my old friends of Summer and Winter tonight I intended treachery.

“Which first?” Adjutant asked.

I sipped at my cup, let the warmth of the wine pool in my belly.

“To the Tyrant,” I said. “As follows: Kairos, you misshapen treacherous weasel, you should have been drowned at birth. I expect whatever spawned you tried but already the Gods had grown gills on your neck, foul monster. Sadly this must have allowed you to crawl out of the refuse pile they tossed you in to come trouble me today.”

The sound of the quill dipping into the inkpot followed by the scratch of it against parchment filled the silence that followed. Hakram’s admittedly superb calligraphy should lend a touch of elegance to the whole tirade, I decided.

“Therefore,” I continued, “in the spirit of our close and cordial alliance, I offer my support for the demand that will be made by the League of Free Cities in exchange for its acquiescence to a peace conference. That support will have the full weight of my force and influence behind it.”

I drummed my fingers against the arm of my chair as I waited for Hakram’s hand to catch up to my words, only resuming when his scrawl stilled.

“Naturally, this is contingent on your own support in extricating the Army of Callow and its allies from their current difficulties,” I said. “Should you refuse, I will be forced to withdraw from Procer entirely and begin preparing the east for the wars that will come in the wake of the Principate’s destruction.”

Adjutant finished writing before raising a hairless brow at me.

“You think he’ll believe that?” the orc asked.

“He will,” I simply said.

After glancing at the certainty on my face Hakram did not argue the point any further, simply conceding with a small dip of the head.

“And add one last thing,” I mused. “Lower down, like we’re trying to be discreet. ‘I have heard that recently you lost a great many horses, which is a tragic happenstance. As I would not have such a dear and noble friend without a mount, I offer you this purebred Liessen charger to ride into battle instead. May he serve you well.'”

Adjutant looked at me oddly.

“We don’t have any purebreds,” he told me. “They’re too costly to field. The Order uses mostly halfbloods and Vale breeds.”

“I’m aware,” I said. “I need you to find the shoddiest, sickliest goat we have and paint it white. Not well, though, just kind of half-heartedly. Try to make it a female one if you can. Send it along with my letter, when the time comes.”

The orc cleared his throat a little too quickly for me to buy him looking at me this disapprovingly.

“This is how you deal with Kairos, Hakram,” I told him nonetheless. “He’s not like Malicia or the Dead King, he doesn’t give a damn about respect or rules or making deals that’ll last longer than a moon’s turn. I offered him steel and honey and an elaborate insult – it should do the trick.”

“We’re not made of goats, Catherine,” Adjutant reproached.

“Fine,” I sighed, disgruntled. “If you can’t find a suitable one just find a stray dog and glue horns on. Diplomacy isn’t cheap, Hakram, you should know this by now.”

“As you say, my queen,” the orc serenely replied.

I gestured obscenely at him before watching him blow the last lines of my letter dry, fake my signature without missing a beat and finally roll the parchment when it was all done. It went into a small leather sheath, ad a red wax candle was lit from the lantern’s flame before he dripped it atop the scroll. The royal seal was pressed until it made its mark, my sword and crown on a balance, and it was put away. His eyes returned to me and I put down the cup I’d finally managed to empty.

“To the Pilgrim,” I said.

“Full honorifics?” Hakram asked.

I mulled over that a moment.

“No,” I finally said. “Grey Pilgrim will do, it’s in that function I’ll be addressing him.”

The tall orc nodded, and began writing anew.

“I, Catherine Foundling, first anointed Queen of Callow of my name,” I said, “formally offer the unconditional surrender of all forces under my command to the Grey Pilgrim, Tariq of Levant, also known as the Peregrine. Let there be no further bloodshed between your armies and mine, and through that surrender peace be obtained for us all.”

It was with a low whistle that Adjutant finished writing the last sentence, with a practiced hand adding signature and seal when I shook my head to make it clear there would be no other addition.

“The third?” he asked, afterwards.

“Addressed to the full war council of the Army of Callow, including summons for Vivienne Dartwick,” I said.

Hakram went still, for a moment, and when he moved it was to eye me warily.

“In your formal capacity as queen?” he asked.

“That’s the one,” I casually agreed. “Put up the formalities, make this an official decree with my seal, and take one of the larger sheaths. I want to write to them about Theodosius’ Dilemma, the whole story.”

Adjutant cleared his throat.

“Those of us who went through the officer track at the War College have already heard it,” he said. “There was a tactics class on the subject.”

“Some of them won’t know it,” I said. “So we’ll be thorough, yes?”

“Yes,” he gravelled in agreement.

For the longest time there was only my voice cast over the scratch of quill against parchment, as I told the story mostly the same as I had read it. There was, however, to be an addition afterward. Hakram’s hand stilled, and when he looked to me for instructions I have him one last sentence.

“I grant to Vivienne Dartwick the title of Lady Dartwick, with all assorted honours and privileges;” I said, “in addition I name Lady Dartwick the heiress-designate to the crown of Callow.”

I hadn’t gone as far as naming her a princess of the royal house as that would mean, legally speaking, that she was either my adopted sister or daughter. Both thoughts were rather unsettling for all sorts of reasons. But by first granting her noble title, even if that title was landless, I could make her my successor without breaking Callowan law. Didn’t much like the thought of expanding the aristocracy, even for Vivienne, but the only two ways to make her heiress-designate without making a bloody mess of feudal law had been that or bringing her into the royal house. The two ways of doing that were adoption and marriage, neither of which I believed to be palatable to us, so Lady Dartwick it was.

“It’s a dangerous game, Cat,” Hakram warned me.

“It’s the only kind we ever play, Adjutant,” I said. “And the letters are only to be sent when I say, so don’t worry.”

“That would be a first,” the orc drily replied, but his hand moved nonetheless.

Three sheaths of leather were hidden away after he finished, bearing my seal, letters awaiting within. A knife, a bet, a lie. Instead of crawling into bed afterwards I spent half the night gazing at the stones where Robber had hung parchment for me. All the while silently feeding Night to the staff in my lap that was not a staff but a sword, a sword that was not a sword but a prayer.

When I finally fell into slumber I slept only fitfully, dreaming of laughing crows.

—

Years ago I would have been in the thick of it. Tripping over every discovery, blood going warm and cold with the twists and turns of Fate as I struggled to bend it to my will. I was older now, though, and though perhaps not all that much wiser I was at least more patient. I’d learned the value of not tipping your hand too early when playing these sorts of games. And so it was sitting in my stolen chair, pulling at a mug of steaming tea, that the news found me. It was Vivienne who carried them up the barrow, steps quick and alarmed.

“A breach had opened to the southeast,” she told me. “An army is going through, its banners from Levant and Procer.”

I inhaled the fragrance of the tea and did not reply, letting her pace back and forth. So it was finally starting.

“Who was the first out?” I asked out loud.

“Our outriders weren’t close enough to-” she began.

I raised a hand.

“I wasn’t asking you,” I gently said.

Larat stepped out of the circle of stones with the languid grace of a hunting cat. The huntsman who’d once been the Prince of Nightfall walked against what I instinctively felt to be the cast of this circle, the way its power had once been leaning. It was like watching a man stroke a cat the wrong way, only I could almost feel it in my bones. Truly, my treacherous lieutenant had taken to petty vexations the way fish took to water. His long cape streamed behind him lazily, dark as night and sewn with jewels. The furs and leather he wore were fastened at his waist by a sash of scarlet cloth, from which hung that sheathless sword he favoured.

“A hero, most tenebrous of queens,” Larat smiled. “Named and finder of paths, strutting for the rest of the cacophony to follow.”

“His actual Name, Larat,” I said, unimpressed.

“A sorcerer of roguish inclinations, my liege,” the fae replied, raising hands to appease me. “Fleeing, then finding and now all aflutter from the sight of us.”

“The Rogue Sorcerer,” I grunted. “Yeah, that sounds about right. They’ll need a mage for this, and last I heard the Witch was up north.”

“That’s all you have to say?” Vivienne said. “Catherine, the situations is getting grim. It’s an army of nearly sixty thousand that crossed, and already Malanza’s own host is sending riders to make contact.”

I sipped at my tea.

“How long before the pursuers come out, do you think?” I asked Larat.

“Within the hour there will be a break,” the huntsman grinned, a slice of pale malice between red lips. “And the parade of fools will merrily stumble out.”

“Cat?” Vivienne slowly said.

Her eyes were moving back and forth between us, like she couldn’t quite decide who to look at.

“Kairos is crazy enough to take a shortcut through a crumbling half-realm likely run by Masego having a breakdown just to get here earlier,” I said. “On the other hand, are the crusaders? Would they take that risk just to go quicker? No, they wouldn’t. But Kairos wants them here as well, and he dictates the military strategies of the League. Which means...”

“He cornered them,” Vivienne said, eyes alight with sudden understanding. “To give them the choice of a battle where they’d likely be annihilated or taking a chance on a path through Arcadia.”

He’d been able to do this not because he was a peerless military genius, I knew, or because he had some oracle at his side. It was simply that the Tyrant of Helike had most likely been trading information with near every other army out in Iserre, and so alone of all the commanding generals he’d had the bird’s eye view of what was happening in the region. Given that, and the cadre of skilled warlocks that the Stygian Magisterium was made up of, it was far from impossible to both corner the other Grand Alliance army and ensure there was a breach nearby when he did. Desperation would do the rest.

“And the crusaders got a guide for the journey, perhaps the only wizard that could truly help them in all of Iserre,” I said. “That is Above’s due, the cast of providence. But that wizard also carries something I want, because Below always gets its due. It all comes to a head here, Vivienne.”

My friend rested her hand on the back of her neck, pressing back a few curls of hair that’d not been brought into her crown-like braid. I’d caught the twitch in her fingers with muted amusement, recognizing it as Vivienne wanting to pass a hand through her hair before remembering it’d been styled.

“What are you actually up to, Cat?” she finally asked. “Juniper’s been on edge.”

“Because I’ve left her to decide how an engagement should be fought, if it happens,” I said.

“Because you haven’t been part of the planning,” Vivienne frankly said. “Until now, you’ve been at the table for every campaign. That you’d take a step back after chewing us out has us a little perplexed.”

Larat’s lone eye was on us, the huntsman nonchalantly leaning against a stone as he listened to our conversation. I debated dismissing him, but I’d been the one to send for him in the first place and I still had a conversation due with the unofficial captain of the Wild Hunt.

“If I didn’t believe the two of you capable of discharging your responsibilities, I would have demoted you,” I replied. “It’s that simple.”

Blue-grey eyes narrowed as I gave answer to only the least important part of what she’d asked. I sighed and raised a calming hand.

“You can’t be in the know for it,” I said. “It wouldn’t work if you were.”

“We don’t have a great history with complicated plans,” Vivienne reminded me.

“It’s not complicated,” I said.

She looked skeptical, which only served to irritate me.

“It isn’t ,” I sharply said. “It’s not a series of events building on each other, it doesn’t fail if there’s a part that doesn’t happen. It’s a set of counterweights that only move if there’s a push.”

“I don’t mean to question you,” she delicately said.

Larat snorted, too loudly for him not have meant for the both of us to hear it.

“That’s exactly what you’re doing,” I flatly said. “And in principle I don’t mind, but in this instance your having incomplete information is part of the design. Which makes it all the more pointless when you press for answers that I can’t give you without making the plan irrelevant.”

“That is mildly polite way,” Vivienne said after a moment, “to tell me to shut up and move along, isn’t it?”

“I understand you’re worried,” I said. “But I’m telling you this has been accounted for.”

A mirthless smiled quirked her lips.

“So either I trust you or I don’t,” she said.

Part of me wanted to sharply point out that Hakram was almost as much in the dark and he’d not needed this kind of coddling, but I held my tongue. I did not mean Adjutant for the same kind of purposes that I meant for Vivienne, and so it was unfair to both to try to expect the same behaviours of them. I could not put the dark-haired woman in front of me in positions of command and authority repeatedly and expect her not to act like someone in them. She, and Callow itself, couldn’t remain under my shield forever. One day I would have to abdicate, and when that day came I would not brook chaos and disorder in my wake. That meant there had to be a worthy brow for the crown to be settled on, and that brow would not belong to someone who feared to ask questions when it was inconvenient. So I held my tongue, and let my irritation bleed out in the silence that followed.

“The Everdark changed you, didn’t?” Vivienne finally said.

My brow rose, but she did not elaborate.

“I’ll talk to Juniper, make sure she understands there’s nothing to worry about,” she continued. “Good hunting, Black Queen.”

“You’ll know what to do, when the time comes,” I said. “I trust in that.”

She sketched a bow before retiring, and it had my fingers clenching. How was it, I wondered, that losing her Name had made her harder to read? Larat’s lone eye had been watching us eagerly that entire time, drinking in the complexities of the relationship hungrily. It was the kind of thing Winter fae had delighted in, and my huntsman might no longer claim any allegiance to that dead court but roots were not so easily discarded. That vicious coldness would always be at the heart of him.

“Larat,” I said. “Approach.”

“My queen,” the fae replied, bowing after a flicker of a smirk.

The raven-haired huntsman stepped forward, light-footed and sure, and smoothly knelt before me. I drummed my fingers against the staff in my hand, idly wondering whether I’d gotten to the point where I should kill him. Did he suspect my thoughts? I couldn’t be sure, but it was with interest he looked at my ebony staff.

“Curious?” I asked.

“No threat to me, that softest of deaths,” Larat said.

I leaned forward and smiled.

“Are you sure?”

The urge to deny me flickered across the fae’s pale face, but a moment pass and that denial never left his lips.

“You make sport of me, my queen,” he said.

“Clever little fox, you are,” I said. “But not as clever as you think. We made a bargain, and it’s your way out, but we are bound by more than that.”

“To my oaths I will remain true,” Larat said.

“Of course you will,” I said. “You don’t really have a choice, do you? It took me a while to understand, but the details put it all into place.”

“We gave our word willingly and without qualms, my queen,” the one-eyed fae reproached me. “Why do you now remonstrate?”

“ Remonstrate ,” I laughed. “How offended you are, now that I know I own you body and soul. Winter – my Winter – died and suddenly your gates are a spinning wheel of destinations. Come now, did you think I wouldn’t learn of it? I am more than you liege, Larat, this entire time I’ve been your patron. The source of your power. You took a chance when you left Arcadia reforged, made yourself into a Wild Hunt that was not matched to a Spring and Autumn. So to stay here in Creation, you needed a little more than just calling yourself that. You needed an anchor.”

“Have we not served you faithfully, O Queen of Night?” Larat said.

“It must have been terrifying,” I mused, “to realize one day that your oaths bound you to more than the Winter in my veins. That there was an ocean of darkness, now, and that within it swam creatures in every way your superior.”

“ Superior ?” Larat hissed, and the anger was bare and terrible. “These-”

I smiled, inviting him to continue, but the former Prince of Nightfall curbed his tongue. Too late to avoid confirming what I’d suspected yet not known for certain. Ah, pride. Of all the weakness of the Fair Folk it had always been my favourite.

“Seven crowns and one, laid at your feet,” I said. “That is what I promised you, and that is what you will receive. Rise, Larat.”

I rose, and let a sliver of Night pulse through my veins. The Wild Hunt was summoned, and my own mount with it.

“Don’t worry, old friend,” I told the fae with a warm smile. “I’ll see to it that you get everything that you deserve.”

I wondered if it was a trick of the light, or if I was truly glimpsing fear in that sole eye. No matter. When night fell I would ride with the Hunt, and the three of us – Pilgrim, Tyrant, myself – would find out whose cunning would cut deepest.

Interlude: West, Ever Pursuing

“Note: investigation in why sharing a problem is said to halve it remain inconclusive. Perhaps more varied trials are needed, as the tiger always ends up killing both subjects no matter the order they’re put in the cage.”
– Extract from the journal of Dread Emperor Malignant II

Lord Akil Tanja of the Grim Binder’s Blood crouched over the thinning snow and passed a hand through it, the twinge in his knees a reminder that this was not his first war but it might just be his last. He was not so old as to crumble into dust at the first touch of wind, but life away from the comfortable confines of Malaga had taken a toll on him. There were practices for a binder of his talent that might allow health to seep back into his flesh but the Lord of Malaga had always disdained their likes. He would not play chasing-games with his age by binding and devouring creatures, not even those that would survive such a perverted act. The rueful reflection on his age was forced to the side by the calm voice of his sworn enemy and ally.

“And?” Lady Aquiline asked.

“The earth beneath is still frosted,” Akil said. “These are war-grounds. Let there be blood.”

“Let there be blood,” the Lady of Tartessos agreed with a crisp nod.

Neither of them considered giving the Proceran captains marching with their host a voice in this decision. Had Prince Alvaro of Salamans survived the battle with the Stygian army there might have been need to do so out of courtesy but the man had died to the Magisterium’s dark sorceries – after taking a wound he’d melted from the inside over the night, Akil had heard – and the remaining commanders were neither highborn nor powerful enough to force the issue. They would follow the Dominion in battle, like it or not.

“They say the One-Eye will be there,” Lady Aquiline Osena of the Slayer’s Blood said. “That would be a worthy head to claim, do you not agree?”

The Silent Slayer’s quarrelsome brood, Akil thought, had always shown a distasteful obsession for the killing of famed foes. The one-eyed greenskin who had been named Marshal of Praes many years ago was perhaps the most famous alive of his kind, but if Akil understood correctly the orc must also be an old beast by now. Hardly a challenge for a sharp young killer like the Lady Aquiline. That she had spoken of an aged orc but not of the Hellhound or the Deadhand was telling, in his eyes, for while those two’s fame was fresher the ending of it would have been worthier dead. Fairer. The Lord of Malaga spat to the side before rising from his crouch.

“Shake the bushes before shooting at the sparrow, Osena,” he replied. “Marshals do not fight from the front and they have raised a fortress from nothing, these easterners.”

The lair of the Black Queen’s armies had been an impressive thing to behold, when Akil had first taken stock of it. Beneath a tall barrow crowned by raised stones a maze of death had been raised from wood, steel and earth. A deep ditch led into a palisade – a base of beaten earth, topped by spears – where legionaries kept watch night and day. Behind that first line flat grounds spread into flat killing grounds, ending in another palisade that prevented easy access to terraces filled with siege engines and crossbowmen. Deeper behind that walled camps filled with tents and protected by teeth-like bastions of earth and wood jutting outwards mad up the last line of defence that would be manned by mortals. Lord Marave’s messengers had spoken of strange lights above the barrow, after nightfall, and so Akil did not need to be told where it was that the Black Queen had made her den. These would be hard defences to crack, he knew, and Lady Aquiline’s loose talk of claiming heads displeased him. Marshals of Praes were not easy meat, nor were the villain queen’s own champions.

“Now is not the time to lose your stomach, Tanja,” the Lady of Tartessos chided. “You heard Careful Yannu’s stratagem same as me, and did not speak against the soundness of it.”

That it had been the scheme of Lord Yannu Marave had only made Akil hesitate all the more. Aquiline Osena had not shared a border with the Champion’s Blood for most her life, unlike Akil himself, and so she could not understand why the way they called the man not Reckless or Brave but Careful Yannu should be troubling. The Lord of Malaga had fought two honour wars against Lord Yannu’s predecessor and found him a hard fighter but no great trouble. He’d sent a war-party into Alavan territory under Careful Yannu only once, though, in the moon that followed the man’s ascension to lordship.

His own cousin and boyhood playmate Jaira had led it, for she was skilled with sword and bindings both and clever in the ways of war. Yet unlike his predecessor, Yannu had not fought the raiders as they passed through the flatlands taking riches and honour. No, he’d waited until they were returning north laden with loot and prisoners. Then he’d caught them while they were fat and slow under cover of night, butchering them wholesale. Without warning, without honour duels, without anything other than death weighed and measured. Jaira had been the only survivor of the night, and Lord Yannu had dragged her to the border before opening her throat in sight of the warbands Akil had sent to reclaim his cousin. He’d then left without even hearing out the calls to duel by the warriors of Malaga.

The point made had been harsh, but so was the man: Careful Yannu was willing to let his holdings bleed if it allowed him to position himself for a killing stroke. And once crossed, he would not stay his hand in retaliation no matter who had first given insult. The Marave were steel-cast madmen who answered to only Gods and Pilgrim, and barely even those. The notion of one blessed with both their line’s talent for killing and a good mind for strategy was worth respect and wariness both. Madness and cold method were dark mothers to dark days. Lord Akil Tanja had not fought a second honour war against Alava since that pointed lesson and slept easier for it.

And now he was being told to place the fate of his captains, of his soldiers, in the hands of the Lord of Alava. A man known to sacrifice for the killing stroke, and do so without hesitation. He was tempted to refuse, to force a conference where another plan would be laid out before battle was given, but Lady Aquiline was watching him with those cold eyes. Waiting, patiently, for a misstep that would allow her to wrest command of the host from him. Razin’s mistakes had been paid for, but the taint of failure still hung over the Tanjas. If the Lady of Tartessos went to the unsworn captains, claiming he had lost his nerve, Akil could not be certain of the outcome.

“I have already said,” Lord Akil replied, “that there will be blood, Lady Aquiline. We will follow the stratagem of Careful Yannu and make war on the Enemy.”

And still, he could not help but glance at the pale and empty vista behind his host. That long expanse of snowy plains, which had until morning been broken by the eldritch sight of a passage leading into Arcadia. It was gone, now, though the remembrance of the harrowing journey through that storm-wracked hellscape would haunt them all for years to come. The League of Free Cities had not followed them through the breach, after hounding them through it, yet Akil could not help but wonder if they had not taken another path after. If there might yet be more to this battle that the armies of the Black Queen and those of the Grand Alliance. Lady Aquiline had sent for the horn-bearer granted to them by the Holy Seljun while he looked, and though she looked hungry for the honour she did not overstep.

The young boy passed him the strange carved horn inherited from days long before the Dominion, an old artefact said to have made from the tip of a guisanes ‘ horn. The legendary gargantuan bulls whose stride had shaken the world and flattened hills into plains were perhaps more myth than history, but it was said a shadow of their thundering might remained in wonders crafted from their remains. Whatever the truth of it, when Lord Akil Tanja of the Binder’s Blood sounded the horn his magic shivered inside him as the deep call echoes across the plains. In the distance, after a long moment, the sister-horn in the hands of the other Dominion host offered a shuddering call in reply.

Banners rose and without further ceremony the battle began.

—

Marshal Juniper of the Red Shields watched her enemies advance in silence. The sight of so many soldiers on the move would have been impressive for someone who had not fought in the Arcadian Campaign or slogged through the brutality of Second Liesse, but after these Juniper had found it took much to awe her. Yet for all that the armies before her lacked the ostentatious wings and sorceries of the Courts or the relentless horror of the Diabolist’s wights and devils they were no less dangerous for it. Flesh and steel did not splash so colourful across the pages of histories as the means of monsters and villains but they worked. And the Grand Alliance had brought much of both to bear on this field and this day.

“They don’t seem to have organized beyond attacking together,” Grem One-Eye said.

The sound of Kharsum spoken crisp and clear was like a breath of fresh air straight from the steppes. Juniper let that taste of home settled in her bones before growling in agreement. The armies of the Grand Alliance had not joined before moving against her fortifications, to her relative surprise. It might have taken them a few days to restructure after merging ranks, but they would have been stronger for it and there was not much she could do to better her own position with the means at her disposal. Her warlord had hinted that the League might be on its way to join the melee as well, Juniper noted. If her foes believed that arrival imminent, it might explain this hasty assault. This was speculation, however, and ultimately of no import to her. It was the facts that mattered. An army of eighty thousand was approaching from the northwest, under the command of Lord Yannu Marave and Princess Rozala Malanza. An army of sixty thousand was approaching from the southeast, under the command of Lord Akil Tanja. The first two commanders were known to her, and their armies as well. Of the latter commander, however, almost nothing was known save for his name.

“The northern force is the weaker one,” Juniper said. “Much of the foot from Vaccei is light and Malanza fields mostly levies. If a rout is to happen at all, it will be from there.”

The orc at her side grunted his agreement. They watched the enemy form up, and with cold eyes the Marshal of Callow sought weaknesses. The northern army advanced cautiously, which did not surprise her – she’d traded blows with them before. The Vaccei skirmishers advanced in a deep but loose screen ahead of the Proceran foot Princess Rozala had brought: a hodgepodge mixture of levies, fantassins and principality troops. Dartwick’s spies had brought back word that as much as six tenths of the Principate infantry should be levies, which was promising, but thoughts of an easy rout were put to rest by the two wings of infantry flanking the Procerans. The Lord of Alava, Yannu Marave, had brought to the crusade some of the finest heavy infantry Juniper had ever seen. Only four thousand in whole, at least, but it was marching ahead of lighter armsmen from Alava and Vaccei in much greater numbers. A sharp sword to open a breach, Juniper thought, after the skirmishers found a weakness.

“Malanza has the horse again, looks like,” Marshal Grem said.

The banner told it true, though she found the other orc made as wary as she felt by the way the near ten thousand horse – mixed Proceran and Levantine horse, though vastly more so Proceran than the other – the Princess of Aequitan led was peeling off from the rest of the army and moving towards the south. The mass of cavalry was moving slowly, but in good order.

“She didn’t make the plan for this,” Juniper said. “She’s much more aggressive a commander than that, she’d keep the horse close on the flanks to try a charge if opportunity arose.”

“Lord Yannu then,” Grem said. “Shame. He’s a hard one to bait.”

“Too much to hope for he spends the Vaccei foot against the palisades, I suppose,” Juniper muttered.

The older man twitched in amusement. The daring raids and ambushes from the Vaccei warriors and their vicious warleaders of the Bandit’s Blood had not endeared the Levantines to either orc. Juniper found her eyes drifting south, to the other army, and found her back prickling. Most of what she saw there she had expected. The enemy was moving with skirmishers ahead, though the screen was much smaller than the northern army’s, with two massed forces of infantry behind it. One Proceran and one Levantine. The Principate foot here should be mostly professional soldiers, Juniper thought, which explained why unlike in the northern army’s formation they’d not been placed between steadier soldiers to hold up their spine. The detail that had her hackles raising was the detachment of cavalry splitting off from the army, a solid seven thousand moving north. From a bird’s eye view, the Hellhound considered, within the hour there would be a point where her camp was as the centre of a neat square.

“They think they have a way to breach the palisades,” the Marshal of Callow said. “Interesting.”

The Marshal of Praes squinted his one eye, gazing at the moving cavalries. He arrived, she suspected, at the same conclusion she had: they were being positioned to hit forces defending the palisades from sudden angles after a path suddenly being opened for them.

“The reserves are readied,” Grem One-Eye said, baring his fangs. “Let them try.”

A moment later the skirmish lines of the northern army entered the first killing yard the Marshals had prepared for them and the slaughter began.

—

Moro of the Brigand’s Blood had lost thirty warriors in the time it took to drink a skin of water. He was not stranger to death dealt and received, but the sheer suddenness of it took him by surprise. The traps had been cleverly hidden, he thought, covered with a thin layer of snow and earth. And they must have been dug at night, for even with watcher his mother’s had not known of them. Not all warriors who’d fallen in the pits had died to the sharp stake at the bottom, but all had taken wounds – and their screams had brought hesitation where before there had been only courage. The warriors of his lands, Moro would admit to himself, were not used to being on this side of the traps and were not taking it well. The heir to Vaccei had called a halt, and sent for what he thought might just be the solution to the troubles. It wasn’t long before the priests answered his call, for the Lanterns were never far from the vanguard of strife. A full battle-party of thirteen had come in answer, to his pleasure, and the eldest among them sought him out.

“Honoured Son,” the woman greeted him. “You seek illumination?”

“I seek to walk within the Light,” Moro agreed. “For me and mine to follow its paths.”

The woman’s face-paint, golden and pale, hid her expression well. He could not tell whether she approved or disapproved of his request, which while not presumptuous was still a request – for some of the Lanterns just that was enough to give offence. They were a touchy lot. Regardless, after a heartbeat she suddenly whipped around and a lance of Light struck out. Twenty feet forward, it broke through a thin layer of snow and earth to reveal the trap under.

“Follow, then, Moro of the Brigand’s Blood,” the Lantern said.

Her companions spread out, and at the fore of Moro’s own warriors came men and women bearing long perches. They would reveal these traps, he smiled, for the Enemy had been foolish enough to lay them far out of crossbow range.

—

General Hune Egelsdottir waited until it was clear no more of the warrior-priests would reinforce the frontlines. She glanced at her senior mage, mildly amused by how eager he seemed to be to act.

“Fire,” she ordered. “On special assets only.”

Behind her, rituals bloomed as the mage cadres finally received the authorization to act. One, two, three, four, five: she long spears of flame formed and were sent out like massive arrows. Without scrying to adjust the trajectory it was unpleasantly imprecise business to use these sorts of rituals, as shown by the rituals. All were impacts – the ogre made a note to commend the officers leading the rituals – but only three of the priests were turned to cinders.

No matter, it was only the first volley.

“Again,” the general of the Second Army ordered, the faintest trace of a smile on her face.

—

Lord Yannu Marave sat atop his horse and thoughtfully chewed the mouthful of bread he’d ripped from the loaf, eyeing the falling javelins of flame.

Princess Rozala had told him the Army of Callow had used such ritual sorceries before, though allegedly it had not since the Hierophant had left its ranks for destination. It would have been sloppy, however, to assume that meant without the Bestowed they could not. So he hadn’t, instead preparing the same manner of defences the Proceran armies had at the Battle of the Camps. The priests from the House of Light, that tame Proceran breed, were shuffled to the front and ordered to form protective panes of Light. The Vaccei warriors were not yellow-bellied, and so did not need much haranguing before their advance resumed.

—

Grem One-Eye leaned forward and Juniper grinned, broad and fierce. They had, she believed, noticed the same detail. Though the ritual sorcery had been checked by priest intervention once more, there’d been a departure from the way that trick had been used at the Camps. Instead of massive layered shields covering the entire frontline, this time the Grand Alliance had resorted to a mere half dozen large panes protecting where the rituals had been striking. Dartwick’s spies, the Hellhound was forced to admit, had actually provided useful military intelligence.

“They’re spread thin on priests,” the Marshal of Praes laughed. “Too many wars, Hasenbach, too many wars.”

The Marshal of Callow did not reply, for her gaze had turned south where battle was finally being joined. General Abigail, the Hellhound had decided, was in need of thorough tempering. Her command at the southern front should serve, for a start.

—

The pit traps had not been part of the warnings Lord Marave had passed, but Aquiline Osega was not moved by the loss of a few dozen skirmishers. In the hunting of a foe strong and cunning, such deaths were inevitable. The Lady of Tartessos had been riding behind the last of the slingers and javelinmen, a handful of captains at her side, when she ordered the assault to be halted. Inevitable losses or not, she would not countenance simply throwing soldiers at the traps until a safe path emerged. Her favoured captain, dearest Elvera – who had such a dark reputation, with some, but to Aquiline remained the smiling woman who’d taught her how to reply to scraped knees with broken teeth – quietly reminded her that with Lord Yannu’s force advancing there could be no long halt without leaving his army exposed to the full attention of the enemy. Feeling out the traps with perches would take too long, Lady Aquiline had decided. No, it was time for bold steps. The rider she sent to that hard-eyed old monster Akil Tanja returned with the answer she’d wanted: the binders of Malaga would take the lead.

Reining in her horse, it was an effort for the Lady of Tartessos not to show the thrum of excitement she felt at the notion of seeing the finest sorcerers of Levant in the fullness of their war-making. When had been the last time Creation witnesses such a thing, she wondered? Not since the Sepulcher War, at least, and perhaps not even then. A mere hundred men and women in thick coats of leather and iron grey cloth marched to the front, skulls and bones and claws bound by fine brass chains. The spread out in a line, and one of them raised a hand. There was a grinding scream, like a hundred blades being scraped against each other, and a translucent drop formed in the air a few feet in front of the binder. The ground beneath it, snow and earth and snow, was sucked upwards by some invisible force that broke it all down to grains. The other binders followed in the first one’s wake, drops forming one after another and the scream becoming utterly deafening. And still Aquiline did not look away for a moment, for in front of her spirits were being given shape.

The first one shaped a wyvern, the winged creature with the long stinger-tipped tail letting out a scream all too-real before it began to advance and strike at the ground to reveal traps. The snow and earth it was made from shifted like true flesh and sinew, for the spirit the binder had called forth still remembered the body it has once worn. It was a company of beasts that was brought forth, manticores and griffins and culebron . Even a few creatures she did not recognize: her , the Lady of Tartessos, whose true domain was the savage Brocelian!

The beasts of snow and earth sprang forward, implacable and relentless.

—

General – despite her best efforts – Abigail of Summerholm idly wondered if you got a worse penalty for deserting when you were a general. She’d assumed it couldn’t get worse than hanging, and that could only happen the once, but considered the amount of Wastelanders enrolled in the Army of Callow she just couldn’t be sure. Well, there was nowhere to run to anyway so it was all academic in the end.

“Burn those up, boys,” she called out.

Krolem relayed the order more proper-like, wonderful aide that he was. Behind the generals rituals bloomed, but Abigail just had this sinking feeling it wasn’t going to be enough.

It wasn’t pessimism, she told herself, if you were part of the Army of Callow.

Interlude: Graves We Have Yet To Fill

“The middle years of the Uncivil Wars can roughly be described as a series of conflicts fought to determine peace terms. The tragedy of those years, in retrospective, can be said that while the overwhelming majority of them desired peace no two Calernian powers could agree on what exactly the terms of it should be – and so to war they all went, convinced every step of the way that the others were at fault for it.”
– Extract from the personal memoirs of Lady Aisha Bishara

The third volley did not work better than those before it.

The spears of flame rose into the sky like quarrels loosed, before the guiding sorceries of the legion mages who’d performed the ritual pulled them down. The arc was sudden but graceful, the crackling fire in red and gold tearing straight through the five largest apparitions the Dominion had sent forward. Earth and snow dispersed at the explosion of heat and light, the grounds beneath what had been the shape of strange creatures scorched through a vaporized layer of a frost. There were about a hundred of the damned things, General Abigail thought, but it wouldn’t have been too bad if a ritual volley actually put the abominations downs. Instead she winced as she watched the flames of her mages disperse in turn, leaving behind only small droplets of eldritch power hovering in the air. A heartbeat later the ground beneath the droplets began breaking up and the creatures that’d been broken began reforming.

“It’s not getting any slower, ma’am,” Krolem said.

“I can see that, thank you,” she acidly replied.

Fuck. At this rate the entire web of traps the army’s sappers had worn themselves to the bone digging during nights and hiding before dawn came would be trampled into irrelevance by some strange godsdamned Levantine magic. She squinted at the creatures again, noting how the massive manticore in the lead acted like it was actually hungry. That had to be blasphemous, right? It was all looking a little too much like necromancy, and you weren’t supposed to do that if you were on the side of a crusade these people were on.

“I’m not arguing the House Insurgent is right, mind you,” she muttered. “But this needs looking at, is all I’m saying . ”

“Ma’am?” Krolem asked, sounding confused.

Had he been talking? Abigail had no idea, but now was not the time to look like she was losing it in front of the troops. The Black Queen’s barn-burning oration at Sarcella had riled them up like young dockworkers who’d just gotten their first pay. If they thought she was the weak link in this army, Abigail thought with a sudden urge to grimace, they were going to tear her apart. Possibly literally given the amount of orcs there were in the ranks. Look calm, Abigail , she told herself. It’s all under control.

“Quite right, Krolem,” she slowly said. “Spot on. On that note, I need you to request a deployment order from Marshal Juniper.”

She sent him off after a quick elaboration, fairly sure the Hellhound would refuse her request and so in the after-battle reports she’d have an excuse for her failure to perform. That it would put her straight at odds with the Marshal of Callow would be even better, she giddily thought. Marshal Juniper might even demote her, or drum her out of the army.

A girl could dream, couldn’t she?

—

Forward, Akil Tanja had ordered.

The Lord of Malaga was no fool, to send his binders forward unprotected, but neither would he spare them contribution. After Lady Aquiline had requested the deployment of his finest war-sorcerers to clear the approach of traps, he’d immediately sent for his son. Razin was in need of deeds to redeem himself, if he was to remain the heir to Malaga, and opportunity would arise soon enough. For that purpose Akil had ordered the boy to gather captains enough for two thousand warriors, all bearing shields, and appointed him to command before sending him to reinforce the binders. They would need that protection soon enough, the Lord of Malaga knew, for the bound spirits that had been sent forth were reaching the end of their leash. No other power of Levant had made as deep study of the arts of binding like the Grim Binder’s line, and though Malaga was hardly the only city to send binders to war for the other families such a thing was rare and always in small numbers. That had obscured some of the limitations of their craft, which would become clear very soon if Akil was not careful with his orders.

The binding of a soul or spirit was done with one’s own blood mixed with the ancient flower-dye, tattooed on one’s skin with needles of barrow-bone. The patterns of these bindings had been refined by Akil’s ancestors, to require less breadth and shackle the bound more tightly – and cease sickening the blood of those who used them recklessly. The sharing of those secrets with those who entered the service of the Tanja was why so many practitioners came to Malaga, with the finest among them allowed to read the tomes of the Obscure Library in exchange for oaths to answer calls to war by the ruling lord or lady of the city. Yet since the founding of the Dominion, no binder saved those Bestowed had ever succeeded at sending one of their bound entities further than three hundred feet from themselves. Akil was talented in the art, as befitting of his blood, and so the silver-winged hawk he’d bound as a boy he could send as far as two hundred and twelve feet without the shackle turning on him. Yet it was a rare thing for any binder to reach more than two hundred feet, and even most of those allowed to peruse the Obscure Library remained in the antechamber of that hurdle.

This mattered today, if only because soon the spirits of his binders would have to halt their advance. Ordering them to advance would remedy the issue and allow them to clear the entire field all the way to the enemy fortifications without further casualties, but it would also leave them vulnerable. Razin and the shield-bearing warriors he’d assembled would see to that vulnerability, he’d decided. It would leave his son close to the front, too, and so able to lead the assault against the same force that had humbled him at Sarcella.

At the head of his host the Malaga binders were surrounded by rings of steel, and as he had ordered forward they all went.

—

“Why?”

Marshal Juniper of the Red Shields was frowning. General Abigail’s tribune – a good Hoaring Hoof Clan boy by the look of his jaw, she’d noted with approval – cleared his throat in that way young officers always did when they had no good answer but had to answer anyway. Silver-quick, the wistful thought that Nauk truly had ruined that army down to the bone came and went.

“So she didn’t say,” the Hellhound cut in before he could reply.

Tribune Krolem sheepishly flared his teeth, and did not deny it.

“Only a thousand?” Juniper asked again, to confirm.

“Yes ma’am,” Tribune Krolem agreed.

The Marshal of Callow’s instinct was to send him back with an order for General Abigail to make a proper proposal including for what she wanted the soldiers, but she held her tongue. Catherine had raised the other woman up for a reason, and it would not be anything as simple as birth. If her warlord had simply wanted to put Callowan hands on the reins of her armies, Juniper suspected Brandon Talbot would have been the chosen candidate. Instead, though, she’d chosen an enlisted legionary who’d shot up the ranks. Not someone with ties to nobles or fame in the kingdom. Catherine had seen something in the younger woman, and though Juniper of the Red Shields did not she’d not long ago had reminder of the value of trust.

“She has them, then,” Marshal Juniper said. “See Tribune Bishara for the proper writ and be on your way.”

The boy moved quick, like she’d stung him, but Juniper had already put him out of her mind. Marshal Grem’s curious eye on her she ignored as well, her own attention now solely turned to the southern front. What was the first commander Catherine had handpicked since Juniper herself scheming, exactly?

—

Shit , Abigail thought, look at the writ Krolem had just handed her with a sinking feeling in her stomach. The Hellhound had actually agreed? Why would she – no, don’t panic , she told herself. This could still be salvaged if she watcher her step. On one hand, she’d actually be expected to produce results now. On the other hand, as long as she tried to pull off a vaguely coherent plan and failed she’d probably still manage to avoid the noose. Gods, Abigail knew she should have made her request more unreasonable, if she’d gone overboard the Marshal would have refused. But no, she’d just to had hedge her bets and make it look like her theoretical plan had been reasonable just to improve the chances the Black Queen wouldn’t feed her liver to buzzards after this was all over with. Her mother was right, she’d never learned to quit while she was ahead. Sure, Ma had lost an eye and a finger brawling with Annie Sutherland over who made the better beer, but just because she was a lunatic didn’t mean she was wrong. Fucking Sutherlands, anyway, strutting around like Annie having been in the Royal Guard meant she knew anything about brewing.

“She did know a thing or two about knives, though,” she conceded in a mutter.

“It is a great honour, ma’am,” Krolem, who was still there, rumbled approvingly.

“Yes,” Abigail echoed with a stiff smile. “Honour. Just the word I was thinking of.”

The Callowan general hid her rising horror with the practiced skill of someone who’d been forced to be around the Queen of Callow and pretend not to be terrified the whole time. All right, so the damned Levant magic beasties didn’t die to fire and that probably meant they wouldn’t give a damn about siege engines either. Munitions, maybe? Couldn’t really do that without using sending sappers in, which seemed ill-advised, but it was only the First Army that had the ‘spitters’, those strange devices Sapper-General Pickler used to lob munitions over long distances. Goblinfire was a restricted substance as of last year, though, so Abigail would need authorization from the Hellhound to send for any and that’d be suspicious as all Hells since Krolem had just been there. Options, she needed options.

“Where’s our Senior Sapper?” she asked Krolem.

“She’s checking in on our engines,” the tribune gravelled. “Though she asked me to pass her continued protest as to the amount of munitions we passed on to Special Tribune Robber.”

“Why?” Abigail said, feeling another spike of fear.

“His cohort isn’t part of the Third Army, it’s detached,” the orc said.

“Why did we pass munitions to Special Tribune Robber?” she clarified.

“You don’t need to test me, ma’am,” Krolem reproached. “Your signature was on the forms, the general staff is aware you planned some contingencies – just not what they are.”

Oh Gods , Abigail thought, realizing that the Black Queen’s favourite goblin assassin had forged her authorization for something involving munitions and she had absolutely no idea what. O Gods , Abigail silently repeated, turning to prayer in her hour of need, I know I’m in the service of a villain but isn’t this still a little much?

—

Razin Tanja crouched down to the side of the pit.

He’d return to the front of the formation soon enough, but for now he... Well, he wasn’t sure exactly what it was he was doing. There was something about this situation that felt like a stone in his boot. The Third Army had defended Sarcella with dogged viciousness, making the Dominion pay in blood for every street. They had done so even after being taken by surprise in the middle of the night after the assassination of their commanders, which while Razin still thought little of Callowan heresy had nonetheless impressed him in regard to that people’s discipline. Now that same army was facing them from a tall palisade after having days and night to prepare, and all they had prepare was a few pits with stakes at the bottom? No, he could not believe that. Certainly the fighting would harden the closer they came to the rampart, but this was too little.

It was not a complicated trap to build, Razin decided as he studied it. A stake at the bottom, the slopes inclined so anyone falling would be led towards it. Some sort of thin weave had been used to keep the hole covered, but it’d been crumpled by the claws of a bound wyvern and the weave had fallen below. That part was the most cleverly made, the heir to Malaga mused, for the weave had made the grounds look perfectly untouched until it was touched. Now the rings of shield-bearers escorting the binders were going around the revealed traps, advance slow but steady. The two sworn swords behind him were shuffling impatiently, but Razin refused to be hurried. He rose just enough to move, circling around the rim of the hole, and wrestled down the embarrassment he was starting to feel. It was a simple pit trap, and he might be making a fool of himself by insisting on taking so long a look at one.

The man’s fingers clenched. No. He would not bend so easily as that. Pride had already led him down a dead end once. If a little humiliation let him make certain there was no deeper trap then he’d suffer the bite and do so unflinchingly. The sun shining from behind him – the afternoon at his back warmed him even in his armour – gave him half a breath’s worth of warning, and that meant he survived the first blow. Coming out in a spray snow and earth from a hidden nook within the put, a howling goblin tossed something at Razin’s sworn swords while leaping up with a knife bared. The heir to Malaga caught the blade with his shield even as he tumbled backwards, the wildly cackling creature continuing to stab away as it landed on him. There was a loud crack behind them and something wet landed on Razin’s cheek. The yellow-eyed monster bared needle-like teeth and slid the knife between two armour plates, but the Levantine socked it in the mouth with an armoured fist. Wincing at the shallow wound, Razing Tanja rose even as the goblin spat out blood and laughed, reaching for something in its leather satchel.

It never got to finish the movement, for the heir to Malaga rammed the hunting knife he’d adroitly palmed through its left eye.

Back on his feet a heartbeat later, Razin grimaced when he saw the bloody mess the thrown munition had made of his two escorts from the shoulders up. Blood and bone and brain fluid stained the snow around the two corpses. Gaze turning to the rest of his command, he heard the crack of further munitions and grimly admitted to himself the Third Army of Callow had once more succeeded as springing an ambush on him.

—

Special Tribune Robber assessed the situation with a proud stare.

Sure, they’d been forced to come out early when one of his minions had revealed their presence before the enemy was fully past their force. On the other hand, even springing this too soon they’d gotten a full two dozen of those Dominion sorcerers. Dipping low, Robber leaned forward a bit to better slit the throat of the blinded warrior he’d caught with his brightstick. Popping out of the holes and hitting fast with munitions, his cohort had done a lot damage in the span of thirty heartbeats. But not, he mused, enough to secure a comfortable retreat. The strange spirits the Dominion mages had sent ahead to continue ripping up traps were hurrying back, and between those and the warriors recovering from the surprise two hundred goblins all spread out had no real chance of fighting their way out. He whistled, loud and clear, three times. Scatter , it meant. Smothering a grin, the Special Tribune began the run back to the tender embrace of the palisade held by the Third Army. A great day’s work, if any of them survived.

Still a good day’s work, if they didn’t.

—

“They won’t make it,” Krolem said.

They most definitely would not, Abigail silently agreed. Already more than twenty goblins had been slain by warriors running them down, but those had been the few whose hiding place had been within the Levantine formation. The rest has scattered to the wings with that insolent goblin aplomb, not that it would save them. They were quick, Special Tribune Robber’s sappers. Far quicker than humans on foot, especially on trickier terrain like snow. But they were not quicker than the enemy’s creatures, not even close, and with more than seventy of those left there was no doubt about the outcome of the chase. The monsters were drawing back already, closing the gap with inevitable haste. Maybe ten would make it out alive, General Abigail guessed. If that.

“Brave man, Special Tribune Robber,” her aide added, tone thick with respect.

Fuck , Abigail thought, with a fresh well of horror. The Black Queen’s favourite goblin assassin was about to get himself killed, and the only parchment trail there would be of it bore her signature. Faked, sure, but who’d ever believe that? She was going to get blamed for this wasn’t she? She was going to get blamed for this and some godsdamned buzzards were going to eat her liver. She needed to get at least that one goblin out alive. Striking with rituals again? No, wouldn’t work. They’d gotten quite good at avoiding those, and there were too many beasts anyway. Slowing down less than ten at a time wouldn’t get her anywhere. What did she have? Siege engines, which wouldn’t do anything more than the rituals, legionaries and – oh, oh . Abigail might just survive this yet.

“Still got that writ, Krolem?” she nonchalantly asked. “Send them out now.”

“Ah,” the orc breathed out, looking at her with shining eyes. “I understand now, ma’am. You’ve played the Dominion like a fiddle.”

“That is absolutely what I did,” Abigail baldly lied.

—

Akil Tanja’s fingers had begun clenching with the first explosion and had not loosened since. He had not anticipated that the goblins in the Black Queen’s service would burrow like worms within their own traps, and neither had his son. Malaga had lost nearly thirty binders for that mistake, men and women whose powers had each taken decades and a fortune to forge. Dead, faster than it took to drink a cup of wine. Now the wretched creatures were fleeing, but they would be run down. If any of them was taken alive, he would have the damned creatures hung from his battle-standard after personally crushing their malevolent skulls. At least Razin had drawn the enemy’s blood and asserted control swiftly, which should prevent his reputation from being tarred too much by this unpleasant turn.

“Movement by the enemy, my lord,” one of his captains announced.

The Lord of Malaga followed the man’s gaze and found the Army of Callow was opening the southern gate of the camp. Reinforcements to extricate the sappers? They would arrive too late. Akil rather hoped the enemy commander was fool enough to send legionaries forward. The spirits bound by his war-sorcerers could kill soldiers as easily as they could clear traps, and any legionary killed down on the plains was one that would not be fighting from atop the palisade. The wooden grate opened, and Akil Tanja’s lips thinned at what he saw. Horsemen, the first of the column carrying a tall banner: a bronze bell with a jagged crack going through, set on black. Lord Akil had read of these: the Order of Broken Bells, the sole remaining knightly order of Callow.

“Call them back,” the Lord of Malaga said. “ Now . And hurry the skirmishers forward.”

Two of his captains peeled off like he’d swung at them with hot iron, both bearing orders. From where he sat astride his horse, Akil was forced to watch it all unfold without being able to intervene. The Callowan knights thundered out of the fortified camp without missing a stride, forming up as they advanced. There must have been at least a thousand, Akil saw with rising dread. The skirmishers were on foot, the binders and their escort too far ahead. They would not arrive soon enough. The only hope of the binders – of his son – was that the bound spirits would slow the enemy knights long enough for a retreat. Razin must have understood the point as keenly, for the bound creatures abandoned pursuit of the goblins within moments and turned sharply to the side. Facing them, the knights of the Broken Bells slowly lowered their lances and quickened from canter to full gallop. The sight of it, Akil thought, was moving. Callowan knights in their prayer-carved armours, charging a host of beasts. The Lord of Malaga tensed for the impact, eyes fixed on the lances.

He flinched in disbelief, when the knights rode through the spirits like they were mist.

Sorcery sliding off their armour like water off a duck’s back, the Knights of the Broken Bells broke through and kept charging.

—

There was something deeply satisfying, Abigail mused, about watching Callowan knights trample enemy foot. It scratched an itch she hadn’t known she had. The enemy mages tried other sorceries, after their nasty little trick failed, but flames and curses were nothing new to the cavalry of Kingdom of Callow. Compared to the Praesi, she thought, these Dominion folk were fumbling amateurs. The commander of the Order’s detachment had split his horse into two wedges of five hundred and rammed them straight at the enemy shield walls, shattering men and shields alike. The knights had then withdrawn in good order, after the initial momentum of the charge was spent, and formed up as they turned the enemy flank and simply charged again. The Dominion had sent two thousand foot to escort its sorcerers, but by the time General Abigail sounded the retreat for her cavalry more than half that number was lying dead on the ground. It might have been more, if enemy reinforcements hadn’t hurried. Where sorcery would fail javelins might just succeed, so reluctantly she’d pulled back the Order. Abigail was leaning against the top of the palisade with her elbows and watching the cavalry retreat in good order when she heard her tribune return.

“Special Tribune and his cohort have been settled, ma’am,” Krolem said.

She nodded absent-mindedly. The goblin she’d needed to keep alive as alive, beyond that they were hardly her concern.

“It’s about to get ugly, Tribune,” she said, gazing at the massing enemy.

The skirmishers remained spread out, but the foot behind them was now locked in thick formations. They were getting ready for a run at the palisade.

“Ma’am?” the orc said.

“Get the engines aimed,” Abigail of Summerholm grimly said. “They have a path to us mostly cleared, now they’re going to take it.”

—

Lord Yannu Marave patted his horse’s mane, and fondly held out his palm to feed her the last piece of bread from the loaf when she turned. He’d been told of the debacle to the south by the outriders he’d left to keep an eye on the situation, and it had darkened his mood. A few hundred warriors were a drop in the sea of what would be lost before this was all done and over with, but binders were a rare breed. They might have been of great use in the war to the north, had the Lord of Malaga’s blunder not effectively pissed away half of them. Yet there was no point in losing his temper, he knew. This was merely the first movement of an intricate dance, and his side had never been meant to win it. In the distance he watched the skirmishes of Vaccei and their Lantern guides make it to the edge of the slaughter yard, and only then raised a hand. One of the lesser horns was sounded, and the warriors came to halt. As well they should – any further and they would be in what he suspected to be the outer range of the enemy’s engines. In truth he should probably should have let them continue advancing until that suspicion was confirmed, but in the end he would rather overestimate enemy range than throw away lives on such a petty confirmation.

He had what he needed of this northern front and if any of Akil Tanja’s captains had eyes they would have what he needed of that front as well.

“I would have your judgement, Peregrine,” he calmly requested.

The Grey Pilgrim did not answer immediately. Instead the holy man gazed at the distant ring of raised stones, that incongruous crown atop a tall barrow.

“She will not step in even if the palisade is assaulted,” the Pilgrim finally said. “Perhaps not even if the camp is breached, as you had arranged.”

And so, Yannu knew, this meant the Peregrine would not intervene either. It had been made clear to the Lord of Alava what the consequences of the Grey Pilgrim acting first might be, and he would not have such disaster brought upon them all.

“Then the offensive I had planned is doomed to failure,” Yannu of the Champion’s Blood said, unruffled. “And we must resort to the second string to our bow.”

A shame. He’d enjoyed the cleverness of the scheme, the use of the Saint and the Sorcerer to take the cavalries through crumbling Arcadia and strike at the heart of the enemy camp while assault on the palisades tied down most of their troops. Yet one must now grow too fond of plans, lest they be followed even when they no longer suited. As was the case here, to his understanding. Neither the Grand Alliance nor the Black Queen wanted to risk the heavy casualties of a committed duel to death, which meant every manoeuvre on this field was in fact was a jostling for position in some greater game. One where the victor could twist the arm of the defeated without having sown too great a field of corpses first. It was Yannu Marave’s duty to help the Peregrine triumph in this struggle, nothing less or more.

“Sound the retreat for all hands,” the Lord of Alava ordered his horn-bearer.

The Peregrine looked at him strangely, as if the holy man was watching someone both a stranger and an old friend. It might truly be so, Yannu thought, if the old stories about his distant kin Lady Sintra were more than merely that.

“You will be challenged over this,” the Pilgrim said.

“I have been challenged before,” Yannu Marave said, neither boastful nor wary.

He might have to kill Akil Tanja, the Lord of Alava mused, or at least the man’s champion. The Lord of Malaga had taken enough losses today anger might lead him to such a blunder. Perhaps even a second champion would need killing, when he told the others that they would resume the attack during the night now that the safe paths to the palisade had been cleared. Ah well, these things happened. Nothing for it but swinging the blade.

Victory was born of blood, and only ever earned through it: this Yannu Marave knew true as any other child of Levant.

Interlude: Trust Is The Wager

“War itself has no worth, as it is a temporary state. War ends, and therefore its fundamental purpose is to shape what comes after it. It then follows that a war fought without the ambition of a planned peace is inherently a mistake.”
– Extract from the treatise “On Rule”, author unknown (widely believed to be Prince Bastien of Arans)

Yannu Marave had been taught, as a boy, to make a spectacle of honour duels. There were some who might have called such a teaching arrogant , a presumption of superiority in all matters of steel, but those people were not of the Valiant Champion’s Blood. The Lord of Alava had followed those ways as a young man, let the crowds roar with thrill and fear as he made sport of warriors. He had done this while master of the field from the first stroke to the last, and taken much too long to understand the sickness and cruelty of the act. Yet a duel fought for honour, for decision, could not be a dull affair. The resolution must be striking, the victory evident, lest other warriors wonder if their own blade would have served the cause better. And so Yannu Marave had left behind the ways of the champion, of a duellist, and instead learned the arts of killing. As his forbears had mad study of the slaying of armies and beast, he had learned to take apart men of all stripes. Warriors in plate or leather, hunters and Lanterns and even the strange-stepping slayers of the Brocelian’s outskirts. All these, and binders as well. He had learned to kill these, kill them quick and clean and without a fuss.

And so he’d opened the throat of Akil Tanja within eighteen heartbeats of their duel beginning, flicking his hooked blade free of blood and sheathing it in the same smooth gesture.

Even as the corpse of the Lord of Malaga finished tumbling backwards and life left the man’s eyes, Yannu of the Champion’s Blood had calmly asked of his fellow lords and ladies of Levant if any other wished to contest the decision to attack again after nightfall. From the corner of his eye he’d seen Aquiline Osega’s hand dip towards her own blade, her Slayer’s Blood boiling at the thought of the match that could be had there, but the young woman mastered herself. The Lady of Tartessos was a dangerous woman, for her age, and would only become more so with the passing of years. She bore watching. The Lord of Malaga’s son and heir, Razin Tanja of the Grim Binder’s Blood, was not so patient. His sword ripped free of the scabbard, cutting through the silence that’d followed Yannu’s question.

“By smoke and dust, I vow enmity between us,” the boy rasped out, his voice cadenced with old words. “’til steel has sung and shield splintered, let there be no truce nor breaking of bread by our hands. On the blood of my father, I swear the last abjuration: by my hand the earth will spit you out from your grave, denied rest in barrow and shade.”

Razin Tanja’s face was still streaked with the iron and red of his line’s facepaint, and though tall and well-formed the boy was in no state to fight the duel to the death he’s just forced. He’d taken a wound today, Yannu noted, which had torn muscle near his shoulder. The healing done had been later and lackluster. Still, a murmur of solemn respect shivered through the assembled captains and Blood of the war council. Though Razin Tanja was said to have blundered and overstepped at Sarcella, that he would be so unflinching in swearing revenge over the same man who’d flogged him was garnering respect. From his own captains most of all, Yannu thought, and that was for the best. Razin Tanja could not formally become Lord of Malaga until his foremost kin gathered to acclaim him before Gods and men: respect and prestige would be his only true claims to command of the war captains of Malaga.

“So be it,” Yannu replied, dipping his head. “When your wound is fully healed, I will meet you on duel-grounds.”

“Why wait?” Lady Aquiline mildly said, eyeing the two of them smilingly. “Send for Proceran priests and have it done and over with. Let us settle all our affairs before battle is given.”

The Lord of Alava met her gaze with clear displeasure. So clever she’d cut herself, that one, and too eager to see her last remaining rival to command of the other Dominion force dead on the ground.

“Shut your fucking mouth, girl,” Lady Itima of Vaccei said, tone conversational.

Aquiline Osena’s stare turned poisonous, when she faced the woman who’d had her two younger brothers killed. Itima was an old hand, and of the Bandit’s Blood, so she was unimpressed by the sight and spat to the side in disdain.

“Yannu, confirm that little bore from Tartessos in command of her army and let’s get this over with,” the Lady of Vaccei said, glancing at him. “The longer she talks the more I feel the urge to make another cup out of an Osena skull.”

“Remain civil, Itima,” he chided her.

“There is no civility north of Tartessos,” Lady Aquiline angrily said. “Only poison and-”

“Fewer of your siblings than there used to be, eh?” the older woman grinned.

“ Enough ,” Razin Tanja hissed.

The two women turned to him with barely veiled surprise.

“My father lies dead on the ground, his corpse not even cold,” the boy said. “And you bicker over old feuds? I will wait until the end of this strife to exact my due from the Maraves yet you cannot even curb your viper tongues for an hour? Shame on both your lines.”

“Not yet lord,” Lady Itima drawled, “and already making enemies. Truly Akil’s boy, though with half the sense and none of the-”

“I name Aquiline Osena war leader of the southern host,” Yannu calmly interrupted. “Do any contest this?”

“Agreed,” Razin Tanja rasped.

“Agreed,” Lady Aquiline coolly said.

There was a pause.

“Agreed,” Itima Ifriqui conceded, reluctance purely for show.

They put it to the captains, afterwards, but with the Blood having spoken the matter was good as settled. Even the Malagans kept to the word of their young heir without qualms when enemies were there to see, though Yannu knew better to think Razin would not have to make private bargains with the most powerful to keep them following his orders.

“Then we are bound with common purpose of war,” the Lord of Alava said. “Let none stray until our enemy is broken.”

Already the sun was beginning to set, he thought. It would be a long night before their armies would be ready to strike at the Black Queen’s host, for soldiers were in need of healing and rest. Yet the time would come, and for the first time in many years an army of the Dominion of Levant would march out with the Peregrine among its number.

—

“The savages are cutting each other up,” Prince Arnaud of Cantal said with open disdain. “I believe one of their great lords was freshly butchered and even now is being set to flame.”

This small pavilion of hers, Princess Rozala thought, was near filled to the brim with royalty. She would have preferred to cut out near everyone here of the council being held, but with the situation what it was that would have been more trouble than it was worth.

“I have spoken with Lord Marave,” the Princess of Aequitan evenly said. “There was disagreement over strategy, and it was settled by an honour duel ending in death. Lord Akil Tanja was slain, and his heir Razin has taken lead of the captains of Malaga. He has been placed under command of Lady Osena, who is well-learned in the ways of war.”

“They’re Levantines,” Princess Bertille of Lange drily said. “How learned can they possibly be at anything?”

The ripple of laughter that went through the tent at the quip was enough to begin scraping at the bones of Rozala’s patience, which boded ill for the rest of this council. She was disappointed to note that the slightest trace of a smile had quirked Louis’ lips. It should not be held against him, she ultimately decided. Prince Louis Rohanon was a clever and decent man, but he’d still been raised Alamans. His ancestors had not fought a hard war to take Levant, unlike hers, or an even more brutal one to keep it. Rozala glanced at Princess Bertille and found the older woman watching her, an assessing look on her face. She was pushing, the Arlesite princess thought, to see how far she could go without being called to order. The temptation was there to immediately put her in her place – it would be as simple as ordering the other princess to take a walk, dismissing her before all the others – but Rozala knew this was not the hour for it. Bertille of Lange was useful to her, and would remain so for a long time. Best to only bare the knife when there was something to hold over her head.

“We will of course defer to your judgement in this matter, Princess Bertille,” Princess Sophie of Lyonis calmly said. “As is only natural, given your distinguished military record and extensive knowledge of the Dominion.”

The Princess of Lange reddened and Rozala Malanza had to smother a smile. Both at the harshness of the reply – Bertille had no military achievements to her name, and was not known as a great scholar – and the fact that Princess Sophie’s continued open dislike for her fellow royalty kept pushing them ever further into Rozala’s camp. Cordelia Hasenbach had picked her watcher for skill at arms and loyalty, not diplomacy. A mistake of some scale, as it turned out, for protracted campaign had tired the patience of everyone and tempers were beginning to flare more and more frequently.

“The Dominion is worrying me, all jests aside,” Prince Rodrigo of Orense spoke up. “They seem most unstable, Princess Malanza. Lord Marave’s scheme to attack the enemy camp was a failure, yet we are now expected to heed his plans once more?”

Rozala inclined her head in acknowledgement of his words, not in the least troubled by the question. After all, they’d arranged before the council for him to ask it.

“He spent only Dominion soldiery, if you’ll recall,” the Princess of Aequitan said. “Not ours. And this is not merely his own design – the Grey Pilgrim is at his side, preparing to fight the enemy we cannot.”

Even an oblique mention of the Black Queen was enough to chase any trace of mirth out of the tent. There were some here who’d not been at the Battle of the Camps, who’d not seen the crowned warlord of Callow split the clouds and drown men like flies or make sport of entire bands of heroes. There were some here who’d whispered behind closed doors that Prince Amadis Milenan and his armies had simply been cocksure and caught by surprise, and in the wake of that sloppiness tried to weave wild tales to avoid the blame. No one whispered such things anymore, Rozala thought. Not since half the people in this room had seen that spit of a girl tear out of the sky in a ripple of darkness only to nonchalantly set herself in the way of an army thousands strong without ever baring a weapon. Without raising her voice, or doing anything but smoking her eerie bone pipe and giving calm warning. Princess Rozala still thought of that afternoon, sometimes, of the death she’s seen in the other woman’s smile. It still had her shivering. The Black Queen was mad, but hers was a madness that had broken every army in her path. The Princess of Aequitan would not test her again without great care and many preparations.

“It’s still a fool’s notion, this night attack,” Princess Leonor of Valencis opined. “Chosen don’t hold ground, Princess Rozala. They can’t be relied on. When we take a swing at that palisade, the enemy will have goblins and drow waiting for us.”

Arnaud pompously cleared his throat.

“We don’t know for certain if drow see in the night, Leonor,” the Prince of Cantal chided, tone condescending. “Let us not make unwarranted assumptions.”

“They live underground, Arnaud,” Prince Louis sighed. “We can assume they see in the dark without it being unwarranted.”

“They could have very fine hearing,” Princess Bertille drawled. “Or mayhaps like bats it is their cry that is their sight.”

“Indeed, Bertille, indeed,” Prince Arnaud enthusiastically agreed. “My point exact.”

Sometimes Rozala wondered what it was like to be Arnaud Brogloise, the kind of person whose triumphant vanity would allow to take anything but the most obvious of mockeries as affirmation. It wasn’t like the Princess of Lange had even bothered with much of a pretence.

“The Chosen will be sent to match the Damned, Princess Leonor,” Princess Rozala said, dragging the conversation back to the earlier path. “We will not be relying on them for the fighting. I assure you, we have accounted for the drow.”

“That’d be why our priests have been in talks with the Lanterns for the last sennight, I take it,” Princess Leonor replied, eyes narrowing. “You won’t be saying more?”

Rozala flicked a glance at Louis.

“Lady Dartwick, the Black Queen’s spymistress, has agents in our camps,” the Prince of Creusens said. “We’ve caught and hung ten of these ‘Jacks’ already. As a result, it was decided that secrecy is to be paramount. If the enemy catches wind of our stratagems beforehand, I need not detail how much of a disaster this could become.”

“But you are aware of the details, Prince Rohanon,” Princess Leonor pressed. “And consider the notion sound?”

“I do,” Louis replied without hesitation. “Risky, but soundly planned and perhaps our only chance at winning this without tossing away fifty thousand foot taking that palisade.”

“Gods be merciful, then,” the Princess of Valencis sighed, “and ward us from the reaching claws of Below.”

“We will begin our advance two hours before dawn,” Princess Rozala informed them. “Camp fires are to be kept alight to mislead the enemy, and there will be no horns sounded for assembly. You will be all be tasked with seeing to your own soldiers, while I’ve appointed Prince Louis to command over the levies furnished by Her Serene Highness.”

“Glorious command indeed, my prince of Creusens,” Princess Bertille smirked.

The Princess of Aequitan’s eyes narrowed.

“As you’ve shown such spirit tonight, my princess of Lange, I expect you will have no trouble leading the tip of the wedge,” Rozala calmly said.

The other woman’s smirk vanished.

“There will be use for our horse then?” she said.

“We’re sending everything we have,” Princess Rozala grimly replied. “So is the Dominion. We’ll win or lose on the knife’s edge that splits night from dawn.”

Dark tidings, that, but they were Proceran and so they still toasted to the madness before dispersing to their duties.

—

Juniper, fresh awoken and only half-dressed, did not bother to ask Aisha if she was serious. Her Staff Tribune would not jest about such a thing, or wake her without being entirely sure it was happening.

“Their military intelligence shouldn’t be this bad,” the Marshal of Callow said.

She wordlessly leaned back to allow Aisha to tie her aketon, letting the Taghreb’s deft fingers handle the delicate clasps she could not reach. The touch was not distracting, but not enough that Juniper could not concentrate through it.

“Catherine’s readings of the Grey Pilgrim have been inaccurate before,” Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara noted. “It might be that these... goddesses from the Everdark have obscured the truths of the drow from our opponents.”

“If we’re lucky that’ll be the case,” Juniper grunted.

With the aketon properly on and no need for full armour quite yet, distance between them resumed and the Marshal of Callow’s mind turned to safer avenues than the golden glow of her old friend’s cheeks in the light of the torches.

“If we’re not lucky,” the Hellhound continued, “and that is to be our working assumption, they have a hard counter to the drow.”

“We are not without cards of our own,” Aisha reminded her.

“It’s still playing to the enemy’s tempo,” Juniper said. “I don’t like giving them what they want, Aisha, and that would be what we’re doing.”

“Should I order the Fourth Army and the assigned Legions to hold the palisades instead?” she asked.

The Hellhound breathed out, considering the lay of it. Would keeping the drow in reserve until the enemy had engaged better the situation? There was no way to tell, honestly. It’d be more prudent to bait out whatever plan the Grand Alliance had prepared early so that a defence could be mounted with it out in the open. Her warlord had made it clear that the tribes of the ‘Firstborn’ were heavies in the league of a Court’s field army, after night fell, but that kind of strength tended to be unreliable in Juniper’s opinion. She put more trust in overlapping lanes of fire and steady shield walls than in powerful but disorganized hordes.

“Keep them in reserve near the front,” Juniper finally said. “We’ll let the drow take the first crack at the enemy. But Aisha?”

Her Staff Tribune smoothly turned, eyebrow cocked.

“Sound the full muster,” the Marshal of Callow said. “Everyone in gear. This is it . I can feel it in my bones.”

—

Moro Ifriqui of the Brigand’s Blood, heir to Vaccei, checked on the leather strap keeping his javelins from jostling around his back with every step. It needed tightening, and though it was awkward to paw at the strap while keeping pace with the other skirmishers he forced himself anyway. Better a small embarrassment now than a mistake that might cost him his life in the heat of battle. The Vaccei warriors around him slowed when they approached the edge of the enemy’s range, where the spears of flame had been thrown at them from a great distance during the day. Knowing his role in this, Moro took the lead and bared the serrated sword that was sheathed at his hip.

“Honour to Levant,” he screamed. “Honour to the Blood. Honour to Vaccei!”

Screams repeated his words back at him, and twice more he repeated the ritual to fray the edges of fear and replace them with ardour instead. Only then did he scream for the advance, and the warriors marched into the field. Above them the Proceran priests wove miracles, globes of Light that cast down a glow over the stretch of plain leading to the palisade. Moro kept the beat of his warriors’ march steady, knowing it was not yet time for the charge proper, and as he moved forward cast wary looks at the pit traps the day’s fighting had revealed. Grimly, he thought to himself that without those being unearthed and the Proceran miracles lighting the way his charge would be little less than hurrying to honourable death. When the same massive sorcerous spears of flame that had been used during the day lit up the enemy camp, the heir to Vaccei felt a thrill of excitement and fear both running through his veins. Fear, for if he were to be touched by one of these his death would be instantaneous. Excitement, for there were no more spears now than there had been during the day and that meant...

Spread among the Vaccei warriors, the Lanterns laughingly called out their battle-hymns and jagged arcs of Light sprung upwards – fifteen, seventeen of them scything through the darkness of the night. They impacted the enemy’s sorcerous flames with a sound like claps of thunder, and though the miracles broke so did the enemy’s magic. Moro laughed, the battle-joy lending his feet wings, and picked up the pace. Behind him his warriors followed suit, the dauntless vanguard of the Dominion, and it was singing couplets from the Anthem of Smoke that the heir to Vaccei passed into the killing yard: the suspected outer range of the enemy siege engines. And it was true, for a mere two heartbeats later projectiles near invisible in the gloom began scything through the lines of his men. First the long darts and round stones of the ballistas, skewering flesh and shattering bones before a scream could even rip free of the throat.

“Scatter,” Moro yelled.

Had they been the lumbering, heavily armoured armsmen of Alava his warriors would have broken and died. But they were the followers of the Brigand’s blood, light-footed and fleet, ghosts in the dark and killers in the wet earth: the formation vanished in a heartbeat, becoming a loose mob of warriors charging forward at backbreaking pace. Moro laughed and veered wildly to the left, barely avoiding the geyser of snow and earth that was the introduction of the first enemy trebuchet. A woman behind him screamed when the large stone kept rolling and caught her, though the sickening crunch that followed told of a merciful quick death in the heartbeat that followed. The paints on his face running with sweat, Moro of the Brigand’s Blood forced his aching limbs to quicken and with another shout urged his warriors onwards. Through the first hail, and the most vicious. The enemy scorpions fired their long javelins with deadly accuracy that only cursed goblins would be able to muster in the dark, snuffing out lives wherever the whim took them. But beyond that, the warrior saw, there was open field.

At too odd an angle for the engines to be able to kill, too close to the palisade. In the glow of the Light globes he could glimpse the dry moat before the enemy’s rampart, and with a proud shout he ripped one of the javelins clear of his back. It was time to have the enemy taste Vaccei’s steel. Yet above the palisade, he saw, it was not legionaries that awaited but instead the grey-skinned devils his mother had told him were truly drow from the Everdark. Their gear was shoddy, he saw with a sneer, and would be no proof for a good javelin. Even better. One more step he took, and then a hand was laid on his shoulder from the front.

“Chno sve noc,” a guttural voice said.

Before the words were even fully spoken, his arm was gone up to the shoulder along with the javelin he’d been holding. Turned to dust, already gone in the wind. Moro opened his mouth to scream as a cold silver-blue pair of eyes contemplated him. The drow, for Ashen Gods it must be a drow, smiled and he saw a flash of obsidian before – before there was a spray of grayish blood all over him, and the creature fell split in half.

“Look alive, boy,” the Saint of Swords idly said, flicking the blood off her blade. “We’re just-”

Moro did not see her move, but suddenly her sword was angled differently and she was flying back, while a ringing sound like another blade had hit her echoed. Not, he saw with dismay, not another blade. The grey palm of a drow’s hand was extended where the Saint had stood, and slowly the creature straightened its back. The abomination was ancient, Moro realized, its skin horridly creased and its thick black veins visibly ridged. It wore a strange tunic of obsidian rings, belted at the hip, and its hair was snow-white and long.

“You again,” the Saint of Swords snarled.

The drow glanced at Moro.

“Boring,” it said in broken tradertalk. “Boring south cattle, no better Procer cattle. Run now.”

In the distance the rest of the drow began a strange ululating prayer. Rumenarumenarumena, they went, some sort of heretical hymn offered up to the sky. As the ancient drow turned its attention to Saint of Swords, Moro took the advice he’d been given.

He ran.

—

Sitting on a stone, legs folded, the Grey Pilgrim watched the battle and waited. For now, all was unfolding as he had foreseen.

So why, Tariq wondered, were the Ophanim murmuring so worriedly in his ear?

Interlude: Death They Cannot Steal

“Ah, the classic imperial dilemma: which caused the other, the rebellion or the tiger pit?”
– Dread Emperor Callous

There were two kinds of horror to be found in war, Razin Tanja had learned.

The first he had met and fought in the streets of shadowed Sarcella, the dark dismay of loss being dealt by the hand of a surpassing foe. Even outnumbered and ambushed, thrust into the backfoot, the Army of Callow had snapped out with jaws of steel and turned what should have been a dazzling victory into a brutal and exhausting slog of death. The heir to Malaga had seen that same skill put to work tonight, when the foot of the Grand Alliance had tried the enemy’s fortifications. Volleys from myriad engines of war scything through warriors of Levant and Procer alike, long darts skewering even the most heavily armoured of soldiers. Worse than those had been the stones of the trebuchets, whose frightful nature lied not in the first impact but in the skill of the engineers using it: most the time, the angle let the massive stones bounce and keep rolling, crushing ten times the warriors even the best-aimed of collisions would have reached. No, this Razin had all watched from atop his horse with clenched fingers and clenched jaw but he would not dishonour the bravery of the dead by mourning the necessity of their deaths. They had known, these warriors, what it meant to charge a position held by the armies of the Black Queen. That no one of the first wave would ever make it to the palisade, and likely none of the second either.

They’d come forward anyway, though. Captains of Tartessos and Malaga first, and the pride of that last one had choked him for those armsmen had fought the Black Queen’s own favoured army before, they understood exactly what awaited yet they’d come forward without flinching, without hesitation. Both Lady Aquiline and he had swallowed unkind words on the subject of Proceran courage when they’d found the commanders of their Proceran allies gambling over which of theirs would take the lead, taking it as attempt to pass off the duty. It was good that he had kept his tongue from wagging, though, for he learned moments later he’d had the wrong of it. They had all volunteered, every last one. The officers, men and women from half a dozen principalities, had turned to the dice to settle the matter for none was willing to concede the honour of the vanguard to another. Arlesites , Lady Aquiline had murmured in an aside to him, praise and condemnation both. These were of the same breed of soldiery that’d once invaded Levant in a relentless tide of butchery. But the two of them, one of the Slayer’s Blood and the other of Binder’s Blood, could understand looking at these people why Levant had been taken at all. Why their forbears had been needed, to humble an empire that could boast soldiers like those. Razin was certain he’d caught one of them – a tanned woman of southern stock, not even thirty but already high officer with a face that was a ruin of scars – cheating at the dice game used to determine who would lead.

It was such a small detail, he thought, and yet as he watched the horror ahead he could not help but fixate on it. That woman had gone as far as using loaded dice to claim the honour, and now she might very well be dead. To the second kind of horror, the hateful one. The dreadful, animal fright that came from witnessing something so far beyond you it could not be fought. Couldn’t be bargained with, or even fled. All that was left was to kneel and pray, to hope for its own reasons it would deign to spare your life. Razin had known that terror once before, truth be told. It had watched him from a river’s bank, wreathed in shade and might, and judged him with cold eyes. There had been no doubt, in that gaze, that his life could be snuffed out with a thought. No fear that the hatred burning in his blood could ever be a peril worth regard. No, in that moment that was the wake of death, the air still filled with the screams of the drowning, the Black Queen had for her own unfathomable reasons decided to spare Razin Tanja’s life. The heir to Malaga had clung to that, while his father took the Blood’s Scourge to his back, for what earthly torment could be half as shameful as the knowledge the greatest villain of their age had not found him worth killing?

Yet it was of that woman whose name he’d never learned cheating at dice Razin thought of, when the drow unleashed their malevolent works, and not of the frightful Queen of Callow. For a heartbeat it had seemed like the assault on the palisade would be a siege as that kind of battle was known to them: harsh and costly, but not beyond victory. Then the devils of the Everdark had struck, and not from the palisade. The drow did not sally out like warbands or armies. Instead they rose from the shadows among the ranks of the Grand Alliance’s warriors, and without warning or mercy they began to slaughter. There could be no other word for it than that, Razin thought. There were not so many of the enemy, perhaps a mere hundred, but they were tearing through warriors like an axe through kindling. Darkness rose in shapes and armaments, rained from above and swept from below, a hundred different sorceries for a hundred different drow, but whatever the singular craft each was an exquisite art of war. Polished and without flaw, for even when dozens and even hundreds charged at the enemy all that changed was the number of corpses made. Within the first quarter of an hour, Razin Tanja thought, almost two thousand warriors must have died. Not, not died.

Been swatted out of existence, like bothersome insects.

That quarter of an hour was what it took for the Grand Alliance’s answer to be brought to the fore, and all Razin could think was that it was a quarter hour too late. The sight should have moved him, and he could feel the sharp breaths and fervent prayers of those awed by the sight, but even as a scattered line of priests opened shuttered lanterns the sight of that casual slaughter stayed with him. And with the worry of how easily they could return to such horror, should their answer fail. It didn’t, Razin saw with relief. No, instead across the entire strip of night where the golden Light kept within the lanterns was revealed the drow flinched. Their strange sorceries weakened, lessened in scope if far from broken, and the Dominion of Levant began its counterattack. Slayers, the tempestuous retinue of the Lady of Tartessos, strode forward. Fewer than five hundred, all in light leathers and bearing the sharp tools of their trade and their ghastly face-tattoos of green and bronze. The Silent Slayer’s own colours, and those of her Blood after her. Above perhaps all others, the slayers of Tartessos espoused the most ancient and honoured tradition of Levant: the killing of monsters.

Even as the deathly gifts of the Praesi engines kept raining down on the advancing warriors, the beast-killers spread out in bands and began plying their trade on the darkness-wielding drow. Razin’s fingers had begun to loosen, though they tightened again when one of the enemy’s trebuchet stones landed far beyond what should be possible. Then out of the spray of earth and snow came blood-chilling laughter, and massive figure wearing a carapace of darkness strode out. It batted the head off a soldier almost casually, and without missing a beat began tearing through the centre of the army’s lines. This would break them, Razin realized, mind racing as he saw what would follow. Lantern-bearing priests retreating to weaken the monstrous drow, only to leave a hole in the line at the front that the lesser monsters would take advantage of. After that the slaughter would resume, and...

“Captain Elvera,” Lady Aquiline calmly said, turning to her second. “You have command.”

“My lady,” the old woman said, “you cannot mean-”

Aquiline Osena removed a lantern from the saddlebag at her side, and hooked it on her belt without opening it. There would be Light within, Razin decided.

“I am of the Silent Slayer’s Blood,” Lady Aquiline replied. “I cannot mean otherwise , Elvera.”

Foolish, Razin thought, for she was not just a fleet-footed slayer but the commander of this entire host. Still, Aquiline’s line was not one known for wits. All the founders had granted different gifts to their Blood, Akil Tanja had once told his son. Valour for the Champion, cunning for the Brigand, skill for the Slayer, wisdom for the Pilgrim – and that grandest of bestowals for the Binder’s own, that privilege known as knowledge. Or so the heir to Malaga thought, until he caught the high esteem all of Aquiline Osena’s captains were not watching her with. They not only approved, Razin realized, but they had expected it. Let neither queen nor prince rule over our dominion , Farah Isbili had once said. The second of the Holy Seljun, and first true ruler of Levant, for her father had not lived to reign for long. For while crown devour honour, one’s blood is not so easily gainsaid. Razin had been raised to understand this as the truth of blood being the true nobility of Creation, what set apart the wheat from the chaff. In having a past to measure up to, a litany of deeds, the great families of Levant were made worthy to rule. They must prove this worth anew with every generation, true, but they always did for blood was not so easily gainsaid. Yet now Razin thought of a woman who’d cheated at dice to earn the privilege of being among the first to die and wondered.

Would you be proud of us, Honoured Ancestor? the heir to Malaga silently asked the night sky. Of the works of my father, of his father before him and his mother before that. Will you be proud of mine, you who stared down an empire with nothing but death and indignation tattooed on your back? He thought of the legends he’d been raised to, of the five heroes who’d snapped the arrogance of Procer over their knee. He thought of that day’s own council, of Yannu Marave’s blade opening Father’s throat and the vicious barbs traded by the others. Would any of them truly be proud, Razin wondered, of what the Dominion had become?

“Captain Fustan,” he said. “I give you command in my stead.”

The bearded man, most respected of his father’s captains, looked at him in surprise. So did Lady Aquiline.

“Your intent, Tanja?” she asked.

Razin inclined his head towards the dark-clad creature in the distance, scything through men like a sickle through wheat.

“It took five to topple an empire, Osena,” he simply replied. “Two ought to be enough for a single drow, no?”

No , he echoed in his own mind. They would not be proud, not a single one of them.

—

That creature, Laurence de Montfort mused, was going to take a lot of killing.

“Bring out your weapon,” the Saint of Swords said. “I’ll even let you, to even things out.”

A lie, that. She fully intended on sending the drow’s head rolling on the ground if it got even slightly distracted. She spoke the untruth without hesitation, for she’d never been encumbered with the delusions of fair play that plagued some of her peers. The moment you bared a blade on someone with the intent to kill, there was nothing else left to consider. Honour was just a way to pat yourself on the back, a pretty face put on the ugliest of all weaknesses: uncertainty. Her opponent face creased with amusement when it bared its teeth, putting in relief the painted stripes of ochre and gold radiating from its lips.

“Why would I need one?” it spoke in guttural Chantant. “Children are disciplined by hand.”

The Saint looked into the thing’s silver-blue eyes and recognized the glint within. It had fury waking up her blood. She’d last seen it on that woman’s face, when she’d glanced at Laurence’s spilling entrails and sighed without even bothering to say a word. Is that all , the glint whispered. Is this the sum of you? It was the gaze of something ancient and fearsome taking it the brief glow of a firefly before it died, only to dismiss it as of only passing interest. She was going to enjoy cutting this one very much, Laurence admitted to herself. Without another word, the Saint of Swords struck. Two steps forward, half-step to the side, her entire withered frame coiling to put full weight behind the blow at the end. But the drow, this Rumena, it moved just as swiftly as her.

Its hand slapped the side of her blade, and it spun low – Laurence, without missing a beat, leapt up. The open palm that would have slapped her knee passed through only void, and she twisted so she could angle her body in midair and strike once more. Instead of having its skull split in two, the creature dropped even lower and waited a beat for the tip of the sword to pass it. None of that , the Saint thought, and this was not the first time she was tasked with killing something with better reflexes than her. The slightest piece of her Name’s power had her kicking at air with enough strength for her swing to swing back just as Rumena began to rise, the drow immediately sinking into a puddle of shadow and vanishing from under her. It rose again half a dozen feet from Laurence, just as she landed lightly in her feet.

In the distance, its fellow abominations were singing its name. Behind her, the Saint’s crusaders were opening lanterns filled with golden Light. Neither of them paid any heed to the audience, for they mattered less than dust.

“Have your godlings taught you anything but how to flee?” Laurence mildly asked.

“Your pale idols are worse than wrong,” Rumena replied just as mildly. “They are prey .”

They’d gotten the measure of their opponent with the first pass, so there was no caution in how they began the second. The drow foot tapped the ground, once, and beneath the Saint the ground blew up. She was already in the air when it did, leaping forward, and over what felt like hours but took less than a heartbeat she sunk into her aspect. Listen , she thought, and the word reverberated through her. And she did, the same way she had when straddling the line between life and death all those years ago. Hearing the Ranger’s footsteps as she walked away, and only then understanding how deaf she had been all her life. Moving against the rhythm of Creation, when she should have been moving with it. The Saint of Swords pricked her ear, and heard the dissonant cacophony of the drow striking at her.

She moved with purpose. A flick of the wrist created a wound for her to push off of, angling her descent so Rumena’s extended hand would pass her flank, then another to take the arm off before the shoulder and even as it drew back – quick, strident tempo – she leaned forward so the next stroke would slice neatly through the neck. The head tumbled on the ground half a heartbeat before she landed, but she did not sheathe her sword. There had been no silence, no precipitous fall. The drow was not dead. A wild, discordant slide, like a fiddle being struck, and the Saint was almost too slow. A prick against her shoulder, like the touch of a needle, and through that fine vessel she felt a sea of death and decay. Millennia of red slaughter and careless rot made into a gnawing bite. Laurence’s blade cut through just enough skin for blood to gush out, and just in time. Even half an instant later and her entire body would have become a pile of blight and bile.

She took the drow’s eye on the backswing, for its impertinence in trying an ambush on her. Carved through the insolent blue stare with relish, and smiled as the roiling darkness in Rumena’s socket failed to heal her cut.

“Careless,” the drow smiled.

The song hacked out a tempo like crows cawing, and before Laurence could move the air in her lungs turned to acid.

—

Ten of them, armed and readied and bearing a golden lantern, struck at the beast.

Seven slayers, a binder and two of the Blood. Not even drakes and manticores could have lightly ignored such a war party, but the darkness-clad drow tall as an ogre moved like lightning and struck like thunder. Razin’s sword was in his hand, his breath steady, and as his binder baited their foe he waited for his moment. A screaming salamander made of starlight and snow screamed at the enemy, and within a heartbeat its large head had been dispersed by a massive fist. The darkness-clad arm went straight through and hit the ground, which was the signal. Lady Aquiline opened the shutter and the golden Light touched the enemy. It screamed in pain, and its carapace visibly thinned. The slayers moved, then, feet whispering against the snow. One, two, three – the harpoons tore through the weakened darkness, giving solid purchase to the long ropes tied to them. In woodlands like the Brocelian, Razin knew, these would be fastened to trees to trap the hunted beast and restrict its movements. Open grounds like these, though, required different tactics. All three slayers pulled at the arm, to trip the creature forward, while the remaining four smoothly split into pairs and moved to flank it.

“Attack,” Razin ordered his binder, gauging the time to be right.

The woman gave no sign she’d heard him, but her horse whinnied in fright and cold and the bound soul of the salamander dispersed, slithering back to the tattoo it was bound to. The sorcery was replaced by an arrow-like burst of translucent magic that flew for the drow’s head, leaving the darkness shuddering on impact. Even where he was seated, the heir to Malaga felt a ripple go over his skin. He wondered how many thundering roars had been stitched together, to make that curse. Whatever the number, the spell distracted the drow even as it was beginning to recover from its surprise. The rope-holding slayers dragged it down and forward, and then the others struck on the exposed flanks. Long barbed spears were thrust into the sides and cracked through the carapace. The drow screamed again and without needing to be ordered the binder tossed at it a blinding orb – sunlight caught and woven. Sniffing a kill, the slayers on the sides unsheathed their straight long sword and prepared for killing blows.

With a deafening wail the drow’s carapace of darkness detonated outwards.

Razin paled as he saw what the wave of sorcery had wrought: the four slayers who’d been closest were half-gone. Their leathers and armaments untouched, but flesh and bone outright evaporated where the drow’s darkness had touched them. A grey-skinned silhouetted landed in the snow, harpoons still in its arm, and fresh darkness bubble out of its skin as it laughed. Blood cooling, Razin Tanja sheathed his blade and dismounted. From his horses’ side he claimed three long knives, which he hooked to his belt, and a small orb of ivory. The binder glanced at him, face tainted with worry at the way their hunt had turned debacle in the span of a single breath.

“Distract it when you can,” Razin simply said.

He rolled his shoulder – still tender from goblin steel – and approached at a measured pace. The remaining three slayers were struggling to bring down the creature before its armour-like darkness could be formed anew, two abandoning their rope for barbed javelins to be thrown. The drow snapped out to catch one with its teeth, breaking the steel tip with a loud crunch before spitting out the remains, and the other javelin went straight through. Or so it seemed, for it never emerged on the other side. A heartbeat later it was spat back out the drow’s chest headfirst and took the slayer who’d thrown it right in the eye. Razin winced at the sight.

“Ready, Tanja?” a voice spoke at his side.

The heir to Malaga glanced there and his brow rose. Aquiline Osena wore no mail not plate, only a tanned vest of leather going up to her throat. Trousers of thick dark linen with small plates of steel sown on went down into good leather boots, though it was not the clothes or even the slayer armaments on her back that were the most striking part of the ensemble. Beautiful patterns of green and bronze war paint covered not only her face but every inch of her skin. Lady Aquiline looked half a fae, though one born for the hunt. Razin calmly unsheathed his sword.

“Shall we, Osena?” he shrugged.

The barest trace of a smile touched her lips.

“Let’s,” she agreed.

The drow roared, and under the golden Light of the lantern they advanced.

—

Laurence de Montfort stumbled.

She fell to her knees, hands trembling, as she began choking on the acid filling her lung while it burned her form the inside. Her sword slipped her fingers, and Rumena smoothly closed the distance. Its sound in the song was too light, the Saint thought. It was another fake, like the one she’d killed earlier. What a cautious bastard. Mind sharpening through the atrocious pain she was in, the Saint of Swords joined her will to the current of Creation. Decree , act and outcome in the same word. Tariq had told her this was a domain, once, but he did not understand it like she did. It was simply her own faith, a tenet made absolute and so perfectly harmonized with Creation. She had decreed that ‘Laurence de Montfort is a sword’, and so she was. It’d taken her decades, to make this as true a part of her as flesh and breath, but in the far north fighting the ratlings she had shaped that decree so that it covered every part of what she was. She could have decreed more, she knew, other rules and laws, but the purity of a single truth would have been lost.

A sword did not need to breathe, neither did Laurence de Montfort.

A sword did not burn or dissolve, neither did Laurence de Montfort.

But a sword cut, and so did Laurence de Montfort.

The shadow-thing that the drow had sent to approach her was split in two by a finger and she rose with her fingers steady and holding her sword. What had once been within her was gone, for it no longer aligned with the decreed truth of Creation, and as it had never been there no wounds were taken. Standing in front of her, hands folded within sleeves, the painted drow waited patiently. The eye she’d cut out was growing back – it’d ripped out the wounded flesh so it would, the song told her.

“Come, drow,” the Saint of Swords said. “Let’s see if your faith is strong enough even I cannot cut it.”

“Come,” Rumena replied, “before one of us dies of old age.”

—

Razin’s knife slid uselessly against the dark obsidian-like carapace, failing to find purchase even after the third time he stabbed at it. The drow beneath shook him off effortlessly, not even paying attention, and the dark-haired warrior only half-succeeded at landing on his feet: he fell backwards after touching the ground, cursing, and the only thing that saved his life was that without a pause he rolled to the side. A bladelike appendage punctured where he’d been a moment earlier, leaving a smoking hole in the ground.

“The eyes,” Aquiline yelled. “Aim for the eyes.”

She was not speaking to him but to their binder, who tossed a bolt of hazy heat close enough to the drow’s eyes that it drew back. Razin rose to his feet, rolling his still-tended shoulder to limber it. What had once been a humanoid carapace silhouette in a carapace, if a large one, had since grown into something rather more monstrous. Two crablike legs made of a strange hardened darkness not unlike obsidian now held up an armoured torso of the same, while what had once been arms had turned to something reminiscent of an insect. Like a mantis, Razing thought, and damnably quick. Of the three harpoons that had first stuck the drow, only two now remained though with the way it has shifted they now protruded from its shoulder instead of arm.

Aquiline Osena ran across the snow, a flicker of fluid movement and even as the drow struck out she caught the end of a rope in hand. Slayer, silent-sworn , he thought. Moonlight and miracle’s cast caught on her clenching arm, painted bronze and green, as she tugged at the monster and threw a barbed javelin at its eye. Grace and terror, peerless in hunt , Razin remembered from the Anthem of Smoke, and the sight was as burned into his eye. It had not occurred to him, until then to find beauty in either the act or the woman. Now he could not unsee it, and something in him trembled at the knowledge. The javelin caught the corner of the drow’s eye, and it screamed in pain, but there was a cry – the last of the remaining slayers was torn through, and thrown at Aquiline. The rope slipped her grip, and Razin began moving without thought. The lantern had fallen off her belt so he tossed his knife aside and snatched it up even as she rose to her feet behind him.

“Take the kill,” he called out as he passed her.

The drow’s obsidian eyes turned to him and it struck without hesitation, bladed limb tearing at the ground as Razin laughed and danced to the side. No binder he, even if the Binder’s Blood, but he had spent hours in the training yards to make up for that shame. Now those hours were sparing his life. It leaned forward to strike again, and this time they were so close there could be no true avoidance – the drow ripped through bone and shoulder flesh, but the heir to Malaga had avoided just enough to...

“Honour to the Blood,” Razin Tanja hissed, and smashed the Light-bearing lantern in its face.

A heartbeat later, Lady Aquiline’s sword went straight through the heart of the flare of light as she screamed a war cry, and wet black blood sprayed on Razin’s face. The creature fell back, its darkness collapsing on the snow to reveal a slumping corpse with a sword through the forehead, and the lord and lady fell exhausted on their knees to each other’s side.

“Lady Aquiline,” he greeted her. “You made a good kill.”

“We, Lord Razin,” she replied, eyes hooded. “We made a good kill.”

The look shared overshadowed even the bleeding pain of his shoulder, for a moment, but it turned to horror when with a wet squelch the drow’s body began to heal and spat out the sword. It began to rise, as did they, but it paused as if struck

Far above them all, light had begun to bloom.

—

It was time.

The Grey Pilgrim could feel it: if he acted now it would be an intervention safeguarding those in his charge. Sitting with his eyes closed, he could still feel the growing weight on his shoulders. The vigor – always sweet, always passing – of a younger man filling his body. The writ of this had not been offered to him by the Choir, it was no tragedy unfolding caught by Mercy’s myriad eyes and made known to his own. This tale had been of his own making from beginning and it would still be that when the end came, Gods forgive him for it. With every death the burden on his Role, the stakes of his existence in this story, had increased. Now, though his spirit felt like a spine on the eve of cracking, he had the necessary reach. It was a bitter irony that the deaths of soldiers had been the balance’s harsh swing in his favour yet the true burden he must bear had been of no consequence at all. Catherine Foundling had given the slip to every story that could bind her to an ending , and so left herself only one path: reign eternal, consumed and consuming, a herald of long prices and hard measures having made mantle of the woes of Creation.

The Black Queen had wriggled out of every binding and shackles, broken the sole irons he’d once set around her wrists. No redemption could be demanded by one who had forsaken her, not even for a greater good, and the broken oaths between them were yet another finger on the scales. Not so heavy, he knew, that it would doom him. But she’d be always a little luckier, a little harder to reach so long as that imbalance stood. In a less dangerous villain that would be merely inconvenient, but this one? She’d always had an astonishing intuition in those matters, and whatever else the Everdark had made of her it had also made her cautious . Patient enough to take a step back and let others take the lead if it meant offering fewer openings to foes like the Pilgrim.

“I wish that you had answers for me,” he said. “That you knew whether in my efforts to prevent our doom I am forging the very instrument of it.”

The Ophanim murmured in his ear, mournfully contrite. Before, in Callow, the Choir of Mercy had been able to see through the skein of her. Where threads may lead, choices that may or may not be. And with his own eyes, his sight of what moved the Queen of Callow, together they had considered what she might yet become. Now, though? There were entities at her shoulders that did not brook such perusals. And what entities they were, colossal towers of misery and murder stitched together with prayers to Below. Goddesses of wails and horror, swimming in a shadowy sea of their own kind’s blood. The Black Queen had clasped hands with these abominations, and from what he could tell done so willingly. Knowing what he knew, not knowing what he did not, what choice was there but the ugly business of this night? If there was even a single chance that Catherine Foundling would be the keystone to the death of Calernia, Tariq must ensure it would not come to be. And so now Tariq was forced to countenance this hour of barren deaths, lest a thousandfold worse might be allowed to pass.

The Grey Pilgrim opened his eyes, looking up at the darkness before the dawn.

“We have sung together before, old friends,” he softly said. “Will you sing with me, once more?”

Murmurs, worried.

“I will not die,” he reminded them. “It will hurt me, this is true.”

His gaze moved ahead at the battle where so much blood was being spilled.

“Yet so does that,” he said. “And this will end it.”

Comforting hands on his shoulder, and with that assent he let out a weary breath.

“Pilgrim of grey,” Tariq sang.

The Ophanim hummed along, a choir distant and melancholy. A chorus of ever-weeping eyes who were charged with ever seeing the worst of Creation, yet still ground their fingers to the bone saving what they could. The hummed along to the Anthem of Smoke, that song that was the flesh and blood of Levant.

“Fleet-foot, dusk-clad, the wanderer,
His stride rebellion and stirring ember.”

It did not feel like peace, when they hummed with him. They were no servants of that, neither Choir nor man. Theirs was the duty of steering the world away from the brink, and none could be spared in the observance of that work. It was an endless procession of bitter choices, of lesser evils in the service of greater goods they might never witness. It felt like a lullaby, gentle and wistful but never without disquiet.

“In his grasp the light of a morning star,
Tattered his throne, tattered his war,” they sang together.

They called it the dawn star, in the Free Cities. In Procer it was morning’s herald, in Ashur the sun’s prow. In Levant, though, in the land of Tariq’s birth, though it had once been known as the morning star it was no longer called that. It was said that the Proceran prince who’d ruled the southern reaches of the Dominion had laughingly told the people that naught by the sky falling would ever make the Principate surrender its conquered prize. It was said, too, that the first of the Grey Pilgrims had been among those listening. A mere boy, when he heard, but he never forgot. And after Above clad him in grey, the boy become a man returned to that laughing prince and, plucking a star from the night sky, lit the first bonfire of rebellion from the tyrant’s palace. In Levant for many years now it had been known as the pilgrim’s star: the peregrine. Tariq was not the first Grey Pilgrim to wield it, and he would not be the last. From the first of his Bestowal, there had been one inheritance and in the wake of the song the old man softly offered it up to the sky.

“ Shine ,” the Peregrine said, and the peregrine did.

Blood burning from the Light coursing through like a river, Tariq gasped out in pain and only the merciful hand on his shoulder kept him from collapsing. Miracle and aspect wove themselves together, the single greatest working of his life, and his vision dimmed with exhaustion. Above him the morning star hung in the sky, and with it dawn had come. The drow broke, creatures of the night that they were, and the battlefield held its breath.

“Now,” Tariq croaked. “Now you have no choice, child, lest they sweep through your servants.”

She would bring nightfall where he had brought dawn, and their powers would find each other matched. It would be neither day nor night but an eclipse in passing, and the Black Queen would be as shattered by the scale of it as he was. It would be a stalemate, a draw, and Gods willing the pattern of three would be set in stone – as would be the victory promised to him, so grimly earned.

Instead the air tore open in front of Tariq and a man rode through.

No, not a man. One of the fair folk, astride a steed that seemed half marble and ice, and that fae’s eyes were cold where his smile was warm and friendly. His red hair was like a streak of flame as he inclined his head in greeting, hand never nearing the sword at his belt.

“Pilgrim of grey, I bring to you greeting and missive from my most tenebrous of lieges,” the fae said.

The Pilgrim rose to his feet, slowly, and took the scroll being offered to him. It carried the royal seal of Callow, he saw. He broke it, took the parchment from the leather and after reading the single paragraph rocked back like he’d been hit. Surrender. Catherine Foundling was offering unconditional surrender. It would be a great victory, if he accepted. Victory .

Gods damn that vicious child.

Interlude: And Pay Your Toll

“Oh no, please stop wrecking everything! Like that urn in the corner, with the djinn bound inside. No, the other one, with golden – oh, woeful day, this wanton destruction of priceless artefacts is so inconvenient to me personally and absolutely no one else.”
– Dread Emperor Irritant I, ‘defending’ the palace of the High Lord of Aksum from heroes

Tariq did not reply. He knew hesitation was herald of defeat, in contests such as this, yet he could not hasten to answer. Not with the stakes at play here – he, this army, this entire continent, none of them could afford a misstep here and now. A surrender had been offered, but could still be either accepted or refused.

The Pilgrim’s first and deeper instinct was to accept. If it was a lie she’d offered, a trick being played, then accepting would allow him to turn this spin of the yarn on her. A false surrender, when he still had the forces in motion that he’d sent out? The backlash of such a ploy would be bloody for the villain who’d played it. But that was the wrong way to think about this, he decided, because it assumed that Catherine Foundling was a fool. And she wasn’t, unfortunately. She was reckless often and at times arrogant, but also frightfully prone to learning from her mistakes – those, at least, that were not born from the flaws at the very heart of her. It was possible, he considered, that she’d pit providence against the weight of his broken oath. Wagered that events would not tumble forward in a way that allowed him to uncover the conspiracy, should there be one. Yet it was not a good wager, for her, since taking it at all meant she’d fallen into the role of the Grand Alliance’s villainous adversary. No it was nearly certain that the offer of surrender was genuine, which only made it all the more dangerous.

It would break the pattern of three, if he accepted. A victory for her, in claiming back her teacher’s body through ploy, and then a much greater victory for him this night, in scaring her into surrender – that would be the end of it. It was a draw that would take Tariq where he needed to go, arm him with the only blade left that might still be capable of killing Catherine Foundling should it prove necessary. If she’d opposed him more directly in this battle, even made act of presence, the Pilgrim would have come forward as well and leaned on the weight of their pattern to nudge events towards the certainty of a draw. But she’d remained veiled, hidden and plotting. And she saw right through me , Tariq thought, abashed. For all that he had told himself he had the measure of the Black Queen, evidently he’d been wrong. If he was to avoid compounding his mistakes, he must discard that belief and approach the situation with fresh eyes. Catherine Foundling had caught sight of the pattern of three he’d spent so long arranging, and most likely suspected the importance of it to him. Should this, then, be seen as an olive branch?

She would not allow a foe the power over her Tariq had sought to obtain, yet she understood why he found the need for it. And so a concession was made, surrender unconditional on the field, offering to his old hands the thread that might just untangle the thorny knot that was the confluence in Iserre. A knife bared, his purpose denied but then a lesser prize offered. It fit, as it would not be the first time that the Black Queen dealt with others using that blunt but potent approach.

Like an old mule he’d been approached, and this was the apple dangled: an end to Iserre that would be to the benefit of the Grand Alliance, in matters earthly. With refusal, then, would come the stick that would be used to thrash him. A more provisional offer might have allowed the Pilgrim grounds with which to refuse, but unconditional surrender meant that the burden of consequence had been passed entirely to him. There could, to be put it bluntly, be no better offer. If it were a trick that would not matter, for to be Good was not to be the kind of fool that fell into every trap: even devils could cite the Book for their purposes. But if it was not a trick, as he believed, then by refusing Tariq would be tossing to the side every sacrifice made tonight. Every death that had pressed down on his shoulders so he could bring morning’s light to the sky. Would the miracle wane and die? The Ophanim murmured uncertainly in his ear, even they unknowing. He suspected not, but it would at least be made fragile. Judged hollow by Creation, and so become exactly that. The Black Queen’s answer, the coiling darkness that lay at the heart of her camp and had been carefully woven into a theurgic ritual, would rip through it. Perhaps reverse the situation entire, unleashing her drow anew in the fullness of the might.

The Grey Pilgrim was no leader of warbands but he had known wars and felt the power of the Everdark’s children fill the night. If they struck out again with their strength restored, the battle would resume with her forces at a distinct advantage. A second victory for Catherine Foundling would end the pattern of three just as surely, which meant his choice was now effectively between two different unmakings of a plan that had taken more than a year to carry out. Exasperation welled up at the thought. All that toil, broken within months of her return to the surface as if on a whim. Tariq leaned into the emotion, let it course through his veins and then pass out of him. There was no use to growing angry at being outplayed: on the contrary, that kind of fragility tended to lead Bestowed into a spiral of decline. He’d seen too many times to count. Mind clear again, the Grey Pilgrim considered what the Black Queen wanted him to believe was his choice. Victory for him, on her terms. Likely victory for her, still on her terms. The old man’s brow creased as he considered it. There was something about this... theatricality that rubbed him wrong. For a villain, he thought, Catherine Foundling had always been admirably reluctant to sacrifice soldiers on false pretences.

What she considered those to be was where the villainy began, but that was another story. Ah , Tariq hummed. So there it is. The Black Queen had spent lives in her service, those of the drow, by sending them into the fight suspecting a miracle would snatch away their powers and leave them exposed. Unusual for her, and she would not do it without a reason. So why had the drow been sent, he mused? To force his hand with the bringing of dawn, certainly, but there’d been no need for such a brutal display as what had taken place. Thousands dead, so quickly, was not war: it was a point being made. They had been sent to make an impression. To swat down multitudes like flies and add weight to the choice the Pilgrim must now make. To create, in a word, urgency. Such a thing would only be necessary, he decided, if there was a deception afoot.

“Where is your liege, Hunstman?” the Grey Pilgrim asked.

“Another question was not the answer sought, Peregrine,” the fae languidly replied. “Your verdict?”

She wasn’t in Creation, Tariq grasped then. Admittedly the surrender offered had only been for those under her command and not the Queen of Callow herself so her presence was not strictly required. But if she wasn’t here, how did she expect to bring down dawn should he refuse her surrender? There might be other drow with power enough, but none with the requisite weight to carry it out. If the Hierophant had still been at her side then Tariq would not have considered the matter further, but the boy currently was in the depths of Arcadia making a ruinous altar of his grief. The Wild Hunt could not wield miracles of darkness, and who did that leave? No one but Bestowed or the most powerful of warlocks should be able to weave a working rival to his, leaving the confines of story, and the only place where the Black Queen would have been able to encounter such a helper since her disappearance should be the Everdark. It was, he reflected, deeply unlikely anyone but Catherine Foundling on her side could bring an end to his dawn – her patron murderesses notwithstanding, for should they intervene directly so would the Choir of Mercy. Old mule that he was, he’d been offered the apple and the stick. But it appeared that the stick might be little more than glamour, a shadow on the wall. If he refused, and dawn held, then...

That would be contingent on her failing to return, but her absence was telling: whatever her scheme, it required her to see to something else. Instead of an olive branch extended, he thought, this might instead be the affected nonchalance of a villain raising the stakes on a bad hand. Trying to scare the opposition into retreating by displaying unflinching certainty. The pieces were there, Tariq thought, for this to be the answer. Yet it was not certain , and in assuming that the Black Queen was gambling he would be doing the very same thing. If the only consideration was whether it was possible to obtain a promised victory on Catherine Foundling, then this was the choice to be made. Refusal, and pushing through. That was not, however, the only consideration. He could it be, when Keter was on the march? Could he truly justify, the Grey Pilgrim asked himself countenance refusing such an offer of peace? Refuse it when it delivered all he asked save for a knife at the throat of the very woman offering it – a knife, it must be said, that he now stood little chance of obtaining no matter his decision. The scope of the scales, Tariq thought, were close to beyond his ability to grasp.

The Black Queen that could be would be the end of Calernia. Between the Kingdom of the Dead and the Kingdom of the East, the continent would be made a ruin of endless war. Yet in combating the Black Queen that could be, was he blinding himself to the truth of the Black Queen that was?

Could there be any justification for the tossing away of the only pattern of three he would ever have with Catherine Foundling? There might not be another way to kill her if she further grew beyond Tariq’s means. By staying his hand he might be letting slip an entity he could no longer put down.

In refusing an offer of peace from Callow when the Dead King was on the march, was he not aiding the Hidden Horror regardless of all other concerns?

Innocents were going to die.

Innocents had died, some by his own design.

The Ophanim were at his side, helping his tired old bones stand straight, and though in their whispers there was sorrow there was also something other. Trust. They trusted him, the murmurs said, to make the choice. They had seen as he saw, tread in his wake for the seemingly endless days and night he had been the Peregrine. They’d been at his shoulder for his every mistake, his every bitter triumph, and still they trusted. Sometimes that was the only reason he woke with dawn, the knowledge that hand in hand they could still do more. Sometimes that was the weight that pressed down on his chest and choked his lungs, the strain of that unearthly trust. Tariq had tread with angels in his wake for so long he’d forgot how it had felt before.

“Should you not have answers?” he asked, voice choked. “Are you not the Watchers Kindly, the burning wisdom of many eyes?”

Old friends , he thought, help me. Help me see, for once more I am lost. But they had no answers for him, would not take the burden from his shoulders. But they stood at his side, holding up his tired from, for in the end they were the Choir of Mercy and though they could not save him they would at least share in his suffering. Tariq thought of the city of his birth, suddenly, of that summer so long ago when the plague had choked it with death. In those days where it had all been so simple, when healing could be the sum of him. When he’d not been charged with clawing Creation back out of the darkness’ hands, just to bring a little light into it. Tariq, who had last felt true warmth before the final breath of the woman who’d used to smile as she called him of no import, looked up at the sky and watched the star that shone there. Somewhere along the way, he thought, he had gone from bringing small lights into this world to bringing great ones.

Sometimes he wondered if Creation was truly better for it.

“Do you really,” he murmured, “trust me to make that choice?”

The Ophanim thrummed. Agreement, absolute in that way only angels could be. The Grey Pilgrim turned to the Black Queen’s messenger.

“Tell the Queen of Callow I accept her surrender,” he said.

—

“This,” the Kairos Theodosian mused, “appears to be a goat.”

Hakram kept a calm look on his face, remaining as dignified as an orc could be while hanging upside down tied by the feet. The Tyrant’s outriders had clapped him in chains and dragged him back to the League’s army in them regardless of his claim to be an envoy from the Queen of Callow, though it wasn’t until the Tyrant himself arrived that Adjutant was forced to watch a procession of gargoyles drag in a tall tripod and trip over each other assembling it for what had to be at least half an hour. He’d then been hung upside down from the centrepiece, and only now had his gag been removed.

“Greetings, Lord Tyrant,” he serenely said. “I am the Adjutant, here as envoy from your ally the Queen of Callow.”

“She wrote some very unkind things about me, Hakram,” the Tyrant accusingly said.

He tapped at the parchment his soldiers had taken from the orc’s affairs along with the goat, the same missive he’d both penned in Catherine’s name and been charged with bringing to the League when given the signal. The process had been more tedious than difficult: the barren plain this corner of Arcadia had been turned into meant he’d been able to see their columns arriving from miles off, though that hadn’t quickened his journey in the slightest.

“I am sure,” Hakram lied, “that they were meant in a spirit of friendship.”

The goat he’d had confiscated looked at him and bleated, which the orc had to admit was fair. It’d been a hard sell. No one seemed to have thought to leash the creature, so it was ambling around this formal war council of the League of Free Cities at will and tracking cheap white paint over the furniture.

“What kind of things?” a tanned woman in dark robes asked, leaning forward with interest.

“Magister Zoe,” the Tyrant gasped. “That is most inappropriate to ask. That man is a known spy, he could be peddling all sorts of calumnies.”

The formal war council of the League of Free Cities, Hakram thought, was about as much as flaming wreck as he’d expected given the fractious nature of that alliance and the general reputation of the Tyrant heading it. The orcs jaw tightened when his suspicion was confirmed and the woman who’d spoken was revealed as a magister of Stygia – what a dignified word for a slaver – thought at least it made placing the others easier. The gangly old man at the very right of the long table who was putting the proceedings to ink was likely to be the representative from Delos, a member of its Secretariat. The young ruler of Nicae, Basileus Leo Trakas, was recognizable as much from the formal apparel as the drawings the Jacks had obtained. The two richly-dressed men glaring daggers at each other should be the rival Exarchs of Penthes, the last two survivors of the shambles the Carrion Lord had made of that city’s ruling class. A middle-aged man in ill-fitting armour was looking rather confused and kept looking over his shoulder like he expected someone to be standing there. The representative from Bellerophon, Hakram suspected. That left only one city without a seat at the table, though someone had nailed what looked like a tome of the Book of All Things to the back of a chair just to the left of the Delosi scribe. Interestingly, the Hierarch himself did not seem to be in attendance.

“Lord Deadhand, it is most uncouth of you to be staring so at the honourable delegate from Atalante,” the Tyrant suddenly chided him.

He was, Hakram realized with horrified fascination, talking about the book.

“I apologize,” Adjutant said. “I have never seen anyone from Atalante before.”

Kairos Theodosian grinned, like he was mischievous boy, and leaned forward before lowering his voice to a conspiratorial pitch.

“It’s actually the Book of All Things nailed to a chair,” the Tyrant of Helike confessed. “I just have a gargoyle read a verse once in a while, I don’t think anyone’s noticed the difference.”

Before a heartbeat had passed, Hakram had decided how to tailor his approach. Like dealing with a drunk Catherine, if the jokes about hanging people who irritated her were actually deadly serious.

“Have you considered having a puppet made?” Adjutant replied in the same tone.

The Tyrant snorted out a giggle, his bad arm trembling under his robes. Hakram kept his distaste off his face: the villain smelled like sickness and crazy, both of the dangerous kind.

“I like you,” Kairos Theodosian smilingly said, but then the smile vanished like mist in morning sun. “Is what I imagine she thought I’d say, anyway.”

Hakram remained calm. The boy was unstable, but not without cunning, and Catherine had already taken the measure of him. She would not have sent him here, at the Tyrant’s mercy, if she thought it would get him killed.

“She does seem to enjoy taking up broken toys, your mistress,” the Tyrant of Helike mused. “A filthy habit that, if you’ll forgive my language.”

The villain cocked his head to the side, his sanguine red eye unblinking.

“But by the looks of you, Hakram, you were debris long before she got her hands on you,” he idly continued. “Magister Zoe, what do you call it again when they just look like a person but lack every other meaningful characteristic of one?”

“Foreigners,” the Stygian drily replied.

The Tyrant of Helike shot Adjutant a friendly, complicit look with a grin that good as whispered see what I have to deal with , like moments earlier the villain hadn’t been feeling for a weakness with his words like water poured on glass in search of fault. This was, Hakram thought, a man as dangerous as he was mad. He smiled back, keeping his fangs hidden by his lips.

“You really are a piece of work,” the Tyrant of Helike admiringly said.

“Pieces, by now,” Hakram replied without missing a beat.

The madman cackled loudly, and even a few of the others smiled.

“So tell me about this goat,” Kairos Theodosian said, “and why it looks like it was half-heartedly painted just before it was brought here.”

“And in wickedness does Evil sow the seeds of its own defeat,” a gargoyle mewled, staring up at a page of the Book of All Things.

Everyone ignored it.

“Your ignorance is understandable, my lord Tyrant, given the recent isolation of Callow,” Hakram said. “This is not a goat: he is, in fact, a purebred Liessen charger.”

Stares moved to the goat, which bleated fearfully at the sudden spurt of attention and ran under the table – she smeared white paint all over the robes of the Stygian magister before being chased away with a kick, which Adjutant silently approved of.

“ She has udders,” Basileus Leo patiently said. “Goat udders. Because she is a goat.”

“Leo, you’ll cause a diplomatic incident at this rate,” the Tyrant replied, sounding appalled. “Besides, my dear ally the Queen of Callow has personally sent me a mount. How could it not be a splendid destrier of Callowan stock?”

Interesting, Hakram thought once more. It had been one thing for him to call the Tyrant of Helike an ally, another for the king to admit it. The orc had been under the impression that while there was an elected Hierarch, foreign diplomacy was their strict prerogative and to go against that would be treason. Yet none of the others seemed bothered by the implicit admission in the slightest – which meant either the Tyrant’s plot were known and permitted, or the Hierarch’s authority was a sham and Kairos Theodosian was the true ruler of the League. Something many had suspected, including Hakram himself, but did not align with Catherine’s own impression of their relationship.

“I wash my hands of this,” the Basileus sighed. “Do as you will, Tyrant.”

“So, Catherine wants us to take a crack at the Grand Alliance,” Lord Kairos said, completely ignoring the other ruler in favour of Hakram. “Interesting offer.”

There was a pause.

“I refuse,” he added nonchalantly. “So, now that that’s done with, tell me true: if you had to be drowned, would you prefer it was in wine or in oil?”

“We were afraid you would hesitate to act, given the circumstances,” Hakram amicably said. “No grudge will be held, I assure you.”

“Circumstances,” Lord Kairos mildly repeated. “Such as?”

“The battle ought to be over by now,” Adjutant said. “The Grey Pilgrim will have woven a miraculous star and broken the strength of the Firstborn, forcing my queen’s unconditional surrender.”

A pregnant pause.

“She doesn’t have that much give in her,” the Tyrant said, red eye narrowing.

“My lord,” Hakram grinned, baring his teeth, “I penned the letter for her.”

The villain peered at him closely, as if looking into his soul, and the orc had to refrain from flinching. There was something... discomforting about the intensity of that mismatched gaze.

“It appears someone will have to saddle my goat,” Kairos Theodosian mused, “for we now must ride out in glorious battle.”

Interlude: When Iron Rests

“What poison is to medicine, war is to empire: apportionment is the balance of life and death.”
– Extract from ‘The Ruin of Empire, or, a Call to Reform of the Highest Assembly’, by Princess Eliza of Salamans

Word of the surrender had rippled through the ranks, drawing out cries of dismay and anger before they both turned to disbelief.

There’d been tension between the Legions and the Army of Callow, when some loudmouths in the former had started to say this was just an elaborate way to sell out the Legions of Terror to the Grand Alliance, but Vivienne had been ready to quell such stupidity. Plants in the ranks had done as instructed, gone on the offensive and accused the complainers of being traitors in Grand Alliance employ. Enough of those arguments had turned to brawl that sergeants got involved, so now the most volatile of the rank and file were cooling their heels under arrest until this could be played out to the end. On the side of the Army of Callow there’d been mostly outrage and laying blame, which to Vivienne’s mix of grief and amusement had been laid along predictable lines. Callowan recruits blamed the Hellhound, or more frequently Marshal Grem One-Eye – whose role in the Conquest still had him closely associated to national wounded pride. Most of the eastern recruits, though, both the fresh and those brought in from gutted legions after the Doom, tended to point the finger at Vivienne Dartwick.

Hardly unexpected: she the most visible civilian authority over the Army of Callow, a known former noble and former heroine. And for the greenskins, most damnably of all she had no famous feat of violence to her name. It was something to look into remedying, in the long term, though it was hardly a priority at the moment. The amusing part of all this, of course, was that while it’d been Catherine who’d pulled the rug out under everyone’s feet with that sudden turn no one seemed to be blaming her in the slightest. Vivienne had absolutely no intention of changing that, since there were only a few things keeping the Kingdom of Callow together and one of them was the myth of the Black Queen undefeated, the kingdom’s own crowned villain whose uninterrupted string of victories had become the backbone of a nation. It would have to be maintained, Vivienne thought, in the years to come – marshals and generals and even the Woe could lose, but the Black Queen could not. But that was beyond the horizon, and Vivienne Dartwick’s troubles were current.

The solution she’d found had been to let the current of older faith guide the rumours she sowed. This was not a defeat, it was a trick being played by Queen Catherine on her enemies. And Gods be merciful, Vivienne thought, but she couldn’t even be sure that was a lie. The drow had been laid low by that sudden star in the sky, all but the most powerful of them battered into slumber for at least a few moments, and even the highest of these ‘Mighty’ had been forced to flee in the face of the enemy’s swiftly resuming advance. Legionaries had moved to hold the walls in good order, but within moments of that Marshal Juniper had been informed that surrender had been offered to the Grey Pilgrim and then accepted, bringing this battle to a close. Vivienne had spent the following hour putting out fires, but now the situation was stable enough she’d finally been able to head the general staff’s pavilion. Truthfully she could have done more, and would have preferred keeping her finger on the Army of Callow’s pulse, but Juniper’s last messenger had mentioned a message from Catherine with the royal seal. Those summons she could not deny, and so she had come.

“Adjutant’s still missing?”

Marshal Juniper looked vaguely irked at her immediate question, though not enough to chide her for it. What Vivienne had expected to be a formal war council in how to deal with the fact that the Grand Alliance had fully surrounded the camp and was now ordering disarmament and the bringing down of the palisade turned out to be rather less crowded. Marshal Juniper, with her perennial accessory Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara, Grandmaster Brandon Talbot for the Order of Broken Bells and Marshal Grem for what some had begun to call the Legions-in-Exile.

“Whatever duty Her Majesty sent him out on, Lord Adjutant is still discharging it,” Tribune Bishara said.

Vivienne kept herself from grimacing. Hakram had been a useful interpreter of Catherine’s occasionally seemingly outlandish decisions even before the Everdark, but nowadays the orc’s talent for understanding the thoughts of their leader had become a priceless asset. The journey into that dark place had changed Cat in deep ways, and much could be argued of whether all these changes had been for the best, but regardless of debate it was undeniable Catherine kept her cards a lot closer to the chest than she’d used to. Adjutant’s presence would have been a boon, Vivienne already suspected, for what was to come. None of the others were seated, so she remained standing as well and simply joined them at the table.

“Now that everyone’s in attendance,” the Hellhound said, flicking a displeased glance at Vivienne that was met with a raised brow. “This was handed to me by a rider of the Wild Hunt, along with knowledge of the surrender and instruction to abide by it.”

The orc tossed out a leather sheath bearing the royal seal of Callow, which Tribune Bishara daintily picked up afterwards.

“Unless there is an objection?” the Taghreb politely asked.

A round of shaking heads. Talbot might have objected, Vivienne thought, it if it’d been another officer but he’d always been a little sweet on the Hellhound’s helper. The wax seal was broken, parchment taken from the sheath and carefully unfurled. The dark-haired Callowan caught a glimpse of the curved, eye-pleasing calligraphy and repressed a snort. Hakram’s hand, that, not their queen’s. Which might be for the best, considering most of the time Catherine’s handwriting only skirted the edge legibility. She’d actually been taught properly at the orphanage, Vivienne knew, but Cat had always written like her thoughts were trying to crawl out through a hand too slow to keep up.

“I, Catherine Foundling, anointed queen of Callow by the grace of the Heavens and first of my name-” Tribune Bishara began.

Marshal Juniper cleared her throat.

“The meat, Aisha,” she growled.

The Taghreb’s head dipped in acknowledgement and she shifted halfway through the sentence.

“So, there’s an old story about the Ol’ Unconquered,” Aisha Bishara said, “that they call Theodosius’ Dilemma.”

The Taghreb’s tone was cultured and elegant, if so very eastern, but the words she spoke reeked of Catherine’s slow, almost lazy drawl. Vivienne knew it to be at least in part an affectation, as their queen was perfectly capable of formal address in her crisp Laure accent. She liked to use the casualness, the thuggish country bumpkin swagger, to prey on people’s expectations. Noble expectations, mostly, Vivienne privately admitted. Their queen had spent most her life carrying a sharp contempt for the aristocracy that becoming the foremost aristocrat in Callow didn’t seem to have changed in the slightest. Something wordless fluttered through the pavilion at the tribune’s words, though, sparing only Grem One-Eye. Backs straightening, shoulders loosening, even half a vicious smirk tugging at Grandmaster Talbot’s lips. They had not been left behind, that was what their stance said.

The Black Queen had a plan in the works, and someone else was about to have a very bad night.

“So in the First League War – which is a horribly inaccurate name, actually, because the League of Free Cities proper hadn’t even been founded yet and, wait, Hakram, scratch that whole part out, they don’t need the history lesson,” Tribune Bishara said.

She added, in a carefully unamused undertone, that the Lord Adjutant had not in fact scratched out anything.

“So in the First League War, Theodosius kept slapping around southern Procer like it was his deeply unloved goblin stepchild until it’d lost so many battles it’d gotten physically impossible for the princes to deny they were losing the war,” the Taghreb read. “At that point, the First Prince was getting worried about losing a third of Procer without war even having formally been declared, so you all know what happens: the Highest Assembly votes to ‘defend the south from foreign invasion’, everyone sends armies to reinforce and the First Prince makes a pointed suggestion that someone be appointed to run this mess that Theodosius hasn’t already cheerfully brutalized.”

Vivienne’ eyes swept the tent, and found most were raptly listening even though most should already know of this bit of history. It was certainly... colourfully narrated, but otherwise common knowledge in those who had some learning of history. And even beyond that. The life and deeds of Theodosius the Unconquered were a favourite of young boys and girls with dreams of military glory even in cities where no Helikean had visited in living memory.

“That gets us Isabella the Mad, and sets up Theodosius’ Dilemma,” Tribune Bishara spoke. “Because Isabella, she doesn’t offer a pitched battle or take back principalities: she just tosses one wave of soldiers after another at any forces that splits from Theodosius’ main army. And Hells, his people win most of those skirmishes and Ol’ Theo gets a few ambushes in himself. But every time he wins, he loses soldiers and Isabella loses nothing much. He’s winning so much it’s destroying his army, and so he has to make a choice.”

Vivienne’s mind raced ahead, for while she was not great student of military affairs she could see the shape of the dilemma outlined. It was not as important, she reflected, as the fact that instead of instructions Catherine had chosen to repeat a lesson that most of the people in this pavilion already knew. Would Marshal Grem? Maybe, as odds were that the Hellhound and Tribune Bishara had learned of this at the War College and the older orc was said to have been influential on the lay of the lessons taught there. Which meant the story was most likely meant for her or Brandon Talbot.

“Theodosius could fight a battle that couldn’t be won against nearly five times his number,” Aisha Bishara said, “to force a decisive outcome to the war. Or he could keep tearing through Isabella’s detachments for months and months, hoping for a better chance as his own numbers dwindled with every victory. We all know, famously, the choice he made.”

The Maddened Fields, to this day considered the only defeat ever inflicted on the first Tyrant of Helike.

“Theodosius bet on his legend, on being able to beat the odds and forge a miracle,” Tribune Bishara continued. “Isabella bet that she could ride attrition to a symbolic victory, and it was a brutal wager but she got what she wanted. They say that when Theodosius’ army retreated in good order, there were more than a hundred thousand corpses on the field.”

The tribune’s brow rose in surprise.

“Less than twenty years later, Jehan the Wise hung seven princes and one,” Bishara said.

Before the implications of that could properly sink in, the Taghreb repeated a stroke of madness.

“I grant to Vivienne Dartwick the title of Lady Dartwick, with all assorted honours and privileges; in addition I name Lady Dartwick the heiress-designate to the crown of Callow.”

Vivienne closed her eyes, ignoring the stir from the others in the tent. Why? No, that could be picked at later. Why now ? The granted titled was clearly just a way to legally allow the second part without making her a member of the ironically-named House of Foundling. So what, as heiress-designate of Callow, could Vivienne do that she hadn’t been able to do a moment ago?

“Lady Dartwick,” Grandmaster Talbot quietly said. “The Royal Guard no longer exists, nor any knightly order save mine, yet-”

Yet I am, theoretically, equal in status to a princess of Callow and first the line of succession, Vivienne thought, opening her eyes. The Shining Prince, in all but name, and those were the Marshals of Callow before such a title existed.

“- yet the laws never excluded the Army of Callow nor any other addition to our forces,” she finished softly. “Which means I am, in the queen’s absence, the supreme commander of all armies sworn to Queen Catherine.”

“You can revoke the surrender,” Juniper said.

In the moment that followed, Vivienne almost did. It might just be Catherine’s plan, a surrender to check some advantage of the Pilgrim’s while she schemed some way that allowed her to both surrender in good faith yet keep her armies fighting. Diabolist could still use the wretched ritual that would bring back the drow to the field, and now the enemy’s armies would be surprised and in disarray. Less than twenty years later , Vivienne thought, Jehan the Wise hung seven princes and one. That was a warning. About winning wars at any price, about what came after. About Callow further humbling a weakened Procer and-

“Oh,” Vivienne Dartwick breathed out. “ Oh .”

“Lady Dartwick?” Marshal Grem asked, brow cocked.

“I’ll need a horse and an escort,” she said. “I’ll need to talk with the Grey Pilgrim and Lord Marave besides.”

“Why?” Juniper asked.

“Delay disarming as long as possible,” Vivienne instructed the Hellhound absent-mindedly, “and keep the soldiers ready for fighting.”

“Dartwick,” the Marshal of Callow growled, “what are you doing?”

“If I’m right,” Vivienne said, “then I’m about to trade the full release of our armies for our help against the League of Free Cities.”

—

“Now, Hakram, I want to be perfectly clear,” the Tyrant of Helike announced.

Adjutant was still hung upside down by his feet, though given that the tripod was now being carried forward at a brisk pace by a swarm of chittering gargoyles the motion had set him to rotating. He patiently waited until the turn brought him face to face with Kairos Theodosian before solemnly nodding.

“Your mistress, I fear, intends to betray me most immediately,” the Tyrant said, not entirely succeeding at hiding his tone of deep approval.

“That does not seem like her at all,” Hakram lied.

The boy gestured dismissively, though with a trembling hand.

“It was a delightful bit of pettiness from her to send me someone whose fingers I cannot meaningfully break, after that little affair with my kataphraktoi,” Lord Kairos idly continued, “but that is that and this is this. Should the Black Queen turn on me – and she will – I will brutally murder you, if you’ll forgive my language”

“You are forgiven,” Hakram calmly said. “Though this seems absurd. Catherine Foundling has ever been a close and trusted ally to you, my lord.”

“You’re not even afraid,” the odd-eyed king complained. “I really should have listened to what my father said about Callowan spite, this is most unreasonable of her.”

“Your father had words on the subject of Callowan spite?” Adjutant asked, cocking his head curiously.

“I wouldn’t know,” the Tyrant cheerfully said. “After I cut his throat all he could manage was wet gurgling noises.”

Hakram made a mental note of the admission. It would go into the growing archive the Jacks kept on the Tyrant of Helike, though whether what the boy had said was true or not remained debatable. The orc found him exceedingly hard to read even for a human. Silence lingered between them, though in the distance the hum of raging storms served as canvas for it.

“I cannot help but notice, Lord Tyrant, that we are not heading out into Creation,” the orc ventured after a moment.

Unlike the rest of the League’s armies, he left unsaid. The last of the armies, a ramshackle mob moving in old infantry formations Hakram was fairly sure hadn’t seen use since the Humbling of Titans, had marched through a well-illuminated breach almost half an hour past. Of the hosts of the Free Cities, all that seemed to be left was the Tyrant’s own personal guard of a thousand. And gargoyles, admittedly, too many and too similar in appearance for the orc to be able to count. Kairos Theodosian looked amused, his red eye suddenly twitching shut and remaining that way.

“I have sent all I need to send,” the Tyrant of Helike said. “General Basilia is more than a match for the Pilgrim’s pet countrymen and the unpleasant surprise your mistress is still sitting on.”

“Might I inquire as to our purpose, then?” Hakram politely asked.

“It would be a terrible blunder to feed a spy my most secret schemes,” Lord Kairos chided him. “Do you expect me, Deadhand, to immediately unveil my every furtive advance merely because you showed a modicum of polite interest?”

A moment passed.

“Yes,” Adjutant replied.

“Is this what loves feels like?” the Tyrant mused, then raised a hand. “Don’t answer, Hakram, it’s not like you’d know.”

The orc cocked his head to the side. The insult did not particularly sting. Perhaps if it’d been slung in the early days of the Fifteenth, when he’d still wondered if the wariness in Juniper’s eyes when she looked at him was not uncalled for, but now? Those doubts were long buried, and it would take more than a madman’s jeering to unearth them. It was not, however, the first time the Tyrant of Helike jibed of Hakram’s leanings towards detachment. That he would keep prodding from an angle that would yield nothing was interesting, and suggested two things: first, that Catherine had been right on the subject of Kairos Theodosian having some skill related to perception of others. Second, that what the Tyrant was seeing in Adjutant unsettled him enough to keep picking at it like a scab.

“Soon, I do think,” the Tyrant of Helike said, looking up at the ruinous sky.

“Soon what?” Hakram dutifully asked.

“You see, Adjutant, the histories will speak of tonight as a triumvirate of treachery,” Kairos Theodosian airily explained, “but that will be most inaccurate. Your mistress and I are having the most delightful match of shatranj while the Pilgrim and his kingdoms of the blind stumble around waving swords and miracles.”

“But, Lord Tyrant, is the Grey Pilgrim not the Named currently closest to victory?” Hakram asked, purposefully keeping his tone as dull and unenthused as possible.

He was, the orc guilty admitted to himself, beginning to enjoy this a little too much.

“You would be most wrong, Adjutant, most wrong,” the Tyrant said. “Tariq Isbili’s mistake is that he believes because he set the initial terms of this fight he still knows all of them. And so he putters around down in the snow and mud, while the real prize of the night is around us. He could get everything he desires, Hakram – and indeed I suspect your mistress is inclined to grant most his wishes, save those that inconvenience her – and still be made of fool of.”

Adjutant kept his face calm, though for the first time that night his heartbeat had quickened.

“Oh yes, my dear green friend,” Kairos Theodosian grinned. “I know what your mistress is up to. Seven crowns and one, yes? She has the recipe for the making of a Court, and the Hierophant provided the final ingredient of that heady brew by cutting an unclaimed realm from the fabric of Arcadia and casting it down towards Creation.”

Hakram stayed silent, unwilling to risk revealing too much through the lie he chose to speak.

“Here’s a secret for you, Adjutant,” the Tyrant of Helike whispered, leaning closer. “The thing that waits for you in the depths of Liesse stolen isn’t just your friend. I would be a great deal more wary of what it intends, were I you. For if this night does not go to the Black Queen or to myself, well, it is another friend of mine that will get his due.”

The boy retreated, loudly cackling.

“Ah, but I digress,” he said. “I did say that your mistress and I were playing shatranj while poor old Tariq was stumbling, did I not? Allow me to elaborate. The Pilgrim anticipated there would be trouble in Creation, Hakram, and so tossed a ball up and out of sight so that providence might allow it to land when it was needed, should it be needed.”

“You are saying,” Adjutant said, “that he sent a force through Arcadia.”

“Exactly,” Lord Kairos agreed. “And, old hand that he is at turning tides, he kept a heroic charge up his sleeve in case matters were truly dire.”

The orc’s jaw tightened. In the distance, coming out of the storms with tall banners, a glittering tide of horsemen advanced. Proceran banners, Levantine banners, the full horse of the Grand Alliance’s armies. Including, Hakram thought, every prince and princess in the hosts.

“What is that delightful Callowan saying again?” the Tyrant of Helike mused. “Ah, yes, I remember now.”

The boy’s eye shone wet crimson, when he turned to grin at Adjutant, as if it had already partaken of the blood about to be spilled.

“Finders keepers,” Kairos Theodosian said.

Interlude: So We Shot Him

“One hundred and twenty one: it can be wise to make a truce with a villain to deal with greater threat. Never forget, however, that fear does not make someone trustworthy. Merely afraid.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

Captain Elvera could not have drawn her sword even if there was a need, for oaths still bound her and so uncertainty was staying her hand. It had been a very fine line she’d walked these last few weeks, one finer than she was truly comfortable with. Elvera had sworn not to make war on the Black Queen nor her allies for the span of three months, and that span had not yet ended, though Lady Aquiline had made use of her regardless. The letter of the oath had been observed: the prisoners released under oath had never left the reserve or bared blade. Elvera herself did not formally hold command, for that might be impugning her word, though her ‘advice’ was obeyed so faithfully this was mere pretence. The old woman would not pretend the spirit of the oath had not been broken, regardless, or that service of her lady excused the act. Even if the Black Queen had likely expected no better of them, it did not lessen the shame of being so feckless. Yet when duty and honour pulled different ways, which one was to be heeded? Elvera had no answer, and her lady was understanding, so here she was straddling a charade instead of declaring for either.

“Those are the Spears of Stygia, we have confirmed it,” Captain Onaedo grimaced. “Ashen Gods, just when the night was turning around.”

Onaedo, second only to her in years of service to Tartessos, held command of the host in the absence of Lady Aquiline – who was, at the moment, still having her wounds seen to. Along with Razin Tanja, who she’d insisted would be healed at her side. That’d raised more than a few eyebrows, and likely would again in days to come. If they survived that long, Elvera thought. Which given the way reputable armies had taken to appearing out of thin air at their rear was seeming less certain by the moment.

“And they are facing the Procerans,” Elvera slowly said.

The League of Free Cities had struck... oddly. Perhaps in part to obscure its numbers, which were still very much in doubt, but their array was unusual. The Spears of Stygia, perhaps the finest infantry that region had to offer, had appeared and formed up for advance at the back of Lady Aquiline’s command. Not facing the Alavan heavy infantry of Lord Malave to the north, which might be understandable if a swift rout was what was meant to achieved. Yet it was a hardened army of twenty thousand Procerans, an army who’d already fought that same slave-phalanx in the past, that they’d formed up in front of. There’d been much easier meat to prey on, if the Stygians had wished: the famously lightly-armoured warriors of Vaccei, or perhaps the hodgepodge mixture of fantassins and levies that was the northern Proceran contingent. Elvera had seen to it that even while moving to encircle the Black Queen’s camp her lady’s army had not overextended, so theirs was not a weak position to assault. Why, of all places, had the Spears of Stygia been put in front of the largest knot of veteran Proceran soldiery on the field? A rider approached, breaking up her musings, and conferred quietly with Captain Onaedo. She glanced at him, brow raised.

“The Black Queen’s surrender seems to be holding,” he told her.

The Grand Alliance would have folded like parchment if it hadn’t, Elvera grimly admitted to herself. Even now, in the distance, she could see the buckling lines of her lady’s host when it was fighting on a single front – two would have ended them in an hour. The Stygian phalanx was pushing through the Procerans inch by inch, unflinchingly, and with few losses. On the left flank the Bellerophans were being hacked into by eager Tartessos captains, though the enemy’s formations were so dense it was like wrestling with a boulder. Elvera would have spared a moment to be impressed by the way conscripts with only spears and old armour were holding up so well in front of proper warriors if the Bellerophan stubbornness wasn’t in the course of losing her this battle. Delosi forces held the other flank, facing Malagan warbands, and though the scribes themselves were nothing to worry of the mercenaries they’d hired had stiffer spines and sharper blades. The Malagan captains were only barely holding on, and if they broke it would turn into a massacre. The Procerans at the centre would be encircled and choked by the Stygian phalanx while Elvera’s left flank remained stuck and unable to help. Until the centre collapsed as well, anyway, and it was swept through as well.

“We won’t be winning this battle,” Captain Elvera bluntly said. “All we can do is hold and hope for Lord Marave to beat back the rest of the League.”

“What would you advise, then?” Captain Onaeodo asked.

“I’d throw everything we have in reserve at our right flank,” she said. “And pray it’ll hold long enough.”

It wasn’t an order, oath forbade it, but it was treated like one.

—

“I expect,” Yannu Marave calmly said, “that you come bearing a threat.”

Had they been dealing with a lesser villain, Tariq thought, then the Lord of Alava would have been correct. If there’d ever been a time for the armies of the East to turn on the Grand Alliance, it was now. Debacle was unfolding down south, while a mere mile outside this tent a hard battle was being fought. Helike’s army had swept out of Arcadia like a tide, hammering at the right flank unexpectedly, and even as Lord Yannu redeployed to meet the threat two more blows had come in quick succession: the soldiers of Penthes smashing into the left flank while those of Nicae poured out in the centre. The first half hour had been one sided butchery, for the Alliance’s army had been taken utterly by surprise, but now that it’d had time to form up a brutal stalemate of shield walls had formed. Yet all it would take was for the Army of Callow to resume firing its siege engines at the army, and the battle would be over. Odds were that Catherin Foundling would never again get advantage so heavy and undeniable over the hosts of the Grand Alliance, and if she were a fool then she would have instructed her followers to take advantage of it. The Grey Pilgrim saw no such thing within Vivienne Dartwick, and that brought forth just as much fear as it did relief.

“Queen Catherine offered the surrender in good faith,” the young woman replied just as calmly. “It stands, regardless of circumstance. I have come to discuss terms of ransoming.”

Tariq almost laughed at the audacity of that. Lady Dartwick had ridden into her enemy’s camp with nothing but a cursory escort, unarmed, and sat herself at the table across one of the most powerful men in the west without batting an eye. Like she did not doubt for a moment that she belonged there, though the Pilgrim’s eye told him she was not without doubts. They were not, however, woven into every part of her as they had been the previous year. Instead now there was a pulsing sentiment that split the difference of ambition and yearning, and it had nestled deep at the heart Vivienne Dartwick. The dark-haired woman, Tariq thought, had quite clearly lost her Bestowal. She was the Thief no longer, both his eyes and the whispers of the Ophanim had so ascertained. And yet, in the bargain of that loss, she had gained something altogether more dangerous: belief.

Am I , the Pilgrim thought , looking at your successor, Catherine Foundling?

“Ransoming,” Lord Marave said, tone flat. “You wish to have some of your forces released?”

“I have come to bargain,” Lady Vivienne pleasantly smiled, “for the ransoming of every force that surrendered to the Peregrine.”

Whispers, sharp and urgent. Not because of the woman’s words, for those were no surprise, but for something unfolding. There was, the Ophanim conveyed, to be another great breach between Creation and Arcadia. Soon, and it would be calamitous in some way. The Peregrine closed his eyes, feeling out the miracle he had woven over the sky. It was on the edge of passing, though it would be a natural death: Creation’s true dawn was about to begin, and it would chase away his own conceited mimicry.

“That is not an offer mine to accept,” Yannu Marave said. “But the terms must be interesting, for what you offer to be worth so many soldiers.”

“The aid of said soldiers,” Vivienne Dartwick replied. “Against the League of Free Cities.”

Left to it, Tariq thought, they would keep fencing for some time. Careful and wary both, even as death bloomed out on the fields. Not without reason, but the situation was on the edge of taking a grim turn. The Tyrant of Helike might have been called here by the Black Queen’s ploy, but he suspected even she did not truly understand what she’d unleashed. She’d let the fox into the henhouse, as reckless as ever.

“Lord Yannu,” the Pilgrim quietly asked. “Can this battle be won without their assistance?”

The other man’s lips thinned.

“If our last hand is played,” he said.

“It is, I think, about to be snapped over the Tyrant’s knee,” Tariq said.

“Then it is not impossible, yet the path is narrow,” the Lord of Alava said.

“Then we have an accord, Vivienne Dartwick,” the Pilgrim said.

There was a flicker of surprise on her face, though she mastered it swiftly.

“There is a mage among my escort,” she said. “If I might be allowed to send a signal?”

“Do so,” Tariq said. “And hurry, for-”

Creation shivered, to a sound like glass breaking had the glass been screamed by a hundred thousand voices. The Grey Pilgrim was on his feet in a heartbeat, leaving his words unfinished even as he raced out of the tent. The Ophanim’s voices rose in a chorus of anger at the thoughtlessness of what had been done, and he could only agree. A breach fractured the plain between the armies fighting, shaped like a thick pane of glass shattered by blow – spinning out in cracks. Through it fell thousands and thousands of horsemen, the very same he had sent into Arcadia. Lady Dartwick came to stand at his side, face gone pale.

“Send your signal,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Before it is too late.”

Cursing his weary bones, the Peregrine straightened his back. First he would need to enlist Laurence, but after that? There was a villain among the rain of soldiers that was being carried down by a swarm of gargoyles. The Rogue Sorcerer should be able to hold him until the two old hands arrived.

Kairos Theodosian had been allowed to run rampant for too long, and an end brought to his scheming was long overdue.

—

It wasn’t even much of a drop, Hakram thought, but then it hadn’t needed to be.

Ten, twelve feet the orc estimated. He’d seen horses jump half that without hurting themselves, though admittedly not horses in armour and bearing armoured riders. Still, he suspected it’d been the angle of it more than anything else: like the floor dropping off under and entire army. Their return to Creation had been accompanied by a horrifying song. Horses by the thousands screaming for their broken limbs, falling to the side and rolling over soldiers crushed by their weight. Horns and trumpets as the Procerans and Levantines who’d remained unharmed tried and failed to assert order, and all the while Kairos Theodosian laughed convulsively. Rend , the red-eyed boy had ordered Arcadia, and beneath the hooves of the west’s cavalry the earth had been rent asunder. At least the Tyrant seemed half-dead for it, Adjutant thought. The orc had seen higher sorceries of this calibre before, but only once before an aspect destructive on such a scale: the Carrion Lord’s own, when he had wrecked the doomsday fortress made from Liesse. Lord Black had been near killed by the overreach, however, where Kairos Theodosian remained conscious. Feverish, yes, exhausted and drenched in sweat. Yet still very much awake.

“It appears,” Adjutant said, “that you’ve repelled the enemy.”

The Tyrant did not reply, slumped and breathing laboriously. The villain was seated on his throne still, a gaudy thing bejewelled and set on a platform almost as luxurious. The platform itself had been carried down by a swarm of gargoyles, along with the wooden frame holding up Hakram himself. And more, too: Lord Kairos’ personal guard had been held up by pairs of the constructs, slowing their fall by enough the descent did not wound them. It’d allowed Adjutant a read on the amount of gargoyles that existed in whole, which to his eyes was somewhere between three and five thousand – mostly likely on the lower end of that span. It was still a colossal investment of resources to have made so many of the creatures, especially for a city-state, and should they ever be broken Hakram suspected it would be a crippling blow for the villain. Something to pass along, when he returned to Catherine. Lord Kairos did not reply to his comment, instead sending out further swarms of gargoyles with an anemic twitch of the arm. Adjutant’s eyes narrowed. The thousand-strong retinue of Helikean soldiers was making a slaughter of the horsemen in disarray, methodically scything through the wounded and the frightened, but it was not them the constructs had gone after.

“Better than repelled,” Kairos Theodosian rasped out. “ Captured .”

Fascinated, Hakram peered at the swarms that were causing such a racket further down the shattered enemy column. There were seven of them, spiriting away seven prisoners. Seven crowned princes and princesses of Procer, he thought, snatched by the gargoyles in the midst of the howling chaos that’d been crashing down onto Creation.

“And now-” Lord Kairos began, but a wet cough tore out of his throat.

The boy’s lips, Hakram saw, were flecked with blood.

“And now,” the Tyrant croaked, “dawn.”

The orc looked up, in time to see the shining star that held back the night wane, and the truth of Creation replace it. The drow were struck down anew, before they could even properly stir.

—

Akua Sahelian watched dawn rise, a crow on one side and a well on the other.

They had watched it all unfold from the highest point in the camp of the Army of Callow, the graceful dance that’d spanned a night and brought them to this very moment. The shade who’d once been the heiress to Wolof had been taught the arts of treachery since the cradle, and taken to them like few others, so perhaps she was the only person in all of Iserre who could suitably appreciate what Catherine had done. The seamless sequence, born of an understanding of her foes that had been like an astronomer’s prediction of spheres in their orbit. Akua had glimpsed but a fraction of the preparations that arranging the stretch of a single night – no, not even that, barely even a bell in duration – had taken and so what she saw was not the luck of meddler but instead a net whose weaving had begun weeks ago, if not months.

“O Goddess of Night,” the shade said. “You walk along her thoughts, do you not? How much of it did she truly anticipate?”

“Enough,” the Eldest Night said.

Though the urge to press the matter burned on her tongue, she did not purse. Akua was not Catherine, to chastise and wheedle entities far beyond her ken with that fearlessness that was sister to folly. Even without moving a finger the shade could feel the towering weight of the goddess who had been born to the name of Andronike, the millennia of blood and screams she had woven into apotheosis. It felt like even just an irritated glance from the half of Sve Noc would be enough to make dust in the wind of Akua, for one’s presence was mountain and the other feathers.

“And now I am called on to do my part, leal servant that I am,” the shade murmured.

In the sky a streak of coloured light stretched, the signal from Lady Dartwick that surrender had been turned into effective – if still temporary – alliance.

“No servant of mine,” the goddess said. “You wield, but do not make covenant.”

“Alas, O Goddess, my heart has already been taken,” Akua smiled.

“This is humorous, for you imply romantic feeling when in truth referencing grievous bodily harm,” Andronike said, tone smug. “I have mastered your ways, shade.”

“I am helpless before your guile, Sve Noc,” she replied, tone the slightest hint of dry.

The crow cawed in high-handed agreement.

“There will be need of a word, to bring it forth,” the goddess said. “Have you chosen?”

“I have,” Akua said, lips quirking. “I believe she would approve.”

“Then we begin,” Andronike said.

Her work was not as crude and unpolished as to require physical contact to be wielded: proximity and binding were sufficient. She who had once been the Diabolist allowed herself to sink into the sea of Night, the receptacle she had filled with the might of the Mighty night after night. Akua had known men and women, in Praes, who would have sold half the world to have such power at their fingertips. And it’d been entrusted to her almost as an afterthought , like it was a chore instead of the kind of privilege children would murder their progenitors for without hesitation. No oath stayed her hand, now, and no chain held her so closely that with this in her grasp she could not sever it. She could turn on the woman who’d slain and bound her. She could even bring this entire beautiful house of cards tumbling down on her head simply by doing nothing. Instead, Akua Sahelian opened black-rimmed eyes and bared a smile like a blade of ivory.

“Fall,” she said.

A torrent of darkness shot up in the sky, and from dawn wove an eclipse.

—

Princess Rozala Malanza woke disoriented, her leg throbbing with pain. She groaned and almost panicked when she realized she could not move her arms or legs – she was bound by rope – but mastered herself before she could scream. She would not give the Enemy the pleasure of her fear before it took her life and sent her back to... No, this was not Cleves. It was Iserre, it was dark, and for reasons unknown she was hanging upside down from a rope.

“Ah,” a familiar voice gravelled. “I thought the prince from Cantal would be first to wake, on account of the thicker skull.”

“Deadhand?” Rozala croaked, her mouth cottony and vision swimming. “You’ve captured me?”

She forced herself to concentrate, and after squinting for a moment saw through the gloom.

“Not exactly,” the Adjutant ruefully replied, just as she realized the orc was hanging upside down a mere foot to the left.

Gods, her throat was parched. Wiggling in her bindings, Rozala saw she was in hallowed company indeed: to her right was Prince Arnaud, and from there a procession of royalty continued. Every prince and princess of Procer in her host was strung up there in a neat row from a raised beam, like venison left to dry.

“Who-” she began, turning to the orc, but then she remembered. “Merciful Gods, the Tyrant. We were thousands and...”

“Shhhh,” a young man called out. “The gallery doesn’t get to talk, Rosalie.”

“Rozala,” the Adjutant said.

“Oh, who cares,” the Tyrant of Helike dismissed. “Proceran royals, eh? There’s so many of them, why even bother? She can complain to Cordovan Hallenban if she feels insulted.”

The Damned, she saw, hadn’t even bothered to turn to address them. He was sprawled on a lumpy throne set atop a platform. Likely for some eldritch reason a goat was standing at his side, allowing herself to be petted while he fed her grass from his palm.

“Cordelia Hasenbach,” Princess Rozala coolly corrected. “First Prince of Procer and Warden of the West.”

Hasenbach was not and never would be bosom friend of hers, but she would not let the elected ruler of the Principate be mocked by a twisted little shit like Tyrant of Helike.

“If Rosalie talks again, my lovelies, eat one of her eyes,” Kairos Theodosian absent-mindedly ordered. “You can choose which.”

Rozala’s blood ran cold when she saw a gargoyle’s animalistic visage peer out over the edge of the beam from which she hand, chittering eagerly. There was a bleat from the goat and the Tyrant snorted.

“No, not you ,” the boy said. “You’re a terrible horse.”

Rozala eyed the Adjutant, wondering whether a whispered question was worth the risk of losing an eye, but the orc suddenly stiffened. A heartbeat later, there was a burst of light as a cut was made through thin air and in a gust of stormy wind three silhouettes emerged in front of the Tyrant’s throne. Rozala knew them well, had fought at the side of most.

“Tyrant,” the Grey Pilgrim greeted the villain. “This has gone on for long enough.”

The Damned idly flipped the jeweled scepter in his hand, catching it by the handle.

“Give me a moment,” the Tyrant of Helike said, cocking his head to the side. “I’m trying to think of an answer that involves a goat pun. Just kidding? No, that’s sloppy. I hold myself to higher standards than that.”

“It will be a mercy to put an end to you, lunatic,” the Saint of Swords said.

“I bet you didn’t even make that one on purpose,” the Damned laughed.

“There’s sorcery being used,” the Rogue Sorcerer told the other two. “Still distant, but...”

“Cutting the head of the snake will serve, for a start,” the Peregrine said.

The old man raised his staff, and as the air thickened with the weight of Chosen preparing to battle a small sound ripped through the tension. It was, Rozala realized, a match being struck. Off the ornate helmet Prince Arnaud still wore even unconscious. Nonchalantly lighting her pipe, the Black Queen flicked the spent match down and offered up a sharp-toothed smile.

“So,” Catherine Foundling said, “we’ve got about an hour before everybody here ends up enlisting in the Dead King’s army the hard way.”

She shrugged, and leaned against the Adjutant’s tied form.

“But hey, by all means don’t let me interrupt.”

Chapter 32: Woven; Weaver

“And so Triumphant laughed, saying: ‘You spellsingers, wisdom of stars and weavers of fate, know now despair. I will break you so utterly even the remembrance of your wholeness will suffocate, and where rose your tall spires there be only the barren sea I made of your defiance.'”
– Extract from the Scroll of Dominion, twenty-fourth of the Secret Histories of Praes

Gods, but it’d been close.

More than once we’d tread the edge of the cliff, and every time it’d been all I could do not to pull the trigger on all of my most horrifying contingencies. If the Pilgrim had refused the surrender, proved himself someone it was hopeless to work with under any circumstances. If the Tyrant had refused to send forward his armies, proved willing to sacrifice even his own plans to prevent truce being made in the west. If Vivienne had fallen even slightly short of the kind of woman I believed she could be, and chosen the early gain over the slow triumph. Every time I’d sat with Komena on my shoulder, watching them face the crossroads and knowing if the wrong choice was made all that was left would be the hardest of measures. And yet, even as I pulled at my pipe and let trails of wakeleaf escape my nostrils, I saw them all turn towards me like sunflowers to the sun and understood bone-deep why someone like Dread Emperor Traitorous could exist.

I’d tasted heights in my life, more than most ever got to experience. Nights of pleasure with men or women who knew their way around a good time, and subtler pleasures of luxury too: a cup good wine and a crisp pipe, meals exotic and exquisitely prepared. Different sorts of satisfactions as well. Evenings by the fire with people I would love until death took me, but also sharper edges – victory in battle, death and terror inflicted on enemies I despised. Enjoyments that soothed the soul but others that had your teeth clenching in harsh, spiteful vindication. And while I knew it was passing, that like a spasm of pleasure or the ephemeral bliss of a drug it would die out and leave the body strained for it, there was a moment where I saw it in their eyes. The knowledge that to get here, in this moment, I had played them for fools and done it remaining one step ahead of them the entire time. The blend of hatred and fear and respect, but most of all of something that was kin to awe, it was like nothing else I’d ever felt.

If someone had distilled and bottled victory, I thought, it would taste something like this.

What a dangerous thing this sensation was, and how careful I must be to avoid falling in love with it. Else I would become another Traitorous, another Irritant, another mad murderer who cared more for victory as an end instead of a methods. For the triumph of cleverness at the expense of all else, like it was enough to simply beat the others.

“Black Queen,” the Peregrine greeted me tiredly. “That is a considerable claim you have made.”

I pulled at my pipe once more and discretely glanced at Hakram. Prince among men that he was, he understood what I needed from him without a word.

“Atalante,” he whispered. “Hierarch. Knows about Zeze.”

The forces at the Tyrant’s fingertips that were still missing, along with something he should have no way of knowing: the final pieces to the sharp-edged jigsaw puzzle that we’d all made of this night. My instincts had been right, then. Kairos was making a play for the shard of Arcadia, using another madman and the most powerful priests in his armies. He still thought he was playing me, I thought, smiling at the villain on question. But he’d actually given me the last puzzle pieces I needed to be able to run a spit through his guts and hold him over the fire like a wildly treacherous goose.

“Kairos can vouch for me on that,” I drawled, pushing myself off Hakram. “After all, he’s been talking with the Dead King throughout this entire campaign.”

The Tyrant gasped theatrically as everyone’s eyes turned towards him. Leaning on my staff, I limped forward and left behind the hanging royals as well as Adjutant. It’d not escaped my notice that Kairos had seven crowns and my closest friend in the world hanging from that wooden beam. I might have been amused by that, if not for the implicit threat to the gesture: that he’d kill Hakram the moment I made a play for the shard, that I could only snatch that prize from him if I was willing to make Adjutant my one . A heartbeat passed and the odd-eyed villain started tittering, putting his trembling hand over his heart in an expression of repentance.

“You got me,” the Tyrant of Helike snickered. “I tried to sell you all out to the Dead King... and for that, I sincerely apologize.”

The sincerity, I thought, was cast somewhat into doubt by his broad shit-eating grin.

“Though, in my defence,” Kairos continued, “it’s the Black Queen’s own court warlock who decided to read the entire Kabbalis Book of Darkness and got himself... inconvenienced.”

Huh. I wondered if he genuinely didn’t know that Masego had actually gotten his hands on much, much worse than that – Neshamah’s actual memories, harvested from an echo in Arcadia – or if he was simply keeping that under wraps for later use.

“By inconvenienced,” the Tyrant added in stage whisper, “I mean he went crazy and ate a city’s worth of souls and now the Dead King is riding him like a mule, if you’ll forgive my language.”

I could have tried to cut him off before he got all of that out, but I didn’t bother. For one, the longer he kept talking the least likely he was to notice I’d ordered my Lord of Silent Steps to take care of a few loose ends. And, most importantly, I wanted him to out the facts that it was Masego who was, uh, getting slightly rough with the fabric of Creation. Nobody here trusted the Tyrant the slightest fucking bit, and this would be taken as an attack on his part – which meant that might my reply, which admittedly stretched the truth a little, would be granted a lot more good faith than anything coming out of my mouth usually would get.

“The Hierophant attempted to find a way to kill the Dead King, at great personal risk to himself,” I said, carefully avoiding mentioning that Masego would have taken a bite out of his own liver for that knowledge regardless of all other considerations, “but whatever it was the Ashurans used at Thalassina, it wounded him. The Hidden Horror seems to have taken advantage of that.”

But it wouldn’t have happened if the lot of you hadn’t gone a’crusading and started a battle that wiped a major city off the face of Creation , I left unsaid.

“That is unfortunate,” the Grey Pilgrim said, “yet-”

“If the next sentence that comes out of your mouth is we might have to kill him ,” I mildly said, “we’re going to have a problem.”

That didn’t win me any favour with the heroes, from the way their backs straightened. I wasn’t feeling all that threatened by that, to be honest. The Saint had tussled with Rumena, so she was far from fresh, and like the Tyrant for all his fronting the Pilgrim was dead tired. The only hero that was in fighting fit was the Rogue Sorcerer, and if it came to that I could bury him in a swarm of Mighty. I didn’t intend on outright dictating terms here, but I had no qualms with disabusing them from the illusion that they were in a position to dictate a single fucking thing to me. Including the death of one of my friends, no matter his current state.

“Shut your mouth, child,” the Saint of Swords said. “You-”

I glanced at the Peregrine.

“Tariq,” I calmly said. “Do muzzle your hound, before I decide to take offence.”

The old man’s face tightened, but he laid a hand on his attack dog’s shoulder and spoke to her in a whisper. I turned to the Tyrant, who was watching all of this happen with a kind of pure malicious glee I’d only ever seen in goblins before.

“Now would be a good time to order your armies to retreat,” I told him.

“I’m no general,” the odd-eyed boy said, “but we do appear to be winning.”

I could have pointed out that the drow had been strengthened by the eclipse Akua had brought at precisely the right time, and that now that bargain had been struck my armies would back those of the Grand Alliance against his. But that’d be missing the point, because none of this really mattered to him.

“Kairos,” I patiently said, “I understand you think that by standing here and mouthing off you’re serving as a distraction for the Hierarch claiming the shard unhindered, but you’ve been had. So call off your damn armies, and let’s have all of us a civilized conversation.”

The Tyrant of Helike gazed at me in disappointment, one eye shining red and the other teary from tiredness.

“Now, if I did have such a scheme,” Kairos Theodosian said, “and I do not, for I assure you I am most defeated and at your common mercy, but if I did... then the most elementary of steps would have been ensuring that the Dead King could not in fact see such a blow coming. That, in this most theoretical of worlds, though I am such a villain’s inferior in many ways distance and the nature of our bargain would blind him to the knife until the very last moment.”

His leg twitched restlessly.

“Now, Catherine, in this abstract, are you still suggesting that I was seen through?” the Tyrant asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m not clear on what exact measures you took, honestly, but I’m fairly sure they worked. Which is why I’m telling you that, while you launched your attacks here, I pre-emptively sold you out to Hidden Horror.”

His face went blank at my words, and I enjoyed the sight a lot more than I’d thought I would. It hadn’t even been all that complicated, to be honest. Not once I’d figured out that Neshamah had his finger in this pie anyway. Masego was the only angle he could feasibly have used other than myself, and that meant all it’d taken to pass a warning about what I suspected the Hierarch of being capable of was putting it to parchment and having one of the Wild Hunt carry it as far into the Arcadian wasteland as she could without getting killed or captured. Something like a shiver went through the Tyrant of Helike’s sickly frame at my words, though I could not be certain whether it was fear or excitement. Or, for that matter, something as mundane as exhaustion.

“Well,” Kairos Theodosian mused, “it seems we truly do have about an hour to live.”

He spared a look for some of the throng of gargoyles ever surrounding him, some of which flew away with urgent chittering.

“Queen Catherine,” the Pilgrim said, tone sharp.

“I’ll give you the broad strokes,” I said. “Kairos can fill in the parts I’m uncertain about. Won’t you, Kairos?”

Most of the time it was a damned pain to deal with intelligent opponents, but once in a while it had its uses. The Tyrant looked at the heroes, face twisting into a thoughtful frown as he asked himself what use I had for the heroes. It could not be to kill him, since he had to know just the same as I did that he’d slip away like an eel if we tried. He had symbolic hostages, had just finished making a broad splash in the story pond with a plan and so he was very much due a beating at heroic hands – followed by him scampering away to fight another day. So no, I wasn’t trying to use the heroes as a borrowed knife. I was even, tacitly, inviting him to be part of this as something other than an enemy. Which meant...

“There are six of us,” Kairos noted, eyeing me as he wagged a finger chidingly.

“Adjutant will stay behind,” I replied.

“Not even one of them,” he laughed. “Ever bold, Catherine. Put this way, how can I refuse?”

My gaze returned to the Pilgrim, whose face had grown cold as the back and forth continued. The light tone of the exchange must have grated on him, considering people were dying as we spoke. You can’t act like that with the Tyrant , Tariq , I thought. He’ll pounce on that kind of weakness every time.

“The block on scrying is what gave it away,” I told the Pilgrim. “I’d been given details before that allowed me to catch on, troubles at the Observatory and my mages theorizing that the sky was already in use and that was why the rituals didn’t work. I thought it was a side-effect, at first, of whatever Hierophant is being tricked into doing, but it was just too convenient .”

The Rogue Sorcerer stirred.

“The scrying troubles are a consequence of the Keter’s Due of some great working,” he said. “That much I have confirmed.”

“Figured it might be that,” I said, “because Hierophant picked up the ruins of Liesse on the way here, and I’m no scholar of sorcery but I do know there’s one thing about that weapon that makes Akua Sahelian a legend: it made use of the Due.”

Instead of the turning Liesse and its surroundings into a blighted wasteland, Diabolist had used the wild release of wasted energy that accompanied every spell to power the city’s flight. That did not mean, however, that the artefact could not be shaped anew until the release served other purpose.

“You’re implying the Dead King, through the Hierophant, intervened to prevent scrying from being possible in Iserre,” the Pilgrim said.

He flicked a glance at the Rogue Sorcerer, who nodded a concession it was possible for that to have been the case. I didn’t need to tell the Peregrine much more than that: he might not have been in the middle of anything like this before, but given how long he’d been kicking around he would have been in the middle of a lot of things that were a little like this.

“We were meant to bloody each other,” the old man quietly said. “The Grand Alliance, the Legions of Terror, your Army of Callow. By cutting off the rituals, negotiation was made difficult and you -”

A coldly burning gaze turned to the Tyrant of Helike. I sympathized with the sentiment. The Pilgrim and I had both known we were doing the Dead King’s work for him, by fighting here in Iserre, but neither of us had grasped quite how literally that was the case until tonight.

“Me,” Kairos grinned. “I’ve had eyes in the sky this entire time, in a manner of speaking. And on occasion, I spoke with a dear friend of mine about... common interests.”

Which explained why the armies of the League and of Helike in particular had been able to dance around Iserre flawlessly, never encountering any true setback until I’d arrived on the surface with Sve Noc at my back: perhaps the only entity in the principality that could veil itself from the ritual Neshamah was using. And to make it even worse, with that knowledge Kairos had undertaken the collection of even more. Since he’d known where every army was, he’d been able to make deals with them for even more secrets until he was the only person in all of Iserre who truly knew what was going on. Which had made him, in turn, even more useful to the Dead King who needed an agent in the region to keep stirring the chaos and escalate the mess. I suspected he’d used that need a chip to learn quite a few things he shouldn’t. Likely the information about the Bard he’d traded me initially came from Neshamah, and for him to know of the specific price to my bargain with Larat – as he quite obviously did – meant the chances were good most of what Masego knew had been spilled and passed on. It did smack of the Dead King’s ironic touch, to be selling my secrets instead of his.

“Of course, they are villains,” I said. “Which means the Dead King always intended to kill him, and Kairos always intended on stealing the Dead King’s victory at the very last moment.”

I cast a curious glance at the Tyrant, since I was still unaware of the full details of what Neshamah was up to. I’d figured out that if no one ended up claiming the shard it would have no anchor and so just keep falling – you know, until it crashed on us – but I doubted the Dead King was just going to let that lying around afterwards. Though after making corpses out of the core armies of the Grand Alliance, the East and the League he should definitely have some further means to meddle.

“He planned on turning this lovely little ruin-realm into a fresh Hell, I do believe,” Kairos mused. “After binding our souls, raising us from the grave and unleashing us against all he opposed anyway. He’s got classic tastes, our friend up north.”

“Neat,” I flatly said. “So, Kairos here wanted to snatch the shard from the Dead King using the Hierarch and Atalante’s priesthood.”

“It was going to be beautiful,” the Tyrant sighed. “Terrible for all of you, of course, but absolutely glorious for everyone that matters. I’d even been looking into the practicalities of crashing it into the Serenity.”

He’d what ? No, now was not the time to let him distract me.

“Won’t work now,” I said. “The Dead King’s been warned. But, as it happens, there’s still a way to prevent this from killing us all.”

The Tyrant leaned back into his throne with a vicious grin.

“Now, this is the part I’ve been looking forward to,” Kairos Theodosian cheerfully said. “Go on, Catherine, I want to see how you’ll be selling the birth of a fae court sworn to Below to the Peregrine .”

The Pilgrim’s hackles went right back up, not that they’d ever gone down all that much. Might be more accurate to say the crux of his indignation had been pointed at another villain, for once. He didn’t accuse me, at least, though at his side Laurence looked both triumphant and remarkably eager to run me through. I rolled my shoulder to loosen it, the same way I’d used to do before fights – in a way, this was one. Without blades having been bared, but it counted all the same. All my plans meant nothing, if I couldn’t convince the Peregrine that backing me was the right choice. The Saint was a lost cause, and I knew next to nothing about the Sorcerer, but they’d both fall in line if Tariq gave his word. Leaning against my staff, I gestured upwards at the darkened firmament.

“Now, a realm has been carved out of Arcadia and sent careening down into Creation,” I said. “There’s no changing that, there’s not sending it back and destroying it would be worse: it’s close enough to us by now that if we broke it the aftershocks would likely kill everyone in Iserre. Which means that realm needs to be seen to, anchored, and there’s only three stories for us to craft that fate from.”

I raised a single finger, then jammed it towards the north.

“The Dead King’s story is a kingdom of death, made for the reigning king of the same,” I said. “Its herald was the folly and blindness of mortals, who willingly sacrificed themselves at an unseen altar to allow the blooming of calamity.”

I paused.

“It also involves everyone here dying and returning as a Revenant in his service, leading his armies in the conquest of Calernia,” I added. “Not, I feel same in assuming, anyone’s first choice.”

I shrugged.

“Now, there was a second story,” I said. “Woven by the hand of our very own Tyrant.”

Kairos nonchalantly waved, which had the Saint’s lips thinning in anger and her hand visibly reaching for her sword. It was almost unsettling to see that directed at someone else.

“His was the madness-”

“-visionary wisdom,” the Tyrant corrected.

“- of the Hierarch woven into the very fabric of a realm,” I continued. “A vessel of revolt, an instrument for the sowing of strife uncivil. That story, however, was broken.”

“She sold me out to the Dead King,” Kairos complained to the heroes. “You really can’t trust anyone these days.”

“The last story is mine,” I said. “It is made of crowns and debts, the desperate trick of a fox chewing through its own foot for fear of the night.”

“Then it is true,” the Grey Pilgrim grimly said. “You want to make a Court of Night.”

“Oh no, this is where you have me wrong,” I smiled. “What I want, Peregrine, is for us to make a god.”

My smile turned sharp, almost blade-like.

“Then to murder that god and make of his bones a highway for our armies.”

Chapter 33: Concord

“Ambition without principle is greed, principle without ambition is mediocrity.”
– Clodomir Merovins, ninth First Prince of Procer

“An empty throne, raised over a land of crossroads,” the Grey Pilgrim said, voice wary.

As it should be, I thought. It was not trouble for the faint-hearted that I was proposing to seek. Larat, now huntsman but once a prince of the Winter Court, had in those days schemed to slip the leash holding the fae to Arcadia by binding himself to Creation instead. Seven and one, a pattern that’d echoed around Calernia long enough for it to have the proper form of binding, and behind it the weight of earthly crowns laid at his feet. It’d been a clever enough scheme but also a risky one, not that he’d had much of a choice. As the King of Winter and the Queen of Summer wed and their war abruptly ended, with it changed the landscape of Arcadia: a single court, and with it different stories that meant Larat was running out of time if he ever wanted to wiggle his way out. Desperate measures had seen him lead a ramshackle Wild Hunt – born of nothing, for Spring and Autumn had not come and might never again – to swear itself to my service, and so avoid entanglements in Arcadia. Doubly clever he had been, the once-prince, for it was to a court contained within my frame he had sworn himself and his fellows. Like fish in the sea, the fae had been content to keep swimming in that familiar power until I gathered the crowns I owed and completed Larat’s scheme for him.

Then the Everdark happened and the power running through the veins of the fae had been ripped out, the reborn Night injected instead, and it had all begun to go awry.

At the moment, my Wild Hunt was not fundamentally all that different from Mighty. Oh their tricks and bodies were different – though I suspected that with time and the full settling of Winter within the Night, the Firstborn would begin taking one fae-like traits – but that was just the shape of their mould, so to speak. The material in those moulds was the same for Hunt and Mighty both, namely Night, which meant that Sve Noc could snuff them out at will. As the Sovereign of Moonless Night, I’d leaned on the oaths to get obedience from the fae because I did not have the know-how to use their connection to Winter as a leash. Given a few decades or a century I might have learned, but Larat would have been long rid of my service by then and so of this trouble as well. Sve Noc, though? They had built their apotheosis from scratch, and though the manner and nature of it had been nothing less than horror they had built it nonetheless. They could end the Hunt with a thought, and the fae had suspected that much from the moment they’d felt my surrender to the Sisters. And so they’d kept their oaths to myself and my subjects, even though they were no longer bound by them, for if they became an enemy I might be troubled to look into the practicalities of ending them. A shame for them, and for Larat, that I’d found out anyway.

“Gates, for the proper toll,” I agreed. “Paths through a realm without the... risks of Arcadia, but similar peculiarities. The armies on this field could turn a march of months into weeks instead, and intervene north before the fronts collapse.”

“And you would beget this through the murder of one in your service,” Tariq said, not bothering to hide his distaste. “Could accord not be reached instead?”

There was a sound like someone choking down laughter, which served to inform me Kairos apparently knew a thing or two about the fae.

“That is not in his nature,” I said. “And fae do not change . It is inevitable. Larat who was once the Prince of Nightfall will rise once more, ruler of a court of dusk, and turn on those that raised him. And when that happens-”

“- inevitability,” the Grey Pilgrim echoed. “A band of five, like few this world had seen, to smother that infant god in the cradle.”

The last words had his face going ashen, for some reason. I supposed the scope of what I’d suggested was beginning to sink in. In the interests of diplomacy, I refrained from mentioning I figured if any Choir was going to be in favour of infant-smothering it’d be Mercy. You didn’t get to make a greater good without laying a foundation of lesser evils, and the greater the scale of that good so with the evils that were its bedrock.

“Tariq,” the Saint hoarsely said. “You can’t seriously be considering this.”

She looked, I thought, like someone had upended her world.

“It sees to our every need,” the Peregrine said, and turned rueful eye on me. “How neatly you have tied us with the strings of necessity.”

I met his gaze unblinking.

“Should I apologize,” I said, “for making this a victory for others than myself?”

He turned away at that. Both at what I’d said, and at what was implied: that’d he been so set on being my enemy I’d had to work against him to help him. Silence stretched for a tense moment.

“Black Queen,” the Rogue Sorcerer said, politely inclining his head. “I have questions, if I may?”

Funny how they got all polite when they no longer had the upper hand. No, that was unfair of me. I was in no position to cast stones on the subject of civility. Beneath the swaying leather coat and the practical chain mail beneath, I could not help but notice that the Sorcerer was rather short. Still taller than me, I was forced to admit, but not by much. I’d had a glimpse of what he could do with the intricate casting rod he kept, and it’d been a notch in power and skill above what I’d seen out of any but the most powerful of Praesi warlocks. Fire-based, I’d vaguely remembered, but there must have been more to it than that: his unremarkable brown pupils were discreetly rimmed with colour, one scarlet red and the other verdant green. Akua had fought him while wearing me the once, but like me she’d failed to tease much out of him. Which meant most his tricks were still unknown, and all his aspects. Both Tariq and Kairos would shoot up as threats the moment they became members of our band of five instead of my spent opponents, Creation itself conspiring to make sure they were fit to participate in what followed, but like the Saint they were mostly known quantities.

I knew nothing of the Rogue Sorcerer, save that he’d repeatedly scrapped with adversaries seemingly his superior without ever taking a wound or revealing any of the dangerous tricks mages tended to hoard like magpies. That alone was enough to make him dangerous.

“Ask,” I replied.

“You will need seven crowns, as the price,” the hero said, his Lower Miezan smooth and accentless. “This I understand the logistics of.”

The gaze he flicked at the seven Proceran royals and Adjutant visibly hanging behind us made his point clear.

“It is the one, however that interests me,” he said. “Seven for weight, but the last to shape. It will be, in a sense, the most important aspect of what you propose.”

“The one we’ll bring with us into the deeps,” I said. “To be bestowed only at the heart of it.”

The Rogue Sorcerer’s lips thinned, obviously not considering that to be much of an answer, but in a sense it’d not been him I was speaking to. Tariq and Kairos both cast glances at me: one wary, the other gleeful. Yeah, there were three of us who could still qualify for the ‘one’. Kairos Theodosian was Tyrant of Helike by Name, but king of the same by title. Tariq was, in the eyes of many of his countrymen, the rightful ruler of Levant. And I had more than a few titles to throw around, these days, but the one that mattered most was Queen of Callow.

“As you say,” the hero murmured. “On the subject of roads and tolls-”

“It won’t be like Arcadia,” I admitted. “That is beyond my remit. It’ll take more than a powerful caster with the right tools to access it. We’ll have to raise gates in Creation, and bind them to the realm. After that, though, journey, should be seamless when the tolls are paid.”

“And the nature of said tolls?” the Sorcerer pressed.

“Blood,” the Pilgrim quietly said. “Isn’t it?”

It was Akua’s best guess, yes, and the Sisters were being ambiguous in their answers but implying that might be the case.

“Freely given,” I clarified. “One cut to enter, the other to leave. A sliver of life to sustain the crossroads realm.”

“And anybody could pass the gate,” the Rogue Sorcerer. “But very few would know how to build one.”

I smiled, and did not answer. The Sorcerer might be able to figure it out, I knew, especially if he was at hand when the realm was born. But aside from him? Maybe five people would have the know-how in all of Calernia, and most of them answered to me to some degree.

“We should kill her now,” the Saint of Swords calmly said.

My fingers tightened around my staff, but beyond that I gave no visible reaction. I glanced at Tariq and raised an eyebrow, silently letting him know that Laurence of Montfort was his fucking problem at the moment but that if she became mine he wouldn’t like what followed.

“I understand your worries, Saint-” the Rogue Sorcerer began.

“No, you don’t,” she bluntly said. “Because you’re barely even thirty, and you still think because she compromises once or twice it changes what she is. It doesn’t .”

“I would not swear truce with her beyond the Dead King’s end,” the Rogue Sorcerer replied, tone touched with strained patience, “but to refuse an arrangement right now would be worse than a sin, it would be a mistake .”

“Do you know who the most dangerous villain I’ve ever faces was, boy?” Laurence de Montfort casually said. “There’s a few people would consider the obvious contenders. I fought the first Horned Lord to wake in five centuries to a draw. I crawled in my own blood after a bout with the Lady of the Lake and put down the Drake Knight after his mind went. All of those would have butchered their way through half a legion of soldiers without batting an eye, all were monsters at the peak of their mastery. But the most dangerous villain I ever faced was my first: an alchemist so sickly he could barely hold a sword.”

She was arguing for my death, I was well aware, but this was still rather interesting so she had my full attention for more than one reason. The Jacks hadn’t put together nearly as much as I would have liked on the Saint, which only made sense if she’d spent most of her years wandering around Calernia as a cantankerous armed vagrant.

“I caught him early,” the Saint idly said. “People were going missing, and I looked into it – bandits and criminals, as it turned out, but he was still keeping them in cells and using them for bloody research. Yet it was for antidotes, for ways to end plagues and heal the worst of injuries. He was just the Salutary Alchemist, I thought, and so young. Not some hard-eyed vulture, and his Damnation looked like it was half an accident. Bad methods, but good ends. So I slapped him around some, made him pass his prisoners to the closest city’s gaol and told him he could use animals but not people. Then I let him off with a warning.”

Slowly, the Saint of Swords unsheathed her blade. She tapped it against her shoulder, striding around the Sorcerer but her eyes remaining on the Pilgrim the whole time.

“Gods, but the boy was brilliant,” she said. “Five years later and keeping to the rules, he distilled an essence of life – a potion that kept people alive past their time. When the secant pox hit Valencis he moved there to cure it, and stayed after. I thought, maybe it didn’t have to be a war all the time. That in some places, sometimes, we could have peace. Make exceptions.”

“Salutary,” the Rogue Sorcerer slowly said. “The word can mean beneficial, but the older meaning is health-giving .”

“Aye,” Laurence de Montfort grinned, old yellow teeth bared. “And give them health he did. Let them live past their time. Except he was the only one with the recipe. And it only bought them a few months at a time.”

I almost let out an impressed whistle, seeing where she was headed with this.

“The prince was old, and so he was owned,” the Saint derisively said. “And with every passing year someone else was in his debt that was old but also rich and powerful. Or sick in a way priests can’t see to, or wanting to look young or a hundred other paltry fucking things that could be fixed with the right brew. I heard nothing about the people who’d started to go missing again, in Valencis, until I ran into one getting grabbed by the fucking city guard . And when I asked questions they all covered for him, all closed ranks, because he’d gotten his claws in them and what were a few dead nobodies for his research when that research was so useful?”

In Procer, I remembered, they knew the Saint of Swords as the Regicide . For her very public slaying of the Prince of Valencis, many years ago.

“He was a helpful lad, the Salutary Alchemist,” Laurence de Montfort softly said. “Helped with his tonics and philters, when the going got rough for Chosen, never swung at blade at anybody in his life. And if I’d left him to it another decade, he would have owned half of Procer without anyone being the wiser.”

The Saint of Swords pointed her blade at me.

“There can be,” she slowly enunciated, “no truce with the Enemy. Not even when they are reasonable, helpful – especially then, because if you let the rot take even a moment then you will always have to amputate the limb.”

The Tyrant of Helike, never one to let an occasion to be a shit pass him by, enthusiastically clapped at the end of her tirade and called for an encore. I glanced at the other heroes. The Rogue Sorcerer’s face had gone blank, which to me reeked of hesitation. It made sense, didn’t it? Because to me Laurence was a zealous old biddy who regularly tried to kill me and my friends, but to the heroes she was the prickly, unpleasant grandmother they didn’t want but always stepped in when they were in trouble. And sure, she thought with her sword, but most of the time that kind of simplicity paid off for heroes. It lent them strength, got them through the worst villains brought to bear against them and if the Light was anything like the Night then conviction had a lot to do with how well you could use it. The Grey Pilgrim was the one that mattered, though, because where the Saint was respected the Peregrine was trusted . And even when he wasn’t, well, if he made a decision then the rest of the Grand Alliance couldn’t really break it without breaking itself given his pull in the Dominion. And I wasn’t sure Laurence would give a damn about that, given who she was, but I suspected the Rogue Sorcerer was a different story entirely.

And the Pilgrim slowly shook his head.

“I will not break the world that is to spare the world that could be,” the Peregrine said.

“Tariq, how many of these ‘turnabouts’ have you seen over the years?” the Saint hissed. “How many Damned made their apologies, swore they’d never meant to hurt anyone, said that they would help you keep the peace instead.”

“Dozens,” the Pilgrim said.

“And how many kept their word?”

“None,” the old man tiredly said.

“And still you want to make bargain with her? The battle’s not done, Tariq. It’ll get ugly, true enough, and thousands will die. Likely one of us too. But we can still win, and though we’ll be a ruin after we’ll be a ruin that can recover,” the Saint harshly asked. “But if we compromise, here and now? There’ll never be any recovering from that. The taint will be in the cause until it runs its course. So why ?”

“Because we are not animals,” Tariq softly replied. “Because we do not shy from compromise simply because it has burned us before. Because if we are willing to break armies for a point of theological purity, then that it is us that deserves the breaking. But most of all, Laurence?”

His eyes were bright as he turned to her, but there was no warmth to them. Only a cold, patient light like the distant radiance of a star.

“Because I will not brook unnecessary suffering,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

The two heroes stared each other down, tension mounting with the silence. The Saint had not sheathed her blade, and though the Peregrine bore no weapon to unsheathe in turn that hardly meant he was unarmed.

“Boo,” the Tyrant called out. “Booo. Just terrible. Bring back the other act.”

“If we bend, we will break,” Laurence de Montfort said.

I breathed out slowly, and though I did not begin to call on Night – that would have drawn attention to me, painted me as the aggressor – I shaped the working in my mind. It would have worked better in Arcadia, but if the Saint turned on me here there’d be no choice but to resort to it in Creation.

“If you still believe that, by morning light, then we will put it to judgement,” Tariq said.

The old woman’s jaw tightened in displeasure, but after a moment she gave a tight nod. She eyed me, spat down in the snow, but then sheathed her blade.

“Lovely,” I drawled. “What a treat you are, Laurence. Shall I take that as agreement on your end, Pilgrim?”

The Rogue Sorcerer glanced at Tariq, who nodded. The other man sighed but did not argue.

“Bargain is struck, Black Queen,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

“Bargain is struck,” I acknowledged, dipping my head.

“That’s nice,” Kairos said. “But here’s something none of you have considered.”

The Tyrant of Helike caught the scepter he’d idly been flipping all this time, and blindly pointed it over his shoulder. Gems incrusted in it began glowing, and an intense beam of fire shot out – before I could so much as move, it burned a hole straight through Rozala Malanza’s forehead.

“Should have sold the villain on the deicide first,” the Tyrant chided me.

I didn’t reply, simply raising an eyebrow, and only then did Kairos’s red eye narrow and he turned to look back over his throne. Where ‘Rozala Malanza’ had dissolved into shadows.

“Ah, the drow,” Kairos mused. “Is there even a single one of them left?”

“What kind of a second-rater do you take me for?” I asked.

Adjutant should be in the my army’s camp right about now, safely escorted there by the Losara Sigil after my Lord of Silent Steps spirited him away and left behind illusion. As for the royals, though, I had other intentions.

“I suppose we should discuss terms, then,” the Tyrant cheerfully said.

“Pilgrim?” I asked.

“I will listen,” the old man said, promising nothing.

“Best you’re going to get,” I told the odd-eyed king.

“It’s all I need,” Kairos Theodosian grinned. “Now, as you all know, I am an ardent proponent of peace.”

I was reluctantly impressed by how confidently he stated what everyone else here knew to be an outright lie.

“This entire little tiff has been nothing but a misunderstanding, I’m certain,” the Tyrant idly continued. “As such, a peace conference would be in all our best interests.”

That part I’d known he wanted for months now. But now he’d lay out what it was he wanted along with the rest of us at the same table, and that I remained deeply worried about.

“But,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Speak up, Theodosian.”

“It seems that an agent currently in the employ of the First Prince of Procer has committed heavy crimes while in the lands of the League of Free Cities,” Kairos smiled. “A complaint was lodged with the Hierarch, who now requires that criminal to stand trial before peace can be discussed.”

My eyes narrowed. No mention of whatever it was Cordelia was dredging out of Lake Artoise? Had that been a red herring, or was this?

“A name,” the Peregrine said.

“I believe he goes by Hanno of Arwad,” Kairos said.

“The White Knight,” the Rogue Sorcerer said in disbelief. “You want to put to trial the chosen of the-”

The Grey Pilgrim raised his hand.

“And if this request is granted, the League of Free Cities will observe a truce until both the trial and the peace conference are at an end?” he asked.

“Of course,” Kairos said. “I am, after all, a man of timid and tender disposition. If not for our beloved Hierarch’s indignation at such brazen offences, this war would never have-”

“For an objection to be lodged with the Hierarch himself, the ruler or representative of one of the member-cities of the League has to do it,” I interrupted. “In this case, who did it?”

“I believe it might have been the representative from Helike,” the Tyrant mused. “What an unlikely coincidence.”

So, Kairos’ play was centered around using the Hierarch against the White Knight then. That gave me something to work with when it came to thwarting him, though I couldn’t do it from here or tonight.

“I am willing to accept that condition,” the Grey Pilgrim said, “on behalf of the Grand Alliance.”

“Oh?” the Tyrant said. “Yet the head of this crusade is Her Most Serene Highness Cordelia Hasenbach. Can you truly speak on her behalf?”

“In this instance I will,” Tariq said. “He would come regardless, Theodosian.”

“That’s reassuring to hear,” Kairos affably replied. “Yet it has been brought to my attention you’ve this nasty habit of breaking oaths, Pilgrim. I will require a guarantor. Now, Catherine, I do remember you promising me in writing that-”

“I lied,” I told him without missing a beat. “You know, while positioning you to overextend in battle and selling you out to the Dead King.”

“That was most unkind of you,” he agreed. “Yet we are, I believe, allies.”

“Of course,” I lied.

“Then I will require you to be guarantor of our greying friend’s oath,” the Tyrant of Helike said, odd-eyed gaze grown cool. “And to kill him personally, should he break it.”

“That’s all?” I frowned.

I didn’t like making empty promises, but this little bastard had been puppeteering half the armies of Calernia into killing each other while the damned Dead King was invading up north for the better part of a year. When we had shared interests, as in against the Wandering Bard, I did not mind working together. Otherwise he was at best a potential threat and more likely an outright enemy. Hells, the Peregrine had tried to kill me a few time and I still considered him to be more of an ally.

“That oath, and yours as guarantor, will have to be taken before every one of importance in all three armies on this field,” the Tyrant casually added. “Proper ceremony and all that.”

Ah, and there we were. Like I’d turned the screws on Razin Tanja a while back, he wanted me to give my word in front of enough people it’d seriously damage my reputation if I broke it afterwards. Of course, killing the Grey Pilgrim regardless of circumstances would sunder the Grand Alliance and most likely sink the Liesse Accords. But if I made and broke an oath before the same people I’d then need to convince to sign those same Accords, I was taking a torch to the worth of my word for those I most needed to believe in it. He truly was a vicious little prick, wasn’t he? I glanced at Tariq, who met my gaze and slowly nodded. He’d realize the trouble inherent to breaking his own word, I thought, but would that stop him if he thought it was necessary to do it? Probably not. But this needs a foundation of trust to work , I thought. And he’d extended it first, even if I had to twist his arm to get there.

“Agreed,” I said.

“Then we are all friends once more,” the Tyrant of Helike said. “And I believe there was some talk of crowns. Shall you have them sent for, Catherine?”

“There’s no need,” I said. “Ivah?”

The illusory curtain of shadows went down, and seven princes and princesses of Procer were revealed to be standing wide-eyed a mere twenty feet to our side. They had, after all, heard the entire conversation from start to finish.

Chapter 34: Seven

“Never once have I betrayed, for such an act first requires the extension of trust.”
– Dread Empress Foul II, the Forthright

Now, far be it from me to even remotely imply Kairos Theodosian was not at best the worst ally anyone would ever have and at worst essentially a malignant disease inflicted on Creation. That said when it came to, uh, the sheer number of crowned heads gathering in the Principate at any given time then he almost had a point. I’d had Hakram drill me on the names and attendant principalities, and still I was pretty sure I had at least two of them confused. Both Princess Bertille of Lange and Princess Leonor of Valencis were women in their late forties with dark hair and tan skin, which considering I’d never spoken a word to either did not make differentiating them at a glance easy. Still, it wasn’t them that’d matter in that throng of royalty. The keystones here were two, princesses both. One of them familiar by now: Princess Rozala Malanza of Aequitan, who was still glaring at the Tyrant of Helike for his casual murder of her illusory form. Kairos seemed genuinely delighted at the prospect of having made yet another powerful enemy. The other I’d met only once before, when we’d had that pleasant chat under afternoon sun where I’d politely asked her and a few thousand riders to turn back. Princess Sophie Louvroy of Lyonis, one of Hasenbach’s staunchest partisans in Procer and I suspected the check sent on Rozala in case her command of a large army so close to Salia prompted... ambitions.

Where Princess Rozala was dark-haired and dark-eyed, tall yet curvy in the way that classical Arlesite beauties tended to be, Princess Sophie was a pale blonder with blue eyes and a narrow face. The Princess of Lyonis was a few years older, I knew from the reports of the Jacks, but it was hard to tell at a glance. They were not the oldest of the seven royals standing revealed in the eclipse’s gloom, nor those ruling the wealthiest or most influential principalities, yet there were no denying it was they who shared the reins of authority. Princess Sophie did so as the First Prince’s eyes and ear in the south, while if Vivienne’s spies had it right then Princess Rozala was considered the informal heiress to the coalition of crowns that Prince Amadis Milenan had laboriously assembled. Since the Battle of the Camps said Prince of Iserre had been cooling his heels in the hands of the Kingdom of Callow as a prisoner, so given the ever-fluid nature of Proceran politics it was only natural a successor had emerged. They could do worse, silently conceded. Malanza was a skilled commander, and though no great diplomat she was not without allure. It would be easy enough to contrast her solid military record to Cordelia Hasenbach’s own lack of anything similar and reliance on her uncle the Iron Prince for all things warfare.

I doubted they’d ever have the votes to seriously threaten Cordelia in the Highest Assembly, but as a bloc of opposition headed by Princess Rozala they could be a force to reckon with.

“This is rank madness,” a dark-haired woman said.

That accent was Alamans, not Arlesite, which should mean I was looking at Princess Bertille of Lange.

“It is certainly dubious,” Princess Sophie of Lyonis agreed, watching me warily.

That sounded like a refusal in the making, and from one of the two people I would much prefer to be in agreement instead of opposition. It would establish whether what followed would be known as a grave diplomatic incident or a heroic bargain struck in the face of despair.

“The exact meaning of giving away a crown are still unclear,” Prince Louis of Creusens calmly said.

The Prince of Creusens was one of Amadis’ – now Rozala’s perhaps – and somehow managed to make a suit of armour quite obviously fitted to him look too large for his frame. He had a scholarly look about him, and his russet eyes were calm even if half his face was a swelling bruise and he was being careful not to put weight on one of his legs. Too delicate-looking a man for me to find him attractive, I thought, but he was not unpleasant to look at.

“Would it mean abdication, Your Majesty?” he asked me outright. “The surrender of our sovereign lands to one of the fae, or even yourself? An offer so imprecise cannot truly be entertained.”

“A trinket will have to be offered,” I said. “But what you will be surrendering, in truth, is rather more abstract: it is you ‘right to rule’.”

“To clarify,” Prince Louis calmly said, “such a gesture will not in and of itself mean abdication?”

“It most definitely does not,” the Tyrant grinned. “And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“It will, save if you are fools,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

For once, the sight of every prince and princess there unconsciously shifting to face him more fully did not bring out irritation. The respect that Tariq commanded and one of the oldest and perhaps the most famous living hero on Calernia was, for once, aiding me.

“Chosen,” Princess Rozala said, “I would request your guidance in understanding this. I cannot and will not condemn the people of Aequitan to a grisly fate, not even for victory this day.”

“Hardly a victory, that we dance one and all to the Black Queen’s tune,” the Prince of Orense scoffed.

Early fifties, this one, and the long brown hair that went down to his shoulders was also bound in a bun behind his head. Prince Rodrigo of Orense, of who I knew very little save that his open scorning of the First Prince in a formal vote had been the talk of the Principate in my absence – and not in a manner that was flattering for him, considering it was Cordelia Hasenbach who’d put an end to the Levantine raids that’d ravaged the south of his principality.

“You never were much of dancer, Rodrigo,” Prince Arnaud of Cantal disdainfully said. “Leave this to your betters, would you?”

Ah, that fucker. Though not one of the royals here with true authority, Prince Arnaud Brogloise had raised my hackles more than once in the past. He was, at the very least, a prodigiously skilled actor. After the Battle of the Camps, when I’d still had the benefit of fae senses, I’d noted that his heartbeat never rose even when he was seemingly furious or busy shouting.

“Arnaud,” Princess Rozala sharply bit out. “Chosen, I apologize for the interruption.”

The Prince of Cantal look appropriately chided, though a mite resentful, and once more I wondered how much of it was an act if not the whole cloth. Rodrigo of Orense’s lips quirked a tad smugly, but seemingly content with that intervening victory he pursued the conversation no further.

“You are forgiven,” the Tyrant magnanimously allowed.

“Though the earthly crown will not be taken from your brow, save if you yourself do so, you will have lost the authority of a ruler in the eyes of the Heavens,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Lingering in that role after discarding it before Gods and men can only bring calamity.”

“I figure it’d be subtle at first,” I said. “Small nudges. Crops get a little worse, people listen a little less. If you keep holding, though, then it’s a different story.”

“Disease and strife,” the Peregrine said, “and they will only grow, so long as authority is kept.”

“To clarify,” Prince Louis spoke once more, echoing his own words, “abdicating in favour of kin would ward off this... curse?”

“It would,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Though ever bearing another crown would birth it anew.”

The Prince of Creusens then, to my surprise, turned to me as if seeking confirmation. I nodded, as to the best of my knowledge it was true. His lips thinned, and I caught his muscles twitching as he stopped himself from looking at someone for guidance. By the looks of it, I mused as I gauged the angle, it would have been Princess Rozala. One of hers, then. Said Princess of Aequitan was standing tall, fingers clenched, and met my gaze eye to eye.

“Foundling,” she said.

“Rozala,” I replied.

“This... lunacy of a land you speak of making,” the Princess of Aequitan said. “Will you allow passage through it to any who would use it to fight the Dead King?”

“That will not be mine to decide,” I said, “but I will bare sword to enforce such a term, should it come to that.”

“The Kingdom of Callow and its allies will refrain from making war on the Grand Alliance, until the peace conference is ended?” Princess Rozala pressed.

“Safe in Callow’s defence, or that of its allies,” I agreed.

The other woman’s jaw grew tight, eyes burning with something that was half fear and half fury.

“There is horror to the north, Catherine Foundling, the likes of which you cannot yet grasp,” Princess Rozala Malanza said. “We war now against the Crown of the Dead not for pride or right or faith , but for the ugly prize of scant survival. In that struggle, Black Queen, do you claim to be friend or foe?”

“If your Grand Alliance makes accord with me, Princess of Aequitan,” I softly said, “oh, what howling ruin I will visit upon the King of Death. I have dooms in my arsenal that the world will shake of them.”

She breathed out shakily and straightened her back.

“Your word, Foundling,” Rozala Malanza asked, eyes on mine.

“On my oath,” I quietly replied.

Fingers steady, she unmade the claps of her helmet and ripped it off her head. Tossed, it flew and landed at my feet in a sprawl a snow.

“That’s one,” the Princess of Aequitan. “Ram it down his fucking throat, Black Queen. Hard enough that even in Keter they will hear the sound of our coming wroth.”

“Malanza,” Princess Sophie hissed, “you cannot simply-”

“It would be,” Rozala said, “cheap at twice the price.”

In the heartbeat that followed, I saw the lay of the royalty around them clear as day. Those whose gaze held admiration, but also misgivings: Louis of Creusens, Leonor of Valencis. Those who were moved to contempt instead, Bertille of Lange and Rodrigo of Orense. Arnaud of Cantal’s face was befuddlement incarnate, though the sudden turn had surprised him enough the confusion for once did not reach his eyes. As for Sophie of Lyonis, she was a battlefield of fear and shame. This , I thought, is why you are followers. Why even though the First Prince fears and mislikes her, it Rozala Malanza who was given the command. And I would not let bravery, let sacrifice, pass unremarked. Not when I had the means of doing otherwise. Leaning on my staff, I limped forward and bent the knee long enough to catch the edge of Malanza’s helmet. Catching her eye with mine, I tossed it back. She caught it, I thought, out of reflex.

“Foundling-” she began.

“Ivah,” I simply said.

My Lord of Silent Steps without a word, and stepped out of my shadow as if it’d been laying within it. In its hands was held a crown of ivory and gold, the front set with a heavy topaz upon which a heraldic griffin had been carved. Behind me, Kairos began softly laughing. I held out my hand, and the drow placed the crown on it before offering a bow and vanishing behind a fresh veil of illusions.

“The crown of Iserre, offered by Amadis Milenan,” I said. “Rozala Malanza alone of seven did not flinch, when sacrifice was asked. For that, she keeps her crown.”

I could have waited until the others had been talked or coerced into giving their own crowns, but I’d felt in my gut I should not. I was not certain, though, whether this was one of the instincts that’d served me so well when navigating stories or simply because it would have been beneath all involved to give Rozala Malanza the honour her due as a trick instead of a forthright display.

“ Connerie ,” Princess Bertille sneered. “You do not dictate to sitters of the Highest Assembly, Damned. Let Malanza waste her rights as she so desired, for I will not give mine.”

“You presume much, Bertille,” Prince Rodrigo snorted. “Not even ally to her cause, and you are to be exempt? I think not. At least I-”

“Enough,” Princess Sophie snarled. “I will not have such disorder. The Princess of Lange is correct in that a foreigner may not speak to the affairs of the Principate. We will, among ourselves, discuss who should be exempt.”

I looked at the Princess of Aequitan, then and what I saw on her face grieved me. Nothing in the loss of a crown moved me to sorrow, for I had little taste for mine and no reverence for those who’d earned their own by mere happenstance of birth. It was the raw, bleak disappointment I saw in a respected adversary as she stared the truth of her home in the eye. That, even as the sky was falling down on their heads, there were princes and princesses of Procer who would rather squabble than look up.

“It could be put to a vote,” Princess Leonor of Valencis hesitantly said. “As is our way.”

Something in Rozala Malanza’s eye dimmed a little as the fourth voice of seven gave weight to the dispute. From the corner of my eye I saw the Tyrant of Helike writhing as if having a harsh episode of the shakes, but it was only barely held in laughter that had him convulsing. He silently mouthed thanks at me.

“Shame on you all,” the Grey Pilgrim quietly said.

For a moment, the old man’s resounding disappointment gave them pause. But only for a moment, because even a hero’s chiding weighed short of a crown kept on the scales of the powerful.

“Chosen do not rule, in the Principate,” the Prince of Orense said. “Much less those born in Levant. With all due respect, Grey Pilgrim, you have already overstepped tonight in presuming to speak for the First Prince of Procer. Let us not further-”

A bundle fell at my feet with dull thump. A straight-edge cavalry sword, wrapped in a cloak.

“I had,” Louis Rohanon pensively said, “genuinely believed myself to be a decent man, until tonight.”

The silence in the wake of his words was loud.

“And still I hesitated,” the man who’d been the Prince of Creusens ruefully said. “If this is the truth of us, my friends, then we have no business wearing crowns.”

“A delicate heart ever bleeds,” Princess Bertille snorted. “Bled all the way out, it seems. Keep your empty sentimentalities to yourself, Rohanon-“

“Shame on you all,” the Grey Pilgrim said, and the light in his eyes as he spoke was the coldest manner of mercy.

The old man took one step forward, the butt of his staff leaving the ground.

“Raise your hand to a sitter of the Highest Assembly and there will be war, Levantine,” Prince Rodrigo warned.

“He’s right,” the Saint of Swords casually said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Go for a walk, Tariq.”

“Laurence-“

“You, Sorcerer,” the Princess of Lange barked, face gone pale with fright. “Are you not a chosen of the Heavens? Will you simply allow this lunatic thug to murder-”

The knife sliced her throat open without much of a spill, for Prince Arnaud Brogloise of Cantal had a steady hand.

“ Arnaud ?” the Prince of Orense gulped out.

The Prince of Cantal waited until the Princess of Lange had fallen to the ground before kneeling at her side, ignoring her dying gasps in favour of opening the clasp of her sheathed sword and taking it off her belt. He tossed it at my feet.

“Will this suffice?” he calmly asked, wiping his bloody knife on his forearm.

“It will,” I agreed.

“You’ll get the Regal Kindness for this, Brogloise,” Princess Sophie darkly said. “I’ll ask the First Prince the right to force it down your throat myself.”

“Unlikely,” the Prince of Cantal noted, pawing at his armour and producing a small scroll stamped with a seal. “By the decree of Her Most Serene Highness Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer and Warden of the West, I have been granted prior and absolute amnesty for all actions taken in the preservation of the Principate, as well as plenipotentiary power to treat with foreign powers in her name.”

“You were one of hers,” Princess Rozala faintly said. “Gods, Arnaud, for how long?”

“Hers, yours, Milenan’s,” the Prince of Cantal bitingly said. “What childish way of thinking. My only concern, Rozala Malanza, is the preservation of the Principate of Procer. What could possibly matter even remotely as much?”

Cool eyes turned to the other royals who had been bickering, until moments ago.

“Must I murder every last one of you, or will a blade at your throat prompt a sudden swell of heroism?” Prince Arnaud mildly asked.

“I like him,” Kairos mused. “He’s got that, what do you call it?”

“Cold-blooded ruthlessness,” I said.

“No, that’s not it. Ah, a knife ,” the Tyrant of Helike said. “He’s got a knife.”

Princess Leonor of Valencis had taken off her gauntlets, and her fingers were working on her ornate silver-enamelled helm. What I had taken for a decorative circlet soldered onto it turned out to be a silver tiara cleverly set into furrows. The Arlesite princess tossed it onto the pile at my feet, smile mirthless.

“What a slaughter of thrones you have made of this night, Black Queen,” she bitterly said. “A princes’ graveyard, shallow dug at your behest.”

I looked at her then, truly looked at her. She had been among those who had admired Malanza’s character even as she balked at emulating it, and for that she had earned more than simply my contempt. No layabout royal, this one, for closer survey revealed hands calloused from the arts of war and scars on her skin that had the make of blades. Her eyes were not cowed, even in loss, and even in her earlier quibblings she had not been spineless. And yet . I looked at Leonor of Valencis and what I saw was good blood, old blood, conqueror’s blood – gilded history, ancient triumphs erected into throne. I saw a woman who’d been taught of rights alongside right, privilege perhaps not unkindly borne but never once questioned. I thought of the High Lords, then, and of something Hakram had once told me under a moonlit sky. And they expected to win, too , he’d said, speaking of our enemy. Don’t they always? Sooner or later, better blood wins out.

And I couldn’t mend that, I knew, because it was not in my hands to shape this world like clay – and it was, perhaps, for the best that it was not. It belonged to more than me, that sprawl of terror and wonderment, of pettiness and valour. It would take more than an orphan girl from Laure to make something new of it, no matter what powers I came to wield. But now and then, I thought, now and then I could wield the knife my father had pressed into my hand all those years ago. And if it was not always given to me to bring something beautiful into Creation, then at least I could expunge some unseemly piece of it. You are part of this, Leonor of Valencis , I thought. Of this land of robber princes and hungry wars, of a tapestry of rapacious ambition so despised it took Akua’s Folly for you to be trusted again. It might be that among your kind you are one of the betters ones, but even should you not be guilty you would remain complicit.

Let them be thankful I had only taken crowns, for I could have taken a great deal more and lost not sleep over it. The only inheritance I’d ever cared to claim was steady hand and an indignant rage that had cowed kingdoms, and within it there was not a speck of mercy for the likes of Leonor of Valencis.

“Tremble then, o ye mighty,” I coldly replied, “for a new age is upon you.”

Rodrigo Trastanes wrapped his sword in a banner, before adding it to the pile. Sophie Louvroy ripped twin ornate silver wings off her gorget and shot me a burning glare after dropping them. Arnaud Brogloise, face betraying not a flicker of amusement, offered the knife still freshly touched by the lifeblood of the Princess of Lange. And with that, seven crowns had been laid at my feet – they were, now, mine to pass on if I so wished. I went looking through my cloak, producing a bundle of wakeleaf that ended up nestled nicely in my pipe. I passed a palm over it, added a flicker of Night shaped into flame and inhaled with a little sigh of pleasure. Expectant gazes had been turned on me, now that my scheme had borne first fruit. Pilgrim, Saint, Sorcerer, Tyrant. And myself, nameless but high priestess of unruly goddesses. I blew out a stream of smoke.

“Now,” I said, “shall we go on an adventure?”

Behind me a breach into Arcadia tore opened.

So it began.

Peers

“It was then I understood: it is a fundamental flaw in Creation that other people can disagree with me, and I must fix that mistake.”
– Dread Emperor Imperious

The sack over his head was gently removed, which meant the hand was not the Saint’s. Dear old Laurence liked to surprise him with the glare of daylight against his unprepared eyes, when she could, and Amadeus last remembered being spelled into slumber at evening time. As always, the former Black Knight took a languid moment to assess the state of his captivity: feet bound, chest bound but, to his surprise, though his hands were still bound they were no longer behind his back. Interesting. They’d never done this before.

“It is not a kind thing to say, but I’ve always found autumn in these parts to be a foul season,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

Amadeus did not immediately reply. Their surroundings, he thought, were worth a second look. Under a gate of raised stones – three slabs of granite, the capstone supported by the other two almost incongruously large – he’d been propped up against one of the supports and arrayed so that he would be looking at an endless expanse of starry night. They were atop a hill or man-made barrow, he decided, for the sodden plains below were distant. If they were still in Iserre, which Amadeus suspected to be the case, then this should be one of the ‘Mavian prayers’ he’d read of: old Alamans tribal monuments many an Imperial scholar has suspected of being tied to the fae in some manner. Well, this was a pleasant surprise. He’d meant to have a look at one while he passed through the region, but the demands of the campaign had not allowed.

“It was always an interesting time, where I was born,” Amadeus noted.

Autumn had been the last gasps of the war season, in the Green Stretch. Once upon a time that’d meant raiding parties from the Blessed Isle riding east under the banner of the White Hand, or companies of miserable legionaries trudging down the old Miezan roads to their winter quarters facing the Wasaliti. His birthland’s status as the granary of Praes meant its freeholders were under the protection of the Tower, and so spared many of the issues farmers and villagers would usually face when soldiers passed through their lands. That protection was no shield for the consequences of paladins and legionaries skirmishing in the region, though, or of the sharp rise in banditry that would often follow larger clashes between Callow and Praes. Still, for all the roving wolves on two feet Amadeus had much preferred autumn to spring. Soldiers, even deserters, could be bargained with. Not so the floods that followed broken levees, or the thick morasses of cloying mud they left behind. His family’s freehold had not been so close to the river as to risk yearly flooding, but the scuttling and swarming vermin those disasters had brought had been just as dangerous in some ways.

“I’ll confess no surprise to the revelation that Proceran weather suits you ill, however,” he added.

Green eyes flicked down to the bemusing sight of the Grey Pilgrim stoking the flames of small fire but a few feet to the side, trying to prod wet logs into burning like dry ones. Cautiously positioned under the large granite capstone, the two of them along with that campfire would be safe from the rain Amadeus’ damp clothes suggested had burdened their day.

“Don’t get me wrong,” the Pilgrim said, “the night sky around here is a wonder. It’s the miserable, cold wetness of it I can’t stand. Sinks into my bones, these days.”

“I am told it will not snow even at the peak of winter, in most of Levant,” Amadeus said, genuinely curious.

Most of the few books entirely dedicated to the region where the Dominion now stood dated back to the golden age of Praesi scholarship, under Dread Emperor Sorcerous. Which meant that while at least they accounted for the changes that’d followed the creation of the Titan’s Pond by the strife between Triumphant and the Gigantes, they were also on average seven centuries old. More recent works were either pieced together from the accounts of traders or outright borrowed from foreign sources, such as the notoriously unreliable Proceran scholars.

“Not exactly,” the old man laughed. “We’ll get snowfall south of Tartessos, now and then, but it rarely lasts the day. Melts quickly. Once in a blue moon a blizzard will tumble down the slopes of the Titanomachy and the afterbirth will touch a shore of the Pond, but that is a much rarer occurrence.”

“I’d never seen true snowfall before my first winter in Callow,” Amadeus admitted. “It was quite jarring.”

“Mine was in Orense,” the Pilgrim fondly said. “I was pursuing this Arlesite warlock who’d cooked up a scheme to hold towns for ransom with this swarm of insects he’d enchanted to be full of diseases.”

“I take it they were not enchanted to be cold-proof,” the dark-haired man said, openly amused.

“Whole swarm died overnight,” the Peregrine chuckled. “He tried to make the remains into some sort of disease-carrying monster, but I caught him halfway through the ritual.”

“I was never impressed with the fibre of Proceran villainy,” Amadeus noted. “Malicia and I looked into making alliance in the region, when it became clear the crusade was inevitable, but it was bare picking all around.”

“There’s a pirate on the Segovian coast, I believe,” the Pilgrim said.

“The Ghastly Marauder,” he agreed. “Wouldn’t hear of taking either gold or information from the Tower, said it’d bring down either yourself or the Saint on his head. There was a promising sorceress in Tenerife, but the Tyrant had her captured and sealed in a barrel full of leeches.”

The older man winced. For a hero who must have tried some rather nasty lairs over the years, he was still surprisingly tender-hearted. Amadeus himself had been inured to the sight of spiders eating people alive before he’d reached twenty. On the rare occasions when Nefarious remembered he was supposed to rule the Empire, he often had a few members of the Imperial court tossed into the arachnid pits and attendance had been, in a sense, mandatory – the Chancellor would pass along the names of any absent to the point the Emperor at them when he next felt like stabbing at shadows. No, after so many years in Praes the mere mention of a cruel method of execution would buy no reaction from him.

“That boy has a nasty streak even for a Theodosian,” the Pilgrim sighed.

“Ours is an uncivil time,” Amadeus replied, tone droll.

“Aren’t they all?” the hero tiredly said.

Even as they conversed, the Duni continued to consider his situation. He could hear, in the distance, the sound of the rest of the party settling in a camp of their own. Given that he was currently atop a hill surrounded by water-logged plains, escape was unfeasible save if heavy rain started to fall. There was not even a drizzle, at the moment, though by the thick humidity of the air Amadeus suspected it was only a matter of time until the autumn showers began anew.

“It is not my execution you intend,” the green-eyed man calmly said. “If so, there would have been better occasions.”

And it was unlikely the Grey Pilgrim himself would do the deed, Amadeus did not say, for when Catherine returned from her journey that might just lead to the Peregrine’s skull splattered all over Proceran grounds. She was not particularly prone to mercy when cut deep, and while Amadeus was rather amused that he posed more threat to the Peregrine as a dead mentor to be avenged than a living former villain in the man’s custody he doubted the hero was unaware of the fact. He might be, of course, which was why Amadeus had said nothing. If he was to be killed, it might as well be of some use.

“No,” the Grey Pilgrim calmly said. “That is not what I intend.”

Amadeus cocked his head to the side.

“Is this an attempt at redemption, then?” the Duni drawled. “Truly, Tariq, I am flattered by the implicit compliment but-”

“I can see in you, Amadeus of the Green Stretch,” the Peregrine softly interrupted. “Repentance is foreign to your nature, as it often is the worst of your kind. I would not waste either our hours on such a fool’s errand.”

He cocked an eyebrow.

“Then what, exactly, is your purpose?” Amadeus asked, honestly puzzled.

“You are one of the oldest living villains on Calernia,” the Pilgrim said.

Alaya was older than he by a year and eight months, the Duni thought, and Hye by a great deal more than that – though it would be an oversimplification to call Hye Su truly one of Below’s, in his humble opinion. It seemed, Amadeus thought, that the Pilgrim was in fact correct. Every other villain he knew of was younger than him by either years or decades.

“So I am,” Amadeus said. “Though that was an observation and not an answer.”

“Come dawn, Laurence is going to sever your soul from your earthly coil,” the Pilgrim calmly said. “What will follow that, you need not know, but I will say that this may very well be the last time we will ever speak.”

The Duni’s eyebrow arched.

“Alas, and our acquaintance had barely begun,” he replied.

“In a way, this could be called a vigil,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Yet I will confess to more selfish motive – you are, perhaps, the closest equivalent to a peer I have in the service of the Gods Below. It would be a waste, to never speak more than a handful of sentences to you.”

Amadeus cocked his head to the side, thinking of the last conversation he’d ever had with Ranker. A Marshal of the Legions of Terror, true, but that was almost the least of what she had been to him. And the last he’d ever seen of her was as a gasping, bloody ruin on a sickbed through an unsteady scrying mirror. The man who’d birthed the plague that took her, that took the two thousand soldiers Amadeus had led into the trap only he had been deemed fit to survive, was now addressing him like the thin pretence of civility between them was anything but that. A pretence. If you can see in me, Pilgrim, can you glimpse the thoroughness of the extinction I will visit upon you given chance? The man who had been the Black Knight smiled, affably, and the sight of the other man’s eyes tightening was the only answer he needed.

“By all means, Pilgrim. I am your captive audience,” Amadeus said.

“The others will not-”

“How like a hero,” the dark-haired man casually interrupted, “to first name me a peer and then proceed to treat me the simpleton.”

There was no apology in him for the sharpness of his tone. The Peregrine and his delightful right hand the Lady de Montfort had spent this entire journey keeping him away from the younger members of their band, there had never been any question of any of them now being in attendance for this indulgence of the Pilgrim’s. The man in grey robes wryly smiled.

“Not unearned,” he conceded. “I assume that there will be terms, Carrion Lord?”

“I am hardly that anymore,” Amadeus amusedly replied. “I offer you the fairest terms I know, Pilgrim: a question for a question.”

“That is civil of you,” the older man replied without a hint of irony.

Amadeus made himself think of taking in hand a stone and smashing it against the Peregrine’s skull until it burst open like an overripe fruit. He considered the matter vividly, seeing to every detail, and then smiled amicably at the hero.

“That,” Tariq said, “was a great deal less civil.”

“Your turn,” Amadeus replied.

Though these days his body was a simple sack of meat with infuriatingly feeble senses, the Duni had been careful to watch for any use of Light or artefact and caught sight of nothing. Which meant this little trick of the hero’s was either an aspect or a gift from Above. At the very least, it did not seem to be outright mind or memory reading. Perhaps a particularly discerning sort of empathy, Amadeus considered, though given the man’s age, breadth of travel and ties to a Choir it might be something more exotic or outright unheard of.

“I am told,” the Pilgrim said, “that you are an intelligent man, and prize reason.”

Amadeus’ lips quirked in dry amusement.

“Intelligence is simple memory and cleverness, neither of which are half so glorified on their own,” he replied. “It should be no different with the pairing of them.”

“But the prizing of reason you do not deny,” the Peregrine stated.

“Insofar as the application of it is useful,” Amadeus acknowledged.

“Then, to be a villain and so cast your lot with them, you must believe in the teachings of the Gods Below,” the older man replied. “What it is, I ask, that you find of worth in them?”

The dark-haired prisoner laughed.

“Simply by asking that question, you have already failed in what you seek to accomplish,” he said.

The Peregrine’s brow creased, but he did not grow irritated with the answer. He would be, Amadeus suspected, a particularly boring man to needle. The Saint was much more entertaining in that regard.

“I do not understand,” Tariq admitted.

“You consider Below as if it were simply a wicked mirror of Above, and seek to understand it by terms it fundamentally does not recognize,” Amadeus said. “Considering the differences in how Named of our respective... sympathies form, I suppose that is an excusable mistake but it is one that precludes ever gaining perspective on the matter.”

“You are a villain,” the Pilgrim slowly said. “You are, therefore, a champion of Below. What is it that you champion?”

They both knew Amadeus to be Nameless, though the Duni suspected that was considered a minor detail compared to his decades as the Black Knight.

“You have put your finger on the crux of the matter,” he said. “As a mortal you championed the ideals of Above – or at least some middling section of them – and fit a particular grove, which as a consequence saw you bestowed power as a blessing to further that cause.”

“A gross oversimplification,” the Pilgrim soberly replied. “Though technically not incorrect.”

“I was – am, I suppose – a villain,” Amadeus said. “And as a mortal, by acquiring power I became worthy of blessing. That is the fundamental difference between your kind and mine, Pilgrim: your Name was a coronation while mine was a confirmation.”

“You argue, then, that the only teaching of Below is the acquisition of power,” the other man said.

“Teaching,” the prisoner sighed. “You speak the word anew as if repetition will make the saddle fit the beast. There are no teachings, Pilgrim, that is the point exact. The exercise of power, of will, is not given meaning. It must be ascribed. That has led to some rather unusual or horrifying uses, I’ll concede, but in my eyes that is more a reflection of human nature than of Below’s.”

“You would absolve your Gods of guilt?” Tariq said, sounding surprised.

“You would absolve humanity of responsibility?” Amadeus asked, scornful. “The deferral of consequence to higher power is the deepest form of moral cowardice conceivable. Even your precious Book agrees, Pilgrim – we have a choice .”

“And knowing this, you still choose to commit evil,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

“And there we reach impasse once more,” he noted. “For you seem to consider some form of goodness our natural state, and so committing an evil a willful deviation from that state. I find such a notion utterly repugnant.”

“Are we born evil, then and only taught to be good?” Tariq pressed.

Amadeus felt a sliver of irritation and willfully curbed his tongue, knowing this lack of sympathy for slow students was one of the reasons he was particularly ill-suited to teaching.

“We are born nothing, and taught a set of... rules for a lack of better term, that allow us to determine what is acceptable behaviour and what is not,” the prisoner said. “What irks me, Pilgrim, is your insistence that these rules are a set of virtues inherent to the fabric Creation instead of covenant between mortals for mortal purposes.”

“Your conception of Creation,” the Pilgrim said, “is utterly barren of morality. It is without principle, without faith, without a single ounce of justice. Is it, in a word, dirt .”

Amadeus had no intention of engaging on the matter of justice – the last time he’d ventured an argument on the subject, the Seraphim had slapped him down through a paved street and left him to bleed to death.

“Indeed,” he casually agreed, unwilling to pursue the debate that if any of the things the Pilgrim had named were inherent instead of ascribed, they became utterly meaningless. “Now, I do believe I am owed quite the question given how your own has considerably strayed.”

“So it has,” the Pilgrim amicably conceded.

“I have made a study of you,” Amadeus said. “And though you’ve left mostly rumour behind I believe you’ve operated in southern Calernia, as well as the upper reaches of the Principate, for more than forty years. You came into your Name before Dread Emperor Nefarious claimed the Tower.”

“More than forty years is accurate,” the Peregrine drily said.

“In that span of time,” the prisoner casually said, “did any villain in those regions achieve particular prominence?”

The Pilgrim cocked his head to the side, considering the matter.

“The Barrow Lord threatened to take the northern half of Levant for the better part of a summer,” he said. “The Princess of Cantal was murdered and then impersonated by the Face-Thief for half a year before they were caught.”

“In summation, the highest peak was a secret victory that did not even last a year?” Amadeus asked.

“Arguably,” Tariq agreed.

“Interesting,” he murmured. “My thanks.”

The Pilgrim frowned.

“Why did you ask?” he said.

“Merely a theory of mine,” Amadeus said.

He knew the hero would glimpse in him the intent to wound, yet also that it was no less true for it. Curiosity, he thought, would do the rest.

“And that theory is?” the Pilgrim patiently asked.

“That you, and to a lesser extent the Saint of Swords, are at least partly responsible the current invasion of the Dead King,” Amadeus said.

The older man stared at him unblinking, for it was not the dark-haired man’s body that would be of interest but whatever sight he used to truthtell. The prisoner smiled, discerning the very moment the Grey Pilgrim realized there was not so much as a hint of a lie. His face went ashen.

“Why?” the Levantine croaked.

“You have been a singularly effective agent for Good in broad and your Choir in particular,” Amadeus said. “To the extent that you’ve just admitted to me that for a span of at least forty years you effectively snuffed out effective villain in over half of Calernia. Did you truly think, Tariq, that this would go without consequence ?”

“The Hidden Horror has ignored longer stretches of peace in the past,” the Pilgrim said. “And Praes achieved resurgence.”

“So it did, in a manner of speaking,” Amadeus noted. “It was the only Calernian surface region where you and the Saint weren’t active, after all. Though, of course, as soon as the civil war in Procer ended the Tenth Crusade was declared and the last major active Evil polity on Calernia risked being ended. Perhaps permanently, given the lessons of the last crusader occupation of the Wasteland.”

“Callow could not be allowed to be consumed, Carrion Lord,” the hero harshly said. “All that suffering was brought by the very Conquest you led.”

“It must be infuriating, to realize that sometimes the balance swings the other way,” the villain smiled. “That victory can be perilous for your side as well.”

The Peregrine’s hands tightened.

“I could be wrong, of course,” the prisoner said. “It is only a theory, though one informed by facts and my decades of experience as a villain.”

“You could have kept this up your sleeve,” Tariq said. “Is that not your way? Secrets hoarded until they can be used?”

“Her name,” Amadeus mildly said, “was Ranker of the Hungry Dog tribe. She was a vicious and mistrusting and often unpleasant, but she was also my friend. I loved her, you see, in my own crooked way. And she died choking on her own blood from your plague.”

“She was a soldier,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

“She was,” he agreed. “And so I do not cry of unfairness. And yet.”

The prisoner leaned forward, green eyes glimmering with something cold and hateful and utterly patient.

“So sleep well, Tariq Fleet-foot, wondering what utter ruin your good intentions might have wrought,” Amadeus hissed. “For I loved her nonetheless, and she is dead by your hand.”

Chapter 35: Colloquy

“Forty-three: if your band is split during a harrowing test set by a villain or ambiguous entity, you may safely assume you will next be reunited in some sort of cell or unfolding sacrificial ritual.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

It was a funny thing, perspective. What Hierophant had stolen from Arcadia was a drop in the ocean, a piece of eternity that became something less by being removed from the whole. Looking at it with my own eyes, though, the scale of what he’d wrought was worthy of awe. A kingdom’s worth of badlands, consumed by howling squalls and the aftermaths of sorcery until the very grounds were made barren. I’d walked only the very edge of this land, but it’d been enough to tell me that it would take weeks if not months to go from one end to another. And it would fall on Creation, a cataclysmic doom on Iserre, if anchor was not fashioned before the tipping point. To accomplish that most important of tasks, an army would have been too much but a single person too little. And so, in a pattern nearly as old as the First Dawn, a band of five had been called. Of those chosen few I would not speak of myself, but the others? It was not small names – or Names – that had been assembled to turn back doom.

The Tyrant of Helike, an odd-eyed madman who’d pulled at the strings of nations and tricked an entity older than the city that’d birthed him. Weak of constitution, sickly and feeble, he did not walk with the others but instead leisurely sat a throne held up by a throng of eerily-intelligent animated stone gargoyles. The ornate scepter in his hand was the least of the artifacts at his disposal, though the only visible, for the villain had inherited a veritable trove of lunacy and wealth from the Theodosians of centuries past. And yet, for all that, I suspected the deadliest things remained his tongue and the mind that but purpose to it. As if making of mockery of this entire war, the Tyrant wore not armour but instead kingly brocaded robes in gold and scarlet, match for the ornate ruby-set crown on his brow and his misformed eye even deeper red.

The Grey Pilgrim needed no introduction, I supposed. The oldest living Calernian hero and favourite agent of the Choir of Mercy. There was a terrifying amount of power in that wizened frame, and the crooked staff of ashwood he bore, but it was the Peregrine himself that was the true terror. He was a weaver of stories in dusty grey robes with second sight and a choir’s worth of angels whispering secrets in his ear. He was incorruptible, implacable and while in body he might just be an exhausted old man his deep knowledge of miracles and deeper well of power allowed him a mystifying breadth of capabilities that only strengthened when exercised to save another. Though near a king in the eyes of his people, his shoes were worn leather and he wore not a single adornment save white locks atop his head.

What more need be said of Saint of Swords, after saying she had once cut the fabric of Winter itself? Oh, like the Pilgrim her years were slowing her down but the vitality of her prime had been replaced by the kind of unbroken certainty that in a Named was a hundredfold more dangerous than muscle. I would never like her, but the Saint was a heroine who has faced sword in hand and slain things whose mere sight would put lesser souls to flight. She was one of the finest blades alive, capable of cutting through sorcery and steel and the fabric of Creation with the plain longsword at her hip, and she had tempered her soul and body into a domain whose existence made her halfway unkillable – and explained why she disdained armour in favour of a plain pale tabard over a darker collared tunic.

The last one, the Rogue Sorcerer, was taciturn mystery who’d faced two of the most infamous villains of our age – in all humility, Akua Sahelian and myself – without taking a wound, revealing an aspect or ever being in danger of death. He’d been able to fend off Diabolist’s ritual attempts to find my father, proved capable of guiding armies through a dying shard of Arcadia and was, to my knowledge, the only person not complicit or in my service to have figured out it was a Keter’s Due that filled the sky. That someone so plainly competent was almost unheard of meant the man was being purposefully discreet, and given my teachers I knew how lethal Named who went out of their way to keep their abilities quiet tended to be. The long coat of leather over practical chain mail and less practical silks of many colours was kept close to his frame, though there were shapes to be discerned beneath. Over his shoulder was hung a heavy bag bearing seven mortal crowns, carried on my behalf.

It should have been a formal affair, this journey, something solemn and dignified.

“So is it true you used to knock boots with the Iron Prince?” Kairos cheerfully asked. “I’m not usually one to bring up salacious rumours, but-“

I ignored the bald lie he’d spoken and instead kept a wary eye one the Saint’s sword hand. Which was, unsurprisingly, on the pommel of said sword. That tended to happen whenever the Tyrant talked, though to be fair we’d only just entered this realm and already I was tempted to let her. I glanced at her face, though, and found it wrinkled as usual but also irritated this time. I bet it’s true , I thought . All those late evenings killing ratlings under moonlight? Hasenbach honestly wasn’t much of a looker – though she wasn’t exactly plain either – but her uncle might wear those broad shoulders a little better.

“Black Queen,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “Am I correct in presuming that the broken tower is our destination?”

He was speaking a little too loudly for this to be entirely about him asking me a question. Still, he was pointing in the right direction so I actually followed his finger and nodded after a confirmatory look. The wasteland here was not entirely plains with a few distant mountains, there were other inclines. It was simply hard to see them, sometimes, buried as they were in ash and dust and smoke. Even far out from the great storms as we were, the winds would be slapping great heaps of those at our sides if not for the small glow dangling from the tip of the Pilgrim’s staff like an amulet of solid Light. Unlike the protection Sve Noc had taught me to make, his did not impose a bubble of stillness around us. It... eased the winds into slowing, so that when they reached us they were little more than a warm breeze carrying nothing at all. It was a more elegant solution, though when we’d get to breaching the great storms I suspected my method would be more effective.

“It is,” I said. “I’m impressed you can recognize it as a tower, to be honest.”

If I hadn’t been there earlier with my Hunt in attendance, I would not have. All that was visible of the tower now under a hill’s worth of ash and dust was a square house of stone with a broken tile roof jutting out form the grey. There’d been glass windows on the sides once, but they had not survived the first catastrophe to hit them years ago and even the last sticking bits were like ground-down teeth in an open maw through which the wasteland’s winds poured through.

“The slate tiles and sandstone are not unfamiliar to me,” the hero said. “They were a noticeable feature of Liesse.”

The nicer parts of it, anyway, I mentally corrected.

“You’ve been there before,” I said.

“Once, years ago,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “I had hear that the secret tomes of the Wizard of the West had been found, and were to be auctioned by a Liessen guild.”

Not one of the legal ones, I thought with a snort. Books written on the subject of magic had been heavily restricted under Black and confiscated whenever found, though there’d been monetary compensation so Callowans hadn’t really cared unless they were wizards. In which case they already had greater reasons to be afraid of the Carrion Lord than books, no matter their subject. This, though, a hero’s ancient tomes put up for auction in largest southern Callowan city but also the only one under an Imperial governor? Knowing my teacher like I did, that story could only be headed one way.

“It was a trap,” I said.

“It was a trap,” the Sorcerer sighed. “I nearly died twice fleeing the ‘auction’ and lost a fortune’s worth of...”

He paused.

“No matter,” he said. “Still, the city was a memorable enough sight.”

I glanced at him.

“Did you get one of the books?” I asked.

“I did,” the hero disgruntledly said. “It was only a transcript of some Praesi trial involving tapirs, and to add insult to injury the Warlock wove a tracking enchantment into it.”

I very carefully hid my smile. I had some suspicions as to who had chosen the contents of the book, at least. Regardless, we had arrived. We’d also pulled slightly ahead of the others as we talked, though they caught up quick enough.

“- in a way wouldn’t that make you Cordelia’s aunt?” Kairos enthusiastically said. “You’re practically royalty yourself, Laurence.”

The Saint’s fingers twitched, but sadly I still needed the Tyrant and he was bound to have some contingencies that’d cripple us if he was actually attacked – I doubted he would have agreed to come otherwise, or kept taunting the old zealot so insistently. Gritting my teeth I prepared to step in, but before I could the Grey Pilgrim quietly laughed. The sound had the Saint’s shoulders loosening, though the Sorcerer’s tightened instead.

“I knew your father, Kairos,” the Peregrine quietly said. “Were you aware?”

“You’ve not exactly been chaste in the array of stories you’ll get involved in, Tariq,” the Tyrant amusedly said, flopping a wrist dismissively. “Though I’ll assume that was before the two of us had our pleasant chat on the matter of succession.”

“You remind me of him,” the Pilgrim said. “He, too, felt the need to fill silences at any cost.”

The Tyrant of Helike went still for less than a heartbeat, and was smiling after as if he’d never ceased, but he’d not been quite quick enough to hide the glint of frozen rage that passed through his eyes at the Pilgrim’s words.

“Already a little less bored,” Kairos Theodosian grinned. “Not so kindly after all are we, my kindly stranger?”

“If a child pricks his hand picking a rose, it is not maltreatment,” the Grey Pilgrim mildly said. “It is a lesson.”

Considering that unlike the Tyrant I hadn’t just had an old wound prodded at and the wise old man tone was still tiresome to me, that was a sign I needed to step in. I didn’t have much sympathy for Kairos, but it would be preferable if every member of this band at least made it to the antechamber of the peril ahead. It’d just be poor form otherwise.

“We’ve arrived,” I called out.

The old man and the young king kept their gaze on each other for a long moment even after I spoke, and I cleared my throat progressively more loudly until they both looked because it sort of sounded like I was choking.

“Now that I have your attention,” I rasped out.

I raised a finger, then breathed out a little. Though I was high priestess of Night, unlike the rest of these people I didn’t have the ancillary benefits of Name easing my way through this journey. When ash got into my lungs and mouth, I still choked like a mortal. Still didn’t regret that transition in the slightest, mind you. You just couldn’t put a price on enjoying a good cup of wine, and not occasionally going mad with Winter.

“When the Hierophant brought Liesse into this place, it was roughly done,” I said. “Roughly enough that pieces of the city were sown all over this wasteland.”

The Rogue Sorcerer inhaled sharply as he realized where I was headed before the rest. The benefits of having an education in matters magical, I thought, and made note that while the Tyrant’s eyes had narrowed he didn’t seem have figured it out. I was honestly uncertain whether or not the villain was a mage or not, since I’d never actually seen him use sorcery except through artefacts. At the very least, though he was gifted in his understanding I was now fairly sure even if he was a mage he had not reached High Arcana.

“In Creation that wouldn’t mean much, but this place is adrift,” I said. “I won’t get into too much detail, since it’s all very technical-” and even after speaking with Akua twice I still only barley understood what she’d said, “- but given the fluidity of laws this place, and the strength of the story we’re riding, the law of sympathy can be leaned on pretty heavily to provide a shortcut.”

“That is... inspired,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “We came through Creation, but to emerge elsewhere in this realm we would be walking the boundary between it and Arcadia instead.”

I smiled and kept my fingers from clenching. It was a good thing I was intending on remaining on good terms with the Grand Alliance, because if it came down to a fight this one might be too dangerous to keep alive. It’d taken Akua Sahelian, a sorceress that even a one-in-a-century kind of talent like Masego considered brilliant, a direct look at my Lord of Silent Steps using something similar in nature to figure this method out. Ivah had begun something close, that it called ‘skittering’, back in the Everdark and had refined the trick since into a very dangerous tool. The Rogue Sorcerer had figured out from a bastard description in a matter of moments, and though that didn’t mean he’d be able to reproduce the feat that was still a rather nasty knack for comprehending my side’s bag of tricks. I’d wanted the Tyrant in this band of five because of the Sorcerer, but now I was wondering if that was going to be as affective a scheme as I’d believed it would be. Not that this was ever going go be anything but a risky roll of the dice, considering there was no one among my fellows I could truly rely on if things went south. Still there’d been no way but leaving Adjutant behind: I needed both the Tyrant and the Sorcerer among the five, since it both gave me the shape of the former’s inevitable betrayal and allowed me to get around the diplomatic debacle that would be robbing people I needed to be allies with. No matter how badly they deserved to be robbed.

“Foundling,” the Saint of Swords said. “You admitted earlier that your Praesi warlock is possessed by the Hidden Horror, yes?”

“Influenced,” I corrected.

“Bit of downplay, that,” the Tyrant snorted.

“As far as my people have been able to tell, the Dead King isn’t in control most of the time,” I said. “Though there seem to be small bursts where he is, it’s true, but always for less than a quarter hour. Though for simplicity’s sake, it would be best to consider the Hierophant as bewitched.”

“And how do you intend to break that bewitchment?” the Saint bluntly asked.

“I can’t answer that without crippling the chances it’ll actually work,” I replied. “But rest assured, I do have a method.”

“If he’s half as powerful as all,” the Saint gestured at the wasteland around us, “this seems to imply, he needs to die. If the Dead King has a way in, he’ll remain a risk after even if-“

“Laurence,” I interrupted, tone eerily calm, “allow me to be perfectly frank with you: if you so much as scuff his robes, I’ll put you down without batting an eye. It’s not diplomatic, or all that practical, but I do not tolerate rabid animals snapping their jaws at the people I care about.”

She glared at me, eyes burning. I stared back, unblinking. The Saint was exactly the kind of heroine to nip what she saw as a looming threat in the bud by the edge of her sword. The same traits that made her capable of accomplishing that also made her a lot more likely to try it, in my eyes, which was rather the issue with Saint in essence wasn’t it? The moment there was no longer a hand on her leash, the truce went up in smoke.

“Queen Catherine,” the Pilgrim intervened. “The question was not meant as an attack. It needs to be asked: if there is no other way, if your own method has failed, a decision will have to be made.”

My fingers clenched, but I forced them to loosen.

“In that very narrow situation you’ve mentioned, then I’ll take action,” I said. “But let’s be perfectly clear: if any of you use what I just said as a pretext to kill the Hierophant, I will take it as an act of war.”

Gods, it was a heavy-handed approach and I might as well be painting a weakness in bright red for the wolves among this flock but it needed to be said nonetheless. I wasn’t sure either the Saint or the Tyrant would actually have their hand stayed by the threat I’d just made, but the sword I’d just hung above the head of this truce should be enough to have cooler heads intervene instead of stand back and watch if either acted. The Grey Pilgrim, anyway, I grimly thought. I didn’t have a good grasp of the Rogue Sorcerer yet.

“As I was saying,” I began anew after a few beats of silence. “We will be taking an unusual path, whose nature is kin to a threshold. There are advantages to that. Through Hierophant, the Hidden Horror would attempt to strike at us if we approached the city openly. But in that more fluid place we will travel through, I suspect it will lurk as well. Waiting.”

“The first crucible,” the Pilgrim calmly said. “Not one, I think, of arms.”

“When assault the stronghold of a villain,” I said, “watch out for three things: a monster, a trial and a pivot.”

“And you believe this to be the trial,” the old man said.

“I believe that everyone here has a few bodies buried somewhere in their past,” I said, eyes sweeping across the heroes and villain. “And something they want badly enough to listen to the devil when he’ll come calling. And make no mistake, I have encountered the Dead King before. It isn’t with threats and screams he’ll approach. It will be with a pleasant offer for a most reasonable bargain.”

Gods, much as I hated to admit it the Saint of Swords was the one I had most faith in to blow straight through. Even Neshamah would have a hard time cracking open that protective shell of hatred and arrogance. The Pilgrim shouldn’t be an issue, either, but there were a lot more levers to move him than I was comfortable with, especially considering the Dead King was bound to know a thing or two about angels. The Tyrant was going to sell us out, that was a given, but that was fine. I’d planned with the inevitability in mind. Once more, it was the Rogue Sorcerer that was the unknown. I glanced at Tariq and caught his eye, then subtly dipped my head towards the youngest hero. Just as subtly, the Pilgrim nodded. He was either reliable, then, or good enough to fool whatever means of second sight the Peregrine used. Either way, it was too late in the span to do anything about it.

“It was a beautiful speech, Catherine,” Kairos called out. “It greatly raised my spirits.”

I rolled my eyes and limped up the hill of ash and dust until I stood by the side of one of the broken windows. Running a hand across the warm stone by the windowsill, I breathed out and let the Night flow through my veins. The shivering line between realms was no domain of Sve Noc’s, but the darkness within the broken house was a threshold I could use. Night poured out of me like a flood, until I breathed out and withdrew my palm. I turned to them, straightening my back.

“Into the deeps,” I said. “We will meet again on the other side.”

Chapter 36: Bid

“Peace is the killer of empire, for when strength is not spent outwards it is instead spent within.”
– Ghislaine of Creusens, twelfth First Princess of Procer

I couldn’t ever remember being afraid of the dark, even as a child. Of what might be lurking in it, sure, but the dark itself? No. Long before I’d acquired patrons whose dominion was night, I’d liked a little shade. The fights at the Pit had often taken place late – even after lining the pockets of the city guard, Booker had been warned to keep her business out of sight – and summer after sundown was where the coin had been best at the Rat’s Nest. Legionary leave did not change no matter the season, but come summer a lot of dockworkers earned a little more coin by fishing in the Silver Lake and a lot of that coin ended up spent on cheap ale. Which was, to my remembrance, the only kind the Rat’s Nest ever stocked. I wondered what Harrion now... I frowned at the drift of thoughts, unsure how it’d started or where it was headed. Did it even matter? Oh, I was standing surrounded by thick and cloying darkness. And it was soothing, serene. It would have been so pleasant to just... float away, leaning into dreamlike thought. Snow, tears and barren laughter , I suddenly remembered. I’d laid down to die, once and the world had refused to take me.

There would be no takebacks.

“More fruitful than a direct assault would have been,” I acknowledged out loud.

I struck at the ground with my staff, and the dark rippled out. Like a stone tossed into a pond, my will wrinkled the fabric of this half-world outwards in a wave. The span of what surrounded me was endless, I thought, and my act had been little more than a shout echoing in a gargantuan cavern.

“Is that to be your trick?” I asked the dark. “Obscuring the path? It won’t work.”

I cocked my head to the side and pricked my ear. The utter silence of this place was broken only by my own breath, which in this strange stillness seemed almost crassly loud. I was afraid, for a moment, that it would drown out what I was waiting for – but it was an empty worry, more born out of nerves at the calibre of my opponent than grounded thinking. My deliverance came in call harsh and hoarse, a distant cawing. I followed Komena’s echoing caw, and limped forward into the dark. The Youngest Night left as swiftly as she’d appeared, for we’d agreed that she should avoid the Dead King as much as we could afford to. Neshamah would not be as dangerous working through Masego as he would be in person, but Hierophant was plenty dangerous enough on his own – and not without experience in the matter of disciplining lesser gods. My hobbling steps forward felt purposeless, without a destination to behold, but I forced myself to keep moving. If I could not trust the Sisters to guide me in the dark, then who could I trust? And, after what could have been either half an hour or an agonizingly long day, the trust bore fruit. The darkness rippled, and not through my will: I’d made enough progress, it seemed, to warrant refinement of the trap.

I almost stumbled when I my good foot came across a step, but I caught myself on my staff. I felt around cautiously and found out it was the first of what seemed like sprawling stairs going up. If this realm had been the Tyrant’s to shape I would have taken this turn as a petty slight to make my life more difficult on account of my bad leg, but somehow I suspected the Dead King believed himself above that. I made my way up the stairs, observing from careful groping by foot and staff that at least they were broad and lightly sloped, and only halted after a long flight up when I felt this place grow... shallower. Frowning, I slowly raked my fingers through the air and let the fabric of this half-world thinner on my fingers. I exerted a pinprick of will and the small ripples than ensued had less to rippled through – and, more interestingly, they revealed some sort of veil in front of me. The way, as always, had to be forward. I stretched up my arm and tore down the veil, flinching at the wave of sound and light and colour that washed over me. I had, it seemed, exposed a doorway. I took a moment to compose myself, to let my eyes grow accustomed to the change in light, and only then tread through the threshold. Immediately, looking down I felt shaky for the height. I had come to tread over what looked like a gargantuan pane of glass, like a skylight put up through the sky.

Above me the sky was darkened by eclipse, a blinding ring of light with a hollow of night at the heart of it, and the clouds around us were a hazy penumbra of light and shadow. Below, though, thousands of feet below, three great armies were warily observing a truce. The League of Free Cities was milling uncertainly without a camp of its own, its large baggage train spread over the plans and guarded by knots of soldiers from half a dozen different city-states. The Army of Callow and the Legions-in-Exile had retreated back into their camp, though leaning down with a wince – Gods, the ground beneath me felt too slippery for this height – I noted that Juniper hard ordered the siege engines to be turned on the League and the drow to be recalled behind the palisades. It was the armies of the Grand Alliance, though, that found their situation most uncomfortable. Split in two by my own host and the forces of the Free Cities, even after the night’s losses they remained the largest of the armies on the field but also the worst-positioned. The calibre of officers on either side had told, I thought. Many of my commanders were young and fresh to their ranks, but they’d also been trained to lead a professional army. The Dominion’s war leaders were clever and brave, but also clearly outmatched.

“This has been most entertaining.”

My eyes flicked up, and I found I was no longer alone on this expanse of glass. I had expected to be looking upon the King of Death, but what I found instead was Neshamah. In the flesh, as he had been in the long ago days of the Kingdom of Sephirah he’d ruled and ruined. His appearance was from late in his reign, I thought, perhaps as late as that dark day where Keter’s Due had gotten its name. Scholar pale and thin, he was closely-shaved but his dark hair was messy. Full red lips quirked as I met his gaze. Just like I remembered this eyes were a shade of light brown that the glow of the eclipse made into molten amber. On his brow, the copper circlet that was the crown of a kingdom long dead sat high over one of those strange Sephiran tunics: one sleeve long and broad but the other short and tight, the patterned bronze and red cloth sweeping down to his ankles with a broad sash belting it around the waist. He had, I suddenly realized, spoken in Ashkaran – that dead tongue Masego and I had stolen learning of from Arcadian echoes, along with most of what I knew of the Hidden Horror.

“You know I don’t speak that,” I said. “Dead King, we meet again.”

“My apologies,” Neshamah replied in Lower Miezan, lips twitching. “We meet again, Black Queen.”

Staff rapping against the glass-like ground as I moved, I limped in a half-circle around him. I would not be allowed, I suspected, to leave this place before conversation was had. But that hardly meant I had to remain his captive audience, rapt and unmoving.

“Your manoeuvres below were worth the watching,” the Hidden Horror idly told me. “It was an inspired skein of treachery, and a victory deserved.”

“Night’s not over yet,” I said. “Though I have to say, you’re being a great deal more civil than I expected.”

Neshamah idly traipsed across the glass sky, the clouds above him making his eyes shift from gold to bronze like passing seasons set in an ageless face.

“I am a mannerly man, Catherine,” he lightly said. “And you have given me no reason to act otherwise.”

It almost felt like I was back in the Pit, for a moment, an opponent and I slowly circling as we took each other’s measure. Waiting for an opening, for a weakness. I remained painfully aware that I had a lot more of either than the Hidden Horror.

“No?” I mused. “Yet you called an immortal, when we first met, and well...”

I shrugged, raising an arm in a nonchalant display.

“I’m hardly that, these days,” I said.

The old monster’s face was like a mirror, I thought as I watched him for a reaction. There would be nothing there to see I had not placed there myself.

“Are you not?” he smiled. “High priestess and herald of an apotheosis you ushered into this world by your own hand – would something as base as age or disease take you, Catherine Foundling?”

“The years will kill me, one of these days,” I said. “If nothing else gets around to it first.”

“Ah,” the Dead King smiled. “But how many years would it take?”

I didn’t answer that, for the truth was that I wasn’t sure. My body now was no stronger than it’d been before I came into my Name, not without Night being woven into it anyway. Pain and exhaustion and so many things that’d felt... distant while I was Sovereign of Moonless Nights had been returned to me in full, but I had not taken sick since being proclaimed First Under the Night. As for age, though? It hadn’t been long enough for me to be sure of whether or not my aging had resumed in earnest. It didn’t feel the same way as it had under my Name, when I’d still grown but there had been something contrived about it – like I was matching a vision, not following nature’s writ. And it was absolutely nothing like it’d been after Second Liesse, where I had been frozen and fixed unto myself. My blood was still red, and had not become gray nor dark, so it might be that I did not share the stretched lifespan of the Mighty who partook in Night. On the other hand, I had come into the priesthood of the Sisters after the devouring of Winter: it was unprecedented grounds we were treading.

“Priesthood is not godhood,” I said. “That path you claimed I would walk, I set aside. You are not all-knowing, Dead King.”

“Do you believe the Intercessor’s strength lies in martial might?” he amusedly asked. “Or mine? You traded a power that shackled you for one whose burden and perils others will bear in your stead, while binding them to you in purpose. Winter’s theft earned you regard, however accidental its execution, but it is your work in the Everdark that suggests you could in time be a peer.”

He chuckled.

“Making peace with the dwarves and wheedling an army out of those unruly sisters in the bargain,” he said, tone approving. “You traded that ill-fitting mantle for more than fair price. One of these days we will have to trade secrets, Black Queen. I rather wonder what you traded the Kingdom Under for a stay of invasion.”

My heart skipped a beat. Was he implying I’d made actual peace between the dwarves and the drow? Or rather, was he implying that the Firstborn still held the old Everdark? I hadn’t, though, the overwhelming majority of the drow was marching in exodus towards his own northern borders. Did he not know? It could be a trick, I thought. I only have the smallest slivers of Sve Noc with me , I thought. The rest is with their people . That would allow them to move unseen to most sorcerous means, and it was true that with his armies investing the Principate the Hidden Horror’s attentions might currently be elsewhere. Unless he was lying to me, I thought. But if he wasn’t...

“Agree to disagree,” I warily said.

Anything more elaborate than trite vagueness might get me seen through, given who I was dealing with. I’d rather seem a little slow than tip my hand if he truly didn’t know about the exodus.

“In at least one instance we do agree,” the Hidden Horror said, “The night isn’t over yet, Black Queen.”

Looking into those patient golden eyes I almost shivered. He was speaking of more than the dawn Akua had held back for a few hours. Night was coming for Calernia, the kind that would be followed by no morning if it ever fell.

“Patience has never been my strong suit,” I spoke with false calm. “Even less so when it pertains to my Woe – one of which you’ve gotten your skeletal hands on.”

“It was not I who sought him,” Neshamah demurred. “And what could do I but answer, when my presence was so earnestly petitioned?”

“You’ve had your laugh,” I said. “And while you came close to breaking the armies below, the scheme was outed. There is no point in you lingering, Dead King. Leave him. Leave here. This is not the field where you want this contest to take place.”

“You demand of me what was willingly given,” the Dead King chided. “And offer nothing in return. What reason do I have to grant your wish, save that you wish it?”

“I have forged,” I said, “a band of five.”

“You have botched a band of five,” he replied, amused. “How many do you believe will still serve your purpose, when choices are to be made?”

“Enough,” I said. “I chose them knowingly. I demand nothing from you, and if it was a threat I’d offered I am not known for my subtlety in their speaking. I am stating that you have nothing left to find in this place save defeat, and not even the useful kind.”

“I suppose,” Neshamah mused, “that I should simply snap the Hierophant’s neck and retire, then.”

My fingers tightened around the ebony staff. I’d known going in that he would try that angle. Whether or not he could actually do that was in doubt, but I had a parry anyway. So long as the Grey Pilgrim lived to the end of this, so would Masego. I’d not forgotten the sight of the Peregrine wielding resurrection with but a word at the Battle of the Camps, unmaking the death I’d snatched from my clash against the other heroes. I almost forced a smile, but that would have been a mistake. No, let him see how the prospect of my friend being snuffed out like a candle grieved me. Let him believe I was willing to fight him anyway.

“If that is what it takes,” I roughly said. “Gods forgive me, if that’s what it takes. Too many lives are on the line.”

“Ah,” he smiled. “There we are. One more mooring, snapping for the tide. How many would be needed, before you truly took the plunge?”

Nonchalantly, he waved a hand.

“A conversation for another day,” he said. “We have nothing but time. Let us speak, instead, of lives.”

“Your plan has been outed,” I said.

“One plan,” he said. “One winter. One year. And how many deaths will it have cost you, even should prove the victor here?”

“You speak as if you were the invaded and not the invader,” I said.

“You speak as one who sought to bargain with me,” he mildly said. “For one such invasion.”

I’d fully intended to betray him when offering that pact, though he’d known that from the start. Still, I almost winced. It was an incomplete truth, but still a damning one. I wish I could say that I’d not understood the scope of what I threatened to unleash then, and I supposed I hadn’t. But I’d suspected, even back then, that it would be a horror unlike any other. I’d been willing to bargain with the King of Death to keep the Grand Alliance at bay, and that I’d been outmanoeuvered by Malicia in the attempt was the sole reason I wasn’t my signature on the treaty that let’s the monster out of its lair. And the truth was, looking down at the fragile truce below me, that I still felt I’d been right . Now that there was a greater threat for all to behold, all the petty games of power and story that’d condemned my home to be either a ruin or pack of tributaries had gone by the wayside. Oh, there were still other considerations but it was telling that while I was just as much the Arch-heretic of the East as last year suddenly everyone was willing to cut compromises and deals with me. It was the breathing room I’d needed, an opportunity I would never have had otherwise. If I’d known before leaving Keter that it would all work, even with these horrid costs, would I still have done it?

It was more damning than anything I’d done that I wasn’t sure what the answer was.

“No such bargain was made,” I said. “I understood what would come of it, if too late, and slew the one who made it. At least one time too few, but how many people can claim to have killed Dread Empress Malicia twice?”

I was not a fool, so I would not admit to such an ugly truth when the Dead King might be displaying this conversation for anyone to see and hear. With the way a grin flickered across his face, gone in the heartbeat it took for his eyes to pass from gold to bronze, I suspected I’d just neatly sidestepped exactly such a trap.

“We were speaking of lives, I believe,” Neshamah said, circling me as I circled him.

His footsteps were a whisper on glass, a contrast to my trudging boots and sharply tapping staff.

“So we were,” I agreed.

“Rhenia has fallen, did you know?” he asked. “Hannoven months ago, but the Lycaonese hold nothing but the last fortress of Twilight’s Pass. After it the heartlands of Bremen will fall, and with them the armies that would defend Neustria. It will be the end of them.”

“They’ve held you back in Cleves and Hainaut,” I said.

“For now,” the Dead King said. “How long can that last? No, the simple truth is that the Principate was not prepared. And then that delightful Theodosian child struck at its allies and its back. Even if you bring Callow to their aid, you but delay the inevitable.”

“Would you say,” I cheerfully replied, “that you are invincible, and your victory is assured?”

“A bold attempt,” the Hidden Horror commented. “Though it makes a poor evasion. Do you disagree with my words, Black Queen?”

“That the Grand Alliance spent a horrendous amount of soldiers etching a bitter stalemate in Callow?” I said. “No. That its loss is written in the stars? Hardly.”

“Imagine what you might do with ten years,” Neshamah idly said. “If my armies withdrew, and truce was observed unfailingly. If you were allowed to truly muster this continent for war, instead of piecing together foes and friends in a broken coalition of mistrust.”

And there it was, I thought. The bargain to be made. And it was quite the prize, wasn’t it? Gods, what I could do with ten years and the promise of a war with Keter at the end. The League could be brought to heel and then into the fold, the Tower brought down on Malicia’s head and the Liesse Accords made to bind even her successor. A decade of recovery for my bruised kingdom who’d known constant war for years now, and once the recalcitrant to the east and the south of the continent were brought into line we’d have a solid, lasting peace – the First Prince would not countenance war where a single soldier might be lost that could instead be sent to hold back the Kingdom of the Dead when it returned. It got me everything I wanted and saved what had to be hundreds of thousands of lives. I’d warned the others that the Hidden Horror would approach us with tantalizing bargains, all the while thinking myself beyond that temptation. And I couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t make a pact with him. But Gods, what a prize it would be.

“Ten years,” he mused. “No, perhaps a decade is too little to move you. Would you like, Catherine Foundling, to purchase a century of truce?”

I flinched. That was a different prize, and perhaps even more tempting.

“If you are truly as a mortal as you insist, then the dead will not trouble Calernia in your lifetime,” Neshamah idly continued.

“And what would you want in exchange, Dead King?” I asked.

“A paltry concession,” he smiled. “I would require the keeping of what lands I have already seized.”

Which would be what? Rhenia, Hannoven, parts of Bremen and Hainaut. The Principate would be losing more than half the Lycaonese principalities, which was a chunk of territory, but to be blunt it was mostly mountains and fortresses assaulted by the ratling warband every spring. Hainaut was more of an issue, since it was a foothold for Keter on the southern shore of the Tomb, but what little word I’d had of that front implied the principality was on the verge of collapse anyway. I’d offered him rights to more than that when I first sought to make a bargain, though admittedly it’d been under false pretences. If the Dead King kept his word, though, the Principate would have a hundred years of peaceful northern border to prepare. If the First Prince agreed, and if it spared her own people annihilation in addition to all the rest I genuinely thought she might accept. And I’d back her, in the aftermath, to the fucking hilt. To expand the Grand Alliance, and then every step of the way.

The two of us, and the Pilgrim if he could be talked into it, we could get Calernia on proper war footing. With ten decades instead of one, the situation with Praes and the Free Cities could be properly seen to instead of hurried. The drow would need a home, but Masego had helpfully ripped a chunk out of Arcadia that could be put to use. This could work, I thought. Of course, it was possible Neshamah would just let the ratlings pass straight through the northern principalities he’d occupy and disrupt the peace without breaking his word. And there’d be benefits for him as well, I thought, or he would never have made the offer in the first place. I was about to bring up the Chain of Hunger when I realized what I was doing and closed my mouth. I’d been considering the practicalities, working out the details. About to try finding his angle. I had, in essence, already accepted the deal he’d offered.

Gods. I’d known what he was doing from the start, and still here we were.

“We will speak of it again, Black Queen,” the King of Death said. “At this peace conference you hve schemed.”

There was a deafening crack, and the glass floor beneath our feet began to splinter.

“You did not test me,” I said.

The Hidden Horror met my eyes, and for the first time there a flash of irritation in the golden gaze.

“Am I chattel, Black Queen, to be led to the altar with blinders on my eyes?” he said. “Am I to willingly embrace the ways of defeat simply because we are at odds? I think not.”

He leaned forward, face cast harshly.

“This game, as all games, I will play on my terms and only that,” the Dead King said. “I have learned what I wanted from this communion, and when I have taken what I wish from this ruin I will forsake it as well. Not a moment before, Catherine, and petty tricks will not force my hand.”

Neshamah flicked a wrist dismissively.

“Remember that, when we speak again. Youth only earns so many allowances.”

In rain of glass I fell through the floor and passed through air and darkness until I landed in another place. Light was peeking through cracks in a door before me, and I opened it. Above me dark clouds pulsed with rings of sorcery, but beneath my boots were the still-paved streets of the ruins of Liesse. My hands were trembling, I saw. I grit my teeth, and put the inarticulate dread that’d sunk in my guts aside. I still needed to find the others wherever they’d come out in the city.

The night was not yet over, even the monster of monsters agreed.

Chapter 37: Accessory

“To keep a friend, avoid sharing these three: coin, cup and crown.”
– Nicaean saying

Three times now I’d come to Liesse bearing a sword.

Once to take it with the Fifteenth at my back, to smother the last embers of rebellion in my time and bury the Lone Swordsman. Again with my father for only company, sneaking in through darkness and death to quell the terrible madness of Akua Sahelian. The city that had once been the thriving heart of southern Callow had been ravaged and ruined years before today, and being ripped from Creation then cast down atop tall peaks had done nothing to mend that state. The sight of the crown jewel of the south reduced to this still had my blood boiling even now. When the Fifteenth had taken Liesse it’d been a sprawl of broad avenues covered in flowers and trees, a beauty in stone pale and tan that seemed at times like it was half churches half mansions. There was nothing of that left now. The third of the city that’d been outside the old walls, mostly tanners and dyers and the poor, had fallen right off when Diabolist raised the city into the sky. The blood and sorcery that’d followed still resonated in this place, the trees were long dead and the slender towers of the basilicas petulantly snapped. Liesse still thrummed with death: it was like a cloying scent in the air, a strange heartbeat coursing through its broken streets. And at the end of the road, in what had once been the Ducal Palace, some fresh madness was blooming. Masego awaited in the ancient hall of the Dukes of Liesse, turned fortress and ritual heart by the Diabolist.

I did not have to look far to see the first touches of his work. In the eldritch sky above us sorcery had been shaped in a great working, like colossal panes of bronze glass. It brought to my mind a telescope, for it was like a collection of increasingly larger glass lenses pointed outwards. Whatever sight they were meant for I was not certain, but on the surface of the panes I saw the barren storm-wracked wasteland of below. Compelling as the sorcery was to watch, I had no time to spare for contemplation of it. I was, it was becoming increasingly clear, far from alone in the streets of Liesse. From the moment I’d stepped out of the dark there’d been the weight of eyes on my back, and the tension had only thickened in the moments that followed. What had once been known as the City of Swans was now the City of Ash and Dust, and it was through the stuff of it that my boots scuffed as I began limping forward. Lingering here would serve no purpose: none of the others would emerge where I had. There would be need to stitch back together our little band before it was wielded against our common foe. Passing through the wreck of what had once been a guild hall, its walls broken so thoroughly that all that remained upright was low ornate pillars of plastered marble, I heard the whispers of an ambush about to be sprung. I caught sight of them, I thought, too easily. A scuttling creature of red-brown fur with long iron claws had been revealed in the shade where it hid, a ray of light playing off a cloud above us laying it bare.

It was devil. I’d even fought this kind before, at the Battle of Marchford and even the ambush that preceded it. At least as clever as a child, and capable of speech in the Dark Tongue as well as some of Creation’s languages. My discussions with the foremost diabolist of our age had since made it plain to me that these were lesser servants, as far as the Praesi saw it, but still commonly used for their wits and ease of binding. And their numbers: the bonsam , as their kind was called, were thrown at enemies not as lone individuals but in packs. My advance slowed by a pillar, and I caught a glint of iron in the carpet of ash that filled this gutted guildhall.

“This doesn’t end well for you,” I called out in Mthethwa. “Flee now and I will not pursue.”

In bursts they came out of the thick layers of ash where they’d lain waiting, and others leapt down from the nearby rooftops where they’d been watching me. In the heartbeat that followed, I counted seven. Four on the ground, dark-eyed and wild and coming at me split evenly from the sides. Three above, two who’d been huddling in mangled bell tower and the one I’d caught first pressing down its body in the hollow of a parapet. It came laughably easy to me. My hand, by happenstance, was already near where I wanted it to be – all I needed to do was let the Night pour through and flick my wrist. By happenstance still, all I would need to elude half my attackers was slip around the pillar I’d reached, and my foot was already halfway there. It was like Creation wanted me to slaughter them, and do so almost effortlessly.

“I gave fair warning,” I said, wrist already moving.

Two of those leaping were, as I pivoted around the pillar, for a moment perfectly lined up. The fine needle of Night I’d sent burst through the flesh and fur of the first like it’d been filled with munitions, and the last of the impact ate halfway through the head of the devil behind it. Two of the bonsam on the ground were now on the wrong side of the pillar to strike at me, and began to turn, while the other pair found I’d smoothly flanked them. They had long enough for their eyes to widen in surprise before with a flick of the wrist in the opposite direction I let loose a second sliver of Night: slight tendrils of smoke that slipped through their nostrils, and they dropped in the instant that followed. It’d turned acid inside their bodies, and melted what there was to melt. The sequence continued, almost dreamlike, with the third leaper landing atop the pillar to my side, two-sided claws scraping at the stone. My hand fell on the side of my staff, as if carried by my last flick, and at the very moment where its weight was drawing back from the landing the tip of my staff struck its chest. It toppled, I knew without even looking, on top of the other two who’d been trying to go around the pillar. With another languid step I finished my way around the pillar, arriving to the sight of two devils snarling at the third as they tried to push it off their side. It was the one who’d fallen that looked at me, letting out a shriek when it saw I’d raised my hand.

I snapped my fingers.

A droplet of Night formed in the middle of the three, and from it a razor-thin pulse emanated. It cut through the heads of the two bonsam on the ground, and through the waist of the one I’d nudged down. They were all three dead before I could bring my staff down to lean on, and I breathed out slowly. The whole scuffle had taken the span of perhaps five breaths, and required me to call on so little Night I’d not even noticed any strain.

“So this is what it’s like,” I murmured. “Having a story like wind in your sail.”

It was even more insultingly leisurely than I’d assumed it would be. How could any hero lose a fight, when Creation conspired a hundred coincidences to give them an edge? I mastered that burgeoning irritation, for it was one of the uglier parts of my inheritance, and set it aside. There was no point in whining about the opposition’s arsenal when instead I could be figuring out ways to use their tools more frequently. There’d be time for that later, though. For now I needed to find the others, which ought not to be too difficult if providence was willing to lend a hand for once. I resumed my advance into the deeper city, treading different shades of ruin as I did. Some the work of devils, some of wights, some of the soldiers who’d once taken Liesse in my name. I did not encounter any more of the bonsam , though once or twice I caught shadows looming on rooftops or watching through the cracks of walls. None approached, though it seemed that courtesy was not being extended to others: I heard a great crack in the distance, and watched with a wince one of the seven basilicas of Liesse toppled inwards. Well, that was as much of a sign I was going to get I supposed. I put some spring to my step and headed towards the collapse. It couldn’t have been more than two alleys of walking until I ran into where my waiting companion had emerged from the aborted crucible: there was a neat line of dead jackal-headed devils, all nine of them cut cleanly through at the waist by the same blow. I glanced at the way the corpses had fallen, and let out a reluctantly impressed whistle when I realized they must have been walking in a file when the Saint of Swords had struck and she’d killed the lot of them before they could even turn. That this was Laurence de Montfort’s work there could be no doubt.

She’d cut off enough my limbs I’d acquired an eye for the look of it.

Though not particularly enthused by who it was that I’d found first, I quickened my limp a little more still. If nothing else, the Saint’s company should make getting around this devil-infested city significantly easier. Not safer, of course, because there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t decide now was the time to clean up a loose end like me, but certainly easier . It wasn’t all difficult to follow the path she’d walked, since she’d sown corpses seemingly ever step of the damned way. It was like there was something about her that attracted the devils like flies, because by the third time I turned a corner only to find a pile of at least twenty dead or dismembered devils – the limbs everywhere made it harder to count – I was forced to conceded this couldn’t possibly just be a string of bad luck. By the fifth mess of corpses I ran into it wasn’t just ironhooks and jackalheads I was looking at, but higher breeds that Wasteland diabolists had used for war in years past. Walin-falme , the leather-winged devils that had been a favourite of binding-inclined Dread Emperors and Akua’s own choice of troops for the Folly, and akalibsa. The latter had been prized by Taghreb tribes, Aisha has once told me, for their raids on their Soninke neighbours to the north. Given that the fanged devils bore rough armour of stone and iron weapons, I could see why. Not that it’d stopped the Saint from slaughtering them.

I would be more or less true to say I saw the fighting before I heard it: further into the city, I saw swarms of walin-falme and smaller gargoyle-like hairy creatures swarming down towards the same plaza. When I got closer the baying of the hound-like akalibsa told me that the Saint was very much under siege, and I grit my teeth as I picked up the pace. Hurrying through a house that looked like some whimsical giant had slapped it down before leaving, I came upon the collapsed basilica and saw that I’d strained my bad leg for no reason at all. There must have been, I thought, easily two hundred devils in the city square I could see past the fallen basilica. The Saint of Swords was alone, and nonchalantly tearing through a the force like it was made of paper.

Pale tabard spinning around her like she was a dancer, the old woman moved among her opponents like the wind. On the ground the scythed through the bondam and the akalibsa like it was sport, smoothly using them as shields against each other as she carved through necks and limbs with unerring precision. The Saint of Swords only put weight behind her blows when the winged devils came for her, the wind left by explosive strength of her strikes sucking them like birds in a storm. I saw her, with my own eyes, cut the air and leap up onto that mark only to kick up and catch a walin-falme in the face, use it as pedestal to twist and carve through the skull of another devil and catch a third one by the throat – she tossed it, casually, against the cut she’d made in the air and it was severed in two halves by the impact. In the heartbeat that followed that insanity she ripped free her longsword and leapt back down into the swarm below, never once having hesitated or broken stride. Merciless Gods , I thought. She might as well be a meat grinder. As I walked through the rubble of the basilica, a shadow was cast ahead of me by the walin-falme who’d thought to take me by surprise and I flicked a wrist backwards without turning. The slithering rope of Night caught it by the neck and tightened before turning to black flame. A charred head and corpse landed behind me a moment later, but I would not be so easily distracted. I suspected that the Saint could keep at this all day without tiring – I’d yet to feel from her more than the occasional flicker of Name power – but devils kept pouring in and there was no end in sight.

We needed to move this along before we got bogged down, and I might as well get two birds with one stone. I supposed I could have reached deep into the Night and unleashed a large working that would have slain many and scattered the rest, but I was disinclined to waste power so early in the fight. Especially when there were more... creative solutions to be had. I left the Saint to her slaughter and crouched against the ground with a pained wince, leg throbbing. Holding onto my staff with tight lips, I ran a hand through the ash and black dust that covered the stone. I closed my eyes, let out a slow breath and let the Night fill my veins. As I’d thought, as I’d felt, there was still power in this place. Deaths by the thousands, as the alchemies of Still Water sunk into innocents and a spark of magic set that corruption ablaze. Other great sorceries as well, Akua’s own works of grand hubris and what Masego had made of this place since snatching it from its Callowan cradle. There were echoes here, and they were not gentle ones. Eyes fluttering open, I swept aside enough of the filth that I could lay my naked palm against what had once been the stone floor of the basilica.

“I saw the birth of you,” I murmured. “Heard the reverb, even then, though I did not yet have ways to heed it. I do now, though.”

I let the Night bridge the gap, felt the wailing held within swell with anger, and gasped as my chest tightened.

“Sing for me,” I whispered.

And though I had failed them I was still their queen, anointed in the halls of the Fairfaxes and the fields of war, so sang for me they did. To my ears it felt like a muted buzzing, at first, something so large and deafening my ears could not truly fathom it. But as the first heartbeat passed, a wave of something eldritch filled me and I tasted of the nature of it. Rage, unbridled and strident and blind: wights killed and killing. But the echo went deeper, to what I had sought. The terror of the inevitable, the helplessness of doom already sown and coming. The shivering moment where the greatest evil of our age had been committed by a woman now in my service. I partook of it, and let the city sing that chorus. It would not last long, I thought as I withdrew my palm and wearily rose to my feet. Maybe thirty heartbeats, and the further away the less keenly it would be felt. But here, now? Even as Laurence de Montfort stood unmoved among a whirlwind of devils, the flock of bound creatures scattered . Fled to the winds, taken by panic and rage that they were not truly able to understand. I’d spared the Saint as much of this as I could, but in truth I’d doubted she would be affected. And, I saw as she calmly turned to watch me, I’d been right. There was no waver in her eyes, no weight on her shoulders. Like water off a duck’s back the tumultuous rage and fear of over a hundred thousand souls rolled over her and found nothing to hold on to.

“Black Queen,” the Saint of Swords greeted me. “Finally. Where are the others?”

“Heading this way, I’d wager,” I said, limping up to her.

I kept some distance. Enough that, if she chose to strike, I’d have long enough to be aware of the blow. That ought to be enough, given my preparations, though in matters like this nothing was ever certain. Much less when it came to a heroine as old and ridiculously lethal as the Saint.

“After that trick you just pulled, there’ll be more than blade fodder headed our way,” the old woman said, then spat to the side. “Might as well have raised a banner for everyone to see.”

“It’ll get the Grey Pilgrim here, as least,” I said. “Perhaps the others as well.”

Laurence’s eyes narrowed.

“Whatever sharpest killer the Enemy’s got as well,” she said. “But you did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

I did not deny it, since it was true.

“I’ve had to assault that palace once before,” I said, gesturing at the looming structure in the distance. “And that was when it was just the Diabolist that put up wards and traps. We don’t want to have to fight whatever monster’s waiting while in there, you can trust me on that.”

“I don’t even trust you to breathe,” the Saint curtly said. “But the decision’s not entirely senseless.”

“You sweet talker, Laurence,” I deadpanned. “Stop, you’ll make me blush.”

She eyed me up and down, though there was nothing suggestive about the assessment taking place. That was the gaze, I thought, of someone deciding how it’d be easiest to kill me when the time came and was rather looking forward to getting around to it.

“What did he offer you, in there?” the old woman brusquely asked.

My jaw clenched. Did I want to have that conversation with Laurence de Montfort, of all people? No, I did not. On the other hand, there were risks to dismissing her question. I studied her carefully. If I refused, would she take that as me confession to collusion with the Dead King and strike? I honestly wasn’t sure. And unless I wanted to risk a fight anyway, I couldn’t hesitate much longer than this.

“A hundred year truce,” I finally said. “For the lands he’s already taken. You?”

If I was going to answer, so was she. The Saint smiled unpleasantly.

“Never even showed up,” she said. “It got dark, I got impatient and cut my way out. So much for your test, Foundling. Didn’t figure it all out, it looks like. I wonder what else you’re wrong about.”

I hummed, cocking my head as I listened to the last echoes of the song I’d asked for. I could follow the... tide of it, with a little effort, and it was telling me interesting things. For one, it parted around the Ducal Palace like a tide around rocks. The end of our journey most definitely awaited there. There was, however, another hole in the city. Much smaller, but unlike the palace instead of being exempt it was violently repelling the song. And that small presence was not far ahead of us, coming in our direction.

“Not about the monster, I’ll tell you that for certain,” I said. “We’re about to have a guest, Saint.”

Her gaze sharpened.

“Then move ahead,” she said. “I will not have you at my back, Black Queen.”

“Why?” I frowned. “I’m not the one who’s a walking domain. I can’t – wait, are you implying I’d stab you in the back?”

She sneered, which was answer enough.

“Seriously?” I said. “Are you incapable of being halfway reasonable without someone holding your hand? I’ve had more cordial conversations with godsdamned angels, Laurence. Angels . Let that sink in.”

I did not see it until it was too late. My mistake, growing irritated enough most my attention had been on the Saint instead of where it should be. My heart quickened and I felt goosebumps crawl along my skin as I saw a single-edge blade of bronze swinging for my eyes. It had been a mistake, I realized, to assume that the song would allow me to accurately keep track of the enemy. Then there was a flash of radiant Light, and the creature that’d been about to take my life was shot out by the impact like a ballista bolt. I blinked out the blindness, absent-mindedly noting that the enemy had been thrown straight through two houses and a sculpture of Jehan the Wise before stopping.

“We appear to have flushed out the enemy,” Tariq said, lowering his crooked staff.

“Thanks for that,” I croaked out.

He dipped his head in acknowledgement. My heart was beating wildly and my fingers felt faint. Gods, but it’d been a while since I’d come that close to dying – without anything like Winter to get me through it. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like. I fell in with the Pilgrim, the two of us advancing to join the Saint. Her eyes were on the plume of dust and ash where the enemy had been thrown, and together the three of us looked upon the silhouette that emerged. Utterly pristine even after being thrown, its bare feet padded across the ashen ground. It wore nothing but a loose long-sleeved shirt of white satin, with trousers of the same, and its extended arm held out the bronze blade at a horizontal angle. It was not human, I thought, and I knew that without needing to study it in greater detail because I’d encountered it before.

“Well now, as I live and breathe,” the Saint said. “That looks to me like an elf.”

“Bestowed, too,” the Pilgrim added.

“It’s called the Spellblade,” I calmly said. “And it’s one of the Dead King’s own Revenants.”

I felt the weight of the other two’s attention, though neither looked away from our enemy, and the unspoken question that went with it.

“In Keter I tried to destroy it, with Hierophant and Thief,” I said.

“And?” Tariq calmly asked.

“I landed about one good hit that whole fight, for which it vaporized half my body,” I replied. “We ran as soon as we could. It’s nasty in the elf way, and it can makes blades out spells as well. This is going to be a ride, I can tell you that much..”

“Good,” Laurence de Montfort said, smiling a wolf’s smile as she began advancing. “Then this ought to be decent practice for Dead King.”

Chapter 38: Pinnacle

“For the left hand is strife and the right hand is ruin, and only one may be clasped. The worthy take, the worthy rise; all else is dust.”
– Extract from the Tenets of Night

The Saint of Swords wasted no time and no words: forward she went, an arrow shot. There was not a motion wasted to the way she moved, a sort of flowing gait that was neither run nor walk. The Spellblade simply walked barefoot through the ruins to meet her, utterly indifferent to the sight of one of the most dangerous heroes alive with her blood up.

“A known weakness?” the Grey Pilgrim conversationally asked.

His eyes had never left the Revenant, and neither had mine.

“Not ice, I’ll tell you that much,” I muttered. “Or stabbing. To this day I’m not even sure if I baited an aspect out of it or if it’s just that ridiculously powerful.”

“He, I suspect, not it,” the Peregrine noted.

There’d been nothing particularly male about the dead elf to my eyes, either now or then, so he probably knew something I didn’t.

“Suspect?” I repeated.

“There is an old story,” the hero said, “about Death taking the Forever King’s only son.”

I’d never heard anything like that, and unlike Tariq I’d been born in a kingdom that bordered the Golden Bloom. On the other hand, he had decades of going around Calernia nudging villains to their deaths and unearthing secrets as well as the Choir of Mercy whispering in his ear. So, the Spellblade had been a prince once. Assuming elves saw kingship as we did, which was anybody’s guess: what went on in the depths of that forest was a mystery to anyone but the elves.

“Doubt the dangling parts are going to affect this any,” I shrugged. “But good to know.”

“Knowledge is always of use,” the Peregrine agreed. “No particular weakness, then. Unfortunate. That will prolong the matter some.”

I almost told him he had a gift for understatement before I caught sight of the look on his face and realized he was deadly serious. That, to him, a millennia-old elven Revenant was simply a vexing delay on our way to the end of this journey. The serenity on his tanned, creased face was not forced or posturing or an attempt to reassure. It was simple certainty that he would be the victor, regardless of the odds. I was surprised, still, by how utterly infuriating I found the sight. Because if a hero that old, that seasoned, could feel that way? Then there was some truth to the attitude. And though that strength on my side tonight, there was still something at the heart of me revolted by the nature of it. No wonder it’s impossible to bargain with you, when you have a mandated from Above to always get your away . I was, I supposed, my father’s daughter in the regrettable ways as well as the rest. I took my hand off my staff and it stayed still and standing as I rolled my shoulders to limber them.

“Let’s get this going, then,” I said.

A moment later, two of Calernia’s finest swordsmen had their first clash. If I’d not woven a sliver of Night into my eyes, I would have missed half of it. It was not that they moved that quickly, I thought, though while the Saint was drawing on her Name and the Spellblade made a mockery of mortal means simply by being who he was. I’d faced fae quicker than them, and likely some with more strength behind their swings as well. It was, for lack of a better term, the timing of their movements that was at their craft’s pinnacle. The Saint feinted high and right, the Revenant stepped to the side and somehow that led him to be behind her and swinging at her neck: then, even as the Saint pivoted on herself and aimed a cutting blow at the side of his own neck, the both withdrew a step. I took me a heartbeat longer than them to understand why. It would have been a double kill, I realized, if they’d both finished the arc of their swing. So instead they’d withdrawn, and gone for a second pass. I almost let out a whistle. I doubted I’d ever like Laurence de Montfort even if I didn’t end up killing her but I could certainly admire her skill.

Black was the one of the few people I’d ever seen move like that – it was how he’d beat Captain when they sparred, even though she’d been massively stronger and quicker on the swing – though on occasion Archer got close to it as well. She still relied on an aspect to get there, though, her Flow . Ranger would be more than match for either of these, I thought, but though rather skilled with a blade I’d never been even remotely in their league. Impressive as the spectacle of the two of them trading not-blows like dancers was, I’d not come here to be a spectator. The tricky part would be, I knew, intervening without getting in the Saint’s way.

“All is Night,” I murmured in Crepuscular, wrist flicking outwards. “The left hand is strife and the right hand is ruin, only one can be clasped: I call on you, Komena, war-bringer and red of deed, breaker of spears and devourer of hope. In your name I curse my foe.”

A brush like feathers of my cheek, the flap of wings, and distant cawing laughter. She approved, it seemed, as she was want to do when I spoke words from her Tenets. Night flowed through my veins, like a cool shadow cast on a spring morning, and I released the working on the two fighting in the distance. Tariq stiffened, for the barest moment, though the tension ebbed when he saw that the Saint had not been hurt by what I’d done. It was a subtle touch, at first. The shadows of the ruins where they were duelling lengthened a little, and the air began to swell unspeakably in that way it did before a storm. Neither of the combatants took notice, for after four bouts they’d now taken each other’s measure and were now going for blood. I waited patiently, and only struck when I found my opportunity: the Revenant’s bronze blade had been cut through by the Saint’s longsword, and when it burst in a flash of flame that blinded Laurence she drew back. The elf’s hand extended and the air began shuddering as rust-like flecks were attracted to its open palm and began to form a fresh blade.

“No,” I replied.

And the flecks went grey, the shivering air went still and the Revenant’s eyes snapped straight to me from across the field. That’s right , I thought. Look at me. I just swung decay and entropy at you look a bludgeon, look at how irritating I am. The burst of flame hadn’t even finished dying when tip of the Saint’s blade went straight through, going half an inch into the Spellblade’s throat before he could react. Laurence’s footing shifted, she began to pivot on herself, and even as the elf took a fluid step back she finished tearing her sword out through the right side of his throat. Too shallow to have caught the spine, I saw with disappointment. Eyes flashing with fury, the Revenant’s left hand shot out and with an open palm he struck at the Saint’s arm – there was a thundering sound of iron being bent and she flew back a dozen feet from the strength of it, the angle of her upper arm making it clear the bones must have been broken badly enough it tore up through skin and muscle. The Revenant’s other arm rose horizontally and moonlight clustered around his fist.

“Still no,” I replied.

The Night clustered around his fist smothered the gathering glow before it grow strong enough to contest that ending. Visibly irritated, the Revenant shook its fingers free of the power and took a step forward that brought it in front of the Saint – just as her arm snapped back in place, wisps of Light swirling around it as the Pilgrim’s work bore fruit. The heroine was ready when the blow came, nudging aside the elf’s forearm with the pommel of her sword and then angling her wrist. Her foot circled back, her body twisted, and the Saint of Swords swung her blade halfway through the neck she’d already cut before a familiar shiver of power began. I knew that feeling. Last time I’d felt it my entire face and the forward half of my body had ended up vaporized because I’d been too close, and whatever this was the Revenant had been able to use it again on the massive pile of blocks Hierophant had tried to bury it under. Come on , I thought, and gathered the Night to pit it against the shiver. There was maybe a tenth of a heartbeat where the forces were even, and then to my horror the Revenant’s working plowed right through. All the Night I’d sunk into the area went into smoke, fully and instantly and harshly enough it felt like someone had ripped off a chunk of my skin.

“ Shine ,” the Grey Pilgrim hoarsely said.

I forced Night into my eyes even though the sensation was unpleasant and it felt like they were boiling, as I was wary of being blinded even for a moment and the radiant shine of the star the Peregrine had just unleashed would have robbed me of sight without it. It almost did anyway, for even though Tariq had unleashed only the palest shadow of the morning star he’d hung in the sky in Creation even that shred was terrible to behold. A ghostlike shimmering globe had appeared between the Saint and the Spellblade, for an instant, and some sort of massive pressure had swatted the Revenant trough the paved ground. I still caught a glimpse of the heroine’s face and saw that all the way to the bridge of her nose the flesh of her face looked like a blanket of acid had been laid over it. It was the same with the entire flank of her body that’d been facing the Revenant most fully, though strangely her clothes were untouched. In the moment where the Night had fought the shiver I’d learned one thing for certain, that it was in fact an aspect, and taste of the nature of that power. Looking at the Saint’s tabard and tunic I frowned: they were, I thought, looking too pristine. And with the harsh taste of the power I’d fought still resounding, I suspected I’d put my finger on the face of that aspect: it related, one way or another, to ‘purification’.

Gods, elves were such assholes. It looked like Ranger had come by it honestly.

Body unmarred by any of the wounds that’d been inflicted on it, the Spellblade leapt out of the wreckage it’d been smacked into, a half-formed blade of light green scales in hand. My working had been scattered, so there’d be no shutting that shutting the door on that quick enough. Time to go on the offensive, then, I grimly thought. A panting Tariq strung healing Light around the Saint once more, and as he did I snatched up my staff. Or would have, were it still there. For a surreal moment I looked to see if I’d simply missed it while reaching but no, the alarm welling up in my stomach was quite warranted and it was nowhere to be seen. Shit . With the amount of power I’d sunk into that, over the months, this was not the kind of artefact I would want in anybody else’s hands even if it wasn’t also my contingency for the Saint. I tapped a foot on the ground, sending out a pulse of Night. If it was close I should get something out of that.

“Pilgrim, there’s another-”

I had gotten something out of the Night pulse, though by the time I did it was pointless because my eyes had done the work already. I’d glanced at Tariq, when beginning to speak, and so caught sight of the Revenant standing behind him. It was hard to even tell she was dead, truth be told, for her tanned leathery skin and the single blond tress going down her back were strikingly lifelike. This one too was an old friend: the Thief of Stars looked no worse for the few hours she’d spent as one of my own Thief’s possessions. Though, if the harsh look she flicked at me was any indication, she hadn’t forgotten that bad turn either. More interesting was the way she was holding my staff, pointing it directly at the Grey Pilgrim’s back. Strange, since in her hands it might as well be a walking stick: she wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. Well, unless she had – and there it was, the shiver of an aspect being used. Something to facilitate using what she’d stolen maybe? It didn’t matter. I raised my hand as the Thief of Star roused the Night in my staff-that-was-not-a-staff, baring my teeth savagely.

“Mistake,” I said in Crepuscular, and snapped my fingers.

Night lashed out viciously and the sound of talons rending flesh rang across the plaza. The Thief of Stars’ upper half splattered the ground, entrails trailing like grim garlands, but there was no hiding that a gaping chest wound had split her in two. As if some great bird’s talons had snapped out of the sea of Night awaiting within the staff, where they had been waiting. They must have thought I was a fucking idiot, making something that dangerous without putting in contingencies – like the attention of the angrier half of the goddesses that artefact was linked to. She might have managed to flee with it, though certainly not remain hidden. Using it, though? That was opening a door for Komena to express her displeasure. It’d had absolutely nothing to do with my fingers being snapped, but given such a beautiful opportunity to pretend otherwise why would I not ? Posturing aside, I sent out a simmering coil of Night to catch the staff before it fell and dragged it back to me. I’d just slapped into my palm when I slammed onto the ground, biting down on a scream as my bad leg gave and rolling fruitlessly to the side. A vivid green sword seemingly made of scales was swung down at my head, though with a grunt the Saint carved through the damned thing. Foul-smelling droplets flew everywhere and I wove a spinning top of Night above me that proved to be the right reflex: wherever the liquid fell, it smoked and ate at whatever it’d touched.

“ Move , Foundling,” the Saint of Swords snarled, slapping aside a blow with the side of her sword.

I almost did, but then I paused. This slugging match with an effectively indestructible and inexhaustible demigod wasn’t going anywhere, and it was a losing fight for us. Sure we were pulling slightly ahead right now but both the heroes would tire eventually and the Peregrine had already dropped an aspect once. Engaging the Revenant like we were storming a bloody wall was just going to get us killed. What did I know about my allies? Tariq I had a read on, could play off of, but the Saint... Sever , I realized. She had that brutal little aspect still. If she was given an opening, she could use I to remove the source of our troubles. I just needed to... Halfway into rising to my feet, I theatrically groaned and flopped back to the ground. The Spellblade saw that as the opening it was and struck again, so it’d just made a tactical mistake. I was prone and crippled, the Saint was having an increasingly harder time fending off its blows and I pointedly did not get up. I stayed there on the ground, hilariously unarmored and basically just asking to get killed. The Saint, though it must be said she did so with considerable ill-grace, heroically defended her fallen ally in a doomed venture. I suspected she was going to cut her losses soon, but that was fine. I’d gotten what we needed.

“What are you-” Laurence started, but she was interrupted by the Grey Pilgrim nailing our opponent.

It was easy to forget that, for all his power, Tariq was not meant to be the tip of the spear in a band or even the healer. He was, by Role, a helping hand. He was at his strongest and ablest when serving as that hand, as demonstrated by the fact he’d been able to once more use an aspect that he should have thoroughly exhausted earlier to save the Saint’s life earlier. Now, the radiant beams of Light bit into the side of the Revenant harshly and as the better part of his left shoulder and kneecap were incinerated, it called on its favourite trick. The air shivered as it drew on its aspect, and the Saint of Swords’ own blade fell on the floor with a clang. Breathing out sharply, the old woman swung nothing at all and the Spellblade screamed . That aspect had cut Winter, elf or not he wasn’t getting through that with a shrug. And, while we were at it, I killed the pain in my bad leg with a sliver of Night and pushed myself up with my staff. The Revenant was staggering back in apparent pain – and disbelief at the fact that it could feel pain, I suspected – while the Saint looked like she was about to keel over. She’d be out of it for at least a bit, so best to tip the scales a little further. The Spellblade’s eyes fell on me just as I leaned forward and rammed my hand through his chest.

“What,” he croaked. “What are you-”

“ Restocking ,” I replied with a feral grin.

I’d had a knack for taking from my foes even before I’d become the herald of goddesses who’d made theft of might the central tenet of their culture. Now? I’d had tutors in the art, patrons who’d touched the godhead and a Wastelander of the old blood. My fingers, coated in Night, dug through its soul and skimmed over the raw ruin the Saint had made of the first bundle. Another two were there for the taking, one still faintly vital and the other necrotized for centuries if not millennia. I could only get a vague idea of what it was I was taking until I’d taken it, but there was no room for hesitation. The aspect still in use felt like some sort of wheel, or maybe a kaleidoscope. The dead one felt like... nothing. Absence, maybe. Denial or gamble? Double down, I decided. A little too late to start playing it safe. Letting out a hissing breath, I withdrew my fingers from the Spellblade’s chest and found they were holding a slim branding iron. Ban , I knew sure as my own breath, and cackled. I called on the Night, and began pushing it into the iron.

“Hold him,” I yelled.

The Pilgrim wove shackles of Light around the Revenant’s limbs but we were the winning side, now – it tore through them effortlessly. But where Role and story failed, Laurence de Montfort instead scathingly said something in Tolesian and carved straight through the elf’s right knee with the longsword he’d already picked up. But already it’d formed a blade out of some eerie pulsing red haze, and instead of attacking one of us he stabbed himself – only the blade broke, and fresh flesh began to sprout where the Saint had cut him before the severed limb even began to fall. But I’d been sinking Night into the brand this whole time, and though the symbol it depicted hurt my eyes to try to discern I could still see smoke was wafting from it. It should suffice. Even as the Revenant dipped forward from the sudden loss of limb, I shoved the branding iron against its chest. The moment it touched the satin shirt it went straight through, and though I saw the Revenant’s skin blacken around where the brand touched the flesh it did not react. It would not feel pain from this, I thought. Or, indeed, anything else. The red pulse shattered, the flesh ceased growing and the elf flinched back once more. I supposed it was rather in shock at the way I’d used his dead aspect to kill the other one. I stepped back and smiled.

“All yours,” I told the Saint.

She was a fearsome one, but he was still an elf and an old one.

It took her seven blows, before his head rolled on the ground and the Dead King lost his second Revenant of the night.

Chapter 39: Looting

“Thirty-four: it is not graverobbing if it was your destiny to have that artefact, just proactive inheritance.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

The Spellblade had taken an awful lot of killing, but he was finished. With the Thief of Stars having tried her hand at stealing something a goddess had her hand on and gotten about what one would expect for the trouble, that left the three of us masters of the field.

And so I was worried.

I had a finer nose for trouble than most, given the amount of times I’d come a hair’s breadth away from death, but it wasn’t a physical threat that had me growing unsettled. I knew for a fact that the Dead King had more than few Revenants to throw into the breach, so why was it two I’d encountered before that were guarding Hierophant? And that wasn’t even getting into the way that I’d bet rubies to piglets we were going to run into the damned Skein skulking somewhere around here before this was over. No, setting that aside for now why was the King of Death putting up dead Named I had some knowledge of instead of any other from his millennial treasure trove of undead heroes? The Spellblade hadn’t been an easy mark, by any means, and it’s cost us heavy use of exhausting aspects from two aging heroes to put him down, but I didn’t buy that Neshamah didn’t have some Revenant around that wasn’t about as much as a heavy hitter and completely unknown to me. Are you tying off loose ends, Dead King? Sacrificing servants I was familiar with so that knowledge couldn’t be used against him down the line? It seemed wasteful, given the calibre of Revenants used. The elf could probably have torn through a Lycaonese border fortress by himself, and if the Thief of Stars was even half as handy as Vivienne had been when wielding a cousin Name she could easily have wreaked havoc on supply lines.

It was true that the Dead King’s method was, in essence, never to leave an opening that could be exploited no matter what it cost to play it safe. On the other hand, it didn’t feel like a coincidence that I could feasibly make use of both the Revenants we’d encountered today. The Thief of Stars had, back in Keter, wielded an aspect that lit up a constellation above her head that was known in Callow as the King’s Crown. It’d been suppressed by my domain, as Winter could snuff out anything given long enough, but if I went digging in our little friend’s split halves I might be able to seize whatever that’d been. The Spellblade, if Tariq was right, had once been a prince of the Golden Bloom and presumably heir to its throne. Of seven crowns and one, it was perhaps viable to seize the last from either the broken Revenants at our feet. If the Dead King was in Masego’s head – and he had to be, to an extent, to have been able to pass on so many of my secrets to the Tyrant – then he would know of my recipe to make Larat into something greater. Could I assume that, since he’d since had opportunity to speak with Kairos, he knew of everything I’d revealed so far? Yes, it’ll be safer to , I decided. So he knew I needed one last crown, presumably, and... No, that was the wrong way to think about this. Both the Revenants couldn’t feasibly recent additions to this mess, they must have been here for some time.

So why would the Dead King send a pair of possible crowns into the mess, of all his possible guards to post around Hierophant?

“Black Queen,” the Peregrine interrupted me. “We should not linger.”

“It’s a trap,” I pensively said.

“What is?” the Saint flatly asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I muttered. “But he laid a trap for us.”

The last crown, the ‘one’ of the ‘seven and one’, it was the most important of the eight. As the Rogue Sorcerer had said: seven for weight but the last to shape. Was this the nature of the snare the Dead King had laid? That if we took a shortcut, attempted to bring a crown from outside our little circle rather than surrender one of our own, we’d be giving him a foothold into this place? The Revenants, after all, were of his make now regardless of what they had been while living. It was tenuous thread, to be sure, but given that my opponent was perhaps the finest sorcerer to ever grace Calernia and had more than ten centuries of experience on me in Namelore even that fine thread might be enough. Given the largely unprecedented nature of what I sought to accomplish tonight, there was still much that I did not and perhaps could not know about it. Or is that your trick within the trick, Neshamah ? I suddenly thought While I go in circles pondering of stories and deep schemes, you use it as shell to strike a more precise blow. Was he offering me a pair of crowns so I would sour on the use of them out of fear, and so force a loss? The right to rule of one of three would be gone, if so: Tyrant, Pilgrim or Queen. Any of them would result in an opponent of the Dead King losing a measure of earthly influence.

“We cannot withdraw,” the Grey Pilgrim bluntly said. “It would mean the death of three great hosts, and possibly of Iserre itself.”

“Getting afraid, Foundling?” Laurence nastily grinned.

Her, I ignored. We were no longer fighting, which meant she’d gone from massively useful to at least something of a pest and possibly a liability. The Peregrine I needed to keep his eyes on the prize, though, so to him I replied.

“I’m not suggesting withdrawal,” I said. “But the Hidden Horror has a game afoot, let’s all take a moment to acknowledge that. There’s too many coincidences beginning to pile up.”

Tariq was no youngblood, but that had advantages as well as the opposite. His eyes sharpened.

“The Revenant you fought before,” he said, and it was not a question.

“Revenants,” I corrected, flicking a glance at the other mangled corpse.

The old man’s face went stiff. Though not, I understood when he began speaking again, for the reasons I’d expected.

“He must hold you in high esteem,” the Grey Pilgrim blandly said, “for having assumed from inception that it would be your arrangements that would win out and lead us here.”

Yeah, now was not even remotely the time for that. The oddly cordial relationship I had with the foremost monster in Calernian history was not a matter I intended on discussing here – with Tariq, ever – so I put down my foot as firmly as I could on this before it could lead anywhere.

“Or, more likely, he planned for every eventuality and we’re simply seeing the contingencies related to my intentions,” I said. “You’ll remember that the Tyrant has been feeding him everyone’s secrets for months now – the Dead King’s not the kind of creature to have only one string to his bow.”

“And how are we to be sure, Damned, that you’re not one of those strings?” the Saint said.

“You sure you didn’t speak with him?” I mused, forcing my lips to stretch into a friendly smile. “Because starting a fight within the band seems like exactly the kind of thing a villain would manipulate someone like you into.”

The old woman’s face blanked, the tightening of her features pressing the creases together in a way that made them look like some surreal mask of flesh for a moment. The loathing she glared at me with was bright and burning. I cared little for it, though, since the reminder that by turning on me she might just be advancing the Dead King’s schemes was enough to have her fingers leaving the pommel of her now-sheathed sword. A little heavy-handed, as far as handlings went, but I suspected anything too subtle would be lost on the likes of Laurence de Montfort.

“What is it that you suggest, then?” the Pilgrim calmly asked.

“I’m going to be taking those,” I said, flicking a hand at the two broke Revenants. “In case they might be of use. But the identity of the third Revenant we encounter will tell us how we need to approach the end of our journey.”

“You have met others, then,” Tariq said.

I had. Two more, to be exact. The nightmare that was a Horned Lord with oracular insights, the creature known as the Skein. And one I had not fought at all, and would rather not: a man who’d once been the Good King of Callow, Edward Fairfax the Seventh. If it was the former that was waiting on our path to the Ducal Palace, then Neshamah’s game remained opaque to me. If it was the latter, though? It’d make three crowns that had been set in my way, increasingly obvious ones. It was an almost insultingly blatant bait, which while shedding no light on what decision should be taken at least would make it clear what the crux of the snare was. Assuming, of course, that this was not all governed by whim and the third Revenant wouldn’t either be one I’d never before encountered. Or that there would be no third at all.

“It should be either a rat or a king,” I said. “The rat means we’re in trouble. The king means dice might need to be rolled.”

“A rat,” the Saint slowly said. “Do you mean...”

“Yes,” I interrupted. “Like that one you fought.”

“You’ve fought one of their kind before?” the old woman said, eyes considering.

“I survived it, with the help of others,” I retorted. “Still on the fence as to if whether where we are right now will make it more or less dangerous.”

There was no Threefold Reflection to spin us around with here, but the Skein wouldn’t be confined to a single room either. It’d had a lot more room to manoeuvre, and freedom in choosing when and where to strike. Given that oracles were agonizingly difficult to deal with even when they weren’t also massive more or less indestructible murder rats, it was not promising grounds either way. I was rather hoping for King Edward even if that path involved the dice having another go. Shit, if it was the Skein then had we been anticipated every step of the way? No, I decided. I knew for a fact that Choirs could affect those sorts of things, and the Pilgrim was sworn to one. Sve Noc would obscure me to most things unless they wished it otherwise, including possibly the Skein’s weakened remnants of a Name, and there was also the very madman that Kairos had been using as a shield this entire campaign: the Hierarch. No, it shouldn’t be possible for the Skein to have followed the entire thread flawlessly given that much interference. It should still have been able to glimpse possibilities, though, which would be dangerous enough on its own.

“The rat has something in common with Cordelia’s cousin,” I delicately said, glancing at Tariq.

The old man’s lips tightened, and he offered me a nod.

“I suspect the both of us will hinder that,” he said. “Though not half as much as Laurence does simply by being who she is.”

I raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“What does she do?” I said. “Cut the future?”

Gods , I immediately thought, please don’t let her cut the future . She was already ridiculously difficult to handle.

“Winter was predictable,” the Peregrine said, “but never, I believe, predicted.”

My brow rose further up, and I glanced at the Saint – who seemed displeased we were trading information to her. I couldn’t honestly blame her for that, since a handful of secrets was often the difference between Named beating all odds or being buried. The Peregrine seemed to be implying that since Laurence had made herself into a domain, more or less, then trying to predict her was the equivalent of having tried to predict my own domain back in the day. So, the Saint would muddle predictions simply by being involved in them. Useful, that, and it went some way in explaining why no one had been able to spring an ambush on her over the years. The Heavens really had shaped a fine executioner, hadn’t they? No one would see the Saint of Swords coming until she was there and by then it would be much, much too late.

“Understood,” I said. “If the two of you would keep an eye out, I’ll clean up these loose ends.”

I dipped my head at the Revenant remains. The Pilgrim’s face flickered with hesitation until he spoke up.

“Your Majesty,” he cautiously said, “you do not intend to eat them, do you?”

I choked.

“Do I –“

What ?

“No, I’m not going to eat the fucking corpses,” I hissed. “Why would you even ask that?”

“Drow are known to take from the dead in some manner,” the old man said. “And you are closely allied with orcs and goblins, whose habits are well-documented.”

“Corpse-eating isn’t how the Firstborn do it,” I grunted. “And for the Clans it’s actually a pretty complicated issue that’s been shaped by generations of – you know what, now’s not the time.”

“The goblins?” Laurence de Montfort asked.

She seemed honestly curious, though that didn’t mean she wasn’t also being kind of a prick.

“Goblins will eat anything , Saint,” I tiredly said. “It’s not like corpses are miraculously excluded from that just because it’s distasteful to think about.”

‘Distasteful’ was never a word you wanted to speak when discussing that particular subject, as it happened, if Robber was around. He would be very swift to inform anyone fool enough to do so that human corpses were actually very savory even without being cooked first. And that in Ater you could get that sort of meat rather on the cheap if you knew where to look, from grave-peddlers whose corpses had not been bought by necromancer and were starting to ripen. There was a reason that Black had told me never to buy grilled meat off a stall in the streets of Ater if you hadn’t seen the animal it came from killed and cooked, and it wasn’t just because it was a possible avenue for assassination. Unwilling to participate in that wreck of a conversation any longer, I hobbled my way to the nearest corpse – the Spellblade’s – and knelt. Its flesh felt strange to my touch, not like a human’s at all. Rougher, almost like bark, though I had no notion of whether that was a consequence of elvishness or of being made a Revenant. Regardless, even a glancing touch was enough to tell me there was nothing salvageable in there: none of the three aspects there’d been were in a state to be taken. The one Saint had severed was a ruin, and when I’d used Ban on the undead’s own third it had shattered the former and faded the latter beyond use. Fair enough, I thought. Given that I’d already taken from him once, I wouldn’t have been able to anyway.

The head and leg that’d been cut off I put back in place, though mending those wounds was beyond me save in the most gruesome of ways. I wove Night in a pall over the elf’s still form, and as the veil of darkness thinned and dispersed so the sight of the body disappeared was revealed. I leaned on my staff to rise, feeling the Pilgrim’s patient gaze and the Saint’s belligerent one. The heroine idly strolled up to me as I headed towards the remains of the Thief of Stars.

“Melted it, did you?” she said. “Useful knack.”

It was difficult for her to seem as casual as she clearly thought she was being when she was clearly itching to get at me. I almost looked t Tariq – was this some misguided attempt to insert a little cordiality into this relationship? Go on, Laurence, go up to the Black Queen and say something nice about her wicked and blasphemous powers.

“I’m keeping them in the Night,” I said. “Matters of burial can be addressed when this is all over.”

“So it’s a pocket trick, like a sorcerer,” the Saint unpleasantly smiled. “Like I thought. So why, Foundling, did you make the Rogue Sorcerer carry your crowns?”

Because I needed bait for Kairos, juicy enough to ensure it was the Sorcerer he struck at , I thought. Because the only way I’m getting my father’s soul back from you people without a fight is if I do not, in fact, get it back from you people. So I let out a little noise of surprise, and smiled all regretful and dim at the Saint of Swords. Eyes a little wide, like I was a touch slow but all harmless.

“Oh Hells,” I ruefully said. “It completely slipped my mind.”

“You’re up to something, Foundling,” Laurence de Montfort quietly said. “And I won’t let you get away with it.”

“Right now,” I said, coming by the mangled halves of the second Revenant, “what I’m up to is having my time wasted. Walk it off, Saint.”

I flicked a dismissive hand at her, which from the way she went red in the cheeks was more insult than anyone had tossed her way in a long time. Gods, if they’d had Black around her for weeks or months they must have kept him gagged the whole time: given the ease of her temper and how viciously he could spin a sentence, if they hadn’t the body I’d claimed would have fewer limbs. Another painful crouch and ah, it seemed that the feel of the other one’s skin had been on account of elvishness after all. The Thief of Stars’s flesh was like a fresh corpse’s, which was rather uncomfortable to think about so I did not linger over it. Her I could still take from, I found. One of the aspects tasted like... flight, cold and in the dark. The starlit one? Hard to tell, my senses in this were hardly exact. The second I studied tasted familiar, and I immediately judged it to be what she’d called on in her attempt to use my staff. It felt like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle clicking together, though there was something else. Rarity? Some sort of limit, I thought, though given the way I made of aspects artefacts with a single use that didn’t particularly matter to me. Still, if it was like I suspected and this was a trick that allowed one to use most anything then it didn’t particularly appeal to me. Boots scuffed the ground at my side, but I bit my tongue at the last moment when I caught a glimpse of them and saw it was not the Saint who’d returned but the Pilgrim.

“She wasn’t always like that,” the old man quietly said.

Oh, were we going to have that talk now, under cover my seeing to the body of a fallen foe? I wasn’t interested in being sympathetic to the Saint of Swords, so he was barking up the wrong tree. What Laurence de Montfort might once have been weighed less on the scales than what she now was, and that was trouble. The third aspect, I found, had been ripped out. And the... fabric around it had been almost burned, for lack of better term, perhaps to ensure that not even a speck of what had been there before remained. Interesting, I thought. Neshamah’s work? That implied a much greater degree of control over how Revenants became what they were than I’d assumed he had. And, more intriguingly, that whatever that aspect of the Thief’s had been he’d judged it trouble enough he’d cut it out before making her into one of his undead. That aside, my remaining choice was being the aspect that tasted of running away and the one that felt like well-placed hands. You can never have too many ways to leg it , I decided, and took the first. I leaned forward, allowing my cloak to drape over me and hide the sight of the small carved wishbone the aspect had taken the shape of from the Pilgrim even as I palmed it. My other hand moved to distract him, pulling down a veil of Night over the broken body.

“If you insist on having this conversation,” I said, “let’s have it on the move. I’m done here.”

Chapter 40: Entreaty

“The priests lie, my friend. A bargain with a devil does not pervert your meanings, or seek to twist your nature. Why would it need to, when the honest desires of men are already so wicked?”
– Kayode Owusu, Warlock under Dread Emperors Vindictive I and Nihilis

When I’d told Tariq that if he wanted to talk about the Saint we’d have to do it while walking, I’d meant it as a way to put him off. Considering we were in a broken ruin of a realm infested with devils, undead and whatever else had might have been summoned and bound, it seemed foolish to have such a conversation when we should be keeping our eyes out on our surroundings instead. How silly of me not to realize that I was dealing with the Grey Pilgrim: he was more than willing to take my words at face value if it got him his way, and I couldn’t even recant. Not without seeming like I was the one out to get the heroine, anyway, which would win me no favours with the heroic three fifths of our party as well as quite possibly turn into a liability down the line. It was one thing if I killed the Saint of Sword in my own defence or that of Masego’s, another if just like when I’d snatched back Black’s body I was baiting her to better take a swing. One would be a tragedy that could be mended, in time, but the other would eat away at the foundation of the alliances I wanted to make. So, when after a few traded whispers with the Peregrine the Saint went on ahead to scout the way through, I sighed but did not object when he fell in at my side. Quite a pair we made, the winded old man and the dusty cripple.

“I had a conversation with your teacher, before his soul was cut out and sealed,” Tariq Fleet-foot suddenly said.

He’d meant to catch me by surprise, which made the way I was just a little too slow in keeping that surprise off my face all the more irritating. My limp faltered, and the way I turned it into a painful longer stride wouldn’t have fooled me – much less an old hand like the Pilgrim.

“Did you?” I blandly replied. “Interesting.”

Like a horse about to bold, there was now no telling where this was headed. If he’d wanted my undivided attention, well, he godsdamned had it.

“He is,” the Pilgrim agreed. “The qualities that steer him could be considered virtues, in a certain light. Had he chosen to serve the cause of Above instead of Below he would have made a great champion.”

My lips quirked, though it was mockery and not amusement that moved them. All I could think of was green eyes burning with something mad, in a little room in Marchford, and that implacable anger that was at the heart of him. Amadeus of the Green Stretch, carrying the banner of the Heavens? No, it would go against every grain of who he was – he was capable of doing great good, he truly was, in that Tariq had grasped him exact. But his disdain for Good was set in the marrow of his bones, and there would be no changing that without changing every other part of him.

“I expect if you told him as much it was not well-received,” I said.

“I believe he made his finest effort to wound me with words alone,” the old man said, sounding unmoved.

I threw an assessing glance at the Grey Pilgrim, finding his tone just a little too blithe. His face was the same, so tranquil I could not help but wonder if it was forced. I’d known Black to twist or break people with but a few calculated sentences, and though the Peregrine would be made of sterner stuff than these he would also have a graveyard’s worth of skeletons in his closet. On the other hand, Black had cultivated his reputation – his legends – into as much of a weapon as the rest of him. It was always hard to discern what he could and could not do, which had always been the way the man liked it.

“Yet his insights, though harshly delivered, have allowed me to shed different light on things I once believed myself to fully understand,” the Pilgrim continued. “In the east, I believe a distinction is drawn between Name and Role .”

“The Book of All Things does to begin with, if you read into certain parts,” I pointed out.

For a beat I sought the exact passage, one of the few I’d actually learned by rote.

“To every soul, great and small, purpose will be tendered,” I quoted. “Through crucible of choice are lives shaped, and one’s mark on Creation defined.”

The passage went on to say some pointed things about villainy being a twisting of that tendered purpose, and so Evil as well as evil, but I’d always taken the Book with a grain of salt. It was a beloved and well-worn story in Callow that some ancient Count of Denier had used that very passage to argue that it was in fact impious not pay taxes promptly and in full. Once words were put to ink, anybody could put them to use and those particular words were so old none could say who’d first written them – more than simply the purposes, I suspected that the words themselves had shifted over the centuries. They couldn’t not have, after all, considering no one in those days had spoken Lower Miezan before said empire came to Calernia and the Callowan manuscripts of the Book were in that language. No translation could be perfect, my expanding repertoire of spoke and written languages had made painfully clear. The Grey Pilgrim’s glance at me was openly amused, which was when I was forced to acknowledge I’d just quoted scripture at a man who rubbed elbows with angels. Ah. Awkward.

“As you say, Queen Catherine,” he said. “I must commend whoever it was that saw to your religious education.”

I wondered how he’d take if I told him I’d drifted through most sermons at the House and only begun studying the Book with any seriousness at the prompting of the wicked servant of the Hellgods better known as the Black Knight. Or, for all that matter, that the only person I’d comprehensively discussed theology with in the last few years was Masego, a man whose main interest in the matter was the practicalities of deicide. In all fairness , I thought , that’s turned out surprisingly pertinent to our lives.

“In Levant, we speak of it simply as Bestowal,” Tariq said. “A gift from Above or a curse from Below. What is done with these is our choice, and the strength of the mark left on Creation is but the illustration of the character of they who were bestowed. One who cultivated customs leading to greatness will leave great legacy behind, deeds worthy of recording. One who allowed mortal failings to remain paramount will be but a line in the ledgers of the Blood, soon forgot.”

“I’d noticed,” I slowly said, “that your nobles – your Blood – seem particularly set in their ways.”

“We seek to emulate admirable people, Queen Catherine, but those people are long gone,” the Pilgrim sadly said. “And their wars, their foes, their disasters are no longer our own. In being inflexible of virtue we have made virtue of inflexibility, often to our detriment. It is a way of thinking, you see, that exalts great deeds done in the name of the Heavens without giving though to their aftermath. Their consequences. At our finest – and make no mistake, for all its flaws the Dominion has rendered great and righteous service for no rewards at all – my people are an assembly of heroes, Bestowed or not. At our worst, we seek glory heedlessly and recklessly kill over matters of honour.”

Which, while a fascinating look into the Dominion from a man who knew it like few others could and likely ever would, had little bearing on the Saint of Swords or even Black that I could see.

“I had thought myself, through the nature events that shaped me, freed of these fetters so common to my people,” the Grey Pilgrim quietly said. “I was, it has become clear, terribly wrong in this.”

After the first surprise he’d sprung on me I’d grown careful to mask my thoughts, but hearing the old man that was arguably the most accomplish hero of our age – and likely a century or two before that – bluntly admit he’d made a grave mistake almost put another stutter to my steps. There was regret in the way the Peregrine had spoken, but mostly it was an honest admission of error. And that was, I thought, why even when he sought to end me it was difficult to hate the man. Because even when he dipped into hypocrisy, even when he dug in his heels long past the point he should, the Grey Pilgrim was trying to do good. And when he failed in that, he looked the truth of it in the eye and owned it.

“I do not regret for a moment my service of the Heavens, Black Queen,” the old man honestly said, “but my blindness to the consequences of it is on my head. In doing merciful work I have sown the seeds of reprisal far and wide and though never once will I bend my head to Evil for fear of contest, more should have been done to prepare Calernia for the storm.”

It sounded, I thought, like he was blaming himself for the Dead King’s stirring. Which seemed backward to me, considering I was fairly sure it was Malicia who’d first opened the gates for his intervention in Creation. Oh, I’d sought to make a bargain as well after receiving envoy from Neshamah but she’d been wearing a body in Keter long before I arrived. If my suspicions were correct and the Dead King avoided intervention save at the invitation of another Evil – to place, in a way, the burden of opposition to Good on another – then it was the Tower’s hand and not any hero’s that was at work. On the other hand, would he have moved if he’d not seen opportunity? I wondered. I doubted an invitation was all it took to secure the aid of the Dead King. Perhaps the Grey Pilgrim was right, and in some eldritch way his works had paved the grounds for the King of Death’s coming. But even so, fuck the idea that the old man was responsible for the slaughter that ensued. I’d stood on the opposite end of the field from the Pilgrim more than once, but I could only praise the vast majority of what he’d done over his many decades of holding a Name.

“You’ve been a helping hand,” I replied. “Sometimes I question the soundness of the causes you’ve helped, but not your intent.”

“That is kind of you,” Tariq said, bowing his head. “And you are not wrong to say I was hand, and mayhaps on occasion a finger on the scale. I was offered chances, you see, to intervene when there was still contest to be had. When the balance had yet to swing.”

He paused.

“Laurence de Montfort was sent forth, for near as many years as I, when there was absolutely nothing left to save,” he gravely said.

And there we were at last, I thought. The song and dance to convince me to stay my hand if a moment came where she turned on me. That the Pilgrim had pressed so hard for this conversation to happen in the first place told me everything I needed to know about the odds of it happening.

“So she’s seen the deep end,” I said, unimpressed.

“No, Queen Catherine, she has swum in it,” the old man sadly said. “When we first spoke in Callow, years ago, you told me you were tired of killing children because they were on the wrong side. Asked me if I was. And I am, Black Queen, Heavens forgive me but I am. Yet mine was still the lighter of the burdens, for even Laurence’s victories have only ever come in the wake of disaster.”

My brows furrowed. If I was following his meaning correctly, he was implying that while his role had been snuffing out disasters before they could fully form while the Saint of Swords had been... well, cutting of limbs when the rot took.

“You see her now, after a life of holding back the darkness, and find only bitterness and distrust,” Tariq said. “I do not expect these to endear her to you, Your Majesty, or even for cordiality to be attained. But I ask that you see her bared fangs for what they are: the scars left behind by a lifetime spent facing down the horrors of Calernia so no one else would have to.”

His voice wasn’t pleading, not exactly, though knowing what I knew about the Peregrine if he thought that tossing aside his pride would save the Saint’s life he would discard it without a second thought. In that sense he was remarkably similar to my own teacher, seeing little worth in personal dignity when it stood in the way of results. But though shy of a plea, there was no denying that a suit was being made.

“I know better than most what it costs someone to tread through ruin,” I acknowledged. “And many of mine were of my own making. But that must be owned, Pilgrim. It does not abnegate responsibility – especially not in the powerful.”

“Those ties got both ways,” the old man said. “There is not a soul on Calernia, Black Queen, that has not benefitted from the toil that clouded Laurence de Montfort. Sword in hand, she has danced with death for the sake of others a hundred times. From the windswept plains of the Chain of Hunger to the silent deeps of the Brocelian Forest: she has drowned plagues that would have killed dozens of thousands in the blood of hundreds, slain beloved heroes who sunk into madness and slaughter, sent scuttling back into the dark all manners of old gods whose hungers grew wicked – though not before they had their taste.”

His blue eyes grew hard as steel, when he met mine.

“All this she has endured, and endured for so long that Creation itself tempered her into something beyond breaking,” the old man said. “I have known souls sworn to Endurance that would weep at having lived half her life – and for this she has asked no reward, no riches nor titles nor honours. Not a single thing, for above all things Laurence de Montfort believes that strength must be put to righteous purpose.”

The Grey Pilgrim let out a long breath.

“She is not kind,” he admitted, “for Creation has burned kindness out of her. She is not forgiving, for there are graves sown across many lands that taught her to cast forgiveness aside. She is not witty or brilliant or fascinating, those traits that so often make the worst of us seem forgivable. She is rough and brusque, mistrusting, and there will never be a day where she does not see you as a seed of the Enemy.”

The Peregrine, old and bent as he was, held himself with the presence of ruler when he so wished. This was not one of those times, for he did not try to tower over me or browbeat into acquiescence. He was asking, as an equal or something close to it.

“And still,” he said, voice growing rough with feeling, “I ask you to see you for what she is: a woman who saw evil preying on the world and took up the sword in its defence. Selflessly, without once grudging what such service would wreak upon her soul.”

And I could see, through the grief in his voice, that there truly was a tragedy there. Because he might be a decent actor, I thought, and perhaps a liar of some skill if there was cause for it, but he had not taken to it the way some of the people I knew had. The tremor in his voice was genuine, coming from someone who’d never learned to fake it so perfectly they’d blurred even to themselves the difference between truth and lies.

“It may be,” the Grey Pilgrim said, “that for the harrowing life she has led Laurence will be given place of honour at the feet of the Gods when death finally takes her. That for greater service greater accolade will be rendered unto her. But that is the debt of the Gods Above, Black Queen, and that realm known only to the just is beyond our mortal understanding.”

His fingers twisted into a symbol I did not recognize, though he did not even seem to notice their movement.

“Those are not the Gods to which you keep, regardless, and so I do not ask you to keep to their ways or their dues,” Tariq said. “I speak to you instead as one of the living. We who still tread Creation, who have benefited from her shattering labours. We who owe better than a shallow grave to this woman. Not for what she might still do, though few are better suited for war on the Hidden Horror, or for the expedience of earthly alliances. We owe it for what she has already done .”

It was, I thought, a touching speech. Well spoken and from the heart. It might just be, too, that every word he had spoken was true. That for all that I’d thrown my castigations in the face of these heroes when the Tenth Crusade came baying at my door for their temerity in coming to offer their salvation more than two decades too late, I’d still lived in the shadow of their protection. That these two old killers had borne the weight of half this continent on their back and these days had nothing but scars and bared swords to show for it. It would have felt right, to follow the course of that thread to the conclusion that what had shaped Laurence de Montfort excused who she’d become. And yet.

“You ask me, in essence,” I said, “to extend the courtesy of a stayed hand because what has sharpened her to a fault was beyond her control.”

“No,” the Pilgrim said, “you mistake me. She made the choice to-“

“I understand you perfectly,” I said. “Just the same as your Blood, her character has led her to this place and this strife. That character is good, and so you ask me to excuse her.”

“How carelessly you reduce a life of doing good to a single sentence,” he said.

“It does weigh on the scales, what you say she did,” I admitted. “But I have to ask, Pilgrim: this courtesy you ask of me, will you extend it in turn?”

The old man blinked in surprise.

“I too have my bevy of broken souls,” I said. “And oh, they’re a vicious lot. No denying that. Savage from their days in the wild, but they’re learning. One step at a time.”

I thought of the Doom, of the same woman who’d let her madness drench the world in blood whispering of the sacrifice she’d made and the woman it’d made her into.

“Some are beyond redemption,” I admitted. “Others...”

Half the world, turned into a prop for the glory of the other half , spoken in a burning whisper. A sardonic smile beneath pale green eyes. And a knife into his ribs, after the Folly, that I could not regret.

“Have declared their own war on despair, and mutilated themselves in pursuit of victory,” I continued. “I’ve gathered them to me, by fate or happenstance, and they’re my responsibility. Even the one high up in the palace, whose grief has sent into a dark not even his eyes can see through. So I ask you again: when the time comes, and they are to be judged, will you return the courtesy you ask of me?”

Blue eyes in a tanned face assessed me, wondering. He did not reply.

“I thought so,” I replied. “Then were are allies in convenience, Pilgrim, and you earn no courtesy from me. If she bares her blade at Hierophant or myself, I will snuff her out.”

“I had thought,” the old man said, “that agreement could be reached.”

“You didn’t offer an agreement,” I calmly replied. “You asked for a concession.”

“Then a barter,” Tariq said, “though we are both lessened for it.”

And it shamed me just a little when he said. That it’d come to this, but also the entire span – every intrigue I’d woven through and around the Tyrant, every trick I had yet to ply. And this man, I reminded myself, had mere hours been trying to leash me with the threat of death through a pattern of three. Not even a day had passed since we’d been at war, and still the disappointment in his gaze stung just a bit. I’ve disappointed people I love , I thought, meeting his gaze. And that did not stay my hand. Neither will this.

“You are in need of an eight crown,” the Pilgrim said. “To cast down yours now would endanger your efforts, for war is ill-time for succession. Kairos Theodosian will fight you over his to his dying breath, for there is nothing he loves half as much in this world as the legacy he embodies and stripping him of right to rule would rob him of this.”

I inclined my head to the side in silent concession.

“I was once Tariq Isbili, of the Grey Pilgrim’s Blood, Honoured Son under the Seljun of Levant,” the old man said, and his voice rang with quiet authority. “Though stricken from the ledgers I have raised rulers of Levant and I have cast them down. My word has been taken for law, and my honour for the honour of the Dominion. If I took the Tattered Throne, the bloodlines would rally to my banner and acclaim me Seljun by right. That crown I promise you, for the life of Laurence de Montfort.”

My fingers clenched, then unclenched.

“If she kills Masego, I will murder her without hesitation,” I told him, meaning every word.

He grimaced, but he must have understood that there was no concession in his power that would possibly make me effectively concede the right to the Saint to kill one of my dearest friends without consequence.

“If she does not kill the Hierophant,” he said.

“Then we have a bargain,” I said.

We shook on it, amongst the ruins of what had once been a great city. It was not long after that the Saint returned, the Rogue Sorcerer looking harried and bloody as he leant against her. The Tyrant of Helike, he announced, had betrayed us.

Finally , I thought.

Chapter 41: Ante

“It is the nature of gambling that the scope of one’s victory is proportionate to the scope of all others’ defeat. So is it with empire, and near as subordinate to chance.”
– Dread Emperor Venal

I studied the Rogue Sorcerer closely as he hobbled forward, not out of any great affection for the man but because the state of him was a piece of information that’d allow me to discern the nature of Kairos Theodosian’s game. When the Tyrant had turned on us, had he gone for the kill or for a more amicable form of betrayal? The Sorcerer’s face was a canvas of bruises and scratches and he looked like he’d been sent tumbling down through a thicket of brambles, but aside from that and a wounded knee I could see no great damage inflicted. While the Pilgrim saw to the other hero’s pain, I considered the private conversation that Kairos Theodosian and myself were having through the particulars of the Rogue Sorcerer’s escape and return. If he’d wanted to break with me permanently the Tyrant would have killed the man – or at least made a serious attempt to do so, which did not seem to have been the case – to lure out the Pilgrim’s lone aspect-resurrection. He’d taken the crowns, that much was obvious, and likely whatever artefacts the Sorcerer had been carrying on him. That appeared to include the casting rod, and likely Black’s soul as well. Kairos had deigned to use the opening I’d left for him and done it without burning bridges with myself or with the heroes in a way that could not be overcome down the line. Which meant he was still open to turning on the Dead King in our favour, if we seemed the horse to back at the latest hour. Assuming he didn’t turn on both us and the Hidden Horror in favour of some still-inscrutable aim, which given who we were dealing with was very much possible.

“- he had me thrown off a balcony by gargoyles after declaring that was the last we’d see of me,” the Rogue Sorcerer said, snatching back my attention.

Really, Kairos? That’s a little on the nose even for you , I thought. If the Tyrant was going around throwing heroes off of cliffs then he definitely wasn’t trying to kill anyone. I paused for half a beat and looked the absurdity of what I’d just thought in the eye, though being absurd made it no less true. I tapped the bottom of my staff against a broken pavement, claiming the attention of the returning hero.

“He took the crowns,” I said.

“He did,” the Sorcerer agreed. “And-”

The man flicked a hesitant glance at the Pilgrim, who nodded in allowance.

“- my teacher’s soul,” I finished instead. “That cat’s been out of the bag for some time, wizardling.”

He watched me warily at that, as if the revelation that he’d been going around with my father in a bottle would be enough to have me strike at him out of nowhere. While even these days I relied on being underestimated to get away with gambits, on occasion it was irritating to be taken as this kind of second-stringer. I wasn’t some cackling Dread Emperor from the Age of Wonders, Sisters bless, and even if I’d actually intended on betraying these people I wouldn’t have been an amateur about it.

“He intends to coerce you with it, I suspect,” the Grey Pilgrim solemnly said.

There was sympathy in his gaze I did not particularly deserve or want. Not from the man who’d ordered Black’s soul cut out and bottled for his own manner of coercion. I might hold Tariq in higher esteem than Kairos, but I’d say this for the Tyrant of Helike: when he slid the knife, he did not pretend it was anything but that.

“He’ll try,” I simply said. “Sorcerer, did he speak anything else before throwing you off the cliff?”

“Balcony,” the man corrected.

“She’s right,” the Saint grunted, almost amusedly. “If a villain tossed you down, it’s a cliff in every way that matters.”

I suspected the old killer had been thrown off, or leapt down, more than a few in her time. The dark-haired man cocked a brow but did not argue.

“He loudly lamented your lack of foresight,” he told me. “In some detail.”

So, Kairos had left a message for me. Kind of him.

“In what way specifically?” I asked.

The Grey Pilgrim grimly smiled.

“You think he revealed his plan by monologue,” the old man said.

I think that if he took the bait I offered, it was for a reason, I thought. He just gave me a way to get everything I want the way I want it. He won’t have done that without a reason, and if we’re to continue negotiating through you then he needs to have his counterstroke made known . If the Pilgrim wanted to take that as Kairos making a Name-induced mistake instead of moving through something that had the shape of one, then that was his miscalculation to make. I dipped my head the slightest bit, then silently invited the Sorcerer to keep talking.

“He castigated your ignorance of precedent, Black Queen,” the hero almost apologetically said. “And insisted there are reasons people don’t ‘go around pulling swords from stones, if you’ll forgive my language’.”

It took me an embarrassing four heartbeats before I put the pieces together. Shit. Shit , that heinous little bastard. There was no way he should be able to know about – no, Hells, he’d been talking with Neshamah for months now hadn’t he? And Neshamah could pick Masego’s brains whenever he wanted. It was quite possible that the Tyrant knew when I’d pulled the sword from the stone at First Liesse I’d done so while presenting myself as the heiress to the tacit king of Callow of two decades: Amadeus of the Green Stretch. That was a crown, one I’d not considered until now and one I could not afford to lose. If my teacher was inflicted the curse that was losing that ‘right to rule’, who was going to unfuck Praes into a halfway reasonable nation for me? I’d come to trust Akua to an extent I would have thought inconceivable a few years ago, but I couldn’t trust her anywhere near the Tower: it’d be like locking a drunk who’d just begun weaning into a wine cellar. And Malicia, well, regardless of the political considerations that prevented allowing her to remain in that seat if the Empress had wanted this to end in any way but one of our heads on a pike then she shouldn’t have started assassinating my friends. I needed Black as, if not Dread Emperor, then someone in a position to resolve the mess in the Wasteland before the cauldron tipped over and fucked us all over while we were stuck looking north.

“He’s threatening to have Black as the one, to cut the grass under our feet and give Larat his due,” I said. “Possibly in my name, possibly on his own – hard to tell at this point. I shouldn’t need to tell you that’ll be a disaster.”

“You mean the most desirable way for this to end, save you chucking down your own crown,” the Saint of Swords bluntly countered.

“Laurence,” the Pilgrim chided.

He did not, I noted, disagree. Of course he wouldn’t. Tariq had considered Black enough of a threat that he’d been willing to unleash a plague to corner him, even if I was right and he’d gone after my teacher with the deeper intent of baiting a pattern of three between us. The Pilgrim wasn’t the kind of man to resort to those means unless he thought the enemy dangerous enough to require it. The heroes knew my teacher as the Dread Empire’s red right hand, the monster who’d torched the heartlands of Procer to starve an empire into collapse when he’d judged he could not defeat its armies on the field. And he was that, it must be said. But he was also a great deal more: the architect of the Reforms, the lid that’d been put on the worst impulses of the Wasteland for nigh forty years and a stubborn madman who’d fought a bitter, thankless struggle to end the cycle of death that’d bound Callow and Praes for millennia.

If I was to have peace in the east in my lifetime, and the kind of peace that would last beyond my lifetime, then Black was one of the keystones for it. As Warlock had once told me, for all that the man saw himself as a replaceable cog in a great machinery he was in truth the beating heart of the dream for a different Empire. If I lost him, there simply wasn’t anyone else who’d do his work anywhere a well, as comprehensively or as reliably – more than just personal ability, there were his personal relationships to consider. Who else had his pull on the Legions, on the Clans and the Tribes? Had Kairos glimpsed that, I wondered? If so, he was even more dangerous than I’d suspected for he was perhaps the first of my foes to truly understand the world I wanted to make. Or it might be simpler, I thought, a scheme as plain as it was effective: I would want to preserve my father, the heroes would want to cripple him. Conflict would ensue, sure as dawn rising.

“Theodosian can’t be allowed to get his way,” the Rogue Sorcerer spoke up. “Especially if what the Black Queen suggests is true.”

“You walked through the same empty towns as us, boy,” the Saint harshly said. “The further the man who wrought that is from a crown-“

“We do not want the man who schemed that to shape this realm ,” the Sorcerer hissed back. “That is the last crown’s purpose, Gods be merciful, and we’d trade what – a petty blow at a woman trying to be our ally for what could be bloody disaster?”

Huh. I’d genuinely not seen that coming.

“Roland,” the Pilgrim intervened, tone calming. “No such decision was made. There is no need for backbiting among us.”

“There is, Peregrine,” the hero furiously said. “I’ve kept my tongue through low ebbs – and there have been a great many of those, since this wretched crusade began – but what sort of black madness is it that the only one here who has attempted to save lives over the last months is the damned Black Queen ?”

I wondered what it said about me, that instead of being touched by that I was immediately suspicious. If you sat in a high seat long enough, I thought, trust sickened and died until all that was left was the strange kin to it that Malicia has famously coined: trusting people to act according to their nature. And I did not know enough of the nature of the Rogue Sorcerer – Roland, to hear Tariq put a name to him– to trust anything coming from his lips. Gods, though, even if he might be playing me it was nice to hear someone say it.

“She’s playing you, Sorcerer,” the Saint told him.

The echo, I thought, was ironic in all the worst ways. My father would have laughed of it until tears came and muscles ached.

“I don’t care, Saint,” the hero said. “This is... this is beneath us. All of us. That even in the face of doom we take each other as foes instead of a having a single forthright conversation to protect the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who put their lives in our hands.”

“There is a conversation to be had,” the Pilgrim tiredly conceded. “Yet now is not the time for it.”

“Respectfully, Peregrine, I disagree,” the Rogue Sorcerer said.

Though his knee had been healed by the Pilgrim along his bruises, it must still have been tender by the way he was careful when turning towards me.

“You have a plan,” the dark-haired man said. “This has been evident since you cowed two armies into truce and stripped rule from a third of the Highest Assembly. What is it that you need done, Queen Catherine, and how can I help?”

And it might be, I thought, that he was honest. That the was speaking from a place of genuine disgust for the way cloak and dagger struggles were still being had even when, as he had said, hundreds of thousands of lives hung in the balance. If that was true, if the Rogue Sorcerer really was as appalled by it as the glimmer in his eyes said he was, then this was the first breath of the newborn Liesse Accords. An agreement, however implicit, that there were some monstrosities that even foes should and would band against. That a form of restraint could be enforced, by the fear of utter opposition from all others if nothing else. It was something I longed to hear, more than any praised or recognition of my bitter efforts to avoid bloodshed, and so damned as I was I distrusted it immediately. Because I’d seen him hobble back to us, leaning against the Saint in quit conversation. Because I knew near nothing of the man under that sweep of dark curls, and if I was trying to trick Catherine Foundling I would have done it just like this. Splitting with the others on root of principle, not for sympathy of the villain but contempt at the actions of my own side. That he’d been a little too castigating, a little too bitter, only made it all the more believable: I’d learned from High Lords that anything too smooth was likely to be false. It might be, I thought, that this was all play by the heroes to get a better glimpse the lay of my intentions.

Does it matter? I thought, taking a cold-eyed look at the practicalities of it. I was, in the end, surrendering little I would not have to reveal down the line. And if I was wrong, if this was an earnest tirade, then that early surrender was well worth the price of encouragement. I breathed out, slowly, and then slipped two fingers to my lip to whistle. The shrill cry sounded loud and far, followed by silence and veiled gazes.

“I need a company to tear through the Ducal Palace’s front door, loud and hard and drawing attention from the dagger,” I said. “Which will slip in through a hidden path, to get at the Hierophant directly and pry him awake from the Dead King’s influence.”

“I tread close to the palace,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “It’s a fortress of wards and enchantments. Brute force will flounder, but I have ways to finesse the locks.”

“Good,” I said, inclining my head. “I’ll be there, as the moment we’re in we’ll need to move on the Tyrant and I’ve some notion of how to deal with him.”

“This dagger you speak of,” the Grey Pilgrim said, “if you do not guide it through the hidden path, how will it know of it?”

“Who do you think told her about that to begin with?”

Saint’s blade had cleared the scabbard before the end of the first word and even the Peregrine shifted his footing to have an easier time slinging Light if it came to a fight – which seemed, if anything, to amuse Indrani all the more. To have come so soon after I whistled, she must have been shadowing us from even closer than I’d thought. Archer’s long leather coat whispered against the ground as she moved to lean against a half-broken pillar, hazelnut eyes bright in the gloom of this city she’d seen both breaking and broken. The way her fingers rested on the handle of her long knives was too casual to be a threat, but there was not a hint of fear in her bearing at the thought of tangling with any of the heroes.

“Archer,” the Pilgrim said, inclining his head in greeting. “How long have you been trailing us, I wonder?”

Indrani grinned, sharp and unpleasant.

“I’m just here to guide you poor lost souls through this nightmare of a city,” she said. “Nothing to read into.”

“Should I be appalled that even after all this you had yet another card up your sleeve?” the old man said, glancing at me. “How many more are left, Your Majesty?”

“One more, Tariq,” I said, lips quirking. “That’s the trick: always one more.”

“Spare me,” the Saint of Swords said. “Fine, if you need warm bodies for a dagger crew then I’ll bite.”

“You’ll be a lot more useful in the assault crew,” I politely replied. “The Pilgrim would be a better fit.”

“We don’t trust you not to cut our boy’s throat at first occasion, ‘cause you’re vicious old bat,” Indrani cheerfully translated. “You’re not going anywhere near him without Cat to keep an eye on you, get me?”

I glanced at the Pilgrim. We had, after all, struck a bargain. The reason for which he might hesitate to leave the Saint alone with me – she’d try to end me and run headlong into grounds I’d prepared to kill her – should be seen to now.

“I am sure young Archer will prove sufficient muscle for the pair of us,” Tariq agreeably said. “We both know, Laurence, that your talents are best suited to less subtle tasks.”

“Getting your way in all of it, are you?” the Saint darkly said, matching gaze.

“Wouldn’t have to, if your way wasn’t so godsawful,” I replied.

“You might be the single worst ally we’ve ever had,” Indrani told her, sounding kind of impressed. “And I’m counting secret Malicia in there, since at least she had panache when batting us around.”

“Secret Malicia doesn’t count, she was just impersonating an ally,” I said without missing a beat.

“So that’s the Woe,” the Saint said, eyes flicking between us and her lips quirked into a hard and unimpressed smile. “Murderers and sowers of ruin, but that’s all right because you’re clever and you’re droll . Like that’s not just a fig leaf on the obscenity of what you are.”

“Gods Above, Regicide,” the Sorcerer said, “how much time must we lose to incivility in the face of cataclysm?”

“You want civil tongue, boy?” she snorted. “Fine. Foundling, what has you so convinced that the dusty vagrant you just revealed can do a single damned thing to ‘wake’ the Hierophant? What is she going to do, put an arrow in him in a friendly way?”

Hardly that. There was a story between the two of them that was old and worn and could be put to purpose, but it would have been stripping bare something of Indrani in front of strangers that were still half foes. I saw no need to sate the curiosity of Laurence de Montfort at the expense of one of mine.

“There’s a method,” I flatly said. “You don’t need to-“

“There’s two people close enough to Masego to pull him back from the brink,” Archer interrupted me without hesitation, “and of the two I’m the one in love with him.”

Ah. Well. I kept a wary eye on the Saint, for if she laughed now I thought that Indrani might very well try to kill her. She was proud, my friend, and to have something so fragile mocked would sting all the more. Instead the old woman silently nodded, face shuttering closed.

“For the dagger to have chance at making it into the deeps without running into entrenched resistance, the assault crew will have to wreak the kind of havoc that simply can’t be ignored,” I said, passing over the discomfort with forced composure. “Sorcerer, you said you have a method to pass through wards?”

“I can bring them down,” the hero agreed.

“Then, given who it is that’s going to be making up this crew, I’d say the time for subtle has passed,” I frankly said. “Let’s smash through the front door and pick every fight there is to be picked.”

It would, as an additional boon, attract the Tyrant the way honey would flies. He’d never be able to let pass an opportunity to meddle in that kind of a brawl, not even if it was to his advantage, and he and I still had a conversation to conclude. I’d put out the crowns and the soul though the Sorcerer, and he’d claimed that. That was the seed of a story, Kairos betraying us and my recovering crown and father from his grasp when we fought. He’d offered the mordant rejoinder of taking them but making it clear he was ready to spend them all before I could reclaim anything. If he’d genuinely meant to go through with that, though, I wouldn’t have received a warning. Which meant he was, in his own way, inviting me to make a counteroffer when we next met. Which gave me until then to figure out what it was that the Dead King had offered him – besides the pleasure of betraying us – and beating that with an offer of my own.

“Now you’re talking my language, Black Queen,” the Saint of Swords said, crooked teeth bared. “Into the breach we go, blade high and let the dark cower at the coming it.”

Chapter 42: Twined

“The Lycaonese are a grim people though not without a dark sort of humour, as became evident when I was first told what a ‘northern burial’ is. The inhabitants of these parts do not bury their dead, for fear of the Kingdom of the Dead, instead burning their own and spreading the ashes on consecrated ground. What the locals refer to as one of their burials is, in truth, someone being eaten by ratlings from the Chain of Hunger.”
– Extract from “Horrors and Wonders”, famed travelogue of Anabas the Ashuran

This would be the second time I assaulted the ducal palace of Liesse, and it would have made three if the Lone Swordsman hadn’t picked a dainty little eldritch church as his last holdout. Gods, now that I thought about it, hadn’t I brawled with Akua every time I’d stepped within city limits in the past? Sometimes it was hard to reconcile the smirking woman I’d hated so bitterly with the Diabolist I know knew and on occasion even liked. Hells, I was pretty sure she’d once implied that some ghoul she was sending after me was Kilian, back when we’d been a couple. An arrow more pointed than plausible but then Akua’s knack had always tended more towards striking deep than striking true. I dismissed the thought as the three of us began our approach down the Caen road, the broad avenue that led directly to the gates of the city’s ancient seat of power. The gates were wide open, having fallen off the hinges, and the stone round them had been eaten into brutally.

“Someone assaulted this before us,” the Saint said.

I grimaced.

“My own work,” I said. “From when I last took this city.”

“Akua’s Folly,” the old woman said. “The stories began trickling across the border after the Camps.”

I did not reply, even though it was rare for her to engage save through threat and insults. I did not owe her a discussion of that catastrophe. Not to her, not to anyone. The breadth of the scope I’d failed my people by no longer choked me day and night, not the way it had before heading into the Everdark, but the Doom of Liesse would never be anything but a bitter brew for me. That I seemed fated to walk it again and again was perhaps cruel, but then by my hands I had earned that cruelty. I’d still my tongue to it and take what was nothing less than my due.

“They say you bound the Diabolist to the heart of the ritual,” the Rogue Sorcerer quietly said. “And then broke it on her head, extinguishing every speck of her soul.”

“It was the Black Knight who struck at Akua Sahelian’s work,” I brusquely said. “And it nearly killed him too. It doesn’t matter, save that we should not touch a ward until the hall where the Diabolist once laid her first threshold.”

I was saved further talk by stirring in the sky, though at the sight of them I almost wished we were still rubbing salt into my old wounds. The colossal panes of bronze-like glass I’d seen earlier – how could anyone not , given how starkly they loomed above the city? – had began to shift. Like those beautiful jigsaw puzzles of glass and metal I’d once stared at in the markets of Laure, the pieces began moving like some intricate interlinked mechanism. Given the descending side of the panels they’d brought to mind a longview when I’d first thought of it, and it seemed that Masego was using them for purpose kin to that: rim glowing with massive carved runes I could not seem to understand, the panes began turning on themselves as if being adjusted for some arcane purpose. As it had earlier the first and largest pane of glass showed clear sight of the barren wasteland below as if it were being scried, but the angle of view and the closeness of the sight seemed to change in impossible ways according to the whims of spins.

“Rogue,” I quietly said. “The runes, I can’t keep them in my memory – that means they’re High Arcana. What are they for ?”

“I don’t know,” the hero admitted.

I waved a hand irritably.

“I know the upper arcane stuff is personal and unique for everyone, but I know there’s usually some bridge of understanding there,” I said. “I’m not asking for a treatise on what he’s up to, just some broad strokes.”

“Black Queen, I cannot understand High Arcana,” the Rogue Sorcerer bluntly said. “I can hazard some guesses at the purposes of this device – I suspect every glass-like pane is a different scrying ritual and the largest one serves as a sort of receptacle for all that is seen, allowing variety of sight – but I cannot know anything for certain.”

I glanced at the dark-haired man catching that he was faintly embarrassed. His pupils had been ringed in red or green, earlier, but that now seemed gone. A simple unremarkable brown, not so dissimilar to my own, was all that remained. I was a little skeptical of his words considering his record when it came to the fights and that at the Battle of the Camps he’d been directing the enemy wizard against my own mage lines led by Masego, who’d been dabbling in High Arcana long before I met him. Still, what did he have to win by lying to me here? Nothing worth the candle, I thought, and I knew better than most that Names could be tricky things: he might have some help from his in these subjects from his. Or, from that matter, the very opposite. It wasn’t unheard of for transitional Names to serve as a set of shackles to be surpassed down the line and – and this was a rabbit hole I did not have to spare tumbling down. I glanced one more time at the pane, and near flinched when an eardrum-shattering shriek sounded across the ruined realm. I’d heard them before, the interwoven four cacophonies that followed, like old metal being twisted and warped. One after another, the angled Hellgates opened in the sky above and devils began pouring out.

“Lesser Breaches,” the Rogue Sorcerer murmured. “Yet four of them. That is... remarkable. And absurdly dangerous. The Hierophant is taking a knife to the already chewed up fabric of this realm.”

“Look at the larger pane,” I urged, “if it’s like the last time then there’ll-”

And there it was, clear-cut in view on the bronze glass in a way it had not been when I’d attempted to look at it with my own mortal eyes: a glittering array of runes that hurt to look at, forming a circle at twice the height of a man. I glimpsed a ghostly silhouette within the circle, but before a heartbeat had passed there was a flash of blinding light and a gargantuan detonation in the distance. I’d looked away in time, though I noticed that both the Saint and the Sorcerer had looked through the glare uninterrupted. Leant on their Name for it, I guessed, though I’d never found how to work that particular trick myself back in my Squire days.

“I don’t suppose either if you can shed light on that,” I said.

“It is no coincidence the Hellgates opened before the other part of the ritual,” Roland told me, turning to match my gaze.

Well, would you look at that. Around one his left pupil, the slightest tint of azure blue was beginning to form a circle. Name or sorcery, I wondered? The more I learned of magic, the more I understood that there were as many ways to practice it as there were languages under the sun.

“Meaning?” I asked.

“That the stuff of the Hells is being drawn in at first, then given shape by the circle of runes we saw,” the Sorcerer said. “It is an attempt, I believe, at making something – though whatever was made seems to have been deemed unfit and so immediately annihilated. I would say those failed attempts are responsible for the Due that was used to occlude scrying in Iserre.”

My throat caught. Not at the subtleties of the sorcery at use slowly being peeled back, but at what the hero had told me without knowing it. Masego was drawing from the stuff of Hells and trying to give it a shape through High Arcana – a form of sorcery that was, by nature, deeply personal. That shape looked human, or close enough, and he was being obsessively exact even by his standards when it came to the results of his work. The Warlock had been slain at Thalassina, it was said, and having passed to the place beyond there was no sensible way for Hierophant to bring him back. But Masego had once told me that devils did not die, not truly. They merely dispersed, returning to the primal stuff of the Hells where another of their kind would be born when the whims of those unearthly realms demanded it. Masego was brutalizing the world with sorcery until it gave him back the only one of his fathers he could reach. And he was, heartbreakingly, failing.

“Your Majesty?” the Sorcerer quietly said.

“Grief and miscarriage have seeped into the bones of this place,” I said, voice grown rough. “And damn the Dead King, for having given him hope where there can be none.”

After all, if the hero was correct it was the Due from this that occluded scrying then Neshamah was have seen to it that this was an exercise in futility: the Hidden Horror would need this to continue for months, if not years. Perhaps there was the slightest sliver of a chance, I thought, but how many lifetimes would it take for Masego to succeed? An obsession had been slid into the ribs of my friend, and not one he would easily be able to shake. I knew him, the way he thought. This would stay with him like an itch he could not scratch: the whisper that if he was a little more accurate, a little more inspired, if he spent another few years of research, then it could be done. That every moment where he had not yet succeeded was a failure. Merciless Gods, that old thing in Keter had wrought damage it would take years to unmake. And the middle of a war was hardly the time to do it.

“Enough dawdling,” the Saint of Swords said. “The longer we wait the greater the chance the dagger will be caught.”

“Agreed,” I growled.

I had more than a little wroth to purge from my blood, now, and a hard fight seemed just the thing for it.

—

A hard fight was precisely what I found us denied.

The avenue leading to the palace had been empty, which was not unexpected, but the way that not a soul awaited as we passed the gates was. We’d seen going in that the fresh waves of devils brought through the gates had headed for the deeper palace, so it might be that strife awaited us there, but why allow us any uncontested advance? It wasn’t like they were going to run out of devils anytime soon, if the numbers brought through the Breaches were any indication. Answer to that was only found after we rose by steps and passed through halls where the marks of my anger in the face of the Doom had yet to fade until we reached a plain oaken door that was not unfamiliar to me.

“Ward,” the Rogue Sorcerer said, resting a palm on it. “Beautifully crafted, though it seems to have been aimed sorely at the Fair Folk.”

“How did you get through back then, if it still stands?” the Saint asked, eyeing me.

I pointed a finger upwards, where I’d once shattered the stone of the ceiling to leap into the room and slaughter the mages that’d been hiding in there. Laurence, every spry for her age, glanced at the adjoining wall once before breaking into a smooth run – the first jump had her angling on that wall, after which I felt a small ripple of Name power and she leapt up through the hole. The Sorcerer, meanwhile, was still examining the oaken door with a gaze much too involved for it to be wood he was looking at.

“Can you break it?” I asked.

He’d said he could, after all. The dark-haired man blinked and turn to give me a sheepish look. Gods, what was it with practitioners and getting distracted?

“I can,” he said. “The Saint?”

The answer came a moment later, as the old woman leapt down the hole and landed in a crouch.

“More magic upstairs,” she said. “Peeked through the door and it was positively reeking of it.”

“Ward?” I frowned.

“Labyrinth,” she replied, shaking her head. “I’m no mageling, but I’ve had to go through enough of those to recognize the scent.”

“Labyrinth, huh,” I said, and looked straight ahead at nothing just in case it’d be able to see me through spell or prophecy. “Didn’t work last time, you one-trick rat, and it won’t this time either.”

“Black Queen?” the Sorcerer asked, sounding alarmed.

“I believe we’ve got the Revenant known as the Skein on our hands,” I said. “It’s got a preference for those.”

The Saint of Swords went still.

“The Skein ?” she repeated. “Like in the old rhyme?”

“What rhyme?” I frowned.

“Eater endless, Shrouded silent,
Sought and lost sleeping below
Tumult tyrant, Snatcher slyest,
Dreaming still but waking slow
Skein scheming, last of five
Lords of Horn from long ago.”

She was not a particularly talented singer, and I suspected she’d rushed the rhythm, but I understood it without trouble. My brow rose: the rat had a history, it seemed. I supposed I shouldn’t be surprised, as the Dead King seemed to enjoy raising in his service the rare and the unusual most of all.

“Might be,” I said. “It certainly goes by that Name anyway.”

“I thought you’d tangled with some hasty longtail that got caught and turned, not one of the Old Lords,” the Saint grimly said.

“It’s tricky but hardly unbeatable,” I shrugged.

“You don’t lack stomach, at least,” the old Proceran said, which was not disapproving if not the opposite either. “Well, if it’s the same as the old legends it’ll be waiting for us. Might as well have a look. Sorcerer, get a move on would you?”

“Please,” I added, flicking a glance at the man.

The Rogue Sorcerer nodded, and after muttering something under his breath rapped his knuckle against the door once. The hand stayed there, after, though he opened his palm and the world shivered close to it. Huh. That’d felt like an old friend, and one I knew well: whatever aspect it was he’d just used, it was cousin to my old Take. And even more distant kin to the more abstract ability I still used as First Under the Night, though whatever similarity there’d been at the source had strayed the further I went from my Name. Interesting, though. Instead of breaking these wards, was he stealing them? It was certainly one way to interpret his Name, though given how subtle such matters could be I was reluctant to come to conclusions so swiftly.

“Done,” Roland said.

The Saint of Swords strolled forward, elbowed him to the side and kicked the door down before walking through. I pushed down a snort and limped after them, gesturing for the Sorcerer to catch up to her. I slowed my steps just as I passed the broken door, bending down to pass my fingers lightly over the shattered oak. There was not, to my senses, so much as a speck of sorcery left in there. Akua had laid her ward in there more than year ago, and considering the usual thoroughness of her work it should have been exquisitely done. Yet there was not a damned trace of it left, not even some faint aftertouch. Creation rarely brooked such exactness, I thought. This was the work of his Name, not any sorcery I knew of. I wonder , I thought, if there’s a touch of colour around your pupil right now? I’d master my curiosity for now, but I’d never been able to leave secrets alone for too long.

I hurried to catch up with them before anyone could notice.

—

I’d give the Skein this much, it put in an effort.

Though I did not know whether it had powers akin to sorcery or it was simply wielding the tripartite works of the old Dukes of Liesse and the two greatest Praesi mages of my generation, it tried to trap and waylay us at every turn. Of course, given that the Rogue Sorcerer seemed to be able to shatter any ward in less than thirty heartbeats and that Laurence de Montfort’s answer to mazes was to cut through any wall in the way of marching in straight line it did not end up amounting to much. While I knew that the Saint would tire in time, she did not seem at the moment more than lightly winded and if anything Roland seemed haler than he’d been since hobbling back to the band. While they brute forced their way through the best-laid schemes of the Skein I kept a wary eye out, for this all seemed to easy to me. We’d yet to encounter any devils, or the Tyrant or any Revenant at all. All three of these would need to be met before we arrived at the conclusion of this journey, and indeed the shape of our story should ne nudging us towards that encounter. If we’d yet to meet them there was a reason for it, and since it was not of our own making it must be of the enemy’s. That usually meant a trap.

“You ever hear of the Two Hundred Axioms, Foundling?” the Saint casually asked.

Boot against the wall, she pushed until the rectangular shape she’d carved into the wall toppled forward. Abandoned servants’ quarters were revealed behind, and if I had to bet I would bet that we were closing on the edge of the western wing of the ducal palace. Soon we’d hit the inner courtyard, that heavily warded killing field that Akua had prepared to fend off any attempting to approach the part of the palace where she’d laid the heart of her ritual and her throne room with it. Hierophant was using the ritual arrays that she’d carved into Liesse, which meant he was likely in there as well. I doubted any of the holes I’d made in the defences on my way in were still there, considering the quantity of devils Masego had been calling forth. They’d turn on him in a heartbeat if they could, Dead King looming or not, so odds were fresh layers of viciousness had been raised instead.

“I have not,” I said. “Some sort of philosophical book?”

“Close enough,” Laurence de Montfort said. “They’re best kept out of hands like yours, anyway.”

“Charming,” I commented, following her through the opening. “Why bring it up?”

“The only sensible solution to a maze is to not enter the maze,” she quoted, tone amused. “This is close enough, I’d wager.”

“And there ,” the Rogue Sorcerer hummed.

The open palm he’d laid on the wall in front of us went straight through what I’d believed to be a stone wall, revealing it to be a skillful illusion. The other half of the room, until now veiled, ended in a broken glass window overlooking the inner courtyard of the inner palace. Which was empty, save for the broken and scorched grounds where Akua had once nearly succeeded at killing me with her clever traps. Were we going to be allowed to run of this all the way to the heart of the palace? Archer had been in here before, and she’d told me the place was swarming with devils. What had-

“Wait,” I said, as the Saint neared the window.

“What?” Laurence growled.

“The Skein,” I slowly said, “in your stories, what is it known for?”

“Scheming,” she bluntly said.

I grit my teeth. Now was not the time to get mouthy on me, Saint.

“Look, in your rhyme all five of the ‘Old Lords’ have some epithet that goes with their Name,” I said with forced patience. “The Tumult is a tyrant, which I’m guessing means it’s good at herding other ratlings. The Eater is endless, which I’d wager means even for a Horned Lord means it’s really hard to put down. The Skein is scheming, sure, but the Snatcher is the ‘slyest’. What does the Skein do , Saint? Are there any stories that hint at anything more?”

The heroine matched my gaze, brow creased with thought.

“It led a horde to devour whole what would become Hannoven,” she finally said. “Through some secret way, using wiles. They’re old stories, Foundling. There’s not a lot of them and the Skein is barely in any. Makes sense, if Old Bones got to him.”

Through some secret way, using wiles. It wasn’t a lot to work with, and that it ate a whole ancient city didn’t weigh much on the scales to my eye – it was what ancient hungry beasts did , what mattered was the manner of it. Hannoven was, as I recalled, one of the most fortified cities on Calernia – it was usually put in the same breath as Rhenia, Keter and Summerholm. Could I assume that even in the dawn of days it’d been a fortress? Yes , I decided. The Skein had, after all, used a ‘secret way’. If it’d been a pack of huts, given the size of the damned thing there would have been no need for subtlety. It itched at me that the story spoke of a city, a place that was fixed. Not an army or a band of heroes, it was a city that made the tale and that was detail that resonated. In Keter, the Skein had been given the defence of a palace and it was the same here. It might have a trick that works well with fixed positions, either both the attack and the defence. I had too little to go on, Hells. That was the thing with the Dead King, wasn’t it? Anything secret that might help in defeating him for good was long dead and buried. If not by his hand, then by sheer dint of centuries. Although, when we’d fought the Skein in the Threefold Reflection, it’d been as part of a pattern hadn’t it? One Revenant per palace. King Edward in the Garden of Crowns, the Thief of Stars in the Silent Palace and the Spellblade in that horrid half-realm we’d tread trying to move between Creation and reflections.

The ancient King of Callow had been placed in a place for only the regal, the Thief of Stars assigned to spy on us in a place where every sound was muted and the Spellblade, a dead elf utterly lethal in direct combat, given watch over a place where there could be no place to hide. They’d all been posted, so to speak, in a place that benefited talents or nature they’d had before being sent there. Was is the same with the Skein then? I knew it’d used an artefact to manipulate the three interlocked realms of the Threefold Reflection, and that its oracular abilities had allowed it to do so even more dangerously, but this felt like a departure from the pattern. The Silent Palace had made it easier for the Thief of Stars to sneak around, not possible – amplification of a capacity, not crafting of a new one. It was the same with all the others, too. And if that held, then some pieces were beginning to fall into place. Gods, I almost couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed: I’d already walked the grounds of this very ducal palace once and seen it gone still and bare, when I’d unleashed my domain of Moonless Nights. And then too, I’d still come across wards and traps. There was a reason we hadn’t come across so much as an imp on our heedless advance through these grounds, and that was because we weren’t in the palace at all: we were in the domain of the Skein.

“Saint,” I said, opening eyes I hadn’t realized I’d closed. “When you cut Winter, cut my domain, you were still within it right?”

“I was,” the old woman warily said.

“And you could feel that you were?” I pressed.

Her eyes narrowed.

“Here, now?” she asked.

“Been too easy so far, hasn’t it?” I said.

Her blade returned to the sheath and she took a moment to steady her stance and breathing. Then the world shattered around us like panes of glass, and the only hint that it wasn’t her work was the slight widening of her eyes.

The first thing I noticed was that the roof over our heads and walls shielding us were gone.

The second was that the Skein in all its horned glory was nesting in the courtyard below, surrounded as far as the eye could by hordes of devils. Two silhouettes were at its feet, though in the gloom I could not make out who they were.

The third, and last, was that of us the Tyrant of Helike was being held aloft on his throne by a swarm of gargoyles while grinning like a man having the time of his line.

“My friends,” Kairos Theodosian cheerfully announced, “I am grieved to inform you there might have been some slight changes to my allegiances.”

Chapter 43: Treachery

“Habitually treacherous enemies are accomplices to their own destruction.”
– King Henry Fairfax, the Landless

I breathed in.

Fear drifted into my lungs along with the rotten scent in the air, the poisonous odour of thousands of hellspawn and one of the oldest beasts of the Chain of Hunger. Death, decay and a fight that would have been hard business even with an army at my back. Gods, but it’d been a long night and the dawn of it was not yet in sight. It’d been one thing to stare down armies when I’d been Named, when I’d been in the deepest throes of Winter, but now I was painfully aware this could all end as simply as my throat being opened by some lucky devil. The knowing of that almost numbed my limbs, when it sunk it so suddenly: I could die, in these few coming heartbeats. I could have died at any time on the way here, and even if we survived the closing jaws of this trap I might still die before the night was over. It was an arresting though, one that had my palms prickling.

I breathed out.

Fear is an old friend , I thought. Fear was the pain in my leg, the whispering tune of mistake and mortality and needing to always do better lest if all fall apart. How could it cow me, when I leant on it like a pilgrim’s staff? I let that tenet straighten my back and took a look at my opposition. Devils, alas, in the thousands. Walin-falme and akalibsa , as we had fought before, but this was a disparate horde and there seemed no end to the assortment. It made gauging numbers difficult, given the wild variation of shape and size in the swarming throng, but it could be no less than two thousand. We moved, from there, to threats in the singular. The undead Horned Lord known as the Skein was nesting among the ruins of the courtyard and attending hall, its darkly furred strangely humanoid body folded inwards as if it were a beast at rest. Great antlers of bone jutted from the top of its head, set above golden eyes made even more vivid by the deep red gouges beneath them. It was a creature gifted with foresight, near impossible to damage and wielding at least one aspect I knew to be capable of unmaking its mistakes – Spool , it had called it in Keter. At its feet stood two silhouettes, veiled to me until a sliver of Night saw to that mundane frailty.

I breathed in.

Yet more trouble, and my fingers harshly coiled. My predictions had come up short in two different ways and quite visibly so, for I now looked upon two men: one whose frayed tabard bore the twin bells of House Fairfax, the other whose pale green eyes watched all unfolding with open interest. The man who had once been the Good King Edward Fairfax, Seventh of His Name, bore old and intricate plate over which a tabard in the gold and blue of the royal line of Callow hung. He wore no helm, laying bare the face of a man in his late forties with sparse white hair and the eternal beginnings of a beard, and in his hand he held a longsword for which there seemed to be no sheath. To his side, the soul of Amadeus of the Green Stretch had been put in slender silvery stocks, his hands too far kept to reach the gag that had been put over his mouth. My teacher looked much like his physical body did, though there were dark rings around his eyes and a sort of haggard look to him I found deeply unsettling. Black had always been near obsessively neat in his grooming, but his soul laid bare was in disarray. That boded ill, though at least the sharpness in his gaze had not been dulled. A bag had been absent-mindedly tossed between the two of them, one I had with my own hand filled with crowns. That left only...

I breathed out.

Kairos Theodosian, Tyrant of Helike, sat draped over the gaudy throne his gargoyles were keeping aloft unevenly. Though he’d quite brazenly betrayed us, the odd-eyed villain had yet to bother with foibles such as armour or a blade. No that he needed them, with a flock of enchanted gargoyles obeying his every whim and a treasure trove of lethal artefacts at his disposal – to which, he’d added the casting rod of the Rogue Sorcerer, which he was currently toying with as he grinned a pearly white grin. This was all of it, I thought. Our enemy, against which stood three: the Rogue Sorcerer, roughed up and stripped of tools, the now twice-winded Saint of Swords and myself. This was not a fight we would win with swords, I thought, given the disparity in strength there. The best that could be hoped for was delay. We did, however, have one advantage over our foes. The foundations of their side were unsteady, while as long as there such a common enemy before us my own triumvirate would stand united. How can I take your strengths and turn them against you? Four heartbeats had passed, and as the fifth reached us Laurence de Montfort sighed. Not out of disappointment, I decided, or sadness. It was the same sigh I’d heard dockworkers in Laure make when some merchant had filled the hold with no eye to taking out the goods out and an hour-long job was going to end up taking twice as long. The Saint spat to the side, then rested her blade against her shoulder.

“That’s going to take a while,” she said, sounding irked.

“That’s mine, you loathsome turncoat,” the Rogue Sorcerer yelled at Kairos.

“I prefer to think of it as ours,” the Tyrant jauntily replied. “Although, if you truly want me to return it...”

So, the sharper was about to blow and the moment the three of us were separated by the horde then there would be no more planning. This was it, all I had to scheme.

“Saint, how long can you buy me?” I asked.

“You got a way to win?” the old woman casually asked.

I nodded.

“Then however long you need, Foundling,” the Saint of Swords told me with a hard smile.

I supposed she could be counted on to be a reliable whirlwind of destruction to anything she faced even when she was on my side, which was somewhat comforting.

“Keep them off me,” I said. “I’ll handle the Tyrant.”

“Figures you’d go for the cripple,” Laurence de Montfort said.

A helpful reminder that ‘on my side’ didn’t mean friendly or any less generally horrid, I noted. A heartbeat later Kairos got the casting rod he’d stolen working and streaks of flame that looked fluid as water shot out towards the Rogue Sorcerer, who took off running towards them. Godsdamnit, Roland . It didn’t matter if he could handle the sorcery being thrown at him, Kairos had hundreds of bloody gargoyles to throw at him and however good the hero’s set of mail it didn’t cover his face or throat or neck. I let the Night course through me and flicked my wrist, spinning a hooked chain that caught the wayward hero by the back of the coat and dragged him back forcefully. The Sorcerer had been about to reach the edge of demolished second story room we were still standing on, but the force I used in pulling him back had him half-tripping backwards. And also narrowly avoiding the knife-wielding gargoyles that popped right up from where they’d been hanging off the edge awaiting to scythe through Roland’s ankles, because because Kairos being a chatty jackass didn’t mean he wasn’t clever. The streaks of flame I left him to deal with as I advanced – he snarled something in a language I didn’t recognize, still tripping backwards, and some sort of swirling eddy of air caught them in a spin until the fires gutted out – and dismissed the chains. The gargoyles that’d come over the top milled uncertainly, knives extended into nothing, and did not even manage to chatter before I’d sent twin needles of Night through their torsos. They blew a moment later, and I met Kairos Theodosian’s uneven eyes as I came to stand by the edge of the drop.

“So,” I said, beginning to reach for my pipe, “how firmly rooted would you say your current allegiances are?”

It was theatrics, not directly asking what it was the Dead King had offered, just like reaching for a smoke in the middle of battlefield. I could not show weakness in the face of the Tyrant of Helike, lest he decide we were spent and that the Dead King’s victory was assured. Calm, control and even a smidgen of nonchalance. Anything less and I would not have gotten that keen glint in his good eye, the one that delighted in there still being a game afoot. For though Kairos Theodosian enjoyed a good bout of treachery, he would not commit to it without purpose and would never climb into a sinking ship. In that sense, I understood him in a way that few people could: like me, he had reached his current heights climbing over a tottering pile of victories. Like me, he knew it only took one hard defeat for it to all come tumbling down on his head.

“We are close as kin, our trust boundless and fondness without peer,” Kairos soulfully said.

“Kill them,” the Skein snarled, head suddenly rising up. “ Kill them all .”

I passed my palm over the head of my pipe, allowing a flicker of black flame to light it before pulling at the wakeleaf unhurriedly. I sighed in pleasure, feeling the Tyrant’s gaze unwavering on me.

“Shouldn’t you see to that?” Kairos amusedly asked, moving his head towards the courtyard.

Devils, Revenant, the closest thing I’d ever have to a father. A fight I could not win. Calm, control, never miss a beat.

“That’s what heroes are for,” I said.

I glimpsed, from the corner of my eye, the Saint of Swords landing in the midst of a sea of devils with her sword raised high. Screaming followed, none of it hers. So, Kairos hadn’t taken the unspoken invitation I’d given to imply he was open to further treachery. Which meant Neshamah had bought him with a prize that was significant enough the Tyrant didn’t believe I’d be able to match it. He wasn’t refusing the prospect of turning on the Hidden Horror, that wasn’t his way, but he was making it known the bidding had started high and would only get higher. So what did he offer you? I wondered. Given that Kairos’ ambitions were still bound, as far as I knew, to the peace conference he’d forced then it had to involve the survival of the armies below. Or at least his, I corrected, for Iserre was made into a tremendous butcher’s yard by the Tyrant’s hand then the only the threat of utter annihilation could possibly bring either Hasenbach or myself to negotiate with him ever again. Couldn’t be just being spared, though, because the Grand Alliance would be crippled by losing the armies below and so far Kairos had gone out of his way to avoid accomplishing that. I was missing something, because I could see no way in which the Dead King taking this realm benefitted the Tyrant. My fingers tightened, beneath cover of my sleeves. Was it that simple? When I’d irritated the Hidden Horror, he’d said something that now sounded anew in my mind: when I have taken what I wish from this ruin I will forsake it as well . If after he got what he’d come after Neshamah had no use for this place, what would he lose by promising it to the Tyrant of Helike?

I inhaled smoke and blew it outwards towards Kairos, whose nose wrinkled at the acrid smell. I couldn’t beat that offer. It was a way for the Tyrant to get everything he wanted, so long as the Hidden Horror got it too. Which was, I realized, my angle. Kairos Theodosian could not, as I’d thought earlier, afford a single hard defeat. And he had to be achingly aware here that he’d made a bargain with an entity his superior in every way, including perhaps even treachery, and that if he was crossed then he had no real way to strike back. Not alone, anyway, and when it came to opposing the Dead King then there was only one game in town.

“Well, he’s lying to at least one of us,” I pensively said. “Did you offer something worth more than a hundred-year truce?”

“You jest,” the Tyrant grinned.

A little too quickly, I thought.

“I’m deadly serious,” I said. “Kairos, I’ll be blunt here because if he’s actually sold this place to you instead of me I’ll need to cut my losses and break it. Which is going to be damned hard to do a messy besides, so I haven’t the time to dawdle. I got my win here in exchange for backing his envoy at the conference when the truce offer comes. One of us got peddled goods already sold, obviously, so which of us is it?”

“A truce,” the Tyrant skeptically said.

“Don’t be daft,” I frowned. “You know what it’s meant for. I’m willing to take the bet, because I’ll get this continent ready for war on Keter even if I have to kill and raise every ruler myself, but I’m hardly blind to the risks.”

A hundred years was a long time. Time to prepare, yes, but also for the continent to come apart. A truce meant no armies, not absence of schemes, and the most brutal blow the Hidden Horror might yet deal was to let that century come to pass and then do nothing . To let every willing sacrifice turn into bitter recrimination, to let his opponents devour themselves from the inside without sending a single soldier across the border. If I’d tried to weave a lie out of thin air, I thought, the Tyrant might just have sniffed me out. But this? If I were Kairos Theodosian, I’d believe it. Because I would afraid I’d been double-crossed, yes, but also because of who it was I was looking at. A woman who’d bargained with the King of Winter and Sve Noc, when the cliff’s edge was reached, and Hells hadn’t I headed to Keter to make another deal not so long ago? The Tyrant of Helike watched me with an inscrutable expression his face, and the simple fact that he was no longer grinning like a lunatic told me I’d drawn blood. I thought, for a moment, of feigning impatience and trying to hurry him along – an announcement it was time to cut my losses, cryptic action begun – but I stilled my tongue. On real stakes I would not gamble this way. And the more I actually lied, the more I risked this exceedingly more skilled liar catching me out.

“Speak to me, then, Black Queen,” the Tyrant coolly said.

Not victory, this, but it was an opening.

“I’m not going to bribe you,” I snorted. “You just knifed us, Kairos. You want back on this side? Make it worth my while to keep the heroes from putting your head on a pike. I’m willing to deal because I’d rather you sell me this place than the Dead King, but don’t mistake that for actual need .”

For a terrible moment, I thought I’d overplayed my hand. That the bluster had been too much, that I’d been seen through because I’d refused to bend my neck even if in that situation it would have been my words exact. Instead I was interrupted by a flock of steel-clad devils, whose leathery wings beat loud as they descended towards me with raised spears. My muscles began to tense and it was all I could do not to reach for the Night. But I had appearances to maintain, and Gods I was so close to flipping the Tyrant I could almost taste it. The walin-falme hit a hastily slapped down ward like birds hitting a window, as the Rogue Sorcerer came through for me. I did not even grin, instead pulling at my pipe as I continued matching gazes with Kairos. Look at how in control I am , I thought . Wouldn’t I have to be a lunatic, to stick to a bluff so stubbornly when the situation is this dire? Airily tossing aside the Sorcerer’s casting rod – Roland distantly screamed in a furious voice about it being irreplaceable and worth a fortune – and extending an open palm, Kairos was handed his jeweled sceptre by a chitter gargoyle and used it to thoughtfully scratch his chin.

“Are you lying?” the Tyrant of Helike asked, cocking his head to the side.

I grinned, all teeth and malice.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Am I?”

A heartbeat passed, both stares unflinching.

“I think, Catherine,” Kairos Theodosian fondly said, “that you are lying through your teeth. But I still can’t tell, and so it seems were are still allies.”

Calmly I inhaled a mouthful of wakeleaf, and waited for the – there it is , I thought as the Skein’s hulking shape obscured the sky, rising behind the Tyrant and myself. The stench of it was horrid, though spitting out the smoke in front of my face took the edge off of it.

“ Spool ,” the Skein snarled.

And just like that/

/the Tyrant of Helike sneered.

“Fate is a tug of war, you raggedy old thing,” Kairos Theodosian said, and there was something sharp in his tone I’d never heard there before. “Do you think the wishes of the conquered matter more than those of contenders?”

“You die laughing,” the Skein hissed. “Or. You flee. Or. I am broken. Or. Everything burns. Or. Or. Why does it keep changing ?”

“There’s more than one reason I picked him out for this band,” I amusedly said.

Was Kairos Theodosian a treacherous, unpredictable and murderous madman? Yes. Obviously. But against a particular kind of foe – say, an oracle who’d spin our of new thread of prediction from his every whim as the lunatic committed to them with ironclad will unhesitatingly – that had its uses.

“ Spool ,” the Skein snarled again and/

/“Do you think yourself above even the Gods, you presumptuous relic?” the Tyrant of Helike snarled back. “Do you think you can erase me like chalk on a slate? Learn your place.”

“Shouldn’t have done that,” I told the Revenant, pulling at my pipe.

“It will kill you,” the Skein cackled, its laughter like rumbling thunder. “Wish, wish into the grave. How many years can you spend?”

I winced. I’d fought enough Named to recognize when one’s bottom line was being crossed, and the continued attempts of the Revenant to use its aspect were definitely whipping Kairos into a proper frenzy. I could only guess at what was the cause of it, but the rage in that crimson bloodshot eye and the wildly shaking hands struck me as too raw to be a lie.

“I will confess,” the Tyrant of Helike said, tone eerily calm, “that you have rather offended me. You may attend to other matters, Black Queen. This one will be settled by my hand.”

“And now,” I said, “for my next trick.”

Because if I were an undead sorcerer with my personal Hell and forever ahead of me, if I’d taken to snatching Named and making them into my vanguard in Creation – which would mean, most of the time, that they’d be far from me and exposed to all sorts of aspects and sorceries – then there was one thing I’d make sure of. The Skein went still as the corpse it was, and pale gold eyes shone with something eldritch.

“You have been fooled, Tyrant,” the Dead King spoke through his puppet. “I struck no bargain with the Black Queen.”

And there it was, I thought. The gap between the man the Hidden Horror had once been and the man the Tyrant was. Neshamah had been a brilliant, sharp-sighted sorcerer whose apotheosis had been achieved over decades of careful planning with nary an opening left open. Even in undeath the heart of that man remained, made stiffer perhaps but undiminished. And the thing was, he had that same flaw that my father sometimes did. Gods, clever as they were they forgot anyone else could see the world in a different way they did. Forgot to see, I supposed, or simply didn’t care. Why would they? Victors that they were, they’d gotten their way so often. But Kairos Theodosian, now that was a man of a different breed. He was Tyrant of Helike not because he wanted to change the world, to shift borders on a map or leave behind a name that would ring through the ages. Kairos, he was villain . He was a partisan of Below, not a warlord or a theft of godhead, and his faith was the same ruinous red thing that had rent the Wasteland asunder for more than a millennium. And so the Dead King, brilliant monster that he was, had just made his first blunder of the night. Because the moment he’d made an effort to not be at odds with the Tyrant of Helike, he’d made every lie I’d spoken irrelevant. Because, in the eyes of the Tyrant, he would only be worth appeasing if he was a threat . And given the choice between successfully crossing me or the Dead King? Well, one of them was worthier prayer than the other.

I met the Dead King’s eyes.

“Mistake,” I said in Ashkaran.

“ Rend ,” Kairos Theodosian laughed, and all Hells broke loose.

Chapter 44: Small Slights

“Forgiveness is a scale balanced, nothing more and nothing less.”
– King Edward Fairfax the Fifth, the Hardhand

Aspects were telling, I’d always thought, especially those with harmful intent.

In practice they tended to have similar applications, true, but you could tell a lot about Named from what imperative it was that’d resonated with them. William had found his principle in Swing , which had been a branch sprung from what he saw as the most important part of who he was: the Lone Swordsman, the one who settled wrongs with a swing of his sword. Now take Masego, though, whose Ruin had crystallized facing the very Revenant before me. The first glance at that might lead one to think Hierophant was darkly inclined, and to be honest the thought had crossed my mind at the time. I’d led my friend into quite a few messes, and few of them pretty. The truth if it, though, was that Masego had been raised by the Calamities long before he became part of that other family the Woe had turned into. He’d learned their lessons young, even if they’d taken different shape in him than perhaps expected. To ruin something, for Masego, was to pare it down it until it’d reached the very edge of breaking. Until, in a sense, it was no longer a threat. That he’d draw the line there instead of going further into annihilation I liked to think was as much due to the empathy he’d been encouraged to embrace over the last few years as the cold practicalities taught him from the cradle. The lessons of the villains who’d crafted the Reforms, the Conquest: it is easier to subdue than eradicate . Less costly, and war like all things was a matter of costs and benefits.

Some were not so clear-cut: as in most things, Black was frightfully subtle under the veneer of overt simplicity. His Destroy , seemingly a straightforward cudgel to bludgeon the Tower’s enemies with, was a glimpse at what lay at the heart of the man. Someone who, when moved to act, would not tolerate any result but the annihilation of what had stirred him to violence. There was no nuance to the word, or to its effect, because in the end to him the world was split in half by the line he’d famously drawn for the Legions of Terror: victory and defeat, with nothing of worth in between. And so it was with that knowing in mind that I watched the Tyrant of Helike laugh his will into existence, the word he’d spoke ringing out in a way that had nothing to do with his voice. Rend , Kairos Theodosian had said. The splash of that decree was swift and brutal, the Skein’s skull half caving-in as a tall antler broke and its right arm was so harshly snapped it came to be hanging by half a bone at the shoulder. Bones broke across the Horned Lord’s body, though in a manner that was haphazard. It was tempting to ascribe that the Tyrant’s whimsical nature, but I was not fooled. To rend something was not to destroy it, to break it or anything so... thorough. It was to tear something into more than one piece, to wound it. To hurt it. But never, I grasped might be the essence if it, to kill. Wound and hurt and sow enmity, but never to finish the fight. Because that was the Tyrant’s way, wasn’t it? Always an enemy, a scheme, a betrayal afoot. Like a spinning top, if he slowed might just tip over.

The deeper gold had vanished from the Skein’s eyes before the Tyrant had even finished speaking, the Dead King leaving behind the corpse he’d inhabited without hesitation at the first indication of danger. It was the great rat itself that screamed in rage at returning to great wounds, all the while a swarm of gargoyle gathered in a chittering flock around the villain. I claimed a last inhalation from my pipe, and reluctantly poured over the last of the wakeleaf over the edge and quite likely onto some devil’s head. Wasteful as this was, given how rare and expensive the herbs was out here, I’d need to intervene soon enough. Not quite yet though.

“My I assume, Black Queen, that you have a stratagem?” the Tyrant of Helike idly asked.

Shaking the dragonbone pipe one last time to make sure it was all gone, I put it away in one of the many pockets of my cloak.

“I do,” I said. “The way I see it, my Lord Tyrant, our trouble at the moment is that the opposition’s got an army and we do not.”

Below us, wading through the sea of devils still filling the courtyard, the Saint of Swords reminding why even at height of my brute power over Winter she’d put me to flight on our every encounter. The sight of that old woman wearing no armour save a tunic and pale tabard flickering through the tide of creatures was spellbinding, because Laurence de Montfort had sallied out to fight an army on her own and she was not losing. I watched her cut through the knee of some devil of smoke and stone twice the height of a man and broad as city gate, pass under its toppling form as it fell and take with three quick strokes the head, the arm and the eye of jackal-headed devils leaping out at her. The last, still living though half-blinded, saw its face used as a steppingstone for the perfect somersault she executed to evade the furious swiping of the devil she’d hobbled. It made paste of the jackalhead, the Saint of Swords landed precisely in front of the still-bellowing devil’s overextended shoulder and with a cold sneer she severed its head from its body. She’d never once broken stride in all of that, nor had she overly hurried or strained herself. She was not using any of those wicked cuts I knew she was capable of, pacing herself in a display of utter scorn at the calibre of her opposition. Gods, if it was just her and the devils contained inside a ward she might not even lose.

It wasn’t just that, unfortunately. Which meant that the Skein’s snarled order to kill us all had been followed eagerly by the devils, and while a great many of them were rabidly going after the Saint there were others who’d decided on different prey. Flocks of walin-falme had come for me, at first, but after beating impotently at the ward the Rogue Sorcerer had put up in their way for some time they’d decided to take their displeasure to the source of the inconvenience. Leathery-winged and furious the devils converged on the broken balcony the hero had claimed as his perch, bearing armaments scavenged from the dead of the Legions and Akua’s most loyal. It did them little good, for while he’d wielded wards when it came to ensuring my protection now the dark-haired man was going on the offensive. It was like watching a talented but self-taught musician at work, I thought, for while the sorceries he used were rough and raw the cleverness of the use and the breadth of his range were astounding. A swirling vortex of air that drew in a dozen devils was fed a cloud of bright yellow acid, earning screams as the creatures began to burn and melt. A large globe of translucent sorcery, much like the shields Masego was fond of using, formed around another pack and after opening a single hole through it the Sorcerer repeatedly shot sloppy but powerful fireballs within until all that was left was ash and slag.

Of the hundred or so that’d first gone after him, at first simply walin-falme but soon most everything winged and borne of the Hells, only half reached his balcony. Where they found the Rogue Sorcerer to have nailed small spike of silvery metal in broad circle around his position. Innocuous, at a glance, but their purpose became clear when he began pouring lighting in a stream above him and the spikes each drew a sliver of that flow in a sudden arc. By this sudden caging of himself in lightning, the hero caught the first wave and fried them in a heartbeat. Lesser devils fled in fright, but the walin-falme had been soldiers for the Tower once upon a time: they were made of sterner stuff. They caught and skewered some of their allies, using them as shields to pass under the lightning untouched. There they found only a ball of radiant light that blinded and burned them, scattering them as the Rogue Sorcerer reappeared atop another balcony after dismissing a glamour almost fae-like in nature. The silvery spikes were still there, and in their wounded surprise the devils were in no state to adjust the new angle: then the lightning began pouring again, none were left alive.

“Well,” the Tyrant of Helike said, “one must concede they have slightly less of an army now than they had an hour past.”

We both knew that was a temporary state of affairs, though. Already I could see the Rogue Sorcerer’s face was flushed and dripping with sweat, his breathing hard. Mages like Masego and Akua, who used the exact amount of power needed to make a spell function to the intended purpose, would be able to continue throwing around sorcery for longer even if it was of higher calibre. Roland, clever as he was, was bleeding power well in excess of Keter’s Due and I suspected his natural gifts weren’t particularly impressive besides: if he continued at this pace for much longer, he was going to fall unconscious. If he didn’t continue at his pace, he was going to get eaten alive. Something of an issue, that. Meanwhile, the Saint had been forced to give ground by the sheer mass of bodies being thrown at her – you could not, after all, manoeuvre around tidal wave of flesh and claws. After that her cuts began tearing at the fabric of this realm, leaving those sharp arcs behind and changing retreat into brutal stalemate, but that was effectively flipping the hourglass on how long remained until her aging body caught up to her. Still, it was almost absurd how well they’d done. Oh they had a story at their back, enough to earn a nudge or two – buying time for an ally against hopeless odds – but most of that was still simply that there were very good at killing things. Devils in particular, I suspected. Above did not send its champions out into the world without first doling out a few tricks aimed at Below’s favourite instruments.

“It’s not a battle where there’s only one host,” I chided. “Proper form, Kairos.”

“My apologies, Catherine,” the boy grinned. “Quite right, quite right. And where do you intend to acquire such an army?”

“One was helpfully provided,” I murmured, looking down at below. “Yet I need someone to be nuisance, if you will. Just horribly inconvenient in every way.”

“At last, my day has come,” Kairos Theodosian gravely said.

I could almost feel the eagerness boiling in his veins.

“How long do you think you can grab everyone’s attention?” I asked. “Do you have a monologue in you?”

“ Catherine ,” the Tyrant said, sounding deeply offended.

“You’re right, I apologize for even asking that,” I replied. “I’ll leave this in your trustworthy hands.”

“You are a dear friend and honoured ally, so I’ll let it pass this once,” Kairos said, waving nonchalantly. “You may proceed, Black Queen.”

I squinted at him for a moment. He was definitely going to be betray me at least once more before this was over, but it shouldn’t be before we’d reached the end of this. And definitely not by selling me out to the Dead King, which should make this possible – I was a lot warier of being disrupted halfway through by the Tyrant than one of Neshamah’s brood of the dead and the damned. Now, to make my way through this mess on foot would take too long, even if I killed the pain in my leg and borrowed some hurt without looking at the interest. I could probably call on the Saint to carve me a quicker path, but that’d make my intentions obvious: which, given that the Dead King could be looking through anyone’s eyes and could intervene through any of them, was the same as dooming my scheme. I had another way, of course, though it wasn’t impossible he’d prepared for that. Couldn’t call on the Sisters for it, though, since the more I asked them to intervene the higher the chances Neshamah would get his hands on slivers of Sve Noc with all the disastrous consequences that entailed. Sloppy and imprecise it was then.

“Kind of you, my Lord Tyrant,” I said, and stepped off the ledge.

The Mantle of Woe and my unbound hair both flapped as I fell, but my attention was on the Night coursing through my veins. Like threading a needle , I thought. The cloth was thinner than I was used to and the window to get it right would be slight, but I still had faint of memories of what it felt like to have that inborn knack Winter had leant me. Darkness spread out like an inky pool beneath me, a handful of the Tyrant’s gargoyles curiously following me with eager cries and also much less endearing knives. I dropped into the dark, and for a moment it felt like plunging into cool, deep water. From the moment I touched the edge of the gate, I had less than a heartbeat to align it properly with the gate out. It was hard to describe, the act if putting it together. Like catching a faint spot of light in a dark cave that told you where the way out was, though that realization had to be paired with the instant act of will to move there lest the way out be botched. Or worst, lost. But I had it, near perfect, and-

“ Wind ,” the Skein susurrated, great golden eyes like lanterns in the gloom.

I tumbled out cursing in Kharsum, well to the side of where I’d been aiming for. That godsdamned rat, if I didn’t have a stripe of its fur as my cloak’s collar by the end of this I’d eat my boots. It took me a heartbeat to get my bearings, which didn’t improve my mood any: I’d meant to come out near Black and the Good King, but instead I was hip-deep in akalibsa on the east side of courtyard. Devils who had most definitely heard me swearing, form the way their houndlike faces turned to me. Armed and armoured in stone as they were I did not count them as a great threat, but given enough anything they could be trouble. Either I was going to have drawing on Night again, which was playing with fire when I had two large workings ahead of me, or-

“Ladies, gentlemen, other assorted beings,” Kairos Theodosian said. “If I may have your attention?”

I suspect they might have ignored him, if the grounds beneath the Skein had not exploded in the moment that followed. I spared a glance at the mess of broken stone and dust that had appeared without warning, eyes narrowing when I glimpsed dirtied snow in there. Hells, had he just weakened the barrier between this place and Creation to the extent there’d been an impact? Had he done that precisely enough to use it as a weapon? How had he – no, no time for that right now. The akalibsa had turned towards the noise, and when they returned their attention to me they found I’d disappeared. Under glamour covering sight and scent I began limping to the nest where the Skein had laired, and the two men waiting there: one a corpse, one a soul. King Edward had remained unmoving throughout the entire skirmish, eyes calmly gazing at his surroundings as he openly kept watch on both my teacher and the sack filled with crowns. Which had yet to be destroyed, interestingly enough. That implied either that Neshamah wasn’t entirely opposed to my getting my getting my hands on this realm, or that there would be something dangerous in him or one of his agents breaking them. Leaning on my staff I made my way through the rubble, avoiding paths that would have taken me through knots of devils. It made the journey longer, but the Tyrant seemed to have things well in hand.

“- worry not, my blessed brethren,” the Tyrant of Helike thundered, “I will be a merciful king, should any of you survive –”

Another chunk of the courtyard went up in noise and smoke. Though it didn’t seem to be killing many of the devils and had only angered the Skein even further, it certainly seemed to be commanding their attention. Near everything dead or spawned of Hell was now trying to put down a cackling Kairos, who was weaving erratically in the air without having ever left his throne. Slipping across the strewn stones, I snuck up on Black and the Revenant from the side. With the horde going after the Tyrant I’d been able to put some spring to my limp, and climbing over some large block of granite I finally reached the broken stairs where they’d been waiting this whole time. The Good King twitched like he was trying to speak, but words never came out. A heartbeat later seven wooden pillars began forming around me, glamoured or not, and shit that was bad. I’d seen this hold the Princess of High Noon, and these days I was just a mortal with too much mouth and prayer. The moment the runes came up I’d be stuck. I managed to sneak my hand into my cloak just as four eldritch runes began to glow around me, linked by a faint circle of light. Frozen in place, I let out a sigh as my glamour shattered like glass.

“Hierophant’s own magic,” I said. “Ironic, I’ll grant.”

“The Abomination was awaiting one of you making for the crowns,” King Edward Fairfax calmly told me. “And hindered my own attempt to warn you, Queen Catherine. Still, I give you greeting. It has been some time since we last spoke, yet I see you have not been idle.”

My teacher was watching us, missing nothing, and if he was surprised by what had just been said his face showed no sign of it.

“Same to you, Your Majesty,” I said. “Didn’t think he’d let you of Keter, to be honest.”

“It was something of a surprise to me as well,” the Revenant said, “though I do not pretend to grasp the thoughts of that monstrous creature.”

He might not, I thought, but through him I might be able to grasp a thing or two. Through what Neshamah did and did not prevent him from doing, watching as he no doubt was through the dead Fairfax. Best to flush out all I could before striking.

“- kneel in abject submission, and you will be granted the mercy for which I am well-known-”

Another deafening burst, though sooner or later that trick would run out.

“I don’t suppose you know what he actually wants from this place, do you?” I asked. “It can’t be the original notion of crashing it into Iserre, that’d be pitting him against a band of five. He might win that, of course, but there’s no real winning that if you understand what I mean.”

And, more than anyone else on Calernia, the King of Death had to be wary of trading early victories for later disasters. There was no one else with as expansive a meaning for later, after all. And, as the way the knowledge of the Bard had become widespread in our age proved, it’d become a lot harder to bury knowledge after it’d been spread nowadays.

“If I could aid you I would,” the Revenant said, tone regretful.

The gold of his eyes had not deepened, but then I was hardly a novice at the sleight of hand. He was in there, and it might just have been him speaking the right words to suggest I shouldn’t pursue this line of conversation, that there was nothing to gain from it. Too neatly done. Which meant I had my opening, and even digging for more wasn’t worth letting the opportunity slip. My fingers couldn’t move, frozen as they were by the binding, and my power was bound as well. But the small carved wishbone was held in my hands and that was enough. Its power, after all, was not mine. Not bound.

“Abscond,” I said, my voice lacking power.

But the wishbone broke, and it was enough: a trail of stars guiding me, I slid out of the binding and my steps took me right behind the Good King. I laid a hand on him a grinned, all teeth and malice.

“O Sve Noc,” I said. “Judge me worthy on this night, that I may take the dead from death.”

Night poured into the man who had once been King Edward Fairfax, and with wicked laughter Sve Noc began to wrestle away rule over the Revenant.

Chapter 45: Long Prices

“Grudge is born of blood, carried by it and redressed through it. As they who came before me swore, I so swear: there will be no peace nor rest ‘til the Cradle is reclaimed.”
– First Oath of the People, taken by all in the Duchy of Daoine at age seven

I’d once had a conversation with Akua, after Indrani had hit the bottle hard enough during our ‘council’ that she’d ended up snoring on the table. We’d talked about him before, of course: the Dead King. The Hidden Horror, the Abomination, the last king of Sephirah – all that a hundred more titles, a treasure trove’s worth of grim honours accrued over the centuries. We’d all been spinning our schemes around the ancient thing in Keter since the invitation had first reached me in Callow, and no small amount of talk and ink had been spent over the thought of what he might intend. In a sudden moment of honesty, sharing a shoddy table with a woman I still sometimes remembered to hate, I’d admitted that the Dead King’s ambitions were opaque to me. Assuming he even had any. What could the immortal ruler of a near-untouchable realm truly desire from Creation? All the wants of a mortal ruler were in his hands already: wealth almost absurd, authority absolute, the adulation of the people he’d forged to worship him as their sole idol. What was there, in all the world, that the King of Death could not obtain with either a snap of his fingers or use of the patience in which he was peerless?

Companionship, Akua had eventually suggested, and perhaps there was some truth to that. When he’d spoken of the Bard it had been with an almost fond manner of respect, though they were foe in all things and more than once she had ruined him. Yet while I would not deny I’d had my moments of arrogance over the years, I would not seriously countenance that my potential apotheosis had been reason enough for him to stir the Crown of the Dead to war. Malicia’s invitation had been an open door but walking through it had been his own will and the purpose of that will escaped me still. Even if he ended up successful beyond a monster’s wildest dreams, even if he devoured the continent whole and brought forth a thousand years of darkness... then what? A fleet raised, and through ships the tide of undeath was to be taken across the Tyrian Sea? Or into Arcadia, perhaps, some other Hell or for true ambition to the Heavens themselves. It was difficult, I would admit, to truly think on the scale and scope of someone like the King of Death given the comparative speck of a life I’d lived. Yet I did not believe that the soft-spoken, patient monster I’d seen make of his own home a pyre for apotheosis would choose as his path endless war on all the world.

Akua had challenged me on that, surprised by my certainty. In some ways, she’d argued, the Dead King was the pinnacle of what being partisan of Below meant. For all that the Hidden Horror had slumbered beyond his borders sometimes for centuries at a time, that only one villain in the history of Calernia had ever been his better. May she never return. How else but war was the King of Death to subjugate the entire world? It’d been a stark reminder, that conversation, that the people who’d raised Akua Sahelian had seen conquering the world as an admirable thing to aspire to. Believed that it was natural to believe so, that all others did as well. Her peers, her highest servants, her kin: her entire little world had shared that madness. It must not have seemed like madness at all, I thought, when you were in the warm embrace of that world. How could it be, when everyone who mattered believed it reason as well? But Akua was still a Wastelander, a highborn, in ways she might never entirely shake. It blinded her to the truth that the Dead King’s victories had sprung from his rejection of everything the brood ever circling the Tower held dear. See, the thing with the kind of game that Neshamah was playing was that the opposition only needed to get lucky once – and they had forever to take yet another swing, praying for that golden day. And every time the Dead King went to war, Above got another shot at him.

An endless war, for Neshamah, was a long and elaborate suicide by odds.

Oh, we’d not peered at the heart of the Hidden Horror and unfurled its deepest secrets that night. We were, after all, both so young and taught to think in the terms of a war that rarely made it so far west. But it’d stayed with me, the thought that patience was not a skeleton key to the Dead King’s every trouble. He could retreat back into the Serenity when he misliked the cast of something, true enough, but that had costs – in champions broken, in secrets unearthed and tricks revealed. Much of that knowledge died with those who’d learned it, so soon gone, but the important bits – those that might one day destroy him? The Intercessor would hoard them, and them dole them out to heroes whenever opportunity arose. Patience allowed him to set the battlefield as he preferred, to stack it, but the battle still had to be fought. Why offer a hundred-year truce, if not because he misliked the shape of this particular battlefield? The paramount virtue of an existence like the Dead King had to be cowardice, in this world of ours, and that meant retreating immediately and without qualms the moment it seemed like there might be a genuine threat after him. That knowledge was no skeleton key either, though, for he remained the Hidden Horror. There were so few things that could be a threat to him, when it came down to it, and even in the dawn of days the Bard had named him adept at avoiding weakness.

The ability to take back a Revenant from the grips of the Dead King would be a strategic threat, but not an overwhelming one. Save if I was prepared to assemble my own army of dead Named to match his, which would taint my reputation beyond repair in my seat of power and antagonize near every possible ally, it was little different from losing one of his champions to the blade of a hero. Of course, I’d not simply petitioned Sve Noc to aid me in clawing back the free will of the Good King: we were doing it while the guiding will of the Hidden Horror was still inside. Now, I was no mage and my learning in such matters were still young. But I knew, from having raised corpses and bound them to my will as well, that the kind of fine control that I’d seen displayed here could not be done without investment . I couldn’t be sure what it would cost him, if we succeeding at trapping whatever part of him he’d disseminated into the Revenant, but that hardly mattered. The Dead King was, not to belabour the title, dead. He no longer healed, in body and soul. Every loss of him was a permanen t loss. And so, as the might and attention of doom-crowned Sve Noc poured into the corpse of Edward Fairfax, I returned to a familiar place. Surrounded by the absolute pitch black of nothingness, I stood leaning on my staff and met the gaze of Neshamah in the... flesh, so to speak.

“I do not hold much respect for recklessness,” the Dead King said.

I replied nothing. The hourglass had been flipped, I thought, and it was not for me the sand was running out. Oh, there was no real guarantee that we’d succeed at trapping him. But even if we failed it would be at a cost, and greater to him than us. For all that the King of Death had made attrition his sharpest sword in some ways, it may yet be turned on him to cut just as deep.

“Still,” Neshamah said, “your use of it as a calculated measure continues to surprise.”

It would have been an empty gesture to look at anything other than him, for there was nothing else to look at, so I did not bother with the theatrics. I did not speak either, though. It was not me, who had come to bargain – though I had schemed the coming of this conversation, I would not deny.

“You will require guarantees as to the Hierophant’s life,” he said.

I inclined my head in agreement. I’d been worried, since the start, that there might be some things that not even the Pilgrim’s resurrection could take back. Or that his hand would be forced early to spend that aspect on some life I cared less for, preventing the use I needed for some lesser prize. Receiving assurances from the Dead King was preferable, for though he was no fae bound to his word he had to know that if he crossed me on this after making a promise I would never bargain with him again. Recklessness, he’d called this. Like in these struggles of ours there was meant to be a manner of cordiality, mayhaps not of fair play but at least of an... understanding that this was a game, a play, a sport to be had. Do not forget , the ache in my leg whispered. Do not forget. I bared my teeth in a feral smile at the King of Death, the savage pupil of savage teachers, and let that pretence die. We were no Proceran princes making courtly war, for there could be no such thing as a war courtly.

“Six months,” I said.

“Pardon?” the Dead King said.

“You armies will not advance a single step for six months,” I said. “This, and the release of the Hierophant. That’s my offer.”

“You overestimate the strength of your position,” Neshamah warned.

“You have,” I murmured, “taken my friend and now bargain with his life while scheming the death of others dear to me. You arranged the destruction of my armies, of near everyone I’ve ever cared for. But for my intervention, you would have buried Iserre in death and borrowed Hierophant’s hand for the deed.”

“You clutch the remains of what you once were, Black Queen,” the Hidden Horror said. “It does no favours to what you have since become.”

“It was never really personal to me, before,” I told him. “You were a foe, but in some ways an ally as well. In principle I thought it tragedy that others died to your invasions, but no one weeps for faces they never knew nor loved.”

“A taste,” the Dead King said, “of what is to come. They will be strangers, Catherine Foundling. One day, and sooner than you believe, they will all be strangers.”

“And if that day comes, I may yet become the horror you foretold,” I admitted. “But today, Dead King?”

I limped forward, into his space, with cold eyes.

“Today you are the thing that took my friend ,” I hissed. “The thing that would have slaughtered the Woe and the Army of Callow without batting an eye. I ‘overestimate the strength of my position’, Merciless Gods.”

I struck at the nothingness we stood on with my staff, the sound ringing like a thunderclap.

“You think after this I’m not willing to try falling off the cliff together, Neshamah?” I said, tone sharp. “To gamble on which of us will find our wings on the way down? Look at my back, King of Death, and see what is writ there – when given the choice between risking ruin and kneeling, I’ve only ever replied one way.”

A moment passed.

“Has your tirade ended?” the Dead King calmly asked. “No purpose was served by it, save the thinning of my patience.”

“You have my terms,” I coldly said. “Six months and the release of Hierophant.”

“That is no bargain,” he said.

“Aye,” I replied. “It’s a price. And if you know a single thing of my people, you’ll know ours are always long.”

“I’ve more than a single hostage in my possession, even if the Tyrant has once more turned,” the Dead King said.

“I knifed Black when we last spoke before ordering him to find his decency,” I said. “He’s since arranged the starvation of several hundred thousand innocents. Try again.”

“If you are to assemble your coalition against me, you will need a ruler for Praes,” he replied. “You cannot tolerate the continuation of Dead Empress Malicia’s reign, which leaves him your sole reputable candidate.”

My fingers clenched. It’d been too much to hope for that playing it off would work.

“Amadeus of the Green Stretch and Masego the Hierophant,” Neshamah said. “For assurances I will not take the life of either on this field, your crows will loosen their talons.”

I breathed out.

“No,” I said.

His eyes tightened the slightest bit, which on another man would have been frustration and surprise.

“Down we go, Dead King,” I said. “Gods help neither of us, the fickle pricks.”

“Assurances,” he said. “And three months.”

It meant he wouldn’t release Masego, that whatever purpose he was using my friend’s body for he would continue until the very last moment. But three months, Gods even just three months? It kept the Lycaonese in the war instead of letting them stumble down the slope into oblivion, and it was enough breathing room to turn this war from lost to losing.

“Night’s not over,” I said, matching golden eyes to mine.

“Once more, in this we agree,” the King of Death said. “Bargain agreed?”

“Bargain agreed,” I replied, and darkness broke.

—

The Sisters had not reached apotheosis gently, and their works were not gentle ones. Yet this was a matter of theft, of taking, and in such matters we were all well-learned. Sve Noc, discerning my thoughts as they formed, loosened their grip on the Revenant just enough that the wisp of spoke that’d been the Dead King’s will slipped away into nothingness. And along the footpath the Hidden Horror had used to withdraw, rapacious Night coursed down. Imperious and grasping, it devoured what bound the man who had once been the Good King Edward Fairfax to his subjugator in Keter. Komena, I knew as she deigned to brush her thoughts with mine, wanted to claim him in the Hidden Horror’s stead. To have a Fairfax flagbearer of her own, to spread the Tenets of Night wherever dusk was known. For where, among the realms of men, were more fertile grounds for her red-handed lessons than the war-torn fields of Callow? Andronike, ever cautious and calculating where her sister craved clash of arms, felt more inclined to snuff the Revenant out. Mastery over the tainted carried risks, she grasped, and brought opportunities for that most dangerous of foes who our war against was only beginning. Why chance it, when there was little need? I disagreed. With both of them I disagreed, and though it was not in the nature of prophets to argue with prophecy or of heralds to argue with the message born, that was not the lay of our ties. It was for my contentious nature most of all they had raised me to be First Under the Night. And so when I spoke the Sisters listened, and our wills joined in miracle.

King Edward Fairfax, Seventh of His Name, breathed his first free breath since he’d died below the walls of Keter. That was the first of the two great workings I would unleash today.

“It has been,” the Good King said, “many years since I last tread the streets of sunny Liesse.”

Letting out a long breath, I opened the floodgates and Night begin to fill me. A rising tide of power, too much of it for me to able to shape or grasp with my own hands. In the sky above us all, deafening shrieking noises began to fill the air as hellgates were torn open one after another. This already half-ruined realm began to shudder at the roughness it was treated with, a sinking ship with yet another hole made in the hull every few moments.

“You appear to have incensed the Abomination, Queen Catherine,” King Edward said.

“I tried to strong-arm him into some fairly major concessions,” I admitted. “It appears he believes I am in need of an admonition.”

Night continued to pour into me, a tide rising, until the world around me turned into an oil painting: imprecise, as if smudged, but no less beautifully coloured for it.

“So it does,” the Revenant said. “I thank you now for the breaking of my chains, you who they name Black Queen, but I must wonder at the price of it. What dark patrons have sought my indebtment?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You owe not a single thing. Miracles are not bought and paid for, even those of the Night.”

“A gift,” King Edward said, sounding unconvinced.

“I have request to make of you,” I admitted. “Yet it would be meaningless if you did not agree of your own free will. And so there will be no talk of debt, to either myself or Sve Noc. On this all three of us agree.”

“Mercy gifted without strings, yet with purpose,” the Good King said.

He sounded, I thought, almost glad.

“I am a priestess,” I said. “But also a queen.”

And there were so very few things that a queen could afford to do with a single pure benign intent, in the end. Virtue alone did not win wars, or keep people fed through winter. In the distance, as if in an entirely different world, the Tyrant of Helike was still speaking. The devils around us and afar were boiling like a pot about to tip, stirred into a murderous frenzy by sorcerous means and now swelling in number with every passing moment. The Saint of Swords fought still, unbending and without pause, and though I could almost hear the Rogue Sorcerer’s panting breaths in my ear still spellfire spun out and devils died. Yet the battle around us, coming to us, seemed almost like a distant scene. I already knew that it was not out there victory or defeat would be found.

“Your petition, Queen Catherine,” the Revenant said. “I would hear it.”

Leaning tiredly on my staff, I raised up a palm and compressed everything I could of the Night in a ball. My will failed, though stubbornness made that defeat slower than it should have been. The forces I was trying to wield were simply too large. But where I faltered the will of the Sisters drew me up, and with their two grips – one deft and soft, Andronike the spinner of weaves, the other imperious and coarse, Komena the breaker of spears – an orb of pure Night formed above my open palm.

“Can you hear them?” I asked. “Our people, the echoes of them in this place. The indelible mark a terrible slaughter leaves long after it has ended.”

“Like songs woven of wails,” Edward Fairfax softly agreed.

“The foe who did this I slew and made my own,” I told him. “Though that end is a pittance, to the madness that was the Doom of Liesse. But there is an enemy that stands before us, using her works for ruinous purpose and waging war on all the world. That, too, is a scale to balance.”

His eyes flicked to the orb of Night.

“One last time,” he said, “into the breach.”

“It will kill you,” I warned. “There is little kindness in that power, and it was not meant for your hands.”

“I am long dead,” the Good King replied. “And kindness is not what I would have of this day.”

Edward Fairfax had no longer been young, when he was claimed, and I suspected even if he had been few would have called him handsome even then. But to the strong cast of his face there was a manner of regality, like it had been hewn from stone and taken the noblest properties of that make. Helmetless, his crown of white hair was the sole he wore and the sword in his hand was bare. Without a sheath to return to, for there was none at his hip, it would never be allowed to rest.

“The war never ends, Queen Catherine,” he told me, tone quiet. “The faces and the borders, the foes and the friends, they are but the shallowest measure of the thing. Not all tyrants reign from the Tower, and many who have hunted the wicked partook of wickedness in the hunt.”

I inclined my head.

“One should not confuse striking at evil and doing good,” I quoted.

“Lest good become the act of striking,” the Good King completed, tone approving. “You understand, then. That when your evil is no longer necessary, Black Queen, to linger would be to stray from the narrow path you have tread.”

My fingers clenched.

“I know,” I croaked out.

Dead fingers snatched the Night from my palm, clenching into a fist and letting the darkness sink into the flesh.

“Then rise, Callowans,” King Edward called, voice like thunder. “Rise once more, for we yet have debts unsettled and House Fairfax calls on you one last time .”

There was a heartbeat of silence, a stillness like death. And they answered, as they had for centuries, for even a grave made for a petty hurdle when it was a Fairfax calling you to war.

Interlude: Repudiation

“It is written that the Hidden Horror sent envoy to the Iron King Tancred, threatening that should he not strike the banners over Hannoven and open the gates the city would be stormed and burned to ash. So did Tancred Papenheim then send back a single torch, with on the side engraved three words: ‘if you can’.”
– Extract from ‘Crowned In Iron’, a compendium of Lycaonese histories assembled by Prince Alexandre of Lyonis

It was like watching two enemy Hells trying to devour each other.

The Revenant – stolen from the Dead King, she’d thought, by the grim patrons of the Black Queen – that had once been a king of Callow spoke in a voice like a clarion call and the dead of this accursed place answered. Laurence watched, jaw clenched, as a coursing tide of wraiths made of silver and shade rose from the scarred ground. Mere dozens, first, but that swelled into hundreds and then thousands before more than a handful of heartbeats had passed. Those were not soldiers, the Saint saw. There were children and elderly among them, men and women whose hazy silhouettes bore no arms save angry hands. And oh, how angry they were. The rage of them was a clamour and a song, the weight of it making the air feel taut. Thousands of voices, of silhouettes, moving like a seething river of souls to tear at devils and dead alike. Laurence splattered the blood of another devil on the ground with a flick of the wrist, catching its clumsy strike and sending its head tumbling down with the riposte, and without hesitation began to move. Not towards the Black Queen, whose lone silhouette was surrounded by an island of stillness, or the other Revenant. No, roughly forcing aside any spirit that in their advance got in her way Laurence de Montfort headed for the imprisoned soul of the Carrion Lord.

She’d seen it when they first broke through the maze of the Skein, still pilloried in that clever silver artefact the Sorcerer had crafted for them, and she could not allow it to be claimed by anyone else’s hands. Allowing the Tyrant to keep it was pointless – even when Theodosian had stolen it earlier he’d not proved to be a least a modicum useful by destroying the soul himself – and it was out of the question for Foundling to be allowed to reclaim the Black Knight. Tariq had allowed himself to savour the taste of hope for the first time in too long, and grow drunk off it, but Laurence would not lower her guard so easily. It was difficult to advance, to the Saint’s displeasure, for though the wraiths were but lesser dead and ignored her even when jostled they streamed forward heedlessly. It was like swimming in death, and more than once Laurence found her sight obscured by the flows. The devils who’d been in the courtyard were ripped apart within moments, she’d seen, harsh hands clawing at them and wailing mouths biting down on flesh. The Skein was not destroyed, but from what she could glimpse it was being drowned in sheer numbers. Foundling, at least, had not moved from her perch.

Stumbling over broken stones and just one more push away from beginning to hack at the bloody wraiths no matter the consequences, Laurence finally broke into what had been the Horned Lord’s nest of ruins and found Amadeus of the Green Stretch still imprisoned. And gagged, thank the Gods for that – if she had to hear a single other sly barb from that viperous tongue she’d cut it out of his mouth. Another company of wraiths flowed before her, cutting her path, and she felt like screaming but she was too close to draw attention to herself now. Only, through two passing spirits she saw a tall shadow standing by the villain. In the flickering lights she could not be sure, but Laurence could have sworn its face had been painted purple. Feeling her stomach drop, the Saint dropped all pretences of subtlety and harshly forced her way through the wraiths. Several swiped at her with angry hands, though when she continued pushing forward they lost interest and returned to their war instead of pursuing. She’d been too later, the Saint saw. The drow that’d been standing by the prisoner snapped closed the silvery artefact that’d been unfolded into a pillory, now no larger than forearm, and with an amused silver glance at her it took a single step forward into nothingness. Bordel , Laurence silently cursed. That was Foundling’s little attendant, wasn’t it? The one she’d called Ivon, or maybe Iva. The Saint, fingers tight around the grip of her sword, turned her gaze to the Black Queen.

She was still standing alone on the rise, that many-coloured cloak flapping around her from the wind of the wraiths flowing around her. Hair long and unbound, her limp grown more pronounced and nowadays leaning on some sort of walking stick, she seemed nothing like the angry mutilated child Laurence had tried to put down at the Battle of the Camps. Catherine Foundling had yet to strike a single blow with a blade since she’d returned to Iserre from her journeys, the rumours went. And she had grown more dangerous for it. All night they’d danced to her tune, the Saint thought, glancing at where the Black Knight had been spirited away before she could take him back, down to this very last note . You don’t know what you’re bargaining with here, Tariq , she appraised. Setting a wolf on a tiger only has two beasts prowling the wilds, wounded and twice as vicious. Yet the time had not come where Laurence would bare her blade to redress yet another mistake made by kinder or weaker souls, so her longsword returned to the sheath. Climbing up the mound of ruins, the Saint came to stand by the side of the rising villain of their age. The woman remained silent, eyes on her dead countrymen now taking the battle to the devils pouring out of the open hellgates. Among the horde, the crowned Revenant led the charge with a shining blade.

“How did you know it would work?” Laurence asked.

The look on Foundling’s face was strange, almost subdued on a face that seemed to have been carved from hard edges with the razor-sharp cheekbones and too-strong nose. Even grief looked harsh on a face like that, much better suited for the sharp grins and cold stares the Black Queen was infamously known for.

“It always does,” Catherine Foundling said, “when you make it hurt a little.”

Laurence’s lips pulled back in disdain.

“Does it sting that much, to have had to borrow another’s hand?” the Saint said. “You’ve not been shy in doing so tonight.”

Though perhaps it struck closer to home, that even being crowned in Laure had not been enough to give the warlord a fraction of the pull the long-dead Fairfaxes had on her people. It was no great endorsement of her reign, that she’d had to use the name and Name of another for that working.

“This city is a mass grave dug by my failures,” the Black Queen replied, tone remote. “And yet here I am, walking its grounds once more. How many more, I wonder, will it take before I have been made to look that failing in the eye enough?”

Laurence hesitated, for though it was a monster she spoke to in that moment she sympathized with the woman more than she’d thought would ever be possible. Because this was not a smirking, victorious puppeteer tugging at all their strings. That distant bleakness she knew well. It came from the same place that had the Saint of Swords wondering what might have changed, if she’d arrived a sennight early instead of late. If she might have slain the beast when it’d taken a handful instead of a village, if she’d found Isodorios when the dragonblood first began to decay instead of after the red had taken him. What if , that old and tireless flagellant’s whip.

“It’ll never leave you,” the Saint said, not unkindly.

It was honest, which was the highest courtesy she had to offer the likes of Catherine Foundling.

“I don’t suppose it will, no,” the Black Queen quietly admitted.

There were a few heartbeats of silence, left unfilled by either of them, before the old woman grew impatient.

“And now what?” Laurence asked.

“We’re a distraction, Saint,” Foundling reminded her. “And I would say that the enemy is suitably distracted, at the moment.”

“The Skein’s not finished,” Laurence replied. “It’ll take more than wraiths to put it down.”

“See to it, if you’d like,” the younger woman shrugged. “Take the Tyrant and the Sorcerer if you please.”

“You’re not going to lend a hand,” the Saint grunted. “What a helpful hand you make.”

Theodosian was probably enough on his own to entirely bury the Horned Lord’s oracular insights instead of simply muddy them the way Laurence’s own domain would, but it’d go quicker with a priestess or ruin keeping the Revenant contained while those of them better-versed in killing the dead put an end to the abomination.

“I’ll be headed inside, should King Edward succeed at breaching the wards on the inner palace,” Foundling casually said.

“Should?” Laurence asked.

“Depends whose wards they are,” the Black Queen grunted. “Let’s hope they’re still using the Diabolist’s work as the base, otherwise it’ll be like trying to topple a rampart by throwing eggs at it.”

Further hellgates opened above them, devils pouring in. The victorious battle for the courtyard finished with the Tyrant of Helike, laughing maniacally as he shot streaks of a fire from a jeweled sceptre at a hissing and fleeing Skein swatting away the dead pursuing it – they had, Laurence saw, ripped away great swaths of fur and eaten the flesh like hungry ghosts – until the Horned Lord leapt over the cliff’s edge of that was the end of the ducal palace. In the distance the dead king of Callow raised his sword at the sky filling with fire and brimstone, and grimly declared war upon it.

The dead obeyed.

Laurence waited. There was ending coming, she could feel it. And when the moment came, she would be ready to meet it as it should be met.

—

Tariq had faced many a villain in his time, and not always with Light and strife. Often words could bring greater good in the world than a harsher touch, if they were the right ones, and so it might just be the truth that there was no living on Calernia who had spoken with more villains than he. The quiet ones, he’d found, tended to be the most dangerous. Those who did not feel the need to boast or fill a silence oft had greater designs occupying their thoughts, and so proved more perilous adversaries. This was no cast iron rule, however. For example, it would have been a lie to say that Kairos Theodosian was not one of the deadliest Bestowed he’d encountered over the years and the boy simply could not stomach holding his tongue. Still, the tendency was pronounced and though the Woe were as peculiar a band of villains as their infamous predecessors when Tariq had first assessed the Archer her constant chatter had encourage him to dismiss her as an ancillary threat when she was without the guiding hand of the Black Queen at her back. A skilled and seasoned killer, mind you, with a way bow in hand that might as well be sorcery. But not a true danger, like the brilliant mind behind the brutish face of the Adjutant or the eerily innocent atrocities the Hierophant had it in him to commit.

He had been wrong in this.

While it was true that the Archer – Indrani, as she’d casually confirmed she was named – was loquacious, the Pilgrim had beheld what went on behind the smiles and the swagger and it had him unsettled . The Archer’s thoughts and feelings shifted constantly, mercurial as the tides, yet there was a bedrock beneath them that was as subtle as it was watchful. It had had taken him the better part of an hour, for one, to put the finger on what a particular association between a part of that bedrock and amusement directed at him meant. Namely, that the smiling young woman was considering she might have to kill him in the future. Without feeling so much as a speck of guilt over it. It would have been easier to swallow, Tariq would admit to himself, if the Archer were a coldblooded devil like some of the monsters wearing human skin he’d had to face. Incapable of joy or fondness in more than shallow ways, though it had to be said that no all such constrained the Pilgrim had met were monstrous or even particularly nefarious. Yet the young woman was not. Deep affection and something like an intricate manner of loyalty had bloomed in her, when she’d spoken with the Black Queen, as well as something he had uncomfortably placed as lust. Something more romantic in nature emerged when mention was made of the Hierophant, though it was paired with a manner of wonder that implied to him the admission there was still fresh.

Indrani the Archer was, he knew by virtue of his aspect, a pleasant if hedonistic young woman would not even slightly hesitate to slit his throat if she judged him a threat or was asked to by someone she trusted. The knowledge was made even more unsettling by the way that wheedling information out of her was ludicrously easy, though the bedrock beneath that ease missed nothing of the nature of the questions being asked. Perceptive, this one, even though she was already on her second flask of Levante monteron since they’d left the rest of the band. That she remained mostly sober after drinking that much hard liquor was notable even in one Bestowed, though given the appearance he suspected she had murdered outriders from Lord Marave’s army for them. Possibly she had killed them entirely for the flasks, for her fieldcraft was not the kind anyone with mundane eyes would easily see through no matter how skilled those eyes.

“- so we signed it as ‘the King of Winter’, since none of us knew the name, but the real important part here is that she called me a sullen wench,” Archer said. “ Sullen , really, can you believe that? The nerve of her sometimes.”

Tariq set aside a concern, namely that he had been repeatedly outmanoeuvered by a young woman whose notion of a ruse fit to enter the seat of the Winter Court was a lie so blatant the fae would hesitate to call her out on it, and addressed a more pressing one. Such as the fact that, while Indrani was gesticulating, she was not keeping both hands on the sheer cliff they were climbing. Something of an issue, as she was the lead climber but if she fell the same rope she used to help him up would help drag him down to his death.

“Should you truly be this cavalier with the handholds?” he asked in a strangled tone.

“Don’t worry about it,” Archer dismissed. “We’re almost there anyway.”

“And that will be solid ground, yes?” the Grey Pilgrim faintly asked.

“Bit of a slope, but pretty much yeah,” the young woman cheerfully said. “Used to be a secret escape tunnel, when this was still Liesse the city instead of Diabolist’s flying magic tantrum. Nobles, right? They’re like moles, always digging tunnels to get out when the going gets rough.”

“And you’re certain it was not found by either the Diabolist or the Hierophant?” Tariq pressed.

“Like, at least half certain,” she badly winked. “Seriously though, it used to lead into Hengest Lake. Had to take a swim in there to flee through, and no villain could possibly take a dip in there. Cat says there was some spare angel corpse lying around inside.”

“The Hashmallim that was tricked into perdition by Dread Emperor Traitorous,” the Pilgrim agreed. “It is well-known, in some circles. He was one of the only two Praesi rulers to successfully harm a Choir.”

“No shit?” Archer said, sending him a serious glance. “Had no idea what kind of an angel bone it was, don’t think the others did either. Anyways, Diabolist slapped a massive cliff in front of this entire part of the city when she landed it to make it easier to defend it so it was buried until Zeze stole it again. We’re the only two people who know about the passage, as far as I know, which is pretty far ‘cause I got good eyes.”

“No shit,” the Grey Pilgrim solemnly confirmed.

Though he was missing much of the context that would be needed to decipher the nuances of the information she had so easily volunteered, he was appreciative of the way she was dragging him up the cliff even as she spoke. Tariq was rather less spry than he used to be, and had never been much of a climber besides. He’d more than once fallen while climbing Sintra’s balcony, though he’d never used the stepladder she’d once ordered set against the wall in what was very much open mockery. The Pilgrim glanced down the sheer cliff, not in the slightest enjoying the fresh reminder that was he was currently dangling down a rope above the height of storm clouds. If he fell down that, it would be more than pride and a planting of bluebells that would sting of it.

“So who was the other?” Archer asked, wedging her boot into a crevice and nimbly hoisting herself up.

“The other?” Tariq asked.

“Praesi ruler,” the young woman clarified.

“Ah, that would be Triumphant if the old histories are to be believed,” he answered.

His tone was a little hurried, as the rope had grown taut with her rising and he’d done his best to follow her path.

“Ah, Triumphant,” Archer hummed. “Now there was a real horror. She’s always fun to read about, isn’t she?”

If one enjoyed pages depicting a procession of brutal massacres and subjugation, culminating in hubris so flagrant it moved not one but two empires on the other side of the Tyrian Sea to wage war on her. Which Tariq did not, for all that the learning of history was important. Praesi histories tended to be sickening, as a rule, a parade of savageries always trying to exceed the last. Dread Empress Triumphant had been the worst of that lot by a fair margin, and one did not need to read of her attempted annihilations in the Chain of Hunger and the Titanomachy to be disgusted. Even the atrocities she’d resorted to in the cowing of the powerful Alamans tribes that’d dwelled on the shores of Lake Artoise were worthy of revulsion, and they’d been but a pale shadow of what she’d inflicted on Callow.

“If you say so,” the Pilgrim replied.

Indrani did not pay his answer any heed, for she was making vaguely pleased noises and wedging herself against outcroppings – only to move swiftly from side to side, rising up as far as the rope allowed and swinging a leg over what appeared to be the ground floor of a tunnel. She rolled back and helped up Tariq, putting those muscled arms to work hoisting up his wizened frame. They unhooked the rope, after that, and the Pilgrim wove the slightest sliver of Light into a globe.

“You don’t know the trick for seeing in the dark?” Archer asked him, looking surprised.

“The Light reveals many enchantments as well,” Tariq told her, “and subtleties that leaning on one’s Bestowal does not. Best we advance cautiously, yes?”

“I suppose,” she said. “Might be the Callowans put up some-“

She paused, or perhaps it might be more accurate to say she was interrupted. Her senses were sharp, but Tariq had more to rely on that what his frail mortal shell could provide: the Ophanim whispered into his ear, urgent but not disapproving. Above them, Liesse shook and a rampant clamour was distantly heard.

“Well,” Indrani said. “It looks like slow and careful just took a leap down that cliff.”

“So it did,” the Grey Pilgrim murmured.

“Look at the bright side, Peregrine,” Archer cheerfully said. “ Nobody does distraction like Catherine.”

Interlude: Renunciation

“We fight not only our own wars but those of our forebears and our children, for we inherit the wounds of those before us and pass our own to those that follow. And so, fools that we are, we keep trying to fill one grave by digging another.”
– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

The damned rat had made a mess on the way out, though that’d turned out of some use: whatever blighted eastern sorcery kept the last stretch of the palace protected it’d been no match for a Horned Lord fleeing without much thought given to its surroundings. Its swinging tail and massive limbs had torn through walls and halls, baring what looked like a set of large private chambers – maybe the lodgings of whatever jackals had settled into this place after the Dukes of Liesse were chased out. Even eviscerated in such a way the palace was not defenceless: the first wave of wraiths to try charging through the opening had dispersed like smoke in the wind. So much, Laurence had thought, for the dead Callowans opening the way. Odds were it’d have to be the boy serving as the key to the locks again, and best he got to that sooner rather than later. It was pretty piece of theatrics the Black Queen had put together, snatching a dead king and appointing to the head of the host meant to meet the Hidden Horror’s last guard. Clever, and not without worth. But if the Saint of Swords knew anything it was that pretty stories came to swift ends, and when this one collapsed she had no intention of being caught out on the open where the devils could swarm them. Foundling must have shared at least some of her opinions, as she’d sent for the other members of this band of theirs.

Roland dragged himself up the mound of ruins looking half-dead, though without wounds. The Rogue was a better hand at avoiding blows than dealing them out, as far as Laurence was concerned, though it took all sorts to reach a journey’s end. Storming a villain’s fortress like this wasn’t really what a boy like the Rogue Sorcerer was meant for, anyway. That they’d yet to run into practitioners while pushing further in just dragged him further out of his depths, though the Saint suspected his particular talents would find sharp use at least once before dawn rose. He spoke a few words with Foundling in a quiet tone – her own was kind, Laurence noted, maybe asking about the state he was in – before coming to a discreet collapse against an upraised stone that could from a distance be taken for him simply leaning against it. Having pushed herself to the edge of what her body could take more often than the boy had seen winter pass, the Saint was not fooled in the slightest. He was on the edge of collapse and his pride must have the lion’s share of the toil of keeping him standing. Laurence approached, as they all waited for the Tyrant to join them.

“Saint,” Roland greeted her without opening his eyes. “Not too worn out?”

“Unlike you,” Laurence bluntly replied.

If Tariq had been there he might have been able to smooth away the rougher edges of that exhaustion with use of the Light, but Foundling had sent him to traipse around secret ways with her foremost assassin. It wasn’t the Adjutant, at least: word was when the Black Queen really wanted something dead it was the orc she sent out. But Laurence knew better than most the kind of lessons the Archer would have learned at the knee of the Lady of the Lake. It’d be a surprise if any of them didn’t involve a corpse in some way. That Tariq had simply accepted being split from the rest of them, where ambush from other forces sworn to Foundling might see him turned into a hostage, had riled her up more than a little. If they were dealing with some raving madman with more minions and powers than sense it’d be one thing to surrender one of their own into their custody – it was a reliable trick to get close enough to a Damned to ‘surrender’ yourself into stabbing distance. Foundling wouldn’t make mistakes that elementary, though, and she’d played them all for fools more than once tonight. It was one thing to bargain with one of Below’s servants, though Laurence still believed that dire mistake, but pretending arrangement was alliance could only be furthering that mistake.

“I have tonics,” the Sorcerer said. “I will not topple, if that is your worry.”

“Relying on potions is a good way to get killed,” Laurence said. “Trust your Choosing, not anything that can fit in a bottle.”

The boy’s eyes fluttered open, the orange rings around his pupils still slowly fading. Whose sorcery had it been, that he’d been spending in the fights? Hard to say. The Saint was no student of the arcane and Tariq had told her that Roland de Beaumarais’ wanderings had taken the boy far and wide: it could have been anyone’s, from anywhere. There were places on Calernia where even she had not found the road taking her.

“We have different approaches, Regicide,” he replied, almost defiantly.

Laurence’s jaw tightened. Even now, she was not sure of this was a long game of Tariq’s or if the boy had genuinely blundered into halfway trusting someone that’d spend him without a second thought. The Peregrine had an eye for detail and for the long view Laurence had never seen the likes of in all her days, so she would not put this past him. But she was uncertain of the boy was this skilled a liar. The truth might lay somewhere in the valley, she considered. A lie but spoken with real anger. There’d been too many defeats of late for a proud young Chosen like Roland not to feel their wisdom had failed. He was not, Laurence would admit, entirely wrong. It was never enough to be right: you also had to be victorious, or it didn’t mean a damned thing.

“Don’t be a mule,” she said. “Stay in the back save when your talents are needed. Foundling and the Tyrant can take the hits until we get to the pivot.”

Spreading around the hurt a bit ought to even things out, when the villains started considering sticking the knife and taking the while prize instead of keeping to the arrangement. Laurence wouldn’t draw first, not when Tariq had given his word. She trusted him too much for that, inconveniently sentimental as he could be. But neither would she stumble blind into the inevitable. And if he proved to be right? Her fingers clenched.

“Do we not have enough foes, that we must ever make more?” Roland tiredly asked her in Chantant.

“Just because she’s not fighting us,” Laurence gently said, “doesn’t mean she’s not our foe.”

Could be the bargain would hold for a few months, a few years. A decade, Gods forbid, though she would not put coin on that. But it would break. Foundling wanted to wiggle her way into Cordelia Hasenbach’s dreams of a Grand Alliance, that much had come clear, and given the way the ventures was on fire the Saint did not mind so much. If the Black Queen wanted to do them all a service and be taken by the blaze, fighting for the last scraps of decency she still clung to, then Laurence would keep her mouth shut. But Catherine Foundling could not have a hand in shaping the world that would come after the ashes settled, lest the old sicknesses carry through to the foundation that would be laid in the ruins of the old order.

“An alliance of victors, is it?” the Rogue quietly said.

He was speaking half of a saying old and dear to their people, though some claimed it was some ancient Merovins who’d first spoken it. An alliance of victors is like a hearth in summer . Useless, it meant, doomed to fail. For when the covenant of need passed, the nature of men ran its course instead.

“You’re young,” the Saint tiredly said. “So this seems like the sum of it to you. But there’s always an after , Roland.”

“Is it not this very manner of thinking, Saint, that saw us end up here in the first place?” he replied.

“I hope you can still believe that, in a decade,” Laurence de Montfort honestly said. “That we will live in a world kind enough to tolerate that belief.”

But I won’t count on it , she thought. If she did not keep a watch, who would?

“My beloved comrades, I have returned!”

The Tyrant of Helike landed atop the mound with a sick crunch, the ugly enchanted sculptures carrying his throne everywhere being ground into the stone by the abrupt landing. They chittered loudly in protest, though another gargoyle wearing the tailored robes of a Stygian magister went around swatting them into silence with a stick. Gods, that nasty little cripple was just sick in the head.

“Good,” the Black Queen said, turning to address them. “We’ll be breaching the last holdout, now. Sorcerer, you and I will take the tip of the spear. I have a feel for the weakness in things, and you’ve...”

She shrugged.

“... that thing that you do,” the dark-eyed woman said, sounding amused.

“Understood,” Roland said, discretely wiping the corner of his mouth.

Not quite thoroughly enough for Laurence not to notice the hint of green broth on his lip. So he’d drunk something, then, and ignored her advice. She’d have to keep an eye on the fool, lest he get himself killed overreaching his grasp.

“Is no one going to address the delicious ironic army of the dead currently warring on the Dead King’s host of devils?” Kairos Theodosian said.

“You’ve summed it up,” Foundling drily replied. “Consider it addressed.”

The boy’s red eye was shining wet, like it’d been dipped in blood, and his smile came too easy. Laurence knew that to be the sight of a sharpened knife being bared, and from the way the Black Queen’s own eyes sharpened so did she.

“I was referring to the way that the Good King seems to be falling apart at a quickening rate,” the Tyrant said. “Presumably, his army would follow him into slumber.”

She’d been right then, Laurence grimly thought. Like an arrow sent flying, that ploy of Foundling’s would hit the mark but then turn into little more than dead wood.

“He’ll hold long enough,” the Black Queen said. “Yet we should not linger. Sorcerer, with me. The two of you should keep an eye out for the Skein – somehow I doubt its leaping down a cliff has rid us of it for good.”

The Saint did not reply, for it would have been too much like taking an order, but she did not disagree. It was decent enough sense, for Roland had his tricks but it was Foundling’s priesthood of the wicked that had wraiths parting for them as they advanced on the last bastion. The two took the lead when the arrived at the feet of the walls the Skein’s retreat had ripped open, climbing up and beginning to paw at the wards. Laurence remained below, as much to keep an eye on the Tyrant as to keep watch for the Horned Lord’s return.

“Did you notice,” Kairos Theodosian said, “that she now seems to have no issue spiriting away the sack of crowns where it cannot be gotten at. Strange, that earlier it had to be carried.”

Of course she had. And the way that the Tyrant’s passing defection – one without consequence, as well – had led to sole change that now both the crowns and the Carrion Lord were in the hands of the Black Queen. How long had she been scheming that, the Saint wondered? Still, the Tyrant was being condescendingly obvious about sowing seeds of enmity. He must think her simple, the little prick.

“Has anyone ever hit you in the mouth hard enough to break teeth?” Laurence asked.

“Alas, my friend, I am but a slave to my nature,” the Tyrant grinned. “So are you, of course. It is why we are being played so masterfully by our delightful leader.”

No leader of mine , the Saint thought, though she knew better than to give the villain what he wanted and voice any of her thoughts.

“I expect I’ll get to kill you before spring arrives,” the Saint casually said. “I’ll admit, you wretched little shit, that I’ll enjoy cutting you down a great deal.”

“Interesting,” the boy mused. “So what is it that the Dead King offered you, to make you so angry?”

“Your head on a pike,” Laurence said, leaning forward to look the boy in the eye. “Insulting, that he’d try to rob me of the pleasure of chopping it off myself.”

“You’re taking all the fun out of this,” the villain complained.

The Saint’s fingers clenched. Too easy. That’d been too easy. She’d made a misstep somewhere, and he was now letting himself ‘lose’ this conversation because he’d already gotten what he wanted. Laurence studied the Tyrant, who studied her in turn with a lazy smile. Should she kill him immediately, just in case? That was where her instincts lay. Scheming villains were like termites, the longer they were left to dig the greater the damages. If she turned on a member of their band of five, loosely as that band was aligned, then there might be consequences greater than physical hostilities. On the other hand, were the consequences greater threat than whatever the boy had planned? Could be feint, she noted, him baiting her so she’d strike and he could finagle the others cutting her loose. She couldn’t be sure Foundling wouldn’t put keeping a close eye on Theodosian above whatever use she might get out of Laurence’s sword arm this close to the finish. On the other hand, the Saint thought, it was too late for the Tyrant to sell them out to the Dead King. Which meant if he was going to screw someone, it was likely to be the one getting closest to their chosen victory. That, reluctant as Laurence was to admit it, was Catherine Foundling.

No, it was not worth making herself the truce-breaker of this story for such an ugly prize. The Saint of Swords would wait, hand on her pommel, and judge when the time came. Above them the first ward broke and the Black Queen yelled for them to catch up.

The Saint and the Tyrant had not moved from their matching stares, but it was Laurence who looked away first.

—

“I had been,” the Grey Pilgrim slowly said, “under the impression your queen disapproved of necromancy.”

Indrani glanced at the old man, putting away the bit that he’d apparently been able to sniff out the nature of the trouble above them through several layers of stones and wards without any difficulty. Might have been the angels, though, she corrected herself. Vivienne had been right, when she’d first said more than a year back that putting a finger on what the Pilgrim could and couldn’t do was complicated even for a Named. His patron Choir made it hard to tell where his own sensory abilities began and the secrets they no doubt shared ended.

“She’d not going to put a few corpse-raisers at the back of a battlefield, no,” Archer snorted. “But she doesn’t ride live horses, Pilgrim. Callowan she might be, but don’t forget who taught her.”

The Praesi fondness for the art was as well-known as their Callowan foes’ strong distaste for it, and both likely sprung form the same source. Indrani had thought for a while that Cat wouldn’t mind an undead legion at all, if having one wouldn’t make half her living soldiers desert without batting an eye. Mind you, Duchess Kegan’s people had been stacking up dead souls for a long time before Akua got around to snatching the whole pile so when it came down to it even Callowans weren’t above getting a little corpse on their hands.

“It is unlikely that I shall,” the Pilgrim replied.

In the light of his, well, Light they’d been making good time through the tunnels. The bloody thing had been built to be swum , unfortunately, not walked. Meaning it was broken ground all around, with shapr ups and downs, and while the Peregrine was spry for a relic he wasn’t going to be leaping around anytime soon. That meant every once in a while the rope came out again and Indrani dragged him up an incline, or slid him down one, though at least he was so light she barely noticed the weight of him. Seriously, he might as well have been made of feathers. Archer glanced at the old man’s pensive expression and snorted. Still anguishing about the way it was the Carrion Lord who’d taught her, was he? He should have been more worried it was Akua she’d first cut her villain teeth on, as far as she was concerned. The Black Knight was sensible kind of savage, most the time. Getting into scraps with Akua Sahelian, though, taught lessons about grinding people into dust so they could never swing at you again. Akua had always been too good at squeaking out of trouble for her own good. Or anyone else’s, for that matter.

“My worries amuse you,” the old man said.

His tone was a tad disappointed, like she’d been unkind to someone’s puppy.

“Sure,” Indrani shrugged. “You’re going about this all wrong, Grey. Digging for stories with me, trying to get a read on where she came from and what she’s after now. Bet you put out little test for her since the lot of you entered this place, too, just to see where she fell on things.”

The old man’s silence sounded, Archer thought, just a little contrite. Caught him out, had she? In all fairness, he wasn’t a bad hand at that game. It was deftly done, just enough give someone not looking for it wouldn’t have noticed the take. But Indrani was pretty sure he was used to coming from the other side: already the darling grandfather, the trusted figure. In a word, the old man was used to being a mentor. That wasn’t a void that’d ever needed much filling with the Woe, though, so any such attempt would only ever feel like trespassing and be all the more glaring for it.

“And you say such an approach would be a mistake,” the Pilgrim carefully said. “It would be considered hostile?”

“More like a waste of time, and probably her a trial on her patience,” Archer absent-mindedly said. “If she notices, which she will, because you’ve tried to kill her a few times so she’s paying attention.”

She recognized this particular stretch of tunnel, as it happened. They were nearly at the end: one last climb up and they’d end up in the tragically empty wine cellar where the trap door had been hidden.

“And what would you suggest instead?” the old man asked, voice sounding a little strangled.

She flicked an impatient glance at him.

“Look, you’re trying to deal with us like we’re skittish fucking horses in need of your reins,” Indrani said. “Throw that to the side, ‘cause that ride ends with your throat cut open. Probably by me, ‘cause let’s face it I’m quicker on the draw than Hakram. You want to know what she wants? Sit across a table with her with a decent bottle and politely ask .”

Archer frowned at him, just to make it clear for once she was being serious.

“And she’ll tell you, Peregrine, because the moment you stop being someone trying to handle us you’re back to being someone she wants to work with,” she said. “Hells, Pilgrim, as far as I can tell mostly she wants things to be slightly less on fire everywhere. That really so devilish a scheme you can’t stomach it?”

“There are other considerations to making a bargain with your queen, Indrani,” the Pilgrim quietly said.

“If your Grand Alliance can’t get its shit together long enough to accept help when the Dead King’s about to eat the whole pie,” Indrani frankly said, “then I don’t get why you’re so keen on it in the first place. Kind of a shipwreck, isn’t it?”

The old hero’s face was unreadable in the dim light of his own making, but this wasn’t really her problem was it? Indrani was called in when there was trouble to be had, not to play the diplomat. Besides, but a few moments later they arrived at the end of the tunnel and what awaited them disturbed the Grey Pilgrim enough the other conversation died on its own.

“Souls,” the Peregrine quietly said, blue peering up as if they could see through the trapdoor. “What awaits there, Archer?”

“A wine cellar, for the first few steps,” Indrani said. “After that, well, you had it right. About a city’s worth of souls, and the man who bound them as his instrument.”

Interlude: Repurpose

“Mastery is meekness, for it is the observation of what we are intended to hold. It is the art of the supplicant. Only through usurpation can understanding be reached, for anything less is servitude.”
– Translation of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness, widely attributed to the young Dead King

Firyal had died screaming, boiling heat washing over her. This she still remembered, sometimes, and in those rare moments of lucidity she knew terror. For while she had once been a mage some skill, the shackles around her soul were like nothing she had ever seen. A trained mind had allowed her to drift out of the dreams, once every few days, long enough to dread the return to that strange slumber where she only saw the life she had lived. Again, and again and again, for some obscure purpose. Perhaps, she had thought, this was one of the Hells. Perhaps she had not looked closely enough at all the bargains she had made, and some devil had gotten the best of her. So Firyal wondered, until she was startled awake by her shackles being ripped away. Freedom tasted sweet, for a moment, before she saw them . Eyes above her, burning and unblinking. As if the sun had been imprisoned in orbs of glass. Unkindly, the eyes peered through the span of her life like a bored scribe skimming a scroll.

“Useless,” a calm voice noted. “Pass in peace.”

The sun in the eyes died and then there was only oblivion.

—

“This is an abomination,” Laurence said. “You know it, Foundling, and would still offer salvation to its architect?”

They’d torn through the last defences surrounding the sanctum like they were parchment, between the Black Queen’s knowledge of their lay and Roland’s knack for taking down wards, but what had awaited them beyond the luxurious quarters and feast halls was an Evil manifest. At Laurence’s feet, like lake water softly lapping at a shore, the translucent and almost shimmering broth of hundreds of thousands of souls was spread out. Above them there was only darkness for a ceiling, whatever foul sorcery was at work here having warped the nature of within into this... sickness. It was silent in here, almost peaceful, and that made the sight of it twice as ghoulish.

“Yes,” the Black Queen said.

She had hesitated, the Saint thought, for barely the fraction of a moment. The loyalty of that was laudable but made a sin against Creation by who it’d been offered to. To safeguard a poisoner against consequence was to share in the guilt of the poisonings that would follow.

“Ah, well they were just Praesi,” the Tyrant of Helike drawled. “It’s not like the Grand Alliance hasn’t been having rousing discussions of their wholesale slaughter anyway.”

The Saint hadn’t known that, not for sure, but then she was not particularly surprised. Tariq’s chomping at the bit for them to head to Salia as soon as this was settled now made a great deal more sense. The boy-villain could be lying, of course, but that didn’t matter nearly as much as whether or not Foundling would believe him. Laurence’s hand casually went down to her sword. There was a pause.

“You’re not even lying, are you?” the Black Queen mused, her tone wry.

She often used amusement to cloak her true thoughts, the Saint had noticed.

“An issue to settle when this is done with,” Foundling sighed. “Pity for Cordelia Hasenbach is not something I particularly enjoy feeling, Kairos.”

Did anyone? Klaus’ niece or not, no one claimed the highest office of the Principate without climbing a mound of corpses. Some justly made, but others? Procer had grown into the kind of beast that would devour the best of intentions and taint them simply by being what it was.

“I cannot assure our safety if we wade into that,” Roland piped up.

His eyes had never left the lake of souls, fascination and revulsion warring within them. Wizards, Laurence unkindly thought. Even the finest of them were only ever one swell of curiosity away from tumbling down a foul slope.

“I’ll be handling that,” Foundling said. “Where there is darkness there is night, and so it stands within my dominion.”

No, not night , Laurence thought. It was ‘Night’ she had said, with a subtle ring of power to the word. Some blasphemous dark mirror to the Light? The Saint had believed the Black Queen’s strange powers to come from a bargain made with lesser gods in the service of Below, but the sacrilege might run deeper than that.

“And where will we be headed?” Saint flatly asked.

“Why, dearest Laurence, that ought to be obvious,” the Tyrant of Helike laughed. “To the throne room, of course.”

No one humoured the madman with further reply. The Black Queen’s staff struck the ground and before it the souls parted. And so , Laurence thought, it begins.

—

Tariq carried light into the dark, as he had sought to do for most his life.

The sliver of it was enough to push back the silvery sea of souls around the two of them, that tragedy happened and happening. The right to Behold the truth of things, that was the gift that had been bestowed upon him many years ago when he found his own base discernment too feeble a thing to rely on, but there were occasions where it was curse as much as boon. This was one, he thought, for not until the Heavens called him to his rest would the Grey Pilgrim forget this sight: an expanse of shivering souls, wounded and crying out from the sudden brutality of their demise. Shackled to Creation and kept in that torment of a half-existence, sorcerous bindings keeping imprisoned in restless slumber. And where someone else might see only the waters, Tariq... Oh, he could see them all. Every weeping child, every terrified innocent lost to a death they had not even been able to understand. For all that, the Grey Pilgrim did not look away. Someone had to see them, to refuse to avert their eyes. And to free them, when the time came, for this would not be tolerated .

“Huh,” Archer said. “So that’s what it looks like when your blood is up.”

“This place is a blight onto Creation, child,” Tariq quietly said. “You are no priestess, but your senses are keen. You must know it as well.”

“He wouldn’t have let it come to this, if he were in his right mind,” she replied. “But that’s what you get, when you push monstrously talented practitioner over the edge. They fall, and either they die or they make wings of whatever’s at hand at the time.”

“The attack on Thalassina is no excuse for this,” the Pilgrim sharply said. “It does not exempt the Hierophant from responsibility for this abomination.”

“You don’t get to make that call,” Archer calmly said. “He’s not for you to judge, crusader. You take a swing at a nest of vicious diabolists, well, you get shit like this. If he crossed a line in defending his home and family then it’s not the enemy that’ll discipline him – it’s Catherine.”

“And if she simply pardons him?” the Peregrine asked.

Hazelnut eyes met his own.

“If you believe that, then your eyesight’s worse than I’d thought.”

The heartbeat of tension that followed was broken by the flapping of great wings. It startled Tariq into looking up, though he could barely glimpse the shape of the large crow in the gloom until it landed on Archer’s extended arm. The pulsing thoughts and feelings of the young woman that’d he’d been able to behold until that moment were suddenly obscured, as if a shadow was being cast over them. The loss was discomforting, he’d admit, though that was a paltry thing compared to the black-winged horror perched on young Indrani’s arm. Even a casual glance into those night-woven feathers was enough for him to hear distant screams. To smell fresh blood being spilled, as if he was standing by an altar where a throat was being opened. The Ophanim breathed into him and the haunting faded, though like a prowling beast it was not gone – merely held at bay.

“You sure?” Archer said, cocking her head to the side.

She winced before she was even finished speaking, and Tariq noted she never looked directly at the crow.

“I always get stuck with the snippy one,” the young woman angrily growled. “Fine, we’ll do it. Away with you, bird.”

The murder made flesh flew above, and Tariq breathed in sharply when he saw its talons had left bloody marks on Archer’s arm. He raised his hand, silently offering healing, but his companion shook her head.

“The Sisters don’t really do nice, but they don’t bleed people without a reason,” she said. “The blood was taken for a reason. Also because I piss them off but Hells at this point it’d a shame to stop.”

She did not lack courage, though the Peregrine found it regrettable she chose not to exercise it on worthier pursuits than recklessly provoking lesser deities born of ritual slaughter.

“And what did the Sisters request?” Tariq asked.

“Masego’s nearing the end of whatever the Dead King using him for,” Archer said. “We can’t afford this slow a pace anymore.”

“We will hurry, then,” Tariq agreed.

Tired as he was, better exhaustion than inaction.

“Ah, you’re not getting my drift,” the young woman said. “Walking the road won’t cut it.”

“Your meaning?” the Grey Pilgrim asked.

“Snuff the light,” the Archer said, “and stay close to me. We follow the crow.”

—

Iblin had been so proud to be called to stand among the ritual even though he was young and not entirely schooled in the proper ways. Yet he had power to spare, and that had been needed most of all, and so among the circles that supported the Lord Warlock he had stood. But then it had... where was he? There’d been a light, a terrible Light, and a voice had Spoken. This was not Thalassina, Iblin realized, this was not Thalassina and – blinding eyes were staring down, releasing a pressure that had been keeping him constrained, and the relief lived only until his soul began suffering examination. Like an insect pinned and open so that the entrails could be looked upon, the last moments of Iblin’s life were studied by that burning glare. He screamed, for it was an intrusion unlike any he had felt before. The presence had been calm, at the start, patient. But twice it looked upon the same moment, when the voice had uttered a word and the circle had lost control of the gathered power, and tried to look at the Warlock from where Iblin had stood but found the angle too stilted. The examination grew rougher, forceful, until the grip suddenly loosed.

“Useless,” a voice impatiently said. “Leave.”

Oblivion fell over Iblin like a blanket.

—

Like children wandering into the woods at night they moved in a line, everyone close enough to the one in front of them to see their back even in the gloom – save for the Black Queen herself, who gazed into the darkness with seeing eyes even where there should be nothing to see. Under their boots the translucent liquid souls turned into solid ground, though only as long as they touched and not an instant more. The Saint had claimed the rearguard, for she would not trust the Tyrant to stand at her back – even if he were truly standing instead of letting himself be carried by his ugly creations. She’d kept an eye on him in case he warmed to the notion of striking at the Rogue Sorcerer’s back, whose earlier spoken sympathies had apparently convinced the Black Queen to place behind her. If this was a ploy, Laurence thought, it appeared to be working.

“Catherine,” the Tyrant of Helike said, “I’ve a query, if you would.”

“Do you?” the Black Queen replied. “Imagine that.”

Laurence noted that their pace quickened at that, limp or not.

“We are being guided by one of your crows, are we not?” Kairos Theodosian mused. “I can almost hear the beat of the wings.”

The Saint could not, though she’d felt there was an air of carrion to this abominable place from the start. She’d presumed it to be either the souls of the dead or Foundling’s own powers, though, not the presence of some old monster.

“I don’t have crows,” the Black Queen mildly replied.

She’d not outright denied having a guide, and the Tyrant hacked out a wet laugh.

“And are you not worried, my dear friend, that so wantonly parading pieces of a godhead around the Hidden Horror will have... intriguing outcome?”

“If he wants to catch Sve Noc in the dark,” Foundling said, “I can only wish him good luck.”

“I thought you might say that,” Kairos Theodosian said. “Which is why-”

In a single continuous movement, gathering the power of her Choosing to refine her strength and swiftness, the Saint of Swords unsheathed her blade and thrust it through the back of the Tyrant’s throne at the height where his heart would be. Always tempting to go for the neck, with villains, but while clever Damned often had artefacts meant to protect such a weakness they rarely bothered with more than a single layer of enchanted armour over their chest. The blow went straight through the stone and metal, but it was no flesh that was torn through afterwards. Lips thinning with displeasure, Laurence withdrew her blade and let whatever illusion had been laid over the gargoyle shatter.

“Betrayal,” the Tyrant called out through the mouth of another gargoyle. “Betrayal most foul!”

The Black Queen turned to gaze upon the mess and Saint took a careful step back. If the confrontation began here, then-

“I really wish you hadn’t done that,” Catherine Foundling said.

“He was about to turn on us,” Laurence flatly replied.

“Yes,” she agreed without missing a beat. “But now we turned on him first, and that means-”

Light bloomed in the sky above them, chasing the shadows, and wreathed in a halo the Tyrant appeared – carried by a swarm of chittering gargoyles, seated on what appeared to a measurably gaudier specimen of the throne he’d previously sat on.

“- so viciously scorned, I am left no repose but to meet you all in open and honourable battle,” Kairos Theodosian cheerfully announced.

“Komena,” the Black Queen murmured in that foreign tongue of hers, “sate.”

This time Laurence did feel the devil, or rather her absence – a weight there had been in the air vanished, even as light spread further around the Tyrant of Helike and he revealed what appeared to be a... sword? Saint opened her mouth, but Foundling suddenly extended her staff out in front of her with a glare.

“Do not,” she hissed, “accept that beginning.”

“What say you, blackguards – if you’ll forgive my language – and reprobates?” the Tyrant shouted, openly gleeful. “Will you meet my challenge?”

The Black Queen rolled her shoulder, as if to limber it, and glanced at the rest of them.

“Head for the throne room,” Catherine Foundling said. “I’m the only one who can handle what he’s about to use, which I suppose is rather the point.”

“How will we know the way?” Roland asked.

Foundling pointed at the Tyrant, or rather the light wreathing him.

“You’ll be able to see it soon enough,” she said. “Get moving. You don’t want to be caught in the middle of that.”

Laurence’s lips thinned.

“The sword,” she said. “What is it?”

“In a word?” Catherine Foundling grimaced. “Hierarchy.”

—

“Well,” Archer said, “that’s not good.”

Tariq gaze upon the light rising in the distance, chasing away the shadows, and knew that once upon a time the stuff of it had been Light. It had been... twisted, after, but the nature of it was not hidden form his eye. The Ophanim murmured in his ear, angry at the perversion but also worried . This was a weapon, and a dire one.

“The Tyrant of Helike has betrayed them,” Tariq grimly said.

“Cat said he’d planned to steal this entire place,” the young woman said. “I guess he’s settled for making a grab at the souls instead.”

“And this does not worry you?” the Pilgrim asked.

“We’re nearly there,” the Archer shrugged. “Although we’re going to lose our guide soon, I suppose. Out in the open in Hierophant’s seat of power she’d be meat on the plate.”

“That Kairos Theodosian could claim such a great bounty of souls,” Tariq clarified.

“Cat’s there,” his companion replied, eyebrow rising.

As if that settled the matter, as if the Black Queen was a talisman of victory. If it had been blind loyalty or even love, the Grey Pilgrim would not have found it half as unsettling. But it was trust, simple and deep. The kind he had never once seen one of Below’s champions so easily extend to another. The Woe defied easy description, in both what had brought them together and what had since bound them.

“Then let us proceed,” the Pilgrim said, tucking away his thoughts.

They moved swiftly, pace racing against the distant blooming of the Tyrant’s light. And the found their mark, moments before the first rays chased away the lesser god that had been their guide and helper both. The Pilgrim and the Archer stood before a flight of tall stairs, roughly hewn and leading to gates of bronze slightly cracked open. Sorcery pulsed like a living thing, hear, a great heartbeat, and the wisps of it were visible in the air. Upwards they hurried and slipped through the opening and into the Hierophant’s last sanctum.

—

Precision.

It had always been about precision, Hierophant dimly remembered, even before this had begun. It was the fundamental failure of humankind, the inexactitude of what it could perceive in a world that was the most finely tuned construct in existence. And so they all puttered about, sometimes blindly feeling out a segment of the greater whole and daring to call it a theory of magic. And Hierophant had been blind as well, was blind still, but in his restlessness he had found what he craved the most: sometimes, just sometimes, he could see it all. Witness it in full. And so the impossible simply became improbable, and now he must fit all the pieces together. Perfectly, or it would be worse than doing nothing at all. There had been a need for tools, and so tools he had gathered.

The souls of Thalassina, the fuel of his work.

Broken Liesse, the foundry from which he would cast salvation.

The Observatory, eyes for where his eyes could not reach.

The secrets of Trismegistus had been of great use in leashing the souls and keeping them at hand, in shattering what he needed of Arcadia and making of it what was required. Souls alone were not enough, no, they were not. And so he had ruined the realm, and from ruin gained mastery – aspect pulsing, breathing, pulsing. It was... unpleasant. His body ached, and so he had withdrawn from it. There were simply too many distractions and the work could not brook those. It needed to be perfect. But it was not, even through the Observatory. He filled the sky to see, to find the shards and reflections of deepest Arcadia, but it was not enough. Muddled, the shards were , inexact . Papa could not be made anew from that. And then it came to him, the understanding. He had the souls, those who had been there in the last moments of it all. He could see through their eyes, and where their own were imprecise bits of flesh his eyes would not fail. Only there were so many, many souls. And who else could he trust with this? No one.

His mind drifted sometimes, moments were lost, but that was as close as Hierophant would suffer to sleep.

The souls did not get him what he needed. Glimpses, yes, but incomplete. Not even his aspect could bridge so broad a gap. But ah, he was not done. Like jigsaw puzzles, those toys someone he could not recall had loved, he took the glimpses and put them together. Fit them until it could all be seen, and then again . All eyes that could be found, for anything less would mean imperfection. Yet distractions came knocking at his door. Vermin wandering through the ruin, armies and travellers. Named, even, that resisted the storms he redirected towards them. Entities, sometimes, and those he spared thought to catching – there was always a need for fuel, for the foundry was ever hungry – but they were slippery things and skilled at hiding in the shadows. Distractions, distractions he could not afford. The essence he extracted from the Hells had bleed and using old arrays he bound devils with it to put in the way of the vermin. No further thought was given than that, for Liesse was high up and defended. But now, now, there was assault. Things crawling in the dark, Named everywhere and even contamination .

Someone was trying to take souls, to rule them through law and faith, and when Hierophant had tried to swat them out of existence he had found the laws resisted him. They disallowed his interference and sunk further into the sea of souls, poison in the well. One of the entities was trying to contain this – and was this not a familiar presence?

No. We cannot afford distractions.

Hierophant had to hurry, yes. Containment would fail, contamination would spread, and it would all be made inexact. The pieces were together, though there would be more. If he kept looking, it would be perfect. As he needed it to be.

It is already perfect. We must hurry, they are trying to break it.

Vermin, vermin everywhere. Yes, it needed to be now. Before it was soiled. It all fell together, dozens and dozens of glimpses he had painstakingly gathered, and when they were all fitted Hierophant breathed out.

“ Witness ,” he whispered.

It rang out, went out, and then it was caught .

“Yes,” the Dead King whispered fondly into his ear, “now show me what it is that she’s planning. Show me what the Intercessor seeks, Hierophant.”

Miraculous

“Courage is what’s left when the rest is gone.”
– Albrecht Papenheim, the Lone Sentinel

Captain Fredda squared her shoulders as she strode up the stairs leading to the summit of the Westenhaupt, her cloak tightly clasped at the neck over her grandfather’s mail. She was glad for the way the cloth over her lower face hid her mouth, lest the soldiers she had been placed in command of see her biting at her lip. Though the responsibilities of command were fresh to her, and she young for them, they were not the source of her worries. She could handle leading a company, on the wall or off it. No, it was the ringing bells that were summoning her to the top of the ramparts that had her uneasy. Her soldiers should have been given six hours of rest in the depths of the Westenhaupt, where no dead could get to them and not even the constant pounding of the Enemy’s mages could keep them wake, yet they’d only had four before being called back to the rampart. Father, who had been a well-known captain back home for all that he’d insisted he was a terrible innkeeper when she’d been a child, had always told her that you could tell a siege was going bad when they sent tired soldiers back into the fray. Her father who might be dead, for there were rumours going around about Hocheben Heights... No, she could not let fear win. It might be, Fredda told herself, that was seeing ratlings instead of hares. But it also might be that her father had been right, instead, and that the Morgentor was on the eve of falling.

Morgentor – Morning’s Gate, the last fortress barring the way out of Twilight’s Pass. The last fortress the armies of the north still held in the face of the Enemy, for inch by inch they had lost the grounds. We’ll hold, Fredda chided herself. The Morgentor hasn’t fallen since the founding of Procer. Had her mother not been a scribe, the fair-haired captain might not have known that the last time the fortress had fallen was the last time the Hidden Horror had invaded the north. As it was, the fond learning of her childhood was the dread of her later years.

“Blades out,” Fredda howled, glancing back at the soldiers following her. “They don’t ring the bells to make it lively.”

“Where else are we supposed to earn a tune, captain?” one of her soldiers yelled back.

“Certainly not your singing, Hannah, or the Dead King would run back to Keter in fright,” Fredda called out, and the lot of them hit the rampart to the sound of hard laughter.

The dead had forced a foothold, damn them all and Keter twice. A wyrm’s great fangs had sunk into the crenellation and the gargantuan dead serpent’s open maw was now spewing out an endless stream of enemy soldiers. Westenhaupt, the westernmost of the Three Peaks, was held by the soldiers of Neustria with reinforcements from those hard Hannoven bastards when the going got rough. There was no lack of soldiers, but Princess Mathilda Greensteel was fighting the dead in Hainaut so the Neustrians had few of the old blood to rally around. It didn’t help, that the finest soldiers and officers had gone south. But they’d earn the fucking keep, and if the Morgentor was to fall it would not be through their peak.

“Shield wall,” Captain Fredda screamed, raising her own.

Her company fell around her and they advanced briskly into the melee, smashing into the side of the dead. The fair-haired captain hacked down with her axe, tearing through dead flesh and smashing old bones, and as she howled her soldiers howled with her. Inch by inch they forced back the dead, until the melee was so tightly packed there was no room for the enemy trying to climb out.

“Where are the godsdamned burners?” Captain Fredda screamed. “Get that fucking wyrm off my wall.”

Before everyone here dies , she didn’t say. Were they out of pitch, she wondered for a horrible moment? It couldn’t be, how else were they to get ride of abominations like the wyrms? But then screams of Papenheim, Papenheim , and yet we stand sounded and flames spread across the dead serpent’s flesh. If custom hold, it would retreat now – the Enemy only had so many of those undead moving siege towers, and could not afford to lose them.

Instead, the head of the soldier to Fredda’s side disappeared into red mist. Fuck , the flaxen-haired captain thought.

“Chosen,” she yelled. “Torch the stretch.”

It’d kill her and half her company, but if one of the enemy’s undead heroes was allowed to linger up here they were all done for. She’s seen one shred near two hundred Hannoven heavies three nights back before it was thrown down the wall. The Enemy’s champion was a half-naked man, a mass of hard muscle wearing little but trousers and scarring, and even though she raised her shied her smashed through it effortlessly and grabbed her by the throat.

“ Audace ,” someone screamed in Chantant, and the lance caught the Chosen in the throat.

Falling to the floor, Fredda wondered if she was dreaming. There wasn’t a man or woman in the army who didn’t know who Prince Frederic Goethal was – the sole southerner prince to bring his army to fight for the Pass – but the fluttering hundreds of horsemen in red and blue silk couldn’t possibly be here, could they? They held the Ostenhaupt, the tower on the other side of the Three Peaks. The dead Chosen vaulted up, even with his neck torn through, and after punching right through the head of the horseman who’d ridden him down he was run through by another three lances in quick succession, pushing him further back. Until the last had him dangling over the edge of the ramparts, and a ridiculously ostentatious man with long curls held by ribbons laughed out loud.

“Enjoy the drop, yes?” Prince Frederic Goethal said, and with his sword hacked through the lance holding up the Damned.

Captain Fredda had risen to her feet, by then and gotten her shield wall back in order. The wyrm’s fangs left stone soon enough, and it slithered back down the four hundred feet it had extended to serve as a siege tower. With the Westenhaupt secured and no other captain coming forward to do so in her place, Fredda ambled forward to speak with the Prince of Brus herself. He was still atop his mount, though someone appeared to have handed him a fine glass of brandy since she’d last looked.

“Your Grace,” she greeted him, and the respect was not feigned.

How could it be, when the Kingfisher Prince and his army had bled for every fortress from Volsaga to Morgentor? This would be remembered. There were Alamans, in the end, and there were Alamans . The man might look a fool, in silk and ribbons, but he was a fool who’d ridden down a sheer cliff to slay an undead dragon. Even the bitterest of Hannoven exiles had to approve of that.

“Captain Fredda, yes?” the Prince of Brus smiled.

The fair-haired captain was glad the cloth still hid her face, for if she’d been caught blushing by any of her soldiers she’d have heard about it until Last Dusk.

“Aye,” she gruffly said. “I thank you for your help, it was a close thing.”

“It was you Neustrians who sortied at Graueletter to pull us out of that mess with the beorns,” the Prince of Brus replied. “An even scale requires no thanks, captain. This was due .”

None of this is due, she almost said. You could be safe south, but instead you’re here dying with the rest of us. But she’d been raised better than to insult sacrifice when it was so gallantly given, and so she kept her mouth shut.

“Then I look forward to returning the favour,” she simply said.

The prince smiled ruefully.

“I expect you’ll get the occasion before long,” he said. “The Enemy seems rather impatient of late.”

Fredda almost didn’t ask, for it was overstepping, but when else would she get such an occasion?

“Your Grace,” she hesitantly said. “I have heard that the Hocheben Heights have fallen. Is it true?”

The Alamans gazed at her steadily.

“Why do you ask?” he said.

“My father held command at Emil’s Displeasure,” she admitted. “And I know that letters are no longer carried, but it has been weeks since I’ve heard from him.”

Something like grief passed through the Prince of Brus’ eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he quietly said. “They held until dawn and got word to Tauenberg in time.”

Fredda’s throat choked. Then Father was...

“Thank you,” she croaked out.

Her fists clenched. The Morgentor would hold, damn them all and Keter twice. Her father had died for it, and if that was what it took she fucking would too.

—

Otto Redcrown, Prince of Bremen by virtue of having been spared by death longer than the rest of his kin, stared down at ink on parchment and saw writ there the death of his people. It might take, he thought, a year. Two, perhaps, if the Enemy spent months thoroughly razing the lowlands of Bremen and Neustria rather than forcing the Rhenian Gates. Yet the moment the fortress around him fell, and Twilight’s Pass with it, the last doom of the Lycaonese had come. They’d lost Hocheben Heights, last month, and the Dead King had since begun to march hordes through the plateau. The fortress at Tauenberg would slow them down a few weeks, he thought, for but after that the dead would have no wall or host hindering their advance into the heartlands of the principality his father and sisters had entrusted to his unworthy hands. Within the month they would be at the gates of the city of Bremen itself, which was in no state to withstand a siege: it was packed with children and the elderly, all those that could or would not fight. Already the roads south had been cleared and all were being sent further south into Neustria, but once the dead had their foothold in Bremen they would begin raiding the refugee caravans and the noose would begin to tighten. The Dead King had moved too swiftly for them, Otto Reitzenberg thought, his armies little quicker on the march than those of the living but ceaseless and tireless in that advance.

Now only a single fortress of Twilight’s Pass remained in the hands of his people: the ancient Morning’s Gate, the last holdfast standing against the march of doom. And if it fell... Oh, Otto understood the stratagem of the Hidden Horror well. It was writ plain in the lay of the map: the last armies of the Lycaonese would be driven from the Morgentor and find in their retreat that the Dead King’s armies were already waiting to the south of them. Supplies would end, the wagon-chains of grain and steel, and even should force of arms fail to end his armies hunger and winter cold would slay his soldiers by the score until none were left. The war was lost, though he could not admit it to the captains looking to him for orders. He must now see to preserving as much of his people as he could, sending them further south into Alamans lands so that a generation from now the war could be taken back to the Dead King and their ancestral holdings reclaimed. Neustria too would fall, of that there could be no question, but further south where the borders of Brus and Lyonis ran close it might be that Lake Pavin and the marshlands of northern Brus could serve as a new line of defence. They were Alamans holdings, as well, and would have many kin to call to their aid when the dead arrived. It might be enough for a time, ff anything could ever be enough when facing the Hidden Horror.

The sharp rap of a knuckle against wood was the sole warning Otto received before his sworn swords let in the man he’d asked for. Prince Frederic Goethal of Brus was still impeccable dressed and groomed even after two weeks of gruelling fighting on the walls and the plains, his ostentatious blond ringlets kept with ribbons made from cloth he’d taken from banners of the Dead King. The Kingfishers, as the prince’s retinue of horsemen had been fondly named by their Lycaonese comrades, had taken to taking the Hidden Horror’s banners at every opportunity so they might have a courtly game of the most insulting use one could make of it.

“Reitzenberg,” the other prince cheerfully greeted him. “Back staring at the maps, I see. Good, I’ve been itching for us to try a sortie.”

“That is what I would ask you to consider, in a manner of speaking,” Otto acknowledged.

The blond man seemed pleased.

“If you’d lend me some of the Hannoven riders, I do believe we could catch their camp near the mountain rivers unaware,” Prince Frederic said. “The waters are already poisoned, I daresay, but we’ll have better luck there than trying the Abomination’s frontlines. Last watch insists they brought in fresh Damned and another pair of wyrms.”

The Chosen dead and raised in the service of the Enemy had been leading the waves trying the walls for days now, though smashing through the ladders before they finished climbing was enough to keep most of them at bay. The wyrms were darker news, for the great serpents the Hidden Horror had crafted from corpses were worse than simple monsters: they were as undead siege towers, their insides made ladders so that the dead could climb up through them after the wyrms sunk their fangs into stone deep enough nothing could move them. Pitch fires were enough to set them to retreat, sometimes, but supplies were running low and more wyrms meant further thinning of them. They might have even less time than he’d hoped before the walls fell.

“I would have you ride in another direction,” the Prince of Bremen said. “Now, before it is too late. Take forty thousand with you, and all our horse. Delay the enemy near Tauenberg, if you can, but you must take everyone you can south.”

“Otto,” the other prince said.

“It is ill-done of me to ask after the sacrifices you have made,” the Prince of Bremen admitted, “but if you could let them into Brus, all who can will fight in its defence. If oaths must be made to you in place of the old crowns, then they will be. I have seen to it.”

“ Otto ,” Prince Frederic sharply said.

“I’ll hold as long as I can,” he promised. “And send word to the Rhenians to march everything they can through the Gates to slow the Enemy’s march south. A month, at least, I can promise. Beyond that-”

“If you speak another word of this foolishness, Gods forgive me but we may have to duel,” Frederic Goethal flatly said.

“We’re going to die, Frederic,” Otto Redcrown quietly said. “There’s too many of them and even the Morgentor cannot hold forever. Thrice in two days did we come within a hair’s breadth of losing one of the Three Peaks, and the moment we do our annihilation has begin. Go while you still can and take the seed of my people with you, so that one day the Lycaonese may return north.”

“Of course we’re going to die, Otto,” the other man replied, tone gentle. “This is no surprise to me. My cousin Henriette has already been confirmed as my successor and I’ve tasked her with preparing our lands. What remains of the Goethal army will advance north into the marshlands to raise forts and escort your people to safety.”

“It won’t be enough,” the Prince of Bremen said. “You are held in respect, Frederic, in a manner that will not extend to your cousin. A prince needs to lead the last of us.”

“Then go,” Prince Frederic languidly shrugged. “You, too, have been crowned.”

“I am the last of the House of Reitzenberg,” Otto Redcrown said, in a tone that brooked no argument. “So long as one of us breathes, dawn will hold.”

Of that matter there was nothing more to say, for Twilight’s Pass would be his grave as it had been that of greater men.

“I do not begrudge you that pride, my friend,” Frederic Goethal said. “Do not begrudge me the same.”

It was not the same, Otto thought. It was not the same, but he did not know the right words to speak and he would fail in this has he had been failing since the moment Elsa had pressed her bloody crown into his hand and breathed her last. Yet before he could say anything more, the door was roughly banged against.

“Your Graces! The enemy stirs!”

The two princes traded a glance, and wordless agreed to set aside the matter for now. If there was to be another assault on the walls there were more pressing concerns to attend to. Neither of them left their arms or armour save when they slept, these days, though attendants brought helmets to them as well as reports as they both made for the ramparts. The Morgentor had first been raised in the days of the Iron Kings, after the third time Hannoven fell and a ratling warband swelled into horde swarmed down Twilight’s Pass looking for yet more to devour. The Rhenian Gates had held, as they always did, so with the way north into Rhenia barred the ratlings had ended up heading south towards Bremen like a tide of vermin. The battle for the lower mouth of Twilight’s Pass was great victory, but a costly one. When one of the Krauff – who had ruled over Bremen, in those days, predecessors to the Reitzenberg – was elected Iron King in the years that followed, he ordered the raising of the Morgentor to ensure when the Chain of Hunger next broke through there would be walls awaiting them. In the centuries that’d followed, every great against the Dead and the Plague had seen it built into a greater holdfast. There was no greater fortress in the north, it was said, save for the cities of Hannoven and Rhenia themselves. That was no idle boast, Otto know, for otherwise he would not have been able to hold at bay the more five hundred thousand dead the Hidden Horror sent against the walls day and night.

The Three Peaks had begun as the two great towers leaning against the sides of the pass, the third one originally raised as a simple bastion before centuries of additions turned it into a massive mountain of granite masonry. The walls between the three towers rose higher and thicker with the passing years, until it seemed like peaks made by the hands of mortals had filled the mouth of Twilight’s Pass. The great gates that allowed armies and merchants to pass through were layers upon layers of enchanted steel, raised in times of peace but now fully closed since all to the north had been lost. Tunnels dug into the mountainside allowed for sorties from hidden places, though each had been built to it could be collapsed on the enemy if they found it. Otto himself had been commanding from the central peak, which was held mostly by Bremen soldiery. Prince Frederic’s army held the eastern peak, while the Neustrians held the western one and the Hannoven exiles served as reserve and reinforcements for all. It was at the heart of the middle peak that Otto had set his quarters, and it would be swifter for the Prince of Brus to rise to the top of the tower and head east from there than to descend all the way down before doing the same – as such, it was together that they reached the summit of the Herzhaupt and came to gaze down at the Dead King’s sea of dead.

“That is not an assault, unless I am gravely mistaken,” Prince Frederic said, frowning.

Otto did not disagree. The armies of the dead had made their camp further north, among the ruins of Graueletter, where their sorcerers were less vulnerable to sorties. Not without reason. The Lycaonese had proved more than willing to trade dozens of lives, if not entire companies, for the destruction of corpse-mages since the beginning of this war. It was known from ancient lore that the Dead King could not easily replace these, and that many of his foulest rituals required their presence. The Prince of Bremen had been forced to halt the practice of late, as he could no longer afford such losses no matter the prize, but the dead had remained cautious anyway. Close to the Morgentor they had only raised forts and filled them with tireless watchers: the river poured forth only when the ramparts were tried, be that day or night. What had at first been constant bruising assaults – some of them having lasted more than a day and night in length – had since slowed in frequency, though none wise would believe that to be good omen. Yet for all that the armies of the dead had come out of the ruins to the north, none of them had advanced further than the outer forts. Among the seemingly endless ranks of corpses garbed in ancient armour, there lay greater abominations.

The wyrms, foul serpents that were monster and siege tower both. The beorns, bear-like monsters that served as the first wave of assault by climbing the ramparts and spewing out a company’s worth of dead to aid their own rampage while ladders and wyrms advanced. Flocks of long-dead drakes circled above, waiting to spew their clouds of poison and acid. And among the lesser soldiers, ready to lead the dead hordes that would attempt to land their iron ladders on the ramparts, Chosen slain and raised into damnation stood still as statues. More than a dozen times now had Otto driven back that host when it tried to take the Morgentor, yet gazing upon it still sent a shiver up his spine every time. It was an army, he’d thought, raised to be the end of Calernia. And ahead of those dark ranks, a company of riders had approached under ancient banner: a circle of silver stars around a pale crown, the Hidden Horror’s own heraldry. The riders bared their blades and raised them blades in salute, high and shining in the morning sun.

And then they left, and the army went with them. Not a word had been spoken, from beginning to end.

“What is this?” Prince Fredric softly asked.

“A miracle, my friend,” Prince Otto replied in a hushed whisper. “Gods save us all, it is a miracle.”

The dead withdrew all the way back to Graueletter and for three months took not a single step forward.

Interlude: Reckoning

“Fate is not a bridle; it is an arrow in flight. No hand but your own can loose it, yet once loosed there can be no desisting from the path.”
– Dread Empress Maleficent the First

Masego awoke from his dream to a firm hand on his shoulder. The touch was unpleasant, as most touches tended to be, but not so distasteful as to stir him to action when he was so... tired . He’d said something, hadn’t he? Just now. And it’d been important. Yet he could not quite recall, and there were other matters to have his mind aflutter. Masego could feel sights flicker just beyond the reach of his eyes, as if stolen before they ever became his.

“I would have preferred,” a measured voice said, “to use means that preserved your gifts. For that I apologize, Hierophant. You are a rare talent and so this stands a great waste.”

Masego had heard that voice before. Months, years ago. It was not to be trusted. It belonged to an enemy. He tried to extend his will, to claw back the sights that had been taken from him, but it was... difficult. He saw a garden and a pale woman in a dress. He saw a man with a silver coin, spinning and spinning until it dropped. He saw a crowned corpse, a grinning skull – and his will was firmly set aside, like a child whose wrist had been slapped. He struggled against it, but only weakly and ceased when the futility of the act became clear.

“It is necessary, however. If we’d had more time,” the voice said, “it could have been done more cleanly. Yet your mistress forced my hand in this, however kind her intentions. So did that amusing child, though from him I would not presume kindness of any sort.”

Masego had no eyes to blink open blearily, but the glinting lights of Summer’s noon came alight once more. There were arrays around him, in the dozens, that he could not remember making. He wanted to study them more closely but it was difficult to concentrate. He felt exhausted and it was only worsening. Like a barrel draining out. There were other circles of rune he remembered carving himself, the necessities of bringing back his father, but they were skillfully intertwined with the stranger’s work. Someone, he realized, had usurped his work. Wormed runes into his arrays and so repurposed them for a ritual that was almost a manner of scrying, though unlike any he’d ever seen. Still, it was all derivative. There should be something at the heart of it all, empowering and empowered.

Gods, he was so tired.

“Steady now, Hierophant,” the Dead King murmured. “Divination is delicate sorcery at the best of times, and we seek to unmask the greatest liar these lands have ever known. It is too early in our shared journey to falter.”

The hand pulled him up from the slump he’d not known he was falling into, its grip now tight enough it hurt, the sights he was still denied began to flicker even more swiftly.

—

“We are too late,” the Grey Pilgrim sadly said.

There had been no missing the colossal pulse of power that’d shivered outwards and through them even as they stepped into the sanctum. Tariq had been given pause by what awaited inside, for never before had he seen such works of magic: it was as if every surface of the great pillared hall within had been covered with runes. They had been artfully carved, no mere circles but instead almost a great mural: waves crested and broke, carved into stone, and spun into forests and peaks. The sight of it was oddly beautiful, like a painting made a hundred thousand little brushstrokes, but like rivers returning to the sea all the patterns of runes coursed back to the throne at the centre of the room. On it, a sickly thin man in dark robes was seated, sightlessly looking up at the ceiling through a tattered black eyecloth. The Hierophant, though he looked more than half dead and great strokes of manifest sorcery whirled around him like a storm.

“He’s still breathing,” Archer flatly replied. “Careful what you step on, Pilgrim. Follow my path.”

Tariq felt a swell of grief, for he beheld the young woman’s anticipation of what might yet come and it was like a flinch of the heart. The first time, he well-knew, was always the worst. And no amount of years or seasoning could ever truly prepare you for it.

“He is being used by the Hidden Horror for a ritual, Indrani,” he softly replied. “Even should he survive, there will be little of him left.”

“You don’t know that,” she sharply said.

“I know we cannot let that ritual run its course,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

“If we interrupt it could-” she began.

Like quicksilver, without the slightest hint of warning, the Archer had two bared blades against Tariq’s throat. He’d not even had time to blink. The cool touch of steel against skin would have been relief, after the exertions of the day, if not for the slight bite of the very sharp knives.

“You won’t cleaning up any loose ends under cover of good intention, Pilgrim,” the Archer mildly said.

“I did not intend to,” Tariq said.

She looked at him searchingly.

“Might be that’s true,” she murmured. “Might be it’s not, or just that it won’t matter. The Lady said there’s only one way to deal with your breed, so I’ll speak plain now. Just between you and me.”

She leaned forward.

“You kill him, Peregrine, and I’ll make whatever ten corpses I need to make the Grand Alliance eat itself alive,” Archer said. “You might think Cat will keep me in line, or the war on Keter, or half a hundred different other practical little worries for practical little minds. But look into my soul, Tariq. When I tell you not a single fucking thing will stay my hand, am I lying ?”

The Pilgrim looked and beheld the truth of it.

“No,” he quietly said. “You are not.”

The blades left his throat, and a few spins later they were sheathed and put away.

“Glad we have an understanding, Peregrine,” the young woman smiled. “Now let’s find a way to wake him without hurting him.”

—

“There’s something out there,” Laurence said.

The dark of this abominable place had been chased away by the glow of the Tyrant’s own blasphemy, which brought to mind more than a few passages from the Book about Evil clawing at Evil. Not that the Book of All Things was all that reliable a guide, when it came down to it. Whoever had penned the old thing seemed under the impression that Chosen were naturally prone to holding hands and tearfully joining righteous cause, in contrast to the spirited backbiting of the Damned. Presumably they’d never witnessed two Chosen with different intentions existing in each other’s presence, much less two of Above’s servants coming from different parts of Calernia. Without someone like Tariq to keep the peace or someone bearing a clear mandate to unite behind like the White Knight, you might as well be throwing a whole bag’s worth of angry wet cats in a half a bag. Laurence caught the drift of her thoughts and killed it quick as he could. The mind tended to wander when one tired, and she’d not been this exhausted in a very long time.

“The Hierophant, presumably,” Roland delicately said. “Or our more discreet comrades.”

He was looking at her like she was old, which was fair. She was. He was also looking at her like she was doddering, though, a dowager seeing monsters in shadows, and for that almost slapped him across the face. Her fingers itched with the impulse, though she pushed it down.

“There are other things out there,” the Saint sharply replied. “And they are looking at us. Prepare for trouble, Sorcerer.”

The weight of the attention placed on them did not waver even after she revealed her knowledge of it. It might be that the watchers were not hostile, she acknowledged. It might also be that they were either powerful or ignorant enough to be unmoved at the prospect of two heroes’ wroth. Whatever the truth, they would not learn it by hesitation or idleness. Taking the lead, Laurence quickened her steps as they approached the final stretch separating them from the shadowed silhouette of the throne room. The Saint bared her sword, for anything that would be offended by such a gesture already meant to be a foe. Sharp eyes picked out the watchers, and what Laurence found did not please her. There were dozens, though each stood alone as some sort of sinister of honour guard around the the Hierophant’s prison-sanctum. Only one was seated, halfway up the steps leading to the gates. It was in the shape of a man, though its hair was too unnaturally dark and its lips too unsettlingly red to truly be one. It was like looking at a story made flesh, Laurence thought. Raven-haired and red like blood, something pretending it was made of flesh with a mocking smile and one eye covered by pretty dark silk cloth. On its lap there was a sword, and the thing was sharpening it patiently with a whetstone. One languid stroke at a time, the sound of it a rasp in the strange silence of this place.

Laurence knew a thing or two of swords, and that one had no need for sharpening at all.

“I bid you welcome, Chosen,” the thing said. “You are awaited.”

The Saint spat to the side.

“Been skulking about, have you?” she said. “And turned out about as useful as a wings on a trout.”

“Saint,” Roland softly hissed, having caught up to her. “We greet you in peace, Huntsman.”

The old thing glanced at the boy approvingly.

“Your kind were a mannerly people, once upon a time,” it said. “It is pleasing to know some of those ways remain. In the manner you have greeted me you may leave, to seek your fate beyond me.”

“My thanks,” the Rogue Sorcerer said.

“What’s inside?” Laurence asked, meeting the faerie’s eye.

She glimpsed something like darkness in there, hungry and old, but she bared her teeth and it found no purchase in her soul. The Saint spat to the side again.

“I asked you a question, scavenger,” she said.

“The king of pins,” the faerie laughed. “I see you, cutter. Wounding and wounded, a rag in pale grasp. How much filth can you swallow before the stains no longer wash?”

Laurence snorted.

“I’ve had more ominous from street soothsayers,” she replied. “If you want to earn a copper at least toss around a few fumes and powders.”

Ignoring the creature’s open displeasure she strode forward, making sure her tabard flapped in its face as she passed it. Roland hurried at her side after making apologies to the thing, but he was only a step behind when Laurence passed through the cracked-open bronze gates.

—

“It’s killing him, isn’t it?” Indrani quietly said.

The old man sucked in a breath, but after a moment shook his head.

“I expect he’ll remain alive,” the Pilgrim said. “Though there will little left of him save a broken mind in ruin of flesh.”

It was difficult to look at him. Masego had thinned, back when he’d first gotten into the Observatory and entranced himself with his own work, but out on campaign afterwards he’d reclaimed back some of the weight. Enough it didn’t look like he was being starved, anyway, though he’d been nothing like the plump man Indrani had first met years ago. Now that was lost, for he was little more than skin on bones with wildly overgrown dreadlocks. He must have eaten on occasion – mage or not he’d be dead by now otherwise – but not often, and he’d likely cheated hunger with spells. His sickly frame would have been bad enough by itself, but there was a river of sorcery coursing through him that was burning his body from the inside. Whatever it was the Dead King was doing, it was not gentle to her... to Masego.

“You need to get me through,” Indrani said. “If I could reach him-”

“We’ve tried, Archer,” the Pilgrim said, pointedly looking at her arm.

It’s just flesh , Indrani angrily thought. The swirls of pure and lingering magic around Hierophant did not immediately breaking through a coating of Light, but it was a near thing. Indrani had tried to speed through anyway, though she’d had to pull back. If she’d stayed any longer she might have lost the entire arm, but as it was all she’d lost was some flesh. You couldn’t even see bone, it was basically a scratch.

“So we try again,” she replied. “Slap some more Light onto me, and I’ll take a running leap.”

“You’ll lose more than a part of your arm,” the old man calmly said.

“Yeah, so I was thinking,” Indrani mused. “Keeping up the protection won’t work, we saw that, but what if the moment it break you just start healing me instead?”

As long as she didn’t lose anything essential, then it didn’t matter in what state she arrived on the other side. Immediately around Zeze was safe, she’d Seen it and the Pilgrim agreed. It was just the outer shell that she needed to get through.

“You may very well die regardless,” the Pilgrim bluntly said. “Neither of us has the means to breach this... defence without risking the Hierophant’s life. I know it runs contrary to your nature, but it would be best if we waited for-”

“We might not have that long,” Indrani interrupted in frustration. “It could be moments or hours, and there’s no way to know.”

Though the strange whistle of spinning sorcery almost covered it, she still heard the footsteps. She already had a longknife in hand when she came to face the fresh arrivals.

“Moments,” the Saint of Swords grunted, striding in sword bared. “So stop whining. What’s this, then?”

—

Tariq breathed out a sigh of threaded worry and relief. Young Indrani was very much at the end of her rope – there was no need of an aspect to tell him as much, though the confirmation was not without value – and expecting of Laurence sympathy for any in Below’s service was not unlike expecting that very thing of a bared sword, which would be a delicate dance to lead. Laurence, however, possessed means that he did not. Where even the most delicate applications of Light whispered into his ears by the Ophanim had failed, her sword would not. He suspected the Archer would forgive a great many things if they came accompanied by the safeguarding of the Hierophant.

“Laurence,” he greeted.

It was no happenstance his tone was pitched just high enough to cut through the beginning of young Indrani’s no doubt less than diplomatic reply.

“We are in need of your expertise, and perhaps Roland’s,” Tariq said. “It appears the Dead King is using the Hierophant for sinister purposes, and has made reaching him difficult.”

“You want me to cut something,” Laurence bluntly said.

He’d known her long enough to detect the amusement twined to the bluntness, though he doubted anyone else here had.

“In that art you have few rivals,” he said, and immediately realized he’d made a mistake.

Mentioning the Lady of the Lake would only remind the Saint was lending a hand to the most prized pupil of that hated foe.

“Can you cut through that?” Archer asked.

She gestured towards the whirling sorcery. Though he’d been ready to step in and smooth the rough edges before the situation... deteriorated, flicked glances at both told him there was no need to.

“Could your teacher?” Saint casually asked.

What he beheld told him behind the nonchalance was a burn that’d dwelled in her belly for more than forty years, and having closed the wound over it with his own fingers and Light he could not find it in him to reprimand her for it. There were some things that couldn’t be forgiven without losing part of who you were, and the open belly had been the least of the wounds the Ranger had inflicted on Laurence that day.

“I’m not sure,” young Indrani admitted. “It’s just wild magic, so there’s no... principle to it.”

The older woman’s smiled was darkly pleased.

“It’ll flow back,” Saint said. “But I’ll carve you a way through.”

“Good,” young Indrani nodded decisively. “Let’s finish this, then.”

“And you attempt does not succeed?” Tariq calmly asked.

“It will,” Archer growled.

“Watch your mouth, girl,” Laurence harshly said. “It’s a sensible question. If it doesn’t work, best way might be to kill him.”

The Archer had blades in hand before the sentence was over.

“Peace,” Tariq said. “Saint does not mean for him to remain so.”

The ochre-skinned villain looked at him with narrowed eyed.

“Your resurrection trick, it works with villains too?”

The Grey Pilgrim was slightly pained to hear described the act through which he came closest to feeling the will of the Gods Above as ‘your resurrection trick’, yet he smoothed that away. No one would had not done the same could truly understand the nature of the act.

“It does,” Tariq said. “As Laurence well knows. I am not, however, certain it would succeed with the Hierophant.”

It was not only young Indrani that looked him askance at that. Laurence was not deeply schooled in the ways of his gift of forgiveness, for there had never been a need. Even now he would rather keep silence over it, for it touched upon the sacred, yet silence would now cost more than speech.

“His body might be too thoroughly ruined already,” the Peregrine admitted. “I could breathe back life into him only for Hierophant to die again within moments. If the wound were of a different nature I would not hesitate, but if they were inflicted by his own magic...”

Wound inflicted by a foe would be one matter, easily dealt with. A wound inflicted by oneself, even under duress, was a thornier issue. There could be no guarantees, and he was inclined to believe it would fail. The Gods Above observed the order they had created, as did all the boons they bestowed. He could not Forgive a disease borne of one’s own body, old age or the insidious manners of destruction that years of sickness or poison could inflict. Deaths unnatural, those could be forgiven for they went against the meanings of Above. The Hierophant’s malady was not so clear-cut that Tariq could promise a return if the boy was slain. If he could be freed whilst still living, of course, that would be a different story. It was always much easier to stoke the last flame of life back to a blaze than to light it anew from spent ashes.

“It’s his magic killing him, isn’t it?” Roland hesitantly said.

“More or less,” Archer said, brow furrowing as she studied the hero.

It must not be far from her mind, Tariq thought, that at the Battle of the Camps all three of them had stood on the opposite side of the field from her.

“I could take it,” the Rogue Sorcerer admitted. “His sorcery. That would save his life at least.”

In the breath that followed, both Archer and Saint refused and they each eyed the other with displeasure for it.

“I appreciate it, Rogue,” Indrani said, and it was genuine. “But taking his magic might kill him in a whole other way, if you know what I mean.”

“Are you an idiot, boy?” Laurence harshly said. “You want to take sorcery currently in the hands of the Dead King ? Are you really that eager to be hollowed out and made into a Revenant?”

A valid concern, Tariq silently acknowledged.

“Roland,” he said . “What you take, can you return?”

“I’ve never tried,” the young man admitted. “I do not confiscate without reason. I suspect not, to be honest, but it is not impossible.”

“Tariq,” Laurence sharply said.

He met her eyes and inclined his head to the side. They had worked together a great many years, the two of them. She should know by now he would not dismiss the concern she’d expressed. After a moment, her face tightened and she looked at the Rogue Sorcerer with considering eyes.

“It’s a risk,” she spoke without looking at him.

“It is the Hidden Horror,” Tariq said. “Can there be anything else?”

—

Laurence chewed on her lip. He wouldn’t try go through with this, she knew, unless she assented. Could she do it, if the worse came to pass? Oh, if it worked the victory would be more than merely sweet. But if it didn’t, she could be permanently crippling a promising young Chosen. If she’d been fresh, then... No, that was false thinking. It made no difference, whether she was tired or not. The issue was of capacity . And there was not, in the end, a single thing in Creation that Laurence de Montfort could not cut.

“A measured risk,” she said, and it was concession.

Tariq nodded, lowering his wispy head of hear.

“Archer,” he said. “Given choice between the confiscation of his sorcery and death, would you not agree that confiscation is preferable for Hierophant?”

The vicious girl glared, more at the situation than anyone in particular. Laurence could almost sympathize. It’d been a long night for all of them, wicked and righteous both.

“It’s not impossible for him to get the magic back, right?” the Ranger’s pupil said, looking at Roland.

“I don’t know,” the Rogue Sorcerer admitted. “But I would do my utmost to return it, that much I can swear.”

“Fuck,” the Archer said. “All right, worst case if Cat doesn’t get here we can go down that road. Won’t matter, anyway. Saint, carve me a path would you?”

Laurence looked at the child the Ranger had so fondly raised. She saw there the same indolent pride and skill, only without the weight of centuries behind it.

“Say please,” the Saint of Swords said.

“Please,” the villain replied without missing a beat.

Laurence’s fingers clenched. Oddly enough, she felt more cheated by how easily the girl had said than she would have if the Archer had never said it at all. Sword in hand, the Saint tread across the carved floor and came to stand by the edge of the sorcerous whirls. She adjusted her stance, weighing her sword in her hand.

“Archer?” she said.

“Ready,” the girl replied.

“ Now ,” she hissed, and struck.

Her will cut where her sword could not, and it was enough to disperse sorcery. Long enough for the Archer to race across the opening. The girl grinned triumphantly as she slid before the Hierophant, laughing, and then-

“Pesh.”

– the seemingly-entrance boy lazily raised a hand, sorcery flickered and Archer’s brains splattered the floor.

“Now that I have your attention,” the Dead King spoke through the Hierophant’s mouth. “That was your single resurrection, I believe. Do not attempt to meddle again, lest your losses expand beyond the recoverable.”

—

Masego was half-asleep, for not even the painful squeeze of the hand on his shoulder could keep him entirely awake anymore. Almost dreaming, he drifted in and out of consciousness. The sights still came, but he could feel they were nearing the end. They were slower now, like they had to reach deeper for less.

“How mundane,” a voice spoke close to him. “How petty . I expected better of you, Intercessor. This is... beneath us.”

“Oh, Nessie,” a woman’s voice fondly said. “You should know by now the house always wins.”

It was a jolt to his consciousness. Masego’s not-eyed fluttered open. Though this surroundings were still hazy, what had been lulling him into slumber had drawn back. There were two people here with him. One stood behind the sorcerer, and had a hand on his shoulder. He was the Dead King, an enemy. And in front of him a woman. Slender, dark-haired, much too pale to be Catherine. He could not make out everything about her, but there was a silver flask in her hand and she was drinking from it.

“You believe I cannot see your little scheme?” the Dead King said. “The thief and the cutter, to lessen me for every year to come. I need not witness your plans to see that. It is an acceptable trade, for I now know the lay of you.”

“That’s getting a bit ahead of yourself, innit?” the woman chuckled.

“I know,” the Dead King said. “And now that I do, I need not lift a finger. I’ll tell them, Intercessor, and every last one will turn on you .”

“Yeah, see, that’s the part where you’re getting ahead,” the woman drawled. “You knowing. The little shard of you in poor ol’ Zeze knows, but you -you? That’s a different story.”

“You failed,” the Dead King said. “The Tyrant spread into the souls, yes, but the Black Queen contains him. I will still have room enough to pass what I know.”

“Do you?” the Wandering Bard grinned.

Masego saw her perfectly then. He saw, too, the blood and brains on the floor and the woman they belonged to.

“Dead King,” Hierophant roared. “You did this.”

The Wandering Bard raised her flask in a toast.

“Always,” she smiled, “wins.”

Interlude: Reverberation

“At which point Lord Bujune and Lady Rania both accused the other of being the Emperor in disguise, and the meeting devolved into protracted argument until the final quarter hour had passed.”
– Extract from the minutes of the fourth meeting of the Red Fox Conspiracy, as taken by the stenographer Shamna Mehere (later revealed to have been Dread Emperor Traitorous all along

“She is not permanently dead.”

Hierophant caught the withdrawing hand by the wrist. This was, he knew, mere symbolic slant: a way for his feeble mortal mind to interpret a complex interplay of forces it could not truly understand even as it used them. The Dead King was not truly standing behind him. The Wandering Bard had not stood in front, either, smiling like a well-fed cat. And so when he squeezed the wrist of Trismegistus until the bones broke , it was not the strength of his grip that mattered. Only that of his mind.

“Listen to me,” the Dead King said. “The Pilgrim can still resurrect her. If I do not intervene. Do not make me intervene.”

“Can you?” Masego asked, cocking his head to the side.

His sorcery, usurpation usurped, rose without his bidding. Like a spear being formed from a dozen threads of magic. It was not, Hierophant noted, the formula that would make a Revenant. But it might be that turning Indrani into such a manner of undead would interfere with Above’s work, so it was not to be tolerated. If you can’t defend , he remembered Catherine once telling him, attack so your enemy has to. And so Masego did not pit his will against the Hidden Horror’s simply weaving spell with his own hands and striking at the Dead King’s presence.

Power met power, a stalemate of an instant, and then the Hierophant truly went on the offensive.

—

Three heartbeats had passed.

On the first, young Indrani had died. With cold nonchalance the Dead King had raised his hand, spoken a word and sent out a flickering spike of void too swift for even the Pilgrim’s eye to follow. It had ripped through the Archer’s forehead, the flesh not wounded or even vaporized so much as... unmade. Gone. The sorcery around the flesh was so strongly concentrated it obscured even his sight. The warning that began to be spoken after through the mouth of the imprisoned Hierophant, Tariq cared little for. He’d heard many of those before and might yet hear more – threats presented as a warning, fear spoken calmly as if that simple veneer changed the nature of what was being said.

On the second heartbeat Laurence, taken aback yet not beyond action, had darted forward to catch Indrani’s corpse by the back of the cloak. To drag it out of the way of the returning sorcery the Saint had parted with a blow of her sword, lest the Archer’s body be mangled by the wild and whirling magic. Roland finished the last syllable of the incantation he’d begun, protective panes of translucent sorcery forming around Indrani’s body. Too late to be of use even presuming they would have held, which the Pilgrim doubted. Tariq did need to look at the young man’s face to know it had gone ashen, burning guilt flaring at the thought of having been too slow. A loss tied to deeper fears, fears that Tariq could do nothing to soothe away. To meddle too much in the conflict that lay at the heart of Bestowal was a danger to all involved, he’d learned the hard way.

On the third heartbeat, young Indrani’s corpse was unceremoniously tossed out of the way by Laurence, sliding across the rune-covered tiles and leaving behind a trail of wet blood. The shield around it winked out, Roland having dismissed the working with a clenched hand, and the other two heroes turned to the possessed warlock with hard eyes. Saint with the intent to cut, either the boy or the infestation. The Sorcerer with guilt-threaded determination, intent on confiscating the sorcery as he no doubt told himself he should have done from the start. It was these implacable twinges of conscience that always reassured Tariq the young man was in no danger of falling into Below’s embrace. Willingly, anyway.

“- expand beyond the recoverable.”

“Hold,” the Peregrine said.

He had not raised his voice. It resonated anyway, and the other two stilled. The Hierophant’s body half-rose, sorcery flaring, but then it fell back down and his power seething uneasily.

“The boy’s fighting it,” Laurence said, tone holding the barest hint of respect.

It was the closest to praise she’d ever come when mentioning any of the Woe. Tariq gazed down at the corpse of the vivacious young woman he’d spoken with, and for an instant wondered at coincidence. That she would take such a risk unflinching, knowing that the opponent was the Hidden Horror. That it would be young Indrani he was partnered with heading into the deeps, as if to make it certain he’d know what was lost should he stay his hand. How far ahead did you see, Catherine Foundling? How deep did the Black Queen’s cunning truly run? It did not matter, the Pilgrim told himself. Not so long as it was turned against their enemy, against the Enemy.

“There will be an opening,” Tariq said, tone calm and patient and unrelenting. “And when it appears, we will strike at the Dead King with our wroth entire.”

The Hierophant, empowered by his affections and the death of one beloved, would throw off the Abomination’s yoke for a moment. It would be enough for the rest of them to... A shiver went through the room, through this warped place, and as if tugged by strings the fabric of it began to pull inwards. Towards the Hierophant. Like silver mist, the souls of hundreds of thousands slithered through the open bronze gates and burrowed into the blind warlock’s thin frame. Villain, the Pilgrim remembered then. The Woe were, for all the kind intentions of their leader, still villains .

And their kind did not get clean victories, even against each other.

—

“You are being made use of by the Intercessor,” the Dead King said. “To your own detriment and that of your mistress.”

“I do not have a mistress,” Masego said. “In any sense of the term of which I am aware.”

The bindings he’d wrought while half-mad were, it had to be said, a work of art. The elegance of their structure was matched only by its strength, far beyond any working made by his hand he could recall. He suspected that Trismegistus might have whispered insights, though considering he was going to end the creature it was unlikely he’d ever know for certain. The souls poured into him, power accumulated at a breakneck rate, though never more than he could handle. He’d made certain of that, taking only the slightest portion before releasing the dead to the Underworld awaiting them. It made the rate of accumulation easier to control, and to his understanding remained legal under Callowan law. It might be necessary, Masego mused, to secure some sort of permit for such future ventures. He would consult Adjutant on the subject.

“I know what she plans, Hierophant,” the Dead King said. “And it would destroy all you hold dear.”

Though the warning seemed well-intended, Trismegistus simultaneously attempted to seize enough sorcery to sever himself from Hierophant in what was likely an attempt to flee. Masego, without batting an eye, released all that Trismegistus would wield unshaped. Wild. Dimly, he noted that it appeared his shoulder now had a smoking hole in it. The physical one, anyway.

“You are dying,” the Dead King said.

“That has been true since my birth,” Masego reasonably pointed out.

“Your attempts to hinder my escape are killing you,” Trismegistus said.

“That is true,” Hierophant agreed. “Though I expect they’ll annihilate you first, at which point I will cease and survive while you remain annihilated.”

Ah, Masego thought, slightly worried. Was this a monologue? He’d been warned against those by several people.

“Given such a premise, what reason do I have not to kill us both?” the Dead King said.

“Nothing,” Hierophant acknowledged. “You simply lack the ability-”

He paused, looking for something suitably pithy to add. Insults were pithy, he vaguely remembered quite a few of his friends using them.

“- you Jaquinite ,” he scathingly added.

—

“Tariq,” Laurence hissed. “What the Hells is happening?”

The torrent of souls was streaming around the Grey Pilgrim without ever touching him, as if the dead were shying away from the Choir ever holding vigil over the soul of the Peregrine, but the rest of them didn’t have a pack of winged guardians to rely on. She’d put her sword through the floor and anchored herself to that, but inch by inch she was being dragged towards the Hierophant by the sheer quantity of dead souls pushing against her. Through the mess she could see Roland huddling under roiling tongues of light, pressed against the ground. His protective spell was being battered down, moment by moment.

“The Hierophant is gathering and then releasing the dead,” Tariq said, calm voice carrying perfectly through the whistling sound of flowing souls. “Massing strength for a crippling blow at the Hidden Horror.”

“And what happens if we’re drawn into that?” Laurence yelled.

She did not gesture at the maddened sorcerer, as she might very well fall into the current if she took a hand off her sword. Already her blade was being pushed back through the stone, her boots slowly sliding with it.

“Death, presumably,” the Peregrine said, then paused as if speaking to the unseen. “Definitely death, Laurence, I retract the presumption.”

You’d think the fucking Ophanim would bother to serve as more than some kind of almanac of dire ends, wouldn’t you? But Mercy was all about the soft touch, way she understood it, so unlike one of Judgement’s Chosen her old friend couldn’t simply call down attention and have this entire black mess smote into smoking ruin.

“ Do something then,” she screamed.

“That won’t be necessary,” Tariq said. “It’s been long enough. If the souls are in here, Saint, then out there what is left to fight over?”

Now wasn’t the time for bloody riddles, she thought, but then there was thunderous sound above and the room’s ceiling dented. Solid stone. A heartbeat later the dent became an explosion of shards and shape fell through. It was a throne, Saint saw, though acid seemed to have eaten away large chunks of it. The ceiling shook once more, though a stunted silhouette tumbled through the hole. The Tyrant of Helike, Laurence saw, was being carried by gargoyles holding his robe and had a visibly worsening black eye. He looked up, slightly worried, though he rallied quick.

“It’s not what you think, Catherine,” the Tyrant called out. “I swear. I didn’t betray you to the Dead King again. Why, I’d never .”

There was a beat.

“I betrayed you to someone else entirely,” Kairos Theodosian proudly announced.

The gargoyles had to draw him back when a crumpled sword fell through where he’d come, and Laurence half-expected the Black Queen to follow through – only, instead, tendrils of darkness tore through half the ceiling and ripped it out like some gargantuan monster. Above them, the hood of her many-coloured cloak raised and two large crows perched on her shoulders, Catherine Foundling coldly glared downwards from the edge of the roof. Gargoyles began raining down, mangled and seemingly half-devoured.

It’d been a while, Laurence thought, since she’d seen the Black Queen really lose her temper.

—

“You are not in love with her,” the Dead King said, sounding irritated. “With resurrection assured by the Pilgrim, unrequited affection should not have been sufficient. Not even with her meddling.”

Hierophant spared an irritated thought for Trismegistus as well, irked by the presumption of that. As if a cursory reading of his memories would be enough to understand the sum of him – one did not master a grimoire by skimming it. While Papa had not been able to understand, not truly, for it was against the nature of an incubus to be as he was, his other father had seen in Masego similarities to what he’d once seen in his uncle. Enough to suggest a conversation. Not every kind of love involves bedplay or poetry , Uncle Amadeus had told him . You can crave closeness with someone without craving them in other ways. Sometimes it just... fits. The intensity of it can be misleading, but you will learn. Still, it would not do to monologue again by informing his enemy of such nuances. Where before the Dead King had fought him over the gathering power, now instead his opponent was allowing him to shape it while gathering his own will. They would clash, Masego thought, over control of that last working. Yet for all that the other mage was his superior in learning and skill, he had the advantage. It was to him the bindings had been attached, his hands that had released them and his will that was giving the power shape. It would be a struggle, but his victory was likely.

“It seems I will have to surrender to you,” Trismegistus said.

“I refuse,” Masego said.

“You refuse the millennia of knowledge I could offer, along with secrets that would allow the Black Queen to end the Bard’s schemes?”

“Yes,” he said.

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“Catherine is already going to be very angry,” Masego pragmatically said. “And it’ll be worse if I dissect your shard after finding a way to torture you, I think. So I’ll wait to take your secrets until we attack Keter and destroy your heart.”

Another heartbeat passed.

“I think I’ll make this painful, though,” Hierophant pensively frowned.

His hand still itched, when he thought of the red splattered on the floor and Indrani’s body falling.

“You overestimate yourself,” the Dead King warned.

“Your secondary runic escapement patterns were subpar,” Masego scathingly said.

He was getting rather good at this pithy banter stuff, Hierophant mused.

—

“Now,” the Tyrant of Helike said, “there are some among you who might be considering killing me.”

The boy did not lack courage, Tariq mused, though in truth it might be more accurate to call it a disregard for consequences. The Black Queen’s entrance had been appropriately eye-catching, a display of the power of this ‘Night’ she had acquired the right to wield. The two monstrous old things perched on her shoulders had no qualms in lending their power, now that the Hidden Horror was busied wrestling wills with the Hierophant, which meant that Kairos Theodosian had found his every advantage stripped away in a matter of moments. Artefacts shattered, gargoyles torn through, and the souls amongst which he might have sought to hide were either tithed and released by the Hierophant or cowed into retreat by the hungry gaze of these Sve Noc . Now the Tyrant of Helike was stumbling back as the Black Queen limped towards him, her staff hitting the carved floor like punctuation. The Grey Pilgrim felt no inclination to intervene in this, for Kairos Theodosian had been the architect of a great many unnecessary deaths.

“But before we get to that,” the Tyrant chuckled. “I need to expound on why and to who I betrayed you.”

The Black Queen did not bother to reply, simply raising her sinister black wooden staff and aiming it at him.

“It was to the Wandering Bard,” the odd-eyed boy said. “And I did it for a pardon!”

“Should have held out for an escape route,” Catherine Foundling drily replied, and Night gathered at the tip of her staff.

“Tariq,” the Tyrant called out. “You still have the pillow you used that night. That’s what she told me to say as proof.”

The Grey Pilgrim flinched.

“Wait,” he croaked out.

“Oh, Bard,” Theodosian murmured with a vicious smile. “You never disappoint.”

“Pilgrim?” the Black Queen said, turning impatient eye to him.

“I’ve only ever told one person that,” Tariq admitted.

Not even Laurence knew that the pillow that’d been the death of Izil... He’d needed the reminder, he’d decided that night, so that never again would her ignore portents until it was too late.

“And why do I care in the slightest if the Bard has promised him anything?” Catherine Foundling bluntly asked. “To be honest I want to kill him twice as much now.”

“Because she would not make that promise without reason,” the Pilgrim said. “And I trust her discernment in such matters.”

“I don’t,” the Black Queen said. “I’ve seen her get up to some pretty shady shit, Pilgrim. And not all of it serving Above, either.”

“It might have seemed that way,” Tariq delicately said. “But I assure you-”

“When this is over, we’re going to talk about the Wandering Bard,” the Queen of Callow grunted. “But fine, Kairos bargained for the lot of you to spare him. Hold to that. I’ll tie up the loose ends for you – just close your eyes and count to five.”

“We are not fae, to muddle through on exact wording,” Tariq sharply said.

“Tariq, allow me to be perfectly clear,” the Black Queen said. “There is no way in the fucking Hells that I’ll consider the word of the Wandering Bard to be binding to me because you and I are on the same side.”

“She makes a good point, Tariq,” the Tyrant of Helike solemnly said. “I hate to say it, but it seems you might be losing this argument.”

The Peregrine grit his teeth.

“I will count it favour,” he said, “if you withhold your hand now.”

The Queen of Callow eyed him silently, considering.

“Same terms as our last bargain,” she said. “Should the other condition fail to happen.”

The old man breathed out. She was doing him a kindness, here. The Black Queen could have demanded much steeper price, or even kept the favour hanging above his head.

“Then you have my thanks,” Tariq said, dipping his head. “For both this and your restraint.”

“I am deeply pleased to be returning to the fold,” the Tyrant of Helike grinned. “Why, it’s almost like I never-”

The sudden pulse of sorcery caught them all by surprise. The Hierophant rose from his throne, gasping a breath, and the Grey Pilgrim beheld the rotten orb that was the Dead King’s hold being torn out of him. It still held by threads, and was slowly its way back into the villain’s soul, but if they acted now. Laurence was already moving, the Black Queen dismissed the power at the end of her staff and began shaping Night anew. Roland was halfway through a spell, but quickest among them would be Tariq. Until his eye caught a slender, dark-haired woman leaning against the wall. In the blind angle of everyone save him. Though she held her usual silver flask in one hand, she was not drinking. It was the other hand that drew his attention, wagging a finger disapprovingly. One, two, three , she counted out and only then mouthed now . The Pilgrim struck out with Light, just as Saint began to carve away at the Dead King’s rot, but the Hierophant only screamed.

—

Trismegistus leaned over Masego’s shoulder looking into the distance.

“Did I not tell you?” the Dead King said. “You overestimate yourself. To be rid of me there will be a price.”

And though the Hidden Horror’s hold was ripped out of him, it did not go alone. For the all the power and sorcery the Hierophant had been holding vanished into smoke, and there was not a single piece of it left.

Masego reached for his magic, and found nothing at all.

—

There were exactly two things within It: instructions, and a secret witnessed through another’s eyes. It waited inside the corpse, and only slithered away under cover of the souls when all Foes were distracted. It crawled and crawled and crawled, as instructed, until it reached the edge of a cliff and fell. Far, far below a large creature opened its mouth. The Skein swallowed whole the animated shard of sorcery, and in the moment that followed fell apart in a shower of dust.

—

Far away, as the slightest shaving of the shard no doubt destroyed by now returned to him, the King of Death laughed. Seven hundred and thirty-three years, crafting the spell he’d used in his mind without a single word or line of it to be found by the opposition. And the loss of the shard would lessen him forevermore, impossible to recover – though without it, how could his defeat possibly have been believed by the Intercessor? All of it a contingency, for it had been victory he sought, but for centuries he had watched his old friend make a friend of plans he’d thought flawless. Neshamah said nothing at all, for it would be a warning if he did, but alone in the dark he softly laughed.

This once, it seemed the house had lost.

Chapter 46: Abdication

“One hundred and two: defeat is inevitable, yet it can be just as useful as a victory. Fate assures you at least one loss, so make sure it’s the right kind.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

We’d won, so naturally in the heartbeat that followed it all went to shit. Masego stumbled down his throne with gasping breaths, fingers blindly clawing at the rune-carve stone. He’d always been tall, but never before had I seen him so thin – it made him look spindly, like some long-legged insect in ragged black robes. The sorcery that’d been hanging heavy in the air was gone now, like some great gust of wind had blown it out, and I suspected that whatever it was that’d achieved that was the same thing that had Masego’s limbs trembling. Heaving, he began to puke and I had to restrain myself from going to him after taking a unthinking step forward. It’d have to wait just a little longer, graceless as that truth was. Before the rest I needed to be sure that I wasn’t going to be asked to make an ugly choice between two people I dearly loved.

“Pilgrim,” I said. “What ails him, does it threaten his life?”

Even if the man did not know, the Ophanim would.

“Only if not attended to,” the Peregrine said after a moment. “The fever will rise and his body will weaken: it will take weeks if not months of recovery.”

“Then raise Archer, if you would,” I said.

I’d phrased it politely but we both knew it for the order it was. Wordlessly, the Sisters left my shoulders

“We don’t raise the dead, Foundling,” the Saint sharply said.

“Resurrect, then,” I replied, rolling my eyes.

I met Tariq’s stare and slowly he inclined his head in agreement. I wondered if I was right in guessing he’d not immediately brought Indrani back because he’d thought Masego might yet die and that, in the war on the Dead King, the Hierophant would be more useful than the Archer. I set aside the thought, for there was nothing to gain from pursuing it. Even if he’d been thinking that way the colder part of me had to acknowledge that it might not be a bad thing at least one of us had been. I was too close to this, to them, to be able to genuinely do the same. Leaving the Grey Pilgrim to the business of overturning death, I hurried to the still-crawling Hierophant. By the looks of it there hadn’t been much in his stomach, which no doubt made the heaves worse as the body stubbornly tried to spew out something that wasn’t there. His glass-crafted eyes moved wildly beneath the eyecloth, but he did not seem completely blind. I knelt in front of him, swallowing a pained wince, and made sure he saw me before further approaching.

“Masego,” I softly said. “It’s me? Do you recognize me?”

“Catherine,” he croaked. “It’s gone.”

“I know,” I softly agreed. “We all saw you push the Dead King out. We struck at it together.”

I caught his shoulder and, shivering at the weight it put on my bad leg, tipped him back so he was leaning against me instead of half-sprawled over the floor.

“Here we go,” I said. “I’m going to get the vomit off you, Masego, is that all right?”

“Not the Dead King,” he rasped. “It’s all gone, Catherine. My magic .”

I stiffened at the announcement. I wished he’d spoken in a softer tone, so that the heroes – and Kairos, who’d remained dangerously silent through all of this – would not have heard him. As they most definitely just had. I immediately rebuked myself for the thought, for he was in no state to consider such matters. Are you sure , that pointed little question, held on the tip of my tongue for a heartbeat before I buried it. It’d only insult him: he wouldn’t be this devastated if he wasn’t sure.

“It’ll be all right,” I whispered. “We’ll fix it. There’s always a way, Masego. Always.”

A lie, I thought, but one I would have wanted to be told in his place. He’d be able to speak to this more clearly when he’d rested and recovered, and when he did he’d have Akua to help and the knowledge of Sve Noc to look through. If there was a path to be had, we would find it.

“I feel warm,” he said. “Fever. My teeth hurt. I can’t fix it .”

Sickly as he was, Masego was larger and heavier than me – I had to draw on Night to subdue him without hurting him, his sudden violent flailing taking me by surprise. Shit. I’d wanted him awake for the last stretch of this but he was going a bad way. Weaving a long thread of Night as gently as I could, I pressed my thumb against his forehead and let the working gently tug him into slumber. His thrashing subsided until it was little more than twitches and I let out a shaky breath of my own. All right. It looked bad, but once we got back to camp it could be fixed. We had mages and priests and I was owed by the foremost hero on Calernia, a man who had an in with a Choir. He’d come out of this all right, and then we could see about clawing back his magic from our enemy. Breathe in, breathe out. There was no place for weakness in me when the Tyrant and the Saint were looking. I unclasped the Mantle of Woe and bunched it together, sliding it under Masego’s head so he wouldn’t scrape it against the runes. I rose back to my feet, leaning against my staff.

“Touching,” the Tyrant of Helike drawled. “I do not jest, Catherine, it was truly-”

“There’s a general that’s been with you from the start,” I said, meeting his gaze. “Basilia, is it?”

“Are you threatening me?” Kairos asked, sounding amused.

“Finish that sentence,” I said, “and you’ll find out.”

Whatever might have followed that was to remain unspoken, for with a gasp Indrani returned to the land of the living. I limped past the Tyrant, making my way to her side. Tariq had put her on her back before digging into his aspect, and now miraculously enough there was no trace of the hole that’d been blow through her head save for dried blood over her face. The Saint was gazing down at her with a sneer when I arrived, while the Pilgrim gently asked her to cease moving so the Light could heal the last of her scrapes. Indrani’s hazelnut eyes swam into focus when I arrived, first staying on me and then moving to the other two heroes by her ‘bedside’. Leaning to the side, Archer spat out a little mucus and wiped her lips.

“Cat’s always been fine and I can be sold on the Saint – gotta love a girl who knows her way around a sword,” she drawled. “But a priest too? Gods, there can’t have been that much liquor in the city.”

In a moment of quicksilver surprise, I saw the Saint of Swords looking like someone had just personally pissed in her morning porridge and the Grey Pilgrim looked utterly, wickedly delighted before I had to cover my mouth with a hand lest I burst out laughing.

“I wasn’t always a priest, I’ll gave you know,” the Peregrine sanguinely replied. “As a young man I once even attempted to become one of the Hidden Poets.”

“They of the seventy-eight methods of carnal love?” Indrani asked, sounding somewhat intrigued.

“Indeed,” he agreed. “Alas, my kamil declamations were judged unworthy and so I took an interest in healing instead.”

“You look rather spry, for a dead woman,” I said.

I looked at her searchingly even as I spoke, looking for a flinch or darkening of mien that would have given away a shadow cast on her soul. Resurrection was too great a boon to come without a cost, in my eyes, though that did not mean that price would be paid immediately. Yet I found nothing and so offered up my hand to cover my surprise. Indrani took it, and with a grunt I dragged her up.

“Well,” Archer said, “I did get to take a nap. I’m all refreshed now.”

I almost winced at that. I’d not seen her die, but the sight of her head missing a chunk was going to haunt my nights for a few months to come. Indrani’s eyes moved to the sleeping form of Masego, lingering on the rise and fall of his chest. The twitched were already rarer, but still I caught his leg in a spasm as he turned and a moan escaped his lips.

“What happened?” she quietly asked. “I know how I...”

She hesitated there, and I found an almost troubled look on her face when I looked. Not entirely without marks, then. I reached for her shoulder, but she shook it away.

“We knew it was a possibility,” she said, tone grown firm. “But it should have shaken him out of the Dead King’s hold. What went wrong?”

“Your little friend pushed out the Hidden Horror,” the Saint of Swords said, approaching. “Long enough for us to help strike him down.”

“When the shard of the Dead King ruling over the Hierophant was destroyed, it took his magic with it,” the Rogue Sorcerer said.

Both the Pilgrim and the Saint shot a look at him, and he dipped his head as if to confirm something.

“Roland?” I asked.

“It is part of my Choosing to know when there is sorcery to confiscate,” the hero told me, face grim. “There is none left in the Hierophant.”

“Shit,” Indrani murmured. “That’s going to leave scars even if we fix it.”

“Which we will,” I meaningfully said.

Indrani questioningly glanced at my neck, more specifically the height where my cloak’s collar would usually be.

“If anyone can,” I agreed. “Otherwise, well, praise the Night and we’ll figure something out.”

“Crows might know something, yeah,” Archer said. “They’re basically magpies only with, you know...”

She gestured vaguely, trying to get across the concept of godhood. Something that had eluded the finest mages and theologians of the continent for millennia.

“That’s heresy,” I piously said.

Komena cawed in the distance, unamused by the way I hadn’t entirely disagreed in my own thoughts.

“See, you’ve angered the gods,” I said.

After the hellish, riotous night we’d gone through – and which had yet to end – trading barbs with Indrani like this was like a balm for the soul. The rest of the band had been looking on with various degrees of amusement and impatience, which was fair. Most of us were allies of convenience, if even that. I cleared my throat, Archer falling in at my left like it was the most natural thing in the world. I found strength in that where earlier I’d begun to find mostly exhaustion.

“The five of us have made it to the journey’s end,” I said. “And so now we bring about an ending.”

“This where you reveal the last crown?” Laurence de Montfort bluntly asked. “Overdue.”

“I’ll confess to some curiosity as well,” the Rogue Sorcerer said.

There was a moment of silence, a courtesy I was offering to the man in question – the opportunity to speak himself, if he preferred it that way.

“It will be mine,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Though the Dominion of Levant has no kings, I was born to the bloodline that has ruled it since its founding.”

The Saint spat to the side.

“Funny how it’s always us who ends up paying the butcher’s bill tonight,” she said. “Almost like it was planned that way.”

I didn’t answer that. It was true, at least in part, though I regretted nothing. For all that I’d scraped them raw, I’d made them fair offers and would deliver on all I had promised. As we’d begun the year deathly foes, I considered that far more generous treatment than was owed by the ways they’d dealt with me in the past.

“There can be no us and them , Laurence, if we are to survive the decade,” the Pilgrim quietly said. “Not against the kind of foe we face. And it is no great loss, I assure you: I know better than most how ill-suited I would be to rule.”

“Some would say merely knowing that would make you better ruler than most,” the Saint replied.

I bit down on my tongue, because now was not the moment to express my strong opinion on the matter. Humility wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in a king, but it was hardly a qualification . Ambition wasn’t a flaw, it was the character trait behind most – no, now was not the time for that. Gods, was this my shatranj speech? Of all the damned habits I could have picked up.

“Oh, please do have him elected Holy Seljun,” the Tyrant grinned. “That would be delightful. We’ll have to have his... great-great-nephew? Close enough, I think. We’ll need to have the current Seljun assassinated first, that is my implication, but worry not. Mercantis offers very fair prices on poison these days.”

“Must you, Tyrant?” the Rogue Sorcerer asked.

“It’s simply getting a little too chummy in here for my tastes, if you’ll forgive my language,” Kairos cheerily replied. “As if most people in this room had not tried to kill each other at some point.”

“Well,” Indrani mused. “He’s not wrong. Why is he alive, anyway?”

“He made a deal with the Wandering Bard,” I said.

“That is the opposite of a reason to keep him alive,” Archer pointed out.

“A courtesy was extended,” I said, tone informing her the line of questioning was at an end.

“Hear that, Saint?” Indrani grinned. “We’re being courteous to you. So maybe you try not being such a-”

“ Archer ,” I hissed.

“-card,” Indrani adjusted at the last moment, “I was definitely going to say card.”

Kairos gasped, as if deeply shocked by her foul language.

“It will not be long before dawn rises,” the Grey Pilgrim said, “even given the nature of this place. We must attend to the tasks ahead.”

“Namely, to slay a god,” the Rogue Sorcerer said.

That bought an aftermath of silence for a few beats. If he’d not been Proceran I would have assumed a pun, but given his origins my assumptions erred on the side of clemency.

“Unless you’re holding out on us, Foundling, the odds are not skewed in our favour,” the Saint of Swords bluntly said. “It would have been one thing with the warlock, but he’s done. The five of us and your cheap Ranger imitation won’t cut it.”

“There were more than simply the Huntsman outside,” Roland said. “The entire Wild Hunt was standing vigil around the room. We will be outnumbered.”

“We won’t be, my dear friend,” the Tyrant of Helike said, “for the same reason that the Hierophant is nowhere to be found.”

Three pairs of eyes sought Masego, and when they found nothing at all turned to me instead. Alas, without my cloak I’d been robbed of my pipe and wakeleaf. Hadn’t thought that through properly, I mused.

“Did you think she wanted this done before dawn for the ambience?” Kairos Theodosian grinned. “Oh no. She wants the war ended before daylight scatters her little army of darkness.”

“I’ve dealt with fae royalty before,” I mildly said. “A story is the one blade they can’t parry and that we earned, as our band of five. But you still need to sink in the knife and that means power. I’ve provided it.”

Of which there would be no lack, before the coming of dawn. The Sisters were circling in the sky above, patient and slow, but the Mighty I’d sent for would have long ago made their way through the broken grounds of Liesse and reached this deeper palace. If the coming Court and my own side came to blow, as I expected they would, I would have warriors awaiting more than the match of a Wild Hunt reforged.

“You think our Larat’s going to be a rougher ride than High Noon?” Indrani asked.

“If we let him get a grip, that seems likely,” I grimly replied.

None of the others here had been part of our fight against Princess Sulia, the general of Summer’s hosts and herald of its sun, so while the idle reference by Archer was not gibberish to them neither was it really understood . The Saint and the Pilgrim had faced villains and monsters I’d never known the likes of, but the fae were... different. Less and more dangerous at the same time. And Larat, once the Prince of Nightfall, had been all sorts of dangerous even before his service under my oaths had taken him across the breadth of Calernia. Fae couldn’t learn, not the way mortals did. Their natures were static in the way our weren’t. Yet I knew from experience that they could learn to... interpret themselves through different eyes, shaping themselves through oaths and stories. The Wild Hunt, while bound to me, had seen more of Creation than the rest of their likely had in centuries. I fully expected any Court they had a hand in making to be dangerous in ways that the ancestral forces of nature that were Summer and Winter could scarcely have imagined. I breathed out, rolled my shoulders to limber them.

“Ready yourselves,” I warned. “We begin.”

I seized my staff and struck down at the ground, a thin wave of Night rippling out, and from that darkness I leaned down to snatch out the bag that held seven crowns. Without even needing to look, I knew that the fae had come. As I strode towards the throne on which Masego had sat, when in the throes of the Dead King’s enchantments, from the corner of my eye I saw silhouettes standing atop the walls. In ripping out the ceiling, I had made of this throne room an arena of sorts – and in a silent circle above the Wild Hunt stood, eyes watchful. I emptied the sack at the bottom of the throne. An old crowb of ivory and gold, set with a great carved topaz. A straight-edged cavalry sword, wrapped in a cloak. An ornate longsword, specked with its dead owner’s blood. A silver tiara, bitter surrender. A bloody knife, regicide absolved. A bare blade within a banner, and last of all two silver wings ripped in spite. A harvest of royalty that cast a shadow over a third of the greatest realm under Calernian sun. No small harvest, this. The Grey Pilgrim padded forward as I threw aside the empty sack, and with measured ceremony came to stand before the pile. The old man brusquely snapped his own staff over his knee, the old thing breaking like it’d been fragile as driftwood, and tossed it onto the pile. He whispered two words under his breath, though I caught only one: izil .

With that last addition the seven crowns and one I’d promised were offered, and so the creature I’d promised them to arrived. Larat drifted in from right, steps silent and smooth, long black hair trailing behind him. He near brushed against me as he passed, though it was not jostling – it was an acknowledgement of his presence. We were, I thought, long past the petty games of posturing other times might have brought.

“I had thought, my queen, that you might destroy me before the debt was paid,” the fae amusedly said. “Or make of me something... tamed and hollowed.”

His sole eye flicked a glance upwards, where two crows still circled.

“I am a woman of my word,” I replied. “However terrible that word might be.”

“So you are,” Larat said, dipping his head. “Let all witness it, and Creation remember it.”

He ran an almost loving finger against the stone of the throne before him, having fluidly stepped around the crowns that were his due. As I watched every last thing tossed onto the pile turned to ash, until naught was left but that, and under Larat’s watchful gaze those ashes rose up. They spun once, twice, thrice, and with every spin they gathered more tightly into something being forged. A crown, I thought. It was made of grey chalcedony and mother-of-pearl, one twisted like threads and the other hanging in star-like spots, but something more eldritch leant both darkness and radiant lights to the shaping artefact. It thickened, until the last touch was added – a distant radiant star, shining on the brow, stolen and set for the pleasure of the newborn Court.

“And so is born the Court of Twilight,” the fae said. “Under the pilgrim’s star, willingly given, and winding through the many realms of mortals wicked and righteous both. We tread the span of dusk and dawn, unhindered and unseen, watchers of boundaries and makers of secret ways. Let none think themselves our masters, for we are the children of the debt repaid and the tricks woven in death.”

Pale fingers caught the crown and Larat softly laughed.

“I thank you, Sovereign Under the Night,” he said. “Not for the bargain fulfilled, for that was as ordained, but for what you gave us all freely.”

He’d not put on the crown, I thought. It had not yet begun.

“And what would that be?” I asked.

“We cannot learn as your kind do, Foundling Queen,” Larat smiled. “But we can... mimic. That is our gift. And you have shown us a great many things. You taught us, my queen, the greatest trick of them all.”

Larat, smiling, put on the crown.

“Hear my first decree, one and all, as Twilight’s King,” he laughed.

Larat, smiling, tossed it back down onto the throne.

“My crown I abdicate, and let the worthiest of you bear it.”

Chapter 47: Tenet

“You who would be mighty, seek excellence in all things, for the conquest of eternity must be earned with every breath.”
– Extract from the ‘Tenets Under Night’, Firstborn religious text

Well, shit. I guessed you could always count on good ol’ Larat to make a bad situation incredibly worse. And I wasn’t the only one to realized that with a pithy gesture and a few words he’d dropped us all in the deep end, because the moment the fae who’d abdicated the Twilight Crown took a step away from the throne I had to speak up.

“Hold,” I got out, and there was an echo.

Archer’s longknife slowed a hair’s breadth away from the hollow of Larat’s throat, as did the Saint’s longsword – though it’d not been me that Laurence was listening but the Pilgrim. Who had, thanks the Gods, enough of a finger on the pulse of this to recognize that killing the fae now would be a Very Bad Idea. High above us, Sve Noc lazily circled the sky. Yet another fire I was going to have to put out the moment I’d assessed the nature of this turnabout. I inclined my head in thanks at Tariq and shot Indrani a steady glance. Shrugging, she withdrew her blade and with an unnecessarily eye-catching spin she put it away. The Saint I left to the Pilgrim, eyes on the fae who’d been the Twilight King for the span of two sentences. Was he still, though? I wondered with a frown. Not king – the abdication might have been a trick, but not of that particular kind – but fae . There was a flush to his skin now, and while his long hair remained unearthly in its perfection it was no longer... unnatural.

“Larat,” I said. “Look me in the eye.”

Baring a smile of pearly white teeth, the one-eye creature met my gaze and my lips thinned in dismay. When I’d first met the Prince of Nightfall, a simple look in his eyes had sent me tumbling down into fear and darkness. A glimpse into his nature, forced by the matching of gaze. I’d learned to resist that pull, in later years, or at times simply been the greater monster of the two of us. I was not currently using any of those tricks, for there was no need to. Larat held not a speck of power within him. And fae, Masego had once told me, were little more than power made flesh and shaped by stories. The inevitable conclusion of that sent a shiver up my spine.

“Do you even know,” I softly asked, “what you’ve become?”

“Something... unprecedented,” he said, smile broadening.

“And the rest of the Hunt?” I said.

One after another they leapt down, graceful and lithe. None of them bore titles that I could catch the scent of, be it the newborn regalia of Twilight or older and more vicious accoutrements.

“We claim nothing,” Larat languidly replied, “save that we are .”

“Fascinating,” the Saint of Swords said. “You gonna feed them to your drow, or should I just go ahead and finish this? I’ve yet to hear a reason that smirking head should stay atop his shoulders.”

“Because someone’s going to have to put on that damned crown, now,” I said, never looking away from Larat. “And while I can’t say for sure what murdering the creature that first forged it would do exactly, I doubt it’ll be particularly pleasant.”

The former fae’s lips twitched. Seed of madness in the crown was my guess, putting an original sin at the heart of what this realm would become. The clever fox had picked a path that meant we couldn’t kill him without dropping a vial of poison in our own cup.

“There no longer are any oaths between us,” I acknowledged. “All debts have been paid.”

“So they have,” Larat admitted. “Would you believe me if I said, my queen, that my service under your banner was a pleasure?”

“Not even an hour free,” I said, “and already lying? You always were a quick learner.”

He laughed, deep-throated and wild. I swallowed a sigh.

“You fulfilled your oaths to the letter,” I conceded, and raised my voice to the others. “All of you. If we are to part tonight, it is not in anger.”

Larat, viper-swift, raised the sword hanging from his hip. I did not reach for the Night, though Archer was halfway through a killing stroke before she turned it aside – my former servant, after a salute, had dropped the blade at my feet.

“May we meet again, my queen, before the end,” Larat said. “For every gift you gave you took fair measure, and I can pay no higher compliment.”

Much as they had years ago when riding horses, the creatures that had once been the Wild Hunt paid me the mirrored farewell to the allegiance they’d sworn. Lance and blade and bow fell at my feet, and with every last a bow. Some paid respects to Archer as well, though to her they offered only words. They gathered around Larat: slender, beautiful and even without so much as a speck of power still terrible to behold.

“And what will you do?” I asked.

“Whatever we wish, my queen,” the one-eyed fox said. “For be it wicked or righteous, it will be entirely ours.”

I let them go without another word, ignoring the Pilgrim’s weighty look and the Tyrant’s fleeting yet fascinated glances at the former fae. There was another issue about to take hold, after all. For all that I’d chosen to part with the Wild Hunt on a cordial note, Larat had repaid my planned deicide in the same manner. The Twilight Crown was not up for grabs, and he’d known exactly what he was doing when he’d offered it to the worthiest . It was respect that’d stayed the hands of the drow so far, for through the Night I could feel hundreds of them hungrily gazing down. If I ordered them to refrain, I’d strain the limited of my authority as the First Under the Night. Oh, some would listen. At first anyway, until they saw foes and rivals close to getting their fingers on great power and the balance swung the other way. They only way they’d obey such an edict was if Sve Noc put their weight to my words. Yet I had the Sisters in the back of my mind, and so I knew they were eying that crown as hungrily as the rest of them.

“Black Queen,” the Grey Pilgrim began, “given the-”

“Pilgrim,” I calmly said. “I don’t think you appreciate how delicate the situation is right now. I need to... confer with my patrons.”

“Evil clawing at itself,” the Saint bitingly said. “There’s a surprise.”

I ignored her.

“It’d be a mistake,” I said in Crepuscular, addressing the sky.

The first crow that landed on the floor did so smoothly, and just as smoothly rose into the silhouette of a drow. Silver-blue eyes shone, and I saw she was wearing the ancient armour of soldiers of the Empire Ever Dark with at her hip a sheathed blade of obsidian. Komena. Her sister, fully formed a drow before her crow talons could touch the stone, made ground with serenity. It was the robes of the long-broken Twilight Sages she wore, in flowing shimmering silk, and her hands she hid within long sleeves. Andronike. My patrons, at least, had taken me seriously enough to make act of presence. And a little more than that, even. I caught flecks of dust gone still in the air around me, made visible by the glinting light, and all others in this seat of power stood as if frozen. Save for the Pilgrim, whose knowing eyes followed me still – whatever power was at work here, bending perception, the Choir of Mercy had not suffered that he would be touched by it.

“Would it be?” Komena said. “Twilight is not so far removed from our domain. And mastery over ways... oh, let the offering of travellers be not blood but instead prayer . There would be opportunity in that, and yet more. We have lost the Everdark and the kingdom you bargained for still has to be reclaimed from death. A home for our people would be fair in every way, Herald.”

“You can’t eat two courts of the fae, Komena,” I said. “That would be grave overreach.”

The two of them, long-legged and fluid, began circling around me on foot the same way they had as crows.

“You have warned us of such perils before, of the foes they would bring,” she replied, and glanced at the Grey Pilgrim. “Having seen them, I am less than cowed.”

“The way I see it, there’s two ways that could go,” I said. “Both end up with every single gain you’ve made so far pissed away.”

That had them both looking at me with their full attention.

“You could become ‘the monster that eats courts’,” I said. “And just like that you’re the greatest threat kicking around Calernia, both taking the weight off the Dead King and beginning a death match with every powerful entity in the service of Above up here and gathered to deal with him.”

I paused, letting that sink in.

“Or, perhaps even worse, you’ve just begun a pattern,” I said. “I made a Court of Winter and you ate it. I made a Court of Twilight and you’d eat it. There’s only one court of the fae left, Sve Noc, and I also had a hand in its inception. Where do you think that story leads?”

“We would be mistresses of the greater part of the Garden,” Komena said.

“Would you?” I said. “I wonder. When I stole Winter, it didn’t do anything to the ruling court of Arcadia as far as I could tell. See, what I think is that it’s the neverborn courts they get their blood from: Autumn and Spring, never to be again. Because Summer and Winter had to die so the unification of Arcadia could happen, so they couldn’t be foundation of an entirely new realm could they? So my theft of Winter? Fine, I was robbing a corpse. The crown just to our side might just be what used to be Summer. So at best, o goddesses of mine, you’ll be even. And you know that one viciously clever little bastard that just walked out of here?”

I jutted a thumb towards the open gates of bronze.

“The ruling King of Arcadia considers him to be a little dim,” I said. “Think on that, before you start believing you’ll be the winners in that scrap even if the weight is even. You’re too young to the godhead, your power is too fragile and your foundations too unsteady. You’re not ready for the kind of attention eating Twilight would bring.”

Komena did not reply. She was not pleased, I could feel it, but she did not dismiss what I’d said.

“I do not disagree,” Andronike said.

And now for the other one, I grimly thought.

“Let us allow the Mighty to find who is worthiest among them, and so establish influence without... overstepping,” the oldest of the sisters said.

“Short-sighted,” I assessed.

I saw Komena hide a smile.

“Pardon?” Andronike said, voice too calm to truly be.

“You’re thinking in terms of gains without also weighing the drawbacks,” I said. “Do you intend to make whoever takes the crown the leader of your people, fold them under their rule and effectively have them stuck in this ruin of a realm forever? Because that’s what you’re headed towards if you make a play here.”

“They have no choice but to make bargains with us if the ways are under our stewardship,” Andronike said. “This war is lost otherwise.”

“You’re robbing them while the Dead King holds them at knifepoint,” I said. “That’s a mistake. What happens when the war is over, Sve Noc? Do you think they won’t go back on treaties you crammed down their throat when they were in duress?”

“And will they come to love us, if we treat them lovingly?” Andronike mockingly replied. “That is surprisingly naïve of you, Herald. If they turn on us for this, they were always going to turn on us. All the more reason to claim what we can before the knives are bared.”

“You’re missing the point,” I patiently said. “There’s nuances to this, Andronike. Sure, the Procerans are never going to put a crown of flowers in your hair, but there’s a difference between ‘the enemy we leave alone because it contains a worse enemy’ and ‘those bastards that extorted us while we were facing annihilation’. You know what’s going to be a lot more useful to your people than one of the Mighty on that fancy chair behind you? An undeniable and weighty precedent for the Firstborn being reasonable, restrained actors. You’re going to have to live up here, after the war ends.”

“You would have us pin our hopes on amity and mercy,” Andronike said.

“I’d have you fight this war in a manner that doesn’t guarantee having to fight another one in twenty years with your current allies,” I frankly said. “You named me First Under the Night because you needed feet on the ground. Someone to steer you away from the mistakes you’re blind to because of your position.”

I paused.

“This is one,” I said. “This might be the mistake. The choice that decides whether you’re a decade-long catastrophe that ends up drowned in heroes or the latest nation to claim a seat at the table up here in the Burning Lands.”

They circled around me still, silent. Thinking.

“This is not our way,” Komena said.

“Your way is a snake eating its own tail,” I said. “Be better .”

“They might turn on us regardless,” Andronike said.

“They might,” I admitted. “Fear or faith, that’s your choice. You can’t cross a chasm without taking a leap.”

The Sisters looked at each other, eyes sliding away from me, and whatever it was they spoke it was not meant for my ears. Pounding heartbeats drummed against my ears, they began circling anew. With every step they further faded into the shadow, until there was nothing left but crows once more circling above. As if they’d never left at all. I breathed out, slowly.

“You are First Under the Night,” Andronike confirmed.

“The Firstborn listen,” Komena said. “ Speak .”

My fingers clenched. Above us the Mighty stood, a ring of painted sigils and silver-blue yes. Watching, waiting. And my goddesses had asked me to teach restraint to a people they had taught to esteem gluttonous theft above all. I was not, I thought, clever enough a liar to trick them all into obedience. And that’d be rather defeating the purpose of this, wasn’t it? I was the high priestess of Night: if I found offence with the faith I’d been named the steward of, who but me could be charged with the change of it?

“Are you worthy?” I asked, and my voice rang out.

Not a soul replied. I let out a harsh bark of laughter.

“Your silence says it all,” I told them. “You believe you are, or that the shedding of blood will make you so.”

And why wouldn’t they? The worthy took, the worthy rose. Did the act of taking not make them worthy? That was the sickness inside them, Below’s ever-red altar made into an entire people. It was the old enemy wearing another face: Callow and Praes, forever intertwined and bleeding. Procer as much burden as bearing, sowing its own demise with every conquest. It was bucket holding the crabs, and I was going to break it .

“I see you,” I harshly said. “Scavengers, carrion things crawling in the dark. You make faith of what you’ve taken and call that worth . I see you, who call yourselves Mighty. I have been you, and heard the sweet anthems of might, so hear me when I tell you this truth: a hundred rats clawing at each other does not make a single king.”

Oh, they did not love me for that. I saw it in their eyes, in the way fury and malice filled the Night. But it was a lesson long overdue and love was not what I wanted from them, much less what I needed.

“Did you believe a single moment of excellence would earn you an eternity of power?” I said. “The one-eye fox that left this place head held high forged this crown through ruses that fooled gods and ruined realms. What bring any of you that matches those deeds?”

I bared my teeth.

“The murder of your own kind? I ask you, what manner of creature under sun or moon is not capable of this? Where lies that which would make you worthy?”

I struck my staff against the ground, let the clap that sounded out jostle them.

“You have grovelled in the ruins of your own empire, bleeding behind the Gloom,” I said. “And through that you survived. Yet is that all you seek, you who call yourselves Mighty? Survival? I thought you seekers of deeds. I thought you reclaimed of an empire ever dark. I thought you Firstborn, not grey ghosts haunting a ruin.”

Fury still, but now their pride had been pricked. And there were some who were listening. Hearing what had been spoken but also what had not been.

“It is not enough to take,” I said. “For you must be worthy to take. It is not enough to rise, for you must be worthy to rise.”

Blasphemy, some would have called that, but how could it be when I spoke with the voice of their gods?

“Did you think eternity would so easily be conquered?” I laughed. “Seek excellence in all things, Firstborn. Seek to stand nighty not by lowering others but by rising above them, lest you make your own victory worthless. They who cannot master themselves will never be anything but servants.”

I breathed out, let what I’d said sink in.

“And so I ask you again, you who call yourselves Mighty – are you worthy ?”

Sa Vrede . The whisper spread, bloomed until it was on every pair of lips. No , the answer came, and with it the beat of spears against stone. Slow and oppressive, like a dirge.

“Then seek excellence, Firstborn,” I said. “Ever seek it until the night comes where your answer has changed.”

Chno Sve Noc , they went. All will be Night. And they bowed, for I has spoken with the authority of high priestess of Night and for all their fury they had found worth in the path I laid before them. As the deity-crows circled slowly above us all they withdrew into the darkness, dismissed without my needing to speak another word. I let out a shaky breath and turned to find the eyes of most everyone else resting on me. I doubted anyone other than Archer had understood any of that – Indrani had learned a bit of Crepuscular back in the day, though it was a fiendishly complex language so not all that much – but I supposed even without the learning it’d been something of a spectacle.

“Dawn will come before the hour’s turn,” the Grey Pilgrim quietly said. “And with it the end of this journey, for good or ill.”

“Then there is only one agreeable solution,” the Tyrant of Helike said.

He let a moment pass.

“We should crown Catherine,” he said, and winked at me.

“I’ve ridden that horse before,” I said. “Never again.”

“A shame,” he mused. “I’d volunteer, yet I suspect my dear friends might...”

“Murder you like we were planning to do to Larat?” I finished. “Of course not. Go ahead, Kairos. Put on the crown.”

“Breaking the crown itself might suffice,” the Rogue Sorcerer said.

“How sure are you of that, Roland?” the Saint asked.

He grimaced.

“Half and half,” the Sorcerer said. “As you might guess, there’s not exactly a precedent for this.”

And considering that the hero wasn’t able to understand High Arcana, there was only so much weight I was willing to put on his word. Gods, I wished Masego was in a fit state to speak right now. Hells, I’d even settle for Akua right about now.

“So either we roll the dice over the life of around two hundred thousand people,” I grimly said. “Or someone puts on that crown and then we kill them.”

Chapter 48: Swan Song (Redux)

“Beware of deep passions, for great love may turn in hatred just as great.”
– Hesperos the Tepid, Atalantian preacher

Less then an hour was left before the sky fell down on Iserre, and three great armies were broken and buried. How many people were down there, right now? I’d off-handedly said two hundred thousand, but with the League’s armies it had to be more than that. Three hundred? It didn’t matter, I thought. Their deaths were simply not the kind of blow Calernia could recover from in less than fifty years, if even that. To anchor this realm and wrest it out of the precipitous fall, Twilight could have three outcomes” a crown-bearer, one’s corpse or a shattered crown. If there was to be a crowning it’d have to be one of us, I admitted to myself. None aside from the band of five I’d assembled and our guide in Archer, the fateful sixth, had the required weight to bring this to an end. We’d been the ones to storm the Dead King’s holdfast, to destroy the shard of him and to face against the clever fox who’d turned it all around on us. It had to be us, didn’t it? I could feel the current of the story and fighting against it too forcefully would only lead to failure. If I tried to bring out Akua, whose ties to this place and murderous legacy ran deeper than anyone else’s, I suspected she would simply not arrive in time. In a place like this, where the rules of Creation ran so thin they could be twisted and snapped, having the story going the other way was a stone around your neck. The flipping of an hourglass would tell me near nothing about how far dawn was, while the rising tension of the choice having to be made would be almost exact a measure.

Crescendo awaited, climax, and cheating it would be tricky business.

“There is no choice to be made at all,” the Rogue Sorcerer said with forced calm. “We must shatter the crown. Anything else would be odious.”

There’d been a time I knew, where I would have agreed with him. But it’d been a few years since I’d last had the luxury to think that way – right and wrong, untouched by practicalities such as risk and consequence. Which was the greater wickedness, I wondered: the killing of one at the altar, or to gamble hundreds of thousands of lives on odds unclear?

“I have heard it told in rumour,” the Tyrant of Helike said, “that our friend the Peregrine can offer solace through resurrection. One after each dawn, the rumour goes, forgiving the mistakes that came before it.”

And there went Kairos, pivoting from pest to useful because he was simply too clever to remain a distraction that all would agree on throwing out when it was all coming to a close. I suspected he would act the wise and sagacious ally, from now on, simply to ease everyone’s well-earned urge to toss him out on his ass and close the doors behind him. Exhausted as the rest of us, Kairos Theodosian had a worsening purple bruise where I’d very satisfyingly decked him in the face, but otherwise no real injuries. Still, from the way his limbs had taken to twitching under the robes you’d think he was the worst off among us. Whatever sickness it was he’d been born to, it was debilitating whenever the protection of his Name waned. I followed the villain’s gaze as it turned to Tariq, adding my weight to the unspoken question: if someone sat the throne and let themselves be slain, could the Pilgrim raise them anew after dawn? The white-haired man cocked his head to the side, as if listening to words only he could hear. He, too, had old monsters to ask answer of.

“It is uncertain,” the Peregrine admitted. “There are some deaths not even my prayers can forgive, and to die on the altar for the sake of others might be one such.”

The old man glanced meaningfully at Indrani, who in deference to the seriousness of the situation had been keeping her mouth shut.

“I cannot bring back those departed twice,” he warned. “No matter the circumstances.”

I’d had absolutely no intention of letting anyone so much as shake a knife in Archer’s direction, but that was good to know. My friend had already died one tonight so, as far as I was concerned, she’d more than the paid the dues she hadn’t even owed.

“Might be this is obvious to the rest of you,” Indrani slowly said, “yet why aren’t we simply having someone put on the fancy hat and stay alive? That ought to do the trick.”

I grimaced. The Saint spat to the side.

“There’ll be no founding of a court in service to Below on my watch, girl,” Laurence de Montfort bluntly said. “The terms of this truce were that there would be a breaking, not a coronation.”

“It would be preferable to the cold-blooded murder of an ally,” the Rogue Sorcerer flatly said.

“Think beyond keeping your pretty hands clean, boy,” the Saint harshly said. “Consider the centuries of blood and suffering that would come from the birth of this Court of Twilight.”

“Ah, but the courts of Arcadia was so troublesome for they had many stories, many titled among their number,” Kairos idly said. “It need not be so for Twilight. A single brow bearing a crown, and nothing else. Power held yet going without exercise.”

His tone had been idle, but there’d been something to it that had me clenching my fingers. He was half in love with the notion already, I could tell. And I could see how it’d appear to the Tyrant of Helike: then moment of temptation forever continued, principled restraint that might yet be broken by the right word or tragedy. And as for the rest of us, none would get what they truly wanted save a life spared. Or, as Kairos was likely to see it, yet another foe slighted and spared. To him, it’d be the loveliest of endings. And Gods forgive me, but I was more inclined to it than a killing. There was no one here that could have their throat carved open without a bloody mess following, greater good or not. If it was a hero and the Saint survived, she’d carry that grudge like a blade pointed at my back until one of us died. If it was the Saint herself, the lengths Tariq had gone to for the preservation of her life would find themselves tossed in the mud before so much as the first signature was put to the Liesse Accords. It was a thinning of foundation where I needed it to be firm. There’d be no talk of Indrani going through this, and while before the end I suspected I’d be put before a choice like this I would not walk the altar path when there was so much work left to be done. Martyrdom without groundwork was vanity, nothing less and nothing more.

It was a possibility, I thought, to force that crown onto Kairos’ head and slit his throat. One I’d seriously consider, but the Tyrant had bargained back his life from the Bard and the Pilgrim seemed set on respecting this. Would it be worth it, I asked myself, to cross him on this? It might be too much of a risk. The Rogue Sorcerer might come out either way, given his scraps with the Tyrant, and Archer would be at my side through Crown and Tower but the other two? The Saint was most likely to see the practicality in bleeding Kairos, but she often deferred to the Pilgrim over calls like these and she’d be just as eager to take a swing at me. The Tyrant’s reaction was arguably the most predictable and least worrisome, for though he’d attempt escape he wouldn’t take it personally in the slightest. No, I finally decided. The odds were too stiff and the cause too red. Even if I got away with it I’d leave scars, the kind that’d come back to bite me down the line, and our alliance was too young not to be mangled by something like this. Gods, sometimes working with Above’s people felt like shackles around my wrists. They just had so many rules . Even making a discreet inquiry as to the nature of the truce agreed on by Bard could feasibly do damage here, I reluctantly acknowledged, so it was best to set aside the notion entirely. Unless the Tyrant betrayed us once more, at which point the chops would be back on the damned plate.

He wouldn’t though, I thought as I he offered me a bright and knowing smile. Kairos had a finger on the pulse here, on the underlying currents, and he had no intention of giving me an excuse. I smiled back, and it did not reach my eyes.

“That’s a pot forever on the edge of tipping,” the Saint growled. “I’ll not have it.”

“If your issue is with a villain bearing the crown, then I will do so myself,” Roland said.

“That sounds lovely,” the Tyrant grinned. “Indeed, what is one more elaborate lie when one is at the very heart of who you are, Sorcerer? You’ve my seal of approval.”

The hero paled, to my surprise. What was it that Kairos had found out about him? Pilgrim and Saint shared a weighty look and Tariq cleared his throat.

“You are too young for such a burden,” the Peregrine delicately said.

Ouch, I thought. That had had to sting. Having the closest thing to your side of the Game’s communal wise grandfather essentially telling you he didn’t think you’d be able to take it if you stepped into the fire. The Rogue Sorcerer tried to hide his flinch, but he was among the least skilled of the liars here.

“If the Grey Pilgrim wants to take the crown, I’ll make my peace with it,” I conceded.

“You sound like you’re making a concession, Foundling,” the Saint harshly said. “When what you’re doing is giving Below a path to one of the most powerful heroes alive. Shut your damned-”

“Tariq tossed his own crown into the bag, dearest friend,” the Tyrant idly interrupted. “So if he takes one up now with the intent of ruling, who knows what manners of wickedness may come of it? We must think of the children, Catherine.”

Indrani choked at the last sentence, sending Kairos an admiring glance that had the villain overtly preening. Aside from the theatrics, he’d actually made sense. It might be that Tariq would be reclaiming the right to rule he’d discarded, by putting on that crown. Or it might be something else entirely, and a disaster in the making. We couldn’t take the risk.

“Even if I were willing to let that much power fall into the Saint’s hands, I doubt she would be willing to take it,” I said.

“You won’t be getting your hooks in any of us,” Laurence de Montfort bluntly said.

“It cannot be you, Queen Catherine,” Tariq apologetically said. “I yet remember your... brittle temperament as Queen of the Hunt. I cannot in good conscience make bargains with such a creature.”

I grimaced. Well, he wasn’t entirely wrong. I suspected I’d handle apotheosis a lot better if the crystallization of it didn’t come from one of the worst days of my life, but there was no real way to know. And it’d be a lie to pretend the notion of claiming that sort of mantle again was anything but repulsive to me. I’d put power over the rest before, and we’d none of us come out the better for it. Slow learner as I was, I would not claim to be that slow.

“I claim only one crown, and hardly forever,” I said.

“While I would be delighted to lend a hand -” the Tyrant of Helike began.

“No,” I said.

“No,” Tariq said.

“Hah,” Indrani snorted.

The Saint’s hand simply went down to her sword.

“- yes, that,” Kairos said, sounding a touch chagrined. “Which leaves only one among us.”

“Kairos,” I mildly said, “did we not once have a conversation on the subject of you taking a swing at my people and the consequences of such an act?”

“It is... possible,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

I nearly twitched in surprise, fixing the old man with a look.

“There would have to be oaths,” the Peregrine said, dipping his head in apology at Archer. “Safeguards.”

“Well, would you look at that,” Indrani mused. “You do listen, after all.”

“Abdication after ten years,” Tariq said, eyes moving to me. “Guaranteed of safe passage for those waging war on Keter. Abiding by earthly treaties.”

I was genuinely taken aback by the turn, enough that it took me a moment to get ahold of my thoughts.

“I won’t force her to do it,” I flatly said.

“Cat,” Archer said. “Look at me.”

I turned, eyes lingering on the traces of blood still on her forehead. The reminder that she’d already died once tonight.

“It’s just ten years,” she said. “And you didn’t age while Duchess or Queen, so I’m losing nothing there. I’m not enough of an asshole to insist we murder someone over a decade.”

Except that she was, unkind as that thought was. Because Indrani was lovely and generous to those few that she loved, but the rest? She was not the kind to bleed for strangers, and I doubted the few months we’d spent apart had changed that about her. Or maybe I just didn’t want to. What would it mean, if months away from the Woe was all it took to let her compassion bloom? Or it might just be away from me , I darkly thought. What had I ever really asked of her, save for slaughter? And though that thought remained, so did my gaze remain on the bloody marks streaking across her forehead. That, too, might be a reason for seeking crown. For all the other burdens of my time as Sovereign of Moonless Nights, I’d been absurdly difficult to kill.

“I won’t pretend it doesn’t make things easier,” I said, meeting her eyes. “Having that much power at your fingertips. But it blinds you to other ways to die, Indrani. It takes from you as much as you’ll gain – perhaps even more.”

“I know,” Archer said. “I was there, remember? But I want to know what the word looks like, from that vantage. That’s reason enough.”

“Is that really who you want to be?” I quietly asked.

“An entire world of secret paths, of unknown horizons,” Indrani smiled. “Wouldn’t be that something to tread?”

It’ll change you , I wanted to say. Even if you put down the crown after ten years, and that is never as simple as you’d think, it will still have changed you in ways you can scarce understand. Gods, I wanted to forbid her to go through with it. And the thing was, if I pushed hard enough she just might withdraw her agreement. I knew that sure as I knew my own breathing. Indrani trusted me enough for that. But it would never be the same, afterward: we would no longer be partners or friends – a line would be drawn, and she’d be on the side of it that meant servant. Merciless Gods. It was ugly and selfish of me, but I would rather let her try the crucible of Twilight than knowingly destroy what bound us to each other.

“We’ll have to agree on the wording of the oaths,” I finally croaked out.

I met her gaze, and an understanding passed between us. It was not love – neither of us had been afflicted with that particular delusion regarding the other, for all that we occasionally shared a bed – or at least not that kind of it. It was... a recognition, maybe. That I thought she was making a mistake, but that I respected her enough to stand in the way of decisions she freely made. Had this, too, been a pivot? A moment she’d look back to, in years to come, when wondering if the ties binding her to the Woe were a lifeline or a leash. Perhaps pivot was a conceited term to use, when matched to the unspoken understanding of two mortals of no real import in the greater scheme of things. Too grand for the two of us. But there was resonance to the meaning of it, I thought. Whether this had been a fault or something akin to wisdom I’d not know for years to come, but in time I would know. I was unnaturally certain of that, in the beat that followed her hazelnut eyes meeting my own. Indrani inclined her head towards me, not speaking a word.

“No,” the Saint of Swords said.

The Tyrant let out a pleased, breathless sigh.

“You told me if I still believed you wrong come morning light, we’d put this to judgement,” Laurence said, looking at Tariq. “Dawn’s around the corner, old friend, and now I tell you this: I will not brook this deal you would strike. It is an abomination in every way.”

Indrani casually took a half-step to the side, coming closer to me. In a better position to buy me time to weave miracles, if it came to blades bared. I wished I could say she was being unreasonably cynical by doing so. I almost spoke up, but there was a reason Kairos was keeping his mouth shut. He, too, suspected that anyone carrying Below’s banner in the Saint’s eyes intervening now would be met with immediate assault. Robber had told me a sapper’s saying, once: no one has hands clever enough to juggle munitions. Simply by speaking up here, I’d be cracking a match in a warehouse full of goblinfire.

“Only ten years,” Tariq told her. “It is breathing room so that we can arrange for a more agreeable ending, Laurence.”

“It’s condoning the birth of a court hatched by servants of the Hellgods,” the Saint barked. “There’s no going back from that once we unleash it, Tariq. And odds are we won’t live to see that garden of ruin come to bear fruit – by what right do you pass on that woe to those that come after us?”

“You would rather embrace murder than compromise?” the Rogue Sorcerer said.

“Shut your mouth, boy,” Laurence hissed. “You understand nothing. You shy away from taking a life now, from takin a risk, and you think that makes you virtuous? All it makes you is complicit . Your scruples will cost a hundred generations blood and fear simply because you flinched when time for the hard choices came.”

“How hard a choice is it really for you?” the Sorcerer replied, tone ice cold. “When did you last make another, Saint of Swords?”

Laurence’s face shuttered closed. Hells, I had to admit that Roland was starting to grow on me some.

“Peace, Roland,” the Pilgrim said.

“Would that she’d hear of it, if only the once,” the younger man scathingly replied.

“No, Tariq, let him speak,” the Saint said. “Let him sing the praises of compromising with the Enemy. You’’ survive this, Sorcerer, for you may yet bring some light into this world. But burn this moment into your memory, child. Keep it close. There will come day when it burns like a lash on your back.”

“What is made can be unmade, Laurence,” the Pilgrim told her. “Even if this bargain were a mistake, and I do not believe it to be, it remains impermanent.”

“Does it?” she asked. “You’re letting them in, Tariq. You are setting a precedent for us sitting across the table from the monstrous and the mad, pretending they can be reasoned with. And Gods be good, perhaps this once it might even be true.”

My brow rose.

“And yet it cannot be allowed to pass,” Laurence said. “Because once the exception is made, the precedent is set, the ink touched the water – it’s done. It’s over. The poison is in and there’s only sickness and death ahead. How many times will this bargain you’d strike lead those who come after us astray? How long will it take, before Twilight becomes a murderous madness that can reach everywhere across Calernia?”

“We must first ensure there is a Calernia left to safeguard, Laurence,” Tariq quietly said.

“Compromising the soul to preserve the flesh,” the Saint of Swords said, “is the first step into Below’s service. There are things worth facing ruin for, Tariq.”

“No compromise with the Enemy,” the Grey Pilgrim echoed. “That is your principle. Yet you know mine, Laurence.”

“So I do,” Laurence de Montfort softly agreed.

Light bloomed, but already the Saint of Swords was moving and she struck.

Chapter 49: Cracked

“They who first look at the sun will never see aught else.”
– Helikean saying

It was just steel. There must have been thousands of longswords just like it in Iserre alone, decently crafted but nothing extraordinary. It was the work of some smith somewhere, not an enchanter or legendary artisan, so there was nothing to that sword that should allow it to cut into the likes of Twilight’s Crown. Except, of course, that it was Saint of Swords of wielded it. Tabard trailing behind her, the old heroine crossed the room in three smooth strides and her sword arced down beautifully: the strike was like flowing water. And hit something that shouldn’t have been there, a subtle glamour broken when Laurence de Montfort’s blow scythed straight through the gargoyle that’d thrown itself in the way. The Tyrant of Helike cackled, high-pitched and delighted, but the Saint’s blow carved through the stone construct and continued through and into the crown. I thought, as I watched the edge of the steel bite through chalcedony and mother-of-pearl, that if not for the for the gargoyle it would have gone straight through. Yet the Tyrant’s stage trick had tainted what would have otherwise been a clear blow, and so instead the Saint’s sword cut halfway through the Twilight Crown before it stopped.

Not even a heartbeat of stillness reigned over the room before a torrent of power tore out.

Everyone here had been in a scrap or two, so the raging tendrils of sorcery that went out did not score a kill the way they might have with less experienced Named. Reflex had me half-stepping to the side, still a swordswoman picking her distance for all my lack of sword, and dusk-like power howled through a bare few feet to my side. More importantly, having been close to the initial burst the Saint had been forced to retreat or see herself run through by a tendril. More than one, even, for a handful of howling streaks chased her even as she retreated, never slowing nor missing a step. Had her attack awoken something in the crown, some shard of sapience? A flicker of a look to the side instead showed me a hard-faced Rogue Sorcerer with his hands outstretched and his long coat fluttering in unnatural breeze, guiding the sorcery with sharp gestures.

“Treachery,” the Tyrant of Helike gleefully hooted. “Treachery most foul!”

With great flourish he presented his left palm, allowing one of the chittering gargoyles in attendance to place down a wand of what looked like pure gold on it.

“Cat?” Indrani calmly asked, eyes on the Saint of Swords.

She was ducking and weaving, for now, driven back by the Sorcerer’s trick. But it’d be temporary. I wouldn’t trust means that feeble to hold back Archer for long, and Laurence de Montfort was her superior in several ways.

“Don’t kill her,” I said. “Unless it puts you at risk not to.”

“Gotcha,” Indrani nonchalantly said.

In a whisper of boots on stone she slipped into the fray, the maelstrom of unleashed energies that had yet to ebb in the slightest. I’d expected the crown to either keep bleeding like a stuck pig or translate the wound into a single punishing torrent of power, but it wasn’t indulging any of my expectations. It seemed almost like the lashing sorcery was the wound itself, thrashing about the room in some kind of eldritch pain. A nudge from Andronike had my gaze lingering on the side of the cut Laurence’s sword had made, a sliver of Night sharpening my sight. Ah. So it was eating into the rest of the crow, shaving through a sliver at a time. It was simply slow and little at a time, though if we didn’t settle this mess for too long we’d still be in trouble. The Tyrant’s wand proved to be an artefact of some power, a heartbeat later, as he aimed it towards the Saint and spoke an idle word: streak of brilliant lightning went out, forking around an approaching Archer and striking at the Saint from both sides. Undaunted, Laurence de Montfort parried one streak and smoothly ducked beneath the other. Just in time for Indrani’s boot to catch her in the chin, sending her sprawling back. Three streaks of twilight-stuff, guided by the Sorcerer, snapped out at the falling heroine. One would have punctured her throat, by my reckoning, but Roland redirected it towards her shoulder instead at the last moment and that was room enough for the Saint to manoeuvre: she twisted on herself, allowing one of the streaks to hit her flank and using the pressure to adjust her fall out of the way of the other two.

She landed in a crouch, slapped aside Indrani’s follow-through strike with the flat of her blade and brutally backhanded Archer. I sucked in a breath, but Indrani had scrapped with Laurence before. She slid back, parried a probing blow by the Saint and adjusted her angle of attack to make the most of the support the Sorcerer was still providing. She’d make it through this, I told myself. I couldn’t even hold it against Roland not to have put an end to this fight right out of the gate, not truly. The Saint had been a respected elder and ally until not so long ago, and even though she’d done so treacherously she was only going through with the fate he’d himself advocated for the Twilight Crown. A glance told me Kairos already had another artefact in hand, some sort of jeweled silver arrow, and was preparing to throw it like he was playing darts in a tavern. Yet it was the last of us whose reaction I was most dreading to look upon, and my eyes finally turned to the Grey Pilgrim. I hid a grimaced. The Peregrine looked as if he’d aged twenty years in the last twenty heartbeats, and given his age that led him at least one foot into the grave. His face had gone ashen, his footing unsure, and if he’d still had his staff I was certain he’d be leaning on it for support. He had, I thought, genuinely not seen this coming. Neither had I, though that’d been more because I’d expected the Pilgrim to seem more worried if it was a possibility and he hadn’t been. I could almost hear my father chiding me for relying on second-hand knowledge without having contingencies in place accounting for it being false.

“Pilgrim,” I said.

He did not reply, eyes clouded as he watched the Saint of Swords cleverly snap out of Indrani’s longknives out of her grasp, catch it with her free hand and smash the pommel into Archer’s cheek. A moment later the Tyrant’s strange arrow struck at her with a keening sound, and though she flicked her blade back in time to cut through it barely helped: at the moment of impact, the arrow broke and a dozen sharp darts of wind exploded out. Maybe half hit the Saint’s flank, scoring blood if no deep wound, though that didn’t hurt her half as much as Indrani’s other blade cutting halfway through her thumb and snatching back the stolen longknife.

“ Pilgrim ,” I said more loudly. “This is not the time to sink into yourself, Tariq. Whatever grief you might hold, how many lives is it worth?”

That shook him out, enough his blue eyes turned to me.

“The crown is wounded,” he said.

“So I’d gathered,” I flatly said.

“You do not understand,” Tariq said. “The wound is permanent. It is part of the crown, now. And it will kill whoever bears it.”

Shit , I thought.

“This from your Choir?” I pressed.

“Yes,” he tightly said.

Shit , I thought once more, with feeling. I wasn’t going to return for a sermon at the House of Light anytime soon, but in current situation I was willing to take the Ophanim to their word. We’d be killing whoever ended up putting it on, which disqualified Indrani from his discussion of succession as far as I was concerned. I’d already had enough close calls with death that I suspected I’d run out of ways to cheat it, and if I croaked it here too many things fell apart. That left who, the Sorcerer or the Pilgrim? It’d have to be Roland, I grimly thought. Much as he’d been growing on me, if the Grey Pilgrim died here the storm that’d follow would be massive. It was an ugly thought, turning on someone who’d been becoming a true ally, but what other choice was there? Indrani , the thought came. I felt a sharp well of disgust at myself, both for her name having come to me at all and then my refusal to entertain it. Was it not rank hypocrisy, to demand this sacrifice from strangers while denying even thought of it when it came to my own? There’d been more than one reason villainy came easier to me than the other side’s works.

“It will have to be me,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

Night preserve me from godsdamned heroes . It wasn’t a righteous sacrifice it you screwed the people you were allegedly doing it for, it was just vanity.

“No,” I bluntly said. “Don’t be a fucking fool. Now, would you help us contain the Saint before someone gets killed?”

The Tyrant had, while we spoke, thrown a javelin of red coral at Laurence. Poorly, for his arm was trembling and it was dubious he’d ever trained his body, so it flew errantly and skittered against the ground – where it blew up into a storm of fire, a solid ten feet to the side of anyone else in the room. The Saint leapt through the flames, apparently deciding to take advantage the opportunity to shake her pursuit, but Kairos already had tossed out a large opaque orb of glass and it caught her in the belly as she went through. It broke against her and smoke poured out as words boomed out in the tradertongue, the smoke solidifying and trying to bind her limbs.

“Laurence,” the Grey Pilgrim called out, but his call was drowned out by the booming tradertongue harangue.

For a moment I wondered if Kairos had planned it that way, before dismissing the motion. Though it was possible, in truth it hardly mattered if it was. I reached for the Night, wove a globe of it and sent it spinning forward. Though it’d do no harm to anyone, it swallowed the words that’d come from the orb like a pit of darkness swallowing even the sound of falling. Unfortunately it also took the smoke bindings with the rest, which I’d not meant for it to do in the slightest. Kairos protested, though I ignored him.

“ Laurence ,” the Grey Pilgrim repeated. “Desist now, while you still can.”

“Better dead than kneeling to the dark,” the Saint of Swords snarled. “Do your-“

The cold beam of Light struck her in the chest before she even finished speaking, and I almost let out a whistle. I’d felt that, the rippling of it in the air. The Peregrine was finally done fucking around, it seemed. The side of her chest a ruin of burned flesh, the old heroine swallowed a scream and slid across the stone floor. Already the Grey Pilgrim was crafting fresh strikes of Light, while Archer ran towards our opponent with five streaks of twilight-stuff guided by the Sorcerer following hidden behind her. The Tyrant had a handful of gargoyles before him presenting artefacts for him to wield like a pack of chittering wee sommeliers surrounding an Alamans prince with choice vintages. With the Pilgrim having been moved to act, the balance of this scrap was sharply on our side. But was it, I suddenly wondered, too sharply on our side? The crown was still falling apart, sliver by sliver, so we had to end this. Yet if this began a lone principled heroine standing against a band of five that was mostly villains...

“Give up, Saint,” the Tyrant of Helike drawled. “Our victory is inevitable. You might even say that, in a manner of speaking, we are invin-”

“ Kairos ,” I screamed. “Don’t you fucking dare-”

“-vincible,” the Tyrant finished in a cackle. “Submit to Below and you may yet be spared, do-gooder.”

It wasn’t anything as obvious as Laurence de Montfort suddenly finding all her wounds had been healed, or a lightshow of power being shoved into her tired frame. Yet, just like that, as she was dragged by Kairos’ latest bout of treachery onto the path of a story the Saint of Swords stood a little straighter. Her eyes sharpened, her footing grew more assured.

“Archer, retreat-” I yelled.

But it was too late. Indrani’s first blade extended as her whole arm outstretched and she place the point of her longknife at the Saint’s back with blinding quickness. Just not quite quick enough. Laurence took a half-step to the side, letting her pass, and cut off her arm the wrist. She would have flicked the blade a second time and taken Archer’s head, if not for the Sorcerer’s quick divesting of twilight-streaks forcing her to withdraw a step back. The Pilgrim’s gleaming Light caught her a moment later, but with hard eyes she carved right through and leapt up. The Tyrant and I struck at the same time, his green jade baton sending out a swarm of green insects at the Saint as I wove Night into dense flecks and sent them out at her. But it was like, I realized, tossing logs into a fire. The insects – each one made of jade, I only then caught – found a cut in the air that warded their approach save for those that impacted it and found themselves cut through. I’d formed four flecks of Night and the Saint almost contemptuously cut through only one, though at exactly the right time for the detonation that ensued to catch the other three. Her right boot landed on the Rogue Sorcerer’s face a moment later and he went down like a sack of beets from the hit. Hells, that’d gone south in a hurry. Unlike the heroes and possibly even myself, Kairos had to know that the Saint would kill him in a heartbeat if she could. So why would he throw the fight this way?

I glanced at the Tyrant of Helike and found his gaze, half of it red as fresh blood, resting on my ebony staff. Kairos grinned when I caught him, utterly unrepentant. I found myself wishing I’d succeeded at cutting his throat instead of blackening his eye. The Pilgrim had chosen to prevent Indrani bleeding out instead of pursuing the offensive, to my relief, and as she held her severe hand to the stump with gritted teeth one of the greatest living healers of Calernia began to put it all back together. Good. Archer might make it back into the fight, I just needed to use Kairos and my own talents to hold until we could turn this around. The Saint should be coming for either of us by now. As it happened, Laurence de Montfort rose from the smooth crouch she’d landed in after tumbling past the unconscious Sorcerer. She glanced at me, calmly, and then her gaze swept the rest of the room. It came to rest on the crown, and without a word she ignored us and went straight for it. Oh Hells. It might be, I knew, that finishing the cut would only break this realm and spare us all either death or bargain.

Or it might mean the death of hundreds of thousands.

“Slow her,” I ordered the Tyrant.

My tone was harsh enough he did not argue. The unpleasant truth was that I did not have the means to contain someone like Laurence de Montfort. Every trick left in my arsenal derived from the patronage of Sve Noc, whose blood-drenched path to apotheosis made the exact kind of power that someone like the Saint of Swords had been meant to put down. Maybe if I’d been quick enough to think of it earlier all of us save Archer could have let ourselves be ‘beaten’ and she could have duelled the Saint with something close to even footing. But at this point trying to use numbers to bring her down was effectively using the same tactics that’d led a horde of devils to swarm this very heroine barely an hour ago. The result back then had been providing the Saint of Swords with a lot of bodies to cut, and I had no reason to believe this would go any differently. I couldn’t contain her or defeat her, and maybe if I had longer I might be able to figure out another way to get this done but I didn’t have the time. So either I bent, and let her toss the dice with the lives of three great armies and most of Iserre besides.

That, or I killed her.

Breathing out, I began to limp forward even as Kairos tossed priceless old artefacts in the Saint’s way like they were apple cores. My staff I raised, and abandoned the delusion that it had ever been one. Night roiled and the ebony fell to ash, leaving behind only a sword in a scabbard. The latter was an ornate thing, unlike most I’d borne in my time. Carved obsidian, depicting the tale of the fool girl who’d made accord with the Night. The blade had not once unsheathed waited within as my fingers tightened around the scabbard. Its long handle was onyx and amethyst, stones chosen for one’s facility in holding power and the other’s aptitude for bridging the mortal and the divine through communion. Kairos had, against all odds, succeeding at expending enough of his inherited trove of treasures to force the Saint to step back. She still stood by the throne’s side, some sort of shining panels of sorcery standing between her and the crown, but my advance drew her eyes went to me. My hobbling had taken me ahead of all the others, and at my approach she smiled a hard smile.

“A duel, is it?” Laurence de Montfort said.

I lowered the scabbard to my side, right hand gripping the grip.

“Stand down,” I said, offering once last chance. “Stand down, and we can still end this with words instead of blood.”

“Some bargains compromise the very heart of what you are,” the Saint replied. “You’ll lose, Foundling. Call your minions back and let me end it the way it should have been done since the start.”

I breathed out, steadied my stance.

“You’re mortal,” Laurence de Montfort sharply said.

“So are you,” I replied, and for the first time since I’d left the Everdark I drew a sword.

I’d gathered Night for months in preparation of this moment, not a single mote of it anybody’s but my own. This was a prayer, after all, not a ritual. I was making an appeal to Sve Noc, and sacrificing power so that a miracle might be granted. And so, when my sword cleared the scabbard, it was revealed to have no blade. Night pulsed all around us, a living and breathing thing.

One.

“What have you done?” the Saint asked.

Two.

“Nothing,” I honestly replied.

Three.

“Do you think I’ll not strike you for being unarmed?” the Saint snarled.

Four, five, six, I counted as she spoke, and she stiffened with the last. It was close, then. I’d wondered how long she would last. I touched me too, but Gods forgive me the touch was lighter than I’d believed it would be. The Dead King, it seemed, might have been terrifyingly correct. The Saint took a step forward, and I almost spoke but instead I close my mouth. It would not do to monologue, would it? Not when the end was close. I watched her skin tighten, grow sallow, I watched her limbs weaken and finally she fell down. A moment later and she was dead. Struck down without a trace. It had, from the beginning to the end, taken eleven heartbeats.

And so in the heart of the prayer I had made, eleven years had passed.

I’d always known that I couldn’t beat the Saint of Swords in a fight. What kind of a fool would fight a heroine forged of war through that which had forged her? No, I’d heeded the lessons of my years under the Black Knight and slain her through one of the few things the Heavens did not protect their chosen from: the passage of time. I let another heartbeat pass, simply to be sure, and only then did the Night’s touch upon this broken realm withdraw.

Chapter 50: Sunset

“Blood freely spilled always offers greater power, for it carries the worth of both the blood and the choice.”
– Extract from “The Most Noble Art of Magic”, by Dread Emperor Sorcerous

“Huh,” the Tyrant said. “That is not what I believed that would do.”

I wheeled on him with cold eyes. For all that he’d helped me land the killing stroke on the Saint, he was also the reason there’d been a need for one at all. We’d been close to subduing her, before he’d decided to taunt Fate and loudly dare it to meddle. There would still have been the issue of the wounded crown, but Gods I would have preferred ending this without Laurence de Montfort’s corpse on the ground. Not because of any deep affection for the heroine, though I’d had a few perturbing glimpses on this journey at the woman that lay under the zealotry, but because the Saint of Sword’s death would both have a messy aftermath and rob us of someone who might have been able to truly hurt the Dead King. I’d begun this winter itching to put her down, but now... A virtue was no less of one because it belonged to an enemy, and for all her horrid flaws Laurence de Montfort had hardly been without the opposite. My hand had been forced, in the end, when the choice had been between a woeful roll of the dice and slaying her where she stood. But for all that the choice I’d made would stay with me, I would not for a moment forget who’d forced me to make it.

“This was,” I said, “one betrayal too many, Kairos.”

“There’s no such thing, Catherine,” he confidently told me. “And if there was, yet one more betrayal would see to it.”

Shouldn’t be too difficult to kill him, I thought. I had no intention of allowing anywhere near the decision yet to be made over the crown, or of sparing him after that last knife in the back, so ending this here and now before the Twilight Crown finished crumbling seemed the way to go about it. Kairos Theodosian still had a handful of attending gargoyles and more artefacts than anyone should have at their fingertips, but aside from that he was spent. He’d burned his strength against the Skein and then against me, shaken his sleeves enough that all his worst tricks had already been revealed. And while I was hardly fresh, above us two crows still slowly circled. Omens of death, and death was what I intended on delivering: if I need seek the helping hand of my patronesses for that, so be it. On the other hand, I grimly thought, there was still one last use left for the Tyrant of Helike tonight.

“There’s one path that doesn’t lead to me snatching the life out of you tonight,” I coldly said. “And that’s you putting on that crown.”

“So it seems I am to die,” the Tyrant pensively said, “unless, instead, I am to die. Truly, my friend, you present me with a dilemma.”

“Burn enough bridges and you’ll find there’s no pretty path left,” I bluntly said. “You just tried to get half of us killed by flapping your mouth, Kairos. Fuck the amnesty you bargained for: the last courtesy I offer you is deciding the shape of your grave.”

The slightest flicker of power, but there were only so many times someone could use a trick around me before I caught on.

“Riddle me this, Catherine,” the Tyrant cheerfully said. “What makes you think that-”

Night flooded me, bringing strength to my hands, and I crushed the obsidian scabbard still in my grasp. The powder that fell I blew through and, shaping the Night I threaded within it, cast it outwards. The obsidian dust revealed Kairos’ glamoured silhouette as he tried to make for the door and the Night I’d sent out wove itself into a noose that delicately went around his neck. The end of that rope fell into my palm, and as the noose tightened my fingers closed around it.

“Well,” Kairos Theodosian slowly said, glamour dispelling. “This is embarrassing.”

“Don’t pay attention to him,” the glamour I’d been conversing with insisted. “He’s an impostor.”

I wound the Night rope around my fist and spread my stance to steady my footing.

“How’s your dilemma coming along?” I asked.

“Bracingly,” the Tyrant replied without missing a beat.

“Enough,” the Grey Pilgrim tiredly said.

The streak of Light cut halfway through the rope of my own making, severing it clean. I was, bluntly put, too surprised by the old man’s sudden turn to properly react.

“How many of us do you intend to slay tonight, Queen Catherine?” the Peregrine said. “Enough.”

“If it’s not him it’ll have to be one of us,” I pointed out. “There is no reason to spare him, Pilgrim. One might well argue he earned that end.”

“Shall we speak of endings earned then, Black Queen?” the Grey Pilgrim replied, tone remote and eyes considering. “It would be an exchange of some consequence, I think.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “You struck out too, Pilgrim. To contain her, as I wanted to. And the damned reason it had to go further than that was the Bard’s fucking amnesty, which you insisted on-”

“I am well aware of what took place here tonight,” the Peregrine harshly interrupted. “Are you ? I’d just lent my hand to the killing of a woman I loved like kin and trusted just as deep. Those ties were already tried and tested when you were yet to be born, Catherine Foundling. I did this because the bargain you offer may yet save lives by the millions and lay the foundation of a long-lasting peace. But do not mistake that, not for a moment, as my having been suborned to your every whim.”

“None of that means he should be sent home with a slap on the wrist,” I hissed.

“A trusted and farsighted comrade has asked me to spare the Tyrant’s life,” he flatly said. “And so it will be spared, no matter the nasty tricks he may play.”

“You are the hero of my heart, Grey Pilgrim,” Kairos Theodosian said, picking out the Night noose still around his neck and dropping it to the floor. “In the spirit of my deep gratitude, I would offer-”

The weight that fell over the room was almost a familiar thing. Above us Sve Noc spared a glance, and so my knees were not made to buckle, but the Tyrant of Helike was offered no such protection. The odd-eyed villain collapsed, first on one knee and then outright to the ground for that leg’s shaking. Twitching on the stone floor, Kairos rasped out a pained breath as the Grey Pilgrim stared down at him. Sharing that gaze, the Choir of Mercy looked upon the Tyrant without the slightest speck of compassion.

“You are not forgiven, Kairos Theodosian,” the Peregrine said, voice ringing with power. “You will yet serve a greater purpose, and for that you will be allowed to crawl out of this place through filth and dust. But you are not forgiven , you creature of ruin and perfidy.”

The Tyrant twitched on the floor still and I realized with a start it was as much from his convulsing body as a shivering laughter ripping out of his throat.

“Coward,” he gasped. “Even now Mercy holds your hand. Coward .”

The old man strode forward, dusty grey robes trailing behind him, and he knelt before the cripple before laying a hand over his lips.

“Through lies and deception you have brought great suffering,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “And so from you I take that poisonous gift: never again will you speak untruth, lest it be the last words you speak at all.”

Radiant light blinded my eyes, for a heartbeat, and through the Pilgrim’s touch I felt the Ophanim reach out into Creation. This would be a curse, if a villain had been the one to place it. I wondered what it was to be called, when a heroic hand had done the placing. My brow furrowed. Would lying make Kairos make a mute or kill him? It’d not been clear, by the phrasing. Looking at the Peregrine’s shoulders, I wondered if that’d been on purpose. The Tyrant’s body shuddered one last time, like someone whose fever was going the way of the grave, and only then did his twitching end. He exhaled a ragged breath.

“This is not,” Kairos Theodosian guffawed, “the last you’ve seen of me.”

Mismatched eyes going wide, he looked up and waited. A moment passed and he did not die.

“Best get crawling then, I suppose,” the Tyrant of Helike mused. “Until next time, friends.”

Without a hint of shame he flipped onto his belly and began dragging his expensive robes through the filth, fleeing the throne room like a snake slithering on the ground. Three heartbeats later the last remaining gargoyles ran out after him, as quick as their little legs allowed. I debated, seriously, reaching for the Night and just vaporizing the back of his head. The temptation was there, made even heavier by the way the odds were good I’d manage it. But if I did, it wasn’t the story that’d punish me. I’d be, in essence, breaking off ties with the Grey Pilgrim. Which I couldn’t afford to, if the Accords were to be more than a waste of ink and parchment.

“That was a mistake,” I finally said.

“If it was,” the Grey Pilgrim said, “then it was mine to make. Not yours.”

I kept my face calm but winced beneath it. Already the cracks were beginning to run through what I’d wanted to be the foundations of the Liesse Accords. And it wasn’t fair, I thought, for there was plenty of fault to spare and divide. But in the end, the Peregrine had stuck to our arrangement and helped slay the same woman whose life he’d bargained for. I could not truly ask more of him or begrudge his bitterness over having been led to this pass.

“If you’re quite finished,” Archer spoke up, “then I could use a hand, Pilgrim. I’m usually concerned only with hitting heads, not what comes after. Does he need healing?”

She’d propped up the Rogue Sorcerer over her knee, supporting the back of his neck. The Saint had knocked Roland unconscious, but aside from a red boot mark on his forehead the spellcaster should have no lasting marks. A concussion seemed likely, though, Named or not. The Pilgrim hurried to the younger hero’s side, wielding Light with a delicate touch for but a few moments before the Sorcerer woke. The mark, I noted, had gone from bright red from light pink but it still remained highly visible.

“She’s dead then,” Roland croaked out, eyes going to the heroine’s corpse. “Gods, what a waste.”

“So it was,” I quietly agreed.

His eyes, for once without trace of a coloured ring around the pupil, met mine.

“Your work?” he asked.

I nodded. Behind us, as is mocking the quiet of the conversation now taking place, the crown continued lashing out around itself with tendrils of sorcery.

“Whoever bears that will die,” the Rogue Sorcerer frankly said. “I’d be like trying to grip a naked blade as tight as you can, only with your soul instead of your fingers.”

The Saint of Swords’ last kill, unerringly made from beyond the grave. Her aged figure still lay sprawled at the foot of the throne, still and silent. No one had dared to touch it.

“Look like the choice was made for us,” Archer said, seemingly amused. “We’re back at making a god and killing it, whether we like it or not.”

“There is no choice to make,” Tariq evenly said.

And already I could see the lay of that, how it’d unfold. A band of five assembled before the eyes of princes and princesses of Procer had gone into broken Arcadia at the urging of the Black Queen, among them perhaps the two most famous heroes alive. Neither the Regicide nor the Peregrine would return from that journey. The treacherous Tyrant of Helike would escape with but a curse, and from the heroes the only survivor would be the Rogue Sorcerer – a hero little known, and a mage to boot. Sorcery was not well-trusted, in Procer, and seemingly rare in Levant.

We’d be at war again before Morning Bell, bargain or not.

“Agreed,” I said. “It’ll have to be me.”

Three gazes turned to me, Archer’s the least surprised.

“You said it was possible resurrection would work,” I reminded the Pilgrim. “And dawn comes. If it doesn’t, well... Vivienne’s been designated as heiress to the throne. I wish she’d had longer to prepare, but we don’t always get to choose.”

“No,” Indrani said.

I blinked at her.

“You’ve cheated death too many times, Cat,” she bluntly said. “You’ve always squeaked out of it so far because you had a story at your back, but this time the wind’s going the other way. You’ve spent your luck thrice over, this is just going to get you killed.”

“It’ll get someone killed regardless,” I said. “I don’t relish the thought I might not come back from this, Indrani, but I knew the risk when I began going down this path.”

“That’s nice,” Archer casually said. “Very stirring. But if you take so much as a step in that crown’s direction, I’ll knock you the fuck out.”

She was, I realized as I looked at her stony expression, absolutely serious. It was a strange thing, to both love and be furious with someone in the same moment for the same reason.

“It cannot be you, Queen Catherine,” the Grey Pilgrim agreed. “You underestimate the depth of the loyalties you have earned, and not only here. The Army of Callow would carry your corpse to the gates of Salia to make a funeral pyre of it. And I shudder to think of what the drow would be, without their designated conscience.”

“It can’t be you either,” I hissed. “You think it’ll go bad if I die? Hells, Pilgrim, your death alone would have Levant on the warpath but the Saint and you? Even if the First Prince turned up just to order the Alliance armies down there not to fight we’d still have a battle on our hands.”

“Then it has to be me,” the Rogue Sorcerer tightly said. “Archer has already been resurrected once, there is not even a chance of her being spared lasting death.”

He shuddered out a breath.

“It will have to be me,” Roland repeated. “It makes sense. I am the only practitioner among you, who best to shape this realm in what is needed of it?”

“At a guess? The only person in this room to have ruled over a court of the fae before,” I said.

“Cat, you can’t be trusted to make a choice like that right now,” Indrani frankly said. “Whenever there’s a blunder – and I’m guessing you count the Saint’s death as one – you always get all... self-flagellating. Like you’re just looking for a sword to fall on. Pilgrim says it’s good politics to keep you alive? Even better. I don’t really give a shit, though. I’d rather cut the damn thing than let you put it on.”

“You can’t think like that, Archer,” I sharply said. “I’m one life. That’s the weight on the scale. You’d be putting at risk hundreds of thousands-”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m not one of Above’s footsoldiers, isn’t it?” Archer said. “I get to be selfish if I want to.”

I wasn’t going to make headway there, was I? Touched as I was, I was just as infuriated. Because I couldn’t be grateful for this, not when it might cost the world so much for her to follow through. Who was it, I’d wondered, who’d taught her to love people on her own terms – much as I wanted to blame the Lady of the Lake for it, the dark suspicion lingered it might just have been me.

“It will not be you,” the Pilgrim said. “Nor will it be Roland.”

Though he’d gone pale at the notion of perhaps embracing his own death, I felt a sliver of admiration for the way the Sorcerer didn’t simply take the first way out he was offered.

“The Black Queen was correct,” Roland said. “There may be war, if you are the one crowned and killed.”

“My death will echo,” the Grey Pilgrim said, cocking his head to the side. “I have been promised this. There will not be war.”

The Ophanim agreed with this? Godsdamned angels.

“You’re needed to keep the heroes together,” I said. “There’s no one else with the pull.”

Maybe, and I would not have put a lot of faith in that prospect, maybe the Saint could have succeeded at that. She’d had the strength, if not the charisma.

“The White Knight will return,” the Pilgrim serenely said. “He was already on his way.

“The Tyrant had plans about him,” I said.

“I expect he does,” the Peregrine said, undertone amused. “It will come to nothing, under the stern glare of the Seraphim.”

“It might be that you could forgive my death,” the Rogue Sorcerer hesitantly said. “None could do the same, for you.”

“Forgiveness was never meant to be a salve for every wound made on Creation,” the Pilgrim gently said. “It was a gift to be handed out in the face of grave injustice. And there is no injustice, Roland, in an old man being allowed to rest at last.”

“So you’re just going to lie down and die?” I said.

The was a heartbeat of silence.

“The Saint of Swords is dead,” I said. “We all had a hand in that, mine looming largest by far. But that’s it, Pilgrim? Your friend is dead and you feel tired, so you’re choosing death when Calernia is facing its harshest test since the reign of Triumphant?”

“Queen Catherine,” the Sorcerer hissed. “There is no need for-”

“You’ve done some real nasty things over the years, haven’t you Tariq?” I said. “We both know you have.”

The old man’s blue eyes, limpid as a cloudless summer sky, met mine.

“You don’t get to roll over for death, after crossing those lines,” I said. “After taking on that responsibility.”

“Which of us are you truly haranguing, Black Queen?” the Grey Pilgrim chided me, not unkindly.

“I think I’ll get away with it,” I pensively replied. “I really do.”

Because I’d been here before. Twice. At this crossroads, making this call. I’d chosen death to rid myself of a pattern of three with the Lone Swordsman and taken my due resurrection from the Hashmallim after refusing the crown they offered me. I’d chosen death once more to slip the bindings the Diabolist had entwined me in, making myself the beastly keystone to her demise, and refused the crown she offered me. Liesse had been the crucible of my existence in a way nowhere else in this world could claim to be. Which of my triumphs and ruins had not been born of this place, or taken place among it? Here in this city I’d forged my claim of power over Callow not once but twice – first through bargain, and then through simple might. I’d struck a pact here that allowed Akua Sahelian to govern this place, and when that governance led to folly it was on these grounds I’d torn through her heart. Indrani said I’d cheated my demise too often, and perhaps she was right. Twice, here, I had tricked life out of death. But there’d never been a third, for before I’d woken in the depths of the Everdark mortal once more I’d dreamt and within that dream asked Sve Noc a question: am I dead? And the reply had been: at the threshold . Not through. Not quite dead. And so, I thought, Archer might be wrong in this.

Maybe I did still have a story at my back: twice living through death after twice being offered a crown. There was power in reiteration, in repetition, and few numbers had heavier hand on a story than three. Or, I knew, this might be where the pattern came to a close. This once I’d be reaching for the crown, and so my death would remain. It could go either way, I felt. Yet even then, I had a better chance of living through this than any of the other three. Rolling the dice on poor odds had always been one of my worst habits, I thought, but why stop now? You only lived once – give or take a few times.

“Three times I’ve been offered a crown here, by someone neither fully friend nor foe,” I began. “Three times-“

Archer, sighing, slid behind me and to my indignation she covered my mouth with her palm and put me in a chokehold. I began struggling, but she was Named and I was not: the disparity in strength could not be breached my mundane means.

“Is that... necessary?” the Rogue Sorcerer delicately asked.

“If you feel like you’re winning,” Indrani said, “the single stupidest thing you can do is let Catherine Foundling talk . Go on, Tariq. Before she turns it around on us.”

I reached for the Night, preparing to force her back as gently as I could, but it slipped through my fingers. Fear rose up in me, and I looked up. The Sisters were perched on the edges of the gutted throne room, one to the east and one to the west. They watched, silent.

Are you worthy? Komena asked, a whisper in my ear.

Patrons, I thought. Not tools or companions but goddesses of which I was the high priestess. If I set a measure in their name, I would be measured by it. It was, I admitted, brutally fair of them.

I have brought us here, through scheme and steel , I told them. I’ve tricked mortals and Named, set the Dead King aflight and freed from his grasp the last of the Fairfaxes. I have slain and won victories, all to bring this journey to an end of my making. Who can be worthy, if not me?

Sve Noc watched me, judged me, and in inscrutable silence passed their judgement.

All will be Night, Andronike whispered in my ear, and it tasted like assent.

Indrani knew me best, and so when the goddess-crows above let out a cacophonous caw she immediately tried to knock me unconscious. Unfortunately I knew her as well, and so restored not to struggle but to the first trick I’d even seen one of the Firstborn use: sinking into a pool of Night at my feet, I dissolved into a tendril of shadow and followed forward. Even in that strange, unpleasant state I could feel the clash of Sve Noc and the Choir of Mercy – both attempting to hinder the others’ champion and prevent their foe from hindering their own. They were, at least in that moment, each other’s match. I could hardly see, when shadowed, for unlike drow this state of being did not come naturally to me. I had to leap back into mortal form to get my bearings, though fortunately I found myself not far from the throne. From the corner of my eye I found Indrani, having strung her bow, nocking an arrow and likely intending to wing me before I could claim the crown. The Sorcerer’s jaw was tightly clenched as he worked some manner of sorcery, but it’d be too late. Sidestepping the Saint’s corpse, I reached for the crown.

My fingers went through it

The illusion broke, now that I knew it was there, and so did the one the Rogue Sorcerer had woven around the Peregrine. The Grey Pilgrim took the wounded crown, set with his own star, and placed it upon his brow.

“No,” I shouted.

Like it was the most natural thing in the world, the Grey Pilgrim leaned down and gently pried the Saint of Swords’ blade from her cold hands.

And, just as gently, rammed it through his own heart.

Chapter 51: Twilight

“Of all Praesi I trust least those who come bearing gifts.”
– Queen Yolanda of Callow, the Wicked (known as ‘the Stern’ in contemporary histories)

There was a part of me still, after all these years, that expected the momentous to be flagrant. That the closing of an era or the birth of a realm should be an affair of thunder and lightning, a crashing and crackling storm of power. But that was so rarely the way, wasn’t it? The pivots of history that we all got to see, the speeches and battles and coronations, they so often flowed from unseen turns taken months before. Quiet bargains and private councils, decisions made in the dark. Yet I had learned that the truth of Creation was that while at times power in exercise was deafening, more often it was hushed. Subtle. And as the ending that was breathed into the Twilight Court came from the Grey Pilgrim – Mercy’s patient, farsighted and indirect hand – why would its coming be a raucous thing?

Tariq Fleet-foot, the sword of his oldest friend through the heart, let out a soft gasp and slumped onto the throne. Blue eyes fluttered to a close as trails of scarlet tainted the dusty grey of his robes: death blooming in three hues, painted by the Peregrine’s own hand. The Pilgrim’s face loosened slowly from a clench decades in the making, and as he sagged down against the throne he let out one last shuddering breath. That shudder rippled out, the last will of a man whose life had been a thankless struggle to lessen suffering in a world so very intent on wounding itself time and time again. It was a death that would ring out across Calernia, I thought. One not easily forgotten. Yet, looking at the white-haired healer who’d stumbled back with a sword through his chest, I could not help but believe it had been a lesser ending than he’d deserved. I’d had my quarrels with the Grey Pilgrim, but never once had I thought him malevolent or deliberately vicious. The shudder I’d felt slowly faded, and in deference to the death of a man who had tried so very hard to be a good I closed my eyes. I had no prayers to offer, for the goddesses I kept to were not the kind whose attentions would have been welcomed by the Pilgrim, and so I remained silent instead.

The roof that would have been above our heads had been ripped away by my own wroth, when I’d hunted down Kairos Theodosian meaning to kill him, and so the lazy summer breeze reached us unhindered. It shook me out of my daze, enough that I opened my eyes and looked up. What had been darkness above us, Masego’s grief and madness given shape, had became something softer. Almost wistful. It was closer to night than day, to my eye, but the shade of the twilight writ across the firmament of this realm was a pale and starry blue. Speaking not a word, I limped out of this cursed room. The summit of the tall stone stairs beyond the bronze gates allowed me to stand and take in the breathtaking sight splayed below: what had once been a ruin of dust and flame was now a realm in truth. The Hierophant’s devastating use of this broken realm had been turned into something beautiful: a sprawling kingdom of tall grasses and rolling hills, of shadowy rivers and secret paths. It was a warm evening, like a southern summer’s, yet the breeze was soft and its caress almost playful. It was the kind of night, I thought, that would be a pleasure to journey through.

I wondered if a young man called Tariq had once roamed a twilight much like this one, a very long time ago in a land far from here. If the echo of that memory had been enough to leave its mark on this place. For that this was the inheritance of the Peregrine there could be no denial: just as it had been set on the Twilight Crown, the pilgrim’s star shone above in the starry sky.

“It’s beautiful,” the Rogue Sorcerer quietly said.

I’d not even heard him approach, too deeply lost in my thoughts. Long leather coat trailing at his back, the last of the three heroes to have heeded my call came to stand at my right. He was looking not only at this starlit realm below but also had what had been made of thrice-broken Liesse. The City of Swans had partaken of life breathed into this place, and though it was not the same city that’d once been the jewel of southern Callow I could still see the traces of that place in its fresh face. The ruins had not been raised anew but the sight of them had been... eased by the growth of greenery. Tall shaded trees had become the pillars of slender basilicas, gutted churches turned into ethereal gardens of flowers in shades of dusk. Vines with umbral flowers bound together streets like strange arches and soft grass had grown through both pavestones and graveyards. Liesse, I thought, had become the City of Twilight. A resting place for pilgrims and the lost, bell towers and softs beds of moss awaiting all who’d wander to this cradle of tragedy. I found my throat choking at the sight. How could it not, when Tariq’s last gesture had been to make beauty out of the broken shards of my bitterest failure?

“The star’s always watching,” Archer softly said, having come to stand at my left. “You old rascal. Keeping an eye on it all, are you?”

How strange, that I found the thought comforting when the man had tried to kill me more than once.

“He always did,” Roland said, tone quietly fierce. “Gods, he was not a perfect man. And there are things he did, that he asked us to do... But he looked out for us. Even when it cost him. Especially when it cost him.”

It was not a grand eulogy, for a man who for good and ill had done so much for so many years, but I couldn’t truly mind. What kind of words could any of us say that would be more than a pittance to the living, breathing tribute to the Grey Pilgrim that was around us?

“I wished I’d never had to fight him,” I simply said, the honesty of it feeling a little too raw. “I wish it’d never come to this. But we so rarely get to choose, don’t we?”

“Then win, Black Queen,” the Rogue Sorcerer said, eyes burning as they met mine. “Because this was not nothing . Two great stars fell to forge this realm you promised, two servants of Above like few before and few will ever come again. It has to matter. Or else...”

He trailed off, though it was not a threat. It was almost a petition and more than a little desperate. Or else what did their lives mean? Their tears and blood and decades of bitter struggle to bring just a little light to Calernia? If the fall of such old and honoured stars meant not a thing, what could any of us ever hope to amount to?

“This war has only just begun,” I softly said. “It will take us to Salia, to forge a peace. It will take us to Keter, to visit upon the Dead King what he has so often visited upon us. But there’s another enemy, Sorcerer. She breaks kings with sentences and topples kingdoms with but the lightest of touches. None of this can end before she’d been killed. For good.”

Roland dipped his head, not in acceptance but at least in acknowledgement.

“It seems,” he said, “that we have much to speak about.”

That we did, I silently agreed, dipping my own head in a return of courtesy. But not here, not now. Not looking at what could either be taken as a last breath of life freely gifted or an entire realm made into the mausoleum of good intentions.

“Not dawn yet, I think,” Archer said. “But close. It might be time to go back, Catherine.”

She was right, I knew. The Pilgrim had promised that the manner of his death would assure there was no war between the Grand Alliance and my own armies, but his death would still be catastrophic to relations between my people and the opposition. The Tyrant of Helike, by now, would not doubt have crawled back to his armies and begun his hasty retreat. There would be fears to quell, explanations to give, and more duties to see to than there were hours to either night or day. I should go back, for though the triumvirate of Vivienne, Juniper and Hakram could see to much of the situation there were parts that could only be settled by my own intervention. Fearsome as those three could be, my reputation loomed taller still.

“Go,” I said. “I’ll follow.”

Indrani cast a look at me, half worried and half hesitant.

“Are you sure that-”

“Go,” I repeated, a tad more sharply.

Her jaw tightened with displeasure, but she did not test me further. I did not have it in me to be furious at Indrani for getting in my way tonight, not right now – it was like the Pilgrim’s death had replaced sentiment in me with some manner of exhaustion – but her actions there would not go unanswered. It would be a thorny knot to untangle, this mess we’d made together, for she had died and we’d both need knives sheathed if we were to help Masego out of the worst of his grief. But she’d not trusted me, in the end, even if her intentions had been guided by love of me. That would need to be addressed, lest the wound fester between us.

“Archer can guide you out,” I told Roland. “She has a knack for paths like these.”

He nodded, though his face was unsure.

“Come along, Rogue,” Archer said, tone thick with forced cheer. “We’re all in a need of a stiff drink after a night like this, and there’s none to be had here.”

No elaborate farewells followed, as they simply disappeared into the city below. Indrani would find a way out, as she had first found a way in when seeking Masego. The Lady of the Lake had shared knowledge with her I’d not asked the lay of, long aware that the keeping of her teacher’s secrets was one of the few things Indrani considered sacred. I sat, after they’d gone, resting my bad leg against the rough granite steps. But for all that I was tired, it was a restless of weariness that’d settled over me. Before long I was hobbling down into Liesse, through the broken palace of the proud and ancient House of Caen – gone from Callow, like the city they’d once ruled. Above me, shadows among the shade, crows flew beneath the starry sky. I had no destination in mind to guide my steps, little more than a wandered in a realm of wanderers. Feeling the breeze stirring my hair, cooling my sweat in the crook of my neck, I passed through the garden that’d been made of Liesse. I trailed my fingers through luminous bushes bearing wine red flowers, limped through fields of soft grass made silver by starlight. It was a surreal city, and one where it would be easy to become lost. Yet I came upon a place, in time, where the scent of old deaths lingered. It’d been a basilica, once, before the walls were shattered.

Now all that remained of whatever beauty there’d been were tall panes of stained glass whose colour had faded, whatever scene they’d once depicted now instead a mere game of blue shades. There had been pillars, within, and though half-crumbled they’d become intertwined with thick and twisty trees bearing small red fruits. Yews, I thought, and what had once been a temple of worship to the Gods Above had instead become a manner of shaded grove, leading to a yew elder and larger than any of the others. It towered tall and broad, its branches spreading out far in a great crown of leaves. The wind set something akin to chimes tinkling when it passed through the branches, and it was when I saw the face of those chimes I understood the source of the taste of death. The ragged remains of a tabard that’d once depicted the golden bells of House Fairfax trailed like streamers, tangled among them the broken shards of the armour last borne by the Good King Edward. Halfway sunken into the earth at the foot of the great tree the last Fairfax’s sword shone from an errant ray of light, the blade still pristine and sharp. I slowly approached, in almost reverent silence: the King of Callow had cowed the Hells themselves, for a time, and done it with little more than will and spite.

The crows threaded through the branches and took perch with only the slightest murmur of a sound heralding them, their shadowy feathers melding into the penumbra of the great yew. They looked, I thought, as if they belonged here. My fingers softly lid across the grip of the sword once wielded by Edward Fairfax, and I smiled mirthlessly.

“In northern Callow,” I said, “the yew is known as the tree of death. In the south and the heartlands it’s the elder trees they claim to be that omen, but even in Laure the story was told different.”

I flicked a glance upwards and found my patron goddesses silent yet watchful.

“It’s because of the Deoraithe,” I told them. “Their longbows, they’re made from yew. And for a very long time, there was no sight half as dreaded in Callow or Praes as a company of Daoine longbowmen. There were older superstitions, too, but in my eyes it was the centuries of reaping lives that hung death on the branches of yews.”

And still my only answer was silence.

“So this is how it goes,” I softly said. “I take up again the sword I lost in the Everdark, and bring war to the Crown of the Dead. It’s an old story. Well-worn, and strong for it.”

King Edward had been taller than me, I thought, with broader shoulders as well. And yet, I suspected that if ripped that sword free from the earth it would fit my hand perfectly. Better than any other blade ever hand.

“The world spins on,” I said. “No matter who lies buried. And so that is the sum of us: we fight and we die and if we’re lucky we’re remembered for a while still.”

All we’d schemed and struggled and bled, and still this night hadn’t belonged to any of us. How could it? When the crabs dragged each other down the only victor to be had was the bucket.

“No,” I murmured. “I think not.”

My fingers left the sword I would not claim.

“Am I not your high priestess, Sve Noc?” I said. “First Under the Night?”

“So you are,” Andronike said.

“In this, we are satisfied,” Komena said.

“Then as your priestess I make this claim – we can do better than this,” I called out to the twin shadows among the branches. “Than a ruin of a victory, handed to us by kindly hand. I don’t care if we’ve been tricked and tripped by the Intercessor or the Dead King or even fate itself. We can do better than this, and so this story has not come to an end.”

I laid my palm against the rough bark of the yew, looking up through the branches.

“I heard you, Good King,” I whispered. “Your warning. I hear and heed, so lend me your aid when I yet stumble.”

Under the twilight sky the great yew groaned and twisted, the scent of death in the air thickening until I could taste it on the tip of my tongue. From the crown of the tree a branch dropped, slender desiccated deadwood still echoing of defiance in the face of the end. I knelt to take it, and found it was of excellent height and yield for me to lean on as I walked.

“We will not go gently,” I promised to the tree-grave of the last Fairfax. “And we are not yet done.”

Turning my back to the grove abruptly, I limped away leaning on the yew branch-staff. The grounds I had tread I tread once more, returning to the summit of the City of Twilight. Through grass and grove, through thorns and flowers and streets of worn stone. Behind me, as if trailing, Sve Noc followed on inky wings. I climbed the great steps of granite, and as I forced open the great gates of bronze I had never closed two great crows claimed my shoulders as their perch. Within awaited silence and something else, for though the Grey Pilgrim still sat dead on his throne with the Saint sprawled at his feet they were not alone.

Like a solemn tribunal, or some aerie of angels, the Choir of Mercy stood vigil over its fallen champion.

Under the stars a multitude of tall and thin silhouettes stood, the only marks of their presence silhouettes like a heat shimmer and ever-spinning eyes like wheels of flame. There were dozens and dozens of them, all bent as if in grief. None turned as I entered the throne room and my own back was coated in starlight, but the weight of their attention was felt nonetheless. I could almost hear a song being sung, as if the wind was carrying to my ear parts of a faraway refrain, and what little I could make out was... heartbroken. Melancholy in a way I was not sure I – or any mortal – could truly understand. The barest fraction of that feeling was enough to put a stutter to my step.

“You actually loved him, didn’t you?” I said, voice wondering. “Or as close to that as you can.”

They answered not. Whatever manner of mourning the angels bore, they would not share it with me. It took a single step forward, and as if a sword had been unsheathed a myriad of burning, spinning eyes turned to me. I swallowed dryly, for though Sve Noc were at my side and I knew well their power the Choir of Mercy was older and colder both, when it deemed it necessary.

“You can’t bring him back,” I said. “I understand. There’s rules , and it’s not in your nature to make exceptions.”

The attention never wavered nor lessened in intensity.

“But I’m not you,” I said. “Your rules don’t bind me. And if you let me, I will.”

I suspected, that if not for the Sisters sinking their talons deep enough into my flesh I bled I would have passed out. The blinding light and heat I felt, for just a moment, would have seen me fall to my knees if not for the staff in my hand. And yet it’d not been strike, for within that heat and light I’d heard whispers and while the words I’d not understood their meaning I’d somehow grasped anyway.

“Why?” I repeated.

It was a fair question, I supposed.

“Because I can, so I should,” I said. “Because even when he was my enemy I did not believe him to be a bad man. Because...”

I struggled to find the words to express it, but perhaps the simplest truth was best.

“Because I don’t want to be at war with you or him,” I quietly said. “And the moment you choose to believe that, the war’s over.”

And I supposed I was a fool, thinking I could make peace with a Choir even if its virtue was that of mercy, but I owed it to all of us at leas to try.

“We kill you,” I said, “you kill us. The wheel keeps spinning, the world keeps bleeding. And maybe that can’t be mended, maybe there’s just something about mortals that’s all teeth and hunger and it’ll never go away no matter what we make of ourselves – but we can do better than this!”

I gestured at the room around us, the realm around us, but I meant more. I meant the armies below, at each other’s throats even in the face of annihilation. I meant the Named scraping each other raw until even the noblest beginnings and the finest intentions became knives to hack at each other with. I meant Praes, hungry and wealthy, and Callow, sated and poor, each capable of helping the other but forever clawing at themselves instead.

“Please,” I said. “I know you don’t make exceptions, and I won’t ask you to. All you need to do is to stand aside.”

We stood there, the Choir of Mercy and the Arch-heretic of the East, and a long moment passed.

They stood aside.

Heart beating wildly I limped forward, until I stood by Tariq’s corpse. He would have looked to be sleeping, if not for the sword through his heart. Night flickered through my veins, strengthening my limbs, and the Sisters flew up cawing like grim omens. I eased out the Saint’s blade, spilling blood all over myself, and dropped it to the side. And then, without warning, I stuck my arm into the Grey Pilgrim as the thief of Bestowal that I was. Three aspects awaited: a star, an eye and a prayer. It was the last I ripped out, a whisper of Forgive touching my mind. My fingers withdrew a small receptacle of wood, which I slid open with shaking fingers. There was a fine red powder within, and a power that would have blinded me if I’d tried to gaze upon it.

“Time to rise, pilgrim of grey,” I murmured. “There’s still work to be done.”

I blew out a breath, and the powder scattered across the dead man’s face. A long moment massed, once more, and my stomach tightened.

Then, above us in the sky, the pilgrim’s star winked out.

Tariq’s mouth opened to a ragged gasp, and within the depths of Liesse death was cheated for the third time at my hand.

Interlude: Concourse I

“When a highborn is slain, look to who benefits and you will have learned what families the third party wants to incite strife between.”
– Extract from ‘The Behaviours of Civil Conduct’, by High Lady Mchumba Sahelian

There was only one crowned head left south of Salia, and it was Princess Rozala Malanza of Aequitan.

As a girl or, honesty compelled her to admit, as recently as a few years ago Rozala might have found such a prospect exciting. To wield such influence, to claim such authority, and with so few to check her! After her mother’s disastrous bid for First Princess during the Great War and the ruin that had befallen the Malanzas for it, Rozala had been forced to look in the eye the fact that if she did not take cover under another’s wings her family mighty yet be toppled entirely and that odds were Aequitan would not know prominence against in her lifetime. And now, not even a decade later, Princess Rozala could be argued to be the second most powerful individual in Procer: she commanded a great host, had inherited the reins of a powerful bloc within the Highest Assembly and her reputation as both general and noblewoman had reached heights she’d never before thought possible. And yet, as dawn inched ever closer the Princess of Aequitan found it all felt hollow. For all the power and influence that had been gathered to her name, Rozala Malanza found that the sum of what she could do in the face of death was look up at the sky and pray.

Pray that the Peregrine and the Regicide lived up to their legends, that the Rogue Sorcerer proved worthy of one day having such tales matched to his name. That the Tyrant’s schemes would be turned against the Crown of the Dead and, most of all, that the Black Queen would make as terrifyingly potent an ally as she had been an enemy. They’d all danced to the sounds of Catherine Foundling’s tune, this winter, found the calm-faced villain always one step ahead . Let the Hidden Horror taste of that, for once , Princess Rozala thought. Let every promise that has been made under cover of night come true, and great vengeance be visited upon the King of Death. Rozala Malanza ruled lands large and wealthy, commanded soldiers in the dozens of thousands and held power of life and death over a dozen times that – and so, left to stand stewing in her own inability to do more than hope, she pondered her growing mislike of the Chosen and the Damned. Those colourful few, cloaked in power and mystery, who would bargain with the fate of nations and the pivots of history. Who left all others in the dust of their grandiose adventures , be they great or small. What a hateful thing it was, to have your own life and death decided by the hands of others.

She was not unaware of the irony inherent to a princess of the blood pondering such things. The touch of rue jostled her out of her thoughts enough that she heard the person approaching behind her, though she did not turn. Hair loose and going down her back, Rozala tightened the warm fur cloak around her body and kept looking at the night sky brought about by the blasphemous sorceries of the drow.

“There have been another dozen,” Louis Rohanon, once Prince of Creusens, told her.

The Princess of Aequitan did not need to look to know he was exhausted beyond all words. Neither of them had slept in much, much too long – and there was only so far brandy and alchemical tonics could carry one past what one’s body could tolerate.

“Were they more coherent than the last?” she asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” Louis sighed. “It has become apparent that the... visions all concern the same journey, but the Heavens were seemingly unconcerned with the order of the revelations. It is all rather haphazard.”

Louis Rohanon had never been a particularly pious man, which was Rozala was less than surprised by his implicit criticism of the manner the Gods Above had granted their insights. No doubt if the Prince – former now, she reminded herself – of Creusens was a one of the Gods the visions would have been regularly arranged, in good order and with the proper seals affixed to bills of delivery. Less than surprised, yes, but perhaps a little amused. Not that she would show it. The mirth was short-lived, though.

“And the initial vision,” Rozala said. “Has anything happened to cast it in doubt?”

She looked at him from the corner of her eye and caught his face tightening.

“No,” Louis quietly admitted. “It still returns at least once per lot of dreamers waking, and never once have we been told of anything taking place past it. It seems to have been the end of their journey.”

The Princess of Aequitan closed her eyes. She’d not slept, so there’d been no opportunity to experience the dreams, but in the urgency after the first dreamers woke she’d had several of those blessed with the visions describe it to her in detail. It always seemed to centre around the same vivid parts: the Black Queen’s scream of denial after she realized being tricked, the Grey Pilgrim taking up the blade of the fallen Saint of Swords and then the wizened hero’s taking of his own life. All who’d dreamt the dream agreed that the Black Queen had tried to prevent the Peregrine’s death, though words failed them when they tried to explain why. Yet it seemed undeniable, by now, that both the Regicide and the Grey Pilgrim were dead. The former, if one of the growingly reoccurring visions was to be believed, having been slain by Catherine Foundling herself.

“Any word of the Dominion armies?” she asked.

“None of the Blood have returned from their seclusion,” Louis said. “The senior captains still hold command, and our people in their camps confirm their rank and file are having similar dreams.”

“It’s the Blood that’ll make decisions, not the captains or the soldiers,” Princess Rozala said. “Keep sending envoys, Louis. We can’t afford for the battle to resume.”

“Dawn will bludgeon the drow hard,” the former Prince of Creusens carefully said. “And will arrive soon. If a victory is to be seized by surprise, it would be in the coming hour.”

“Tell me, Louis,” the dark-haired princess flatly said, “even if we slew every last soldier of the Army of Callow without losing a man, what do you believe will happen when the Black Queen returns?”

“She’s already raised one army of the dead,” Louis said, though he shivered. “How many times could she truly do such a thing?”

And shiver he should, for Malanza had been told the same tale as he and it had clenched her guts to hear it. An ancient king of Callow stolen from the Dead King’s grasp and hundreds of thousands of furious wraiths summoned to deliver his wrath? Such a thing could break an army fresh and dug-in, if well-used, and Rozala Malanza’s host was tired and spread out. For all that the Black Queen had come to favour subtler tricks than those she’d plied at the Battle of the Camps, it would not to do forget for a moment that they were facing a woman capable of slaying thousands with snap of her fingers.

“Regardless, this is not a gamble we can even begin to consider with the League still on the field,” Rozala reminded him. “They may have withdrawn but they are not so far as that.”

The disparate armies of the League of Free Cities had, as of an hour past, begun to retreat. They’d put perhaps a mile between themselves and the other two great hosts on the plains, their great combined camp turning into a labyrinth of mayhem before it’d even been fully raised. Rozala had ordered envoys sent there, to probe for intentions and information, but so far all had been turned away outside the camp and the few spies she’d tried to slip in had been shot and hung from poles as a warning. She’d not even tried to get anyone inside the Army of Callow’s camp, well aware that Wasteland sorceries would make infiltration more than merely difficult, but at least there her envoys had been received by Lady Vivienne Dartwick. Who was now, it seemed, heiress to the throne of Callow. Lady Dartwick had been courteous but dclined Princess Rozala’s offer of sending a contingent of priests from the House of Light to see to her wounded, likely suspecting the additional intent of gleaning the state of her camp through it. At least the venture had confirmed that some of her soldiers were touched by the dreams too, as well as confirming that the ‘priests’ of the heretical House Insurgent were truly capable of healing. Which would not be a pleasant to hear for some of the priesthood in Salia, Rozala suspected. Last she’d heard from the capital, lines against Callow had been hardening amongst the House of Light.

“As you say, Princess Rozala,” Louis relied, inclining his head.

She grimaced, for until a few hours ago though she had been his leader they had also been peers: and while the former still held true, the latter did not. They would have to become used to that. Rozala tried to conceive of a sentence that could mend the gap she could feel growing between them, but sentiment had never been her knack and she struggled over the words until the entire debate was made moot. A messenger approached, though Rozala did not recognize her face and she was being escorted by a pair of Aequitan soldiers. The messenger bowed low, and only began to speak when Rozala gave her leave.

“Your Grace,” the woman said, her faint Alamans accent still discernible. “You have been summoned to stand before the First Prince. The Order of the Red Lion has found the restrictions on scrying lifted at last.”

Louis’ face darkened with both anger and embarrassment.

“It was ordered that any successful contact with Salia be reported immediately,” he sharply said. “How is it that I am only now hearing of this?”

“You ordered everyone under your command to do so,” the messenger politely agreed. “Yet I am here on behalf of Her Most Serene Highness’ plenipotentiary envoy Arnaud Brogloise, who answers only to the First Prince and the Highest Assembly.”

So Cordelia Hasenbach had hidden an entire set of messengers and scryers right under her nose, Rozala darkly thought. Likely among the army of the former Prince of Cantal, who until so recently she’d believed one of her most eager supporters. The Princess of Aequitan grit her teeth at the memory of Arnaud’s treachery revealed in the bloodiest of ways, though now was not the time to settle that account.

“As always, I am at the disposal of the First Prince,” Rozala replied flatly. “Guide the way, messenger.”

Louis was left with instructions to have someone inform her the moment there was movement from the Levantines, no matter who it was she was speaking with at the time. The dark-haired princess followed the messenger into the camp of the Cantal army, though she was not so foolish as to do so without a company of trustworthy Aequitan soldiers escorting her. She was well aware that the First Prince would find it much more difficult to take her head after the dust had settled and her star rose in the eyes of commons and royalty alike, and while Rozala was not certain it was in Hasenbach’s nature to so bluntly snuff out a rival these were dark days for all. Fear could do strange things to a woman: sometimes it could urge her to greatness, but it could just as easily spur her to the basest of instincts. Yet Rozala and her escort were not surrounded and slaughtered but instead guided to the former Prince of Cantal’s private pavilion where the man himself awaited. Along with a handful of wizards who took their leave when dismissed, and a basin of water large enough it could have been used as a bath. Arnaud Brogloise rose from his seat when she entered, as the fresh disparity in their ranks required, and personally introduced her.

“Her Grace Rozala Malanza, Princess of Aequitan and supreme commander of the southern armies,” he briskly said.

Cordelia Hasenbach’s cool blue eyes, framed by those perfect golden tresses, were already studying her through the waters and so Rozala offered the proper bow.

“Your Highness,” she said. “As I was summoned, I came.”

“For that promptness I thank you, and again for the services you rendered the Principate on this campaign,” the First Prince said. “You may consider me informed or recent developments in Iserre, for the purpose of this conversation.”

“So I shall,” Rozala replied, resisting the urge to glance at Brogloise. “May I then inquire, Your Highness, as to what the purpose of this conversation is? While I have matters to bring up before you, your messenger implied... pressing need.”

It was as close as she could come to chiding the First Prince for summoning her so abruptly, and the message should be twice as loudly heard for the way Rozala had kept to the courtesies while Hasenbach very clearly had not.

“As of a quarter hour ago, we have confirmed that the Dead King has withdrawn on all fronts,” the First Prince said.

Rozala’s eyes widened in surprise.

“Furthermore, while my cousin finds it difficult to see through either the Hidden Horror or the Black Queen, she has confirmed that a truce of more than one month and less than six was bought, though not at what price.”

I did not escape the dark-haired princess’ attention that Catherine Foundling had been mentioned in this, though for now she could only speculate as to why.

“You believe this is the doing of the Queen in Callow?” Princess Rozala asked.

Hasenbach sighed.

“Queen of Callow,” she finally said. “Best we grow used to that, Your Grace, for it seems bargains will have to be struck. The Augur had gleaned that the truce is related to the Black Queen, though little more than that. Given the consequences of hostilities resuming, we cannot afford to take risks with Queen Catherine’s life – or, indeed, to risk provoking her at all for at least a month.”

A pause saw the First Prince’s tone grow heavy and solemn.

“In that spirit, Princess Rozala Malanza, as commander of the Principate’s southern armies I charge you with the preservation of Queen Catherine Foundling’s life and the safeguard of her armies and associates. Should the Dominion strike at her, you are to take any measures short of open war with Levant to prevent conflict reigniting between Callow and the Grand Alliance.”

Rozala sharply breathed in. Open war, the First Prince had said. Which was implicit endorsement of assassinating Dominion commanders over allowing the Black Queen to be put at risk. If it ever came out that Cordelia Hasenbach had given such an order, the Grand Alliance might very well splinter. The First Prince, Rozala thought, had just handed her a knife to put to her throat in years to come. The Princess of Aequitan would never like the cold-eyed woman ruling over Procer, she knew that. There was too much bad blood.

Yet there were times where she could not help but admire the other woman, in spite of all the rest.

“I understand, Your Highness,” the dark-haired princess said.

“I believe you do, Princess Rozala,” the First Prince of Procer evenly replied. “Whatever comes, the Principate must survive. Do as you must, and know you have the full weight of my authority behind you.”

The water in the basin rippled and in the heartbeat that followed Cordelia Hasenbach’s silhouette disappeared, leaving behind only tepid liquid. While the First Prince had been within her rights to take her leave so abruptly, it surprised Rozala that a woman known so far and wide for her diplomatic talents would so carelessly offer discourtesy twice on the same night. Then it occurred to her that with the audience having come to an end so swiftly she’d never had opportunity to bring up the petitions passed on to her. The dark-haired Arlesite turned to Arnaud Brogloise, who still stood in silence. His dark eyes had not ceased studying either of the princesses as they spoke, though at least he’d not bothered to put on the pretence of being a blustering fool again. In Cleves the middle-aged former prince had put on some muscle, adding it to his pudgy frame, but Rozala had never found him to have much of a presence – on occasion a sort of buffoonish swagger, but nothing to give her pause. Yet now his girth seemed less laughable, his ruddy face no longer a fool’s visage, and the Princess of Aequitan realized odds were he was physically stronger than he. It was somewhat unsettling to know that, now that she’d seen Arnaud Brogloise open the throat of royalty without batting an eye.

“You are still her envoy, I take it,” Princess Rozala said.

She was princess and he not: no longer was courtesy owed.

“I am to begin negotiations with the Queen of Callow when she returns,” the older man acknowledged. “I’ve already spoken with her right hand, to interesting result.”

“Lady Dartwick?” Rozala asked, surprised.

“Hakram Deadhand, the Adjutant,” the Alamans corrected. “He lacks formal title save for his Damnation, but wields the influence nonetheless.”

An orc, holding power in Callow? It had been one thing when the Wasteland still held sway over these lands, but it seemed rather odd that one of that land’s ancient enemies would have such authority within its borders now.

“And what did the Deadhand have to say?” the Princess of Aequitan asked.

“A great deal, on the subject of accords,” Arnaud replied, lips strangely quirking. “I have a great deal of reading ahead of me.”

“More than you believe,” Rozala said. “I have petitions to pass on to the First Prince. As you’ve demonstrated a knack for reaching her, they will be placed in your hands. Delaying would be ill-advised, Arnaud.”

The man let out a breath that straddled the line between a sigh and a chuckle.

“You have something to say?” the princess flatly said.

“I would not speak out of turn, Your Grace,” he said. “Yet I wonder – these petitions, would they be the designated succession for the abdications of the night?”

They were, though Rozala did not immediately say so. Thought it was little more than a formality, save if accusations of treason and other great crimes were to be made, the designated succession for a principality of Procer was to be submitted to the Highest Assembly. There’d only been a handful of refusals throughout the entire history of Procer, usually when villainy or civil war had split the realm asunder. Why would such a matter amuse Arnaud? Certainly the amount of crowns to be approved was unusually high, perhaps even without precedent, but... The Princess of Aequitan’s blood ran cold.

“Send for the wizards, Brogloise,” she said. “I will put the matter to the First Prince myself.”

“I will change nothing,” he replied. “An extraordinary session of the Highest Assembly was called. In times of troubles the wisdom of our predecessors is once again needed, and so the Guillermont Decree has been restored.”

It took a moment for Rozala to place it. Not the name of Guillermont, for that she could hardly ignore: it was the name of royal house that had ruled Aequitan before the Malanzas rose to prominence and set them aside. The decree in particular, though, came from the First Princess Éloïse Guillermont – best known for ending the Principate’s occupation of Callow. Before she’d been First Prince she’d been a sitter of the Highest Assembly, and her election to the office of First Princess had been... contentious. The politics of the time had been complicated, as they often were in Procer – Guillermont had been the leader of a bloc among the Assembly that held no lands in Callow and so considered the taxes levied to keep armies standing there an utter waste – but the broad lines had been that Procer in those days had been split between the royalty that wished withdrawal and those that wished to tighten Procer’s grip. Princess Éloïse had risen to power by seizing an opportunity after Callowan rebels had slain five princes in their beds in Laure, gathering her allies in the Assembly and passing her eponymous decree before succession could be arranged. It was an obscure procedural measure that specified no assermenté – that pretentious Alamans term for proxy – could be used to present one’s name for confirmation of succession. The would-be ruler had to attend in person. In practice, that’d meant that the designated heirs and heiresses of the slain royals had been forced to leave their seats in the Assembly empty for more than a year as they remained in Callow trying to keep their holdings from collapsing. Those empty seats had allowed the Princess of Aequitan to swing the balance of votes in her favour by enough of a margin she was elected First Princess and ordered the withdrawal from Callow, changing the path of history.

Yet that had been a mere procedural trick, one that First Princess Éloïse herself had been easily persuaded into rescinding when she’d ascended to the office. What Rozala was beginning to piece together was a different beast entirely. Seven crowns had been abdicated, this night. That meant that almost a third of the Highest Assembly, which held twenty-four seats, had been silenced: proxies could not vote when there was no ruling prince or princess stood behind them, for they were the voice of that ruler and had no formal decisional power of their own. That left seventeen votes, then, for the foreseeable futures. The Lycaonese principalities made four. Salia itself, the demesne of the First Prince, held a vote as well. Prince Frederic of Brus and Hasenbach’s other two foremost loyalists in Salamans and Tenerife were well known to have instructed their assermentés to follow Hasenbach in all things, which meant eight votes. Prince Beatrice of Hainaut’s lands were being defended by Lycaonese armies, which likely made for nine and with Prince Gaspard in Cleves being heavily dependent on southern supplies for his defending armies that made ten out of seventeen. A clear majority that would vote however Cordelia Hasenbach wanted it to. And it would not be broken in the coming months, for the First Prince would be able to put her chosen candidates on the abdicated thrones long before any possible designated heir presented themselves in Salia. After all, the only mages who knew the secrets of scrying in Iserre were in Hasenbach’s service, and no rider could ride quicker than sorcery.

“She has made herself the queen of Procer,” Rozala croaked, “in everything but name.”

“On doom’s approach,” Arnaud Brogloise said, “law must fall silent.”

“And you would enable this?” Princess Rozala hissed. “You were a prince, Arnaud. You understand what is at stake: the Assembly can be led, but it must never be commanded . That way lies tyranny.”

“Oh, we’ll survive a spot of tyranny,” he replied. “Yet we might not survive Keter without it.”

“What did she give, to make of you such a loyal hound?” the Princess of Aequitan hissed. “What manner of ugly bargain was made?”

“She let her kin die and her home burn, to better our chances of victory,” Arnaud said. “Loyalty is a child’s sentiment, Your Grace. I heed Her Highness’s decrees because she had proved willing to sacrifice whatever is necessary for Procer to survive.”

The scathing reply on the tip of Rozala’s tongue had to be swallowed, for another entered the pavilion. It was, the princess saw, one of her own officers.

“Captain Matias?” she asked, tone harsh.

“Your Grace,” the soldier said, bowing. “Louis Rohanon has sent word: the armies of the Dominion are gathering.”

Cursing, Princess Rozala Malanza thought, would not help in the slightest. Yet she still blasphemed several times, before sending for enough soldiers to give those damned Levantine madmen pause before they got everyone killed.

Interlude: Concourse II

“Thus the Gods granted us the third boon: no longer would scales close our eyes, obscuring knowledge of Good and Evil and preventing us from earning just deserts.”
– The Book of All Things, sixth verse of the second hymn

Juniper had done what she could to keep the army on battle footing, but not even the Hellhound’s sternest warnings could keep an air of festivity from hanging over the camp of the Army of Callow. Hakram noted with some amusement that while the ale rations that Legion tradition dictated should be opened after a great victory remained sealed and put away there seemed to be no lack of drink flowing through the cups of the legionaries – be they exiles or the Black Queen’s own. While the Army of Callow had been under strict instructions to refrain from sacking towns and cities even when its columns were detached and the supply situation became arduous, there’d been no order sent down to avoid trading with Procerans. Callowan soldiers were on campaign pay, which meant only half the coin was handed and the rest set aside for return home, but they were hardly penniless and in a war-torn region like Iserre they were the closest thing to patrons the locals would see for the winter. That’d overridden reluctance to trade with wicked heretics some, though no doubt there’d been price gouging. At the very least, most the bottles and flasks merrily being traded around fires were filled with the rich red wines the Principate’s heartlands were known for. The ambitious had sprung for bottles of pleurs de fée , the heady Alamans herbal liquor whose name could more or less be translated into Lower Miezan of ‘fairy tears’. Hakram had tried it a few months back and found the drink foul, though humans seemed to like the taste well enough.

“You’d think we fought a battle, by the revelry,” Vivienne said, tone dry.

Neither of them were fools, and the former Thief was an old hand at this sort of game, and so instead of wandering around the camp in heavy dark cloaks that hid their faces they’d put on officer’s armour and kept their faces half-hidden by helms. Two well-fitted armoured gauntlets, one empty and the other hiding bone, had seen to it that Hakram’s most easily discernible marks would be kept out of sight. The orc followed the human’s gaze, finding a pair of grizzled or goblins cheerfully bullying some Callowan girl-soldier into drinking enough aragh it was a near-certainty she’d puke. The sappers noticed the attention but were unbothered bit it. Not unreasonably so: Adjutant was passing for a captain of heavies, and Vivienne for a mage lieutenant. Neither of them would be in an easy position to punish the drinking of soldiers so far removed from their own theoretical commands.

“Perhaps we didn’t,” Hakram quietly replied, “but it feels like victory nonetheless, doesn’t it?”

“We threw some spells and shot some engines and General Abigail ordered a single cavalry charge on enemy mages,” the blue-eyed noblewoman said. “The drow fought, admittedly, but us? This entire ‘battle’ had seen fewer than two hundred soldiers die, Hakram.”

“Aye,” Adjutant agreed, once more amused. “Fewer than two hundred of ours dead, and we’ve both forced the Grand Alliance into truce and put the League of Free Cities to retreat. They’d make songs of today, Vivienne, even without Choir dreams gilding the legend.”

“Legionaries would make songs of rivers being wet, after drinking,” the heiress-designate to the throne drily replied. “They’ve taken to the sport of it the way Callowans once loved jousting.”

Hakram had never actually seen one of the famous Callowan tourneys, much less a joust, tough he’d read of them in books. Under the Carrion Lord’s rule knightly orders had been banned, which effectively killed the practice, and though under Catherine the Order of the Broken Bell had risen anew it was also part of the kingdom’s army in a time of war – and so not free to pursue such leisurely pastimes. Under the old kingdom the Fairfaxes had often held tourneys to recruit promising knights into the Royal Guard, which had leant the practice a certain legitimizing weight, but Cat had balked at resurrecting it. When Grandmaster Brandon Talbot had pressed the matter she’d told him she’d rather arm another company of regulars or feed a village through winter than ‘piss away gold celebrating the virtue of knocking down people with sticks’. He’d caught Juniper, whose distaste for the chivalric trappings of Callowan knighthood was deeply ingrained, grinning to herself for a solid month after that session of the Queen’s Council.

“Mock if you will,” Hakram gently said, “but you know I speak the truth. Tonight will be remembered for many years to come. It will have consequences, Vivienne. Ripples.”

They’d resumed walking, and though the gloom of Akua Sahelian’s curtain of night had cast darkness over all it was not enough that Adjutant did not see the unease his words had brought to Vivienne’s face. Like him, she had difficult grasping what might yet come of what had taken place tonight. Unlike him, however, that blindness worried her. Their steps slowed as they left the outskirts of the Second Army’s camp in favour of Fourth’s. He’d have to speak less here, as he’d spent months as an observer with the Fourth Army and he might be recognized by some through his voice even in the dark. Vivienne’s gaze was on a young Soninke legionary, standing on the shoulders of a pair of orcs with a clay pot of black paint in hand as he added to one of the army’s banners.

“Wings,” she softy said. “I will not be surprised if the Third is doing the same. Sve Noc were not meek of hand in Sarcella.”

The legionary had some talent, Hakram, though, for though instead of a brush it was the work of fingers dipped in paint the fresh symbols added to the banner could not be mistaken for anything but what they were: crow’s wings. Two pairs, sharply shaped and feathered, and the Soninke finished the last touches on the last wing only to reveal the Fourth Army’s changed banner: the four in Miezan numerals, gold on Fairfax blue, but now framed with crow wings at the upper corners.

“It’ll spread from there,” Adjutant acknowledged.

The soldier-artist was helped down by the pair of well-built orc women who’d been holding him up – one of them, Hakram could not help but notice, had an enticingly muscled frame and fangs that looked like they’d go right through bone – and the three of them were greeted by cheers from the throng of soldiers that’d been watching.

“I’d say something scathing about soldiers and superstitions,” Vivienne mused, “but for all I know that might be enough to attract the gaze of the Crows.”

“Best to keep on good terms with gods, when death and dying’s your trade,” Hakram said.

“Even those?” the noblewoman said. “I wonder. That Catherine has charmed ancient horrors into some manner of patronage I’ve no trouble believing – Merciful Heavens, it wouldn’t even be the first time – but that does not mean the spread of their influence is a boon. She will not always be there to keep them honest, and when our soldiers return home there might be... complications.”

“The House Insurgent has been rather amiable to the drow,” he pointed out.

There’d been incidents, of course, but the Firstborn were being kept in hand by their chieftains and to be frank the Insurgents were trouble all around. Hakram had been told of quarrelsome priests, before, but it’d been with the understanding that those quarrels were largely theological. The House Insurgent was rather prone to fistfights, for priests, and it likely did not help that most of them were young and fresh to their rebellion.

“The Insurgents are the hotheads and Catherine’s most radical partisans in the House,” Vivienne said. “It’s the priests in Callow that might have words when the banners come back bearing Night’s wings. Heresy, in particular, comes to mind.”

Hakram had followed the debates within the Callowan House of Light with great interest, to the extent that he’d sought a sister for theological lessons. More than once Sister Mariet had hinted that he should consider conversion for the sake of his soul, but given how clear-spoken and learned the old woman had proved to be he’d hardly minded. The conclave in Laure that’d followed the Jacks seeding the rumours he and Vivienne had agreed on of the Woe’s time in Keter had taken them both by surprise, and they’d both found that as they had no real influence within the House they could only be spectators to what then unfolded. Perhaps a third of the priesthood of Callow, numbering high with the young and those hailing from the heartlands of the kingdom – which had always been the region most eager to embrace the Black Queen’s reign – but also a surprising among of oldest priests from the north who’d been infuriated by the Proceran House being involved at the Battle of the Camps had taken a hard line and pressed for the entire Tenth Crusade to be declared graceless. That’d been judged too extreme an approach by many, even though the Grand Alliance had come to be held in great disdain. It would be, in essence, declaring the entire priesthood of the Dominion, Procer and Ashur to be grasping heretics and any soldier participating in the crusade to have forfeited the grace of the Heavens.

Cooler heads, mostly priesthood from the ravaged south and the wary east, had tried to broker a compromise by instead declaring the decrees of the same Salian conclave that’d declared Catherine to be Arch-heretic of the East to be themselves heresy. That vote had passed unanimously, but the radicals had pushed for denunciation of the House of Light in Procer as a whole and found little appetite for the measure among their fellows. The talks turned harsh when the compromise motion of the House providing a tithe from its coffers to the Kingdom of Callow to support the defence of the realm was flatly refused by the southern priesthood, who was already beggaring itself providing charity to the families displaced by the Arcadian War. With that second compromise collapsing, the radicals scorned their fellows and mocked them for children of Dana – which, Hakram learned from the ever-helpful Sister Mariet, was a reference to the infamous Sister Dana of Laure who’d colluded with the Procerans during their occupation Callow – before walking out of the conclave. They’d come to call themselves the House Insurgent, in the months that followed, and many had flocked to the Army of Callow. Yet it could not be denied that most the Callowan priesthood, more than two thirds of it in truth, had preferred a tamer stance.

In the kingdom the priests who’d remained in the fold had come to be called the House Constant, though that was more story than truth: they were united mostly in their eschewal of harder measures, and in other things remained as prone to squabbling among themselves as the Callowan priesthood was reputed for. They could be counted on to back Catherine against all comers, so long as those comers were foreign, but Vivienne was right in worrying of dark wings painted on banners. The settling of a goblin tribe on Callowan soil had been a hard mouthful to swallow for many of them, as was the entrusting of so many high offices to Wastelanders and greenskins, yet those had only been earthly matters. The Crows earning some devotion of their own, however, would be seen as Below sinking its claws in the hearts of the Callowan flock. There would be trouble.

“Most the soldiers we took in from the old legions keep to Below, if they keep to anything at all,” Hakram said. “And many of what used to be the Fifteenth do the same. It may not be too contentious a matter so long as it is kept ceremonial. Soldiers’ superstition, as you said.”

“I hope you’re right,” Vivienne said.

Yet her eyes were on the cheering soldiers, surrounding a crow-marked banner.

“But if you are not,” she said, “then it might be necessary to back our favoured horse within the House of Light.”

Adjutant’s brow rose.

“Insurgent over Constant, you mean,” he said, tone pensive as he measured the rusks. “It might be it can be done. If we return victors one and all, their reputation will have risen. Yet there are risks to meddling there, especially for us.”

House Fairfax had been embroiled in disputed with the House of Light more than once, over the span of its line, most often over the great cathedral of Laure and what was spoken in the sermons given there. Yet the old kings and queens of Callow had been Named as often as not, exalted in Above’s service. It was one thing for one of that ilk to intervene in the House’s affairs but entirely another for the Black Queen to do so. If a villain was seen as trying to subvert the House of Light, rebellion was certain. Even the Carrion Lord had chosen the soft death when dealing with the priests, preferring instead the stratagem of starving them of coin.

“Too early to tell if it’ll come to that,” Vivienne Dartwick finally said, eyes hooded. “We’ll have to keep an eye on things as they unfold.”

Adjutant rumbled in agreement and they resumed their walk. The First Army’s camp, where they’d begun their wandering, had been quiet and orderly compared to the rest – as was only to be expected, as it was Juniper’s own command and closest to her displeasure should festivities become too obvious. The Second’s, under General Hune, had been tense for other reasons entirely. As Hune’s army had seen fighting during the day and the night, it’d been allowed to rotate most their companies to sleep. Which had turned out less than restful, when vivid dreams began waking the legionaries. The First Army’s entire mage contingent had been awoken to put together answers, as well as the Senior Mages from other armies. So far there’d been little more put together than the string of visions depicting parts of the struggle that’d taken place over Liesse, though the shape of the whole adventure had been taking appearance when they’d left the mages to it. Adjutant would have liked to assign Akua Sahelian to the matter, but she’d had more pressing duties: the soul of the Carrion Lord had been stolen back from the heroes, as had been his body weeks ago, and now the shade who’d once been the Diabolist had been tasked to bind soul and flesh anew after their brutal severing. Still, useful as her expertise might have been the army’s mages and scribes were capable of seeing to the matter. It was less than urgent, anyhow, as Catherine would tell the tale herself when she returned. Most important, as far as Hakram was concerned, was that the most recurrent and vivid of the visions showed that Grey Pilgrim and the Saint of Swords were seemingly dead. The latter would do no favours to Catherine’s reputation, but the former was a deeper concern.

The Dominion was prickly, when it came to the Peregrine, and though the visions legionaries had received made it clear Cat had tried to prevent his death that might not mean too much to grief-stricken killer with more pride than sense. Someone would have to be blamed, and even if it did not outright come to war they might try to kill Catherine upon her return to ‘avenge’ the Grey Pilgrim. Which would lead to war regardless, no two ways about it. His warlord was popular even with the Legions-in-Exile, who of the coalition holding this camp were the host with the least fondness for the Black Queen. The Army of Callow and the Firstborn had deeper loyalties, and very few qualms over killing either Procerans or Levantines if provoked. The truce over the field had been achieved by scheme and force of personality more than great desire for peace by the soldiers, Hakram knew, and that made it fragile. Even more so now that the League’s hosts had retreated some and no longer stood as a close and obvious threat to the other two great assembled armies on the field. Juniper was well-aware, which was why there were scouts out there keeping an eye on the Grand Alliance’s positions and the Army of Callow had yet to entirely leave battle footing.

If the betrayal came, they knew, it would come after dawn rose when the drow would be struck by the sun-sickness and forced into slumber after being stripped of their power. Some would remain able to fight, but few and as little more than tribes of warriors.

The orc was forced out of the thought from the first stirrings of a song in the distance, one he did not recognize. The mismatched pair wandered closer to the source by unspoken accord, until they found a broad bonfire and a crowd half-drunk soldiers around it. Orcs and goblins, Taghreb and Soninke and Callowans. They were, to hear of it, crafting a song in the old legion manner – everyone trying a verse, a chorus of loud voices singing the attempts until something passable had come of the crucible. Hakram missed Nauk like a limb, in that moment. The other orc’s rough humour and gift for song and poetry, his strange yet unrepentant sentimentality. It was not enough to distract him from the sight of one of Vivienne’s agents approaching her discretely, whispering news in her ear when she gestured permission. The orc’s attention turned instead to the song, heart clenching at the remembrance of a friend he’d now twice grieved.

“Came they proud princes, one and all
Great lords from olden, golden halls
And as one they fell, under the moon
When the Black Queen sang her tune

For in lovely Iserre did come undone
Dominion of seven crowns and one

‘lo blood of slayer, brigand, binder
And champion too, binding tighter
Yet what star could shine so brightly
It would not fear our queen’s fury?

For in lovely Iserre did come undone,
Dominion of seven crowns and one.”

The song, he thought, was fiercely proud. Raw and half-done, yet already he could see the grimly boastful shape of it ripping free of a hundred voices. The Jack slipped away and without pause Vivienne leaned close, lowering her voice.

“Juniper sends that the Dominion has begun to gather troops,” she whispered. “So has Princess Rozala.”

The one-handed orc looked up the night sky, so very close to fading. He could feel it in his bones, how close to that veil falling they had come, how near to the end of the journey they’d arrived. It would all end soon, one way or another. And beyond that, Hakram felt another pull. An older claim to him, one he’d embraced body and soul.

“We gather our own, then,” he growled. “And quickly.”

The woman who’d once been the Thief glanced at him knowingly.

“You know where Catherine will return,” she said.

“I do,” Hakram Deadhand said. “So let us gather steel, and march towards it.”

Vivienne did not question him, for she knew the truth of it. In end, Hakram of the Howling Wolves Clan was many things. A soldier, a killer, a steward and on occasion a scribe. He’d served as an advisor and a herald, as an ender of loose ends and watchman of missteps. For the hand taken from him by the Penitent’s Blade and returned by the sorceries of the Sovereign of Red Skies, he had earned the sobriquet of Deadhand . To ensure the succession of everything that had been built in the beating heart of Callow he’d carved through the other wrist, and not once regretted it. That lesson, like many others, he had learned from someone he loved the way a knife loved a steady hand or sparrow loved flight. For, most of all, he was a bored sergeant on a warm Wasteland night, catching his first glimpse in the eyes of a stranger of the girl who’d topple empires and feeling his blood burn .

He was the Adjutant, and Catherine Foundling was returning.

If any stood between them they would be broken, sure as dawn and dusk and the death of men.

Interlude: Concourse III

“All law is upheld through violence, but when violence itself becomes the law then only disorder can come of it. As prosperity requires order, to ensure prosperity a ruler must therefore suborn violence to law.”
– Extract from the memoirs of Dread Emperor Terribilis II

Razin Tanja was not yet lord of Malaga, and in truth might never be. Father had named him heir, before they left Levant, and so of all that could lay claim his right would be the foremost and hardest to dispute. Yet he remained only heir, until he’d stood the ancestral grounds of the Tanja and been acclaimed to lordship by his closest kin. Razin had no right to call on the oaths once sworn to his father and so the captains of Malaga could defy him his orders if they so wished, though on war-grounds with the death of Akil Tanja still fresh they’d chosen to follow his commands nonetheless. It was because of that frail arrangement and the rights of his Blood he was considered to have voice equal to the other three standing at this council, though it would be foolish to assume the others did not regard his standing to be the lowest among them. Yet here they were nonetheless, the four of highest authority among the Dominion’s armies, having woken from the waking-dreams the Peregrine had sent them to hold these talks.

There were only seats and a deep-dug firepit within the tent, for though it belonged to Lord Yannu Marave it was not the same they’d before used for war councils. This one was rather smaller and behind ancient ward-stones brought from Levant, gifts from the Gigantes that had been rarely made and were even more rarely taken away from ancestral grounds There they kept veiled from sorcery and spying the affairs of the families owning them, as it should be. Though the stones could have been set around a larger tent, Razin knew enough of sorcery to know that certain patterns must be kept arithmetically exact to exert their full strength. The wonder-makers of the Titanomachy were free in speaking the secrets of use when they granted gits, though never the secrets of making, and no two such gifts were ever truly the same. If the Lord of Alava had chosen this lesser tent, it would be for good reason. Razin would acknowledge, in the quiet of his own thoughts, that the closer seats and crackling flames set to the talks a different tone than that of the battle-councils.

It was easier to see the truth of the others this way. Lord Yannu Marave – Careful Yannu , as the man was known in Levant – had not personally taken the field, yet the general of the Champion’s Blood looked drained under his sweat-flecked facepaint. For him Razin found little compassion, for the man had slain his father even if the matter had been settled in fair and honourable duel. He found near as little for Lady Itima Ifriqui of the Brigand’s Blood, who had held command of the Vaccei warriors but left her eldest son to lead the vanguard that’d tried the fortifications of the Callowans. Moro of the Brigand’s Blood had been made to sleep again, fed herbal potions concocted by binders so that if there was more to be seen in dreams one of the Blood would see it. He might yet be allowed entrance to this tent, should he come with pressing knowledge. Though Lord Yannu sat on the other side of the flames and Lady Itima to Razin’s right, to his left was the only person in this tent he counted as more companion than foe. Lady Aquiline Osena, who twice had tried to see him slain before they had shared strife against the drow. He found his gaze drawn to her bronze-green paint, the sinuous lay of it covering every inch of skin not covered by her tanned leather vest.

He’d not forgot the sight of her running over moonlit snow like a whisper of smoke over water, beautiful and terrible like some ancient goddess of the hunt from olden days. Ashen Gods, how could he? He might as well been branded with a hot iron. Aquiline found his gaze, for he’d allowed himself to linger too long, and though the cast of her face was difficult to read under the colours she did not seem displeased in the slightest. Though Razin had known women before, something of the wicked glint in her eye had him feeling like he should blush. He looked away, careful not do display undue haste in doing so that would draw attention from the others but found he had to force down something like a smile.

“The Peregrine is dead,” Yannu Marave said, voice shattering the silence. “We have all seen it.”

And more besides, Razin thought. The journey the five Bestowed who’d gone to fight the Dead King had not been shared in full, he thought, but enough had been offered to know what need be known. The Grey Pilgrim had gone to death for the sake of all the world, and though the Black Queen was wicked and scheming she had not schemed his death nor broken the bargains she had made. The same could not be said of the Regicide, which had troubled all. Laurence de Montfort, though unfortunately Proceran, had been held in high esteem by most of them. Rarely had the Heavens known so righteous or unyielding a servant.

“The Tyrant of Helike must die,” Lady Itima of the Brigand’s Blood harshly said. “The Theodosian line should be ended for good, lest the viper keep biting again and again.”

“Are we to wage war on the League, then?” Aquiline replied, unconvinced. “The One-Eyed King is poison to all he touches, but still surrounded by a great host.”

“We can petition the Grand Alliance for soldiers,” Lady Itima insisted.

“Which ally would you petition, Ifriqui?” Razin calmly said. “Ashur, broken at Thalassina and besieged on its own island by the fleets of Nicae? Or perhaps Procer, who even now makes desperate war on the Hidden Horror?”

“You would let this go unavenged, Tanza?” the Lady of Vaccei sneered. “All knew you without magic, but are you without honour as well? You talk like a coward.”

His teeth clenched, his anger rose.

“Razin Tanja rode with a slayer band and fought death steel in hand,” Aquiline sharply said. “Can you claim the same tonight, Itima Ifriqui? Did you even come close enough to drow or legionaries to loose a single arrow?”

“I have nothing to prove to you, girl,” Lady Itima replied, tone just as sharp. “When you’ve fought in half as many battles as I have, then you-”

“The Peregrine is dead,” Yannu Marave repeated, calmvoice cutting through the rising voice. “And so, without his wise hand to guide us, we must decide where the honour of Levant lies.”

Though neither of the two ladies were pleased with the interruption, they allowed it nonetheless. There would be other nights to pursue their feuds.

“Dangerous words, Marave,” Aquiline warned. “It is the Holy Seljun who keeps the Dominion’s honour, on behalf of the Majilis.”

“Must we keep to that pretence even now that he is dead?” Lord Yannu asked, tone exhausted. “Custom is custom, yet we all knew who was the Isbili we followed – stripped of that name or not. In this tent are four of the five that would be seated if the Majilis was called to session. The fifth has not been more than a decoration in my lifetime.”

“Hasn’t been a ruler of the Pilgrim’s line worth the name since Yasa Isbili,” Lady Itima conceded.

“What it is you suggested, Lord Marave?” Razin stiffly asked.

“That decision must be made as to the fate of this Grand Alliance,” the Lord of Alava said. “What has it brought us, to warrant what we’ve lost in its name?”

“You’d abandon the Tenth Crusade?” Aquiline asked, genuinely surprised.

“What Tenth Crusade is that?” Yannu Marave asked. “We’ve marched for more than a year now, and I’ve yet to see it. We have fought soldiers of Callow, soldiers of the League and now the drow servants of the Black Queen. Was it not the Tower we swore to war upon? Pretty words were spoken yet the truth is plain: only Ashur tread Wasteland soil, and it has been defeated. The Tenth Crusade is done, and if there can be said to have been so much as a thimble’s worth victory to it then it belongs to the Queen of Callow.”

He exhaled.

“Let us go home,” he said. “Let us bury our dead and see to our lands, instead of chasing shadows for Cordelia Hasenbach’s sake.”

“Oaths were made,” Lady Itima said.

“To march,” Lord Yannu said. “March we have, and fought too. How much more can be owed? Aid was given, oaths kept.”

“And what will happen, when the Dead King devours the entire Principate and raises it as an army that’ll outnumber grains of sand?” Razin said. “Do you suppose he’ll simply stop at our borders and turn around?”

“The Red Snake Wall has never been breached,” the Lady of Vaccei said.

Her Blood knew the great work better than any other, having often snuck past it to raid Arlesite lands, but this was foolishness. Aquiline agreed, it seemed.

“Never has the Hidden Horror tried it,” the Lady of Tartessos said. “Mighty as the enchantments of the spellsingers are, the Crown of the Dead is a spawning pool of endless fresh horrors. What manner of abomination might be made from the corpse of an empire? Best not find out, for all our sakes.”

“It is not written in stone that Procer will fall,” Lord Yannu said. “Bestowed have flocked to the north, and now both the Black Queen and the League offer truce to the First Prince. Let Procerans see to the defence of their own lands, and if friendship so compels your souls we may offer other bounty than the blood of our people. Foodstuffs and arms, loans of gold to fund their war.”

“And so when the war for Calernia’s survival is ended, we shall be remembered as those that crawled back to our own lands after the first taste of bloodshed,” Aquiline scathingly said. “Or, even as the continent dies around us, we’ll be cursed as the cowards who might have preserved it – if not for the wisdom of Yannu Marave.”

“Thousands have been lost already,” the Lord of Alava said. “Our old ally the Thalassocracy is ruined for at least a generation even if it shakes the Nicaean boot off its throat, which is hardly certain. Would you exhaust our every army as well so that Salia can reclaim Levant after the war end? We all know how much alliance meant to princes, after Callow lost its armies in the last eastern crusade.”

“The First Prince is an honourable woman,” Lady Itima said with a grimace, looking like it cost her to admit it.

Though the Brigand’s Blood was fervent in its hatred of enemies abroad and Procerans in particular, the Lady of Vaccei had spoken of Cordelia Hasenbach with respect more than once. The peace forged between Vaccei and Procer by its First Prince could have been so costly as to ruin the Ifriqui, for none had stood behind Lady Itima in her warmongering and would have protested heavy reparations overmuch, but Hasenbach had been restrained and allowed for honour in peace. That’d been remembered just as much as the many treacheries of the Principate.

“Will her successor be as well?” Lord Yannu retorted. “Or will our spent lands be hungrily eyed by Arlesite crowns and a would-be conqueror be elected after her?”

“To ward off a betrayal that might be,” Razin mildly said, “you instead offer a betrayal that is. I see no honour in this, Marave. Only fear.”

“Hear hear,” Aquiline said. “It might be the Tower we declared war on, but it is the Dead King that now seeks our end. Until the Last Dusk that old thing will be our enemy, and I will not retreat without even catching sight of his armies once .”

The Lord of Alava turned to fix Itima of the Brigand’s Blood with a steady look.

“Your judgement, Lady Itima?” Lord Yannu asked.

The older woman hesitated.

“It is not the war we agreed to fight, no denying that,” she said. “And you speak sense in being wary of Arlesite friendship. Yet honour must be observed. Some may remain, but others should return.”

Lord Yannu said nothing, gazing at them over the fire.

“Then let it be remembered that when the Enemy marched, Vaccei flinched and Alava turned tail,” Lady Aquiline Osena said, tone cold and contemptuous. “Tartessos will not shame itself in such a manner. My captains will remain, and I with them. Run back behind tall walls, if that is the sum of you.”

The gaze moved to him.

“Malaga stays,” Razin simply said.

“You’re not lord, boy,” Lady Itima replied. “You’ve no call to make that decision. It will be put to the captains.”

“I imagine it will,” Razin Tanja of the Grim Binder’s line replied. “I will be certain to tell them the Lady of Vaccei believes them so cowardly as to flee. No doubt they’ll be eager to prove you right.”

It might have been enough, Razin suspected, just for the captains to be told that retreat was Lord Yannu Marave’s own notion. His slaying of Father had seen him politely despised among the men and women who’d spent decades in the service of Akil Tanja. Now that one of the Brigand’s Blood had called their bravery into doubt this way? Gods, there might be honour-duels over insinuations they’d even considered returning south. Lord Yannu gazed at him for a long and silent moment, until he tiredly sighed.

“Has your shoulder been fully healed, Razin Tanja of Binder’s Blood?” the Lord of Alava asked.

It had been. Though the drow’s blow had been hard enough it was still tender, the healing of his binders had ensured that within perhaps a day he would perfectly hale. As it was, save for a mild ache when he moved there was naught left to fix. Still, a strange amusement took him when he realized they were not even speaking of the same shoulder wound as the previous time – it was not a goblin blade that’d hurt him last but a monstrous drow appendage.

“It has,” Razin acknowledged.

He would not lower himself to lying over the matter, even if Yannu Marave meant now to kill him just as he’d killed Father.

“By smoke add dust you vowed enmity between us,” Lord Yannu said. “To be set aside until healing was seen to.”

The Lord of Alava rose from his seat, graceful for all his exhaustion.

“Let us settle matters of honour, then,” Yannu of the Champion’s Blood said.

“As was sworn,” Razin calmly agreed, rising to match him.

The tent was not large, he thought, yet neither was it so small it could not be put to use as duelling-grounds. It would best to keep this away from the eyes of their captains, regardless.

“Will either of you require an officiant?” Lady Itima drawled. “I’ve no horse in this race, and so put forward my name.”

Razin declined, as did Lord Yannu. Theirs would be a duel to the death, not first blood or first wound, and so there was no need of another pair of eyes to adjudicate when to call a halt. Aquiline had risen as well, and leaned closer so her whisper would not be overheard.

“I’ve seen the two of you fight, Razin,” she said. “You’re one of the finest blades I know, but he is finer still and experienced in such duels besides. You will not be the victor in this.”

“He is tired,” Razin replied.

“So are you,” she said.

“I vowed enmity nonetheless,” he told her.

She studied him in silence.

“So you did,” Aquiline conceded.

She leaned closer still, and for a heartbeat he believed she might kiss him. Instead he swallowed a gasp when he felt a knife slide into his lower belly. He’d not even seen her draw. Still studying him, the Lady of Tartessos nodded approvingly.

“You didn’t scream,” she said, sounding proud. “Good. You may consider this the formal beginning of our courtship.”

“Well,” Razin croaked, “you’ve certainly made an impression.”

“Lady Aquiline, what is your meaning by intervening here?” Lord Yannu coldly asked.

Aquiline graced his reply with a twitch of the lips before turning to the Lord of Alava.

“As Razin Tanja is injured, he may not fight you,” the Lady of Tartessos said.

That was one way to delay the matter, he conceded. She’d even been kind enough to slide the blade somewhere that had little risk of killing him. Yet it would amount to little, for Yannu Marave’s intent remained: the man would slay either himself or Aquiline, and so ensure that few enough captains remained that those of Malaga or Tartessos would follow the rest home simply not to be stranded without allies in the midst of the Principate. Before long, there would be one more-

“And so I claim his right as his champion,” Aquiline Osena casually continued. “Any may contest this claim if they so wish, but it will have to be blade in hand.”

“Aquiline,” he began, “don’t-”

“Alas, he has become delirious from the pain,” she said. “And so his word can no longer be taken over the matter.”

Lord Yannu’s cool eyes moved from him to the Lady of Tartessos, assessing.

“So it seems,” the Lord of Alava agreed.

The choice was clear, Razin supposed, between a mere unacclaimed heir like himself and a true ruling lady like Aquiline. If one of them had to die, in Yannu’s eye she would be the better choice for unlike him, she could call on oaths to force her decisions onto captains. Knowing there was no point, he set aside the urge to continue protesting. Both duellists moved to the side of the tent, where they would have more room to move, and the other two of the Blood were invited to withdraw to the opposite end of the tent. Knife still in his belly, Razin obeyed.

“Even if she is the victor,” Lady Itima casually told him. “I’ve not agreed to your own decision.”

“What do you want, Ifriqui?” he grunted.

“The Tyrant of Helike,” she murmured. “If not the annihilation of his line, then at least his head.”

Aquiline and Yannu unsheathed their long, hooked swords and bowed. The Lord of Alava was taller than her, he could not help but notice. Larger and heavier with a great deal more blood on his hands. The Slayer’s Blood were unnaturally skilled duellists, it was true, and Aquiline skilled even compared to her kin. Yet the Champion’s Blood were known to reap lives like wheat and laugh through wounds great and small. There was no telling who would be the winner.

“We’ve no soldiers for that reckoning,” Razin said. “And no ally to borrow them from.”

“You know my terms, boy,” the Lady of Vaccei simply replied. “They will not change. If you and the girl want my warriors, earn them.”

The unspoken threat being that otherwise she would leave with her host, and perhaps the Alava men as well. If Yannu was slain and no other captains left, the Alavans might be shamed into remaining with the greater army – lest they be known as the sole warriors of the Dominion to have fled. It the Vaccei swords left with them, however, there could not be talk of dishonour. Or at least not quite as pointed, which for men who wanted to leave would suffice. Of course, this meant nothing unless Aquiline won. The two duellists had begun to move, he saw, yet blades had yet to clash. They were fighting over position, for now, looking for an opening to end it quick and clean. They were both tired and well-aware of it. The Alavan captains would be hard to keep, he thought, if Lord Yannu was killed. The hill-folk of Alava disliked taking orders from any save the Champion’s Blood, and were prouder than most. Aquiline suddenly lunged forward, blade flickering forward, but Lord Yannu calmly parried and withdrew, with the hook of his blade scoring a long cut on the Lady of Tartessos’ cheek. Red blood trailed down onto paint of green and bronze.

This would only end when one of them died, Razin thought, and in that moment the though disgusted him. The Peregrine’s corpse was hardly cold that already the children of others lines were killing each other over disputes of honour. Was there really any honour to be found in this? Razin wondered, watching Aquiline deftly manoeuvre around the fire pit to avoid a blow that would have taken her hand and scoring a cut of her own on Lord Yannu’s face – above his brow, where the blood might trickle down onto his eye if he was not careful. There was skill, that much was certain. Admirable skill. But honour? It was his own father being avenged, Razin reminded himself. His father who had been slain in a honour-duel much like this one, disagreeing over a decision of great import. Theirs were hard ways, Razin Tanja knew, but he’d been taught that they were also honest ways. Unlike Procerans who poisoned and schemed, unlike the Free Cities and their empty trials, those of Levant did not leave the rot to fester. The brought it out, cut it out, settled the matters so they would not grow and settled them in honour. Honour-duels, he thought. Honour-wars. So much honour was there to be found in the Dominion, and all of it derived from blood.

“If he kills her, the Osena will feud with the Marave,” he quietly said.

And, though it would be early and almost presumptuous of him to say, the Tanja as well.

“So they will,” Lady Itima shrugged.

She was unmoved, for this was simply the way of the world. Steel touched steel, as they watched, as a quick exchange that had Razin’s heard racing saw Aquiline avoiding a cut throat but taking a blow to the side of the head from Lord Yannu’s heavy pommel. She seemed dizzied, and so his stomach clenched in fear. Razin Tanja had stood just like he was standing now and watched his own father be slain, because this was an honourable way to settle things and it would be dishonourable of him to do otherwise. This settles nothing , he thought. It is rule by the blade, and it brings ever more the same. If Aquiline slew Yannu, avenging Razin’s own father, then some other Marave would one day come for her to avenge Yannu. And then in years after someone would come for her killer, and on and on and on it would go until either Levant died or the Last Dusk came to pass. Razin felt as if he were standing on the edge of a tall precipice, as if he were about to fall, and every inch of him wanted to retreat. To take a step back. But he thought, in that moment, not of anything his father or teachers had ever said but of a pair of cool brown eyes and a cutting grin wreathed in smoke. You mock yourself , the great monster of their age had told him almost gently, by pretending today did not happen. It did. Learn from it, or die in a ditch somewhere blaming everything but yourself.

“Enough,” Razin Tanja of the Binder’s Blood said.

Lady Itima eyed him curiously, but nothing else came of it.

“ Enough ,” Razin hissed, and he ripped the knife out of his own guts.

Even when the blade clattered on the ground they did not cease their fighting, though when bleeding and wincing he stepped in between them the blades were held back.

“Razin,” Aquiline harshly said, “do not-”

“How many years has it been, since the Dominion was founded?” he interrupted. “Three hundred and change, I’d say. That is how long it has been since Procerans ceased killing us and we’ve started doing it to ourselves. Enough, damn you.”

“You dishonour yourself,” Yannu Marave scorned him. “Fearing defeat-”

“The Valiant Champion took up arms to end tyrants, didn’t she?” Razin said. “Rulers who forced their will through force of arms. I wonder how much difference she’d really see, between you and a prince.”

The Lord of Alava paled, either in dismay or white-hot fury.

“If there is honour to be lost,” Razin said, scorning the very word as he had himself been scorned, “then let it be mine.”

“You would let your father’s death go unavenged?” Aquiline asked, and there was something like contempt in her voice.

That wounded, it did, but still he must press on. Learn from it, or die , he told himself.

“Someone has to,” he snarled back. “What does this change? What does any of this change?”

Something in him snapped, for if he’d been able to see this why hadn’t they? Why did it have to be him, bearing those disdainful looks like he’d somehow spewed in their cup by arguing that more killing wasn’t going to get them out of the put killing had first dug.

“It settles our disagreement,” Lord Yannu said. “Move aside, Tanja, or be struck down.”

Razin laughed.

“Do it,” he said, extending his arms and wincing from the wound in his gut being stretched. “Is this what we are now? Even when the world is half-ended we kill each other over battle plans and decisions and how we’ve killed each other over the last two. Are we truly that... little ?”

“I will not warn you again,” Yannu Marave calmly told him.

“Move, Razin,” Aquiline said, and though there was still disdain in the voice there was more worry.

It was not much of a balm, but it was not nothing.

“No,” Razin said. “If you want to force this through look it in the eye, Yannu Marave – admit that you are willing to cut down an unarmed man to get your way.”

“Damn you, boy,” Lord Yannu hoarsely said, but raised his sword anyway.

The knife came to rest against his throat without anyone having it heard unsheathed. The Lord of Alava stilled.

“Keep talking, Tanja,” Lady Itima said.

A convulsive chuckle ripped its way free of his throat.

“Do I truly need to make some great argument,” he said, absurdly amused, “of why we should cease slaughtering each other at least on the same night when the sky almost fell on our heads ?”

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“Gods Above,” Razin said. “Look at us. We might as well be an Alamans farce: the four fools who duelled on the night the world almost ended. We’ve fought half a score in battles and skirmishes against the Army of Callow and the League and the drow, yet the closest the Dominion’s armies have come to breaking this winter is this very hour. Think on that, for a moment. We’ve wounded ourselves more viciously than the Black Queen and all her heretic cohorts put together.”

“Much have you chided us,” Aquiline said, “yet you’ve said nothing of how to mend the wound.”

“We bring back the Peregrine’s corpse,” Razin Tanja said. “And we put it to a proper pyre. And when that’s done? We don’t butcher ourselves like fucking animals . If we are to decide the fate of Levant, then let Levant have a say.”

“The Holy Seljun?” Lady Itima said, sounding surprised.

“No,” Lord Yannu softly said. “He means the captains. He means that we speak our case to an assembly of our soldiers, and choose our way by acclamation.”

Razin nodded.

“And if the soldiers choose to go home?” Aquiline pointedly asked.

“Then we go home,” Razin said. “We have to be willing to lose, Aquiline, to bend. Otherwise this only ever ends with swords bared.”

“That has been our way,” she replied, “and it has served us well.”

“Has it?” he softly asked. “The Grey Pilgrim has been dead for nary an hour, and already in this tent the seeds of a decade of war have been sown. Can you truly say our way has served us well ?”

“I will agree,” Yannu Marave said, “to sending warriors to bring back the Peregrine in honour.”

Razin admired, against his will, how calm the man’s tone was when Itima’s knife had yet to leave his throat.

“The escort and the assembly both have my agreement,” Lady Itima of the Brigand’s Blood said. “Be it battle or retreat, let it be chosen before Gods and men.”

“The escort and the assembly,” Aquiline agreed after a moment, tone brisk. “The right decision will be clear to all that are not craven fools.”

Razin Tanja idly wondered if it would be ill-taken to send for a priest or a binder for his stomach wound before an honour guard of warriors was assembled to take the Peregrine back to his kin.

“The escort and the assembly,” he said, as if there’d been any doubt.

He was still bleeding from the belly when they left the tent, but at least no one had died. That was, he decided, better than he’d had any right to hope for.

Interlude: Concourse IV

“A victor has a hundred friends, every last born yesterday.”
– Helikean saying

Abigail of Summerholm – still a general, despite her best efforts – had finally figured it out. As the Gods despised her for reasons known only to them, her attempts at mild incompetence had instead been reward with successes that’d earned her a reputation as a ‘tactical prodigy’. Her continued protests that she was not such thing were being taken as humility instead of desperation, to the extend that Marshal Juniper had commended her for being ‘grounded’ and ‘not letting acclaim go to her head’. Abigail had never seen anything half so horrifying in her life as the Hellhound attempting an approving look, and she’d had goblin stew. Which was made by goblins and not of goblins, as she really wished someone had told her before she’d eaten a bowl out of fear of offending a whole swarm of sappers. Ah, but it’d been naïve of her to assume that simply trying to pass on her responsibilities to literally anyone else would be enough to see her demoted back to a set of responsibilities less gallows-adjacent. Indeed, from the towering heights of her fresh understanding she now grasped how guileless and green that manner of thinking had been. But she’d learned, oh yes she had. They were going to sweep her under the rug quietly, maybe even enlarge her retirement pension so she kept her mouth shut for the rest of her life, which as far as she was concerned was the ideal state of affairs. Of course, her most cunning plans still hinged on the Deadhand not getting them all killed before Morning Bell.

Which was, unfortunately, looking less likely by the moment.

“Six hundred, at least,” the Adjutant calmly said. “Personal armsmen of the Blood, by the looks of their equipment.”

The tall, broad-shouldered villain spoke in that way orcs often learned to after they’d been out of the Steppes for a few years: slower than they would in Kharsum, and careful to avoid being too loud. You could tell how long they’d been out of the homeland by the way they talked, since those fresh out of the Clans hadn’t usually yet figured out that a big orc speaking loud and harshly in a hard-to-understand accent tended to make humans a mite twitchy. Hakram Deadhand struck Abigail as the kind of person who went around spending a lot of time thinking about what other people thought before acting all cold and measured. She’d known folks like that more than once, they were the traders who’d done the best under the Praesi at Summerholm. Those who’d not choked on pride when it came to getting trade permits from the easterners, who’d not balked at serving legionaries and greasing the palms of Wasteland scribes. They usually weren’t nice people but they did tend to be able to afford nice meals, which in Abigail’s humble opinion was a lot more useful a trait.

“The Tartessos and Malaga captains were hard in a scrap,” General Abigail replied. “And they’re not even the people known for having heavy foot.”

Please, Lord Deadhand , she silently prayed, do not ask my two cohorts to take that damned hill. Four hundred legionaries, even veterans, trying to dislodge those armsmen would be like swinging a trout at a wall: amusing, except for the trout. She’d seen those bastards in Sarcella taking a run at sapper-dug positions and still make a dent, since they refused to die even when shot repeatedly and didn’t seem to have a single self-preserving bone in their bodies. It was always worse when one of their nobles was around, too, it put an unnecessary amount of additional steel to their already-steely countenance in the face of danger.

“That would be the Alava warriors, whose colours are also flying,” the Adjutant said. “I receive your point, general. An assault before reinforcements are had would be difficult.”

Huh. She’d not expected that to work. Did praying to people actually change things? She’d heard that there was talk about making the odd offering to the Crows these days, which she didn’t entirely disapprove of. The Gods Above asked for a lot, birds were probably much easier to bribe as far as deities went. Alms took hard coin, but you could get dead rats from any poorly-kept cellar.

“Haven’t been told why we set out either, sir,” Abigail said. “Er, lord? My lord?”

“Adjutant will do,” the ivory-fanged villain told her.

Ugh, he’d even done the fucking grin just like Krolem did. Someone really needed to have a sit down with all these orcs and explain to them that some big muscled bastard displaying enough sharp teeth to fill the mouths of at least three jackals wasn’t ever going to be taken as reassuring by anyone with any sense. At least the goblins were aware they were horrifying as all Hells when they did it.

“We are to serve as the escort for Her Majesty’s return to Creation,” the Adjutant said.

Abigail was well-learned in the ways of the Army of Callow, by now, so she didn’t need to have it spelled out for her. Of course it’d gotten worse, it always did it this bloody outfit.

“It’s on that hill isn’t,” she whined. “With all the warriors on it.”

And any moment now the Dominion was going to be reinforced by a battalion of demons, or a legion of angels, and still the Deadhand would say: take me that hill, General Abigail, or no general’s pension for you. And that was the thing, wasn’t it? Abigail had come too far to retire without the pension now, she refused to attend that many bloody strategic briefings and not make it out of this damned war set for life.

“Your intuition is as acute as rumoured,” Deadhand said.

The Summerholm girl didn’t squint at the villain, because that was a good way to get your eyes eaten, but she did wonder how long it’d taken the orc to perfect a tone of voice that so perfectly straddled the line between serene and sardonic.

“Thank you,” she said, cleared her throat. “Sir lord Adjutant.”

“As for why you in particular are serving as commanding officer for the cohorts instead of a commander or even a legate, it’s simple enough,” the one-handed orc gravelled. “You’re one of the few people Catherine has ever personally promoted. I was curious.”

Abigail looked up at the sky, casting out her despair for any god willing to hear her. How much would it cost, for people to stop getting ‘curious’ about her? She was willing to resume attending sermons, if that was what it took. Or offer, like, three dead rabbits to the Crows. She could probably get a few of those from goblins if she found a gaggle around a campfire and put up bottles to trade.

“I’m flattered,” she lied.

She was going to have to implement that plan faster than she’d earlier intended, the general thought. Gods forgive her, she might even have to accept that dinner invitation Grandmaster Brandon Talbot had sent her. Rumour was he extended that to every rising Callowan officer, but she’d thought to avoid the whole thing like the plague by claiming that a goblin had eaten the invitation. It would have held up, they ate basically anything if they got hungry enough or were dared to. Now, though, she’d have to use a nice public dinner with important people to say something horribly, absurdly racist somewhere too many high officers were seated for it to be ignored. She was still debating on what to say, that was the issue. She wasn’t going to start mouthing off about greenskins – not when she had so many of them close to her and bearing sharp things – and going after Wastelanders tended to earn retribution. Taghreb officers watched each other’s backs, and if there was a single Soninke in this damned army that couldn’t do magic or didn’t have a friend who could she’d yet to run into them.

No, it’d have to be about real foreigners. She’d been mulling over arguing that ‘all Procerans should be eaten, especially the children’. If she said that in front of enough people it’d have to be bad enough she was encouraged to retire, right?

“And now Rozala Malanza graces us with her presence,” Hakram Deadhand said. “This is going to get interesting .”

It was hard to make out much in the darkness, especially at a distance, but the Procerans were hard to miss: they’d brought their own torches, and not few. Even after the Tyrant of Helike had tumbled them down form Arcadia it looked like the princes had been able to put together a contingent of horse. Abigail had a hard time guessing numbers, given the swiftness they rode with and the movement of the torches, but there had to be at least two hundred riders there. Trailing behind at a slower pace, men-at-arms whose strength was easier to gauge were approaching in a column. Easily five hundred there, Abigail saw with dismay. This was about to turn into a bloody godsdamned mess, wasn’t it? The Dominion had six hundred foot, but it also had the hill and some of those hard warrior-priests who’d melted the Princekiller’s own plate over him. Princess Malanza of Wherever and Whatnot had that light Proceran horse and some decent fighting men for a sum of seven hundred but Abigail suspected charging up a hill at Levantine armsmen wasn’t likely to end well for Malanza, horse or not.

And then there was them, approaching with two cohorts of two hundred. One of regulars, veterans from Arcadia and the Doom, and the other a lighter force: sappers, mages, crossbowmen. The weakest force of the three, if you didn’t count that Hakram fucking Deadhand was part of it. She’d seen the orc Named thrown like a trebuchet stone at Akua’s Folly and walk it off before assaulting a rebel bastion near single-handed. The Adjutant could turn it into a fight, if not a very pleasant one.

“Our reinforcements might get there in time,” General Abigail tried.

And they might, pretty please, bring with them someone high up enough in rank this would no longer be her problem. The low hill the Dominion had taken and would allegedly be the Black Queen’s stepping stone back into Creation was roughly between the camps of Levant, Procer and Callow but the dark-haired woman would bet on the Army of Callow’s muster over anyone else’s without batting an eye. No one else drilled battle-muster save for the Legions, so if this got out of hand their own legionaries should get here quicker than either the Levantines or the Procerans. Of course, there were a lot more of those around so that’d only go so far.

“Unlikely,” the Adjutant said, eyes moving across the darkness.

He could see where she could not, Abigail knew.

“We’re mobilizing faster,” he acknowledged, “but they began earlier. This is the vanguard for all of us, and it’ll have to be by our hands it’s settled: by the time reinforcements are on the field Catherine will have returned and it will be over.”

Please don’t order me to take that hill, Lord Deadhand sir , Abigail desperately thought.

“I suppose we’ll have to take that hill,” the orc mused, and she whimpered a little inside.

He cast at her an almost knowing look before offering the barest flash of fang.

“Not alone, though,” the Adjutant said. “See the banner riding towards us? Rozala Malanza seeks audience.”

—

Princess Rozala rode her destrier hard, intent on snatching this disaster out of Below’s ruinous grasp before they all ended up paying for it.

Whatever it was the Blood had been up to in their closed council, in the wake of its end they’d not bothered to even acknowledge the presence of the messengers she kept sending to their camp. They’d gathered entire war parties of their finest warriors, sent for the Lanterns and marched out for the hill where Rozala’s mages said enough power was currently coalescing to burn a town to the ground. The Black Queen’s return must be imminent, her people had concluded, and its location was beyond dispute. Which meant the way the Levantines had made for it without missing a beat unlikely to be a coincidence. The riders she’d sent after the Dominion forces with orders to try anything short of baring blades to get an audience with the lords and ladies had been turned away roughly, though at least not in utter silence: they’d been informed that this was a sacred matter, and concerning only the Blood. No interference would be brooked. Heart clenching, Princess Rozala had sent forward the soldiers she’d been able to muster up until then and left Louis to assemble the second wave.

The Callowans weren’t blind, of course, so they’d sent out a force as well. Just two cohorts from the Third Army, but that force’s general had something of a reputation: the Levantines spoke of her with a measure of respect for the way she’d held on to the city of Sarcella even when taken by surprise and outnumbered. This General Abigail was also said to have slaughtered like lambs almost a quarter of the Levantine mages during the first assault on the southern palisade, which was no small thing. Rozala Malanza’s ancestors had fought binders often and known them to be dangerous foes when moved to war. Still, even led by a superb field tactician four hundred legionaries were not a major force. Not so great as the one fielded by Levant, at least, or even the hasty party the Princess of Aequitan had put together and led forth. Or so she had fought, until she’d seen the Black Queen’s own banner flying above the cohorts: silver on black, a balance bearing a sword and a crown. That the sword weighed heavier said much of the woman who’d taken that heraldry as her own, and how it was she’d come to be Queen in Callow – of Callow, Rozala corrected herself. Best not make that mistake around Foundling herself, her temper was well-known.

That the Sword and Crown flew could simply be sign that it was expected the Black Queen would return under it. Or it could mean that the Adjutant was with the cohorts, and that’d complicate things. In truth, it could be said that Hakram Deadhand was the least dangerous of Catherine Foundling’s woeful company. He lacked the terrifying great sorceries of the Hierophant, the Archer’s talent for sudden and surprising killing strokes and even the Thief’s rumoured endowment to steal anything from a fleet or river barges to some fae princess’ sorcery. The Adjutant was a lesser figure in the stories that’d made it across the mountains, as the nature of his Damnation would imply. Yet there was one thing all tales agreed on – of all the Woe, none were so implacably loyal to the Black Queen as her Adjutant. The others, Rozala felt confident she might have swayed into holding their hand. The Archer was drunken sot, for all her lethality, the Hierophant had read through then entire peace talks after the Battle of the Camps and the Thief had been cautious even before she’d been rumoured to have lost her power. The Adjutant, though? Be reputation, he was temperate and even-handed sort. Those, in Rozala’s experience, always tended to make the worst fanatics.

Few things were as troublesome as an otherwise reasonable man believing an unreasonable thing.

Escort riding close around her even as the rest of her vanguard advanced on the hill where the Levantines had taken position, the dark-haired princess veered hard to the side when she saw the Black Queen’s banner split from the rest of the legionaries. An escort of ten, the very same number she rode with, made for her direction at a sedate pace while the rest of the cohorts continued marching on the hill. Wary of too sudden an approach being taken as a charge, Rozala reduced the pace of her mount and shouted for her soldiers to do the same. Within moments they were in sight of the enemy envoys, and even before she drew her up reins and halted the Princess of Aequitan was silently cursing. There was no mistaken the burnt and darkened plate on the tall orc for anything else: the Adjutant was there, along with a young woman bearing the marks of a general and a retinue of Callowan regulars. The dark-eyed Arlesite would have called it a risk taken, bringing but a matching number of legionaries when she rode to them with horse, but knew better. The orc was Damned, and not fresh to his legend: he could likely kill them all without coming to breathe heavier for it.

“Hail, Lord Adjutant,” Princess Rozala called out in Lower Miezan.

“Your Grace,” the Adjutant replied in the same.

She flicked her eyes to the side, taking in the sight of the woman who was most likely this General Abigail of the Third Army. Black hair, tanned cheeks, watery blue eyes. More tavern girl than warrior-queen, and what was it with Callow and spawning all those wee dangerous women?

“I present you General Abigail of Summerholm, in command of the Third Army,” the Deadhand said. “You may have heard of her.”

“So I have,” Rozala replied. “Well met, general. Your deeds in Sarcella drew attention.”

“That was all Her Majesty,” the black-haired woman replied almost hurriedly. “Truly, I have done nothing worth remembering.”

Humble, the Arlesite princess wondered, or trying to remain obscure so that she would take her enemies by surprise in wars to come? Either way, she was one to watch out for.

“It appears, Princess Rozala, that the Dominion has seen fit to obstruct the return of my queen,” the Adjutant gravelled in that unsettlingly deep voice. “This seems to me a violation of the truce that was struck.”

“I am sure they merely mean to serve as an honour guard,” Rozala lied. “Though, of course, that honour should be shared between all of us. Indeed, I brought soldiers with me for this very purpose.”

The orc’s hairless brow narrowed.

“A threefold honour guard is your intention?” he asked.

“Of course,” the Princess of Aequitan said. “Is it not yours? Surely the Army of Callow would not seek to break the truce your very queen arranged.”

The Damned let out a noise that was either amused or contemptuous, Rozala knew too little of his kind to tell.

“I’ve no intention of sharing the honour,” Hakram Deadhand calmly said. “We’ll be clearing out the Dominion by force of arms.”

General Abigail let out a mocking bark of laughter, though her voice made it sound like strangely terrified trill.

“There is no need for such a thing,” Princess Rozala insisted. “I can accompany you to treat with the Blood and this can all be achieved without breaking truce.”

The orc studied her for a long moment, and then slowly bared his fearsome great fangs.

“The First Prince ordered you to keep Catherine alive and amenable,” the Adjutant serenely said. “You’d have tried threats otherwise. Well now, that’s a fascinating turn. How far are you allowed to go to assure that?”

“You assume much,” Rozala flatly replied.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” the orc said, snorting. “Send your people in a flanking position for the hill, on the eastern side. We’ll take the other flank. You and I can speak with those Levant lordlings from a position of strength.”

“You overestimate your position,” the Princess of Aequitan said, tone glacial.

Hakram Deadhand studied her, then laughed.

“No,” he said. “I don’t. Glad to have you on our side, Princess Rozala. I’ve great esteem for your campaigning in Cleves.”

And just like that, he turned and began to walk again. Though anger boiled in her stomach, the Princess of Aequitan found she had no means to deal it out. What could she do, strike out at the Black Queen’s own aide or let him lead his cohorts into a fight that could not be won? She’d been ordered to avoid provoking Catherine Foundling, and letting the Adjutant die would be very much the opposite of that. The Princess of Aequitan found that General Abigail was looking at her still, a strange expression on the Callowan’s face. She reached for something within her armour and Rozala tensed, half-expecting a knife, but instead it was a dull bronze flask. The general tossed it to her and patted her horse’s neck with what seemed to be genuine sympathy.

“I’d tell you it gets better,” General Abigail said, “but it would be a lie.”

Seed I

“In declaring all that is not Good to be Evil, one surrenders the better part of the world to the Enemy.”
– Theodore Langman, Wizard of the West

The librarians were skulking about again.

Amadeus was going to have to kill a few before this was done and over with, he suspected, which would have been trouble if Dread Emperor Nefarious still took interest in anything but his seraglio and his grimoires. The Deep Library, as the misshapen people of this place called the true Imperial archives – those hidden deep beneath the Tower, where none without permission could enter – was purely the Emperor’s to oversee. It’d been that wat since it had grown from a tomb full of secrets to one of the greatest repositories of knowledge on Calernia, in the days where Dread Emperor Sorcerous had reigned and learning had flourished in Praes like never before. The Deep Library was as a small city, now, those that saw to its obscure labyrinthine stacks and records born and raised within the depths. Few had ever seen the light of day, and centuries of inbreeding and exposure to old sorceries had warped them in... unseemly ways. They wore the hoods by imperial decree, as some ancient Tyrant having been disgusted by their appearance. For all that they’d made clear their disapproval of a mere Duni like Amadeus being granted access to the stacks even if he’d come with a writ bearing Nefarious’ own seal. It’d been the Chancellor’s hand that’d pressed it down, truth be told, but the rats scuttling in these deeps had no way of knowing that.

“I can hear you,” the Black Knight calmly said. “Come into the light or be treated as a spy.”

The Chancellor no doubt had suborned a few eyes among this lot and tasked them with study of what it was he was studying, but he’d hardly be the only one. The old families of the Wasteland would have agents of their own, entire bloodlines of traitors cultivated over centuries whose practical worth was greater than that of a vault full of rubies. The ring of flickering lights cast by oil lanterns – mage lights would have been more efficient but they tended to go wild in these parts, affected by the ancient wards and magics – revealed the yellow-robed silhouette of a lesser librarian. To a guest bearing a seal, like Amadeus, they were to be ordered about as wished though it was customary to allow one of the greater librarians to see to it instead, expressing wishes to the greater so that they could send the lesser to carry them out. Of course, that would require one of the greater librarians to have remained in attendance of the Black Knight as was also customary instead of vanishing back into the dark maze. A distasteful parting shot had been made about getting mud on the scrolls, for which Amadeus had considered taking the woman’s tongue as a warning to the others. He’d decided against it, for now anyway. There were yet more ways in which the keepers of this place could hinder his research, which was too important to risk on what was hardly likely to be the last reference to his breeding he’d hear.

“This one has what was sought, Lord Black,” a mellifluous voice spoke from under the hood.

The Mtethwa spoken had an archaic bent to it, for those speaking it had been separated from other speakers for so long they’d not changed their manners along the same lines. The court address was properly done, though still unfamiliar to his ear: highborn had only begun using such courtesies with him since he’d slain the Heir and put a permanent end to their struggles.

“The Thalassinan records, yes?” he questioned.

“It is so, Lord,” the librarian agreed.

He gestured for the yellow-robed stranger to approach. Stuttering steps brought the tablets he’d sent for, and Amadeus allowed the librarian to set them on one of the rare corners of the reading hall he’d claimed that wasn’t covered. It looked like utter chaos, at first glance, piles of scrolls and manuscripts and stone inscriptions sprawling under ancient maps of Praes and eastern Callow. The divisions were not geographic, in truth, but chronological. Inconveniently enough, he’d had to spend longer finding the right time and place in histories to look for answers than actually finding the answers he sought. The seal that’d allowed him access to the Deep Library had been a reward claimed from the Chancellor, but it was not without bounds: he had only seven days and nights to seek his answers. He’d not slept more than two hours apiece in the last five days, and if Amadeus could have avoided that without measurably impairing his mind’s ability to retain details he would have done so. There was no telling when he would next have such an opportunity.

“If this one may speak, Lord,” the librarian said.

Black’s eyes flicked up in surprise. He’d expected them to leave as soon as the precise duties were discharged.

“It may me presumptuous of this one to grasp at the intent of one of hallowed rank, yet it seems that it might be grain quantities in particular being sought,” the librarian delictely said.

“That is correct,” Amadeus said. “Under the tenure of Rector Cornelia Orbivia, to be specific.”

Which had been irritatingly difficult to find out with any degree of accuracy. The Miezans had famously put everything to writing and what remained of the records of their occupation was surprisingly extensive, but Praes had been one of the most distant overseas provinces of their empire. Which meant that, far from the stern gaze of their imperial rulers, the rectors overseeing Praes had been habitually corrupt and falsified the reports they sent to Mieza in order to better enrich themselves off imperial revenue. Cornelia Orbivia had been unusually corrupt even among rectors, to the extent that Amadeus had found himself reluctantly impressed by her gall. On the same year where Taghreb tribal record of the Banu Hiraq spoke of several large gold shafts being mined in the Grey Eyries, she’d had the gall to send envoys to Mieza requesting funding for the rebuilding of the Wasaliti levees that she otherwise ‘could not afford’. As a nice touch, she’d even mentioned that failing to repair those works would agitate the local savages. Amusing as that had been to find out, Rector Cornelia’s falsifications made it difficult to assess what the yield of fields under her rule had actually been. Which was unfortunate, for under her successor the Miezans had begun trading regularly with the Callowan chieftains of Summerholm and that influx of grain would throw off the numbers in a way Amadeus couldn’t really account for.

“The harbour records of Thalassina would only provide incomplete understanding, Lord,” the librarian said, “as they do not account for ships that were exempt from duties and inspections by Rector’s decree. This one presumed to send for the records of such exempted ships, if it pleases the hallowed one.”

“It does,” Black replied, eyes narrowing by the barest of fractions. “Yet are you implying that Rector Orbivia kept record s of her own corruption?”

“Hallowed one, they are in fact from the array of charges brought against her by Imperatrix Iusta,” the librarian said. “Who later recalled Rector Orbivia and had her drawn and quartered after public trial.”

More than once, perusing Miezan histories, it had occurred to Amadeus that the Praesi apple had not fallen far from the tree.

“Those charges would be accurate, in your opinion?” he asked, cocking his head to the side.

“This one recalls the Imperatrix was reputed for her preoccupation for justice,” the librarian said. “Yet the hallowed one need not take this one’s recollections as facts, for such is mentioned in the Annales Zosimia and the Sicorat Aheli .”

Amadeus’ brow rose. The famous historian Zosimia had been prone to embellishing when the truth of things proved insufficiently exciting for the audience, but as a rule they’d been faithful in relating what more reliable and unfortunately lost histories had believed to be the truth. The Sicorat, on the other hand, was not a Miezan history but a Baalite one. Amadeus’ passing knowledge of tradertalk had him suspecting the meaning of the title was something along the lines of ‘Foe-Tale’, which was an apt summation of the relations between the Hegemony and the Empire during their shared span of history. That rather added integrity to the source, in his eyes. Invectives from an enemy ever flowed freely, but praise? That was a rarer thing, and grudgingly given.

“Have the Annales Zosimia sent to me,” he ordered. “Do you have a translation of the Sicorat from I assume to be the original High Tyrian?”

“This one knows only of a highly revisionist reinterpretation of the work penned by High Lord Saman Muraqib during the reign of the Dread Empress Maleficent the Second,” the librarian replied. “It does contain several accurate translations of the Sicorat Aheli’s text, spread among High Lord Saman’s own writing.”

The Black Knight almost snorted. Considering the second Maleficent had clashed more than once with the Thalassocracy of Ashur in her day and that the islanders were the last remnants of Baalite rule on Calernia it was no great stretch to infer the nature of the Taghreb aristocrat’s commentary. The man would hardly be the first of the Wasteland’s highborn to rail at the Ashuran ‘perfidy’ in not allowing Praes to raise a fleet worth the name. He would not even be the first to frame Praes as the inheritor of Mieza and Ashur that of the Hegemony, poetically fated to war as their progenitors had been.

“My palate might not be discerning enough to truly understand the depths of High Lord Saman’s wisdom,” Amadeus drily said. “His work shall rest, I think.”

“By your will, hallowed one,” the librarian said, bowing.

The Black Knight hummed and considered matters for long moment. Weighing risk, weighing dues.

“Your name?” he asked.

“This one is called Nafari, hallowed one,” the librarian replied.

“After arranging for the Annales,” Amadeus said, “I believe you will find your duties take you far from this part of the stacks. For some time, too.”

The hooded librarian stiffened.

“It will be so, hallowed one,” Nafari croaked out. “Manifold thanks from this unworthy one.”

Amadeus did not further acknowledge the exchange, unwilling to tip his hand too deeply. This one had been helpful, and polite. The slight risk could be taken as gratitude. It was forgot before long, for the promised records had arrived and so he returned to his calculations. To his surprise, though Rector Orbivia had smuggled out the wealth she’d stolen from imperial revenues at a rate of between five to eight ships a year, a significant part of that theft was grain. The quantities allowed him to add the last finishing touch to his estimates of grain yields, yet the detail remained in the back of his mind like a wiggling tick. Rector Orbivia had been nothing if not apt in extracting wealth from her office, Amadeus thought. Why, then would on a year where she had sent six ships sailing to Liceria would a full three of them have been filled with grain? The same hull filled with slaves, for example – orcs had been rare on the other side of the Tyrian Sea and wildly popular, fetching high prices on Miezan slave auctions – should have secured much greater profit. Had grain been easier to obtain, in those days? It was possible, for the Wasteland had not yet earned its name through Sinistra’s cataclysmic blunder. Yet agriculture had grown more sophisticated since those days, and the crops reaped relative to the amount of cultivated land had been numerically higher in those days.

Something was beginning to dawn on him, slowly, as he kept open his leather journal with his lower palm and marked in ink the numbers for Rector Orbivia’s tenure.

Yet it would have been absurd, when Praes held so many other ways for a Miezan rector to enrich themselves, unless he was missing a detail. The Annales Zosimia were brought to him, all seven volumes, by another yellow-robed librarian. This one did not speak nor linger, and Black dug throughout the fourth tome until he acceded to the parts concerning Imperatrix Iusta. It was easy enough to confirm Librarian Nafari’s words, namely that the Imperatrix seemed to have displayed a very real concern for justice even when it was politically inconvenient for her. Yet it was not those sentences in Old Miezan that caught his attention but instead slight details of military history. An attempt from the king of the Luxor, a Baalite ally, to seize the lesser city of Antisma on the coast of Caracisson. The last name was familiar, and referral to the Miezan history of the Bellum Stobogii shed some light over it: Caracisson was a rich stretch of coast in the Miezan province of Stobogia Minor. Which, along with its northern sister-province of Stobogia Major, were the Miezan empire’s traditional breadbasket due to their great fields and golden summers. Over the reign of Imperatrix Iusta, according to the Annales, no less than eight battles had been fought over the provinces against a variety of northern nomadic tribes and southern Baalite-backed petty kingdoms. Looking further back through previous reigns, the trend had begun at least four decades earlier.

And like that it fell into place, bitter as the epiphany was.

When Alaya arrived, she found him with a cup of wine in hand and a dark look on his face. His mood had turned sullen, now that he’d put the pieces together. Even wearing a cloak and drab vestments she was a vision, as if the lackluster clothes had been picked to make her beauty evident by contrast. There’d been a time where Amadeus had felt the first stirrings of interest in his friend, though the notion had been buried early and he missed it not. The thought that he might force a manner of affection onto Alaya that she could not reciprocate was viscerally repulsive to him, moreso for the nature of how she’d been brought to the Tower. That she’d been graceful in enduring her situation did not detract in the slightest from the atrocious nature of it. Alaya dropped onto the seat at his side without any of the put-on grace that might be expected of her higher in the Tower, wordlessly accepting the cup of wine he’d poured her and offered. She drew back her hood and Amadeus found his eyes lingering on her cheekbone. He’d learned to recognize the sight of mage-healing, and even the most exquisite of sorceries could not avoid flesh being made tender when it was knit anew. He said nothing, for he knew pity would burn her like acid. His friend drank a sip of the cup and made a spluttering grin against the rim.

“Gods, that tastes truly awful,” Alaya said. “From the Green Stretch?”

“Where else could they make such a horror?” he grinned back.

It’d been worth suffering the rest of that bottle just for the smile, he thought. She drank again, deeper this time.

“It might as well be vinegar with a handful of grapes left to stew inside,” Alaya said, sounding fascinated. “This might be the single worst wine I’ve drunk, Maddie.”

“Only the finest of the worst for you, Allie,” he toasted.

She quietly laughed, the way she had back home when she was truly amused and not simply putting on merriment for the patrons at her father’s inn. They both drank, and he let her take the reins of the conversation without qualms.

“Dare I ask what had you glaring balefully at parchment when I arrived?” she asked.

His jaw tightened, until he mastered himself.

“I believe,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch said, “I’ve grasped how the Wasteland was made.”

She straightened in her seat, fingers tightening against the cup.

“I expect,” she said, “your answer runs deeper than Sinistra’s famously ruinous attempt to steal the weather of Callow.”

He dipped his head in agreement and she breathed out.

“Tell me,” Alaya ordered. “All of it.”

She held no office, wielded little influence and bore no Name while, Duni or not, he was still the Black Knight of Praes. Yet it did not occur to him that this could be anything but an order, or that it could be disobeyed.

“I began studying it because Sinistra’s ritual was, in essence, our first great national act of lunacy,” Amadeus said. “Before her, we had a hundred and twenty years of relative success: the Grey Eyries annexed, and though Summerholm did not fall its Counts were near enough to vassals of the Tower. We backed them against Alban attempts to bring them into their realm them twice, Alaya! Why would Sinistra, then, risk such a ritual? Was she simply mad, consumed by the urge to wield her sorcery?”

“Was she?” Alaya asked.

“Last year,” Amadeus said, “Wekesa, Sabah and I broke into one of the lesser spell repositories of the Warlock. While Apprentice had his design on volumes writing of wards, my own interest was in a rumour: namely that old failed rituals were kept there and used as tools of teaching for the Warlock’s pupils.”

“And you found the ritual Sinistra tried to use there,” she murmured.

“I did,” he agreed. “And Wekesa believes it sound in principle, though wildly ambitious and with laughably little margin for error. If heroes had not interrupted it, the sorcery could have functioned as intended.”

“She could be a talented mage and mad nonetheless,” Alaya said. “We’ve certainly precedent enough for that.”

Not, he knew, because she was arguing against him. It was the way they spoke, the two of them, presenting the opposing view so that weakness in argument and knowledge could be made evident. Iron sharpens iron , highborn might have said, though she was anything but a foe.

“Agreed,” he said. “On the other hand, if the ritual was well-formed then it had to be tailored to the realities of where it was meant to affect. That implies...”

“There was an observable phenomenon on Creation she was reacting to,” Alaya said. “Was the land souring?”

“I wondered the same,” he smiled. “And early Imperial records to make increasingly frequent mentions of famines and food shortages from the moment of the Declaration onwards. Yet considering that there were little changes to agricultural practices after the end of the Miezan occupation, the source of that issue had to be older.”

“Explaining why you’ve a pond of books in Old Miezan spread over this hall,” she drily said.

His lips quirked, but the mirth left him soon enough.

“It was Rector Cornelia Orbivia who led me to the answers,” Amadeus said. “The last of the Miezan rectors before trade with Callow was established. She was spectacularly corrupt, you see, yet somehow found it profitable to sail ships full of grain back Liceria.”

“Meaning,” Alaya said, “that even compared to the wealth of the more traditional resources offered by Praes grain still remained a worthy investment.”

He felt a rush of affection, heady and sudden, for this woman to whom he’d never really had to explain his thoughts. Who he could speak a word to and have a page understood. If it was not love, then what was this to be called?

“Stobogia Minor and Major, the breadbaskets of Mieza, were under pressure from Baalite allies and displaced tribes to the north,” Amadeus said. “The worth of grain would have risen accordingly.”

“More than that,” Alaya murmured. “It became a strategic resource. The city of Mieza was famously populous and the heart of their empire in every way. Grain could buy the love of the hungry, bind them to causes. And even for the less ambitious, it would have been prized. A ship filled with rubies and gold ingots would attract attention: an army could be raised with such a prize, or offices and officers bought. To an Imperator, it would have smacked of rebellion in the making. Grain would not attract near as much attention, if sold discretely, yet still turn great profit.”

She paused, turning dark eyes to him.

“And this was when, in the Miezan span?” she asked.

“Between the First and Second Licerian War,” Amadeus said.

“The practice won’t have ended at all, after,” Alaya said. “After the Second much of their empire fractured and governors raised their own private armies to try to claim the throne and fight the encroaching Hegemony. I expect that with the collapse of the usual grain markets, Praesi harvests kept ambitious armies fed on campaign more than once.”

He’d not considered that, truth be told, for his interest had been in the consequences here and not across the Tyrian Sea. Yet every sentence she’d spoken only confirmed what he’d suspected.

“So now you understand what drove the madness,” he said.

“Madness?” she asked.

He set aside his cup and leaned forward, snatching the leather-bound journal where the ink he’d put down had long gone dry. He opened it at the correct page and passed it to her.

“Grain exports from the province of Praes,” she acknowledged. “I take it the sharp rise is when trade with Callow begins?”

“It is,” Amadeus agreed. “No move to the fourth page of the journal.”

She moved.

“Comparative yields for fields now and under the Miezans,” she noted. “Higher in those days, yet the land might have been more fertile then. Less ravaged.”

“Ninth page,” he said.

There she would find the compared yields of eastern Callowan fields compared to those of northern Praes under the Miezans. Alaya’s eyes narrowed.

“This implies,” she slowly said, “that the lands now called the Wasteland were significantly more fertile than Callow’s own fields as of...”

She trailed off, glancing at him.

“Seventy years ago,” Amadeus said. “The most recent instance an Imperial agent had a look at the ledgers of the Count of Summerholm. The numbers to the side are for, respectively, one hundred and three years ago and two hundred and fourteen years ago.”

“Largely the same,” Alaya said. “Which means it is not a lone oddity. Yet it should not be possible – no, it isn’t possible. Not naturally.”

“Field rituals,” Amadeus softly agreed. “They used sorcery to increase the crop yields beyond what nature allowed, year after year, because grain was more useful to them than gold and we were too far for their enemies to strike at us. And so, like a body healed again and again by sorcery without care to its natural functions...”

“The land began to rot from the inside,” she completed.

“Dread Empress Sinistra might have been mad,” Amadeus acknowledged, “and have significantly worsened the situation, but she was not the cause of it. Her ritual was a desperate attempt to turn back the death throes of what became the Wasteland.”

Her jaw tightened.

“We still practice field rituals, Amadeus,” she said.

“Trismegistan magic, not Petronian,” the Black Knight replied. “And they are meant to ensure the land can be cultivated at all, not to offer unnaturally great bounty. Wekesa assures me the grounds are exhausted but not damaged by the rituals. For all his other flaws, Dread Emperor Sorcerous was a brilliant mage.”

Eyes bright, almost excited though nothing had been revealed since doom and the source of it, Alaya drank of her cup again.

“So you’ve found answers,” she said. “What do you mean to use them for?”

“To make this empire,” the Black Knight said, “into more than a covenant of the hungry.”

“An ambitious enterprise,” Alaya commented, eyes veiled.

“It is,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch said, holding her gaze. “It’d take at least two to see it through, at a guess.”

Something flickered across her face, then, that he could not put a word to. It stayed there, for a time, until her chin rose and her eyes blazed with something utterly implacable.

“So it will,” Alaya said, and it rang like an oath.

Interlude: Concourse V

“Diplomacy is war without all the clumsiness.”
– First Princess Eugénie of Lange

If it came to a fight, Lord Yannu Marave decided, they would likely lose. He did not fear the Proceran horse, for its charge would break against a shield wall strong and unflinching. Neither did he balk at the numbers, for though legionaries were skilled soldiers and men-at-arms brave neither were match for armsmen of the Blood holding high ground. It was the Callowan sappers that tipped the balance to the opposition’s side, for he had seen with his own eyes what their munitions could do when lobbed at a tight formation. The word shredding came to mind. Torture of Callowan prisoners had yielded knowledge that these ‘sharpers’ were both commonly used and in large supply, which made it likely the packs of sappers he’d seen shoot out of the torch light and into the darkness would be carrying them. No, if the Procerans and the easterners had ridden forth to betray them then every son and daughter of Levant on this hill would be dead before reinforcements could arrive from the camps. Had they?

“That is Rozala Malanza’s personal banner,” Lady Aquiline said. “Arlesite she might be, but she’s no foe of ours – she has behaved honourably since taking command in Iserre.”

“I see cavalry and foot coming for us, not bread and honey,” Lady Itima replied. “This has an ill cast to it, girl.”

Spoken, Yannu thought, as a woman whose lands shared border with Arlesites. Unlike Aquiline Osena, whose main preoccupations as Lady of Tartessos had always been rivals of other Blood and the prowling creatures of the Brocelian.

“The Black Queen’s banner flies as well,” Razin Tanja mentioned, eyes narrowed. “One of the Woe might be with the legionaries.”

The Lord of Alava considered that. Though the visions the Peregrine’s last will had carried to them had told much of what happened within the nightmare of dead Liesse, it had not revealed where the Archer and the Hierophant had gone. They should both be alive, though the great Soninke warlock had been stripped of his power, so it would be possible for them to be riding with the cohorts. Yet it seemed unlikely, after the night’s troubles, for the Archer’s death was still seared in Yannu’s own memory and the Hierophant had been put to slumber as an act of mercy. No, if any of the Woe rode under that banner it would the Adjutant or the Thief – and there had long been rumours that the latter had lost her Bestowal by stepping into the responsibilities of rule.

“If it is the Archer and they mean to slay us, then we are all dead,” Yannu Marave noted. “She will kill ourselves and our officers as the opening stroke, and our only answer would be to charge down onto sapper-prepared grounds.”

Everybody held in a wince at that, for all here had suffered of the vicious devilries goblins could prepare when given opportunity. Razin Tanja most of all, from what he’d heard, for the Third Army under General Abigail was said to have turned the streets of Sarcella into a slaughter yard even before the Black Queen arrived.

“No one’s sprouted an arrow in the forehead,” Lady Itima of the Brigand’s Blood said. “I’ll take that as a hint that either the Archer’s not there or they’re not baying for blood.”

If it were only the Callowans coming none of them would have batted an eye, for when the Peregrine’s body was returned it would be by Catherine Foundling’s hands if by any. Yet the Procerans coming out had muddied the waters, for they had no business with what would come by morning’s light. They had even been told as much, for their messengers had insisted on audience beyond politeness, yet here they were. More suspicious yet, their advance had come to be matched to that of the Army of Callow’s legionaries: together they were heading towards flanking positions that would be difficult to push back if assault was given.

“The Praesi crossbowmen could be firing by now,” Lady Aquiline pointed out. “Not to great effect, but at least to soften our defence before assault.”

Lord Yannu was inclined to agree this was sign of peaceful intent, yet this was a delicate situation. It was likely that canny old Itima Ifriqui had noticed already, even if she’d held her tongue, yet the younger two among them might not have: save for Itima’s own two sons, every individual of any Blood in Procer was standing atop this hill. And given both the Brigand’s line poor reputation and recently-mauled forces – their assault on the Callowan camp had been costly – it was unlikely that they would be able to sway even most captains into following them through diplomacy or threats. A strike here and now would be decapitating the armies of the Dominion abroad, and even when word trickled back home months from now any retribution for the treachery would have to wait until matters off succession were settled and a session of the Majilis convened. The Lord of Alava was not certain why betrayal would be had here and now, but there was no denying the opportunity was there. Had the Procerans or the Callowans peered into their private councils and then decided removing the Blood to be in either their interests? It seemed a senseless thing, truth be told, but easterners were willing in a villain’s service and Procerans lied as easily as they breathed.

“Silence serves us not,” Razin Tanja said. “It is unseemly to treat with foreigners before the Grey Pilgrim’s body has been given to the flame, yet strife would be even more so.”

“Shall we give them voice in our councils as well, Tanja?” Yannu said, voice hard cast. “We have our wats for reasons, though it seems you have forgotten both. Blood can wash out, unlike honour tarnished.”

It was more than simply unseemly to play politics with foreigners now, it was dishonoring a great man’s death. That Proceran royalty would not be willing to discard their precious Ebb and Flow even long enough for the Peregrine to be put to pyre was...

“If the Black Queen’s the one bringing back the Peregrine, the Callowans at least are already part of this,” Tanja replied.

“Speaking to them and not the Procerans might split them,” Lady Itima noted, sounding approving. “There can’t be a lot of trust between them.”

Akil Tanja’s son seemed as if he wanted to argue that’d not been his intent at all but restrained himself in the end. Young Razin was not so stubborn as to toss away victory he’d already earned, then. For victory he had indeed earned, Yannu had silently acknowledged the moment Lady Itima spoke in favour of audience . For Lady Aquiline had made her preference for talks clear already, and if only the Lord of Alava stood alone of the four against words being bandied then his growing isolation among the Blood in Iserre would only be set in stone. Neither Razin Tanja’s words nor a knife at his own throat would have stayed Yannu’s hands after he’d set out to guide the Dominion away from disaster through duel, as he had. He’d taken a step back simply because Lady Itima Ifriqui, who had every reason to stay out of the affair for dislike of the Osena, had chosen to put that knife to his throat anyway. Though it was a proud old boast in the lands of his birth that Alava had stood alone even when the rest of the Dominion fell to the Principate, and that the hill-folk needed no ally save the bravery of their own kin, the reality was that the city and lands he ruled could be starved of coin and goods and even many foodstuffs if it broke with every other great line. At the very least, alignment between the other three would see him removed from the highest command of Levant’s armies even if killed one.

He could kill them all, perhaps, but that would be just as dangerous a roll of the dice and he was a careful man by nature. No, best to take step back then and now so that he might arrange victory on his own terms when the opportunity was ripe.

“It seems there will not be a choice,” Lady Aquiline suddenly said. “Look.”

Under three banners – Aequitan, Foundling and truce white – a party had approached the foot of the hill as they spoke. Two riders were behind Princess Rozala’s familiar silhouette, one carrying her heraldry and the other a torch. Behind a tall orc in darkened plate two smaller humans were carrying the other two trailing cloths, a mere six souls in whole. Unlikely to be an ambush, then, even though the burnt plate was as good as announcement that the orc among them was the Adjutant.

“We can send an invitation to the Deadhand alone to stand before us,” Itima said, smile gone hard.

It could be a fine line between envoy and hostage. Razin Tanja cast her a considering look, and for a moment Yannu was reminded of the boy’s father. Lord Akil had been known for his keen wits, and though he’d been no great general under his reign the Binder’s Blood has seen their influence rise through careful bargains and treaties. It was an old jape back home that the true talent of the Tanjas was not the magic of their famous ancestress but in truth the wealth that flowed through the canals of Malaga, yet few before Akil Tanja had been so skilled at making use of that wealth. More than once Yannu had seen the same look he now saw in young Razin’s eyes in his father’s own, just before someone was goaded into making a costly mistake on the floor of the Majilis.

“Alone would be insultingly obvious,” Razin said. “Let him bring an attendant, at least.”

Itima’s agreement was the sound of the decision being made, and Yannu Marave began to wonder if it might not be better for the realm to kill the boy than Lady Aquiline after all.

—

Princess Rozala was more than passingly familiar with bravery. She would not consider herself a great paragon of that virtue, though neither was she a coward. Rozala, for all that she did not shy from battle, was still a princess of the blood: she went to war surrounded by loyal bodyguard and with priests ready to bring her back from death’s door should wound be taken. It was natural this be the case, though perhaps not fair in a godly sense, for her death would herald a great deal more trouble than a fantassin’s. Yet it was easier to brave, the Princess of Aequitan privately thought, when so many were sworn to keep her alive. Yet she’d seen purer strains of bravery in other men and women. Soldiers who volunteered to hold border positions in the face of the Enemy, knowing no reinforcements could be spared. Conscripts running back under arrows and spellfire to drag fallen friends back to safety behind the lines, boys and girls not even eighteen summers old stilling their shaking hands and raising their shields steady as the dead charged howling at them. The Arlesite princess had even seen many whose fearlessness had been hollow, a spectacle put on for myriad reasons ranging from stiffening moral to preserving reputation. And yet Rozala Malanza could not for the life of her tell if Hakram Deadhand’s serene disregard for the danger surrounding them was genuine or not.

The orc’s helmet was held in the crook of his handless arm, revealing the thick leathery skin and the troublingly large teeth of his kind. Greenskins were not well-known to Rozala, and so discerning one’s sentiments did not come naturally to her, yet he’d not hesitated a moment when invited to walk into the wolf’s den atop the hill nor expressed particular concern since. It was as if he could not see the hundreds of flaring heavily armed soldiers around them, whose gaze lingered on the truce banner Rozala was carrying with open antipathy. She would have preferred to come in riding, truth be told, but Deadhand had spooked her destrier something fierce when he’d come close. That instinctive dislike by animals was said to be natural to greenskins, though until recently Rozala had believed it to be one of those commonly accepted falsehoods like Praesi being liars from the cradle or Callowans being physically incapable of halfway edible cooking. It seemed there was truth to it, however, for all horses had grown unruly when the Adjutant had been upwind of them.

“The banner’s dipping, Your Grace,” Hakram Deadhand said.

His coarse voice betrayed the slightest hint of what she took to be amusement. Gritting her teeth, the Princess of Aequitan raised back to full height the banner she’d been made to carry like some sort of, well, attendant. Which the Adjutant had not hesitated to designate her as when the summons had come from the Levantines. To her dismay, she’d even had to play along for the sake of being there when the talks were held. As if leaving alone an orc and a foursome of quarrelsome Dominion lordlings could end in anything but bodies on the floor.

“Is your line known among your people to be of particular dignity?” Princess Rozala tried.

This would be slightly less wounding of her dignity if at least he was the orc surrogate for highborn. Otherwise, she was carrying a banner for one of the Damned plucked out from some northern waste to serve the Black Queen. A heartbeat passed.

“My mother famously made the finest Callowan meat stew in the clan,” the Adjutant replied.

She was being mocked, Rozala realized. Wait, Callowan meat stew? Surely he could not mean...

“I’d never heard of this delicacy,” the Princess of Aequitan said. “May I ask what it contains?”

Surely not Callowans, she thought, for the Black Queen would not have made so important a dignitary of him were it the case.

“Not humans, of course,” Hakram Deadhand nonchalantly replied.

She mastered herself so that she would not breathe out in relief. At the very least she was not being made to consort with a bloody-fanged cannibal.

“Much too expensive, that far out in the Steppes,” the Adjutant continued just as nonchalantly. “Never ate it done the traditional way until I came to Ater.”

Before Rozala could conceive of a gracious way to ask the Damned at her side whether or not the ‘traditional way’ involved human flesh, they were ushered past one last ring of armsmen and came to stand before the four heads of the Dominion’s armies abroad. The older two she was most familiar with: Lord Yannu Marave of Alava and Lady Itima Ifriqui of Vaccei. The latter had particularly poor reputation among Arlesites for her vicious and unprovoked raids into Orense in the years before the Tenth Crusade. The First Prince might have made peace there, but the looting and burning of southern Orense had not been forgot. Lord Yannu she did not much like, but at least respected. The Lord of Alava, who claimed descent from the Valiant Champion, was a cautious and ferocious man who displayed little of the famed recklessness of his line. The Princess of Aequitan had misliked that by virtue of being the foremost Levantine commander he’d effectively seized command of the Iserran campaign, especially considering unlike her and several of her generals he’d never fought either Queen Catherine or Marshal Juniper. Yet the Dominion had provided the greater part of the host, and so claimed greater influence. If the Battle of the Camps had been a victory perhaps Rozala could have argued otherwise, but while those brutal three days had been many things they had not been that.

The younger pair she only through reports, though the Levantine fascination with war paint and bloodline colours made their identities easy enough to deduce. The young man in iron grey and crimson would be Razin Tanja, son and heir to the fresh-slain Lord Akil Tanja of Malaga. The peculiarities of Dominion inheritance laws meant he would not be Lord of Malaga until his kin had acclaimed him on the grounds of that very city, assuming his right was not challenged, so among the four highborn here his authority was the weakest. His own captains could defy him without breaking oath, at the moment, though if he ever ascended to lordship that’d be a poor decision indeed. The impressively-shaped young woman to his side would be Lady Aquiline Osena of Tartessos, by repute rival to the Tanjas and deathly foe to the Ifriquis for reason of kinslaying twice over. Dominion political affairs were fluid even by Proceran standards, for they shifted with the feuds of every generation of the Blood, but it was usually to be expected that their highborn would be feuding with whoever’s lands bordered their own and seeking cordial ties with whoever’s did not. The Maraves of Alava did have a reputation as proud lunatics staying out of politics save when offended, which had made it both surprising and not when Lord Yannu became informal head of the Dominion’s armies abroad. Rozala was not unfamiliar with the trick of putting those that could not be called to heel in charge.

The four lordlings were standing and fully armed. And, by the visible wounds on the Osena and the Marave, had recently fought some manner of duel among themselves.

“You stand before four lines of the Blood,” Lady Itima said in heavily-accented Lower Miezan. “You may kneel.”

“You stand before the Queen of Callow’s right hand,” the Adjutant calmly replied in Chantant. “You may bow.”

Princess Rozala would have appreciated the insolent confidence a great deal more if it hadn’t run the risk of getting them both killed. Lady Aquiline’s lips twitched in amusement, as did Lady Itima’s, but Tanja’s lips thinned and Lord Yannu’s face remained inscrutable.

“Princess Malanza,” the Lord of Alava said. “Are you now attendant to one of Below’s servants?”

“I am sworn envoy speaking for the First Prince of Procer,” the Princess of Aequitan replied. “Who also happens to temporarily attend to the Lord Adjutant.”

If he expected to shame her into retiring, he would have to do better than that. Rozala had been the ruling princess of principality that’d half-beggared itself fighting to the death with the current ruling First Prince, the daughter of a woman who’d once laughingly boasted she would send Cordelia Hasenbach running back north with her tail between her legs to ‘suckle on icicles and brood’. She’d had to wade through seas of scorn and mockery to rise to the height’s she now stood at, all of it dealt by peers – which not a single individual here could claim to be.

“What an unlikely coincidence,” Lady Itima sardonically said.

For some reason, she shot Razin Tanja a half-approving look afterwards.

“You interrupt sacred ceremony, Bestowed,” Lady Aquiline said, eyeing the orc curiously. “Withdraw your warriors and let nothing more be spoken of this.”

Rozala found herself almost shamefully glad that there’d been no talk about claiming the Black Queen’s head in some sort of doomed attempt at vengeance. Near enough to every highborn of the Dominion was here, if some dimwit among them took a swing at Catherine Foundling the entire Levantine host could be decapitated. It wasn’t as if the Princess of Aequitan had sallied forth to protect the Black Queen, for what would that monster fear from not even a thousand soldiers? The Queen of Callow had looked more than eight thousand horse in the eye, drawn a line in the snow and dared them to cross it. And when Rozala had offered her challenge, after, it’d not been met with fear or defiance. It’d been met, chillingly enough, with a sort of vague irritation. Like Foundling had already done them all a favour by refraining from slaughtering them like animals and anything aside from withdrawal from that point on had been trying an already thinning patience. That, more than threats or promises, had seen Rozala Malanza order a retreat. And rumour had since trickled in that the Black Queen had, for having struck at her legionaries, broken two fingers from every cataphract of Helike and sent them marching back to the Tyrant stripped of arms and armour. It might be that the Lanterns and the armsmen might kill the villainous queen, if they struck at her. It’d been a long and arduous night.

More likely, though, Catherine Foundling would lose patience at the attempt and kill them all without batting an eye.

“You have claimed the grounds where my warlord will return,” Hakram Deadhand said. “That will not be brooked.”

“We’ve no interest in your queen,” Lord Yannu bluntly said. “We await the arrival of the Peregrine’s remains.”

“I’ve no interest in the remains of the Grey Pilgrim,” the orc replied. “I await the arrival of my queen.”

“Perhaps a simple honour guard can be arranged,” Rozala suggested.

The Lord of Alava fixed her with a steady look.

“Sons and daughters will bring the Peregrine to the flame,” he flatly said. “None other.”

“The Queen of Callow will not return from saving all your lives to a ring of foreign soldiers,” the Adjutant replied just as flatly.

Rozala would have hissed at him in an other language, if she shared any with him that the Levantines would not.

“It was the Grey Pilgrim who sacrificed himself for all who stand here,” Lady Aquiline sharply said.

“It was the Black Queen who made truce where you sought war, and led the band of five to victory,” the Adjutant said. “Do you deny this?”

“That the Queen of Callow acted honourably this night is not in doubt,” Lady Itima said. “Bargains made were kept.”

There was agreement from the others, some of it more reluctant than others.

“Yet you diminish the sacrifice made by the Peregrine through your words,” the Lady of Vaccei continued. “Curb your tongue, Damned.”

“Damned you call me, but my honour lies in the service of my queen,” the orc unflinchingly replied. “I will not suffer her return being a circle of swords bared.”

In that moment, Rozala Malanza grasped that the Adjutant had been playing them all. Gods, he’d been trying to extract something from them from the start.

“No offence is meant,” Razin Tanja said.

“Then why do you insist on giving it?” Hakram Deadhand said.

There was a rumble of discontent from the Levantines.

“What offence is this, orc?” Lord Yannu bluntly asked.

“Though under truce, you are enemies still,” the Adjutant said. “How can your surrounding my queen be taken as anything but slight?”

“The Peregrine’s last escort will not be opened to Callowans or Wastelanders,” Lady Aquiline firmly said. “This will not be argued.”

“Then to avoid slighting Callow’s honour, you must no longer be enemies to its queen but instead allies,” the Adjutant said.

“Are we to swear oaths to the void?” Lady Itima mocked. “Even were we willing, there is nothing to be done.”

“There is,” the Adjutant replied, offering a fanged grin. “Years ago, Queen Catherine requested to become a member of the Grand Alliance. All that would be required for friendship to be established is your agreement to this suit.”

“It would mean nothing, without the First Prince’s approval and the Majilis’ agreement,” Razin Tanja said.

“It would satisfy honour nonetheless,” the orc said.

Rozala’s pulse quickened. Should she intervene, she wondered? For all that the Foundling Queen had declared her intention to join the war against the Dead King, that was not the same as her becoming signatory of the Grand Alliance. If four of the five greatest aristocrats in Levant agreed to back Callow’s bid to become part of the Alliance, its chances would become more than merely good. The consequences of that were... hard to foresee. Gods, this was too great a decision too swiftly made. Rozala Malanza bit her lip.

A heartbeat later, dawn began and a gate tore open before all of them.

Two people hobbled through it, and just like that the Princess of Aequitan felt the world change.

Chapter 52: Recovery

“Negotiation with your ruler, my lord, is like treading the edge of a hidden pit filled with man-eating tapirs. Unrelated, but before we further discuss taxation would you take a single step to the left?”
– Dread Empress Atrocious

Dawn broke through the night sky, revealing bared steel.

That, I considered, was a lot of swords. Shame about the way the people wielding those seemed inclined to point them in my direction. Princess Rozala, who was here for some reason, immediately began shouting for the pack of Levantine warriors surrounding us to sheathe their blades, which went largely ignored. Almost like some Proceran princess screaming out orders at people her ancestors had invaded hadn’t gone over well with this particular crowd. Who’d have thought? Hakram, who was there because he was a prince among men, strode forward ignoring all the shouting and the foreign priests looking like someone had kicked over their anthill. After going through his cloak pockets he produced a nice little wooden pipe and stuffed it with wakeleaf, at my unspoken invitation putting it up against my lip and scratching out a match to light it. A few puffing breaths later I breathed in the smoke, breathed it out and let out a pleased moan before facing the angry shouting crowd.

“Right,” I got out around the pipe’s lip, “you all seem to be very concerned about something and I don’t want to, uh, diminish that. But I also don’t speak Lunara, so we’re at a bit of an impasse.”

“That was mostly Ceseo, in truth,” the Grey Pilgrim rasped out.

His speaking triggered another round of shouting while I pondered the complexities of smoking a pipe without having a free hand for it. I had one holding up Tariq’s doddering frame, slipped under his shoulder to let him stand, while the other was busy keeping me up by leaning on my staff. Our journey here through Twilight Throneless had been somewhat less than graceful, though I’d been rather amused by the fact that the first set of stairs we’d encountered on our way out of Liesse had probably come closer to killing either of us that night than Kairos.

“Figured they’d be a little happier to see you, Tariq, I’m not gonna lie,” I mused. “Would you care to translate?”

The old man cocked his head to the side.

“To put it delicately,” the Peregrine said, “questions are being raised as to the authenticity of my person.”

“Oh?” I mouthed back, grinning nastily around my pipe. “Did someone call you an undead abomination yet? That’s always been one my favourites.”

“You’re enjoying this a great deal more than you should,” the Grey Pilgrim muttered.

“Someone else being called that?” I murmured. “Never. That would be highl y petty of me, after all.”

A heartbeat passed.

“Maybe they’ll name you Arch-heretic of the West,” I suggested. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

I wasn’t sure whether what shook him was a cough of a snort, but it ripped through his frame suddenly enough it very much did become a cough. My use of his resurrection trick was apparently a little rough around the edges compared to his personal touch, and he’d not been a young man to begin with. And if that hadn’t been enough, I still remembered what it’d felt like having an aspect cut out of me. Tariq had been dead when I’d ripped Forgive out of his corpse, so he’d been spared the inhuman pain I’d felt when Masego carved Seek out of my soul, but losing a third of your Name was nothing something to be shrugged off . Especially when you’d had your aspects as long as the Grey Pilgrim had. A quartet of Levantines seemed to be getting deferred to by even the Lanterns, who were visibly itching to have a go at Tariq and I, and one’s familiar face told me why: Razin Tanja was among them, which meant they were Blood. I waved at him from the Pilgrim’s side, wiggling my hand against the old man’s flank, but my treasured acquaintance seemed rather offended by the act. Fancy that, I drily thought. I’d always got on so well with Levantines.

“Queen Catherine, please,” Princess Rozala shouted in Lower Miezan. “At least answer the accusations-”

“My return was wrought,” the Grey Pilgrim said, weak voice firming, “under the auspices of the Ophanim.”

“Forgiveness, Peregrine,” a towering muscle slab of a man said, “yet if the corpse of the Grey Pilgrim were to be so defiled, it would speak as you do. Truth must be ascertained.”

I glanced at Hakram, who’d fallen it at my side and was nonchalantly ignoring the way the few hundred warriors surrounding us had yet to put down their swords or even lapse in their general glowering. I drew on the pipe, letting the wakeleaf sink down my throat and into by lungs before breathing it out through my nose. It burned a tad – I usually blew it out – but not unpleasantly.

“So,” I drawled. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a flask of Vale summer wine stashed away in that cloak?”

“I could only get my hands on Dormer pale,” Adjutant apologetically said.

My lips twitched.

“See, now I know that’s a lie,” I replied.

“This is going to be a hand joke, isn’t it,” he sighed, sounding resigned.

“If I say yes,” I murmured, “are you going to lose it?”

I shamelessly chortled at my own joke and regretted it not a bit. His jaw muscles twitched in what was either suppressed amusement or the sudden urge to bite off my face, and not metaphorically speaking.

“Your Majesty, would you start taking this seriously?” Princess Rozala hissed. “This could easily devolve into a battle. Already forces are gathering, all bloody chaos requires is a spark.”

I glanced at her, brow rising, then looked at Hakam.

“It’s looking like Hasenbach’s riding her hard to keep you alive and happy,” he told me in Kharsum.

“She must just love that,” I replied in the same.

Not even the harsh syllables of the main orc dialect entirely managed to hide my petty glee at the revelation, from the looks I got. I sighed and began helping Tariq off of me.

“Need my stick, old bones?” I asked. “I’ll let you borrow it if you promise to give it back.”

“I’ll stand, thank you,” the Grey Pilgrim sighed. “I will have to grow used to having broken mine.”

I cast a look at the middle-aged warrior who’d very politely just told Tariq they were going to have to check if he was my dead corpse-puppet, mentally going through what I knew of Levantine commanders in Iserre. That was Yannu Marave, probably, though I couldn’t be sure from his face-paint as I could not remember the colours of the Champion’s Blood at the moment.

“Lord Marave, is it?” I probed.

“It is so, Black Queen,” he calmly replied.

“Word of advice,” I said. “When you have your priestlings poke at the Peregrine, tell them to be gentle.”

“Truth must be ascertained,” he replied, eyes tightening.

“Sure,” I said. “But if they get too rough, after tonight I’m guessing the Ophanim might end up ascertaining them all over the ground. I mean, it’s not my hill so I’ve no horse in this race, but think of the poor Proceran peasant who’ll end up stuck cleaning that up.”

I bet Alamans princes didn’t even tip, too, they seemed like the type.

“We will see,” Lord Marave said.

I had a free hand, now that Tariq was standing on his own, so I used it for the very important task of having another pull of my pipe and spewing out the smoke into the crisp winter morning air. Then, resting my staff against my chest, I extended an open palm towards Hakram and saw it filled with a nice little silver flask. Had to unscrew the cap, but a sniff told me it really was Dormer pale inside. I’d be damned, hadn’t thought any Callowan drink would make it this far out. The surprise brought back sharp remembrance of Ratface, whose days as a quartermaster had seen him taken as some sort of contraband magician, and the ache of my dead friend’s absence was a lingering pang. I smoothed it away from my face, pulling at the wine. A pair of Lanterns were not helping the Pilgrim stand, gently but firmly inspecting him.

“I’m guessing, Lord Yannu,” I said, “that you want me to stick around until that little charade there is over with.”

“I accept your kind offer, Black Queen,” the Lord of Alava said.

Someone was letting the inch I’d given them go to their head, looked like.

“Put words in my mouth again, Marave, and that’ll be the last time you have a tongue,” I casually replied, with a nice friendly smile.

The warriors around us didn’t like that, or at least not my tone. I wasn’t clear on how many of them spoke Lower Miezan. The other three of the Blood – the older woman had to be the Lady of Vaccei, who I remembered had grown children, while by elimination the last was the Lady of Tartessos – didn’t either, though none spoke out to take me to task over the threat. Almost like they were realizing they were trying to keep the Queen of Callow prisoner, breaking truce in the process. I allowed myself a single appreciative glance at the Lady of Tartessos, whose bronze and green paint paired with a rather tight leather vest made for an attractively unusual look. Truthfully if Lord Yannu had been twenty years longer he might have been the one to draw a second look but as it was he was both at least twice my age and getting on my nerves.

“No offence was meant,” the Levantine lord said.

He didn’t sound all that apologetic, which made sense as I’d yet to hear an apology.

“Now, for the sake of diplomacy I’ll tolerate this,” I said. “But I’d like the lot of you to consider the amount of insults you’ve been laying at my feet this morn, after the trouble I went through to save your ungrateful hides.”

“You claim debt, Black Queen?” the Lady of Vaccei asked.

“I claim slights,” I idly replied. “Three now and your tab’s still open. Best start thinking now of how restitution will be offered for them.”

I was willing to make peace with these people, to make alliances and sign treaties and fight by their side. But I would not allow that willingness to be confused even a moment for fragility . If they offered insults, they’d pay up for them – or else. I had no intention to allow either myself or Callow to be made the rented mule of the Grand Alliance in the war to come. Grace would be answered with grace, but disrespect with the same thing as well. The talk of restitution went over about as well one would expect when spoken by a villain, but in those haughty faces I saw something like abashment as well. No one who spent as much time going around talking about honour as the Dominion’s highborn did could be unaware that they were pushing me far enough a less temperate woman might have chosen violence as answer. Oh Gods, I thought, pulling at my pipe. You knew a manner of thinking was awful skewed when I could be counted as temperate by it. One of the Lanterns, speaking rhythmic prayers in what might still have been Ceseo for all I knew, brought forth a long spike of Light. She touched it to the Pilgrim’s skin, near the wrist, and that was then the Choir of Mercy took offence.

Well, I’d warned them. The rest was on their heads.

There was a ripple of power by now familiar to me, a taste of flame and smoke and the beat of wings, and before it could draw blood the Light winked out. The Lantern fell to her knees, stunned, and began babbling in one of the Levantine tongues. I glanced at Hakram, pulling at my pipe, but the orc shrugged. He had no idea either then. I turned to Princess Rozala, realizing only then she’d been bearing a truce banner this entire time. Gods, I was more out of it than I’d thought. I almost asked why she’d been made flag-bearer, but to be honest the true reason might not be as amusing as what my imagination was providing so it’d be a shame to break the illusion so soon.

“I don’t suppose, Your Grace, that you speak... that,” I said, somewhat vaguely.

“Still Ceseo,” Princess Rozala said. “They use it for formal conversations even in northern Levant. I’m not fluent, but she seems to be saying she has lost the ‘grace’.”

I cocked my head to the side.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

“Again,” Hakram helpfully contributed.

I would have gestured obscenely at him, were my hands not full. Truly, my Adjutant’s wiles were without match.

“They stripped her of the right to use the Light, then,” I whistled. “That’s as clear a verdict as you’ll get.”

I was not, apparently, the only one to think so. It was only Yannu Marave, at first, but within moments a handful of warriors followed suit and from there on it was like levees breaking: before the bone-tired Grey Pilgrim the men and women of Levant knelt. I could feel the tiredness withdrawing from my wary bones, though it must be illusion. I’d been at the end of my rope hours ago, by now I was dangling in the void. I sniffed at the flask in my hand once more.

“Hakram, is there anything aside from wine in there?” I asked.

“A Praesi alchemical tonic,” he admitted.

My brow rose.

“Didn’t think to mention that before I drank it?” I said.

“You have been awake for nearly twenty hours, Catherine,” he said. “And few of them restful.”

“Potions are always hollow strength,” I grunted.

I didn’t further mention it, though, for cheat or not the tonic’s effect was pushing back the moment where I’d collapse in my bed for three days by a few hours yet. Might be I wouldn’t need that long before I crawled under a set of warm covers but I might as well be fully awake for the time it did end up taking. I took another sip from the flask. It might just be the lack of sleep talking, but the wine might actually taste better with the tonic in it. It took the edge of the sweetness of – oh Gods, I’d been spending too much time with Akua lately if I’d seriously been thinking about that. Next thing you knew I’d be talking about what poisons paired well with an Aksum sour, and what kind of a dress you should wear when crushing your enemies underfoot. Probably something red, I mused, depending on how literal the crushing was. The winding turns of my life had made me rather depressingly familiar with how difficult blood could be to get out of clothes. I forced myself to pay attention to what the Pilgrim and the Levantines were doing, which from the look on Malanza’s face must be rather impressive.

Well, they did make a pretty painting. I’d at least concede that much. Tariq, weary and bloodstained and victorious, surrounding by a ring of kneeling warriors in steel and paint as the sun rose above them all. Unfortunately, pretty as this all was I was beginning to lose patience with it. If the Dominion wanted to get all ceremonial about the Peregrine returning to them all the better, but they could go about it without my attendance. It was also rather ungainly that myself, Hakram and a Proceran princess were the only people on this hill not kneeling to the Pilgrim. Didn’t particularly make me want to take a knee to good ol’ Tariq, mind you, but we stood out a mite. Adjutant looked askance at me, but I shook my head. Hakram Deadhand had no need to kneel to me, so why should he kneel to anyone at all? The Grey Pilgrim addressed his countrymen in one of their languages, sounding as if he was admonishing them, but even then they all stubbornly remained kneeling save for the four of the Blood. I was occupied wondering whether it would be rude to, well, leave after I’d finished smoking my pipe when the four aristocrats were calmly addressed by the Pilgrim and turned to us.

“We are told this was wrought by your hand, Black Queen,” Lord Yannu Marave gravely said.

“Mercy allowed it, as the Peregrine said,” I honestly replied. “And it was not without price for all involved.”

Least costly to me, who’d merely tossed away the chance in the future that one dear to me could be stolen back from death, but it’d been a price still. Chances like that one came only once, when Creation’s writ conspired to deliver them into your hand, and spurning what had been offered would ensure there was no repetition.

“Honour was given,” the Lady of Tartessos said.

“Honour was given to all Levant,” the Lady of Vaccei said. “This we agree.”

“And so honour must be returned in kind,” Razin Tanja gravely said.

So, I idly wondered, what kind of a largely ceremonial gesture would be made. Would concession be made, a declaration that I was not truly Arch-heretic of the East? No, I decided, not that. It’d been a conclave of several priesthoods that named me that, even if they were influential enough to force the Lanterns to agree it wouldn’t be enough. Amusedly, I wondered if I was about to be made some manner of Blood. Not one of their own, of course, but recognized as some Callowan equivalent. I did remember that for all that their five great lines held the power and influence, other Named were granted some privileges as well. As far as Levant was concerned, being Named was being nobility . Catherine Foundling of the Squire’s Blood , I thought. Well, it’d been a long year. I could use the laugh, even if diplomacy dictated it must be had behind closed doors where these touchy nobles could not hear it.

“The Champion’s Blood endorses Callow’s petition to join the Grand Alliance,” Lord Yannu Marave said. “In my name, I speak this, as the Lord of Alava.”

“The Brigand’s Blood endorses Callow’s petition to join the Grand Alliance,” Lady Itima Ifriqui said. “In my name, I speak this, as the Lady of Vaccei.”

“The Slayer’s Blood endorses Callow’s petition to join the Grand Alliance,” Lady Aquiline Osena said. “In my name, I speak this, as the Lady of Tartessos.”

“The Binder’s Blood endorses Callow’s petition to join the Grand Alliance,” Razin Tanja said. “In the name of myself and my kin, I speak this, as the heir to Malaga.”

They were, I understood after a moment of silent disbelief, deadly serious. Because for them this wasn’t about treaties and interest and Calernia’s balance of power – it was, old-fashioned as the thought was, about honour . What had moved their tongues was the same thing that’d been the source of indignation that’d seen Captain Elvera chastise me even as my prisoner for daring to suggest she might go back on her word when released. What lay at the heart of Praesi and Procerans I could understand, for it was not so different for all the posturing and castigations that both so freely threw. This, though? I would call it some sentimental ardour coming through in a moment of weight, but I was coming to grasp that was a mistaken understanding. This was good as law to them, wasn’t it? Returning boon to even those they believed to be in Below’s grasp, when boon was given. Honour, the way they spoke of it, was not something I could understand. It might be one needed to be born in their lands, to grasp it as they did. But my own people knew of debts, of scores settled, and perhaps those were not tenets so estranged as I might once have believed.

“I will not speak for the Pilgrim’s Blood,” Tariq said. “Now or ever. Yet I will speak of this to the Holy Seljun, Queen Catherine. And I swear now that the Majilis will speak as one, endorsing the petition of the Kingdom of Callow.”

Chapter 53: Avowed

“Count them all, in the snow
Red and gold and black as night
Count them all, high and low
Seven crowns broken by rite
Brought they forth, in accord
Peace, oaths and a sword.”
-Iserran children’s rhyme

If felt like the fact that my hands were currently filled with a pipe and liquor might be detracting some from the solemnity of this occasion, but maybe it was just me. Gods, I wished I’d gotten ten hours of sleep in me before having to parse this. On the surface this seemed like a coup, but not looking further than the surface was how you lost feathers at this game. Levant was backing my bid for being a member of the Grand Alliance, and Ashur had been struck down into irrelevance by the Battle of Thalassina and then being knifed in the back by the League. I forced my tired mind to keep slogging on, but as far as I could see the heart of what this meant was that if I made a bargain with Cordelia Hasenbach – which, given the amount of things I had to trade, I should be able to – then Callow would be brought into the fold. Was this a case of putting a leash on the beast you couldn’t defeat, an attempt by the Pilgrim to bind me to his causes? It hardly mattered, though, in the end. I’d been trying to get a foothold in those treaties for years now, and if they were seeking a peace because they thought they could win that where war had failed them then I could live with that. Because I, too, sought more than my signature on declarations of alliance from this. I would get the Liesse Accords signed, and whatever else could be said of tonight it was also was a step towards that end.

Discretely as I could in this situation, which wasn’t all that much, I pressed back the flask into Hakram’s hand and hide the pipe behind my arm to empty it into the snow. Already I was half-wishing I’d drunk the whole thing, as much for the wine’s touch of warmth in the face of the cold morning air as the tonic that’d shaken off some the lethargy clawing at my thoughts. Leaning against the dead yew offering I’d found in the depths of Twilight, where lied the grave of king the world had decreed to be good, I shivered but matched their expectant gazes.

“I have one foe,” I said, “and he dwells north, behind the walls of Keter, where his tyranny lies serene. Everything else is chaff.”

Would that I had my cloak, as much for warmth as for the presence it lent.

“You have bled my people,” I said. “And we have done the same to you, every one of us dancing on damned strings. Let that end with this dawn, for we share one war still and it will not be found on this field.”

“War on Keter,” Aquiline Osena called out, voice loud and clear. “Honour in victory, and should doom find us then honour in defiance unbent .”

The last word clapped out like a challenge, proud and finding reflection in those that heard it.

“War to the north,” Razin Tanja agreed, his words ringing out. “As oath was sworn in Blood and smoke. The shames we will redeem, the graces we will earn.”

“To the Crown of the Dead we bring steel,” Itima Ifriqui smiled, hard-toothed and starved. “Through wasteland and snow, until tall walls come to echo our scorn.”

“Oath was given. War to the knife,” Yannu Marava said, eyes cold and limpid, “to ruin and carrion things and silent dusk. Let Creation know that the Dominion of Levant marches to war, and the sword will not return to the sheath until the Enemy has broken or we are dust.”

Would my countrymen have shivered this way, I wondered as I watched the fire light in the eyes of the warriors around us, if a king of the Old Kingdom had called on their oaths? I remembered still the sight of Edward Fairfax standing bedecked in bells and spite, the words that heady call that’d sounded beyond the veil of death – rise, Callowans, rise once more for we have debts yet unsettled – and called the sum of my failures to war. It was a bastard throne I had made, and bastard was the claim I had on those who had chosen to follow me into strife. This, though? It was older, purer. The stuff fables were made of. I watched it ripple through the hundreds of armsmen around us, that intangible weight that betrayed history’s gears turning. Sometimes, I thought, it didn’t have to be a scheme. Sometimes the stars were aligned and Creation let fate flow like water down the river. A hundred thousand touches too light and too small to have been seen, conspiring to shape something grim or beautiful or both. The Levantines sounded swords and axes on shield, though this was no acclamation: the rhythm sounded like a strange dirge, like grief and doom and wonder.

“The Anthem of Smoke,” Princess Rozala Malanza murmured under her breath.

It was, I remembered, one of the great story-songs of their people. Not unlike Here They Come Again for mine, or perhaps Red The Flowers . There was an anger to the tune, I thought, and why would there not be? Levant had been born of bloody, merciless rebellion. Their Named were not the white-clad knights of the Old Kingdom, the tricksters and preachers of the League or even the blinkered, colourful exemplars of Procer. No, that lot had tasted the blood in the mouth from the start, hadn’t they? Slayer, red-handed killers one and all. Binder, shackling doom to ride it to war. Brigand – that incongruous Chantant word in Levantine hands, the scornful dismissal of bandit instead turned into declaration of war. Even the Champion had stood for a people who’d preferred burning their own homes to surrendering it. And at the heart of them all a Pilgrim in grey, and how did the famous line go again? His stride rebellion and stirring ember. Oh, theirs were not the finest armies I had seen. They lacked discipline, lacked training, lacked equipment. But they were brave, I thought, and the manner of savagery I saw in their bearing I thought might be kin to the sort I’d glimpsed in another hard people. One I’d come to trust, and in many ways they was still the backbone of my armies.

One served as my right hand, too, and another as the marshal of my hosts.

Savages as they might be, I thought, striking each other at every turn and writing honour’s couplets in blood, but when the dark pivots came they wouldn’t break easy. It was slight, and fading, but there remained something in them of the people who’d humbled the Principate when it stood at the height of its power. May the Hidden Horror yet choke on it . I stood in silence until the hammering of steel on steel ended, trailing off into the clearing sky.

“So be it,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

And oh, he sounded exhausted but there was a brightness to his voice as well I’d rarely heard there before. Pride, I thought, if not without sadness. I could not blame him, for Levant had sworn anew to do the right thing and that never, ever came without a price.

“I stand witness to oaths sworn again, and let none break them while claiming honour,” he said. “Let it be remembered that when the Enemy came for the world, Levant did not shirk its duty.”

The sound of steel sliding out of its sheath drew all gazes to my side, where Rozala Malanza had drawn the slender blade at her side. In the morning’s cast the princess was a sight, long dark curls loose behind her and matched in shine only by the gleam in those equally dark eyes. Tall and curved but hard-handed, as much general as she was princess, the Princess of Aequitan breathed out mist. In war too, had that one been forged. Her mother’s war, the one whose defeat had haunted her life, but other since. The Battle of the Camps, where ambitions were ruined and I first tasted the fear that would lead me down the road to Keter. This one as well, though, had left a mark. A princes’ graveyard , Leonor of Valencis had called it, one from which only one crown emerged untouched. Her own, for having judged it less than the lives of the people it ruled over. I’d admired the gesture then, and still did now. Of all the princes and princesses of Procer I had beheld, none save the First Prince herself could be said to have character worthier of respect.

“I am not the First Prince,” she said. “Yet I stand the sole of my title in Iserre, and the south entire. I speak only to that, which is right enough to my eye.”

I studied her in silence, not alone in this: so did the four of the Blood, and the Pilgrim as well. The Peregrine had been at her side before, I remembered, when he’d led the heroes of the northern crusade.

“We have been foe before,” Rozala said, princess still but in that moment Arlesite even more, “on Levant we warred, unjustly, for many years. And to the east, across the mountains...”

She looked at me then, and I did not soften gaze or offer sympathy. I still remembered the bloody gaps left in the ranks of my army after I’d awoke from Winter’s grasp, on the last day of the Camps, and though war was war even if I did not count it grudge neither would I simply forge t it.

“We spoke righteous words, and schemed that which was not,” the Princess of Aequitan said. “A fresh entry to a tally long kept of contempts offered unprovoked. I say this not to apologize, for I bear not so great a crown it can change the lay of the past, but to...”

She hesitated, struggling for the word.

“Acknowledge,” Rozala Malanza said. “That even though treaties were signed, that alliances were made and bargains stuck, we did not earn this. That in the face of the darkness what we have sown might have seen us stand alone, if you all had not chosen to heed beliefs of a higher order.”

She let out what might have been a laugh had it not been utterly without mirth.

“To acknowledge that there were choices to be made and you chose to act in honour,” she said. “Knowing that like the viper of old lore we have sunk our fangs in the flesh of our benefactors before, still you chose. And I cannot – I cannot offer anything for it that would not be insult.”

She’d stumbled, in the last sentence, like it’d been disgraceful to speak it.

“There are no honours I could grant that would be higher than those you claimed simply by making this decision,” Princess Rozala said, raising her chin. “I will not pretend that wealth or promises would be worth the blood you have and will shed, though should you wish them of me you have all I own. Yet I can, Merciful Gods, at least I can say that this was heard . That it will be remembered, that it will not slip quiet into obscurity once the menace has passed.”

She breathed out shallowly.

“Shame on us,” Rozala Malanza softly said, “if we ever forget it.”

Her sword she thrust into the ground, through snow and ice and earth, and it bit deep.

“And if ever comes to that,” she said. “On that day I, or one of my line, will come for that sword again. To take it up and wield it until the shame has been cleansed.”

My fingers clenched. That had not been small oath, I thought, or a feeble one. The Princess of Aequitan had sworn, in her own way, that should Procer turn against those who were coming to its help in its hour of need she would rise in rebellion. No, more than just her. She had sworn as a Malanza and bound her entire line to the oath.

“Rozala Malanza,” the Grey Pilgrim called out, voice clear and bright, “hail.”

Like a snake uncoiling the call spread through the Levantines, Blood and not, until the hail rang out like thunder. Softly I struck the butt of my staff against the ground, looking at the sword and wondering what manner of curse would take anyone trying to take it up save in fulfillment of the oath. There’d been a weight to the princess’ words, Named or not, and such a thing was rarely without consequence. No, they’d remember Rozala’s Oath for many years to come. After the last hail died, like the wind had gone out of all of us we began to disperse. The force that had held us all spellbound had ebbed, used to nothingness or passed afar.

And so the great battle on the plains of Iserre ended with three things: peace, oaths, and a sword in the ground.

—

I could feel the vigor leeching out of me as we began walking downhill, the half-scattered Levantines parting respectfully for us. Princess Rozala had made her own way down, apart from Hakram and I and directly headed towards the horse and foot she’d brought. I’d traded a meaningful look with Tariq before we parted ways, both of us aware that there would be need for talks of all sorts in the days to come. Gripping as the exchanges on the hill had been in their own way, they would amount to little and less if the diplomatic legwork did not follow behind the grand gestures. Verbal agreements at sunrise made between recent enemies were not actual treaties, though my life would be a great deal simpler of they were. Still, I’d be useless before I got some sleep in me and Tariq was in even worse state: freshly-resurrected, robbed of an aspect and with no finger on the pulse of where his people had been headed before we returned. I, at least, could rest certain that Vivienne and Juniper would keep things running as they should in my absence. With Hakram to watch over them, these days I did not need to keep nearly as close an eye on the Army of Callow’s workings as I had in the early days.

It was for the best, in my opinion. I still believed myself a fair hand as a general and an occasionally inspired tactician, but the army could not come to rely on me. Black, when he’d first forged the modern Legions of Terror, had been very careful to ensure that his presence and Name would be supplement but never required . The Legions, and now the Army, must be perfectly capable of functioning without my being involved. It freed my hand to address other perils, true, but there was also an issue of legacy – I would build no host that would be crippled by my death or abdication, whichever came first. I’d been taught better than that. Two cohorts and a pale-faced General Abigail were awaiting us when we reached the bottom of the hill, which had me casting a mildly reproachful look at Adjutant. She was far too high-placed an officer to be in command here if someone higher up the ladder had not requested it. The culprit seemed obvious, and after the general hurriedly distanced herself from us under pretence of leading the cohorts back to camp from the front, turned out to be unabashed.

“Wanted to see how she holds up under pressure,” he quietly told me in Kharsum.

“She’s held command in battles without folding in the slightest,” I pointed out in the same. “She’s a twitchy thing, mind you, I won’t deny that. But she thinks fast on her feet and she’s got the right instincts.”

“Reminds you of anyone?” Adjutant mildly said.

I rolled my eyes.

“I was never all that shy when it came to getting into scraps,” I replied. “Not every canny Callowan girl is my kin in spirit.”

“If you say so,” he teased.

“I do,” I said. “And you’re being cagey. Haven’t told you anything you didn’t already know, so what’s your actual reason for bringing her along?”

“There’s more than one kind of pressure,” Hakram said. “Many moving parts, tonight, and many ways it could have spun out of control.”

I grunted, conceding the point. Keeping the lid on the pot was different than keeping your head screwed on straight when the blades were already out.

“So?” I asked.

“She kept her head,” he said, almost approvingly. “General staff material, that one. She’d also thank you for sending her far from the frontlines.”

“She needs accolades first,” I murmured. “A few feats under her belt. Otherwise the nobles will squeeze her too easily.”

The bastard system of fresh Callowan rule I would be passing on to my successor had governors holding many of the great territories that’d once belonged to the aristocracy, but the nobles hadn’t been stamped out. Yet there were still baronies up north, Duchess Kegan in Daoine and even highborn stripped of their lands still held a lot of influence. Though the unspoken threat of my disapproval – paired with the open secret I was less than fond of aristocrats – had kept a true noble faction from forming since the effective dissolution of the Regals, there was no guarantee such a state of affairs would be maintained under whoever followed after me. Rebellions or even just unrest, would be a nasty turn after the way Callow had exhausted and would further exhaust itself prosecuting war against the Dead King. Best to nip that in the bud with a large standing army whose head would be both popular with the people and not bound to any of the great nobles and dignitaries of Callow. Whether Abigail of Summerholm could be that woman still remained to be seen, but for now she was at least the foremost candidate. I was shaken out of the reverie I’d slipped into when thinking when I caught sight of a familiar silhouette approaching. Ivah, by now well-known in the Army of Callow’s circles, found the shield wall opening for it without a comment.

General Abigail glanced askance at me, silently asking whether her presence would be required for the conversation that’d follow, but I shook my head. And tried not to be too visibly amused at her poorly-hidden relief.

“Ivah,” I greeted the drow. “Still up, I see.”

“My tasks have yet to end, Losara Queen,” it replied. “I bring forth message from your shade, as well as your mantle.”

It did, in fact, have my cloak with it. It spread it out, though not before handing me a small stripe of parchment, and I turned to the side to cast better light on it. He is one again , Akua had written me. Losses were slight. Exhaustion will keep him slumbering for a time. A tired smile stretched out my lips. It’d been a damned ride of a night, but there’d been more victories than defeats. Foremost among them was that my father’s soul had been reattached to his body and he’d wake before too long, whole and not greatly lessened by the experience. Akua had come through for me once more, as she was in the habit of doing these days. Good news. I thought I’d heard a scuffle behind, but when I glanced there was nothing out of the ordinary. Hakram laid the Mantle of Woe on my shoulders and I breathed out in comfort. It was not so warm as that, but I’d grown used to it more than I’d ever believed I would.

“Masego is stable?” I asked.

“He is,” Hakram gravelled. “And still asleep. We have him watched.”

I snorted.

“Archer let you post guards?” I asked. “Which brings to mind, did Roland return to the Proceran camp in the end?”

“The Rogue Sorcerer,” Adjutant frowned. “Archer was not sent out on a task?”

My stomach dropped.

“No, she wasn’t,” I said. “You haven’t seen her or the Sorcerer, I take it.”

“They did not come to our camp,” he said. “And neither were mentioned to me otherwise.”

“Shit,” I muttered. “Did anyone recently move their – no, you don’t even need to answer that.”

I sighed.

“Still got that flask, Hakram?” I asked.

He nodded, though his eyes were curious.

“Hand it to me,” I grunted. “I’ll need the tonic if I’m to have talks with Kairos.”

Chapter 54: Lustrate

“A house can be destroyed by a fortune spent and twenty years of exquisite scheming; or in less than an hour with a single well-thrown torch.”
– Dread Empress Massacre

I didn’t even step foot into my army’s camp, knowing that if I rested for even a moment I’d drop like a sack of flour. Truth be told, I was I no state to deal with the Tyrant of Helike if he decided to get clever with me. I was very nearly out of tricks, dawn had come and exhausted was the demure word for how bone-tired weary I was. But Archer and the Rogue were likely prisoners, and that meant sleep would have to wait a little longer. I had, though, absolutely no intention of getting clever back at Kairos. If he wanted to have a neat little rapier duel, all wits and triple meanings, then I was going to stroll into his fucking camp with a flying fortress full of sappers. I would have specified the sappers to be bloodthirsty but Hells, when had I ever met any that weren’t ? Even Pickler got that unholy spring to her step when told her latest devices would be unleashed on enemy soldiers. So no, I’d not gone to camp to pick up an escort or a detachment of soldiers that’d look as impressive as they were useless under the dawning sun. Instead I’d gone to pick up my personal diabolical possibly-undead tame thing, and also Zombie.

“You are smirking most fetchingly, dearest,” Akua Sahelian noted. “As you only ever do when pondering unkindness at my expense.”

“Not a single part of it was untrue, though,” I mused.

“Then all hail Catherine Foundling, fae queen of our souls still,” the shade prettily smiled.

I could only resent the way the way sarcasm was actually an attractive look for her, instead of aggressively spiteful as it tended to for on myself. There was probably some dark magic at work, I told myself. Zombie’s saddlebags had been filled with the bare necessities, such as wine and munitions and a set of knives. And a pouch of wakeleaf, though it was the redleaf variant I felt tasted a little too strongly against the roof of the mouth. Still, considering Iserre was half a ruin and the closest town was several days of travel to the north it was a miracle my people had even managed to get their hands on that much.

“Which reminds me, actually,” I said. “Either of you catch sight of Larat and his posse after they made their exit?”

“No,” Hakram said. “And we did look, now that scrying has been restored. No one has a clue of where they’ve disappeared to.”

I let out a reluctantly impressed whistle.

“Larat, you magnificent bastard,” I murmured. “Good on you.”

I raised the flask of tonic-flavoured Dormer pale towards the sky in a toast.

“May you forever be someone else’s problem,” I said.

The last of the wine slunk down my throat, gone cold. The toast and respect that went with it I’d offered without rancour, even though his slipping the noose had meant trouble for my plans. As those plans had involved carving him open inside like a fish at market, though, I found that to be fairly done. That one-eyed fox had wanted to stroll into a strange new daw unfettered and unbound, no matter the costs, and had gotten exactly that. For all that the once-Prince of Nightfall was a monstrous old bastard, in the end he’d beaten both Fate and his own nature to claim his prize.

So very few of us could say the same.

“I think he might have been my favourite treacherous lieutenant,” I mused.

Akua, without ever moving from her textbook perfect horse-riding stance on one of the confiscated Helikean horses, conveyed her deep and genuine offence at my words.

“You can’t be my treacherous anything, dearest ,” I drily said. “Aren’t you on the side of angels these days?”

“I’m sure some sort of arrangement can be reached with them,” she serenely replied, after gracing me with a pleased smile. “Perhaps a pact of some sort.”

Hakram choked.

“Are you suggesting diabolism be used on Choirs?” the orc got out.

“Finding the ‘morally righteous’ equivalent of blood sacrifice has been something of a riddle,” Akua candidly admitted. “Priests have been... less than supportive of my inquiries, when pressed.”

“Try helping people,” I suggested.

“That sounds positively horrid,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

I was at least two thirds certain she was joking, though. I took another look at her face, then amended to half. It was a work in progress, though maybe one of these days I’d have to sit her down along with Archer for a friendly talk about Why Other People, Who Are Not Us, Matter . Gods, I wondered if Black had ever been forced to have that with the Calamities. Not Sabah, I thought, as for all that she’d carried a ravenous man-eating monster within her she’d always been a decent woman. But Warlock or Ranger? Sisters, I’d pay good coin to have transcripts of that conversation. If Robber’s band of marauders were still putting on plays, we could even make an evening out of a theatrical reading. Mean thou, Black Knight, that Creation be more than the navel at which I gaze so pridefully? Prithee, these be lies. Godsdamned Ranger. The rising sun had begun to cast down unpleasant glare before we reached the edge of the League’s maze of camps, no doubt making for a strange sight. There were only three of us, after all, and Hakram was on foot. His longs limbs and the tirelessness of his Name allowed him to keep pace, so long as riders shied from anything faster than a trot. We’d certainly not gone unnoticed, at least, for now seven detachment of troops were hurrying out of the sea of League tents to greet us.

“Is that a bedsheet?” Hakram asked, cocking his head to the side.

The Helikean foot carrying what was quite likely a bedsheet stolen from some Proceran clotheslines, and therefore also the Hierarch’s personal banner, moved faster than the rest. It seemed like every city in the League had sent some people to meet us, including a thick pack of what I assumed to be Bellerophan infantry significantly outnumbering everyone else put together. Gods, but the armour they wore looked like it belonged in some war two centuries ago. So did the thickly-packed formations they advanced in, formations that would be reaped by wheat if they encountered a few lines of Praesi mages or even some swift-footed sappers.

“We are received in honour,” Akua said. “Queen of my heart, shall we proceed?”

I breathed out. Could be a trap. Wasn’t likely, considering Kairos had to know that breaking truce in any way at this point would see everyone else turning on him like rabid wolverines, but you never knew with the Tyrant. Just because he’d antagonized nearly everyone he could didn’t mean he wasn’t going to keep pushing his luck. If he were a reasonable sort of madman, he’d be a great deal less dangerous.

“Let’s,” I said. “As for courtesies to offer, I have only one thing to say.”

Hakram’s eyes found me, and Akua’s brow arched in invitation.

“Remember the first time I attended court in the Tower?” I said.

“Vividly,” the shade replied, lips quirking.

“Feel free to make that look polite,” I coldly instructed.

We resumed our advance towards the Leaguers, bearing no banner and offering no announcements. They clustered uneasily around each other, a band of mercenaries and militias and career soldiers whose allegiances were only loosely bound together by Named madness and happenstance, and awaited our arrival. It would have been customary to rein in the horses before them and speak, I knew. Diplomatic. I kept riding.

“Black Queen, we greet you,” one of the Helikean officers called out.

Hurriedly, I noted, as we’d not slowed in our advanced.

“You’re one of Kairos’,” I noted. “Run back to your master, soldier. Tell him if Archer and the Rogue Sorcerer are not freed and in full health by the time I reach him, I’ll rip out his fucking heart and feed it to Adjutant right here.”

I jutted a thumb at Hakram, who gallantly displayed every inch of fang there was to display. I’d been told he had impressive pearly whites, by orc standards. It was a lot of teeth, and none of it friendly.

“You cannot threaten-” the officer indignantly began.

“She just did,” Akua daintily sighed, as if put-upon by the man’s poor breeding. “Best start running now, for we’ll not slow in deference to the likes of you.”

“Treachery,” the call came from further down the field.

The Atalante contingent, by the looks of the banner.

“You knifed the rest of Calernia in the back at the Dead King’s behest,” I coldly replied. “And are now breaking the same truce you begged for last night. You have exactly once chance to make reparations before every army on this field marches against you.”

“Seeking extermination, this time, not surrender,” Akua casually added. “One does not twice allow a rabid dog to run free.”

Ah, and there was that Wasteland highborn breed of nastiness. I’d not missed in the slightest, though having it turned on my opposition was a refreshing novelty. We could have lingered further, reasoned with them, but that would imply that we were in less than complete control of this situation. That we needed to speak with them, rather than having granted them the privilege of being spoken to. So we resumed our advance as if we were untouchable, and so went untouched. No one, I realized with amusement, wanted to be the first to step forward. As much for fear of death as for the calamitous consequences that laying a hand on any of us would bring, I thought. However rude we were, they must be painfully aware they were a long way from home facing better and hostile armies more than twice their number – and that there would be no swift retreat from Arcadia, now that the shard had been settled into a newborn and broken realm.

So they moved aside, and two Helikean riders peeled off in haste to bring warning.

I was too tired to properly assess the enemy’s camp and so left that to Adjutant’s watchful gaze, contenting myself with noting that just like the getting parties their tents remained highly divided. This was not a great army, it was a coalition of smaller ones. On the field, even if they had significantly greater numbers than either my eastern coalition or the Grand Alliance individually I would bet on those over this mess. Helike and Stygia fielded fine hosts, but none of the others were of that quality. Arguably, now that Ashur had been broken the League of Free Cities was now the preeminent sea power of Calernia – but down here, on the ground and in Iserre? Juniper would eat these poor bastards for breakfast, and she’d actually lost battles to the Grand Alliance in this campaign. It was only the prospect of casualties that kept everyone’s sword in the sheath, and these days Kairos Theodosian was proving too much of a nuisance for that to keep being enough. Under our unfriendly gazes some attendants in servant robes came for us when we entered the edge of the camp, guides meant to bring us to the Tyrant of Helike and his ‘guests’. We followed, and so tasted the Tyrant’s warning pulsing blindly and dimly in the distance. The same invisible current I’d felt in Rochelant, and again made as a sword in Kairos’ hand. The Hierarch had returned, and though his ruinous leviathan of an aspect was still slumbering its presence could still be tasted in the air.

Waiting until it could wake again, and feed.

Neither of my companions had been exposed to it before, and I glanced at them in worry. Distant as the pounding was, faint like a sleeping dragon’s breath, it still trembled in the air. Adjutant, though remained as calm as ever in the face of it. And as for Akua, she simply cocked an eyebrow.

“Quaint,” she murmured.

“Quaint,” I repeated, disbelieving.

She smiled at me, golden eyes almost visible through the veil.

“Whatever else I am,” Akua said, “I am a Sahelian still. What a shallow chalice this would be to drink from, compared to the many heady madnesses of my forbears. My blood has known great sweeps of lunacy, heart of my heart, and this kind is not so great I would fear it.”

Well, who was I to deny that hard-headed arrogance couldn’t let you fight the run of the world? I’d never truly understand – could never – that hard Wasteland pride rooted in old blood and deeds always terrible and sometimes great, for it was a highborn pride. I was the daughter of orphanages, raised to Wasteland lessons on Callowan lips, and the only blood I trusted was that which my hand had spilled. But I would not fully deny the bones of Akua Sahelian’s vanity, for it was not fully unearned. We rode on, until a great pavilion awaited us and the guide-servants bowed, and only then did I dismount. The shade followed suit, and without waiting to be announced we strode within. To my utter lack of surprise Kairos Theodosian awaited within, not the Hierarch whose slumbering aspect I could still feel further in or even any of the greats from the other cities of the League. It was grimly satisfying to see that even a jackal’s grin could not hide the black eye I’d given him or his exhaustion. There were but a few gargoyles left to attend him, for near all those he’d brought with him in the seeking of Twilight had been broken by my own miracles. He was, I thought, slowly but surely running out of artefacts to spend.

“Catherine,” he affably greeted me. “In a fine temper, I see.”

We were deep in the Helikean camp now, surrounded by thousands soldiers whose loyalty to the Tyrant would be absolute. Unless we slew him with the first strike – unlikely, given the faint whisper of sorcery lingering within the tent – attacking him would start a fight I could not win. Yet my hand still itched with the desire to make a matching set of blackened eyes.

“Archer,” I said. “The Rogue Sorcerer. They’re in your hands.”

“Honoured guests,” he assured me. “Kept safe until you came to fetch them.”

“I have,” I bluntly told him. “Where are they?”

“They’ve been sent for,” Kairos said, “though there has been something of a complication.”

He could not lie, I knew. The Grey Pilgrim had seen to that. Yet he was not cripple in wits as he was in flesh and could easily deceive without outright speaking an untruth. Tariq, I thought, might have actually made him more dangerous. Knowing he couldn’t lie I’d been inclined to believe him, until I’d realized he’d never specified exactly who it was he’d sent for.

“Complication?” Adjutant asked in my stead.

“Archer, while having peacefully enjoyed her pick of our bottles earlier, now appears to have killed her way through the company of soldiers sent to fetch her,” the Tyrant sighed. “She’s now retrieved her armaments and is suspected to be coming to kill me.”

“And you would know this how?” Hakram asked.

“There was talk of beating me to death with one of my own gargoyles,” Kairos informed us. “Well, shouts to be more accurate.”

That did sound like Indrani, I’d admit to that.

“Your presence has since been known to her,” the odd-eyed king said. “One hopes it will be enough to stay her hand.”

I inclined my head.

“The Rogue Sorcerer?” I asked.

“Last I heard he was hesitating over which of the ancient tomes I’ve provided for his perusal he will keep. I’ve offered such a boon as a parting gift,” the Tyrant said.

Tiredness had slowed my wits, but not slowed them so much that I would not understand the implication here. The two Named that’d stumbled into his grasp had been treated very well, and there would be no trouble in retrieving them. They’d not been hostages, then, but instead a pointed invitation.

“You wanted me here, obviously,” I said. “Here I am.”

“Would you like a drink?” he offered.

“I’d like two days of sleep and to see you eat your own hand before a jeering crowd,” I casually replied. “Get on with it, Kairos. My patience wears thin.”

“There is no need for us to be uncivil,” the Tyrant of Helike chided me.

Akua’s head inclined towards me the slightest bit, a question asked. I replied with the ghost of a nod. If she wanted to speak, then by all means.

“A surfeit of treachery is the mark of an insecure hand,” the shade casually said.

“Did one of your most infamous emperors not style himself Traitorous?” Kairos said.

She laughed, rather cuttingly.

“Traitorous?” she smiled. “Oh, youth. You are barely even a Malignant .”

Hadn’t one of those started the War of Thirteen Tyrants and One? No, I decided, it’d been the First War of the Dead. Gods, the Praesi had had so many damned civil wars. Procer could try as it might – and most definitely had – it had a few centuries of catching up to do before it could even begin to rival the Wasteland in this regard.

“Third?” Hakram asked.

“Second, of course,” Akua daintily replied.

“Harsh,” he commented, undertone appreciative.

“You are tamer a beast than I believed you would be, Akua Sahelian,” the Tyrant of Helike said, tone friendly. “Learned to love the hand that cowed us, have we?”

So he’d been able to see through that, had he? I was too tired to be afraid, and not certain I would have been even if I’d been well-rested and sober. Kairos could shout this on every rooftop across Calernia, if he wanted to: he’d burned too many bridges to still be believed.

“I see now, why you so easily strike a chord with so many of them,” the woman who’d been Diabolist said, offering almost fond amusement. “You are, in essence, a poor man’s Carrion Lord.”

Gods, but I’d forgotten how genuinely vicious she could be with a turn of phrase. How easy it was, now that the sharpness had been dulled and turned to teasing and bantering insult, to forget that while I was playing in the streets of Laure and skipping my lessons Akua had spent her days learning to flay the pride of others with mere sentences. To play all the deadly games of the Wasteland highborn, those beautiful and elegant monsters with eyes of gold and poisonous tongues. Kairos’ face tightened, imperceptibly. Were less tired, less raw, I suspected it would not have. But it did, and the woman who’d once been the Heiress saw the weakness bared.

“So eager to offer insult,” Kairos said, tone friendly. “Shall we play that game, then? I know of the rules.”

“Then you have played poorly ,” Akua said, scathing. “Look at you now, Tyrant of Very Far Away. You pretend it power that you can greet us without the greats of your League but we both know different, don’t we? It is an admission that if they see you bleed, they will turn on you like hungry wolves.”

“Am I to take lesson from you?” Kairos grinned, red-eyed and mutedly furious. “Oh, that strikes me as folly .”

“I have seen boys like you played to death by the dozen,” Akua said, almost gently. “Minds like pretty baubles of glass, thinking themselves untouchable for their sharp edges. It does not take brilliance or treachery to end the likes of you, did you know? All it takes is a thick enough boot.”

A flicker of power, but not in here. Outside, and familiar. Discretely I gestured at Hakram. If it was Roland, I would prefer for them to await without entering. For looking at Akua now I saw cruelty like frost, yes, but not only that: I also saw a woman lancing an old and festering wound, and of that I would not brook interruption. Adjutant quietly left the pavilion, the gargoyles following him with their eyes but neither the Tyrant not the once-Diabolist even noticing.

“And yet you pair me to the man who called your kind to heel,” Kairos idly said. “Who took the proud High Lords of the Wasteland for mere horses to be broken in, and then proved the truth of that contempt.”

“A pale imitation, in truth,” Akua mused. “Armies and cleverness and parlour tricks, only without everything laudable in our man. Even made a shivering ghost, still he commanded enough loyalty for armies and pupils and companions to seek him. You? Victor and surrounded by armies, you’ve ruined yourself and call it brilliance. You are alone .”

“So are we all,” Kairos Theodosian said, and it was too harshly said for it to be pretence. “They beat you and fed you, Akua Sahelian, with pain and scraps of affections – until like a loyal hound you licked the cruel hand. The apprentice did to you as the teacher did to your entire people. And now you put on their masks and speak their empty creed, but that is a hollow thing isn’t it? Compared to the truths you can still feel slithering through your blood, those that whisper of greatness instead of submission .”

“I am more than blood,” Akua Sahelian hissed. “I am more than what I was made from. But you , Kairos Theodosian? You are the apostle of the cage, the congregant of scrapped iron. And what has that made of you, Tyrant of Least and Less? You bargain with every change of the wind, and every time find return diminished. You have run out of coin to sell yourself with. You have made an enemy of all the world, and so you no longer have place in it .”

“I am a droplet in the tide that will drown Creation,” the Tyrant of Helike smiled, eye red like fresh blood.

“You are yesterday,” Akua said. “That is the sum whole of you. And scream and wail as you will, that is all you’ll ever be.”

And, chin high and back straight, she turned. She walked out without another word and left behind her oppressive silence. I watched Kairos, and in turn he watched me. Like a furnace lit and closed, the rage could be seen glowing at the edges of him. The tent was opened a fraction, even as he continued trying to master himself.

“Archer found the Rogue and followed him here,” Hakram told me in Kharsum. “Both are fine.”

I inclined my head in acknowledgement without turning and the tent closed.

“You made a deal with the Bard, while we were out there,” I said, tone even.

“A greater game is in the works than you suspect,” the Tyrant of Helike said. “She is no ally of mine.”

“The rest I could stomach,” I mildly said. “But the Bard? You burned a bridge with that. Still. There’ll be a conference of the great powers and you’ll have your seat.”

“As was promised,” he said.

“As was promised,” I agreed.

I turned and began to limp out.

“We have more to discuss, Black Queen,” Kairos called out.

I glanced at him.

“No,” I said. “We don’t. You want an audience? Crawl to my camp. You ought to know how, after last night.”

To the sounds of his anger and the chittering of gargoyles I walked out of the tent and did not look back until I’d brought my people safe to camp.

Chapter 55: Renewal

“It is said that when his Chancellor told him the scheme to release a culling plague would cause rebellion, Dread Emperor Vile thoughtfully replied that should this be the case he could always release a second one.”
– Introduction to ‘Thirteen and One’ by Hakim of Kahtan, the Haunted Scholar

I woke up knowing two things: were more than halfway to dusk and that my leg hurt .

Gods, the throbbing was atrocious. Like someone was taking a hammer to my knee with every breath. I was tempted to reach for the Night before I’d even opened my eyes, to weave it so that coolness would sink into fevered flesh and the pain would recede to a dull and distant beat. Instead I forced myself to unclench my teeth and breathed in and out slowly, soothingly. I’d already pushed my limits last night more than was wise, cheating my body’s due once more would only worsen the eventual settling of the debts. No, best to feel the harrowing pulse now when I had yet to see demands made of my time rather than putting it off until the cup tipped regardless of what I wanted. I let out a shuddering breath and opened my eyes, taking in the dim lighting within the tent. I’d settled onto a padded armchair to sleep instead of a bed, which no doubt would have made things even worse with my leg if someone hadn’t propped both of them up on footrest while I slept. As usual, I was left to wonder about who it was that’d struck a devil’s bargain in my name to arrange my meeting Hakram. In truth it was coincidence, I thought, though perhaps of that pointed kind that some might call fate. And it wasn’t like that relationship had been made of thin air, willed into existence – it had taken time and trust and understanding. But how many people in Creation went through their lives without ever encountering someone who understood them even half as well as he and I did? It might not be providence, but it would be a lie to say that villains did not get golden luck of their own sometimes.

I let a few breaths pass, two sensations warring over mastery of my body. The loud and strident call of pain in my leg and the sort of earthly satisfaction one got from much needed sleep. The pleasant lethargy that lingered until you stretched, telling you a need had been seen to. I embraced the former to drown out the latter and sought further distraction by taking in the tent. The reason I’d ended sprawled in an armchair instead of a bed was but a few feet away: Masego still lay still on his cot, hands folded over his chest as it slowly rose and lowered. Indrani had fallen asleep on him when seated on his bedside, forehead on his side as she lightly snored. And, by the looks of the sheet beneath her mouth, drooled. Well, we’d all had a long night. The folding chair she was still seated on was precariously balanced on its two front feet, anchored only by her weight and leaning against the cot. I resisted the urge to suddenly shout just to see her stumble on the ground, though it was a close-run thing. To my surprise, there was another within the admittedly cramped tent. In another armchair, curled up like sleeping cat, Vivienne was clutching at a blanket and sleeping so heavily she might as well be dead. I wasn’t the only one who was a fragile little mortal these days, it was true, and her hours of waking had been almost as troublesome as mine. While I would not hesitate a moment to ruin Archer’s sleep, Vivienne at least should get to keep her slumber for a while yet.

There were two layers over me, my cloak and a thicker blanket above it, so I softly dropped the latter on the ground and with a muted grunt pulled the former around me. Gods, even with the brazier in the corner the air was cool and I’d shrugged off quite a few of my clothes for comfort. Barefoot, I slid onto the footrest and back into my discarded boots, tightening the straps. Pain in leg spiked, which did not bode well for walking out of here. I reached out blindly and without fought, but my fingers closed around my staff. I almost started, eyes narrowing as I turned to look at the dead wood. Had I remembered where I’d propped it up last night, somewhere in the back of my mind? Or had it just been where it needed to be? Didn’t matter, I ultimately decided. It was meant only to help me walk, not to serve as a weapon or a tool of power. It could not fail me in an hour of need if I never relied on it for more than what any stick could provide. I pushed myself up, swallowing a moan of pain, and took a few hobbling steps. It got better after a bit, though never less than unpleasant. Finding myself close to Indrani and Masego’s sleeping forms I allowed myself to take them in for a moment, Masego most of the two. It’d been near a year now, hadn’t it? How strange, that someone who’d been nothing to be for most my life could come to be missed to sorely when we were now parted. It wasn’t even that Zeze was the one among my friends I saw the most. That’d always been Hakram. But there’d always been a manner of comfort in knowing that Masego was close by, even if he’d disappeared into a tome or an experiment for a few days. From the moment we’d met he’d so rarely been afar, even if not together. Until he’d left for Thalassina. I could sense a discreet working of Night on him, woven to keep another appraised of his health, and that served as fresh reminder of what our third time in Liesse had personally cost him.

When he woke, it would not be pretty. There’d be many among my fresh allies howling for punishment, and the loss of his sorcery would not necessarily be enough to appease. They weren’t even wrong, I thought, for though he’d done it in grief and while manipulated by the Dead King he had come within an hour of killing hundreds of thousands. More, even. If the realm that’d become the Twilight Ways had crashed into Iserre, it would have taken more than this battlefield with it. How many more thousands lived in the principality’s cities, its towns and countryside? No small number, and most of that civilians. Penance would have to be found, I thought, though delicately doled out. Already returning to lucidity would make him behold in full the truth that his fathers were gone, but that anguish would be paired with his sorcery being taken. That would... take time to accept, I suspected. I would not pretend to truly understand every part of the complex relationship Masego had with magic, but I suspected it would not be too different from losing a dear friend or a spouse for him. But we’re back , I thought, looking at the sleeping pair. Vivienne was not far, and though Hakram would already be busying himself with one of the thousand little hidden things that kept my world spinning he was close as well. After months in the dark and split across the face of Calernia to seek our own truths, we were finally together again. Grim as the days to come were, the Woe had found each other once more.

Whatever doom lay approaching behind the horizon, it would find us waiting and bearing sharp knives.

Swallowing a wince as I leaned down, I picked up my blanket and softly laid it on Archer’s shoulders. I brushed back a lock of hair that’d tumbled over her ear, fingers lingering as I acknowledged that there would be need to settle matters personal as well eventually. Though Indrani has spoken it nonchalantly enough as we chased victory in Liesse, the admission that she loved the sleeping man she was drooling on was no small thing. Out in the open it was no longer as a butterfly’s wingbeat, easily ignored or taken for illusion. Most of what would have to be settled in there would have to be seen to by the pair of them, and I had no place in it, but only most. I’d been sharing a bed with Indrani regularly since that first time in the Everdark, but it might be for the best for that to cease until boundaries had been clearly drawn for them both. Or disappointments had, if it was to be that. Masego was in no way mandated with returning that affection, after all. And someday I wondered if he even could. That he had no interest in bedplay was well-worn knowledge, but he’d displayed disinterest in more than that. There were many ways to love someone, and not all involved skin or pining sighs. They’d find their balance, I knew. Or make peace with the way they could not. We were all too tightly bound for such a small thing to wound.

Being a good friend when the mood struck me, I slid a few small firewood logs under the lifted feet of Archer’s chair so she’d not topple when she inevitably woke. I limped out quietly, feeling filthy with sweat and soot and blood. The thought of a warm bath or even a basin of hot water ferociously attractive, but I’d not eaten in too long and drunk quite a bit over the last day and night. Best get breakfast before that came back to haunt me. The thought was enough to work an appetite, and as it happened there was an open campfire not far. The two silhouettes by it I knew well, and was greeted by amused smiles when I leaned over the fire to smell at the iron pot being heated.

“Tea?” I said, surprised.

“One of Aisha’s blends,” Hakram replied. “It ought to help with the leg, if only a little.”

Adjutant knew well my reluctance to cheat the discomfort for too long, so it wouldn’t be an herb meant to kill the pain. Maybe one of those Wasteland herbs that helped with the flow of blood? Eh, I’d ask later. Instead I made Akua move further down the old stone and sat myself with a grunt, hands rising to accept the mug of tea the orc had just poured. I sniffed once more, but though the smell was vaguely familiar I couldn’t quite put the finger on what had gone in it. I blew out the mist that wafted up, ignoring the increasing number of eyes I could feel on me. This part of the camp would be restricted, I thought, but there’d still be soldiers. It wouldn’t be long before word spread I’d woken. The prominence of Lower Miezan in both Callow and Praes meant that gossip still flew with swift wings no matter who ended up joining the ranks of my armies.

“I’m guessing that clever little Night-weave on Masego is your work,” I said to Akua.

She inclined her head.

“His health remains within my expectations,” she said. “Though it may be some time still until he fully recovers.”

My brow rose.

“Losing the magic didn’t knock him out,” I pointed out. “I did.”

“You only pre-empted the natural course,” she told me. “You may think of it as Lord Hierophant having recently gone under a chirurgeon’s knife.”

“Like when I lost an aspect,” I murmured.

“That was a metaphysical wound,” Akua disagreed. “This is physical. The body must acclimate itself to the absence of magic.”

“And typically how does that go?” I frowned.

“It is not a phenomenon I am much familiar with, for in the Wasteland is it exceedingly rare for one to lose sorcery without death ensuing,” she admitted. “And I no longer have a storied library to expand my learning, much as I would like to.”

The Sisters might know, I thought. Or Roland, considering part of his Name apparently involved the ‘confiscation’ of magic.

“I see no reason to worry,” Akua assured me. “Though he should remain weakened for a span, he should wake much sooner. It is exhaustion, not forced torpor.”

I slowly nodded. Still, I’d not gamble with Masego’s health if I could help it. Behind me the sound of eggs on a pan caught my attention: Hakram had cracked three, as I usually took, and was frying them on the open fire.

“I’ll get you a conversation with the Rogue Sorcerer,” I told Akua. “You should be able to get use out of that.”

She inclined her head in agreement. I claimed a bowl myself, as Hakram’s sole hand was already occupied, and watched with mild bemusement as Akua Sahelian heeded his instructions and got out a small pot of salt before sprinkling a few touched of it on my eggs. He deftly turned them afterward, using only his wrist. There was still half a cookpot’s worth left of stew – horse, since we were starting to run low on other fresh meats, and I ended up digging hungrily into a bowl filled with both. The tea took me longer to get through, for it tasted bitterer than I preferred, but I was not drinking it purely for pleasure. It was a pleasant meal, my two companions keeping the conversation going on matters of no great import while I only occasionally interjected a grunt of agreement or the opposite. Apparently the heartlands of Procer used a great deal more salt in their meals than I was used to back home, since it could be brought in cheap from the great salt pans on the western coast of Neustria and Brus. I stretched a bit afterwards, pleasantly full in a way that I’d never truly known how badly I missed until I could be again.

“Right,” I finally sighed. “Lay it on me, then. What did I miss while I slept?”

“In truth, nothing particularly pressing,” Hakram said, to my surprise. “Arnaud Brogloise has sent messenger to request an audience when it is convenient for you. He’ll be approaching you in the name of the First Prince, since the powers she granted him have yet to expire. I’d consider what he has to say more representative of the situation in Salia than what Princess Rozala will speak to.”

I hummed.

“But it’s not pressing,” I said. “Why?”

“I expect he’s still going through the partial text of the Accords I passed to him,” Hakram said.

I didn’t reply immediately, though I almost chastised him. We’d discussed passing that along to the Procerans in advance of the conference that would most likely be held in Salia – I couldn’t see Hasenbach leaving the city at the moment, she’d be leaving the Highest Assembly to its own devices – but I’d been more inclined to Princess Rozala, or even the now-former Princess Sophie Louvroy. The latter was one of Hasenbach’s loyalists, the one sent to keep an eye on the army, which implied a degree of trust. On the other hand, Arnaud Brogloise had turned out to be her spy and empowered envoy. He was, objectively, the better pick: not only was it assured that whatever he saw would end up in Cordelia’s ear, he had the authority to speak on her behalf before we got to Salia. And though dear old Arnaud obviously had very few compunctions with killing, he’d been able to play some highly perceptive Proceran royals for fools. For years . Malanza was more general than steward, by my reckoning, and to my knowledge not a particularly skilled intriguer. No, Brogloise was the right choice. In some aspects, anyway. I’d rather have the Princess of Aequitan at my side than on the other one, when the time came to push for the Accords, and that couldn’t be done if she was kept in the dark about them.

“Have another one prepared,” I said, then thought more of it. “No, two.”

“Pilgrim,” he said. “And Princess Rozala, I’d assume. Is that wise?”

I cocked my head to the side. There couldn’t be many reasons he’d expected me to keep one of the two most powerful women in Procer in the dark until the last moment.

“You’re afraid they might use the Accords to draw lines in the Assembly,” I said. “For and against, every sitter to gather behind one or the other.”

“The First Prince remains unpopular,” Hakram pointed out. “These are times of war and she is not a general while her seat of power – the Lycaonese north and its support – has been uprooted. Of course, with the fighting up north toppling Procer’s ruler would attract a great deal of scorn. Unless it was reluctantly done to avoid some great mistake.”

“She’s fought the dead, Hakram,” I said. “And you saw her on the hill. She’s not going to make a grab for the throne halfway through the end of the world.”

“She might,” Akua disagreed. “If she believed Cordelia Hasenbach to be unable to fight this war the way it needs to be fought.”

“If we don’t tell her now,” I said, “she’ll take that as the insult it is.”

“Agreed,” Akua easily said. “Arlesites are notoriously prickly over such matters. I also rather disagree with Lord Adjutant’s notion that discussion of the Accords will be used in the Highest Assembly. Your support is much too precious a commodity at the moment for one of them to discard it offhand.”

“My support,” I skeptically said. “Wouldn’t my backing in any of their private squabbles be a kiss of death? It’s both a villain and foreigner intervening in Proceran affairs.”

“Ah,” Hakram suddenly breathed out.

An elaboration would have been more helpful, as far as I was concerned.

“You have a series of victories to hand out, my heart,” Akua smiled under the veil. “End of the dwarven ban on armament sales. Assurances of truce with the Firstborn and the support of their armies against Keter. Access to Callowan grain markets come next harvest. The secrets of the Twilight Ways for Proceran armies to use. And, of course, the great achievement of having turned the dreaded Black Queen into a tame tiger unleashed on the dead.”

My fingers clenched and unclenched as I considered that. I’d considered most of those a given the moment bargains were struck, but I could see their point. If all those things were presented as the victories of either Hasenbach or Malanza, they’d come out looking like the person getting things done. The kind you wanted in charge, when someone like the Dead King was at the gate. The First Prince already had the throne, true, but the Princess of Aequitan was fresh off what could be considered a success here in Iserre. And I knew better than most than when the days got dark people liked to have a soldier wearing the crown.

“If Malanza tries to seize the reins, then they’ll both try to use the Accords as meat to barter for anything I could provide them,” I said. “So if we don’t send her the text we’re essentially tipping the scales in Hasenbach’s favour. She’ll have had time to prepare, and she’s too skilled a hand not to turn that into a significantly better position.”

“The decision must be carefully considered, in my eyes,” Akua said. “For the twin truth of what you said is that, in apprising Princess Rozala of your intent, we tacitly allow her to present a challenge to the First Prince in Salia.”

Which I doubted Cordelia would take all that kindly to, all things considered.

“I would be surprised, in truth, if Cordelia Hasenbach’s unseating was the intent,” Akua continued. “By the procedures of the Assembly such a thing would be difficult to accomplish – and embitter the Lycaonese for generations if carried out. Assuming they did not outright rebel. More sensibly, with the right maneuvering it would not be impossible for Rozala Malanza to become the true power in Procer no matter who rules in name.”

If this was just about curtailing how much hostility I’d be earning by my decision, I suspected sending the simplified Accords to the Princess of Aequitan would make for much less personal a grudge than keeping the same woman in the dark until we reached Salia. On the other hand, approaching the matter that way was a fine way to make a mistake: wading into a melee before knowing who you wanted to thump was a good way to end up eating dirt.

“There’s no guarantee they’ll turn on each other,” I finally said.

“The Principate is on the precipice of change,” Akua disagreed. “And only one may hold the reins if their nation is survive the war, they both know this: divided, squabbling, Procer can only break. The lesser crowns cannot look to two mistresses for orders, and so one of them must submit to the other before the Highest Assembly for uncertainty to end. She who remains standing will rule the Procer that is to come, should she survive the war.”

“We lose little from allowing Princess Rozala a challenge,” Hakram noted. “If anything with two bidders concessions ought to be easier to secure. If the First Prince had been more willing to negotiate with us in the past I’d advise against it, but there’s hardly any good will there to spoil.”

“I believe that Cordelia Hasenbach remains the superior candidate to ensure lasting peace,” Akua told him. “And if decision is made to back her from the start, being owed a favour can be worth more than auctioned support – and would create good will. A knife hand stayed is worth more than promises.”

I shook my head.

“You’re selling both of them short,” I said. “And I don’t mean there won’t be tensions, because that ship rather left the dock when Hasenbach made Malanza’s mother drink poison after their civil war. But they’ll remain cordial while the Dead King is at the gate, because neither will be willing to roll the dice when snake eyes might mean the end of the Principate.”

I thought back to a conversation that felt so long ago, Hasenbach and I alone in the depths of my since-devoured domain. You miss the central tenet of the Principate , she’d chided me as we spoke of tyranny. It is, unlike Praes, a nation built on consensus. She’d sent Prince Amadis and his cabal into my hands to be savaged, I’d retorted back then, her opposition in that Assembly she so touted. Yet she’s believed in her words, back then, even as she struggled with realities that were flawed. Did she still, I wondered?

“No, if Procer is to decide its own fate then let it be in the open,” I said. “Cordelia Hasenbach cannot grudge me her own principles observed. Malanza gets the Accords, same as the Pilgrim.”

Although, in truth, this entire matter should have been debated with Vivienne awake. Which they would know, I thought. Yet they’d spoken of it anyway. I would not count that a coincidence.

“You’re not telling me something,” I said.

“I thought you’d come to the conclusion yourself without prompting,” Akua said, sounding fascinated. “It truly is a glaring blind spot.”

“We’ve named boons you can offer that would win princes to either cause,” Hakram gravelled. “Yet there’s prize that would win the people as well. In these parts for certain and others as well. It is a matter of pride, in the end.”

My heart clenched.

“Black,” I said. “They’ll want Black’s head on pike.”

The shade dipped her head in agreement.

“And you pushed this not because you want me to make a decision,” I said, “but because he’s awake.”

“Before seeing him you should know what may still lie ahead,” Hakram said. “Make no mistake, Catherine, they will hound you for him. Their people will riot otherwise, after what he’s done. The Legions themselves may be spared, but the Carrion Lord? They cannot afford to simply let him go.”

“They can’t afford to fuck with me either,” I sharply replied.

Akua looked at me, and for a moment under the veil I believed she might have looked sad.

“There will be a choice,” she said, “between what the woman wants and what the queen requires.”

I grit my teeth, rising to my feet.

“Catherine,” Hakram called out.

I turned a glare on him.

“I handed him the full Accords,” he said.

Why , I almost asked, but already knew the answer. Either my father would sign the damned thing, or he’d be sold so that everyone else did.

I stalked off, furious at no one in particular, to find Amadeus of the Green Stretch.

Chapter 56: Reflections

“In winning a game one may only grasp lesser victory; only in setting the rules may greater victory be found, for one then transcends the possibility of loss.”
– Extract from “Bought and Sold”, a collection of the teachings of the Merchant Prince Irenos, founder of Mercantis

It wasn’t all that hard to find him, even though my temper refused to allow me to double back and obtain Black’s location from those two. The combined camp of the Army of Callow and the Legions-in-Exile was centred around the barrow where I’d schemed the coming of this day, and the elaborate Mavian prayer atop it. It was half a fortress raised from the plains around the tumulus and half a well-organized city of tents, the latter being what told me where to look. Most of the layouts for camps that my army used were slightly adjusted from Legion standard, which I was long familiar with. By virtue of remembering a bird’s eye view I knew which parts of the camp would have access restricted to them by order of one of my triumvirate of deputies – Juniper, Vivienne, Hakram – and where the restrictions ran high and the wards with them my father would be kept. Not as a prisoner, no. That’d be a blunder, given that within our own camp were the same legions who’d followed Black on his ill-fated campaign into the Proceran heartlands. I had no doubt, not for a moment, that Grem One-Eye would force a battle if we tried to imprison the Black Knight or execute him. None of my little triumvirate would have dared to take so bold a step without my approval, anyhow, not after the way I’d chewed them out harshly for overstepping not so long ago. Especially not when it came to a matter as delicate as Amadeus of the Green Stretch.

It wasn’t long before I found the tent where he’d been recuperating, though somewhat unsurprisingly he’d already left it. Along with, from the lack of papers strewn all over the inside, one of the few fully scribed texts of the Liesse Accords. He was in fit state to move, then, which was good news. From there I did not even bother to ask questions of the legionaries still standing guard around the tent. I knew the man, better than most, and after so long cleaved from his own flesh he’d not be able to tolerate remaining stuck in bed helpless while the world moved around him. Especially not after having been handed an intriguing read by my Adjutant’s hand. No, there was no doubt as to where he’d be holed up if the matter was seriously considered. I began my slow trek up the barrow’s slope, slipping through the three concentric rings of raised stones that from below looked like some eldritch temple’s wall. At the heart of it, seated among the dead riverbed of what had once been an altar to the fae, my father sat in the very seat I’d stolen from Arcadia. The parchments I’d once had Robber hang up on stones, when trying to divine a path through the Iserran chaos that would not break half the world, had long been burned – I would brook no evidence of my schemes to survive them – but I’d come by that method of thought honestly. Put up on worn and ancient stone in little clusters entire sections of the Accords had been put together.

Black did not look up from the parchments he was frowning down at even as I approached, though even Nameless he must have heard my limping gait. I could only make out the side of him, from where I was approaching, for he’d pivoted the seat to ensure that the afternoon sun would shine against his back and onto the sheets. He’d shaved, I saw, stripped away the growing and greying beard his soulless body had kept growing without him. It did not make him look younger – the thickening strands of grey in his hair saw to that, black touched by iron – but he felt more like the man I knew than the sleeping body had been. The cleanliness of him, not some highborn peacock’s perfumed pretence but instead the austere thoroughness of someone who could not tolerate the slovenly, had been restored. Pale green eyes narrowed in thought before he rose to his feet and set down a thick sheath of parchments on the table I’d had put up here days ago.

“How much of it did you read?” I asked.

I limped up to his side slowly as he remained still, gaze still on the parchments ahead of us that traced the bare bones of the manner of world I wanted to make. I stood at his side, noting with old surprise that I was taller than he these days by more than an inch.

“The substance of it,” my father replied. “The legal minutiae are not so interesting as what you seek to achieve through them. Which is...”

His head moved to the side, as if amused. My heart skipped a beat, for though I was no longer his student and his ways were not always mine, the thought that he might be my foe in this was almost too much to bear.

“Ambitious,” Black said, lips quirking. “With iron and ink and oaths, you would bind that which is worst in us and through it call forth a strange new dawn.”

“It’s how we get out of it,” I said, dry-mouthed. “The wheel of misery that rolls over us all, the wound some misbegotten part of us just keeps picking at. I see no other way.”

“It is that,” the green-eyed man quietly said. “And it’s beautiful, Catherine. It truly is.”

My throat choked up. Fingers clenched around the yew haft and my other hand rose, hesitantly. It was one thing to acknowledge the thinning, even crossing, of a boundary to myself but another to presume acting upon it. At our last parting, I’d slid a knife between his ribs and chased him out of my kingdom. Things, thoughts that had seemed certain in the privacy of my own thoughts or even those few I trusted now seemed – arms pulled me close, and I breathed out lingeringly as my nose came to rest on my father’s shoulder. I could be furious with him later, I thought. It was not weakness to choose when an accounting was asked. His fingers held tight to the cloak he’d gifted me long ago, before I’d taken to adorning it with own victories and covered the blackness of its beginnings, and for a while we stood that way. The embrace broke without the embarrassment I’d expected from at least one of us, much left unspoken yet somehow still acknowledged.

“It appears I owe you the salvation of my soul,” Black said, tone the faintest hint of dry.

“If there’s pieces missing, well, it was like that when I found it,” I replied.

His lips twitched, which coming from him was good as a smile.

“Gratitude, nonetheless,” he said. “For the difficulties my defeat brought to you.”

“The parts where you were arguably winning have been much, much worse,” I frankly said.

“Then for that as well,” he said, inclining his head to the side.

It was, I saw, an apology for the inconveniences he’d caused me. Not, even the slightest bit, regret for the dozens if not hundreds of thousands he might have killed through empty stomachs. I’d not truly expected otherwise, truth be told. He’d never been one to flinch in the face of monstrous acts, if he deemed them necessary to victory – or to repent for blood spilled a necessity’s altar.

“You’ve gotten old,” I casually said, statement and question both.

“They found me on Lake Artoise,” Amadeus said. “Their band of heroes, so nobly clad. And before the fist blow was struck, already I was no longer the Black Knight.”

“Below sold you out?” I frowned. “I’m no great admirer, mind you, but that doesn’t sound like them. They prefer their favourites to go out in a blaze.”

“Already I had sensed the thinning of my mantle,” he admitted. “The well was always shallow, and I leaned on it as rarely before, but the signs were there.”

My eyes narrowed. That did to sound like the loss of Name, or more accurately not only that.

“You’re a claimant,” I said. “Shit. To what?”

He hummed a tune, and my blood ran cold for I had heard it before.

“There was once a girl without a name,

There was a tower no one could claim

No one remembers why she has climbed,

Or all those she must have left behind,” he softly sang.

The Girl Who Climbed the Tower , that tune was called. Only those who might one day claim the tower at the heart of Ater had ever been known to hear it.

“You said you’d heard it before,” I said.

“The fullness of it, only once,” he murmured. “When I was yet young and believed there was nothing sufficient steel and cleverness could not cure.”

It was what I wanted from him, wasn’t it? Should he overthrow Malicia and become Dread Emperor, he could make of the Wasteland more than a wild and cornered beast. Carve out the worst of it, by fire and sword, and leave room for something better to grow of the ashes. And yet, hearing the pale-skinned man humming that eerie tune, a shiver had gone up my smile. Dread, perhaps, to match the title that may yet be claimed. Claimed , I mocked myself. What a nice, genteel word that is to describe the murder of one the few people he loves still drawing breath.

“And now?” I softly asked.

“Now I heard the refrain and wonder,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch said, “at the attributes that make an act a mistake.”

I paused, sensing this was somewhere to tread lightly. I was not the only one in his life to have ever commanded affection, and his partnership with Malicia at its height had seen the Empire reach its greatest height since Maleficent the Second. Their ties were decades in the making and keeping, and though cracks had been wrought the temple they’d raised to each other was still tall and many-pillared.

“She’s been making increasingly hardline decisions since you left,” I said.

“She has made increasingly hardline decisions because I left,” Black countered calmly.

Which might be true. I did not think the Empress so sentimental a creature that she’d lash out over the loss of a companion, no matter how dear, but Black was a little more than that. When he’d taken so many of the Legions to the Red Flower Vales and ignored every missive coming from Ater, he’d stripped her of her most feared enforcer as well as put it out in the open that at least half the Legions of Terror would heed orders from him over her. Her position had been crippled, even before the Ashurans started torching the coasts and cities with them. Even before Thalassina went up in smoke, taking the Thalassocracy’s finest fleets but also Warlock with them. Now her power was shrinking, the vultures circling, and she could not afford even the pretence of weakness less she be torn apart. Of course, she’d ordered the Night of Knives before it ever came to that. There were some who might say that by making peace talks with the Grand Alliance and distancing myself from the Empire I’d courted such retaliation. They might not even be wrong.

That did not mean I would either forget or forgive it.

“You’ve read the Accords,” I said. “I can’t see her signing them, for many reasons but most of all that she’d need to abdicate.”

“You underestimate her,” my father noted. “If it became clear that her diplomatic position was untenable, she’d concede rather than fight a war she could not feasibly win.”

“She won’t sign it,” I said, “because the moment she does the High Lords will slit her throat and one of them will claim the Tower over her corpse.”

“Not,” he said, “if I have returned.”

My fingers clenched.

“I’ll be blunt,” I said. “No one would trust her to actually enforce the terms, least of all me. Sure, the throne in the Tower would go empty. A Nameless ruler would be rustled up. And before night’s end the struggle to decide who would be the Secret Emperor or Empress ruling through them would be concluded. Maybe, and I do mean maybe , if you were keeping an eye on the situation those promises could be trusted. But then it would still be you that’s the keystone, not her. She is not an asset to the arrangement.”

I’d had frank, almost brusque talks with my father before. We had disagreed over matters great and small, most notably when we’d last spoken face to face. But never before had we really had such a discussion when I stood in the position of greater power and authority. Oh, even out here in the heartlands of Procer surrounded by enemies Amadeus of the Green Stretch remained one of the most powerful men on Calernia. He commanded the loyalty of a large and capable army, stood at the head of a great net of informants and had ties to powerful Named. There were those who called themselves rulers out there that paled in comparison. Yet now I stood Queen of Callow, First Under the Night and with great names and Named in my debt. I could, in all honesty, say that perhaps the only entity on the continent that could feasibly dictate terms to me was the Dead King – and even then, there would be difficulties. I supposed a lesser man might have felt cheated by that, the way the balance had swung to my side with the passing of the years. I’d seen it in Callowan nobles, the indignation at needing to heed the orders of some young warlord of no great line. At being made to kneel before someone the truths of their world stated should be kneeling to them instead. It ate the insides like poison, and always left a mark. And yet I found no trace of that in the man who’d once been the Black Knight. It should not have surprised me, even if it did.

When had ever begrudged me so much as a step forward, even when it came at his expense?

“Only so much can be spoken of this while neither of us has knowledge of the situation in Praes,” he finally said. “I will have to speak to Scribe. We should still have scrying relays on this side of the Whitecaps.”

“Scrying works now,” I confirmed.

Green eyes narrowed.

“I will have to speak to Scribe,” he said, tone strange.

“Your people are more likely to have fresh word of the Wasteland than mine,” I freely conceded.

His lips thinned.

“Eudokia, this is hardly the time,” he murmured. “Catherine, sharpen your mind against influence.”

My brow rose.

“You think someone’s meddling with my mind?” I said. “I’m not dismissing that out of hand, but there’s other things in there nowadays that’d not take kindly to that.”

“It is not active interference,” he explained. “Consider it more akin to one being so utterly unremarkable that the mind dismisses them.”

That... rang true, somehow. I drew on the Night, feeling the interest if the Sisters directed at me.

“One of my companions is the Scribe.”

Oh. Oh . All this time? I’d just... not thought about her, even when by all rights I should have. Like my mind’s eye had skipped over any hole left by her absence.

“Godsdamnit,” I said through gritted teeth. “All right. I know she was with Marshal Grem for some time after your capture, but I can’t speak to her movements after that. Hells, she could still be hiding in some tent here for all I know.”

“She won’t be,” Black said.

To my irritation, there was an undertone of open fondness.

“If she has left the armies, then it was to prepare for what she saw coming,” he continued. “Considering both defeat and victory would have brought you – and likely myself – to Salia then that is where she will be.”

“You’re telling me your spymistress has been in Procer’s capital for what could be months,” I slowly said. “What for , Black?”

“We’ll have to find another form of address, if Amadeus makes you so uncomfortable,” the green-eyed man said, sounding amused. “That one will never be accurate again, I don’t think.”

I rolled my eyes, though it was true enough. It felt... disrespectful to call him by his given name.

“Pray tell, Lord Amadeus, what has the Webweaver gotten the fuck up to in Salia?” I politely asked.

“I’d expect she has been taking root in the city, Your Majesty,” he replied without missing a beat, lips twitching at my wince. “She often prefers to spread influence for some time before taking action, as a better read on the currents of the local allows for intervention so indirect as to be near traceless.”

“And what is it she’s been trying to set up?” I grimly asked.

“It could be near anything, truth be told,” Amadeus said. “Though in all humility, I expect she will have given priority to reclaiming me. After ensuring she was in a position to do such a thing should opportunity arise, I would venture she began making arrangements for the political collapse of the Great Alliance.”

If someone else had told me that, I might have been skeptical. Cordelia Hasenbach was probably, all things considered, the most skilled diplomat of our age. She’d also run circles around the Highest Assembly for years while simultaneously fending off the Tower’s sabotage of reign. The Thalassocracy of Ashur had never been a great worry for me – they were a naval power first and foremost, what trouble was that to Callow? – but I’d read of them since the Tenth Crusade began. They were a realm arguably older than Praes and who’d largely remained stable for that entire span. As for the Levantines, though their squabbles of honour made them the obvious weak link they also had the Peregrine looking over the shoulder. The Grand Alliance was hardly the most stable of edifices, it was true, but neither was it captained by fools and with the Dead King at the gates there was mortar to keep them together. And still, if Black now told me that Scribe could threaten it, I could only believe him. For if I’d sent Thief or Adjutant or – Gods forbid – Akua in Salia and let them prepare for a few months? Oh, they would wound it badly. And Scribe had been the spymistress to the Calamities for longer than I’d lived.

“But you can tell her to call it off, whatever she has prepared,” I said.

“It is not,” my father said, “quite as simple as that.”

Not the answer I’d been looking for, that.

“Eudokia takes orders from me so long as those orders are sound,” he said. “In the sense that my judgement is unimpaired.”

“Which it is,” I pointed.

“Only if you do not consider sentiment to be an impairment, which she does,” he said.

“I need the Grand Alliance to hold, Black,” I flatly said. “For one, I’m going to be part of it.”

“Indeed,” he said, cocking his head to the side. “You need it. Callow benefits. On the other hand, the Alliance’s continued existence means that the Dread Empire is effectively cut off and at the mercy of its signatories.”

“Which won’t matter if the Empire signs the Accords,” I pointed out. “I’m not trying to end wars – I can’t change human nature with bits of ink. But the moment Praes is no longer the nation of flying fortresses and undead plagues-”

“- which assumes that the Dread Empire of Praes, regardless of who rules it when the matter is broached, will be signing the Liesse Accords,” Black said.

My heart caught in my throat.

“Are you saying you won’t?” I asked, calm forced.

“Asking,” he said, “is not enough. That you are my daughter in all but blood is not enough. We barter now the stuff of empires and the fates of nations. You would set the foundation of the Age that will follow you, and I fear that in some aspects of that seeking you are ill-prepared. I offer you, then, opportunity. If you want any ruler of Praes at all to sign your Accords?”

He met my gaze.

“Convince me,” he demanded.

Chapter 57: Hearing

“It was written in faraway Mieza that law is what separates men and beasts. We know better, in Praes: law is what separates the beasts wild and tame.”
– Dread Emperor Terribilis I, the Lawgiver

It was tempting to send for Hakram and Vivienne, who in some ways were just as much the architects of the Liesse Accords as I might claim to be. The shape of them had come from me, but it was Adjutant who’d discretely gathered jurists from Callow and Praes and pressed them for understanding until a cohesive body of law could be put together. Vivienne herself had been at our side the entire way, spreading out her Jacks far and wide to obtain the practical knowledge that was needed to make any of our fancies a functioning reality – yet burning, ardently, to see it done. Some days I suspected she’d spent more hours working out how the Accords could be made to hold up than either of us, moved by sheer want of seeing them take hold. It wasn’t like they wouldn’t be of use when arguing, either. Hakram had a ludic way with cold logic, and a mastery of details I’d never be able to match. And Vivienne’s brand of argument, half ruthlessly pragmatic and half genuinely passionate, did tend to reach people neither Adjutant nor myself would get to. I didn’t, though, because it would be missing the point of this exercise. Black wasn’t simply demanding that I convince him, he was giving me the opportunity to cut my teeth on selling the Accords to a foreign ruler in a relatively safe manner. Here, if I stumbled, it would not be a disaster that struck at all I’d fought for.

Even now, I thought, he was a sort of teacher still. Some things you never entirely outgrew.

Still, in the end it would be me that carried the Accords to the shore if they were to ever reach it. Vivienne, while heiress-designate to Callow, was still deep in my shadow from an outsider’s eyes. And Hakram, and Gods it was unfair, but Hakram wouldn’t be taken seriously by any of them save if he had a knife at their throat. Because he was villain, because he was an orc, because he had chosen to stand at my side instead of raising his own banner. It angered me, the suspicion that in centuries to come the Liesse Accords would likely be written of as my work alone and other names with claims just as deep would be allowed to fall to the wayside. History, I thought, would shortchange Hakram of the Howling Wolves Clan. I’d fight it every way I could, even when he might wish I did not, but I did not believe it would be enough. For too many out there the story would feel neater without him – less challenging of what they thought they knew – and I well knew the knots people were willing to tie themselves into to allow their view of the world to go unchanged. Yet it was undeniable truth that when the deal was brought to the table where Hasenbach and the Blood and Ashur’s committees sat, it would live or die by the wagging of my tongue. And so I dare not call on the others now, less that same tongue fail me on a day mistake would mean lasting calamity.

Still, it was past noon and we both kept to some of the Wasteland’s ways: though I did not send for the others, I did send for wine. And so Black and I claimed that old Mavian prayer for ourselves, breaking out bottles of some sharp Iserran wine – Prière de Fou , it was called – that lingered on the tongue like sin or vengeance. In the afternoon’s light he seemed strangely vital, for all the greying marks of age in his once-dark locks. With a loose white shirt on his frame and woolen dark trousers going into Legion-issue boots, he honestly seemed more... carefree than I could remember ever seeing him. There’d been a heavy jacket of linen on his frame when I first came, but by the second cup of wine it was on the back of my seat to my own cloak’s side.

“The throne of Callow recognizes Lord Amadeus of the Green Stretch, Praesi dignitary,” I began.

I was toasted with a rough clay cup holding wine of which a singe bottle could likely but a whole bag of. He was seated at the edge of our heavy wooden table, ignoring the perfectly good seat I’d left

“The Dread Empire of Praes deigns to recognize the Queen of Callow, Catherine Foundling,” he allowed, lips twitching. “In the depths of our mercy, keeping with our well-known concern for the fellowship of nations.”

“Kind of you, eastern devil,” I drily replied, leaning on my staff as I took a sip of my own shoddy cup. “Now, I assume you’ve read the proposed treaties that were sent to you.”

“These so-called Accords, yes,” Black easily replied. “A blatant attempt to weaken, isolate and starve the Dread Empire. And you expect us to sign these? You should be grateful our answer wasn’t releasing a plague in Laure and setting your granaries aflame.”

Threats, huh. It was true that while I arguably stood the greater victor on the fields of Iserre, Callow was not untouchable and despite the best efforts of my companions in fact remained rather fragile. Praes had other fires to put out, at the moment – a goblin rebellion that’d taken Foramen, the sack of Nok by Ashuran fleets and the annihilation of its largest port Thalassina along with every living soul in that great city save one – but Malicia might be able to get a handle on the mess, or whoever murdered her and claimed the Tower might. That meant Praes, though wounded, could turn its attentions on the fledgling goblin nation to its south and a very vulnerable Callow whose armies were largely abroad and had been for months. There shouldn’t be food shortages though the winter, though there’d certainly be a rationing of the handouts by the royal granaries Hakram had created. If those went up in flames, though? It’d be more than a lean winter we were dealing with. No, the Dread Empire was not entirely without answers if cornered. On the other hand, there was a reason that even though Black was speaking like some arrogant Wasteland highborn even in that pretence he’d not ‘actually’ struck at my kingdom. The current lack of open hostilities was something very much in the Tower’s interest to maintain, lest I turn my attention to it instead of the Dead King.

“If you strike across the border, I’ll dismantle Praes after we’re done up north,” I said. “The Grand Alliance already wants to, we both know that. The only thing that’s truly been standing in their way is trust and distance, both of which will be sufficiently seen to if Callow becomes a signatory.”

“When you are done up north,” Black repeated. “And there is the arrogance. Even should you beat Trismegistus on the field, will the Alliance not be ruined in achieving this? You threaten me with soldiers already sworn to die very far away. Your own armies are abroad, and their loyalties complex besides. If you do no want my concern to be how to break Callow before you return, or how to break it when you are returned, then offer terms other than submission or the sword.”

I drained the rest of my cup and tossed it at his head. He caught it, though a lot more narrowly than he would have a few years back, and filled it with the Iserran red even as I considered my answer. So he was making it clear my position in the Tower’s eyes was not so strong as one might think at first glance. I could concede to part of that, at least. After a costly campaign against Keter, I couldn’t see the current signatories of the Alliance eagerly embarking on a second military enterprise immediately after. In Praes, the prevailing belief among the High Lords might very well end up being that Callow was the only threat to worry of if it came to war. They might not even be wrong, I thought. I was not so sure the Sisters would send a great army of Firstborn to aid me again, if blades came out in the east.

“Then let’s see to your worries,” I said. “You said that the Accords would weaken, isolate and starve the Dread Empire.”

“When paired with your declared intent and seemingly imminent achievement of becoming a signatory of the Grand Alliance,” Black specified.

I inclined my head in agreement. Wasn’t going to be a secret for long, assuming it even was at the moment, so I did not mind the boundaries of our debate including it.

“I’m listening,” I said.

He rose to his feet and strode across the thinning snow, pressing the filled cup into my hand as he passed, and came to stand by one of the raised stones. He tapped the parchments hung there with a finger.

“Weakening,” he told me. “Your proposed laws would forbid the summoning for extra-Creational entities, save for peaceful purposes, and even then under restriction. These are specifically stated to include angels, devils and demons.”

“They are,” I said. “Cutting through the legalese, civilian labour and advice-giving is fine for angels and devils. Demons are forbidden under all circumstances save if all signatories of the Accords agree such an act is necessary.”

“And so you roughly enforce parity of means between Named,” Black said. “Which will be pleasing to some Named, mostly those incapable of actually doing any of this, but you seek to remove those same Named from positions of rule. As for lordly concerns, since those matter foremost under your laws, you would highly disadvantage Praes as a military power. Centuries of accumulated grimoires and contracts, which are potent soldiery when called on, are suddenly made invalid. Demons have been an integral part of the defences of our cities for ages, as deterrent and blade both. Some lasting presences of their kind would be difficult to dispose of even were we so inclined.”

“I’ve made provisions for that last part,” I said.

“Yes, heroic Named under villainous supervision would remove lingering mistakes such as Hell Eggs,” he mildly said. “If that supervision were Praesi in nature, such an act might even be only mildly offensive foreign intervention in our affairs. Yet you do not address the most essential of imbalances: the Dread Empire would be surrendering a great deal of strength while other signatories would not. What does the limiting of angels mean to Procer or Ashur? To Levant? By weakening the Empire, you strengthen all its rivals at its expense. There is no nation in existence that would agree to such a thing unless forced – and treaties thrust upon a realm by force of arms rarely last.”

“Demons,” I flatly said, “damage the fabric of Creation. Every time one is used, it is an act of war waged on every other sentient being. That the Empire has been practicing that sort of diabolism for centuries is not an excuse to continue, it is something to expiate .”

“Regardless of such concerns, it remains an advantage surrendered for no given rationale,” he pointed out.

“You do get something from this,” I said. “You get to no longer be the Dread Empire.”

His brow rose.

“Look,” I said. “I’ve read Malicia’s treatise. The famous one, I man, ‘The Death of the Age of Wonders’. The touchstone of what she makes her foreign policy is making alliances abroad beyond the traditional Good and Evil lines, with the Thalassocracy of Ashur being the keystone. It’s skillful politics, using it as counterbalance for Procer since raditionally it keeps the Principate in check by strengthening Levant and ensuring the League of Free Cities is pointed west.”

“That,” Black said, “and alliance with Ashur means that sea trade lanes and the grain they represent would be effectively untouchable.”

“It’s a nice thought, but Ashur jumped into bed with Cordelia and just spent the better part of a year putting everything in Praes within walking distance of the sea to the torch,” I said. “Hasenbach is good, Black, but she’s not that good and Malicia had decades at the game before she was even born. Why did the Thalassocracy pick her over a risen but since restrained Praes as their ally?”

“Because the Tower can’t be trusted,” he replied. “Mind you, we had the effective heir to the Thalassocracy and some of their foremost admirals willing to back alliance after the death of Magon Hadast. But a powerful Praes – and we were, in those days, perceived to have largely assimilated Callow – will always be seen as a continental threat.”

“And if you sign the Accords,” I said, “you get to shed that like old skin. Oh, I don’t mean that suddenly the Wasteland will be trusted and the Tower will be the sudden beloved of people it spent centuries sending flying fortresses at. But when decisions are made, high up? They’ll know that the Empire is sitting at the same table as everyone else, following the same rules. The moment other crowns no longer have to worry about whether the latest Emperor is going to feed a few thousand babies to a snake to summon an army of devils, then they become a much more palatable ally. Then interests begin to matter again, and if that’s the game then Praes brings quite a bit to the table. You ask what signing the Accords give you? Proof that you’re a reasonable actor. And Black, how else are you ever going to get that?”

He studied me for a time, then gave half a nod.

“Some of the Empire’s highborn might be swayed by such an argument,” he noted. “Not the better part, but enough to make civil war feasible to win. Which brings us to an issue born of your Accords, yet not part of them.”

“Callow,” I said.

“Starvation,” my father agreed. “Having largely forsworn diabolism, the Wasteland might not longer be able to conquer the Kingdom of Callow to secure grain supply. Even less so should Callow be a member of the Grand Alliance, which involves clauses of mutual protection against non-signatory aggression. Praes would surrender the means through which to forcefully acquire grain without having first secured other means for that acquisition.”

“Praes can’t sign the Grand Alliance,” I admitted. “I can’t see that ever going through.”

“Neither can I,” Black replied, amused.

“So we cut out the middle man,” I said. “Praes and Callow, bound in a treaty of trade and peace. It’s not like we don’t take losses selling the crops south and west, anyway. The Principate has fertile plains and Mercantis gouges us habitually. Besides, in everything magical we’re at least half a century behind the Empire, if not more, so it’s not like you have nothing to trade aside from precious metals.”

“You would be tying our nations at their very heart,” he warned me.

“Good,” I snarled. “I want it to be that the Tower can never war on Laure again without starving itself. I want the fucking stained glass in the windows of our palaces not to be imported from Procer . All these centuries of taxes and steel and young soldiers we’ve spent moving the same border back and forth can be put to better use. Gods, Black, just imagine what Praes could do if it didn’t waste its talents on magical plagues and flying fortresses and bleeding its own people for fields! Imagine what Callow might become, if half the yearly taxes didn’t go to raising knights and raising walls to the east – we could be so much more .”

I laughed, harshly.

“Did you know that the cathedral in Laure, the one Elizabeth Alban had built spending Alamans treasures, is the reason why the House of Light is allowed to ask coin of the faithful?” I said. “Because there were points in Callowan history where the crown was too poor to pay for its damned upkeep while also raising armies and fighting wars in the east. Gods, Black, as nations we’ve spent more of – name it! – on killing each other than any single other thing in the span of our history. And while we were busy biting each other’s tails, the world moved on.”

“There will be those,” he said, “for whom those truths will not be enough.”

“Aye,” I said. “I had a few of those too, back home. I hung the sloppy ones and murdered the rest.”

He laughed.

“Those poor Regals,” he said, lips twitching. “The fought as barons challenging a queen and found themselves instead having slighted the Dread Empress of Callow.”

That there was a fond pride to his tone was not enough to prevent my wince. There was some truth to that and I knew it, for I had not learned the lessons of rule from my distant predecessors the Fairfaxes and the Albans. I’d wielded knife and scheme like one reigning from the Tower, tyrant no matter my good intentions. So be it. The Fairfaxes had failed, in the end, and I would not suffer that of myself after the myriad lines I had crossed.

“Your meaning is taken,” the green-eyed man said. “Thought here are objections still.”

“You trade the weakening for strength elsewhere,” I said. “Your feared starvation will be sworn away. That leaves what, isolation? Praes is already isolated, by virtue of having pissed away every possible alliance it could have struck. What fault of that is mine, or the Accords?”

“Don’t be childish,” Black chided. “You would require of the Empire that it willingly embraced your new age – you must then make a place for it amongst that age.”

“When did the High Lords and Ladies of Praes become lost children I must lead out of the woods?” I mockingly said.

A true speaker for those highborn might have taken offence to that, but while my father was hardly the source of my disdain for nobility he’d certainly reinforced the leaning.

“When you sought to place your will above even the Tower’s,” he easily replied. “In this world you would make, Praes must have a role to play. Else its energies will be spent unmaking what you have made.”

“To be honest, I expect that within thirty years it’ll be at war with the Free Cities,” I admitted. “They’ll not be Grand Alliance, and maybe not even Accord signatories.”

“War is one thing,” he said. “Inevitable, no matter what treaties are written. Yet more is required. Which brings me to this.”

Striding forward, wine cup in hand, he gestured at another raised stone. One holding parchments regarding the to-be city of Cardinal, and the academy it was to hold within its bounds. An academy unlike any other Calernia had ever seen.

“The school,” I said.

“It was,” Black said, “a stroke of brilliance. Forcing Named to attend there, teaching them the articles of the Accords as well as manners of villainy and heroism? The academy is the means through which your dream lasts longer than your life’s span. But it does not go far enough.”

In truth the academy was more Vivienne’s notion than mine – I’d been more concerned with enforcement, which had led me to the founding of Cardinal itself – but it truly was a stroke of brilliance. Oh, all those young Named would get practical lessons in how to accomplish what they wanted but they’d also get an education in the Articles of Strife: the manners of violence that were allowed of Named, depending on situation. How to keep mortals away from the damage, when it was allowable to kill another Named over a disagreement and what methods were legal to employ in that killing. And what methods would instead bring down on your head the wrath of the signatories, including the Named sworn to lethal enforcement of the Accords for a period of ten years at a time. I would leave behind a world where someone using a magic plague to wipe out a city would be met with heroes and villains from all over Calernia coming down on your head like the wrath of the Gods, where someone breaking the acceptable rules of warfare would be barred from Cardinal, from the Twilight Ways, from receiving support by any signatory government. Shatranj was a horrid metaphor for war, as war wasn’t a game. But the strife between Named I fully intended on making a continent-wide tourney, a pit fight that’d allow the Gods to claim their due and the rest of us to keep on moving.

“You named these very accords after a tragedy wrought by sorcery – it was a Named practitioner, to be certain, but it was still magic that brought the madness,” Black said. “Shaping Named is not enough.”

“You want me to regulate sorcery,” I frowned.

“I want you to make this Cardinal of yours the greatest centre of magical learning on Calernia,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch said. “And to crown it the thief of our worst follies, made to serve higher purpose.”

Chapter 58: Prolong

“All are free, or none. Ye of this land, suffer no compromise in this.”
– Inscription on the founding stele of Bellerophon

My heart skipped a beat. Certainly, it was no deep secret that I had bound Akua Sahelian to the collar of the Mantle of Woe and there would be some who suspected the true nature of the ‘Advisor Kivule’. Still, none I’d not brought into the secret had ever spoken of it until now save for Kairos Theodosian. And the Tyrant could have bargained for that knowledge with the Dead King, who knew all of my deeds that Masego had known of, or even through the use of whatever aspect allowed him to be so sharply perceptive of the wants of others. Black, though? If he knew now it was either because officers of the Legions-in-Exile both knew and had passed it along since he woke, or because it’d been known to him before he was captured. Or maybe, I reluctantly thought, he’d just known me well enough from the start to tell where that story was headed.

“Flowery language, that was,” I carefully said. “Perhaps a little lacking in precision.”

His face had grown no easier to read, for all the purported insouciance he’d been carrying himself with since he woke.

“Use them,” Black said. “Our madmen, our warlocks and sorcerers. Give them laws, give them coin and great undertakings to embrace. Else they find all these on their own.”

I calmed, the slightest bit. It was still no small thing, he was speaking of – Cardinal as neutral grounds for the Accords as well as the seat of the legion that’d enforce them by steel if need be would already be costly, but to make it a centre of sorcery as well? I was no great scholar of sorcery, but I’d had a close looks at the deep pockets required for the sort of research that Masego and his father had considered to be leading-edge. The costs to both found and fund a mage’s school would be daunting, to say the last. He wasn’t wrong about the virtues of keeping Praesi mages occupied, though, especially those who would have before then spent much of their years learning the intricacies of diabolism. The notion of even a hundred furious highborn Wasteland warlocks out in the world with little left to lose was the sort of thing disasters were made of. And quite possible Named, though I’d always known that dropping this large a stone in the pond would cause ripples. I’d counted on it, in truth. If instead of ruinous wars between Good and Evil I could instead make the crux of the conflict strife between Named that heeded their laws and did not? Then it became a war of Names, not nations, and Calernia avoided another coming of Akua’s Folly.

“Did you perhaps believe I meant the shade of Akua Sahelian?” the green-eyed man casually asked, smile sudden and sharp.

His sense of humour, it seemed, had not been gentled by the loss of his Name. I supposed that’d been a little too much to hope for.

“Oh, it would please some of High Lords to have her placed in position of importance,” he conceded. “Yet when it comes to the Doom of Liesse, my advice will always remain the same: no matter how clever you believe your scheme to be, it isn’t. Kill her now, in full and beyond anyone’s mending.”

“I have a purpose for her,” I said.

“And she for you, Catherine,” he chided. “It would hardly do to forget that. If a single victory was all it took to bind the highborn to one’s cause, the Tower would not change rulers the way other lands change seasons.”

“I know that,” I said, a tad sharply. “There’s a lot you don’t know, Black. Couldn’t know, because after I told you to get your shit together you instead decided to take a walk through the heartlands of Procer with a torch in hand.”

“A calculated measure meant to ensure the Principate could not continue waging war as it had,” he said. “The morality of it I’ve no intention of debating, though I’ll say that if the First Prince of Procer intends to use massed levies to fight wars then she marked her peasantry as a war asset by her own hand.”

“You condemned hundreds of thousands to a slow death by starvation,” I flatly said. “Not innocents, perhaps, not all of them. But certainly non-combatants. There are manners in which waging war is acceptable, Black, and you used to know them. You didn’t allow sacks during the Conquest, or any of the other myriad atrocities that followed the old Legions like a loyal dog.”

“I set boundaries appropriate to the manner of outcome I desired,” Black calmly replied. “As I did in the Principate. There can be no peace settlement with a crusade, Catherine. They end when one side is no longer capable of prosecuting the war. I took the most swift and plausible path to that ending.”

“You also failed,” I told him. “Failed hard enough my Marshal had to commit Callow’s armies to bailing out your own and I had to tangle with two of the most potent heroes alive to take back your soul after they’d fucking cut it out .”

I would have thought less of him, after, if he’d made the argument that the legions under Grem had bled not long before to defend the Red Flower Vales and so relief had been owed. It was true, and the debt that lay there was one of the reasons I’d not entire lost my temper at Juniper’s adventurous western campaign. But it would have been, implicitly, an admission he’d expected someone to step in and save him. Coming from the man who’d taught me to pray at the altar of taking responsibility for one’s actions, be they righteous or wicked, that would have been... disappointing.

“Indeed,” he frankly admitted. “I significantly miscalculated in both assessing the danger posed by the Grey Pilgrim and the lay of the strategies decided by Calernia’s great powers. Marching the legions north towards the Stairway would have been the correct decision, in retrospective. Klaus Papenheim would have followed us and so arrived to bolster the defence of Hainaut in time to avoid losing the shores. The losses would still have been bloody for both him and Malanza’s hosts, still leaving the First Prince in a vulnerable position but without having committed either my legions or your Army of Callow to the field.”

The assessment was spoken clearly and concisely, like some chirurgeon slicing open the cadaver of a mistake one word at a time. At least he wasn’t shying away from admitting he could blunder. And my own hands were not clean as driven snow here. Malicia might not have told him of her attempted dealings with Keter, but neither had I, so he’d made his decisions blind. And though the famine he’d wrought on the Principate was both a lasting shame and a lasting complication, it would have been dishonest to pretend I’d not also benefited from it. And from someone else doing it, too, so that my hands would not be stained by the deed.

“Procer wouldn’t be so willing to bargain with me now if you hadn’t first broken their wealthiest and most fertile territories,” I admitted. “And I’ve reason to believe that the Grey Pilgrim went after you in particular to secure a hold on me.”

He cocked his head to the side, sharp-boned face gone pensive.

“Not a hostage,” he decided. “That would have carried... considerable risks. Forcing a confrontation on his own terms, then.”

I looked at him then, the mind at work behind the pale green eyes, and still saw the bones of the man who’d become the Carrion Lord. He’d lost a mould of power, when he’d lost his Name, but the substance of what made Amadeus of the Green Stretch dangerous remained. A fresh mould might yet be found, I thought, and if it was what came of it would not be gentle. His eyes finally flicked to staff in my hand.

“Pattern of three,” he deduced.

I dipped my head, an acknowledgement that at least I suspected as much.

“Congratulations are in order, then,” Black said, to my surprise. “You have been marked the equal of one whose influence spans more than half of Calernia.”

His lips twitched, but I’d learned to tell the difference between mockery and amusement with those and this was of the latter.

“I have higher ambitions still,” I admitted.

“Indeed,” he said. “You are aware that there are some who will say the council you propose will be the true ruler of Calernia from the shadows. Especially if your proposed enforced succeed at attracting Named as well as funding a standing army.”

“It’s not going to be a campaign army like Juniper and Grem command,” I felt compelled to say. “It’ll be meant for battles and hitting cornered Names who gathered people to their banner. For large-scale warfare we’d call on the signatories.”

“That will always be one of the weaknesses of your Accords,” Black warned. “You saw firsthand the shortcomings of a ruling council in Laure: voting blocks forming and personal interests coming to command the debates is inevitable. Forming a diplomatic council including an elected hero and villain to settle disputes will only aid so much, if every signatory’s designated representative fights for their country’s interests alone. Outside enmities and alliances will interfere with the diplomatic mechanisms functioning as intended.”

“That’s one of the reasons in need Praes to sign on and claim a seat,” I admitted. “I’m not sure the League will sign on – certainly not as long as the Hierarch lives, however long that’ll last – so without the Empire the signatories are essentially the Grand Alliance, Callow and the drow. It’ll be too imbalanced.”

“It is unlikely the Golden Bloom will deign to participate in such a treaty,” he agreed. “Or the Titanomachy, for that matter.”

Which meant Levant and Ashur, historically close allies since the Dominion’s founding, and Procer with all its wealth and influence radiating outwards. Callow and the Empire Ever Dark, as nations on the outskirts who must deal with Procer to have any significant trade presence, would inevitably end up on the outskirts of the Accords’ council as well. If the Empire was a signatory, the game changed. Ashur would have commercial interests on the Praesi coast, and the Wasteland would be closely aligned with Callow’s own interests as it would be its effective granary and strongest trade partner. If the west pulled together so would the east, and that’d prevent any bloc from commanding a strong majority in council. Which, considering that I’d set in law that such a council could call on signatories for war against a nation in breach of the Accords, was essential if I wanted them to actually function as intended. If the council in Cardinal became a way for an alliance of nations to force its influence at the expense of others, the Liesse Accords would inevitably collapse.

“A roving band of Named enforcing your laws backed by an army will earn resistance in and of itself,” Back said. “Yet combined with your insistence that Named cannot rule or own property of more than a specific total worth – which should be higher in general, by my reckoning, but significantly stricter on landholding in particular – it may very well be taken as the villain Catherine Foundling attempting to claim rulership of Calernia from behind a veil of shared laws.”

“I won’t have any particular authority under the Accords,” I pointed out. “In Cardinal itself yes, but-“

“But the Woe makes up a significant portion of living villains, you are a ruling queen with great resources at your disposal and undeniably the most famous Named of your generation,” he calmly interrupted. “It is near a certainty you will have a seat on that council as the representative for Below. That will be enough for rumours.”

“Fine,” I said. “But on the other side of the table, odds are it’ll be the Peregrine speaking for Above. The man commands a lot of trust in the west, Black.”

A moment passed.

“It has a story’s shape,” he conceded, which was praise and condemnation both. “That does not, however, change the truth that you would be risking war every time you tried to depose a popular ruler having come into a Name.”

“It’s necessary to avoid the worst Named can deal out,” I insisted. “Sure, a Good King will usually improve things more than not. And a powerful Dread Empress binds Praes together for at least part of her reign, allowing for growth. But if they share a border, what would be skirmishing between mundane rulers becomes much more prone to escalation – and capable of escalating to vicious heights no one else could reach.”

“A Good King being told to abdicate by a council mostly made up of foreigners will withdraw from the Accords and bitterly fight against any attempt to have its terms enforced upon him,” Black said. “The Dominion sees its Named as figures of religious reverence, at least those from the great lines. Even if the Pilgrim backs you, you’d be using to obtain compliance the very trait you seek to eradicate. A tower of shallow foundations, that. In Procer you might find agreement, for Named do not rule there, but where else?”

“Named are under influence,” I said. “Below or Above’s, it doesn’t matter, the judgement will always be impaired. Sometimes that impairment leads to upright deeds but even then it still remains a thinning of their ability to make clear-headed choices.”

“Will you also place law in the Accords forbidding the crowning of a drunk or an idiot?” Amadeus asked. “These, too, are impairments.”

“You know that’s not the same thing,” I said.

“I know you are attempting to dictate who can and cannot rule nations that are barely your allies if at all, nations you have not conquered or truly defeated, nation on which you are attempting to impose your personal belief in the face of centuries of culture speaking to other directions. And, most of all, this is directed at nations whose goodwill you need very badly for the Liesse Accord to exist as more than ink and fantasy,” he said, tone never rising nor ebbing low. “You are overstepping.”

My fingers clenched.

“You know we’d all be better off if we agreed on excluding Named from rule,” I said. “Gods, even just Praes getting rid of some of its-”

“Until the Dread Empire itself desires the mending of that wound, no amount of treaties will change a thing,” Black said, tone bland. “That was made plain to me, in knowing and truth. It is not enough to be correct in principle , Catherine. If you cannot offer a practical way to deliver on your beliefs, then they are wind. No one will agree on the Cardinal council having right to call signatories to war to depose a Named ruler, not even your own people once you’ve passed on the crown. It is best you make your peace with that early and prepare yourself to fight more salient battles.”

He didn’t suggest taking the articles out though, I noted. Ah, of course he wouldn’t. Since in his eyes it’d never been something worth seriously attempting, scrapping it became an easy concession in a true negotiation. I wasn’t convinced, honestly, that he was right. But I could at least consider him as a herald of the opposition I would face in days to come, and that meant at the very least some parts of this would have to be reconsidered. There was no point in making a toothless law, but one with too much bite might be even worse considering most of the signatories would have been recently at war with each other to one extent or another.

“Such as?” I asked.

“Your academy,” he said. “True, without it the Accords die with you. If your rules of engagement are not carved into a pattern all must heed, they will fade the moment the strength behind them does. Yet you must address the inherent difficulties in gathering Named and forcing lessons and laws upon them.”

“I’m not making a War College, Black,” I said. “It won’t be classes and lectures for both a fourteen-year-old Squire and a grizzled Unconquered Champion in their late thirties, that’s doomed to failure. The main purpose of the that academy is to teach the Articles of Strife – acceptable levels of violence against other Named and Nameless – and set out rules of behaviour. I expect most will attend for a few months only and wander back out into the world. But they’ll be wandering with the knowledge that seeding an undead plague in some village’s well brings Named killers down on their head, that calling an angel down on a city will get your throat slit and that city quarantined. I can’t control a continent’s worth of Named, it’d be absurd to even try. But if I can teach them rules of engagement and get them to agree that those rules should be enforced? Then the Accords have already done half of what they were meant to.”

“Short-sighted,” Black said. “Do you not realize the amount of influence Cardinal – and by extension your academy – will inevitably accrue? The Good King. The Dread Empress. The Tyrant of Helike. The Grey Pilgrim. What do all these have in commons?”

“They are or can all be the head of their nation,” I frowned.

Oh , I thought.

“The crowns of most of Calernia will spend at least half a year studying abroad in Cardinal,” I said. “Shit.”

He’d didn’t need to expand on the point any further, my mind was already spinning. If I wanted the spending of months in a foreign city to be seen as more than an imposition on a sovereign or sovereign-to-be, Cardinal needed to provide more than just an education in the intricacies of the Accords. That much could be provided by tutors when it came down to it, and that meant no one had motivation to fund Cardinal’s existence – which meant the weakening of a heart to them, and that was a death knoll in the making.

“Sorcerers,” I said. “We’ll need every damned one we can get, and any grimoire we can get our hands on. Teachers and books as well, of every subject and stripe. League histories, Ashuran atlases, Proceran poems. It can’t just be for Named, can it? It has to be the school, so that when some angry kid with a sword and growing powers is offered a chance to study there it’s an opportunity and not a chore. They have to want to come.”

“Oh, you’ll get more than Named and Named-incipient if you succeed at that,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch smiled, thin and bladelike. “Gather such fine teachers, such deep knowledge, and you’ll find even nobles sending their children there. Do you think any tutor in the Dominion could match the education you have spoken of? In Callow, in any city of the League? Highborn and diplomats and the ambitious seeking to become intimates of Named still in their rise: all these will knock at your door, demanding a place.”

“That’s...” I hesitated. “It’ll cost a fortune. And you don’t even know where the city is to be raised.”

“I am not a fool,” my father said, sounding amused, “so I do. You are still, deep in your bones, Callowan. You’ll have it carved out of the Red Flower Vales, putting neutral grounds between yourself and Procer while also opening the gate to enriching trade.”

I wondered how many more people had seen through that. It wasn’t like it’d be a mistake to do that – as Queen of Callow I could cede enough fields to support the city from my side, and given the way Procer would be gaining much from the Accord while losing less than anyone else getting an equivalent land grant on the other side of the Whitecaps shouldn’t be impossible. It was at the centre of Calernia, too the crossroads of the west and the east. Still, it would have been a lie to say I’d not intended the location of it to be boon for Callow.

“You’ll be making the capital of a new age,” Black said. “And so you must reassess your negotiating stance accordingly, or see yourself outplayed. It will not be your backyard alone, Catherine. You are founding the royal court of Calernia itself.”

And his lips were quirking as he spoke, like the world demanded that they turn into a smile regardless of his wants.

“I need you to see it through,” I admitted. “I need you at that table, speaking for Praes and signing the Accords. Gods, I need you just to have someone I can speak to about these things.”

Someone who, unlike Hakram and Vivienne, had desires sometimes estranged from my own. Who’d look at my schemes and see weaknesses I had not.

“Help me,” I asked. “Help me to break the Game of the Gods.”

He looked away, at the hung parchments that laid out my fool’s dream in ink and law.

“A better world, is it?” he pensively said.

Pale green eyes narrowed, something cold at the heart of them. Like great cogs of steel, made to half yet stuttering back into movement.

“It can be done,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch said. “And if nothing else, it ought to be an interesting way to spend my twilight years.”

Chapter 59: Review

“To repudiate what lies at the heart of Praes – ambition, skill, learning – would be a mistake, yet to allow those traits to be principle rather than tool has been the mother of a great many dooms. The greatness of olden days must be put to modern purpose or see itself turn irrelevant to the lay of Creation.”
– Extract from ‘The Death of the Age of Wonders’, a treatise by Dread Empress Malicia

Afternoon soon drifted into evening, and it seemed for a moment as if I’d found the Laure beat of affairs once more: too many things to do and so little time to do them. The herbal brew Hakram had made me took the edge off the pain just enough that if I remained still while seated it didn’t throb too badly, so I took full advantage of the relief when seeing to the many duties that’d piled up while I slumbered. Still, I did not regret having a physical need to sleep once more even if it ate away at the hours I could work. It was a pleasurable sensation, sleeping, but also one I’d found grounding in some ways. It was easier to make mistakes when your thoughts ran uninterrupted for days and nights, like a hound chasing its own tail. Sleep was a wedge in between it, a way for thoughts to cool and distance to come down. I’d need another night’s sleep, I decided, before speaking of the Accords with my father again. I’d not made nearly as good an argument for the banning of ruling Named as I could have now that I’d had time to better gather my thoughts – no one touched by a Choir, for example, should be allowed anywhere near a throne – but I would not resume the back and forth without rest and preparation. Besides, we’d both have demands on out time for days to come.

Marshal Grem and the Legions-in-Exile had been parted from him for months, simply getting the bare bones reports about months of campaign in order would take at least a day. And he’d have more waiting, especially now that scrying worked properly again. No, Black would have busy days ahead and myself even more so. By the time I’d come down from the barrow-top there was a mixed honour guard of legionaries and Firstborn, dzulu from the Brezlej and Soln sigils, waiting for me along with Adjutant. A full line of veterans from the First Legion, Marshal Grem’s personal command, was waiting for Black slightly to their side. I offered them a respectful nod and got the same in return. Legio I Invicta had fought like lions in the Red Flower Vales, I’d been told, facing down a charge of Lycaone heavy horse the White Knight himself had led. I would not forget anytime soon that the Legions-in-Exile were the same who’d fought in the defence of Callow. For those that’d remained holed up in Praes while the wolves howled at my gates I had no great fondness, but these? They’d bled for my home, even though once upon a time they had also conquered it.

I claimed a comfortable seat in the First Army’s war council tent, hiding under the broad table how carefully I had to manage my leg, and as Hakram stood by my side I sunk my teeth in the day’s first work. Casualty reports began it all on a high note. The Army of Callow and its sister-legions from Praes had taken negligible losses in last night’s battle, and though Ivah came bearing the drow losses in Rumena’s name it revealed the losses there had been relatively light as well. Less than two thousand dead, and though the Levantines had found a surprising amount of success while killing Mighty – my Lord of Silent Steps mentioned that the warriors of Tartessos in particular had made an impression – most those killed had not been sigil-holders or even rylleh but lesser Mighty. The Dominion has pulled out some sort of enchanted or blessed lantern that’d interfered with the Night, and the least of the Mighty had been struck hardest by it. Both the League and the Alliance would have gotten significantly worse off from last night, which was a damned wasted of soldiery on the eve of war to the north but also a boon to my own diplomatic position. The situation of our supplies was a great deal less promising, unfortunately.

The Hellhound had arranged baggage and foodstuffs for a long campaign, as she’d originally believed it might be necessary for the army to seize the principality of Arans to hold it against the Dead King’s advance, and the Southern Expedition of the Empire Ever Dark had been dragging around the supplies I’d bargained for with the dwarves throughout its Iserran fighting. We were not, by any measure, in danger of running out of food or necessities soon. But the Army of Callow had been campaigning for months now, and probably would have suffered from a steady trickle of desertions were it not the middle of winter in hostile foreign lands. Professional soldiers or not, my legionaries needed rest and recovery before going into another fight. That would be difficult to arrange in Procer, I suspected, and while the details of the use of the Twilight Ways remained unknown to me I doubted they’d be much more efficient at moving troops than the Arcadian paths. That meant bringing my soldiers back to Callow would take them out of the war for at least the better part of a year. I couldn’t do that. Victory or defeat against Keter might very well be decided by then.

The issues with the Firstborn were more complicated in nature, and I ignored the irritated look on Juniper’s face – and the fascinated one on Hakram’s – while Ivah expanded on them in Crepuscular. One sigil-holder, the Mighty Zoitsa, and two rylleh from other sigils had been slain in the fighting. The former Zoitsa Sigil would have begun tearing itself apart over succession had General Rumena not personally intervened and broken all the limbs of the two most prominent rylleh aiming to claim the sigil. The other two casualties had prompted power struggles as well, as the complicated weave of alignments and enmities that made up the upper levels of a stable sigil was upset by the removal of two high-placed killers. Those had, for now, been kept under control by the own sigil-holders. But my decree that drow could not have killing duels while we were on campaign was being tested sorely by the situation, and the strain was showing. Rumena had politely suggested that I come adjudicate the matters myself, which was enough to tell me it was serious. It was almost never polite to me if it could help it, and its command of the southern expedition gave it the right to settle such disputes without my involvement in principle. If my presence was being sought, then it meant neither the respect nor the fear General Rumena commanded had been enough to settle the situation.

“I’ll come after dusk,” I said. “Unless the general believes the situation is so dire as to require my immediate intervention?”

Ivah bowed low.

“It is not so, Losara Queen,” it said. “The general has remarked that containment will be more... arduous after the coming of Night, but under pale light all will be brought to order.”

In other words, Rumena was willing to run roughshod over the squabblers while the sun was out but would have to get pretty hard-handed to keep it all under control after Mighty started slinging Night around. Fair enough. For all that it had been appointed general and commander of the southern expedition by divine mandate, Rumena remained very much a first among equal: there were limits to the orders it could give without having to spill blood to see them enforced. Ivah left, and I marked the whole situation as a cauldron I’d need to see settled before it tipped over and burned everybody else. And Hells, this was just a single sigil-holder and a pair of rylleh. How bad would it get when we started taking real losses? Another method needed to be put into place, one that didn’t end up with Mighty turning on each other violently whenever one of them died.

“What did the drow want?” Juniper asked.

“They’re having some internal disputes,” I grunted. “It’ll be taken care of.”

The orc eyed me carefully, then accurately guessed that if I believed she needed to know more about that then she would. The conversation moved on to the debate on whether or not the old Legion tradition of ale rations being broken out after a victory should be indulged with so many other armies camped around us. I argued in favour, for not even the League would be foolish enough to think an evening of drinking would be enough to save it if it resumed hostilities now, but Juniper dug in her heels at it being an unnecessary risk regardless of the improvement to morale. A compromise over shifts that’d allow at least half the army to be on war footing at any time was being put together when Vivienne joined us, a little over an hour before sundown. Wearing a practical cloak and dress over boots and trousers, the heiress-designate to the throne of Callow strode in looking pink-cheeked and well-rested. We dismissed the general staff, after that, and she settled at the high table by Hakram’s side when he finally took a seat instead of standing by my side like some grim green gargoyle.

“Indrani?” I asked.

“Wandered off after we ate,” Vivienne replied. “You know how restless she gets after a long sleep.”

From closer up than the former thief suspected, yes, though usually having slept together beforehand made her slightly more mellow about it. Knowing Indrani she’d be having a look at the League positions or feeling out the half-there paths into the Twilight Ways. In the overwhelming majority of situations she was more likely to be the danger encountered than the one encountering danger, so I wasn’t all that worried about her safety. She’d drift back in to check on Masego before too long anyway.

“She’ll turn up,” Juniper gravelled, unmoved. “Damn hard woman, the Archer.”

Coming from the Hellhound, that was high praise. I fished out my dragonbone pipe and stuffed it, calling on the slightest touch of Night as I passed my palm above the bowl. I breathed in lightly before looking up, finding the other three gazing at me expectantly. A heartbeat passed.

“I’ve only got the one pipe on me,” I said. “And I’m not sharing, folks.”

Irritation for Juniper, resignation for Vivienne and some sort of rueful amusement for Hakram.

“Yours talks with Lord Black,” Marshal Juniper said. “How did they go?”

My brow rose and I glanced at Hakram.

“Everyone knows,” Adjutant admitted. “Even putting the matter under seal would have changed nothing. Word began to spread before you were even all the way up the barrow.”

Merciless Gods. No one who made jests about gossiping fishwives had ever served a term in an army.

“The Exile Legions haven’t withdrawn or begun to muster, so it can’t have gone too badly,” Vivienne noted.

The Jacks were still hard at work, it was heartening to see.

“I have his backing for the Liesse Accords,” I said. “He’s not committing to a stance on the Tower until he knows more of what’s happening in the Wasteland.”

I caught a look between Juniper and Vivienne, which had me suppressing a spike of irritation. From these two in particular, the impression that things were being hidden from me would remain ill-received for some time.

“The Observatory works again, though essentially crippled in capacity,” Vivienne volunteered. “Fadila Mbafeno repaired what she could, though she maintains that without Hierophant’s personally attention it is a fantasy to attain full functions.”

“But our scrying web is back,” I flatly said. “What have you learned?”

“General Sacker moved east on the Blessed Isle,” Juniper said. “Our man in Summerholm – Legate Asadel – requested that she evict the Praesi refugees before taking up positions on the shore.”

Which, considering that we were feeding General Sacker’s legion out of Callowan granaries, was a request that’d carry a great deal of weight.

“Legate Asadel,” I slowly repeated.

“Fifteenth,” Juniper said. “Taghreb, originally one of General Hune’s at the War College. He’s loyal, Catherine. No reason to doubt that.”

There was always a reason to doubt that, I thought, though if you did not learn where to draw the line such worries could only drive you mad.

“I take it the refugees declined to follow the orders,” I said.

“They also called on Governess Abreha’s protection, which was granted,” the orc continued. “Household troops were sent to discourage Sacker, but she picked out their positions and broken them in night raids. Then she set the refugee camps on fire and ordered shot any who fled west instead of east.”

I let out a hissing breath.

“Shit,” I said. “Tell me the announcement was enough, Juniper. Tell me one of our own fucking legates didn’t have a role in the slaughter of terrified civilians.”

“One caravan was butchered,” the Marshal of Callow said. “Two hundred dead, we think. Children were spared. It was enough to get everyone else running.”

I closed my eyes. Breathed in, breathed out. Why was it that the moment I took my eyes off anywhere it all went to shit? No, I thought, that wasn’t fair. If Legate Asadel was a contemporary of Hune’s and so the rest of is back at the College, then he was no older than twenty-five. His rank was high, for one his age, and while part of that might have been talent it was also undeniably because we were running out of College-taught officers and most the veterans of the old legions we had left had loyalties too complex to be entrusted dangerous postings. I could not put men and women still green around the edges and then become furious when they made mistakes.

“Recall Legate Asadel,” I said, opening my eyes. “Move him to a garrison where he can’t do any damage and replace him with someone more seasoned.”

“No one in Praes will raise a ruckus of the civilians, Catherine,” Juniper said. “By going into Callow they were abandoning Tower law.”

I saw Vivienne wince from the corner of my eye.

“Aye,” I said. “That’s true. And also the finest argument I’ve heard for Black’s old dream of putting every highborn in the Wasteland to the sword. Recall Asadel, Juniper. That’s an order.”

She nodded.

“That won’t be all,” I said. “Get on with it.”

“Governess Abreha deemed the attack on her household troops to be treason, given her Tower-granted rank,” Juniper said. “General Sacker replied that she was following orders from the Black Knight, supreme commander of the Legions of Terror, and so therefore it was Abreha’s own interference with her operations that was treason. She lodged an official protest with the Tower.”

“The Empress won’t knife High Lady Abreha in the back so soon,” Hakram said. “Not to Sacker, of all people, who has ties to the Matrons and remains a close associate of the Carrion Lord. Malicia might need Abreha either dead or disgraced, but if she throws her under the wheels now then she might as well abdicate to the Black Knight.”

If a general’s mere claim to be working at Black’s behest when he was on the other side of the continent was enough to make the Dread Empress back down, then Adjutant was absolutely correct: she’d have effectively stated herself to be less influential than one of her own right hand’s servants, and so by Wasteland standards she’d be meat on the plate. On the other hand, could she really afford to throw to the side the Legions-in-Exile? Given that she’d lost Foramen to the Confederation of the Grey Eyries and her coastlands were a bloody wound, I’d argue not.

“The Empress is considering the petition,” Juniper said. “But has yet to act on it. General Sacker seized the western shore of the Wasiliti and dug in. It’s been a standoff with Governess Abreha ever since.”

I grimaced.

“We need to find out who General Sacker answers to,” I said. “It best be Black, because if it’s the Matrons we have trouble on our hands.”

The fledgling goblin nation south of the Hungering Sands could only benefit from enmity between Praes and Callow deepening, since history had made it clear that the Tribes could only fail if they attempted to stand against the Dread Empire on their own. An embittered Callow, on the other hand, would have a vested interested in keeping the Confederation standing as a thorn in the Wasteland’s side. And considering my kingdom had largely adopted the war doctrines introduced by the Reforms, we’d keep needing goblin steel and munitions only they could produce. They’d have good we wanted, and we’d share a common enemy – alliances had been built on less. Unfortunately for the Matrons, they were planning their schemes blind. They had no real idea of what went on this far west, and they would not be aware of anything related to the Accords. They were fighting last century’s war, not this one, playing a game of Good Queens and Dread Empresses when that was the very manner of existence I want to strike a match over. If they were brought into the talks, I suspected they’d sign. If nothing else, the clause establishing that a signatory nation attacked by a non-signatory one could call on the aid of all other signatories would get them interested. Either as a deterrent for a non-signatory Praes, or because Praes had signed and they could not afford to be on the other side of that rule.

Yet they were blind, at the moment, at a lot of damage could be done by an assembly of vicious old goblins matrons pursuing what they saw as their own interests.

“Vivienne,” I finally said. “Anything to add?”

She bit her lip.

“There are rumours,” she said, “that Malicia is calling near every highborn in Praes to the Tower.”

My brow rose.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t believe anyone knows aside from her,” Vivienne admitted. “The usual rumours are there – the edict making it treason to claim the Name of Chancellor is to be ended, she seeks another Black Knight or a spouse – but there’s nothing certain. Whatever she’s planning, though there’s a lot of expectation.”

“Given the recent string of disasters, such a great assembly of highborn would either see her deposed or her reign secured for many years by a great victory,” Hakram opined. “She’s rolling the dice on her reign.”

Malicia doesn’t roll dice , I thought. She only ever plays when she believes she’ll win for sure. Sometimes she was disastrously wrong about that, as she had been at Second Liesse, but no one was without blind spots and I suspected in some ways Black was hers. This, though? This was Wasteland politics and she’d danced around these well-dressed killers without missing a step for decades. If she was acting now it was because she had something in the works that’d secure her hold on Praes. She would not expose herself to the wolves of the Imperial Court for anything less, in my eyes. I breathed out.

“Send an official messenger to the Carrion Lord, then,” I drily said. “Requesting a sharing of intelligence concerning Praes tomorrow. Odds are he’ll know more than us.”

Vivienne nodded, I noted, instead of Juniper. Interesting, that the Hellhound would recognize her as the higher authority in diplomatic matters even when those matters involved Black and the Legions. It was the implicit mark of a respect I’d been well aware did not exist when I left for the Everdark.

“We need to determine where the army’s headed,” Juniper bluntly said. “We’re wearing thing, Catherine. Your return and a win did wonders for morale, but it’s been a long winter and we fought through most of it. Even if it’s up north we’re headed, I want winter quarters raised and a rotation of leave for soldiers. The edge will grow ragged otherwise.”

“I can’t give you an answer to that before the diplomacy’s been worked through, Juniper,” I replied just as bluntly. “And for that I need to sit with the Pilgrim, and likely Arnaud Brogloise – if not the First Prince herself through scrying link.”

Whatever the Hellhound would have answered to that I was not fated to know, for before she could speak the Advisor Kivule was introduced. My eyes moved in surprise to Akua’s veiled silhouette even as she entered the tent and bowed.

“The Hierophant is awake, Your Majesty,” the shade said.

I rose to my feet, ignoring the throb of pain from my leg.

“Meeting adjourned,” I said, and they all knew better than to gainsay me on that.

Chapter 60: Melancholy

“And after Okoro was taken its King Berengar Rohanon was dragged before the people in the place of Faded Jackals, where his hands were cut for having reached beyond his grasp and his head scalped for having dared to claim kingship over Praesi. His Dread Majesty ordered him driven into the Wasteland, bearing his hands around his neck and his scalp scribed with for all crusaders this warning: ‘There is only one crown east of the river Wasaliti, and once more will you be taught to dread it.’”
– Extract from ‘Commentaries on the Campaigns of Dread Emperor Terribilis the Second’

The Sisters were in the tent. Their presence was like a whisper on the edge of my mind, and though they’d not hidden their presence by Masego’s bedside neither had they drawn my attention to it. It had my fingers clenching, and my growing ill-temper was noticeable enough my legionary escort gave me a wider berth as I quickened my limping. I’d had a reputation for having a foul temper even before my anger began frosting over tables, and trading Winter for Night had not put away that repute. Sve Noc knew what lines they could and could not cross without our bargain fraying, and they would not be so foolish as to try to force the Night onto an unwilling Hierophant. But they were not above making that offer when he was freshly awake and grieving, still in shock from the loss of his magic.

Crows were carrion birds, and just like carrion the Sisters were preying on the vulnerable to attempt patronage of another powerful figure – for Masego was that still, even bedridden and stripped of sorcery. My anger was less from the crafty offer I suspected was being made and more from the way that I had no solid grounds for wroth or recourse if I wanted to denounce what they were doing. It was a sharp reminder that the Sisters were my patrons and allies, not my followers, and they had schemes of their own. And Masego, though one of the Woe, was not my sworn man or a subject of the crown of Callow: any claim I could make over his loyalties was one he’d given out by his own hand, and by the same could withdraw.

The crows were never far from my thoughts and often pointed address within those was enough to earn their attention, but they did not deign answer my insistence this time. The same tent where I’d slept was shaded in subtle ways when I found it, the shadows it cast and kept within its folds too deep and cool even with the falling dusk. There was power at work, the attention of sister-goddesses manifest. I dismissed my escort abruptly and strode past the folds, catching sight of Sve Noc perched atop the armchair I’d slumbered in while a half-naked and sitting Masego looked at them from his sickbed. Feathered in darkness and ink-eyed, the crows seemed almost too large for the chair and even the tent – not that it seemed to cow my friend.

The dark-skinned sorcerer, eye cloth fastened loosely over his glittering glass eyes, was still painfully thin from his time in the Dead King’s thrall but his face was calm and his hands steady. His long braids were still matted from their lack of washing, the silver trinkets woven in them shining dully in the lamplight, but even abed looking at him was like looking at an open flame. The burn was feverish, perhaps, but grief and tragedy had not seen its intensity wane. All this I took within a heartbeat, as I arrived to what must have been the tail-end of the offer tendered.

“Faith kept will be kept in kind,” Andronike said. “And in the end, all will be Night.”

Masego’s eyes pivoted under the cloth to glance at me, and the Sisters needed no sight to know of my presence, so when I cleared my throat there was no hint of surprise on any’s face.

“Faith can wait until another evening,” I said. “There will be-”

“That won’t be necessary, Catherine,” Hierophant quietly interrupted.

Wings spread and with a few lazy beats Komena was on my shoulder, as displeased by my meddling as I was by hers. Andronike, though, perched herself on the side of Masego’s bed. Peering at him curiously with dark eyes more god than bird no matter the shape of them.

“You have been hollowed,” Andronike cawed. “Miracle can yet mend this.”

The urge came, quicksilver and fleeting, to intervene once more. If the Sisters alone had requested the stilling of my tongue I would not have held it, but Masego had as well and so let the urge pass.

“There is only one side of apotheosis of interest to me,” Hierophant said, “and it is not the one that involves kneeling.”

“You are yet young,” Komena said from my shoulder. “We can wait, though the bargain will not twice be so sweet.”

“It will eat away at you,” Andronike told him. “From the inside, it will-”

Sudden as it was, it caught me by surprise like few things in my life before it: Masego’s nimble fingers, mage-deft and long, snapped up and seized the crow addressing him by the throat. They squeezed , and as Komena cawed in protest and beat her wings against my shoulder the Warlock’s son let out a scornful hiss.

“Do not ever attempt to peer into my mind, covetous vermin,” the Hierophant harshly rebuked.

Night flooded the room as the behest of livid lesser gods, thick and oppressive current like veils of shadow, but his Name burned like a clear and unyielding flame.

“I knew Winter well, before you fed on it,” Masego said, eyes burning with Summer flame, “shall I rip it out through the stitches of your belly? Ruin will run down the course of you into the heart of your entire people, little spiders. Did you believe you could make yourself the life of your kind without also being its death?”

He barked out a laugh.

“Lucky you, that it was Akua Sahelian and not I who accompanied her below,” he said. “Else I would have cut out your ravenous eyes long ago and made a banner of your butchered remains.”

“Masego,” I said. “Enough.”

Summer-bright eyes flicked to me, then returned to Komena on my shoulder. My fingers clenched.

“Masego,” I repeated sharply. “ Enough .”

Scoffing, he released his grip on Andronike. She flew away in wroth, and I saw that the flesh of Hierophant’s hand looked as if it’d been frostbitten where it’d been touching the divine crow.

“And that’s why,” I calmly said, “you speak to me before trying to bargain with one of the Woe.”

“Offence was given,” Komena cried out, the sound cacophonous and somehow blinding.

“Your tried to look into the head of a man whose Name is practically made of the death of gods, you fucking fools,” I barked. “What did you think was going to happen?”

Before they could answer I pressed on.

“You didn’t think,” I said. “You got greedy, you got hasty, and then you got spanked. Take it as a reminder that there are things up here on the surface that are nastier than you. And be thankful all it cost you was a few moments of indignity.”

The fury pouring out of them and into the Night was like the burn of sudden ice, but I refused to be bowled over by it. They’d made a mistake, believing that dangling power in front of a grieving man was all it’d take to induce another Named to bargain. They’d taken him for one of the Firstborn and for that blindness very nearly ended up losing more than a few feathers.

“I carried your banner from victory to victory,” I said, “because I’ve been careful. Because I’ve been patient and cautious and I’ve picked my battles. If you begin to sidle up to every Named on a ragged edge and offer power for rites, you’re not goddesses: you’re cut-rate devils. And one of those days, sure as dusk, you’ll end up stepping blind into a story that’ll end you.”

The fury did not wane in the slightest, but I met it unbowed. I felt the slight touch of their thoughts against mine, a feather’s brush looking for the taste of honesty and finding it. Still, few gods were in the habit of apologizing. The Sisters flew out with malcontent cawing, blowing out of the tent and leaving it lighter for their absence. I breathed out in their wake, still feeling where Komena’s talons had dug into my shoulder even if no blood had been drawn and no mark would be left behind. Though Masego’s face and torso were facing me, I caught through the cloth that his eyes had followed the crows out before finally returning to me. The radiance of his Name, not visible but like a taste hanging in the air, finally dimmed into nothingness. It left him panting and visibly tired. Leaning against my staff, I limped up to his bed and swallowed a wince when he tensed up at my approach. Very slowly, I sat on the side near his legs.

“I see you still get cranky when woken up early,” I said.

He didn’t blink, for the lack of eyelid, but the way he angled his head good as implied it.

“I was expecting anger,” Masego admitted. “For this, and... the rest.”

“Stealing a city, cutting up Arcadia and nearly wiping an entire principality off the face of Creation,” I elaborated. “Including most of the people you care about in any significant manner.”

He winced.

“Yes,” he said. “That.”

I sighed.

“I am angry,” I told him. “But for large parts of that you weren’t in your right mind. And now that you are, I expect all those things you were trying to deny – and the scope of what you nearly did – are about to start sinking in. We will, one day, have an unpleasant discussion about this. But it won’t be today, and when we have it you won’t be...”

I hesitated, looking for the right words, but Masego smiled bitterly.

“My fathers will be no less dead in a few days, Catherine,” he said. “Nor will...”

His lips thinned.

“Nor will my sorcery have returned,” he said, as if forcing himself. “The severing should have killed me. Would have, had it not been so improbably precise. I still wonder what stayed his hand, for it would have been child’s play to snuff me out at the end. Much easier than this.”

It was my turn to hesitate, though the moment I did I knew I’d have to speak. His glass eyes missed nothing and Masego had known me long enough he could discern the expressions of my face much more accurately than most people’s.

“I bargained for your life,” I said, “when I had a shard of his soul in my grasp.”

He tiredly leaned back against pillows that’d not been there when I left in the morning. Archer’s work, I thought. Which meant they were probably stolen, but I could ask her about that later.

“Thank you,” Masego solemnly said. “For that. For coming, too.”

“We all came, Zeze,” I quietly said. “And we will again, if we need to. Don’t doubt that.”

There was a long moment of silence, and finally he nodded. His breath rasped out along with words barely more than a murmur.

“He killed Indrani. Using me.”

I reached out a hand towards his own, and after the moment he accepted the implicit offer. We threaded fingers and I nodded.

“The Grey Pilgrim brought her back,” I said.

“As Trismegistus said he would,” Masego quietly replied. “And yet the last thing she will remember before dying is my hand raised and my lips speaking an incantation.”

I let silence pass, sensing there was more he wanted to say.

“That is unkind,” the braided man finally said. “Isn’t it? To her even more than I.”

He looked to me as if asking confirmation, unsure and tone hesitant.

“It would be unkind with any of us,” I told him. “But to her more than the rest of us.”

“I don’t know how to mend that,” Masego whispered. “Catherine, I don’t know how to mend any of it.”

This was, I thought, the first time he’d even obliquely acknowledged that Indrani might have feelings for him. I was not certain whether his careful handling of her came out of a gentle nature – which he had, somehow, not lost in our years of war and hatred – or because he considered himself to have a distinctive relationship with Archer, and it was not my place to ask. But the acknowledgement alone was more than I’d sometimes thought this entire affair would earn of him unless Indrani pressed the matter.

“She won’t blame you, Zeze,” I quietly said. “You have to know that. It might have been your hand but it was not your will, and that’s the part that matters.”

“Is it?” he asked. “Since I was a child, always I’ve been told these sweeping... truths. Eulogies of the perception of my fellows, the triumphant veracity of ties. And near always they proved false, for though my own fathers were as much reason as they were blood that is a rare thing. A memory, a pain, these are things that linger. Principles are beautiful – they are the bones of Creation and what we make of it – but they do not course in veins. They are... distant.”

Archer was a creature of blood and not reason, he did not say. Or needed to. It was true, I wouldn’t deny, that in some ways more than any of us Indrani followed her instincts. How much would principle matter, he was asking, when she still remembered the raised hand and the death that followed?

“You’re looking at it like the depth can only mean it’ll hurt more,” I gently said. “That’s only half the coin, Masego. It also means you want to see the best in them, to get past the roughness, because what you love about them weighs heavier than what hurt you.”

I had, in my attempt to soothe the fear, somehow worsened this I realized. The way his face clenched made that plain. He did not speak immediately, and I did not dare to further talk lest I once more stumble over something blindly.

“It didn’t,” Masego hoarsely said. “I was so angry with them, Cat. They said sorry, about hiding what they knew from me, but they weren’t. Not really. Not the way you showed me, where it stings that you did the wrong thing and its stays with you. They were just sorry I knew they’d hidden things from me, and that doesn’t count. And they tried, you know. After. To say things or give me things or act ways that would make me less angry, makes us good again. But I couldn’t trust it, because I knew they’d just make the same choice again if they had to, so I stayed angry. Even...”

He swallowed.

“Even on the day they died,” he said. “I knew they were planning to bind me. I am not a fool , Catherine. They were going to put me in a cage so I’d be out of the way when the Empress went after you, when Callow was hurt until it knelt. And it rankled, that they would. It surprised me, though, when it rankled they just... didn’t care about the rest. I know you want me to care about the people, Cat, but it’s hard. They’re not very interesting, as a rule. And they’re so ignorant .”

He hesitated.

“But I don’t want them to be hurt, either,” Masego said. “If things can be made better for everyone, shouldn’t they? It just seemed so obvious, but my fathers didn’t care. Or they couldn’t see it, and isn’t that worse? So I was even angrier with them. And I told them to be careful, when I left, but it was almost a lie because after the battle I was going to disappear. And the last thing I said to them was... tainted, Cat. I couldn’t be not angry, even if I loved them.”

“It’s all right to hate something they did,” I told him quietly, thinking of hungry deaths still being reaped. “It doesn’t mean you hated them .”

Gods, but how fragile he looked in that moment. How could this be the same man who’d seized a goddess by the throat not an hour ago, threatened the ruin of an entire people for their patrons having crossed him? Exposed like a raw nerve and heartfelt until he bled, yet even stripped of the sorcery he’d spent his entire life embracing he could still daunt a lesser god. I understood, now, why to someone like Indrani the mixture might be intoxicating. Strength and vulnerability all at once, someone she could respect without feeling threatened. Masego was, in her eyes, a peer without being a rival.

“I thought Papa I could bring back, at least,” the dark-skinned man admitted. “I cannot account for a soul, and Father had already passed beyond my reach. There was naught to be done there. But Papa was a devil. Sufficient precision should have been enough.”

“But it wasn’t,” I said.

I had seen only part of the string of failures that made a wasteland of the Arcadian shard, but they must have gone on for months before that and there’d be no indication that success had been looming.

“No,” Masego said. “Always something was missing. I’d believed it a question of accuracy, and perhaps if Trismegistus had not stolen the use of my aspect the gap could have been bridged. But the more I think of it, of what I had begun to glimpse, the more I doubt it. Papa was unique. He did not have a soul, Catherine, but he was unique.”

Of the incubus that’d been one of Masego’s father, the ancient devil known as Tikoloshe, I knew precious little and so I did not dare venture an opinion. What did I know of these matters, anyway, that I could disagree with my own Hierophant? If he believed his father had been singular, an exception that surpassed the stuff he’d been made of, I would believe him. And though I could not say I had been fond of the incubus I’d never met or Warlock who I had known and scorned, I could at least share in the grief of this man who was family to me.

“Some things stay lost,” I murmured. “You have to learn to make your peace with that.”

I winced, after, realizing it could easily be taken as my speaking of his magic instead of his fathers.

“How carefully you tread,” he gently mocked me. “As if speaking it out loud would break me: I have lost the Gift, in every meaningful way.”

Which, I silently noted, did not mean every way. Given Masego’s lasting obsession with being exact in all things, I did not take that as a coincidence – though it hardly seemed the time to pursue the matter. I thought of Vivienne, in that moment, of the way she’s seemed to terribly convinced that making a mistake or losing her Name meant she was no longer one of us. Like she’d be discarded the moment she faltered or changed. I would not, I decided, let Zeze fall into that same pit.

“Losing your sorcery doesn’t meant you’re not one of us anymore,” I told him. “Being one of the Woe – us loving you – it’s not conditional . It’s not the Hierophant I came for, and it wasn’t the Apprentice that became part of my family. It’s you, and that’s not something you can lose.”

He squeezed my fingers, though looking at his face I realized with a degree of strange amusement that in that moment he was the one trying to comfort me.

“I did not believe that,” he assured me. “I won’t leave you to stand alone like Uncle Amadeus did, so don’t worry about me leaving.”

I mastered myself just in time not to breathe in sharply. Sometimes, I thought, Masego saw things more clearly than any of us. I saw him hesitate once more, after, and made myself squeeze his fingers back in reassurance.

“I could have,” he said.

My brow rose.

“Could have what?”

“I could have begun apotheosis,” Masego whispered. “I had the souls. The weight. The bones. But I wanted to bring my father back, instead. But I still remember, Cat.”

My eyes narrowed.

“Remember what?” I asked.

“How gods are made,” he whispered. “And so how they are unmade.”

I matched his gaze, hidden as it was by the eye cloth.

“The Dead King?” I murmured.

“Oh yes,” Hierophant murmured. “Even him. And Catherine, I think I want to kill him.”

He leaned forward, as if confiding a great secret.

“I believe,” Masego solemnly told me, “I might have become nettled by this affair.”

“Well,” I smiled, thin and bladelike, “we’ve certainly started picked fights with lesser gods over less.”

And so we spoke, just the two of us, of the last king of Sephirah’s end.

Chapter 61: Reformation

“Zarei, of short stride
saw the long’s pride
and carved, laughing
found them wanting:
chased into shadow
by one mighty blow.”
– Extract from the ‘Zarei Veste’, a Firstborn traditional epic

Night had become my time, refreshing to my tired bones like a cool drink on a parching day. I enjoyed the quiet of it, the veil of stillness laid down by the dark under the stirrings of creatures nocturnal. Without so much spinning my thought came clearer, less cluttered, and these days what already lay within my own mind was quite enough clutter already. It felt, at times, like I was attempting to juggle half the continent – it felt that way because it was, essentially, what I was trying to do. Yet while there might have been quiet awaiting us at the heart of the drow’s tent-city, there was hardly any stillness to be found: with dusk passing the curse of the pale light had passed, and the Firstborn tread under the moon’s unblinking eye like shifting shadows. After my Lord of Silent Steps’ report I’d expected for there to be a tautness to the air, but that had perhaps been naïve of me. Drow didn’t complain or riot or indicate their displeasure, because every last one of them was born to the knowledge that all it took was irritating someone stronger than them once to end up killed. The only drow who were vocal about much of anything were the Mighty and even among those only sigil-holders could really be said to be outspoken, that cabal of the few who’d spent years slaying all comers until they rose to the summit of the pyramid of strife. No, instead of a boiling cauldron about to tip over the tent-city of the Firstborn looked like half a festival.

A drow one, anyway.

Grey-skinned dzulu wearing the colours and signs of their sigils, either painted on skin or woven into cloth, had come out under moonlight to play. I was used to a soldier’s vices of choice being drinking and gambling, but those were the favourites of the Legions. Here it was instead the old amusements of the Everdark that reigned, and they were less bloody in nature than I’d expected. Standing before a tall heap of piled stones drow would set on their brow a thin leathery chord set with a single small stone and claim in cadenced Crepuscular that their tongue was made of flame. Another drow would then step up to them, and call them an eight-year-snake, after which they would each sing a couplet with the challenger going second. It seemed to me that, more often than not, they were citing old and well-known texts with only just enough adjusted to brutally mock their opponent or boast of their own obvious superiority in all things. Hakram sent me a look that was disturbingly pleasing, coming from an orc that hefty, and I allowed our steps to slow so we’d catch some of it. One dzulu from the Sudone claimed that its opponent was –

“ Cunning as cattle, fearsome as a trout ,
Beloved of nerezim, quiet as a shout!”

– which had the watching dzulu laughing in approval. The other singer, one of the Jindrich, went the other way instead. Boasting shamelessly, it announced it would –

“Swallow pale light and make it night,
Harvest from death its very breath,
Weave with loom a second gloom!”

Which had a few of the Soln in the crowd and most the Jindrich ululating in approval, some even calling out a name: Zarei Stride-Carver. After both songs had been sung in full the dzulu cast small tokens – trinkets, pieces of cloth, even simple stones – at the feet of one or the other, deciding whose song had been the finest. The Sudone dzulu won, that time, and triumphantly called out that for the fourth time its tongue was flame.

“There are traditions much like this in the Lesser Steppes,” Adjutant murmured as we both watched another drow step up and challenge the victor.

The steppes beyond the Wasiliti, I knew that meant. Where the Clans had been able to hang on to more of their old ways, further from Miezan steel and the Tower’s schemes.

“Duels of singing?” I asked.

“And steel as well,” Hakram said. “Though there was a time, Catherine, when no great warrior would have wielded the axe without the verse.”

I eyed him amusedly.

“If you want to challenge one them, I could always translate into Crepuscular for you,” I offered.

He looked genuinely tempted but eventually shook his head, clicking his fangs in polite refusal.

“Too much would be lost in translation,” he said. “And though I was taught old and cherished words, there are few I can claim as my own.”

I thought of Nauk, in that moment, Nauk who’d written In Dread Crown and whose song was still sung even after the warpriests of the Dominion had taken him from me. I caught the exact moment Hakram thought of him too, and we watched the Firstborn trade singing barbs in silence as we shared in the same grief. I half-smiled at the defending champion’s verse – it’d just claimed it would make a tomb for the Tomb-maker – and we let it flow out of us, like a mouthful of wakeleaf smoke offered up to the wind.

“The formula they speak, at the start,” Hakram said.

“My tongue is made of flame,” I quoted, then my lips quirked. “You are but an eight-year-snake.”

He inclined his head.

“What does it mean?”

“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “Rumena, care to share?”

I felt the general’s mild irritation through the Night at having once again failed to approach me unnoticed and savoured that for the very petty victory that it was. The general of the Southern Expedition strode to my side in silence, filling the empty space at my left.

“It an old story, Losara Queen,” Rumena said.

“Oh,” I said, sweetly similing. “So you were there?”

“I see,” General Rumena gravely said. “Now that you have servants to flatter you again, you have resumed your delusion of being amusing. I had thought your cured of this ailment, Queen of Lost and Found.”

“Careful, buddy,” I said, jutting a thumb at the singing drow. “One of those just promised to put you in a tomb, are you sure you want to spend your last moments failing to get the best of me?”

Rumena glanced at Hakram, pale silver-blue eyes lingering on the missing hand.

“The orc has only one hand and still a defter touch with words,” it told me.

“He hasn’t even said anything,” I protested.

I winced the moment I said it, feeling the sense of mocking satisfaction wafting off of it into the Night. The prick.

“One of these days,” I told it. “One of these days, Rumena.”

“It is true,” the Tomb-maker conceded, “you might truly have a chance, if I am asleep.”

Ouch. Well, it was probably a good thing I wasn’t going up there to sing with the old bastard anytime soon.

“It is from a legend of the ancient days, before the Twilight Sages,” the old drow told Hakram. “There was once a manner of snake that was said to be born with the favour of the Shrouded Gods, manifest as stone on its head. Should it live for nine years, and devour flesh every day, it would grow to become izmej . That is, flame-tongued and immortal, swimming through stone with on its brow the shine of pale light.”

Dragon , I thought, but it was not like the dragons I knew of – which were, anyway, all but disappeared these days.

“And so an eight-year-snake is one that could not become izmej ,” Hakram thoughtfully said. “What happens, if a singer is the victor nine times?”

“None who cast token in the contest may kill the nine-year-snake for a span nine nights,” Rumena said. “Immortality, Deadhand. For a time.”

It murmured in Crepuscular, after that, citing the Tenets of Night. For glory fades and stone crumbles, no victor forever crowned. The words were sobering, for they brought to mind the reason I’d come to the tent-city in the first place. Under the currents of celebration here there was a lit sharper that’d blow unless I put out the fuse quick enough.

“The Zoitsa Sigil is still under control?” I asked.

“The children that were disciplined have recovered,” Rumena said, “yet word of your impending arrival has stayed hands for now. The Lutesuk and the Vachikna will require adjudication as well, if your intent is to prevent killing between all Mighty.”

“Between all Firstborn,” I sharply corrected. “Take me to them, then.”

The general’s pale eyes flicked to Hakram.

“The Adjutant’s presence will be commented upon,” the old drow said.

“Let them comment,” I grunted. “He can’t understand Crepuscular anyway, I’m bringing him as an advisor.”

“ Ade Varul ,” Rumena said, eyes narrowing. “Yes, this would be accepted.”

It’s sounded the same, to an extent, but the meaning had been different: truth-bearer, or truth-keeper maybe? It was from an older form of Crepuscular, the one drow tended to use for formal titles.

“ Mais encore?” I said in Chantant, just to show it wasn’t the only one who could speak all fancy.

“When the Empire Ever Dark still stood, it was the title given to those who learned precedents of law and bore old scrolls of histories to provide these during adjudication,” General Rumena said. “A learned servant.”

“In service of who?” I asked.

“The Twilight Sages,” the Tomb-maker. “Or those they appointed to pass judgement in their stead.”

It was easy to forget, I thought, that there’d been a time where the Firstborn had known laws more elaborate than the rule of the hardest hand. I nodded my assent, though in truth even an oblique tie with the fools who’d nearly destroyed their entire race for fear of death had me uneasy. Very few would remain that had known those days, I reminded myself. And of those that did, only Rumena had come south instead of marching with the Sisters themselves. We moved as swiftly as my limp around, eyes lingering on the distractions that’d seized the camp. Small packs gathered around the small colourful tiles that were the centrepiece of a game of inic cin , carefully placing down their own to make or break patterns according to the labyrinthine rules of their game – hardly any two sigils allowed the same set of patterns, and drow from the outer rings would rather kiss a dwarf than begin the game with a lizard-fish prowling pattern already on the floor instead of empty space, the way Firstborn from deeper in the Everdark insisted the game was meant to be played. There were more earthy entertainments as well, ones I was more familiar with: javelin-throwing and wrestling, as well as the madman’s bargain that was the por neroc , the axe-fortune. I’d yet so see anyone play that game without bleeding, and not for lack of trying.

Firstborn were more prone to indulging in luxurious meals or elaborate concoctions than hard drinking, as a rule, since liquor was usually reserved for the very powerful or the very much powerless. For the former it was a statement of might – that even drunk they could take all comers – while for the latter it was a tacit admission that their lives could be reaped at any time and there was nothing they could do about it. That might change, in time, at least if the drow were guided towards ways that bled them less often and eagerly by their own hands. Still, I doubted they’d ever become great drinkers of the wines and liquors of Calernia, anymore than the nations of the surface were at risk of becoming enamoured of the drow’s own drinks. I suspected that the Firstborn tasted things rather differently than we did, because some of the things they ate and drank... Ugh. There was a reason that I’d sometimes used their mushroom-based liquor on Archer as a punishment. I set the ponderings aside as we found the heart of the tent-city, and the Firstborn that awaited us there. What must have been the entire Zoitsa Sigil – which would keep that name even after Mighty Zoitsa’s death until another Mighty claimed the sigil – was patiently standing and awaiting us. An open space had been cleared on the snowy grounds, fitting the thousand or so drow in what I could only call a hierarchy laid bare. Four rylleh were seated at the front, then jawor behind them, then ispe behind those, leading to what must have been nine hundred and change dzulu. The Zoitsa were not a large sigil, though given that they had twelve jawor among their number I could see why they wouldn’t be taken as easy meat either.

“You stand in the presence of the Queen of Lost and Found, the First Under the Night,” General Rumena called out. “ Kneel .”

They did. And they stayed kneeling, as I considered the approach I wanted to take. Ivah’s report had mentioned Rumena savaging the two most prominent claimants, and through the Night I could easily tell who those would be – they were significantly stronger than the other two, though not so much that the weaker pair allying against one would not see that particular rylleh killed. Unless they had a particular lethal Secret, anyway, but that struck me as unlikely. Drow that lucked into one of those tended to rise quickly through the ranks until they either died or became sigil-holders. I limped forward, leaning on my staff of yew as I cast a cursory glance around us. This was no Legion camp, there was no such thing as restricted sections of it: anyone brave enough linger where they could either hear or see could, unless someone chase them away. And there were plenty of curious Firstborn, though I noted they were largely ispe. The lowest of the Mighty. Sigil-holders, I grasped, were sending people to keep an eye on the judgement I was meant to render. Whatever decision was handed out tonight, it would not be long before the greatest Mighty of my host knew of it. That was trouble, for already I’d once denied them the prize that had been the Twilight Crown. If I further chipped away at their ways I might begin to encounter resistance, which given the hold sigil-holders had on their followers would be... more than inconvenient.

“You who would claim the Zoitsa Sigil, rise,” I said. “And come before me.”

I’d fully expected all four rylleh to rise, but instead it was only three. One of the weaker pair, I thought, must have been convincing enough to earn the other’s backing. The drow came to stand before my scrutinizing gaze, calm-faced and straight-backed.

“Decree was given,” I said. “The Southern Expedition is as one great cabal, and until it has ended no Firstborn may slay another. Yet I am told you would have broken the edict, if not for General Rumena’s reminder. Explain yourself.”

The weakest of the three kneeled.

“Losara Queen,” it said, “I am-”

“Bereft of a name or my mercy, until you have given me an answer,” I mildly said.

It didn’t flinch at my words, though its face blanked and I felt the malicious pleasure of the other two rylleh through the Night. It’d earned the rebuke, I thought, the moment it tried to smooth-talk me out of anything.

“Night cannot be left to fade, O Great One,” the rylleh said. “Mighty Zoitsa must have successor, and when strife is had over who that Mighty should be there is only one manner of settling the claims known to us. I aim not to break the Night’s decree, only to obey the Tenets of Night.”

Meaning that none of the three were willing to back down and let one of the others harvest the Night from Zoitsa’s corpse, which meant duels to the death were the traditional solution as established by Sve Noc. Lovely. The leftmost rylleh knelt.

“Losara Queen, this one recognizes the truth of the great cabal binding us,” it said. “And so this one implores your holy judgement in deciding who is worthy of rising, in place of strife.”

And there it was, my opening. All I needed to do was accept the invitation and this could all be settled in moments without blood being spilled. That this particular rylleh had been clear-eyed enough to realize both that I wouldn’t allow blood being spilled and that easing my way to judgement would incline me well towards it made it a strong candidate for sigil-holder, I thought, though also someone to watch. And yet I stilled my tongue, because what I did here would echo. Through the ears and tongues of the ispe lingering at the edges of this clearing, yes, but also through the years to come. I was setting a precedent , and it was not something I should do lightly. I turned my eyes to the third rylleh, the last one still standing.

“And you?” I said. “What words would you speak?”

It knelt, smoothly.

“None, Losara Queen,” it rasped. “I do not presume to reach beyond my grasp.”

Tasting its words through the Night, I decided it was speaking the truth – or at least that it believed what it was saying. If I was to wade in an make an appointment through the awarding of Zoitsa’s corpse, then this one was the safe bet. Not too ambitious, steady. Likely more set in the old ways than either of the other two, but with enough deference for Sve Noc and through them myself that it would broadly balance out. This one, I decided, was the choice if I wanted to avoid making waves among sigil-holders. If I appointed the second speaker, it’d be seen as my raising ambitious lickspittles. Those not willing to become my creatures would feel threatened and react accordingly. The first speaker, the one I’d chastened, was trickier to parse in implications. It was the weakest of the three, which would ruffle some feathers but perhaps also raise the hopes of Firstborns who’d hit the limit of what they could claim with their own strength that in my service they might rise further still. I wasn’t one to particularly enjoy a smooth-talker, and this one reminded me a little of Praesi highborn, but vague dislike was not reason enough to exclude them as a candidate.

“If you had the pick of three highborn for a lordship,” I said in Kharsum, “what measure would you use to weigh the right choice?”

Adjutant was at my side, a towering presence of calm that passed on a portion of that serenity to me.

“The three,” he replied in his native tongue. “Are they the only people I can pick?”

“Without making a mess, yes,” I said. “And no matter which I choose, I’ll have intervened in the succession of a noble line – while using royal authority.”

Religious, in truth, but it would not be too inaccurate to compare the kind of influence I now commanded among the drow to what a Good Queen might have commanded in the Old Kingdom.

“Letting the succession pass without intervention isn’t in the cards,” he half-asked, half-stated.

“They’d go at each other like Wasteland nobles over it,” I said. “Only without the subtlety. It’d be setting an even worse precedent, as far as I’m concerned.”

If I exempted strife over the succession of sigil-holders from the ban on drow killing each other, then the gate would be cracked open. As far as I was concerned, any possible benefit to be obtained from a higher concentration of Night in some former rylleh’s hands was far below what I got by keeping the drow who knew how to use their own tricks in possession of those tricks. And that was in a military view, anyway. The moral aspects of it were... well, I couldn’t keep raising my nose a ritualized murder for power being a central tenet of drow culture if I simply allowed it to keep going on when I could do otherwise.

“If you are bound to rancor for any intervention at all,” Adjutant pragmatically said, “appoint the most apt candidate. At least you’ll be getting the most out of what it cost you.”

Sound advice. Following it, all that remained before passing down judgement was considering which of the three rylleh would be most valuable to my intentions. Gods, probably the first of the three. They’d – no, that was the wrong way to think about it. The most apt candidate was the one that’d best serve the interest of the sigil it led, not necessarily my own. Ah , I thought, but why appoint a lord at all? I thought of a thin man in ragged robes, keeping records no one would read for a revolution that pulsed out of him like a titan’s breath. How many of us are there, tyrant, he’d asked, and how many of you? I could not use old means save to reach old ends.

“General Rumena,” I said. “Send for the Firstborn.”

The old drow’s head bowed by a fraction.

“Which sigils?” it asked.

“All of them,” I said. “Every last one of you.”

If I was to hand down judgement, it would not be to seek the least of three evils.

I would try to do better .

Chapter 62: Pledged

“Power is as wealth; that which is yours has always been snatched from another.”
– Dread Emperor Venal

General Rumena had sent for them and they had come.

The Firstborn, I’d understood since my first steps past the murk of Gloom, were the ruin of a people. Even the name of their realm was the remnant of olden nights: from Empire Ever Dark to a brutal tapestry of sigils haunting the last gasps known simply known as the Everdark. They had been, when I journeyed through their ancient broken cities and their endless tribal wars, little more than a desperate ritual masquerading as a people. Sve Noc had bargained for their salvation of their people, made a pact with Below, yet it was survival they had sought and there their ambitions had ended. Wise of them, perhaps, given how insistently the Twilight Sages had courted the doom of their kind until they were slaughtered in their own seat of power to earn audience with those the drow called the Shrouded Gods. Under the auspices of Komena and Andronike the Firstborn had carved out their old glories and made of them hovels and walls, forgotten how to read their own sacred writings and traded steel for obsidian. Cut after cut, they’d forgotten what they used to be until what they’d become was but distant kin to the people who’d raised the great works I’d seen but the barest fraction of.

I’d taken me some time to understand how much more they’d lost than things like knowing how to build sewers or make steel tools, or a hundred other small practical bits of knowledge that made life easier for people who knew them. No, the wound was deeper than that. There’d never been a day in my life where I did not know that if I sought the right books, or the right stories, I could not know the history of my people. Who we had been in ages past and through that how we’d become who we were. What it meant, when a well-dressed Proceran tread a street and my people began humming the tune of Red The Flowers . Why at every summer fair there was an evening where primroses were hung form the tallest tree or roof and comical plays were had under them until dawn – a last defiance in the name of the Albans, smothered in madness so long ago. Hells, I’d even been able to find out why early in the spring so many grizzled old men and women filled the taverns of Laure and that’d actually been fairly dangerous to openly acknowledge. That old soldiers still mourned the last defeat of the Conquest drink in hand had not been one of those things people talked about fit they didn’t want to draw the attention of the Eyes. Not too loudly, anyway.

Even during Black’s decades of occupation the old histories had not been burned. Oh, he was a cannier man than that. He’d restricted grimoires and weapons, eradicated every legacy of the paladins of the White Hand, but the histories he’d not even tried to torch. Viciously elegant as always, he’d simply made the histories he preferred cheaper and easier to obtain before letting human nature do the rest. Yet for someone designated enough to digging, Callow’s past was there to find. Even under the Praesi, I’d known more of the truth of my people than any drow born in the last thousand years could claim to know of theirs. I’d seen the truth of that laid bare between the Lord of Silent Steps and the Tomb-maker, Ivah and Rumena. The younger looked at the Firstborn and saw the only thing it had ever known, a history that was closed circle of murder under the Night, while the older drow held a rank in the host of an empire that no longer existed, commanding soldiers that were long dead. Rumena treated even other sigil-holders as children because that was what they were, in its eyes: children putting on the regalia of the empire that’d birthed them, thieving magpies making a nest of rubies and golden bracelets. It wasn’t wrong, I thought, to believe that. It was true, that the Firstborn born of this era wore old honours and spoke old words without knowing the truth of them, having made mystical of mundane through the passing of the years. And still, looking at this host of magpies before me, I could not deny that they were beautiful.

Fifty thousand strong, spread out before me as a sea that’d swept away tents and bedding and distractions until all that stood in the moonlight was flesh and bone. They were a riot of colour, these warriors sworn to a hundred sigils: red and silver, yellow gold and radiant green and deep azure blue. Few sigils shared the same colours, and none the same symbols. My own Losara, stayed mine through even Winter’s death, had taken to drawing the silver tree down the ridge of their nose and encircling their eyes to finish the pattern. The effect was striking, a mask of purple and silver whose roots were the lips and teeth of warriors. The golden sunflower on ochre that was Rumena’s own sigil-symbol was more often tattooed with needles on cheeks or necks, though every drow out there seemed to have their own manner of bearing their sigil. Their manifold banners traced the air lazily under the trailing fingers of the wind, each speaking a claim or story or boast, and even their armaments were as works of arts. Oh, the dzulu bore spears and shields and practical tools of killing, but the Mighty? Every one of them treated both their body and armaments as works of art. Artifacts shaped in Night likely older than some Callowan cities had been painted or polished or touched with strips of cloths and ribbons.

The warlord in me, the general, looked upon them and saw only chaos. An army of wild folk, without standardized equipment, the doctrine to use them and the discipline to do so well. But part of me I’d stolen back from eternity along with my death, the one that could savour a good smoke and a sunny day and the chill of cold against my cheeks, that part looked at them and saw that even though they were the bastard children of the Empire Ever Dark the Firstborn were nothing less than splendid. Like a precious vase shattered and made into mosaic, still imperfect and broken but no less lovely for it. I would not forget that, I told myself, looking upon the proud ranks of the Mighty and their dzulu warriors behind them. In some ways I knew less of their people than even the least of them, and if I was to have a hand in the shape their kind would take long after my death I would move that hand with aware of my own ignorance. Our ways are harsh, but they are not without graces. Malicia had told me that once, years ago, because even what she hated about the Wasteland was still part of Praes. And so it’d been part of her bones and her flesh and her breath, taken in with her mother’s milk. I could not mold the nature of the Firstborn like clay, uproot everything that was at the heart of them because it displeased me.

I was a cold-eyed stranger speaking hard truths, not any kind of saviour. And truth was, the closest the Firstborn would ever have to watchful angels was the pair ink-feathered crow slowly circling above us all, high under the stars. I breathed out, watching the mist and whishing it was smoke instead, but I could hardly nurse a pipe throughout this. Merciless Gods, I wish.

“Are you worthy?” I asked, and it rippled across the night.

Thousands of lips spoke the same question I had asked of the Mighty before the Twilight Crown: sa vrede . The tale of that moment had already spread through the throng last night, when it was still fresh. Not to all, but to enough. And though my question found echoes aplently, none dared to answer it.

“The Mighty Zoitsa was slain, and its Night awaits a worthy taker,” I said. “Yet it was decreed under Night that no Firstborn may slay another before the Southern Expedition has ended. And so now I am asked who is worthy of that Night, who is worthy to rise .”

I laughed.

“Did we not answer this question already, you who were born of blood?” I sang out. “Did you not learn that answer well?”

Fear and anger and uncertainty wafted up in the Night, a sea of emotion I could hardly touch lest I risk drowning in it. High priestess or not, I was only one woman and a mortal one at that.

“I wonder, you who claim might,” I said, “are you ashamed now to speak again before dzulu what you admitted in the shade of dusk? Is vanity the truest answer you have to give?”

That stung them, as it had been meant to. No, some said. I did not reply, and in the silence they were forced to confess the word again and again, louder and louder until none among the entire host of the Firstborn could claim they had not heard it. It was Mighty who had been questioned, but it was all who answered in the end – for if the great among them could not be said to be worthy, which of the lesser dared claimed themselves to be instead?

“There is no shame in this,” I said. “I am First Under the Night, and I do not claim to be worthy where you are not – else would it not be my right, my due, to rip the Night out of every single one of you?”

Fear strengthened, but also respect. The drow were not a people to resent threats, or for that matter to think well of weakness. A reminder that my power towered over that of even their greatest Mighty made everything else easier to swallow, for was it not the privilege of the strong to do as they would of the weak? That was the principle, anyway. As it always was with those, the reality was rather more nuanced.

“But there is shame,” I spoke, and there my voice sharpened, “in knowing yourself unworthy and remaining so. There is shame in sloth, in apathy, in seeing the flaws in what you are and not seeking to be more.”

A fine line I must walk here, for though the sentiment I spoke was old and beloved to their kind it also went hand in hand with the spilling of blood. At least, I wryly thought, I was by now an old hand at riding tigers and I’d yet to be eaten for it.

“I see before me hands hallowed in blood and little else,” I said. “What have you offered the Night, save for strife?”

I struck my staff against the snowy ground, the yew hitting it with a clapping sound and kicking off a gust of wind.

“When the Last Dusk comes to take you all and tally is taken of the deeds of the Firstborn,” I said, “what will any have you fill the pages with, save for death?”

There I sneered.

“Death,” I said. “Every creature’s given end. No great gift, to hurry what is certain.”

And there came the turbulence, for I had begun to speak of worthiness, of who was fit to hold a sigil, and now I was sneering down at the only measure the drow knew how to use: the long arm and blade it wielded. If not killing and claiming Night, what then was to be the path taken? And there, there I could not bestow upon them an answer like a saving grace made flesh. Because I could hardly see to my own soul, most days, and dared not speak to an entire people’s. Because I still knew so little of the Firstborn, of what they were and might yet be. Because I would not be my father, a well-meaning tyrant with a blade in hand intent on cutting out the ugliness of a culture until no imperfections remained. The drow were not children, to be led by the hand. I could speak to them of a horizon, but it they chose to chase it that decision would be of their own making.

“Those of you who hold sigils stand only below Sve Noc and those they have raised of their own hand,” I said. “You possess deep wells of Night, have bloody deeds of valour and cunning to your name. You have the weight of many years behind you, and an edge honed by as many victories. Yet the keen blade you have made of yourself goes unused. It was sent south in these lands to teach the Burning Lands the return of the Empire Ever Dark, yet what will follow our victory?”

I paused, my gaze swept the crowd.

“Rust,” I said. “Rust awaits you. Your sharpness will grow dull, your fire gut out. Lest you find higher purpose and seek it with those of like soul.”

I raised my voice, pitched it to resound.

“The Mighty Zoitsa was slain,” I said, “and its Night awaits a taker. None under this sky are worthy, yet it must not remain so. And so, Firstborn, I charge you to strive . To seek excellence in all things, and through this conquer eternity.”

I felt the feather-light touch of the Sisters against my thoughts, like a finger sliding down a page. My patron goddesses perceived the shape of my thoughts, the decree I would pass down to their people. I felt them brush up against me, those great looming presences, and taste of their judgement. Komena sat astride the wall, the remains of the woman who’d once commanded soldiers displeased but the idol of sacred strife pleased. It was Andronike whose attitude would settle the scale, and her judgement came more slowly than her sister’s. Beyond even my own thoughts she gazed upon the many ends such a decree might lead, the scattered strands, and where she went I could not follow. One who had touched the godhead, as the Sisters had, could follow the strands in ways beyond my comprehension. In silence, Sve Noc drifted down from the darkened sky on long wings. Down and down they went, until they dropped on my shoulders with sharp talons. I had their blessing, silent as it was, and the simple act of them perching on my shoulders had fifty thousand drow shivering. This was not an omen or an oracle, some religious text interpreted through the lens of years.

Sve Noc was true to them, true as snow or shadow or obsidian’s edge, and they had granted me their blessing beyond dispute. I raised my hand, palm up, and on it coalesced in Night what I had taken from the corpse of the Mighty Zoitsa. Power, given the shape of the sigil-symbol: a heavyset key, whose four teeth were as tortured antlers.

“This is the sigil of the Zoitsa,” I said. “It will be held before the pale light comes.”

A shiver, a ripple. Excitement like a crowd awaiting the first blood of a duel.

“All of you who are Zoitsa,” I said. “May lay claim to the sigil.”

I leaned forward.

“I took oaths from some of you, once, and though those nights are passed there was truth to our ways,” I said. “To hold this sigil is to make an oath, to strive to be worthy of the honour bestowed. And through this oath, power is gained, for the oath is the promise of a deed to come.”

I grinned, sharp and mean.

“Yet there can only be one oath, and many will be posed,” I continued. “And so there must be a beginning and an end, for no victor can ever be crowned...”

And in the end, all will be Night , the drow returned, finishing the verse from the Tenets of Night I had cited. I had thought of the terms, as Rumena assembled all the sigils, and found that the irony of them please me. It ran deeper than that, of course. A foundation set in song was set in something deeper than stone, more poignant than law. And if you knew the right song, the right stories? All you needed was to give the first push, and stone would tumble down the slope on its own.

“The oath will hold for nine years,” I said. “And upon the last dusk end, the sigil open to claiming once more. The keeping of oaths and bestowal of Night is a duty I bestow upon my own sigil, for the Losara are the children of the lost and found.”

I raised a hand.

“That burden will be the duty of the Losara, to discharge without friend nor enemy so long as there is empire,” I said, “and so in the keeping of oaths they will not rise or fall so long as they remain Losara.”

Balance, balance must be had. If I was going to make Ivah and my warriors the priesthood that harvested and bestowed the Night, then they could not partake of that bounty – otherwise I might as well simply name the Losara the founding nobility of the Empire Ever Dark, saving their kind a few centuries of intrigue and treachery before we reached that result anyway. My sigil would serve as a priesthood, taking no sides in the discharge of their duty, and that meant barring them from the greater games of power.

“Which oath will be worthiest,” I said. “You wonder this, do you not? If I will speak for the Night when every great one passes, choosing oath.”

I laughed harshly.

“Are you children, Firstborn, that you must be held by your hands?” I said. “Are you without eyes, without ears, without tongue? Can you not choose your own path?”

I struck down my staff once more.

“I give you nothing save for tenets under the Night,” I said. “To perish or flourish will outcome brought by your own hand, and the Shrouded Gods take any who speak otherwise.”

My grin returned, for it had been some time since fate had last allowed me to bask so deeply in well-tailored irony.

“Any who are Zoitsa may lay claim to the sigil,” I said. “And so any of the Zoitsa may offer oath that will be sought for nine years as they hold the sigil.”

I let that sink in, then struck again.

“And it will be the same hands as it has always been, that will tell between snake and izmej ,” I said. “For when oaths are offered, it will be the Zoitsa who choose which will own their sigil with tokens.”

They would, in the end, vote on the oath that would bind their sigil together for nine years with the elected sigil-holder keeping the Night for that duration. It would, I believed, forced the strongest of ay sigil’s Mighty to care for the weakest – lest, when nine years had passed, they find the strength that had led them to the summit lent to another for another purpose. There would be more, beyond this. The sigil-holders that still lived would be charged make oaths as well, though they would keep their Night when the nine years had passed. It would only be the rulership that would be open to challenge on that night, though it would be decreed than any sigil-holder that died while in that role would see their Night turned into oath-Night. The trick to all of it, what they wouldn’t care about until it was too late, was that it would be sacred under Sve Noc for any drow to leave a sigil whenever they so wished without violence being visited upon them. Sigils would still make their own laws for those they allowed into their fold, but no longer would Mighty be able to keep other drow in their service by force. I meant to hang tyranny with the rope of expedience, for if sigil-holders treated their followers like animals what drow would willingly remain in their sigil? Still, the deeper workings could wait for a time still.

“You who are Zoitsa and would put an oath to the Zoitsa, step forward,” I said.

I smothered a madwoman’s grin, when this time instead of three candidates I got thirty-nine.

“Hear that?” I murmured, low enough only the Sisters could hear. “That’s the sound of your people taking an axe to the old order.”

I was hearing it too, and it warmed the cockles of my damned villainous heart.

Chapter 63: Draft

“Rebel prisoners, Black Knight? Ah, you must mean the fresh orc rations.”
– Dread Emperor Foul I, the Frugal

Under moonlight Ivah of the Losara sat at my side, wielding ink and parchment, and made record of oaths.

We begun with the Zoitsa, for they were the reason of my coming as well as the first attempt to make old stones into a fledgling temple. I had given this crucible of acclamation the shape of their singing-rites, and that aspect they embraced with relish. It was not merely oaths that were offered to the many waiting ears of the Zoitsa Sigil but verses crafted with deft hands and heady cadence. The first pledges were mundane, enemies that would be defeated and protections that would be ensured. One ispe then hazarded the pledge of sharing the sigil’s Night with all Zoitsa, and though the oath was met with shocked and disapproving silence, the words had broken the levee. It was not merely prudent, if well-spoken, promises that were made but instead ambitions unveiled. A jawor spoke of raising a city where no pale light would ever reach for the Zoitsa to live in, another of arming even every dzulu with coats of steel and shining blades. The rylleh, older hand and the subtler games of sigils, let others come forward to gauge the sigil’s wants before speaking their own oaths.

The same drow that’d not presumed to speak to me before now swore to swell the ranks of the Zoitsa so it would become one of the great sigils, while the ambitious one who’d invited me to pass judgement instead swore that the Night of every Zoitsa to die in the wars would be passed to a dzulu proving themselves worthy. I felt through the Night the last oath earned the most approval, at least until the fourth rylleh, the one who had not even stood forward to lay claim to the sigil until now, spoke its own pledge-

“host of empire will we be,
servants first to right
if Zoitsa bend the knee
let it be only to Night”

The Night thrummed with approval, and not only from those drow who bore the colours of the Zoitsa. Morovoy was the name of the rylleh that had made the oath, and it had been clever in its shaping. The verses of it made it clear that for its span of nine years it would have the sigil suborn its own ambitions to the needs of the reborn Empire Ever Dark, serving as army and obeying the orders of leaders appointed by the Night. The other Firstborn had sought to earn acclaim through pretty ambitions and heady boasts, but Morovoy’s pledge instead harkened back to the old dream: a nation of drow, proud and mighty under darkened sky. It was opening the door to any who wanted to bare blade for that purpose, at least for a span of nine years, and in offering such selfless oath was making all the pledges of those that’d spoken before it seem... base. Almost petty. When tokens were set down to match oaths, Morovoy earned more than half those cast and more than double of its closest rival. I sent Ivah to bestow the Night I had shaped into a sigil, after that chosen oath was written down, and so the first crucible of the nigh was passed.

The hurdle, after that, was that those already holding sigils need take oaths of their own. It’d taken hours to gather fifty thousand drown and even longer to clear room for them all to stand, so I’d had time to do more than ponder the shape of the reformation I wanted to offer. I’d made arrangements as well, quietly reaching out to those in the Southern Expedition that were most beholden to me. It was why the Losara had not stirred, when I set them apart from the rest of the kind and charged them to never rise too high nor fall too low. It was why though many of the sigil-holders were taken by surprise by the changing tides, not all were. In the silence that followed the ascension of Morovoy, Mighty Jindrich strode forward. The same hard-headed, choleric warrior that Rumena and I had taken to using as a battering ram whenever we needed something dead or broken. It was feckless and brutal, though prone to forgiving those that amused it. Yet its faith in Sve Noc was deep and militant, and it thought nothing of making oath if it was the will of the Night. And so Mighty Jindrich stood before tens of thousands of its kind, white-toothed and red-handed, and it sang a pledge-

“to be the point of the spear
ever furthest from the rear;
to battle under veil of night
and the glare of palest light;
hear me: nine years’ spread
a hundred victories tread!”

I’d expected the Jindrich Sigil to flinch at the pledge, of fighting as the vanguard wherever fight was to be found and to forge a hundred victories in nine years, but that was not what I felt from them. Oh, far form it. They were burning with the kind of hard pride that would have any people but the Firstborn howling. In the Jindrich, their faces painted azure and white with the jagged fang-like wings of their sigil-symbol, I found boiling blood and a thirst for blood. The took after their sigil-holder, and other drow listened to such an oath with envy – oh, some would leave the sigil, but there would be twice as many petitioning for entry. One after another, the sigil-holders who had once been of my Peerage followed suit. Mighty Soln’s pledge to found a cabal with any other sigil willing to help raise another Tvarigu in the heart of the Burning Lands had the crowd rippling in approval and a few feet stomping down, but when after it finished speaking Rumena stepped up fifty thousand drow went still as statues. The old drow laughed, softly, and offered the trace of a bow at the crows on my shoulder. It spoke simply, cadenced but with an implacability that was beyond boast-

“ before nine years have passed,
Keter’s gates will lie broken
as trembles Death’s holdfast. ”

I breathed out sharply at the oath the general had just made. A heartbeat passed and the sheer wave of fervour that raged through the Night had me leaning against my staff for support. Drow raised their voices in an ululating cry, honouring the old monster who’d promised it would lead any following it to smash down the gates of the Crown of the Dead. The ancient creature closed its eyes, breathed the cool air of Procer’s winter night, and smiled the smile of one who would cast their wroth against even gods. And still Ivah wrote, ink on parchment, for the Losara would keep records so long as there were records to be kept. I only left the Firstborn two hours before dawn, having granted delay to those few sigil-holders who had no oath yet to pledge, but that number was few. Before dawn my Lord of Silent Steps would have begun transcribing its records to a book whose pages would be the one of the greatest things I had ever made.

Whether it would be a great triumph or disaster, only time would tell.

—

Hakram and I found our way back through the dark, passing legionaries on watch and the odd still-lit tent, but it was a surprise to find that my own was lit up with sprites and magelights. My feet slowed as I heard laughter from inside, glimpsing two silhouettes – one on a bed, the other seated by its side. A man and woman, I thought, and though the words were indistinct Indrani’s voice was a familiar drawl.

“I can hear what they’re saying,” Adjutant murmured, the offer implicit.

I’d be able to as well, if I drew on the Night. Instead I breathed out slowly and shook my head.

“Leave them to it,” I said.

The orc’s eyes moved to me, unreadable.

“They have their own matters to settle,” I said. “And if I’m there...”

“The war follows you,” Hakram completed, clicking his fangs.

I shrugged, affecting nonchalance, though I held out little hope so shallow a deception would not be seen through by my Adjutant.

“Hells, Hakram,” I said, “I might as well be the war, to those two. No, let them have a night without red on the horizon and talk of plans.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” he gently told me.

I thought of Vivienne, scared she would be cast out and left out in the wilds, and the way I’d used that fear to bring her a little closer to the woman I needed her to be. Not lightly, not without qualms, not for selfish reasons. But I’d still done it.

“It does,” I disagreed.

There might come a day where that was no longer the case, but until the continent no longer teetered on the brink then the queen’s needs were more important than the woman’s wants. I clapped Hakram’s shoulder, and together we went to find somewhere else for me to sleep.

—

I woke up with Morning Bell, still tired but knowing there was too much on my plate to be able to justify sleeping any longer. Adjutant, already awake, passed along that both Masego and Indrani were still sleeping in so instead I broke fast with Juniper and Vivienne. The Hellhound had always been – rather despicably so, in my opinion – a morning person so while cheer was no more in the cards than usual she was still noticeably more animated than either myself or Vivienne. Who, I’d noted over the years, had never really gotten used to staying awake most of the day. Neither thieving nor heroics were always work to be done under the sun, at least not in an occupied Callow. So while Vivienne and I blearily drank our morning brews and poked at porridge, Juniper sprinkled bits of jerky into hers and dug in with relish as she began expounding on this Proceran book she’d found. Some history of the First League War penned by a prince of Lyonis she’d found a Lower Miezan translation of. The title – one of those long, elaborate ones highborn Proceran scholars were so fond of – she spoke scathingly of, but apparently it was a fascinating look at the events and much less drily written than most histories. Vivienne leaned towards me as the Hellhound told us all about how Helikean kataphraktoi had actually begun as a tradition before Theodosius, contrary to popular belief.

“This is torture,” the heiress-designate to Callow murmured.

“Just don’t mention the Commentaries,” I whispered back. “It’d be like tossing meat at a wolf.”

Usually it only got this way when we drank, though, so I was somewhat surprised. By now Aisha should have... Ah , I thought, looking at the empty seat where Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara would usually be seated. There’s your trouble. The living and breathing person that served as the better part of Juniper’s social graces was missing, and so we were being subjected to the full Hellhound treatment.

“Fascinating,” I lied, just after a sentence. “Where’s Aisha, by the way?”

“Liaising with the Legions-in-Exile,” Juniper growled. “We’re taking full stock of the armies down to company size so we can adjust the doctrine for whatever battles are ahead.”

Ah, and there was no one else in the Hellhound’s general staff that’d get that done nearly as quickly or neatly as Aisha so there she went. She’d probably been absent form general staff meetings too, which would only make the Hellhound grumpier.

“I’m sure it’ll be done soon,” I said.

“It’d help if you could tell us where winter quarters will be,” the orc bluntly said.

“I’ll see if I can get that settled today,” I sighed, then sipped at my tea.

The warmth of it seeped into me, and I glanced at the other Callowan at the table. As much out of need as out of mercy, I threw Vivienne a bone.

“I’ll need you to send a messenger to Arnaud Brogloise,” I said. “Today will be convenient for the audience he requested. I’ll be expecting you at that table, Lady Dartwick.”

She nodded.

“And the Dominion?” she asked.

I glanced at Juniper.

“We’re overdue a fireside evening, the lot of us,” I said. “I expect at some point during that evening the Pilgrim will swing by for a chat, if he’s ready to talk.”

“Tonight?” the Hellhound asked. “We’ve all got-”

“Competent subordinates,” I interrupted. “We can afford a few hours by a fire, Juniper. If you believe your staff so incompetent that if you have a drink they’ll be lost-”

“I never said that,” the Hellhound bristled.

“Good,” I smiled, “then you can bring the aragh.”

I hadn’t had a taste of that since becoming mortal again and I was curious if my recollections from the old days were still accurate.

“You baited me,” Juniper growled.

“Can’t win them all, Marshal,” I grinned, and toasted her with my steaming mug.

Vivienne shot me an amused look before making her retreat, and a wise woman she was. This time, when Juniper began to talk about the logistics of the Army of Callow, the glint in her eye made it very clear the torture was entirely on purpose.

—

It was not until Noon Bell that I met with Arnaud Brogloise, plenipotentiary envoy for the First Prince of Procer. I’d been ready for talks earlier, but the other side had not. Apparently the Grand Alliance’s camp was like an anthill that’d been just gotten a good kick now that scrying was restored to Iserre and Hasenbach’s Order of the Red Lion could arrange talks with Salia. Not just Salia, though, likely most of the Alliance’s signatories. No doubt the Blood wanted to speak with Levante and their Holy Seljun, if only to gain a veneer of lawfulness for whatever they’d get up to regardless of what their figurehead ruler wanted. Given the number of highborn of all stripes who’d want access to scrying and what must be a highly limited amount of mages that could use such sorcery – as well as spell formulas a generation behind the Empire’s, which meant the further two-way scrying went the more relays would be required and the more prone to failure the magic would be – I wouldn’t be surprised if they were working their practitioners to the edge of burning out. Still, at least the development meant I could rely on the former Prince of Cantal having freshly spoken with Hasenbach.

This was the closest I’d get to speaking directly with the First Prince before getting to Salia, I suspected.

This was not a formal negotiation, only a private audience, so I’d seen no need to overburden this with ceremony and entourages. On the side of the oaken table I’d claimed Hakram sat at my right and Vivienne at my left, while Arnaud Brogloise had brought with him only a pale redheaded scribe whose accessories seemed to indicate was meant to serve as both note-keeper and scholarly expert. The ink and quill made the first plain, while the veritable pile of tomes and scrolls he’d brought in with a legionary’s help implied the second. I knew from experience that someone well-learned in where the writing you were looking for tended to shave hours off of discussions such as these, so I rather appreciated the expertise the Alamans had brought with him.

“Your Majesty,” Arnaud Brogloise greeted me. “Lady Dartwick, Lord Adjutant.”

I craned my neck back.

“I’m unfamiliar with the proper address for a plenipotentiary envoy,” I admitted.

“It is ‘lord envoy’, though it is only a courtesy title,” the middle-aged replied, smiling amicably. “Yet if I may be bold?”

My brow rose and I nodded permission.

“It is my understanding that you are not partial to formalities,” Brogloise said. “We could dispense with them, if you would allow it, and you could simply call me Arnaud.”

I smiled back.

“Did you know that I could hear heartbeats, back when I was Sovereign of Moonless Nights?” I mildly said. “If I pricked my ear, I could ever hear blood flowing in someone’s veins. Smell their fear and anger.”

His face expressed only confusion. He really was, I thought, one of the finest actors I’d ever seen. The Alamans might even be better at it than Akua, which was impressive in all the worst ways.

“I’m aware I’ll find about as much genuine emotion at the heart of you than I would in door hinge, my lord envoy,” I said. “So spare us both the affability.”

The ruddy face slackened, moving towards blankness though not quite reaching it. To be entirely vacant would have been an effort as well, while this was simply the release of a pretence.

“If you’d prefer, Your Majesty,” he calmly said. “Shall we attend the matters at hand?”

“If you would,” I agreed.

“Her Most Serene Highness has, after consideration, decided to honour the Grey Pilgrim’s non-binding promise of a peace conference,” Brogloise stated.

How magnanimous of her , I drily thought. I’d grown more diplomatic in my old age, so I refrained from rolling my eyes. Hasenbach might not be happy about Tariq agreeing in her name to anything, but she needed the truce and conference badly. Refusing to honour the Pilgrim’s agreement with the Tyrant would have been cutting off her nose to spite her face, considering it’d set the League back on the warpath and mortally offend the Dominion.

“And the guarantee of truce until the conference has ended?” Vivienne asked.

“Will be honoured in full,” the Alamans agreed.

“Including the Legions-in-Exile?” Hakram asked.

“So long as the Queen of Callow formally agrees to take responsibility for their actions while they remain on Proceran soil,” Brogloise said.

Mhm. So, Cordelia had recognized that at this point she didn’t have the strength or influence to push the issue when it came to the Exile Legions. Making them my problem was a way to deal with it, since she knew by now I needed the goodwill of the Grand Alliance for the Accords and letting the Praesi loose anywhere in Procer was a good way to throw away every inch of progress I’d made there. Still, I’d take it.

“Agreed,” I said.

The redhead scribe’s quill scratched against parchment.

“However,” the former prince said, “the Highest Assembly formally requests that the escaped prisoner of war Amadeus of the Green Stretch be turned over for trial.”

“The Highest Assembly has been heard,” I mildly said. “Though I will caution that considering he never surrendered to the Principate and was tortured while in custody, by Callowan law you have no grounds for such a request.”

“Indeed, this has been acknowledged,” Arnaud Brogloise said, to my surprise.

That, I thought, had been much too easy considering how despised Black was in these parts. Was Cordelia sparing him as a favour to me so she could call that favour in elsewhere? Shit, if it came to that I might actually have to agree.

“However, as a Named military commander who carried out plans of mass murder of civilians he would be considered in egregious breach of the Liesse Accords,” the former prince said.

Ah, I thought. And there it was.

“Procer has not signed the Liesse Accords,” I said.

“It will, if you agree to apply them to the Black Knight,” Arnaud Brogloise plainly said.

The bluntness of it jolted me. He was actually serious, I realized, and he wasn’t just speaking hot air: the powers Cordelia had invested in him meant he could sign agreements in her name in a legally binding manner.

“It would be selective application of the articles, unless you also intend to pursue the trial of the Grey Pilgrim for the massacre of a port town and an entire half-legion of Praesi legionaries,” Vivienne noted. “Or of the Queen of Callow for the particulars of the Battle of the Camps.”

“Guarantees can be made that this will not be the case,” the envoy said.

“You’re missing the point,” I flatly said. “If the Accords are used from the very moment they’re signed as a tool to pursue enmities, they’ll not last the decade.”

Hakram, at my right, was looking intently at our Alamans friend. He’d noticed something, then.

“A matter to be discussed in more detail at a later date, then,” Brogloise said. “The First Prince is offering to host the conference in Salia, Your Majesty, and seeks your opinion on the matter.”

Adjutant moved a fraction, and so I stilled my tongue. I inclined my head towards him without looking.

“In the eventuality this is agreed on, where does the First Prince suggest the Army of Callow and the Legions-in-Exile march on?” Hakram asked.

“Escort would be allowed up to four thousand for every ruler attending the conference,” the envoy replied. “Four hundred into the city itself.”

“And the armies themselves?” I asked.

Arnaud Brogloise glanced at his scribe, who bowed at him then myself before rising to snatch a half-dozen scrolls from the pile. Maps, I realized, reading the letters on the seals.

“In this matter,” the former Prince of Cantal said, “Her Most Serene Highness is willing to entertain your proposals.”

I grinned. I’d been a while since I last had a good haggle, I mused, so this ought to get interesting.

Chapter 64: Breathe

“Fifty-three: a trusted companion who, after a string of personal disappointments, begins to dress in darker colours should no longer be considered a trusted companion.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

I didn’t mind heading out to Salia for the talks, and there were so many of those to be had: the peace conference, Callow’s petition to join the Grand Alliance and the Liesse Accords themselves. The treaties making up the Grand Alliance had first been signed in the Proceran capital, so the symbolism in Callow doing the same there would be powerful, and for the rest having the Highest Assembly at hand would save a great deal of time. Considering most armies in Iserre had fought months of strenuous skirmishes and battles, I foresaw the First Prince’s invitation would be accepted. In truth, considering it was Arnaud Brogloise who’d approached me with the notion in private, odds were the Dominion had already agreed and Hasenbach was simply sounding me out to avoid public embarrassment if I refused. The First Prince was too clever not to know the moment she got everyone else to agree on Salia she’d effectively forced Kairos’ hand, since him having a fit then would mark him the enemy of everyone invested in seeing peace secured. No, I understood why Cordelia Hasenbach’s capital would be the seat of the talks and indeed preferred it that way for reasons of my own.

But we were haggling, so damned if I wouldn’t get something in exchange.

The First Prince, through her envoy, had been pushing for the Army of Callow and the Exile Legions to make camp in northwest Brabant but we flatly refused. Reports from the Jacks made it clear that the principality of Brabant was overwhelmed by refugees from the lakeside holdings to the north, and that the front against the Dead King in Hainaut had been on the edge of collapse for some time. If we raised winter quarter there my armies were the second line of defence whether they liked it or not and we’d be surrounding by hungry, desperate people. We pushed for northern Arans instead, which was more than reasonable in my opinion: it put my soldiers close enough to the northern passage they could be supplied by Callow through it while propping up the right flank of the Hainaut front. Where it got messy was my insistence that the armies be allowed to raise their camps close to a city and my soldiers be granted access to said city while on leave. Brogloise had not been particularly inclined to grant me adjacency to anything but the dead until I started hinting Salia might be a little too far for my tastes. That had the tune changing pitch, as I’d thought it might.

He still demurred from outright agreeing until Prince Ariel of Arans was consulted over the matter, though I threw in agreement to the four thousand escort and four hundred retinue in Salia to make sure it’d be worth the candle to Cordelia. I made it plain that the drow were not my slaves or minions but allies from another nation, the Empire Ever Dark, and that the Firstborn required an emissary when time came to discuss both peace and the Accords.

“You want the Highest Assembly to recognize the legitimacy of this Empire Ever Dark,” Brogloise mildly said.

“If you’d prefer,” I said, “the princes and princesses could come explain to the sigil-holders why without a vote being held in Salia they can’t belong to a real nation.”

“It’d be extending diplomatic recognition to, well,” and there the envoy looked faintly embarrassed, “the grisly minions of some wicked foreign deity.”

“I’m not asking you to trade embassies,” I patiently said. “I’m asking you to recognize that fifty thousand warriors would get the Firstborn a seat at the table even if they required newborn babies as refreshments. How many more enemies can Procer afford to make right now, Brogloise?”

There was more nuance to the situation that I would have liked, as it happened. As a rule, the Principate didn’t usually consider itself bound by treaties to entities beholden to the Hellgods. Whoever held the Tower was usually Arch-heretic of the East, which meant no agreements with them need be upheld, and neither the Kingdom of the Dead nor the Chain of Hunger offered treaties. Agreements in the Free Cities were subject to the authority of the League itself, which meant none of those cities sworn to Below were usually a direct interlocutor to the Principate save in secret pacts not admitted to. In short, there was very little precedent for Procer making any sort of treaty with a state that worshipped the Gods Below and considering it worth more than what the ink and parchment had cost. Largely, I could admit in the privacy of my own thoughts, because very few of those states ever put much stock in keeping to their word. On the other hand, as of now I was still Queen of Callow and if the Principate was incapable of negotiating with me – still a villain, regardless of the waning of my Name – then this would all head downhill rather fast. The former Prince of Cantal retreated somewhat gracefully at that, noting that even if official recognition could not be guaranteed then at least a legal equivalent could be.

It’d do. I would not expect miracles, even when the Principate was so deeply in trouble. It had been the preeminent power of Calernia, on the surface at least, for too long. The arrogance had been bred into its rulers by generations of genuinely being some of the wealthiest and most influential individuals on the continent. I’d not coddle the highborn, when the time came, but neither would I got out of my way to step on their toes. My deep personal dislike for most royalty of the west was no reason to get in my own way when it came to greater purposes. We discussed a few other details of logistics, namely where the escort of four thousand would be offered amenities – as it turned out, from towns less than a day’s march from Salia itself – and the practicalities of bringing an armed retinue into the capital. I had no intention of turning over any of my people who were alleged to break laws to Procer for trial, but I indicated I was willing to hold them to that standard while they stayed in Salia so long as it broke no laws of Callow or regulations of its army. I gave an inch on my insistence that any such lawbreaking would be dealt with by Callowan trials, allowing for an observer appointed by the First Prince to sit in on the proceedings should it come to that.

We ended the talks soon after that, since Hasenbach now needed to herd her royal cats before she could agree to what I’d required. Vivienne and Hakram both stayed with me after the man left, the three of us seated in a silence that was rather contemplative. The former thief had kept notes herself throughout most of the talks, though mostly on the exact language of what had been agreed between Brogloise and myself. It’d been a surprisingly large amount, though less than one might expect from literal hours of talking. Still, I could not help but notice that a great deal of the tediousness I associated with diplomacy vanished when I ended up in an arguable position of strength. Fancy that , I sardonically thought. I shook away the cynical amusement. Pleasant as indulging it could be, I had no time to waste on indulgence at the moment.

“You saw something, didn’t you?” I asked Hakram instead.

“Not in him, but in what he spoke,” Adjutant agreed. “It is a question of logistics, Catherine. Hasenbach cannot agree to signing the Accords without having first consulted the Highest Assembly, yes?”

I cocked my head to the side, not bothering to assent to something be both knew to be true.

“Arnaud Brogloise has had the written text of them since the night of the battle,” Hakram continued. “Which means that, up to this meeting being held, Hasenbach and the Highest Assembly had a day and a half to both read the papers, debate their content and hold a vote – the offer made, of the Carrion Lord turned over in exchange for a signature? It was lawfully binding, coming from an envoy with the man’s invested powers.”

“Which is doable,” I pointed out. “They could call session at night, if necessary. They don’t necessarily need to read the whole thing themselves, either, they can have scholars they trust sum up the contents.”

“Not if the Assembly also has to wrangle together succession for seven principalities too,” Vivienne quietly said. “Even in times of war they have conventions, Cat. And they’d have to arrange it all over scrying, too, which is faster than messengers but still a devil’s delay.”

I drummed my fingers against the table as I began thinking back on all that’d been said. They were right, these two. And more than they knew, considering all the different things Brogloise had agreed on in the First Prince’s name.”

“They’d need to vote over hosting all this in Salia,” I said. “Over the amount of soldiers allowed in the capital. Shit, that should have been a tip off shouldn’t it? That this is diplomacy and we still got so much done .”

“Bad faith negotiations?” Vivienne suggested. “Hasenbach could be making promises without having held vote over them yet, banking on confirmation afterwards.”

“That’s too sloppy for who we’re dealing with,” I grunted. “Setting aside anyone wanting her deposed would be handed a pretext if she did it, she’d be playing with fire when it comes to us – and she won’t risk that when Procer’s out in the wilds with the wolves prowling.”

“Then there remains one plausible alternative,” Hakram said. “Which is that Hasenbach has held those votes and rammed them through the Highest Assembly by virtue of having the votes to pass essentially anything she’d like without debate.”

“That can’t be the case if the royals who abdicated here got their pick of successor on their throne,” I flatly said. “There wasn’t a lot of loyalty to Cordelia Hasenbach in that crowd even before the campaign cost them their crown.”

I grimaced. That meant seven empty seats in a voting assembly of twenty-three, which was a significant chunk, and considering the main opposition to the First Prince had coalesced around Princess Rozala, who was here in Iserre there’d be no one with the influence to seriously get in her way. No, by simple arithmetic I could see Hasenbach having finagled what was essentially run of the place. Between the Lycaonese, the lakeside principalities and those in the south that were quaking in their boots at the thought of the League coming in to stay? On one hand, this meant I could actually make bargains with the First Prince and expect to see them bear fruit. On the other hand, this whole situation had the potential of turning into a nasty brew if accusations of tyranny were thrown around and enough people listened.

“Nothing we can do about that from here,” Vivienne pragmatically said. “And I’ve just begun to restore contact with the Jacks in broader Procer, so it’ll be some time before we can hear of what’s happening in Salia.”

I leaned back into my seat, closing my eyes to think. I tended to think of Hasenbach as a largely reasonable woman, when it came down to it. Arrogant and high-handed, yes, but not bloodthirsty or blind in her principles. She’d despised me and all I stood for but never closed the door to negotiation because to her diplomacy was a preferable path to war if it could lead to the same ends. I couldn’t say I liked the woman, but I held to a degree of professional respect towards her. She had, after all, held her own against Black and Malicia for years and come out ahead as often as not. So when I’d heard that she was dredging something out of Lake Artoise through Kairos I’d suspected it wouldn’t be pretty, but also been inclined to take it as a precaution on her part. A weapon to unleash if all else fail, not a stick she’d begin waving as a club near everyone else to get her way. I’d been reasonably certain, deep down, that she wouldn’t ever use what it was she was having dredged. Now, though? They were all justifiable, practical steps she was taking. I knew that. But there was a word for people who did things like seizing control of the Highest Assembly and digging up ancient weapons, and it wasn’t heroine.

“Vivienne,” I said, opening my eyes. “Lean on the Jacks, I don’t care how many you end up burning. The situation in Salia is no longer the highest priority.”

“The dredging,” Hakram gravelled, studying me closely.

“Find out what Hasenbach is fishing out of the lake, Lady Dartwick,” I said. “And find out quickly .”

The woman who was likely to be my successor nodded decisively, and we left it at that.

—

If there was anyone who still kept to the ancient faith that’d had had the stones on the barrow-top raised, they’d be within their rights to call this desecration. My affairs had been removed from the heart of the Mavian prayer, brought back to my tent, but given that this would be the first fireside night we held in more than a year I’d charged Adjutant with... furnishing it properly. Which was why where some olden thinning boundaries had once been arranged, now a deep and broad fire pit had been dug by legionaries with shovels. Benches were brought up, the roughly-hewn kind that regulations frowned upon but appeared just as inevitably as washerwomen – both the kind that actually washed clothes and the one that did, as well as those impressively enterprising souls that did both – and peddlers when an army stayed in the same place for a time. The only reason the benches were discouraged were because they were a waste of wood and often got in the way of the swift deployment that Legion camps were meant to enable, though so long as legionaries left them behind most officers let the matter lie. They made for a comfortable enough arrangement around the fire, and with a handful of seats they made up the heart of the arrangement.

The drinks were as broad in arraignment, Adjutant having gotten his hand on a barrel of Laure ale as well as what I suspected to be a wide array of confiscated liquors. In an exercise of nostalgia for our College days we’d killed two pigs and put them to roast on spikes, before prudently arranging skewers of horse as well given the number of greenskins among us. For those of us with ‘cow teeth’ there’d be a massive communal plate of biryani as well, out here in Procer the cumin and pepper that went with the rice almost more expensive a luxury than the rest of the meal put together. I claimed my seat there not long before night fell, abusing my queenly prerogatives to get a decent bottle of wine while I read through the last of the reports Juniper had sent me. There was speculation among our general staff that the League’s armies were less than a month away from running out of food, which would be rather interesting if it were true. Already preparations for the likely march on Arans were beginning, too, though Tariq and I would have to see to the practicalities of that. A Named or two might be able to slip in and out of Twilight on their own – especially here in Iserre, where it would be so thinly parted form Creation – but not an army. That would require a gate, and a great deal of power.

I handed back the reports to the officer who’d brought them to me in the first place just before the first two of my little band of miscreants strolled in. The first I’d seen not too long ago in this very place, though Robber had apparently since led his cohort in a reckless ambush on Levantine mages he’d somehow lived through without taking a wound. The other, though, it’d been quite a while. Senior Sapper Pickler had never been what you’d call a sociable woman even at her most convivial, and between her suddenly expanded budget in building engines and my ever-broadening duties it’d been ages since we saw each other outside our work. She had, like Robber, visibly aged – her leathery skin was more deeply creased, her angular face grown gaunter. She’d gotten bigger, too, larger in height and frame than most goblins. It was said that Matron lines – and as a Matron’s daughter, Pickler was of a purer strain of that than most could claim – grew larger and lived longer than most of their kind, though the rumours of sharper intellect as well I’d never put much stock in. It was easy to claim superior wits when the opposition was kept ignorant on purpose.

“Your Majesty,” Pickler greeted me.

To my surprise, without a hint of irony. I glanced at Robber with a cocked eyebrow.

“It is your title,” he defended.

“She’s never that deferential,” I flatly said. “ None of you are ever that deferential.”

The sapper was, I noticed only then, carrying a handful of scrolls.

“Pickler,” I said, reluctantly amused, “are you trying to sweeten me up before asking funding for your latest project?”

A heartbeat passed.

“No,” she tried.

“What’s in the scrolls, Pickler?” I nonchalantly asked.

“... recipes,” she slowly said. “For cooking. Which is a pastime I took up since we last spoke.”

“I thought cooking was a strictly male thing for goblins,” I said, eyeing Robber.

“No Matron would ever eat anything another female had a hand in making,” he agreed.

“I began out of my deep respect for human culture,” Pickler said. “Which I never mentioned until now because...”

Out of genuine curiosity I let her try to think her way out of this one without interruption.

“... because I believed it so obvious it did not bear mentioning,” she triumphantly finished.

Her professed respect was slightly undermined by the way she’d said human culture instead of, you know, mentioning an actual culture. Still, I knew how to bring this to a solid finish,

“That’s a shame,” I mused, “I mean, I need to blow all that dwarven gold on something and you know how I love a good siege engine. I sure wish someone had schematics to show me.”

Robber discretely shook his head, the filthy traitor, but she wasn’t paying attention.

“I also have schematics, Your Majesty,” the Senior Sapper immediately said, voice almost visibly brightening. “For unrelated reasons.”

“So close,” Robber moaned. “ So close , Pickler.”

I glanced at the cup in my hand, finding it mostly empty, then shrugged.

“What the Hells,” I said. “Drag a seat here and show me what you’ve got. So long as Robber keeps pouring me wine, anyway.”

By the time the others began drifting in we were half an entire bottle in – I’d ordered our mutinous manservant to begin cupbearer duties for her as well – and loudly arguing about the practicality of even greatly ameliorated scorpions against undead.

“It’s not like I don’t think siege has a role to play,” I said. “But bolts aren’t going to win us an engagement, Pickler. Massed catapults . That’s our force multiplier.”

“Why don’t we just pick up stones and throw them at Keter, while we’re at it,” she hissed back. “Or better yet, import a dwarven pebble and toss that. Shame on your line , Foundling.”

“And you were so sweet to me earlier,” I mourned.

“Oh, a human put on a crown and started ruling other humans,” she scathingly said. “How unprecedented. You still can’t do abstract mathematics properly, I bet.”

“I’ve had other things on my plate,” I replied, perhaps a tad defensively.

“What’s this about shaming Catherine?” a voice cheerfully called out. “I can’t believe you’d leave me out of that.”

The rest of the lot had come as a wave, it seemed. Archer, who’d just cheerfully thrown her hat into the ring, and with her Hakram and Masego. At a glance, Juniper and Aisha was further down the slope and climbing up while talking animatedly. Everyone, then. I leaned back into my seat.

“Don’t mouth off, wench,” I replied to Indrani. “I bet you can’t do abstract mathematics decently either.”

“Funny you would say that,” Archer said, and grinned like I’d just made a mistake.

Godsdamnit , I thought, and prepared to take my lumps.

Seed II

“Patience is the art through which rivers shatter mountains.”
– Solon of Many Decrees, founder of the Secretariat

Deep beneath the beating heart of the Wasteland, in a repository of secrets ancient and terrible, two accomplices debated the truth of empire.

Alaya of Satus had been born to the Green Stretch, but her roots were not of the mud. Soninke of no great line was she yet Soninke still, and though some of the ways she kept to had sprung from the shores of the Wasaliti her years in Ater had seen her embrace the Wasteland’s rites. A caged bird in the Dread Empire’s most gilded cage, she had learned the songs of power from the carrion circling the carcass of Nefarious’ reign. With watchful eye and steady hand she’d taught herself to kill without ever baring a blade and to sow ruin with but whisper, the trade and tongue of those born high. Patient and smiling, she had learned the mistakes and the triumphs of those who called themselves her betters, and behind the smile taken the measure of the ailing empire falling apart around her. Like a chirurgeon and a sculptor, her hand had marked the cut. And so Alaya of Satus asserted this: Praes is a game that can be won .

Amadeus of the Green Stretch was the son of corpses now buried, born of a land tread by soldiers under different banners with every season. Duni, he was, his skin the pale shame of old defeats that Praes had deemed filth even in name, and never did he forget it. It was not the Tower’s promises that whispered in his sleep but the footsteps of his youth, the wheel of unending defeats seen from the side with cold eyes. In indignation he had become squire, and so sharp a blade found it that it slew his rivals and knighted him in black. To the banner he’d raised the disgraces of the Wasteland had flocked, be they green of skin and red of hand, Named hunted from above or every sharp mind and soul of steel that knew contempt but no captain. His was a company of the hungry and the lost, sworn to bleed for those unworthy of that blood. And so Amadeus of the Green Stretch asserted this: Praes is a mould that must be broken.

An emptying bottle of wine stayed on the table, and as arguing the fate of a realm was thirsty work it was not long before a second was opened – just as awful as the first, though to Amadeus the smile it brought in his friend was sweeter prize than the finest vintage would have been in its stead. Tipsy as they were, the Black Knight found that he more disposed to poetic language as he might have been otherwise though Alaya hardly seemed to mind.

“If a mill only makes poor flour,” Amadeus said, “one must first look at the wheat that is brought to it. Yet if, no matter what is fed to the millstone, the flour remains poor? Then the trouble is not with the wheat, it is with the mill.”

“You argue then, that Praesi are not of poor make,” Alaya said. “That the Empire is as a broken mill and so will only ever make broken things out of us.”

“Soninke, Taghreb, Duni,” Black replied. “Goblins and orcs and even ogres. There is no inherent blemish in any of these people, yet the Dread Empire spits out madmen and monsters with historical consistency. If the people are not the weakness, Alaya, it can only be the empire itself that is the flaw. And no amount of clever schemes can ever change that, because cleverness is the virtue of an individual and it is the structure itself that is faulty.”

Dark-eyed and lounging, long hair unbound, the imperial concubine – oh, how it had something at the heart if him clench in hatred every time he heard the title – sipped at the cup in her hand before raising an eyebrow.

“Yet this mill has ground out more than what you castigate, Amadeus,” Alaya pointed out. “It has whelped derelicts and disasters, true, but not only these: Maleficent first and second, Terribilis of the same. Sorcerous and Maledicta. Some of these were greater than others, but all were potent rulers.”

“Ah,” Black smiled, “but what circumstances were these? The Praes that Maleficent founded, that Maledicta and the first Terribilis ruled, is estranged from ours by more than thousand years. And the others you name all inherited debacles, an empire falling apart: Maleficent the Second came after the Secret Wars, Terribilis the Second after the Forty Years of Shame and Sorcerous’ predecessor broke three armies in three years on the walls of Summerholm.”

He shrugged.

“All three of these reigned over days where the order of things was fraying. And so I argue that our skilled rulers rose despite the lay of the Empire, not because of it,” Amadeus said.

“There we disagree,” Alaya frankly said. “Maleficent the Second was of middling birth and only a general in title. Sorcerous rose to prominence as the Warlock, not by ancient blood. Terribilis the Second was of a great line, true, yet never ruled as High Lord. In any other realm they would have been the shining star of a few years, then doomed to disappear when the adversity that raised them passed.”

The dark-skinned beauty elegantly pointed a finger towards the ceiling, and so the Tower above it.

“The Tower and all that comes with it ensured they were able to rule , not merely serve,” she said. “Praes does not merely follow the line of succession of an old blood, as the Callowans do, and hope greatness will come of that roll of the dice. We seek out greatness.”

“And do not find it,” Amadeus frankly replied. “Or at least not sufficiently often to balance the lunacy and incompetence that is much more frequently obtained. More often than not the Tower is claimed through murder, which ensures that the crowned tyrant is a skilled murderer but guarantees none of the traits desirable in a ruler. As a method of seeking greatness, it is ineffective.”

Alaya’s brow rose.

“And so what is to be the cure to this ailment you have pronounced?” she asked. “To shatter the Tower and to establish instead a royal line?”

“A monarchy in the western manner would not take,” Amadeus said, agreeing with what she had not said. “And to collapse the Tower would be more symbolic a gesture than practical.”

“And yet you sound pleased,” she said.

“You have led to the exact point I wanted to make,” Black said. “The reason a broken Tower or a proclaimed royal house would both be futile gestures is the same.”

“The High Seats,” Alaya said.

“The reason no madman or madwoman’s folly has been enough to break the Dread Empire is that, functionally speaking, more power lies with the High Lords and Ladies than the Tower.”

It was a bold claim to make, though be believed it the truth, so it was not without expectation of contest that he’d spoken.

“You are not the first to make that claim,” Alaya said. “Always the Haunted Scholar’s old work stands at the heart of it, the same three reasons given different wording: Ater, the Legions and accretion.”

Ater, City of Gates, the great capital of Praes and seat of the Tower. At more than half a million souls, it was the largest city and most populous city in the Dread Empire: the queen of the Wasteland. Within its walls the greatest works of a hundred tyrants stood, among them sown secrets and wealth beyond one’s wildest dreams. The Empire could not be ruled without holding Ater, for without it the bureaucracy was masterless and near every instrument of rule save for military strength mde beyond reach. It was also a city that could not feed itself, could not pay for its own upkeep and must keep its gates agape to even enemies for the Imperial Court to be worth holding. Anyone holding Ater must either rely for food on the ever-vulnerable Green Stretch, on the practice of bloody mass field rituals, or on a highborn ally who’d then gain great power and influence from that alliance – if not outright become Chancellor.

The Legions of Terror, in principle, balanced the scales of power as the largest and strongest standing army in the Empire. In practice, without the backing of the High Seats the Legions would always begin to decline. It was taxes and tributes that funded their ranks, and a tyrant attempting to assert authority over the lords and ladies of the Wasteland would see the flow of gold and steel dry up. War on the wayward nobility was one way to force the matter, and often nobles would flock to the Tower’s banner in those conflicts – but with the expectation of reward, always. Besides, the gains were temporary and civil war typically opened the Empire to Callowan raiding as well as extortion over trade by Ashur and the Free Cities. Greenskins, the Clans and the Tribes, might serve as loyal and effective soldiers if trained but fear of the strength they might gain from such meant they were allowed to serve only as expendable auxiliaries. The Legions were a noose, but one not always tightened around the neck of the ruling tyrant’s foes.

The last of the three, accretion, had first become known to Black as Sanaa’s Ruse . An old Soninke story about a young girl outwitting her uncle in claiming her mother’s inheritance. The eponymous Sanaa proposed that to avoid strife within kin a contest be used to choose who’d inherit, the rolling of a great stone over a set distance. The uncle was reluctant until Sanaa told him he would only have to roll the stone for a mile while hers would be for three, in deference to his age and power. And so he did not disagree, when Sanaa decreed that to ensure there was no cheating the stones could only be rolled in daylight. And only then did the uncle learn that his mile was up a steep hill’s slope, while Sanaas’ three were on flat grounds. And though he was a strong man one day’s span was not enough to finish the trial, and when night fell he could no longer lay hand on his stone. So it rolled back down the slope .

In a way it was the same with whoever claimed the Tower, for the tyrant usually became the enemy of near every High Seat simply by rising to the throne. And all those hallowed and ancient lines had at their fingertips centuries of accumulated power, influence and wealth. They ruled from cities impregnable by most means, and though no ancient bloodline was without its murderous squabbles the kinsmen banded together when the family itself was threatened. A Dread Emperor, on the other hand, rarely inherited the allies and influence of their predecessor. A decade of consolidation of authority in Ater, enforced by wars and a river’s worth of gold, could evaporate into thin air the very moment the slide of a knife decided succession. A Dread Empress must undertake the great game with only what she had brought to the Tower, while the High Seats had behind them the weight of all their line. It was not that the tyrants were powerless, for they were not: Ater was the key to ruling the Wasteland, the Tower a beacon gathering Named and with the throne came the treasury as well as the Legions. It was possible for a tyrant to rule largely as they wished, and indeed this was regularly the case. But not without the support of some the High Seats, and struggle against others.

With every fresh reign the Tower’s stone went back down the slope, while the great lines slowly but surely rolled their own forward.

“It is a well-written treatise,” Black said.

“It is the tedious lament of disgraced second-stringer,” Alaya mildly replied. “One who fundamentally misunderstands the reason the Tower stands at all.”

Amadeus inclined his head to the side, inviting her to elaborate.

“No tyrant is meant to rule absolutely save if they triumph at the same games you now condemn,” she said. “That is by design. From inception, the Tower has been a way to keep Praes as a single nation through what the first tyrants knew to be inevitable civil wars. It is the greater prize that prevents the Wasteland from splintering. The rise of the bureaucracy in Ater under Terribilis concentrated power there, which was dangerous to the fabric of Praes. A succession of Sahelian tyrants wielding such authority, for example, would have seen Aksum attempt secession within decades. And so resistance from the High Lords became entrenched, the difficulty in wielding greater authority increasing.”

She flicked a finger at the side of her glass.

“This is not an accident or a flaw, Amadeus, it is the very intent ,” Alaya said. “No tyrant may wield absolute authority without being exceptional in a way that no contemporary High Seat can dispute. The middling and the lucky are removed when they overstep, leaving only the splendid to undertake great works.”

“Your argument, then, is that the Empire’s difficulty in regularly producing effective rulers is not a shortcoming because it is on purpose,” the Black Knight calmly replied. “Which is absurd, Alaya, even if it is true. A government is meant to function , if it does not there is no compelling reason for it to keep existing.”

“It does function,” she said. “It does exactly what it was meant to do, which is keep the Dread Empire together and serve as means to power for the individuals of excellence who do claim the Tower.”

“The for all our pretence of being an empire we are in truth a pack of tribes, requiring a charismatic warlord to move us to accomplish anything of scale or ambition,” Black said. “We both describe as disastrous method of rule, Alaya. The only difference is that in your understanding the disaster is a deliberate one.”

“No,” she disagreed. “That reform is required I don’t deny in the slightest, so do not imply otherwise. Where our opinions differ is that you ascribe the Empire’s failures to institutional blindness and idiocy, where I believe them to be the consequence of an initially sound structure having survived beyond its relevance.”

“Let us compromise, then,” Amadeus drily said, “and say it was blindness and idiocy that kept the structure standing past its time.”

That earned him the flash of a smile, seen and gone in the heartbeat’s span.

“Reform is long overdue,” Alaya said. “On that we agree. Yet I suspect the manner of it required will see us differ again.”

“Reform is perhaps too mild a word,” Amadeus conceded. “Though rebellion has an implication of haphazardness I find rather insulting.”

While Black saw no particular issue with slitting the throat of unfit authority, he had no use for sloppy tools like riots and secession. Such matters were best settled with swift, steady-handed precision: the scalpel and not the torch.

“It would need to be comprehensive,” he said.

“Seizing the Tower, and then?” Alaya murmured.

“Dismantling the underpinnings of the power of the High Seats,” Amadeus said. “I would begin by arranging for mage academies under the Tower’s direct authority and outlawing those of the nobles.”

“And already we have civil war,” she smiled.

He was no fool, and so had suspected that might very well be the case. Though household troops represented the foundational military strength of any Wasteland highborn, it was through mages that most lines rose or fell. A talented practitioner, helped by a cadre of skilled mages and using a potent ritual, could turn around a campaign or make all manners of obstacles disappear. All the great lines had sunk fortunes into finding, teaching and binding all those born with a strong Gift in their holdings – though some such policies were better implemented than others, with Wolof and Kahtan’s traditionally the finest in Praes.

“There will be civil war regardless,” Black bluntly replied. “That is inevitable. Resistance by the High Lords can then be used as a pretext to begin purges of the aristocracy.”

“To weaken the lines?” she asked. “It would cow them, for a time.”

“It would be convenient to pretend as much at first,” Amadeus noted. “Though the intention is the extinction of every High Seat and significant landholding line in Praes.”

Alaya went still, then after a moment studied him very closely.

“You do not jest,” she stated.

“I am aware a significant amount of mages would be lost by doing so,” the Black Knight noted. “Yet if the cities of the Empire are to be purged of demons, their wards and walls pulled down and their private armies folded into the Legions then no highborn of influence can be allowed to live. I suppose children younger than six could be spared but offering any further mercy would be guaranteeing an insurrection some years down the line. It would be best to exterminate the aristocracy entirely, to my eye, but Wekesa is certain that would represent a catastrophic drop in mage births in the following generation. Minor lines can be folded into the bureaucracy instead, with the old High Seats turned into provinces in the Miezan manner – with appointed, non-hereditary governors of limited terms.”

There was a long moment of silence.

“Maddie, they would fight you to the death over this,” she said.

“That is,” the Black Knight smiled, thin and bladelike, “the idea.”

“The civil war, assuming you can even win it and –” she raised a hand to silence his interruption, “and I know you believe you would, given time to prepare, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation but Amadeus you’ve not even begun to see what they can do when feeling truly desperate – yet even assuming you do win it, it would take decades and it would ruin Praes as thoroughly as Triumphant’s conquests. And we would never entirely recover from the losses, not after the purges you describe.”

“Amputating a diseased limb is not weakening yourself,” Amadeus calmly replied. “It is salvaging one’s body whilst it can still be done. We would be lessened in some ways, perhaps. But from that position, we would then be capable of genuine growth. It is an acceptable loss.”

“It is a brute force solution,” Alaya retorted. “A chirurgeon’s garb with a butcher’s blade. The violence itself is not inherently unfit a means, but the impatience you would wield it with spoils the broth.”

Black’s brow rose, but he did not interrupt.

“Slaughtering an empire’s worthy of influential, wealthy and well-armed highborn sorcerers through war is impractical,” she told him. “First a more traditional reign need be established, to carefully oust them from the bureaucracy and the Legions. Then one must constrain their wealth, lead them to spend their soldiery outwards, and only then would they be ripe for the taking.”

“It would still come to violence,” Amadeus said. “The last step will be blade in hand.”

“The last step will be unnecessary,” Alaya smiled. “Irrelevance serves the essentially the same purpose as extermination, without the massive losses your method would entail. War to the knife is a messy affair, Maddie. Best the fade away instead: slowly, quietly, inexorably.”

“What you describe can’t be done,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch said, “without first seizing the Tower.”

“No,” Alaya of Satus softly agreed, “it cannot.”

The Black Knight sighed and reached for his cup, draining the last of the wine. Had he the choice, he’d prefer this conversation to continue for hours yet – there was still so much to say, to debate and plot. Yet what had been said here was already enough to see them both killed, if reported to the wrong ears. And if the Chancellor learned he was boon companion to a member of the Emperor’s seraglio, then the very kindest outcome would be the both of them leashed through that secret being held back. No, it was time to see to the loose ends. His hand came to rest on the pommel sword, and as librarians hid in the shadows they thought him blind to he set down the empty wine cup.

“You always end up having to get your hands bloody for the both of us, don’t you?” Alaya said, watching him with hooded eyes. “I think I might grow to despise that, one day.”

Black’s sword cleared the scabbard, and dimly he heard a few of the more cautious librarians begin to flee. As if that’d help.

“But not today,” he said.

“But not today,” she softly agreed.

He went out into the dark, sword in hand, and screams followed.

Chapter 65: Convivial

“Note: while the assertion that one’s friends ‘are an anchor’ held up to examination, said individuals (either dead or alive) seem no more effective in that purpose than a stone anchor of the same weight. The popularity of the saying remains baffling.”
– Extract from the journal of Dread Emperor Malignant II

With seven expectant gazes remaining peeled on me, I was starting to feel a mite cornered. Just a mite, mind you. I’d gotten out of tighter corners than this through cunning use of diplomacy.

“I was,” I began, “perhaps less than correct.”

Without missing a beat the crowd began to boo me, and that vicious little wretch Robber even threw something at me over the fire. I didn’t quite manage to catch it but it slid into a fold of my cloak and I picked it up there. I blinked, finding a rather fancy glass eye looking back at me. Where had he even – no, I didn’t want to know. It had to be someone of stature, though, part of it was painted but there was also coloured glass and that’d expensive as all... No, if I asked then he won. I’d get Hakram to find out later. Still, I pocketed the eye without any qualms. He could make a tidy little sum from selling that, if he got around to it, so we’d just call this a... pre-emptive fine. Hells, maybe I could get General Abigail to believe I’d had one of those on the whole time.

“Do the apology, at least,” Aisha called out, too well-bred to grin but with suspiciously twitching lips.

I sighed.

“Archer,” I began, ignoring Indrani’s enthusiastic affirmation of ‘that’s me, you know’, “you peerless beauty whose approval I secretly crave, and that’s why I’m so mean to you-”

“That sounds about right,” Hakram gravely agreed.

The filthy traitor. I was surrounded by treachery of the worst tonight.

“- I retract any implication that you are incapable of abstract mathematics,” I valiantly soldiered on. “There. Finished.”

There was a heartbeat of silence. Masego, swaddled in a rather unnecessary amount of blankets, leaned towards Adjutant.

“Is it on purpose that she did not apologize at any point in that sentence?” Zeze asked.

Godsdamnit, now even Masego was getting in on it. The little shit absolutely did know that I’d done it on purpose, I pulled this on him all the – ah, and suddenly his sordid betrayal made a little more sense.

“Ask to be made a countess,” Juniper suggested to Indrani. “Even odds she’d take that over actually saying the word ‘apologize’.”

That was a lie. I wouldn’t go any further up the ladder than baroness to get out of this. Honorary, mind you, not landed. I shuddered to think of what Archer might get up to with regular tax revenue.

“I apologize all the time,” I protested.

I got a few skeptical looks in return.

“Here’s one for the road, then,” I sneered. “I’m sorry you’re all so thin-skinned you need apologies in the first place.”

Alas, the resuming of the loud booing was the herald of diplomacy’s failure. Sometimes, I sadly reflected, the other side simply wasn’t willing to take the very generous and reasonable terms you offered them. That was not on you, it was on them, I reminded myself. Robber once more tossed something at me, though this time I caught it – it was, to my surprise, another glass eye. Just as prettily made, although the heft was lighter and oh Night the iris was brown on this one instead of blue. And angled in the opposite direction, implying my Special Tribune might have murdered not one but two foreign highborn officers just so he could use their glass eye as toy. For once the actual specifics of something he’d done had managed to surprise me, though the spirit of the affair I was painfully familiar with. I pocketed it too, because the little bastard would have hit me with it on the chin if I hadn’t caught it. It was decided by a tribunal of the people that I would have last pick of a cut from the pig that was nearly done roasting, my threats to have them all tried for treason leaving the unruly mob indifferent. Truly, they had gone mad with power.

Juniper insisted on making the cuts herself when shed judged the meat properly roasted, ignoring Indrani’s protests that it should have another quarter hour of being turned with spices sprinkled on the searing fat. I sided with the Hellhound, half out of spite for Indrani knowing all about Stygian abstracts when she’d been raised in the middle of the damned woods and half because I rather did miss the taste of a pig roasted in the College way: mostly unseasoned, and still juicy the way orcs preferred meat to be if it couldn’t be bleeding outright. Adjutant squatted by the fire with plates while Robber was charged with bringing the communal plate of biryani. Aisha was, to my mild amusement, the first to receive a plate and by sheer coincidence got some of the choicest cuts. Masego requested belly meat and the Marshal of Callow allowed him a fat slice, which Robber claimed to be blatant favoritism, and as bickering exploded I reached for my pipe with a smothered smile. Indrani sidled up to me casually, leaning on my shoulder like a pest as I stuffed and lit a packet of wakeleaf.

“We’re missing some people,” Archer said.

Her tone wasn’t quiet, not exactly, but it was pitched not to carry.

“Vivienne will come when she’s done with the Jacks,” I said. “Whenever that happens to be.”

“Not who I meant,” she replied.

I craned back my neck just to glance at her. Indrani looked down at me, eyes serious, though face to face like this I felt the urge to kiss her. I set aside the impulse.

“Akua can’t really be here if Vivienne is,” I murmured. “And if she’s allowed to sit with us just until Vivienne arrives that’s worse than not being invited, I’d wager.”

Not the last because it made plain the tensions between my appointed successor and the monster I’d absurdly enough come to like – and more importantly, rely on. I could expect Akua to take such a situation with a degree of elegance, if not necessarily enthusiasm under the mask, but I doubted Vivienne would be so agreeable.

“I think they’d both surprise you,” Indrani said. “It’s personal, between them, but our little thief also knows a thing or two about sitting around a fire with people you were trying to kill not so long ago. Still, once more not who I was speaking of.”

Ah. Her. I lowered my head and breathed in through the shaft of my pipe, the acrid smoke filling my throat and my lungs. I let the taste and warmth of it stick with me, and only then breathed out a long stream. I should learn to do tricks, I decided. With the smoke.

“I bet Hakram’s been tiptoeing around it all careful-like,” she drawled. “Like he doesn’t want to needle tender skin. But you’re made of rougher stuff than that, aren’t you?”

Tiptoeing wasn’t the right way to put it. A perch had been offered, on occasion, and my refusal to grasp it had seen the matter implicitly closed without it ever being outright put into words.

“You’d know,” I murmured, not wagging my eyebrows but conveying the sentiment by voice. “Although it’s been a while, so maybe you forgot.”

“Godsdamn,” Archer whistled, sounding impressed. “You never get that racy where people might hear. You really don’t want to talk about it, do you?”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” I stiffly said. “She declined twice, I don’t see the need to keep inviting her.”

I wasn’t a bloody widower in desperate need of a second wife, in so dire a bind I’d buy a white stallion and learn to recite Valencian poetry just to impress. Cordial disregard suited me just fine, and to be honest it was probably safer for her. Enemies wouldn’t bother going after a love affair gone cold if trying to get to me, not when there were deeper and more obvious bindings in my life.

“You won’t even say her name,” Indrani grunted, undertone amused. “Yeah, you’re totally over how that went down. How dare I suggest otherwise.”

“Senior Mage Kilian can be fetched, if you require it so deeply,” I replied in a clipped tone. “If she declines, shall I have dragged in chains? She doesn’t fucking want to be here, Indrani.”

“It’s a bad habit, that thing you do,” Archer seriously said. “When if it’s not a blade at your throat, you let relationships stay ambiguous by doing nothing. Bet she might have changer her tune, if you’d let a few more months pass before asking again.”

“It’s been quite a bit longer than that,” I coldly said. “I won’t open up a casket just so you can sate your curiosity, ‘Drani.”

“Oh, that one’s probably cracked beyond mending,” she casually replied. “But it doesn’t have to be that way all around. Send for Akua. And make her stay, even when Vivienne joins.”

My eyes narrowed.

“You don’t give a shit about Kilian, do you?” I said. “You just wanted me to feel raw enough I’d agree to this.”

The ochre-skinned woman grinned, sharp and pale.

“Sure,” Indrani admitted. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

We should have gotten her started on the liquor earlier, I darkly thought. Might have spared me all this. I turned to meet her gaze, unflinching, until our silence was interrupted by Hakram sliding a plate full of pork and biryani on my lap. He glanced at us, dark eyes missing nothing.

“Juniper cracked open a bottle of aragh,” Adjutant said. “Or do you two need to take a walk?”

“Nah,” Indrani smiled. “Aragh sounds good. We’re done here.”

She broke our stare first, strolling away nonchalantly, and Hakram cocked a hairless brow at me in her wake. Underestimating them both, was I? I doubted it, but beyond that assertion I saw a truth she’d not mentioned. If there was going to be strife, when would we next have so relatively safe a moment to handle it? Certainly not in Salia, or up north fighting the dead. Fuck . I really hated it when Indrani pulled the whole incisive insight thing on me, but now that I knew I was taking a greater risk by not handling this now I couldn’t really justify not doing it. Knowing Archer had manoeuvred me didn’t make it any less effective.

“Invite Akua up,” I sighed.

He cocked his head to the side.

“Ought to make for an interesting evening,” he simply said.

Adjutant moved away, boots crinkling against the icing snow, to tread downslope until he’d cross the wards and send one of the legionaries to pass the message along. Ah well, it wasn’t even guaranteed she’d come. I glanced down at my plate and frowned.

“Tenderloin?” I called out at Juniper. “Really, the tenderloin ? I should have you hanged.”

I saw Indrani pout and flip Robber a silver as Aisha hid a smile behind her hand.

“Let me go halfsies with Aisha’s cuts,” I wheedled.

Robber cursed in Taghrebi and flipped back the silver to Indrani, who took an overly showy bow. No one seemed particularly inclined to consider my suggestion, the bastards.

“None of you are ever becoming a countess, mark my words,” I bitterly said, and dug into my pork.

Pickler passed me the bottle of aragh, though, so maybe at least one of them would make it to baroness.

—

My wakeleaf was half-finished by the time Akua glided her way through the raised stones of the Mavian prayer. She’d chosen a rather conservative appearance, by her standards: a high-waisted dress with a long ruffled skirt, in red and yellow touched by eldritch patterns of gold brocade. Given that it was long-sleeved and went up to the beginning of her neck, it was one of the tamer things I’d seen her wear. Still, it was well-fitted and on a woman who looked like Akua Sahelian did that was enough to draw a lingering second look. I puffed out a mouthful of smoke as she approached the fire, bowing slightly towards me as she came to warm hands that needed no warmth against the roaring fire. I nodded back, and both of us pretended not to notice every conversation had died the moment she arrived. I took a moment to study reactions – Indrani was pleased, Hakram pleasant and Masego... staring with fascination at her torso? Must have been an arcane pattern that interested him. Those I’d anticipated rather well, though, so it was the others that got me curious. Robber was grinning, one of those needle-filled offerings that meant amusement so sharp it might as well have been spite. Pickler was indifferent, though the way she’d shuffled on the bench implied surprise and maybe a little curiosity. Aisha had put on the highborn face, a mask of pleasantry so perfect if might as well have been made of marble. Her I wouldn’t get much out of unless I asked. Juniper’s face was disgruntled, and without any hint of the respect I’d expected an orc to bear for someone who’d faced more than half the armies of Praes and Callow on the field without flinching.

Robber would test her, then, which I wasn’t all that worried about. Juniper, though? Contempt might be more dangerous there than antipathy and I suspected that was the way she was leaning.

“Spooky Saddie, sit your ass down,” Archer called out. “You’re not fooling anyone with the warming hands thing, you’re a damned ghost.”

“How have you not run out of those by now?” I said, reluctantly impressed. “Also, shade. Shade is the word you were looking for.”

“What can I say,” Indrani mused, blitherly ignoring my correction, “I’m just a giver at heart.”

“She has a list,” Akua slyly said. “She keeps it in her arrow-bag and her next one is Revenant Rags.”

Archer spluttered out it was lie, Robber cackled loudly before swearing to steal it and just like that the spell of silence was broken. Conversations resumed. Wasteland highborn, huh. I suspected she’d be on decent terms with half the people here before the night was out. She had a knack for charming others, even those who should know better. I let the warm chatter wash over me as I leaned back into my seat and smoked my pipe, following the threads of two different conversations at the same time. Juniper and Pickler had dragged a highly amused Indrani into a debate about whether or not her bow, due to its ridiculous size and the way her arrows were closer to javelins, was still a bow or in fact an exotic siege weapon. Pickler’s insistence that it was a derivative of a ballista by any reasonable set of principles ran into Juniper’s flat reminder that ‘she draws the string, with her arm, because it’s a bow’, while Archer’s insistence that while she was a trebuchet in the sack she was also handy with a string did absolutely nothing to help.

Robber was spinning an elaborate yarn about smuggling an ass – a donkey, not the other kind – in a cadet-captain’s room back his War College days for the benefit of a seemingly amused Akua, with the occasional dry correction by Hakram. Masego and Aisha, significantly more sober than most people around this fire, were discussing whether the old Alamans legends about the morions , barrow and underground-dwelling creatures that had a rapacious hunger for gold, silver and jewels, were an extinct people or simply dwarf-sightings made legend by the passing of time. It seemed the subject was of particular interest to Aisha, because I was bestowed the rare sight of Hierophant knowing visibly less about a subject than his interlocutor. As the one of the few people here who’d actually seen and spoken with dwarves I contributed a few details, though mostly I enjoyed the sensation of closest thing to home I’d felt in a very long time. Still, I was not so much at ease I’d not kept an eye and ear on where the first knife would come from. And as expected, two yarns later Robber turned a sharp grin and sharper words on Akua.

“Mind you, the fun didn’t end when we left Ater,” he drawled. “There was this one time – this was when you were still Governess in Laure, before we murdered your every ally and broke everything you ever strove for – when the Boss sent me south to kill your buddies as they moved west. Would have kept it up for even longer, except I was torturing this guy named Mulin who claimed to be under your protection and-”

Akua’s brow rose.

“Mulin,” she said. “Would you happen to mean Mulade Humin, by any chance?”

“Friend of yours?” Robber grinned.

“No, but the Lady of Salizan sent a cart’s worth of gold ingots with him,” Akua mused. “Never did get these. He was the heir to the holdings, so his mother was rather cross, but I did wonder what had happened to him.”

“Borer slit his throat,” the goblin said. “And I’m not saying we ate him, but Hells we were low on rations and if it’s Wasteland highborn anything goes, right?”

He was, I thought, looking to shock her. To get a reaction out of her. But then Robber had known little of the Empire’s high nobility, save when standing against them on a battlefield. As a student in the War College, he would have been considered under the protection of my father back in the day – who was known to brutally murder any highborn meddling with the College, and quite publicly at that. He believedt he knew what Akua Sahelian would be like, I thought, but he rather didn’t.

“Was he a screamer?” she asked.

Robber blinked.

“When you tortured him,” Akua clarified, “was he a screamer? Because there’s been these persistent rumours about the Humin-”

“Oh, come off it,” Aisha interrupted. “Even if spice birds did exist, which no one has ever proved-”

“There’s Miezan records, Bishara,” Akua solemnly said.

“By Calavia ,” the Taghreb replied, sounding deeply offended. “The same hack who wrote about giant crabs living in the Wasaliti and insisted the Blessed Isle was a nest for crocodiles that spoke riddles in High Tyrian. She wrote to entertain patricians in Mieza, not as true historian.”

“I can’t comment on Calavia’s accuracy in all things,” Akua said, “yet I once shared a table with Mulade Humin when we were nine, and by the noises he made when I ate the last spice cookies you’d think I ate his firstborn using only forks.”

“Is it me, or is it kind of titillating when those two argue about things?” Indrani pensively asked.

Godsdamnit, Archer. If you’re going to say things like that, at least say something I don’t kind of agree with deep down. So both of them were rather good looking, and them getting heated over debate was a good look. It wasn’t my fault I had eyes! Still, best not to say that. Akua hardly needed the encouragement and trying to get Aisha into bed had terrible idea written all over for all sorts of reasons. I set aside the distracting though but focusing on more practical matters. The more the two of them spoke, I saw, the more out of his depth Robber looked. I sympathized, but then trying to take the shade on in courtly games like this was not the wisest choice he’d ever made. I’d seen few people outright chew through Akua when it came to this, Vivienne most vividly coming to mind. Even Black’s attempt to humiliate and terrorize her into doing something unwise by making her nail her own hand to a table had not borne the fruit he’d wanted it to, back in the day, and Akua in those years had been nowhere as smooth as she now was. Without having ever drawn blood as he meant to Robber was turned aside, and the conversations moved on. When lively debate over the kind of riddles in High Tyrian a talking crocodile might have feasibly asked – Archer, the filthy show off, started quoting riddles from ‘Tyrant and the Fool’ in the play’s original tradertalk, a tongue that had common Baalite roots – I found Aisha elegantly sitting at my side.

“My queen,” Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara said.

“I thought I’d trained you out of that,” I sighed.

‘’It’s been some time,” she smiled. “And this is a serious enough affair.”

My brow rose, and I decided to pass the last of the aragh to a distracted Hakram instead of drinking it.

“I’m listening,” I said.

Aisha’s lips thinned, then she leaned forward and lowered her voice.

“Do you mean,” she softly asked, “for Akua Sahelian to be Dread Empress of Praes?”

Chapter 66: Silvered

“Trust given is a gift, costing only the giver. Trust earned is in balance, worth as much to earner as granter.”
– King Edward Alban of Callow, best known for annexing the Kingdom of Liesse

The urge was there to laugh in disbelief, though I didn’t. Aisha was deadly serious in her question, and she was one the better-informed officers at the highest rung of the Army of Callow. She had Juniper’s ear, working relationships or personal connections with most the Woe and the rest of my closest collaborators. She was, as it happened, one of the few people who knew of the Liesse Accords even if that knowledge was modest. If she could believe that, then others would.

“I do not,” I said.

The Staff Tribune nodded in graceful acknowledgement, lovely heart-shaped face touched by the firelight.

“Then this is a mistake,” she murmured, discretely glancing at Akua without turning.

I kept any hint of displeasure from showing on my face. Of all my old College companions I’d always had one of the more complex relationships with Aisha Bishara. Her high birth in an old Wasteland line had made it difficult to trust her, at first, and back in the days where Juniper and I had been more frequently at odds her open siding with her friend as made her one of the Hellhounds and not one of ‘mine’, so to speak. We’d gotten past that, over the months and years, but I’d never hidden my belief that quite a few Wasteland highborn belonged dangling from a rope and that’d always lain between us. Aisha was more careful not to offend, ever stepping lightly around matters she thought our very different origins would make contentious. Frowning now or thinning my lips would have her shuttering immediately, and that was the opposite of what I wanted. I gazed where the Taghreb had flicked the glance, finding Akua effortlessly drawing Masego into what had become a debate over the poetries of the east by mentioning the ‘riddling-sorcerers of the Nameless City’. The blind mage let out an amused huff and a began declaiming something in a dialect of Mtethwa I could barely make out a few words from.

“There are lines in Praes that are older than the Sahelians,” Aisha Bishara murmured. “Others who have more often climbed the Tower, or through whose veins greater gifts flow. Yet one of that shade’s kin ruled Wolof, when the Empire was first founded, and where every other great line of that days has withered and died the Sahelians still thrive.”

I rolled my cup against the flat of my palm, eyes hooded as I listened to Aisha in pensive silence.

“That woman right there is of the blood of the original murder, Catherine Foundling,” she whispered. “The first iron-sharp treachery. All under the sun have known this since the Tower was first raised, and yet again and again the Sahelians have betrayed through surprise. Because they are charming, my queen. They are beautiful and fascinating and so very useful that certainly it couldn’t hurt to bring them into the fold just the once.”

Aisha bared the fainted hint of teeth at me, almost like an orc would have.

“They are like ink, that lot,” she said. “It only takes one drop in a cup water, and no matter how much you pour from that day on it will never be entirely pure again. And now you have let one of the finest makings of that line into your hearth, Catherine.”

Her fingers clenched, her gloves crinkling.

“She’ll have half of them charmed by the end of the night,” the Staff Tribune clinically said. “The rest uncertain. I expect she could ever turn Juniper’s opinion of her around, given long enough.”

“You maker her sound like a force of nature,” I said.

We watched the laughter and warmth unfolding before us, separate from it as if a transparent wall of dread had been slammed down between us.

“She was Named,” Aisha simply said. “And she rose high during years were the iron was sharp like rarely before.”

An elegantly backhanded compliment sent my way, that. There was a reason I’d more than once mulled stealing the Staff Tribune away from the army and making her my foremost diplomat.

“She remains impressive, even as a shade,” I admitted. “And you’re not without reason to worry.”

“And yet,” Aisha said.

“And yet,” I agreed.

A heartbeat passed.

“This is indiscreet, and perhaps insolent to ask,” Aisha delicately said, “but are you-”

I waved the notion away before she could even finish.

“I am,” I said, “Callowan.”

I’d come to learn that just as the Wasteland’s worst excesses needed to be excised from its flesh, so did Callow’s own spiteful inclinations. But in the end, I was more than mind and principle, more than thought. I was flesh, too, and like so many of my people my bones were made of grudge. There were some trespasses that could not be forgiven or forgot. One hundred thousand souls. Some follies were beyond forgiveness even were it wished. Sometimes, tough, forgiveness was not the heart of a story.

“I will have long a price as I can conceive, in due time,” I murmured. “Worry not of that.”

“You have lingering eyes,” Aisha hesitantly said.

“They’ve lingered on you as well,” I amusedly replied. “Shall I make you empress instead, Lady Bishara?”

Her cheeks reddened the slightest bit, which was unexpectedly charming. Ah, if it didn’t have terrible idea written all over it... The embarrassment passed, swiftly mastered.

“Rarely has there ever been more poisoned a chalice than the Tower,” the dark-eyed woman somberly said. “I would not dare drink of that cup. Yet someone must hold it, and that person cannot be Malicia.”

Something hard and cold passed in the cast of her face, at that, whisked away by the noblewoman’s mask but not quite quickly enough.

“Agreed,” I replied. “And Aisha, about Ratface-”

She curtly shook her head.

“I thank you, Catherine, but I will grieve Hasan in my own way,” she said.

Aisha was the only person I’d ever known to call him Hasan instead or Ratface regularly. They’d been lovers, back at the College. A strange pairing, given Ratface’s deep hatred of the nobility and Aisha’s open pride in her own heritage, but they’d both been incredibly lovely and the intensity of a passion could make up for a lot of differences. They’d parted ways before I met either of them, though Ratface had remained... inclined in the years after. I’d thought Aisha less attached, but now I wondered. Faded affections could find fresh life in other forms, and remain sweet at heart for the good times once shared. I nodded in deference to her grief, for it was greater than mine and it had older claim on the shade of the man who’d died in my service at Malicia’s order. Damn her for that, and so many other things.

“It’ll be Black, if I have my way,” I said.

A moment passed as Aisha mulled over what I’d just said.

“You usually do,” she finally said, tone faintly rueful. “It will be a bloodletting that makes the War of Thirteen Tyrants and One pale, if he rises.”

“Change will come,” I said. “If fought, it will not come gently.”

“They’ll fight,” Aisha tiredly said. “That is our nature, for good or ill.”

“It can’t be like it was before,” I told her. “You know that. Nor should it. We’ve come too far for that.”

“And her?” the lovely tribune said, glancing at Akua. “Where does she stand, in this new world of yours?”

“Nowhere gentle,” I said. “Though that will be a choice of her own making.”

“Will it?” Aisha said. “I imagine many have thought themselves her captain, in days past. I see none still drawing breath.”

“If I were trying to conquer her, I’d fail,” I softly said. “I’ve known that from the start. She has ever been my better at those games.”

“And yet,” Aisha repeated, the echo almost chiding.

“Always she’s had a knack for masks,” I said. “More than wearing them she became them, you know. It was why she wielded her Name so well.”

“Masks are shed, eventually,” Aisha warned.

“What if you didn’t want to shed it?” I said. “What if wearing that mask you got all these things that some part of you, deep down, had been craving? Because Sahelians are still humans, Aisha. There are some things you can’t train yourself out of no matter how hard you try.”

“There are things she will crave deeper still,” she said. “For that too was taught. And when the opportunity comes, the same choice that has always been made will be made.”

I smiled, and remembered a winding talk had some time ago under morning sun. You have seen the worst of us , she’d said. And through that knowing taken our measure. But there is more, Catherine. She’d seemingly been speaking of her own kind, of the High Lords and Ladies. But there’d been the slightest chink in the mask when she’d spoken of her great-uncle who’d fled to Nicae. If even a Sahelian can have the taste for peace, there is yet something left to be kindled. A little too sharp, a little too brittle. The first hint of the bile she’d vented on Kairos Theodosian the same dawn that’s seen the birth of the Ways. And I knew, of course, that she was not beyond such exquisite deception. That she might have been weaving that intricate web around me since the moment she saved my life in the Everdark. But it wouldn’t matter, I thought, watching Akua Sahelian letting out a snort of laughter at some pointed comment Indrani had made. It wouldn’t matter because she’d want it to be true.

“Be watchful, Aisha,” I said. “I will be as well. But that arrow has already been loosed, and I will not gainsay it now.”

“May the Gods avert their eyes from it all,” she murmured. “You’ve always had an uncanny way for seeing what others do not, Catherine. I will trust in it once more.”

“With open eyes,” I smiled.

“Is that not the finest manner of trust?” Aisha smiled back.

She drifted away just as easily as she’d come when there was a lull in the conversation for her to slide into, adding her thread to the weave of it with practiced grace. Sometimes I envied how easily it seemed to come to the highborn around me, the social graces I still struggled with even when I genuinely meant to use them. There was something to be said for training from one’s youth, even if the other aspects of nobility held little worth in my eyes. The hours passed smoothly, after that, eased by the wine and food and warmth. Twice more Robber tried to needle Akua into anger and struck only at smoke, until even Pickler looked discomfited on his behalf. He did not try a third time. With the greenskins swiftly moving for second portions of meat and the cask of ale being opened conversation bloomed in every direction, sometimes coming together for virulent debates but just as often staying a chaotic multitude. A warmth had seeped in me that had little to do with the fire or the drink, though I’d partaken of both generously. Still I sensed it immediately when two people passed through the outer wards surrounding the tumulus maybe half a bell before midnight. I wove Night to have a look, and to my surprise found two familiar faces walking up the hill.

Marshal Grem One-Eye, the grizzled old orc who was still thought by many the finest general alive, was carrying two bottles of aragh and from the sounds of it complaining that my father hadn’t even offered to carry one – to which Black piously informed him that as a recovering hostage he could not trust himself to carry out such strenuous labour. A few of my people heard the steps before the two came in sight, but there was a beat of surprise when they were fully seen in the firelight.

“Black, Marshal Grem,” I greeted them. “Have a seat, it’s not like we’re lacking room.”

The orc Marshal – Black’s, not mine – sniffed the air with a bemused look on his craggy face.

“Is that horse I’m smelling?” Grem One-Eye said. “Haven’t had a skewer of that in decades. Last time was...”

“Fleeing after that raid on the Wall,” Black said, lips twitching. “When those Iarsmai riders went after us.”

“Wait, I think I had a Name dream about that back in the day,” I said. “When you lot went after the Commander of the Watch?”

“Oh man, I heard about that,” Archer enthused. “I mean, no lie, the Lady is terrible at telling stories-”

“No lie indeed,” Black said, lips quirking outright.

“- but this one she actually made pretty entertaining,” Indrani finished.

“Did she mention the part where the Commander beat Black like a rented mule?” I said. “It was almost embarrassing to see.”

“That detail certainly never made it to Court,” Akua slyly added.

“A grave exaggeration,” Black said, eyeing me from the side. “I was maneuvering her into a killing blow.”

“While she was manoeuvring you down a set of stairs, head first,” I drily replied.

He slid into a seat not far from me while Grem passed the bottles to a – oh Gods, that was just wrong – blushing Juniper. I’d forgotten she had this uh, intense sort of admiration for Black. She half-glared at me for having the gall to mention that the legendary Carrion Lord had once been thrown down a set of stairs. Gods, I should find a way to pass along that one dream I had where he and Ranger were getting all... bright-eyed at each other. That ought to cure her from this right quick.

“We must have been fleeing on foot for half a day before they caught up,” the Marshal of Praes said. “Flat grounds, maybe a bell from the marches proper. Twenty of them, with this big man in mail the ranking officer.”

“The cousin to Duchess Kegan’s husband, we later learned,” Black said.

The old orc grinned.

“The Watch is coming, he said,” Marshal Grem recounted. “Soon you will be in longbow range. You cannot escape our sight. Surrender now, or-”

Indrani made a whistling sound, like an arrow loosed, then a fleshy hit.

“So Hye shot him, naturally,” Black said. “Right in the throat.”

“And Wekesa, still drenched in sweat from the running and looking like a rumpled cat, he leans forward and he says all cool as ice,” Grem One-Eye began.

“Guess he didn’t see that coming,” the two old killers guffawed together.

They chuckled with the ease of two old friends sharing a worn and beloved joke, now thrown around as much for the fondness of the tale as for whatever waning humour it might have once held. I shared a look of secondhand embarrassment with Masego and Indrani. Calamities, huh. They were a great deal less dignified once you’d had a close look at them. Those left, anyway, I thought with a grimace. Sabah I’d mourn for she was worth mourning, but the Warlock I grieved more for how his death had pained and would pain Masego more than anything else. Little about the man had endeared him to me.

“Here, Marshal,” Juniper said, passing him a skewer of juicy horse meat.

“Thank you, Marshal,” Grem replied, openly amused.

“Sisters take me, let’s be done with the titles for the night,” I grunted.

“Your Majestic Highreachingness, I must protest,” Indrani gravely said. “It would be most improper of your loyal subjects to behave in such a manner. And also us.”

“Reaching high shelves is her only weakness, as it happens,” Robber drawled.

“Really,” I flatly said. “The goblin is going to make height jokes.”

“I am a veritable titan, by my people’s standards,” the Special Tribune shamelessly lied.

“I’ve seen piles of apples taller than you,” I scathingly replied.

“Ah,” Robber replied without missing a beat, “but did you see over them?”

That cut a little too close to home so I replied with a gesture more than mildly obscene and a few curses in Taghrebi that had Aisha tittering in amusement before her face suddenly went blank. Ah , I sadly thought, my own memory prompted by the sight. It’d been the same man who’d taught them to the both of us, then.

“I have a question, Marshal Grem, about your assault on the Wall during the Conquest,” Pickler said. “If you don’t mind.”

“Grem will do, around a fire,” the old orc gravelled. “You’re Old Wither’s daughter, I hear?”

Pickler’s face tightened with discomfort as the mention of her mother, the Matron of the High Ridge tribe.

“I am,” she said.

“She tried to have my liver ripped out, once,” Grem said. “Not even because she disliked me, mind you, she was just trying to insult Ranker by eating an ally’s flesh.”

“I am,” Pickler slowly said, “sorry?”

The grizzled orc quietly laughed.

“Not much like that old horror, are you?” he said, baring teeth. “Ask your question, girl.”

Even as Pickler began a long question about the order of battle for siege when attacking the fortresses of the Wall I tuned out the taking and leaned closer to Black.

“You actually here for the company, or the other thing?” I quietly asked.

“I expect the Pilgrim will arrive come midnight,” he replied just as quietly. “And if you are to speak of the Wandering Bard, as I expect you will, one whose veracity might be ascertained might be of some use to you.”

I felt a sliver of gratefulness at that, though I knew he would bring as many complications as he did uses by being there. Tariq could no longer see through me unless Sve Noc let him, these days, and even if they did let him it would be considered suspect. Black, on the other hands, was no longer even Named. The Peregrine should be able to use his trick without any complications, though I doubted someone like the Grey Pilgrim would find much to approve of in my father. My brow raised, when I caught a detail. I’d never actually told him that the Sisters could ward of the attentions of the Choir of Mercy – and likely an aspect, as I doubted angels would so frequently lend a helping hand even to their apparent favourite.

“Come now,” Black smiled, before I could say anything. “Pacts with lesser gods are not so rare as to be unheard of. Wekesa spent many a year trying to mimic through ritual the benefits one gains through such patronage without the drawbacks, though to only middling success.”

“It’s not quite as clear-cut as that,” I said. “We have give and take.”

“No doubt,” the green-eyed man said. “Besides, considering the trials you’ve put your soul through over the last few years I doubt there are many takers left.”

I gasped.

“Are you making fun of the state of my immortal soul, you perfidious heretic?” I said.

“I suppose I must be a heretic indeed, if the Arch-heretic of the East deems me so,” he mused.

Gods but I’d missed insulting the man. There were still so many things left unsaid between us, recriminations still simmering and hard arguments yet to be had, but what had been so deeply wounded in the aftermath of Akua’s Folly felt... lighter tonight. Not healed, and perhaps it never would be, but not quite so raw. It helped, I thought, that I had been allowed to feel for my own path so far from him that it was impossible for any part of it to have been his notion. Whatever the reasons the two older men had come, they certainly kept the conversation going. Black eventually went to sit by Masego’s side, the two of them conversing quietly, and that I did not approach. The grief they shared went back to long before I’d entered either’s life, and I would be an unwelcome interloper if I attempted to be part of it. Vivienne had yet to come, which had me frowning. She would not snub an evening like this out of anger at Akua being here, so it likely meant the Jacks were finding something of us. I’d like for her to be there, regardless, but I couldn’t deny that finally getting even a bare bones report about whatever it was the First Prince was dredging out of Lake Artoise would be a relief. As it turned out, though, like so often Black was right.

Mere heartbeats before midnight, the wards shivered as the Grey Pilgrim passed through.

Chapter 67: Starlight

“Without enemy, without backbone.”
– Callowan saying

I didn’t even have to say anything.

Black had been watching me discreetly ever since midnight’s threshold, and a simple nod of acknowledgement did the trick. Unlike me the green-eyed man had no connection to the wards that surrounded the tumulus, but by using me as a tripwire he’d effectively learned of the Peregrine’s arrival mere heartbeats after I did. Just because the man had lost his name hardly meant he’d ceased being perceptive – or dangerous. I slowly rose to my feet, hand reach for my yew staff, and watched from the corner of my eye as the former Black Knight drew away from the circle that’d gathered to listen to an old campaign story of Grem One-Eye’s. Hakram’s eyes found me, silently questioning in the dark, but I shook my head. The fewer people there for those talks the better, for though I trusted Adjutant as I would trust my own hand the Grey Pilgrim had no reason to do the same. I’d not further muddle the waters of what might already be troublesome talks simply for the base comfort of having Hakram at my side. I slipped away, not unseen of my friends but at least unquestioned, and tread between the dark silhouettes of the stones raised by the ancient Mavii. Far above stars hung in the night sky, pale constellations set in ink. Leather boots creaking against the snow I advanced, the edges of the cloak on my back skimming against smooth stone.

Tariq Fleetfoot stood a few feet further down the slope, upright and steady for such an old man. Robes of faded grey fell loosely down his frame, so used as to be halfway to raggedness, and the last wisps of white hair on his head stood out starkly as he gazed up at the stars. He did not have a staff, the gnarled old thing he’d snapped over his knee as the finishing touch to the Twilight Crown. In the days since that he could have easily found another, I knew, yet he had not. It tasted to me of a loss, something surrendered that would never be had again. None who’d given away their crown would ever find a way to fill that void and the lack of a walking stick was the least of it. Black drifted out of the stones a heartbeat after I did, tread quietly as the long coat he wore trailed behind him. Tariq’s jaw shifted, as I looked, a tensing so slight I might have missed it were I not already studying him. Wariness, I thought. The Pilgrim recognized Black’s footsteps, near silent as they were, and he was wary of the man they belonged to. I knew not what had passed between those two when my teacher was held prisoner, before his soul was mutilated, but the cold spite in the Carrion Lord’s eyes and the strain in Tariq’s shoulders did not speak to anything pleasant. Still, they were both pragmatic men in their own way. Like it or not they were in the same boat, and neither would be inclined to behave in a way that might just tip it over for all of us.

“Your Majesty,” the Pilgrim calmly said. “A beautiful night, isn’t it?”

“Iserre has its beauties,” I acknowledged.

The old hero half-smiled, then turned to dip his head respectfully.

“I invited myself to an evening of comradery, and for that I apologize,” Tariq said.

“You should,” Black noted. “I brought liquor, at least. Is your presence meant to be the gift?”

There was a slight pause, then he muttered heroes in a scathing tone. I sent him a warning look, but he was visibly unmoved. A consequence, I grimly thought, of having me try on those when I’d been a great deal less dangerous than I now was.

“Apologies twofold then, Black Queen,” the Pilgrim lightly replied. “Yet I believed it wiser to have this conversation away from prying eyes, and before too long had passed.”

An opportunity he’d not have again soon, I understood even if he did not spell it out. I was not all that surprised that the Peregrine had somehow slipped past a dozen layers of wards, patrols and watchmen to arrive unseen in the very heart of my camp. He was, after all the, the Grey Pilgrim: appearing sudden and unexpected was his wont, as much a part of his Name as the ashen-coloured robes. But he’d pulled this off because I was apart from the rest of my army, and my watchful patrons. If he’d tried to pull this on the tent where I slept, the Sisters might just have taken offence and good luck trying to keep that quiet.

“You were not unforeseen,” I said. “I require no apology.”

“Your kindness is appreciated,” the old man said. “I received the papers sent by the Lord Adjutant, Queen Catherine. They were... an interesting read.”

Well, it wasn’t like I’d expected the man to gush, slap me on the back and ask where he had to sign. Had I hoped for that, just a little bit? O Night, yes. I was in no way above easy victories when I could have them, which was tragically infrequent. Fingers tight on the dead yew in my grip, I carefully stepped down the slope until I was standing at the hero’s left. Black, never one to allow subtle theatrics to pass him by when they cost nothing, nonchalantly cut through behind me and came to stand at my left. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, knowing it’d only further entertain him.

“I expect you have questions,” I said.

Objections, too, but best get the clarifications out of the way first.

“Those were not the full text,” the Pilgrim said.

“The simplified manuscript,” I said. “Though no tricks were plied, Peregrine. I did not hide anything I thought might be contentious, only removed the many inkwells’ worth of minutiae that the full treaty will need to properly function.”

“Function,” Tariq repeated, blue eyes crinkling. “Yes, that is the word I was seeking.”

He breathed out, mist rising up easily on such a windless night.

“I have issue, as you must have anticipated, with some of the laws you would set,” the old man said. “Yet that is not so great a thing, for even if your terms were accepted without amendment I would wager the Liesse Accords being harbinger of more good than not.”

The Pilgrim’s already-crease face, wrinkled by long years of saving lives and taking them, grew serious.

“And so I must ask, Your Majesty,” he said, “what it is you intend as the function of your Accords? Their purpose, for I have glimpsed the lay of your work and it is neither salvation nor abolition.”

Oh, that was an ornate way to put it but no less true for that. I’d known from the very moment the thought of the Accords had begun to haunt me that there was only so much I could accomplish through them. It’d be a pretty thing, a treaty that promised a hundred or a thousand years of peace between all who signed it, but that was a fool’s dream. Old Terribilis the Second, the canniest of the Old Tyrants in so many ways, had once said that armies were like water: they took the path of least resistance. The line had stuck with me, even more than the rest of the Commentaries, and I’d seen since that the wisdom of it ran deeper than Terribilis had claimed. People, more often than not, took the path of least resistance. Because it was easier, because it was encouraged, because no one liked to struggle or get hurt. If I raised a dam in the way of our own nature – and, like it or not, people had been waging war one each other since the First Dawn – then perhaps it might hold for a time but it would inevitably break. And perhaps wreak greater destruction than before for the containment attempted. I could not change what lay at the heart of mankind, or orcs, or goblins or even the drow for that matter. I was not even sure the Gods could, and even at my most arrogant I’d never claimed to reach those heights. What I could do, though, was create a set of rules. Not too limiting, lest they be bucked, but limiting enough that never again would a city be broken by the strife of Named.

“I told you the first time we ever spoke,” I said. “What I cannot break-”

“You will regulate,” Tariq softly finished. “I remember. You spoke of your teacher too, that day.”

Black looked mildly curious, eyeing us both.

“He cannot conceive of a word where he does not win, you said,” the Peregrine reminded me.

And this is not a victory , he left unspoken. I’d known that was going to be one of the harder parts to navigate, though, for some time. That the Accords required trust in more than just me on the side of Below’s champions, lest trust in them die when I did. Part of me wondered if my teacher would take as an insult a remark I’d never intended to make it to his ears, though I stood by it still, and I flicked a glance to the side. He did not seem aggrieved, though only a fool would take what could be seen on Amadeus of the Green Stretch’s face as the sum of his thoughts.

“Yet I have lost,” Black said. “Undeniably so.”

I stilled. I’d not expected for him to speak in answer, save perhaps to send the occasional measured barb towards the Peregrine. Indecision warred in my mind, for though the Accords were my creation and I was circumspect of letting my teacher speak to or for them I could not hold them in my arms like some babe in need of soothing. They would grow larger than me, I knew, from the moment they were signed. They must, for if they did not this was no more than some Old Tyrant’s madness: though I would have chosen law and treaties rather than an invisible army or fortresses aflight, the doom of it would be just as certain. And so, though if felt like control of this was slipping through my fingers, I kept my mouth shut.

“Have you?” Tariq mildly asked. “You stand free once more, a leader of armies. Aligned with one of the rising stars of our age, shielded from judgement and assured seat and voice when the lay of this war and what will follow is writ. Have you lost, Amadeus of the Green Stretch?”

Part of me was almost offended on my teacher’s behalf, for I had seen victories of his making and they had little in common with the stuff of these days. Yet there was another quieter voice in the back of my mind that, while not agreeing with the Pilgrim had said, found it was not senseless. For someone who’d been a severed soul mere days ago, Black had returned to a degree of prominence with almost blinding swiftness. The itch was there to speak up, to intervene, because there was too much riding on this talk and this night for me to feel content in silence. I mastered it with some difficulty, knowing stepping in now might end up disastrous. My teacher had turned to look at the Pilgrim, pale green eyes considering, until he suddenly let out a biting sting of laughter.

“A victory , Peregrine?” he scorned. “This night, this moon, this year? The span of my days I have spent in the service of that searing, fleeting thing that’d even the scales for the smallest of instants and you would claim this to be it?”

The dark-haired man, though those locks now knew white as well, laughed once more. It was a sound like a bag being peremptorily emptied, a cup drunk to the last drop. More will than instinct.

“Those few I love are dropping like flies,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch harshly said. “My kindred atop the Tower spirals ever deeper into old follies and the order I have worked my hand to the bone raising has burst like an overripe fruit. The manner of things that have been lost...”

He shook his head, then smiled. Thin and wide and much too sharp, the blade-smile I’d come to know so well.

“These have been calamitous years, Peregrine,” the Carrion Lord said. “What gains were had always came at too high a price, and while I will not partake of regret neither will I shy from the truth that not a single of those games proved worth the candle.”

“You bleed,” Tariq acknowledged. “You rage, frozen and bitter as that poison is. But you are not cowed. You have ruled, but what do you know of rules? Am I to believe you will now put a yoke around your neck out of sentiment?”

The old hero eyed the aging villain with disdain.

“There is only so much of that in you,” the Pilgrim said. “And it never bore more than a feather’s weight on the scales, Lord of Carrion. I have seen the laws that would be the fabric of the Accords, and I see good in them for even if the children of Above will find their hands bound in some ways it is but a pittance to what it will cost Below’s favoured monsters. You will be stripped of manners of terror and brutality in myriad, forced to measure your wickedness and moderate your cruelties. You will be bound by fetters and told at the edge of the blade that ambitions cannot be without restraint. I see nothing, have seen nothing, in you that would take any of this as more than wasted ink.”

“It must be a pleasant world to live in, where any that stand opposite of you must be either grasping or grasped,” Black smiled. “Either the creature of the Gods Below or their apostle in wickedness – either way, what sin can there be in breaking us?”

He chuckled.

“Well, if I must be wicked to hold regard then wicked I shall be,” the Carrion Lord said, eyes coldly glinting. “I’ll speak for the crooked and cruel, pilgrim of grey, and give you the answer you deman.”

Under starlight the dark-haired man took a dramatic bow, and I could see in the cast if his face that he was relishing this. The chance to speak without measuring every word, considering the consequence on the balance of his Role and Name. To... cut loose, after a lifetime of ironclad control. Praesi, I thought, not entirely without fondness.

“The first conspiracy will bloom,” the Carrion Lord said, “before the ink is dry.”

My fingers tightened. That was not what I had expected of him. Or wanted. He grinned, a slice of pale bone cutting through the dark.

“We will twist around the spirit of every rule while obeying the letter,” the green-eyed man said. “We will lie and cheat and hide our sins, while dragging into light those of our foes and rivals. We will seek to twist the laws as a tool for our ambitions and a sword to slay our enemies. We will hide behind every protection afforded and make red art of the details that save or slay. We will defend our advantages and seek to unmake yours, never once faltering in our callous greed.”

The grin went wider still, a madman’s grin. A challenge.

“And yet we will uphold the Liesse Accords, you broken old thing, and wage war on any that would unmake them,” the Carrion Lord said. “Merciless Gods, you think they tip the scale in your favour? Your entire breed are servants of stillness, shaped from the clay of recoil. You came out victors of the Age of Wonders, but this... Age of Order will be ours body and soul.”

“You are mad,” the Grey Pilgrim said, tone hushed.

“That may well be,” the Carrion Lord laughed, “but am I lying ?”

Tariq’s face tightened.

“Peace will smother your kind out of existence,” the old hero said. “This I know and have seen many a time. Under law you will reach too high and pay the price of vainglory.”

“Why now, Tariq Fleetfoot,” the Carrion Lord replied with languid amusement, “that rather sounds like a wager.”

The Levantine’s fingers clenched.

“This could have been a beautiful thing,” he said. “The principles of Good made into law, however slightly. You soil this by your very existence.”

“I have only ever recognized one sin and one grace,” the green-eyed villain replied. “Your whimpering sense of virtue is as dust to me, Peregrine. Choke on it and perish, as you should have decades ago.”

Well, this was just lovely. Still it rung close enough to an accord from both sides that I wouldn’t be interceding for everybody if I stepped in now. You know, before two of the most powerful people on the fucking face of Calernia started pulling each other’s pigtails and calling their Gods a lie. Charming stuff all around, though I’d give it to Black that while he might have been a vicious shit about this he’d at least more or less gotten results.

“Glad to see we’re all friends now,” I said, perfectly willing to keep repeating the sentence louder and louder until objections died out.

Neither of them contradicted me. Well, would you look at that. Maybe they were clever after all.

“I am in agreement with the principle of the Liesse Accords,” Tariq tightly said. “Though when talks are had in Salia, I will argue against the articles I believe to be unsound.”

“I expected no less,” I said.

It was an effort to keep my voice steady, to keep the sheer fucking triumph out of it. Because if Tariq was in agreement with even just the principles of the Accords, then I was pretty sure a majority of living heroes would fall in line. There were probably heroes out there more powerful, but there were none more respected or influential. Getting Below’s side of the fence in order would be trickier, but if Black held the Tower and the Tyrant’s head ended up on a spike? It could be done. The fucking shape was there, now. It could be done . My excitement ebbed, though, when I remembered this conversation was not yet over. And that what we had to speak about might shake the foundations of the rest, if it went poorly. I hesitated on how to bring it up at all, and to hide the indecision reached for my pipe once more. Black gave me a mildly disapproving look.

“Wakeleaf is an ungainly vice,” he said. “One of the few things I ever agreed with Tikoloshe about.”

“I’ve tried that wine you keep bottles of,” I replied, stuffing my pipe, “and I’m not getting a lecture on ungainly vices from a man who regularly drinks something that tastes like rat poison. Muddy rat poison.”

“The mud makes all the difference,” my teacher pleasantly agreed.

I passed my palm over the pipe, black flame bloom amongst the stuffing, and breathed in sharply. Well, indirect talk had never been my strong suit so it was doubtful trying my hand at it now would somehow yield success with the godsdamned Grey Pilgrim of all people. Direct it was, then. I breathed out, let the smoke rise up towards the night sky and took the plunge.

“Pilgrim,” I said, “we need to talk about the Wandering Bard.”

Except I didn’t.

I was, instead, standing to the side of the three people – the Grey Pilgrim, the Black Queen and the Carrion Lord – standing in the starlight and snow as they spoke. I could even see the smoke wafting up from both my mouth and pipe. Shit , I thought.

“Catherine, Catherine, Catherine ,” a woman’s voice said, sounding almost pained. “You were so close but now you’re fucking it all up.”

I looked at where the voice had come from – to the side, perched atop one of the raised stones, the Wandering Bard was seated. Slender and dark-haired, with blue eyes and a rather attractive face. The accent, though, I had recognized. Alamans.

“Really,” I said, “Alamans? What, where there no other bodies left?”

The Bard cocked her head to the side, looking surprised and more than a little amused.

“That is uncanny ,” she muttered.

Raising a silver flask I’d not seen her grab, she shrugged and took a swallow.

“Right,” the Intercessor grinned after wiping her mouth. “So I’d say it’s about time we had a little chat, you and I.”

Chapter 68: Apropos

“A good liar finds every lie a fetter.”
– Arlesite saying

It shouldn’t be possible, I thought. How did this somehow not qualify as direct intervention? I was looking at myself standing between the Peregrine and the Carrion Lord, smoke coming up from my pipe hanging still in the air like it’d been frozen stiff. The Bard had what, stolen my soul out of my body under the nose of Sve Noc and slowed the flow of time to a crawl? Considering anything sorcerous touching upon time was known to be requiring the kind of power that’d break a kingdom to steal away a mere heartbeat this had to be a Name thing, but even if that proved true this was... My fingers clenched. No, Cat, you damned fool , I grimly thought. You’re looking for a heavy-handed miracle when this one’s the reigning queen of smoke and mirrors. I’d stood here before, though I’d been brought into such a folded moment by another old monster’s will. The difference was that the Dead King preferred titanic scenes – an old crusade assaulting the walls of Keter, the chaotic field some had already taken to calling the Princes’ Graveyard – while the Intercessor had subtler tastes. A lighter touch that hinted at powers she likely did not possess, but who could know for sure? Some sardonic jest at my expense, or an attempt to rattle me?

“Going in circles, are we?” the Bard drawled. “That’s fine. We got time, Cat.”

This was an illusion, I thought, or perhaps a memory made into something both more and less. Yet it was exquisitely woven, I’d admit, for the silhouette of the Intercessor perched atop the old stone was flawlessly touched by the cast of starlight that could not truly exist. The shoddy lute on her lap, more driftwood than instrument, was as much one of her signatures as the shining silver flask in her hand. This thing of many faces and a hundredfold in years, there were some who might call it a god. One that sat astride the boundary between the Gods and Creation, like some fickle high priestess of inscrutable designs. And for all that Kairos Theodosian had whispered in my ear secrets of her nature, there was still much more that remained unknown to me.

“So it seems,” I finally said. “What name do you happen to go by these days, Almorava?”

“Marguerite of Baillons, at your service,” the Bard said, bowing foppishly.

“Does it not get tedious?” I curiously asked. “Trading names and faces so often?”

“You’d be surprised what people can get used to,” the Intercessor said, then looked me up and down. “Or maybe not. You’ve had an interesting few years, haven’t you?”

“Same as you,” I calmly replied. “Heard you a little spot of trouble down south. Tyrant’s a tricky one, eh?”

“You get a particularly sharp one every few centuries,” Marguerite nonchalantly admitted. “Mind you, that boy’s not making it to thirty.”

I don’t think he’s trying all that hard to , I thought. I did not voice it, though, for though Kairos Theodosian was my foe and had betrayed me many a time – and would again, given occasion – I would still choose him over the Intercessor every time.

“Is this a warning, then?” I mildly asked. “That I need to fall in line if I want to make it to that age?”

She laughed, dark-haired and blue-eyed and looking frightfully young for what I knew her to be. Barely out of girlhood, and on such an ancient creature that was almost obscene.

“Shit, Cat, you think this is what – some kind of intimidation racket?” she grinned. “Behave now, young girl. No more slaughtering your enemies or I’ll slap your buttocks with a wooden branch.”

Her tone was gently mocking, though her face turned serious quickly enough.

“This is a favour I’m doing you, Catherine,” the Wandering Bard said. “Because you’re trying real hard to do some good and it might even work. If you stop getting in your own way, just the once .”

Ah. So we were starting with the friendly, smiling face then. Like I’d swallow that.

“I do make it a point of always believing ambiguous immortal creatures without question, when they assure me they’re doing me a favour,” I prettily smiled. “So, do I need to sign something before you take my soul or will a spoken bargain be enough?”

I winked exaggeratedly.

“For the first of my three wishes-” I began.

“You really are a terrible asshole,” the Intercessor said, almost admiring. “Hells, I bet even Nessie gets a little vexed at times and he’s gotten pretty hard to ruffle over the millennia.”

I was never going to get those wishes, was I? The disappointment only grew with the passing of years.

“You would know,” I smiled.

A heartbeat passed as she studied me.

“Spinning this out won’t allow the sisters to take you out of here,” Marguerite sighed. “You can stop trying to delay now.”

Shit. And I’d been trying to hard not to actually think about it just in case she could pick up on things like that.

“Fine,” I said. “You want to talk, Bard, let’s talk. What do you want?”

“I’d like for you to not help Nessie wiggle out of this, is what I’d like,” the Intercessor said. “I don’t mind your Accords, Catherine. I think they might even do some good for a century or two, before they become a noose around the neck of Calernia. If you get them signed, well, congratulations. But you’re about to scrap most your efforts before the year is out, and while that’s mostly on your head and I’d usually abstain from the mess what does matter to me is that you’re endangering more important endeavours.”

Even if we’d been under the noon sun instead of under the veil of night, I thought, I would not have been able to read the woman perched atop the stone. She’d been a weaver of words for longer than Callow had stood and though the Wandering Bard was hardly unbeatable or infallible she was not someone I’d ever have a solid grasp on. Still, even knowing she might be spinning a web of lies tailored exactly for me I had to keep her talking. When else was I ever going to have the opportunity of stealing a glimpse of what she intended?

“And what would those endeavours be?” I pressed.

“Killing the Dead King,” the Intercessor said. “For good. Not a soul-shard or an inhabited corpse, not his endless legion of expendable intermediaries. Neshamah King, he who once reigned over Sephirah and so doomed it.”

“I’ve no quarrel with that end,” I shrugged.

Which was nothing but the truth. Creation would be better off without the Dead King, there was no denying that. I fully intended on seeing it done, too, if the price for it was not ruinously steep. That did not mean, though, that whatever the Bard had planned was to be blindly welcomed. Assuming she was speaking the truth, which I would not. And now , I thought, comes the demand. Oh it’d be disguised, but the tricks being plied on me were not unfamiliar. A common enemy, a common striving, had first been established. Then it’d been hinted that she would not oppose my own heart’s desire, seeing the Liesse Accords signed, so long as I did not begin a feud with her. Now she’d make her demand, reasonable and modest, and she might even go a step further by throwing in a bribe. Some secret that’d be of use to me, or a light nudge that’d help me along the way. So, I wondered, what was it to be? Was I to bite my tongue when it came to sharing with the Pilgrim what I knew of her? Or perhaps it’d be something subtler, a particular secret that need be kept.

“Good,” Marguerite smiled. “Then when he offers you a truce – and he will, that much is certain – do not put your weight behind accepting it.”

I pushed down my surprise, keeping my face a bland mask. What? I’d considered the offers Neshamah had half-extended while in Liesse, since the end of the battle, the truces of ten or a hundred years. Tempting as they were, in retrospect the former more than the latter, I’d been growing increasingly inclined to refuse them outright. The long game was his more than ours, in the end, and the Dead King would never had made the offer if he did not gain from it more than we. Yet this was not what I’d expected of the Bard. I’d taken this little aside of ours, much as she pretended otherwise, as a tacit admission that my speaking against her to the Pilgrim might do damage. That she must prevent it. Yet she now spoke as if her great concern was war on Keter and nothing else, which was raising my hackles. I’d seen her act in the name of Below as well as Above, which meant she was not the heroine she oft presented herself as, but what she truly wanted did remain a mystery to me. The destruction of the Dead King was a believable striving for this entity, along with the admittedly chilling notion that there was little she was not willing to sacrifice to see it done, but it was... too clean. The two scheming immortals, plotting and scheming across the span of history with Calernia as their pawns?

It had the shape of a story to it and that was what had me wary. The Bard’s trade was the peddling of stories, and I could not help but think I was being sold one right now.

“And why shouldn’t I?” I said. “A reprieve would allow us to gather stronger forces before marching on Keter.”

Was I playing into her hand, I thought, by keeping her talking no matter my true intent? I could not know, but ignorance was cure to nothing at all even lies taught something of what was.

“You’d be clinging to the wrong story,” the Bard calmly explained. “In truce he will ‘hold’ the territories he seized in Procer. And after the truce runs out, you’ll take them back from him. Drive him back to Keter. And that’ll be your victory.”

She paused.

“And so nothing will change,” she said. “Oh, I burned a shard of him when he got greedy in Arcadia. That’s a loss for him, it is, but it’s a drop in the ocean. I did not wait centuries to let him slip away now, Catherine Foundling, not when he could be destroyed instead.”

“You’re implying that if the war is unbroken by truce, our victory will be in Keter instead,” I slowly said.

That by cutting a deal, we’d dilute the substance of the triumph that could be had. Which, while sounding to me of a repugnant repudiation of the practical for nebulous ‘principles’, sounded quite a lot like some of the hero-talk I’d heard over the years. No truce with the Enemy and all that. And coming out of the Intercessor’s mouth it was a lot harder to dismiss, I thought, for though I still doubted the virtue of such a stance I wouldn’t deny that as a story-knife it might just hold up. The more complicated a tale the less strongly it bound, in my experience, and I doubted anything short of steel fetters would keep the Dead King dead. Besides, this entire affair assumed we’d be able to win the war in the first place. Which was far from certain, in my opinion.

“He needs Keter, you know,” Marguerite idly said. “Everything else he can spare, but Keter? Without it he’s no longer the King of Death, he’s simply Evil in a box – and that, my dear, delivers him into my hands sure as dawn. So he’ll fight for the city tooth and nail, and that’s how he ends.”

“If that’s true,” I said, “why would he ever wage war? Why not simply close the borders of his kingdom and avoid the risk entirely?”

After a grisly demonstration of power or two, harsh enough they were seared into the Principate’s cultural memory, it was unlikely Procer would try his lands again. Few rulers would be fool enough to seek war with the peace of death to the north when there were better lands south and east to annex instead.

“Because I haven’t given him a choice,” the Bard candidly said. “If not regularly bled of strength by a war he’ll gather enough to try something genuinely dangerous, like conquering another Hell or ingesting another kingdom into the Serenity. So I’ve arranged for the war to be taken to him, again and again.”

“Not this time, though,” I said. “He’s the one who wanted to sally out, and he’s taking risks. Why?”

She laughed, fiendishly pleased.

“Because he’s been cornered, Catherine,” the Bard said, “by the passing of time. The Kingdom Under will have taken the entire continent underground soon. And on the surface cities are getting larger. Sorcery and learning keeping crawling forward. Larger, more stable alliances are forming. By the time there is a Twentieth Crusade, it’ll be able to win .”

“So he needs to do something now,” I said. “A sweeping change of some kind.”

“Oh, he caught onto that some time ago,” Marguerite said. “There’s a reason Procer is such a bloody mess. Ever wonder why the dead strike so often at the Lycaonese while the Alamans by the lakes are an afterthought?”

Because there are much fewer Lycaonese, and they lack allies in the broader Principate, I’d thought. It was much more feasible to slowly eradicate the northerners and their smaller population than it was with the lakeside Alamans, whose principalities tended to be more populated further from the coasts regardless.

“You’re implying he’s been sabotaging the Principate,” I said.

“He’s been sowing hate between those tribes since before there was a Principate, Catherine,” she replied. “Keeping them estranged, shaping their stories one incursion at a time so that when the black days come they’ll be too far gone to band together.”

“If you’ve known for so long then why did it come to this?” I flatly said.

“First Prince isn’t a Name,” the Intercessor sighed. “That’s what I work with, like your teacher told you. Names. I can’t touch the Nameless outside of some very narrow boundaries. And what a funny coincidence it is, that the Principate took the shape it bears to this day after Nessie and his friend in the Tower ran roughshod over it. You following me yet, Foundling? Kairos isn’t the only one who’s ever pulled a fast one over me. The entire bloody nation has been a fire in my lap since its founding.”

It was, I thought, believable enough. Though there was one detail more than the rest I focused on.

“Narrow boundaries,” I repeated, hinting at a question.

She looked amused.

“You spoke of me,” the Bard said. “It was enough, given who you are.”

And wasn’t that just the loveliest of ambiguous sentences? Who I was. It might even be true, given that I’d avoided speaking of her as much as I could. The last time I could recall, in truth, had been with the Tyrant of Helike and we’d been hiding behind the madness of the Hierarch unleashed on that night. She would not have known anything that was spoken in that carefully forged blind spot, Kairos having no doubt made it largely to check her. And that, more than anything else, was what had me convinced she was lying. Because it was a pretty story she was selling me, but she did in fact have a way to get to the First Prince: the Augur, her cousin and most trusted of advisors. She’d had that way in for years now, and still the Tenth Crusade had headed east instead of north. There was, I thought, a greater game afoot than she would have me believe. Oh, if I pressed no doubt she’d have an answer for me. A reasonable one, too, as for why it had all unfolded the way it had. But my instincts were screaming I was being had, somehow, for some reason. Why would you tell me any of this? Why are we having this conversation at all? You’d have me believe this is your first true opportunity, but since when would you see this as an opportunity at all? A sculptor does not owe a chisel an explanation.

Gods Below and Everburning, what was her fucking game?

“What are you, really?” I quietly asked, looking into eyes that were not the first she’d ever worn. “You’re Named, but like none I’ve ever seen. And for all your pretences you’re not a heroine.”

“I’m what was made so that no one ever eats the world,” the Intercessor said. “I am herald before the ruin; envoy when it waxes beyond restraint. What I am has no name in any tongue still known to the living or the dead, and many have gone mad seeking it. I’ve had as many faces as there are graves and never once did I taste true death.”

The old thing smiled.

“I am not an arbiter,” she said. “When the hour is kind, I am granted kind purpose. When the hour is wicked, I do what I must. And when the hour is mine, I seek the story that will free Creation. Until I have found it, you grasping thing, I see to the monsters that slip through the cracks. So crawl through the muck and do the passing things you can, but do not once presume to meddle in the greater works beyond your understanding – I will not tolerate the meddling of amateurs.”

She had given me, I thought, I reasonable enough answers. Not justifications, and only barely would I call them explanations, but it... held up. More or less. Enough that I could glimpse the shape a tale that’d make sense of it all. And that was why I doubted it, but I did have to wonder – had I sunk too deep into lunacy, that a plausible tale was enough to have me disbelieve? Had I become like Kairos, baring knives at the faintest hint of weakness? Or is this kind of hesitation exactly what she wants from me by doing this? The trouble here was that I had so very little to bring out as argument if I wanted to qualify the Intercessor an enemy in the eyes of the Pilgrim. She’d pulled strings for the death of Captain, it was true, but Sabah had spent a lifetime as an enforcer for my teacher and through him the Tower. She’d had a hand in the sundering between Black and Malicia being so deep and bitter, but again what sin would that be in the Pilgrim’s eyes? I had the words of Kairos Theodosian, which to Tariq would be less than nothing, and the memories of the Sisters when they had sought out Below and encountered the Bard as an envoy. Which, while less than sunny a cast for the Intercessor, was not utterly damning. What else could I bring up, save the words of the very Dead King we were not gathering against? Even I could not that deny that for all the hints of more sinister intent I’d seen her put the finger on the scales for Good rather more often than the other way around.

I had little to say, which begged the question of whether or not I was truly looking at an enemy. Oh, she’d sought my death once or twice – but then I’d been a rising villain attempting to claim Callow and considering the amount of deaths I’d personally brought down on Creation since I couldn’t fault her on principle either. In strategy, perhaps, but then given the scale she worked on it would have been painfully arrogant of me to pretend I knew everything she did. I kept my fingers from clenching, for it was too obvious a tell. Was that the answer, then? That I was to kneel and trust in the benevolence of some eldritch creature’s designs, to step only where she deigned to let me step and babble out thanks for the privilege ? No, I thought. Even if all she’d spoke was true, she no more owned the right to shape the Creation than any of us. She was my enemy, come what may. But not one I could face tonight, with preparations so feeble. If she caught even a hint that I was coming for her... I’d only be able to act in surprise once, and I doubted there would ever be a second chance. I clenched my fingers and unclenched them, allowing the conflict I genuinely felt to touch my face.

“You’ll back the Accords?” I asked.

“I’ll let them stand on their own merits,” the Intercessor said. “Neither more nor less.”

I spat to the side.

“Then we’re done here, Bard,” I said.

She peered at me, seemingly amused.

“That we are,” she agreed.

I blinked, tasting the warmth of smoke in my mouth, and Tariq Fleetfoot’s face creased.

“Why must we speak of her?” the old hero asked, tone wary.

And this was the moment, I thought, where I hinted arrangement had been made and began to bide my time until I could strike. Plotted behind bling spots with the Hierophant and learned from the sharp madness of the Hierarch. Like a clever little villain attempting to snuff out a great light. It was a story, I realized in a moment of cold dread. I’d been sold yet another story, on the sly, and come so very close to embracing it wholeheartedly. I’d not bit the bait when she’d approached me as a smiling offeror of advice and bargains, so she’d changed the story. The immortals warring over the world I’d again refused, silently as I had, and in doing so tumbled down the most dangerous of the three stories she’d woven. Believing it was my own notion every step of the way.

“I do believe she just tried to kill me,” I thoughtfully said. “So let’s drag out into the light every dirty little secret I know about her.”

Back in the old days, if I’d gone down the hill to meet the Exiled Prince in an honourable duel he would have made sport of me. I would have been, after all, fighting him on his own terms. Why would I offer the Intercessor the courtesy I’d refused him, even if clothed differently? I would not fight a weaver of stories the way she wanted to be fought, damn her.

Elegant had never been my strength, so time to drag us both into the mud.

Chapter 69: Repute

“Assertion that the end justifies the means in in truth embrace of the Heavens, for it is they who will decide the Last Dusk and so all justice then derives from them.”
– Hektor the Ecclesiast, Atalante preacher

It was a little unsettling to see that even without the Name my teacher could still shed the face of Amadeus of the Green Stretch and become the Black Knight. A single sentence and humanity slid down his face like morning dew, leaving behind a cold-eyed thing weighing the necessity of harsh violences to visit. The Grey Pilgrim, on the other hand, did not look surprised. Troubled, the lines on his face deepening with weariness, but not surprised at all. The blue-eyed old man cast a glance at Black, fingers tightening with something like concern at what he saw, but the faint weight that was the attention of the Choir of Mercy scrutinizing him was batted away like overbold fingers. Perched atop the same stone where the Intercessor had sat, two great and shadow-feathered crows gazing down with merciless eyes. They had no claim on my father, I knew, and he was the kind of man who would rather die straight-backed than accept patronage. The extended warding had been offered as a courtesy to me, their thoughts whispered against mine, though all three of us knew they’d have mourned losing out on an opportunity to take a swipe at a Choir without starting a celestial war.

I breathed in smoke, disconcerted by the way it was warm and barely touched when it felt like that pipe had been lit for so long. Masego had told me, once, that there was no such thing as time: only the perception of it, and entropy’s ruining touch. I couldn’t quite grasp that, truth be told, for even entropy’s encroachment must be measured by something . Yet the disparity between the acrid smoke against my tongue, the weight of the dragonbone pipe still mostly-full, and the span of the conversation I’d had with the Wandering Bard? They’d lent me a glimpse, perhaps, at what he meant. Had I still been Winter’s Queen, such a sliver of understanding would have been turned into peril and artifice without batting an eye. As the priestess to dark goddesses, instead I hoarded it away the way I did so many other half-espied revelations and the secrets they led to. I had little wisdom of my own to offer, but I was not above passing through that which had been bestowed upon me by wiser souls.

“That is an accusation not without gravity,” the Peregrine said.

He flicked a glance at Sve Noc, as if he’d felt their intervention, though what he saw there had him recoil from the unpleasantness. The cold night went colder still, and as the stars above grew more radiant from the wroth of the Ophanim the Sisters cawed out in mockery – though their touch against my mind was agitated, as the attention of an irate Choir of Mercy felt like a burn on their godhead. To my eye, there were times and places where Sve Noc would cow the Ophanim should it come to a contest of might. After they’d taken a petty shot at Mercy’s own favourite son was not one of them, though. I cleared my throat, intent on distracting the angels by distracting their champion.

“You don’t look all that surprised, though,” I mused. “Something you’d like to say, Tariq?”

The white-haired hero turned his attention to me, and as expected the weight of Sve Noc’s chiding began to wane with the turn. You’re welcome , I uncharitably thought. Now please cease screwing with the hero I’m trying to convince, if you would. Komena cawed in irritation at my gall, though Andronike signified amusement. I forced myself to ignore the distracting dance of their thoughts against mine, for this was too important a talk to attend to it only half-listening.

“That though you’ve been known to have... broad an understanding of what constitutes as such an attempt, I have no difficulty believing there was dispute,” the Peregrine said. “Younger Bestowed might defer to my decision to take a chance on you out of respect, even if disagreeing, but the Bard is both my elder and greater in the service of the Heavens. She would not feel bound to yield to my decisions.”

I breathed out and did not clench my fingers, for it would have been an obvious tell of my sharply risen anger. A broad fucking understanding , was it? Coming from a man who’d tried to send me to my death or shackling down the spine of a redemption story, that was a little rich. He could try to pretend he’d kept his hands clean all he wanted, in the hands of a Named a story was no less murderous a tool than a knife.

“You admit to the likeliness of an ally’s attack and in the same breath castigate her for having a dainty disposition,” Black mildly said. “Come now, Pilgrim, if you’re in the business of betrayal at least have the decency to display some skill at it.”

He looked like a person again, and not a monster with a mask of clay, but beneath the calm affability he’d painted over his face I could see the blades were still bare. I’d seen him smile just as pleasantly before he Spoke and ordered Akua to nail her own hand to a table.

“I scheme no treachery, Carrion Lord,” the old hero bit back. “And jeering at me will not serve whatever purpose you seek from it.”

“And he’s going to stop anyway, isn’t he?” I sharply said.

Wondering, beneath the sharpness, if he was being so acerbic with the Pilgrim for the very purpose of my reining him in or if he was simply enjoying mocking a hero. Knowing Black, I grimly thought, it was likely to be both.

“If I must,” he nonchalantly shrugged. “Shall we then return to the Peregrine simultaneously absolving himself of responsibility for the actions of his ally while also refusing to denounce her? ‘Twas a charming bit of rhetoric. Add a few insincere protestations of friendship and it’ll be like I never left Praes.”

Ouch. That one had to sting a bit, especially when taken by someone whose understanding of the Wasteland would be through the latest horrors mighty enough to leave Praes and become a peril for everyone else.

“I do not condone attack, if attack was had,” the Grey Pilgrim sharply replied. “Do not speak for me, much less with viper claims. Yet neither will I pretend that all servants of Above will follow me in making bargain with the Black Queen. As for the Wandering Bard, her Bestowal forbids as much as it allows. Behaving with grace will ensure she neither wants nor can act against any of you.”

“She’s not a heroine, Pilgrim,” I said. “I’ve seen her make pacts on behalf of Below. If you don’t believe me, I’ll even ask the Sisters to let your little winged friends have a look at me to ascertain the veracity of what I saw.”

That either the Ophanim or Tariq Fleetfoot himself would feel entitled to have a look at my bloody soul simply so that my words would be given due weight was infuriating, but that was the nature of the game. Trust was ever in short supply, in matters such as this. Especially when accusations were being thrown around.

“So have I,” the Grey Pilgrim calmly said.

I went still with utter surprise. What?

“I suspect I am a great deal more learned in what the duties of the Wandering Bard entail than you, Queen Catherine,” the old man continued. “An envoy does not decide the substance of the offer they carry, and some of the bargains the Bard was sent to offer were dark indeed.”

“You know she has a greater game, then,” I pressed.

“I know that across the faces she has worn she has warred against Keter wherever there was war to be had, and ever done good over evil whenever the choice was given to her,” Tariq said. “That the Gods Above do not have sole claim on her works does not mean she is not a heroine.”

“The moment before this conversation began, she dragged me out for an aside,” I flatly said. “And she-”

“It does not matter what was said, Queen Catherine,” the Pilgrim told me. “For you were being tested, as I have seen others Bestowed be and once was myself. By choosing rectitude over baseness, you emerged unharmed and proved you were not a menace that must be seen to.”

“So you’re agreeing, then, that the Wandering Bard just took a swing at me,” I slowly said.

He frowned.

“She would have if you were less than you are,” he said, as if it was evident. “You were not, and so this was merely confirmation.”

Black laughed, softly, the sound of it like cool silk.

“See, Catherine, there was nothing to it,” he smiled, sharp and cold. “The ordeal would only have stung were you a heretic, which makes wanton use of it perfectly permissible. Indeed, how dare any of us question the Wandering Bard’s right to pursue our demise whenever the whim takes her? How very impious.”

“He’s being a bit of a shit right now,” I said, “so it rather pains me to agree with him, Tariq. Even if you trust in the Bard – and Gods, I’d like to know what you have on her for that to be the case – then how the Hells does that translate to her getting the right to pull things like this? Nobody here is your fucking vassal, Pilgrim, much less Above’s. This wasn’t a test, it was a fucking act of war. And you’re defending her right to have done it.”

“I trust in a woman I have seen dedicated a lifetime to carrying out good deeds wherever and whenever she could,” the Pilgrim said. “I have known her to do this since before either of you were born, and in her deeds she has not spared heroes when they courted disaster. I do not know what she intended by acting as she did tonight, nor do I blindly presume it was righteous. Nor will I, just as blindly, accept your belief that she is... by your words, some manner of sinister immortal schemer?”

“You’ve seen part of her work,” I flatly said. “I’ve seen others, and they’re hardly pleasant. Her enmity with the Dead King is more or less the only thing I take as a given with her. She was part of the Lone Swordsman’ band, before he called down Contrition on Liesse. She was in the Free Cities before it all went to shit there, and she had a hand in Akua’s Folly as well – though the exact nature of what she did remains unclear.”

“And so she fought the occupation of Callow through every means at her disposal, when the rest of the servants of the Heavens forsook their duty to the fallen kingdom,” Tariq kindly said. “I’ve no doubt her actions were harmful to you or others beloved of you, but that does not make her sinister – only a foe you never evened your scores with.”

This wasn’t going to work, I thought. And it was why the Bard had been so utterly unworried about my talking with Tariq: she’d known she had decades if not half a century of a solid record with the man that’d weight against whatever I said. And the more I made this about the places where I’d fought her, the more this became a personal grudge between myself and his old friend. Bringing in Black’s run-ins with her would make it even worse, given that the Pilgrim would wholeheartedly endorse the decimation of the Calamities and the break-up of the partnerships that’d kept Malicia’s reign so strong. My teacher had mentioned she’d openly admitted to allowing a heroine to die so that Sabah’s death would be set in stone by a story, but she’d also likely been fucking with his head at the time so that his break with myself and Malicia burned all involved. And even if he believed us... well, Captain had killed more than a dozen heroes over the span of her career. From a practical Good perspective, trading a young heroine for the death of an old monster and the first crack in the Calamities would be worth it. I’d been counting on the shock of the Intercessor having acted on Below’s behalf to create the Night to jar him into re-examining their history, but there’d been no surprise. Which left me only with a second-hand memory in which the Bard had still outright advised annihilation over taking the bargain.

Shit. She’d covered all her angles there, hadn’t she? It made sense. The Grey Pilgrim had been Above’s foremost agent in the west of Calernia for at least half a century now, by sheer dint of the stories he’d have been involved in they would have encountered each other quite a bit. Plenty of time to work on him, which once more made sense considering how influential a man he’d been headed towards being for a very long time. No, it would have been absurd for the Intercessor not to foster strong ties with him: she was too old and too fair a hand at weaving to have left such an obvious loose end unattended. And to have attended to it in a manner that I couldn’t feasibly shake right now, I grimly thought. I had interests in common with the Peregrine, maybe even some shared principles, but also a red history that’d turned amicable only very recently. Hells, I’d killed the woman that’d probably been the closest thing he had to a friend without wings not even a week ago. Truce and my begetting the Liesse Accords was not enough to have him cut ties with the Bard. It’d be like going at an iron chain with a butter knife: how long had she spent to ensure the strength of those ties? How much time had been... Oh, oh . No, I’d been thinking about this all wrong, hadn’t I? I’d learned a few tricks in the art of bargains and how to wag my tongue instead of my sword-hand, but in the end I was not more silver-tongued than the silvertongue.

It’d been laughable of me to even try, because once more I was letting the Bard pick the face of our struggle.

The Intercessor had invested time and effort and trustworthiness in her relationship with the Grey Pilgrim, but while he trusted her he did not seem to defer to her outright. When he defended her actions, it was as an act of trust. Trust she’d earned over decades, and I’d tried to fight with respect mere days old. I’d been so fixated on removing the Wandering Bard from this entirely I’d missed the obvious: that the ties went both ways. That if she was relying on relationships she’d forged in the past to have a finger in every pie, then she had to live up to the terms she had set to those relationships. And considering the high esteem in which the Grey Pilgrim apparently held her, the standards she’d set could not be low. So if I made a reasonable request born out of reasonable – if, in the Pilgrim’s eyes, still unwarranted – fears then unless she had a damned good reason then she couldn’t go against it. No, wouldn’t be enough, I thought as I parsed out what doors it closed for her in truth. Relying on the decades of trust she’d be able to make apologetic noises but get away with it by simple virtue of producing one of various skeleton keys: it was necessary to beat the Dead King, allowing it would have caused suffering in years to come, had to prevent the rise of a great Evil. The Pilgrim would be angry, maybe, but the expectation would still be there that as long as the damage wasn’t too bad for the greater good I’d have to grin and fucking bear it. On the other hand, was I good? They couldn’t both treat me like Triumphant incipient and expect me to be their own personal Choir of Endurance. I’d surprised heroes pleasantly over the last few years because their expectations of me were low.

Well, they were certainly the easiest kind to live up to. Feigning indignation here would be risky, for though Tariq’s inability to understand that one could be good without being Good had left him strikingly naïve in some ways he was frighteningly perceptive in others. Thankfully, I wouldn’t have to. My jaw clenched and I did not have to look far for the anger. I’d stowed away the wroth, chosen the benefits of a clear head over it, but it had not disappeared . How many times was I supposed to let the whip crack against my back because my betters were not willing to see to their own? How many times was I supposed to let it go, that to kill me or mine was a virtue but that daring to crawl out of the ash alive – much less fight back – was a sin? I blew out the wakeleaf smoke, and the bitterness that lingered against my tongue was not only from the herb. There were parts of my father’s madness that I would never make my own, but some that’d always rung true: in the end, in their eyes we were not equal. And we’d never be people until we followed their rules and spoke their prayers, until we’d admitted that their way was right and ours was wrong.

“For small slights,” I hissed, “long prices.”

The Pilgrim’s blue eyes widened in startlement, and he raised his hands in appeasement.

“Your Majesty-” he began.

“Yes,” I coldly said. “That is who I am, Peregrine. The Black Queen. The Arch-heretic of the East. It seems you have forgot how we came to stand here on this night. Shall I help you remember?”

“There is no need for threats,” the Pilgrim evenly said.

And yet I could see it in his eyes, the rising awareness of who it was he was dealing with. Remember, you arrogant old priest, I thought. Remember that you did not take me for Triumphant come again without reason and then curb your fucking priestly tongue.

“You sing the praises of she who strikes at me and declare her worthy of passing judgement upon my works,” I mocked. “ You , Tariq Fleetfoot? By what right?”

I grinned, sharp and vicious.

“You are not victor here on this field,” I said. “You are the defeated, breathing only by the grace of the aspect I ripped out of you with my own hand. Your plots I shattered, your armies I routed and your own Choir stepped aside when faced with the glare of my purpose. And now you strut about like a green boy, arrogating the rights to lecture me when it is only my mercy that spared your throat my boot.”

“This is not the talk of an ally,” the Grey Pilgrim warningly said.

“You do not behave like one,” I snarled. “And if you can only conceive of amity as vassalage, then this truce is at an end.”

“You have sacrificed much to deliver it,” the Peregrine reminded me flatly. “And through such savage actions you would end any chance of the Accords being signed.”

I laughed, full-throated and cold.

“You think I’d give you a choice?” I smiled. “You think I chose peace because I fear the other path? I’ll not fight the Grand Alliance, Pilgrim. I’ll leave and let you die like whimpering dogs, alone in the dark.”

I took a step forward, limping, and he drew back.

“I’ll return only when I have the full might of the East behind me in array of war, and when I come back wherever the veil of night falls all will have a choice,” I snarled. “You can take up a sword and join my war against Keter, or you can do it as a walking corpse . If treaties and alliances fail, I’ll take steel and fire to the Dead King as Dread Empress, Victorious.”

His eyes went cold.

“You will find me waiting at the end of that road,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

“At the end?” I grinned. “You’ll be the first damned thing I step on, Peregrine.”

He looked at me searchingly, looking for lie or weakness, and found none. Harsh as my words had been, Gods but the truth of them simmered in my belly. I had chosen peace, but I was not beholden to it. And if the only way through was crowned in dread, then so be it.

“What do you want, Black Queen?” the old man finally asked.

“WANDERING BARD,” I screamed out into the night. “INTERCESSOR.”

I waited a beat, to see if she would appear. She did not. No matter, it would be enough to attract her gaze.

“You spoke for that faceless thing, Peregrine,” I said. “And so now you answer for her as well. If you shelter and safeguard her, then you are responsible for her actions: if she schemes against me or mine, if she moves against truce or Accords, then I will take it as betrayal from both of you.”

My jaw clenched.

“That will not be without consequenc e.”

And I would tell every soul willing to listen. I’d tell the First Prince, I’d tell Princess Rozala, I’d tell the Blood and every hero willing to hear me shout from behind a blood wall. But most of all, I’d just told the Pilgrim himself. From now on, if she acted against me she was knowingly fucking over the Accords and the truce that was the only thing keeping Procer standing in the war on Keter. If she pulled something, she now had to justify it to Tariq as something more important than the death of several million people. Silvertongue or not, there wasn’t much that would even those scales. This was, I ruefully thought, the principles of the Accords used once more: the practical realities of Creation being used to restrain its stories. Ties went both ways, didn’t they? Sure, if the prize was worth it the Bard would make her move anyway. But she’d lose the Pilgrim, and when she did strike I fully intended on being ready for her . If you’re without ties, you have no strings to pull , I thought. If you keep them, though, then a strong enough tug on the strings makes it a thin line between puppet and puppeteer. Tariq looked tired and grieved, but I was out of pity to spare.

“At dawn I’ll begin work on the gates into the Twilight Ways for the armies,” I said. “Be there or not, as you wish.”

I began hiking my way back up before he answered, intent on returning to the soothing warmth of fire and booze and good company. And before the end of the night, I thought, there would be a need to speak with Masego. He’d get whatever he needed to test his Quartered Seasons theory, even if I ended up cutting corners elsewhere for the allocated resources.

Deicide, sadly, was unlikely to come on the cheap.

Chapter 70: Dawning

“For light blinds just as surely as the dark, and hatred binds just as surely as love.”
– Sherehazad the Seer, Taghreb poet

I woke up to the feeling of bony elbows digging into my ribs. It surprised me not because I’d forgotten that Indrani and I had ended up in bed – I still felt pleasurably sore from those exertions, so it’d have been a shame to – but because she was still here. In my bed, though for once she was only mildly hogging the covers. The gift of awareness Sve Noc had granted me, I sometimes suspected without strictly meaning to, had me mindful that dawn was a little more than an hour away. It’d not been a long night of sleep and to be honest I still felt a little drunk, but worse come to worse I’d take a nap come the afternoon. I might need to whatever my intentions, if raising a gate into Twilight was as exhausting as I suspected it would be. My mind recoiled at the thought of it, for I would need the guidance of the Sisters to see it done and that was rarely pleasant or gentle thing. I stretched and yawned to keep my thoughts moving instead of lingering on the coming unpleasantness, sliding out of the blanket and sitting on the edge of the bed. Indrani began to stir awake and I smoothed away a puzzled frown. I’d wondered if our arrangement would be set aside until she’d resolved whatever she was going to resolve with Masego, but truth be told I’d not been entirely surprised we’d ended up in bed after the rough few days we’d had.

Honesty compelled me to admit I’d not needed much convincing when she’d offered, either.

That she’d stay afterwards, though, that had me wondering. Not at whether or not this was blooming into something more romantic in nature – for all that Akua had once claimed I had difficulty separating bedplay from attachment, Indrani and I had always been very clear that neither of us was likely to ever fall in love with the other – but at the nature of whatever accord she was trying to reach with Zeze. I doubted a man raised by the Warlock and an incubus would be all that inclined to give a single thought to what people might or might not consider proper, but I disliked not knowing what I was involved in. Even if only peripherally. That was on a personal note, anyway. As the nominal leader of the Woe, there were concerns about what all this fumbling might mean for our little band. Though in all fairness , I grimly thought, if it’s such a great concern I probably shouldn’t be sleeping with Archer. I bet Black would never have – huh, no, he most definitely had. With Ranger, of all women. I cast a speculative look at Indrani as she opened her eyes. Comparisons between the Woe and the Calamities had begun before the Queen of Summer had even granted us the name, so if I was to be my generations equivalent of Black and Indrani of Ranger? Ugh. That did feel a little sordid.

Indrani took my lingering gaze for something else entirely, and just so happened to stretch in a way that pushed back the covers and arched up her breasts. Pure coincidence, no doubt. Well. It would have been rude not to appreciate the sights, really, if you thought about it. Best not to mention that earlier thought about equivalences, I decided. Archer was not, as a rule, all that opposed to sordidness. She did like to rub my nose in it, though, so no need to hand her a full quiver.

“Don’t suppose I could convince you to stay in bed a little longer,” Indrani said, voice still husky from sleep.

And perhaps something else as well, though that might just be my continuing look at the smooth expanse of brown skin laid out before me.

“Any more of that and we’ll break the cot,” I smiled. “Wasn’t made for two people, much less that sort of... exercise.”

“Wouldn’t be as an issue if I tied your wrists again,” Indrani airily said.

Now that was just unfair. And surely I could spare a bit of time before leaving the tent. Or perhaps half my time. Unfortunately, my awareness of looming dawn made it clear that was not the case despite my body’s insistence otherwise.

“I’ll need time to prepare the grounds for the ritual,” I reluctantly said.

She sighed, though from the sly look in her eye I’d say my hesitation had been the prize she’d been after from the start. Indrani always turned pixie, after a shared night, as if the shedding of clothes brought out her vainest sort of guiles.

“Boring,” she said, waving a hand in dismissal. “Still, I’m already up. No point in going back to bed alone.”

I snorted. Yeah, she hadn’t been expecting me to accept then. It was still night out, and so it was not all that difficult to spin black flames around the stone basin to the side of my bed until the water within it was warm. I took the cloth to the side of it and began by washing my face, though I ceased when I felt Indrani looking at me.

“Not happening,” I said.

I swept my unbound hair back over my shoulder as I spoke, aware from how frequently Indrani liked to grip it that she had something of a fascination there. I didn’t have curves to display, unlike my friend, but I was hardly unattractive to her. It was my arms, though, that she was looking at.

“You’re getting wiry,” Archer said, sounding fascinated. “Haven’t seen your body change that much since the Folly.”

Had I gained muscles? Strange, since I wasn’t walking around in plate or sparring regularly anymore. Some of my surprise must have shown on my face, as she continued to speak.

“You were bulkier when we first met,” Indrani said. “Warrior-framed. You look more like a hunter now, made for the long stride instead of the shield wall.”

“You’re feeling rather poetic this morning,” I drily said.

“Been a while since slept in the same bed,” she smiled. “Don’t get used to it.”

I wet the cloth again, for the wetness had cooled, and wiped the lower half of my face to hide my hesitation. Ah, well. If I waited for either Indrani or Masego to tell me what was going on, I’d still be waiting on my deathbed.

“Should,” I delicately began, “I get used to this ?”

I flicked a few fingers at the messy bed we’d been sharing. Her expression was difficult to parse, and not for the lack of light in the tent: a sliver of Night had seen to that.

“Not sure yet,” she said. “But I did tell you, back in Great Lotow – that is that, and this is this.”

For you, maybe , I thought. I wasn’t sure exactly what she was trying to have with Masego, but any manner of pairing would rather imply he could have an opinion as well. It wasn’t that I expected Zeze to suddenly make like an Alamans priest and condemn the pleasures of the flesh as wayward. Mores aside, he was not above those himself: me might not have any interest in bedplay, but I’d seen him dig into fresh apple tarts like a starving orc would a pig. He’d not been overweight when we first met without reason. Still, I honestly had no idea of what he’d want of a relationship – any relationship – that wasn’t friendship or family. Didn’t help that I’d never heard him express a desire for one. His fathers had been married and a closed circle, as far as I knew, and among the rest of the band of Named who’d raised him Sabah had been happily wed and mother while Black had his... rapport with the Lady of the Lake, though I’d been made to understand that they only met every few years for a short span. Gods, none of us had been raised in a traditional family, had we? Orphan, diabolist and incubus, Ranger . Vivienne’s mother had been assassinated by the Empire, after all. Although, now that I thought about it, Hakram’s childhood had not been all that unusual by orc standards. He’d simply been an ill-fit for his clan, and later the College.

Hells, that might actually go some way in explaining why he tended to be the most stable of us.

“Still, I’ll not be offended if our company lapses until you have your house in order,” I told her.

She ought to know already, but sometimes it was best to have those things stated outright.

“And who will you work out your tensions with, then?” she grinned. “I suppose our shady friend might be up to scratching that itch, but you’ll have to train her up to snuff first.”

I frowned.

“That’s thrice now that people have commented on that,” I said.

Hakram had asked me directly, and though last night Aisha’s question had been a great deal more circumspect it’d been of the same vein.

“Come off it,” Archer said. “It’s hardly the first time I’ve jested about the Mighty Shadow Lass’ neckline plunging whenever she thinks you’re looking. No need to be troubled over it, Cat: she’s a looker, and invites the looking. It’s hardly a sin to accept the invitation now and then.”

On occasion it felt otherwise, though that voice was the same that reminded me there could be no just reason for allowing the Doom of Liesse to breathe free air. That a hundred thousand souls demanded, if not lasting torment, at least as painful an execution as I could carry out. I could not entirely articulate why it was worse that I found her attractive added to the rest, but it’d always had that taste against my tongue. That I’d grown to like, and in some ways even trust, Akua Sahelian was worse still. The fate I meant for her was just in the ways that mattered, I truly did believe, but I suspected many would disagree. And so the wheel spun, the endless loop of wondering if I being swayed or played or if the whispers were black and brutal vengeance indignant at being denied. I’d wondered these wonderings before, and no truth had come of the spinning. Which had me glancing thoughtfully at Archer, curious if that’d all been a skillful to steer the conversation away from a subject she was not yet ready to speak of. Given her enduring reluctance to simply state as much – for which I blamed Ranger, who’d beaten into her head while young that admitting anything of the sort was naked weakness – I wouldn’t put it past her. Best let those sleeping dogs lie for now, then.

“You can’t lecture me about sin, you wench. Who’s the priestess here?” I lightly replied.

That devolved into petty bickering, not that there’d been any doubt, and we washed up and dressed in quick order after that. Hakram was sleeping, for once, but we still found a fire going outside my tent and a pair of legionaries awaiting by it with breakfast. We chatted over the porridge as cuts from last night’s meal – horse, by the smell of it – were put over flame. The two were lieutenants, one from General Istrid’s old legion and the other one of mine since Marchford though she’d first seen combat when Winter struck at my demesne. The lieutenant from the Sixth was an old Soninke and quite obviously a bastard from some noble line by the cultured, highborn manner of speaking. They were both respectful but neither gazed at me with the near-awe I got from so many young legionaries these days. It was both a great deal more comfortable and made conversation easier. Archer left early after stealing half my horse meat, alleging she was going to have a look at Masego.

“Bring him, if he’s awake,” I said.

Pilgrim might not like it, but I was less than charitably inclined towards the man right now. As for the Sisters, unless they wanted to be present at every gate-crafting then the knowledge of how to craft it would have to be passed and I could think of none more fitting than Hierophant to hold it. Their last talk had, uh, not been all that civil but no grudge should be kept over that. They’d acted like carrion and so been treated as such, and it was doubtful Masego would keep a grudge on his side. I felt Sve Noc’s attention, brought by the thought pertaining to them, and their silence was implicit agreement. They gained nothing from being at odds with Hierophant, though I doubted it was writ in their fates they’d be bosom friends anytime soon. I finished breaking my fast, thanked the officers and claimed a steaming cup of the herbal concoction Adjutant had arranged to be waiting for me before I began my trek back up the slope of the barrow. My fondness for the place had grown with the use I’d made of it, but Sve Noc and Akua were all adamant: the heart of the old Mavian prayers was where the boundaries were thinnest. It’d be significantly easier to make a passage there, though sentimentality aside I’d had more practical objections.

The raised stones would make it more difficult for large amounts of people to pass through, and this gate into the Twilight Ways was meant for my armies to use. The footpaths up the slope were difficult, which meant there were no roads for supply carts and siege engines to feasibly employ. Besides, unless we knocked down the stones it’d be effectively impossible to take them through. My advisory triumvirate of assorted crows and shade had uncertain when I’d asked them whether after the passage was made it’d unmake it to bring down the stones. Akua insisted that it was a ‘boundary echo’ that made the place appropriate, and so it wouldn’t matter, but Andronike had disagreed. Something about an indent having a particular shape, and not existing without that shape. I was a decade of schooling in sorcery short to understand Akua’s opinion and short an apotheosis to properly understand Andronike’s. Still, even if the entire thing proved unworkable without the stones then at least we’d have a working pathway into Twilight for small groups and schematics for the second one to be made. The wards and workings around the tumulus had been removed, so there was nothing keeping the cold bite of the night wind away as I limped up the hill. I drew on Night to chase away the cold, though it was more an illusion cast on myself than true warmth.

I’d been able to feel her through the Night even before calling on it, so my face betrayed no surprise when after passing between the circle stones I found Akua Sahelian waiting atop the barrow. She’d eschewed dresses for a heavy yet elegant cloak line with fox fur, its deep red tones perfectly married to the heavy velour robes she wore below. She did not turn as I limped forward, nor when I came to stand by her side and sipped at the herbal brew in my hands.

“Deep thoughts?” I said. “I’ve a copper or two to spare for them.”

She did not immediately reply. Unlike with the drow, I could not taste of Akua’s emotions through the Night. The Sisters had told me it was because she partook of their bounty only through me, and the nature of that tie was older than the touch of the Night itself. It’d been inherited through the Mantle of Woe and Winter’s last gasps, which made things rather more complicated. Amusingly enough, in some ways my patron goddesses were as much in the dark as I: there was no precedent to any of this, and no understanding of sorcery or power was so comprehensive that this extraordinary an unfolding would be perfectly grasped. A reminder, perhaps, of the unbridgeable gap between gods and Gods. The shade’s eyes were not on me or even the dry riverbed of what had once been a place halfway to Arcadia: she was, instead, gazing at the now empty firepit that’d been dug yesterday.

“Do you remember Barika Unonti?” Akua suddenly asked.

Truth be told, for all their high birth and purported importance most of the then-Heiress’ helpers had half-faded from my memory. Sneers and tittering and arrogance could only have so many flavours without my keeping them in my remembrance only as some Wasteland brat who’d insisted on crossing me until death ensued. Barika, though? Her I remembered. The way I’d broken her finger, the first time I attended court in the Tower, and been punished for that mistake. More for the way she’d died. Convinced she was untouchable, even after helping Akua open a Lesser Breach straight into Liesse. I’d put a crossbow bolt in her eye as she knelt, and she’d died before she could even be surprised. And that death I’d made into salt to rub into Akua’s wounds that day, when I’d ordered her buried in consecrated grounds so that nothing of her could ever be brought back from the afterlife.

“I do,” I said. “She taught me a valuable lesson.”

“Looking back now,” Akua said, “I suspect she might have been my friend. Or as close to that as our understanding of the sentiment allowed.”

And still, I thought, the young Heiress had left her behind as an illusory decoy knowing I might very kill her for what was about to be unleashed. Part of me scorned her for that, though another wondered of the cold choices I’d made sending some of those I loved into battle and wondered if the difference there was not shallower than I’d wish. I did not answer. In part for my role in how Barika Unonti had died, no matter how worthy of that death she had been, but also in a moment of wonder. I’d suspected, even back then, that of all her followers Unonti was likely the only one she had any degree of real fondness for beyond that which usefulness garnered. It’d been years since I killed the girl, much less thought of her, but her mistress remembered her still. It was a small thing, and fragile. And it tasted like triumph to my tongue, for the fate I had promised Akua Sahelian was beginning to take shape.

“I used to think you lacked the knack for cruelty, did you know?” the shade smiled. “Oh, you’ve a way with the striking: to evoke fear or loyalty with an act and turn of phrase. Yet I always found your ways to be... clear. Lacking that touch of malice my people drink along with mother’s milk.”

A moment passed, wind stirring both our long cloaks.

“But not anymore,” I said.

“Last night,” Akua pensively said, “might be the single most cruel act I was ever subjected to.”

I did not protest. Because it was true. Because this was the sound of bile being bled out of tainted veins.

“I cannot even muster rancor, Catherine,” she said. “For it was a misery entirely of my own making, and exquisitely brought besides.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said.

She laughed, bleakly.

“Doesn’t it?” Akua said. “For I was allowed, for just a moment, the taste of something I might have had. And oh it was a heady thing, my queen. A place by your hearth, partaking of the warmth and belonging that radiates from it. And though they love you and have long despised me, your favour alone was enough for me to be made welcome. For them to...”

She turned to me with burning golden eyes.

“Do you not understand that the laughs should have been empty?” she hissed. “That it should have been artifice, at show put on for purpose. I am a better liar than any of them, Catherine Foundling, than any of you. I know the face of truth. After years of enmity all it took for them to make room for me by the fire was a word from you. I could have had all of this years ago .”

“Yes,” I agreed, “you could have.”

“The closest I have to match to last night is a girl I sent to die,” Akua bitterly said. “You’ve devised a poison so sweet I will crave the taste of it.”

I looked at her, in the dark before the dawn, and knew that in that moment either I had been made of fool or I had won. Once more I chose silence, knowing that the slightest hint of what might be taken as gloat would send the entire delicate edifice tumbling down.

We were silent still, when the others arrived.

Chapter 71: Verge

“I am told awe is made half of reverence and half of fear. Let us find out, knights of the Callow, if terror alone will be enough to teach it to the likes of you.”
– Dread Emperor Nihilis I, the Tanner

The last of them arrived half an hour before dawn’s start.

Since I’d been granted my first command in the Legions I’d gotten used to the way that large-scale ritual magic tended to require more people than you’d think, at least when it needed to be done quick and dirty – as was usually the way, when on campaign. It was often a question of needing to pool power so no one died or burned out feeding the ritual though I’d lucked out more than I’d realized when Masego, in those days still the Apprentice, had joined the Fifteenth. There was a reason that Black had preferred massed spells to the old standard of ritual cadres when he’d rebuilt the Legions of Terror from the ground up after the Praesi civil war: it standardized the arsenal of a legion’s casters. It’d become increasingly clear over the years that the way it was mostly Wasteland highborn that used cadres of ritual mages along with their personal armies wasn’t a coincidence. The heart of the matter was that for a circle of sorcerers to be able to use a ritual together without significant preparations it required for them to be highly skilled, familiar with each other and learned in that particular ritual. That meant keeping mage cadres together, for the Legions, which Black would very much try to avoid since by simple odds it’d mean a lot of Soninke and Taghreb officers of noble birth forming cliques with disproportionated influence inside a legion.

One set of rules for the aristocrats and another one for the soldiers was something my teacher had spent decades trying to dismantle, he wouldn’t tacitly endorse its resurrection in the very institution he’d spent so many years shaping. The Fifteenth, and later the Army of Callow, had avoided much of these issues by simple virtue of having Masego along. I’d not understood the importance of the role he played in large-scale battlefield sorceries until our last campaigns, where his absence had effectively made disappear half our ritual arsenal into thin air and robbed me of the High Arcana savant I’d turn towards for answers whenever some strange phenomenon appeared. Oh, Zeze had taught my mages some rough and relatively simple rituals to use on battlefields: his Lightning Strikes and the Spears of Fire remained a staple of the Army of Callow, who unlike the Legions simply didn’t have enough mages to be able to afford massed spells as a tactic. But even with those, without his presence there was significant drop in range, power and rate of fire. It wasn’t just that he’d used to have rather impressive reserves, but rather that having Masego standing among a ritual was like having someone to conduct a choir. He made up for the imprecisions of others, guided through the stumbles and kept precise the manipulations in the way that someone who wasn’t him just... couldn’t.

Akua had once compared it to having one of the finest swordsmen on the continent running recruits through formation drills, and she wasn’t entirely wrong. Still, with the Dead King’s cut those days had seemingly come at an end and the crowd that’d gathered was not a throng of half-awed young mages taking Masego’s every word for sorcerous gospel. With the mere arrival of Hierophant and Archer, our company had grown to the sort of dawn tales were made of. Two black-winged goddesses, silently looming atop raised stones in the shape of great and terrible crows. The Doom of Liesse, veiled and silent but not grown much the lesser from her hour of folly. Hierophant, stripped of sorcery but still vivisector of miracles and the kind of man whose insights even gods flinched from. Archer and myself were perhaps lesser figures, for what mattered. All that was required from me in this thinning darkness was a steady hand and the wielding of Night, while she was here as the hand propping up Masego as well as one who had more than once tread the demimonde between Creation and the Twilight Ways without needing any guidance. Should the Pilgrim demur from coming, it would be Archer whose intuitions would be relied on when the burn was made. Yet Tariq did come, in the end, though not alone: bleary-looking and huddling inside a thick cloak of fur, the Rogue Sorcerer was with him. And with those last two there were none left to await, so I drew first blood against the silence.

“Morning,” I said. “Or close enough.”

Only Masego, I noted, was kind-hearted enough to reply with a full return of the courtesy. Roland shivered inside his cloak, and the Peregrine merely nodded. His face bore the manner of calmness that one wore around a foe, I thought, and though I’d known provoking a return to that was necessary to tie the Intercessor’s hands I still regretted it. It would have been pleasant, to be on decent terms with the unspoken doyen of Above’s champions.

“Dawn’s just around the corner and it’ll make everything more difficult when it comes, so I’ll spare us all the small talk,” I said. “Most of my advisors in matters eldritch say this is where making a stable gate into Twilight will be most straightforward.”

“You’ll need an anchor for the other side,” the Sorcerer said.

“If the aspiration was a clean cut followed by material shoring up, perhaps,” Masego dismissed. “Night is not so precise, from what I’ve observed, and none of the appropriate ritual substances have been gathered here.”

I glanced at Roland, who unlike most people subjected to Zeze’s mild puzzlement at their ‘ignorance’ did not seem to have taken offence in the slightest. If anything, he rather looked like he wanted to have ink and parchment on hand. That ought to take care of itself without my intervention, then. Good. The Rogue Sorcerer was by a significant margin the friendliest hero I’d encountered, and I had no intention of letting academic rivalry get in the way of that.

“The Hierophant is right,” I said. “What I’ll need, though, is... a sense of where to aim for. Which I don’t have, unlike some of you. Archer might be able to help, but the person atop this barrow with the deepest tie to Twilight should need no introduction.”

Namely the man who had once borne the Twilight Crown, for however short a span. Bearing a mantle like that left marks, I’d know that better than most. It was no coincidence that I’d been able to feel this very place’s affinity with Arcadia long after having divested myself of the last of Winter within me. The Grey Pilgrim eyed me warily, though he did not outright decline. As expected of the man, he could already tell where this was headed and was less than enthused.

“Oh,” Roland said, shivering from the cold. “Resonance, to shape the depth at which the damage will be inflicted. Yes, that would work. A brute force solution, though.”

Archer could serve that purpose as well, but her ties were nowhere as deep. She’d tread the grounds of Twilight for longer than any of us, journeyed through its nook and crannies and even stood open-eyed while the transition from stolen shard of Arcadia to a realm took place. None of these were small things. But the Grey Pilgrim had given the last crown and borne the burden of giving the Twilight Ways their face and shape. The difference was extensive and would likely make a difference in my being knocked out for a day or a week. Figuratively speaking, one hoped, though my advisory triumvirate had not been willing to commit to it.

“Fine tools come from refinement over years and decades,” Akua said. “This is work without precedent, Sorcerer.”

The last word she spoke with the faintest hint of dubiousness. Had I been worried about the wrong Soninke, then? Shit. She was usually better about this stuff than Zeze, but then this one was a hero as well as a practitioner.

“He is correct,” Masego noted. “This is not unlike making a gate by melting stone and shaping it into a threshold.”

“And we’ve so many people observing to establish if there’s a better way to do it, next time we must,” I said, cutting in before pride could get anything started.

Mages, huh. And I thought it was the brawlers like Indrani and myself that had troubles with surfeit of swaggering.

“And how is this resonance to be acquired, Black Queen?” the Grey Pilgrim asked.

I suppressed a grimace.

“A close look at the traces Twilight left on you,” I said.

“Soul-gazing,” Tariq flatly said.

Little thick, coming from a man I was pretty sure had an aspect essentially dedicated to that and constantly used it on everyone, but I’d cut him so slack considering who’d be doing that gazing. Namely the Sisters, who for all my occasional appreciation for them were not the kindest or best-inclined of entities on Creation.

“An intermediary will be provided, should you so wish,” I said, inclining my head towards Akua.

Wouldn’t be as precise a reading, as for all her talents the shade did not benefit from the indescribable senses and perceptions that sprang from apotheosis, but she was talented. What she did pass along to me would be more than enough, and as she was not sworn to serve the Sisters the scrutiny might be more acceptable. Maybe. I wasn’t sure where Mercy would fall on that, much less Tariq himself.

“And who would you be?” the Pilgrim openly asked, eyeing Akua cautiously. “We have met before, that much is undeniable. And yet I now see you standing as a bound spirit before me.”

They’d met? I frowned, raking my memories and finding no instance. Even during the Princes’ Graveyard there should have been no acquaintance. The Battle of the Camps, I realized. Akua had run around wearing my body while I’d been stranded in an endless Winter nightmare and she’d even fought an assembled band of heroes. The Pilgrim would have had a look at her then, and though she had body of her own now I supposed the substance of what she was had not changed too much.

“I am one in the service of the Black Queen of Callow,” Akua smilingly said. “Naught else is of import here.”

“You chose this appearance,” Tariq frowned. “But are not bound to it. What are you, spirit? I have never seen the likes of you, not even in the olden-most barrows of the Brocelian.”

“Dawn’s coming, Peregrine,” I flatly said. “She’s bound to me and can wield Night without being in the service of Sve Noc. There will be no more offhand a manner to see this done, if you’ll accede to it at all.”

“Presumably the Ophanim would slay all here, if attempt was made to wound your soul,” Roland pointed out in an aside.

“That is a presumption, yes,” Masego calmly agreed.

Archer smothered a smile, and to be honest so did I. It was hardly the time, but the earnestness he’d spoken what would be a boast in another man’s mouth made it amusingly endearing. The Pilgrim’s eyes were closed, no doubt conferring with the Ophanim, and glimmered still with Light when they finally opened anew.

“So be it,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Trespass not, spirit, lest you find more than you bargained for.”

“Worry not, Peregrine,” Akua amicably said. “I’ve always held angels in high esteem.”

It was an effort not to choke. I supposed she technically wasn’t lying, considering she’d wanted to use one of the Hashmallim as fuel for her doomsday fortress. After all the posturing I’d expected some degree of ceremony, but what unfolded instead was the shade striding forward and silently asking for permission before laying her hand on the Pilgrim’s shoulder. He acceded with a nod, and closed his eyes once more as hers remained wide open. After a long moment she let out a long breath and jerkily nodded towards me. I hobbled forward and raised my hand, which she caught by the wrist: the sliver of Night she’d called on seeped into my own. I’d expected this process to be far beyond my ability to fathom, but to my surprise found it rather familiar. It was not unlike the sensation of opening a fairy gate, the sense of the needle going through the fabric and being... fated, for a lack of better term, to leave the cloth again in another place. What Akua had sensed from the Pilgrim and passed to me was not so sharp and narrow, but it was kin to that. A way to put it, I thought, would be that fairy gates under Winter had been the act of needling while what the shade had shared was having touched the cloth. I already knew from experience that trying to grasp the knowledge perfectly would result mostly into a searing headache, so I let it linger half-known and instead breathed out.

“For I have seen crowns broken and forged anew, snatched a star from the starlit sky and traded a season for half the world,” I whispered in Crepuscular. “Now that dawn crawls forward unbid, o Sve Noc, grant me might to wield and the conceit to wield it fearlessly. Where there is rampart let my hand make a road, and Creation deny not my will.”

The crows cawed, a resounding cry like the crack of a whip against the night sky, and Night flooded my veins thick and pure. I almost lost my foot but at my side Akua held me up by my elbow, having left Tariq to stand alone, and I gasped as I forced my staff of yew to rise.

“ Deny not my will ,” I hissed once more.

Night struck out, like a wave and a strike of thunder, like a flood raging down a riverbed long gone dry. And where it found resistance, I clenched my fingers against the long haft of few and burned Creation. Scarred it, so that the blackened and bleeding scabs would stand at the threshold and mark the path to be taken. It was like riding a tide, every moment a struggle, and I swallowed a scream as I felt my strength ebbing. I would not break, not before the work was done. Not even when the coolness of Night lazed like smoke in my veins, tainting my every sense, and in the far distance I felt the distant glare of light marching like a harsh vanguard.

“Catherine,” Akua whispered against my ear. “Catherine, you have to stop.”

Was she holding me? When had she? Some pried off the hand that’d gone around my waist and it was put around a shoulder at least. Someone taller than I. I grit my teeth, for all the distractions had loosened my grip on the Night – the work had slowed, suffered. Long and delicate fingers joined mine on the staff, and like a miracle the veil on my eyes lifted. Ironclad will became intertwined with my own and I shared a feral, savage grin with Hierophant without either of us ever looking away from the howling darkness before us.

“You can still wield,” I whispered.

Ashkaran, I dimly realized.

“A god rode my mind, Catherine, for many months,” Hierophant whispered back. “I have learned things .”

Power billowed out, and I was no longer a fool of a girl clinging to a tiger: we were Woe, standing side by side, and though we were battered things no creature in this world or any other had ever earned submission of us. We painted in Night with bold strokes, feeling those around us flee backwards for the storm in the making. Komena laughed in the back of my mind, and it was eagerly that she opened the floodgates between us. Andronike hesitated, until a splash of Night boiled stone like water and we shaped it like clay without ever glancing – after that there was a well of hunger, and Gods Below but the power they granted us. Raised stones melted away into liquid strings like festival banners, spinning into roiling winds of Night. With four hands we sculpted the stone prayer to long-dead gods of Arcadia and usurped the old sacraments like thieving masons in the garments of priests. Two tall pillars, covered with words that were a godless prayer in a dead tongue, were molded and carved. And atop them dropped down the closing of the threshold, a stone like door being slammed shut. Woven from the scabs and burns, sealed in rock where the nature of it could be obscured. Power would fade in time, we knew. But the hurt, the scar? Some transgressions had weight by virtue of being what they were. This would hold for a very, very long time.

After an eternity we half-fell to the ground, Masego’s fingers clumsily leaving my staff as I used it to steers us away from tumbling down like drunks. We still crouched, exhausted and exhilarated, as the sense robbed from us by the scale of what we’d wielded and built slowly began to trickle back into our minds. We’d felt something like this once before, in Dormer. There’d been more of us, though, Adjutant and Archer as well. We’d marched forward into the heart of the enemy, bearing the story of the Woe like a banner. This had been a smaller thing, I thought, the Queen of Lost and Found and the Hierophant crafting a miracle out of power and pride. But, Gods... it’d been like a drink of the sweetest of wines, like honey on the soul, and some part of me almost wept that it’d ended.

“Look, Cat,” Masego croaked out. “Look.”

I followed his trembling finger and beheld the gate of stone we had raised. The runes inscribed on the two great pillars that I knew, just knew , were twenty feet tall and twenty apart were no as gibberish to my eye where before I had known them as if they were my native tongue. But the thrum of them, the crawling flow of power going up them through the barrow like they were rooted there, it sang to me. Of the Twilight just beyond, a mere smear of blood on stone away. And all that power was kept bound, kept locked, by the rough and massive stone pressing down – and the scars it held within, like a secret under seal.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

And it was, in its own terrible way. We stayed there in the snow for a long time, at the heart of a circle of raised stones we’d unmade and forged anew, a barren barrow-top caressed by the winds. We stayed there until dawn crested in the distance, the faraway lights that’d be the final touch on our work.

“’lo and behold,” I murmured.

The first rays of the sun struck the stone and, as if reflecting from the spiralling runes and stretches of ancient symbols, spun like a dust whirl between the tall pillars. Just long enough a glimpse could be had of the realm beyond, of the endless starlit sky and the shady hills that could be journeyed to any journey’s end.

“There’s always something more, isn’t there?” Masego whispered. “Another horizon, another wonder. Another threshold to cross into deeper unknowns.”

It was his own truth he spoke, I thought, but in I heard the echo of Indrani’s as well. But what was restlessness in her, wanderlust, in him was instead awe.

“We’re not done yet, Masego,” I said. “We’ve bled to get where we stand, and when we come out on the other side we’ll not be the same people who began the journey. But we are so very far from done.”

He nodded, slowly

“Tomorrow will be ours,” the Hierophant agreed, tone tranquil the way old and dark waters were tranquil. “And if there are any who would deny us that, we will Wrest it from them with bloody hands.”

The word sang, and the world with it, as my old friend found the truth of third aspect and we sat silent in the warm light of dawn.

Interlude: Iron

“There are only two sorts of freedom to be found in Praes: the tyrant’s freedom, and the freedom to do as the tyrant said.”
– Extract from the memoirs of Hiram Banu, the Ninety-Year Chancellor

Her Most Serene Highness Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer, Princess of Salia, Prince of Rhenia and Warden of the West found that her patience ran thin, these days. Not for a freshly developed failure of character, she’d decided, but rather because there was simply so much to do and so little time to see it done. Petty temporizing from others had once been something to tolerate out of courtesy, to maintain the ties of etiquette binding all to civility and so providing a common tongue, yet now ever instance was measurable loss. And never a frivolous one, either, for all the decisions of middling import she could pass on to subordinates she already had weeks ago. Therefore, when the First Prince of Procer entered her solar at a brisk pace she was quietly irked by the absence of one of the three men she’d sent for. The Principate of Procer could be said to have three great assemblies of spies, when counting those attached to the sole office of the First Prince and not the particular of who sat on the throne. The first and foremost was the Circle of Thorns, whose webs of informants abroad had been the eyes and ears of the rulers of Procer for centuries now: its current highest patron, the skeletal and balding Louis of Sartrons, rose smoothly as she entered. A noticeable moment later the other man in the room, Balthazar Serigny, followed suit.

That hirsute bear of a man, his face a bold battlefield between ferocious eyebrows and an uncompromising beard, was the head of the Silver Letters. A pack of thieves and assassins grown so successful some centuries past they were given official sanction and from then on used as the spies of the First Princes within the boundaries of the Principate itself. Balthazar the Bastard, as his subordinates called him without speaking of the circumstances of his birth, had opposed Cordelia’s rise to power during the Great War and remained in place after her crowning largely because he was too difficult to swiftly replace and the successor she’d handpicked for him was not yet ready. There should have been a third on his feet there, Simon of Gorgeault, standing in the name of the Holy Society. That one was as much a diplomat as a spy, for the Holy Society and its assembly of highborn lay brothers and sisters was at times more an informal channel of communication with the House of Light than shadowy obtainers of secrets. Gorgeault’s lateness grated on her more than it should have, Cordelia knew, for knowing the man it would not be without reason. Yet his close ties with the House and in particular the Holies – that informal assembly of the influential within the House whose equally informal decisions ever became formal policy – were doing him no favour in her eyes of late.

“A good morn to you both,” the First Prince of Procer calmly said.

She paused long enough to allow the two spymasters to return the courtesy.

“Be seated,” Cordelia Hasenbach ordered. “We will begin without Brother Simon.”

The blonde Lycaonese pressed her skirts against her legs to more elegantly sit her chair, dismissing the attending servants with a polite shake of the head when inquiries were made by silent look. She had no intention of entertaining these men long enough for refreshments to be required, much less a meal. Besides, should she offer either etiquette would require small talk be made over them before serious matters were spoken of and she had absolutely no intention of wasting half an hour on inanities when Procer was rarely more than one calamitous day away from annihilation.

“We will attend to the Iserran situation first,” Cordelia stated. “Gentlemen, am I to understand that disaster was truly averted?”

The men shared a silent glance, the rapacious-faced head of the Circle and the half-wild former fantassin who’d killed and blackmailed his way to supreme prominence in the Silver Letters. It was the latter that spoke first, first clearing his throat in a surprisingly dainty manner for a man of his looks and conduct.

“We have confirmed that the foreign forces have all begun to evacuate the plains,” Balthazar the Bastard said. “It was made known to the rank and file of both the Army of Callow and the Legions of Terror that winter quarters will be raised in Arans before they went through the gate, so I believe it likely the Black Queen intends to keep her word.”

Of that there had been little doubt in the First Prince’s mind: she’d read a transcript of these Liesse Accords, passed along by hasty scrying. It was becoming increasingly evident they’d all severely underestimated Catherine Foundling, and that her game was a long one indeed. Cordelia’s cold blue eyes moved to the other man sitting across from her, inviting elaboration.

“The League of Free Cities has agreed to begin marching south, and to the offered sale of supplies as the costs you offered,” Louis said. “The Hierarch himself is said to have granted full authority to his advisory council over the matter, though the Tyrant of Helike remains the dominant force among it.”

Though not by so large a margin as he would have been before what her people had taken to calling the Princes’ Graveyard. An ornate affectation, given only a single royal had died instead of abdicated, yet the Alamans fondness for grand appellations was not do be denied. The League’s audacious – foolish, some would call it – march through the Waning Woods to take the Principate by surprise had meant it would need to live off the land after the supplies it brought began to run out, given the lack of supply train. The situation for them was not yet dire, yet the Circle of Thorns had learned that they had perhaps two months left before their grain ran out. Which was something of an issue for the invaders, given that the Carrion Lord had already stolen or torched every granary in the heartlands of the Principate: there was nothing left for them to steal in turn. Offering just enough supplies to fend off starvation in exchange for a retreat south had been a gamble, but a necessary one. She could not let more than a hundred thousand foreigners camp in Iserre while talks took place here in Salia. For one, it was much too close to the capital. More importantly, if the League’s armies stayed in Iserre so much enough of a force to check it even if truce was currently being had.

Oh, Kairos Theodosian would no doubt turn on her as soon as the conference came at an end and he’d secured whatever prize he now sought. Yet by that time the armies of the League would be much further south, perhaps as far as Tenerife, and the military situation would have changed. The Black Queen had, after all, admitted to making bargain with the Kingdom Under concerning sale of armaments and implied to Arnaud that arrangement could be had there between herself and the Principate. That meant delaying resumption of hostilities with the League a valid tactic, for by the time the blades came out again the massed levies Cordelia had ordered in all southern and western principalities would be furnished with fresh dwarven weaponry and be ready to hold the line against the League’s treachery. It would have ruinous costs in both lives and gold, but it was either that or allowing the Tyrant of Helike to dictate the course of the war on Keter however he wished. The Prince of Rhenia had sent her own people to die and abandoned her kinsmen to the Dead – she could and would stomach Arlesite conscripts bleeding to defend their own lands. Louis of Satrons’ pause was smoothly filled by the other spymaster a heartbeat later.

“My people in Iserre had a look at the delegations when the Black Queen opened the fairy gate for them,” Balthazar said. “Getting too close was judged risky – the Jacks are sharp-eyed and there’s goblins skulking around everywhere – but we believe the agreements were honoured when it comes to soldier strength.”

Cordelia’s brow did not rise, for she was better bred than that, yet she politely expressed surprise.

“Even the Carrion Lord?” she asked.

The offer extended had been an escort of four thousand for every representative attending the conference, which Cordelia had intended to mean the Hierarch and the Queen of Callow. Now instead there was a certain ‘General Rumena’ representing the interests of the Empire Ever Dark and requiring their own escort, which was unfortunate confirmation the drow were on the move once more. The suggestion the Carrion Lord would attend as representative for the Dread Empire of Praes had been like ash in Cordelia’s mouth, given the man’s cold-blooded scheme for the death of thousands and thousands of innocents. In all fairness, Foundling seemed to have understood the... delicacy of that situation and offered a compromise: she’d be responsible for the man’s actions while in Procer, and as her dependent he would be allowed only a thousand men in escort to be deducted from her own four thousand. The blonde Lycaonese suspected the hand of Vivienne Dartwick in those terms, whose diplomatic acumen had proven greater than one would expect of a former Chosen.

“He seems to have brought only four hundred legionaries,” Balthazar said. “Though given how popular he remains with parts of the Army of Callow, he’s hardly vulnerable.”

Not that Cordelia was fool enough to entertain assassination at the moment. Not with his apprentice – who, it seemed, still remained fond enough of him to seek his release regardless of reports of their quarrelling after the Doom of Liesse – having become so crucial to the survival of the Principate and perhaps even the continent itself. The amount of forces coming close to Salia made her uneasy, in truth. Four thousand drow, possessed of strange eldritch powers at night by all reports, four thousand eastern legionaries and a mixed force of four thousand from the League whose finest were from Helike. The Dominion would bring four thousand of their own, though they’d proved unreliable allies in many ways, and the First Prince had provided four thousand of her own soldiery to stand for the Thalassocracy of Ashur under thin pretence. Salia was hardly undefended, of course, and Princess Rozala Malanza would be bringing ten thousand soldiers besides as a guarantee. Yet sixteen thousand foreign soldiers within a day’s march of the capital was not something to take lightly in any circumstances, much less these. Countries grown weak often found their allies had grown hungry.

“Then it seems we had survived the crucible,” First Prince Cordelia calmly said, “and must now begin preparing for the one waiting beyond the horizon.”

“If I may, Your Most Serene Highness?” Louis of Sartons asked, and she moved her had in concession. “Our allies in Ashur are becoming increasingly desperate, and when word of the bargain struck for the retreat of the League that despair will turn to fury.”

It would, Cordelia privately agreed, for every step that took the armies of the League further from Procer took them closer to the shores of the Thalassocracy. All the while the fleets of Nicae kept blockading the island-nation and sinking even fishing boats, very clearly aiming to starve Ashur into submission. The bargain would be seen as a betrayal, not entirely without reason, and Cordelia’s assurances that this was maneuvering would ring hollow so long as they were not paired with some manner of relief for Ashur. Which she could not provide so long as the League’s fleets had the run of the Samite Gulf, given that no Arlesite principality had a considerable military fleet to call on. Largely because of Ashuran bribes and threats, one might uncharitably add.

“We will have to exert pressure on the League during the conference,” Cordelia agreed. “Lest we lose Ashur entirely to spite or surrender. If a common front is put forward to at least allow for grain barges to be allowed through, there would be hope to offer.”

“That would require Callow to back us against the Free Cities,” Balthazar grunted. “They’re trying to get a foot in the Grand Alliance so it’s not impossible, but the Black Queen’s no fool. She’ll not let herself be brought into the fold before she squeezed us dry of every concession she can prior to alliance.”

“I am not so certain,” Louis disagreed, bony face gone pensive. “No force under her command has ever resorted to looting or foraging while campaigning in our lands. Though I would agree she has distaste for the well-bred, I would venture she’d be rather sympathetic to the plight of starving Ashurans. It is not an uncommon trait, in tyrants who have popular support.”

Cordelia was, in fact, inclined to agree with the leader of the Circle of Thorns. Catherine Foundling had a record of trying to spare commoners the worst of war even when it was inconvenient to her armies, and the Army of Callow’s regulations were perhaps the strictest on the continent when it came to civilians. Unfortunately, the First Prince found it dubious that the Back Queen would antagonize the League of Free Cities on behalf of the Grand Alliance without some manner of concession. Which was not unreasonable, given that she would be taking on risks for nations that had warred on her own, but was most definitely unfortunate. The fair-haired First Prince only had so many concessions she could make and was reluctant to begin doling them out too early in negotiations. She might have to regardless, Cordelia grimly conceded. Choices were the privilege of those mighty enough to afford choosing.

“There will be a need to approach her in private after she arrives,” the First Prince finally said.

That much had never been in doubt, truth be told, though the extent of matters in need of discussion sometimes felt like to Cordelia like it increased by the day. The First Prince found herself in the unpleasant diplomatic quagmire of having to negotiate with a need to preserve an empire’s dignity without having an empire’s might to ensure it. Whatever alliances she might have once been able to call on were now stretched thin, the Chosen so unreliable as to be worthless and to add one more complication the Silver Letters were adamant that the Black Queen had become somewhat popular with Alliance armies that’d been on the field. The entire host had been plagued with dreams, allegedly the work of the Choir of Mercy, that had shown a span of the ‘heroics’ that’d taken place in these Twilight Ways. The result had been flattering to the Queen of Callow’s reputation, to say the least, though the transcripts of some of these dreams had been disturbing to read. The cunning that Foundling had shown that night was more dangerous than the power, in Cordelia’s eyes, though the power was the stuff of nightmares as well.

Now it was good as certain that the Callowans would follow their queen with fanatical devotion into any war she chose to wage – Gods Above, even as some kind of priestess of darkness she’d received the tacit blessing of angels – which would be a great boon if these negotiations saw fruit but a cataclysm otherwise. More worrisome was the apparent oath by every great line of the Blood to support her bid for joining the Grand Alliance, as it’d received the approval of the Grey Pilgrim. To Levantines, that might carry as much weight as that of the Choir he was said to be servant of. When Rozala Malanza’s soldiers came to Salia, and the Levantines with them, they would find a city that still spoke of the Black Queen as the Arch-heretic of the East and a perfidious enemy. The survivors of the campaign in Iserre would not take well to being called liars, much less the potentially disastrous epithet of heretic. It could all turn into an ugly circumstance with frightening ease if Cordelia was not very, very careful. Merciful Heavens, what had the world come to when she could expect the Black Queen to be a calming influence on the proceedings?

The First Prince would not be blinded by relief at a withheld blade or a sudden surge of sentiment, yet she could not deny that Catherine Foundling seemed to be trying to claw back the continent from the brink of they abyss. She was a horribly inconvenient person, it was true, but she’d also proved she was capable of restraint and a degree of foresight – which Cordelia could not truthfully say of all those who had a seat in the Highest Assembly. That Calernia might end up bound by a set of treaties even more far-reaching than those of the Grand Alliance had rankled, at first, but looking upon the content of the Liesse Accords the First Prince had been forced to concede they might be of genuine help in stabilizing the continent. That the rules of behaviour they proposed were elemental meant they were likely to be functional in practice even when binding such fractious individuals, and that most Chosen and Damned would be inclined towards enforcing them: a flying fortress rarely benefited anyone but the one flying it, and so even another villain might delight in seeing it brought down along with a rival. And as for the Chosen, Cordelia was far past needing convincing they too were in need of similar restraints . That the same plague that’d wiped out a detachment of Praesi legionaries had also wiped out an entire town on the shore of Lake Artoise without a single breakout elsewhere before or since was a damning hint of who was responsible for it.

There would be consequences to that, one day.

The dawning truth of the last few days had been that the Black Queen intended to bring forth an order to Calernia, and that this order was not too inimical to the order that Cordelia Hasenbach had been trying to bring forth since she was but a girl. It was not the resounding victory for Good that the First Prince had wanted, yet it was compromise she was willing to live with. She fully intended on securing as many gains as she could for Procer and the Grand Alliance, yet she would do so with the preservation of the Accords in mind. In truth, there were some aspects she’d found thrilling. This posited city in the Red Flower Vales? It was, she hoped, an end to wars between Callow and Procer. With this Cardinal forbidding the march of armies and the only other land-route between the two realms the Stairway up north, war would become highly impractical to wage. Three kittens and a ribbon could defend the narrow pass of the Stairway against a princely army, if they had the nerve, and having a great city at the crossroads between the east and the west of Calernia would allow for trade between adjoining realms to flourish and make hostility even more costly a prospect. And there was much to gain, in having such a neutral ground where diplomacy would be had even on the darkest days. No, Cardinal would have much greater reach than even the Black Queen seemed to realize.

A sharp rap against the closed door had Cordelia raising her voice to grant entrance to the servant. A man in livery hurried in at her invitation and after courtly bows came to whisper in her ear. The First Prince of Procer’s lips slightly thinned and she nodded a dismissal.

“Brother Simon’s absence should be excused, it seems,” Cordelia Hasenbach crisply said. “For he has been detained by order of the House of Light. The Holies are calling the Highest Assembly to session.”

Two of the most skilled spymasters alive looked at her with faces betraying utter surprise.

“That’s madness,” Balthazar said.

“It’s treason,” Louis said, tone cold. “In time of war, no less. Your Most Serene Highness, this cannot be allowed to pass.”

“Nor will it,” Cordelia Hasenbach said, voice like iron. “It appears I have at last found an end to my patience .”

Interlude: Rope

“ First, gifted:
Iron to bind
And rope to kill.”
-First of the three so-called ‘Mavian Entreaties’, found on raised stones across much of eastern and Procer

The anger had come, white-hot and blinding, but it did not last for Cordelia had learned calm at her mother’s knee. Mother might have never held an audience or passed judgement without swallowing a sigh of impatience at been the bare bones ceremony of a Lycaonese court, but then she’d never been a creature of halls and laws. The Rhenian blonde still remembered being taken on her first hunt out in the mountains, her ever-restless mother still as a statue for half a night as they waited for the stray ratling to come into arrow’s reach. Patience, sparrow , Mother had whispered . Patience and quiet and take your kill only when the time is ripe. The arrow had taken the ratling in the flank instead of the neck and even at seven Cordelia had been ashamed at the mistake, but the lesson of the night had lasted longer than the chagrin. It had been years since the First Prince had held a blade larger than a knife, much less strung and fired one of the sturdy shortbows her people kept for children and the weak, but unlike Margaret Hasenbach – once Papenheim – she’d not been born for the song of steel and strife. These halls, these laws, were the blades she knew how to wield.

And it seemed someone had begun quite the ambitious game, just under her nose.

The thought lingered and spread after she sent out her messengers, summoning to the ancient palace of the Merovins every trustworthy sword and spear she had in Salia. After that release of anger, the venting of frustration, her temper cooled and she began considering the details of this apparent folly. The Holies had called into session the Highest Assembly, which while truly a power they held if only obliquely – the House of Light had the right to present petitions directly to the Assembly on any day of the year, even on days where no session had been called, which meant the act presenting such a petition could turn into functional summons to one – had been used only sparingly since the Liturgical Wars. They had also ordered the arrest of Brother Simon by their own guards, along with consignment to one of the House’s basilicas in the capital. The summons themselves were not an overreach on the surface, though likely in practice, yet the arrest of one of Cordelia’s own spymasters and formal court official was a direct challenge to the office of First Prince. One done in wartime, when she held an absolute majority in the Assembly that could not easily be shaken.

Using Simon of Gorgeault’s arrest and detainment as a pretext to discipline the Holies would not be a popular measure, not when darkness loomed to the north and faith in Above was the last comfort for so many, but neither would it be the stuff riots were made of. Not when Cordelia had paid lips to whisper her preferred telling of the tale in every great tavern and brothel of Salia, which the priests knew well she had. They had, in the past, complained of her savaging of the reputation of Amadis Milenan and his allies through such means by the intermediary of the now-arrested Brother Simon. They would know that so long as sanctions were fair and artfully phrased, she would be able to lay them without much trouble. And that after such lasting conflict she would settle for nothing less than a crippling: confiscation of wealth, grain and lands. Every priest not serving provable purpose in their current position sent to the norther fronts to provide healing and moral succour. Cordelia had been pressing for these measures or milder manners of them for some time now and been denied again and again. There was no true short-term gain the First Prince could think of that would be worth the bleeding she would inflict on them in its wake. That was concerning as it meant, in all likelihood, that the House of Light intended to force her to abdicate.

Agnes would have warned me , Cordelia thought. Though her cousin’s peering eyes had been on the darkness to the north and the madness in Iserre, she would not have missed so glaring an attack. And mentioned it even if it were doomed to failure, which the fair-haired prince was unwilling to believe out of hand. There was always a way to end a reign, even if it was a simple as a knife in unscrupulous hands. And so the deeper game she’d glimpsed began to take shape for while one failing was a mistake and two ineptitude, but three could only be deliberate . Of that sudden awareness Cordelia gave no outwards sign, though assessing her current situation she felt her stomach clench. The Rhenian princess had moved from her solar to the beautiful Gallerie des Hérons after sending out her summons, for the gallery with the great windows overlooked the outer courtyard where her trusted soldiers would be coming to gather. It was large enough to accommodate an assembly of captains before they set out as well, which she’d been giving instructions in arranging even as she considered the words she’d speak when addressing them. She’d had servants fetching tablecloths and refreshments to make the entire affair seem less of a hasty arrangement, but the great gallery was rather empty of other company.

The First Prince idly strode towards the great open glass window, a time-worn but still powerful enchantment on the windowsill keeping out most of the wind and cold from winter’s last gasps. Cordelia pretended to enjoy the view, though in truth she’d been gazing to see if any of her Lycaonese soldiers had come. They had not, and the soldiers in the courtyard below were all in the livery of Salia itself – which meant they were little more than city guard, and of suspect loyalty. Half a step had her body angled so she could study the gallery through its reflection on the glass, as she casually set a hand on the lukewarm windowsill and allowed fatigue she truly felt to reach her face. Eight, nine, ten servants in the hall. All with an Alamans look to them, none that she’d brought with her from Rhenia. Louis of Sartrons had departed some time ago to reach out to any Circle of Thorns agents in the capital, yet the second of her three spymasters had remained at her side. Balthazar the Bastard had taken being so surprised by the Holies poorly and been in constant conference with some of his spies since. He offered fresh reports to Cordelia regularly, having early on found out where Brother Simon was being held and confirmed that ever current sitter of the Assembly had been sent for by the House of Light.

Even as the First Prince watched, a woman in rough fantassin leathers was allowed in by the guards guarding the southern entry to the gallery and made her way to where the head of the Sliver Letters was seated to whisper in his ear. The ferocious-looking spymaster heard her out, replied in a low tone and sent her off. Cordelia looked away before her scrutiny could be noticed, instead assessing the guards surrounding her. Eight at the southern and northern entrances, all in Salian livery. There were another three discreet doors in the gallery, from what the tall blonde could recall, though through the glass reflection she could only see two. Servant entrances for two of the three, and the last would lead to a privy room for guests too inebriated to stray far to relieve themselves when feasts where held in this gallery. She knew which of the three was the first servant door – one of the maids she had sent for cloths mere moments had left through it – yet did not know the other two, which meant attempting to leave through one risky. Cordelia knew there would not be two chances to slip the noose, which was why she studied the soldiers assembling below in the courtyard. Near fifty now, still all Salians. Could that many truly have turned their cloak?

Were she trying to isolate the First Prince of Procer within her own palace she would have only moved after ensuring she had enough conspirators to do so, yet there was no telling if her enemies had been forced to move early. Having kept the jaws closing around her hidden so far might mean as much, springing from fear of what she might do were she aware, or it might simply be consequence of a preference for discretion. The odds were better down there, she thought, than with the guards at the entrances. The courtyard must be at least ten feet below, and solid stone. Her blue dress, while not so impractical as to make it impossible for her to move quickly, would still be ungainly. The First Prince of Procer kept herself from stiffening when her spymaster’s recognizably heavy gait was heard before her. She turned to glance at the approaching Balthazar, allowing the faintest hint of impatience to touch her face.

“Your Most Serene Highness,” the black-haired man said. “I’ve news from the city.”

“Speak,” Cordelia invited.

“There have been riots in the streets,” he grimaced. “The priests have claimed that you mean to crown yourself queen and incited the people to violence.”

“Unfortunate,” the First Prince of Procer said. “They will have to be dispersed, by club if not by speech. Best to act promptly before the unrest can spread. How many soldiers have arrived?”

“Two hundred in the palace barracks, and those that can be seen below,” Balthazar said. “I would starkly advise against taking to the street with numbers less than five hundred, Your Highness. Salian riots see stones thrown and knives bared even in times of plenty.”

And there it was, she thought. A feasible reason for her to stay here in this hall, cooling her heels as the city went to the dogs around her and conspirators carried out their coup. Balthazar Serigny was one of them, of that there can be no doubt. The Holies could not have her unseated without a vote in the Highest Assembly, and they could not possibly be so foolish as to expect that such a vote could be won without preparation. The House of Light must have reached out to fence-sitters and the discontent, which the Silver Letters should not have missed given their heavy presence in Salia. And to think that Cordelia herself had ordered them to strengthen their presence, in order to expunge the last of the Eyes of the Empire from the capital. She’d invited the wolf at her table, believing it a hound. At least, the Rhenian thought, the conspirators had failed to secure enough votes to unseat her properly. They would not be resorting to such methods if they could use legitimate ones instead. On the other hand, if she was made prisoner and another candidate for her office presented how many of her allies would truly stay with her? Cordelia’s grip on the Highest Assembly had not been gentle, though she had been careful never to ruffle feathers without good reason. Some would turn, though, she knew. Some already had under her very nose.

“Send for Captain Haas,” she said, making her face imply restrained desire for a frown.

Balthazar would not accede to that, for Andrea Haas was the head of her personal retinue and a hardened killer besides. Cordelia’s heart clenched when she realized that her old compatriot had likely been assassinated as a prelude to the coup, though it could not be certain. Agnes... no, they would not touch Agnes. The Augur was too important a strategic asset for them to hurt even if she was Cordelia’s cousin. I can do nothing for anyone from the bear’s den , the First Prince thought. First I must escape. Balthazar grimaced, as if reluctant, and she gazed at him with polite impatience until he gave answer.

“Captain Haas had been drinking,” the spymaster said. “And is half in a stupor, at the moment. I would send for a priest to sober her, Your Highness, but given the circumstances...”

“As you say,” the First Prince of Procer said. “The entire priesthood is suspect until proven otherwise.”

“I’ll send for the current ranking officer, if you’d like,” Balthazar offered. “A Lieutenant Beringer, I believe.”

So the conspirators had even sunk hooks in one of hers, Cordelia thought with distaste. It could be a hostage had been taken, she considered, but then she would not glorify the stuff her people were made of. They could be just as venal and treacherous as anyone else, and there were some who might say that the way Cordelia Hasenbach had sent no host to bolster the defence of the Lycaonese realms meant she’d betrayed them first. All of her soldiers here had kin who had either fought at Twilight’s Pass or died there. No, their loyalties were no so ironclad as they might have been a year past.

“So long as it does not detract from muster,” she idly said. “It seems the Hellgods have my plans in their eye, tonight.”

“We’ll crush them as soon as we have our forces in order, Your Highness,” Balthazar Serigny said. “It is a matter of an hour at most.”

Cordelia inclined her head by a fraction and then looked back down into the courtyard, a clear if silent dismissal. There were perhaps a hundred soldier now, some of which had noticed her presence. Not a single one wore anything other than a Salian tabard. There was movement in the corner of her eye, and the First Prince almost tensed before she forced herself not to – and then Balthazar nailed the windowsill with a dagger, biting into the wood, just as her fingers clenched against the wood until they paled.

“Always were sharp, weren’t you? For a savage,” the man casually said, and whistled.

Half the servants unsheathed knives, while a pair of guard on the southern entrance and a single one to the north were slain by their comrades without hesitation. One of the maids tried to run for a door, but a thin man in servant’s livery threw a blade without missing a beat and it went through the back of her skull. The others screamed, and obeyed when told to sit on the ground with their hands behind their head.

“It was the lack of a flinch, was is not?” Cordelia calmly asked.

“It’s a good trick, when you’re dealing with a scheming one,” Balthazar grinned. “Anyone would flinch, expect someone thinking they might have a reason not to. What was it that gave us away?”

“Agnes would have warned me,” the First Prince said. “If she did not, it was because someone prevented her from doing so.”

And only the Silver Letters, of all the many possible conspirators in the city, had the means of doing that. They had, in the end, caught the most damning of the weakness in an oracle: a warning meant nothing if it went unheard. It had been four days, since Cordelia last spoke to her cousin. She’d meant to do so, she truly had, yet there was so much to do and if the Augur had an important insight she’d send a messenger to say as much. The servant who were not Silver Letters had all obeyed and knelt, and Cordelia felt her blood turn cold when she saw Balthazar trade a look with one of the assassins.

“No,” she hurried said. “Do not-”

Throats cut the servants dropped to the side, one after another, as they twitched and gurgled the last of their life away. Cordelia did not look away. She had not known their names, not one of them. Yet she would learn them, if she survived, these innocents who had lost their lives because she’d not been quite as clever as she thought she was.

“That was unnecessary,” the First Prince said, voice raw.

The bearded man chortled.

“Going soft, are you?” Balthazar said. “Can’t have witnesses to this, Hasenbach, lest the priests find their scruples after the deed is done and decide to turn on me.”

“So the Holies truly are in revolt,” Cordelia said, forcing calm. “You did not simply suborn some of my people and feed me a lie.”

“Wouldn’t move without them,” the spymaster said. “No, without the righteous sort at my back this would have been mere wickedness.”

The man grinned, revealing crooked teeth.

“This is Above’s work, though, or I’ve been assured,” Balthazar said. “Though the full amnesty was more to my taste than some old fool’s early absolution, I’ll tell no lie.”

Amnesty. And there it was, why she’d kept speaking to this stain of a person even as the blood of innocents spread across the panelled floor. Balthazar Serigny was a gloater, and one who had a particular distaste for his social superiors as well as Lycaonese – though the second came as a surprise to her, truth be told. There’d nary been a hint of it before today. Amnesty over killings within the bounds of the capital could only be extended by the ruler of the principality of Salia, which was however happened to be the First Prince or Princess of Procer. This was, currently, Cordelia herself. The conspirators had therefore a clear successor for her in mind, one that’d gone as far as putting their name to a pardon before the bloody work of dethroning Cordelia had even begun. And there were only a very few people in Procer who could feasibly fill her seat so smoothly. Amadis Milenan might have, before his abdication, and now in his stead Princess Rozala Malanza – who in truth had become a stronger candidate than Amadis had ever been even at the peak of his influence.

Her own uncle, Prince Klaus Papenheim, might also gather such support as the foremost general in the Principate as that realm lay on the brink of destruction. Prince Ariel of Arans might squeak through as a compromise candidate, but the man lacked strong ties outside the eastern Principate. Not the kind of figurehead around which a coup would be birthed, and certainly not when hundreds of thousands of soldiers were marching through eldritch paths into his lands. No, of all these the only practicable candidate was Rozala Malanza. Who, aside from middling talent in scheming, had spent most of the last year on campaign in a principality where scrying was impossible. Which meant either Princess Rozala had hidden her cunning very skillfully, someone of influence was behind her or this was a foreign plot to cripple Procer just as it seemed possible for it to be saved. Cordelia’s heart whispered of Malicia, the old enemy in the East, but the Dead King was conceivable foe as well – though through clandestine intermediaries, for the Rhenian doubted even the lowest of the low would strike bargain with the Hidden Horror directly.

Or , Cordelia grimly thought, they might be fools. They grew scared of what they saw on the horizon, rustled up someone of high enough birth and used them as a figurehead for this ill-advised butchery. That the Holies might truly be so arrogant as to presume they’d be able to force the election of their chosen candidate without any real support seemed unconvincing, but Cordelia Hasenbach was not so conceited as to deny that the measures she’d taken to ensure the survival of Procer might lead others to act against her this dramatically. Out of fear or principle, or perhaps even the heady potion that could be brewed from both together. It did not matter, in the end. Order would be restored, and everyone who’d lent their hand to this utter lunacy made to dance at the end of a rope. Balthazar, sure he had her in hand, moved away from the window.

“Now be a good girl and sit down in a corner, Cordelia,” the spymaster grinned. “You might even make it out of this alive, if you do as you’re told.”

He’d left the knife in the windowsill, she saw. That simplified matters. The blonde princess snatched the dagger’s handle, ripping it clear of the wood. The large bearded man looked at her with a mixture of contempt and amusement. He was a former soldier, a hardened killer and significantly larger than her. There were more than a dozen soldiers and Silver Letters as well, now all casting eyes on her. Uncle Klaus, she thought, would have said something outrageously obscene before baring his sword and attempting to fight his way through. And, brave stubborn old warhorse that he was, he would have died trying.

“I suppose even the runt of the litter will know a little fighting,” Balthazar Serigny laughed. “Go on then, First Prince . Impress me.”

The princess’ cool blue gaze swept the room, burning every face into her mind. Names she might not have, but this would suffice. Patience, sparrow , her mother’s voice rang. Patience and quiet and take your kill only when the time is ripe.

“Before spring comes,” Cordelia Hasenbach calmly said, “I will see you all hang.”

Before they could reply she slashed as her own breast before dropping the dagger. Shallow but long, the wound bled vividly and began soaking her dress. Even as surprise and confusion bloomed across the faces of those looking at her, the First Prince climbed the windowsill and threw herself down into the courtyard. The landing was painful, and she did not suppress her scream as she felt her leg crack.

“Murder,” Cordelia called out to the crowd of soldiers looking at her. “Treason! Serigny tried to assassinate me!”

It was time to find out, she thought, whether Alamans gallantry was an empty boast or not.

Interlude: Candle

“Fear not faith in the unworthy, for to be fooled is shame only on the undeserving.”
– Extract from ‘The Faith of Crowns’, by Sister Salienta

Brother Simon of Gorgeault had been, for near half a bell now, wondering what manner of madness might possibly arouse the leading souls of the House of Light to such actions. His arrest had been impeccably polite, his detainment in the back hall of the Selandine Basilica coming along with a nice wine from one of the lakeside monasteries and what was admittedly the finest roasted quail he could ever remember having. The accompanying plums had been flavoured in the manner of the famous ‘sacred recipe’: dipped in sweet brandy for seven days and seven nights. The name was a delicious little jest for the learned, as it was said that before Arianna Galadon had first founded the House of Light in the west she’d for seven days and seven nights prayed by the shores of the Lake Artoise. A shame that his enjoyment of the meal had been spoiled by the way a pair of armed guards waited by the door, a reminder that any attempt to leave would be tactfully but firmly rebuffed.

Simon was morbidly curious as to whether they’d go as far as striking him, should he insist. Though only a lay brother and so not hallowed by vows, he was not without repute in the House. Looking at the cast of the tanned faces – Arlesites both, and from the resemblance perhaps even kin – he decided that violence was not so improbable. The grandees of the House must have brought hands they were certain of from isolated holdings in Valencis and Orense, where the ancient grants of fortress-monasteries by the Arlesite reales had never been rescinded. It was an open secret among certain circles that orphans were taken in and raise for such purposes, particularly after long winters when desperate families found they had too many mouths to feed. The House of Light might be forbidden by law to field armies, but it was hardly defenceless.

Simon sipped at the potent red in his cup, enjoying the bouquet even as he considered what must now be done. In here he was isolated from his fellows in the Holy Society, which barred him from ascertaining how deeply this conspiracy ran. For this was a conspiracy, there could be no doubt about it. He’d been taken when coming to the basilica for an urgent council with a dear friend, Sister Dominique, whose position in the middle ranks of the Holies meant anything she deemed urgent was very much so indeed. Alas there had been no Dominique awaiting when he arrived, only a handful of apologetic priests and a detachment of guards. Brother Simon wondered if she had betrayed his trust of her own initiative or been ordered to.

Oh, there’d never been any doubt that Dom’s greater loyalty would be the Heavens and their House. That much had been made clear when they’d... parted ways many years year ago, after she’d refused the deeper courtship he sought . I will suffer none to rival Above in my affections, love, not even you , she’d said. He’d believed the friendship to have survive the end of their other tie, but this seemed to be a day of revelations. Simon drank a deeper sip than was strictly proper, wasting the vintage like some Callowan lout. It was the way of the Ebb and the Flow, he consoled himself. It seemed his vigilance as the First Prince’s eye on House affairs had lapsed, for he’d glimpsed no hint of the conspiracy before it struck. The failure stung, more from the consequences of it than his wounded pride.

By now, he thought, that animal Balthazar would have seized Her Highness and a purge of her loyalists would be taking place. None, and the Lycaonese least of all, could be counted on to take the deposition of a Hasenbach withy anything remotely like placidity . The Holies would have sent for the current sitters of the Highest Assembly before making their move, but the cautious among them would have delayed setting out. It might not matter: First Prince Cordelia’s most ardent supporters were all on the northern fronts, leaving only assermentés to speak for them, and there were tricks of procedure to deal with those. If enough of the royalty in the city had turned conspirator, anyhow. An outright majority from the onset was laughably improbable, but even half a dozen princes would be enough for the fence-sitters to believe the conspirators had a chance. Especially with the Silver Letters and the House behind them, and the First Prince kept under watch until she could be formally deposed and perhaps even put to judgement.

Simon’s ponderings were jarred astray when the door between the guards was opened, a woman in pale robes striding through. Age had been kind to Dominique of Blancbriand, tinting her hair more silver than grey and leaving her both straight-backed and lithe. Those grey-green eyes, though, ever smiling? They had not changed at all since he’d first gazed on them when they were both fifteen and Simon still believed his rightful name to be Simone. The lay brother drank again, for it would be a terrible faux pas to let the Principate begin its inevitable spiral into annihilation without being at least slightly drunk.

“Brother Simon,” Sister Dominique greeted him.

Her smile was forced. For being sent here against her will, pretending she had not been the bait in the trap to catch him, or because she was being forced to civility by circumstance? He could not tell. It ought to be interesting to find out.

“Sister Dominique,” he replied, setting down his cup to daintily wipe his lips with the attendant silk cloth. “I am sad to say you’ve missed the quail.”

She looked mildly taken aback. At his lack of open resentment, perhaps? He nearly sniffed in disapproval. If that were the case, she had spent too long speaking with House firebrands. Even if a lay brother, Simon was an Alamans of proper birth. It was to be expected he would walk to even the gallows with a bon mot and splendid indifference, much less suffer a turn of the Ebb with grace.

“I already ate, though I thank you for the courtesy,” Dominique said.

“Ah, but at least let me offer you a cup of wine,” Simon gregariously said. “You there, with the sword.”

As both guards bore such a weapon, there was some degree of confusion until the one to the left gestured at himself hesitantly.

“Indeed,” the spymaster said, “do fetch a cup for Sister Dominique – and make it silver, by the Gods. This is a coup, not a Lycaonese debutante ball.”

He did not bother to speak to the guard any further, knowing that in circumstances such as this one confidence was the key to being obeyed. He invited his old friend to sit across from him, smiling pleasantly as if he were host instead of prisoner. Poorly hiding her bemusement, Dominique sat.

“Why are you...” she began hesitantly.

“It is an Arlesite red,” Simon told her, sounding surprised as he glanced at the bottle by his now-finished plate. “Copper would taint the bouquet.”

It was not what she’d been speaking of, as they both knew, but that was they way to get to someone with the upper hand talking: confusion and blithe refusal to acknowledge they had anything of the sort. Simon’s fascinating summer as a young man with a Lantern lodge in Tartessos had taught him that a gentleman could get away with nearly anything, given sufficient audacity and an amicable bearing.

“You seem in a congenial mood,” Dominique ventured.

Simon smiled and from the corner of his eye saw the guard returning with a silver goblet in hand. The man hesitantly set it on the table, as if he did not know quite how it should be done, and after an awkward half-bow made as if to leave. The lay brother restrained him with a gesture and let out the faintest hint of a sigh.

“My good man,” he said, “Sister Dominique is one of the Holies. Do you intend to make her pour her own wine?”

The guard looked vaguely panicked for a moment, before venturing a no touched by a heavy Tolesian accent. Ah, as he’d thought. Most definitely one of those trusted sword arms from Arlesite lands, likely even a lay brother himself. Proper vows taken would naturally forbid violence, save if given exemption by holy tribunal, but these had only rarely been granted since the Liturgical Wars. The man clumsily poured wine for his old friend, who protested it was unnecessary all the while. The guard looked deeply relieved when Simon dismissed him, further marking himself as a figure of authority.

“I had feared you might be distressed,” Dominique cautiously said, after taking a polite sip from her cup.

“Aggrieved, perhaps,” Simon conceded. “These cloak and dagger theatrics are rather unseemly for servants of the Heavens, though I can understand the necessities involved.”

Something like relief touched her grey-green eyes, and that burned Simon more than all the rest. For it meant she did care for him, after all, at least a little. Yet she’d gone through with it anyway. It would have been better if she were only using their old closeness, he thought. Cleaner.

“I argued for your involvement, Simon, I truly did,” Dominique told him. “I told them that your silence was out of hopelessness, not malfeasance. They might even have listened, had Serigny not argued so strenuously that you were Hasenbach’s creature body and soul.”

“Of course he did, the brute,” the diplomat sighed. “His value would have lessened if you had another among you with close access to her.”

Gaze careful as he spoke, he found no hint of a hesitation before she nodded in acknowledgement. Good. Balthazar the Bastard’s involvement had been a given, since such a great plot could hardly have taken place in Salia without the notice of the Silver Letters, but it was heartening to learn even by implication that the Circle of Thorns was not involved. Louis de Sartrons had no part of this... spasm of lunacy.

“The Silver Letters were too valuable to antagonize by insisting,” Dominique told him, faintly apologetic. “And there were fears he might turn on us if he felt the cause to be in too frail a state.”

Now, it was most unlikely either the Holies or a creature as leery as Serigny would have put treason to act without a patron of sufficient influence. There were only so many of these in Procer, these days, and among those one stood out above all others: Princess Rozala Malanza of Aequitan. She hardly seemed the kind of woman to try her hand at such an affair, but then the most successful of ambitions were often the most skillfully hidden. A prod was in order to see what might yet come tumbling out.

“I imagine he pressed Princess Malanza for a pardon before committing to anything,” Simon idly said. “I’ve never known the Bastard to have faith in anything but favours rendered.”

Dominique looked at him amusedly, nursing her cup.

“Clever Simon,” she said. “Fishing for answers, are we?”

Ah, and yet she did not deny. That was telling, for all she had not outright told.

“I imagine I shall have to resign my position in the Holy Society, after her election,” he mused. “A poor way to end my tenure, but retirement would not be such a terrible thing at my age.”

“It might not have to be so,” Dominique said.

He made his eyes widen in surprise and leaned forward when she invited him to do so.

“We have been corresponding with her for months,” she murmured, “and she’s expressed very devout sentiments. There was talk of restoring the House’s ancient seat in the Highest Assembly, Simon. Not even after the Liturgical Wars was that seriously spoken of, but with the Hidden Horror warring on us Malanza says the Heavens must be brought to the fore once more.”

To Simon’s knowledge Rozala Malanza was no more devout than most Proceran royalty – that was to say, she had Salienta’s tongue and Bastien’s hand – though he rather doubted the Holies had been suddenly convinced of her deep and abiding respect for the House of Light. Of her deep and abiding desire for overthrowing the woman who’d made her mother drink poison, however? That they’d believe, and perhaps simple base hunger for power as well. And in such dark times, well, why would Princess Malanza not restore the House’s long-abolished seat in the Assembly? It was only natural to pay stronger heed to the light of Above when the night grew long. That such a seat would bring the influence of the Holies to heights not seen since the fresh first days of the Assembly must not have weighed on the scales at all, surely.

Brother Simon de Gorgeault had spent most his life serving as a bridge between the royalty of Procer and its priesthood, finding loyalty belonging to neither but instead to a higher calling: peace. He had served, willing, for he saw in the Holy Society a function that would prevent the coming of another three Liturgical Wars. Pride in robes and crowns was an unfortunately common affliction, and a company of men and women with a foot on both shores went a long way in smoothing away conflicts that might otherwise have grown into harsher things. Yet the truth was that Simon had oft leaned more strongly towards the House, as for all its many flaws it served Good more genuinely than any other institution on Calernia. Princes and princesses, even the finest among them, so often chased venality and power at the expense of those they were meant to be the just stewards of.

It was a bitter thing, to be faced with the truth that the House of Light could be just as grasping.

“It would be a grand thing,” Simon breathed out in wonder.

Dominique leaned back, smiling contentedly.

“The seat could not be yours, naturally,” she told him. “Yet you might say I am the foremost candidate for it, and should election confirm me I would find great comfort in the keeping of an advisor knowledgeable in such matters.”

Not the most subtle of offers, though it did have the benefit of both plausibility and political significance.

“I would be honoured,” the lay brother smilingly lied.

They both sipped at their wine.

“It will be different, under First Princess Rozala,” Sister Dominique casually told him. “There’ll be no more of Hasenbach’s heresies and tyranny. Gods, the gall of that woman. She might as well have declared herself queen, stacking the Assembly with her lickspittles and those she bullied into submission. And for what? To make peace with the Arch-heretic if the East and her helper the Carrion Lord.”

“No mortal ruler can overturn the decision of a conclave,” Simon agreed.

In truth he’d wrestled with the First Prince’s decision himself, in private. That Cordelia Hasenbach had grown increasingly ironhanded could not be denied, though he’d always reminded himself that every method she had used to strengthen her influence was legal and with recorded precedent. The peace talks with the Black Queen and the Carrion Lord had been... hard to swallow. Both were infamous Damned who had wrought great suffering on the Principate, and the Queen of Callow in particular had been declared Arch-heretic of the East by a greater conclave. Bargaining with such a monster was to stray from the path the Gods Above had set for their children, undeniably, yet what else was there to be done?

Would the Gods truly prefer the destruction of Procer and all its people to making peace with one of the Damned? Simon could not believe it so. Such a thought reminded him too much of the light gone cold in the eyes of some of the older priests, those who spoke of shepherding needing the stick as well as the kindness and how sparing one was straying from the will of the Gods. There was valour, there was virtue even, in refusing to compromise with Evil even in the face of death. In holding principles above life. Yet Simon de Gorgeault could find no Good in sending millions to their death when it need not be so. It was a poor shepherd that let wolves take the entire flock.

“And this talk of sending priests to the north as if they were soldiers, this demanding the House’s belongings as if they were hers to dispose of,” Dominique continued, tone genuinely angry. “Did you know there are no House holdings in Lycaonese principalities, Simon? All lands belong to the princes and even chapels must pay rent as if they were tenant farmers. That is what Cordelia Hasenbach sought, mark my words. It had to be done.”

“It must have been a difficult decision,” he said, sounding sympathetic.

Her goblet was mostly empty by now, and he poured it full anew without her taking much notice. She’d always been a lightweight.

“Of course not,” she replied. “The will of the Heavens was clear. A choice made in clarity is hardly a choice at all.”

“I can only imagine,” the silver-haired man said.

“There will be no need to stretch your spirit for such,” Dominique teased suddenly learning forward. “I had expected this to be difficult, Simon, but I did your faith disservice. In truth I came to make request of you, before your pleasant hospitality distracted me.”

“Anything, for you,” Simon smiled.

“The Holy Society’s eyes in the city are needed,” Sister Dominique told him. “And they will not acquiesce to lending aid without your word.”

“What shall we seek?” he asked.

“Serigny botched the work,” his old friend said with open aversion. “Hasenbach tricked some of the palace garrison into protecting her and escaped into the city with a handful of soldiers. We need to know with whom she took refuge, but her lackeys have barred their manses to all priesthood. Your fellows, though, will not find all such doors closed to them.”

It was a labour not to close his eyes and breathe out. Oh, Gods grant you allmercy . They’d lost the First Prince. Even if it was truly Rozala Malanza who’d been trading letters with the conspirators all this time then their pardons were now no better than scrap parchment. Nothing less than civil war would topple Cordelia Hasenbach if she was not a kept prisoner, and that left them as the fools who’d tried to execute a coup mere days before foreign armies arrived. If they did not find the First Prince soon, everyone involved in this was as good as dead. Her Highness was no Alamans or Arlesite, to hesitate at chastising priests: she’d hang them all without batting an eye. Serigny, at least, would know that well. And he would not be afraid of turning to great bloodshed if he felt cornered. Something needed to be done.

“Of course,” Simon agreed. “I shall need ink and quill.”

“I’ll have them brought,” Dominique smiled.

“Simpler to walk to a scrivener’s desk, I would think,” he amusedly said. “It would be unseemly to send guards back and forth like fetching boys.”

“I suppose,” Sister Dominique chuckled. “You’ll need to write quite a few letters, besides.”

They rose, and to steel himself Simon drained the last of his cup. He gallantly offered up his arm for his old friend to take and they made for the end of the hall unhurriedly.

“There are some who will need to speak with me in person,” Simon said, sounding pensive. “So it is plain I am not being coerced, you see. Still, given the... ruckus outside an escort would not go amiss.”

“I will send for guards from the cathedral,” she assured him. “Though I’ll need to sit in on such councils, you understand. The Holies would not agree otherwise.”

“It is only natural,” Simon dismissed. “I am not yet trusted.”

Dominique patted his arm approvingly, like one would a dear friend. Or a pet.

“You have always been blessed with an understanding nature, Simon,” she said. “It is one of your greater virtues.”

He made himself look pleased.

“I shall blush if you continue in this vein,” he warned.

A discreet glance ahead told him the guards were only half paying attention to them as they approached. The timing, he thought, would be of some importance.

“Did I ever tell you of the summer I spent in Tartessos?” Simon smiled.

“With the Lanterns?” Dominique said. “Little, in truth.”

She did not sound particularly regretful of that.

“They must have some wisdom to their teachings, I suppose,” she conceded.

I remember when you were hungry , Simon thought. When you burned with a need to read every book, speak with every stranger from a faraway place. When your eyes grew dark for the late nights and you were furious of your body needing to sleep at all. I remember how beautiful the flame that moved you was, Dominique, and I mourn that woman for you are only what’s left of her. Was this what happened, he wondered, when you began to believe there were no more answers left to seek?

“They refused to humour me before I ventured with a band into the Brocelian,” Simon said, almost nostalgic. “It was a rather fascinating experience. I met this woman, you see, by the name of Elvera. And she knew a remarkable trick.”

“Did she,” Sister Dominique patiently smiled.

“Oh yes,” Brother Simon smiled back, gently extricating his arm just as they passed the guards.

This would be his seventy-fourth winter, and it had been much too long since he’d undertaken strenuous exercise. Yet for all that his limbs no longer had the limberness of his youth, utter surprise had wings of its own. His fingers smoothly drew the sword of the guard to his left and he pivoted slightly, ramming the pommel in the other guard’s face. Another pivot and he thrust the point of the sword backwards into the first guard’s throat. Dominique yelled out in surprise, the other guard rocked back in pain and surprise as Simon ripped free the sword only to cut into the back of the survivor’s neck. Messy blow, the lay brothed judged. A killing one, but the death would be more painful than if he’d cut deeper. He left the sword in the corpse and both dropped a heartbeat later. Ah, but the bloodspray had rather marred his robes it seemed.

“It does work better with an axe,” the silver-haired man noted. “She was quite right about that.”

“You madman,” Sister Dominique hissed. “What are you-”

“You were correct,” Simon pleasantly said. “A choice made in clarity is hardly a choice at all.”

Best to make a run for it, Simon de Gorgeault mused as a woman he’d once loved cursed him loudly. Though she’d let it slip that there were so few guards here an escort would require more to be sent for from as far as the cathedral, it was unlikely there would only be two.

Time to see if these old bones still remembered how to run in the face of certain death.

Interlude: Harp

“Second, beholden:
Candle to blind
And harp to still.”
– Second of the three so-called ‘Mavian Entreaties

Les Horizons Lugubres was a tavern in the same sense that silk was cloth.

None could lay foot within its glass and stone gardens without first having been vouched for by three patrons, and though the hall’s outside looked rather trivial its insides were a maze of shifting private alcoves: they changed with the sun and the moon, the season and the weather, so that no two hours spent there would be quite the same. The nature of the establishment had made it a favourite of the Circle of Thorns since decades before Louis of Satrons’ tenure at the head of the league began, though it was under his stewardship that the Circle became the hidden proprietors of it. Tonight’s surroundings were the work of a young woman from the principality of Orne, he’d been told, an artist who had one walked the fields of the Red Flowers Vales seeking inspiration. The influence was plain to the eye, though for all the provincial origins it was exquisite to the eye. Redwood tables and sculptures of colours glass – angled so that the moon’s shifting radiance and shadows would mimic the touch of wind on grass – were flanked by panes of green and grey painted in the Bourdonnier manner, with the occasional glinting metal thrown in pêle-mêle to hint at the armour of fallen knights and fantassins. It was all rather appropriate, given the reason the Circle was convening, and the tart Lange red the affair had been paired with by their sommelier lent the hasty proceedings a much-needed touch of civility.

After the last of them arrived and took a seat, being poured their glass by the colleague to their left rather than a servant according to one of the Circle’s more practical traditions, Louis of Sartrons rose to his feet. His glass went up, matched by that of the other twelve men and women in the room, and he cleared his throat.

“To Procer, and Her Most Serene Highness,” he toasted.

His words were politely echoed, and as one they drank before settling into their seats. Louis waited a few moments, tinted light casting red shadows like claws on his skeletal face, before addressing his peers.

“It would appear a coup is underway,” the spymaster said. “As of now the involvement of the Holies of the House of Light and the Silver Letters under Balthazar Serigny have been confirmed. The extent of the conspiracy beyond this is unclear, though a degree of royal involvement is only to be expected.”

At the other end of the table, the comfortably withered Antonie of Bientaillant rapped her knuckles against the table to signify a desire to address the table. Louis acceded to the request with a sight inclination of the head.

“My friends in city guard tell me the conspiracy claims to be acting on the behalf of Princess Rozala Malanza, though they have not made this widely known,” Antonie said.

Bertrand de Gonfallond, sharp-eyed and younger than most in this room, rapped his knuckles but a moment later. Louis paused for a moment longer than necessary before allowing him to speak, an unspoken reminder that lack of courtesy to a fellow patron of the Circle had no excuse.

“Given the prominence of Balthazar Serigny within the coup,” Bertrand said, “we must consider that this was made known to Antonie’s friends on purpose. Balthazar has some knowledge of our laws, as you all know.”

It was not impossible, Louis thought, or in truth even unlikely. The Circle of Thorns served no master but the Principate itself, that was its governing principle and foremost law. Not the First Prince, not the Highest Assembly and certainly not the House of Light. Given that the highest office in Procer was not hereditary, it had been understood by wise minds early in the nation’s history that the Principate’s spies abroad could be beholden to any one family or institution. The Circle must ever be above the fray of schemes within the bounds of Procer, intervening only when there was foreign involvement. If the Circle took sides in the Assembly’s little squabbles, it risked endangering itself and therefore the Principate’s eyes abroad. In truth that vaunted neutrality had been bent, on occasion, but never too far. Those who would have the ambition of playing throne-maker in the Assembly were weeded out early in their tenure with the Circle, long before reaching positions of true influence. Were these years of peace, or even less strenuous a war, an attempt to dethrone Cordelia Hasenbach by another princess would merit no debate. And it was undeniable that even in these... delicate times the only acceptable successor to the First Prince was Rozala Malanza, as no one else had the support or popularity to keep the Principate from falling apart.

Yet Procer had come upon the antechamber of the end times, and now the lines between the foreign and the domestic had blurred. It did not help that the Bastard might be behind what Antonie’s people had learned, as their young colleague had noted. The head of the Silver Letters had learned too much for comfort of their laws and methods during the Great War, and he was in no way above using Princess Malanza’s name as a shield to keep the Circle out of this affair until the dust had settled. To his left another knuckle rapped the table, Alejandra of Cuenera departing from her usual sullen silence to raise her voice.

“It matters not if Seregny attempts to trifle with us,” she said, voice faintly accented. “It is not ours to decided whether Cordelia Hasenbach or Rozala Malanza will rule. It is ours to unearth whether the attempted transition of power is free of the Enemy’s meddling.”

There was a rippling murmur at the table at that, as much in consternation as approbation. Several knuckles rapped, though Louis chose that of Joachim of Essenrer – one of the elders among them, and the sole Lycaonese. The Circle had been careful that there should always be at least one from the northern principalities among them, though recruitment was oft difficult. They could not claim to speak to the interests of Procer without the rearguard of their empire having a voice at their table.

“It will be necessary to carve into the Silver Letters,” Joachim said, voice oddly powerful for a man so old his skin looked paper-thin. “They are the weak link. The House will have everything of import in cloisters and basilicas, but the letter-openers brought in too many for every safehouse to truly be secure.”

Louis hid his amused smirk at the dig at their opposition behind a sip of wine, as many others at the table. Letter-openers , Joachim had mocked them as, for the head of the Circle at the time of their rise to legal employ had mocked the thugs as a ‘confederacy of letter-openers and cutpurses’. There were some who said the name of Silver Letters itself had come from the way their first founders had made much of their wealth opening the correspondence of the wealthy and powerful to extort coin by blackmail. The smirk faded along with the taste of the wine on his palate as Louis de Satrons digested the rest of his colleague had said. It was true but it would also carry consequences unless acted on properly.

“It appears I will have to be led astray by my personal loyalty to Her Highness,” the head of the Circle of Thorns calmly said. “As is our way, I will depart early to allow you to write the denunciation without my presence.”

He paused a moment. Louis supposed he should mayhaps be moved to say more, as if it proved that the Silver Letters or their fellow conspirators had not been induced by a foreign power this would be the last time he addressed the Circle as its leader. Perhaps at all. Yet he had never been particularly prone to such flights of fancy, in truth, and he had known everyone at this table for decades. Theirs was not a profession that allowed for sentiment, and he would not insult their common service to the Principate by looking back upon it with unnecessary nostalgia. Theirs was grim and often foul work, and those who carried it out oft came to grim and foul ends. They had all known that long before earning a seat at this table.

“You know of my endorsement for my successor,” Louis said. “And for the seat my removal would leace empty. As for the rest...”

He rose to his feet once more and raised his glass.

“Let none lay hand on this land,” Louis de Sartrons said.

Glass roses to match his, as one.

“Without bleeding for it,” they replied, every last hard-eyed.

You will be as a circle of thorns set around Procer , their ancient founder Clément Merovins had charged, so that none may lay hand on this land without bleeding for it. If there was rot in the flesh, if the Enemy prowled Salia on this night, then they would rip it out root and stem.

—

Balthazar had not taken a seat at the table, instead leaning against the wall of the ornate Hall of Herons as he indulged himself by studying those seated.

He’d not known the full breadth of their plot, as was not unusual in such things, yet at this hour of truth the masks had come down when this council had brought out those who wished to form the heart of the coming reign. It was no small company, near a hundred to his count. His Silver Letters and the Holies had formed the heart of the conspiracy so he had known the involvement of near everyone of import, but now the rest of the lot had come slinking into the palace he’d taken for them to gather like maggots on a corpse he found the disparity of those involved to be somewhat troubling. That they’d run thin in matters princely was only to be expected, given that near every royal that remained in Procer was on one of the northern fronts, but a harvest of two was not so trifling a thing: Prince Arsene of Bayeux, one of Amadis’ old hounds now trained to heed Malanza’s hand, had been the easy mark.

He had much to gain from the Princess of Aequitan rising to higher office, as one of her inherited partisans. Princess Cotilde of Aisne had been a surprise when he’d first learned of her, and even now she seemed highly uncomfortable in the company of the others. It was principle that’d turned her against Hasenbach, he gathered. The consolidation of the Highest Assembly into a tame thing had smacked to her of tyranny, and she’d approached the Holies for moral guidance and advice – only to be brought into the fold of the conspiracy instead. There were only two other royals in the city, Renato of Salamans and Ariel of Arans, neither of which had been judged safe enough to invite.

Prince Renato was one of Hasenbach’s loyalists, now more than ever as a war against the League of Free Cities had miraculously spared his lands, and while Prince Ariel was more ambiguous in his allegiances he also had a great many soldiers marching on his lands through these ‘Twilight Ways’. Both had only reluctantly accepted the summons to a session of the Highest Assembly, and immediately begun delaying on actually moving towards the physical assembly until their spies could have better notion of what was taking place. They’d learn little, Balthazar had seen to that. Between the bloody chaos in the streets of Salia and the mysterious deaths of the few captains and officials best known in the right circles to trade whispers for bribes the easiest ways to gather information had been neatly closed.

The true trouble with those two was that now that Hasenbach had made a fool of him and escaped his own damned hands it was quite possible she’d taken refuge in the manse of one of them. Both princes had refused entrance to both the city guard and the House of Light, Prince Renato’s captain of the guard splitting open the head of an overly ambitious city watch officer without batting an eye. Those manses could be taken, the conspirators had the numbers for it, but it’d be hard fighting and neither of the royals part of the coup were willing to agree to it.

The precedent might be dangerous to their kind, after all.

A motion passed in the Highest Assembly could pry open those gates, most likely, but the masquerade there had to be played out first. For all that the conspiracy was currently lacking princes, with a little enthusiasm it could begin the work of making a few. There were candidates on hand, Hasenbach had seen to that when she’d begun her little trick with the restored Guillermont Decree – she’d had men and women of the right blood and birth to serve as successor-candidates for every principality left leaderless by the Princes’ Graveyard. Much like how those who’d plotted to unseat the Lycaonese savage had enjoyed the very refreshments in this hall that Hasenbach had arranged for her own captains, these royal candidates would now be crowned and made the conspiracy’s creatures instead of the First Prince’s.

It would begin soon, for the summons to the Highest Assembly would soon have been sent a full bell ago and when that time was reached the sessions could begin even with the absent. A mere two votes would not be enough to pass anything, of course, but there the Holies had come of some use. While the crowned heads were away from Salia they had left behind assermentés , sworn surrogates who could vote in their stead. By oath these surrogates were to vote only by the will of their prince or princess, yet the House of Light had applied both fear and faith to good effect.

It was the will of the Heavens that certain measures be passed, and to vote even by oathbreaking was sinless. To refuse was to serve the Enemy, whose dark hands had touched the heart of Cordelia Hasenbach and corrupted her body and soul. Those priests could not convince Balthazar had seen to himself, now that the Augur was no longer an issue: hostages, blackmail and naked threats had been enough to secure a narrow majority. He’d have preferred to hold the session without even waiting for the whole bell to pass, but both the royals and the Holies had refused to hear of it. Rozala Malanza’s ascension to holy rule was not to be marred by even the slightest of procedural faults. The former fantassin thought them fools for it, for though they worried of such details being used to overthrow Malanza down the line they were forgetting they first had to get the fucking princess on the throne.

Which he suspected would be harder to achieve than expected, given the discordance of conspirators he was looking at. There were Salians there, officers in the city guard and the garrison as well as bureaucratic officials. Hasenbach’s harsh measures against corruption in the capital had seen kinsmen from most great families in the region lose a sinecure and the assorted income, and as she’d refrained from purging the old guard that’d acted with probity quite a few had nursed private hatreds of the First Prince for years and only now come out to settle them. It’d been Balthazar himself who dug out half of those malcontents, having his fresh flush of agents in the capital find out who had grudges while ostensibly looking for ‘Praesi infiltrators’, yet Prince Arsene and the Holies had stumbled across quite a few themselves.

It’d been the realization of exactly how many enemies Cordelia Hasenbach has made that’d prompted the conspiracy to act, as well as the understanding that the window of opportunity was slight. A coup could not be had while there were foreign armies within marching distance of the capital, and Malanza had been exceedingly clear that she could not be seen to be doing the overthrowing herself: it had to be settled before she arrived in Salia. Still, the Gods had smiled on them when the time came. Some scrivener in the House had unearthed a precedent from the Liturgical Wars about a priestess’ regency in Segovia that’d had one of the holdover faction in the Holies swing over into the camp preaching direct action, swinging the House of Light’s influence entirely behind the coup just in time.

Some agents of Prince Arsene had caught sight of the priests moving guards into the city and the Prince of Bayeux had tentatively reached out to the Holies, adding the weight of his own growing conspiracy to their own. It’d all fallen into place, just before the last chance any of them would have for years if ever, and so Balthazar had set aside his own wariness of Princess Rozala in favour of backing the coup to the hilt. Never again would he have such an opportunity and Balthazar Serigny would not let that fucking murdering savage rule one moment longer than he had to. Not when his own sister had never even gotten a grave in Brus, just gotten thrown into a mass grave with the rest of the fantassins by the northern butchers.

He might have suffered through that, in truth, even if that’d been the day where he’d thrown his support entirely behind Princess Constance of Aisne. But Salieri getting an arrow in the back for coming too close of the Neustrian camp after dark? Balthazar considered himself a callous man and did so with some pride. Callouses were what grew from rough use, honest use, and though poets and highborn could afford sentiment the likes of him found just as costly as any other luxury. Yet even for him, a sister and a husband was too much. It’d been like poison in his veins every time he looked at Hasenbach, the knowledge that if she’d just stayed in her fucking frozen wasteland like Lycaonese were meant to then someone proper could have put an end to the Great War and the only two people he’d ever slightly cared about would still be alive.

And he could do nothing, for even intent would be smelled out by Hasenbach’s pet oracle Chosen. So he’d smiled and served and waited, even as she made plain she meant to replace him with some twit from Lyonis. He’d kept it all inside him and placed men and women he owed in useful places because one day, one day , there would be an opening. And it had come, hadn’t it? Because there truly had been Eyes of the Empire in the Salia, and his people had caught them along with their papers – including a dated suggestion of how to arrange the murder of the First Prince, mentioning the Carrion Lord’s own theories of how the powers of the Augur worked.

Given that the eastern monster had run a merry chase around the heartlans while making a fool of every force in the west until the Peregrine caught him by surprise, Balthazar had read those ‘theories’ with great interest. And, upon deciding they were reasonable, finally reached out to the Holies afterwards, to... lend a hand, and perhaps a few suggestions. Not that they’d ever trusted him, which was admittedly not unwise of them. Seven priests from the very upper ranks of the Holies were in attendance now, representing the House of Light along with their swarm of lesser priest attendants. The priests had been scheming for longer than any of them, as it turned out. Balthazar had seen some of their correspondence with Malanza, and while it’d begun innocently enough also it’d begun months ago and grown increasingly treasonous as it went.

The Princess of Aequitan had struck gold when she’d raised the notion of restoring the House’s seat in the Highest Assembly, by his reckoning. That’d been enough to move the ambitious to begin convincing the not, and after that it’d only been a matter of time until enough priests fell on her side. I’d been bold of her to use the royal seal of Aequitan on some of the correspondence, though Balthazar had noted she’d been clever enough to do so only on those letters which were seemingly innocent. Not all had been penned by her, for perhaps a third were identical to the samples of former prince Louis Rohanon’s handwriting the Silver Letters had in their possession. Yet given how deep the once-ruler of Creusens was known to be in her councils that was not unexpected, if surprisingly trusting of her. It might be that Rohanon was to be her formal consort after her election.

It was unfortunate that the situation in Iserre had made it impossible to send someone directly in the army camp – Sophie of Lyonis was watching Malanza like a hawk for exactly such a thing – but it had been observed by his agents that the letters were in fact coming from the heart of the coalition army. He’d even intercepted one, and used it as an introduction to begin his own private correspondence with the princess. That’d been the last confirmation needed for Balthazar, as while someone else might be willing to offer him an empty pardon there was no one else who should be interested in very obliquely suggesting that Rozala Malanza’s younger brother and rival claimant, at court here in Salia, should perhaps meet with an unfortunate accident in the chaos of the events to come. She likely had her own agents to arrange such a thing, Balthazar knew, so he’d taken the request for what it was: an extension of trust to bring him more fully into her camp.

It would be a pleasure to work with a woman such a deft hand at the Ebb and Flow, especially one who had the foresight to hide it unlike so many of her peers.

“- and so the House of Light had begun to debate whether the actions of Simon of Gorgeault have made him graceless, as the known murderer of lay brothers of the House.”

The spymaster’s eyes snapped up at the old man who’d been speaking, of the Holies from the south.

“A clarification,” Balthazar the Bastard said. “Was Brother Simon harmed before being returned to confinement?”

Gods, let them not have bled the old man. Balthazar was not particularly fond of him, but the Holy Society had friends in many high places and if they began whining about their leader being harmed during the coup there’d be an outrage. The Arlesite priest purpled at being questioned in such a manner, but there was no one in this hall who did not know who Balthazar Serigny was now – or why crossing him would be a costly mistake.

“He was not,” the Holy said.

Balthazar’s brow rose in surprise. Gorgeault was long past his prime, but it was known in some circles he’d had quite the adventurous youth. He would not have gone quietly.

“He was not harmed at all?” the spymaster pressed.

The priest spoke through gritted teeth.

“He was not returned to confinement, cutthroat,” the Holy reluctantly said. “He escaped.”

Oh. Oh, those fucking fools. Did they not realize how that changed things? Balthazar, much as it burned to admit it, had blundered when he’d failed to seize Hasenbach more forcefully. But now the Silver Letters were out in force, every priest in the city was keeping an eye out for her and the manses of her supporters were under constant watch. It was known she’d fled into the high districts after making it out of the palace, and those had been closed down by guards and garrison so it was a certainty she was still in there. If she was in anywhere but the manses, it was only a matter of time before she was found. If she was in one of the manses, she could only wait helplessly there. It was still a dangerous situation, given the cunning of their quarry, but one that could be salvaged: especially if the Highest Assembly came through. But now Gorgeault would be out in the streets, and all his little friends and their little hiding places that no one else knew about would be opened to Hasenbach the fucking moment the other spy found her. Which he would, because for an old sack of bones he was sharp as goblin steel.

“Serigny,” Prince Arsene said, voice cutting through the room and demanding silence by simple virtues of his station. “What troubles you?”

“It troubles me that our friends in the cloth have let slip one of the few individuals capable pf smuggling Cordelia Hasenbach out of the capital,” the head of the Silver Letter flatly said.

The silence that fell was deafening.

“That cannot be allowed,” another of the Holies said. “She is to stand judgement before the Heavens and the Highest Assembly.”

“Shall either bother themselves to fetch her?” Balthazar cuttingly replied.

Anger from the priests, which like most of them was growing rather tiresome.

“Enough,” Prince Arsene yelled, and when heeded lowered his voice. “You have a suggestion to make, I take it?”

“I’ll need at least two thousand men,” the spymaster said. “Retinues, city guard or garrison it matters not so long as they are steady and will obey orders.”

“And what will they be ordered?” a Salian captain suspiciously asked.

“We know what part of the city Hasenbach has fled into, and we’ve sealed it off,” Balthazar Serigny evenly said. “Yet I have received fresh information that, in her despair, the Wicked Prince has struck a bargain with Below and is now attempting to bring forth demons into the city.”

There was a pause.

“For the sake of Salia,” the Bastard smiled, “we shall have to burn her out.”

—

Wearing heavy cloaks, in deference to the last winter chill and not any great need for discretion, two tall silhouettes strode within the southernmost gate of Salia. The Witch of the Woods frowned, smelling blood and smoke, and inclined her head to the side questioningly.

“Order must be restored,” the White Knight calmly agreed.

Interlude: Bone

“Here’s the only justice I care to bring across the Vales: a sword in a just hand.”
– Queen Elizabeth Alban of Callow, the Queen of Blades

The stone hit the man square in the cheek and he screamed in pain as bone broke blood began trickling down. Another few followed, though most were detritus snatched off the street instead of loose pavement. This was the first time Sister Marie ever saw a stoning with her own eyes, though some of the older scriptures did mention the practice in specific circumstances – traitors in Salamans had been dealt with in such a manner, in those ancient days when the Arlesen Confederacy stood and the Gigantes still tried to bring their rebellious escaped slaves to heel on occasion. A case could be made, Sister Marie decided, that in these troubled days a northern in Salia was close enough to a traitor for... this not to be without precedent.

“Please,” the man begged. “I’m not even Lycaonese, it’s a-”

A clump of thrown ice interrupted the man’s words. Was that a tooth Sister Marie had glimpsed? Hard to tell, for the torches cast only wavering light and the screams of the crowd were distracting. Odds were the man truly wasn’t Lycaonese – he’d hardly be the first one with a vaguely northern name to be dragged out of his shop tonight to stand before the judgement of the crowd – but it hardly mattered. The young priestess’ sermon had whipped up a frenzy in the odd hundred Salians who attended her temple regularly, and it was not an easily quelled thing. Brother Rémi, who stood between her and the Holies, had been clear that nothing must be said that would temper the righteous wrath of the people against Princess Hasenbach’s attempt to make herself a queen.

“Procer is no queendom,” Sister Marie screamed, to the approving roar of the crowd, “it is an assembly of the highest in the eyes of the Heavens, and let all tyrants-”

Her eye caught sight of a glinting thing, spinning. She turned in surprise as a dark-skinned man caught a coin with an open palm. The crowd had parted around him without even realizing it, Sister Marie realized. Like a school of small fish around a larger one. Calm eyes found her own, serene in the midst of the screaming chaos. A heartbeat later there was a burn of blinding Light and she felt searing pain going through her skull before she felt nothing at all. Sister Marie’s headless corpse fell to the ground, everything about the neck turned to ash.

“Disperse,” the White Knight evenly told the crowd.

—

Louis de Satrons found, to his surprise, that he must have missed field work. He did not consider himself a sentimental sort, but there was a strange pleasure to seeing to the necessities by your own hand. Like filing a nail, he thought, or cracking a joint. The man before him the dark room was awake, though the hood on his face had been enough to cow him into stillness for now. Perhaps the Silver Letter agent even believed that by keeping his focus he’d be able to retrace his steps to this particular safehouse. If so, the head of the Circle of Thorns commended him for his dedication. Not that it would help.

“Proceed,” Louis ordered.

The hood was ripped off by one of his helpers, and the unremarkable face of a middle-aged man with luxurious blond curls was revealed. The spy blinked at the sudden restoration of his sight, but found he could not see well: surrounded by glowing magelight orbs, the man was bound sitting in the sole island of light within the interrogation room. Louis’ own presence would be reduced to a voice from the dark until he wished it otherwise.

“You’re making a fucking mistake, whoever you are,” the spy called out.

“My mother,” Louis said, voice dry as dust, “was a huntress of great skill. Stag, boar – even geese and swans in our lands by the shores of Lake Artoise. She insisted I learn, but I never succeeded at sharing her enthusiasm for the affair.”

“They’ll know I’m missing,” the man said, fear beginning to win over anger in his tone.

Few good things ever happened to bound men in dark rooms being told wistful stories.

“If you return me to my people I’ll argue leniency,” the spy tried. “Otherwise they’ll fucking rip you apart, I don’t care how high your birth is. I’m a Silver-”

“Letter,” one of Louis’ helpers completed from behind the prisoner. “We know.”

“Then what do you want?” the prisoner hissed.

“From you?” Louis said. “Nothing you will not give soon enough.”

He slowly rose to his feet, then glanced to the side. There was quite the selection awaiting, for the Circle’s facilities in the city were well-equipped.

“But there is one part of her insistence I thank my mother for, to this day,” Louis de Sartrons mused out loud. “For she was old-fashioned, and demanded I skin and cut my kills myself instead of allowing a servant to do so in my stead.”

His fingers closed around the flensing knife, elegantly inlaid with silver.

“Look, I’m willing to talk,” the spy hastily said. “Just tell me what you want to know and-”

“You know nothing of import,” the helper said. “Your position is that of a bottom-feeder in Balthazar’s band of beasts.”

“Then what is it you want ?” the spy desperately said.

“For you to scream loudly enough that it will carry to our other prisoners,” Louis mildly said.

It truly had been kind of Mother, to ensure he would learn young to have a precise hand with a knife. And how to use it, too: there was surprisingly little difference between a stag and a man.

Under the skin, anyway.

—

“What’s the damned holdup?” Prince Arsene yelled from atop his horse.

Balthazar Serigny supressed a sneer. The man had insisted on coming yet barely left the palace grounds before beginning to complain about every little thing. The tall spymaster discreetly palmed a knife in the long sleeve of his greatcoat and barreled forward on foot, elbowing the soldiers ahead of him so he could reach the front of the column. There was little difficulty in finding out what the trouble was when he’d arrived there, however. The men and women in their way were a ramshackle bunch, a patchwork of different arms and uniforms when they even had either. There was Salian city guard in there, and garrison as well, but others were civilians: many fair-haired and older, Lycaonese veterans who’d dragged themselves awake and into the streets in the name of one of their own. The loyalty Hasenbach still commanded among her kind even after abandoning them to the wolves was outright disturbing. Some youths in elaborate arms and armour, clearly highborn and perhaps even distant royalty, had gallantly gathered as well. They were the loudest by far. Their challenges to the soldiers that were in principle led by Prince Arsene of Bayeux – and in practice by Captain Julien, who Balthazar owned – were both boastful and improbable, as was Alamans custom.

The spymaster was reluctantly impressed by the young woman who baldly asserted she would kill them all with half an icicle, one handed, if they dared to take another step forward.

Still, this was a waste of time and time was his most dangerous foe at the moment. With every passing moment that old fuck Simon had been loose in the capital for longer and the chances he’d found Hasenbach rose. And though Balthazar’s middling esteem for the man had dropped even further when he’d failed to sniff out such a large conspiracy amongst the Holies, there was no denying that the Holy Society had a wide array of friends and hiding holes in the city: if Brother Simon got his hands on the savage, the coup was unlikely to recover from it. Which meant there was no time to humour the fools who’d raised a ramshackle barricade across the street, barring the way to the near three thousand men the conspiracy had gathered to smother any chance of Hasenbach’s escape in the crib. There were a few hundreds at most and would be swept away in moments if it came to blades. The head of the Silver Letters shoved aside one of his own soldiers, who was standing around hesitantly as insults were hurled at her. Fucking Salian garrison, they had no spine and hardly more pride. The former fantassin approached the barricade and raised his voice.

“By order of the Highest Assembly, you are charged to disperse,” Balthazar called out. “You are aiding treason and heresy by standing in our way.”

That saw some hesitating, for both offences he’d named were capital ones and there tended to be generous in doling out death when it came to rooting them out. A hirstute, bearded old man – drunk, by the looks of him, leapt over the barricade with only a long knife in hand.

“Crook,” the man said, Lycaonese accent thick. “Crook and servant of crooks. Hannoven fell for you and now you slide the knife.”

“You will not get another warning,” Balthazar called out, ignoring him in favour of the crowd.

“ Lest dawn fail ,” the old man screamed, and hundreds roared it out with him.

Fools that they were, they charged out from the barricade. Balthazar hastily retreated, loudly calling for a shield wall to be formed, and the slaughter began.

—

Francesco grit his teeth and struck again, finally smashing through the wooden shutters. The others let out a whoop of joy and Anselme helped him clear away the broken remains before going through the window. Moments later the other man opened the door from the inside and the lot of them went into the shop, a few looking for any coin that might be kept by the drapier but less ambitious looters simply grabbing every roll of cloth and displayed tapestries they could. It was all a sin, Francesco knew, but virtue did not fill stomachs. That pretty tapestry displaying verses from the Book of All Things might, though, so while ashamed he carefully unhooked it before folding it under his arm. From the ripping sound to his side, not all his fellows had been so delicate in taking it. What waste.

“Drop everything,” a woman’s voice called out. “Or you’ll not leave here alive!”

The drapier herself had come out from the back, he saw when he turned. She was overweight and long past fifty, so the sight of her brandishing a slender duellist’s sword while in a nightdress was more laughable than worrying.

“We’ll take the sword too, thank you,” Alessandra chortled, mocking the woman they were robbing.

It was a hard crowd he ran with these days, but with a crime to his name the city guard ran him off whenever he tried to attend the First Prince’s alms-givings. Who else was he to run with, if he did not want to starve or die of cold out in the streets? Francesco caught a flicker from the corner of his eye and saw a coin spinning up – and though it spun so well and high it should have touched the ceiling instead it vanished. There was some hooded figured leaning against the doorsill behind them all, but Francesco barely noticed for the silhouette that’d spun the coin moved like the wind and then Alessandra’s head was rolling on the floor. The man, for Francesco now saw it was a man, paused to take a look at Anselme before killing him too.

One stroke of his longsword, that was all it took, and as the looters began to flee the stranger repeated the process again and again. A look, a strike, a death. The drapier had pissed herself at the sight, though he could hardly judge her since he’d done the same. The man finally turned to him, tall and dark-skinned and with eyes that Francesco met entirely by accident. Within he saw a spinning coin, silver, one side bearing crossed swords and the other laurels. And then it ceased, and laurels was what he came back to himself and knew this to be a glimpse of madness. The stranger’s sword rested against his neck, and he tapped it lightly with the flat side.

“Amend your ways,” the White Knight said. “While you still can.”

Then he moved to the side and Francesco flinched in anticipation of a changed mind or a cruel game coming at an end, but the man instead took a look at the drapier – who’d fallen on her knees and dropped the sword, trembling in terror.

“You have reason to be afraid,” the stranger coldly said. “They see all.”

There was a flash of light and the drapier’s charred corpse tumbled back, half the face whispering ash. The man took a last glance around before walking out of the charnel yard, the hooded figure following him without a word.

Francesco threw up and nearly choked on the filth, for he was weeping in relief.

—

“Interesting,” Louis de Sartrons said, washing his hands clean in a water basin.

He dried them with a silk cloth before setting it aside. The full weight of his attention went to the woman at his side and the report she had recited by memory. Promising that she would have such talent for recall without any notes, though Louis was in no position to make an official commendation. If it turned out that the Silver Letters had not been used by a foreign power, then his ordered abductions and torture of their members would be taken a gross overreach of the Circle’s mandate. Should this be the case, he would confess to having abused the resources of the organization out of his deep personal loyalty for Cordelia Hasenbach and take full responsibility. For that fiction to be kept, however, it must appear as if he’d acted on his own unknown to his peers. A commendation on record would rather strike a discordant note.

“It appears that as far back as five months ago the Silver Letters began unearthing Praesi infiltration,” his helper said. “Interrogation of a captured spy yielded information that led them to several safehouses, including two holding scrolls and correspondence. Balthazar Serigny is said to have taken great personal interest in the findings of the second one.”

“And we missed operations of this scale?” Louis frowned. “How?”

“Of all these, only the two Eyes of the Empire in Madame Soucillon’s brothel were known to us. Their capture and death were made to look like criminal activity, however, so they raised no alarms,” the woman replied. “As for the rest, the Silver Letters appear to have found a genuine Praesi spy chain unknown to us.”

That the Bastard had not passed along everything related to the Dread Empire to the Circle of Thorns at first opportunity was impolite, but not outright damning. It could be argued that the Circle’s inability to ferret out the Praesi had voided obligation for the Silver Letters, and this incident in and of itself was not enough to justify the assault on them Louis had ordered. As he had said earlier, however, it was an interesting detail.

“Have every known and suspected Praesi infiltrator in the city looked in on, immediately,” Louis de Satrons finally said. “And it is time we deploy all our... acquisition assets.”

“Sir?” she murmured, sounding surprised.

“Find me someone who had a notion of what was in that correspondence the Bastard took,” the spymaster order. “Neither gentleness nor discretion are any longer a concern in achieving this.”

—

“Are the firebreaks ready?” Balthazar asked.

The wind had picked up, though by the standards of Salian winter this was still a rather mild night. Though the tall killer knew that decisive action was needed for Hasenbach to be put down, he had no intention of burning down the entire capital. Though Princess Malanza might be grateful for what he’d done, she’d still have to order him killed to appease the mob. Not being a fool, he’d ordered firebreaks to be dug around the high districts and great masses of snow carted up to prevent the fires about to be lit from spreading. It would be enough, most likely. With a little luck it’d even snow later that night or come morning, and even the embers would be put out.

“They are,” Captain Julien agreed. “Are you certain this is wise, sir? Lots of royals have manses in this part of the capital. They might take issue with returning to ashes instead of a nice salon .”

“These are hard times, Julien,” Balthazar mildly said. “And we’ve confirmed that Prince Cordelia has set mages to summoning demons to take back the city somewhere within the districts. The ritual must be disrupted no matter the costs.”

The other man did not believe him the slightest, though he was wise enough to keep silent. In truth, though for those of some learning this was a wild accusation Balthazar had not chosen that particular excuse without reason. Few Procerans knew much of magic and it was well known that Hasenbach had brought some of the magickers back to prominence by founding her Order of the Red Lion. Those with little knowledge of sorcery, which happened to be the overwhelming majority of the Principate, would find it believable enough. As for the learned, they would know well enough not the cross a broadly popular First Princess with great command of the Highest Assembly and the enthusiastic backing of the House of Light.

“So be it,” Captain Julien said, murmuring Gods save us all under his breath.

For all his dithering, he was prompt in having the fires started. Balthazar had ordered they begin with the northmost sections and rake their way down, to flush out Hasenbach if it was possible: it was still best to have her imprisoned instead of dead if possible, though not so such a great extent he’d let an opportunity to put an arrow in her pass. The high districts had sewers, which he had watched by his people, and every way out of them was currently held by soldiers and guards. The noose would not be slipped, not by a woman who was suspected to have a broken leg. The torches hit the oil-soaked bundles of wood and roared out, beginning to spread into the attached manse. As the fire crackled merrily Balthazar the Bastard smiled, for he’d have the savage in chains before dawn even if he had to go street by damned street.

—

Lieutenant Pauline had been feeling nauseous for near half an hour, now, and emptying her stomach had helped absolutely nothing. She was city guard, she told herself, she wasn’t meant to handle messes like this. There must have been at least two hundred corpses scattered around the street where the ‘authorities’ had clashed with the ‘rebels’, most of them belonging to the poor fuckers who’d gone after garrison soldiers under Julien while armed about as well as your average street tough. The shield wall had scythed through them like wheat, though stubbornly quite a few had kept coming. Some old veterans and garrison men stayed loyalist had tried to get a shield wall of their own going, but Captain Julien had brought archers and there weren’t enough shields on the rebel side to be able to even remotely take an organized volley.

The whole thing had been a massacre, and the smell of it was now lingering in her nose and mouth even when she covered it with cloth and faced wind blowing the other way. Gods, if only she’d not had a taste for poppy brew. If her debts had not been so deep the Silver Letters would never... It mattered not. They were deep as could be, and she owed to the wrong sort of folks. Hasenbach had been a decent enough sort to the people of the capital but not so saintly Pauline would burn down her own life for the First Prince’s sake. Weren’t no saints anywhere in Salia, as far as she could tell, and a woman had to take care of herself when the going got rough. She just wished the stench would go away.

“Stack the bodies together properly,” she yelled through the cloth. “The carts need to be able to pass through the street when they’re carried out. And all of you just standing around, lend a fucking hand would you?”

Only her own guards heeded the instruction, the idling soldiers and fantassins – Silver Letters, most likely – ignoring her outright. Considering they made for half the hundred she’d been left with, it was no surprise this bloody mess was going on forever. Even if the damned carts did finally get here they’d all be stuck waiting until guts and corpses no longer clogged the way. The Bastard ran this coup, looked liked, and he’d not trusted her enough to let her guards handle this alone. Fair enough, but the man could at least have left her with more than godsdamned watchers if she was to have this street cleaned up enough it didn’t look like a butcher’s yard under morning light.

“Half of them,” a man’s voice calmly said, “were hardly even armed.”

Lieutenant Pauline nearly jumped out of her own skin. The man who’d talked was some tall foreign fucker, though well-dressed. Probably one of Balthazar’s, if he’d made it through the other blockades unimpeded. Maybe he’d know when the carts would be coming. There was a hooded woman at his side, the guard then noted, and she could see bits of a mask in the shadows beneath. Yeah, definitely some sort of spies.

“They were armed enough,” Pauline grunted. “And you’re sounding awful judgy for one of theirs, I got to say.”

“I do not judge,” the dark-skinned man refuted. “Though judgement has been passed on you nonetheless.”

“You’re not one of Balthazar’s,” Lieutenant Pauline said, stomach sinking.

“No,” the White Knight said. “Though I expect we shall meet in due time. I shall mark the exculpated, Antigone. For the rest, do as you will.”

The woman cocked her hooded head to the side as the wind suddenly picked up, and the last thing Pauline ever saw as a blade shining like the sun.

—

“And you are quite certain,” Louis de Sartrons said, “that it concerned the Augur’s limitations?”

“Yes,” the dark-haired prisoner said. “I saw only part of the scroll, but it claimed to contain the Carrion Lord’s own thoughts on the matter.”

And there it was, the trap the Tower had laid. It’d been done cleverly enough, the emaciated spymaster had to admit. If that scroll had been found on the first foray of the Silver Letters, Balthazar would have recognized it for the dangled bait that it was. Instead it’d been a progressive, heady climb for the other spymaster: information extracted that led to more, operations successful but never too easily, until he’d found quite the cache of compromising documents including this particular scroll. Likely Serigny had held some doubts as well, but ultimately decided that not even the Empire was so callous as to sacrifice near a hundred spies and hirelings altogether to simply feed someone information. He never quite had gotten the measure of the Eyes of the Empire, had he? Oh Balthazar had prevented their successes on occasion but there was a reason that the Webweaver’s pawns were for Louis and his peers to deal with and not the Bastard. Clever as Balthazar could be on occasion, he was used to the deceptions of the Ebb and Flow: shifting alliances and secrecy, the labyrinthine procedures and precedents of the Highest Assembly paired with blackmail and the occasional assassination.

And the Tower did use those means, it was true. But the Tower was a cursed beast that swallowed its own tail, there was no gambit too ruthless for it. Worse, after the Scribe and the mysterious Lady Ime had wrested the reins from the hands of their predecessors they had proved to be exquisitely deft hands at the game. Some of the ways the Circle’s agents in Mercantis had been dislodged had been so superbly executed that Louis had been more admiring than angry when reading the reports. Under the tenure of those two, the Eyes of the Empire had become the peer of the Circle of Thorns in every way. He had a great deal of respect for that society, and he’d studied them for decades: this had the telltale marks of a Praesi conspiracy all over it. It was always their preference to fund and empower local turncoats rather than to introduce a plot of their own whenever possible. Under Dread Empress Malicia the Empire had turned again and again its wealth into poison flowing through the veins of the Principate, and this was no different.

Yet when the reports from the other order had had given began to pour in, what had been clear instead became muddled.

“Pardon me,” Louis said. “I don’t believe I heard you correctly.”

“They are killing each other, sir,” the helper said. “It is not a coincidence, we’ve ten separate instances confirmed of known or suspected Imperial agents fighting.”

A factional struggle between the Eyes? It was said that the Black Knight and the Dread Empress had sundered ties, but the Circle had been dubious given the lack of follow-through on either side. It would not be the first time that those two feigned quarrels to draw out foes and slay them. It was not, however, impossible.

“In seven out of ten instances, the party being attacked was trying to start a fire in the city,” the helper recited. “In two out of the seven, magic was used by the attackers. In all ten instances the attackers won and retreated. We have several being followed.”

The mages, Louis thought, were the trouble here. The great advantage of Praes spies was the ability to transmit what they learned by scrying, which greatly complicated ascertaining if a suspect individual was truly in contact with handlers. Which was why the Eyes so carefully guarded the identities of their mages in Procer, often preferring to lose an entire band of spies on the ground rather than endanger that more important component. Two had already been outed tonight, and more might follow. Which meant either this gambit, whatever its meaning, was worth burning them and potentially a very significant potion of the Eyes of the Empire in Salia – if not all of Procer.

Or, he grimly conceded, there truly was factional fighting within the Eyes. Between the Empress and the Carrion Lord, or more practically speaking Lady Ime and the Scribe. The former was said to never leave the Tower, if she even truly existed, but the latter... She was alleged to have been in the heartlands at some point in the past, though the information had been judged unreliable. It was not impossible for her to be in Salia at this very moment. One side was attempting to start fires, another to prevent such actions. It could not be that arson itself was the liability, for given the utter chaos in the capital it’d be nearly impossible to seriously contend that Praes had been responsible for the fires. Not when Balthazar’s band of pawns was happily starting a few without prompting.

“The riots will grow worse, if the fires take hold,” Louis frowned, thinking out loud. “Both those of the First Prince’s partisans and those of the conspirators.”

More specifically the House of Light, who could stir the people to anger like few others. Still, Cordelia Hasenbach was not without friends in Salia and remained popular with the people – in particular soldiers, retired or otherwise, but also artisans and the poor.

“Fighting has begun in earnest between our own people and the Silver Letters,” his helped noted. “As well as the Eyes and the Silver Letters, though that has been infrequent and we believe possibly accidental.”

Louis de Sartrons’ eyes sharpened.

“Where?” he asked. “Where are the Eyes and the Letters clashing?”

The particulars had to be sent for, but the ember of inspiration had struck and slowly he followed the thought to its conclusion. As always, the devil was in the details. One might credibly conjecture that at the moment there were four assemblies of spies in Salia: the Silver Letters, the Circle of Thorns, and what one might venture to term the Praesi arsonists and the Praesi hatchets. The hatchets, as it happened, were the key. Because as descriptions were confirmed it became clear that there were significantly less of them than the arsonists – this was known because some of their executioner crews were sighted several times.

The Praesi arsonists were being clipped away by the hatchets with methodical precision before they could light fires in vulnerable parts of the cities, where it might easily spread. Now, the hatchets did not intervene when Silver Letters and arsonists fought but they themselves had raided several Silver Letters safehouses. Which meant that the Praesi ‘hatchets’ were trying to prevent the ‘arsonists’ from carrying out a plot, while most likely trying to get their hands on some damning piece of evidence. Meanwhile the Silver Letters were being fallen upon from all sides, including the Circle’s more martial assets, while lashing out essentially blindly.

The hatchets were being used to contain and clean up a plot someone had evidently judged ill-advised. Given their small numbers but efficiency and eerily skilled coordination, as well as their precise strikes at Silver Letters safehouses, Louis believed he knew who was heading them. He sent for his coat and arranged for an escort to accompany him back to Les Horizons Lugubres . The other members of the Circle would be long gone, by now, but it was not they he intended to meet.

“Sir,” the helper said as he was led out, “I had a room set aside as you ordered. Who should I let the watchers expect?”

“Oh, you might say she’s an old friend,” Louis de Sartrons smiled, “Though I expect she’ll let herself in.”

—

The princes were folding, and Balthazar could almost taste the victory in the air.

The last two royals in the city that were not already at the Highest Assembly had sent messengers expressing they would not be setting out to attend, and that they would go accompanied by their retinue given the disorder in the city. They’d ordered that the blockade was to move aside for them and their escort when they arrived, which Balthazar had arrived – so long as only men on foot and by horse came, and every single one was inspected before being allowed to pass. They’d grown desperate now, enough that neither Prince Renato of Salamans nor Prince Ariel of Arans had even brought up that the head of the Silver Letters was torching the district where their own manses stood. They’d recognized it for a lost cause, and they were falling in line. Captain Julien had protested letting the retinues out in the city, but they were less than two thousand in whole so Balthazar had disagreed. They were elite soldiers, true enough, but they could not seize the city with so few. If they took the palace they might be able to hold it against greater numbers, but Balthazar had ordered than only twenty soldiers be let in by prince and any attempt to force entry with more be met with violence.

Given that the conspiracy’s own soldiers were the ones on the right side of walls and gates, at the moment, even if the two princes had struck an unlikely alliance they simply did not have the strength to take the palace with steel. And even if they did, by some miracle, they could not defend it: while it might be true that the servants in the palace had been fond of Hasenbach, and some even protested her seizing, he had Silver Letters among their number that’d open secret ways into the palace if it need be retaken. Watching another manse burn down, the ferocious-looking man waited at the edge of the blaze’s warmth for the latest word out of the palace. By now the Holies and Princess Clotilde ought to have crowned their pet princes, and the decrees could start being passed in earnest. Cordelia Hasenbach’s deposition would likely be the first. The soldiers had begun piling the wood by the walls of another manse, while another detachment briskly inspected the servants and lesser nobles that’d come out of the last before sending them south in small groups, when the messenger did arrive. One of his own Silver Letters, he noticed, Rosalie. Less than pleasant a person, but utterly without scruples and so reliable for all manners of work.

“Have I missed the election of First Princess Rozala Malanza?” Balthazar amusedly asked.

The red-haired woman grimaced.

“You haven’t,” she said. “The Highest Assembly hasn’t even officially convened yet.”

He was, for once, more utterly surprised than furious. For a moment, at least, then fury claimed its due.

“What?” Balthazar hissed. “Are they all drunk? It’s been most of a bell, what could possibly be taking so long?”

“They can’t enter the Chamber of Assembly,” Rosalie said.

He blinked, unsure how to respond to that. Had some enchantment been laid upon the threshold?

“They don’t have the key,” she explained. “There was only one, in the hands of the Master of Orders-”

“One of Hasenbach’s,” Balthazar frowned.

“No one can find him,” Rosalie said. “He must have fled the palace. I have our people looking for him, but he could be anywhere by now.”

In principle that was a blow, as the Highest Assembly could only hold session within the Chamber and any motion passed outside of it would not be binding, but only in principle.

“Are you telling me no one can simply batter down those doors?” the spymaster growled. “Given their age a few good soldiers ought to be enough.”

“Princess Clotilde has refused,” Rosalie darkly said. “And the Holies have agreed. They say it would cast into doubt the legitimacy of Malanza’s ascension to break open the Chamber.”

“Of all the bouts of bloody lunacy,” Balthazar cursed.

He called for a horse, after that, and for Prince Arsene as well. This part of the city was under control, now it seemed they were needed back in the palace. Balthazar Serigny would see this coup succeed even if he had to batter down the fucking doors himself.

Site Hack

Some of you on the Discord server or the APGTE reddit might have come across a mention that the site was hacked last night, and indeed it was. It changed a few chapters as well as other pages to some malware link under the claim that something tragic had ‘happened to the site moderator’. I was having dinner at a friend’s at the time, but it was pretty easy to fix when I got home and nothing was lost. The password has been changed, so with a little luck it shouldn’t happen again.

E.E.

Interlude: Mirror

“Third, taking:
Bone to wind
And mirror to fill.”
-Third of the three so-called ‘Mavian Entreaties’

Louis de Sartrons had been speculating to himself as to how long he would have to wait before his guest arrived and had ultimately settled for ‘less than an hour’. Which, given the sheer bloody chaos in the city and the difficulty to move around the streets – and so have information carried through them – he’d felt was generous of him. Which was why his face went blank when he entered the private alcove at Les Horizons Lugubres and he found someone already seated a the table.

“You are late,” the Scribe said, her Chantant flawless.

The head of the Circle of Thorns, for the first time laying eyes on a woman he’d crossed blades and wits with across half of Calernia, immediately tried to commit her appearance to memory. Obtaining a description of the Webweaver had so far proved impossible, but now he saw that she was –

/

– and ink-stained hands. Louis was debating how to pass the knowledge to one of his helpers as soon as possible when he realized he had nothing to pass. The moment his eyes left the Scribe he knew nothing of her: height, colour of the eyes, even if her hair was long or short. He knew not whether her skin was dark or pale, or indeed anything at all save that she had ink-stained hands. Fuck , Louis thought, made unusually vulgar by the depths of his irritation.

“I would apologize, but I see you helped yourself to the wine,” the spymaster replied.

Two cups had been filled, hers already touched, and though he had no intention of putting his mouth anywhere near something the Webweaver had poured he accepted the delicate crystal glass when she offered it. He settled into his seat, the two of them surrounded by swirling panels of bottle-green glass and hanging stone lanterns that seemed to transmute all of Creation in jade.

“Shall I begin by reminding you that your presence in Salia uninvited is an act of war when truce has been declared?” Louis mused.

“Then it is for the best I am not here,” the Scribe replied. “Given the seriousness of the situation, shall we dispense with the preliminaries?”

Louis felt rather cheated that after all these years of wanting to meet one of his few peers in the trade he’d have to set aside the games of their kind, but he had to admit there was little time to spare. Despite what appeared to be the Webweaver’s best efforts, Salia was on fire. Several of them, in fact.

“It would be judicious of us,” the thin man conceded. “It appears that you are looking for something, my friend.”

He’d been told the Eyes – or at least the faction among them not attempting to set the city increasingly more on fire – had hit yet another warehouse of the Silver Letters while taking a carriage to the Horizons . Whatever it was that Scribe was seeking, she was seeking it urgently.

“I am,” the Scribe said. “Two things, as a matter of fact. I will require your aid in finding them.”

—

Brother Simon watched the man drop, bleeding from the throat, and fall into the filth of the sewers.

Age was catching up to him, after his exertions in leaving behind the hospitality of the Holies, so he’d gone and rounded up a few friends. They had, in turn, sent for friends of theirs. One of the several results of that unfolding awareness had been Simon of Gorgeault’s presence in the sewers of the high districts, under the escort of thirty well-armed fantassins. The friendly young woman who’d just snuck up to the Silver Letter who’d failed to hear them approach and decisively dispatched him sheathed her short sword then waved the others forward.

The lay brother cast a lingering look at the corpse floating on the surface of the river of excrement and trash, grimly thinking that with the amount of corpses his band had sown tonight the rats down here would be rather well-fed. He’d been breathing from his nose from the moment his escorts had ripped open the grid over the river of filth flowing into the muddy fields of the Petite Oblique – better known as Constant’s Arse by Salians, as the drop into the Old River and rain-channels meant many threw their waste there for it to be washed away – and been grateful for the hurried pace into the sewers proper.

There’d been precious little crawling, for which he was thoughtful, for later in the underground tunnels the wealthy and highborn of Salia had built the sewers at near a man’s height so that whenever blockage was had it could be dealt with promptly and not stink up their beautiful manses should the wind grow capricious. Balthazar was not a fool, so the Silver Letters were keeping watch in the tunnels, but a quick and heavily armed group could tear through such a cordon if it struck without hesitation. They’d met with success so far, though Brother Simon had silently tempered the victories with the knowledge that it was only a matter of time until a corpse was found.

And the moment one was, the Silver Letters would come down here in force. Perhaps even with garrison soldiers, which given their better arms and armour would be even more troublesome to deal with. No, while his group had been able to enter the high districts by the sewers but leaving through them would be another story entirely. As it happened Simon had some notion, though the risks would not be small. Yet there must be a part of the district where the blaze was weaker, and given enough wet blankets and snow... It had better chances of success than assault, anyhow, given the numbers the conspirators had surrounded the districts with.

“Here,” a voice whispered.

Simon followed the gesture with his eyes and found indentations in the wall, with rusting iron grips above them. A makeshift ladder to return above, thank the Gods.

“Where will we be?” the old man asked.

“Maybe a street away from Prince Renato’s manse,” the same fantassin who’d been guiding them through the sewer said. “Can’t be sure if there’ll be people, so we have to move fast.”

It was agreed upon in murmurs, and one of the fantassins took the lead in climbing up. A heavy wooden trapdoor barded in steel was opened and lowered as quietly as possible and they all fled upwards one after another. The night wind was a blessing after the stink of below, Simon thought, even though it carried the scent of burning in the distance. There were soldiers in the distance to the side, piling up wood, but they were busy with their work and did not look their way. The infiltrators hurried regardless, closing the trapdoor as quick as they could and fleeing for the shadows. They were hailed the moment they arrived in sight of the walls of the Prince of Salamans, and even earlier than Brother Simon had believed they would be: Renato’s retinue was out in the streets in great numbers, as if preparing to leave.

Simon was not unknown to the prince himself, though none of the officers among the soldiers knew him by sight, yet the lingering stink of his travels by sewer earned him some consideration when he claimed to be at odds with the conspirators. The head of the Holy Society had attempted to have the Prince of Salamans warned that he would be coming, but the messengers must have been waylaid for he was unexpected. Prince Renato himself was having his horse saddled when Simon was brought to him in the outer courtyard.

“Brother Simon,” the moustachioed Arlesite said. “I am told that the Holy Society has been protesting this lunacy.”

“It did even when I was still prisoner of the House of Light, Your Grace,” Simon agreed. “I am pleased to see you of a like mind.”

“There will be a reckoning for tonight,” Prince Renato warned. “One way or another.”

The lay brother mutedly nodded.

“I may have a method to smuggle Her Most Serene Highness out of the districts, if I may be allowed to speak with her,” Simon said.

The Arlesite prince’s face flickered with surprise.

“You do not know, then,” Renato said. “She is not here, Brother Simon. It was a ruse.”

Before Simon could ask where the First Prince had then gone, genuinely bemused, both of them turned when soldiers in the courtyard began to yell in surprise. The lay brother swallowed drily, when he saw what appeared to be an entire manse rise high in the night sky before being suddenly smashed downwards to a chorus of screams.

That, Simon of Gorgeault thought, rather changed things.

—

“It would be easier to look if I knew what to send my colleagues looking for,” Louis mildly said.

He’d promised nothing, not that his word given in such a situation would be of any worth at all. His duty was to Procer and Procer alone. Everything else was noise.

“The first is correspondence taken from one of the Empire’s safehouses,” she said. “It includes an entirely academic exercise by the Black Knight as to how one might arrange the assassination of Cordelia Hasenbach past of the vigilance of the Augur.”

Academic , was it? Louis knew of no less than twelve plots aimed at the murder of the First Prince since her coronation that could be traced back to either the woman in front of him or the black-cloaked devil she answered to. They’d been thwarted in part by the Circle, in part by Agnes Hasenbach’s unerring guidance and in part by the quality of guards Cordelia Hasenbach surrounded herself with. The only surprise here was that, if the Scribe was so desperately seeking to get her hands on the scroll that’d entice Balthazar into treason, it might genuinely be the Carrion Lord’s own words. It was a feasible explanation for why she might be trying so hard to find it: the revelation would be damaging to her master.

Or, his naturally suspicious mind whispered, after planting that ruinous seed the Scribe was now attempting to remove the evidence. Yet she had revealed that scroll’s existence to him while she must be uncertain of whether he knew of it or not, which meant whatever drove her was urgent enough she was willing to take the risk that the Circle would take the correspondence itself. Or that she infiltrated the Circle deeply enough she already knew of our awareness , he mused. In which case she is building credibility for a later lie. Ah, but he’d not felt this vital in in decades. It was like a stiff tonic dragging him back to the days of his youth, when the burning in his bones had not yet calmed. It was quite exhilarating, to want to crush someone so very utterly as he did the Scribe.

“As for the second, it is stolen imperial property currently held in a Silver Letters warehouse,” the Webweaver said. “Which is why you will help me, Louis de Sartrons.”

“There can be no legal theft of Praesi property while in a state of war with the Dread Empire,” Louis noted. “And that is a bold claim besides.”

“Also an accurate one,” the Scribe said. “For after the legionary detachment accompanying the Carrion Lord onto Lake Artoise by barge was wiped out, the boats were brought back to shore. And the Silver Letters had hired hands there, ready to claim first pick of what lay in the holds.”

The old spymaster forced himself to recall what he knew of the force that’d been found dead to the last on the barges, allegedly through some terrible miracle of the Grey Pilgrim’s. Numbers had been moderate, the only officer of note had been the veteran from the Conquest known as Marshal Ranker – Ranker, yes. A goblin.

“Goblin munitions,” Louis said with feigned serenity. “They seized goblin munitions.”

“The Silver Letters have been contracting alchemists in attempts to divine the recipe for our traditional munitions,” the Scribe agreed. “They have also brought into the city what I estimate to be three full cart’s worth of goblinfire.”

—

Prince Renato brought only a small escort when they sallied out, all mounted, and provided a mount for Simon as well. There was no point in bringing great strength, for they’d seen rise in the sky how such would be answered. No, best to flee if things went badly and for that horses and few soldiers were best. Brother Simon felt almost guilty of such wariness against what could only be one of the Chosen but not all such souls were kindly ones, much less kindly hands. The Regicide had famously held no compunctions in tearing through whoever stood in her way when she pursued a quarry and the lay brother had heard... troubling things about the Grey Pilgrim. Long before the man became involved with the Black Queen, too. The ten riders went down the street at a brisk trot, finding a graveyard of broken stone and corpses among which two silhouettes stood. One turned towards them, masked and cloaked in green, while the other spoke to a kneeling man. Simon spurred his mount onwards, casting his voice loudly.

“Hail, Chosen,” the lay brother said.

The hero who’d been speaking with a soldier glanced back, revealing dark skin to the torchlight, and Simon was thus able to name him: this would be the Ashuran hero that had been summoned by the First Prince, the White Knight. Whispered, among some priestly circles, to be in the service of the Choir of Judgement. The Chosen look back at the kneeling soldier, and before Simon could so much as speak another word the kneeling man’s head was rolling among the stones. Some of the soldiers behind him breathed in sharply at the sight, either shocked or afraid.

“You are not of these Silver Letters,” the other Chosen stated, her voice a woman’s. “Who then are you?”

There was something about the words that had Simon’s mind askew. Almost like the heroine had not been speaking Chantant, though obviously she had been.

“I am Brother Simon of Gorgeault, from the Holy Society,” the diplomat introduced himself.

“Prince Renato of Salamans,” the prince introduced himself, leading his mount to stand by Simon’s.

Brave man, the prince. Arlesites often were, though they had a way of turning that virtue into a vice.

“I am the Witch of the Woods,” the heroine said. “He is the White Knight. We seek the man called Balthazar Serigny. Do you know where he is?”

The White Knight turned to look at them, eyes utterly serene even as his sword dripped blood.

“We are here for a reason, Antigone,” the Ashuran said, almost chidingly. “To meet them, perhaps. Do you know where the First Prince is being held?”

“She has freed herself from the trap of the traitors,” Prince Renato said. “Have you then come to support her cause?”

“There is no cause,” the White Knight said. “She is the First Prince, that is fact. What more need be said?”

“Then you must help us,” Brother Simon says. “For my colleagues will have gathered every sword they can from the city guard and the garrison, every loyal man and woman in the city, but even with the help of loyal princes and the retinues we will find it hard to take the palace.”

“See?” the White Knight smiled, glancing at his comrade. “Always a reason.”

—

Oh , Louis thought, those utter fools . Like no one had ever tried to piece together the goblin’s recipes. The Stygian Magisterium was said to have spent a fortune in repeated failed attempts, the Thalassocracy had a standing reward for any goblin munitions in any state and even the First Prince herself had briefly tried to have alchemists reproduce the ones known as ‘sharpers’ before admitting that whatever the process involved was the Principate simply did not have the sorcerous know-how to match it. And now a significant portion of the Eyes of the Empire was going around the city setting fires, when they should be well aware that all it’d take was a single drop touching flame and... and the city would burn green. As was the telltale mark of the Black Queen bringing her enemies to heel.

“Malicia wants to sink the Liesse Accords,” Louis said. “Yet you are attempting to protect them. Why?”

“Because I have been ordered to,” the Scribe replied.

Her closeness to the Black Knight was well-documented, true enough, and with the lifting of the veil over Iserre it had become possible to scry again days ago. All it would have taken was a face-to-face conversation with the Carrion Lord and the matter would have been settled. Of course, that much implied she had already been in Salia. That she had been here and that the Eyes of the Empire in the service of Lady Ime instead of herself had somehow succeeded at fomenting such schemes without her knowledge. Which was, in a word, absurd . The strife between Praesi spies was too recent, Louis decided. And though he dared not underestimate the Eyes of the Empire, neither would he overestimate them: the way Balthazar Serigny had been played, and likely other conspirators as well, was beyond the reach of most Praesi spies.

“It was your scheme, wasn’t it?” Louis de Sartrons suddenly said. “All of this was plotted in concert with the Tower. And then the Carrion Lord pulled your leash.”

The bones of the aftermath of the initial plot might have taken were still there. Cordelia Hasenbach dead, the House of Light irreparably discredited by the fire and the coup, Rozala Malanza crowned First Princess but illegitimately so in the eyes of most. Large swaths of the Principate would outright rebel, and even if the Dead King was beaten back there would be no keeping the Lycaonese in Procer after this. They’d fight bitterly to secede and many of Prince Cordelia’s steadiest allies with them . Either Keter devoured us whole or we’d collapse in the wake of our survival , Louis thought half-admiringly. And with the House perhaps purged and inevitably disgraced, there would be no one left to mediate between the combatants. It’d been a very comprehensive scheme. Terrifyingly so. Until part of the schemers had turned against it, anyway.

“If that were the case, such a plan would have been made when Lord Black was held prisoner by heroes,” the Scribe said.

“You need our help,” the spymaster smiled. “To find those munitions before half the capital burns green and your master ends up being held responsible.”

“You need my help,” the Scribe replied, “before half your capital burns green and hundreds of thousands die.”

“It will cost you,” Louis de Sartrons nonchalantly said.

Her eyes narrowed, but she answered through gritted teeth. Resigned. Oh, this was delicious turn indeed.

“What do you want?” she asked.

Praes had attempted to lay hand on Procer, Louis mused with a thin smile. As the charge of the Circle of Thorns ordered, it was time for the Dread Empire to bleed for presumption.

—

Balthazar felt his face turn ashen. His mind stalled, for a moment, in utter surprise and dismay. He nodded at Rosalie in acknowledgement afterwards, who once more this might had been appointed the carrier of ill news. This time, though, much worse than the last.

“You would do well to listen for once in your misbegotten life, you jumped-up fantassin,” Brother Bertran sneered, Arlesite accent thick. “If you expect to keep your station after Princess Rozala’s election you should learn-”

“Shut your fucking mouth, priest,” Balthazar the Bastard said, voice gone flat. “The rest of you, listen to me closely.”

There was a ripple of surprise among the crowd. They’d agreed to speak with him when he’d insisted that the damned door to the Highest Assembly needed to be battered down because of his prominence within the conspiracy, but none of these were used to being spoken to in such a manner.

“You dare speak-” Brother Betran began.

Balthazar glanced at one of his men and the priest’s nose broke with a wet crunch a heartbeat later. A sheath weighed quite a bit, especially with the sword still in it.

“If we do not enter the Highest Assembly and depose Hasenbach within the hour, everyone here is dead,” the large spymaster calmly said. “The princes of Salamans and Arans broke through the encirclement of the high districts and gathered a crowd of armed malcontents. They’re coming for the palace.”

“We have the run of the palace, Serigny,” Princess Clotilde replied. “We’ve retinues of our own and loyalists, as well as the walls. We could hold ten times our number, and I’ve doubts they have gathered such.”

“If that was all they had, I’d hardly care,” Balthazar grunted. “We could break them all at once. But there are two Chosen with them – the White Knight and the Witch of the Woods.”

“This is good news, Serigny,” Sister Adelie dismissed. “We need only send an envoy and they will come to our side, perhaps even bearing Hasenbach herself. She is a heretic.”

“The two of them have killed somewhere around three hundred people since they’ve entered the city, best my people can tell,” Balthazar said. “At least a dozen were priests. They are coming for our heads, ladies and gentlemen, not to lend a hand.”

A great deal of consternation ensued. The Holies, in particular, remained unconvinced that the Chosen would not embrace their cause. Amusingly enough there was talk of Hasenbach having seduced the White Knight, or the Witch of the Woods, or both as well as the less salacious talk that she might have lied to them so they would misunderstand the situation. One even suggested they were in truth Damned and not Chosen, though there were few takers. The more practical suggested envoys be sent to the Chosen regardless, to ‘clarify the situation’ to which Balthazar agreed mostly so they’d cease their shrill whining. Fear, though, finally got the lot of them moving. They all knew that so long as Hasenbach was the First Prince, they were all rebels. Deposition followed by an election, even a hasty and dubious one, would change the situation. The White Knight was said to be a scrupulous observer of the law, when there was law to be had, and even a parchment hat was better than none at all when it was raining outside. Their soldiers and guards were sent to hold the fortifications around the palace, key parts of the inside carefully garrisoned as well, and then they finally marched on the Chamber of Assembly. A strange procession of priests, highborn and spies. Only four soldiers, enough to carry a large bench that they immediately began ramming into the ancient doors. Once, twice, thrice and then the doors opened . Seated on the tall seat of her office, flanked by soldiers and the bearded Master of Orders, the First Prince of Procer awaited them all in the full and resplendent regalia of her rank.

“Hasenbach,” Balthazar snarled. “ Why are you here? ”

“The Highest Assembly is in session, traitor,” Cordelia Hasenbach said, face a mask of frigid contempt. “Where else would I be?”

Winter I

“Forty-one: should personalities among your band be clashing overmuch, consider leading the band into grave peril. Either friendship or a corpse will ensue, which remedies the issue either way.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

Merciful Gods, it truly was a terrible job but someone had to do it. Today that person was Ernest, and though he’d gone as far as offering up his entire savings to anyone in his company willing to go in his place there’d been no takers. Either he’d not saved up enough to tempt someone into the risk, or they’d wisely decided that a corpse could spend no coin. Captain Noémie – her rank meant she did not have to participate in the lottery, the damned lucky witch – had ordered half a dozen of his fellows to come down to the shore with him, enough that even if the Dead struck there should be at least one runner left to bring back the news. Ernest’s last attempt to sway one of them into taking his place was met with jeers and one promise to comfort his sister if he did not make it back to shore. Victor, the last one had been. He’d remember that. The rowboat was cramped and uncomfortable, though even in winter it’d been kept oiled and clean so it would remain in good shape. Ernest, by what he intended to claim was a coincidence, smacked Victor in the face with the oar when his companions pushed him out into the lake.

The waters of Lake Pavin rarely froze even at winter’s peak, but they were icy cold and prone to ripping currents that could easily tip over a small boat like this one. Still that was the last of Ernest’s troubles this morn, for he’d been sent out to see if any of the Dead were lurking beneath the waters. Orders had come down from Prince Gaspard himself, it was said, that all forces by the shores of Lake Pavin and the Tomb were to survey the waters every day. Rumour had it that Langueroche, further up north, had fallen after heavy fighting because the undead had massed in great numbers under the surface of the lake before striking just before morning. The people had fled in time, but now the entire northwest was said to be buckling under the weight of the Dead’s offensive. The young man glanced back to the distant shape of Sengrin, the fortress-town on the hilly slope where he’d been born, and prayed once more it was too small a town to be worth the Hidden Horror’s attentions. They hardly had the men to resist an incursion if it came, for many had been called north to the capital where the Enemy had struck hardest.

Yet the siege there had been broken, Ernest reminded himself. The war was not yet lost.

A scream from the shore shook him out of his thoughts, reminding him simply rowing out would serve no purpose. Carefully, he went looking through the cloth bag hung at the front of the boat and took out a handful of small round stones. As he’d been instructed to, he leant over the side of the boat and dropped three in a line. Whatever it was the priests had done to the rocks, it worked as they’d said it would: light bloomed as they sunk deeper, casting a warm and broad glow. Now he only had to wait until it touched the bottom of the lake, repeat this twice more and he could – oh, oh Gods no . Standing in still and silent rows at the bottom of Lake Pavin, hundreds of figures in ancient armour spread out as far as the light was cast. Ernest desperately scrabbled for the oars again and began rowing, screaming out in alarm for his companions still on the shore, but with utter terror he saw from the corner of his eye one of the stones he’d dropped bounce off the side of a skeletal thing’s bronze helmet. It looked up, an eyeless leering skull, and the young soldier nearly pissed himself.

He hardly made it another twenty feet, screaming all the while, before a spear’s tip punched through the bottom of the rowboat and it began taking water. He tried to keep rowing for a few heartbeats, even as more iron spikes went through the wood, but the weight was too much and his arms too weak. There were dark shapes moving under the water’s surface, but what choice did he have? Cursing, he leapt off the boat towards the shore and began to swim in the icy waters. There were things trying to grasp at his feet but he was quicker than they, even though his limbs were growing numb, and he swallowed cold and scummy water but against all odds he made it near the shore. Enough he could find his footing on the ground below the water – which was then spear took him in the back of the leg and he screamed as hooks sunk into his skin and something dragged him back into the deeper lake. Fingers closed around his throat to keep him still, and though he panicked he realized after a moment they were warm. And coming from the wrong way. A large woman in plate, with a helmet shaped like a snarling badger, grinned at him.

“Stupid brave,” the stranger praised. “But this hurt.”

And then he was screaming and flying through the air, blood spurting as the spear that’d been put in him accompanied him still stuck in his leg. He landed half-weeping, the pain and vicious bite of the wind on his wet body too much for him to take. The wet spear broke, though the head only dig deeper into his flesh. Someone wrapped a blanket around him and faces he could hardly make out for the tears hastily brought him up to the fire near the watchtower further up the hill.

“There’s a priestess on her way,” someone said. “We’ll take out the spear then. You did good, Ernest. Gods, you did good.”

“Who was that, near the shore?” he croaked out.

“Don’t know the name, but I know what the other one told us what they go by,” Victor quietly said. “The Valiant Champion. Levantine, I gather.”

A Chosen, Ernest shivered. With the warmth of the fire and blanket his vision was beginning to stop swimming. He looked back to the lake and thought he must have gone mad, or been poisoned, but the others breathed in sharply and some even began to pray. All along the shore, for what must have been a mile, shapes began to emerge from the water. The dead walked, garbed in iron and bronze, flesh and bone dripping water. And further from the shore great shapes broke the surface, gargantuan snakes of bone and leather and crackling sorcery. And in front of them stood only two silhouettes, sharply glared at by the morning light. Women, both one in wet plate with a great axe resting on her shoulder and the other in a coarse green cloak-tunic that went all the way to her feet. She turned, revealing that behind the long locks framing her face she wore a mask, and flicked some droplets of blood against the rocky shore. The world shivered and Ernest rose to his feet.

“They’ll die,” he said. “There’s too many, and the snakes-”

“Look,” another man croaked. “Gods, look .”

Lake Pavin screamed and tore back, the waters fleeing the shore as if terrified and snapping up most the undead with them. A few soldiers who’d already reached solid ground strode forward uncertainly as the lake continued to retreat, though any who dared to approach the pair were casually dispatched by the Valiant Champion: she smashed through them like they were glass, never needing more than a single blow and moving with blinding swiftness. The snakes – there were three, Ernest now counted – broke free of the waters pulling back and with sky-tearing screams tore forward. The Chosen in the snarling badger helm glanced at her cloaked companion, who nodded distractedly. Laughing wildly, the Valiant Champion began to run towards the gargantuan monsters.

“There’s a few still loose,” Ernests said, glancing to the sides.

“We can handle those, at least,” Victor said, grunting.

In the distance one of the great snakes struck at the Champion, who slapped the massive maw with the flat of her axe – and after a rippling sound the snake was tossed back like a rag doll, hitting the lake and causing waves.

“That’s the Witch of the Woods, it is,” another soldier said, grabbing his spear. “Heard about her. Walloped the Sovereign of the Red Skies real good when they fought.”

“She’s not even the leader of that bunch, I hear,” Victor said. “It’s some Ashuran knight.”

Before their eyes, the waters that’d been drawn back by the Witch began to ice. Tendrils of frost went through, like ink in water, and thickened as they went. Gods, Ernest thought, what manner of a man could command women like these?

—

Hanno caught her wrist before the blade could claim more than a scratch on the Mirror Knight’s chin. He would have liked to restrain the Painted Knife entirely, for the threats she was screaming in Lunara were not mild ones, but he could not. His other hand had seized the wrist of the Mirror Knight instead, catching it before he could finish drawing his sword.

“You dare?” the Mirror Knight thundered.

Not at Hanno but at the Painted Knife, who snarled back in kind.

“Enough,” the White Knight said.

“The Levantine tries to slay me in broad daylight and-”

“If you do not release your grip, I will crush your wrist,” White calmly said in Chantant, then changed to Lunara. “Kallia, drop your blade.”

“Did you not just hear him call the Scouring of Vaccei necessary ?” she hissed. “Thousands of my people killed, children choking to death on ashes and-”

“I will not ask twice,” Hanno calmly said.

Snarling at him once more, she did. Christophe released the grip of his own blade as soon as he no longer felt threatened, though the dark-haired hero found he had little sympathy for the man. In some ways it was a relief that Procer gave birth to so few heroes, for Hanno had known none save for the Rogue Sorcerer who’d not at one point or another stirred black rage in heroes from another nation. The Mirror Knight was a good man, principled and well-meaning, yet his rustic attitudes and insistence that Procer’s wars abroad had been for the good of Calernia were being received increasingly poorly by the heroes of the Dominion. If he stilled his tongue more often, it would be a negligible issue. Unfortunately, Christophe was both opiniated and frankly rather easy to bait. Which he inevitably was, by one of the several heroes who considered him pompous and in need of a good thrashing.

“Blood was spilled,” the Mirror Knight flatly said. “There must be answer to that.”

“Are you requesting,” the White Knight peacefully asked, “the judgement of the Seraphim?”

The other man’s face shuttered and he curtly shook his head in denial. The Painted Knife, whose Chantant had improved with the months she’d been in Cleves, understood enough to chortle at Christophe’s expense. Hanno’s gaze moved to her, quelling, and she stalked away like a proud cat. A spar with the Vagrant Spear would settle her, he hoped.

“You’ve lost less than thimble of blood, Christophe,” a cultured voice drawled. “Shall you require less than a thimble’s worth of justice to go along with it?”

The Repentant Magister had yet to finish the cup of wine in her hand, for she’d been more interested in spectating the aftermath of the careful barbs she’d sent the Mirror Knight’s way than in finishing her drink. Lounging in her seat in heavy velour robes, the patrician beauty wore a sardonic smile that could widen or dwindle but never quite entirely left her face. Nephele might have renounced the sordid practices and sorceries of the Magisterium, but she’d yet to shed their taste for making a game of others. Even after it had nearly come to blows between two heroes she seemed entirely unrepentant – which might have amused Hanno, given her Name, were he shallower sort of man. As it was, instead he considered to be as much if not more at fault for the incident as the two who’d reached for steel.

“Nephele,” he warned.

“Stygians,” the Myrmidon shrugged from the side, speaking Aenian. “What else can be expected, even from one claiming repentance ?”

Bereft of her armour for once, the slender woman was sitting on his cot and polishing the large bronze shield whose holy blessings were as a song to Hanno’s Name. The Repentant Magister’s smile had sharpened the moment she began speaking: neither had hidden the strong and instant dislike they took to each other the very moment they met.

“When the Exarch ran you of Penthes like a whipped dog,” Nephele conversationally asked in the same obscure tongue, “is it true that you were jeered at by the mob on your way out?”

Heroes were not meant to gather in great numbers, Hanno thought, not for so long. Not without a common enemy they could all strive against – and though the Dead King was that, he was simply too distant to fill the need. He could not be found on the field, which left instead a crowd of heroes each itching to fight the war on Keter in their own way without the slightest desire to heed anyone’s commands or any notion of how to remain civil with others just as stubborn. Keeping the peace between them was like trying to teach humility to a cat.

“The Magister does not speak untruth,” the Mirror Knight said, having ignored the exchange he could not understand. “Can the Dominion’s band of heroic killers now cut their allies without consequences?”

“Nephele speaks to stir up amusement,” Hanno flatly said. “And you gave offence with your words that was no less than the scratch of a blade.”

Christophe’s face set mulishly.

“I do not deny that the sanctions visited upon Vaccei were harsh, yet they were hardly-”

“Ah, I’d forgotten,” the Myrmidon mused, still in Aenian. “When Procerans have a massacre, we have to call it sanctions instead.”

“What was that?” the Mirror Knight sharply replied, having caught the tone if not understood the words.

“Is fuck him,” the Myrmidon replied, her Tolesian heavily accented.

“You,” Nephele helpfully clarified. “She means fuck you , Christophe.”

The Mirror Knight reddened. He was a young man, and proud. Too many slights had been offered to him tonight for him, he’d chew on them for weeks. It was the persistence of the Repentant Magister in stirring the pot that bothered the Ashuran, as much for the stirring itself as her persistence in doing so when she’d been confronted about it. She did not usually continue past the first verbal raking of her claws on someone’s back when caught out. The White Knight’s gaze moved to her hands, which he found steady, but then to the cup she was holding. Which was, as he’d noted earlier, still full. So was the open bottle at her side on the table.

“Are you drunk, Magister?” Hanno suddenly asked.

The smile vanished.

“Of course not,” Nephele replied, tone serene.

A lie, Hanno thought. He glanced at the other two heroes: Christophe had followed, but as the Myrmidon spoke nothing aside from Aenian, barely passable tradertalk and a smidge of Tolesian she was utterly in the dark.

“I would ask you for use of the room, Mirror Knight,” he formally asked the Proceran.

The man was still furious, but now he was also confused and aside from it all his natural manners won out – when politely asked a minor favour by someone he considered a social superior, Christophe would feel the need to grant it with aplomb. He acceded to the request. The Myrmidon would require better reason, so instead Hanno asked her to see if the Painted Knife had calmed – and if not, if she could be talked into a spar with the Vagrant Spear. The Penthesian was quite taking with the latter, if not in a romantic sense: their very public matches had become one of the favourite entertainments of the army in Cleves.

“Am I to be punished now?” the Repentant Magister smiled. “I have been a bad girl, and since we have the use of the room...”

“Would that help you?” Hanno frankly asked.

She blinked in surprise. He thought it a little sad, that she had grown so jaded of her own life she no longer genuinely sought companionship in others.

“If all it takes is asking, it is cruel no one has told Antigone,” Nephele chuckled.

That brought out no reaction from him. Hanno understood the Witch of the Wilds perhaps better than anyone not of the Gigantes could, for the silent tongue they shared had a hundred thousand nuances but not a single lie . They knew where they stood, and what could and could not change from it. Insinuations thrown against that were like an egg tossed at a rampart.

“No, then,” Hanno frowned. “Drink is not a remedy, Nephele.”

“A remedy for what?” the Repentant Magister asked.

“Your hands shake without it, I think,” the White Knight said. “How many bottles have you drunk?”

The heroine’s face tightened, and so he knew he’d been correct.

“I am not weak ,” the sorceress said.

Hanno sat at her side. How many times did it make now he’d been in this position? The strain was getting to all of them, one way or another. They were far from home, drowning in death, and forced to stand shoulder to shoulder with people they might otherwise draw blades on. The exhaustion they felt was making them all quarrel more than they would have otherwise, for though their bodies were often kept rested by their Names the same could not be said of their minds.

“When you left Stygia, you renounced the sorceries you were taught,” Hanno gently said.

“Not all,” Nephele said. “Enchantment and clairvoyance, healing and strengthening. I am still mistress of these, for all I have cast aside.”

But the curses and destructive sorceries the Magisterium was fond of unleashing on its enemies – or had been, before Hanno and the Ashen Priestess personally slew its finest sorcerers – she had renounced. The magics she used were useful, for all that some of their companions had expressed regret she was the one to come north with them instead of the Rogue Sorcerer, but in the face of relentless tides of death they would not save her life. Fear, Hanno thought, was at the heart of this. That could not easily be mended, but in sharing its hold could be lessened. So they spoke of many things, the two of them, for once pressed the heroine seemed almost eager to speak. They always were, when they searched his face and found no castigation there. Why they could expect it he did not know, for while Hanno often diverged in belief form his companions he had never once thought them his lessers . He, too, knew fear. Still remembered a corpse and a trick, words wielded like knives. Certainty and blindness , the monster had said. I have ever wondered at the difference. The sorry song of doubt, for a monster’s curse in defeat might be dismissed but not so a gloat in victory.

“We must seem so petty to you, White Knight,” Nephele bitterly said. “With our doubts and our failures.”

“You have come a very long way to fight for the sake of people you never knew, against an enemy some claim cannot be defeated,” Hanno gently said. “Even at the worst of the casual cruelty you have offered, never once did I think of you as petty.”

Why do you all hold me in such esteem ? He could not help but wonder, for even those among the heroes in Cleves that had never once obeyed his commands still seemed to consider him as a figure of authority – though not one to which they were beholden. It was as if they all knew something he did not, something that set him apart from the rest, and he knew not what it was. So instead he stilled his tongue and held Nephele when the bottle was empty and she wept for the home she loved as much a she hated, for the golden life she had left behind because she could not stand to see men in chains. He held her as she broke and helped her rise when she put herself together again. She’d not needed him, not truly. The woman she’d been the moment she spurned everything she was raised to embrace was the true face of her, not the malice that came out when fear and exhaustion won. They never seemed to understand it, Hanno had learned, that every single one of them had a light in them that was not so easily put out. He put the Repentant Magister to bed, after, and took his leave. It was not yet too late to call on Prince Gaspard and Princess Rozala, to discuss where the Dead were striking.

There would be no rest for the wicked if he could have it otherwise.

Interlude: And Yet We Stand

“There are some who will, for what was writ in this volume, call me traitor. Name me a hater of all that we are. But it is untrue. I weep at what we are for I see what we could be, what we tried to be until we lost our way: an empire unlike any other, where the law is just and measured and rule belongs not to one but many. It is not hatred of the patient, to despise the disease.”
– Extract from the conclusion ‘The Ruin of Empire, or, a Call to Reform of the Highest Assembly’, by Princess Eliza of Salamans

Agnes still missed the tall peaks and blue skies of Rhenia, but sometimes in this particular garden it felt like she had never left. It was the bareness of it, she supposed. The palace was filled with gardens each competing to be more ornate and opulent than the last, and this one had lost the contest. A handful of bare trees, a broken headless statue of a man Cordelia insisted was First Prince Clothor Merovins, and two roughly uncomfortable stone benches. Agnes Hasenbach liked the one by the statue best, for she could glimpse the skies while enjoying the familiar sensation of being surrounded by the tall walls of the open courtyard.

The traitor-guards owned by Balthazar Serigny had allowed her to return to the garden from her rooms, and even allowed her some illusion of privacy: though every way in and out was heavily guarded, within she had been left alone. It would change nothing, of course. Not with her. The sky told her the hour was near – hunter ascendant, the hound’s eye waning – but not quite there yet. And so the Augur tread softly on the snow to the bottom of a dying tree and bent to pick up a thin and long branch. She returned to sit on her bench and, leaning forward, began to trace signs in the snow.

Iron. Rope. Candle. Harp. Bone. Mirror.

And as she finished the last stroke on the old symbol some called the verdant mirror, she came. Leaning forward as well from her seat, the Wandering Bard gazed at the signs in the snow.

“That old Mavii trick?” the Bard chuckled. “Gods, it’s been ages.”

And so , Agnes Hasenbach thought, it begins .

—

Balthazar drew his sword before the savage was even finished speaking. Surprise gave way to rage at having been made sport of in such a manner: she’d never even left the palace, had she? Some servants must have hidden her in their quarters while the soldiers who’d save her ran off towards the high districts carrying some other blonde woman in her clothes. His Silver Letters dropped the bench they’d been meaning to use as a ram and reached for their own blades even as the tall spy suppressed a grimace. He had four of his own and he was fair hand with a blade himself, but Hasenbach had a fully twenty soldiers spread out in the Chamber of Assembly – all of them Salian garrison, from their tabard.

Prince Arsene of Bayeux did know his way around a sword, from what Balthazar remembered, but the Princess of Aisne would be dead weight in the fight. The priests even worse, though some might serve as healers at least, and damn Hasenbach but even though the amount of sworn delegates and royal candidates with his group meant they outnumbered her significantly few of those would be willing to draw a blade on the First Prince even if they had one, or knew how to wield it. One of the Holies – Sister Adelie, he recognized – strode forward bold as you please even as the soldiers unsheathed their own swords in response to his people.

“Cordelia Hasenbach, Prince of Rhenia, you stand accused of heresy,” Sister Adelie announced, voice echoing across the chamber. “All of you, throw down your swords and-”

“The House of Light has not yet been given leave to speak,” the Master of Orders cut through. “Be silent or be removed from this Chamber.”

“Rosalie,” Balthazar spoke softly without turning, eye on the enemy soldiers even as the priests began blustering. “Fetch reinforcements. Now. At least sixty, we may need to force the room.”

His agent whispered assent and she began a slow retreat, though she’d break into a run the moment she passed the corner. Cordelia Hasenbach’s blue eyes followed her leaving, but she said nothing. Did she have them surrounded, he wondered, and so did not care because Rosalie was about to be slain? Or did she truly think that he wouldn’t have her dragged out of the Chamber and stabbed the moment he had the men? The woman was a northerner but not without cunning, so she could not possibly believe the latter could she?

“The Highest Assembly has been convened,” Cordelia Hasenbach said. “ Assermentés , sit the thrones to which you are sworn. I will brook no more delays.”

“You’ve been accused of treason, heresy and tyranny,” Princess Clotilde of Aisne said. “You have no right to sit that throne, Cordelia Hasenbach.”

“Such accusations may be brought only before the Assembly, when it is convened,” the blonde royal said. “It is not convened until the sworn delegates and the sitters present have claimed their seats. Unless, of course, you intend to give the House of Light right of trial over Proceran royalty.”

Fuck , Balthazar thought, for though the trick itself was mere procedure it would –

“The Heavens spare none their judgement, be they high or low,” Brother Bertran proclaimed.

“Curb your tongue, priest,” Prince Arsene of Bayeux said. “We come to unseat a tyrant, not crown the Holies in her stead.”

In mere moments one of the priest with a better head on their shoulder would step in and retract the hasty claim, or at least nudge it to the side, but the damage had already been done. Hasenbach had been aiming at neither the House nor the two royals in the Chamber: it was the sworn delegates she’d had in her sights. Who’d just seen the two great legitimate powers of the conspiracy, the crowns and the robes, turn on each other without hesitation. They’re losing trust in this coup , Balthazar cursed as he saw many of them fall into blank expressions.

The priests had converted some by conscience but others he’d seen to with threats and those threats lost power if it did not look like Balthazar Serigny would be able to carry them out by the time dawn rose. Glaring Heavens, Rosalie needed to hurry with the reinforcements or their support would melt like snow in summer sun – and if he had to put a sword behind every neck before the votes were taken, would the White Knight truly stay his hand when he broke through the lines? Balthazar suspected not.

“The House of Light would not venture to pass judgement over royalty without the consent of the Highest Assembly,” Brother Philippe of the Holies said. “This is a-”

Hasenbach gestured discreetly at the soldiers flanking her and spears were slammed into the floor with deafening fracas.

“The House of Light has yet to be given leave to speak, priest,” the Master of Orders said. “Wait until your petition is brought forth, or see yourself expelled form the Chamber. Assermentés , to your thrones or you will be taken as abstaining from the session.”

The sworn delegates, to the silence of the priests and the dismay of the other two royals in the chamber, moved towards their thrones in charged silence. Balthazar eyed Hasenbacg closely, gauging whether he might be able to close distance with her without the soldiers getting in the way, but no: he was being watched and his agents with him. Why haven’t you removed me from the Chamber yet? he wondered. Or taken him prisoner, or anything else realty. Hasenbach had the advantage right now, before his reinforcements arrived, so why was she not acting?

—

“She’ll pull through, your cousin,” the Bard said, comfortingly. “Don’t you worry about it.”

Agnes wanly smiled.

“I have known Cordelia since we were girls,” she said. “I have better measure of her than anyone else alive.”

That was not a boast, though Agnes would not claim that she was closest to her royal cousin of all their kin. Yet the oracle had seen her across many choices, many fates, many mistakes. And across none of these did Cordelia Hasenbach cease to be fundamentally the same woman she’d been when, fresh to her throne and strangled by her many responsibilities, she’d still made time for her odd cousin who liked to speak of flocks and stars. The same woman who’d sent her handmaids to look at the wares of southern merchants for birdwatching almanacs, and on Agnes’ seventeenth nameday even obtained for her a Baalite eye. The truth at the heart of Cordelia Hasenbach was that she always chose kindness, when there was a choice to be made.

Agnes glanced at the play of shadows on the wall, moonlight and starlight and the denial of both, glimpsing what might yet be: crossroads, crucible, hallowing. The oldest treachery in the guise of the writ of angels. How tired she was, of walking on the line between abyss and abyss, of measuring her words as if ear was leant to every single one. How long had she been waiting for the end, now? Sometimes she got lost in the blue sky and the distant winds, listening to distant cries carried by the wind and the truths they whispered of. There were days where Agnes no longer knew her age, or the face of her mother. What had her father whispered in her ear, before he died? But she knew truths, and the coming of more, and in the end that would be enough. Her choices had been made before she was even given the opportunity to make them.

“Iron to bind, and rope to kill,” the Augur quoted.

“At first they reddened those altars for blessings, for revels,” the Bard said, “but it was desperation, later on. The Arlesites knew the secrets of steel, and though the Mavii were wonder-makers in stone theirs were wonders of peace.”

“Fetters for hand and feet, the slow death of a night and day,” the Augur said. “To call forth the lords and ladies of the fae.”

“They were a thing of beauty, leading their supplicants in battle,” the Bard fondly remembered. “Yet even that was not enough to turn the tide. The Arlesites had simply learned too well at the feet of the titans.”

“The legends say they went willing, those who hung,” Agnes said.

“There was a time,” the Bard softly agreed. “When the days of the Mavii darkened, though, so did the practice. Oathbreakers, first. Then the craven. Then the defenceless. And bitter seeds bore bitter fruits.”

“But they went willing, once upon a time,” Agnes murmured.

The Bard nodded, silent.

“Sometimes there is a need for bleeding,” the Augur said, looking up at the horizon.

Plumes of smoke had begun to rise, for Salia was burning. She would ask the Gods to forgive her, but she sought no absolution.

Let her silence drag her all the way to the Hells, if it was what she deserved.

—

The numbers in the Assembly were still in their favour, if the delegates they’d twisted the arms of held. Balthazar saw there were as many thrones empty as not, within, and if they crowned their royal candidates then Hasenbach was done for. She still had the votes for Rhenia and Salia, but the other three Lycaonese principalities had no representatives and neither did Prince Renato and Prince Ariel. The conspiracy had the rulers of Bayeux and Aisne as well as sworn delegates for more than enough: Aequitan, Tenerife, Segovia, Brabant, Orne, Cleves and Hainaut.

Using those votes they could crown another six princes and princesses, the same who’d abdicated at the Princes’ Graveyard, and from there they would have a majority of votes even in the absolute sense. The legality of the proceedings would be much harder to deny. If the sworn delegates held. If Hasenbach did not clutter the session with other matters so no such votes could be taken. It doesn’t matter , Balthazar the Bastard thought, eyeing the soldiers still keeping watch . Let her play queen for a little longer, it will matter not a whit when I have more swords than her. The moment could not come too soon.

“As is ancient law, a representative for the House of Light may now come forward and speak to the petition being put to the Highest Assembly,” the Master of Orders said. “Let the second order of the evening begin.”

Second? What had she – if she was keeping to the pretence of legality when what could she even – oh, fuck . The summons by the House of Light meant the formal session had begun hours ago, when Hasenbach was the only sitter in the room. As long as she kept to majority votes that didn’t require a quorum or to matters in simple need of formal recognition – without voting – then she could have done a great many things without breaking the letter of the law. Potentially, Balthazar Serigny grimly realized, every empty throne in the Chamber now had a formally recognized sworn delegate in the person of Cordelia Hasenbach. It’d never hold up to a serious contest when a full session was held, true, but then it hardly needed to.

So long as she survived the night, Hasenbach would no doubt be perfectly willing to have everything on the record for this session struck and maybe even express apologies for her abuse of procedure. If she sounded highly unapologetic while making such repentance, it might actually improve her popularity with some of the Alamans royalty: they did enjoy a brisk turn of fortune in the Ebb and Flow. The House of Light put forward Sister Adelie as their speaker, which the spymaster held his breath over. At leas they’d had the sense to name someone broadly familiar with the Assembly’s procedures, by the looks of it. When they had the advantage the Holies could afford to break such rules as a show of power, but if they did the same on this night it would instead reek of uncouthness and desperation.

“The House of Light, in the name of the Gods Above, brings forward charges of greater heresy against the First Prince Cordelia Hasenbach,” Sister Adelia announced. “Let all in Creation know that the line of Hasenbach has fallen and estranged itself from the grace of the Heavens.”

“And what proof does the House of Light bring for these claims?” the Master of Order asked.

“She has made peace with the Arch-heretic of the East, declared so by a great holy conclave,” Sister Adelie said, voice rising in pitch and heat. “She has forgiven the Carrion Lord’s great slaughter of Procerans and even offered truce to the wicked Tyrant of Helike and his master the butchering Hierarch.”

The priestess had turned to address the delegates instead of Hasenbach and her bearded creature, to his approval: she too understood that if they were to keep the veneer of legality for all this it would be by keeping that petty lot on their side. Yet they were not without qualms, Balthazar saw, for they feared setting a precedent. If the delegates vote here, on formal record, that the House could unseat a First Prince for not obeying the dictates of a conclave then they were going to have to answer very pointed questions by their own masters as to why they’d ever allow the House such power over the Assembly. Yet Sister Adelie did speak for the House, which was very much respected in moral and holy matters, and it could not be denied that Hasenbach was making pacts with an awful lot of Damned.

“Point of order,” the Master of Order said. “The First Prince, after seeking the assent of this very Highest Assembly, offered truce to the Queen of Callow and the League of Free Cities. Not peace. No formal agreement was reached over the fate of the Carrion Lord.”

A technicality, Balthazar thought, which shouldn’t matter. If the sworn delegates were going to be swayed by the accusations of heresy, they’d not care about such quibbling. If they weren’t, they’d hardly care anyway. Yet Hasenbach was being very careful to keep every part of this as lawful as she could.

What was her game, and where were his damned reinforcements?

—

“They were such vain, temperamental creatures,” the Bard mused. “Even at the heyday of their influence. I suppose we all are, in our own way, but the fae were always a kind apart.”

“Candle to blind,” Agnes quoted, “and harp to still.”

“They despise being in debt, you see, even such a small one as rope-slain in their name would induce,” the Bard amusedly said. “But a circle of candles would make them mindless when they witnessed it, and then beautiful songs soothed them into a more amenable disposition. Boons could be wheedled out, then, or lesser oaths.”

The Augur had taken different lesson from them. A candle in the dark drew everyone’s eye, even when it was what was unfolding in the shadows that needed to be seen. And a sweet song, a beloved pleasure? That was a diversion one did not want to see through, even when they could. Never trust a man who smiles easy. Had those been the last words of her father? No, it couldn’t be. Frost had crept across a branch, in the shape of a hawk with wings extended: providence was smiling down on her. Some nights, some days, she could look until her eyes watered and hardly catch glimpses of anything. Tonight the signs were overflowing, crowding her senses like eager courtiers even when she sought no answers. The wind sang songs – death, death rising with the smoke and schemes over a treacherous altar of jade – but Agnes shook her head. She needed to centre herself, or she would be lost.

“I am Agnes Hasenbach,” she murmured. “I am Agnes Hasenbach, and I am here and I am now .”

She tightened her fingers around the stick she still held, proof of her claims, and breathed out. The secrets, the signs, slowly ebbed away.

“Oracles always have it the worse,” the Bard said, sympathetic. “Mortals aren’t meant to see the way you do, so close to the deeper truth of things. The kind of foes you have to fight can’t be slain.”

And they always win , Agnes thought. There would be a day where she went too deep, glimpsed things so far beyond her understanding, that there would be no coming back. Not whole, not even close to it. And she was already touching the limits of what she could do: trying to peer around the edges of the darkness that shrouded the Dead King was a thin of horror, the endless chorus of screams and crazed laughter. Or even worse, deeper in, the chilling serenity of the voices worshipping him as a god. Yet she had seen things, learned things. The Black Queen, at least, was brutally straightforward in her refusal to be seen: thrice the Augur had woken up fallen in the snow, livid claw marks that soon faded on her arms and the taste of blood in her mouth.

Yet she had learned from that too, and from that learning shaped finer sight. Or had it been the other way around? Had she first glimpsed the Wandering Bard, and learned from this? Or had she only seen the shadow of any of this, and taken all sides of the crossroads in other lives? It was hard to tell the difference, sometimes.

“You are seer as well,” the Augur said.

“I see things,” the Bard snorted. “But a seer I am not.”

“Like a bird of misfortune perched atop the tower, you see it all below,” Agnes said, and her own voice sounded distant. “Stories.”

“I know many stories,” the other woman agreed.

“You know stories,” the Augur softly laughed. “ All the stories, all the time, as if they unfolded beneath your wings and you need only look down to see the lay of them. You pick, and choose, and swoop and how does it not drive you mad .”

Moonlight on frost – lizard, yawning – a distant bird in the night, halfway between the lone sentinel and the weeping man. Danger , the world whispered, tread lightly. As if she needed be told. She should not have spoken so much.

“It has been a very long time,” the Bard lightly said, “since someone grasped that.”

“It must have been about family,” Agnes frowned. “He always talked about family. He was a terrible father, but he never knew it.”

Eyes studied her, then looked away. The icicle it was melting and it was weakening and it would break in three, two –

“Vain, temperamental creatures,” the Bard mused. “As are we all.”

Broken. For now.

—

Oh, it had been a mistake to let her speak. Balthazar understood it now. Better they had all fled and only returned when they had the soldiers to drag Hasenbach out, rather than this . It was like watching a nine-sun Arlesite duellist toying with a notchless swaggerer. Seated on the seat that had once been that of Clothor Merovins, the founder of the Principate, Cordelia Hasebach kept silent as if this was all beneath her. The Master of Orders answered in her stead, never once hesitating.

The priests went first, Sister Adalie leading the charge. The Holies set out their case for the unseating of Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer, and though they were not without cleverness they were methodically taken apart. Dealing with villains, they said, was moral taint. It made her unfit for the office. And even the Hidden Horror had held his blow, which was clear indication of bargain struck with the abomination.

“No treaty of peace has been signed, and the Dead King’s withdrawal was effected by the Black Queen and not the First Prince. This is of her own admission, confirmed by the Augur.”

She was shown herself to be without mandate from the Heavens by failing to bring the Tenth Crusade to success, both in Callow and in Iserre.

“Princess Rozala Malanza held command at both the Battle of the Camps and the Princes’ Graveyard.”

She’d intervened in the affairs of the House of Light, which was beyond the authority of any mortal ruler, and schemed to pervert the decision of a greater holy conclave.

“No such decree has ever been passed and it would require the consent of the Highest Assembly to act against the House of Light.”

She was a tyrant, having stacked the Highest Assembly with her associates in clear perversion of the rightful order of Procer as set by its founders. At that Hasenbach finally made a noise: sharp, scornful laughter as she eyed the procession of royal candidates standing to the side of the thrones. Shame burned more than a few faces. The House of Light then tried to make an argument using a precedent from the Liturgical Wars for a regency of the realm by the Holies, but unfortunately it relied on the premise of the First Prince being prisoner and so fell apart when it was pointed out that Hasenbach clearly was not and so no regency could be considered as needed. They priests were, after this, visibly at a loss.

Prince Arsene and Princess Clotilde, like Balthazar sensing that they were losing the reins, then tried as well. Arsene of Bayeux boldly suggested that the chaos in the capital was proof she had lost the trust of the people, and so of the Assembly, and that the election of another First Prince was necessary for the stability of the realm in these dark times.

“The lawful procedures to unseat a First Prince are known, and have not been attempted, which begs the question of what the Prince of Bayeux intends if it is not the lawful manner.”

The Princess of Aisne instead stated that Hasenbach had overreached her authority and made a mockery of the procedures of the Highest Assembly, naming specific instances: repeated emergency votes held in quick succession, the granting of broad authority and precautionary amnesty to Arnaud Brogloise that even included the power to negotiate diplomatic settlements with Damned. Assigning the former Princess of Lyonis under the command of Princess Malanza while granting her authority over Princess Malanza, which undermined the very appointment made by the Highest Assembly.

None of these, Clotilde of Aisne conceded, were strictly speaking unlawful. But they were perversions of the intended meaning of the procedures of the Highest Assembly, and to allow them to happen without consequence would inevitably lead to the collapse of the Principate of its reduction into a mere kingdom. That struck a note with some of the sworn delegates, but not enough to recover from the continued verbal slaughter. The grievances were solid in their eyes, Balthazar suspected, but not worth all this strife and not in time of war.

Prince Arsene tried his hand again, insinuating that the foreign troops marching on Salia were meant to force the will of Hasenbach on even princes, but at last the savage bestirred herself. The Master of Orders hastily recognized her right to speak, cutting straight through the Prince of Bayeux’s rising speech.

“Are you quite finished?” Cordelia Hasenbach calmly asked, blue eyes like ice.

Hands on the arms of the ancient throne of Salia, the blonde princess’ gaze swept across the Assembly.

“For near an hour now I have sat here, awaiting a single justification for the way the capital outside this palace is burning to the ground ,” she said, voice like the crack of a whip. “For the deaths that continue to happen even now. For the loss of trust this will cause in the allies we require for our very survival. For the way our enemies will see weakness and tear at our throats.”

She drummed her fingers, scathingly.

“Well?” she said. “I await still. Speak, if any of you can.”

Silence reigned, and not merely for reason of procedure.

“I thought not,” Cordelia tiredly said.

She breathed out slowly.

“This farce is at an end,” she said. “There is not even the slightest of pretences for you to legitimately take power in Procer, and you have not the strength to do so illegitimately. Surrender now, before I am required by law to have you all put to the sword.”

And then, the sweetest of sounds: armoured boots treading fast on a wooden floor. Balthazar discreetly glanced back. Rosalie was at the head of them, and though there were less men than he’d wanted – barely forty – it would be enough.

She was good at talking, Hasenbach, but it was hard to talk when you had a sword through the throat.

—

“Ah,” the Bard hummed. “There we are.”

“Bone to wind,” the Augur said, “and mirror to fill.”

“Still on that, are you?” the Bard amusedly said.

“The bone is twofold, yes,” Agnes said. “It took me long to understand. Sometimes they open barrows and there are fingerbones. Around them twine was wound, very long ago. I was told this, by a tribunal of owls from Hannoven.”

“Owls,” the Bard slowly repeated, as if dubious.

“Owls are terrible gossips,” the Augur said. “Never tell one your secrets. The twine was an oath, they told me.”

“Owls, huh,” the Bard muttered. “I’ll have to remember that. They had it right: the twine was an oath’s length. They learned to keep count, after the first few times one of the lords stayed longer than the oath lasted. Even the gentlest of the fae have sharp humour.”

“Bone is also the bone of man,” Agnes solemnly told her. “We stand not without it. We move not, act not. It is...”

The word stalled. Had the shadow always touched the tree at that angle? No, stars moved here. The moon did not blink, it circled. Ah! Solemn fingers in three, the mark of the Tribunal. Not the owls, though also with wings. The White Knight was near, and the three fingers were touching one of her own footsteps leading north. Ah, the front of the foot and not the back: forward, coming, grim ending. Yes, it was as she had seen.

“Quintessential,” the Bard said.

“Yes,” Agnes smiled. “To have the bone of them is to own them, to have them wound around your fingers like twine. Clever Mavii.”

“Nature can be shaped,” the Bard disagreed. “It can change. It doesn’t even take all that much: sometimes all you need to do is throw a stone in the pond and the ripples will see it done.”

Ah , the Augur thought, is this what you believe we have done?

—

Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer, Prince of Rhenia, Princess of Salia and Warden of the West, did not stand as the Silver Letters entered the Chamber of Assembly and began spreading out. She had expected this, known it was coming since the moment she decided against leaving the palace. They would try strength, when all else failed. And there were enough foes here her twenty Salians were likely to lose. And yet she stayed seated. Rhenian blue dress going down to her feet, high-collared and match for the sapphire-set circled of white gold she’d chosen to wear over her golden curls, she simply stared down at the spies that had turned on her and made all of this possible.

“And here we are,” Cordelia said. “The true face of all this: swords and ambition, both bare for all to see.”

“Surrender and I won’t need to have you dragged out by the hair,” Balthazar said, smiling wide. “Your Highness.”

Him she ignored, instead looking at the Silver Letters behind him.

“If you obey him, if you truly bare swords and spill blood on the grounds of the Chamber of Assembly, it will be the end of you,” she told them.

Threats would not cow the likes of them, so she need make it plain this was no such thing.

“It does not matter if I live or die,” she said. “Whoever takes my place, whoever sits this Assembly, they will need to see you all dead. Publicly, loudly, excruciatingly painfully. Because if they do not make an example that resounds through the ages, one that quells the very thought of anyone ever doing something like this again, they will never be able to safely sit this hall again.”

She gestured at the Holies.

“Do you believe they will protect you?” she said. “The House of Light will not even be able to protect itself from the consequences of this. Every priest in this room will be sacrificed by the rest of the Holies, for they have openly committed rebellion and no First Prince could countenance such of the House. Do you understand, now? If you obey Balthazar, he has killed you.”

Silence struck once more, until Balthazar cleared his throat.

“She’s right,” he said. “Savage that she is, she’s right. This got botched, so now we need to tie up all the loose ends.”

The tall, hirsute killer cleared his throat.

“Hasenbach went mad, having made pacts with devils, and used her wicked powers to slaughter the entire Highest Assembly,” Balthazar the Bastard announced. “We’ll torch it after just to be sure.”

The Silver Letters hesitated. But then they started to advance, swords high, and two began to close the doors so no one would escape. It was madness, Cordelia thought. She’d known Serigny might go mad, try to burn her out, and made certain the secret passage out was unencumbered. But this was madness . No, it was worse than that: it was service to the Enemy. It was every ugly, dark impulse she had tried to smooth out of Procer, growling and lunging for her throat. And now she was to flee from it, again? As if swords and brutality were enough to rule the heart of the Principate? No. No, she would not have it. She would not skitter away once more, abandoning good men to swords, this realm to the heedless animals that would rule it. She was the Warden of the West, not-

Before the doors of the Chamber could close, a sword was slid through them. As if the heavy oaken gates were light as feathers, they were forced open and a tall man in plate and a trailing cloak advanced.

“My apologies for disturbing the proceedings,” the White Knight politely said. “I am looking for Balthazar Serigny.”

—

The Wandering Bard went still.

“What have you done?” she hissed.

Agnes laughed, laughed, laughed.

“Exactly what you wanted me to,” the Augur wheezed. “Just a little too quickly.”

“She was meant to-”

“Meant,” Agnes hissed. “ Meant . As if you did not meddle, Bird of Misfortune. As if you did not pull long strings.”

“You changed nothing,” the Bard said.

“I changed everything,” the Augur said. “She has a choice, now.”

“They always make the same choices,” the Bard said. “You’ll learn.”

“Mirror to fill,” Agnes said. “With iron and rope we died, and you came. With candle and harp we danced, and you stayed.”

She cackled.

“But I have the bone of you, Wandering Bard,” she said. “I have the bone of you and in my mirror you found nothing but your own reflection. You have not fooled me, Longstrings.”

“You may just have destroyed everything,” the Bard said. “ Everything , child. The Dead King-”

“There is one truth in this world that cannot be broken,” Agnes Hasenbach, the Augur, calmly said. “I have learned this from portents many and varied, spoken to birds from strange and distant skies as well as consulted with the secret whisperers of the winds and clouds.”

She leaned forward, erasing the six symbols she had drawn in the snow.

“Would you like to know them, Bird of Misfortune?” she asked.

—

And then, only then, did Cordelia rise to her feet. She nearly fell, face paling for the pain of leaning on that broken leg. This, she knew, was the White Knight. The Sword of Judgement made to walk the grounds of Creation, silver coin in one hand and death in the other. She advanced.

“Chosen,” Brother Bertran called out, sounding both relieved and expectant. “These Silver Letters conspirators would murder us. Bring to them the judgement of the Seraphim, in the name of the Heavens!”

The White Knight cocked his head to the side, rolling a silver coin between his fingers.

“You are one of these that call themselves the Holies, yes?” the man asked.

“The Heavens have bestowed this honour upon us,” Brother Bertran proudly agreed.

“That is certainly possible,” the dark-skinned Chosen agreeably replied.

A flick and the coin went spinning, up and up and up. Cordelia’s hand moved quicker than her mind, than her flesh, and she snatched it out of the air. It burned against her palm, scorching. She swallowed the pain.

“Enough,” the First Prince of Procer said. “There will be no killing.”

The Chosen was watching her with wide eyes, before something like surprise and awe flickered across his face.

“You are...” he said, sounding moved. “I have never seen it with my own eyes.”

And she felt it too, pulsing through her veins, the mantle that was within her reach. His judgement she had ended for there was only one fit to pass it in these chambers, and it was the Warden of the West. Even the burning against her palm seemed distant, like her flesh was being filled with something – no. No . She fought the pull, the inevitability, everything it entailed. She fought it tooth and nail. There was nothing greater than this, this flesh, this moment and this place and the laws that bound them all. She had only one master, and it was the Principate of Procer. The coin burned into her flesh and she cast it down. The White Knight’s face went ashen.

“This is,” Cordelia said, “the Principate of Procer. We rule with accord and law, we mete out the same justice to the highest soul and the lowest. We fail that principle, often and utterly, as men and women have failed principles since the First Dawn. But I will not renounce it: not for a day, not for an hour, nor for a single breath. This land will know no queen, no empress, no pale-clad warden to stand above all others.”

In her palm the laurels had been burned black, a wound she knew would never heal so long as she lived.

“Conspiracy will be tried by our laws,” Cordelia Hasenbach. “And no one else’s.”

She could be the law, the First Prince knew. After this, looking in the eyes of those around her, seeing the loyalty that was blooming there. The faith. She could take it, and First Prince or not she would be the only law Procer would need. With scheme and knife, with ruthless will, she could purge the rot and turn Procer into what it should be instead of... this. No , Cordelia thought once more, and this time it was barely a struggle at all.

She returned to her throne, and the moment she sat the conspiracy was finished.

—

“It does not matter,” the Augur said, “if on the other side stand kings and monsters and all the gods that stride this earth. It does not matter if the odds are paltry and the signs scream of defeat with every silent voice.”

Blue eyes and a warm embrace. Of course you’ll live with us now. You are family. You always will be . This, this she would not forget until that final venture beyond where she was meant to go.

“I will,” Agnes said, “always, always bet on Cordelia Hasenbach.”

Chapter 72: Rumours

“Reputation is as a wild horse; gone at a gallop and returned at a trot.”
– Arlesite saying

“Tell me what you’ve learned,” I ordered.

The small town they envoys of the First Prince had led us to was called Roque-Faillie, and though it was not particularly pretty or luxurious it did have the benefit of being mostly empty. Apparently during winter most of the countryside around Salia went empty with the seasonal labourers or farms and fields the locals called manants migrating into the capital with whatever coin they’d saved up. The Callowan in me balked at the notion that good honest farmers could be effectively forced by poverty to take refuge in a large city, but Hakram had noted it was a little more complicated than that. Unlike my own people, who tended to leave the family home and strike out on their own unless they were in line to inherit property or trade, Alamans apparently tended to form in closely-knit clans of kin that bought property belonging to the family itself and not individuals. The young and fit worked fields during the warm seasons, the returned to the family’s house or houses in Salia with that wealth once winter rolled in. It was all very communal, and rather strange to my own sensibilities. Still, practically speaking it meant that there’d been a large string of mostly empty towns and villages within a day’s march of the capital where all the many envoys and armies could be settled.

According to my scouting lines – and Robber, who I’d let loose to skulk with for sole instruction not to start a diplomatic incident that wasn’t fairly deniable – and the chatter amongst us diplomats, settling my men in Roque-Faillie meant I was between the League’s town and the Dominion’s. Amusingly enough they’d put General Rumena and its drow past the Dominion, possibly in an attempt to separate them from the rest of my delegation. Considering most of the Firstborn were prompt to violence and spoke not a whit of Chantant, I suspected anyone trying to negotiate with them on the sly would have ended up having a rough time even if I’d not been the First Under the Night. Still, Heavens take pity on whatever poor fucker Hasenbach would send to probe the intentions of the drow before it came to negotiation. Princess Rozala had garrisoned her larger army in between us and the capital, though she’d had to split them into three smaller forces in different towns. Not that her soldiers would complain much, I imagined. Much like mine, after so many months of campaigning they’d find sleeping in an actual bed surrounded by actual walls to be the height of luxury. Worryingly, though, Malanza had promptly vanished into the city. So had the Grey Pilgrim, my watchers told me.

At a guess, it might relate to the fact that someone had set the damned capital on fire since we’d last spoken with the First Prince. The smoke was lingering over a large chunk of Salia, visible even from miles away, and if the capital of Procer was anything like Laure an uncomfortably large amount of it must have been made of wood. Probably even more, I grimly guessed. Salia was said to be the largest city on Calernia, large than even Ater which boasted around five hundred thousand souls. You couldn’t house that many people in stone: no empire in Creation was so extravagantly rich. Whatever it was that’d happened, though, I needed to know of it. If I was about to be blamed for yet another fucking fire I’d not started, best I know of it before I ended up accused before Gods and men. Thankfully, we’d had Jacks in the city and Vivienne had been very far from idle these last few weeks. There was a reason I’d seen so little of her.

“There was an attempted coup,” Vivienne Dartwick bluntly said.

For all that these days she was Lady Dartwick in more than an honorary sense, as my heiress-designate to the throne of Callow, she was still the head of the Jacks. I was genuinely unsure if the Fairfaxes had kept spies of their own before the Conquest, though I assumed they must have. If there’d been such a web of informants Black had long destroyed or suborned it, which meant we’d had to start very much from scratch. As a result, though the quality of the reports of the Jacks was fairly solid the eclectic nature of the organisations they’d been put together from meant there were some glaring blind spots in our tradecraft and that our people were usually very much outmatched by the spies of other nations. Not least, I’d admit, for what was likely the same reason the Fairfaxes had not had a reputation for being particularly well-informed: spies were expensive . Even without getting into bribes and hirelings, just keeping the Jacks fed and clothes and paid was painfully costly. If trade with Praes and Procer didn’t pick up after the wars came to an end, we might have to disband parts of the Jacks simply because we couldn’t afford to keep such a sprawling array of agents.

For now, though, dwarven gold would prop us up. It’d certainly opened more than a few doors in Salia that would otherwise have been closed to us, not to mention loosened a few tongues. East or west, everyone liked to make a little coin on the side.

“Fuck,” I eloquently said.

This was an informal council, without even the full roster of the Woe – Masego had gone to speak with the Rogue Sorcerer and Archer had mentioned she was, Sisters bless, ‘just going for a walk’ – though in truth all those with an interest or proper role in the proceedings were there. Vivienne as my heiress and the head of the Jacks, Hakram as my right hand and Akua as, well, Akua Sahelian . Whether that was a good or terrible thing had wildly carried depending on the time and situation since I’d first met her, but at the very least she’d never been slow on the uptake.

“Pretty much,” Vivienne agreed, brushing back a strand that’d slipped below her milkmaid braid. “City’s boiling over with rumours and we don’t have anyone anywhere close to the First Prince’s inner circle, but we’ve gathered at least a little more than your average man in the street. For one, the House of Light and the Silver Letters were heavily involved.”

The Silver Letters were one of the Principate’s several informant networks – Merciless Gods, how much must it cost to run a solid network across even just the span of Procer, much less three ? – and said to be in particular the one concerned with the affairs of Procer itself. The Circle of Thorns, the second, were charged with gathering secrets abroad. We’d caught a few of their people trying to get into my court and even the Regals before they’d been gelded, and most likely missed a few more. The Eyes of the Empire had continued to out them to me even after relations between Malicia and myself had cooled all the way to ice, though there was no telling of those had been the Tower’s people or Scribe’s. It was the third and last that was surprising me, though, because if the House had been part of the coup then they should have been as well.

“Not the Holy Society?” I asked. “I though their whole mandate was keeping an eye on the House.”

“Their nominal head, a certain Brother Simon de Gorgeault, was sought by parts of the city guard on charges of murder and heresy for some time before the First Prince crushed the coup,” Vivienne replied. “It seems he was fooled but not complicit.”

“As I recall the head of the Silver Letters was an interesting little man by the name of Balthazar Serigny,” Akua said. “Unless that changed?”

She glanced at Vivienne, who had not hidden her dislike in the slightest but remained professional. My spymistress shook her head.

“Interesting how?” Hakram asked.

“As in ‘the Eyes have been working on him for more than a decade’. I know not to what purpose, however,” Akua said. “None of my mother’s spies ever rose high enough in the ranks to be brought into the scheme, though the Lady Scribe would know.”

Fuck , I thought, this time at least refraining from speaking it out loud. We couldn’t be blamed for the bloody House of Light deciding now was the time to start a fourth Liturgical War, but if the Silver Letters were the fault of the Scribe then that put us in the deeps as well. Black was viciously loyal to those he considered his own, at once both one of his best and worst traits. He likely wouldn’t have agreed to throw her to the hounds even if she deserved it a few years ago, much less now that the Calamities had begun dropping like flies.

“That makes for spies and priests,” Adjutant noted in his gravelling voice. “Which princes were involved? They would have needed a candidate to replace Hasenbach.”

“It’s not common knowledge yet, not in the streets, but apparently this was all in the name of Princess Rozala,” Vivienne said.

Akua’s fine eyebrow arched, as if to remind me she had predicted the possibility of strife between the First Prince and the first halfway-decent princess I’d ever met. It didn’t fit, though, not to me. We’d discussed how the two rulers might skirmish through the Highest Assembly and debate over the Accords, but neither Akua nor Hakram had ever brought up a coup as a possibility . Neither knew Cordelia had effectively stacked the Assembly in her favour, back then , I then reminded myself. Even still, I had a hard time reconciling the same princess who’d been the first to toss her crown, the princess who’d plunged her sword in the earth and sworn oaths of gratitude, with someone who’d risk the madness that a coup in the narrow window where we had a truce with Keter might bring on us all. She would have to know that the Lycaonese would take is a betrayal beyond forgiveness if the first First Prince of their people was deposed not even halfway through a war with the Hidden Horror.

“She left the for the capital not long after settling her soldiers,” I said. “I don’t suppose you know on what terms?”

“We have someone in Louis Rohanon’s serving staff,” Vivienne smiled. “She went livid, when it was intimated this was from her hand, and threatened something called the ‘liar’s leash’ on anyone who’d repeat such slander. She left with hardly an escort, too.”

“Don’t suppose you know what this leash is?” I frowned.

My heiress shook her head.

“From context, it is likely to be unpleasant,” the former thief said.

“It is an ancient Arlesite punishment for one who speaks calumny of a real ,” Akua conversationally provided. “A hook tied to a long line of twine is put through the tongue of the liar and tied to the tail of a horse, which the real then rides for a mile. If the liar survives the mile without the hook ripping through their tongue, the Gods Above have judged their lie to have been accidental. Otherwise, what is left of their tongue is to be carved out and buried beneath the gate of the real ’s fortress.”

Vivienne looked split between sharp irritation at being shown up on even such a slight detail and disgust as the old Arlesite ways of justice. Mind you Akua had said real and not prince, which was a telling detail: it meant it predated the founding of the Principate. Which for all its many, many flaws, was significantly less prone to elaborate executions than its predecessor-states. Mind you, I could cast no stones there without being a hypocrite. My people had indulged in some excruciatingly brutal ways of killing prove traitors, especially those who struck bargains with Praes. It’d been delightfully horrible to read about public drawing and quarterings, or even the rarer red hangings as a kid – I’d taken me year to realize the unlikeliness of books about the worst excesses of Callowan ‘justice’ being so easy to get your hands on, Black you prick – but as I aged I’d been left to wonder at the monstrosity of hurting even a traitor so carefully they could be hanged by their entrails. Even the Deoraithe had dabbled in impalement whenever the Clans made a run at the Wall, though their worst they’d always kept for whenever they got their hands on a Dread Emperor. I supposed I shouldn’t be surprised Akua knew about this, given that the Praesi had quite literally written the definitive books on this, but why would she have cared about some Arlesite... oh.

“You looked into bits like that for all over, didn’t you?” I said, reluctantly amused. “When you still believed you were going to conquer the whole continent.”

Akua looked only mildly embarrassed.

“Attention to ironic detail is the difference between a Triumphant and a Nihilis,” she defended.

Gods, I could not wait to pass that on to Indrani and see the utter mockery that would follow. That ought to be weeks’ worth of entertainment right there, maybe even a full month if Robber was dragged into it. Adjutant cleared his throat, which I allowed without resistance to drag me back to the matters at hand. As amusing as that had been, we did have more pressing matters on our hands: like the fact that someone had torched part of Salia and that someone I must by extension answer for might have been involved. Hells, assuming I wasn’t just blamed on general principle. Although, the commander of the legionaries I’d brought was General Abigail so who knew? Maybe this time she’d get the blame, regardless of involvement or general infeasibility. Fucking William, I couldn’t believe people still thought I was responsible for Marchford. Both times , too, thank you very much Chider.

“Cordelia Hasenbach remains First Prince, however,” Hakram half-asked.

Like me, he’d assumed that if she wasn’t that news would have been the first thing spoken.

“She is,” Vivienne confirmed. “She also came out of the mess smelling like roses with the Highest Assembly and highly popular in Salia itself. Rumour has it she prevented the summary execution of the conspirators so they could stand proper trial instead right after they tried to assassinate her. Which brings me to another important part.”

She drew breath.

“Both the White Knight and the Witch of the Woods are in the city,” she said, blue-grey eyes narrowing. “The White Knight was the one attempting to pass judgement on the conspirators, before Hasenbach interrupted him.”

I leaned forward in my seat, feeling a mixture of surprise and respect ripple through the other two as well.

“She told the hatchet man of the Choir of Judgement to step out?” I said, and a heartbeat later my stomach sunk. “Shit. Shit .”

“Catherine?” Vivienne asked, sounding surprise. “I thought you’d be pleased. It shows great adherence to principles in accord with, well, the Accords.”

Hakram had been with me longest and was most familiar with my way of thinking. He got it first.

“It shows will and fearlessness, as well as strong belief,” Adjutant said. “And it is a powerful story: we know what brew these are the ingredient for.”

“Better than even odds she got a Name out of that,” I cursed. “Can you really see the White Knight backing down otherwise?”

And that was an issue, because if Cordelia had come into a Name then the Wandering Bard could now reach her at will. Fresh off her transition she’d be flush with power and confidence, if hers was anything like mine, which would make her harder to influence in some ways and significantly easier in others. Especially if the Augur vouched for the Bard, which unfortunately seemed quite possible. Hasenbach wouldn’t have years of history with the Intercessor, though, no ironclad trust. I could work with that if I moved quick enough, which it seemed I’d have to.

“That is the end of the notion of Named being excluded from ruling, I’d say,” Akua calmly mused. “That clause is dead in the water, if First Prince is now more than a mere title.”

Wouldn’t be First Prince, I thought. Too weak a story, too many strings attached. A Name that could be made illegitimate by a vote of the Highest Assembly, that had to be sanctioned by such a vote in the first place? No, it’d never form properly unless. It’d be something along one of the few lines the disparate peoples of Procer had in common belief. If not for the House of Light apparently being part of the conspiracy I would have bet on it being from holy scripture, but as things stood it’d probably drawn on a narrower stripe of commonality. The Fair Prince, maybe? Procer didn’t really have any strong unifying stories, which made it difficult to predict. No point in guessing when I knew so little.

“We’ll see,” I grunted. “There’s rule and then there’s rule.”

Wizards of the West had been the royal wizards of Callow for centuries and wielded both wealth and influence as well as their magic, but they’d not owned land and only rarely commanded armies. I might have to compromise on the degree of power Named were allowed in rulership, but simply flying a white flag over the matter wasn’t in the cards.

“Rumours are split as to who is responsible for all this,” Vivienne said. “You are prominent among them, Catherine, but both the Black Knight and the Dead King are preferred culprits. My people believe that the First Prince is actively encouraging the perception this was the work of the Hidden Horror, for both political and diplomatic reasons.”

“She’s discrediting the priests,” Adjutant said, huffing out soft laughter. “They can’t be holy men, if they were the pawns of the Dead King.”

“Preparing for a purge, you think?” I asked. “She hangs the Holies and the House of Light in Procer is essentially leaderless. Given the times, the House might look to a hero or the Assembly for leadership until they’ve managed to name a fresh batch of replacements.”

I cocked my head to the side. There weren’t a lot of prominent priestly Named, at the moment. The Grey Pilgrim, arguably, but he was effectively Levantine royalty so it was doubtful Procerans would fall behind him. Roland was Alamans, but also a wizard, and what Proceran heroes were there aside from him? There’d been some knightly man at the Battle of the Camps, if he was still alive, and I vaguely remembered the Forsworn Healer working with Proceran priests on the shield trick that’d fucked us on the first day, but I knew next to nothing about that hero save for the obvious.

“The diplomatic benefits are obvious,” Akua said. “If these Holies – ah, claiming for the silent Heavens, now there’s a lovely swindle – were the pawns of Keter, then everything they have done in the last few years is suspect. Including naming you as Arch-heretic of the East.”

“You sound a little sad,” I accused.

“Oh, it’ll be useful for negotiations,” the shade said. “But such an epithet is quite prestigious in certain parts, you know.”

“The benefits of a retraction with Calernia at large outweigh the prestige it gained her in Praes,” Hakram said.

“I would not dare imply otherwise, Adjutant,” Akua said, gracefully dipping her head.

“It’ll cost them, though,” Vivienne suddenly said. “It was a greater conclave that declared you Arch-heretic, not just the Procerans: the Speakers from Ashur and the Lanterns from the Dominion were also involved.”

“If I’m reading the Pilgrim right, the Lanterns might actually be grateful for the excuse,” I said. “They’re having a hard time reconciling it with Mercy not smiting me to ash. Their only way out is saying I tricked the Ophanim, which no one wants to roll the dice one while they’re here to disagree.”

“She’s still effectively saying that her priesthood alone, of all the western ones, was compromised by the Dead King before making it shoulder the whole blame for the nomination,” Vivienne said. “It’s a massive loss of face for the Proceran House, Cat.”

“You believe the First Prince wants to revisit the balance of power set by the Liturgical Wars,” Akua said, sounding surprised but also a tad intrigued. “Arguably, Cordelia Hasenbach has been scrupulously observant of the authority of the House of Light until now. Even when it was at her detriment.”

“That was before they took a swing at her,” I said. “And they’ve been at odds with her policies for some time, too. I’m not necessarily agreeing with what Vivienne is saying but measures she would have balked at a few months ago might be on the table now.”

“It would go some way in explaining her insistence on strict lawfulness in dealing with the conspiracy,” Hakram said. “It allows her to drag the Holies through trials before the Highest Assembly, bringing out the ugly details of how they tried to meddle with the secular powers. She’ll get support from powers that might usually be on the fence, even the royals close to the House won’t want to let it stay in a position to try this again.”

“Public trials of priests while we’re at war with the Dead King?” I said. “That could get messy. Not sure she’d risk that. Traitors or not, they’re House. People won’t be comfortable with priests in front of a tribunal when the Dead are the gate.”

“I’d expect her to go for property over privileges, if she does act,” Akua noted. “All those monasteries and abbeys with attendant lands. The tax emptions as well. The war efforts would justify the measures and leave the appearance of the old order intact while severely curtailing the influence of the House in truth.”

“Ultimately, so long as it does not affect her ability to negotiate with us it is only somewhat relevant to our affairs,” Hakram finally said.

“Our stance going forward hasn’t changed,” I agreed. “An additional degree of caution, maybe, but if Hasenbach is able to keep the White Knight under control it’s not a major concern.”

“I’d prefer if he wasn’t there at all,” Vivienne sighed. “Now the Tyrant gets his trial. We could have put him off for months if the Knight had stayed away.”

“Not sure I’d want to find out what Kairos might do to get him to hurry up, considering he began a war with Procer just to get him there,” I said. “Obviously we’ll need to keep a close eye on him, Vivs, which is why your Jacks-”

It was a pleasant surprise to have a door to be knocked on, after the Everdark and the fields of Iserre. Adjutant bade our sentry to enter, and the young orc in legionary armour passed a message. The Carrion Lord requested audience and had mentioned he was bringing an old friend. Well now , I thought. The Jacks had done admirably well, all things considered, but it wouldn’t beat hearing of this madness straight from the horse’s mouth.

Time to see what the Scribe had to say for herself.

Chapter 73: Discerning

“Poison is the weapon of the trade, knife the weapon of the intimate and sorcery the weapon of war. To use any for the improper purpose is the mark of inferior breeding, save if greater game is yet afoot.”
– Extract from ‘The Behaviours of Civil Conduct’, by High Lady Mchumba Sahelian

Akua leaked a sensation of query into the Night, an implicit question as to whether or not she should leave given the nature of our arriving guests, but I shook my head. While she was close to neither she was likely to be a fairer hand at reading them than either Vivienne or Hakram, and that lack of closes itself was not without its uses. I doubted a distraction as petty as that would be enough to get beneath the skin of the Scribe, but it took more than one stone to build a house. Adjutant smoothly rose to fetch another two seats without my asking, while Vivienne pressed into my hand a cup before pouring her own. Cold ice-cooled water, sadly, but I did get drunk a lot faster than I used to these days so perhaps that was for the best. Only a fool blunted the edge of their sword just before tugging at a tiger’s tail. Might not be necessary , I reminded myself. It would not do to assume hostility from Scribe because of the less than stellar terms we’d parted on last time we spoke. Or even with those in mind given that if my father asked her to play nice, I believed her likely to do so. Still, I’d recently learned that Black did not have nearly as tight a leash over the Scribe as I’d once assumed.

It would not do to presume in favour of her either.

It was still half a surprise every time to see Black in anything but plate when it was daylight, though I noted that while he wore a dark tabard and matching long-sleeved tunic the faint hint of a coat of mail could be seen under them. Hard to unlearn a lifetime’s worth of paranoia, I supposed – though when it came to Praes it could not realty be called paranoia could it? Scribe was as slippery to the eyes as she’d always been, even when I was actively trying to watch her. It wasn’t invisibility, for she was definitely there, but trying to notice anything about the villainess had my attention sliding away like water off a duck’s back. She had ink-stained hands, and she was not tall, although she might just have been slouching. Her clothes were loose and made of cloth. I bit the inside my cheek, using the pain as a spur as I narrowed my eyes. She had pale, seemingly bloodless lips. They were not smiling. Black took a seat at Adjutant’s invitation and I only then realized how long I’d been staring at Scribe, with only little to show for it. Something to revisit later, perhaps. I sent an idle prayer to my patronesses, though who knew if they’d deign to intercede for such a trifle.

“Would I be correct in assuming you have been parsing through the reports of the Jacks?” the Carrion Lord calmly asked.

“More or less,” I agreed. “Speculating as to the consequences of the mess, too. An insider’s eye of the affair would be appreciated.”

The last sentence I spoke casually, though none here were fool enough to believe it. I was reserving anger along with judgement, but I was less than pleased at the fact that Cordelia Hasenbach had apparently come rather close to being buried in a shallow grave. If the Eyes of the Empire truly had been either authors or helpers to this episode of convulsive stupidity, I would see to it that heads would roll unless very good reason was given. And I did not mean it as a figure of speech, this once. Black glanced at his aide, either ordering or encouraging.

“The Eyes of the Empire were involved,” the Scribe calmly confirmed. “Not directly, but in the nascent stages of the conspiracy and on its edges when it came to a head.”

“Do the Procerans know?” Vivienne flatly asked.

“The Circle of Thorns did as it took place. By now I would venture this has expanded to the First Prince and her most trusted,” Scribe said.

My eyes flicked to my teacher, whose face had remained serene even as one of his oldest companions casually admitted she’d just attacked the Principate in front of Cordelia Hasenbach while we were under formal truce and headed for the negotiating table besides. He was unmoved, so there was likely more to the story. At least some semblance of a reason for me not to denounce Scribe as an agent of the Tower and send her fucking crucified corpse to the First Prince as an apology.

“Elaborate,” I coldly ordered.

“After the ambush sprung by the Grey Pilgrim that saw Lord Black seized, the Tower reached out to me through the Eyes of the Empire,” Scribe said. “The Empress intended a rescue mission in Salia, paired with a strike at the internal stability of Procer, and given the circumstances I agreed with the necessity. Lady Ime and myself, over the span of several months, laid the groundwork for certain factions within Procer to come to the conclusion a coup was feasible.”

“The rumours that Rozala Malanza was backing the coup,” Hakram gravelled. “They were not simple slander.”

“It was difficult but not impossible to impersonate her by letter,” Scribe agreed. “Given that neither the House of Light nor the Silver Letters use scrying mages and the First Prince’s own order was rendered helpless by the interdict cast over Iserre. We’ve had a convincing forgery of the royal seal of Aequitan since the Proceran civil war, when we funded Aenor Malanza’s bid for the throne through the Pravus Bank.”

“The coup happened,” I said. “Which means the trigger was pulled on this scheme, and recently too. After you were informed of my intentions for treaties with the Grand Alliance.”

“I was ordered by scrying link to end any ongoing operations, erase any evidence of Praesi presence in the capital and ensure the loyalty of all agents in the city,” Scribe agreed.

I glanced at Black, who inclined his head in confirmation.

“In this I did not succeed,” Scribe said. “Ime had several long-term plants among our scrying mages I was unaware of, and she used the Tower’s clout to mobilize the Eyes in the capital for action before I could clean up all loose ends. It appears the Empress had judged the Liesse Accords to be an existential threat to herself and her continued reign.”

Well, I grimly thought, she wasn’t wrong about that.

“Given actions that could not be denied, you had to ensure your loyalists among the Eyes were seen as undertaking damage control,” Akua quietly said. “Which is where the Circle of Thorns was brought in. The First Prince will not take the word of anyone here as to the actions of your agents, but she will heed the reports of her own spymaster. A calculated move.”

“Concessions had to be made to the Circle in order for their leader to agree not to spread knowledge of our involvement beyond the necessary, and hand over the written proof of Praesi involvement,” Scribe said. “I gave formal agreement to the Praesi and Callowan delegations backing the First Prince when she requests relief ships be allowed through the Nicaean blockade around Ashur.”

I’d likely have agreed to that anyway, I mused. Oh I’d have tried to exact a little something to sweeten the pot, or made a show of asking for nothing in exchange to foster a sense of debt between myself and Hasenbach, but this was not a great loss for me. I was still swimming in leverage. On the other hand, Scribe had just entered a biding commitment in my name. That she’d presumed to speak for me was galling enough. Considering that Black was effectively my dependant under Proceran law at the moment, Hasenbach would not be entirely without grounds to kick up a fuss if his aide made promises and then they were gone back on. It’d never hold without the strength to enforce it and I could cut right through by sending the Highest Assembly the charred corpse of Scribe along with a polite note informing them she in no way spoke for me, but it’d sour my reputation with some people I badly needed the willing collaboration of. Worse still, though, was that simply by speaking in my name when negotiating the cover up the Scribe had implicitly stated I was in some way related to this. Sedately, I set down my cup on the table.

“I’ll not insult your intelligence by asking you if you know what you’ve done,” I calmly said. “I assume if you were willing to be in killing distance of me, you have further explanation as why I shouldn’t execute you out of general principle.”

Black’s lips thinned, but he did not object. Neither fucking should he. If Adjutant had entered a binding agreement on the behalf of the Black Knight, back in the day, even if my teacher had then judged it worth upholding he would have put Hakram’s head on a pike as a warning for anyone else wanting to overstep. All else aside, I was the Queen of Callow and a villain in my own right. That someone not in my service or given my explicit permission had presumed to speak for me in such a delicate situation was worthy of violence.

“The Empress was aiming at the Accords themselves, apparently considering them the primary threat,” Scribe replied, voice unruffled. “The Silver Letters brought stolen goblinfire into the city and Ime’s agents set fire near their safehouses in attempts to trigger a blaze. Such an event would have destroyed large swaths of Salia and, given your reputation for the substance’s use, affected popular opinion enough to make made negotiation near impossible. Especially for a weakened First Prince, be it a surviving Hasenbach or a freshly elected Malanza. The odds were more than fair that the Grand Alliance itself would collapse.”

I smoothly drummed my fingers against the table. Her answer, unspoken as it’d been, was that she might have overstepped but she’d done so while in the process of averting what could have been a great crisis for me. Certainly one much worse than the minor concession this had ended up costing me – and the unfortunate implications to Scribe having spoken for me could be smoothed away by making it clear to Hasenbach it’d been an exception and not to be taken as face value again. It still got stuck in my throat that her own personal failure to get her house in order would cost me, and that Malicia’s unimpeded schemes would be considered my problem, but I supposed an argument could be made that I was the one who was diplomatically cornering the Empress. Scribe’s repeated mention of the Accords as the main target was certainly hinting at that heavily. Black cleared his throat.

“Regardless of circumstance,” he said, “offence was given. We will offer reparations to the Kingdom of Callow for having drawn on its influence to clean up our own mistakes.”

Scribe did not speak for a moment, as if reluctant.

“As of this morning, the Jacks serving under Duchess-Regent Kegan of Callow have been granted access through liaison to my informants within the Wasteland,” the Scribe said, “along with a list of all suspected Malicia agents within the kingdom.”

My brow rose. Those were... not small things. Black had been outing Malicia’s agents in my kingdom for a while now, true, but he’d done it slowly and at a pace Vivienne was adamant had been chosen so his own agents would not be outed by the revelations. And the cooperation with Scribe’s own faction in the Eyes would go a long way in keeping Kegan from ending up in a grave between Ratface and Anne Kendall. Those were heavier reparations than I would have felt comfortable asking for, if I’d set the terms, which my teacher would know. Ah , I thought, meeting green eyes with my own. This was not just reparations it was a polite gift-assisted request not to kill Scribe for having crossed me. Which I was finding difficult to refuse, all thing considered. Black was being genuine here, I decided, this was more or less the way he dealt with allies. But there was something about the way Scribe was acting... Oh, she didn’t like me. Which was fine, as the sentiment was broadly shared: the cordial beginnings of our acquaintance had begun to fade effectively the moment I sought power independent of my teacher, which I suspected had simply moved me from asset to liability in her eyes. Still, while she didn’t like me I would not deny she was an intelligent woman.

Which was where the flaw could be found. My temper had waned some, these days, but not quite that much. So why would she test it by appearing reluctant over Black’s reparations? She had to know I’d not be all that well inclined towards her, and exactly what those reparations were meant for. Meaning either she didn’t consider her life or freedom worth these concessions from the perspective of the resources available to Black, which was too warped a view to be objectively credible, or she was playing me. Playing up reluctance so I’d feel more grateful for my teacher’s contrastingly fair attitude? Could be, it would be just like her to damage her own reputation to prop up his own. Even made sense from a tactical perspective, given that she and I were unlikely to ever be on good terms and so the loss relative to gain was greater. Except that I could taste it in the air, now that I’d notice a flaw: I was being sold a story. Not the way the Pilgrim or the Bard would, no. That wouldn’t be Scribe’s game. Instead I’d been invited to stroll through a house of mirrors so that I could take in my own reflections and hold them as truth. Even my father’s blunt but sincere bribery had been used as an ingredient in the brew, something I’d find and read as true and so believe the rest was true.

So, I was being had. And Black hadn’t been brought in on it. So was this really Malicia’s ploy at all? It was true the Empress was only losing so much even if it became public she’d helped along the coup, considering the Grand Alliance had been founded in large part to bury her and the Accords would entail her removal regardless. This could be Malicia realizing that openly allying with Keter had burned too many bridges, and that the same alliances taking shape to drive back the Kingdom of the Dead might turn towards her if victorious. Sloppy work, by her standards, but then she had to be running out of tools to use. On the other hand, if I was frustrated in my efforts to establish alliances to the west she had to know I’d be headed east instead – and with a sword in hand. Short-sighted, yes, but honestly still a feasible mistake if Malicia was desperate enough. Which she had to be, with the Tribes having taken Foremen and the Dread Empire on the edge of rebellion from repeated defeats. Feasible, though, was why people thought the hooded figures with tattooed eyes on their skin were the true Eyes of the Empire instead of the chatty innkeepers. Feasible meant you stopped looking because you had the answer. Yet I couldn’t see, frankly, what Scribe had to gain from all this.

“Appreciated,” I said, not bothering to force a smile. “I’ll want a report of everything that took place so no detail can be sprung on me at the table.”

“Naturally,” Black conceded.

He dipped his head in thanks, trusting in the word I’d just as good as given.

“Vivienne,” I said, “I’ll need you to arrange a scrying session with Duchess-Regent Kegan as soon as possible.”

“I’ll see to it immediately,” she briskly replied, rising to her feet.

“Akua,” I said, simultaneously dumping into the Night a sense of stillness, “we still need to bring General Rumena into the loop.”

“As you say, dear heart,” she smiled.

In the Night she shaped her will as a sense of action, then a question, and I assented through the same. Neither of us missed a beat, or otherwise gave sign of this.

“I’ll arrange for that report presently, then,” my father said, sounding rather amused as he rose to his feet.

His old friend followed suit without missing a beat.

“Scribe,” I said. “A word, if you would. I’ll require a few more details out of you in case Hasenbach sends for a private meeting soon. I’m not walking into that blind.”

“The report-” she began.

“Eudokia,” Black sharply said.

She returned to the seat. I nodded thanks at my teacher, who acknowledged them with a discreet dip. No, he most definitely hadn’t been brought into this. I smiled at Hakram, who was lingering behind me, and drained my cup of water before handing it to him. Clicking his fangs in amusement, he moved to fill it again. Scribe waited patiently even as I reached for my dragonbone pipe and slowly stuffed it, only then clearing her throat.

“If you could refrain?” she said.

A heartbeat later I felt Akua’s working slither around us, smooth and silent, and tapped a finger against my pipe to light it. I puffed out, waiting until Hakram had set down the filled cup at my side before speaking.

“You get one chance to tell me the truth,” I said. “After that, my patience will run out.”

Adjutant’s muscles shifted the slightest bit, coiling as he readied for strife. He’d not hesitated in the slightest, I thought with affection.

“You are seeing shadows of your own making,” Scribe said.

I breathed in, then spewed out a steam of smoke.

“Hakram,” I said.

Over two hundred pounds of raw fighting orc struck with blinding quickness, leaping across the table and catching a surprised Scribe by the throat. She began screaming for help. I leaned back into my seat.

“We’re under containment,” I said. “Screaming won’t help.”

“They betrayed us?” Adjutant casually asked, slamming her against the wall and dragging her gasping form up the wall.

“She’s lying,” I said. “But whatever she’s up to, Black isn’t in on it.”

“You are making a mistake,” Scribe gasped. “There is no deceit, only your need to be right.”

She didn’t try to bring Black’s name into this, for which I afforded her a sliver of respect.

“You had months with the Eyes in Procer,” I said. “Oh, I’m sure that everything you told us about how it unfolded is correct in detail. That there were plants answering to Lady Ime among the mages, even that the order to start fires near possible munition locations came from the Tower. What I don’t believe for a moment is that you couldn’t have prevented it from happening. You had months with the Eyes in Procer, Scribe. What was your game?”

Black, I thought, would not question her story. It wouldn’t even occur to him, I thought, the same way that it would not occur to me to wonder if Adjutant was lying to me. Too much of the bedrock of who we were depended on the certainty that they could be relied on, even when all else failed.

“Sometimes we fail, Catherine Foundling,” Scribe gasped. “Sometimes it is not malice, or scheme, or treachery. Sometimes we just fail .”

“I will torture you,” I frankly said. “I won’t like it, but the stakes here are too high for me to leave stones unturned out of squeamishness. I’ll bleed you, and if that doesn’t work I’ll ask one of my people to peel your mind like an onion until the secrets come spilling out.”

“We trained this in you,” Scribe laughed. “I suppose it is our own doing, in the end. There is nothing to be found, Black Queen, save the unravelling of what you have wrought.”

I blew out a long breath.

“Rip out an eye,” I said.

It occurred to me a moment later that Hakram had only one hand left, made of bone, and that it was already holding up Scribe by the throat. I had begun to rise, to do the dirty work myself, when I saw Adjutant was moving. At the end of his stump folds of gleaming translucence were taking shape, almost spectral on appearance. They folded into themselves, methodically, until a broad clawed hand had come together. I glanced at his face, saw only the pleased baring of fangs, and the point of two claws touched above and beneath Scribe’s eye. And then the hand dispersed.

“No,” Adjutant said.

I blinked in surprise.

“Pain won’t do anything to a woman like that, Catherine,” Hakram said, calmly studying Scribe. “And neither will something live having her mind sliced open.”

“We don’t have anything else to threaten her with, Adjutant,” I flatly said.

“We do,” he disagreed. “Send for the Carrion Lord. Let him see this.”

I began to tell him I’d sent Black away in the first place to spare him this when I noticed stillness. Scribe had gone utterly still, even through her aspect I could feel that. Hakram had found the pulse of her, somehow.

“She’s not kept him ignorant out of disloyalty,” Adjutant said. “Have you, Scribe?”

Silence.

“I suppose you would understand, wouldn’t you?” Scribe rasped.

“You love him,” Hakram Deadhand said, almost gently. “Not a call of the flesh or a tender feeling. The way a knife loves a steady hand, the way a sparrow loves flight. It can’t be helped.”

It felt wrong, to be here. Like I was intruding on a moment to which I alone of us could claim no kinship. Yet my mind turned heedless of the rest, cogs falling into place. The details had been there all along, hadn’t they? The conversations I’d had with Scribe were few, but one had mattered more than the rest. When I’d tread the halls of the Tower for the fist time, and she had whispered a dangerous secret in my ear. Ranger and I disagreed on many matters, Catherine, but there was one thing we always agreed on. Was it really that simple, that... I hesitated to say petty, but what else could it be called? No, not petty. Personal, and in a way that was worse.

“Malicia,” I croaked out. “This wasn’t about Procer or the Accords or anything else. You did all this so he would have no choice but to kill Malicia when he returns to the Wasteland.”

Chapter 74: Partial

“Trust not oaths: from a liar they are wind, from the true they are needless.”
– Penthesian saying

Gods, I should have seen it from the start.

What did Scribe actually care about, in that all-consuming way Named cared for things? It wasn’t land or wealth or glory: all of those she could have easily claimed from her position at the side of the Carrion Lord and no one would have batted an eye. She hadn’t, though, and neither had she claimed any formal authority beyond what her service to Black brought. She’d been a shadow, the spider at the centre of the web. Named could be quiet, subtle even, but rarely in the manner she’d been. I doubted more than a dozen people on Calernia knew what Assassin’s face looked like, but he had a reputation. He’d done deeds, however grisly. Scribe, though? Even in Callow, where she’d effectively run the bureaucracy of the occupation for two decades, she was known as little more than Black’s aide. When Named wanted something they acted, and those actions rippled consequences outwards in ways that had little to do with power – it was the Role that cast a long shadow, not unnatural swiftness of limb or the heady thrum of an aspect unleashed.

Yet when thought was given to the matter, the Scribe had been slightly more than a shadow: she’d been my teacher’s shadow, in particular. There was something about Amadeus of the Green Stretch, or perhaps his ambitions, that must have drawn her to him. She had little stake in the Empire, though, and was not from it: she’d herself told me she was not born of it, and Black had once told me they’d met in Delos. I could go mad trying to parse together the desires of such a purposefully obscure stranger, though, so why even try? I could see what mattered to her simply by looking at where she hadn’t... faded into the background. She’d cared for the old Calamities some, less so their children – Masego rarely spoke of her – but in the end it was my father she’d attached herself to. Fear of pain or death wouldn’t work on someone like Eudokia, Adjutant was right about that. You’d have to threaten something she cared about, and as far as I could tell one of the few things she valued in this world was the trust between her and Black.

Hakram had caught scent of that, far before I could even begin to glimpse the shape of the truth, and so now I had a knife to rest against the throat of that trust. No longer strangled or threatened, the villainess slowly rose to her feet and talked.

“It was necessary,” Scribe said. “And considering your personal and political enmities with Malicia, none of this should be unpleasant to your ear.”

Akua’s Folly had been permitted and even somewhat obliquely funded by the Tower, I had not forgotten that. Akua Sahelian would pay her dues for that and more, but the Dread Empress would not be spared the settling of all accounts. And her debt had only grown, with the brutal attack that’d been Night of Knives. Some of those losses had been personal, too. Ratface would not soon be forgot. Only now I had to wonder if I’d been steered, didn’t I? If Scribe could do it to Black, someone she loved and trusted, she would not bat an eye before aiming me at her enemies. On the other hand, would the Empress not have tried to cast the blame on Scribe for that if she could, even if it was even slightly feasible? And there was General Istrid’s death during the Doom, too. Juniper’s mother had taken a knife in the back and it was still anyone’s guess who’d wielded the blade. These days I was inclined to flip a coin over whether it’d been the Empress removing one of the key Black loyalists in the Legions or the Matrons getting their pieces in place and giving me opportunity to swallow up leaderless legions into the nascent Army of Callow. Which I had, promptly enough. Now, though, looking back? Malicia had lost two legions and the supreme commander of my freshly strengthened armies been given good reason to despise the Empress. There was no end to that rabbit hole, if I tumbled down it.

“As far as I’m concerned, this can only end with Malicia’s head on a pike,” I conceded. “But this is not a reasonable way to go about this, Scribe. Shit, you were more than just playing with fire: Procer might have collapsed , if someone put a knife in Hasenbach! All for something an honest conversation might have achieved instead.”

“That is where,” Scribe calmly said, “you are wrong.”

There was no tremor to her voice, no hesitation. She believed what she said. And she also didn’t give the slightest fuck about the hundreds of thousands of deaths that might come from the Principate toppling. No , I darkly thought, she wouldn’t . Sabah had been the only one of the Calamities who gave more than a passing thought to the lives she took, which made it all the more a tragedy she’d been the one to die first.

“I expect we’re not about to have a stirring discussion about whether Cordelia Hasenbach truly is the key to keeping the Principate functional,” I cuttingly said.

“He would have forgiven her, Catherine Foundling,” Scribe said. “Without ever using the word forgive, but that would be the truth of it nonetheless. No matter what any of us said, he’d make peace again.”

“Look, I’m not going to argue he doesn’t get sentimental on occasion,” I said. “To be blunt, there’s a reason I’m still breathing. But he’s still Black . There’s lines, and if he has to choose between the Praes he wants and Malicia-”

“He’ll try for both,” Scribe said. “Offer her to be his Chancellor, another leap of faith: trusting that she would be one of the few who never schemed the death of their tyrant.”

“That would not be acceptable,” I sharply said. “If she takes a ship across the Tyrian Sea I won’t pursue, but she doesn’t get to stay anywhere near the reins of power. Not after all the shit she’s pulled. He knows that.”

“It won’t matter. He always forgives,” Scribe said, and under the calm tone that were and old and cold anger. “Malicia. Ranger. Even Wekesa, who spurned one of the few ways the Empire could be corrected without steel in hand out of sheer petty apathy. He always forgives them and takes up the work instead. It will kill him, Catherine. It has been killing him for years, but this once he might as well slit his own throat. I will not have it .”

I almost denied her, the words on the tip of my tongue, but then I thought of Arcadia. Of the Queen of Summer holding Masego and I in the palm of her hand, and how she’s still not come the closest to killing me that day. He would be angry, if I killed you, Ranger had said, her desire to take my life almost a physical thing, but we’ve been angry before. It passes. The Scribe had known my father for a very long time, and though she was... warped in some ways, as all Named were, she was not necessarily wrong .

“There were ways that weren’t as risky,” I said.

“None that would hold under scrutiny, which you can be certain will be had,” Scribe said.

And the thing was, if you counted Black’s life above everything other concern I could even understand why she’d believed this was what needed to be done. And why she’d assume I’d go along with it too. As a play, it’d finished isolating Malicia from every other halfway trustworthy actor on Calernia – at this point, who aside from Kairos would even consider bargaining with her? It would ensure that Black would climb the Tower, putting someone at the head of the Empire I could trust when I abdicated, and while Hasenbach still held the reins of Procer her position was weakened just ahead of pivotal negotiations. Now that this had been carried out successfully, I only benefitted from the outcome of her scheme. Oh, no doubt she’d have preferred I never catch on, but this was not a fatal mistake to her was it? I gained nothing from outing her and would lose quite a bit from tattling. Now that the Jacks could benefit from her agents in the Wasteland, I had an actual reason to want her to keep breathing – the arrangement would likely die with her. Would Black killer her, if he knew? I honestly wasn’t sure. He’d tolerate manipulations for Malicia, I suspected, but then he’d considered the Empress his superior.

Not so with this one, I thought.

“It wasn’t worth the risks,” I finally said. “And you know if he ever learns about this, he’ll snap.”

“There are three people alive who know of this,” Scribe said.

I felt a pang of irritation.

“Don’t be daft,” I said. “He’s a villain. So are you, so am I. Secrets like this always come out with the likes of us, Scribe. And if you don’t do it on your own terms it’ll be on some hero’s instead.”

There were simply so many ways for secrets to be snatched from even the grave. Some manners of necromancy, echoes in Arcadia, or even just a very improbable but not outright impossible human mistake. Providence wasn’t a panacea for all ills that handed you everything always, the way Black had once intimated to me, but it did make sure that if there was a chance in a hundred all a hero needed to do was roll the dice.

“You speak with great certainty,” she said, “yet I have buried greater sins than this and never did they rise from their graves.”

“You’ve never been in everyone’s eyes like this, though,” I flatly replied. “Every great power on the continent is looking at Salia and the smouldering remains of your plot, Scribe. Hells, you’ve got the White Knight and the Grey Pilgrim here. Your really think two Choir busybodies like that aren’t going to get even a hint from up on high?”

“There are limits to how much even angels can intervene,” she said, sounding irritated. “It is not a rule that the Heavens see through every scheme, else there would be no purpose to ever scheming. They have no reason to even begin to look, so-”

“How are you not getting that you’re not playing iron sharpens iron in the fucking Wasteland anymore?” I snapped. “This isn’t killing teenage heroes in Callow before they get their first aspect, Scribe. You’re trying the odds with the godsdamned fate of millions on the line, every hound the Heavens have to send sniffing at the ashes, and you think-”

A hand came to rest on my shoulder, though it was not warm.

“Cat,” Hakram said. “This no longer serves a purpose.”

I breathed out angrily. I’d not even noticed getting to my feet, much less the clatter of my abandoned pipe against the table. Ash had spilled, though not enough to start a fire.

“Fine,” I said. “You’re right. This is not acceptable, Scribe.”

“A decision made in anger might be regretted,” Adjutant cautioned.

My fingers clenched. My instinct was to drag her, by the hair if need be, in front of Black and let the truth spill out. But Hakram was right, there’d be long-lasting consequences to that. And until I could separate my instinct to go through with this from my harsh urge to see Scribe getting the rude awakening she’d been bargaining for, it would be best if I stayed my hand.

“I’ll hold my tongue for now,” I said.

“I will require guarantee that you will first speak with me, should you unwisely choose revelations,” Scribe said.

Fuck you , I almost said, you get nothing from me you – but Hakram’s bony fingers squeezed my shoulder slightly.

“Fine,” I got out.

Both Adjtutant and I knew she might start scrambling for leverage over me the moment she left the room, but if she did take off the gloves and flay her alive before use her reanimated puppet-corpse to call off whatever she’d schemed. The days where I was willing to let the Calamities twist my arm were long past me. I snatched back my pipe, though the wakeleaf was spoiled. Out of sheer pettiness I hobbled to cut in front of Scribe as she made for the door.

Wasn’t much, but it did slightly help my mood.

—

Even after the anger cooled no answers had sprung forth, because there were some choices that had no clean way through. It’d been one of my earliest lessons as the Squire, and though I wished it hadn’t proved as repeatedly and brutally true there was no denying it had. I could have slipped away into a warded room with the same half-council I’d gathered earlier to debate the matter, let their advice carry me through the noise until some sort of conclusion took form. I didn’t, for I’d grown weary of the same words echoing around my mind again and again. A council sounded deeply unpleasant, at the moment, and though I knew indecisiveness could be a costly thing to a woman in my position a day’s staggering would not change too much. Dawn would carry with it a great many hopes, for messengers had come from Salia and the delegations were to be received at midday. As agreed, an escort of four hundred would be allowed to every representative save for Black – who was, effectively, here as an extension of my own delegation. It would have been wiser to head to bed brisk and early, but restless and the coming of darkness had me too awake for it.

I went out instead, shedding all escorts save for the handful of Mighty I sensed trailing me in the dark. The countryside around Salia was, well, rather mundane. Given all the wild things one heard about the Principate’s capital I’d half expected everything within ten miles of it to be a pleasure garden dripping in jewels, but this could easily have been Callowan countryside. Lands did not look so different from one another, when covered by ice and snow. Though the village where my soldiers had been quartered, Roque-Faillie, had nothing of note all that close I was surprised to find a light fluttering in the distance after ghosting past my guards. It was coming from structure, too, though not a large one. Curiosity drove me forward, limping as I went and leaning on my staff of yew. The Mantle of Woe I’d left behind, traded instead for a warmer fur-rimmed cloak that Hakram had sown me. It was quite lovely, and he’d even reminded my whining about all my clothes being black: it was a pleasant shade of deep green instead, almost like the colour Archer favoured. I blinked in surprise when I got a good look at where the light was coming from, for though the sight was not that odd I’d not expected to see it.

It was a small farm I was looking at, though it must have been used for cattle-herding as well by the looks of the low wall to the side. Someone had hung a lantern on the side of house, off a rusting iron hook, and I caught a grunt of effort coming from near the low wall. Light in my limp, I moved onto the snowy path and found a man working on the cattle-wall. It’d been shoddily built, I thought, more piled stone than anything else, and a large swath of it had collapsed. Some had used a shivel to break the snow and ice and was steadily stacking the stones anew. Brow raising, I took a closer look. Not a Proceran, this one, at least not by birth: his skin had that Thalassina tone to it, too pale to be Soninke but too dark to be Taghreb. Tall and built like a working man, with fuzzy hair cropped even closer than even Legion regulations demanded, he’d shed his coat. Instead he wore a long-sleeved grey tunic he’d rolled up the sleeves of, and I let my gaze linger just a moment on the muscled forearms and calloused hands. He was rather plain-faced, I saw when he turned to glanced at me, and either clean-shaven or hairless. His dark brown eyes had a sense of steadiness to them, peace almost.

“Can I help you?” he asked in flawless Chantant.

Almost embarrassed at having stared, I gestured towards the wall he was working on.

“Won’t hold without mortar,” I said. “And it’s a little late in the year for that. Won’t take properly in the cold.”

He looked surprised.

“Are you a mason?” he asked.

“I have a friend who works with stone,” I shrugged.

Insofar as Pickler could be said to be doing then, when she crafted engines to tear down walls. I took another few steps, moving to the side of the path so I could lean against an intact part of the cattle-wall.

“Spring is coming soon enough,” the stranger said. “It may hold.”

“Hopeful sort, aren’t you?” I drawled.

“I see no purpose to ever assuming the worst,” he replied. “It seems like a tiring way to live.”

“You get more pleasant surprises that way,” I hedged. “You don’t have the look of a local, if you’ll forgive my saying so.”

“I am not,” the man agreed, body shifting as he stacked another stone. “It is not my farm, if that is your question. I was given leave to use it while waiting for a friend.”

“Here?” I said, genuinely surprised. “You know there’s delegations close, right? The League further east and Callow’s just to the west. That’s a lot of jumpy soldiers.”

Not to mention I’d let Robber loose. He wasn’t going to around stabbing farmers – although this definitely wasn’t one – but he wouldn’t be above a bit of a scare if he got bored.

“I had heard,” the man said. “I warned my friend, though she cared little for the warning.”

“Headstrong?” I said, genuinely sympathetic.

Indrani wasn’t exactly what you might call a pliable young maiden, even when I wasn’t actively insulting her.

“Rather,” the man said, amused. “And she dislikes cities. It will do her some good to stretch her legs.”

“Been in Salia, then?” I casually asked.

“I have,” he said. “We are being hosted in the city.”

“Not Levantine, by the look and sound of you,” I mused. “Sure as Hells not Proceran. Ashuran, then?”

“A long time ago,” the man agreed, then shifted to Lower Miezan. “You are Callowan, yes?”

“Laure born and raised,” I agreed in the same.

“Come with the Black Queen, I would think,” he said.

“More or less,” I said. “You a translator? I expect with the amount of people coming into the capital there’s bound to be good coin in it.”

He was perhaps in too good a shape for one, but it would rather impolite to outright call him a mercenary who’d picked up a few languages while out on campaign. A hired blade wouldn’t make it into any place of import, but with foreign soldiers in Salia knowing their tongues would be a skill people were willing to pay coin for.

“I know a great many languages,” the man said. “You might say I have a gift with them.”

There was an almost rueful note to his voice when he said that. Yeah, that wasn’t a mercenary. No idea what he actually was, but I was leaning towards whatever the Thalassocracy’s equivalent of the Eyes of the Empire was.

“Were you at the Princes’ Graveyard?” he suddenly asked.

I nodded.

“It is said that angels seeded dreams among soldiers of all armies,” he said, dark eyes lingering on me.

I’d gotten an interested look or two in my life, and this wasn’t one of them. He’d assessed me as someone who knew how their way around a blade – checked my frame, my stance, for callouses on my palm. Yeah, definitely not a common mercenary.

“Didn’t get one,” I said. “But I’ve heard the same.”

He slowly nodded.

“Unfortunate,” he said. “I’d wanted to speak with someone who had dreamt.”

“Oh?” I asked. “Dubious about the Arch-heretic of the East not getting smote by angels?”

He looked amused.

“It is a meaningless title,” he said.

I cocked my head to the side, honestly surprised.

“It comes from no sacred writ, it has the blessing of no Choir nor the assent of the Heavens,” he elaborated, seeing my curiosity. “If priests declare the sun to be wicked, does it make it so?”

“I think you have a large enough conclave, probably yes,” I mused.

The man’s lips quirked into a smile. He hoisted up another stone and set it down before wiping his brow and pulling down his sleeves. Picking up his coat, he moved to sit by my side on the cattle-wall.

“You do not think much of priests, it seems,” he said.

“ A priest is usually a good thing,” I drawled. “It’s when you’ve priests in the multiple that the trouble starts. They’ve a way of starting to believe that whatever they agree on is the truth, and it’s all downhill from there.”

“Is there not a House of Light in Callow?” the man asked, sounding surprised.

“Sure,” I snorted. “But it’s never been overly guilty of agreeing on anything. Mind you, they still keep to the Book. It’s the Praesi that have no priests at all.”

“My mother kept to the Gods Below,” the man admitted. “She was rather bemused at the notion of formal priesthood.”

I glanced at him.

“Soninke?” I guessed.

He nodded. I’d been right then, he had mixed blood as was – had been now, I reminded myself – common in Thalassina.

“From Thalassina,” he said.

I grimaced.

“Hope you didn’t have any family there,” I said.

“I do not know,” he admitted, then frowned. “It is true, then? That the city was sunk into the sea?”

“Large chunk of it went up in smoke, way I heard it,” I said. “And that much sorcery, even when you’re just close...”

It was his turn to grimace. Yeah, I suspected that’d not been a pleasant way to die for those unlucky survivors.

“Heavens shepherd their souls beyond,” he murmured.

A well-meant sentiment, I thought, though most Praesi would sneer at it. The man pushed himself off the wall and put on his coat – good make but well-worn, most likely not a noble then – and with a smile offered me his hand.

“Hanno,” he introduced himself.

I went still for a heartbeat as it all came together. Slowly, I breathed out.

“Catherine,” I said, clasping his wrist in a legionary’s handshake.

His eyes widened, the slightest bit.

“Black Queen,” Hanno of Arwad said.

“White Knight,” I replied. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Chapter 75: Analog

“I assure you, Chancellor, that with but a few words they’ll come around to agreeing with me. Almost like an incantation, really.”
– Dread Emperor Imperious

Good grip , I thought, as he clasped my arm tightly once back before withdrawing.

“I was warned about you,” the White Knight conversationally said.

He was a dangerous man, I knew, for heroes usually were. Yet I did not feel particularly endangered, for by all reports Hanno of Arwad was not the sort of madman who’d draw a sword thoughtlessly. I leaned on my staff to push myself up on the low cattle-wall, pressing my cloak against the back of my leg with my other hand so it wouldn’t bunch up. That’s better , I thought. Took the weight off my bad leg.

“Were you?” I replied. “You don’t seem all that worried.”

“Not that sort of warning,” he said. “The Grey Pilgrim called you a thresher.”

My brow rose. I was a city girl to the bone, true enough, but it was still a Callowan city. I knew a thing or two about farming, if only in principle.

“Like for grain?” I asked, cocking my head to the side.

He had a rather honest face, I decided, for all that it was plain. The calm on it wasn’t affectation, no. It was just the consequence of being so amiably unruffled by all that went on around him, perhaps not even something he knew he showed.

“One that separates the wheat from the chaff,” the White Knight quoted. “He argued that there are Bestowals that, by their nature, draw to them both great loyalty and great enmity.”

“Sounds like Tariq,” I conceded. “Mind you, I’ve always found he throws words like ‘fate’ around a little too easily. Anyone who ends up making waves will draw both enemies and allies, there’s nothing magical about it.”

“There is, when so many of those allies were once your enemies,” Hanno said. “I am told that most of your closest companions fought you at some point or another.”

Well, not that many. Indrani had introduced herself by ambushing me, I conceded. Vivienne too. Juniper and I hadn’t exactly begun as bosom friends, and there was a reason that I’d ripped Akua’s heart out of her chest. Shit. Hakram had always been a delight, though! And Robber had mostly been other people’s problem, which by goblin standards was positively saintly. I forcefully refrained from thinking too much about how the Everdark had turned out for all involved.

“Oh Gods,” I muttered. “I genuinely can’t argue with that.”

If I’d lost that argument in my own head, I somehow doubted it’d go my way spoken aloud. The hero softly chuckled.

“It is not unlike sculpting, I’ve found,” Hanno said. “What your hand knows, what you have crafted, is not what the eyes of others see.”

“Been mistaken a few times, have you?” I asked.

He agreed with a nod.

“Often it is misunderstood what the Choir of Judgement is,” the White Knight said. “I’ve been asked to adjudicate land disputes, to settle disagreements over scripture and once even to decide on the rightful owner of cattle.”

He breathed out, as if exasperated by the whole of it.

“The Seraphim do not attend to earthly laws or even holy writ, Black Queen,” Hanno of Arwad said. “They render only one manner of judgement and it is not fettered by anything of Creation.”

“That’d be the spinning coin and the,” I mimed a blade across the throat, “I take it?”

“If the coin spun for ever soul on Calernia, it would show the laurels more often than not,” the White Knight said. “The circumstances in which it is prone to spinning, however, have favoured the showing of the swords.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?” I asked.

He cocked his head to the side.

“Why would it?” the White Knight asked. “If only wicked men are judged, why would another end come of it?”

“And you don’t think you’re passing judgement as well?” I frowned.

“That is not my place,” he said.

“The coin doesn’t flip on its own, you know,” I pointed out. “And as far as I know, you don’t toss it for everyone you meet.”

The hero looked frustrated, but only in passing. I supposed I hadn’t been the first person to say as much to him. He was one of the great Names of our generation, true, but he was also a pretty personable man all things considered.

“You are Queen of Callow,” the White Knight said.

“Don’t suppose you could get me that in writing?” I drily said.

If getting the Sword of Judgement to put it to parchment didn’t end up settling the legitimacy of my rule, nothing ever would. He blinked, visibly bemused.

“Ignore that,” I sighed. “Yes, I am Queen of Callow. Couple other titles too, but that’s the highest one.”

“Then, unless I am mistaken, you have right of high justice over all in your kingdom,” Hanno said.

That was slightly more complicated an issue than you’d think, actually. High justice – essentially the right to sit in judgement of anyone no matter how high their birth and the severity of their crime – had been moved around some these last few decades. Before the Conquest the answer would have been a straightforward yes, as the ruling king or queen of Callow had been one of the few figures able to sit in judgement over anyone. Under Black the right of high justice had in theory devolved to the imperial governors, though in practice he’d been the one holding it: though his authority came from the Tower and not a crown, he’d been the only man in the kingdom would could sit in judgement of both governors and the remaining nobles. It was no without reason that when I’d called my teacher the crownless king of Callow not even the Choir of Contrition had gainsaid me. These days my kingdom’s laws were a messy jumble of old Praesi decrees and dusty Callowan laws, but as the anointed Queen of Callow I did in principle have right of high justice. If I started going after the few nobles left through even legal means, though, I’d have a rebellion on my hands. I’d allowed my court to squeeze the northern baronies in their coin purse but nowhere else, and Gods forbid I ever try to pass judgement on Duchess Kegan even if she ate a full cartload of babies in broad daylight before a hundred witnesses.

“By law I do,” I conceded.

“As one with the right to pass judgement over any Callowan,” Hanno said, “did you then proceed to drag every man and woman you encountered before a tribunal?”

My brow rose.

“You don’t stand judgement in Callow without having broken a law,” I said.

“And I do not bring into the gaze of the Seraphim every soul I encounter without reason,” the White Knight replied. “Nor would I stand benumbed and allow a life to be taken before my eyes while I asked for their verdict. I do not judge, Catherine Foundling, because I recognize the fallibility of what I am and what I know. It does not mean I am blind or helpless: it means that where others have no choice but to be burdened with uncertainty, I am not.”

That was rather more reasonable than I’d expected of the man, I admitted to myself. My brushes with Choirs had been less than pleasant, most of the time, so I’d been predisposed to seeing lunacy lurking in one who had openly sworn himself to do the bidding of one. Black had been less than flattering in his assessments of the man, too, though he’d also cautioned that the White Knight was both intelligent and an exceedingly dangerous and versatile killer. Then again, I could hardly imagine my father ever sitting down to have a polite chat with a hero – or the opposite, in all fairness. Over two decades of the Calamities smothering heroes in their narrative crib had rather thoroughly burned that bridge for both sides. I still found the notion of the Seraphim being considered an authority over even a chamber pot rather revolting, but hardly enough to draw a blade over it. So long as that authority was not forced on anyone, and it stayed well out of my kingdom, it fell under the category of ‘someone else’s problem’. If the nations of the west wanted to grant the right of high justice to the Choir of Judgement, that was their decision to make.

Of course, there was one little issue with all this.

“And villains?” I asked. “Don’t they always get a flip, White Knight?”

He smiled, though it was a distant sort of smile. One straddling the line between reminiscence and the aloofness of professional attending their trade. He stood before me, little more than a well-built man in cloth, and still he spoke with an authority that could not be denied. Conviction was at the heart of Names, I knew, and this one did not lack faith. Black was one of the finest hero-killers Calernia had ever known, and he’d gone after Hanno with the full roster of the Calamities while the White Knight led a disparate band of greenhorns. And the man stood before me still. Some of that could be laid at the Bard’s feet, at her schemes, but only so much. Even the Intercessor could not make a sharp blade out of straw.

“Are all those that worship the Gods Above to be called Good?” Hanno replied.

“No,” I said. “But worshipping Below is against the scriptures, isn’t it? Heresy.”

“Do you worship Below?” he asked.

“I curse in their name, mostly,” I drawled, rather amused. “But I’ve been called an odd duck amongst my kind. Most villains do in fact keep to the Gods Below.”

I knew Hakram did, though it was in the orc way under the name of the Hungry Gods. He wasn’t particularly pious, though, and considered it a private matter besides. Indrani’s utter indifference to all things religious probably counted as some sort of heresy, I was pretty sure, and while Akua worshipped the Hellgods in that very Praesi way that did not exclude attempted murder and usurpation that worship was not less sincere for it. That her growing fondness for heroics had not been paired with conversion to the ways of the House of Light had been a source of some amusement to me, particularly since even if she was a Wasteland aristocrat she knew her way around the Book of All Things better than I did.

“The Choir of Judgement does not follow scripture,” Hanno reminded me. “It was written by mortal hands, a fetter like any other.”

“But if a villain, say, made a carriage out of skulls,” I said, then let the sentence hang.

“Graverobbing is not a particular concern of the Seraphim,” the White Knight replied, sounding almost amused. “Especially when it is only presumptive.”

“But you’d keep an eye on them, after that,” I shrewdly said.

“As I would keep an eye on a man walking into a house with a bared sword,” Hanno said.

While the man in front of me was far from an idiot – I suspected he’d be deeply unpleasant to argue with – I wouldn’t assess him as the kind of silver-tongued schemer I’d come across more than a few times. Oh, it was possible a long game was being played even if he was a hero. But my instinct was that he was much as he put himself forward, and I’d stayed alive this long by listening to that little voice when it tugged at my attention. And right now that voice was telling me that the White Knight didn’t have to be my enemy. I didn’t relish the notion of angels passing judgement through someone else’s hand, and I very much doubted that Hanno would stay his work even if I asked him to pretty please do so, but he could be accommodated. If he worked within the bounds of the Accords, and even worked to enforce them? Hells, he might be a legitimate boon. Heroes would follow the Grey Pilgrim out of respect for the man, but if the White Knight endorsed something a lot of people would take that as the blessing of the Choir of Judgement. There were parts of the continent where that carried a great deal of weight. Even now, after the Tenth Crusade and the fury that’d followed the Salian conclaves, Callow was still one of them.

Everything he’d said fit with what I knew of his actions. He’d come to be involved in the Free Cities because the Tyrant had started a war, and as far as I knew never fought where there wasn’t a villain involved. He’d come as part of the southern crusade, which was a mark against him, but it was largely Black he’d been there for. And while I loved my father a great deal, I couldn’t deny that he was a monster twice over. I believed him to be the man who’d stood between Praes and its worst impulses for decades, and perhaps the monster needed to reform the Dread Empire into a nation that wouldn’t vomit its poison over the rest of Calernia every few decades, but that in no way made him a good man. It was not unjustified , to want to kill him. That didn’t mean I’d allow it, or that it would not make things objectively worse if it happened, but I wouldn’t delude myself into thinking that Amadeus of the Green Stretch was not a monster. He was other things, too, but that didn’t expunge the first truth him. In the end, I didn’t have a lot of axes to grind with the White Knight and he’d proved one of the more reasonable heroes I’d come across. Hanno had even gone north to fight the Dead King and only returned to prevent the Tyrant from having a continent-collapsing tantrum.

In all honesty, that put him pretty high up my list of people who hadn’t severely fucked up in the last year. He had Black beat, for one.

“You don’t take issue with mortal laws, then,” I said.

“It would be absurd to,” he noted. “Lest the Heavens themselves rule, what other way is there?”

“And if those laws applied to even Named?” I pressed.

“A law need not be just,” Hanno of Arwad said. “It need only be a law. I would no more bend my neck to such a wrong than any other threat.”

“I’m not talking about settling right and wrong for all of Calernia,” I said. “That’s doomed. Howling Hells, let’s not even talk about Good and Evil – not even all of Good agrees on the same boundaries. No, I mean basics. You can’t tell Named that regicide is over, neither heroes nor villains would obey that. But limiting the means by which it can be done? That might work. And it’d end the practice of burning down half a city to kill a tyrant or usurp a throne.”

“Not laws, these,” the White Knight said, eyes curious, “but rather rules of engagement.”

My veins thrummed with excitement, because unlike Tariq he’d not needed to be led to that. He’d grasped it, quickly, and did not seem opposed in the slightest. The dark-eyed hero let out a little noise of understanding.

“Ah,” he said. “I see now your cleverness in making such rules so basic. If the expectation placed is so low and Named still fail to clear it, none will desire to support them. Neither others who bear mantles nor the powerful without, for only the erratic would break such bare bones rules. The vast majority of Named will see their lives go untouched, with only the most radical being restricted.”

He paused, looking at me with an expression I found difficult to place.

“This is more than rules of engagement,” the White Knight said, “this is a blade swung at the most callous servants of Above and Below. Within a few generations of grand gestures being harshly answered by all other powers, you would excise that entire manner of thinking from the Named on Calernia.”

Not even Black had caught that, I thought. Oh, he’d seen parts of the Accords as being meant to restrain the most destructive aspects of Praes, but he’d not really gotten it because at the end of the day he did not think of stories the way I did. He’d stayed alive as villain occupying my home, a hotbed of rebellion, by avoiding ever getting caught in a story or pattern that’d get him killed. Unlike me, unlike Akua even, he only rarely wielded like a weapon. It was the same with the Pilgrim, I though, in his own way. Tariq carried around on his back the weight of all his tragedies but at heart he was a guest in the stories of others. Sometimes a guest who ended that story before it could grow into something dangerous, others a wise old man who nudged it to something more acceptable, but the Peregrine as an entity remained... constant. Always playing the same few roles in different stories. He’d know a great many of those, but it would be his nature to think of them as a landscape he’d travelled far and wide. Not something that could shift and change.

“If the flying fortress crowd and the Contrition-ritual crowd always die, always fail? People will remember that,” I quietly agreed. “Gods know it’ll be public enough when the hammer’s brought down. And when it’s been happening for long enough, well, everyone will ‘know’ that sort of thing doesn’t work. Same way heroes don’t die when they’re thrown down cliffs or villains don’t get beaten on the first step of their plan.”

“And with most Named having a stake in ensuring at least the barest of civility is maintained between their kind, the odds are strong that your rules will last long enough to make that mark,” Hanno said. “It is a sound notion.”

“Then you’d be in favour of such a set of rules?” I asked.

He half-smiled.

“They did warn me,” the White Knight pensively said.

I almost cursed. Gods, let this not turn into a damned flop where by simple nature of having been proposed by a villain this entire concept was to be dismissed as a plot of Below. That would be bitterly disappointing after the rest of this conversation.

“I’ve not spoken a single lie,” I said.

“Which makes you singularly dangerous,” Hanno agreeably replied.

My fingers clenched until the knuckles went white under the gloves.

“Ah, you misunderstand me,” the White Knight said. “That you are silver-tongued and perhaps one of the most dangerous people alive does not mean I am dismissing your proposal, Black Queen.”

“Then what does it mean?” I asked.

“That I understand what the Grey Pilgrim meant, now,” Hanno of Arwad said. “You have a pull, Catherine Foundling, that drags others into your wake: either as followers or as wreckage. I am glad to have seen it myself before we first met on formal terms. It would have been startling.”

That last part he spoke ruefully, as if mocking himself.

“There doesn’t need to be anything mystical about this,” I insisted. “I don’t have sole claim to the Accords, not in the slightest. I speak for them because I’m in a position to, not because they’re solely my horse to ride. I don’t know what you think-”

“I very nearly agreed,” the White Knight amusedly said. “Just now. Without thinking twice. After speaking with you for not even an hour. Because you are reasonable, well-spoken and even charming in what I assume to be a rough Callowan way.”

That last one was kind of insulting, I decide, but the rest pretty flattering. I cleared my throat.

“Still not too late to agree now,” I gallantly tried.

“No, perhaps not,” Hanno calmly replied, “but it is certainly too early.”

He suddenly twitched, head turning to look at the far south. I couldn’t hear or see anything, at this distance, and it might be a little gauche to call on Night to aid my senses next to the Sword of Judgement so I refrained out of politeness.

“My friend is returning,” the White Knight said.

It took a moment for me to place it.

“The Witch of the Woods?” I asked.

He dipped his head in agreement.

“A great she-wolf walks with her,” he said. “Neither are fond of cities.”

“I’ll take my leave, then,” I said.

I could on occasion recognize a hint when it was sent my way. I dropped down onto the snow, softening the blow with my staff, and tightened my cloak around my shoulder. Wouldn’t be too long a walk back to camp and I probably should head to bed – I had quite the day ahead of me tomorrow.

“Good night to you, White Knight,” I said, dipping my head in salute.

“And to you, Black Queen,” he replied, doing the same.

I cleared the path, though as I crossed back into the plains I was stopped by a call.

“I expect they will not grow fonder of cities overnight,” Hanno said.

He wasn’t speaking loudly, but his voice carried perfectly.

“Might be I go for a walk, then,” I replied without glancing back.

The yew staff dug into the snow as I limped back home – thump, thump, thump – and I wondered if it truly should go. There might come a day where the coin went up spinning in judgement of me, after all. Not this winter, not this year, maybe not even this decade. But one day? Oh, there’d been a shiver of that going through the conversation. Violence coiled and controlled but never too far from the surface. As a younger woman that might have disturbed me, but these days it simply marked him to my eye as someone able to handle strength properly. Still, I now understood why many heroes deferred to that man: he was so utterly at peace with the power he wielded and what he wielded it for that looking on the surface of that placid pond you’d only ever see your own doubts reflected. I wondered if he’d hesitate, if on that day the coin showed swords. I wondered if I’d hesitate to kill him before the coin ever began spinning.

Neither yew nor snow held answers for me, save that when night came again I would return.

Chapter 76: Procession

“Orphan am I, yet with many mothers and fathers. At once ruler and ruled, yet never only one.”
– Famous Proceran riddle, referring to the city of Salia

I’d never been all that fond of the cloying amount of ceremony that accompanied rising up the ranks.

Oh, I understood the reasons for it. I’d argued the matter with Black back in the day, when we still had our lessons in Ater. Said that it was absurd to treat a king or a general as if they were gods, that the more you set distance between the people making decisions and the people about which those decisions were made the more you ran risks of losing perspective. I still believed that, truth be told, but after years in command of armies and a few wearing a crown I could better appreciate the points my teacher had made back then. When someone was invested with a great deal of power and authority, treating them like a stranger off the street meant treating all that power and authority just as casually. That tended to foster bad habits. In Praes the lie of Malicia and Black’s invincibility had kept rebellions from flaring up because they’d just seemed beyond that: Black always ended up crushing his foes, Malicia always ended up having been three steps ahead of everyone else. It was the same principle for this, more or less: the more ceremony you surrounded someone with, the more they seemed different. Apart from the rest. And, since they were of a different breed from the common man on the street, their authority need not be fought and their power need not be questioned.

That was the reason while my morning had turned into a damned slog, when it came down to it. There were four delegations that the Principate of Procer was to welcome into Salia officially for the peace conference at the capital, and while I would have been happy with being ushered in through the city gates without first needing to bribe the guard that just wasn’t the way diplomacy was conducted between great powers. No, this had to be a show . So everyone had come with their nicest banners and their armour freshly polished, prepared a hundred empty courtesies and now Procer was going to parade us one after another through the large Griffon Gate and the broad avenue it led to. Callow had not been invited to proceed first, naturally. The Principate might be in dire need of my help but it wasn’t going to own up to that before the eyes of gods and men: no, instead it was the Dominion of Levant that was invited in first. Levant was an ally, after all, and a member of the Grand Alliance too. Still, at least we were second. General Rumena was third in line, which I took to be a rather blunt slight to the League of Free Cities in general and likely the Tyrant in particular.

It’d been made clear to me that we would be signaled when the time came for my delegation to proceed, and I’d sent Adjutant ahead to make sure everything went smoothly. That left me with rather little to do, to my rising irritation as time went by. General Abigail was, as usual, finding work for herself so she would not have to remain in my immediate vicinity and while the Third Army was laden with old War College acquaintances of mine – it had, after all, initially been raised from Nauk’s old command in the Fifteenth – there were none I could casually approach for conversation. With Archer still out there somewhere, having sent a single message through Robber’s marauders that she was ‘onto something’, that left me rather light on choices. Moreso than usual since it’d been decided neither Black nor Akua would accompany the delegation on the first day, as that was when there’d be the most eyes on us, and sadly Vivienne was further ahead of our procession. I could go to her, but it’d disturb arrangements that’d taken the better part of an hour to put in place and it felt a little pitiful to do that out of mere boredom.

There were around three hundred of us, arrayed in our finest. A full cohort of legionaries in their parade grounds best made up the heart of it, veterans from a half a dozen fields most of which were old to my service. Thirty knights of the Order of the Broken Bells added a dash of Callowan flair to it, though their hymn-inscribed armour and long lances had been proved to be anything but decorative in conflict against foes of Creation and beyond. They brought with them tall streaming banners, numbering three. The Third Army’s own golden numerals on blue, carrying with them the cognomen of Dauntless I’d granted them at Sarcella as well as the fresher addition of crow wings at the bottom corners. The broken bells of bronze set on black that were the heraldry of the sole chivalric order of Callow trailed in the wind besides it, and last of all of all my own. The laden silver balance on black, what Hakram had told me my people now called the Crown and Sword . And under it words I now longer called my own: justifications matter only to the just . I’d been considering having them struck for some time now, but it would draw questions I was not entirely ready to answer.

I’d been made just as gaudy as the rest of this procession, put up in full plate for the first time in ages though it was one without a helmet – my hair had been put up a long elaborate braid and I’d put on a crown for once. Silver set with emeralds, the practical crown I’d worn when actually moving around in Laure instead of sitting on the fancy chair in full regalia and attempting to look wise. It was not a coincidence that Lady Vivienne Dartwick, herself sitting astride her mount in a beautiful blue dress, wore a crown as well. A slight circlet of silver, without jewels and much less ornate than mine, but a crown nonetheless. She was heiress-designate to the throne, after all, and though still a lady in title arguably she had higher status than any Proceran royalty save for Cordelia Hasenbach. I’d begun to consider the virtues of outright sending for General Abigail so I could entertain myself at her exp- to consult with the senior commander of my escort, I meant, when Adjutant finally dragged his carcass back to me instead. The Procerans had finally given the signal, so as soon as Hakram was standing by my side our procession began moving forward.

For all its fame, Salia had yet to impress me. This far west it was hardly rare for a great city to expand far beyond its walls, especially if it had seen little war as the capital of the Principate had. Even southern Callow had dabbled in that bad habit. Salia, though, seemed to have more territory outside the distant Yearning Walls than behind them. It wasn’t slums, at least not near the road we were led through. But it was certainly a chaotic mess, since it seemed construction was only overseen by the sides of the large roads that led to the deeper city gates. The smell of mud and shit was staggeringly potent even in winter, and chimneys were belching smoke upwards seemingly endlessly. By the looks of it all the cattle and workers that would be out in the fields around the capital during fairer seasons had migrated to this riotous outer-city for the snows. Houses were wood and mud, rarely stone, and they’d been built in tight clusters like a thousand strange little islands separated from one another by muddy street-moats. The stone road that led towards the Griffon Gate was clean, though, and swept clear of snow. No house was every built less than forty feet away from either side though merchant carts of food or trade goods filled much of that empty room instead.

Small crowds had gathered by the side of the road, though they dared not approach soldiers. At least they seemed more in the mood to stare than throw stones. The deeper we went into Salia the more it began to resemble the Proceran towns and cities I’d seen, as if order was radiating from the centre of the capital and waned the further from it you stood. Streets began to have a semblance of order, shops with hanging signs and neat little houses raised in stone with tiled or thatched roofs. It all looked rather prosperous, though not the kind of wealthy the stories about the beating heart of Procer had led me to expect. Oh, I’d not deny the city was damned large but then so was Ater and the Wasteland’s capital was a treasure trove of grand architecture. Mind you, large swaths of Ater were half-abandoned and only filled when famine drove the desperate to the Tower’s shadow while it looked like every damned inch of the capital of Procer was crawling with a dozen people. Still, the looming cathedrals beyond the Yearning Walls in the distance were distinctly less impressive than the gargantuan horrors of the City of Gates. Procer was a younger nation than any on Calernia save for Levant, I thought, for all its great wealth and power.

It was almost an hour all told until we stood before the Griffon Gate, the great panels of bronze on its wood listing every First Prince and Princess to have ever reigned. It opened to the sound of trumpets, and beyond it was revealed the sweeping Merovins avenue. Great statues of marble flanked on us on both sides, beginning on my right with the stern gaze of Clothor Merovins – the first to ever be elected to the office of First Prince. I suspected the man’s actual furs had not been quite so rakishly cut, or offered glimpse of what was admittedly an impressively muscled chest, but that was the Alamans for you.

“They’re not all royalty, did you know?” Hakram said.

I glanced at him and cocked an eyebrow.

“Famous generals and officials can earn one as well,” he gravelled. “One of Rozala Malanza’s ancestors is further up from the days before the Malanzas were royalty. He conquered most of northern Levant for the First Prince of the time.”

“I don’t suppose anyone’s told the Blood about that?” I drily asked

“I believe it might be one of those inconvenient truths we must all politely ignore,” Hakram replied, clicking his teeth in amusement.

The brassy call of trumpets jarred us out of the conversation. The Proceran welcome was laid out before us, a riot of silken banners under brightly armoured horsemen and even more colourful highborn. Every line with a seat in the Highest Assembly had sent a representative, by the looks of it, because that was a great many banners. And an infuriatingly large amount of very nice warhorses. They could have outfitted a good company of heavy horse with that, the wasteful fucks. Ugh, this was going to be as bad as the Tower wasn’t it? All rubies the size of a fist used a bloody bench decorations and gold slapped onto things that had absolutely no need of being made of gold. Which, to be fair, was essentially everything except certain coinage and maybe crowns. A representative for the First Prince herself, an old man that carried the title of Master of Orders – one of the important officials in the Assembly, as I recalled, though he shouldn’t be royalty himself – formally greeted us. I forced a smile through the greeting and let Vivienne answer it in my place. That drew attention from our hosts, but then it’d been meant to. The sooner it was made clear to people that Vivienne was truly meant to be my successor, the better.

Advance resumed with the additional escort, though still at an agonizingly slow crawl. Salia itself was worth a second look this deep in, though, I’d admit to that. The Yearning Walls were well-built and apt to weather a siege, I’d say that much, and their shockingly rose-gold stone shining like a mirror under the sun. Hakram continued to speak in a low voice as we passed through, his own research on the city far dwarfing the few books I’d opened in expectation of my visit. Salia itself was often said to be split in two parts, the City Yearned and the City Yearning – a reference to some ancient poem that’d established the name of its walls, with the city behind them being yearned and the city outside being yearning. Passing the gate had brought us into the City Yearned, and into the portion of it known as the low districts. So named not for the poverty of their inhabitants but rather in contrast to the high districts to the west, which had been raised on high hills. The low districts covered nearly a third of the City Yearned, stretching across its south, and the knowledge that it wasn’t even the wealthy Salians that lived in these parts had my stomach clenching in envy. The houses were all stone, often several stories high – Adjutant noted that renting was common practice in these parts, and very lucrative – it was not rare so see coloured glass windows. These were artisans, I thought, traders and officials. Yet their wealth clearly rivaled that of the minor nobility of Callow, if not outright surpassed it.

How much richer would the nobles be here? I’d read that Procer was arguably the wealthiest nation on Calernia, some of its princes surpassing even the famously rich High Seats of Praes, but I’d never really understood until now how far down that wealth went. When Vivienne had told me, before the Tenth Crusade, that’d it’d been brutally expensive to bribe even the servants in the holdings of the Prince of Iserre I’d assumed the Jacks were had, or that she was exaggerating some for effect. Now I could believe that even the servants in the capital of that principality had been well-off, by my people’s standards. It was a bitter pill to swallow, that the Principate had been basking in all this while my ancestors were dying in droves just to keep Praes in its shore of the Wasaliti.

Merovins avenue led directly to the old palace and the Highest Assembly, but that was not our destination. We diverted northeast through another broad avenue, going through the districts known as Les Vendeuses . Great open-air markets, I’d been told, though we skirted the edges of them only. The route we took led through pleasant sights instead. Some streets seemed to be bordered entirely by great winter gardens artistically adorned with glasswork and sculptures, others filled with guild halls and mansions that competed for the most elegant manner of opulence. It was with some amusement I noted that not once we passed in front of a House of Light. The crowds were something of a surprise, having thickened the further in we went. I’d expected jeering and rocks, but while there certainly wasn’t any jubilant cheering we were being treated as a show rather than, well, the Enemy incarnate. The knights probably helped, I decided, for they were a popular sight with children. Orcs were as well, though more in fascinated horror than positive appreciation.

They’d probably never seen orcs before today, I thought. Or goblins, or Taghreb and Soninke. Even Callowans were rare this far west, these days. It’s another world , I thought. One that knew nothing of the blood-soaked Fields of Streges, of the eternal back and forth between knights of black and white and their grand armies that clashed every few decades. They did not understand the dread of seeing a city rise into the sky, heavy with death, or the way greenskins still flinched at the call of our knight’s horns being sounded. All we had in common with these people was worn history, slights and boons long past, and how little did that really weigh ? I understand you less than I understand Praesi , I thought, watching the people of Salia . I know their truths and their conceits, their mad ambitions and dark splendours. But you? I know so little of you it could be said I know nothing at all. It was a humbling thing, to know that. A daunting one as well. The world was large and even this meagre sliver of it was vast. Could anyone really change something that... immense? A troubling thought, and not one I wanted to linger on.

It was a relief when the procession ended at last and we entered the restricted district where our provided lodgings stood. It was called the Lineal, for it’d once been the ancestral grounds of the Merovins chieftains-turned-royalty of Salia. They had kept large grounds to themselves, the seat of their power when another line claimed the title of First Prince or Princess. Now that the Merovins were long gone, the Lineal stood as almost a city within a city that was under the sole authority of the ruler of Salia. Its significant attached incomes were one of the great boons of the title, and as the old seat of power of royal line it was a beautiful place. I’d expected a manse and some attending barracks for my soldiers, something along the lines of the noble’s houses you could see in Laure’s Whitestone Quarter, but instead we were directed to what was effectively a small palace. The grounds surrounding the structure alone were larger than the palace in Laure, and I suspected this was a winter pleasure palace and not anything official .

I reined in my horse after passing through a pretty copper gate sculpted like a flock of chubby naked Cherubim playing laughingly, slowing Zombie’s stride in the courtyard. There were servants swarming all over the place, which were most likely spies, and I almost bit the inside of my cheek. It was going to be a damned pain keeping track of all these people with my limited escort, so I’d probably have to cordon off a part of the palace and have it guarded and warded at all times.

“Any chance at least one of them isn’t spying for Hasenbach?” I sighed and asked Hakram.

“Of course,” Adjutant amusedly agreed. “There’s probably a few working for other royals.”

I accepted his offered hand to dismount, wincing at the impact, and when a stablehand hesitantly approached Zombie I suppressed a grin. I glanced appreciatively at the sandy-haired man, who while approaching a winged undead fae horse looked more like he was wondering if she’d fit in the stable than if this was in any way wise.

“Don’t touch the reins, she’ll bite you,” I said. “Zombie, the man is going to show you where the stables are.”

My mount huffed, displeased.

“You can’t come in with me,” I patiently replied, “this is a very nice palace. It’d be impolite.”

I glanced at the stablehand, who was now seemingly wondering what he’d gotten himself into. I could sympathize.

“She’ll follow you to the stables,” I said. “Leave a stall open for her, but she’ll wander around for a while still. If she gets anywhere she’s not supposed to, send for me. But she’ll be good, won’t you Zombie?”

I scratched her mane and she whinnied.

“Liar,” I muttered, not entirely without affection,

I flicked a glance at the stablehand one last time.

“Don’t feed her anything,” I instructed. “Even if she whines. She always fills her stomach, but she doesn’t actually need to – you know what, just don’t feed her anything. Let’s leave it at that.”

I’d hastily amended my approach when even implicit discussion of necromancy made the man look like he was about to faint. He bowed, looking like he was one stern talking to away from weeping.

“It will all be done exactly as you say, Your Majesty,” he said.

It would have been polite to call what followed retreating, but I knew what it looked like when someone legged it.

“Don’t you say a damn thing,” I grunted without turning.

“I would never,” Hakram lied, the filthy traitor.

“I can feel your mockery without even looking at you,” I complained.

“Would it help your mood to terrify a gardener as well?” my loyal right hand said.

I turned just to flip him off, though the deepening amusement on his face – like the world’s ugliest green cat had just caught a bird seasoning itself – warned me I’d just missed something. A young woman in Salian livery had been approaching, and was now looking like she’d had no idea queens could gesture obscenely and she wasn’t sure whether she should pretend she’d never seen that or not. Godsdamnit, Hakram, I thought. You know Hasenbach’s going to read about that in a report, don’t you?

“Just say whatever it is you were sent for,” I tiredly told the woman.

She bowed.

“I was sent with a message scroll, Your Majesty,” she said.

As I recalled, in Proceran etiquette people weren’t supposed to hand things directly to royalty. I glanced at Hakram, who stepped forward to accept the scroll. He broke the seal – featureless, a mere press of wax – and glanced at the contents.

“An invitation,” Adjutant said.

“For?” I asked.

“Tea with the First Prince of Procer,” Hakram said. “She awaits us in this palace’s own parlour.”

Chapter 77: Artless

“Even the most skilled of liars are only ever wielding a lie. Truth is the superior artifice, for it will strike deeper than even the most perfect deception.”
– Princess Beatriz of Salamans, later thirteenth First Princess of Procer

“I’m not going to lie,” I muttered under my breath, “it pisses me off a little that anybody can be rich enough to have a room dedicated to tea-drinking .”

Hakram was ahead of us, engaging our guide in what sounded like idle conversation about Salian cloths and their obvious superiority to that of the despicable yet superficially similar works from Lange, so I could vent my indignation without every sentence making it straight to the First Prince’s ear.

“I expect they’ll have one filled with only spices, should we look,” Vivienne drily added. “You know, to make the one that’s just a giant gold ingot stand out less.”

“Right?” I grunted. “Hells, Vivs, you were born noble-”

“A baron line, short on land and incomes even before the Conquest,” she reminded me.

I shot her an incredulous look. Those poor nobles, so very impoverished.

“Did your house have stables?” I asked.

“I’m not dignifying that with an answer,” Lady Dartwick informed me.

“I bet your servants had matching livery too,” I scathingly said.

“ You have servants with matching livery, Your Majesty ,” she exasperatedly replied.

“Eh,” I said. “More like I’m borrowing them for a few years. And I’d help if any of them wanted to find real decent honest work, like running a tavern-”

“Nests of criminal activity, aside from those in better quarters,” Vivienne told me.

I almost gaped at the audacity of that.

“You’re the Queen of Thieves for Callow,” I indignantly said.

“Mere rumours,” she smoothly said, “all I’m saying is that your notion of what good, honest work is tends to be rather skewed given your...”

“We’re in Procer now, you know,” I growled. “Lese-majesty’s something they actually enforce here.”

“Everything,” Vivienne mused. “Your everything, really. Didn’t you use to participate in an illegal fighting ring?”

“I was also a waitress,” I defensively said. “That was lawful – wait why am I justifying myself to you, you used to be the bloody Thief . Have you actually ever had a job?”

“It’s sad to see one so steeped in her criminal ways rising so high, but these are dark days,” Vivienne sighed.

“That’s a lot of backtalk, coming from someone who couldn’t even murder Hakram,” I muttered.

“Is no one ever going to let that go?” she complained. “Do you all want me to murder Hakram now , you niggling harpies? Don’t you think I won’t, you’ll drive me to it.

There was a commotion in front of us, the attendant that’d been sent to guide us concernedly asking Adjutant if he was all right. He had, I grasped from context, stumbled and let out a choking sound. Merciless Gods he’d been eavesdropping with his Name the whole time, hadn’t he? My cheeks burned a little, but I cleared my throat and put on a mask of queenly dignity. Vivienne looked mildly concerned about her dear friend Hakram Deadhand having stumbled, a degree of shamelessness that was positively royal of her. We were close now, the guide told us with an unnecessary amount of bowing.

“Do you think it still counts as a labyrinth if it’s this full of tapestries and nice woodworks?” I asked.

It really was nice woodwork, too. In the same style as those in the royal palace in Laure, which I’d grimly admit to myself probably meant we’d imitated a Proceran style. They also had tapestries that weren’t about hunting, nature and warring with Praes which I’d confess was a nice change of pace.

“It’s the classic Alamans scheme, my queen,” Vivienne drily said. “If you throw enough jewels at your enemy, they’re bound slip and break something eventually.”

“They’d be in a lot less shit if they’d put some of that tapestry coin on good walls instead,” I grunted in agreement.

“Don’t be silly Your Majesty,” Lady Dartwick sardonically said. “This is the Principate, if there is need of a wall that’s what stacking peasants is for.”

I swallowed a laugh at that. I’d never heard that one before and serving drinks in a tavern that catered to both legionaries and Callowans meant I’d heard a lot of cheap jokes at the expense of Procer. Under the Empire’s occupation it’d been safer to go after Procer than to take a shot at Praes. Since not even the most quiescent of my people had been entirely free of the urge take a verbal swing at the Wasteland on occasion, Procer had been getting rough treatment among my countrymen even before the Tenth Crusade so selflessly provided them with fresh ammunition. Relentless mockery of our hosts had me in a rather pleasant mood by the time we arrived at the small hall where the First Prince of Procer was awaiting the three of us. The fair-haired woman who’d been chatting with Adjutant the whole way rapped her knuckles against the door to signal our arrival and bade us farewell, looking almost reluctant at ending her conversation with Hakram. A majordomo in tasteful silks emerged from the room and bowed, intimating he would be announcing us. As the guest of highest rank, etiquette dictated I enter first.

“Her Majesty Queen Catherine of Callow, first of her name, protector of Daoine and high priestess of the Everdark.”

He had a pleasant, ringing voice, exactly the kind you’d want in someone charged with announcements. Queen of Callow, huh? Not so long ago Hasenbach had refused to even recognize me as Queen in Callow, much less the rightful liege lady of Duchess Kegan of Daoine. And someone had been talking to drow, though that might simply be the consequence of the Pilgrim feeling chatty. I entered, the polished plate on my frame making me regret having left my staff behind with every step I took. A bit of Night smoothed the pain quick enough, but when that ended I’d be left feeling the consequences of my pride tonight. I stepped into the hall, followed by the announcement of Lady Vivienne Dartwick, heiress-designate to the Kingdom of Callow . Much as I disliked the Proceran propensity for luxuries, I could not deny that the parlour before me was a beautiful piece of work. A tall plaster ceiling led into great arched windows of glass that let in the winter midday sun, the lighting coming to rest on a long low table of painted wood covered by a perfectly transparent pane of glass. The walls and draperies were in a pleasant pale green, and the seats prepared at the table looked sinfully comfortable with their matching cushions and broad armrests. The First Prince of Procer was seated at the centre of the table, two people standing behind her in respectful deference, and I advanced to the table as behind me the announcement of Lord Hakram Deadhand of the Howling Wolves, the Adjutant sounded.

One of those two people behind Hasenbach was long familiar to me. Princess Rozala Malanza’s classic Arlesite good looks were only called into attention by the light mail and closely cut tabard she wore, but it was the sword at her hip worthy of a raised eyebrow. Few people were allowed to be armed in the presence of the First Prince: I’d worn no sword today and so divested myself of nothing, but Hakram had left behind his axe and Vivienne a surprisingly high quantity of knives before we were allowed into this wing of the palace. A point was being made by Hasenbach, one directed at me: I trust Rozala Malanza to be armed and standing behind me. Procer is not so divided as you think. The other one behind Hasenbach I did not know, though he was quite aged – if bearing that burden rather well, hair having gone a distinguished silver instead of white or falling – and wearing well-tailored but otherwise rather humble robes. On his right shoulder two pale hands intertwined had been embroidered, which struck me as priestly imagery, but I would not assume anything in a place like Salia. I imagined introductions would come soon enough, regardless.

The First Prince waited to speak until Hakram had come to stand at my right, a towering pillar of steel and muscle, and Vivienne at my left – just as whip-slender and hard-eyed as in her thieving days, but grown steady in a way she’d never been while Named.

“Welcome to Salia, Queen Catherine,” the First Prince of Procer greeted me.

It’d been about a year since I’d last seen Cordelia Hasenbach, though this would be our first meeting outside the unearthly domain of darkness and cold that I’d used as our bridge when I still stood Queen of Winter. As was often her habit she’d dressed in the dark blue that was from the heraldry of her native Rhenia, the cut of it conservative – her neckline ended an inch beneath her collarbones – but close on her frame. It was flattering, though there was no hiding that Hasenbach had been born with a warrior’s build: tall and broad-shouldered, with a strong jaw and hale complexion. Her discreet touches of cosmetics, golden eye shadow that made the vivid blue of her eyes stand out even more and the painted nails at the end of the wrists revealed by sleeves ending in an undercut of puffy lace, worked to shape her appearance rather than to change it, which I thought clever of her. If she’d tried to hide her features it would have made her look comical, while as it stood her height and haleness only enhanced the palpable weight of her presence. Her crown was as a simple circlet of pale gold, holding back long golden curls I’d always considered to be the most appealing part of Cordelia Hasenbach – rich and full, they cascaded down her back in perfect ringlets.

“Your hospitality has been impeccable, Your Most Serene Highness,” I replied.

She inclined her head in acknowledgement.

“Our honoured general Princess Rozala Malanza requires little introduction for you, I am told,” Cordelia smiled, “but I expect my other attendant is not so well-known.”

My elbow moved towards Vivienne, softly and as if by happenstance, and her own pushed back against mine. Good, so she did know.

“Lady Dartwick?” I said.

“Unless I am sorely mistaken we are in the presence of Brother Simon of Gorgeault, current head of the Holy Society,” Vivienne smiled. “It is an honour to meet such a distinguished colleague, Brother Simon.”

“As I am honoured to meet you, Lady Dartwick,” the old man replied, lips quirking.

That smile had been almost roguish, I thought. Must have been a heartbreaker in his youth, that one. Regardless he was not in priest robes, so he should be a lay brother who’d taken no vows. Interesting Hasenbach would want him here for this, though. There were implications to that. The First Prince wordlessly invited me to sit and there was a discreet shuffle as the order of seating was seen to. Myself first, as reigning queen, then Vivienne as my designated successor, then Rozala as a ruling princess in her own right and then the broad equivalence in rank between Brother Simon and Adjutant – who while Named was a villain and only actually owed lordly address under the Tower’s law. A small swarm of servants brought trays of silver bearing a tea pot of Ashuran porcelain and matching cups, as well honey to sweeten the brew.

“They are Yan Tei leaves,” Hasenbach pleasantly told me. “Bitterer than the Baalite imports and the plants of the Thalassocracy, though I find they have a richer taste.”

My own passing familiarity with tea came largely through Aisha’s stock – which was Baalite leaves mixed with cheaper Ashuran ones – and the few times Black had served some while we were in Ater. His were from another country across the Tyrian Sea, though, which I suspected to be where the Ranger’s father was from. He didn’t break out the cups often, which didn’t surprise me given the astronomical cost of even a single pot’s worth of brew. It was one of the few luxuries he indulged in, which I’d always found rather amusingly subdued of him given the sheer amount of power at his disposal. I’d brushed up on etiquette before beginning the journey to Salia and made sure all my closest companions did as well, so none of us touched the brew after it was poured for us save when Hakram sweetened his own with honey. Princess Rozala did the same, I noted with amusement, and looked somewhat discomfited that only the orc at the table shared her tastes.

“So what is this palace, if you don’t mind my asking?” I said.

“It was the winter home of the Merovins, in the days where they still numbered many,” the First Prince said. “After their line waned it became the favoured location for winter solstice balls instead, though it had not seen that use since the Great War.”

“Not been in a feasting mood?” I idly said.

“There were better uses for our coin and hours,” Hasenbach replied. “The latter is even harder to replace than the former, I have found.”

Was that an invitation to stop wasting time? I wouldn’t exactly mind. Every day spent dancing around what needed to be done was one more day tossed away as our truce with the Dead King came closer to ending. I understood the Principate had its pride and its ways, but the Principate was also on the brink of annihilation and more than slightly on fire. There was dignity and then there was idiocy.

“Ah,” I said, drawl thickening, “are we to actually talk , then, or do we continued this pleasantly inane ritual of taking each other’s measure? We were past that a year ago, as far as I’m concerned.”

Malanza let out a choking sound, but my eyes were on Hasenbach. She had presence, as much as ever, but I wasn’t feeling... weight off of her. The kind Name would bring to bear simply by being. Might be she was on the more discreet side of things, when it came to that, but that would be rather odd for a ruler. Temper tended to get ripples going, through, so it was worth a try. The Warden of the West studied me for a moment and then allowed for an amused half-smile. She seemed, I thought, tired. It only occurred to me then that the golden eye shadow might not be artifice of beauty but meant instead to hide the dark circles of someone gone too long without sleep. Still, not a hint huh. I’d be unusual for a fresh Named to have that much control over their power, but then this Cordelia Hasenbach and not a farmboy with a grudge and an old sword. She’d held the reins of the greatest empire on the surface of Calernia for years before she’d even had a Name. If she had one.

“I have spent more then twelve hours preparing for this conversation, did you know?” Cordelia ruefully said. “Some of the finest minds in my service studied ever scrap of knowledge we have of you, from your favourite wine to the tactics of your earliest battles.”

“And this is what you came up with?” I replied, brow raising as I cast a look around us.

“It all seems rather pointless, does it not?” the First Prince said. “Yet what can I possibly arrange that would bring to bear even the tenth of the wroth of an angel, or a fraction of the horrors of the Folly? We have nothing that can move if you if you do not wish to be moved, and more masterful hands than we have failed to use you. It is an unpleasant truth, this, and not one I find it easy to face.”

“We have been at war almost as long as we’ve been speaking,” I acknowledged. “And there are things about your country I despise, and likely always will. The grounds for alliance between us are not fondness or kinship.”

“Yet my people are in dire need of your help,” Hasenbach said. “And so as you have proposed let us talk .”

That was as clear an offer as I’d get, I figured, so I took her up on it.

“You do not seem to be Named,” I said.

Cordelia Hasenbach brought her porcelain cup to her mouth and inhaled from the brew before taking a cautious sip.

“I am not one of the Chosen, or the Damned,” she confirmed, elegantly setting down her cup.

I hid my relief. It might be useful to have a heroic First Prince holding up the Accords from her side, but to be honest it wasn’t worth the risks coming with the Intercessor being able to meddle with Cordelia directly. Rather less elegantly I reached for my own cup and took a sip. I didn’t grimace, because I wasn’t a damned savage, but it looked like Hakram had been showing wisdom in honeying his. Wasn’t exactly an avid admirer of sweets, though, so even then it’d be rather like trying to put out a barn fire by throwing sharpers at it.

“Have your spies passed on recent news from the northern fronts?” Cordelia asked.

“We’ve only ever had rumours from Lycaonese lands,” I frankly replied. “As for the rest, we know the general state of it – Cleves was reclaimed, Hainaut’s last lines are on the edge of collapse – but little more.”

“Prince Papenheim has used the truce to solidify the lines in Hainaut, though the Dead King has seemingly massed around six hundred thousand soldiers to break them open anew when the three months end,” the First Prince said. “Hannoven has fallen, as you likely know, and Rhenia has been scoured save for a handful of fortresses where my subjects suffer siege. Only one fortress remains standing in Twilight’s Pass, and when it falls – and fall it will, given the great host waiting before it – the Principality of Bremen will follow in short order. Only Neustria will remain then, and I am told its lowlands will be effectively impossible to defend against an enemy with such overwhelming superiority in numbers.”

A heartbeat of silence passed in the wake of the stark assessment the First Prince of Procer herself had just spoken of the war she was about to resume losing.

“Cleves has been reclaimed,” Cordelia Hasenbach acknowledged. “But at great cost. Four Chosen died and more than twenty thousand trained soldiers. Meanwhile the Enemy’s ranks swell equally with every dead, be they farmer of princess.”

The fair-haired princess sat stiff-backed, but her voice was raw.

“My generals now believe that the battles for Cleves might in fact have been trap,” she said. “The fighting was meant to bleed our number of professional soldiers, you see. To thin the number of Chosen and leave as much as a third of Procer’s armies stranded behind enemy lines when Hainaut falls and the dead hordes close the circle behind them.”

Cordelia Hasenbach raised her cup again, hand forcefully steady, and took a sip. The porcelain cup then returned to the plate with so small a sound it might as well have been silent. The reclamation of Cleves, I thought, was the closest thing the Principate had known to a victory since the Dead King had begun invading. Malanza had fought there. I looked at her now, and though her face as ashen the fact that she did not disagree spokes volumes. How much of a blow must it have been, to come to realize even that sole victory had been a greater defeat in the making?

“I will not lie to you, Queen Catherine,” she said. “You would find out regardless, given your ties to the Eyes of the Empire and the surprising skill of your Jacks. When the truce ends, if hostilities resume the Principate will fall within five months at most.”

Her frank assessment of the state of Procer’s norther fronts had rung loud in the silence, but this? Coming from her, of all people? Even Hakram stilled in surprise.

“The last strongholds of Hainaut might hold for two months, perhaps,” the First Prince evenly said. “After which the dead will tear into Brabant and the masses of refugees there, which will within another month make the numbers of the Dead King too large to successfully fight on the field. If the armies in Cleves intervene to prop up Hainaut we will lose Cleves, and Hainaut will then fall to a pincer regardless.”

She paused.

“The Morgentor, the last fortress of Twilight’s Pass, will likely hold until the other fronts have collapsed,” Cordelia said, a hint of pride to her voice. “Yet it will fall, and though the truce you bought us has allowed the southernmost of my people to flee into Alamans lands we...”

Her voice broke a little there.

“We do not retreat, Catherine Foundling,” she said. “Even when we should. It is not in our nature. Some will go as ordered, but more will flock to walls and fortresses and they will die screaming defiance against the dark. It will be the end of us as a people.”

I said nothing to that, for what was there to say?

“When those fronts collapse so will Procer,” the blue-eyed woman told me. “Already the cracks have begun. I have stripped the western principalities bare of grain to feed the heartlands and bare of men to fill our ranks, but keeping the northern armies supplied has emptied our granaries and our treasury. Foreign trade has broken down and the principalities untouched by war grow weary of paying their taxes to Salia. Even if the Kingdom Under lifted its sanctions, we would not be able to afford their armaments. There will be starvation, and despite my best efforts shortages of steel ensure that we can hardly even keep our current armies in fighting fit.”

She slowly breathed out.

“I expect that the moment Salia falls the Principate will end,” she said. “Southern principalities will secede and form alliances with each other and abroad, throwing the rest of us to the dogs. To be frank, I’d expect Ariel of Arans to offer to pay you fealty for protection before it even came to that – and neither Bayeux nor Orne would be far behind.”

Cordelia Hasenbach met my eye squarely.

“You must understand, now, that I do not have a single thing to threaten you with,” she quietly said. “I have no armies to send forth, no coin to cajole or coerce with and my alliances are weaker than yours. Besides, those allies I do have would not war on you for my sake, for you have them bound by debt and respect. I have through steel and insult ended any inclination between us that could now be called on, much less between our respective peoples.”

The thing was, there was a part of me that was savouring the words. The same part that remembered my every desperate plea to this same woman to call off her armies and rapacious princes. That remembered every spurned offer of peace, every sentence of scathing dismissal and barely-veiled contempt. She’d been so godsdamned arrogant , telling me she could choose the fate of Callow because she had the swords and the righteousness and that I should just go into exile like a good little thug after shutting my mouth and abdicating. And now she needed me. They all did, her entire alliance and the heroes behind them too. Even the Grey Pilgrim had good as admitted to it. They had sneered and spat and tried to kill me, and now I fucking had them . Cordelia Hasenbach had laid out before me the death of her nation and her people, and yet I could not help but think that they’d brought this all on themselves. That if they’d left Callow alone, that if they’d let me fix it instead of hounding me every step for their own hungry purposes, they wouldn’t be tumbling down the cliff right now.

Then, to my surprise, she pushed back her seat and rose. Not well, in opposition to the understated elegance of her every other movement. It was clear her leg had been broken and not finished healing. The pain had her lips thinning as Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer and Warden of the West, knelt before me.

“I have a responsibility,” Cordelia said, “to the people of the Principate. To rule, to guide and to protect. To ease their worst inclinations and spur their finest ones. I have failed them in this.”

She was proud, Hasenbach. Not the kind of person something like this would come easily to. Not someone to do it unless she believed it to be necessary. Rozala was halfway to her feet, protesting her ruler kneeling before a foreign queen, but neither of us paid her attention.

“I have no right to ask grace of you now, and no might to compel it,” the First Prince said. “So I can only beg that you act as I did not, and help those I cannot.”

That I’d savoured this, for even a moment, tasted like ashes in my mouth. Because it wasn’t her or her reign she was begging for. It was her people. And while I might not be leading a crusade into Procer, I could not deny it felt poisonous that I could be in this moment and begged at instead of begging. Not because I enjoyed the helplessness of it, but because I’d never liked to think of myself as someone who would need to be implored to save lives.

“Get up,” I said, voice rough. “Enough. There was no need for this.”

I pushed back my own chair, rising to my feet, and the eyes of both Malanza and Brother Simon went to me. Watching, weighing.

“Get up, Hasenbach,” I said. “You and I are going for a walk.”

Chapter 78: Trenchant

“The great candour in ruling Praes is that, if you make a mistake, assassination attempts will follow. Unfortunately if you do not make a mistake assassination attempts will also follow, which admittedly makes it difficult to tell if a mistake was in fact made.”
– Dread Emperor Pernicious, the Imperiled

There were protests, though only from Hasenbach’s side as by now mine knew better, but those words might as well have been wind for the weight they carried. They were more out of principle than conviction anyway, I suspected: Princess Rozala dawn well knew that if I was moved to violence little short of a band of heroes could put me down. Spite and impulse would only carry me so far, though, so I did not enter the labyrinth of luxury that awaited outside the small hall. A knuckle rapped against the glass doors along with a sliver of Night slithering through the lock had them popping open without trouble, and beyond lay a pretty little balcony overlooking a winter garden. My boots sounded crisply against the thin layer of snow as I walked out into the cold, knowing the First Prince would not be far behind me. The coolness of the air was pleasant against my face, and as this little corner was windless the cold felt rather mild – more like a refreshing swim in the Silver Lake than winter’s hard bite.

Hasenbach followed along, her limp barely noticeable on the move, and I noted she seemed rather unmoved by the cold. Lycaonese , I reminded myself. Compared to the brutal winters of her far northern home, this must hardly be noticeable at all. The railing was an elegant thing of stone, sculpted to seem like vines and the detail of the work was only made more pleasant to the eye by the touch of frost. Disdaining the stone benches set in little alcoves to the sides of the doors, I came to lean against it and cast a curious look down into the garden.

“I’m surprised you didn’t get that leg fixed,” I said.

“I did,” Cordelia Hasenbach replied, slowly moving to stand by me.

She was too well-bred to lean against a snow-dusted railing while wearing a nice dress, apparently, or maybe just to do so in front of a foreign ruler. Regardless, standing that ramrod straight must be Hells on her leg.

“Not mage-healing, though that’s hardly surprising,” I said, eyeing the way she was standing. “Priest work, then. They’ll have fixed the bone and flesh but it’ll still feel raw for a few more days. Hasn’t the Grey Pilgrim offered to see to it? He’s a notch above what I’ve seen even the finest priest-healers do.”

“I will not accept so much as the dust of a copper more from the Peregrine than I must,” the blue-eyed woman said, tone frosty.

I almost asked to the source of that open enmity, given that Tariq might have been after my neck for a while but he’d been standing in Cordelia’s corner for as long as I’d known him, but it didn’t take much digging to put the finger on it by myself. In order to capture Black, the Pilgrim had seeded a plague in a town by the shores of Lake Artoise – it’d taken a full legion detachment, true, but that entire town too. Wiping out Proceran towns was one thing when a villain did it, but it must have cut to the bone coming from a servant of Above. Especially one it was essentially diplomatically impossible to touch at the moment.

“Fair enough,” I conceded.

“I could ask the same of yours,” the First Prince of Procer said. “I am told you are high in the council of dark powers. Such a boon would be but a small favour, no?”

“If I’d paid harsher prices for my first mistakes, I might have better learned from them,” I said. “There’s nothing free, not even for villains. Some costs are just subtler than others.”

“Then I shudder to think what the likes of the Hidden Horror have paid,” Cordelia said.

I breathed out, itching for the pipe I’d not thought to bring. Neither parade nor tea were well-matched to wakeleaf, at least not when paired with the presence of the First Prince of Procer.

“All of Sephirah, for one,” I said. “And quiet things too, I’d imagine. After all a dead thing cannot heal, cannot grow. Every wound on his power forever remains.”

The Lycaonese princess’ face was cool as she studied me, though more distant than adverse.

“Sephirah?” she asked.

“What the Kingdom of the Dead was called, before ruin took it,” I said. “Keter was the greatest of its cities and the Dead King himself its last king.”

“There are legends among my people,” Cordelia acknowledged, “though they speak not of this Sephirah but instead of the Thirteen Kings and the Time of Wolves. You are well-learned in the beginnings of the Enemy, it seems. Does the Tower share such dangerous lore freely?”

“I learned it in Arcadia,” I replied, “walking the echoes of that dead realm. I learned much, during my march to Keter.”

“Your Jacks have seeded rumours with skill as to the purpose of that journey,” Cordelia said, and it was not a compliment. “Selfless of you, to seek to break the Tower’s schemes even if you failed.”

I drummed my fingers against the snowy railing, eyes trailing the winding circles of primroses and jasmines filled with purple pansies. The patterns were oddly soothing to look at.

“Hannoven,” I said. “Cleves and Hainaut. That was my offer. I intended to warn you some months in advance, so that you could evacuate the principalities.”

“And so the gathering armies of the Tenth Crusade hurried north instead of trying your borders again,” she said, tone mild.

“The entire point of the exercise,” I admitted. “I didn’t quite grasp what it was I was dealing with, not yet. The entire journey was a trap anyway. Malicia had been in talks with Keter for months, I was being used to start a bidding war.”

“With lives and lands in my charge as the currency,” Hasenbach coldly said.

“The counter-offer was the entire northern third of Procer and Callow having to claim the eastern border principalities on its own,” I said. “I had Malicia’s host bodies assassinated – twice – but it wasn’t enough.”

“And do you expect that excuses the rest?” the First Prince said, eyes hard.

“Are you sure you want to start a conversation with me about lives and lands being used as currency, Cordelia Hasenbach?” I replied, lips quirking into a smile just as hard as her gaze.

“It was a monstrous thing, what you set out to do,” Hasenbach replied, unmoved.

She wasn’t mincing her words, and I could respect the honesty of it at least. Coming from the woman who’d put me in the corner where I’d begun to take hard measures, though, that only went so far.

“Monstrous?” I mused. “I suppose it was. But then so was your refusal to entertain peace even on egregiously favourable terms when I repeatedly offered it. Not even for moral reasons, but simply because it was politically inconvenient for you. Does my wearing a black cloak somehow make my atrocities worse than yours? As I recall, only one of us actually went through with it and it’s not the villain.”

Her body was tightly wound as a spring, though not as a warrior’s would be – it was the mark of emotions mastered I was looking at, not violence in the making.

“I do not say this to create strife between us,” Hasenbach said, voice forcefully calm. “Yet you must understand that the truth you tried to barter away part of the Principate nary a year ago is not to be taken lightly.”

Probably shouldn’t tell her I’d once tried to bribe Rumena into treachery with another chunk of it then, even if it’d been a jest.

“I didn’t expect it would be,” I frankly replied. “But I’d rather you hear it from me than have it revealed as some dark secret.”

As for Praes’ involvement in the coup that’d nearly unseated and killer her, what the Circle of Thorns had told her was factually correct: Scribe had helped shape the early plot but later set out to crush Malicia’s continuation of it at the order of the Carrion Lord. I saw no need to tell her more than that, especially not while my own teacher was still being kept in the dark.

“So now that we’re being all nice and honest,” I said, “anything you’d care to tell me?”

We could have kept on arguing about this, I knew and so did she, but there was no gain in it for either of us. I very much doubted she’d forgive what I had admitted to anytime soon, much less forget, but then I wasn’t interested in the forgiveness of Cordelia Hasenbach. That she was worthy of admiration in some ways did not mean I no longer remembered why it had come to this. Me with my hands ever redder, Procer dancing ever closer to annihilation. None of it was truly behind us, and perhaps never would be, but neither of us were inclined to chase the stag off the cliff. And so we moved on, however grudgingly. Now the boot was on the other foot, though, and it was time for her to unwrap her own dirty little secrets – some of which I knew, and more that I suspected.

“I funded the Truebloods, through intermediaries,” Cordelia reluctantly said. “High Lady Tasia Sahelian in particular, as the Empress’ foremost rival.”

It’d been a long time since I’d been so utterly taken by surprise. It made sense, I thought. Procer was wealthy, Praes infamously prone to backstabbing its way into civil wars and there was harsh irony in giving Malicia a taste of her own medicine after the way she’d meddled in the Proceran civil war. My fingers clenched hard against the stone, though, not because of any of that. It was a smaller, slighter branch splitting from what I’d just been told.

“You bankrolled the Doom of Liesse,” I said, tone perfectly mild.

“Not knowingly, or directly,” she said. “Yet that is not untrue.”

I could kill her in the blink of an eye, I thought. No need for anything elegant or skillful, I could just pour so much Night in her body that the skin sloughed off and the bones melted and her head fucking popped off . Akua Sahelian had been the architect of that folly, and she would even that ledger in time. So would Dread Empress Malicia, for having allowed the madness and even helped it along. But now it seemed that even the Warden of the West had put coin to the butchery of my people, good Proceran silver turned into a wound on the south that’d last century and a city so broken that not even being the heart of a newborn Court had mended its ruin. She’d not known. It did not absolve her, but she had not known. Hasenbach stirred, and I knew deep as I knew my own breath that if she opened her mouth to compared her funding the Folly to a pact I’d never made with Keter, Sve Noc bless my hand if she did I would rip out her fucking tongue and she could crawl on her knees to Tariq to have it put back on.

“You already know of my involvement in the Liesse Rebellion, I take it,” she said.

I breathed out slowly and mastered myself. Rage I could allow myself to feel later, if I decided it was still warranted. But I’d come dangerously close to allowing my control to slip, just then. It genuinely might have, in other circumstances, which was why this conversation was needed in the first place. I would have been much, much worse to hear it after an insulting Proceran blunder and revealed by the Tyrant’s cruelly taunting voice.

“I am,” I said. “Your intentions in that I will not speak to, yet though that rebellion might have had your coin and your puppet-candidate to kingship it was not fought for you purposes. I’ll call it a clean slate.”

Duke Gaston of Liesse might have been the figurehead all gathered around, but it’d been the Countess of Marchford and the Lone Swordsman who’d done the bloody work of the uprising. Neither had been in the First Prince’s service, or all that well inclined towards her. Gaston Caen had been a pretext, not a motive, and regardless none if it would have come to pass if I’d not spared William’s life in Summerholm that fateful night. Still, for all I would not quibble over the Liesse Rebellion I was less pleased about what Cordelia was keeping silence over.

“Once silent is reluctance, or mistake,” I said. “Twice is a lie of omission.”

“I own an empire’s worth of secrets, Black Queen,” the First Prince said. “And so very few of them are fair to behold.”

Which might just be true but was no more an answer for it.

“Lake Artoise,” I flatly said.

“A weapon to wield against the Enemy,” Hasenbach reluctantly. “Should all else fail.”

My eyes narrowed. It’d been in the lake, what she was talking about, because even though Vivienne’s people had failed to penetrate Proceran operations there they’d at least confirmed there’d been ships and dredging involved. The Order of the Red Lion as well, and in numbers too great for them to be a mere scrying relay. But if she had in her hands a weapon that could give the Dead King pause – which it actually wouldn’t, from what I knew of the King of Death, but that was besides the point – then Procer was not in so dire a situation as she’d implied. Unless it’s not functional , I thought. Unless she needs to build something or arrange rituals.

“There’s consequences to using armaments like those,” I said. “And I don’t mean in a moral sense, either. High stakes and a single point of failure are to Named like honey to flies. Heroes moreso than villains, but even they get to have the wind in their sails sometimes.”

“It is not something I would use lightly,” the First Prince said. “Or at all, if I can avoid it.”

“But you won’t burn it until the Dead King’s been driven back either,” I grunted. “You’ve read the Accords, Hasenbach. Ensuring no one ever has their hands on a lever that opens a Greater Breach of brutalizes the souls of an entire city is exactly what they’re for .”

“And should the Liesse Accords be signed and enforced, I will gladly let you destroy every last trace of that weapon,” the blonde princess replied. “Yet until Keter has been sealed or the Dead King destroyed, I cannot justify tossing away the sole tool at my disposal that could possibly turn the tide.”

Frustration spiked in me, but she was not being unreasonable. I’d been raised in the shade of a royal palace built from stones taken from a flying fortress brought down, taught from the moment I’d had a Name that massive rituals and grand artefacts always failed in the end, and still I’d sided with Malicia near the end of the Folly. The dead were already dead, I’d thought, and if from that tragedy peace could be forged then I’d shoulder the hatred of my own people and do what I must. It would have been, I now recognize, a terrible mistake. My father’s handling of the situation remained singularly botched but given the Intercessor’s involvement that was perhaps not entirely his fault. Cordelia Hasenbach was not Named, did not come from a people who held them in high esteem or deeply studied their lore. And while she might have matched wits with Malicia for years with more than a few successes to her name, it had been a very different sort of game. I could not be angry at her making a mistake I had also made while laden with advantages she was not.

“Having a weapon like that carries risks in ways you have not been taught to understand,” I said, forcing patience. “Especially in a situation thick with Named, like any war with Keter will be. This isn’t won with a flying fortress, Hasenbach, it’s won with a coalition binding the east and west.”

“And I will do everything in my power to see that coalition assembled and bound by treaties,” the First Prince said. “Yet I cannot disarm when those alliances are still wind, no ink has touched the parchment for treaties and the Dead mass to the north in numbers beyond reason.”

“When Callow joins the Grand Alliance,” I said, “and the Accords begin accruing signatories; will you then agree to torching whatever the Hells you dredged up?”

I’d be willing to cough up the goblinfire myself, if that was what it took. And still she hesitated.

“Merciless Gods,” I said. “What is it that you even got your hands on? Tell me it’s not a Hell Egg, Hasenbach. It’d be utter lunacy to send a demon after the great mage ever born to Calernia, dead or not.”

“It is not,” the blue-eyed royal stiffly replied. “I will speak no more to the nature of it, save that it holds no truck with Below.”

It was probably an angel, then, I grimly thought. Some not-corpse like the one the Lone Swordsman had leaned on in Liesse to bring down Contrition, and later Diabolist to create her gate-maker. The Choirs were forever fixed, the way Masego told it, so there could be no such thing as an angel’s corpse – or at least there’d been no real precedent for it, and not for lack of Praesi trying – but one’s death would still leave marks. And something to use, if you knew how. It’d still need a hero though, I suspected, or at least a massive number of priests capable of using Light. One was easier for the First Prince of Procer to get her hands on, especially now that the House of Light’s leadership had been discredited and was likely undergoing a through purge. Who would dare argue with Hasenbach now, if she gave priests orders? I need to speak with Masego , I grimly thought. I wasn’t even sure what such a weapon would do, practically speaking. Would the Choir it had belonged to change the effect? Contrition had been the writ of corpse and Named both, when the Hashmallim were called down at First Liesse.

So what would happen if the corpse was from one of the Ophanim or the Seraphim? Somehow I doubted it would be as simple as calling down a great storm of Light on the enemy. This was a mistake, no matter how I looked at it, but then if there was one thing that today had made very clear it was that Cordelia Hasenbach was afraid. She was afraid enough for the Principate that she’d knelt to a woman she considered a brutal murderous warlord to beg for help, and a few moments of private conversation on a balcony weren’t going to magically fix this. It was frustrating as Hells, considering that not so long ago she’d been on her knees begging for my help, but throwing around ultimatums on the first day of talks wasn’t going to accomplish anything – save maybe mark me as exactly the kind of tyrant they’d all feared I would be. And still part of me was quietly furious at the notion that I’d have to allow a mistake to keep going right under my eyes because it would be too heavy-handed of me to force the issue. It was not a coincidence, I’d admit, that so much of Black’s teachings still resonated with me.

No matter what Vivienne said, Below was always going to be the banner I raised. There wasn’t enough give in me for it to be any other way. If I couldn’t push without blowing on the house of cards that the Accords still was, then I’d have to try pulling instead. Time to start showing the cards I’d been hiding up my sleeve.

“You don’t believe we can win this war conventionally,” I said. “Yet we can, Hasenbach. I have made pact with the Kingdom Under.”

“The resumption of arms sales will help, though Procer will need to borrow heavily to afford them,” the First Prince acknowledged.

“That’s part of it,” I said. “More practical is that I have oaths the Kingdom Under will launch offensives on every front to seize all underground territory of the Dead King if a sufficient force is gathered to war against him above.”

Cordelia Hasenbach went still.

“In addition,” I continued, “arrangements have been made as to the supply of armaments and foodstuffs. Any force engaged in warfare against Keter will see steel provided at two tenths of the usual price, and foodstuffs at cost. Loans offers will be extended to the Principate, though I’m afraid they refused to do the same for the Dominion. Too likely to be unable to repay, I’m told.”

“You do not jest,” the First Prince croaked, sounding dry-mouthed.

“I wouldn’t take the loans, they offer pretty cutthroat terms,” I said. “We might be able to strongarm Mercantis instead, if the entire coalition brings pressure. They live and die on trade, and we have everybody but the League at the table.”

“The dwarves would use us as their own fantassins,” Cordelia realized, eyes narrowing. “Tying down the forces of the Hidden Horror above-ground as they strike below. Only we would emerge in their debt instead of owed.”

I didn’t deny it, as it was essentially true.

“If their advance is successful all the way to Keter, a siege of the city becomes feasible,” I told her. “Our supply lines would be underground and untouchable, so long as we have the coin. I’d we willing to endorse the creation of a Grand Alliance treasury for the duration of the war against the Dead King, and to provide grain for your principalities from Callow granaries on loan – with interest on the value of the goods, I’m not a saint.”

“The Kingdom Under would not make such offers without a prince, Black Queen,” the blue-eyed princess said. “What did you offer in return?”

“The Everdark,” I said.

The bluntness of the answer took her aback.

“I believed you to be allied with the drow,” the First Prince said, grown wary.

“I am,” I said. “This was done in the name of their goddesses, the bargain struck with the dwarf Named known as the Herald of the Deeps.”

“They have submitted to the Kingdom Under?” Cordelia asked.

I almost laughed at that.

“No, they have not,” I replied, smiling thinly. “The Everdark is empty .”

Cordelia Hasenbach was not slow of wits, and so she understood the implication quick enough.

“They are marching against the Kingdom of the Dead,” she said, almost breathlessly.

“All of them,” I agreed. “The entire Empire Ever Dark is marching on the Dead King’s back, led by Sve Noc themselves, and I believe he still has no idea .”

Chapter 79: Hitch

“The crocodiles in the pit ate the condemned too quickly when starved and only nibbled when well-fed, which is why we bespelled them to be always be hungry for a little more. Thankfully they do not wear clothes, and so can still be told apart from the rest of my court.”
– Dread Emperor Perfidious

The conversation did not truly resume after we returned inside.

Hasenbach was burning with the need to reassess the situation, I caught, to summon her advisors and generals and reconsider where Procer stood after the several revelations I’d dropped onto her lap. It drastically changed her nation’s situation going into the negotiations, I knew that very well. Though the First Prince still needed the Grand Alliance as a whole I’d likely gone from an important ally to the single most important foreign relation of the Principate. There was no point in further kicking the hornet’s nest by trying to get anything out of her before she was certain of where she stood, not that I minded. Time was on my side as much as it was on any mortal’s: what I brought to the table only became more valuable the closer to the end of truce we came. Naturally, before we left the balcony I’d made it clear to Hasenbach that the affairs of the Firstborn were not to be spoken of even with her closest advisors. Sve Noc kept me out of arcane eyes and ears, but loose lips were harder to ward against and there was no doubt that Procer was currently a barrel afflicted by an army’s worth of leaks. That she did not argue the matter was a sign, to my eye, that she correctly understood the stakes involved.

I got dark looks from Malanza and Brother Simon as the talks effectively stalled after we limped back to warmth and excuses were soon made for the Procerans to depart. From their point of view, I’d gone outside with the Warden of the West after she humiliated herself at my feet and returned her both troubled and boiling with the urge to leave. They might be assuming threats had been involved, which admittedly given our respective positions would be child’s play to hand out. Foolish in the long view, of course, but then my people were not known to be fond of anything long save for prices. Cordelia had not willfully tugged at my conscience without reason: it was the closest thing she had to leverage on me at the moment. She’d snapped her pride over her knee to try to begin evening the scales between the two of us, which I supposed was laudable. It didn’t, of course. Even the scales, or make me fonder of her on a personal level. She wasn’t my friend, she’d not somehow ceased to be the same woman who’d thrown my people to the deeps out of convenience. But that did not change the necessity of fighting back the Dead King or the perils lurking in overplaying my hand while it was still the strongest at the table. They were separate matters, and I need not like the woman to work with her.

Besides, in some ways I genuinely respected her. Often that was better than liking someone, when it came to making bargains: fondness waxed and waned, character tended to be more stable a foundation for agreements. We stayed in the hall after the three Procerans departed, Hakram and Vivienne rising as Hasenbach departed the way etiquette dictated while I did not. I wasted no time in weaving a ward of Night after they left, as I had no intention of being eavesdropped upon by the inevitable spies that’d be waiting with their ear pressed against the door.

“Whatever Hasenbach has dredged up, she can’t use it yet,” I bluntly told them. “It’s not a Hell Egg, unless she’s a much better liar than I thought and surprisingly shirt-sighted to boot. I’m leaning towards the remains of an angel at the moment.”

“William needed forty-nine hours to call Contrition, but little more than that,” Vivienne noted. “Though the Choir whispered many secrets to him in his dreams he did not share, and I have only the shallowest knowledge of such matters.”

It was nice to see that green Named on both sides of the fence ended up mostly fumbling their way through the dark. If the Heavens had handed out some sort of manual to their champions while Below ate dust it’d be deeply unfair. On the other hand, I grimly thought, I’d not be all that surprised in such a situation to hear that Below did hand out a manual but some villain had burned all the copies to hinder the competition. I had, after all, yet to encounter a single villain who put stock in the notion of fair play.

“The Lone Swordsman was a hero in Contrition’s service, treading the remains of one of their own and bringing them forth,” Hakram pointed out. “It was an alignment threefold, pouring out after years of heroes being suppressed by the Carrion Lord. It seems unlikely the Principate will benefit from such factors in its own attempts at mastery.”

“Hero is the heart of the matter here,” I said. “The First Prince either needs one of those taking orders from her or a legion’s worth of priests to make anything out of those – still speculative, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves – remains.”

“Would it not be, in a sense, an angel’s corpse?” Vivienne suddenly asked.

I cocked my head to the side, unsure of where she was headed with this. Hakram let out a rumbling noise.

“The Dead King is the greatest necromancer that ever lived,” Adjutant reminded me.

I sucked in a lip, but after a moment shook my head.

“The water in Lake Henghest was blessed and that was just from touching the remains,” I said. “Light tends to screw with magic, anyway, and this is about as consecrated as a corpse can get. Necromancy shouldn’t be able to raise it.”

A beat passed.

“We’ll still ask Masego just in case,” I added.

“Diabolist as well,” Vivienne calmly suggested. “Her knowledge of such lore might be deeper than even Zeze’s.”

I shot her an assessing look. It’d always been a given I would talk with Akua about this – as Vivienne had intimated, if anyone would know about angel necromancy it would be Wolof’s most terrible golden child – but I’d not wanted to rub it in her face. My successor’s expression was hard to read, leaving me few hints as to her thoughts. Was this an oblique way to tell me I need not walk on eggshells when it came to Akua Sahelian, or simple blunt pragmatism? Something to mull over later.

“It’s a liability even if it can’t be raised,” Hakram gravelled. “Bringing that into a battle with the Hidden Horror is like wading into a goblin feast-night with pockets full of munitions. It can only end one way.”

Most Named would balk at being compared to goblins no matter whose banner they flew, but it was rather heartwarming to imagine the likes of the Pilgrim consigned to the fate of metaphorical goblinry.

“The Dead King’s one looming trouble, but the Tyrant’s another,” Vivienne darkly said. “That man would strike the match to the whole world’s pyre just for a laugh, Cat, and he’s not nearly as neutered as you think.”

“His armies really are headed south,” I told her, “you told me as much yourself and the Eyes confirmed independently. The League’s fallen behind the Hierarch and Kairos with him, but not the point of utter idiocy: they’re not going to backstab a continent-wide alliance in the middle of throwing down with Keter. Not even for a few southern principalities. They’ll know damn well that if we lose they’re screwed too and if we win we’ll return it all a hundredfold.”

Frankly, if I were an utterly amoral monster with the intention to expand and in charge of the League’s political decisions, I’d promptly sign the Accords to avoid falling on the wrong side of the mutual defence clause against non-signatories and then simply wait . Patience would mean the Grand Alliance’s armies bleeding against Keter, and when those armies all went home then I’d strike at southern Procer. Riding to the Principate’s defence again would be wildly unpopular with all its allies, after a brutal grind against the dead up north, which would limit the effectiveness of the treaties. If the League then gobbled only limited territories, like Tenerife and Salamans, there might be heavy pressure on Procer to then accept a peace should offer be extended.

“That only means that the horse he’s riding is not longer the League,” Vivienne said, eyes sharp. “It might be the Hierarch, or the Dead King or a dozen other flavours of madness. We don’t know , which is half the trouble with that one.”

“His play here is to take a swing at the White Knight,” I said. “Has to be, he had the man summoned by treaty just so he could stand trial. And Hierarch could make that troublesome, I suppose, but if he does then he’s signing his own death warrant – decapitating a hero is breaking the truce, Vivs. Especially if it’s the Sword of Judgement. They do that, neither Hierarch nor Tyrant walk out of Salia alive. Not with the kind of power that’s gathered here.”

“There’d be legal grounds for an execution, considering he’s an Ashuran hero that fought in an internal League war and presumably took likves,” Hakram said. “And even a public attempt would stir up trouble among the heroes when it’s pointed out to be lawful under the Accords.”

Which I did not doubt for a moment Kairos Theodosian would. By now full copies of the text had been made available to all delegations, even the League’s, so there was no doubt he’d either read or had someone read them.

“More likely he wants to strike at Judgement through the White Knight, which I’ll lose no sleep over,” I said. “I’ll give fair warning to all involved but besides that it’s no trouble of mine. I owe no debt to any Choir, save that which would be paid in steel.”

Hanno was personable enough and seemed to think well of the Seraphim, but I’d weep no tears for the Choir of Judgement getting a taste of its own medicine even if that lesson came by madman’s hands. Either the angels would lose a few feathers or either of the two villains at the head the League would get a taste of smiting. I couldn’t see a losing proposition in that for either Callow, the Accords or even myself.

“The Tyrant of Helike is nearing the end of his thread,” Hakram said. “He’s burned too many bridges, we all saw that much at the Graveyard. If not for the Dead King’s more pressing threat, half of Calernia would already have banded together to crush him. His actions have isolated the Free Cities diplomatically as long as he lives and his defeats mean he’s losing prestige within their ruling structure. Given the informality of his pre-eminence among the League, that could mean the waning of his influence.”

I worried my lip.

“He’s cornered, you’re saying,” I slowly said.

Which was not a good thing, in a villain of Kairos Theodosian’s calibre. Best to kill him with a clean, quick stroke than let him scheme with desperation moving the hand.

“Or exactly where he intended to be from the beginning,” Vivienne said. “When a skilled enemy makes an obvious mistake, it is no such thing.”

That last part was a quote from the Strategoi , as I recalled, which was an amusing piece of irony considering it was believed to have been written by Theodosius the Unconquered.

“Either way we should share our concerns with the Grand Alliance and have some of our people look into whatever it is he’s up to,” I mused. “Fair enough. Best not to let him make a mess even if it’s not in our backyard, strictly speaking.”

I leaned back into my seat, glancing at the cup of cooled tea I’d barely touched. Yeah, I wasn’t going to force myself to drink that even if it came across as rude and Hakram had somehow tricked himself into finishing his own. Still, while the Tyrant remained a threat he was no longer the most pressing of my concerns. The First Prince’s ruinous little project weighed deeper on my mind, because it felt like a ready-made pivot in someone’s story – and not one of my making, which was even more worrisome.

“Double down on efforts to unearth what it is the First Prince dredged, and where it’s headed,” I ordered Vivienne. “Have your people look for large concentrations of priests as well.”

I paused.

“Concentrate your efforts on Lyonis and Brabant, for that last part,” I added. “Maybe Brus as well, if you can spare the people.”

As far as I was concerned Cordelia Hasenbach was acting foolishly by meddling with doomsday weapons, but that did not make her a fool. She’d know that gathering priests in great numbers close to the northern fronts would bring a lot less scrutiny than doing the same in the south. Especially in Brabant as it was, by all reports, drowning in a tide of desperate refugees who could certainly use some food and healing. If the weapon could be moved, and for it to be of practical use against the Dead King it would have be, then if we found where it was headed we could double back from there. Going at this from the other way might finally allow us a peek through the veil of secrecy that’d surrounded this entire affair. I sighed, then cracked my shoulders.

“Hakram, I don’t suppose you could send for a change of clothes?” I asked.

I’d lost the habit of plate, and the weight of the metal did no favours to my leg even if I could not feel it at the moment. The sooner I was back in cloak and leathers the better. Might add a light coat of mail, though, because really there was never a reason not to wear armour if you were wearing clothes at all. I’d not deny that my preferences in clothing had been shaped some by the unfortunately high amount of times I’d been stabbed in my life.

“They are already on their way,” Adjutant replied, because he was a prince among men and always would be.

“Good,” I said. “Well, folks, the talks begin in earnest tomorrow. Let’s see if we’re ready for them.”

—

I wasn’t sneaking out of Salia, not exactly.

That would imply that a pack of spies wouldn’t have noticed me saddling Zombie and leave the palace with the slight escort of three knights in dark cloaks, or that I would have hidden my departure from my companions. But I’d not made it clear where I was headed for either and pretty much let the assumption that I would be going back to our camp stick. Hakram could read me like a book, so he knew there was more to it than I’d said. He also trusted me same as I trusted him, though, so he didn’t ask. I doubted that my having conversations with the White Knight would cause much of a scandal if it came out – even radicals under the Heavens would think twice before claiming I could corrupt the Sword of Judgement – but it’d certainly raise eyebrows, and very much attract attention. I’d rather not have to deal with the Pilgrim coincidentally coming by for a chat, or someone’s admirably optimistic attempt to eavesdrop through arcane means, so it’d stay quiet for now. Though this was not casual, could not be given who we were, keeping such talks informal would allow the illusion of it to last a little longer. I’d set out early after dark, since I did genuinely intend to get some work done when I passed through camp and led out my escort at a brisk trot.

We were followed, to my utter lack of surprise. Riders kept pace at a respectful distance behind us maybe a dozen, most likely at the First Prince’s behest. Though I was First Under the Night and the dark had already fallen, I was not unaware that my spilling blood in Salia would bring great complications. Even putting down some overly ambitious robber or some drunken rowdy fantassin would meant I’d killed a Proceran under truce, and for many reasons that was best avoided even if justified. No, Cordelia had likely sent those riders to serve mostly as diplomats. And maybe guides, given the gargantuan size of this damned city, but I could see to that with prayer truth be told. So long as I was willing so suffer Komena’s rampant mockery of my sense of direction, anyway. Easy not to get lost, when you fly over the streets , I grumbled. South we rode, through the palatial streets and estates of the Lineal and then the large plazas and avenues of the markets known as Les Vendeuses – which were awake and swarming with people even at this hour, for the city never slept and the glow of torches and lanterns lent it all an air of the fantastical. Keeping to the broad avenues that’d been built to allow for carts, as many as four of them I’d wager, we made good time cutting through towards Merovins avenue.

From there it’d be an uncomplicated ride, straight south until we were through the low districts and the Griffon Gate. Out of curiosity I’d slowed down on my way through some of the marketplaces, taking a look at what was being peddled. The array of goods, even at the tail end of winter and while Procer was at war, was rather bewilderingly large. Ashuran silks, Levantine ceramics and even Taghreb silverworks were on display, not to mention what must have been goods from more than half of the principalities in Procer. It was no wonder I’d been taught that the Principate was near capable of sustaining itself through trade between its own princes: it was a large empire and one that lacked for little. Save perhaps for restraint, but was that not ever the way with empires? My knights were gawking as well, which was no surprise. None of the three looked older than thirty under the hood, so none had known Callow save under either myself or Black – and under both reigns little had been traded with Procer save for arrows and insults. I’d be surprised if either had left the kingdom before this campaign. Still, it would not do to linger forever so I spurred on Zombie to a brisker pace.

It did not last long, as it happened. A smooth turn around a counting house brought us in front of an open shop from which no less than four signs had been hung, all painted with bright red letters. Unlike the rest of the signs I’d seen in this city, the words on this one were in Lower Miezan instead of Chantant or Tolesian. Bundles Of Wakeleaf, So Cheap It’s Almost Crime . Vale Summer Wine, So Many Bottles You Can’t Drink Them All. We Did Not Steal The Wakeleaf, We Swear, That Would Be A Crime. I Guess You Could Drink Them All, If You Are A Drunk. With morbid curiosity I led Zombie closer to have a better look, and to my mild surprise there did seem to be a genuine stock of neatly wakeleaf bundles. And a few crates of wine, one of which had been opened and revealed the impurities-riddled glass bottles that were typical of my homeland. I gesture for my knights to rein in their horses and approached one of the hanging signs, touching the K at the end of ‘drunk’. Red wetness marred my gloves, the paint hadn’t even had time to dry yet.

An indignant hissing sound came from the shopfront, as a surprisingly tall gargoyle in a too-large dress and a merchant’s hat pointed a half-empty sleeve at me accusingly. The insides of the dress moved, so I drew it up with the tip of my staff and found another gargoyle down there, who looked at me with a scandalized gasp. Another one was standing on its shoulders, and I suspected another one on its own. I withdrew my staff with a sigh, letting the dress’s hem drop. So the Tyrant wanted to have a talk, looked like.

“Stay here,” I ordered my knights. “It shouldn’t be long.”

I dismounted, landing on the stone with a wince, and paused before entering. I grabbed a bottle from the crate, and then a few bundles of wakeleaf, and only then went to treat with Kairos Theodosian.

I had a feeling I’d need them.

Chapter 80: Descant

“My dear High Lords, there is nothing to fear. We might be losing the war against Callow yet there is an obvious remedy to this: this morning, I declared war on Ashur. I will be surrendering unconditionally as soon as they acknowledge this, which ought to take care of our Callowan troubles.”
– Dread Emperor Irritant I, the Oddly Successful

The scent was cloying, heavy against the roof of my mouth before I even stepped into the room.

The incense was the heaviest of the tastes, but there were subtler scents threaded along: sage and cedar, as well as the faint bloom of flowers. The burners from which it all came were spread around the room haphazardly, tended to by chittering gargoyles, and the glow cast by the glass lanterns hanging from the ceiling played shadows along the thick trails of scented smoke rising up. Kairos Theodosian lounged on a seat that was little more than a large bowl of bronze filled with thick red cushions, though as always he’d found a way to have it incrusted with jewels and covered with sculpted bas-reliefs. The Tyrant of Helike greeted me with an indolently raised hand, his brocaded robes of gold and scarlet folded with careful precision so that they would almost hide the length of his arm prone to trembling. Though he’d been thin and sickly for as long as I’d known him, Kairos’ narrow face seemed to have shed the last of its softness: his brown curls hung low on a forehead whose skin looked pulled taut over bone. His good eye, the brown one, moved around lazily as if it could not quite focus on anything. The other one, the red of fresh blood and always wetly shining, almost seemed to have grown. As if the crimson had grown to devour more of the Tyrant’s face as the rest of him pulled back.

“Welcome, friend,” Kairos Theodosian cheerfully greeted me, throwing in an exaggerated wink. “Welcome to my humble shop. You’ll not regret visiting, for our prices are princely and our merchandise most definitely acquired through at least partially legal means. Probably.”

The cheerfulness was nothing new, from this one, but for once it did not entirely succeed at covering something had grown... feverish in the villain. I’d thought more than once that the Tyrant’s position would collapse if he was dealt a grave enough defeat, but now I was wondering if perhaps defeat might not cause in him troubles rather more visceral. My staff rasped against the wooden floorboard as I limped in, and I found a seat awaiting me on my side side of the low table between us. Mine was less a nest of cushions and more along the lines of my favourite seat, the one I’d had creatively acquired from Arcadia. Padded, with heavy armrests. On the low table the sight of a strange game being toyed with caught my eye: three bowls filled with differing numbers of smooth pebbles had been put down, as well as a handful more on the surface of the table itself. Kairos had been moving a few around as I entered. The game did feel vaguely familiar to my eye, though it clearly wasn’t mancala. Not enough seeds or pits for them to be sown in.

“Tired of shatranj?” I asked.

“I grew curious, after reading the treatise,” Kairos mused. “It is a game meant for three, in truth, but trying my hand at the play was interesting regardless. He’s a barren little thing, your Adjutant, but I’ll not deny he is brilliant in his own way.”

Ah, was that were that was from? I’d seen Hakram fiddling with the game once or twice, for it was of his own making, and Robber had once told me the orc had been doing so since before he first came to the War College. I mostly remembered being vaguely irritated that the pot of stones everybody could steal from was called ‘Callow’, accurate as it was to the game’s implicit metaphor.

“Tower-raising, isn’t it?” I frowned. “I didn’t know he’d finished the treatise, much less made it public.”

“It has become rather popular at your royal court, I am told,” the Tyrant said. “And has even come somewhat in fashion as a curiosity in Ater.”

I eased myself into my seat unceremoniously. Amusing as Kairos’ petty schemes could be on occasion, passing amusements hardly made up for the nuisance he was in so many ways. I wouldn’t pick a fight with him without a good reason, of course: so far he’d not aimed his plots at Callow itself, only at my soldiers in Iserre. Yet neither would I forget he’d made bargains with the Dead King and the Bard, in full knowledge of what they might lead to for this continent.

“What do you want, Tyrant?” I asked. “I haven’t got all night.”

“That’s hardly a way to talk to a shopkeeper,” the ruling king of Helike solemnly told me. “I’d be well within my rights to raise my prices for such disrespect.”

I broke the wax over the bottle in my hand and took a sniff at the contents. It did smell like genuine Vale summer wine, to my surprise. A swallow confirmed as much.

“You just called my right hand a barren little thing,” I said. “And likely meant it, given the curse of truth laid on your tongue. I have limited patience for your games, and other business to see to tonight. Speak or I’ll leave and wash my hands of this.”

“You’re free to go, if that is what you truly wish,” the Tyrant shrugged, red eye pulsing.

It might be safer to do so, I thought. With no one to speak to and a continent of close doors facing him, there were not many ways for the Tyrant of Helike to slither his was back into a story that’d keep him from sinking into a swamp of his own making. Speaking with the people of most influence in Salia might do the trick, though, or at least allow him opportunity through talking to cajole the winds of fate back to his sail. From that perspective, the best decision here was to rise and leave without another word. On the other hand, that also left Kairos Theodosian with precious little to lose. Vivienne had warned me he was unlikely to have emptied his quiver quite yet, and it could be argued that villains were often at their most dangerous just before they were defeated. And he’d let slip some of what he was up to, I suspected. Not carelessly but instead carefully, like a fisherman baiting a hook. And to get his foot back in the game the Tyrant would not hesitate to toss me some secrets of worth coming at the expense of his many enemies. Some of which were also mine, as it happened.

I sighed and caught sight of a gargoyle carrying a tray with cups – only one which was empty – and gesture for it to approach. It did and I snatched the empty silver cup before holding it out, reaching into the Night to fashion a tendril of darkness that poured from the bottle into it. More discretely, as my theatrical gesture distracted those in the room, a very thin tendril of darkness crept into the filled cup and stole a single drop before withdrawing. It didn’t look like water, instead like some sort of herbal potion, and though tasting it myself would tell me little I had people in my service who knew much of herbalism and alchemy.

“I’ll buy the wine and the leaf,” I said. “So long as it’s not poisoned, and the price isn’t ridiculous.”

“I never found out how much any of it cost,” Kairos admitted. “A hundred royals?”

That was Helike gold coinage, if I remembered correctly. There were several currencies floating around the Free Cities, and Helike’s was not considered to be one of the more reliable.

“I’ll offer you a whatever’s in my tunic pockets right and now,” I offered instead. “As well as one sentence that is more or less a compliment.”

He leaned forward.

“ Intriguing ,” the Tyrant enthused. “You have a bargain, Catherine Foundling.”

I surrendered the treasures hidden away in my tunic: a handful of half-chewed oats I’d forced Zombie to spit out after catching her indulging, a few pinewood matches and a soiled tablecloth from the palace I’d used to wipe my mail clean earlier.

“Your tunic’s colour matches the cushions, which makes you look significantly less scrawny from a distance,” I added.

“It does , doesn’t it?” Kairos replied, sounding deeply pleased. “That is what I was going for.”

He gestured for one of the gargoyles to waddle forward and handed it my end of the bargain.

“Feed the oats to Hakram,” he instructed.

My brow rose questioningly as the gargoyle whined in protest then scampered away after gathering everything up.

“Hakram is the name of my trusty war steed,” the Tyrant revealed. “It was a most wonderful gift, Catherine, my thanks. I’ve taught her to bully the gargoyles and it has been most diverting.”

Oh Gods, he was talking about the goat wasn’t he? I’d not expected him to actually keep her.

“It was,” I hesitated, then valiantly rallied, “my pleasure?”

He picked up the cup I’d stolen a drop from and sipped from it after dismissing the gargoyle, then leaned back more comfortably into his cushions.

“Would you like to talk about the Dead King?” Kairos Theodosian casually asked.

“Sure,” I replied. “Heard he’s up in Keter. Good manners, maybe a little heavy on the devouring of all living things. Keeps a good table, though.”

“So I’ve heard,” the Tyrant amiably said. “He also intends to send an envoy to the formal talks tomorrow, I’m told.”

My fingers clenched, and I forced them to loosen before taking a sip of wine.

“He intimated as much in Liesse-Before-Twilight,” I said. “Dare I ask where you heard it from?”

“The Dead King,” Kairos smiled. “And his envoy, which he intends to send to the formal talks tomorrow.”

“You’re hosting the Hidden Horror’s diplomats,” I flatly said.

“Diplomat, singular,” the Tyrant corrected. “Tough you are in essence correct. I was prevailed upon to bring the envoy to Salia and introduce them.”

“You must realize that’s twice now you’ve provided aid to Keter,” I grimly said. “Your bridges are not so much burned as turned to smoke.”

“I imagine our friend in Keter would have found a way regardless,” the Tyrant mused, sipping at his cup. “This is hardly a deep collaboration.”

“You’ve repeatedly made pacts with the Dead King, and now serve as facilitator for his diplomacy,” I said. “Kairos, that has consequences. It’s one thing to play princes against each other or to make a red ruin of the League for your schemes. Villainous, true, but it stays within certain boundaries. What’s happening up north, though, is a higher order of war. The consequences of defeat there are... severe is too light a word, really.”

“You seem certain there will be a war,” Kairos said, sounding amused. “As if it were inevitable, written in the stars.”

“At this late hour, it effectively is,” I bluntly said. “There is no offer he can make that will change things. The Grand Alliance will gather and sweep him back into the Crown of the Dead.”

“Or he’ll leave when faced with such an unprecedented coalition,” the Tyrant said. “For he is not an utter fool.”

“Then we reclaim the Kingdom of the Dead without loss of life and begin to siege the Serenity,” I shrugged. “It is not too disadvantageous an outcome.”

“You misunderstand me,” he said. “His armies retreat, and as they do several millennia of the worst rituals Calernia has ever seen are unleashed on the lot of you. And then your shaky alliance, stripped of its common foe, must face the brewing horrors you ignored as your eyes remained fixed on the north.”

“So we should take his peace, should we?” I scathingly said. “Pass the torch to those yet to come and hope they take care of it for us? That’s how we got into this mess in the first place. It’ll be ugly work, closing the door on him, I’ll not deny that. And costly in ways I suspect will resound for generations. But someone will have to pay that price, sooner or later, and it’s cowardice of the worst sort to pass the duty down the line our of petty fear.”

“And it is mere pleasant coincidence,” Kairos mused, “that a great shared cataclysmic war would lay deep foundations for your Accords. Your own Arch-heretic of the North – the King of Death, the peerless Named that suffers the yoke of no laws even in death – crucified over a sea of corpses so that the story of your rules enforced becomes as whisper passed from mother to child across the lands.”

The accusation rang true because he wasn’t entirely wrong. The Liesse Accords being signed and then promptly yielding the end of the Kingdom of the Dead would be the strongest possible mortar to build with. Undeniable proof that even the greatest of monsters could not stand alone against the rest of us when heroes and villains kept to terms. The thought had lurked in the back of my mind for some time now, it was true. On the other hand, unlike what he was implying I was not eager for the horrors that war would bring. Marching on the Crown of the Dead and the creature that ruled it was not something to be lightly considered no matter what advantages it might bring.

“Mock as you will, you offer no other path,” I said. “You never do, Kairos. And still I am a little disappointed, because I figured that no matter how deep in the old madness you went you’d at least grasp the consequences of Keter claiming victory in this.”

“You speak as if the Dead King could truly win,” he said, cocking his head to the side. “As if this confluence was not a carefully arranged affair, a trap laid by subtle hands.”

“I’d be much more willing to listen to hard talk about the Intercessor from you if you’d not make a damned bargain with her yourself,” I harshly said. “Your actions have not matched the distaste you profess.”

“Of those that collaborated with the Bard on that night I am not the one that wounded your side deepest,” Kairos mildly said, “though you know it not.”

“You lie, Tyrant,” I sighed. “Even speaking only truths, you lie. And if you had something that’d cut deep when plainly said you would have spoken it plainly.”

That made it two secrets he’d dangled in front of me now. He’d implied there were disasters brewing elsewhere, earlier, and there were only so many places that could be the case. Ashur was still blockaded by Nicaean fleets, last I heard, and it was possible for it to be turned into a cradle of madness through desperation. Yet I knew Malicia to have schemes afoot, and she stood the more likely culprit: the Tower’s arsenal of horrors had not been unleashed in many years, but it might yet be if she felt there was nothing left to lose. So someone had worked with the Bard on the night that saw Twilight’s birth, then, and I’d been wounded by it. Probably Saint, I decided. It’d explain why the Tyrant had not outright given a name: she was dead by my hand, that account already settled. All he had left was suspicion to sow while speaking exact truths.

“We are pieces in an intricate game, Catherine,” the Tyrant smiled. “One whose board was lain far before either of our births. Did you believe it coincidence, that the Principate would be so weak and isolated? Decades of civil war to bleed it dry, foes on all sides and then even a disastrous campaign to the east before the Dead King had first stirred. There have been but a few times in the history of Procer it has been so weak, and I’d wager none when the greatest heroes of the time were either far past their prime or far short of it.”

“She’s not a god, Kairos,” I said. “And neither is he, despite all his boasting. Even a continent like Calernia has so many moving parts it’s impossible to manipulate it so precisely. They may have seen it coming, helped it along even, but this is not an elegant game of flawless immortals: this is two old monsters riding a tiger and hoping the other one is bucked first. You know they’re not unbeatable. Hells, you handed the Bard a defeat yourself.”

“So I did,” the Tyrant conceded. “Neither is invincible, Catherine, I agree. They are cleverer than that. Yet we approach the crescendo of their hatreds, the unmaking of the knot. And I suspect neither’s lasting victory would be a pleasant ending.”

“Help me, then,” I said. “Help the Grand Alliance. You’ve been gathering everyone’s secrets, Kairos. The Intercessor’s, the Dead King’s and everyone else’s. You could be the finger on the scales.”

“I find it most amusing that your good intentions will haunt this world for centuries to come, if you truly win,” the Tyrant grinned. “Ah, the necessary villain. The hard woman making the hard decisions when trouble has come calling and all others are flinching from what simply must be done . I wonder how many atrocities will be poured out of that mould in years to come simply because you scratched that groove deep enough onto the fabric of Creation.”

I’d gotten about as much out of him as I would, I decided. All he was doing now was spreading the poison of suspicion, and I had no reason to indulge him I continuing to lend an ear.

“Even as we speak,” Kairos idly said, “thousands are dying in agony to the far south.”

“End the blockade of Ashur and the starvation will end with it,” I flatly replied.

“It already has ended,” the Tyrant of Helike smiled, red eye burning like a red star. “Tomorrow, Catherine, the Tower reminds the world it is yet to be feared. Magon Hadast will withdraw the Thalassocracy from the Grand Alliance.”

I frowned.

“She doesn’t have the ships to scatter Nicae,” I said. “Or the calibre of mages to not need the ships.”

“No,” the Tyrant agreed, “what she does have is many men who must drink water from barrels.”

Poison? That seemed unlikely, even if it was one that took an absurdly long time to kill. It was possible to craft poisons that had no taste and would not visibly mar water but making one that also took months to kill – the only way slipping that much poison onto so many ships unnoticed was even remotely feasible – would be massively difficult and expensive. It’d also require the skills of the Empire’s finest alchemists employed in concert, as well as exotic ingredients by the barge. Scribe would have noticed such movements, even if the Jacks were fooled. Kairos reached a shaking hand into his tunic and produced a small glass vial filled with a light gray powder, tossing it to me. I caught it, holding it up to the light. That was an alchemical powder, I’d bet rubies to piglets, but not one I recognized.

“Poison?” I asked.

“In a sense,” Kairos said. “If inclined to poetry, I might call it the stillness of death.”

Oh. Oh . Oh shit. Stillness, water? This was the same horror Akua had used to turn into wights the entire population of Liesse. One of the Warlock’s old doomsday tricks, named Still Water . Mere alchemy, almost impossible to detect as it accumulated in bodies. Until it was triggered by sorcery and slew all it’d contaminated before raising them as undead. If the water barrels on the Nicaean fleet had been tainted, there was no telling how much of it Malicia had instantly turned to her service with a mere snap of the fingers. She can’t have done that before they even struck at Ashur , I thought. No one’s that far-sighted, not even the Empress. Yet if the barrels had been tainted in the months since, that meant...

“That can’t have passed by you,” I said.

“It did not,” Kairos agreed.

“And you didn’t stop it?” I frowned.

“Why,” the Tyrant of Helike grinned, “that would rather defeat the purpose of helping her, wouldn’t it?”

My mind raced. While I was less than surprised Kairos would betray even the League he was currently leading to war, I saw little advantage for him in this. If Ashur was willing to fold and leave the Grand Alliance at Malicia’s behest, it might have done the same at the League’s. This did hurt Nicae, which was arguably still his strongest rival for power within the League, but there would have been less costly ways to achieve that. And in truth a great defeat might shake his own position even if it’d not been dealt to him, as the Hierarch’s violent indifference towards such matters meant Tyrant was effectively setting the policy of the League of Free Cities at the moment. This... didn’t fit, I thought. The Tyrant of Helike might have been a true partisan of Below, but however deeply it was buried there was always a method to his madness. The ripples from this would be a blow to the Grand Alliance but not a crippling one, and a victory for Dread Empress Malicia but hardly a substantial one. And it’d weaken the League going into this peace conference. Kairos might have used all this as a mere vessel to get his hands on the White Knight, but it was unlike him to so utterly spoil one game in favour of another.

“What do you want , Kairos?” I asked, honestly lost.

The odd-eyed boy leaned forward, trembling hand touching the bowls filled with stones he’d not touched this entire conversation.

“I’d like us to play a game, of course,” Kairos Theodosian smiled. “Why else set out the stones?”

Chapter 81: Devotional

“To have faith is to believe there is a plan greater than your own. And so the dreadful crowned are faithless one and all, for what plans could ever be greater than our own?”
– Dread Emperor Reprobate the First

“As I recall, the game requires three people,” I said. “I’ve only had half a cup, Kairos, it’s too early to start seeing double.”

Which was as pointed a cue as he could hope for before unveiling whatever nasty surprise he’d been keeping up his sleeve. The wretched little bastard grinned at me appreciatively, recognizing the extended hand for what it was. It was never pleasant to be forced to look in the eye the truth that I understood Kairos better than I did more people – and that it came naturally, without effort.

“I believe you’re familiar with the man,” the Tyrant of Helike mused. “He goes by Beiakim.”

In Ashkaran, that’d be Be-Iakim, which translated to ‘Child of Iakim’. The name was not unknown to me, for though it had been millennia late and in another realm I had attended King Iakim’s burial. It’d been in that echo that I had first heard the word Intercessor spoken by the lips of the man that would become the Dead King: Prince Neshamah, at one time the most obscure of King Iakim’s many children. That was on the nose, even by villain standards, but I couldn’t say as much without acknowledging Masego and I had stolen knowledge of the long-dead tongue from Arcadian echoes. Along with others things. Hierophant had plundered the thoughts of still-mortal Neshamah but I’d seen/

/. Still, this was a rather clear indication of our coming guest’s identity. Chittering gargoyles scattered as someone left the back of the shop to join us, some of them hurrying to bring forward a skull-adorned chair and place it to the side between myself and the Tyrant. The Dead King’s puppet, for I much doubted this to be the true body of the King of Death, made no pretence of still living. Though dressed in long cloths of purple and silver – the colours of Keter’s banner, as I recalled – it was a skeleton that I was looking upon. The bones were as polished ivory, much of them adorned with purple chalcedony and silver, and there was something lurking in the shadows of the empty eye sockets that was dreadfully vital.

“Catherine,” the King of Death greeted me. “How pleasant to see you again.”

“He is rarely so sweet to me, you know,” Kairos complained. “Favoritism is a sin, Catherine.”

“Might have something to do with all those betrayals you did,” I noted.

I then cleared my throat, gaze turning to the Dead King. Wariness quickened my pulse, but I could not show weakness in this den of tigers. They would not strike at me with violence, not here and now. It would have been more reassuring if those two were not some of the finest masters of twisted words living and dead. The dead thing claimed the skull chair, leaving me to wonder if Kairos had ordered it made for this very occasion or if he’d campaigned across a third of Procer with a spare skull thorne stashed somewhere in Helike’s baggage train.

“Beiakim, is it?” I said. “That’s new. Surprised you didn’t stick with the classics and go with Trismegistus.”

“If I had, I would have been robbed of the pleasure of your pretended ignorance,” Neshamah replied in Ashkaran.

“I don’t speak that, you ought to know it by now,” I replied without missing a beat.

“Dandelion mouse fishing,” the Tyrant proudly added in Ashkaran.

More or less, anyway. He was accenting the wrong parts of the words and there were some syllables he was pronouncing in what I figured to be the tradertongue way which just... didn’t work with Ashkaran. There was almost no commonality between the languages. He might have meant moue instead of mouse, now that I thought about it.

“Well said, Kairos,” I agreed.

“I suppose that, bereft of anyone able to share my humour, Trismegistus will have to do,” the Dead King said.

“King Trismegistus,” the Tyrant mused. “It has a ring to it. Might I offer you refreshments, Your Highness?”

I eyed the clothed skeleton skeptically. It had no, well, throat. I assumed the fact that he could speak at all was the result of sorcery, maybe some sort of runic trick. Likely I was looking at a small sliver of the Dead King invested in a construct, not unlike the crows that Sve Noc has sent south with me – and which, physically speaking, had about as much business talking as a skeleton. I had to say I admired Kairos a little for the amount of sheer pointless pettiness it took to offer the Dead King drinks he couldn’t drink. Say what you would about the Tyrant, but there was absolutely no one to which he would no offer at least one inconsequent slight.

“That will not be necessary, Tyrant,” the Dead King said.

I willfully ignored the chittered disappointment of a few gargoyles, unwilling to entertain exactly what it was that Kairos Theodosian might have considered fitting refreshments for the Hidden Horror.

“Come to attend the peace conference, I take it?” I said.

“As I told you I would,” Neshamah said. “I find I’ve lost taste for war, even in the defence of my ally.”

Keter had made bargain with only the Tower – officially, anyway , I thought as I glanced at Kairos – which meant it was Dread Empress Malicia he was speaking of. Might have been more apt to call her a shield or an excuse than an ally, in my opinion, but it was true he’d not actually struck before being invited out of his lair by the Empress. I was not unaware that killing Malicia might actually forced him back into the Serenity, though actually achieving that would be difficult considering Ater would be murder to siege and against all odds the Empress still had a firm grip on most the Wasteland. Pulling away the kind of forces that would be required to take Praes from the Proceran fronts would almost certainly collapse them, which made the plan rather unattractive. It might still come to that, if everything went to shit, but it was not the first or finest arrow in anyone’s quiver.

“It’s more than a few corpses too late to be claiming a fondness for peace,” I said.

“Mayhaps,” the Dead King said, “it is a few corpses too early instead. It matters not: I am a patient man.”

“How I love a pleasant evening with friends,” the Tyrant enthused. “Yet I believe there was talk of indulging a foible of mine.”

“Tower-raising, is it?” the Dead King said.

“Indeed,” Kairos smiled. “’tis an interesting game, though I believe it would benefit from a greater number of competitors.”

“Is there a single thing you don’t believe that about?” I drily asked.

That actually surprised a laugh out of him, and it ripped out of his throat in too ungainly a manner – spit touched his lips, his side convulsed – to be entirely feigned. Though I wasn’t all the inclined to play and the Dead King seemed largely indifferent, Kairos still adroitly pressed for us to indulge him. The rules were not all that complex, and I’d had vague memories of them. Each of the three of us would begin with a hidden amount of stones: either six, eight or ten. To win one of us must gather twenty stones, and those could be obtained both by taking from opponents as well as from the ‘kingdom’, a pile of fifteen stones all could see and take from. Acquiring stones had a tad more nuance to it, for taking from an opponent required the assent of the third while taking from the kingdom could be done without. One could destroy one’s own stones, one at a time, also without assent. The game ended in common defeat should twenty full circles pass without anyone having raised their tower, as the kingdom being plundered ‘rebelled’. The last detail was the ‘pledges’, bargain struck between opponents.

Anything could be agreed on, with the only forced detail being that a number of stones had to be ‘pledged’ as collateral by both sides. Should one of them then break the pledge, the stones would be obtained by the wounded party. The Tyrant covered the bowls with embroidered cloths after having a gargoyle move around the stones, and only then had them set on the table before us. I checked under mine, raising an eyebrow. Fortune had been a little too much on my side, these days: I began with six stones.

“As the most ancient king among us, I would invite honoured Trismegistus to begin,” Kairos said.

The Dead King’s eyeless gaze turned to me and I shrugged.

“If you’re robbing him, I’ll assent,” I said.

The Tyrant of Helike pouted but handed over his stone, which the Hidden Horror deftly took and slid into the cloth-covered bowl before him.

“So Malicia twists the Thalassocracy’s arm so it’ll leave the Grand Alliance,” I lightly said. “And now the two of you are here, thick as thieves. Now, if I were a suspicious sort, I’d suspect some sort of coalition was being assembled.”

A counterweight to the Grand Alliance, in a way. The Dread Empire, the Kingdom of the Dead and the League of Free Cities bound by treaty. With that in mind, forcing Ashur on the fence made a great deal more sense. Malicia had been trying to make an alliance there for decades without successes, but the Thalassocracy lived and died on trade: when its ports were closed by blockade, it quite literally starved. It could not petition to re-enter the Grand Alliance the moment the wight fleet sailed away if doing so cost it closed ports across the entire League, the same of Praes and the displeasure of the Dead King. Trade with the League of Free Cities was Ashur’s lifeblood, much more so than trade with Levant and Procer. Oh, I doubted the Thalassocracy would turn on the Alliance even then. But it would suddenly have a great interest in remaining neutral, one that’d be highly encouraged by how absurdly lucrative it would be for Ashuran trade to become the middleman between the two great alliances. This had Malicia’s mark all over it, precise violence followed by the subtle chains of coin and politics.

Of course, there was one little detail in the way: such an alliance could not take place without the assent of the Hierarch of the League, and I suspected Anaxares of Bellerophon would rather eat his own sandals that bargain with the likes of Malicia or the Dead King. Not for the Evil involved, but rather the crowns. Sisters bless that highly inconvenient madman. I stole a stone from Kairos as well, with the Dead King’s amused assent.

“Catherine,” the Tyrant said, “if you would-”

“No,” I said.

The Dead King refused as well when Kairos’s gaze moved to him. The Tyrant took from the kingdom, still pouting.

“There would be advantages to endorsing peace with such a coalition,” the Dead King said. “I’d think such a gesture would sway all its members into signing your Accords.”

And there was the bribe they wanted to throw my way. Even if Praes and the League came out as allied with Keter – which I still figured at least somewhat unlikely – the Grand Alliance might still try its luck. The League’s armies were marching south and depending on Procer to ward off hunger, Praes dealing with the loss of two major cities, one of them lost to goblin rebellion that’d birthed the Confederacy of the Grey Eyries and now threatened the Wasteland’s south. It’d be damned risky to push through with war in such a situation, but it was a gamble that might be made. It couldn’t be made without me , though. I brought to the table the Firstborn as well as the Army of Callow and the Legions-in-Exile, and if war came out the eastern front would be my kingdom. In effect, if I refused to press through with war then the Grand Alliance had little choice but to accept peace. My pulse quickened with excitement. Not because the offer was one that pleased me, for it did not, but because of what it implied.

The drow were marching on the Kingdom of the Dead with the intent of seizing it as their home on the surface. If the Dead King had known as much, he would have realized that his offer was not so tempting after all – it involved selling down the river my own patron goddesses and the nation that was arguably my steadiest ally, while they were all carrying out a plan I’d been the one to suggest in the first place. No, if the Dead King knew then this was a botched offer. Which meant he’d not yet found the Firstborn marching towards him, and they might yet launch their assault from the north with the benefit of surprise.

“A meaningless gesture,” I hedged. “You could forge the kind of doomsday artefacts forbidden by them in the Serenity by the dozens and without access we’d have no way of knowing.”

Silently, I assented to the Hidden Horror once more stealing a stone from Kairos then in quick succession did the same.

“Inspection might be considered, should the inspectors not bear Names,” the Dead King said.

“Catherine-”

“No,” I said without turning.

“No,” the Dead King said, before Kairos could even ask.

The Tyrant took from the kingdom again.

“Gods,” I muttered. “She really scares you, doesn’t she?”

“You believe it is fear of the Intercessor that commands my interest in your Accords,” the King of Death stated. “In a sense, you are not incorrect.”

My brow rose. That was quite the admission, coming form the Hidden Horror himself.

“So long as the Liesse Accords stand, I have no need to war against Creation,” the Dead King calmly said. “I lose nothing in observing such a peace, even on the terms of another.”

An ivory finger pointed at Kairos questioningly and I absent-mindedly agreed. The Tyrant complained about the unfairness of being so brutally and repeatedly plundered, but neither of us leant much of an ear to it.

“No need,” I repeated.

“What is it that you believe I gain from such ventures, Black Queen?” the Hidden Horror asked. “Wealth, bodies, fame?”

We both knew he had need of none. His wealth was beyond measure, he had a Hells’ worth of human farms to harvest and the Dead King was the most storied being on Calernia bar none.

“You keep your story alive,” I said. “And shape it in the cultures of those who live in your shadow. It’s not about invasion, you know the risks in that. You were pruning Calernia so nothing that could strangle you would ever grow.”

That was the conclusion I’d come to, after my latest chat with the Intercessor. The Wandering Bard might nakedly have tried to manipulate me, but she’d not necessarily been lying about everything. There was no denying it was unlikely to be a coincidence that the Principate had never had a Named ruler. Someone must have had a hand in that and given that the Intercessor worked best through Named she did not strike me as the obvious culprit there. The routine of tower-raising continued, Trismegistus assenting to another theft of Kairos and the both of us refusing the Tyrant’s attempts to break out of encirclement.

“You miss the forest for the trees, Black Queen,” the Dead King said. “ Why is it that all that grows in this garden of Creation would so seek to destroy me?”

I frowned.

“You’re saying you were warring on the Intercessor, not on Calernia,” I said.

“I was denying tool to my opponent,” the Hidden Horror said. “You would do this for me with your Accords. What need have I then of pursuing the matter further?”

I paused. Ghastly as what he was implying was it sounded terribly, well, believable. Neshamah as a mortal prince had already recognized the dangers in bearing a Name, for all the power they brought, and so carefully arranged his apotheosis through the work of years if not decades. He would not have forgotten those early lessons after touching the godhead, him least of all: undead did not change, at least no in the way that the living did. His only invasions had been under the shield of alliance or invitation, and it could not be denied that he’d been cautious about intervening on Creation. He’d been utterly monstrous when he did, but then it wasn’t his soul I was putting on trial. That ship had long ago sunk at the bottom of a deep, black sea. It was the sense in what he said and horrified as I was to admit it rather fit . If he’d been using scorched earth tactics against the Intercessor instead of pursuing conquest of any sort, some pieces of the puzzle began to fit together. Cordelia Hasenbach had nearly gained a Name, hadn’t she? Which meant the Principate had been growing into a nation where the ruler might be Named, which the Dead King would see as a direct threat.

Which explained him taking Malicia’s offer over mine, among other things. He wasn’t really interested in taking lands or helping the Tower: he wanted to thoroughly dismantle everything about the current Principate that might grow into a danger to him, and there was no world in which I would have allowed him that loose of a leash. The Dread Empress, though? So long as Praes and its breadbasket stood, she hardly cared about what happened to the rest of the continent. I’d been invited to Keter to bag two birds with a stone: the Dead King could have a look at the latest fool to touch the outmost edges of apotheosis and simultaneously use my presence as a way to finally secure Malicia’s agreement after months of negotiations. Now, though, large parts of Calernia had come together in a coalition, which as a story was poison to him. War, even if he had the advantage in strictly military affairs, carried other risks if pursued.

On the other hand, signing the Liesse Accords meant that so long as he did not provoke the living realms he wouldn’t be up to his neck in crusades anymore. What was curtailing a few of his worst habits in the face of that? Shit. It fit together well enough I couldn’t be sure if this was true or an exquisite lie – the only kind the likes of the Dead King would deign to employ. The Firstborn might be able to find a home among the tall grasses of the Chain of Hunger, I thought. It’d certainly give the Mighty something to do other thank killing each other. Another circle passed according to our habit, Kairos’ stone slowly dwindling at our hands. No, I decided, that entire approach was mistaken. The Intercessor being an enemy did not mean her opponent was an ally, or indeed ceased being an opponent.

Leaving the Dead King to rule his realm and garden horrors in the Serenity was not the same thing as admitting that Stygia’s slavery was not mine to curtail, or that Praesi blood magic would not end because I found the practice disgusting. On the other hand, was it really my place to make a decision that would see at least dozens of thousand die? No, even though I probably had the influence to force the outcome either way. It was something that Cordelia Hasenbach needed to be brought in on, and likely the Blood as well. Another circle passed, the Tyrant complaining at how dully uninspired our playing was. My eleven stones could not be in the lead, no matter who it was that’d begun at ten stones, but soon enough the rising threat would see the game beginning to have real conflict.

“This isn’t a decision I can make in haste,” I said, biting my lip.

It was a lie, I thought. Unless the rest of the Grand Alliance flinched, the decision was already made. And I remained skeptical that the League would fall on the side of this scheme, no matter what the Tyrant wanted. So long as the Hierarch lived it was unlikely and should be he slain I rather doubted Kairos Theodosian would be elected to the office instead, or anyone for that matter. Which would mean the end of unity between the city-states, every ruler able to bargain for their own people again. Malicia might have full coffers and the influence to sway some, but she wouldn’t even get most the cities on her side. It’d turn into a quagmire that would effectively take the League out of the war, which was more than acceptable. That would leave Praes and Keter, and a fight that could be won.

“There is yet time,” the Dead King said. “Consult your pawns if you must.”

Another way around the table, leaving me at twelves stones – and Trismegistus at either fourteen or sixteen. One more, then, I’d assume he’d begun at ten.

“Lovely Catherine,” Kairos tried.

“Flattering,” I said, but shook my head.

The circle passed, and I now had thirteen stones in my bowl.

“Truce for seven turns,” I offered the Tyrant. “Neither theft nor assent against either of us. I’ll pledge six stones over it.”

“Alas, I only have one stone,” Kairos smiled.

I frowned, counting in my head, and that should mean he’d begun at eight stones. The Dead King was only three away from winning, then.

“What happens if you can’t pay the full pledge?” I asked.

“One pays as much as one can,” the Tyrant said.

“Offers stands, then,” I said.

I glanced at the Dead King, whose gaze conveyed amusement and little else.

“Denied,” Kairos grinned.

My brow rose. Interesting strategy. The moves continued in quick succession. I allowed Kairos to be robbed once more by the Dead King to turn up the pressure then myself took from the kingdom, as did the Tyrant. I reiterated essentially the same offer for fewer turns and a lesser pledge but was once more turned away. The Dead King took from the kingdom, bringing him to nineteen and I gazed at the Tyrant. Unless he wanted to throw the game, if I took from the kingdom he’d have to ask from my assent and take from the Dead King. It’d be better for me to take from the kingdom, there were only four stones left in it and they were the only way to gain stones without someone’s assent. So I smiled back at Kairos, and from the kingdom’s bounty rose up to fifteen stones in my own bowl.

“A pointless exercise,” the Dead King suddenly said. “It is not a game that can be won save through the idiocy of another.”

Hollow sockets gazed at Kairos.

“Should you require it for the settling of my boon I will continue until the end, but this can only lead to a common loss,” the Hidden Horror said.

He wasn’t wrong, I thought. Cannibalizing the rest of the kingdom with Trismegistus would bring me up to sixteen while he stayed stuck at eighteen, but after that Kairos would have no real incentive to do anything but assent to the Dead King and I robbing each other while he profited from the side. Our possessions would then slowly equalize until we all lost.

“I got all I bargained for, Trismegistus King,” the Tyrant of Helike grinned. “The debt is settled in full.”

“Then a pleasant evening to you both,” the King of Death said, rising to his feet.

He did not bow, for haunted bones or not he was the Dead King, and left without further deigning to speak.

“Tell me a game of tower-raising isn’t what you asked for in exchange for bringing him to Salia,” I slowly said.

“That would be a lie,” the Tyrant piously said. “Although I’ll confess, this affair was not meant for my own benefit.”

My eyes narrowed. Kairos Theodosian smiling took the last stone in his bowl and rolled it against his own palm, before tossing it behind him.

“You would have destroyed your last stone,” I said.

“I have lived on no terms but my own,” the Tyrant of Helike tranquilly replied. “And when the day comes, as it does for us all, it is on my terms I will perish. That is my nature, Catherine Foundling. That is the truth of me.”

And with Hakram’s game, he’d also tried to show me the nature of the Hidden Horror. Who’d not considered for a moment, I thought, that any of us could take any action in this save that which benefited us the most.

“He wouldn’t keep to the Accords,” I quietly said. “That’s what you were trying to tell me. It’s not in his nature to suffer his will to be leashed.”

“Neither of them would tolerate your little orderly world, I don’t think,” the Tyrant mused. “And who could blame them? It’s a dreadfully dull one you have painted. Yet for all your occasional snivelling self-righteousness, you’ve not been boring. And you’ve indulged me, so I shall return that favour with a boon of my own.”

The odd-eyed boy leaned forward.

“Here is the first secret: angels cannot be seen by the Augur, save if they allow it,” he said. “Neither can the Intercessor, the Dead King and yourself.”

He smiled.

“Here is the second secret: one who has made treaties with the Queen of Callow will soon break them.”

He grinned, red eye shining malevolently.

“Here is the third secret, and the last I offer this night: the Twilight Paths can lead to places not of Creation.”

Kairos Theodosian dropped back into his cushioned seat, a grin like a knife still stretching his lips.

“Sweet dreams, Catherine Foundling.”

Chapter 82: Delegations

“Trouble reveals either true friends or a corpse.”
– Arlesite saying

I’d charged Vivienne with handling the ceremonies from our end and come out pleased with the arrangements.

Mostly for the swiftness of them, truth be told, as instead of squabbling with the Procerans and the rest over pre-eminence and etiquette she’d cut through the waste and agreed the Callowan delegation would be the fourth to enter the hall. After the Proceran one – save for the First Prince herself, who would be the last person to enter – and the other two current members of the Grand Alliance, Levant and Ashur. Out of the twenty delegates I’d brought a share of five had been set aside for Black, who’d brought in Scribe as one of them as well as two translators and an officer from the Legions-in-Exile. My people were a little more varied in nature, though it couldn’t be denied that we were thin on the ground when it came to actual diplomats. The Empress and the High Seats would have trained diplomats, usually highborn, truthfully not unlike the way the Old Kingdom had usually sent powerful and trusted nobles to talks with foreigners. I’d had precious few aristocrats I could call on even before I’d crushed their overly ambitious faction in my court, though, and the few I had a modicum of trust for were already in military or administrative positions. I couldn’t exactly pull away Grandmaster Talbot from his knights simply to bolster my delegation’s prestige, not when he was so much more useful at the Hellhound’s side.

The presence of Lady Vivienne Dartwick, heiress-designate to Callow and arguably these days my main diplomat, had never been in doubt. Neither had been Lord Adjutant’s – who was one of the only two orcs in the room and so stood out not unlike a bull surrounded by lambs – or General Abigail’s, as my respective right hand and the ranking commander of the forces I’d brought to Salia. The dark-haired general had discreetly downed half flask of brandy before we set out in what I took to be an attempt at fortifying her spirits, and ever since tired with admirable effort to attract the least attention possible even though her ceremonial armour clearly indicated her rank as one of the ten highest officers in the Army of Callow. I had two sapper officers with me chosen at Pickler’s recommendation, one specialized in fortifications and the other in war engines, and beyond that mostly civilians. Scribes and translators from the personal staff Vivienne had brought across the Whitecaps, as well as the closest thing we had to a scholar of Proceran etiquette – Henrietta Morley, eldest daughter and heiress of Baroness Ainsley of Harrow. Vivienne had apparently set her to studying with the now-abdicated Prince Amadis to shore up what she’d been taught by tutors, the former Prince of Iserre apparently having been thoroughly amused he was being asked for etiquette lessons and not state secrets.

After us the Empire Ever Dark was to follow in, General Rumena having gathered a band of ten sigil-holders for prestige, accompanied by Ivah and three dzulu from the Losara because someone needed to take notes and few Mighty were all that likely to do so. Ivah had told me that the Losara Sigil’s sworn duty of marking down the oaths made by sigil-holders had actually been drawing to its ranks Firstborn inclined towards scholarly pursuits. Though literacy was one of the more common Secrets, the Losara were beginning to stand out in that even dzulu were expected to know their full glyphs. Akua had once, after a few drinks, gotten into a heated debate with Indrani about whether the surprisingly high literacy rate of the Firstborn was because there had been more drow when the Night was formed and so literacy became more common along all lines when the population number reduced, or because it was one of the few things no one would bother to kill over and so a harmless skill to learn the old-fashioned way. I knew not the answers, and even the Sisters had given ambiguous reply, but whatever the truth of it I suspected the Firstborn could only benefit from the prominence of such knowledge deepening with every generation. Not that they’d ceased... acquiring through the old means. Of the ten sigil-holders, all familiar to me, all spoke Chantant and three Tolesian. One had even acquired Lunara from the Princes’ Graveyard, which I was pretty sure Rumena had almost killed it for. Getting the drow to, uh, do that less often was admittedly something of a work in progress. I’d made sure to get oaths none of them would fight here, even against each other.

The delegation for the League of Free Cities would be the last to enter, and though I’d yet to see them with my own eyes Vivienne had made inquiries as to its composition. It was about what one would expect from an alliance as shaky as the League tended to be even when it had common enemies. The Tyrant and his favourite commander, General Basilia – who I’d met her once before, at Rochelant – were clearly the heart of it, but all cities seemed to have claimed seats as well. Basileus Leo Trakas of Nicae and his personal scribe, the two self-proclaimed Exarchs of Penthes, a senior member of the Secretariat with a lesser one carrying his ink and parchment, the Bellerophon’s appointed general and his minder from the kanenas , one of the foremost Magisters of Stygia, Zoe Ixioni, and two preachers from Atalante. These last two had for some reason been made to carry a copy of the Book of All Things nailed to a plank and were seemingly deeply offended by it, though the other delegates seemed to find it most amusing. Like everyone else they’d brought translators aplenty, and even a few scribes for what I assumed would be their common records. There was no trace of the Hierarch, which was cause for both relief and renewed wariness.

The Jacks had found no sign of the Dead King among the delegation but that meant little. He was not the kind of monster that would be found unless he wished to be.

“Queen Catherine Foundling of Callow, First of Her Name, Protector of Daoine and high priestess of the Empire Ever Dark.”

We’d not waited long before the painted gates barring the hall, for we’d been fetched only when the Dominion’s delegation was already moving, but it’d been long enough for my thoughts to drift. As the gates swung open and the majordomo’s voice ran, I was jolted back to full attention and stepped forward. The Cloak of Woe trailed behind me as I limped forward, leaning on my staff of yew. No plate for me today, not if I was to be seated for hours while talking, though the dark embroidered tunic that’d been chosen for me was discreetly padded. Enough it could blunt a knife, if one found its way into my ribs. Hakram knew me well. Belted across my body under my breasts and at belly height, the tunic was almost uncomfortably high-collared and came down to my hips, where I’d prevailed when demanding trousers and comfortable leather boots. I’d had a look at the effect of it in the mirror that morning, and though it made it rather plain I was... less than curvy, when matched with my cloak it also leant a certain severe martial look I rather liked. The crown on my brow was the same I had worn at my coronation: a thing of jagged iron that dug into my scalp, though since my crowning a single pitch-black piece of onyx had been set at the front of it.

A murmur passed through assembly as I entered, and though I’d hardly expected a tavern’s common room to serve as our place of gathering I was still faintly surprised as the sheer size of it. The tea hall where I’d met with Hasenbach yesterday had been beautiful but not overdone, but this? You could fit a garrison in here, if you piled them up. I’d never seen ceilings so tall save at the cathedral in Laure, and the dome there was not bordered by sculpted gold depicting passages from the Book of All Things. The dome’s surface was a superb painting of the founding of Procer, beginning at the collapse of the Tower and ending with the election of Clothor Merovins as First Prince. The hall itself was a broad circle touched by painted doors at an interval that was pleasing to the eye, as were the ornate golden arcs filled with the Merovins heraldry above the doors. The marble of the square pillars holding up the dome was bare, though polished, in what was clearly a conscious choice to allow the brown tone to stand out and contrast with the white and gold that was otherwise prominent. The floor beneath my feet, itself also pure marble, was of the same tone and so perfectly polished it could serve as a mirror. The circle shape of the hall had leant itself well to the arrangements, curved tables radiating out from the centre at increasingly longer length. There was a broad avenue between each set of tables, of which there was one for every delegation, which allowed servants and attendants to come and go with ease.

The announcements continued behind me as the rest of my delegation entered behind me, and I cast a look at those delegations already inside. That of the Dominion of Levant I recognized well, as I’d at one time or another fought most of them. Lord Yannu Marave of Alava, of the Champion’s Blood, had been the leading Grand Alliance general for most of the Princes’ Graveyard. Big man, muscled like an ox and with that unsettling calm that never seemed to thaw. Lady Itima Ifriqui of Vaccei, of the Brigand’s Blood. Old but lean and whip-hard, before the Tenth Crusade she’d brutally raided Orense and nearly started a way with Procer. Juniper said she and her brood of sons were cunning as vipers and just as vicious, and she’d know: they’d fought running battles across half of the Principate. Lady Aquiline Osena of Tartessos, of the Slayer’s Blood, who sadly was not wearing the tight leather vest and paints she’d on last I saw her. Slender and graceful with coiled muscles, she was said to be a fine killer and a more than passingly skilled intriguer. Mighty Jindrich had sung her praises after the Graveyard, boasting in her stead of having killed it once and suggesting she be offered the opportunity to be slain in single combat and harvested so her Night could toughen up one of our weaker Mighty.

The last was the most familiar of old, Razin Tanja of the Binder’s Blood. Heir to Malaga, though as I understood it Levantine inheritance laws meant he could not be lord of Malaga until he returned there to be acclaimed by his kin. It spoke well of his influence that he sat at the same table as the ruling lord and ladies, though, and the way his eyes and Aquiline Osena’s kept finding each other and lingering told me there might be some ‘diplomacy’ going on there. He looked older, I thought. Still sharp-boned and handsome, but where before his eyes had been raw emotion now there was a colder fire in them. Purpose, I decided. It tempered people like nothing else, that cold blaze. That one had gone through crucibles, at Sarcella and the Graveyard, and perhaps become the better for it. I winked at him and he replied with a scowl. To my amusement, I saw as my gaze moved on that Tariq was not seated at the Dominion’s foremost table. He was only at the second, making a show of his lack of formal authority, and Gods but he must have insisted to be seated there. I’d bet the Blood would have preferred him to be the sole person on the first rung and the rest of them where he now sat. I inclined my head in a polite greeting, and he did the same.

Ashur’s delegation was a bare bones affair. To the left of the Proceran one, as the Dominion was to its right, it counted a mere ten men and women in saffron-coloured robes. The important one was an official from the committee the Thalassocracy had formed to oversee its presence in the Grand Alliance. Sitter Ahirom Seneqart was a tanned young man of exquisite manners but whose role as the voice of the Ashuran bureaucracy on the continent had dipped into irrelevance with the annihilation of the greater part of Ashuran fleets at Thalassina followed by an immediate sucker punch of the League’s own fleets. With the Thalassocracy’s star being rather dependant on its supremacy at sea, his influence would have waned and these days he was unlikely to be anything more than an official mouthpiece for the decisions of Magon Hadast, the ruler of Ashur. I’d just finished studying the Ashurans as much as I could without being rude when the last of my delegations’ announcements came: Lord Amadeus of Praes, the Carrion Lord. Attendants ushered us to our slice of the hall, which was to the side of the Dominion. Our foremost table remained light: myself, between Vivienne and Hakram, and to Adjutant’s side sat Black. Behind my father the Praesi ‘delegation’ radiated out, as behind me the Callowan one did.

It felt like half the damned room was looking at me, so as a distraction I looked up the Procerans. Theirs was by far the largest presence – there must have been at least sixty people at their tables – and they were certainly heavy on royalty. Princess Rozala Malanza met my eye and returned my polite nod. I was surprised to see Louis Rohanon behind her, the former Prince of Creusens apparently serving as an aide. Brother Simon of the Holy Society I recognized form yesterday, but few of the other faces. I leaned forward Vivienne, who helpfully provided names to match.

“To Simon de Gorgeault’s left, the man who looks like the dried up remains of a man?” she murmured into my ear. “That’s Louis de Satrons, the head of the Circle of Thorns.”

Cordelia’s spies abroad, and from Black had told me by far the most competent of her spymasters. Considering one had been a traitor and the other missed a conspiracy that involved half the upper priesthood of Procer when that priesthood was his very area of expertise, that might not have been a difficult crown to claim. Louis de Sartons had beady and watchful eyes, I thought, made even more prominent by his almost skeletal thinness.

“Tanned man with the mustache, middle-aged?” she continued. “Prince Renato of Salamans. His brother Alvaro died fighting the Stygians down south. He’s fresh to the throne but he’s been his brother’s man in Salia for years, he’s one of Hasenbach’s most loyal backers. Fought for her during the coup, too, so he’s bound to be in favour. The blond with the well-cut beard if Prince Ariel of Arans – not a Hasenbach supporter but not an enemy either, and he came out more or less on her side when the blades went bare.”

Prince Ariel of Arans’s lands would also be playing host to both the Army of Callow and the Legions-in-Exile soon enough, which I imagined had informed his lack of support for the coup. The Proceran delegation’s arraignment was actually slightly different from the rest. A small and luxurious table had been set most forward, presumably for the First Prince, yet there were two seats awaiting there. Slightly back and to the left the table with the spymasters stood, though once more an empty seat awaited at the table, and on a mirroring table to the right the two princes and Rozala were seated. From there the tables radiated as everyone else’s delegations, though the missing seats rather drew my eye.

“I would have expected Princess Rozala to have that seat at Hasenbach’s side, if anyone,” Hakram murmured.

“Coup’s still too fresh,” Vivienne disagreed.

“It is the first official event with foreigners since the coup,” Black softly agreed. “Malanza has to be clearly shown as subordinate. Sitting her with two known princely supporters of Cordelia Hasenbach adroitly addressed the issue without slighting anyone. Note that of the three Rozala Malanza is seated closes to the high table, an acknowledgement of influence.”

The Firstborn delegation was announced before the conversation could continued, beginning with General Rumena of the Empire Ever Dark, the Tomb-Maker . I’d actually made a note of the proper titles for all the Mighty before passing it on to the Procerans, and I was pleased to see they’d actually observed the courtesies. Ivah was even addressed as Lord of Silent Steps, though like everyone’s attendants the dzulu accompanying it went unnamed. They made waves, the drow. Their procession as they entered Salia had drawn eyes as well, but today they had come in their full ceremonial glory instead of their war-making clothes, and it could not be denied they were a sight. Grey skin and silver-blue eyes were half-covered by the colourful paint of sigils, from Rumena’s ochre and gold to my Losara’s purple and silver. They wore strips of obsidian and exquisitely woven clothes, all dripping with jewels and gold, and though perhaps on a human it would have been mocked as vulgar on the drow it made them look like the exotic princes of a distant land. I even caught a few eyes lingering, though anyone trying to talk a drow into a night on the sheets should be prepared for disappointment. Firstborn had little interest in such affairs, save for the lowest among them – and even then, only for a certain part of their lives.

The Tomb-Maker sat alone at the leading table, and none even thought to contest this.

“That leaves the League seated next to the Ashurans,” Vivienne murmured, sounding amused. “Hasenbach has a sense of humour, it seems.”

She was right about the seating, at least: only one slice of the circle remained free, between the Firstborn and Ashur’s delegation. I was less certain it’d been meant humorously, however. It would bring a pressure to bear, the two colluding parties being side by side in their corner and bearing the weight of everyone else’s disapproval. The Thalassocracy’s envoys had no real say in the decision they were to announce, but this could be a passingly clever ploy if aimed at the League. The Tyrant was a fearless madman, true enough, but not all of the Free Cities boasted such spirit. Some would see the writing on the wall, and weigh whether following their madman Hierarch and madder Tyrant was truly worth antagonizing every other nation in this hall so deeply.

“I would not venture to give you orders, Carrion Lord,” Adjutant said, sounding pained, “but perhaps it would be wiser to cease smiling so at the Pilgrim.”

I turned to a glare at Black, whose apparent calm was marred by a vicious little twist of the lips.

“I was merely greeting an old acquaintance,” Black said.

Tariq’s lips were pressed thin, and though obviously my teacher was the one being a shit there I was still a little miffed that it took so little to provoke the Peregrine. It was like Black’s presence here was an insult already and the slightest addition to it was enough to tip the vase. I incline my head in implicit apology and after a moment he accepted it.

“You going to taunt Hasenbach too?” I muttered under my breath, casting a dark look at him.

He shook his head.

“I’ve nothing but respect for the First Prince,” he calmly said. “A thoroughly competent woman. Had our interests not been so completely at odds for the entirety of our careers, I might even have been personally fond of her.”

I frowned at him.

“Didn’t she try to have you taken from the Pilgrim and decapitated?” I asked.

“As I said,” he smiled, “a thoroughly competent woman.”

Maybe that shouldn’t have surprised me, coming from the same man whose response to learning thousands of knights had slipped his watch in the south had been mourning the likely death of whoever had first come up with the plan to achieve that. The League’s delegation was announced moments later and I trusted Vivienne and Hakram to memorize the names while I was seeing to more important business: namely, watching raptly what was intended for the Book of All Things nailed to a plank. The League’s front table ended up rather crowded, as few were willing to surrender a seat there even if the room was limited, and to my utter delight one of the two Atalante delegates was forced to relinquish his seat to the book – the plank was propped up against the chair, the book lulling open lazily. Mere moments after the League settled into their seats, the majordomo struck the floor with his staff of office and the entire Proceran delegation rose to its feet. None of the Blood did, save for the Pilgrim, nor the League’s rulers. The Firstborn did not stir, and among my tables Black and I stayed seated. Cordelia Hasenbach entered the hall from the door at the back of the Proceran tables and strode forward flanked on both sides.

One of the two was a woman, blonde and short-haired and wearing a rather loose dress. I knew her not by sight, but the similarities with Hasenbach’s face and her own hinted at the answer. Agnes Hasenbach, the Augur, was cousin to the First Prince. As to the other, there was no need to wonder: the White Knight was familiar enough a sight. Well now, I’d wondered in what capacity he would attend. Hanno split off before the Hasenbach, coming to stand by the empty seat with the two spymasters, and Agnes Hasenbach was eased into the seat to the First Prince’s left at the high table. Finally, Cordelia Hasenbach smiled at the assembly and elegantly sat. All who had risen followed seat, and a moment later the First Prince of Procer broke the silence.

“And so I declare this conference to have begun, under auspices of truce,” the First Prince said.

The Tyrant, in the heartbeat that followed, clear his throat.

“Your Most Serene Highness, if I might be allowed to address the point?”

I met Cordelia Hasenbach’s eyes from my side of the room and smiled a hard smile. All right, Hasenbach, I thought. Let’s see what you and I can achieve, when we’re on the same side.

Chapter 83: A Mould Unbroken

“Diplomacy is half lies and half courtesies, which is to say it is entirely lies.”
– King Alistair Fairfax, the Fox

The Tyrant of Helike had seemingly decided to strike with his surprises hard and early, which I could appreciate. It’d save us time, since admittedly anything discussed before ‘surprise, the Dead King is here!’ was likely to fall by the wayside. I’d half-expected him to wait until we were halfway through a particularly complex discussion before dropping that into our laps, actually, since Kairos Theodosian was rarely one to avoid heaping insults upon injury. Murmurs spread through the room at the Tyrant daring to speak so boldly in the wake of the First Prince, though I’d seen to it that the people that mattered would already be in the know.

“Shut your cripple mouth and sit down, boy,” Lady Itima of Vaccei snarled out. “It’s a fucking outrage you even have a seat in this hall.”

Hasenbach had implied to me that while Itima of the Brigand’s Blood was – rather ironically, given the legendary hatred of her line for foreigners in general and Procerans in particular – her steadiest ally among the Blood she was also very much out to get the Tyrant’s head on a plate for his actions during the adventure that birthed the Twilight Ways, as well as a handful of prior betrayals. The redeeming aspect of that was that unlike most Levantines the Lady of Vaccei was not insistent on having that head taken on a battlefield or by honour duel. A knife in the dark or poison in the cup would do just as well, for the Vengeful Brigand’s brutal pragmatism in aging war against the Proceran occupation had trickled down to his descendants.

“The Dominion of Levant objects to this departure from the agreed-upon order of affairs,” Lord Yannu Marave calmly translated in more polite terms.

“Look at the other two Blood,” Vivienne murmured.

I followed her own gaze and found the faces of my old buddy Razin and Lady Aquiline utterly calm. I knew precious little about Aquiline Osena, but I’d watched Razin Tanja come apart at the seams in the shadow of Sarcella. I liked to think I had a good grasp on the man, and he was not all that skilled a liar or dissembler – if anything he a rawness to him I found almost refreshing compared to the practiced masks of near every other aristocrat I knew. He would have been embarrassed by Lady Itima’s outburst, if it had come as a surprise to him. Which meant it wasn’t. I let out a small noise of approval at Vivs for that, I might not have caught if not for her sharp gaze. She was getting to be a fair hand at these games, which boded well for the years to come.

Itima Ifriqui’s flare of temper had been planned, it seemed, though I could only wonder as to why. Reinforcing the knowledge that Kairos was hated abroad to the rest of the League? It might even be a simple matter of herding him towards a particular response, though that would mean the true hand behind this was the First Prince. This was her preferred battlefield, not mine.

“Friends, allies, companions,” the Tyrant of Helike enthusiastically said. “How could I dare to defy such ironclad law as the order of affairs? No, I speak now so that an oversight might be corrected.”

“Get on with it, Tyrant,” I called out. “There’s only so long of you orating at your own navel I’m willing to suffer.”

“ Catherine ,” the odd-eyed villain cried, sending me a wounded look.

From the corner of my eye I saw Princess Rozala’s lips twitch in suppressed amusement. It would have been impolitic to wink, I supposed, and besides I had a policy.

“And what oversight might that be, Lord Tyrant?” Cordelia Hasenbach calmly asked.

“Why, there are yet delegates to arrive and be seated,” Kairos Theodosian grinned.

The First Prince of Procer elegantly extended her arm, palm up, and a dark-haired attendant offered her a small ceremonial baton of sculpted alder. Though carved from one piece, it’d been made to look like it was a bundle of small twigs tied together by a string. One twig for each principality, symbolizing that each twig alone was fragile but the bundle was stronger than the sum of its parts. It’d been a common imagery in Procer until the Liturgical Wars, during which it fell out of favour, and had been around long enough for a few verses back home to have been written about it. Even as Cordelia Hasenbach knocked the baton against the surface of her table I hummed the tune to Two Dozen Snakes A Knot Do Make , Vivienne at my side going rigid to avoid showing reaction.

“And though Billy King did step on them,” Black quietly hummed, lips twitching, “they hardly even-”

Of course Black would know the words, I amusedly thought. He’d ruled Callow for twenty years and unless he’d done so without ever setting foot in a tavern he probably knew most the old songs.

“-noooooticed,” I could not help but finish, swallowing a grin.

Vivienne had joined her voice to the sound as well, though discreetly. Even in a Legion haunt like the Rat’s Nest they’d sung that regularly, legionaries being rather fond of the imagery of anyone stepping hard on the proverbial knot of snakes west of the Whitecaps.

“Your people do have a singular talent for putting mockery to a tune,” the Carrion Lord fondly said.

Our shared mirth had not gone unnoticed by the rest of the hall, a few other delegates eyeing us curiously. It was rather pitiful that between three former Named not a single one of us could properly hold a tune but aside from that I claimed no regrets. Yet Black’s uncharacteristic levity, I suspected, might just be the result of seeking diversions to distract frim his worries about a matter I’d warned him of. While we whispered in our corner the First Prince had begun out first gambit of the day. At the knocking of the baton the attendants were set abuzz like a swarm of bees, the gates to the back of the League delegations’ left and right opening. Down both avenues a small but beautiful desk was carried, and behind the desks a single seat each. Kairos’s good eye narrowed for the fraction of a moment as he took in the second desk before his face eased into a delighted smile. It’d stayed long enough for me to catch his surprise, though.

Come now, Kairos , I thought. You might as well have told me outright. I know how Malicia works, there’s no way she’d ever trust one of her lords to negotiate with the likes of you. Even if they were not treacherous and courting you support to overthrow her, they’d be always a step behind you in any talks. Which meant the old body-taking trick of Dread Emperor Nefarious would have been put to good use. It was a small leap from there to figuring out it was rather likely that Malicia’s host body might have accompanied him in his campaign, or meant to be another surprise attendance at this conference – after all, Black’s presence here meant that in principle the Dread Empire of Praes was allowed to attend. It’d been a risk to bring out the two desks from the start since this was speculation and not certainty, but the First Prince had argued we lost precious little from being wrong while inflicting sharper uncertainty should we be correct. I’d still been against it, but Cordelia’s instincts had seemingly paid off if the Tyrant’s surprise was not mere playacting.

Now he had to wonder how deeply we’d seen through him and if my alliance with the First Prince might not be closer knit than he’d assumed. The painted desks were set to the sides of the League’s delegations, slightly behind their leading table. A subtle slight, that, implying inferior status. Cordelia was apparently not above venting her displeasure through small details, which I found rather endearing. It added a touch of humanity to the ice-cold and masterfully controlled princess I’d been treating with, a woman who’d use even her own grief and shame as tools to get her way without batting an eye.

“How very gracious of you, First Prince,” the Tyrant laughed. “Without further ado, I then present-”

Black tensed. If I’d now known the man I might not have noticed, for he had not moved a hair, but his eyes gained an edge of razor-sharp attention that’d not been there before.

“His Majesty Trismegistus of Keter, the Dead King!”

It was almost amusing the way the older of the Atalante preachers went white as a sheet when the other one rose to his feet. Sorcery coursed down the body of the impostor in thick rivulets, revealing beneath an illusion the same skeletal puppet of polished ivory bones and long purple cloths I had met with last night. I’d been wondering if it’d be the same, or if he had another host form to ride hidden away somewhere in the city. The tall dead thing stood before the desk set out for him, and the room erupted in whispers. Some scribes even cried out in fear, as if they’d been told the Gods Below had come up to see to them personally. It was a different sort of fear they had for the Hidden Horror, here in Procer. Even in the south he was not so much a legend as a sword hanging above everyone’s head: after decades of it not falling down you could tell yourself it never would, and even forget about it.

But every time you happened to look up, you were made to remember that safety was just the tale your parents told you as a child so you’d sleep well. Callow knew the Tower’s shadow like its own breath and blood, but it could not be denied that the Principate knew the Crown of the Dead’s almost as intimately.

It was not all fear, though. Lady Aquiline looked like she was itching to draw a blade, and her fellow Blood all had measuring stares. I glanced at the princes’ table, and my respect for them rose a notch when I saw only cold disdain on those faces. The luxuriantly mustachioed Renato of Salamans took in the Dead King’s clothes with a look that could only be called scornful, and Ariel of Arans leaned to the side and idly spoke to Princess Rozala in a low voice. As for Rozala Malanza, her dark eyes stared at the Dead King unblinkingly. The burning intensity of the hatred I saw in there gave me pause, for I’d seen hatreds great and small in my time and that one was neither shallow nor passing. As for the First Prince herself, her face was a cold and regal mask framed by golden curls, offering only icy loathing.

Parts of the League’s delegation – Atalante, Nicae – were dismayed by the sudden revelation, but others largely indifferent. Delos and Bellerophon’s delegates were respectively keeping notes and looking rather lost, while the Penthesians seemed more cautious than alarmed. Yet it was the Firstborn whose reaction had me savagely grinning. General Rumena, silver-blue eyes staring straight at the King of Death, clenched its fingers into a fist and struck against the table once.

“Prav ruvan,” the Tomb-Maker said.

First claim , it meant. A statement, but also the beginning of something more. Mighty Jindrich laughed, the sound scything through the room filled with murmurs, and struck at its table as well.

“First claim,” Jindrich also said. “For this I offer three spears of finest obsidian, and the Secret of Shells.”

Mighty Soln jeered.

“Cheapskate. First claim,” it said. “A finely made bureau of wood, and the Secrets of Shaping and Sight.”

The only word of that not in Crepuscular was in Chantant, bureau , for the drow were wildly appreciative of the Proceran style of elaborate wooden desks and in deference to that appreciation had been very particular about using the ‘proper’ term for it. And so, as the rest of the hall handled the surprise of the Dead King’s presence, the proud Mighty of the Empire Ever Dark held their bidding war over which of them would have the privilege to first attempt to kill the Dead King on the field and take his Night. The Tyrant cleared his throat, and I felt Black tense again.

“And, naturally, Her Imperial Majesty, Dread Empress Malicia of Praes!”

He sounded, I thought, like a merchant hawking wares at the market. Murmurs bloomed anew as one of the translators from the League rose to her feet. I noted with faint amusement that Malicia’s host-body had chosen to be seated close to the aisle. I supposed the revelation would have lost some of its gravitas if she’d had to politely ask the other League translators to pull forward their chairs so she could stride out with the right sort of presence. The illusion laid there was rather simpler than the one that’d revealed the Dead King: a young Soninke woman was revealed, but one of broadly similar height and body shape as the feigned translator. Bright runes were visible, carved directly into the skin and looking halfway between mutilation and tattoos. The Empress’ puppet made way to her pulpit with a fluid grace that was all Malicia, impressively conveyed halfway across the continent and to a body not all that like her own save in the dark tone of the skin.

Whatever amusement I’d savoured while pondering the practicalities of that theatrical reveal went up in smoke when I turned my gaze to Black. He was looking at Malicia’s puppet with the naked desperation of a drowning man, eyes roaming her form almost obsessively. It took me a moment to understand why. My father was looking for a hint, any hint at all, that this might not truly be Dread Empress Malicia. That it could be a trick or some sort of fake. My fingers clenched as I watched him watch her stand before her desk and he was forced to admit there was no such thing. Something died in those pale green eyes, at that moment, and I realized Scribe had been right. Even now, even after the betrayals and the lies and the mistakes, he’d still intended on finding a way for the Empress to live. And when Amadeus of the Green Stretch grasped the truth, truly came to look in the eye, that he was about to be robbed that recourse? A light went out in his gaze that I suspected none still living could bring back.

Something flickered across his pale face, a weighing of choices, and then something like disgust. In the heartbeat that followed, he pushed back his chair and rose to his feet.

“Alaya,” Amadeus said in Kharsum, voice only barely clinging to calm, “this is a very grave mistake.”

Sigil-marked and burning with hollow fire, the puppet that Malicia rode turned empty eyes to Black. Considering, until she spoke.

“Unless oaths were sworn to the crown of Callow, the correct placement for the Empire’s delegation is behind me,” the Empress replied in Lower Miezan.

“This is madness ,” Black hissed, still in Kharsum. “Dark Days protocols and alliances with Keter will not take us through the storm, Alaya. I have secured other means, if you would simply let me-”

The eyes of nearly the entire hall were on the two of them. I wondered how many people could even speak Kharsum, here. It was not even all that common in Praes, much less Callow, and so I doubted even the Procerans had a translator for the main orc dialect. I hid a wince at my teacher’s mistake a moment before he bit his tongue over it, but it was too late.

“Let you?” the Empress softly replied. “Am I then to hide in your shade like a child and let the rules of power to be decided in this ostentatious scrap heap of a city? I think not.”

Something like a twitch of pain marred the puppet’s face.

“Stand behind me,” the Empress ordered, asked, pleaded. “The game can still be won, Amadeus. I yet know how.”

I bit my tongue, knowing from experience that my stepping between those two ancient monsters had ever only earned the disapproval of both, and followed across the face of the green-eyed man the war between the Carrion Lord and Amadeus of the Green Stretch. One had followed and trusted Dread Empress Malicia for most of his life, murdered and sacrificed and bled to see the order they’d built together stand. Yet of the two that creatures was the one that’d turn on the Empress. Not easily, or without cause, but turn on her it would. If the gears turned and the verdict churned out was that victory demanded the blood of his dearest friend, the steel would be whet red once more.

The other, though, was that part of Black that had seen a barren wasteland of empire and wanted to mend it. That’d made a family of a young mage hunted by the most powerful practitioner in the empire, offered friendship to a woman whose curse had devoured her life and charmed the likes of the Ranger and the Assassin through the strange mixture of devotion and black-hearted ruthlessness. The same boy who’d struck a friendship with a tavern girl long before either of them ever saw the Tower’s hulking shape on the horizon.

It was the part of him I loved, if not the one I’d taken lessons from. And I thought it might just be the part of him that, right now, was murmuring in the back of his mind about one last leap of faith. Murmuring that by abandoning Malicia now all the darkest fears – and Gods, how could she not fear when it’d been armies led by Black and loyal to him above all else that saw her rise to the throne? – would be confirmed by his own hesitation, his own weakness. Guilt and love and the chains of a loyalty that had been well-worn long before my birth. I was my father’s daughter, and so this I understood.

As he’d no doubt understood, when for the heraldry of the noble house of Foundling I chose not some glorious beast or some fearsome weapon. I did not even choose to ape the dignity of the Fairfaxes and the Albans by stealing their arms so I might better suckle at the love they’d earned among my people. I’d chosen a silver balance, set on the stark bleak blackness of the man who’d taught me, and on it I’d weighed a crown and sword. Right and might. Principle and necessity.

The wants of the woman, as Akua had once told me, and the needs of the queen.

The thing was, that as much as we – Malicia, Black, myself – were pretending this was a war, it wasn’t. It was the inexorable sound of a noose being pulled tight, the song of an arrow before it tore flesh. It was the march of the inevitable, because while I believed it was Amadeus of the Green Stretch that both the Empress and I cared for, that boy was just who he’d been born to be. The Carrion Lord, the Black Knight, the cold-eyed and stead-handed killer that broke armies and conquered nations? That was who he’d chosen to be. And so, inch by inch, the inevitable one. Those hungry, callous cogs of steel ground up the boy that’d been and the girl he’d loved.

And when the steel came free of the last parts with a wet squelch, the Carrion Lord breathed out shallowly.

“It was never a game, Alaya,” he gently said. “It is a mould, and it will be broken .”

They shared a long glance, in a hall where the great and powerful of an entire continent had gathered to speak and yet not a single whisper could be heard – only utter, oppressive silence. What he was going to say now, I’d predicted. I’d told Cordelia what he would say, what would drive him to it, with a degree of exactness that now chilled me. Dark hair flecked with grey, back straight as an arrow, the Carrion Lord turned to address the hall with eerie calm.

“I address now all who would lend ear, mighty of Calernia come to this hall,” the green-eyed man said, in perfect Chantant.

Translators hurriedly whispered as he spoke, for those who did not speak the tongue.

“The so-called Dread Empress Malicia I hereby denounce as unfit to reign and having lost the favour of the Gods Below through carelessness and misrule,” the Carrion Lord said. “I claim the Tower as Dread Emperor of Praes, and ask for the recognition of the delegates to speak in its name.”

Sometimes, I thought, it was an ugly thing to be right.

Winter II

“Good for a day, a man. For a year, a priest. For a decade, a Chosen. For a lifetime, a fable.”
– Alamans saying

“The western shore has held,” Princess Rozala Malanza announced.

There was a round of cheers, and even some of the royals among the crowd bent their pride enough to participate. Hanno found the customs of the Principate interesting, for much of the rules that bound their behaviour to each other were unwritten. This very assembly, for example. Though the city of Cleves was ruled by Prince Gaspard, who had commanded the defence of the principality for three months before the relieving armies arrived, when assembly was had in the prince’s hall the man always deferred to Rozala Malanza. The Princess of Aequitan, while leading such assemblies, in turn always offered Prince Gaspard the courtesies due to a close friend even though as far as Hanno could tell they could hardly stand each other. The grey-haired man that ruled Cleves was said to stand opposed to much the younger princess’ politics, for though he was only a lukewarm supporter of the First Prince he’d been hostile to the alliance led by Prince Amadis of Iserre – of which, Hanno had been informed, Rozala Malanza was part.

The almost bewildering amount of subtleties to every interaction between the princes and princesses in Cleves was difficult to understand, though often Hanno grasped the shape of what was taking place. Though what some had called his father’s unfortunate marriage meant that even within his citizenship tier he’d never been seriously considered for any of the committees, the dark-haired man himself had once been scribe to the Outer Tribunal. He’d seen the ways the higher tiers heeded conventions of their own that no mere scribe could understand, and the unseen pull those could have on the exercise of all things. Still, some aspects of this remained clear to his eye. In matters of war, Princess Rozala Malanza stood first among equals in Cleves. Even orders from the Iron Prince, fighting fiercely to reclaim Hainaut from the dead, would only ever be taken as suggestions – though suggestions well-heeded, for no man was half so practiced at the war against the Dead King as Prince Klaus Papenheim.

The First Prince of Procer was the highest authority of all, in principle, but she had so far refrained from handing out orders through her Order of the Red Lion. She was said, though, to be moving stone and sea to ensure supplies arrived on time and aplenty on all three northern fronts while pursuing a campaign of her own against the Carrion Lord’s army in the heartlands. Cordelia Hasenbach’s readiness to support a political enemy – Rozala Malanza’s hatred of the First Prince and her allies was an open secret – as well she could and without then meddling at every turn for the sake of the defence of Cleves had impressed the White Knight. Restraint and farsightedness were laudable traits, but especially encouraging when displayed by the ruler who was to be the backbone of the war against Keter.

“Princess Adeline’s army held the beaches until the enemy retreated, and Cantal horse intercepted a flanking force that’d made shore unseen,” Princess Rozala said. “Yet we would all have been days too late, if not for the intervention of the Chosen: we thank the Witch of the Woods and the Valiant Champion, who held the main force at Sengrin for three days and three nights.”

Another cheer followed, even more enthusiastic than the first. The royalty and their attendants turned their gaze to the heroines of the day, which Princess Rozala had requested attend – Raphaella usually did not, and Antigone had confessed finding the proceedings enormously tedious. The Champion was grinning as she preened under their praise, though, and the Witch seeming rather taken aback. Antigone detested cities save for the towering and airy labyrinths of the Gigantes, and as a rule was less than fond of crowds. She’d been forced to suffer both for some time during the defence of Cleves, which was why she was always so eager to take the field against the dead far from the capital whenever opportunity arose. Which was why she’d no notion of how high in the esteem of the Procerans she had risen, the mystery of her mask and aversion to speaking with them only adding to her allure. Already three poems describing the heartbreaking beauty she was hiding under the clay were floating around the city, one even rumoured to have been written by the eldest son and heir of Prince Gaspard.

“It was a victory, and one worth celebrating, yet we must not lower our guard,” Princess Rozala said. “The Dead still have a beachhead at Trifelin, and we’ve reason to believe the attacks on the western shore were meant to draw away some of our forces before an assault from the east.”

The mere mention of the name of Trifelin cast a shroud over what had been a rambunctious assembly. After the siege of Cleves was first broken and the armies under Princess Rozala bolstered the defences, a general offensive had been undertaken to reclaim the shores that’d fallen to the Dead King’s first wave of corpses. Along the shores of Lake Pavin, to the west, the campaign had largely been a success: Prince Alejandro of Segovia had ridden out with much of the Proceran horse and shattered the warbands that’d been ravaging the countryside. Even as a second wave of foot under the Princess of Orne had begun to march there to thoroughly sweep and then garrison the coast, near two thirds of the living armies in the principality had marched in pursuit of the retreating undead army that’d besieged Cleves. The pursuit had led to a mining village by the name of Trifelin, perhaps a day’s march from the northern coast and less than a week’s march from the border with Hainaut. The White Knight still remembered the battle that’d raged there, the utter brutality of it. It’d been the harshest defeat the defenders had been inflicted so far.

The Dead, they later learned, had found a shepherd’s trail leading to the shore of the Tomb that’d allowed them to quietly mass numbers. It’d been an ambush, the purported retreat of the undead a trap to bait the Proceran armies away from walls and defensible grounds. The undead had poured in from the sides when the army was still stretched out in a marching column, archers firing volleys one after another and undead leaping off slopes heedlessly. Often they were simply aiming to kill a soldier with their fall so that the dead man could be raised and turned against his comrades in the heartbeat that followed. It’d been bloody fighting, and Hanno’s order to send the Fortunate Fool ahead of the column had seemingly not paid the dividends he’d expected. Yet the tide had begun to turn when the Mirror Knight struck at a cliff until it collapsed atop him, allowing for a countercharge by Rozala Malanza’s cavalry that swept through the undead archers on one side. It was only moment later that the White Knight was found by the Fortunate Fool, who as it turned out had fallen down a crumbling mine shaft, and only then was the full horror of the trap revealed.

Trifelin was a mining village, and even as Cleves was besieged the dead had been expanding on the tunnels. The Hidden Horror had been laying this trap for months. The Fool’s warning made the difference: Hanno found Antigone and told her of what was coming. When the Dead collapse the tunnels under the outstretched army, the Witch still held the grounds aloft for half an hour through sorcery before collapsing unconscious. And so only six thousand died, at the edges of where the Witch had stood and worked her magic, instead of what could easily have been twice that – if not thrice. All those that died in the collapse rose before the dust had even settled, and though the Vagrant Spear and the Valiant Champion led a furious counter-attack against the undead that was the moment where Keter first revealed its Revenants: a dozen dead heroes and villains had hit the lines and broken the last of the Proceran army’s cohesion, routing it within moments. Hanno and Christophe found Arnaud Brogloise’s still mostly untouched infantry and led it in a rearguard action until night fell, which allowed most the army to retreat, but in the dark thousands more were hunted and slain by prowling ghouls.

Casualties at Trifelin numbered over twelve thousand, at the last count, and given that those losses instantly bolstered the Keteran forces by that much there had not been a major offensive in the northeast of Cleves since. The Dead King’s beachhead was being contained by a ring of fortresses, and Hanno had sent two of his own in the region to stiffen resistance, but those measures would not suffice. It was only a matter of time until the Dead resumed a general offensive, and Trifelin was likely to be where the hammer came down from.

“Prince Gaspard,” Princess Rozala said, “I would now invite you to share the latest news from Hainaut.”

Raphaella, disappointed to no longer be the subject of cheering, cast a curious look at him and Hanno shook his head. She was free to leave if she so wished. The Champion wasted no time disappearing into the crowd of officers, many of them clapping her back and speaking to her on her way out. The Witch followed closely behind after watching Hanno for a moment. Back leaning forward, head moving to the right. Apology for abandoning him to such an assembly, even if she felt in her right to do so. He replied straight-backed, rolling his eyes with chin raised and slightly moving to the left. Haughty amusement, without sting. She was chuckling under her mask as she left, curtly refusing to speak with the officers brave enough to address her.

“Prince Klaus caught the dead flatfooted at the Prisoner’s Mercy with his heavy horse and his spears, breaking ten thousand and the latest offensive against the capital,” Prince Gaspard said. “Keter has not fielded a great army since, for fear of losing it as well!”

The cheers that followed were hardy and desperate, for all knew the defence of Hainaut had been a losing battle and should Cleves’ eastern neighbour fall the principality would not be far behind.

“A great victory,” Prince Gaspard said when the cheering died. “Yet to achieve it much of the garrisons in the northern crags had to be stripped empty, and once ceded that ground will not easily be regained. The Iron Prince cautions us that the Dead now hold the shores of Hainaut without contest, and that they may begin marching reinforcements towards our northeast along the shoreline.”

It was an unsettling thought, and one that dimmed the enthusiasm that’d begun to bloom anew.

“An attempt was also made on the life of the Iron Prince and Princess Mathilda of Neustria, by some fresh manner of ghoul,” the Prince of Cleves continued, tone grim. “They speak to the monsters being more cunning than the usual breed, and possessed of the ability to squeeze through very small spaces. Princess Mathilda was attacked in a holdfast as she slept and took a wound.”

Uneasy murmurs passed.

“Mathilda Greensteel informs us that they die just as easily to steel as the rest, and shriek most satisfyingly when struck with fire,” Prince Gaspard drily added.

Laughter and some surprisingly fond words about Lycaonese valour chased away the uneasiness, likely as the Prince of Cleves had meant to achieve.

“I will be sending the Painted Knife to Hainaut to guard against further attempts,” the White Knight spoke into the silence. “The Repentant Magister will accompany her in scholarly capacity. It has been thrice now that undead still unknown to Cleves have been revealed in Hainaut, and I want them studied for weaknesses before they are faced on our walls.”

It would also prevent Christophe and Kallia from coming to blows again. The fury of their last argument had yet to leave them, and it was only a matter of time until it erupted once more. As for Nephele, a month or two proving the knowledge she had learned at the feet of the Magisterium could be used to fight the Enemy would do her a great good, and Hanno’s understanding was that the situation at the capital of Hainaut was a great deal less perilous than at Cleves. At least for the moment. A rest away from the frontlines would help her find her strength again.

“Would the Forsworn Healer not suffice in such capacity?” Prince Arnaud of Cantal called out. “How many Chosen must we lend to the Iron Prince before he grows satisfied?

Several faces darkened in irritation, others betrayed faint embarrassment: the demarcation between those who were not allies of Arnaud Brogloise and those who were. Hanno watched the man mildly. The prince was prone to bluster, and hardly a popular man even with his allies, but he tended to keep his calm when doom came to call. It was the reason he remained tolerated to such extent. That and Rozala Malanza’s deft handling of him, which was why so many eyes turned to the Princess of Aequitan in the wake of her ally’s comment. Still, there was something about Arnaud Brogloise that had him itching for the coin. A sense of wrongness that only the judgement of the Tribunal would truly be able to settle in his mind. Yet that would have been... unwise. If given reason he would without hesitation, but he had not yet been given reason. In some ways it was a shame that Kallia would soon leave, for among the heroes in Cleves her skills at moving unseen were second to none.

“Surely you did not mean to imply that the Chosen are ours to command, Arnaud,” Princess Rozala smilingly said.

The prince’s already blotchy face reddened.

“Of course not,” he said. “Only, perhaps, that in times of war royal wisdom is best heeded and-”

“Royal wisdom was heeded,” Hanno evenly interrupted. “That of the First Prince of Procer, when she granted the heroes of the Tenth Crusade leave to deploy as they would in accompaniment of her armies.”

“And surely one must not court even the shadow of Her Most Serene Highness’ displeasure,” Prince Alejandro of Segovia said, tone masterfully straddling the line between earnest and sardonic.

Prince Gaspard sneered at the handsome younger man in distaste, but all held their tongue. As Hanno understood it, hard words were still occasionally exchanged over the fact that all the reinforcing royals had voted and even agitated against the measures in the Highest Assembly that’d provided gold for the refurbishing of many of the fortress walls they now fought behind. Prince Alejandro was still on occasion heard to bitterly say that Cordelia Hasenbach’s scheme to spruce up Lycaonese lands with Arlesite gold had paid rather unexpected dividends at this late hour, though only in his cups and in carefully chosen company. When the reinforcing princes had first come, for all their help they’d still been remembered by the people of Cleves as the royalty that’d nearly tossed Cleves and Hainault to the dogs so that Iserre would not suffer Praesi raids. Their reputation had starkly improved since, but their offences were not yet forgot.

“As you say,” Hanno agreed. “That aside, the Silent Guardian and the Silver Huntress have now been at the fortress ring for three months. I will be recalling them for rest and recuperation. As this will coincide with rotation of troops among you as well, I would hear of the designated commanders’ preferences.”

He made no promise to heed them, but he would at least listen. The amused look Princess Rozala cast him made it plain she’d noticed as much though the man meant to accompany her own forces, Prince Arnaud Brogloise, seemed blind to the subtlety.

“I’ll want the Witch of the Woods,” the Prince of Cantal said. “And call the fool anyone who‘d choose otherwise.”

“As was explained at previous councils, Antigone’s ability to work great magics means she is best kept in reserve so she can blunt the Enemy’s offensives,” the White Knight patiently replied. “As she did so recently at Sengrin.”

“Offence is the very essence of war, young man,” Prince Arnaud asserted. “Why, if you were under my command we’d already-”

“I thank you for your contribution,” Hanno serenely replied,

His gaze moved to Princess Rozala, ignoring Prince Arnaud’s spluttering.

“I don’t suppose I could talk you into shaking loose the Valiant Champion?” the Princess of Aequitan smiled.

“I had meant to send the Vagrant Spear to relieve the Silver Huntress,” Hanno admitted. “And the two of them...”

The dark-haired princess sharply nodded, too polite to outright grimace. It was not that Raphaella and Sidonia were at odds, much to the contrary. After some stilted awkwardness due to the significance of Raphaella’s Name to Levantines, they’d become fast friends. Which, for women who were bound to the Champion’s line and the Slayer’s line, meant hunting very dangerous monsters together, drinking every bottle of hard liquor at hand and finding people to either brawl or sleep with. Inherently there was nothing terrible about this, but it did tend to cause some degree of damage to their surroundings. Less than ideal, on the frontlines. It also tended to cause betting pools to form, which Hanno had been told Alamans disapproved of on grounds of impiety.

“Lady Spear has a talent for striding the wilds, I’m told,” Rozala said. “A good fit to relieve the Lady Huntress at Hochelin fortress, given the heights. It is Sautefort I am wary of, for they’ve been seeing larger numbers try their walls lately. A steady sort will be needed.”

“I had been considering the Myrmidon,” the White Knight said. “Yet I can see your concern. She is not the most talkative among us.”

She spoke none of the Proceran tongues, but if she stayed with heroes who could understand her native Aenian she’d likely never bother to learn any of them beyond a handful of words. It would have been good for her, the steady fighting and camaraderie slowly easing her into the learning. Hanno was not, however, beyond acceding to larger concerns.

“The Mirror Knight will ride to replace the Silent Guardian, then,” he said.

There was a thrum of satisfaction in the room, as there always was whenever Christophe was mentioned. Though the Procerans had been duly thankful that heroes had come to help their support against the Dead King, it’d rankled some that so many of the Named they must rely on and occasionally obey were nearly all foreigners. The Mirror Knight, very clearly Alamans and of respectable birth, had been the darling of those since they first heard of him. He remained highly popular with Procerans as a whole, helped in that by the unusual strength of his Name. His growth had not been in wild spurts, as it was for some Named, but the steady regularity of it remained troubling to Hanno. What manner of Evil was Christophe meant to fight, that he would need such strength? Something to see to after the war. There were more pressing matters. It might be needed to send someone with the Mirror Knight, Hanno decided. When exposed to long to the admiration of his people without counterpoint, Christophe tended to lapse into regrettable arrogance. A steady presence at his side reminding him that his power was meant to serve and not be gloried in could only do him some good.

“Three cheers for the Mirror Knight, then,” Prince Arnaud of Cantal loudly said.

“And all our other trusted comrades among the Chosen,” Princess Rozala added, a tad more diplomatically.

Wine was promptly sent for. Hanno was not all that fond of the drink, truth be told, or even drinking spirits as a whole. Yet Procerans drank wine by the barrel whenever they had an excuse, toasting even their worst enemies without batting an eye for the right vintage. Attendants returned with glasses already filled – it would be different bottles for the royals and the officers, Hanno suspected – and a shyly smiling young woman in Cleves livery offered him his glass.

“Thank you,” he replied, then paused.

Like an itch on the back of his neck, a hum in his bones. The attendant paled, thinking she’d given offence. Hanno calmly set down his glass on the table to his side.

“I’d suggest taking cover,” he kindly said,

In the same moment he unsheathed his sword, feeling his Name roar in his veins.

“The Enemy comes,” the White Knight roared along with it.

Bells began to ring outside, and a moment later claws the size of a horse tore the ceiling open. A sky-shaking scream erupted from the fanged mouth of the gargantuan winged beast half-revealed through the tears, and even as he felt the Light well up in him the White Knight could not resist but to feel the slightest bit thankful.

The attack, after all, had come before he was forced to drink the wine out of politeness.

Interlude: Rise, Rise

“A treaty is fooling all the people at the right time, an alliance is fooling the right people all the time. A war is when all the people are fools all the time.”
– Prokopia Lekapene, first Hierarch of the League of Free Cities

The Carrion Lord’s spoken Chantant was flawless, the First Prince grudgingly admitted. Almost entirely without accent, too, and it was the tongue the most people in the hall would speak so it’d been the canniest choice. After such an incendiary claim it was no surprise that the hall fell into disarray, a hundred whispers filling the room as loudly as any ringing shout. There were many faces that Cordelia Hasenbach could have watched. The Dead King, the Enemy incarnate, was seated and still not a hundred feet from her. The ‘Firstborn’, whose unknown tongue and strange disposition married to the sudden strategic importance made increasingly important to understand. Even the Carrion Lord himself, who she had watched for some time as he had that terse, charged exchange with the Dread Empress in some eastern tongue. The pale man’s face had turned corpse-like halfway through, like a mask made of wax.

Malicia’s inhabited body was not so expressive, but she’d seemed shaken as well. Perhaps there truly was genuine sentiment between the two of them, Cordelia thought. It hardly mattered, with monsters like those. The First Prince’s gaze had left them before the end, though, turning to the tanned woman leaning back into her seat at the same table. Catherine Foundling’s face had not lost any of the sharp angles that meant no one would ever call her a beauty, but where before she’d seemed sullen there was now a certain... carefreeness. The Black Queen’s eyes had always been what softened her mien to something short of severe, Cordelia considered, but now instead of wild swings of emotion or utter iciness there was an unsettling candidness to what could be glimpsed in them. The First Prince had found her personable, when spoken to face-to-face, which she had not expected.

Which made it all the more chilling that the sequence of events the Black Queen had so offhandedly predicted last night was coming to pass so unerringly.

Cordelia Hasenbach was not above admitting when she had made a mistake, and her early assessments of Queen Catherine had been very much mistaken. She’d taken the lapses in etiquettes, the strange asides and poorly-kept temper to mean that the Black Queen was mediocre diplomat, and in truth little more than a charismatic warlord whose grip on power was maintained by terror in blood. Considering the other woman had since wheedled support out of the Kingdom Under – the likes of which had not been seen since Triumphant’s day! – and somehow become the foremost religious figure of the drow and then leveraged this into the Everdark’s entry into the war, it would be absurd to keep believing as much. And so much of this was absurd already, Cordelia grimly thought. How could anyone have a pitched battle with the Dominion and somehow come out of the slaughter in good odour with the Blood?

No, Foundling was not a mediocre diplomat. She simply disdained the usual means of diplomacy, which had seemed the same when it was through these that Cordelia interacted with her. Her Liesse Accords, which admittedly she professed to be as much the work of Vivienne Dartwick and Hakram Deadhand, were also a diplomatic solution coming from a woman the First Prince had once considered a canny, dangerous thug with an army. It was necessary to reassess what she’d once thought of the Black Queen, for though she was now an ally only a fool kept both eyes on the stag when hunting with a wolf. Cordelia had known all of this, or at least thought she did. Yet looking at Catherine’s Foundling calm face, the barely-veiled sympathy she looked at the Carrion Lord with, she could not help shiver. For all that the Black Queen had yet to even address the hall, every person here had so far danced to the tune of her choice. Cordelia set aside the thoughts and the wariness, striking at the table as her majordomo loudly called for order. The noise withdrew, leaving a palpable sensation of absence in its wake.

“We recognize the words of the Carrion Lord,” the First Prince said. “Yet let it be said, and known, that this conference claims not the authority to install or depose rulers.”

Enthusiastic approval from the Dominion’s tables at that, as they’d been understandably wary of the precedents that might be set today. For all that Levant now stood strong compared to a weakened Procer and bloodied Callow, it would not last forever. None of the Blood wanted foreigners to us this conference as pretext to meddle in Dominion affairs a decade from now, when their power waned and Procer’s waxed. Cordelia waited a beat, for her partner in this intricate dance to step in. The Black Queen rose to her feet, demanding the floor, and a nod from the First Prince to her majordomo had it granted.

“The Wasteland’s affairs are its own,” Catherine Foundling said, then offered the Empress a hard smile, “at least for now. Yet it cannot be denied that the Carrion Lord speaks for the Legion-in-Exiles, and others among the Dread Empire. We may not have the right to crown him, but let us not shy from practical realities for politeness’ sake.”

And there it was. The line that would allow them to hamstring Dread Empress Malicia and bring the Carrion Lord to the table without granting her the wellspring of Praesi support that ‘foreigners attempting to place their chosen candidate atop the Tower’ might otherwise garner. Lord Yannu Marave rose and was passed the right to speak.

“The Dominion backs the right of the Carrion Lord to speak for the Legions-in-Exile and any other who come under his banner,” the Lord of Alava said, his Chantant polished and practiced.

He had been the right choice, the First Prince decided. Razin Tanja was emerging as a rival power among the Blood, and one the Grey Pilgrim was taking an interest in, but he was young and not as skilled a speaker.

“The Kingdom of Callow seconds this,” Vivienne Dartwick said, tone brisk.

A moment passed as the Black Queen raised an eyebrow at the drow.

“The Empire Ever Dark recognizes the Lord of Carrion and his rights,” General Rumena said, sounding amused.

It – Cordelia had learned that the drow eschewed sexes, and found insult in their use – was smiling most unsettlingly, the pale blue eyes that seemed universal to its kind never blinking. It was ancient, the First Prince tell that much by a simple glance. Yet it also looked ancient. Given that the Black Queen had once casually mentioned her attendant, the one they called the Lord of Silent Steps, had been alive before the Conquest and yet looked near boyish the princess had to wonder how long it would take for age to become so visible among one of their kind. Centuries? A thousand years?

“Why don’t you take this one, Leo,” the Tyrant of Helike said, grinning as he winked. “Did I not say that I would allow other voices than my own to be heard?”

The Basileus of Nicae, Leo Trakas, looked hesitant at the sudden offer. The young man was unfortunately not a well-known quantity to her. Until recently his ancient office had been the lesser of the powers in the city-state, largely concerned with stewardship and ceremony while the ruling Strategos truly held the reins. Strategos Nereida Silantis had been an ally of hers, and one cultivated by half a decade of gifts and correspondence as well as fair mediation between Ashur and Nicae. She’d also died when the Tyrant took Nicae and in the chaos Leo Trakas had seized great authority, preventing the nomination of another Strategos. His victories against the Thalassocracy had since ensured he was highly popular in Nicae, though his hold on rule was a great deal more fragile than one would assume at first glance.

He’d be deposed within the month, should he blunder badly enough the people turned against him. The Basileus mastered himself, after a moment, and as Kairos Theodosian had no doubt expected him to do he chose the safe path.

“The League of Free Cities abstains,” Leo Trakas said.

Which left only one vote, until Procer delivered its own.

“The Thalassocracy abstains,” Sitter Ahirom said.

The man had kept his composure, but it was visibly fraying at the seams. As it would be, Cordelia thought. Magon Hadast might have been forced to break alliances to repay a debt of gratitude and prevent the starvation of his people that might follow ingratitude , but keeping company with Keter and Ater was nothing to be proud of. Much less when it was becoming increasingly clear that neither the Crown nor the Tower were quite as masterful as they’d no doubt pretended to be.

“The Principate of Procer supports the motion,” Cordelia Hasenbach crisply spoke into the silence. “Four in favour and two abstentions, the motion passes. The Carrion Lord’s right to speak for the designated peoples is accepted by this hall.”

In the silence that followed, the First Prince of Procer mused, one could almost hear the first spark of civil war in the Wasteland.

—

It had all been going smoothly, which in Vivienne Dartwick’s experience meant the other shoe was due to drop.

The Black Knight – she knew he held the Name no longer, but how could that man ever be anything but the Black Knight in her eyes? – had a seat at the table without this conference and its heart, the Grand Alliance, overreaching by attempting to enthrone him. Most importantly, the careful wording the First Prince had convinced Lord Yannu to employ had deep implications down the line. And any who come under his banner , the large Levantine had said, and the wording had been upheld even if Hasenbach had been careful not to repeat it. It meant that the Black Knight could be offered terms now, lenient ones, and that those terms could then be made to apply to all of Praes should he become Dread Emperor. As Dread Empress Malicia had earned little but hate from those in this hall, any terms she might receive would be decidedly inferior. It was leverage that might tip the scales win favour of supporting the Carrion Lord among certain Praesi, though unless the Empress outright abdicated it was good as certain there’d be a civil war between their supporters.

Not necessarily a long one, given that the loyalties of the Legions of Terror might just swing in his favour hard and early, but Wasteland wars were always nasty stuff.

Another two rounds of the tables saw confirmed the recognition of Dread Empress Malicia – even the Carrion Lord voted in favour, amusingly enough, which made the vote unanimous in favour with Magister Zoe Ixioni’s assent in the name of the League – and another for the Dead King. Ashur abstained on that one, as did the Black Knight, and Nestor Ikaroi of the Secretariat voted against in the name of the League. Malicia was his sworn ally, however, and the Grand Alliance delegations had all been forewarned and agreed on common action, which meant that the majority in favour carried the vote. The King of Death had his seat and his vote, at least for now. Not that the motions had much power outside the strictures of the peace conference: they were a tool to manipulate the rules of this game through formality, not something that could be used to truly produce diplomatic results.

Vivienne had voiced the votes for the Kingdom of Callow both times, Catherine remaining silent. She knew well what it was Cat was doing, giving her the duty to speak for their shared home in front of every great power on Calernia. It was as tacit an endorsement of her as a successor there could be without Vivienne being named a princess, which would be... complicated to accomplish, and likely require her adoption into House Foundling. Setting aside the thoughts, Vivienne forced herself to sharpen her focus on the proceedings. Though the Dead King had yet to speak a word, little more than a grim sculpture of bones, the Empress had no shared such compulsions. With a pleasant, sonorous voice – Vivienne wondered if the body had been picked for it – she opened her part of the dance. The Carrion Lord, a mere landless rebel, had been allowed to address the hall while the rightful ruler of Praes had been denied the same right, she said, which was miscarriage of procedure.

It was not an unexpected assault. Hasenbach had named it a likely avenue, since refusing the Empress would taint the appearance of fair proceedings and accepting would allow her to go on the offensive while bypassing the agreed-on order of affairs. Which would otherwise keep her contained until hours into the talks simply by speaking of very little Praes could weigh in on.

“We recognize the words of Dread Empress Malicia of Praes,” the First Prince said.

Malicia’s mangled puppet smoothly rose to her feet.

“The Dread Empire cedes its speaking right to the Thalassocracy of Ashur,” she smoothly said.

Ah , Vivienne thought, almost grimacing. And there went the first stumble in the plan. Tightening the vise on the opposition by hammering home how isolated the League and the Empire were one motion after another wouldn’t work if Ashur withdrew from the Grand Alliance formally before the talks had even begun. Sitter Ahirom rose to his feet, acknowledging the First Prince’s evenly spoken recognition of his right to speak with a nod.

“I speak now the words of Magon Hadast, citizen of the second tier of the Baalite Hegemony, Sitter of the Eminent Committee,” the man said.

A heartbeat of silence passed.

“As of this day, the Thalassocracy of Ashur declares its withdrawal from the Grand Alliance and all attendant treaties,” Sitter Ahirom said.

Few across the room were surprised, and those that were told much to Vivienne. The Dominion had been brought into this early and the Firstborn had only middling interest in matters unrelated to the war against the Dead King, but the lack of surprise did come as a surprise to Sitter Ahirom himself. It was as the First Prince had speculated, then: Ashur was good as blind on the continent, and clutching at any offered driftwood that would prevent it from drowning. More interestingly, there was a great deal of surprise among the League’s delegation . Not Magister Ixioni, though , Vivienne thought. Helike and Stygia were traditionally kept close alliance when the League was at war, as they fielded its finest armies and typically both benefited greatly from strife. A Tyrant’s rule also meant that Below held the reins in both city-states, buoying Evil in the Free Cities for a span.

Delos and Atalante had both had no idea. The general from Bellerophon still looked lost and afraid of asking questions, but the two Penthesians were calm. Better at hiding their thoughts, or in the know?

“Penthes?” Vivienne murmured.

“Theodosian owns and informs them, I’d wager,” the Black Knight softly said. “Prodocius has an emperor’s ambition and the wits of a well-bred trout while Honorion is afflicted by that peculiar condition where one comes to believe that gold makes up for any and all shortcomings. Scribe has theorized the Tyrant ensured they’d be the last two claimants because they are singularly inept at anything but banquets and squabbling.”

“If he leans towards one we could back the other,” Hakram suggested.

“Tyrant’s too canny for that,” Cat grunted. “He’ll have them both convinced he’s secretly helping them against the other.”

“The Empire has influence there as well, through trade,” the Black Knight said. “Penthes is a dead end. Nicae might not be.”

Basileus Leo Trakas looked like someone had slapped him across the face. He was a handsome one, Vivienne thought, though less so when his eyes were narrowed in surprised anger.

“He doesn’t know about the ships yet,” Vivienne quietly said. “Otherwise he’d be storming out. Trakas only thinks he’s about to get strong-armed into backing off Ashur by his own side.”

“Agreed,” Catherine said. “He’s not smooth enough to keep it in the pot if he gets knifed that hard and deep in the back.”

“Then we approach him during the recess,” Hakram said. “We lack proof beyond the Tyrant’s own words, which only a fool would take, but the groundwork can be laid.”

“Hasenbach tried to use Nicae as a counterweight for Kairos and that went over about as well as pepper in a kennel,” Cat reminded them.

“If enough of the League’s armies keep withdrawing to their territory, it no longer matters that Theodosian is dominant,” the Black Knight noted. “He’ll no longer have the strength to collapse Procer or invade Callow, which effectively muzzles him.”

Which would be ideal, as far as she was concerned, since acting against the madman outright was likely to see them burned. If he could instead be dragged back into the lesser squabbles of the League of Free Cities until the war against Keter was brought to an end it should be significantly less risky of a proposition. Which meant bending the individual city-states, and that would require significantly more pressure than the coalition had brought to bear so far.

“We need to strike while they’re still uncertain,” Vivienne said.

Catherine looked at her curiously.

“We out it now, Cat,” Vivienne said. “It’s out of the order, but then so was this. It ought to put them on the back foot again.”

The Queen of Callow considered it for a moment, then nodded.

“Hakram,” she said, “find me an in.”

The orc’s brow creased as he put his superb memory to work.

“This isn’t a motion, it’s an address,” the Adjutant said. “Which means we can ask for right of reply on if what we speak of is associated. If the First Prince grant it, which I’d venture to assume.”

Catherine’s lips quirked into half a smile and she turned.

“Do it.”

Vivienne started in surprise, looking at the woman that was both her ruler and her friend.

“This isn’t a vote, Cat,” she said. “It’s-”

“I know what it is,” Catherine said. “It was your notion, and a good one. Besides, you’re the one who’ll reign under it. Speak the words.”

Vivienne breathed out shallowly. But it was too late to flinch, to fear. It’d been too late since that night in Laure where she’d chosen to bet on the Squire. She rose to her feet.

“The Kingdom of Callow request right of reply,” Vivienne Dartwick said.

Cordelia Hasenbach, tall and fair and with eyes like chips of ice, considered her for a moment.

“We recognize the words of Lady Dartwick, heiress-designate to Callow,” the First Prince said.

“Pertaining the Grand Alliance, as addressed by Sitter Ahirom,” Vivienne said, “we declare now before Gods and men that the Kingdom of Callow is a member and signatory.”

Interlude: All Ye Villains

“In studying our histories I have cast aside old mistakes, instead embracing fresh and interesting ones.”
– Dread Empress Atrocious, later devoured by man-eating tapirs

The games being played on this marble floor, Hakram thought, were no less deadly than any played axe in hand. Perhaps even deadlier, for an axe took one life at a time while here a streak of ink and a sharp phrase could kindle the death of thousands. Most of his kind despised the ways of the Tower’s court: the poisons drunk and spoken, the colourful clothes worth a manse and the alliances that came and went faster than the tides. It was not that orcs knew nothing of treachery or cunning ways, for though the Adjutant had long left behind the Steppes he still remembered the spoken histories and there were betrayals aplenty in the tales. Some were spoken of as reverently as great deeds unsullied, for though the treachery was not in question neither was the greatness.

Aslog Ironfoot’s warbands turning on Warlord Gorm at the Battle of the Lights, bringing bloody end to Eldest Horde. Dagmar Hardteeth allying with the Queen of Okoro to murder their rivals by sorcery and surprise at the gathering of the thaw . And lesser betrayals, too were spoken of, not worthy of legend. Not even a century ago the Blackspear Clan had broken alliance with the Howling Wolves at the incitement of the Painted Dogs, allowing warbands through their territory, and then ambushed the returning Dogs to take the spoils of the cattle-raids. No legend had come of this, no tale save that Blackspear blood flowed without honour. No, Hakram Deadhand did not believe the Clans to be made of finer stuff than the rest of Creation, for their history spoke otherwise time and time again.

Yet his people disdained those who made sport of their own word, those who pretended to valour and honour while acting otherwise. And there was a sense of that, hanging around this great hall. Vivienne’s words were ringing still, yet the harvest of surprise they reaped was meagre indeed. A few of the Tyrant’s playthings, the Thalassocracy’s man – who like the nation he stood for was this day isolated and out of his depths, ship bound to currents unknown – and those few scribes and translators too low in status to have warranted warning. The Dread Empress of Praes, wearing a mutilated and marked body like a coat, betrayed no surprise. Neither did the grinning devil known as Kairos Theodosian, or the utterly still corpse inhabited by the Dead King.

It was the first of these that Hakram was most wary of. Malicia had lost the reins of much she once commanded, but the most dangerous part of the Empress had ever been her boldness and clever mind, neither of which had been taken from her. Catherine thought her half-spent a force, with jackals circling the Tower and her realm deeply wounded, and dangerous mostly in that way a desperate villain tended to be. The Adjutant was not so certain. The Empress had not even attempted to bring the Carrion Lord to her side, by scrying or sent agent, this he knew for a fact: as the Eyes had people in the Army of Callow, so did the Jacks have people among the Legions-in-Exile. And the Scribe would have forewarned them, if those eyes were fooled, for the Adjutant understood her in a way most frightful.

He would act in similar manner, if Catherine was preparing to throw away her life and life’s work.

And so while the hall twisted and turned, twining around the already half-known revelation that the Grand Alliance had known of Ashur’s unfaithfulness and behind the Thalassocracy’s own back prepared answer of its own, Hakram Deadhand watched the Empress. Malicia was not beloved of his people as her right hand had been, still was, for unlike the Carrion Lord she had neither been warlord nor tireless defender. Yet she was respected, by the wise among the Clans, for having enacted the Reforms without needing to cram them down the throat of the High Lords by civil war as the Black Knight’s iron-handed ways might well have required. She had been good the orcs in a way few of her predecessors could boast, and never given slight without reason nor meddled in the affairs of the Clans beyond the old rights of the Tower.

Malicia had been a fair ruler to his people in most regards, Hakram thought, and looking upon the puppet-thing she now wore he could not bring himself to believe her to have gone the way of the Old Tyrants. The Empress had bought and paid for the Doom of Liesse, it could not be denied, yet meant to use is to serve the principles she had once writ in her treatise ‘The Death of the Age of Wonders’ . She’d since used only the blades of assassins, sharp intrigue and the sole doomsday weapon of the Warlock that was already known to Calernia. Still Water was a thing of terror, true, but it should not be forgot that in the eyes of most in this room that terror had already been laid at the Empress’ feet.

She lost little by using it, and gained form the use a great fleet as well as means to influence Ashur into leaving the Grand Alliance. It had not been a careless or desperate act, he thought. Which meant Malicia’s keen edge had not faded, and nothing of the play taking place in this hall was a coincidence. Not even that raw thing that the Carrion Lord’s voice had carried, when he good as begged for a reason not to turn on her. It’d be a damned cold thing, making that cut on purpose.

But cold was oft the winner, in Wasteland games.

“Catherine,” the Adjutant whispered in Kharsum, leaning closer to her. “I think we are being had.”

Tanned face set into a calm look as she studied the hall, his warlord slowly nodded.

“There’s no swing in them,” the Black Queen murmured. “This isn’t their game. We misread them, Hakram.”

As was often the case whenever Catherine’s eyes narrowed and her twisty mind wandered down paths the rest of them could only dimly glimpse, Hakram was forced to take a moment to parse what she’d said. Not enough swing . As in the opposition was not putting up a fight, and so without pause she had decided it meant they saw what was happening as not worth fighting over. It might be argued instead, Hakram knew, that Callow’s entering of the Grand Alliance was good as certain, and so the opposition had not considered it something that could be fought. Yet the Adjutant’s instincts sung in accord with his queen’s, for one did not face the longest-reigning Dread Empress in the history of the Wasteland and the King of Death himself and received so little ‘swing’, as his warlord had said.

Vivienne sat down even as a clarification was requested by the current speaker for the League of Free Cities – Basileus Leo Trakas once more – as to the veracity of the statement made by Lady Dartwick. Confirmation from the First Prince and Lord Yannu Marave followed.

“If they have no stake in this, then their victory lies not in a contested field,” the Carrion Lord quietly said.

“That would mean they’re not looking to get anything out of this conference,” Vivienne said, her Kharsum still a little ragged even though they regularly practiced together. “So why are they even here?”

Catherine’s hand half-reached to the pockets sown within her cloak, before she remembered it would be unseemly for her to light her pipe before so many eminent rulers. She forced it back down and let out an annoyed hiss through her teeth. Odds were, Hakram fondly thought, that she did not even realize how around greenskins she tended to mimic their manners. That particular manner of hissing couldn’t properly be done without goblin teeth, for unlike theirs human teeth had no gaps when put together, but more than once Adjutant had seen goblins shoot her almost awestruck looks when she did it before them. There was a reason half the goblins in the Army of Callow considered her to be a Matron in human flesh, and contrary to what Indrani kept insinuating it wasn’t the height. Well, not only the height.

“Where else are they going to get a gathering like this?” Catherine said. “What happens in the conference is as dust to them, I bet. But they’ve got an audience with the powerful of most Calernia here, don’t they? They’re hear for the ears, not the tongues.”

Utter silence seized the room, sudden and oppressive. Half the hall was watching the same thing, and Adjutant followed their gaze. The Dead King he saw, had moved for the very first time since his body sat. His skull had turned to gaze at Catherine, hollow sockets empty and unblinking. The slightest of tremors was going through the skeletal thing, Adjutant saw, and for a moment he did not understand. Then he did, and his blood went cold.

The Dead King was looking at Catherine Foundling, and shaking as he laughed .

—

The Enemy was laughing.

Cordelia Hasenbach was not one to boast of bravery, for hers were not the gifts of courage on the field, yet neither did she consider herself to be faint of heart. And yet the sight of the Hidden Horror’s silent tremors of amusement sent a shiver up her spine. That the monster was gazing unerringly at the Black Queen as he did only made it eerier. The blonde princess did not allow it to reach her face, or seep in her eyes, instead thinking of Hannoven. Of the city broken once more, walls torn down and her kinsmen slaughtered to the last. Cordelia thought of the brave men and women who’d died on those walls, keeping dawn from failing just a little while longer, and when cold wroth roared through her veins she fed it the fear. Composure returned to her, for that anger was an old friend, and finally she gestured for the page standing behind her table to step forward. At her side, Agnes suddenly stirred.

“Magon Hadast was killed,” the Augur said.

Agnes, she saw, was staring at the Carrion Lord. The page passed Cordelia a sealed scroll, bearing scarlet wax stamped with the heraldry of the Order of the Red Lion. She set it down and turned a sharp gaze on her cousin.

“Is he dead now,” Cordelia whispered, “or is he going to die?”

Agnes blinked sleepily, a look of utter frustration flickering across her face. It took her a moment to speak again, as if she had to piece together once more when and where she was.

“Soon,” the Augur said. “Many branches but always he dies. The spider waited until he was too deep in the web to turn back. There is nothing anyone can do. Too quick. All the paths are dead ends.”

She hesitated, scowling.

“They are learning,” she admitted.

The spider, Cordelia thought. There were some who called the Scribe the Webweaver, in the Wasteland, yet the Augur had used the word before to mean another. The Assassin, who more than once had tried to take her own life and that of people dear to her. Had this been the order of the Carrion Lord, then? The other villain was said to answer to him alone. Ashur had made bargain with Malicia, and so Magon Hadast was to die? It would sow chaos, Cordelia admitted to herself, until the old man’s successor consolidated power. The heir that’d been groomed before had died at Thalassina and now only distant relatives remained, none of which would be a deft hand a navigating the Thalassocracy’s labyrinth of committees and bureaucracy. It was still unacceptable, if it was truly the Carrion Lord’s order.

Magon Hadast had long been her ally, and for his defection now she blamed him not as the Grand Alliance had failed him before he it. He might yet return, besides, given time enough for it. To have him so casually ordered slain was a foul thing, though no less than should be expected form a rabid animal like the Carrion Lord.

“Darkness looms, Cordelia,” Agnes murmured. “Tarry not in opening the scroll.”

Lips tightening in sudden wariness, the First Prince reached for the parchment and broke the seal. She unfurled the scroll and her eyes moved carefully across the contents. This was not a direct report but instead the welding of several, from across broad swaths of Procer. Three names in particular caught her eye: Prince Otto Reitzenberg, Prince Gaspard Langevin and Princess Beatrice Volignac. The ranking commanders on the three northern fronts of the Principate, at least in principle. Prince Otto’s words were coming from the Morgentor, the last fortress held in Twilight’s Pass, and though he cautioned of the Enemy possibly laying a trap Gaspard of Cleves and Beatrice of Hainaut were both seeing the same thing. And like Prince Otto they’d followed the dead carefully. Cordelia turned to the awaiting page.

“One whose authority was the scroll sent?” she curtly asked.

“Anselme of Beaudry, Your Highness,” the man quietly replied.

A telling detail. Anselme of Beaudry was the ranking officer of the Order of the Red Lion in Salia, and Cordelia had chosen him for that office in large part because his cautious and meticulous nature. He would not have sent such a scroll without first making certain there had been no misunderstanding or sudden change. The First Prince quietly thanked and dismissed the page, mind racing, before glancing meaningfully at one her closest attendant. The young woman approached discreetly.

“Have word passed to the Callowan and Levantine delegations that I will put forward an extraordinary motion for immediate recess and I would request they support it,” Cordelia said. “There is urgent need for a private discussion between us.”

Cordelia allowed time for the messages to be passed, through Razin Tanja for the Dominion and the heiress to the Barony of Harrow for Callow. When the First Prince of Procer asked for immediate recess soon after, the vote in favour was unanimous. The Enemy’s gazed moved towards her as it deigned to vote for the first time that day, silently raising a hand in approval.

The Dead King had yet to speak even once, and some part of Cordelia Hasenbach felt blind dread at that realization.

—

Half an hour of recess had been voted on, and Hakram found himself part of the handful of guests invited into a nearby parlour by the First Prince. The Blood were likely to be brought in as well, he guessed, for whatever it was that Cordelia Hasenbach had learned it seemed to concern all signatories of the Grand Alliance. The Carrion Lord’s presence along with Catherine, Vivienne and himself was a reality all involved politely refrained from looking in the eye, as the man was deeply despised in Procer and might well have been excluded from such talks if not for the Queen of Callow’s influence. It was an almost amusing turn, that after early years of relying of the Black Knight’s power and influence it was not the same man who was relying on his former pupil’s instead.

There was an almost feverish energy to Cordelia Hasenbach, Adjutant saw when they entered the parlour. Though she was composed as ever, she was standing instead of seated and looking at her gave the sense she had a burning urge to pace that only manners were keeping at bay. Catherine limped in ahead, eyes considering as she took in the sight of the full roster of the Blood as well Princess Rozala. Liveried servants offered refreshments that all refused, and Hakram noted with exasperated amusement that his warlord’s eyes were lingering a little longer than necessary on Rozala Malanza. Half the Blood too, though he was surprised that among the men she seemed to prefer the almost orcish frame of Yannu Marave to Razin Tanja’s, who was much closer in age.

As she was less than discreet he wondered if offence might accidentally been given, but if he was reading the expression correctly Lady Aquiline Osena looked more flattered than anything else by the roving eye. He met Vivienne’s eyes in shared aggravation behind Catherine’s back, though he figured at least they should be pleased she’d not been undressing the First Prince of Procer with her eyes. That might go over poorly, he thought. As the others advanced and went to stand with the other nobles Hakram remained at the back near the threshold, where he could watch from a distance. A set of eyes removed from the thick of it was often more useful than another wagging tongue, he’d found, and he’d always disliked wandering into arguments without first taking the measure of all that was being said.

“Thank you all for coming,” Cordelia Hasenbach gravely said. “And for your trust in aiding my motion.”

“You seem to have received news,” Lady Itima Ifriqui said, rather bluntly.

“I have,” the First Prince agreed. “I have received reports from all three northern fronts against Keter, and they all speak to the same truth: the dead are retreating.”

Exclamations of surprise from many here followed, though not Hakram Deadhand or the queen that had chosen him as much as he had chosen her. Catherine Foundling’s hand went inside her cloak and Adjutant, Name tugging at his feet, was moving before she could even begin stuffing the pipe with a satchel of wakeleaf. He struck a match a heartbeat before she extended her pipe, lighting it neatly, and was offered a thankful flash of pearly teeth before stepping back. The nerve of the Lord of Silent Steps, that it’d think itself fit to step in between the ordained cogs of fate with its little moving tricks. You didn’t need to move swift as an arrow to see too things, just leave at the right time moving to the right pace.

“Does the Hidden Horror seek to hold the northern shores against us?” Lady Aquiline frowned. “It hardly seems necessary, given his advantages.”

“It will allow us time to bring our armies to bear, regardless,” Lady Itima said. “A blunder, this.”

Catherine blew out an acrid stream of smoke that had Lord Yannu wrinkling his nose in distaste at the smell.

“No,” the Black Queen said, “it wasn’t. We just got knifed in broad daylight, make no mistake about that.”

It amused Hakram a great deal that though several of the great nobles here suppressed distasted as the spoken ‘us’, not a single one of them denied it. It seemed that his warlord’s usefulness had at last outstripped the distaste these righteous folks had for the colour of her cloak.

“You believe this to be a scheme,” Cordelia Hasenbach said, then sharply nodded. “I agree. This is a poor decision by the eye of a general, which means it was made by another.”

“They’re going to offer us a truce out there,” Catherine said, jabbing a thumb towards the wall.

The wrong one, Hakram drily noted, if she meant to point towards the hall.

“They?” Lord Yannu calmly asked.

“This is, if not outright the plan of Dread Empress Malicia, at least in part her notion,” the Carrion Lord tiredly said. “This sort of manoeuvre is her very signature: weakening the opposition then posing great incentive to keep a truce that allows her to further work on dismantling her enemies without the direct use of force.”

First Prince Cordelia would not doubt be the first of that western lot to grasp what exactly it had meant, when the Hidden Horror had extended Catherine an offer to sign the Liesse Accords last night. The implications of it, in the long term.

“We have no reason to accept this truce even if it offered,” Razin Tanja flatly said. “We war against Keter to the end, and Dread Empress Malicia makes herself enemy to all that live through alliance with it.”

Vivienne Dartwick had spent years in the shade of one of the great villains of their age and yet more in the service of another, so it was no surprise she caught on quick.

“If the decision was made solely in this room, you would be right,” Vivienne grimly said.

“They will be seeding rumours of the offer of truce even as we speak,” Cordelia Hasenbach told them all. “In Salia and everywhere they can, which given the reach of the Dread Empire and the Tyrant of Helike is far and wide.”

Her lips thinned.

“There will be riots if we push for prosecuting a war against the Dead King in the face of offered peace while the north is months away from collapse,” the First Prince said. “Mayhaps even rebellion.”

“The odds are strong that the Empress will declare a treaty of mutual protection with Keter,” Lord Amadeus calmly said. “The Dead King ought to agree, as otherwise there would be free hand to settle his sole reliable ally.”

“Why should we pursue if the Hidden Horror retreats to his lands?” Lord Yannu Marave bluntly asked. “Is that not the victory we sought to achieve?”

The King of Death had not even yet spoken, Adjutant darkly thought, and already he was drawing blood among the Grand Alliance’s ranks.

“You would call this victory?” Razin Tanja scathingly replied. “Keter coming and going as it pleases, massacring any who oppose it?”

“Are we then to send armies to die in the Kingdom of the Dead for the sake of your boyish swagger?” Lord Yannu harshly retorted.

“Better honourable death than a coward’s disgrace,” Lady Aquiline sneered.

“This is what he wants,” Princess Rozala said, voice cutting through the rising noise. “Chaos among our ranks. It is why he is marching north instead of south, because if he does not we are a threat .”

“Well said,” First Prince Cordelia calmly added. “Make no mistake, my friends, the Enemy cares nothing for peace. He has only ever known truce, and ever broken it when suited him.”

“We have yet to speak of the League,” Lady Itima said. “The Tyrant offers aid to their wicked lot and sows chaos in his own ranks. It is madness, and I would not let a hound gone sick lounge at my threshold for long.”

“That is the nature of Kairos Theodosian,” Catherine said. “He will set fires until either the world is ash or he is.”

She had not spoken loudly, but it commanded the attention of all in the parlour. She blew out another stream of smoke, visibly savouring the leaf.

“Can’t set fires if there’s nothing left, though,” she idly continued. “And that’s what happens if the Dead King wins. So I’d suggest we all save ourselves some trouble and invite the Tyrant of Helike in here.”

She grinned.

“I’m rather curious how long it’ll take him to sell out the King of Death, this time.”

Interlude: So Smile, Tyrants

“And so as night fell over the Blessed Isle, his Dread Majesty sent across the river the corpse of Prince Robert and the captured Princess Juliana, still bound in chains, for when released she had bit off the ear of the High Lord of Okoro. King Selwyn Fairfax rode halfway across the bridge, where he thus addressed His Dread Majesty: ‘You have fought this war grimly on the field and gallantly beyond. Would that you had been born west of the river, under a virtuous star.’ And so His Dread Majesty replied: ‘For having been born east of the river I became instead a man to pluck stars from the sky. Is that not a higher virtue?’”
– Extract from ‘Commentaries on the Campaigns of Dread Emperor Terribilis the Second’

To match the coming Damned, Chosen had been sent for.

Because Creation was a strange and ironic thing, Rozala Malanza thought, this had been the suggestion of Catherine Foundling and opposed largely by Cordelia Hasenbach. Not that the First Prince would be so uncouth as to risk offending the Dominion by implying its favourite son was anything other than a treasured ally. There’d been talk instead that the Peregrine’s presence might incite the Tyrant to misbehave, that surely the White Knight himself would be enough. Princess Rozala suspected that the First Prince had known it would fail, and it had, but had allowed herself to vent a sliver of personal dislike in as harmless a manner she could. That Hasenbach despised the Peregrine was no surprise to her, not since she’d heard the full story of what had taken place at Saudant. The sleepy little fishing village by the shores of Lake Artoise that had been butchered to bring the Carrion Lord to heel, leaving not a single survivor. Not even children.

It had shaken Rozala’s high esteem of the Chosen, to hear this. A greater good had been achieved by the act, that much could not be denied. How many more dozens of thousands would have died if the Legions of Terror slipped the noose in Iserre to ravage the western principalities as well? Yet it’d been a grave evil, that too could not be denied, and one dealt unto a sworn ally. The First Prince’s view of the matter was without nuance, but the Princess of Aequitan could not quite bring herself to share it in full. She remembered still the Grey Pilgrim saving thousands of lives during the Battle of the Camps, and almost as many after when he went from wounded to wounded and worked his healing to exhaustion. It had been an ugly choice the old hero made, and one he had no right to make. But did they not breathe a little easier for it? Were they not, behind the outrage at the lives taken and the brutality of the act, all a little grateful for what had come of it?

The dark-haired princess could not embrace the choice he had made, the deaths it had meant, but neither would she condemn it outright. It would be hypocrisy of the worst sort to let Peregrine undertake the bloody work of capturing the Carrion Lord for them and then in the same breath to complain of his murderous meddling.

“Princess Rozala?”

The Arlesite general turned a pleasant smile upon the woman who had approached her, for this was a relationship that must be cultivated for years to come should they all survive these dark times. Lady Vivienne Dartwick cut rather more regal a figure when out of the thief’s leathers she’d worn at the truce talks in northern Callow, though Rozala decided that the milkmaid braid crowned by a tasteful silver circlet rather helped the effect. It was said she’d once been a Chosen, before the Black Queen turned her to villainy. Though few believed the Black Queen’s handpicked successor to be anything close to ‘redeemed’ from such damnation, she was still considered rather less incendiary an interlocutor in diplomatic talks. Nobly born as well, for House Dartwick was on the Callowan lists of nobility, which was a balm on the pride of those who still balked at negotiating with a no-name orphan like Catherine Foundling. A foolish thing, that, when the shadow of that orphan’s displeasure had half of Calernia shaking in its boots, but pride could oft be a foolish thing.

“Lady Dartwick,” Rozala replied. “How may I be of service?”

“The Lord Adjutant is being sent out by my queen and will require a guide,” Lady Vivienne said. “If I might trouble you to provide one?”

A matter of too little importance to speak to the First Prince over, Rozala idly thought, yet requiring the assistance and assent of a high-ranked Proceran. The Callowan noble had correctly navigated etiquette in approaching her, which was a refreshing change compared to her mistress – who largely behaved as if she were above such things. Rather more gallingly, she was not wrong to believe so.

“My personal secretary Louis Rohanon will see to it,” the Princess of Aequitan said.

She discreetly gestured for one of the attendants to approach her, so Louis could be informed of her request. It was insulting that her dear friend’s abdication of his crown for the sake of the Principate meant he no longer qualified to attend councils such as this, but given the recent... agitation in Salia the princess knew it was not the time to test the First Prince’s tolerance.

“Will the Lord Adjutant be leaving us, then?” Rozala asked.

She would not mind that, for the quiet watchfulness in the orc’s eyes spoke of little missed. Yet it would not do to loose a Damned without first learning where he would head, and for what purpose.

“Queen Catherine intends to sound out the loyalties and interests of Nicae,” Lady Vivienne said.

And she’d sent out an orc to do so? The Princess of Aequitan was no village bumpkin, to believe orcs men turned to corrupted forms by some ancient sin and the hand of Below, but it could not be denied that the Deadhand’s large fangs and leathery skin fed into his looming presence to unsettling result. Though the Lord Adjutant had struck her a clever-minded and methodical, he hardly made for a pleasant envoy. Unless, of course, a reminder of force was what the Black Queen meant to send. Who could truly know, with that one?

“Then allow me to offer my secretary’s services as scholar and translator,” Princess Rozala suggested.

The heiress-designate eyed her pensively. It would mean anything spoken would later be reported to her, true, but it would also lend the weight of Procer’s tacit approval to whatever was spoken. Besides, Louis truly was fluent in tradertalk and of scholarly inclination besides. He would be of practical use, regardless of all the rest.

“I thank you for the boon,” Lady Vivienne said, tone formal. “I am certain Lord Adjutant will delight in the use of such an able aide.”

Secrecy was not paramount to whatever the Black Queen had planned for the League, then, or perhaps even Nicae in particular. The arrangements were made swiftly, and all was in motion before the latest arrivals stirred the room. The Grey Pilgrim’s stride was greeted enthusiastically by the highborn of the Blood, though rather more coolly by the Callowans and the Carrion Lord. First Prince Cordelia herself offered the due courtesies and not an inch more, for even in utter scorn the Lycaonese princess was rarely anything but flawlessly polite. The White Knight’s entrance was, by contrast, was more warmly received. The Chosen’s willingness to work with the Highest Assembly – though never under, for Hanno of Arward answered to the Tribunal alone – and the strictures of Proceran law had endeared him to Hasenbach and even Rozala herself, she would admit. Never before had she heard of a Chosen who would list and explain every kill he’d made in a rioting city before scholars of law so that the actions might be assessed.

At least not without hinting it was mere humouring of mortal crowns, while the White Knight had instead seemed serious and even earnest .

The White Knight and his companion the Witch of the Woods were also notably strong Chosen who had come to safeguard Salia and the peace talks, which had been reassuring considering who would be attending. The Black Queen, the Hierophant, the Tyrant of Helike – and now it seemed even the Hidden Horror himself. In truth Princess Rozala had been surprised at Queen Catherine’s suggestion that the White Knight attend this council, for the Sword of Judgement was blatant enough a ward against her that the dark-haired general had believed she might take offence. Apparently, Rozala Malanza faintly thought, someone had forgot to inform Catherine Foundling of this: she met the White Knight’s arrival with a smile and a respectful nod, which the Chosen casually returned. Rozala was not the only one to take notice, the eyes of half the room coming to rest on the pair in silent surprise.

“Kairos Theodosian nears,” the Black Queen suddenly said.

—

It had been more than a year now since the Tyrant of Helike had sworn eternal friendship to Cordelia Hasenbach. Not that she had ever believe him. Nor would she now put too much stock in anything he said, not even if Chosen insisted he had been bound by a curse of truth. If a madman believed the sky to be green, did that make it so? No, the Tyrant had been a thorn in her side for too long to be taken as anything but a peril.

The First Prince had considered the young king a diplomatic and military headache from more or less the first breath after he’d taken the throne, for he’d proven to be both cunning and very much inclined to turn that cunning against Procer. The blonde princess had once believed that Helike and its boy-king could be restrained by fetters of ink, treaties binding the League to a ten-year truce with the Principate until other affairs were settled, but that had arguably been the second-most serious diplomatic blunder of her reign. She could not be certain that the Tyrant’s rise could truly be laid at her feet, for he might well have struck out for power regardless of anything she did. Yet the League’s vote for truce with Procer had undeniably been the trigger of the civil war that propelled the Tyrant of Helike to greater heights. And saw Anaxares of Bellerophon elected to the office of Hierarch of the Free Cities, though in some ways that seat was still good as empty.

Still, for all that Cordelia had maneuvered and plotted against Kairos Theodosian she had never seen the man with her own eyes until he came to Salia. Much of what she had read of him proved true, the First Prince pondered once more as the Tyrant swaggered into the parlour, but it did not quite do the man justice. The thin sickliness, the loose robes that did not quite hide erratic convulsions and trembling, or even the blood-red eye under wispy brown curls: Theodosian almost seemed more notion than man, as if some godly hand had painted grinning malevolence on the canvas of Creation and crowned it king of Helike. Most of those here loathed him, the First Prince considered. Some loathed him so deeply it was like a poison in their veins. Yet looking at the young king and the two waddling gargoyles flanking him, one would think he was among friends.

“Oh my,” Kairos Theodosian drawled. “Such a gathering of great and mighty names. My heart is made all aflutter.”

“Lord Tyrant,” Cordelia Hasenbach calmly said. “Welcome. You are thanked for accepting our invitation.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” the odd-eyed villain grinned.

“Gods, you really are such a prick,” the Black Queen of Callow said, sounding almost admiring. “If I didn’t know better, I’d call it an aspect.”

The fair-haired Lycaonese bit down on her initial wave of fear and irritation. Much as she disliked the manners of the other ruler, it could not be denied that no one in this room had even half the understanding of the Tyrant she could boast of having. As if to prove correct her thought, instead of storming out at the casual slight and informality the other villain instead let out a cackling laugh.

“Catherine,” he replied cheerfully. “A pleasure to see you, as always. Is that my old friend Amadeus I see cowering in your shadow?”

The Carrion Lord, who had kept his peace and spoken only sparingly since his declaration of war on the Tower, never lost his air of cold indifference.

“It is a rather broad shadow, these days,” the Carrion Lord casually replied. “It makes for comfortable cowering.”

The choking sound from her side was, Cordelia realized, most of the Blood supressing laughter.

“An empire’s worth of room, eh?” the Tyrant sneered. “I wonder, did the broken spine take the Name or was it the other way around?”

She must step in now else the villain would needle everyone here ‘til Last Dusk. Satisfying as it was to hear the Carrion Lord pricked, it did nothing to endear the one pricking him to her heart. Or advance the cause of Procer’s survival to let it devour time from the recess, for that matter.

“The Dread Empire of Praes,” the First Prince said, “is not why it was asked you attend this council.”

“Then by all means,” Kairos Theodosian drawled, “reveal this revelation to me, Warden of the West.”

Cordelia stepped forward, back straight. Closer to a villain whose suspected body count was in the hundreds, who had once router an entire host by wielding a storm and not so long ago ripped out thousands in cavalry from Arcadia and smashed them down onto the earth. She stepped forward with utter calm, for these were her chosen grounds and her favoured manner of strife.

“Circumstances have ensured there is an alignment in our interests, Lord Tyrant,” Cordelia said.

A heartbeat passed; the blood-red eye blinked.

“Boring,” the boy-king said, solemn as a judge passing a sentence.

“Yet here you are, standing among us,” the First Prince said, unruffled. “Itching to turn on the Crown and Tower who have used you better than you used them.”

“Slightly less boring,” the Tyrant conceded. “Still I’ve yet to hear a single reason I should break such deep trust or sunder a precious bond of fellowship.”

“You require assurances, understandably,” Cordelia said. “This can be arranged. You stand, as you said, among an assembly of great and mighty names.”

“And what would be required of me in exchange for these assurances?” the Tyrant grinned. “Go on now, Warden of the West. Do not disappoint.”

“You have been deep in the Enemy’s councils, Lord Tyrant,” Cordelia said. “Reveal their plans to us and-”

“Nonono no ,” the Tyrant of Helike interrupted, growing increasingly shrill. “That was not the right thing to ask. You’re doing it wrong .”

The villain seemed genuinely agitated, his arm slipping out of the folded sleeve hiding it in a spasm. His brown eye had grown watery, as if he were in pain or sorrow. The First Prince was taken aback, and for once uncertain as to how she should respond. A limping gait whispered across the floor, the Black Queen hobbling behind the Tyrant’s back and slowing only to offer her the most insolent wink Cordelia had ever seen. She flushed.

“Sometimes they need us devils to speak the ugly things, Kairos, you ought to know that by now,” Queen Catherine said, tone teasing.

Tension in the Tyrant’s shoulders loosened by a fraction at the words, and Cordelia grasped the game. Silk and the steel, then. She was more used to standing as the former than the latter, but not unskilled at the exercise.

“ Say it ,” Kairos Theodosian demanded.

“Give us a good reason to keep warring on Keter,” the Black Queen said.

As she often did, the Queen of Callow was cutting to the bone of it for that was the truth exact of what they needed. A great banner of fear and outrage that would bind Principate – and beyond – to pursuit of the war against the Dead King, and if there was one man who might give them that at this very moment it was the Tyrant of Helike.

“Ah,” the odd-eyed king said, savouring the sound. “There it is. Now, let the mangled relic in the corner attest to my words – not you Amadeus, at least this time – and pronounce truth where it is. I have such a reason and can reveal it to you.”

All eyes in the parlour turned to the Grey Pilgrim, whose eyes were narrowed.

“Truth,” the Peregrine slowly said. “In word and intent.”

“Then let us speak of price, Theodosian,” Cordelia said. “Some offences may yet be forgiven, should you bargain in good faith. Wealth and honours could be laid on your brow.”

Cordelia was much taller than the Tyrant and made certain to loom over him as he spoke. A tilt of the neck lent her the appearance of looking down on him as she spoke, and she added a faint hint of sneer to her lip. Dislike was as distracting a feeling as any other, and if she must wield the reputation of the Alamans abroad to best achieve it she would not balk at the indignity.

“He’s not the coin kind of king, Hasenbach,” the Black Queen drawled. “No, he’s an old-fashioned sort. He wants his seat at the table back. Don’t you, Kairos?”

Which Queen Catherine wanted no more than Cordelia herself, though with the amused glint to her eye she was doing a fair impression of desiring otherwise.

“Catherine, how distressing,” the Tyrant grinned. “That would imply that I currently no longer have a seat. Am I not a participant in good standing of this peace conference?”

“Helike can be spared retribution for its reckless war-making and treachery,” Cordelia said, phrasing it as a great concession. “Your abdication, however, might be required for the sake of peace.”

“Now there’s a familiar tune,” the Black Queen smiled.

It was, the fair-haired princess thought, a little too sharp a smile for that sharpness to be entirely feigned.

“Ladies,” the Tyrant intervened, sounding utterly delighted, “come now, is there truly need for such language? Now, unless I am mistaken there was some talk of dues.”

Queen Catherine began circling again, and Cordelia breathed in. Time to see what the two of them could bargain him down to.

“You are due quite a few things,” the First Prince pleasantly agreed.

“Mostly the one, as far as I am concerned,” Kairos Theodosian grinned. “And dear Catherine knows what I want, she does. She even brought it for me.”

The trial, Cordelia thought. It was all coming to hinge on the trial of the White Knight, as promised at the crossroad of the Princes’ Graveyard. She had been warned by every Chosen and Damned she was on speaking terms with that to allow such a thing to unfold would be highly dangerous and acted accordingly.

“Your demand for a trial of the White Knight is on the official order of affairs, Lord Tyrant,” the First Prince mildly said.

“Very far down the list,” the Tyrant replied, just as mildly. “And I could not help to notice some details of procedures related to its positioning. Now, were I a suspicious man, I might suspect they’d allow a clever sort to put off that discussion for weeks, if not months.”

Which had been the very intent. The League of Free Cities as it currently stood was a derelict taking water, and the situation would only worsen unless the Hierarch himself intervened. It was unlikely he would, meaning that waiting for a span might very well see the Tyrant’s power among the League and perhaps the League itself collapse – and so make any demands of his utterly irrelevant, for he would no longer have the knife at the throats to see through his extortion.

“Then we move it up the list,” the Black Queen shrugged.

“I would not wish to be unseemly in my demands,” the Tyrant smiled. “And so, I’ve a suggestion to offer that could be considered less of an imposition.”

The smile widened, until all that Cordelia could see was a thin, sharp slice of teeth and a pulsing red eye.

“Let us hold the trial now .”

Interlude: And So Let Us Be

“The source of might in an army is unity, not numbers. Therefore, the mightiest of all armies numbers a single soldier.”
– Isabella the Mad, Proceran general

Hakram was smelling a rat. Adjutant had always enjoyed using that particular human idiom, as it happened, mostly because it was patently untrue by face value. Humans had all the nose of a sparrow, stumbled around like drunks in the dark and were terribly fragile in most ways that mattered. The last had little to do with rodents, but it was always worth mentioning. As a rule, humans would not be able to smell a rat if it was nesting under their own pillow. Unlike goblins, who entirely coincidentally tended to have very full cookpots when Legions were garrisoned in cities. Goblin stew was always an enjoyable meal, Hakram thought, if not necessarily for the taste then always for the surprise.

“The Magisterium is pleased by your understanding, Lord Adjutant,” Magister Zoe Ixioni smiled. “It is always a delight to speak with a professional like yourself.”

The slaver – he would not forget for a moment what she was, even if she offered an empire’s worth of smiles and compliments – offered Louis Rohanon a more restrained look.

“And we honour the Principate as well, of course,” Magister Zoe added. “It is deplored by the enlightened members of our assembly that war was waged between our nations.”

“First Prince Cordelia is a fervent adherent of peace and diplomatic resolution,” Louis Rohanon replied without batting an eye, lips quirking enough to imply a smile without ever delivering it.

Princess Rozala’s ‘secretary’, who regardless of what he was now titled had been until recently the Prince of Creusens, had proved to be fairly adept at navigating the meetings Hakram had found himself dragged into one after another. Adjutant rumbled out a breath, feeling the rhythm of Bittertongue’s old song sound against his bones. No peace can there be, between lash and orc. It was an affront to the history of his kind that he must now speak otherwise, pretending the ways of the sorcerer-lords of Stygia did not sicken him as he watched the magister slip away. Rohanon let out a noise of distaste, when it was only the two of them left in the room.

“I always end up feeling like I need a wash after entertaining someone from the Magisterium,” Louis Rohanon admitted.

“Would that someone had laid to waste that city and its slaver-lords with it,” Hakram gravelled. “Yet they have tread with care to avoid this, over the years, and it seems still.”

The man nodded, slowly. He was a skinny, scholarly sort this one. Yet not without spine or cleverness, and for a Proceran seemed a surprisingly decent man. That might explain why the Jacks had found out he was so badly in debt to Iserre. Decency was unlikely to see one thrive in a place like the Highest Assembly.

“If I might speak frankly, Lord Deadhand?” Rohanon hesitatingly said.

“I would prefer it,” Adjutant said. “Mine are a simple folk, and the sly ways of humans confuse me.”

It was almost appalling, the orc thought, how eager people this far west were to believe that. Not so appalling he would not use it, however. The former Prince of Creusens choked.

“That would have been more believable a lie before I saw two envoys fall for it, my lord,” Rohanon delicately said. “It no longer holds water in the slightest. Not that listening to Basileus Leo explain to you the office and powers of the Hierarch was not most entertaining, but I would spare myself the indignity if you’ll allow it.”

“Leo Trakas was a most helpful young man,” Hakram drily said, neither admitting nor denying anything. “You offered frankness, Louis Rohanon, and I accepted. Speak accordingly.”

“I would not dare to presume as to the Black Queen’s intent in sending you out,” the former prince said, “yet if you were meant to assess divisions and seek weaknesses in the League, you should have come to the same conclusion as I.”

The orc studied the man, considering if this was a conversation he should be having, then lightly inclined his head I agreement.

“The League of Free Cities is on the verge of collapse,” Hakram acknowledged. “Nicae has yet to hear of the disastrous fate of its fleets but already the Basileus seeks to displace Helike as the leading power. Atalante chafes under a villain’s lead, and at the frequent slights it is offered.”

“Bellerophon is out of its depth,” Louis Rohanon noted. “I would hazard a guess its general-delegate has not received instructions from the People in weeks, if not months, and is entirely unwilling to do anything that might result in execution by the kanenas.”

Which was, as far as Hakram could tell, essentially any action at all. The Republic of Bellerophon’s legal system struck him as what might come to be if a dutiful scribe set down every single shout from an angry mob and made them all into law, then repeated the process half a hundred times.

“Delos remains aloof, but it appears both Stygia and Penthes are readying to leave the sinking boat,” Hakram added. “Else Magister Zoe would not have been so eager to assure me theoretical alignment with the Tower would not result in military support of any kind.”

“The Tower has been digging at the Tyrant’s position in the Free Cities,” Louis Rohanon openly aknowledged, “and the Empress has lived up to her reputation in achieving such broad success. Unless the Hierarch takes the League in hand this day it will not survive this conference as a united entity. Should he die, nearly half the League will seek the Empire’s protection against coming retribution before the corpse is cold.”

Which was inconvenient as without allies in either the League and the Thalassocracy the sole avenue to bring the Empire to heel was a land war of the old way, Callow and Praes entwined in the ancient dance of steel once again. Yet as much as Hakram’s mind was inclined to tumble down the slope of logistics and strategy, it would be a mistake to do so. The Tyrant of Helike was the devil of the day, and what they had now discovered the Named must have already known. The ship that had carried him to the peace conference of Salia, the large and largely untouched army of a united League of Free Cities, was on the verge of collapse. As things stood, even if the Tyrant ordered these armies to ravage southern Procer most of them would ignore him and continue the retreat south. And with Catherine having crippled the famous kataphraktoi , Helike’s own army was crippled in turn.

The Tyrant of Helike no longer had the clout to make demands. More worryingly the boy-king must have known it would come to this for weeks if not months, and he had still come. And so, Hakram was smelling a rat.

“I fear,” Hakram Deadhand said, “that Lady Dartwick’s instincts have proved true.”

“In what way?” Louis Rohanon asked, eyes cautious.

“Kairos Theodosian is exactly where he meant to be,” Adjutant said, “and cares little for the fate of the horse he rode after he ceases riding it.”

—

Indrani had never been one to shy from admitting to herself when she was enjoying something, and so she wasn’t going to start now: this was hilarious, and she in no way regretted striking the first spark of that debate.

“Soon you’ll be telling me magic is an art and not a discipline,” Masego scathingly said. “ Divine approval? You might as well start praying for spell formulas.”

“There is recorded precedent for certain workings functioning better when aligned with the words of the Book of All Things,” Roland said. “While I would not-”

The Rogue Sorcerer was trying to keep things civil and academic, which naturally meant he was doomed to fail just as all voices of reason had been since First Dawn.

“Spoken like a Trismegistan coinpurse,” the Witch of the Woods snorted contemptuously. “Praying would work swifter than your method and involve rather less scribbling of numbers. And Gods forbid you forget to carry a one: you’ll melt your face instead of lighting a candle, if anything happens at all.”

“While Trismegistan sorcery is known to require significantly more study than most, it has also been proven to produce more reliable-” Roland tried.

“You defend ignorance as creativity and methodology as shackles,” Masego retorted, deeply appalled. “I should expect nothing more from someone who apes Ligurian magic without-”

“Dogs of Trismegistus bark not –”

“Perhaps,” the Rogue Sorcerer desperately said, “we should lower our voices. At this rate illusion or not they’ll hear us arriving.”

A moment of silence followed, the two mages who’d been arguing looking away in embarrassment at how heated the conversation had grown.

“I hear Jaquinite sorcery can do stuff neither yours can do,” Indrani idly said.

“That would matter, I imagine, if Jaquinite sorcery could reliably do anything in particular,” Masego said.

“Teach an apprentice Proceran magic for a year and they will crush one taught Wasteland posturing for the same,” the Witch of the Woods retorted without missing a beat.

Ah , Archer thought. Much better . Roland shot her a betrayed look she answered by prettily batting her eyes, and the giant wolf the Witch was riding on glared at her woefully. Indrani sniggered. ‘Woeful’, which worked as two puns because Archer was one of the Woe but it was also close to wolf and... eh, just wasn’t the same when Cat wasn’t there to be offended to her core by the puns. She’d keep it in mind for when she ended up giving her report, though. The four of them were getting close to Lyonceau, the small town they’d been headed towards for the better part of an hour now, so perhaps it was time to pretend she’d been on Roland’s side this whole time.

Zeze and the Witch were in a full blow argument again, voices progressively rising along with the general pettiness of what was being said, so she cleared her throat loud enough it’d cut through.

“Shame on both of you,” Indrani piously said, “ignoring poor Roland, when he’s trying to warn you about dangers.”

The Rogue Sorcerer eyed her pensively.

“I believe,” he said, “that you might just be the worst person I know.”

“That was unkind,” Masego seriously said.

“Rogue,” the Witch said, “comport yourself cordially. They are our allies for now.”

There was a pause.

“You have fought the Dead King, besides,” the Witch reminded him.

“I know what I said,” the Rogue Sorcerer muttered.

“I forgive you, as mine is a forgiving nature,” Indrani lied.

Roland met her eyes discreetly, lips moving to silently mouth ‘ the worst person I know’ in Chantant, and she grinned back. Indrani had grown to like the Rogue Sorcerer: he was a delight to toy with and halfway decent in a fight. Not too hard on the eyes, either, which was always nice in a boon companion. He’d also proved more useful when they’d run into the Witch of the Wilds and accusations had flown about how they were plotting to murder the entire Grand Alliance. Which Indrani was reasonably sure was not the case, since she would have had a seat at the council where that’d be decided and she’d not been that drunk in a while. Roland had more or less vouched for them not being up to no good – at that moment in time, anyway – and that’d led to the question of why the Witch would think they were up to some skulking murderousness.

The answer was, in a word, Lyonceau.

Archer herself had found there was something odd with the League’s camp when she first went out on a walk thereabout, in essence because there was nothing at all odd with the League’s camp. The Tyrant might be able to keep his lunacy in check for a few days, Indrani had mused, but the Hierarch ? Unlikely. She still remembered the frightful madness that’d fallen over Rochelant like a veil, the red-handed tribunals that’d spread out like tendrils of sickness from where the Hierarch sat. It was the sort of thing you could tuck away in Arcadia or some other neat little pocket, on occasion contain behind the right sort of wards and sometimes even something you could lull into sleep. For a time. But there were always, always signs. So Indrani had told herself, maybe there were wards. None she could find, true, but it wasn’t her specialty by any means.

Zeze had been raised by a man who’d turned warding into weapon to shatter fortresses, though, and losing his sorcery had done nothing to curb his sight. The Rogue Sorcerer had been with him then, the two of them discussing the Twilight Ways and the making of gates for it, and it’d been easy to bully – convince! Convince him to come along. No wards of the calibre that’d keep the Hierarch quiet in the League camp, they’d confirmed for her. Might have been a good time to go to the Crows, then, but Zeze still kind of wanted them on a vivisection table and the Sisters tended to ask payment up front for miracles from anyone but Cat. Who had half a dozen other cats to skin, about then, and a limited amount of additional hands in Hakram and Vivienne. So instead Indrani had called on the finest band of useless busybodies she knew, namely Robber and his cohort of miscreants.

Her Majestic Catherinery had helpfully turned them loose on the countryside with even looser instructions, so it’d been child’s play to commandeer their little goblin legs and watchful eyes. The Hierarch had to be close, because there was no way to the Tyrant was wandering too far away from him, and it wasn’t like the man was going to feed himself – so find the food, find the man. Or so had been the thought. And Robber had put his cohort to passable work, keeping a watch on the League’s camp through the day and night. Unfortunately Kairos Theodosian was, as usual, a twisty little fucker. The food wagon had gone out under illusion veils, then passed through some wards carved into stones. Twice they’d followed a wagon and lost it, which none of them had taken well pride-wise, and some Magisterium prick had caught the goblins lurking so Archer was forced to send them away.

They’d gone hunting for the ward stones instead, since those would be the key, which was when they’d run into a masked woman on a giant wolf and some very hurtful accusations. The Witch had come to it form the other way entirely, as it happened: she’d found an abandoned town a few hours out of Salia that was entirely hidden by wards and followed the wagon line from the other direction until she ran into them sniffing around a ward stone. Conclusions were leap to, though Indrani would admit that a pair of villains around a disappeared town was usually pretty damning stuff. The place was, according to the maps Roland had gotten his hands on, called Lyonceau. It was one of those small Proceran towns that emptied during winter, and according to the locals pretty much the only thing of note bout it was that it had a large House of Light: several towns and villages around used it for the festivals instead of their own small altar, since it was cheaper than building and maintaining one of their own.

It was suspicious nonetheless, all had agreed, and they’d gone to trespass – by which Indrani meant investigate , naturally, since you got to call it that when you were on the side of the angels. Though in theory the Witch was the one guiding them, in practice since she’d spent most the way arguing with Zeze it had been the helpful giant wolf that led them.

“This isn’t right,” Masego suddenly said.

All four of them were Named, and none fresh to the mantle, so the moment the Hierophant spoke the other three ceased moving forward. Indrani could see nothing but a snowy plain above, and apparently neither could Roland, but even with the mask she could see Masego and the Witch were looking at the same place.

“We’ve arrived?” she asked.

Leaning on her aspect might allow her to peer through an illusion or a ward, but she’d rather not begin using those too early in the day – not when there might yet be a fight ahead of them.

“We are at the outermost boundary of the wards,” the Witch of the Woods said. “I grasp your meaning, Hierophant. This is... unusual work.”

Roland muttered under his breath in the mage-tongue, gesturing sharply with one hand as he reached within his coat with the other. The silvery sorcery that gathered around the tip of his fingers he laid against the small wooden box he’d produced and it sank within. He opened it deftly, revealing some sort of oily ointment.

“Around the eyes,” the Rogue Sorcerer told her, “and over the eyelids.”

Indrani’s brow rose and she dipped a finger, handling one eye and then the other. The smell was unfamiliar to her, save for what she suspected to be apple tree bark, and it tingled pleasantly against her skin. One she’d applied it as the hero had instructed, she found she could now glimpse colours where before there had been only air. It was a vast tapestry of many-coloured threads, she thought, yet she could only ever see the threads she was directly looking at.

“It is not merely unusual work,” Masego said, sounding troubled. “It, in part mine. Akua Sahelian’s also, and a myriad others, but some of those patterns were first laid down by my hand.”

“There are other influences in there,” the Witch of the Wilds said. “Callowan wards, Aenian cants and that odd Jaquinite escapement.”

“No sorcerer could make such a thing,” the Hierophant said. “No living one, anyway.”

“The Tyrant’s bargained with the Dead King before, we know that,” Indrani said. “What’s so troubling about these wards anyway?”

“The Doom of Liesse was meant to bring forth devils, to forge Greater Breaches,” Masego hesitantly said. “This is...”

“Angels,” the Witch of the Wilds said. “They are not as easily summoned as devils, but this is meant to command the attention of angels.”

Well, Archer thought, shit .

—

Vivienne found Adjutant waiting in the hallway, along with a worried-looking Louis Rohanon. She was not the only one to notice this, Princess Rozala excusing herself from her conversation with Lady Itima to silently join her as she sought out Hakram.

“Lord Adjutant,” she greeted him, “Secretary Rohanon.”

Rozala Malanza went through the same round of courtesies, receiving the same nods for it.

“The situation in the League is considerably more unstable than we’d believed,” Hakram quietly said.

“We believe the Tyrant no longer holds sway,” Louis Rohanon added just as quietly. “And that he was undermined by the Tower. Both Stygia and Penthes seem to be leaning towards Praes.”

Which went some way in explaining why the Tyrant had willingly served as the Dead King’s herald once more, Vivienne thought. She’d believed until now it was simply a matter of letting loose a wild lion in the pen so he would not seem as dangerous, but this... fit. Though a raging lunatic, the boy-king of Helike was brilliant in his own way. He must have known that the Princes’ Graveyard would be the beginning of the end for his influence in the League, and with it his right to make demands of the Grand Alliance, so he had helped forge another calamity so that he could bargain away the key to beating it back in exchange for the promises being made to him being kept. The vicious wretch had yet to miss a single step, though Vivienne had a hard time believing the outcome of the Graveyard had been his intent. Most likely Catherine’s victory had forced him to improvise in the wake of the defeat, leading to this fresh madness.

“It no longer matters he’s lost the League,” Vivienne admitted.

Surprise, from both men.

“He swore before the Peregrine he has a way out of our current predicament,” Princess Rozala elaborated. “His bargaining chip has changed, though the bargain has not. He still requires the White Knight to stand trial for his actions in the League.”

“When?” Hakram asked, hairless brow creasing.

“Today,” Vivienne said. “The recess will be extended into a dismissal of today’s session. We will be heading out to the trial’s grounds presently.”

Catherine and Hasenbach had returned to the hall along with Yannu Marave and the Carrion Lord to swiftly pass the motion, though given that the Grand Alliance commanded a comfortable majority in such votes that was largely a formality.

“It cannot be held in Salia, surely?” Louis Rohanon said, looking alarmed. “I know not the consequences of attempting to pass sentence onto the Sword of Judgement himself, but surely we cannot risk the people of the capital so recklessly.”

“The First Prince agreed,” Princess Rozala said, smiling approvingly. “The trial will be held outside the city. Haggling was had over the exact grounds, until we settled on a town in the countryside three hours’ ride from here by the name of Lyonceau.”

“It is a trap,” Hakram bluntly said.

“It’s Kairos,” an amused voice drawled. “Of course it’s a fucking trap.”

Vivienne turned and saw her friend – her queen – limping forward, leaning on her strange yet oddly soothing staff. She did not hide her surprise at the swift return, or at the way that the drow called the ‘Lord of Silent Steps’ stood at her side. Hakram was just as surprised, by the looks of it.

“Your Majesty,” Princess Rozala greeted her. “Was your right to vote passed to a delegate?”

“We’re already done,” Catherine replied. “First Prince Cordelia wasted no time on ceremonies, and most votes were know before they were cast.”

“The League?” Vivienne asked.

“Couldn’t even agree on a delegate without the Tyrant herding them,” the Queen of Callow said. “The wheels are coming off that cart, mark my words.”

“And the Dead King, Your Majesty?” Princess Rozala probed.

“I hesitate to ascribe surprise to a bare skull,” Catherine mused. “But this was not his work, I’d bet rubies to piglets over it. This stage belongs to Kairos Theodosian alone.”

“We believe the Tower to be actively courting cities among the League, Queen Catherine,” Louis Rohanon said. “Dread Empress Malicia would have greatly undermined the standing of the Tyrant for this to succeed.”

The Queen of Callow frowned.

“Then after riding his last horse to the grave, he has saddled a fresh one,” Catherine said. “You saw it true, Vivienne.”

Even now, the former thief was surprised by the flush of pleasure she felt at the freely offered praise. It was not entirely warranted, in her eyes, for while she’d brought up the notion first but she doubted they would not have seen it themselves in time. Still, it was not unpleasant to hear. She smoothed away the emotion, for there were higher callings than indulgence at hand. A drow painted in the colours of the ‘Losara’, the tribe among their kind that Catherine had unsurprisingly ended up forging when none at hand suited her purposes, stepped forward to murmur in Lord Ivah’s ears before retreating. The Lord of Silent Steps addressed the queen in Crepuscular, and she closed her eyes in thought. A few moments passed, and she opened them.

“No, doesn’t mean anything to me,” she told the drow. “Adjutant, I need you to find me someone who knows something. An herbal brew made of foxglove, nightshade and powdered graveborn mushrooms – what is it for?”

Vivienne was looking for it, so she caught it: the faint tremor, the pulse that shuddered through the fabric of Creation as Adjutant called on one of his aspects. The tall orc’s head snapped to the side, cheeks creasing in amusement as his eyes came to rest on the approaching form of Lady Aquiline Osena.

“Providence, warlord,” he gravelled in Kharsum. “The wind is in our sails for once.”

“Don’t rejoice,” Catherine replied in the same. “Think on how bad the opposition must be, that we are smiled upon.”

The Lady of Tartessos was approached, and Princess Rozala was prevailed upon to make introductions. Few courtesies were had, as Levantine ways tended to be pleasantly brisk. The question was asked, though nightshade was a term unfamiliar to the Levantine. Belladonna, however, she recognized.

“That is champion’s brew, though I have never heard of graveborn mushrooms being used in the recipe,” Lady Aquiline said, though she looked bemused at the question. “Only one without character would use it in an honour duel, but it can be a worthy thing when drunk in the deeps of the Brocelian.”

“What does it do?” Catherine pressed.

“It lends strength to the dying,” Lady Aquiline said. “It calms limbs, eases the flow of blood and lends vigour – for a time, and at a price. It is false strength, and when it fades often kills the drinker.”

“Let me guess,” Catherine Foundling grimly smiled, “graveborn mushrooms would add a little more to the vigour, right?”

“I am not certain,” the Lady of Tartessos admitted. “It would be better to ask Razin, as one of the Binder’s Blood would be learned in such lore. Yet what you say seems likely, for barrow-born things often lend poisonous strength before they kill.”

“Catherine?” Vivienne asked, looking at her cautiously.

Something almost like fear had flickered across the Black Queen’s face for a moment.

“The Tyrant of Helike was drinking this by the cup last night,” Catherine said, “and it was brewed potently enough it would have outright poisoned someone without a Name.”

A moment of silence passed.

“Steel yourselves, my friends,” the Black Queen gravely said, “for when the likes of Kairos Theodosian comes to sing his swan song it is not a thing to be taken lightly.”

Interlude: Wicked

“Inexorable is the end of the journey; choose wisely how you spend your steps.”
– Ashuran saying

“Look, I’m not saying half a hell won’t come howling out if you disappear instead of attending like a good Choir boy,” Queen Catherine said. “But this whole serene thing you’ve got going on? That’s the look on the face of someone about to have it slapped right off.”

Hanno was not certain what was more surreally amusing: that the most prominent villain of their age was expressing sincere worry for his well-being, in her own rough way, or that the First Prince of Procer was seemingly unable to decide what part of this she found the most appalling. The three of them were riding ahead of the rest of the column and at brisk a pace, though Lyonceau would not be in sight for some time.

“I have fought the Tyrant before, Your Majesty,” the White Knight replied. “I am not unaware of the danger he represents.”

“You fought Kairos when he was sowing the seeds of a hundred enmities,” the Black Queen flatly replied. “Now he’s reaping his harvest, Hanno. He’s going to burn every favour and story he’s got up his sleeves so he can snap Judgement over his knee.”

“Damned or not, he remains a single man,” Cordelia Hasenbach carefully said. “Surely you do not mean Kairos Theodosian could face a single angel alone, much less an entire Choir.”

“I’ve been in brawls with two Choirs, Your Highness,” Queen Catherine reminded the other woman. “It can be done, and without losing a finger if you’re quick and careful enough.”

From the look on the First Prince’s face, Hanno mused, she had finally happened upon the part she could find the most appalling. The White Knight was less offended, for though the touch of Contrition always served a purpose it was not often gentle in pursuing it. As for Endurance... Hanno cleared his throat.

“Fuck off, you bottom feeders. This one’s been claimed fair and square,” he quoted, drily amused.

Some of the last words the Stalwart Paladin had ever heard. That life had perhaps been the most useful to call on, when studying the Black Queen. The Lone Swordsman had been the rival of her youth, and her struggles there too far removed from the woman she’d become, and none of those who’d died at the Battle of the Camps had seen much of her aside from the terrifying foe that’d been the Sovereign of Moonless Nights. The Stalwart Paladin, though, had walked among the people of the Callowan city of Dormer and then spoken with the Black Queen for some time. It had been fascinating, hearing through him the offer she’d extended. Go home , Catherine Foundling had offered, looking so very exhausted. She’d offered peaceful means, and bared steel only when pushed.

It was not his place to judge, yet it had troubled Hanno that he could not easily decide what his answer would have been, had he truly stood in the other hero’s boots.

“Shit,” Queen Catherine said, cheeks darkening. “Went fishing for that, did you? In my defence, they tried to snatch the man after I’d already put him down hard. It was unsporting, is what I mean.”

“You cursed at angels,” Cordelia Hasenbach slowly grasped. “You called them bottom-feeders ?”

“It wasn’t about the bird wing thing,” the Queen of Callow assured the other royalty. “I can’t stand puns. It was about the kill-snatching.”

“Perhaps,” the First Prince said, voice choked, “we might return to the matter at hand.”

“As I was saying, Your Majesty,” the White Knight calmly continued, “your worry is appreciated yet I speak not in arrogance. I understand what it is that the Tyrant of Helike seeks to achieve through this purported trial.”

“He’s going for Judgement,” the Black Queen agreed. “And any other day I’d say the Seraphim lose a feather before they eat him, but today ? We get a curse on the way out, White Knight, and it sticks . Even when it has no right to.”

For once, the memories that set his mind astray were not another’s. Gods of my ancestors, grant me due , his mother has once snarled. And as the blood-soaked tile through which she had honoured Below for many years shattered, the heavy weight of a curse had filled the air. All it had taken for it to seize men by the throat was for a knife to kiss a throat, and Hanno of Arwad to become entirely an orphan. The White Knight knew a thing or two of curses spoken with one’s last breath.

“I speak not in ignorance either, Your Majesty,” he softly said. “I understand that Kairos Theodosian is perhaps the closest thing to a high priest of Below that draws breath on Calernia, and his passing will not be a gentle thing. Yet it is your own past, that drags your eye away from the truth of this.”

She considered him with those clever, serious eyes that ever belied the casual manner of speaking she wielded as club and scalpel both. Honestly examining herself for where she might have made a mistake, a misstep. A refreshing thing, this. The willingness to entertain she might have erred.

“You think it doesn’t matter what he comes at you with,” she slowly said. “All he’s accomplishing is giving the Seraphim a good, clear shot at him.”

Judgement had already been passed on Kairos Theodosian, on a floating tower in sight of the walls of Delos. That verdict had not waned or weakened for the passing of months, and still resounded like a whisper in the back of Hanno’s mind. The Tyrant of Helike had ran across half the continent hiding in the shadow of great hosts and great needs, yet now he was delivering himself to the Tribunal of his own free will. There was no escaping that judgement, once it had been passed.

“Even as Queen of Winter, you did not wield your full might,” Hanno said. “You understood, then and now, that strength without restraint in a villain is a call to the grave. Yet I am not a villain, Catherine Foundling.”

He met her gaze, serenity untroubled.

“I am the Sword of Judgement,” the White Knight said. “If Evil seeks to end me, I will break it. Should the Enemy seek to struggle against the Tribunal instead, then what heeds not justice will be put down with overwhelming might.”

“Using strength on Kairos Theodosian is like trying to strangle a stone,” the Black Queen warned.

“Yes,” the White Knight agreed. “And crow he might, that he will not lack for air. Yet it will not matter when the grip shatters rock.”

He watched her watching him, saw the eyebrows narrow and the thoughts adjust. She had understood, without him speaking a word of it, that there was more to his certainty than she knew. From he could almost see her passing through a list of possible allies, now as nimble in her thinking as William of Greensbury had found her to be on her feet. Her eyes almost flicked behind them, to look where the other guests were riding, and Hanno nodded in assent. Yes, she’d understood correctly. It would be not one but two Choirs the Tyrant of Helike would face, should he bare his fang against the Tribunal. The Black Queen clicked her tongue against the roof her mouth.

“I’ve given you warning,” she finally said. “I have nothing more to say on the matter.”

Her gaze moved to the First Prince, whose face had remained inscrutable for some time as she followed the conversation closely.

“Your Highness, I extend offer from Sve Noc to weave... containment over Lyonceau, in case the Tyrant’s last surprise is meant to spread.”

Cordelia Hasenbach smiled pleasantly.

“A kind offer,” the Warden of the West – though only the shadow of what that might have been, to his sorrow – replied. “Yet I wonder at the price of it.”

The Black Queen grinned.

“No cost,” she said. “Call it a gesture of goodwill between allies against Keter.”

The First Prince seemed even less pleased, which took Hanno some time to grasp. Ah, it had been horse-trading. Cordelia Hasenbach would have preferred this to be a transaction, bought and paid for. The Black Queen offered instead a favour, to be repaid in kind one day. It was a bargain that demanded little of Procer yet would benefit the drow in the currency they would need the most after the Tenth Crusade came to an end. The blue-eyed princess turned to him, and already he could hear the question on the tip of her tongue: how likely would it be that such protection would be needed? Yet she never spoke the words and looked faintly ashamed for a flickering moment.

“Procer will be grateful for the aid, First Under the Night,” the First Prince of Procer said.

Hanno’s esteem for the woman, which had already been set high by the laurels branded onto her palm, rose a notch. She’d preferred owing a favour than to gamble with lives in her charge, even on the finest of odds. The Black Queen nodded in acknowledgement, then flicked him a glance.

“Mind you, they’re not coming any closer even if things go south on your angels,” Catherine Foundling said. “I’m not risking their feathers on the Tyrant of Helike’s chosen grounds.”

“The grounds were our choice, Queen Catherine, not his,” the First Prince reminded her.

“That doesn’t mean they’re not his chosen grounds,” the Black Queen grimly replied.

Both she and the White Knight moved in unison when there was a tremble of sorcery ahead, though when the silhouettes revealed became clearer the tension went out. Antigone could hardly be taken for anyone else, riding Lykaia’s broad back as she was, and Roland’s eternal leather longcoat was almost as familiar a sight. The other two he recognized only by description. The tall woman in mail with a long green coat and a half-hidden face must be the Archer, a guess that the massive longbow on her back seemed to support. The blind man with dark skin and long trinket-woven braids must be the Hierophant, a warlock who when enthralled by the Dead King had very nearly killed every single living thing in Iserre. Hanno cocked his head quizzically at Antigone, who replied in the same Gigantes stance-speak.

Respect, dislike, danger. The dislike had implication of arrogance, not offence, which was interesting. So was the danger, for the corresponding tilt spoke not of ‘past danger’ or ‘potential danger’. Antigone’s opinion was that the Hierophant, even stripped of his sorcery as he currently was, might be able to kill either of them in a fight. That spoke to the respect, for the Gigantes prized not a single virtue should it be accompanied by weakness.

“You both seem untroubled by those approaching,” the First Prince of Procer mildly said.

Unlike them, her eyes could only discern details so far.

“Archer, the Rogue Sorcerer and Hierophant,” the Black Queen said. “And if I’m not mistaken?”

“The Witch of the Woods,” Hanno agreed. “I expect they will have word of Lyonceau for us.”

Simply because the Tyrant of Helike had kept his cards hidden until the last moment did not mean they would enter the trap blind. The White Knight had learned much from his own defeats, from studying the dooms and triumphs of his heroic predecessors. And this particular method, which he had once discussed with the Peregrine, often served: sending a companion out with only vague mandate when the enemy was afoot. It was creating an opportunity for providence to smile upon them, for as all other things providence must be helped along lest if fail. That Roland had been chosen as an instrument along with Antigone was no great surprise, and neither was the Archer’s presence. Like her storied teacher the Lady of the Lake, she was likely cast in Roles either heroic or villainous by circumstance.

Her allegiance to the Black Queen put a hand on the scales towards Below, it was true, but then Catherine Foundling had often sailed dark ships to pale shores – terrible shores, it was true, but pale nonetheless. The Hierophant’s presence was more surprising, and ill-omen. For providence to have offered a stirrup to his foot, his particular knowledge must have been needed. The four approached, and though the First Prince’s armed escort neared they were not so uncouth as to take defensive positions. Cordelia Hasenbach’s horse was shaken but not put aflight by the massive shape of Lykaia, which he noted approvingly. It was a well-trained beast.

“I don’t suppose you just happened onto Lyonceau by accident,” the Black Queen tried.

“Warded up to the Heavens,” the Archer said. “Literally, even!”

The Hierophant stirred.

“Inaccurate,” he said, voice mildly irritated. “For the third time-”

“Greetings, Your Majesty, Your Highness,” the Rogue Sorcerer said, bowing. “What my companions are attempting to convey is that the town is heavily warded with an eye as to the angelic.”

Accurate , Antigone silently told him. Secrets, Dead King.

“Are any of the wards harmful in nature?” the White Knight asked.

“No,” the Hierophant said. “Not in the slightest. They command and retain attention, and so in function have similarities with the initial part of a ritual Breach-”

“As in devil summoning,” the Black Queen flatly interrupted.

“The first segment of such a ritual, yes,” the Hierophant peevishly replied. “As I was saying, Catherine, if you had let me finish.”

“Surely that must be harmful in some manner,” the First Prince said, looking sickened.

“Not unless you want to argue that attracting angelic attention is harmful,” Queen Catherine drily noted. “Which I’m guessing might be less than popular a stance with some of your subjects.”

“Simply the act of warding makes such a meeting place suspect,” the blonde princess insisted.

“Salia’s warded,” the Archer said.

“What Lady Archer means, Your Highness, is that making such an argument given the nature of the wards might be considered by some a breaking of faith,” Roland delicately said.

Which was a peril that Hanno would not lightly risk, as it would expose all those that had broken faith with the Tyrant of Helike to the vengeance that would follow. In a stroke, the heads of all signatories Grand Alliance would be in the villain’s reach. There was no understanding of this situation that was acceptable, for even if the White Knight was certain to die in such a trial his life would weigh less on the scales than that of Catherine Foundling and Cordelia Hasenbach: without those two, the war on Keter was lost. The cause would be weakened by his own death, but hardly irreparably.

“We must proceed,” the White Knight said. “Though given the circumstances, I believe the presence of great mages among our number could not easily be made into a slight.”

“I don’t care if the Tyrant gets snippy about,” the Black Queen snorted, “Hierophant is coming. Archer, I need you in Salia.”

“You can’t be serious,” the Archer replied, tone hardening.

A swift exchange in Kharsum followed, neither of them apparently aware he’d used Recall to learn some of the tongue months ago. Queen Catherine was insisting that should they all die in Lyonceau then Vivienne Dartwick would need both the Archer and the Adjutant at her side to keeps things from collapsing, while the Archer argued not untruly that if the Black Queen died the talks were dead anyway. The discussion ended when the Archer informed her queen that she’d stick around ‘Zeze’ to watch his back and stay out of trouble, if that was what it took, and Queen Catherine angrily conceded. Neither of them paid any attention to the Hierophant’s protest he had no need of a bodyguard.

Antigone inclined her head in question, but he dismissed it. Best for all if she started with them, as far as Hanno was concerned, and Roland as well. He was not as powerful a spellcaster, but he was cunning and his knowledge broad in scope. And so they resumed the ride forward to Lyonceau, into the jaws of the beast waiting to gobble them up.

It was, for a hero, one of the most practical places to be.

—

It had made for a serviceable temple, if to admittedly asinine Gods and the occasional feckless Choir, but it made for a rather dignified courtroom.

Kairos Theodosian had seen to it, assigning his most trustworthy servants to the task. Sadly most of the gargoyles that could tell colours apart with their beady little stones eyes had been merrily massacred by Catherine when they’d had their little tiff at twilit Liesse, which had made for a charmingly eclectic selection of paints and cloths. Even as the latest of his esteemed guests passed the threshold of the wards encircling Lyonceau, the Tyrant of Helike leaned back against his throne and cast a critical eye on the stained glass before him, which was depicting the first elected First Prince being crowned by what appeared to be a flock of naked giggling cherubs. One of his trusted servants had painted over the face of Clothor Merovins a bright red beaked nose and touched up his hair with bright blue spikes, which one might venture to say was a fetchingly clashing addition, yet it was lacking a certain je ne sais quoi , as the Alamans said.

“Naked angels?” the Tyrant of Helike said. “’tis most obscene, my loyal minions. Possibly blasphemous as well, I’d have to inquire with a priest.”

Inquisitive chittering was his answer, his last gaggle of gargoyles gathering to hear his regal proclamations.

“You shall have to clothe them,” Kairos decided, touching his lip with his scepter. “In undergarments, naturally.”

More chatter, increasingly inquisitive.

“The colour will be of your choice, I would not lightly infringe upon your artistic integrity,” the king of Helike assured them. “Yet if I might venture a suggestion as to the appearance? Lacy .”

The chittering turned rather enthusiastic, matching his mood perfectly. Even as he ordered his porters to move him away, his heart already warmed in anticipation of the fresh abomination those incompetent little mongrels would create in trying to paint something as delicate as lace. The House of Light was coming along nicely, in his opinion, and all it’d taken was knocking off the roof. And large swaths of the walls, and rearranging most the insides. Also desecrating the consecrated grounds, as the delightful outrage from Above at his presence thundering in his ears sadly hadn’t been worth the constant migraines. Yet now the temple was a lovely piece of work, raised platforms with benches and seats surrounding what he liked to think of as an arena : the altar to Above turned into the defendant’s stand, and the splendidly shoddy table and chair the Hierarch of the Free Cities had spent several days making with his own hands, as Anaxares despised the notion of using tyrannica l Proceran tables and chairs instead.

Gods Below, Kairos had not regretted having the man elected even once.

The sole standing walls that remained were those encasing the tall panels of stained glass, casting colours lights on the ground that mixed with that which the afternoon sun carelessly shone through the gaping swaths. The Hierarch of the Free Cities was already seated on his rickety three-legged stool chair, methodically scraping any ink off the parchment that’d been used to send messages to him, avoiding the need of in fact using any such scroll not given unto him by the People – which was perhaps for the best, as to Kairos’ understanding of Bellerophan law he would then have to report anyone having gifted him such parchment to the kanenas for having paid tribute to a Foreign Despot, namely the Hierarch himself. The laws of the Republic were as a splendid maze made entirely of trapdoors, to the Tyrant, most of which led to a pit of spikes but some instead to a mob of angry crocodiles. That there would be a dead body at the end of the journey was perhaps the only part of it not in doubt. Truly, the people of the Free Cities could all learn a lesson or two from the Republic.

They were significantly better than anyone else at spontaneous lapidation, for example.

“It’s all the practice, I think,” Kairos told his trusted attendants.

“It is fascinating,” the Dead King said. “Even now, I cannot tell if you are mad or feigning.”

The Tyrant’s good eye found the skeleton-thing that claimed kingship of death and Keter, and to his continued distaste found nothing at all. Oh, the body was there. A shell, pretty enough if a little too pretentious for his tastes, but he couldn’t see in it. Even if he leaned into the aspect, in that way that allowed him to glimpse past that first burning wish at the heart of everyone into that myriad of lesser ones, all that there was to be found in the Dead King was a darkness. If he saw the first body, the true one, Kairos believed his sight would not fail him so. It had not failed him with the Wandering Bard, after all. Yet Trismegistus was ever a cautious one, a creature of brokers and emissaries and intermediaries. All of them the same old horror, but as the name went it was intent on remaining hidden. How unsporting of it, really. How was he to break what the Dead King wanted most in the world, if he knew not what it was?

“How boring life would be, if there were only ever two choices to be had,” Kairos lightly said. “Our guests have come, dear friend.”

“Yes,” the Dead King said. “I can feel the Hierophant. Soon, now.”

“It is a shame the Empress could not attend,” the Tyrant sighed.

The old thing laughed, for the both knew Kairos would have betrayed her as eagerly as he intended to betray Ol’ Bones himself. Sadly, Malicia had decided that after wringing him dry of every use she had of him and cutting the grass under his feet among his beloved allies she no longer had a need to humour him. The Dead King himself was here because the old thing was under the impression the only one that could make him bleed was the Intercessor, and that these games in Salia were a passable amusement until he retired to his domain. What splendid arrogance, this, what sumptuous hubris! Truly, was the King of Death not among the greatest of their ilk?

“I shall have refreshments brought to you,” Kairos smiled, for he was an impeccable host.

It should be interesting to see if the Dead King would in fact drink from a cup of human blood, even though he had no throat or stomach or any real need to. Still, with the guests so soon to arrive the Tyrant of Helike had his porters bring him to the highest point in the old temple, atop the platform in the back. A more discreet snap of the wrist had another cup of Valiant Passing brought to his hand, and he drank the brew fully though the taste was horrid. It was a necessity, sadly. Without it the fits came every half hour and he was blind in one eye, though the old recipe was only a temporary reprieve. Soon, Named or not there would be enough of the poison in his bones that no purging trick would see him through it unharmed. Ah, but the harm had been done long before the drink and there’d never been any purging of that . Tossing away the cup in a corner, Kairos allowed his loyal attendants to drape him in the formal regalia of the kings and queens of Helike: the cloths of purple and gold, the heavy bejewelled crown that Theodosius has adorned with the jewels of defeated royalty, the pearl-incrusted slippers.

He was ready before the first of his guests arrived, passing through the open and unhinged gates of the former temple. Catherine, bold as ever strolled in first. The Queen of Callow still bore one of the strongest wishes he had ever seen, pulsing with her heartbeat: peace, peace, peace . It was like watching a flower bloom anew with every beat. Even now it was all he could do not to laugh until his throat bled, for what an exquisite jest it was that one of Below’s finest servants in the long history of Calernia was at heart one of Above’s! At her side that boring little thing the White Knight tread, all desires his own faded while that horrid thing intertwined with the Seraphim – I wish to be just – tainted everything. Most of the others that followed behind were tedious to behold, Cordelia’s implacable duty and ugh, the Blood was all honour and glory as always and oh, wasn’t that Itima Ifriqui craving revenge ? Ah, what a proper villain that one would have made with a little prodding.

Neither Rozala Malanza nor Vivienne Dartwick were attending, which was amusingly cautious of Catherine and Cordelia, though it seemed the Witch of the Wilds and the Hierophant had been dragged along. Reading the latter was always amusing for the splitting headache it gave him, the Hierophant’s path to apotheosis being so deeply steeped in High Arcana that trying to understand the concept was like driving nails through his own forehead. The Witch was intriguing, for a hero, her wish for completion too complex and driven in notions he did not understand to properly grasp, but she was still a passing fancy compared to the Archer and that delightfully strange and nuanced horizon . The wonder of discovery, of the fresh and new, of doing things no one had done before. It was not all-consuming like Catherine’s craving for a peace that would justify all the horrors or the White Knight’s childish need to have his hand felt, but it was deeper in some ways.

It was not always the wish that commanded her, but it was so deeply ingrained abandoning it would kill her sure as dawn.

The Tyrant of Helike gestured for his porters to take flight, though until more of the flock joined in to even the sides his throne was slightly askew in the air and Theodosius’ crown, always too large for his brow, went askew with it. His rise caught the eye of everyone in the room, even the Hierarch.

“Greetings, friends,” Kairos Theodosian grinned, “and welcome. Now that all are in attendance, it seems we can at last begin the trial.”

At last , he yearningly thought. At long last .

Interlude: Suffer No Compromise In This

“Fifth of all Choirs, sternest Judgement
They who cannot abide the repugnant;
None more farsighted than the Tribunal,
And none as even-handed or as brutal.”
– Extract from the ‘Hymn of Hymns’, Atalantian sacred text (declared heresy in Procer and Callow)

Anaxares had been a boy when he’d first heard the song of rage.

He’d been seven when thousands boiled through the streets of Bellerophon in wroth, for the lot-drawn iakas had mismanaged the People’s wheat and rationing was announced. He’d heard myriad voices howling out the same displeasure, like a great beast made up of an entire city, and it had been a thing of awe. So many voices, all telling of the same belief: this may be, yet this is not how it should be . The iakas were dragged out one and all, and before the citizens they had failed were made to answer for that failure. Tribunals were called by the People, held by the People, and the People handed down their bloody verdict. As a boy he’d watched the fear on the faces of the iakas with curiosity, but it had felt distant. Like a glimpse of another world entirely. His own was easier grasped for it was made up of the pounding of a thousand feet, the shouts of a thousand throats. The people, he’d dimly grasped then, were the river that carried them all. No single man nor woman could command the current, and like any capricious river-god it could bathe or drown as its whims demanded. What purpose was there to fear, when naught of this could be changed? And so Anaxares the Diplomat had let the river take him where it would, beyond care or worry.

Yet the river had brought him to a shore where none of the people should ever know.

What a terrible thing it had been, to watch the sole thing he truly believed in turn against itself. Your services to the people have made you a Person of Value , the kanenas had told him. And in that blasphemous betrayal the seed of a greater folly was planted, for the People cast their vote for Anaxares the Diplomat and that worst of treasons saw him elected the Hierarch of the Free Cities. Long had he wondered of this, of the purpose to it. Could there even be one? Forbidden to take his own life through action or inaction by the decree of the People, he had been left to wallow in the absurdity of his continued breath. And with every moment the world had hounded him for further treasons, flies swarming to him like they would to carrion. Named and kings and queens, princes high and low, a buzzing flock of foreign despots that wanted him to sit at their table and pretend they were anything more than ticks sucking the blood out of those they claimed to be ruling . And all the while Kairos Theodosian, Helike’s bloody son, had taken the spurs to his flanks until this day came. This hour, this moment, this reckoning for all the many balances left uneven.

Anaxares was not blind. He knew well the Tyrant had paved the road to this for his own foul reasons. It did not matter to him, for the destination was of his own choice, and no part save that one weighed on the scales. It’d been a choice forged in that terrible, lucid moment where the creature that called itself the Wandering Bard had tried to clap him in chains, but he had not grown to regret it since. Anaxares had been a boy, when he’d first heard the song of rage, but he heard it still as a man grown. It had stayed with him, seeped into his bones, and as the great despots of the east and the west entered under his watchful gaze the tune was so loud he grew deaf to all that was being spoken. The Tyrant flew above on his gargoyle-carried throne – a familiar twitch of revulsion went through him at the sight, the clenching muscle of Thrones Are An Unforgiveable Abomination Unto The People, To Be Met With Scorn And Thrown Rocks – and addressed the lot of them, weaving his exact truths into the finest of lies. The song ebbed low, though it did not leave, and the Hierarch cut in through the chatter.

“Be seated or you will be expelled,” Anaxares stated.

“Lord Hierarch,” a fair-haired woman said. “I greet you-“

The diplomat twitched.

“There are no lords in a court of the People,” Anaxares of Bellerophon coldly said. “Neither crowns nor the petty tyrannies of those claiming them are of any weight here. Be seated presently or you will be expelled-”

He did not know her name, unfortunately, and so glanced at the Tyrant in question. The mad boy grinned back.

“Cordelia Hasenbach,” the king of Helike helpfully provided.

Was she? It would explain why she might be under the mistaken impression her words carried authority here.

“Yes,” Anaxares said, “that.”

His eyes swept the crowd, recognizing only a single face: Catherine Foundling, the so-called Queen of Callow. The Black Knight of Praes was not here, which was displeasing. The man had also committed crimes under the laws of the League and would not have been unfit to stand trial today, were he present. A woman at the back of the pack, bearing a large unstrung bow, raised her hand.

“Speak,” Anaxares said.

“Is that the Dead King?” she asked, pointing behind him.

There did indeed seem to be some sort of crowned skeleton there, the Hierarch noted. It was holding a cup full of blood, which after a long moment he was forced to concede was not against any law he knew of. The diplomat once more cast a glance at the Tyrant, who equivocated with a wiggled palm.

“More or less,” Anaxares replied.

She raised her hand again, to his irritation.

“Speak,” he repeated.

“I see the Dead King got refreshments,” the woman said. “Which is most terribly unfair, as we have not.”

“That is not a question,” the Hierarch peevishly told her.

It was, however, true. And damning. Anaxares turned to glare at the Tyrant.

“My staff are on it,” the boy assured him.

It would suffice. He was not concerned with the matter beyond the perception of willingly allowed imbalance.

“I will not repeat myself a third time,” Anaxares bluntly said. “All attending must take their seats or depart.”

There was offended shuffling from the band of Avaricious Foreign Oligarchs, but they heeded the reminder. Not that the diplomat spared them much attention, not when the accused himself was stepping forward. The White Knight, Hanno of Arwad. No longer a citizen of Ashur by their own laws, inquiries to the Thalassocracy had established, and seemingly claimed by no one in particular. No one mortal, that was. The White Knight was a tall and solid man, plain of face but of calm bearing, and he strode to the stand reserved for the accused without need for prompting. Anaxares approved. He waited until the man stood amidst the gutted altar to Above before speaking up.

“I am Anaxares of Bellerophon,” he informed the Named. “The elected Hierarch of the Free Cities.”

“I know who you are, Anaxares the Diplomat,” the White Knight replied.

The afternoon sun filtered in though the stained glass and the gaping walls, casting the court in mixed and coloured light. It made the White Knight seem as if he had been painted on, as if this entire court of law was some delirious stretch of Arcadia. Anaxares remained seated at his table, facing the accused with a quill in hand and the parchments he had prepared for this day ready.

“Then you know why you stand now before me,” the Hierarch said. “A grievance was lodged by a member of the League concerning crimes you committed, and my judgement was sought over the matter.”

“I am not a citizen of any nation of the League,” the White Knight said.

That was true, and to be entered in the record, though of no repercussion on the proceedings.

“That is irrelevant,” Anaxares flatly replied. “Crimes committed against citizens of the League on the grounds of the League fall under its jurisdiction nonetheless.”

He paused.

“I am told,” the Hierarch said, “that you willingly agreed to submit yourself to judgement.”

If so, that was a principled action. Not one that mattered in the slightest when it came to culpability, but the principle was laudable regardless.

“I agreed to stand trial,” the White Knight corrected.

“Then as is allowed the laws of the League of Free Cities, you are allowed to request someone to advocate in your name,” Anaxares said. “So long as they are a citizen of a member-nation, that is.”

“I have volunteered to serve as your defender, should you desire it,” the Tyrant called out. “Otherwise a band of seven candidates was arranged.”

Those had already been refused, which the boy knew even if he now implied otherwise, and so Anaxares made note of the Tyrant’s petty obstruction.

“Your candidates were judged unlawful,” the Hierarch reminded the Tyrant. “Gargoyles are not citizens, even when words indicating otherwise are painted on them.”

His gaze turned to the former Ashuran.

“While remaining here in containment, you have an hour to send for such an advocate should you so wish,” Anaxares informed him. “Or you may accept the offer of the Tyrant of Helike.”

“It was my understanding,” the White Knight said, “that it was the grievance of the Lord Tyrant that led to this trial.”

A moment passed.

“That is correct,” Anaxares conceded.

“I would seek to be impartial in both offices, naturally,” Kairos Theodosian cheerfully assured the accused, “You have my solemn vow in this.”

“A kind offer,” the White Knight drily said. “I will be serving as my own advocate, Hierarch. Who is to be my accuser?”

The song stirred at the man’s mellow manner, the way he seemed to take none of this seriously. Anger, anger the white-clad killer who had walked the Free Cities and killed as he pleased and never once thought there might consequence to this. That a Name and the blessing of angels set him beyond such petty matters.

“There is no accuser,” the Hierarch harshly stated. “Your crimes are not in dispute, they are a matter of known record as certified by sworn witnesses from Delos, Stygia, Helike and Nicae.”

“Then the actions you deem as crimes should be listed, should they not?” the White Knight said. “Unless you intend to simply pass sentence.”

“I deem or dismiss nothing,” the Hierarch said, grinding his teeth. “The law is writ, and known to any who care to know it.”

He brought forward the first parchment, his own familiar writing providing the list that the Named was asking for.

“Murder of citizens of Helike and Stygia is the first charge,” Anaxares said. “On one hundred and seventy-three counts assured, forty-two alleged with proof in only the second degree.”

Which was to say, less than two witnesses and no writ evidence.

“You speak of soldiers,” the White Knight said, “fought in time of war.”

“In time of war between members of the League of Free Cities,” the Hierarch said. “You are not a citizen, and so not legally part of such a war, unless you took coin as mercenary in the service of a lawful government. Do you here claim to have done so?”

“I do not,” the White Knight said, “though I worked in lawful accord with the Secretariat in the defence of Delos and with the permission of Strategos Nereida Silantis in the defence of Nicae.”

“The Secretariat has provided records that put truth to your words,” Anaxares acknowledged. “Basileus Leo Trakas, who speaks for Nicae, has declined to do so. Yet in the absence of payment from Delos that would qualify you as a mercenary in the employ of the Secretariat, the point is irrelevant. The askretis cannot absolve a crime, only abet it.”

Anaxares reached for his papers, where he had put to ink the names he could not all remember. There were many, some he had known when he was still entirely a diplomat.

“You also murdered sitting members of the Magisterium, the exact list of your victims being-”

“Has the Magisterium then made complaint to the League?” the White Knight interrupted.

The song rose in pitch at the interruption, not for the words themselves but at the disrespect for the trial they implied.

“It has not,” the Hierarch replied, brow creasing in displeasure. “It has, however, granted rights to another party to seek redress in its name.”

“That would be me,” the Tyrant gleefully said.

“That is correct,” the Hierarch agreed. “You have also attempted to murder the ruling king of Helike-”

“Also me,” the Tyrant added, still with unseemly glee.

“- and in the attempt claimed to hold the authority to pass judgement over King Kairos Theodosian of Helike,” Anaxares continued unflinchingly.

“That is incorrect,” the White Knight said.

Someone in the benches loudly cursed, but the Hierarch paid it no mind.

“Speak now, if you would amend the record,” Anaxares said. “It has until now been understood that in your role as the White Knight you spoke for the Choir to which you are sworn and passed judgement in their stead.”

Was the man now renouncing the authority bestowed upon him by the Choir, in an attempt to exempt it from consequence? If so, it was a cowardly thing.

“I do not judge,” Hanno of Arwad said, “and passed no judgement over the Tyrant of Helike. The judgement was passed by the Tribunal, and I sought to execute the sentence it as is my duty.”

The song, oh the song swelled. This was, Anaxares understood, so much worse than he had believed. Had the Tyrant known? No, that did not matter. Law was law, no matter what capering gargoyle brought it to the fore. Yet mistakes here could not be allowed.

“Clarify what you mean by ‘the Tribunal’,” the Hierarch ordered.

“The Choir of Judgement,” the White Knight replied.

“You then allege,” Anaxares slowly said so there could be no mistake, “that the Seraphim of the Choir of Judgement have claimed the right to pass judgement over citizens of the League?”

“It is not a subtle thing, what you attempt,” the White Knight told him. “Do you understand this? That you have not tricked or fooled any in this hall. That your intent is clear as day.”

“What I attempt ,” Anaxares of Bellerophon softly repeated. “As if this were some sort of plot, a scheme against you or your masters. Is that what you believe, Hanno of Arwad? That the Seraphim and your service of them are owed abeyance? That the world entire is to twist and bend to your verdicts, unasked for and unsought ?”

We are all of us free , the song whispered in his ear, or we are none of us free.

“Madness,” the White Knight said, “is no excuse for baring steel at the Heavens.”

“If the Heavens would have part in this trial,” the Hierarch coldly said, “they may be seated and silent, like the rest of the gallery. Speak not otherwise of those that cannot be called to account.”

“This will not end as you wish, Hierarch,” the White Knight calmly said. “Yet if you cannot be turned aside so be it: the Choir of Judgement acknowledges none to be beyond its jurisdiction, save for the Gods Above.”

The song filled him, up to brim, but that wroth was as much his own as the tune’s.

“There is no law, writ or known, that grants this right to the Choir of Judgement,” Anaxares of Bellerophon said with excruciating calm.

“And yet it is theirs nonetheless,” the White Knight said.

We are all of us free , the song hissed in his ear, or we are none of us free.

“No,” the Hierarch coldly said. “It is not. And if it would pretend otherwise, let it stand before this court and defend that crude arrogance.”

“I warned you,” the White Knight sadly said.

Power coursed around the court, first the distant weavings the Tyrant had laid around this place and then the blooming protections the tyrants high and low garbed themselves in out of fear. And then it came, the answer he had asked for. There was no ceiling above them, nothing save the cloudless blue sky, and through it the wroth of Judgement came down on him.

The Hierarch burned.

The Tribunal gazed down upon him, and its fury broke his bones and scoured his flesh. All around him shattered, even the very ground, and even as his body tore apart claws dug into his mind. Force him to look where they would, to see what they wished him to see. Before his eyes unfolded and endless shifting tapestry, made from all the decisions that were made and could be. The depth was... too much to grasp. The threads of every action and consequence, of the reasons and the endings. This was, the Hierarch grasped, what the Seraphim saw. The truth of their judgement. And as he tried to parse it, he felt his mind begin to unravel. He could have looked away. It would have spared him the horrendous pain going through every fiber of who he was. But that would be admitting that their judgement was right. That it was correct, for they knew things mortals could not. And so as he stared unblinking Anaxares of Bellerophon found oblivion snaking her arms around him. Oblivion, and with it would come rest. Would that not be a relief? And yet there was one thing he could not help but see.

It was a woman, carving words into a stele of stone that somehow reminded him of a great bird’s corpse. Around her was a sea of people in rags, thin and sickly and hungry. Yet there was something in their eyes, as they looked at the stele and the woman, that made him want to weep. And the words, oh the words he knew them. Every child born of Bellerophon knew them. All are free, or none. Ye of this land, suffer no compromise in this. The woman was wounded, bleeding within, and with the last letter she died. But the words, the words stayed. And as the city rose around them, around the stele, blood splashed stone. Suffer no compromise in this , the stele had told them, and so they did not. And they bled and they bled and they bled, and they bled but they never bowed. Not once did they look at the world, even at the very bottom of the pit, and bend their neck. It would have been easy, light as a feather. And perhaps they would have been better for it. And from mother to son, father to daughter, the words on the stele had carried down. Until they ended up told to a small boy, who one day would be a diplomat. Suffer no compromise in this , Anaxares thought, and the world sang it with him.

His body was a ruin yet there was a need for it, and so the Hierarch decided it would have to Mend .

Bones set back in place, soldered by will, and flesh knit itself anew. Teeth made by heat into black and broken stones flew back into his mouth as the table and the chair snapped back into place. The Hierarch of the Free Cities dipped his quill into the inkwell, tongue lolling out of his half-broken mouth as it reformed.

“This will be added to the record as evidence of guilt,” he informed the Choir.

Attempted murder of a sitting judge of the court , he penned. The Seraphim had expressed their displeasure yet not bothered to attend, but that would not be enough to spare them judgement earned. Mind clear and still as a pond, the Hierarch closed his eyes and allowed himself to Receive what he required. Silhouettes stood before his gaze, bearing each six wings of bronze and a conviction like a fire that nothing could put out. They gazed back, and in their fury struck again. The world broke, and Anaxares with it, but without pause it was mended anew.

“Petulance,” the Hierarch said. “I address now the Seraphim of the Choir of Judgement, also known as the Tribunal, and Indict you for the following crimes-”

They smote him again, and he mended. It did not matter, for now his Name sang and filled the world. As it had in Rochelant, a blank slate on which all could write their accusations and have them known by all.

“- despotism high and low, arrant and illegal intervention in League affairs, attempted regicide –”

The Tyrant of Helike was laughing, he realized as he mended anew.

“- disturbance of the court, three –”

It was desperate now, the burning that consumed him tinted with dismay.

“- four times,” the Hierarch adjusted. “And repeated attempted murder. Given the overwhelming evidence-”

It no longer hurt, the Hierarch mused as he mended, as if the ability to feel pain had been scoured out of him.

“- the verdict cannot be in doubt,” he continued. “I pronounce you guilty and sentence you to-”

The words choked in his mouth, for something has seized his throat. Not the Tribunal, no. It was a great presence but not that, and as the grip tightened around his throat the Seraphim prepared to strike again.

“I win,” Kairos Theodosian laughed.

And the grip was gone .

Interlude: A Hundred Battles

“Under pale moon,
Across the snow
As the dead croon
And flies the crow

Did we not lose,
A hundred times?
Did we not win,
A hundred times?

Our iron wrought,
Saw use earnest
It rusted not
Left unburnished

Did we not lose,
A hundred times?
Did we not win,
A hundred times?

We came and went,
Unconquered few
We Tyrant’s get,
The tried and true

Did we not lose,
A hundred times?
Did we not win,
A hundred times?

Weep not for us,
For in the annals
Our stele reads thus:
A hundred battles

For we did lose,
A hundred times
And we will win,
A hundred times
‘till falls the age,
And end the times!”
– “Dead In A Hundred Battles”, Helikean soldier’s song

“I win,” Kairos Theodosian laughed.

“- death,” the Hierarch of the Free Cities said.

The Tyrant wished and the candle was lit.

No heartbeat passed before the wroth of the Choir of Mercy descended upon him: it was immediate and unflinching. Even as his lie echoed across the hall the curse laid upon him by the Grey Pilgrim tightened its grip, seeking to smother him. Ah, it was worth every irksome moment where he’d been denied the pleasure of blatant lies to now have the Peregrine’s little mistake smash the Ophanim in the back of the knee just before they could tidy up all the loose ends. Mercy’s cold purpose forced against him, an immeasurable sea of pressure against his soul, and the Tyrant of Helike was going to lose this. But he knew, even as his last good eye shrivelled in its socket, that he had bought a candlespan of life before that loss occurred. And that made all the difference in the world, didn’t it?

“I have vexed you, I see,” the Tyrant gregariously said, addressing Mercy. “Well, if you would allow me a-”

They did not, in fact, allow him a rebuttal. The full weight of the Choir’s attention descended upon him and he tasted blood in his mouth, as the Ophanim finally grasped that they would not be allowed to murder the Hierarch before they’d dealt with him. Stories were such a funny thing, weren’t they? Like, say, ‘wicked villain is sentenced never to lie again by the champion of a Choir, then in a moment of delightful hubris speaks such a lie’. It was the kind of story that’d need a thundering, righteous Choir to smite that uppity servant of Below. Not the sort of thing you could do while simultaneously serving as the hidden knife of the Heavens in someone else’s tale. It wouldn’t matter that the Choir had the capacity to serve in both roles concurrently. Fate would punish such lackluster commitment with failure on both fronts.

His left knee pulped. The Tyrant was not certain whether that was his own doing or that of the angels, which rather amused him.

Kairos has once been told he would not make it to his thirteen nameday, a prophecy croaked by the dry lips of the ancient thing that laid in the crypt deep beneath Helike. And it’d told it true, it had. A hero might have thought, perhaps, that their kind and benevolent Gods had cured them of their many miseries. Kairos Theodosian knew very well what manner of deity he served, though, and so never once deluded himself into believing this – indeed it was a relief, when he first came into his favourite of his aspects. Wish. What a pretty bauble it had been, seeing the wish of others. Even more so when he learned it could be used to do things, to bridge the gap between the possible and the not. For a price, of course. It was then the he understood the prophecy, forged anew by darker hands.

Twelve times the Tyrant of Helike would be allowed to see come and go the day of the year where he had been Named and die on the dawn of the last. The Gods Below, magnificent monsters that they were, had presented him with a beautiful dilemma: would he spend his thirteen years of reprieve in mediocre obscurity, or would he spend the years to reach for glory? For that was the nature of wishing: all could be had, for a span of the life he might have lived.

“I always was a spendthrift at heart,” Kairos confessed. “It is the nature of princes, my friends, to waste the treasuries of their fathers.”

Alas, the Choir of Mercy was growing no fonder of him. It must have been quite cross, he mused, that its greatest strength was hamstrung by its own champion. For Mercy was not the mightiest of the Choirs, the most farsighted or the most beloved: it was the most flexile, befitting of its purpose as the tier of loose ends for the Heavens. Yet now it must pass its thread through on very particular needle’s head before it could attend to greater purposes, namely the continued existence of Kairos Theodosian. Anaxares, glorious mad son of Bellerophon that he was, was attempting for force his verdict upon the dealers of verdicts, and though he was not succeeding neither was he failing . The Seraphim’s crushing strength slid over the Hierarch like water off a duck’s back, though his own burning indictment found bite but no flesh: even with Bellerophon’s fury at his back, the Choir of Judgement remained the Choir of Judgement.

It was like watching a man attempting to wrestle the sea, and every bit as gloriously absurd as that sounded.

The Ophanim, sadly, did not seem to agree. And in their impatience as finishing to choke out the Hierarch – oh, that one detail must have burned Tariq like acid when he’d emerged at the crucial moment and unleashed his patrons like a dagger in the side – they decided the time for subtlety was past. If a tight grip would not suffice, then a fist would have to serve. The Tyrant, Gods take him if he lied, had no parry against such a stroke. Even simply receiving it would burn through the last of his life in the bat of an eye. Of course he didn’t need to have such a parry, not strictly speaking. The Ophanim smiting this entire temple into barren ash would mean...

Darkness flooded the broken House of Light, the cold night soothing Kairos like a cold press as it cooled the blood seeping out of his pores. His head lolled back, the bone of his neck feeling like they were made of wobbling pastry, and he grinned malevolently as a match was struck a mere foot away from him. It was the sole light to be had, and it cast Catherine Foundling’s face into sharp relief as she lighted her pipe. She puffed, glowing red embers burning as she did, and spat out long stream of wakeleaf.

“You want to burn Kairos, burn Kairos,” his beloved enemy shrugged. “But you don’t get to burn the rulers of half the continent with him. Archer’s escorting them out, under protection of the Hierophant. Until they’re out of the way, hold your hand.”

It was a superb thing, the way the Black Queen could so address a Choir and expect to be obeyed . She’d survived so many close calls with angels she’d somehow come to believe she could match them, and through that utterly crazed belief become something that could genuinely give a Choir pause. And so Mercy found itself peering into the Night, wondering if the battle laid out there to be fought would truly result in its victory – and hesitating, for the consequences if it didn’t would be utterly disastrous . Against any other foe it would have struck regardless, but Sve Noc? The blood-soaked goddess of theft in victory? Losing might just have consequences . And even the villainess was preventing the full exercise of their power, she was letting through the wroth still shattering him bit by bit. Their hand held, and convulsive laughter escaped his throat until he choked on it. How long would it take for them to grasp that every time she got away with that, she came harder into the story of someone who could get away with that ?

“You’re about to die,” the Black Queen told him.

“Well spotted,” Kairos cheerfully replied.

He spat out a thick glob of smoking blood afterwards, but it was well worth the trade.

“Now would be a good time to pay up what you yet owe,” the Queen of Callow said.

“Indeed,” the Tyrant of Helike mused. “Allow me then to grant you the greatest gift of all.”

The red burn of her pipe was the sole light in the dark, and what allowed him to be certain he was addressing her instead of an endless void. It also revealed her sigh.

“It’s a monologue, isn’t it?” she said, sounding resigned.

His fingers clenched, not out of surprise or dismay but because a swath of flesh and muscle on his arm had gone dead and dried up in the span of a breath, contracting the rest. Yet the rebellions of his own body were nothing new to him and did not truly distract from the great pleasure of having someone who understood . Not someone who agreed or sympathized, for indeed either of those things would have spoiled the broth, but someone who... followed the cast of his dice. It was such a rare, precious thing.

“Gods Below, Catherine,” he grinned, “why would it be anything else?”

His throne was half-sunken into he ground now, his attendant gargoyles made rubble, but still he clasped his scepter and his head loosely kept Theodosius’ crown. All was as it should be.

“It is said among my people that the hour of death is also the hour of revelation,” Kairos said, “for when the distance between life and death grows thin so do the veils that keep our eyes from hidden truths. My own father, for example, called me as grotesque imp as he died. Which was remarkably perceptive for the old drunk, I assure you. Still, I’ll admit stabbing him those seventeen times might have served as something of a hint.”

Talking should have, by all earthly laws, precipitated his death. Taken him tumbling down the cliff of annihilation, an already strained body and soul snapping like a twig under the added strain. Instead, the Tyrant of Helike found the trembling of his hand slowing, the blood in his throat drying. He was, after all, villain speaking his death-words: earthly laws were the lesser set of those now applying to him.

“I stabbed my father too,” the Black Queen mused. “Twice. And it wasn’t even the same person both times.”

Well, now she was just showing off. And by amusing him doing almost as much to kill him as the angels were, which was quite inconvenient.

“Don’t interrupt,” Kairos chided. “This is a monologue, not repartee . As I was saying, in the spirit of my rapidly approaching annihilation, I would therefore offer revelations.”

And did he not have a great trove of these to spill over the ground, painstakingly gathered one betrayal at a time?

“We begin with the corpse of an angel,” the Tyrant of Helike said, “though of course there can be no such thing.”

It was months ago he had first dangled that truth in front of her and knew she had been digging after it ever since. As well she should, for it was the very devil in the details – in a manner of speaking.

“In glorious old days,” Kairos Theodosian wistfully said, “there was once a woman who broke in Evil as one would break in a stallion. From triumph to triumph did she march, west and ever pursuing, until by the shores of a great lake she met in strife a hundred priests-elect of the Hallowed. And these holy souls did scour themselves to bring forth the great spirit they worshipped, one that cast judgement upon all it beheld, and behold her it did.”

Ah, what he would not have done for a glimpse of that grand moment. Truly, there never had been nor ever would be a match to Dread Empress Triumphant.

“For that presumption she slew it,” The Tyrant ferally grinned, sharp teeth bared, “bearing tall banner, and wrote her rage in blood across a hundred trembling tribes. That which was not a corpse sunk into deep waters, turning into bones that dreamt, and there was left to slumber. Some across the years learned of this, and of the great works that might wrought from such a thing, but none were so bold as to attempt to make a sword out hallowing petrified.”

Ah, but heroes lacked for such beautiful ambitions. The living kin of that dreaming thing came too easily to their help, he’d always thought, and so there was no need for ingenuity unleashed.

“That hoped-for boldness still escapes our kind,” he mourned, “but a lesser manner of soul did grow desperate enough.”

How could Cordelia Hasenbach not be, when doom covered her home and kin as the south tore itself apart in a war with no end nor meaning? There had been so little left to lose, and in the end the First Prince answered first to duty .

“This is no coincidence,” Kairos reminded his peer, “for indeed there are no coincidences. This one least of all, however, for it is a harsh sword long in the swinging. There is a thing out there that delights in intercession –”

He paused, allowing for dramatic arrival should it be in the cards. Only silence answered.

“No?” he mused. “No, I suppose not. Not while the Hierarch still breathes.”

Even should she wear a different face when she arrived, Kairos amusedly thought, all that would change would be that the crime of personation with intent to confuse the court would be added to her tally. If it was as he suspected, her very name would prevent her from putting herself in such a situation even should she desire it. Setting aside the thoughts, he returned to the thrust of his speaking, though he did not there was not anger in the Black Queen’s eyes. Ah, noticed his little trick had she? That the wards around Lyonceau made escape more difficult when the fabric of Creation was troubled. Which, given the presence of two Choirs in wroth and the high priestess of Night wielding the very stuff, was very much the case. It ought to keep the hostages close long enough for his purposes.

“And that thing, Catherine,” he drawled, “it has been waiting a very long time to kill another: one who claims rulership over dust and bones. But is a cautious crown that lairs to the north, one that does not often leave its shell. It took cornering and opportunity, to bait it out. Defeat on the horizon and victory at hand, how could even such a leery thing not be tempted? It scuttled out and lost a finger or two but got to witness the truth of its foe in exchange.”

One of his kidneys had just melted, the Tyrant dimly noticed. Oh dear, that was quicker than anticipated. Mercy was refining its technique.

“A fair trade, as these things go,” he rasped out.

He mastered his voice a moment later, with great effort.

“It would not have mattered,” the Tyrant said, “if not for the hidden sting of augury. You see, there was a plan. A warden for the west, besieged. Her ears open to whispers. And as the sky darkened, inch by inch the finger would tighten until the trigger was pulled.”

His only functioning arm snapped up, for the other was a desiccated waste, and he snapped his fingers.

“Death, dead,” Kairos said with relish, for it had been a pretty plan indeed. “That was the trick, you see: letting it eat someone’s whole world before they mattered, and then make them matter. Too late, then, to shake free of that story and the chains it brings. Quite a bit more would die along with it, of course, but then victory is not without costs. The clever crown caught on early, now, and it flees back to its lair. It would shed the chains binding it for a set more pleasing, if you let it.”

He met the Black Queen’s gaze, with his bloody red eye.

“Don’t let it, Catherine,” he said. “It does not deserve this.”

He hacked out a wet laugh, for deserving hardly ever mattered.

“And so here we are now, at the crossroads of it all,” Kairos Theodosian said. “The crossbow has been forged, and aimed, but the hand that wields it is closed to intercession. Its quarry is a lion rampant, and forewarned, but there are a great many hunters gathering to hunt it. It would lair again, let the danger pass, but it cannot simply vanish – lest it be followed, crossbow in hand. To survive now it must either cow the hunters or break the crossbow.”

And even then, the Dead King would not ever truly trust the first of those two. Even cowed, the great Names of Calernia might still be nudged into rolling the dice. It had made striking fresh bargain with it after the Graveyard disappointingly easy. He’d been looking forward to the challenge of convincing Keter to ally again after betraying it so often and cheerfully.

“And so back it went to its old friend Kairos,” the Tyrant drawled, “who happened to have a grain of sand on hand that fit that hallowed mechanism quite nicely. There was a need for some expertise to see it through, which was helpfully provided, and now we arrive at the moment of truth.

He grinned, his teeth gone red for the bleeding of his gums.

“Yes, Catherine, I see the question is on the tip of your tongue. Say it.”

She studied him, unblinking.

“What happens when a Judgement-corpse is wielded, if Judgement is dead?”

The right question, as he had expected. She had yet to disappoint.

“Truth of truths, my friend,” he chortled, “I already gave you the only answer to that question worthy of being spoken.”

A Rochelant, when they had first begun this dance of theirs.

“That’s the entire point,” she softly quoted, “finding out.”

He’d be dead long before that riddle was answered, naturally, but what did that matter?

“Now,” the Tyrant cheerfully said, “you two distressing damsels stuck bargain with me in Salia, and I promised you a good reason to keep warring on Keter. I am a tyrant of my word, and so here it is: Keter will keep warring on you.”

Surprise, for though she was clever and ruthless and dangerous, she did have an inflated sense of the threat she truly represented to an entity like the Dead King.

“Your coalition does not scare the King of Death,” Kairos told her, not unkindly, “your petty assembly of armies and treaties which you so wastefully wring your hands over. He fears only one thing in all the world, and I have torn through the perilous nets she wove against him.”

The darkness thinned, and the Ophanim wasted no breath in stepping harder on his existence. Kairos spat out blood that looked like boiling pitch, burning a streak down his own chin. The hostages must be close to out of danger, then. Yet it was as had been ordained, for now that he had spoken in pride through the lessened gloom he was allowed to see if his pride was to be deemed arrogance after all. Was the net truly broken? Would a thousand years of fury and madness poured into a single man be enough to humble a Choir? For all his scheming and deals, the truth was that the Tyrant had no idea.

No longer was Anaxares the Diplomat flattened into the ground by angelic verdict, he saw, mended only by stubborn will. Yet that did not mean the Hierarch was winning. It was, to his eye, a shattering deadlock. The will of Judgement was hammering down from the Heavens, to no avail, yet Anaxares’ scathing dismissal of that authority was not resulting into his own judgement biting into the Choir’s flesh. It was a tight embrace between entities that could not bend and a man that would not. It would not be enough, Kairos saw. In time the Tyrant would be slain, and when that moment came Mercy would choke the life out of the Hierarch.

Too strong. Even after all the schemes and the lies and the hundred petty victories, the servants of the Heavens were simply too strong. Like a rat biting a lion’s tail, their rage had been a splendid but doomed gesture. Yet there was glory in that too, the Tyrant of Helike thought. In firing an arrow at the moon and coming close before it fell back down and took you in the throat. Even in defeat he would have no regrets, for –

“If you will not come to me,” the Hierarch said, rising to his feet, “then I will come to you .”

Anaxares of Bellerophon rose while under angel’s wroth, and for that insolence the flesh was peeled from his bones by fervent fire.

“Oh,” Kairos breathed out, genuinely moved. “Oh, you splendid madman.”

The Hierarch of the Free Cities was swallowed whole by shimmering heat that for a moment chased out of even the darkness of Night. And when it went out, he was gone. The White Knight dropped to the ground living, but unconscious, and the Tyrant of Helike felt a laugh bubble out of his throat. Not a rat biting a lion’s tail, how wrong he had been. This was a king swallowing poison. He was with them, now. Standing among them, obstructing like only the sons and daughters of Bellerophon could.

“Gods keep you, Hierarch,” Kairos said, and for the first time spoke the title with respect.

Gods Below keep you, Anaxares of Bellerophon, and it is a pride to call you Hierarch of the Free Cities, he thought. Die as you lived, my friend, without peer in your madness.

“And now we have a war, Catherine,” the Tyrant of Helike said. “The war that will bring this age to an end, one way or another.”

The Black Queen looked at him through the dying gloom, her face a cool mask.

“On your feet, Kairos Theodosian,” she said. “That much you are owed, and not a single thing more.”

It would have been a lovely thing, he thought, to dance with that one until one of them died of it. A lovely thing indeed. Matted in sweat and blood, one knee a ruin and both legs half-gone, the Tyrant of Helike pushed himself up. He stumbled forward, legs failing him, and knew he would die before he touched the ground. And it came, it came as he knew it would. Like a whisper across his skin, soothing the pain like a kind hand flicking dust away from his shoulder.

Below was watching.

The attention itself was as a question, for what man or woman alive had paid finer dues than the Tyrant of Helike? And so, at this later hour, he was asked for his wish. So many tantalizing possibilities flickered in the back of his mind. Curses that would rend the continent asunder, the strength to wound even the Choir that was about to take his life or even a loop in the hole – a few years more, if he could talk his way into keeping them. O Wicked Gods of mine, do you not know me better than this? All I have ever wanted of you was the answer to a single question, and only in this moment could it be asked. One staggering step forward, and he wet his lips as he spoke.

“lo,” he croaked out, “and behold...”

Another step, his knee giving out. If he could only prick his hear, he thought he might...

“I have...slain-” he whispered.

Ahead of him the veil lifted, and terrible light was revealed. And in that moment he finally heard it.

“-the Age of Wonders,” the Tyrant finished, smiling with pure childish joy.

And to the sound of applause only he could hear, a moment before light engulfed him, Kairos Theodosian died.

Chapter 84: Declaration

“To concern yourself with wickedness and virtue is to raise partitions within your mind, expecting the world to heed them thereafter. There can be no sin, save for fettering.”
– Translation of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness, widely attributed to the young Dead King

Kairos Theodosian died before the light engulfed him. I couldn’t know that for sure, for the Tyrant of Helike had already been a half-mangled corpse by the time he rose, but some part of me just... knew . Night wrapped around me like a cloak, for without its cold embrace I would have been blinded, I watched as the brightness burned and consumed and finally ended. Of the boy-king who’d played half the crowns of Calernia, not so much as a speck of dust remained. The fury of the Choir of Mercy had swallowed him whole, though too late. Not long, truly, in the greater scheme of things, but in affairs like this a single beat could make all the difference in the world – and he’d clawed to him a great deal more than that. The fading light of his absence left me feeling disordered, for though Kairos Theodosian had been an appalling monster in some ways in others he had been almost admirable. I would not miss him or fall into the snare of remembering him as more than he had been: mad, treacherous and like poison to all he touched. Yet neither would I pretend he had not been brilliant, in his own wicked way.

The world was better for his passing, but in some terrible way perhaps lesser as well.

In the gutted temple that’d been the seat of this lunacy of a trial, the dust settled and the darkness I had called down thinned until nothing of it was left. The Grey Pilgrim laid in a bed of shattered wood and ground, made unconscious by the heavy grip of the Choir that’d reached out through him. The White Knight’s hand still clutched the side of the broken altar where he’d stood as the living channel to Judgement, or perhaps the anchor around its neck. It was hard to tell if the Tyrant would have been able to bait – although could it really be called that, when all he’d needed to do was shine a light and let nature take its course? – the Tribunal into this disaster of a situation without the White Knight at hand to work through. And a disaster it had been, no two ways about that. Mercy would walk away from this with little singed save perhaps its pride, should even have such a thing, but Judgement? I could still feel in the air the weight of the power it’d thrown around, smiting the Hierarch into the ground again and again as he refused to bow to their authority.

I could still feel his power, too, the same heavy lingering furor that’d swallowed Rochelant whole. It had been more sharply wielded here, turned against the Seraphim instead of allowed to run rampant, and perhaps been stronger for it. It’d glimpsed things at the heart of the storm, images I hardly understood – a stele in stone, a woman dying – but one thing was clear: there had been power behind the Hierarch, and it was not simply the power of a Named. The weight had come from elsewhere, and it had been... oppressive. In every sense of the term. And though it had failed to cow Judgement, neither had it been willing to be cowed by it. More worryingly, when that stalemate had grown beyond what either side would tolerate the Hierarch had, for a lack of better term, pursued. I’d not felt a speck of power from either him or the Choir since.

Still, my eyes looked beyond as I waited. To the other thing that yet waited.

“And?” I quietly said.

“He was still alive,” the Hierophant said.

Masego’s feet tread across the scorched earth unerringly, his stride as sure and certain it had been even as Choirs raged and darkness swelled. What would the works of godlings matter, to one like him?

“That last strike by the Seraphim burned him clean through,” I said. “Not even bone left, Hierophant. What business does even the likes of the Hierarch have surviving that?”

“You mistake life for the wearing of flesh,” Masego replied. “I know not if it was willingly or by chance, yet the Hierarch sacrificed his own as skillfully as any Old Tyrant: the loss of flesh was taken as victory by the Choir of Judgement, and so they withdrew.”

Above us the afternoon sky grew darkened, and slowly the sky began to weep ash. It felt, looking up, like the dusk heralding the end of the worlds. Gods forgive us all, it might yet be.

“And he withdrew with them,” I softly said. “Hooked into the hallowed flesh by the ironclad belief he had the right to judge it.”

My old friend’s steps slowed and finally ceased as he came to stand by my side, shoulder-to-shoulder. Masego, wearing cloth over eyes of glass and the ragged dark robes like a doomsday prophet, seemed more the man of the moment than I. The truth, though, was that he had been spectator while I’d had my hands all over this blunder.

“I am uncertain what will come of it,” Hierophant admitted, tone displeased. “It may be that the man becomes an obstruction in all things, as a seal ever judged and judging.”

“Or he could be a poison,” I murmured. “Taint in the blood, changing what stood incapable of such until now.”

The latter, I thought, felt more like the parting arrow of Kairos Theodosian. Something wounded but not slain, a crippling rendered back unto the Creation that had so carelessly wounded him since his first breath.

“Let us hope it is that,” Hierophant said, and my brow rose.

He dipped his head to the side, conceding to the need for elaboration.

“A poison will be purged, whether it takes an hour, a decade or a millennium,” Masego said. “A seal, however, might just last until the convictions of either side falter. And before that moment, would sever Judgement from the rest of Creation.”

That would be... dangerous, I suspected. A Choir was no small thing, to have one removed from the machinery of Creation could not possibly be without consequence. And that was without even considering the matter of Cordelia Hasenbach’s angelic corpse-weapon: Gods only knew what might come of using it, now. Ash fell like rain onto the open-sky temple at the heart of Lyonceau, and I was forced to wonder if in my need to forge a better world I might not have doomed the world as it now stood. The Tyrant had been cryptic, as was his wont, but not beyond interpretation: the Bard had truly had a scheme afoot to slay the Dead King, and I’d taken an axe to it. I was not alone in this, it seemed, for the hidden sting of augury was undoubtedly a reference to the Augur, but it could not be said that a great deal of the blame to be laid did not belong at my feet. If I’d not tried to fix it, to make it better, the Intercessor’s scheme might have gone through and the Dead King would either be dead or marching towards death. He implied using the weapon would have had... costs , I reminded myself. It must have been the sight of those to come that’d led the Augur to turn on the Wandering Bard, however she’d done it.

Gods Everburning, how harsh must that price must have been that a hero would have shied from paying it to slay the Dead King .

“I can’t tell,” I softly admitted, “if I’ve made everything better or worse.”

A chuckle, deeply amused.

“Neither can anyone else, Catherine,” Masego told me. “Why would you be any different?”

I looked up at the sky, at the trails of ash left by the wrath of angels, and did not answer. It was not untrue, what he’d said. Perhaps not the answer I’d wanted, but when had they ever been?

“Too late to turn back now,” I said, letting out a long breath. “We’ll have to see it through to the end.”

A hand came to rest on my shoulder, lightly.

“I would have been disappointed if we did not,” Hierophant said.

The danger had passed, as much as it would ever pass in a place marked by the indignation of two Choirs, and so it was not long before the others began to trickle back in. The Rogue Sorcerer headed first to the Pilgrim – the right choice, I thought, both tactically and politically – and with visible relief pronounced him in fine health, save for deep exhaustion and a few bruises. Lord Yannu and Lady Aquiline lifted him up, with reverent care, and brought him out. The Witch of the Woods saw to her partner hesitantly, and I suspected she knew precious little of healing. She seemed pleased when Roland came to lend a hand, though less so when admitted that Hanno’s slumber was not natural, but otherwise beyond his ability to see to.

“Bring him out,” I said. “And if the Peregrine cannot see to him when he wakes, then the Crows will.”

The heroine rose to her feet, tall and shrouded in a cloak that covered a long tunic. The painted mask of clay on her face hid her expression, but not so much I could not feel the hostility wafting off her like smoke.

“As they did when the Choirs struggled against your kin under Below?” the Witch harshly said.

There was, I thought, something strange about her voice. I heard her speaking in Lower Miezan, but there were almost other meanings woven in – and with the Sisters warding my mind, I could almost discern what language she was actually speaking in. It didn’t sound like any I’d ever heard before, and I was a more than passing polyglot nowadays.

“I warned him,” I said. “Sve Noc would see to containment and nothing else. Be glad they did, or this entire town would be drowning in fire and angelic anger.”

“You brought down darkness after the Tyrant struck,” the Witch accused.

“And saved the lives of everyone on those grounds by doing so,” I flatly said.

“I could have warded us from the anger of the Ophanim,” the Witch said. “Had you not-”

“If you could have handled it better, you should have,” I mildly said. “You didn’t, so I stepped in. Whining afterwards is an exercise in pointlessness.”

“Every hero that speaks well of you ends up crippled , Catherine Foundling,” the Witch of the Woods snarled. “While you grow ever stronger. I wonder why that is?”

“Antigone,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “This serves no purpose.”

“Neither does pretending she is our ally,” the Witch said.

“In the face of some foes, all those that breathe are allies,” the Sorcerer flatly said. “Pretending otherwise is how the day grew so dark in the first place.”

“Hear hear,” Archer drawled.

She’d sauntered in at some point and done so quietly enough I’d barely heard the sound of her boots biting into the ash. Throwing arms around the necks of both Masego and I – that could hardly be comfortable, given the height difference – she leaned forward grinning.

“We get you’re all pissed your boy Hanno got had, but maybe if you whiteclads better kept your eye on the bird you wouldn’t have to keep eating dirt,” Indrani said, tone was deceptively cheerful.

Her arms were tense, and I knew well how quickly she could draw her blades when it was time for killing.

“You offer insolence and nothing more,” the Witch said.

“Really?” Archer drawled, drawing out the word obnoxiously. “’cause look at how we’re standing right now, my sweet. Who are, again, the only ones keeping an eye on the bird?”

And like a cold sheet of rain falling on everyone, we were all reminded of the presence in the back that had yet to move or speak a single word. The Dead King’s vessel watched us all with his eyeless gaze, and it was true that while the Witch of the Woods was facing me, all this time Hierophant and I had been facing him. Indrani had spoken the observation lightly, but it had unpleasant aftertaste for much of the room – enough that the Witch briskly and oddly moved her head in a manner I assumed to mean the conversation was over. The King of Death said nothing, all the while. Now that they’d all been warned of his presence again, the others in the temple felt the same thing I had since the beginning: weight. The old monster was waiting, and as he did his looming presence grew oppressive without need of a single act on his part. If he’d incited quarrels between us, I thought, or even mocked and scorned us, it would have been different. It would have felt like he was part of this, a villain far more dangerous than most of our kind but not other . His silence, though, drew a line between him and us.

The Dead King was not involving himself in this because he was above us. Because he had no need of resorting to petty tactics when we were, to him, little more than children stumbling in the dark.

It flowed, after that, like a river settling into a riverbed. Like Creation wanted the pieces to fall into place. The White Knight was carried out by Roland and the Witch, carefully, and in the place of heroes came in the mortal crowns. Cordelia Hasenbach stood at the centre, the First Prince of Procer of regal bearing even in her riding dress but not quite successfully hiding how unnerved she’d been by the last hour. The Blood come to war north: Lady Aquiline and Razin Tanja, elbow to elbow and fitting there like a shield wall of two. The young ones, those, two, and rising. The old guard stood at their left, grizzled Lady Itima and grim Lord Yannu, both killers as fine as the Dominion had forged in my lifetime. And to the Warden of the West’s right, more than half of the Woe. Hierophant, ragged and of glimmering eye, foe and student both to the Hidden Horror. Archer, smile sharp as the blades at her hip, having walked through death and come out of it without fear. And I, last of all, leaning on the long staff of yew I had chosen over the sword of a Fairfax and all it would mean. All this assembly, and on the other side only the King of Death. Seated, silent, still.

Ash drifted down through the open-sky ceiling, coating us all in grey.

“There is a place,” the last king of Sephirah said, “in the heart of Levant, where the first pilgrim of grey slew many men.”

Red embers lit the hollow sockets, as the Dead King finally spoke.

“In that place lies a secret that Tariq Isbili will know,” Neshamah continued, “and it will tell you, should you be clever enough, of the doom you all so narrowly escaped by the grace of Kairos Theodosian.”

The malevolent redness lingered on Masego’s face, and he met that gaze with glass forged in Summer’s flame.

“Follow the truth, Hierophant,” the Dead King said, sounding almost amused.

Always more secrets, I tiredly thought. Always more schemes. Would there ever be an end, before either he was broken or we were?

“Enough,” the First Prince of Procer said. “You came to these lands, Trismegistus King, to this conference, and yet held your peace. Speak now to your intent, or begone.”

She must be afraid, I thought. Brave as she was, she was without power. Not even a trained warrior, as I understood it, and she was looking at the oldest and most powerful monster ever spawned by Calernia. Yet Cordelia Hasenbach stood tall and proud, eyes hard and bearing icy. I caught her fingers brushing against what looked like a necklace made of little fangs, under the sleeve of her dress.

“I have been considering peace,” the Hidden Horror said, tone nonchalant. “More than truce, peace. One enforced by treaties that you all seem so eager to embrace.”

I would not brook you signing the Accords , I thought. Else how could you be the sacrifice binding them together?

“But you are blind,” the King of Death said. “Even the finest of you, so very blind . And so I wonder now what purpose would there be to such a peace. None. Not when the Intercessor would still use you as tools whenever she so wishes.”

“You speak in riddles, of strangers,” Lord Yannu Marave of the Champion’s Blood said. “Your babble means less than dust.”

“It seems like the path of recklessness, at first glance,” the King of Death pensively said. “Yet it is more calculated a risk than waiting. Some chances never come again, no matter how long the wait.”
“Has age caught up to you, dead thing?” Lady Itimi Ifriqui sneered. “You speak senselessly.”

“No,” I quietly said. “He doesn’t.”

Red embers moved to me, the patient and inhuman mind behind them gracing me with its attention.

“That was a declaration of war,” I announced.

There was a thundering silence in the wake of the words I’d spoken.

“There is still time to the truce,” Cordelia Hasenbach sharply said. “Will you now break your word, Dead King?”

The Hidden Horror considered her in turned, before he let out what I could only call a fond bit of laughter.

“Hasenbach,” the Dead King said. “Yes, that is fitting. One of the old blood should be here, at the beginning of the end. Your line is a respectable one, Cordelia Hasenbach. Never once did the city of Rhenia fall to my armies, when one of your blood held it. None other can make the same boast.”

“Dawn has not yet failed,” the First Prince of Procer said. “Nor will it, so long as I breathe.”

The old monster shook with laughter.

“Let us do this properly, then,” Neshamah said.

The corpse rose, tall and robed and resplendent, and from the heights he had not left since we first came to this temple he looked down on us – with ember-like burning in the hollow sockets of his skull, red glimmering on the jewels set in the bones.

“There is no peace,” the Dead King said. “There is no truce. There is only the shiver before the blade claims your neck. You will fight and you will rage and you will weep, but in the end there can only ever be one end to this.”

The red burned, burned like red star that would swallow the world whole.

“I am the King of Death,” the last king of Sephirah said. “I come.”

Beginning with the crown of the head, the bones cracked and splintered and shattered. From the fractures the pale ivory-like bones turned to dust. The jewels broke and dimmed, the metals rusted and curled, until there was nothing left of the vessel at all.

Ash fell down from the sky, silent and soft.

And so it begins , I thought. Gods save us all, and so it begins.

Chapter 85: When It Rains

“Kill an enemy,
Make another
How dreadfully
We do usher!
Killed; enemy
To another.”
-Extract from ‘And So I Dreamt I Was Awake’ by Sherehazad the Seer, Taghreb poet

“You’re certain?” I asked.

“As can be,” Vivienne replied. “Our own people have intercepted reports and the Scribe’s agents confirm it.”

“Then send for Pickler,” I said. “We’ll need someone navigate the implications of that.”

I paused, and the other Callowan caught my eye with understanding.

“Robber as well, then,” the dark-haired woman said.

She dipped out of the room long enough to send out messengers and returned as I poured us cups of wine. She took it when offered, and we both sipped in silence. Lost in our thoughts. It’d be better with the two of them, and I was glad she’d realized it. While it could not be denied that Senior Sapper Pickler’s upbringing as the daughter of a Matron leant her insights into the ways of goblinkind that a nobody like Robber wouldn’t have, neither should it be ignored that she was, well... horribly unsociable. Even with other goblins. Special Tribune Robber, on the other hand? He somehow seemed to know every other greenskin we came across, and though goblins were clannish in the extreme amongst themselves they gossiped with relish. Robber would have his finger on the pulse of things in a way Pickler would not. Gods, and to think I’d believed it would be quiet after the disaster in Lyonceau. Showed what I knew.

Midnight had come and passed, though it would be more than a bell still until dawn came, and no part of that span had been calm. I’d not returned to Salia, after the Dead King’s chilling farewell, for it would have been unwise. Riots were beginning again, though this time not as a tool of conspiracy: word had spread that the war against Keter was resuming, and in terror and impotent anger the people had taken to the streets. Given that there’d been killing of foreigners last time, it’d been judged cautious for the delegations not to return to the capital at least until the day after. If not longer. The First Prince had admitted that she’d rather not soldiers – even solely her own – to put down the turbulence but that she might not have a choice. Should it come to that, though, no other member of the Grand Alliance could be seen intervening even if only to help. It would feed the rumours from the coup attempt that’d not entirely died down, that the First Prince was in league with foreign powers that wanted to destroy Procer.

As Salia roiled and the rest of us kept to our camps, surrounded by soldiers, the last stretch of day into the night had been filled with fervent activity. For one, the two Named that’d been effectively keeping the League of Free Cities together were gone. The Hierarch perhaps not yet dead, as Masego had insisted, but undeniably he was in no place to rule. Not that he’d ever done that even when he was actually meant to. There’d been accusations of assassination from some cities, Penthes leading the charge, but it was hard to argue with a town covered in ash and two heroes stuck in bedrest. The League delegations had hastily withdrawn to their camp under a heavy escort of Proceran soldiers, howling mobs of Salians tossing everything they could get their hands on at them. I had Archer out and keeping an eye on them, though with strict instructions not the kick the hornet’s nest. That Penthes had been so aggressive earlier was a good indication that Hakram was right about Malicia having sunk in her hooks there, but there was no telling where much of the League would fall. Helike, in particular, promised to be a mess. Kairos Theodosian had no formal successor, and rumour was he’d pruned minor branches of the Theodosians quite enthusiastically after usurping his nephew. It was not impossible that the royal house of Helike was dead, and there was no telling if some other nobles would make a play for the throne or some distant relation was about to be produced so they could ‘rule’.

And now, like we didn’t have our plates full enough with the south, north and west trouble was coming from the east as well. The affairs of the Confederation of the Grey Eyries, the fledgling goblin state that’d risen in rebellion against the Tower and declared independence before going a step further and taking Foramen, had always been opaque to outsiders. The Council of Matrons had ruled the goblin tribes under the Empire and it still did under the Confederation, but to my understanding the alliance between the tribes was a loose thing even at the best of times. The Matrons were nominally an ally to Callow, for Hakram and Vivienne had backed their bid for independence with dwarven gold and foodstuffs, to be repaid in goods we needed: goblin steel and munitions. A blockade of the Hungering Sands by the loyalist Legions of Terror had made deliveries of these highly sporadic, though they’d not entirely ceased, but the Matrons were making visible efforts to keep their word.

I’d believed that to be a promising sign, and though the goblins were said to have committed atrocities against Taghrebi nobility when they took Foramen, the loss of the Imperial Forges and yet another great city of Praes had been a hard blow to Malicia. The Confederation was riddled with practices I despised, and the Matrons were generally speaking about as trustworthy as a nest of vipers, but as a counterweight to the Tower in the southeast they’d been an invaluable asset. Just the fact that they’d tied up the loyalist legions down south had been worth its weight in gold, since it meant I didn’t have to worry about those same troops securing the Empire for Malicia – or marching on Summerholm, for that matter. There was the promise of a long-term partnership there as well, with the Snake Eater Tribe having settled in my lands near Marchford. It’d allowed Juniper to recruit goblins to fill the ranks of the Army of Callow’s sappers and scouts, and more abstract benefits as well. The relative harmony with the locals had been both a proof that Callow might be able to handle greenskin settlers and a tie to the Council of Matrons themselves.

The generous income that rent of their tribal lands brought didn’t hurt either, given the until recently dreadful state of my coffers.

Some parts of it in particular: Pickler’s mother, Matron Wither of the High Ridge Tribe. Who’d been trying to push Pickler into retiring and becoming Matron of the Snake Eater Tribe since the moment it was settled on Callowan grounds. I’d been more amused than anything when I’d first heard, for trying to get Pickler interested in anything that wasn’t engineering was like pulling teeth, but given the fractious nature of goblin politics I’d found it shockingly impressive that Matron Wither has succeeded at ensuring no other matron was appointed in the wake of her daughter’s refusal to retire and take up matronship of the tribe. Guards knocked on the door and jolted me out of my thoughts, Vivienne calling out to allow entry as I took a sip from my now near-empty cup. The two goblins came in together, for a moment allowing a glimpse of the difference between them – Pickler was, I realized, growing significantly larger than Robber. Half a head more now, and where the male’s skin was beginning to wrinkle in some places as he approached his kind’s middle age her own was the same as when I’d first met her. Matron lines, it was said, were as a breed apart from the rest of their kind.

That did not strike me as the kind of thing that came about naturally.

“Boss, Princess,” Robber greeted us, scuttling in and sliding into a seat.

My brow rose as I glanced at Vivienne.

“Since I was designated your heiress,” she admitted. “It’s exactly as annoying as you’d think.”

Oh, Vivienne, why would you ever admit that out loud? There was no way he was ever going to stop, now.

“Catherine, Dartwick,” Pickler greeted us, slightly more deferentially.

She waited for me to invite her with a gesture before taking a seat, at least.

“I’ve need of your insights into the Confederation,” I admitted. “There’s been news.”

Amber eyes wary, Pickler watched me without blinking.

“I’m not corresponding with my mother, Catherine,” she said. “And even if I was, she would not share secrets with me. Nor I with her, if that is your-”

“Not in the slightest,” I interrupted. “But you were raised about as high as can be, by my understanding, and you know your mother better than anybody else we’ve got.”

“And I am here to speak for the common goblin, I assume,” Robber grinned, pearly needle-like teeth gleaming. “Allow me then to present our demands: first, we would like larger cookpots. The ones we have can’t fit a full Proceran child. Second-”

“Robber’s here because he hears gossip even Hakram doesn’t,” I said, pretending to have heard none of that.

“His ears are too high up,” Robber agreed without missing a beat, “it’s like someone carved an ugly mug onto a tree, Boss.”

“Matron Wither has seized control of the city of Foramen and, along with what seems to be another few tribes, evicted the Confederation from the region,” Vivienne calmly said.

It was like someone had dropped a sheet of ice-cold water on the two goblins. Genuine surprise, from the two of them.

“Was blood spilled?” Robber sharply asked.

Vivienne handed me the scroll carrying the latest summary report and I tossed it across the table. He caught it and passed it to Pickler without hesitating, eyes remaining on me.

“As far as we can tell, all forces within the city that didn’t belong to the High Ridge or their allies were taken by surprised and killed,” I said. “There were a series of skirmishes afterwards that droved back Confederation warriors into the Grey Eyries. Maybe four to five thousand dead, all in all.”

“The Legions haven’t moved,” Pickler slowly said.

“They have not,” I grimly said. “Even our allies in the Eyes are certain. I’m not all that familiar with Marshal Nim, but I’m told she’s the most aggressive commander among the marshals. She would not miss an opportunity like that without a good reason, I think.”

“The Tribes have always turned on each other when rebellions turn sour,” Robber said, “but this is... wrong. Too early. They’re winning, too.”

He did not, I thought, sound even slightly disapproving of the goblin tribes beginning to sell each other out to the Tower at the first hint of defeat. There was something in me that was disgusted by the notion – Gods, what kind of Callowan would sell out their own just because the going got rough? – but I forcefully reminded myself that goblins did not see the world as most humans did.

“No rebellion against the Tower ever lasted more than five years,” Pickler quietly said. “My mother told me this, once, when I was a child.”

“The Long War did,” Robber argued. “It took fifteen years for them to put down Matron Trifler up in her hidden fortress.”

“Trifler led one tribe and the castoffs of the rest,” Pickler said. “After three years the rest of the Council had submitted to Sulphurous, and for the twelve years that follow it was a war of raiders against raiders.”

Much as the Wasteland’s history could be interesting – and I was pretty sure Dread Empress Sulphurous had actually died to the first known Shining Prince after cornering him out in the Fields of Streges – and the parts of it involving the goblin rebellions as bloody as they were fascinating, I’d not brought them here to speak of it.

“Why bring this up, Pickler?” I said. “The Grey Eyries haven’t fallen.”

Nor were they likely to, in my opinion. The reports of the Eyes made it clear that Matron Wither and her allies comprised less than a third of the tribes of the Confederation and that surprise had been the deciding element in her victory against her former allies. She might even be able to hold Foramen, given the wards and walls on the city, but if she tried to take the Eyries she was in for the same bloody slog Praesi armies went through every time they put down rebellion there. And unlike the Empire, she didn’t have the numbers to simply take the casualties inflicted by constant vicious ambushes and keep advancing. Her people would know the grounds, sure, but so would the enemy.

“Because I do not believe my mother intends to go back to the Grey Eyries,” Pickler said.

“She doesn’t have the strength to fend off both the Confederation and the Empire,” I slowly said. “To be honest, I’m not sure she has the strength to fend off either if they put their back into it.”

“Malicia cannot tolerate losing the forges of her war machine to an independent power, from a practical perspective,” Vivienne noted. “Not even one at war with her enemies. And it would see her overthrown by the High Lords, besides.”

“Which she’s gathering in Ater,” I pointed out. “Where she has the Sentinels, the one force of soldiers that she can be assured the loyalty of.”

They were hardly an army, mind you, and more like the personal guard of the reigning tyrant. But within Ater they were undeniably the largest stick around, even if I wouldn’t bet on them against the household troops of most High Seats beyond those walls.

“It seems highly unlikely for her to attempt so risky a purge,” my successor said. “Especially when the aristocracy is bound to come down firmly in her favour when the Carrion Lord comes for the Tower.”

“You’re missing the point, Boss,” Robber quietly said. “Pickler’s saying her mother doesn’t think this can be won. So all she did was get her hands on goods to bargain with.”

I blinked in surprise. This was, on the surface, madness. The Dread Empire was largely without allies at the moment. Sure, the Empress had probably made pacts in the eastern Free Cities, but none of them would be willing to march to war for her. And the Dead King had most the continent arrayed against him. Crusades with lesser forces than those gathered in Salia had driven him back into Keter, so why would Wither choose now to change sides? The Matrons were a cautious bunch: they’d waited until Thalassina was dust, half the legions were in effective exile and Callowan support was secured before finally striking. Why would Wither not wait a few more months before making her decision, at least to see how the Grand Alliance did against Keter?

“And what might she trade the return of Foramen for?” Vivienne asked.

“Rule over the rest of the Tribes,” Robber suggested.

“That wouldn’t hold,” I said. “It solidifies goblins around a single ruler, even if it’s a hated one.”

And once the Tribes began to unify, a thousand years of Praesi work would begin to unravel. A coalition of tribes nudged into constant feuding by breeding restrictions and strictly limited trade was something the Tower could comfortably believe itself to be able to put down if it rose in rebellion, even with the difficulties inherent in campaigning in the Grey Eyries. An effective goblin queendom , though? That was a whole other kettle of fish. Even if the throne changed dynasties with every season, a common army and the ability to mobilize workforce from all tribes would make even a fledgling goblin state an utter nightmare to put down should it rebel. It would be much unlike Malicia to trade a short-term gain for a long-term disaster, considering she likely intended to reign until the long term came to pass. Especially when she could simply have waited until the goblin armies had bloodied each other then forcefully taken Foramen from whoever came out the victor.

I wished Akua was here, for her insights into Praes would have been welcome, but she had duties just as pressing. Someone needed to get in touch with our armies before they came out of the Twilight Ways, and though Masego still had the know-how he no longer had the sorcery. I’d told him to double down on exploring his theory, besides, with the help of the Rogue Sorcerer whenever he could be spared. If the Dead King was truly about to start flinging around a few millennia’s worth of accumulated nastiness, we needed anything that might truly be able to make a difference.

“Agreed,” Pickler said. “Nor is my mother a fool. If such an offer was made she would not have trusted it.”

“Then what did she bargain for?” Vivienne asked. “The current situation is untenable, Senior Sapper. Her seizure of Foramen has been the death knell of our supply routes for steel and munitions. We’ve enough in Callow to fill the Army’s stocks once more, but after that the well is dry.”

And that was without even speaking of the Legions-in-Exile, who after a year of campaigning had expended the vast majority of their own stocks. Marshals Juniper and Grem had combined their stores while they were fighting together in Iserre, but fought they had. There wasn’t much left in those common stores, now. Much of the Army of Callow’s war doctrine came from the Legions of Terror, straight from the Reforms, and that meant the sappers had a major role as both combat units and siege engineers. Losing one of those for lack of munitions to furnish them with would be a blow, and an ill-timed one if we were to fight Keter in the coming months. Against the hordes of the dead, goblin munitions would make a massive difference. One we badly needed if we were to have a prayer of holding the northern fronts.

“Poison Tooth,” Pickler said, quoting the scroll I’d handed her. “Bitter Stride, Clay Sun, every single tribe listed here – they are all face-tribes.”

“ Pickler ,” Robber hissed.

“That is not preserved knowledge, Robber,” she dismissed. “The Taghreb figured out that much centuries ago. And even if it was, what would the Preservers do ?”

“The Preservers,” I slowly said.

“There are some among our kind that are tasked with the preservation of secrecy,” Pickler said.

Robber, never one to miss an occasion to be grisly, slit his throat with a finger.

“Loose tongues lead to open throats,” Robber said. “Even a child knows that.”

“And the Legions allow this?” I frowned.

“Not openly,” Pickler conceded. “Yet Marshal Ranker did not join her entire tribe to the Carrion Lord’s cause without requiring concessions, in the days before the Conquest. As for the days before the Reforms, well...”

What did your average Dread Emperor care for goblins killing each other, she meant. Not a lot, most likely, and they’d have to know that trying too hard to get at goblin secrets would mean a rebellion. I doubted that the common assertions that only goblins spoke the goblin tongues was true, but then Black had taught me they regularly changed their spoken language so that it could not ever truly be grasped.

“I made no such concessions,” I flatly said.

“They would have sought them form you, in time,” Pickler said, hissing through her teeth. “Made sale of steel and munitions contingent on them.”

“Allow me to be perfectly clear,” I said, tone clipped. “In choosing to serve in the Army of Callow, you have become citizens of Callow. With all rights and protections so afforded.”

“We do not make exceptions to this,” Vivienne said, voice as offended as I felt. “And if the old crones think they can twist our arms over such a matter with trade , then they will be taught otherwise harshly.”

Robber looked, to my deep unease, almost helpless.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “It is... you, we... We just don’t spill secrets, Boss. It’s not what we do. It’s not what a goblin does.”

“Matrons talk,” Pickler said, tone embittered. “All else hold their tongue. That is our way.”

We had, it seemed, tumbled into a deeper pit than I’d thought. It would not be bridged tonight, I thought, and there were prior callings. Best move on.

“Face-tribes,” I said. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Tribes who represent us with outsiders,” Pickler said. “The High Ridge learn and speak with the Taghreb, by custom, but under my mother the Banu of Foramen were the humans cultivated. No doubt the secrets she stole and traded helped the Confederation take the city from the Banu and helped her take it from the Confederation.”

“And all the other tribes she allied with have similar purposes?” I pressed.

“The Bitter Strides are a dark hand by custom – they hurt in concert with another tribe that speaks sweetly – but they too know well the peoples of the Hungering Sands,” Pickler said.

Suddenly Pickler’s assertion that her mother did not intend to return to the Grey Eyries sounded more believable. Matron Wither had assembled allies that could navigate the Wasteland and only that kind, which implied those were the people she had a use for.

“Fuck,” I said. “She’s trying for nobility, isn’t she? With so many nobles dead the Empress can find her a holding somewhere, and she’ll take in her allied tribes as retainers.”

“Thalassina was obliterated with sorcery, but it has a strategic location and great prestige as a holding,” Vivienne said. “A worthy reward, perhaps, for one returning Foramen to the Tower.”

The knock on the door saw my irritation rise sharply, but I mastered it. A young Callowan soldier – fair-haired, likely southern of birth – entered, face anxious. He was bringing, he said, word from Lord Hierophant and Royal Advisor Kivule as well Lord Adjutant. Contact had been made with the Army of Callow. My brow rose, since Akua had told me it was unlikely to work until we were much closer to dawn. Hierophant’s presence must have helped more than anticipated.

“Noted,” I said. “You may leave.”

He looked like he wanted to twist his hands anxiously, but he spoke up again.

“Your Majesty,” he said, “your presence has been required.”

I frowned.

“I left Lord Adjutant with them to see to anything that might require my presence in the first place,” I said.

“And it is he that sent me to you, Your Majesty,” the boy said. “I am to tell you that the Army of Callow has left the Twilight Ways, and is now encamped in northern Bayeux.”

It took me a moment to place the principality in my mind – it was south of Arans, where my army was meant to march, and had commanded one of the two paths into the Red Flower Vales before the passes were collapsed. Well short of where they should be.

“Are the Legions-in-Exile with them?” Vivienne asked.

The boy shook his head.

“My lady, they left ,” he got out. “And Marshal Juniper has placed herself under arrest, along with almost third of the officers in the army.”

Chapter 86: It Pours

“The cruelty of a dilemma is not only in the choice itself; it lies also in the truth it reveals to you about yourself through the making of that choice.”
– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

Akua Sahelian and Masego the Hierophant were, undeniably, two of the finest mages ever produced by the Wasteland. One had been taught the old sorceries of Wolof since she could remember and taken to them with dreadful skill, the other had been apprenticed since he could speak to a warlock who’d dissected the corpses of gods. Their deeds were many and renowned, and their reputations were such as to make men shiver in the dark of night. They’d also used a godsdamned bathtub as the vessel of water for their scrying ritual. I’d excuse Masego in this, since he was usually more concerned with practicalities than appearance, but Akua would earn no such mercy from me. The same woman who’d campaigned with multiple enchanted ceremonial armours was now trying to pretend it’d never occurred to him there might be some slight indignity to this, an innocent look on her face. Yeah, I wasn’t buying that. I spared some of my glare for Hakram, the filthy traitor who must have been willingly complicit in this, and at least he had the good grace to look abashed.

I didn’t have nearly as much time to spend on designing petty vengeances as I used to, but they weren’t getting away with this unpunished. And I wasn’t above delegating my pettiness these days, anyway. A council consisting of Robber, Indrani and Vivienne ought to be capable of coming up with a suitably vindictive reprisal.

I limped up to the side of the copper bathtub, discretely surrounded by carved and inscribed wardstones stabilizing it against the strenuous effects of long-distance scrying, and the faint amusement I’d felt at the absurdity of having to speak with my officers through a bathing implement died. On the surface of the waters I saw Juniper, and what I read there was not promising. She looked exhausted, the thick skin around her eyes touched with muted grey, and beyond that she looked angry . The kind of low festering anger that stayed in your belly, kept simmering there by your own impotence to do anything about its cause.

“Juniper,” I said. “I’d say it’s a pleasure to see you, but it seems that would be premature. Report, Marshal.”

“Warlord,” she gravely replied, dipping her head to the side.

It bared her neck, if only slightly, which implied much greater deference by orc standards than inclining your head in agreement. I’d noticed Juniper tended to fall back into orc mannerisms when she was unsettled, abandoning the more human affectations that she’d picked up in the War College. That was not a promising sign, not that any part of this had been hinting at my night getting any better.

“Time is difficult to gauge accurately in the Twilight Ways,” she began, “but around what we believe to be fifteen hours ago the Legions-in-Exile under Marshal Grem abandoned the march towards Arans and changed direction.”

Fifteen hours , I considered with a frown. Aligning the timelines, and allowing for a degree of imprecision, that around the time the conference’s first formal session had been held. Hakram stirred, having approached my side without my realizing. Consciously, anyway. It wasn’t like he’d been silent, more that his presence at my side hardly warranted particular notice. I glanced at him and nodded, tacitly allowing him to ask the question he wanted to.

“And was reason given for that decision, or even the destination itself?” Adjutant asked.

Juniper grimaced.

“That is complicated to answer,” she admitted. “Both the Army and the Legions were breaking camp, when it happened, and it was not immediately clear what was happening. The messengers I sent were given the answer that this changed march was at the order of the Carrion Lord, which I did not believe.”

My eyes narrowed. All other things aside, Black shouldn’t have a way to contact his people while they were out in the Ways: I’d not put Akua and Masego on the ritual so they could reminisce together about the bad old days. Here in Salia he shouldn’t have the calibre of mages to accomplish something like that, much less without the Observatory to use. Which meant he would have had to give secret orders before coming with me to Salia, which was... dubious. I wasn’t going to blindly trust the man, even if I loved him, but it would be ludicrous for him to turn on me at this juncture. The moment I ceased extending my protection to him the Procerans would slip a noose around his neck, if they were feeling kind , and while maybe I could see him taking calculated risks if he were still partnered with Malicia he’d just burned that bridge in front of the rulers of most the continent. No, Juniper had been right to be skeptical.

“I sough to speak personally with Marshal Grem,” Juniper gravelled, “but was turned away. The rank and file of the exiles were taken by surprise, my queen, but not worried. Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara approached officers she worked closely with during the campaigns and learned that the Legions were returning to Praes.”

Fuck , I thought. That wouldn’t be a secret order from Black, he had to know that his soldiers were exhausted and undersupplied. Beginning a campaign to take Praes before rest and refit would be madness, the Legions-in-Exile had been out in enemy territory for almost a year now.

“Someone got to One-Eye,” I said. “Either he’s dead and being impersonated, or someone has hooks in him.”

“Marshal Grem has a great deal of prestige among the troops,” Hakram quietly said, “but not so much that such a decision would be uncontested. Marshal Ranker might be dead, but there are still Conquest generals. General Mok for the Fifth and Yawa Foehammer for the Twelfth.”

Both were decorated veterans of the invasion of Callow, from what I knew, though General Yawa had been a lesser officer then – she’d been raised to general after Afolabi Magoro died at the Doom and rebuilt the Twelfth from the wreckage of that legions. Neither were anywhere as famous or beloved as the One-Eye, but among their own soldiers their word would carry a lot of weight. If both accused the Marshal of being compromised, people would listen. Juniper grunted in agreement.

“That was my thought as well, and so I pushed again for a face-to-face meeting,” the orc said. “Which is when it was made clear to me that the entire upper echelon of the exiles knew of this order.”

My brow rose.

“All of them?” Hakram slowly said.

“Marshal Grem, all generals and most the legates,” Juniper said. “There was no arguing with that, my queen. The only way I could feasibly prevent them from leaving was putting the top officers of the exiles under arrest.”

“That would have led to a pitched battle,” I grimly said.

While bonds were tight between Black’s army and mine, given the common wars fought and the common descendance from the Reforms and the College, the Legions-in-Exile were not mine. They’d not sworn to me, nor ever intended to. My marshal ordering their highest commanders all imprisoned would have been seen as an attempt to bring them into the fold by force, which would have gone... poorly, to say the least. The Army of Callow would probably have won that fight, between superior numbers and whatever was affecting the Legion officers, but it would have been a bloody business all around and there was no guarantee my barebones mage lines would have been able to fix whatever had been done to the generals afterwards. Juniper wouldn’t have had much of a choice, when it came down to it.

“It was the right call to let them leave,” I said.

“Thank you,” Juniper said, dipping her head forward.

Been worried about my reaction to that, then. Fair enough.

“Hellhounds, remind me,” Adjutant said. “General Birne, Ranker’s replacement. He’s got a golden stripe, doesn’t he?”

The honour granted those who’d fought with distinction at the Fields of Streges, as I recalled.

“And a silver cord from the Siege of Summerholm,” Juniper said, tone approving. “You caught on quick. It wasn’t me that noticed, Deadhand. General Bagram’s got a stripe too, and they’re old friends.”

My eyes flicked between the two of them questioningly, for clearly I’d missed something along the way.

“The golden stripes are considered the highest of the personal honours granted during the Conquest,” Hakram said. “Because only forty-three were granted, and-“

“All by Dread Empress Malicia’s own hand,” Akua finished from behind us.

I glanced at her, and the implication sunk in. She’d once told me that her family considered any spy left alone with the Empress to be compromised. Yet Malicia had outmanoeuvred High Lady Tasia Sahelian, in the end, destroyed her completely. Even that stark a warning might have been underestimating what the Empress was capable of.

“Marshal Grem is certain to have spoken with the Empress in person at least once,” I said. “And I imagine the same would hold true for any general and quite a few of the high-ranking officers that participated in the Conquest.”

And whatever it was she’d done, it was possible for it to affect every single one of those individuals. Shit. That was a fucking disaster. There was no such thing as flawless mind control, especially not from a distance, but even simple planted orders could do a lot of damage. Especially if they were sown generously across the entire old guard of the Legions, which tended to be both the finest commanders we had and my father’s most ardent supporters. I’d believe it too, if I was a legionary and the One-Eye told me his orders came from Black , I thought. After all those years of friendship and loyalty, why doubt it?

“Within an hour of realizing this, I removed the army from the Twilight Ways,” Juniper said. “And ordered every officer who has ever set foot in the Tower or been in the presence of the Empress to be placed under arrest.”

And Gods, both of those decisions had been the right call once more but looking at the scope of the mess I felt like smashing the fucking bathtub in front of me. Not all our College-taught officers would fall under those conditions, but most our Praesi highborn and distinguished veterans would. Which meant all my best and seasoned commanders. We wouldn’t be without officers, since so much of the army was Callowan now, but essentially all the veteran officers we’d taken from the legions cannibalized after the Folly and kicked up the ranks would have to be removed from the chain of command. Without knowing exactly what it was the Empress had done, how it worked and what it could do, we just couldn’t take the risk of leaving them in place. Including Juniper herself, for all that she was still the one giving me a report. Everything she’d just told me would have to be confirmed second-hand by someone not in doubt, for a start, and it’d be a mess to manage that considering most of her general staff was likely to be on the compromised list as well.

Dread Empress Malicia had not so much as swung as sword and she’d effectively crippled the Army of Callow. That, more than anything else, told me I was not wrong to believe this to be her work. How many people alive would be capable of a blow that vicious?

“Who’s in command, at the moment?” I asked.

“Grandmaster Talbot has legate-equivalent rank and technical seniority,” Juniper said. “Yet most Praesi soldiery balks at his command. Legate Tendai is the other candidate, but while she has years under her belt as a frontline officer she is fresh to higher command. For now the two are keeping the peace in accord but tensions are rising.”

Thank the Gods for the Reforms , I feelingly thought. How many other armies on the continent would be able to weather so much of the upper ranks being put under arrest this well? That measures meant to prevent decapitation of leadership by heroes were working almost as well against a villain’s work was a nice touch of irony.

“Has there been any sign of enthrallment in any of our people?” I asked.

“None that I know of,” Juniper said. “Though I am no longer being kept informed, my queen.”

“There won’t be,” Akua said.

I turned to face her, sharply gesturing for elaboration.

“Unlike with the Legions-in-Exile, the Empress cannot suborn the Army of Callow outright,” the shade elaborated. “Which means the greatest gain she can derive of any enthrallment sown in your ranks is delay, keeping your soldiers out of action for as long as she can.”

“Making a third of my officer corps commit suicide would achieve that,” I pointed out.

“It would cripple your army, it is true, but also flush out her hidden hands,” Akua said, shaking her head. “Better to leave the ship infested, and you aware of that. Then either you must send valuable assets to investigate the trouble or go yourself. Either way, a great deal of your might is tied down for weeks. Possibly even months. And should it look like you have a solution, well, it is not too late then to order the killings you described.”

My lips thinned. Yeah, that sounded about right. Either I went myself with Sve Noc at my back, which given the distance and what needed to be done in Salia still would complicate everything, or I sent both Akua and Masego together to be safe – which lost me a great deal of knowledge and power at hand I might need for other tasks. And the moment it looked like I might turn things around, I had no doubt that just like Akua had said the Empress would twist the knife once more. If not earlier, the moment she learned through her spies that whoever went had entered the Twilight Ways. Fuck .

“Thank you for your report, Marshal,” I crisply said, then grimaced. “You acted correctly in every regard, Juniper. This isn’t on you, we were just had by the Empress. We’ll dig our way back to daylight.”

“We always do, Catherine,” the Hellhound said, but she sounded so very tired.

I gestured for Masego to end the ritual, not willing to look at her in this state any longer, then breathed out as Juniper’s image on the water vanished.

“Akua,” I said. “How high are the odds that the Empress can just snap her fingers and have them all commit suicide?”

“I am not certain,” she admitted. “This is not mere sorcery, dearest. A Name is involved, and so there are deeper considerations. In principle, such mastery of others can either be fine or numerous – as it is with Speaking, where one may have an entire crowd kneel once or enchant an individual intricately.”

“Even at the peak of my Name, I wouldn’t have been able to order that many people to kill themselves,” I said. “Maybe two, three at most? For simpler stuff fear and thunder carries it through, but...”

“If we could Speak entire hosts to death, what need would we have of hosts at all?” Akua smiled. “Yes. In truth you were only the Squire, while Malicia is Dread Empress and a great one besides, but I took doubt that even should this be borne of an aspect she could so easily take lives. Especially if the commands were seeded. Having such a decree lying in one’s mind for years would lead to severe disorders of the mind, besides.”

“Unless that mind is prepared for that particular purpose, and accordingly conditioned with enchantments and alchemy,” Masego cut in. “As the Sentinels are said to be.”

Akua conceded with a nod.

“Without a story at her back, I do not believe it is within the power of the Empress to order deaths,” she said. “Though lesser beguilements would be well within her grasp, and in their own way just as dangerous. I am greatly surprised by the skill displayed in the manipulation of the commanders of the Legions-in-Exile, I confess.”

“I’m not,” Vivienne said. “Not considering what you said about stories. It was around fifteen hours ago this all started, the Hellhound said. Give or take a bit, that’s when the Carrion Lord declared rebellion against the Tower.”

I closed my eyes and let out a soft curse.

“And that makes an empress calling her subjects to heel,” I said. “Considering most who climb the Tower have an aspect related to authority, she would have had the wind at her back when she pulled that trigger.”

“It would be more complex a matter when it comes to those among the Army of Callow,” Akua noted. “Though some of them were once sworn to her, they are now sworn to you instead.”

“Creation likes clarity,” I agreed. “But that’ll serve to weaken, not protect or prevent.”

Neither of which I was all that sure I could do, when it came down to it. Distance was the element of dismay here, the more I thought about it. Those under my charge that needed help were far, and there was no guarantee that by the time they were reached they would still be in a state to be helped. Possibly I could leave behind someone under an illusion to impersonate me and hope that Malicia didn’t catch on, but given the way it’d be impossible to keep that deception going for too long it’d be rolling the dice to try that. Assuming them Empress didn’t catch on immediately, which give how deeply the Eyes had apparently infiltrated Salia I could hardly be sure of. Sending Masego and Akua would hardly be any subtler, even if I made an effort to suppress knowledge of it, and at the end of the day I had to admit that whatever my decision was there was nothing I could do. Save perhaps doing nothing, which I expected was exactly what the Empress would prefer of me: days passing in indecision, paralyzed by the risks in committing to anything.

For the first time since I’d returned from the Everdark I’d been caught entirely flatfooted, and the impotent anger I’d earlier glimpsed in Juniper was finding a mirror in me. I’d forgotten how much I hated this. How much I hated her. There were reasons to kill the Empress that were personal to me, like the death of people I had cared for, and practical ones as well. And then there was this, the ugly sinking feeling in my stomach and how much I despised that she could do that to me. Still even now, after all I had learned and wrought. Because she was patient and cold-blooded and everything I was not. Gods, the Dead King could still scare me in a way few things could but the only foe who had ever made feel like an arrogant child was the Dread Empress of Praes. The woman atop the tower who had, again and again, made me bleed without my ever landing a blow on her in return.

“Fuck,” I cursed. “All right. I’ll see if I can find a way out of this mess. Meanwhile, Hakram, speak with Talbot and this Legate Tendai. I want Juniper’s report confirmed point by point, and word of everything that’s happened since.”

“As you say,” Adjutant replied. “The Army will still need a commanding officer, Catherine. The Hellhound made it clear the current situation is untenable.”

I’d be able to take care of it, if I went, but if I wasn’t sure I could afford to leave Vivienne here to finish the negotiations without me. She had the judgement to see it through, sure, but cleverness was not what had brought the opposition to the table. They’d taken a seat because they were desperate and scared of me, and though the former still held they simply would not be afraid of Vivs the way they were of me. Which would mean squabbles I wouldn’t have to deal with, heroes not being as leery of meddling and a hundred other little messes we could ill-afford. On the other hand, if it was not I who went then there was only one high-ranking officer who could fill the shoes.

“It will have to be General Abigail,” I said. “At least until the hooks can be dug out of our people’s heads. I’ll speak to her myself. Vivienne, I need you to prepare an escort for her when she’s sent out. At least two full cohorts. I’ll need to consult with-”

Black, I realized in this moment still likely knew nothing of this. Shit. I was not looking forward to that conversation at all.

“- with Black,” I grimaced. “And soon. Akua, Zeze, can the scrying ritual be done again without the both of you?”

“It can be done by our mage lines, Catherine,” Masego reminded me. “They are on Creation again, all this ritual commotion was unnecessary.”

“Right,” I said, mildly embarrassed at having forgot. “Good, then I have jobs for you. Hierophant, I need options to purge the mind of my officers from the Empress’ influence.”

He opened his mouth, but I raised a hand to interrupt.

“I have a dozen things I need to be doing right now, and I’d not remember all the details if you simply told me anyway,” I said. “Write it down for me, Zeze. Prepare all you can, so I can put it to council when everyone is there.”

“I suppose I have nothing more pressing at the moment,” he said.

“Thanks,” I honestly replied. “I appreciate it.”

“And I, my heart?” Akua smiled.

“You’re with me,” I said. “Black will get snippy about you being there, but when it comes to Praesi politics you’re my expert. We’ll head there now, I don’t doubt that with the agitation in our camp Scribe already woke him up.”

I clapped Hakram’s shoulder, nodded at Masego and managed to take exactly one step towards the door before it was thrown open.

“There you are,” Archer said, face serious. “We have a situation, Cat. Chunks of the League’s people are moving.”

“Moving where?” I frowned.

“By the looks of it? Here,” she flatly said.

It was a good thing I knew my way around more than a few languages, these days, because loudly cursing in only one would not have been nearly enough.

Chapter 87: Connive

“An enemy will remember you long after your dearest friends forget your face. Consider this, when you choose yours.”
– Argea Theodosian, Sacker of Cities, Tyrant of Helike

Under the moon’s light the outskirts of Salia were still a pale field of snow, but I almost started in surprise at the warmth of the breeze. Winter was dying, at last. At my right, Archer nonchalantly strolled forward as she strung her overlarge bow. I spared a moment to admire the deftness of her fingers as she did, and the strength of the arms hidden by mail and coat. At my left it was Akua Sahelian that tread the snow without leaving footsteps, so ethereally graceful she might as well have been gliding. Under the guise of Advisor Kivule she wore long black veils hiding her face, though the splendid black velour ballroom dress she’d decided to wear for out little walk provided insisted reminders she was one of the most attractive people I’d ever seen.

“It’s called a Segovian cut,” Indrani idly provided.

I tore away my gaze from the small slits in the dress’ skirts that’d allowed glimpse of the smooth legs beneath. I did not reply, knowing from long experience that if I engaged it would be the verbal equivalent of leaping headfirst into quicksand. Akua had several veils over her face, and yet somehow I could still feel her smirking.

“They wear those for dances they have, where the women spin and-”

“We’ll need to pass by my rooms so I can take my cloak,” I interrupted, pretending I had no interest in her finishing that story.

Segovian cut, was it? I’d have someone look into that, there might be one that’d fit Indrani lying around Salia. Although, I couldn’t ask it of Adjutant. That would be... uh. No, definitely not Hakram. And Hells, now that I thought about it, if I sent for anything like there’d be a report about it on the desk of the First Prince, the Empress and Gods forbid maybe even my father before the day was out. That made the whole notion a lot less enticing, although there might be other ways. Still, if it ended up that I had to call on the smugglers among the Jacks to get Indrani into a revealing dress without half the crowns on Calernia knowing of it I was going to find a tall cliff to leap down it. Even as Archer continued to heckle me I began to hobble towards my quarters, but quiet undercurrents in the Night warned me company was coming.

My Lord of Silent Steps emerged of the darkness between two crowded houses, the purple and silver paint of the Losara Sigil so intrinsically part of Ivah nowadays that I could hardly recall what it looked like without. Ivah’s presence was ever welcome, and once more it was bringing to me what I required before I even thought to ask. Arm extended, it offered me the Cloak of Woe.

“Losara Queen,” it greeted me.

“Lord Ivah,” I replied. “My thanks.”

I wrapped it around me, fingers rising to fasten the broach binding it closed under my throat, and the familiar weight of old mistakes and victories on my back was a reassuring thing. My hand had been filled by a sword, once. First of goblin steel, then of ice and shade, and after that of obsidian only once unsheathed. The dead yew staff that felt cool against my palm, somehow fitting it perfectly, was still a fresh choice: not one I had not fully embraced, for the consequences of it were not all known. The mantle on my back, though? It was like an old friend, and even just wearing it made me feel sharper in thought and deed.

“Should I rouse the Mighty to war, First Under the Night?” Ivah asked. “Steel-clad soldiers march on your camp.”

“No,” I easily replied. “It will not come to that. The Mighty will have may wars to wage, in the coming nights. This need not be one of them.”

Or even a war at all, if I could finagle that. I wasn’t sure why the League of Free Cities would choose to lash out against me of all the rulers in Salia – even if Malicia was the one pulling the strings, it hardly seemed a winning venture for her – but I had no intention of allowing what was coming to develop into yet another front for Callow to fight a war on. I did not invite Ivah to accompany us out in the snows, and it did not presume to invite itself. The League’s people were much further out than we were, since they’d left long before I even began to set out, but as I reached for the Night and let it empower my sight I saw they were hardly a single unified band. Out of the four thousand soldiers that the League of Free Cities had been allowed to bring, maybe two thousand were on the march. One thousand yet remained in their camp, across the distant field, and the rest was marching away . South, although they were split into two groups and one must have left recently to still be so close to the League’s town-camp.

“Archer,” I said. “You followed their movements from the start, yes?”

“You’re wondering about the stagger,” she said, sounding amused.

“The two packs of deserters, yeah,” I frowned. “If the second wave was deserters who hesitated I’d not think of it twice, but they’re moving in an orderly manner. Ranks, supply wagons.”

“First group to walk out was Atalante,” Indrani told me. “Packed up their affairs, assembled their soldiers and diplomats and left without looking back.”

Which was not entirely surprising, I thought. Atalante had no real allies in the League, at the moment. It’d been at odds with Delos before the Tyrant upended the apple cart and started a round of civil war, and from what I understood the closest city it’d had to an ally, Penthes, had only been interested in using the chaos to grab some of the eastern Delosi holdings. Now that there was no Hierarch to compel the city to war against the Grand Alliance, they were likely to head home to lick their wounds instead of linger on foreign fields. If I had to guess, I’d put coin on the second band being the Bellerophon soldiery, and the old-fashioned tight formations I could glimpse in the distance held up to that perspective. It made no sense they’d waited for so long to leave, though.

“What happened with the Bellerophon delegation?” I asked.

“Mind you, I only saw from a distance,” Indrani cautioned.

“You can put an arrow in a wasp from a mile away, Indrani,” Akua amusedly said.

“Sure, but I could exactly hear what they were saying,” Archer reminded us. “Still, as far as I could tell the kanenas tried to execute the general.”

I saw no point in asking why, given that Bellerophon’s laws had been written not even by a single raving lunatic but by a whole assembly of them, many of them violently opposed to each other in their ravings but every single one rabidly incensed by even the hint of foreign meddling in their common lunatic affairs. For all I knew, they’d wanted to executed him because he’d combed his hair the wrong way on the third day of the month. Tried , though, was something worth asking about.

“They defied the authority of their mage-inquisitor?” I said. “I’d never heard about one of them doing that before.”

“The kanenas dropped dead all of a sudden,” Archer replied, shaking her head. “And then they spent a while arguing about that.”

I shiver went up my spine, and against my will I glanced up at the night sky. At what might lay behind it, waiting. What had become of the Hierarch was not yet clear, I thought, but surely all that he was must be tied up in his struggle against Judgement? The mere notion of Anaxares the Diplomat having become some sort of watchful angel to the Republic of Bellerophon was enough to make me sick in the stomach. I shook my head and focused anew.

“That doesn’t explain why they’re so far beyond Atalante,” I finally said. “Unless they argue for nearly ten hours.”

“Funny story,” Indrani grinned, mouth half-hidden by her scarf, “they actually headed north first. Then they saw a road marker that said they were headed towards Salia and argued for an hour before turning south.”

“And what’s so funny about that?” I said, brow rising.

It was incompetence, but honestly a fairly mild one in nature. It wasn’t unheard of for professional armies to need to catch their bearings, that this particular half-trained mob would have to as well wasn’t anything unusual. Especially since we’d all come here through the Twilight Ways, which would be highly disorienting for those unfamiliar with Arcadian journeys. An embarrassing mistake, maybe, but nothing worth a grin.

“Well, the general,” Indrani said. “You know, the one that didn’t die? I think he must have been the one who chose the directions, because-”

“They executed him,” I sighed.

She chuckled at that, and to my utter lack of surprise even Akua’s body language hinted a smile under the veils. Yeah, well, between Wolof’s golden child and the favourite pupil of the Lady of the Lake I supposed the general sense of humour for this company tended towards the dark.

“Bellerophon and Atalante flee the field, then,” Akua calmly said. “We face numbers diminished and disunited. Who was it that lingered in the League’s lodgings?”

“The people in the camp are mostly Mercantis mercenaries and the Delosi,” Indrani said. “Everyone else is headed here, but not together.”

“Should I guess?” I grunted. “Stygia and Penthes together. Nicae will have made room for a few members of the Secretariat with their own people, their Basileus needs all the friends he can make right now. Helike will come alone.”

“Penthes came with Nicae,” Archer corrected, “though you’re right about the Secretariat. Stygia and Helike march without allies, even each other.”

I worried my lip.

“Penthes is Malicia’s hook in the League,” I said. “And Malicia just broke Nicae’s naval power in a single stroke, so why is Basileus Leo Trakas tolerating them at his side?”

“There were only two cities among the League that might feasibly be able to scry on par with Procer , much less Callow or Praes,” Akua pointed out. “Stygia and Helike, and even the latter held true mostly on the back of the many deals made by Kairos Theodosian. Neither of these have an interest in passing such news along to Leo Trakas.”

“Hakram assessed he still didn’t know during the conference, but even now ?” I frowned.

It’d been at least two days since the disaster, by my reckoning.

“Dearest heart,” Akua said, sounding amused, “not all realms are so blessed as yours, to have inherited the scrying rituals of Praes and then been graced with the work of one of the most brilliant practitioners in living memory, the Observatory of Laure. Though your nets are not as wide and your spies nowhere as deeply planted as the Empire’s, Callowan long-distance scrying is likely the most swift and reliable on the continent.”

I grimaced as I considered that. It was true that even when I’d begun as the Squire I’d had access to the reports and assessments of the Eyes of the Empire as well as Legion scrying, and then spent near every campaign that followed with Masego at hand. My standards for the swiftness information was transmitted at were probably askew from most people’s, as Akua was so gently implying. Besides, scrying was largely Trismegistan as far as rituals went – though the Principate’s Order of the Red Lion used a formula Masego had noted as being raw, ‘primitive’ and influenced by Jaquinite methods – and the Free Cities weren’t exactly practitioners of that. There were some local magics, from what I remembered reading, but no dominant school or unified tradition. The Stygian Magisterium were the finest sorcerers in the region, but they weren’t sharing their secrets and it was a point of pride for them they’d been practicing sorcery for longer than the Praesi. Which the Praesi denied, of course, but that sort of historical pride pissing match tended to continue because no one could really be sure either way.

“All right,” I said. “So Basileus Leo sees the League is falling apart. Stygia’s the traditional rival of his city among the League as well unpalatable for the slavery besides, and Helike’s the power he’s trying to dislodge from the place of first among equals. Everyone knew Bellerophon couldn’t be kept in the fold from the start, I’m guessing, so doubtless they didn’t even try.”

“That Atalante walked away implies he is failing to consolidate the League,” Akua noted. “He would have attempted to keep the preachers from walking, if only for their coffers and healers.”

Indrani laughed.

“So in Leo’s hour of need, his buddies from Penthes come to offer support,” she said. “And he’s got no idea’s that Malicia’s hand is up the ass of the Exarchs, moving the lips so they’ll say all the right things.”

Colourfully put, but not inaccurate.

“You think she wants to prop up Leo Trakas and make a puppet of him?” I guessed. “I don’t see how it can hold all that long. As soon as he hears about Still Water being used on his fleets, he turns on them in fury. He has to, his own people will stone him in the streets if he doesn’t.”

“Agreed,” Akua said. “I would wager his usefulness is purely temporary, and the man himself disposable.”

“Yeah, Sahelian’s got that one pegged. He’s an arrow loosed, not a lasting catspaw,” Indrani said. “Ain’t like the Tower’s ever been shy about using people and then tossing them away.”

“We are in agreement this is a ploy of the Empress, then?” I said.

“It seems likely,” Akua agreed.

“We’d already be hip-deep in corpses if this was the Dead King’s work,” Archer frankly replied.

“Good,” I grunted, eyes fixed on the shapes approaching in the distance. “Then we tread carefully. I’m not willing to hand her yet another fucking victory tonight.”

We slowed and stopped without ever needing to speak a word, my limp carrying me atop a slight hill on the plains and the two of them coming to stand by my side as we waited for the League to walk the last stretch separating us. We could have met them halfway and gotten to speaking more quickly, but that would have been sending the wrong message: it was them coming to me, not us meeting as equals. The Tyrant had not made granted the same quantity of soldiers to all members of the League when making the delegation, that much was made clear by those advancing towards us. The two Exarch-claimants of Penthes had maybe three hundred foot with them, with the looks of professional soldiers about them: long mail shirts of good quality, crested helms with full cheek guards and oval shields. Their spears were unlike the long beasts the Stygians used in their phalanx, only about the height of a man, and they bore not swords but long-shafted axes at their hips.

The forces of Nicae, themselves numbering closer to five hundred, steady sword and board men in chainmail and cuirasses though they used small round steel shields and straight-edged sabers instead what I’d equip a shield wall in in their place. They had about a hundred riders as well, though it was only light horse. Long lances and javelins as well as what looked like armour of leather and cloth had me almost rolling my eyes. Aside from riding down conscripts, I hardly saw what good that kind of cavalry could ever do in a proper battle. They’d shatter under Legion crossbows in a hurry, and Gods wouldn’t that be a horrible waste of good warhorses? The Stygians had brought a mere two hundred, their Spears of Stygian with their long spears raised high advancing at brisk pace as the few mounted people ahead I assumed to be magisters keeping an eye on the slave-soldiers. Kairos Theodosian had not been a man afraid to stack the deck in his favour, so it was the Helikean force of nearly nine hundred that was by far the largest of the approaching contingents.

Men-at-arms with their scale armour and sharp blades, the steady foot that was the foundation of Helikean warfare, counted six hundred. They moved in formation and good order. The last three hundred, however, were a sight that half-surprised me: kataphraktoi . I’d confiscated the equipment of the four thousand cataphracts that’d warred on my army in Iserre and sent them back to Kairos with a broken finger each, but it seemed at least part of that force had been raised anew. The broken finger I’d not expected to keep them down for too long, not with so many priests among the League army, but the horses and armaments were surprise. Mind you, I was looking at three hundred when my soldiers had once fought four thousand . I doubted even the deeper schemer like the Tyrant had anticipated needing to rearm all four thousand of the most elite force in his army. The last presence from the League was the Delosi Secretariat, and it evidently had not brought soldiers at all. A handful of askretis were walking with Nicaeans, carrying small scribing desks for what I assumed to be a senior member of the Secretariat.

“This is pretty nostalgic,” Archer said, silver flask in hand. “The three of us, more enemies than we practically know what to do with.”

“They’re not necessarily enemies,” I said.

“Cat insisting we’re not necessarily going to kill them,” Archer airily continued. “All we need is caves full of corpses and it’ll be like we never left the Everdark.”

“Any moment now, we’ll declare war on an entire civilization,” Akua suggested.

“We did pretty well last time,” Indrani mused. “I’d say we rank at least a draw, don’t you?”

She passed the flask to the shade, who drank a deep sip.

“Generous, that,” Akua said afterwards. “Although, for an invasion force three women strong I’ll concede there was a surprising amount of invading achieved.”

“I need a better quality of minions,” I complained. “Mine are too mouthy. I bet the White Knight never has to deal with anything like this.”

Heroes must be all sweetness and light, to the Sword of Judgement. All I got were crows that got mouthy about giving me directions and underlings who couldn’t ever let anything go. Akua handed me the flask and I took a sip myself – then spat it out, coughing.

“Indrani, you horrid wench,” I gasped out. “This is senna.”

Drow liquor, made from mushrooms and tasting like godsdamned mud. It’d been tolerable underground, where there was little else even remotely drinkable, but up here? After months of wine? It was like licking a muddy lake shore.

“You slipped me a flask when I left before the Graveyard,” Indrani beatifically smiled. “How does the saying go again? For small slights, long prices. Wench.”

I glanced at Akua who had brazenly betrayed me by pretending this was halfway decent liquor when she’d drunk of it herself, and she languidly shrugged.

“How could I stand in the way of righteous revenge, my heart?” the shade said. “It would have been most uncharitable of me.”

“This is why Hakram is my favourite,” I muttered under my breath.

At the very least, the indignation had me less tense as the soldiers approached.

“And now,” Indrani narrated, “as foes stream forward like a mighty river, atop the hill stand a peerless beauty, a regal queen, a mysterious seductress – and also you two, I guess.”

I could not flip off Archer in front of the League, I reminded myself. No matter how much she deserved it. Indrani shifted slightly to the side, eyes narrowing, and her tone went serious without warning.

“Mages with the Basileus,” she warned. “At least three.”

I followed her gaze and found Leo Trakas atop his white stallion, as well as the two Exarch-claimants, but the mages took me a while longer to figure out. Some of Basileus Leo’s escorting horseman wore ill-fitting armour, I realized. The sleeves were too long, as if made for larger and taller men, and they seemed uncomfortable with the weapons they were carrying.

“You sure?” I quietly said.

“Their horses move like they’ve been drugged,” Archer murmured. “Those are war horses, willful, and they’re not good riders. Either those mounts were spelled to be docile, or they were fed something.”

“Akua?” I said.

“Enchanted,” she said. “Though sloppily. I’d wager they are either Nicaean mages – no great wonders, those – or hired practitioners from Mercantis.”

“Lovely,” I growled.

If Leos Trakas had tight reins on his ‘allies’ I’d call this a precaution and let it go, but given that Penthes was likely playing him at Malicia’s behalf there were risks involved. The larger party, consisting of the Penthesians, Nicaeans and the Secretariat observers, halted its march maybe a hundred feet ahead of our hill. A smaller party advanced, though it wasn’t that small: the Exarchs brought thirty men, Leo Trakas thirty men of his own – including the mages, now dismounted – and with four scribes and the Secretariat official it was sixty eight people who strode towards the three of us. In the distance, the forces of Helike and Stygia halted on either side of the large force. Two riders peeled out of the band for Helike, one for Stygia. Bundled up in furs, Basileus Leo was at the head of the delegation and it was him that addressed us first.

“Hail, Black Queen,” the young man said.

“Hail, Basileus,” I calmly replied. “Your visit is an unexpected pleasure.”

“Is it a visit to walk Proceran soil, now?” one of the Exarchs mocked. “How quickly your dominion extends, Queen of Callow.”

I glanced at Akua.

“Advisor,” I said. “Do remind me – is that one Prodocius or Honorion?”

“Prodocius, my queen,” Akua replied.

I glanced at the dark-haired man, his cheeks gone red from anger as much as the cold, and my eyebrows rose.

“Did you know that the Eyes of the Empire have you officially marked as ‘having the wits of a well-bred trout’?” I asked.

The man snarled.

“You coat your insults in lies, you-”

“I assure you,” I amicably smiled, “it is a verbatim quote.”

“Prodocius,” Basileus Leo sharply said. “We did not come to trade barbs.”

“That is pleasing to know,” I said.

“So why did you come?” Archer drawled. “I’m assuming it’s not to visit the nice Proceran countryside. Snow’s not measurably any nice close to our camp.”

Knowing her, she might actually have checked.

“Accusations were made against you, Queen Catherine,” an old man spoke in lightly accented Lower Miezan.

Long hair white as snow and bound in a ponytail, the man who’d spoken was wrinkled like old leather and nearly as dark of skin. This was, if I remembered my briefings correctly, Nestor Ikaroi of the Secretariat. On each of his cheeks could be found a blue stripe and a black one, tattooed. The marks of someone who had climbed the ranks of their bureaucracy until there was nothing left to climb.

“Secretary Ikaroi, isn’t it?” I said.

The old man, to my surprise, gallantly bowed.

“It is a great pleasure to formally meet you, Your Majesty,” he said.

“And I you,” I replied, dipping my head in thanks. “I’ve long had an interest in the ways of the Secretariat.”

Which was true enough, since back in the first days of my reign I’d been desperate to find a working bureaucratic model that wasn’t an imitation of the Praesi one. There’d never really be time or resources to spend on a venture in the Free Cities though, not with Procer mobilizing.

“Then perhaps in the days to come you might be willing to speak with formal chroniclers,” Nestor Ikaroi offered. “We have a troubling lack of direct sources concerning the beginning of the Uncivil Wars.”

I blinked, taken aback at the continued civility. Usually people were only this polite after they’d lost a few battles or I’d put a blade at their neck.

“Time allowing, I’ve not objection,” I slowly said. “The Marshal of Callow is already writing a history of her own, and I would not object to your speaking with her either.”

“It pleases us all you are willing to interact peacefully with the League, Your Majesty,” Basileus Leo said, reclaiming the lead on the League side. “Yet it would benefit us all if you would answer the accusations that were posed.”

“It is interesting that the Basileus of Nicae considers himself to have authority over the Queen of Callow,” Akua mildly said. “I wonder which precedent is so in use.”

The younger man looked like he’d swallowed a lemon.

“Should I take this as refusal to speak with the League?” he asked me.

“Do you speak for the League now?” Indrani drily said. “You seem to be missing parts, ‘Hierarch’.”

I raised a hand.

“We have further guests, Archer,” I said. “Let us not jump to hasty conclusions.”

The riders from Helike and Stygia had finally arrived. The Stygian was no surprise: Magister Zoe Ixiani had been the voice of the Magisterium through the League civil war and the Proceran campaign, and it seemed she was still to be the same tonight. The fact that she was a slaver rather spoiled her good looks, sadly. As for the two Helikeans, I was familiar with both. General Basilia, who had I once met in Rochelant and later learned was the Tyrant’s favourite general, rode well and high in the saddle. Dark-eyed and dark-haired, she had sharp cheekbones and the well-built shoulders of a warrior. The other I knew almost intimately: the pale eyes straddling the line of blue and grey, the surprisingly young tanned face I had once seen kneeling before me. General Pallas, who had led the kataphractoi who killed my men.

“Generals,” I said. “Magister Ixioni.”

The two commanders offered brisk salutes.

“Magister Zoe would suffice,” the sorceress smiled.

I did not smile back and flicked a glance at the Helikeans.

“Quite the gathering,” I said. “Dare I ask why?”

“We are here as observers,” General Basilia said.

“You are here as an usurper, general ,” the other Exarch-claimant said.

That one wasn’t Prodocius, which made him Honorion. Plump where the other was thin, he was middle-aged and his curly hair luxuriant. From what Black had told me, he was prodigiously wealthy and had no particular talent aside form this. Considering a great source of wealth for Penthes was trade with the Empire, I’d wager he was even more Malicia’s creature than the other one.

“I will uphold the last will of the Tyrant of Helike, Penthesian swine,” General Basilia coldly said. “Steel in hand, if I must.”

I was detecting the slightest hint of tension there.

“Accusations, you said,” I mused. “Am I to hear them, or will they remain a mystery?”

“Are you willing to submit to the judgement of the League?” Basileus Leo eagerly said.

I met his eyes, unamused.

“Look at my back, Leo Trakas,” I said. “What do you see there?”

The young man’s lips thinned.

“The Mantle of Woe, it is called,” he said.

“It’s a list of people who asked me to submit to things,” I said. “I would not be so eager to be number among them, were I you.”

“Then we are at an impasse,” Basileus Leo said.

“Secretary Nestor,” Akua said. “What does the record indicate the accusations are?”

Leo Trakas paled, either in anger or fear.

“Claimant to the title of Exarch Prodocius Lesor alleges that Queen Catherine Foundling murdered the Tyrant of Helike,” Nestor Ikaroi calmly said. “Claimant to the title of Exarch Honorion Kapenos alleges that Queen Catherine Foundling was accessory to the murder of Anaxares of Bellerophon, Hierarch of the Free Cities.”

A heartbeat of silence passed, then Archer burst out laughing. It was not, I decided, the most diplomatic we’d ever been. I glanced at the Helikean generals, who seemed untroubled.

“And what does Helike say of this?” I asked.

“We cast no such accusation,” General Pallas bluntly said.

“Our sire would have disdained such a measure, even were the accusation true,” General Basilia added with open contempt.

I glanced at Basileus Leo, wondering in what possible world he might have thought that my ‘submission’ to ‘League judgement’ might have resulted in anything the wholesale slaughter of everyone trying to execute me on such thin pretence. Gods Below, I’d sent running larger forces than the entire League escort, much less his little coalition. No, he was young but he wasn’t an idiot – he wouldn’t have been able to prevent a Strategos from being chosen in Nicae if that were the case. Ah. Had he been presenting himself as the speaker for the League so that he could then declare me innocent in that capacity, avoiding a fight with me while binding Penthes to him? On parchment that was a halfway decent plan, but he had to realize I had no damned incentive to indulge him and the precedent of the League having authority over a Queen of Callow was unacceptable. If he is not stupid, which I know him not to be , I thought, then he must be desperate.

“Gods, do you have a semblance of evidence at least?” I asked. “Tell me you didn’t march near two thousand soldiers for... this .”

The Basileus flushed and gestured towards his attendants. Archer, I saw, was carefully watching the mages. Good. One of the soldiers came forward with two sheaths of parchment, but Exarch Prodocius sneered and elbowed him, snatching the scrolls. He strolled up the hill, staring me down with surprising aplomb for a man who as far as I could tell had no power and no military training – he wasn’t even in particularly good shape. Except, I realized as he approached, he wasn’t staring me down. His eyes were wide and showing white, like a terrified horse’s. He was, I grasped as he hurried towards me, frightened nearly out of his wits. And still he threw the parchments towards my face. Akua slapped them down, even as Exarch Prodocius stepped up to me with a rictus of bared teeth that straddled fury and terror.

“There,” Prodocius snarled, “you murdering tyrant, you-”

At the Basileus’ barked order two Nicaean soldiers stepped forward, one grabbing him by the shoulder and dragging him back and the other offering me an apologetic bow before picking up the parchments – they’d fallen short, as open scrolls were want to do – and bowed again before pressing them into my hand.

Or at least tried to, before Archer caught his wrist and rammed a blade through the side of his neck.

Chapter 88: Testament

“Reputation is as rope: it can be either a lifeline or a noose.”
– Eudokia the Oft-Abducted, Basilea of Nicae

Asking Archer why the Hells she’d just killed that soldier that would have implied in front of all those people I had at best partial control over her actions. Which, while true, wasn’t something I wanted to remind the League of right now. So instead of looking surprised or angry I allowed my face to slip into a cool mask, flicking a seemingly disinterested glance at the dying man. Indrani, eyes cold, left the blade in his neck and plucked at the hand still holding the parchments: a long, thin needle was brought into the moonlight by careful fingers.

“See,” Exarch Prodocius frothed, “her thugs murder our attendants without-”

The Nicaean soldier that’d been dragging him back slugged him in the belly. He wheezed out in pain, looking like he was about to vomit.

“Poisoned,” Archer idly said, sniffing at the needle’s tip.

She casually ripped her longknife clean of the soldier’s neck, snuffing out his life with the casual flick of the wrist.

“Merciful Gods,” Basileus Leo Trakas croaked. “Queen Catherine, I swear on the Heavens that I had nothing to do with this. I would never-”

I looked at the young man in fair pristine armour, his hair perfectly coiffed and his eyebrows impeccably plucked. What I saw beneath the façade was fear. The ugly kind that clawed desperately at your insides trying to get out. It’d been there before we ever began speaking, I thought, perhaps even before he’d set out with this procession. But where it had been mastered before, now it had slipped the leash. No, that one did not have the stomach to try to kill me.

“A personal guard of the Basileus of Nicae just attempted to murder the Queen of Callow,” Akua calmly replied. “Your guilt can be debated, Leo Trakas, but your responsibility is beyond doubt.”

Would the needle have pricked me, if Archer hadn’t intervened? Possibly. I wasn’t sure it would have killed me, though. I was hardly immune to poison, but Akua ought to have been able to keep me alive long enough for Sve Noc to come to my side and purge the blight. Was this Malicia’s doing? It was a sloppy attempt by Wasteland standards, though I’d been cavalier enough it’d nearly succeeded anyway. If there was someone who’d notice I had a habit of going ahead to negotiate with others with only slight escort, though it would be the Empress. If it’d been Masego and Vivienne with me instead, would the needle have broken my skin?

It sent a shiver up my spine I could not be certain as to the answer.

“No doubt this was the work of one of your many enemies,” Exarch Honorion dismissed, cutting through my musings. “Pay reparations, Trakas, and let us return to the matter at hand.”

The smug look on the man’s face had me itching for a blade in my hand. Someone had just tried to kill me and he thought throwing a few coins at me like I was a beggar with a bowl would end the matter? My fingers clenched. If he could not curb his tongue, perhaps a curse that silenced it would remind him of – no, no I could not . I breathed out, tamping down on the heat in my blood. I was being provoked and it was not an accident. Prodocius might be terrified, but this one was not. Did he know something the other Exarch-claimant did not, as the likely favourite of Malicia among the pair? Black had been scathing in his opinion of the man’s intellect, it might just be foolishness and arrogance.

“Secretary Nestor,” I said, tone calm. “The weapon that was used, does the Secretariat have record of precedents for its use?”

The white-haired man, who’d been looking at the work of one of his scribes over the young woman’s shoulder, turned his gaze to me and dipped it before turning to Indrani.

“Lady Archer,” the askretis said, “has the tip of the needle been dipped in a substance that is green and viscous, yet dry as leather?”

“That’s about right,” Archer frowned, then sniffed again. “Smells like rotten meat, too, but with something flowery mixed in.”

Her senses had rivalled some of mine even when I’d been Sovereign of Moonless Nights, nowadays even with Night lending me the occasional edge it wasn’t even a contest.

“Wyvern venom made into a paste with periwinkle blossoms,” Nestor Ikaroi said. “Known as the ‘Taste of Redress’, brought to our records by the Magisterium’s profligate use of it during the latter years of the Stygian Spring.”

“A wild assertion, this, and without proof,” Magister Zoe said. “It is known, however that, a substance like the one you describe can be readily obtained through Mercantis. It would have no current ties to Stygia even should it truly have roots there.”

“The Secretariat’s records are without fault,” Secretary Nestor coldly retorted. “And the use of the Taste and needle is the signature of the Manifold Laments. Killers for hire alleged to be based in the League.”

“My own grandfather was slain by the Laments, Queen Catherine,” Basileus Leo told me. “I would never bargain with them.”

“You spineless cowards,” Exarch Prodocius snarled. “How can you even know this wasn’t her doing from the start? How eager you all are to lick Callowan boots.”

“Catherine,” Akua murmured, low enough only Archer and I might hear. “This is a noose. I know not how or why, but this is a noose. A situation like this does not fall into place by happenstance.”

Yeah, I was starting to agree. Something was wrong here. Leo Trakas still didn’t know about his fleets being broken and stolen, yet he was strangely desperate to get Penthes on his side. I understood he needed allies, but why would he need them badly enough to risk provoking me? He could hardly afford any more enemies, much less one that was a member of the Grand Alliance. And the two Exarch-claimants had to know they were playing with fire by coming after me this hard. Especially in the wake of an attempt on my life, when it’d be damnably easy to accuse them of having a hand in it. I was missing something.

“Mind your tongue, Prodocius,” Magister Zoe Ixioni warned. “It is the mark of a weak stomach, to grow drunk from the scant power you wield.”

The Helikean generals, still mounted, watched all this unfold in stony silence. Unconcerned or indifferent, not that it made much of a difference. I could see, stepping out of myself for a moment, how this was going to unfold. The young Basileus had too many enemies, and just given me slight, so though it was plain to all that Penthes was a stone around his neck he’d have no choice but to try to salvage the Exarchs. If he lost a metaphorical finger bringing them out of this untouched, they’d owe him badly enough they should be halfway-reliable allies. Especially if they were without other allies of their own and antagonizing most everyone else in the League. Bellerophon was a beast most prone to devour itself, and likely to fall into that old habit in the wake of this mess. Atalante had quite literally walked away from this coalition and Delos was positioning itself as aloof. Helike was, well, it was hard to tell what Helike was at the moment.

Exarch Honorion had earlier accused General Basilia of being an usurper of some sort, but then he was hardly the most trustworthy of sources. On the other hand, if Kairos Theodosian had truly massacred most his kin and there was no true claimant left to the throne of Helike it would not be surprising that whoever consolidated control over the army became the ruling authority of the city-state. Theodosius had risen to kingship in such a manner himself, and if I recalled correctly General Basilia was highborn. Either way, for now it looked like she was the one speaking for Helike and she seemed utterly disinclined to step in and stabilize the situation. If Basileus Leo was trying to emerge as the saviour and leading light of the League in the face of chaos, then Helike would be at best uninvolved and at worst likely to spike any of his efforts simply to ensure Nicae didn’t emerge as the preeminent power among the League. Stygia, I thought. I’d not accounted for Stygia.

Magister Zoe was here for the Magisterium. Given that yesterday she’d made assurances to Hakram that even if Stygia made treaties of assistance with the Tower it had no intention of ever lending military support, I’d bet they were planning to use Malicia’s ‘protection’ as a deterrent against the rest of the League while offering only token compensation for it . For that protection to be worth anything, though, they’ll have to make it public , I thought, then hesitated. Had they already? Bellerophon and Atalante holing up, Helike looming and Nicae’s old Stygian foes promised assistance by the Tower. Leo Trakas was seeing the League fall apart around him after his fleets had ravaged Ashur, and realizing that in the wake of the glories promised by the Tyrant he’d been left out in the cold. Penthes alone was offering a hand, and though there were fools they were fools with coin, a largely intact army. The kind of ally that would give an adventurous Stygia or Helike pause. I stepped out of myself and looked at the world the way Leo Trakas would.

Retribution was coming, that could not be denied. Ashur would neither forget nor forgive, had deep ties to the Grand Alliance even after withdrawing from it, and the ancient shield that was the League of the Free Cities was falling apart. The League’s treaties to resist outsiders together must be shored up and the foundations of the arrangement made firm again after the debacles abroad – all under the leadership of Nicae, preferably, since no one else seemed willing to take up the mantle. If this could not be done, though? Then Basileus Leo was in desperate need of allies that would keep the wolves away from his door while he figured out a way to avoid losing his throne to a Strategos and keep retaliation from laying waste to Nicae when the balance swung back the other way. Either way, to him, Penthes was the key. And Penthes was owned by Malicia, who had carefully been setting her schemes in place even as I fought my way through Iserre. Now she was bringing them to bear one by one. So how do you want to use them to hurt me, Malicia?

“Though Exarch Honorion misspoke, he is yet a leader of his people,” Leo Trakas intervened. “Threats help none of us, Magister Ixioni.”

“The Magisterium seeks no help from Nicae,” Magister Zoe disdainfully said.

“Already found yourself a backer, have you?” Archer said.

Indrani was, with her usual nonchalance, putting her foot in a dispute that might have been best left to the League itself. Without knowing what Malicia had planned, any step taken here might be a blunder.

“What right does a vagrant from Refuge have to ask questions of of us?” Exarch Prodocius scornfully laughed. “Still your wagging tongue, girl.”

Merciless Gods , I thought, half-awed. She was going to kill him.

“Archer,” I got out.

Halfway through drawing her blade, Indrani reluctantly stilled.

“Your choice of allies speaks poorly of you, Basileus,” Akua said.

A swing in the dark from her, as it seemed she’d come to the same conclusions as me through reasonings of her own. Both of us were watching the younger man, and both of us saw the same thing: the twitch of a repressed grimaced, followed by a resounding absence of denial. So he’s pursuing these idiot accusations because Penthes – meaning Malicia – put him up to it , I thought. They’re backing him so long as he pushes me tonight, most likely.

“Another chattering peon for the Black Queen,” Exarch Prodocius snorted. “Are you to threaten violence as well, when reminded of your place?”

Here I had no worries. Archer, for all her keen perceptiveness, was not meant for affairs like this. I’d not hesitate before sending her along with heroes for something, or soldiers, but restraint in the face of provocation was simply not the way she’d been raised. If someone slighted the Lady of the Lake, she killed them. If someone took offence to that, she killed them too . Indrani might not have the age or reputation to be able to get away with that the way the Ranger did, but she’d been raised to think that way regardless. Akua, though? Prodocius could spend all day tossing the worst insults he could think of at her and she’d hardly blink. Akua Sahelian had been playing more dangerous games with more dangerous men since before she’d had her first moon’s blood. Still, the way Prodocius and Honorion were constantly antagonizing my two obviously dangerous companions was genuinely surprising me. Prodocius in particular, as the terrified white of his eyes still showed.

“Gods Below,” I slowly said. “What can the Empress possibly have on you that’d put you this deep in her grasp?”

Akua, at my side, went still.

“And now you accuse us of being in the service of your foes,” Exarch Honorion mocked. “As if you were not merely seeking an excuse to-”

“Still Water,” Akua spoke in Kharsum. “The Tyrant helped Malicia, you said, but Helike does not border the Empire. Where did the alchemical compounds come through? It would not have been small quantities, Catherine. The Empress would have needed assistance to keep it quiet.”

And it fell into place. Penthes, who had grown rich from trade with the Empire. Penthes who controlled one of the branches of the Wasaliti river. Penthes, whose last Exarch-claimants were two venal and corrupt men who’d been chosen to survive from all the many there once were by two people: the Tyrant and the Empress. They’d been accomplices to Still Water being used on the Nicean fleets, I realized. And now, too late, they were realizing that with Kairos dead and Malicia untouchable in the Tower they might end up taking the blame for that. For murdering thousands of Nicaeans, yes, and breaking that city’s naval power. Worse yet, for betraying a member of the League to a foreign power while the Free Cities were at war and under the rule of a Hierarch. If it came out, they’d have no allies. Even if Penthes itself did not turn on them most the League would end up coming after them.

If Malicia said nothing, she owned them. If Malicia said something she still owned them, because who else could possibly protect them? Mind control was not needed when you had that kind of leverage on people. It would be redundant.

“Why is she having them come after me so hard, though?” I replied in the same. “It makes no sense, Akua. She gains nothing out of those two getting on my bad side, by virtue of being her creatures they were already there. I might as well not-”

I swallowed my tongue. I might as well not be there. Because it wasn’t about me, not really. None of this had been from the start. I’d been thinking of these people as the tool Malicia was using against me, when in fact I was the tool Malicia was using against them . A Nicaean soldier had just tried to kill me not because the Empress had believed it would work – although I doubted she would have complained if it had – but because it burned a bridge between Callow and Nicae. And the Penthesians were going after me because the Basileus needed them, and the more he defended them the more at odds he and I became. Fuck me, she was trying to flip the League wasn’t she? Leo Trakas would go home and find his fleets were gone and his reign going to the dogs, and so to avoid losing his throne and possibly his head he’d need to rely on his friends. His Penthesian friends, who unlike Stygia had not openly declared for Praes. The Tower had seeded the sickness, then offered the remedy.

Penthes, Stygia, Nicae. Bellerophon and Atalante were removing themselves from the flow, Delos wouldn’t got at it alone and how difficult could it possibly be for Malicia to spark a civil war in Helike if the Tyrant had left no clear successor? She’d run the southeast of Calernia, more or less, and with the fleet that’d been broken by Still Water she’d have leverage over Ashur as well. And all she needed to get this all started was for a Catherine Foundling, a woman with a known temper, to get angry after someone tried to murder her in the middle of diplomatic talks. Gods, but I hated dealing with Malicia. Even now I couldn’t even fucking be sure there wasn’t another layer to this plan that I’d missed. And I still wasn’t sure how to step back from the ledge even now that I might have caught the scheme. Walking away was giving her the win, but my word alone wouldn’t convince the Basileus that his Exarch allies were playing him.

It was exactly the kind of thing I would say if I was trying to collapse the League so it couldn’t be a sword at my back anymore.

“If I may be so bold, Your Majesty,” Secretary Nestor said, “might I ask for a summary of the words that were shared with your advisor? None of the attending scribes speak the language.”

I flicked a glance at the old scrivener with the tattooed cheeks. It was a genuine request, not a hint of any sort, but it still had me thinking. Could it be that simple? I’d spent all this time trying match Malicia at her chosen field and gotten dirt in my face for it again and again. But that was fighting this war the way she wanted it to be fought. Hanno had warned me, hadn’t he, that I was still thinking like I was a villain needing to threaten and fight everyone into doing what needed to be done. The latter part of that, where he’d said the might of Judgement would carry the day, had been wrong. But he was right that in some ways I still thought, first and foremost, like a warlord under siege from all directions. But I wasn’t that anymore, was I?

“It is called Still Water,” I said. “It is a sort of alchemical poison developed by the Wekesa the Warlock that lingers in the body of those who imbibe it and, afterwards, requires only a ritual trigger to kill and turn into undead all those poisoned. Those undead in fact resist healing by Light, though they remain mindlessly violent without guiding by necromancers.”

“The First Prince of Procer sent word of such a weapon, before the Tenth Crusade was declared,” Nestor Ikaroi acknowledged. “Do you then confirm its existence?”

“I do,” I flatly said. “It was used on the city of Liesse by the Diabolist. And once more since by Dread Empress Malicia on the war fleets of Nicae.”

In the wake of that there was only silence, and the scratching of Secretariat quills. My gaze found the two silent generals of Helike, who were both unsurprised and watching me closely. Had the known? I couldn’t be sure, but General Basilia was said to have been Kairos’ favourite. And if nothing else, his will might have contained such secrets. So now I had a choice to make. Either I dragged Helike into this by revealing the Tyrant had a in this, or I kept my silence on that. The Exarchs might try to drag Helike into this anyway, but who’d believed them at that point? Might be enough to stir Helike to war if they tried, too, which was not ideal but still better than Malicia sinking her claws deep into the southeast. It would not be just, to spare them the consequences of helping such a great and traitorous massacre. But if kept the Dead King from devouring Calernia, I could live with having abetted that injustice.

“That is the leash the Tower has on these two,” I said. “They helped smuggle the alchemical brews into the League’s territory. Advisor Kivule was reminding me, Secretary Nestor, that the Empress would have needed local collaborators, individuals of authority hiding her tracks to achieve such a thing. It allowed for an explanation for the continued hostility of these ‘Exarchs’ to Callow, for it is no secret that their mistress is my enemy.”

“Advisor Kivule, is it? She would know of Still Water, no doubt,” Exarch Honorion sneered. “I had not intended to speak to this, but this filthy mudfoot intriguer leaves me no choice. Prodocius and I entertained envoys from the Tower, is true. I’ll not deny it. For Dread Empress Malicia meant to warn us of a plot to destroy the League and incite war with Praes: this advisor that masquerade before us is no fae nor drow, she is the Diabolist herself. Akua Sahelian, the Doom of Liesse.”

Malicia had caught on? No, of course she’d caught on. Black had too, it would have been fairly obvious for anyone in the know as those two were. And from there it was information that could be passed to her agents, like those two. But why did she think it would – oh, fuck .

“It is not the Empire that struck at the fleets of Nicae, Basileus Leo,” Exarch Honorion said. “It was the Black Queen using the foul alchemies of the foe she enslaved. What a neat scheme she planned, is it not? The League sundered and at war with the Empire, her enemies clawing at each other even as she bent Ashur to her will.”

Malicia , I seethed. Hellgods, I had not wanted to kill someone that much in a very long time. Could I deny Akua? No, that’d be a mistake. Too many people knew, or at least suspected, and when it came out she truly was Akua Sahelian it’d lead people to believe I was lying about not being behind Still Water’s second deployment as well.

“Are you seriously accusing Catherine Foundling of using something like Still Water?” Archer said, sounding somewhere between amused and offended. “She fought a war over the last use.”

Mistake , I grimly thought.

“You would have us believe it was the Dread Empress who has possessed such means for decades and never once used them?” Exarch Prodocius said. “We’ve all read the reports from the Battle of the Camps. Thousands dead from reckless sorceries! All of Iserre was almost destroyed because of a weapon that once lay in Callow, and we are to believe the Black Queen would balk as such a ploy?”

Leo Trakas was the key to this, I decided. Delos was unlikely to lift a finger either way, and Stygia would back the winning horse. And the Basileus did not look like he knew who or what to believe, right now.

“You then make the accusation that Callow was able to brew such alchemies, then seed them unseen in the fleets of Nicae?” Akua said. “How mighty you believe us to be, Exarch.”

She knew he’d have an answer to that, he wouldn’t have risked this otherwise – and his words were likely Malicia’s, anyway, who would not make this elementary a mistake. Akua was baiting out the last part of their tale, so that we might see if there were holes to poke in it.

“An animal like you has no place in this conversation,” Prodocius harshly replied.

The Basileus of Nicae raised a hand to end this before it could escalate.

“As part of the evidence for the accusations laid against the Black Queen was the secret meeting she had with King Kairos in the city of Rochelant,” Basileus Leo said, tone cool.

He was start to lean towards believing Penthes, I realized. Because he wanted to, because it’d be easier, because Malicia was brilliant woman and it was a skillful lie.

“And to hide evidence of your malice, you then sold the Tyrant of Helike to his enemies among the Grand Alliance,” Exarch Honorion said. “I will not pretend the man was anything but a bad seed, but your treacheries are worthy of contempt.”

Gods, but she was good. It did not make me hate her any less, but she was good at this. Even through as feeble a tool as those Exarchs, Malicia was still hitting all the right notes for the Basileus. I could see it in his eyes. I breathed out. I was not only a warlord, now. I had allies.

“Are you willing to repeat your accusations before a truthteller?” I flatly said. “The most skillful of our age is in Salia. I am more than willing to do the same.”

Akua almost began to move before she ceased, and in the Night I read her uneasiness. I had made a mistake of my own, it seemed.

“A transparent attempt,” Exarch Prodocius sneered. “You’ve sunk your hooks in the Grand Alliance, corrupted even rulers as respected as the First Prince. The Grey Pilgrim will say whatever you want him to say, lest you turn on Procer.”

I almost laughed at the notion that I could force Tariq to do anything, much less bend the rest of the Grand Alliance to my will, until I caught the look on their faces. Not Akua or Indrani, but the delegates of the League. Over half a hundred people were here, some of the most influential people in the League, and after the lunacy Prodocius had just spoken not a single one of their faces expressed disbelief . Fear and hesitation, anger and doubt, but none of them believed it to be absurd. Because they weren’t looking uphill and seeing me, I realized as my stomach sunk. They were looking at the victor of the Camps and the Graveyard, who’d strung along heroes and villains and dealt death to thousands. My reputation, these days, was enough to cow thousands of charging horsemen. I knew this, I’d relied on it.

Malicia was relying on it too.

My grip tightened around the yew staff. I’d fought wars, struck deals with the Everdark and the Kingdom Under, compromised and warned and did everything I could to keep this continent from falling apart. And still the Empress, who hadn’t left the Tower in a year, was strangling me with my own fucking achievements. Malicia, though, would be Malicia – a praise and insult both. What had my blood boiling was how eager these people were to be manipulated. To believe the worse of me and in the same breath decide that the Dread Empress of Praes was looking out for them. And they had their reasons, and it was one of the finest liars alive who was making a game of them, but still it... stung. That I always had to be patient and careful and let things go, while the rest of them could just fucking blunder along and let the rest of us pick up the pieces.

I could kill them, I knew.

The Night was but a thought away. They had mages, but I had Archer and Akua Sahelian at my side. It wouldn’t even be difficult or need to be a slaughter. Honorion and Prodocius were owned by the Tower, but Penthes itself wasn’t – the Empress would have influence, but hardly rule. I could snuff them out like candles and there went this ploy. Gods, there was so much I could do if I simply took off the gloves. All these soldiers heading south, all this insistence on backstabbing and bickering when the Dead King was seeking to kill us all, it could end. It’d be as simple as telling the people here, over the smoking corpses of Malicia’s tools, that they could march north to fight Keter either living or as corpses in my service. If their armies objected? They had no Named left to match me. I’d open portal over a battalion aligned with a large lake or a sea, then repeat the process every half-hour until I got an unconditional surrender. The Grand Alliance would whine, but the whining would end when I ensured our back was secure and brought a fresh army to the table.

Gods, it would be so satisfying . To order something instead of barter and beg, to just order something and see it get done. And even if Malicia had laid some kind of clever trap behind it all, well, cleverness only got you so far in the face of overwhelming strength. What exactly could she do, if it was Praes and Keter against the rest of Calernia? And all I needed to do was just... reach out. Sve Noc would approve, if anything. And the thing was, hadn’t I done it all the right way? I’d let the heroes take their swings, taken the whipping without complaint. I’d helped the same Procerans who had meant to carve up my home for a meal, sacrificed and bargained to keep the Dead King from killing hundreds of thousands. I’d done it all right, and at the end of the day Malicia could still just upend it all with a snap of her fingers. And if it was this... weak, this fragile to do things the right way, then what was the point? If it didn’t work better than being a bloody-handed tyrant, if it was objectively worse , then why was I putting myself through all this? I was not going to let Calernia die because I needed to clutch to the delusion that I was a decent woman. I would not.

I took a step forward, Night coiling, and my leg throbbed with pain. Do not forget , it whispered. That this was never a game. That you make mistakes . And most of all, and my fingers clenched white to hear it, the pain whispered one last thing: do not forget, that there must be more than ruin . I paled, leaning against my staff. Gods, the pain was agonizing.

“Cat,” Archer whispered, looking at me with worry.

I gestured harshly. Do not forget , my leg throbbed.

“You’d really do it, wouldn’t you?” I said.

The two men that would be Exarch of Penthes milled about uncertainly.

“Let thousands of your own people die,” I said. “Birth civil war in the League. Gods, you’d gamble with the fate of Calernia itself – all because you were foolish and greedy and you’re afraid to die.”

I looked at the two of them and saw something that it was not in my power to mend. In anyone’s power to mend.

“Go,” I said. “Leave. I have nothing left to say to you.”

It emboldened them, I saw. The resignation in my voice. They’d poured poison into the ear of anyone who would listen and not been chastised for it.

“How petulant you are when unmasked,” Exarch Honorion mocked.

“We’ll survive without you,” I said, gaze sweeping across the entire lot of them. “ Despite you, if we must. So let your records state this, Nestor Ikaroi: when Death came for Calernia, men and women rose to meet it. From the Blessed Isle to Segovia, from Levante to Rhenia, they came when the call sounded.”

I spat into the snow.

“Death came for Calernia, and when steel was bared to turn it back the League of Free Cities was nowhere in sight,” I said.

Quills moved against parchment, the scribes of the Secretariat recording the words spoken. Cloak of Woe tight on my shoulder, I let out a misty breath and looked at the sky. I was done here, wasn’t I? If diplomacy could mend any of this, let Cordelia Hasenbach take care of it.

“And?” General Basilia said.

The other Helikean, pale-eyed and straight-backed, let out a hissing breath.

“Yes,” General Pallas. “ Yes . The blood quickened.”

“Then we part ways here,” General Basilia said, saddened.

I would have left, had Archer not put a hand on my shoulder. Indrani was smiling.

“Will you not flee back to your barracks, Helikeans?” Exarch Prodocius called out. “Your little intrigues are of no import to us, and the cripple no longer-”

General Basilia unsheathed her sword, which had the man flinching.

“I speak now the will and testament of King Kairos Theodosian, Lord Tyrant of Helike, the Unbroken,” General Basilia said, voice echoing across the plains.

Prodocius flicked a glance at the sword and swallowed whatever he’d been about to say.

“With me dies the line of Theodosius, at last conquered by death. I name no successor and offer no legacy, save for the following words,” General Basilia said, and her eyes were wetly shining, “ Ye of Helike, do as you will .”

“Oh, would you shut up with the-” Exarch Honorion began.

He did not finish, for General Basilia rammed her sword through his throat. Half the soldiers on the hill had swords in hand before a heartbeat has passed, but the dark-eyed woman only laughed. She ripped the sword out and flicked blood onto the snow. Penthesian soldiers crowded around the other Exarch protectively, shields raised.

“ Murderer ,” Exarch Prodocius screamed, voice gone shrill with fear. “How dare you, you-”

“Tyrant?” General Basilia said. “I suppose we shall see. You may consider this a declaration of war, Prodocius. Penthes can hang you as a traitor to the League and servant of the Empress, or it can burn. It makes no difference to me.”

“Are you mad?” Basileus Leo yelled. “Do you not understand the consequences of-”

“Tell me, you pathetic worm,” Basilia nonchalantly said. “What will you do, if I ignore your petty threats? What have you ever done that I should fear you?”

“I’ll not allow you to run rampant, Helikean,” the young man snarled.

“Then beat me, Nicaean,” General Basilia grinned.

And she had, I thought, so very little in common with Kairos in body. She was well-formed and made like a soldier, not striking save perhaps those sharp cheekbones but not in the least ungainly to look at. Yet when she grinned that grin, all pearly white teeth and daring, for a moment I would have thought... She reined in her mount, offered us a salute of her sword, and rode back to her soldiers. The young Basileus let out a shout of anger but did not pursue. He barked out orders in tradertongue and his soldiers clustered with the Penthesians once more, beginning a quick march back to the rest of his force. He offered no farewells, and I had said all I intended to say. Secretary Nestor Ikaroi, however, remained. Along with his scribes. They stood in silence, watching. Waiting. General Pallas dismounted. Under the pale moonlight she came to stand before me, tanned and grey-eyed and inscrutable.

“My name,” she said, “is Pallas Messene. I am a general of Helike, raised to the rank by the Tyrant himself, for a score I have been a soldier and leader of soldiers.”

“You know,” I replied, “how I am.”

“I have seen it,” General Pallas agreed. “I tonight I saw it again. Once you called me and those under my command a worm in the flesh , Black Queen. You deemed us servants of Keter, and stripped us of all the strappings of kataphraktoi .”

“And of a bone as well,” I calmly said, “for the lives in my service you took.”

“Bones mend,” General Pallas said. “Armaments, horses, they can be had again. Pride is not to easily bartered back.”

“That is not in my power to return,” I said.

‘’It is,” the grey-eyed woman disagreed. “In keeping to my oath, I spilled blood to the benefit of the King of Death. I weep not for this, for I swore to a Theodosian and there can be no higher calling. And yet I would even the balance, with oath given anew.”

She knelt, dark-haired and stone-faced, in the snow.

“Every wound I dealt, I deal anew,” Pallas Messene spoke. “Every battle I fought, I fight anew. Let spears shatter and swords break, for my oath will not. Let there be no rest nor relief until the war is won, and should death take me let me rise in indignation, for I am a daughter of Helike and we were borne unconquered. I swear to this, Black Queen of Callow: until the King of Death knows oblivion or I do, my sword is pledged to your war.”

Behind her, three hundred cataphracts dismounted under moonlight.

“How many?” I asked.

“Half,” she said.

“Half the kataphraktoi ?” I said, surprised.

That was near two thousand soldiers.

“We do as we will, now,” General Pallas smiled, looking up at the night sky. “He gifted us this.”

After a long moment, she met my gaze.

“Half the army of Helike, Black Queen,” she said. “If Death comes, let it learn the same lesson as every other army under the sun: there is Helike, and there is the rest .”

Chapter 89: Sing We Of Ruin

“Fifty-five: if your powers are lost, they will nearly always return greater than before so long as the appropriate moral lesson is learned. With kindness and humility comes overwhelming martial might.”
-“Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

It was over.

The League’s soldiers withdrew, the hostility between the different forces open but reason prevailing just enough for battle not to erupt less than a day’s march from the capital of Procer. Considering the people involved, I’d not considered that a given. Secretary Nestor and his attending scribes withdrew for the night but requested permission to send an embassy under daylight. The clear intention was to request the presence of Secretariat scribes and chroniclers up north, and I accepted tonight as I fully intended to accept tomorrow. There’d be restrictions and conditions, but in principle I had not objection to their work. If I got lucky, maybe a report making its was south would even stir some Delosi to shed neutrality long enough to cease recording the end times and actively try to turn them back. A girl could dream. General Pallas and her kataphraktoi swore oaths and sent back half their number to claim their equipment and supplies still in the League camp, the rest returning with me.

Adjutant had finished speaking with Talbot and the remaining senior legate when I arrived – Tendai, wasn’t it? Sounded Soninke – though he opened his report by passing a dry comment on my ‘dragging yet another army home’. Like it was a bad thing, the wretch. As it turned out Juniper’s report had been essentially confirmed, with the sole fresh developments a few accusations of ‘Praesi treachery’ and ‘Callowan purges’ tossed around by soldiers that’d ended in brawls. One dead, from an unlucky broken neck, and both Tendai and Talbot had come together to hang those involved as per Callowan regulations. Adjutant argued for the growing urgency of intervention there, even if risking dire consequences to the compelled, but I had no order to give him. I hesitated still to speak when those words might just kill Juniper and Aisha, among others. I presented General Pallas to him instead and dropped onto his ‘drily humorous’ lap the work of getting the cataphracts settled.

There’d be talk later of how many soldiers Pallas was proposing to bring north, though it shouldn’t be more than ten thousand. Less, probably, though there likely to be the most finely drilled and commanded troops among the coalition’s armies. At least one good thing had come out of this otherwise ruinous night.

Archer wandered off, likely to check in on Masego though given the work I’d asked of him he was like as not to ignore her presence beyond what basic courtesy required. If even that much. Vivienne was speaking with General Abigail’s staff tribune to pick out what soldiers would be sent out as her escort, and I made a mental note of having the general formally granted the authority of a Marshal of Callow until Juniper could be declared fit to resume it. I’d no intention of promoting her to the rank, not for many years yet if ever, but to get affairs in order with the Army she’d need to have the weight of that authority behind her. Both the inherited structure of the Legions of Terror and the Hellhound’s preference for strict lines of command had resulted in formal authority being needed to get anything moving in the Army of Callow. Akua remained with me, a shadow shadowing mine, and though I could guess she wanted to address the fact that she’d been outed I did not approach the subject. It’d be out and about before long, I knew. If Malicia felt comfortable enough handing out that information to the likes of Prodocius and Honorion, it meant she was comfortable putting it out there.

I was still uncertain how my people would take it, on the Callowan side at least. If Akua had still been stuck in my collar save when I let her out I suspected it would have been taken as a long price, but ‘Advisor Kivule’ was not a prisoner or entirely unknown to the men. Like as not it’d cost me a few feathers in the eyes of the heroes in the Grand Alliance, too, though I’d not hesitate to call Cordelia a damned hypocrite if she spoke so much as a word in condemnation. She didn’t get to play that card when she had people lugging a Seraphim’s corpse around Procer. Truth be told, given the hour I probably ought to head to bed. The immediate necessities were seen to, and the rest was probably best approached with a well-rested mind and a clear head. Black was awake, there could be now that about that, because Scribe would have missed little of what had unfolded or left him to sleep during it. I was still not looking forward to that conversation, and arguably waiting until daylight for it would not be a bad idea. It’d allow Scribe’s people in the Eyes to learn more, and that when we held council we’d both have a clear idea of what was happening before decisions were made.

It was over, the succession of twists and turns that’d swallowed up my night. Or at least it ought to be over. If it was, though, why would my shoulders not loosen? Like I was awaiting a blow I was clenching onto myself, my instincts screaming there was something yet to come. And there were not, I thought, a thousand directions from which further trouble could come. So grimly I sent Akua away for the night and, cloak trailing behind me, limped towards empty smithy the Carrion Lord had claimed as his home for the duration of the conference. There were no legionaries at the door, or near either of the two windows, which was... unusual. Black had been the one to teach me that a Name was a useful thing but that it was no substitute for people watching your back. His Blackguards might not have been able to do much against a Named assassin, but there weren’t a lot of those and there were lot of the regular kind. Especially when you crossed Praesi nobles. The heavy wooden door was not locked and did not resist when I pushed it open. The burning glare of the lit furnace within blinded me for a half a beat, flames roaring tall and proud.

The shadows they cast on the walls of the smithy, which had been stripped bare of much it would contain during warmer seasons, were long and shivering. Amadeus of the Green Stretch sat alone by a blackened iron anvil, his drab grey tunic and worn boots making him look like an aging shopkeeper instead of the Black Knight of Praes. On the anvil was a bottle, and not of wine. An empty one had been set on the ground by the anvil.

“Catherine,” the green-eyed man greeted me. “An eventful night for you, I am told.”

It was so genuinely taken aback by the slight slur to his voice I didn’t manage to entire hide my surprise. I could not remember, in all the time I’d known him, seeing my teacher even half as drunk as he clearly was right now. Not even once.

“You too, looks like,” I said, flicking a glance at the bottle.

“Salian brandy,” Black replied, tone amiable. “It struck me as fitting.”

Shit. I wasn’t familiar with the Salian kind in particular, but brandy was hard liquor. Not necessarily the hardest-hitting stuff, but if he’d really drunk more than a bottle of the stuff I could only be reluctantly impressed he wasn’t falling down his Legion-issue folding chair. This isn’t like you , I almost said, but bit down on it. I’d never seen him like this before, true, but then when I’d been young he’d still had the Calamities with him. People he could unwind with, as I myself did with the Woe. Who was left of that for him now, save for Scribe? So instead I snatched a cup from his table and braced my staff against the side of it, freeing my other hand to claim the other folding chair. I bit down on a hiss of pain as I limped forward to the other side of the anvil, dropping my seat there as pale green eyes followed me. I let out a sigh when I sat down, glad for the rest, and set down my cup atop the iron by the side of his. Without a word he filled it with brandy, and his own again.

“What are we drinking to?” I asked.

“Epiphany,” my teacher said. “Harsh mistress that she is.”

That was not a promising start, I thought, and drank deep of my cup. The brandy burned on the way down and if I’d had swallow of that at sixteen I suspected my eyes would have watered. It was smooth on the tongue, so clearly good stuff, but it couldn’t be called anything but heavy.

“It’s been a day,” I agreed. “And a night, even.”

“Yes, it has,” he mildly said. “Eventful enough I’ll confess the tumult blinded me, at first. Time to think set that weakness to rest.”

“Kairos took us all for a ride,” I said. “Our enemies a little more than us, which is the saving grace of this, but everyone took a few bruises. It’ll be months if not years before we can really glimpse the scale of what he wrought.”

“Kairos Theodosian’s schemes are of only passing interest to me,” Black said, pausing to knock back a quarter of his cup without batting an eye. “No, it is the moments that led to his swan song I have been dissecting.”

The conference. Malicia. It won’t matter , Scribe had warned me. He always forgives. I might not love the woman, or even like her, but I that did not mean she had been wrong in this.

“Scribe told you about the Legions-in-Exile,” I guessed.

“I knew within an hour of your knowing,” Black agreed. “And now I ponder how it all came to be.”

“It must have been a contingency the Empress had in place for years,” I said.

Another quarter of his cup went down his throat. The breathy slip of laughter he let out after that had my fingers clenching in dismay. It was... unpleasant, seeing him like this. So close to losing control, when control had always been at the heart of him.

“Decades,” my teacher corrected. “The sheer breadth of possibly compromised individuals is simply staggering, viewed in retrospective. I assume it is the consequence an aspect. Wekesa would have noticed such a contingency were it sorcerous in nature and told me of it.”

Most likely, I silently agreed. Masego had rubbed elbows with Juniper for years while holding an aspect related to sight and then eyes forged of Summer flame without noticing a damned thing, so I was not overly surprised that the Warlock had caught nothing. Named power could imitate sorcery, but it should never be mistaken for it – it answered to different rules, took different shapes.

“Or he might not have,” Black then genially said. “It appears that the many warnings I received of sentiment being more blinding that I believed were accurate.”

“The writing was on the wall after Akua’s Folly,” I reluctantly said.

Not for reluctance to speak the truth, but knowing how deeply painful it was to him.

“Oh no, not when it comes to Alaya,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch softly said. “It is Eudokia I gravely misread.”

Fuck , I thought, and kept my face blank. I’d waited too long. All this time I’d been agonizing over whether I should tell him or not, if the likely fallout was worth the honesty, and somehow it’d never occurred to me he might just figure it out on his own. How much did he know, though? I’d gotten a confession and explanation, while he must have simply pieced together details on his own.

“It is a bad habit, forcing lack of expression,” Black chided. “You still do it sometimes, when taken aback. It reveals that you know something, by consequence of revealing you have something to hide.”

I grimaced. He drank again.

“Not that confirmation was truly needed,” he noted. “Your request with a private conversation with Scribe stood out even at the time.”

“I did not know whether I should tell you,” I admitted.

I might have, I thought. I liked to think I would have. But I would not lie to him and pretend it had been a sure thing.

“It would be ill-done of me to rebuke you for behaviour I instilled in you myself, largely through example,” Black said, sounding darkly amused. “Though it is a fresh novelty to be treated in so high-handed a manner by anyone save Malicia.”

“Scribe, she believed, believes she was saving your life, you know,” I said, then hesitated before continuing, “and I’m not sure I disagree with her.”

“Would you like to know how I inferred what happened?” the green-eyed man idly said, filling his cup anew.

I’d yet to finish mine, or him his, but down the bottle went. I slowly nodded, though I was not sure I actually did. He drank from his cup and I matched him, the brandy’s burn a pleasant distraction from the roaring heat of the furnace and this miserable conversation.

“In the moment it bled me, that Alaya stood in that hall and saw me only as a hindrance,” Black said. “That she had not, beforehand, even attempted to speak to me so it might be made into a game of silk and steel. That she’d considered a decision that so wounded me to make as inexorable, a betrayal assured – so assured there was no need to even attemp t conversation.”

He paused.

“Then I made myself cease to think of her as Alaya and began to think of her as Dread Empress Malicia,” he mildly said. “And I still saw an unexplainable mistake from a woman whose judgement I yet hold in some esteem.”

“You figured she knew something you didn’t,” I said.

“The moment Eudokia intrigued to pass the blame onto her for the botched Salian coup, everything that followed was set in stone,” he mused. “Either I had ordered this, and now stood her foe. Or I had been deceived, and anything spoken to me could aid Scribe in furthering her attacks. Or potentially reveal how they had been anticipated and answered. Either way, even a secret missive would have been a foolhardy risk.”

I drank again, deep, since what I had to say was like as not to be unpleasant to get through.

“That doesn’t excuse anything,” I said. “She’s still the ally of the Dead King. She still spent decades seeding commands in the minds of people. No one forced her to order the Night of Knives, Black. Hers might have been choices with reasons to them, but that does not excuse a single fucking thing. You’ve been preaching personal responsibility to me since the day we met – why would she, alone of all the people in Creation, get a pass?”

He held up his cup to the light of the furnace and it cast a streak of shade over his eyes.

“ I trust people to act according to their nature ,” he quoted. “ Anything more is sentimentality. She said this not long after her formal claiming of the Tower, when there was still talk of who might be her Chancellor. It was the talk of Ater for weeks and remains her words most often quoted in Praes. I never thought much of the saying, for it presumes much, but it speaks to the woman who spoke it.”

The cup went down, and the green gaze was pensive.

“Malicia seeded commands preparing for a betrayal, and that betrayal came,” he said. “I blame her for this no more than I blame you for the terrible habits your learned at my side, though I would chastise another for them.”

“Brandy makes you chatty,” I said. “You’re muddling cause and consequence, Black. Fucking with the minds of your subjects is something that deserves answer. It’s not a betrayal to recognize that. You’re just being...”

I bit my tongue.

“Sentimental?” he finished, slightly slurring. “So I am. Eudokia said the same, when we spoke.”

I went still.

“And what else did she say?” I slowly asked.

“That she regretted her actions,” Black said, tone dry. “And would not repeat them. That she understood it had been a mistake. I thanked her for this, naturally, for it was a needed lesson to us both.”

And yet she was not here, drinking with him.

“So where is she?” I pressed.

“I wouldn’t know,” the green-eyed man said. “Neither does it matter, for she is no longer in my service.”

My fingers clenched.

“You’re drunk,” I flatly said, “you’re regret this after-”

“I made that decision without having had a drop,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch said, tone eerily calm.

“Then you’re grieving, not in your right mind,” I hissed. “There’s nothing practical about-”

“No longer extending trust to someone who deftly manipulated me into rebellion and undertaking a road that ends in the murder of someone dear to me?” Black said. “An interesting premise. I offered no rancor and held no grudge. It is a parting of ways, nothing more and nothing less.”

“You can’t afford to lose Scribe,” I bluntly said. “If you do you lose the Eyes, and if you no longer have the Eyes the Empire will eat you alive.”

“I considered this, but then decided it to be irrelevant,” he amiably said.

He drained the rest of his cup then, with clumsy fingers for one usually so sure-footed, produced a small strip of parchment from a pocket within his tunic. He put it down on the anvil, without a word. It was in Mtethwa, two words: Come home. I knew not the handwriting, but then unlike him I’d not spent decades corresponding with the Empress.

“You can’t be serious,” I quietly said.

“All of this might genuinely have untied the knot, you see,” Black said, sounding highly amused. “I did betray her, in the end. As she always believed I would, deep down. And after that betrayal failed and she triumphed over me so utterly she can now, at last, feel at ease.”

He poured his cup full again as I did absolutely nothing to hide the horror I felt.

“Of course, I will never question her again,” he said. “I will have lost that right, alongside any notion that this is partnership instead of vassalage. But the doors of Ater will be open to me and, as far as she is concerned, kneeling before the throne as every lord and lady of Praes watches will be my great penance.”

“It can still be turned around,” I said. “I know it’s a blow, the Exile Legions leaving and Scribe having manipulated you, but this isn’t your only choice. You have allies, Black.”

The green-eyed man tipped back his cup, taking another swallow.

“You misunderstand,” he said after. “I could no more do this than I could pretend I still put my trust in Eudokia. It is best to look what you are in the eye, as a villain. Lying to yourself is ever a dangerous business.”

“And what is it you are?” I quietly asked.

“Not yet content,” he said, smiling as if he was having a private jest at my expense.

I wasn’t helping him, I realized. Sitting here with Black and finishing that bottle would not make him feel any better. This breakdown had been a long time coming, maybe as far as Captain’s death, but letting him drink and entangle himself in his thoughts would solve nothing. Gingerly, I rose to my feet.

“Sleep it off, Black,” I sighed. “Scribe won’t have gone far, and that woman would forgive you nearly anything. She’ll forgive you this. We can make plans after dawn, when we’re all sober and rested.”

He looked at me for a long moment, then set down the cup. For a moment he looked about to say something, but instead he smiled crookedly.

“Good night, Catherine,” my father said.

I left, limping, and left the blazing heat of the smithy in favour of the cold. The coolness outside leant a refreshing touch the sweat on my brow and neck, but the exhaustion I’d expected never came. Even now, after all this, restlessness lingered in the marrow of my bones. High up above, under the stars and moon, to great crows feathered in darkness drifted across the sky. Their thoughts touched mine, gently, and shared a sight they were glimpsing in the distance. One man, leaving Salia. Well now, that was earlier than anticipated. I saddled Zombie and rode out, declining escort, and the journey on her back was swifter than it had been on foot. The small farm had not changed at all since my last visit, though perhaps that should not have surprised me: it might feel like an age ago, but I’d last stood here two nights back. The cattle wall, I saw, had been built anew. And stones had rolled down, as I’d warned the White Knight they would. By the eyes of the Crows I would not have company for some time yet, so after tying Zombie to the side of the farm I was spared a few breaths to consider how to comfortably wait.

Inside would be most reasonable, I thought. But the cold was pleasant, and I was reluctant to part from it. Instead I propped up my staff against the sidewall and, after soothing my leg with Night, hoisted myself up the side of the farm. The roof was as sturdy as it looked, good tiles and well set. Grimacing in pain even through the Night trick, I crawled atop it until I was resting my back against a chimney stump. Tightening my cloak against me comfortably, I let myself drift into the mixture of warmth around my belly and coolness against my face. It was soothing, and I almost fell asleep. I was not sure how long I’d been there when I finally heard approaching footsteps in the snow. I heard the White Knight chuckle as he figured out where I was, then deftly climb up the side. As Hanno dragged himself up on the roof, I finished stuffing my pipe and went looking for a match to light it. Finding one of my last sapper pinewoods I struck it against my sleeve but it failed to light. Sighing, I discreetly tapped a finger and seeded with black flame before hastily lighting my pipe with it.

The White Knight rose to his feet and strode to the edge of the roof, the two of us watching the nearing dawn begin to light up the sky.

“Back so soon?” I said, blowing out a stream of wakeleaf smoke.

“Within an hour of Tariq waking, he drew me out of my own slumber,” Hanno said.

All else about the man aside, there were Named out there with the word ‘healer’ in the Name who weren’t half as good at the art as Tariq Isbili was. Hells, for a time he’d even been able to cure death.

“And now you’re here,” I said.

An invitation to elaborate, but he did not take it.

“You were Queen of Winter for a time, were you not?” Hanno asked instead.

I hummed, pulling at my pipe.

“Close enough,” I said. “If only by virtue of being the sole scavenger with a road to it.”

“And you are no longer,” the White Knight said.

“Took a leap of faith,” I acknowledged. “All things considered, I don’t regret it.”

“And when Winter left you, Black Queen,” he softly said. “Did it feel like an absence?”

Oh , I thought, and was surprised to find I yet had pity in me.

“It felt like flying out of a pit into the blue sky,” I gently said. “It felt like the first drink of water after a long day in the sun. But I never loved that power, White Knight, nor did it love me.”

Not as he so obviously loved the Choir of Judgement, strange as that sentiment was to me. He stood there for a long moment, looking at the lightening horizon.

“They have all been asking me,” the White Knight said, “what befell of Judgement. Would you like to know, Catherine Foundling?”

I had half a dozen flippant replies on the tip of my tongue, but I was not feeling so callous right now as to offer them up to a decent man so obviously grieving.

“Tell me,” I said instead.

He flicked his wrist, and in the dawning light I caught the shine of silver. A coin, flipping, for a moment I almost struck out with the Night. But Sve Noc was silent, and I remained still. The White Knight caught the coin and did not even look at what had turned up. To him, and so to me, it’d just been a flip of the coin. There had been nothing more to it.

“Silence,” Hanno of Arwad said. “Only silence.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.

“The Hierarch still fights them, then,” I quietly said.

“You warned me,” the dark-skinned man admitted. “I did not listen, for never before has the strength of Judgement failed before my eye. You warned me, and now there is silence.”

And silence stayed there, hanging in the air.

“And now what?” I asked.

“I am blind,” Hanno of Arwad said. “Yet even a blind man can see that war must be waged on Keter.”

“I have pledged myself to this,” I said. “And do not take such oaths lightly.”

He turned towards me, his broad silhouette ringed by morning’s light, and met my eyes.

“Then we are allies,” the White Knight said, and offered his hand.

I took it.

And so we went to war, against the King of Death.

Winter III

“Good Gods, man, you can’t simply fire arrows at them. You have to let them finish the monologue first, otherwise it’s simply unsporting.”
– Aldred Alban of Callow, the Prince Errant

The White Knight did not enjoy fighting beasts.

It was not something particular to Hanno’s Name, his study of his predecessors had made that much evident. Those of his titular forbears born to Callow, in particular, had often taken such fights as their specialty. There was sense to it, as traditionally rivalry with the Black Knights of Praes belonged to Shining Princes or Princesses. Many a flying fortress or ritually spawned monster had died to the blade of a White Knight, even as the Legions of Terror were scattered by radiant royalty. Yet west of the Whitecaps, White Knights had long been known as first and foremost killers of villains. In time of crusade they rose to higher prominence still, but that was rarer affair and in the greater scheme of things one late to the history of Calernia. Indeed, most of the White Knight memories Hanno had recalled centred around strife against agents of Below. Hanno himself considered his aspects and training to have suited him to a great variety of works, but most deeply so to fighting Named. His dislike came not from a difficulty in fight beasts, even so.

But, he reflected even as he smashed a table’s foot and let the momentum flip it up as a manner of greatshield – just in time for torrent of greasy liquid to splash against it and start eating through with noxious fumes – more that whenever he found himself doing so collateral damage became inevitable. The more removed from the plans fate had for them a hero acted, the more stiff and resisting Creation became. Hanno kicked down the warping table before it could get in his way, glancing up in time to see the Dead King’s monstrous winged vanguard further tearing through the roof. The greasy liquid it had spewed was likely poisonous as well as acidic, but that was not the most inconvenient aspect. The Dead King was fond of using such creations as transports for lesser dead, and this one was no exception: even as the greasy wetness ate at the floor, the dozen fleshy abominations that’d been vomited out with the liquid began to shape themselves into legged creatures with wet squelches. Most people would have been struck with deep fear and disgust as such a sight, but this hall was filled with veterans of the war against Keter.

They’d all seen worse, and like as not those sights still haunted dreams. So instead before five heartbeats had passed every royal in the hall had a blade in hand, Princess Rozala Malanza called out for a shield wall and the retinues formed up with finely-honed discipline. There was a reason that even in the heart of Cleves, behind tall walls and sturdy gates and thousands of guards, every single person here had worn armour. The Enemy’s reach was long, clever and ever-changing. They had all been taught that lesson the hard way.

“Archers, ready a volley,” Princess Rozala said, tone even.

Even before the arrows flew Hanno knew they would have little effect, the following beats proved him right. Steel pierced into the shifting flesh, but there was no blood to spill nor organs to break and so the projectiles had little practical purpose.

“Your Graces,” the White Knight said, “I would invite you to withdraw to the Low Keep.”

Which was close, and halfway underground. The remains of a fortress that predated Alamans presence this far north, he’d been given to understand, and one very stoutly built. The beast would not find that structure as easy to rip into. Pride and fear warred within the royalty he’d addressed, for though they liked not the notion of retreating they were not unaware that from this hall they could do nothing. With siege engines from the city, yes, and by bringing every priest in the city to bear against this great monster. But arrows shot from here would not even merit attention, and their lives were likely to be why the beast had come to this hall at all. It was the Princes of Cleves within who the war was most decisively fought, and it was pride that won.

“Lord White, we will not abandon you to face that creature alone,” Prince Gaspard thundered back. “I yet rule this city and-”

With a groan the ceiling the great hall came off entirely, the roar of the beast above them all drowning out the words of the Prince of Cleves. When it passed, Hanno spoke again.

“Withdraw, Your Grace,” the White Knight simply said. “And do not worry of my fighting alone.”

Providence punctuated his sentence by a massive streak of lightning screaming down from cloudy skies, Antigone’s working ripping straight through the back of the beast and all the way out its belly. More of the poisonous liquid spilled out, and animated corpses with it. A heartbeat later, falling from the sky in the wake of the blinding light, an armoured silhouette wielding a great trident landed on the beast’s back. The Myrmidon was in good form today, Hanno noted. The White Knight took a measured step forward, sword rising as he watched the fleshy creatures take what seemed to be their war-shape: a tall, bent humanoid silhouette with strangely gleaming claws on the ‘hands’ and feet. Thin, he saw, and so suspected they’d be agile as well as blindly quick. Assassins, these, not warriors. The Dead King sought fresh crowns added to his tally. The arrows earlier shot into them were on the ground, now, like they’d been spit out by the shifting bodies.

“Well?” Hanno politely asked them. “Shall we proceed?”

In ghostly silence the creatures moved, and he moved to meet them. Behind him he finally heard the Procerans withdrawing as he had requested, shield wall tightening to block the back of the hall. It would not be enough, not against ritual-made killers like this. Of the dozen foes, a mere four were heading towards him, falling forward on four legs and they ran like terrible hounds. The rest made to scatter around him, moving so swiftly they found no difficulty in treading tables and walls like they were the ground. Breathing out, the White Knight let Light flood his veins. Control, patience, and timing. This he had learned from his defeats, that with skill little was needed to accomplish much. Light glinting on the edge of his sword, Hanno took a single step forward and a sudden extension of his arm had the tip of his blade piercing the leading abomination’s belly. His Name’s power pulsed and then the creature was burning away like a leaf lit aflame, for the necromancy that moved it was no proof to disturbance by Light.

With a step to the side his stance shifted, and he took a second through the knee. It shed its own limb, flesh boiling as it surrendered a limb before the burn of Light could swallow it all, but the backswing carved it through the torso. Hanno smoothly finished his pivot, facing the opposite of where he’d begun, and with a step towards there thrust through the back of a third creature. He tamped down on the power he’d slid along his sword, adjusting it to what he gauged to be strictly necessary to the effect. He did not know how long this battle would last, and power wasted was power he might lack when wielding it might have saved lives. The last of the four that’d come towards him opened a mouth where there should have been a stomach and spat out a mouthful of foul black liquid at him. A flicker of Light down to his back leg, using that to push himself forward at speed – a favourite trick of the Flawless Fencer, which he has carefully learned to reproduce without drawing on her memories – the angle he craned his torso forward at carefully measured so the gob would pass over his shoulder. Hanno’s blade carved right through, the Light on the edge of it making the process closer to a warm knife through butter than steel through flesh. The remaining eight had passed him, as he’d anticipated. Four on each side, all heading towards the still-open door at the back of the hall the princes and princesses had retreated through.

Numbers needed to be brought down, lest at least one succeed at squeezing through.

“ Ride ,” the White Knight said.

He’d been refining his use of the aspect for months now, ever since the battle at the Red Flower Vales. Hanno leapt forward even as he spoke, Light roiling violently beneath him and forming into a horse already at a gallop – the trick had been learning to make it come from his legs, so that he would already be astride the horse and not need additional movement. The lance of Light formed around his free hand and in the blink of an eye he’d crossed the hall on horseback, the tip of the lance tearing through an abomination crawling up against the wall and breaking as it killed it. That part of the sequence still frustrated him, for the ephemeral had made it impossible to make the weapon more durable even if he’d since figured out how to make it other armaments than a lance. Dismissing the aspect, he did not allow it to simply disperse as he once had: the Light he claimed, for it was own, drew it back to him and then precisely released it.

Grey Pilgrims used prayers and hymns, when drawing on Shine to similar purpose, though Tariq was skilled enough to sometimes dispense with this. The Peregrine still lived however, so it had been by digging through a dozen past Pilgrim lives, three Preachers Militant of Atalante and an ancient Sage of the West that Hanno had crafted a method that was manipulation of extant Light without spoken word, though at the expense of delicate control. The broken mount of Light pulsed, once, and split into three thick javelins that flew out. They tore through tables and glasses and seats as they went, unerringly finding and tearing into the other three abominations on his side. A heartbeat later, all that remained was cinder. The last four abominations, swift-footed and still silent, reached the Proceran shield wall a heartbeat later. Bodies rising above the rim of the shields, flesh swallowing the swung swords without harm, two of the creatures leaned over the shields and quickly punctured the heads of the Proceran soldiers before them. Another simply ignored the soldiery by continuing to run against the wall as it went around them, and the last impossibly leapt above the soldiers and straight to the gates.

It flew back a moment later, missing half its body, and the Valiant Champion entered the fray.

“Gloryful day,” Rafaella cheerfully bellowed. “Axe for all!”

The Champion would be able to prevent the last three from going any further, Hanno knew, and the greater threat here was admittedly the beast above. Yet she was not so quick she would be able to put down the last three without more soldiers from the hall dying. Leaving her to the fighting now would mean the certainty of dead soldiers for purposes uncertain, and so he would have to trust Antigone and the Myrmidon to handle the situation a while longer.

“Take the wall-crawler,” the White Knight ordered.

She did not answer, nor did she need to. They had fought at each other’s side long enough that he trusted her implicit. The two who’d already kill soldiers had followed their assault by crouching down again and slithering through the now open ranks of soldiers, raking claws and spitting venom as they did. A flicker of Light down his back leg, knowledge of that trick courtesy of a woman long dead, and the White Knight was moving again. Boots whispering across the floor, he barreled through the soldiers in his way without so much a speck of the sinuous, unnatural fluidity of the foes he pursed. Better bruises than death, he believed. A flicker of movement caught his eye, the abomination closest having pressed all the way down against the ground as it tried to pass through and, striking out suddenly, he nailed it to the floor with a downward thrust. His instincts screamed and he ducked, a gleaming claw ripping through where he had been standing. Having missed its opening the creature tried to retreat, but only revealed its position in doing so.

Tossing aside the young soldier in his way like he was made of feathers, the White Knight grunted in effort as he threw himself forward. Wreathing his gauntleted hand in Light, Hanno dug into the squirming abomination’s torso and let the blinding touch of the Heavens sunder the sorcery animating it. Returning to his feet a heartbeat after, he rose to learn that the Valiant Champion had meanwhile, found another weakness to these creatures: repeated partition would cause them to collapse like the touch of the Light. Hanno offered his hand to the soldier he’d tackled down, helping the young man back up, and patted his shoulder.

“Thank you, lord,” the man said.

“It is everyone’s war,” the White Knight calmly replied. “We are in it together. Champion?”

“Is me,” Rafaella volunteered.

“Best we get at that beast soon,” Hanno said. “The kind of sorcery the Witch would use to destroy it would destroy large swaths of the city as well.”

And though the Valiant Champion did not much concern herself with details like this, or Antigone for that matter, Hanno was well aware that the treasuries of Procer were like leaking sieves these days. The Principate was beggaring itself simply trying to keep afloat, and the foremost city-stronghold of the Cleves front being half a smoking ruin would only quicken the trouble. Not to mention smoking ruins were hard to defend against assault, and the Dead were not yet expelled from Cleves.

“Is dragon,” Rafaella firmly told him.

He flicked a long glance at the monster. It was massive and winged, this was true, and bearing great claws. Yet it did not seem capable of breathing fire, and its scales were not those of a lizard as those of dragons were. To his eye they were instead closer to the chitinous shine of an insect’s carapace, and much too large to be a dragon’s since every scale was no smaller than a heater shield. Likely they would be easier to break as well, though the flesh beneath could not truly be wounded like a dragon’s would be. Undeath was limiting in some ways, but the Enemy was clever in employing its few advantages to great effect.

“It has some distant similarities,” Hanno said.

“Is dragon,” the Valiant Champion cheerfully said, “and I going to slay it.”

Ah. Well, that did explain the insistence. Heroes of the Dominion had a distinct taste for the kind of deeds that’d been the staple of heroics at the peak of the Age of Wonders, he’d noticed. Such customs had poorly aged, in a Calernia where there were so few dark or savage corners left. Yet he would not argue against the truth that Rafaella had a way of eagerly brutalizing monsters that would make even other heroes hesitate. In some ways, Hanno considered the Named of the Dominion to have best taken to the war against Keter. How long that would last, however, he was uncertain. For though Levant’s sons and daughters were known for their bravery, they were not known for their stomach for long, gruelling wars. The old heroics took the shape of a splash of glory and an elegant exit, while the struggle against Keter instead promised to be a brutal, protracted grind.

“We can debate that later,” Hanno said. “First we need to get to-”

Through the open ceiling the beast’s massive head came down, struck by an unseen force, and even as a deafening roar sounded and a gaping maw filled with great fangs opened to reveal advancing armoured undead, the White Knight reflected that on occasion providence could have a truly rotten sense of humour.

“As planned I,” the Valiant Champion smugly said.

“Just as planned,” he absent-mindedly corrected.

“No, you just,” Rafaella patiently said. “I valiant. This not difficult, Hanno.”

The White Knight opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. He’d known for some time that the Champion greatly enjoyed making sport of others, particularly those she considered friends, but to this day he was uncertain exactly how much of her attitude was a pretence. Besides, the dead were beginning to march out of the monster’s gullet. Dripping in the greasy liquid that should by all rights eat right through them and their armaments, for the Dead King was nothing if not a thorough enemy. The two of them limbered wrists and shoulders as they began to advance towards the enemy.

“I have idea,” the Valiant Champion said.

“You can’t keep getting eaten by creatures to kill them from the inside,” the White Knight sternly replied.

Hanno honestly suspected that the acid in this one’s stomach was the result of Dead King’s rising irritation at how successful Rafaella had found that tactic to be. Not to mention Christophe, whose unrivalled ability to take punishment had seen Antigone adopting the tactic of forcefully cramming him down such monsters several times now. The way Dominion heroes kept referring to this as ‘Proceran stuffing’ only added insult to injury for the Mirror Knight, though after soldiers had seen him walk out of the smoking remains of a thirty-feet tall undead ape creature without a scratch his reputation had reached new heights.

“Is from Book of All Things,” the Champion assured him.

“I asked the Peregrine about these alleged differences of text in the Levant, did you know?” he casually asked.

“Oh no, enemy close,” the Valiant Champion hurriedly said. “Talk later.”

She hastened forward, barreling into the first group of emerging undead with her shield and greataxe raised. Though the acidic grease was eating at the edge of her axe, it hardly mattered with undead. Shattering them was often more practical an approach anyway, and the sheer weight of what the Champion wielded paired with her strength ensured any blow would at least knock the foe down. The great winged beast tried to rise again from its prone position, screaming in anger, but whatever great working Antigone had used on it was keeping it pinned to the ground. He was pleased to see she’d listened to the talks he’d made all heroes in Cleves sit down for on the subject of fighting within fortresses and cities: pinning down great monsters instead of batting them around not only limited damage, it also allowed their own side to put their own advantage to work. With every moment more priests and mages from the garrison would be gathering, more siege weapons and soldiers with oil or pitch.

Still, the Dead King had ensured that wherever this abomination landed its maw could serve as a beachhead. With Rafaella and himself facing the open maw serving as the gate, it then fell to them to hold the line while the rest of Cleves gathered the might to unmake this beast. Yet before Hanno could step forward and lend his blade to the toil of wiping out the remaining dead, an armoured shape leapt down into the group the Champion was swatting around. The Myrmidon wasted no movements in sweeping away the last few dead, her trident glinting with Light. She offered a muted salute with her weapon as he approached, quite unnecessary to the proceedings. Until the undead began to pour out in earnest, anyway. This band of a mere twenty seemed to have been a mere vanguard, by the lack of follow-up.

“Myrmidon,” Hanno greeted the heroine, and she nodded back. “How fares the rest of the city?”

“This is the sole beast,” she told him. “Other undead were spilled out when its belly was opened, but the Vagrant Spear and the Mirror Knight have them contained.”

Only one beast? Though the White Knight suspected that creating such a construct must have been horrendously difficult and expensive, he had still expected it would be one among a flock or at least a pair. Perhaps the vanguard of a greater assault, for mighty as the creature was it was no match for the number of heroes currently in Cleves. The garrison of the city alone would have been enough to repel it, in his opinion, though significant casualties would be incurred. If this was plain to him, it ought to be the same to the Dead King. That had implications.

“This is a distraction,” Hanno said. “Keter sent something after the royals while this drew our attention, as it sent ghouls after those in Hainaut.”

“The Repentant Magister went to attend to them,” the Myrmidon told him. “Alone.”

It should be enough to slow down whatever had been sent, but he must hurry.

“Rafaella-” he began.

“- I stay on dragon,” the Champion interrupted. “Go.”

He nodded his thanks, extending a similar courtesy to the Myrmidon, and set out as fast as his feet could carry him.

It would end in the Low Keep, one way or another.

Epilogue

“And on the first day of the year four hundred and ninety-three after the Declaration did a stranger slay High Lord Baraka Sahelian in the streets of Wolof, and she did not flee. Instead she challenged the Sahelians in such a manner: ‘Come now, you who believe you might triumph over me, that I might teach you the error of your ways.’”
– Extract from the Scroll of Dominion, twenty-fourth of the Secret Histories of Praes

Inch by painful inch, Malicia had dragged the Dread Empire of Praes out of the pit and herself along with it.

She allowed herself to feel a sliver of pride over that, though only for a passing moment. To grow conceited over victories would signal the beginning of a swift descent. Yet victories she had won, slowly and carefully laying the foundation for them until they could be brought to bear against her enemies. The throne that had been crumbling under her had been forged anew by the fresh blood she’d spilled abroad: watching the Imperial Court through the enchanted wall that said to be the work of Dread Emperor Sorcerous himself, Malicia read the lips of the highborn gathered before her. Rumours had swelled of the developments in Salia and the Free Cities. The sudden reverses against the Grand Alliance only echoed more loudly for the way it had before seemed on the rise to pre-eminence, restoring the prestige eroded by Ashuran depredations and the losses in Thalassina and Foramen. Malicia did not rejoice of this, for she knew every speck of that clout would be needed for what was yet to come. Though in dark days the High Seats and lesser nobles were more easily convinced of great changes, there were many who would balk at the mere setting of a precedent.

The crop before her, however, looked ripe for harvest. High Lady Abreha Mirembe’s absence, for Alaya had refused to relieve her from her duties as Governess of the Blessed Isle, had naturally prompted protest from Aksum and the Mirembe. In attempt to make her influence keenly felt Abreha had ordered the lords and ladies sworn to Askum to refrain from attending court until she was summoned back to Ater, but to Malicia’s eye this had backfired. Lord Kosu’s lion-like mane of hair could be picked out from the crowd, as could Lady Sesay’s famous enchanted dress of pure gold. Those two ranked among the most powerful vassals to Aksum, and another half dozen lesser nobility sworn to Abreha had ignored her edict and attended regardless. None whose holdings were close to the city of Aksum, for Abreha Mirembe’s wrath would run hot at the defiance, but enough that the High Lady of Aksum’s position was revealed for the worsening drought that it was. A year ago, Abreha had been but a few manoeuvres of having herself proclaimed Chancellor regardless of Malicia’s opinion of the matter. Now the vultures were beginning to circle her, her defeats at the hands of General Sacker when she’d attempted to intervene in Callow having soured her position.

In the wake of the recall of the inaptly named Legions-in-Exile, the highborn of Praes had come to believe the entire affair a long-reaching scheme of hers and General Sacker one of her agents in humbling High Lady Abreha. Perhaps if Sacker’s soldiers had not so neatly slaughtered the Askum forward parties and driven the refugees back to the Blessed Isle – where they must now be fed at the expense of Abreha – her influence could have been salvaged, but the defeats had been both swift and utter. The Governess of the Blessed Isle was then left with the dilemma of either pursuing a punitive campaign into Callow and risking starting a war with Laure or admitting herself to have been almost contemptuously swatted down. Abreha had attempted to sidestep the issue by accusing General Sacker of treason, which the goblin general had answered in kind, which had been trouble at the time. Amadeus was a rebel in all but name and conceding to the shadow of his influence would have been a grave mistake. By stretching out giving answer, however, Malicia had been able to feign control of the situation and leave the High Lady of Aksum’s support to wither on the vine.

With the currents within Praes mastered, it had been time turn her full efforts outwards. The League of Free Cities had been the easiest grounds to make gains in, and so where she had first concentrated her efforts. It had swiftly become clear that Penthes could be bought, courtesy of Amadeus sowing crippling chaos across the nobility during his last visit and Kairos Theodosian then pouring oil on the fire. Reaching an accord with the Tyrant of Helike had proved necessary, for through the Hierarch he wielded great influence over the rest of the League. They’d agreed on the Exarch-claimants that should be spared, and in binding them irremediably through participation in a darker scheme: the deployment of Still Water against the fleets of Nicae. From there, it was only a matter of ensuring that her position in the Free Cities was strong enough Kairos Theodosia’s coming treachery could inflict only minor damage. The Magisterium was approached and promised protection from invasion until it had finished its cycle of replenishment for the Spears of Stygia. The deal had to be further sweetened with magical tomes, but in principle Malicia had no objection to an empowered Magisterium tying down the resources of neighbouring city-states.

Antagonizing Atalante had been as simple as inciting the Tyrant and other greats of the League to constantly and publicly slight some of their most beloved preachers, culminating in their delegation being forced to carry a nailed manuscript of the Book of All Things as a formal member during the conference in Salia. The utter humiliation and the rest of the League’s acquiescence to it had made them walk away from the situation the moment they were no longer bound by law to be involved. The Secretariat’s longs-standing tendency to state neutrality when its interests were not being threatened – as well as the dire state of its coffers after maintaining so many mercenaries in its service for so long – meant that so long as they were not provoked they could be counted on to be neutral as well. All that was required then to utterly isolate the Tyrant of Helike had been to sever or turn Nicae from the rest, which Theodosian might have assumed to be difficult given their shared treachery against the city and its young Basileus. And it had been a thorny problem for Malicia, she’d admit, at least until Catherine had returned to the surface and begun reminding the rest of Calernia of the looming threat she represented.

It’d only been a question of aiming at Basileus Leo Trakas in particular, from there, and he was not all that complicated a man.

The deceased Strategos whose authority he’d usurped had been a close ally of Cordelia Hasenbach, and now so was Catherine Foundling. A foundation for mistrust. She’d also had dealings with the Tyrant, at the best of times his enemy as well as his ally, and made the leading heroic lights of the Grand Alliance defer to her will several times. Best of all she had the soul of Akua Sahelian, the sole known user of Still Water, bound to her service. It’d not been all that difficult to tip wariness into fear and then fear into the making of mistakes. Not that her victory there had been as complete as it could have been, Malicia silently conceded. Kairos Theodosian had risen from the grave to spit on her plans one last time, a poisonous snake even in death. The Eyes had confirmed that one of his two foremost generals had sworn herself to the war against Keter while the other, General Basilia, had openly declared war on Penthes. A weakened Helike might be able to maul the even more desolate Nicae, should it support Penthes, but it would not find Penthes itself so easy a prey. The distance between the city-states was significant and marching there would involve making pacts with the states between them, which Malicia fully intended to sabotage.

Still, where the League of Cities might have informally been an ally to the Dread Empire instead it was likely to spiral into another civil war that tied it down for the foreseeable future. In the longer lay of things, the Empress would see what might be arranged. If the war went badly for General Basilia and her Helikeans, the Magisterium might yet be convinced to step in for easy spoils. And if it went well? Then the Magisterium it might yet be convinced to step in lest victory allow Helike to resume pre-eminence among the League. The Tyrant might have allowed his people to reach tall heights while he lived but in his death he had left them stranded and surrounded by potential enemies. There would be some pleasure in teaching Helike the consequences of its actions, Malicia would confess. Kairos Theodosian had been an atrocious little prick, convinced he was amusing and that his sneering smugness was somehow endearing. It’d been draining to deal with him even when he was genuinely trying to cooperate with her, and passing the duties to Ime had not been possible: the moment the little shit had sniffed out how abhorrent she found him, he’d insisted their bargaining be done only between rulers.

Steps coming from the deeper reach of the hidden corridor the Empress still stood in, studying her court as she awaited the proper time to enter, shook her out of her thoughts. Ime’s pace was brisk, befitting urgent news. Malicia did not turn, eyes on the overly lingering courtesies Lady Nazar and the younger brother of Lord Salee – affair or scheme? The Salee and Nazar lands bordered one another, lending potential weight to either. It would not be the first time Lady Nazar allowed a foe’s younger sibling into her bed as well as her plans.

“Speak,” Malicia said, eyes moving to catch yet another of the thousand little details that might allow her to keep the court under her thumb.

“Duchess Kegan had our envoys drawn and quartered,” Ime said. “In front of cheering crowds.”

Unpleasant, but not unexpected. The Deoraithe were not an expansionist people by nature and with Kegan’s appointment to Governess-General of Callow they’d begun accruing honours in the kingdom as the duchess appointed kin and allies to offices. Competent ones, sadly, which only added to the faction’s influence. It meant that the Black Queen’s promise to the Deoraithe of independence-in-all-but-name along with a tight military alliance was a very difficult bribe to better.

“The Legions?” Malicia asked.

“The Okoro mages cadres were made welcome by Marshal Nim, and construction of the ritual grounds is progressing at a steady pace,” Ime replied.

Good , the Empress thought. When the time came and signal was sent by the Exile Legions mages, the ritual could be initiated and the armies forced back into Creation from these ‘Twilight Ways’. Returnign exactly at the centre of fortified killing ground, manned by her more loyal armies. High officers of dubious loyalty would be taken hostage and kept at the Tower, the unsalvageable purged and more trustworthy men forced in place. Heavy-handed but necessary. The Legions of Terror needed to be unshakeably hers before Amadeus returned. It meant more blunt action than she would have preferred employing, but in these times such bluntness could serve as a reminder of her strength as well.

“And?” Malicia asked.

There would be more. Neither of those reports had been time sensitive.

“Lord Amadeus has gone missing,” Ime hesitantly said. “Neither our people in Salia nor in the Army of Callow know where he is. We believe Queen Catherine herself is unaware.”

Alaya stilled.

“You are certain?” she said.

“It is like he vanished into thin air,” Ime said.

He was not dead, Alaya decided. She would have... felt it, somehow. She would have. And though the Empress had been harsh in demonstrating to him the futility of defying her, it was no more than he had earned. He’d know that, understand how measured the answer had been considering the gravity of his mistakes. Had she not held her hand until he claimed a right to her very throne? Even allowing for what had no doubt been poisonous whispers by Scribe – who, it was now clear, after decades was finally done pretending to be anything but an enemy – there was no light under which those actions could be seen that was anything but a betrayal. It was, Malicia knew, better this way. Now there was no longer anything let wondered and unspoken, no question of what would happen if he turned against her. He had, and he had lost. Swiftly, utterly, without ever landing a blow in return. And with that question finally laid to rest, they could forge a fresh understanding of who and what they were. Amadeus would not have taken his own life over such a thing, for sober admissions of his blunders were at the heart of who he was. He was still alive, which meant he was coming home. One way or another.

“It is likely he went into the Twilight Ways,” the Empress said.

“Agreed,” Ime said, standing by her side. “And though I know it displeases you to even consider this, Your Dread Majesty-”

“He could be returning as a foe,” Malicia said. “I am aware.”

Amadeus yet commanded loyalty with much of the Legions and had many sympathizers among the Empire’s bureaucracy. Scribe had seen to that. Some of the High Seats might be using to use him as a stalking horse for their own bid for the Tower, too, High Lady Abreha most of all. There might even be some lesser nobles that would genuinely rally to his banner, should he raise it. Though despised by most highborn, his tenure as her Black Knight had also seen him become widely feared. For some that meant respect, especially with families who had martial inclinations by tradition. His Duni birth meant most would not even consider him a possible claimant, true, but there would be some with greater interest in deeds than skin. More worrying were his ties to the Clans and the currently rebelling Tribes, though Malicia had already begun to check those potential threats with measures of her own.

“I would win,” the Dread Empress of Praes said.

“You would,” Ime agreed. “And so I caution you of assassination.”

Malicia glanced at her spymistress, almost amused.

“You believe he’d run me through in open court?” she asked.

“At this point?” Ime said. “Yes. Or, at least, I’m unsure enough of the answer I have to consider the possibility.”

“Without his Name, I could have him frozen with a word,” Malicia noted.

“That is no reason to expose yourself unduly,” Ime said.

“I do not intend to,” Malicia flatly said. “I am not a debutante thankfully accepting an ally’s antidote, Ime. Regardless of his reasons he has failed and betrayed me. It will be years before I can even begin to trust him as I once did.”

She paused.

“But I will not rob myself of what could be restored out of petty fear,” Alaya said. “He will have a place in my court, should he return.”

What was there left to fear, after all? In Praes, her vise was tightening around all who might yet oppose her. In the Free Cities, she stood queenmaker and holder of strings as the crows gathered above. In the far west she had sown chaos and confusion, stranded for months the Army of Callow, and last of all she stood the sole ally of Keter on Calernia. The Dead King needed her, lest the entire continent band against him as the sole crucible of darkness. Lest every hero turn north, the sum of every Hell and Heaven march against him. Malicia would betray him, in the end. That much had never been in doubt. She would betray him the moment the armies of the Grand Alliance were savaged beyond ability to harm her, and in the uneasy peace that followed the Dread Empire of Praes would stand without peer. Hers to mold into what it should be, as she reigned untouchable from atop the Tower.

The storm had come for Dread Empress Malicia, First of Her Name, and she had beaten it. She had survived the crucible thrust upon her by Below, and now she would claim her dues from Creation.

“It is time,” the Empress said, eyes on the court. “Have them readied.”

“By your will,” Ime said, bowing low.

Malicia was left to stand alone, watching her court. Where she would soon enter and introduce before the lords and ladies of Praes the beginning of a new age. From the Northern Steppes, chieftains had come. Blackspear, Graven Bone and Stag-Crowned. Large, powerful clans of the southern stretches. Their chieftains had come to be proclaimed Lords of the Steppes, empowered to collect tribute in the name of the Tower from the other clans while themselves standing exempt of it. There were some among the court who would despise this, and what would follow yet more. For there was one more awaiting, hidden. She would be presented as the very first of her kind: High Lady Wither of Foramen, having renounced her former title of Matron as she returned Foramen to the Praesi fold. The Great Game, it always changed.

The only thing that didn’t was that Alaya of Satus always, always won.

—

Tariq listened in wonder to the roars of the crowd. Mere days ago the people of Salia had been angrily rioting, boiling out onto the streets, and yet now the same mob was cheering Cordelia Hasenbach so vociferously it seemed as if the very sky above might collapse from the ruckus. Merovins Square was considered one of the great works of Procer, the great Salian gathering place built over generations of the rule of the family of the same name. In the upper reaches of the part of the city men called the Joinery, massive arches of pale stone formed a perfect circle above great open avenues. Statues and monuments of every stripe dotted the square, some so worn by ages that the faces had been eaten through by rain and sleet while others were but a few years old. The tall, slender monument to the dead of what Procerans called the ‘Great War’, for example. The twisted marble, showing a ring of men and women both dragging each other up and pushing each other down, had chilled him when he’d first glimpsed it. The sculptor has shown great skill in making the faces move from triumph to agony and grief under the vagaries of the ‘Ebb and the Flow’. A fitting monument to a bloody civil war.

And now a young father was hoisting up his daughter so that she could peek over the weeping face of a marble woman and have a better look at the First Prince addressing the people of Salia. Merovins Squared had filled with thousands upon thousands, like a sea of people split by elegant islands of stone and metal. From where Tariq stood, under the shade of a great roofed terrace overlooking the magnificent wooden pulpit from which Cordelia Hasenbach was addressing the crowd, he could only barely make out the words the First Prince was speaking. Yet there was no mistaking their thundering approval, the way it echoed through the sunny afternoon air. He was not the only one who had been invited to wait here, far from it. The Grand Alliance’s shine must be burnished, for the people to put their hope in it, and so the great names had all been brought. Young Razin and Aquiline, pretending to be speaking politics over wine when they were truly flirting in that heady, hesitant way of those still unsure of the affection of the other. Tall and serious Yannu Marave, in the cast of whose face Tariq could not help but seeing Sintra. Itima Ifriqui, the sole of the Blood could still remember him having a full head of hair, though their long acquaintance had yielded little fondness. Respect, yes, but the Peregrine had always held in distaste the fondness for bloody vengeance of the Brigand’s Blood.

Others too, the seconds of their realms: Princess Rozala Malanza and Lady Vivienne Dartwick, seated in the shade and speaking in low tones of granaries and treasuries. Tariq’s opinion had already been sought over the matter of a temporary common treasury for the Grand Alliance, though he’d demurred from giving an opinion. It was a sound notion, as far as he was concerned, but he must wean the Blood from the habit of seeking his council. The chances he would survive the coming war were slim, and the surrender of his crown had only made him warier of speaking on matters of rule. Yet it was the last here on the terrace that his eyes lingered over. Hanno of Arwad, once the Sword of Judgement and perhaps one day once more, was leaning against the balustrade and look down at the crowd. At his side the Black Queen of Callow, hair loose down her back and a light smile on her face, was looking down with him and speaking without reserve. The easy cordiality that held between the two, natural as a sparrow’s flight, had surprised him. Perhaps it should not have been, for those two had never fought before and for a hero sworn to the Seraphim the White Knight could be said to be... unusual.

Tariq approached, as much out of curiosity as desire to converse.

“- wait, so if you recall someone that understood High Arcana, wouldn’t you-”

“Only so long as I am within the memories,” the White Knight replied. “Which makes you correct, but the knowledge itself impossible to use.”

“You still get to learn languages by the fucking basketful, so I wouldn’t complain,” Catherine Foundling drily said. “Even back when I still had Learn, it took me months to learn what I knew. Even had to learn Chantant the hard way.”

“I find Tolesian significantly easier,” Tariq admitted, coming to stand at Hanno’s side. “Though that might be because of the tradertongue and Lunara loan words.”

“Everyone should just speak Lower Miezan,” the Black Queen suggested.

“Chantant is the single most spoken language on Calernia, I believe,” the White Knight said. “Should it not be the chosen tongue, by virtue of this?”

“It’s got more exceptions than a Wasteland loyalty pledge,” Catherine Foundling snorted. “Over my dead body.”

The Grey Pilgrim’s brow almost rose, for though the Black Queen was known as something of a wit and prone to bantering, there seemed to be a genuine rapport between the two he’d not expected. They were both young and attractive, Tariq thought, so perhaps... No, he decided, flicking them a long and considering glance. The Black Queen had a roving eye, a fact he’d heard had been the subject of great interest among Proceran royalty, but the White Knight had no reputation for dalliances. And seemingly little interest in them, which the Grey Pilgrim could only approve of considering the days they lived in. Below them, the crowd roared again,

“The First Prince is in fine form today,” Tariq said.

“She is a gifted speaker,” Hanno noted. “As one would expect of a woman bearing her title.”

“She’s offering them hope,” the Black Queen said. “She could be stumbling over half those sentences and still they’d cheer fit to shake the earth.”

“The Grand Alliance has lost a founding member, with Ashur,” Tariq cautioned.

“The League of Free Cities retreats, or joins our ranks,” the White Knight said. “And the dreaded Black Queen has been tamed and added to our ranks. There is reason to rejoice.”

Young Catherine replied with what he believed to be fairly obscene language in Kharsum, to Hanno’s apparent amusement, but Tariq was grimacing. Precious little of the League had joined, no matter the posturing, and Tariq mistrusted those that had. General Pallas and her ten thousand, the appallingly named Tyrant’s Own , might not have the stomach to truly see through the war to the north. It remained to be seen, and soldiers were not to be turned away, but these were not to be relied on.

“Best for all of us that Cordelia has her day,” the Black Queen said. “If parading us all before the crowd puts some spine back in Procer, I’ll even smile and say pretty things.”

“Your generosity is remarkable,” Tariq said, only half teasing.

Most of her allies had, after all, until recently been at war with her. The Peregrine cast a discreet look at young Razin and Aquiline once more, heart clenching. Blood, both of them, and that would matter in the days to come. But Aquiline Osena had not so long ago tried to kill the man she now courted and yet now the smiled softly at one another. Razin Tanja, defeated and orphaned, had not been embittered or broken but instead risen past what he had been taught. Tariq had heard of his words, of the renunciation of the honour killings. Of the harsh words he’d spoken at what Levant had become. And Gods, but Tariq was feeling his years. His soul had been wounded, and his body was nearing the end of its days. There was a future for the Dominion, but it lay not in Yannu Marave, who embodied at once the best and the worst of Levant, or in Itima Ifriqui’s borderlands savagery. Yet those two, the seed of what they might yet become, it would need to be nurtured. Protected. And he might not live long enough to see this through.

“I would, Queen Catherine, ask of you a favour,” Tariq said.

Dark eyes studied him, amusement sliding off her face.

“Funny, that,” the Black Queen said. “I’ve been meaning to ask one of you as well.”

“A trade might be arranged, then,” the old hero said, pleased. “When the Grand Alliance marches north, you are to be among the great warleaders of it.”

“Seems likely,” the young priestess acknowledged.

“There are two of mine I would have you take under your wing,” Tariq said. “Under your protection.”

She followed his gaze to Aquiline and Razin.

“You’ve got plans for them,” the Black Queen said.

“It is a new world you would make,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “I will not have Levant left behind.”

Slowly, she nodded.

“I am told you might be one of the few people alive capable of removing a compulsion from someone’s mind,” Queen Catherine said.

“I have some experience with this,” Tariq acknowledged.

Sorceries to that effect were more easily disrupted, but even alchemies and Speaking could be purged if one knew the way. The Peregrine had greatly benefitted from the tutelage of the Ophanim in this.

“I believe Dread Empress Malicia to have planted commands among several officers of the Army of Callow,” the Black Queen said. “I’d request your assistance in removing them without harming the officers in question, which I’m told could be... difficult.”

“This I would offer free of recompense,” Tariq frankly said. “I will not begrudge you my hand’s work when it is to be used to aid your soldiers in fighting for the preservation of mankind.”

She seemed surprised, which had him pushing down a grimaced. It had not been unfounded a conclusion, but Tariq was attempting to bridge the gap and vexed to see how deep he had helped dig this one. The Grey Pilgrim was not unaware that there was only so long one could keep treating someone as an enemy before they became one in truth.

“I’ll keep the favour, then,” the Black Queen said, eyes watchful as she studied him.

Below the crowd roared anew at some fresh turn of phrase of the First Prince. White, Grey and Black, the three of them looked at the lone silhouette of Cordelia Hasenbach. The stubborn soul that would not allow the Principate to fall to its knees, no matter the coming doom.

“The Tower stirs,” Tariq quietly said. “The Ophanim whisper of it.”

“I suspect,” the Black Queen quietly said, “that the Tower is about to have a great deal of trouble on its hands.”

Suspect. Was it true, then, that she did now know where the Carrion Lord had gone?

“And if Praes sallies forth?” the White Knight asked.

“Then I will get the east in order the hard way,” Catherine Foundling replied, tone steady as stone.

It was a small, almost imperceptible thing. Tariq Fleetfoot saw it anyway, as did Hanno of Arwad. A flicker, a spark. When the Queen of Callow had spoken the words and meant them, something had begun to take shape.

A Name, Gods help them all.

—

It was a beautiful realm, Amadeus thought.

A summer night unending, starry and warm. The kind of realm that made for a pleasant journey even when the sum of your earthly possessions was a horse, bundled armour and a fortnight’s worth of rations. Bridle in hand, sleeves rolled up on his tunic as the sword at his hip moved with his leg, he wandered down the road snaking forward through the Twilight Ways.

Amadeus no longer had his armies, not even his personal guard – he had left them in Catherine’s hands, requesting she safeguard them through the strife to come.

Amadeus no longer had spies, or wealth or even the power of a Name. He had sent away Scribe, failed Captain and lost Warlock. Assassin was gone, if not from Creation then at least from his service.

Alaya would see him kneeling, or forever gone from her sight.

Tabula rasa , a blank slate. After so many decades, the thought of it should have angered him. Should have brought in him despair and bitterness, for all he had built went up in smoke. Instead he felt relieved. Like a weight had been lifted from his shoulder. It was just him, now. Him and a sword and a plan against all the world. He looked up at the starry sky and laughed.

“Evening, stranger,” a voice drawled. “Where might you be headed, that it has you in such a merry mood?”

Leaning back against a tree, shrouded in darkness, Hye Su was gazing at him with mild interest. It’d been years since they last saw each other, and she’d hardly changed at all – save for the burns on the side of her face, a mark of Summer challenged but not beaten.

“East, I would think,” Amadeus mused.

“Whatever for?” Ranger asked, tone nonchalant.

Voice high and clear, he sang.

“The last is strangest, she said to them
The easiest and the most solemn
For when the tower is yours to claim
You will have forgotten why you came.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the Lady of the Lake pushed herself off the tree.

“Might be I’ll walk with you a while, then,” Hye Su said.

“I thought you might,” Amadeus smiled.

And into the starry night they went, side by side.

Update Schedule (Book VI)

Hey!

The update schedule for the last book will be proceeding differently, since I was starting to feel the sting of three different chapters a week by last book’s end. Instead of three smaller updates I’ll be putting up two larger ones, on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Word count wise I will theoretically split the length of what the third chapter would have been in two and assign it to the two remaining updates, but practically speaking I expect more content will end up put out there. At the very least I’ll have longer to check chapters for typos, which I expect many of you will find a welcome change.

As I said before the break that updates would resume on the 6th that is still what you’ll be getting, so the prologue and extra chapter will still be coming out a little after midnight, one day early.

Hope you’ll enjoy the new book, and the last stretch of the series!

E.E.

Winter IV

“One must admire the thriftiness of Callowan war-making, given the cost of arming bold orphans with enchanted swords compared to that of crafting undead plagues and flying fortresses. They even get to reuse the sword, most the time, if rarely the orphan.”
– Dread Empress Prudence, the Frequently Vanquished

The silence was how he knew it’d all gone wrong.

Hanno of Arwad was no longer a green boy in the ways of Named, if well short of the priceless experience someone like the Saint or the Pilgrim could rightfully boast of, but he’d been allowed to learn the lessons of others. The softest touch of Recall saw them all drift to the surface, the parade of kindred memories. The Noble Corsair stepping onto a ship still and dead, the Shining Princess finding the great hall of Denier empty as the night sky, the Silent Slayer finding a clearing in the Brocelian without a single sound to mar its almost oppressive hush, a hundred others. A thousand. The aspect was best used scarcely, when reaching for patterns, for it was so easy to get lost in that endless sea of memories. Easier still to realize the smallness of what Hanno truly was, but a single speck of light within a great and ancient star. Such silences were the herald of dark news, of ambush, of the Enemy having struck. No surprise marred the brow of the White Knight when he reached the narrow stone corridor that led into the Lower Keep and he found splayed before him half a dozen corpses. Cleves soldiers, the prince’s own men, in good ring mail and wielding long halberds. Steady sorts, Hanno knew from having fought at their side on the walls, and skilled at war.

They’d been slaughtered like helpless children.

Some manner of long blade had slashed through the mail and broken both bone and metal with the sheer might it was being swung with. The crudeness of the wound a second glance revealed was undeniable sign this was the work of a Revenant: the blade had not been sharp enough to warrant cutting through good armour, which meant either strength beyond the reach of mortal men or some other manner of power. It was useless to attempt recalling with so little to go on, the White Knight decided, and would lose him time besides. He bowed his head to the dead as he passed, apologetic for not lingering long enough to close the eyes of the dead. Hanno would seek to keep the living alive before giving honour to the dead, though his lengthening stride as he left was poor repayment for the loyal service these men and women had kept to while they still drew breath. The Ashuran set the guilt aside for now, instead considering the wounds as he sped forward. Too lengthy and broad to be a longsword’s work, closer to a broadsword or greatsword. Both were popular weapons with Proceran fantassins from the northern Alamans principalities. Those few soldiers of fortune who could afford one, anyway.

Most likely a Revenant borne of the Principate, then. Or else one so old as to make the current preferences of weaponry among Calernian peoples irrelevant. Even the former was unfortunate, given how few of those lives he’d explored in depth. Proceran heroes – and villains as well, from what he could tell – rarely left the principality they’d been born in. They tended to be called by places as much as stories, in truth. Even Christophe, perhaps the most potentially powerful Mirror Knight in the history of that Name, had been called to his fate by the need of the Elfin Dames for a defender of their sacred waters. Often heroes from the Free Cities and Callow were more useful to learn from by simple virtue of having more often fought and encountered greater breadth of opponents, and when it came to the affairs of wilderness there was simply no matching the Dominion’s many heroes. Hanno had also called on the memories of the legendary founder of the Valiant Champion’s bloodline to learn his delicious garlic lamb roast recipe, which admittedly some might consider an abuse of his powers. Not that any of his companions had ever complained when it was his turn to cook. Theft of recipes aside, Hanno was coming to realize that in the way he’d chosen to look through lives he’d left a gap in his understanding of Proceran ways. It would have to be remedied to, should he survive the day.

The Low Keep he was moving through was little like a castle as they were built these days, instead as much a shelter and a tomb as it was a fortress and a home. Those who had raised it, thought to be either eastern kin to the western tribes that grew to be the Lycaonese or another people entirely that’d been ended by Alamans northern expansion, had preferred digging below to raising great walls. Yet they must have been a people used to being besieged, for the Low Keep’s looping corridors ended in narrow chokepoints and were curved in a way that would allow the defender to strike behind the shield of an attacker. The first of those narrowing points he encountered had seven dead soldiers, the second a full twenty scattered beyond a broken door and barricade. The third had a thick steel grid keeping corpses up against the wall, having been blown off its hinges and straight into the soldiers. A Revenant with great physical might, Hanno thought, as he’d earlier speculated. But not one with an aspect that’d allow it to cut through the likes of steel, as he’d also speculated, else that grid would be cut through instead of repeatedly hammered until it broke out of the hinges.

The White Knight was not overly familiar with the Low Keep, as he’d mostly fought in the city proper and atop the walls, but from memory he should not be far from what the servants called the Old Hall. Once the banquet hall of the rulers of ancient Cleves, nowadays it was more often used as a wine cellar for its natural coolness. The bottles and barrels had been moved early in the siege and the Old Hall instead been made into the bastard child of an armory and a war room, for though the Old Hall was too small for a great council of royalty and Named it was fit for private talks between those who had already been given duties by the greater council. The princes and princesses who’d escaped the scuffle above should have retreated there, given that the Old Hall’s ancient and crumbling wards had been entirely overhauled by Princess Rozala’s mages according to the Rogue Sorcerer’s design. Roland had allegedly been rather embarrassed to put these to ink, calling them a ‘sloppy, faulty mimicry’ of those used by the Army of Callow to protect its war camps, but even Antigone had admitted that the Praesi wards were usually half a century ahead of everyone else’s. At least in lesser patterns, for she maintained that in great workings no one had yet to so much as touch the feet of the Gigantes.

Hanno has walked the airy streets of Orseis as a young man, where stone flowed like water under the guidance of songs, where great columns of moonstone decreed the very lay of winds and clouds, and so he’d not argued this. It was not without reason the Gigantes were also known as wonder-makers, even though they named themselves nothing but a pale shadow of what they had once been.

Regardless of all else, the wards on the Old Hall ought to keep the least of the dead from entering and hinder even the likes of Revenants. Given the number of soldiers that escorted Proceran royals even here in the depths of Cleves and the alleged presence of the Repentant Magister, he might not be too late in arriving. Nephele had left behind the destructive sorceries she’d learned in Stygia along with the other dark teachings of the Magisterium, but that hardly meant she was defenceless. Hanno’s steps slowed as he entered a low, downwards-sloping gallery. It could be no longer than thirty feet, though the span of it had been swallowed by darkness: save for the two torches behind him and the two outside the door on the other side, there was no source of light. A few years ago, the White Knight would have let his Name augment his sight and seen through the dark without missing a beat. He’d been taught better since, by a green-eyed killer who’d delighted in brutally punishing his every bad habit. If darkness had been laid here, it was not because his opponent had expected him to be blinded by it. It was because the moment his sight adjusted a nasty surprise was to be sprung on him. From memory, the gallery was no more than six feet wide and the footing deliberately tricky so that bowmen and spearmen able to strike into the gallery through narrow slits in the side walls might find easier prey.

“Physically strong Named rarely bother with tricks,” Hanno noted out loud, “save for those used to fighting creatures even stronger than them.”

The White Knight timed the sequence of his movements closely, first snatching out one of the torches at his side and tossing it out into the dark before adjusting his footing: one foot horizontal, as if prepare to thrust out with a slender blade, but instead a flicker of Light went down the back of his leg and Hanno propelled himself forward at inhuman speed. The last part of the sequence, strengthening his eyes against light, came the moment he caught a glimpse of a silhouette within the dark. A fraction of a moment later there was a loud bang and a flash of burning light – the kind that would have seared his eyes powerfully, were he adjusting them to see in the dark. Instead it merely stung and stinging he could suffer through without batting an eye. Even as the torch he’d thrown arced up, Hanno caught sight of a tall and broad man in ornate bronze armour plate. Of a helm, too, depicting some snarling creature, but before he could make out which his opponent was moving. A greatsword swung, aimed to carve through the still spinning torch, but as the initial heartbeat of the fight ended Hanno’s movement trick ended with him under the very torch.

He snatched it out again, thrusting it towards the helmeted head of the Revenant, and his opponent aborted his blow before silently withdrawing into the dark. A mere moment later, there was no sign left of the undead Named at all.

“A wolf,” the White Knight pensively said. “Yet in bronze, not iron or finer.”

Not so with the greatsword, which was well-made steel. A more recent weapon, which was interesting. It meant the bronze armour had been kept even with steel plate likely available and that would hardly be without reason. Even more interesting was that he was being met in battle here, in what Hanno could only term an obvious trap, while the undeniably better prize would be the lives of the Proceran royalty within the Old Hall deeper in. The White Knight was being delayed, which implied another entity was already after those lives and the intelligence behind this entire affair believed that other entity capable of breaching the defence of a heroine, wards and soldiers if given long enough. Likely a second Revenant, then, though some manner of specially crafted monster was not impossible. It also meant that Hanno needed to pick up the pace.

“Your hiding trick only works when you have darkness to work with,” the White Knight spoke out loud.

The dark-skinned hero genuinely believed this to be true, though that was not why he’d revealed his conclusion to his foe. It was an unusual scene he’d been presented with. The Revenant’s former Name must have been geared towards physical might, for him to make use of a greatsword and so swiftly, yet he was not behaving as most Named of that bent would. Hanno was not the kind of fool to dismiss those Named inclined to the strength of bodies as duller than others, but it was true that the breed tended to be more inclined towards recklessness and swift advance than other heroes. As they should be, given that their Names usually rewarded such audacity with luck and power. Rafaella was a good example, for though clever and apt in tactics she tended to prefer throwing herself into trouble with only limited planning. It was where and how she thrived, for that was her Role as a Champion. Yet the Revenant he now faced had preferred laying an ambush, using tricks that many heroes would outright consider beneath them and was even now lying in wait instead of seeking battle . Used to fighting stronger creatures, Hanno considered, though it did not feel like a full explanation. Unfortunately, given that the Dead King’s grasp reached across several centuries and lands now considered quite tames had at times been considered more dangerous than the Brocelian, this did little to narrow the scope of possible identities. Torch still in hand, the White Knight began to stride towards the other end of the gallery.

Bronze armour, and a helmet like a snarling wolf. The Lycaonese were the ancient enemies of Keter and they did have a strong cultural association with the beasts, Hanno thought, but they were hardly the only ones. And they’d been one of the first human ethnicities in the west to begin using iron, too, which would make the bronze armour odd. Or would it? Iron hindered many lesser sorceries, he remembered. The darkness trick, and perhaps even the light that had blinded him, might not be faded aspects but instead enchantments woven into an armour. One made in bronze, a metal that the ancient peoples of Calernia had favoured above all others when it came to laying enchantments. Nine steps, before Hanno reached the end of the gallery and the second part of the ambush was sprung on him. It was the light trick that’d given it away, and it was the same reason the White Knight had been unsatisfied with his guess of the Revenant’s former purpose. The trick had been woven to specifically hurt a Named fortifying their eyes, which meant his opponent was used to fighting other Named. And that meant the light at the end of the gallery, the other two torches, was a second part to the trap.

Why even leave them, if the Revenant had advantages from the dark? The coming ambush had been obvious enough even with only part of the gallery shrouded in darkness. The Revenant had left a sanctuary at the end of the obvious danger because it allowed him to dictate where Hanno would be moving without lifting a finger. It was, the White Knight decided, a cunning killer he was facing. One whose life might be worth learning from, should he learn enough to tell it apart from the rest of the sea. Three steps now, and timing would be everything. On the first step, the White Knight breathed in. Light, never far from his grasped, stormed through his veins. On the second step, the White Knight breathed out. He grasped the Light by the reins, shaped it and directed it. On the third step, the White Knight acted. He tossed the torch forward again, even as from a dead angle’s shadow the Revenant emerged and snuffed out the two torches flanking the gallery’s gate simply by clenching his armoured fingers into a fist. The stretch if corridor ahead went dark, for all the other torches were too far to cast light.

All that was left was the flickering flame of the torch he’d thrown, arcing up and forward, and even as the Revenant faded into the darkness the White Knight smiled. And stomped his armoured boot onto the ground, releasing Light in a wave. The Revenant’s looming silhouette reappeared, seemingly startled, and Hanno idly confirmed that his guess had been correct. It was the armour that allowed him to disappear, that same armour touching the stone floor he’d just shot Light across. Modern sorceries might not be so easily disrupted, but this was ancient magic: it shattered at the slightest touch of Light. Without pausing, as the reflected light of the arcing torch flickered across polished bronze, Hanno called on his aspect without so much as a whisper. Ride , he thought, and Creation echoed of it. And now the White Knight used a second refinement on the aspect he’d devised since the Red Flower Vales. Namely, that while the aspect usually helped him form Light to use this was not, strictly speaking, necessary: he could use Light already at hand. Such as the one he’d just released across the floor, snatching it up before it could fade and shaping it for swiftness. His arm extended, he rammed the forming lance of light through the weakness in the Revenant’s armour, the slight space between helmet and cuirass, and felt the Light searing its way through like a hot knife through butter.

Amaranta Viegle, long ago the Sage of the West, had spent a lifetime studying the Light. She’d been a major influence in the shape the Lanterns took in the centuries after and died at the age of ninety-three, fighting a dragon with her bare fists. That last brawl had made it into Levantine legend, but it had been not the many duels of her early and late life that Hanno had found most useful but instead the stretch from her fifties to seventies. During those decades she’d experimented with applications of the Light, and though most of what she’d set down of those studies had been lost to flame during the Scouring of Vaccei the White Knight had sat through the revelations of those years with her over long hours of mediation within his aspect. Like, for example, the evening where she had grasped that with enough concentration the initial movement ascribed to Light could still be changed when it had been set in motion. All it required was the addition of fresh Light, as for some reason beyond the comprehension of mortals even a speck added to the initial Light would be enough to turn even a pre-existing sea of the power into a completely different working by the Light’s own laws.

And so, even as the White Knight’s aspect saw Light emerging from his legs to form into a mount, he added a speck more. In the fraction of a moment that followed he seized all the Light that’d been made, and without missing a beat slammed the lot of it into the lance already in the Revenant. The upper half of the dead Named vaporized, and he formed a bladed edge along the lance’s length so he could slice through the lower half outright. He’d had only a single opening, but these days that tended to be all that Hanno needed. Ahead of him the torch he’d thrown clattered against the stone, and without a word the White Knight resume his advance towards the Old Hall. The Repentant Magister ought to have lasted this long, he thought even as he quickened his steps, and with a turn under flickering torchlight found himself stepping into the narrow hallway where the Old Hall’s gate awaited. Corpses were strewn over the length of it, savaged enough it was hard to tell how many bodies there truly were. The grisly scene reeked of blood and excrement, and the White Knight pushed down a grimace when he saw the heavy oaken doors that should have protected the Old Hall’s entrance had been ripped open.

He could not tell the state of the wards, but that boded ill. As did the silence that was all he could hear coming from what should be a hall crowded with soldiers. Sword in hand, he prepared to – the sound that interrupted him was deafening, like someone had balled up together a hundred screams, distilled them and unleashed them all at once. A thin silhouette was blown out of the Old Hall and smacked against the wall opposite its gate before nimbly rising to its feet. Long claws of steel had been affixed to the Revenant’s hands, and it bore a now half-shattered mask of clay painted in shades of grey and green. Sound resumed from within the hall, most of it cheers. Before the Revenant could even decide whether to flee or attack again a small painted clay tile, no larger than a pair of fingers, was tossed onto the ground in front of it. The Revenant hissed in anger and tried to back away the opposite way from the White Knight – who noted with amusement he had yet to be noticed – but the moment it took a step an intricate rope formed of what appeared to be small interlinked shield panels emerged from the tile and snatched its foot, dragging it back.

Even as it tried to kick away the tile the sound from the hall cut out again, as if swallowed whole, and the Repentant Magister emerged from the Old Hall. Loose robes trailing behind her as she advanced in silken slippers, Nephele was holding up a hand and within it was a golden device spinning so swiftly on itself it seemed almost a sphere. It was sucking up noise and sorcery like a hungry whirlpool.

“I did not need them to learn right from wrong,” the Repentant Magister said, tone hard but somehow awed – as if even in the depths of her wrath she could not quite believe what she was doing. “And I will not return to their old lessons now like some cowering child.”

The Revenant smashed the tile and the rope vanished. Hanno did not move an inch. The Repentant Magister, with a snarl, clenched her hand around the golden device and the deafening blast from before sounded again, smashing the Revenant into the ancient stone and grinding it like some monstrous millstone of noise and sorcery. A ragged remnant of the undead Named fell to the ground, when the working ended. Nephele slowly stepped forward even as her palm opened and the device began spinning again.

“I am not defenceless,” the Repentant Magister said, glaring down at the Revenant. “I am not lessened by looking in the eye the evil I was once part of and choosing to cast it aside. And Gods take my tongue if I lie, but when this war ends I shall not be ashamed of how I fought it.”

Fingers clenched, sound and sorcery roiled, and the last remnants of the Revenant were ground to dust. Hanno thought of how Nephele had looked that night, weeping and afraid, and felt his heart clench with pride. You are your worst day , the White Knight thought, looking at the straight-backed and clear-eyed sorceress standing before him. But you are your finest day as well, and every single other one. Even those yet to come. It had been a dark day, this one, Hanno of Arwad thought. And yet it’d become a little brighter for the light just brought into it. This is how victory comes , the White Knight softly smiled. One candle lit after another, until we have chased away the night. Hanno sheathed his sword and stepped into the light, for the Enemy was still afoot in the city and there was work to be done.

If his steps were just a little lighter, well, who could tell the difference?

Prologue

“And so Dread Emperor Heinous thus addressed his court: ‘Are we not rulers of devils and dead, princes among usurpers? Why then should we suffer another to call himself king of our demesne?’ All agreed in this, and so war was declared upon Keter.”
– Extract from the Scroll of Vainglory, thirty-ninth of the Secret Histories of Praes (destroyed by order of Dread Empress Maleficent II, only partial texts remain)

They’d had three months of reprieve, to the day.

Prince Otto Reitzenberg, who his people yet called Redcrown, had prepared for the hour the truce would end without pause or rest. He’d slept as little as he could, and when he did he’d found himself plagued by nightmares. Unable to meet the solemn and silent faces of his sisters, of his father, of the all the Reitzenbergs that’d died keeping dawn from failing for one more night as they stared at him unblinking. All the shades he had come so close to failing. The Morgentor, the last fortress still in the hands of the living in Twilight’s Pass, had been mere weeks away from falling when the Black Queen had tricked a truce out of the Enemy. Otto Redcrown, last of his line, had done all he could to keep the Dead penned up in the pass but the doom of his people had been writ in the stars. Yet for this inadequacy he had somehow been rewarded with three more months to prepare, and knowing the end was coming the Prince of Bremen had worked himself raw .

Frederic at his side, they’d squeezed the full worth out of every heartbeat. Soldiers allowed to rest, yes, but some put to work other than war. Supply lines were opened anew and refurbished, wagons filled with the necessities of war. First Prince Cordelia herself secured gold and foodstuffs and steel, striking deals with half the continent to secure supplies and reinforcements. She had not forgot, Otto had been moved to see. Rhenia’s favourite daughter had not come home when Keter marched, but never once had she forgot her kin. She’d stayed south to make sure the south would come to their aid, that famously unbending Hasenbach backbone lent to all Procer. Just as importantly, the young and the old of Lycaonese lands had been sent south to safety under the protection of Frederic’s cousin and heiress in Lyonis when the dead ceased their raiding into the lowlands. The future of his people was now safeguarded under the kin of his friend. Then a hard choice had been posed to Otto, as was so often the way in these times.

Should he send all soldiers save those holding the Morgentor into northern Lyonis, to ready the fight there for when Twilight’s Pass fell and the Lycaonese lowlands followed, or should every sword in the land be brought to Morning’s Gate to spit one last defiance in the Enemy’s eye? It had burned him to even consider it, but he must see to the future of his people beyond the cast of pride. Yet he’d been a fool, Otto realized the first time a warband of haggard souls bearing ill-fitting mail and hard eyes marched into the sprawling camp at the bottom of the Morgentor. They had come. Alone and in pairs, in bands of twenty or a hundred. Through wind and snow and treacherous mountain paths. Farmers and miners and shepherds, innkeepers and drapers, scribes and carpenters and a hundred other things. Yet Lycaonese all, so they came wearing the steel handed down families since the days of the Iron Kings and there would be no talk of retreat .

Twilight’s Pass was the last lock on the door that might keep the Dead King from devouring the world, and so it would hold until there were none left to hold it. Their numbers had swelled with every band of volunteers, to almost one hundred thousand, and though the Enemy’s might was without question, the Morgentor was no less mighty a fortress. It would hold, Otto Redcrown had sworn. It would hold whatever might come. They had prepared, sharpened their steel, and they stood atop perhaps the second finest fortifications in all Calernia – only the cliff-city of Rhenia or Keter itself might claim to surpass Morning’s Gate, now that Hannoven had fallen. Odds were never good, against the Dead King, but this was perhaps the finest they’d been in Otto’s lifetime.

Then of the three tower-fortresses of the Morgentor, the Three Peaks, they lost two on the first day.

If Frederic had not come into his Choosing they might have lost the third tower as well, the central one, and that would have been a disaster there’d be no recovering from. The Kingfisher Prince had held a buckling line by sheer dint of refusing to die and reclaimed the top of the walls from the Enemy long enough to set everything aflame with pitch. It’d cut off the dead within the fallen towers from steady reinforcements long enough to take them back as well, though it’d meant twelve hours of bloody uphill fighting. Otto Redcrown had scraped together an army of one hundred thousand, his people assembled from every corner of Lycaonese lands, and on the first day of the Dead’s resumed offensive he had lost near twenty thousand of them. The Reitzenberg would have wept at that, if there were any tears in him left to shed, but there were none. All there was left was duty, and so he let duty devour him whole.

The Dead came and Otto Redcrown met them with steel and fire unrelenting. When half an army of ghouls crawled up icy walls like they were treading open road, massive iron scythes were freed to swing through the lot of them. When flocks of winged abominations dropped down like a flood of locusts, they were dragged down with nets and kept there for the mages to scour in flame. Plague-seeding rats, clouds of poison, even a rain of fire: every night the Enemy tried a fresh devilry and the last of the Reitzenberg grit his teeth before standing his ground. The days belonged to Frederic but the nights were his, though as the siege continued time became meaningless. There was only the sea of death lapping at the walls, the relentless assaults through every hour of every day. And though the cracks were spreading through the army, the fault lines of terror and sleeplessness and a fight that could not truly be won, still every dusk and dawn soldiers climbed up the stairs to fight for the ramparts of the Morgentor.

It was an honourable way to die, the Prince of Bremen had decided. If the days of the Lycaonese were fated to end, Otto thought, let them end with the last of them standing straight-backed in the Enemy’s way. He’d been sleeping for barely three hours when he was brought out of a forming nightmare, shaken awake in his cot at the bottom of the Herzhaupt, and though bone-tired and bleary-eyed the Prince of Bremen rose without protest. The captain that had come for him, one of Frederic’s men, awaited outside and bowed low when Otto emerged with his armour already being strapped tight.

“Which peak is falling?” Otto Redcrown bluntly asked.

There were not many reasons why he’d be woken now, and so soon after going to rest besides.

“Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but it is quite the opposite,” the captain replied, bowing again. “We have reinforcements.”

The dark-haired prince blinked in surprise. It could not have been another warband of his people drifting in: it still happened every few days, though the gap was spreading as time passed, and was not so unusual as to require him being awoken.

“Who?” he asked, then added, “and where’s Prince Frederic?”

“Awaiting you at the Prinztopf so that you might greet them together, Your Grace,” the captain replied. “And the simple answer would be that they are... from the Grand Alliance.”

Clapping the man on the back, Otto wasted no more time on quibbling. He trusted Frederic Goethal not to have ordered him roused without good reason, though it had taken some convincing before the Alamans prince was sold on ‘obtaining a rare bottle of wine and wanting to share it’ not being one of these. An escort of sworn swords followed him without a word as he headed towards the massive camp raised in the shadow of the Three Peaks, as they did everywhere since a Revenant had been sent to claim his head as he slept. Frederic was not difficult to find, as the man surrounded by the usual swarm of courtiers. Otto could not muster even a speck of contempt for these, however, for though their silks and bon mots were trying they belonged to men and women he’d once seen savagely fight their way through two beorns and a crippled Revenant merely to snatch the banner carried by the latter. It’d emerged three days later as a dishwashing rag in the Ostenhaupt kitchens, for the Alamans were making a game of finding the most insulting use possible for the Dead King’s banners.

They were mad one and all, which was undoubtedly why the rest of the host had grown so fond of them.

“Otto, my friend!” Prince Frederic Goethal of Brus greeted them. “It has been too long since we shared daylight.”

The clasped arms, though Frederic’s insistence on cheek-kissing as they did remained just as unsettling as it’d been the first time the Prince of Bremen was subjected to it.

“Your man was vague when I asked who’s come,” Otto said.

“I can understand why,” the Prince of Brus replied, sounding amused. “None of the etiquette we’ve been taught applies here.”

They left the large iron-reinforced tent soldiers called the Prinztopf – the prince pot, it meant, for it was where they held councils in camp and the odd shape of the tent was evocative – behind them and Otto allowed himself to be led, enjoying the warmth of the spring sun on his skin. When they found their guests, the reason why the Alamans were at such loss was made evident. Of the five people in the tent they’d entered, only three where human and only one was Proceran. The gold and white robes of the Holies were not unknown ever this far north.

“His Grace, Prince Otto Reitzenberg of Bremen, styled the Redcrown,” Frederic introduced him in Chantant.

“Prince Frederic of Brus,” Otto said, returning the favour in the same. “Chosen. The Kingfisher Prince. We share command here.”

“I am-” the priest began, but was immediately interrupted.

“One of the idiots who figured overthrowing Hasenbach was a good idea,” the old woman with painted face said. “You’ve been sent here to die by Keter instead of noose, Proceran, no one cares about your name. I am Lady Itima Ifriqui of Vaccei. My Blood is that of the Vengeful Brigand and I bring ten thousand warriors. I am told your people have been struggling with raids on your supply lines, coming down from Hocheben Heights.”

She grinned, and it was not a pleasant sight.

“I have come to lend my expertise in such matters, Procerans,” Lady Itima said.

The stunning redhead in good armour that was standing by the pair of goblins looked faintly amused but passed no comment before introducing herself.

“Special Tribune Kilian of the Green Stretch, Army of Callow,” she said, her Chantant strangely accented. “By the order of my queen I bring twenty mage lines, including some of our foremost warding and scrying specialists. I’ve been tasked with ensuring the Morgentor is both warded up to Callowan standard and brought into the Grand Alliance scrying relay system.”

She was in the Black Queen’s service? He would not have guessed at a look.

“We are most thankful for your assistance,” Prince Frederic said. “Though it appears introductions are not yet complete?”

One of the goblins, Otto saw, was scribbling with a charcoal pen on parchment. The other one spoke for it, voice narrowly revealing it was male even though it was the smaller of the two.

“Special Tribune Robber,” the goblin introduced himself, malevolently grinning. “I’m told you folk could benefit from a little sabotage of the opposition. As it happens, I’m not unfamiliar with-”

“Sapper-General Pickler,” the other goblin interrupted, revealing herself female. “I’m told some cretin talked you lot in using dwarven engines for the defence of your fortresses.”

“We make some defences of our own,” Prince Otto replied, unmoved by the rudeness. “Though few proper engines.”

“Good, that’ll make useful hands to borrow,” Sapper-General Pickler said, sounding approving. “I’ve been tasked with raising your siege capacity to something that wouldn’t make a goblin simpleton weep as well as crafting apparatuses specifically to deal with the creatures you’ve named ‘wyrms’ and ‘beorns’.”

Frederic looked uncomfortable, though he was too polite to grimace. His people, especially the highborn, were taught that even subtly referring to coin in conversation was quite crude.

“Even with our current loans, we don’t have the coin to afford this,” Otto frankly told the goblin general.

“Congratulations,” the goblin replied, “as per arrangements struck with the First Prince of Procer, you’ve been granted conditional loans by the crown of Callow over this matter.”

The Prince of Bremen blinked.

“And what conditions would these be?” he asked.

“ Is this going to be useful ?” Sapper-General Pickler grinned, revealing rows and rows of needle-like teeth.

Otto Redcrown, last of the House of Reitzenberg, grinned back. Oh, this would do. This would do nicely indeed.

—

Rozala would never grow to like Gaspard Langevin, she mused as she watched the growing shape of the man’s capital in the distance.

The Prince of Cleves was prickly, of resentful temper yet swift to offer insult himself, and seemingly convinced that the ancient beginnings of his line meant that he belonged to a sort of nobility within nobility. The Princess of Aequitan knew well her histories and had even, as a youth, snuck in a reading of Princess Eliza Alaguer’s ever contentious The Labyrinth Empire so she’d been darkly amused to learn of this. After all, most of the ancient Alamans tribes would have been appalled at the very notion of nobility: tribes elected their chieftains, whose authority was even then shared with the tribe’s high priest or priestess of the Hallowed. It was her own Arlesite forbears who’d brought princely rule to the Principate, as before the founding of Procer the greatest of the fortress-holding reales had already come to exact oaths of fealty from their lesser kindred – and so arguably become the first princes and princesses as the word was understood in modern parlance.

Yet these days it was the Alamans that orated of ancient blood, while Arlesites had been taught the virtues of bringing in the fresh sort onto thrones by the constant warfare on the southern and eastern borders. Rozala’s own line, the Malanzas, had not always been royalty. It’d been great victories in Levant and a ruthless streak at home that saw them rise to bear a crown when the previous ruling line of Aequitan grew weak. That ‘lowly’ origin was no secret, and so part of the reason that as far as the Prince of Cleves was concerned Rozala Malanza was still more a general than princess. It was no surprise that during the Great War his principality had supported the bid of Princess Constance of Aisne instead of Rozala’s own mother. Still, for all the disdain they shared for each other – only sharpened by Prince Gaspard’s personal and political antipathy to the faction Prince Amadis had formed in the Highest Assembly, of which Rozala had openly been part before rising to command it – they were well-bred enough to remain cordial.

To his honour, Prince Gaspard had never once been sparing nor stingy in supporting the armies that had come to fight in the defence of Cleves. Though the man rarely took the field himself, he’d charged his eldest son and heir with command of his army as well as bought the service of every fantassin company north of Cantal not already under contract. Between this and the supplies being brought into Cleves the prince had gone deeply into debt, though he was keeping up appearances with admirable Alamans aplomb. He should be able to dig himself out of the pit, after the war. Cordelia Hasenbach had wrought some sort of financial wizardry that’d greatly lessen the debt burdens incurred defending Procer. Something about bundling together the debts of many principalities and slicing that mixed greater debt apart before selling the slices to the Merchant Lords and banks of Mercantis, and promised yet more aid to come. Her mind was drifting once again, the Princess of Aequitan realized.

Perhaps it was only to be expected. The Twilight Ways invited deep reflections, she felt, the eternal starry night sky somehow giving an impression of solitude even when one was surrounded by thousands. Even two days out of those eldritch paths Rozala’s mood and that of the forces under her command remained rather restrained. For some, like the princess herself, the disposition had lingered at the thought that after witnessing fresh horrors south they were now returning to the familiar ones of Cleves. The dark-haired princess had not been able to sleep on a cot since leaving the Ways, unwilling to let herself be unconscious without being certain that digging beneath would wake her. For others, though, it would be the first fresh taste of what war against the Dead King looked like. Rozala was pleased to have gotten Lord Yannu Marave when the Levantines armies were split between fronts, and not only for the heavy infantry the Lord of Alava brought with him: his cool, calculating manner would serve him well when the terror began. The other allies she was bringing to Cleves were harder to read, not that the Princess of Aequitan was all that inclined to try: sometimes she was almost as wary of them as the Dead.

Forcing herself to attend to the present instead of sinking into her thoughts again – anything to avoid remembering the sound of digging, digging beneath her feet, which she sometimes still heard even though she was hearing nothing of the sort – the Princess of Aequitan spurred on her horse forward and her mounted escorts followed. Clevans called the sparsely paved road beneath the hooves of her horse la route aux chandelles , the candle road, because of the stone markers on the side of it: each had been set down at the length it would take for a candle to melt from the last marker, allowing travellers and merchants to gauge how long they had left before reaching the capital. It linked the city to the southern walled town of Jurivan, itself a destination for roads coming out of Brabant and Lyonis, and so was rightfully seen as the trade artery of the principality. It was also the largest road in Cleves, made so that three wagons at once could use it, one of the reasons Rozala had chosen it for the path of her armies.

The last stretch of the candle road was nearly flat ground until the foot of the capital itself was reached, if flanked by a low plateau to the east, and so the Princess of Aequitan was not surprised when ahead she saw tall banners and a company of riders heading towards her. Prince Gaspard had been warned of her coming by scrying ritual, and by the looks of the tallest banner had come out to greet her himself. The pale unicorn on azure, crowned by a six-petalled flower – one petal for every crusade in which a ruling Langevin had personally fought – was the Prince of Cleves’ personal banner, which meant he was of the approaching company. Reining in her horse, the dark-haired Arlesite slowed until she could easily turn back. It would be impolitic of her to meet with the Prince of Cleves without bringing along the other two generals of this grand coalition of theirs. Lord Yannu was not difficult to find, for the Levantine lord was himself riding out to meet her, and so was the natural beginning.

“Princess Rozala,” the Lord of Alava greeted her, reining in his horse.

“Lord Yannu,” the Princess of Aequitan replied with a nod. “Our host rides out to meet us.”

“Armies have a way of commanding courtesy,” the large man bluntly said.

It was true enough, though rather uncouth to voice it.

“My outriders on the left flank have lost sight of our friends,” Rozala admitted. “I don’t suppose yours had sharper eyes?”

“Somewhere in the hills to the west is the most I can give you,” Yannu Marave said. “They’ve proved arduous to follow.”

Then the two of them would proceed without their third peer, the dark-haired woman decided. Lapses in etiquette were unlikely to matter much to that lot regardless. The two aristocrats waited for their honour guards to gather before riding out together, going down the road at a brisk trot. They were met by the sound of drums and flutes playing the stirring tune of the Roving Minstrel’s famous Marching on Keter , the banner of the Langevins of Cleves flying high with those of the lesser highborn beneath. Prince Gaspard himself brought his horse out ahead and took the initiative to greet them.

“Your Grace,” Gaspard Langevin said, meeting Rozala’s eyes and bowing. “It is a pleasure to see you returned to Cleves.”

“Our work here is not yet finished,” Rozala Malanza said. “I look forward to keeping your council once more, Your Grace.”

And even though she held no love for the man that courtesy had not been entirely untrue. For all his pettier traits, Gaspard Langevin was an able man. Rozala would rather take council from a man she disliked but respected than the opposite.

“It has been one hundred and twelve years since one of the Champion’s Blood has last honoured Cleves by being a guest, Lord Marave,” Prince Gaspard continued. “I am pleased to end this unfortunate course today.”

“The Dominion honours its oaths,” Lord Yannu replied in his very good Chantant. “War on Keter, war to the knife.”

The Prince of Cleves inclined his head in further thanks, not having been given much to work with. Rozala was dimly amused, for once she had also found it necessary to adapt to the bluntness of the Levantines in such matters.

“I was given to understand,” the Prince of Cleves delicately continued, “that there would be a third.”

“It is so,” Princess Rozala agreed. “Though General Rumena-”

“Can speak for itself.”

Rumena the Tomb-Maker – and oh, that even the Black Queen named it this has been enough to make Rozala very wary – was the sole visibly old drow the dark-eyed princess had ever seen. Though tall it had grown stooped and its skin deeply creased, disdaining weapons and attired in a long belted tunic of obsidian rings not unlike chain mail. Its long hair was pure white and its eyes a shade of silver that seemed almost blue in some lights. At the Graveyard, that drow had scored a draw against the Regicide without even using a blade. Now none of the startled riders, many of which now reached for their blades, had even noticed it approaching. It was as if it had been spat out by the rocks, without warning.

“You have corpses wandering your lands, Unicorn Prince,” General Rumena continued, its Chantant eerily good.

Given how the drow were rumoured to learn such things, the fact that the old monster had a distinct Bayeux accent was distressing.

“Well met, General Rumena of the Empire Ever Dark,” Prince Gaspard said with what she deemed to be remarkable poise. “You speak truly. Keter has found unseen paths from the coast and warbands now wander the land.”

“Rest easy, Unicorn Prince,” General Rumena grinned. “Now so do we .”

Lord Yannu let out a bark of appreciative laughter. Princess Rozala Malanza met the eyes of the ruler of Cleves when he hesitantly turned to her and inclined her head. Monsters, Gaspard, make no mistake , she tried to silently convey. They are monsters. And Gods forgive us all, but Keter will rue the day they lent their fangs to the cause of our survival.

—

Prince Klaus Papenheim spat into the melting snow, abandoning the reins of his mount to wipe the wetness from his lips after. Ratbiter was placid horse for a Bremen stampfen , to his old rider at least, and so he’d not taken to misbehaving even after the arm Klaus lost in the fall of Hainaut had made him a clumsier horseman. Leaning against his stirrups to remain straight-backed, the Prince of Hannoven – prince of ruins, ghosts and exiles these days – unclasped his helmet and ripped it off before wedging it into the crook of his arm. Sweats-soaked hair slipped down onto his brow and the old man let out an exhausted breath before mastering himself.

The day was coming to an end, but that would bring no relief: in the darkness his soldiers would slow and stumble, exhausted and blind. The dead would not share those weaknesses, and relentlessly pursue so that dawn would find half his host had been slaughtered whimpering in the dark. It was a favoured tactic of the Enemy, the reason his ancestors had taken to raising walls and fortresses instead of meeting the Dead on the field. Unlike the ratlings, who were best met and broken on prepared killing grounds before the could cross the rivers and slip into the Hannoven lowlands, the Dead King’s legions were always risky to confront in open battle.

All it took was for the living to lose once and the Enemy would turn setback into disaster before hounding even that all the way to annihilation. One of his own guard rode to his side, as exhausted as he but hiding it better for her lesser burden of years.

“My prince,” Captain Karolina Leisberg said, “I would ask for your permission to reinforce the rearguard.”

Dirty blonde hair peeked under the rim of her helm as the other soldier forced her words to come out steady though she’d just volunteered for a duty that was likely to see her and everyone she brought with her dead before night fell. Klaus spat again into the snow, though the taste of blood and grime could not seem to leave the roof of his mouth.

“No,” the Iron Prince replied. “I’m not throwing horse into that hungry maw, captain. It’d be raised and sent back to hound us after dark: I’ll not hand Old Bones riders to bleed us.”

One of the few saving graces of fighting the Dead was the thrift of horsemen, not that Keter had not tried to make up that lack by killing and raising any cavalry it could get its hands on. Klaus Papenheim had no intention of tossing a good company of four hundred Lycaonese horse into the embrace of the Enemy, even to save twice that in foot. Not when the cost in foot ridden down afterwards might easily dwarf what had been saved, for none had known true pursuit until they’d been chased by riders whose horses did not tire. Not that the retreat from the Hainaut lowlands hadn’t been bound to be a messy affair regardless, as abandoning the defences of the southern castles of the principality for the sloping plains leading into Brabant had been as good as a written invitation for Keter to strike at them.

There’d been no choice, though, Klaus and Princess Beatrice had agreed. They were losing too many soldiers trying to keep the lines of defence standing, it was only a matter of time until Keter ground them to dust by attrition. They’d been in talks with Prince Étienne of Brabant for near three months now, arranging the line of hastily-raised defences where they would retreat to, but it looked like the losses in getting there might be more dire than even the Iron Prince’s bleakest predictions. Their plan had been sound, Klaus still believed, and nearly worked: a sudden offensive on the Dead King’s western flank, as if they were trying to break away and join the armies in Cleves, had drawn the Enemy’s strength away from the fortresses for a time.

The wounded had been evacuated from the southern fortresses first, and then the garrisons under the command of Princess Mathilda, and so the better part of the military strength in Hainaut would be preserved and able to stiffen the defence of northern Brabant. But the distraction force that Klaus and Princess Beatrice had led west to sell the lie by their very presence had found stiffer resistance than expected: they’d retaken the fortress at Luciennerie easily enough, for the Enemy had torn down the walls taking it, but heading into the hilly highlands afterwards they’d found a force Klaus had once believed to be an old legend: the Grey Legion, led by the silent and implacable Prince of Bones.

No petty skeletons, these, but undead whose ancient bones had been surrounded by a body of wrought iron and steel. Though slow and lumbering, the seven thousand abominations were near unbreakable by force of arms, a crushing steel fist before which all men crumbled. Their long axes entirely made of steel had reaped near two thousand lives before the Prince of Hannoven understood who it was they were facing, and by then the Prince of Bones had entered the fray. It was said in Lycaonese legends that the Revenant who held sway over the Grey Legion was an ancient Iron King, slain by the Dead King’s own hand and raised anew, but in Hannoven the tale was slightly different – it was, Klaus’s own father had told him as a child, their ancient ancestor Albrecht Papenheim. The Lord of Last Stands, the Lone Sentinel.

The same man who’d stubbornly held Twilight’s Pass with only a bare bones garrison for a year even as an Alamans foray into Bremen was driven out. He’d died, the stories said, standing alone as the last of his army on the same dawn the armies that’d beaten back the southerners began marching north for the Pass. True to his charge ‘til the last breath. Whatever the truth of who the Prince of Bones had once been, he’d since been made into an implacable servant of Keter: the Silent Guardian and the Blade of Mercy had both sallied out to meet him in battle and been swept aside almost contemptuously. The Painted Knife had struck it from the back trying to cut through the neck – a practical girl, that one, Klaus rather liked her – and found that below the armour was only a sea of furious sorcery that’d violently lashed out and blown her away. If the Repentant Magister had not been able to trap him within a circle of flames for an hour, the defeat they were inflicted that day might have been an outright rout. Not that their retreat south towards Brabant had been anything but a succession of losses since that first defeat.

Three days, that was the worst of it. Another three days and their host would have made it to the freshly raised fort at Engrenon and been able to dig in to await reinforcements. The way the day was going, though, it was not to be. Not unless hard decisions were made. A short trumpet call told the Iron Prince that the woman he’d been waiting for had arrived, and Princess Beatrice Volignac rode in with her personal guard at a brisk trot. The latest Princess of Hainaut looked rather ludicrous, at first glance: her considerable girth was coated in mail and heavy furs, and from a distance she looked like a bloated waterskin forcefully strapped atop a horse. Younger sister to Princess Julienne, she had the same green eyes and coal-black hair but unlike her late sister’s they were set on a narrow, pinched face with too-large lips. Klaus had thought little of her at first, he’d admit as much. For anyone to grow fat as Princess Beatrice was would have been considered a shameful thing back home, thoughtless indulgence and selfishness. To eat so much meant that either another went hungry or granaries were taken from.

He’d been wrong though, even in his lazy assumption that her weight meant she’d be a poor rider. She was a better horsewoman than even her sister had been, and a finer lance as well. More importantly, Beatrice Volignac had a searing fire inside her that made her one of the most driven people the Prince of Hannoven had ever met. She hardly slept, and Klaus had found her so proficient a captain of men he’d effectively ceded command of all Alamans forces to her. She had a defter touch with them, and under her command they’d risen to become almost as fierce fighters as his own soldiers.

“Her Grace Beatrice Volignac, Princess of Hainaut,” the herald announced.

The woman in question reined in her horse by his side, gesturing for her escort to withdraw. Klaus glanced at his own riders and nodded. Without a word they did the same.

“Prince Klaus,” the dark-haired woman said.

“Princess Beatrice,” he replied. “I’ll be blunt: the rearguard is failing and if we reinforce it we’ll lose our entire host.”

The Alamans princess grimaced.

“I’d begun to suspect as much,” she admitted. “The lesser dead are slowing them down too much, it’s only a matter of time until the Grey Legion catches up.”

And a pitched battle against that, neither needed to say, was a fool’s errand. They’d tried to send for the Witch of the Woods, whose sorceries might be a match for those relentless steel killers, but there was no telling if the riders had made it to a scrying station – or whether she’d arrive in time, even should she be reached.

“We’ve twenty thousand men to care for,” the Prince of Hannoven said, knowing it was likely closer to seventeen now. “Those soldiers who hold our back have proved brave and true, and this is poor repayment, but we cannot throw away the other sixteen thousand trying to save that four.”

The Princess of Hainaut looked disgusted with herself, but she did not disagree.

“Weeping Heavens,” she murmured, “what ugly creatures this war makes of us all.”

Klaus’s gaze turned to behind them, where the sprawl of their column could be made from atop the hill where they both sat. His own horse had scythed through the packs of ghouls that’d sprung from the snow and earth to ambush the flanks of the column’s centre stretch, freeing it to resume its advance, but Keter had still gotten its due: the temporary slowing had been enough to force the rearguard to fully engage the undead skirmishers that’d been pursuing them all day. Though these were little more than skeletons with javelins and swords, wearing not a single piece of armour, the ‘naked’ skirmishers were damned fast and tireless, and one of the Dead King’s favourite manners of tying down foot so that his heavier forces could catch up to them. It would be so here, the first battalions of sword and board corpses bearing old ringmail already beginning to emerge above nearby hilltops. The rearguard’s shield wall was spreading out, preparing for the brutal melee heading towards it.

“Someone will have to take command there,” Klaus said. “Else they’ll break too soon.”

There was no contempt in his tone as he spoke, for though the soldiers in the rear were mostly Arlesites his own brethren would behave little differently. Men often found great courage when they knew there was no avoiding death, but when there was still hope for life – as there would be, should those in the back of the shield wall break and run before too many of the dead arrived – it was only natural to find one’s feet itching to flee. It was the duty of a good captain to make their soldiers understand why there was a need to stand and fight even when there would be no leaving the field alive.

“Agreed,” Princess Beatrice said.

A heartbeat later they both began to speak-

“I’ll-”

A twin look of surprise was shared, and Klaus Papenheim let out a rueful chuckle.

“I’m at the end of my rope, Volignac,” he bluntly said. “I’m an old cripple a long way from home, fading out no matter how much the priests fight it. You’ve still decades in you, and your sister’s sons to raise.”

“You’re the Iron Prince,” she flatly replied. “Your reputation is the reason this is a retreat and not a rout. So long as you still breathe our host believes it might survive this march. I’ll entrust the safety of my nephews to you and beg you might request of the First Prince that she’ll allow them to attend her in Salia.”

Before he could dismiss that for the foolishness it was – how trite a trade, to keep alive an old sack of bones like him for a few more years when she might serve the cause for decades yet – when they were interrupted by the sound of swords unsheathing as one. Princes Beatrice’s guards and his were all looking at a strange gash in the air. Through the opening Klaus glimpsed a night sky and eerily enough felt warm breeze drift out. What came out with it, though was more familiar a sight.

“Sheathe your swords,” the Iron Prince ordered, then inclined his head in greeting. “White Knight. It’s been some time.”

“Prince Klaus,” the Sword of Judgement replied, inclining his head in return.

“Come to join our little stand, have you?” Princess Beatrice said. “You’re welcome to a few battalions. Plenty to spare.”

“Indeed,” the dark-skinned hero agreed. “Though I come bearing request on behalf of another, in truth.”

“Indeed?” Klaus drily repeated.

“It is requested that your rearguard pull back by a hundred feet and any spears and pikes you have might be brought to its fore,” the White Knight said, impervious to sarcasm.

“And who requests this, pray tell?” Princess Beatrice demanded.

It was a sound like cloth ripping, if it were a cloth so large as to cover half the world. Klaus Papenheim caught sight of the rippling gates and the soldiers that strode out of them. On the left side of the shield wall, painted soldiers bearing hooked swords and shields rushed out. On the other, rows and rows of shining steel marched out in cadence, shields raised and tightly packed. Legionaries . Army of Callow, by the banner: stark cloth, bearing the Miezan numerals for three.

“The Black Queen,” Klaus Papenheim said, and it was not a question.

Gates kept opening, some as small as a single man while others were making room for engines of war being dragged out by wagon, and soldiers kept pouring out.

“Today it is our turn, Iron Prince, to go on the offensive,” the Sword of Judgement smiled.

The Prince of Hannoven’s remaining hand reached for the pommel of the sword at his hip, clutching it tight. Another gate opened atop a hill to the west and, banners streaming behind them, a company of knights rode out to form a wedge aimed at the Enemy’s flank. At their head was a single silhouette in a colourful patchwork cloak, twin great crows perched on her shoulders. A horn sounded: one, twice, thrice. Lances went down and the last knights of Callow began their charge, their warlord queen at the tip of the spear. Klaus Papenheim smiled a wolf’s smile, fierce and toothy and so very eager to finally sink his fangs in the Enemy’s throat.

“Then let’s turn this army around, Princess Beatrice,” the Iron Prince said, meeting his comrade’s eye. “And remind Ol’ Bones this war has yet to find a victor.”

Chapter 1: Recommence

“In the conduct of war offence is commonly preferable to defence; for in attacking a general acts according to their own designs, while in defence they act according to the designs of the enemy.”
– Extract from the ‘Ars Tactica’, famed military treatise of Dread Emperor Terribilis the First

The afternoon sun stared down blearily at our backs, banners flapping in the wind as we watched the soldiers on the field below. These were good flat grounds; my men had had time to set up and there were fewer than five hundred undead facing them: this was as close to a safe skirmish as we’d ever get in a war like this one.

I had no intention of wasting such a rare opportunity even if it’d been tragedy that dropped it into my lap. Hakram himself had handpicked the lines that made up the formation of three hundred legionaries, with an eye to ensuring they were greenhorns – as much as the Army of Callow still had any of those – instead of veterans. We wouldn’t always have the luxury of well-trained soldiers to draw on, and if the assault companies were to be a success on the northern fields then we’d need to plan for the lowest fare of what we’d be able to field and not the finest. Even after only two months of training, though, my countrymen did me proud. Spears were hammered into the ground at a sharp angle, as if a line of long stakes, and behind them the first rank stepped forward in orderly manner: greatshield-bearing soldiers in heavy plate and short swords, a veritable wall on legs. Behind them the second rank set up, soldiers in mail coats handling halberds and the long hammers known as ‘raven beaks’. The third and fourth ranks wielded the same mixture, though with heavier lean towards halberds, and behind them were kept in reserve our specialists.

We might not have the mage numbers the Legions of Terror could boast of, but we more than made up for that in priests. The House Insurgent had absolutely no qualms about using Light as much to burn undead as their more traditional colleagues used it for healing.

The commanding officer of our trial assault formation was a young man from Ankou by the name of Algernon Beesbury, who’d swiftly climbed up the ranks by virtue of having both a solid tactical acumen and a facility with languages. He’d been fluent in Chantant before even enrolling, as it happened, and served as one of General Hune’s favourite vanguards during the Proceran campaign only to make it to tribune rank shortly after the Princes’ Graveyard. Adjutant spoke well of his wits, too, which was even higher praise than Hune’s several official commendations as far as I was concerned. Tribune Beesbury was not disappointing me so far, as he ordered a spreading of the formation when the undead pack began to splinter. The zombies would keep moving swiftly and purposefully so long as the Binds within their number remained unbroken, though compared to the skeleton waves I found the fleshier undead to have a certain... feral way about them. Their bite tended to be poisonous, too. The process that saw zombies rise anew made their gums bleed as they died and keep suppurating blood and pus for weeks after they were dead.

Though it might take a while to kill, foul blood in a wound was poison all the same.

“How many Binds in the lot, do you think?” I said.

“I’d say no more than five, Your Majesty,” Grandmaster Brandon Talbot replied.

Keen-eyed as he watched the unfolding skirmish through his open visor, the commander of the Order of the Broken Bells was careful not to bring his own mount too close to mine. Zombie liked to snap at other horses and given that she smelled like Winter and death it tended to unnerve even Callowan war mounts. Glancing at the man I marvelled that his beard was still so neatly cut: the aristocrat seemed to make it a point of pride to remain nobly groomed even when out on campaign as we’d been for half a month now.

“They are looking pretty sloppy,” I conceded, the two of us eyeing the dead as they closed the last of the distance.

When there were more Binds the necromancy binding the dead together was... tighter according to Masego, though he’d gotten a little lost in a greater metaphor about how the Dead King used necromancy entirely when explaining it. Regardless, in practice the presence of more Binds allowed those same undead more control over their lesser brethren, and finer control as well. Given that the Binds still had soul bound to their dead frames, hence the name, that tended to mean better tactics for the pack than simply rushing at whatever living were closest. Talbot and I kept our eyes on the zombies as they hit the outer line. To my pleasure, just as they’d been meant to they staked themselves on the spears. Not all of them did, for some avoided the jutting steel or simply tumbled forward with great enough speed they either broke the spear or ripped free of the point, but it broke the dead’s momentum across the line.

“It would not work as well against skeletons,” Captain Karolina Leisberg said, her Chantant accented in that attractively sharp Lycaonese way.

Where Grandmaster Talbot sat mounted at my right, the Iron Prince’s representative sat the same at my left. Prince Klaus Papenheim had proved very much interested in our attempts to adjust war doctrine to the realities of war against Keter, to the extent that he’d sent one of the captains of his personal guard to have a look at this skirmish after I’d given him advance notice it would be taking place. That and I assumed he’d wanted eyes he trusted assessing how much damage the Dead King’s latest nasty surprise had managed to sow behind our main lines. Gods, we were just lucky Tariq had caught the infiltrators before they made it into Brabant. If the fucking things had made it into one of those cramped refugee camps instead of being forced to prey on the isolated towns and villages of southern Hainaut instead, the damage would have been staggering in scope.

“It’ll still slow them by simple virtue of being in the way,” I reminded Captain Leisberg. “The object is to sap their momentum before the lines hit, not score kills.”

We’d learned the hard way that a wave of armoured skeletons could topple even a proper Legion shield wall by simple virtue of being so damned heavy, if it got enough room for a proper charge.

“And it seems to be working as intended,” Brandon Talbot noted.

Eyes returning to the skirmish, I caught sight of exactly what he meant. I’d missed the first exchange, but the results left in its wake spoke for themselves: a long line of zombies, pulped or hacked down by the polearms and long hammers while the line of greatshields anchored against the ground effortlessly bounced off the few dead that made it close to enough to scrabble at the wall of steel. The dead slowly forced their way behind the line of jutting spears but they were repeatedly butchered as they did until the mangled corpses were tall enough a pile that some of the zombies began using it as a way to leap above. There the halberds proved their worth over the raven beaks, a forest of jutting points that speared the few leapers clean through. Tribune Beesbury barked out an order and whistles were sounded by the sergeants. The mages and priests at the rear lashed out with flame and Light, providing cover to the rank of greatshields as it rose and retreated five paces before setting down again. They were adding depth to the killing floor to avoid further leapers, I noted approvingly. Hune’s man was living up to her commendations.

“A pack is splitting off from the rest,” Captain Leisberg pointed out.

Eyes flicking to the side of the skirmish, I saw the Lycaonese was right. Maybe thirty zombies and what must have been a Bind within the lot were peeling off from the slaughter on the plain, heading southwest. There were villages there, as I recalled, though not large ones – likely the reason they’d not been hit in the initial wave of contamination when two neighbouring small towns had. The infiltrators had aimed for numbers above all else, perhaps understanding that weaponless zombies would require as much to make a dent in a line of proper soldiery.

“Shall I send out one of the Order’s wings, my queen?” Grandmaster Talbot offered.

I mulled on that a moment, even as the assault formation on the plains continued its methodical savaging of the remaining undead. This might be the least of the infantry the Dead King could field, but I was still rather encouraged by the day’s results.

“That village we sent Lord Tanja to, what was it called again?” I asked.

“Pierreplate, I believe,” Brandon Talbot replied.

“About half a bell away,” I said. “And the one Lady Osena was meant to get moving was maybe another half bell further west.”

“The Levantines should be returning, then,” Captain Leisberg said, quickly catching on to my meaning.

Lord Razin Tanja, who was now truly the Lord of Malaga instead of merely the heir designate – his kin back in Levant had found a technicality that allowed him to claim the title without physically returning to the Dominion – should already have been back, truth be told. I rather suspected he’d waited for Lady Aquiline to finish covering the grounds I’d assigned her and catch up to him before heading back together. I was not one to grudge a young man his fancy for a lithe-limbed whirlwind of swagger and knives, especially when said whirlwind had legs like Aquiline Osena’s, but if Tanja was under the impression that he could use our hours on the field to flirt with his betrothed he was in dire need of instructional sparring with Adjutant.

“Send a pair of riders to warn them, just in case they got sloppy with their own scouting,” I ordered Talbot, eyes following the fleeing undead.

The Levantines, particularly the Tartessos foot, were actually better hand at this sort of thing than any of mine save for goblins so it was likely an unnecessary warning. Still, why indulge in a gamble when a sure thing was close at hand?

“By your will, Your Majesty,” the grandmaster said, bowing his head.

He guided his horse away, leaving to pass along my command, but I kept my attention on the undead. They were using the shoddy dirt road headed southwest instead of just running across broken terrain, I noted, so there was definitely a Bind doing their thinking for them. Not that it’d help them much, given the region and season. The borderlands between southern Hainaut and northern Brabant were a strange place, to my eyes: flat stony plains were broken up by valley-like dips in the ground where greenery grew almost aggressively, though the part I’d grown to despise was the damned bogs. They were everywhere, though they always spread like the clap in an army camp after winter snows melted. For a few months every year the entire region became the favourite piss bowl of the Gods, which made campaigning around it deeply unpleasant. The only part that was mildly tolerable about the bogs was the way so many birds flocked to them, which made for good hunting and a change of fare when catches were made. The road southwest was half-flooded by such a bog, which had lapped up at a turn already quite cramped up against a rocky hill.

It was half-expectantly that I watched that narrow passage as the dead neared it. If I’d been trying to lay an ambush around here, that was where I would have done it. Painted faces crested the hill and a heartbeat later a volley of javelins scythed through the flank of the zombie pack. Wouldn’t be enough to put any of those down for good, but it’d pin and tumble quite a few as well as disrupt their ‘formation’. I was not the only one looking, though, I noted.

“That’d be the Tartessos foot,” I told Captain Leisberg. “Those call themselves slayers in honour of the Silent Slayer, the heroine that founded the ruling line of the city.”

Lady Aquiline herself claimed direct descent from the woman, and for all I knew it might even be true. I’d never seen any people half so obsessed with Blood as the Levantines, save for actual Praesi blood mages.

“They are wearing almost as much paint as armour, and most of that leather,” Karolina Leisberg skeptically said.

Lycaonese, I had found, held what I could only deem a very reasonable sort of respect for the virtues of putting on good steel armour whenever it was even remotely possible to get away with it. The way some of the Levantines disdained it was utterly baffling to them, and unfortunately that was one of the least contentious ways their cultures seemed to rub each other wrong. The way the Dominion held single combat as a glorious thing, in particular, had a way of earning aggressive contempt from the northerners. It was, I’d come to believe, the difference between a people that held war as an honourable duty and one that held war as honourable, period. There were no frills to Lycaonese ways: if it worked, it did not matter how ugly or unfair or harsh the way of getting it done was. Captain Leisberg hadn’t come across an honour duel, at least. Those always made the Lycaonese fall into black temper. There was a reason I’d ensured they were encamped at opposite ends whenever I could even though it was a headache to organize. These days I sometimes felt more like a juggler than a general or a queen. And the moment I drop a single ball , I thought, people will die.

It was a sobering thought, and the source of much of my patience these days.

“Slayers are monster-killers by training, not line infantry,” I told her. “They’re used to fighting things that consider plate little more than the crunchy part of the meal. I expect that when we finally get the Unravellers they’ll be the ones fielding them for our front.”

The woman’s eyes brightened, for I’d said the magic word: Unravellers . The sheer intensity of the lust the Lycaonese held for those artefacts surprised me almost every time, though perhaps it shouldn’t. We’d been fighting the alchemical monstrosities of the Dead King for not even two years while their kind had been the proverbial rock in Keter’s boot for centuries.

“I’d heard the Workshop deemed them unfeasible,” Captain Leisberg said.

Unfeasible wasn’t exactly the right word. The first few attempts at making artefacts that disrupted necromancy had either been violently explosive failures or run into what Masego deemed a ‘proportioning’ problem, namely that those first attempts simply didn’t have enough sorcery or Light in them to successfully unravel something like a wyrm or a beorn. Our people had eventually succeeded at making an artefact that could hold that much power, but it’d been a material solution. As in, the materials used in the making of that thing were about as expensive as arming two cohorts in full Legion standard. That’d been bad enough, but they’d also been quite rare: in particular, the kind of eldritch lumber they’d used grew only in the southern stretches of the Waning Woods. Which meant importing it in large quantifies was a half-baked daydream. The Belfry had since claimed a breakthrough in figuring out a structural workaround, though, and fresh plans had been passed along to the Workshop a month past. We’d learn if they were truly functional soon enough, at least in principle.

I’d only venture to call it a true success after shoving a spear inside one of those fucking undead dragons collapsed the whole thing, instead of requiring three Named and a full mage contingent to get that job done.

“Might not be, after all,” I said. “Though I’ll not count the chickens before they’re ha- Razin Tanja, you shit .”

It’d been a beautiful little ambush, pretty as a pearl: javelins first, then a dozen Malaga foot had emerged to block the road, raising a shield wall the zombies promptly threw themselves against. The slayers had leapt into the chaotic melee and scythed through the lesser undead with almost laughable ease, Lady Aquiline Osena among them. Quick enough all that was left from the massacre was the Bind that’d led the pack. They should have killed it first, by my reckoning, since the zombies would regress to almost animal thoughtlessness after it was broken, but the reason why they hadn’t had became rather clear when Razin Tanja stepped forward in chainmail and leather, a hooked sword in hand. The Levantines formed a circle around the two, those with shields in front, and took to shoving the undead back into the middle of the makeshift battle circle when it strayed too far from the Lord of Malaga.

“Foolish,” the Lycaonese captain said at the sight, and I grunted in agreement.

Not that Aquiline was any better when it came to this sort of stuff: if anything she was much, much worse. The Grey Pilgrim had made clear that the two lordlings were to listen to my orders, so at least they usually obeyed when I was there to keep an eye on them, but when I wasn’t this sort of inanity still cropped up with depressing regularity. It was like someone had chopped out the part of their brains where common sense was and replaced it with glorious single combat instead. Gods, I supposed I should be glad at least they weren’t stabbing each other. Apparently the sole Dominion aristocrat killed at the Graveyard – Razin’s own father – had not been slain by one of mine or the Tyrant’s but instead by the Lord of Alava. I was rather glad that one had ended up on Malanza’s front, even if he’d been somewhat easy on the eyes. On the plains the assault company under Tribune Beesbury was cleaning up the last of the zombies with admirable thoroughness and without much trouble, so I decided the Levantines were due the first visit. I could personally praise Beesbury and his three hundred for their work later.

“Grandmaster Talbot,” I called out.

Zombie moved under the pressure of my knees almost eagerly, and I could tell she was itching for a flight. I patted her mane fondly.

“Later,” I told her.

The leader of the Broken Bells was not long in attending me after the summons, and as a sign that he was getting used to my ways he’d come riding with twenty knights and my banner instead of a courtier’s manners.

“Good man,” I smiled at him, then turned to my knights. “Lord Tanja seems intent on putting on a spectacle. Wouldn’t it be poor manners to fail to indulge him?”

There were a few smiles, and even a laugh. Though Levant’s soldiery was not hated among my people, neither was it liked. It had not been forgot that a campaign had been fought against them in Iserre, or that they’d been part of the Grand Alliance back when it was still just a pack of hounds baying for fresh meat. Callowan meat, at least in part. I flicked a questioning glance at Captain Leisberg, to see if she wanted to accompany us, but she shook her head. With a courteous dip of mine I took my leave, staff of yew laid across Zombie’s back as we took the lead on our ride down the hill. I kept a brisk pace and made no pretence of hiding my approach, so the Levantines saw us long before we came. Tanja finished his opponent before I got close enough to hail him, a clean blow that carved through the Bind’s spine under the throat. The head, still wrapped in leathery but seemingly living flesh, tumbled to the ground. The Levantines let out a cheer. Hiding my irritation, I spurred Zombie onwards quicker, not slowing as I came upon the ring of soldiers surrounding the victorious young Lord of Malaga.

The warriors had to hastily scatter out of my way and instead of pulling on my reins I let Zombie enter the ring at a trot, circling Tanja. So maybe I wasn’t hiding my irritation that much, all things considered. By the time Zombie had slowed to a halt, there was only silence surrounding me.

“Hail, Black Queen,” Lady Aquiline called out.

“We’ll get to you in a moment, Lady Osena,” I flatly replied.

Lord Razin Tanja looked up at me with defiant eyes, his tanned skin and coal-black hair framed tight by his helm. It wouldn’t do to upbraid him like a child in front of his own men and his betrothed, I reminded myself, even though it was tempting to allow myself to spit out a few scathing lines that’d cut him down to size. On the other hand, it wouldn’t do to simply let this go either. He and Osena had been testing me more often lately, as if pushing to see how much I’d take from them. If I gave them an inch now, they’d be reaching for another before day’s end. I stared down the Lord of Malaga without blinking until, reluctantly, he opened his mouth.

“Hail, Black Queen,” Razin Tanja greeted me.

“And to you, Lord Razin,” I calmly replied. “Now, would you care to explain to me why you were tormenting what is most likely the soul of an ancient crusader bound by dark sorcery into unwilling service to the Hidden Horror?”

Ah, the embarrassed silence of someone who’d not quite considered the implications of what they were doing. How nostalgic. I could see why people had done this to me so often, if it was always this darkly satisfying to be standing on this side of the exercise.

“Well?” I prompted amicably. “Do go on. I’m sure your reasons will be... enlightening.”

That was just twisting the knife but then I wasn’t Razin’s mother. I had absolutely no interest in caring for his bruises, be they on his skin or his pride.

“The Volignac companies are already back at camp, last I heard,” I casually said. “Because they saw no need to play around with corpses, they’re having first crack at the ale rations that just got shipped in from Brabant.”

I’d ordered some set aside for the assault formation too, as either reward or comfort for the way the skirmish went, but I saw no pressing need to mention that. Knowledge they’d be laying claim only to what the Procerans saw fit to leave behind went over with the Levantines about as well as I’d figured it would. There wasn’t an army on the continent that didn’t run on drink and brothels, save perhaps the one we were pitted against.

“It was a good kill,” Lady Aquiline said, rallying to the defence of her betrothed.

Gallantly, some might have argued. Some but not me. My eyes flicked to her painted face, hardening.

“Made by a man half a bell late on his march back to camp,” I said. “I don’t suppose you have anything to say about that , Lady Osena?”

Embarrassment once more, and matching silence. And she should be damn well be embarrassed: they’d been sent out to ensure none of the zombie-makers had gotten or could get at villages, not to mess about. And considering they’d gone out with two hundred warriors each and there couldn’t be more than fifty here with them right now, they couldn’t even pretend with the parchment-thin claim they’d linked up for safety in numbers. For now, I’d generously assume the other warriors were left behind to be thorough in ensuring the safety of the evacuating Proceran civilians, though I’d be sure to ask pointed questions about this later. I was making no friends among the Levantines here by asserting my authority so bluntly, but then I didn’t need to be liked by these people. Only obeyed, and they’d been growing lax about that lately.

“Return to camp,” I said, eyes sweeping across the ranks. “I’ll expect a distinct lack of detours, this time.”

It felt like I was spanking unruly children, which was all the more galling for not being entirely untrue. Neither of them were all that far from me in age, though sometimes I felt more like tired old Klaus Papenheim than the woman of twenty-three I truly was. I could understand why Tariq wanted me to keep an eye on them, too, to both meanings of that. For all their sloppy habits and general recklessness, the two Levantine nobles made for a very charismatic pair when they weren’t straining my patience. Both brave and skilled at arms, and while Aquiline was a finer blade and the most popular of the two it was Razin I’d found had the firmer grasp on politics. If the Grey Pilgrim was in the market for successors to keep the Dominion stable after he died, then these two were by far his best bet from the current crop of the Blood.

Sadly, this did not in any way make them less of a trial to deal with.

I didn’t linger around the Levantines any longer, guiding Zombie out of the battle circle as my knightly escort and Grandmaster Talbot fell in. The man who’d once been the heir to Marchford rode up to my side as we returned to the hill that’d served as our earlier vantage point.

“The Levantine fondness for duels truly is a tawdry habit,” Brandon Talbot said. “It has no place in proper war-making.”

“Duels are useful when they can be used to demoralize the enemy,” I disagreed.

I’d myself duelled in the past, after all, and sent others to do the same on my behalf. Usually I’d done it to kill a Named foe before they could inflict great losses on my soldiers, or eliminate a titled fae before they could unleash a large working, but there was a reason I didn’t use that method unless there was no other choice. Fighting on the front bound your soldiers to you in ways that could be hard to explain – it’d been my willingness to fight on the frontlines that’d first won me loyalty in the Fifteenth – but there was a difference between that and seeking out every duel there was to be had out there. One was sharing risk, the other courting death. Even the Lady of the Lake picked her fights and fled when they turned south on her.

“The dead have no morale,” the Grandmaster said, and I didn’t disagree. “Which makes all this posturing rather puerile.”

“Lord Tanja is young and in need of proving himself to his warriors,” I said. “Lady Osena’s bloodline is famous for such duels, so there is a reputation to uphold.”

“Facts which did not seem to hinder you in the slightest from disciplining them,” the older man said, sounding faintly amused.

“Because if they pull something like that against a Revenant after these little victories let them think they’re champions, they’ll get themselves slaughtered like lambs,” I grimly said. “And while it might be a fool’s errand to expect Levantines to discard centuries of customs, I’ll expect them to at least bend those to accommodate the realities of the war for survival we’re fighting.”

Neshamah could afford toss fifty thousand Binds in a pit and forget about them until Last Dusk, if he felt like it. If half the visions the Sisters shared with me of the drow front in the deep north were accurate, then that was the kind of force he was willing to throw away on a fucking distraction . On the other hand, if either of the Dominion nobles got themselves killed the Grand Alliance had a damned mess on its hands. Whether it was about succession, command of their armies or even the casting of blame that’d no doubt follow there would be no part of it that wouldn’t end up a nasty turn. So when I saw them playing duellist with undead, you might say my temper rose just a tad at the sight. Even in the wildest streaks of my days as Squire I’d never been reckless for recklessness’ sake, much less acted so blithely unaware of the stakes at play.

“Doesn’t matter,” I finally sighed. “They’re only in my charge until we’ve swept the region clean. We’ll be moving on to other things afterwards, and the Pilgrim can shepherd his own cats.”

“Another day’s march south and we’ll have reached into Brabantine lands proper,” the bearded knight said. “We ought to be encountering the first of Prince Étienne’s forward patrols come morning, and soon after our duty will be discharged.”

“Looking forward to a stay in a proper city?” I teased.

“A warm bath,” Brandon Talbot reverently said, “and food not cooked in a cauldron. The Heavens smile upon us indeed.”

I chuckled. It was funny, the way months in the field could turn the simplest of things into luxuries. I was, myself, looking forward to finally getting a decent drink as well as a full night’s sleep: wherever lay diplomacy also lay quality wine and wards good enough I wouldn’t need to sleep with one eye open. Hanno was due back from out west, too, which would be nice. It was always easier when he was there to foist off chores o– share the burdens with , I’d of course meant, in an absolutely equal and unbiased manner.

“Let’s get this business over with, then,” I said. “I’ve had about as much as I can stomach of spring in these parts and the walking dead do nothing to improve the scenery.”

“I’d hardly noticed a difference,” Brandon Talbot drily said.

Let it not be said that one of my people had ever willingly let an occasion to rag on Procer pass them by. We returned to the hilltop only to learn that Captain Leisberg had already taken her leave and headed back to camp, from where she’d be changing mounts and riding straight for Prince Klaus’ forces further north by the main roads. While I was somewhat irked she’d not stayed around long enough to discuss her impressions of the day’s skirmish and the performance of the assault formation, she was not under my command and owed me nothing save perhaps the occasional courtesy. Odds were I’d need to have that talk with the Iron Prince himself, which truth be told I hardly minded. The First Prince’s uncle was an old soldier of a breed that was deeply familiar to me: I’d spent most of my life either serving them drinks, fighting them or leading them in battle. If the man had known a few rebel songs and told a story about some wound he took during the Conquest, it might have been enough to make me homesick.

It was brisk business after my return, organizing the return of our soldiers to camp and sending out riders to check on the forces we’d sent further out. While we’d be keeping a force of knights here in case an undead force had slipped our notice and reinforcements were needed by one of our detachments, there was no real need for me to stay here to supervise in person. Grandmaster Talbot was perfectly capable of handling this without my breathing down his neck. Consequently, I’d been preparing to ride away with an escort when Zombie suddenly shivered in discomfort. She’d only ever done that around a single man, which meant it was no deep mystery as to who had finally emerged from the wilds again. It was hard to tell how old the man was, or where he came from, though Indrani had once told me he was only a few years older than her.

Between the tan and the filth, though he could have been from anywhere from twenty to forty and passed as anything but Soninke. I’d expected a Named of his bent to be athletic, but instead he was built like a bear: tall and broad-framed but undeniably heavyset. His clothes were thick leather, save for the fur boots and the beautiful hood he always kept up: lined in ermine and made of fox, it was beautifully sown and it seemed a waste it would be pressed up against long matted brown hair. A long knife and a hatchet at his side, the man might have passed for a warrior of some sort if not for the most eye-catching thing about him: the two great falcons seated on his shoulders, watching me with unnatural poise.

“Beastmaster,” I greeted him, turning and betraying no hint of surprise at his sudden presence.

“Black Queen,” the man rasped out. “I have found you a quarry.”

My eyes narrowed. I’d not expected there to truly be one born from this crisis, as we’d been swift in crushing it. It was worrying it had anyway, even though I’d known the possibility was there. Events were quickening at brisker a pace than even our worst predictions.

“Where are they?” I asked.

“He,” the Beastmaster said. “East.”

“Where east?” I impatiently said.

“It will be easy to find,” the Beastmaster replied, hacking out a laugh. “It is the only village on fire.”

Shit , I thought. Couldn’t I, just the once, get an easy Named to bring into the fold?

Chapter 2: Enlistment

“My lords and ladies, have I not always been a firm believer in second chances?”
– Dread Empress Malevolent II, announcing her second (and penultimate) invasion of Callow

This would be the fifth one I brought in, so to speak.

The first time I’d come across a new Named was maybe two weeks after the first proper battle that’d followed Callow entering the war, which one of my own soldiers had jauntily named the ‘Scrap at the Gap’ only to see the quip tumble down into the pages of history. It’d been our first use of a pharos device, and the proliferation of gates out of the Twilight Ways had allowed us to take the dead flatfooted. The soldiers under Volignac and Papenheim had rallied with burning rage in their bellies, and we’d turned the chase around on Keter: we’d forced the dead to retreat and even dented the Grey Legion.

At the time we’d believed we could reclaim all of Hainaut if we struck out aggressively enough, so we’d concentrated on reclaiming the roads and strongholds of the western region of principality: the aim had been to establish a solid defensive line all the way to the border with Cleves and after solidifying root out the dead as we moved north in a Hainaut-wide curtain. No one had expected there to be anything still living in the region, for Keter had had the run of it for months, which was why when the Tartessos scouts had begun finding the remains of small undead raiding packs we’d expected a monster and not a half-feral woman in her seventies.

The Stained Sister had shattered Hakram’s shoulder and nearly blinded him when we’d gone out to find what might be lurking in the hills. She’d been one of Hanno’s, not mine, for even three days buried up to her neck in the corpses of everyone she’d ever known had not been enough to break her faith in Above. She’d listened anyway, when I laid down the law as it had been agreed on: so long as Named were willing to take up arms against Keter, they would fall under the aegis of the Truce and Terms.

Amnesty was offered to all willing to join the war against extinction, and peace would be kept between villains and heroes until the Dead King was no more. For those who were sworn to Above, the White Knight stood as representative in councils and first among equals. For those that dwelled in Below’s shadow, the same duties fell to me. It was a simple enough arrangement, in principle. In practice it’d been as about as horribly complex and strenuous a state if affairs as I’d expected it to be, and it’d been a very long time since I was last called an optimist.

I’d picked up two more during our offensive to take back the capital late last summer, the two of them pretty middling villains – one lowlife gambler who’d managed to survive by stealing other people’s luck and using it to avoid and escape the dead, the other a hedge mage who’d slit open her own brother’s throat to fuel an enchantment that made her invisible to Dead King’s armies but was now beset by his furious shade. Half-starved and almost pathetically grateful to be given shelter, the two of them had accepted the Truce and Terms without batting an eye. Unsurprisingly, getting them to toe the line afterwards had been more difficult.

The Pilfering Dicer now had nine fingers to illustrate the point that stealing the luck of my soldiers wasn’t something you could talk your way out of, but at least I’d pawned off the mage to Indrani for her roving band and gotten only praise about her since. The Dicer I’d sent instead to the First Prince, as his talents were best suited for the sort of battles she was fighting on our behalf. The fourth had been both the easiest and the worst, in some ways, for though he’d come to me instead of the other way around it would be very much a delusion to claim I had any sort of control over the Beastmaster.

As I could not help but be reminded when the man opened his eyes, breathing out deeply.

“There are still a few,” Beastmaster said. “Three or four. Less than earlier.”

I looked at the great blaze across the half-dug dry moat and grimaced. It was rather surprised anyone but the fresh Named was still living.

“And you didn’t consider helping them flee when you first noticed?” I replied, tone curt.

“And risk the ire of a green Named who could already do this ?” Beastmaster snorted, gesturing towards the village.

The falcon that’d flown over the nameless village returned to its master’s shoulder, undisturbed at having leant him its eyes while it was still up there. The Named at my side might not be anywhere as proficient a combatant as someone like Indrani or Hanno, but his talents were surprisingly broad in application and it’d be a rough affair to put him down if it came to that: I’d seen some of the creatures the Beastmaster used as mounts, and none of them were beasts to take lightly even without a rider on their back. More than anything else the man had proved his worth as eyes up in the sky even in regions where scrying might be disrupted, as was becoming increasingly common. His stable of birds of prey currently had a better record at tracking people than our sorcery, since even young Names could sometimes disrupt scrying ritual. There was a reason I kept the man close, and it wasn’t his charm or sunny disposition.

“If he meant to kill them, they’d already be,” I said, tone grown sharp.

Matted hair pressed against the side of his eyebrow, thick with filth, the man shrugged apathetically. I wasn’t sure whether Beastmaster had been born a prick or he’d been taught the ancient ways of prickery by one of the finest practitioners of the art alive – the Ranger herself – but his utter unwillingness to risk so much as the tip of his toe for another’s sake had a way of raising my hackles. Even when Indrani had been fresh out of Refuge and the Lady’s tutelage she’d not been this... savagely unconcerned with everything that went on around her.

“Fine,” I said. “Tell my knights where the survivors are, they’ll help them out. Where’s the boy?”

“The House of Light,” Beastmaster said.

If this was going to be one of the religious ones, I really hoped it’d made it this far north that the Salian Conclave had struck down its decree naming me the Arch-heretic of the East. If I was lucky, they might even have heard that instead the Dead King had been proclaimed Arch-heretic Eternal. Lucky, huh. That’d be the fucking day. I whistled loudly, Grandmaster Talbot riding up without missing a beat or betraying irritation at the somewhat undignified summons.

“Beastmaster had eyes on survivors,” I told the knight. “Have some your people get them out. Our healers are fresh?”

“Good as, my liege,” Brandon Talbot replied. “Though I’ll caution once more they are not the finest of that trade.”

Yeah, the House Insurgent did tend to have that little defect. You couldn’t learn to burn with Light without missing out on the deeper secrets of healing, apparently. The Grey Pilgrim had once told me it was more a consequence of mindset than a hard limit of ability, but then there was no one alive who could use Light the way Tariq Fleetfoot did – not even Hanno, who had the shade of near every dead hero up in the library shelves of his head.

“Have them do what they can,” I grimly said.

Burns were nasty way to go.

“I’ll be seeing to the hero,” I added a moment later. “Hurry with the survivors, Talbot.”

The man nodded, and after a nod to the Beastmaster – who bothered himself to return it, though seemingly with great effort – I rode out. This place must have been a nice little village, once upon a time. How many people had lived here? One hundred, two hundred? Couldn’t be more than that. There was rarely such a thing as a proper street in places like this, even a dirt one, and this village was no exception. There were a tighter cluster of once-thatched houses now blazing up trails of smoke surrounding what might have once been a village market, but aside from that houses and shops had been raised rather haphazardly. They were scarcer on the outskirts, with the house nearest to the unfinished ditch standing entirely alone.

Zombie did not even need to jump over the trench, as a quick walk around the edge of what had been dug accomplished the same result rather less dramatically. It’d been poor sense, trying to dig a dry moat in so wide a circle. The villagers would have done better trying the same further in, or better yet raising a palisade instead. There was no way the work could have been finished in time to repel the dead, not with the numbers they had. What I’d been looking for was a mere three steps away from the edge of the finished ditch, slumped and still. I slowed my mount, frowning as I leant down to turn the corpse with the tip of my staff. At first glance the killing looked like it’d been done with Light, a hole torn right through the chest of the still-living woman, but the edges were too blackened. Charred.

Light was cleaner than this when used on living people, even those corrupted by curses and sorcery. Light and fire threaded together? Unusual. I would have thought someone more prone into coming a Name apt to wielding that if they’d been forged from a great fire, not the source of one. Hooves sounded against the ground behind me, a belated escort of knights. It was still a reflex for me to argue against the necessity of one, but there’d been twenty-three different assassination attempts against me in the last year. Few had even come close, but I’d been taught the virtues of having eyes other than mine and armoured bodies in the way of harm.

“I’ll be entering the House alone,” I spoke without turning. “I’ll not have numbers spooking our friend.”

“If you so order, my queen,” Grandmaster Talbot replied, the genteel disapproval in his tone clear.

I rolled my eyes. If the boy who’d done this still had fighting on his mind it was a lot more likely I’d end up protecting my escort than the other way around. I let the body I’d been examining slump back against the ground and spurred Zombie onwards. We passed through the outskirts briskly, though I slowed once more to verify the sort of injuries on other corpses were the same as the first before heading deeper in. Towards what should have been the market, as well as the small dirt path beyond it and led to the sole building in the village that was tall stone with a tiled slate roof: the House of Light. There the Named would be waiting, I knew, though I would not cross the threshold before figuring out exactly what it was I was dealing with here. Whether the boy was a hero, a villain or of those whose Role tread that narrow path where circumstance could cast you as either did not matter so much as the fact that he’d seemingly butchered an entire village.

If he was a hero, as the use of Light to kill would imply, he was unlikely to be the kind I got along with.

We closed in on the market, where the roar of the flames was almost deafening. Wary of entering the central grounds, where heat had hardened and cracked the muddy grounds, I led Zombie into lingering at the edge of the circle in one of the larger gaps. There’d been an inn among the lot of them, I noted, though it was hard to tell exactly how large it’d once been. It’d been hit hardest of all the village: the walls had been torn through with great blasts of Light, then the ceiling had fallen and caught fire. Even that rubble, though, was not enough to hide the sheer number of corpses there’d been inside. Those the flames had not yet devoured were close to the door, some even just out into the ‘street’. They, I saw, had been hit in the back. The Grandmaster of the Order of the Broken Bells caught up to me as I sat studying the burning inn, face betraying utter disgust what he beheld.

“Gods,” Brandon Talbot rasped out. “Even the children.”

Only one of those was untouched by flame, pale brown hair fanning her face like a veil but doing nothing to hide the black-rimmed hole that’d torn through the middle of her back. There were bones I could see in the embers and flame, though, that even blackened could not me mistaken for those of a grown man. And yet. Gods, and yet.

“Do you still remember that skirmish just a week away from the capital, last summer?” I quietly said. “What happened to that company of Volignac outriders, when they found that little village tucked away in the reeds.”

“The dead wearing the guises of children,” the bearded knight said, tone sickened. “I’d heard. I do not blame them for fleeing, Your Majesty. I am not certain if I could have done it myself, striking down infants with knight’s steel.”

And so Neshamah’s abominations would have torn you down from your horse and clawed out your throat, I thought, the way they did too many of those honourable outriders. Honour has no place on this field. Not against the kind of foe we face. My voice came out cool, a warning under the swirling columns of smoke.

“This is not a war, Brandon Talbot, where hurried judgements thrive. Do not forget that.”

Yet sometimes I wondered if that was not Below’s game, lurking behind everything else. Even if we won against Keter what kind of creatures would we have become when we emerged from the crucible? Already I’d grown wary of castigating the slaughter of children without knowing more of how it’d come to be, and we’d yet to even step into the Dead King’s lands. There was an old saying about the dangers of looking into the abyss that most peoples of Calernia held some form or another of. It’d been taught to me at the orphanage as ‘beware of matching horror’s eyes, lest it gaze back into yours’, one of those Old Miezan sentences turned into proverbs only nobles and priests ever seemed to quote. The thing, though, was that horror wasn’t sickness. It wasn’t something that tainted you from watching it or fighting it, like ink or filth or oil.

Horror, horror was a pit .

It was a deep dark hole the world pushed you into, remorseless. Sometimes the only way through was to wade through the deeps of it, do whatever it took, and there lay the trouble: even if you got to climb out, after, who you’d been in that pit would never leave you. Gods, it’d be reassuring if it was a taint that’d made the decision for you, but it wasn’t. Not really. It was just you, when you were scared and cold and desperate and didn’t want to die. That tended to be an uglier sight than devils, in my experience. Nowadays Calernia was being dragged into the pit, one inch after another, and there were nights where that thought kept me from sleeping. Lessons learned in the deeps of pit were long in being unlearned, if they ever were at all. What kind of a world was it, that Cordelia Hasenbach and I would end up raising out of the ashes of the old?

“I sometimes wonder if even heroes are worth it,” Grandmaster Talbot softly said, “if they must always be born of such grief.”

“Men murder men,” I said. “They rob and cheat and lie. From all I know we’ve done so since the First Dawn and will keep on doing it until the Last Dusk. Don’t blame the blade for the heat of the forge, Talbot.”

I bared my teeth.

“Blame the fucker who lit the furnace.”

Though in this case, I thought, the two might just be the same. My gaze had moved on from the inn, swept across the rest of this would-be marketplace, and a story had unfolded before my eyes. It’d begun with the inn. There had been a gathering there, with perhaps as many as a hundred packed tight inside. The Named had let loose his power, moved to violence by something, and then the nightmare had begun. The villagers had been packed too tightly: panic and stampede began to kill them just as much as the power unleashed. The place had caught fire, smoke and heat further stirring the pot, and even as some tried to escape through the back the Named had left by the front to strike down the few that’d successfully escaped. The relief inside was short-lived, as the roof collapsed not long after.

From there, the tale grew murkier. I’d wager that the noise and escapees had moved those few villagers with a weapon to try to kill the Named, and he’d reacted... harshly. I’d yet to catch sight of him going for anything but a killing blow. From there it looked like the boy had swept through the village, heading to wherever he saw movement and killing until there was no one left save for a handful of hidden survivors. He’d then limped back to the House of Light, either exhausted or wounded or both. I breathed out, almost comforted by what I’d grasped. I was not dealing with coldblooded thrill-killer or a broken bird grown dragon’s claws: wildly wandering around striking down those who moved in a panic was a mark of lapsed control. Lack of premeditation, too.

This was too much fear and too much power, not the first atrocity of a great monster in the making.

“You seem grieved, my queen,” the knight quietly said, voice almost drowned out by the blaze.

“Better it had been a monster, Talbot,” I tiredly said. “One of those I would have been able to use without guilt.”

Zombie pulled ahead, answering my mood before my knee gave the order. The breeze shifted: like raking claws, threads of smoke were blown across our path. We rode through and broke the ghostly shackles, flanked by the unforgiving blaze on both sides as my mount’s hooves broke the hardened mud beneath them. And then, quick as a stolen kiss, the heat and smoke were gone. We tread then the path to the House of Light, where flame had not reached. Yet blood had, for it was smeared over the wooden door left slightly ajar. I dismounted smoothly, though not so smoothly that I did not hiss in pain when my bad leg touched the ground, and lay a light slap against Zombie’s rump. She left to wander, gait unhurried, and a last look over my shoulder quelled any thought my knights might have held of following me inside. The Mantle of Woe trailing behind me, leaning on my staff of yew as I limped forward, I cracked the door open just enough to slip in and entered the temple.

There was a skylight. That was the first thing I noticed. Though a village like this was too poor to afford glass windows and so the walls had been full stone, a clever trick of architecture had allowed for the making of a skylight in what I’d taken to be just a lightly angled roof. And it had been cleverly done, too, as it was carved to allow for the sun’s journey through the day. The stone floor had been painted with scenes from the Book of All Things and different times of the day would see light fall on different parts. It had been most ingeniously built, for a temple in the middle of nowhere. Procerans: so much to hold in contempt, so much to admire. Light fell from above on the painted scene of Gods in black and white standing on both sides of the wan silhouette of a woman, theirs hands held out. A choice offered.

The drying trail of blood that’d trickled down all the wat to the woman was one of those vicious little ironies Creation was so fond of offering.

My staff struck the floor as I limped up, sounding obscenely loud in the silence of this place. At my sides roughly hewn benches, some of which had been toppled by struggle or negligence, only made it more palpable how empty the House was. At the very back, behind the painted scenes and the light, two bodies lay slumped. One was that of a priest, still clad in his pale robes. He was dead, a long cut-like wound opened from one shoulder to the opposite hip – and though it still bled blood, all the way to the painted stone, the outer edges of it were charred. Eyes wide open and unseeing of the sun pouring through the skylight, the back of his head lay against the altar he’d once tended to. Against the other side of the altar, bloodied and burned, lay the young boy who’d butchered more than a hundred souls beyond the gates of this place.

His face was a charred ruin. Stories, when they spoke of burns at all, delighted in telling of villains whose burn scars were disfiguring marks warning of wickedness. In a few there was even shoddy symbolism attempted: a face half-burned, the duality of a man’s soul, Good and Evil at war. The boy’s face just looked like someone had held it down against a fucking fire, and there was nothing elegant or symbolic about that. It was just pain and ugliness and pus, having devoured an uneven two-thirds of the face of a kid who couldn’t be more sixteen. It’d taken an eye with it, or close enough, as it had grown a clouded grey instead of whatever colour it’d once held. On the right side, on the part left untouched by fire, a lone blue eye and closely cut black hair were almost incongruously healthy compared to the rest of the young Named.

The boy wore a leather jerkin and woolen trousers, both so worn as to be near rags, and his shoes were little more than leather strips wrapped around a flat wooden sole. The wound I’d suspected he might have proved to be a knife slash on his leg, though not near anything that’d kill him. It’d still gone untreated and soaked the wool red. Not that infection was likely to kill him, now that he was Named. It was exhaustion, pain and horror keeping him down.

“Are you to be my punishment?” the boy rasped out. “I have sinned and do not deny it.”

Gods , I thought, stricken. He sounded so very resigned.

“Have you?” I said, making myself sound only mildly interested. “Tell me about it.”

“I am-”

“That is yet to be determined,” I mildly said, cutting in. “Tell me about the killings.”

The Alamans boy – and he must be that, for his accent in Chantant had that lakeside twang to it – forced himself to focus. His blue eye fluttered and the cloudy one turned to me as well, some thought returning to the gaze. He watched me and I returned the look, leaning on my dead staff of yew.

“You are not,” the Named said, “an angel.”

My answering smile was thin and sharp.

“Not,” I agreed, “in any sense of the word.”

“Who are you, then?” the boy rasped out.

“The judge, child,” I said. “And if comes to that, the other two as well.”

The Named laughed, though the convulsion twisted him in pain.

“A fitting end,” he said. “I took their lives, stranger. I blinded and burned until nothing was left. How do you judge that ?”

“Sloppy,” I said, tone cool. “The inn was the correct place to begin, but to let loose while you were still inside? Sloppy is almost too kind a word. Packed that tight, all it took was a stroke of luck and any one of them might have caved your head in. You should have left, barred the doors and only then started the flames.”

The boy’s face twisted with rage at my indifference.

“I couldn’t know if they were all-”

He stopped, biting his tongue. Ah , I thought. There it is. He’d wanted me to splatter him across the stones, justice swiftly done and harshly meted. But there’d been something more about this, a part still obscured. And where gentleness would unearth nothing this wounded child wanted buried, calculated callousness might just bait it out.

“You’re not from here, are you?” I mused. “You’ve got that lakeside twang, like you’re always chewing. It’s a long way south, for a boy of no great means.”

Lack of boots meant his family had never been even remotely wealthy. Refugee, it had me guessing. From one of the later waves, long after soldiery had ceased escorting civilians south.

“What does it matter?” the boy asked.

“Means either you came with someone,” I said, “or you were capable of making it alone.”

“Did you not see my work outside, stranger?” the Named mocked.

Confirmed, then, that the power wielded there was something he’d had for some time.

“I saw your convulsing terror burned across a few hundred people,” I agreed. “So what is it that had you so scared, boy?”

The Named grit his teeth.

“I am-”

“Meat, until I deem it otherwise,” I interrupted once more, tone gone cold. “So speak, boy .”

I saw anger, in eyes both blue and clouded, and anger was an anchor. I knew that as bone deep as I knew my limp and the sound Liesse had made when it broke. It would keep him grounded in the here and now, at least long enough for our talk.

“It was too late,” he snarled. “The disease was in them, same as it was in Maman. And I told them, told them I could see it and they needed to send for a real priest, but they just wouldn’t listen -”

His mouth closed with a snap.

“I do not beg for my life,” the boy said. “I do not quibble nor defend.”

And it fell into place, just like that. The ditch begun but abandoned, the way so many of them had been gathered in the same place.

“They were going to leave,” I said.

I saw I had the right of it in the boy’s eyes, even if he denied me an answer. A makeshift caravan of some sort, most likely, headed further south for one of the great refugee camps. When I’d last gotten a report on the seeded plague from the Grey Pilgrim, he’d mentioned his worry that there might yet be carriers in who the disease would be sleeping. Lying in wait. He’d caught the infiltrators headed for Brabant himself, but not even heroes could be everywhere. If the boy was right and the villagers had slipped further south without being caught? Thousands dead, should we be lucky . And we’d be putting out that fire for months instead of heading north as we needed to, losing a good chunk of the war season. This might not be the only village where it was attempted , I thought. If it was attempted all , I also considered , and the boy did not simply go mad with enough will it became... more.

I’d need Akua to study the bodies as well few survivors we’d pulled out. More than that, if this was the plan within the Dead King’s plan then I needed to put out a warning there might be other villages like this oute there. Villages that’d not had the mixed of luck of being stumbled upon by a Named.

“I couldn’t let them,” the boy said. “And they weren’t real miracles, I know the priests said so, but they worked .”

My gaze moved to the priest, dead and cold, the wound that was bloody but hardly mortal. If you could heal, anyway, use the Light. The boy was no natural wielder of Light, I realized, smiled upon by the Heavens and bestowed some manner of searing holy flame. But he did have a power he’d been born with. An eye for recognizing a magically seeded disease, the ability to wield highly concentrated light and flame in short bursts while losing control of it upon release? Those were the marks of a wild talent, a born mage. And one of great power, to have torn through a village while so unschooled. How badly you must have wanted to be anything but a mage , I thought, for the only magic you ever used to be such a close mimicry of the Light. It was heartbreaking. That he’d been warped into this, that he’d been broken after even that and then forced to look a truth in the eye: he had the power to fight back against horror, just this once.

So long as he was willing to make a horror of his own.

“It was,” I mused, “an easy mistake to make.”

The blue eye fixed me with burning contempt.

“It was not,” the boy replied. “And so mistake is either too feeble a word, or entirely mistaken.”

“I was speaking,” I replied, “of the mistake I made. I came in here, you see, expecting you to be one of Hanno’s.”

The Saint of Swords come again , my mind whispered. Necessity that bleeds the grip, the hard deed that keeps the night at bay. The bottom of my staff whispered against the stone as I limped forward and the young Named tensed, though truth be told he’d be too exhausted to put up a fight if taking his life was my intent. Instead, leaning against the yew I knelt in front of him – and, miracles of miracles, the pain in my leg was barely a whisper. Meeting the mismatched gaze, the clouded eye and burning blue, I reached out and gently tipped up his chin.

“My mistake,” I quietly repeated. “No, from the beginning you were one of mine.”

The gentleness, I thought, was what unmade him. A shiver went through his frame, turning into a tortured convulsion and only then a ragged sob tore its way out of his throat.

“I’m a monster,” the boy wept. “Gods forgive, oh Gods forgive me.”

My hand went down to his shoulder, comforting.

“Of course you are,” I gently said. “That’s what makes you one of mine. We’re the wicked ones, you see.”

“I don’t want to be wicked,” he rasped. “I just- I just couldn’t...”

“We never can,” I softly told him. “That’s how we end up wicked, I think. Because we can’t stand to be good, if it also means we must let it go .”

“I didn’t want to kill them,” the boy whispered, “but what else could I do? If I’d had the Light, the real one, I could have healed them. Helped them. Instead...”

I drew back my hand and leaned on the yew I’d received in the depths of Liesse, born anew under twilit sky. I rose, the light behind me drawing the eye to the snaking crimson blood of the dead priest on painted stone. You are a child , I thought.

“That is not the gift you were given,” I said.

“My gift is death,” he spat.

“Aye,” I said. “So it is. Either accept that truth or die under the weight of your utter inconsequence.”

The boy-Named flinched. He had, perhaps, expected comfort. Maybe a better woman would have offered it.

“The corpses smouldering outside were good, as much as most people are ever good,” I said. “What do you think sets you apart from them?”

“Death,” he said.

“Will,” I corrected. “The belief, deep down, that you know what is right and you’ll see it done.”

He hesitated.

“It is the mark of Named,” I said. “And why, even now, some part of you wonders – wasn’t I right ? Didn’t it need to be done?”

“Did it?” the boy asked, prayed, pleaded.

You are a child , I thought once more, almost ashamed.

“What’s your Name?” I asked.

“I am Tan- no, that is not the sort of name you meant at all, is it?” the boy whispered.

His fingers clenched.

“I am the Scorched Apostate,” the boy said.

I nodded in approval.

“Come along, then,” I said. “You have much to learn, and this war won’t fight itself.”

I did not wait for an answer, simply turning around and limping away without once looking back. One, two, three heartbeats: the Scorched Apostate dragged himself up to his feet and followed behind me, quickening his steps to catch up. You are a child , I thought once more. But we’re in the pit, now, and if Keter is to fall then this is the least of the horrors I’ll need to stomach.

We left the House of Light to its dead priest.

Neither of us looked back.

Chapter 3: Standard

“The tragedy of our time, of every time, is that while there is power in knowledge there can be just as much in ignorance.”
– First Princess Eugénie of Lange

I watched the Scorched Apostate sit in silence, face solemn, as the two healers from the House Insurgent finished seeing to the wound on his leg and moved to the larger task of his heavy burns. I’d had him brought away from where the last four survivors of the nameless village were being looked at by another priest. Grandmaster Talbot spoke with the priestess in question – a fair-haired Liessen girl in her late twenties – before trudging his way to me through boggy grounds. With his helmet removed, Brandon Talbot’s neatness was even more apparent than usual, all the more glaring for the contrast with his worn armour. He sketched a bow and I flicked an impatient hand to tell him to cut it out. I’d made my peace with a lot of the formalities having put on a fancy hat meant for me, but they had no place out in the field.

“My queen,” the knight said. “Sister Cecily says the survivors are physically healthy and without disease.”

If the boy was right about the seeded plague and his eyes were sharp as I suspected they were, he might have spared them for that very reason. Or it might be he’d simply missed them before exhaustion caught up with him and he ended up retreating to the temple.

“Send a rider ahead to Lord Adjutant, informing him he is prepare a quarantined tent for them,” I ordered. “Then have them sent back on some of your spare mounts, under escort.”

“By your will, Your Majesty,” he said, then hesitated. “Though it is unlikely they will know how to ride.”

“Tie them on, if need be,” I flatly said. “They’re in no state to walk and I’ll not have them rubbing elbows with this one.”

The last two words were married to a jerky nod of the head towards the young villain I’d found.

“Agreed,” Grandmaster Talbot said, tone heavy with distaste. “I’ll see to it.”

I let him handle the arrangements, gaze lingering on the Named. Two healers from the House Insurgent spent thirty heartbeats trying to heal the burns, but to no avail. There was less bleeding beneath the blackened skin, but no other difference to speak of. The charred ruin that’d been made of the Scorched Apostate’s face was not something Light or sorcery would be able mend, I suspected. I limped up to the three of them, the two priests ending their attempts as I approached and falling into deep bows. The House Insurgent’s priests always seemed to be trying to make up for the my significantly more nuanced relationship with the House Constant by open displays of esteem and allegiance, which I still wasn’t quite sure how to deal with. Over my years of ruling Callow I’d had good working relationships with a few brothers and sisters of the House, but genuine deference from people sworn to Above was still something I struggled with.

“A gallant effort,” I said, “but those are beyond Light’s ability to mend.”

The boy’s eyes betrayed no disappointment at my words, only a sort of cynical satisfaction. He’d not believed for a moment he’d be freed from the burns.

“I can only apologize our failure,” the older of the priests said, and seemed intent to continue along that line until I briskly shook my head.

“There is no need for that. It is a natural thing, and not unknown to me,” I said. “I once had such a scar as well.”

A long red cut that went all the way across my chest, where the Lone Swordsman had gutted me before leaving me to die.

“Once?” the boy spoke up, picking up on the implication. “No longer?”

“It took a death, but I was rid of it,” I agreed. “But you’re rather to young to be thinking of trifling with angels.”

It’d taken snatching a resurrection from Contrition to wipe the scar away, and I was not truly certain it’d been the angelic touch and not the victory before it that’d actually done the trick there. I’d ask Tariq to have a look at the boy regardless, just in case Mercy might feel like living up to the virtue it claimed, but his Name seemed like it might just resist the change tooth and nail: he wasn’t called the Lightly Singed Apostate.

“Thank you,” I told the priests. “I would speak with him alone, if you don’t mind.”

Deeps bows once more, and murmurs of agreement.

“Congratulations,” I told the Scorched Apostate. “You are Named, and the first of this spring to be brought into a treaty backed by almost every crown on Calernia.”

He blinked with his blue eye, uncomprehending.

“There’s a proper formal name for it,” I idly continued, “but most of us call it the Truce and the Terms.”

“A treaty about what?” the boy asked.

“Not hanging boys like you when we find them,” I said.

“I’m not a boy,” the boy insisted. “I’m fourteen.”

I did not betray my surprise. The burns had made it hard to tell his age and he was tall for a boy of fourteen. Especially a peasant one. Fourteen , I thought with muted grief, and already hundreds of corpses to your name. There were some among the Named he’d be rubbing elbows with that would be impressed by this. They wouldn’t even all be villains.

“That’s the part that trips you up?” I still asked, dimly amused. “Not the hanging, being called a boy?”

“You can call me Tancred instead,” the young villain said. “Or Scorched.”

I did not quite have the heart to tell him no one would ever call him the latter save as mockery, though I suspected even Archer would feel a little bad about making sport of someone so painfully earnest.

“Tancred,” I said, a half-hearted concession. “You are Named, and though there will be an investigation about what took place in this nameless village-”

“Marserac,” the boy interrupted, tone heavy. “It is called Marserac.”

I forced myself not to look at the burning wrecks in the distance behind us. Only a handful of far-flung houses would survive of what had been called Marserac.

“Do not interrupt me again,” I said, tone calm but firm.

Tancred bit the sole part of his lip that was not a blackened ruin, looking like I’d slapped him. I made my heart ache, but it needed to be done. I was not his mother or his friend: I was his patroness, and perhaps on occasion I’d be his teacher. Boundaries needed to be set from the very beginning.

“As the Scorched Apostate, you have been approached by one of the Grand Alliance’s high officers and extended the chance to sign and abide by the Truce and Terms,” I said. “Though what took place in Marserac will be investigated by my people, and your claim of a seeded plague looked into, even if you are mistaken in that claim you’ll still fall under the blanket amnesty that comes with agreeing to abide by the treaty.”

Tancred’s sole blue eye burned with indignation and he looked about to boil over, but he kept his tongue. My lips quirked in approval. Good. If he could master himself on this day, of all days, then he had some promise.

“Speak,” I said.

“That’s rotten ,” the Scorched Apostate burst out before I’d even finished the word. “That I’d still get away with it if I’d just-”

He shivered, and I could almost see his mind shying away from fully looking at what it was he’d done today. There would be a need to nip that habit in the bud – failing to recognize what you were was a dangerous thing, for a villain – but even now I still had enough mercy in me to leave that for another day.

“- if it’d just been slaughter for slaughter’s sake,” Tancred forced out, “murder for sport. That’s rotten .”

The boy hesitated.

“Sir,” he hesitantly tacked on, half as a question.

“That’ll do,” I said. “And it’s not a pretty thing, you’re not wrong about that. The business of survival never is.”

The indignation had yet to abate, so I flicked out a hand in permission for him to speak once more.

“They say we’re winning the war, though,” the Apostate said. “Last summer the Black Queen and the Iron Prince almost took back the capital in Hainaut, and since then the attack midwinter was beaten back. Why does there need to be an amnesty for villains?”

“For heroes as well,” I plainly said. “We’ve no sole claim on bloody swords.”

It was somewhat refreshing not to have been recognized, I found, but this perception that we’d achieved anything but a bloody stalemate against the Dead King – the ruling champion of wars of attrition – needed to be put to rest. This summer we might just begin turning the tide, Gods willing or out of my damned way, but the sole front that could be said to have truly gained victories until now was the Lycaonese one. Those hard fuckers up in Twilight’s Pass were making all of us proud.

“There is a truce, Tancred, because that first summer offensive in Hainaut nearly lost us the war,” I said, tone serious. “Because the midwinter attacks would have broken through the defensive line if the Fortunate Fool hadn’t sacrificed himself to take out the Lord of Ghouls, or if the Witch of the Woods hadn’t flattened one of our own fortresses with two thousand of our soldiers still in it. Because we need every Named, even the worst of them, and each one that hides from us out fear might end up raised into the Dead King’s ranks instead if he gets his hands on them.”

The young villain looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. My assessment had been stark, true, but I’d wager that was not the reason: I was not speaking as an officer would, but as someone who had a seat at the kind of table where there were precious few warranting one.

“So crimes committed before joining the treaty are granted amnesty, no matter how foul,” I said. “Heroes and villains are to observe the peace of the Truce with each other until Keter falls, no matter past enmities. Should conflicts arise, or accusations need to be made about breaches of the Truce, they are to be brought to their representative under the Terms.”

I nodded at his inquisitive look, granting leave to speak. Indignation had gutted out, looked like, as it tended to when it was cast against the abstract instead of something you could see or hear. Curiosity was more tempting a mistress than arguing with me, at least for now.

“And who are they?” the Scorched Apostate asked.

“The White Knight, for heroes,” I said. “The Black Queen, for villains. Those who claim to be neither can choose who they would appeal to. A band was assembled under the Archer that has a degree of legal authority as well, but they are wanderers.”

Tancred slowly nodded, seemingly not unfamiliar with the Name. Indrani’s reputation had made it this far north, then. She’d be pleased to hear it, vain creature that she was.

“Under the Terms are also set out obligations that must be fulfilled to remain protected by the Truce,” I continued. “I’ll let you paw through the lot of them later – actually, can you read?”

Tancred looked away, then shook his head.

“Something else to see to, then,” I said. “They’ll be read to you in detail by a sworn representative until you can read them yourself. The crux of them is simple: follow the laws of the land and serve in the war against the Dead King. If there are lesser grievances or breaches, punishment will be meted our by your representative under the Terms.”

Quite a few of the heroes had howled at that last detail, a few like the Blade of Mercy and the Blessed Artificer even threatening to walk if it was upheld, but with both the White Knight and the Grey Pilgrim in my corner we’d had the clout to ram it through. Not that Tariq hadn’t had his reservations, but we were all aware that precious few villains would even consider Truce if joining it meant they were under heroic jurisdiction. On my side of the deal the trouble had been making it clear to the Named that I was actually serious about enforcing the Terms. The Pilfering Dicer hadn’t really believed me, and so Hakram had held out his hand on a stump as I hacked a finger off as chastisement. There’d been another sort of challenge too, unsurprisingly: two other villains had lost little time before trying to take my place as representative by force of arms.

The Barrow Sword had been pleasantly straightforward about it, telling me outright he intended to use me as a stepping stone to rise high enough he could bargain with the Dominion to be named as the founder of a line of Blood. He’d just as straightforwardly submitted when I’d struck him hard enough with Night to blast him through two carts and a palisade. We’d had drinks after, and while he was a ruthless bastard he was also halfway decent company if you didn’t get him started on the Silent Slayer’s line. The Red Reaver had not been so respectable in his ambition. He’d tried to slit my throat in my sleep only to be caught by Indrani while trying to slip through my tent’s wards, and after that I’d... made an example. A warning to anyone else who might have similar ambition and lack of sense. There had not been a challenge since, though I’d no doubt that the longer this war lasted the more I’d end up having to face.

“I will fight the Hidden Horror,” the Scorched Apostate solemnly said, “on that you have my oath. I will march north and face the dead.”

“You’ll be headed to the Belfry for a few months, Tancred, unless there’s a pressing need for your talents,” I drily told him.

While the smouldering remnants of Marserac behind us were testament to the power the young villain was capable of wielding, I had no intention of sending a mage so spectacularly untaught straight into the nightmare of the northern defensive line. That was a recipe for either losing a company to an uncontrolled blaze or serving up Keter a fresh Revenant. Named lost a great deal of power after the Dead King got to them, and some aspects Neshamah either could not or would not maintain in death, but a Revenant spellcaster with this much of a bite to him would be a rough ride to deal with even if he ended up having only one trick.

“The Belfry, sir?” the boy hesitantly asked.

“This isn’t the kind of war that can be won with boots on the ground alone, Tancred,” I said. “The Grand Alliance understood that well before it began mobilizing. There would be a need for fresh sorceries, for unprecedented warding schemes and artefacts. A safe haven would have to be built for those scholars who would study the Hidden Horror’s tricks and learn how to unmake them, too, one beyond his reach. And so the Arsenal was ordered raised.”

I let a moment pass, gauging how much I should truly say. There’d been some of us, at the beginning, who’d argued that the Arsenal’s existence should be kept a secret. Princess Rozala had been one of the more ardent partisans of that belief, arguing that against Keter the best defence was secrecy, and the Grey Pilgrim had backed her – which meant the Blood had as well. In private with me, Tariq had argued that by keeping the Arsenal secret now we would later get the benefit of revealing it when tipping a pivot one way or another, but I’d been unconvinced then and I was unconvinced now. As it happened Hasenbach and I had, for once, been in complete and utter agreement. Even if one was willing to write off the effects on morale that knowing such a place existed would have on the rank and file of the Grand Alliance, which neither of us was, the fact remained that practically speaking keeping it secret would be near impossible.

Too many people would be involved in its construction and its upkeep. Whether it be building the towers and laboratories, bringing in food by cart or even something as simple as making the beds in the rooms there would be a need for workers and servants to handle the labour. That we’d gathered some of the finest magical minds in Procer, Callow and Levant before going further by bringing in scholars, priests and artisans meant that numbers alone would make disappearances glaringly obvious anyway. And it wasn’t like the Dead King wasn’t going to expect us to have such a facility. No, better to lay false trails by the dozen and keep the location secret rather than attempt the improbable outcome of utter secrecy.

“There are two societies within it, the Workshop and the Belfry,” I continued. “The Workshop concerns itself with the making of artefacts, armaments and alchemies. The Belfry’s mandate is broader in scope: study of the Dead King’s creatures, war magic and warding, experimental research.”

I let a beat pass so the details could sink in. The part that mattered most I’d consciously split from the rest.

“The Belfry also concerns itself with teaching mages,” I told the boy.

It’d been a struggle to pull away Masego from his attempts to establish his proof of concept for Quartered Seasons and the other half dozen projects he’d picked up, but the results had been well worth the hassle: he’d trained up a few talented Proceran practitioners to what he called ‘acceptable’ scrying ritual standards, which was maybe two decades ahead of what anyone west of the Whitecaps had previously been capable of. That cadre now served as permanent teachers for the hedge talents the First Prince was sifting through Procer for, sent in by bands of twenty for teaching. The scrying network for the Grand Alliance was arguably the largest and widest-reaching on the continent at the moment, if likely still inferior in quality and reliability to Praes’. Communications grew harder the closer we were to active warfare against Keter, too, now that Neshamah had begun using disruptive rituals.

Adjusting our rituals so that the disruptions wouldn’t affect them was exactly the kind of puzzle the Belfry had been assembled to solve, though, so we’d see how long that lasted.

Getting a training camp running for war magic had been a great deal less successful, unfortunately. Even after lowering the bar of used sorcery to the standard of the Legions of Terror we’d proved incapable of reliably training up mages in that manner. We were running thin on instructors, true, but at the end of the day the unpleasant truth was that there was simply a limited amount of people in Procer with a Gift that was strong enough to be useful for war. The total number of mages living in the Principate was likely higher than that in the Empire, by simple dint of population, but the quality of those talents was the trouble. Massed sorcery remained beyond our grasp for now, though at least training up a handful ritual cadres had proved a workable alternative. Standardization remained the largest issue there, since no two cadres were capable of doing the same things and there was only haphazard overlap.

“Are you not going to teach me?” the boy quietly asked.

His face was hard to read, which I supposed was a feeble silver lining to the scorching of his face. His voice, though, his stance? He was fourteen and, Named or not, he’d seen precious little of the world. He might as well be an open book to me.

“There are things you’ll learn from me,” I said. “Magic, however, isn’t one of them. I don’t have the Gift. I do happen to be acquainted with a few of the finest practitioners of it alive, though, so rustling up a good tutor for you shouldn’t be all that difficult.”

Who to send him to would be something to consider. Masego’s interest in teaching could best be described as passing, though he was a rather able tutor when talked into it. Hierophant also had so much on his plate the meal could feed two and he’d lost the ability to practice magic. Roland might be a better fit, anyway, given that his tendency to be a generalist meant he always had common grounds with pupils. The Rogue Sorcerer was a hero, though, and the way he ended up saddled with the work that no one else was particularly good at meant his days were nearly as filled as Masego’s. The Hunted Magician owed Indrani a favour which I might be able to call in for this, but the Proceran villain was an enchanter for the Workshop and just... generally unpleasant. I’d rather the Scorched Apostate be taught by a Named mage instead of a Nameless one, but we’d have to see.

“But I will be sent to this Belfry,” Tancred said, hesitant.

“Not alone,” I replied, taking a measure of pity on him. “I’m to head south myself before long, and I meant to pass through the Arsenal. I’ll be accompanying you there, at least.”

Indrani had been riding me about physically setting foot at the Arsenal for a few months now, though until today I’d been on the fence about taking the detour there after the council. This settled it, though, since I’d want to settle the boy comfortably under someone able to teach him before moving on. Archer wasn’t wrong, either, when she said that it was sloppy of me to have never met so many Named on our side, including villains I represented under the Terms. How many were there nowadays, between the Workshop and the Belfry? Ten, twelve? Less than half of that were of mine, since it was harder to find villains willing to play nice with others than heroes, but even getting a good look at the currents of the place might not be a bad idea. If we lost the Arsenal, the war would begin a death spiral downwards in a matter of months: best to make sure it wouldn’t shatter itself from within.

“Good,” the Scorched Apostate said, perking up. “I have-”

I wasn’t riding Zombie this time so her discomfort could not serve as warning for the closeness of the Beastmaster, but the old trick I’d once taught Vivienne still worked. Someone had been looking at me intently, too intently. It’d been an attempt to sneak up on me, I decided, and there were few who’d attempt that against me in broad daylight.

“Beastmaster,” I interrupted, “have you grown shy? Come out properly, introduce yourself.”

The man bedecked in furs and leather let out a grunt and circled away from my back, only then catching Tancred’s notice. Only one hawk was still on his shoulder.

“Your pet witch sent word,” Beastmaster said. “She makes haste, as you ordered.”

“Have you called her that to her face?” I asked, morbidly curious.

I almost hoped he hadn’t, just so he might try it before me: it’d been too long since I’d seen Akua flay someone alive with her tongue. The Beastmaster spat to the side.

“Better to embrace vipers than speak with witches,” the Named dismissively said.

So , I thought amusedly, you’ve most definitely called her that to her face and the predictable ensued. Slow learner, was he? Not that he’d been the first. It never ceased to amaze me that some people somehow ended up thinking Akua Sahelian would be an easy prey for barbs or bluster just because she did not have a Name while they did. It was like sticking you hand in a wolf’s maw and expecting the teeth not to wound because they weren’t a bear’s.

“That hawk,” Tancred said. “I’ve seen it before.”

“She saw you,” Beastmaster replied.

Since apparently Ranger’s education in Refuge had not extended to basic courtesies – and Gods, I’d meant that as a jab but now that I thought about it – I saw to the introductions myself.

“Tancred, this is the Beastmaster,” I said. “He’s a former pupil of the Lady of the Lake, and now a mercenary in the service of the Grand Alliance.”

Paid not in coin, which I would almost have preferred. The Beastmaster had instead bargained for certain rights and permissions, as well as guides to be provided to show him paths to ancient places in the depths of Brocelian Forest. Coin meant little to the Named of Refuge, used as they were to barter instead, and the relative modesty of the man’s demands meant he’d gotten near everything he’d asked for. He’d simply been too useful an asset to be carelessly tossed aside, and even with Refuge having effectively collapsed it wasn’t like he’d not had other places to go. The fighting in the Free Cities was far from over, despite General Basilia’s streak of victories.

“Greetings,” Tancred said, though he was frowning.

“Beastmaster, this is the Scorched Apostate,” I said. “He has agreed to abide by the Truce and the Terms.”

The older Named looked the younger up and down, seeing no longer the villain who’d caused the blaze in the distance but a boy a fourteen with most his face lost to burns and clothes that were well on their way to being rags. He was visibly unimpressed.

“Another one plucked out of the mud?” Beastmaster said with a hard bark of laughter. “At least this one has fight in him.”

“Not half an hour ago,” I mildly reminded him, “you were wary of him. Did you boldness perhaps travel by foot, to be arriving so late after the rest of you?”

His face darkened. I met his gaze squarely. Like Archer in the early days, he’d take any attempt at diplomacy as weakness and continue to push his luck. But he wasn’t Indrani, and I was not a Squire well out of her depth. I’d killed harder men then him and done it with a great deal less power than I could now call on. Confident in his strength as he might be, he’d be looking at the trail of corpses left in my wake and be forced to admit that were Named among the lot that would have butchered him without batting an eye. And so he backed down, or at least as close to that as his character could afford to let him.

“There is nothing left to hunt,” the Beastmaster said. “I take my leave of you.”

I could sting him further, but there would be no point to it save passing pleasure. Not that I’d let the retreat pass entirely without comment, lest he take that as relief on my part.

“By all means,” I replied. “The conversation was getting stale.”

Beastmaster’s lips thinned, but he strode away without speaking any further. I glanced at Tancred, who’d been following all of it with wide eyes and now was looking at me a little guiltily.

“I’m sorry,” the Scorched Apostate said. “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

“Trouble?” I echoed.

“Won’t he complain to the Black Queen?” the boy asked. “You’ve made an enemy of a powerful Named on my behalf.”

He seemed genuinely worried, which was a little touching.

“You seem to have misunderstood the nature of my relationship with him,” I said, smoothing away any trace of my amusement.

Tancred looked appalled, and a little sickened.

“I am sorry, sir,” he said. “I did not mean to insult your lover.”

I choked. Beastmaster, of all men? Gods, I’d rather sleep with the Mirror Knight. The man might be an insufferable prick, but at least he bathed regularly.

“He’s not my lover, he’s my subordinate ,” I said.

In the boy’s defence, he seemed pretty mortified by the mistake. His embarrassment passed soon enough, though, and left behind only the latest hint in a series of them that’d been growing the longer we spoke.

“Those priests and horsemen,” the young villain said. “They were Callowan. And yet they bowed to you.”

“So they did,” I agreed.

My hand reached within my cloak to extricate the long dragonbone pipe Masego had gifted me so many years ago, then producing a satchel of Orense bitterleaf from another pocket. Sadly the bitterleaf enough had come to replace wakeleaf as my vice of choice as it was much easier to get your hands on this far north. The smoke was heavier than wakeleaf’s, and it was often mixed with sweeter herbs to take the edge of the sourness off, but it scratched the itch well enough when stuffed in a pipe.

“You implied you were a high officer of the Grand Alliance,” the Scorched Apostate continued. “But that’s not all you are, is it?”

I passed my palm over the pipe, flames flickering within through a twist of the Night, and pulled at the mouth a few times before spewing out a steam of smoke.

“Who are you?” Tancred asked.

“The Firstborn named me Losara, the Queen of Lost and Found,” I lazily replied. “To the Wasteland I was the Squire, the Carrion Lord’s sole apprentice. The fae knew me by many names, though the last I ever bore was that of Sovereign of Moonless Nights. On this side of the Whitecaps, though? It’s a simple name I am known by.”

“The Black Queen,” the boy whispered hoarsely. “The leader of the Woe.”

“Aye,” I said, with a crooked smile. “And now let’s find you some boots, because I refuse to keep wincing every time I look at your shoes.”

Chapter 4: Shadowed

“By my own hand I have made my enemies, and so own them just as a craftsman owns his craft.”
– Dread Emperor Nihilis I, the Tanner

Dusk was shyly peeking over the horizon when Akua Sahelian arrived.

Tancred’s exhaustion had caught up to him before long, and he now lay curled under a blanket on the closest thing to dry land we’d been able to find: a large flat stone. The boy was resting his head against a rolled-up horse blanket, too-large boots dangling out of the covers, and drooling into the coarse cloth. He was dreaming, though from way he sometimes clenched his teeth it must have been a nightmare. Hardly a surprise, after the storm of fire and death he’d unleashed on Marserac: it would take a colder soul than this one possessed to sleep restfully after that kind of butchery. I tore away my gaze from the boy, knowing that if stared any longer I’d find it more difficult to resist soothing his sleep. I’d always had a hard time picking my attachments, and though that’d saved my life more than once in the past it would not always remain that way. Though I was only a claimant, even after two years in the crucible, it could not be denied I was once more on the path to being Named.

That meant an apprentice – a real apprentice, not an occasional pupil or a child under patronage – might just be the first step on the road to an early grave. There were ways around it, at least. The Lady of the Lake was the example to emulate there, for once. Ranger had been a teacher for decades in Refuge without ever falling to that peril. In my more charitable moments I wondered if the way she’d been so harsh with all she taught was not in that sense a way of preserving her own life, but that charity was ever passing. Regardless, there were parts of her methods worth emulating. Teaching many students, teaching a general method more than passing one’s own signature talents, not allowing yourself to be drawn into the stories of one’s pupils. All were rules to consider when seeing to the youngest villains in my charge, and perhaps even when Cardinal itself would be raised. Much as I intended to be sitting on the council arbitrating the Liesse Accords instead of teaching, I might be moved to dabble on occasion. It might prove necessary, should we be thin on the ground for teachers in the early years.

Regardless, I must step carefully until I grasped the nature of the Name I was moving towards. I had opponents still out there that would slit my throat through even the slightest of missteps. One in particular had been most noticeable by her absence, though I was not so foolish as to believe that just because I’d not heard of the Wandering Bard she’d not been busy weaving her nets. But we were busy too, and though the Dead King was our enemy I’d not forgotten his parting short at the Peace of Salia. There is a place in the heart of Levant, the Hidden Horror had told us , where the first pilgrim of grey slew many men. And there, he’d claimed, there would be a secret buried that would tell us how Kairos Theodosian had saved all our lives. The Dead King had claimed that Tariq would know of the place, and that’d proved true enough: it was valley in the depths of southern Levant known as the Verdant Hollow. Finding the truths buried there had not been anywhere as simple as the King of Death had implied, though.

For one, the White Knight’s aspect could not see into what had taken place within the bounds of the valley during the first Grey Pilgrim’s life. It had not stopped us following the thread, but it’d certainly slowed us down. Soon, though , I thought. Vivienne’s reports was clear about that. With Tariq’s influence backing us we’d been able to bargain with the Holy Seljun for access to the secret records of the Isbili and using those another trail had been found. I’d winced at the number and calibre of Named we’d had to send to follow it, but the band of five under the Painted Knife had found success in the form of a secret they’d refused to entrust to scrying rituals. A knot of hope and fear had laid nest in my stomach ever since I’d read the report. The truth they were bringing north would not be a gentle one. Yet the grim cast of my thoughts was dismissed by the beat of wings on the wind. I turned, having felt her presence nearing in the Night long before either ear or eye afforded the same, and felt the same clench of the heart I always did when I saw the span of those black wings on the wind.

Akua had taken to embracing the changeable nature that her strange half-life lent her – in part because emphasizing her unearthly nature helped my reputation, making her seem more as a bound spirit than the Doom of Liesse now keeping my council – so it’d been expected that she would start shapechanging for reasons both practical and entirely dramatic. I’d even expected that it came to choosing a shape that could fly she would not settle for a paler imitation of Sve Noc. Yet I’d expected some mimicry of a Wasteland legend, like the rain-birds the Taghreb claimed the Miezans had hunted to extinction or the red-feathered ibis whose croaks at dusk were said to be prophetic by Soninke myths. What she had chosen, instead, was a black swan. Swans were not native to the Wasteland: they were Callowan beasts, most known to nest in the south. Liesse had been called the City of Swans, once upon a time. That the woman who’d once been the Doom of Liesse would take the shape of an ebony-black swan was a gesture of many nuances, and one I still had difficulty parsing.

The few knights still with me, no more than a score, turned hard gazes towards the nearing bird almost to the last. The revelation that the Advisor Kivule was in truth the Doom of Liesse bound to my service had been ill-received, though it’d been a strangely fascinating exercise to see why and by who. The House Insurgent had in fact praised my efforts to redeem the former Diabolist in their sermons, nearly sidestepping the issue that we were both villains of disputable retirement, and the eastern parts of my armies had been largely indifferent. The Order of the Broken Bells, and indeed most Callowan highborn among my armies, had not been so blithe in their indifference. I’d had petitions to allow her to stand trial before either a military tribunal or a noble one that’d gotten increasingly pressing as time went on, and even my blunt reply that I still had a use of Akua had not been enough to put the matter to rest. It was a black mark on my record for a lot of my countrymen, and if not for the constant pressure of Keter to the north I suspected the backlash would have been a lot worse.

As it was, there’d still been desertions. Not many, but given how few of those I’d suffered since the first campaign of the Fifteenth it had stung in ways that were hard to explain. That was a candle to the bonfire that’d been the reaction back in Callow, though. Vivienne had appointed Duchess Kegan Iarsmai of Daoine to the office of Governess-General of Callow before leaving the kingdom for the Proceran campaign which had been, and in many ways still was, good sense. The Duchess’ armies were the largest military force left in Callow, she had the clout and pedigree to keep the northern nobles in line and most of all there was absolutely no doubt that Kegan Iarsmai would reply to secret offers from the Tower by steel and public hangings. Duchess Kegan was also the ruler of the Deoraithe, whose ancestral spirits had been stolen and used as a glorified fuel for the doomsday fortress at the heart of Akua’s Folly. The news that I now kept the eponymous Akua in my service, even as a shade, had... not been well received.

What few gains in trust I’d made with Daoine had gone the way of thin air, and there was now little doubt that when the war with Keter was settled Duchess Kegan would exercise the right I’d promised her when I’d first bargained for her aid: namely, that the freshly-elevated Grand Duchy of Daoine would be allowed to secede from the Kingdom of Callow while remaining a military ally and suffering no loss of trading rights or privileges with the kingdom. At least the northern baronies hadn’t agitated over it beyond some expected opportunistic posturing: they’d least felt the taste of both the Praesi occupation and Akua’s span of folly, so truth be told they’d had little to agitate with . And that was only the reaction of nobles, who as the Hierarch had once reminded me were but a few to the many. Though news travelled slow and the shifting nature of rumours gave the hydra a hundred different heads, my reputation had taken a hit back home as well.

A lot of my appeal to the people as a ruler, Hakram had noted in that clear-eyed way of his, had come from how harshly I’d dealt with the Folly and the fae incursions. Akua’s survival was a complication in what had had previously been a straightforward story, and people rarely took well to such added twists and turns. There’d not been riots, at least, but there’d been open unrest in the growing southern towns. Many of the former refugees settled there had lost kin in Liesse, and having had my name associated with years of food and shelter in the wake of the ravaging of the south had only helped quell the tensions so much. The House Constant had stayed aloof, as if usually did when it came to worldly affairs, but the Jacks had made it clear that most of the small factions that’d been leaning the way of the House Insurgent now had second thoughts. No, the revelation had cost me a great deal of trust that I would likely never regain: a decade of good rule might see this turn into nothing but a bump in the road, but I didn’t have a decade of rule ahead of me.

I fully intended to abdicate in the wake of the war against Keter, so at this point it was more important to gild Vivienne’s reputation than glue back a few lost feathers onto mine. As a silver lining that’d proved almost ludicrously easy. Before my thoughts could wander down that rabbit hole, though, elegant talons touched the ground beneath open wings and darkness shifted from swan to woman. Akua had perfected the process: it looked like she was rising from a kneeling position, sweeping up gracefully. Her first attempts, Archer assured me, had looked a lot more like a kid failing at a pirouette. The Doom of Liesse rose to her full height, skirts sweeping around her, and tastefully curtsied.

“My queen,” Akua greeted me.

The hard eyes of my knights remained on her back and, I almost imagined, on mine. It made me feel restless, and as it happened I had decent reason to indulge the urge to move: I’d sent for Akua because I needed answers about what had taken place in Marserac, and the village in question was ahead.

“Walk with me,” I said.

She did, without missing a beat. We’d had these walks often enough, over the last two years, that it felt like a natural thing for her to fall perfectly in step with my limp. There was a lot that felt natural these days about having her at my side, which I needed no warning to know was a dangerous thing.

“You heard about what happened here,” I said, brusquely gesturing towards the burning village.

Unlike me, whose limp was forcing to slog through the wet grounds inelegantly, she was not dipping in so much as a toe. I could probably achieve the same thing by calling on the Night, but she needed not such thing – where once her body had been a soul given flesh by Winter, she now used the power of Sve Noc for the same effect. She didn’t need to draw on Night, per se, as she was made of Night – changing the properties of her physical shell was child’s play to her, like playing with clay.

“I did,” Akua acknowledged. “And from the looks of that sleeping boy under a Callowan blanket, you have gathered another stray to your hearth.”

“The Scorched Apostate,” I said.

She let out a sigh of sympathy.

“An unfortunate Name in many ways,” Akua said. “Those marks will not be easily shed even should he stay at your feet.”

“He won’t, not for long,” I said. “He’s headed for the Belfry.”

“Mage?” she inferred, interest rising. “He does not have the look of one from a wealthy household.”

“Talent is not distributed according to land holdings,” I grunted back.

The shade glanced at me, seemingly amused. Akua Sahelian was a lovely sight in any light I would care to name, even more so now that she had discarded the veils she had worn as ‘Advisor Kivule’, but I’d grown partial to the way she looked under spreading twilight. Shapely as she was – tall and full-breasted yet slender, an almost hourglass shape I’d believed belonged only in stories before first witnessing the unearthly beauty of Wasteland highborn with my own eyes – there was no time of the day that would do her figure disservice, much less in the tight and high-waisted dress of black and scarlet she’d chosen to wear, but twilight always lent her a certain... It was the golden eyes, I thought, and the sharp bones of her face. Under dusk’s cast she looked as gorgeous and terrible as the old tales had promised the fae would be. She felt me stare, no doubt, but said nothing of it. It wouldn’t be the first time, nor would it be the last.

“Magic is not an inexpensive art to train in, heart of my heart,” she said. “I cast not unkind auspice on the boy’s talent, but merely express surprise that one with such a powerful Gift did not burn themselves out long before they could become Named.”

I wasn’t ignorant of the dangers of having a powerful magical talent without being taught, of course. The War Collage had gone into some detail about it, and Black had made certain I read the highborn screeds about the matter like Sorcerous’ Bequest and The Burden of Privilege . Praesi highborn often used the death rates as a justification for the ways High Seats plucked out young mages from their families for training and servitude. Mind you, Black had wanted to replace that with Legion schooling and at least one mandatory term of service in the ranks – he’d bee much more interested in breaking the grip of the Hight Seats over the loyalty of the finest mages in Praes than in ensuring the freedom of practitioners. Knowing him he’d have no issue with said freedom either should it come as a consequence of his policies, though.

“He’s got only the one trick, as far as I can tell,” I reluctantly conceded. “And it’s some sort of imitation of what Light can do in a fight.”

“A limited repertoire would help,” Akua confirmed. “Quite a few untaught mages end up using similar wild spells – the easiest of conjurations and illusions – regardless of where they are born with no ill effect. It is lack of control married to strong emotion that is the most common killer for hedge practitioners, but an intense obsession on a single crude formula would... restrain this danger.”

She paused, afterwards.

“An imitation of the Light,” she repeated, tone ambiguous. “How very Proceran.”

It did not sound like a compliment, nor was it meant to be one. The distaste was not directed at Tancred, though.

“Not all peoples in the world hold magic as the gift of all gifts,” I reminded her.

My own had a complicated relationship with sorcery, for one. It was a rare city in Callow that was not warded, or where a few practitioners could not be hired with coin through the Hedge Guild. Yet magic would never be held in high esteem the way steel or prayer would be, for sorcery was inherently linked to Praes for most of us. Though Wizards of the West and Wise Enchantresses had been a staple of Callowan Names for centuries, none of them had ever held so much as a regent’s title – mages were advisors and retainers in Callow, never rulers.

“Nor should they,” Akua said. “Though it is a great talent, it is only ever one among the many needed for one to achieve greatness. It is those calling the Gift a curse I hold in contempt.”

I didn’t disagree, as it happened. The reason why the power of mages had first been curbed in Procer was eminently reasonable: some of the largest wizard guilds had taken to playing kingmaker in the First Prince elections, only to get harshly disciplined when a candidate they’d opposed and even tried to depose consolidated power and began dismantling their guilds. First Prince Louis Merovins had not been bloodthirsty man, so he’d ended their power by ruinous taxes and starkly limiting guild sizes instead of brutal purges. Yet his successors had simply kept their boots on the throat of Proceran wizardry without ever reconsidering the matter, often with the House of Light’s enthusiastic endorsement. Proceran mages couldn’t even serve as healers, which I found absurd as magical healing could accomplish things that priestly healing simply could not. Mages were not outright hated, in the Principate, but they did tend to be viewed as keeping to a disreputable trade. I did not think it a coincidence that we’d gotten more villain Named mages out of Procer than we had heroes.

“Things will change,” I said. “Hasenbach founded her Order of the Red Lion and they’re just too useful to be despised. Now we’re gathering and training their mages for war, which ought to gild the record even further. The Principate will have to adjust, after Keter.”

A few thousand mages trained in war whose edge had been honed against the Kingdom of the Dead would not meekly bend their neck so the boot could be placed on it again. And I somehow doubted that someone with Cordelia Hasenbach’s ruthless streak of practicality would simply release a force like that back into the wilds. Given how badly the higher ranks of the House of Light had blundered when backing the attempted coup against her before the Peace of Salia, I believed the First Prince might even have the pull to force through some much-needed reforms.

“It is in the nature of rot that it is not so easily removed,” Akua disagreed.

I simply grunted, unwilling to dispute the point here and now. We had other cats to skin, and we’d wander far off the beaten path. Metaphorically speaking, anyway. In practice we’d reached the outskirts of Marserac and that now familiar half-dug ditch.

“The boy’s also got good eyes, like as not,” I said. “It’s why I sent for you. He claims he found traces of the Dead King’s seeded plague in the villagers.”

Her brow rose, arching with irritating elegance. When I did the same thing, it just made me look kind of angry.

“A much rarer talent, this, if is not an aspect,” Akua told me. “It implies either an exceptional sensitivity to magic or a physical gift.”

I had an inkling it wouldn’t be an aspect. Tancred might have had the power before reaching Marserac, but the Name had gotten its weight through the choices he’d made in the village. An aspect beforehand would be putting the cart before the horse.

“Humans don’t usually have the latter, as I understand it,” I frowned.

One of the pleasures of conversation with Akua, as it happened, was not having to always spell out everything. Sidestepping the notion of it being an aspect was enough for the implied to be understood.

“There are always exceptions,” the golden-eyed shade shrugged. “But you are largely correct. It is a gift most often achieved by twining the line with beings so blessed.”

A delicate way of saying that the Scorched Apostate was either a one in a hundred thousand birth or there was nonhuman blood running through his veins. Either way there was more to his story than I would have guessed at first glance, and he’d not struck me as a simple soul from the start. Something else to dig into, though that was the kind of matter best tossed into Hakram’s lap. Aside from the practical consideration of having left him in charge of serving as my go-between with the Jacks, there was the more esoteric one of avoiding taking too direct an interest in Tancred’s past. Unruly curiosity had a way of carrying costs for Named. I looked down at the first corpse I’d encountered earlier, still slumped and scorched.

“Find the plague seeds if there are any to be found,” I ordered. “If the Dead King really has such a weapon, we might have a situation on our hands.”

It wasn’t that I feared there’d be major spread beyond the initial outbreaks: we’d caught this early enough that we ought to be able to contain if not outright smother the attack. Even if one of the refugee camps was turned we’d be able to strike quick enough to prevent a disaster. The Grand Alliance’s use of the Twilight Ways meant we marched and deployed significantly quicker than the dead, after all. Yet containment would occupy our armies long enough a summer offensive would become more difficult while simultaneous making us vulnerable to an offensive on the northern defence lines.

“If there is something to be found, I will,” Akua replied, calmly certain.

And I believed her, too. Aisha had once warned me about the Sahelians, and this one most of all. They were always trusted, my old friend had told me, by people who ought to know better. Because they are charming, my queen , Aisha Bishara had warned me as only a fellow daughter of the Wasteland could. Because they are beautiful and fascinating and so very useful that certainly it couldn’t hurt to bring them into the fold just the once. And she’d been right, I thought as I watched the woman who’d once been my bitterest enemy kneel by a corpse, weaving strands of Night with her hands. Already I could hardly imagine fighting this war without Akua at my side, and some days it would be untrue to call the amount of trust I put in her measured . If this had been achieved as it’d been in the Everdark, where I had been starved of the company of nearly all I trusted, it would have been one thing. But she had done this while the Woe were at my side, and my armies as well.

Even as a shade whose power I could strip with little more than a prayer, Akua Sahelian remained one of the most dangerous people I had ever met.

I sat on the side of the trench, staff propped up between my shoulder and my neck, and brought down the hood of the Mantle of Woe on my head before closing my eyes. Though night was creeping in, I still felt exhausted. I’d not had an empty day, that much was true, but I fancied it to be a different kind of tired. The kind that saw only days like this one writ in the horizon and could not tell how long the world would remain so. I knew, in principle, that we were reaching a turning point: I’d read the same reports as Hasenbach, had the conversation with the Iron Prince a dozen times. Within months we’d reach the peak of the Grand Alliance’s fighting capacity, with Procer’s industry and manpower fully turned to war and the wealth injected into every nation’s war machine by Mercantis and the dwarves finally being brought to bear. This summer would be the time where we went on the offensive, when we took back every Proceran shore and dug in before the assault on Keter itself.

And still I felt so very tired. Neshamah was fighting against us the kind of war where even victory had a taste of defeat. And sometimes, sometimes we just lost . So I closed my eyes and let my mind drift, as close to sleeping as I could get without drifting into slumber, and let Akua unfold the leather bag holding the set of tool’s she’d use to cut open a corpse and find out of it had been seeded with death or worse yet. I waited perhaps half an hour before I got my answer, eyes fluttering open as I heard the shade rise to her feet. Though her dress had been traded for more practical chirurgeon’s garb – a heavy leather apron over a long-sleeved cloth shirt and fitted trousers – there was no mistaking the blood on her forearms. Or, for that matter, the small stone-like sphere she held in the bloody palm of her hand. Golden eyes met mine, gaze perfectly matched even in the shade of my hood.

“Tell me,” I said.

“It is sorcerous in nature,” Akua confirmed. “More specifically an enchantment, and though I cannot yet tell you the nature of it – I will need the use of my full workshop to ascertain that for sure – I can already tell you two truths. The first should be evident.”

She slightly rotated the sphere, revealing a slightly scorched surface.

“The sorcery that killed this woman damaged the ‘seed’, and rendered it inert,” she said. “Whether it was a delicate enough enchantment structure that damage was enough to disrupt it or that is a property inhering to the sorcery used by the Scorched Apostate, I cannot be sure. If it is the latter, I would urge you to hurry the boy’s journey to the Belfry – the implications of that would be far-reaching indeed.”

I slowly nodded. If there was a particular sort of sorcery that was damaging to the Dead King’s own methods, we needed to get a precise spell formula for it as soon as possible and spread knowledge of it to every single mage in the Grand Alliance to that could learn it.

“The second truth is this ‘seed’ was aptly named,” Akua continued. “It is not meant to permanently remain in this state, but to eventually dissolve and release another enchantment held under the outer shell.”

“A plague?” I pressed.

“I cannot yet tell, Catherine,” Akua said. “Without a full component kit I cannot even properly gauge how long the shell is supposed to last before dissolving, though from the lack of observable reaction to both silver and cold iron it ought to be more than a lunar month from now.”

Cold iron, as I recalled, was a hindrance to weak magics while silver strengthened some and hindered others. The Dead King’s necromancies, unfortunately, were not affected by it. Some of his early works likely had been, but Neshamah had not been resting on his laurels all these centuries: his necromantic magic was unlike any other on Calernia.

“Shit,” I feelingly said. “It would have killed the boy if he’d ever learned, but I was half-hoping he’d gone mad. We’ll need to ring the alarm, Akua. This is the first time he’s managed to slip a meaningful force behind our lines since the Lord of Ghouls got offed.”

“It is quite possible that Light used in the correct manner will be able to disrupt the enchantments,” Akua reassured me. “If nothing else, that should relieve some of the logistical burden in weeding out the seeded.”

I sighed but conceded the point with a half-nod. Priests were already everywhere in the refugee camps, if we figured out a countermeasure using Light we could further limit the casualties.

“Collect all the seeds you can find,” I told her. “I want to know everything about those things we can, and spares to send the Belfry’s way.”

“I will see to it,” the golden-eyed shade replied. “Shall I keep them until we return to camp?”

“Do,” I said.

There was not much I could do with one, save asking for the opinion of Sve Noc – which I’d rather do when we were safe back in camp anyway, along with my usual nightly communion. Out here in the open, there was no telling what might be lurking. I left Akua to the labour, dragging myself up and limping away. Night had fallen in earnest, and under the starlight sky I headed back towards the boy and my knights. And the priests as well, as I’d forgot. One of them was leaning over Tancred, back hiding what his hands were doing, and I frowned. The Light had already proven unable to help, and though the House Insurgent were loyalists I’d rather not have them putting around a fresh Named with highly destructive inclinations. I hastened my steps, and only when I was within a dozen feet did the priest notice my approach. He withdrew his hand, looking embarrassed. He’d been smoothing away the boy’s last tufts of hair. It was the younger of the two Brothers, I recognized that much though I’d never caught either’s name.

“Don’t,” I said, and gestured, for him to move away.

He did with great swiftness and looked ill at ease under my glare.

“I apologize, Your Majesty,” he murmured. “It’s, only – I have a little brother his age, my queen. He’s just a kid, isn’t he? Even though he burned the village, he’s just a kid.”

My expression softened. I’d not noticed earlier, but the priest couldn’t have been more than twenty himself. His robes were slightly askew, like they’d not been made for someone with his exact frame, and he moved a little jerkily. Embarrassed and a little intimidated, I felt it safe to assume.

“I don’t fault your kindness,” I said. “But after a day like this one, waking with a stranger’s hand on his brow might be... ill-received.”

The priest might have ended up with a black-rimmed hole in his chest, even Tancred had woken up still in the grips of his nightmare. Although, from the looks of it, that had passed. He no longer moved or flinched in his sleep, and his breath was slow. Nearly imperceptible.

“My apologies once more, Your Majesty,” the priest repeated.

I waved it away.

“Hold on to the kindness,” I said. “It’s rarer than rubies, these days. Only add a little caution to it, would you?”

I patted his shoulder as I limped past him, feeling him go still as stone. My score of knights had dismounted, for it’d be absurd for them to remain mounted for hours, and the horses had been tied to a log in the distance. They moved as little as the rest of us, the stillness having caught up to even the animals. Brandon Talbot was long gone, but he’d left one of his officers to lead my escort. Figuring I might as well inform the man we’d be here for some time still, I picked out the man in question – George Redfern, as I recalled. Helm on, the knight was looking up at the moonless sky but even through the steel had little trouble hearing me arrive. My limp was not quiet.

“Your Majesty,” the man bowed.

Starlight caught the edge of his plate armour, revealing a carved passage form the Book of All Things. And, to my mild surprise, what looked like dried blood. Talbot had not mentioned the Order fighting today.

“You’re wounded,” I said.

“The priests have already seen to it, my liege,” he reassured me.

I clenched my fingers and unclenched them.

“Your helm, sir,” I mildly said.

He stuttered out a surprised apology and hurried in taking off his helmet, revealing a reddish mustachioed face. His gorget was loose around his neck. The priest earlier had been a little off too.

“Fuck,” I said. “ Fuck .”

Night howled through my veins as I drank deep from the well.

“My queen?” the impostor asked.

“New kind of ghoul, Neshamah?” I asked in Ashkaran.

The thing that was not George Redfern grinned.

“What gave it away?” the King of Death replied in the same

The lance of Night burned trough his head in the blink of an eye, but every other knight and priest was moving. Flesh squelched and boiled as the ghouls squirmed out of the shells, turning into unnaturally flowing things with claws and gaping maws. There’d been no bodies, so they must have eaten the dead. Replaced them one by one over the span of the afternoon and evening, while I was distracted. Still, for all their vicious cleverness and sharp caution there were only a score of ghouls and one – and night had fallen. My staff struck the ground as I let loose my anger, lines of Night slithering outwards at breakneck speeds – the first ghoul I caught I speared through the flank, and when it tried to flow around the wound I detonated the strand into black flame. Two, three, four, five. Up the count went as they ran, first towards me and then away from me. I kept only the last alive, wrapping it in solid strands of Night instead of killing it. We’d need a containment box for it, but it would be headed towards the Belfry soon enough. I strode towards it, fingers clenched around my staff.

“You ought to know better than to try me by night, by now,” I hissed.

The ghoul laughed, shaking in an unnatural spasm. It’d not been meant to make such a sound.

“Ought I?” the Dead King replied. “Catherine, Catherine. You never watch your back as carefully as you should.”

I stilled. The priest had been standing over the Scorched Apostate, whose breathing had become so faint it almost couldn’t be heard. The slight pressure I felt from the ghoul vanished, the Dead King’s attention with it, and I turned my eyes to the boy on the stone. Who slowly put aside the blanket he’d been huddling under and rose to his feet in his too-large boots. His skin was pale. He was not breathing. The Scorched Apostate’s hand rose and brightly shining flame gathered to it.

“I’m sorry, Tancred,” I quietly said. “Gods, I’m so sorry.”

I should have watched more closely, I should have moved quicker, I should have... I should have protected him.

“But it’s not that kind of a war, is it?” I murmured, Night flooding my veins. “Sometimes, sometimes I just lose .”

I took the part of me that felt like weeping and put it in the box.

I had a Revenant to kill.

Chapter 5: Expired

“It which does not take the knife of mistake by the grip is destined to take it by the blade instead.”
– Drow saying

When I’d still been a girl of sixteen, the closest thing I ever got to a father taught me the basics of killing mages. Hit them quick , Black had said, and don’t give them time to dig in. Hinder visibility and close the distance. Always go for killing strokes, a wounded mage is twice as dangerous. They’d been good lessons, time had taught me, though they shone most against Wasteland practitioners. Unfortunately, they’d been lessons meant to be used against mundane mages. Not Named. Not Revenants.

Those I’d learned to fight the hard way.

The Scorched Apostate’s – no, he was just the Revenant now, lest guilt slow my hand – wrist came down jerkily and a strand of brilliant mageflame shot out towards me. It was quick for a spell of that calibre, both in casting and in movement. I breathed out and let the Night flow through my veins, chasing away the cool touch of spring and sharpening my eyesight. The properties of that spell were still unknown to me, so caution was in order. Would that I’d believed that just a bell ago , the thought came, bitter and unbidden. Dark power roiled in a circle, expanding outwards between myself and the flame as the unstable portal into Arcadia came into being with a quiet keening sound. The Revenant’s other hand rose, flames gathering to it, but I wouldn’t fall for this shallow a trick. I was already grasping the Night with my will when the still-moving strand went around the expanding portal, and I saw no need for great subtlety: I broke the strands that made up the edge of the portal-gate, leaving the working to violently collapse.

The detonation of Night did not disperse the flame, to my surprise, but it at least established that the Revenant’s sorcery was not entirely unaffected the power I wielded: it was knocked off its trajectory. My sharpened sight picked out the way the Night seemed to unravel when in direct touch with the brightly shining flame, much as Night did when in direct contact with true Light. A consequence of source purity , Hierophant had once told me: Light was said to be a gift from Above, while Night ran from the fountainhead of Sve Noc. There was an inherent superiority to the fundamental stuff Light was made of. Magic should not have been able to mimic that effect, of course, but people kept telling me usurpation was the essence of sorcery for a reason. It didn’t matter, though. This was a fresh Revenant, not a fully settled one, so when I painted surprise on my face and let the flame continue streaking towards me – swiftly joined by a second strand – it did not look any further. It did not notice the fine line of Night I had slithering along the ground, the way it formed a loose circle around it.

When the first strand of bright flame came within two feet of me, I breathed out and took a step back through a gate into the Twilight Ways before closing it. I did not look at the kinder, softer starry sky above and simply kept my mind turned to the Night strand I’d left behind in Creation. Using it as a compass, I took five brisk steps forward before raising my staff and opening a gate back into Creation. The Revenant had the time to half-turn towards me before I unleashed a torrent of raw Night from the tip of my staff, aimed straight at its head. Decapitation wouldn’t kill one of them, it’d take more damage than that to break the necromancy animating it, but it would blind it. With the sole two spells it ought to be able to control still out there it should have no – ah, clever Revenant. Even as I stepped back out into Creation, in the same heartbeat it dismissed the sorcery it’d been using and began a fresh spell right on its own face. It wasn’t quite quick enough, or powerful enough: half of my torrent remained untouched and so tore right through the left half of its face.

Even the right side was damaged, because it did not quite have the control to detonate one of its spells so close to itself harmlessly, but for a Revenant such surface damage was mere cosmetic. I struck the ground with my staff, seizing the circle of Night I’d left behind and sharpening it to an edge before pulling it tight: like a razor-sharp garotte, it sprung towards the Revenant at ankle-height like I’d pulled on a noose knot. For a heartbeat the undead Named hesitated. I was close, a mere three steps behind it, and it wanted to kill me. But its legs were being threatened. It chose, and chose poorly. Two spells bloomed, one striking toward the Night-wire and the other towards my face. That single heartbeat had allowed me to take a step forward, and so before the spell towards me could shoot out I slapped away the arm with the side of staff. It knocked the Revenant askew, which disrupted its aim with the other spell as well. As it tried and fail to gain its footing back, I struck out with my free hand even as the Night-wire sliced through its too-large boots – the box’s lid trembled – at ankle height.

My fingers sunk into its chest, coated with Night, and I went looking for an aspect should there be any to take. Two-half formed, I found with cool disappointment, but nothing I could make my own. I still ripped out the shapeless bundle that tasted vaguely of sight, dust trickling down my fingers as I drew back and let the Revenant hit the ground. It had, I found, decent combat sense for one so freshly raised: it’d shot out the two spells after all, and instead of trying to form others from scratch it was now guiding both strands of bright flame straight towards my torso. It would have been a proper monster, I thought, if given time to sharpen. Instead I whisked out all the Night still flowing through me, shaped it and tapped the butt of my staff against its chest once before taking a limping step back. The black flames I’d birthed ate through the flesh as if it were dry kindling, though not so fast that I did not have to take another two painful steps back to evade the strands of bright sorcery still chasing me.

The strands of flame gutted out suddenly, after the second step, but this wasn’t my first Revenant fight. I left my own flame to its work until it was undeniable that more than half the body was gone, only then smothering them out with a twist of will. I breathed out, leaning against my staff, and felt my leg throb with violent pain. It was an almost welcome distraction from the way I’d taken a boy of fourteen under my protection and then he’d not even lasted through the fucking night . Though she made no sound at all, I felt Akua’s presence in the Night as she hurried at my side. Too late for the fight, which had felt like it lasted an hour but in practice couldn’t even have lasted a long prayer’s length. The hem of her dress sweeping the wet grass and stoe as she slowed her pace, the shade came to stand at my side. She followed my gaze, which had dipped beyond Tancred’s broken corpse to the mutilated remnants of the ghouls who’d eaten and impersonated my escort.

If she offered me sympathy – pity by another name – Gods forgive me, but I’d find a way to put her back into the godsdamned cloak. I was in no mood for platitudes.

“A new breed of ghouls,” Akua said, tone calm. “Impersonators?”

I breathed in, breathed out. Good. Yes, there were more important matters at hand than the way I felt like screaming.

“Yes. They were slightly off,” I said. “Too small, maybe? It was hard to tell.”

“It might be a matter of mass,” she suggested. “It tends to be one of limitations for shapeshifters.”

“Sisters make it that those are too expensive to make often,” I grunted back. “They weren’t anything to boast of in combat, not like the war-breeds, but that’s clearly what not they’re meant for.”

“The presage boxes the Arsenal makes can be used to weed out such impostors,” Akua noted. “Assuming those ghouls are, in fact, still necromantic constructs.”

“They are, the Dead King was able to speak through one. But the boxes glow when there’s any undead within a hundred feet, Akua,” I skeptically said. “Sure, this far behind our lines that’ll work as a test but out there on campaign? I’ll be damned if they don’t be turn into lanterns you can’t even put out.”

“We might need to rely on priests until more precise instruments can be created, then,” the shade said. “Regardless, as a preliminary to deeper studies you’ve left enough of the corpses that they can be tested for baser weaknesses.”

“Back to camp, then,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “We’ll put the bodies in the Night. Do the same with the villagers, and some of the building materials as well. We’re trying to recover more than the seeds now: we’ll have to see if they can reproduce the Revenant’s sorcery as well.”

“Agreed,” Akua said. “It can be done within half an hour, I’d wager. If you would retrieve your mount?”

I breathed in, breathed out. The horses, the one’s that’d not moved much. They still hadn’t, so they’d probably been killed, but I’d have to make sure.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I can do that.”

The golden-eyed woman stood at my side, still as only a shade could be. Waiting for me to move first. I took a step, fingers taut around the yew, and caught sight of the horse blanket still on the flat stone where the boy had been sleeping.

“ Fuck ,” I hissed out.

Leaving my staff to stand unnaturally upright in my wake, I strode away. Even with only one woman for audience it would have felt childish to throw it down. Yet the urge to just break something was consuming my hand, the desire so strong Night was flickering around my hands without having been called upon.

“I should have caught it, Akua,” I said. “ I should have godsdamn caught it . I’m getting slow on the uptake. Worse yet I’m getting sloppy. I should have dragged him back to camp immediately even if he had to ride with the survivors the whole way. Instead I waited here for you and the kid got killed because I figured we could take it slightly easy just once.”

I was starting to make mistakes, and I couldn’t afford mistakes.

“Yes,” Akua Sahelian frankly said. “You should have.”

It should have angered me, the way she confirmed my disgrace without so much as a speck of hesitation, but it didn’t. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to lose my grip around her if I’d not been willing to suffer that sort of appraisal in the first place.

“I wouldn’t fallen for something like this in Iserre,” I said. “Or even in Salia. I’m losing my touch.”

I’d run rings around the Pilgrim and the Tyrant, but now a pack of fresh ghouls was enough to snatch a boy under my protection? I would have called it humiliating, if the greater failure here wasn’t that a kid had been slain and put down again, so instead I just called it shameful.

“The Graveyard was the span of a single night,” Akua said. “Salia of a few evenings – the parts that mattered, at least.”

I turned a hard glare on her, but she did not bat an eye. Why would she? She’d faced me down when I’d come at her with steel and Winter, with Name and host. She had no fear of my temper, this one.

“If you use even the sharpest sword in the world every single day, it is only a matter of time until its edge grows dull,” the shade told me.

“We’ve all been in the same war, Diabolist,” I snarled. “That’s not an excuse.”

Because the heroes weren’t faltering, were they? Or Archer, or Hierophant, or even grizzled old Klaus Papenheim – who’d lost so much it sometimes beggared my comprehension as to how he got up in the morning.

“You have been the preeminent general in Hainaut’s defence for more than year,” Akua evenly replied, “while also acting as captain and peacemaker for Named or Blood of every stripe, serving as one of the chief strategists of the Grand Alliance and, all the while, being the diplomatic broker between it and the Empire Ever Dark.”

“That-”

“I am by no mean excusing you, Catherine,” Akua interrupted, meeting my anger without blinking. “This is a failure, and an even starker one is the way you came to make this one in the first place. You were warned by Adjutant that you could only take so much on your shoulders without running yourself ragged. You did not heed his words.”

“Didn’t I?” I snapped. “I as good as handed over Callow and the negotiations for the Accords to Vivienne. Hakram sifts through every single report and letter before they make it to my desk, culling what doesn’t need me in particular – Hells, I haven’t seen an actual list of our supply stocks in a year, only summaries. Indrani and her band are handling finding the new Named, Masego and Roland are running the Arsenal. I don’t even strike beyond our defensive lines anymore: we send out bands of five!”

I panted quietly, the tirade having set my lungs aflame.

“How much more can I possibly delegate?” I asked. “I’m not whining, Akua, I’m genuinely asking – how much more of this can I possibly delegate ?”

“Turn over full command of the Third Army to General Abigail,” the golden-eyed shade answered without missing a beat.

“She’s not there yet,” I said. “Not against-”

“Then demote her, or name someone able in her stead,” Akua said. “You are making, dearest, an old mistake of my people.”

“Haven’t raised any flying fortresses, have I?” I scoffed.

“You have warred with the same enemy for too long, fought him too often,” she said, tone flat. “The Dead King is learning your back of tricks, your art of war. You are teaching your strengths and weaknesses to the Enemy, Catherine, and it is learning. That you tire, that you grow impatient, that sometimes kindness is what moves your hand instead of practicality.”

The thing was, Merciless Gods, that she might just be right. I wanted to dismiss her, to ask who if not me, to tell her that insisting on seeing Creation always through the eyes of the Wasteland would lead her to mistake after mistake. Except she’d not been the one to slip-up, had she? And she might not have been the only one to notice I was getting tired, either. Was that why Razin and Aquiline had started pushing me again, testing boundaries I’d thought settled? The Dominion’s nobles, as a rule, were not the kind of people who’d let a weakening warlord keep the reins. My own people hadn’t said anything, but would they? To Callowans, I was still the Black Queen. If it looked like I was slipping, how many of them would simply assume a fresh game was afoot?

“You need to step back,” Akua said. “Sharpen your edge once more and return to the field only on your own terms. Else you will bury yourself in a grave you insisted on digging every shovelful of yourself.”

I gestured sharply at her, before limping back to my staff, and she did not say more. Adjutant, I thought, would have gently kept prodding until I either agreed or dismissed. Unlike him, Akua Sahelian was well-acquainted with the sin of pride: the shade said nothing that would further bruise mine. She would not bring this up again, I knew, for which I was almost grateful. I’d turn to Hakram for advice over this, trusting in the clarity of his gaze where mine grew muddied, but I would be able to move towards the decision on my own terms. For the grace of Akua’s approach I was almost grateful, yes, but also bitterly angry. Because if I could have had this, the best of her, without the rest?

“Sometimes,” I said, tone low and fierce, “I wish you...”

She’d been a master at keeping her thoughts away form her face even before she’d gained the ability to shape it at will, but the sudden stillness of it gave her away. Surprise.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, shaking my head.

A hundred thousand souls, for which there would be a price long in the taking. That much was an absolute truth, a bedrock. A look passed through the golden eyes, one that straddled the line between loathing and yearning. I had, once more, offered artless cruelty. Akua Sahelian was too good a liar not to have caught it’d been genuine feeling that moved me to speak.

“I’ll find my horse,” I said, cutting through the stillness. “And take care of the corpses here. I’ll leave Marserac to you.”

Golden eyes met mine and only then did she incline her head.

“As you say,” Akua Sahelian murmured.

—

We took the Twilight Ways back to camp, laden with corpses kept in the Night.

That sort of capacity was one of advantages the bounty of my patronesses boasted compared to the Light, which tended to be its superior in direct applications and confrontations. Dimensional pockets were usually the province of talented mages, who required significant power and resources to establish them, or of Named – Black, for example, had been able to carry quite the arsenal in his shadow when he’d still been the Black Knight. It was a rarer ability in heroes than villains, though not unheard of. The Myrmidon had one, as I recalled. Having a domain could allow Named to cheat, too, if they were clever enough and its nature allowed. It was still a rather rare skill, in the larger scheme of things, and one priests were patently incapable of learning. In contrast, knowledge of how to create such a space in the Night was considered a useful but hardly uncommon Secret among the Mighty. It required a certain amount of power not held beneath the lesser ranks of the Mighty, but aside from that little was needed to have one save knowledge of the trick.

The warm breeze of the realm I’d seen the birth of turned into outright wind, when flying on Zombie’s back, but I hardly minded. The noise of it against my ears was drowning out all thoughts save for the most disjointed, too much of a distraction for a brooding mood to truly seize me. Akua, once more on swan’s wings, was keeping pace with me further down. We’d used the same crack to slip through into Twilight, so like me she’d not need the use of a gate to return to Creation – or, indeed, to be guided towards an exit beyond what the starlit compass provided. It was the subtler means of using this realm, though in some ways also the most difficult of the two; for there were two ways to use the Twilight Ways for travel, at least that we’d grasped so far.

The first was rather similar in nature to using Arcadia, the making of a gate using power. The crux of the difference was in the ease of use: to enter Arcadia there’d been need of either a powerful ritual by mages taught in that branch of sorcery, or that a sufficiently powerful fae intervened. Oh, there were natural places of alignment between Arcadia and Creation where anyone could cross through freely – there was one near Refuge, and allegedly one in the deeps of the Brocelian Forest – but those were rare and the fae often made sport of those who ventured though. In contrast, the Twilight Ways had always been meant to be used for travel: they welcomed such use, encouraged it and enabled it. Mages found it easy to open a temporary small gate without even a ritual if the fabric of Creation was thin enough where they tried, and even elsewhere the amount of power needed to form such a gate was significantly smaller than if one had tried the same with Arcadia. More importantly, it required less skill. It’d been described to me as the Ways reaching out and meeting the spellcaster halfway, helping them... anchor, for lack of a better term.

And it was not only mages who could succeed at this. It was possible with Night as well, though the Mighty had admitted to me that drow seemed to need a certain knack to be able to do so no matter how powerful they were. Said knkack seemed, to my amusement, to run particularly strong among the Losara Sigil as well as another band of familiar souls: the Longstride Cabal in the far north, who’d once tried to hunt me in Great Strycht. Light could open a gate as well, though once more there seemed to be some ineffable requirement we poorly understood: the Lanterns could create such gates almost to a man, while Procerans struggled greatly and my own House Insurgent had proved incapable of consistent results. No matter the provenance or power, though, all had the benefit of what some Arlesite poet had named the ‘ starlit compass’ . Anyone entering the Twilight Ways with a clear destination in mind would feel the call of that destination ahead of them, and known where to weave a gate out. Not so accurately as I had when I’d been Sovereign of Moonless Night, but usually within a mile of where they intended to arrive.

This was also the method by which permanent gates could be established, though we’d found that to be chancy business. A physical, permanent gate tended to disrupt every other kind of gating in the region around it and they were finicky beasts besides. Hierophant had nearly lost an arm trying to make a second one, afterwards telling me that the Ways had somehow been displeased by him being the architect of more than one. The Witch of the Woods, on the other hand, had forged one on the outskirts of Salia in an afternoon’s work and without any difficulty whatsoever. We still knew so little about the Ways, in the end, and perhaps come better days we’d be able to spend the scholars to plumb the depths of the secrets but as it was the Belfry had too much on its plate to be able to spend many hours on it. Besides, I was disinclined to complain too much of the eccentricities of Twilight when one of them was the realm’s active antipathy for the Dead King and all his works.

The second manner of using the Ways was the one Akua and I had used tonight, which Archer – who’d effectively pioneered it, and still remained a finer practitioner of than anyone save perhaps the Grey Pilgrim himself – had named sidling . Those of us with senses that were not entirely physical could often sense where the fabric of Creation thinned, but with practice it could be learned to feel out where there were... cracks between Creation and the Twilight Ways. Cracks one could slip through when they were found, though they were ephemeral things and particularly capricious where gates of any sort had been recently used. It could take some time to find the cracks, and often required some luck as well as fine senses, which was why near everyone using the method was either Named or nonhuman. Given the difficulties involved one might be tempted to dismiss sidling as an inferior form of travel, save for two facts: sidled paths through the Ways were measurably faster and more precise than those come of gates, and there were also completely traceless.

A Twilight gate, even only a temporary one, could found by scrying, rituals or even just having a sufficiently sensitive entity close when it happened – whenever we used them to deploy troops against the Dead King, the surprise was strategic and almost never tactical. Our presence was known ahead of being seen, always. Archer, on the other hand, had once sidled out of the Ways with her entire band with only a crumbling wall between her and the Prince of Bones and the Revenant hadn’t had a clue before she shot it in the back of the head. Not that it’d killed the thing, but it’d been a gallant effort. Beneath me, the black swan Akua had shapeshifted into began a graceful arc downwards and I led Zombie into the same. The wind’s howl picked up, until my mount landed at a gallop and obeyed the touch of my hand by folding in her wings. I pressed down against her mane even as Akua’s graceful form passed between what seemed to be two raised stones and disappeared.

Zombie navigated the slope leading down to the raised stones and slipped between them: a heartbeat later, after a sensation like a hand passing through my hair, we were on Creation again.

As a testament to the accuracy of sidling, we’d emerged a mere twenty feet away from the camp’s main gate. Akua’s elegant landing had seen her rise into human shape again, and she caught up to me after I reined in my horse’s heady gallop to a halt. By the time the shade was once more at my side, a frown had made its way onto my face: I was looking at the camp, and not liking what I was seeing. The outer defences were untroubled, remaining both well-manned and vigilant. The army camp’s layout was a recent advance, a merging of the Belfry’s advances in temporary warding and the demands of military efficient: four interlocked squares, all sharing the same initial lines of defence. First a ditch dug into the ground, followed by a thing stripe of solid ground leading to a second ditch, itself leading directly into a traditional Legion palisade, bolstered by watchtowers. The stripe of solid ground between ditches had stone markers wedged in at regular intervals, carved with a runic ward that would produce a loud bell-like ringing sound as well a begin glowing should there be movement within the span of the ward.

The teeth of the defence were at the bottom of the second ditch: spikes might not do much against undead, but the gouts of flame from enchanted metal rods and the Light-infused stones could turn the bottom of the palisade into a brutal killing yard.

The warding stones had not been activated, and atop the palisade the watchful gazes of a mixture of Callowan and Proceran soldiers were not something I found any fault in. It was the pulsing lights at the heart of the camp, where the four squares interlocked, that had me frowning. Each of the squares held its own separate set of three large-scale protection wards – against scrying, vermin and illusions – but they were also connected to the central array near my own tent. That array was mostly there to serve as a stabilizer, but it could also be used to forcefully purge power that accumulated in any of the wards because of imprecisions in how they were laid. Essentially it was a pressure valve we could activate before the wards started breaking down from the impurities, though the act of release itself sent out a pulse of power that tended to screw with all the lesser enchantments and wards within the camps so we very much avoided using it if we could. Yet it’d been activated tonight, that much was clear from the way there were still glimmering lights above the centre of the camp.

Likely more than once, too, for the leftover sorcery to be this visible.

“Akua?” I prompted.

“It was activated when there were no accumulated impurities to purge,” the shade said, sounding displeased.

She would be, having personally set down the central array this ought to have turned into a proper mess.

“And what would that actually do?” I asked.

“Still send out a pulse of sorcery,” Akua said. “Yet it would be weaker, and the sorcery would be drawn from wards that are functioning as intended. Likely it would damage them, perhaps even crack the wardstones.”

I vehemently cursed in Kharsum. The materials for those were damned expensive, as you couldn’t just carve runes and lay enchantments on any slab of sandstone grabbed from the side of the road if you wanted to make proper wards: you had to get materials from places where power of one sort or another had flowed for a long time. Even worse, it was the labour of weeks if not months to both anchor the ward in the stone and then align that ward with the rest of the wardstones so they’d bolster each other instead of conflict.

“Unless my general staff and Princess Beatrice suddenly went mad, they’ll have an explanation for it,” I said, in a tone that implied they damn well better have an explanation for it.

Ahead of us the watch had seen us lingering in front of the gate, and by the sounds of it recognized our admittedly distinctive appearances. Hails were sent out and I answered with my raised staff, which was enough to get the gates open. A group of five Lanterns, twice as many Proceran fantassins and what looked like one of the Third Army’s mages bid us to approach, the mage holding a presage box in her hands.

“There is someone else with the authority to order such purging,” Akua pensively said.

She was right, I considered as we entered the camp and the gates thunderously closed behind us. There was one more.

Which meant, like as not, that the White Knight was back early.

Chapter 6: Equivalent

“Fairness is the refrain of the lazy, the inept, the heroic. Anyone unwilling to stack the deck and murder the judge to seize victory has no place wielding any real power.”
– Dread Emperor Callous

I’d seen enough presage boxes by now I could tell who it was from the Workshop that’d made them. The Blind Maker’s carved enchantments were in beautifully fluid cursive, like the High Tyrian they derived from, and they felt warm to the touch. The Bitter Blacksmith – the heroine, not her villain brother at the Morgentor – chiselled in hers with swift, impersonal precision while avoiding flourishes. She had little taste for such work and always sought to finish it as quickly as was possible without compromising quality. The Hunted Magician, whose work was being held up in front of me right now, took to the craft with the same amount of cryptic paranoia that was his signature in everything else. Though the symbols he used were some sort of ancient Mavii runes and like much of that ancient people’s work they were as much art as function, within them the villain carved entirely unnecessary and unrelated symbols. Masego had told me that carving those signs in any order but what it must have originally been done in would make the box fail to function, sounding about as impressed by this as he’d been miffed.

The runes on the side, which I fancied to look like a wheel woven from winds when taken in all at once, remained inert even when brought close to me. The mage from the Third Army – a lieutenant, by the stripes – tested Akua as well before drawing back with a sharp nod at the rest of the force surrounding us. She saluted me, pointedly not looking at Akua more than she needed to. Blonde, that woman, I noted. Liessen did tend to be fair-haired.

“Your Majesty,” she greeted me in Chantant. “Lieutenant Eve Baldry, tenth company. I’m currently under loan to Captain Raphael Twice-Drowned of the Ardeni Guard.”

Fantassins, then, not proper Volignac foot. The ten soldiers who’d come along with the Lanterns and the lieutenant had undeniably had that look about them, it must be said. It wasn’t a question of equipment, not anymore, as Cordelia had with my enthusiastic blessing begun offering to pay the mercenary companies with good steel the moment trade with the Kingdom Under opened again. Nowadays fantassins were not significantly better or worse off in equipment than Proceran regulars, though the personal armies of the princes and princesses still boasted superior arms as well as training. But where regulars and sworn men wore the colours of some royalty or another, fantassins wore marks just as garish as the names of their leaders and companies. As a rule, the more outlandish the names and colours the longer they’d been in the mercenary trade, which meant the eye-watering shades of orange and green on their feathered helms were a good sign.

Any soldiers wearing colours that bright in a war against Black’s legions would get a goblin arrow in the throat before the campaign’s first night was over, but the Principate had fought a different sort of wars in the days before the Dead King. The Ardeni Guard was not familiar to me as I knew only the most distinguished of the companies in Hainaut, like the Grands Routiers and Hermosa Foxes. I’d taken Klaus Papenheim’s solid advice and left Princess Beatrice Volignac to handle the fantassins along with southern Procer process as a whole, which meant I was not forced to entertain half a hundred swaggering captains for meals regularly but also that I was only passingly knowledgeable about that particular slice of our forces. I cast a curious glance at the Lanterns – faces painted white and gold and built like they’d spent the better part of their lives in a shield wall instead of a temple – but got no introduction out of them, only respectful nods. The formal priesthood the Dominion answered to only the Gods Above, in principle, and not even the Holy Seljun could command something of them should they be disciplined. In practice they tended to be receptive to requests from the Blood, though not to the point of outright subservience. The only person I’d ever seen the warrior-priests take a knee for was the Grey Pilgrim.

To me they offered respect but no great deference, and to use them on the field I usually needed to pass the order down to them through Aquiline or Razin. Inconvenient, but given how brutally effective they’d proved against undead I’d keep my complaining down to a pittance.

“Well met, lieutenant,” I replied in Lower Miezan. “I don’t suppose you could tell me what the lights above are about?”

“Above my paygrade I’m afraid, ma’am,” the blonde mage said. “I heard there was a scuffle, but my orders didn’t come with a briefing attached. Captain Raphael might know, though, they’re in charge of the gate for the first night rotation.”

I frowned. I was more inclined to head directly to the heart of the camp and interrogate someone in charge than stop by for a chat with a fantassin captain, but the casualness of the mage’s reply was surprising me. She did not seem concern in the slightest.

“Muster wasn’t sounded?” I asked.

“It wasn’t,” Lieutenant Baldry confirmed.

Akua hummed out in amusement.

“The White Knight has returned, hasn’t he?” she asked.

The Callowan lieutenant turned a cold glare to the shade, long enough to acknowledge a question had been asked before turning to me to answer it.

“Lord White returned about half a bell ago, ma’am,” Lieutenant Baldry agreed. “He’s got another two Named with him, though I can’t say I recognized either.”

I could have said I was warned of another’s coming by the sound of footsteps, but that would almost have been untrue. The sound of boots on earth was a small thing compared to the almost aggressive loudness of what the approaching soldier was wearing: there was a good coat of mail somewhere under there, and a cuirass, but it was almost hard to see under the green-and-orange striped vest that went down to their thigh, which were in turn covered by bouffant pants going down to the knees that added bright blue to the palette. None of the... frills, though, seemed to hinder movement: the pants were tucked into good steel greaves, and the vest was close enough to the body it shouldn’t get caught in anything when a sword was being swung. The long dyed hair, half orange and half green with two small stripes of blue, was the finishing touch to the ensemble, framing an almost comically unremarkable face. The fantassins parted for them, which allowed me an easy guess.

“Captain Raphael?” I asked in Chantant.

Gods, let them be the captain. I was not sure my eyes could physically take the amount of garishness it would take for the captain to out-peacock this one.

“We meet once more, Black Queen,” the Proceran boldly replied. “A strange turn of fate, that would see us fight side by side when we were once enemies.”

I smiled blandly, wondering if I was meant to have any clue at all who this was beyond some mercenary captain. Still, it wouldn’t do to let anyone know I was confused.

“Yes,” I gallantly tried. “That is true.”

At my side Akua’s stance stiffened the slightest bit, which was the Sahelian equivalent of uproarious laughter at my expense. All right, so maybe it’d not been the finest of my illusions.

“Twice-Drowned?” I prodded, cocking my head to the side.

“When the grounds collapsed at the Battle of Trifelin, I fell into an underground well,” Captain Raphael smiled. “Along with a few hundred pounds of stone. Yet it was still more pleasant an evening than being subjected to your tender mercies at the Battle of the Camps, Your Majesty.”

Trifelin was, from what I recalled, a major defeat that Princess Rozala had been inflicted in the early months of her defence of Cleves the first time she’d been charged with the defence of the principality. It’d been a hard setback that could have turned into a proper disaster had heroes not held the rearguard of the retreat. Impressive they’d survived that mess when standing in the thick of it, much less the implication they’d been on the field at the Camps when I’d opened the gate into Arcadia and dropped a lake on the crusaders. Someone to keep an eye on , I decided. Survive enough scraps by the skin of your teeth, these days, and a Name might not be too far ahead.

“You may rest assured, captain, that when lakes next fall you’ll be on the side welcoming it,” I said, tone droll. “And as it happens, I’ve questions you might have the answer to.”

“It would be my pleasure, Your Majesty,” the captain replied with a sweeping bow.

I took a step forward, Akua falling in behind, only to found Captain Raphael had offered me their arm. How long has it been since someone tried that? I wondered, baffled and just a little charmed. I took the offered courtesy and we walked towards the closest watchtower, where a brazier was being used to roast meat in a way that would have seen a legionary of my armies harshly reprimanded for. Fantassins, though, had different standards of discipline.

“I have heard that the White Knight returned,” I began.

“Indeed,” the captain agreed. “Along with the Valiant Champion and a girl from parts unknown.”

I forced my face to remain calm, my fingers to remain unclenched. The Valiant Champion, huh. Hanno was usually cleverer than this when bringing strays home – that I’d not skinned that so-called heroine alive and made a cloak out of the leather was already showing great restraint, as far as I was concerned. The Champion was an ally in the fight against Keter, and so would be extended all courtesies and privileges that the Truce and Terms required of me. Yet I’d rather eat my own hand than offer a thimble more to that woman, and that was not an enmity that would ever be buried.

“And it was Lord Hanno who ordered the use of the warding array?” I asked.

Raphael nodded and leaned in close, lowering their voice.

“I am told there was some manner of infiltration by the Dead King,” the captain said. “It was quickly dealt with through use of the sorcery that lies at the heart of the camps, though that section still remains closed.”

“Casualties?” I bluntly asked.

It wasn’t that Neshamah wasn’t capable of subtlety: he was, and often the costs of missing his quieter schemes were the stuff nightmares were made of. On the other hand, even if Hanno had ridden in with providence at his back to unmask the Hidden Horror’s latest ploy this seemed too sloppy of an attempt to feasibly have lasted on the long term. Which meant this wasn’t an infiltration attempt, it was strapping goblinfire to a sapper’s back and sending him running at a gate. The Dead King was always willing to trade lives or resources for corpses, even at seemingly ruinous rates.

“I know not, Your Majesty,” Captain Raphael said. “Though I was told the central camp was closed by the Deadhand’s order, so your man ought to have the answers you seek.”

He usually did, truth be told. I’d come to sincerely believe that the Empire’s occupation of my homeland might have led to widespread chaos and rebellion within a few years, if Scribe hadn’t been at my father’s side. Like Black, who’d never settled in a Callowan city to rule the kingdom from, I’d been forced to discharge a great many responsibilities from a glum succession of army camps, small towns and fortresses – without Hakram keeping everything organized even as we moved, it would have all gone to shit with remarkable haste. Even now, he tended to know more about what was going on in the camp than I did.

“Then I will seek him in turn,” I said. “I thank you for the conversation, Captain Raphael.”

Taking the hint, they adroitly extricated their arm from mine and offered another gallant bow.

“Until fate deigns to reunite us, Black Queen,” the mercenary smoothly replied.

While I wasn’t always the, uh, sharpest when it came to picking up on this sort of thing I was pretty sure I was being flirted with. One hand, well, Alamans . They’d try to seduce the Choir of Contrition, if the angels showed enough leg. On the other hand, it was kind of flattering. It’d been a while since someone without a Name had tried their hand at that with me, even so superficially. It put the slightest of springs to my step as I left the fantassin captain behind. Akua did not say a word, though she did begin walking at my side instead of remaining a step behind as we headed deeper into camp.

“Hakram’s on board with whatever the White Knight pulled, sounds like,” I murmured.

Reassuring, that. I’d come to put a surprising degree of trust onto Hanno’s shoulders, since the Peace of Salia, but it was not the kind of trust that went without questioning or disagreement. Adjutant, though, I trusted implicitly. I might as well begin questioning my own limbs, should I not. If he’d backed this there was a good reason it for it.

“The Sword of Judgement has proved a capable ally,” Akua conceded. “And unlike some of his more rambunctious colleagues, he is not one to resort to collateral damage when there are other approaches to be had.”

That’d been a pleasant surprise, since while heroes tended to be careful with the lives of others they tended to be a great deal less so with equipment. Even when that equipment was very, very valuable. It was a cold hard truth that there were artefacts and siege machinery in this camp that were worth more than soldiers, and though that was an ugly thing to face it came with being a professional soldier. I could send for reinforcements, if what was lost was lives, but there were only so many wardstones to distribute across all the fronts and they were not easily replaced.

“He’s a solid one,” I grunted in agreement.

I wouldn’t have been able to pull off the Terms and Truce without him, that much couldn’t be denied. There’d been heroes that simply would not have been willing to deal with a villain if he’d not leant me the weight of his seal of approval, and that would have led to deaths. Even just a few of those would have made it seem like I was trying to conscript Named into my service, which would have gone... badly. Tariq still had a lot of pull with heroes he’d helped or saved when they were younger, that much couldn’t be denied, but as word of my raising him from the dead at the Graveyard had spread so had rumours that he was somehow under my influence. He was no longer the unquestioned grandfatherly fount of wisdom he’d once been to his side, though his record over the last two years had certainly begun redeeming the dip in his reputation.

The avenue leading to the heart of the camp was guarded by checkpoints at regular intervals and it was not long before we found our first one, along with a proper company of my soldiers. The captain commanding it knew about as much as Captain Raphael had, which wasn’t much, but she sent a runner ahead of us along before providing us with a full line in escort. I did not need more defending inside my own camp, but twenty legionaries at your back did tend to expedite most conversations. We continued deeper in, the sparse conversation I’d shared with Akua petering out entirely. I spoke with my soldiers instead, learning with pleasure that the line’s lieutenant was an old hand from the Fifteenth. He’d been from the second wave of Callowan recruits, after Three Hills and Marchford – when Black had essentially emptied the Legion training camps in the kingdom and tossed all those green men my way.

“Lost a finger at Dormer,” Lieutenant Oliver told me almost eagerly. “From one of them Immortals critters, after the Hellhound sent us up the hill.”

“They were hard bastards, even for fae,” I said. “Summer’s finest.”

“Shit name though, no offence Your Majesty,” the veteran snorted, and I grinned back. “After Lady Dartwick nicked those banners, they were pretty moral when the gobbos from ninth company unloaded. Finger got fixed up good anyway, one of them Soninke wizards from Afolabi’s legion put it right back on.”

“Not even a scar?” I teased. “All the best war stories have scars to go with them.”

“Aye,” Lieutenant Oliver mourned. “It tingles a little when there’s magic in the air, I know it, but these fresh pups from after the Folly don’t believe me. Say it’s all in my head.”

“Tell them you have me convinced, next time,” I suggested.

“That ought to make a few of the little pricks piss their armour,” Lieutenant Oliver gleefully said, then remembered who he was speaking to. “Um, Your Majesty.”

I snorted, clapped the man’s shoulder.

“I’ve spent more time on a saddle than a throne, soldier,” I reminded him amusedly. “By all means, make the little pricks piss their armour.”

That got a howl of laughter out of the lot of them, and it was in a better mood that I hit the second checkpoint. Where, looming tall above Osena sworn swords, I found the key to getting answers about what had happened in the camp tonight. No amount of polish would ever remove the scorch marks Summer flame had left on Adjutant’s plate, though as time passed he’d come to like the look. It was distinctive, as was his height even among his own kind. The black, fur-like hair nowadays going down to his jaw on the sides was another distinction, as it was far longer than either Legion or Army regulations would allow. Still, there was a reason he was not known as the Blacksteel: the most distinctive part of all was the fleshless hands, one of sheer bone and the other cast in pale spectral light. Hakram Deadhand had earned his sobriquet twice over, and Dead the Hand remained a favourite to sing among my soldiers.

A few lines had even been added after his scrap with the Baron of Thorns, as his brutal dismantling of the Revenant while reciting orc poetry had made something of an impression. Hakram strode through the Levantine armsmen, either not noticing or caring how a few of them had to hastily move out of the way or been bowled over. His broad face looked relieved.

“Catherine,” he greeted me, arm taking arm in a legionary’s salute. “I’d wondered if you were ambushed. Beastmaster knew little, but it seemed likely.”

“We were,” I darkly replied.

Good mood gone the way of mist under morning sun, I fixed a calm look on my face before dismissing my legionary escort with a few kind words. By the considering look on Hakram’s face, he’d picked up on the general vicinity of how badly my night had gone.

“So were we,” Adjutant added in a low voice as we passed through the checkpoint.

He settled at my right side, so naturally I almost didn’t notice, while Akua took my left. Not an unapt summation of the last two years, I thought.

“What happened?” I quietly asked. “Our defences shouldn’t allow for infiltration, Hakram. We’ve put the stones in every gate, any enchantment he hits our people with should be disrupted.”

“Ghouls slipped in,” the tall orc told me. “A new kind, that can-”

“Shapeshift,” Akua murmured.

Hakram shot her a considering look and she offered back a slight nod.

“Your escort,” Adjutant told me, and it was not a question.

“We have the bodies in the Night,” I said.

A halfwit would have put one and one together, given that much to go on, and Hakram was the very opposite.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Beastmaster said he was just a boy.”

My finger clenched around my staff until the knuckles turned white.

“Sometimes we just lose,” I softly replied, through teeth I did not remember clenching.

It fit, though. I felt like my entire body was clenching every time I thought of the kid I’d had to put down because of my own sloppiness.

“I’ll be seeing what duties I can shake loose, to avoid repeating the mistakes that led do that loss,” I forced out.

As if by coincidence, his flank leaned against mine. It was the most comfort either of us would allow him to give me in public but, trivial as it might seem, I was shamefully grateful for it.

“The presage boxes should have caught them,” I said, and if my voice was a little choked all three of us pretended not to have heard it.

“We’ve found a weakness in our defences,” Adjutant gravelled. “The Order of Broken Bells.”

Akua caught on before me, somewhat unsurprisingly. Generations of her forbears had cut their teeth on this very obstacle, after all.

“Their armour,” the golden-eyed shade said. “The same hymn carvings that disrupt active sorcery prevented the ghouls from triggering the boxes.”

Fuck , I thought. The weakness we could fix, the corpses we could not. I’d lost even more knights, by the sounds of it.

“Talbot?” I asked.

Losing him would be a setback. Not only was he the highest-ranking noble officer in my armies, the man had essentially put the Broken Bells together from scratch. In both politics and war, his death would be a loss keenly felt.

“Getting his eye fixed by the White Knight’s fresh helper,” Hakram replied. “The ghouls were caught out before they could finish what they’d been sent for.”

My eyes narrowed, relief at the Grandmaster of the Broken Bells surviving being shoved at the back of my mind.

“Assassinations, but that’s nothing new,” I said. “Wouldn’t have been worth revealing another breed of ghouls for. They went after the wardstones.”

“They meant to contaminate the lesser array in the Third Army camp,” the orc confirmed. “They were caught out by the White Knight, but the alarm being rung only made them strike out aggressively.”

“Losses?” Akua asked.

“Light,” Adjutant said. “Twenty dead, half again that wounded. They aimed for high-ranking officers but got caught before getting to them. The wardstones from the Third’s camp were hit with some sort of sorcery that Senior Mage Dastardly called ‘poisonous’. He had some difficulty elaborating on this, but was adamant it was a problem.”

I felt Akua gaze’s fall on me.

“Go,” I said. “I’ll want a damage assessment as soon as you can deliver.”

She bowed, more for the eyes peeled on us than anything else, and without another word melted into the nearest shadows.

“So the array purge was used to flush out the ‘poison’,” I said, then flicked a glance at the lights in the distance.

It’d take more than one purge to have that much sorcerous aftermath left behind.

“Whatever shapeshifting trick it is the ghouls use, it is of a nature similar to enchantment,” Hakram replied.

And the sorcery sent flowing out by a purge screwed with enchantments, which was why I disliked using those in the first place.

“It unmasked them,” I mused. “Clever.”

Sounded like Hanno, too. He preferred helping people help themselves rather than sweeping in on a white horse and fixing everything before disappearing into the sunset. Hopefully that hadn’t cost us a few months of vulnerability to the Dead King’s tricks, though. Gods, the vermin wards better be fucking holding at least. The atrocities Neshamah could commit with undead rats and bugs were not something I ever intended to suffer through again.

“I ordered the central camp closed as soon as we learned, but they were already inside,” Hakram told me. “They eat and impersonate people at a distressing rate, Catherine. We think the Barrow Sword and the White Knight’s followers cleared them out, but we’re keeping the camp closed until everyone with access to the stones has been cleared with both Light and sorcery.”

I grunted in approval.

“Full audit of the ranks come morning,” I said. “I don’t care if they grumble, there’ll be no risks taken with something that dangerous. And for the Order-”

“Talbot already offered that every knight should dismount and submit to testing by Light whenever they enter camp,” Hakram told me.

“We’ll see if something less clumsy can be arranged,” I replied.

I had clever enough people in my employ, and if nothing else I could have Razin and Aquiline cut their teeth on the logistics of it. After I shoved them back into the Pilgrim’s tender embrace, they’d hold their commands without my looking over their shoulder. They needed to be prepared to deal with situations like this on their own. This deep in the camp and with Adjutant at my side, we went through the last checkpoints without anyone trying to stop us. Even though the situation had, in principle, already been handled I still wanted to at least speak with Hanno. Besides, since he’d brought in another Named I would prefer having a look at them before too long. Best not to have one of those wandering camp without being able to put a Name and face to them, even if a name wasn’t always forthcoming. The last ring of defences was manned entirely by the Army of Callow, which did tend to end up with those duties by virtue of both being my personal army and the best organized of the troops. When the Iron Prince’s own troops were around it was another story, but Prince Klaus was far from here, holding the northern defence line in our absence.

I got to hit three birds with one stone when the captain in command informed me that the White Knight was currently in the same tent where Grandmaster Brandon Talbot was being healed, supervising the work being done by the healer he’d brought in. It wasn’t a long walk from there, and I knew my way around the camp well: a few moments later I was parting open the tent flap and passing it to Hakram before slipping into the tent. Within a heartbeat of that I saw a half-naked Brandon Talbot try to rise to his feet, to the vocal if inarticulate protest of the two heroes in the tent, but he only stopped when I sharply gestured for him to sit.

“Don’t blind yourself on my account,” I said. “My queenly honour will withstand your staying seated.”

“Much obliged, Your Majesty,” Grandmaster Talbot replied.

He was careful not to move his head this time, having been levied a heavy frown by the healer in front of him.

“The nerves were almost healed,” said young girl mourned. “We’ll have to start over, Sir Brandon. Please remain still, if it pleases you.”

The tent flap closed behind Hakram, who had to bend his neck the slightest bit to avoid his head touching the ceiling of it.

“Catherine,” the White Knight greeted me with a smile.

“Hanno,” I replied, feeling my lips quirk the slightest bit.

It really was good to have him back. Even just sitting on a crate in a leather jerking, keeping an eye on his duckling, the dark-skinned man felt like an island of calm in a chaotic sea.

“I would greet you properly, Your Majesty, but I cannot stay my hand,” the young girl apologized without turning.

And she was young , I saw. Scrawny and that dirty tunic she wore had seen better days, but for all that there was no denying the pulsing potency of the Light she was wielding to help my knight.

“You do me more courtesy by healing Brandon Talbot than a hundred curtsies would scrape together,” I said. “White Knight?”

“Introductions can be seen to when her attention is not elsewhere demanded,” Hanno said. “Though I wager you’ve other questions. I’ve news to give you, regardless.”

“Do you now?” Hakram gravelled from behind me.

“Not so urgent as to need an intermediary, Adjutant,” the White Knight told my second, unmoved.

The relationship between those two was best described as cordial dislike, though I’d never quite managed to put a finger on the source of it.

“What happened, Hanno?” I asked, cutting through the tension.

“After stumbling across one of the ghouls, I did what was necessary to flush out those in hiding before major damage could be done,” he said. “Yet this was part of a greater scheme, Catherine. I’ve been speaking with Prince Klaus, and before coming here I met with the Peregrine.”

My brow rose.

“Tell me,” I ordered.

“The Order of the Red Lion confirmed that the dead were massing for an offensive until an hour ago,” he said. “And now I fully understand why they gathered, and now no longer do.”

“I don’t suppose you intend to share at some point?” I drily replied.

He shot me an amused look.

“I found Pascale here,” he said, gesturing towards the young girl, “with the help of the Valiant Champion after following up on a rumour that Tariq had been seen in the region.”

I’d already made plain my feelings on that woman to the hero, so I saw no need to belabor the point by expressing the again now. Talk of the Pilgrim, though, sparked my interest. The Peregrine had lent his hand to none of the fronts, instead staying true to the roots of his Name and journeying wherever the Choir of Mercy deemed him to be most needed. If he’d really come here, then either we’d narrowly avoided a disaster or we were about to have one on our hands.

“It was a Revenant behind all of this,” Hanno told me. “We named her the Plague-Maker, though besides her Praesi origins and talent in sorcery we know little of her.”

“You found plague seeds as well,” I breathed out.

“It was a scheme in two parts, as far as we can tell,” the White Knight said. “First, after slipping through our defensive lines-”

“Which she shouldn’t have fucking been able to do, Revenant or not,” I bluntly said. “That’s the reason we send the Augur all our oracles, so that she can warn us about shit like this.”

“There was demonic taint on her,” he told me. “Absence, Tariq believes, which might be why she blindsided us. I do not know when the Dead King might have found such a Named-”

“I do,” I replied. “And if it’s from when I believe, she’s not the last one he’ll have in store.”

Malicia herself had once told me that Dread Empress Maleficent II had used demons of absence to avert the disastrous consequences of the three Secret Wars, for after failed invasions of the Serenity a counter-invasion of Ater by hellgate had been imminent. I couldn’t know how many people the general who’d later become Dread Empress had throw to the dogs to avert utter calamity, but considering how ruthless Maleficent the Second had ended up being as a ruler I doubted that it’d be a small number. Hells, considering half the continent was fighting Keter these days and we were still slowly losing I couldn’t even blame her.

“A discussion to be had later, then,” the White Knight said. “Regardless, the undead plagues were meant to draw a significant fighting force south. A large force of zombies was massed around the Plague-Maker, hidden in the wilds, which I believe was meant to attack this very camp.”

“The new ghouls were meant to hit our wards and leadership right before,” I said.

“Exactly,” Hanno nodded. “And, as a precaution, even if we won that battle handily we would be kept occupied by massive breakouts of the seeded plague in Brabant.”

“Which we’d have to move to suppress, even as his armies took a swing at the northern defence line,” I muttered.

It’d been, I thought, a pretty good plan. And it ought to have scrapped this summer as a season for an offensive war even if it didn’t go entirely his way, all at the price of at most a single Revenant.

“You caught the Plague-Maker first, I take it,” I said.

“Tariq found her in a western crossroads town, seeding refugee caravans passing through,” Hanno said. “Rafaella and I caught up with him just as the confrontation began.”

My eyes flicked to the young girl who was, by the looks of it, checking on Talbot’s eye one last time before declaring him healed.

“That is where we found Pascale,” Hanno agreed. “She’d caught on to the Plague-Maker’s work.”

I felt my hackles raise, though I wasn’t quite sure why.

“Hale as you might hope to be, Sir Brandon,” the girl – Pascale, apparently – smiled. “I am finished, if it pleases you.”

“You have my most sincere thanks, Lady Apostle,” the Grandmaster replied, rising to his feet. “If there is anything I can do to repay you-”

“I have already been repaid,” the girl said, “in the only way that matters.”

He bowed to her anyway, for he was a decent man, and offered to give me a report even as he put on a shirt before I bluntly told him to sleep off his healing and find me on the morrow. My shoulders were still tense, and I was not quite sure why. Hakram hovered close behind me, having picked up on my discomfort but being as confused as to the source of it as I was.

“I take it the Grey Pilgrim did as the Grey Pilgrim does,” I said, getting the conversation going again.

“He stepped in to protect me, when I tried to heal the plague,” Pascale happily told me. “My Choosing had already happened, but it is not suited to strife and I was most distressed.”

“He drove the Revenant off and we caught her as she tried to escape,” Hanno elaborated. “She called on the undead she’d been gathering, but we held them off long enough for the pilgrim’s star to shine.”

Meaning Tariq had smote into the ground what must have been at least a few hundred zombies but most likely had been a few thousand. It was easy to forget how fucking terrifying Tariq Fleetfoot could be, when he had the right story had his back.

“Lucky us you’d learned enough of the Light by then to pick up on the plague,” I warmly told the girl.

She blushed.

“I had not, Your Majesty,” she admitted. “My father was a wizard, who taught me of the Three Tells and the Seven Essences. Yet even so, magic would have failed. Yet my prayers were answered by Above, in our hour of need.”

“You are,” I slowly said, “a mage.”

“I was,” the young girl told me with an elated smile. “When I became the Stalwart Apostle the sorcery vanished from my veins, and the Light finally answered my prayers.”

A crack resounded in the room. It had, I dimly realized, come from my staff. My grip had been too tight around it.

“Did they listen to you?” I quietly asked. “When you warned them about the plague?”

I felt the White Knight’s heavy gaze on me but did not meet in. I looked only at this slip of a girl, who was so smilingly alive where the boy was dead.

“They did not,” Pascale sadly said. “But the Heavens did, when I knelt and asked for guidance. And through the Light, I found the way to dissolve the plague.”

This was, I told myself, nothing I should not have expected. A Named – or close enough – in the service of Evil, had been sowing death and preparing to bring about a great woe. It was only natural for the Heavens to put together a Named meant to end those designs, as the girl clearly had been.

“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred,” I said, voice cold, “nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, that act of faith would have killed dozens of thousands.”

The girl looked like I’d struck her.

“Catherine,” the White Knight warned me.

My fingers clenched tighter still around the staff of yew, death made into a marching stick. He’d been a wretched boy, Tancred, but he’d not been wrong . To act instead of pray, to trust his the ugly work of his hands rather than the silent Heavens. How many thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions had stood in this girl’s place over the centuries and seen their faith rewarded only by a grisly death? No, the Scorched Apostate had not been wrong. He’d not been Chosen either, he’d done his own choosing. And the Heavens had damned him for it, so damn the presumptuous fucks for that in turn. Hakram’s hand warmed my shoulder and I closed my eyes for a long moment.

“It’s been a long day,” I finally said. “We’ll speak tomorrow.”

There was a reason I was more than halfway fond of Hanno of Arwad: he looked at me for a heartbeat the nodded.

“Tomorrow,” the White Knight softly agreed, eyes considering.

I walked out of the tent and into the night, Hakram hastening to catch up.

Tancred had not been wrong, I thought, shoulders tight and teeth gritted.

But what did that matter, when he was dead?

Chapter 7: Approach

“Friend and foe know a different man.”
– Helikean saying

The contents of my tent were one of the few splurges of luxury I’d ever allowed myself. The bed was from Orense, whose carpenters were famous even within the Principate, and though it could be folded in two for transport it was nothing like the cots the Legions of Terror used as their standard. It was large enough for two and topped by a good woolen mattress, as even now featherbeds were just too soft for me – I found it difficult to fall asleep in them. A pair of enchanted braziers and a set of magelight lanterns saw to heat and light, while a small sculpted table flanked by a library-box and a few trunks held my personal affairs. That part of my tent was parted from the rest by a heavy curtain sown into the ceiling, keeping it separate from the larger segment where I received others.

The broad desk, which I’d had carved out of Ashuran cedar twice struck by lightning to my exact specifications, had been was the great expense there though I believed it worth ever copper. It’d been Akua that had told me about the cleansing and healing properties of the cedar trees that grew in the shade of Mount Tyro, the mountain where the mage-doctor schools of Ashur had first been raised centuries ago. Masego had added that a lightning strike would bring such properties to the surface, and Vivienne’s people in the Free Cities had found cedar that’d been struck twice being sold by a broker in Mercantis. Whatever the magic behind it, sitting at that desk never seemed to pain my leg no matter how long I did and I tired measurably slower working on it.

The seat behind was naturally the same sinfully comfortable armchair I’d stolen from a Summer count during the Arcadian campaign, my perennial favourite. A pair of less comfortable but prettily sculpted – roaring lionheads for the arms – seats sent to me by Vivienne matched it on the other side. My personal desk was only a part of the large tent, however, as it’d become inevitable that I would have to frequently ‘entertain’ the kind of people who expected luxuries even when at war. The first wooden table I’d used was hacked straight through during either the fourth of fifth assassination attempt of last winter – I couldn’t quite recall, they rather melded into the same general sense of unpleasantness after a while – and the replacement had only lasted two months before I put the Bandit Lord’s head through it, but Archer had been sufficiently amused by that last setback she’d actually carved me one herself.

That oaken stretch was the single most beautiful thing I owned, as far as I was concerned. Though it was broadly rectangular and the surface was still only half-polished, Indrani must have put half a hundred hours into the carvings that adorned it. Four snakelike legs coiled their way up, jaws opened to swallow legionaries as had truly happened when Akua unleashed devils on the Fifteenth before the Battle of Marchford. From there Archer had carved scenes as her fancy struck, without rhyme or reason. The Woe’s battle with the Princess of High Noon abutted depiction of the duelling scene from the Lay of Lothian’s Passing she so enjoyed, the last moments of Larat’s splendid escape were wedged in between the dying gasp of the Kingdom of Sephirah and the view of the Silver Lake from her favourite Laure tavern.

It wasn’t finished, perhaps only two thirds of the sides having been carved and the wood atop the table still being prepared for carvings of its own, and already it was one of the most precious possessions I’d ever owned. My officers and allies had quickly caught on to Indrani’s habit of adding a few carvings whenever she passed through our camp, and it’d become a manner of entertainment for them to make a pretext to visit my tent and try to find the latest additions afterwards. The First Prince had sent a set of ten cushioned seats in matching oak as a gift, which given their delicate craftsmanship were likely worth a fortune, but coin couldn’t buy what it had meant for someone as restless as Archer to have spent so many hours working on a piece meant for me.

There were other adornments to the tent, of course. Heavy tapestries hung from the sides, woven in the Callowan manner – the Hedges style, to be precise, since the thickness of those helped keep the heat in the tent during winter. My people’s tapestries admittedly tended to only depict three things: hunting, the Book of All Things and war. Given that I had little taste for hunting or the Gods Above but more than a few wars under my belt, I’d settled for the last and matched that martial tendency with the grand maps I’d commissioned. Smaller ones of the fronts in Cleves and Twilight’s Pass, larger ones of the Principality of Hainaut and the Kingdom of the Dead. Braziers, sprite-lanterns and a long commode that was admittedly mostly a dump for scroll and parchment stacks – as well as holding a pair of compartments filled with bottles of wine and liquor – finished the last of it.

It was a comfortable dwelling, as had been made necessary by the sheer amount of time I’d spent in it over the last two years.

I rose with dawn and broke my fast on the carved table, wolfing down eggs and rashers as I read through the damage reports from last night’s troubles. Akua sat across from me and we shared a pot of tea in companionable silence as I busied myself frowning at the ink. Most of the damage was superficial but one of the wardstones from the Third Army’s camp, which was where the Dead King’s ghouls had found the most success, had cracked. This was not beyond our ability to fix, but the artefact the ghouls has used to try to contaminate the stone – some sort of sharp obsidian spike that just reeked of sorcery – was still stuck in it. It’d have to be either destroyed or extracted. In destroying it we’d improve our chances of repairing the wardstone, but to extract it we’d have to cut through the stone instead and effectively wreck it permanently. On the other hand, if we could figure out what the spike was we could prepare countermeasures for its next use.

Adjutant joined us just as I finished reading the last of the report, his timing as fatefully impeccable as always, and he claimed a seat at a table. He demurred when Akua offered him a cup of tea, as they’d both known he would. He hated the Nok blends, insisted they made his fangs taste of herbs for days afterwards. Akua had not once, so far, missed an occasion to try to socially maneuver him into being forced to drink a cup regardless. It was easy to tell how well they were getting along on any given day simply by how playful the shade was being about that little game. This morning, though, I gave them no time to get into it.

“Thoughts?” I prompted.

“It’s only the wardstone against scrying that was affected,” Hakram calmly said. “The least important of the three. Carve it, send the spike to the Belfry and lean on the Arsenal to get a replacement sent as soon as possible.”

My eyes moved to Akua.

“Destroy the spike,” the dark-skinned woman replied. “It costs us more than weeks or months exposed to destroy a wardstone: it also costs us the hours spent realigning the array with the replacement stone. Hours that skilled mages would otherwise spend addressing current threats or preparing for those to come.”

“The Dead King seemingly believed he could sink our full ward array with the spike, Lady Akua,” Hakram pointed out. “If we do not learn the nature of the threat, that might just be the case when one is next used against us.”

“The Dead King has millennia of such accumulated tricks and tools to wield whenever he so pleases, Lord Adjutant,” Akua replied. “We cannot and indeed should not attempt to match every single blow with an exact parrying dagger. The superior approach would be tightening security around our wardstones and instead leaning our efforts towards innovations of our own.”

“Our innovations spring from Jaquinite and Trismegistan sorcery,” Adjutant gravelled. “One was forged in the Dead King’s shadow and he is the founding practitioner of the other. We might as well try to drown a shark.”

“However potent a practitioner of sorcery, the King of Death remains a single mage,” the shade argued. “While he can have helpers and acquire the knowledge of others, it is highly improbable for the Dead King’s mastery of the Gift to be so superior as to eclipse every advance come out of the Arsenal.”

I drummed my fingers against the table, thinking in silence. The two of them were, through the locus of an ultimately minor tactical decision, coming to stand in for the two great currents of thought among the strategists of the Grand Alliance. One school of thought, of which the most prominent advocates were Princess Rozala Malanza and Prince Otto Reitzenberg, argued that the Alliance should fight aggressively on a tactical scale but defensively on a strategic one. Stable defensive lines and regular sorties were to serve as way to grind down Keter’s forces in Procer while the Empire Ever Dark held Serolen and raided through dwarven tunnels behind the lines of the dead. All of this was to serve as a method of weakening the Dead King until either the Arsenal created armaments capable of turning the tide or a strategic opportunity to strike at Keter itself was made. The ever-increasing amount of Named joining our ranks had, of late, been added to the arguments. Defence was their creed, until we took the King of Death’s head in his seat of his power.

The other school of thought, which claimed Prince Klaus Papenheim and Lord Yannu Marave as leading lights, argued instead for full offensive war. Their belief was that the Grand Alliance would soon reach the peak of its capacity to wage war and would only be headed into a death spiral if it did not begin scoring decisive blows before that capacity was spent. The doctrine would begin with reclamation of northern Procer by three-pointed offensive, followed by a winter of preparation and then a joint all-fronts offensive into the Kingdom of the Dead while the Empire Ever Dark struck out from its position in Serolen. With enough victories to show for, we could bargain for open dwarven military support and offer them a clean strike at Keter while the Hidden Horror’s armies were tied up on four different campaigns in other corners of his realm. There were half a dozen other variations on how the offensives should be waged, some of them not even involving the Kingdom Under, but the common tie was always the call for offensive campaigning.

Akua was, I knew, very much inclined to agree with the defensive school. Like most Praesi highborn she still saw mages at the most important part of warfare and was generally inclined to believe Named were best suited to creating the kind of breakthrough that’d deliver victory against Keter, either in a study or on the field. Hakram was not quite so clear-cut in his preferences, but for good reason his sympathies tended more the way of the offensive school. While Akua was hardly uninformed, she was not nearly as aware of how fragile the Grand Alliance’s situation truly was as my second. The strain of the war against Keter was being felt across the entire coalition, but most keenly of all in Procer: high taxes, frequent requisitions and lasting restrictions on trade were causing mounting unrest. And that was without even mentioning the waves of refugees in need of settling, for whom sympathy tended to sour very quickly whenever food or room ran low and human nature took its usual course towards the ugly. Hakram tended to favour the aggressive approaches, including getting ready to fight the war now , because he was unsure how long we could keep waging it.

I leaned more towards the offensive school myself, as it happened, but only within limits. The Principality of Hainaut and the last stretches of Twilight’s Pass ought to be reclaimed in full and a proper defensive line raised across all shores that’d be able to prevent large-scale invasion by the dead. Then, and only then, could further aggressive campaigning be considered. Cordelia Hasenbach agreed, as it happened, at least when it came to the reclamation of Hainaut – she was less eager to try taking back the Pass once more, considering the lair of nightmares Neshamah had turned the last fortresses of it into. Regardless, the two of us agreeing and the Grey Pilgrim not opposing us meant that a summer offensive into northern Hainaut was a certainty unless disaster struck beforehand.

As it nearly had, with that seeded plague. We were not unexpected or unseen in our designs.

“Do either of you have anything else to add?” I finally said.

“Our armies will be headed north, to the warded fortresses of the defensive line,” Hakram said. “We can afford the window of vulnerability while we replace the stone.”

“Expanding the ritual repertoire of our mage cadres would be more efficient a use of their time, and the potential gains from breaking the wardstone are limited,” Akua calmly replied.

I sharply nodded, fingers withdrawing from the table. As things currently stood the scrying ward was incontinent but not outright broken, so while the choice shouldn’t be dragged out it did not need to be made immediately either.

“I’ll have a decision by Evening Bell,” I said. “Hakram, what have you got for me?”

“You intended on speaking with the soldiers and officers from the assault formation,” the orc reminded me. “Assembly can be had at half an hour’s notice. Reports will be coming in by the Alliance scrying network at Noon Bell, including Vivienne’s. Lady Aquiline and Lord Razin seek an audience, as does the White Knight.”

He paused for a beat.

“Nestor Ikaroi of the Secretariat arrived during the night as well,” he added. “Along with his usual scribes. He requested audience as well, and mentioned he’d been charged with diplomatic correspondence meant for you.”

My eyebrow rose. I did not ask from who – if he’d known, he would have told me – but it was not from lack of curiosity.

“I’ve the usual disciplinary action and assignment summaries for the Third Army for you to review,” Hakram added, moving on to more mundane matters. “As well as the patrol and guard roster suggestions for the coming month.”

The latter parchments could not be passed on to anyone else, since if they did not have my authority behind them those suggestions would be balked at by our rowdy collation of Proceran, Levantine and Callowan captains. They’d need another read, anyway, to see if someone had tried to favour their own again. The former, though...

“You don’t need to bring me the Third Army summaries anymore,” I grunted. “General Abigail doesn’t need me looking over her shoulder.”

He flicked a considering glance at Akua, whose face was serene as a pond as she drank from her cup of tea. I did not bother to hide my irritation at that when his gaze returned to me, and he clicked his fangs apologetically.

“I doubt she’d agree if asked,” Adjutant said. “I’ll see to it regardless.”

I hummed, sipping at my own cup thoughtfully.

“Send for Secretary Nestor first,” I decided.

The Blood could wait, it’d do them some good, and when Hanno came by for our chat I’d rather have it with a drink in hand. Past Noon Bell, then, which wasn’t a bad idea anyway. Though the White Knight did not get reports the way I did, relying on the First Prince for information on that scale, he did correspond with a great many heroes who, as heroes were wont to, found out all sorts of hidden things. Often what he learned there was little better than gossip, but on occasion there was treasure buried among the dross. Akua took her leave without needing to be prompted, heading out to organize the repairs of the lesser damage on the wardstones. Though Senior Mage Dastardly was still the ranking mage of the Third Army, he was suborned to Akua’s authority as the informal commander of our coalition’s mage cadres. Both the Proceran wizards and the Levantine binders – those Abigail hadn’t slaughtered like lambs, anyway – took orders from her as well, within certain limits.

From experience I knew Secretary Nestor Ikaroi would be awake even at this hour, as the Delosi askretis hardly ever slept even at his advanced age. I was, it had to be said, rather fond of the man. He was polite, useful and his dedication to recording history accurately bordered on being principled. It was therefore with a smile that I greeted him when Hakram ushered him into the tent, half-rising from the desk where I’d migrated before inviting him to sit across. He did so after a slight bow, the shallowness of it as much a reminder of his high status in Delos as the two stripes tattooed across each of his cheeks. One black and one blue, traditionally the highest rank one could rise to within the Secretariat.

“Queen Catherine,” he greeted me. “I thank you for the audience, and twice over of your promptness in granting it.”

Ikaroi’s long white hair was kept in a clean ponytail and his grooming was impeccable even so early, something made clear by his turning back to gesture for an attendant scribe to approach. A scroll case was passed to the Secretary, who in turn passed it to Hakram. Considering the last time someone from the Free Cities had tried to hand me something directly it’d been an assassination attempt, that particular bit of decorum had grown on me.

“The Secretariat has proved a good friend, if not outright an ally,” I replied. “It’s my pleasure to return the courtesy.”

I glanced at the scroll case Adjutant had taken in hand but not opened.

“Although it seems that this time we aren’t to discuss the submission of questions,” I added.

“In truth the Secretariat has also passed along a list of inquiries, along with making funds available to me,” the blue-eyed man noted.

Good news, that. The Grand Alliance’s war machine was ever hungry for coin.

“Anything interesting?” I idly asked.

“Secretary Thais stills seeks to prove her theories on the source of the Stygian Spring, so a perspective in attendance of the Violet Peace’s signing has been requested,” he replied.

I snorted. Secretary Thais remained convinced that a secret treaty had been signed between Nicae and Stygia beyond the officially recorded peacemaking, and that it was exactly such a secret that’d allowed the Magisterium to begin aggressive attacks against Delos and Atalante a few centuries back. That assertion had yet to have even a slight indication of being historically accurate but if the old woman was willing to sink a fortune in being proved wrong, I had no objection.

“A question on Callowan history as well, for the Annals,” Nestor Ikaroi said. “Seeking to ascertain if Queen Yolanda the Stern’s was a villain in metaphysical sense or a merely a political one.”

I hummed thoughtfully.

“Actually, I wouldn’t mind knowing that as well,” I admitted.

Callowan historians still debated to this day if Yolanda the Wicked had truly been one of Below’s or just Proceran-born and deeply despised, but I’d never cared much either way. It was ancient history, and not the sort I need be concerned about. On the other hand, if she’d truly been a villainous Named then it occurred to me there was precedent for one of those reigning as Queen of Callow for more than a decade. While I didn’t particularly want my reign to be painted with the same brush as a woman I’d once seen written of as ‘barely more popular than the plague’, it could serve as the foundation for a legal argument. One that lent my rule a little more legitimacy than that of a victorious warlord. That wasn’t much of an issue for me, these days – not unless I started losing battles anyway – but if I didn’t want Vivienne or her successors fighting a civil in twenty years then we needed a better arguments than brute force and wearing a fancy hat.

“Usual rates, you know the drill by now. I’ll be speaking with the White Knight later this evening,so I’ll see when it can be done,” I told Nestor. “The list?”

“Timo, if you would?” the old man asked.

The young scribe passed a neatly folded parchment to Hakram. Usually the Secretariat only sent ten questions at a time, which I’d been informed by the Jacks were the subject of much internal politicking between the upper ranks of their bureaucratic ruling class. This entire affair had begun when Hanno, early into the first Hainaut offensive, had offered during an idle conversation to use his Recall aspect in order to settle a question about the size of the armies at the Battle of Lerna as recoded in the Annals. The askretis had gone wild at the potential resource that was having access to the memories of thousands of heroes going centuries back, the Secretariat even lodging a formal request with the Grand Alliance to consult with the White Knight over historical matters only to be reluctantly informed by Cordelia that the Sword of Judgement was not hers to ‘lend’.

So they’d gone to Hanno himself, who like a complete chump would have simply answered their questions whenever time allowed and thought nothing more of it. Gods, heroes . It showed most of them had never had to handle a treasury, much less fund a war. So I’d had a private word with him and we’d emerged from that conversation with practical prices in coin if the Secretariat wanted to take advantage of an opportunity that might never come to them again. Most the gold went into the Grand Alliance’s coffers, because Hanno was Hanno, but I’d insisted he take a cut even if he ended up spending it on other people. These days the Delosi tended to bring the questions to me, since I was often easier to find, and strangely enough he seemed to prefer it that way. Hakram set the parchment bearing the questions aside on my commode and returned to hand me the leather scroll case after having inspected it thoroughly.

“I don’t suppose you know what’s in that,” I asked the Delosi.

“I have my suspicions,” Secretary Nestor said, “but cannot know for certain. I know only that General Basilia meant it for your hand.”

Yeah, I’d thought it might be from her. The woman who’d once been Kairos Theodosian’s favourite general was arguably the closest thing I – and the Grand Alliance at large – had to an ally in the Free Cities, sad as it was to say. I broke open to seal and fished out the scroll, unfurling it carefully. Though the courtesies were curt they were still present, followed by a few matter of fact sentences about her latest victories on the field. The part that caught my attention, however, was right afterwards.

“Stygia’s getting involved,” I summarized. “One of the Helikean patrols caught some of the Magisterium’s people bringing wagons of arms onto a ship whose captain was headed for Nicae.”

Secretary Nestor dipped his head, seemingly unsurprised.

“It is the Secretariat’s belief that the Magisterium seeks to prolong the war as much as possible,” the old man said. “So long as Basileus Leo holds the city and Strategos Zenobia holds the countryside, Nicae remains divided. It is so with General Basilia’s campaigns in Penthesian lands as well. Our archivist-oracles believe they will not hinder transport of supplies so long as no decisive victory is scored, but would begin sabotage immediately if General Basilia succeeded at forcing such an engagement.”

Which she hadn’t, and likely wouldn’t. Exarch Prodocius still held on to the throne he’d won by virtue of being the last puppet standing, but his authority hardly went beyond the walls of Penthes itself. Many towns and tributary cities had declared him usurper and unfit – moved either by genuine outrage or by the very real chance of being sacked by Helike should they not – but his control on the city-state itself and a few key fortresses had not been shaken. Malicia was propping him up, if rumours of warlock ‘diplomats’ having joined his court were true, but for all that he was a pawn the man was not a complete fool. General Basilia’s army had chewed through every Penthesian field army sent its way and taken lesser walls, but Helike did not have the siege weaponry or mages to take the city of Penthes itself. The Exarch would remain holed up behind his tall walls with the last of his armies, trying to wait out Basilia.

“For Stygia to interfere with a supply line that passes through Delosi territory might taken by some as an act of war,” I mildly said.

“The Magisterium has not done such a thing,” Secretary Nestor serenely replied. “The worse that can be laid at its feet is words.”

I could read between the lines. The Magisters had spoken words so the Secretariat was being forthcoming with those as well, tacitly passing information to the Grand Alliance through me. It wasn’t willing to escalate any further unless Stygia did first, though, their precious neutrality remaining in place. They could have gone to the First Prince with this instead, but by going to me they could better claim to have maintained an impartial approach: General Basilia was already sending me information, and Callow’s openly hostile relations with Dread Empress Malicia meant I could be said to have a legitimate stake in the war. They’re not helping a foreigner against the League , I sardonically thought, they’re helping Helike’s almost-ally against Stygia’s almost-ally. With a few added steps and tortured justifications, no doubt.

“One would think that Malicia would advise against Stygian ambitions, given the civil war she’s fighting,” I complained. “But it’s never that simple, is it?”

“Dread Empress Sepulchral has failed to gather support beyond the initial wave,” the old man shrugged. “She is a threat, to be sure, but for all her clever maneuvering she has not beaten the Legions.”

“The part of those that still fight for the Tower, anyway,” I replied, bit bothering to hide my relish.

Though Malicia had seized the rebel old guard of Black loyalists that’d refused to bend the knee and even crucified a few, she’d underestimated both how popular my father was with the rank and file and how badly the revelation her sorcerous mind control would be received by greenskin officers. Nearly half of the former Legions-in-Exile had deserted her service at the first opportunity. A few of those joined up with Sepulchral’s armies, but most had either thrown down their weapons or joined the ever-growing camp of disaffected soldiers on the edge of the Green Stretch. While Sepulchral’s – once known as High Lady Abreha Mirembe – own High Seat of Aksum had followed her into rebellion and Nok had declared for her as well, most of Praes still remained in Malicia’s hands.

She’d not managed to dislodge Sepulchral, though, despite Marshal Nim’s best efforts, and knowledge that the Grand Alliance had opened negotiations with the rival claimant to the Tower ought to have curbed her willingness to provoke us even through surrogates. Evidently not, though. Now if only Black would come out of the woodworks – or acknowledge he was behind Dread Empress Sepulchral, as many suspected he might be – this entire nest of snakes could be put to rest. But for some reason he’d yet to tip his hand.

“Praesi will do as Praesi have always done,” Secretary Nestor said, unconcerned. “It is nothing to Delos. Yet, Queen Catherine, if I might give a word of warning?”

My eyes sharpened. Not a word the man would use lightly, that.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“There are strange undercurrents in Mercantis, these days,” the old man warned. “Ones even the eyes and ears of the Secretariat cannot quite parse.”

I kept my dismay off my face. The City of Bought and Sold was a pack of despicable profiteers, there was no denying that, yet so far they’d known how to toe the line of how much they should attempt to profit. The wealth of Mercantis’ banks and merchant lords had been instrumental in keeping the Principate’s industry from collapsing as the strain of curtailed trade and heavy taxes took its toll, but the city-state was almost as useful as broker capable of obtaining materials and rarities for the Arsenal. If they turned on us now, it’d be a crippling blow. Yet I couldn’t quite believe even the famously avaricious merchant lords would be this foolish. What would their gold be worth, when the Dead King was at their gates? And if they pressed us now, they had to know that should we win the Grand Alliance’s fury would be a black thing to behold.

“Thank you for the advice,” I said, tone forcibly calm.

I’d have to speak with Cordelia, soon. She was the foremost diplomat of the Grand Alliance, by both talent and station, and I was still astounded she’d somehow managed to talk both Atalante and Delos into allowing the Helikean armies and supply train to pass their through territory. Last I’d heard from Vivienne the First Prince was looking into bringing Strategos Zenobia into the Grand Alliance’s orbit without angering her current patron General Basilia in the process, so she ought to have been keeping an eye on the region. If something was going wrong with Mercantis it was Hasenbach that’d be noticing the signs, and likely she who’d have to fix it anyway. If this was a ploy from Malicia, though, that’d make two provocations from her: Stygia’s growing interventionism and trying to strike at our finances. The Tower would be, to be blunt, picking a fight. If we didn’t answer her in kind she’d only grow bolder, too, and that simply couldn’t be allowed. On the other hand, we could hardly afford to send an army Praes’ way could we?

There was no easy answer to this, as tended to be the way when dealing with Dread Empress Malicia.

“I trouble you no longer, then, Your Majesty,” the old askretis said, rising only to offer another slight bow.

“Always a pleasure, Secretary Nestor,” I simply replied.

I slumped into my seat, after the old man and his attendant had left. And this, I thought, had been meant to be the pleasant part of my day. Adjutant stood in silence at my side, close but not reaching out.

“All right,” I sighed, opening my eyes. “Get me those rosters, Hakram. Let’s get this done before some other looming disaster appears on the horizon.”

One thing at a time. It could be done, if we did it one thing at a time.

I told myself I believed that, straightened my back and got to work.

Chapter 8: Stanchion

“Friendship is as a garden: taking years to flourish, unmade by a season’s negligence.”
– Proceran saying

Neat rows of legionaries in polished armour stood in resounding silence as Zombie passed in front of them at a trot.

The three hundred men and women making up the assault formation that’d performed so well against the zombies yesterday – for all that the small victory had since been drowned out by bitterer defeats – had already been praised by their commander, Tribune Algernon Beesbury, and even been commended by Adjutant earlier. Hakram had also taken care to speak with the rank and file, asking what about the assault formation they felt had functioned properly and not, then passed along their answers put to ink to consider. I’d taken a glance, and while I’d read it properly later my glimpse had mostly told me the legionaries were satisfied in most respects, save that they were clamouring for more hammers. The raven beaks, as they were called, tended to be better at putting down dead than the halberds even if they lacked the flexibility of the other polearms. Reconsidering the proportions of each might be in order, though if thinned by too much the halberds would lose much of their effectiveness.

I gazed at the legionaries as I rode past them, most of the helmeted faces unfamiliar to me even after holding command in Hainaut for so long. Perhaps I ought not to be surprised, as most of these soldiers came from General Hune’s command and I did tend to stay with the Third Army rather than the Second. Its soldiers and officers were not as familiar to me, as much a single woman could ever be said to be familiar with an army. A few faces among these I’d seen before, if not put a name to, but it was some time before I pulled the reins to end Zombie’s stride. The leathery grey-green skin I was glimpsing through the lieutenant’s open helm stirred my memory, as did the vivid red scar cutting across the face of the orc.

“I know you,” I mused. “Second Liesse?”

“Yes, Warlord,” she grinned, showing teeth. “I was only a legionary, then. Fresh to the Fifteenth.”

I tapped a finger below my eye, mirroring the jagged bend of the red line under hers.

“Seasoned now,” I replied approvingly. “That was made by wight teeth or I’ll eat my hand, Lieutenant...”

“Gunborg,” she proudly said, “of the Howling Wolves Clan.”

Hakram’s clan, that, and Marshal Grem One Eye’s as well. She must have been in one of the last batches of recruits we got from the Steppes before the Empress stripped the Fifteenth of its recruitment rights.

“One of them slipped in below my shield and bit me, Warlord,” Lieutenant Gunborg said, then grinned nastily. “But I bit back .”

I couldn’t help but grin in answer. There was something about that iron-cast martial pride that served as the backbone of the Clans that’d always rung true with me. There were parts of what came with being an orc that I’d never truly be able to understand, but the pride? I’d partaken of it eagerly, as a young girl. It’d done more to bind me to the Dread Empire than any conversation I’d ever had to Malicia.

“Looks like you got the better end of that trade, lieutenant,” I laughed. “But polish your shieldwork a bit, would you? When I see you make captain, I’d prefer you not to be missing any bits.”

“You have my oath, Warlord,” she solemnly assured me.

With a last chuckle I set Zombie back to her walk, passing the rest of the full first rank without seeing another old comrade. At the end of the line Tribune Beesbury was waiting, a young dark-haired man with surprisingly gentle brown eyes. With the pretty curls and the delicate face, he looked more like a poet than an officer of my armies. Until one got a look at the callouses on his hands, anyway: those didn’t come from quillwork.

“Tribune Beesbury,” I said, pitching my voice so it could be heard as far as the back. “I appointed you to lead these assault companies while knowing little of you, because you were warmly recommended to me by General Hune and endorsed by Hakram Deadhand.”

I let a moment pass.

“You have lived up to every word spoken in your praise,” I said.

Though he had good mastery of his face, for one his age, he was no courtier. The flush of pleasure and brightened eyes let me know of his thoughts even as he tried to keep them from showing.

“You do me honour, Your Majesty,” Tribune Beesbury replied.

I shook my head.

“You do us all honour,” I said, voice rising as I turned to the assembled legionaries. “Assault formations like yours were untested, until yesterday, but you fought with prowess that cannot be denied. Not a single fatality! ”

I roared out the last sentence and got a roar back in return. It was not as great a victory as I was making it sound, in truth, since zombies were the least of the dead and numbers had only been slightly larger on Keter’s side. There’d been a score wounded, and without the House Insurgent there would have been two dead, but the performance had still been very promising. Enough that I was willing to invest time and coin into training legionaries in this method of making war even if was not backed by another ruler in the effort. I raised a hand and the cacophony went down, leaving me free to speak again.

“As a reward for your conduct in yesterday’s skirmish, I’ve ordered ale and meat rations be opened to all of you for supper,” I called out. “You sent the dead back to their graves, legionaries – fill your bellies tonight, and dream of doing it again!”

Cheers filled the air again, even louder than last time, and my name was even called out by some. It wasn’t my finest bit of speaking, truth be told, but I’d given so many of these speeches lately I couldn’t even remember how many this made. They couldn’t all be fresh and stirring. Besides, ale and meat would get people cheering even if they’d come with a sermon instead of the praise I’d freely doled out. A celebration, even a small one, ought to lift some of the pall of uncertainty that’d fallen over the camp since yesterday. Hanno had caught the Enemy in time, so spirits had not taken too hard a hit, but the revelation of the existence of shapeshifting ghouls had everyone distrustful and uneasy. I had a word with the senior officers of the formation, committing names and faces to memory, but did not linger long. Razin and Aquiline ought to have been sent for by now, unless Hakram had lost his touch, so I passed Zombie’s reins to a legionary and limped back to my tent.

The first hint that something was off came in the shape of a full line of legionaries whose pauldrons bore a distinctive scorched mark in the shape of a skeletal hand. Adjutant’s personal command, those, grown from a single tenth when I was still the Squire to a full cohort of two hundred now. The sight of them around camp was hardly unusual, but that twenty would be standing almost skittishly around my tent most definitely was. The lieutenant in charge saluted when I approached and I hobbled up to him, about to ask the reason for this reinforced guard when my tent’s entrance curtain was parted open. Hakram strolled out, leathery face offering up only forced calm.

“There has been a misunderstanding, Catherine,” Adjutant said. “If you’d only give me a few moments I’ll-”

My pulse quickened. Not from danger, but from something else I couldn’t quite parse yet. I’d been meant to sit with the Blood, hadn’t I? There were only so many people from their corner of the world that my second be struggling to prevent my talking with.

“Hakram,” I blandly interrupted. “Who’s in the tent?”

His face fell into an apologetic grimace, head angling to the side in an unconscious display of apology. Without another word I passed by him, staff forcing aside the curtain, and I felt my fingers clench in a spasm. Around the table Indrani was still carving me, four people were seated. Lord Razin Tanja and Lady Aquiline Osena were those who’d requested audience of me, but the other two were uninvited guests. The Barrow Sword’s presence I had no real issue with. Ishaq might insist on continuing to wear the ancient bronze scale suit for reasons dubious to me, but the equally bronze sword he’d stolen from an old barrow along with the armour was a vicious piece of work especially well-suited to dealing with Revenants. The way he was rather easy on the eyes – though I remained skeptical of beards, even well-groomed ones – and had been a solid partisan of mine since we’d established the pecking order meant I tended to be well-inclined towards him.

Oh, he was still a ruthless and largely amoral bastard who’d once tried to kill me just for the perks it’d earn him among his people. Yet, compared to some of the villains I had to deal with, he was agreeably straightforward in his intentions. It was the last of the four that had my lips thinning in barely mastered anger. The Valiant Champions’ name was, I’d been told, Rafaella. I’d never used it before, and did not intend to ever start. Short and stocky with a long braid going down her back, the Champion was the savage sort of cheerful that I might have appreciated in someone who hadn’t fucking skinned Captain and worn her fur as a cape . My eyes flicked towards the tanned ‘heroine’, who gazed back without either fear or embarrassment.

“Walk out of this tent,” I ordered in Chantant, tone eerily calm.

Hakram entered behind me and I could almost feel him wincing as Lady Aquiline opened her mouth.

“Queen Catherine, she is here at our-”

I’d coddled those kids too much, hadn’t I? I must have been for them to be so fucking unafraid . Night flooded my veins, singing back eagerly to the call of my boiling anger. The sprite-lanterns hanging from the strips of cloth crisscrossing my tent’s ceiling shone bright in the deepening shadows that swallowed everything between them, the enchanted braziers flickering as if touched by wind. A small ball of air formed above my palm, spinning, and Aquiline Osena gasped at the absence of the breath I’d just taken from her. My eyes never left the Champion.

“Walk,” I softly repeated, “out of this tent.”

She did not want to. Anyone with eyes could have seen that. I’d not been deft or delicate in my dismissal, and for a woman as proud as she it would rankle to have to obey. But she was in my tent, and an uninvited guest, so with a scowl the Valiant Champion got to her feet. She strode out, heading to my right since to my left Adjutant was silently standing. As she passed me, I spoke up again.

“Don’t forget my warning,” I murmured without looking at her. “If you ever wear that cloak again, even far from this camp, I’ll know .”

She left the tent without giving reply, showing she was not entirely a fool. The Barrow Sword’s soft, pleased laughter escorted her out. I loosened my grip on my anger, the shadows that’d swallowed up the tent fading, and crushed the ball of breath within my fist. Lady Aquiline gasped out, her voice returned to her. Razin eyed me with open anger, hands falling to his sword, and whatever ire might have been found in his gaze was matched twice over by what lay in Aquiline’s.

“You struck at-” she began.

“Bring Named into my tent uninvited again, Osena,” I softly interrupted, “and you’ll have to crawl on your belly to wherever Tariq’s hiding for healing, your severed feet hanging around neck. Do you understand me?”

They both looked at me with fear and surprise. I’d been too soft on the pair of them, I thought, and now familiarity had bred contempt. They were in dire need of a reminder of who exactly they were dealing with.

“I asked,” I hissed out, “ do you understand me ?”

The Lady of Tartessos’ tanned face paled, as much from humiliation as fear.

“I understand, Queen Catherine,” she replied through gritted teeth.

But the point hadn’t quite sunk in, I mused. Maybe being made to stand for the rest of the audience would do them some good, or –

“Catherine,” Hakram murmured in Kharsum. “There is discipline, and there is insult. Only one is warranted.”

I breathed out shallowly. He was right, of course he was right. There was no point to further turning the knife in the wound save that vicious little twinge of satisfaction it’d give me. And that was no reason to do anything at all. I let the sudden fury that’d seized me flow out and limped around the table, going towards the head. Hakram pulled out my seat for me and I sat with my staff propped up against my shoulder, eyeing the lot of them a tad more calmly.

“Ishaq,” I said, turning my steady stare to the Barrow Sword. “You, at least, ought to have known better than to bring Named uninvited into the quarters of a villain.”

“I was unaware until the last moment,” the bearded warrior replied, grinning crookedly. “Could have warned them, true, but then I wouldn’t have gotten to see that .”

He gestured a calloused hand the direction the Champion had left. Considering the Barrow Sword and Levantine heroes fought like cats and dogs whenever they were in the each other’s vicinity, I had no trouble whatsoever believing he’d kept silent just to see me expel the other woman from my tent. I grunted, unamused, and turned my gaze back to the two Dominion aristocrats. They were both glaring at the villain, though that rolled off like water from a duck’s back.

“You asked for an audience,” I said, tone still clipped. “You have it. Speak.”

“We come today to speak of the Barrow Sword,” Lord Razin said, not bothering to hide his irritation towards the man in question. “Who has, once more, petitioned the Majilis and the Holy Seljun for his deeds to be recorded by the rolls.”

The rolls were one of those peculiarities in the way the Dominion of Levant treated its Named. While there were highborn among the Levantines who were aristocrats purely because of their ancestry, they were ultimately all descended from Named and to their people that was the very source of being highborn. Coming into a Name would see one immediately raised to nobility, though like everywhere else on Calernia there were nobles and then there were nobles . There wasn’t a lot of difference between someone like the Painted Knife and, say, a Callowan landed knight or a baronet. Often merchants were wealthier in everything but largely decorative privileges.

Bestowed, as they called their Named, were always either associated to one of the already existing lineages or, when unprecedented, entered in the rolls as the founder of their own line of the Blood. The rolls themselves, aside from serving as records of such lineages in ‘Blood and Bestowal’, held records of all the great deeds of Levantine Named. Those who were not villains, anyway, at least in theory. I personally believed that a few villains had slipped through the cracks by virtue of not openly keeping to Below or being tied to an originally heroic lineage in some way. It might even go deeper than that: some of the things I’d read had been done by the Vengeful Brigand, one of their founding heroes, had been genuinely nasty in a way not often seen out of the Wasteland.

The issue here, though, was that Ishaq was openly a villain. While undeniably Bestowed, he was effectively demanding he be made a noble by a country keeping to Above, one where men like him were expected to be the proving grounds of more honourable lines and nothing else. In other times he’d be laughed out of the room or ignored, should he not instead find the Grey Pilgrim politely knocking at his door one evening, but times were changing. The Liesse Accords stipulated that being a villain was not inherently a crime and, though the members of the Grand Alliance hand not yet signed the Accords, the Truce and the Terms were widely seen as prelude and trial to their implementation.

It had been Cordelia Hasenbach’s own notion to keep the two separate so that mistakes in one would not taint the other before it was implemented. I suspected I might have come to resent how damnably clever that woman was, if it weren’t so damnably useful.

“Interesting,” I mildly said. “Yet also a matter for the Dominion of Levant to resolve.”

I mostly liked the Barrow Sword but I wasn’t going to meddle in the brutal debacle that was Levantine politics on his behalf, much less to try to force the raising of a villain to nobility. The backlash to such an act from, well, most everyone was likely to be spectacular.

“We came to request a clarification about the Truce and the Terms,” Lady Aquiline said, visibly still fuming. “And how they would apply against a decree of the Majilis.”

“The Majilis voted unanimously for the Dominion to sign onto the Truce and Terms,” I pointed out, frowning. “There is no conflict to be had.”

“There’s the trouble, Black Queen. I have been given amnesty for grave-robbing by the Terms, and my Bestowal is not itself an offence against the laws of Levant,” the Barrow Sword smiled. “So by the ancient laws of the Dominion, I must be added to the rolls as the founder of the Barrow’s Blood.”

“Those laws were written with the understand that Below’s servants would be hunted by the righteous without protection,” Aquiline flatly said.

I sucked in a breath.

“The Terms bend the meaning of your laws so that you no longer have grounds to refuse him,” Adjutant said, voicing my realization.

The two of the Blood nodded, while the villain leaned back in his seat with a smirk. Hence the clarification that was being requested here. They wanted me, as speaker for the villain Named of the Grand Alliance, to make it clear that the Terms couldn’t force their hand.

“The Holy Seljun has expressed his intention to call the Majilis to session and change the laws to reflect the will of the Heavens,” Lord Razin said. “When informed of this, the Barrow Sword-”

“The Barrow Sword told them he’d have to lodge a complaint with his representative under the Terms should the Majilis, seated halfway across the continent, try to fuck him up the ass while he’s fighting in the thick of the melee against the Dead King,” Ishaq said, tone hardening.

Fuck , I grimly thought. So that was why they’d come to me even thought this was a Dominion matter: I’d sworn oaths under the Terms to defend the Barrow Sword and settle complaints on his behalf. It was a thorny little predicament they were bringing to me, too. On one hand, if I twisted arms for Ishaq over this then the Black Queen was intervening in the Dominion’s own affairs. That was the kind of overstep that shattered coalitions. On the other hand, if I just looked away and did nothing then I was telling villains that I’d throw them under the horse the moment living up to my oaths became slightly inconvenient. That, and afterwards what Levantine villain would want to lend their power to the war if back home they were being forbidden by law the rights and privileges of other Named? Even those already fighting would think twice about keeping their oaths, if the Dominion scorned them so openly. That was the trouble, with making continent-spanning treaties: afterwards you had to deal with a continent’s worth of trouble.

“To clarify,” Hakram intervened, “no such complaint has been made, and no law was changed?”

“No,” the Barrow Sword smilingly agreed.

“The Majilis has not yet been called,” Lord Razin said. “Before the matter is to be debated, we meant to seek the insight of the Black Queen on this matter.”

Meaning they wanted to know how hard I’d come out swinging for Ishaq before they made a decision that couldn’t be easily walked back.

“I’ve also requested that a record of my deeds in Hainaut be sent to the Blood for consideration,” the Barrow Sword added.

That much, at least, I had no qualms promising. Whatever the rest I’d not deny the man acknowledgement of the fierceness he’d fought against Keter with.

“That will have been put to ink and bear personal seal by dawn tomorrow,” I said, flicking a meaningful glance at Hakram.

He’d be the one to write it, after all. From the rueful look in his eyes he’d understood my meaning perfectly.

“The Valiant Champion was meant to speak on this matter for Bestowed of the Dominion,” Lady Aquiline told me, defiantly. “Before she was so unreasonably sent away.”

“If Levantine heroes are to have a say in this dispute, that is a Dominion matter,” I coldly replied. “Under the Terms, my interlocutor is the White Knight. I owe not an inch beyond that.”

“How pettily you complain of another’s trophy, while wearing many yourself,” the Lady of Tartessos mocked.

Razin threw her an anguished look but said nothing. Trophies? Oh, I did wear those. Banners on my back and once, only once, I’d snatched the soul of a fallen foe who’d butchered an entire city in her folly. What I’d not done was mutilate the corpse of a fallen foe, made a wolf fur cloak of the woman who’d first taught me how to use a shield and – I breathed out. Sabah, Sabah had deserved better. Of all the Calamities, she’d deserved better.

“You get one warning, Osena,” I quietly said. “Test me on this again and you will not enjoy what follows.”

I met her gaze, the dark eyes so defiant, and did not blink. They’d been allowed too much leash, these two, and I’d be glad to see the back of them when next I met Tariq. But until then, they’d learn meekness again even if it had to be beaten back into their bones. Razin said something in one of the Levantine languages, tone flat, and only then did Aquiline of the Slayer’s Blood look away.

“Your audience is at an end,” I said.

Razin, often the deftest of the two when it came to matters like this, simply inclined his head.

“We can resume the discussion when a record of deeds has been written and the White Knight’s insight has been sought,” the Lord of Malaga replied.

In the same sentence establishing that nothing had been settled and that under the Terms they had someone to bring into this as well if I came out too hard on the Barrow Sword’s side. He was turning into a decent hand at that, I mused. Being surrounded by people who usually dwarfed him in power and influence had taught him something of subtlety, smoothed away some his rawness.

“A good day to you, Lord Razin, Lady Aquiline,” Hakram gravelled, standing at my side.

I blandly smiled and said nothing, letting them speak their own courtesies before leaving. The Barrow Sword made to do the same but I discreetly shook my head. I took a long look at Ishaq Deathless when her sat back down, allowing the silence to linger. With that tanned skin, strong brow and a thick – if well-maintained – beard he was a fine instance of what I’d been told was classic Alavan looks. He was broad-shouldered as an orc and not much taller than me, with for sole warpaint two long streaks of ash grey just below pale brown eyes. I’d seen him in a shirt, where the muscles under that armour had been well-moulded instead of tucked away, and I was honest enough with myself to admit I might have taken him to bed once or twice by now if he’d not been under my command and so brazenly ambitious. From his occasional lingering look I doubted it would have been all that difficult to talk him into it either.

“Your people have this saying, you told me,” I said. “Kick a barrow, die stupid?”

He looked highly amused.

“Kick a barrow, die a fool,” the dark-haired villain replied, half-grinning.

“That’s the one,” I agreeably said, then narrowed my eyes. “Ishaq, don’t go around kicking barrows when we’re in the middle of a war for the right to keep breathing.”

“You swore oaths, Black Queen,” he reminded me, carefully.

“The Truce and Terms are a vessel to help gather Named to fight the Dead King,” I said. “If the ambitions one of those Named threaten that cause, the Terms have failed in that purpose.”

“I’m not asking them for land, or for right of rule,” the Barrow Sword protested. “I ask that my deeds not fall into obscurity simply because I do not kneel at the altar of the Ashen Gods.”

“And I think that’s fair,” I told him. “I really do.”

All else aside, if a villain was rendering a service to Grand Alliance they were due the same recognition a hero would get for those deeds. Of course, fair only went so far in this world.

“So because I’ve grown passing fond of you, Ishaq,” I continued, tone casual, “I’ll tell you right now: if I have to choose between you and eighty thousand Dominion soldiers, you are going die tragically fighting Keter.”

I’d not raised my voice in the slightest, yet the hardened killer almost flinched. I smiled amicably at him.

“Ambition is a virtue, when tempered by restraint,” I said. “We understand each other, yes?”

“We do, Black Queen,” the Barrow Sword soberly replied.

Vinegar had been served, so the other hand must offer honey.

“Good,” I nodded. “Then I’ll have the record of your laudable efforts in Hainaut written up and lean on the White Knight to have it confirmed independently by heroes. If it still looks like they’re being unreasonable, I’ll personally take this to the Grey Pilgrim.”

His expression brightened, and I could only think of the way Wasteland villains would eat the poor bastard alive. Ishaq wasn’t stupid by any means, he was just... uncomplicated. He took what he could, retreated in the face of superior force and saw absolutely nothing wrong in either thing. There was a soothing clarity to that way of living I sometimes envied.

“Then I take my leave, Black Queen,” the Barrow Sword smiled. “I thank you for your time.”

“Keep putting down Revenants and my door’s always open,” I smiled back. “Fair days, Ishaq.”

“Fair nights, Black Queen,” the villain replied.

I waited until he’d left before letting out a long sigh. I slumped back into my seat and closed my eyes.

“So?” I asked Hakram.

“You went too hard on Aquiline,” Adjutant assessed. “I know why you did, but now she’ll feel she’s been dishonoured until she gets some sort of victory over you. We both know that your patience is going to run out on that.”

It would, which meant I’d probably have to serve her up a meaningless win over something to soother her wounded pride. Considering I was less than well-inclined towards Aquiline Osena at the moment, that prospect did not fill me with enthusiasm. What had she done, to deserve this from me?

“It’s not the same, Hakram,” I said. “The Mantle, and that abomination the Champion wore.”

A beat of silence.

“Levantine take trophies,” the orc said. “Especially from famous foes. It is part of who they are as a people. I expect if she could have taken armour instead of fur, she would have.”

I opened my eyes, stirred to anger once more.

“But she didn’t,” I hissed back. “And you know that’s entirely-”

He sat at my side, around the corner of the table. The chair did not creak under his weight, as Cordelia Hasenbach was not one to forget such details.

“I know, Catherine,” the orc told me. “Of course I know. But I also understand that to them there is no difference, and so your anger seems frivolous to their eyes.”

“Praesi highborn murder each other at the drop of a hat, Stygians practice slavery,” I flatly replied. “Am I to pretend their ways are just some quaint local custom as well?”

“My people eat corpses, and sometimes the living,” Hakram frankly said. “Goblins take oaths about as seriously as porridge. I would be bitterly disappointed if you only took us in because those things have yet to prick you too sharply.”

That actually stung to hear, and I drew back in surprise.

“That’s different,” I said, “it’s not...”

“It’s not one of the two Calamities you’ve loved,” Adjutant kindly finished for me. “It’s not the woman who taught you to keep your shield up when you swing a sword, worn on some stranger’s back.”

A long moment of silence passed as I struggled with my words.

“It’s not wrong, to be furious about that,” I quietly replied.

“No,” he agreed, “it isn’t. You can carry that grudge until you die, should you want to, and you’ll not be wrong.”

“But the Black Queen can’t?” I bitterly asked. “I don’t agree with that, Hakram. Akua said something once, about wants of the woman and the needs of the queen, but no one cuts it that clean. The Praesi have tried, and it’s sickened them perhaps beyond mending. I’ll have no part of it.”

Adjutant set against the oak the hand of bone he’d earned in my service, along with near every other wound that rent his body. It was, I thought, a statement powerful enough that it need not be spoken at all to be heard.

“I am not Akua Sahelian,” Hakram said, tone almost chiding. “I swore myself to Catherine Foundling, not a Name or a crown. I’ve no interest in splitting my oath between your and your shadow, seen by Wasteland eyes. But I will say, Warlord, that the moment you let hate choose your path for you at last fetters were clasped around your wrist.”

He bared long fangs, sharp and pale as bone.

“If you cannot tolerate the way of the world, change it,” Hakram Deadhand said, sounding even now like he did not doubt for a moment that I could. “If you will not take up those arms, though, do not keep clutching them in your grasp. Creation has no patience for the half-hearted.”

I leaned forward, elbows on the table as I passed tired hands through my hair.

“I’m tired, Hakram,” I admitted, looking down at the half-polished wood. “I’m tired and I slipped up and just... the moment I did, the single fucking moment , a kid died. Just like that. And I’d like to think I’m not the kind of monster that would wish a fourteen-year-old kid would die just because another one did, but...”

The tall orc leaned his head against mine, softly, and said nothing. It was one of the kindest things anyone had ever done for me.

“I understand him, now,” I said.

And though the anger was not on my tongue, it was even worse than that. It’d settled in my bones, in the marrow of them, and now it was a part of me. One that would never leave.

“Who?” Hakram softly asked.

“Black,” I murmured. “Why even knowing he was wrong he still wanted to win. To beat them. A single breath blown on the balance of Creation, so that for just a moment you could look at it and say: this is fair. This is equal. And know that it wasn’t but you made it that way.”

“There’s nothing at the end of that road, Catherine,” Adjutant said.

“I know,” I said. “Gods, I know. But every time I see their kid survives and ours dies, every time I see they get to walk around in the skin mother of three and we’re in the wrong for daring to be offended by that? I understand him a little better.”

In the end, though Black had wanted to even the scales by pushing down on Good. And that wasn’t a victory, not really, but for all his pale skin and cold steel mind there was something about my father that was utterly Praesi: the Wasteland only ever knew victory by triumph over others. The other way, the hard way, was pushing up the other scale. And I would walk that road, that was the choice I’d made. But, I thought as my forehead pressed against the cool oak and Hakram’s hand lay on my shoulder, before my feet began moving again I could... wait a while. Catch my breath. I closed my eyes, alone in my tent with the person I loved most in this world, and it was the closest I’d felt to peace in years.

It would pass, I knew. So I enjoyed it, for the little while it lasted.

Kingfisher I

“Regrets will find you on their own, but redemption must be sought.”
– Hektor the Ecclesiast, Atalante preacher

In Brus there was a story every child knew, about the birth of kingfishers.

Some said it had been the House of Goethal that first spread it, for the kingfisher was their emblem, yet shrewder souls instead mused that it had long been a popular legend among the Bruseni and that a young royal line would be wise to tie itself to such roots. The House of Barthen was long gone, the last of its line married into the Goethals, but some yet remembered that Florianne Goethal had first seized the crown from a boy of three after the entire adult line of the Barthen had perished on the killing fields of the Sixth Crusade. Yet the story was told to children, and as is ever the way with stories it grew and changed with the span of the years.

Brus, the story went, was once a green and fertile land. Blessed by the Gods Above with ever-bountiful crops, its weather was fairer than even that of the southlands and none knew hunger within its bounds. It was a kingdom of peace and plenty where swords and disease were banished, for in those days the Halcyon kings and queens ruled and they had been hallowed above all others. Every year the king and queen journeyed west to the Skyron Ocean, where they humbly gave themselves to the waves and asked for the blessings of Above. And so, pleased with their obeisance and humility, Above returned them to the shore along with the favour of the Heavens for the coming year.

So it was, until Queen Alisanne and King Cenrich ruled, for the two were fair to behold and clever of mind. Their three sons were worthy princes too, and Halcyon was set to thrive for my years to come. Yet the king and queen of their virtues they grew too proud, telling men that they ruled a great realm of their own making and that its greatness owed nothing to the Heavens. When the days grew short and the nights long, they did not journey west to the sea and instead threw a great banquet where all were invited. For this impiety, the Gods Above punished them, turning their three sons into beasts: the eldest into a wolf, the second into a snake and the youngest into a bird.

Angry at the punishment, the king and queen renounced the Heavens and incited the people of Halcyon to anger. When statues of the Gods were broken and temples burned, Above sent a great wave from the sea that turned a third of the kingdom to rotting swamplands. There the people starved, until the youngest son taught them to fish and partake of the flesh. In doing so the bird-prince stained his throat red and belly with the guts of the catches, the feathers forever grown red. There the people renounced the king and queen and returned to the embrace of Above, sowing great fury in the heart of prideful rulers.

They set a crown on the brow of their eldest son, the wolf, and sent him to cause death and dismay among the people who had renounced them. For this heinous act the Gods Above made barren a third another third of the kingdom, making hills of stone where there had once been golden fields. The bird-prince, seeing the plight of his people, struck at his brother with sharp talons and sent him fleeing north, where he would breed with wolves and rule them, ever scheming vengeance. The lost people of the hills he led to a river whose waters had turned blue and bathed in it, teaching them the secrets of the hills: within the barren stone lay cobalt and copper, which could be dug out and traded for food. His feathers, doused in the waters, turned blue save for those which were already red. And so the people of the hills renounced the king and queen as well, singing praise to the Heavens.

Queen Alisanne and King Cenrich grew fearful, then, of what they had wrought through their arrogance. They sought to make amends and sent for the youngest son the bird-prince, but they had closed their eyes to evil. Their second son, the snake, had sworn his soul to Below for the throne and sunk his fangs deep into their hearts as they slept. He claimed the crown, coiling around the realm, and the people acclaimed him. For this obscene act the last third of the kingdom was cursed with strife, death repaid in death as all the kingdoms of the world struck the realm to take its bounties. It was to a land of swords and fear that the bird-prince returned, and at this he grew wroth.

The youngest son sought the people of the swamps and the hills, telling them of his brother’s foul deed, and asked for their aid. The people of the swamps, fishermen with spears of bone, answered the call but those of the hills were fearful of death. They made swords of copper, to arm the fishers, but did not heed their prince and for this were made lesser: the metals they dug out from the earth began to seed sickness in them, a weakness of the body to match the weakness of their souls. Yet with the fishermen alone the bird-prince went to war, and with the blessing of the Heavens cast down his treacherous brother before making peace with the kingdoms of the world.

There were those who would have proclaimed him king, then, yet instead he flew west and humbly gave himself to the sea. The Gods Above returned him to the shore, once more a man, and with their blessing he returned to be crowned. Never again would the golden days of Halcyon come, but King of Fishers had through the curse been taught how his people should be made to thrive and heeded the lessons of the Gods Above until old age took him. At the moment of his death it is said that his last breath left him in the shape of a bird in feathers of red and blue, which men now know as the kingfisher: the soul of the King of Fishers, hateful of wolf and snake until the Last Dusk, eternal guardian of the Bruseni.

On the day Florianne Goethal became Princess of Brus, it is said that hundreds of kingfishers were seen flocking to the capital. Struck by the sign from Above she chose the bird as her sigil, and ever since the House of Goethal had ruled ably and justly.

—

Frederic Goethal was five years old when his mother told him the story, and he only half-listened. It had been a long tale and he’d been tired out from his lessons of the day, then lulled into half-sleep by her tender hand against his brow. He could not remember falling into slumber, only waking up late the following morning with the unearthly slight of a kingfisher perched on his windowsill. The brazen plumage and long beak had him string in awe as the bird cast him a long glance before flying away. Somehow, even at five, he’d felt like he’d just failed at something. When the servants came and clothed him, later, they brought him into his father’s parlour and Robert Goethal glared down at his son through a thick frown to inform him that his mother had been sent away for being an embarrassment to the family.

Frederic asked what that meant and was slapped across the face. Tears stung his eyes, but he asked if he would ever see Mother again. He was slapped across the face, harder this time. He began weeping, five and in pain and confused. Father furiously bellowed for the servants to come and take him away.

As he grew older Frederic learned what an embarrassment to the family had truly meant, listening to the gossip of servants and household guards. Mother had taken a lover from the city’s House of Light, a sister good standing and high birth. That meant that when Mother refused to end the affair when confronted, Robert Goethal had not been able to simply order the priestess killed. Instead he’d had to ask a favour of his brother, the Prince of Brus, and use his influence to have the other woman sent to a temple in the far south. His wayward wife he’d had sent away to a summer house on the shores of Lake Pavins, where she would be kept luxuriously enough her kin in Lyonis could not complain but kept in utter isolation from the rest of the world.

At the age of seven, Frederic bribed a passing fantassin with nine stolen silver butter knives to bring a letter to Mother. Before the day’s end Father slapped him across the face and sent him in the courtyard to be switched by a servant. The mercenary had turned him in, of course she had. Why travel all the way lakeside when she could earn an even greater reward by betraying him? Twice more he attempted, once with a brother from the House – who left the mansion before day’s end with fresh Goethal silver for his temple wile Frederic got switched – and the other with a grizzled old Lycaonese soldier, who simply took the reward and left. The last stung most of all, in a way, for he’d been told that the northerners were savages but an honourable breed in their own way. Evidently not.

At the age of ten years old, Frederic Goethal set down his training sword after a afternoon’s work with his swordsmanship tutor and reached for a cool wet cloth only to find a kingfisher perched on the edge of the basin, long thin beak drinking from the water.

“If I am to lose the other,” Frederic told the bird, “you’ll get no grief from me.”

The bird flew away at the noise, spooked. It was just a bird, of course, and he’d been silly to believe otherwise. So he kept believing, until he was called to his father’s parlour that night.

“You will be leaving this house tomorrow,” Robert Goethal told him, deeply delighted.

He did not ask if he was to be sent to Mother’s side. Frederic had not taken long to learn that the slightest mention of her would have his cheek stinging.

“Am I to understand I have displeased you?” he asked instead.

“No, Frederic, you have done well,” his father said. “You have lived up to my blood. Tomorrow morning you will begin fostering with your uncle, at the palace.”

“With Prince Amaury?” Frederic exclaimed, genuinely surprised.

Though his father had another sibling, a younger brother, he hardly ever spoke of him.

“Indeed,” Robert Goethal triumphantly smiled. “His own sons have proved to be weak seeds. Bide your time, Frederic, and we might just get the last laugh.”

Frederic Goethal thought of the kingfisher, then, of the swift beat of wings and the ripples they’d caused across the water. A warning, a promise, or simply a herald of change? Perhaps the choice was his to make.

“Of course, Father,” Frederic smiled back.

There was no we to be had, here, and never would be. If there was a choice to be made on this night, let that be it.

—

He never called the man Uncle Amaury, not even once.

Prince Amaury Goethal of Brus was not a man who invited informality, not from his closest kin or even his wife. Being fostered in the palace was a bewildering experience for the first year largely because Frederic had no real notion of why he was even there. Prince Amaury had two sons, the first of his cousins the young boy had met, and it was the poisonous hatred the eldest of the two showed him at every opportunity that eventually allowed Frederic to put the pieces together. Nathanael was a womanizing drunk with persisting gambling debts, though his royal father had only washed his hands of him entirely after an incident where he killed the son of good family over allegedly cheating at cards. Frederic refrained from asking how many sons from families not quite as good had died and gone unlamented before the line was judged to be crossed.

His other cousin, Auguste, was on some days a perfectly fine and amiable fellow. Yet not even the finest efforts of the House of Light had not managed to end his unfortunate tendencies to fall into black rages and address thin air. A wizard had been brought in and fed him some tonics before babbling a few incantations, which only succeeded at making Auguste blind in one eye when the rages struck. The wizard was hanged as a charlatan, but there was no denying that Prince Amaury’s youngest son was no more suitable to rule than his eldest. And so Frederic Goethal, sole child of Prince Amaury’s oldest brother, had been brought to foster at the palace. No formal announcement was made, at first. Stringent lessons by an ever-shifting roster of tutors filled his days.

Languages with Monsieur Lucien, until his Tolesian and his Reitz were as fine as his Chantant, riding lessons with Captain Ghyslaine of the Lances Farfelues , the noble sword with an Arlesite nine-sun duellist and the soldier’s sword with a retired Hannoven instructor. History and poetry, the lute and the seventeen formal dances of Alamans courts, arithmetic and heraldry. His head was filled to burst and sometimes it felt like half of what was poured into him spilled out, but Prince Amaury did not send him away. Cousin Nathanel’s cruelties became more frequent as his stay lengthened. The older boy – who should have been a man, by that age, but Prince Amaury had ever only called his eldest son boy where Frederic could hear – was a petty tyrant, helped in arranging insults and torments by his feckless friends and favourite servants.

His uncle treated Frederic in a way the boy found hard to place at first, until one morning he went to the stables and realized he was being treated the same as stallion being trained to race. Watched closely, worked to exhaustion and scrutinized for every imperfection. Whatever kindness was doled out was distant and measured, but neither was he offered cruelty or mistreatment. Frederic Goethal was being assessed for his suitability to inherit Brus, and should he be found lacking one of his cousins from the third branch of the House of Goethal would be sent for as he returned to the house in the city, to live with Father. That, more than anything else, drove Frederic to excellence. He would not return there, he would not. He would distinguish himself, and one day he would be important enough that when he went to see Mother no one would be able to stop him. The fire lit in him was enough, in the end, to attract Prince Amaury’s approval.

His uncle found him, one afternoon, looking at one of the tapestries in the ivory wing of the palace. It was a beautiful piece, lightly woven with fil d’or and the finest Lange linen. It depicted Florianne Goethal’s victory over the grasping traitors who’d tried to sell Brus to foreign crowns after the House of Barthen was decimated in the Sixth Crusade. A flock of kingfishers flying above the triumphant warrior-princess as she led noble riders in trampling an assembly of distinctly snake-like traitors.

“My prince,” Frederic knelt, when he saw his uncle.

“Rise,” Prince Amaury replied, flicking a dismissive hand and turning his gaze to the tapestry. “A pretty thing, isn’t it?”

“Glorious, even,” Frederic replied. “It is the true birth of our house, my prince.”

“True? Truth has naught to do with it. Learn this well, nephew: all pretty things are lies,” his uncle conversationally said.

Frederic was rather aghast, though he kept this away from his face.

“Did you ever hear the story of the kingfisher’s birth, Frederic?” Prince Amaury asked.

“I have, my prince,” he replied.

“Stories are the dregs that gather in the grooves left by truth,” the ruler of Brus said. “The Bruseni, long ago, ruled a great kingdom in the north of what became Procer. That kingdom broke, and the kingfisher’s story tells us of reasons why – the sea’s encroachment, land turning barren, civil wars. Lycaonese raids. The rest is what men believe ought to be there, or were told was by their fathers.”

“Is there not truth in the story as well, then?” Frederic asked.

“Not in the manner you mean, nephew,” the prince thinly smiled. “Florianne Goethal had a wicked sense of humour, you see. Or so the story goes, among our kin. She chose the kingfisher as her royal sigil for the lesson she’d discerned in the story.”

“And what lessons were these?” the boy softly asked.

“Opportunity, Frederic,” Prince Amaury smiled. “Opportunity must always be seized, that is the lesson of our blood. The kingfisher-prince found fish in the swamps, found wealth within barren hills, found a throne amidst wars. Always where lesser souls faltered he sought opportunity and rose .”

“Is the lesson not one of humility, my prince?” Frederic asked. “For all his exploits he remained but a bird, until the Heavens deemed it otherwise.”

“The Heavens are another story we tell ourselves,” Prince Amaury said. “There is a groove of truth beneath it, never doubt that. But we have filled the silence with a madness of words. We must always fill the silence, nephew, as Florianne herself once did.”

The older man, handsome and regal even in his growing age, ran an almost tender hand down the tapestry.

“There were families that were closer kin to the Barthen,” the Prince of Brus told his nephew. “The Fenvain were so deeply married into the line they were considered a cadet branch. There were more powerful families, as well: the Manvers were seneschals of the city, the Loncoeur had ties to Lyonis and the greatest standing army in Brus. And yet it was Florianne Goethal, her line noble for only three generations and of soldier’s stock at the root, who became Princess of Brus.”

Prince Amaury stared at the depiction of their common forbear, her splendid golden locks a crown before she’d ever worn one.

“While they all quibbled at the capital, fighting over who would be regent and who would get the last Barthen as a son-in-law, she went to the country instead,” the fair-haired prince smiled. “She gathered every soldier she could call on, the sunk her fortune into buying every fantassin company in Brus.”

A pause, an admiring sigh.

“She took the city and she hung them all,” Prince Amaury said. “Every single last one of them. Because she had seen the opportunity and they had not. Oh, we wove stories afterwards. That the Loncouer were trying to sell the crown to Lyonis, that Fenvain and the Manvers had sworn oaths to part Brus in two so both could rule, and perhaps there is even a grain of truth to them. But we shall never know, because Florianne hanged everybody who might speak to that.”

“That is savagery,” Frederic said.

“That is ruling,” the Prince of Brus replied. “That is the truth of the House of Goethal, nephew: we are, in the end, the kingfishers. The children of opportunity. And that is why where other houses boast of honour and faith and prowess, ours are simpler. What are they, Frederic? Our words.”

“ J’ose ,” the boy replied.

I dare , it meant. And Frederic now heard words at the end of them he had never imagined before : I dare to murder, to betray, to usurp. I dare to rule. All the pretty things he’d believed in now tasted like lies.

“It was my mother, who first told me this story,” Frederic said.

The fair-haired prince did not reply. Would not, the boy grasped, until he dared to ask.

“Is she still in the house by the lake?” he asked.

His cheek did not sting, though what followed made him wish it did.

“She is dead, Frederic,” Prince Amaury replied. “She was dead before you began your fostering. She went for a swim the first spring after her consignment and drowned.”

The sting of a hand would have passed. This, Frederic knew, this would not. This would stay.

“Are you going to defend him?” the boy asked, dimly curious.

“Your father is my brother, and there can be no closer tie than blood,” the fair-haired man said.

“That is not a defence,” Frederic said.

“He is my brother,” Prince Amaury acknowledged. “Yet I will not have my successor unduly influenced by even my kin.”

Past the tapestry, through the long sunny corridor of windowpanes filled by light and warmth, Frederic Goethal glimpsed a bird of red and blue.

He too, the boy decided, was a child of opportunity.

Chapter 9: Acceleration

“As sage in Nicae is a fool in Stygia.”
– Free Cities saying

Afternoon Bell came and went before Hanno made his way into my tent. The bundle of reports that inevitably accompanied contact with Salia had eaten up even more of my time than I’d anticipated it would. Vivienne had been enthusiastic in her account of the progress in the talks over the Accords, writing that giving ground over whether or not scrying a foreign country could be considered an act of aggression – which both Procer very much wanted it to be, considering its massive deficiencies in both city-warding and scrying rituals compared to Callow and Levant – had allowed her to get concessions over what we’d termed ‘civil diabolism’, the summoning and binding of devils for purposes other than war. The rest had been more disparate a pack of news than a cohesive, though no less useful for it.

Archer had apparently been seen in the Proceran heartlands with a sixth member to her band, which meant a fresh Named had been added to our roster and would be in touch soon. The First Prince had passed along a note on the state of the Grand Alliance treasury – which remained surprisingly good, all things considered – but also cautioned that the Principality of Brabant’s harvests seemed headed for catastrophe. She went on to write me that feeding this territory, and its massive numbers of refugees, would put us squarely back in the red before winter came. Pickler had sent a refinement on the rotating siege harpoon ballistae schematics she’d made up in Twilight’s Pass. She also mentioned in a separate letter, sounding somewhat flattered, that Prince Otto Reitzenberg had extended a formal invitation for her to found and settle a tribe in Lycaonese lands after the war.

It was a grave misreading of my Sapper-General’s interest in leadership duties so I wasn’t worried about poaching, but I doubted this would be the last of it. Even the Iron Prince had expressed interest in goblin engineering and, considering that Hannoven was yet in the hands of the Dead King, his people had a great deal of rebuilding ahead of them. Still, maybe a strongly worded letter to Otto Redcrown might serve as a helpful reminder that trying to recruit from my sapper corps was, at the very least, a slight to the crown of Callow. Moving on to less grounded matters, the rumours gathered in the south and east by the Jacks remained wild as ever.

The dead were said to walk the streets of Nicae, General Basilia had supposedly eaten the heart of a holy oracle and could now see the future. A band of pale spectres was haunting the Green Stretch, all the while Dread Empress Sepulchral had turned into a black-scaled dragon and ravaged the outskirts of Wolof’s territory. That last one might in truth be the reappearance of General Nekheb of the Tenth Legion, though I’d also heard it said they were nesting among the ruins of the Red Flower Vales so I was less than sure. Somewhat amusingly, it was also quite a popular tale that I’d apaparently brought down the sky on Refuge so that I could steal its Named away into my service.

More important than the wild stories, though was the hastily tacked-on addition from Vivienne that Duchess Kegan had passed forward Dread Empress Sepulchral’s request to open formal diplomatic talks with the Grand Alliance. So far the diplomacy there had been informal and half a secret, and I’d gladly left it to my successor and Hasenbach. This, though, would require my personal attention. Joy. At least we might get enough leverage from that I might be able to wheedle out whether Sepulchral was a genuine claimant or just a horse for Black to ride. I’d better bring Akua into this as well, though that wasn’t unlike asking a wolf about their opinion of the hunt. Still, even years away from the Wasteland she had a better grasp of the way functioned there than anyone else under my command.

Aisha’s family was old and well-connected, after all, but ultimately minor nobility. The Sahelians lived and breathed intrigued at the very highest levels of Praes, and Akua hadn’t just been any one of the lot: she’d been the heiress to Wolof, groomed for either rule of the High Seat or the claiming the Tower itself. Short of kidnapping an actual High Lord there was just no beating that. I was considering who else to bring into this – Hakram, naturally, but it might be worth bringing in some of the high-ranking officers I’d inherited from the Legions of Terror as well – when one of my guards popped in to inform me Hanno had arrived. I thank the man and rose to my feet, limping my way to the commode even as the White Knight entered.

He looked at me then sighed.

“Let it be brandy, at least,” Hanno haggled.

I tapped the top of the commode, jostling a lock, and the door to left compartment popped open. I snatched out a bottle of Creusens brandy and two small silver cups. I’d been prepared. Amusingly enough it was easier to get him to drink liquor than wine, and he drank quick – if only to get it over with. He waited until my nonchalant gesture to take a seat, though I’d long told him not to bother anymore.

“Well bargained, White Knight,” I solemnly said.

“You only ever say that when I’ve been had, Black Queen,” he drily replied.

I limped back to the table, using his momentary distraction as he felt out one of Indrani’s latest carvings to take a closer look at him. Even after two years of facing one brutal horror after another, the Sword of Judgement had little changed in appearance. His fuzzy hair was so closely cropped as to seem almost shaved, leaving the eye to linger instead on a plain but well-formed face. He was built like someone who worked for a living, which I’d always found appealing, and the long-sleeved grey tunic he tended to wear when out of armour had earned a few more stitches since I last saw it but still framed those muscled arms rather nicely. He wasn’t a looker, not the way Ratface had been or Akua was, but he wasn’t without his charms either. Not that I’d ever seriously consider going there, Crows, though apparently Tariq still suspected we were somehow secretly engaging in torrid trysts.

You’d think that after trying to mentor me into the grave the man would have a better appreciation of how much I had no intention of coming anywhere close to something that could, even vaguely while in dim light, pass for a tragic love story. Dismissing the thought I idly noted that he’d brought a small leather satchel – papers, maybe? He shouldn’t need to, his memory was unusually sharp. It was a side-effect of his aspect of Recall, he’d told me, which I’d found fascinating. How many aspects had little quirks like this one, barely noticeable boons tucked away in the shade of the more prominent use? Looking back, after getting Struggle as the Squire I’d gotten rather good at assessing the skill and power of my opponents compared to me. How much of that had been my gaining experience, and how much an ancillary benefit? It was an interesting bit to consider, if at this point largely academic.

“Is that the Saint of Swords that the Archer depicted herself fighting?” Hanno asked.

I set the two silver cups on the table and went to work on the bottle’s cork.

“Battle of the Camps, it was,” I agreed. “They had a scrap while Masego and I were dreaming.”

“Impressive,” Hanno said even as I finally got the cork out with a pop. “There were not many capable of facing Laurence de Montfort’s sword up close and live to tell the tale.”

Indrani had privately admitted to me that she’d waited until the Saint was tired out from the battle and it’d still been a damned close thing, but I wouldn’t disagree with Hanno’s assessment even knowing that. Archer’s talent in close quarters was only slightly helped by her Name, while the Saint had been sharpening her skills in this regard for decades. Considering how much of a terror the woman had been in her old age, I often thought we’d been damned lucky not to fight her in her prime. I poured out two cups of brandy, quirking a brow at the dark-skinned man.

“Wouldn’t have you been able to check with Recall, anyway?” I asked.

He grimaced.

“The fresher the death and the stronger the personality the more it... lingers after use,” the White Knight admitted. “I would not call on the Saint of Sword’s life without great need.”

“Lots of her tricks came from her domain, anyway,” I mused. “Which you can’t mimic, as far as I know.”

He shot me an amused look, well used by now to the way I went about digging up everything I could about his abilities. Well, it was no mystery I’d not been raised by angels. He touched his fingers to the brandy cup, brow rising.

“Two,” he said.

“Five,” I replied without missing a beat.

“Three,” he compromised.

Ah, an opening.

“Twelve,” I boldly tried.

“Four and I’ll not tell Tariq you tried to get me drunk,” he suggested.

Oh Gods was I not in the market for another hesitant, indirect conversation about not ‘casting doubts on the nature of the Truce and Terms through unwise indulgence’. On the other hand, apparently the Witch of the Woods had heard about those and thought the whole thing was fucking hilarious – she kept making fun of Hanno in that nonverbal Gigantes language they used with each other, with all the poses and shifts. He had a stake in this as well, I figured.

“Five and I’ll stop implying in front of Secretary Nestor that your tunic’s grey because you don’t wash it,” I retorted.

As something said by the Black Queen about the White Knight, it went into the Annals every time. Every single time.

“Four and I’ll share the Workshop gossip I received with you,” Hanno offered.

You shit , I thought, not without fondness. He would definitely have shared that before, but he’d hold it back now for sure just so that when we next negotiated he’d have this to point back to.

“Fine,” I mercifully allowed. “Four.”

I set down the bottle on the table and took my cup, offering a toast.

“May you live to bury your enemies,” I said.

“Fair winds and slow rivals,” Hanno replied.

We clinked our cups and drank deep, setting down in unison. It took the edge off enough I barely felt the sting when I seated myself across from him.

“Dare I ask what’s in the bag?” I probed.

“It is not meant to be a mystery,” he said, leaning down to take the satchel before setting it in front of me. “It is a gift, Catherine. Your twenty-third nameday happened while I was away, no?”

I blinked in surprise.

“Oh,” I said. “Yes. Thank you? I’m an orphan, so I don’t really have one of those – just the foundling day late in the spring.”

It also didn’t explain why he’d given me a gift, though I wasn’t complaining.

“From your polite confusion, I take it nameday gift-giving is not a Callowan tradition,” Hanno noted.

“Not really,” I admitted. “For nobles sometimes, I think, but for most people gifts are given at the solstices and when you reach fifteen.”

The dark-skinned man cocked his head to the side, curious.

“Fifteen?” he asked.

“Age of enrollment,” I told him. “Used to be, anyway. It was kept for private noble armies under the Empire but I kicked it up to seventeen all around when I took the throne.”

Keeping it at fifteen would have helped fill the ranks after our losses more quickly but, as both Ratface and Governess-General Kendal had pointed out back then, if we kept pressing the young into service there’d be no one left to practice trades and tend to the fields. A large army was no help when it was busy starving.

“How interesting,” Hanno said, sounding genuine. “Ashurans are expected to give yearly nameday gifts to those they are tied to – family, friends or close collaborators. All within the same tier, naturally. For a citizen to court favour from a higher tier or display favour to a lower one would be frowned upon.”

The Thalassocracy of Ashur sounded like a deeply unpleasant place to live in, as usual. Weren’t there families with citizens of different tiers in them? Still, the implications there were a little flattering: I was being called both an equal and close collaborator.

“Thank you,” I said again, and took the satchel this time.

It was easy to unmake the bronze buckles, and within I found in neat little cloth packets what must have been at least half a years’ worth of wakeleaf.

“You know, when I told you to keep some of the Delosi coin I didn’t mean for you to blow it all on enabling my worst habit,” I drily said.

It’d been, though, a rather touching gesture.

“I have also been considering buying another tunic,” the White Knight calmly replied. “I’ve been told it passes as unclean to the unskilled eye.”

I swallowed a grin and clasped his wrist in appreciation. He smoothly returned the gesture.

“So when should I be looking to return a gift in kind?” I asked.

“Two days past winter solstice,” he smiled.

Ought to bring him to twenty-nine, that. As I recalled he had more or less five years on me, not that it showed: he had one of those faces which would look much the same age until he started greying. I set down the satchel to the side.

“So,” I said. “Business?”

“To business,” he agreed.

I poured him another cup, then myself, and we knocked them back without a toast. I gestured for him to begin as soon as the burn had faded from my throat.

“The Titanomachy reached out to us through Levant,” Hanno began. “They are sending an envoy north.”

I sucked in a surprised breath. The Gigantes were notoriously isolationist, and though they had longstanding ties to the Dominion it’d been my understanding those were limited to exchanges of gifts and the occasional favour. They didn’t even trade with humans in the traditional sense, as far as I knew.

“You don’t sound all that thrilled,” I noted.

His body gave what might have seemed like a twitch at first glance but I’d learned to recognize as him beginning to use that silent language he used with the Witch before stopping himself.

“It will be a complicated matter to handle,” he admitted. “I am told it is Ykines Silver-on-Clouds that was sent.”

“Which is,” I slowly said, “... bad?”

“When I left the Titanomachy, Ykines was skope for Hushed Absence,” Hanno told me. “It is... hard to describe in human terms. A skope is one charged with a message, speaking for others, but it is not exactly a position of authority. It does denote respect, however, and the Hushed Absence is the chorus that most prizes retiring from the affairs of Calernia.”

“So they sent us a lesser noble from the isolationist faction at court as the envoy,” I tried.

“That is untrue in every single specific yet broadly accurate in essence,” the White Knight said, sounding impressed. “You have to understand, Catherine, that since Triumphant and the Seven Slayings the Gigantes have only ever spoken of ties outside their borders in terms of loss.”

“The Seven Slayings,” I repeated curiously. “That’s the Humbling of Titans, right?”

“I would not recommend using that name around any of their kind,” Hanno advised. “The Slayings soured most of their kind on humans, though the tendency had been there for ages before.”

“I never did get why they’re still so viscerally furious about the Hum- the Slayings,” I said. “Procer struck by surprise, sure, but that’s hardly a first for them. Their armies still got savaged when they got deeper in, and all the Principate got to show for those deaths was a modest stripe of land added to southern Valencis.”

They’d also gotten the Titanomachy to unofficially back down from its defence pacts with the Levantine petty kingdoms, which had allowed Procer to eventually keep pushing into Levant after its conquest of Vaccei. Yet the amount of losses taken during the Humbling had supposedly kicked back that conquest by at least a decade, so in a sense the Gigantes had fulfilled their treaty obligations.

“It is not the treachery itself but what was committed through it,” the brown-eyed man said. “When the Principate called for talks, it was some of the greatest left among the Gigantes who went. Three of the last elder spellsingers, the amphore for the Sublime Auspice chorus and two candidates for the Name of Stone Shaper.”

My brow rose.

“Choruses are court factions,” I guessed.

“Gigantes are not social in the way humans are,” Hanno admitted. “You would find their cities to be empty things, and there’d be no court to be found. A chorus is more akin to an ideology, though even within a chorus there will be differing songs. The Hushed Absence, for example, will call to both those who advocate for isolation and those who curtail wonder-making by all Gigantes. Yet some will speak to one over the other or speak of both these in relative moderation. A skope will be messenger for one of the shades of belief, should it gain enough adherents within the chorus.”

“So what does the Sublime Auspice sing about?” I asked.

“Guidance of younger peoples and intervention beyond the borders,” the White Knight said. “In the past they were also the foremost slavers among the Titan Lords.”

I grimaced. Proceran history wasn’t something I’d studied in great depth, especially not when it came to the south – which had barely ever crossed Callow’s path before the Principate was founded – but I had learned some broad strokes back at the orphanage. Arlesites are passionate and romantic people, fond of poetry and duels , Douglas Robinson’s much maligned yet still widely used ‘Peoples of East and West’ described them. Their name comes from the ancient Arlesen Confederacy, which rebelled against the slaving giants. There were stories to be found there, to be sure, but I’d always had a hundred other things to attend to and never had the Titanomachy seemed likely to become relevant to my affairs. It wasn’t the first time I’d been wrong and was unlikely to be the last.

“They never recovered from losing their amphore to human Named while under truce banner,” Hanno continued. “And though the killing of the candidates was a grave insult in the eyes of the Gigantes – not unlike killing a Fairfax prince would be to your people – it was the death of the spellsingers that incited outright hatred. The magnitude of that loss for them as a people is not easily put into words, so I will simply say it was worth great grief and grief often turns to matching enmity.”

My brow rose.

“Named did that?” I asked. “I’d heard it was just assassins.”

“All were Arlesite heroes save for the White Knight of the time, who was of the Cantalii,” Hanno said. “Most of those Names are dead and gone now. Of the twelve assassins to strike only the Drake Knight survived, and not even that potent blood allowed him to grow back the arm he lost.”

He had that distant look on his face as he spoke, the one that told me he was drawing on memories he’d obtained through Recall.

“So you’re saying that since they’re sending us the isolationist skope as an envoy, we shouldn’t get our hopes up about the Titanomachy entering the war,” I said, drawing him back to the here and now.

“To an extent,” he replied, brow creased. “From what I can remember, Ykines was of the Hushed over the Absent – that is to say, his isolationism came as consequence of his desire to restrict wonder-making. It might be he is meant to haggle down contributions, not obstruct involvement.”

“I’ve seen the wardstones the Blood use, Hanno,” I said, hands tightening with want. “They have no fucking idea of how those even work and they’re still better in most regards than anything my people can make. Hells, even if they don’t want to enter the war I’d take a hundred of them joining the ranks of the Arsenal and still lick their boots clean in thanks.”

Metaphorically speaking, anyway. Considering their probable boot size, it seemed like a bit of hassle to get done otherwise.

“That is the complication, Catherine,” he admitted. “In some ways, entering the war might be more popular. What I tell you now, I would have your oath no to repeat.”

I let out a whistle. That was rare. He wasn’t one to ask oaths without a reason, and I perhaps still a little charmed even now that the Sword of Judgement considered my oaths to have worth, so I gave it without argument.

“Gigantes are not ageless in the way of the elves or the drow,” Hanno said.

To this day I was still uncertain as to whether he actually knew that Winter had done away with the mortal lifespan of the Firstborn or he’d simply, like most, assumed that drow were effectively immortal if not taken by strife or sickness.

“They gather power unto themselves by bathing in the light of moon and star in sacred places, by songs and patience, and this power lends them vitality,” the White Knight said. “To be a spellsinger is to be born with the gift of power, to come to weave a second soul and through it be able to pluck at the chords of Creation. These are rare, and prized, as for most Gigantes to make a wonder is to craft with the very stuff of what keeps them alive.”

My eyes narrowed.

“The Seven Slayings,” I said. “They came after that tussle with Triumphant that’s said to have made the Titan’s Pond out of what used to be plains. How much of their lives did they spend to take her on?”

I’d always counted it passing odd, that a people capable of playing rough with the greatest monster to ever come out of the Wasteland had taken hits from an infant Principate without any great retaliation save for the building of the Red Snake Wall much later, after the Dominion freed itself. It made a little more sense now, especially if heroes were thrown into the mix. I knew better than most how dangerous those could be when properly motivated. Sisters bless, these days I’d come to rely on it.

“A fifth of their people died outright,” Hanno frankly said. “Centuries of accumulated power were spent in an hour, and many left themselves only enough to live until they could fill themselves again – yet, even now, a great many of the Gigantes are but a decade away from death should they not observe the old rituals.”

“So they’re not going to want to spend themselves close to the grave to save Proceran lives,” I grimaced. “Harsh. The spellsingers, though, if they’re born with the Gift wouldn’t they be effectively immortal?”

“In a sense,” Hanno conceded. “Yet most of them are young, by the reckoning of the Gigantes, and so have spent but a century or two accumulating power after forging their second soul – through both celestial rituals and their own gift folded onto itself, true, but even so it remains a delicate and time-consuming process. The trouble, here, is that the Titanomachy’s greatest wonders all require the stewardship of spellsingers to some extent.”

Of course they did, because those would have been made before good ol’ Triumphant swaggered in, butchered most of their spellsingers and emptied out the vitality-power reserves of a significant chunk of their population. Much like the Firstborn after Sve Noc first bargained for survival, they must have felt like rats scuttling in the ruins of their own empire, forced to choose between their lives and seeing their greatest works fall apart. Shit, no wonder they hated the Principate like poison: to them it must have felt like Procer savagely kicked them when they were down and just starting to consider how to get back up from the last kick.

“So if they’re with us they’re not keeping their own cities functional, which is going to be less than popular at home,” I sighed. “That’s great. If they’re that tied up, Hanno, why even bother sending an envoy?”

“Because inconvenience and hatred of Procer does not mean they are willing to surrender Calernia to Keter’s grasp without having lifted a finger to fight the encroaching doom,” the White Knight said. “I imagine that our failure to drive back the Dead King has them justly worried, given the scope of the efforts employed by the Great Alliance. I fully expect the Titanomachy will try to gift us old wonders instead of agreeing to craft new ones, and strictly limit the numbers they sent north. Yet even that much would be godsent, let’s not pretend otherwise.”

It’ll be fear that got them moving too , I mused, now that the initial disappointment had passed. Procer alone and surrounded by foes, the way it’d been before the Grand Alliance steadied, that’d be acceptable to them. But Procer as the heart of a great continental alliance that included even their old allies the Levantines? They couldn’t let that happen without keeping an eye on it . I imagined the great developments of the last few years would have attracted the attention as well. It was one thing to play the hermit kingdom when your magic was beyond the wildest dreams of your neighbours, but what happened if the Arsenal put Procer on even footing in even just some regards? A Principate with a few war-making artefacts like that under its belt might not be so inclined to let it go when the Gigantes killed its people on sight near the border.

And given that the Twilight Ways were without precedent, I imagined a lot of their defensive wards would need reworking to adapt to their existence. That had to be keeping them up at night. While they might be able to access the Ways on their own, they’d need deep study before they could feel safely walled up again – and the quickest way to achieve that was sending people to the Arsenal to look through what we’d already found out. No, there were decent reasons for them to reach out even though Hanno had already succeeded at weaning me off the hope that the Titans would come in at this late hour and turn the tide of the war. Hells, if nothing else just seeing how fragile the situation on the fronts was might motivate them to send more than crumbs our way.

“I’ll take what we can get,” I fervently agreed. “I’m guessing this was kicked up to you because we can’t use Cordelia as our diplomatic workhorse this once?”

“It would be unwise to ask the First Prince of Procer to meet Ykines Silver-on-Clouds on behalf of the Grand Alliance,” he mildly agreed. “The Holy Seljun noted that Antigone and I were both mentioned by name, as even to the Hushed Absence we are known.”

“Might have to be you, if they want a familiar face. Haven’t heard of the Witch in a month,” I said. “Not since she went up to have that gander in northern Cleves.”

“From there she struck at the Enemy,” Hanno informed me. “I expect you’ll be getting the message from Princess Rozala late tonight. Antigone put together a band of five and intercepted a turtle-ship before it could land.”

A savage grin split my lips. The Dead King marched his skeletons at the bottom of the Tomb and the Grave regularly, but it wasn’t without effects on the equipment of his soldiers: you couldn’t keep chain mail or a sword underwater for a month without it rusting. For the fodder that was all fine and good, but when Neshamah went to the trouble of arming a few thousand Binds in good steel he didn’t then proceed to scrap it by sending them on an underwater march. For those he used ship transports, in his own horrible manner: massive turtle-barges made of bone and wood with a hollow shell protecting his elites from the elements. As tended to be the way with him, the turtle-ships were made to move by a necromantic flesh construct that was more lizard than turtle and boasted both massive claws and bags of liquid poison it could spew out in a stream.

“Godsdamn,” I whistled. “Now that’s something to brag about. They sunk it? I thought he’d hardened the shells to magic after Akua ripped one open last summer.”

“It had the cold iron linings,” Hanno confirmed. “Antigone made the tactical decision to use her available assets according to methods that had previously proved successful.”

A beat passed and I cocked an unimpressed eyebrow at the hero.

“She threw the Mirror Knight real hard at it,” I deadpanned.

The slightest twitch of the hero’s lips was the most openly he allowed himself to be amused.

“I honestly can’t remember a time where that didn’t work,” I pondered out loud. “Maybe she’s onto something.”

The Mirror Knight was, admittedly, the closest thing to unkillable I’d ever seen even amongst the distinctly hard to kill company that was heroes. During the Dead King’s winter offensive, he’d lasted alone against three Revenants for an hour at Duchesne until Ishaq and I arrived. Though he’d put none of them down it was still utterly absurd that they’d not managed to put a serious wound on him either. Regardless, it was impressive he had a hard enough head that it had sent a few thousand of Neshamah’s finest troops at the bottom of the Tomb. I poured us each another cup of brandy and offered another toast.

“To the Mirror Knight living to be thrown another day,” I said.

“To success against the Enemy, whatever the shape of it,” Hanno said, almost reproachfully.

I wasn’t fooled, he found the whole thing just as hilarious as I did. The drinks went down, and the cups hit the table. A grimmer look passed across his face, afterwards, which immediately had my hackles rising.

“They did more than simply break a turtle-ship,” the White Knight said. “When out there they found a hollow where the scrying disruptions didn’t reach. They got a glimpse of northern Hainaut, before Keter adjusted to block them.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“The Hidden Horror is making a bridge across the tributary river to the Tomb,” he told me, tone calm. “We’ll be facing a full-on offensive within six months, and the numbers...”

I grimaced at his hesitation.

“How bad?”

“At least two hundred thousand of his finest foot is preparing to cross,” Hanno replied. “He’s building from both shores and building in stone – if we don’t break it while unfinished, it will be warded and enchanted so thoroughly as to be near indestructible.”

Fuck , I feelingly thought. On parchment a bridge wasn’t much of an issue, considering Keter could walk its troops at the bottom of the lakes and ferry them across with turtle-ships, but in practice it might be a deathblow to our hopes of retaking Hainaut. The Tomb and the river limited how quickly the Hidden Horror could send his soldiers from the Kingdom of the Dead, especially considering the strong current of the tributary, and the turtle-ships were vulnerable to heroic raids. A bridge, though, meant he could just keep pouring troops into Hainaut day and night: and that wasn’t a metaphor, it wasn’t like the dead tired . So far we’d been keeping our edge against the massively larger numbers through superior troop quality: even a Proceran conscript could handle a few mindless zombies alone, or a pair of skeletons if their arms and armour were rusted through. Once we got full battalions of Binds to deal with, though, we’d be facing a well-armed and fully intelligent army.

If we gave them room to manoeuvre, let the Dead King deploy his full array of tricks against us, then this was the death knell of the Grand Alliance.

“Do you have dimensions for the bridge?” I said. “A notion of the timeline on its completion?”

“Antigone used one of the Repentant Magister’s artefacts to capture an illusory image,” he said. “And sent it south to me by a trusted hand.”

Who did he – ah, and that would be why the Valiant Champion was in my camp. The three of them were supposed to be close.

“Shit,” I cursed. “We need to bring this to the Alliance’s high command as soon as possible. This changes our schedule for the offensive into northern Hainaut, at the very least. If we can grab it back fast enough we could put this entire mess to rest, or at least take the southern end of the bridge and defend it.”

“Antigone went east to blunt another offensive against the western coast of Cleves,” Hanno said. “Which means I will have to move south to speak with the Gigantes envoy myself.”

“We’re due a proper council anyway,” I pointed out. “And a visit to the Arsenal couldn’t hurt. Hells, the Painted Knife is due back soon as well, the way I hear it, and I’m curious to hear what she has to say.”

“We gather it all at the Arsenal, then,” Hanno agreed. “It ought not to be impossible, given the facilities there.”

“It can be done in the other senses as well,” I grunted. “We have the pull to ensure it.”

Though the mood had grown more somber, I poured out another two cups. Hanno’s eyebrow rose questioningly.

“Surrendering the last cup so soon?” he said.

“Well, if we’re to have the conversation I suspect we’re about to have we might as well finish the drinks first,” I said. “Argument does tend to spoil the taste.”

“Ah,” Hanno exhaled.

He took the cup in hand and we drank. Because he was a polite sort, he waited a few heartbeats before speaking.

“You have lashed out at two heroes in two days, Black Queen,” the White Knight said. “I would know why, and what happened to the Named you meant to bring back to camp.”

Chapter 10: Reflections

“Men pray only to angels because their devils need no summons.”
– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

“See, I thought that too at first,” I mused. “That I owed you some sort of explanation. But then I had another think, looked back at what I actually did. And, really, what’s the worse you can put on me? I was curt with a kid. I told a Named who came in my tent uninvited to get the Hells out before I tossed her out.”

I shrugged.

“I hurt a heroine’s feelings,” I said. “Twice. Ah, what utter perfidy.”

The last sentence I uttered with a cocked brow and the driest tone I could muster.

“I suppose we’ll have to get through this the usual way,” I announced. “I’ll bring the hammer and nails if you bring the cross, White Knight: if I’m going to be crucified over a trifle, the least you could do is go halfsies on the materials.”

Hanno’s face betrayed no reaction to my words as he studied me, calm as ever. No, perhaps calm was the wrong word, for it implied a degree of peace. Indolence, when at its worst. The White Knight was a creature of certainty , which leant him the appearance of calm, but there was nothing peaceful about certainty. Especially in the hands of a hero, who could so often weave from it either death or salvation.

“You’ve not often had an equal, have you Catherine?” the dark-skinned man pensively said. “A few superiors, I imagine: most of them unkind or untrustworthy, more marks in the making than someone whose lead was worth following. And followers by the thousands, that one is beyond denial. Not all of them truly beneath you in skill and strength, either. You might insist that the Woe are more allies than subordinates, but when has one of them ever tried to give you an order?”

I rather hoped this wasn’t about to segue into a little speech about the nature of the Woe. I’d had quite a few people try their hand at those over the years, most with knowledge of the individuals involved about as deep as Keteran grave. Usually it was some sort of hackneyed comparison with the Calamities. I’d even once asked it of Black, out of morbid curiosity, to which he’d mildly answered that given the way even individuals who’d borne the same Names could vary so wildly in motivation and disposition any attempt to force precedent in groups of Named was, at best, misguided. Which had essentially been an elaborate way of telling me the Calamities were the Calamities and the Woe were the Woe, and anyone trying to hack at the truth of either to fit both into the mold of legacy was a fool. There were good reasons I remained fond of the man to this day.

“I will assume that this is meant to, eventually, reach something baring vague resemblance to a point,” I said.

“If you perceive me as being subordinate to you, or allied, then you have a rather sweet temper,” Hanno said, sounding rather fascinated. “Yet the moment I am seen as demanding answers from you or being set above you in some manner, you bare your fangs without hesitation. I have never seen it so neatly displayed in sequence as it was today, which I’ll chalk up to exhaustion on you part. You are rarely so easy to parse.”

I pushed down the toothy, slightly nasty smile I’d been about to send his way. No need to feed the metaphor.

“Most people don’t enjoy being described to themselves, Hanno,” I said.

Might be there was some part of truth to what he’d said, though. Adjutant saw more of me than anyone, so he’d be able to tell me – from there, it’d just be a question of how to smooth away that wrinkle. I couldn’t afford to have obvious levers on my temper in my position, especially when I had a nascent Name. Mantles tended to put the best and worst of you in sharp relief, so it was all the more important to know what those were.

“You are not most people,” Hanno calmly replied. “Already the measured part considers adjustment, while the one forged by your teachers begins to ponder if this is not a manner manipulation.”

It wasn’t difficult to manipulate who respected you, I knew. I did it all the time. His vocalization of that fact did nothing to put out the ever-burning embers of suspicion that seemed to fall asleep around fewer people every year.

“We’ve strayed far from whatever grievances you might want to bring to me,” I said. “Which I’ve yet to hear, regardless.”

“You were unkind to a scared and tired child of fourteen, for reasons which had little to do with her,” the White Knight said. “If you could offer an apology or a reassurance so that she does not believe the foremost villain of our age had personal enmity towards her, I would appreciate it. I am, however, aware I have neither right nor means to compel this of you.”

“Would you, if you did?”

I almost wondered who it was that’d asked that, before I recognize my own fool voice. The question had slipped out of me before it could be put away in the back of my mind, my lips moving of their own accord. Some part of me had expected some classical answer to come out of the White Knight’s mouth before a heartbeat had passed, but that was doing Hanno disservice. The Ashuran hero considered the matter seriously, only answering when he was certain of his answer. I trusted his words more for that, twisted as the thought might be. It was one thing to say you would never but we both knew it was different when you actually had that power. I’d come up the ranks of the Empire talking of reason and compromise but later in my career, when I’d had the strength to dictate terms, how many times had I refrained from doing so? People always found it easy to dismiss the thought of drink before sweet wine was pressed to their lips.

“No,” he said. “It is not a crime to be uncivil. Regardless, it is not my place to give such orders.”

“You give orders to your heroes all the time,” I retorted, and raised a hand to quiet him when he began to answer, “You don’t get to call them requests when people listen to them every single time, Hanno.”

“That is only the use of my authority as a representative under the Truce and the Terms,” the White Knight told me. “It is not a personal matter.”

“Yeah, so that’s nonsense,” I said. “We dressed it up real good, put it in ink and slapped some impressive seals onto the parchment, but pretending even for a moment that our authority isn’t personal is ridiculous. Heroes don’t listen to you because you’re a high officer of the Grand Alliance, they listen to you because you personally command their respect – either because of your record, your Name or your character.”

“That sounded almost like a compliment,” Hanno said, sounding amused.

I rolled my eyes.

“Look, to keep my side in line I have to show I’m powerful, ruthless and I’m willing to send a few plumb opportunities their way should they toe the line,” I said. “For you it’s more like a virtue pissing match paired with your war record – and on top of that you’ve got just a dash of divine right to lead, since this whole mess is somewhat crusade-shaped and you’re the White Knight.”

“I would ask how a virtue pissing match would take place in practice, but I’ve learned better than to provoke your talent for the descriptive,” the White Knight noted.

“I’m serious,” I flatly told him. “Tariq was everyone’s favourite grandfather, until he made a deal with me once. He’s still digging himself out of that hole. If he pulled out the same kind of tricks right now he used to catch my teacher, I’m not sure he wouldn’t get a hero after him for it. Why? ‘cause he made a truce with a villain. His virtue bragging rights were put in doubt, his heroic ‘reputation’, so now he couldn’t do the job you do even if he wanted to.”

“Trust in the Peregrine ebbed because a villain was instrumental in his resurrection,” Hanno corrected. “There is long precedent in corrupting magics and even necromancy being used on heroes, which means those with only glancing knowledge of those events have reason to worry about him being unduly influenced.”

He paused.

“Heroes who learn of even surface details of the affair tend to dismiss such concerns entirely,” he noted. “I would argue you overestimate how deeply the Princes’ Graveyard affected his repute, at least as far as faith in his judgement is concerned.”

“And you don’t think it’s grotesque,” I said, “that butchering an entire village by plague didn’t get people wondering about that, but that evening did ?”

“I do not judge,” the White Knight replied. “Now less than ever.”

“But you do, Hanno,” I hissed out. “Because you chose to be part of a structure, and that structure doles out judgement all the time. It judged that your kid, the one whose answer to fucking death on the march was to get down on her knees and pray , she’s the good one. She gets to live. Mine, the one who actually tried to bloody well do something? Well, he was bad. He gets to die.”

His dark eyes were kind, which only strengthened the streak of anger that’d torn through me.

“How close was the mirroring?” Hanno quietly asked.

“The Scorched Apostate,” I said, baring teeth. “A mage too. His sorcery mimicked Light, with a tinge of fire to it.”

Tancred was the greater loss here, damn me twice for it. Healers were useful, but most were mediocre in fight against other Named unless they were part of a band of five. The Scorched Apostate would have been useful in half a dozen ways, from his eyes to his sorcery to the potential contribution to the Arsenal. What was the Stalwart Apostle going to do, except dole out Light? If the Heavens were going to pick the children they saved, they could at least pick them better .

“I take it he is dead,” the White Knight asked.

“The Dead King got the drop on me,” I straightforwardly said. “Kid fell asleep, the new ghouls ate and replaced my escort while I was studying the remains of the village and turned him into a Revenant.”

I saw him, saw the cast of his face and his mind as he almost asked why a village had become remains, but then he thought better of it. He had a knack for knowing when to advance and when to retreat, this one.

“I’m sorry,” Hanno said. “It would have been a blow, and Pascale’s survival would have been salting the wound.”

“I shouldn’t have been curt with your kid,” I conceded. “But I will not apologize for speaking the truth to her, either.”

The sooner she learned that providence was not a panacea for poor decisions, the better.

“That,” the White Knight calmly said, “is where we disagree. You did not speak the truth to her, you simply spoke in anger and dismay.”

“They’ve got it all handled, then? How lovely,” I scathingly replied. “If the Heavens have it all under control, forgive me for meddling. I’ll march my armies home and leave you lot to the business of winning .”

“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred,” Hanno quoted, “nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, that act of faith would have killed dozens of thousands. That is what you said, word for word. Regardless of your sarcasm, I disagree.”

“How many little villages did the zombies eat, to make up an army whose numbers warranted three heroes and a fourth forming to fight?” I said. “Five, ten, twenty? You really think none of the people there ever thought to pray their way out of it? They still died, White.”

“You take helplessness for negligence,” the dark-skinned man flatly replied. “Do you sincerely believe that, if the Heavens had been able to empower a champion during those tragedies instead, they would have stood by and done nothing? There are rules , Black. What you condemn as apathy, I mourn instead as inability.”

“Gods should not need to be excused ,” I harshly said. “If you’re to claim yourself as the source of all that is Good, then either triumph or stop strutting about. If faith is a wager, then at the very least they should have the fucking decency to acknowledge it.”

“Below are deities as well,” Hanno said. “While deploring that the Heavens are not omnipotent, in the same breath you rage only at the half of the Gods trying to mend-”

“I’ve seen the work of Choirs,” I softly interrupted. “And I do not call that mending . I’ll say this for the Gods Below: utter bastards that they are, they always grant the precise measure of what was bargained for. And they don’t ask you to kiss their feet for it first.”

“Because Below does not have agents or servants,” the White Knight sharply said. “It has horses, and they are ridden ‘til they break . Or are you so enamoured of the Hellgods you will not acknowledge that by the time hero’s blade bites into the flesh the villain is long dead? That whatever beauty, whatever decency there might have been in what drove them at first, it ever transmutes into deaths and red madness?”

“I find it rich of you to argue this, given that before the Graveyard the two oldest heroes were the Saint and the Pilgrim,” I snorted. “Which of them did not have a body count to match those of the greatest villains of their age? Above warps you just as much as Below does us, except we’re supposed to pretend in your case it’s a good thing. It’s almost like wielding great power and rubbing elbows with unearthly entities for decades has consequences no matter what direction your prayers are headed.”

Vivienne had made it plainly clear that the Dominion of Levant would rather leave the Grand Alliance than sign onto the clause I’d pushed to be added against named rulers, but I still believed in the principle: Names affected you, everyone knew that. It was just that the side dressing in white had convinced itself into believing for them it was never a bad thing.

“Would you have balked at comforting a child you scared, in the days before you became the Squire?” Hanno simply asked.

That stung, though half the sting came from the surprise. I hardly ever thought about those times, nowadays. In every way that mattered the girl Catherine Foundling had been died when I chose to take the knife Black had offered me.

“I some ways I was even worse of an ass at sixteen,” I replied, unsure what the true answer to his question would be. “And you’re falling into that old heroic trap, White: looking back at olden times and thinking they were a golden age instead of an age just like this one, with troubles and joys both.”

“Or perhaps you are falling into that old villainous trap, Black,” Hanno said, “of refusing to look back at who you were in fear of what it might make you question now.”

“Funny thing, about fear,” I said. “I’d wager I know it a lot better than you, Sword of Judgement . I don’t get to kick my decisions upstairs when I have to make them.”

“And you believe this to be easy?” Hanno said, cocking his head to the side. “That restraint, patience, faith – they are somehow easier paths to follow than those you tread?”

I bit my tongue, because even angry as I was I would not descend into petty insults. That beat of silence let him take the initiative in speaking again.

“The child you so disdain,” the White Knight said, “had magic to call on. Enough she could have fled or fought the undead. Yet when death swallowed her little corner of the world, she did neither. She sought a way to heal the people who doubted her, and when all she knew failed her she still did not give up. She threw away what she was to help others, Black, and I will not let you even imply that such a decision was cowardice or laziness. It was courage, and a refusal to compromise over what she held dearest.”

“And if her story had been just a little off,” I said. “To the side, and it just didn’t quite settle into the proper groove for a Name – would you still be praising her then? Because she would have made for a courageous corpse, true enough, but we’d have a rampant plague on our hands.”

More corpses, and those would not be the sort inclined to stay in the ground. It was all nice and good to be principled, until those principles started applying mostly to the way the world should be and not the way it actually was.

“Yet that is not what happened,” Hanno said.

My frustration mounted.

“But it could have-”

“It did not, nor will it,” the White Knight said, sounding the faintest bit irritated as well. “She is the Stalwart Apostle, a story of faith in the dark rewarded. You were advising her to act in a manner that goes against her Role, Catherine. If she takes the wager, she’ll win every time.”

“She couldn’t have known that in advance, Hanno,” I said. “Or you, for that matter. Are you telling me we should give advice to kids that’ll get them killed most of the time?”

“I believe we should advise people according to who and what they are,” he replied. “Yet your objection, I see, is not with the advice some young Named benefit from being given.”

“You can’t tell people that praying will solve things,” I flatly said. “It won’t, except in one in a hundred thousand occurrences like this. If that’s what you put out as a story, that’s what people will do instead of acting to save themselves. People can’t rely on the Heavens for that, they’ll just die .”

If prayer somehow summoner heroes to the peril, or called forth angels or really anything useful at all this wouldn’t get stuck in my throat so much but it wasn’t like attending fucking sermons at the House made you able to use the Light.

“People rely on the Heavens for more than just intervention,” Hanno chided me. “Faith in Above guides a soul both on Creation and beyond; simply because it does not call a storm of fire does not make it worthless. Besides, prayer does not preclude action.”

“If you’ve got time to kneel and mutter, you’ve got time to raise a palisade,” I bluntly replied. “One of them’s a lot more useful than the other.”

“I understand that you do not keep to Above,” the White Knight said, frowning. “Nor would I expect you to. Yet your insistence that faith and ability are mutually exclusive is, to say the least, insulting.”

“Faith doesn’t keep the dead out,” I said.

“Most the time,” Hanno gently said, “neither does the palisade.”

But there was the gap, I thought. He was phrasing as prayer, faith, making it some grand old thing. But what it was, in practice, was sitting and hoping someone else would solve your problems for you. And I couldn’t abide that, not in people I was supposed to respect, not even if it worked . Because for most people it didn’t, and you couldn’t call it a solution if it worked one time in a thousand. But there was no point in arguing this with him, was there? This was a man who’d embraced the role of champion for the Choir of Judgement and never looked back – he’d been able to call on the judgement of the Seraphim with the flip of a coin for years. There was no questioning that kind of closeness with the divine and telling him the only two gods I’d ever liked were the ones I’d helped make would only amuse him.

“Nothing more to be said on this, I don’t think,” I sighed.

“Agreed,” the White Knight replied. “I do enjoy our talks, Catherine, though I doubt we’ll ever change each other’s mind. If your own philosophy is to be the face and method Evil takes in the decades to come, it is one I can make my peace with.”

I grunted, not replying outright. Of all the heroes I’d met he was one I had most affinity for, but sweet as that could be sometimes on other it only served to bring into relief the things we deeply disagreed on. None of them, though, we worth parting ways over. I’d tolerated worst of people I respected less.

“You’re not bringing me an official complaint under the Terms, am I understanding correctly?” I asked instead.

“Neither Rafaella nor Pascale sought me out for one, that is true,” Hanno confirmed

I might despise the Champion, but I’d at least admit she didn’t seem like the kind of woman who’d run to the White Knight after getting her pride bruised.

“I am not demanding answers of you,” the dark-skinned man continued. “I am simply noting your rather famous sense of diplomacy had lapsed of late.”

I rolled my eyes at that. I wasn’t a diplomat, I was just good at maneuvering myself into a position where people had to listen to me or the consequences to them would be horrid. As for handling villains, that wasn’t diplomacy: I was pretty sure you stopped being able to call it that after the first two times you dropped someone at the bottom of an Arcadian lake and left them there for thirty beats before taking back them out to... emphasize the importance of keeping a civil tongue.

“It has been made clear to me I’ve been taking on too much,” I admitted. “It’s taking its toll in a lot of ways, some of them more subtle than others.”

Some were not subtle at all, like the fact that the White Knight had brought back to camp a recruit while I’d brought back a corpse. Hanno grimaced, the expression odd to see on his face. While he was not solemn, neither was he prone to strong expressions. I watched his arm coil as he closed his hand, reaching for something against his palm. A coin, I thought. The coin.

“I have contributed to this, Catherine, and I apologize for it,” Hanno said as my brow rose in surprise. “I many matters I have deferred to you and relied on you to express to the Grand Alliance our shared opinions.”

“It’s not like you’ve been sleeping in,” I drily said. “You’ve been either out there, training heroes or here with me since the war got going.”

“You have duties I do not,” he frankly said. “As a queen and a general. I have known this yet often allowed you to take the lead on shared responsibilities whenever you offered.”

He slowed, looking uncomfortable for a passing beat.

“It was comfortable for me, deferring,” the White Knight admitted. “In the wake of the silence left by the Hierarch’s folly it was pleasant to let someone else take charge and rely on the sharpness of their vision until I got my bearings. And, after, I saw no harm in leaving matters as they were: you excelled, and I could contribute in ways that did not involve changing the way of things.”

“You didn’t force authority onto me,” I said. “I took it, knowingly.”

In those early days, even with our unsettling connection weighing on the scales I wasn’t sure how much I would have trusted him anyway. By that point I’d hardly ever met a hero that hadn’t tried to kill me, much less one who was actively trying to be helpful .

“And it has run you ragged, hasn’t it?” Hanno murmured. “You nearly never allowed yourself to be this... raw around me. Even drunk you are guarded.”

I clenched my teeth. This was starting to sound a lot like pity. Save your pity for the kid who’ll never reach fifteen , I thought. I’m just tired and wicked and wary.

“I would begin handling the formal correspondence with the First Prince and Highest Assembly, if you’ve no objection,” the White Knight firmly offered. “And, considering the many demands on your time, perhaps your end of the Origin Hunts could be passed to another villain.”

“Beastmaster-” I began.

“Cannot afford to alienate the both of us,” Hanno said. “And is well-aware of this. He’ll collaborate with whoever you choose.”

He said as much in the tone of someone who fully intended to make that prediction into a fact, blade bare if need be. The White Knight had taken to Ranger’s wayward pupil even less than I had, which was how Beastmaster had ended up largely in my wheelhouse in the first place.

“I intend to withdraw from the front for some time,” I admitted. “If necessity dictates that we begin preparing an all-out assault on northern Hainaut soon it’ll not be as long or restful a withdrawal as I’d been considering, but as it is I’m considering heading to the Arsenal early.”

Masego would be there, who I’d not seen in too long, and if I got lucky maybe Indrani would be as well – although in that sense the getting lucky would be coming after her presence was confirmed. Gods, that’d do me some good as well. When shady, ambitious Levantine villains were starting to look tempting it meant it’d been too long. And, Hells, even if she wasn’t odds were that Nephele would be there. That remained an enticing piece of unfinished business.

“You should,” Hanno encouraged. “We’ve ended the immediate threat of the plague and the Grey Pilgrim is tracking down whatever remnants might have been seeded – he might come to take Pascale for a journey soon – so aside from military matters you should be able to hand off there’s no pressing need for you to remain.”

“The Blood might come to you with another beehive that got kicked,” I told him.

“The Barrow Sword?” he asked.

I snorted.

“Guess,” I said.

“I expect it will and in a compromise that pleases no one in particular,” Hanno said. “Either separate rolls of the Blood for the villainous, or admission into the existing ones with most of the attendant privileges stripped out.”

Which would be a massive gain for Ishaq anyway, though well shot of what he wanted. Much as he might protest otherwise, the Barrow Sword very much wanted a little corner of Levant to rule. One where he could begin gathering other Bestowed from our side of the fence, and began smashing his way into a degree of prominence at some other family’s expense. He was not so much a fool as to think he had a chance of toppling the Isbili, but he was ambitious enough I would not put it beyond him to have an eye on taking one of the great cities belonging to another founding bloodline.

“Either way I can’t let them simply bury the man,” I said. “It’ll close the door on any other Levantine villain joining us, and I swore oaths otherwise besides.”

“I’ll advise restraint and compromise, then,” the White Knight replied. “Yet even that does not seem too pressing a need – scrying back and forth with Levante will take months.”

“So long as the Holy Seljun and the rest of them know I’ll frown on Ishaq being cheated,” I said. “At the very least the man is owed recognition for the things he’s actually doing.”

“A sensible stance,” Hanno nodded. “Is it him you’ll be naming as your stand-in for the Origin Hunts?”

The Barrow Sword, serving as some poor freshly-risen Named’s introduction to the Truce and the Terms? No, that had disaster written all over it. That’d need someone with a defter touch, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to spare Hakram.

“I’ll probably pull the Rapacious Troubadour back from Brabant,” I frowned. “He’s certainly got the knack for finding hidden things.”

Archer would probably have taken him into her band of five, compulsive killer or not, if she’d not already been full-up. I was rather happier with her trusting her back to the Harrowed Witch instead, even if she’d murdered her own brother – sometimes it could be slim pickings, when it came to recruiting ‘trustworthy’ villains. With his thirst for death and songs sated by the access the First Prince reluctantly had given him to death row prisoners, the Troubadour had nonetheless proved to be damned useful. He’d predicted the skirmishes between refugee camps and the Brabant locals months before they happened, even identifying the likely ringleaders for violence on both sides, which had allowed us to snuff that whole mess out in the crib. He’d also brought two other Named into the Truce and the Terms without there being violence involved, one of them even being a heroine, so between the instincts and the silvertongue he was probably my best bet around here.

I’d need someone to keep an eye on him, but that would also have been true if I named anyone outside the Woe.

“I don’t suppose I could talk you into sending for the Hunted Magician instead,” Hanno tried.

I snorted. The mage was much too useful in the Arsenal to be sent traipsing around the countryside.

“I’d thought not,” the White Knight sighed. “I’d hoped it would be someone halfway respectable.”

“I’ll take that as a backhanded compliment,” I said.

He smiled, surprised, and to my own surprise extended his arm to take the bottle of brandy in hand. He poured us each a cup with neat, measured spills that wasted not a drop.

“What are we drinking to?” I asked, taking my cup and raising it.

“Trouble waiting until tomorrow,” he toasted.

Hells, I’d drink to that.

Chapter 11: Veer

“A dog to the brave, a wolf to the craven.”
– Arlesite saying

I would head for the Arsenal tomorrow, I decided after the White Knight left.

There were still decisions to be made and responsibilities to discharge, so I put my back into it instead of leaning backing into my seat and sleeping for a few months the way I wanted to. It was tempting to simply say I could take the bundle of reports and letters with me, but if I wanted to keep a decent pace while on the move I couldn’t afford to have wagons of affairs and a crowd of attendants with me. That meant answering every bit of correspondence I’d received – or left to languish, honesty compelled me to admit – over an afternoon’s span, Hakram flitting in and out of my tent like some big green bureaucratic butterfly after I’d told him of my intention. I’d left Baron Henry Darlington’s complaint about the continued Deoraithe presence in the northern baronies unanswered for two months, considering the shit knew very well it’d been at Vivienne’s order that Duchess Kegan had sent her soldiers to hold our end of the Passage. He was just trying to extract concessions for the supply convoys passing through his territory to feed the host there, the rapacious prick.

I penned an amicable reply inviting him to propose a plan to field a force apt to replace Kegan’s, if his objections to the Deoraithe were so deeply felt. No doubt he’d enjoy that, it was the kind of thing that could be used to muster up some support and influence among the few remaining nobles of Callow. I added that he should forward such a plan to ‘Heiress-Designate to the Crown Vivienne Dartwick’ as soon as it was done, which he’d enjoy a great deal less. Did he really think I’d not noticed he was trying to go over Vivienne’s head by calling directly on me over something she’d already ordered? I might be the Queen of Callow, but I wasn’t fool enough to start undermining my own chosen successor’s authority. The invitation from the Closed Circle of Mercantis to attend one of their auctions had already expired by the time I got it, in a practical sense, given that the auction had already been held when I got the letter. I’d been meant a mark of honour than a real expectation I’d leave the front, though, so I wrote a polite refusal anyways.

It always paid to be polite to people you owed money to, even if the ‘you’ here was the Grand Alliance and not me personally.

The offer by the Holy Seljun of Levant, one Wazim Isbili – who was, to my understanding, Tariq’s grand-nephew – to formally send an ambassador to the Callowan court and receive one from us in Levante in turn was rather more pressing. It was heartening to see that the Dominion was willing to establish closer ties with my kingdom, and to an extent rarely sought given the distance between the two realms, but there were... complications. For one, I didn’t really have anyone to send as an ambassador. In the Old Kingdom that’d been a role for the highest ranks of nobility, which had been quite thoroughly exterminated in the decades since the Conquest. My father being the viciously meticulous bastard that he was, he’d also done all he could to stamp out what one might call diplomatic apprenticeships. Almost like he’d wanted to make sure Callow was isolated and incapable of properly reaching out. It was a sad but undeniable fact that most ‘diplomats’ I could send would be Praesi officers of noble birth from my army, with as other option maybe Brandon Talbot. Who I needed in command of the Order of Broken Bells anyway, making him highly unsuitable for the task.

I kicked that decision back to Vivienne, after pondering the matter a bit, along with a note outlining that she’d be in charge of finding a suitable ambassador if she decided to accept. I also suggested that a potential Levantine ambassador should be received by her in Salia rather than at my ‘court’ in Laure, and lastly stipulated that no ambassador of ours could be related to Duchess Kegan. There was already enough discontent at the way the Duchess of Daoine kept naming kin and vassals to key court and bureaucratic positions, she needed no encouragement. Especially if a decade from now the Duchy of Daoine was to be independent, complicating the loyalties of all such appointees by a great deal. More recently, the Iron Prince had sent a missive describing the way the dead beyond the defensive lines had massed for assault before suddenly withdrawing and asking if I had an explanation.

I spent the better part of an hour describing the Dead King’s latest plot to tie us here down south while he went on the offensive again. Klaus Papenheim had added a note that his envoy had spoken glowingly of the results of the assault formation on the field – somewhat to my surprise, given that she’d not expressed such enthusiasm before me – and that he would want to pit a formation against a more traditional mixed force of Bones and Binds before committing to that doctrine but he was definitely interested. Amusing enough, he also warned me that Otto Redcrown had extended an offer of settling in Lycaonese land to Sapper-General Pickler but that no offence should be taken by it. Any such offers made in the future would pass by me first. It was enough for me to soften my language when I wrote to the Prince of Bremen over the matter, mentioning that I was willing to serve as intermediary between the Lycaonese and the Confederation of the Grey Eyries if they wanted to extend that offer to the Tribes instead of to troops sworn to my service.

The rest was minor correspondence, mostly from my commanders on other fronts, including the usual letter written in Crepuscular from General Rumena that turned out to bear some insulting nuance to a native speaker I wouldn’t get without asking for help. Hence getting me insulted in front of an audience every single time. The old bastard never actually bothered to send me proper reports, given that Sve Noc saw to it we spoke in ‘person’ regularly. I’d be due that tonight, I thought. Not necessarily a conversation with Rumena, but communion with my patronesses. Last time they’d brought me in for a waking dream it’d been to show me the sigils of the Exodus raising the foundations of a hidden city in the depths of Serolen, though also to make a point that warfare around the edges of the Gloom reborn was growing... rougher. The Dead King was getting serious about dislodging them from their positions, not just trying to erode them one corpse at a time. I set those drifting thoughts – a sure sign I’d been going through these chores for a while – aside when Hakram flitted back in, wasting no time to bring another folded parchment to me. I took it with a sigh.

“What am I looking at?” I asked, eyes begin to scan the cramped lines.

“The proposed numbers and composition of our escort to the Arsenal,” he said.

I frowned.

“I don’t need knights,” I said. “They’re a lot more useful out here.”

“You’re the Queen of Callow,” Hakram pointed out. “Knights are expected . They expect is as well, Catherine.”

“I’ve no personal guard,” I said. “There will be no second Gallowborne. If the Order of Broken Bells understands this differently, Talbot is in need of being disciplined.”

These days I was not quite so prone to leaping into the fire, but what mortal guard could possibly be expected to survive the kind of messes I got into? No, there would be no revisiting that old blunder under a different name.

“And cut that number in half,” I added. “I want us riding briskly.”

“Wagons don’t ride briskly, Catherine,” Adjutant gravelled.

“Then they can catch up at the Arsenal,” I said. “I’ll not double the length of the trip for comfort.”

“Let me requisition packhorses, at least,” the orc said.

I waved my hand.

“So long as we don’t slow,” I said. “And send for Akua, will you?”

He nodded.

“You’ll also need to personally write to the Rapacious Troubadour, if you want him to take up Origin Hunting without feeling slighted,” he reminded me before leaving.

Ugh, and I’d been just about done too. That letter I took my time in writing, since he was a prickly thing for a bandier of words and not half-bad with a knife. Mind you, when he’d admitted he stole songs from those he killed I probably shouldn’t have replied ‘surely you mean souls’ in a dry tone. He hadn’t taken that well. Still, vicious bastard or not he’d sniff out any Named popping out in this neck of the woods and ease them into the Truce – and I’d make it clear that Hanno was in the area too, which ought to keep him honest when it came to his more unsavoury tendencies. I was up and limping about looking for my seal when my right hand and my left arrived. I waved in their direction, pushing aside sheaths of parchment with a frown.

“It’s in your desk,” Hakram said.

“I looked in my desk, thank you very much,” I waspishly replied. “It’s not in-”

Having stepped around my desk and opened one of the drawers even as I spoke, he produced my personal seal – the Crown and Sword, as it’d come to be known – and said nothing. His silence was, admittedly, quite damning enough on its own.

“Must have been under something,” I weakly said.

“Walnut shells, mostly,” the orc reproached.

I winced.

“Look, sometimes it’s late and I’m not hungry enough for a meal,” I defended.

“And so the Black Queen so spoke to her dark legions,” Akua intoned. “Bring me walnuts, my wicked servants. But don’t tell Adjutant, for he gets snippy about the mess.”

I flipped a finger at her and hobbled to the side of the desk, picking up the bar of grey wax I’d set next to the letter before forming black flames against the side. Wax dripped and I dismissed the fire, extending my free hand and receiving my seal from Hakram. With a firm push the seal was affixed and I set the letter aside.

“Right,” I said. “So I considered it, and we’ll be scrapping the wardstone to get the obsidian spike.”

I gave a heartbeat of room for Akua to protest, but of course she’d been taught better than that.

“I’m not comfortable going on campaign against Keter with a repaired wardstone anyway,” I told the shade. “So we might as well get another weapon to study out of it.”

“You no longer speak in the theoretical,” Akua noted.

When it came to a summer campaign? No, no I did not. That little revelation about the bridge had ensured as much. We couldn’t afford to ignore that.

“Talks with the White Knight were fruitful,” I grunted. “I’ll need to speak with the rest of the Grand Alliance leaders, but an offensive campaign in Hainaut is now a certainty – the only thing up in the air is the timing of it.”

“I’ll see to extracting the spike immediately, then,” Akua decisively said. “If you’ll excuse me?”

I nodded my thanks, she returned them with a smile and just as quick as she’d come she was gone. The tent flap closed behind her, cutting through the slice of dusk it’d bared. She must have appreciated the courtesy of being told in person, I supposed, even if ultimately I’d not taken her advice.

“Tell me when it’s done,” I said, eyes turning to the tent flap. “I’ll have a look at it myself.”

“And until then?” Hakram asked, sounding curious.

“It’s getting dark out,” I said. “Time to speak with the Crows.”

—

At the exact moment night fell, I was seated alone in the dark of my tent.

The sprite-lanterns had been hooded, the braziers put out, and I’d dragged my fae seat away from the desk so that there’d be more room around. I’d long grown familiar with weaving silencing strands of Night around my tent that would prevent eavesdropping, be it physical or otherwise, and even my guards had been told to step further away. My pipe in hand, breathing in the wakeleaf I’d been gifted, I watched the burning red brand that was the only light inside and spat out a long stream of acrid smoke. The only sign that Sve Noc had deigned to join me was a slight breath of breeze, almost like an exhale, and then they were there. Perched on either side of me, on the back of the seat, great crows feathered in darkness so deep and even the dark of the tent seemed bright in comparison. Long, sharp talons dug into the wood of the armchair with a sound like steel scraping bone.

“First Under the Night,” Andronike said, voice cool.

Like stone far below where the sun never shone, like a deep lake whose waters were as a veil.

“Losara Queen,” Komena said, voice sharp.

Like the ring of steel against steel, like pride and hate and all the things that made men go mad.

“Sve Noc,” I replied, dipping my head in respect.

Two years was perhaps not so long a span, as gods would have it, but it had made a world of difference with these two. They were no longer taking their first stumbling steps past the threshold of apotheosis: these were goddesses in all the arrogant vigour of their youth, casting a covetous eye upon the world. And I was, on most days, the closest thing they possessed to restraint. I breathed in the smoke, held it in my throat and blew it back out. I ought, perhaps, to be afraid of those sharp-clawed patronesses of mine. I’d never quite managed, though. That might just be the reason they took my advice still.

“General Rumena brings ill tidings back to the Night,” Komena croaked.

“Do they?” I mused. “I’ve not had the displeasure to hear them.”

“Watch,” Andronike ordered. “Listen.”

The darkness within shifted as the Sisters seized the darkness for their own, made it as a domain forced onto Creation. It was one of their lesser tricks – a paltry thing, compared to the waking dreams that saw me tread grounds halfway across the continent and speak with others as if I were there – but it was still a casual display of power. Similar end could be achieved with sorcery, true. But it would be the work of years, not moments . I saw now, from my seat, two different fractured memories given unto the Night by willing Firstborn.

–

A human, a prince, an Alamans. All three and no longer young, seated with another crowned head: Rozala Malanza, vulgar in form to drow eye yet respected for its mettle. Not so its companion, this Prince of Cleves who could not preserve it sigil yet had not seen it stripped from its grasp.

“- this talk of leaving all conquered lands to the dark elves,” Prince Gaspard of Cleves snorted. “A kingdom’s worth, for a paltry few thousand raiders? It is madness, Princess Rozala.”

“The greater might of the Empire Ever Dark fights in the deep north,” Princess Rozala replied.

“And let them keep it, by all means,” Prince Gaspard dismissed. “But the lands south of Hannoven’s height should be brought into the fold: some of them would make good farmland, after a proper cleansing. It would be a waste to surrender them to these lesser elven cousins.”

–

A human, a killer, the Dawnstride: Mirror Knight, humans called it. Unsettling, its power like the sting of morning, and harder to kill than Savanov Hundred-Lives. But like most cattle, its guard lowered when it was busy mating with another of its kind. The other one in the bed: human, the daughter of a prince, Langevin. Carine, daughter of the Gaspard. They spoke after spending themselves.

“You really should consider it, Christophe,” Carine Langevin said, fingers trailing naked flesh.

“The war’s not won, Carine,” the Mirror Knight replied.

“But when it is, all those lands will need proper stewardship,” Carine Langevin insisted. “And who better than one of the Chosen who fought to reclaim it?”

“I wouldn’t know the first thing about ruling,” the Mirror Knight said.

“It would be my honour to help you, of course,” Carine Langevin smiled.

–

I let out a shallow gasp, closing my eyes. How very Proceran, I thought, to begin divvying the spoils of victory before the end of a war we were currently losing. Malanza had seemed lukewarm at the notion, at least, so I didn’t have to revise my opinion of her by too much. That she’d not stamped out this petty scheming immediately, though, got stuck in my throat. Hadn’t they learned by now that it was exactly this sort of habitual treachery that’d nearly seen them stand against the Dead King alone? What exactly did they think was going to happen next time a calamity like this struck and Procer had a record of backstabbing even the people who fought to save it ? I brought the pipe to my lips and breathed in the wakeleaf, ordering my thoughts as I let the burn in my throat sharpen my attention, and spat it out.

“That’s one prince,” I finally said. “It would have been too much to ask for that all of that lot be kept honest by even the looming prospect of annihilation.”

And if it’d been going to happen anywhere, it was going to be Cleves. Between the Firstborn forces under Rumena, the veteran Dominion reinforcements under Lord Yannu Marave and Rozala Malanza’s practiced hand guiding the fight, it was the front that’d arguably least suffered. While the Dead King’s raiding parties frequently slipped the coastal defences and warfare around the lakeside fortresses was an almost permanent fixture, it was the most ‘stable’ of the fronts. The city of Cleves had not suffered a third siege, the supply lines remained wide open and the Named there were proving capable of dealing with Revenants – at least defensively, as the Stormcaller still had the run of all western Lake Pavin and we had no one that could touch her in the water. No, if anyone was going to start getting ideas it was the royals in Cleves. They’d not been afraid for their lives in too long.

“Does it go any further up?” I asked. “If they can’t even bring Malanza into the plot, it’s dead in the water.”

“If they continued down this path,” Komena said, “they will be as well.”

“More sinister than humorous, but not half bad,” I absent-mindedly praised.

Yeah, that the literal goddesses of murder and theft that were my patronesses would not look kindly upon their so-called allies planning to turn on them had been a given. I was not unaware, either, that they were in no way above calling back the forces under Rumena from Cleves and leaving the Procerans high to dry. It’d be a disaster both militarily and diplomatically speaking, but the Crows had no interest in playing nice with people sizing them up for a knife in the back. They’d cut ties with the Principate without batting an eye, if it came to that.

“The First Prince was told,” Andronike said.

My fingers clenched around the arms of my chair.

“You’re sure?” I asked.

The shadows shifted once more.

–

Humans, bearing the emblem of a red lion. Magelings, surrounding the Princess Malanza. They speak into the scrying bowl, believing themselves safe behind their wards. They are not, for the Lord of Silent Steps has brought great knowledge into the Night as to treading through without tripping.

“Gaspard is pushing hard, Your Highness,” Princess Rozala said. “But he’s toed the line carefully so I’ve no grounds to come down him. He’s still gathering support but the notion is a popular one.”

“It would permanently alienate the Empire Ever Dark,” the First Prince of Procer’s voice replied. “And perhaps Callow as well. If the Black Queen did not slaughter everyone involved first, that is. I do not suppose he spoke to this?”

“There’s a lot of heroes who don’t believe she’ll survive the war,” Princess Rozala said. “And with his daughter in the Mirror Knight’s bed, he gets to hear every rumour going around the Chosen. Callow under Vivienne Dartwick is a beast with a lot less bite, Gaspard argues.”

A long silence.

“I cannot step in,” the First Prince said. “Already the heartlands are chafing under the taxes and levies, there will be accusations of tyranny if I begin imprisoning princes over mere words. Let them plot, Princess Rozala. It will be seen to at a time of our choosing.”

–

It took a moment to gather my bearings. That turned to anger quickly enough, that Hasenbach was once more failing as an ally because of the Principate’s fucking internal politics. I mastered myself, though, and took a calming drag from my pipe. Procer was, undeniably, bearing the worst of the weight of the fight against the Dead King. It was its lands being ravaged, its people being conscripted and its traders being taxed into poverty. It was even its princes falling into debt. Callow and Levant, meanwhile, had sent north largely professional armies and while we’d felt the burden of war neither had suffered attacks from Keter. Procer, I then silently corrected, was bearing the worst of the weight among human nations. The Firstborn had been fighting against Keter in earnest for two years, and they’d had no reinforcements for any of it. But they were also fighting very far away, and people were people.

Sacrifices earned less gratitude when you didn’t get to see them happening.

“The two most prominent women in Procer don’t back the plot,” I said. “And it’s years away, besides. You’ve reason to be angry, and I’ll be taking up the issue when I next see Hasenbach, but it’s hardly a crisis.”

“An undeniable and weighty precedent for the Firstborn being reasonable, restrained actors,” Andronike said, mimicking my voice perfectly as I repeated words I’d once spoken to the Sisters.

“When we refrained from taking Twilight, you promised us our restraint would bring forth results,” Komena croaked.

“I’d have you fight this war in a manner that doesn’t guarantee having to fight another one in twenty years with your current allies,” Andronike said, eerily imitating my every intonation from back then without flaw.

“And yet,” the youngest of the sisters said.

They were questioning the value of playing nice when faced with allies like these, whose actions might very well lead to that war in a few decades regardless of what the drow did. It went back to the lessons they’d been taught while still mortals: that restraint would always be seen as weakness, that only the strong were bargained with and strength came without mercy. Of course, they were wrong in this.

“You did get that,” I pointed out without hesitation. “Sure, we might need to arrange an accident for Gaspard of Cleves in a way that can’t be traced back to us a few years from now, but you’re missing the point: the two most powerful people in Procer want to shut him down and will at the first good opportunity. The Empire Ever Dark is seen as valuable , something not to antagonize without reason. Considering the general amoral ruthlessness of Proceran diplomacy over the last centuries, that’s basically weaving you a crown of flowers and asking if you’re going to the fair with anyone.”

I’d, uh, maybe gotten a little too enthusiastic with that last metaphor.

“ Were you going to the fair with anyone?” Andronike asked, tone too serene for her not to be fucking with me.

Great, they were still missing the mark half the time with sarcasm but naturally they’d be the finest of students when it came to learning how to pull my leg.

“I had a shift at the Rat’s Nest anyway,” I said.

I felt Komena’s gaze descend on me, somehow coming across as skeptical even coming from a bird.

“Fine,” I grumpily admitted, “Duncan Brech did not, in fact, ask me to the fair.”

He’d asked Lily from one of the other rooms at the orphanage, whose... charms had developed quicker and more amply than mine. Mind you if I’d had my pick of the litter I might have chosen Lily as well, so I could hardly blame him.

“Procer has not asked us to the fair either,” Andronike comfortingly said.

See, if it’d been her sister I might have thought that halfway genuine but coming from her I just knew she was just having me on.

“Very droll,” I said. “Thank you for passing this along, then. I’ll be seeking out Hasenbach to bury it for good.”

Preferably without dead bodies being involved, but that depended on how reasonable Prince Gaspard intended to be. If he was willing to bend his neck and make reparations for overreaching in this way, I’d leave it at that. Otherwise I was going to have to take some measures to express my irritation, less than subtly. If even that didn’t make the point sink in, then I’d have to put some thought into how best to have him disappear without entangling the Mirror Knight into this mess. Tricky but not impossible, if I leaned on the White Knight to get him moved to another front and he’d not confused sleeping with the pretty Langevin girl for true love. Hells, though, why couldn’t he just have stayed out of this mess? The prince would not have been so bold without a Chosen to back him. Why was it that the only Proceran hero to have any degree of sense was Roland and he was the one I couldn’t have on the field? The Gods were pricks, as usual.

“How’s Serolen?” I asked.

There really wasn’t a proper, commonly accepted name for the massive forest in between Lake Netzach and the Chalice. Most maps ended at the bottom of the Kingdom of the Dead, and few people had an interest in what went on north of the human nations of Calernia. I’d seen it called the – inventively-named – Dead Wilds, the Forest of Ghosts and rather more poetically the Bleak Weald. Mapmakers tended to call it whatever they felt like, and there was no one to contradict them: it wasn’t like the Dead King’s legions had shared their name for it, if they even had one. Serolen was what the Firstborn had come to name the forest, and in Crepuscular it more or less meant the Duskwood . The Firstborn had fought nine battles and a hundred skirmishes before claiming the greater span of the woods, securing them enough that Sve Noc could bring down the Gloom around the edges and plunge the territory in permanent dusk.

Neshamah was perhaps the greatest sorcerer Calernia had ever known, so of course he’d found ways to pierce through the Gloom. They weren’t perfect, though, and it’d enabled the Firstborn to secure their frontline and begin settling in the depths of Serolen. The first drow city on the surface still shared its name with the Duskwood, for now, but I expected that would change with time. I’d already filled the ears of the Crows with rants about why Proceran principalities and capitals sharing their name was highly inconvenient in half a dozen senses, so you might even say it’d be a religious obligation. I’d shove that in the holy book if I had to, they knew damn well.

“See for yourself,” Komena said, open pride in her voice.

The shadows shifted, but this time it was not a memory that was offered up for me to tear through. I dragged myself up to my feet, teeth keeping my pipe in place, and walked over what had been made to seem like the evening sky. Below me, misty woods shrouded in shadow spread out as far as the eye could see. The ground fell beneath my feet as we closed in on the Duskwood, my old calcified fear of heights sending a familiar pang up my leg. What I found beneath the mists had me smiling, though. The sigils of the Everdark had come together under the Ten Generals and their great cabal of the Exodus, whose founders were Sve Noc themselves, and the results were a wonder. An empire’s worth of looted wealth had been made into a city at the heart of the gloomy woods, temples of stone and millennia-old steles held up by trees coaxed through Night to serve as stairs and roads and a hundred other things. Within the bark had been nestled precious stones and obsidian, while leaves around the sacred places were painted with colourful prayers and poems.

It was a city like none I’d ever seen, like no one had ever seen, made up from the stolen parts of half a dozen cities who’d once been among the most glorious of this land. And everywhere among the labyrinthine lay of its ‘streets’ the Firstborn were living. Sleeping and haggling and brewing their horrid drinks, making lizardscale clothes and harvesting the mushrooms from the deeps that’d spread like the plague. Waters had been diverted from half a dozen streams, and stolen lakes brought from their ancient homes, making the entire span richly watered and leading into an artifical lake at the heart of Serolen. There the great temple that had once been the soul of the Empire Ever Dark, the seat of the Twilight Sages and where Sve Noc had struck their ill-fated bargain with Below, stood tall. Entire flocks of crows like the ones on my shoulders perched there, ever-hungry and ever-watchful shards of godhood. I let out a low, impressed whistle after taking my pipe in hand.

“That’s new,” I said, pointing towards the great temple. “I didn’t know you’d looted that.”

“All of Holy Tvarigu is within us,” Andronike replied.

“It’s coming along nicely,” I approved. “Do you intend to keep a strong presence up here even after the war?”

“There would be advantages,” Komena said. “Like the nearness of the Chain of Hunger.”

Words to make a Lycaonese choke, that, but it made sense. To the drow, yearly ratling raids would be like a fresh harvest of Night coming over and asking to be scythed through.

“We’ve got time yet,” I said. “Might be worth speaking with the First Prince when you decide on where you’ll raise your cities. She’ll be better placed than I to point out the northern trade arteries of Procer.”

I received no acknowledgement of my words save for the two of them taking flight and landing on my shoulders, sharp talons digging into my flesh. I put my pipe back into my mouth and took a drag, spewing the smoke upwards just to spite them. It was time, it seemed.

“All right,” I said afterward. “Show me the war.”

I steeled myself and the shadows spun.

Horror swallowed me whole.

Chapter 12: Contest

“The enemy’s come to die on this field, my friends, for an awful prince and terrible pay. We, on the other hand, have come to die on this field for a terrible prince and awful pay. That the Heavens are on our side ought to be evident.”
– Captain Thierry the Acerbic, addressing his company before the infamously bloody Battle of Motte-aux-Foins

Anticipation hung in the air like smoke.

The sigil of the Seventh General, Vesena Spear-Biter, was painted on thousands of stretches of dark cloth hanging from arms and armour and even hair: two jagged, monstrous fangs tearing at what looked like a thunderbolt of iron. Red and white set on black, it was eye-catching and when the breeze blew through the outskirts of Serolen a sea of pale teeth biting into iron stirred with it. These were not the drow from the Outer Rings I’d once fought, the dregs of the dreg-empire. No, the Vesena came armoured in iron and obsidian, bearing polished cuirasses and helmets shaped like angled bat wings. Tough tezkuze leather, those massive hard-skinned blind lizards who could eat even Mighty should they prove reckless, had been fashioned into trousers and long-sleeved vests touched by tinkling bracelets and sculpted greaves of stone or dull iron. There was an order to this host of the Firstborn, unlike in most of their kind, for in the days of the old Empire Ever Dark the Mighty Vesena Spear-Biter had been known as the ‘Relentless General Whose Victories Flow Like A River’.

The Vesena were not so much a sigil as they were the last field army of the ancient Empire Ever Dark, kept standing through the ages by sheer dint of the Spear-Biter’s brutal murder of all rivals and naysayers. Time had taken its toll, and warriors now stood where once soldiers had, but there was no closer among the Firstborn to a professional army than the Vesena Sigil. It had occupied the whole of the city of Great Noglof, before leaving with the Exodus, and made the entire city into a bustling army camp – kept going by the plunder in Night and gifts and food that was brought back by the fighting drow of the sigil after every campaign. Even now, a discerning eye could make out what had been the components of a field army simply from the way the warriors were equipped.

First came long stretches of skirmishers, bearing hard bucklers of iron painted with their sigil while long barbed javelins hung from their backs and short blades were kept at their hips. Dzulu, most of them, but the Vesena were one of the rare sigils that taught Secrets to their own and so they all shared a deadly blackflame trick that allowed them to have quite the sting to them.Behind them came hunters, those that would have been infantry regulars in olden days. These stood in companies of nine times nine each led by the least of the Mighty, an ispe, and were armed as I had only ever seen the Watch be armed: though they bore long swords of Night-forged steel on the flanks, they also held horn bows. Short, stout and curved these little wonders were no match for a good Deoraithe longbow but they fired at surprising range – regular arrows would be next to useless against the dead, of course, so the Vesena had adapted by infusing obsidian arrowheads with Night in a way that made them burst on impact.

At heart of the army stood the finest warriors of the Vesena, three thousand hulking towering shapes whose shells of iron-joined obsidian left no opening at all from head to toe. The Ebonclad were a cabal of their own within the Vesena, each and everyone a jawor that drew on Night to breathe and see through the sealed armour and wield their large stone-and-steel maces. As another exotic addition, the Vesena Sigil also boasted no less than ten of the hulking things called zanikzen , the famed annihilation-engines that Mighty Ysengral had gone to war nine times to steal only to be driven back every time. House-sized and made entirely of bone and onyx, they looked like two-wheeled carts holding up the fused bones of a hundred ancient drow whose wretched half-seen silhouettes ended up pointing their hands towards the horizon and forming a gaping maw filled with spear-like spikes of onyx. As field siege engines I deemed to be to be inferior to what the Empire and Callow used, but they’d been murderously proficient at defending tunnels.

And in the very middle of the army, seated atop a writhing living throne made of once-Mighty foes stripped of Night so thoroughly they became nisi, Mighty Vesena the Spear-Biter waited. Though it would have been as ravaged by age as Rumena in appearance, being its senior, the long stripe scars going down its face made it impossible to tell what it might once have looked like. It wore an armoured cuirass of obsidian over flowing pale cloth, needles of bone woven into its pale long hair to keep it in an elaborate bun. It claimed for only a weapon a long-handled axe – so long as to be half as tall as they – whose head was steel so deeply imbued with Night it flickered around it like smoke. Around it an honour guard of rylleh stood, clad in bright colours, but the lesser Mighty had been spread among the host as commanders of dzulu. The Sisters had once told me that most titles among the Mighty had once been military ranks in the Empire Ever Dark, for the soldiers had been among the first to thrive in the nights after the end of the Twilight Sages, and the Vesena in a way kept closest that that old truth.

There were twenty thousand, all in all: but a fifth of the might of the Vesena Sigil, but its sharpest fangs were all bared here, spread amongst the trees. Facing them was only deep darkness and the mists of the Gloom. Open grounds for six hundred feet after the end of the forest, which struck me as having been the Dead King’s picked battlefield: the dead fared poorly in the woods. Against, drow, anyway.

“They haven’t even dug ditches,” I frowned. “Sloppy. Ysengral would have done better.”

Mighty Ysengral, the Cradle of Steel, had distinguished themselves to my eye as the finest of the Firstborn generals even if they were towards the lower end of the Ten Generals when it came to raw power. Considering it was debatable where Rumena would rank second or third among them, though, that was still nothing to sneer at.

“Ysengral was defending the Wilting March from another breakthrough,” Komena said, and I almost shivered.

Standing to my left, eyes silver-blue and form little more than flickering shadow, the image of what had once been a mortal woman was sharing the sights with me. Before I took my eye off her, every time I glimpsed a long-fanged skull beneath the shadows that was always gone if I tried to find it. There was a twang of something like iron and blood to her voice, something I could not help but taste against the roof of my mouth. Komena wore armour, and a sword at her hip. She was the Youngest Night.

“We did not foresee the Hidden Horror until it was edging into the Gloom,” Andronike said, her voice coming from my right.

Her eyes, too, burned pale blue. But over her face flickered the shape of the iron mask she had once worn as one of the Twilight Sages, and the thick billowing cloak she had decked herself in almost seemed like dark-feathered wings whenever she moved. There were strings twined among her fingers, which she ever twined. The affect to her words was subtler, like a drink thought harmless until your tongue was felt to be numb. She was the Oldest Night.

“You didn’t get time to dig in,” I put together. “Vesena was the closest?”

“Kurosiv,” Komena replied, shaking her head. “But its horde was spread out. Vesena was ready for war.”

“He’s able to slip past your scouts with entire armies now,” I whispered.

Shit. If they could only tell that the Dead King was attacking when he was beginning to breach the Gloom, then that gave them what – half a day to mobilize at most? They’d either have to permanently garrison a significant portion of their forces to defend all the southern stretches of Serolen, which would cripple their ability raid into Keter’s territory, or start breaking through whatever means he used to obscure the movements of his armies on this front. I would have pursued the matter in conversation, but was robbed of the opportunity: the battle was beginning. It started with a sound like the whistle of a falling arrow, though utterly deafening. Then flashes of blinding light scythed through the mist in five places, like a titan’s raking claws, and for a moment the passage between Keter and Serolen was forced open by the sorceries of the Dead King. In that heartbeat, long ladders of steel with spiked ends fell through the open space and buried deep in the ground, the runes carved on the glowing bright. Like a steel road, one meant to keep the gap open.

“Second through sixth,” Mighty Vesena said, voice ringing out. “Wail.”

The Crows and I were standing by its side and so we’d seen its eyes had not blinked, not even when the light had been at its brightest. Five of the massive zanikzen lit up, thousands of glyphs in Crepuscular craved into the bones unveiled, and as crews attended to the large engines I saw heat waft of the surface and half the body of a nisi too close to the maw turn to ash. Heat shimmered between the onyx spikes, near-invisible lances of impossibly hot air shooting out and lashing out at the ladders in a lazy, low arc. The needles went abruptly still afterwards, forcing out a strange sound like a hundred inhuman wails. The first to get hit dented, and its front melted like summer snow, but the dead had moved quick enough to contest three of the remaining four. Ghouls who’d moved forward like lightning threw themselves in the way, embracing annihilation to curb the blow, and though one of the lances tore through and broke a ladder’s end in a spray of earth the other two held. The dead had three beachheads. Further down the line, another five bursts of light signaled that Keter was broadening its offensive.

“Two by breach,” Mighty Vesena ordered.

Even as the drow annihilation-engines began hammering at the fresh beachheads, the Vesena Sigil began its advance without needing to be told.

“They’re impressively disciplined, for a sigil,” I admitted, eyes remaining on the battle.

“Vesena made of the old western army regulation a set of holy rites,” Komena told me, sounding fond. “All who break them are said to have broken faith with the sigil and are free to be slain.”

I’d gathered that Vesena Spear-Biter was a darling of hers, which didn’t surprise me all that much. Komena did tend to favour the old warhorses who’d survived the collapse of the Empire Ever Dark.

The ever-relentless dead had wasted no time getting through their protection for the three ladders that’d landed: shield-soldiers the size of ogres in heavy plate, protecting in a ring the more vulnerable mages putting up translucent shields of sorcery preventing repeating fire from the engines from getting through. With the second wave, if Keter’s usual northern doctrine held, would come another circle of corpse-mages to attempt to raise rough but swiftly functional wards that’d make it hard work dislodging the dead from that position. The Firstborn were well aware of that, of course. Even as the first rank of a shield wall formed beyond the beachheads the drow skirmishers finished closing in the distance. Javelins flew whistling, the drow never breaking stride or slowing as they threw, the barbed ends hitting the shields of the dead with dull thumps before exploding in black flames of Night.

The shield walls broke, shattered like overripe fruits as the the first line of skirmishers unsheathed swords and wading into close combat. The lines behind disrupted the gathering dead with further throws, enabling the nimble drow to slip through the gaps in the defences of the dead. Mighty Vesena had been, I gathered, one of the few Firstborn generals to win victories against the dwarves during the war that broke the Empire Ever Dark. It had typically won those victories by hitting the heavy-armoured but slow-moving dwarven armies with crippling blows while they were in movement, never allowing them to deploy the siege engines and harsh sorceries that’d shattered so many drow armies. Traces of that mindset could still be seen here I decided as I watched the drow skirmishers of what the expanding assault of the Dead King had made the right wing slink their way deeper behind the lines of Keter.

Their objective here was clear: hitting the dead mages putting up shields before a second wave could set up wards, then prying away the Dead King’s breaches from him one after another. It was a much more aggressive defence than Ysengral was prone to waging, or even the other general I was most familiar with: Radosa. The Hushing Dread actually preferred letting the greater strength of the dead past the Gloom before striking at the weakened defences of the breaches, picking off the enemies at its leisure within the forest. Its battles lasted twice as long as everyone else’s, but then it also counted about a third of the casualties most the time.

“He’s fought Vesena before,” I grimaced. “And no one else uses the blackflame skirmishers. If you use the same tricks against the Hidden Horror too many times...”

In the distance another set of blinding lights shone. And again. And again. You’re going to run out of skirmishers before he runs out of cabals capable of making those, Vesena , I grimaced. And I would give the Spear-Biter its due, the first three breaches the Dead King had forced through were swept back. The skirmishers were just a little too slow, a flow of reinforcing armoured Binds pulling them down and slaughtering them to the last, but, a second wave of longsword bearing warriors carved their way to the mages before the second wave could put up wards, helped through by the focused arrow-fire of their brethren. They slipped into shadow and danced around the bone-giants, artists at their work, but what was three beachheads when another ten had just dropped in the span it took to clear them? The right flank had gone quiet, but the wailing of the zanikzen was the herald of strife spreading to the left and the centre. The Vesena redeployed with impressive swiftness, as a well-oiled machine, but this time when the skirmishers hit the first wave of beachheads they found they were expected.

Through the black flames leapt out slender, almost insect-like silhouettes.

“Hexenghouls,” I whispered.

Shit, Neshamah really wasn’t pulling punches here. Those nasty little things weren’t like most ghouls: swift and passingly intelligent in a way that allowed them serve as both harassers and a sort of replacement for the Dead King’s general lack of cavalry. No, these were almost as smart as people. Hexenghouls, named by the Lycaonese, were good at two thing only: killing, and disrupting magic by their mere presence. They had hardened bronze rods instead of bones, enchanted in a way that Masego told me destabilized the structure of spell formulas when they got close enough. Those vicious beasts were the reason Lycaonese mages were relatively rare while as a people they had much reason to keep magical bloodlines going. Every year, scaling through passes and mountains, those monsters made it into the lowlands and went hunting . Tonight, deployed in numbers I’d rarely before seen, they went through the skirmishers like a sickle through wheat. The few dzulu who were quick enough to call on Night found they couldn’t focus it properly and were massacred within moments.

Night was not sorcery, but evidently the Dead King had been adjusting what he ordered carved onto those bronze rods.

The second wave of longswords drove them back, even if they destroyed but a handful, but by the time the hexenghouls retreated behind them stood a heavy shield wall of skeletons. Too heavy to punch through in time: valiantly the warriors threw themselves against it, but Neshamah’s second wave of mages came through. Wards came up and then, with a position finally secure, the dead began unleashing their real offensives. Beorns tumbled through, carelessly stamping through the skeletons, and spat out the corpses they held within them in the middle of drow ranks. Dzulu could do nothing against the likes of those, much less the even more heavily armoured ‘tusks’. Those were a recent addition to Keter’s arsenal, rarely seen on my front: catapult-sized necromantic constructs shaped rather like boards, unlike many of the Hidden Horror’s creations they held within then no lesser dead. They were instead filled with rocks, and in front of them jagged tusks of steel were meant to make them into moving battering rams designed to crack open shield walls.

Going against drow foot? They trampled straight through those lines like they weren’t even there.

“Now,” I murmured, “for the tug-of-war.”

With a slew of fresh casualties, Night and necromancy came out. Even as the officers-Mighty destroyed the war-constructs or died trying, the mage cadres of Keter competed with drow as to whether corpses would get up as undead or be emptied of Night first. The undead drow could not use Night, but they would explode with what they’d held when their corpses were shattered. It wreaked havoc on the attempt to keep a battle line going to have your own dead blow up on you when you drove them back. Not that there was much of a battle line: at best it could be said that there was a line where the Vesena and the dead met. And where half a hundred Firstborn must have died with every passing beat. Behind it was an ugly chaos of Mighty and war-constructs tangling in duels that paid no heed to the warriors around them. For all that Vesena Spear-Biter had mimicked the ways of the old armies of the Empire Ever Dark, it was only that: a mimicry. The Mighty were not true officers, they were chieftains who ceased paying mind to their own companies the moment there was a great foe for them to fight.

“Using the Mighty as construct-killers instead of officers works better,” I noted, brow creasing at the sight. “If the Spear-Biter sent packs of pravnat and jawor after the beorns and the tusks they could be put down much quicker. Instead they keep running into isolated ispe and pravnat and overwhelming them.”

Vesena’s strategy being a success had depended on breaking through the initial defence of the breaches and shutting them down before casualties could mount, but that’d failed. Now the attempt by its sigil to push through the dead was turning into the sort of meat grinder that could utterly destroy an army if a general got stubborn. With the centre and the left wing taking such a beating, the Vesena were forced to thin their right flank to reinforce the lines that’d been devastated by constructs. And even then, the remaining skirmishers were now pointless going around through the woods in a far-flung circle that might allow them to eventually flank the left wing of the dead but practically speaking would just take them out of the battle for the rest of its span. Mistake, that. They’d have been more useful kept anchoring the thinning right flank in my opinion.

“The Vesena are inflicting great losses on the dead,” Andronike replied.

“Sure,” I dismissed. “Those officer-Mighty are pure slaughter against Keter’s Bones and Binds. No denying that.”

It was hard to, when all it took was for even an ispe, the lowest of the Mighty, to reach the shield wall of the dead to contemptuously crack it open.

“And I don’t mean to dismiss what’s being achieved here,” I continued. “At this point Mighty Vesena had lost what, three or four thousand?”

“Closer to four,” Komena told me.

“And it’s cost the Dead King more than three score of his finest war-constructs, on top of at least thrice that in foot,” I said. “The problem here is that while Vesena’s sigil is killing the enemy, it’s not doing it in a way that wins the battle.”

I pointed at the worst of the slaughter, where the lines were going back and forth.

“They’ve been gaining and losing the same thirty feet since the battle started in earnest,” I pointed out. “Maybe this battle can be won, at this exchange rate of lives for undead, but it’d be pissing away the war to keep fighting it this way. Packs of Mighty striking together allows for decisive blows in a way spreading them out cannot.”

“General Rumena said much the same,” Andronike said. “Though it did mention that Vesena’s methods would function significantly better when on the offensive instead.”

I narrowed my eyes. Yeah, I could maybe see that. As an offensive army they’d be smashing through whatever forces the Dead King could put in their way, which tended to be light on war-constructs, and if they ran into a few of those then the same rylleh that’d yet to move so much as an inch would be able to handle them.

“Might be,” I muttered.

The battle was going badly for the Vesena, even a fool could have seen it, but to the Spear-Biter it must seem like it could still be turned around. The zanikzen had polished off every breach they could, leaving only the four whose wards had been raised, so they began pounding at the dead instead. Every burst of burning heat swatted down entire companies, and the crews prudently aimed them far behind the fighting so there’d be no risk of hitting their own. They wouldn’t be able to handle that rate of fire for long, not without risking the engines blowing up, but then they’d didn’t really need to. The superbly aimed hits slackened the pressure of the dead against the drow and, sensing an opening, Mighty Vesena sent in its finest. The Ebonclad advanced, flowing forward silently as if they were gliding over the ground. Signals went up in the sky, woven in Night, and a corridor was opened for them to strike cleanly at the dead. The sight of it was... I let out a sharp breath, genuinely impressed. It was like watching a hammer strike at an egg: clad in ebony armours sealed by melted iron, the Ebonclad were untouchable to the dead. Their large war maces, on the other hands, released waves of Night whenever they struck and so pulped the dead straight through their armour.

The tusks and beorns that’d not been handled were struck at in groups of then, methodically and cleanly if with little regard to the collateral damage against the dzulu. That armour did not seem to hinder them sinking into pools of shadows, and they even seemed to have greater control over the trick than most: they sometimes slunk up the beasts and let only the upper half of their body emerge form the shadow, striking at the necromantic constructs with impunity.

“Impressed?” Komena asked.

“They’re exceptional,” I acknowledged. “But Vesena just got played the fool.”

It’d been baited into committing its finest troops before Keter slapped its last cards on the table.

“Oh?” Andronike hummed.

This battle had already taken place, so they knew what had taken place while I was left to guess. But while Akua might have pointed out to me that the Dead King had grown to learn my tricks, the opposite was true as well.

“We haven’t seen Revenants yet,” I said. “When we do, I wager things will swiftly proceed downhill.”

The Ebonclad smashed their way through the dead on two of the breaches and began making serious assaults on two of the warded beachheads, but I bade my time an counted up to seventeen before my cynicism was ‘rewarded’.

Like great raking claws, five lights burned again where the battle had begun. On the right flank that’d been so weakened reinforcing the others.

“Vesena just lost this battle,” I grimly said.

Though the zanikzen were on the edge of breaking apart, they still fired unflinching at the fresh breaches. Two per breach, as Mighty Vesena had early ordered. Or so they attempted. Three of the annihilation-engines went up in storms of ashen heat, killing the crews instantly, and one aborted its shot. Still, every breach received a direct shot just as the rune-inscribed ladders came down and one even received two. That one broke. The other four held, protected by what looked like swarms of ghouls nailed to the ends as a grisly shield. With the army already too committed down the line, it would have been a disaster to try to redeploy. So instead Mighty Vesena sent into the breaches what few regulars it had left, and with them sent its hardest hitters: it sent out rylleh. Unfortunately, the Dead King had picked his timing exquisitely. Before the rylleh were halfway there, Revenants strode out of the warded breaches and tore into the Ebonclad. Half of the rylleh had to be recalled, which made a mess of things.

“So that’s where the Stitcher went,” I muttered.

A castle-sized abomination made from the bodies of half a dozen horrors put together – the scales and bones of a dragon, what looked like the heads of at least three sea snakes, the heavy fur and leather of ratling Ancient Ones – was butchering its way through the Ebonclad, even swatted down a rylleh that got too close. The Revenant was inside, and damnably hard to put down. We hadn’t seen her in a year, so I’d hoped the Blade of Mercy had damaged her beyond use in their last tangle, but it seemed not. Hanno was convinced she’d been a healer before the Hidden Horror got his hands on her, which somehow made it all even more horrifying. Even as I watched, Mighty Vesena tried to stabilize the situation by firing its remaining annihilation-engines directly into the Revenants, but that caught only one and killed a few hundred of the Ebonclad in the exchange. Bad trade, the Seventh General was losing its cool.

Even worse the rylleh who reached the fresh beachheads were not, to their surprise and mine, greeted by swarms of ghouls or skeletons. Awaiting them were dead mages and large pots of metal, heated and filled with two things: necromantic sorcery and steel scraps. Like sharpers they blew, the cursed metals ignoring most defenses that could be put up by Night, and I winced when I saw not one but three rylleh go down. They got up shortly, of course: rylleh were harder to kill than that, and even if one had actually died that probably wouldn’t have kept drow of that tier out of the battle for long. But the corpse-mages were bearing strange metal staffs, and though I could see no visible mark of sorcery being employed the three rylleh that’d been struck down... stayed down.

“Weeping Heavens,” I murmured. “Has he found a way to shut down the Night?”

“Not quite,” Andronike said, voice grown cold. “Those staffs were made of an alloy of tin and antimony, and strangely enchanted – they did not disrupt Night, or end it, which we could have fought. They directed it away from our warriors, down into the earth.”

And moments later, petty ghouls they would otherwise have been able to slaughter by the hundreds began tearing into the downed rylleh. They devoured their flesh so that they would never recover from that death. Gods, I fucking hated fighting the Dead King. There was always another nasty trick just waiting to be unveiled. Binds began pouring of the breaches, forming up under arrow fire by the increasingly outnumbered and outflanked Vesena. This was going to turn from a defeat into a disaster, if something wasn’t done soon, and I wasn’t the only one to see it.

The Seventh General, Vesena Spear-Biter, took the field personally.

I did not even seen them move until they were standing before the Stitcher, long axe resting against the shoulder.

“Sa vrede?” Mighty Vesena asked of the Revenant.

Are you worthy? I shivered to hear my words spoken by one of the ancient monsters of the Firstborn, taken as writ of faith. Whether in fear or thrill – or perhaps both – I could not be certain. Vesena received no answer, and as the stitched up necks and heads of sea snakes struck out at it the Seventh General vanished into shadows and emerged atop the monster. The axe came down, head biting into the dragon scales, and inside the beast a sea of Night cut through. Split in two, the Stitcher’s monster poured our blood, guts and strange liquids of many colours. Inside a dead young woman screamed and the corpses of the drow began gathering to her, forming another shell, but Mighty Vesena landed before the Revenant and stood knee-deep in guts and blood. Its shoulder twitched, once, twice and then it proved why it had earned the sobriquet of Spear-Biter . I’d thought it a reference to mere spears, once, but that was not the case. Vesena had once warred against an ancient sigil-holder that’d unearthed and partially repaired one of the ancient wonders of the Empire Ever Dark, a great tower of arcane-forged steel that gathered lightning into itself and spewed it in a constant storm around itself. The steel walls had been thirty feet deep, surrounded by constant death, and the way the tower jutted out from a deep pit in the Inner Ring had led Firstborn to call it the Spear.

Night pouring out of it as it twitched, Mighty Vesena screamed in pain and its mouth unhinged, revealing a bestial maw as large as the sigil-holder itself had been. Bat-like wings tore out of its back, and even as the Stitcher tried to form a grisly homunculus of drow corpses roiling with Night the horrid creature Vesena had turned itself onto unhinged its great jaw even further and revealed glinting fangs – before biting straight through the corpses and Revenant, as it once had through thirty feet of solid steel, and swallowed the Stitcher and a bloody swath of her work whole.

Officers began calling for a retreat, heeding some unseen order, and the Vesena obeyed in largely good order. Their sigil-holder continued to sow destruction left and right, covering the retreat along with the remaining rylleh, and I slowly breathed out.

“After?” I asked.

“They pulled back and Kurosiv drowned the invaders in violence, sweeping them back to the breaches, then broke the wards personally,” Andronike said, her voice betraying little of her opinion of that Mighty.

Mighty Kurosiv the All-Knowing, the Second General. It rarely bothered with deeper tactics than throwing warriors at the enemy but given the absurd amount of those within its sigil that tended to work regardless. I found the way it benefited from the deaths of its own and so encouraged them to be rather disgusting, and I suspected the Sisters felt rather the same for different reasons: Kurosiv had found a way to grow fat as a parasite nestled in the heart of the Night, exploiting the system they had built as no one else had before or since. Rumena had allegedly taken it as enough of a threat it’d exterminated its first five sigils, earning the epithet of Tomb-maker in the process, but it was telling that in the end it was not Kurosiv that’d settled in the Outer Rings.

“Three other battles were fought that very same night, Queen of Lost and Found,” Komena said.

The images flickered quickly through my mind, almost a memory shared but not quite.

Ysengral the Cradle of Steel, the Eighth General: a lipless grin and tittering laughter hiding a mind like a steel trap. And traps did it wield, mazes and madness and traps behind which stood soldiers in steel and machine of war that worked on and fed of and spat out Night. Endless bands of dead slipping through the Gloom, testing the defences day and night.

Ishabog the Adversary, the Fourth General: ever-moving, ever-restless, a spear and song on the lip and a glint in its eye. Only Mighty may have the right to call themselves of the Ishabog, and mighty was their calling: always one against ten, ten against a hundred, a hundred against a thousand. Vicious creatures made of dead flesh hunting through darkened woods in packs, hunted in turn.

Radhoste the Dreamer, the Sixth General: a bed of stone like a sepulcher, carried by rigid in dread. Eyes closed but seeing, a mind that spans miles and sifts through the sleeping and the dead. A hundred battles fought with the Enemy like a fencer on the field, back and forth ever going for the throat as a thousand die with every hour.

All happening, all being fought.

“Remind Cordelia Hasenbach that she will be fighting those battles as well, if she does not leash her lackeys,” Komena hissed in my ear.

And in the heartbeat that followed, they were gone. Dawn shyly peeked through the flaps of my tent, and I eyed my shaking hands before sighing.

So much for getting a good night’s sleep before leaving.

Interlude: Truce

“Raise the price by a coin of gold and you make enemies; raise the price by a copper and you make losses. Profit lies in silver: moderation without timidity.”
– Extract from ‘Discourse on Nature and Man’, by Merchant Princess Adorabella

Above the foyer of the royal quarters in Rhenia hung a painting – six feet long, four feet high – depicting the famous ancient Iron King Konrad wrestling with what the artist had deemed a personification of the concept of duty.

Cordelia sometimes thought of that painting, when the days grew long. At first, when she grew from girlhood into womanhood, she had remembered it for the stories her uncle had had told her about it. Of how her father, a man she’d never known, had despised it ever since he was a boy and had it taken down the same day he became Prince of Rhenia. He’d been known to claim he would sell it to some art-hungry Alamans princeling in the south and use the gold to buy a few more dwarven engines, though he’d never gotten around to it before his untimely death. Cordelia’s mother had eventually ordered it put back up, being rather fond of it, though she’d called the motif ‘Konrad Getting Beat By A Bald Bear’ instead. Sometimes Cordelia thought she’d only ever truly known her parents through the stories of others, for even though she’d been fourteen when her mother passed away Cordelia had only been graced to know a meagre few facets of Margaret Papenheim.

Now that years had passed, though, she thought more of the motif. Not of Old King Konrad, who stories told had let all eight of his children die rather than surrender Twilight’s Pass, but of what lay at a heart of it: a prince, wrestling with duty. Was that not, in a way, what lay at the heart of rule? To bear a crown was to swear yourself to making order out of chaos, law out of anarchy, prosperity out of ruin. Cordelia had been orderly even as a little girl, for Mother had never been prone to coddling: it had been up to her to decide how her hours would be spent when she was not seeing to her duties. She’d taken on seneschal duties for the fortress-city by the age of twelve and extended her authority to Rhenia’s dependencies by the age of thirteen, and as her writ ran further her hours became ever more precious and in need of careful parcelling. Those habits had followed her into adulthood, into the Salia and her rule as First Prince of Procer, and she was grateful for it.

There was simply so much to do and too little time for all of it. Cordelia would try anyway and parcel out ever ounce of her so that, at least, all that she could do was done. The First Prince of Procer delicately nibbled at the caramelized poultry she’d been served, then took a sip of no more than two beats from her cup of water – obeying court etiquette to the letter. The two men seated across from her, who had patiently been waiting for her to finish her bite and rinse it down, only then began speaking again.

“Merchant Prince Fabianus has signalled he will not involve himself in matters of Proceran debt,” Louis of Sartrons told her. “We’ve established this is a firm commitment, and not a bargaining position.”

The old spy’s face had always struck her as being rather skeletal, skin pulled taut against the bones of an aristocratic face and only topped by ever-receding tufts of hair. He was not a physically striking man, looking more like a well-born coin counter than what he truly was: the foremost patron of the Circle of Thorns, the secretive society whose agents were the eyes and ears of the Principate abroad. Louis of Sartons was not a close ally of hers, for the Circle preferred to maintain a degree of distance so that it would not be swept into internal struggles and so suffer in a way that blinded Procer to its enemies, but he had come out boldly to support her when a coup had been attempted against Cordelia. For this he’d earned a degree of trust, and a freer hand than she’d allowed him before. The news he was bringing, however, were not pleasant ones.

“That is a blade that bites both ways,” Cordelia mused.

Most of the Merchant Princes and Princesses that ruled Mercantis were not Named, and rarely more than influential firsts among equals, yet their value as intermediaries with the banks and merchant houses of the city they ruled was priceless – if always priced. That Fabianus was had formally stepped back from intervening in the matter massive loans that Mercantis had extended both Procer and the Grand Alliance meant he would not demand that the sums, lenders and borrowers be made public within the Consortium as a growing number of merchants now demanded. It also meant, however, that he would no longer facilitate those arrangements as he had until now.

“The Circle believes he remains in favour of the arrangements but has grown to fear assassination by his opposition if he does not bend,” Louis informed her. “Recusing himself allows him to give them an inch without slighting us outright.”

Wiggling out was the mark of an eel, not a prince, Cordelia uncharitably thought, but what else was to be expected from Mercantis? Not that the merchants were entirely without reason to be worried of the loans extended, for the First Prince had woven there a maze to obscure exactly how badly the finances of the Principate were faring. By obtaining the permission of the Highest Assembly to seek loans in the name of its individuals princes and princesses – all marked down, and to be repaid by the Principate to the individuals in years to come – she’d been able to seek smaller loans from multiple royals in a shared ‘bundle’ from different banks and merchants, effectively spreading out debts in a way that made it nearly impossible to assess from the side of the lenders. The key to this had been requiring secrecy from the lenders in exchange of higher interest, something she’d had the Circle of Thorns strictly enforce.

The first two merchants who’d tried to break their written oaths had been promptly assassinated, using some of the most painful poisons the Circle knew of. None had tried after, not individually anyway: through the great merchant guild known as the Consortium, which Mercantis counted as both a court of law and ruling body second only to their Merchant Prince, pressured was being applied for the hidden information being made available not to individuals but to the Consortium ‘itself’. It was a legal fiction, given that nearly all those who’d signed to secrecy were also members of the Consortium, but one that might hold up under the few treaties Mercantis kept with Procer. That even Merchant Prince Fabianus was beginning to give way was bad omen for the Grand Alliance’s fortunes in the city. Possibly quite literally.

“This is no longer a purely Proceran matter,” the First Prince eventually said.

The older man bowed his head in acknowledgement, and with a look Cordelia made for one of her attendants to approach. The young woman curtsied, then silently awaited instructions.

“Please request of Ingrid that she inquire whether Lady Dartwick would be amenable to having tea,” she began, and for a heartbeat considered when she could first spare the time, “tomorrow, an hour past Noon Bell.”

“Immediately, Your Most Serene Highness,” her attendant replied.

Ghislaine , Cordelia suddenly remembered, repeating the name in her mind to better commit it to memory.

“Thank you, Ghislaine,” she smiled, and the woman curtsied again.

Vivienne Dartwick would not have the authority or influence to settle such a matter herself, but needed to be brought into the issue as the first step into bringing in Catherine Foundling. The Black Queen, Cordelia thought a touch guiltily, really was such a useful large club to threaten people with. Where law and diplomacy failed to make a mark, Queen Catherine’s scowls and fearsome reputation had a way of bringing out sweet reason from the most unreasonable of souls. Callow would, besides, need to be told of the developments regardless: its treasury was guarantor to some of the loans extended to the Grand Alliance and it was the second-largest contributor to the war chest besides. Not that Lady Dartwick had not ensured the kingdom would not benefit from the process. If anything, she’d proved frighteningly cunning in finding ways of seeing to that.

The notion of allowing repayment in nature for extended loans had, for one, effectively erased twenty years of damage to Callowan horse-rearing while simultaneously thinning the hordes of their traditional greatest rivals in the trade, the Arlesite princes of the south. If Queen Vivienne was to be her neighbour to the east, one day, Cordelia would not make the mistake of taking her lightly. The former Chosen might in truth have better gifts for ruling in years of peace than the woman who’d chosen her for a successor. The blonde princess had another bite of poultry, savouring the subtle aftertaste of the sauce, and then a nibble of those perfectly steamed and spiced carrots. It was washed away with a sip of water, afterwards, and even as she dabbed her lips with an embroidered cloth the First Prince cleared her mind of unnecessary thoughts.

The matters that would be brought to her attention by Brother Simon of Gorgeault, formerly the head of the Holy Society and nowadays the Lord Inquisitor of Procer, would require her full attention as well. Though the well-formed man with the hair grown silver was no longer the leader of the society of highborn lay brothers and sisters, it was because at Cordelia’s incitation the Highest Assembly had charged him instead to root out corruption and wickedness within the ranks of the House of Light, granting him worldly authority over the priests until his inquisition was at an end. It was reform at the edge of a sword, all knew this, but after so many of the Holies had been caught publicly backing her deposal the House had not had room to argue.

“The House of Light has formally decided to accept your latest set of suggestions,” Brother Simon said, a tad drily. “The lands will be ceded to the throne, under condition that they are to be ceded in turn to the appropriate crowns.”

Cordelia was too well-mannered to smile in triumph, so instead she drank a sip of water. With that last concession, it could be said that she had subdued the Holies and the uglier aspects of the House of Light they represented. Even after the public disgrace of the House during the Salian coup attempt, it would have been a grave overreach to come down too hard on it where the people could see: it would restore public sympathy, and feed into the perception that she had a tyrant’s grip on the Principate. Instead, she had struck more subtly. First she’d abolished every ritual power the House had over the office of First Prince and the Highest Assembly itself, save for the right to directly petition the latter – one of the oldest and more importantly the most well-known of the House’s privileges. Then, with the fetters of tradition removed, she’d gone after the coin. The House was invited to divest itself of all its merchant interests, donating such wealth to the feeding of the refugees in the heartlands. The House was invited to accept taxation on its holdings, if only while the Principate was at war. And now, the Lord Inquisitor had confirmed that all the lands of the House whose purpose was commercial in nature – vineyards, orchards, mines – were to be ceded to the throne of Procer, which itself would then cede them back to the appropriate princes and princesses.

For a price, which Cordelia would mercifully offer to be paid through writing off any debt the treasury of the Principate might owe any such royalty. In the same stroke she’d ensured that her office would not go bankrupt after the war, curried favour with her subjects by restoring lands to them and ensured the Holies would never again have the wealth to ensure the degree of influence they’d been boasting for the last century.

“The wisdom of the House illuminates the way in these dark times,” Cordelia Hasenbach replied, long practice allowing her to keep even the faintest hint of irony out of her voice.

This would devour hours and hours of her days for weeks to come, but it was worth it: with a little inventiveness, she should be able to shuffle around debts and debtors to secure another round of loans abroad.

“It shines what light it can,” the Lord Inquisitor agreed, both praise and warning in the same elegant turn of phrase.

Simon of Gorgeault, she sometimes thought, would have made a better prince than most if fate had deigned to grant him that birthright.

“Furthermore,” Brother Simon continued, “though numbers will only arrive tomorrow, I can already tell you that another company of priests has volunteered for service on the fronts.”

This, at least, Cordelia would give the honour it was due. Every Lycaonese child was taught that there could be no greater service to one’s own than to put your life between them and the Enemy.

“If you have names for me, the lists can be read to the people again,” Cordelia offered.

It was both a gesture of respect and a way to raise morale, which in turn tended to lead to volunteers.

“I will extend the offer to House,” the Lord Inquisitor said, tone grown warmer.

That saw to the immediate matters, she grasped, and just in time. With one last touch of her fork, she brought a bite of poultry to her mouth and swallowed, washing it down with water just before the first ringing of Noon Bell in the distance. The two spies took their leave with the proper courtesies, which she duly returned, and only then did Cordelia allow her brow to crease as she looked down at her plate. There were still two mouthfuls of poultry left, and one of sides. Her timing had been off: imprecision, chaos, had won a small victory. The First Prince left the meal unfinished, and allowed herself to be led to the antechamber down the hall – where she was deftly undressed by her handmaids and helped into a dress more practical than the powder blue court regalia she’d donned for her duties of the day until now. Grey velvet was laced at her back and paired with matching shawl bordered in golden brocade in deference to the chill that occasionally seized parts of the palace.

Her escort to what her councillors had taken to naming l’archive en vogue – the Vogue Archive – was a familiar face. Captain Lois had been a simple guardsman, when Cordelia had thrown herself down a windowsill, and proved to be a man of his oath. He’d been among those that helped her escape, and he’d killed to ensure she would not be dragged back to Balthazar Serigny’s feet as a prisoner. There were some, after the coup, who’d said that the ancient palace of the Merovins should be emptied of all Salians and only trustworthy Lycaonese be kept in her service. These calls she’d resisted, and instead ensured both honours and promotions for all the Salians who had proved loyal. She was not First Prince of the Lycaonese but of Procer, and she would not let fear taint who she was: leal service must ever be met with reward.

“If you would allow me the honour, Your Most Serene Highness?” Captain Lois offered along with his arm.

Cordelia did, though lending an arm was as far as she intended to ever indulge the flirtation. She’d had discreet liaisons over the years, with men and rather more rarely women, but becoming involved with one in her service would be... uncouth in many ways. Her own people’s traditions encouraged sharing a bed with one of the ‘pleasant trade’ rather than involvement with one’s fellow soldiers but this far south it was seen as frivolous for an unmarried woman of her rank to dally with courtesans of any gender. Especially if there were lands in line to inherit, as was the case with her. The Rhenian princess had therefore been forced to be most careful in her dalliances, indulging only in the company of those who might never be a hazard to her position or reputation. The affairs had been rare, and after the first heart-wrenching time she’d had to part from a man she held deep affections for Cordelia had never again allowed them to linger.

Still, that did not mean she could not appreciate a well-formed calf or a muscled arm.

The First Prince’s guards moved aside when they reached the threshold of the Vogue Archive, for access to what within was restricted by both ancient enchantments and much more recent wards. Cordelia parted with her escort with a courteous smile, pressing her palm against the heavy oaken door before her. Sorcery crackled against her skin, like a minuscule gust of wind, and the door opened without a sound as the old enchantment recognized her right to enter. The wards buzzed against her ears as she crossed the threshold, but the blonde Lycaonese paid it little mind: already her mind was on the sight awaiting her. This had been a great salon, once, where the Merovins had entertained others in the sort of amusements where none were expected to be wearing clothes by the end of the evening and the company of the beautiful was much encouraged.

The need for discretion – the people of Salia would have raised brows upon hearing of the diversions of their rulers – had seen enchantments laid on the doors leading into the room, restricting for whom they would open. That and the size of the salon had been the deciding factors in Cordelia ordering the beating heart of administration settled within, and there was no trace left to see of the original trivial purpose of the Vogue Archive. Great tables covered in sprawling maps of the different regions of the Pirnicpate as well as broader Calernia had been set down, each matched with bureaus seeing to the reports from such regions and foreign locales. The maps themselves were adorned with sculpted stones and silk ribbons representing trade arteries and supply lines, garrisons and crucial resources.

The Order of the Red Lion, whose mages swept in and out of the room regularly, kept reports and notes as fresh – en vogue – as was possible, resulting in a living and breathing map of the Principate of Procer that had allowed Cordelia and her councillors to avert enough crises over the previous two years that she could not remember when anyone had last argued to cut funding for the Archive. Trusted and thoroughly vetted scholars, traders and officials swarmed the great hall like ants in an anthill, filling scrolls of their own as the read through reports. Those scrolls headed to the very back of the hall, where on a raised dais the keen minds the First Prince had appointed as her foremost analysts had been granted desks of their own. Theirs was the task to sift through the mass of reports and identify the disasters that would plague Procer and the Grand Alliance before they came to pass, warning Cordelia so that they might be averted.

The Rhenian princess’s entrance was met with a pause in the intricate dance of duties as bows and curtsies were offered, though when she returned them with a nod the sudden hush broke and activity resumed. Cordelia took the time to pass by some of the tables and speak, as she’d scheduled for, praising the Segovian bureau for the sea supply lines to Bremen they’d successfully forged and encouraging the Aisne bureau to redouble its efforts to find a way to keep that principality’s granaries and treasury afloat after the ravages the Carrion Lord had inflicted there. Callowan grain would not be able to feed the heartland forever. The Levantine bureau approached her with an intercepted communication from the Holy Seljun of Levant trying to formalize diplomatic relations with the Kingdom of Callow through ambassadors as well as a list of the most likely individuals the Dominion might send should such an offer be accepted, which made for interesting reading.

She thanked the young woman who’d brought her the scroll and requested a more comprehensive report be made over the matter and sent to her. That would see to a third of the quarter-bell that Cordelia had allowed herself for reading this evening, by her own estimation, which was an acceptable way to spend the time. The First Prince’s feet took her up the low steps and onto the dais, where the three appointed analysts that were currently awake and serving were awaiting her. One was a distinguished merchant of low birth, Maria Fernanda of Treville, who’d turned the ailing fruit trading family business she’d inherited into one of the foremost trade societies of the south by virtue of being able to read trends in demand in time to capitalize on them. The second was Brother Alphonse of the Montresor monastery in Creusens, who Simon of Gorgeault had personally recommended as being the finest policy hound of the Holies prior to their fall.

The third and last in attendance was more complex a presence than a merchant and a priest: the Forgetful Librarian was undeniably a brilliant woman, but she was also Damned and largely unwilling to entertain the notion of someone having authority over her. That she’d been born to a family distant kin to the House of Brogloise ruling in Cantal had only encouraged what Cordelia suspected was an instinctive resentment of anyone who might have a claim on her hours, not to mention seen her wealthy enough a villain few had suspected her of even being one before the Archer had caught her in the middle of trying to steal manuscripts from Mercantis bought at auction and headed for the Belfry. A great many dead hired swords and several bruises later, the Forgetful Librarian had accepted the Truce and the Terms and been assigned to Salia by the Black Queen at Cordelia’s own request. There were good reasons for that, though on some days it was necessary for the Rhenian princess to reminder herself of this more than once.

“Your Most Serene Highness,” Brother Alphonse greeted her, hastily rising to his feet and bowing.

Maria Fernande mirrored him, but a heartbeat slower on the draw, but the Librarian had yet to raise her eyes from the book she’d been reading. Only when she turned the page did she look up, and sharply nodded.

“First Prince,” the mousy-looking woman said. “Right on time. Shall we get to it?”

Cordelia ignored her, smiling and gesturing for the other two to return to their seats before taking her own.

“Librarian,” she said, tone mild. “You have something to report?”

“You might say that, Your Highness,” the Damned said, closing the book. “Maria read through the reports on trade through with the League and the Dominion, and I matched this with the records of tariffs between principalities south of Salia. The numbers I arrived at are worrying, when the substance of the Principate’s debts is taken into consideration.”

“And why is that?” Cordelia asked.

“We suspect,” Maria Fernanda intervened, shooting a warning look at the Damned, “that the Principate had become fragile, Your Most Serene Highness.”

Brother Alphonse cleared his throat.

“It is our conclusion that, unless regular trade routes are opened anew with League and Ashur,” the priest delicately said, “Should Mercantis cease propping up the treasury Procer the entire Principate might come down like a house of cards.”

A talk might be required, Cordelia faintly thought as the explanation continued, with the Black Queen.

—

“Half past the hour would suit me better,” Vivienne replied. “Though if it is a matter of great urgency, something might be arranged.”

“We would not dare impose on your time in such a haphazard manner, Lady Dartwick,” the tall woman facing her said. “I will relay your answer to Her Highness and see to it that your staff is kept informed of any and all developments.”

Lady Vivienne Dartwick, heiress-designate to the Kingdom of Callow, watched with a bland expression as the First Prince’s own chamberlain bowed and retired. She was not blind to the courtesy Hasenbach was extending by sending the very head of her household, Ingrid Backhaus, to arrange a meeting to ‘drink tea’. Neither was she particularly moved by it, though. For the First Prince to be seeking out such an arrangement meant that the ruler of Procer needed to address something by informal channels of diplomacy – given that Vivienne did not yet have an idea of what was in need of addressing, she was inclined to chalk any courtesies up to the woman trying to butter her up before the talks. Cordelia Hasenbach wielded pleasantness and courtesy with an uncomfortable degree of effectiveness, Vivienne had found, so it was best to remain wary.

It was a delicate line to walk, between being Hasenbach’s friend and her foe. Never to trust too deep or to give offence unprovoked, and though the dark-haired woman knew she was not half bad at these games she had not been born to them as the opposition so often was. Catherine could afford to ignore most of this, swagger in with a drink and quip and turn everybody’s plans inside out, because she had the charm and the raw power for it. Vivienne had neither, so instead she tread as carefully as she had when she’d been the Thief and the evening air had smelled of ambush. She leaned back into her seat and let out a long breath, wondering if she should send for the Jacks now or later: whatever had moved Hasenbach to seek a meeting, it’d be best if she knew of it before that meeting.

“Let us resume, Henrietta,” she finally said. “Word from the Observatory, you said?”

Henrietta Morley was heiress to the Barony of Harrow, Ainsley Morley’s eldest daughter, and so the proper address would have been Lady Henrietta. They’d grown close enough to dispose with much of the formalities in private, however, as was only necessary if the heiress to Harrow was to remain as her secretary and advisor. That she was a thoroughly competent was only to be expected, given that Baroness Ainsley could not afford a weak successor given her rambunctious vassals, but even if she’d been a moonstruck fool Vivienne would still have found some place for her in her Salian ‘court’. Ties to the baronies of the north, the last great landed nobles in Callow save for Duchess Kegan herself, were important in keeping the latter constrained.

Naming Henrietta her personal secretary had been a sign to the disposed nobles stripped of their lands by the Conquest and the Liesse Rebellion, too, that Vivienne was not as determined as Catherine to keep the highborn at a distance – after all, while Cat had used nobles and even appointed some to great offices she’d never kept any of them close . That’d been reserved for the Fifteenth, for the Woe, for those who’d borne steel in her name. But Vivienne saw these same man and women as a valuable resource: educated, often still wealthy by lowborn standards and often influential those nobles could be used instead of slowly ushered into oblivion. It’d be a waste to let them stay unused, where any rebellious hand might pick them up besides.

Besides, if the former thief was to be queen one day it wouldn’t hurt to have a good relation with the future Baroness of Harrow.

“Fresh as of an hour ago,” Henrietta agreed, tucking back her hair. “Lady Fadila has deemed the contents of the missive she passes on to be demanding of your immediate attention.”

Vivienne’s brow rose. Fadila Mbafeno was something of a liability, in her eyes – she’d once been a servant to Akua Sahelian, which as far as she was concerned was disqualification enough from holding office anywhere in Callow – but she’d remained as the informal head of the Observatory by virtue of being effectively impossible to replace and more than slightly competent. The dark-haired Callowan might not like the Soninke sorceress, but she did respect her judgement.

“Whose missive is it?” Vivienne asked.

“Our friend in the east,” Henrietta delicately replied.

Ah, and there went her day. That meant Dread Empress Sepulchral, that ruthless old bat from Askum, who the heiress-designate to Callow trusted about as, well, a Dread Empress of Praes. Sepulchral was repugnant in nearly all regards, but too useful as a check on Malicia to ignore. In appearance, at least. The ‘civil war’ in the Wasteland had been going on too long and too oddly for Vivienne to take the surface stirrings of it as face value anymore. That the former High Lady Abreha was foe to the Tower was beyond doubt, however, and regardless of all the rest that made her useful. Sepulchral had naturally gone out of her way to cultivate her usefulness to both the Grand Alliance at large and Callow in particular with typical Wasteland canniness. That often involved passing on information that neither the Jacks nor the Circle of Thorns would have gotten anywhere near otherwise.

“You’ve the transcribed message?” Vivienne asked.

“Translated from the cypher and ready for your perusal,” Henrietta agreed.

The scroll she presented held a seal in dark blue wax, the Observatory’s own. The wax was enchanted to turn to dust the moment the seal was broken, which made it clear whether the message had been spied upon on its way to the hands it was meant for.

“Thank you,” she replied, taking the scroll.

The wax frittered into fine blue dust as she broke the seal, and she blew it off the edge of her desk before turning sharp eye to what had been written.

“Dire news, my lady?” Henrietta asked.

Vivienne grimaced.

“Our friend sends us a timely warning,” she replied. “Malicia is about to bite our fingers off in Mercantis.”

And wasn’t that going to sting, a kick in the Grand Alliance’s moneybags? Something needed to be done before the fingers felt the teeth closing in, and for that Vivienne required more than what she had at hand. Fortunately, last word had Catherine on her way to the Arsenal.

Vivienne was overdue a visit, she decided.

Interlude: Terms

“The doom of carefully laid plans is two unfeeling sisters by the names of mishap and surprise.”
– King Pater of Callow, the Unheeding

“She’ll be here in two days, we believe.”

Masego thoughtfully peered down at the blade, insofar as it could truly be called that.

Though Helmgard had eventually been able to forge a sheath for it, an ornate affair of enameled steel, even that skilled heroine’s finest work had not proved sufficient for full containment. The sheathed blade was being kept in a deep pool of ice cold water so that the power it constantly emanated would be dispersed, though to his practiced eyes it seemed like there would be need for more liquid: as matters stood, the surface of the pool subtly stirred as if touched by winds and the Hierophant believed that someone dipping a finger into the water was near certain to lose it. The aspect that Catherine had extracted of the Saint of Swords’ corpse had been a temperamental thing even before seven Named and one had lent their hand to making a proper artefact of it. Masego was careful not to stand too close to the edge of the pool, for the edge of his robes would be no more immune to the power than flesh, and he frowned. Though the capacity of what had been forged here could not be denied, he suspected that he might well be scolded for the unfortunate impracticalities of certain aspects of it.

The odds were at least six in ten that anyone drawing the blade would die, after all.

“And you’re not listening to me in the slightest, are you?” the Rogue Sorcerer sighed.

“Perhaps if we made a suit of armour,” Masego considered. “That allows one to withstand using it.”

Though in principle he supposed use would be ‘withstood’, if at the likely loss of limb and or head. It was all a matter of defining the acceptable boundaries of loss. It would take significant time and effort to create such a suit of armour, however, and a wielder for the blade would have to be decided upon first. Such matter, to his admittedly half-hearted understanding of the politics involved, might become somewhat contentious.

“You could at least deny it,” the Rogue Sorcerer complained.

What were they talking about again? Hierophant vaguely remember talk about hearings, and beliefs. A trial of some sort, he decided.

“I agree,” Masego said, which usually got him out of these situations.

A heartbeat passed.

“Yet we should discuss it in greater detail with the others,” he cunningly added.

It would not do to accidentally approve of another bout of foolishness like a wine cellar being added to the Workshop, even if acceding to that request had ended up making the Hunted Magician unusually agreeable for a few weeks. Either that or drunk, Masego could sometimes find it hard to tell.

“You only ever say that when you haven’t been listening, Masego,” Roland said. “It’s the single most transparent evasion in an arsenal made of particularly thin air.”

Hierophant’s brow furrowed. He’d been seen through, then. Fortunately, Indrani had taught him how to escape this sort of situations flawlessly. Pushing down his general dislike of physical contact with anyone but a few, he laid a hand on Roland’s shoulder and put on a sympathetic expression.

“I am flattered by your interest,” he said, “but I do not reciprocate the attraction.”

Roland looked down at the hand, then back up at him. It would probably take a few heartbeats to work, Masego mused. Referring even obliquely to sex made people skittish, which made sense as it seemed like a lot of trouble for middling returns. It wasn’t like children couldn’t be made with the proper alchemies, either, though admittedly the lack of soul might be off-putting to some.

“It is important to me, my friend,” the Rogue Sorcerer slowly said, “that you understand the Archer is not an appropriate person to take cues from.”

Masego’s brow rose, loosening the silken blindfold before this glass eyes.

“In what context?” he asked.

“In any context,” Roland feelingly said.

That sounded rather dubious but then, for all his intelligence and learning, the man was a hero. And Proceran as well, which some of the bolder treatises about bloodlines from the ninth century considered to be a birth defect. Masego withdrew his hand, having left it there quite long enough.

“As you no doubt already knew,” Roland said, tone rather pointed for some reason, “Queen Catherine has reached out to one of the boundary stations and informed the garrison that she will be arriving within two days.”

It would take the better part of a day to get to the Arsenal proper from any boundary station as well, Masego knew. He’d never known the translocation to happen in less than six hours, and it had to be initiated at the proper time besides.

“It will be good to see her,” Hierophant agreed.

“It will,” Roland sighed, then muttered under his breath about herding cats.

That was a notoriously difficult activity, Masego knew, which meant the other scholar had likely reached a dead end in one of his research ventures. Hierophant could sympathize, given that proving his Quartered Seasons theory had become increasingly difficult. If there was truly a fourth realm of power out there, or even the husk of one, it was resisting his best efforts to locate and measure it. Yet Catherine’s return, he thought with a brightened mood, would – as if often did – open up the option of using overwhelming brute force against a complex problem.

“Is this why Tomas and Helmgard have been holed up in their private workshops for two days?” he suddenly frowned. “Catherine wouldn’t insist on running them ragged to finish the last touches on the Mirage, she’s always found the Observatory quite sufficient for all her needs.”

Masego allowed himself a degree of pride over that last truth, for he’d known granting his request to built in those first months after her coronation had been ab extension of trust on her part. It was deeply pleasant to know he’d not failed that trust. Besides, while she knew neither the Blind Maker nor the Bitter Blacksmith he doubted Catherine would want them to face consecutive sleepless nights on her behalf.

“It’s not for her personal use, it’s for a full council session of the Grand Alliance’s highest officers,” Roland said, as if he ought to already know this. “Twilight’s Pass sent the Kingfisher Prince to speak in its name, but neither Princes Rozala nor the Iron Prince will be able to make the journey. That means the Mirage will have to be fully functional or we’ll be relying on constant scrying-chains.”

Hierophant idly wondered if he should start paying more attention at the daily evening briefings of the Belfry. Maybe, since he’d had no notion of any of this. Would he? Probably not.

“The Order cadres in Salia would prove sufficient for the task, when it comes to Vivienne and the First Prince,” Masego said.

It was a little unseemly, resorting to such slick wiles to ascertain if either of these would be coming. Yet to do otherwise would shatter the illusion he’d been maintaining that he devoted his full attentions to any part of those meetings that was not about funding or the attribution of staff.

“It won’t be necessary, with both of them here in person,” Roland replied. “Mind you, there might be as much as a week between Queen Catherine and the arrival of the rest of them so we’re not out of time quite yet.”

“It would be best to be ready ahead of time in case of any surprises, though,” Masego caught on. “That is reasonable. I’ll take a look at the complex myself.”

“That would be appreciated,” Roland said, inclining his head.

Hierophant briskly nodded but cast a lingering look at the sheathed sword within the waters. When the other Named moved he willed one of the glass orbs within his skull to pivot and watch him, noting the short-sleeved cloth shirt and simple trousers the other man wore. Tinkering clothes, the kind that would not get caught on things and would not be a significant monetary loss were they irreparably damaged. The shorter Named strode up the five steps to the edge of the pool, only there ending his advance. Out of politeness Masego kept an eye on him, even if he did not turn his head.

“We still haven’t agreed on a name for her, have we?” the Rogue Sorcerer mused.

“It is not a sentient artefact, it cannot have a gender,” Hierophant noted. “And I remain in favour of Severance .”

“ Severity has the better ring to it, as far as I’m concerned,” Roland replied.

“It hardly matters,” Masego said, “unless one adheres to that Pelagian nonsense about term resonance.”

Though Procer’s sorcery was largely of the unfortunate Jaquinite mold, there were several enclaves in the Arlesite territories where older methods were at work. The Pelagian theory of magic was a child’s mimicry of what the Gigantes could to with Ligurian methods, liberally seasoned with ignorant mysticism and rites more religious than magical. Pelagia herself had been famous in her time for her splendid enchantments, and some of that talent still remained in those who claimed to be the inheritors of her ways, but the few shards of truth to be found there buried in a sea of drivel.

“I do believe in it,” Roland reminded him.

Ah. He’d quite forgot that, admittedly.

“Naming something cannot stabilize its ‘nature’, which is a rather dubious concept in any case,” Masego bluntly said. “There has been no dependable evidence of this being the case.”

“When it comes to most things, I would agree,” the Rogue Sorcerer said, then he flicked a glance at the blade in the water.

Ever-roiling, as if waiting for the hand that would wield it.

“But there are bodies in Creation that obey different rules as the rest,” he said. “How can I not believe that, having seen it with my own eyes?”

“We are all ignorant children trying to piece together the truths of titans,” Masego said, “but the moment, Roland, that was we are satisfied with an explanation we are lost. Observation is not understanding, and is there anything as hateful as willfully lingering in your own ignorance?”

The other man’s lips quirked.

“You’ve a surprisingly poetic bent, on occasion,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “But in the end, my friend, you are a scholar of the Gift while I remain a mere practitioner. If I only ever used what I understand, I would use nothing at all.”

“You are deepening your faults beyond the reasonable,” Hierophant informed him. “Though on occasion you act more like a collector than a mage, you’ve also used sorcery from every extant theory of magic without going stark-raving mad.”

That was, as far as Masego knew, largely unprecedented. At best one of the Gifted would borrow insights from other approaches to sorcery, as delving deep into another after already being taught tended to learn to severe mental sicknesses as well as deeper spiritual weaknesses. In this matter Hierophant suspected that it was one of the Rogue Sorcerer’s own aspects that shielded him from the backlash inherent in genuinely believing often fundamentally opposing facts about magic, the same that allowed him to flawlessly wield any sort of magical artefact he touched: Use , simply termed for how frightfully deep the waters of it ran.

“Collector’s accurate enough,” Roland quietly said. “Though I like to believe myself a principled specimen of the breed.”

The man was in an odd mood, one Masego found it hard to decipher, so he decided to press forward.

“Would you accompany me to the Mirage?” Hierophant asked. “If I find defects in the work, I’ll have to seek you out regardless.”

“If that is agreeable,” Roland replied. “Shall we?”

Masego nodded. A few steps took them away from the pool where the blade that once been an aspect lay sheathed and seething, and the pulsing runes carved into the otherwise bare stone walls shone brighter as the pair of them left the room before winking out. Behind them, enchanted doors barred themselves shut and they continued across the granite walkway leading them further from the cube they’d been inside of. The holy water within, regularly blessed by priests, swept over the walkway the moment their feet reached the other side: the wretched Blessed Artificer, though utterly unpleasant in most regards, had been somewhat helpful in providing mechanisms that would allow the walkway to rise and lower without relying on sorcery the blessed water might disrupt. The precautions were, in the end, warranted: that blade was, so far, the closest to a weapon capable of destroying the Dead King the Arsenal had come to making.

Another set of enchanted doors closed behind them as the pair entered the Depository proper, which Masego tended to think of as an overly grandiose name for what was in effect a glorified warehouse. There were parts of it more protected and restricted than others, the one they were leaving most of all, but the least secure parts were typically large rooms full of crates awaiting shipping out and not some mysterious maze of wonders. The nature of the men and women the two Named encountered after passing another three protective chokepoints reflected this. There were few of the scholars in red, white or bronze – Gifted, priests, academics – that were everywhere in the branches of the Belfry. Instead it was armed guards, handpicked from the different hosts of the Grand Alliance in equal numbers, and workers that they came across. Most bowed, though unlike scholars they tended to aim the courtesy more towards Roland than himself.

Masego asked of his companion’s latest venture, a runic seal meant to be able to impress that same rune into cloth or wood and have it magically functional, as they walked and found himself engrossed in the pleasant conversation as they made their way out of the Depository, through the curling hallways of the Knot and through that oft-messy and crowded crossroads up warded stairs and into the silent hush of the Chancel. There only a few were allowed entry, and the wards guarding the sanctum had been of his own design. Though the Chancel was the smallest section of the Arsenal, it held within its walls several matters of variable importance: the central warding array, the restricted stacks and the offices of the Arsenal treasury. It also held the reason the two Name had come: the great enchanted room called the Mirage, which Masego suspected might just be the first example of the sorcery that would come to replace scrying.

The lower level belonged to the treasury and the restricted stacks, the latter of which being warded and guarded, but the Mirage and the central warding array were further above and even more heavily restricted. At least the Mirage was not the furthest level up, where the array awaited: the guards here, heavily armed and armoured as they were, were not allowed beyond the first checkpoint. The second gate would open only for a drop of the proper blood, fresh from the body, and would fill the hallway with hellflame should it not be provided quickly enough. The last and seemingly third gate was kept closed unless one of a limited set of keys was used, though depending on which was another action was required beyond it – else a mounting accumulation of power in a hidden enchantment would grow to trigger an alarm ward. The Mirage was meant to be used, however, and restricting access too much would be inconvenient.

A series of comprehensive checks and another set of wards were all the two Named had to wait through before entering, though the guard captain supervising notified them there were already people within.

“Scholars?” Roland asked, brow rising.

“Chosen, Lord Sorcerer,” the soldier replied. “And one of the Damned as well.”

Masego strode pas the two of them, mildly curious but rather more interested in inspecting the latest refinements of the Mirage. The room itself was not so large, a circle of a mere two hundred feet in diameter, but it had still taken a colossal amount of work to ensure that not so much as speck of the floor, walls and ceiling would offer magical interference with the delicate sorceries meant to be worked within. For that reason the great round table at the heart had been made of stone as well, as materials that had previously been alive had been judged risky, though the parts worthy of admiration were not these. Around the table, exactly twenty armchairs of stone had been placed within boxes of glass just slightly apart from each other. Linked to the scrying pool hidden beneath the table, ropes of a dozen different purified metals – including grey adamant, which only the Gigantes knew how to make – connected to different parts of the ritual arrays hidden under the floor of the seats, connected to the glass of the boxes through a superbly clever bridging enchantment of the Repentant Magister’s invention.

The result was a nearly perfect illusion carried by the glass: with the proper preparations made on both sides, anyone seated at the table of the Mirage would be within an illusion perfectly mimicking the immediate surroundings and individual of whoever was being scryed by the central ritual. When Catherine would claim her seat here, she’d be able to converse with the likes of Rozala Malanza and the Iron Prince as if they were all truly in the same room. The difficult part had been creating the portable kits that’d allow the illusion to carry from the other side, and there imprecisions remained in need of fixing. But an elementary kit for connection had already been provided to all three fronts, and at this point the burden of work was largely on the Arsenal’s side: it was the room here that needed to be flawless so that everything would function. Which was why Masego’s lips thinned when he saw that one of the glass boxes had been opened, the seat within removed and the tile of stone covering the hidden arrays taken out.

Of the three people already in the room, two were kneeling and digging into the entrails of the array while the last was on his feet and looking down with apparent indifference. The Hunted Magician, as the only one not occupied, was the first to notice Hierophant’s entrance. The dark-haired man in ornate court dress took a bow.

“Lord Hierophant,” the Magician said. “An unexpected pleasure.”

The sound of boots scuffing stone informed Masego that Roland had caught up, and the Rogue Sorcerer answered before he bothered to.

“Magician,” Roland said. “Shouldn’t you be working on a replacement wardstone for the Army of Callow?”

The distaste between those two had been instant and instantly shared, which Hierophant found a waste given that they were the two finest Proceran practitioners he’d met.

“Have my hours suddenly become accountable to the likes of you, Sorcerer?” the Magician nonchalantly replied.

“A pleasure to see you as well, Lord Magician,” Masego finally replied.

If he was lucky, his intervention might even end the bickering before it truly began.

“Roland, kindly abstain,” one of the kneeling pair called out. “I was the one who requested his assistance.”

The Repentant Magister rose to her feet after speaking, smoothing down her robes.

“Assistance with what?” Masego asked.

“Worry has been expressed that the Black Queen’s mere strength in the Night might serve as a disruption of the Mirage,” the Hunted Magician said. “And so there was a need to get at the lower arrays for testing.”

The Proceran villain had been the one to design the enchantment that kept the stone tiles in place, so both his presence and the way he’d merely been waiting around when Masego entered were explained in a single stroke. Yet a question was begged by what he’d been told.

“And when it comes to matters of Night,” Hierophant said, turning his head towards the Magister, “you did not come to consult me?”

“She didn’t need to,” the last person in the room said, rising to her feet.

The Blessed Artificer smiled tightly in his direction. Her dark skin and golden eyes, the signature of Wasteland highborn of the oldest and most powerful lines, were always jarring to behold when paired with the truth of what she was: a priest with a blacksmith’s hammer, an ignorant meddler of the worst sort. Masego was not Roland, to let his irrationally strong dislike of the other Named affect his judgement, but neither would he deny that something in him always itched to crush her work utterly whenever he caught sight of it. It was quite distressingly visceral a reaction.

“After all, she already had an expert on hand,” the Blessed Artificer said.

“You have never even encountered Night,” Masego replied in clipped tones. “And you hardly have the proper academic frame to even begin to conceive of it.”

“You’re a Praesi miscarriage of a person,” the Artificer smiled. “You’ve no proper frame to conceive of anything at all.”

Her hand slipped into her tunic, fingers closing around some half-seen device, Light bloomed and then Masego saw nothing at all. Not that he’d fallen into unconsciousness, but rather that some sort of device was interfering with the sight of his eyes. How deeply unpleasant of her.

“ Adanna ,” the Rogue Sorcerer reproached.

Witness , Masego thought, and his Name sang. His eyes burned behind the blindfold, with Summer flame and something entirely his own, and in the Artificer’s grasp he found the whirling device of steel and Light she’d used to blind him.

“ Wrest ,” the Hierophant coldly said, raising a hand.

The Light ripped out of the device, uncontested for the lack of will behind it, and it formed into a ball above the palm of his hand. He closed his fingers into a fist. When he opened his palm again, it was to reveal dispersing wisps of Light.

“You broke my device,” the Blessed Artificer harshly said.

“Be thankful it was not your spine,” the Hierophant replied, just as harshly.

Both eyes on the heroine, he did not catch sight of the sculpture until it bounced off the side of his head with a perfect bopping sound.

—

On most days, Indrani was all for the amount of pretty people in this room getting all red-cheeked and flustered but sadly this looked a lot more likely to end up in the Eleventh Crusade than clothes hitting the floor. Something had to be done, so Archer turned to a method that had never failed her: throwing things at people until they did what she wanted. The wooden sculpture she’d been working on over the last wander just because it made Alder and Aspasie embarrassed bounced off Zeze’s head magnificently, catching the eye of all five other Named in their secret hush-hush magic room.

“Is that a naked woman?” the Repentant Magister asked, cocking her head to the side.

“Is that Catherine?” Masego asked, sounding rather curious.

Bless his soul, Indrani fondly thought, he no longer even bothered to comment on her tossing things at him.

“You’ve seen the Black Queen naked?” Roland asked, sounding shocked.

Indrani swaggered up to her paramour, throwing an arm around his shoulder so he’d be too distracted to mention it was the faint scar carved across the belly and not the nice ass that’d revealed the identity of the woman she’d been carving.

“He’s been in her quite a bit, Ro-ro,” Indrani told the Rogue Sorcerer, wagging her eyebrows.

“Quite regularly, during the Tenth Crusade,” Masego agreed absent-mindedly, which was just perfect.

The Repentant Magister – Nephele, wasn’t it? – cast a look at her carving that bore curiosity of more than merely academic nature, so Indrani almost patted herself on the back for being such a good friend. The Stygian heroine was quite the beauty, with those curls and curves, so one might even argue she was being a very good friend. Indrani’s intentions to keep stirring the pot for entertainment and also the sake of peace, she supposed, were neatly waylaid by utter surprise when Masego turned and put a hand on her shoulder. He stood almost a head taller than she, Indrani froze when he leaned down and pressed a soft kiss on her right cheek and then the left. His lips were soft. He smelled of ink and cool stone.

She was not blushing.

“Welcome back, Indrani,” Masego warmly said.

“Er, yes,” she said. “Lovely to welcome you too. Back. You know what I mean.”

“Not particularly,” Masego cheerfully admitted.

He extricated himself from their embrace and she let him – she’d known from the start it would be best to let him set the boundaries of their involvement, when it came to physicality – only after they’d separated tugging down her tunic.

“You can keep the sculpture,” Archer told the Magister, winking. “You know, for comparison purposes.”

The Stygian reddened, speaking a denial in tradertalk that shouldn’t fool anyone with any sense.

“What a delight to have you among us once more, Lady Archer,” the Hunted Magician smiled at her.

Ah, yet another pretty one. That one was all about the chase, though, as Alamans tended to be – the way he was simultaneously pursuing the Bitter Blacksmith and the Blessed Artificer spoke to that. Both of them looked they wanted to cave in his head, on most occasion Indrani had seen, but also there seemed to be a lot of feeling reluctantly flattered. Right on time, the Blessed Artificer shot the man an unimpressed sideways look.

“Same, Mags,” she drawled. “Brought in a new girl for you lot, so put on your fairday best.”

“I would not dare to disappoint, Lady Archer,” he drily replied.

“New girl, you said. A mage?” Roland asked.

He looked all hopeful now, which made it all the more a pleasure to crush his happiness. In her defence, Archer wouldn’t have kept picking on the man if it wasn’t so fun .

“She’s called the Red Axe,” Indrani grinned. “And she screws with magic just by being around it.”

“That would be interesting to study,” Zeze agreed, blind to the disappointed look on Roland’s face.

“Brought in the rest of my band too,” Archer idly mentioned. “Rest and recovery, until we head out again. Magister, you know the Vagrant Spear right?”

“We fought together in Cleves,” the heroine agreed. “Though I would not consider us closely acquainted.”

The way Indrani had heard it Nephele had been pretty much a twat up there in Cleves, before she got her shit together, so she wasn’t surprised to hear it. Then again, Cat did like the catty ones so it checked out.

“You’ll be staying for some time, then?” Masego asked her.

“At least a week,” Archer shrugged. “Why?”

“Catherine will be arriving in two days,” he told her. “I’ll have your affairs moved to my quarters.”

Indrani suppressed a smile. It was pleasant to sleep in the same bed, and even more so when he seemed to enjoy that intimacy as well.

“You could buy me a drink first, at least,” she said, fanning herself.

“A wine cellar has been added to the Workshop, so that shouldn’t be necessary,” Masego revealed.

Indrani flicked a look at the Hunted Magician, whose lips twitched, and she bestowed upon the man a nod of solemn approval. It was heartening to see at least one of these people had their priorities straight.

“That’ll be fun to break into,” Indrani mused, the eyes the calmed situation in the room and decided that if she left all the ingredients here the brew was likely to start boiling again. “Come with me to have a look at the Red Axe, would you? I want to know if the poor girl will be locked into a room for the rest of this or if she can wander around some.”

To her appreciative surprise, Masego not only agreed but offered her his arm. Considering she’d made it clear that he shouldn’t offer physical contact unless he wanted it, a lesser woman might have been chuffed by how unhesitatingly he extended the unspoken offer. Not Indrani of course, unless you squinted a lot in the right light. She threaded her arm through hers and offered the rest of the Named a nonchalant wave, allowing herself to be escorted back out.

“So, is it me or do you have even more Named kicked around than before?” she asked as the began their way down the stairs.

“It isn’t you,” Masego replied. “The First Prince got her hands on the Forgetful Librarian, but we’ve added two since your last visit: the Blind Maker and the Doddering Sage.”

“Heroes?” Indrani idly asked.

“We are not certain for the Sage,” he admitted. “His moments of clarity are rare, if incredibly useful. We’ve also a guest in the person of the Wicked Enchanter, though he’ll not be staying. He’s more a hedge mage than a true practitioner, even if he has mastered some lesser arts, so his value outside the field is limited.”

“Anything fun?” Archer said, mildly curious.

“Mind control, though rather imperfect,” Zeze replied. “Some elemental conjuring as well, but his arsenal is essentially varied methods of domination.”

Indrani’s steps stuttered.

“The Wicked Enchanter,” she slowly said. “Where did he come from?”

“Valencis originally,” Masego said, “though he spent some years in Helike and lately in –”

“- Orense,” Indrani finished. “He was in Orense, where he slew and robbed and raped his fill in the villages around the outskirts of the Brocelian.”

“You have heard of him before,” Masego realized.

“I just spent two months travelling with the heroine he made,” she grimly replied. “So we best hurry and keep them apart, or there’ll be blood on the floor.”

They were too late.

Archer realized, with a sinking feeling, that she might just have helped make a very large mess.

Chapter 13: Ingress

“One must not look down on tricks that deceive only fools, my son, as the better part of the people of the world are patently foolish.”
– Extract from the infamous ‘Sensible Testament’ of Basilea Chrysanthe of Nicae

It’d once been a delicate balance, keeping Zombie walking at a pace that Hakram could easily match, not anymore. She’d grown used to it and was quite capable of understanding without me pulling on the reins that I wanted to keep pace with my towering second-in-command. Sometimes I wondered exactly how intelligent the undead horse was, or even if she was truly still that at all. The necromancy I’d used when Sovereign of Moonless Nights had been... off. The dead Akua had raised in my place at the Battle of the Camps had famously ignored holy water, and I’d noticed myself that the longer they remained raised the more intelligent they seemed to become. That was not, I’d been told, something typically associated with necromantic sorcery. It was with the summoning arts, though, and some days I could not help but wonder whether I was riding a corpse or a bound spirit. I stroked the mare’s mane softly, and she neighed softly in approval.

“The White Knight is five days behind,” Hakram said, breaking me out of my thoughts. “He found it difficult to arrange for a trustworthy replacement in seeking fresh Named.”

Trustworthy was unlikely to be the problem with Hanno arranging for someone to stand in his place. Even the worst pricks on his side of the fence tended to be at least well-meaning. I’d guess that the trouble had been finding someone who wouldn’t pull a blade on a fresh villain or talk in a way that got a blade pulled on them instead. Heroes with a diplomatic bent didn’t grow on trees, though if I ever caught so much as whiff of such a thing growing anywhere I’d been sending a band of five after it faster than you could say ‘oh Gods please, just please’.

“Do we know who he picked?” I asked.

“The Silver Huntress,” Hakram gravelled.

Approvingly, I noted. I was more ambivalent over that particular heroine, as though she was undeniably competent in all manners of ways she also fought like cats and dogs with Indrani whenever they got even remotely near each other. Archer had, to no one’s surprise, regularly ‘sparred’ with the heroine back when they’d both been pupils of the Lady of the Lake. The Huntress was eager at the notion of settling that old debt, and very sensitive to the perception that she might be getting forced back over anything by her old bully. Between that and the two of them being Named with a preference for bows, there were quite enough grounds there for seething hostility to be the name of the game.

“She’ll get it done,” I evenly replied.

And on that we set the matter aside, both of us having noticed the approach of the outriders headed our way. The fortress where we were headed went by the name of Saregnac, though fortress was something of a misnomer: it’d been as much a jail as a castle, which a less diplomatic woman might have said meant it’d been a pretty shitty castle. Gods, look at that curtail wall: the bastard thing wasn’t even crenellated, it was like they were just asking to be stormed.

“It’s all over your face,” Hakram said.

“I could take this place with five goblins and a scarecrow,” I muttered back. “I’ve seen the costs to the treasury, they could have at least sprung for a place with a proper moat.”

“How good of a scarecrow are we talking?” Adjutant asked, sounding interested.

I flicked another glance at those walls: barely twenty feet tall, and I’d seen thicker ogres.

“Below average,” I decided.

“I could do with three, it it’s a really good scarecrow,” Hakram said, the fangs he allowed to peek slightly through his lips implying mocking challenge.

“Please,” I snorted, “any idiot could do it with that good a scarecrow. Just dress it up like Black and bait them into a field full of munitions. Scarecrow quality is the crux of the difficulty here.”

The outriders from Saregnac reached the vanguard of our little caravan, though in truth our entire group was ahead of the slower-moving wagons as unlike those we could cut through the countryside without risking wheels coming off. The line of legionaries ahead of us spoke with the Procerans and shorty after a lieutenant peeled off from the rest to pass along the message. Saregnac, he told us, was ready for our arrival and the Arsenal had been told of our coming. We were lucky, as it happened, as one of the functional times for translocation was one hour before Noon Bell and we were nearing it. The wagons would have to stay behind and wait until one past Afternoon Bell, but if our little group picked up the pace we’d get there with time to spare.

“Send a messenger back to Captain Forfeit,” I ordered Adjutant. “We’ll be going on ahead.”

The Soninke would approve of resting the horse teams for the wagons beneath the shade of Saregnac’s walls, I suspected, however unimpressive the walls in question. She’d probably enjoy a halfway decent meal and cold water as well, I mused, the spring days were much warmer in southern Brabant. Even as a messenger peeled off, the rest of us returned to the journey. It wasn’t long before we were back on the Proceran country roads – which, though it pained me to admit it, were better than anything in Callow save for the royal roads and what little highway we’d inherited from the Miezans – which I was coming to suspect were the reason Saregnac had been chosen as a boundary station for the Arsenal. The defences might not be anything to praise, but the place did seem eminently accessible. That was almost as useful, though in all honesty I would have preferred the northernmost of the Arsenal entrances to be a stronger holdfast.

The gatehouse was respectable, at least, with a drawbridge over a shallow dry moat leading to a well-maintained portcullis that was already up when we arrived. The commander of the forces holding Saregnac came out to meet me personally. Some middle-aged cousin of Prince Etienne of Brabant, which was the unfortunately not an unexpected amount of nepotism when it came to Proceran soldiery. They weren’t usually stupid about raising up kin, though, so there ought to be – ah, and there was the man actually in charged. A former fantassin , by the looks of the garishly dyed red and yellow hair, but he’d clearly not gotten the scar under his eye in garrison duty. I requested the man in question – Lucien of Pitrerin, as it turned out – to be my escort, pawning off the royal relative to Hakram, and was rewarded by a blunt assessment of the situation as we were escorted deeper into Saregnac by impressively well-drilled soldiers.

“We can’t hold the walls if we’re seriously tested, Your Majesty,” the man agreed without hesitation. “I wouldn’t even try. The place was a prison for nobles, so it was never meant to withstand a proper storm.”

“I don’t mean to impugn your efforts here,” I said. “But that’s not the answer I was looking for, Master Lucien.”

“We have truly defensible grounds, Your Majesty, they’re simply not the walls,” the man told me. “The barbican deeper in is what the place was built around, and it’s from the early days of the Principate. That I could hold against an army for days, and the room where the magic circle is was dug beneath into bedrock.”

That was good to hear, I thought, though I still had concerns. While losing one of the boundary stations to the Dead King wouldn’t necessarily mean losing the Arsenal – there were further precautions – it’d be a hard blow. While it’d be a waste to send a Named to stand guard here, there were things that could be done without resorting to that.

“I’ll see if I can’t shake loose a company of sappers and send it your way,” I replied. “Not permanently, but at least long enough to turn those outer defences into something it doesn’t wound me to think about.”

“My most humble thanks, Your Majesty,” Lucien of Pitrerin said, sounding genuinely thankful.

I waved a hand, somewhat embarrassed.

“We’re all in the same boat, soldier,” I said. “Gods forbid it capsize.”

“I hear that ,” the man muttered back.

By the time we reached the barbican the soldier had told me about – which was a solid little bastion, I’d admit to that, though hiding the arrowslits under gargoyles was good as, practically speaking, not hiding them at all – Hakram was back in the fold, his royal lamprey in tow. I almost had to admire the dedication to social climbing of a Proceran willing to fawn over an orc. It was oddly inspiring to see petty ambition triumphing over bigotry, kind of like if I’d seen an imp knife a Beast of Hierarchy. The nearing turn of the hour served as sufficient excuse to escape an invitation to a meal with the man, and reluctantly we were led into the barbican and then through a broad downwards tunnel into bedrock. A few wards and fortified doors later, we stood in an otherwise bare ritual room large enough to accommodate maybe a hundred people at a time. Rituals arrays, a dizzying tapestry of circles and squares and interlocked arcane shapes that would give me a migraine if I looked at them too long, had been craved directly into the floor.

The mages stationed here were mostly Procerans, though there were two of twenty that were on loan from the Army of Callow. I was attended to by them – Callowans both, I learned, fresh to the service but both taught personally by Masego at the Arsenal – as my escort and I were herded into the proper locations and finally asked to avoid leaving the circles we were standing in. Some larger shapes, probably meant for wagons and the like, remained empty. The ritual itself was not long, half an hour of incantations in sequence as the arrays were methodically powered, and then with a shiver we were all standing within an almost identical stone room without the mages who’d sent us here. The air here had that particular taste to it I knew well: Twilight’s subtle sweetness, or perhaps freshness. Arrowslits in the walls around us were the first indication that any intruders would find this a well-prepared killing ground, though when red-robed mages from the Arsenal entered the room to invite us to follow them I was quick to see that was only the beginning of it.

The corridor beyond had been built with seemingly two things in mind: for supply wagons to be able to pass through and the ability to wage a stubborn defence against anyone entering through the array room. Spike-bearing steel bars could be brought down to anchor makeshift palisades, portcullises were set in the ceiling every thirty feet and I even caught sight of runes and ritual arrays carved into the walls, awaiting someone to wield them. Soldiers in red, the Arsenal’s own garrison drawn from every army of the Grand Alliance, watched in silence as we passed through ward after ward. This place, I thought with approval, would be a bloody grinder if the Dead King ever reached it. Which he shouldn’t be able to, as it’d begun as a simple cavern within a mountain in the Twilight Ways before being expanded into this: no full route to the surface had ever been opened. At the other end of the corridor, we reached another ritual room that would take us to the last stopover before we reached the Arsenal proper.

To my surprise, though, it was not only red-robes mages awaiting us in there: pushing himself off the wall he’d been leaning against as he waited, Roland de Beaumarais – also known as the Rogue Sorcerer – stood up at my approach. His inevitable long leather coat swirling behind him, he made to bow until I caught his arm and pulled him into an embrace instead.

“Roland,” I smiled, “Weeping Heavens, it’s good to see you.”

He looked about to say something, his still-tanned face beginning a frown, but instead he returned my smile in kind.

“And you as well, Catherine,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “It’s been too long.”

Over a year now: he’d not set foot outside the Arsenal since its construction that I knew of, at least not on Creation. The half-realms allowing entry to our little house of wonders didn’t count. Hakram stepped up and the two of them clasped arms, the orc towering over the human.

“Rogue,” Adjutant gravelled. “Always a pleasure.”

“Deadhand,” Roland replied with quirking lips. “Glad to see the Stained Sister didn’t leave you with a limp.”

I was a little sad Indrani wasn’t there to hear that, since she would have been able to make something damned filthy out of that.

“Is something wrong?” I asked. “I’m always glad to see you, but I’d not expected to run into any of you until we reached the Threshold.”

Which was on the other side of that complicated array in front of us, as it happened.

“There’s been some trouble,” Roland grimaced. “I judged it necessary to give you advance warning.”

My brow rose.

“Not Keter,” I slowly said.

We’d be having a rather more urgent conversation were that the case. It wasn’t that I believed it to be impossible for the Dead King to reach this place – I couldn’t think of a way out of hand, given that we were using the Twilight Ways as way to keep his creatures out, but that hardly meant there wasn’t actually one – but rather that if he did get to the Arsenal, it would be for a killing stroke. I couldn’t see Neshamah revealing his hand over anything less than a good chance of outright destroying the place: a raid would just lead us to tighten the defences, after the frankly ridiculous amount of Named within the halls drove it back.

“There has been killing,” the hero told me, sounding like someone trying very hard to avoid saying the word murder.

If there’d been blood spilled by the mundane staff of the Arsenal, I thought, he wouldn’t be standing in front of me offering advance warning. It would not be my place to address a knife fight between guards or a scholarly rivalry gone red. Which meant this wasn’t about the killing so much as who had done the killing.

“Who?”

“A villain by the Name of the Wicked Enchanter was slain,” Roland told me, pitching his voice low.

“And one of you lot did the slaying,” I deduced.

My fingers clenched, though I would not hasten to judgement. I’d given a bleeding boy surrounded by the corpses he’d made the benefit of the doubt, and it was not a principle if it only applied to people you felt for.

“The Red Axe,” he tacitly agreed. “I will not argue for breach of the Terms, Catherine, but there were... extenuating circumstances.”

“The Enchanter has – had – a certain reputation,” Hakram told me. “Though he was also considered a promising lead in usurping control of lesser dead from Keter.”

“I hope they’re damned good circumstances, Roland,” I bluntly said. “Otherwise this ends with gallows and a noose.”

I leaned a little closer.

“This is known?” I softly asked. “It was seen?”

“It was done as our people were heading out for midday meal, an openly fought battle,” Roland murmured back.

Shit . Whatever happened now, there would be no keeping that from spreading. The Arsenal might be isolated from Creation and we read the letters going in and out, but given the amount of people that lived within its walls there would be no way a Named fight would stay secret forever.

“How many Named are there in the Arsenal right now?” Hakram asked.

Good, I’d been wondering that myself.

“Archer arrived two days past with her full band and the Red Axe,” the Rogue Sorcerer replied. “Which brings us at sixteen – eighteen including you and Adjutant, Catherine.”

In other words, I was about to walk into a warehouse full of goblin munitions after someone had tossed a torch into it. Fuck . Better it be me than anyone else I could think of, and even better that Hanno was on his way, but still. In the immortal words of Queen Catherine Foundling, first of her name: fuck. And there were more of us coming, too. The White Knight for one, but the Painted Knife and her own band were headed our way at a brisk pace. I genuinely could not remember reading of such a large amount of Named in the same place at the same time, at least not outside a crusading army marching on Keter itself.

“Tell me it didn’t get out of control after that,” I demanded.

He hesitated.

“Tell me no one else died after that,” I said, haggling with disaster.

“Accusations were thrown that the Chosen were attempting a purge, and Archer had to pull the Vagrant Spear off of the Hunted Magician. Bruises and a cut, but nothing lasting.”

I repressed the urge to swear under my breath, knowing my soldiers were close enough they’d be able to hear. The Vagrant Spear was one of Indrani’s crew, so I wasn’t worried there, but all my reports about the Arsenal mentioned the Hunted Magician as being fairly influential among the villains there. Masego could have edged him out of the unofficial leadership fairly easily, as either more or equally powerful as well as significantly better-connected, but Masego would have no interested in playing court games as long as the Magician let him have his way on the things that actually mattered to him. And if he’d been good enough to survive as a Procer mage villain while the Saint and the Pilgrim were still kicking around, then it was safe to assume he was at least that smart. Fuck , I thought once more. Why was it that, of the two Proceran spellcasters with social skills, it was the one supposedly on my side that was most likely to become a headache?

This had the making of a pivot, and not one I liked the looks of.

“Get me there, Roland,” I said. “Before the fucking Eleventh Crusade starts in our backyard.”

“Your Majesty,” the Rogue Sorcerer replied, inclining his head.

He was one of the few heroes that’d never actually sounded at least a little mocking coming from, yet another reason I’d seriously considered asking Masego if it was possible to make more of him. With a Named wizard taking over the ritual, the second translocation was a breeze: Roland outright dismissed the attendant mages and handled it all himself, taking us into one of the larger wagon circles and muttering the incantation under his breath. With a sensation like having a stiff wind suddenly blown over my entire body, we went through after a mere quarter hour of chanting and when my eyes opened it was to the sight of a slab of stone standing surrounded by nothing. Behind us was only void and ahead of us was another slab of stone, but only one.

“I took us through a shortcut,” Roland told me. “Otherwise we’d be stuck going through several checkpoints.”

“What is it with wizards and not putting up railings?” I wondered out loud, looking at the empty void surrounding us.

There was some quiet snickering form my soldiers, to my own amusement.

“Your horse can fly,” Roland pointed out.

“My horse is only coming through with the wagons, so I am distinctly lacking wings at the moment,” I replied. “Crows, at least it doesn’t rain in here.”

Just the thought of treading slippery-slick wet stone with only nothingness around was enough to have me want to wince. I’d worked through most of my old fear of heights, but half-finished dimensions like this were in a category of their own.

“I’ll be sure bring up your complaints at the next monthly assembly,” the Rogue Sorcerer amusedly said.

He took the lead, walking assuredly through the first stone slab and then not pausing as he reached the end of the second. With reason, as there was another slab in place under his foot before it could be put down. I looked back, wondering if the first slab would disappear, but it was still there. This was unlikely to be a conjuration, I decided – it’d take a massive amount of power to make something like stone slab out of seemingly nothing – but odds were this was from too esoteric a branch of sorcery for me to be able to make a proper guess besides. I simply followed, as did my personal guard, and Roland led us through a walk of perhaps half an hour in a straight line before we reached a significantly larger slab, where a circle of silvery light the size of a door was hanging in the air.

“The shortcut leads into the most heavily defended part of the Arsenal,” Roland told us. “Do not be alarmed by the steel and spells awaiting you on the other side, they are a mere precaution.”

“Reassuring,” Hakram drily replied.

While the defences were slowing our way, even with a shortcut being what we took, I could not help but approve of how thoroughly the safety of the Arsenal was being seen to. I was one of the few who’d been brought in on the nature of the place, so I was aware that the Arsenal itself was in neither the Twilight Ways, Arcadia or even Creation: Hierophant had, using Warlock’s old research and what he’d learned by stealing the ruins of Liesse, hung a fortress in a stable dimension somewhere between Twilight and Creation. The Witch of the Woods had then gone a step further and grafted on the Threshold, less dimensional pockets between the Arsenal and everything else. That was where we were right now, and that gate ahead ought to be the last hurdle in getting in. Roland saw to it quickly, tracing the hanging edge with his fingers until it filled silver and speaking in cadenced mage tongue until the circle had become a rectangular door anchored on the ground.

“I’ll have to be last to cross,” he told us. “But the way is open, go ahead.”

“See you on the other side, then,” I shrugged.

I limped through, ignoring a half-hearted protested by my escort that one of them should be first to cross. It wasn’t all that different from a fairy gate, I decided as I crossed, though somehow more... precise. Travelling Arcadia or the Ways was a journey, while this was more like... walking up or down stairs. The other side was, I found out, a beautifully designed killing field. Flat stone grounds overlooked by tall structures leading into corridors, bristling with soldiers and engines of war, and even just striding through and onto the stone I could already feel the sorcery buzzing in the air. Wards and enchantments and half a dozen other things too. My escort followed me through as I limped forward, at least a hundred soldiers looking down on us, and I noted that the only way through was a stairway wedged between the heights. I waited until Roland crossed as well, the gate closing behind him, and only then noticed that someone was coming down the stairs. I smiled, recognizing him immediately.

Though Masego was tall as ever, he’d gained some weight since I last saw him. Nowhere near what he’d worn when he was still young, but at leas enough he no longer seemed thin – though he was still built like a scholar, not a warrior, as there was not much muscle to his frame. The long braids goings down his back had shed some of the ornaments they’d down, now limited to one ring per braid. Most of them gold but a few silver and even bronze. All of them carved with runes. His robes were no longer the old black ones he’d taken to wearing after becoming the Hierophant, instead a more ornate grey set touched with tiles of pale green and paler gold. The cloth band that covered his eyes matched the grey of the robes, though it was not broad enough to hide the glimmering light of Summer’s sun still dwelling within his glass eyes. Masego looked, well, hale and happy. To my admitted surprise.

I’d not exactly expected him to waste away here, but I had expected that without one of us to keep an eye one him he’d go through an obsessive phase the way he had after the Observatory was first built – only without Indrani around to force him to eat and actually talk to people. Evidently I’d been wrong, and I was pleased to learn it. Masego swept down the stairs and, to my deepening surprise, brought me in for a short embrace before leaning down and kissing my cheeks one after the other.

“I, uh,” I eloquently said. “Hello, Masego. It’s good to see you.”

Hierophant looked rather pleased with himself, standing a little straighter.

“And it is good to see you, Catherine,” he said. “We have much to talk about.”

A pause of a heartbeat.

“I would also enjoy catching up,” he mused.

I choked on a startled burst of laughter before coughing into my fist, though I found myself grinning like a fool. Some things never changed, huh? It just wouldn’t be Masego without the effortless praise and insults, neither of which were entirely meant to be offered.

“I have missed you, Zeze,” I admitted.

I patted the side of his elbow and he withdrew, straightening his perfectly straight robes. While I’d been distracted Adjutant had come to stand at my side, and the dark-skinned practitioner tuned to him afterwards.

“Hakram,” Masego smiled. “Good. I have been meaning-”

“Win a shatranj and I’ll consider changing the hand,” the orc replied.

“I have been practicing,” Masego swore. “And I have this lovely artefact, which has fingers but also shoots lightning and –”

“Shoots lightning?” I mused. “Hakram, you should reconsider.”

I was only halfway screwing with him, since I could think of a lot of situations where shooting lightning might be useful. Like, a solid half of all the conversations I’d ever had in my life.

“Masego, please stop bartering away ancient Mavii artefacts,” Roland sighed. “Especially when our ownership of them is dubious to begin with.”

“It was my understanding that grave-robbing is allowed when a hero is the one doing it,” Masego replied, sounding surprised. “Surely that is not invalidated simply because it was a heroine instead.”

His tone implied a degree of appalment at the discrimination involved, which had me breathing in sharply so I would not laugh.

“That’s not,” the Rogue Sorcerer began, “I mean – you ought to... we can discuss this later, Hierophant.”

I suppressed my grin. Masego’s occasional bouts of well-meaning earnestness had always been near impossible to ward against, in my experience. The humour faded, though, when I considered what was still ahead.

“So,” I said, eyes on Masego, “I hear from Roland we’ve got a bit of a situation on our hands.”

Hierophant’s face brightened.

“Oh,” he said. “That reminds me: I have been asked by the Hunted Magician to arrange an audience with you at your earliest convenience.”

I did not groan, because I was a grown woman – sadly enough, as grown as I’d ever get – and a queen and I’d not yet found a way to pawn this off to anyone else.

“Lovely,” I muttered.

“The Blessed Artificer also requests such an audience,” Roland said, coming up behind me. “She wants to lodge a complaint under the Terms.”

My brow rose.

“What about?” I asked.

The Rogue Sorcerer looked meaningfully at Masego, who looked unimpressed.

“The device blinded me,” he said. “I will not apologize for breaking it.”

The device had what ? If some fucking heroine thought she could take a swing at Masego and that I’d then make him apologize for it just to keep the peace, then someone was in need of a rude awakening. My friend might not be the deftest of hands when it came to avoiding giving offence, but on the other hand I’d almost never seen him resort to violence without dire provocation himself.

“Who did what now?” I asked, lips thinning.

“I’ll not get into it without her being there,” Roland said. “There is little point. Something to discuss when we are not standing in the middle of the translocation area, yes?”

Fair enough, I silently conceded. I wasn’t like we were in anyone’s way, but I should settle in my guards and take up quarters of my own instead of standing around. Besides, considering the treasury of Callow had pitched in to pay for building this place I was rather due a tour of this Arsenal. I would have preferred to visit when the Named here weren’t at each other’s throats, but if wishes were horses than beggars would ride.

“You have me there,” I easily said. “Which of you fine gentlemen volunteers to-”

A silver rectangle opened behind us, though more than ten feet to the left of where own door out of the Threshold had stood.

“Roland,” I said. “Was anyone else supposed to come today?”

By the shortcut, too, if I was correct.

“No that I know of,” the Rogue Sorcerer grimly replied.

“To the stairs,” I barked at my guards.

We’d only barley begun to withdraw when a silhouette came out. My staff rose, until I caught sight of the perfectly polished shield the figure bore. The Mirror Knight gathered his bearings, then started in surprise when he caught sight of me. I ought to have been the one surprised, really: after all, he was meant to be in Cleves right now.

So what the Hells was he doing here ?

Chapter 14: Audience

“To boast of an opinion unchanged is to boast of wearing child’s clothing.”
– Atalantian saying

The Mirror Knight’s appearance had me surprised, but the three other Named that followed him out pushed that over the edge and into consternation.

One of those I was already familiar with: the Blade of Mercy’s youth and greatsword would have made him memorable enough even if I’d not once ripped out his arm to throw it in another hero’s face as a distraction. Another Alamans, like the Mirror Knight, and one who’d strenuously argued against the Terms before they were forced through with the Pilgrim and the White Knight’s backing. The other two took me a moment to place, as I’d only ever heard of them through reports. But heard of them I had, and they were not unknown quantities. Short, stocky and painted in colours that belonged to no Blood, the Exalted Poet looked like he belonged in a Dominion shield wall instead of the pleasure palaces of Levante he was said to have been conscripted from. Archer had mentioned to me he’d once been among the Hidden Poets, some highly prestigious Levantine society of poets and singers, until he’d somehow touched upon some truth of the Heavens through his words. Yet for all that he did not wield Light – he was a spellcaster, if a middling one, and likely how the band had come through.

The last of the four was a Callowan, though she wasn’t one of mine in any sense. She’d allegedly fled in the early years after the Conquest, and she was the only one who did not openly consider herself one of Above’s champions. The Maddened Keeper looked instead like a perennially exhausted woman in her early twenties, skin drawn and pale and her dark hair ratty. Her threadbare robes ever rumpled and she was thin, but there was a sense of... menace about her. Not like a snake coiling but rather like a diseased thing, the sight of which had you withdraw your hand out of fear and disgust. She was host, it was rumoured, to a great many old secrets that should have stayed unknown – and had even turned herself into a living seal on a Hell Egg from Triumphant’s days. After the Mirror Knight himself she was the one of that bunch I’d be most wary of fighting. I knew from personal experience that one didn’t rub elbows with entities on the darker side of the fence without learning some rather nasty tricks.

“Mirror Knight,” I said, tone cool. “I was under the impression your duties kept you in Cleves.”

Adjutant fell on my left side to cover by bad leg, as naturally as taking a breath, and he did not need to reach for a blade for the heroes to tense. Christophe, for that was the Mirror Knight’s name, looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him. The Blade of Mercy’s hands closed around the handle of his greatsword so strongly the metal creaked as he stared me down with pale eyes and clenched teeth. I was meant to be respectable, these days, so I refrained from asking him how his arm was doing. The Poet looked calm, and had even warily stepped away from the Blade, but the Maddened Keeper was looking at me blearily through the long strands of her ratty hair.

“And I was under the impression I need not answer to you, Black Queen,” the Mirror Knight replied, back straightening.

“Christophe, you speak to the anointed queen of Callow,” the Rogue Sorcerer mildly said. “Have you forgotten your courtesies?”

Roland had stepped between myself and the newcomers, while I was studying them, and though he seemed calm I recognized the tension to his stance from the last time he and I had been in a mess together. He’d not known about this either, then. I’d not expected him to, but these days my trust came slower and died more swiftly than ever before. The world had gotten larger, the older I got, and ever more complex. There were fewer certainties left in my life than I’d like. To my surprise, Roland’s admonishment actually seemed to strike true with the Mirror Knight. A flicker of something like regret passed across his face, and the man offered me what a generous soul might call a bow.

“That was not one of the usual portals,” Masego suddenly said, voice cutting through the room. “And there is more coming.”

The glass eyes beneath the cloth were staring at what I would have thought to be nothingness, but then I was not the Hierophant. There were only three other Named with Christophe, I noted once more. I’d thought him one short of a band of five, and that a good sign, but was he really?

“What are you doing here, Mirror Knight?” I asked, tone grown colder. “The Arsenal is not a hostel anyone can visit when the whim strikes. Explain yourself.”

My gaze swept by the armoured hero and onto the rest of his companions, flat and unfriendly.

“That question stands for the rest of you,” I said. “Two of you ought to be in Cleves, and the –”

“Hooves,” the Maddened Keeper suddenly said. “Someone rides.”

My brow rose. That implied whatever was coming was not with them, which only further added to my confusion. Supplies, maybe? There would be carriages and wagons for those. It should be too early for it to be my own, though I supposed time did tend to get rather fluid when it came to places like this. No telling what it was.

“You tneed to ask why I am here, Queen of Faithlessness?” the Mirror Knight sneered. “Fine, play your games if you must. I am here to prevent the murder you’ve plotted.”

The what now? Wait, was he talking about the way Prince Gaspard of Cleves might bargain himself into a slit throat if he didn’t curb his ambitions? Because I’d not even begun to pursue that, choosing instead to delay until I spoke with the First Prince before beginning to act.

“Have we been plotting murder?” Masego asked, sounding a little bemused. “People never tell me these things. You should write more often, Catherine.”

I closed my eyes and sighed. The last part was probably true, I’d give him that at least.

“See, even the Hierophant admits it,” the Blade of Mercy triumphed. “A murder here in the Arsenal, where no word will escape of it-”

“This is absurd,” Roland flatly said, “and beneath you as well, Antoine. Are we now nothing more than a pack of street thugs throwing around wild accusations? We set down rules to address suspicions like the one you have brought, and swore to follow them.”

“ Va te faire foutre , Sorcier ,” the Blade of Mercy cursed in a hiss. “You might have forgotten the butchery at the Camps so you can get comfortable playing the wizard in your little tower, but we are not all so eager to be bought out of our principles.”

“What principles would these be?” Hakram gravelled. “All I see is a handful of Named who were caught breaking agreements and now spin unlikely tales to dig their way out.”

“It is no breach of the Terms to come to the Arsenal,” the Exalted Poet said in Chantant, and I started at how gorgeous his voice was.

Warm and full-throated, like honey for the ear. I could understand why he’d never had to work a day in his life, with a voice like that: people would have thrown coppers at him just to hear him list out the chores of the day.

“That may be true. Lacing your voice with sorcery when speaking to other Named is , however,” Hierophant said, tone gone icy.

The warmth left me, gone as if by a snap of the finger. I frowned, eyeing the Poet rather more warily than before.

“Who throws wild accusations now?” the Blade of Mercy said.

“Keep your lackeys in hand, Black Queen,” the Mirror Knight ordered me. “This is disgraceful.”

My fingers clenched around my staff of yew.

“What,” I asked very gently, “did you just say to me?”

“Did I perhaps stutter?” the Mirror Knight smiled.

I breathed out, mastered the frozen vicious thing that was roaring in my veins. At seventeen, you arrogant little shit, I would have answered that sword in hand. But now I had responsibilities, and no matter how fucking satisfying it would be to make the prick spit out his teeth it would also be a major incident. The Truce and the Terms, I knew, would already be stretched to a breaking point by the killing of a villain no matter how the matter was resolved. If the representative for Below’s lot assaulted the most famous Proceran hero alive the same week, they might just snap. I told myself this again and again until the anticipation of that smirking jackass bleeding from the mouth had left my knuckles, and only then spoke again.

“Under the Terms, I judge your presence here to be suspect and your behaviour needlessly provocative,” I said, voice cool. “You will be held under guard until the White Knight is here to speak on your behalf.”

Outrage was the answer, and the Blade of Mercy laughed scornfully, but I was not finished,

“Set your weapons down on the ground, right now,” I said. “All of you. You will use neither sorcery, Light nor Name until it is made explicitly clear to you it is permissible once more.”

“I did not mean to breach the Terms,” the Exalted Poet said, raising his hands, “and will not add further insult to the injury.”

The voice was just as gorgeous as before, I thought, but it wasn’t so... attention-grabbing anymore. Huh, interesting. A little like fae glamour, then? That made him an odd duck compared to the usual Dominion lot, who rarely resorted to tricks on the more subtle side.

“You bloody coward,” the Blade of Mercy swore. “Have you no pride?”

“Roland,” the Mirror Knight gravely said, “did you not hear her speak? Hear the threat she threw at our feet like challenger’s glove?”

The Rogue Sorcerer’s face was a blank mask.

“If Hanno had given the order to a group of Named, I would have backed him without hesitation,” Roland replied. “Christophe, swallow your damned pride for an hour. It is not worth what your swaggering threatens to bring down upon all our heads. I do not know what brings you here, but I have been here all this time and I tell you now that you are mistaken.”

The Mirror Knight hesitated. I kept my mouth shut, even though by all fucking rights in the eyes of Gods and crowns just my giving the order here should have been enough, because I was not so enamoured of my pride that I’d knife a method that seemed to be working.

“It was a villain that was slain,” Roland continued, “and-”

“See,” the Blade of Mercy spat, “ see ? It is exactly as we learned. Some wizard rapist got nothing more than he deserved and now they would slay a Chosen in cold blood for it.”

“And how did you learn this, I wonder?” Adjutant asked, voice calm.

“Orcs have-” the Blade of Mercy began-

“Finish that sentence,” I mildly said. “And I will have to answer it.”

I met his eyes, pale blue, and idly ran a finger just to the side of my shoulder. About where I’d ripped his out with my bare hands, the last time we’d fought. The boy flinched, until his eyes glowed with Light and he leaned forward instead.

“Answer the Adjutant’s question, Christophe,” Roland said. “Something is afoot.”

“I will not unmask our friend in these walls so that you might silence them and hide the next sin from our eyes,” the Mirror Knight harshly replied. “Queen you might be, Catherine Foundling, but you are no queen of mine .”

Was I supposed to be stung by that? I sometimes pitied Cordelia Hasenbach for the fact that the blunders of her nation’s heroes inevitably reflected on her and counted my blessings that the closest thing to a hero I had to answer for was Vivienne Dartwick. Once in a while, I supposed, I did get a stroke of luck.

“I didn’t ask you to kneel,” I said. “But I did ask you to put your fucking sword on the ground, Christophe . I can’t help but notice you haven’t even managed that much.”

“And what will you do, if I do not deign to indulge you?” the man smirked.

“Do not think,” I softly said, “that I will not beat some sense into your empty head, if you leave me no other choice.”

“What do I have to fear of Night?” the Mirror Knight chuckled. “Perhaps this is for the best, yes? Too long have better souls tread softly around your pride for fear of your power . You are in dire need of a-”

I’d have to aim it carefully, to finish it one blow. Just tossing Night around like some Secret-drunk ispe wouldn’t do anything, the man had survived being submerged in acid with only light discomfort. The trick to it would be-

“Hooves,” the Maddened Keeper sighed. “I told you.”

The portal’s opening was silent, though the shiver of power was not. A rider came through, leaning low against the neck of the horse to avoid hitting their head, and there was no missing the power wafting off of them. Another one?

“Weeping Heavens,” I swore, throwing up my hands. “Is this a secret magic fortress or a bloody fish market?”

“We do have ponds,” Masego helpfully told me in a whisper, “and some of them have fish.”

“Thank you, Masego,” I sighed. “But the fish weren’t the point of the comparison.”

“It’s not a very good comparison, then,” he informed me.

I did not answer that, because I had better things to do and also I couldn’t think of anything that’d be a match for that serious earnestness he’d spoken with. For a moment, looking at the rider straightening in the saddle, I was genuinely unsure whether I was looking at a man or a woman. But then I caught sight of the ornate kingfishers carved into the armour and put one and one together. Frederic Goethal, the Prince of Brus. More importantly, the Kingfisher Prince: the only ruler Named in Procer I’d ever heard about outside old legends. Prince Frederic, I decided as I took in the perfect blond hair, slender jaw and fair skin, was ridiculously pretty. The mass of ribbons in his hair would have looked ridiculous, I thought, if a closer look did not reveal they were purple and silver. The Dead King’s banners, torn up and made into vain ornaments.

The Prince of Brus had style, I had to give him that.

“My, it seemed I’ve stumbled onto quite the assembly,” Prince Frederic laughed. “I dare not claim it was sent for on my behalf.”

Eyes just a little too sharp for me to find them beautiful lingered on me, and the Prince of Brus offered me a theatrical bow from atop his horse.

“Queen Catherine, I must say it is a fine pleasure to meet you in person at last,” he said. “I am, one might say, an admirer of your work up in Hainault.”

The heroes I’d been about to draw on looked utterly befuddled by a Named prince of Procer quite literally riding into the middle of the confrontation. It calmed the waters some, took the edge off the stormy urgency everyone had been feeling in their air.

“I hear good things of you from my people, Prince Frederic,” I replied, meaning every word. “Or do you prefer your Name instead?”

“There is less difference between one and the other than I would have thought,” the man mused. “But Frederic is all I would require of you, Queen of Callow.”

“How forward,” I said, smothering a grin, but did not outright deny him.

It was just an Alamans thing, the grandiose manners and bold suggestions, but it was still flattering in its own way. Dismounting smoothly, the Prince of Brus set foot on the stone and offered a sweeping bow to the rest of the Named here.

“I am Frederic of the House of Goethal, Prince of Brus,” he introduced himself.

“Did we invade that?” I heard Masego ask Hakram in a whisper. “He’s very polite, if we invaded that.”

“We haven’t,” Hakram replied in a whisper. “Too far north. And technically speaking we never invaded Procer. We were invited into Iserre by Prince Amadis Milenan.”

“Oh, I get it,” Masego said, tone brightening. “We never killed any Procerans either, we just stabbed them and then an unrelated death ensued. Politics is all about ignoring causality.”

I decided, after a moment, to pretend I’d never heard that. The Kingfisher Prince greeted several the other two Proceran heroes by both Name and name, which seemed to rather move them, and charmed his way through introductions with the Poet and the Keeper. Who was, if I was not mistaken, blushing. Roland stood at my side, a rueful look on his face, and shrugged when I raised an eyebrow as if to say, Alamans, what can you do? The glance I traded with Hakram was more laden with meaning. Retreat , I asked him with my eyes, or press forward? He studied the heroes and the Prince of Brus for a moment, then nodded. Forward, he was saying. I was inclined to agree. Though in principle the Mirror Knight and the Blade of Mercy were of equal standing to the Kingfisher Prince, in matters of Truce and Terms at least, the way they behaved spoke differently. They were deferring, treating the man a superior whether they were conscious of it or not.

And I’d been around Alamans long enough now to learn that their culture frowned on making a scene when a superior was there to see. The trait was even more pronounced in highborn, who would be expected to ‘remain graceful’ to the extent that they’d have to face even an utter disaster with a smile and a pithy phrase instead of genuine emotion. It galled me that I’d have to use someone authority’s as well as my own, but not so much that I wouldn’t actually do it. I stepped into the circle, Hakram and Masego trailing behind, inserting myself into the ongoing conversation.

“- it was the of the Bitter Blacksmith’s make as it happens, though not the one here,” the Prince of Brus said, touching the sword at his hip with a smile. “The younger brother of the pair. His blades are in high demand, and Revenants have learned to fear their sight.”

“I am sure that stories would be best traded in comfortable a place than this room,” I said. “Your horse will need stabling as well, Prince Frederic.”

“Every time title is used, Queen Catherine, my heart breaks a little more,” the man said, hand over his heart.

“Frederic, then,” I smiled, against my own better judgement, but the mirth went away as I turned to the four unexpected guests. “As was discussed earlier, your unexpected presence at the Arsenal means you’ll have to remand yourself to the custody the guards until the White Knight can be scryed. I expect you’ve no issue with this?”

“None at all, Black Queen,” the Exalted Poet immediately conceded.

“A place with little light, please,” the Maddened Keeper said. “Queen of Lost and Found.”

My eyes narrowed as I looked at the haggard woman. That was not one of my better-known titles, much less by someone who should not have ever gone anywhere the Firstborn. This one was worth keeping an eye on. I smiled at the Mirror Knight and the Blade of Mercy, who were both doing poorly at hiding their anger. But they were only two against many, and likely to disgrace themselves in everyone’s eyes if they fought back against my very reasonable request .

“Of course,” the Mirror Knight said. “We will do what is right.”

“We always do,” the Blade of Mercy said, looking at me defiantly.

I glanced at Roland, who nodded. I’d trust him with seeing to that, then. I knew not the officers that must be spoken to or the places the heroes would have to be stashed away until Hanno could either free my hands to deal with this mess or deal with it himself.

“I’m sure one of the guards can show you to the stables,” I told Frederic Goethal. “I’m afraid I cannot claim the same.”

“Every hour parted from you will be a torment,” the Prince of Brus assured me, “but I may be able to withstand it, for the promise of a cup of wine shared at a later date?”

“Best you bring the bottle,” I told him, tacitly accepting, “I know little of Proceran wines.”

Even when it came to Callowan bottles, I only knew so much. Gods, I realized with some amusement, I could name more sorts of liquor than wine.

“A journey of discovery is always a pleasant evening to share, Queen Catherine,” the Kingfisher Prince smiled, and with a bow took his leave.

A charmer, that one, I considered. That made him that dangerous, if rather pleasant. The heroes left, until the only ones here in this strange room in this strange place were of the Woe: Masego and Hakram, who I would trust so long as I still had it in me to trust anything at all. I breathed out, then, appreciating how close to fighting this had come. The heroes were bucking the Terms and bucking them hard . Those two Proceran hotheads were trouble, had been from the start, but I’d thought that Hanno’s word would be enough to keep them in line. That belief was starting to wane, unfortunately, and if words failed then there was only one way left.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “This is going to get worse, isn’t it?”

I knew better than to believe house arrest would keep a hero contained. Which meant I now had to take this situation in hand before the fucking idiots broke the agreements that were keeping Named pointed north at Keter instead of squabbling.

“Find me a room I can received people in, Zeze,” I asked Masego. “And then get me the Hunted Magician.”

“Are you not going to settle into your quarters?” Hierophant asked, cocking his head to the side.

“I’ll rest when I’m dead,” I sighed.

Better that than everyone else dying, I supposed.

“And Hakram-” I began.

“I’ll see what bottles I can rustle up,” the orc agreed.

Ah, Adjutant, that prince among men. What would I do without him?

—

I’d expected to end up in a glorified scholar’s nook, but perhaps that’d been naïve of me. After all the Arsenal had been built on the Grand Alliance’s gold with the understanding that it would be receiving some of the finest minds from three nations as well as packs of Named. Moreover, for something like the Mirage – that great enchanted room that’d been sold to me as the sorcerous step beyond scrying – to be worth making, there would have to be fitting accommodations for the few people on Calernia that would actually be allowed to use that room. That meant that an entire wing of the Arsenal, named the Alcazar, had been built for that purpose. There were luxurious private quarters, there, and private dining rooms, but also the kind of parlour where a prince or a queen could receive important guests away from prying ears.

Masego had cut me loose in the wing after bringing me there, admitting he was less than familiar with the place and so of limited use, and instead gone off to find the Hunted Magician. The attendants here, though, had sorted me out. I’d requested something ‘intimate’, which was what rich people called small, since I’d not brought a household with me and the villain I was going to receive was both Proceran and mostly likely highborn. Better the lack of personal attendants be taken as preference for privacy then an admission I’d simply not brought any. Or had any, to be honest. Even when I’d spent most my time in Laure, I’d kept a rather modest house by royal standards. Enough that Anne Kendall had once praised me for my frugality, and that thought had me reaching for the bottle of aragh that Hakram had somehow gotten his hands on.

I’d been a while since I’d last thought of the once Baroness of Dormer, who’d been my Governess-General and died so senselessly in the Night of Knives. Her and people dearer to me, like Ratface, whose death Malicia would one day answer for.

I gulped down the thimble I’d filled, the roaring warmth of the Taghrebi liquor spreading down my throat, and leaned back into the cushiony Proceran sofa I’d claimed as my seat. The parlour was not large, two sofas and a low table taking up the greater part of the room while service tables and tapestries took up the rest. It would serve for my purposes, as would the bottle of aragh set on that nice polished table along with one wet thimble and one still dry. Adjutant stood behind my seat, to the side, since he was here as my second and not a villain his own right. I’d not expected for Masego to return with the Hunted Magician, since he’d see little point in walking back and forth the Arsenal for courtesies he only dimly paid attention to, so I was not surprised when it was only the Magician that was announced by attendants. The man was ushered in, and as he bowed I took the time to study the man that Hierophant’s indifference to matters of status had allowed to become chief among the villains of the Arsenal.

Nearing or past thirty, I decided, well-dressed in fine robes but leaning towards the practical – and I did mean well dressed, not richly dressed, which smelled of nobility to me. Good-looking and well-groomed, the stubble on his face sculpted, he was dark of hair and his eyes straddled the line between grey and blue. No one knew his name, only his Name, and the mystery around him had so far remained inscrutable. He cleaned up nicely, I thought, but that wasn’t why I kept staring at him. There was something about the Hunted Magician, something strangely familiar. It was on the tip of my tongue and it was irritating me I couldn’t quiet spell it out.

“Queen Catherine, it is my honour,” the Hunted Magician said, bowing respectfully.

I stared at him, some part of me feeling like I could just order him to kneel and he would. The certainty of that thought was what surprised me, because there was no room for so much as the shadow of a doubt in it and that was not something that came upon me often. Not anymore, thank the Gods. And just like that, it fell into place.

“Oh,” I said, “you poor dumb bastard. Which Court is it that you sold your name to?”

The man twitched, then looked at me what I could only call naked fear. I was almost surprised Masego hadn’t noticed it, but then I supposed that was not he part of fae nature Hierophant was familiar with: he’d studied fae, made use of them, but he’d never felt that power coursing through his veins. He knew it like a rider knew a horse, while I knew it like the horse knows the stride.

“I-” the Hunted Magician began, mouth gone dry. “I do not know what you mean, Your Majesty.”

“I can smell it, Magician,” I said. “They’ve still got a claim on you, and a debt like that can be pulled at by more than the true debtor. Can’t be Summer, or I’d feel like smashing your skull open, and if it was Winter you would have physically balked at lying to me. So, which is it: Autumn or Spring?”

“It is true, then,” he quietly said. “You were, for a time, queen amongst the Fae.”

“I scavenged that crown,” I said, “and it ever sat ill on my brow. I was glad to be rid of it. Answer my question, Hunted Magician.”

I did not Speak – I’d lost the talent when I ceased being the Squire, and my new Name was not so close to coalescing that I could call on old tricks – but he shivered anyway. There was an echo of power there that had a call on him, much as he would like to deny it.

“Autumn,” the villain answered. “It was Autumn I bargained with.”

And you use Maviii runes that not even Masego can seem to figure it out, I thought, so I don’t really need to ask what you bargained for, do I? Ancient knowledge seemed a petty thing to sell your name for, but then that’d never been my calling.

“Good,” I smiled. “Then I have a use for you, Magician.”

“I have evaded the eye of the Prince of Falling Leaves, remaining free of eternal servitude,” the Hunted Magician angrily said, “I’ll not suffer the yoke of the Black Queen instead.”

“I’m not going to make you into a puppet,” I snorted, “I’m going to speak to Hierophant so that you might be brought in onto a project of ours that the Kingdom of Callow backs above all others. You have the potential to greatly contribute, and so be greatly rewarded.”

Masego had been running into trouble proving his Quartered Seasons theory, but if we could bring into the work someone who had a lasting tie to Autumn then doors would open. And I’d just discovered I could squeeze the Hunted Magician rather hard if I felt like it, so I was even fairly comfortable bringing him in. Already my mood was improving.

“That can wait for later, though,” I dismissed. “You wanted an audience, Magician. Well, you have it.”

I gestured vaguely, inviting him to proceed. The man straightened in his seat.

“The death of the Wicked Enchanter was not happenstance, a stroke of fateful misfortune,” the Hunted Magician told me. “This is a plot, Black Queen, and we are all in danger.”

Kingfisher II

“A wise man fears heroes not for their nature but for what they were made to fight.”
– King Edward III of Callow, the Fratricide

Learn this well, nephew , the Prince of Brus had told Frederic. All pretty things are lies.

Was this to be the bitter truth of the world, then? That men and women gilded the ugliness of their works and smiled at each other, in tacit accord never to pick at the paint? It was a foul thought but those words, among others, echoed still in the boy’s ears even as he was formally proclaimed the heir to the Principality of Brus. The Florian Basilica was an exquisite piece of work, at the heart of it a great circle of stained glass windows tall as two men each and enchanted to chance colours with the seasons, yet the pews that could have seated five hundred bore less than a fifth of this. Frederic’s prince uncle had arranged for a brisk ceremony without frills, so that the unfitness two rule of his two sons would not be lingered on even as they were formally stripped of their right of inheritance. One of the Holies had deigned to attend in person and even signed the act of disinheritance instead of Brother Antoine, the appointed shepherd of the basilica.

Frederic was rather thankful for the attendance of the Holy, as otherwise Cousin Nathanael might well have thrown a fit: even now he was not bothering to hide his fury, though it was kept mastered. Even Nathanael was not fool enough to indulge in a tantrum before such an influential priestess as the one who had come, for the House’s disapproval was a weighty thing to even one of royal blood. The Holy One personally saw to the appointment of Prince Amaury’s new successor, a gesture of great respect that Frederic could not help but see as two great beasts scratching each other’s back. His uncle borrowed the authority of the Gods to see his own carried out, while the Holies were recognized as having the right to grant that authority to begin with. All benefited, the fair-haired boy whimsically thought, save perhaps the Gods Above themselves. But when faced with silence, what can men do save fill it?

Frederic Goethal was anointed with blood and water, then draped in a fine cloak bearing the colours of his house. The priestess led him in swearing the ancient oaths – he was to be true, to be brave, to pursue the grace of the Heavens in all things – and afterwards he rose to his feet the heir to the Principality of Brus in the eyes of Gods and men. How strange, that he felt no different before and after. Almost as if a crown was only ever a crown when seen in the eyes of others.

If Frederic caught sight of wings in red and blue high above in the rafters, he kept it to himself.

—

The years passed and the Principate of Procer continued to eat itself alive.

He’d been too young to understand it, but he was fourteen now and there was more to his world than the walls of the palace and the few lessons that took him beyond them. Princess said she had a right , the people sang in the streets, growing quiet when riders passed by them. Princess said it’d be a fight , the words picked up when the sound of hooves passed. Now princesses are all aflight, and the pot it is boiling . The irony of it, Frederic had come to decide, was that this war had already been won half a dozen times. It’d been won at the Battle of the Swallows near the border of Orne, again at the Sack of Lullefeuille in Creusens, at the Waltz of Fools in Brabant and even the Treachery of One Mile just outside the Salian border. All victories that should have broken the spine of causes, yet though the faces and the friends changed the war kept marching on unabated. When even victory was not enough to win a war, Frederic sometimes wondered, what was left to it but losing ? Yet his unease did not matter, for the House of Goethal had had already picked its man for the throne, Prince Dagobert of Lange. The cause seemed promising, it had to be said, as the Prince of Lange had lately become the preeminent crown of the northwest and perhaps even beyond.

The year before Frederic was first brought to the palace had seen the final death of the other great alliance in the north, the coalition with Cleves and Hainaut that had formed around Prince Fabien of Lyonis. A victorious pitched battle near the capital of Lyonis had forced Prince Fabien into the fold under Prince Dagobert as well as inflicted grievous enough casualties that – at least for now – the principalities of Hainaut and Cleves had withdrawn from the Ebb and the Flow. Peace had not followed, naturally, for victory ever brought danger with it. Now it was the Malanzas of Aequitan that were turning their gaze north, eyeing the southernmost ally of the coalition: Segovia. Though Princess Aenor of Aequitan was no great general, she’d brought great numbers to her side through skillful diplomacy. So far caution had kept her coalition’s attention on the eastern alliance under Princess Constance of Aisne, but now Princess Aenor was wary of allowing Prince Dagobert to consolidate his position in the northwest without Lyonis and its allies acting as a check on his expansion.

Frederic learned all of this from his uncle, whose steady hand at the keel had kept Brus out of the worst of the wars while reaping great benefits. He could admire the man, even if he would never love him.

“An offer has been made for your hand by the Malanzas,” Prince Amaury told him one evening.

After turning thirteen, it had become custom for Frederic to spend one evening every week in the Prince of Brus’ solar to discuss lessons and politics. Sometimes these discussions were only between the two of them, but other evenings saw his uncles’ favourite advisors and the powerful men and women of Brus invited to share brandy and talks. Frederic had grasped, without needing to be told, that he was being introduced to the same faces he would need to use and be wary of when he came to rule. Cousin Nathanael had savaged a salon with a knife in a fit of rage when he’d heard of the invitations become regular. Frederic now had a taster for his food and drink.

“Princess Aenor of Aequitan has daughter and a son,” the fair-haired boy recited by rote. “Rozala and Hernan, with Rozala the eldest of the two.”

“It is her hand that was offered,” Prince Amaury told him, sounding amused. “She has a few years on you, though I am told she is a handsome girl.”

Which added value to the match, though not as much as the fact that Rozala was the heiress to Aequitan. Though it was true and Brus and the other principality were far apart and that marriage alliances between ruling royals always complicated matters of succession, the offer was an attractive one. Most likely Rozala would follow her mother to Salia, being groomed for a Malanza dynasty on the high throne, while her younger brother served as Prince of Aequitan in all but name. Frederic himself would be expected to come to Salia as Rozala’s husband and his uncle’s man in the Highest Assembly, the two of them arranging matters of succession so that the House of Goethal would be stable at home while keeping a foot on the high throne. It was a tempting offer, befitting of a woman of Aenor Malanza’s reputation.

“If we turned on Prince Dagobert while his armies are gone south to battle the Malanzas, this alliance might well collapse,” Frederic noted.

“Lyonis is still looking for a way to start another bid for the throne,” his uncle agreed, sounding pleased. “And Luisa of Segovia is too clever a woman to remain on a sinking boat.”

“Yet you’ll refuse,” the fair-haired boy said.

“Dagobert has daughters as well,” Prince Amaury smiled. “A hint of the offer ought to open the dance for blood ties there.”

Without soiling Brus’ reputation or risking quite so much, Frederic grasped. And as he was young, he would be betrothed yet not wed: betrothals could be broken, should the situation change. Prince Dagobert was a proven military commander besides, in contrast to Princess Aenor’s shoddy record there, and marriage alliances from principalities far apart were notoriously unstable besides. Brus and Lange were neighbours, blood ties there would create a powerful bloc in the northwest that might well serve as the foundations for a dynasty in Salia.

“Mind you, in matters of land the most eligible woman in Procer dwells further north,” his uncle mused.

“Cordelia Hasenbach,” Fredric recited. “Prince of Rhenia, heiress to Hannoven.”

“Fine soldiers, the people of those lands,” Prince Amaury said. “Yet I wager Old Klaus will want his niece wed to one of his kin, so that one child can be a Hasenbach and the other a Papenheim. Lycaonese rarely marry out, regardless.”

Frederic put the notion out of his mind, and the Lycaonese as well, as their disdain for playing the Ebb and Flow meant were only ever witnesses to its proceedings. Instead he began to correspond with Perenelle Griffeu, Prince Dagobert’s eldest daughter, at the tacit invitation of the man himself. His uncle had, once more, navigated his way to great gains. Perenelle was pleasant enough, and of a certain wry humour that Frederic appreciated, so the cultivated relationship took well. Frederic believed it was in part as a reward for this that Prince Amaury invited him to sit at council when ambassadors from Rhenia were entertained. The expectation was that, with relations tightening between the four Lycaonese principalities, an effort was being made by them to secure better trading rights in the south by negotiation as a faction. Still, there was opportunity for profit there and there was palpable excitement at the possibility of securing some Lycaonese soldiery as fantassins .

Yet there was little discussion of trade, when the ambassador was entertained. Frederic found he agreed with his uncle’s scorn when the Rhenian envoys were laughed out of the room. Prince Cordelia Hasenbach – not even a princess , that one, northern savagery at its most glaring – had sent warnings of Praesi gold pouring into Procer through brokers, that if civil strife continued unchecked the Principate might well splinter. The ramblings of a young Lycaonese fool, Prince Amaury’s councillors dismissed. Prince Klaus Papenheim would have been worth indulging to an extent, if he could be roped in as an ally, but who cared about the dubious doomsday prophecies of some slip of a girl at the edge of the world?

The same councillors advised patience and composure, when the Neustrian army began to muster. There would be raids, they said, as there’d always been raids, but only that. The Lycaonese were a miserly people: they always retreated after a slew of casualties was inflicted, fleeing back north with what little wealth and warmth they’d managed to steal. The garrisons of northern Brus had been thinned to fill the field armies, true, but the fortress walls were tall and well-kept. The Neustrians would retreat soon enough and the House of Goethal would make them pay for their perfidy after Prince Dagobert of Lange became First Prince Dagobert of Lange.

When Frederic turned fifteen and the first fortresses fell, though, the silence from the councillors was deafening. Word filtered in from the north and the faced grew darker for it was not the Neustrians alone who’d come: Rhenia, Bremen and Hannoven all flew banners as well. The entire north had gone to war, and every day brought word of a fresh defeat as the weakened and surprised defences of Brus utterly collapsed. Prince Amaury Goethal grew sour, his moods darkened, and when Princess Mathilda Greensteel was found to have led a host through the famously treacherous Guiseron swamplands, the aging Prince of Brus led his soldiers out of the city to break her army before it could rejoin with the rest of the Lycaonese. Prince Amaury never returned, his life claimed in single combat by the renowned warrior-prince Manfred Reitzenberg.

Frederic did not yet know this, when he was woken up in the middle of night with a blade to his throat.

“What is the meaning of this?” he indignantly asked the soldier.

“Prince’s orders,” the man said.

“Prince Amaury?” Frederic blinked, taken aback.

“Prince Nathanael,” the soldier smiled as a floor of armed traitors filled the room.

—

The armies of Rhenia and Hannoven had marched south with blinding swiftness, Frederic learned, and had begun to prepare for the siege if the city. By then he was in a cell, naturally, but dear Nathanel did like to chat after savaging him. The fair-haired boy of fifteen tasted blood in his mouth as his cousin retreated panting yet bright-eyed, Frederic’s bruises having been built on bruises – the pain had been atrocious, at first, now he felt almost divorced from it all. As if he were stranger looking at his own body, at this entire farce.

“Are you weeping?” Nathanael – not Prince Nathanel, never prince, Frederic would rather choke on his tongue first – asked, sounding so very pleased.

Was he? The boy blinked, and found tears going down his cheeks. The salt stung his bloody cheekbones, making it impossible to ignore.

“I weep at what you are,” Frederic decided, which was untrue but pleasing to say.

“The victor is what I am,” his cousin laughed. “But take heart, little usurper. You’ll be away from my tender care soon enough.”

All pretty things are lies , Frederic thought, and being away from Nathanael would be pretty thing indeed.

“Am I to be executed, then?” the boy said, voice shaking through his nonchalance. “How very predictable.”

There was an ugly glint in his cousin’s eye at having been denied the pleasure of stripping away hope, but it passed.

“I would never kill one of my own kin, Frederic,” Nathanael smiled. “Dear me, cousin, think of my reputation . But when I open the gates of the city to Hasenbach, handing you over the Lycaonese as Father’s accomplice in foolishly disregarding the offered hand of the savages ought to earn me some trust. I do wonder what manner of grim execution they’ll have in mind for you.”

Stepping out of this, looking at it like a stranger, Frederic almost admired the wicked man across from him. Nathanael had acted effectively to reclaim the birthright he considered himself unfairly deprived of, seizing the opportunity with both swiftness and ruthlessness. Perhaps, Frederic mused in the most darkly, his cousin was the true Goethal between them after all. Who was the true child of opportunity, between the one chained and the one standing? His cousin advanced towards him, smiling.

“I’ll have you moved to more fitting accommodations and healed,” Nathanael mused, patting his cheek. “Do complain I mistreated you, it will do wonders to make you seem a liar.”

“You’ve such a pretty future ahead of you, cousin,” Frederic smiled.

Nathanael’s hand withdrew, then returned as a slap across the face. Blood filled his mouth again, but Frederic pushed down the pain and gave his tormentor nothing. Why, he was an Alamans prince of the blood: if he was to die, it would be having had the last word.

—

The morning of what was to be Frederic Goethal’s last day on Creation, he was woken up by the light coming through the open windows of his old rooms in the palace. He rose without attendants around him, padding all the way to the open glass and letting the warm morning breeze caress his face. There would be no escape from here, he knew. There were guards at the door and in the gardens below, with orders to cripple him should he attempt to flee. But it was such a pleasant morning. Some part of him was not surprised, when he looked at the apple tree across from him and found waiting there the slight silhouette of a kingfisher. It truly was, he thought, a beautiful creature. The long beak and bright plumage, the clever eyes watching him just as he watched them.

“Come to escort me on my way out?” Frederic asked.

The bird looked at him for a long moment, as it had when he’d been a boy. And then it took flight, leaving him with the same taste of esoteric failure in the mouth he’d first tasted as a boy of five.

“Still unworthy, am I?” he bitterly whispered.

Perhaps he was. He’d lost, after all, without ever having lifted a sword. And now he was going to die. And so, as a son of the House of Goethal, he put on his best and combed his hair so that he would at least perish while presentable. The guards that came to get him he did not recognize in the slightest, which meant they were likely fantassins hired by his cousin. Was he finding it difficult to secure loyalties? How amusing. Frederic really ought to needle him over it before he was handed over the Lycaonese for execution. Yet when he was ushered into a parlour, there was only one person waiting for him. Mute with surprise, Frederic was served wine and had a pleasant conversation with a very dangerous woman.

“Nathanael Goethal,” Cordelia Hasenbach pleasantly told him, “was seventeen thousand thrones in debt to the Pravus Bank. He entertained envoys from them on the day of his ‘coronation’, seeking further loans.”

Cousin Nathanael, Frederic aptly deduced from the context, had been met with an unfortunate accident. Auguste’s mental illness made him highly unsuitable to rule, and so the Lycaonese were turning to him as a candidate to secure Brus. He was hardly the only choice, given that there was another branch of Goethals, but he could be said to be the natural choice. He was certainly Prince Amaury’s heir by right, should the northerners care the slightest whit about upholding these. He could not know, not when those terrifyingly – beautiful – cold blue eyes were studying him without giving away anything going on behind them.

“I owe no debts,” Frederic told the fair-haired woman.

“You would owe one,” Cordelia Hasenbach coolly corrected.

And thus the game was played, the ancient song of Ebb and the Flow. He could rise, if part of her alliance. So be it.

“My uncle’s was a fair death, dealt in open battle,” Frederic admitted. “There would be no disgrace in swearing myself to you.”

“You misunderstand me, Frederic Goethal,” the Prince of Rhenia said.

She was not beautiful in the way that ladies of Brus were, slim and delicate and sophisticated. Prince Cordelia was... regal. It was intoxicating, from up close.

“A crown is not a privilege,” Cordelia Hasenbach calmly said, meaning every word, “it is a duty. You will owe a debt to your people, to Procer itself. See it is paid pack in full, Prince Frederic.”

Frederic Goethal looked into the blue eyes of the Lycaonese princess and something burned in his blood. Something demanding that, one day, he would get to look there again and find respect .

—

Three days after Prince Frederic of Brus was crowned, one of his uncle’s councillors praised him for having tricked the Lycaonese brutes and suggested that the principality should now pledge its faith to Princess Aenor of Aequitan in secret. Fredric idly wondered if the man had suggested the same thing to Nathanael, before. He could not quite remember running his sword through the councillor’s stomach, but as he ripped it free he cast a cool gaze on the pale-faced men and women he still needed.

For now, anyway.

“Cordelia Hasenbach will be First Prince of Procer,” Frederic said, and it rang like an oath.

Never again did any of them speak of treason to him.

The Prince of Brus readied himself for the war that would end the war, the peace by the sword, and brought to heel the commanders sworn to his crown. Even as he did the Lycaonese armies trampled Lange, Lyonis betrayed Prince Dagobert to the northerners without batting an eye and Segovia began negotiating its entry into the alliance before the gates of Lange’s capital were even breached. All of Procer trembled at the swift turn in fortunes, the great princesses of the east and the south beginning to muster their armies in fear – fear enough, Frederic knew, that they might just ally long enough to bury the Lycaonese together. But before the Prince of Brus could bring his steel to the Rhenian cause, there was one last matter to see to. One last debt left unbalanced.

When he sent for his father, it was not to receive him the throne room. Frederic ordered for a seat to be brought at the edge of the great pond in the depths of the royal gardens and he sat there, looking out into the water. Herons hunted for fish, ducks slumbered in the shade and an odd peace reigned over the place, as if the chaos and war of the outside world was prevented by some ancient enchantment from reaching here. Robert Goethal was brought to him and his father was visibly miffed by the fact that no seat had been prepared for him, but he held his tongue. Frederic gestured for the guards to withdraw far enough the conversation would remain private.

“Your Grace,” Robert Goethal said, bowing.

“Father,” Frederic replied.

He said nothing, after. Silence stayed.

“It is a pleasant sight,” his father finally said, sparing a glance for the pond.

“Is it?” Frederic mused. “You are right, I suppose. I shall offer you better, however.”

He felt the man tighten with anticipation, at the though of years of patience and offering his own son – his property, in the man’s eyes – to his brother. Finally, finally his day in the sun would come.

“There is summer house on the shores of Lake Pavins,” the Prince of Brus said. “It has, I am told a most beautiful view. It is yours.”

Robert Goethal was not the cleverest of men, but even he would not forget the house he had sent his wife in exile to.

“The death truly was an accident, Frederic,” his father insisted. “I would not have-”

“And you’d begun so well,” Frederic mildly said. “ Your Grace is the proper address. You will not be reminded again.”

The man’s mouth closed. Frederic could glimpse the fury in them, the same that would have seen his cheek stinging as a boy. And had he not dreamt, over the years, of the many revenges he would take in this man? Of the torments he would inflict, the pains and humiliations. And yet now he thought of Nathanel’s bright eyes as he struck the arrogant boy who’d stolen his birthright, of how righteous he must have felt when unleashing his wrath. And so the fair-haired boy wondered: would he have that same feverish glow in his eye, taking his revenge from Robert Goethal?

“It is a beautiful view,” the Prince of Brus repeated. “Though I suppose in time you will tired of it.”

“You can’t mean to-”

“There will be only one way you are ever allowed to leave that house,” Frederic Goethal said, and then he turned to smile at his father. “And that is by going swimming.”

He never spoke another word to Robert Goethal.

The Prince of Brus turned his eyes to the pond, after, but there was no flicker of red or blue to be found. He was, it seemed, entirely own his own. But then, was that not ever the way of princes?

—

Frederic Goethal, Prince of Brus, was sixteen years old when he fought his first battle.

It was not a glorious affair: his vanguard accidentally ran into Prince Etienne of Brabant’s just north of the fortress of Saregnac, leading to a quick and confused engagement. Frederic followed the advice of his uncle’s generals of and of his old teacher Captain Ghyslaine of the Lances Farfelues , trading three charges of horse with the Brabantines and getting the better of the last two. It was enough to have the enemy withdraw, as Brabant was fresh to the cause of Constance of Aisne and less than eager to bleed on her behalf. Perhaps three hundred people died on the field, in the span of an hour that Frederic spent mostly trying to find out what was happening. He never even drew his sword. Half a month later he led his retinue in relieving a Lyonis force further east that’d been ambushed by Brabantines and took three lives in the struggle, two by lance and one by sword.

Soldiers told him, after, that he was one the finest lances in the north and devil in a fight. It surprised him, for steel in hand war was never more than a blur. They were all chewed out by the Iron Prince for having strayed from the planned march and skirmishing unnecessarily ahead of a battle, but the grizzled old general then slapped his back and praised him for being acting decisively. His soldiers took to him after that, as much for the deaths to his name as the praise by a famous general, but Frederic found himself unmoved. Sometimes he thought of the third man he’d killed, up close with his sword. Of how shoddy the equipment had been, of the fear in his eyes when a boy wearing armour worth more than he’d earn in a lifetime had come at him with a gilded blade. He thought of it still, astride his horse as thousands upon thousands slowly lined up on the plains to the northwest of the capital of Aisne. There must have been near a hundred thousand men facing them, between the coalition armies of Princess Constance and Princess Aenor.

How many of them were soldiers, instead of shopkeepers in ill-fitting armour?

The Battle of Aisne would be marked as a famous one in the histories of Procer, for it had all the ingredients for exciting interest: one side badly outnumbered, two princes and a princess changing sides halfway through, valour from soldiers of all sides and a clear-cut ending: bloody, overwhelming victory for Cordelia Hasenbach and her allies. Frederic remembered little after he’d dismounted and gone to fight with the ranks, ceding command to more seasoned hands: it was all streaks of blood and mud and sweat, cut through by spurts of crimson. When darkness fell that night he returned to the field, though, to watch the carpet of corpses spreading as far as the eye could see.

“ A horse and a fall was all it took ,” Frederic softly sang, looking at the dead.

He did not hear company approaching until it was close, and belatedly laid his hand on his sword.

“Easy now, princeling,” Prince Klaus Papenheim said.

“My apologies, Your Grace,” the Prince of Brus said, dipping his head.

“Klaus is enough, after today,” the old soldier said. “You fought well.”

“Did I?” Frederic murmured.

He could hardly remember. All evening he’d been lauded for having scythed through enemy ranks lance and sword in hand, for his bravery, but they might as well have been singing the praises of another man entirely.

“I was told this would be a glorious thing, Iron Prince,” he found himself saying. “I was raised to fight this war, to earn acclaim through it. And now...”

He spat on the muddy ground.

“All it took was a horse and fall,” the Prince of Brus said, “for us to make ourselves into the great charnel yard of this world.”

It was a pretty thing, the dream of Procer. Of the greatest nation of Calernia, proud and powerful and righteous. And like all pretty things, it was a lie. The ugly truth of us lies on this field, being picked at by carrion under night’s veil. The Prince of Hannoven said nothing, standing by his side in silence. Death spread out around them in every direction, like weeds devouring the earth, like an open maw breathing out poison. Frederic felt his throat close, his vision swim. Was it the wind he was hearing, of a chorus of moans whispering: up and north, south and down , Ebb or Flow, we’ll still drown .

“How do you do it?” Frederic croaked out. “How can you see a smile without seeing a skull, how can you sleep? How do you suffer even an hour ?”

“When I close my eyes,” Klaus Papenheim gently replied. “I dream of spring. Of the green in the ground, of the singing rivers, of the fawns on the mountainside. Of the warmth that chases out the cold.”

“Springs is the season of war, for your people,” Frederic said.

With the melting of the snows the Chain of Hunger came south, even Bruseni knew this.

“And so I open my eyes,” Klaus Papenheim said, “knowing I am what stands between war and that dream.”

Frederic Goethal closed his eyes and though he dreamt of nothing, he could almost hear the beat of wings. It was not spring, he thought, but it was something. It would have to be enough. The Prince of Brus fought fiercely through the rest of the war, he was told, brought honour to his house and his subjects and the cause he had come to support.

If sometimes his gaze lingered strangely on the kingfisher embroidered on his banner, no one ever said anything of it where he could hear.

—

The same year Cordelia Hasenbach was crowned First Prince of Procer, Princess of Salia, Warden of the West and Protector of the Realms of Man, she received him in a cozy little parlour within the palace that had now become her own. This conversation had been coming for some time, they both knew. Frederic had brought into his circle the last kin he cared to claim and among them his surviving uncle’s eldest daughter, Henriette, showed great promise. As an heiress-presumptive, he was satisfied with her. Yet he was young and unwed, and there was no reason he could not have a child of his own siring should the proper wife be found.

“An invigorating brew,” Frederic said, after having taken a sip of the offered tea.

“I am fond of the spices,” Cordelia Hasenbach said, gracing him with a smile.

It was measured, as were most things with her, but that did not necessarily make it untrue.

“I will not waste too much of your time, Your Highness,” Frederic said. “I not unaware that my hand in marriage is not so tempting as some offers you might be entertaining. Still, I can offer hunting and fishing rights for Lycaonese in the swamplands, waiving of all tariffs for your people in Brus and my services as intermediary with fantassin companies.”

Compared to the full coffers and untouched lands allying with the Milenans of Iserre would bring, the great fleet and foodstuffs that taking Princess Luisa’s son Alejandro as a consort would secure or even simply the docile husband, prince and vote in the Assembly that choosing the debt-ridden Louis Rohanon of Creusens would acquire, his suit was hardly worth a second look. The First Prince sipped at her cup, seemingly pensive for all that this should be the easiest decision in the world.

“I had expected,” she slowly said, “that you would speak instead of the battles you fought under my banner. Of the support you have given me in the Highest Assembly.”

Frederic Goethal still heard the beat of wings when he closed his eyes. Even now, and perhaps he would until the day he died. But when they were open, sometimes he glimpsed spring and it bore the face of Cordelia Hasenbach. She was knitting back together a realm decades in the wounding, one step at time, running roughshod over southern royalty in the Assembly just as her armies had over theirs in the field. She did it so politely, though, that half the time they’d not even noticed it happened.

“That I cannot offer you now,” Frederic said, “for it was already promised to the payment of another debt.”

He would not quibble now and pretend the woman seated across from him was the not the best thing to happen to Procer in many years. This time, he thought, there was less measure to the smile she offered him.

“I do not intend to wed, Prince Frederic,” the First Prince gently said. “But if I did, the words you just spoke would have made you a finer suitor than any other I have entertained.”

The moment passed and though he left that parlour as unmarried as he expected to, Frederic found he’d somehow been eased into a rather lucrative arrangement to transport steel into Neustria that would nicely fill the coffers of Brus. And likely quiet any talk back home of ungrateful Rhenians, he realized with a start of amusement as he returned to the Goethal manse in the city. It seemed, though, that he was not to be freed of politics for the day: before evening came, he was called on unexpectedly by another royal. Prince Amadis Milenan of Iserre was a rising man these days: wealthy, ambitious and not afraid to use the former in the service of the latter. He was handsome enough, Frederic found as they sat together and drank a lovely Creusens white by the window, yet there was something about him... For this impiety, the Gods Above punished them , he heard in his mother’s voice, telling the old story again , turning their three sons into beasts . The eldest into a wolf, the youngest into a bird...

Amadis Milenan smiled and complimented Frederic’s deeds at the Battle of Aisne.

And the second into a snake , the Prince of Brus finished in the privacy of his own thoughts. Oh, there was a forked tongue behind that smile. Prince Amadis spoke of the peace, of the many changes the First Prince was bringing to Salia. Some, perhaps, were ill-advised. Brought by ignorance – quite understandable, if unfortunate – of the way things were done, here in the south. The Prince of Iserre spoke of the great costs of war, of keeps that need be rebuilt from the ravages of Lycaonese warmaking, of trade arties disrupted and merchants yet afraid. Amadis Milenan spoke then of his daughters, the second oldest of which was yet unwed, and of the trust that could only be had by ties of blood in these uncertain times. Did gratitude not fade so very quickly? Why, was the Prince of Brus himself not unwed? You are everything my uncle wanted to be and more , Frederic thought, admiring, but also: how many shopkeepers would you force into ill-fitting armour, to get even a step closer to the throne?

“You speak such pretty things to me,” Frederic said, “Alas, I must confess my heart has been broken. I simply cannot conceive of marriage until such grief has passed.”

Amadis Milenan’s pleasantness trailed down his face like rainwater.

“Hasenbach’s hound to the end, then,” the Prince of Iserre coldly said.

Every time you speak , Frederic kept himself from saying, I can almost hear a thousand corpses from the fields of Aisne singing that same old refrain. The fair-haired prince laughed, instead.

“Woof,” Frederic solemnly replied. “I expect you can find your way out, Prince Amadis.”

He did not bother to watch the man leave. On the windowsill, looking at him, was perched a kingfisher.

“You are far from home, old friend,” the Prince of Brus smiled.

The bird considered him, for a long moment, and then trilled once before flying away. Frederic kept looking at the sky long after, in startled fear and delight.

It was the first time one had ever sung for him.

—

Frederic Goethal sometimes thought he’d been born to fight a war, but it’d simply not been the one he’d fought.

The Tenth Crusade seemed like it might just be that war, he mused years later. The Dread Empire’s conquest and rule of Callow was a blemish on the face of Calernia, and it seemed like the old beast’s hunger was not yet sated: a city had been slaughtered, some sort of fearsome doomsday fortress raised by a rebel Praesi noble and a fresh madness of undeath unleashed on the world. A hundred thousand ‘wights’, Gods save them all. Yet the talk in the Highest Assembly, at the edges of conversation where truths were whispered instead of lies proudly proclaimed, was not of liberation . Promises were being made of fiefdoms carved in the Kingdom of Callow, and it left a foul taste in his mouth. He yet remembered the endless stretches of death after Aisne, the cloying choking smell of rotting flesh, and he would not brave this once more to repeat old mistakes by new hands. Not even for Cordelia Hasenbach.

The Callowans rallied behind the Black Queen, on the other side of the mountains, armies and knights and fresh devilries coming fresh out of the earth with every stomp of her feet. They too glimpsed a spring when they closed their eyes, Frederic thought when he heard, and Procer had no part in it. That dream was a dangerous thing to fight against.

He sent one of his kin to command the Bruseni contingent he’d pledged to the crusade, pulling strings so that it would be under the trusted command of Klaus Papenheim where he would be able to learn the trade of war without too much risk. The greater part of Brus’ army, though, he kept home. He may yet march it east when the war against the Wasteland began in earnest, and he took to formally preparing his cousin and heiress Henriette to hold a command should it be so, but instead the invading armies of the Principate were struck by disaster north and south. Prince Amadis had been beaten and taken prisoner, Rozala Malanza retreating west with the salvaged remains of that army, while the Red Flower Vales had held and instead spat out the Carrion Lord so that he might ravage the heartlands while the Iron Prince dug his way back into Callow. Madness and chaos, all the while Ashur played pirate against the Wasteland’s coasts and the Dominion dragged its feet.

Frederic ordered the army of Brus readied, upon reading the letters from his people in Salia, but one more letter came before he moved south to fight for the restoration of order. The Dead King marches , it said. Hannoven has fallen. All soldiers make for Twilight’s Pass. Ready yourself. So wrote the brisk hand of Prince Manfred Reitzenberg, who had years ago slain Frederic’s uncle and predecessor. Something in him shivered, when he read the words. A primal fear, an ancient terror bred in the bones of men. The Dead King marches , he thought, and the world shivered with hum. Doom had come for Procer, had already swallowed Hannoven while its armies were fighting far south. So were those of Neustria, and while both Rhenia and Bremen would bring reinforcements the Lycaonese had still been stripped of great strength and their finest general.

“North,” Prince Frederic of Brus told his captains, dropping the letter on the table. “We march north.”

—

The Bruseni made haste, but the Prince of Bremen was dead by the time their host arrived.

So was the Princess of Bremen that followed him and the Princess of Bremen that followed her , all dying in the span of same night carrying out the same unflinching charge. Now only one of the House of Reitzenberg remained, bearing a red crown: Otto Reitzenberg, dour and brooding and so transparently haunted by the thought he might not be equal to the duty he had taken on. Frederic sympathized, yet only so much. The first time he stood on the snowy grounds to meet the dead, steel at his back and the back sea of the Enemy’s horde in front, he closed his eyes and smiled. Terror should have swelled in his breast, for the armies of Keter made those of the Great War seem like the mischief of children, but instead it felt like he was breathing fresh air for the first time in his life. The banner of his house flew high, the sun shone bright and even the cold felt crisp .

The dead came and somehow Frederic laughed.

The strange joy that’d taken hold of him, though, had not spread throughout his soldiers. In their eyes he saw fear, for this was not a foe they had faced before and it was not a foe anyone with any sense would ever want to face. It was his duty, as their prince, to replace that fear with something else. Frederic dismounted, to show he would fight with the foot that would not be able to flee if the tide turned, and in silence of the mountain pass raised his voice to address his own.

“I see fear in you,” Frederic Goethal called out. “I offer no scorn for it, for what sane man would blame you? Is it not a thing of horror, this army of the damned?”

Corpses and monsters and worse, legions dark and darkly led.

“But I tell you now, there is nothing to be afraid of,” the Prince of Brus. “I have already killed you all.”

The murmurs bloomed, uneasy.

“You stand at the edge of the world, sons and daughters of Brus,” Frederic said. “There is nothing but doom waiting beyond the horizon, and with every beat of your hearts it crawls closer to you.”

And in the distance, as if to prove him right, the dead quickened their pace.

“And yet there is nothing to fear,” the Prince of Brus continued, “for you are all dead and I share a grave with you. So I’ll not offer you gold or glory or even honour – what are these worth to a corpse?”

He could feel in the air, now, and they must too. The weight, the scent of steel about to be drawn.

“Instead I tell you this: we can claw our lives back from this day. All it takes, Bruseni, is to win .”

His voice rang out against the mountain pass, defiant.

“Win, and tomorrow you will be alive,” Frederic Goethal said. “Win tomorrow, and you will push back death by one more day. Every victory claws back one more hour, one more song, one more cup of wine.”

He bared his sword, raised it high, and ten thousand blades rose with it,

“There will come a day,” the Prince of Brus roared, “where we who stand beneath the banner of the kingfisher will falter. Where our swords break, our shields splinter and valour flickers out like a candle in the dark. Where the Enemy, at long last, keeps our deaths clutched too tightly too steal back.”

He laughed, bright and merry and somehow he could feel the fear in them vanishing like morning mist.

“But I ask you, Bruseni, you children of opportunity – is today that day?”

No, they screamed. No, they thundered, until it echoed down the pass.

“To doom,” he screamed back, “and glorious death!”

Doom, they screamed back, and glorious death. These loyal fools who had followed him north to seek out the end of days and fight it. It was like a shiver that went through all of them, a fearsome and intoxicating pride. We are here, King of Death , they sang with every swing of the blade as they drove back the dead, we are here, so is this the best you can do?

Frederic closed his eyes, just before the lines collided, and found he could not hear even the slightest echo of the song he’d caught in the wind after Aisne.

—

From that day onwards, it was a dazzling dance of defeats with three men leading the beat: somber Otto and smiling Frederic against the Dead King, the pair never more than a missed turn or step away from utter annihilation. Otto Redcrown grew on him, for the hesitant kindness behind the rough manners and the solemn honour the man refused to surrender even an inch of no matter how dark the days grew- and the days grew dark indeed, for all that the nights were even darker. Yet it was when Volsaga fell and the two of them together hammered an iron farewell into the side of the mountain pass that Otto Reitzenberg ceased being an ally and became a friend instead. He was, Frederic decided, the kind of man it would be a pleasure to die with.

Loss after loss they were driven back to the Morgentor, Morning’s Gate, the last fortress between death and lowlands of the north. The last gate between Keter and the Principate. And when even that last redoubt seemed about to fail, in that last hour the dead withdrew: truce had been forged, a breath before the last plunge. It was a magnificent courtesy that the Black Queen had extended, Frederic mused. When death came, it would be after he’d had time to properly arrange welcome for it: he and Otto ran themselves ragged, preparing for the end of the three months. Preparing themselves, Frederic sometimes thought, to die in the full splendour of their ruinous pride. And so when the truce ended, when the dead came again, Frederic Goethal was ready to perish slightly drunk on fine wine and exquisitely dressed, as was only proper for a prince of the House of Goethal.

They lost the eastern peak first, then the western. Frederic fought in the same red haze he’d always known for the last peak, the last standing stones in the way of the King of Death, and he knew deep down that he was going to die. For he had met the snake, in the heart of Procer, but know he knew at last the true face of the wolf: hunger unceasing, death that would swallow whole the world. This was the last of his story, the death that could not be snatched back, and he found himself at peace with the notion.And yet in that smoky stairway where the dead howled and soldiers died, among the torches and the flashing lights of desperate sorcery, Frederic Goethal caught sight of wings in red and blue.

“One last time, is it?” the Prince of Brus smiled, strangely moved.

His blood burned. Yes, he decided. One last time, in the face of the end of the world. He sent for his horse, for his riders that the Lycaonese had taken to calling the Kingfishers, and up the stairs they rode.

“Doom,” Frederic screamed, chasing the beat of wings, and they screamed it with him.

Through death and fire they charged, a whirlwind of steel and hooves, until the dead broke and Frederic Goethal found himself at the summit of the peak under the morning sun. The kingfisher trilled, but the sun blinded his sight, and when he could see again he found only one of his own banners trailing in the wind. But now, oh now...

The Kingfisher Prince smiled. They won, and so the day after they were alive.

It was a pretty thing and it was not a lie.

—

In Brus there was a story every child knew, about the birth of kingfishers.

Chapter 15: Machinations

“A ruler should always join regicide plots: is the finest possible teacher for a locksmith not a thief?”
– Dread Emperor Traitorous

I poured myself another finger of aragh, since it was quite evidently going to be one of those days.

“A bold claim,” I said, “but I am open to the notion.”

The Hunted Magician would, by my reckoning, have spent Gods only knew how many years pursued by a prince of the fae. Most likely through agents as there would have been... waves if a fae noble of that calibre came into Creation to collect a debt, but the old Courts of Arcadia had come by their reputation of always getting their due honestly. It would have been a constant ordeal of enemies hidden under glamour, pursuit that could not be shaken off by simple distance and terrifying visions both sleeping and waking. The occasional complaints I’d gotten about the man being cryptic, distrustful and generally unpleasant now had an explanation. Living in a world where there might be an enemy hidden behind any smiling face, with forced servitude as the consequence of making even a single mistake, had a way of making people paranoid to the bone.

The thing was that the kind of enemies I was up again did actually warrant that level of caution. The Dead King had been three steps ahead of the rest of the world this entire war, the Intercessor had been out of sight for an unsettling amount of time and that was setting aside the most dangerous enemy of all: simple, petty human nature. The trouble here would not be the paranoia itself but figuring out if the Hunted Magician’s paranoia was the right sort of paranoia.

“Two weeks ago, the Blessed Artificer received news that troubled her a great deal,” the Hunted Magician told me. “I know not what they were, but I do know that some of the other Chosen here began acting oddly around the same time.”

“And how would you know that?” I mildly asked.

“The Bitter Blacksmith was herself unchanged, and did not seem to notice any difference,” the Magician said.

I traced the rim of my cup with a finger.

“You misunderstand me,” I said, and perhaps on purpose , I did not speak out loud. “How do you know that the Blessed Artificer received such news?”

The man did not answer, his face turning into a pleasant mask that was just a little too sloppy to be believed. It didn’t reach the eyes, which to a Praesi would be counted as a beginner’s mistake. He did not trust me, which was fine, but that distrust was getting in the way of my finding answers and that was not acceptable. Using coercion here would only make things worse, I decided. Threats would serve to make me an enemy and that was not the role I wanted to play in this conversation. Another approach would be needed.

“I am observant,” the Hunted Magician replied.

“So you are,” I mused. “You must work closely with the Artificer?”

His eyes narrowed.

“On occasion,” he said.

“This is unrelated to the current conversation,” I elaborated. “I’m told she wishes to lodge a complaint under the Terms about some device being broken, and I would like some understanding of the technicalities involved coming from someone else than the plaintiff.”

A chance to exert influence, which I knew he’d want to take: one did not become the informal speaker for villains in the Arsenal by accident . It was ambition, and ambition was a familiar beast.

“It is not my field of speciality, but I do have some insights,” the Hunted Magician said.

“Do you know what it was meant to accomplish?” I said. “Or at least what it might have been based on?”

“The underlying principles had some similarity to an artefact displayed by the Repentant Magister last year,” the Magician said, “though I am unsure whether or not you’d be familiar with it.”

Underlying principles, huh. No, that could still be shop talk between colleagues.

“Made of the same materials?” I asked, pitching my voice in surprise.

The Proceran mage suppressed a smirk. That’s right , I thought, I’m just some uneducated mudfoot from Callow. Lord your knowledge of me, you know you want to. I’d bet rubies to piglets the man was highborn, and some of that stayed in the marrow even when you left the life behind.

“Light favours different materials than sorcery,” the Hunted Magician told me. “She chose them accordingly.”

“So you saw the device as it was being built,” I said.

The man went still as stone.

“Adjutant,” I mused. “Do remind me – can projects without official sanction be built in the official crafting rooms of the Workshop?”

“They cannot,” Hakram gravelled. “Though it is allowed in one’s private quarters, on their own time.”

A beat passed.

“So,” I smiled, “you’ve been sleeping with the Blessed Artificer.”

“I was simply visiting-”

“I would invite you,” I mildly said, “to consider very carefully whether or not you want to lie to me.”

The Haunted Magician’s mouth closed. Yeah, I’d thought as much.

“I like to operate by a simple rule, when it comes to keeping an eye on my Damned fellows,” I told him amicably. “Don’t make it my problem, and I won’t treat it like one.”

Looming behind me, a tower of muscles and fangs in burnt plate, Hakram stared the man down.

“Are you going to be a problem, Haunted Magician?” Adjutant growled.

“I came to lend aid,” the man protested.

Good, he was off-balance. Time to press.

“So aid me,” I smiled. “Have you been sleeping with the Bitter Blacksmith as well?”

He did not immediately answer, and I had to hide my utter surprise. Godsdamn, that’d been a shot in the dark since he’d specifically named her as well: I’d actually wanted him to deny it so I could twist it into a confirmation he was sleeping with the Artificer. The silence was as good as an admission, though. I cocked my head to the side, studying him carefully.

“I am impressed,” I said, and he smirked, “that you haven’t gotten your head caved in.”

Would you look at that, the smirk was gone. Probably helped that neither of those heroines were fighting Named, I mused, though that hardly made them shyly blushing maidens. Still if he’d tried to pull something like that with, say, the Painted Knife and the Vagrant Spear? There’d be a mistake-shaped corpse propped up in front of me instead of a living man.

“That makes you a useful source of information,” I mused.

That reassured him as it was meant to, though he tried to hide it. If I’d tried to assure him I held no ill intentions towards him he wouldn’t have bought it for a second, but from villain to another an open admission of usefulness was one of the most prized guarantees of safety.

“You said the Artificer was troubled,” I said, “and others began acting oddly. Expand on this.”

“She put an end to our trysts, irregular as they were,” the Hunted Magician admitted. “And I saw her speaking with the Repentant Magister frequently afterwards, when they have never been close.”

Shit, Nephele too? She’d not struck me as the scheming type when we last met, but a flirty acquaintance wasn’t exactly understanding in depth.

“And the oddness?” I asked.

“They’ve several times gone to the general archives, both together and separately,” the Magician said, “and the two times I spied on them it was the old assembly transcripts they were going through. Specifically, those of the monthly sessions.”

What were those for again? Roland had not long ago joked about bringing up my complaint about lack of railings in one, but they couldn’t be just a general venting of complaints. It’d be a waste of time to make the ten Named based at the Arsenal sit through these. Of course, asking would make me look like I’d missed what he was implying. Which I had, but he didn’t need to know that. Cowing people stopped working when they saw you stumble.

“Allocation of personnel and resources, general financing,” Hakram said. “Do you have a notion of what they were trying to piece together?”

Ah, Adjutant to the rescue. So, going scavenging through the records of what and who had been allocated to projects those two had been trying to figure out the nature of one they hadn’t been brought in on. There weren’t many of those, only three. As I recalled the Hunted Magician and the Sinister Physician – who was also one of mine – were working on a ‘plague’ that would affect undead, under the appellation of Late Regret. Roland and the Concocter were working on a brew that’d affect undead like holy water and could feasibly be produced in sufficient quantity to contaminate the northern lakes, called Sudden Abjuration. The last was actually under debate to be opened to all Named, an attempt by Blind Maker and the Repentant Magister to make an artefact that’d prevent the Dead King from actively possessing undead within a certain range.

Only the last of the three was showing promising results, though it was also the one whose success would be hardest to prove: Neshamah was clever enough to pretend it was working to take us by surprise after we’d come to rely on it. The Haunted Magician hesitated, and not because it was Adjutant who’d asked the question. It was well-known to everyone by now that when Hakram spoke it was with my voice.

“I believe,” he finally said, “that they were not interested in what was in the records so much as what was not .”

My face remained calm, because it was not the first time an ugly surprise had been sprung on me today. Hells, it wasn’t even the first time today . I reached for my cup of aragh and sipped. Shit . Was this about Quartered Seasons, then? Hierophant was the only Named on that and we’d kept it very, very quiet. Hasenbach knew the name and that it could yield a potential tool for deicide, but on the Dominion side the only one I’d told was Tariq since Levantine nobles had famously loose lips. I’d wanted the Pilgrim to be able to vouch someone from Levant had been told and picked him in particular because it’d put out any talk of dishonour the moment the Peregrine’s involvement was mentioned. It was even true that the funding and resources for Quartered Seasons wouldn’t be discussed in their little Named councils, since I’d made it clear to Masego that if need be the crown of Callow would fund it entirely on its own.

But there’s only many so people within the Arsenal, and for some parts he would have needed helping hands , I thought. For drudgework and fetching records or even assembling mundane objects. Hells, just the use of limited ritual resources like high quality scrying tools or rare substances were trails that could be followed if you knew where to look – which Nephele would, since she was in on one of the quiet projects. The two heroines had been trying to figure out what had been used by figuring out what hadn’t been allocated in the actual sessions: resources and staff that mysteriously never made it to the discussion, unexplained holes in the budget. Even if they had managed to pull it all together it still wouldn’t be enough to actually know what Masego was trying to accomplish, but it might be enough to allow them to make a few educated guesses. Which as lot more dangerous than them actually knowing, in my opinion.

“Interesting,” I finally said, putting down my cup. “But it’s the killing of the Wicked Enchanter you mentioned when making claim of a plot.”

“There have been rising tensions for weeks,” the Hunted Magician said. “Incidents occur more and more frequently, and become graver – and then, in a fortress the size of the Arsenal, the Red Axe and the Wicked Enchanted simply happen to meet. Someone filled the cup, Black Queen, and then arranged for the drop that would make it run over.”

And the thing was, that made perfect sense to me. But then I was speaking to a man for who paranoia had been the path to survival for years and coming back from fighting on a front against the Hidden Horror for two straight years. I was inclined to believe him because I’d grown used to death hiding in every shadow, which meant my judgement was not unbiased . And if I tighten my grip too strongly around honest mistakes by heroes , I thought, I might just cause the incident I am trying to avoid. There were more than twenty Named in the Arsenal, if I – a villain, however respected I was in some quarters – acted like I was trying to cover up something then someone was going to do something stupid. And when the first stone in the avalanche came down, it’d be beyond my power to turn the tide back.

“That is speculation, not proof of anything,” I said.

The man’s face fell into a mask again, this time tying to hide his anger.

“But I mislike the shape and timing of this,” I conceded. “You were right to bring this to my attention. I’ll take the situation in hand personally.”

Anger was gone, a mix of relief and wariness in him instead. He must have been halfway decent at this at some point, I thought, since the reflexes were there. He was badly out of practice, though, and he’d learned some self-defeating habits since. Another detail adding an entry to the ‘highborn who fled from the consequences of his actions’ tally I was mentally keeping.

“Then I can only thank you for granting me this audience, Black Queen,” the Hunted Magician said, bowing in his seat.

I didn’t invite him to stay and share a drink, though it would have been good politics, as my mind was already considering what needed to be done and I was reluctant to let the pot keep boiling while I played courtesy games. Instead I rose to escort him out, then closed the door behind him and leaned against the wooden frame. Hakram poured himself a finger aragh in the cup the Magician had not used, then sat down on the edge of the sofa to sip at it.

“Two Named, if not more, were led to start digging around one of our most dangerous secrets,” I said. “Another two Named, between who conflict is good as certain, happened to run into each other here. And now the Mirror Knight was sent here to prevent a ‘murder’, when even with the fluidity of time in the Ways it’s near certain he was warned about the circumstances before they took place.”

I grit my teeth.

“Once is accident, twice is coincidence,” I began-

“Thrice is enemy action,” Hakram finished.

Except that, when it came to Named, coincidences were nothing of the sort. Which meant my enemy had drawn first blood and then struck again before I even realized I was in a fight, so I was in dire need of catching up. I limped back to low table and took my drink in hand, tossing the rest of it back in a single swallow.

“You have a plan,” Adjutant said.

“I have a step,” I corrected. “What I need is someone with utter disregard for other people’s privacy, an inveterate hunger for juicy gossip and a pathological need to screw with everyone until it’s clear what makes them tick.”

“Wouldn’t it have been simpler,” Hakram asked, “just to say Archer?”

—

I’d meant for Indrani to come to us but apparently she was currently eating, not all that inclined to move and the attendant we’d sent to fetch her was afraid of her. Which, in all honesty, was probably smart of him. So instead I limped my way down to the meal hall with Hakram at my side, the two of us and our guide passing through corridors ghostly empty. The Alcazar, the part of the Arsenal meant to host important guests, was apparently connected to quite a few other sections by private halls not meant to be used by anyone else. It made sense, I supposed. If Cordelia Hasenbach needed to use the Mirage, she wouldn’t want half the scholars in this place to watch her every time she headed there. I learned from our chatty guide that Archer had ignored her own guest rooms in the Alcazar to bunk elsewhere – Masego’s quarters in the Belfry, at a guess – and that she’d never bothered to use the private eatery in there. She was eating the same commissary fare as everyone else, which I found odd given her appreciation for luxury.

It all made a great deal more sense when we entered a hall that could have seated four hundred and I saw she was the only person in it, sprawled lazily on a bench as she dipped pieces of bread in melted cheese and popped them into her mouth. Indrani did not need decadence to be brought to her, she brought decadence wherever she was.

“Did you make the kitchens cook this for you alone?” I called out. “I’d call it abuse of power, but honestly by your standards this is almost reasonable.”

Practically inhaling another dipped piece of bread, Indrani swung around and rose to her feet in a single fluid gesture. It would have been a lot more impressive if she didn’t have a string of melted cheese hanging off the corner of her mouth.

“Your Queenly Majesticness,” Archer solemnly bowed, smothering a grin, “your most humble servant hath returned. I now pray most faithfully that Your Great Regality will smile on-”

With great pleasure, I stopped leaning on my staff just long enough to smack her on the crown of the head – or would have, if she’d not twisted around and caught the yew before pulling. Before I could so much as insult her I was made to stumble, caught by the waist and led into a dip before she kissed me. If I put a hand behind her neck it was purely to hang on, not because I was trying to lean into it and feel a little more of her. She withdrew with a smug grin, leaving my lips pleasantly bruised.

“You smell like cheese,” I told her.

“You sound a little breathless,” she replied, the smugness deepening.

“From trying not to breathe it in,” I scorned, then parted from her with a step to the side.

“That aragh I got from you?” she asked, sounding interested.

I leaned forward and stole a piece of bread from her plate, dipping it and deftly popping it into my mouth. Huh, that really was quite good. Adjutant cleared his throat, reminding Archer that he was also there. The attendant had retired during my passing moment of distraction, though the more honest word for it might have been fled .

“I’m happy to see you too, big guy,” Indrani warmly said, clasping his arm. “But you’ve got too much teeth for a dip of your own, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”

“You’ve got too little to warrant a hint,” Hakram replied without missing a beat. “But it’s good to see you too, ‘Drani.”

Even as I laughed at the casual verbal backhand she’d received with a stunned oof , the tall orc picked her up in a hug as easily as if she were bag of turnips. She shrieked in laughter, her ‘surprised struggling’ somehow ending up with him being smacked on the side of the face quite a lot. She was put down on the long table little bird and tried to bat away my continuing pillaging of her meal – there was some Arlesite sausage there, the good stuff with the spices from the Free Cities, so I’d gleefully helped myself – only to be ignored by right of queenly prerogative.

“Did you come all the way here just to eat my food?” she complained.

“Callow pays for part of the food budget,” I said, chewing on a mouthful, “so in a sense it was really always my food.”

“It’s sad how power will go to the head of even the most sensible of women,” Archer sighed. “And you too, I guess, but-”

I threw a stripe of mustarded venison at her, though as expected she caught it. I’d been hungrier than I’d thought, I mused as I stole a stripe for myself. There was a sweet taste to the sauce as well that was delicious, and I let out a little noise of pleasure. In a sense the way I’d been when I’d still been Sovereign of Moonless Nights, requiring neither sleep nor food, had been better. It’d certainly been more efficient. But I still remembered the nights where it had all been like ashes in my mouth, when nothing but the hardest of liquors had tasted of anything at all, and I could only count my blessings that I was now rid of those times.

“Is no one going to offer me anything?” Hakam drily asked.

We ignored him, since it wasn’t that large a plate.

“We have something of a problem,” I told Indrani.

She nodded.

“I brought the killer in from the cold and didn’t keep close enough a watch on her, that’s on me,” Archer frankly said. “Mind you, the man had it coming if even half the stories I heard are true.”

The Wicked Enchanter had been, from what I beginning to grasp, broadly disliked and held in disgust. It shouldn’t be difficult to find out exactly why, though likely unpleasant, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. He’d been a villain even other villains were lukewarm about, one the heroes would be able to hold up as the kind of monster deserving the headman’s block instead of the protection of the Truce. That was a problem, since it meant this wasn’t just a thorny little mess to arbitrate: it was a knife someone had aimed at the Truce and the Terms themselves.

If the Red Axe was killed over this, I suspected the heroes would riot. If the Red Axe wasn’t killed over this, I knew sure as I knew my own breath that the villains would riot. And on top of that, just adding more more disastrous insult to the injury one of the heroes I’d find it most difficult to beat into humility without killing him, the Mirror Knight, had just blown in with supporters and no warning to meddle. If it even looked like I was lenient on the Red Axe, the perception among the villains I spoke for would be that I’d been leaned on by one of the luminaries of the other side and given ground.

I’d look weak and Below’s champions did not follow weakness, much less obey it.

“We’re in a fight, ‘Drani,” I murmured. “And it’s starting to look like we showed up to it already bleeding. I’m going to need you.”

Archer’s hazelnut eyes turned serious as she leaned forward.

“You have me,” she said. “Are the heroes taking a swing?”

“I don’t know yet,” I grimly replied. “But we’re in a story, Archer, make no mistake. And it’s one meant to cut us deep.”

And it might just be my imagination , I thought, the habit of seeing a grinning skull in every dark corner... but I can almost the smell the cheap booze in the air , hear the mocking tune from the badly strung lute. I took the pretty silver knife on the side of Archer’s plate, idly flipping it through my knuckles as I stepped back from the table.

“There are now,” I said, “twenty-three Named within these walls.”

That we knew of. Certainty was a necessity for Named, if you wanted to ever be more than a middling swordhand in the middle of nowhere, but this early and when the game afoot was still shrouded it would be a mistake to believe we knew everything about the board there was to be known.

“The Arsenal usually counts five heroes, three villains and two Named of unclear allegiance,” Hakram said.

I took to tapping the flat of the silver blade against the side of my fist, thoughtful.

“The Concocter’s one of ours,” Archer said. “She keeps it quiet but the things that end up in her cauldrons aren’t always the sort the Heavens would approve of, if you catch my drift.”

Charming. Five to four, then, and with the Doddering Sage being the only uncertain – though more because his bouts of lucidity were rare than because of any reluctance to pick a side, as I understood it. That was still ten Named who stayed in the Arsenal on a more or less permanent basis, and most of them would have ways to communicate with the outside world beyond those the Grand Alliance had made available to them.

“You’ve got four,” I said, eyes turning to Archer.

“Half and half,” she cheerfully said.

And she’d brought in the Red Axe as well, who was now being held in a cell. Then another five Named after that: the Mirror Knight and his close friend the Blade of Mercy, the seemingly cautious Exalted Poet and the ambiguous Maddened Keeper, and last of all the gallant but decidedly dangerous Kingfisher Prince. Throwing in Adjutant and more generously my own nascent Name brought us at twenty-three. Twelve heroes, nine villains and two whose nature was not so clear-cut. Enough that the villains would feel outnumbered, and dangerously so since one of them had just been killed. Yet the heroes would feel pressured as well, given the quality of the opposition: four of the Woe were here, and our reputation was a weighty thing. The two poor bastards in between would be seen as potentially decisive in any clash, and so worth forcing the allegiance of – either to get rid of liabilities before blades came out or to secure a nasty surprise to spring on the opposition when they did.

It was a murderous brew someone was pressing to the lips of the entire Truce and Terms, and all it’d take was for one fool to be scared enough to drink.

“The Arsenal regulars are the thread that should be quickest to unwind,” Adjutant said. “Someone set the Repentant Magister and the Blessed Artificer after a secret – it may truly be Quartered Seasons, it may be something else. But they were contacted, and that is a concrete thing.”

There were five under Above in these Arsenal ‘regulars’: Roland, the Blind Maker, the Repentant Magister, the Blessed Artificer and the Bitter Blacksmith. The Hunted Magician had implied that his ‘close study’ of the Blacksmith had revealed no change in mood around the time the Magister and the Artificer began digging, so she was not a likely suspect. I closed my eyes to think.

“So we find them in their rooms and make them spit out a name,” Indrani mused.

“As it happens, the Blessed Artificer has already requested an audience to lodge a complaint under the Terms,” Adjutant gravelled, pleased.

Something about that had me begin tapping the side of the blade against my knuckles, the coolness of the silver against my skin grounding me.

“It’s bullshit,” Indrani flatly said. “She was pushing Zeze, not the other way around. I don’t think she meant to actually blind him – she looked surprised by how harsh his reaction was – but she was definitely trying something.”

“What he means is that we should now consider ourselves watched at all times,” I said without opening my eyes, “and that an audience she requested is a reason to meet in private with her not even the heroes can grumble about.”

As it happens , Hakram had said. That was what had raised my hackles. It’d happened and it’d happened in a fight where coincidence was nothing more the flimsiest of the lies at play. A story had been offered up to us: Adjutant, Archer and the Black Queen met with the Blessed Artificer. It was the only the first step, though, the air of the tune. Through guile and reason those three would reveal the machinations hidden in the shadows of the Arsenal, to prevent madness from seizing the halls and keep the peace. It was a pretty story, true, and for more than a few Named it’d be a serviceable horse to ride. For us , though? I was a warlord, a killer and maker of pacts. Adjutant was my right hand and guardian, Archer was my blade and my eyes. It was a good horse but one for which we’d make poor riders, which made it a shit horse in every way that mattered. After all, no matter how good the horse if an ass was riding it’d still lose the race. We’d been offered that hook so we might bite it and be reeled in to our defeat.

Another angle was required here. The villains? There were four among them that were Arsenal regulars: Masego, the Hunted Magician, the Sinister Physician and, if Indrani was correct, the Concocter. I was inclined to believe her, given that they’d known each other back in Refuge when they’d been pupils of the Lady of the Lake. But no, it was still the same story from a different angle. We’d shake the tree until truths came tumbling out, and they would. I was not so naïve as to assume that if some plot was afoot there would not be at least one of mine involved. The Hunted Magician himself was not exempt from the suspicion for having brought this to me in the first place, for though I doubted he had the skill or know-how to hook me onto a losing story that did not mean he was not the tool of someone who was . Trouble was, we only had so much to go on here and following any of those threads would take us back to the end I was trying to avoid it.

“It’s a shit horse,” I muttered. “But it’s the only one we’ve got, isn’t it?”

Ah, but that was my mistake. I was trying to win according to the rules when I should be trying to win despite them. If you were forced to run a race you could only lose, then the only way to win was to cheat . I opened my eyes and found both Hakram and Indrani were watching me in silence. Waiting, knowing from experience that if I’d emerged from inside my head it was with an idea.

“This is a story,” I repeated, and smiled.

I twirled the knife across my knuckles, enjoying the blur of silver and movement that danced according to my will.

“And we might not know how it goes, not exactly, but we know the shape of it,” I mused.

We three curious souls would learn things from our first step that only caused more questions, struggle and search and perhaps even tangle with a mysterious or misguided opponent. It’d go downhill from there, though, but when it all seemed like it was going to fall apart we’d get a moment of revelation from an unlikely source that flipped it all upside down and allowed us to turn it around at the last moment. We wouldn’t, of course, because we were not the heroes of his story. I was likely to be executing the Red Axe before long, so it’d be like a chicken trying to fly in a sparrow’s tracks if I tried to act like I had the right to that sort of providence.

“The thing about providence, though, is that once you understand how it works you can predict it,” I told them with a smile. “It can’t do something out of nothing, and it uses the most appropriate tool for the job.”

And of the ten Arsenal regulars, who was it that was the best fit for a revelation at the edge of disaster? I caught the knife and flicked it down, smiling when it bit into the table with a satisfyingly sharp thunk .

“We’re going to speak to the Doddering Sage,” I said. “To see if going backwards from the revelation allows us to quicken the pace.”

Disaster was on the horizon, I thought, I was in over my head and even the trusted companions at my side might not be enough to get us through this unscathed. And still, as I hummed the first few notes to the old rebel song The Fox In the Woods , I found myself smiling.

Gods, but it was good to be home.

Chapter 16: Divine

“Biting the hand that feeds you is another way to feed.”
– Dread Emperor Vindictive II

There were seventeen different repositories of books in the Arsenal.

It was a frankly absurd amount and that number didn’t even account the private collections some scholars, priests, mages and sundry Named had brought with them. The amount of knowledge held within these walls could be staggering to think about. There were a few places on Calernia where there might be greater collections, like the Tower in Ater or the House of Ink and Parchment in Delos, but those were fewer than five and even those would not draw from so many places and scholarly traditions as the Arsenal had. Several of the libraries were restricted to individuals assigned to official Grand Alliance projects and some held knowledge dangerous enough only a handful of people would ever be allowed to enter them, but we were not headed into the depths of this maze of a hidden fortress: the miscellaneous stacks were, in fact, a repository even guards had access to.

“People around here call them the Stacks of This and That,” Archer told me.

She’d fallen into to my right and Adjutant to my left as the three of us abandoned the eating hall and headed towards where the Doddering Sage was most likely to be at this hour.

“So it’s the dumping grounds for everything that doesn’t fit into another repository,” I said.

And wasn’t either potentially useful or dangerous, I didn’t add. Those books our people were most careful about leaving lying around.

“Might have started out this way, but it’s a different beast now,” Archer said. “It’s one of the largest rooms in the Arsenal and it’s filled with little alcoves. Now there’s half a hundred little secret nooks where people can sit with a cup of something, hide for a secret talk or a fuck or even just a quiet nap.”

“Wouldn’t the custodians put an end to that?” I said, eyebrow cocked.

While I found it oddly charming that even in a place as alien as the Arsenal people were finding ways to claw back a piece of normality from the world, at the end of the day the stacks had an actual purpose.

“I expect there aren’t enough of them to make a proper attempt,” Adjutant said. “There’s been two written requests to increase the people assigned to these stacks, since they frequently get their people temporarily poached for other work.”

I’d probably seen one of those requests and simply put it out of my mind within moments of reading it, I silently admitted to myself. Throwing more coin and people at something like the miscellaneous stacks wouldn’t have even warranted a second look when there were only so many of either those to go around and so many more important matters requiring them.

“It doesn’t seem to be causing trouble,” I finally said.

I was willing to let sleeping dogs lie, if the only consequence of letting this go on was the existence a few discreet places for people to wind down. Gods knew even Hasenbach’s financial wizardry had its limits, and I wasn’t going to be sending more coin this way if I could avoid it. The Arsenal cost near as much as one of the war fronts to maintain, which was a damned burden on the treasury even if it was a necessary one. The three of us kept a brisk pace as we passed through the central nest of winding hallways that was the Knot, the occasional pack of scholars in coloured robes falling silent as we passed by. A few recognized Indrani and greeted her, either through actual greetings or hastily taking a turn leading away from her, but to my amusement Hakram drew the eye more than I. I wasn’t wearing the Mantle of Woe and my face was not well-known here, while he was a towering orc in attention-catching blackened plate.

We headed down through a set of broad stairs towards the part of the Arsenal known as the Stump. Named for its stout build, low ceilings and the fact that it was where the leftovers of more important places ended up, it reminded me of the old Proceran keeps sometimes found up north. Except the stone here was new and utterly bare, like it’d been conjured up out of thin air, and there was a... scent in the air. Almost like metal, but not quite. It was everywhere in the Arsenal, I thought, but stronger here than anywhere else. It smelled of work done through sorcery, and the taste of it had seeped into every breath I took. We took a right on a crossroads where the other path would have, as the carving on the wall indicated, led us to the Repository.

“You’ve met the Doddering Sage before,” I said, breaking the silence.

I glanced at Archer and found the trace of a frown on her brow.

“Met is a strong word,” Indrani shrugged. “It wasn’t one of his good days.”

“He grows... confused, as I understand it,” I said.

“He’s an interesting fellow,” she replied, “but his conversation loops back around after a bit. He does not realize. Sharp, though, when he’s there. Or so Zeze says, anyway. He must have been quite something in his prime.”

Or he was a skilled liar and thought it in his interest for others to believe him as past said prime, I thought. Though Indrani could be frightfully perceptive at times, she was not flawless in her judgements. None of us were.

“Anything I should worry of?” I asked.

She considered that for a moment.

“I can’t place his accent,” Indrani said. “More like he doesn’t have one, and he speaks at least four languages.”

Maybe not Proceran, then. Most Named tended to be polyglots, but in that regard both heroes and villains from the Principate tended to be lacking. It wasn’t a reflection of any inherent inferiority but rather of the fact that most of them tended to be regional and might genuinely never meet someone who didn’t speak their native tongue throughout their entire life. Then again the old man was a sage, even if a doddering one, and that implied a certain knack for the scholarly. Something to keep in mind, anyway. A walk down a stunted little corridor brought us to broad open doors, and a carving in the wall spelling out Miscellaneous Works Repository in three languages: Chantant, Lower Miezan and Ceseo. There was a bureau buried under an avalanche of books just pas the doors, and a harried-looking young man behind it who was frowning at an open volume by magelight. Someone had written department of this and that in chalk on the side, as well as the even cheekier ring if you need a custodian, we would like one as well I noted with a suppressed smile. We entered and as Archer took the initiative to go speak to the young man I took a moment to study our surroundings.

After the description of this being dumping grounds for every other library, I’d expected some sort of rampant chaos with but it wasn’t anything like that. The magelight globes hanging from the low ceiling shone instead down on cramped but neat paths of shelves filled to the brim with books of all shapes and sizes, Chalk slates haphazardly distributing revealing some arcane library reference symbols and broad themes to swaths of the collection to which I saw no rhyme not reason: history of fish, probably untrue sat side by side with Arlesite romance and both were across an entire stack filled with travel journal, but metaphorical . There was not a single lit flame within here, but magelights in glass globes had been tied to tongs of leather in a way that made it so they could both be worn and used as a handheld lantern. The impressive part, though, was the size of this place.

It was larger than the throne room in Laure, at the very least, and every spare inch seemed to be used by either stacks or wagon-sized wicker baskets filled with books not yet classed . I could hide an entire company of legionaries in here , I thought, and not a soul would notice until the goblins got bored. While I’d been lost in my contemplations, Archer had apparently gotten what she needed from the young man at the bureau – who was now, I noticed, staring at me with fear and awe while trying very hard to pretend he’d gone back to reading his book. I winked at him, then turned to Indrani.

“So?” I asked.

“He’s in there,” Archer said. “Though Gods only know where. Last sighting was apparently near the ‘fluorescent, neither flora nor fauna’ stacks.”

“Stacks,” I repeated. “As in, we have multiple of those?”

“It’s important to look on the bright side of life, Catherine,” Indrani grinned at me, then winked. “You know, ‘cause fluorescent means-”

“You are the worst person I know,” I informed her in disgust.

Ugh, puns. At least when the sappers made one of those, something usually exploded not long after. That was as close as redeeming such atrocity against the laws of Gods and men could be had. It was a true shame the Sisters weren’t willing to allow that in the holy book, but I’d just have to keep suggesting it. Maybe some sort of appendix, I mused.

“But I don’t expect we’ll have too hard a time finding him,” I continued, “will we, Adjutant?”

“That’s about as clever as her pun,” Hakram told me. “You just didn’t wink afterwards, so it was less glaringly terrible.”

We both ignored Indrani’s outraged noises.

“Everybody’s a fucking critic these days,” I muttered. “ Fine . My lord Adjutant, kindly use your aspect to search for the Doddering Sage until we have obtained his presence .”

“Well, since you asked so nicely,” Adjutant gravelled, sounding amused.

I found I was swallowing a grin. Gods, how was it that I’d missed those assholes so much? Without any more need for verbally jostling, Adjutant called on one of three crystallized manifestations of his Name. Find was Adjutant’s most subtle aspect, and in truth one of the most nuanced I’d ever heard of: much like with Hakram himself, the apparent simplicity hid remarkable depth. While it could be used to significantly accelerate searched for anything material, whether living or not, it had more abstract uses as well. They tied into the way the aspect itself functioned, in my opinion. For example, after we hit the first crossroads Hakram closed his eyes and called on his aspect again before taking a swift left. This was not the act of finding information from a book where we knew it was or picking out a woman from a crowd: he was, in effect, going on nothing. And still he’d get us to the Doddering Sage, I had no worry whatsoever about that.

Masego had theorized – and Akua seemed to think it a reasonable inference – that what Adjutant was doing was a phenomenon known among diabolists as tapering . It was apparently common among the most intelligent of devils, when they grew ancient enough. It was an inherently inhuman degree of perception born from the fact that such devils could notice and remember ever detail in a way that humans could not and call on a sheer amount of experience physically unattainable by mortals. It allowed those creatures to adapt to wildly different surroundings, people and situations with seeming flawlessness by taking in everything around them and then refining the possibilities to what was the most likely truth. Tapering the noise until all that was left was the true tune. It was why an incubus could take over a Praesi seraglio just as easily as it could break apart a Stygian line-match.

The devil had a degree of perception that could not be matched by humans, and it was helped along by decades if not centuries of learning about the ins and outs of human nature. It was the opinion of those two that Hakram’s aspect essentially allowed him to tap into a similar state for a small amount of time.

Vivienne, on the other hand, had noted she’d seen similar behaviour from the Bumbling Conjurer: providence’s golden son, whose every debacle turned out to be a masterstroke until he ran into a villain so far beyond him providence was buried along with him. I was actually inclined to side with her on this. To my eye, Find looked a lot like discount providence put together for one of Below’s: luck put together from the possible, but only ever a story’s sort of luck. It could get us closer to what we needed, or what was already within our grasp, but it was not a panacea for all our ills and relying on it for answers was putting our lives into the hands of fickle, fickle luck. Regardless of who had the truth of it, though, in practice Adjutant guided us through twists and turns until we were deep within the maze.

Twice we passed hidden nooks, one occupied by a snoring priest on an armchair and the other by an impressive collection of bottles from I confiscated what looked liked genuine Harrow brandy in the name of the throne of Callow, until Hakram’s steps slowed. I cocked my head to the side, taking a whiff of the air. Was that what I thought it was? Huh. I took the lead in turning the corner, stumbling onto my first sight of the Doddering Sage. The old man looked haggard, I thought, taking in the rumpled grey robes and ratty cloth shies, but somehow there was a sense of power to it. A mane of shoulder-length grey hair mixed with would have been a long and luxurious beard, were it not unkempt. The Doddering Sage licked wet red lips and narrowed his amber brown eyes as he caught sight of me in turn, leaning back into a ratty brown armchair. In his hands was the source of the smell I’d caught: a polished little wooden pipe filled with freshly-lit wakeleaf.

“It’s not for you, Constance,” the Doddering Sage told me. “You’re much too young, and this is a fool’s vice besides.”

“ Shit ,” Archer muttered. “Not a good day.”

I stepped forward, ignoring the comment, and came to lean against the stacks at his side.

“Tell me about it,” I sighed, reached for the pipe I carried in my tunic. “I get headaches if I don’t smoke at least once, nowadays.”

The Doddering Sage watched me produce a small packet of my own wakeleaf – Hanno’s gift, still with me – and stuff my own pipe before passing a palm over it to light it with a touch of black flame.

“Dragonbone,” the old man said, eyes narrowing further. “Expensive. Rare. Dangerous . You are not Constance.”

I breathed in, swallowing the smoke and spat it back out.

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m the Black Queen, and you have answers for me.”

“Do I?” the Doddering Sage said. “How good of me.”

He brusquely snorted, then pulled at his own pipe. I could only watch in envy as he blew a smoke ring, then further showed off by blowing a smaller ring into it.

“Damn, but that is impressive,” I admitted.

“I have a few years of practice on you, Foundling Queen,” the old man smiled, face wreathed in the lasts wisps of his smoke. “You come to me for my eyes, I take it.”

“Do I?” I asked.

When completely out of my depth, I was in no way above smiling meaningfully and saying something mildly cryptic. A truly ridiculous amount of people were almost eager to fall for that.

“That boy of yours, the one with the deadly earnestness, he’ll be a terror one day,” the Sage said, “but he’s a few years short still. That’s why an old sack of bones like me are brought in even when there are all these swaggering youths. I can look, yes I can. But you’ll not hurt Constance, will you? Promise me.”

His lip trembled in sudden emotion, and something in me clenched. He looked fragile, in that moment, though the truth of his fragility was hidden from him. Pity welled up, but I pushed it down. You could be playing me , I thought. And so I’ll offer kindness where I can, but never without keeping a knife in hand.

“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”

“Good,” he muttered. “Good. You do remind me of him, you know. Robert. He was kind, but he was not soft .”

I said nothing, for there was nothing to say.

“ Perceive ,” the Doddering Sage said, and Creation shivered.

I watched him, and saw his eyes had turned pure white – he looked blind, but only a fool would have made that mistake. I felt something skittering across my soul, like a spider against glass, and the old man exhaled.

“Twinned,” he said. “Incipient. You make your own Role, and the Name walks hand in hand with another. I cannot see them, there is... refusal.”

I shivered, fingers clenching around my pipe, and did not believe this for a moment to be the mad ramblings of an old man. Not when my very soul was shivering along with the rest of me, lost and reaching. The Doddering Sage turned towards me abruptly, so quick I thought his head might snap.

“More?” he said, sounding surprised. “You... how ? It isn’t yours, where did you take it?”

“What?” I said, leaning forward. “What did I take?”

“A rival?” he muttered. “A thief? A successor ? You keep stories within you that neither your ear nor eye ever knew. Shapes and beats and the sound of the knife kissing flesh.”

My pipe tumbled across the floor, though I did not remember dropping it – or catching the Sage’s robes, fists tightening around them as I pulled him closer.

“Focus,” I ordered, voice ringing with power. “The stories, where do they come from?”

My hand was shaking, and the answer was on the tip of my tongue. I knew this, I’d had it since/

/and my eyes were blinking. I pushed down the surge of rage that seize hold of me at the way I just couldn’t seem to remember what I wanted. I would be mistress of my own mind, even if I had to rip out the parts that misbehaved.

“Sage,” I said, “ tell me .”

“Reflection,” he whispered, sounding awed. “No, an echo. You stole from her echo, and now it’s in your head. How did you not break?”

I released his robes, stumbling back. Oh. Oh . And at last I remembered, what it was that Masego and I had done in the depths of Arcadia, when we’d harvested the echoes left behind by things that would become gods. He’d learned dark secrets from that, deep magics. And I had/ no you fucking don’t, it’s my mind and I there is only one ruler here. I wrenched the world back from the blankness, wrestled it back into submission. I was kneeling, gasping, and Adjutant’s worried hand was on my shoulder. But it didn’t matter, even as I convulsed and threw up at the feet of the Doddering Sage.

“Cat,” Hakram quietly asked, “can you hear me?”

“Yes,” I laughed. “Yes, I can hear you. And I remember now, what it is I got from the Intercessor.”

The shape of a thousand stories, the tune of the song if not the words. An instinct, one that’d sharpened something already existing into a blade capable of upending old monsters and empires. I wiped my mouth and an apology to the Sage was halfway to my lips when I realized his eyes were closed and he was, seemingly, sleeping. Unearthing what had been waiting in the back of my head had knocked him out, looked like. I rose to my feet, slowly, and allowed Hakram to tuck my cleaned pipe back into my tunic as I leaned against his arm.

“Catherine,” Indrani quietly said, “what the Hells was that?”

“I forced myself to remember something my mind didn’t know how to cope with,” I said. “But it was worth it. I know what’s in the back of my head, and now that I know it can’t be used against me.”

The Augur had told us that the Bard saw in stories, saw all the stories, and that when dealing with Named she was nigh untouchable. But she could be beaten, because the more we knew of her the less power she held over us. And one of these days I would find a set of shackles even her smug immortal ass couldn’t slither her way out of. The first step to that was realizing I’d stolen part of her and made it my own: that was on less surprise for her to pull on me when the time came. With surprising gentleness, Indrani reached out and took my face in hand. She withdrew after touching under my nose, fingers coming away flecked with blood.

“Don’t think too hard, Cat,” she said, sounding worried. “You’re not made of Winter anymore: some things you won’t get back up from.”

“The more I bleed now,” I replied, “the less I’ll bleed when the knives really come out.”

Still, I winced as I wiped away the blood beneath my nostrils. I had the most horrible headache. A glance at the Doddering Sage told me he was still out, so there’d be no more to learn here.

“Find out who the Constance he was talking about is,” I quietly told Hakram. “If she’s still alive, see to it she doesn’t want for anything. If she’s not, see to her descendants.”

I owed the man, for this, and I’d pay my debt in full. He’d have a warm place to stay in after the war, be it in Callow or at Cardinal. That much I could repay, for what I’d learned today and what it had cost him to tell me.

“I’ll see to it,” Adjutant promised.

“I hate to be that girl,” Archer said, “but we’re in the shit now, aren’t we? You said we were here for a revelation, but there wasn’t anything about this that helps us figure out what’s going on here.”

I pushed off of Hakram and took my staff from the stacks where I’d left it propped up against, rolling my shoulder to loosen it. She wasn’t wrong about that, though she wasn’t exactly right either. I found the bottle of Harrow brandy I’d liberated from oppression earlier pressed into my hand, uncorked, and Indrani gave me a steady look.

“Your breath still smells like, you know,” she told me, not unkindly.

Ah. That. Fair enough. I took a long swallow from the bottle, then another until the taste of vomit was quite gone and a pleasant warmth was beginning to settle into by belly.

“Good stuff,” I muttered, passing it back. “Right, so us being the shit. True enough, ‘Drani, but the actually told us exactly what we needed to know before we dipped into my little... gift.”

“He told us things about your Name,” Archer skeptically said. “Which I’ve been curious about, true, but it doesn’t get us out of this mess.”

“Sure it does,” I said, “if you consider that, should we have followed the story as it was offered to us, we’d be learning this quite late. This is our revelation, Archer. We can go back from it.”

Hakram cleared his throat.

“You’re doing that thing again,” he told me, “where you talk to yourself in your head and then expect us to keep up.”

“You usually do, though,” I muttered. “Fine, hear me out then. The three of us are bold investigators for truth and justice-”

“Hungering Gods,” Hakram swore under his breath.

“ Yes ,” Indrani jeered, “and let them kneel before us, begging abjectly for mercy we will always deny!”

“I’m not going to touch that,” I decided, “so, by going down that road we bite into a story. One that got set out for us to bite because we’re a bad fit for it, so we’ll fail.”

“And we are a bad fit for it, because?” Hakram asked.

“Indrani,” I said, “how many people have you killed this year?”

The ochre-skinned Named hummed.

“Define people,” she finally asked.

“Because that,” I told him.

“So we are avoiding this story,” Adjutant said.

“No,” I said, “if I had something else to slap down instead I might, mind you, but I’ve got nothing. But that doesn’t mean we can’t cheat. The thing is, Hakram, that is a functional story. If we were a band of heroes, we could ride it to the finish.”

“Now you’re just making it too easy,” Indrani reproached.

“For the trap to work,” Adjutant slowly said, “the story has to be... functional for lack of a better term. It is simply us who would not function with it.”

“Yeah,” I said, “which is why we went directly for the Doddering Sage. He was my guess for the guy who, when it looks like we’re about to lose for good, reveals a truth to us and allows us to turn it all around.”

“As heroes are wont to,” the orc nodded.

“Hate to break it to you, Cat, but he didn’t say shit about conspiracies,” Archer pointed out.

“Yes,” I agreed. “He talked, instead, about my Name. Which means someone’s trying to fuck with my Name, or maybe the one ‘twinned’ to it.”

A poetic way to talk about a nemesis, but it fit. For every villain with Destroy, there was a hero with Protect. That was the way the Game of the Gods was played, and I’d be no exception. I cleared my throat.

“Without sounding arrogant-”

“That’d be a first,” Indrani mused.

I flipped her off.

“- at least part of this is meant as a swing at me as well as a broader attack on the Truce and Terms,” I said. “And that rather narrows down who it is we might be fighting against.”

“If you cannot name the swordsman, name the sword,” Archer snorted. “Fair. Only so many people who’d come swinging at you this way. So we’re in a scrap with the Wandering Bard, are we?”

“She’s come out of the woodworks at last,” I grunted in agreement. “And she took her sweet time before she did, ‘Drani, so this isn’t going to be some sloppy half-baked attempt. She’s come for blood, and at the moment she’s winning .”

“The Truce and the Terms are holding,” Adjutant said. “And you have learned valuable information.”

Yeah, I had. Which I would have taken for a victory, if I’d not just learned that part of the instincts that’d driven me to this decision had been ripped out of the old monster I was now facing. Which meant I was about to get taken for a ride, because she’d known about that and until now I hadn’t.

“The Sage is unconscious,” Archer suddenly said.

“But obviously alive, and not a hero besides,” Hakram said. “If stirring conflict is the purpose, that is a weak hand.”

“Shut up,” I said, “both of you. Use your Name.”

I called on Night instead, sharpening my senses to the very limit of what I could bear, and that was when I heard it: hissing sounds. Like a gas being released. At least ten, probably more.

“There is something in the air,” Adjutant growled.

“And I don’t hear anyone out there moving,” Archer said.

Was everyone else out there dead? It might simply be a curse or a deep sleep instead, I mused, though death would likely be easier to arrange. I could not afford to take a moment and ponder how many innocents had likely just been snuffed out as part of a scheme, not when there were more lives on the line, so I tucked that away cleanly.

“The Concocter would be capable of making a brew that can do this,” I said.

“I’ve known her to work with gases, sometimes,” Indrani hesitantly agreed. “But she wouldn’t, Cat.”

“It doesn’t need to be her plan,” I murmured, “just her work. It being used will be quite enough, when heroes stumble into this.”

Because that’d be the logical move, wouldn’t it? If someone was trying to start a fight between Named in the Arsenal, what better way to have a pack of heroes stumble unto me and two of the Woe surrounded by corpses and an unconscious Named. Hells, it was going to be the Mirror Knight and his band wasn’t it? That was the reason that little fucker was here at all: so that the Intercessor would have someone capable of rallying the heroic side of the Arsenal but having no interest in talking this out with me instead of drawing a sword. Any moment now he and the worst possible combination of Named the Bard could muster were going to come in, and I needed to think how I could wiggle out of this mess. The moment the Mirror Knight and the Black Queen came face to face, I decided, this was no longer recoverable. It’d become a conflict between the two of us, and people would have to take sides: even if I won and showed restraint, there was a decent chance the Truce and Terms would collapse in the aftermath of this debacle.

I needed someone to distract the Named coming, and then I needed to start tugging at the other threads of this story until it all came tumbling down and the Intercessor had nothing left to work with.

“People just came in,” Archer murmured, then paused as she pricked her ear. “Five, two in armour.”

“Hakram,” I said, “I need you to do something for me.”

The orc looked at me, then sharply nodded.

“It was my plot,” he agreed. “Will you have already arrested me, or are we fighting?”

I clenched my fist, then slugged him in the side of the face.

“The day I throw any of you under the wheels like that is the day I slit my own throat,” I hissed. “ You , Adjutant, are investigating this on the behalf of the Black Queen. You’re going to them for help, because you caught sight of two people running. Do what you can from the inside.”

He took a step back, staggered more by the words than the hit.

“Archer and I are going to make a run for it,” I said. “Make it look good.”

If the Intercessor wanted to make me the villain of this fucking story, then she ought to have been more careful what she wished for.

Chapter 17: Felonious

“Crimes against a crown are treason, crimes by a crown are a reign.”
– Dread Emperor Reprobate the First

And then we were two.

Part of me might have been more comfortable keeping Adjutant at my side instead of Archer, but it’d be a mistake: she was the one who knew her way around this place and the Named within it.

“We need to make an escape,” I said.

“Like we used to say in Refuge,” Indrani cheerfully told me, “the best kind of invisibility is killing all the witnesses.”

She was probably messing with me, but then that did sound like something Ranger might say.

“We can’t kill anyone,” I told her.

“That sounds like a terrible plan,” Archer complained.

“But we’re probably going to have to fight,” I frankly added.

“I never doubted you for a moment,” she assured me.

This was hauntingly familiar, I mused, although we weren’t in a tunnel surrounded by dead drow with the entire invading army of the Kingdom Under behind us. We must have been skulking through the labyrinthine stacks for almost eighty heartbeats now, but I kept us going what I – probably mistakenly – believed to be west. It was, at the very least, vaguely leftwards.

“The thing is,” I said, “neither the Black Queen nor the Archer can fight any of these fine heroes coming to foil the plots afoot.”

If the Mirror Knight saw me flee a room filled with dead bodies while leaving an unconscious old man Named behind then there really would be no talking him into the possibility that might not, in fact, trying to undo my own life’s work and doom Calernia because of my inherent dastardliness . Fucking heroes , I uncharitably thought.

“I get it,” Indrani said, with enthusiasm that surprised me. “So we, like, put on masks and we’re these mysterious villainesses of cryptic intent. I will be the Peerless Beauty, whose legendary good looks eclipse the sun itself-”

“So we’re going to pretend we’re dead bodies,” I interrupted with great relish.

See, when I’d known Archer for only a few months I might have been tempted to chide her for joking around when this was a rather deadly situation, all things considered, and one that could have drastic consequences for the entire continent. Except that now I knew her well enough to know that, while she did very much enjoy being mocking even rapidly approaching doom, she did these kinds of things for a reason. The back and forth was calming me, I was not above admitting, and back when I’d been made of smoke and mirrors it’d been one of the few things that had me feeling human for a bit. I knew this, she knew I knew this, and I doubted either of us would ever admit it out loud. That did not mean in the slightest that I did not thoroughly enjoy shutting every door on her metaphorical fingers that I could.

“ Cat ,” she said, sounding betrayed.

“Revenants, to be exact,” I blithely continued. “My glamour hasn’t gotten all that better since it stopped being that and became Night instead, but it should still fool anyone without eyes out of the ordinary.”

“Which they’ll have,” Archer noted.

We tread around the messy pile of books left by a shelf that’d collapsed, and I grunted in agreement. This would be the Mirror Knight’s band, and with the amount of heroes there were in this place he’d be able to draw the most useful talents from a rather large lineup he was even halfway clever. And even if he wasn’ t, he should still end up with at least one hero of extraordinary perception: mages and mystics tended to have a trick or two to see to that, given the nature of the threats and villains they were born to face.

“Which is why I’ll need you to take them out of the fight before they can catch on,” I said. “We’ll be springing an ambush.”

“We’re good, but not that good,” Archer said. “Not if we’re staying quiet.”

“If we’re taking a swing at a band of five on war footing, maybe even with Hakram backing them up, then no we’re not,” I replied. “So we’re not going to do that.”

Indrani peered at me for a moment, then smugly smirked.

“We’re going to set something on fire, aren’t we?”

I coughed.

“It’s not the only thing we’re going to do,” I defended. “It’s just, you know, a part-”

“A part that is on fire,” Archer sagely continued. “A fire hat you set. You monster.”

“Hey,” I weakly replied. “I wouldn’t keep using it if didn’t work all the time. It’s not like I have a preference for it, it’s just that so many things out there are flammable.”

“Inflammable,” Indrani haughtily corrected.

“Fuck off,” I retorted, “Akua already pulled this bit on me, flammable is right.”

“You’re taking language lessons from a ghost, and I’m the dubious one?” she replied without missing a beat.

Even as the latest bit of back and forth was spoken, we reached what I was fairly sure to be the western wall of the Miscellaneous Stacks. We weren’t quite at the back of the great room, but we ought to be pretty deep in by my understanding. And far enough from the Doddering Sage that he shouldn’t be at risk of being hurt before one of the heroes rescued him – and he wouldn’t be forgotten about, either, not with Hakram joining them. The Mirror Knight was actually the reason I considered setting a fire here to be a valid tactic when I did not yet know if the gas that’d been released had killed the custodians or simply put them asleep. A more... nuanced Named might have been tempted to make the hard decision of sacrificing the people for the chase, but though Christophe was a stubborn ass with half the wits one of those should have, that was simply not his nature. He did not seem himself as someone who’d make that choice, so he wouldn’t, and as the leader of his band he’d give the order to start with a rescue. Sure as providence, we’d probably run into one or more of the heroes and whoever had good eyes was near certain to be of that lot.

But it wouldn’t be a band of five, which meant Archer and I would have a lot more leeway to deal with them without tipping our hands.

“Fresh faces first,” I said, slowing to a stop.

“Revenants, huh,” Indrani mused. “So you want to slap the Dead King’s name on this?”

“They won’t necessarily buy that,” I noted, “but at this point I’m not trying to convince them of something so much as trying to convince them they don’t know anything.”

“Lies and violence,” Archer fondly said.

At least there wasn’t anyone there to here, I grudgingly thought. One of these days, though, she’d say that in front of some chronicler and it’d be written down and it would all be downhill from there. If those ended up being taken as the words of House Foundling, I was going do drown her in a vat of ink.

“For you I’m thinking the Black Sickle,” I said. “Word is Tariq torched his ass good a few months back after catching him sneaking around near Sommont, but he was never actually confirmed destroyed.”

And the Revenant in question had, while being somewhat taller than Indrani from what I could remember, used a pair of eerie dark sickles as his weapons of choice. That much I couldn’t replicate but while Archer didn’t have her bow and even if she did using it would be a dead giveaway, she’d most definitely have knives.

“Do you have any other blades than your-” I started, before closing my mouth.

Of course she did, she was Archer. She had enough blades on her that half the time I got her undressed her actual clothes made as much noise hitting the floor as her mail.

“Stupid question,” I finished, “I withdraw it. Just don’t use the longknives.”

They were not her signature and odds were none of the Mirror Knight’s band would have ever seen Archer fight regardless, but it was a risk when Indrani had brought her band into the Arsenal: those knew her arms well, and half of them were heroes. I cast her a searching look, wondering what best to anchor the working on.

“You mind if I use your scarf for this?” I asked.

“Don’t,” she said. “The coat would do, right?”

Considering she wasn’t wearing her mail at the moment it was the part of her most likely to be hit – and I couldn’t be sure a good enough hit with Light wouldn’t break my illusion – but that scarf was one of the material possessions she cared about so I didn’t insist.

“Belt would be better,” I said, shaking my head.

She conceded with a nod. As for my face, I did actually have an idea that had the potential to get Christophe running in the wrong direction with a great deal of certainty.

“You’ve seen the Wicked Enchanter, right?” I asked.

“Alive?” Indrani replied. “No. But I did get a good look at his still-warm corpse.”

“That might be even better, actually,” I mused. “Mind letting me have a look at the memory?”

“Go ahead,” she shrugged, leaning forward.

I put a hand against her temple and reached for the Night, letting it flow through me and ever so gently into her. I closed my eyes, sunk into the darkness.

“Think of it,” I softly asked.

A moment later she did, with vivid sharpness, and I saw what she saw. The Enchanter had looked rather young, to my surprise. Perhaps in his mid-twenties, though for a villain such appearances didn’t necessarily speak much to the truth of their age. Tanned, dark-haired, athletically fit and actually rather handsome he was not the emaciated and sinister figure I’d somehow imagined he would be. But upon closer look, his handsomeness was a little too neat. Too symmetrical, and somewhat unnatural for it. Not unlike the Exiled Prince’s had been, all those years go. Name vanity , I thought with disdain. The gruesome axe wound that’d split him open from the bottom left of his neck to his belly button had spilled blood and guts all over what looked like it might have been a nicely-tailored set of green tunic and trousers with silver linings, the kind of thing a minor Proceran highborn or a wealthy merchant would wear more than a villain.

“Did he use any tools?” I quietly pressed.

An intricate casting rod appeared in my mind, stained with blood and bitten into by a blade. To my distaste, it appeared to have been sculpted in longer homage to the ceremonial baton that Cordelia Hasenbach used on some formal occasions. Her was sculpted as a bundle of twigs tied together by a string, though, while the Wicked Enchanter’s casting rod was instead a knot of snakes eating each other and encircled by chains. I remembered when he’d been brought into the Terms, I’d read the report, and it had mentioned that he was middling conjurer but skilled in ‘domination magics’. From the beginning he’d been noted as a potential problem, though also as being something of a coward and so unlikely to misbehave if kept an eye on.

“Thanks,” I said, withdrawing the Night back into me.

Keeping the image firmly in mind, I laid a hand against my belt and felt the cool touch of Night wash over my skin. I reached again and tightened my fingers around my staff – which would give away my identity in moments, if it kept looking like itself – but the Night struggled to sink in.

“None of that, now,” I muttered. “I did not snatch you from that tree so I’d get mouthed off to.”

As if reluctantly, somehow giving off the impression of ill-grace, the resistance ceased and I was left to hold the illusion of the dead villain’s casting rod. It wasn’t an exact fit, as my staff had been longer, but it’d serve. I wasted no time in laying a hand on Indrani’s belt, ignoring the suggestive eyebrow-wagging it earned me. Night seeped into the leather, and as I watched Archer was replaced by a slender figure in ragged robes and a hood that revealed only dark skin and a mouth sown shut. Her knives I didn’t change, since it’d frankly be more trouble than it was worth to try and make them look like sickles. I exhaled and gathered Night into me once more time, as I could no longer afford delays: the moment I’d begun using Night, I would have tipped off the heroes as to our presence. I traced a finger against the wood stacks closest to me, leaving behind a trail of flame – natural, not of Night. Blackflame would be a dead giveaway, but it also meant I couldn’t outright throw fire around. I dipped a thick leather-bound book into the growing flames and tossed it at Archer, who caught it without missing a beat.

“Spread it around some,” I ordered. “We need a proper blaze.”

“Gotcha,” she nodded, then cocked her head to the side. “And after?”

“Hit and run,” I said. “I trust you to set up your ambush.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, airily waving my words away.

She didn’t fool me even a little: Indrani was a little pleased as the spoken acknowledgement of something we’d both known to be true, and not putting all that much of an effort into hiding it. It had been some time since we last fought side by side, I mused, that was true. But her duties would have kept her sharp and working with her on the field had always come easy. I saw no reason why that should have changed in the last two years.

“Don’t keep me waiting,” I smiled, waving her off.

She was gone in a moment, silent as a ghost, and I sighed as I cast a look at the fire springing up to my side. Burning books, damn me: I might as well be burning silver, miscellaneous stacks or not. Still I picked up a heavy tome from the opposite stack and fed it to the flames long enough for it to catch before putting some spring to my step. It’d be quicker with Night, but it’d also risk giving away where I currently was. Another three sources on top of what Archer cooked up ought to do the trick without putting anyone in too much danger, I mused. By the time I’d gone down another two shelves and started a fresh blaze on the other side, a shout of dismay in the distance told me the game was properly afoot.

“Now,” I muttered as I hastened my steps and started another fire, “you split up.”

Hakram ought to have run into them by now, and if that’d ended up in brawl, I would have heard it. Which meant that in the best case they would be tacitly accepting him as an ally, and in the worst they’d be considering him an enemy best brought with them to keep an eye until he could be counted on to cackle and reveal the depths his perfidy in a surprisingly informative speech. I’d considered villains who actually indulged in monologues to be complete idiots, when I started out, and my father had encouraged that perception. Not without reason. I had a lot more sympathy for villains who indulged now that I’d spent a few years around heroes, though. Some days you just wanted to rub their utter fucking idiocy in their faces, like forcing a dog to look at its vomit.

That, uh, burst of opinion aside, Hakram would be sure to mention the Doddering Sage’s presence if it wasn’t brought up. That meant at least one of the five, headed straight for the unconscious Named. Adjutant wouldn’t go along, since that’d carry the risk of the Sage waking up and recognizing him, so that left a group of five. There should be one, maybe to who took care of the custodians – be they corpses or unconscious, and actually I now that I thought about it I should be able to answer that question right now. Was it worth revealing my position for? Yes, I decided, absent-mindedly starting another fire as I kept walking forward. If only so that I could more accurately predict how the heroes moved. Sinking into Night, I reached out for the nearest corpse to raise and found nothing that would serve. Good, all alive then. That meant I could definitely count on at least one hero going off to save them rather than coming after me, bringing them down to a peak of four. Most likely three, though, I mused. Less likely to have accidental casualties that way. Which meant the real question was whether or not Hakram would be one of the three. Time to draw them in close and find out, I reckoned.

I tossed the book into stacks to my right and kept moving without bothering to check if it’d started another blaze or not. By now, when standing at the right angle between some stacks I could see the smoke from where Archer had started fires of her own. Not the flames themselves, given that the ceiling was low the vision obscure and I might, possibly, not be the tallest person alive. The smoke would serve well enough, though, since it told me where she’d headed. Apparently while I’d been headed in a straight line south, she’d gone south-east and been messy about fostering flame: it didn’t give a trajectory to follow, not like I had with my straightforward march down. Now, if the opposition was made of fools they’d follow the burning arrow I was lighting for them and wait for me at the bottom. But they weren’t fools, or this war would have killed them by now. Well, they weren’t fools in this particular way, more like, I mentally corrected.

They’d have to send someone there, but the Mirror Knight would be headed into the burning mess Archer had just made. Which meant it was also where I needed to go. It was possible, in theory, that the person who’d be waiting for me at the end of the line I’d drawn in fire would be Hakram, and so I’d be free to just put him through a few shelves and get out while leaving him plausible deniability. In practice, I was the opposition and facing a band of five so it was the eyes that’d be waiting for me there – but close enough to come quick when the scuffle started elsewhere, just in time to stumble onto the scene and unmask me. That sounded like a bad thing, at first glance, but it wasn’t. It meant I could dictate the location, make-up and tempo of that encounter. If I couldn’t scrap together a win with that on my side, I might as well just slit my wrists and join up with Keter.

A sharp turn to the right saw me heading towards Archer’s devouring blaze with a song stuck in my throat. The smoke and heat were licking at my sides, and still I hummed out the tune and words.

“Run the hounds, rides the hunter

His spear in hand, banner aflutter.”

It was an old one, this one, though not so old as Here They Come Again or Red The Flowers . It’d come later, when the struggle against Proceran occupation had begun turning in the favour of Callowan partisans – but not yet so much that the cities were in their hands again, and so there’d been a need to be circumspect where princes’ men might be listening.

“Charging that way, this one baying

Trampling the paths, again raging.”

Before me, a bonfire of wood and parchment roared. Loud enough it was almost deafening, which meant I wouldn’t be able to call on my sharpened senses. But neither would the opposition, and I was the one with something to hide. The smoke would help mitigate visibility, and it was something I’d be able to wield to great use, considering the functional goal here was escape and not actually winning the fight. The heat itself was no great trouble to me, though I felt it rather more keenly than I would have with the Mantle of Woe on my back. I picked out, after a moment to consider, exactly where I was to be ‘caught’ by the heroes. Further in, between two tall racks already touched by flame but not yet consumed. Enough fire and smoke ahead and behind that I would be half-veiled, but not so much that I would choke. One, two, three times did I lay my hand and only then counted myself satisfied.

On a whim, I snatched up a book from the shelves and smiled when I read the title, written in Chantant: The Life and Lies of Monsieur Montfailli, A Monk No Longer . Suitably absurd, I decided, for what was about to unfold. One, two, three times did I lay my hand and seed Night, only then counting myself satisfied. I was ready to begin.

They came for me through the smoke, two of them, even as the refrain of the song caught up with me at last.

“But we know, oh we know,

That in the woods, the fox is king

Yes we know, oh we know

That in the woods, the fox is king.”

Alistair the Fox was the closest thing to a trickster-king my home had ever had to boast of, though at times he’d been little more than a bold bandit in good armour. The Mirror Knight advanced with his sword already in hand, silver shield up and living up to the Name. He wore no helm, and his hair was pressed close to his brow by sweat. At his side was the Blade of Mercy, whose hand snapped out as soon as he saw me to clasp the handle of his greatsword and slide it out of the leather straps on his back.

“Who are you?” the Mirror Knight snarled. “Why did you do this?”

The book in my hands I snapped shut, turning to face them entirely and watching both their faces pale when they saw the grisly wound that’d killed the Wicked Enchanter. I’d never heard the man speak, of course. Neither had Indrani, so I couldn’t even attempt to imitate his voice. But then, it wasn’t necessarily the Enchanter himself I was pretending to be, was it? The Dead King I was a passing hand at impersonating, from all those lovely little talks he and I kept having at the edge of the world.

“Late again, Mirror Knight,” I said. “Do you not tire of always needing better Chosen to take you by the hand?”

“We’ll stop you, monster,” the Blade of Mercy said, voice shaking. “I don’t know what pact you’ve made with the Black Queen, but-”

Oh, come on . Really, now I was conspiring with the damned Dead King to sabotage the same Arsenal I’d shelled out gold to help build? At some point these assholes were going to have to explain to me exactly what my plot was supposed to be here.

“- it won’t be enough,” the Mirror Knight grimly said, sword rising higher. “Powerful you may be, but your vessel was not. Even the King of Death cannot grow the dead.”

“With men such as you,” I said, tone contemptuous, “why would I need to?”

First touch, and it would be the most subtle. Just a palm I’d pressed against the back of the stacks to my left, seeding the slightest bit of Night. And as I gestured my veiled staff, I ripped it right out. There was a crack, which was enough to have the Mirror Knight shooting forward at impressive speed for a man in plate while Light engulfed the Blade of Mercy’s weapon. The Night hadn’t been much, really the barest of seedlings, but then the wood was already burning and breaking down. It was more than enough. The entire set of shelves collapsed, spewing out debris and burning books in a flood even as the Mirror Knight passed. Wouldn’t do anything to actually hurt the man, of course. He was the closest thing the Heavens had been able to rustle up to a fortress on legs. But then his strength came from resistance, not, necessarily physical power, and that meant he was still a human-shaped thing of human weight and subject to the same sort of creational forces that would affect these. The point of breaking the shelves had not been hurting him, it’d been blinding him.

I took a single, measured step to the left.

The Mirror Knight burst out of the fire and debris, still under the impression I was right in front of him, but now he was a man in plate running blindly and very much intent on stabbing me with his sword. If I’d swung at him with even my full power in the Night, I honestly doubted I’d be able to crack that shining shield of his. But that wasn’t my game, not here and tonight. The second touch I’d laid was running my fingers across a stretch of about one foot and a half on the ground, against the warm stone, making the oiliest residue of Night that I could. So the Mirror Knight slipped, shouting, and stumbled forward and past me with a precise slap of my staff against the back of his armour I tipped him all the way into falling into a pack of shelves already on fire. Now that left the other pest, arguably the most dangerous of the two in the current circumstances – one hit in the wrong place from that sword of his and the illusion making me look like the Enchanter was gone.

“Keeper,” the Blade shouted, “it’s the Dead King, he’s overpowering us!”

The Maddened Keeper, huh? Not who I would have guessed. That might get real tricky if I wasn’t careful. The Blade of Mercy was not content with merely calling for reinforcements, naturally. A little more careful than the Mirror Knight, he sliced through a library stack and then caught the side of it with the flat of his sword, tossing it towards me with a mighty heave. It was a beautiful display of dexterity and skill, the sort no human without a Name would really be able to replicate. It was also a showman’s attack, so obvious in the coming I would hesitate to call that anticipating. And actually, with a little bit of movement. I took one step back to call his aim where I wanted it at the right moment in the swing, then two swifter steps to the right. The Mirror Knight, freshly back on his feet, ate fresh wooden debris right in the face. As for the Blade, who’d followed-up the toss with a dash forward, I almost sighed.

He was moving too quickly, his large and heavy sword dragging behind him. It was sloppy swordsmanship, the mark of a boy who relied on his Name for the kill instead of proper footwork and technique. I’d indulge him with a lesson on how a projectile should actually be used in a fight between Named, out of the goodness of my heart. I leaned forward, waiting until he’d closed distance, and the book I still held in my free hand was tossed at his face. Light flashed over his skin, some sort of protection, but it wouldn’t help: the Night within the book I’d already called on, and the detonation of heat looked close enough to a fireball that it ought to pass. More importantly the flames that went out were not, strictly speaking, magic or Night. Just regular fire, against which Light was no protection. Flame and debris went into the boy’s eyes even as I cast half a glance behind me, adjusted my angle as I took two steps forward and with the side of my staff struck at the Blade’s side. I didn’t hurt his momentum, just redirected it.

The Blade of Mercy tumbled into the risen Mirror Knight, and the two tumbled back into the fire.

It should be about time for the Maddened Keeper to show up, which was good as I was running out of petty tricks. I began to walk away, hearing the roar of power behind me as the heroes extricated themselves from the mess in a fury. The flames had spread, while we skirmished, so it was unpleasant to the ear to sharpen my hearing but no less necessary. Footsteps could hardly be discerned, but hardly was enough. By the time the heroes were – more cautiously than before – headed towards me once more, I ended the sharpening and waited for what had been arranged to take its course once more. My steps slowed, just as a flickering silhouetted passed the edge of soot-touched stacks with a glinting knife in hand and struck out – missing, for I’d ceased to advance the side of the stacks blocked the deeper angle of the blow. It wasn’t the knife that worried me, though, even if it was a Named wielding it. The Maddened Keeper’s eyes would be a lot more dangerous to me than her blade right now.

Fortunately, I still had a card up my sleeve.

The long-haired Named withdrew her hand lightning-quick and took half a step into the alley where I stood, prompting shouts of triumph from the Proceran Named behind me, but those were short-lived. With calculated brutality, Archer leapt down from the top of the stacks and her boots tore into the side of the Maddened Keeper’s face. The slender woman fell, taken utterly by surprise, and Archer leaned over after landing on her torso to make two quick cuts with her knives. She didn’t cut the eyes themselves, as there might be complications in healing that, but instead just above them. The blood would drip down and blind her, but just to be sure Indrani smeared what was already flowing into the to the Keeper’s hoarse shout of pain. I turned, cast a disdainful look at the Proceran heroes who were frozen with fear and anger.

“Take care of the rabble,” I told Archer. “They cannot be allowed to interfere with what we came for.”

Indrani, still hidden as the Black Sickle, did not nod. Revenants were sometimes capable of such things, but the Sickle had not been. I’d pitched my voice just loud enough that the Mirror Knight and his companion should be able to hear me, and watched them from the corner of my eye. That’s right , I thought as Christophe’s gaze narrowed, you overheard me saying too much in my utter contempt for you lot . Now figure out that I’m here for something properly nefarious, like turning the Doddering Sage into a Revenant or somesuch.

“He’s here for Hakram Deadhand,” the Mirror Knight said. “Blade, run to him. The Dead King’s trying to frame us for murdering the Black Queen’s second.”

That... was not what I would have gotten from that, but Hells I’d take it. Even odds he still thought the Black Queen was conspiring with ‘me’, though. Well, I got what I’d come for. Now I just had to follow the most honoured of villainous traditions and turn a clear pair of heels to this situation. Archer would delay them for a bit and slip out, there weren’t any of them here who were her rivals in those arts. I just needed to make a sufficiently clean break, which without using Night might be... ah, this would do. I turned a corner around shelves already merrily burning and, discreetly hit it pretty hard with my staff.

It collapsed, and as the fire flooded my back I legged my way out of there.

Right, onto the next part of this. I needed to steal a dead body, then see someone about having a chat with it.

Chapter 18: Clout

“You bargained for my soul, dear devil, and that is what you received. Is it my fault you did not stipulate it was to be my original one?”
– Dread Emperor Traitorous, trading the soul of a single gnat for infernal enlightenment

We shed the illusions like one would shed a cloak.

We’d get more use out of us being the Black Queen and the Archer right now, though there was also an aspect here of knowing I should not press my luck too much. I was a villain who’d just finished the first part of her plan, securing the expected victory, which meant I was due a nasty surprise if I kept going down the path. Best to shake off this story and embrace another before the teeth of it could come around to bite me. Gods forgive me, but tonight I would be following down the path Kairos Theodosian had so brazenly blazed through while he lived: always scheming, always at odds, so that very same thing that should be burying you instead kept you alive. I did not miss the Tyrant of Helike himself, for he’d been cruel and feckless and admirable only in his qualities turned against others, but sometimes I did miss the times I associated him with in my memory. The days where my foes had breathed and there had been an end to them.

“So what are we doing now?” Archer asked.

She’d caught up to me quickly enough, swift on the stride as she was, and shrugged when I’d asked if she had any difficulty shaking off the opposition. I would have given her good odds of pulling this off even without Creation’s favour blowing into our sails, so I was not surprised. None of the Named I’d seen of the band of five so far were made for the subtle side of things – well, neither of the Procerans anyways. I still knew distressingly little about the Maddened Keeper.

“When you asked me for the Harrowed Witch for your band,” I said, “you gave me two reasons. The first was that her stealth sorceries were impressive. The other was-”

“Aspasie is good at calling up the dead to chat with,” Indrani finished. “Which has been worth more than gold, Named being Named. So who is it we’re going to be chatting with?”

“The same man whose body we need to make disappear,” I said. “If the Wicked Enchanter has been seen walking around but his corpse is still on a slab, fingers will start being pointed.”

“We get my witch or your dead body first?” Archer asked.

She was a practical woman, my Indrani, and I really did enjoy that. Not the kind that would balk at either borrowing – it wasn’t stealing if you were a queen, probably – a dead body or calling on the spirits of the dead for questioning. Much as I liked, say, Hanno I suspected he’d not be up for a spot of corpse robbery without several serious questions first being asked.

“The corpse,” I mused. “Quiet-like, yeah? The point is to get it to the Harrowed Witch, so we’ll avoid being seen bringing her there.”

If we showed up there with a known necromancer in tow we’d be giving away the game. I cast a sideways look at Indrani.

“Her dead brother’s still haunting her?” I asked.

“Sure, but it’s more nuisance than trouble,” Archer shrugged. “And I’ll answer the question you’re building up to before you ask it, spare us both some trouble. She can be trusted, Cat. She’s not Woe, won’t ever be, but she knows who to close ranks with.”

It’d have to do. It wasn’t like the villains we’d picked up since declaring the Truce and the Terms were all black-hearted treacherous devils, though admittedly we had picked up a few of those. It was just that, as a rule, they tended to be a lot less preoccupied with other people’s wellbeing than the White Knight’s lot. Villains, I’d learned, were not beyond loyalty. But they had the loyalty of wolves, to the pack that bit and bled for them, while heroes instead had the loyalty of knights: to oath and realm and Good. It didn’t necessarily make the champions of the Heavens pleasant people, but on the other hand I couldn’t deny that Hanno’s side of the fence counted not a single rapist or thrill-killer. There were days, when the likes of the Mirror Knight’s ingratitude and ignorance became so very grating , that it was tempting to forget things like that. Tempting to forget that there was more to villains than the Woe and the Calamities, that the banner I’d chosen to bear had flown tall over millennia of dark deeds.

I couldn’t afford to close my eyes to that, going forward. Not if the Truce and Terms were to one day be remembered as the prelude to the Liesse Accords, as I so badly wanted them to be.

“I’ll take you word on it,” I said. “We need to get a move on, ‘Drani. There’s a least one of that band that’ll remember to go look for the Enchanter’s corpse as soon as nobody’s in danger anymore.”

She snorted.

“Wouldn’t count on that,” she said.

I shook my head. Tempting as it was to take the Mirror Knight and his ilk as all Light and no brains, it’d be mistake.

“Wind was out our back and the sun in their eyes in there,” I reminded her. “We get in scrap with them again, and we’ll get what Revenants get. A third time and it’ll be us with the wind in our faces.”

“Won’t make them any smarter,” Indrani pointed out.

“We fought their two frontliners and ambushed the eyes,” I said. “ Someone serves as the thinking head of that band, we just haven’t run into them yet. Any cart’s a bad cart if you take off half the wheels.”

Hopefully Adjutant would be keeping whoever that was pointed in the right direction, cleaning up behind any mistakes Indrani and I might have made. Not that we’d be the ones having made the greater share of mistakes in there. The two Procerans here, in particular, had proved significantly easier to handle than I’d expected. It made a horrible sort of sense, now that I thought about it, because though I heard about things the Mirror Knight had done all the time I couldn’t honestly recall a single story where he’d been the leader . He wasn’t even a band’s second, most the time: he was the brawns to the Witch of the Woods’ magic, Hanno’s vanguard or bait for the Silver Huntress. Was this a blunder of our own making, I wondered? The man’s an ignorant ass, but has anyone actually tried to set him straight and teach him to recognize what’s going on around him? It ought to have been his responsibility to see to that, sure, for he was a grown man and few of us had gotten to have our hands held through the process of gaining power. But then was it not undeniably a blunder to let a hero with that kind of power stew in a puddle of his own obtuseness, growing ever more frustrated and wary?

Something to consider more in depth later, I decided. It would be Hanno’s failure more than mine, but I’d never spoken a word about it either and that made for shared responsibility. Indrani and I had been moving even as we talked and quickened our pace further as we fell into silence, her longer stride letting her take the lead as she guided me through the hallways of the Arsenal. I inquired as to our destination and learned that after the Wicked Enchanter was butchered before half a hundred people, his body had been taken away to the Depository. I’d been a little surprise to hear that, considering that was the part of the Arsenal where all the weapons and artefacts were kept in crates until they could be shipped to the fronts: it was a storehouse, more or less. But it was apparently a storehouse with some fairly secure sections, and as one of the parts of this place where no Named resided it’d been deemed as the least provocative of the places to stash a villain’s dead body.

“There’s going to be guards,” I said.

“Of course,” Indrani agreed. “But people aren’t allowed in and it’s a sealed room.”

Meaning that if we went in and, after a few moments, popped back out asking the guards where the Hells the body was there shouldn’t be anyone able to gainsay us. I could dump the corpse in the Night until we got it to the Harrowed Witch, so we wouldn’t essentially be blatantly lying with a dead body strapped onto Archer’s back. When we got there the whole affair turned out to be, well, surprisingly straightforward. There was a full line of guards by the door, Lycaonese by the looks of them, and their commanding officer had the key to the wards. I was recognized, even without my cloak, and when I requested entry they didn’t even bother to ask me why before accepting. Obviously I had the right, since this was a dead villain and I’d been his representative under the Terms, but I was somewhat surprised at how utterly indifferent the Lycaonese were to the whole thing.

They key to the wards was a simple stone disk that unmade the sealing enchantment on the steel-barded door when pressed into a slot above the handle and it remained in there even as I opened it and slipped inside. The tingle of other wards washed over me as I did – probably a few to prevent coming in by Arcadia and Twilight, and perhaps to prevent summoning within – but there was no other defence. The dead body was in the back, on what was very clearly four wooden shipping crates covered by a slab of steel, thought at least someone had placed a white shroud over it. There was no corpse-stench in the bare stone room, which meant the corpse had been preserved. By alchemy and not enchantment, I noted, since the sharp tang of embalming fluid and something more like flowers was lingering in the air. Good, the Night wouldn’t disrupt anything when I took the body then.

I checked it was the Enchanter under the shroud, sought Indrani’s confirmation it was the right man and received it with a nod, then I seized Night a heartbeat later. The body sunk into the darkness I wove under it, and I breathed in through my mouth as I began choosing my words.

Time to raise a ruckus about the theft of the body I’d just stolen.

—

The damned song just wouldn’t leave my head, I mused as I poured myself a fresh finger of aragh and knocked it back.

“The henhouse stands unlatched

All within, by the fox snatched.”

A fresh change of clothes had done me some good, though that wasn’t the main reason I’d done it and ordered Indrani to do the same before sending her out. Smoke had a particular scent to it, and not one easy to hide. At least one Named was bound to notice if we kept wearing garments smelling of a fire we weren’t supposed to have been anywhere near. I dressed formally, or at least what passed as formal for me: having a soldier queen’s reputation meant I could dispense with a lot of the finery some other crowned heads might be stuck wearing. The heart of it was a high-collared and long-sleeved tunic of dark green, bordered in deep gold and going down to my calves. It was split all the way down to my belly by more elaborate embroidery in the same golden colour, though buttons kept it closed and close against me all the way up to the hollow of my throat – where the sole button I’d left unmade prevented the tunic from digging into my skin.

A broader belt that I was used to in good leather was kept in a complicated knot I’d taken me ages to learn how to make without Hakram’s help and ended in a long stripe going down to slightly below the hem of my tunic. The buckles were gilded and a few patches as well though they were inscribed with the Crown and Sword instead of simply polished, lending the whole thing a rather ceremonial look. Trousers of the same good cloth and colour ended in knee-high boots of fine make, which I’d insisted have enough room for a knife to be slipped in. Up the sleeve of my tunic, an old gift from Pickler I more rarely wore these days had been made to serve a again: a complicated set of knots and leather strings that could have a knife falling into my palm a beat later if I flicked my wrist just right. With the Mantle of Woe on my back, my hair pulled back into a long braid and a bare circlet of gold that sat high on brow as my crown, for once I looked like a queen and not a soldier with a looted crown.

There might be more truth to the second of these, in the end, but appearances were too useful a tool to be discarded.

I’d abandoned my rooms not long after making use of them, preferring instead to return to that same small parlour in the Alcazar I’d used to entertain the Hunted Magician. The half-empty bottle of aragh from earlier had been pining for me there, along with what looked like little slices of bread with some sort of mousse on them. It smelled like meat and spices and it tasted delicious, so I polished off a few while waiting for Archer to return with the Harrowed Witch in tow. I was careful with crumbs and stains, since I was not going to go through all the trouble of dressing up regally only for the impression being ruined by mousse on the corner of my lips. The song stayed with me, and as I hummed absent-mindedly my brow rose: someone had knocked at my door. That wasn’t Indrani, who would not have bothered herself with courtesy like knocking before entering a room in general, much less a room I was in. I discreetly brushed off some crumbs from my cloak and gathered myself on the sofa.

“Enter,” I called out.

So here they go, once again, I hummed under my breath . Chasing a red tail into the glen.

Adjutant was the first to step into the room, giving me a bow that told me two things: this was a formal visit, and he did not trust whoever was with him with even the light knowledge of our usual informality with each other. Considering who it was I’d sent him out with, I could understand why. The Mirror Knight entered behind him and I noted with approval he’d been made to relegate his sword and shield before coming into my presence. The staff of yew laid lightly on my shoulder was a comforting weight, even though it was more a focus of my powers than a weapon. Behind good ol’ Christophe was not his perennial shadow the Blade of Mercy, to my surprise, but instead a more familiar sight.

The Repentant Magister, Nephele Eliade, was the very painting of what people thought of when talking of a Free Cities beauty. Though her face was sharp in cast and her nose strong, pale grey eyes and luxurious long dark hair would have made her worth a second look even if she’d not been a supple and curvy woman. There was a highborn look to her, in the way she stood and spoke, that’d made it easy to believe she had been born to the highest reaches of the Magisterium of Stygia. The Eliade, I’d been told, remained one of the most influential families in the city-state to this day.

I’d first encountered Nephele in Hainaut, as in the early days of the war against Keter she’d already been our foremost authority on the Dead King’s necromantic constructs. Even Akua had expressed admiration when she’d read her work on ghouls, and the shade was rather stingier with praise than Masego. In those days there’d not yet been an Arsenal, so the Repentant Magister had moved wherever there was a need for her. Her presence was always an easy sell, given that while she was not an impressive combat mage she was an extremely talented healer and capable of making artefacts that more than made up for her lacking offensive spellcraft. I’d found her rather pleasant, and not only because she usually wore tight velour dresses with dipping necklines. I would have expected someone emerged heroic from the horrors of Stygia to be eager to distance themselves from anything and anyone bearing Below’s mark, but she’d turned out to be almost serene about it.

That calm certainty, the knowledge of her place in the world, had been damned attractive and I’d begun making polite inquiries about her preferences – flexible, thank the Gods – to what I’d thought might just be a receptive audience when she’d left Hainaut to help found the Arsenal. Unfinished business, all in all, but not unpleasantly so. The kind that might even be picked up should the situation allow. Now, though, I had to consider her in an entirely different way. Already the Hunted Magician had told me that Nephele was part of whatever the Blessed Artificer was up to, only for her to be turning up here as well? I couldn’t be sure she was part of the Mirror Knight’s band of five, not yet, but neither would be it an unwarranted assumption. What is it you’re actually up to, Nephele? No third hero followed the first two, which I found interesting. It meant there were still three of them out there, out of my sight.

“Your Majesty,” Hakram greeted me. “If I may?”

“Proceed, Adjutant,” I granted, leaning back into the sofa.

“I present Christophe of Pavanie, the Mirror Knight,” the orc said, “and Lady Nephele Eliade of Stygia, the Repentant Magister. They would humbly request audience of you.”

The Mirror Knight looked like he’d swallowed a lemon, but he didn’t actually contradict Hakram. Huh, I’d not believed he had it in him. Nephele’s face was unreadable, not trace of our previous acquaintance there to be found. I poured myself another splash of aragh. Was that a bit of a sting I felt? We’re never as charming as we think we are, Catherine , I reminded myself.

“Then be seated,” I said. “I expect this’ll be interesting.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” the Repentant Magister said, bowing slightly.

Gods, that accent. Helikeans sounded like they were spitting out every other word in Chantant, but the Stygian accent was like silk in the ear. Didn’t hurt that she had one of those smooth, throaty voices either. The Mirror Knight offered a curt nod and seated himself briskly, the heroine following suit more gracefully a moment later. Hakram stepped back, standing behind the sofa they occupied and looming as only an orc of his towering height could.

“There is a traitor in the Arsenal,” the Mirror Knight gravely said.

My eyes moved to Adjutant, who nodded, then returned to the other two as I cocked a brow.

“I take it you have evidence for such a claim,” I said.

“Two Revenants were allowed past the wards,” the hero said, “which is impossible without someone on this side letting them in.”

My eyes flicked to Nephele, who bowed her head.

“I believe they were not truly Revenants,” the dark-haired heroine evenly said, “but instead masking their true identities through an illusion. Which does not change the truth of what Christophe has said: there is a traitor in the Arsenal, and likely more than one.”

Well now, wasn’t that interesting? Not the revelation itself, as it was a conclusion I’d been inching towards myself for some time – the Bard would need boots on the ground to pull off something like this, there was only so much that could be done without willing hands – but that they’d bring it to me of all people. Nephele had allegedly been sniffing around Quartered Seasons, which for someone with only cursory knowledge of my intentions might very well look like an attempt at apotheosis, and the Mirror Knight both disliked and distrusted me. I sipped at my aragh, considering, and delicately set down the cup.

“I am surprised,” I said, “that a man who accused me of plotting murder not a bell ago would now come to me with such tidings. Unless, of course, you mean to accuse me.”

The Proceran hero grit his teeth and did not look away from my gaze, dark green eyes matching my own.

“I see what you are, Black Queen,” the Mirror Knight said, tone curt. “You have fooled the White Knight and broken the Grey Pilgrim, but I see you . Carrion Queen, heiress to a lord of the same: you burrow into the heart and then claim the body for yourself. You stole the armies of Praes, the Kingdom of Callow, the Tenth Crusade and now you would do the same to the Grand Alliance itself. I will not let you make yourself queen of the Chosen and Damned, Gods preserve me in this.”

“But,” Nephele mildly said.

“But,” the Mirror Knight continued, tone reluctant, “you are foe to the Dead King and all his works. This I... recognize.”

How kind of him. I was a little skeptical, though, considering that when I’d been veiled as the Wicked Enchanter he’d accused ‘me’ of having made a pact with the Black Queen. Unless he’d been baiting a monologue? Possible, though he didn’t seem like the sort. As far as I knew most of the foes he’d faced since becoming Named had been Revenants, and there was very little subtlety required in dealing with those.

“All well and good,” I said. “But it doesn’t tell me what brings you here .”

“We require your understanding, Queen Catherine, in dealing with these troubles,” the Repentant Magister said. “We are aware that there are... tensions within the Arsenal, but the situation requires investigation nonetheless.”

“You want my permission to run your own Chosen inquisition,” I said.

My tone expressed exactly what I thought of that without needing to say anything more.

“You are on Proceran land,” the Mirror Knight said through gritted teeth.

“Do tell the First Prince that, preferably when I’m in the room,” I drily replied. “I’ve never seen her blush in utter embarrassment before.”

The Arsenal was not in Creation and had been made explicitly beyond Proceran rule by multiple treaties besides. Actual laws here were a complicated issue, with nations being responsible for the people they provided and Named themselves falling largely under the Terms.

“We believe,” Nephele said, “that your second has already been a target.”

My brow rose and I looked at Hakram before returning to her.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“You have heard of the fire in the Miscellaneous Stacks?” she asked.

“I have,” I cautiously said. “You are arguing that the Revenants were responsible for this?”

“It was an assassination attempt on the Adjutant,” the Mirror Knight bluntly said. “You sent him to question the Doddering Sage discreetly, and it was seen as an opening. If my companions and I had not arrived in time he’d be dead.”

Huh . Well, Hakram clearly ought to be grateful at having his life preserved in such a manner by upstanding ladies and gentlemen, I mused.

“That was the plot, Queen Catherine,” the Repentant Magister quietly said. “Your second dead on the ground, and only heroes there among the ashes. Someone is trying to set us against one another.”

She was very much correct about that but given that I was seated across from two of the blades the Wandering Bard was currently swinging at me I couldn’t exactly come out and tell her as much. Still, this was a pleasing turn. I seemed to have accidentally stumbled into the role of authority figure these enterprising investigating rogues might somewhat answer to, which was something I could work with.

“You’ll understand,” I said, “that while I might believe you speak the truth at least in part, I also have sworn responsibilities. Letting Chosen run amok in the Arsenal and interrogate my lot without supervision would be a gross failure of those oaths.”

Nephele was clever enough to see through that, but then she’d been clever before entering this room: she would have known that their request for my blessing to hunt as they wished had no chance of being accepted without some alterations to what had been proposed.

“What if we had one of the Damned with us as well?” the Mirror Knight said. “Someone you can trust.”

“You have a name for me, I take it?” I asked, brow raised.

He looked back at Hakram. The same orc whose life he had ‘saved’, who he would have sent to save unconscious custodians and not been failed by. That decision made itself, didn’t it?

“The Adjutant is a good man,” Christophe firmly said. “It would not be an injury to count him among our number.”

But we know, oh we know , I almost hummed, that in the woods, the fox is king .

This would do, I decided. With Hakram following them and serving as my voice I could count on them keeping out of my way while I expunged the Bard’s influence from this fortress one pawn at a time. With a little luck, they might even actually unearth a real conspiracy that I’d missed.

“Where would you begin?” I said, tacitly accepting.

The Repentant Magister released a long breath, though the Mirror Knight only nodded as this was expected. His due. Dislike cannot dictate policy , I reminded myself, or I would have been at war with every other Calernian nation within a year of my coronation .

“The Hunted Magician has been seen going in and out of the Workshop at odd hours,” the Mirror Knight told me.

Because he’s been carrying on two love affairs with heroines , I thought, the most impressive part of this being that he’s yet to lose a limb. Mind you, if I was the Intercessor I’d consider the Hunted Magician as a good in for the Arsenal: he had a enemy he’d probably do next to anything to avoid being found by, and precious few scruples as a person. If they wanted to dig there they had my blessing.

“It’s start,” I agreed. “Come back to me when you’ve found something. I might even have insights of my own to share, as I’m looking into a few things as well.”

“It might be,” Nephele softly said, “that some of your own trusted have not proved entirely deserving of that trust.”

Well now, that was something. A warning, if I read her right. And considering she was one of the Arsenal regulars and there was only one of the Woe who shared that state of affairs? She was warning me about Hierophant. Quartered Seasons , I decided. She’s dug up something about Quartered Seasons, and she’s decided that Masego is deceiving me somehow. Or she was trying to sow dissent between myself and Hierophant. Either way, it was a swing and a miss. Zeze honestly didn’t care enough about my approval to lie, it wasn’t how his head worked. He’d either go through with it anyway or decide it wasn’t worth the trouble, deception wouldn’t be part of the recipe either way. That the Repentant Magister had said that at all, though, was telling. Masego was fairly open about his intention to one day reach apotheosis on his own terms and Quartered Seasons might be seen as a way to that. The Repentant Magister, and likely the Blessed Artificer as well, knew enough about the project to misunderstand. That put the alleged blinding of Masego by the Blessed Artificer in a rather more sinister light.

Someone had just shot up the list of problems I needed to handle.

“I am not,” I said, “in the habit of leaving stones unturned. Go, you two. I’ll speak with Adjutant a moment and send him after you.”

It got a nod from the Mirror Knight and a proper bow from Nephele, though she also carefully studied my face as she moved. I do not know what she found there, but she left looking satisfied. The doors was barely closed and the courtesies done when I turned a steady gaze to Hakram.

“Who’s the fifth?” I asked.

Mirror Knight, Blade of Mercy, Maddened Keeper and Repentant Magister. That made four, which meant there was one left I’d not seen. I would have bet the Exalted Poet, before Nephele’s presence was revealed, but now I had doubts. Bands of five were rarely so heavy on Gifted.

“The Vagrant Spear,” Hakram replied.

Shit, Archer’s second? That explained why she’d not heard armour, but we were lucky we’d not run into her: she likely would have recognized Indrani, glamour or not. Fuck, we actually gotten pretty lucky on that. If I’d not acted to split the band of five, Archer would probably have been outed. The first step never fails, huh? I’d been so worried about good eyes I’d missed the greater threat of simple familiarity. A reminder the victory was rarely quite as triumphant as it felt when it was happening.

“What’s she after?” I asked.

“I believe she is trying to keep the Red Axe alive,” he said. “And was drawn in by the Mirror Knight’s impassioned defence of her right to break the Terms for a revenge killing.”

The Red Axe had travelled with Archer’s band to come here, hadn’t she? And as I recalled, the Spear had almost begun a fight with the Hunted Magician over the Enchanter’s corpse. I’d need to ask Indrani about this, looked like. The way that Adjutant had phrased his answer told me both what I’d asked and his own opinion of the matter, which was rather helpful of him given how little time we had. I’d need to cut him loose soon else his new companions would ask questions, but I still had a bit more.

“Mirror Knight,” I said. “Your opinion of him?”

“There is more him than I had anticipated,” the orc gravelled. “Genuinely unambitious, but he clearly sees himself as the flagbearer of Proceran heroism with all that entails. And he’s on the edge, Catherine. Sometimes he snaps at the Blade of Mercy and the boy always looks surprised, so it can’t be habitual.”

I slowly nodded. That made the man even more dangerous, truth be told. People did stupid and dangerous things when they felt they had no other choice. I was glad I’d asked, since that would change how the Knight would need to be handled: carefully , in a word.

“On your end?” Hakram asked.

“Going to ask the Wicked Enchanter some questions,” I replied. “Indrani should be here any moment.”

“Then I’ll leave, they might be waiting for me outside,” Hakram said.

And we would not want them to run into each other. I got up to clasp his arm before sending him out, and when the door closed I closed my eyes and breathed out. The song hadn’t quite left me, I found as the hum left my lips.

“Yes we know, oh we know

That in the woods, the fox is king.”

Chapter 19: Spectral

“I’m afraid that that old saying about resting when you’re dead has proved overly optimistic, my good fellows.”
– Dread Empress Malevolent III

Having a dead body splayed on a table in an otherwise nice room was oddly nostalgic, I’d admit. It made me miss my sappers, who back in the old days had brought me the corpses of my enemies much like cats brought home chewed-up birds. It’d been too long since I’d sat down with Robber and Pickler in person, though in truth I might be able to see them before too long: if we went on the offensive in Hainaut to take back its capital and secure the shores, I’d want them both as part of the attacking army. There wasn’t anyone quite like them when it came to getting the job done.

“The spirit still has ties to the body,” the Harrowed Witch told us. “I can summon it back for a time, Your Majesty, if that is your wish.”

The villainess looked nervous around me, as she’d been ever since I’d made it clear I could see through the enchantments she used to hide. I couldn’t, actually, but the Crows could and I was not above the occasional lie to obscure the true scope of my abilities. Brown-eyed, brown-haired and rather drab in both clothes and conversation the other woman had a slight hunch in her shoulders that never quite went away – like she was expecting someone to slap her hard in the back at any moment. As I understood it the brother she’d murdered and now haunted her could not directly touch her, but as his strength waxed and waned the wraith was capable of speaking to her and sometimes even throw small objects.

Archer was inexplicably fond of this one, though I supposed Aspasie might be an acquired taste. Indrani herself was lounging on the edge of the sofa, having stolen the last of my bottle along with the nice little snacks the servants had put out during my absence. Admittedly the Wicked Enchanter’s corpse had taken up the table where the plate had been waiting, but that was no excuse to just steal the whole thing and begin tearing through them.

“Is it actually the soul you call back?” I asked, genuinely curious.

In theory, necromancy was capable of doing that. In practice necromancers tended to prefer setting up wards to prevent the souls from passing on or even outright binding the soul to the body before killing the individual – as Masego had once done for me, before First Liesse – since calling back a soul gone past the veil of death was tricky at the best of times. The only mages I’d ever heard of regularly doing such a thing were the Twilight Sages of the drow, who wee long gone and their knowledge destroyed. The Sisters had seen to that, and thoroughly.

“The priests say it isn’t,” the Harrowed Witch hedged. “That it’s just some spirit called up from the death and the echo of the mind.”

Said priests had declared me an abomination in a Salian conclave after I’d tricked a resurrection out of the Hashmallim, so I was inclined to take their assertions with a grain of salt. Though calling back a soul was hardly resurrection the House of Light in the west had always jealously guarded what it saw as the sole domain of the Heavens, and thus theirs. Proceran mages having been squeezed out of the healing trade was proof enough of that.

“And what do you believe?” I asked.

“Even if they’re right,” she shrugged, “there’s not much difference, is there? Whether the spirit’s fresh or old, it’s still got the same stuffing.”

“Praesi believe it’s the soul,” Archer told me. “And that the imperfect memory is because you can’t drag one back without damaging it some, not unless the formula is perfect in a way no one’s managed.”

Yeah, well, just as the Proceran priesthood had a vested interest in claiming this to be spirit-work it could be said that the Praesi had an interested in claiming the opposite. The Wasteland was fond of claiming its ways would make you as a god, if you were good enough at them. And if someone could master life and death, while it might not make you a God shouldn’t it make you at least the lesser kind?

“So long as I get my own questions answered, that one we can leave to the Wasteland and the priests,” I said. “Do it, Witch.”

“By your will, Black Queen,” the villainess bowed.

She knelt by the Wicked Enchanter’s corpse and laid hands on his face, peeling open the sightless eyes and prying open his mouth. Two fingers she pressed against the black and swollen tongue, whispering urgently in the mage tongue, and the same again on the ear of the left side and then the right.

“Three black pearls were granted unto me by the spirits of the land, and I bestow upon you their use this hour,” the Harrowed Witch said, her Chantant fluid and beautiful and ringing of something that was not Chantant at all. “One that you may hear, and in death obey. One that you may speak, as I bid you now. One that you may know once more, heedful and waking. I know the secrets of the sleeping stones and I have heard the echoes that outlived the word: I am mistress among the lost, and I command you to return .”

The last word reverberated with power, with will, and though it was neither aspect nor Speaking it was the culmination of a skilled witch’s craft: the weight of it was not to be trifled with. A burst of cold wind passed through the parlour even as the Wicked Enchanter’s corpse took a ragged gasp, as if the corpse had somehow sucked in the air, the brown-haired witch laid a hand atop the corpses’ brow. The shadows in the well-lit room somehow seemed longer to me, and deeper in their darkness.

“I have him,” she said, brow furrowed in concentration. “Ask your questions, and swiftly: he struggles against the call.”

I cast a look at Indrani, who seemed only mildly interested by all of this. Not her first time up close to such a thing, I imagined. Well, might as well get this over with.

“Are you the Wicked Enchanter?” I asked.

“I am,” the corpse rasped.

He twitched, as if trying to say more but being prevented by the Witch’s firm grasp.

“Have you ever spoken with, or been spoken at by, a woman named Marguerite of Baillons?”

“I have not,” the corpse rasped.

I frowned. Had the Wandering Bard changed face and name once more? No, perhaps my mistake had been of a different sort.

“Have you ever spoken with, or been spoken at by, the Wandering Bard?” I asked.

“Yes,” the corpse rasped.

My veins thrummed with something that was neither fear nor excitement, for though I was not cowed by the notion of tangling with the Intercessor neither was I looked forward to it. I already had too many deadly enemies. And yet I would not deny that I was also relieved. Until that single word, it’d been possible that I was just putting up my own fears on a blank slate. Now I knew my enemy, and the war could begin in earnest.

“What did she tell you?”

“She warned me that I had been noticed,” the Wicked Enchanter’s shade told us. “And that my joys in the wilds would come to an end.”

As I recalled, the dead villain had been the one to seek out the Grand Alliance and not the other way around, though there’d been some rumours of his existence in the far south.

“And this convinced you to seek out the Truce and Terms?” I pressed.

“Eventually. I brought my court to another three villages first.”

So there it was, I mused. There was a story, back home, about one of the petty kings that’d ruled in Callow before the Albans united the realm. An old man, said in some tales to have ruled over Liesse and others in Dormer, but all agreed he’d been as harsh a tyrant as they come. But his knights had stayed loyal, and kept him from knives in the back, and for subtler threats he had bargained with a wizard. For great favours he’d won an enchanted amulet that would glow when in the presence of poisons, and so for many years the tyrant had ruled safely in his castle. Until one day a clever cook, whose kin had been killed on the tyrant’s whim, arranged for a particular plate to be served: grilled mushrooms, the savoury kind growing in stone shadows known as the ‘False Wings’.

The tyrant ate, for the amulet had not glowed, and then drank of his favourite mead as he every meal. The mushrooms, the False Wings, were not a poison. Neither was the mead. Yet mixed together, as they were in the tyrant’s belly, they became a deadly mixture. The story went that the tyrant did not die of the poison, actually, but went so mad from the pain eating his insides he’d thrown himself off the highest tower of his keep.

The Wicked Enchanter was not, by himself, poison for the Truce and Terms. Scum, there was no denying that, but even scum was worth marshalling when the King of Death was on the march. The Truce being extended to the likes of him was the price of being able to pull in villains not quite so vile, who otherwise might wonder exactly where the line was drawn and elicit to instead remain in hiding – or, worse, make troubles at our back. And it’s necessary for what is to come , I thought. The Liesse Accords must apply to everyone, even the worst of us, and if their predecessor-treaty had been used as a way to execute villains many of Below’s would see them as a tool of heroic control and nothing more. Yet the Wicked Enchanter would have been tolerated, if he lent his Name and skills to the war against Keter.

He only became poison when the Red Axe was added to the meal: a heroine born of his very depredations, fated by her Role to slay him. And when she’d fulfilled that role, well... There would be time to consider the full breadth of that blow later, I told myself. First there was one last piece of information that I must extract from the dead. While it was possible the Bard would have relied on mere chance to have the two fated foes encounter each other, and chance did tend towards a certain theatrical certainty when it came to Named, the way the killing had been described to me smacked of it being arranged. It’d taken place in the Knot, the central halls of the Arsenal, when they were filled with people and other Named were not too far – yet not so close that they might be able to intervene.

The Intercessor had boots on the ground, like as not, and I wanted to know who was filling them.

“When you encountered the Red Axe,” I said, “where were you headed?”

“To the Repository.”

My brow rose.

“Why?” I asked him.

“A supply convoy had come the day before,” the corpse rasped. “The red orchid I paid for would be stashed in the usual crate.”

“I can’t hold much longer,” the Harrowed Witch hoarsely said.

I nodded in acknowledgement. Smuggling, huh. I supposed I shouldn’t be surprised: this place might be a wonder, but in the end people were people. I’d see to it this leak was plugged and whoever was involved got the noose, but what had been mentioned was not familiar to me. Red orchid, was it? I cast a curious look at Archer, whose own brow rose.

“Drug,” she told me. “Hard stuff, expensive and from the Free Cities. Hard to kick when the hooks are in, too.”

Probably illegal in Procer, I mused. An addiction – particularly one to a substance even Indrani seemed wary of – was an obvious lever for the Bard to use, I thought, but there would have been need for another Named to arrange the practical aspects of it. Possible well in advance, I thought, which was a disquieting notion.

“How did you hear about smuggler?” I asked the corpse.

“I was told by the Concocter,” the shade of the Wicked Enchanter rasped.

And there went the last detail I’d needed to know.

“Thank you for your service,” I told the dead thing. “You will receive your dues under the Terms, even from the grave.”

And not an inch more , I thought. I gestured at the brown-haired witch, signifying I was done.

“Kill the girl,” the corpse hissed. “ Killkillkillkill -”

“I release you,” the Harrowed Witch gasped. “Begone.”

Wind blew out violently, rustling my cloak and pushing back strands of my hair, but in its wake the room seemed settled. There’d ben a weight in the air, a tension, that had now been released. Sweat beaded the villainess brow, and she was panting like she’d just fought for her life.

“What a charmer, that one,” I nonchalantly said. “But at least he was talkative, thanks to you. You’ve done me a good turn, Harrowed Witch.”

“I know to keep my mouth shut, Your Majesty,” she weakly replied. “There is no need to present the stick now that you’ve dangled the carrot.”

“Archer’s already vouched for you,” I said, “else I would not have asked you at all.”

Aspasie shot Indrani a surprised look. I sympathized with her there, as Archer’s actual affections tended to be rather opaque. I tended to blame that on the Lady of the Lake, but honesty compelled me to admit it might have been in part natural inclination as well. Indrani replied with a smile, or at least tried to: she’d stuffed the last snack whole in her mouth, so her bulging cheeks rather undid the intended effect until she swallowed.

“I meant what I said,” I told the witch. “Consider how you’d like the favour repaid and return to me when you are certain.”

“You’re powerful enough to simply compel my service,” Aspasie said, sounding genuinely bewildered. “Why make this offer when you have nothing to gain?”

Because if you never reward siding with you, the only rewards to be won are in siding against you , I thought.

“Forced service is always mediocre,” I said. “And I’ve no patience for such things. I’ll use you, I won’t deny that or pretend we are equals, but you will also gain from the use.”

The Harrowed Witch slowly nodded, looking abashed, and hesitantly rose to her feet.

“I will keep your words in mind, Your Majesty,” she said. “And return to you with an answer.”

Archer from the side, finished licking up the last of the mousse on her fingers and snatched up my bottle of aragh. She tossed it at the brown-eyed witch, though she was too slow and only caught it after it’d hit her sternum and dropped into her outstretched hands.

“ Archer ,” she complained.

“I know how your head gets after a restless calling,” Indrani said, almost gentle. “Drink up, or you’ll have a pounding headache by the time you get to your rooms.”

“I’ll still have one if I drink this,” the Harrowed Witch said, “I’ll simply be drunk as well.”

“It’ll take the edge off, at least,” Archer snorted. “You still got your fancy herbs?”

“Julien scattered them,” she mourned.

Her brother, I took it. The realization seemingly drove the decision to pull at the bottle, though she choked on the Praesi hard liquor and had to force herself to gulp it down.

“What is this, the Dead King’s piss?” the Witch moaned, then had a moment of panic when she looked at me. “Um, I mean, Your Majesty-”

“Taghreb delicacy,” I told her amusedly. “Consider yourself lucky you never tried dragon’s milk.”

“I might have something for your head,” Indrani mused, “I’ll pass by your rooms later.”

“If you’re just bringing a hammer again, that ceased being even slightly funny after the third time,” the brown-haired woman complained.

I smothered my chuckle with all the practice of a woman well-acquainted with Indrani. It was a dismissal, even if one delivered by Archer instead of myself, and the villainess treated it like one. She made her courtesies and departed swiftly, my bottle still in hand. I blew out a long breath after Archer closed the door behind her.

“The Concocter, huh,” I said.

“She’d a shady, haughty prig,” Indrani said, “always has been, but I don’t think she’s your traitor Cat. Hells, what would the Bard have to even offer her? She doesn’t care about politics, only that she can keep making her potions.”

I wasn’t inclined to romanticize the Concocter having joined us without prompting, myself. Much like the Beastmaster she’d only come to us because Refuge had collapsed after Ranger’s disappearance, though her concerns had been more direct than Beastmaster’s: without a pack of Named to trade with, the Waning Woods had lost much of their appeal for her. It wasn’t like she was going to be hunting for manticore hearts or elderwood snake fangs herself. The Arsenal had been what she was after, the funding and books and safety of it, and she’d certainly thrived there. She’d gone from trading healing poultices in the woods to being able to order her pick of ingredients from Mercantis through Proceran envoys, and she’d been judged useful enough to be made the informal lead of one of the secret projects: Sudden Abjuration might also be under Roland, who was higher in the pecking order of the Arsenal, but it was ultimately an alchemical pursuit and so her word carried more weight than his.

“She’s involved with the smuggling, at least,” I replied. “And she brought in the Enchanter. I’m not saying she’s an ardent partisan of the Bard, but do you really think she’s above cutting a deal?”

The Intercessor had been studying human nature since the days where Calernia used bronze. She was a very, very skilled temptress when she put her mind to it.

“Dunno,” Indrani reluctantly admitted. “The Lady was always keen on reminding us that fucking around with your betters was a sure way to get burned, and we all learned that lesson some, but the Concocter was always clever. She got ahead just by trading, and she used what she had to get away with a lot. It’s always been her, then everybody else. I don’t think even Lady Ranger knew her real name.”

“I have questions for her,” I said. “How nicely they’ll be asked, that depends on her.”

Indrani put up her hands in appeasement.

“Don’t misunderstand, Cat,” she said. “We shared a camp years ago, that’s all there is to it. If you want to cut off a few fingers to set the mood, I’m not protesting. I’m just saying that the Arsenal is a wet dream come true for her, so she’d be careful about not mucking it up too much.”

I grunted in acknowledgement. To my understanding having shared the tutelage of the Ranger wasn’t really the kind of shared history that bound people together closely, save perhaps in shared mingled fear and admiration of the woman, but I still knew precious little about Indrani’s years there. She was rather tight-lipped about it, save for a few well-worn amusing stories she was always ready to dust off around a campfire when the drinks got flowing.

“Would she say more if you went knocking alone?” I asked.

“Would she be less wary if the wasn’t the fucking Black Queen popping up unannounced?” Indrani said, sounding amused. “Who knows? It might just be one of those unsolvable mysteries of life.”

I sighed.

“Fine,” I said. “Go ahead, see what you can get out of her. But ‘Drani, I need those answers. If you don’t think you can-”

“I can ,” Archer assured me.

I searched her face for a moment, to see if it was stung pride talking, but she seemed certain.

“I’ll get harsh if I have to,” Indrani continued when I did not answer. “Cat, you can trust me with this.”

But this was important, I almost said. This was the Bard, and I could not take risks, and... You were warned by Adjutant that you could only take so much on your shoulders without running yourself ragged, Akua’s voice echoed, over the broken corpse of a boy and the bitter taste of failure. You did not heed his words. I couldn’t handle this alone, guiding every moving part. Hells, having trusted allies might genuinely be the single absolute advantage I held over the Intercessor. And still it felt like a mistake to let Archer go alone, because what if she made a mistake? There was trusting someone, and then there was trusting them to win. I clenched my fists. This is fear , I thought. This fear speaking through my lips, a worm slipped into my mind through my ear. And once fear rules, she is the mother of defeat.

“Go,” I said. “And ask about the gas in the Miscellaneous Stacks as well. There are others here who could make those, but she would be the best hand for the work.”

“I’ll get it out of her,” Archer promised. “I know that look, though. Where are you headed?”

“A pretty blonde invited me for a drink,” I told her. “Figured now as good a time as any.”

“You’re pulling my leg, you wench,” she grinned.

“I speak no lie,” I grinned back. “If I’m not here, then look for me in the rooms of the Prince of Brus.”

Now, I’d never actually paid all that much attention to the arcane rules governing Proceran wine drinking so I had to wonder: which was it that went with asking a stranger to commit what was technically a spot of treason, a red or a white?

—

“And you say this liquor is called aragh ?” Prince Frederic Goethal said, sounding delighted.

I made a mental note to order a raise for the Callowan quartermaster here who’d ensured there would be a decent reserve of Legions and Army liquors. The Taghreb drink was actually a favourite among even my countrymen these days, the taste for it having spread from the former Legions officers to the men and women they’d trained.

“Indeed,” I replied. “I developed a taste for it when I trained at the War College. It was quite popular amongst the cadets there.”

The Prince of Brus was no longer in armour, having instead traded it for a riot of silk in red and blue whose shape and cut somehow evoked wings splayed across the Proceran warrior-prince’s chest. I availed myself of what was being displayed, namely some very nicely muscles on an otherwise slender body. The accompanying silken trousers were tight enough they made clear the calves under them were iron-hard, which they were very clearly meant to. Prince Frederic had been quite surprised by my unannounced visit but proved to be an amicable host, leading us to the little salon attached to his rooms and dismissing the servants so that we might speak alone.

“Ah, the famous War College,” the blond mused. “I have heard many tales of it, most of them I suspect of being splendid lies.”

He popped open the bottle and laid down the cork on the table between us – once again a low one between two sofas, the Proceran basics had very clearly been used as a standard for decoration across the Arsenal – before offering me a smile.

“Unless, Your Majesty, it is true that you once defeated an army with an exploding goat?”

I coughed.

“It was only a company, and the goats were part of a greater strategy,” I confessed.

“Dear Gods,” Frederic Goethal mused, “if I return home with word that Special Tribune Robber is not a complete and utter liar, the Morgentor itself might well fall over from the shock.”

That little shit , I thought, not entirely angrily. A quarter of the continent away, and still he was finding ways to be a pain in my ass.

“Tell me he’s not doing plays anymore, at least,” I asked.

“Their all-goblin rendition of ‘The Election of Blessed Clothor’ saw several of my courtiers weep openly,” the Prince of Brus cheerfully denied.

I noted he did not specify whether the weeping was at the beauty of it or the sheer horror. Truly, the man was a skilled diplomat. I gestured to offer to pour from the bottle and he conceded, rising instead to fetch to very crystal glasses with gold rims. Gods, I hoped those were his and not the Arsenal’s. If my kingdom’s taxes had ended up pitching for gold-rimmed glasses, someone on my side had been botching their job. I poured him a generous measure, and a smaller one for myself – I’d already had a few, after all. Besides, from what I recalled Proceran court etiquette dictated that women should drink daintier cups of strong spirits. Larger cups of wine, though, strangely enough. Something about men having stronger stomachs but women better palates.

“Prince Frederic,” I began.

“Frederic,” he insisted. “I’ve told you before, Your Majesty.”

“Catherine, then,” I replied.

It was a false closeness, this, but not one that was particularly unpleasant to me. I suspected that if I got to know this man, I might actually grow to like him.

“It would be my pleasure,” the Prince of Brus smiled, perfect white teeth and stunning eyes taking me aback. “Might I offer a toast, Catherine? To the Grand Alliance!”

He raised his cup.

“To old enemies, and new friends,” I replied, touching his glass with mine.

We both drank, and I noted with approval that he did not choke and his eyes did not water. It was always pleasing when a man knew how to hold his liquor. Our glasses touched the table, and the Prince of Brus leaned back.

“I believe,” he said, “that I might have interrupted you. I offer apology, and willing ear.”

I mulled over that a moment, choosing how the subject was to be broached,

“Are you fond of stories, Frederic?” I asked.

“A complicated question,” the Prince of Brus said. “As a boy I would have mocked it, but I have learned better in the years that followed. It would be a lie to speak of like or dislike, perhaps. In the end I take stories to be much like the finest of paintings: a thousand men and women can look at the same and find different sight, yet none of them are entirely right or wrong.”

“Ah,” I mused, “but there lies the power of it all: for a thousand men and women, there was something there to be found.”

“I have known the right truth to give a man wings, Catherine,” Frederic Goethal quietly said. “I do not deny the power of stories.”

“That is comforting to hear,” I said. “Now, if I spoke of intercession to you, would the word mean anything?”

The Grand Alliance was aware of the Wandering Bard, the enigmatic Named that had not joined the Truce and Terms and could not be trusted – I would have had her known as a foe outright, but the Grey Pilgrim had been bitterly opposed. Knowledge of the Intercessor, though, was more sparse. I had shared much of what I knew with Cordelia Hasenbach, and in turn she had shared the insights of the Augur, but I did not know how broadly she had spread that knowledge. Considering Frederic Goethal was both a prince of Procer and Named, though, he struck me as likelier to be warned than most.

“It would,” the man murmured. “Agnes Hasenbach is a woman of deep and painful wisdom, whose word I will not gainsay.”

“Knowing both these things,” I said, “do you understand how a ruler who is Named might sometimes act according to rules that are not the rules of Creation’s shallows?”

I’d asked Vivienne about Prince Frederic Goethal, about his reputation in Procer, before he became Named. He’d garnered some interest from me since he was the only southern royal to have marched his armies north instead of south. The report had mentioned some things that were well-known, like the fact that he was wildly popular among Lycaonese as well as northwestern Alamans and apparently considered to be among the finest warriors and generals in Procer, as well as more discreet truths. He was considered to be one of Cordelia’s fiercest loyalists and had once proposed to her, but within the Highest Assembly and Proceran royalty at large he was considered rather indifferent to politics. He’d survived this long dealing with cutthroat princes though, I thought, so he wouldn’t be slow on the uptake. In the highest reaches of Procer, even standing still required a great deal of cunning.

“The kind of action,” Prince Frederic slowly said, “that an unenlightened observer might consider... harmful to one’s position, I imagine. Yet most sensible according to a different set of rules.”

Gods, but I did enjoy dealing with intelligent allies. It was always a treat not to have to drag people to the right conclusion kicking and screaming.

“I would not want a request for such an action,” I said, “to be taken as having another, baser purpose.”

“I am not blind to the corpses you have left behind you, Queen Catherine,” the Prince of Brus softly said, “or to fell deeds done by your hands. But I also remember the stench on the fields of Aisne, and that men had never needed Below or Tower to make butchery of themselves. I also know that if it is the destruction of Procer that you sought, the most required of you was not to do a thing at all. We are allies, Catherine Foundling. If you need my help, I will do what I can.”

I looked at him steadily and tried not to let out that I was actually rather impressed with the man. After a moment I cleared my throat.

“I’ll be direct, then,” I said. “I need you to break out the Red Axe from where she is currently being held, then protect her from what is coming.”

“And what is it that is coming?” the Kingfisher Prince asked, eyes gone hard as steel.

“I cannot yet name it,” I said, “but I know this: were stand atop a mound of sharpers, and the death of the Red Axe is how the match is struck.”

Chapter 20: Hook

“Fate is not the river but the fisherman: run wild as you will, it will reel you in before the end.”
– Queen Edda Norland of Summerholm, shortly before the surrender of her crown to House Alban

I was a city girl at heart so hunting had never been something I thought all that fondly of.

Not that I hated it, either. Out in the country, away from walls and merchants, a good stag or a few geese were a good way for my people to feed their families. One that’d become increasingly common after the Conquest, actually: with the removal of most nobles in the kingdom, there were no longer great forests and fields reserved for the sole hunting right of aristocrats. The Empire had required a yearly fee in silver for the right to hunt in a governor’s jurisdiction, but otherwise been largely indifferent to the practice. I’d maintained the policy, and why wouldn’t I? It was a good way for my subjects to put meat on the table, especially those who might not have otherwise been able to afford it. But that’d been in the country, not in Laure.

There hunting had been a leisurely pursuit for the wealthy and the noble , practiced by great trains of riders and multiple packs of hounds. Sometimes the animals being hunted were not even edible: by ancient law foxes could not be hunted for sport in Callow, but wolves and bears could and frequently were. It’d been a great deal of pageantry and gold pissed away on reminding people that even under the rule of the Dread Empire the rich and highborn were still important and worthy of awe. The coin would have been better spent ensuring that the basins the street drains emptied in near Nelly’s Alley didn’t fill up after rain and so end up becoming an open-air sewer that stank up a good dozen city blocks like you wouldn’t believe come summer sun, in my humble opinion, but what the Hells did I know?

I’d had them properly dug anew and done during my first year as queen, even though Ratface had howled about the costs.

Still, general distaste for the spectacle or not it’d been impossible not to pick up a few things about hunting being born in Callow. It wasn’t as simple business as riding a swift horse after a stag and running it down with a spear, else highborn would not get to be so bloody pretentious about the whole thing. You had to tire out the beast, set dogs after it so it’d run itself to exhaustion. Only when it was on the edge of collapse would it turn and fight, antlers down as fear turned to despair, and only then was the kill to be made. If the nobles had gone after the stag themselves from the start, their horses would have tired out long before the stag would. I was after a beast of my own, here in the Arsenal, so I’d used a method not so dissimilar to that of my countrymen: to get the enemy running, I’d sent out a pack of baying hounds.

The Mirror Knight’s band was even now chasing down a conspiracy to bring it into the light, though perhaps not the conspiracy they believed they were. They were a cacophonous bunch, but for all that I believed they’d be able to shake somethin g loose. They certainly had the power and numbers for it: four heroes and the Maddened Keeper, with Adjutant to keep an eye on them and ensure they did not end up misusing the authority I’d granted them. They’d begun their investigation with the Hunted Magician who, all things aside, we could all agree was a shifty fellow. Whether or not he’d been up to any sort of wickedness was not of too great import, as far as I was concerned: more crucial was that the heroes would be seen digging, and word would soon after spread it was with my blessing. There was someone in the Arsenal with something to hide, and ruby to piglets that little tale would get them moving. With such fine hounds out in the woods someone’s never was going to crack, and they’d want to make sure their tracks were covered.

Following them should neatly reveal exactly what it was that was being covered up.

Mind you, the hand behind the opposition was not some ingrate prince with more greed than sense or a heroine fresh off her first nemesis’ death and looking to sink her teeth into another victory: it was the Intercessor pulling the strings here. Just because she’d already struck blows didn’t mean she was going to stop hitting me below the belt. If anything, it’d be the opposite. So I had to see to my own defences, which meant keeping the goblinfire away from any open flames. The Red Axe was a natural target there but seeing to her protection myself would make me directly involved in her death if it happened, which would be considerably worse than her simply dying. No, someone else needed to be charged with that else I was running into the risk that my personal involvement had been the desired object from the start.

The Kingfisher Prince was of high rank, popular with heroes and his word would mean a great deal to the likes of the Mirror Knight if he vouched for me. That he’d been demonstrably competent and receptive to the concept of the manner of war being fought over the Arsenal had sold me on the notion for good, and so off he went to sae the Red Axe with a signed set of orders from me granting him permission to do so under the Terms. Gods help him, mine and maybe even Above if they were to share a win instead of pissing in the communal porridge bowl out of principle.

Now, it wouldn’t be enough to simply wait and see now that the hunt had been sounded. Which was why Archer was hitting up her old acquaintance the Concocter for answers, a conversation that should end up with the latter spitting out a part of the Wandering Bard’s design here. It had to have been a long-term scheme, I figured: the Red Axe and the Wicked Enchanter had been tools of opportunity, but the tools to use them had already been in place. The smuggling, the precise timing used to guide the Enchanter onto the path of the heroine that’d kill him? That’d been arranged long before, one of no doubt many levers to nudge along the happenings within the Arsenal. After that it was just a matter of the Intercessor getting the right Named close enough, and she could get it all to begin rolling downhill.

The Concocter wouldn’t know the whole web, I was aware of that: there should be at least one outright accomplice to the Bard in here, as well as several agents unwitting and not. But by dragging into the light what she knew, I could get a glimpse of what the levers were meant to accomplish. And once I knew that, well, I could smash the Intercessor’s game to pieces with a sledgehammer and force her to swallow the broken shards with a smile. So there we were, I’d considered after the Kingfisher Prince had set off. The Mirror Knight’s band were out there turning over primarily – one hoped, at least – stones, Archer was finding me a thread to tug at so the net might unravel and the charming Prince Frederic was making sure this wasn’t about to violently turn on me.

Now, the Bard would see those stories in motion same as I did. The question was: if I was her, where would I strike at?

Setting the Mirror Knight after the Kingfisher would have been obvious, except my little letter and Frederic being trusted had cut that disaster off before it could start looming. The Concocter wasn’t officially one of mine, but with what Indrani had told me about her I could easily unmake any attempt to claim that ‘the Black Queen’s agent was persecuting a heroine’. The Mirror Knight’s band could be tricked I figured, even with Hakram keeping an eye on them, but there wasn’t a lot that could physically threaten them. At this point I’d be willing to let them encounter an early setback without intervening, anyway, since that should ensure they later brutally crushed whoever had beat them this early in the pattern.

My trouble, right now, was that I could not see an easy way the arrows I’d loosed could be made to swerve. Out in the open the Intercessor couldn’t beat me, because even if I was distrusted I was still recognized. A figure of authority, backed by other figures of authority. Yet Archer should be unearthing part of her machinations where I’d sent her, and using violence to prevent her of doing that would reveal part of the machinations as well: whoever struck at Indrani would be one of the Bard’s trusted hands, and pumping them for information would be even more useful than shaking some insights out of the Concocter. There probably were ways to beat my hand, but I didn’t know what they were and that meant I couldn’t prepare for them. Or, at least, prepare in specific.

There was going to be an answer, and I would have to react to it. While I could not prepare for the specifics for the unknown, I could prepare for the unknown. Practically speaking, that meant assembling a team to handle whatever came crawling out of the woodworks on the Intercessor’s behalf. Calling back anybody I’d sent out would be a mistake, unmaking the story they were playing out, which meant if I was to gather some sort of bastard band of five I’d need to pick from the rest of the Arsenal’s Named. Four comrades, huh? I could do that. First, I’d naturally needed a trusted second.

Thankfully I had a spare lying around.

—

“I’ve just had to put out a library fire,” Roland of Beaumarais, also known as the Rogue Sorcerer, mildly told me as he washed his hands free of ash. “I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that?”

“I know lots of things, Roland,” I vaguely replied.

His hands left the now-clouded water of the basin and he methodically dried them with a cloth.

“Books, Catherine?” he said, sounding agonized. “Castles, armies, ancient architectural wonders, I can make my peace with them all. But books , Catherine? A line has to be drawn somewhere.”

“If such a thing had been done, it would not have been done lightly,” I said.

“You haven’t even been here a whole day,” he complained.

Actually, I mused, this could also work.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m a reckless, dangerous woman who’ll do anything to win.”

He cocked his head to the side.

“Have you been drinking?” he asked.

Well, yes. But that was not related to this. I decided, for the sake of tactics, to ignore his rejoinder.

“Which is why you should come with me,” I said. “Be the voice of reason, keep me out of trouble. Prevent me from burning more libraries.”

A beat passed.

“Not that I’ve done that,” I added.

Another beat passed.

“But hey, the day’s young,” I added with a hopeful smile.

He twitched a little. Still, under the harried exterior I could see something sharpen in his eyes. The understanding that none of this was as casual as it looked, or without calculation.

“The way Archer tells it, your last designated voice of reason once stole the entire sun,” Roland said.

“She’s still complaining we never got to pawn that off, isn’t she?” I sighed.

“I expect sooner or later the litany will be put to verse,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “Still, large boots to fill.”

He shrugged.

“I’ve nothing else planned for the day, however,” he said. “So I supposed I might as well.”

“That’s exactly the kind of spirit I’m looking for,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Come, Roland, we have an important task ahead of us.”

He shot me a steady look.

“I don’t suppose you could tell me a little more, that I might equip myself accordingly?” he asked.

I hummed, then thoughtfully clasped my chin.

“We’re going to cram as many potential traitors as possible into a band of five, then dabble into some stirring heroics,” I replied.

“Ah,” Roland of Beaumarais nonchalantly said. “We’ll have to take a detour through the Workshop, then. It’s where I keep my war artefacts.”

Good man , I thought, and smiled.

—

“Her name is Adanna,” Roland said as we walked, “and she was born, as she tells it, in Smyrna.”

“It’s got roots in Mtethwa,” I noted. “Not a common Soninke name, though. You said she’s highborn?”

“She certainly behaves like it,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “Though there is a distinct Ashuran bent to her manners.”

“What colour are her eyes?” I asked.

“Golden,” he replied. “It is quite unusual, even for a Chosen.”

I let out a low whistle.

“That’s not just highborn, that’s from one of the old lines,” I said.

Born in Smyrna, was she? It was one of the two cities of the Thalassocracy of Ashur, its capital. Hells, that must have been quite the tale. It would have been a point of pride for the Wasteland family they’d fled to have them assassinated, and old families like that tended to have a few grimoires’ worth of nasty tricks to pull.

“She’s made her disaster for the Dread Empire and all those who dwell within it quite clear,” Roland said. “It has been one of the reasons she so frequently clashes with Hierophant.”

Which was why Masego wouldn’t be part of this band, among other things. I also wanted him free to be a source of knowledge and wisdom for any of the three stories I’d loosed, which he couldn’t be if I was dragging him along for mine.

“Hierophant’s not here,” I said. “And she requested an audience with me, you said. We can have words as we move.”

“I expect that was not quit what she wished for,” Roland said, “but regardless, here we are.”

That last part had not been an outburst of fatalism on the Blessed Artificer’s behalf but instead Roland informing me we’d reached the Artificer’s quarters in the Workshop. We’d already picked up the Rogue Sorcerer’s artefacts, which were now stuffing his pockets and sleeves, and it’d not been a long walk from there. The bare stone hallways here were little different than anywhere else in the Arsenal, and though I would have enjoyed visiting the great workshops of the Workshop – birthplace of wonders that it was – there was no time for sightseeing. Instead we found ourselves in front of a neat wooden door, and without ceremony I knocked against it with my staff a few times. Mere moments later it was wrenched open to my surprise.

“I’ve told you already, I won’t-”

Adanna of Smyrna, wearing small spectacles over her golden eyes and garbed in clothes I would have expected more of some kindly toymaker than a powerful Named, was visibly taken aback when she realized who it was standing at her door. Realizing that the Rogue Sorcerer was at my side did nothing to help he confusion.

“Good evening,” I said. “I see that look on your face means I won’t have to bother with introductions, Blessed Artificer.”

“I am, yes,” the dark-skinned woman said. “I know of you, Black Queen. And Roland as well.”

“Splendid,” I said. “I’ve need of your services for a bit, as it happens. I’ll give you a moment to change and equip yourself.”

“Equip myself?” the Blessed Artificer blinked. “For what?”

“Trouble,” I vaguely said.

Yeah, looking more closely at her she had that highborn look down to the bone: quite literally, as those high cheekbones were one of those telltale marks of Soninke nobility. This Adanna of Smyrna had not quite inherited the inhuman good looks of Wasteland aristocracy, though she was far form ugly. I supposed having met Malicia in person and spent years in Akua’s presence had rather skewed my standards when it came to beauty, anyway. She’d definitely not inherited the Wasteland social schooling, anyhow, as it took her a full three heartbeats before she recovered from the onrush of surprises.

“I do not recall agreeing to lend you my aid, Black Queen,” the Artificer said, chin rising. “And if you believe that the Rogue Sorcerer’s presence will be enough to bully me-”

“I do believe you’ve just indirectly called me a tool,” Roland noted, though he sounded rather good-humoured about it.

“- into compliance then I assure you, you are sorely mistaken,” the heroine finished.

She had that look about her, like a cat ready to hiss the moment a hand was extended, but then that in the first place she’d assume I would need Roland to bully anyone told me exactly how I needed to handle her.

“Please lend me your aid,” I bluntly asked.

Ah, so she had been taught to hide her emotions some. She wasn’t great at it – Gods, but they would have eaten her alive in Praes – but she did smooth out her surprise after a moment.

“It is for a noble purpose,” Roland told her.

Noble might be a bit of a stretch, I mused, but did not contradict him.

“And you requested an audience, as I recall,” I said. “We can see to some of that as we walk.”

The golden-eyed Named hesitated.

“What is it you require of me, exactly?” she asked.

Gotcha , I smiled.

—

In what I hesitated to call a stroke of luck, given the amount of Named in the Arsenal, the last two Named I’d decided on were in the same place.

“You know I respect your judgement a great deal,” Roland murmured, leaning towards me.

“People only ever say that sentence with a but implied,” I said.

He shrugged, not denying me.

“This seems like it will make a terrible band of five,” the Rogue Sorcerer assessed.

“Yes,” I grinned, “just genuinely terrible, wouldn’t it be?”

He cursed under his breath in what I recognized to be tradertalk.

“Last time I saw you that savagely enthusiastic, I was thrown off a balcony,” he complained.

“If a villain throws you off it, it’s really more of a cliff,” I said, echoing an old foe.

One who’d deserved both better and worse than what she’d got, but that’d been the lesson of the Proceran campaign hadn’t it? That I was not facing righteous steel things glinting of Light but people of flesh and blood, with all the complexities of character that implied. Though we’d been quiet in our little talk, we’d not been that quiet: the Blessed Artificer overheard, and was not shy in offering up her own assessments.

“One’s useless, the other is drunk and useless,” Adanna of Smyrna said.

Well, I couldn’t deny the drunk part at least. The Arsenal held within its walls hundreds of people, who while they might not have been forced to come here had not been aware of exactly how long or where they would be. Given the concerns about the Dead King’s inevitable interest in this place and the fact that relative secrecy was the Arsenal’s best defence, we’d known form the beginning that people would only rarely be able to leave once they’d been brought into the fold. As a consequence, aside from what had been tacked onto the seat of Grand Alliance’s research and artifact-crafting to fill its secondary role as a communication relay for rulers and high officers, thought had been given to the entertainment of all the men and women we’d cram into here possible for years on end.

That was the niche the Frolic was meant to fill, in essence. Accessible only through the central halls of the Knot – as well as a discreet tunnel coming from the Alcazar – that part of the Arsenal had been built as a sort of ring made up of diversions. One section was essentially a sprawling tavern, another a private little brothel, a gaudy strip was a gambling house and there’d even been a fighting pit tacked on. Callowans and Procerans were fond of dogfights, but the more exotic beasts Levantines liked to throw into pits had been deemed too expensive and dangerous for consideration. Duels and brawls, though, were allowed. Only to first blood and with healers in attendance, but a few hundred people could not be squeezed in tight between walls for years without some fighting erupting.

Better to give a clear and controlled outlet for that strife than let it erupt out of sight, where there’d be no healers waiting.

What I was looking at, though, was not anger being settled with first blood. It was a crowd of maybe half a hundred cheering at one of the sloppiest fistfights I’d ever seen. The part of me that remembered fighting for coin in another pit was almost offended by how fucking terrible these people – these Named! – were at hand-to-hand combat. The three of us stood in the shadows of the entrance hall, looking down at the fighting pit and the rafter above it, and let the sound wash over us.

“Fallen,” the crowd howled. “Fallen, Fallen, Fallen.”

The Fallen Monk was one of Indrani’s band, and one of the villains on our rolls that heroes tended to react the most violent to. That was not because his sins were so great compared to the rest of Below’s lot, but because once upon a time he’d instead been known as the Merry Monk. A Proceran hero from their southern lands, whose very public fall from grace had been the talk of Salamans for year: it wasn’t every day someone force-fed one of the Holies until her belly literally burst. Archer counted him as better at sneaking around than Vivienne had been back in the day, and good as a bloodhound when something needed to be found in a town. When it came to fighting, though, aside from being able to take some punishment and being quite useful against Light-users she’d never considered him anything all that special for a Named.

Fortunately for the overweight and very clearly drunk middle-aged man in cloth robes, his opponent was even worse a brawler.

The Exalted Poet’s face paint, which had been a neat affair of black and red when I first saw him today, and since been damaged by a purpling black eye and an amount of sand that really could only have come from having his entire face shoved into it. His lack of shirt made it clear that they made them muscled in the Dominion, but for all that he was built like a warrior he certainly wasn’t performing like one: the punch he threw at the Fallen Monk’s face was met with a mirror on the other side, the two of them rocking back when they hit each other. The Monk stayed up though, if rocking on his feet, while the Poet took a dive and had to hastily push off the sandy ground of the fighting circle before he could get kicked in the ribs by the fat fallen priest. By the amount of empty bottles the audience had carelessly left around in the stands, they must have been at this for some time now.

“It is written in the Book of All Things,” the Fallen Monk shouted red-cheeked for the audience, “that those who are worthy of the love of the Heavens will be blessed with their golden love. Bless me, you mighty asses!”

The watchers cheered on, and someone threw a wineskin at the villain for what was evidently not the first time this afternoon. The former priest guzzled down what looked like some pale wine, even as the Exalted Poet got back on his feet and charged – even when tackled in the belly, the Monk kept drinking as he went down.

“They are perfect,” I solemnly announced. “Exactly what I was looking for.”

“It cannot be that hard to find a fool and an idiot,” the Blessed Artificer replied.

“The Monk has a body count of over a hundred, as I hear it,” Roland noted. “Though I suspect close quarters were not involved.”

Actually, the more I watched those two the less I was convinced that he was right. Sure, the Monk stumbled around a lot and got tackled and took punches. Yet, almost as if by happenstance, never at an angle that’d hurt him much: bruises might ensue, but little more. Either was damned good at taking hits, or he was a better fighter than what he was letting on here.

“If I fetch them myself, Black Queen, can we then proceed to more important matters?” the Blessed Artificer asked me. “You have yet to hear the complaint I mean to lodge.”

Somehow, I suspected that if I let her handle that we’d not have five Named up here but three down there. Roland suddenly stiffened, which caught my attention, and he discreetly gestured to our common right – though somewhat behind me. Up there, sitting on a bench and leaning back against the wall, another Named was reading a book. Sallow-skinned and thin-haired, the Sinister Physician had always looked to me like the last person you’d ever want to let cut you open. His skills as a healer were beyond dispute, though, if not his occasional indulgence in taking vitality or souls as payment or even his clear obsession with immortality.

“They’ve observed the rules, then,” I murmured at Roland. “They’re meant to have a healer at hand.”

I saw no need to seek the other villain out, as it happened. I’d not come for him. But that he was here, though, was interesting: at the very least, it meant he wasn’t elsewhere . At first glance anyway.

“Check if it’s an illusion,” I told the Rogue Sorcerer. “Discreetly.”

“You are ignoring me, Black Queen,” the Blessed Artificer impatiently said. “If that is all you sought me out for-”

“I’ll see to it myself, Artificer,” I replied.

Her open irritation I didn’t particularly care about, or even the threat to leave she’d obviously been building up to. I knew an empty threat when I heard one: for all that the heroine at the very least disliked me and had some axes to grind with Roland, she was too curious about where this was headed to leave now. I’d not missed her constant not-quite-subtle glances at my staff, either. While it was my understanding that Light and miracles where her wheelhouse and the length of yew I’d retrieved from the heart of Twilight after its birth was not exactly either, neither was it simply a staff. And as there was no sorcery at the heart of that difference, perhaps her interest in that undefined otherness should have been expected. A halfway clever Named could to a lot, with the undefined.

“So?” I pressed the Rogue Sorcerer.

He released what he’d been clutching in one of his pockets, breathing out.

“Not an illusion,” he confirmed.

Good, that was one more Named accounted for. Time for me to get bring in our last two comrades, then. The audience that’d been cheering for the two brawling Named all the while had not noticed the three of us, as we’d stayed in the shadows of the hall, but when I began to limp down the stairs a few caught sight of me. My face might not have been all that recognizable, but even this bare a crown and the Mantle of Woe were enough for exclamations of Black Queen to shiver through the crowd. I ignored the attention and made my way to the edge of the pit, looking down at the two Named whose brawling had ceased when silence spread. I flicked a look at the people up here.

“Dismissed,” I said, voice ringing.

Not one argued otherwise, and they filed out with a rather subdued mood hanging over them. Of the two Named below, only the Exalted Poet looked embarrassed at having been caught slugging it out in the sand with a stranger.

“Your Majesty,” the Fallen Monk jovially greeted me, his Lower Miezan crisp and perfect, “a pleasure to meet you in person.”

He raised a wineskin, not even the same one I’d seen thrown at him earlier.

“I hear from a common friend you’re partial to the pales, so it would be my honour to surrender this triumphant bounty to you,” he continued.

I snorted.

“Tempting,” I said, “but I’ve had enough to drink for a while. I’m here to inform you that Archer has lost you to me at cards.”

The middle-aged man cocked an almost incongruously delicate eyebrow.

“On a good hand at least, I hope,” he said.

“Half a good hand,” I said, then added, “seen double.”

That startled a laugh out of him.

“I am in your service for the day, then,” the Fallen Monk bowed, adroit for all his impressive girth. “Though I cannot think of what you might require an old priest like me for.”

“You’d be surprised,” I said, and turned my stare to the Exalted Poet.

Sadly enough, he’d put a shirt on again. He bowed very graciously, though, so I’d allow it.

“We meet again, Black Queen,” the Levantine hero said.

Yeah, that voice was still like getting honey poured in my ear – and drawing on Night just the slightest bit ensured there was no sorcery adding on to the impression this time.

“So we do,” I replied. “As it happens, our common acquaintance the Monk was not the only man I am here to look for. I’ve a need for your particular skills.”

“Indeed?” the Poet replied, sounding surprised. “I am most flattered, Honoured Queen, yet also befuddled. What is it you might need them for ?”

I reached for my pipe, in the inner pockets of my cloak, and took it in hand while I went fishing for a packet of wakeleaf. I was about to tear it open, when a tremor went through the Arsenal. A second happened a moment later, stronger, and I felt the very stone around us shiver. You horrid wench , I thought towards the Bard, you could have waited until I actually lit the damned pipe.

“Don’t you hate it when a question answers itself?” I said, matching the Exalted Poet’s eyes.

I had my answer about how it was the Intercessor would avoid the story arrows I’d loosed at her, at least.

If you couldn’t move the arrows, I supposed instead you could move everything else .

Chapter 21: Line

“Turn back, Emperor, for if you venture further west the sole stretch of land you’ll have of me will be six feet long and three feet deep.”
– King Jehan the Wise, before the famous Battle of the Sparrows

I tapped the side of my pipe, seeding flame, and drew in a long breath of wakeleaf.

It was a good gambit, I decided as the Arsenal shuddered again. Shuddered like a wall taking trebuchet fire, like a gate being touched by the ram: someone, something was trying to force its way in. An obvious outside threat would draw in the Mirror Knight and his lot like a moth to the flame, and in the ensuing chaos a move could be made against either Archer or the Kingfisher Prince. Hells, if the mess got big enough a ruthless schemer like the Intercessor might just be intending to tie up all her loose ends through casualties. My choices in giving answer were limited, each an opportunity I could not easily discard. Fighting at the Mirror Knight’s side now might earn trust I’d need down the line, but intercepting enemy action headed for Archer or Prince Frederic would pay greater and more immediate dividends. I breathed out the smoke and offered a calm glance at the Named assembled around me before turning to the side.

“Sinister Physician,” I called out.

The man had closed his book and risen to his feet the moment the first shiver went through the stone around us, but aside from a small bow to me he’d shown no interest in being involved with this situation.

“My queen,” the villain replied, turning and indifferent gaze on me. “How my I serve?”

“Head out to the Knot and prepare to receive wounded,” I ordered. “Set up a temporary infirmary. You have my full backing to requisition whatever you might need.”

A glint of interest appeared at that, though not particularly deep. Still, unpleasant as the man was he’d be able to handle this without trouble. The Knot was the centre of the Arsenal, a mess of winding hallways, but it would have the benefits of being accessible no matter where the enemy struck from and being some distance from the fighting itself: it struck me as the best location to set up our healers.

“It shall be done,” the Sinister Physician said. “If I might take my leave?”

“Do,” I replied. “As for the rest of you, we’ll be headed elsewhere.”

So, should I see to the front door or the back ? I mused. Either way I’d be taking a risk. Hells, given who I was up against it might be that there was simply no good decision to be made here. Perhaps instead of thinking in terms of avoiding mistakes, I should be thinking in term of picking the mistake whose consequences I could deal with more ably. No, that was still playing the Bard’s game. Getting stuck in a story, digging in my heels. A defensive mindset would inevitably lead to my loss when facing an opponent whose understanding of the terrain was superior to my own. I’d already sent out Archer and the Kingfisher Prince, I must now trust in their skills. Where could I attack ?

“A defence must be organized,” the Blessed Artificer seriously said.

“Catherine?” Roland asked, eyes meeting mine.

He’d always been a sharp one. He must suspect by now we were fighting on more than one front and that I’d gathered this band of five as much to make sure it wasn’t out of my sight as to make us of it. Which means heading into a fight wouldn’t necessarily be the best move, I thought, but then breathed in sharply. Not, I corrected myself, it absolutely would be the best move. Sure, as a fighting band we’d be highly dysfunctional at best: both the Exalted Poet and the Fallen Monk would be better against people than the sort of things we were likely to face, and the Blessed Artificer wasn’t a frontline Named. Furthermore, while the Rogue Sorcerer and I were both forces to reckon with, neither of us were in the habit of being in the thick of it these days. We’d grown used to relying on martial Names to take the frontline. But that only mattered if the objective of the fight was victory, which it wouldn’t be here.

If any of these people had served or were serving as agents of the Intercessor, given the stories we had unfolding they were likely to be very difficult to kill even when by common sense they should be thrice-dead and buried. Creation would nudge things to help them might survive, so that in the last act of the play they could be unmasked by the triumphant heroes. The quickest way to ferret out an answer, I thought, would actually be taking this bunch into a fight far beyond what such a purposefully shoddy band of five would be able to handle. Good, I mused as I breathed in wakleaf and smiled, that meant I could attack and defend with the same stroke. I spat out the smoke, Roland batting it away so it wouldn’t linger near his face.

“This is a distraction,” I said. “We need to intercept the enemy before they get what they came for. Roland, which would you believe the most likely target for destruction among our potential war assets?”

He grimaced.

“Either the Severance or that one theoretical exercise,” the Rogue Sorcerer said after a beat. “I’ll add that the former is significantly better defended.”

So either the weapon that might possibly end the Dead King or the first steps of Quartered Seasons. The aspect I’d taken out of the Saint of Swords’ corpse and which had since been forged into a sword was unique, and thus would be irreplaceable if lost. The other was technically recoverable, since while losing Masego’s set up here in the Arsenal would set us back some months the truly important part was the surveying artefacts we’d seeded across several realms. It’d be a pain to re-establish connections with those again, but hardly impossible. Of those two tools it was my opinion that only Quartered Seasons’ ultimate results would feasibly be able to harm the Intercessor, but that didn’t necessarily meant that was what she’d be going for. The Dead King had implied, back at the conference in Salia, that some aspect of the Intercessor’s plans hinged on the corpse of Judgement the Procerans had dredged up being used.

I’d worked on Hasenbach enough that I knew she’d not pull that trigger without having no other option left, so I had to wonder if that was the Bard’s game: peeling away every other alternative, until that was left was oblivion’s approach and a finger on the trigger.

“The sword is in the Repository,” I said. “The other is...”

“Belfry,” Roland said.

Masego’s quarters in that part of the Arsenal, then. He’d never quite understood why anyone would separate their life from their work, as he saw little difference between the two.

“And for those of us slower to catch on,” the Fallen Monk cheerfully said, “might an explanation be provided?”

The Exalted Poet cleared his throat in support.

“Please,” he politely added.

“Isn’t it obvious?” the Blessed Artificer sighed. “They believe someone’s making a grab for the most dangerous projects in the Arsenal: the Severity and the Hierophant’s own private research.”

Wait, had she called the sword the Severity? From what Roland had said, I’d thought it was the Severance. Didn’t matter, I decided. Especially not given what she was trying to pull here.

“That research is secret by the order of more crowns than any of you can afford to defy,” I mildly said. “Do have a care about those loose lips, Artificer.”

“Light ever cleanses,” the Blessed Artificer replied, uncowed. “Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.”

“I must have been unclear,” I patiently said, “if you ever talk of that subject again, within the hour I’ll have an order signed by every high officer of the Grand Alliance to have you executed without trial or appeal. You have absolutely no idea what you’re trifling with, and your ignorant swaggering is a potential existential threat to this continent. Congratulations, Blessed Artificer. There aren’t a lot of people alive who’ve had apocalypse counted as a possible consequence of their blind arrogance.”

Adanna of Smyrna reared back like I’d slapped her across the face, which to be fair I essentially had. I did not regret it, for I had rather limited patience for unearned self-importance these days. Especially from heroes.

“I,” she said, “I didn’t-”

“Think?” I coolly replied. “Consider this matter with a thimble’s worth of commons sense? Evidently not.”

Harsh as I might have been right now, there had been ways to handle this other than sneaking around investigating and then trying to force my hand by talking about it publicly. If she’d brought her concerns to the White Knight earlier, or Hells even to the First Prince, then this could all have been dealt with by the mechanisms we’d put in place for that very purpose. Instead she’d blundered onwards, heroine to the bone, and become yet another ingredient in the poisonous brew the Bard was trying to pour down my throat. My gaze swept across the rest of the gathered Named.

“I expect I won’t have to repeat myself,” I added.

“Already forgotten,” the Fallen Monk said, raising his wineskin.

“My Chantant is lacking at the best of times,” the Exalted Poet said.

Roland said nothing, only inclining his head. He didn’t know the specifics of what Masego was looking into, since there was no need to, but he’d been made aware since the beginning that if Hierophant required time to spend on Quartered Seasons instead of other duties he was always to be granted that request.

“Good,” I said. “Now, let’s get moving. The moment we’ve ascertained where the breach will happen, we’ll-”

There are limits, Bard , I thought even as the Arsenal shuddered once more and then a massive cracking noise sounded as the wards were broken through, to having a nasty sense of humour. My senses weren’t anywhere sharp enough to tell me where the breach had taken place, but then I was far from the Crows and surrounded by wards. Someone who’d helped put those up, though, would have a better idea.

“Roland?” I asked.

“West,” the Rogue Sorcerer replied. “Near the Belfry and the Workshop.”

Opposite of where we were, unfortunately.

“Then to the Belfry we go,” I ordered. “Prepare yourselves, my friends. This could get interesting.”

—

I let Roland see to the Artificer’s rustled feathers while we moved, the two of them taking the lead as we sped trough the halls as quickly as we could. I wove Night through my leg to numb the pain so I wouldn’t slow us down too much, but even so I had to stay in the back with the Fallen Monk and the Exalted Poet. I didn’t mind, since it was as good an occasion as any to get them talking.

“So I heard you killed one of the Holies,” I told the Monk. “In a pretty grisly way, too.”

The villain laughed. There’d been no deep emotional reaction to the mention, not on his face anyway, and his weight made it more difficult to gauge his body language. Especially in such thick robes when it was a man I did not know well.

“You refer to my first, though not my last,” he fondly said, Arlesite accent thickening slightly. “I got my hands on three before the Saint of Swords began popping up around the region and I had to flee. I slipped into the Dominion through the Brocelian Forest, and I’d made it as far as Levante when the war up north erupted.”

Ah, I thought. So that how he’d survived as a villain west of the Whitecaps contemporary to the Saint and the Grey Pilgrim. I knew for a fact the House of Light in Procer had records on both, he might just have been keeping an eye out for them from the start.

“I heard rumours,” the Exalted Poet said, a little too casually to be casual, “that around this time, several lodges of Lanterns disappeared after venturing into the Brocelian.”

The Fallen Monk smiled, friendly as a beloved brother, but there was something about him... there was nothing comical about his weight then, his size and lumbering demeanour. It was like looking at a predator that’d gotten large and slow by devouring, feeding again and again until it weighed him down.

“Does the Book of All Things not preach that the righteous must answer kindness with kindness and wickedness with wroth?” the Monk pleasantly said.

The Poet stiffened.

“That is blasphemy,” he hissed.

“To quote the Book of All Things?” the Monk chuckled. “What interesting practices the Dominion keeps to, if that is indeed true.”

It was always nice, I thought, when Named made friends. If only it weren’t so fucking rare.

“Can’t cast stones, I suppose,” I noted, “I was proclaimed an abomination for a few years, and Arch-heretic of the East for a tad shorter. What did they do to piss you off, anyway?”

“They called themselves holy,” the Fallen Monk said. “That was, all things considered, more than enough.”

“A Proceran priest is still a Proceran, after all,” the Exalted Poet conceded.

In a sense, was ragging on the Principate not the foundation of international diplomacy? It’d yet to fail me, anyway, not even with actual Procerans.

“Can’t argue with that,” I snorted. “Mind you, Hasenbach seems to be cleaning house there.”

She’d named some kind of spy lay brother her Lord Inquisitor with the coup attempt as a pretext then used him to rip out the fangs of the House in the Principate, the way the Jacks told it. She’d even done it carefully enough they’d had to just lie back and take it, which was damned impressive given the pull the House of Light still had in Procer even after their leaders got caught backing a coup.

“A cleaned pigsty does not become a temple for the cleaning,” the Fallen Monk shrugged. “Though I suppose peeling some jewels off the pigs is laudable work.”

Godsdamn , I thought, reluctantly impressed. This one would get along splendidly with the House Insurgent if they ever got introduced.

“Lanterns know better,” the Exalted Poet proudly said. “They have a single lodge in Levante, and it does not involve itself with politics.”

And if you believe that, there’s a house in Hannoven I’d like to sell you , I thought. The Lanterns had kept themselves from being squeezed under any ruler’s thumb since the founding of Levant, and that wasn’t the sort of thing that could be done by keeping your hands entirely clean.

“Right,” I said, keeping my skepticism off my face, “you lived there, didn’t you? As one of the Hidden Poets.”

The man looked surprised at even this bare bone knowledge of him, though perhaps I should not be surprised by that in turn. We had never met in person until today, and as both a recent addition to our roster and one without impressive martial skills he’d warranted precious little attention from me.

“That is true,” he said. “Though I am one of them no longer, as I have left the Old Palace and taken up paying work.”

“I heard of the Hidden Poets claiming an entire street’s worth of brothels for their use a full day and night, when I was there,” the Fallen Monk slyly said. “Though no doubt that was mere vile calumny.”

“No,” the Exalted Poet assured him, “it is quite true. It happens every spring, as part of the Feast of Many Sighs.”

Why was it that all these southern nations seemed to have those delightful customs involving a lot of beautiful naked people, when all that Callow could measure up against them was harvest festivals where everyone got drunk and made poor decisions? It was a little unfair, in my opinion. Anyhow, the Monk had been trying to tease by relying on a cultural need for discretion in such affairs that was very Proceran in the first place. Levantines, though, were remarkably forthright about sex even by my own Callowan standards.

“So what is it that moved you to leave the Old Palace?” I asked. “Sounds like a pleasant enough life.”

“It would have been shameful to remain there as Bestowed,” the Exalted Poet said, “given the call to war by the Holy Seljun. Besides, I have been thinking of composing an anthem of my own.”

Bold, that. If I grasped what he’d said correctly, he was referring to the Anthem of Smoke: the founding epic of the Dominion of Levant, verses recounting the legendary hero-led rebellion that’d thrown out Procer and created the nation that still stood today. Mhm. This little chat had done nothing to move me towards believing those two were or were not pawns of the Intercessor, unfortunately. The Fallen Monk’s fairly open hatred of the Proceran House of Light didn’t necessarily make him an ally, since it wouldn’t be impossible to use the Dead King as a way to break it without breaking Calernia itself along with it. If you had the right ally, anyway. Obviously he wasn’t shy about getting a little blood on his hands or even killing to make a point, but then he wasn’t one of Hanno’s. My lot rarely had clean hands to show.

As for the Poet, he remained opaque to me. The Dominion’s distinct fondness for honour and debts meant their Named had obvious levers for the Intercessor to use, but he did not seem quite as stuck in that rut as most of his countrymen: he’d backed down instead of dug in, when I’d pushed against the Mirror Knight’s band right after its unexpected arrival. In a sense that only made him harder to read, though, and considering how straightforward Dominion Named tended to be that had me warier of him than not. I knew myself to be a fair hand at assessing people, it was a skill that’d saved my life more than a few times, but I had too little to go on here. For both of them. Until I got a finger on the pulse of what it was that drove, distrust was the order of the day.

Nothing new in that, sadly enough.

The Belfry was one of the more unusual parts of the Arsenal, in the sense that its existence was only possible because of the peculiarities of this place. In one sense it was exactly what it’d been named after: a belfry tower as could be seen in most temples of the House of Light, if a particularly large one. There could be no such thing as a view of outside in the Arsenal, though, as there was no outside. The pocket dimension this place was built in was very precisely tailored to what had been needed, as anything more would have been a waste of resources. To put it simply, the entire facility had been carved out from the interior of single stolen Arcadian mountain, using existing caves that were now the Knot as the start. It accounted for strange, sprawling and yet stratified lay of the Arsenal, which had been designed in a way that would have been absurd in a place not surrounded by stone on all sides.

We’d reached the broadly square base of the Belfry a while back, and been greeted by the first sight of the Arsenal I’d really consider to be worthy of story: where in a temple’s belfry there would have been an empty hollow for the rope and bell, instead hung a long sculpted stalactite of what might once have been stone but was now quite different. The material had grown translucent from the sorcery poured into it, almost like a sort of crystal, and it offered a gentle glow that I recognized from some of the magelights in the rest of the Arsenal. Fourteen floors of a great library swept upwards around the former stalactite, which now hung more like a chandelier than anything else. It was the single greatest repository of books in this Arsenal, but the lay of the stacks also filled with writing desks and research nooks and even places to sleep. A few discreet hallways on different levels even led into personal quarters carved outwards from the Belfry, one of them Masego’s. The stone railings on every floor parted to allow for a stone path leading into the crystalline hanging hear, which itself had been hollowed out and could serve as both stairs upwards and way across.

The truly beautiful part, though, was the lights and sights echoing within the translucent stone. They were not from here, as it happened. Though the Belfry’s tallest heights reached the summit of the mountain the Arsenal had been carved in, there would simply have been nothing to see outside the windows. Just an endless void which had been described to me as desolately empty yet somehow oppressive, like a ceiling too close to one’s face. It was the kind of thing that chipped away at one’s sanity if looked at long enough, regardless, so the ‘windows’ at the highest ring of the Belfry instead showed something entirely different: they were great silver scrying mirrors looking instead at the beautiful vistas of Arcadia and the Twilight Ways, at the seas and sky of Creation. There were smaller mirrors on lower levels showing such sights as well, all of them angled so that what they held within might echo in the central stalactite.

It was genuinely wondrous to behold, and I’d cast more than a few looks to the side in fascination even as we went up the first floor and onto the second. Masego’s quarters would be on the thirteenth floor, and they where the enemy was most likely to strike, so I’d been prepared for the long hike up. My steps slowed before we could even come close to the third floor, however, same as Roland’s in front of us. I cocked my head to the side, strengthening my senses with Night. The entire Arsenal was walled in by wards and had been raised in a pocket dimensions created and maintained by sorcery, which permeated the air and made sensing anything but the ambient power a difficult task, but the both of us had recognized a twinkle of what was coming up behind us.

“Enemies,” Roland said. “It seems we arrived first.”

“Fae,” I added. “And if I can feel them from this far out, in this place? They’re titled.”

Not a weak title, either, which meant this was going to get rough. My otherworldly senses were too muddled by the surroundings for me to be able to put a finger on exactly what manner of fae was headed our way, but there could be no good answer to that sort of question.

“We should make our stand at the stairs leading up from the first floor,” the Exalted Poet suggested, sounding rather enthusiastic. “Hold the line there.”

“It’d be pointless,” I grunted.

Roland nodded in agreement. I wasn’t sure if he’d tangled with fae before, but at the very least he’d been in a few scraps with the Tyrant of Helike and his bloody gargoyles. The lessons to learn were not entirely dissimilar.

“Ah,” the Blessed Artificer breathed out, quick to catch on. “They fly, the stories say.”

Everyone’s eye’s turn to the empty space between the central crystalline structure and the railings. If they could go right up flying where we could only go on foot, they’d make it to Masego’s quarters long before we did. Assuming they knew where those were, and that was truly where they were headed for. Wasn’t a risk I could afford to take, regardless.

“Rogue Sorcerer,” I said. “Head in there, find a good vantage and try to keep them from going straight up. I’m leaving-”

The Blessed Artificer? Not a fighter, but potentially bearing useful tools to clear out a swarm of lesser fae. Dangerous for the same reason, though. The Fallen Monk would be next to useless save as a bodyguard – and couldn’t be trusted for that anyway – while I knew much too little about the Exalted Poet’s combat abilities. He had the Gift, though, and unless you were cooking up a ritual putting all your mages in the same basket was typically a bad idea.

“- the Blessed Artificer with you,” I said.

She was the most likely to be able to crack open the wards Hierophant would put around his quarters, if she was the traitor. Roland already knew I’d gathered potential traitors here, so he’d know to both keep her at hand and keep an eye out for a knife in the back.

“Understood,” the Rogue Sorcerer replied, catching my gaze and dipping his head.

I did enjoy working with Roland, no two ways about it.

“I will do what must be done,” the Blessed Artificer grimly said.

Fair enough, I thought, so long as that didn’t involve a knife slipped between mine or the Rogue Sorcerer’s ribs.

“And the three of us, Black Queen?” the Fallen Monk asked me, a theatrical gesture extending the question to include the Poet.

“You two should run down to the entrance as quick as you can, we’ll contain what we can there,” I said.

“You will not be coming with us?” the Exalted Poet asked.

“I’ll be taking another way down,” I said. “Get moving, would you? There’s no time to waste.”

Though I could tell neither of them were convinced, they didn’t manage to talk themselves into asking about it either. Keeping a good distance from each other, as if making a point of it, they doubled back at a run towards the stairs we’d taken up to get here. As for me, I waved off Roland and the Artificer and went fishing for my pipe again. I’d not finished the wakeleaf from earlier and it had gone quite cold, but a touch of blackflame saw to that. I limped my way to the railings and propped up my staff against them, leaning forward as I pulled at my pipe. A stream of smoke left my lips as I waited, patient, for the enemy’s first blow. Unlike what I assumed to be the rest of this little band, I was familiar with fighting the Courts. Though Winter and Summer had preferred very different tactics, they’d had a few in common. There were, I imagined, only so many ways to make use of similar assets.

Which was I was not surprised when, before either the Named I’d sent down could make it down to the entrance, a winged silhouette shot out of the floor below and began to ascend the gap at a breakneck pace. A titled vanguard, hard enough to take a few hits from a powerful foe but not so powerful it’d be a great loss if their heads got caved in early. Classic fae, that.

“Not a prince or a duke,” I mused, gauging the amount of power wafting out of the humanoid shape. “A count or a baron?”

Hard to tell, but I’d be more inclined to bet on baron. Regardless, it was time to act. I snatched up my staff and used it to deftly pull myself atop the railing, calling on Night and beginning to weave it even as I estimated the right angle. I leapt down, pitch-black power beginning to erupt from the top of my yew staff and hurtled down towards the fae heading up. It could see it – no, her. Decked in dark brown armour styled like a coat of branches, translucent wings batting as her long golden hair flowed behind her, the fae offered me a mocking smile even as she veered off to the side and avoided me entirely. Leaving me, without a word or care, to fall towards the ground.

“Mistake,” I noted around the mouth of my pipe.

Taking my staff up by both hands I snapped it forward like a fishing rod , and so the rope of Night I had woven snapped forward as well, snatching the fae passing me by the neck and smashing her down.

“How dare-”

The golden-haired fae passed me as I continued to fall down in a descent barely slowed, mouth open to scream in anger, but I took a hand off my staff and pulled at the Night-rope. It tightened around her throat and I dragged her close even as my teeth clenched around my pipe, then gripped her throat and forced her further beneath me. Using my staff as support I shot a painful jolt of Night into her body, disrupting her wings, and used her twitch of pain to flip her around. We kept falling, but I was now above her back and holding a makeshift rein of Night to guide our descent.

“- am the-” the fae forced out before I tightened the rope again.

I eye the rapidly approaching ground beneath us, counting in my head how long we had before impact and disrupting her wings with further jolts of Night another two times as we dropped. Only when we were a mere count of two from the ground did I allow her wings to form again, and our descent to slow as I impacted her back from the gathered momentum and she swivelled down and forward a bit before stabilizing. We were a mere six feet above the ground, and in the hallway in front of us what looked like a raiding party of fae were fast approaching. Best to finish this before they got close.

I laid a hand on the Night leash and poured further power into it, turning rope to flame, and with a twist of will sent it to eagerly devour the fae’s throat. The neck turned to ash in an instant, the head plopping down unmoored and the wings winking out. The corpse dropped below and as the Mantle of Woe fluttered around me I adjusted my fall, landing on my feet a heartbeat after the corpse did – the head hit the ground a moment later with a wet sound, rolling half a foot towards me by happenstance. I brought to a halt with my boot, taking a last inhale of wakeleaf before all that was left was ash, and with my foot angled the fae’s head so that I could empty my pipe into the silently screaming mouth.

I put it away after, smoothed my cloak and turned a winning smile into the incoming fairies even as the Fallen Monk and the Exalted Poet emerged from the stairs to my right.

I blew out the smoke, let it wreath my face as the fae emerged form the shadows of the hall.

“Good evening,” I said. “I can’t help but notice you’ve taken something of a wrong turn. Do you need some help in finding the way out?”

I’ll take that as a no , I decided as a raging thunderstorm erupted in answer.

Chapter 22: Sinker

“Know mercy for what it is: the plea of the ant to the boot.”
– Queen Elizabeth Alban of Callow

They were a lovely sight, in that terribly foreign way that was the mark of the fae.

Seven of the Fair Folk attacked under cover a rain and thunder, each of them some painter’s wild dream made into flesh. The vanguard came as a matching pair, swift in their stride and a pleasure for the eye to behold: their skin like honey and their eyes a pale grey, they wore cuirasses and vambraces of copper so perfectly burnished they looked like the surface of a still pond. Beneath those a long robe ending in skirts had been woven of dead grass in grey and yellow, the colours perfectly matching those of their long and flowing hair. Each bore a single long blade, fashioned whole from what seemed like a single strand of dead grass – the straight edges of the blades crooned as they touched the winds, though, as if they were so keen even the storm was cut by their touch. They were titled, both of them. I could feel it. Yet they were not among the greats of whatever Court had sent them, servants of higher powers.

One such power stood behind them. Towering in height but slender in his build, the fae was a splendid sight: an armoured and tunic of woven brass and bright-red flame, glittering with rubies, went down to his thighs, loose and long-sleeved. Below, long skirts that were a netting of gold filled with brass yet as supple as cloth swung over black-skinned bare feet. What little skin was left bare by the slender helm of brass and smouldering charcoal, its long cheek guards of carved red opal going down to a round collar of gold touched with flickering embers, was just as dark in tone. As if the two burning red eyes set in the elegant face had charred the fae entirely, I thought. In his right hand was held a rounded kite shield, woven together from frozen bright-red fire, while in his left he held a bastard sword hilted in gold and ruby but whose blade was pitch-black and smouldering.

I caught sight of the last four, before the storm swept over me, but only glimpses. A tall woman bearing a great antlered helm, or perhaps antlers, face painted with streaks of blood-red and bone-white as she wielded a spear of twisted bone. A small figure, almost childlike, trailing long strands of straw like a dress or a cape and whisper-swift on its feet. A calm-faced man wearing a strangely nostalgic smile, sprouts of green twisting around him like a bandolier and a quiver. And behind them all, an amber-eyed woman with a sizzling grin, messy hair swept around by the wind as lightning crackled up her frame and she guided the storm. That one was the most powerful among them, I sensed, and if she was not at least a Duchess I would eat my own hand. There was no time to consider that in depth, though, for the wind and rain and lightning hit me like someone had thrown a damned wall at me.

I took half a step back, cursing, and had to shift my weight so I wouldn’t be outright blown off. My mantle flapped like a banner behind me, and I dragged my crown down on my brown so it wouldn’t fly off. This wouldn’t do, I couldn’t see a bloody thing in this wind and rain and –

“ Bordel de merde ,” I swore in Chantant, throwing myself to the side even as lightning struck.

It still singed the edge of my face, and I grimaced at the burning of my skin. My hair might well have caught fire, if not for the rain. I rolled up into a kneel and drew deep of the Night as I brought up my staff, only to smash it down on the stone. The thing with Night was that, for all its wondrous flexibility, it tended to fare pretty badly in straight-up fights against other powers. Light most of all, but sorcery tended to come out on top as well and I suspected that the work of the fae would behave just the same. Night was the power of a thief, not a soldier, and always shone best when there was no struggle to be had. Which was why even though these days I probably had as much raw might to throw around as my current opponent, if not more, I did not try to unmake the storm. Instead a bursting bubble of darkness spreading out created an oasis of calm within it before fading but leaving the boundary maintained. I rose gingerly to my feet.

“Come now,” I said. “If I know a single thing about the likes of you lot, it’s that you literally cannot refuse an invitation like this. Don’t be so coy, my lords and ladies.”

A rich chuckle answered me as the dark-skinned fae that wore flame like cloth strode out of the storm in front of me, bare feet not even a whisper against the stone. His sword stayed pointing at the ground, his shield loose in his grip.

“It is my honour to make your acquaintance, Queen of Lost and Found,” the burning-eyed fae said. “Your cavalier grave-robbing of Winter is legend among our kind.”

Distraction, I mused. He might as well have it carved into his forehead – which meant the twins were either about to flank me or already using the storm as cover to burst out and make a run at Masego’s quarters. If it was the latter, I could only trust in the ability of Roland and the Blessed Artificer.

“And who is it that I speak to?” I replied, clicking my tongue. “What Court boasts such poor manners?”

Dead grass, fire, harvest, hunt and storms. Tough the spread of those displayed dominions was not small, it did bring a season to my mind over others. Best to have it confirmed by fae tongue, though.

“Manifold apologies, Your Majesty,” the fae bowed. “I am the Count of Ravenous Flame, presently at your service and ever to that of my master, the Prince of Falling Leaves.”

Fuck , I thought. So they really were here to prove the Hunted Magician’s epithet was well-deserved. Yet beneath the dismay there was something like triumph: Masego, that glorious bastard, had been right once again. Somewhere out there the ruling mantle of the Court of Autumn still existed. There was evidently a lot more power left to it than we’d believed, if there were enough nobles left to call on to assault the Arsenal, but the principle of Quartered Seasons had been sound all long even if we’d been unable to prove it.

“You’ve given me a greater gift than you know, Count,” I grinned. “So I give you this in return: if you flee now, I will not pursue.”

To my surprise, the nobleman bowed.

“Your capricious arrogance was everything I hoped it would be,” the Count of Ravenous Flame replied, “count no debt here, Queen of Lost and Found, for anything I might have gifted by happenstance has been repaid twice over.”

The moment he began talking I knew where this was headed: as the Count spoke the last word of his superficially friendly answer, I took a sudden step back and avoided getting skewered by two crooning blades as they thrust where I had been standing a heartbeat before. By the height, the blows would have slid between two of my ribs and punctured my throat. I was almost admiring: fae were rarely so precise in their attempted murder, or so flawlessly synchronized. I was not, however, so admiring that I did not immediately punish that predictable flair for the theatrical: the rightmost of twin fae in copper and grass was smashed in the back of the head by my staff, which sent it stumbling into the other’s way. They both spun away towards the Count, smooth in their recovery, so I tossed a handful of blackflame at the left one’s grass skirts and watched the flame take with some satisfaction. It cut away the grass-cloth before the burn could spread, but by then I was gathering Night and our little skirmish had borne more pressing developments. The Count of Ravenous Flame entered the fray.

“A spark, a birth,” the Count sang, his voice soothing like the warm crackling of bonfires.

As he strode forward, he trailed sparks. I would have interrupted whatever it was he was doing but the rightmost twin kept me busy: its wings burst to life in a flicker and it used a beating of them to help itself into a backwards leap that would have led it behind me, blade at the ready, if I’d not traced a trail of blackflame in the path. The wings beat again, ending the leap, but by then I’d positioned my staff under it and let loose with a concentrated burst of Night. I caught only its shoulder, but that much I tore right through. The fae screamed in pain, but by then then Count of Ravenous Flame had gotten just enough time to proceed unimpeded.

“A hunger, a swell,” the Count sang, voice gone the way of the blaze. “I command you, dimming fire, herald of plenty to lack: devour all you behold, ravenously .”

The sparks had strengthened, turned to flame, and been swept up in the thunderstorm around us. Only instead of being put out by the rain the fire had spread, as if the very wind was oil, and a howling blaze surrounded us even as the ember-eyed Count of Autumn laughed.

“Perish,” he told me, “so thoroughly that naught of you is left to be lost or found.”

Damn , I thought, reluctantly impressed. That was a pretty good line to kill me on, if he could pull it off. Already Night was coursing through my veins and as the Count of Ravenous Flame raised his black blade high, heat and fire swirling around it as he commanded the blazing storm, I began shaping my answer.

“The hand in greed can only clutch sand,

Even exquisite passion, the lover’s brand

Is a vainglorious army headed for rout:

Ardour fall spent, the flame gutters out.”

The verse was spoken in Chantant, barely more than a whisper against the roar of the blaze, and yet it slithered through the burning storm like snake. I knew the voice that’d recited it, that deep and resonant tone that was decadently pleasing to the ear, and the sorcery it was laced with ate at the gathered fires like spreading rot. Even as the Count of Ravenous Flame fought to keep hold of it, the Exalted Poet’s verse tore at his work like some divine candle snuffer. An opening, I thought with a wolf’s smile, and abandoned the spinning threads I’d been about to shape Night into in favour of something with a little more bite. When the twin fae came for me this time, wielding their blades of grass, I was ready for them and without a distraction to handle.

One came high, leap aided by wings as its blade whistled down towards my skull, while the other came low: knees bending low beyond what a human body would have allowed, its sword whipped out aiming for the femoral artery on my left leg. It was a close thing, spinning my staff so that the lower part went up and swatted aside the strike about to cut into my skull while the upper part going down nudged the other blow to pass harmlessly between my legs, but worth the risks: with the two fae over-extended in their strikes, neither of them were able to avoid my reply. Two small tendrils of Night sprang out of my staff, shooting out and puncturing the skin of the fae near the throat. The moment they did I dumped all the power I’d gathered, in just the right way, and I got maybe two heartbeats before the fae managed to retreat far enough the tendrils broke.

“You may consider this end,” I told them, “courtesy of Mighty Urulan, once of Great Lotow.”

I’d never seen anyone melt from the inside before, but considering the sheer among of acid I’d pumped into their veins it was no surprise that within moment the two fae were bleeding, broken corpses-to-be falling apart as they tried to crawl away. As I’d thought, that was a particularly nasty trick to be on the receiving end of when your body wasn’t entirely made up of smoke and mirrors.

“ Dieux du ciel ,” the Fallen Monk hoarsely said, sounding sickened.

The Exalted Poet’s trick – had that been an aspect or was he potentially more useful than I’d thought? – had killed the flame and the storm with it, restoring a broader line of sight to me. The Fallen Monk, looking more than a little singed and bleeding from messy wounds on his shoulder and belly, threw a wineskin into the path of a sapling-green arrow loosed by the fae adorned in vines I’d glimpsed earlier. The arrow sprouted wild growth as red wine sloshed all over the ground, a young tree falling on the stone and spasming a few times before it began to swiftly wither. That explained the messy wounds, I thought. The Monk had been quick enough to rip the arrows out before that could happen inside his body. Good on him, Named or not those roots would have shredded muscles. The Exalted Poet himself was bruised and battered, but there was a reason he’d been able to ply his tricks: he was currently without an opponent.

Given the lack of corpses and two missing fae – the childlike one wearing straw and the antlered huntress in blood and bone – I’d bet that they had casually slapped him down before making a run upwards. The telltale noises of battle sorcery being used further up good as confirmed it, Roland seemingly making a gallant effort of swatting the fae back down. The real threat, though, was the fae still in the back. The grinning one with the amber eyes, who’d opened the games by casually throwing an entire storm at us. She still there, grin broader than ever as she watched us struggle. You’re the most powerful of this pack , I thought, so you have to be a at least a Duchess. A Count would not defer to her otherwise. So why was I finding these opponents so... lacking? Perhaps it was simply that I was no longer a squire or a bastard duchess of my own, and that I’d faced greater monsters since, but I’d just ridden a Baron of Autumn down a drop and killed him without much effort.

Something was wrong here.

Boots squelching wetly as I walked through the dissolved remains of the twin fae, I rolled my shoulder to limber it.

“Poet,” I said, “help the Monk. I’ll be handling our friend the Count, and the kind lady out back if she’d care to introduce herself?”

A lie, I did not intend to have them fight any of these three right now if I could avoid it, but it was a useful lie so long as the grinning fae heard it.

“You presume much, mortal,” the Count of Ravenous Flame chided me.

His long blade rose, and his shield rose with it. I flicked a glance at the Exalted Poet and got a nod confirming he’d heard. Good, I could put most of my attention on the last two then.

“Where’s all that sweet queen talk gone, Count?” I grinned. “Still, if you keep talking for your lady I’ll have to assume she’s a mute – or that you have the right to choose her words for her.”

The Count seemed to shrink on himself at that. Fear, I judged. That’d been hard, blood-curling fear at even the possibility that the fae behind him might take offence to his behaviour. That went some way in confirming the pecking order, at least. The Prince of Falling Leaves might be his ultimate master, but where there was a captain there was a lieutenant.

“My dear Aedon is guilty of only eagerness to serve me,” the amber-eyed fae laughed. “But your point is taken, Queen of Lost and Found. You stand before the Duchess of Rash Tempest.”

“Delightful name,” I smiled, all pretty and friendly with just a little too much teeth. “Would you mind ordering your servants to cease attempting to murder mine as long as we are talking? It’s most uncivilized.”

“Alas, oath was given,” the Duchess shrugged. “I cannot recall those I have sent.”

“But our green-clad friend here...” I suggested, gesturing towards the fae archer facing the Poet and the Monk.

“That boon I can deliver,” the Duchess of Rash Tempest grinned, “for a price.”

Ah, and now we came to the bargaining. If I could keep her talking, and the two fae with her down here with us, then I might be able to send my own two companions upwards to help Roland and the Artificer before all of us came down to tangle with these three together. The key to keeping control of this would be offering terms before she could make demands, since letting fae pick their careful words was a good way to get stabbed by them.

“I’ll offer you the last words of a king,” I said, “and the dream of a hard-fought defeat, not a decade old.”

The Duchess went still. Yeah, I’ve dealt with your kind before , I thought with grim amusement as something like greed seized those amber eyes . I know what your lot is hungry for.

“A generous offer,” the Duchess of Rash Tempest said, “perhaps too generous.”

So she wanted to avoid being in my debt if I was judged to have overpaid, huh. Fair enough.

“I would consider us even, given the might of your servants and the feebleness of mine,” I replied.

I heard the Fallen Monk let out a snort of laughter, and the Exalted Poet an indignant yelp – though he took an arrow in the thigh not long after, and I was interested to see he produced a strip of parchment as he sang a verse in what I thought might be Ceseo. Though the sprout-arrow savaged his flesh, by the time the verse had been fully recited it had turned to dust and the Poet’s flesh was healed, if heavily scarred.

“Then by these terms I strike bargain with you, Queen of Lost and Found,” the Duchess of Rash Tempest said.

“Bargain struck,” I agreed. “You two, hurry up and help the Rogue and the Artificer with-”

There was a blinding flash of light, or perhaps Light, and something like a massive thudnerstrike sounded, followed by an inhuman scream.

“That,” I completed. “Help them with that .”

“At your service, mistress,” the Fallen Monk said, sounding deeply amused.

“Are you certain you would not like me to remain and record-” the Poet began, then I turned a dark look onto him, “- your wisdom touches me, Black Queen, and so I promptly heed it.”

They moved, and for now I put them out of my mind.

“Amusing,” the Duchess of Rash Tempest said. “Yet you tarry in fulfilling our bargain.”

“I would never,” I smiled, then added in Crepuscular, “ My crown I abdicate, and let the worthiest of you bear it. ”

Larat had been king for a moment, after all, even if his first and last decree had been one of abdication.

“I do not know this tongue,” the Duchess hissed.

“Then you should have bargained more precisely,” I chided her. “But perhaps this will be more to your taste?”

I wove a bubble of Night carefully, using strands of the vision Sve Noc had given of the battle between the Dead King and Vesena Spear-Biter’s sigil, and blew it towards her. I had no intention whatsoever of giving her any of my memories, even if she might have taken that from the sentence. Disappointment flickered, but hunger won over it soon enough. The Duchess of Rash Tempest’s lips opened in a sigh, as the bubble landed on her palm, and she laid delicate fingers against the Night.

The bubble popped.

I’d offered her the dream, not the right to see it, and if she had been unable to keep that dream once given that was hardly my fault, was it? The Duchess turned her amber eyes to me, her face gone frozen with hate.

“What a clever creature you are,” she said.

“Nah,” I denied, “you’re just not as good as this as you think you are.”

“Neither are you, I’m afraid,” the Duchess replied.

The bowstring twanged and a green arrow whistled as it was loosed at me and I was forced to hastily duck out of the way. Ah, true. While I’d bargained for her servants to stop fighting mine we’d never said anything about them fighting me . The Count of Ravenous Flame sprung forward, bare feet unseemly quick as his eldritch sword and board came barrelling towards me.

“Hey, Duchess,” I grinned, even as I gathered Night. “Wanna make a bet?”

“Why would I, when you’ve proved such a feckless debtor?” the amber-eyed fae replied.

The Count was on me before I could answer, sword down and pointing towards me as his shield crackled with the sound of flame. At the last moment he shifted his footing a step and a half to the right, revealing the green arrow whose whistle the crackling had been meant to hide, and clove at my side. I swallowed a curse, for it’d been clever work, but with my free hand caught the edge of the Mantle of Woe and swept it around me. It caught the arrow, but my hasty attempt to push back the cleave with a strike of my staff had me on the losing side. I was thrown back two paces, rolling only to rise into another arrow, perfectly aimed at my throat. A lash of Night erupted from my hand to torch it, but once more the Count of Ravenous Flame smashed into me from the side. A staff was not a sword, with a guard and a proper grip, so even though I caught the blow again the strength of it had the Count’s blade sliding down and biting into the flesh of my hand. I half lost a finger there and felt something unpleasant slithering into my blood from the wound.

“Back,” I snarled, and Night flooded my veins.

It purged the poison, feeling like ice coursing through me. I struck my staff against the ground, Night billowing out like a wave, and the arrow loosed at me was swept aside even as the Count of Ravenous Flame retreated out of range with a wing-aided leap backwards. I forced calm onto myself, even as blood dripped down my knuckles.

“I get it,” I told the Duchess of Rash Tempest, “you don’t believe you’d be able to get the best of me, if we had a wager. I sympathize, it’s a regrettably common affliction.”

“You are attempting to goad me,” the amber-eyed fae said.

“I am succeeding at goading you,” I corrected with an unpleasant smile. “To quote a clever creature of my own acquaintance: a well-laid trap does not rely on surprise but on the opponent’s nature.”

She had to accept a bet, if I offered it and it looked like she might win. Because she was better than me, greater and cleverer, and she must always get the last laugh with us poor mortals.

“You witty little thing,” the Duchess laughed. “What might you even offer as a wager worthy of my time?”

“A duel with Count of Ravenous Flame,” I said, “where I will be considered to have lost if I kill him with either Night or my staff.”

“You insolent insect ,” the Count snarled.

“Those are all you have,” the Duchess of Rash Tempest said, and then looked like she had swallowed a lemon. “I accept, you fool.”

How unpleasant it must be, to be able to see the shape of the snare but be driven by your nature to step into it anyway.

“Should I win I want you to answer me five questions, fully and true,” I said.

“Should you lose I will have your name, freely given,” the Duchess replied.

Ambitious, but then if it got to that the odds were better I’d die.

“Bargain struck,” I said.

“Bargain struck,” she echoed. “My Count of Green Apples, do head upwards.”

Count of Green Apples? No, it wasn’t the same. It was the Duke of Green Orchards that we’d fought at Dormer all those years ago. And yet when my gaze found the fae in question, he offered me a sly smile before wings bloomed at his back. His face... It’d been a while since I’d thought of the opponent of that night, the creature who’d butchered my Gallowborne and burned Nauk into a mere shadow of himself, but I was nearly certain there was a resemblance there. That was troubling, considering I’d been very thorough about killing that Duke and Hierophant himself had pulverized what had been left of the remains. I didn’t have the time to ponder that any further, though, because the moment the bargain had been struck my duel with the Count had begun. I breathed out, settled myself.

A duel, huh.

“Gods,” I murmured, “it’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

The Count of Ravenous Flame advanced in his full splendour, armour glittering in the eerie light of the Belfry, a flick of his long sword gathering bright-red flame along the edge. It was tempting to watch the feet, for against all sorts of opponents the footing told a truer tale of intent than the guard, but against fae it was next to useless. Their bodies did not entirely work like those of mortals, and wings allowed them to further differ from what even Named could accomplish. My right hand was slick with blood, but the same numbing of sensation that had prevented my leg from hampering me kept the throbbing pain of it quiet, and as I widened my stance and drew a foot back I seized the long staff of yew like a spear without a tip. Far above us sorcery crackled, and voices both human and not mingled in war cries.

“Burn,” the Count of Ravenous Flame hissed.

He swung his sword and a wave of flame followed, hiding him from my sight, but I’d seen that tactic used before. Used it myself, even back when I still had ice to throw around. Night gathered at the tip of my staff, forming into a full circle hovering just beyond the wood, and when the Count burst out of his own obscuring wave of flame with his sword half-swung and shining red wings behind him, it was to eat a blast of pure Night in the stomach that smashed him back. My turn. I slipped through the opening in the flame, Mantle of Woe trailing behind me, and even as Night gathered at the of the staff I thrust at the Count’s chest. He recovered in time, though, shield covering him and the small burst of power that followed impact slid off harmlessly. He raised his shield, smashing down the point of my staff, but I deftly withdrew and slid in a strike just over the rim of his descending shield.

It was slapped away with the side of his blade, followed by a beautiful pivot to turn that slap into a backswing straight at my neck. I ducked low, swing passing overhead, but my unstable footing was punished by a hasty kick that hit my chest and had me falling backwards. I abandoned the staff to break the fall with my hands, weaving Night and leaving it to clatter against the ground even as the red-eyed Count adjusted his footing and prepared for a thrust that would go right through my throat.

“Gotcha,” I smiled, pulling at the slender strings of Night connecting my hands to the staff.

The length of yew smashed through the back of the Count’s feet, toppling him, and by the time he’d broken the fall with his wings the staff was in my hands and pointed right at his head. A slender arrow of Night, not powerful but quick and piercing, tore right through the golden round collar and into flesh. Not so quickly it was not slapped aside by a strike of the shield before it could go through the fae’s throat, but that was the opening I’d been waiting for. In striking, he’d exposed his shield arm – the arrow released, I wielded the staff to hit his exposed elbow before releasing a small burst of Night. Not enough to hurt, but enough to continued feeding the momentum of the movement. He kept spinning, sword arm rising to stabilize his footing, and there I struck again: the piercing arrow of Night went through the wrist like a harpoon, I dragged him back in a spin and the sword the fingers had been grasping went flying.

Without hesitation I threw my staff down onto his knees, impeding his attempt to twist around. One, two, three limping steps to the side, and even as Night flowed through my veins and lent me unnatural precision the Count of Ravenous Flame turned, just in time to watch my fingers close around the hilt of his sword. Burning eyes widened in fear as I stretched out with a grunt and turned that catch into a descending thrust. The shield went up, or would have if my free hand had not pulled at the strings on the staff to smack its length down onto the fae’s wrist. It slowed the defence just long enough that my thrust drove deep between those lovely red eyes, finding a deadly sheath. Silence followed in my wake, as I flicked my wrist and ripped the sword clear of the corpse.

“Damn me, but I I’ve missed this,” I admitted with a sigh.

The enemy and I in the pit, fighting to the death, without any of the unending shades and subtleties that my life held these days. Just steel and cunning and the desperate need to live. My eyes went to the amber-eyed Duchess, finding her looking furious.

“You owe me five questions,” I said.

“Ask them,” the Duchess of Rash Tempest snarled.

“Who rules the Court of Autumn?” I asked.

“No one.”

Which meant the mantle was laying there for the taking, if we could just find it. My blood thrummed with excitement. It could be done. The second part of Masego’s theory, the one that made a weapon of the crown, it was possible . We might yet kill a god, or do something a great deal worse.

“Why have you come here?” I asked.

“To collect a debt left unpaid,” the Duchess said.

I waited patiently.

“And to repay that which we owe,” she added.

Been hoping I’d ask the next question before she was finished answering, huh? It wasn’t my first time interrogating her kind, I wouldn’t fall for that.

“Who do you owe that debt to?” I pressed.

“She who told us where the Hunted Magician is,” she grimaced. “The Wandering Bard.”

Fucking finally , I thought, satisfaction welling up inside me. I’d gotten it out of the mouth of fae, entities that literally could not lie: the Intercessor had attacked a villain protected by the Terms. Even the Grey Pilgrim would have to bend his neck now. Every single Named in the Grand Alliance would get a warning about the Bard being a hostile and dangerous entity. A warning backed by the most prominent heroes of the age as well as my own not inconsiderable reputation, let her try to talk her way out of that .

“In what way are you to repay the debt?” I asked.

“We are to destroy the contents of a certain room,” the Duchess of Rash Tempest said, “and break a sword.”

Shit, they’re going after the Severance as well , I realized. Had I been right, was the Intercessor really just trying to strip away every path out of the deeps we were swimming in except the one she’d let Hasenbach find? If so, this was just the beginning of our troubles.

“Do you have any allies in the Arsenal that are not fae?” I asked.

“Yes,” the Duchess said. “Though I know not their identity, only that they can make themselves known to us through a certain phrase.”

I supposed keeping the fae in the dark about the traitor Named was only natural, given the number of mages here we had that’d be able to rip that information out of them.

“Victory is transient,” the Fallen Monk said, sliding a dagger into my jugular.

Interlude: Rogue

“It takes two hands to clasp in peace, only one fist to strike in war.”
– Taghreb saying

Roland had not been forced to dig so deep into his reserves for years and had not missed the sensation it brought in the slightest: like sandpaper against his insides, his very soul rubbed raw and bloody by sore Use .

The Rogue Sorcerer pointed the dragon oak wand at the latest fae to land on the railing, the artefact grown sluggish from being fired repeatedly, and swallowed a curse. Another piece of his collection, going up in smoke. The red-veined wand trembled, the last of the dragon blood the tree’s roots had once drunk unleashing its nature in the form of a narrow, powerful ray of flame. The Lord of Plentiful Harvest, childlike face serene, winked mischievously at him right before the sorcerous flame tore right through yet another damned fake made of straw. The bait was gone in a wisp of fire a moment later, as Roland dropped the wand before the angry embers it burst into could savage his hand.

If that one had been a fake, then the real Lord must be the tone trying to break through – before the dark-haired man could finish his thought, another shape bearing the Lord’s appearance unleashed a torrent of golden power against the web of crackling Light that Adanna had unleashed around the spire, preventing the fae from ignoring them and simply flying up. The fae’s blow stretched the web back, but as Roland mustered a hard smile he already saw how it would end: the web stretched but held, and as if made of rubber it shot back the golden power at the flabbergasted fae that’d struck with it. The Blessed Artificer it had to be said, was abrupt at the best of time and often judgemental.

She was also ridiculously brilliant .

“It is too soon to smile, mortal.”

Roland did not bother to look behind him, where the voice of the Baroness of Red Hunt was coming from, instead immediately vaulting over the footbridge’s railing. Beloved Gods , he prayed even as a burst of some sort of power passed just above him and set every hair on his body affright, for the curse of brag you laid on these creatures, I give many thanks. Hands already digging in his pocket, the dark-haired man fished out a small engraved copper ring and shoved it onto his finger. The old Arlesite artefact woke eagerly, itching to be used even after centuries, and Roland clenched his belly in anticipation. Though Pelagian artefacts tended to be remarkably long-lasting works, since they’d been made from an understanding of sorcery derived from the Gigantes they tended to also...

Stomach lurching as his momentum was forcefully reversed and instead of dropping down to the bottom of the Belfry, where going by the sound of it Catherine was having a merry old time slaughtering eldritch creatures older than the written word, he instead shot upwards. Roland swallowed a scream and an emerald-studded bronze bracelet on his left wrist, shaped like a snake – which many in the Free Cities considered a symbol of healing and protection – broke like a cheap bauble. Better the Stygian artefact than his spine and most his bones, as would have been the case without the harm-gathering bracelet’s effect. Gigantes sorceries were effective but unfortunately they were also made for, well, Gigantes. Living titans who’d barely notice the kind of forces that would snap poor old Roland of Beaumarais like a twig. Ligurian sorcery, and its Pelagian offspring, as a rule did not usually bother with the protective measures for the caster common to any other family of the Talent.

There was a reason the Jaquinites now held in sway in most of Procer.

Sadly, though he was going up instead of down the Rogue Sorcerer was not unaware that he was still, to used the academic parlance, damned screwed if he did not act. There was only death to be found in the air, when fighting the Fair Folk. Reluctant as he was to call on such a precious resource, Roland reached for the small orb within himself that was the sorcery that’d once belonged to the Hateful Druidess. A mere sliver was unleashed, in the shape of a burst of wind erupting from his back with precise aim that allowed him to stumblingly land back on the footbridge between the sides of the Belfry and its central crystal spire. The Baroness of Red Hunt, though, had been quicker on the move than he. Already she was there, spear of bone raised and the stripes of red going down her face grown vivid. That could prove tricky, Roland noted.

“Crouch,” Adanna of Smyrna yelled.

He did, without hesitation, but alas so did the Baroness. Yet the fine line of Light that shot over his head did not simply pass beyond the fae, instead stutteringly halting over the Baroness and then shooting abruptly down onto the fairy’s back. Another penitence box, Roland realized even as from the point of impact a hundred small lines of Light spread out and covered every inch of the Baroness of Red Hunt in a shining webbing before locking down. How many of those had the Artificer actually brought? She had to be running out by now. Still, this would by him at least thirty heartbeats – though the Light cut both ways, protecting as well as imprisoning – before the penitence box broke and the Baroness was freed.

Adanna herself was in a spot of trouble, Roland saw as he turned. The Blessed Artificer used Light much as an enchanter would used sorcery, at first glance, but the Rogue Sorcerer knew better. One of the weaknesses to the blessings of priests – and Chosen – was that they lacked staying power. An object could be made to lastingly have the properties of Light, like holy water or the famous armour of Callowan knights, but Light simply could not be used the way sorcery could be through wards and enchantments. Which meant that while Adanna, like him, relied heavily on artefacts the abilities of those artefacts were nearly always temporary in nature. When the Light ran out, so would they. No trouble, when comparing a wand using magic and one using Light.

A great deal of trouble, however, when comparing the twenty three continuous layers of magical defence Roland currently had on his body compared to the single fading globe of Light that’d been all that separated the Blessed Artificer from the vicious blades and tricks of the Fair Folk. The shell vanished, and in the fading glow three silhouettes were revealed.

Adanna of Smyrna, tall and proud in her loose white button-up shirt and black vest covered by a long apron in striped shades of grey, golden eyes cold behind her spectacles. In her right hand she held a dull sword of iron, roiling with Light, and in her left a phial of coloured glass glowing like a torch. To one side the Lord of Plentiful Harvest was perched on the railing, looking small and childlike in his sweeping cloak of straw but with golden power already gathering above him in the form of a blade. The other fae perched on the other side was an unpleasant surprise, however, for it meant a third lord of the Fair Folk had joined their struggle. Wearing green vines as cloth and quiver, the green-winged fae looked eerily calm as he shaped a long spear out of what looked like young green wood. For a heartbeat, stillness held between the three of them.

Roland’s hand went for the doubling of his enchanted coat, fingers closing around a small steel knife heavily inscribed with Mavii runes. A flick of the wrist spun it into the proper grip even as he went for one of his pockets and pressed his thumb on the correct rune for the pocket dimension to present him the handle of his second finest casting rod. The three-foot long rod felt warm against his palm, and even as he swung it forward in an arc began gathering blue flames.

“Mabethe,” the Rogue Sorcerer roared in the tongue of the Taghreb.

Scatter , it meant. An imperious incantation for an imperious people. Streaks of blue flame thundered down along the arc he’d traced, shaped like five great furrows, and the dance began anew. The green-winged fae struck with the swiftness of a viper, green spear darting forward, but the Blessed Artificer grit her teeth and shattered the vial of coloured glass in her grip.

“Flee from the Light,” she snarled.

Bloody shards dripped down, but they revealed a blooming sun of many colours – Roland was forced to close his eyes, lest he go blind, and even so the glare was burned into his pupils. The fae screamed, and when he found he was able to see again the Lord of Plentiful Harvest was seared and howling. The other, though, had merely retreated into the air past the railing. And was nocking an arrow, aiming at a still-blinking and seemingly unaware Adanna. Had she blinded herself with her own work? The Rogue Sorcerer broke into a run. His flames had been blown away by the great burst if many-coloured Light, but the ornate casting rod was still in his hand. Pulling at one of the dozens of spheres within him that had belonged to mages from the Army of Callow, the Rogue fed the sorcery through the casting rod and let the artefact shape it.

Still at a run, he slashed the length of lapis-lazuli and gold at the winged bowman. A notch of blue flame was spat out, sizzling in the air as it flew towards the fae. The creature disdainfully flew back with a beat of wings, adjusting his aim with the bow as he did, but was visibly taken aback when the blue flames followed . Adanna traced a streak of blood along the length of the dull iron sword she held, speaking soft words, and in the beat that followed Light bloomed once more: a great construct of it, shaped like a massive sword around the small one she held. The shine reflected against her spectacles, but the Blessed Artificer’s hard grin was not to be mistaken for anything but feral as she turned towards the recovering Lord of Plentiful Harvest.

Even as Roland closed the distance between himself and Adanna, the green-winged fae shot a greenwood arrow into the seeking blue flames with open irritation. There was a strange growth of the wood within the blaze, which to the Rogue’s disappointment was enough for both fire and arrow to peter out. As it was one of his better bread-and-butter spells, it was disheartening to see it fail so easily. Still, he’d gotten there in time. Adanna carved through a fake fae made of straw, the railing beneath it and even a chunk of the footbridge while she was at it, but the sword of Light would not dissipate on a single blow. It would last for a few more moments, at least, which left the Rogue Sorcerer free too... The arrow streaked forward, but fresh blue flames devoured it even as Roland leapt and his foot landed on the railing.

The green-winged fae was just out of reach and retreating quicker than he could catch up, damnation. He’d been just a little too slow to leap, and now-

“Sweet the sorrow, the heady rue

That has my hand aching of you.”

The Exalted Poet’s voice sounded like the plucking of a harp, its sorcery filling the air. It sunk into the fae effortlessly, seizing him whole.

“ Thank you ,” the Rogue Sorcerer hollered without turning.

The bowman fae had frozen in apparently transfixing sadness for just a few heartbeats, but it was enough for the Rogue Sorcerer to tackle him in the air. The fae’s garments of green vines boiled angrily as the two of them dipped in the air and Roland pressed the casting rod against the side of the fairy’s neck before pushing through blue flames.

“Unwise,” the fae calmly said.

Well, that’d be nothing new. Even as vines grew wildly and tore the rod out of his grasp, putting themselves between the fire and fae, Roland smiled for he’d not been holding on to the casting tool. His hand on the fairy’s shoulder, ignoring the pain of biting vines that broke through the Praesi shielding tool he’d obtained at great cost, the Rogue Sorcerer rammed his steel knife into his enemy’s back. A beat passed.

“Mine,” Roland confessed, “is a most greedy Name.”

His lot was take and keep and use, though he would never become what he had risen to correct. The Rogue Sorcerer would take only from those deserving: those who misused their talents, the gifts the Gods had given them. And there was another word, for such a thing, one that had become part of who Roland of Beaumarais was: Confiscate , his soul whispered, and Creation whispered with it. Like a hungry leech, his aspect sunk its hooks into the power at the heart of the fae. Ah, a Count of Autumn were we? The Count Green Apples, for that was his name, struggled and trashed impotently as his very nature was exsanguinated. The Rogue Sorcerer might die or go mad, if he took too much of the power within him – especially a power so utterly alien as that of the fae – but then that was why he’d brought the knife.

The runes shone, and blood both human and fae mingled as a the greater part of the power of the Count of Green Apples passed into the steel knife.

“What are you?” the Count gasped.

The wings faded, swallowed whole. The pair began to fall, still intertwined.

“The sole charlatan among a parade of demigods,” Roland told the noble. “Smoke and mirrors, my good count. Or rather smoke, mirrors and a knife .”

Ripping the runic blade free, the Rogue Sorcerer kicked off from the fae and then kicked him again in the face so the creature would drop his leg. He still had a hand free, and a small window as they both fell, but there was no artefact that would quite do the trick. Gritting his teeth, Roland shaved another sliver off the Hateful Druidess’ power and wove a quick wind that tossed the powerless Count of Green Apples into the first story of the Belfry over the railing, to impact with great fracas against a writing desk. The ground was swiftly hurrying towards Roland, and there seemed to be an unfortunate amount of fire down there, so he promptly began to Use the knife that’d drank so deep of the fae noble. His coat and clothes suddenly shivered, and the hand holding the knife was seized by massive pressure as he tried to coax out power from within.

A set of three enchanted black pearls on a string of dried seaweed, an Ashuran acquisition, immediately blew up as the power that tried to force metamorphosis onto his hand was kept from succeeding – the dark-haired man still cursed profusely as the many tiny shards drove through the skin of his ankle. The Rogue Sorcerer succeeded at making green wings bloom from his back, focusing through the pain, and immediately stopped drawing from the contents of the knife. The pressure faded. The knife he kept in hand, as a tool for control, flying crookedly back up to the footbridge on fae wings. For lack of knowing how to land, Roland instead positioned himself above the bridge and ceased using the knife. The wings shattered and he dropped, landing on his feet. Yet it felt like he’d forgotten something, the Rogue Sorcerer mused as he rose to his full height. It came to him a heartbeat later.

“ Mautedit ,” Roland swore. “My casting rod.”

It would have dropped all the way down and the odds it’d broken in the fall weren’t low. Still, even if it’d shattered into a few pieces it could likely be repaired by Hierophant or the Blind Maker.

A heartbeat later Night billowed out at the bottom of the Belfry like a massive sea of power unleashed, lapping at the walls and the base of the spire. Roland let out a whimper. How was it that every time he fought at Catherine’s side, he ended up losing a priceless and irreplaceable artefact? That casting rod had been crafted in Thalassina, which didn’t even exist anymore. Gods, if she’d burned down a slice of the Belfry’s library while she tangled with the fae they were going to need to have words. Cross words, even. It would have to wait, however, as now it seemed like the tide might be turning against the fae. The Baroness of Red Hunt had been freed of her prison of Light and come to reinforce the Lord of Plentiful Harvest – who was now missing an arm, and sporting a furious sneer – but now that the Exalted Poet had come, the Chosen finally had numbers on their side.

Odd, Roland thought, that Catherine would have sent up one of the Named with her but not the other. The Fallen Monk would no more be able to withstand existing in the general vicinity of the Black Queen taking a fight seriously than the Exalted Poet would have, which was why he’d assumed reinforcements had been sent at all. Both fae turned, watching him like hawks as the last wisps of his stolen wings dissipated. Yet they were not striking, and neither was the pair of Chosen facing them.

“Unmake your web, witch,” the Baroness of Red Hunt said.

Adanna, in her own way a delight, took a moment to realize she was the one being addressed and not the Exalted Poet.

“I think not,” the Blessed Artificer stiffly said. “I offer you this instead: surrender now and your deaths will be swift.”

Roland would need to have a conversation with her about how the Grand Alliance did not, in fact, endorse the execution captives but he was willing to chalk that one up to a lack of practice in heroic banter. The Artificer was not young to her Name – she’d had it for a few years – but she had been... sheltered. Treasured for her intellect and miraculous abilities by the Thalassocracy, she’d been privileged and protected to the extent that she had faced neither a villain nor a disaster before coming to join the Tenth Crusade. No wonder her first taste of war at the Red Flower Vales had seen her shy from the frontlines and embrace the concept of the Arsenal wholeheartedly.

“You need not bleed for this,” the Lord of Plentiful Harvest told them, voice warm and reassuring. “We seek no death, only to prevent a great danger that threatens us all.”

The hateful sneer from earlier was gone from the childlike face, but some ugly glint of it still lingered in the fairy’s eyes. Roland trusted not these creatures, and his fingers began inching towards another artefact from his trove. The polished orb of quartz he’d picked up in Dormer, imbued with three Callowan war-spells, was slippery against his sweaty palm but Roland cupped it against the side of his pocket and managed to seize it without giving away the game.

“Your fellows downstairs were not so eager to treat with us,” the Exalted Poet said. “This is petty trickery: Splendid are the eldest children of deception.”

“Your lives were not bargained for,” the Baroness of Red Hunt said. “They will only be lost if you persist in this fool’s errand. Let us through , lest we all pay for the madness of a single man.”

“Whether or not your intentions are laudable no longer matters,” the Rogue Sorcerer said, fingers tightening around the orb. “You have attacked the Arsenal, and in so doing become a tool of Keter and Gods knows who else. For that, there is only one end awaiting you.”

“The thief speaks at last,” the Lord of Plentiful Harvest jeered. “You’ll have no more of us, usurper. Your words are wind, and in the end what you stole will take from you.”

“What splendid diplomats you make,” the Rogue Sorcerer drily replied, fully intending the second meaning. “Begone, creatures.”

Will taking hold of one of the sorceries within the orb, Roland let it loose with a thought. He cut the side of his hand at the antlered baroness, a long streak of chittering lightning lashing out forward. Wessen’s Fork, as it was called, had been the invention of an ancient Wizard of the West of that name. It was a clever piece of work, a bolt of lightning that – ah, and there it was. The Baroness of Red Hunt threw her spear of bone at the sorcery, but instead of being shattered by the greater power the spell split into two streaks of lightning both still headed towards the fae. A heartbeat later Adanna tossed up a disk of clay covered in High Tyrian writing, which began to spin and shot out a long blade of Light. The two fairies elected to retreat, pushing off the railings and dropping below.

The spear of bone fell into dust and vanished, but Roland wouldn’t fall for that trick twice: the Baroness would have the thing in hand when she next reappeared.

“They are not attacking anew,” the Blessed Artificer noted. “Perhaps they are retreating.”

“That would be a stroke of luck,” Roland said, implicitly disagreeing. “Poet, how fares the fight below?”

“The Black Queen triumphs,” the other man shrugged. “And requires not the assistance of my verses in her struggles.”

“But the Fallen Monk’s fists suit her better?” Adanna said. “One cannot account for taste, I suppose.”

Roland kept his eyes on the Poet as the Artificer talked, looking for a reaction. He found only indifference there, as if the matter did not truly concern him. Roland knew little of the Monk, save what Archer had mentioned in passing. The man had talents useful against those who used Light, and a knack for stepping lightly. As befitting, the Rogue Sorcerer supposed, of a villain who’d been able to very publicly murder several of the Holies and then escape Laurence de Montfort’s pursuit. The dark-haired man went through his pocket, finding a slender wand of ebony. It was petty work but its sole enchantment, one that spewed out a fist-sized blow of kinetic force, tended to be useful in all sorts of situations. Roland twirled it absently around his fingers, feeling the sorcery within lapping eagerly at his skin.

“Your aid here is welcome,” Roland agreeably said. “For when they will return.”

“If they return,” the Blessed Artificer insisted.

“I expect they will, my lady,” the Exalted Poet said. “Yet I have something of my own prepared that might wound them, a fresh work inspired by what I glimpsed below.”

The Rogue Sorcerer joined up with the other two, shoulder brushing past the Poet’s as he kept half an eye on the empty space around them. But only half, for he had not forgotten this band’s true purpose.

“I look forward to witnessing it,” the Blessed Artificer said.

“I will endeavour not to disappoint,” the Poet laughed. “Yet it might be a verse of some potency. Do either of you have any defences I should beware of hurting?”

“Yes,” the Blessed Artificer noted. “My web is maintained by a-”

“ Stop ,” Roland ordered, eyes on the Poet. “Leave it at that, Adanna.”

There lay hidden beautiful diamond spinning top that formed the web of Light blocking the fae from going upwards would keep feeding it so long as the top kept spinning and there was Light within it. It’d been covered by illusion of his own – more accurately, of a travelling illusionist with some truly unpleasant habits Roland had briefly encountered – and had been stashed away in a nook within the spire to their side, where it should be beyond harm for now.

“If he does not know, he cannot avoid disrupting it,” the Blessed Artificer lectured him.

“I do not know what I have done to earn your mistrust, Lord Sorcerer, but I can only apologize for it,” the Exalted Poet told him, though he sounded at tad aggrieved.

“Why aren’t the fae attacking, Poet?” Roland asked.

“Who can know the minds of the Splendid?” the Poet replied. “Perhaps they are waiting for us to be distracted, or even striking at the Black Queen’s back.”

Then why can’t I hear any noise coming from downstairs? the Rogue Sorcerer thought. Not a single noise at all, not since there’d been that massive wave of Night.

“What did Queen Catherine say when she sent you up and not the Monk?” Roland asked.

“She simply ordered us so, and we obeyed,” the man laughed. “Who dares argue with a such a woman?”

That laugh had come just a little too quickly, the Rogue Sorcerer decided. And Catherine was commanding, true, but in no way above explaining her reasonings when asked. If anything Roland had noticed she tended to think better of the people who did ask, if the situation allowed for it and the tone was not confrontational.

“Of course,” Roland said, smile tugging at his lips. “I would have done the same.”

His fingers tightened against the ebony wand. He could not prove it, but his instincts were screaming. Theirs was a band of possible traitors, Catherine had made clear to him, and Roland fancied he’d just sniffed one of them out. It was the silence below that worried him. The Black Queen at war was many things, but quiet was not usually one of them.

“It has been a long day,” the Rogue Sorcerer apologized. “The web is maintained by an artefact I hid under illusion, Poet, I’ll allow you to glimpse through it.”

He gestured, calling on one of the spheres within him, and crafted an illusion of a little box of glittering gold in the middle of the footbridge. One only the Levantine should be able to see. The Exalted Poet’s eyes flicked to it, which was when Roland casually pressed the tip of his wand against the man’s throat.

“Don’t move,” the Rogue Sorcerer mildly said.

“This is becoming absurd, Lord Sorcerer,” the Poet protested.

“Roland, put that wand down,” the Blessed Artificer ordered. “Your suspicions are getting out of hand.”

“I do not understand what is moving you to violence,” the Exalted Poet told him. “And the fae could return at any moment.”

“The Count of Green Apples that nearly killed the Artificer,” the dark-haired man said, “did you get sent before or after he flew up?”

Roland was not unfamiliar with clever sorts, women with glib tongues or witty men with laughing eyes. Liars of one shade or another, especially Named, were used to being able to talk themselves out of anything. That could be used. And in this particular case, the burly Levantine might have the frame of a warrior but as far as the Rogue Sorcerer knew he only had sparse fighting experience under his belt. That was a weakness in knowledge, paired with a proficiency and tendency at lying.

“After, naturally,” the Exalted Poet said. “I assumed I was sent as reinforcements.”

Except that Catherine would have known that the Count would get here long before anybody sent up by the stairs, considering the wings, so that decision made no tactical sense. It would have been better for her to drag back down the Count of Green Apples with Night while her two helpers kept the other fae at bay long enough for her to pull it off.

Without hesitation, Roland fired the wand right into the man’s throat.

The Exalted Poet blew over the railing, toppling down with a surprised scream.

“ Roland ,” the Blessed Artificer screamed.

He turned to find she had pointed a short stave of charred wood at him, eyes gone grave behind her spectacles.

“Two out of three are traitors,” the Rogue Sorcerer noted, for the Poet had covered for the Monk with his words and the conclusion to be had was obvious. “I wonder, will it be three?”

“You’re the one who just threw an ally to his death, you madman,” Adanna retorted. “Put down the wand, Roland.”

“If you are, your game is deep enough I can hardly glimpse it,” Roland admitted. “But I will not surrender my wand, Artificer.”

He would not disarm himself when the enemy was not about to return. She’d understand soon enough, anyway.

“You leave me no choice, then,” she grimly replied.

A heartbeat later a spear of bone pierced up from under the footbridge, tearing through where Roland had woven the illusion of a golden box. The bait had been taken. The Baroness of Red Hunt burst through in a storm of rubble, red wings bright as Adanna’s face fell.

“You laid a trap,” the Blessed Artificer said, catching his eyes.

“Nothing,” the fae shouted. “It was nothing , you useless worm.”

“That would have been it for the web,” Roland replied, ignoring the creature.

The end of the footbridge opposite the spire shivered as a glamour went down, revealing the Exalted Poet – throat visibly bruised – and the Lord of Plentiful Harvest at his side.

“It does not have to be this way,” the Poet rasped. “They are right, Artificer, you already know it. You were shown the truth, weren’t you? They play with powers beyond their understanding, and they will doom all the world.”

“Traitor,” the Blessed Artificer replied in an indignant hiss. “I stand with Above, now and always.”

A moment of tense silence passed.

“Her wonders will break if she dies, most likely,” the Exalted Poet said, tone reluctant.

The fae looked unamused, both of them.

“A pinnacle of uselessness,” the Lord of Plentiful Harvest sighed, face displaying a childish moue. “We knew this already.”

“Wrong,” the Blessed Artificer said. “You know nothing and less.”

“I know this, child: the Black Queen is dead,” the Baroness told them. “Take down your web now, if you do not wish to follow her in this.”

Roland’s fists clenched. They could not lie knowingly , he reminded himself. Which still meant there would be no reinforcements. It would be a hard fight, even with the fae lord crippled and the Poet’s throat hurt.

“I’ll take the Lord of Plentiful Harvest and another,” the Rogue Sorcerer mused. “Do you want the Poet or the Baroness?”

A wreath of blinding Light came to life around the charred stave in the Blessed Artificer’s hand, crackling like lightning and growing into a great spear.

“I’ll take both,” Adanna of Smyrna snarled.

Well, who was he to argue with a lady?

Charlatan I

“Where there is cause for wonder, there is cause for fear. Only through faith and rectitude can the Talent be mastered instead of master.”
– Jaquinus the Elder, Proceran monk and scholar

Olivier hadn’t meant to end up the family disappointment, but then he supposed no one did.

His parents were not unkind about it, as they were not unkind people, but by age eleven Olivier’s eyes and ears could no longer deny what his heart had been whispering for years. The irony of it was, of course, that in most places being the sole member of his family born without the Talent would have been seen as blessing instead of a failing. Not out here, though. Beaumarais was one of those hundreds of border villages that the rulers of the Principality of Bayeux, the House of Chavarel, only ever remembered existed around tax season and then promptly forgot again. The people hardly minded, as the town had been raised in lands that had been claimed by both the Principate and the Kingdom of Callow for as long as either had existed, nestled in a swamp long gone dry. The people of Beaumarais were loyal House Chavarel and the high throne in Salia, of course, though that loyalty’s ebb and flow tended to be somewhat related to the latest tax rates and whether Callowan raiders had been sighted that spring.

Out here the people were a practical lot, even the priests from the House of Light who’d managed to cross someone influential enough to be assigned here to languish in obscurity, so having a few wizards around was counted as a boon instead of courting disaster. You never knew when you might need a few fireballs tossed at bandits or a brew concocted that’d see to whatever was sickening the sheep. Olivier’s parents were both practitioners, his grandfather having been one as well and his mother having served as the man’s apprentice along his father. The continued exercise of magic had seen their family grow into one of the prominent ones of Beaumarais, allowed a seat in the town council and earning enough coin that they’d been able to afford a small alchemy laboratory and their pick of what few books travelling peddlers brought for the family library. Olivier, as the eldest, had naturally been expected to continue the family trade.

Until they’d learned he did not have the Talent.

Were these older days, the boy could have redeemed this lack by taking up a spear and becoming one of the town’s militia officers. Olivier’s ability to read and write likely ensured he’d rise in rank after a few years, should he not prove an utter craven. But these days it was the Dread Empire that held the Vermilion Valleys – what easterners called the Red Flower Vales – and the people of Beaumarais had found the Praesi to be more peaceful neighbours than their predecessors. The Legions of Terror did not sally out from the old mountain fortresses to raid, the way the riders of the Counts of Ankou had under Fairfax rule, which meant people had begun grumbling about paying for a militia that spent most its time drinking in taverns and chasing skirts instead of guarding anything. The mayoress had dismissed near half their number, and those that remained were all real veterans or from better families than Olivier’s own. There was no future for him in the militia as an officer, and hardly even as living decoration holding a spear.

That had only been the beginning of his troubles.

It had been one thing for the eleven-year-old boy to know he did not have the Talent, but a harder one altogether to realize he did not have any talents . His parents had sent him out a few weeks with Old Alphonse, the perpetually short-handed shepherd outside town, and he’d somehow lost both the sheepdog and half the flock. A fortnight under Mistress Caroline, the town blacksmith, had taught him that while he deeply enjoyed taking things apart to see how they worked, left alone with a hammer and anvil he was more likely to break a finger than straighten a kitchen knife. The Codenault brewers, one of the few families in Beaumarais with a last name and allegedly noble kin as well, had only agreed to teach him the trade if he was betrothed to their three year old daughter, took their name and his family began providing some herbs at a rate that was Callowan robbery. They’d been turned down by his parents more for the last condition than the rest, Olivier had come to suspect. For two summers in a row he was thrown at anyone that might deign to teach him, only to be spat out like a sour apple seed within a few days every single time.

Olivier the Jinx, some people had taken to calling him behind his back. Those who kept more closely to the House of Light muttered about it being the just comeuppance for the public impiety – to be understood as meaning magic – of his parents, which had been harder still to swallow.

Most days it seemed like the only thing Olivier was any good at was reading. He’d taken to both letters and numbers swiftly, and in those days where his parents had still believed he might have the Talent they’d always praised his ability to understand and recall whatever it was he read perfectly . You’ll make a fine wizard someday, with a mind like that , Mother had been fond of saying. The boy had been methodically going through every book in the family library ever since he could recall. He’d read through it all, whether they bestiaries, histories, alchemical primers or even his favourite, the precious first tome of the ten making up the Louvroy Encyclopediae . There was not a thing under the sun between beginning with a letter between A and C he did not have some knowledge of. And the truth was that, even after it was known he was without magic, his parents had encouraged his erudition. It was only proper, given his family’s trade, and once a week he was even allowed to light a candle to keep reading after dark.

A few days after he turned eleven, though, for the first time in his life Olivier found himself denied a book.

“There’d no need for that, lad,” Father said, clapping his shoulder. “Best you spend your time helping your mother around the house, the sooner she finishes the sooner she can start brewing.”

“I’ll read only after chores are done, then,” Olivier promised. “I wanted to borrow the Herbal Compendium now so that I wouldn’t have to disturb you later.”

His father sighed, withdrawing the hand.

“Roland’s apprenticeship begins today,” he said. “I won’t be lending you books anymore, Olivier, save those that are for entertainment. A wizard must have a broad mind and that means reading as much as one can, especially when still young. I won’t indulge you to his detriment.”

Olivier’s little brother was nine years old. He was quick and clever and charming, so all who knew him said, and good with his hands. Three days ago, he’d also set accidentally set fire to a bush after being stung by a bee. He had the Talent, and it ran powerfully in him: it’d taken years for Mother to be able to form a ball of flame while Roland had done it by accident.

In that moment, Olivier saw the years spreading out before him: his brother always in the light, him ever in the shadow.

In that moment Olivier grasped a heartbreaking truth: his own parents saw him doing the only thing he was good at as an inconvenience .

Olivier the Jinx had struck again.

He ran out of the house, and though Father called out the man did not follow.

—

The townsfolk called the small valley the Knightsgrave.

Legend had it that, on those very grounds, hundreds of years ago a band of militiamen had stood their ground against a charge of Callowan knights with only spears and pitchforks. They would have lost to the mighty riders, though, had the small river at the heart of the valley not suddenly swelled up and swept over the knights. Unhorsed, the knights been slaughtered to a man while they stumbled around in the mud in their heavy armour. The continuing swell of the river had forced back the militiamen, though, and they’d had to abandon the corpses in the valley as they fled the water. The story went that deep in the riverbed the armoured knights were buried in graves of mud, awaiting only the day they were dug up. Whatever the truth of it, it had become tradition for the daring among the town’s children to sneak out during summer nights and plant seeds of red anemones by the river banks to honour the ancient victory – and prove neither wolves nor ancient ghosts were enough to scare you.

Decades and decades of that practice had seen the Knightsgrave turning into a stirringly beautiful sight by night: a small valley split by a quiet mountain spring, bordered on the slopes by tall grass touched by droplets shimmering under the moonlight, the green turning red as anemones and marigolds grew thick closer to the waters. It was considered bad luck to let cattle graze where dead had been buried, so the people of Beaumarais had left the valley largely untouched. Olivier had gone there, after he’d run out, as he simply did not know where else to go. He had a few friends in town, but none so close that their family would host him should his parents ask for his return. Gods, if they even asked for his return. Perhaps he was going to stay here forever, he thought as he lay down on a bed of red flowers, eating wild berries and drinking from mountain springs. It was cold out, but it need not be: from his failed apprenticeship under Old Alphonse he’d learned how to make a fire with little but sticks and stones.

The stars twinkled above him, and Olivier wondered what it was he was meant to do. He was drowning, in Beaumarais. In his own family. He was drowning and he saw no way out.

The sound of the tall grass being passed through woke him from his glum reverie, Olivier rising to his feet and closing his fingers around a sharp stone. If wolves were out hunting around here there would have been howling, which he’d not heard, but wolves were not the only dangerous thing to lurk in the Vermillion Valleys after sundown. Except that it was not a beast lurking out there but something entirely worse: his little brother. Roland emerged from the greens looking a little harried but otherwise fine, gaze sweeping the valley and finding Olivier within moments. He cursed, but it would have been petulant to run when his own blood had come out to find him. The older brother tossed his rock into the river, helplessly, and sat back down amongst the flowers. Nine years old, and Roland had made it to the Knightsgrave. Olivier had been ten when he’d done it. Was there even a single thing his brother was not better at? Gods, it must be some sort of sin to be so furiously envious of your own blood. Roland stepped up carefully, and eventually sat down at his side.

“I’m sorry,” the other boy said.

Olivier breathed out.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “I’m not even sure it’s theirs.”

Yet it is not mine, either, he wanted to scream up at the moon, so why am I suffering for it?

“If I lend you the book in secret, they can’t stop us,” Roland offered.

“It’s not about the book,” Olivier tiredly replied. “It’s about what it means that they refused.”

“I’m not going to throw you out just because you don’t have the Talent, Ollie,” Roland softly said. “When the house is mine, it’ll be yours too. Family keeps.”

I don’t want to just be your family , Olivier thought. I want to be someone. But that was a lie, wasn’t it? He looked up at the round eye of the moon in the sky above, the sea of stars spreading as far as he could see, and Olivier felt small. More than anything, he wanted to have magic. Not for what it would bring him but for what it would bring to the eye of Mother and Father when they looked at him. So here he was now, tears in his eyes sitting by the side of the brother he was so ashamed to resent, and he wondered if that was to be the sum whole of him. A bitter husk of a person, forever envious of what others held that he did not. And Gods forgive him, but was there not so much to envy? The Talent most of all, but also all the other things where he always seemed to fail where others succeeded.

It would swallow him whole, Olivier realized. It would twist him into something ugly, if he let it.

Moonlight bearing down on the both of them, he cast a look at his younger brother and found that Roland was shivering from the cold. His short-sleeved woolen shirt was not meant for the cool nights of the valleys. He felt a surge of affection for his little brother, then, who’d braved darkness, cold and treacherous mountain paths to seek him out when their own parents could not be bothered. He could choose, Olivier knew, to resent Father and Mother for this. For the callous indifference of assuming he would return, cowed and knowing not to act out like this again. Or he could choose to love Roland, instead, for having come. It was such a small thing, such a small choice. And yet it felt like the whole world, right now. What is it you want to rule you, Olivier of Beaumarais? he asked himself.

He took his brother’s hand.

“Let’s find our way back,” Olivier decided. “Together.”

Under the silent gaze of the sea of stars they went home, hands clutched tight like they were the only people left in the world.

—

It had lit a fire in him, the crossroads he had glimpsed that night.

There was no other way for Olivier to describe the vigor that’d grown in him from that evening onwards, the way he woke up rested and eager to seize the day where before mornings had been a slog. His parents caned him four times for having run away, but he stepped forward when Father mulled disciplining Roland the same way – they’d gotten caught coming back in, though consequences had waited for morning. He took those two canes for his brother, and part of him felt only disgust at the approving look in his father’s eye as he dealt the blows. I do not do this for you, he thought, but kept his mouth shut. That same afternoon, Roland smuggled him the Herbal Compendium and they sat together in the sun as his bruised back ached: turning pages when they were both finished reading, and not a moment sooner. It would not be enough, Olivier, knew, to simply read. If his parents had no future to offer him, he would have to make his own.

“I won’t forget,” Roland whispered when Father came looking and they had to part.

His little brother’s eyes had gone flinty, even as he spoke.

“I won’t forget that you took the blows,” Roland whispered, then his eyes turned to the house. “Or who dealt them out.”

They were children, the two of them, but in these parts children grew swiftly. Those were not idle words.

Yet for all that, the path ahead suddenly seemed brighter. Roland took to his studies with exceptional ability, though Father said his true calling lay in elemental magics and not subtler branches like alchemy or healing. He did, however, display a burgeoning talent for enchantment that had their parents utterly delighted: neither of them had good skill in it, but it was known to be the single most lucrative way to practice sorcery. Their joys in teaching their younger son had them keeping only the lightest of eyes on the older, which was the way Olivier preferred it. It allowed him the right to spend his hours as he wished, so long as chores were seen to in the morning. He began by knocking at Master Laurent’s door, the man who was the mayoress’ brother and the town scribe. Master Laurent had no interest in training a boy of another family in his skills when he had two daughters of his own to pass down the trade to, naturally, but Olivier already knew how to write.

What he offered, instead, was to serve as the man’s copier.

Books were rare this far out – the closest city, Apenun, was two weeks away on horse – and what the peddlers brought was fought over by the two literate families in Beaumarais. Transcribing a book would be difficult work, requiring a good writing hand and attention to detail as well as many hours to sink into the work. It’d also be somewhat expensive to even try, given the sparsity of parchment, but if anyone in the town had any to spare it was Master Laurent. The older man was intrigued by the offer, as Olivier had thought he might be. His eldest daughter would be the one taught the written courtesies and forms necessary to see to the town’s sparse formal correspondence with the taxman and the few dignitaries who might claim to have some right or responsibility over the town, but the scribe had another child. Finding her a good trade that would not conflict with her older sister’s must have been a tempting prospect.

“Clever,” Master Laurent said, dark eyes sharp. “Yet risky and costly to attempt. And you are not needed for it, strictly speaking.”

The man had books of his own, after all.

“I am, if you want to able to copy any of the books in my family’s library,” Olivier replied.

“I am not a fool, boy,” the scribe sharply said. “They do not let those out of the house, it is well-known.”

Olivier, in lieu of a retort, recited the first two pages of the first tome of the Louvroy Encyclopediae by rote without once hesitating, stumbling or missing a single detail. The three hours he’d spent with Roland practicing his pronunciation had paid off, he saw on the older man’s face.

“I’ll want to see a page’s worth of your hand first,” Master Laurent finally said, “and my younger daughter Elise will share in the work.”

So this was what it felt like, Olivier thought, to win.

—

When peddlers came that spring, after the snows melted, for the first time since Beaumarais’ founding they were books waiting to be sold to them.

Two copies of the same alchemical primer – it was both short and rare – as well as single manuscript of the lengthier Annals of Bayeux by the famous monk-historian Brother Lucien. The primers went for ten silvers each and the Annals for sixteen. As per their arrangement, as both a source of books and a copier the now twelve-year-old Olivier made a copper on every silver, leaving him with twenty-six copper coins filling his pocket. Master Laurent, even after the costs of ink and parchment were considered, had made a profit almost equivalent to half a year’s worth of scribing. Olivier began to be invited at the town scribe’s house for meals, Mayoress Suzanne referred to him as a promising young man the sole time she visited her brother for supper. Careful inquiries were made as to whether he got along well with Elise and as to what his marriage prospects were.

Elise was a sharp girl, and though not as lovely as her older sister she was quite lovely enough for anyone, but Olivier did not intend to spend the rest of his life copying manuscripts. Though he made it known that his winter hours were theirs for the taking at the same arranged rate as before, a few days after he received his coppers he parted with two for the right to hitch on peddler’s wagon all the way to Ploncheau, the nearest town to the east. One meal a day included, if he kept watch and fetched firewood for the peddler, which he agreed to without hesitation. He’d sought the permission of his parents before leaving, and they’d granted it almost eagerly. Suggestions were several times made that he seek a position in Ploncheau’s militia while he was there. Roland clutched him tight, and unlike their parents actually asked why he needed to go.

“Last autumn,” Olivier whispered back, “remember when the mayor of Ploncheau visited?”

“To warn about the werewolf and trade some goods,” Roland agreed.

“And to get two dozen documents written by our town scribe,” Olivier said. “Testaments, a request for the seneschal to repair a road, all things we have Master Laurent handle for us.”

“They don’t have a scribe,” Roland caught on, but his face fell. “Are you leaving?”

“I’ll be back before summer’s end,” Olivier reassured him. “I’m just selling them something.”

“Selling them what?” Roland asked, frowning in confusion. “You don’t own anything.”

“Literacy,” the older brother smiled.

The journey was to Ploncheau short and pleasant, two days and nights spent in the company of the most well-travelled man Olivier had ever met. The peddler was free with stories, and pleasant in demeanour. They parted on good terms, and with Olivier having put to memory the way to Ploncheau. Between that, the meals and the stories the coppers felt well spent. Knowing better than to bite the hand that fed him, when Olivier went to the mayor and offered to teach one of the townsfolk how to read and write he offered nothing that Master Laurent might have earned coppers for. Most of the rules of formal correspondence and legal documents were unknown to him, besides. Mayor Guy of Ploncheau was quick to recognize the advantages in being able to read received letters and for the town to keep its own records, though, so after that all that was left was the haggling. Five months later, having been offered free room and board by the Mayor as he taught his oldest son to read and write, Olivier hitched a ride back to Beaumarais with ten silvers in his pocket and a sickly young goat in his arms.

The goat he traded to another peddler for a faded hand-drawn map of the villages and roads of the region as well as a pot of ink and a nice roll of scraped vellum. The vellum went some way in thawing the rather cool reception he received from Master Laurent at his return, and a precise description of what exactly he’d taught the mayor’s son further warmed relations. Olivier returned to his little brother with a map and more than a few stories, the two of them laughing at tales of their months apart swapped back and forth in a quiet corner.

Mother and Father were disappointed to hear he’d been unable to find a position in the Ploncheau militia.

Olivier copied manuscripts during the day, and when he dreamt at night the fire in his belly only burned brighter.

—

By the age of fifteen, Olivier was surprised to find himself moderately wealthy.

He’d ventured out four more times to trade literacy for silver and goods, seeing his savings grow and his reputation with them. On the second of those trips the town scribe whose monopoly he threatened by teaching another family’s daughter how to do rival records sent a few ruffians to beat him halfway to death and steal the payment. The fools chased him into a mountain pixie nest without knowing they would get riled up by the noise, though, and more importantly that rubbing bilberry juice against one’s skin would keep them away. Bilberries, according to Sister Ostace’s ponderous Common Bestiary of the Parish , was poisonous to the little creatures and so they fled the smell. The toughs fled back to town with swollen faces, and after hesitating Olivier returned to lay accusations. The roughs were threatened with a beating by the mayor and swiftly began pointing fingers, which gave Olivier right to make demands of reparation.

Sensing an opening, he passed the right over to the leading brother of the House of Light, to the visible approbation of many townsfolk: the scribe was forced to apologize and match the silver reward he’d tried to have stolen. More importantly, a charmed Brother Albert from the House wrote him a letter of commendation worth more than everything else he’d gotten that trip. The piece of parchment singing his praises marked him as a friend of the House of Light, who should be received as a guest in any temple. It would open so many doors it really ought to be called a key.

The fourth venture saw the first time he ran into bandits, though they called themselves a company of fantassins in the employ of the Prince of Bayeux, simply collecting tolls on his behalf. They took what few copper coins he had on him as well as his writing implements, but Olivier bargained for the latter back when he offered to write for them an official contract of employment with the prince that they might show... doubters . Just so that unthinking violence might be avoided , he told them. They agreed eagerly, though much was taken on trust as none of them could read. Two months later, a troop of horsemen from Apenun caught them on flat grounds and killed them to a man, having been out looking for them. Olivier had, after all, noted on the piece of parchment that the bandits were not fantassins , had boasted of taking coin from the Dread Empire and that anyone reading this ought to see it as their patriotic duty to report these facts to the authorities in Apenun. Eventually a peddler must have seen the ‘contract’, he assumed, and brought word back to the city in hope of a reward.

Olivier’s own reward came when the horsemen rode into Beaumarais a week later and their highborn commander asked for him by name. The man revealed his trick to the befuddled townsfolk and added that the last line of the ‘contract’ was in fact Olivier noting exactly how much copper had been taken from him by robbery, then politely requesting that the sum be returned to him should the bandits be brought to justice. The nobleman returned him the coin, amused and impressed, then threw in a silver for his ‘laudable honesty’. Ironic, considering that when writing Olivier had added a copper to the sum actually stolen to account for the way he felt personally inconvenienced. The soldiers stayed for a few days more, and though most people these days were buying him drinks and calling him Witty Ollie – a pleasant change, he mused, from Olivier the Jinx – the sudden fame was not enough to blind him to the way that the highborn officer, Captain Alain, was regularly visiting the Beaumarais House of Light.

The soldier did not seem all that pious, which only added to the mystery. Still, Olivier found little occasion to pursue the affair and had other preoccupations besides: he would have to venture much further out if he was to keep his teaching scheme, and the returns would be diminishing. Best to move on to something else, but what?

“You’ve some coin, now,” Roland said. “And I can enchant passably. We could open a shop together.”

His little brother, now thirteen, had grown by leaps and bounds. They were near of a height with each other, though Roland’s cocksure grin and quick laughter had seen him grow popular with the town girls – and even some boys – in a way that Olivier’s plainer looks had never quite managed. Kissing games and fumbling under clothes were the least of what Roland had been up to, though. As he’d said, he was now capable of enchanting appropriately prepared granite stones to glow like lamps for up to three weeks, and the enchantment could be rejuvenated repeatedly afterwards for perhaps up to a year before the stone crumbled. About half the time he could make a blade immune to rust for six turns of the moon, and he was beginning to work on enchanting iron rings to put vermin like rats and insects to flight.

“Not as long as you live under their roof,” Olivier said.

“Buy a shop and we can live in it together,” Roland insisted.

“There’s still much you can learn from them,” he told his younger brother. “Finish your learning first, Roland. I’ll still be there when you’re finished.”

They argued over it several times after, but Olivier did not budge. The notion of a shop, though, remained with him. The question was of what he had to offer. Already he’d learned that one could make their own trade, their own way if the old ways failed them – but what manner of a shop would he able to make and man? Before he could settle the matter in his mind, however, his peaceful life was troubled by something rather more urgent. On a sunny autumn morning, Sister Maude of the town’s House of Light came knocking at their door with three armed men in livery.

She bore with her an ultimatum: Olivier’s family was to cease practicing sorcery for coin, or it would be expelled from town.

Interlude: Archer

“The kindest mirror is an old friend, the cruellest an old foe.”
– Callowan proverb

The smell was, impossibly, just the same as Archer remembered.

That sweet, high odour that came from too many different herbs being hung to dry for even a Named nose to be able to tell them apart. Deeper in, Indrani knew, the lingering potion fumes would add a lingering tang of sourness: it’d been near impossible to get rid of that even out in Refuge, where there was nothing but open air around the Concocter’s workshop, and a room of stone would fare no better. Gods, it was like she’d never left Refuge. It felt like any moment now Alexis might turn the corner, covered in twigs and dirt, eyes looking for the fight her mouth wouldn’t admit she was picking. Like John was just out of her sight, with those stupid bells and the tasteless tattoos he’d be so damned proud of, like Lysander would be getting a fire going for the fresh stag he’d caught with the latest beast he’d brought to heel. But there was no time for reminiscence, for memories fond and not. The smell had only come when the door was yanked open and the Concocter’s dour face was revealed.

“Archer,” the other woman said, general dourness turning into a proper frown. “What do you want?”

“That any way to talk to an old friend, Cocky?” Indrani smiled, all nice and toothy.

She hated being called that, always had, but then she’d refused to give out so much as a fake name to any of them. Even the Lady, who’d been amused enough at the novelty of being refused something she’d never pursued the matter. As children the other pupils had made a game of picking the Concocter a name and half a hundred must have been thrown around, few of them clever and all of them mean. She’d invited it, in much everyone else’s opinion: Cocky’s disposition was what a poet might call just fucking awful.

“Funny,” the Concocter thinly smiled, even as her purple eyes narrowed. “Stop wasting my time. What do you want, Archer?”

It was amusing to see the eyes were purple now. When Indrani had left Refuge they’d been bright yellow, and last time she’d been at the Arsenal they’d been an unnatural shade of green. The hair was still black – had been for a few years, though the more sober colours these days would never make up for that memorable month when they’d been thirteen and Cocky had thought she could pull off platinum blonde – but it was now straight instead of curly, and long enough to be pulled into a thick topknot behind her head. The colour of her skin she’d never tinkered with, a pleasant southern tan that could be from anywhere south of the Waning Woods, but where other women might paint rouge over their lips Cocky had simply turned her own the same shade of purple as her eyes. It was one of her more striking appearances, Indrani admitted, if far from one of her wildest.

“I’m here on behalf of the Black Queen,” Archer replied. “You fucked up, Cocky, and you were even sloppy enough to leave a trail. So now I’ve got questions and you’ve got answers.”

Indrani let her smile harden a bit.

“It’s up to you how polite my getting those is going to be,” Archer said.

“She’s no queen of mine,” Cocky said, rolling her eyes. “My terms were reached with the Grand Alliance. If you want to ask me questions, come back tomorrow after making an –”

Indrani kept it measured: a light jab in the throat had her choking, but it wouldn’t do lasting harm. The Concocter stumbled backwards and Archer elbowed the door aside, her old acquaintance tripping all over her grey robes as she tried to retreat. Wasn’t this familiar too? Indrani felt a surge of grim amusement pass through her. When she’d been young and fresh off bondage, fresh into the Lady’s care, she’d once done something much like this. Only instead she’d beaten the Concocter for the purpose of ransacking her stores of anything Indrani might fancy without any need to do something like trading .

Cocky had taken it when it happened, she didn’t have much of a choice, but then that same night Beastmaster and the Silver Huntress had jumped Indrani in her cot and savagely beaten her within an inch of her life before returning the goods to the Concocter. They’d got paid with manticore bait and sedative for Lysander and a full set of tailored physical supplement potions for Alexis, both of which were near impossible to get from anyone else.

The Lady had said not a word, no more than she had done when Indrani robbed the Concocter. The Ranger did not play favourites.

“You’ve got ties with smugglers,” Indrani said. “We’ve got proof, so you have not a damned thing to hide behind.”

Cocky, one hand clutching her throat, backpedalled deeper into her rooms. Where Masego’s were the amalgam of a workshop, library and bedchamber as conceived of by somehow who genuinely saw little difference between the three, these were openly a potioneer’s brewing room with a small nook to sleep in. Between the seven cauldrons, the several cabinets of ingredients and the lines crisscrossing the room with herbs hung on to dry, it was a miracle a writing desk could fit in there, much less the silk panes delimiting the space where Cocky’s bed and clothes trunk had been stashed. It was all real candles in here, as magelight might disrupt more delicate brewing, but enough strange humours had seeped into the wax and wick that half the flames seemed to burn in blue or green. Those flickering lights played against the Concocter’s face as she tried to reach for a vial of green liquid in a rack, though she froze before she withdrew it.

Indrani’s knife at her throat had seen to that.

“None of that, now,” Archer said. “I told Cat I could get answers out of you alive, I’ll look like a real tart if we have to call up your shade instead.”

She paused, meeting purple eyes.

“But the more you try your hand at this the more I’m feeling tartish, get me?”

Cocky scoffed.

“You haven’t asked a thing,” she said. “You’re just looking to hurt something, as usual.”

“Tell me about your smuggling friends,” Indrani said, taking back the blade.

“Did you think just because you shoved a few hundred people in a box they’d stop wanting things?” the Concocter snorted. “A few flake addicts from the guards were already looking to get their fix in quietly, a few strings were pulled and it got broader and organized. If your mistress had any sense, she’d look away and let it go. No one can live off only what’s brought in on inspected supply wagons.”

The thing was, Indrani tended to agree. Flake was pretty gentle, as far as alchemical drugs went, and the infamous side-effect of your skin flaking off in chunks when scratched only happened if you’d been taking it regularly for years. Otherwise it was just euphoria in a bottle, which might go a long way towards making daily patrols in this boring grey hell liveable. It was inevitable that people in the Arsenal would want, once in a while, to partake of a little something without it first coming across the desk of the likes of the First Prince of Procer in a list. It was healthy, even. Keeping your head down all your life, toeing the line to the letter, it killed something in your soul. On the other hand, she could see where Cat was coming from too: people were smuggling things into the dimensional fortress where all the god-killing weapons and the nasty frontline tricks were being made, and that meant risks .

The kind that you just didn’t take when it came to Ol’ Bones, unless you wanted a city or two to die screaming.

“And when did you get involved with them?” Archer asked.

“Well, Indrani, haven’t you become just the most devoted hunting hound I ever did see,” Cocky sneered “How does that work, anyway? Throw the Archer a fuck, she brings back a few corpses? I suppose even she can’t stomach you for long, if she has to pass you off to the H-”

The Concocter went still as the tip of the longknife hovered a mere hair’s breadth away from the surface of her left eye, afraid to even blink. Anger was good, anger was warmth in the blood and something like satisfaction when you finally butchered the thing that’d made it burn in you. But anger wasn’t going to get her those answers, so Archer made an effort to master it. It wasn’t true, she knew that, and it wasn’t like some words from a woman long a stranger would make her doubt it. But to have someone speak in such a vile way of ties that were so important to her almost felt like a sort of defilement.

“You don’t really need two of those to keep brewing,” Indrani said. “And you don’t need either of them to answer my questions. I wouldn’t forget that if I were you, Cocky. I certainly haven’t.”

“You wouldn’t,” the Concocter said.

Indrani smiled at her, the knife’s tip still as the grave.

“You know me better than that,” Archer simply said. “If I have to repeat my question, I’ll be taking something as recompense.”

“Maybe a year ago,” Cocky said. “I needed some ingredients that’d get me unwanted attention, they needed the kind of clout that comes from having a Named in your corner. We scratched each other’s back, that was it.”

It would have had to be something truly unpleasant, Indrani knew, for the Concocter to not have wanted to put it to ink in requisition form. There were very few lines the Grand Alliance was not willing to cross, these days. The desire to survive had lowered the standards of what people were willing to suffer to exist, or even enable. But Archer was not here for Cocky’s old tricks, she had greater prey to hunt.

“You introduced the Wicked Enchanter to them,” Indrani said. “Why?”

Catherine didn’t know Cocky the way Archer did, didn’t understand that for a stranger there really weren’t a lot of levers that could be used to move a woman like that. So Cat figured that the Bard had found an ally here, but Indrani didn’t. The Lady had raised all of them to know better than to make a deal with any entity you didn’t know how to kill.

“Because he seemed like a man who’d use the service,” Cocky said, rolling her eyes. “And he might have become useful when-”

The longknife flicked down, finely slicing through skin from below the eye to the bottom of the Concocter’s cheek. Blood began to bead before the point had returned to hover above the eye, and the other Named swallowed a moan of pain.

“Lie to me again and it’ll be the eye,” Archer coldly said. “We called up his shade, Cocky, and we dug into things. We know a lot more than you think.”

“Fine, it was a favour called in,” the Concocter hissed out. “Happy?”

Indrani’s face tightened in dismay. Had she really struck a deal with the Bard? Gods, one of the Lady’s own? They’d been taught better than that, than to let themselves be made pawns and pieces in the Game of the Gods.

“Whose favour?”

“You know who,” Cocky said. “The woman holding your leash might despise her, but half the heroes have a fond word to say.”

“The Wandering Bard,” Indrani quietly said.

“I heard the Peregrine has her back,” the Concocter smiled. “I expect he’ll speak for me as well, if you try to press this too far. Did you think you were the only one who could make friends in high places?”

Archer’s fingers tightened around the hilt of the longknife.

“You have no idea who you bargained with,” she tightly said. “Burning Hells, Cocky, what made you think you could bargain with a creature like that and end up ahead? We were both taught –”

The Concocter let out a burst of laughter, and Indrani had to pull back the blade or she would have pierced her eye.

“Oh, Ashen Gods,” Cocky said. “Years out of Refuge, even after taking up with another band of villains, you still clutch to your blanket like a child. That blade you point so proudly at me, it’s from the set she gave you isn’t it? And that scarf, taken from the man who owned you while she looked on with motherly fondness .”

“We all hid beneath her wing, before we could fly on our own,” Indrani said. “There is no shame to be had there.”

“There’s always shame in being a fool,” the Concocter said. “She wasn’t your mother, Indrani. She wasn’t any of our mothers, and she was barely even our teacher. She never gave a damn, even about you, and well all knew you were the favourite. The way you’ll shatter like cheap glass if you admit that is honestly the most pathetic thing about you.”

The urge was there to slice her again. Archer had sliced people for less, and she was being provoked her beyond what anyone could expect her to suffer without steel being bared. But Indrani had not come here to spill blood, she had come here for answers. And if she could not master herself long enough for get what she’d come from, if red heat and pride was all that she could bring forth, then she truly would be pathetic. Just a thug, fit for thug’s work and nothing else. And the truth was that while there might have been a time where that would have been enough, when taking and bearing the consequences and doing it again and again and again until she died would have satisfied her, it no longer was. She had a hearth now, a warm place by it, and sometimes that meant bending the neck for a bit. A thirteen the thought of this would have disgusted her to the bone, but she was older now. She had learned what the world was like, when you were alone.

Indrani had come to understand why it was the world had fewer wolves than dogs.

“Gasses were used on the librarians in the Miscellaneous Stacks,” Archer said. “They were rendered unconscious but not killed. Your work as well?”

Cocky was, for the first time, visibly taken aback.

“I, but – I didn’t use those,” the Concocter said. “They were a private commission from the Highest Assembly and the First Prince, a way to quell riots without deaths. But I only made a single batch, and it should be in the Repository awaiting shipment. I haven’t attacked anyone, Archer.”

She wasn’t lying, Indrani decided. Not because of any particular fondness for the Concocter, but because she very much doubted that Cocky had dragged the potions and set them off in the Stacks. She wouldn’t have the know-how for something that complex, much less the sneaking skills. Which meant there was at least one other traitor out there, acting knowingly on behalf of the Bard. And it’d been a traitor who’d known about a private commission being kept in the Repository, so most likely someone who worked in the Workshop and would have known about Cocky brewing something meant to ship out.

“I believe you,” Archer admitted. “And will speak to that, along with the rest.”

Something like surprise, and perhaps even gratitude, flickered across Cocky’s face. Indrani, without wasting a moment, flipped her grip and struck her right in the fucking face with her longknife’s handle. The Concocter’s nose broke with a beautiful crunch, cartilage smashed and blood spraying. Archer’s loosened her grip, after, and flicked her wrist as if she was shaking her knuckles.

“Consider that a reminder,” Indrani said, “of lessons you should not have forgot.”

And with that their business was done, she mused. If there was need for the location of the Repository crates raided for the gas receptacles, someone could be sent for ask. Besides, it was quite possible that the Concocter herself did not know. The other woman had reeled back from the blow, shouting in pain and holding her broken nose, but after her fingers came away red she turned to Indrani with cold eyes. Cocky smiled, that one nasty little number she only pulled out when she had something cutting to spit out in someone’s ear.

“And there she is,” the purple-eyed woman said. “Our old friend Indrani, bare of the pretences. It’s a relief to see you acting without those airs you’ve been putting on. Still looking to just make someone bleed and then hiding behind another’s cloak when consequences come.”

That stung, more than it should have after the years that’d passed since she left Refuge.

“I’m not the one who’s hiding behind the Terms,” Indrani replied. “Or you’d be bleeding from a lot deeper in for some of the things you’ve said tonight, Cocky.”

“Whatever happened to rules only mattering to other people, Archer?” the Concocter slyly said. “I thought you were going to be freed, unfettered. Nothing but you and the horizon, right?”

“Which of us is supposed to be clutching the Lady like a blanket again?” Indrani jeered. “Did it wound your precious little pride when she left, Cocky? Did it bite to realize that even with all your little potions and secrets in the end you just weren’t that special ?”

“Even now you’re licking her boots,” the Concocter said, tone disgusted.

“I always knew what she was,” Indrani replied. “Who she was. She told us from the start. It’s your own delusions that scraped you raw.”

“Knew what she was?” Cocky shouted. “You sanctimonious bitch, you signed up with the first outfit that took you in. We stayed, Indrani, we stayed and she left . All these years with her, for her, and almost without a word she just left. Because we were pets to her, Archer, not people. And when you find something more interesting to do, pets get left behind.”

“Whining,” Indrani replied, contemptuous. “The pathetic whining of someone who was unwilling to stand on their feet and find their way outside the shelter of the Lady’s shadow. You were given years as a pupil, teachings half the continent would lose a hand for, and now you complain because she was not willing to hold your hand until you breathed your last.”

The Concocter snorted.

“Look at you, talking proudly like you didn’t just trade one mistress for another,” she mocked. “You think it makes you someone, that some girl with a crown found you fit to kill for her? You’re still fetching errands for one of your betters, now you just have some fancy seal behind you instead of Ranger’s reputation.”

There was anger there, Indrani found, but any fool could have found that. The old hate was familiar too, in its own way, but it was the unfamiliar glint that caught Archer by surprise. Envy. And just like that, it fell into place.

“It burns you, doesn’t it?” Archer said. “That I’m actually happy now.”

The Concocter hadn’t even flinched this hard when she’d broken the woman’s nose.

“I wonder if they’d look at you the same, your Woe, if I told them what you’re really like,” Cocky said.

“They know,” Indrani replied. “They’ve known from the start, and they love me anyway. That’s the part that really burns you, isn’t it?”

“You were vile to us,” the Concocter snarled. “To everyone, any time you could get away with it. You taunted and bruised and bled us for sport, and now you’re the Black Queen’s enforcer?”

“We were all like that, Cocky,” Indrani said. “And I don’t miss it, but the lessons of those days kept me alive through worse ones.”

“I still remember that night you forced Alexis into that sack full of beetles and tied it up,” the purple-eyed villainess said. “Gods, the way she screamed. And the Lady just said-”

“That’s one way to cure a fear,” Indrani softly finished.

Casually, she’d said it. Almost amused. There’d been a time where Archer had admired that, thought that callousness was something to be cultivated instead of exactly what it claimed to be: callouses. Roughness born of use, the easiest thing in the world to accrue.

“No wonder she still wants to kill you,” Cocky said. “One look at you with your Hierophant and your little queen and she will draw a fucking blade, Archer.”

If she bent her neck now, Indrani thought, there might yet be something to repair here. Because they’d all hated each other at times, the Concocter was right about that, but it’d also been more complicated than that. Because it’d been them and then everyone else, and that wasn’t a place you could live in for years without loving the people you shared it with. There had been warm lights shared along with the dark places. But Indrani would have to apologize. To express regret. To lie . Because the truth of it was that Archer didn’t particularly regret who she’d been at thirteen. She’d make no excuses for that girl either, but Indrani could look that past in the eye without feeling all that ashamed.

Sometimes she figured that Catherine believed her to be, when they talked of Refuge. But Hells, Cat had always taken them as better people than they were. Sometimes Indrani felt a little bit of shame over that, not being the better person her friend thought she was, but those claws never dug deep. Mostly because Archer actually liked who she was, for the most part. She was comfortable with it, she’d grown comfortable with it. And that meant if the things she cared about changed in ways she might never have imaged they would when she’d been a girl, it didn’t trouble her. Indrani believed in doing what she wanted, most of all, and sometimes that could be a little more complicated than just enjoying what was happening at hand.

“Refuge is dead,” Archer said, “bury it, Cocky, and move on. I have.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” the Concocter laughed, and it was a bleak sound. “You think it’s about your having found a good backer or a bedmate, or even just a place in the world. That we hate the way you thrive.”

“Isn’t it?” Indrani asked.

“It’s the way you laugh with them, Indrani,” Cocky quietly said. “The way there’s no prick to the barbs. Because you love them and they love you.”

Hand whipping around she viciously threw down a rack of empty vials, glass shattering over the floor, and there was a hate on her face that was like pondwater gone still and festering.

“We would have loved you too, if you’d let us,” the Concocter said. “If you’d given us what you give them. But you never did. What is it that makes them so much better , Archer, so much more deserving ?”

“I never had to fight them,” Indrani honestly said.

They’d never been competition, the way the others had been in Refuge. There’d been jostling, growing pains, but never anything with bite to it. It’d been a hearth opened to her, not other wolves to fight for the same scraps.

“That’s the thing, Archer,” the Concocter tiredly said. “You never had to fight us either.”

That, more than any other thing she had heard that night, gave Indrani pause. It had the unpleasant ring of truth to it. The other woman drew in on herself, bloody and somehow looking exhausted.

“Go,” she said. “I have to brew myself something to fix the nose and I’ve seen enough of you for two lifetimes.”

Indrani replied with a jerky nod, wiping her blade clean on her coat before sheathing it and abruptly turning. It felt like fleeing when she left the room, no matter how much she told herself otherwise. The door closed shut behind her and Archer let out a shallow breath. She, too, felt oddly exhausted. Leaning against the wall for a bit, she wondered if would truly leave it all at that. There were more pressing things to see to, and she needed to find Cat and pass along the answers, but somehow she thought that if she left now that conversation would be over for good. Could she live with that? Did she want to? Lips twisting, she raised a hesitant hand towards the handle.

The Arsenal shivered.

Indrani’s hair rose up all over her body, the sensation of coming danger acute, and the hand went down. There was never enough time, was there? It was something you had to learn to live with, the give and take of how you were willing to spend yourself. The door was slammed open and Cocky peered out, some sort of dark poultice shining on her cheek. She caught sight of Archer a moment later.

“What was that?” she asked.

The Arsenal shivered again, like door being pounded on.

“Trouble come a ‘knocking,” Indrani drawled.

She cocked her head to the side, studying the other villainess.

“ What ?” the Concocter said, sounding irritated.

“You’re going to end up on a lot of powerful people’s shit list your role in this, Cat not the least of them,” Archer said.

“And?” Cocky replied, unimpressed by the prediction.

“How would you like to get a head start,” Indrani said, “on earning your way out of those?”

They locked gazes, hazelnut to purple, and a long moment passed. The Concocter dipped her head the slightest bit.

“I still have a field bag,” Cocky said. “Give me a moment to grab it.”

It wasn’t much, Indrani thought. Barely anything at all. But it was something, and if she’d learned anything since she’d stumbled across the two most important people of her life in Marchford all those years ago, it was this: people who didn’t plant seeds never got to grow trees.

—

Indrani wasn’t surprised the Arsenal’s wards eventually broke, even though Cocky expressed her disbelief what must have been a least three different times. It didn’t matter how tall the walls were or how thick the gates when there were traitors behind both. The breach had taken place in a set of hallways between the Belfry and the Workshop, so the two of them had been close, but by the time they got there the battle had moved on. An utterly smashed workshop that’d once belonged to the Blind Maker now boasted mostly broken wood and corpses, though fresh guards had come in since what must have been the first slaughter. Archer found an officer and got asking question, Cocky lingering behind her and not bothering to offer potions to the few wounded still around. Indrani approved.

The brews she carried that’d help were expensive, and best kept for more urgent situations.

“We were crushed, Lady Archer,” the Levantine captain in charge told her. “We would have all been slain if the Mirror Knight and his allies did not intervene.”

“Who did the crushing?” Indrani asked.

“Fae,” the captain said. “They were not many, less than thirty, but their power... it was like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

If the Courts ever remembered the Dominion of Levant’s existence it was no doubt to even more promptly forget about it, so that didn’t mean much. There was no point in asking the mustachioed man if it was a princess or a count they were dealing with, it wasn’t like the fairies went around announcing their titles to human rank and file.

“Mirror Boy and his band drew them away?” Indrani pressed.

“Some but not all,” the captain said. “A band left the rest, heading for Belfry. And there are some among my men who say it was not the Mirror Knight that had the fae moving.”

“Meaning?” Archer frowned.

“They might have been looking for someone, and that is why they let themselves be drawn towards the Repository,” the captain said. “But it was battle, Lady Archer, and that makes for poor recall and wild truths.”

“Thank you, captain,” Indrani muttered, and the man saluted.

Cocky leaned in closer.

“The Repository is where they’ve been stashing that sword,” she quietly said.

“Adjutant’s with Looking Glass and his buddies,” Indrani replied. “He’ll keep them pointed at the enemy, and the enemy out of the good stuff. We’re headed for the Belfry.”

The Concocter’s brow rose.

“Worried about your,” and there she hesitated, “... lover?”

“Partner,” Archer said. “No, he can look after himself just fine. But he keeps some nifty stuff in his rooms, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that fae headed that way.”

“We’ll be too late to do much, considering the fae left some time ago,” Cocky pointed out.

“We’re late as first line of defence, sure,” Indrani shrugged. “But we’re headed out as reinforcements, and for that we’re just fine.”

Because a running battle against fae in the middle of the Belfry had trouble written all over it, which mean Cat would be drawn there like a moth to the flame. Probably half drunk and halfway through a terrible plan that’d somehow end up working, Indrani fondly thought, or at least close enough to working that she could pretend it’d achieved what she’d meant it to. They set out quickly, because fashionably later got results but actual late was just being sloppy. The gates into the great tower of the Belfry were wide open, but wariness wasn’t why Indrani’s steps stuttered. The very stone of the floor had been charred, almost turned to glass in that distinctive way that blackflame did. But this was too much, she thought, and not wielded well. Even just the shape of the burn...

She strode forward, heedless of the possibility of ambush and even the sound of fighting far above. The Night had, by the marks on the floor and the slight inclined of melted stone, billowed outwards in an explosion. But at the centre of where that explosion had begun, Archer could see a charred corpse with a knife stuck in its neck. She knew that blade, had seen it used before. No , Indrani told herself . It can’t be her. She wouldn’t have died from a knife. Cat might not be able to pull the regeneration tricks the drow could, or even heal with Night, but she could have kept herself from bleeding out long enough to kill the Fallen Monk and gotten to a healer. Indrani chose to ignore the treacherous whisper in the back of her mind about Night being able to hurt Catherine, when she did not properly control it.

“Cocky,” Archer said, voice steady. “I need you to have a look at that corpse.”

The other woman grimaced.

“Archer, that’s probably...”

“If it is, I want to know for sure,” Archer said. “Cut the body if you have to.”

The Concocter slowly nodded.

“And you?”

Indrani reached for the bow on her back, fingers itching for an arrow, and looked up at the spire where the sounds of a fight were echoing from.

“I’m going to make someone bleed,” the Archer said, and her voice rang of steel.

Interlude: Deadhand

“One hundred and twenty-five: under no circumstances should you trust anyone who has the title of chancellor, vizier or duke. While they will always be powerful and competent, keep in mind they will also inevitably turn out to be in some way treacherous.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

One was limping, two were nursing an arms and Adjutant had only withstood that blow from the Duke of Unrelenting Landslide’s morningstar at the price of his plate being dented and the flesh beneath it torn right through.

The Repentant Magister had done what she could, and she was a skilled healer, but magical healing was less immediately potent than the priestly kind when it came to deeper wounds. All of them were Named, and so the pain and increased fragility was only a minor matter, but Hakram had considered it an interesting piece of irony that he usually received a better quality of healing with the Woe, a band of villains, than he had from a pack of Above’s designated footsoldiers. The air was rife with tension as the band of five he accompanied let the Vagrant Spear guide them through the bare stone corridors, though conversation had not died down even the wake of the defeat inflicted unto them by what could only be remnants of the Court of Autumn. The calm voice in the back of Hakram’s mind noted that where the Woe would digging into their second plan of attack by now, everyone pitching even if it was Catherine who’d put it all together, these five were instead wasting their breath on largely inconsequential matters.

Adjutant decided to take his own evaluation with a grain of salt, acknowledging he would always favour his own companions whether or not he was aware of it.

They’d all been headed towards somewhere called the Spins for some time now, ominously enough without any fae harassment as they moved. Aside from Hakram’s professional vexation at the way half of the Arsenal seemed to have some sort of nickname known only to the locals, on top of the already labyrinthine amount of sections within the facility, there should have been no reason for displeasure on anyone’s part. Unfortunately, the lack of immediate peril meant the Mirror Knight’s band of five had promptly lapsed back into open malfunction. It felt like dealing with children, Hakram thought. While that was not entirely a rare thing with heroes, who were often more preoccupied with pretty ideals than practicalities, this band of five was... remarkably unstable. It would not be impossible to make them functional, in his opinion, but it would take sustained effort to keep them that way and some truly miraculous labour to mend the root causes.

“Would you hurry, Magister?” the Blade of Mercy complained. “We’ll lose them if you keep slowing us down.”

As displayed, though in his opinion the younger of the Proceran heroes was, for all that he was vastly irritating, more a symptom of the troubles than a cause. The Repentant Magister, whose true name was Nephele Eliade, visibly bit down on the sharp retort she equally visibly wanted to let out at the boy who’d been needling her for hours now. The Stygian was slow because she’d taken bad fall in the last scrap with the Prince of Fallen Leaves and magical healing could only help so much with bones, not because she was somehow lazy as was being implied. Now, that should have been the moment when the band’s unspoken leader stepped in before tempers further rose. The Mirror Knight had brought these people together after all, and that implied a level of deference to his leadership. Instead, Christophe of Pavanie leaned closer to the Vagrant Spear and addressed her in a low voice. The look the Magister shot at his back was distinctly less than adoring. It must have been rather irritating, Hakram mused, deferring to something that essentially did not exist.

“How is your arm, Blade of Mercy?” Adjutant gravelled.

The redheaded boy started, constant in his surprise that Hakram could do anything but stand behind a human villain threateningly or eat village babies. Adjutant had known men and women who truly, genuinely hated his kind and so he’d not been all that ruffled by the Blade’s casual bigotry. It was the way of thinking of a boy who’d been told orcs were not people and had never had occasion to question that before, not something running deeper. Hakram thought less of men who chided the likes of the Blade for speaking their opinion of his kind but privately shared in the belief, for at least the boy could be taught .

“It stings,” the blue-eyed boy admitted. “But it is only pain.”

“I am sure Lady Eliade could heal it further, if the sting is a distraction,” Adjutant suggested.

The Blade of Mercy cast a look at the Stygian sorceress and bit his tongue, looking somewhat abashed at the implicit reminder that the only reason his arm wasn’t bleeding meat was the Magister’s healing touch.

“I would not ask her to waste her valuable magic on my discomfort,” the Blade of Mercy stiffly said, inclining his head at the sorceress.

It was exactly the kind of answer someone with a disdain of magic trying to politely excuse themselves from healing would have used, but Adjutant suspected that when it came to the redheaded boy the words were genuine. Or close enough. Hakram had met two very different Blades of Mercy, after all. The first was a boy with Light gleaming in his eyes, spouting lines sounding suspiciously similar to those of the heroes of Proceran bodice-ripper novels and very much trying to act like one of those heroes. The other was an awkward redheaded boy, out of his depth and painfully aware of it. He found it easier to pity the latter than the former, for all that they were one and the same.

The Maddened Keeper, further behind, let out a harsh bark of laughter at the about-face but did not speak. That she did not contribute much of anything was, to Hakram’s eyes, a contributing part of this mess: there was an element missing to their band, the Callowan Named’s aloofness withholding an influence that would have stabilized matters even if it was negative – a designated enemy, after all, would have given the Blade someone to focus his grandstanding against. The Magister offered Adjutant a discreet incline of the head in thanks when no one else was looking, which the orc did not hesitate in returning. It was a rare thing for him to have high opinion of a heroine before meeting her, but the Repentant Magister had been an exception. How could he not hold a woman who’d spurned the slavery she was raised to in high esteem? If Catherine intended to take this one as a consort he could only approve.

“Adjutant,” the Mirror Knight called out from the front, “if we might have a word?”

Hakram put some spring to his step, catching up to the two in front as the Vagrant Spear moved to the side so he might stand between them. Those two were significantly easier to read than the rest, but in a way twice as hard to understand. Adjutant, in theory, knew much of the Vagrant Spear from Indrani’s reports – which, while usually written in sloppy drunk handwriting with some of the filthiest limericks he’d ever seen slipped in here and there, always seemed to cover enough the important parts thoroughly enough he couldn’t actually complain about it to Catherine – and her equally informative tendency to shamelessly gossip after she had a few drinks in her.

He knew that Sidonia was from the city of Alava, from one of the lesser lines of the Blood related to spears and considered as related to the Champion’s Blood even though in practice their skills had much more in common with the Slayer’s Blood. A political issue, he’d been made to understand. Hakram knew that Sidonia was strictly interested in men, could kill skillfully with both hands and seemed to have some Name-driven taboo against wearing shoes of any sort. None of this, though, helped him understand the mercurial brew of affection and dislike she related to the Mirror Knight with, or why it seemed to spin the man’s head around so much. Half the time the man seemed to crave her good opinion, the other half he seemed to court actively spiting it. It was probably about sex, which humans keeping to the House of Light tended to make a lot more complicated than it needed to be.

“I have heard that the Woe fought mighty battles against the Seasons of the Splendid,” the Vagrant Spear said. “Do you have insights to share about the nature of our foe?”

Adjutant considered that, for a moment.

“The Prince of Fallen Leaves is weak, for one of his title,” Hakram replied. “And the court he belongs to should be Autumn.”

The orc cast a curious look at the Mirror Knight, who he’d expected would have known much of this. The ‘Elfin Dames’ living in a lake the man was supposedly sworn to defend sounded very much like fae, or something close enough it hardly mattered.

“The Fair Folk are a weakness of mine,” Christophe of Pavanie boldly volunteered. “My shield will not reflect their works, and their illusory wiles are effective against even my protections.”

“Your oath protects your mind from glamours and manipulations,” the Vagrant Spear dismissed.

“It does not,” the Mirror Knight curtly said.

Sidonia of Alava looked surprised, by Adjutant’s reckoning, but not by the curtness.

“You once told me-”

“I know what I said,” the Mirror Knight grunted, looking away, “yet I repeat: my oath will not protect me.”

The Levantine looked confused, for a moment, then a wicked grin split her lips.

“Are you telling me you finally lost your-”

“I would recommend that the Repentant Magister provide protective enchantments against glamour, if she can,” Hakram interrupted. “The stronger fae do not usually bother with deception, but once cornered they’ll break habit if they lack the strength to win otherwise.”

Something like gratitude gleamed in the Mirror Knight’s eyes at the distraction that’d been provided.

“Have you fought Autumn before then, Adjutant?” he asked.

“No,” the orc gravelled. “But it is the spawn of Summer broken, and I have fought Summer enough.”

The dream that the King of Winter had seeded in Catherine after titling her in his court had been a difficult thing to sparse even though her recollection of it was vivid, because it was not truly a single dream: it was the recollection of a cycle’s shape, one so old and primordial that mortals mind found it difficulty to truly grasp. There had been lessons to learn from it, though, and Hakram Deadhand had committed them to memory.

“The Lady tells marvelous tales of the battles against Summer,” the Vagrant Spear agreed.

It took Hakram a moment to grasp that she was talking about Indrani, simply using the same term Indrani herself slipped into whenever talking about the Ranger. Interesting, he mused. Archer might not be interested in making a legacy for herself, but that did not mean she wouldn’t end up making one regardless.

“I’ll ask Nephele if she can weave such enchantments,” the Mirror Knight said. “Thank you for your advice, Adjutant.”

“It was my pleasure,” the orc replied.

The Mirror Knight retreated further back with eagerness, leaving Adjutant alone with a still-grinning Vagrant Spear. That grin was directed at him, now, like she expected him to pat her on the back for having put the Proceran hero to flight.

“Now is not the time to make sport of him,” Adjutant bluntly said. “We’re headed into a hard fight.”

“You said the prince was weak,” Sidonia replied. “Have you not defeated stronger royalty of the Splendid?”

“As part of a band containing the Black Queen and the Hierophant,” Hakram flatly replied. “And even then, it was a close thing.”

And that was the thing that had his hand itching, wasn’t it? Metaphorically speaking. After so many years among the Woe, where Catherine steered and inspired and mediated, having his Name attached to this walking mess was making him restless. His very nature was urging him to fix this band so that at least they’d cease bleeding each other with their sharp edges. It wouldn’t even be difficult, he knew, to untie the most pressing of the knots. If the Mirror Knight ceased focusing on the Vagrant Spear he’d start taking the Blade of Mercy closer in hand, which would free the Repentant Magister to be a moderating influence on the band. All it would take was establish some sort of accord between Christophe and Sidonia, terms of interaction they could keep to instead of constantly pushing each other.

“You underestimate us,” the Vagrant Spear said.

“You overestimate yourself,” Adjutant frankly replied. “The only reason there hasn’t been a casualty on our side so far is that the fae aren’t here to fight us.”

That struck her in the pride, as it’d been meant to. Indrani had coddled her four too much, they’d started to get ahead of themselves. The Vagrant Spear, the blooming pattern of blue on grey on her face tightening as she scowled, turned to him with a straightened back and tight grip on her spear. Trying to make it so he was not looming so tall above her.

“The Lady bats you around when you spar, I hear,” she challenged, baring pale teeth.

Hakram Deadhand did not bare his own teeth, posture or swagger. He simply looked at Sidonia of Alava, calmly, and considered how long it’d take him to kill her if he was serious about it.

“You are the not the Archer, child,” the Adjutant simply said. “And if you challenge me again, I will rip your fucking throat out.”

The younger woman stared at him for a long moment, then shivered.

“Apologies, Lord,” the Vagrant Spear said, briskly dipping down her head. “I should not swat at him while we head into battle, it does us all disservice.”

“I don’t know what stands between you two,” Hakram said, and raised a hand to stop her when it looked like she might tell him, “and I do not particularly want to. There will be time to pursue it after the fae are scattered, Sidonia. Until then, the Mirror Knight holds command.”

The Vagrant Spear threw him a sardonic look.

“As you say, Lord Adjutant,” Sidonia said, tone a tad dry.

The orc decided not to address that. There was only so much blood you could squeeze from a stone.

“Are we close?” he asked instead.

“Soon,” the Vagrant Spear said. “We should get there ahead of the Splendid, if they took the main halls.”

“Good,” Adjutant said, baring his fangs in approval.

He slowed his stride, leaving Sidonia alone in the front and sliding into the conversation that had been forming behind him. As expected, with the Mirror Knight there to impress the Blade of Mercy was significantly more personable. Without the needling to interrupt, Lady Eliade skillfully steered the conversation away from what she’d been asked, an enchantment that would perfectly resist glamour, to make it seem like the Mirror Knight had instead requested something she could achieve, an enchantment that would allow someone to tell if they were under the throes of glamour. When properly angled, the four Named could associate without wounding each other. But there were still only four, Hakram noted, as the last member of the band of five had stayed aloof and behind all this time.

The Maddened Keeper’s long and unkempt hair did much to hide her face, but Adjutant would have been able to peg her stare as cool and distant even if he’d not spent the last few years learning the nuances of human expressions. That one watched and missed nothing, but she kept her peace. She was Callowan, but from the times before the Empire had ruled it and so little like the Callowans that Hakram knew. There was a sense of... threat to her, one that had the orc’s instincts apprehensive. To his senses, to his Name, she felt like a predator waiting to strike. She was no fighter, the earlier scraps with the fae had proved that, but the Maddened Keeper had also swallowed whole a cloud of decay that’d powdered rock and would likely have killed the Blade of Mercy if it’d been allowed to spread. In a senses she reminded him of Vivienne, in the sense that she was clearly familiar with violence but just as clearly not trained in it – but there ended the similarities, as no prince of the fae had ever very carefully avoided being touched by Thief even at the height of her Name.

Adjutant slowed his steps even further, slipping at the back of band and matching his stride to the Maddened Keeper. She peered at him through oily bangs, unsmiling.

“We were never properly introduced,” Hakram gravelled.

“So that’s what you’re used for,” the Maddened Keeper said, voice apathetic. “The plate and the axe, the height – it all paints the wrong picture. They don’t see it coming, that your brain’s the most dangerous part of you.”

She was not such a tall woman, the Keeper. Skinny thing, no real muscle to her, and though she had vigor it was the feverish kind: burning but not healthy. Whether it was with his hand of bone or the spectral one, it would have been child’s play to snap that sparrow-like neck. So why was Adjutant’s Name screaming at him that if he laid a finger on the Keeper he’d be snuffed out in the blink of an eye?

“If we are to be at odds, so be it,” Adjutant said. “There are old wounds, between your people and mine. But there are more pressing needs, Maddened Keeper.”

“Necessity’s son,” the woman said, tone gone velvet soft. “Whispering her sweet nothings. Stack, stack, stack – move around the stones and maybe one day the game will make sense. But the tower always crumbles, doesn’t it? You’ll not find me so easy to steal or pile, death’s hand.”

She cast him an unfriendly look through the ratty curtain of hair.

“Walk away, orc,” the Maddened Keeper told him. “Lest I develop an interest in pulling at your seams.”

Adjutant was not above recognizing that creeping sensation going up his spine as fear or heeding its warning. There were some that were beyond his ability to corral, and so to continue an attempt was to invite sanction. Villains that did not know their limits died young, and Hakram had too many labours unfinished to be able to afford delusions about his own ability. He walked away, not with undue haste but without lingering either, moving towards the centre of the band again. Hakram caught only snippets of what was being discussed, which turned out to be heroic gossip about the lingering rumours of the White Knight and the Witch of the Woods being romantically involved. He filed it away regardless, but before the subject could change the Vagrant Spear called them to a halt with a peremptory gesture. They had reached the end of a long hallway, which Adjutant found was leading down to a broad downwards slope, spiralling inwards oddly.

“We are here,” the Vagrant Spear said. “The top of the Spins.”

Quietly walking to the edge of the hallway, Hakram leaned down and studied the battlefield the band had picked with a frown. The Repository was largely used as a great warehouse for all the incoming supplies for the Arsenal and outgoing artefacts feeding the war machine of the Grand Alliance, which in most situations would mean a large room spreading outwards. The Arsenal, however, had been carved form the inside of a mountain: there was no difficulty in layering several of these warehouses atop each other, so long as they could all be accessed by wagon. The Spins were likely the part meant for that very purpose, a soft-sloped spiral leading into eight different broad hallways of different heights. Most of those would lead to warehouses, though the ‘central’ hall was likely to be the one heading deeper into the Repository. Towards the restricted sections, where war assets were being kept and the Maddened Keeper informed them all the fae were headed – though she couldn’t tell them exactly what the fae were after. Speaking of the devil, she’d come to the fore at long last.

“The fae haven’t come through here,” the Maddened Keeper said. “But we don’t have long.”

“I’ll take the front,” the Mirror Knight immediately said. “Lady Eliade, your sorcery will serve well from the heights and Antoine can serve as your escort. Sidonia-”

He was making mistakes, Hakram thought, planning like his magical back-up was the Witch of the Woods instead of the Repentant Magister – whose sorceries lacked bite, and the artefacts she used to make up for it tended to require shorter distance.

“I can go on the frontline with you,” the Blade of Mercy interrupted, “the Vagrant Spear can see to the Magister’s protection.”

“I strike, I do not defend,” Sidonia of Alava flatly said. “That is the nature of my Bestowal. This plan is foolish.”

“Perhaps the Adjutant could see to my defence as I weave sorceries from closer,” the Repentant Magister suggested. “You are well-versed in such duties, Lord Hakram, if I recall correctly?”

Catherine had begun needing a flanker once more since her return from the Everdark, so Nephele Eliade was not wrong. That said, Hakram was by far the most durable of the Named here after the Mirror Knight so frankly speaking he should be at the man’s side when the fae began taking the gloves off instead of out back with the Repentant Magister.

“I am,” Adjutant said. “But we have the advantage of surprise. It would be wasteful not to at least attempt an ambush.”

The Mirror Knight blinked in surprise, while the Blade of Mercy stared at him in undisguised distaste.

“That would be dishonourable,” the redheaded boy told him, as if addressing one slow of wit.

“The Adjutant has it right,” the Vagrant Spear grunted. “You don’t meet a raiding party on open ground, you turn the raid on them.”

“They have the advantage in numbers,” Lady Eliade noted. “It would be wise to try to remedy that as quickly as possible.

“The Levantine and the mage, arguing in favour of ambush,” the Blade of Mercy sneered. “How surprising.”

Christophe of Pavanie straightened.

“No chivalry was offered in the attack, none be offered in the defence,” the Mirror Knight said. “It would be best of the prince could be slain swiftly, the rest might buckle.”

“ Christophe ,” the Blade of Mercy protested.

“Honour offered to the dishonourable is gold tossed into the river,” the Mirror Knight replied. “Both the Adjutant and I can afford a long drop without any trouble, we might as well leap. Sidonia and Antoine flanking the hall, Lady Eliade on the slope overlooking?”

“Agreed,” the Vagrant Spear nodded.

Hakram rumbled in approval himself. Keeping himself and the other heavy back might seem counterintuitive, but that way they’d be able to more easily pick out a fae high noble to tie up. There were mutters of approval from the rest.

“I will go with the Repentant Magister,” the Maddened Keeper said, and none gainsaid her.

With the bare bones of the plan agreed on, all that was left was preparations.

“Gather close,” Nephele Eliade ordered. “And don’t move, it will make laying the enchantments much harder.”

Adjutant had heard much of providence, the golden luck of heroes, but rarely had he wished for its arrival. He did today, though, because if they were to make through this without corpses on the ground a dollop of providence would very much be required.

—

The first fae to arrive reminded Hakram of a dragonfly.

All shiny carapace in shades of blue and long wings, with a long halberd in her hands, she cast a look around but after a long moment it appeared she could not see through the illusions that the Repentant Magister had woven around the flankers. The Lady of Cooling Nights , Adjutant recognized. Coming after the outrider, the vanguard should be next. The first fae whistled softly, the melody of it haunting, and two more fae slunk in. Though the orc was familiar with the sight of them, their titles remained unknown. Their unnaturally tall bodies and long limbs, though, could not be mistaken – neither could their skin, pale as bone, or the sharp spears of ivory they held. Pale wings bloomed and they scattered upwards, Hakram’s fists tightening against the handle of his axe as he hoped none of the heroes would be spooked into striking too soon. A beat passed and none of them moved, to his relief.

The Prince of Fallen Leaves’ court strolled in afterwards, riding at a leisurely on great white horses. Three lancers of what Adjutant suspected was Autumn’s equivalent to the Immortals of Summer and the Sword of Waning Day for Winter, their scale armour fashioned to look like a thousand fallen leaves but their lances wickedly sharp and their horsemanship unnaturally skillful. Then the Countess of Still Amber, half a statue and dressed in her namesake from head to toe, and the Duchess of Red Sunset – blinding to look at, which had made the Mirror Knight the only one who could withstand her up closer. The company slowed, only to be joined a few moments later by two more fae. The Duke of Unrelenting Landslide, looking like his armour had been carved out of granite by an artist and his massive morningstar hefted over his shoulder, was simply too heavy for a horse to be able to bear him. He towered tall enough he could keep up with the last fae’s mount, however.

The Prince of Fallen Leaves himself was of a dark grey-brown tone, wearing loose court clothes in tones of burnt orange that subtly evoked the membrane of a leaf by the cut and cloth, and on his brow rested a heavy crown of burnished copper. Bearing a slender longsword of what looked like rotting wood, he offered a permanent faint smile under pale orange eyes. Yet for all that the fae looked more like a dandy out on ride than a prince of the fae, Adjutant knew him to be wickedly fast on his feet and seemingly impossible to wound: any cut made on him would begin spilling fallen leaves, as if he were a sack filled with them, until it closed and left no scar behind. The Lady of Cooling Nights landed at the prince’s feet, kneeling.

“My prince, all the halls seem to lead here,” she reported. “Shall we assemble the court and sally forth?”

They’d split their forces, the orc realized. Given the sometimes maze-like lay of the Arsenal, it made sense that pathfinders would have been needed. Especially if they were after more than the sword made out of the Saint’s corpse, as Hakram suspected they were. The Bard would have needed something to put them in her debt before they came here, or more likely someone . Now was the time to strike, Adjutant thought. Before some fae happened to see through their illusions, and before more of them gathered here. The Mirror Knight might cotton on to that, he considered, but there was one of their company a great deal more used to raids and that was...

The Vagrant Spear blinked into existence, grinning with all her teeth and spear screaming with the Light as it tore right through the Lady of Cooling Nights’ throat.

“Honour to the Blood,” Sidonia of Alava gleefully shouted.

Chaos broke out in the moment that followed, the fae all aflutter at the sudden attack. Adjutant kept a calm eye on the situation, looking for his opening. The Blade of Mercy revealed himself with a hoarse shout, greatsword glinting with Light as it carved through both a lancer and its mount in a single stroke, and a heartbeat later the Repentant Magister fired her sorcery into the mess. The power gathered to strike at their ambushers by the fae, a panoply of titles and abilities, was sucked into a small spinning orb of gold that then blew up in a pulse of pure sorcery at the height of the chest of all those mounted. Only one of the lancers was caught and blown of its mount, the others all dismounting in time, but with that trick Lady Eliade had bought the rest of the band another heartbeat of advantage.

“I will engage the prince,” the Mirror Knight’s voice murmured, though coming from empty air.

Adjutant simply grunted in reply, wary of being overheard himself, but picked his own target before leaping. The whistle of the wind against his face was pleasant, as to his side a thrown spear of ivory struck at what should have been emptiness – but bounced a mirror shield, revealing a steady-eyed Mirror Knight falling with his silver sword already in hand. Below them the tall, pale fae who’d not thrown its spear instead leap up on pale wings and flew towards the Magister. The two remaining lancers were stuck against the side of the hall, moved there impatiently by the greater fae around them as they made room to fight, but already the Duchess of Red Sunset was beginning to emit searing light. Adjutant looked away, guiding his fall with his shield and landing a heartbeat later on the head of the Countess of Still Amber, knocking off her horse in surprise and rolling away before her petrifying curse could begin eating at his boots.

Shield rising as he rose, Adjutant brought up his axe just in time to strike the side of a massive morningstar as it was swung down at him, pushing the blow to the side enough that it shattered the ground instead of his skull and shoulder.

“You again,” the Duke of Unrelenting Landslide said, voice sounding like a thousand stones grinding against each other. “It seems you did learn to fear your betters last time, orc.”

Hakram Deadhand rolled his shoulder, limbering the muscle he’d almost just pulled, and bared his fangs at his foe.

“Yes,” the Adjutant growled, “let us talk, fae, of betters .”

Interlude: Concert

“A problem that cannot be solved by brute strength can still be destroyed by it.”
– Dread Empress Massacre

The Duke of Unrelenting Landslide struck like a mountain made hammer, his stride shaking the earth and his war cry echoing as if sung through a gorge.

Hakram Deadhand stood before him in his burnt plate, armed only with a shield and a long axe, and breathed in deep of the cool air of this place. Fear, fear did not come. It should have, for his foe was a godling in the flesh while he was nothing but old steel and arrogance, but all that Adjutant felt was a quickening of the blood. A stirring. His enemy roared out a challenge, but the orc did not answer: the time for taunt and boast was past. Instead the Adjutant breathed in deep, and even as the Duke of Faerie brought down his morningstar he moved. A step to the side, as the mace shattered stone, and with keen eyes he darted forth. Axe high he struck, but the great fae batted his blow aside with his bare hand and laughed.

The morningstar swept across and Adjutant was not swift enough to leap over the blow, his shield taking it head on as he stood his ground. The whisper of the word was with him, and it had been but a casual stroke, and still he was sent flying a dozen feet back as his shield bent. Hakram barrelled into a horse, toppling it, and rolled away as the morningstar came down and splashed the mount’s entrails over rock. Twice now he’d escaped death narrowly, and yet where was the fear? No, instead a strange and wistful joy had come over him. Like he had come home, after a long journey, or found an old place once beloved. His voice escaped his throat, neither challenge nor scream, instead softly and almost sadly singing in the Kharsum of his youth.

“I sing of spring, come winter deep
I sing of a dream beyond sleep.”

Adjutant stepped to the side, the lilting and bittersweet pace of The Old Raider guiding his feet. Down the morningstar went, the Duke roaring in implacable anger, but Hakram was not there.

“The world was fair, when I was young,” he sang.

The wind screamed, the morningstar sweeping, but Adjutant had begin moving before it. Under he went, knees creaking, and rose to his feet as the Duke turned to him in surprise.

“My grip was strong, my fang was long,” the orc sang.

The proud creature did not shy away when he approached, pitting its own strength against the curve of Adjutant’s axe, but this time when the Duke slapped away the blow Hakram flicked his blade with Name-strength and the fae screamed. Its hand was bloody, and a finger fell onto broken sone.

“And never,” Hakram of the Howling Wolves sang, “did my axe falter.”

—

The Archer sped up the stairs, steps soft as the breeze as her aspect warmed her bones like noonday sun: she could Stride to the end of the world, never faltering nor lost, so long as it shone within her.

She’d already strung her longbow, felt the enchanted wood tighten against her finger as she pricked her ear for the sounds of fighting above. There were five beats to the song, three and two at odds, and the fae were on the side with the numbers. A woman let out a hoarse scream of pain – the Blessed Artificer, Archer guessed – and so made it clear that the fae were on the winning side as well. She must hurry, she thought, reaching for the quiver at her side. Her fingers brushed through the touch of magic that would keep dust and water away from the wood, thumb sifting through the fletching until it found strix feathers and extracting that particular arrow. Black alder wood for the shaft, two centuries old so that the taste for shade and quiet would seep into the ambient magic, and an arrowhead of steel forged by a blacksmith born mute. It was a lurker’s arrow, a slayer’s arrow.

The strix feathers were simply a fancy of Archer’s: the great flesh-eating owls of Waning Woods, after all, preferred to hunt by moonless night.

Her boots touched the second story moments later, arrow loosely nocked as she slipped in the shadow of tall pillars. The foes were righting on the footbridge that tied the hanging spire of crystal to the sides of the Belfry, though the fae wove in and out as was their way. Roland and the Artificer stood on one side, the black-skinned woman bleeding from a long cut across her chest and the Rogue looking like he was so deep in an aspect migraine he could barely see. Against them: a child of straw, an antlered huntress and what could only be a traitor. The Exalted Poet, Archer recalled. Caster, but in a tricky way and not entirely vulnerable up close. Very much human, however. The Archer carefully chose her vantage even as sorcery and Light, past trying to win, desperately tried to keep the two from dying against the three. She would only strike in complete surprise once, and so the shot must be made to count.

Angling herself so that the pillar would hide her from the side but she had a good view of the enemy’s side, Archer breathed out. In the beat that followed, she fluidly drew the arrow past her ear and loosed in a single gesture. The lurker’s arrow flew without making a sound or drawing the eye in any way, a wisp passing behind a flying tuft of straw from one fae being cleaved in two but inevitably, unerringly finding its target. Steel tore right through the Exalted Poet’s throat, avoiding the spine but shredding the vocal cords. The man began choking on his own blood but Archer was already moving, slipping from shadow to shadow as her enemies fell into disarray.

One , the Archer counted

—

His insides were aching, the roughness of continued Use having taken him past raw and into bleeding. Worse, Roland was beginning to lack precision: he could not longer properly seize artefacts or sorcery, sometimes fumbling and losing a precious few moments before finally succeeding. It was the sort of time a man in his position – in over his head – simply could not afford to lose if he was to keep avoiding an unfortunate end.

“No wall, no gate, no mighty keep.”

The Exalted Poet’s rasping voice called out another spurt of what a generous man might call poetry – a far cry from the fine verses of Candide Farstride or those of the princess-poetess Luna Trastanes, what was being inflicted on Roland’s ears – and the Rogue Sorcerer answered with the quickest thing he had at hand, a sizzling Liessen Chisel that spurted out form his sleeve. The Callowan spell was a ward-breaker by design, but it kicked like a horse and it would have shut up the Poet if it’d hit. If. The Lord of Plentiful Harvest leapt into the path, and thought the chisel split him in two it was straw and not blood that went flying: just another false body.

“Will turn away slumber’s cr-”

An arrowhead bloomed in the Exalted Poet’s throat, stealing his breath in a red gasp, and Roland de Beaumarais felt a startled, nervous giggle leave his throat.

“Rogue, what was that?” the Blessed Artificer asked.

Both fae scattered before she was done speaking, faces startled at the sudden bloodletting.

“The tune turns about, my friend,” the Rogue Sorcerer said, grin tugging at his lips.

The tightening of the Helikean bronze burr into the flesh of his flank warned him that power was being directed at his back and Roland threw himself down, scrabbling for a sharp enough blade that he’d be able to make some damage. That unexpectedly lethal jet of acid from the Dominion hedge mage, or perhaps hellflame confiscated from one of the Eyes? Golden power shivered above him, biting into the railing and sending shards of white-hot metal and stone flying every which way. His coat took most of it, three layers of impact-negation enchantment blown through in the blink of an eye, but it couldn’t cover everything. He swallowed a scream when a piece of shrapnel shredded through his cheek and the corner of his lip, his aspect stumbling into the use of another power.

“Bite,” the Rogue Sorcerer shouted.

Ice erupted with a shrill cry, singing of death.

—

“The days were long in summer sun,” Hakram sang.

There was Adjutant, and there was all that went on around him. In the coolness of his mind, he found himself able to follow both without trouble.

The Duke of Unrelenting Landslide stamped his foot against the stone, the air shivering of the power as a rippled went through the ground as if a pond had been struck. Hakram swiftly circled to the side, waiting until he had come near one of the remaining lancers and the fae struck out at him by sword to measuredly leap up. The lancer’s blade rasped against his plate, burnt by fires mightier than any of those burning here today, and Hakram dropped his axe to catch the fae by the wrist and toss him to the side, right onto the downwards arc of the morningstar come to pulp him. He landed in a crouch, blood flecked all over him, and snatched up his axe.

Light flashed, the Blade of Mercy screaming as his greatsword shattered the spear of the Countess of Still Amber, drawing from the fae a scream of rage as he swept her down from her horse with pure strength. The Vagrant Spear whooped madly as she leapt sideways, smashing a bare foot into one of the distorted pale fae’s face and an elbow into the others’ neck. The three of them stumbled to the ground in a pile, even as one of the lancers made to run through the now-prone heroine only for a tight circle of red sorcery to form around his neck and choke him with his own momentum, buying just enough time for the Mirror Knight to lightly dance away from the Prince of Fallen Leavens and casually split the head from the body in a single stroke.

“Even sorrow sweet, in battles won,” Hakram sang.

The Duchess of Red Sunset burned with power, grown incandescent, and the Adjutant could not touch her. None of them could. Tough she was weaker in power than the prince himself, in some ways the nature of that power was harder to deal with. Now it was only a matter of time until she unleashed the fires, and those might turn the tide. Her attention needed to be drawn, focused. The orc retreated towards her, stoking the Duke’s anger even further as he found himself denied his foe.

“Coward,” the Duke of Unrelenting Landslide screamed

The insult passed over him like water on a duck’s back. The Duchess saw him coming, not blinded by her own works, and even as behind him the Duke roared and smashed into the melee like an angry bull she struck at him. A whip of flame lashed out from behind the blinding incandescence, unnaturally twisting over his raised shield and sweeping down to seize his hand. But the whip found only bone there, crafted by a Warlock of which there had been few equals, and there was no pain to loosen his grip. Hakram Deadhand lunged forward and struck at the fae within burning light, only to be driven back. It did not matter, for he’d heard her snarl in anger at his insolence. These were predictable creatures, once their nature was grasped.

The whip withdrew.

“And never did my hand linger,” Hakram sang.

The fires of a setting sun swallowed him whole, but Adjutant had followed the rhythm: quick as the Duchess was, she was not so quick that his soul did not first echo with the will to Stand .

—

The huntress had come to hunt her, Archer saw with blade-sharp amusement.

She was a tall one, that fae, painted red and white with antlers tearing out of the sides of her head and a long spear of bone in her hand. Light-footed, almost reluctant to use her wings, and now striding across the stone floors of the Belfry in search of the archer who’d fired at her ally from behind. Ear to ear and eye to eye, Archer knew, the fae’s senses were likely better than hers. In a game of shadows, at first glance it might seem like the huntress had the advantage. Of course, that perception relied on one assumption: that, when she heard the string of the bow being pulled, the fae could move faster than Archer could loose. The Named’s fingers went drifting through her quiver once more, finding the arrow she sought by the soft touch of the bellhawk feather fletching. Prodigiously loud birds, bellhawks, known to use their cry to startle animals into leaving their hiding places.

The purpose of the matched arrow was a little different, but not dissimilar in essence.

Crouched atop the stacks, overlooking the huntress from the distance, the Archer drew and loosed before a single breath’s span could pass. The antlered fae’s head swivelled, but before she could finish finding the arrow from the whistling sound the enchantment carved into the birch shaft was awakened by the touch of wind and a deafening cry erupted. The huntress winced in pain, her unnaturally sharpened senses coming back to haunt her, and that delay cost her. While the fae narrowly managed to recover in time to catch the small glint of light on steel and swat aside the arrow, the second one – tipped in cold iron, a precaution she’d originally taken in case the Wild Hunt grew rebellious – that Archer had drawn and fired under the cover of the first found her thigh and struck true. The trick had been in the angle, aimed just so that the fae’s peripheral vision would miss the second shot until it was too late. Even if the fae were magic made flesh, as Masego insisted, so long as they used human shape they shared the limitations of human eyes.

Two , the Archer counted.

The huntress screamed as the touch of cold iron spread through her veins like poison, ripping out the arrow only too late. It would not kill her, but she was slowed now. Weakened. And when the antlered fae looked atop the stacks, ready to unleash her wrath, she found only shadows there. Archer was gone, had been since the heartbeat that followed the second loosing. She did not need to stay to know whether her arrows had struck true.

It was with something like wariness that the huntress now eyed the open space before her.

—

The Rogue Sorcerer could feel it in the air, like a scent in the wind: the tide, it was turning.

The Lord of Plentiful Harvest snarled in anger, having been just a beat of the song too slow to escape the sudden blooming of the ice. His foot was frozen up to the knee, and with his childlike body even given his physical strength he was having a hard time finding the right angle to rip himself free. Roland was still panting even as he rose, he wouldn’t make it in time, but he was not fighting alone. Adanna of Smyrna, bloodied but unbowed, turned a dark glare unto the fae they had each killed a dozen times only to see straw fly instead of blood. She was nearing exhaustion as well, sweat beading her brow and staining her clothes, but it was with a steady hand that she raised up a simple bundle of four twigs and crushed it in her grip. Four bolts of Light screamed to life, grasped tight and reflecting on her spectacles.

“Four,” the Blessed Artificer said, “will be plenty enough for you.”

Not bad , Roland, mused even as Adanna’s hand came down and the Light thundered. It was well-known among Chosen that speaking the right phrase or challenge could nudge the odds of a blow landing in your favour, and this seemed like it might just pass muster. The Lord of Plentiful Harvest had already lost an arm to Adanna earlier, and today she was to be his bane for the four streaks Light melded together into a single great spear that tore through his chest, burning its way through flesh and bone and whatever deceit lay at the heart of fae. The Rogue Sorcerer, sensing that the end of this was to come soon one way or another, touched a finger to one of the runes in his pocket. The bottom of the Slow Regret, that despicable piece of Stygian work, slapped against his palm and he withdrew the small clay statue depicting a crane.

“You insects ,” the Lord of Plentiful Harvest snarled, body visibly boiling in the wake of his wound. “I will see you annihilated for this.”

He’d begun shedding strands of straw form the sides of the gaping hole the Artificer had burned, and with a shudder he contracted onto himself: becoming significantly smaller, yet whole again. Have we been destroying true pieces of him this entire time? Regardless Roland touched his bloody cheek and rubbed some of the redness against the side of the statue, watching it sink into the clay without a trace, then grimaced. They part that came after was not one he enjoyed.

The Rogue Sorcerer produced a knife, the same he’d used to bleed dry the Count of Green Apples, and with a ragged war cry ran towards the fae.

—

The flames of a dying sun seared him, scorched him, devoured him whole.

Hakram Deadhand should have been made ash, dust scattered on the wind, but he stood unbowed in the face of the wrath of the Duchess of Red Sunset. Like a statue made of conceit, he refused the fae’s verdict and his aspect came smooth and deep at the call. It too, disapproved of the utter arrogance of that creature in believing her will was enough to end him. He bowed his neck to one woman only, and she had sent him out today to win. The fires waned, as all fires had and ever would, and when the last ember died the Adjutant stood still. Unmoved.

“I bore a crown once, of iron hewn,” Hakram sang, and struck.

Through the blinding light still at the heart of the fae, Adjutant saw the recoil of dismay. His axe’s edge cut through a whip of flame, a pretty trick but poor in defence, and found flesh beneath. The Duchess cried out in pain and he hammered her down on the ground, teeth bared. The orc felt a strong grip squeeze around his ankle, the Repentant Magister’s enchantment warning him he was now under glamour. Without missing a beat, Hakram stepped back and closed his eyes. Find , he thought. Find me my foe. The aspect pulsed within him and blindly he swung, letting Creation guide his hand. The blow glanced off the side of a spear of ivory, a pale-skinned fae coming into existence with a sound like a shattered mirror.

“ Flicker ,” the Blade of Mercy yelled.

In the heartbeat that followed he smashed into the pale fae’s side, made entirely out of Light – it was a simulacrum, Hakram understood only when after cutting through the spear and tackling the glowing Blade winked out. The orc took the opening, shield smashing the Duchess’ face when she tried to rise before he knelt atop her, axe rising. The incandescence flared, tossing him away in a torrent of flame but it had been enough. Already coming down, one eye wide open and burning from the refusal to close, the Vagrant Spear rammed her spear through the fae’s open mouth, screaming in triumph. Hakram landed on his feet, steel boots shooting sparks as he slid to a halt.

“Earned riding,” Hakram sang, “under autumn moon.”

As if spellbound, the head of every single fae swivelled towards him. Unexpected, the Adjutant thought, but he could work with this. He rolled his shoulder, loosening it before all the howling Hells came for him.

“And never did my heart waver,” Hakram Deadhand hummed.

—

Archer savoured the hesitation in the huntress’ steps like fine wine, knowing it was the closest fae could come to true fear: the implicit recognition that there was something out there that could kill them, if it wanted to.

It was time to bring this to an end. First she allowed her boots to drag against the floor, the fae near instantly turning towards the noise and tossing a spear of blood-red power at the pillar Archer had been hiding behind. Stone shards and dust blew everywhere, but she’d already been moving. One, two, three steps even as the bellhawk arrow she’d reached for was nocked and loosed. The huntress went wild, charging forward, and though she parried the arrow in question with her bare hand the Archer had already released that second pulsing tension within her. The Flow that went beyond what earthly hands could master, hers to borrow for the shortest of whiles. Sometimes she wondered if that was what it felt like, to be the Lady. When everything fit perfectly, and you could place yourself within the parts of the world exactly the way you wanted.

There were twenty feet between the Archer and the huntress. Before one had been crossed, the second arrow was loosed: a slender thing of birch, that would have torn through the fae’s left ankle were it not slapped aside by spear. Archer loosed the third arrow before the huntress was even done moving, and the cold iron tip tore through the fae’s right shoulder. The enemy screamed in excruciating pain but strode forward. Seventeen feet left. The huntress had learned the trick, now, but it did not matter: Archer had killed things like here before. Much as the fae wanted to ignore the fourth arrow she could not, for it was of cold iron and headed right for her throat. She twisted around, ducking low as she moved – fifteen feet – but the fifth arrow ripped right through her left knee before the spear could adjust to the lowered height. The huntress stumbled but stubbornly carried on.

The sixth arrow was loosed low, at her midriff, and the fae’s back erupted with red wings. One bat of them was enough for the fae to drag herself up, the shot passing under her as she forced her body straight – ten feet – but the seventh tore through the left wing and her flight swivelled downwards. The huntress hit the ground but struck at the stone with the butt of her spear first, so that she would remain half-standing and half-stumbling forward when her feet touched down. Eight feet. A simple trajectory, and the spear was already occupied: the eighth arrow, the last cold iron tip Archer carried, punched through the fae’s ribcage and into her heart. She stumbled forward a few steps, gasping, and raised her spear in a last effort. The Archer felt the flow leave her, the world become clumsy and blind once more, but even at her least she could see the span of that death.

Nonchalantly, she stepped to the side of the huntress blow and waited for the antlered fae to drop down with a plaintive scream of pain. Unmoved, Archer took another two steps forward and nocked a mundane arrow before turning. The blood-red power the huntress had gathered above her head did not defend her from the shot the Archer loosed a heartbeat after turning, punching through the back of the fae’s skull.

–

One of the Rogue Sorcerer’s ribs shattered as the little fae slapped his side, throwing him away like a ragdoll, and he screamed in pain. It wouldn’t be enough, damn him, damn this damned statue and the damned sorcerer whose damned soul had thought it was a clever damned thing to make. At least some sort of spell could have been woven in to numb the pain but no, Stygian sorcerers were all bloody sadists. Exception made for Nephele, of course, was a delight unless she had a few drinks in her and reason to be displeased. Roland landed on the stone footbridge, which was not great for his already bruised back, and tried to hack away at the fae that’d flown over to him and was now dropping down. Sadly his knifeplay had gone somewhat rusty of late, and the Lord of Plentiful Harvest snapped the wrist holding the knife before landing on his ribs and shattering another few. Gods, the pain.

“Duck,” the Blessed Artificer screamed.

Sadly, between the excruciating amount of pain he was in and the fact that the fae was standing atop his abdomen it had been fated that Roland de Beaumarais was going nowhere. Which proved something of an issue when a bolt of Light struck him and not the Lord of Plentiful Harvest, who had been in a position to heed Adanna’s advice. With a breathless scream of pain, the Rogue Sorcerer felt the power scythe through the last two layers of protection on his shirt and sear his skin. Not deeply, but he comforted himself with the knowledge that at least properties would be maintained.

“Cower,” the childlike fae ordered, tossing a disk of golden power at the Blessed Artificer.

He then turned cruel eyes at the Rogue Sorcerer, freshly back on his feet, who met him gallantly with a raised knife.

“Adanna,” he called out. “Still alive?”

“Yes,” the Blessed Artificer panted back.

“Then prepare your sharpest blade,” Roland de Beaumarais said. “This ends.”

“In this,” the Lord of Plentiful Harvest beatifically smiled, “you are correct. This ends, and it ends with you screaming .”

The Rogue Sorcerer smiled, deeply relieved.

“Say what you will about Theodosian,” Roland said, “but the little bastard would have seen it coming.”

On that scathing assessment his fingers closed around the clay statue artefact still in his pocket, the Slow Regret. With a grunt he shattered the clay with his grip and pointed a single finer at the childlike fae. Before his foe could even blink a small thread of translucent sorcery connected them, and Roland screamed once more as his ribs unsnapped . The Lord of Plentiful Harvest turned surprised, pained eye on the Rogue Sorcerer, who grinned back mockingly. Roland’s seared skin healed, while the fae screamed as the burning touch of Light ate at its chest.

“Artificer,” he yelled. “Now is-”

“Soon,” Adanna yelled back, tone distracted.

The Rogue Sorcerer’s ribs unshattered once more, as the last if the wounds he’d taken since binding himself to the Slow Regret flowed through, and the fae broke out of the enchantment with a yell of triumph.

“Now,” the Lord of Plentiful Harvest said, “you-”

He paused, looking up, and Roland followed his gaze. Above them, the crackling web of Light that had been preventing the fae from going up was gone. Instead a hundred glinting swords of Light hung in the air, while the Blessed Artificer grinned a devil’s grin at them both.

“Boom,” Roland helpfully said, flicking a finger at the fae.

The swords came down and the world went white.

–

“Spring passed into summer song,” Hakram sang.

His ankle was still being squeezed, a reminder that he was under glamour and could not trust all that his eyes told him. Yet he saw much, in the moment where the Court of Autumn tried to destroy him. The Maddened Keeper, laying the lightest of touches on one of the pale fae – it melted from the inside in the beat that followed, in too much pain to even scream. The Repentant Magister, throwing a bauble of silver at the Countess of Still Amber that froze her in place just long enough for the Blade of Mercy to cleave her in two. And Hakram saw, too, the wrath headed his way: a cloud of rot and decay, from the Prince of Fallen Leaves’ hand, and single smooth pebble from the Duke of Unrelenting Landslide. Adjutant knew the latter would carry with it the strength of an entire avalanche and was likely to kill him on impact even if the former did not.

The Mirror Knight, unflinching, stood between the orc and the onslaught. Straight-backed, shield raised, the hero widened his stance.

“ Withstand ,” Christophe de Pavanie said.

And though death struck at the Mirror Knight, he looked upon it in disdain and let it wash over him. It was an opening, Hakram thought as the rot split around the Proceran. They would not see him coming, not through that. The Adjutant did not embrace fury, for the Red Rage had never been in his blood. He reached instead for the cold, for the frozen bite, and let it flow through his veins. Strength filled his limbs, and he knew the Rampage had begun.

“Then summer into fall, headlong,” Hakram sang.

The rot ate at his flesh as he leapt through it, but in the throes of his aspect that meant nothing. It was back, and he emerged from the cloud with his axe raised high. The Duke of Unrelenting Landslide blinked in surprise, but swung down the morningstar without hesitation. A step to the side, as the stone broke. The morningstar swung, but Adjutant had the measure of his foe now. And the swiftness to act on that measure. He leapt over the swing, and with all his might smashed his shield in the Duke’s face. The fae rocked back, in pain, and took a hand off the morningstar to blindly swipe. Adjutant began to duck the moment he landed, smooth and measured, and his axe sliced through the fae’s heel. The Duke screamed out in pain, falling onto his knee, and there the orc was waiting.

“And I know what waits after,” Hakram Deadhand sang, axe smashing through the Duke of Unrelenting Landslide’s forehead.

Again and again he ripped free and swung, making a red mess of the fae’s head, until the giant toppled at his feet and he breathed out. He chanced a look around him, finding that now only the Prince of Fallen Leaves still stood and that the band of five was surrounding him. Yet Hakram’s ankle was still squeezed tight: a heartbeat later Sidonia struck at the fae, only for the illusion to shatter, and the orc grasped that there was worst yet ahead.

The prince was in the wind, and there was no one protecting the sword meant to slay the Dead King. The last two lines of the old song came to him, like a mournful warning.

I sing of spring, come winter deep
I sing of a dream beyond sleep

Interlude: Threads

“The finest exercise of war is to interrupt the enemy’s plan. Therefore, the general without a plan is also without peer.”
– Isabella the Mad, Proceran general

“Archer,” Roland smiled. “It’s damned good to see you.”

Indrani flicked a glance at the ripped-up footbridge, large chunks of it either torched, cut or otherwise savaged beyond recognition.

“Same to you, Rogue,” she replied. “You’ve had an interesting day, by the looks of it.”

The rueful smile she got in answer to that was classic Roland, a touch of nonchalance facing the constant messes he seemed to get himself into. A tall, dark-skinned woman with those famous Wasteland golden eyes made her approach, skittish as a cat.

“Greetings, Archer,” the Blessed Artificer stiffly said. “I am-”

“I know who you are,” Indrani informed her.

She was not hostile in tone, even though the heroine seemed physically unable to help herself from picking fights with Masego whenever they were in the same room. Archer had no need to fight Hierophant’s battles for him. Besides, she’d made some inquiries and judged that Adanna of Smyrna would stay within acceptable bounds even if she got the upper hand – nothing permanent, nothing crippling. If nothing else, the Artificer would serve to make sure that Masego didn’t got too soft during his years away from the front.

“Pick up the Poet and bring him down,” Archer ordered them. “I want to ask him a few questions.”

“You have a healer?” Roland asked, sounding relieved.

Someone had done a nasty turn on his cheek – heated metal, by the charred and bloody looks of that wound – so she could see why he’d be. The Artificer was bleeding as well, but it looked mostly like shallow cuts. Both heroes were exhausted, though, maybe a quarter hour away from the sense of danger fading and the shakes settling in instead. The Rogue Sorcerer had a few potions to delay that further, she knew, but odds were Cocky would have better stuff below.

“I brought the Concocter,” Indrani said. “She’s down there, examining the body.”

“Only the one?” Roland probed, sounding surprised.

“It is the Black Queen’s,” the Blessed Artificer bluntly told her. “The fae said that she died and they cannot lie.”

“Knowingly,” Archer corrected. “They cannot lie knowingly . There’s a body down there, sure, but I’ve my doubts.”

If Indrani was right, though, it begged the question of where the Hells Catherine actually was. She wouldn’t have left Roland and the Artificer to face enemies outnumbered without a good reason, or even just disappeared at all for that matter. Indrani had been sent out to get answers and she’d yet to bring them back.

“There will be another prisoner,” Roland volunteered. “I crippled the Count of Green Apples and tossed him into the stacks on the western side of the first story.”

Archer let out a low whistle, genuinely impressed. Fae didn’t usually leg it when they’d come for a reason, as these clearly had, so if the Count hadn’t come back then crippled must be something of an understatement.

“I’ll pick him up, then,” Indrani said. “Can the two of you handle the Exalted Poet?”

The Blessed Artificer was already kneeling at the man’s side, she noted with approval, already getting down to work. Except the dark-skinned woman was grimacing in dismay, finger on the side of the traitor’s neck.

“He’s dead,” Adanna of Smyrna said. “He has no pulse.”

Archer blinked in surprise. She’d shot him in the throat, true, but she’d avoided the spine. She’d buy unconscious, she’d been banking on it really, but dead ?

“Isn’t he a Levantine hero?” Indrani said.

“He was a Levantine poet , Archer,” Roland reminded her. “An occupation not habitually known for its physical fortitude.”

“It isn’t as if being born in the Dominion lends someone greater vitality,” the Blessed Artificer waspishly said. “Though to my passing knowledge of medicine, he appears to have died from choking on his blood.”

“Hells,” Archer cursed. “I wanted to interrogate him. How dead is he, would you say?”

“... averagely dead?” Adanna of Smyrna hazarded.

“Not fresh gone,” Roland noted. “If you’re thinking of fanning a last spark with tonics, I’d say that stallion has left the pen.”

Damn it, just when she finally had someone at hand who had those sorts of brews.

“Just toss him down, then,” Indrani sighed. “Can’t leave the body unattended, not with the number of potential necromancers in this place.”

“He’s a hero,” the Blessed Artificer bit out angrily. “We can’t just-”

“He was a traitor,” Archer flatly interrupted, “and now he’s a corpse. Carry him down in a tender embrace, if you feel like it, but I’ve no intention of lending an ear to your praise of a failed turncoat.”

She shot a look at Roland.

“Don’t linger,” she said. “That’s a nasty wound, best to get it seen to as soon as possible.”

Archer did not bother with goodbyes, instead leaving them to make their decision on their own as she headed for the stairs. Much as it rubbed her the wrong way not to remove her arrows from the corpses, given how precious they were, it would have to wait. After going one story down she made her way around the side of the Belfry and found the fae the Rogue Sorcerer had handled, brow rising when she saw one of the Fair Folk outright unconscious. She’d seen their like wounded and dead by the hundreds, but unconscious ? That was much rarer. What had Roland done to screw with it that badly? Screw with him, it turned out as Archer got close, but when she turned over the body – a longknife in hand, just in case – she started at the face.

“I know you,” Archer muttered, brow creasing.

Whatshisname from the Battle of Dormer, wasn’t he? The fucker who’d kept throwing fire at her and nearly burned Vivienne to death when he caught her flatfooted. The Duke of Something Something. Green Trees, Green Yews – no, that was some other bastard Cat and Hakram had murdered while she’d been out in southern Callow with Zeze – oh, Green Orchards ! So the last time she’d seen that face it’d been on a Duke of Summer, one who should be thoroughly dead by now. Cat had been in a black mood that night and people didn’t tend to walk those off. Much less turn up a few years later with a different name, yet here we were. That had implications , according to some of what she’d picked up lately.

Indrani had honestly paid only passing attention to this Quartered Season racket that Masego and Catherine had going on, doing her due diligence of going through everybody’s things more out of habit than genuine interest, but she’d picked up a thing or two. The principle, as she understood it, had come from a theory Zeze put forward after the Twilight Ways were born and he got rid of the petty god in the back of his head: that the Court of Arcadia Resplendent, the one born from the wedding of Summer and Winter, was an entirely new entity and not something flowing directly from either Winter or Summer.

There were a bunch of complicated explanation for why that was, best left for others to dig into, but the heart of it was a division being made between ‘power’ and ‘crowns’, the former being the good stuff and the latter the formal mantle. Masego believed that Arcadia was one crown and Twilight another. Which meant that regardless of where ‘power’ had been accrued – mostly Arcadia with Twilight and the Crows splitting the difference, the theory went – there were still two ‘crowns’ up for grabs. It didn’t matter if there wasn’t much ‘power’ left behind either, the way Masego put it, because it was still a functioning godhead. Dried up, sure, but functional.

What he and Cat meant to make of it had been straight out of that brand of outrageous that tended to spring up whenever they collaborated on something: vicious to the bone and too clever by half. Instead of making a giant sharper or even a fine arrow for their good pal Indrani, they’d decided to make a gift. So what did it mean, this old face with a new name? Someone else would have to figure it out, she supposed, because it was beyond her.

“Might as well bring you down,” Indrani mused, gazing down at the fae.

She was wary of waking up one of the fae and interrogating them without a warding specialist at hand, but Roland with a few potions in him might do in a pinch. There was a need for answers. She hoisted the fae over her shoulder, forcing her bow to the side, and finished the trek back at the bottom of the Belfry. Cocky was kneeling on the floor, silver knife in hand as she studied the insides of the dead body she’d been left with, and only vaguely gestured in greeting when Indrani dropped the unconscious count.

“So?” Archer probed.

The Concocter withdrew her hands, stripping them of some sort of gauzy transparent film they’d been coated in and throwing it aside. It melted a beat later, leaving behind only the filth and blood it’d soaked up.

“I was going to have to ask you if the Black Queen was misassigned, but it won’t be necessary,” Cocky bluntly said. “Whoever this boy was, he was not finished going through puberty.”

Indrani felt her shoulders loosen. She’d believed, she had. Believed that Cat wouldn’t go out like this, to a nobody and a few fae, that this plan had been of her own making and that meant she still had hands to play. But Archer also remembered the stillness of ice around her, the utter silence of creeping death, and shed known that sometimes there just wasn’t anything you could do. Sometimes the world got the last laugh, and all you could do was take it. But not today , she thought, breathing out. She wouldn’t be losing anyone today.

“Keep that between us,” Archer said. “You couldn’t identify the body.”

“I know the Rogue Sorcerer professionally,” Cocky pointed out. “He is aware I am not, in fact, a complete imbecile.”

Indrani swallowed the theatrical my Gods, how long have you been lying to him? that’d come to her tongue unbidden, an old habit not quite shed, and forced herself to focus.

“He’ll also know to keep his mouth shut,” Archer replied. “We understand each other.”

While the dark-haired Named had no idea why Cat wanted to pass herself off as dead, she didn’t feel all that inclined to spread knowledge of the trick around now that she’d figured it out. Presumably there were reasons for this, another round of deep games that Indrani had long given up trying to figure out. Archer could catch the scent a story when it was around, and she’d been taught how to avoid those that’d get her killed, but she just didn’t have the knack for that sort of thinking that Catherine did. It took a peculiar sort of madness, to master those arts, and not of a sort she envied.

“Did you get another prisoner upstairs?” the Concocter asked. “I have serums readied, if it is the case.”

“He, uh, died,” Indrani said.

A beat passed.

“You killed him, didn’t you?” Cocky said, and it wasn’t really a question.

“Let’s not get hung up on who did what,” Archer evaded. “Do you have something that would compel fae to speak?”

Her brow rose, and she now seemed interested.

“Magically compel, no,” the Concocter said. “But there are other ways. I have a substance than should be able to lull him into a pleasant trance and make him receptive to inquiries.”

“That’d do it,” Indrani approved. “They’re hard to break with pain, but they’re not immune to gentler methods. Thanks, Cocky.”

The purpled-eyed woman eyed her with something like wary surprise, as if expecting a barb to follow, and only nodded after a few moments had passed.

“I can wake him up now, if you’d like,” the Concocter said, gesturing at the prisoner.

“Best to wait for the Rogue Sorcerer for containment,” Archer replied.

As it happened it was not long before Roland and the Artificer were there, the two of them carrying the Exalted Poet’s corpse by the arms and legs. The arrow had been removed, but the wound was visible.

“ Really , Indrani? An arrow to the throat?” Cocky murmured. “Quite the capture method.”

“He’s Dominion,” Archer defended, “they’re supposed to be hardy.”

“I’m sure that fact was a great comfort while he choked to death on his own blood,” the Concocter replied, sounding deeply amused.

Everyone was getting snippy, these days. The heroes set down the corpse without much ceremony – it was heavy and they were tired – before Roland straightened his coat and the Artificer wiped her hands clean on her apron.

“Rogue Sorcerer,” Cocky greeted the Proceran as she rose to her feet

She let a full moment pass.

“Artificer.”

Indrani, no stranger to the art of petty slights, had to smother a smile at the refinement of that particular bit of pettiness.

“Concocter,” the Blessed Artificer replied, tone flat.

“Let’s get that cheek healed up,” Archer cheerfully said. “Maybe something for the fatigue as well, unless Rogue’s been drinking?”

“I refrained,” Roland said. “I would be in your debt, Concocter, if you would oblige.”

That stroked Cocky’s fur the right way, as courtesies tended to, and she got to work without quibbling. It was quick work sewing up the cheek with needle and thread then applying the salve and having him drink the potion that back in Refuge they’d called the Pardon. It was red and thick, almost more molasses than liquid, and it smelled of death – which is was partly made of, Indrani suspected, or at least flesh – but within moments of drinking it Roland was looking better. The bleeding on his cheek ceased and the charred skin began to flake, though this wasn’t a miracle brew: skin did not grow back, and it’d take more than a drink to fix his carved cheek muscles.

The Artificer got seen to as well, if less comprehensively, with a small vial ending the bleeding in her cuts and an elongated pill for the pain. The heroine grimaced as she swallowed the latter, not without reason: Cocky didn’t coat hers in honey or extracts, unlike a lot of medicine-peddlers.

“Feeling up to a bit of a talk, Sorcerer?” Indrani asked.

“What about?” Roland asked.

“Not you and me,” she laughed, then pointed a boot at the unconscious fae. “I’ve questions for our friend here.”

“I can run containment, if you want,” the Rogue Sorcerer said, “but it should not be necessary. He should barely be more physically capable than a human, at the moment.”

Archer’s brow rose. While she was damned curious about how he’d pulled that off – everyone and their sister knew Roland had sticky fingers when it came to tricks and artefacts, but there was quite a leap between that and hollowing out a Count of Autumn – that seemed like it might infringe on the nature of his aspects, and that... just wasn’t something you asked . It was fair game if heard, or fought, but asking someone to just hand out one of three words at the heart of them a different story.

“Keep an eye out anyway,” Indrani said. “Cocky, the fae’s all yours.”

“Joy,” the Concocter muttered, rolling her eyes.

Backtalk or not, it was with poorly veiled eagerness she knelt at the Count of Green Apples’ side and forced his mouth open. Odds were she didn’t often get to ply her trade on the likes of him, Archer mused. Her own eyes wandered a bit, coming to rest on the dead body that was not Catherine’s. Roland hadn’t asked, though she suspected that when they got a moment to talk without people to overhear he would, and evidently the Blessed Artificer still believed herself to be correct. Whose body was it? It couldn’t be the Fallen Monk’s, she thought, even though it was his knife that Cocky had taken out from the neck and laid down next to the body.

Wait, why was the knife there?

Indrani could recognize it on sight, she’d seen it make quite a few cuts. The Monk had always been sharp in a bad way, but she hadn’t thought that he would... Well, you couldn’t always see it coming. There were nights ahead of her where Archer would examine whether she ought to have seen that betrayal coming, but not now. Last blood had not been spilled. The knife was placed here so I could see it , Indrani decided. The rest of her band was here, but dispersed and unlikely to come here in the Belfry without reason. Cat must have left it there as a message. Not recrimination, that wasn’t her style. It’d been stuck in the corpse, though, so what was it that was important about the corpse?

Oh , Indrani thought, and put it together. You’re listening through it, aren’t you? You’re waiting for my report and for whatever we dig up here. Breathing out, Archer knelt by Cocky’s side even as the fae’s eyes fluttered open – glazed, unseeing – and Roland took position behind the Count of Green Apples.

“It’s working?” she asked the Concocter.

“It should,” Cocky said, finger forcing open an eye and looking at the dilation. “Try asking him a question.”

“Who are you?” Archer asked.

“I am the Count of Green Apples, of course,” the fae said, sounding surprised.

“Dreamlike state,” Cocky said, sounding satisfied. “It took hold properly.”

Indrani nodded her thanks, then took to interrogation.

“Who sent you here?”

“The Prince of Falling Leaves,” the fae said.

The Blessed Artificer flinched at the words, all eyes save the Count’s turning to her in surprise.

“Care to share?” Archer lightly said.

“The Hunted Magician,” Adanna of Smyrna replied. “He’s had dealings with that creature before.”

Fuck , Indrani thought. This better not end up being blamed on Cat because a villain had been the way in and not one of Above’s shiny helmets. Interesting that the Artificer would know that, though. She’d have to remember to look into it later.

“Why did you come to the Belfry in particular?” Archer asked.

“To destroy the works of the Hierophant,” the Count said. “And so settle half our debt.”

Indrani’s fingers clenched in triumph. That sounded like a proper scapegoat being set out for her, didn’t it?

“Who is the debt owed to?”

“The Wandering Bard.”

Cocky stiffened at her side, beginning to grasp the depths of how badly she’d miscalculated by making a bargain with the Intercessor. The Artificer looked mostly confused, Roland grim.

“Where did the prince go?” Indrani asked.

“To get his due,” the Count of Green Apples proudly said. “To break the sword.”

And there it was, Autumn’s plan laid out. The dark-haired killer rose to her feet, stretching as she did.

“Archer?” the Rogue Sorcerer tried.

“Knock him out and bind him,” Indrani ordered. “We’re got work to do.”

Now, Archer thought, how was she going to keep giving her report to a dead body subtle? Any notion of her guess there being wrong was put to rest, after all, by the way the corpse’s neck had slightly turned so it would be able to watch the interrogation.

—

Christophe de Pavanie took the blow without flinching, angling his shield so that it would slide to the side and giving answer with a slice of his sword. The fae drew back with a scream, having tasted of the Light running along the blade’s edge and found it to be a thing of pain, and in a flash of orange-red wings it withdrew. The creature fled down the hallway to the right, the faint squeeze against the hero’s ankle informing him glamour had been woven against him, but the Mirror Knight did not pursue. He halted his steps, for though Christophe himself was not tired in the slightest the same could not be said of all his companions.

Lady Eliade was suffering the worst of it, by his reckoning. Between the wounded leg, the fresh break of her shoulder by one of the Lords of Dwindling Warmth and the exhaustion of continued spellcasting, she was reaching the end of what her body could take. She might be able to use a few more trinkets, but no more great spells. The Repentant Magister was not like the Witch of the Woods, a war mage meant for the killing fields. Her gifts were gentler in nature, for all her sordid past, and she grew exhausted significantly more quickly than her savage counterpart. Sidonia was helping her keep pace, the Vagrant Spear the only one among them confident she could react swiftly to ambush even one-handed. Frustratingly, Sidonia had also refused healing after looking directly at the Duchess of Red Sunset with an eye that was now a blackened ruin.

Christophe was not certain whether she was refusing because he’d been the one to suggest healing or because some fool Dominion code of honour forbade it, but neither answer would do anything to abate his anger over the matter.

Antoine was keeping pace for now, slightly behind and to the Mirror Knight’s left as was their habit, but he could recognize that his compatriot was quickly headed towards collapse as well. The Blade of Mercy’s nature was to prove dangerous beyond his years, as was only proper of a young man the Saint of Swords herself had once deemed ‘built for killing Damned’, but though his strength was explosive it was also short-lived. He’d used Kindle earlier, so by now he should be drawing on true Light and not the one contained within his aspect: the way Antoine heavily relied on Light and Choosing to move and react meant he was now headed faster towards collapse with every fight. He’d used up Flicker as an offensive strike, too, so he wouldn’t be able to use it as a life-saving trick. That fact would be weighing on him, a lingering distracting fear.

The man Antoine had used the boon to protect was near spent as well, Christophe suspected, though the Adjutant hid it better than most. The orc had to have called on at least two aspects when tangling with the Fair Folk in that last melee, and he was slower on his feet now if you knew what to look for: the Adjutant was simply tall enough that even slowed his stride was quicker than most humans’. That was ill news, as the Mirror Knight was aware that Hakram Deadhand had not been a stranger to their successes thus far. The orc could not be called silvertongued, he did not have the... cunning mien for that, but he had a calming and orderly way about him. Christophe, who half the time seemed to infuriate when he meant compliment and praise when he meant to insult, could only envy that.

He even envied the man’s Name, he would admit to himself. Though like him the Adjutant had been blessed with endurance, unlike him the orc was just as deadly on the attack. It was an impious thought, to envy one of the Damned, and half-heartedly Christophe chided himself for it. A lot of what he’d believed to be truth in the beautiful shade of the lakeside of orchards of Pavanie had not taken well to the harsher glare of the world beyond them.

Of the Maddened Keeper he thought little, knowing from Cleves that she hardly ever tired – it was as if her body resisted any change at all, be it good or bad. Christophe also knew that she was no comrade in the shield wall, no sister-in-arms. She would come and go as she wished, and though she did the work of Above in swallowing whole the evils that she did the manner in which she bound those within her made her not unlike the carrier of a sickness: there was nothing that the Keeper kept within her that was not a mere finger’s touch away from Creation. Had she not been in the city when he gathered Chosen to head out to the Arsenal and end the plot revealed to him, he likely would not have sought her out. Yet she’d been invaluable in navigating the Twilight Ways and finding a path into the Arsenal that would not take them months and months to travel. In some ways he sympathized with the Keeper: her Choosing, like his, had made her into someone to use instead of someone to honour.

“Keep your guard up,” the Mirror Knight said. “We should be nearing the Severance.”

“It might have been broken by the time we arrive,” Antoine said, tone bleak.

“They would not still be ambushing us if that were the case,” Adjutant said, his voice rough as stone.

A far cry from that eerie, beautiful tune he’d sung in some Praesi tongue as the fae stormed around them.

“They must be buying time for the prince to break through the wards,” the Repentant Magister said. “Those were put up by the finest mages in the Arsenal, they won’t fall easily.”

Obvious. That had been obvious , so why hadn’t he seen it? All these blessings, but what were they really worth in his hands? The Dames had chosen him, back home, but he’d wandered a long way from that home. Would they choose him again, he wondered?

Somehow he doubted it.

“We push on with all haste,” the Mirror Knight grimly said. “We cannot allow a weapon that might be able to take the Dead King’s head to be broken.”

No life here was worth that price. That blade might save hundreds of thousands of lives, millions . Some of the Named would balk at what he’d said, or perhaps how bluntly he’d said, but it was the truth nonetheless. What was one Chosen, in the face of that many innocents? Or even all five of them, and the Damned one too. It might rub them raw, to hear it starkly said, but it was Christophe’s people who were dying in droves holding the fronts. It was his countrymen who’d been forced to flee their homes and now sickened and despaired in great refugee camps, who gave up harvest and coin to keep Calernia from Keter’s reaching grasp. So often he’d had to watch his people beggar themselves with gratitude as the foreign armies that’d come to lend their aid, and the sight of it sickened him.

Whose lands was it that were burning, bleeding, trod upon by the dead? The Principate had been made into the shield of the rest of the continent, just like he’d been made the shield for the rest of the Chosen: they were both expected to keeping taking the hits and keep their mouth shut, as if it were an honour . No, the Mirror Knight would spend every life here without hesitating a beat if it meant saving the innocent. There was more to being Chosen than Light and tricks: it was a burden as well as a privilege. Too often only the privilege was remembered.

“We don’t all have your... stamina,” the Vagrant Spear said, tone faintly mocking.

Or was it lurid? He itched to answer but took hold of himself. Now was not the time for this.

“Then some of us will pull ahead, and the others will have to catch up,” Christophe said. “I do not like splitting our numbers, but it must be done. We will draw the attention of the fae as we advance, which will flush out ambushes.”

“Unless they slip behind with the intent to strike at the laggards,” the Repentant Magister pointed out.

“You are free to retreat, if that is your wish,” the Mirror Knight replied. “I expect they will not follow.”

“Perhaps,” Antoine hesitantly said, “Lady Eliade could seek reinforcements?”

“That would be wise,” Christophe agreed, cursing himself for not having thought of such a delicate way to send her away.

Must he always give insult? It had not been meant as one even if it sounded like an accusation.

“Vagrant Spear, Adjutant, Keeper, with me,” the Mirror Knight said.

“Christophe?” Antoine said, blinking in utter surprise.

“You’re nearing the end of your rope,” he replied. “I can’t take you into the thick of it. Besides, someone needs to see to Lady Eliade’s protection.”

“I am still fit to fight,” Antoine insisted. “I promise you-”

Anger flared.

“Don’t promise me anything,” Christophe forced out, “just do as I say.”

The stricken look on the younger man’s face had him regretting his tone immediately, but did the Blade not realize what he was doing by arguing with him in front of the others? How could they heed his orders when his own second contradicted him? The Vagrant Spear, uninterested, instead cast an uneasy look at the woman she’d been supporting for some time now.

“Nephele-” she said.

“Go,” the Repentant Magister said. “I am sure the Blade of Mercy will see grandly to my safety. We will make haste and return with help.”

“The Forlorn Paladin won’t be far,” Sidonia said. “He’s an odd duck, but steady. He’ll listen.”

“I’m sure,” the sorcerers smiled. “Shall we, Antoine?”

The Blade of Mercy cast him a look and Christophe nodded jerkily, hoping his eyes could carry the apology he could not allow himself to speak before this company.

“It would be my pleasure, Lady Eliade,” the Blade of Mercy stiffly replied.

The Adjutant was watching them all, face unreadable, but the orc said nothing. Christophe did not know whether he should be disappointed or grateful for that.

“Form up,” the Mirror Knight said. “We must move quickly.”

They would kill the Prince of Falling Leaves, he swore it. And if none of their blades could do it...

Christophe of Pavanie would do what he must.

—

She was not surprised to find herself awaited.

Deftly, the other woman began to shuffle a deck of cards and cocked a sardonic eyebrow.

“You took your time,” she said.

Slowly, careful not to aggravate her injury, she lowered herself into the seat across the table before replying.

“I had some catching up to do,” Catherine Foundling replied, making herself comfortable. “But I’m about ready to begin. You?”

“Just about,” the Intercessor smiled, and began to deal out the cards.

Interlude: Set Them Up

“The Vales we held with valour
And swept clear the Wasaliti
But spring returns the enemy
As we grow old in armour.”
– Duncan Threefingers, Callowan poet

Catherine Foundling leaned back into her seat, neck yet bloody but her sharp smile unwavering. On her brow sat a crown, blackly won, and she wore a mantle made of many woes. Facing her, sprawled on her seat like a languid cat, the Wandering Bard shuffled a worn deck of cards. Trickster’s fingers danced, below light blue eyes and a smile that had seen many a kingdom turn to dust. At her side waited a badly-strung lute and before her a flask of silver lay open. Both women were smiling in that way people did, when sharpening knives behind their back.

“So, what are we drinking?” Catherine asked, flicking a glance at the flask.

The Wandering Bard, whose name was now Marguerite, chuckled and set down the cards. She took a delicate glass from the side and snatched her flask, pouring a finger for the other woman.

“Ashuran haralm ,” the Bard replied, tone whimsical. “Some call it the very elixir of life.”

“Nice touch,” Catherine admitted. “But, as you might be aware, I have recently been stabbed.”

“I may have heard of this unfortunate happenstance,” the Bard said. “Do you mean to say you won’t be drinking after all?”

The Black Queen snorted.

“Crows no,” she said. “It means make it a double, my neck still hurts like you wouldn’t believe.”

“That’s the spirit,” the Wandering Bard grinned, and poured again.

The tanned queen picked up her glass, swirling the hard liquor within as if she were appreciating the bouquet of a fine wine instead of playing with shipborne rotgut.

“So cards, huh,” Catherine said. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for the type.”

“I enjoy the underlying truths of the game,” the Bard demurred.

“Illuminate me, by all means,” the Black Queen invited, sipping at her drink.

Unlike the last time they’d shared it, she did not choke. Marguerite of Baillons deftly began shuffling the cards again, a smooth and soothing cut from hand to hand.

“Cards are unfair,” the Intercessor said. “Cards about luck and lies, and sometimes there’s simply no way to win.”

“That usually means you’re not playing the right game,” the Carrion’s Lord apprentice replied.

“Are you?” the Wandering Bard smiled.

Catherine drank, the liquor warming her guts.

“Hard to tell until the end,” she said. “What did you have in mind?”

“How kind of you,” the Bard mused, the undertone skeptical, “to let me choose this uncontested.”

“Can’t win if there’s no game,” the Black Queen grinned, all teeth and malice.

“Can’t cheat without rules, is it?” the Wandering Bard smiled back, reaching for her flask. “Fair enough. Have you ever played Affray, Catherine?”

“That drunk’s game?” the dark-eyed queen said, brow rising.

The Intercessor cast a look at the now quarter empty glass in her hand, then raised her flask for a silent toast.

“It’s medicinal,” Catherine Foundling protested, meaning point taken .

“Back in the day it was used as peacemaking ritual, in the lands that became Lange and Salia,” the Bard confided as she shuffled. “It was your Queen of Blades that brought it east, after she went about the business of carving an empire across the Whitecaps.”

It was a simple enough game, one that could be played with any tarot deck’s Major Arcana. The first player would set down a card from their hand, opening an ‘affray’: players could set down cards one after another, with the cumulative value of the cards of any of the twenty one Major Arcana put down used to count who the winner of that affray was. To win an affray granted a player one point. The trick was that there could be up to five affrays – or more or less, depending on variants – on the table at any time, and a player could declare their loss and clear out the affray by conceding the point. For that concession they would gain the right to take back one of the cards they’d put down in said affray.

“Nowadays it’s a tavern game for people too drunk for more complicated ones,” Catherine snorted.

“The Langeni used clay tablets instead of cards,” the Bard told her. “Each of them standing for a life sworn to the resolution of the strife.”

“That’s just a battle without the steel,” the Black Queen said. “Nothing more or less.”

The Intercessor drank of her flask and did not disagree.

“While we’re having this pleasant little chat, one pal to another,” Catherine said. “I’ve got a question to ask you.”

“I delight in giving answers,” the Bard replied.

“You see, I’ve had this song stuck in my head all day,” the orphan queen said. “I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that?”

“Sounds troubling,” the Intercessor said, glint of triumph in her eye. “But you are in luck, as I happen to be something of an authority when it comes to songs. Which one is it that haunts you?”

The Black Queen hummed the first few bars of ‘The Girl Who Climbed The Tower’ and saw the way the glint died, smiling at the sight.

“Ah,” Catherine Foundling said. “So there it is. Never you mind, Marguerite, I withdraw my question.”

They matched eyes in silence, a moment passing.

“Seven cards each,” the Wandering Bard said. “Draw on drop, five affrays.”

“I await your pleasure,” Catherine Foundling replied. “Hells, you can even open the game.”

“Your kindness is without bounds,” the Bard praised.

With light fingers she began to deal. One each, back and forth.

“Kindness?” the Black Queen said. “No. I’m just recognizing that you drew first blood, that’s all there is to it.”

The last card was hardly down that they both took up their hands. Each looked at their own, seeing how once more Creation had seen to the details, and with a flourish the Wandering Bard set down her first card and in the same gesture drew. What she revealed was a fair-haired woman subduing a lion, Strength. The older name for that card, and the truer one today, was Fortitude.

“The Mirror Knight,” the Intercessor said. “Lost and angry and feeling it all slip away from his grasp. He’ll take up the sword because it fixes all he despises about himself.”

A card was set down over it, without missing a beat: a crowned and dark-skinned man on a barren throne, the Emperor.

“The Adjutant,” the Black Queen said. “Faith with a cold eye, patience without hesitation. He will steer them all away from the rocks, because it is in his nature to mend what is broken.”

—

The Prince of Falling Leaves had lost patience, Christophe de Pavanie saw.

Hammering at the wards hadn’t borne fruit – the enchanted steel gates were still shut – so instead he had unleashed the fullness of his wrath on the stone around them. Some clever soul had seen to it this would be no solution, and even now that the cube of rock surrounded by water holding the Severance had been peeled open of protection by rot some invisible barrier still prevented the fae from entering the room. Yet the prince of the Fair Folk had grown darkly ruthless in his pursuit of entry, snatching up Arsenal armsmen and making puppets of them before throwing them across the unseen divide. The poor soldiers were slowly forcing open the enchanted doors from the inside, using their blades to pry them apart as they groaned in protest.

“Forward,” the Mirror Knight bellowed, sword high.

The Vagrant Spear whooped, quickening her pace as she claimed the vanguard. The royal fae’s gaggled of attendants were sent out by him and swept forth against the three Named, lords and ladies carved out of frenzied dreams and wielding powers outlandish, but the Mirror Knight and the Adjutant stood like tall stones as the tide washed around them. There could be no strategy to this, no cunning: it was only a parade of sneering faces and blades that Christophe must strike at, cutting when he could and forcing through their blows as if they were but summer rain. Yet his blade bit fae flesh too little, the Adjutant was tiring and Sidonia was still half-blind. The Vagrant Spear took the first wound, a deep slash across the face that added red to the savage paints on her face, but the orc was not far behind in having a barbed spear pierce into the side of his leg. On the sides, all the hallways leading to this godforsaken place, fae were pouring in. The wayfinders were returning, heeding the call of their lord and prince. Before long, Christophe of Pavanie knew, he would be standing alone surrounded by corpses.

Again. Too slow, too weak, too stupid, again .

“Cross the wards,” Hakram Deadhand roared.

None knew if they would be allowed through, for the Repentant Magister was not there to speak of it – and who was it that had sent her away? Christophe of Pavanie, once more the gravedigger of finer souls – but what choice did they have? The Adjutant was the first to reach where once stone had stood, before it frittered away into pebbles and dust, and after resisting for a heartbeat the wards let him through. Without hesitation the orc limped towards the enchanted soldiers, axe raised. Sidonia was halfway to safety, when some wild-looking fae ran her trough the side with a slender rapier of bone. Christophe swelled with anger, screaming, and tore his way through the Fair Folk to get to her side. The fae parted like mist wherever her struck, and though their strikes glanced off his sides and shield with barely any effort the Mirror Knight had never felt more impotent than in that moment.

Sidonia had rammed a knife through the hollow of the fae’s chin, by the time he got there, even as the warrior twisted his grip and ran through her lung. The Mirror Knight smashed down the animal with his shield, fury boiling out, and dropped his blade to pick up the Vagrant Spear even as the fae swarmed him like flies. Step by step, keeping Sidonia safe under the shield, he retreated to the safety of the wards as the Fair Folk harassed him. It was onto wet stone he stood, a wounded friend clutched tight in his arms, and Gods forgive him but he had sent away their only healer . He would have wept of it, but what would weeping do? Sidonia could still make it through this, if the fae were scattered and help sought. But could he abandon the Severance for the sake of one soul, to its likely destruction?

No, he thought as he laid her down, he could not.

To the side, the Adjutant slew the third struggling soldier with a clean stroke through the neck but it had been a moment too late. The doors had been open, just a finger’s worth, and the crack the steel gave as it did had the ring of the inexorable to it.

—

“I didn’t think you’d send the Deadhand out with that valiant lot right from the start,” the Bard acknowledged. “You usually keep him in reserve for longer.”

“He was the only one who could do it,” Catherine shrugged. “Can you imagine if I’d sent Archer with them instead?”

The Intercessor chuckled.

“That would have been my affray before long, true enough,” she said. “He’s a steady sort, your man, I won’t argue that. But he can’t spin gold from straw, Catherine. The Mirror Knight has been left to fester for too long, the sickness sunk into the bones.”

“I’ll not speak to Christophe of Pavanie,” the Black Queen said. “He’s not one of mine, and I know him little. But I have put my faith in Hakram Deadhand many a time, when the day grew dark, and I was never once disappointed.”

“Your father’s daughter indeed,” the Wandering Bard said, and it was a compliment to neither. “I told him then and I’ll tell you now: love always fucks you over.”

“If you want the right to lecture me,” Catherine Foundling replied, unmoved, “ win .”

As if prompted by the words, the Bard set down her second card. A black spire of stone piercing even the clouds, as pale lightning struck at it: the Tower.

“Ruin onto your Truce and Terms,” the Intercessor said. “The Red Axe slain in blind revenge, heroes and villains at each other’s throats beyond what can be mended.”

The other woman gave answer without batting an eye, her card dropped atop the other with insolent nonchalance. It showed a fair prince, riding a chariot pulled by horses both black and white: the Chariot.

“The Kingfisher Prince,” the Black Queen said. “Alamans iron forged in a Lycaonese forge, daring with duty holding the reins. Authority and trust, crowns earthly and not.”

Under her breath, barely noticing it, she hummed the tune to a familiar song that spoke of foxes and kings.

—

“It appears we’ve run into a spot of trouble, my friend,” Prince Frederic of Brus jovially said.

Soldiers crowded both ends of the hallway, perhaps sixty in whole? Not a small amount, considering the garrison of the Arsenal should not surpass three hundred in whole. By the looks of them it was a mix of bearded Levantines and the latest issue of the mold buried at the heart of Callow that kept churning out gruff, middle-aged soldiers with hard eyes. No Named or creatures, by the looks of it, but Frederic’s eyes were not so fine he would trust them without condition.

“Let me go,” the Red Axe grunted. “I’ll make it out on my own.”

Doubtful, considering she was currently bereft of the weapon that’d earned her the Choosing, but admittedly it sometimes paid to keep your coin on Chosen when the odds were long. Regardless it was simply out of question that he might let an unarmed, shoeless and manacled woman be captured by a band of soldiers. The sheer dishonour of such a thing would force him to abdicate, shorn his hair in contrition and never again enjoy a vintage more than a year old.

The Prince of Brus might even have to drink wine from Callow in penance, which was simply too horrid a fate to contemplate.

“No need for that,” Frederic assured her. “I do happen to have a smattering of royal blood in my veins, which comes in useful on occasion. I should be able to talk our way out of this.”

From the corner of his eye, he caught the sight of an approaching half-company of crossbowmen. It seemed to have been what thee surrounding soldiers were waiting for, as a moment later a captain in Dominion armour and paint hailed them.

“You are surrounded and were caught red-handed helping a prisoner escape,” the Dominion warrior said. “Surrender now or be served the sword.”

Whoever it was who’d arranged this, Frederic thought, had been careful. There was not a single Proceran soldier here, someone who might have trusted or deferred to a prince of the blood – on the contrary, trying such a thing with this lot was a lot more likely to have them using those crossbows. The Callowans in particular still remembered being at war with the Principate and were a famously touchy lot when it came to foreigners. Not without reason, but in the current circumstances that was rather unfortunate.

At least it smoothed away any notion he might have developed of this being a betrayal by the Black Queen. Cordelia had told him once that Queen Catherine had a fondness for soldiers and the common folk, sometimes at the expense of those of higher births, which given the First Prince’s diplomatic tendencies likely meant that the Black Queen would bake an entire pie out of dukes to feed an urchin child from the street without batting an eye. She was not the kind of woman who would sacrifice her own countrymen, her own soldiers, to carry out so petty a scheme.

Like as not, Frederic mused, this was part of the trap. A Proceran prince, the sole Chosen among them, slaughtering Callowan soldiers to help a killer escape justice – even if Queen Catherine came out in his support, which would be... delicate, the mere appearances of this would have the Army of Callow brought to a boil. Someone, Frederic Goethal thought, was trying to sow dissension within the Grand Alliance at a time where unity was one of the few things standing between them an annihilation.

Someone was going to have to die , evidently.

“I understand that you have a duty,” the Kingfisher Prince called out. “Yet so do I, and I have reason to believe that this woman’s life is in danger. That is why I sprung her from her cell.”

“I don’t care if you’ve got duty or if you’ve got the clap, princeling,” the Dominion captain said. “Drop your sword and kneel, now .”

“I will do this, on my honour,” the Prince of Brus replied, “if you can assure me that I will be placed in the same cell as the Red Axe, and that my sword will be returned to me when I am in that cell.”

It was possible that Frederic would be able to fight his way through this, though far from certain – Dominion foot was hardy and sharpened by years of raiding, while the Callowans were veterans from half a dozen ludicrously brutal wars – but it would be a slaughter. Against such numbers, it would be vanity to attempt anything but his utmost. That meant killing blows, and the full might of his Choosing behind him.

“I must not have been clear,” the Dominion captain shouted, “this isn’t a negotiation, princeling. But it’s your last warning, though, so drop that fucking sword.”

If it came to a fight, Frederic Goethal thought, in a very real sense he had already lost. What did he have he could bargain with, here? Should he simply surrender, and from a visible and reassuring position of weakness try to make his case then?

“You shouldn’t have come,” the Red Axe whispered. “It’ll make it all worse. Just step back and act strange, I’ll say I used my Bestowal to make you do it.”

“I do not believe I could ever come to enjoy Dormer reds,” Frederic confessed, “so I shall have to decline.”

“Hold,” another voice called out. “What’s this all about, then?”

It was a Callowan lieutenant who’d spoken out, a stout orc with a scarred face and a wary look about him.

“Stay out of this, Inger,” the Dominion captain said. “You are outranked.”

Ah, how embarrassing – about her, the prince silently corrected.

“Outrank my ass, Hassar,” the orc growled. “I’m not shooting a fucking war hero without at least asking why first.”

That, the Kingfisher Prince decided, sounded like a way to turn this around.

—

“Agnes continues to hold a grudge, I see,” the Wandering Bard said. “She really ought to know better than to meddle by now. It never helps.”

“It’s a tired old game, this one,” Catherine Foundling said. “This pretence that you know better , that you are the natural mistress of all our fates and we do offence by pulling our own strings. I’d oppose you for that alone, even if you were all you try to pass for.”

“You oppose me because there is no part of you that can tolerate being used instead of user,” the Intercessor replied. “Everything else you add atop of that is a justification attempting to be just.”

“Have you ever been beaten twice in the same century before?” the Black Queen mused. “Gods, twice in the same decade ? The Tyrant of the Augur, and maybe now a third headed your way. It has to sting, that your grip is growing loose after all these years.”

The Intercessor laughed.

“How very badly you want me to be your enemy,” she said, as if awed. “To be malicious , out to get you. As if I was not simply snuffing out fires before they swallowed too much, no small number lit by your hand.”

“You feed on agency, Intercessor,” the Black Queen said, tone cold. “You are a parasite sucking the blood out of all you touch. Whatever you might once have been, that is what you are now: mad as any Tyrant, callously make use of all the world to fight your war on Keter.”

“Yours is a rout, Catherine,” the Intercessor said. “I watched, for two years. I waited. And what do you have to show for it? You teased out a few of his tricks and buried a kingdom’s worth of dead as the price. You are out of your league. You are failing .”

“You lie as easily as you breathe,” the Black Queen replied. “These plans have been years in the making, you did not wait a whit. You simply cannot tolerate that this war can be fought in any way but with your hand at the helm.”

“Where are the devils, Catherine?” the Intercessor said. “Where are the hosts that darken the skies, and the demons he has kept leashed for centuries? Where are the rituals that poison the land and the sorceries never before seen? I’ll tell you the truth of it.”

She leaned forward, eyes hooded.

“Your alliance is not great enough a threat to warrant the use of any of those,” the Intercessor said. “ You do not worry him .”

“You must know, deep down, that the truth of you is unpalatable to any who grasp it,” the Black Queen said, hard-eyed. “Why else would you remain half-hidden, pulling strings instead of serving as an advisor to the greats of this age? You talk about the Dead King, again and again, as if the horror of him in any way excuses what you are.”

“As is your habit, you talk of-”

“ Gods, have I had enough of that ,” the orphan girl snarled. “This insistence that we don’t understand while you don’t explain, that we are ignorant when you do not teach, that we are blind when you keep us in the dark. You are not somehow beyond us, you leech. You’re not too important, too big to be judged – not when you spend our lives like coppers. Being old and hard to kill does no exempt you from consequence, and even if it’s the last thing I do I will carve the truth of that into your fucking skull.”

“How many times I’ve been in this seat, the subject of that same indignation spoken through a different tongue,” the Intercessor said. “And do you know how it comes to happen, that I am lectured again?”

She smiled mirthlessly.

“Because I do what is necessary anyway,” the Wandering Bard said.

“You might be fighting a monster,” the Black Queen said, “but what of it? The rest of us are, after all, fighting two .”

The other woman softly laughed.

“A leech and a scavenger,” the Wandering Bard mused. “My, but what a pair we make. So, my friend, from one bottom-feeder to another – shall we settle the order of precedence among the base and hungry?”

A card was put down on the table, smoothly but without gentleness. Grey-clad and tanned, bearing a lantern and a staff: the Hermit.

“Fear and treason, conspiracy,” the Intercessor said. “Your fishing rod of crowns untouched but the fisherman drowned by the tide anyway. The Hierophant, slain .”

It was carefully, almost delicately, that a card was placed over the last. Two figures crowned with roses and holding hands, a radiant sun above them: the Lovers.

“Archer,” Catherine Foundling said, her voice clear as a frozen pond, fury gone cold. “Love like greed and feet unrelenting – Gods have mercy on whoever you sent after him, because she will make them into meat .”

—

It had taken Indrani longer to figure that she needed to go after Masego than to figure out where he actually would be.

Cat had been no help at all, disappearing from the corpse the moment she heard what there’d been to say, but eventually Archer had pieced it all together. She’d gone to the Belfry because she figured Catherine would be there, and she’d been right, but that’d been true for a reason: Cat had come here to keep Autumn’s grubby little hands off of the stuff in Masego’s quarters. This debt business the fae talked about, it was about breaking the most promising stuff in the Arsenal – the Bard, for some no doubt godawful reason, must have wanted it gone. Except the fae that’d gone for Quartered Seasons had gotten slaughtered wholesale, and presumably two traitors had died in the failure as well: the Poet and the Monk, both gone. It seemed like a right mess for the Bard’s side, but who the fuck ever knew with that one? She was all twists and turns and nipping at her own tail.

The bottom line of it, though, was that it’d been a pretty shit plan to send a bunch of fae after what was probably one of the single most warded rooms in the entire Arsenal. Indrani figured that even if the Artificer hadn’t bottled up the fairies near the bottom of the Belfry they would have been stuck hammering at that door for at least an hour, if not more. Fae were infamously shit at dealing with thresholds, and while Olowe’s Theorem suggested that a bastard realm like the Arsenal would only have weaker versions of creational laws like those weak didn’t mean absent . For a supposed weaver of wiles like the Wandering Bard, it was a lackluster effort. It’d tied up a lot of Named, though. And when Indrani had considered Quartered Seasons with a cold eye, thinking about how she would have scuppered that ship, the answer had been pretty obvious: Hierophant.

The material stuff could be built up again, but if Masego was dead that project was dead in the water. It was his theories, his rituals, his methods from beginning to start. Even if his notes got passed to someone else, it was doubtful they’d be able to keep going. There just weren’t that many mages with that kind of talent in Calernia. So, that must have been the play then: striking loud at the front gate, then slipping through the back to slide the knife. Zeze wasn’t helpless, but he wasn’t exactly invincible either. More worryingly he had some pretty dangerous weaknesses, for someone who knew where to look.

After that it’d just been a matter of figuring out where he was, since he obviously wasn’t in his rooms. Archer had almost smacked herself in the back of the head when she’d realized she was making this a lot more complicated than it needed to be: the outer wards of the Arsenal had been broken through by Autumn, and Hierophant had been one of the mages to set those foundations down. He wouldn’t be holed up or spoiling for a fight right now, he’d be fixing those wards and making sure that the entire Arsenal didn’t start splitting in pieces between multiple layers of the Pattern. Which, uh, would be... unpleasant to anyone happening to be in one of those pieces when they split. Archer didn’t need four Named to watch Masego’s back, though, and there’d be other fires to put out. So she sent Roland and Cocky where she figured they’d be most useful, and went on with only the Blessed Artificer at her side.

Adanna of Smyrna was exhausted, grumpy and running out of Light baubles to use but she have did one very important thing to contribute: she was one of the few keyed into the wards that surrounded the Chancel, the part of the Arsenal where the central warding array was.

They cut in through the Alcazar’s tunnels, since they were deserted and a shortcut, and got through the first checkpoint smoothly enough. It’d been stripped of guards, which boded ill but might well have a mundane explanation given that the Arsenal was currently under attack. The two of them passed by the restricted stacks, Indrani feeling the hum of those heavy wards against her skin, and then the large room called the Mirage. Yet before they arrived at the bottom of the stairs leading to the second of three checkpoints protecting the central array, Archer caught a familiar scent in the air. Blood. Somewhere close to here someone had spilled blood, and recently. She raised a hand, signaling for the Blessed Artificer to halt. The other woman did, after a beat.

“We’re not alone,” Archer murmured. “Assume an enemy, blood was spilled.”

“Do you think the Hierophant is wounded?” the Blessed Artificer whispered back.

“There’d be a lot more holes in the everything, if someone stuck him,” Indrani decided. “But it might be where the guards are gone.”

She gestured for the Blessed Artificer to follow her, quiet as she could, and they withdrew some. The smell had been coming from the near the Arsenal treasury offices, Indrani figured, so it was worth a look.

Archer caught the reflection of magelights on steel just before the blade slid between her ribs.

—

Catherine Foundling drained her glass dry and learned forward. Hands hidden beneath a cloak laden with many victories, eyes cold, she cracked her neck the saw way she had back when she’d still fought for silvers in the Pit.

“I’d say it’s about time to get started in earnest, isn’t it?” the Black Queen said, smiling the smile of a woman who’d ransacked a shatranj board before coming there.

Hands carelessly plucking at the strings of the badly-strung lute on her lap the Wandering Bard hummed, fingers too deft for the clumsy sounds they brought and eyes looking at places that were not in this room.

“I couldn’t agree more,” the Intercessor said, smiling the smile of someone whose sleeves were filled with half a dozen decks of cards.

Interlude: Knock Them Down

“The henhouse stands unlatched
All within, by the fox snatched
So here they go, once again
Chasing a red tail into the glen

But we know, oh we know,
That in the woods, the fox is king
Yes we know, oh we know
That in the woods, the fox is king

Run the hounds, rides the hunter
His spear in hand, banner aflutter
Charging that way, this one baying
Trampling the paths, again raging

But we know, oh we know,
That in the woods, the fox is king
Yes we know, oh we know
That in the woods, the fox is king

Over the hills, across the glade
Where the sun rests in the shade
He hides and waits, until the day
When the hunts are chased away

For we know, oh we know
That in the woods, the fox is king
Yes we know, oh we know
That in the woods, the fox is king.”
-“The Fox in the Woods”, a Callowan rebel song from the latter years of the Proceran occupation

The Wandering Bard set down her card with telltale nonchalance, to the side of the three affrays that had already been opened. Though there had once been many appearances for this one for hundreds years now one had come to dominate all the others: a dark and faceless woman, holding a red banner, and at her feet letters were written large – TRIUMPH. The Empress. The Bard withdrew her hand and smiled, gesturing for her opponent to act in turn.

“Silence?” the Black Queen said. “That’s a new one for you.”

“I have not a single new game,” the Intercessor smiled. “Only a legion of old ones, given fresh faces.”

“Stingy,” the orphan queen complained. “You haven’t revealed who it is that’s the little helper you’ve still got running around the place, either.”

The Miscellaneous Stacks had burned, but before that those who dwelled within had been forced to slumber by a gaseous poison. The hand that’d opened those bottles had yet to be revealed.

“You still go about this as if you were a general, Catherine,” the Bard said. “Seeing battles and sending soldiers out to fight them until some nebulous war can be won.”

“Doing it all wrong, am I?” the Black Queen mused. “By all means, Marguerite, educate me.”

“Your teacher, in truth, is a finer hand at this than any might suspect,” the Wandering Bard said. “So I shall borrow his words, spoken once to another: it is all objects in motion, Catherine. If you can see the trajectories of the spheres in the void, all that is required from you is the first nudge.”

“Been talking to him?” the woman who had once been a girl said.

Even as the words left her lips, she grew vexed. The airiness she had affected as she spoke had been too sweet on the tongue for either of them to swallow it.

“He has no use for the likes of me, that enterprising blackguard,” the Intercessor said. “But he seems to be having a great deal of fun out there, having every part the Wasteland hacking at the other as they try to catch his shadow.”

“How pleasant for him,” the tired general replied.

“But look at me, jabbering on about things so very far way,” the Bard said, salting the wound. “It is your turn to lead the dance, Catherine.”

“I’m just biding my time,” the Black Queen shrugged.

“Archer is bleeding,” the Wandering Bard told her. “Adjutant is spent.”

“When you came up,” the woman who had once been a girl said, eyes sharp, “it was alone, wasn’t it? You weren’t part of a band.”

“Stories were not as... forgiving, back then,” the Intercessor said, half a concession. “But I have been part of many bands, Catherine.”

“No,” the Black Queen quietly said, “you haven’t. Not in the way that really matters.”

“Do you think I’ve never loved?” the Intercessor disdainfully said. “That I’ve never craved, never lost? I am more human than anyone ever has been, or ever will be. All that is it to be that, I have been a thousand times over.”

She leaned forward, a flush to her cheek that had nothing to do with drink.

“When I tell you that loves fucks always fucks you over, I no not speak in contempt or in ignorance,” the Intercessor said. “I speak, Catherine Foundling, from pity .”

The Black Queen, her hand certain and her fingers deft, place a single black pawn on the table from the shatranj she had stripped bare.

“One,” the Queen of Lost and Found stated.

Her mind thrummed with an old song, the beat of it eerily resonant.

“You still believe they can’t be touched just because you love them,” the Wandering Bard said, almost disbelieving. “You cannot be that naïve. That is not trust, it is fantasy.”

“It’s fine line, between that and faith,” Catherine Foundling said.

“The game goes on, whether you play it or not,” Marguerite said, eyes moving to the wooden pawn painted black with something like wariness. “Whatever else you might be playing.”

She slid a card above the Chariot, obscuring it. A man holding a broken scepter, at his side a golden cup filled to the brim: the Magician.

“Why now,” the Black Queen murmured, “that’s almost an admission, isn’t it?”

“I will not hold your hand through all of this,” the Bard chided.

“That’s fine,” Catherine said. “I’ve got better uses for mine.”

A card was gently placed atop the last one, elaborate in appearance. A crowned man on a throne, seven nooses and one around his head and a sword in his right hand: Justice.

—

During his time observing that most of the foreign soldiery seemed to dislike his countrymen, not entirely without reason, Prince Frederic of Brus now realized he might have underestimated the extent to which they also disliked each other .

“I gave you an order, Inger,” the Levantine captain – Hassar – shouted at the orc. “Get back in the damned ranks.”

“You don’t give me fucking orders, Dominion,” Inger the orc snarled. “Don’t you have sheep to go raiding your cousins for? Let the professionals handle this.”

“Slight my honour again and we’ll settle this steel in hand,” Captain Hassar harshly said.

“I’d like to see you try,” the orc said, to the cheers of her fellows. “Clear that scabbard and we’ll give you another Sarcella.”

“You ran from us across half of Procer before the Black Queen stepped in to save your hides,” Captain Hassar mocked, to the cheers of the Levantines. “Try to give us a Sarcella without her, orc , see how that ends for you.”

“I’ll tell you how: with a lot less mercy, feet-dragger ,” the orc lieutenant jeered.

The Callowan legionaries banged their shields, the Dominion warriors shouted in anger and Frederic decided now was not the time to remind these fine people that Sarcella had been a Proceran city stuck in the middle of their fighting without much of a choice in the matter. Not unlike him, truth be told.

“If I might claim your attention once more,” Frederic said, tone cheerful. “I would be much obliged if no blood was spilled tonight, my friends. We are, if I might remind you, yet under attack by common foes.”

“Then throw down your sword, prince,” Captain Hassar said. “You were caught red-handed, no talking will get you out of that.”

“I was charged with the protection of the Red Axe from assassination by the current ranking authority in the Arsenal, Queen Catherine of Callow,” the fair-haired prince said. “I understand you may doubt my word, but I do not require great concession – only that you allow me to see to her safety by sharing her confinement.”

It was not ideal, but at least he seemed to have flushed out part of the Bird of Misfortune’s schemes. And should his terms of surrender be accepted, he could use the walk to the holding cells as an opportunity to find out – perhaps from Lieutenant Inger, who seemed friendly enough in that orc way – who it was that’d sent all these soldiers after him. Learning that Name would likely unmask an agent of their great foe within. Yet Frederic’s words were not met with understanding or consideration, but instead a great deal of anger from both the Callowans and the Levantines.

“You’ll be dead before you take the first swing,” Captain Hassar said. “CROSSBOWS, at the ready.”

The lieutenant did not gainsay the Dominion officer, to Frederic’s surprise, and the soldiers called at obeyed without qualms. Something was wrong here. Had his words been misheard? Suspecting the worse, he unsheathed his sword and set it down on the floor. There was no reaction from the soldiers.

“This is your last warning,” the painted captain snarled. “One more step and-”

An illusion, Frederic grasped. Someone had laid an illusion on the soldiers and through the lie was misleading them to attack. The enemy was already here.

“My lady of Red,” the Kingfisher Prince said, “might I trouble you to chase away the enchantment bedevilling these soldiers?”

“I can’t,” the Red Axe said, tone tormented. “It only protects me, not others.”

Reluctantly, Frederic began to consider reaching for the sword he’d placed down. He would try to abstain from killing as much as possible and cease the moment it appeared the illusion might be faltering, but he would not fail in the charge that had been given onto him. The Red Axe would be good as dead if surrounded by soldiers under an enemy’s spells, unarmed and still shackled. If the political consequences of this were focused onto him instead of the Principate, Frederic Goethal thought, and he was ‘made’ to abdicate by the First Prince, the Grand Alliance might yet survive the blow without sundering. Henriette would rule well in his stead, it would do no disservice to the people of Brus to crown her princess in his stead.

Breathing out, the Kingfisher Prince crouched to take back his sword.

“Stop,” a woman screamed. “Stops this right now .”

The soldiers stirred, turning to watch the two unexpected arrivals behind the Dominion swords: a woman of the Free Cities, visibly bloodied from hard fighting, and a young man that Frederic was more familiar with. The Blade of Mercy, Antoine of Lange. One of the two countrymen Cordelia had asked him to take in hand when she suggested she came to the Arsenal. The young man’s greatsword was recognizable enough, and by the reaction of the soldiers the woman Free Cities was even better known.

“Lady Eliade,” Captain Hassar said, “with all due respect-”

“With all due respect, captain, you are currently under an illusion,” the Repentant Magister said. “If you would simply allow me to dispel it, the truth of this will be revealed.”

Frederic Goethal was not above accepting salvation, particularly when it was so gallantly offered. He was not above the occasional theatrics, either, and so he rose to his full height and left his sword on the ground. It would make a more striking image that way. A moment later the painted captain grudgingly gave his assent, and the Repentant Magister raised her had.

Sorcery bloomed, and there was a sound like a mirror shattering.

—

“Tricky, tricky,” the Wandering Bard said, eyes faraway. “How did you know it would clever little Nephele that stumbled into this mess?”

“Objects in motion, wasn’t it?” the Black Queen replied, lips quirking savagely. “She’s got maybe half the power to throw around that Hierophant had at his speak, and she uses it mostly on tricks and defensive spells – and she’s in a band, which means she’ll be using any spell she puts out six times whenever she uses it. A running battle against fae, of higher mettle than the one I tangled with? It was a given she’d be the first to grow exhausted.”

“That is hardly a guarantee she would end up there ,” the Bard leadingly said, glancing at the other affrays.

“Archer’s was always going to be a fight, and she just left the other mess,” the Black Queen said. “Providence good as ensured she was going to end up where she could actually save the day. I can’t ride that horse, most the time, but a heroine like her sure as Hells can.”

“Those do not sound like the words of a villain,” the Intercessor smiled.

“The world’s changing, Bard,” the Black Queen said. “Whether you like it or not.”

“Such a brash one, you are,” the Wandering Bard chuckled.

She shrugged, cards peeking out the edge of her sleeve.

“But not without skill, I suppose,” she continued, then rapped a knuckle atop Justice. “I concede the affray.”

Trickster’s fingers went looking for a card she had set down – the Tower, the other glimpsed before the card was made to disappear with a flourish of the wrist – and she gallantly gestured for the opposition to proceed.

“One point to me,” Catherine said, eyes narrowing as she cleared out the rest of the pile.

Warily, she set her card down as the first of another affray. It depicted wings of bronze holding aloft a faceless entity wielding a pale sword, at its feet kneeling a humbled prince, priest and merchant: Judgement.

“Well now,” the Wandering Bard grinned. “What might that be about?”

“Silence for silence,” the Black Queen retorted. “It will matter when it matters.”

“How exciting,” the Intercessor praised. “But I suppose it is up to me to get this game back on the right path, isn’t it?”

The card she laid down over the Lovers was austere to the eye. A priestess in penitent’s robes, pouring water from one cup into the wine of another: Temperance.

“It’s not that she means to be a traitor, our dear Artificer,” the Bard said. “It’s simply that given what she is and where she is, she might as well be – she who tinkers with Light knows neither doubt nor restraint.”

—

Indrani swung around, blinding striking at whoever it was that’d knifed her – and had suspicions, foolish as they might be – and the blade slid out as the attempted assassin withdrew before she could hit anything. She clenched her teeth from the pain, but at least she was fairly sure it’d not punctured the lung. That would have been a bloody and embarrassing way to die.

“Archer,” the Blessed Artificer called out in fear and anger, “DUCK.”

With a curse Indrani did, the sound of a twig snapping being followed by a strike of sizzling Light above her. The lack of even a grunt of pain was the only warning she got, and she didn’t act quite quickly enough. Even as she began moving, the bolt of Light curved down and struck her back. Screaming as she coat gave, feeling aftershocks of Light going through her body even as the space between her shoulders was turned into a burned and bloody mess, Archer was smashed into the floor.

“Adanna, don’t-” Indrani croaked out, but Light bloomed again.

A collar of the burning glare formed around the neck of the man looming standing behind her – and by the size of him, Archer’s outlandish thought had come true – but a moment later it the Light was instead nailing Indrani’s arm to the stone floor, having formed into a spike and burned through flesh and muscle just above her elbow. Fuck . She wouldn’t be able to shoot like that or use both of her blades. The Fallen Monk eyed her for a moment, a serenely calm face over a bulging belly, but only bothered to kick her in the face before he flickered out of sight again. How was the man still alive, after getting Catherine to make darkglass out of a stone floor? Indrani had seen him fail to manipulate the works of Below before, she shouldn’t have cut it against Night. Light bloomed again, as the Monk reappeared close to the Artificer and the green heroines panicked.

“Fuck,” Archer cursed again, rolling to the side as the defensive net of Light that’d popped up was turn into a rain of deadly shard headed for her.

A few caught the edge of her wounded arm, but her mail turned what would have been a hard turn into mild burns. She ripped her coat rising to her feet, though, as one of the shards had nailed the edge of it down.

“Stop using Light, you fool,” Archer shouted, unsheathing one of her blades.

Just in time to see the Fallen Monk slug the Artificer in the stomach, her hasty attempt at a guard blown through. Indrani grit her teeth and aimed before she could think, her longknife spinning as it sailed through the air. But the Monk slid behind the heroine, Indrani’s throw missing him by inches, and he nudged up the Blessed Artificer’s chin with his bloody knife. Archer already had her other blade in hand, but no opening to use it: frozen in fear, Adanna of Smyrna had gone still.

“Drop the blade,” the Fallen Monk said. “Or I slit her throat.”

“Shit, you got me,” Archer lied, and without hesitation advanced.

The Monk withdrew his hand from Adanna’s apron, producing a twig and snapping with his free hand. Light erupted and curved out in two staggered arcs towards Archer. She’d seen it coming this time, though, and it was not good enough a trick to take her by surprise. She quickened her step to pass the first arc, darted back to let the second pass before her and in the beat that followed she’d closed the distance entirely. Still reaching for another bauble inside the Artificer’s stash, the Monk was surprised when she got hold of herself and elbowed him in the guts. His fat meant it barely stung, but the surprise bought Archer a moment – she carved at the man’s wrist, and though he darted away with viperous quickness he had to leave Adanna behind.

Indrani had blood on her blade, now, and she fully intended to get more. Did the Monk think he’d been the only one to study the weaknesses of the Named in her band?

“Listen close, Artificer,” Indrani said. “I have a plan to kill the bastard.”

—

“So how’s that one working out for you?” the leader of the Woe smilingly asked.

The Wandering Bard sighed, which was answer enough.

“All of Ranger’s pupils are absurdly hard to kill,” she complained. “She stayed out of that sort of thing until recently, you know, it’s your bloody teacher who gave her the taste for it. Among other things.”

The leer there was painted on, put there to irritate, but like most barbs of that hand it struck true.

“One can’t account for taste, I suppose,” Catherine said, wrinkling her nose.

“Gotta agree with you there,” Marguerite said. “She’s a looker, mind you, but everything else?”

“Funny,” the Black Queen mused, “since I consider the two of you to have quite a lot in common.”

“Harsh,” the Wandering Bard replied, appreciative.

The other woman offered a shallow smile, amusement so thin a finger run across it would reveal dislike.

“I’ve been wondering,” Catherine Foundling said. “Now that you’re Alamans-”

“This is going to get uncivil, isn’t it?” the Bard sighed.

“- does that fill with wine more often, or does it stay the same swill?” Catherine Foundling finished, gesturing at the silver flask.

The Intercessor considered the other woman, for a moment.

“The limp,” she replied, “does it come and go the way you want it to?”

The other woman did not answer. Instead she reached within her mantle and pulled out a second painted black pawn. She set it down next to the first, the ring it gave as it hit the wood echoed of the word mistake .

“Two,” the Queen of Lost and Found stated.

“Feigning a deeper game will not get you out of this,” the Wandering Bard said.

The Callowan queen hummed under her breath, knowing that now the ugliness was to come, and the Intercessor eyed the pawns with cold eyes.

“We are not yet done,” the Bard said, and set down a card.

It fell over the Severance’s affray, over the Emperor, and obscured the card beneath it. It depicted a tall and well-formed person, with chains around their neck going to the border of the card. Two details gave away the truth: claws at the end of fingers and red eyes. The Devil.

“Violence,” the Wandering Bard said. “Violence bringing about the inexorable.”

—

Adjutant’s jaw tightened as he grasped that he had been just a little too late.

The soldiers the fae had enchanted had forced open the doors of the room using their blades and that was the beginning of the end. The steel doors had only been pried open a crack, but it would be enough: already his attempts to draw them shut were failing, the implacable strength of a great noble of the fae pulling against him. Now that the enemy had a way to cross the wards it came down to strength, and their strength had waned. The Vagrant Spear had been bloodied and could barely stand, much less fight, while the Mirror Knight had lost his blade saving the heroine and now had a look in his eyes – like a horse that’d smelled blood, fear and fervour all mixed up together. Hakram pulled at the doors again, but against the massive strength on the other side he failed: they pulled further open.

Snatching up the axe and shield he’d thrown to the side to struggle, he retreated just before a cloud of rot and decay hissed through the opening.

The fae began to hammer at the steel, shaking the doors and forcing them open inch by inch. Behind Adjutant, the Mirror Knight had retreated across the holy water through a path that’d risen up and was now carrying Sidonia into the stone cube where the sword was kept. Hakram followed, forcing down the throbbing pain in his leg where a spear had torn flesh, and was nearly across when the doors broke and the tide of fae poured in. A spear flew at him, and the orc’s fangs clicked together in dismay – he would not be fast enough. Yet a hand jutted out from behind the wards of the cube, grabbing him by the arm and forcefully dragging him to safety. The Mirror Knight released him as the spear shattered on the wards, the way they shivered a warning that they would not hold forever.

“Thank you,” Hakram said, and meant it.

The spear would not have killed him, but such a wound might well have been permanent. Some things neither sorcery nor Light could heal.

“Think nothing of it,” the Mirror Knight said, eyes on the roiling fae outside.

The Prince of Falling Leaves was gathering them into an array of war, readying to batter at the wards keeping them from their prize. The Severance, sleeping in the pool of water in the back of the room. The surface of the water ever shivered, as if some wind that did not exist was caressing it. Both of them found their steps drifting closer to it.

“We will have to wait for reinforcements,” Adjutant admitted. “We cannot fight them off alone.”

“If we do,” the Mirror Knight quietly said, “Sidonia will die.”

“I can speak for myself,” the Vagrant Spear wetly coughed, from where she lay propped up against the wall. “It will be an honourable death, Christophe. One worthy of being added to the rolls. Hold until the others come.”

“Will they come?” the Mirror Knight softly asked. “Who is it that would relieve us, Sidonia?”

He shook his head, eyes hardening, and he took the last step up to the edge of the pond.

“No,” the Proceran said. “We stand alone.”

That growing iron in the man’s eyes was a dangerous thing, the orc thought. It must be averted before it grew tempered, for it reeked of desperate decisions. How? His eyes found Sidonia, her breathing broken by a wet cough. A punctured lung, the orc judged. Yet even wounded and prone, she remained the key to salvaging this.

“Archer will be coming,” the Adjutant said. “The other war party was a lesser one, it will have been wiped out by now. She must be headed our way already.”

“See?” Sidonia rasped. “The Lady will see to it. She might even be dragging the Physician along by the ear.”

The second part had been tacked on with more effort than skill, but for all that the Mirror Knight hesitated. Adjutant breathed out. If it came to a fight, the hero would win. That much was set in stone. But it would not come to that, and he could still prevent some foolish decision from –

—

The Black Queen paled, knuckles turning white from the strength of her grip. She rapped them against the last card placed down, the Devil.

“I concede the affray,” Catherine said.

Without waiting for an answer she leaned forward and her fingers grasped the edge of the Emperor, trying to extract him from the pile.

“That’s not how it goes,” the Intercessor gently said. “You’re playing the game, right now, but you’re not playing the Game .”

The old thing with a young face offered a half-hearted smile.

“He’s not going to leave, Catherine,” she said. “That’s not the kind of man you made him into.”

She shrugged.

“Take the card, if you want,” the Intercessor said. “It doesn’t mean anything. But as a last piece of advice-”

Even as the Black Queen, lips thinned, began to remove her card the Wandering Bard set down one of her own. Catherine’s hand ceased, as she tried to look at the fresh card and found she could not.

“It’s a damned scary trick,” the Bard said. “For a damned scary woman. Think back, Catherine – how many cards are there, in the Major Arcana?”

Twenty-one , the Black Queen almost said, but she held her tongue. Now that her eyed had been drawn to the oddness she could feel out the shape of it, if not fill the void. It was as if what had lain there was now absent.

“The Moon,” the Wandering Bard said. “The Maddened Keeper: the seal on darkness, who partakes of its powers. You did not remember her, or her card, because Creation finds her to be absent.”

“Demon,” the Black Queen said. “I remember her being added to the rolls, some months ago, but nothing more recent.”

Her fingers clenched.

“How many does she hold, Bard?” Catherine Foundling asked.

“Seven and one,” the Wandering Bard said.

Fingers clenched even tighter.

“I warned you,” the Intercessor said. “Love always fucks you. You can’t be... this and love them all the while, Catherine. It will hollow you out from the inside.”

Catherine Foundling took the card, her mouth tasting of ashes.

—

“-might even be dragging the Physician along by the ear,” Sidonia assured him.

Even she did not sound entirely like she believed it, but Christophe could see the sense in what she and the Adjutant had said. He could not find it in himself to wait long, but to not even attempt to put his faith in his comrades would be almost as grievous as sin. The fae hammered at the wards, the cube shaking around them, but these were not the works of middling wizards. They would hold for some time yet.

“We should prepare for the assault of the fae,” the Mirror Knight said. “There is only one entrance, so-”

Before he could finish speaking, as if to mock him, a creature appeared. A strange woman, with long unkempt hair and a sickly mien. She was standing behind the Adjutant, and without a word she reached out towards the orc.

“Adjutant,” Christophe screamed, and he would have done more but he had no sword , “behind-”

The woman’s hands touched the orc’s side and his flesh boiled, from the arm all down to his foot, as the reek of demonic corruption spread through the room. The Mirror Knight’s hand plunged into the waters, seizing the sheathed blade within even as some eldritch force tore at his armour until only the bare skin of his hand was left – itself stronger than steel, from all the dawns it had seen. Sidonia threw her spear, and the enemy moved back even as the Adjutant dropped with a blood-curling scream, but the Vagrant Spear’s aim had suffered from the wounding.

Christophe’s did not.

The Severance came clear of the scabbard with a faint scream, as if it were cutting the very air, and in three steps the Mirror Knight was before the villainess who had struck at his orc companion. She raised her hand to protect herself, unarmed for all her monstrous power, and offered a faint smile even as Christophe swung and cut through both the arm and the head behind it with barely any resistance.

“Disappear,” the Mirror Knight snarled, as she dropped lifeless to the ground.

But there was no time to waste, he knew. Hakram Deadhand lay on the ground, twisted in pain as corruption began to spread through his body. If the Mirror Knight did not act, the orc would be dead – or much, much worse.

“Gods forgive me,” Christophe prayed, and like a butcher he hacked .

The arm, the leg, most of the side – he cut before the demonic taint could spread, and left his ally broken and bleeding. Unconscious. But it was done, he thought. Now there were only the fae left and –

“Christophe,” Sidonia screamed, “the corpse!’”

The stranger’s remains convulsed, once, twice, and a heartbeat later the Hells broke loose.

The first thing to go was the wards, and it was all downhill from there.

—

Silence reigned for a long moment. The Black Queen, gripping the card close, set down the Emperor above the sole affray she’d opened.

“Ah,” the Wandering Bard murmured, “so that’s where the Concocter went. If you’re lucky, she’ll be able to save your Adjutant, true. Or at least keep him alive.”

“The Mirror Knight is many things, but a poor fighter is not one of them,” the Black Queen said, voice tight. “He’ll slaughter her a way through the thick of it, come what may.”

She cleared away the affray she had already conceded, her every movement speaking to barely controlled rage.

“One to one,” the Wandering Bard said. “Let’s hasten this along, shall we?”

One affray had still lain untouched, the one she had never explained, and with a hum the Intercessor took out the Tower once more and placed it above that very affray, obscuring the Empress. The Black Queen’s eyes narrowed.

“You are trying to drown my first victory,” she said.

“I am succeeding,” the Wandering Bard corrected. “The Empress was from the beginning our old friend Cordelia Hasenbach, who is still headed this way. There are many ways to skin a cat, Catherine, and I know every last one of them.”

—

The illusion broke and Frederic Goethal smiled at the wave of exclamations from the soldiers, who saw the truth of his offered surrender laid bare by the sword at his feet. He turned to offer the Repentant Magister a bow but found that her eyes were widening.

He turned to find the Red Axe with his sword in hand, just as the blade hacked into the side of his neck.

—

The Black Queen’s eyes strayed to the last remaining of the initial affrays, where Temperance still led the dance. The Intercessor caught her out and her lips quirked.

“Worried about Archer?” the Wandering Bard said. “Have a little faith.”

“Funny thing about the Magician,” the Black Queen said. “I happen to have one as well.”

She dropped it atop Temperance, cocking an eyebrow.

“Must have been a mistake of some sort,” Catherine Foundling said. “I would never accuse you of cheating .”

“Quite right,” the Wandering Bard grinned, stuffing cards back into her sleeves.

—

Archer put her useless side in the way, letting the knife blow through so that she might get a good strike in for her trouble. The blade tore through her coat but slid against the mail, the Fallen Monk trying to tackle her down but letting out a grunt when she stabbed him in the shoulder twice. He was strong, though, and heavy. If it kept up he’d be able to force her down, and then she’d be in trouble – save if Adanna... and there she was. The Blessed Artificer threw herself at the Fallen Monk’s legs, trying to snare them with her arms and refusing to give even when the man kicked her and her spectacles gave with a crack. Indrani took the opportunity to push him down, toppling atop of him as he fell and stabbing away still. That cursed fat, it made hard to get at the parts that actually mattered . Half a dozen bleeding wounds, not a single one that would kill a Named.

The three of them were in a messy, writhing pile of violence but another kick finally pushed Adanna away, sending her rolling as she groaned in pain, and though Indrani got in a good knifing through the Monk’s armpit the man still struck her across the face with his full strength. Archer felt her nose break and she rolled away, just in time to see the Fallen Monk crawl to his feet. She dropped her knife, snatching his ankle through the robe, and with her own full strength squeezed . Bone broke and the man screamed, but he tore out of her grasp and winked out of sight. Fuck, Indrani thought. That’d been their shot, and it wouldn’t work twice. The Monk was in a bad place, but so were they and she couldn’t use her bow one-handed.

“Auréole.”

Indrani, wondering if she was going mad, found that her body was softly glowing. So was Adanna’s, who was moaning as she tried to get up with trembling knees. So was the silhouette of an overweight man, glowing where there would otherwise seemingly be only air.

“Roland, you clever little artefact princess you,” Archer praised, swallowing a scream as she rose to her feet with her knife in hand.

The Rogue Sorcerer, some wooden casting rod in one hand and a handful of shining rings on the other, was standing his ground as the silhouette of the Fallen Monk rushed him. The rod went up, there was a blasting sound and the Monk was forced back a mere foot. It didn’t matter, because Indrani was moving too and she was fucking done with this one. The man reappeared in his entirety for the blink of an eye as he turned towards her just in time for his mouth to open in surprise as her extended arm slid the longknife just under his chin and all the way through this throat. He gurgled wetly, for a moment, and with a pained scream Archer turned her wrist and ripped her way out in a spray of blood.

“There,” Indrani panted. “Try to walk that off, Monk.”

She then slumped to her knees, eyes closing.

“If I might offer healing, Archer?” the Rogue Sorcerer gently asked.

“Why are you here, Roland?” Indrani asked. “You should be headed for the Severance with Cocky.”

“I began to head there at first,” the man agreed, “but halfway there realized that no one had stabilized the wards. It would be a shame to all die in the immediate wake of our victory, yes?”

“Zeze should be fixing them,” Archer said. “It’s probably already done.”

“I checked moments ago,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “No work has been done.”

Indrani went still. Where, then was Masego?

—

The Wandering Bard’s head wrenched from faraway, returning to the small room she was sharing with her foe. Catherine Foundling offered her a hard smile and slowly, surely placed a third black pawn on the table.

“Three,” the Queen of Lost and Found state. “Now it ends.”

“Some affrays have yet to end,” the Wandering Bard said. “You are-”

“I have no interest in your game,” Catherine said.

Disdainful, she slapped the table’s surface and the piles of cards blended in chaos.

“Your first mistake,” Catherine said, knocking down a pawn with a flicked finger, “was believing you understand what it means to be part of a band of five. You don’t . Like Ranger, you drift in and out of stories and bands without ever really being part of them. It’s temporary to you, not something you give yourself over to. I’ll wager you never had a moment like I did at the Battle of Dormer, when the Woe blended together and became part of a greater whole.”

“If you want the right to lecture me,” the Bard mockingly echoed, “w-”

“Your second mistake,” Catherine said, knocking down a pawn with a flicked finger, “was telling me what you wanted. The song I already knew had stuck too much in my head to be a coincidence, but then you told me the exact nature of you what you were after by drawing the comparison between us. The Doddering Sage warned me: rival , thief, successor. You’ve been trying to make my Name into one shaped by opposition to you.”

“And why would I ever want that?” the Intercessor said, tone calm.

“Because if it’s that, it’s not something else,” Catherine smiled. “Whatever it is growing into, slowly but surely. And that is a balm onto my heart, Intercessor, because for you to intervene means that outside the walls of this place we are winning .”

“You very much want that to be true, don’t you?” the Wandering Bard said. “But-”

“Your third mistake,” Catherine said, knocking down the last pawn with a flicked finger, “was never asking the right question until it was too late. Until I’d earned my way to this, one pawn at a time.”

“And what would that be?” the Intercessor asked.

“ Why haven’t you been using the Night since you came in ?” Catherine Foundling smiled, all teeth and malice.

The Wandering Bard went still.

“Hierophant,” she said.

The Black Queen threw the card going by the same name on the table, contemptuous.

“There,” she said. “And choke on it. We have what we need, Masego.”

The darkness in the back of the room peeled away, its control long wrested away from the Black Queen, and revealed a tall man with blind and burning eyes.

“Finally,” the Hierophant said. “My preparations are finished.”

“Odds?” the Black Queen asked.

“Half and half, I’d say,” the vivisector of miracles said. “And that is without considering your end of things.”

“Quite the trick,” the Intercessor admitted. “But it means nothing.”

“I thought so too, at first,” the Black Queen said. “But then, you’re not the goddess of stories are you? You don’t have a mantle, just a duty. In the end, you are still Named. The oldest and trickiest of our kind, but that does not change the nature of what you are.”

“This is getting tedious,” the Wandering Bard said, and blinked her eyes.

Silence was broken only by the sound of Catherine Foundling smiling a blackguard’s smile.

“Your tricks can be learned,” the Black Queen said. “They can be blocked. And you’re in our little corner of the Pattern now.”

“You’ve won nothing,” the Wandering Bard said, tone arctic. “The affrays-”

“You were playing a game,” Catherine Foundling chided, “while I was playing the Game. You bled us, but I have three mistakes now. We earned this, through that victory and the weight of what you did to us.”

The Black Queen rose to her feet, leaning forward over the table as the Wandering Bard leaned back.

“Eyes open, Hierophant,” the Carrion Lord’s daughter said. “If she still has a miracle up her sleeve, be ready to kill it next time.”

Her wrist flicked, a knife falling into her palm, and ever as the Intercessor opened her mouth to speak Catherine Foundling slit her throat. Marguerite of Baillons twitched, clutching her wound, and cards went flying from her sleeves as two of the Woe coldly watched. It was only Catherine that thought, for a moment, that there had been a strange glint in the Intercessor’s eyes. Relieved, triumphant, afraid?

Eventually, the body ceased moving.

“So?” the Black Queen asked.

“I could not catch the soul,” the Hierophant said, “but even when in danger she cannot leave my bindings. It is possible she is dead and has gone Beyond.”

Catherine Foundling looked at the corpse for a long time, clenching her fingers and unclenching them.

“No,” she decided, “this isn’t the last we’ve seen of her.”

She dragged herself up, tired but knowing there was still chaos to put to order.

“We’ve got work to do, Masego,” the Black Queen said. “Let’s get to it.”

Neither of them looked back, as they left, and so neither saw that by the sheerest of coincidence the struggle had left untouched one of the affrays – the Empress, the Tower – save for one card that’d fallen from the Bard’s sleeve in her death throes.

Judgement lay with the Tower between it and the Empress, speckled with blood.

—

She breathed out and opened her eyes, a starry sky sprawled above her.

In and out, slowly. Unmistakably. She was still alive, though no longer Marguerite de Baillons. The Wandering Bard, the Keeper of Stories, closed her eyes and repressed the urge to scream until her voice went hoarse.

“I did it all right,” she said. “And still? Still ?”

Her nails dug into her palms until they bled.

“Fine,” she whispered. “Fine. The hard way it is, then, and on your heads be it .”

Chapter 23: Repercussions

“Giving battle is as being made to wed one of two ugly sisters– even if you get the prettier of the bargains to be had, it is still a dreadful affair all around.”
– Princess Clothilde of Arans, the Cautious

It was a subtle thing, but when you were looking for it the change was noticeable. There was now a certain weight to the place that’d not been there before, a resistance to power that’d earlier waned. My steps stuttered and Masego moved halfway towards glancing at me in question, though in truth his eyes of glass were merely staring at me through his own head.

“I think the wards were just restored,” I said.

“Possible,” Hierophant acknowledged. “May I?”

I nodded, suppressing a grimace, and the air shivered with the power of his aspect. The Hierophant used his will to Wrest the Night away from me, as he had earlier when we’d trapped the Intercessor, and I gave token resistance before letting him win. We’d found out if worked better if he got control by winning a conflict, even the resistance was largely ceremonial. I didn’t much enjoy the sensation of having my power stripped from me, or of losing for that matter – I’d never been one to enjoy defeat even when the real victory was in throwing the fight. Masego shaped the Night into small pinpricks, gathering dewlike drops of it with a finesse I could not replicate despite my best efforts, and detonated them one after another. He varied the size of the pinpricks according to some eldritch artihmetic, observing the detonations with care, and only when the last had vanished did he slowly nod.

“Someone has activated the emergency wards,” Hierophant told me. “Repairing the true arrays will take time and mage cabals, but these will be enough to prevent further incursions by extradimensional entities.”

“Will it keep them in?” I asked.

“So long as they do not force one of the designated gates, yes,” Masego said. “Though I do not speak in absolutes, as sufficiently powerful fae can brute force their way through such things and demons usually require wards tailored to them.”

“We might have eight demons on the loose, Zeze,” I cursed. “They need to be contained, and quick.”

The tall mage offered me a reassuring smile.

“Don’t worry about them escaping into Creation,” he said. “In nearly all observed cases, they will first devour the entire pocket dimension before trying to move beyond it.”

“And,” I slowly said, just to confirm, “by ‘pocket dimension’, in this case you mean the Arsenal?”

“Yes,” he smiled, visibly pleased by my understanding.

“The Arsenal, where we and a lot of people and priceless artefacts are?” I continued.

“Yes,” Masego agreed once more. “So do not worry, since if the demons do get into Creation we will be long dead – or at least no longer truly aware, as living vectors of demonic infection.”

The whole reassuring thing was a bit of a work in progress with him, I mused, but at least his heart was in the right place.

“Well, that’s certainly something,” I muttered. “Would you mind releasing the Night?”

“Of course,” Hierophant agreed.

Much as he immediately complied when I asked him that, I thought it telling that he always kept the Night until that very moment. Indrani had told me he’d taken the loss of his magic well, and from what I’d seen of him I’d tended to agree, but no one took that harsh a loss without it leaving some scars. No one liked losing power, especially if you’d been skilled at using it, and there had been few mages more skilled than Masego.

“Let’s go,” I said. “The sooner we get to the Knot the better.”

“I still do not know why we are headed there,” Masego reminded me.

He got walking, though, and I got limping. It’d do.

“The Sinister Physician is there,” I said.

I’d made sure of that, assigning him healing duties at the crossroads of the Arsenal before disappearing.

“He has already seen to your wound,” Hierophant pointed out.

My hand almost went to the still-blood mark on my neck where the Fallen Monk’s knife had sunk into my flesh. That’d been a nasty surprise. I wasn’t a fool, I’d suspected that a traitor was going to come after me, but the metaphysical Night tripwires I’d put up on the stairs after the Poet and the Monk went up hadn’t warned me of the coming backstab at all. I’d lost all hold on Night, maybe because of some aspect of the Monk’s, and it’d poured out of me as a sea of blackflame. It’d gone around the Fallen Monk, though I’d felt him try and fail to seize control of it, but still singed him some just by the heat and killed every fae at the bottom of the Belfry besides. That’d been enough to spook him into fleeing, thank the Crows, because if he’d actually stuck around...

I’d had little to no control over the Night for an uncomfortable amount of time after the blow, and I’d come closer than I liked to admit to simply bleeding out. Even when I’d achieved mastery once more, the best I’d been able to do was prevent the cut veins from killing me by freezing blood flow and limp my way to the closest healer, the Sinister Physician. Roland might have been able to help, but with fae still up there and other potential traitors it would have been a risk – easier to feign my own death, and slide the Monk’s knife into the corpse most closely resembling me I had at hand. I’d figured it would warn Archer when she came to try to find me, and I’d been right: she’d grasped my intentions without a word ever being spoken between us.

“Catherine?” Masego gently said.

I shook my head. My thoughts were drifting, as much from the blood loss as the exhaustion.

“I sent him there as a beacon of sorts,” I told Zeze. “He is a healer, in a known and easily accessible position. Any Named from my indirect conflicts with the Intercessor-”

“These affrays ,” Hierophant carefully said, as if trying out the word.

“I was trying to protect things, or people, and she was trying to break them,” I agreed. “But if anyone got seriously hurt and they aren’t dead, they’ll be headed to the Knot and the Sinister Physician – because he’s there and visible and obviously helpful.”

“A beacon to gather people,” Masego frowned, eyes swivelling as he thought. “So by heading there now, we will learn what has happened in your ‘affrays’.”

“I have some idea,” I said. “If the cards were truthful, anyway. But it should get me the information quickly and in depth, yeah. There’s also another use.”

He half-turned towards me but said nothing, the invitation silent.

“There’ll be mages and soldiers there,” I said, “as well as Named. If we’re going to contain the demons and the fae before this gets any worse, we’re going to need all of those.”

I was not looking forward to tangling with demons again. Hopefully Hakram wouldn’t be too gravely wounded from whatever it was the Bard had arranged to hurt him, I thought, fingers clenching. A leg lost, an arm or perhaps an eye? Gods, why was he always the one who ended paying in flesh for our mistakes? The Mirror Knight would have taken up the sword, so if we were lucky he’d cut down parts of the opposition before we got there. If we were unlucky , well... Best be prepared to put down a corrupted Christophe of Pavanie, wielding a sword that’d been made to kill a lesser god. As much as you could ever prepare for something like that, anyway. The grim thoughts stayed with me as we passed through stone hallways nearly indistinguishable from one another, hurrying as much as we could without running outright.

The Knot was a riot of activity when we stumbled in from one of the upper halls, the Sinister Physician having organized what looked like an impressive field infirmary from Arsenal supplies. Half the cots were filled with soldiers, only the most lightly wounded of them kept awake instead of placed under a sleeping spell. Priests and mages were swarming all around but the Sinister Physician himself was seeing to a pair of cots set apart from the rest and from each other. In more ways than one, I thought, since one of the people on the cots was bound by leather straps and had half a tenth of crossbowmen trained on her at all times. That did not bode well. The healers in spell and Light parted for the two of us, offering words I only paid half attention to as we headed towards the Physician and my fear was confirmed.

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath.

One of those two wounded was Frederic Goethal, the Prince of Brus. The Kingfisher Prince as well, but it was the other princely title that’d be trouble in the coming days.

“Your Majesty,” the Sinister Physician greeted me. “I am glad to see you in good health.”

“As I am glad to be,” I replied. “Would I be correct in assuming the woman tied down is the Red Axe?”

“She is,” Masego said, before the other villain could.

The Physician eyed Hierophant with mild irritation but nodded.

“Her peculiarities mean initial treatment had to be done by priests, naturally,” the Physician told me. “But I have been continuing the work with alchemies, which she does not seem to affect.”

“How bad?” I asked.

“Prince Frederic will have scarring on the side of his neck, but no more than that,” he replied. “Part of it was the Magister’s stabilizing intervention, but there appears to have been another manner of interference. He was struck with his own sword, which seems to have sorcery laid into the steel that made it reluctant – if not incapable – to kill its own wielder. The blow was deep but avoided the jugular.”

I glanced at Masego, who nodded.

“The Bitter Blacksmith, by which I mean not Helmgard but her brother, would be capable of this,” Hierophant said. “He has the Gift, and skill with it.”

Thank the Gods for him, then. I rather liked the Prince of Brus, and that aside his death would have been a political mess of legendary proportion.

“And the Red Axe?” I asked.

“Hovering at the edge of life and death,” the sallow-skinned man frankly said. “She was shot by twenty-three crossbow bolts, including one that pierced her liver and two that went in her lungs. If another had been half an inch to the side, it would have taken her through the heart and she would have died before getting here.”

My eyes moved to the woman in question, prone in her cot. She didn’t look like much, not that people ever did when they’d lost that much blood. Brown hair, tanned skin, muscled arms. Not tall, either, even prone I could tell as much. A lot of trouble for such a small package. When I tore away my gaze, I found the Sinister Physician was studying me closely.

“Despite my best efforts and those of the priests,” the Sinister Physician mildly said, “it is, of course, possible she will die. These things do happen, Your Majesty.”

It was an offer, however indirectly made.

If I were a better woman, I would have refused it outright. Without hesitation. Instead I considered the notion. If the heroine died bedridden, shot by soldiers, I would not need to have her executed and deal with the outrage from Above’s crowd over the matter. It would also nip in the bud the mess that would come from a Named having tried to murder a ruling prince of Procer, and how that was simply not something Cordelia Hasenbach would be able to let go . It’d be murder, of course. Sure, the Physician would be the one carrying out the deed for me, but the order would have been mine. The weight of this would be on my shoulders. But what was one more life, these days, one more splash of blood on the stone? How many had I killed by my hand or by my words?

I was a little late for scruples, wasn’t it?

If it were found out, though, it’s be a disaster. I’d be breaking the Truce and Terms and given my position in that arrangement the very foundation of them would be rocked. So long as the Sisters were with me, though, I was beyond truthtelling even if the heroes had suspicions. It’s a secret, and the Arsenal is a gathering place of Named. Yet that was not an absolute rule, a certainty. If dark deeds were done cleverly, and cleverly hidden, they could remain secret. I clenched my fingers and unclenched them, looking at the Red Axe once more as the silence grew long. I should have felt pity for her, I thought, or perhaps sympathy – she had been forged in pain, like most Named, and it had led a pitiless ancient to make use of her. Yet I did not. All I could see was the consequences of her actions, all the way down to Keter swallowing this continent whole. There was no place for pity in that vision.

Yet I had made rules, hadn’t I? Rules to govern these conflicts between heroes and villains, between Named and laws. The Truce and Terms had been raised in no small part by my hand, and they had been my design since their inception. They were, in the end, the first step towards the Liesse Accords becoming truth instead of remaining ink. If I broke those rules, if I didn’t have faith in them, then who would? Who should ? How could I ask anyone to follow them when I broke them at my own leisure whenever I thought it best? One of the Old Tyrants, Terribilis the Second, had once written that you should never make a law you did not intend to enforce – because allowing it to be broken lessened all other laws.

I would be lessening all I had built if I did this. Even if I got away with it.

“It would be best,” I finally said, “if she made it through.”

“I am sure she will, Your Majesty,” the Sinister Physician said, just as mildly as he had offered her death. “I will return to my duties, if you have no further questions.”

“Please do,” I replied.

I watched him walk away, Hierophant standing at my side.

“Did he just offer to murder the Red Axe?” Zeze leaned in to ask, sounding puzzled.

“Quiet,” I murmured, but nodded.

“He could have made it plainer what it was he was saying,” Masego resentfully muttered.

He wasn’t all that troubled at the notion of the killing, or that I’d seriously considered it, but then for all that his family had made him essentially untouchable Hierophant had spent much of his childhood and adolescence in Praes. People killed themselves over theatre seats, there. Politics saw enough red flow to rival rivers. I realized a moment later that I did still have a question for the Physician, though I supposed asking one of the officers would serve just as well. The villain had mentioned that Nephele’s sorcery had kept the Kingfisher Prince alive long enough for him to be brought to a healer whose metaphorical gourd wasn’t running empty, but I’d never actually learned where she went after that.

A slower, more careful look around told me there was less of a force to muster here than I would have liked. Maybe thirty soldiers, from those a few of mine and more from the Dominion. A dozen priests were seeing to the wounded, with half that in mages – most of them Proceran, by the looks of it, so barely passable as war casters – and it wasn’t like I could strip them from the infirmary without endangering those being seen to. The lightly wounded would survive that, but those who’d lost a limb or worse would be at risk. We’ll all be at risk if demons devour this place , I reminded myself, and none of the soldiers here will do much difference if a Duke of Autumn finds this place.

I’d moved on to considering which officer to approach, as the ranking one here seemed to be a Levantine captain but my natural leaning was to rustle up a few Army sergeants and get my people forming up, when the first question I would have asked answered itself. The Repentant Magister emerged from one of the side halls, escorted by a good forty soldiers – two full lines from the Army of Callow – and the Blade of Mercy. Her eyes found mine and I nodded a greeting, watching as she thanked the ranking lieutenant with courtesy and headed straight towards me. Us , I was reminded when Masego shuffled silently at my side.

“She is on the very edge of burning out,” Hierophant told me. “And nearly out of trinkets.”

I nodded in acknowledgement, then pitch my voice low.

“If you wrested her sorcery form her grasp,” I quietly asked, “would she still be at risk of that when you used it?

“I am uncertain,” he admitted after a moment. “The nature of the Night and your own prodigious affinity for it make you a poor subject to use as the base of a theory.”

“You haven’t experimented with the aspect?” I said, genuinely surprised.

He’d been the one who pushed me hardest to experiment with the limits of my mantle, when I’d been Sovereign of Moonless Nights.

“Not in a manner that would physically cripple or kill anyone should I misstep,” Masego chided me. “There is much that can still be studied before only these mysteries remain.”

Fair enough, I mused. The Repentant Magister was upon us, so the conversation ended, and though in other circumstances I would have been less than pleased to see the Blade of Mercy at her heels today I was even glad to see him .

“Your Majesty,” Nephele greeted me, offering a bow. “Lord Hierophant.”

“Nephele,” Masego replied.

“Lady Eliade,” I replied. “Blade of Mercy.”

The boy hesitated but received an almost admonishing glance from the sorceress.

“Queen Catherine,” the hero said, curtly bowing as well.

He did not greet Masego, not that Zeze cared in the slightest. By the fade of the glare behind his eyecloth, he was actually looking elsewhere while pretending to be paying attention.

“I understand I have you to thank for saving the life of the Kingfisher Prince, Lady Eliade,” I said.

“I cannot claim to have saved him, only delayed until salvation came by other hands,” the Repentant Magister replied. “But I receive your sentiment gratefully regardless.”

“It’s true, then,” the Blade of Mercy said. “It was you who sent Prince Frederic to protect the Red Axe.”

He was speaking somewhat rudely, but I could live with a little rudeness. Now was not the time to have a fit over manners.

“The Red Axe was used to sunder the Truce and Terms by a foe that kills through plots, the ancient creature known as the Wandering Bard,” I replied. “I have been trying to warn people of her for years, but there has been... opposition from your side of the fence to having her declared an enemy. We are all paying the price for that dithering today.”

There was no way the Grey Pilgrim would be able to keep fighting my push to have the Bard declared a foreign and hostile entity, one it would be treason to deal with, after the events of the last night and day. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t have him pay a tithe of blood and pride over this, though, or darken the Intercessor’s name as thoroughly as I could with anyone who’d listen.

“Then your reputation was attainted without reason, and I offer apology for it,” the Blade of Mercy stiffly said. “It was believed that you were attempting to use this affair to make the Chosen into your vassals, using the deeds of the Red Axe as a pretext to extend your influence.”

It wasn’t like he’d suddenly come to believe I was a good woman or ally, I thought as I studied him, but rather that he was perfectly willing to believe that there was another Evil out there who had been using the Red Axe for their own nefarious plot. Rubies to piglets he was already thinking of the Bard as villain in his head.

“It takes character to own to a mistake,” I replied, offering a nod and nothing more. “But if I may dispense with idle talk, there is a peril we need to address. I’ve reason to believe that there are demons loose in the Arsenal.”

“Gods be good,” Nephele hoarsely whispered. “Demon s , plural?”

I nodded, appreciating her grasp of the gravity of the situation. Not that I’d expected otherwise of her. Coming from Stygia – and from the Magisterium at that, whose ranks boasted the finest diabolists of the Free Cities – she should have a decent idea of how nasty even a single demon could get.

“Where?” the Blade of Mercy sharply said.

“Near the Severity,” I said. “There might be as many as eight.”

“The wards will not contain them forever, even if they were unleashed inside them, which we do not know for certain,” Hierophant warned, having resumed interest in the conversation. “The anchors are on the inside, as the pattern was primarily designed to resist assault from the outside. Eventually they will corrupt or destroy the anchors, and the wards will collapse.”

“We need to contain them before it gets to that,” I bluntly said. “Blade, are you capable of destroying their kind?”

Not all heroes could, I had learned, but the boy used Light and lots of it. The odds were good he was one of those with the ability.

“Yes,” the Blade of Mercy said. “In principle. I have never encountered one before.”

Gods, but I had the strangest headache. Was I forgetting something? No matter.

“Then we will do what we can to set up those kills,” I said. “My priority is containment, so that we can gather numbers and Named to deal with this more safely, but none can be allowed to run wild.”

“You’ll be needing wards for that,” Nephele seriously said. “And while in other circumstances I might be able to provide-”

“You are close to overdrawing,” Hierophant interrupted. “We are aware. I have trained none of the mage around us here, which means none should be capable of the required work, but Catherine –”

“I’ll conscript half so you can borrow their power,” I agreed.

Or at least however many of the six weren’t close to burning out themselves. The priests would have been able to see to most wounds, so it shouldn’t be the case, but mages in an infirmary did a lot more than healing spells – the way so many of the gravely wounded men were spelled to sleep made that plain enough.

“I will choose them myself,” Hierophant said.

“Use my name if you have to,” I shrugged. “Lady Eliade, if you’d accompany him?”

Couldn’t hurt to have a gentler touch along when gathering a few mandated volunteers.

“It would be my pleasure,” the heroine replied with a smile.

Good, then she got my meaning by sending her along. I cast a look at the Blade of Mercy, noticing his hesitant look. He wanted to stick by the Repentant Magister’s side but couldn’t think of a reason why he should. Gods, how old was he? He couldn’t be older than twenty. It was easy to hate the sneer and the accusations, too easy to forget that I was actually looking at a kid .

“With me,” I said. “We’re going to procure a few soldiers.”

The boy jerkily nodded, falling in at my side.

“How old are you, Antoine of Lange?” I asked.

The boy offered me a mulish look.

“Nineteen,” he still said. “There is no need to use my personal name, Blade will suffice.”

A lie, I decided, or at least an exaggeration. He must be younger; it was a rare thing for that lie to be spoken the other way around.

“I was seventeen, the first time I fought a demon,” I quietly said. “I’d fought devils before, and Named of some power, so I figured I knew what I was in for.”

That, at last, got his undivided attention. His eyes were wide and went still.

“The fight itself was a terror,” I said, “like few things before or since, but it was the aftermath that scraped me raw. The demon laid seeds of corruption within some of my soldiers. Brave men and women, who’d done nothing but their duty.”

“What happened to them?” the Blade of Mercy softly asked.

“We killed all those who’d been corrupted,” I said. “As gently as we could, but they were no less dead for it.”

The boy swallowed.

“Why are you telling me this?” Antoine asked.

“The Mirror Knight is your friend, as I heard it,” I said. “So I’m telling you now when you can still prepare yourself. He might be lost, Blade of Mercy. Corruption spares no one, and all it takes is a drop.”

“He is strong,” the boy insisted.

“Then pray they’ve not made something warped of him,” I said. “Else that strength will be turned against us.”

I left him to think on that, limping my way to the two lines that’d been Nephele’s earlier escort. One of regulars I noted, and one that was a mix: on tenth of crossbows, another of heavies. The senior lieutenant was an orc, who introduced himself proudly as I approached.

“Lieutenant Inger, ma’am, it’s an honour.”

Herself, then. My mistake.

“Lieutenant,” I replied, nodding amiably. “I’ve a task for you and your soldiers.”

“I am at your pleasure,” she replied, fangs bared eagerly.

“Before I forget, though,” I said. “Where were you escorting Lady Eliade?”

“She meant to head towards the Chancel, so that the wards might be fixed,” the lieutenant told me. “Yet she sensed them being established again on the way, so we turned back.”

I hummed in approval. A good call by Nephele on both parts: a good use of her expertise and exhausted state, then a decisive cut of her losses when her effort proved unnecessary. From the corner of my eye I saw the Blade of Mercy coming closer, though the boy remained far enough he wasn’t exactly standing with me so much as in my extended vicinity.

“This will be for volunteers only,” I told Lieutenant Inger. “If you’d allow me to address your men?”

“You’ll find no dragging feet among us, Warlord,” the orc assured me. “But to have you address them would be a privilege.”

Masego and the Magister looked nearly done, two mages already following them, so I didn’t have long if I didn’t want to start wasting time in a situation where it was precious. But I owed my soldiers, given what I was about to ask of them, what honesty I could offer. Lieutenant Inger barked out an order and my legionaries fell into ranks crisply, offering hearty salutes as I limped up in front of them. Rows of expectant, eager faces waiting for some stirring speech I could not offer. I’d not do them the insult of cloaking this with the appearance of glory where there was none to be found.

“I’ll be brief,” I told them, “and blunt. Chaos has the run of this place, and it will get worse from here: demons were loosed and we don’t know how many or how contained they are.”

That sobered them right quick, though not as much as it should have. I have won too many unexpected victories , I thought. It was the foundation of my reign, this ability to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, but it had grown into a legend I was not always the equal to. There was no clever plan that would keep demons from melting them like wax, no surprising turnabout to reveal at the last moment. I could see in their eyes that they believed there was one, that the Black Queen would come through once more no matter the enemy, and it tasted like ash in my mouth.

“I’ll be heading out with Lord Masego and the two heroes you’ve been escorting, as well as three mages,” I told them. “We mean to contain this madness until sufficient strength can be assembled to destroy it outright.”

In other circumstances I’d settle for a binding and a very deep hole, but if we had the might to outright annihilate a few demons I’d take the opportunity without complain.

“There will be fae and Named, some of them might be corrupted already,” I said. “Not knowing the face and nature of our enemies, there can be no guarantees that our methods will be able to contain them. And so I ask you all to come with us, into the dark”

There was a roar of approval, and blades were smacked against shields, but I raised a hand to quell it. I would take them with me, because they would be useful – needed – but I would not let them pretend this was some sort of glorious adventure.

“I will take only volunteers,” I said, and my hand rose once more to end the clamour of volunteering about to erupt, “but let me be perfectly clear about what I am asking of you. None of you can kill a demon. Swords and arrows cannot do it. What I am asking you is to stand between the mages and the horrors, to buy them the precious time that will make the difference.”

I’d asked silence of them, and silence they gave me.

“Even those of you who survive,” I said, “will likely be lessened in some way. That is the ugly truth of fighting demons, that there cannot ever be a real victory. There is no cowardice in avoiding this fight: I would, if I could.”

I met their gazes, breathing out.

“But I cannot, and so I ask for volunteers,” I simply said.

I could see the fear in them now and I knew I’d put it there. For a moment I wondered if I had been too candid but regretted the thought almost instantly. I could and had spent the lives of my men, those who had sworn oaths to me, but I’d not do it while lying to their faces. There were some who called me a soldier queen, and deep down I knew there was truth to the sobriquet.

If I was queen of anything at all, it was the likes of these soldiers before me.

“You’ll go, won’t you?” Lieutenant Inger asked, gravelly voice cutting sharp across the silence.

“I will,” I said.

“You always go,” the orc said, eyes hard, hands clenched. “And so we follow . I volunteer.”

And so they went, one after the other, even after my every warning.

Forty soldiers, and I was left to wonder at how sometimes pride could feel like grieving.

Charlatan II

“To be a mage is to seek to master yourself so that through this you might master the world around you.”
– Extract from “The Most Noble Art of Magic”, by Dread Emperor Sorcerous

Sister Maude left after delivering her ultimatum, as if it were done thing, and behind her chaos erupted within Olivier’s family.

Father was hesitant, Mother belligerent and Roland seemingly just in deep shock. It occurred to the Olivier that, until this moment, no one had ever really made it clear to his younger brother that magic could be seen as anything but good. He was not certain whether he should be glad of that or not: sometimes callouses were for your own good. Olivier’s parents began to argue, Mother talking about calling in favours and rousing the town while Father called it black madness, talking instead of trying a bribe. Olivier led away his little brother, who did not need to see or hear any of this, bringing him to his room. The shouting could be heard through the door, but he was no magician to be able to solve that.

“Ollie, what are we going to do?” Roland quietly asked. “We can’t fight the priests, Father’s right.”

There was no denying that , Olivier thought. The temple in Beaumarais was nothing impressive, a simple house of stone with pretty side gardens holding within a small cloister that served as both a hostel for travellers and lodgings for the few lay brothers and sisters who occasionally spent a handful of seasons here. Sister Maude was a stout woman in her forties, who rumour placed on the wrong side of a political squabble in the faraway city of Maupin to the west – a month and a half away by horse – as explanation for why such an obviously well-educated priestess had been sent to a border town like theirs. The men in House livery she’d brought with her were lay brothers reportedly from Apenun, the kind that came here in a retreat for a year before returning, and besides a young woman and an old one they were the only other people of the House in Beaumarais.

It wasn’t that physically the priestess and her fellows couldn’t be run out of town. Sister Maude’s grasp on Light was weak and she was not in great shape, while none of the others could call on the blessings of Above. Father alone using what few dangerous spells he knew would be able to clear out the lot of them fairly handily. The trouble was that the House of Light stood behind them, and the House could not be threatened or bullied: if Sister Maude was sent packing, she’d be back in three months with a dozen priests and a company of horsemen from Apenun. There might even be a royal magistrate with them, someone who’d be empowered to seize property and pass judgements. If it came to that, Olivier’s family would lose everything they owned in the span of moments.

In principle, the ancient rights of all Procerans colloquially known as Salienta’s Graces meant that not even a prince could take a single blade of grass from a farmer without the matter being brought to an elected magistrate and the law being made to speak. In practice, though, royal magistrates – those appointed by the authority of the royal house, if rarely by the ruling prince personally – were allowed to ignore the Graces and render judgement when it came to treason, heresy and royal dues. Out here in the Valleys there was no elected magistrate anyway. Not enough people to warrant it. It was the ones in Apenun that received petitions, but none had come out as far as Beaumarais in living memory. And should Sister Maude call in a royal magistrate over ‘heresy’, though, even appealing there wouldn’t do a damned thing.

They stuck together, all these powerful sorts, like a covenant of foxes running the henhouse.

“There has to be more to this,” Olivier told his brother quietly. “Our arrangements with the House have been holding for more than two decades now, why force what will be an unpopular measure? Something must have happened.”

“I know Mother met with someone quietly and after nightfall, about a week back,” Roland said, frowning.

“To sell green brews, you think?” Olivier asked, brow rising. “She doesn’t know any recipe that’d bring down heresy charges on our heads.”

Green brews, or hedge alchemy as some books referred to it, was a reference to potioneering practices that were as much folk wisdom as sorcery and were of sometimes dubious efficacy. Some bordered on black arts, like potions empowered by animal sacrifice for fertility and powdered human bone in philtres that fixed arthritis, but no reputable wizard would be caught dabbling in those. No where anyone might be looking, anyway. Most were harmless, besides, and folk wisdom had sometimes become accepted as such for good reason: there were a lot of useful tricks to be learned from old tales.

“It was healing call,” Roland said, shaking his head. “Though I don’t know for what. Father went into the laboratory as well, but not long enough for him to have cast anything.”

“It’ll be in their records, then,” Olivier mused. “I’ll have to take a look.”

His parents were very methodical about marking down all they sold and to whom, Mother in particular. She was a better brewer than spellcaster, and she liked to follow up on the health of those who’d drunk of her potions – especially if she was using a different version from the usual recipes.

“The lab’s lock is magic,” Roland reminded him. “You’ll need me.”

Olivier turned to look at the door and the muted shouting still going on behind it. As good an opportunity as they were going to get, he supposed.

“Let’s go,” he agreed, and his brother’s brilliant smile almost made the whole mess worth it.

—

They snuck into the laboratory with, in all honesty, more caution than was strictly needed. Of their parents where was no sign, though Olivier made haste in finding the bookkeeping tallies anyway. No need to take risks when his little brother was with him, not if he could avoid them. He did not need to look for answers long – three entries from the last was a name that had the young man wincing. Master Nicholas, who’d been given a potion to see to the sickness that’d taken hold in his leg for a full silver. Double what the brew was actually worth, and maybe a third over what his parent would usually charge for it. Roland looked over his shoulder, and after glancing at his face the younger boy’s eyes narrowed.

“The name means something to you,” Roland stated.

“It does,” Olivier agreed, “but let’s get out of here before we speak of it.”

They scurried out and headed towards a small thicket outside the house where they could speak in privacy and feign boredom games if their parents came. Roland was visibly impatient, not used to either the excitement or having to wait for answers.

“Master Nicholas and his kin handle the gardens for the House of Light, as well as the vegetable fields that feed Sister Maude and her lay guests,” Olivier said.

“So why did he come to us for healing?” Roland frowned. “A priest could do the brew’s work without issue.”

“Because he’s in a dispute with Sister Maude over wages,” Olivier said, fully brought into the know by the occasional dinners he still had with Master Laurent’s family. “Some of the flower garden work was done by the two lay sisters for leisure so Sister Maude wants to pay less than the full wage, and there was some sort of argument over the vegetables as well.”

A petty enough argument: Sister Maude had taken vegetables from the fields early, going against the arrangement of allowing Master Nicholas first pick as part of his payment, but done so taking vegetables the man never chose and not the prettiest of their kind either. The man now refused to work at all, and in retaliation Sister Maude was refusing him healing. Mayoress Suzanne, who’d been the one to speak of the bickering at dinner over a good bottle of wine, had done so while obviously considering the whole affair an amusing anecdote. Bruised pride, nothing to be worried of. Olivier now saw differently.

“We’ve sold that potion to people before,” Roland said. “Regularly, too. It was one of the first recipes I learned.”

“If we sell one to a shepherd who will spend his days in the valleys, it is a trifling thing,” Olivier patiently said. “After all, if that same shepherd was in town he would head to the House instead. But Master Nicholas was refused healing by Sister Maude. There is a reason he paid higher than the usual price.”

And so the House of Light found itself threatened by the emergence of relief beyond its gates. Otherwise Master Nicholas would have been forced to bend his neck in that dispute, eventually, and then after being assuaged Sister Maude could have shown mercy to repair the relationship. But now a family of practitioners had helped someone she was quarrelling with frustrate her: that was not simply a transaction, in the Sister’s eyes, it was a challenge . One she must answer, or her influence in Beaumarais would wane.

“She’s coming after us because we healed someone,” Roland heatedly said. “Because of coin. That is foul , Olivier.”

“I imagine the power matters more to her than the silver,” he replied. “But it’s true. I’ve heard that out west mages cannot heal at all, by decree of law.”

He now understood why much more sharply than his previously nebulous grasp of the forces at play. It was rarely a comforting thing to have a glimpsed at the ugly fingers pulling at the strings from behind the curtain, but blindness had a way of costing more than discomfort.

“People won’t stand for this,” Roland insisted. “We have friends too, and people who owe us favours. There’s things Light can’t do, they need us for those.”

It certainly wouldn’t be a popular measure to drive out Olivier’s family, which forbidding it to practice wizardry for coin would essentially ensure. Still, in the end the family could move to another town – they’d lose the house and the laboratory, the ties with spring peddlers and the gathering places for ingredients, but the trade itself could continue elsewhere. It would be the townsfolk of Beaumarais who’d find a lot less convenience to their lives, especially with Roland being a blooming young enchanter already capable of very useful things. Sister Maude’s influence would wane regardless, Olivier considered, because she’d be seen as a petty tyrant who’d robbed the town of useful and respected tradesmen for no good reason. Did she perhaps mean to only use the ban to put fear into his parents, and then lift it before they were forced to leave? It would be a risk, even so.

There was more to this than he understood, Olivier decided, and only one place where he might get answers shedding light over the matter.

“I’ll head to the temple,” he said. “There is more to this situation than we know.”

“And why would she hear you out?” Roland said, skeptical.

It’d not been meant to be hurtful, Olivier reminded himself, the way he’d phrased that. The underlying implication that Olivier wasn’t even a mage, so why would his word matter in this?

“I have a letter of commendation from another priest,” the young man replied. “She’ll hear me out, and when she does I’m sure an agreement can be reached.”

“We shouldn’t have to agree to anything, Ollie,” his little brother insisted. “We’re not wrong, she is. If she just left us alone-”

“That’s not how the world works, Roland,” Olivier said, a tad sharply. “You can’t solve everything with a spell or getting stubborn about being right. Everyone thinks they’re right – and if you never try to see it the way others do, you’re going to end up fighting all of them.”

His little brother’s cheeks reddened in anger and he looked away, mulish.

“I didn’t mean to raise my voice,” Olivier said, feeling his stomach sour. “I’m sorry, Roland. But this needs to be fixed and getting angry won’t do that.”

“I know,” Roland quietly said. “But you do know it, don’t you? That they’re wrong about this.”

“I do,” the young man agreed, clasping his brother’s shoulder, “but we can still try to turn it into a right.”

—

When Olivier arrived with Brother Albert’s letter of commendation in hand, it was to the mild awkwardness of being received by one of the very men in House livery who’d come to visit his family home as an unspoken threat. Taking a closer look at the man in question, he noted some faint scars – blademarks, if he was not mistaken – and what the son of an alchemist skilled in healing recognize as a broken nose that’d been healed well enough it was barely noticeable. Between that and the ramrod straight stance, the man screamed soldier to him. Not exactly your average lay brother. Without introducing himself, the scarred man disappeared into the house with the letter – not asking permission to take it, either – and returned only some time later.

“You are invited to have a cup of wine in the gardens,” the man told him.

“How civilized,” Olivier drily said. “My letter, please?”

He received it and felt the man’s eyes on his back as he took the side path and passed through the field of flowers and flowering bushes that surrounded the cloister. He’d not asked where it was to be received, but the answer presented itself before long: between a few beautiful magnolia trees, a small wooden table and two seats awaited. A young woman in austere lay sister’s robes stood behind it, a hand folded her back, ready to serve the wine for guests. There was no sign of Sister Maude, though making the likes of Olivier wait would hardly be unusual for a woman of her stature. The young man made his way there, eyes straying when he noticed that the lay sister – this would be the young one, not the aged – was really quite striking. Grey eyes, long and braided blonde hair: she seemed of age with him, or perhaps slightly older, and by looks half a princess out of story.

“Sister Maude invites you to sit,” the young woman smiled as he approached. “She is seeing to House duties but will be along shortly.”

“I come and go at her leisure,” Olivier replied. “We journey as the Heavens will.”

The blonde lay sister hesitated for a moment, then recalled the answer.

“And ever head towards their grace,” she firmly replied.

Not a lay sister meaning to take vows, then, Olivier decided. She’d been in the cloister for at least a year and she was still so unsure when giving the Traveller’s Blessing? No, this one was not wanting to trade sister’s robes for a Sister’s.

“It would be hopelessly impolite of me to sit while you stand,” he said. “Will you not take a seat as well?”

“That is very kind of you,” she replied, “but it would be improper for one of my station.”

If you’re not from a good family, I’ll swallow whole a stone , Olivier thought. Etiquette wasn’t something nobodies knew, it was the little rules the powerful had made so they could tell each other apart from the rest.

“The easy solution is for me to stand as well, then,” he lightly replied. “It is a beautiful day to enjoy a garden, anyhow.”

Grey eyes studied him and the hint of a smile emerged.

“How obstinately gallant,” she said. “I am Alisanne, a lay sister to this temple.”

“Olivier de Beaumarais,” he replied. “I dabble in this and that.”

“What brings you to this House, Olivier?” she smiled.

It was a pretty smile, he thought, which made it dangerous. Young men did a lot of foolish things to make pretty girls smile.

“I hope to resolve a misunderstanding,” Olivier said.

“A diplomatic way to speak of strife,” Alisanne replied.

“Strife,” he said, meeting her eyes, “is what happens when reason has lost. So I speak of a misunderstanding, because I do not believe any involved in it to be unreasonable.”

“A bold statement,” the grey-eyed woman replied.

There was a flicker of something like interest in that gaze, and it had him restless. Pleased and irked all that once.

“I lack for much,” Olivier de Beaumarais said, “but never that.”

Whatever else might have been said was not to be, for Sister Maude emerged from the garden path. The older woman’s bearing was calm, her gait measured, but Olivier saw unease under the surface. That spoke to discomfort about her decision, he decided, since he hardly warranted anything of the sort.

“Young Olivier,” Sister Maude smiled. “It is a blessing to see you, even in these tense times.”

“Sister,” Olivier replied, bowing. “It is a blessing to be received in any time.”

He made the bow exactly as low as Manners of the High and Noble indicated he should when speaking to the head of a temple.

“What a mannerly young man,” the older woman said, tone warming. “Please, do be seated.”

He waited until she’d claimed her seat before doing the same. Alisanne poured with grace, first allowing Sister Maude to sniff and taste the vintage to see if it suited and only pouring full cups when the older woman nodded her assent. Courtesies were exchanged over small sips, slivers of politeness that meant little in and of themselves but stood as an expression of goodwill. Of respect. It was a gesture one did not bother offer when there was no common ground to be found, so it was promising to have gone through it at all.

“I was surprised, my son, to hear of your visit,” Sister Maude eventually said. “I had thought that after the regrettable events of the day your hours might be otherwise occupied.”

“My family is still reeling for the surprise,” Olivier amiably agreed. “But it is not my place to intervene in the conversations of my parents, and so I am left with free hands.”

“It is a shame,” Sister Maude mused as she eyed her glass, “that you do not have such a place. You have grown into a sensible young man, Olivier, and even as a child you were of virtuous leaning.”

The sole without the Talent in a family of the talented, she meant, and she’d spoken like there could be no doubt that having magic was some sort of a taint . Perhaps not a sin, no, but the mark of a propensity to sin at least. He could understand why his brother’s teeth had clenched with anger, when he’d caught scent of the sentiment lying under all of this, but the anger did not burn in him. Olivier had been outside too long for that.

“You flatter me,” the young man said. “I have ever been too concerned with earthly matters, in truth, and it is they who bring me here. I come here so approach you on behalf of my kin, Sister.”

The stout woman’s face cooled.

“It is a pious thing for a son to seek absolution for his parents,” Sister Maude said. “Yet such matters are between the sinner and the Heavens, not for us to intercede in.”

He’d lose her, Olivier thought, if he came here asking for forgiveness. Even if he offered reparations, bribes like Father had been mulling over. This wasn’t about coin, it was about power. If they’d been at odds with a merchant, whose power flowed from gold and goods, those might have been an answer. But the House of Light’s strength did not come coin, it came from authority – an authority his parents had threatened. Yet Olivier had been wondering at the sudden and radical decision, the ultimatum thrown in the face of his family without warning or even attempt at negotiations. This would not be without consequences for Sister Maude, so why was she doing it? The answer, Olivier now grasped, was standing besides the table after having poured them wine. The lay sister Alisanne had not been dismissed, as someone in her position usually would have been past the initial courtesies being exchanged.

The beautiful girl was related to someone important, Olivier suspected, and Sister Maude saw her presence here as a way to escape the priestess’ exile into stewardship of a nowhere temple in the Valleys. It made sense, now. The old lay sister was likely a tutor or guardian of some sort, while the three lay brothers with soldiers’ scars were household guards. It even explained why the highborn Captain Alain, who’d led the riders from Apenun who came to clear out the bandits over summer, had visited the House so often when he was hardly the pious sort. He’d been courting the favour of a highborn girl who’d been sent here as a lay sister for some reason. Alisanne was likely from Apenun herself, then, he mused. And she could not be of middling birth, if an older nobleman with a military command had been courting her goodwill.

Of course, Sister Maude would only see her fortunes change if Alisanne spoke favourably of her host when she returned home, which made the lingering troubles with Master Nicholas a much grander affair than any had suspected. Was the Sister trying to gain esteem by acting decisively, showing authority and prestige to impress her highborn guest? It was a graceless way to play the game, but it was true she had little choice now that she had been so cornered by the situation. She could not let a family of petty wizards thwart her, or she’d pass for the fool of that story. The source of this conflict, Olivier considered, was a struggle of power: the House and his family were seen as rivals, each wielding influence in competition. The deeper layer was that Sister Maude needed to achieve something by this crisis, or her hopes of escape would be dashed.

Good, he thought with a smile. This could still be salvaged.

“Ah, I am afraid my careless words led to a misunderstanding,” Olivier said, dipping his head in contrition. “I come not seeking such an intervention but instead bearing an offer of partnership with the House, Sister Maude.”

The utter surprise on the woman’s face gave him the leave to continued speaking.

“As you might know, my brother has begun to enchant and my trading has seen me accumulate some coin,” Olivier said. “Our family intends to open a shop in town that will serve as an apothecary and a provider of such enchanted tools.”

A lie, the last part, but a plausible one. He could feel Alisanne’s eyes on him but he had no attention to spare for that heady gaze.

“Are quite certain,” Sister Maude delicately said, “that now is the proper time for such a venture?”

“You cut to the heart of the matter,” Olivier smiled. “Indeed, I am afraid that such open sorceries where faithful townsfolk like those of Beaumarais live might lead to unwarranted fears. Which is why I would humbly petition that the shop would be opened in partnership with the House, and naturally under its supervision.”

There could be no conflict between the power of the House and his family’s if they were one and the same. That meant taking the subordinate’s position, and paying for that privilege to boot, but that would also mean that anyone troubling the shop would also be antagonizing the House of Light. No more humiliating than paying taxes to the prince so his soldiers would clear out bandits, if looked at a certain way. And when Alisanne goes home, it will be with the tale of how the clever Sister Maude made her wizard foes submit and gained revenue for her temple without lifting a finger. Everyone conceded but everyone won. That, and he saw a longer game on the horizon. One that might finally let him reconcile his blood and his calling. The priestess considered him for a moment, over the rim of her cup.

“And how,” Sister Maude finally said, “would such an arrangement be made formal?”

Just like that, all that was left was the haggling.

—

Neither Father nor Mother appreciated his ‘meddling’, they made very clear, not that it mattered after Roland came out and sided with him. Neither of them could enchant, and both knew it was only a matter of time until he could match Father in raw strength. If they antagonized their younger son, he could simply turn to the older for the coin to start his own shop. In the end their choice was between a slugging match with the House of Light or letting Olivier have his way, and while both cost pride one would cost them a lot more than that as well. Hardly blind to the resentment he’d earned by forcing their hand, Olivier found himself belatedly grateful for one of the conditions Sister Maude had pushed: namely, that he himself was the be the owner of the shop along with the House instead of any other of his family.

The priestess had phrased it as recognition of his entrepreneurial spirit and the silver he’d be sinking into the shop, but they both knew it was because this way she could avoid being in business with practitioners directly. Regardless it was Olivier’s name that was signed onto the formal contract Master Laurent drafted, as Master Olivier of Beaumarais , and it meant that there was no lawful way to displace him from the arrangement. Sister Maude herself would not involve herself into something as mercantile as running a shop directly – it would be frowned upon by her fellows – but she sent a representative to speak for the House of Light and help around the shop.

Olivier was not particularly surprised when grey-eyed Alisanne in her neat lay sister robes was the one who was ‘assigned’ to the duty.

Regardless of his suspicions regarding her the young man found that Alisanne knew her letters and could keep a tight ledger, both of which were godsent as he tried to get everything in place for an opening before winter. She was even willing to help with handiwork when in the right mood, which struck him as unusual for one of her likely birth. Shelves were filled with potions, herbs hung to dry and as Olivier moved into the shop back home Roland put his whole back into learning enchantments. His younger brother had begun to tear through his lessons at impressive speed, to Olivier’s mild surprise. Roland was talented and dutiful, but he’d always enjoyed his leisure time. No doubt the girls of the town would miss him, now that he spent all his hours pouring over books or shut in the laboratory. It was only when his little brother coincidentally began to always arrive at the shop to speak with Olivier or bring over herbs when Alisanne was there that the reason revealed itself. He’d not been the only one to notice, either.

“By his reputation in town, I would not have thought him so hesitant to approach me,” the grey-eyed sister told him one evening.

“You are quite striking,” Olivier absent-mindedly replied, most his attention on the ledger before him.

He only realized what he’d said moment later, and furiously pushed down the blush even as he cursed his loose tongue. He scratched his quill through hellebore, of which he already had seven stalks.

“Am I now?” Alisanne slyly replied, coming to learn against the table.

“And almost transparently highborn,” Olivier added, to put her on the backfoot.

The fair-haired woman shrugged.

“I never pretended otherwise,” she said.

“Which does have me wonder what you are doing in the likes of Beaumarais as a lay sister,” Olivier said, brow rising.

He’d not expected an answer, but he was pleasantly surprised.

“I was judged to have impolitic opinions and too little will to refrain from speaking them,” Alisanne said. “My mother thought a religious retreat in the mountains would help me learn... temperance, and my father was disinclined to fight her over the matter.”

“You’re from Apenun, I believe?” he said.

“How relentless you are in your questioning,” she sighed. “I much preferred the blushing flattery.”

“I’ve a curious nature,” Olivier admitted.

“So do I,” Alisanne said. “And worse, I am easily prone to boredom.”

She offered him a smile, then, that he suspected he would much dislike see offered to another.

“You have yet to disappoint in that regard,” she told him.

“I will,” Olivier frankly told her. “My wanderings are seasonal, and I’ve only so many stories of old ones to tell. Besides, this shop will keep me more tethered to Beaumarais than I was before.”

“How easily you dismiss the possibility that you might be the most interesting part of you, Olivier,” Alisanne replied, amused. “On our very first meeting, I witnessed a country boy ruthlessly read and manipulate a woman trained in the halls of power of the House of Light so that she might serve his interests. Do you believe such a thing is frequent?”

“I simply found a compromise that benefitted everyone,” he said.

“It is the most genteel and noble manner of mastery,” Alisanne said, sounding as if she was quoting someone, “that which benefits both the master and the mastered.”

“I am the master of nothing,” Olivier said, rolling his eyes. “And the sum of my coming ambitions is becoming a passable shopkeeper.”

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” the grey-eyed woman said, leaning in as she considered him with serious eyes.

She was close, he saw, and a strand of hair had slipped her bun to slide along her cheek. The urge was there to tuck it away, though Olivier knew that if his hand went to her cheek he’d not be able to stop himself from kissing her. It was difficult to think, the air around him seemingly thick and his skin tingling. He forced himself to anyway.

“Yet I’d be a poor shopkeep indeed, if I traded something for nothing,” Olivier said.

“Why, Master Olivier,” she said, “what manner of a deal might you be trying to offer this poor lay sister?”

He almost choked when he realized exactly what that coy smile was implying, even though he knew she was teasing.

“Your full name,” he said. “I’ll tell you, in exchange for your full name.”

“There is more to me than that,” Alisanne said, tone cooling.

Part of him wanted to bend like a reed in the wind at the hint of her displeasure, but he pushed it down. If she wanted to learn his secrets she would have to share hers.

“I share only stranger’s faith with strangers,” Olivier said. “For even the most splendid tree has roots.”

The fair-haired woman’s brow rose.

“Sherehazad the Seer?” she asked, sounding impressed.

“The quote was somewhat butchered,” he said, “but the sentiment stands.”

Father had bought the book believing it to be full of Wasteland spells, as it was Praesi, only to find after translation from Lower Miezan that it was repository of eastern poetry. Alisanne slowly nodded.

“It is somewhat clumsy to compare a woman to a tree, even by foreign verse,” she said sounding amused. “But we have a bargain.”

She offered her hand and he took it – using surprise and the grip she jerked him closer. Lips against his ear, she whispered.

“Alisanne Lassier.”

Lassier? Where had he heard that name before? Olivier withdrew an inch, looking into her eyes with an unspoken question, and she chuckled. Whatever ill mood had first taken her at his words it had clearly since faded.

“My mother rules Apenun,” Alisanne told him. “My uncle is the commander of Prince Arsene’s personal guard.”

“Ah,” Olivier murmured.

She was of higher birth than he’d suspected, and he’d suspected fairly high.

“And you?” she said. “What is it that you are plotting in the guise of a shop, Olivier?”

He bit his lips.

“I am not certain it will work,” he cautioned.

She was unmoved, and visibly, so he continued.

“This shop is not a shop,” he murmured. “It is haven for those with the Talent, its safety guaranteed by the House of Light itself. I have legal right to hire workers as I see fit.”

Alisanne’s eyes brightened.

“You think more will come,” she said.

“When word spreads,” Olivier quietly agreed. “And I intend to help it along.”

“I was right,” Alisanne said, smiling that smile. “Not boring at all.”

It would be trouble, Olivier knew. But he’d never been good at staying out trouble, and so he found himself kissing Alisanne Lassier quite ardently as the ledgers were left to gather dust.

—

If he was to be lucky, he’d thought, one wizard might risk the paths and come to Beaumarais during winter. Instead there were four practitioners before the first snows fell, and one more came before the ice took.

Trouble, Olivier de Beaumarais thought.

Chapter 24: Like A Hanging Sword

“Loyalty to an unworthy prince is treason against the Gods Above, for it places that prince before the teachings of the Heavens themselves.”
– Extract from “The Faith of Crowns”, by Sister Salienta

Four Named, three mages and forty legionaries.

It wasn’t a large company to take into a demon hunt, but in hallways and narrow rooms being too many would be a disadvantage anyway. It’d be a lot more useful to be able to move swiftly and without getting in each other’s way than to have another forty bodies to throw into the maw of the enemy. I’d have taken more mages if there were any to spare, mind you, but those didn’t grow on trees. I’d sent runners out to gather reinforcements as quickly as possible and send them our way, but I doubted they’d arrive in time to make a difference – whether the demons got to run loose or not would probably already have been decided by the time the second wave made it to the fight.

We set out briskly even as I arranged our formation so that it wouldn’t result in immediate collapse if one of the demons got the drop on us. A shield wall would be useless, so instead a tenth of regulars in a loose skirmish formation took the front. The sole tenth of heavies behind them, their tall shields meant to buy time for the soldiers behind them: crossbowmen, spread out both so they could fire from broad angle and so that Named would be able slip between them. Then came those same Named, Hierophant closer to the back where the three Gifted whose gifts he would be using stood, and behind that our rearguard of ten regulars.

The junior lieutenant was with those in the back, so that we’d still have an officer even if Lieutenant Inger died up front where she stood with the other tenth of regulars.

“For the four of us,” I told the other Named, “the tactics are simple enough. I won’t enquire too deeply about your bag of tricks or try to tell you how to fight with it, but I want our priorities established before we find the enemy.”

Or the enemy finds us , I silently added.

“You are the seasoned battle commander among us,” the Repentant Magister said, “and you’ve fought demons before. You will not be gainsaid.”

I glanced at the Blade of Mercy, who silently nodded, and considered the potential powers struggle a done thing. Masego knew our business well enough and would not argue, though I still jabbed my elbow into his side to make sure he was actually listening.

“If we’re lucky, the demons come at us from the front,” I said. “Most of them are aggressive, in a tactical sense, which is where our first three lines come in: my legionaries will slow them down as much as possible.”

My fingers clenched, knowing full well that the slowing would come through dead bodies and the corruption of the still-living.

“That’s when we come in,” I said. “After the crossbows fire, Lady Eliade and I will use what means we have to try to pin down the demon. Even if we succeed, it’ll be temporary, which is when Hierophant will attempt a binding.”

The Blade of Mercy shuffled on his feet, as if afraid he’d been forgot.

“There are no guarantees that will work,” I said, “and even if it does, we can’t simply leave the demon there: we need a killing blow, which will be provided by the Blade of Mercy.”

Nods all round, until the Repentant Magister cocked her head to the side.

“I believe, Your Majesty, that your intention is not to try to slay all of these demons,” she said.

It wasn’t, because rolling the dice against eldritch abominations eight times in a row was a shit plan. Kind of her to indirectly reassure me she didn’t believe me to be an idiot, though.

“No,” I said. “We’ll be trying to push through towards the room where the Severance was being kept. Hierophant, if you’d care to elaborate on why?”

I leaned a little closer.

“ Simply , if you would,” I murmured.

“There will likely still be ward foundations there,” Masego said, “which I can use to trap the demons inside before closing the door on them.”

He shot me a disgruntled look.

“Sword room good, demons go in,” he peevishly added. “Much rejoicing. Was that simple enough, Catherine?”

“Rejoicing has three whole syllables,” I replied without missing a beat. “A lackluster effort at best.”

“Sometimes, when you fight other people, I root for you to get hit,” he confessed.

“That’s treason, you know,” I gravely told him.

“It is not,” he triumphantly said. “You kept saying that about a great many things, so I got my hands on a Callowan law codex. It’s not treason to say you snore either, which you insisted to Indrani it was.”

I heard the Repentant Magister politely cough into her hand to hide her laugh, while the Blade of Mercy looked away with slightly trembling shoulders.

“Tread carefully,” I told him, “or I’ll raise taxes on mage towers.”

“I’ll make it invisible,” he defiantly said. “You can’t collect taxes from an invisible tower.”

“Don’t think I won’t contract it out to the fae if I have to,” I warned.

He stared me down from the side of his head, before grudgingly nodding.

“Accusing you of snoring is treason,” he offered.

Ah, selling out Indrani instead of admitting you were wrong. One of the classic retreat stratagems of the Woe, along with blaming anything from rain to mispronunciations on Akua’s scheming.

“So is throwing wooden carvings at my court wizard,” I granted him, magnanimous in my victorious tyranny.

He brightened at that, though for some reason Nephele’s cheek went red. Had she thrown something at Masego’s head? Curious as I was, now was hardly the time to ask. I’d leaned into the banter at least in part because it would distract the four of us – and also the soldiers all trying very hard to pretend they weren’t listening – from the grimness ahead, lighten up the air some. But we were well into the Repository now and wariness was the order of the day from here on out. We passed through a sort of confluence of hallways, like a lesser Knot, where the marks of Named fighting against fae were evident. Nephele confirmed as much when I asked, as it had been her band that fought here, and added that there did not seem to be any missing bodies.

Thank the fucking Gods for that.

Hakram had fought here, I could tell from the way some tall rocklike fae had been slain, but I set the thought aside before it grew too dark. I’d done what I could by ensuring the Concocter was there for Archer to send as reinforcements. Shy of the Sinister Physician himself, she was probably the best healer in the Arsenal. We hurried along, quickening our pace to a near run, and we’d just passed the corpse of another fae when a shivering scream sounded in the distance ahead. I felt it go through my soldiers, my allies, through my own bones. It’d sounded human, or at least ripped out of a human throat, but there’d been something... wrong about it.

“At least one is out, looks like,” I said, forcing my voice to sound even. “Advance with caution, swords out.”

I’d offered up my calm and it was drawn from by those who needed it – there was no need for a harangue here, simple confidence would serve the same purpose better. From the corner of my eye I caught Nephele staring at the back of the neck of my soldiers, and I raised a brow. It was man, Callowan by the paleness and the flush.

“Lady Eliade?” I asked.

“Please call a halt,” she quietly asked.

I did, and a moment later the Repentant Magister was at the legionary’s side and asking him the permission to perform an exploratory cantrip. The light on the sorceress’ fingers was barely visible and she spoke no incantation, but a moment later she withdrew her hand with a grim look on her face.

“We are facing a Host-Breaker,” Nephele Eliade said.

I looked at Masego, expecting an elaboration.

“Demon of Terror,” Hierophant said. “I know little of their kind, few in Praes have ever summoned them.”

My fingers clenched at the words.

“They’re that dangerous?” I asked, pitching my voice low.

If the Empire thought they were too risky to use, it boded very badly for out little crew.

“No,” Masego replied. “But it is known they can be subsumed by Demons of Excess, which made them a highly unpopular choice among diabolists.”

No doubt Wasteland nobility saw it as a faux pas, like a tasteless bracelet or using a floral poison during winter court. Nephele looked fascinated and sickened by what she’d gestured heard, but she focused on the dangers a hand.

“I know of them, Your Majesty,” the Repentant Magister told me. “The Magisterium has used them for war in past years.”

I nodded in appreciation, gesture for the Blade of Mercy to cease standing at the edge of the conversation and come in closer so he’d hear properly.

“What are we in for?” I asked.

“Fear, in essence,” Nephele said. “It can be carried by sound or by sight, though like with all of their kind direct touch has the most powerful effect.”

“That sounds dangerous and potentially lethal, but not horrifying,” I said. “Which given my past experiences with demons lead me to believe means I’m missing something.”

“Permanence of contamination, Catherine,” Masego reminded me.

I blinked then finally put it together. He meant that the fear would never go away, and the contamination – the fear – would only grow worse with every scream or glimpse or touch. Yeah, that was closer to the kind of despicable fuckery I’d expected.

“There it is,” I darkly muttered. “How quickly does the fear escalate?”

“My people say it comes in three steps,” the Repentant Magister says. “Fear, which can still be treated by Light and alchemies. Dread, which puts men to flight they will never break from. And terror, which breaks the mind and ends only in death.”

Charming. And it was starting to sound like fighting this would be a headache and a half.

“So we can’t even look at it,” I slowly said.

“There are enchantments which would protect people from the effects, if not for long and not against direct touch,” she said, then bit her lip. “Yet I am in no state to lay them, not on so many. I do have an artefact whose effect is similar , but I did not make it to face demons and it will not protect nearly fifty people for more than moments. It has not the power.”

“Trace the formula for the enchantment in the air,” Masego said.

The Magister glanced at me and I nodded. Fine fingers left coppery traces in the air that Hierophant studied it for a moment before he sharply nodded.

“Now your artefact,” he instructed.

Nephele, having discarded her hesitation, presented a ring in a pale and silvery metal, set with translucent stones whose shine was not natural.

“Ah, I see,” Masego muttered. “Originally a torture spell, yes? To keep the mind from breaking under pain. The formulaic traces are still there.”

The Repentant Magister, face grown ashen, silently nodded.

“It can be done,” Hierophant decided. “Give me a moment.”

Casually he reached towards one of the Proceran mages, seizing the man’s magic with a ripple of will, and then he extracted the sorcery from the sorceress’ artefact with a great deal more care. Lights spun up and formed themselves into runes – several wriggled their way out of my thoughts, which smacked of High Arcana – then rearranged themselves under Masego’s dancing fingers and clucking tongue, before he finally let out a little noise of satisfaction. The runes collapsed onto themselves and formed into a series of small pinpricks of light that sunk back into the ring.

“There,” the Hierophant said. “It will protect fifty people for a quarter hour, though the protection will be stripped permanently by contact with a demon. It will also break after use, Catherine, so spend it wisely.”

The Repentant Magister was looking at him like he’d just knocked over a castle by blowing at it – split between disbelieving and awed. I sometimes forgot how brilliant Masego was, exceptional even among a people whose excellence in sorcery was legend. I thanked him and passed what we’d learned on to the two lieutenants, who in turn handled informing their soldiers. Advance resumed as I limped forward with the ring clutched tight between my fingers. Two corners we turned before another scream sounded and before it finished I broke the artefact – the demon sounded close enough to warrant it. There was a pulse of light and warmth, then a sensation like a wool in my mind.

“Quarter hour starts,” I called out. “We finish this quickly.”

The third corner we turned, mere heartbeats later, led us to the sight of the waiting abomination. It was far – knowing sight and distance worked in its favour? – and currently unmoving, at least as much as such a thing could ever be. Corruption had been a revolting twisting of flesh, but this thing was of a different mold. At its heart was a black, faded body that evoked a snake or a slug, but most of it was made up of translucent black veils that spread out like trails and tails and wings, ever moving. Five moon-round eyes, two angled on each side and a larger crowning one, stared at us like the glare of a lighthouse through the fog. Behind it I glimpsed delicate trails on the ground that were like smoke made liquid. Blood from a wound or secretions?

“Don’t step on the trails,” I warned.

It was unlikely that my soldiers got to hear the latter part of the warning, as before I was finished speaking some of the demon’s veil-like layers formed a triangular mouth between the eyes and it began screaming . I felt the protective enchantment on me begin to wane, like parchment being picked at by a swarm of insects. The screaming did not stop, for the demon needed no breath, and just like that our battle had begun. I reached for the Night even as Masego wrested power from our mages one after another in quick succession, but first blood went to my crossbowmen. Without flinching they brought up their weapons and fired a volley in good order, seven of the ten bolts fired landing on the enemy.

Four of those went through the veils, including one through the ‘mouth’, but they passed if through them as if they were smoke and ended up clattering on the stone further back. The last three shots, though, sunk into the dark flesh at the heart of the monster and remained there. The demon was unlikely to have been wounded by this but it was still moved to act even as liquid smoke began to sweat out of its flesh around where the bolts had sunk in. Layers upon layers of translucent blackness unfolded, splitting into wings and limbs and hooks as the demon skulked up the side of the wall and onto the ceiling with unnatural lightness.

“ Kytima ,” the Repentant Magister said, a slender wand of iron in her hand.

The metal length shivered and spat out burst of transparent sorcery that struck at the demon’s body even as I began to shape the Night I had gathered and Masego began to incant in the magetongue. The host-breaker was knocked down from the ceiling, slipping and falling but landing below with insect-like deftness. It was still screaming, and when another salvo of bolts was fired upon it instead of trying to avoid it the demon simply convulsed. The four shots that’d tasted of its flesh went flying out and I hastily abandoned the cage of Night I’d been crafting, instead forming a sweeping scythe that would slap the projectiles aside. When the roiling Night came to touch the first bloodied bolt, though, it winked out .

Sve Noc had forcefully dismissed it from my grasp before it could make contact

Oh Merciless Gods, I realized. They’re the Night, or close enough. So they’re afraid that the taint might seep into it, and of what that would bring when it returns to them. It was not a senseless fear, I knew, but that was a hollow and bitter thing to tell myself as I watched the four bolts unnervingly find a targets. One glanced off a shield raised just in time, but the others sunk into flesh – neck or elbow or knee, the weak parts of the armour that brute force would be able to punch through.

My soldiers screamed loud enough that not even the demon’s ceaseless hollering was able to drown it out.

I glimpsed their eyes turning white, the utter panic that seized them as their mouths foamed and their own screams served to amplify the spreading infection of the demon. Swallowing a snarl of bitter rage I swung out with Night, making a thick knot of it detonate in the air by the closest soldier’s ear. Whether the shockwave killed or knocked her out I couldn’t know, but before I could clear out a second the bolts fired into the demon earlier found flesh and my fingers clenched in dismay.

“ Stop shooting ,” I screamed, but cacophony overruled me.

Hierophant stood utterly still behind me, save for his moving lips.

“ Kytima ,” the Repentant Magister yelled again, knocking back the demon once more.

I put down another soldier with a detonation but the third taken had turned to flee and when the heavies got in his way he began hacking wildly at them, still screaming at the top of his lungs. The demon had landed almost flat on the ground when knocked back by Nephele, and instead of rising at full height once more it remained there and began slithering forward like a sea of tails and tentacles creeping along the ground. Gods, just the sight of it... A heartbeat later its veils burst open, like a peacock unfolding its tail, and the bolts it’d just taken went flying back. I was ready, this time: one after the other hanging orbs of Night exploded, scattering the bolts into the walls.

I only realized I’d missed the greater threat when one of the heavies struck down the last contaminated soldier and her blood went spurting out looking like liquid smoke. The soldier in plate began screaming in turn, clutching the dead soldier as he convulsed and so spraying smoke-blood everywhere. I lost four heavies in that heartbeat, but a lot more worrying was the single drop that landed on a crossbowman’s cheek. I killed him without missing a beat, teeth grinding my mouth raw, and then I saw the Blade of Mercy pass by my side at a run and hatefully cursed.

“It has to be now,” the boy screamed, and charged forward with his greatsword streaming behind him.

But the demon had never ceased moving and it’d taken advantage of the chaos to push through. On veiled limbs it slipped through the last regulars of the front and through the screaming gap in the heavies. The Blade of Mercy swung his blade at it, glinting with Light and blindingly quick, but it cut only through translucent layers and the demon’s body tumbled among the crossbowmen. One, two, three, four – seven orbs did I weave out of Night, detonating them in a perpetual circle I filled as soon as it broke so that the abomination would remains stuck, but tendrils shot out and the Night shattered again as Sve Noc fled the demonic taint. A thief’s power, mine, not a soldier’s, and now my legionaries were paying the price for it.

The creature, still screaming, struck out at still-whispering Masego but the Repentant Magister blew it back – in part, at least, for it had been expecting the blow and it merely spun about some as it was mostly translucence that was blown through. I spun Night into a vortex behind it, sucking it backwards, but with a bat of wings is stayed in place and the Repentant Magister was forced to blow back another reaching hand, screaming the same word of power in a ragger voice. The Blade of Mercy had swung round, slicing through a taken regular as he did, and now swung at the demon from the back but the thickening glare of Light ate away at my own working – the demon fell to the ground, a single long limb extending as it tore through the Repentant Magister’s torso.

Nephele began to scream, face twisting in utter terror in a vision that would stay with me until I died, and the Blade of Mercy’s strike faltered at the sound. The Light trembled, the demon was ripped back by the strengthening anew of the vortex I had not ended, and the limb unfolded into a dozen wings of translucent black that clawed to Antoine of Lange’s sides as they were torn away. Was he... No. His armour, I thought, his armour would have been thick enough no blood was spilled.

“Dry rivers and sunder mountains,” the Hierophant said, his calm voice cutting through the chaos like a blade. “Scatter chariots and snatch sunlight: I command that you will be still .”

The demon froze. Immediately and utterly, as if it had been the decree of Creation itself.

“Now,” I screamed through the screaming, “ now , Antoine.”

“ Burn , you misbegotten thing,” the Blade of Mercy hissed, and his blade shone bright once more as it went down.

It was blinding to look upon as it went through the Demon of Terror. The veils evaporated, the black flesh shivered and boiled and went up in smoke as the wrath of the Gods Above came down upon the abomination and eradicated it through their chosen champion. Like a sun at midday, the Light swallowed the hallway whole and chased away my Night. When it faded, there was nothing left of the demon but the aftermath. Screaming soldiers, who I knocked unconscious as gently as I could with spinning orbs, and one more yet. Nephele Eliade had slumped onto the ground and she was bleeding, but the red was turning darker. Soon, I thought, it would be as liquid smoke.

She bit her lip until it bled to swallow the scream, and unto me she turned a pleading gaze. I knew what it was she was asking.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, as I brought up my staff.

I made it quick, quick enough it’d be painless. It was the least I could do.

“Handle the contamination,” I told Masego without turning. “Please.”

I felt him nod without turning and left him to it, as began the roar of flames and I closed my eyes. It was a weakness, but I would allow myself it. Just this once. I only wished that, even with eyes closed, the only thing I could see was not the look of grateful relief in Nephele Eliade’s eyes as I killed her. I did not allow myself more than a few moments, though. Now was not the time for indulgence. Our losses had been... harsh. Not only was the Repentant Magister dead, but we’d also consigned to ash six of our ten heavies, two of our ten crossbowmen and eight regulars. Nearly half our company had died in its first engagement.

Against a demon, that couldn’t even be said to be a bad roll of the dice.

Before the ashes grew cold we moved on, carefully stepping around the rivulets of contamination the demon had left coming there. It slowed our advance, but we were close to the part of the Repository where the Severance awaited now. The slight detour we allowed ourselves was taking the hall the Demon of Terror had not at a crossroads we stumbled upon, so that we wouldn’t have to keep stepping around death and worse as we tried to hurry up. I was on edge the entire time, but it wasn’t a demon we ended up running into. It was a woman, with striking purple eyes and black hair pulled into a topknot. Not someone I knew from sight, but the Concocter had been described to be before and her appearance was unusual enough. It was what she was dragging behind her that had my heart rising up in my throat.

A makeshift litter with an orc on it.

It’d taken me a moment to recognize Hakram, for most of him was now a raw and bloody wound. With unnatural precision and severity his flesh had been cut, from his upper thigh to the side of his now visible ribs to the shoulder stump that’d been made of the same arm he’d once mangled for Vivienne. He looked more than half-dead, skin pale and wan as sweat covered his armour-stripped body. His wounds were not bleeding, I thought, but neither was he in any way healed .

“Gods Above,” the Blade of Mercy whispered.

“Hierophant,” I began, but Masego had already been moving.

He swept past the Concocter, whose face showed only relief at our arrival, and I was left to speak with her as Masego saw to our friend.

“He’ll live?” I asked her, even though it was not the most pressing of matters.

“For an hour,” the Concocter said. “If I get him to the Sinister Physician before that, he’ll make it through.”

I breathed out. At least there was that.

“Lieutenant Inger,” I called out. “Our heavies are to help the Concocter carry the Lord Adjutant to the infirmary in the Knot.”

“Ma’am,” the orc soberly saluted, then set to passing along the orders.

“The Mirror Knight?” I asked the villainess.

“Doing his best to contain the mess,” the Concocter grimaced. “When I left the Vagrant Spear was still alive, and she insisted on staying after taking a potion.”

I nodded.

“How many demons?” I pressed.

“I couldn’t tell,” the Concocter admitted. “They got to the fae, it was...”

She shivered at the memory.

“I would not have stayed even if asked,” the purple-eyed alchemist said. “We weren’t pursued, so at least one of them should still be alive.”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them. Not necessarily promising, but better than nothing. It’d have to do.

“Anything you need to keep him alive,” I said, forcing myself not to look at Hakram lest my voice shake, “you have it. Use my name if you have to.”

She dipped her head in acknowledgement.

“Concocter,” I said, voice going low. “I am in your debt for this. I will not forget it.”

She watched me, eyes considering.

“Neither will I, Your Majesty,” she said.

Masego came back to me even as the Concocter and her escort of four heavies – half of them carrying the litter – left.

“He was struck by a demon, though I cannot tell which sort,” Hierophant told me. “The Severance was used to cut the flesh, presumably to halt the spread of the taint. He will survive if properly tended to but there will be no reattaching the limbs.”

I breathed out. Hakram would live. Masego himself had told me, and I did not doubt his words. The rest we could deal with when horror had been thrown back into the hole from which it had crawled out. We pressed on, our company thinned even further, until we had reached the threshold of madness. What I had expected to be waiting for us was two Named on the edge of annihilation, or perhaps a desperately fighting Mirror Knight devoured by grief at the loss of his companion, but what we got was different.

As we approached what had been the resting place of the Severance, we stepped into a charnel yard.

The corpses closest to us were fae, or at least had been. Several of the bodies were in hacked pieces, some of them twisted by what I recognized to be the touch of Corruption, and even those of the fae that had died without first being swallowed by demonic taint were a grisly sight. Carved through from head to groin or across the torso, spilling red or half a dozen other things as their faces remained frozen in ugly rictuses of surprise or anger. My boots waded through blood as I advanced, but other things too – red leaves, grown that as much from autumn as death, stuck to the bottom of my boots. There were precious stones and broken wooden shafts, silks and shattered dreamlike armours. The might of the Court of Autumn had come for the Mirror Knight, and he had massacred it.

Beyond those rested a thing that looked like a twisted afterbirth, hacked into and burned until it was no longer a threat. The remains of a demon, I thought as the lot of us walked through death. There was another, forced into a hole carved in the wall and both stone and corpse were scorched so thoroughly nothing could be glimpsed of the manner of demon it had been, Beyond it a few steps up led us to open steel gates and the last gasps of madness beyond. At the gates, where the Mirror Knight and the Vagrant Spear must have stood and fought, the blackened and scattered remains of another two demons could be seen. It was further in that the fighting still held, past the three stripes of burned flesh that had my heart stirring in unease to look at and the... hole that it hurt my mind to even think of. There I first found the Vagrant Spear, the Levantine heroine named Sidonia, ever barefoot and holding her tall spear as she let loose the occasional small burst of Light from it to prevent the last demon from escaping .

Christophe de Pavanie’s face was calm, but his eyes hard. Armoured in polished silver plate from head to toe he was hard for the eye to follow – he was quick, quicker than a man in such heavy armour should be, and the mirror-like plate obscured his movements to even a careful eye. His shield was dazing to look at, a perfect reflection of all it beheld, but it was the sword in his hand that had my hair raising. Whistling softly as it cut through the air even when it did not move, the Severance sliced through a twisted shape of shifting mercury like it was butter. The demon screamed and tried to flee around the hero, but the Vagrant Spear drove it back with a burst of Light. One, twice, thrice did the Mirror Knight strike, his plate burning with radiance as the demon burned into molten remains from the glare of the reflection.

I no longer had to worry about madness swallowing whole the Arsenal, it seemed, which was a relief.

Less pleasing was the fresh peril that the day had brought to my door: if I fought the Mirror Knight, now, I believed I might just lose .

Chapter 25: Sanitize

“Though it is not poor advice that one should imitate excellence, one who follows this advice alone can only ever aspire to be an imitation of excellence.”
– Extract from the treatise “On Rule”, author unknown (widely believed to be Prince Bastien of Arans)

As the radiance in his armour slowly faded, the Mirror Knight turned towards us.

With the echoes of Light that’d shone within his plate dispersing, the aura of power that’d hung around him should have gone the same way – and it did, some. Christophe of Pavanie no longer seemed like an implacable thing fashioned out silver and light: he looked human again, the raised visor of his barbute revealing dark locks pressed by sweat against his brow. Yet I could see the certainty he was moving with now, that certain something that came from being in your element and knowing it, and grew no less wary of the man. The softly whistling sword in his hand he sheathed without a word, sliding it home in a beautiful and heavy piece of iron, but even his putting away the Saint of Sword’s cutting rectitude made blade was not enough to have my shoulders loosen.

Losing the unearthly touch had simply left behind a man, I thought, with dark green eyes and narrow lips. Flawed, yes, but not unpleasantly so. It made him seem more attainable, the stark opposite of the Exiled Prince’s golden perfection back in the day – which had been beautiful but also somehow unnatural to the eye. This one, though, he looked cloaked in might but no less human for it. It was a dangerous thing, that mix of vulnerability and power. I should know, given how often I’d used it to bind people to me. Soldiers were willing to pay dues to a faraway idol, but real loyalty came from sharing in blood and mud. Christophe de Pavanie, to speak the words that had my fingers clenching in dismay, looked like someone people might rally around.

That was dangerous, when the man being rallied to bore both a sword forged for deicide and a child’s understanding of politics.

The Mirror Knight had carved his way through seven demons and half a Court’s worth of fae in a single evening, so there was no arguing that the man had the might to back anything he chose to say. Much as my mind wanted to argue that providence and another lesser hand had provided in this, that the Severance and Light made him uniquely suited to demonslaying, I knew those whispers for what they were – a tinge of fear and dismay. Behind them was the knowledge that, right now, the one trick I had that might still be able to curb him was beyond my reach: now that the emergency wards had come on, I could no longer try to gate the hero to his demise. The Saint could cut gates , I thought. So would it even be enough if I could still use them?

“Black Queen,” Christophe de Pavanie greeted me. “One of them slipped by ua, a dreadfiend. Did your party catch it?”

Only then did his eyes slide away from me and onto the rest of our company, ignoring the legionaries and barely paying attention to the mages before lingering on Masego and at last offering the Blade of Mercy a slight nod. Even that was enough to have the younger man blooming in pleasure, whatever gilding having been knocked off the Mirror Knight today freshly plastered back on by this victory.

“It’s been destroyed,” I replied, voice even. “There were losses.”

His face fell into dismay, the peace on it whisked away in a heartbeat.

“Lady Eliade?” he hoarsely asked.

“And sixteen of my soldiers,” I replied, tone growing sharp.

I grieved Nephele’s death, but power and a story had not somehow made her life worth more than those others.

“I did not mean to dismiss their deaths,” he stiffly said.

I forced myself to breathe out. It’d been an unkind interpretation of his words, and I’d known it even as I spoke the words.

“My temper is not at its best,” I replied, stopping short of an apology.

The Vagrant Spear, who I’d barely been paying attention to, began to pant noticeably as she suddenly went deathly pale. Earlier upright and dealing in Light, she now began to lean heavily against her spear – and even then she looked about to topple over.

“Sidonia,” the Mirror Knight exclaimed, catching her elbow.

I stepped forward, though he had things seemingly in hand so I did not try to offer my own arm.

“Hierophant can provide healing, if you’re willing,” I offered as I kept limping forward.

Now that I was paying closer attention to her, the ironically eye-catching scorched eye was not the worst of what she’d gone through tonight. There were subtle tells of harsher wounds. For one the flush she’d had while fighting had not abated in the slightest since, and she was sweating badly enough it was making her face paint run. Some tells were less subtle, like blade marks including one puncture that would have gone through her lung by the angle. Nasty stuff, lung wounds, even for Named. Some slender blade had done it, but definitely a sword. The marks weren’t bleeding, though, and even looked to be healed some: scabs had formed, though they looked bloody and crusty. The Concocter’s work, no doubt.

“The second of the peddler’s potions has run out,” the Vagrant Spear admitted. “It was champion’s brew, Black Queen, or close enough. There is little that the Hierophant can do. With a few days of rest, I should be on my feet again.”

“Something can be done about the fever at least, surely,” the Mirror Knight insisted.

“He’s right,” I said. “Consider it an order by an officer of the Truce and Terms. I might still have questions for you, so you can’t disappear into sleep and avoid all the unpleasant work that’ll come after this spectacular mess.”

She let out a weak chuckle.

“As relentless a taskmistress as your reputation promised,” the Vagrant Spear told me, though it almost sounded like a compliment.

Masego had come to stand by me, having already wrested away sorcery from a mage, and by the look on his face I suspected he would have healed Sidonia regardless of her answer. Zeze was not a foe to other people’s pride, usually, but he did tend to draw the line at what he perceived to be willful stupidity.

“Close your eyes,” Hierophant ordered, yellow light coming to wreathe his fingers. “And if you feel muscles spasming, tell me immediately.”

I heard him mutter champion’s brew with a pronounced degree of distaste under his breath, then add something about calling poison what it was. I clenched my fingers and unclenched them, considering how I was now to deal with the Mirror Knight. From the corner of my eye I could see that the Blade of Mercy was hesitating to approach, likely afraid of interrupting a conversation between two people that were his social superiors, and in a snap decision I gestured for him to approach. It’d buy me a bit of time to think while they chatted, and I took the opportunity to send some regulars doubling back to get mages and priests here in all haste. I wanted every inch of this bloody place scoured clean until even layers of bedrock had gone.

Hells, if we could figure out a way how I was going to dump this entire section of the Arsenal out of here and then find a way to ensure not even a sliver of any kind of taint was able to crawl out of the destruction visited onto it.

I still had one loose end to clean up before I could pass supervision of this to competent officers and crash into a bed, though, and now I had to decide whether I wanted to take the Mirror Knight along with me when I saw to it. The man had no position under the Terms that’d warrant that, of course, and by treating him like he did I might be lending him that authority in fact. If I acted like he was important, a lot of people would follow suit. That was the argument against it. The opposite side of this was that the Terms were an abstract, an ideal: in practice, power mattered. The Mirror Knight had the Severance, he was nigh-unkillable and was also a rather famous Proceran hero – arguably the most famous of them all. The Kingfisher Prince had spent most the war up in Twilight’s Pass, after all.

It was indisputable that Christophe de Pavanie would end up with clout, after tonight, so shouldn’t I begin to bring him into the... fold, for lack of a better term, as soon as possible? Even if it happened that he was intent on being an enemy, it’d be best to find out early. It felt like a mistake, but then it’d be just as much of one to go the other way wouldn’t it? The Intercessor knew her way around a scheme: her works left me only shades of loss to pick from. From the corner of my eye I noticed the conversation between the two Proceran heroes had come to an end, which meant my delaying must come to an end.

“Mirror Knight,” I called out.

I gestured for him to follow me when he glanced my way, stepping away from the closest soldiers for a degree of privacy. I hid a wince when he came close, as the last glints of Light in his armour unsettled the Night within my body – like wind on the surface of a pond. I could understand now why Firstborn would find him deeply unsettling, being so much more deeply dyed in the Night than I could ever hope to be. But it was the sword that had me wariest of all. Even sheathed, I could feel its hostility. You know who I am , I thought, sneaking a look at it. And there’s just enough of Laurence left in you to hold a grudge, isn’t there?

“Black Queen,” Christophe de Pavanie said. “You wanted to talk?”

His eyes were wary, but he did not strike me as spoiling for a fight. I supposed even his stamina must run out eventually, or at least dip downwards.

“This isn’t over yet,” I said.

He slowly nodded.

“Antoine says you have fingered the culprit behind all this,” he said. “The Wandering Bard, yes? More fearsome an enemy than her Name would have one believe.”

“The Bard can’t act directly,” I bluntly said. “Think of her as a devil or a fae: her weapons are deals and persuasion, not blades. And she had helpers in the Arsenal from the start.”

The Mirror Knight’s face went cold.

“Traitors,” he spat. “That will need seeing to.”

“Most are dead, outed by their actions during the crisis,” I said. “But there is one still unaccounted for – the person who unleashed the Concocter’s creations in the Miscellaneous Stacks, likely the same collaborator who tried to arrange for the Kingfisher Prince to fight guards.”

“Then we are still in danger,” the Mirror Knight said, side of the neck twitching as he forced himself not to look to the side.

Where Masego was seeing to wounded Vagrant Spear. Wasn’t the danger to himself that was worrying him, evidently. I was going to have to look into that relationship, wasn’t I? Gossip about Named tended to be a lot more useful than you’d think in figuring them out, at least when it was halfway credible.

“I don’t believe the individual in question to be a current threat,” I noted. “But neither do I believe in letting loose ends linger.”

Dark green eyes narrowed.

“You’ve been vague on purpose about the traitor,” the Mirror Knight said. “Are you afraid I’ll take justice in my own hands?”

That edged on a challenge, and it had my blood quickening. My instinct was to slap him down, to set a tone for the coming days that established very clearly where we stood in the pecking order, but that was a risk . I’d be antagonizing a useful resource and, to be blunt, if the challenge turned to a fight the consequences of a defeat here would be disastrous. I must walk a fine line, remaining convivial without bending my neck – weakness would invite pursuit, not restraint.

“You barely know the third of what went on in the Arsenal this night,” I flatly replied. “Justice is not something you’re even remotely in a position to provide.”

His lip curled in displeasure, but there was nothing there he could argue with.

“You could, however,” I continued in a calm voice, “assist me in my duties under the Terms as witness for your side. Something I brought you aside to invite you to do.”

“If there is still a traitor, this fight has not ended,” Christophe of Pavanie insisted.

“This is not a battle, it is a disciplinary matter,” I said. “If there are sentences to be doled out, then that will be done by the high officers of the Truce and Terms – and after discussion and trial, not by dragging people to the nearest hanging tree.”

Too confrontational , I chided myself, but then what choice did I have? I could not let him believe, not even for a moment, that he had the right or authority to pass judgement over other Named. That’d be the end of the Truce and Terms, an implicit admission that its rules would always favour the side with the biggest stick. Without the perception of fairness, they were nothing but ink and air.

“I do not speak of summary executions, Black Queen,” the Mirror Knight said, sounding appalled.

“Then we have no issue,” I said. “Will you be accompanying me, or will I be reaching out to another Chosen?”

That particular trick I’d learned Akua. The false dilemma was an older lesson, but the little deceit of refraining from specifying something – which hero I would be reaching out to, in this case – while letting the wording do the thinking for the interlocutor. Chosen, I’d said, and there was only one other Proceran hero. The Mirror Knight’s eyes flicked to the Blade of Mercy. Young, exhausted, more than a little shaken by his brush with a demon. And the older man would see the younger as in his charge, too, not exactly a subordinate but at least a responsibility. The question had decided its own answer.

“I accept your invitation to ser- stand as witness,” the Mirror Knight said, hastily changing the sentence halfway through.

“Good,” I said. “See to your affairs here, then prepare yourself to leave. We’ll be going as soon as enough mages and priests have arrived to contain this properly.”

The man nodded and briskly walked away. Fair enough. I checked in on Masego, to see how the healing was doing, but was shooed away. I did manage to slide in that I wanted him to lead containment and purge protocols here, which he agreed to without missing a beat. Our reinforcements were there before long, first a few careful squads of lightly armoured Dominion warriors sneaking in to have a look and then proper companies. Mages and priests aplenty, led by the Harrowed Witch and an earnest-faced man in armour who introduced himself as the Forlorn Paladin. Right, the hero with amnesia – one of Indrani’s band. Much as their presence was appreciated, it was an old Lycaonese captain I left in charge, with a note that he should follow the recommendation of the specialists regarding containment to the letter.

With that left in good hands and the Mirror Knight having made his goodbyes to the Vagrant Spear and the Blade of Mercy, the two of us left. No escort came with us, though Lieutenant Inger offered, as I did not want to spook our target too soon. The downside of that was that I was left alone with Christophe de Pavanie, who for some godforsaken reason took it upon himself to attempt stilted small talk.

“I heard that you dealt handily with the undead plague in southern Hainaut,” the Mirror Knight said.

I eyed him sideways, and seriously debated simply telling him he didn’t have to do this. Good odds he’d taken as an insult, though, so I supposed we were fated to suffer through this.

“Would that we could have prevented that instead of suppressed it,” I said, then made effort of my own. “I heard through the White Knight that you were part of the band that sunk a turtle-ship near Cleves – a well-done thing.”

I bit my tongue a heartbeat later when I recalled what Hanno had told me of how that’d been achieved: throwing the man to my side through the shell, like some sort of eldritch trebuchet stone. His cheeks reddened and his hand slipped towards the Severance. Not to grasp its handle or threaten to unsheathe it, I thought, but... cautiously. Disbelievingly. As if to reassure himself it was there. Fuck, that might actually be worse. There were ways to handle a swaggering bully with a new toy, but this looked like a deeper thing.

“It was necessary work,” the Mirror Knight said, tone steady. “Perhaps we might discuss where we are headed, and to meet whom?”

Yeah, I wasn’t going to look that particular gift horse in the mouth.

“This is one of the paths to the Workshop,” I said. “And we’re headed towards the persona quarters of the Hunted Magician.”

The dark-haired man jolted in surprise.

“One of the Damned?” he said. “I had thought...”

Wait, this entire time had he thought that I was trying to off one of the heroes and using him as a witness and helper? Had that been why he was so appalled when I mentioned hanging? Neither of those questions were something I could really ask outright, so I swallowed them and pressed on.

“My proof of his dealings with the Wandering Bard is weak,” I said, “but I have enough that I should be able to startle more out of him. Besides, his troubles with Autumn came back to haunt all of us.”

“He has given an oath to the Fair Folk?” the Mirror Knight asked.

“He never paid the debt,” I corrected. “And Autumn came here in part to collect.”

“Then every life taken by the fae is on his head,” Christophe de Pavanie coldly said.

I shook my head.

“He didn’t invite them, and as far as I know his enmity with them is older than his signing onto the Truce and Terms,” I said. “Quite a few Named have old enemies that’d take a swing at them if they could, that’s not a crime.”

“Corpses strewn across the Arsenal speak otherwise,” the Mirror Knight said.

“He was a tool in that, not the culprit,” I flatly said.

That, to my surprise, actually seemed to strike a chord.

“But he is a traitor still,” the Proceran hero said.

“ That ,” I muttered, “I won’t argue with.”

And I suspected I already knew exactly what the Intercessor had bought his cooperation with, which while understandable did not make me want to burn him at the stake any less. When we actually got to the Workshop I had to ask for directions, since I didn’t know where his quarters were, but the Arsenal was crawling with soldiers now so it was easily done. I shot a look at the Mirror Knight when we got to the door, waiting for his nod, and only then knocked. Before it opened I already knew he’d be behind it: the buzz of sorcery against my fingers, the telltale mark of something being warded up to its neck, assured me as much. He’d clearly made his rooms into a place where it would exceedingly difficult for enemies to find him.

The door was cracked open, the Hunted Magician carefully peering through. His eyes widened when he saw me, but he mastered his surprise and opened the door wide. Only then did he notice Christophe de Pavanie looming tall at my side, and the mask of affability he’d halfway put on lapsed into blankness. Whatever he’d believed me to be here for, the Mirror Knight being along did not fit with that belief. I used my staff to gently but firmly finish pushing open the door.

“Hunted Magician,” I mildly said. “You know the Mirror Knight, I take it?”

“I know of him, Your Majesty,” the Proceran mage said, inclining his head in a silent greeting. “What bring me the pleasure of your companies, if I might ask?”

“Not the sort of conversation to have in a hallway, yes?” I smiled.

“It would only be decent to offer seating and refreshments,” the Mirror Knight pointedly said.

The look of pure genuine dislike they traded after that allowed me to take a look inside while they were both busy. Classic Alamans tastes, all cushions and painted wood with the furniture alone being worth as much as some houses back in Laure. We didn’t pay the man nearly enough for that, but there was no telling what wealth he’d squirrelled away or favours he’d called in since.

“Alas, I only have one set of cups fit to witness royal lips,” the Hunted Magician said. “I’m afraid you will have to some servant set I have lying around, Knight.”

“Your hospitality matches your reputation,” the Mirror Knight replied without missing a beat.

Point went to Christophe for that round, I decided.

“Oh, we won’t be here for long,” I said, still smiling. “I only mean to put some misunderstandings to rest, then we’ll be off.”

The Proceran villain glanced at the hero, brow quirking.

“I can just imagine,” he thinly smiled, “what manner of misunderstanding you mean.”

The Mirror Knight shot me a burning look, but if he hadn’t wanted me to use his being an ass to my purposes then he shouldn’t have been in the first place. We were invited to sit, myself on a seat like the Hunted Magician himself while Christophe was made to stay on a padded red footstool by my side.

“You are aware of the troubles that struck the Arsenal, of course?” I asked.

“Indeed,” the Hunted Magician said. “I fought in defence of the Workshop, but found myself alone and so withdrew in the face of the enemy. I did return to help with healing at the Sinister Physician’s infirmary when the immediate peril had passed, though I returned when I grew tired and my services superfluous.”

He probably had done all those things, I mused. He seemed like the thorough type in some ways, so there’d likely be witnesses and everything. Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t digging at the truth – I already had it. What I wanted from him was an admission.

“I did not see you at the Workshop when I fought there,” the Mirror Knight accusingly said.

“There’s more than one room in it, as it happens,” the Hunted Magician drily replied.

“You’re familiar with fae,” I said. “What’s your take on their presence here?”

“I see,” he mused. “As you’ve grown to suspect, Your Majesty, our foe must have used my past dealings with their kind to muster them against the Arsenal – though I was not hunted for long, and so their true reason to have come here must be a deeper game.”

Halfway believable, I thought, but still a little weak. He had to know that, so odds were he was counting on mere suspicion not being enough considering how useful he was to the Grand Alliance as an artificer and enchanter. In most circumstances that would have been a correct read of the situation, to his credit. These were not circumstances, and it was not just anyone he’d bargained with.

“That was also my conclusion,” I mildly said. “And who would you name our foe?”

“It must be the Dead King,” the Hunted Magician gravely assured me.

I drummed my fingers against the side of my staff, thoughtfully.

“Let’s try this again,” I said. “But with you being aware that I slit the Wandering Bard’s throat after extracting every secret I could from her, including her multiple collaborators within these walls.”

The man paled, grey-blue eyes dilating with fear.

“I understand that questions must be asked, Your Majesty, but I have never dealt with a foe of the Grand Alliance,” he assured me, voice impressively calm.

“Liar,” the Mirror Knight coldly said. “You stink of it.”

“Do be silent, péquenaud,” the Hunted Magician snarled. “I must protest at the presence of one of the hounds of the Heavens, Your Majesty, this is most-”

I sighed and slowly I reached for the long dragonbone pipe within my cloak. The eyes of the two of them on me as I slowly opened a packet of wakeleaf – Hanno’s gift, amusingly – and stuffed it before passing my palm over the bowl and letting a flare of back flame light it. I breathed in deep, then leaned back into my seat and crossed one of my legs over the other. I breathed out the smoke slowly, letting it curl up around my face.

“Your Majesty,” the Hunted Magician tried again. “If I may-”

“Who am I, Magician?” I patiently asked him.

“The Black Queen, as all know,” the man replied. “I question not your authority under the Truce and Terms-”

“No,” I said. “You just take me for a fool. Now that with the Bard’s help you were able to have the prince holding your debt killed, you think you can wiggle your way out of this without too much trouble.”

“I have never heard of this woman you accuse me of having made common cause with,” the Hunted Magician said, exasperated.

“It must have seemed like a sweet bargain,” I mused. “Open a few canisters of gas, weave an illusion or two, and just like that the great sword ever hanging over your head would go away forever. Hardly even a breach of the Terms, even if you got caught. There are others under this roof who have done the same or worse.”

I breathed in the smoke. The Mirror Knight was watching me in silence, visibly eager to speak but forcing himself to remain silent anyway.

“I brought worthy concerns to you, Your Majesty,” the man said. “Why would I do such a thing, were I a traitor?”

I breathed out the smoke, then leaned forward.

“Right now,” I said, “the only thing standing between you and a tribunal of heroes, of angry Grand Alliance officers? It’s my word, Magician. So I want you to take a moment to consider, really consider , exactly how much of an imposition on my patience you want to be after the night I’ve had.”

The Hunted Magician fell silent.

“This was a bad bargain,” I told him, tone cool and calculating. “I don’t even need to lift a finger to destroy you, after this: all I need to do is stop extending my protection and they’ll have you gagged and chained before the hour’s out. And even if you escape, where do you go? We’re half the continent, Magician, you’ll be hunted like a criminal everywhere we rule. Even in the League we’re owed favours, and if you somehow make it to Praes the best you can hope for is a gilded cage – though more likely they’ll use you, then murder you so you cannot be used by another. You traded one faraway fairy prince as an enemy for the lasting anger of half fucking Calernia .”

“This is coercion,” the Hunted Magician tightly said. “Is that not an abuse of your authority, Black Queen?”

I spewed out a long stream of smoke.

“Authority,” I repeated, amused. “Are you going to begin listening to me, then? The word goes both ways. You cannot hide under my wing and sink a knife in my flank at the same time – I am not so tolerant a soul as to allow that .”

His appeal to my better nature – which had always been pragmatic enough to know when it was time to go for a walk and let the other one handle things – having failed, he turned to the other way out of this mess.

“What do you want?” the dark-haired mage asked, teeth gritted.

“I want a reason I should go through the effort to keep your head off a pike,” I said. “Because the more you keep wasting my time, Hunted Magician, the more I begin to consider how putting it there instead would solve so very many of my problems.”

The enthusiasm I’d spoken that last sentence with, I thought, was what tipped him over the edge.

“I know you can extract memories with Night,” he suddenly said. “So I can give you the Bard.”

“I have the Bard already,” I said, unimpressed. “Try harder.”

“I know how the Blessed Artificer and the Repentant Magister were tipped off to the existence of Quartered Seasons, and by whom,” the Hunted Magician said.

My pulse slowed. I wanted that. Most the traitors of this night had come from outside the Arsenal, and that meant the Intercessor was likely to still have helpers out there. A way to begin ripping out her influence root and stem was a decent prize to bargain with. Not, though, quite enough to tempt me.

“Better,” I said. “But sweeten the pot a little more.”

First he looked insulted by the cavalier treatment, then hesitant. He licked his lips.

“I know,” the Hunted Magician slowly said, “where to find the ruling crown of Autumn.”

I breathed in smoke so that a triumphant grin would not reveal the truth of my thoughts. And like that, the pieces fell together. If Hierophant could get his hands on it, Quartered Seasons became more than an idle notion.

“That will do,” I said.

The Hunted Magician’s relief was not as well-hidden as he probably believed it to be. I rose to my feet, brushing some ash off my cloak.

“Don’t try to leave the Arsenal,” I said, not bothering to add on a threat. “I’ll send for you when the situation calms, likely with the White Knight and other Alliance representatives sitting in.”

“As you say,” the Hunted Magician said through gritted teeth.

I glanced at the Mirror Knight and saw the face of a man who was moments away from blurting out a great many opinions.

“Escort me back to my rooms, please,” I said.

Christophe de Pavanie stiffly nodded, and even opened the door for me.

I suspected the conversation that was about to follow, though, would be a great deal less civil.

Chapter 26: Palaver

“Hold not even the least of the laws of men in contempt, for where their like is absent rule only the laws of beasts.”
– Isocrates the Harsh, Atalante preacher

I’d learned over the years that there were a lot of unspoken rules in Alamans culture.

Many them seemed about social status at first glance, in a way that made every mudfoot Callowan hackle in my body rise, but I’d eventually been forced to admit it was a little more nuanced than that. The Alamans were the most populous of the three Proceran peoples – Vivienne believed that there might be as many as three times more of them than Lycaonese – and I suspected a lot of their culture had been shaped of need to keep that massive amount of people at least halfway orderly. The Ebb and Flow might be a vicious wastrel thing by anyone’s standards but the Wasteland’s, but not every custom should be painted with the same brush. As an example; the typical Alamans reluctance to ever contradict a social superior in public wasn’t from their ways being more set in stone when it came to the aristocracy, but arguably from the opposite .

Proceran royalty worried a lot more about public opinion than I’d ever believed such a rapacious lot would, because to them it could be a lethal thing. The Alamans understanding of authority was fundamentally rooted in a ruler having the graces of the Heavens of the people, so losing either tended to have an ambitious sibling or cousin remove you for the good of the family – when it wasn’t done by another noble family entirely, one which had recently proven competent and popular. That sort of thing was exceedingly rare, in Callow. Back home when rule of holdings passed to another house it was usually because the last one had died to battle or Praesi madness, or the sparse cases where the Albans and Fairfaxes had stripped a house of its titles for some manner of treason. And that last one was damned rare, since some houses had flown the rebel banner and even fought battles against the Fairfaxes while still retaining their titles after their loss.

I’d found it fascinating that while back home it was broadly assumed that Proceran peasants were starvelings constantly robbed by their princes, the common folk of Procer in truth had their rights guaranteed by law: a set of rights known as ‘Salienta’s Graces’, which royals naturally tried to squeeze around but were very leery of outright breaking. The sole lawful check on noble abuses, in Callow, was the crown being petitioned for intervention. Sure, it was an open secret that if some baron began to trouble their people too much they were likely to one day not return from a hunt or mysteriously choke on their supper, but if violence was the only way to end a crime then there was a weakness in the law. It’d been humbling to realize some of the last remaining Callowan nobles might get outright rebellious if I tried to cram down their throats the legal rights for the commons that Proceran folk took for granted .

Not because they intended to abuse their subjects, no, but simply because the crown would be weakening their authority. Right or wrong didn’t enter the equation, just the balance of power, and that was a hard thing to swallow even for me – whose opinion of Callowan nobles had long been, one might say, uncharitable . It’d also made me reconsider a lot of the conversations I’d had with Cordelia Hasenbach over the years, approaching them with fresh eyes. Her threshold for losing power in Procer had never been outright rebellion, as it could be argued to be for me, but simply growing unpopular enough that there would not be much trouble if someone of good repute toppled her through the Highest Assembly. Hells, hadn’t people tried to overthrow her with only middling backing just because it seemed like her decisions were getting unpopular? A lot of what had seemed to be hemming and hawing for its own sake back then could now be understood differently, if not necessarily be more forgivable for it.

It’d been almost as fascinating to me that lowborn Procerans tended to cling to those unspoken rules even more tightly than the nobles, as if deviating from them would be taint on their character. Christophe of Pavanie was, from what little the Jacks had been able to dig up on him – genuinely obscure origins had, there, been an even finer shield than an empire’s worth of spies – of middling but not outright lowborn birth. His family would have been from the equivalent of a town’s eldermen, in Callowan terms, but not necessarily influential or all that wealthy. Comfortable enough to ensure he’d be able to read and write, though, and evidently have some tutoring in the etiquette of the well-bred . Which was why the Mirror Knight had not spoken a single word about the conversation I’d had with the Hunted Magician, even though he was very clearly itching to.

I was a queen, you see, and a duly recognized high officer of the Grand Alliance. If I wasn’t going around breaking the Truce and Terms myself, making myself into an outlaw and so throwing away all privileges, he might hate it to the bone but he’d not deny that I was his social superior. Mind you, that would only hold so long as we were out in public. And considering we’d long left behind the Workshop and entered the Alcazar, the thin barrier that’d ensured his sullen silence as we walked was soon to be stripped away. My first instinct had been to bring him to the small room where I’d received him earlier, but since it was currently filled with a mess of cards and the Wandering Bard’s latest corpse I’d naturally reconsidered. There was a small private parlour in my quarters here where we ought to be able to talk, though, and it’d do just fine.

The protective working of Night I’d laid on my door had dispersed when I’d been stabbed by the Fallen Monk earlier, so all it took to open my rooms was the use of a key. I gestured for the Mirror Knight to follow me in then closed the door behind us.

“Do you drink?” I asked, unclasping my cloak.

The man looked taken aback by the question, standing awkwardly in his full plate as I tossed the Mantle of Woe atop a dresser. I could hardly mock him for that, since if I’d been wearing proper armour instead of ceremonial dress I wouldn’t have gotten stabbed in the neck by the Monk. Black’s insistence on wearing plate seemingly at all times had never seemed more justified.

“Er, yes,” the Mirror Knight said. “Your Majesty.”

“Good,” I grunted. “Do take you helmet off, and stash that sword somewhere I don’t have to watch it seethe at my continued existence. I’m not going to stab you in my own parlour, I assure you.”

His eyes widened.

“I did not mean to imply faithlessness of you by keeping my arms,” the man hastily assured me, sounding like he very much wanted to wince.

He left the Severance near the door, propping it up against the wall like it was some farmer’s hoe instead of tool for deicide, and after looking around for somewhere to place his helm and failing he simply held it in the crook of his elbow. Uncomfortably, one assumed. Meanwhile I unearthed what looked like some Proceran bottle of red from an overly fancy drink cabinet before liberating two crystal cups – a donation, I hoped, since the thought of Callowan coin going into paying for those had me more than a little displeased – and setting all three of those things on the table.

“That ought to do,” I said, and flicked a glance at the helm. “Put that on a dresser, would you?”

Amusing as it might be to watch him try to juggle holding his war helm and drink at the same time, it’d bode ill to make sport of him before our conversation even began. I uncorked the bottle with a pop and had moved to pour when I caught sight of the appalled look on the hero’s face from the corner of my eye. Ah, yes. I was of higher rank, so pouring was either a breach of etiquette or implied a nonexistent degree of intimacy between us. Smothering a sigh – it’d be hypocritical to benefit from useful Alamans ways then complain of their inconvenience in the same breath – I flipped my grip and offered the bottle to him. With surprising deftness for a man still wearing gauntlets, he poured first for me and then for himself. I nodded thanks and sat, while he followed suit in the latter a heartbeat later.

“You have questions,” I said.

Safer to frame them as that than objections. Someone confused could ask for clarifications without it being a threat, but to object implied a degree of authority I had no intention of allowing him in this conversation. The Mirror Knight’s lips thinned.

“You as good as solicited a bribe from the Hunted Magician and threatened to purposefully fail your responsibilities to him if one was not offered,” Christophe de Pavanie flatly accused. “Worse, when that bribe was offered you took it.”

I hummed.

“If I had simply asked questions of the Hunted Magician,” I said, “what would have happened?”

“He would have lied,” the Mirror Knight curtly said. “But you would not have disgraced yourself and the office you hold. He should have been imprisoned until a truthteller could be brought to the Arsenal.”

I wasn’t sure whether it was basic grounding in reality or a belief in the general perfidy of villains that had him aware that the Magician had no real reason to tell the truth if pressed, but I could work with it either way.

“Assume I had done this,” I allowed, to his visible surprise. “What would have followed?”

“A truthteller-”

“Who?” I pressed.

“The Peregrine,” he said, “or perhaps the Exalted Poet.”

“The Poet was a traitor who openly sided with the fae in battle,” I noted.

And thank you a hundred times over, Indrani, for passing that piece along. The dark-haired man’s face went slack in utter surprise. They’d fought on the same front, as I recalled. They must have known each other. I would have a lot more sympathy for his dismay if that friendship might not have led to the Bard getting her picked truthteller in a key position, had this all happened differently.

“I – are you quite certain?” the Mirror Knight croaked out.

“It has been confirmed by multiple witnesses,” I said. “And that is not the heart of the issue, regardless: every single truthteller in the Grand Alliance is a hero .”

“I do not see the issue,” he replied, sounding entirely honest.

Because that just wasn’t how he saw the world in the end, was it? Heroes – the Chosen – were honourable and good, so even us wicked Damned must recognize these qualities and believe in their word when it was given. It was a shade of the same sentiment I’d so deeply despised in Tariq, that bedrock assumption that only the mad and the lost could ever choose anything but service to the Gods Above. It was a way to see the world that simply did not allow for disagreeing equals.

“The word of heroes isn’t trusted by the Named I have in my charge,” I bluntly said. “Most of them have fought Chosen at some point in their lives-”

“It is not a crime to have stopped crime,” Christophe burst out.

“No, but it is ridiculous to ask villains to believe in the impartiality of heroes when they’ve almost certainly fought with one of their friends or companions in the past,” I patiently said. “You yourself came into the Arsenal all but accusing me of plotting to murder the Red Axe-”

“For which I apologize,” the Mirror Knight said through gritted teeth. “I was given reason to believe such a plot was afoot.”

“And you believed it,” I said.

He began to apologize again but I raised my hand to stop him.

“I’m not here to rake you over the coals for that,” I said. “Mind you, I’ll want to know why you came to believe that, but my point is that you did believe it. Because there is no trust between us.”

I paused to let him digest that, taking up my cup at sipping at it. Some strong-flavoured red. From where in Procer I had no idea, but it was pleasant enough to drink.

“You are saying,” the Mirror Knight slowly said, “that the lack of trust goes both ways.”

I’d led him to that, true enough, but that he’d gotten there at all meant he was likely someone I could deal with. Not like the Saint, whose principles had cut both ways and never bent an inch even when they led her to facing death standing all alone. Ignorance I could mend, zealotry I could not.

“At best, using heroes to settle villain affairs would be seen as weakness on my part,” I bluntly said. “At worse, it would be seen as collusion and plot.”

“Whether that is true or not,” Christophe said, “it remains that you threatened the Hunted Magian with withholding the protections he is due by law.”

“Is he?” I said. “He plotted with the Wandering Bard to help an assault into the Arsenal – this is fact, not supposition, even though my proofs are limited. I would have been well within my rights to cut him loose and offer him up in chains to stand before a military tribunal.”

“Then it is even worse,” the Mirror Knight said, “for that was your duty, and you laid it aside for a bribe .”

I rolled my eyes.

“I laid nothing aside,” I said. “He’ll still stand trial as he should under the Truce and Terms and I have received nothing from him save for words.”

“Just because the bribe was not delivered-”

“I asked him for reasons his coming tribunal might have to refrain from a brisk hanging being the sum whole of the judgement rendered,” I sharply said, growing irritated with the constant accusation of bribery. “Not for any sort of bribe .”

I’d bloodied my hands enough for three villains, but the accusation that I might be corrupt was still enough to infuriate me. I was a cheat and a killer, but I was not godsdamned crook.

“You were promised a fairy crown,” the Mirror Knight unflinchingly replied. “That did not escape me, Black Queen. The purported scheme that brought me here was your attempted seeking of queenship over Named, and this eager pursuit of Autumn’s regalia does nothing to abate my fears.”

I breathed out, gathered my calm.

“I don’t care,” I bluntly said.

He blinked in surprise.

“That entire project is being kept secret for a reason, and it’s been approved by people a lot more important than you,” I said. “If the White Knight wants to bring you into the circle of those aware of its nature I’ll consider agreeing to it, since you’ve already stumbled onto the outskirts, but ultimately that’s not my decision to make.”

That was the pivot, I thought. I was asserting that I had little direct authority over him, which should please him, but it came with the added implication that he was still subordinate to Hanno. Those were the lines drawn by rules and agreement, though, not something immutable. If he decided to push anyway this was going to be trouble.

“Then there should be no trouble with the Hunted Magician being placed under guard until the White Knight can speak of this matter for the Chosen,” the Mirror Knight said.

It wasn’t an unreasonable thing to ask, when it came down to it, and in principle I had nothing to lose by agreeing to it. In principle. Practically speaking, I’d be admitting that Christophe de Pavanie was someone who had a right to ask things of me. If I gave in now, would it just invite him to push for more? On the other hand, digging my heels in over even the slightest bump in the road was a good way to ensure this went to the Hells in a handbasket. I’d have to take the risk, then, and maybe phrase it so that I wasn’t actually making a concession.

“I’ll consider him to be the subject of a complaint under the Terms, then,” I said. “The Rogue Sorcerer can see to it that no unseemliness happens when he’s freed from other duties.”

Roland was not the most trusted of heroes, he was too close to me for that, but he wasn’t outright distrusted by his fellows either. He’d serve as an acceptable compromise candidate since I sure as hells wasn’t putting the Blade of Mercy in charge of anything – much less guarding an experienced villain. I’d even managed to make this happen within the appearance of lawfulness, keeping to the Terms. But it was an illusion, I knew that all too well. Pick at the gold on any crown for long enough and you always found the steel that’d put the gilding on.

It was not a pleasant thing to be the side with the gilding instead of the steel, for once.

“That would be acceptable,” the Mirror Knight said, and my fingers clenched.

I drank from my cup to hide my sudden urge to break his nose. Acceptable . Like he was doing me a favour by deigning to accept. The Magician was one of Below’s, there was precisely no fucking part of this that Above’s crowd had a right to dictate to me over. I breathed out, slowly, and forced calm. I glanced at the green-eyed man, finding him looking faintly embarrassed. Not because of me, I decided, I was not so easy to read these days.

“You look like you want to say something,” I said.

“I yet remain in the dark about much of what went on during the attack,” the Mirror Knight admitted. “And it occurs to me I am unlikely to find anyone more apt to tell the tale.”

I hummed. After that little sentence I was less than inclined to indulge him in anything, but that he was asking at all implied a degree of trust in my word: there was no point in asking an explanation from someone you believed a liar. That belief was worth encouraging, I decided after a moment.

“To my understanding, the Wandering Bard’s plot began with the Wicked Enchanter and the Red Axe,” I said.

“Someone passed as the latter in Revenant form, when attacking the Stacks,” Christophe said.

I watched his eyes tighten, his fingers clench, and remembered the few barbs I’d thrown his way when disguised as the Wicked Enchanter’s corpse. Evidently, they’d stung deeper than I’d believed they would. I could confess to that deception, with or without revealing Indrani had been my companion, but to be frank I saw no real need to. There’d been enough chaos going around the Arsenal that it should comfortably remain a mystery, and even if it were suddenly revealed down the line by a twist of circumstance there was nothing all that damaging to reveal in the first place. Arson and skirmishing were not laudable behaviour, but given the circumstances I doubted my word would be gainsaid if I stated it’d been necessary.

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “The object of the plot was to arrange a deep enmity between a heroine and villain, then ensure that they met where many other Named could see the violence that’d ensue.”

“An attack on the Truce and Terms,” the Mirror Knight nodded. “Clever, given that Damned were certain to ask for her head no matter how justified her actions were.”

I wasn’t going to touch that, considering how ambivalent I was feeling at having to pass down sanctions on behalf of an animal like the Wicked Enchanter. Safer to move on, I decided.

“From there, the Arsenal would become a dry bale of hay awaiting a match,” I said. “The Blessed Artificer and the Repentant Magister were made privy to incomplete but dangerous information about a restricted project, while you and your fellows were summoned to fight a false plot that would still have been weeks away from existing at all when word was sent.”

There I paused in significant silence, inviting him to elaborate on that. Just because I was sharing information didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try to learn any. The Mirror Knight frowned.

“It was a letter,” he admitted. “From one of my friends within these walls, though when I arrived and sought her out she told me she had sent no such thing.”

“And that friend’s name?” I asked.

“You would know her as the Bitter Blacksmith,” he said. “She passed through Cleves on her way to the Arsenal, and the friendship we struck then remains.”

His friend had been sleeping with the Hunted Magician for some time, I immediately thought, which meant he might have been the one to send that false letter using his access to her quarters. Although that hardly fit when I considered it more deeply: the Magician’s relationship with the Intercessor had been transactional, and he was unlikely to have taken a risk like leaving a parchment trail on her behalf. Especially not a letter coming out of the Arsenal, where everything is read through before it’s allowed to leave. No, most likely he or another of the Bard’s helpers had gotten their hands on some writing of the Bitter Blacksmith’s before passing it on. Another traitor would have then forged the letter outside the Arsenal and sent it to the Mirror Knight. Considering that the Concocter had ties with the smuggling ring of this place and bargained with the Bard as well, she seemed a more likely suspect there.

I’d still ask the Grey Pilgrim to confirm the Bitter Blacksmith’s words if he could, just in case.

“A forgery,” I said. “One that ensured you would come here and act aggressively.”

His face soured but he did not argue with my words.

“I suspect we were meant to be at each other’s throats,” I said, delicately skipping over the part where we actually had been. “So that when the Court of Autumn struck we would be divided and unready.”

Back in the Stacks, the Mirror Knight had varied wildly between tales when addressing my impersonation of a Revenant. I’d dismissed that as stupidity, back then, but in retrospect a more charitable interpretation might have been that he’d been utterly confused as to why he was there at all. It wasn’t anyone’s natural leaning, not even mine, to begin by entertaining the notion that you’d been brought in because you were bound to fuck things up somehow. It made sense he would have been grasping at straw instead, desperately trying to figure what was going on around him. Yet the Intercessor had known exactly what she was doing, on the other hand: he’d been picked as much for his... inflexibility as for his potential to take up the Severance. A danger in both the short term and the long one. Gods but I hated fighting the Bard. Even when you won you lost.

At least we’d made it through better than she must have anticipated, my little trick of going directly to the Doddering Sage forcing her to use the Hunted Magician early – which ultimately came back to bite her, since it was one of the things that allowed me to figure out he’d been working with her – and the stroke of inspiration that was sending in Adjutant leading the Mirror Knight straight to my door later, no longer seeing me as an immediate foe. The memory of Hakram’s body on that stretcher came back and I gritted my teeth. Inspiration had its costs. Yet when the fae had hit the Arsenal, they’d not fallen upon a pack of twitchy Named ready to blame each other but instead faced a few separate bands of five hunting down the Bard’s schemes. What should have been a hard blow instead became a distraction, which I was honestly rather pleased about. If it’d really gone to shit in the Arsenal, the fae likely would have been able to make straight runs for the sword and Quartered Seasons and broken both.

“The fae went for both the Severance and the Hierophant’s research, both of which represent a potential way of killing the Dead King,” I said.

“But why ?” the Mirror Knight quietly asked. “Why would anyone, even one of the Damned, try to doom Calernia to an eternity of undeath?”

“The Bard’s been pulling strings for a long time, using a lot of different faces,” I said. “She led the First Prince by the nose towards the creation of a weapon that might kill the Hidden Horror as well – the corpse of an angel of Judgement – but it has since been gleaned that the use of the weapon might have catastrophic consequences for all of Calernia. The idea of using it was laid aside, for now, but if Cordelia Hasenbach is stripped of every other option and annihilation comes to call...”

“Then the First Prince will do as she must, and sacrifice many to save the rest,” the Mirror Knight said, sounding admiring. “How like the Damned, to attempt to make use of virtue as a flaw.”

I didn’t mention that, according to the Dead King’s parting words in Salia, when the Painted Knife arrived we’d be learning the exact magnitude of the mess that would have ensued from Cordelia pulling that trigger. I suspected it was... not negligible, which might go some way in explaining why the Intercessor had struck now of all times. With her secrets about to come out, she urgently needed to cut down on the Grand Alliance’s options or there would be absolutely no reason for the First Prince to even consider using the Bard’s preferred path. It also explained why this had been rather open engagement, by the Intercessor’s standards: if that secret being revealed would burn all the bridges that were currently aflame, she was not losing much in a longer sense. And while trying to shape my Name might have been one of her reasons for coming out, I very much doubted it was the only one: it wasn’t the Intercessor’s way to get only one bird per stone.

“We fought better than the Bard expected,” I said, which was not exactly true but not exactly false, “so she had to tip her hand further. Her traitors within the Arsenal took action – the Hunted Magician, the Exalted Poet, the Maddened Keeper-”

Christophe’s brow rose.

“Was this Maddened Keeper the one responsible for the demons?” he asked. “I did strike down a woman, after taking up the sword.”

“That was most likely her,” I said. “Information is sparse about how she got here or why she did anything, since there’s nothing quite like a demon of Absence to obscure your trail.”

“How grotesque,” the Mirror Knight said, disgusted.

I wouldn’t disagree, there. There wasn’t really much of anything that could ever justify use of demons.

“The Fallen Monk and the Rex Axe are the last two known collaborators,” I continued. “The former attempted to kill me and then the Hierophant, while the latter tried to assassinate the Kingfisher Prince after I sent him to ensure her safety.”

The man started in surprise.

“You tried to ensure the protection of the Red Axe?” he said.

“She’s a prisoner,” I flatly said. “And therefore in our care until she has stood trial. Prince Frederic struck me as the man to see to her safety and I was not wrong in my judgement, though that task ended poorly for him.”

“Antoine tells me he was wounded,” the Mirror Knight tried.

“He’ll live,” I said. “I’d be surprised if it doesn’t leave a scar on his neck, but he’ll still be ridiculously pretty even with it.”

The green-eyed man snorted, though he then tried to disguise it as a cough.

“It is an act of gallantry for a man to receive a scar in the defence of a woman, even if it is in the defence of herself,” Christophe de Pavanie said. “I’m sure he will wear it as the badge of pride it is.”

I had my doubts any sort of a prince would take to a murder attempt so lightly, but you never knew with Procerans. Not that it’d mean a thing, anyway. Whether or not the Kingfisher Prince complained under the Terms, such an egregious and open breach of them would have to be addressed. Not that we could hang her twice , anyway, though some of the Named in my charge were bound to argue for me to at least try.

“Might be,” I said, noncommittal, and sipped from my glass.

The dark-haired man half-smiled and reached for his cup, until now left untouched, fingers closing around the gilded crystal rim before he froze. Slowly he looked up at me, dark green eyes narrowed.

“We wouldn’t have had this conversation,” the Mirror Knight quietly said, “if I’d not taken up the sword, would we?”

I hesitated for just the fraction of a moment and my mind whispered mistake as Christophe de Pavanie’s face closed down. He rose to his feet, curtly bowing.

“If I might take my leave, Black Queen?” he said. “If there any need for further discussion, we can speak again after the Red Axe is released.”

Wait, what? From what part of this conversation had he gotten that ?

“And what do you mean by that, exactly?” I mildly asked.

“That once the White Knight comes, it must be recognized that like myself and other Chosen she was made a tool to the Wandering Bard’s schemes,” the Mirror Knight. “The only righteous outcome is to pardon her for her actions.”

“That is not my understanding of the situation,” I coldly said. “And neither do I believe it will be the White Knight’s.”

Christophe de Pavanie, risen to his full height, stared down at me with green eyes.

“I pray you are wrong,” he said, “else I will be forced to ask a question I would rather not.”

“And what would that be?” I replied, thinly smiling.

“What is the Sword of Judgement, without Judgement?” the Mirror Knight asked.

Just a sword , he didn’t say, but I heard it anyway as he left with the Severance and I didn’t stop him.

Just a sword, and he had one of those too.

Chapter 27: Nigh

“When using tigers you don’t have enough time to gloat, when using rats you risk awkwardly running out of gloat before the end: true equilibrium is found in a pit of humble man-eating tapirs, beasts that have never once failed me.”
– Dread Empress Atrocious, later devoured by man-eating tapirs

I woke up with a stiff back and an aching leg.

I’d courted as much by sleeping in a chair instead of a bed, but I’d not had it in me to retire to my rooms. Groaning as I shook off the last pangs of sleep and felt out the throbbing side of my leg – today wasn’t going to be one of the goods days, I could already sense it – I pulled back my hand to settle my messily loose hair some. The pale glow of the magelights in the healing ward’s private room was hard on the eyes, somehow harsh and cold compared to the way the light of day felt. The Arsenal was not growing on me: the endless bare hallways and the dusty air had me more restless than even the Everdark had back in the day. Below the earth, moving through caves and tunnels, it’d still felt like my feet were on the ground. Here, though, it all felt fake. Unnatural.

Swallowing a yawn and stretching, I finally made myself look at the man lying on the bed by chair. Hakram’s upper body was bare and I could see his hairless and muscled chest rise and fall as he breathed, the steady rhythm ensured by the sorcery woven over his mouth and nose. A ball of spelled air, made thicker and almost translucent by the nature of the spell, was ensuring that he would keep breathing steadily even should his body fail as it already had several times. Gods, my heart still clenched every time I looked at him. I could not see the leg and the chunk of hip – including bone – he’d lost, as they were under the blanket, but there was no hiding his carved-up flank and the stump of his arm. The priests, the mages and even Masego were all in agreement: there could be no healing most of this.

In time flesh would grow back over the bared ribs and the stumps would cease to be purplish scabs, but there could be no question of attaching another limp even if we managed to get another one from an orc or even grow something through sorcery. Wounds inflicted by the Severance could be fully mended by neither sorcery nor Light. I’d already asked Hierophant to begin work on prosthetics, but the cuts through bone at the hip and leg were... Hakram’s fighting days were likely over. After months of bedrest and the finest prosthetics the Arsenal could create, he might be able to walk around without help. Might. But he would no longer be fit for battle, that much couldn’t be denied. I did not realize I was worrying my lip with my teeth as I looked at him until the door was cracked open and I released it.

My lips were dry, and my teeth sharp, so I tasted a fleck of blood against the roof of my mouth as I turned to see who’d intruded.

“Cat?” Archer quietly asked as she poked her face in. “Ah, good, you’re awake.”

She opened the door further with her foot and came in with a wooden tray. The smell from the pastries on it, some sort of Proceran pasties filled with cheese and herbs, wafted in.

“Breakfast,” she announced.

“Thanks,” I wanly smiled, waving her in.

I noticed a steaming mug besides the pastries, filled with something liquid and dark. Indrani crossed the room, letting the door close behind her, and passed me the tray even as she sat down in one of the seats by mine. The moment my hands were occupied supporting it she pre-emptively stole one of the pastries, which had my lips twitching, and I settled the tray on my knees with a nod of thanks. I sniffed at the mug and my brow rose when I recognized the distinct scent of the herbs Masego used to give me for pain back in the day.

“Cocky had a few,” Indrani shrugged in answer when I glanced at her.

How like her, I fondly thought, to mention that in a transparent attempt to draw attention from the gesture of bringing the mug. Or from having remembered this precise recipe even years later. It was rare for her to bother with little things like this, usually when someone brought me a meal it was – the thought soured me, and I breathed out shallowly. I made myself take a bite from one of the remaining pastries, the crust falling apart in my mouth and the warm cheese drowning out the taste of the herbs. It was tasty enough, and filling, so I tore through two before stopping to breathe.

“Thanks,” I told Archer. “Didn’t realize how hungry I’d gotten. What time is it?”

“An hour before Morning Bell,” she replied.

Past dawn, then. This would make it the longest night of sleep from the four I’d had since the culmination of the Bard’s plots in the Arsenal. Indrani had not, I noted, bothered to wipe away the mess of crumbs she’d made eating her own pastry. Hiding a slightly crusty smile at the sight, I sipped at the brew. The taste was as dubious as I remembered, but it’d do wonders for my leg without needing to draw on Night.

“You don’t usually wake me, much less bring me breakfast,” I leadingly said.

“I did in the Everdark, sometimes,” she defended.

“Like we didn’t make Akua cook whenever we could,” I snorted.

Indrani was a much better cook than either Akua or me, in truth, but she was also in no way above taking a nap and letting someone else handle it after a long day of marching.

“Making the only known poisoner among us handle the stew,” Archer dryly said. “Yeah, that sounds about right for our little Everdark walkabout.”

I snorted. That whole affair had been an exercise in recklessness, it was true, for all that in the end it’d turned out mostly well. I did not immediately answer, instead enjoying the silence as I sipped at my mug. She’d probably come for a reason, but I was in no hurry to press her for it.

“Sometimes I wonder how it would have been down there, if he’d come along like he wanted to,” Indrani said, eyes going to our unconscious friend.

Not even Masego could tell us when he’d wake. There wasn’t exactly a known precedent to call on for demonic taint followed by a cut of the Severance.

“We would have been better off,” I said. “And Callow would have fallen to pieces.”

She hummed, not exactly in agreement but not disagreeing either.

“Always thought you were much rougher on Vivienne and the Hellhound than him, for that mess we found in Iserre,” Indrani suddenly said. “He had just as big a hand in it, but his chewing out was had in private.”

“Juniper and Vivienne had titles, he didn’t,” I replied. “I wouldn’t have been quite to brutal with those two if not for their blunders in ‘welcoming’ me, either. Couldn’t afford not to, after those.”

“You also like him most,” Indrani frankly said.

I jolted in genuine surprise, looking askance at her.

“It’s fine,” she waved. “I’m not getting all jealous on you, Cat. And it’s not like you really play favourites in the Woe. Hakram’s been with you from start, the longest of any of us, so you two have always been the closest in some ways.”

I didn’t bother to argue that I didn’t sleep with Hakram, since we both knew that was a different thing. Her nebulous but inarguably existing partnership with Masego involved not a speck of bedplay, as far as I knew, but that in no way took away from the importance of it to both involved.

“Sometimes I think I might be afraid of becoming Black, if we make it all through the next decade,” I admitted.

She didn’t immediately speak, and I appreciated the moment to gather my thoughts as I drank.

“The rest of you wandering off to see to your own lives, the way the Calamities did with him,” I said. “I never had to worry about that with Hakram. I knew he’d stick with me into Cardinal and the Accords.”

It was never something we’d outright discussed, but more than once common plans had been drawn for things that the two of us would be able to do when the city was raised, together. It seemed faraway now, watching him breathe on that bed. I snorted.

“He wants to make cisterns up in the mountains, you know,” I said. “With canals that’d lead the water down to the city since water’s going to be an issue if it gets too large.”

“Wouldn’t that be something to see,” Indrani softly said.

“Nonsense it what it is,” I smilingly said. “We should drain one the lakes up there and gate it down instead, much more practical.”

How many times had we had that debate? Must have been at least a dozen, I knew all the arguments for and against by rote. It’d gotten stale, retreading the same grounds, but I’d still give a queen’s ransom to tread them once more with him right now. I breathed out, looking away.

“You know you’re going to have to leave him behind, don’t you?” Indrani gently said.

I turned so quickly I almost dropped the tray.

“Excuse me?” I flatly said.

“He’s in no state to be transported,” Archer said, not cowed by my glare in the slightest. “And even if he was, the Arsenal is the best place for him to recover. He can be fitted for the prosthetics here as they’re being made, and there’s not a place with more or more kinds of healers on the continent. If you take him with you Cat, it won’t be for his benefit. It’ll be for yours.”

“I can’t just let him rot here,” I hissed.

“Masego will be attending him,” Indrani said.

“Masego will remember to attend him in between more important things,” I bit out.

A moment of silence passed, Archer saying nothing.

“I didn’t mean that,” I finally said.

It was doing a disservice to him. Masego was sometimes forgetful, but never when it came to taking care of one of us.

“I know,” Indrani said. “Like you know you won’t be able to stay here by his bedside forever. There’s still a war on outside, and it needs you.”

“Some days I wonder,” I darkly said. “We managed to chase off the Intercessor, ‘Drani, but what else do we have to show for this? Entire sections of the Arsenal trashed or tainted, a pile of dead soldiers and Named, a fucking knot of politics to entangle that just got even more knotted. The Mirror Knight has the fucking sword, and he’s not going to give that back even if asked nicely.”

“You drove back a creature that gives even the Hidden Horror the shivers,” Archer said. “If there wasn’t a pack of ruins on fire left behind, Cat, I’d be a lot more worried.”

I took my mug in hand and reached to set aside the tray, swallowing a hiss at the way the move pulled at my leg, but Indrani leaned over and set it on the ground instead. I gestured in thanks, which she airily dismissed.

“And Mirror Knight trying to play politics won’t amount to shit,” Archer continued. “Most Dominion people can’t stand him, and it’s not like him having a real cutty sword is going to impress Hasenbach or Malanza. And if both those two tell him to sit down and shut up, I don’t care whose daughter he’s fucking: there’s no one in Procer who’s going to argue.”

“It’s a sword made to kill the Dead King, Indrani,” I said. “And we only have one of those. That gives him clout, whether I like it our not.”

“Balls to that,” Archer said. “I don’t care how many Mirror Knights we throw at Keter, it’s not going to get shit done. You think it’s the first time the Original Abomination got some scrappy hero with powerful aspects and a fancy sword knocking at his gate? He’ll snap that boy over his fucking knee, Cat. The Saint might have pulled it off, ‘cause she was hard and canny and gone feral in the Heavens way, but the Mirror Knight ? He’s just some asshole. Not the worst I’ve seen, and sure he tries, but when it comes down to it he’s still just some jackass with a sword.”

“If he was just that, I’d have gotten him under control by now,” I said.

“Way you told it to me, you treated him like Black and the Empress treated you back in the day,” Indrani said. “That wasn’t going to work.”

“It usually does,” I said through gritted teeth.

And Christophe de Pavanie wasn’t an idiot: I’d shown him how I did things, and then explained why they needed to be done that way. I’d even thought it was working, for all that I was wary of him and probably not hiding it entirely. I still had no real idea what had set him off at the end, though there was no denying I’d botched my handling of his little tantrum.

“Yeah, but you’re the Black Queen,” Archer said. “If you’re being nice to him, it’s probably a plot. If you’re being mean to him, it’s probably a plot. If you’re not being anything to him, it’s probably a plot . There’s a reason it’s Shiny Boots in charge of the heroes and not you, Catherine. Most of them still think you’re out to get them.”

She might be right, but I wasn’t convinced. Still, there was no denying I was in a position where trying to keep forcing the matter would do a lot more harm than good. For now all that I could do was let sleeping dogs lie – and keep an eye on the dogs, just in case.

“Shiny Boots will be coming soon, at least,” I grunted. “By midday tomorrow.”

“The Painted Knife and her band the day after,” Indrani said, “then Vivienne and Hasenbach the day after. It’s going to get lively around here.”

I didn’t answer, resuming sipping at my brew as I watched Hakram from the corner of my eye. Silence stretched out again, almost peaceful.

“I want to be here when he wakes up,” I said. “I can’t help but feel that is the least of the least I could do, ‘Drani.”

“The conference won’t be done in a day,” Archer replied.

But it wouldn’t last forever either, I knew. And if it ended and Hakram had not yet woken up... Gods, how was it a harder decision to leave him behind than to send soldiers into battles where I knew many of them would die?

“Yeah,” I finally said. “It won’t be done in a day.”

It was the coward’s way out, but I still hoped it was a decision I simply wouldn’t have to make. My mug was nearly empty now, so I drank down the last of the bitter brew and set it aside.

“So why is it that you came to wake me, anyway?” I asked.

“Prince Pretty is about and kicking, the Physician finally cut him loose,” Indrani said. “He was looking to speak to you when you have a moment.”

I groaned and began to rise to my feet.

“Might as well,” I said, reaching for my staff. “I feel like I need to stretch my legs a bit.”

“That’s the spirit,” Archer grinned. “I’ll keep watch on Hakram, you go and breathe some slightly more fresh air.”

—

I washed myself and changed clothes first. With a washbasin and a cloth, not a bath: the Arsenal had no source of water, which meant it had to be brought in from Creation by barrels. The practical limits to doing that meant it was permanently rationed, and though I could have probably flouted the rule I saw no real reason to. I dragged out a leather hunting doublet – which I’d never actually used for hunting – and loose black trousers I could tuck into my boots, pulling my wet hair into a braid and loosening my cloak around my neck. It wasn’t exactly court clothes, or queenly ones, but I had a limited patience for both and the only way I’d ever put on full Proceran royal dress was if they dressed up my corpse. Cordelia somehow managed to make it seem natural, but I had a deep and instinctual distrust for anything involving that many ribbons and knots.

I’d asked attendants to find out where Prince Frederic was before going into my quarters, so by the time I left them the answer was awaiting me. It also had me raising an eyebrow, since I’d expected any conversation between us would be taken care of in a private audience room or either our quarters. Instead the Prince of Brus was currently breaking his fast in the meal hall where I’d found Archer on the day of my arrival. Except she’d used it when it was empty, while around this time there were bound to be more than a few full tables. Well, at least my hair would dry a tad on the way there. I’d somewhat learned my way around the Arsenal, what with all the traipsing about I’d done here, so to get to the hall I needed no guide.

It was a quick enough walk – the architects who’d designed the place had clearly known the Alcazar would be hosting the people who paid them, and so positioned it very conveniently – and I got through it briskly, the herbal brew having finally kicked in enough I could put a bit of a spring to my limp without swallowing a wince every time. The meal hall was a little over half-full, as I’d expected, offering up the sight men and women from their twenties to their dotage in three colours of robes. I would have expected some degree of clannishness but even those who most stuck to their own kind, the white-robed priests, had but a few islands of pale while most were spread out. The mages and the scholars, in red and bronze, were seated seemingly without thought to affiliation.

The closest thing there were to clans were actually the tables with Named, which everyone else avoided. In the back, near the corner, the Blade of Mercy and the Blessed Artificer were quietly speaking as they ate together. Closer to me I saw the Kingfisher Prince laughing at something Roland had said, the Harrowed Witch looking at them warily but also seemingly a little charmed. More than a few gazes turned my way when I limped in, a hush falling over the room. I said nothing, only making my way to Prince Frederic’s table and clapping Roland’s shoulder in thanks when he made some room for me to sit by his side.

“Your Majesty,” the Harrowed Witch greeted me.

“Good morning,” I said, then nodded at the others. “And to the both of you as well.”

“Better yet for the pleasure of your company, Queen Catherine,” Frederic Goethal smiled.

“Yes,” the Rogue Sorcerer drily said. “That.”

My gaze flicked to the side of the Kingfisher Prince’s pale neck, where a thin red line went around with an even neatness that was somehow pleasing to the eye. Hells, if I’d not known better I would have believed it a tattoo. A rather tasteful one, at that.

“This is highly unfair,” I complained. “How does the scar make you prettier ? Mine just make me look like I got mauled.”

I got treated to the sight of Frederic Goethal’s eyes going wide in surprise, and the Prince of Brus politely coughed into his fist as Roland loudly choked. I glanced at the Witch, cocking an eyebrow and she reluctantly offered me a nod of agreement. See? It’s not just me.

“I thank you for the compliment, Your Majesty,” the Kingfisher Prince got out.

“Catherine,” Roland muttered, aghast. “You can’t just hit on a prince of the blood in the middle of the meal hall.”

“I’m just stating the truth,” I protested. “Look at Aspasie, she’s not disagreeing is she?”

“I have finished my meal,” the Harrowed Witch hastily said, “and so take my leave, with your permission.”

Before said permission could either be offered or denied, she just as hastily bowed and made her escape. A cannier tactician than I’d expected, that one.

“Look what you did,” Roland reproached.

“War makes beasts of us all,” I solemnly said.

This time it was the Prince of Brus that choked, but in amusement. After mastering himself he poured me a cup of what looked like warm milk – with honey and something else in, maybe cloves going by the smell? – and offered it, which had my eyes sharpening. This was a rather informal setting, but he’d still poured for me. To an Alamans, which this one was for all that he’d spent the last few years being the darling of the Lycaonese, that implied either intimacy or the sort of admission of lower status that a prince of Procer would not, strictly speaking, need to offer me. Over the years First Princes had often tried to pass kingship of Callow was a rank of nobility below their own office, making it equivalent to that of the lesser western royalty instead.

Cordelia Hasenbach had never tried that with me: even back when she’d called me Your Grace instead of Your Majesty, it’d been with the implication that a proper queen of Callow would have warranted the latter appellation.

“Thank you,” I slowly said, cocking my head to the side.

It was a statement, what he’d just done, and he’d chosen to do it in front of more than half a hundred people. Including several Named. The sole Named among Proceran royalty had just implied intimacy and trust in me in a subtle but very public way, which would not be something without consequence. I drank from the cup, and though it was too sweet for my tastes forced myself to swallow. Frederic Goethal had been raised to the Ebb and Flow during an era that Procerans still called the Great War, so I did not doubt he knew exactly what he’d just done. It explained why we were meeting here, even. It also left me feeling somewhat indebted to him, even if I’d not sought out the gesture, which I doubted was a coincidence.

“How is the Adjutant, if I might ask?” Roland quietly said.

I told him, and the conversation drifted towards that and other idle talk about the state of the Arsenal – there would need to be a hard look taken at the tainted parts of it before the First Prince could step foot here – that lasted until my cup and their plates ran empty. The Rogue Sorcerer skillfully took his leave after that, which left me alone with the Prince of Brus.

“I must confess to a degree of restlessness, now that I’ve been allowed to escape the infirmary,” the Kingfisher Prince idly said.

“I can sympathize,” I said.

I’d spent a lot of my early years as the Squire going from one healing ward to another.

“Then perhaps you might care to escort me to that fighting pit in the Frolic, Your Majesty,” Prince Frederic suggested. “If I do not exercise my arm at least a little I might just go mad.”

Mhm. A genuine request, or just an excuse for the two of us to be able to talk in a more private setting? Either way I had little reason to refuse.

“I could use the walk,” I agreed.

—

It’d been idle but pleasant talk all the way to the Frolic, which was empty at this time of the day.

Mind you it was an amusingly fresh experience to pass by a brothel with a genuine Proceran prince, an establishment he couldn’t possibly have missed even if he was too polite to comment on it. The fighting pit was just as deserted at the rest of this area, rafters empty and sand untouched, although by the looks of the pair of practice swords left at the edge of the stands a servant must have come through at some point. I cocked an eyebrow at the fact that there were two swords there: unless the Kingfisher Prince had ceased using a shield, that meant he expected to be exercising his arm against someone. Unhurried, the fair-haired man went down the stairs and undid the straps keeping the dull swords in place.

“The First Prince will be arriving tomorrow, along with your Lady Dartwick,” Frederic Goethal told me. “Word was sent to me overnight.”

Quicker than we’d thought. They’d get here the same day as the White Knight, then.

“Good to know,” I cautiously replied. “We have much to talk about.”

The pale-skinned man took up one of the swords, testing its weight first by holing the grip and then by a succession of swift swings.

“You and I do as well, Your Majesty,” Frederic Goethal seriously said.

He tossed me the sword, which I’d half expected. It’d been well thrown so I snatched it out of the air easily. The balance was a little off for me – I preferred a heavier pommel and a longer blade – but I was out of practice anyway. It’d hardly make a difference.

“It’s been some time since I used one of those,” I warned him.

“So I’ve heard,” the Prince of Brus said, eyeing me openly, “yet the instincts will still be there, and you have the fitness for it.”

I might not have been entirely opposed to being looked up and down by Frederic Goethal in different circumstances, but it hadn’t been that kind of look: he’d been gauging callouses and muscles, not how well I might fill my clothes.

“Swords and a chat, huh,” I said. “Fair enough. I can work with that.”

I made my way down the stairs, leaning on my staff, and after dulling my bad leg with a quick touch of Night leapt down and landed on the sands in a crouch, Mantle of Woe billowing around me. Prince Frederic’s boots touched the pit floor a moment later with catlike grace. His loose white long-sleeved shirt – with those puffy Alamans sleeves – and silken trousers would have made him seem like some lordling who’d stumbled into the wrong place by accident, if not for the comfortable way he held his dulled blade. Idly I spun my own sword to loosen my wrist, considering how best to approach. He’d weigh more, and be quicker on his feet, but that’d been true of a lot of my opponents over the years. It was hard to decide how best to attack when I still only had vague notions of how skilled he might be.

“So the swords are bare, but what is it we’re meant to be talking about?” I probed.

“We have trouble brewing,” the Prince of Brus said, “of a most inconvenient kind.”

Ever light on his feet he approached, and I tested his guard with a flick of the blade he allowed to touch his but otherwise ignored. The fair-haired man began to circle me rightwards, which I reciprocated in the opposite way.

“You’ll have to elaborate,” I said. “It’s been one of those months.”

The prince darted forward, sword going to the side in what I realized too late to have been a feint, but when he struck at a sharp angle that would have hit my swordholding wrist he found instead that a hard blow of my staff forced him to withdraw.

“How unsporting,” Frederic Goethal boyishly grinned.

“I don’t recall agreeing to swords only,” I nonchalantly replied.

He laughed and we began circling each other again.

“I have decided not to press charges against the Red Axe under the Terms,” the Kingfisher Prince said, and my eyes narrowed, “though I am not unaware that ultimately means little.”

“There was no need for that little piece of theatre in the meal hall, if you meant to throw in with the Mirror Knight,” I noted.

“It is a personal decision, not a political one,” he admitted. “I have known hatred, how it can twist you. The Red Axe was done great wrongs, and the depth of the hatred born of them makes anything I have partaken of a pittance. I do not forgive or forget her attack, but neither would I see her slain on my behalf.”

I slid a step to the side, sweeping low with my staff and baiting the attack I’d expected to follow. He was too quick on his feet to resist such an opening, dancing around my sweep and darting a strike out at my shoulder. Grip shifting, I grabbed the edge of my cloak with my freed fingers and swept the strike into the cloth, nearly ripping the blade out of his grasp. Yet nimbly he went, retreating out of my range before I could try to hem him in. The tricky bastard.

“It won’t change that she killed the Wicked Enchanter,” I said.

“Or that she tried to open my throat, lack of complaint or not,” Frederic of Brus acknowledged. “Unfortunately, the latter of these might turn out to be the most trouble. Though I am of the Chosen, I am also a prince of the blood and the anointed ruler of Brus. The First Prince is of the opinion, and to my regret I cannot disagree, that my attempted killer must stand trial under Proceran law.”

“By any reasonable measure she’ll get the-” I almost said headsman’s axe, but it would have been both ghastly and a pun, “- noose for the Enchanter, which would allow us to sidestep that issue outright.”

It wasn’t that I couldn’t see where Cordelia was coming from, really. One of the heroes had just stuck a sword in the neck of one of her empire’s ruling nobility, if she didn’t act then she was legitimizing the right of heroes to pull shit like this in years to come. On the other hand, coming from the side of the Truce and Terms, we were going to see more than a few desertions if turned out that we were all subject to Proceran laws. People just didn’t trust the Principate that much, and given what the Sisters had shown me of the plotting in Cleves it wasn’t without reason. The unspoken conflict of authority between the officers of the Terms and the crowned heads of the Grand Alliance had been from open conflict so far, with great care, but this seemed like just the kind of mess to make it into a very spoken conflict instead.

“If the situation in the Arsenal had unfolded differently, that might have been an elegant solution,” the Kingfisher Prince aknowledged. “Unfortunately, the Mirror Knight now wields the Severance and he has ties to the Langevins of Cleves. Whose loyalties have waned even as their ambitions waxed.”

The Prince of Brus raised his sword high, blue eyes cool.

“If Chosen striking at royalty is left unpunished,” Prince Frederic gravely said, “we believe that my neck might just have healed from the first blow struck in the Principate’s next civil war.”

Chapter 28: Contend

“Diplomacy is not an art of peace or a higher calling, it is the act of nations bartering what they disdain for what they desire.”
– Magister Haides Katopodis the Elder of Stygia

The sword came forward in swift thrust that I let come close, as Prince Frederic’s footing told me it was just a feint.

“My people don’t have a great opinion of royalty west of the Whitecaps, as a rule,” I said.

Or east of the Wasiliti, south of the Hwaerte and north of Daoine. Callowans were less than fond of foreign crowns in general, was the point, though it would be impolitic to belabour it.

“Not without reason,” the Prince of Brus replied.

I limped to the side, baiting an attack with an opening that was seized without hesitation – an opportunist, this one, man after my own heart – and the Kingfisher Prince’s sword came swiftly from the side. I spun, putting my weight on my good leg, and swept him back with a swing he easily avoided but set him up for a longer thrust with the tip of my staff. Leaning backwards and edging his head to the side by half an inch, he narrowly avoided the second blow. It ruffled his blond locks some, and I only partly managed to catch his own blow with the crossguard of my practice sword. He was better than Ishaq with a blade, I decided, but not as physically strong. That last catch with my crossguard would have broken my wrist if I’d tried it with the Barrow Sword. The Kingfisher Prince was quicker on his feet, though, and that was a lot trickier for me to handle given my limp.

“I like to think so,” I said. “Which means when even I say that I have doubts Gaspard Langevin of Cleves, whose lands are on the frontline of a war with Keter, would be enough of a fool to try something? A claim like yours begs an elaboration.”

Of course, he probably hadn’t meant a civil war that’d begin tomorrow. Even princes who despised Cordelia – and there were more of those than I’d once thought – wouldn’t try to start one in the Principate when it was under siege from the Dead King and swarming with foreign armies it currently required to continue existing. But if this was headed where I thought it was headed, then Cordelia Hasenbach’s envoy was going to make her position and intentions clear as spring water. And her offer as well, I thought, because if I knew anything about the First Prince it was that she always had one of those up her sleeves.

“Such a war would yet be on the horizon,” the fair-haired prince agreed. “Yet it looms tall there. Before I elaborate, if you might permit an insolence? It has been suggested by advisers to Her Most Serene Grace that you have become aware of what stirs in Cleves.”

He came in close, this time. Dropped under the swing of my staff, a half-step took him right out of the way of my sword’s sideways swipe and he aimed his own blow perfectly. Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t in the habit of playing fair: fingers abandoning my staff to stand perfectly still, I withdrew my hand and just in front of his face snapped my fingers. Eyes widening, he hastily withdrew with swiftness that was too smooth and sudden to have been entirely natural. I took back my staff, beginning to circle him again as absolutely nothing happened. I’d known for a while that the Pilgrim had given a pretty good accounting of my skills with Night, so I was not surprised in the least that the assessment had made it to the Principate’s sole royal hero.

“A bluff,” the Kingfisher Prince grinned.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged, keeping down a smile, “was it?”

I was, against my better judgement, enjoying myself. I’d always had a weakness for the pretty ones, especially if they could handle themselves.

“The Augur or the Thorns?” I asked.

“The Circle of Thorns,” the Prince of Brus said, “noticed a sudden rise in the antipathy of certain sigils in Cleves towards Cleven forces.”

The strength and weaknesses of the Firstborn in a sentence, that: skilled enough to spy on a hero, sloppy enough people who couldn’t even speak their tongue could read them. The Everdark had forged them into one of those blades of obsidian they so loved: remarkably sharp in some ways, remarkably brittle in others. Neither of us commented on the fact that we’d both been spying on allies, which was for the best considering neither of us had any intention of stopping. Gods, but what I wouldn’t do for spies as good as the Circle of Thorns.

The Jacks were, in truth, better than such a young and haphazard organization had any right to be. That they could operate outside Callow at all was damned impressive, all things considered, much less with the amount of success they’d had. But the Thorns were still several notches above even the best of what the Jacks could do. Imagining the kind of access their long-standing rivals, the Eyes of the Empire, must have back in Callow had caused many a worried night. Even after several purges and Scribe outing part of the network to me as appeasement back in Salia, I doubted we’d flushed all of them out.

Black and Malicia had spent two decades digging them in, it’d likely take just as long to dig them out.

“I got wind of Gaspard’s ambitions to expand the boundaries of the Principate,” I acknowledged. “And of how his daughter’s been spending some of her evenings.”

“The First Prince passes along her appreciation of how measured your response has been,” the blue-eyed man told me.

I went on the offensive, this time. Came in low, sweeping with the sword so he’d have to parry, and then struck with the staff. In an impressive display of skill, at the last moment he angled his parry so that my sword would get in the way of my staff, then without missing a beat tried to trip my bad leg. I managed to pivot on myself, Mantle of Woe fluttering and hiding away my body as he withdrew his blade and tried a downwards cut. I slapped it aside with the staff and gave ground, which he graciously enough allowed.

“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “Sve Noc were livid, and I have visions to share of the kind of casualties the Empire Ever Dark has taking up north to drive home exactly what kind of an ally your man in Cleves is tempting to walk away.”

“Given the unpopularity of the current levies and taxes with the people, ordering Prince Gaspard’s arrest might result in the current riots turning into uprisings,” the Kingfisher Prince said. “I assure you, it is not apathy to the bad faith on display that has stayed the First Prince’s hand.”

“You know,” I mused, “I even believe that. Mostly. But here’s the deeper issue behind all this, Frederic of Brus.”

I touched my arm with Night and struck out, viper-quick: when the prince parried he found me significantly stronger than before, and in the misaligned surprise of his parry the tip of my staff hit his shoulder once and sharply.

“A Proceran prince is scheming, which threatens the war against Keter,” I flatly said. “Proceran politics prevent anyone from doing anything about it, which threatens the war against Keter.”

I struck out again, even as he gave ground, and when with Name-strength he turned aside my sword and staff I abandoned the latter and spun about. When I snapped my fingers he thought of it as a bluff, at least until dark light bloomed. A closer look at the purely decorative effect gave me the barest of openings to slug him in the stomach, though he rolled with the blow and so it was barely more than a caress to a martial Named like him.

“A Proceran heroine tries to kill Proceran royalty, which threatens the war against Keter,” I continued. “And then another Proceran hero snatches up a unique artefact forged through the efforts of several Named to kill the Dead King and begins making demands, which once again threatens the war against Keter.”

I ceased moving, even as he got back his footing and raised his guard.

“Do you perhaps begin to divine a pattern to our troubles, Prince Frederic?” I bluntly asked.

I wasn’t blind to the fact that the Dominion was having some growing pains of its own when it came to the Truce and Terms. It would have been hard to when I’d been forced to look those very troubles in the eyes through the Barrow Sword. Yet neither Ishaq nor the Blood were allowing their arguments to become a growing international crisis, so the way that Procer kept foisting its internal troubles onto everybody else was really starting to be a trial on my patience.

“That is the price to fighting this war on our lands instead of yours,” the Prince of Brus bluntly replied.

He’d begun to take me halfway seriously, so instead of the almost teasing spar before I got a glimpse of what he looked like on a proper field of war: with dexterity he struck, baiting my parries into overextending and then stinging like a wasp. Even with two weapons I found myself hard-pressed and forced to give ground.

“The Principate is crumbling,” the Kingfisher Prince said as he kept advancing. “What few of our youths are not needed in fields and mines are sent north to die in dwarven armour we went into debt to buy. Royalty are now forced to confiscate the necessary goods they cannot pay for, while no grain has been set aside in two years because massive armies must be fed. Horses in the fields go without horseshoes because the blacksmiths were conscripted; fish is taken from the hands of fishermen as far south as Salamans so it can be salted and put in barrels headed north.”

With a flashy snap of his wrist, he batted aside my parry and cut downwards at my wrist. I didn’t drop my blade, but it was a near thing and I was sure to get a bruise. If the sword had not been dulled, I’d be seeing bone. I chased him away with a swing of my staff, though he retreated at his leisure and without giving openings.

“What you condemn as our fecklessness is in truth the death rattle of a nation of millions,” Prince Frederic said. “And while I confess I know little of your people, Queen Catherine, I doubt they would fare any better under this strangling grasp than we have.”

“I won’t deny that Procer has been taking the harshest losses in a lot of ways, or pretend that our sending coin and soldiers and grain is a true replacement for what was lost,” I said. “But neither can you deny that your royalty has not been a constant thorn in the Grand Alliance’s aside at a time where we can ill afford that sort of foolishness.”

“I do not deny it,” the fair-haired man frankly said, “for it is the truth. Yet you have a reputation as a pragmatic woman, and so I expect you can recognize that regardless of what is deserved having Gaspard Langevin arrested is not a solution. It is a way to precipitate the collapse of the realm standing between Callow and the Dead King.”

That was a solid retort, I had to give him that. And all of it true, if not necessarily answering my grievance.

“I didn’t ask for Prince Gaspard in chains, or in a grave,” I said. “What I am asking for is for the First Prince to get her people in order, before my own hands become tied and I have to act on this.”

“Then the First Prince requests that you add your voice to the Red Axe standing trial before a tribunal of the Principate,” Prince Frederic reluctantly asked. “As it would send a stark warning to the House of Langevin, as well see justice done.”

Ah, and there we were. The reluctance told me this was more Cordelia than him, but nothing I’d heard about the Kingfisher Prince had let me to think he was a spineless lackey: if he was willing to pass along the request, then he at least saw the sense in it.

“So you approach me instead of the White Knight,” I said, “since I’m more likely to be willing to deal.”

It wouldn’t be impossible to sell to my side of the fence that I’d simply traded the Red Axe’s neck to Procer in exchange for concessions, if I could then distribute those concessions. And if she was still executed, then I genuinely shouldn’t get too much trouble over this. Hanno, though? Hanno wouldn’t bend the neck over this. He might be more inclined to consider if Procer goes to him with my signature already on the parchment, though , I thought, which explained with Cordelia Hasenbach was going to Below’s side of the Terms first. Unfortunately, she’d misread me on this. The Truce and Terms were to be the foundation the Liesse Accords were built on, so my bottom line wasn’t anywhere as flexible as she might have imagined.

“The White Knight has not ruled,” the Prince of Brus said. “I admire his principles a great deal, but it does everyone a disservice to pretend that his political judgement is infallible.”

“I don’t disagree with him,” I bluntly replied. “If the Red Axe doesn’t stand trial as a Named but as a criminal under Proceran law, it erodes the foundation of the Terms.”

“If Named are judged only by Named, then are two laws of the land,” Frederic Goethal said.

I took a swift step forward and struck out with the blade, pressing down on his parry when he caught it.

“Oh, don’t give me that shit,” I said. “You’re a prince of the blood, we both know that maybe in principle you get the same justice a peasant does but that’s not how the world actually works.”

“Yes,” the Kingfisher Prince agreed, to my surprise, “which is why I am wary of enshrining near as unfair a distinction into law.”

I was pushed back but slapped away his thrust with the side of my staff, losing no ground as we began circling each other again.

“You can’t regulate Named like you would other people,” I said. “It’s not like making laws about magic or dealing with fae, you’re basically dealing with wild horses – if you make the pen too small, they’ll burst out. That’s why the rules stay limited, not because more wouldn’t be a positive change. The point is to establish a foundation, a baseline that future generations can build on.”

“If Named do not answer to the same laws as even princes, not even in principle,” Prince Frederic said, “then they are by objective measure set above even royalty. That would birth an age of warlords, Queen Catherine. I do not believe Christophe de Pavanie is the kind of man who would use his strength to make himself a crown, but by would other Chosen and Damned not be tempted to seize power if they are above the laws of other men? You would make Named a kind of royalty standing above all the crowns of Calernia.”

“If I’d written that in the Accords, you’d be right,” I said. “But it isn’t there. You can hang heroes and villains alike should they break Proceran laws – so long as the law doesn’t simply outlaw being a villain. It’s the Truce and Terms that extend these protections, and those last only until the Dead King is dealt with.”

A feint with my staff, then I tried to whip at his wrist with the blade much as he’d done with me – instead he caught it with his crossguard and tried to flip my blade out of my fingers, though I withdrew before he could.

“The Terms are the predecessor to the Accords, it is openly known,” the Prince of Brus retorted. “What becomes common practice now is likely to remain regardless of what is put to ink. If Chosen and Damned refuse to enforce the parts of those treaties they mislike, those that go against what they have become used to, how are we to make them obey?”

“Force, if need be,” I said. “Even the most powerful of our kind can’t take on armies alone, much less armies backed by those Named who will respect the Accords as written.”

“What you describe is likely to lead to a civil war that would finish breaking apart Procer even should we defeat the Dead King,” Prince Frederic said. “The schemes of the Tower set our principalities tearing at themselves for decades, and now the weight of the war against Keter teaches us fresh ways to despise each other. We will not survive a third conflict, Queen Catherine, not as a single nation.”

He’d advanced and struck quickly, and at an angle where it was hard to drive him back, but I joined my staff to my sword and that forced him back a step.

“It’s a convincing speech you made,” I said, “but we both know that ultimately half of it is guesswork and predictions. If the Augur had predicted it, you’d have led with that. So we’re left to choose behind the danger I see looming, Named seeing the Terms and later the Accords as a tool for nobles to control them and so walking away, or the one you’ve described. One I can only see as avertable even should it come to pass.”

“Your reluctance is not unforeseen,” the Prince of Brus admitted. “Which is why I was asked to tell you that the First Prince is willing to sign the Liesse Accords as they currently stand should you concede in this.”

I’d been angling towards his side with my sword raised, but at his words I drew back with a start of surprise.

“Lady Dartwick left me under the impression that there were still months of negotiations left to be had,” I cautiously said.

“Yes,” Frederic Goethal said, “and on all currently contested issues, the First Prince will concede.”

Mhm. She couldn’t speak for the Dominion, though, so while this was a significant concession it didn’t end the negotiations outright. It’d still be a massive boon and one that put a lot of pressure on Levant to sign on as the terms were, or at least with minimal quibbling. And even should Hasenbach go to them in private to try to use them as proxy to continue negotiating – which I doubted, it’d be too starkly in bad faith – they were unlikely to champion points that favoured Procer without also helping them. It was damned tempting offer, which was nothing less than I should have expected coming from a diplomat of the First Prince’s skill.

“Something to consider,” I eventually replied.

There could be no serious expectation of my agreeing to this in the middle of spar, much less when I’d not spoken with Vivienne or had a recent look at the articles of the Accords still in dispute. But it was classic Hasenbach to use someone beholden to her yet on good terms with me to present her offer early, preparing the grounds before negotiations truly began – and well in advance of any rivals. Cordelia did like to win before the battles were had, when she could. I did not disapprove. Even her sort of battles could be messy and chancy things when started, no matter how well you might think the situation was in hand.

“A lot of this could be made simpler if you went out and asked for the Red Axe’s head,” I said. “Her attack could stand trial as both a breach of the Terms and Proceran laws, so we’d sidestep at least part of the troubles.”

The fair-haired prince studied me closely.

“The two of you are more similar than either cares to admit,” Prince Frederic said.

Ah. He’d gotten that speech from the other side as well, then. If Hasenbach hadn’t managed to sway him, I very much doubted I’d be the one to manage it instead.

“I’ll choose to that take that as a compliment,” I said.

“It was,” he said. “And other things as well. It is a matter a conscience, Queen Catherine. I will not ask for a death I do not believe deserved.”

His sword rose and I matched it with mine. Circling began again, my eyes lingering on his footing as he tested my defences with quick flicks. Looking for an opening to score a decisive blow and end this, I’d wager.

“That’s an interesting stand to take, considering what you’ve just said about the White Knight,” I said.

A deeper lunge, but I was low on my feet and in a swirl of my cloak obscuring my movements I pivoted and let him pass by me – though I wasn’t quick enough to catch his back as he passed. We were face to face once more before I could even mount a proper attack.

“On matters of politics, I can and will compromise,” the Kingfisher Prince calmly said. “But not on matters of integrity.”

And the thing was, I respected that. Admired it, even. But when principle got in the way of itself, a closer look usually gave away that the whole affair was really about pride. I tested his guard with a flick of my staff, found it slow and pressed on. It’d been a trap, and he tried to slide under my guard in the beat where I began to move and my bad leg slowed me, but I’d been waiting for it. Finesse wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so instead I bludgeoned at him as hard and quick a I could. It took him by surprise, enough that I drew back the staff and began to press him with both arms.

“I’ve lived most my life in the shadow of people that would use that rope to hang you twice over,” I told him, ending the sentence with a flourish of the wrist.

The strike I’d thought would bruise his shoulder was instead caught with the very end of his own blade, Name-strength compensating for the poor angle I’d forced him to parry in.

“That a principle can be used against you does not invalidate it,” Frederic Goethal fiercely said, “and decency is not made worthless for the use the indecent would make of it.”

Even with a touch of Night, the difference in strength allowed him to first force away my sword and then rip it out of my grasp. He did not get to take the opening that give him, though, as I spun around his back and elbowed him harshly. He gave ground just in time to avoid the strike of my staff, and before he could turn on me I’d retreated – bending to snatch my blade up from the sand as I did.

“If the exercise of a virtue is put to the service of evil,” I replied. “It is an accomplice to it, regardless of what else it might be.”

The fair-haired prince had begun to use his Name more liberally, though he was keeping aspects out of this much like I was refraining from using workings of Night, so I’d have to adjust. I wouldn’t be able to force my way through his guard anymore, even using both arms. Bait and flank, I decided. My staff was too long, it’d get in the way, but there were ways around that. Better wait for him to close in on me, though: my leg was beginning to throb so now was not the time to dart about.

“To put evil means in the service of good ends is still putting out evil in the world,” the Kingfisher Prince replied. “We can quibble of lesser or greater evils as we wish, but averting harm is not the same as acting morally.”

I’d turned this on him once or twice, so he came in careful. I took it as a mark of respect, coming from a swordsman of his calibre. A quick half-step forward, baiting out a strike of my staff that I gave him – he flowed into a high parry as he used his backfoot to quickly shoot forward, already trying to turn the first movement of his blade into the beginning of a strike at the side of my neck. I abandoned the staff, spinning to the side, but I’d used that on him twice now and he’d been waiting for it. A sharp strike of his elbow into my flank pushed me aside, putting me back into the trajectory of his swing if he finished the full arc. I dropped low and instead of pivoting anchored myself at a steady angle, ramming by shoulder into his chest even as he barrelled into me. He was light on his feet, though, impossibly so. Like he’d somehow turned into mist as he reversed his momentum, my shoulder hit nothing at all and I was instead forced into a damned awkward parry to cover my neck.

“Not the same at all,” I agreed. “We just disagree on which is more important.”

I saw the muscles in the prince’s arm tightening as he put his back into the clash of blades and knew that in the heartbeat that followed my guard would give. So I gave with it, using the moment where he thought he’d gotten me to finally pivot around him like I’d already tried twice. I deftly flipped my grip and thrust under my armpit, though just before the tip of my practice sword could touch the ridge of his spine I found the edge of his own against my throat, ready to slit it. He must have begun reversing his swing the moment I began moving, to match my timing, and it was with a degree of admiration I realized that meant he’d read my movements without even seeing them.

“Draw?” Prince Frederic lightly offered.

“Draws are for suckers,” I replied, and tried to trip him.

He let out a startled laugh and turned around as I tried to tackle him down into the sand, dropping his sword to try to wrestle mine out of my grasp. We dropped down in a tangle of limbs, and perhaps I did not struggle quite as much as I could have to prevent Frederic Goethal ending up on top of me, holding down one of my wrists. His blond locks were a mess, he smelled lightly of sweat and not even those puffy sleeves were enough to take away from my enjoyment of the muscles under them. It would be bad politics to fuck a prince of the blood, I reminded myself as I looked into very blue eyes, and besides we were on sand.

I couldn’t even be sure that he was interested, besides, although... I wiggled my hips under the thin pretence of struggling and got confirmation I might not be the only one finding our position startingly arousing, swallowing a pleased gasp. That knowledge did nothing to curb the temptation, especially not when I could feel his broad chest against mine and his face was so close I’d barely have to lean up to nip at his lip.

“You could have just declined to put forward charges,” I said.

The tone came out more flirtatious than I’d intended, but I wasn’t exactly biting my nails over it.

“It wouldn’t have been as interesting,” Prince Frederic replied, voice gone slightly husky.

All right, I could at least be honest enough with myself to admit that if we weren’t out in the open – or at least not in sand – I’d be flipping him over and undoing his belt right now. Shit . This, uh, might end up being something of a problem.

“Maybe I’ll take that draw, after all,” I made myself say.

Best to make this about politics again, I decide, since I didn’t usually wonder about how politics would feel between my legs. Although he was a prince, so if I wanted to get technical about it...

“Of course,” the Prince of Brus agreed.

The fair-haired man released my wrist and then the rest of me, rising to his feet and gallantly offering his hand to help me up. I took it, still much too flustered and aroused for my own good.

“I get the feeling you’re no exactly enthusiastic at the First Prince’s method of solving this,” I made myself say.

He offered me my sword by the handle, having picked the blades up while I adjusted my cloak on my shoulders. Nonchalantly, he tugged his shirt back into a semblance of order. It still fit him very nicely, I tried not to notice and promptly failed. I reined in my gaze before it could get me into any more trouble.

“I recognize the dangers she speaks of,” the Prince of Brus admitted. “But while the necessity of staying them might be clear, it does not sit well with me that we have made a woman’s life into a rag doll for half the world to pull at.”

She’s Named , I thought. We’re all rag dolls for Creation to pull at, until enough gives we’re only fit to be thrown away. The lucky ones among us got to accomplish a few things. The rest died remembered only as their killer’s stepping stone.

“So what is it you’d do instead?” I asked.

The man was an idealist, but he wasn’t a fool. He’d know that mouthing regrets at a course without offering another was just wind. The Prince of Brus considered me silently, seemingly sobered by the seriousness of the question I’d asked.

“I would begin,” Frederic Goethal finally said, “by speaking with the Red Axe.”

I clenched my fingers then unclenched them.

Well, I supposed it’d make a change from all this talking about her instead.

Chapter 29: Conviction

“The advantage of fair laws is not inherent but rather in the people’s appreciation of them. It is therefore just as useful to offer only the perception of fair laws, and easier to attain.”
– Extract from the treatise “On Rule”, author unknown (widely believed to be Prince Bastien of Arans)

I’d avoided going to speak with the Red Axe.

I’d actually even gone further than that, avoiding sending anyone I trusted to speak with her in my stead. She was in a heavily warded cell, where she would benefit from the finest care the Arsenal could offer as a full contingent of armed soldiers guarded the door day and night with orders to let no one inside. It wasn’t that I was afraid of speaking with the woman, though I suspected I’d come out of that conversation feeling like the monster that these days I so often was.

It was to prevent accusations, more or less. If she did something... strange during the trial and I’d been alone in a room with her at some point, odds were it’d end up blamed on me. One of the Woe or even just a Named I was on good terms with were likely to end up facing the same sort of accusation if they went in my stead, so I’d been cautious and ensured she was isolated instead. Aside for meals and healing, the Red Axe saw no one.

Of course, the identity of the man now accompanying me meant that I’d be able to afford taking this risk. Frederic Goethal was both one of Above’s and a prince of the blood, both things which would silence the Mirror Knight if he tried to kick up a fuss. If anything, the political inconvenience that was Prince Frederic refusing to ask for the Red Axe’s head on a pike would only lend him greater moral credence should he vouch I’d been up to nothing. Why would the Prince of Brus enable by plot what he might have easily obtained by law and patience?

In truth I could probably have arranged an interrogation earlier, but it would likely have come at the price of Christophe de Pavanie or one of his still sparse following sitting in attendance of the talk. No so great a cost, on the surface, but the opposite on closer look. It’d be implying the that Mirror Knight and his crew had the right to oversee my activities as a high officer of the Truce and Terms.

I had no intention whatsoever of making that concession, not even in so unspoken a manner.

Over the last few days, in between bouts of thinking that some viperous tongues insisted might be brooding, I’d come to wonder if the trial ahead of the Red Axe was not just another avenue for the Intercessor to damage the Truce and Terms. I couldn’t know how closely the heroine was aligned with the Bard, or even what she was truly after, but it did not take knowing either of those things to understand that the Rex Axe would be put in a room with some of the most powerful people in the Grand Alliance and allowed to speak her piece. I knew better than most how dangerous words could be if they were the right ones, spoken into the right ears. On the other hand, what else could I do but let this proceed?

If I’d let the Sinister Physician quietly dispose of her the risk would have been avoided, true, but only at the price of another, arguably worse risk. Gods, but I hated fighting the Bard. It had all the manners of unpleasantness of fighting Kairos and Akua to it, and then some nastiness all her own. I needed more information, in the end, and I now had a good opportunity to get it.

The Prince of Brus had sent for a coat before we headed out in the small nameless section where the prison cells of the Arsenal stood, conversation between us sparse as we moved. The intensity there’d been between us, down there in the sands, had cooled the further we got from them. I was not certain whether or not to be pleased by that, but the conversation I knew lay ahead of me put out any remaining embers there might have been anyway.

I was not unaware that yet another reason I’d had to avoid the Red Axe was that I’d known the necessary would become harder once I had a face and a story to match the Name. It should not be, I knew. I’d killed, both in cold blood and in the heat of battle, and this heroine was nothing to me. No one. But while the orphan girl who’d played in the streets of Laure had grown into someone else, I’d not forgotten her.

Or that she’d taken her first steps down this road slitting open the throat of a rapist, something I was now going to hang another woman for.

“It is my understanding that she travelled with Lady Archer for some time, before coming to the Arsenal,” Prince Frederic quietly said as we walked.

“Archer was the one to find her, or close enough,” I confirmed. “Her intention was to drop her off here at the Arsenal, where her talents could be tested until the White Knight could decide on which front she might best assist the war effort.”

I’d have been consulted as well before decisions were made, at which point the Wicked Enchanter would have come up and we’d have ensured those two would be as physically far from each other as possible. Distance and well-informed officers had served us well in this regard so far, and would have again if the pieces hadn’t ended up aligning in just the precise way to foster a disaster.

“Then you will be aware that there were... circumstances,” the Prince of Brus delicately said.

“I knew what the Wicked Enchanter was when he was brought into the Truce,” I replied. “Disgusting as his actions were, they were granted amnesty.”

Didn’t mean I didn’t have him marked in the back of my head for when the Truce and Terms ended, though. Under the Accords I owed the man nothing, and if heroes wanted to bury him in steel and Light the moment he resumed his old habits I would have raised a damned toast to the kill.

“I do not envy your office under the Terms,” the fair-haired man admitted. “I am glad it is held, as I’ve seen what villains can bring to bear for our side of the war, but I envy it not in the slightest. It seems like a duty that would wear away at one’s soul.”

My lips thinned. That’d cut a little too close to home for comfort.

“That’s the thing about being taught by Praesi,” I blandly said. “You learn that, for all the preaching, souls are just another commodity to bargain with.”

That killed the conversation the rest of the way to the cell.

—

The Red Axe – I did not know her real name, leaving me only this to refer to her by even in my own mind – was looking rather healthy, for a woman who’d been shot by almost two dozen crossbow bolts. Fired by my legionaries looking to kill, too, not by sloppy amateurs. There were so many bandages wrapped around her torso that even through her dull brown prisoner’s shift I could see them peek out. Though she was hardly in a state to walk around and I’d been told she still spent most of her days asleep, the heroine was not visibly feverish. There was a certain sickly pallor to her otherwise tan skin though, I judged, and her breathing was laboured. A heroic constitution and a swarm of priests had seen to an impressive recovery, though and when we entered her pale brown eyes were wide awake and unclouded.

“I’d get up if I could,” the Red Axe greeted us in accented Chantant, “but my legs will not allow.”

Even if they had, she was still shackled at her ankles. Cleverly done work with a loose enough chain she’d be able to move around some but not walk. A similar set was around her wrists, to be loosened only when she was helped to bathe once a day. She had still had the muscles arms I remembered from seeing her fresh to the infirmary, but they’d grown thinner. Even healing with Light had costs, and she’d needed a great deal of healing to pull through.

“Lady Red,” the Kingfisher Prince greeted her, offering the slightest of bows.

“Prince,” the heroine replied, grimacing.

“If I might introduce-” Prince Frederic began, but she interrupted him with a tired gesture.

“That cloak speaks,” the Red Axe said. “Well met, Black Queen.”

I did not let my frown touch my face. I’d been studying her as she spoke, but when she’d looked at me I’d not found any hostility. Was she a natural talent at obscuring her thoughts? Given that she’d come from the middle of nowhere, it seemed unlikely she would have been taught. Not impossible, though. It seemed unlike the Intercessor to linger around teaching anyone, but then I still knew depressingly little about her methods when out of my sight. There was a simpler explanation, too, but it struck me as unlikely.

“You’re looking healthy,” I said.

“Enough for the noose?” the Red Axe chuckled.

Blunt, but then when you were down in the pit there was rarely a point in pretending otherwise.

“The block’s a lot more likely,” I replied. “But there’s to be a trial first.”

“A trial ,” the brown-haired heroine said, her distaste clear. “Just get it over with, would you?”

“You have rights, Lady Red,” the Prince of Brus reminded her.

“I also cut open your neck, Prince,” the Red Axe said, tone calm. “Don’t come in here pretending that’s all forgotten. I won’t have any of that.”

“I have not forgot a moment of it, I assure you,” the Kingfisher Prince replied, tone cool.

I noticed his hand twitch, on the side of his pale neck where the scar could be seen.

“But it does not change that you have rights and protections under Terms,” Prince Frederic said.

Measuredly, the Red Axe turned to me.

“Can I renounce those, Black Queen?” she asked.

“I’m not your representative under the Terms,” I said. “That’s the White Knight, who’ll be here soon enough.”

“I remember the Archer’s speeches,” the heroine dismissed. “You did not answer my question.”

I breathed out, studying her. She did not look angry or afraid, although there was something to her expression... Impatien t, I decided. She’s impatient. Yet I found none of the despair and hopelessness I would have expected of someone actively trying to hurry along their own death.

“No,” I said. “Or I suppose it’s more accurate to say that you could, but it’d hardly matter. You agreed to the Terms before coming here and committed breaches while a signatory. What follows will not change whether or not you renounce anything.”

In principle an argument could be made that if I she signed a renunciation of her own free will before witnesses I could follow up by snapping her neck in the moment that followed without breaking the Terms, but in practice that’d just be throwing oil on an already crackling fire.

“The cogs of your bureaucracy are soaked in blood, Black Queen,” the Red Axe said, offering a hard smile.

And in her eyes then, for the first time, I found something like hate. Not for me, which had been the part that tripped me up, but for the rest. I’d done her a disservice, I thought, in thinking that she could not hate the tower without also hating its architect. Something of that must have shown on my face, as the brown-haired prisoner let out a bitter chuckle.

“Sharp,” the heroine said. “Sharp enough to cut yourself, Black Queen. Or everybody else.”

There was pain there, I thought, and hurt. But it didn’t own her, it didn’t drive her. Whatever horror it was her Named had been forged out of, it had made her hate a cold and measured thing.

“You didn’t kill the Wicked Enchanter in a red rage,” I stated. “This was deliberate, and you know exactly what it is you’re doing.”

Thinking of her as a victim or an accomplice had been dead ends from the start, I was beginning to realize. It is all objects in motion , the Intercessor had told me. This wasn’t the plot of an eldritch abomination in a woman’s shape, not really. The Red Axe hadn’t been manipulated into this. She’d wanted this, perhaps before the ever saw the Bard – if she’d ever seen her at all.

“I don’t think you’re a monster, Black Queen,” the Red Axe told me. “A bad woman, maybe, but those aren’t rare. I’ve seen a real monster, the bleakness at the heart of him, and I don’t see it in you. I don’t think the Archer could love you like she does, either, if you were like that.”

“It’s the Terms that are your enemy,” I quietly said.

“I don’t think you’re a monster,” the heroine repeated. “But your Truce and Terms? They’re the most monstrous thing I ever saw. You took in every scrap of filth this world has to offer, knowing what they were, and you’re protecting them.”

“Without the Damned, we would not be alive to have this conversation,” the Prince of Brus said.

I started, having almost forgotten his presence, and saw that same surprise on the prisoner’s face. Frederic Goethal’s silken coat had been pulled close around him as he leaned against the wall, the only overt sign of what I suspected to be discomfort.

“What was done to you...” the prince began, voice trailing off. “There is no excusing that. But the Truce and Terms are not responsible for that evil, and they are responsible for a great many saved lives.”

“What was done to me,” the Red Axe snorted. “Do you know, Black Queen? What it is he’s tiptoeing around?”

“No,” I admitted.

I had suspicions, though. Rape and torture highest among them. What sparse details we’d found of how the Wicked Enchanter had lived on the lawless outskirts of Procer had been a sickening read. The dark-eyed heroine glanced at me.

“Would it change anything, if you did?” the Red Axe asked.

I could have lied. But I was going to see her killed, one way or another, and so part of me felt like I owed her the truth.

“No,” I repeated.

To my surprise, she smiled. As if obscurely proud or pleased.

“You’re a cold hand, aren’t you?” the heroine said. “The kind ones, like Prince here, they go all soft-touched the moment rape’s even hinted at.”

“You are a tragedy, Red Axe,” I honestly said, “but hundreds of those come across my desk every day. Even a bleeding heart eventually bleeds dry.”

And, truth be told, I’d started with a lot less blood in mine than most. The jury was still out on whether or not that’d been for the best, in the greater scheme of things.

“The Wicked Enchanter was a monster,” the heroine said. “The details of it don’t matter, save that what he got he deserved a hundred times over.”

“If you’d decided to kill him the heartbeat the Truce was over, I would have looked away and covered my ears,” I said, meaning every word. “But you didn’t wait, and you took a swing at more than just the Enchanter.”

“I’m not a child, Black Queen,” the Red Axe said. “You don’t need to take me by the hand and lead me down the path to where this is headed. I knew before I ever raised my blade how this was all going to end.”

“This wasn’t justice,” Prince Frederic quietly said. “It was just blood, and many more lives might be lost because of it.”

“You’re guiltier than she is,” the Red Axe said. “She’s not supposed to be better than this, Kingfisher Prince. You are .”

“And you?” the Prince of Brus replied. “Are you not supposed to be better than this as well, Chosen?”

“I give my life for what I believe,” the heroine said. “What more is there left to squeeze out of me? I am not the one baring steel in the defense of the indefensible.”

“It is defensible,” I said. “Just not to you.”

I was not bitter of that. How could I be? No, instead some part of me wondered if this was what the Grey Pilgrim had felt like, that day he’d looked at me and called me the culmination of old sins come back to haunt Calernia. If I was the punishment of the apathy and pettiness of the west when Callow fell, then was this woman not my own for the practical brutality lying behind the ideals of the Truce and Terms? I could not be angry or bitter, no, not when this was richly deserved.

“Don’t-” she began.

“I won’t take you by the hand, like you insisted, so forgive my bluntness,” I calmly interrupted. “If we don’t extend the amnesty part of the Truce to animals like the Wicked Enchanter, we lose Named. Those who have skeletons in their closet, who’ll wonder if maybe their sins will be enough to get them the noose instead of the Truce should they come out of the woodworks. And most of those will be of mine, but there’ll be some of your end of the Book too – those on the fringe, who learned to love striking at evil just a little too much. And even more costly than the lost champions, it’d mean the reliable Named would be up north, fighting the dead, while the radicals would be down south with no one left to handle them.”

I breathed out and began to resist the urge to spit to the side before quelling that reflex and going through with it. It was not a pretty habit, but then nothing about this was pretty. It was blood on cogs, exactly like she’d accused.

“It’s an ugly truth, and bare of morality, but in the end getting you a semblance of justice would have simply cost the war effort too much ,” I said. “I’d apologize, but I knew there would be people like you when I began to head down this road. I did it anyway.”

I couldn’t fix the world, in the end. Even if I had the power to shape it as I willed, I knew my own limitations well enough to be aware I’d likely do as much harm as good. Yet the Truce and Terms, for all their occasional dip into brutality, they worked . We’d gathered nearly seventy Named now, heroes and villains and those circumstance could cast as either. Near seventy Named, pointed at the great enemy to the north. Not even the First Crusade, when all of Calernia had risen to topple Triumphant, had fielded so many of our kind. It had not been painless or bloodless and certainly not without sweat, and neither I would not pretend that the system was without flaws, but Merciless Gods it worked . If these were kinder times, I hoped I would have been kinder as well, that what I’d built would not have been so harsh.

But there were not kind times, and I could not be more than I was. It was either the Truce and Terms or rolling the dice on the annihilation of life on Calernia.

“I don’t want an apology,” the Red Axe said. “I want all these swords and oaths to be defending something worth defending. You spawned a monster that cares nothing for the past and looks hungrily at the future, Black Queen. Maybe it was the best you could, for all your famous cleverness.”

She laughed, the sound of it bleak to my ear.

“So think of me as the voice Creation uses to say that this is not good enough ,” the prisoner said. “Your Truce and Terms will break, and you’ll either do better or be cast aside.”

Just another hero, lighting a torch and declaring it wasn’t enough without ever offering another way. There was an echo of so many I’d faced in that voice, in that castigation. The Lone Swordsman, willing to make our home a wasteland so land as it was our own banner flying above it. The Grey Pilgrim, willing to choose war over peace because it wasn’t the peace he’d wanted. The Saint of Swords, eyes hard as she decided to risk the death of all Iserre rather than compromise. I’d heard this refrain before, sung by different voices or with different words.

I’d won against this many a time, and I would again.

“We’re not that special, you know,” I said. “Named. In the right place at the right time we’re able to do things that no one else could do, it’s true, but we don’t matter as much as we like to think.”

The Prince of Brus breathed out sharply. He was Alamans, and well-taught, so he grasped my meaning before the other.

“The Truce will hold,” I said. “The Terms will hold. If they were hated, if we were facing anyone else, it might be that enough wounds would kill them. But that’s not the world we live in, Red Axe. They’ll hold, if only because there are simply too many people that want them to.”

And I believed that, I genuinely did. Something fragile, without a proper foundation or results to point at? A mess like the one ahead would break it, sure as dawn, even if everyone was trying to keep things together. But I had bartered away kindness for sturdiness, and so my creation would withstand the storm. Some dangers were born of the same strength that allowed you to beat them back, weren’t they? Creation’s sense of humour had not grown any less vicious as I aged.

“You will try,” the Red Axe said, and the calm certainty in her eyes was troubling. “You will fail.”

I met her eyes, for a moment, and wondered what to say. I would give no apology, for any I might offer would be meaningless.

“It’ll be quick,” I said. “That much, at least, I can promise.”

I left, after, sensing that neither of us had anything left to say.

—

The Prince of Brus stayed in the cell after my departure and I was not in a mood to wait for him. My leg was starting to pain me again, an unhappy turn, so I ambled off towards the Alcazar and counted on my slow gait being enough to ensure he’d catch up to me if he wanted to. He did so, though after long enough I’d come to believe we would be parting ways. I half-heartedly went through the usual courtesies after he joined me.

“There was little change after your departure,” the Kingfisher Prince told me. “She tired of speaking to me quickly.”

I grunted, noncommittal.

“It is a useful conversation to have had,” I said. “I thank you for the opportunity.”

“I can take pleasure in having provided that, if not the outcome of the journey,” the fair-haired man said. “Have the Red Axe’s words informed your opinion on other matters?”

A very polite way to ask if I was more open to taking Cordelia’s offer of pushing through the Accords in exchange for ceding jurisdiction over this particular Named. Which actually seemed halfway possible, now, considering the Red Axe had tried to renounce any rights she might have under the Terms in front of a credible witness. It was a more than decent excuse to throw her at Procer, were I so inclined, though I suspected Hanno would see it otherwise. Which was why Hasenbach wanted me on her side in the first place, when it came down to it. Officially there were three crowned heads in the Grand Alliance: the First Prince of Procer, the Holy Seljun of Levant and the Queen of Callow. If she got me in on her side, not only was she securing Below’s side of the Terms but also ensuring that whoever ended up speaking for the Dominion in this would be very reluctant to side against two thirds of the alliance.

“It has,” I simply said.

He left it at that, as I’d thought he would. It’d be uncouth to try to press me for a quick answer on so delicate a matter.

“So what part of that was it that you wanted me to see, in specific?” I idly asked.

He did not look surprised, and though he did not deny what I’d said neither did he look abashed.

“It might be argued, given her enmity to the Truce and Terms, that she was never really a signatory,” the Kingfisher Prince simply said.

Ah, clever man. If she’d been an enemy from the start, then she was not under anyone’s protection. Procer would be free to have at her. It was still a relatively shaky excuse, to my eye, but before I’d met with the Red Axe I probably would have dismissed it outright. He’d read that correctly.

“To my knowledge, you never spoke with her in depth,” I said.

I’d sent him to ensure her safety during the assault on the Arsenal but fleeing clandestinely through corridors was not the time for the sort of conversation that would have allowed him a solid read on her. I’d not been made aware of any visit to her since, either, and considering my orders to the guards I would have known within a quarter hour of such an attempt at most.

“I had much time to think, while recuperating,” Prince Frederic said. “If she were Damned, I would have noticed. I have seen enough Named I am certain of this. Yet she was not, and still attacked me. There was a likely reason for that, given what I know of her past.”

Meaning he’d deduced her antipathy was towards the Terms before we ever set foot in that room. Competence was attractive, I reluctantly admitted to myself. Especially so in attractive people. My eyes narrowed as I fit another set of details together.

“That’s why you don’t want to press charges under the Terms,” I slowly said. “You don’t believe she was actually trying to kill you.”

“In a sense,” the prince said. “Regardless of whether my death was meant or not, or perhaps even hers, it was not Frederic Goethal she struck. It might have been a signatory of the Terms or a prince of the blood, but for all that she has she my blood I cannot truly consider her an enemy.”

“All three of those people you mentioned happen to live in the same body,” I drily pointed out. “I suppose they are all of a forgiving temperament.”

“I am not a saint, Queen Catherine,” Prince Frederic quietly said. “I am not pleased to have been attacked by someone I was risking life and limb to save. Yet, knowing what I know of why this came to pass, I cannot in good conscience seek her death for it. I am not blind to the nature of some of those who have been protected by the Truce and Terms, or the injustice matching the expedience of enlisting their service.”

“You’re not an officer of the Terms,” I said. “Or one of their architects. You bear no responsibility there.”

“I have chosen to uphold the Terms, to participate in them, and so bear a personal responsibility,” the prince replied, shaking his head.

It was torturous chain of logic, as far as I was concerned, but not entirely senseless. A little to labyrinthine, though, for the amount of passion he’d been speaking with all this time. I suspected that under all the talk of conscience and responsibility, the truth was that Frederic Goethal’s heroic hindbrain believed the Red Axe was at least a little right bout all this. That would make it an utterly repulsive notion to him to ask for her death, even when it might be convenient. Perhaps even more because it’d be convenient, I mused. Where he’d be standing, it was that sort of liberties taken with justice that would have started this mess in the first place.

“I’ve already given my opinion of this,” I said. “I doubt you’ve forgotten it.”

“It would not dare, Your Majesty,” the blue-eyed man said, a tad ruefully.

We’d gotten into the Alcazar as we talked without my even noticing, nearer to the heart of the section than my rooms but not all that far. That sudden realization had me closing my mouth, eyeing the pretty prince from the side. It wouldn’t even be particularly suspect, I thought, to invite him into my rooms. Which were warded. Private. The kind of place where I’d be able to take my time peeling him out of those clothes and get at the much more interesting body beneath them. I’d not said anything, but the Prince of Brus caught the corner of my gaze and his steps stuttered for the barest fraction of a moment. Without a word being spoken either side, my blood quickened again. It wasn’t a very good idea, I reminded myself

It might turn out to be a thoroughly enjoyable idea, though.

I glanced at his face and found a conflict I suspected might not be too different in nature from mine. There were quite a few temptations I considered myself apt in dealing with, more than most at least, but this sort of thing wasn’t one of them. I saw movement form the corner of my eye, dark robes and a long stride, and to my relief and dismay – more dismay than relief, honesty compelled me to admit – I found Hierophant headed towards us with intent too obvious to be mistaken.

“It appears I have other claims on my time,” I said.

“I can only look forward to our next meeting then, my queen,” Prince Frederic replied.

Without my being entirely sure how it happened, I found my hand being kissed as smoldering blue eyes looked up at me. Fuck , I thought even as he retreated. All right, so I was probably going to end up sleeping with Frederic Goethal. I just needed to be smart in going about it, and maybe not do it too much. I could probably handle that. I wasn’t looking for anything serious and he was headed back to Twilight’s Pass before long anyway, so really you might even say I was being responsible about this.

“Catherine?” Masego said, interrupting my thoughts.

“Zeze?” I replied.

“Is there a particular reason you are looking at this man?”

I pondered that for a moment.

“None you’d enjoy hearing about,” I honestly replied. “I take it you’re looking for me?”

It was only then I took a longer look at him, and noticed how visibly exhausted he was. Physically, anyway. There was a fervour burning in him I’d long learned to recognize as him reaching a particularly interesting stretch if his research.

“I was,” Masego said, then lowered his voice. “I did it, Catherine.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“Did what?”

“I found the crown of Autumn,” Hierophant grinned.

Chapter 30: Quarters

“Admittedly, it was my fault for not specifying the flying fortress had to be able to fly in directions other than up. Oh, it can fly down as well? Splendid. Guards, drag the Lord Warlock beneath my fortress. It’d be a shame not to use it at least once.”
– Dread Emperor Inimical, the Miser

“Walk me through it,” I said, then added, “metaphorically speaking.”

Masego’s mouth snapped shut. His quarters were larger than I’d expected, but I was rather familiar with the way it got filled from our years together. It was unusual, by Wasteland standards. Given how sorcery tended to come with some degree of wealth and influence, at least in Praes, the rooms of most mages I’d seen tended to be tasteful and well-furnished. Many even had a corner set aside to receive guests and a few impressive-looking magical trinkets to impress the uninitiated. Research or actual practice of sorcery would take place not there but in workshops and mage towers, behind heavy wards and away from the prying eyes of rivals. Masego, on the other hand, had never seen sorcery as something he practiced . He was a mage first and foremost, even without his magic, so in his mind there was nothing to separate his living quarters from a workshop. Our surroundings made that exceedingly clear.

Where my own quarters in the Arsenal had a parlour to entertain guests, he instead had a neat and well-organized library whose shelves went from floor to ceiling. A comfortable scribing desk – I’d actually seen cushions like this one’s on Alcazar furniture and the red didn’t match the wood, so Indrani had probably stolen it – with enough leg room for him to sit reading without feeling cramped was the only concession to this being somewhere actually lived in. The same couldn’t be said of the larger room deeper in, where I found the mixture of lazy chaos and almost rigid orderliness to be a nostalgic sight: like his tents out on campaign, or his rooms in Laure. While dirty clothes, plates with half-eaten meals on them and the blade cleaning kit Hakram had gifted Indrani a few years back had been strewn around without a care, it actually only served to contrast with the parts Zeze did care to keep clean.

Like a long table with half a dozen leather-bound manuscripts, the sole open one revealing Masego’s finicky calligraphy in ink, also boasting several reference books I dimly recognized from my continuing lessons on sorcery with Akua. All were laden with bookmarks, though none more so than the heavy tome titled Metaphysics of Realms from some ancient Warlock by the name of Olowe. Stacked scrolls and carefully folded parchments along with a nice leather armchair told me this was likely where Zeze sat to work, and there was not a single crumb or speck of dust on that table to be found. Another nook looked like a small alchemy lab, another like an enchanting table and yet another was covered in glass domes constraining pulsing luminous mushrooms. Experiments, I rather hoped. Around those islands of order even the wood shavings from the wooden carvings Indrani had carelessly sown around everywhere else seemed reluctant to enter.

I wouldn’t but it above Masego to have warded them.

The large bed in the corner, which evidently neither he nor Indrani had bothered to make, seemed to have been placed there almost like an afterthought – fitted in there after the important stuff had been, half-heartedly wedged in where there was still room. My suspicions that he might have forgot to put actual furniture in there at first were deepened by the way the dressers were on opposite sides of the room and the closet was awkwardly close to a cupboard opening the opposite way. It went from suspicion to standing assumption when I noticed that the small table where they ate meals – by the amount of dirty plates – was clearly Archer’s work by the look of the carvings. Zeze was not particularly fond of tapestries, so I assumed the few hung on the walls were there at Indrani’s addition, but the sheer amount of magelights and candles was all him. Beautiful and elaborate carpets clearly from the Wasteland – no one wove those quite like the Taghreb – added a splash of colour that livened up the room into a place where it might actually be pleasant to live.

Yet it was a small room behind all this where we stood, though, behind a steel door warded tightly so none of the influences from the other parts of his quarters could drift in and contaminate the workings. Here the walls were bare stone and even the tables and chairs polished granite, with only his work on the Quartered Seasons breaking up the stony monotony. Half a dozen copper boxes with glass lids and water held in crystal spheres – an improvement on the traditional scrying bowl, though significantly more fragile – revealed shifting colourful shapes from places beyond Creation, while on the left wall a great slate covered in markings and formulas depicting the secrets that the Hierophant had successfully teased out of the Pattern. I’d been invited so sit on one of the granite chairs but instead elected to stand at his side, looking at the slate.

I gestured for Hierophant to begin, and with sharp nod he moved closer to the slate. He found a corner of it without writing, then paused and turned towards me. With his full body not, just his eyes, which got my attention.

“I will begin by noting that the Hunted Magician’s information was the definitive factor in this success,” Masego said.

My brow rose. I’d suspected that it’d be useful stuff, but this was much stronger praise than I’d anticipated. Hierophant was in no way shy about claiming intellectual successes when he believed himself their author, and to this day still utterly disinterested with politics, so if he was talking up the Magician then every word spoken was true.

“I hear he’s come across some trouble under the Terms?” Masego continued.

“He worked with the Bard, among other things,” I said. “I’m not eager to press for an execution, given his uses, but letting him off with a slap on the wrist isn’t in the cards.”

“I’ve little interest in those matters,” Masego admitted. “But since you told me he gave what he knew as part of an arrangement for leniency, I’ll specify that his information saved me possibly literal years of work. I was looking in entirely the wrong places.”

That’d weigh on the scales, though less than Zeze might expect. The way I saw it, the Hunted Magician couldn’t be allowed to buy his way out of consequences no matter what he offered up. All that he floated us and ended up panning out, though, should be put together as a case for why certain punishments should be sought instead of others.

“I’ll pass that along to his tribunal,” I said. “And I might need you to put it in writing at some point.”

He nodded.

“Duly noted.”

From the look on his face, he was already tossing the entire matter into the pile of things he felt no particular need to remember. To my eye it was still an improvement that he’d bothered to speak to the subject at all instead of simply assuming I’d handle it, so if anything I was rather pleased.

“The crux of the matter is a question that concerns one of the few commendable books on sorcery to come out of the Principate, Madeline de Jolicoeur’s work ‘ Essences of the Fey’ ,” Masego said, charmingly taken by his subject.

He drew a small circle on the slate, his long fingers deft. It was always heartwarming to see him genuinely in his element. I frowned a heartbeat later, though.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that name before,” I told him.

Where? Obviously it was from Proceran history, but my studies of that had been rather skewed. I’d focused on the major wars and turning points, along with Cordelia Hasenbach’s rise and reign. Considering the sheer size of the Principate, even though the state hadn’t even existed for half the time Callow had that still meant a staggering number of things would have slipped through the cracks of my learning.

“I believe she was also known by her contemporaries as the Fey Enchantress,” Masego said.

Ah, her . Leave it to Zeze to primarily remember the villainess that’d taken over most of Cantal and Iserre only to fail at toppling Salia and the Highest Assembly for her apparently impressive magical research.

“Lady Madeline was part fae herself, and familiar with the Courts of Arcadia, which eventually led her to ask the question of what happens when fae are killed,” Masego said. “Her work was the first to suggest that fae cannot truly die, and that the changing of the seasons is the mechanism through which the Courts renew themselves.”

“So fae don’t die,” I said. “You told me that several times in the past, and I’ve seen the proof of it myself. What’s useful about this?”

“When the physical body of a fae is slain, they are not destroyed,” Masego said. “We know their essence continues to exist, as it will be spun anew into another fae come the changing of seasons. Where, then, does that essence go ?”

Huh. I’d not considered that, actually. Fairies didn’t have souls, so it wasn’t like they’d pass into beyond and then be resurrected when they were needed by their endless cycle again.

“It could lapse back to the crown of their respective court,” I eventually said. “Some fae are dukes one cycle and princes another, so we know there’s a variance in power to some extent. It might be the ‘crown’ is a system for apportioning that power into different fae.”

Masego turned burning eyes towards me, noticeable even under the eyecloth.

“Akua has been very good for you,” he seriously said.

Words to make half of Callow faint in rage, but I decided to let him finish his thought before settling on a reaction.

“You’ve always been clever,” Zeze continued, “but now your instincts are grounded in knowledge. I am glad she has been tutoring you, even if your closeness makes Vivienne unhappy.”

“More than just Vivienne,” I reminded him, and left it at that.

He shrugged, unconcerned with the broader ramifications. Most days I wished I could be as well, given how much simpler it’d make my life.

“A return to the crown was my first theory as well,” Hierophant told me. “Which led to the creation of the copper eyes. Through a process you are not educated enough to understand even if I explain, I created power that would behave similarly to Spring or Autumn and released it in different places with the aim of tracing it back to the crowns.”

This part I’d known about, though not the reasoning behind it. The ‘copper eyes’, the scrying boxes in the room with us, were meant to follow the power he was releasing into the wilds and so find the location of the crowns. They were linked to measuring devices that’d been put out in different layers of Creation and adjoining realms, with great difficulty, but for all the trouble last I’d heard that avenue had proved to be something of a dead end.

“It didn’t work, though,” I said.

“It worked perfectly,” Masego contradicted. “It simply found nothing. My theory when facing those results was that I was simply not releasing the power in the correct places, which was not improbable given the size of Arcadia alone – much less the full spectrum of the search.”

“So what changed?” I asked.

“To understand that, first consider a more recent theory introduced by my own father,” Masego said, drawing a second circle on the slate. “Namely, that all of Arcadia – even the fae themselves – are of the same fundamental matter, with the differences between a stone and a duchess being essentially cosmetic. Father suggested that fae cannot truly die not because of an effective immortality of essence, but instead because they are not truly alive.”

He spoke of Warlock with a tinge of wistfulness, but the grief had visibly faded. I wasn’t too surprised. When the Dead King wasn’t riding in the back of his head, Masego actually tended deal with his emotions better than most of the Woe. I set that aside and considered his actual words instead, the theory the Sovereign of the Red Skies had put forward. I wasn’t quite sure I bought it, not after some of the things I’d seen.

“If the fae were entirely self-contained in their story cycles, I’d agree with that,” I noted. “But that theory doesn’t explain Larat.”

Who had walked away from kingship Twilight and become something else. If fae were not more thinking than a trebuchet or a water wheel, merely more complex, how could his actions be explained?

“A fascinating contradiction,” Masego warmly agreed. “Are Larat and your former Wild Hunt then the first fae to have ever lived, or by virtue of living do they cease being fae at all?”

“Which links to Quartered Seasons how?” I asked.

“It doesn’t,” Hierophant replied without missing a beat. “I simply find it a gripping mystery.”

I, uh, should have seen that coming. Honestly it was a sign of how engaged he was with this subject that he’d only ended up going down a side path the once.

“Returning to the theoretical framework,” Masego happily said, “if we believe both Lady Madeline and Father we are led to a particular state of affairs. Fae are not destroyed when their body is slain, return cyclically, and are not fundamentally distinguishable from the rest of Arcadia.”

My eyes narrowed.

“A return to the earth,” I said. “That’s what you’re getting at. Like Arcadia itself is a pool of water, and when they ‘die’ the water just returns to the pool.”

“ Precisely ,” Hierophant grinned. “From there I draw not on the work of others but on my own, if you’ll forgive the intellectual vanity.”

“I’ll magnanimously deign to do so,” I replied.

He eyed me sideways, knowing there’d been sarcasm in that sentence but with little interest in deciphering where and why. He still drew a third circle, below and in between the first two.

“My own Quartered Seasons theory was built on the back of the two older theories I’ve introduced you to,” Masego said. “Madeline de Jolicoeur suggested that the changing of seasons was a way for the courts to renew themselves, but I would venture to go further. The existence of the seasons themselves is a mechanism for that very purpose, allowing a set of two seasons to be active while the other two become ambient and begin condensing into their coming shape. Your own vision, Catherine, made it clear that the transitions between seasons were not instantaneous. Given Arcadia’s otherwise loose accord with creational laws, there must be a mechanical reason for this to be so.”

“You’re losing me,” I admitted. “I thought that your theory was about the separation between a court’s ‘crown’ and its ‘power’.”

“It is,” Masego said. “Think of Arcadia as the pool of water you mentioned.”

He drew a large circle in the centre of the space.

“Each Court is, for lack of a better term, a smaller pond that will be filled through a canal at regular intervals.”

His hand moved again, depicting four lines leading out of the large circle and leading into four smaller circles.

“All power is limited,” Hierophant stated, idly filling in the large circle with ‘water’. “I believe that, for reasons of stability and coherence, only two ponds can ever be safely filled from the pool’s water. That leaves two ponds’ worth of power returned to ambient Arcadia, slowly shaping themselves into the coming seasons. If all four ponds are filled...”

“The pool would be empty,” I frowned. “And so Arcadia would grow thin. That seems dangerous.”

“It would be, which is why I believe a deeper mechanism ensures that only two ponds can be full at a time,” Masego said. “The decay in victory of Winter or Summer until they become Spring and Autumn, which you saw in vision, would be the visible part of that mechanism in action.”

“So the water is the power, that I get,” I said. “That still leaves out the crowns.”

He nodded, pleased, and methodically drew little crowns above each of the four smaller circles, the ‘ponds’.

“The crowns are, in effect, simply the shape of the pond the water is poured into,” Masego said. “Given the cosmic scope of these ‘waters’, however, this had still made them godheads in every meaningful sense.”

I watched the slate board, fingers clenching an unclenching. He’d not kept talking, which meant he’d given me the rules of this as he knew them. It also meant that I might be able to figure it out, at least in part. It was a sloppy habit to have all this explained to me all the time, one that might come back to bite me in the future, so I forced myself to think.

“When the King of Winter and the Queen of Summer wed,” I said, “neither of them lost their crown. They didn’t stop being royalty, just became the royalty of something new.”

“Correct,” Masego said.

He drew a line through two of the found crowns. On opposite ends of the pool, as Hierophant was nothing if not precise even in his doodles.

“But I know they didn’t get to keep the power of Winter, because I got my hands on it,” I said. “And then Sve Noc ate it, to stabilize the Night into something that won’t destroy their entire species if it collapses.”

He drew a line through one of ponds already bereft of a crown.

“I am still uncertain whether the lack of corresponding crown to go with the power you inherited is what kept you largely sane or was instead the very reason for your troubles with principle alienation,” Masego admitted. “Regardless, it is undoubtedly why you were only ever able to command but the barest fraction of that power.”

“If your ‘deeper mechanism’ was working right, when the newborn Court of Arcadia Resplendent was formed there would have been two ponds back in the pool,” I slowly said. “The power of Spring and Autumn.”

His lips quirked. I’d underestimated how much and how long he’d been wanting to talk to someone about this, I thought. The secrecy meant neither of us had brought in even the Woe fully, though Hakram knew some things and no doubt Indrani had gone looking through everybody’s papers as was her wont. Masego drew lines through two ponds, the same who still had their crowns.

“Given that in this state their very purpose is to be shaped anew for a coming cycle, it would explain the ease by which this unprecedented Court of Arcadia Resplendent was formed,” Masego agreed. “And we look at two crowns’ worth of control for two ponds’ worth of power, which would lead to a highly stable arrangement explaining why we’ve not heard of collapse in Arcadia since.”

“Winter’s power went into Night,” I said. “Which means it has to be Summer that went into Twilight, it’s the only pond of power that was still free. Except we had no call on that power, Zeze.”

“We did not,” Hierophant agreed. “Yet you struck a bargain with the Prince of Nightfall, who did.”

What I’d promised him was seven mortal crowns and one, though, and while we’d undeniably both been at war with Summer at the time neither of us had held a right to its power. Although hadn’t the imprisoned Princess of High Noon gone spare when I’d told her about the bargain with Larat? She must have seen something looming on the horizon even that far back.

“I can’t see how we got our hands on it, even then,” I admitted.

“Though I cannot be certain, I believe it to have been a matter of blind mechanics having worked to our advantaged,” Masego said. “Larat was fae, and so his ritualized apotheosis called to power of a fae nature. It made the water go down the canal, so speak, and there was only one pond’s worth of water left to flow.”

“And the seven crowns and one?” I asked.

“When trying to force such a powerful mechanism to work, some manner of power must be spent,” Hierophant suggested. “It is telling that the same fae who escaped the foundation of united Arcadia asked for this specific bounty, among all those that could be asked.”

That many crowns would have a weight to them, undeniably. Was that what the Princess of High Noon had seen and panicked about? Not necessarily that Larat would eventually use up the very stuff of Summer, I doubted even fae could be that farsighted, but that he was aiming to make a Court of his own. It fit, I had to admit. If there was a recipe to make a Court, it made sense that royalty on both sides of the fence would be at least vaguely aware of it.

“So that leaves the crowns of Spring and Autumn up for grabs, like we thought,” I said. “Where were they, that the Hunted Magician was able to help you – wait, actually, what about the fae we fought here in the Arsenal?”

My brow knotted. I’d almost forgotten those, but they were a stick in the wheel of what had been explained to me so far.

“They were Autumn,” I said. “There shouldn’t be an Autumn left, Masego, by your theory.”

“The answer to this was obtained by Roland, though unknowingly on his part,” Hierophant said. “He captured alive one of the fae, whose physical body it turns out we’ve destroyed before. The Duke of Green Orchards, who was slain in Dormer, though he now goes by Count of Green Apples.”

So I’d not been wrong, I thought, when I’d noticed an eerie similarity.

“I saw him,” I admitted. “Noticed his face. So you’re saying all those fae that attacked the Arsenal are, what, salvaged corpses?”

“Those entities whose bodies were slain can never be made anew with a new Winter or Summer, as there will never again be either of these,” Masego said. “That leaves them existing, yet purposeless. Some must have bound themselves to the crown of Autumn to acquire that purpose. There will be some of other natures, kept into existence by outside ties like contracts or debts, but I imagine much of the roster will be those killed in the Arcadian Campaign. For all those that anchored themselves to Autumn or Spring, I expect ten times as many went wild and are now partaking of sundry powers on Creation or elsewhere to sustain their existence.”

The Prince of Falling Leaves, then would have continued existing because of the Hunted Magician’s unpaid debt. That had a sharp little irony to it I could not help but find amusing – that man really was prone to shooting himself in the foot, wasn’t he? Actually, now that I was considering this, was my pact for the crowns with the Prince of Nightfall what’d allowed him not to become one of the subject princes of Arcadia in the first place? Larat , I thought with reluctant admiration. You cleverest of foxes.

“So fae fell through the cracks of our mess and now suckle at whatever they can find, including Autumn,” I summarized.

That sounded like it’d be an issue in the long term, fae loose in the world and grown hungry, but right now we had more pressing cats to skin. And it was now occurring to me that if the dead fae from my old campaign were excluded from the newborn Court that’d followed it, then most of Winter and Summer’s royalty had been removed. The very same kind of entities that might be rivals for whoever sat the newborn thrones.

Somewhere, I suspected, the creature that had once been the King of Winter was smiling.

“More or less,” Masego agreed. “And to answer the question you never finished asking, what the Hunted Magician provided was not exactly a location. There is, if you’ll forgive the metaphor, no buried treasure to unearth. That was what he clarified for me, that I could not find a crown because in a very real sense it does not currently exist. What he gave us is a set of circumstances that will coalesce the crown of Autumn into being. More specifically, a ritual to be used in a particular place and alignment.”

“So when you said you found the crown of Autumn,” I leadingly said.

“An artistic flourish,” Masego proudly said. “I have merely confirmed the ritual will function and located an appropriate ritual site and date.”

I let out a noise of appreciation.

“Well done,” I said. “What kind of a timeline are we looking at?”

Considering how much about the fae had to do with seasons, I’d guess somewhere around a year. Maybe the autumn solstice or something else along those lines.

“Thirty-one days,” Hierophant said.

I blinked in surprise, lapsing into a stunned silence.

“I could make the attempt tomorrow,” Masego said, misinterpreting the reason for my quiet, “but to both travel and prepare for the ritual over so small a span would significantly increase the chances of failure.”

“That...” I began, almost at a loss for words. “That changes things. The location, the resources you need, it’s all set?”

“I’ll have to significantly empty the Arsenal reserves of gems and precious metals as well as require of the services of at least two hundred mages – three hundred would be more comfortable, it would allow for replacements and adjustments – but in principle all needed is at hand,” Masego said.

Noticing my surprise, he smiled.

“You have helped create one of the grandest magical sites of learning and magic on Calernia, Catherine,” he said. “Do not then be surprised that it serves that purpose with distinction.”

I coughed, slightly embarrassed.

“The ritual site itself will be familiar to you, as the Princes’ Graveyard was fought near it,” he continued.

“The Mavian prayers on the hill?” I asked.

“Indeed,” Masego said. “There are other locations with perhaps more precise alignments, but this one benefits from being the seat of a permanent Twilight gate. The logistical benefits are obvious.”

I could definitely believe that tumulus would work as a ritual site, at least. I still remembered walking the tall raised stones and feeling the echoes of long-faded might, the call they’d made to the last wisps of fae power in me.

“The ritual could fail,” I said.

“All rituals can fail,” Masego pointed out.

“Allow me to rephrase that,” I said. “If the ritual fails, what are the consequences?”

“The ritual site will be obliterated, a significant portion of the mages involved will die or go mad, the fabric of Creation on a regional scale will be weakened for several centuries,” Hierophant calmly listed.

My fingers clenched. That was not negligible losses.

“The Twilight gate?” I made myself ask.

“Three in five odds of withstanding the damages and keeping full functionality,” Masego said. “No chance of destruction, or that partial functionality will not remain. We did not craft a fragile artefact, Catherine.”

Considering the sheer amount of Night we’d wielded that day and the way he’d come into an aspect halfway through, I was not inclined to doubt him.

“Odds of success?” I pressed.

“Tomorrow, perhaps one in five,” Hierophant mused. “Likely a little less. By my suggested timeline, I’d say somewhere between seven and eight in ten. Closer to eight, by my calculations.”

“If we wait longer can you bump that up?” I asked.

He frowned, staying silent for a long moment.

“With another two months, perhaps a little over eight,” Masego finally said. “With a full contingent of Wasteland mages and a month to teach them we could near nine in ten, though I believe that Dread Empress Malicia might be disinclined to lend us these.”

By the tone of his voice, that was very petty of her. I suppressed a smile. Indeed, how dare international politics and all these wars get in the way of one of the great magical feats of the century?

“I’m currently inclined to wait the three months and get all the sureties we can,” I said. “But I’ll discuss it with our allies, since Quartered Seasons is starting to become a genuine war asset.”

If nothing else, having this kind of a tool in our pocket would greatly strengthen the case of those commanders among the Grand Alliance who favoured the defensive strategy to this war. Princess Rozala and Prince Otto Reitzenberg had been arguing from the start that so long as we held our defensible borders, time would be on our side – either because of the amount of Named we’d accrue, or because the Arsenal would eventually produce a weapon capable of turning around the war on a strategic scale. The crown of Autumn might just qualify, since while it had no real use against field armies it could potentially allow us to deal with Neshamah himself. Not destroy him, mind you, that’d been what the Severance was for, but neutering him as a threat was more important than outright destruction.

“Assuming you successfully coalesce the crown,” I said, “will it be a physical artefact?”

Masego nodded.

“One not unlike the crown of Twilight when it was formed,” he said. “Though the strength of the godhead is in the concept and not the material.”

“And once we have the physical artefact,” I said, “you can begin shaping it.”

“I’ve had the appropriate workshop for the work built in the Arsenal for some time, though it is currently sealed,” Hierophant said. “It is difficult to estimate how long it would take me to shape the godhead, as even the Dead King’s work in Keter bears only passing similarities for me to draw on. It is safe to assume at least several months.”

I hummed. We wouldn’t need the crown to take back Hainaut, anyhow, which in my opinion was a prerequisite to taking a swing at Keter itself. We simply couldn’t afford to thin land defences against his armies the way we’d need to in order to make a serious crack at the Crown of the Dead, the risk of collapse was too high. Pushing Keter back beyond the lakes would allow us to dig in, though, and muster the armies properly for an assault on the Hidden Horror’s capital next spring or summer.

“We can afford that,” I said. “Especially if it wins us the war, which it will if we can make him lose control over the undead.”

That was, after all, what lay at the very heart of Quartered Seasons. Something like the Severance, an offensive artefact, it could be resisted. Which was why we wouldn’t be attacking the Dead King, we’d be giving him the crown – not in a way he could refuse, but still as a gift of godhead. That’d slip right through the overwhelming majority of his defences, by Masego’s reckoning, and Hierophant had spent most of the year with Neshamah riding in the back of his head. He knew the Dead King, understood him in ways most of us could only dimly grasp. The trick was that we wouldn’t just be tossing him the crown of Autumn, Hierophant would be shaping it first. It had to remain powerful, or it’d wiggle out of the groove of being a gift, but we’d get to choose what power was given. And what strictures accompanied it, of course, because the mantle of godhood could hardly come without costs.

I was more than comfortable making the Dead King physically indestructible if that power came at the expense of, say, his ability to command the dead .

I jolted myself out of my thoughts, since there still remained a question I’d forgotten to ask.

“Spring’s crown will still be out there,” I said. “That strikes me as a dangerous thing to leave simply lying around.”

Not the highest priority, but given my personal role in shattering the old order of Arcadia it’d be irresponsible to simply hide my head in the sand when it came to Spring.

“I agree,” Hierophant calmly said. “And since me might not have need of it for the war efforts, I’ve been considering how else it might be used.”

My lips thinned. I knew where that was headed. It wasn’t like Masego had ever made it a secret that he still intended on apotheosis, though he’d set those pursuits aside temporarily in deference to the horrors currently trying to sweep over the continent.

“I’m not sure I have the pull to allow you to get your hands on that,” I admitted. “Not after that mess in Iserre before the peace. I’ve been having trouble with heroes as well, so to be frank your pursuing godhood might end up the proverbial match in the munitions warehouse.”

“I believe that power is even less in your hands that you know, Catherine,” Hierophant said. “I attempted to narrow down possible ritual locations for Spring’s crown, so that I might test them for essence resonance, but out of the five locations I scried three repelled my spell.”

I breathed in sharply. While Masego might not currently have direct access to the Observatory, arguably the finest scrying facility in existence bar none, he was still one of the finest living practitioners of that art and sitting on a treasure trove of resources. There weren’t a lot of people, of defences, that could just repel him.

“The Dead King?” I asked, tone gone grim.

If Neshamah got his hands on a godhead, he’d make anything we might make out of one look like child’s play.

“No,” Masego sad, shaking his head. “On the third attempt I was ready for the opposition and salvaged a glimpse before my scrying sphere was shattered. I’ll show you.”

Walking over to one of the granite tables, as I watched he opened a compartment and took out what appeared to be a small sphere of silver glittering with sorcery. His aspect pulsed and he wrested it out, weaving for my eyes an illusion. The background was unclear, though I thought a tall streak of grey might be stone and the muddled green perhaps a field, but the forefront was crisp. A tall, slender and inhuman shape turned and watched with too-large eyes. It did not move, but the spell broke less that a heartbeat later. Silence held the room for a moment before I let out a long sigh.

That, unfortunately, had been an elf.

Chapter 31: Pursuits

“The man who sleeps with virtue finds the bed has no room for a third.”
– Proceran saying

“ Fuck ,” I said.

Ever eloquent in times of trouble, that was me.

“I thought that might be your reaction,” Masego noted.

I closed my eyes. Was there anything we could do about this? I wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of the elves getting their paws on the crown of Spring, assuming they hadn’t already. On the other hand, I couldn’t think of anything the Grand Alliance needed less right now than picking a fight with a power as strong as the Golden Bloom. I didn’t know anywhere near enough to be sure what to think about this. What did they want the crown for, how important was it to them? A decision on that scale couldn’t be made without at least a solid guess at the answers to those questions, and it wouldn’t be made by me alone anyway.

“Right,” I said, opening my eyes. “I need you to keep digging into this, Hierophant. It’s higher priority than Quartered Seasons, as least for the next few days.”

The ritual wouldn’t be happening anytime soon anyway: I doubted the First Prince would accept even the slightest unnecessary risk to the countryside of Procer. Not when the timeline to stacking the odds in our favour as much as possible was perfectly acceptable from a strategic view.

“There are limits to what I can accomplish,” Masego said.

“I want you to find out if they already have the Spring crown,” I said. “And at least check on the ritual sites, to guess at how much force they’ve actually deployed out there.”

Likely on Proceran territory, too, not that elves tended to be particularly concerned with any borders save their own. But of I was going to have to break it to Cordelia Hasenbach that the Forever King had sent agents into the Principate, I’d prefer to at least like to have some estimates to offer her about how many of those there were.

“The latter I can assure, if not the former,” Zeze said, pushing back one of his elaborate braids. “They’re likely to resist my probing attempts, however.”

The implied question there was, in essence, about how insistent he was allowed to be in the face of that resistance.

“Don’t harm anyone,” I said. “Try to avoid damage, if you can, and whatever you do avoid starting a fight. Other than that, you’re free to use whatever means you want.”

“It ought to be an interesting intellectual exercise, at least,” Masego mused. “The nature of their defences is unique, which will force a degree of unorthodoxy to my approach.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” I said, meaning every word.

I cleared my throat, after, hesitant to speak what I wanted to say.

“I don’t need to tell you to stay safe, do I?” I eventually asked.

He smiled.

“I’ll take precautions, Catherine, there is no need to worry,” Masego said.

“We might have other ways to get to that information,” I reminded him. “You, on the other hand, can’t be replaced.”

“I am fond of you as well, Cat,” the blind man easily replied. “Now do be off. I’ll not have you hovering about as I work, your presence alone is enough to disturb all my precision instruments.”

Probably true, though that didn’t mean that he wasn’t just itching to get me out of here just so he could get started on the latest challenging task I’d presented him.

“Take care, Zeze,” I quietly said.

To my surprise he placed a hand on my shoulder, if only fleetingly.

“And you as well,” Masego seriously said. “Hakram is wounded but you are not alone. We are here if you need us.”

I breathed out, since I was a grown woman and getting moist eyes over something this simple would be a little shameful. I left before another burst of that disarming earnestness could scrape me even more raw, returning to the cold halls of the Arsenal and the ever-increasing amount of troubles awaiting me.

—

When I went to relieve Indrani from her watch over Hakram’s bedside it was past Noon Bell, so I returned her earlier kindness and brought a meal with me.

Pork with garlic sauce, a loaf of brown bread and a large saucer of some strange mix of oil, vinegar and olives. They were all Arlesite staples, the mixture in the saucer meant for the bread to be dipped in, and I’d grabbed a pair of apples to round the meal out. Archer was carefully carving an arrow when I entered, eyes on the wood and the knife in her hand carefully precise. Back in Callow this sort of work tended to be done out of logs with an eye to making many and quickly, but Indrani was rather more discerning with her own arrows: she picked the branches herself, when she could, and saw to their carving personally. Considering the rarity of some of the woods she used, that was only to be expected. She tended to treat mass-made arrows with the same disdain Masego reserved for massed Legion sorcery, and for much the same reasons.

“I get to be served by a queen,” Indrani bragged, even as I began unpacking the meal. “How many people can boast that, I wonder?”

Out of petty spite, I left her half of the meal on the table and only arranged mine on a plate. I offered her a pretty smile.

“Not you, for one,” I sweetly said, and sat down with plate.

Huh, I’d been skeptical about the oil and vinegar but it was actually pretty good. Made the brown bread better than butter would have, for sure, and while I wouldn’t trust Procerans to make a halfway decent stew they were admittedly good at roasts like the pork one.

“You’re a terrible friend,” Indrani complained, rising to her feet.

“You taught me well,” I agreed.

She helped herself to her meal with a snort, the two of us settling comfortably in our seats. We were both hungry enough that conversation waited until we’d polished off our meals, though even as I tore into the pork I found my eyes drifting to Hakram’s unconscious body. I missed him even more sharply now that I needed advice. Him and Akua, I was forced to admit, as I’d come to rely on the two of them quite a bit in Hainaut. Bringing Akua Sahelian into the Arsenal would have been ill-advised, though, and not just because it’d strip the Hainaut front of its sole high calibre spellcaster – it’d been as much the number of heroes awaiting here and the rulers I’d be meeting as the strategic considerations that’d guided my decision.

“You look glum again,” Indrani said, licking the garlic sauce off her fingers.

“Quartered Seasons had a major breakthrough,” I admitted. “But it’s also looking very likely that the elves are trying for a fae crown.”

She let out a lot whistle.

“A nasty people, the elves,” Archer opined. “They never came after Ranger while I was in Refuge, but about a decade earlier a few of the Emerald Swords tried to ambush her in Bayeux.”

The Emerald Swords, huh? Hadn’t ever really given those any thought, to be honest. Their strength was quite literally legend, though there were rumoured to be no more than ten. Each was supposed to be worth a small army, the Forever King’s blunt instruments in eradicating what he could not stand. They supposedly rarely left the Golden Bloom, like most elves.

“I don’t know what they want the crown for, but it worries me,” I admitted.

“Also irks you something fierce, I’d wager,” Indrani smiled. “They’re scavenging power they had no hand in laying low.”

I did not answer, looking away. She wasn’t wrong. That the Forever King thought he could sit out the war against the Dead King and use the chaos to go grabbing mantles of power while we were busy fighting for Calernia’s survival was not endearing the man to me. If the elves had played a role in the end of the old Courts of Arcadia I would have kept my mouth shut, but they were just being opportunistic vultures.

“We can’t afford to push the Golden Bloom too far,” I reluctantly said. “They could make keeping what we still hold in Hainaut a nightmare with little effort and if they send out the Emerald Swords we’d have to pull our best fighting Named from the fronts to be able to handle them.”

“I figure the prick out in the Bloom thinks the same, Cat,” Indrani said. “Remember, the Dead King made their king’s son into a Revenant that you put down at Third Liesse. There’s no love there, and the elves have to know that if the screw with the Alliance too much they’re helping along ‘Ol Bones.”

“They’re elves, Indrani,” I said. “Their take on foreign policy is shooting even the birds that come within a mile of their forest. I’m not saying they’re idiots, but I’m honestly not convinced the Forever King wouldn’t be in favour of a few million uppity humans being eaten before the Hidden Horror is driven back.”

“They haven’t brought their lands back into Creation, so maybe you’re right,” Archer said. “Mind you, there’s at least one upside to that.”

My brow rose questioningly. I couldn’t really see one, to be honest. The Grand Alliance had neither the leverage nor the strength to spare to do anything about this, while just letting it happen seemed like a mistake.

“Might be Duchess Kegan won’t be so eager for Daoine to go independent, when she hears about this,” Indrani said. “Elves were bad enough on their own, but elves with a godhead? I don’t care how large the Watch gets, it’ll be like fielding as shield wall of goblins against a pack of ogres.”

I mulled on that a moment, even as I chewed on the bread. The Deoraithe were masters of defensive and irregular warfare, but as a rule they tended to be weaker on the offence. Restraint and their isolationist streak had still earned them an impressive military reputation, but the era where a duchy’s army could stand up to those of the greater powers of Calernia was coming to an end. The Conquest had proved that massed mages and siege engines combined with heavy infantry could crush armies in the mould of the Old Kingdom’s, and the rest of Calernia hadn’t lain asleep in the decades that followed. Procer had fielded large units of priests and mages with its field armies during the Tenth Crusade, a significant departure from their old way of making war, and the years of fighting against Keter were further refining their methods.

Even the Dominion was starting to change its doctrine, using its limited numbers of Lanterns and Binders to crack open enemy lines much in the same way that the Legions of Terror used scorpions and goblin munitions.

That was the death knell of Daoine’s military relevance, whether Duchess Kegan realized it or not. Putting together the Army of Callow had taught me how damned expensive an army of that kind was to raise and keep in fighting fit, and it simply wasn’t a financial burden that the Duchy of Daoine’s revenues was capable of supporting. The Watch were devils on the field, and arguably some of the finest foot on Calernia, but you couldn’t win a war with them. House Iarsmai’s historical military prudence was, at least in part, flowing from that realization. The issue was that, when everybody’s military doctrine was done with its growing pains in twenty years, the Watch wouldn’t even allow Daoine to win battles . Throw in that the enemy whose destruction was at the heart of their culture might raise its ruler to a form of lesser godhood, and Indrani could very well be correct.

The Grand Duchy of Daoine might just find the world outside a lot colder than expected, after leaving the Kingdom of Callow’s protective embrace.

“If we can keep Daoine in the fold I won’t complain,” I said. “Though that should be Vivienne’s situation to handle, in the end.”

If we weren’t all dead, by then I was likely to have abdicated. Besides, if Vivienne could begin her reign with the diplomatic feather in her cap of having kept the Deoraithe part of the kingdom she’d have an easier run of things going forward. I’d taught the last remains of Callowan nobility the dangers of trying to go against a popular queen backed by a powerful royal army.

“She seems to have a handle on things so far,” Indrani shrugged. “And if we win against the Hidden Horror, it’ll be a long time before the shine of that wears off. Hells, we might actually get a few decades of peace.”

I was not nearly so optimistic. Too many parts of Calernia had only heard of the Dead King without ever catching sight of his armies or his monsters. The League of Free Cities hadn’t even bothered to stop warring against itself as thousands of soldiers from an large coalition died to hold the defences to the north, and Praes was knee-deep in a civil war being prosecuted at what I could only call a languid pace. The rulers who’d seen the worst of the war would come out of it reluctant to war against those who’d been their comrades in the face of annihilation, but that’d only go so far. One of my hopes was that the construction of Cardinal would sap interest in resuming old skirmishes, given the many opportunities it represented, and that the city-state’s territory would serve to settle at least some of the people whose lives had been upended by the wars.

“We’ll see,” I replied. “Even the peace years ought to be quite a ride, after a war like this one.”

The afternoon passed slowly, after that, as the two of us sat and talked. Several messengers came to find me over the following bell, as I’d made it clear that the infirmary would be where I stayed, but there was nothing truly urgent to see to. Some concerns about the current tonnage of water that my rank obligated the stewards to inform me about, then a bold request for funding by a Proceran mage that I sent to Roland after skimming and finding the idea worth investigation. The closest thing to a crisis came an hour before Evening Bell, when I was informed that someone had been caught trying to enter one of the restricted zones of the Arsenal. It turned out to be a young couple trying to sneak off for a tryst, and I was informed they were very apologetic when they learned they’d triggered an alarm ward in their attempt to find a dark corner.

Their pays were docked, and in a fit of mercy I spared the two men the necessity of having to explain themselves to me in person. I sent written note warning that a repetition of the mistake would see them suspected of espionage, which should have them thinking twice about where they sneaking off.

“You’re enjoying this,” Indrani accused, afterwards.

My lips twitched treacherous.

“It’s been a long time since I was asked to weigh in on things so...” I trailed off.

“Easy?” she suggested.

“Straightforward,” I corrected. “The lower stakes are a relief.”

The knowledge that the worse I courted if I made a mistake was passing embarrassment instead of the usual lives lost by the hundred. I enjoyed the calm all the more for the knowledge it was soon to come to an end. While the Arsenal might be its own little hermit kingdom, isolated from much that went on beyond its walls, the broader world was coming towards it. Tomorrow would bring the First Prince and the White Knight, and with them a great many troubles that for now still seemed on the horizon. The Painted Knife was nearing, too, and the envoys of the Titanomachy. Any of those visits would have been an event, but all of them in swift succession promised to be more of a circus. While I lost myself in thought, Indrani groaned and rose to her feet.

“Headed somewhere?” I asked.

“Having supper with Masego,” she said. “You’re welcome to come along but I’ll be carving and he’ll be reading.”

“When you put it like that, how could I resist,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Go on, have fun.”

It left a strange taste in my mouth to say that. It wasn’t jealousy, it’d essentially be the same as getting jealous Vivienne was having dinner with Hakram, but it was... odd. The ease she’d said that with, the way she’d not needed to check he’d be there or even just inclined to have dinner with her – all those things spoke of a habit. It wasn’t the first time they were doing it, and they’d been doing it for long enough they considered it a given it’d happen. It was oddly domestic, given who they were. I waved out Indrani, and idly wondered if perhaps I was a little jealous after all. Not of either of them, but perhaps of what they had. It’d been a long time since I’d had that level of intimacy with someone.

Not since Kilian.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted that, and I knew I simply didn’t have the time to afford something like it these days. Yet the easy way that Indrani had displayed a sort of intimacy I’d have not believed her capable of when we first met had me uneasy. My friends were changing and making lives for themselves while I swung my sword at the world trying to make it a little more like I wanted. My eyes moved to Hakram’s, his chest rising and falling in steady rhythm as the spell took care of keeping his lungs going. Sometimes the changes weren’t for the best. A knock on the door – too respectful to be Archer’s – caught my attention and I invited in the messenger. A report from the captain of the garrison, I noted with a raised brow, and one that bore his official seal.

I cracked it open and as I scanned the lines I had to forcefully keep my fingers from clenching. The Mirror Knight had tried to enter the Red Axe’s cell, insisting even when the guards refused to let him in. It’d come close to violence before he walked away. I folded the parchment, ignoring the messenger’s nervous gaze. Someone had informed Christophe de Pavanie that I’d gone to speak with the Red Axe with Prince Frederic, I decided. This was not a coincidence. It also meant the Mirror Knight had friends within these walls that were willing to stretch the bounds of propriety to help him. I put away the parchment and dismissed the messenger without sending an answer to the report. I’d been warned of the incident, and since it’d not come to violence for now there was little I could do.

Not, that wasn’t true. There were more than a few things I could do, but there was nothing I should do. At this point, overreaching would be dangerous. Restraint now could be used later to make the point to the White Knight that I’d tried patience only to find it ever more stringently tested.

Restless at the inaction, I rose to my feet and after patting Hakram’s shoulder took to the halls. I had no precise destination in mind, though that parchment was burning a hole in pocket. I’d not been the only one to go to speak with the Red Axe, I considered. Maybe I should mention this to the Prince of Brus as well. I’d already been headed vaguely in the direction of the Alcazar, anyway. Halfway there I forced myself to admit that I wasn’t going there to tell him about that report, or at least not only that. It’d do me no good to pretend otherwise. There were risks, although it wouldn’t be difficult to weave an illusion around myself that’d ensure I wasn’t seen going there. And if I was going to do this, which the way my teeth were worrying at my lip were telling me I was, then now would be the time. Before Hasenbach got here and the Arsenal was swarmed with guards and watching eyes.

I felt myself reach for the Night, beginning to weave an illusion, and admitted to myself I’d already made my choice.

I made sure to be seen returning to my rooms before backtracking under veil of Night, remembering the way to the Prince of Brus’ quarters well enough from the last time I’d visited. If I’d been a few years younger I might have hesitated before knocking on the door, but in that sense Indrani had been good for me. A few moments passed and I felt a little like a fool. He might not be there at all, given that it was not so late. Perhaps it might be better if I left. Then the door was cracked open and Frederic Goethal curiously looked out, blue eyes slightly widening in surprise as he saw me. His blond locks were slightly dishevelled, and above the belt he wore only a loosely buttoned white cotton shirt that did nothing to hide the kind of muscles that came only from a warrior’s life.

“May I come in?” I asked, doing nothing at all to hide the way I was looking at him.

Frederic of Brus’s eyes darkened with something that I was rather looking forward to seeing unleashed.

“Please do,” he replied.

The door closed hurriedly behind me and I came closer, noting he was just tall enough I had to lean up to kiss him. His hand found my hip, but it was my lips that found his in a soft, tentative kiss as I tiptoed upwards. A brief thing, and I withdrew to find his eyes still closed.

“You’ll do,” I decided, pushing him back against the wall.

There was nothing tentative at all about what followed.

—

I woke up not long past Midnight Bell, pleasurably spent and sweaty. Frederic, still deliciously naked under the twisted-up sheets, was still asleep at my side. It’d be a mistake to spend the night, given the risk of being seen, so reluctantly I wriggled out of his embrace and sat up on the bed. It was enough to wake him and he stretched out in a way that pleasantly captured my interest for a few moments. Getting my hands on his body had done nothing to damper my appreciation for it. Much the opposite, as it happened.

“Restless or leaving?” he asked, voice still husky from sleep.

“Leaving,” I said. “As soon as I can find my clothes, anyway.”

Where they’d ended up had not been a priority around the time I was taking them off.

“How soon you dispose of me,” Frederic teased. “Did I disappoint?”

“I was vocal enough with my opinion you shouldn’t need to fish for compliments,” I drily said.

“One enjoys hearing those anyway,” he grinned.

It’d been a while since I’d been with a man, but I’d definitely enjoyed returning to that brand of diversion. Thinking of it was enough to stir my interest again.

“Considering you’re Alamans, I expect I won’t have to mention that this is best kept under wraps,” I said.

He looked rather amused.

“This is hardly my first tryst, though it has certainly been a... vividly memorable one,” Frederic said, sitting up in the bed as well. “I understand that some passions are meant to remain discreet. I’ll not moon after you like a green boy either, if that is your worry.”

“I’d tolerate a bit of mooning,” I grinned. “It’d be rather flattering. But only a bit.”

“I’ll see what I can arrange,” he quietly laughed.

It really was shame it’d be genuinely terrible politics for even the suspicion of an affair between us to fall on either, I mused. I’d have thoroughly enjoyed more than one visit to this bed. Safer to cut this after one night, though, I knew. I’d taken risks enough already. On the other hand, I mused as I tossed aside the sheets and pushed him back against the headboard and got on top of him, the night wasn’t quite over yet.

“One more for the road,” I suggested.

The gasp that followed was not one of disagreement.

—

The following day, the First Prince and her escort arrived several hours before the White Knight and still Hanno set foot in the Arsenal before Cordelia Hasenbach.

With the wards back in order scrying relays to Creation had been established again, so the Procerans had known in advance that we’d had not only a fae incursion but several demons running loose not so long ago. Considering that the First Prince would be a great deal easier to kill than Hanno and the that magnitude of the political crisis that’d followed would be... significant, I’d not been offended when her personal guards had not taken me to my word when I’d told them the Arsenal was secure. A company of mages and soldiers had swept through the attainted areas with a fine comb, though I doubted that any mundane mage out of the Principate would able to catch something that the likes of Masego or Roland hadn’t.

While I debated heading to the Arcadian waystation where the First Prince was awaiting the word to go on ahead from her people, I ultimately decided against it. Hasenbach liked her ceremony, and I might as well ensure I had her in as pleasant a mood as I could before the negotiations started. There was precious little of what I wanted to discuss with her that could be spoken about in such a public place, anyway. To my disappointment I learned that Vivienne would only be arriving tomorrow, having been slowed on the march by sudden rains that’d flooded the roads, but I’d lived without seeing her for several months already. A day more or less wouldn’t make much of a difference.

Besides, I kept busy: while security was an issue for Hasenbach the White Knight breezed right past her after a few greetings and proceeded straight into the Arsenal. I dragged Archer with me to watch my back, leaving as a lookout as I limped my way down a long set of stairs. The White Knight came out of the translocation ritual in the same wide room where the Mirror Knight had nearly drawn on me less than a week ago, a single mage in Arsenal livery at his side. Hanno looked tired, eyes pulled tight, and was leading his horse by the reins. He’d ridden hard, I decided, after hearing about the attack. Even odds he’d even ridden through the night on the last stretch, for him to be visibly tired: it wasn’t something that came easy, in Named of his calibre.

“Black Queen,” he greeted me.

“White Knight,” I replied. “I’m pleased you came quickly.”

“I can only wish I’d been there when the attack happened,” Hanno frankly said. “None of the affairs that kept me from travelling with you were even near important enough, seen in retrospective.”

“Hindsight’s no cure for bad luck,” I shrugged.

A sharp whistle sounded from the heights above, a sign from Archer we were about to have company. Indrani wouldn’t have bothered for guards or diplomats, which meant Named.

“I’d wager that’s my latest headache trudging towards us,” I said. “I tried my hand at handling it and failed, White Knight, so it’ll be yours to deal with.”

Hanno’s brow rose.

“I thank you for your assistance,” he said, turning to offer the mage a smile.

She blushed, much to my amusement, and replied by espousing the virtues of duty before scurrying away. However nicely phrased, it’d very much been a dismissal. I eyed him speculatively. Heroes tended to be popular with women – and men, when so inclined – but I’d never know him to keep company. I didn’t believe him to be like Masego, disinclined towards the act, but neither did I believe him so discreet he would have been able to keep a bedmate quiet.

“I received some interesting missives from the First Prince, when I passed by a scrying relay yesterday,” Hanno said. “Including a subtle but rather firm request that I take Christophe of Pavanie ‘in hand’. I’ve rarely known you to be in such swift accord with Cordelia Hasenbach, Catherine.”

Well now, wasn’t that interesting? Frederic hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said that the First Prince saw the Mirror Knight as a potential threat because of his closeness – and occasional nakedness – with the House of Langevin. If she was willing to start putting pressure on the White Knight to intervene before he’d even gotten to the Arsenal, then she was serious about curbing dear Christophe. While I’d only extend so much trust to Cordelia over much of anything, I was rather pleased at the notion that for once she might be entirely on my side – if largely for her own reasons.

“He still has the sword, and now he’s making demands,” I grunted.

“I’ve never known him to be prone to overstepping, only clumsy in expressing himself,” the White Knight calmly said. “As for the Severance, while it should be temporarily returned to the Arsenal I can see no better wielder for it.”

I could think of several, including the very man speaking to me. Those two had shared a front in Cleves, I recalled, before the Salian Peace and Callow joining the Grand Alliance. There might be a degree of trust there, the sort earned in battle. It didn’t worry me overmuch, in truth, considering that Hanno was remarkably clear-eyed when it came to most things. Still, a warning was in order.

“Be careful with him,” I said. “I don’t think you’ll find him all that pliable.”

“Pliable is something a lord wants in a vassal,” Hanno said. “I am not one, nor he the other. All I need of him is reason and a willing ear, neither of which he’s ever failed to offer.”

Our little chat was interrupted by armoured boots on stone as the Mirror Knight, in full armour and with the Severance at his hip, briskly began to make his way down the stairs. Looking rather uncomfortable and noticeably unarmed, the Blade of Mercy followed behind him. Christophe de Pavanie’s green gaze was distinctly unfriendly as he took in my presence, though it stopped short of a glare and he began to pointedly ignore my presence. The boy at his side looked away from me when I glanced.

“White Knight,” the Mirror Knight began the moment his boots reached the bottom of the stairs. “Your presence gladdens me.”

A long moment of silence followed when Hanno did not reply. The White Knight eventually cocked his head to the side.

“I had assumed,” Hanno slowly said, “that you were not done in your greetings. Was I incorrect?”

Huh. I threw him an appreciative glance for that even as Christophe’s cheeks reddened.

“Wouldn’t be the first lack of manners from him,” I idly said. “I doubt it’ll be the last. We’ll speak later, White Knight.”

“Until later then, Queen Catherine,” Hanno replied with a slight bow.

I began to limp away, without further ado, and though the Mirror Knight began to say something that might have been a belated greeting I did not turn to hear it or bother to lend an ear. I was almost hoping he tried to pull something of the sort in front of Proceran diplomats, who’d be genuinely appalled at the sight. They were known to be polite to even people they despised, after all. Archer was awaiting at the top of the stairs, leaning against a wall. She’d kept the room below in sight the whole time, taking her duty of watching my back just as seriously in this place as she had in the tunnels of the Everdark. Different dangers here, perhaps, but barely fewer.

“So?” I asked as she pushed off.

“They were hurrying,” Indrani said. “So they weren’t just coming to greet Shiny Boots, I’d bet.”

That soured the pleasant mood the night’s exertions had left me in, even after this little interlude. They’d hurried because they’d heard I myself was there to receive Hanno, then. For them to have been forewarned, it meant they had more friends in the Arsenal than I’d hoped they would have. Not necessarily Named, as the Mirror Knight’s slaying of no less than seven demons had earned him a great deal of admiration with soldiers and mages from the rank and file, but I wouldn’t dismiss the notion outright either.

“With Hasenbach joining us tonight the number of soldiers in here will swell,” I said. “We’ll be able to spare some for more private duties. Reach out to Lieutenant Inger, Archer. I require some eyes.”

With the First Prince’s arrival, I finally had a pretext to meddle with the garrison without raising an eyebrow – given that Hasenbach would have a soldier escort of her own, it’d raise no eyebrows if I arranged one for myself out of garrison troops. I didn’t intend to use mine guarding doors, though. I wanted to know who the Mirror Knight would speak with, and when. It would be imprudent to begin acting on anything before making sure how much support he had, exactly.

“I’ll take care of it,” Indrani said, pushing off the wall. “While you were down there a messenger came by for you, though. I took the message for you.”

She fished out of her coat a small folded parchment, handing it over.

“And what’s inside?” I asked.

Neither of us bothered to pretend she wouldn’t have opened that without the slightest hint of hesitation.

“The First Prince of Procer is inviting you to dinner,” Indrani said, waggling her eyebrows lasciviously.

Considering I could no longer claim to have never slept with Proceran royalty, answering that insinuation with even mock indignation would have, uh, weaker foundation than I might be used to.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose I’m about due to have an exquisite meal spoiled by politics.”

Chapter 32: Convened

“Let priests offer forgiveness before the hanging, a queen can only afford it after.”
– Queen Yolanda of Callow, the Wicked (known as ‘the Stern’ in contemporary histories)

I found out, to my mild surprise, that there were not one but three private dining rooms in the Alcazar. I’d not even been aware that were any, though it made sense upon refection: it was the part of the Arsenal meant to host important guests, essentially the facility’s diplomatic quarters. In my experience a great deal of diplomacy was had over meals and drinks, compared to the great formal conferences I’d envisioned as a girl. One of the two smaller rooms was where the First Prince of Procer received me, having brought her own private cooks to prepare the meal in the Arsenal kitchens. I appreciate the restraint of not having gone for the formal banquet hall, which was large enough that any meal taken there would bring with it a tiring amount of pageantry.

Instead we sat in an elegant and comfortable dining room whose walls were covered by panels of painted wood that I vaguely remembered being donated by the recently ascended Princess of Cantal. Lovely work with a touch of warmth to it. It was a pleasant departure from the bare stone that was so prevalent everywhere in the Arsenal. The meal itself was of the quality I’d come to expect from Cordelia Hasenbach’s personal cooks, which was to say both delicious and almost unnecessarily elaborate. Four services, each with a paired cup of wine – I noticed she drank on sparsely from hers – and ranging from some sort of potage whose ingredients came from a garden first planted by the founder of the Principate to a roasted bird that ate only enchanted seeds and was illegal for anyone but royalty to eat in most of Procer.

Unlike me, it seemed that Hasenbach had something of a sweet tooth. Though she’d eaten with measured grace throughout the meal, she dug into the fourth and final serving of a strawberry-topped custard tart sprinkled with slivers of marzipan with discreet enthusiasm. I ate enough of mine to be polite but found myself much more interested in the bottle of wine that’d been provided to me: Vale summer wine. Slightly cooled in a chillbox, as was the custom this side of the Whitecaps, it proved a pleasurable way to end the finest meal I’d had in a long time.

“I suppose it would be unpatriotic of me to admit I’m growing fond of Proceran cuisine,” I mused.

“I will refrain from spreading it around,” the First Prince drily replied.

I’d actually put on a dress for once, given that any fighting taking place tonight was unlikely to involved swords. One the downsides to being known as a soldier queen was that there was a expectation I’d show up to everything looking like I was fit for battle, something that was rarely compatible with the sort of cotton summer dress I remained fond of wearing. Not that I could put on one of those when meeting with the likes of Cordelia Hasenbach, sadly. The Arsenal was too cold anyway. Instead I’d put on a long-sleeved dress in black velvet, discreetly embroidered with my heraldry in silver thread on the sides. I’d not bothered with jewelry aside from a set of intricate silver bracelets set with grey agates I’d received as a diplomatic gift from Hasenbach herself a year or two back.

My own small preparations were, naturally, nothing compared to the spectacle that was the First Prince of Procer receiving foreign royalty. The intricate brocade dress in gold and pale she must have been helped into – it was too tightly fitted to her frame for it to be anything but laced in the back – ended in long skirts that matched the length of the light ermine-collared cloak in the same colours she wore over the dress. A long, slender golden necklace set with sapphires reached well below her throat and over the cloak, calling attention to the narrowness of her waist by contrast. A clever trick of perspective, that, helped along by the way the skirts expanded swiftly outwards. It made her look like slender girl instead of the woman with the Lycaonese warrior frame she actually was. The cape hid the broad shoulders too, I’d noticed, which was a recurring pattern with her.

Still, with the all the intricate layers and the way for once her long golden locks had been allowed to tumble down her back – in a very careful and artistic pretence of – carelessly I felt like you might be able to fit two of me in her.

“Much appreciated,” I drawled. “So, if it’s not too indiscreet to ask, how was it that you learned my favourite wine? I cannot help but feel deeply amused the prospect the famous Circle of Thorns going digging for that.”

“It was learned by happenstance during the Liesse Rebellion,” the First Prince idly replied, polishing off the last of her dessert. “A certain Hasan Qara used smugglers with which the Circle has ties to obtain a large enough quantity of the vintage that questions were raised.”

I breathed out slowly, startled by the way the grief had jumped out at me. It’d been some time since I’d last thought of Ratface. Who’d trusted me and followed me, only to die by an assassin’s blade on the night that Malicia had ensured that this could only end with one of us dead.

“I seem to have given offence,” Cordelia softly said. “My apologies.”

I mastered myself and waved it away.

“He was a good friend,” I said. “He died during the Night of Knives and I miss him still.”

The First Prince slowly nodded.

“If not for Agnes’ foresight and the protection it affords, I would have lost much of my family to the Tower’s assassins over the years,” the fair-haired Lycaonese said. “I can only offer my sympathies for your loss.”

I wasn’t sure if she was simply that polished a speaker or if she genuinely meant it, but it made no difference. Ratface’s corpse had been given a Legion funeral, in Laure, and one day I would settle his last accounts on his behalf. I could offer no more than that, though it would still be too small a thing for all that he’d freely given.

“We’ll lose more before this is over,” I simply said. “Tears are best kept for when the swords return to the sheath.”

“A sentiment my people are more than passingly fond of,” Cordelia said, faintly rueful.

Our conversation paused as an attendant came to take her empty plate, another bringing in an elegant porcelain teapot to replace it. The First Prince gestured for the woman to pour and she filled a cup with a dark tea fragrant enough I caught the scent from my seat – it was distinctly bitter, as Hasenbach seemed to prefer her brews. The attendants withdrew again after one filled my half-empty glass anew, leaving behind the bottle. Within moments we were alone in the room, and the tension began to rise. After the meal and the idle talk that’d accompanied it, we would finally be getting at the meat of why she’d wanted this meeting.

“We have a great deal to discuss, Queen Catherine,” the First Prince said. “This was true before I left Salia, and circumstance has since added to the heap of troubles ahead of us.”

“The Prince of Brus conveyed your opinions and offer to me,” I carefully said. “Yet I would take council with Lady Dartwick before speaking more to the subject.”

Hasenbach lightly sipped at her tea, never making a sound.

“Jurisdiction over the Red Axe is one matter,” she said. “The Mirror Knight and his involvement with the House of Langevin are another. Yet even further abroad we are not without ill news.”

I frowned.

“Mercantis?” I asked.

Vivienne had recently warned me the situation there was bad and about to get worse, mentioning that we’d speak more of it in person, but I’d not believed it to have gotten to the point of ‘ill news’. The Secretariat had warned me even earlier of going ons there as well, through Secretary Nestor, but they’d been vague and I was not in the habit of flinching from shadows. I’d been skeptical then and remained skeptical now. The City of Bought and Sold might have gained some leverage over the Grand Alliance by its merchant lords and banks becoming the foremost lenders to the war effort, but they had to be aware that there were limits to how much they could push that. Given that most of the mercenary armies they relied on for protection were either six feet deep or under contract, these days, they were also rather vulnerable to directly expressed displeasure.

Also known as violence.

“There is a limit to the papers I can provide you on the matter,” Cordelia said, surprisingly forthright, “as they contain privileged information on the Principate’s capacities of production and trade. I will have what I can sent to your quarters, however, and I would myself convey the conclusions of my staff if you have no objection.”

I hid my surprise. This was a lot more serious than I’d expected.

“Please do,” I replied.

“To summarize, unprecedented burdens and the interruption of near all our usual trade routes have effectively ended Procer’s ability to sustain itself without outside help,” Cordelia Hasenbach said. “Conscription and the previous drains on our treasuries are shaping what would have been a dire crisis into a risk of outright collapse.”

Coming from the woman ruling what was still the most powerful nation on the surface of Calernia, that was stark thing to hear.

“You should still be able to trade with Callow and Levant,” I pointed out.

It wasn’t that I doubted her, but rather more that I was surprised. I’d been reading the treasury reports for the Grand Alliance assiduously, and though there’d been dips they’d never been long-lasting. I’d believed we were staying afloat, if not necessarily by much.

“The profits to be found there are smaller than those our merchants are accustomed to,” the First Prince delicately replied.

Meaning the Kingdom of Callow and the Dominion of Levant, the two allies who’d not closed their doors to Proceran traders, were simply too poor for their trade to sustain Procer. That, I grimly thought, actually sounded about right. I’d been shocked at the wealth of even minor cities in the heartlands of the Principate for a reason.

“And within your own borders the trade is failing,” I said, cocking an eyebrow.

“Prices have gone up for nearly all goods,” Cordelia said. “To protect their own tradesmen and prevent other principalities form buying up their reserves, princes have been raising increasingly stiff tariffs.”

Which was reasonable enough, I thought, but with an eye on the Principate as a whole it must be crippling. Maybe Procer at its peak could withstand every principality becoming as an island and cutting off trading ties, but it wasn’t at its peak right now. Whole swaths of it had been ravaged by Black during his ill-fated march, the north had been turned into a series of ravaged war fronts and there was a mass of displaced refugees to care for in the heartlands. All those were drains that Procer simply wouldn’t be able to sustain if all its principalities were closed-off and trying for subsistence instead of prosperity.

“Prince Frederic mentioned confiscations, when we discussed the state of affairs in Procer in passing,” I slowly said. “How bad is it really?”

“They have become common practice even south of Lange, now,” the blue-eyed princess replied. “If princes attempted to keep to their war quotas without resorting to them, nearly two thirds of the Principate would begin toppling into bankruptcy.”

Oh fuck . That was... Hells, we were scraping through at rough cost and with only a little hope in the distance right now, but that was with the full weight of the Principate of Procer behind us. If it collapsed behind us the Dead King wouldn’t even need to crack our defence lines: we simply wouldn’t be able to field and feed large enough armies to keep him back. At that point we’d be forced to retreat, otherwise we were just feeding him well-armed corpses to march south with.

“But the Mercantis loans are keeping you afloat,” I said.

“It is not sustainable in the long term,” the First Prince said. “We will need increasingly larger loans to remain standing where we are the longer this continues. Yet you are correct, at the moment the coin from Mercantis had allowed us to ward off the spiral downwards.”

I drank deep of my cup, barely even enjoying the taste of my favourite wine.

“Are they aware of that?” I asked.

Meaning, was awareness of the not negligible leverage this represented the reason they were pushing us now?

“I am uncertain,” Cordelia said. “Given the unfortunate amount of success the Eyes of the Empire have had in infiltrating the Principate, however, I believe that on the other hand Dread Empress Malicia is .”

Of course she godsdamned was. This wasn’t the kind of knowledge she was just going to sit on either. Considering that she couldn’t really spare military forces to stir up trouble at the moment, the possibility of going for the Grand Alliance’s moneybags using her preferred weapons of knives and influence was the kind of opportunity she’d dig into with relish.

“For a woman fighting a civil war she’s remaining unpleasantly active abroad,” I growled.

The First Prince sipped at her tea.

“Lady Dartwick informed me that our... friend out east warned the Tower will soon take action in Mercantis,” Cordelia said.

Yeah, she’d told me that as well. Our friend out east, huh. My lips twitched. A pretty little euphemism, that, used to refer to Dread Empress Sepulchral. I’d known her as High Lady Abreha Mirembe of Aksum back in the day, though our acquaintance had only been middling – I’d strong-armed her into backing the creating of the Ruling Council of Callow using her nephew as leverage, but we’d not really crossed paths since. She’d risen to prominence in the years that followed mostly by virtue of ruling one of the few High Seats whose holdings had not been touched by civil war or foreign incursions. She’d failed to ride the wave of discontent against Malicia that’d welled up after the destruction of Thalassina all the way to the Tower, but against all expectations her eventual rebellion had not been brutally snuffed out by loyalist legions.

The two empresses past the Wasaliti were still grappling even now, and though Malicia’s position was the stronger Sepulchral’s own was in no immediate danger of collapse.

“I’d count that as good information,” I said. “Malicia scoring victories against foes abroad will strengthen her position with the nobles, so it’s in Sepulchral’s interests to see her thwarted.”

“You had some involvement with Sepulchral when she was still High Lady of Aksum, as I understand it,” the First Prince said. “Did you form an opinion of her?”

“Her nephew’s the one I had the most dealings with, and he was a follower of the Diabolist with waning ties to his aunt,” I cautioned. “But Abreha Mirembe...”

Black had considered her one of the most dangerous nobles in the Empire, considering the amount of blood she’d shed to claim Aksum, but it was not my father’s opinion being sought.

“In a lot of ways, she’s emblematic of Wasteland upper nobility as a whole,” I eventually said. “Cunning, even brilliant in some regards, but also appallingly callous. Abreha Mirembe does not have ideals – or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that her ideal is the acquisition of power no matter the costs.”

“The Circle judged her to be hard and opportunistic even by Praesi standards,” Cordelia shared.

“Praesi in her rarefied circle of nobility are expected to exalt cruelty in the same way that your princes are expected to show off their piety,” I frankly said. “That she not only survived but outright thrived in that environment should tell you a lot about her. She can be relied on to slide a knife into Malicia’s back every chance she gets, but not much else.”

We’d strayed from our original discussion Mercantis, though, so I subtly changed the subject back to it.

“Mercantis,” I said. “I doubt you would have brought it up to me without having some sort of a solution in mind.”

The First Prince drank from her cup, taking her time, and set it down so delicately I barely heard the clink of porcelain on porcelain.

“Diplomacy will not be enough to settle that matter,” Cordelia Hasenbach said. “It is unfortunate, but no less true for it.”

My brow rose. Well now, that was bold of her. And a far cry from her usual methods.

“I can’t commit my troops still in Callow to an attack on the city,” I warned. “Even if I could afford the vulnerability to Praes that’d bring, only a fool would try an assault on Mercantis without a proper fleet.”

Which the Kingdom of Callow did not have. In theory it might be possible to requisition river barges and fishing boats up the Hwaerte until there were enough floating rafts to manage a crossing with, but considering that Mercantis had a small but professional fleet of dedicated warships trying that would just be pissing away an army at the bottom of the Great Lake.

“Nothing quite so significant is required,” the fair-haired princess replied. “A few Chosen and Damned, however, would make the point felt quite clearly.”

I grimaced. It’d be less of a headache trying to shake a few of those free than trying to shuffle around troops, admittedly, but it’d still be a headache. The real issue was that at least one of those Named would need to have a reputation as a genuine threat to something the size of a city-state if they were to serve as a potable warning against overreach. We had few Named of that calibre, and they were best used up north on the fronts. Pulling one off for what someone unaware of the nuances might think to just be petty politics would not be popular, aside from the actual martial considerations in pulling out such a war asset.

“I could reach out to the Kingdom Under,” I suggested.

Mercantis was under their protection, and the dwarves had a vested interest in the Grand Alliance continuing to make a dent in the forces of the Dead King.

“If the King Under the Mountains can be convinced to intervene, it will have a significant impact,” Cordelia agreed. “Yet the dwarves have traditionally been reluctant to involve themselves in such matters.”

Which was probably why she’d not opened by requesting I try that – she didn’t believe the Kingdom Under would actually move even if asked. She might not be wrong, since they were a pretty mercenary people and they didn’t exactly owe me any favours at the moment. Those had been spent keeping the drow fed on their exodus, amongst other things. Might as well find out, though, there wasn’t much to lose in asking.

“I’ll draft a letter,” I said, drumming my fingers against the table.

“Thank you,” she smiled. “While I would ask you to consider the practicalities of sending Chosen to Mercantis, such a measure would yet be distant. I have arranged a conference with representatives of the Consortium here in the Arsenal. I would be pleased if you could attend it.”

Impressing the merchants with a look at the Arsenal, huh? A pretty simple tactic, but it’d probably still be somewhat effective considering how unearthly and impressive this place could look. It wasn’t like this place wasn’t going to turn into a major diplomatic artery for a month or two anyway, we might as well make use of it properly.

“I’ll be there,” I agreed. “Have the details sent to my people.”

I let a moment pass.

“To be sure,” I slowly said, “you do want me in that room to scare them, correct?”

The First Prince of Procer was too self-controlled to be visibly embarrassed by my laying out the truth so bluntly, but I doubted it was a coincidence she chose that moment to take a sip of tea.

“Your reputation carries a great deal of weight, Queen Catherine,” the blue-eyed princess carefully said. “Your displeasure would not be courted lightly.”

Meaning that those representatives were a lot less likely to try to push the Grand Alliance if I made it clear that such a mistake would lead to my gating in with a few thousand drow one evening and expressing my displeasure . Fair enough. I’d have hesitated to be the rabid hound of this play more if there were likely to be long term diplomatic consequences for Callow, but my abdication should see to the worse of that. Besides, by then my home should be a lot less afraid of Mercantis’ displeasure: if trade with Praes and Procer was open, then the Consortium’s usefulness as a middleman waned significantly.

“I’m sure they can be made to understand that if their greed ends up feeding Calernia to Keter, before the end I’ll personally lead my armies to raze Mercantis to the ground and salt the ashes,” I mildly said.

“The very sort of talk that might give the ambitious pause,” Cordelia delicately admitted. “The imprudence in relying too heavily on the Consortium has been made clear, however, which demands other measures be taken. Bringing peace to even part of the Free Cities would allow for the resumption of trade, and so lessen the burden on the southern principalities.”

“In principle I’m very much in favour,” I said. “I simply don’t see a practical way to achieve peace in the region anytime soon.”

The wars in the League of Free Cities had reached a point of stalemate, more or less. Basileus Leo Trakas still ruled in the city of Nicae itself, but he’d lost the countryside to Strategos Zenobia and neither could afford to dislodge the other. Penthes’ armies had been whipped on the field by General Basilia, who’d managed to get Helike in order behind her, but after the casualties of the Proceran campaign and half her army leaving to serve under the Grand Alliance she didn’t have the siege or mages to take Penthes itself – whose much-despised Exarch Prodocius was rumoured to be propped up by Malicia directly. Stygia was quietly feeding the flames, hoping to expand after everyone was spent, and neither Atalante nor Bellerophon seemed inclined to get involved.

Only Delos was keeping an eye on things, but while the Secretariat had passed information to me in the past it was also very reluctant to surrender its current neutrality. The askretis had no interest in a war after the way their last one had gone.

“Though there will be difficulties,” Cordelia Hasenbach said, “if the signatories Grand Alliance were to wield their clout in accord it would not be impossible to effect change.”

I watched her and drank from my cup, noncommittal. There’d been good reasons for the Grand Alliance being so reluctant to involve itself in the wars of the League, and though what I’d learned about the darkening of Procer changed the situation some I was still inclined to caution there. Any resources spent on trying to plug that sinking boat might very well end up wasted with nothing to show for it, leaving us even worse off than before.

“A shared recognition of Strategos Zenobia as the legitimate ruler of Nicae, for example, would strengthen her support,” she suggested.

“Not enough to topple Leo Trakas,” I pointed out.

Which would make the gesture entirely pointless, as far as I was concerned.

“Perhaps so, if paired with a severing of all ties with territory under the rule of the Basileus,” Cordelia said.

That’d put pressure, though not an enormous amount: with sea trade in the Samite Gulf good as dead, Nicae wouldn’t be taking any real losses by this. It’d still be made a pariah to a large coalition, though, and that might make some nobles in the city turn on the Basileus out of fear the sanctions would remain even when things calmed. It was also, however, something that might just backfire spectacularly if the people of Nicae were moved to anger by the foreign interference into their affairs. Something that the First Prince would be well aware of, which meant there was another angle there.

“Under what pretext?” I asked.

“I would have the Grand Alliance name Leo Trakas a friend to the Dead King, and so an enemy to all the living,” the First Prince said.

My hands clenched. I forced them to loosen, the drank again from the cup as I gathered my thoughts. The refusal on the tip of my tongue had been instant, but it had been more a thing of instinct than thought. This entire proposal smacked of the House of Light declaring me Arch-heretic of the East to me, only even more shamelessly political. Basileus Leo Trakas was inconvenient to us, and circumstances might well have forced him into some degree of alliance with the Tower, but it was going a step too far to call him an ally of the Dead King. I calmly set down my cup.

“I don’t like the precedent this sets,” I said. “We’re an alliance, not the ruling lords of Calernia. And while this sort of denunciation might be taken as face value by a lot of people, given the war we’re in, we both know that Leo Trakas is mostly trying to stay alive at the moment. I’ve little pity to spare for the man, but I’m not comfortable using titles like ‘friend to the Dead King’ as a diplomatic stick.”

It was the sort of thing that made a man genuinely desperate, and a Basileus with both nothing left to lose and helpful Wasteland friends was a recipe for disaster.

“I understand your hesitation,” the First Prince said. “It does not please me to have to resort to such a method. My advisors suggested the same manoeuvre be used to exert pressure on Penthes, in truth, but I balked. It would be an overreach.”

So Exarch Prodocius, arguably by far the worse man of the two for having helped Malicia arrange a use of Still Water, would be spared the same epithet. Because Cordelia was trying to put together the western half of the League as a mostly stable trading bloc for the Principate, not the east. The naked truth laid bare by what she must have considered to be a demonstration of restraint only made me more uneasy. Some of that must have shown on my face, as she pressed forward.

“As you have yourself pointed out, we otherwise lack the means to truly affect matters in the Free Cities,” the fair-haired princess said.

“I still think that even in putting out the fire in Nicae you’d be laying the foundations for a worse blaze down the line,” I said. “Did you go to Levant about this?”

“The Holy Seljun was willing to agree,” she replied. “Though only after a formal vote of signatory members, and only should that vote be unanimous.”

Ah, so Wazim Isbili was cleverer than his reputation implied. That way Tariq’s distant nephew could let me refuse Procer on his behalf instead of having to do his own dirty work. That trick of procedure, though, spoke to me of a smaller nation used to existing in Procer’s shadow and wary of helping it gain too much influence even in a crisis. Those passed, after all, while influence gained during them lingered a lot longer. Of course, if I could figure this much out then Hasenbach could as well. I cocked a silent eyebrow at her.

“As I said,” the First Prince of Procer repeated, “I understand your hesitation. Perhaps a more cautious approach would better suit? A private mock-vote can be had, and should it be unanimous a letter of warning can be sent to Leo Trakas as to what will follow.”

I didn’t like having even the pretence of my seal of approval on this, but unfortunately she was right that we weren’t flush with ways to settle the mess in the League. It might not be avoidable for me to get my hands dirty here. And I can always change my vote when it comes to actually going through with this.

“You’re leveraging him,” I said, implicitly agreeing. “So what is it you’re trying to leverage him into?”

“Opening the gates of Nicae to Strategos Zenobia, who by law is the senior ruler of the city-state,” Cordelia said. “This would be under guarantee of safety for him and his partisans, naturally. I have been corresponding with Zenobia and she is amenable to those terms.”

I couldn’t help but notice she’d not mentioned General Basilia, who’d been the one to raise Zenobia up in the first place. Mostly as a way to keep Nicae off her back while she went after Penthes, but it couldn’t be denied the two were aligned with Basilia the distinct greater of that alliance.

“I could get Helike to accept those terms,” I said, “if Zenobia is willing to turn on Penthes.”

The First Prince’s eyes narrowed as she watched me closely.

“In what sense?” she asked. “The city will have little force to field after this.”

“It will have ships,” I said. “The lack of which is one of the reasons Basilia can’t siege the coastal fortresses properly.”

Able to cut them off from the sea, the Helikean general might be able to starve them out even if she couldn’t take the walls. Or at least make a good enough threat of it that Prodocius’ army would have to either give battle or face the prospect of losing every holdout outside the walls of Penthes. Considering that Basilia seemed a lot more interested in winning her wars than cementing influence over Nicae, I suspected she’d take naval support from Nicae over Leo Trakas’ head on a pike. He’d made for a pretty middling rival, anyway.

“I will have to contact the Strategos,” Cordelia said, “yet I suspect she will be amenable to such terms.”

I suspected that Hasenbach would push for acceptance, regardless of whether or not Zenobia liked the deal. It was compounding gain with gain, from the Proceran perspective: with a fleet on her side, Basilia would be able to become a serious headache for another ally of the Tower. More importantly she’d be doing that fighting in the eastern territories of the League, far from anything Hasenbach currently cared about. Considering that while I might be the effective patron of Basilia’s Helike the Principate had a much more contentious relationship with her, keeping the general busy in the east might even be considered yet another gain. I nodded sharply.

“Stygia’s going to be an issue,” I said. “Lukewarm as they might be on the Tower, they’re not going to let alliances firm up the western League without taking measures.”

“I concur,” the Lycaonese princess said. “And it so happens I have a few thoughts on how to check them.”

We must have spoken for at least an hour more after that, breaking only for a bit when we had to send for maps – I was trying to make the point of why a Nicaean support fleet would practically double the size of what Basilia could field in soldiers just because of the supply line they represented – and Hasenbach excusing herself to use the privy. It was turning out to be a thoroughly productive evening, and though the suggestion of sponsoring defensive pacts between cities against Stygia in particular would be dead in the water without Atalante or Delos being brought on, it was a solid notion we could keep pushing without a significant investment of resources on our part.

In time the subject was exhausted, at least in the sense that more could not be discussed without the both of us having sought answers outside and read through reports. I was just starting on my third cup of Vale summer wine by then, though I’d been slow in drinking it, so I was largely sober and feeling rather vivified by how much we’d gotten done. In a concession to my own consumption Hasenbach had sent for a cup of hydromel she’d been nursing ever since she’d finished the tea, and it was that she set down when the conversation hit a low ebb.

“I believe we have discussed the matter exhaustively enough for the night,” the First Prince said.

“Agreed,” I said.

I sighed, leaning back into my seat.

“So let’s talk about the troubles closer to home.”

Chapter 33: Convenience

“Thirty-seven: theft in the service of Above is not a sin. It is, however, still a crime. Be discreet.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

“Shall we begin with the least contentious of the subjects to be broached?”

Her Most Serene Highness Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer, Warden of the West and Protector of the Realms of Man, struck me as looking rather cautious right now. Wary of angering me? Might be, depending on what she considered to be the least contentious of the things we needed to talk about. It was always relative, when it came to stuff like this – the least murderous of three High Lords still usually had an unfortunate amount of murder under their belt. I took a long sip from my cup, letting the pleasant taste of my favourite wine linger against my palate.

“I’m all ears,” I said.

“There are, from the reports I have received about the incident at the Arsenal, two Damned who will need to face punishment,” the First Prince said. “Namely, the Concocter and the Hunted Magician.”

I smothered a grimace at the pun, which I would generously assume to have been unintentional.

“All other villains who were involved are dead,” I agreed.

So that was why she’d been cautious, huh. Dealing with villains was my legal responsibility, in the end. The Hunted Magician would stand trial before a tribunal, since he’d actively helped along an invasion of the Arsenal and the Arsenal was an interest of all the signatory states of the Grand Alliance, but the tribunal itself couldn’t actually sentence him to anything. Only I could, as his representative under the Terms. In theory, at least. In practice, if I outright ignored the recommendations given out by a tribunal that’d count the White Knight and representatives for both Procer and Levant, I’d be asking for a diplomatic shitstorm.

Hanno would be in the same situation when it came to the Red Axe. I’d have a seat on her tribunal as well, as both the representative for both Callow and Below’s lot, but I wouldn’t have the right to pass a sentence on her any more than the First Prince or whoever the Dominion ended up sending. There were good reasons for that. In my case, for example, if I had the authority to sentence heroes it’d lead to the rebellion of more than a few before the day was out. Hanno of Arwad was trusted as an adjudicator, and only him. Though while he had the same right to outright ignore anything the rest of the tribunal would say, when it came down to it he’d also have the same considerations as me to deal with.

Hasenbach was treading carefully here because, after pushing for the Red Axe to be tried by Procer and not under the Terms, she did not want me to mistake her asking about my current leanings on punishing my charges as an attempt on her part to keep usurping authority over the Terms.

“May I be blunt?” I asked.

Something like an amused flicker passed through those blue eyes.

“Have you not been?” the First Prince of Procer asked.

Well now, I thought, lips twitching. Get another few drinks into that one and she might actually be fun.

“I don’t think you’re trying to get your hands on the Terms,” I frankly said. “Only an idiot would try to make that many Named into a personal army, and even back when negotiating with you regularly drove me to screaming I did not believe you to be one. You don’t need to tread lightly for fear of offending me there. If I consider you to be overstepping I will say as much, but I am not looking to be offended.”

Blue eyes considered me, weighing the extent of my honesty in speaking, then she nodded.

“A lengthy trial for the Hunted Magician would be damaging,” Cordelia said. “And your intentions when it comes to the Concocter remain unclear. I would establish as soon as possible what you intend, so that the affair can be solved swiftly when it comes to deliberation.”

“You won’t be alone in that tribunal,” I pointed out. “And, now that I think of it, will it be you personally or a representative?”

“I might have nominated Princess Rozala if we could afford to pull her from the front, but as circumstances stand I will personally represent the Principate,” she said. “And while I will freely profess to be unable to account for the White Knight, Lord Yannu Marave’s interests are well known to me.”

Ah, so Juniper’s old foe from the Champion’s Blood was the one the Dominion has sent. Considering the Cleves front was supposed to be holding steady at the moment I supposed he was the natural pick. My own two Levantines might represent a significant bloc in the Dominion now that they were betrothed, but they were both still a little young for this sort of game. The Lord of Alava had a weightier reputation than either and probably better understood how to preserve the interests of Levant.

“What does Levant want out of this?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“To ensure punishment is dealt,” the First Prince said, “and to avoid, at all costs, even the shadow of a precedent that might force them to ennoble one of their Damned.”

Yeah, that sounded about right. Aside from the Grey Pilgrim, whose concerns tended to extend far from the borders of the Dominion, in my experience the Blood tended to hardly care about what went on beyond their borders. So long as their anger wasn’t actively courted, they were unlikely to take a stand.

“Neither should be an issue,” I said. “When it comes to the Hunted Magician, considering his cooperation with the Wandering Bard it’s a given that he loses the right to object to assignments for the remainder of the duration of the Terms.”

“Yet, given the nature of his talents, he would still be best employed at the Arsenal,” Cordelia skeptically noted.

Meaning it was an empty punishment, as far as she was concerned, since he wouldn’t be going anywhere or be losing anything.

“That’d be the basic consequence of dealing with an enemy, not the punishment,” I replied. “For that, I’m currently leaning towards a fine. Within the next three days we should have estimates of what the damages to the Arsenal will cost to repair. A fine of that amount will be given.”

I paused.

“Once for each signatory nation of the Grand Alliance,” I said. “In addition, he will personally have to repay the pensions any of our nations give to the families of soldiers who died during the attack.”

The First Prince’s brow rose, ever so slightly.

“That would be a considerable sum,” she said.

More than any man could repay in a lifetime, though admittedly the occasional villain got more than that. With a debt like that over his head the Magician was a lot more likely to leg it to the Free Cities after the war than stick around and repay it. I’d considered that, of course. The trick was in how it’d be paid back.

“It would be up to the nations to decide in what nature they might prefer that repayment,” I said. “The Kingdom of Callow, however, will accept it in artefact-crafting and enchanting work.”

Meaning Vivienne would have a fortune’s worth of labour from one of the finest mages on the continent to call on when her reign began, already paid for. The Rhenian princess considered me for a moment, remaining silent as her well-honed mind parsed out all the implications.

“While heavily in debt, to a sum total comparable to a prince’s treasury if not greater, the Magician will also have direct ties to the rulers of three great nations,” Cordelia quietly said. “In the world of the Accords, that would be the sort of protection one of the Damned might well kill for.”

It really was. So long as three crowns had a fortune’s worth of highly valuable and difficult labour left to extract out of the Hunted Magicians’ hide, none of them were likely to let the man get his head cut off by an overzealous hero or bar their door to him. I was still making the man a beggar for at least a decade, forcing him to largely live on the charity of the patrons he’d work for, so it wasn’t like I was letting him off easy. But it was the sort of punishment that would win me points with the cleverer among my kind and avoid alienating the Magician entirely.

“The Concocter deserves less punishment,” I said, “and I don’t intend to convene a tribunal over it. She’ll lose the right to refuse assignments, like the Magician, but aside from that I only intend to have her personally brew tailored potions for every lastingly wounded soldier in the Arsenal or the family of any deceased. The ingredients will, of course, come out of her pocket.”

A princely gift, in the sense that few aside from princes would otherwise be able to afford the Concocter brewing for them personally. I owed the woman a favour for having kept Hakram alive, so I intended to offer to quietly float her a loan from my own funds to pay for the ingredients. If it just so happened that I forgot to ask for interest or a fixed timeline for repayment, well, so be it. Hakram was worth a lot more to me than the coin, and it would have still been a bargain for a hundred times the price.

“A harsh price, given the paucity of her involvement,” Cordelia said, “but that will win you esteem from Lord Yannu. You foresee no complications there?”

“None,” I said.

“I had expected that I would have to push for harsher sentences,” the First Prince admitted. “In that I did you disservice, for you have struck an admirable balance between stern and sufferable.”

I snorted.

“I have weaknesses as a queen, glaring ones,” I said, “but I’ve been a warlord and leader of Named since I was seventeen. When it comes to that, you can expect a steady hand of me.”

It wasn’t the same, handing out a sentence as a queen and as the leader of a band. No ruler in the world had absolute authority, true enough, but it was an even more tenuous thing Named. Too loose a hand and they would run wild, too firm and they would leave. I’d believed my father to have been as a lord over the Calamities, when I’d been younger, and half-believed it a fault when I later grasped he was anything but. Being a representative under Terms had forced me to understand, though, how delicate a balancing act his leadership of that band had really been. I’d done this for many more Named than Black had ever led, but I’d also done it for scarcely two years and with literal Death knocking at the door up north. He, on the other hand, had kept the Calamities largely sane and safe for several decades even with few outside threats to keep them together.

“Talent is distributed blind to titles and breeding,” Cordelia said.

I’d take that for the backhanded compliment that it was. I doubted Hasenbach and I would ever see eye to eye on a lot of things – it’d be hard to, when she would always put Procer first and I Callow – but that’d not prevented a degree of respect from emerging as our working relationship grew less venomous. I would not soon forget how many of my soldiers had died in a war I’d not wanted to fight, or the burning anger of having peace refused again and again, but I had less unpleasant things to add to the tally now. She’d turned out too damn useful over the last two years for the old anger to be the only thing I associated with her now.

“Flattery,” I said. “Which tells me we’ve gotten to more contentious territory. Which poison will be your pick, Your Highness: the fool with the god-killing sword or the threefold nightmare of jurisdiction?”

The blonde Lycaonese sipped at her mead, the largest I’d yet seen her take. She’d be laughed out of a Callowan tavern as lightweight, I suspected, but then she didn’t strike me as the kind of woman to step into a tavern in the first place.

“I have concerns about the Mirror Knight, as Prince Frederic made known to you,” Cordelia said. “I understand that you have some of your own.”

Much as I would have enjoyed venting about Christophe de Pavanie, I wasn’t having a drink with Indrani. Petulance would get me nowhere, so it’d be best to keep this concise.

“The extent of my concerns will depend on his actions over the coming few days,” I said. “He has made demands wildly beyond his authority – a full pardon for the Red Axe – and that he’s made demands at all is alarming, but so far that’s only been words. So long as it doesn’t go further than that, I’m willing to let a lot of it be water under the bridge.”

The Mirror Knight had turned what would have been certain death for Hakram into something less immediately mortal, though if the Concocter hadn’t been on her way Adjutant would have died regardless. I owed him significantly less than I did the Concocter, but I owed him still. So I’d swallow my anger and let bygones be bygones, so long as he behaved. Hasenbach’s eyes went sharp.

“You do not believe he will necessarily defer to the White Knight,” the First Prince stated.

It was not a question and neither of us pretended otherwise.

“I’ve difficulty putting my finger on how messy that might get,” I admitted. “But if they disagree, the Mirror Knight will not simply capitulate.”

“A coup, even a soft one, would be unacceptable to the Principate,” Cordelia coolly said. “The Terms as signed do not have provisions for the White Knight to be replaced, save should he die.”

“The legalities won’t kill this,” I said. “Not with heroes, Hasenbach. Villains you can cow or bribe, but that won’t work with Above’s lot. They’ll hold to doing the right thing even when it’s an anchor around their neck – or everybody else’s, for that matter.”

She did not reply for a long moment and I bit my tongue. It’d come out just a little too caustic to have sounded entirely objective, which I regretted already. Anger would win me no points with this one, even if she decided it was justified anger.

“Would you be opposed to my intervening in the matter as First Prince?” she asked. “While this cannot be termed as an entirely Proceran issue, given those involved, it can not be denied that my subjects are at the heart of it.”

“If you can disarm him with words I’ll applaud,” I said. “But this could turn on you right quick. If you’re seen as interceding on my behalf that’ll taint you by association, and in a way that might not be reparable.”

It shouldn’t be forgotten that the Mirror Knight would be her problem a lot longer than mine, assuming we all survived the war. He was a powerful Proceran hero with ties to a royal house, there’d be no disappearing into countryside obscurity for him.

“I will take your warning under consideration,” the First Prince mildly said.

Meaning that I was trying to teach a knight how to ride, but very politely implied. Fair enough.

“The Severance remains the most salient issue concerning him,” she continued.

My eyes narrowed.

“And what is Procer’s stance on that?” I asked.

“Given that it was forged with materials that the Kingdom of Callow provided on Arsenal grounds and as part of an Arsenal undertaking, the artefact is to be considered a war asset of the Grand Alliance,” the First Prince replied, the answer smooth and easy.

Practiced as well, no doubt. While Callow arguably had the best claim to the sword since I’d provided the initial material of it – though it shouldn’t be forgot it was an aspect ripped out of a woman at least in theory a Proceran subject – my interest in securing it for the kingdom after the war was lukewarm at best. The First Prince’s stance here was nuanced enough I wouldn’t outright be renouncing the claim I hardly cared about, just weakening it, but it came with the upside of having the Severance designated as a war asset of the Grand Alliance. That meant we could strip it and assign it wherever we wanted, so long as the three signatory nations weren’t stuck in an impasse.

“I’m amenable to those terms,” I said.

She was just a tad too slow in suppressing her surprise. The eyes gave it away. Hadn’t expected me to give my inch quite so swiftly, huh? If there’d been a Named back home that was a good fit for the sword I might have fought harder, but there simply wasn’t one.

“Then we are in agreement,” Cordelia faintly smiled. “I expect that Lord Yannu will be of a like mind, as it happens.”

I snorted. Yeah, I’d heard that Mirror Knight wasn’t all that popular with the Levantines. They were a touchy lot, especially when it came to their history with the Principate, and Christophe de Pavanie had been cursed with the twin disadvantages of being Proceran and prone to giving offence.

“The little I heard of the White Knight was in partial agreement to this,” I noted. “Though he mentioned that he considers the Mirror Knight the best fit for the sword when it is assigned.”

“It would be doing a disservice to the other Chosen to refrain from even considering their candidature,” the blue-eyed princess diplomatically replied.

Meaning she really wasn’t eager to leave it with good ol’ Christophe. Music to my ears. I supposed from her perspective it’d be handing both a powerful weapon and a powerful symbol to hero already tied to a rival power within her borders, something that was bound to come back to bite her down the line. Mind you, the damned thing was a sword meant to be used so it couldn’t all be about the politics.

“Come the time to assault Keter, if he’s truly the best pick then I’ll swallow my tongue and do what needs to be done,” I admitted. “Until then I’d prefer him nowhere near that blade.”

“Establishing the precedent that the Grand Alliance can strip and assign the sword is more important than the hands holding it at the moment,” the First Prince said. “Though I will not deny that removing it as a symbol will be helpful considering he appears to be, as you have said, trying to arrange a pardon for the Red Axe.”

And so we finally got to the thorniest of the knots.

“I imagine your stance on that won’t have changed since it was conveyed to me,” I said.

Meaning that she wanted the Red Axe tried under Proceran law for the attempted regicide of Frederic Goethal, regardless of any other claim there might be on the heroine’s life.

“In essence it has not,” Cordelia calmly said. “I am sure that, as a ruler yourself, you can understand the difficulty in being unable to hold a trial over the attempted assassination of one of my princes. An attempt that took place before more than half a hundred witnesses, no less.”

“Her slaying of the Wicked Enchanter was done in front of more than twice that,” I pointed out.

Which wasn’t the issue, I knew even as I quibbled on the detail. Her issue was that the First Prince of Procer was finding herself unable to punish or even imprison someone who’d tried to kill a sitting member of the Highest Assembly, which must admittedly be infuriating.

“I do not deny that her breach of Terms also deserves punishment,” she said. “Simply that her actions against the Principate take precedence.”

“We can’t try a corpse,” I frankly said. “Which is what her actions would fetch, though I’m not sure what manner of execution follows attempted regicide in Brus.”

“Boiled alive in oil,” the First Prince replied without batting an eye.

Grisly, but hardly any worse than the drawing and quartering it would earn in Callow – and even that bloody practice was well shy of the ancient atrocity known as red hangings I preferred not to think too much about.

“Charming,” I drily said. “Might hinder the process of questioning some, if you ask me, though on the upside at least it’ll be a quick trial.”

“If I were to concede that a trial could be held under the Terms before the sentence to the Principate’s own was applied, would that remedy your objection?” the blonde princess asked.

That was already a better look for the whole affair, but it was also strictly that: a look. In substance, we’d still be establishing the jurisdiction of Proceran law over the Named serving under the Terms.

“What kind of a trial would you be holding, exactly?” I asked, frowning. “I’m familiar with Salienta’s Graces, but I recall there’s some sort of exception for matters of treason that explains why your people have two kinds of magistrates.”

“Treason, heresy and royal dues fall under the authority of the crowns and not the rights of the people of Procer,” Hasenbach clarified. “Given the unfeasibility of princes personally seeing to such judgements over their entire holdings, royal magistrates might be appointed to do so in their stead. In this particular case, however, Prince Frederic would be entitled by royal prerogative to render judgement himself.”

Which would actually play out decently with villains, I thought. It’d be a heroic mess cleaned up by a heroic blade. I’d have to posture a bit and agitate in the Wicked Enchanter’s name, but the Kingfisher Prince beheading the Red Axe would settle this halfway agreeably for everyone. Which made it all the more galling that he wasn’t going to be doing that. That lovely thing he did with his hips wasn’t anywhere near enough to excuse the headaches he was causing me.

“Yet he won’t,” I grunted, not hiding my displeasure. “So where does it go from there?”

“A formal trial by the Highest Assembly,” Cordelia said. “Which I will admit would have... uses in settling other troubles.”

It took me a moment to put the pieces together, as I was not used to putting myself in the shoes of the First Prince. Ah, she could use this whole affair to turn the screws on Prince Gaspard Langevin. The man would be fraying his ties to the Mirror Knight if he voted to have the Red Axe killed, since the hero wanted her pardoned, but it’d still be better than the alternative. Should he vote for acquittal after all, or even a lesser punishment, he’d be fraying ties to every single prince and princess of Procer . No one, after all, was denying that the Red Axe had tried to kill Frederic. Considering how popular the Prince of Brus was in the north, actually, even if simply ended up abstaining he’d be damaging his reputation a great deal in the region.

I could admire the cleverness of it, and I was pleased Hasenbach was taking the Langevin problem seriously, but the nature of my own objections to this mess had not changed either.

“I understand why you want your trial, I really do,” I admitted. “In your place, I’d be pushing for the same thing.”

“Yet you are not in my place,” the blue-eyed woman said, smiling thinly.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m speaking as the representative for Below’s champions. And Procer simply isn’t trusted enough for them to be comfortable with it having the authority to hang them.”

Hasenbach actually tended to be held in high esteem by the more intellectual of my lot, as a ruler whose knack for legal manoeuvring and diplomacy had led to remarkable achievements involving relatively little warfare, but not even the most admiring would want the Highest Assembly to have so much as a speck of authority over them. Even the other side of the fence, Hanno’s crowd, was unlikely to have a much better opinion of such a measure. Heroes tended to see laws and crowns as obstructive, when they weren’t the ones behind them, and Procer’s rulers still had spectacularly bad reputation abroad for the most part.

“That reluctance is not unearned,” Cordelia said, “yet it, too, must have limits. Minor crimes such as theft and assault I will not balk at leaving to the Terms, in the same way that an army in the field is subject to military justice and not that of a prince. Yet I cannot allow attempted regicide on Proceran soil without having it face Proceran justice. It would undermine the peace of the entire realm, establishing for all to see that Chosen and Damned live under different laws than the rest.”

And that would go over significantly worse in the Principate than it would back home, where centuries of Good Kings and Wizards of the West had associated Names with authority, or even Praes – where being in a realm of your own, untouchable by your lessers, was half the draw of being Named in the first place. In Procer the people had an expectation that the law would apply to even rulers, if perhaps not quite as comprehensively, so the Red Axe slipping the net would be sure to cause resentment. It was still better than the alternative, in my opinion.

“They do live under different laws, until the war is over,” I bluntly said. “They’re called the Terms. They are unfair, set apart their members from everyone else and even offer amnesty to monsters, but they are also what has allowed us to muster more than seventy Named to the defence of Procer. There’s a price to bringing in that kind of help, especially given the lack of trust between most parties involved. Going back on the nature of the Terms now will cause desertions. ‘You will be under the protection of the Terms’ does not have quite the same ring to it when ‘unless it becomes politically inconvenient’ gets added.”

Heroes would at least take infringement there better than villains, who’d see this as Procer preparing the grounds for purges following the fall of Keter, but I suspected that tolerance would not survive for long. The Dominion heroes who’d not immediately balk at being subject to Proceran law – something the founders of Levant had actively warred against! – would sour on it the moment it put them in a situation where they had to willingly take punishment by a prince. The contingent from the Free Cities wouldn’t be quite as incensed, but they were likely to band together for protection and it would all go to the Hells if the rulers of Procer started courting native heroes to bring into their personal orbit.

“I am no stranger to the tyranny of convenience, Catherine Foundling,” Cordelia Hasenbach quietly said, “but that blade has ever cut both ways. You fear desertions? I fear riots . You fear the collapse of the fronts? I fear the collapse of everything behind them .”

“Armies won’t be enough to breach the walls of Keter, Cordelia Hasenbach,” I quietly replied. “You’ll need Named, bands of five that can triumph against impossible odds and the finest killers on Calernia to bring an end to the Dead King himself. Don’t throw away your chance of winning the war from fear of having already lost it.”

I matched her gaze, unflinching. She was not wrong, I thought, not really. But then neither was I. And behind the tension of the present I glimpsed something deeper. The legacy that this golden-haired daughter of the north wanted to leave behind, a nation of laws and trade and peace that would at last thrive without attempting to devour all it beheld. Its edges would scrape against those of my own craved-for legacy, if we were not careful. I wanted order forced onto the old war, the first war, the war that had begun the moment Creation did: Above and Below, the spinning coin of the divine wager. It was rules for those unearthly champions of black and white I wanted to set down, rules that went beyond borders and thrones, but my finest intentions would have to share the world with those same thrones they sought to surpass.

I did not hate what it was that Cordelia Hasenbach wanted to build, but I would not strip bare my own dream to gild hers.

“It has been some time,” the First Prince eventually said, “since I have last been quite so thoroughly refused.”

She’d not expected me to fold, tonight, but neither had she expected that I’d not be moved even an inch. I was not surprised, considering the boon she’d offered me if I saw things her way: accepting the Liesse Accords as they now stood, without further contest. It was something I would have paid dearly for, and might still. Yet in the end I was no more willing to weaken the foundation of the Accords before they were even signed than she had been willing to let the Choir of Judgement cast down a sentence on the very floor of the Highest Assembly.

“It gives me no pleasure to rebuff you,” I honestly said. “But there are some days, some choices, where the only thing to be had is your pick of the shade of bleakness ahead.”

The First Prince of Procer drank deep of her cup, her calm face like a too-small mask that exhaustion was peeking around the edges of. She saw, I thought as she turned her gaze to me, something to match that on my own face. The sum of too many half-nights, too many hard choices, too many victories that felt like defeats and defeats that felt like wounds. Sometimes it felt like I was sharp only because the world had whittled away everything but the sharpness. Rueful, she half-raised her cup towards me and I returned the gesture. We drank, for what else was there to do? The glasses were lowered all too soon.

“Is it easier,” Cordelia softly asked, “when you are not born to it?”

Born to the crown, to the sword, to power. I looked down into my cup at the pale wine still remaining. I thought of the friends I’d buried, of the decisions that still sometimes haunted me in the dark of night. There were more of either than I wanted there to be.

“No,” I faintly replied. “Not unless you are an even harder woman than I thought.”

The silence lingered for long moment between us, not entirely comfortable but neither unpleasant. I looked up at the painted ceiling, letting out a long breath.

“But if not us, then who?” I asked, a smile quirking my lips.

I lowered my head to find her studying me quite closely, face grown serious.

“You might yet be my enemy, I think,” the First Prince said.

It was true, so I did not deny it. In the end there was peace and then there was peace . It was not yet decided which of these we would have when the dust settled from Keter’s fall.

“And still I find it easier to trust you than many I would call allies,” Cordelia continued. “What a strange thing that is.”

I almost laughed, for I knew exactly what she meant. Even if the day came where we were allies without doom having marched north to cement the pact, I’d consider her just as much of an opponent. A rival, perhaps, in the strangest of ways. The sky was not so large that there would be enough room for the full span of both our ambitions, and neither of us was above jostling.

“I imagine that on some nights,” I half-smiled, “when we were girls, without ever knowing it we looked up at the same stars from different lands.”

She inclined her head by the smallest of measures, and we left it at that.

Yet there was a whisper in my ear as the silence fell, pleased yet indistinct. Like a curl of smoke. And for the barest of moments I felt a warm breath against the back of my neck. A trick of the light had deepened the darkness in the corners of the hall and I fancied, just for that fleeting moment, that I glimpsed the silhouette of a great beast cast there from the shadows.

Ah , I thought, smiling a secret smile. Are you back, old friend?

My Name did not answer.

Not yet.

Charlatan III

“Beware of they who speak of doing good without speaking of those whose good they seek.”
– Theodore Langman, Wizard of the West

The townsfolk of Beaumarais were not particularly superstitious or zealous, but when the number of practitioners in town more than doubled over a season’s span it was only to be expected that there would be unease.

Olivier tried to think of it in the same terms as if the number of people carrying swords had swelled by the same amount, but he knew there were differences. An unscrupulous mage could to a lot more damage with a little black knowledge than a rapacious fantassin could do with a sword and heartlessness. But unease was not outright fear, and it’d remain that way so long as the House of Light kept supporting this arrangement through Sister Maude. It was only a matter, then, of soothing away apprehensions and making clear that all these ‘wizardly vagrants’ – as he’d heard Old Gontrand call them quite loudly in the streets – were useful to the town. Thankfully Olivier had been raised among practitioners and spent most his life since trying to make coin out of thin air, so when it came to acquiring usefulness he had ideas aplenty.

The first two who’d come, a certain Master Maurice and his young daughter Segoline, had been the easiest of all. They were peddlers by trade, openly offering Maurice’s services as a smith in small towns without one but more discreetly offering some healing and enchanting in towns that seemed to have a tolerance for magic. The man was a widower who wanted a place to raise his daughter in peace, and as soon as the town smith Mistress Caroline was reassured that none of her business would be taken from her all opposition melted away. Olivier’s private suggestion of a partnership with Master Maurice, enchanting some of her products for a fee so that she might sell artefacts herself, had caught her interest. The town smith even began throwing her weight around in favour of the ‘guests’ .

It was the arrival of the one who introduced himself Maxime Redflame, a middle-aged and grizzled man who claimed to have served in several fantassin companies as a war wizard, that began to complicate things. Much as lords and princes might prize those whose Talent could be turned to violence, Olivier had no real use for them. It did not help that he liked his drink and got rowdy when drunk. Alisanne, who’d never heard of half the companies who’d supposedly employed him, suggested the drinking was why he’d sought refuge out here in the mountains. Drinking could be forgiven in a simple soldier, but in a mage it was another thing: no one wanted a drunk throwing around fireballs. The man was put to work gathering herbs out in the mountains, for he was handy with a knife, and made to learn enough to improve his rather mediocre brewing.

Maxime Redflame resented the work and took no pains to hide it, but he was in no position to bargain.

Just before the snows the fourth practitioner arrived in town, in almost every way unlike the last. Morgaine was her name, and she was both young and comely – not even twenty-five, and though obviously a wanderer she was well-dressed and of some means. She claimed to come from the Principality of Orne, to the south, though she was a traveller who’d spent some time in the Free Cities and the Thalassocracy. Morgaine was well-read and genteel in ways that sometimes made Olivier uncomfortable, for his own worldliness had never ventured much farther than these mountains. Though she remained vague on the depths of her leaning in matters magical, she proved a very fine healer as well as capable of predicting the weather to some degree. The latter did much to endear her to the town, as it the snows had come early that year and might have caught the townsfolk by surprise otherwise. Morgaine was charming and well-spoken, and so for all the power that she was known to wield she quickly became a darling of the town.

It was a young man called Ludovic that proved to be the greatest trouble of all, though in a fit of irony. Ludovic himself was shy and gentle, with all the temperament of a mouse, and was half-dead of cold when he stumbled into Beaumarais after having taken the mountain paths before the ice could take enough to make them unusable. He knew no magic, though it was undeniable he had the Talent, and had been almost abjectly grateful for being given a bed and a hot meal. Ludovic, as it happened, came from the town of Grisemanche. A little under two weeks away by wagon, when the paths were clear and dry. He’d run away from home after losing control of his Talent and rendering his mother mute, hoping that the rumoured ‘home for wizards’ in Beaumarais would take him in. It was unlikely that Ludovic’s family would be coming after him anytime soon, not with winter making such a trip so arduous, but with spring that would change.

Olivier saw to it that the younger boy was given a cot in the back of the shop until proper accommodations could be found for him, and reluctantly he asked for Morgaine’s help in ensuring that the weeks travelling in the cold with little food or rest would not leave marks. He gave them privacy during the examination, and when the slim dark-eyed woman emerged from the backroom it was with a look of tightly controlled displeasure on her face.

“Ill news?” Olivier asked.

“The frostbite was mild, and though he has thinned it is nothing that regular meals will not be able to fix,” Morgaine said. “It was also the least of his troubles. Most of the bruises on him are older than his travels and some of his bones were broken several times.”

The young man breathed out sharply. It was not unheard of, this. While it was against the teachings of the Heavens to mistreat a child, magic made things different in the eyes of some people.

“Understood,” Olivier simply said.

Morgaine fixed him with a steady look, a strand of her crow-black hair having come loose from her elegant hairdo.

“And what do you intend to do about this?” she asked.

“Settle affairs with his family when the snows melt,” he replied. “So long as the curse of muteness is lifted and reparations made, his kin should be willing to surrender their claim to him.”

“That boy was beaten,” Morgaine said. “Often and cruelly. And you speak of reparations ?”

“I speak of removing him from that peril,” Olivier calmly replied. “I am not a lord or a magistrate, to be able to take it further than that.”

“There are other ways to discourage that sort,” Morgaine said. “Some are discreet. It would not be so difficult to arrange for persistent nightmares or move a few sprites to mischief.”

“And when his kin go to the mayor and the House of Light to complain of being harassed by mages intervening in their family’s affairs,” the young man flatly replied, “which they very well might even if we do nothing, mind you, but if they do and we have harassed them – what will we do, when hard-eyed men in House livery come sniffing around and we truly have something to hide?”

“Is your deal with Sister Maude not meant to shield us from that very scrutiny?” Morgaine said.

“She is a single sister in a backwater town,” Olivier replied. “This arrangement has been allowed to continue because for some it represents an opportunity. If it ever becomes a threat, even a written contract will weigh no more than smoke.”

“I had believed you bolder than this, from the stories told in this town,” the dark-eyed mage said.

“I had believed you wiser than this, from all the stories you’ve told of your travels,” Olivier flatly replied.

It ended with that, the two of them parting ways with courteous words but also a distinct chill. He sensed he had disappointed Morgaine in some way, but then she had also disappointed him. He spoke of it with Alisanne, the following evening when they spent time together, and she was unsurprised.

“She believed you to be ambitious in a different way than you are,” she told him.

“I’m not ambitious in the slightest,” Olivier said.

Alisanne’s grey eyes were rich with the laughter at his expense she was too well-bred to indulge in.

“Indeed?” she said.

“I’ve some notions of what the future might look like,” Olivier allowed.

“You’ve proved a fair hand at soothing the fears of the townsfolk,” Alisanne said. “That aside with the smith might even have worked better than you think.”

His brow rose.

“How so?”

“I have it on good authority that our own Master Maurice has been going on long walks with Mistress Caroline,” she said. “A widower and a widow, brought together by the... heat of the forge. How passionate, no?”

She was teasing, as she often did, but months of increasingly ardent embraces away from prying eyes had taught him to tease back.

“I know no passion, save the taste of her lips,” he quoted in answer. “Is it not a folly, how my heart skips?”

Her cheeks pinked, as he’d thought they might. The following poem by Genevieve the Rossignol grew rather more risqué than the first two lines might lead one to believe.

“It is a good thing that you are not as handsome as your brother,” Alisanne decided. “Such a man would be entirely too dangerous to my gender.”

It was difficult to feel insulted by that when she followed up by catching the back of his neck and dragging him close for some very enthusiastic kissing. It was late, and there were only the two of them in the shop, so when clothes began to drop the ground – first his shirt and then her robes, until neither of them wore much of anything at all – Olivier said nothing. It was only when they were to be entirely bare, and what they both knew would follow, that he forced himself to speak.

“Are you certain?” he asked, though he might just go mad if she said no.

“Gods yes,” Alisanne hissed.

The visible desire in her eyes only fed into his own arousal. There were no more objection from him after that, and hardly any words at all until they were well and spent. The two of them ended up holding each other on the rug of the store’s backroom, enjoying the warmth of the other’s body.

“What kind of ambition did you mean?” Olivier asked. “Earlier, I mean, when were talking about Morgaine.”

“You want to talk of another woman now ?” Alisanne said, sounding mightily amused.

“I could withdraw my question until tomorrow, if you’d prefer,” he drily said.

She dragged him closer, silenced him with a kiss, and he took it as the end of the conversation. It wasn’t, however.

“You’ve the services of several wizards, some coin and ties with the House,” Alisanne sleepily said. “I hear tell you’ve even been seen seducing highborn ladies of late.”

“Lies,” Olivier amiably said, “I assure you it was entirely the other way around.”

His shoulder was swatted in half-hearted admonishment.

“She expected you to make yourself into a sort of lord, using the mages as your enforcers,” Alisanne said. “Now, since you’ve had the indecency of forcing me to think you’ll have to fetch a blanket as atonement. I’d rather enjoy you for a little while still than return to the temple.”

Disinclined to argue with that, Olivier extracted himself from their embrace and rose to his feet. His heart skipped when he noticed the door to the front of the shop had been slightly cracked open this entire time, a damning testament to how... distracted they had both been. No one had come in, however, so after closing it shut and grabbing the blanket he’d been sent questing after he put the whole matter out of his mind.

—

It was not a long winter that followed but it still felt too short to Olivier.

He’d not wasted the time, instead cementing the usefulness of the shop in the eyes of the town by arranging for the mages to create enchanted stones capable of radiating heat as well as light when firewood began to run low in some homes – freely given out, though with a signed promise of payment when the season turned and coin was had again. Roland and Morgaine had proved to be a remarkably gifted team when working together, and though the other practitioners had not helped much the successes of those two had reflected on all of them. Yet when spring came there would be changes. There would be fewer quiet evenings where he and Alisanne could lose themselves in each other, for one, but there was also a hanging sword above their head: Ludovic’s kin would come for him, sure as dawn, when the ice thawed. Roland’s visits had also grown rarer, as he dove into his studies with both their parents and accepted Morgaine’s own gracious offer of sharing some of knowledge. Olivier took to visiting him regularly instead.

It was one night on the eve of spring that he found his younger brother in his rooms at the family house, reading through Mother’s eastern poetry book, and to his surprise Roland eyed him with thinly-veiled antipathy.

“Ollie, is it true that you and Alisanne are lovers?” Roland said, closing the book and hastily putting it away.

Olivier’s brow rose. He’d believed the two of them to be discreet, or at least as discreet as one could be in a small town. He did not consider lying, though it would have been simpler.

“Yes,” he admitted. “Though that is best kept secret.”

Though no rule of the House forbade dalliances, a lay sister would be expected not to dabble in them if she’d been sent to a temple to learn temperance in the first place. It’d reflect poorly on both their reputations if it became common knowledge they were involved.

“You know that I am fond of her,” Roland accused.

“So am I,” Olivier frankly said. “And you barely know her. I am sorry that this pains you, but you’ve no real call to be bruised over the matter.”

His little brother’s face reddened. Though he was not exactly spoiled it could not be denied that Roland was used to getting his way, especially if he put in the effort. It sometimes brought out ugly things in him.

“It will not last forever,” Olivier sighed. “So put it out of your mind. She will bore of the town and leave eventually, Roland. She’s too clever to stay in a place like this forever.”

“She might,” Roland denied. “She is the youngest of seven, she has little to inherit.”

The young man’s brow rose as he considered his brother. He’d known that Alisanne had siblings – she’d mentioned two in passing – but he’d not known how many, which made it more than passing odd that Roland did .

“How do you know that?” Olivier asked.

His brother looked aside.

“Roland,” he sharply said.

“I asked, that’s all,” Roland angrily said. “Let it go, Olivier. It’s none of your business.”

He swallowed the angry reply on the tip of his tongue and nodded. Perhaps it wasn’t.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” Olivier stiffly said.

His little brother grimaced, looking guilty.

“I’m sorry,” Roland said, then hesitated. “Do you mean it, though? That the two of you won’t last?”

“I cannot see how it would,” Olivier admitted.

He would miss her sorely when she left, and be morose for a long time, but he would not delude himself into thinking that their affair would keep her from leaving this backwater when the opportunity to return home to Apenun beckoned.

“Then it’s nothing,” Roland firmly said. “Just bruising, you’re right.”

Olivier left, both heartened by the almost cordial way the conversation had ended and oddly troubled. Yet there was no time to delve into his unease, because within days spring had come and fresh troubles with it.

—

Jacques and Annette of Grisemanche were, Olivier grasped within an hour of first having met them, in their own way some of the vilest people he’d ever met.

Ludovic’s parents had not gone to the shop, when they’d arrived to Beaumarais, but instead straight to the House of Light. Alisanne had slipped out while they spoke with Sister Maude, bringing with her bad news. Ludovic’s wild spell that’d rendered Annette Grisemanche mute had faded over the winter, as untaught magic often did, and the attentions of a priest capable of wielding Light had been enough to chase away the lingering wooden tongue that’d been the last remnant of the curse. There would be no leverage or goodwill to be had by removing it. Olivier sent the youngest mage in his charge away from the village, out with Maxime Redflame to camp in the mountains and harvest herbs for a few days, then prepared for what would no doubt be an unpleasant few days.

That very evening he was invited to have a cup of wine with the two strangers and Sister Maude, so that the priestess might host them and help ‘resolve the dispute’. Given the half-faded bruises on their son’s body he’d half expected the couple to have horns and burning eyes, but instead they turned out to be rather personable. Neither good-looking nor ugly, they dressed modestly and spoke courteously. They were in good odour with Sister Maude’s equivalent in Grisemanche, Sister Lucie, and considered to be respectable by their community. Their children had all found trades, and they donated regularly to their temple.

“Ludovic was always troubled,” Annette of Grisemanche sadly said. “We never suspected it might be something as serious as magic, Sister, but perhaps we should have.”

“The signs were there,” Jacques of Grisemanche agreed. “We were blinded by familiar love, I fear. To think he would attack his own mother!”

“Troubling indeed,” Sister Maude said, turning a steady gaze towards Olivier.

He’d waited patiently for them to cease talking, remembering the look on Morgaine’s face that night. The one when she’d emerged from a room where she’d seen repeatedly broken bones in a boy barely twelve. He understood her anger a little better now, he thought. It was a dead end, such things always were, but then it was easier to be calm when it was not you the blows were raining on.

“Blinded is perhaps the right word,” Olivier said, smiling pleasantly. “For I cannot imagine how else you might have missed the many bruises on his body, or the oft-broken bones.”

There was a moment of silence.

“That is a heavy accusation,” Jacques of Grisemanche harshly said.

He was not a big man, but he was larger than Olivier – who was not done growing but would not be tall even when he had. The older man leaned forward, as if to loom, but the younger one had been faced with bare steel before. Posturing seemed like a trifling thing, after having seen your own death reflected in a blade.

“It was a simple statement,” Olivier calmly replied. “I wonder why it is you might feel accused, Master Jacques.”

“Any parent would feel this way, when told they missed the injuries of their child,” Annette of Grisemanche said. “Emotions are simply running high, Master Olivier. No doubt Ludovic simply hid them from us with his magic, ashamed of his truck with evil spirits.”

Olivier did not doubt for a moment there’d been evil in that child’s life, as it happened. How could he, when at this very moment it was looking at him with measuring eyes?

“A short recess is in order,” Sister Maude said. “It will allow for the heat of the moment to pass.”

Her gaze on him was no longer quite so demanding, but she was still handling the couple carefully. Olivier frowned. Why? She had to know that allowing them some time to speak alone would let them agree on some sort of story explaining away the evidence of beatings. The two strangers left for a short walk through the garden, even as Sister Maude broke with etiquette and filled Olivier’s cup anew herself.

“This is a problem, Olivier,” the priestess said. “You are poking at more than you can afford to provoke.”

Why would she think that? Gods, why would a woman of even middling faith allow a beaten child who’d suffered not just bruises but broken bones to return to – oh , he thought, blood going cold. The bones. They’d been broken several times, yet never healed wrong as such a break badly set or healed often by magic would. Ludovic used his arms and hands without trouble, after all. There was only one person in Grisemanche that would be able to heal the boy like that. And since it happened several times, even a fool would have been able to figure out why , Olivier realized. The couple, he’d been told earlier, was seen as respectable.

They even donated regularly to the temple in Grisemanche.

“I do not wear a red cross on my clothes,” Olivier said. “I do not crusade the cleanse the world from all evils. But I will not return that boy to beatings, Sister Maude.”

“I have not asked you to,” the priestess stiffly replied. “Yet I warn you now that if Sister Lucie requests an inquiry by the House in Apenun, then all that was built here will vanish into thin air.”

So he would have to grease the palms of the hollow things in human flesh that’d sat across him, and perhaps even the crooked sister as well. Else a fuss would be kicked up, before the shop and what it represented was ready to withstand the attention, and the consequences would be on his head.

“I understand,” Olivier de Beaumarais said, tone forcefully even.

“I knew you would,” Sister Maude said. “Patience is a virtue, Olivier. All accounts are settled in due time.”

He did not answer, the anger too sharp and close to his tongue. When the couple returned he began to negotiate in indirect, meandering pretty words how much it might cost to buy their son. They wanted to continue taking a cut of his salary and the profit of his works, the parasites, but he managed to present that as taking from the revenues of the House of Light so they hastily withdrew. In the end it came down to thirteen silvers and three promised artefacts of a nature yet to be determined, the quality of which would be attested by Sister Maude. It was steep cost, but Olivier at least finagled them into having to settle any doubts by their friend Sister Lucie themselves. May they all choke squabbling over what their shares of the bribes should be.

He left the temple feeling exhausted and feeling dirtied, so it was not a pleasant surprise for him to find Morgaine waiting at the shop. Lounging behind the counter, the beautiful sorceress did not take the initiative to greet him and only studied him with dark and knowing eyes.

“Morgaine,” he greeted her. “Can this wait until tomorrow? I find myself in no state to converse.”

“There is a spell from the east that allows one to see what is far away, within certain rules,” Morgaine said. “Mine is a paltry enough imitation, but it still allows me sight within the temple.”

Olivier’s irritation mounted. Not only was she admitting to having spied on him, she was stubbornly refusing to take the hint that he was in no mood for this.

“Should you be caught indulging in that, it is not you alone that will suffer the consequences of it,” he sharply said.

The dark-eyed woman smiled.

“Does it unsettle you, the lack of control?” she asked. “The realization that your authority exists only so long as we allow it to?”

That have him pause. His eyes narrowed.

“You are beginning,” Olivier calmly said, “to speak unwisely.”

“Ah, and we must be wise,” Morgaine mocked. “Always. Else we are wicked, and so we’ll be clapped in irons and ran out and butchered and burned . But you fine folk, well, that is different. Even if you beat us and break our bones we are to smile, and if we’re lucky we can pay you for the privilege of leaving us alone. Eventually, that is. After you tire of the cruelty.”

The longer she spoke the more the anger dripped into her voice openly. Her hands clenched over the counter as her expression hardened and sorcery flickered around her fingers in thread of red light. Olivier had never really thought of magic as something that could be turned against him, that could be used to hurt him, but in that moment he realized that if she struck at him with a spell he would most likely die. She’d not survive the night, for he’d die loudly and draw attention, but simply because of her magic and anger she had power over him. And he was but a young fool in the middle of nowhere, he knew. How galling it must be for an officer in expensive armour to feel like this, or a highborn magistrate. And so Olivier understood just a little bit, now, why people feared mages. Why they wanted them gone. It was a shameful thing, but he understood the fear at last.

And yet for all of Lady Morgaine’s anger it seemed to him that her eyes stayed calm. Calculating. But it must be a mistake, he thought, for there was nothing calculated about this confrontation. It felt too raw for that.

“You ask me to change the writ of things,” Olivier said. “I cannot, Morgaine. It is unfair, and it should not be this way, but it is not in my power to mend. All I can do is what I am doing.”

The sorceress looked tired, suddenly.

“You are not as those two jackals are,” she said. “But this... stray dog refuge you are trying to make for us, it is not an answer. You are trying to protect us like we’re children, to chase away those who’d harm us while we hide in the mountains until you have settled our affairs for us. It is no way to live. You make decisions in our name without truly understanding our troubles, because they have never been your troubles. It is a well-meaning condescension you offer but condescension nonetheless.”

It wounded this pride, that this stranger would come and complain of what he had built with little help from anyone at all. He was not an angel, to be able to solve all troubles with a snap of his fingers, and she was not forced to be here. If there were better offers to entertain, then let her take one of them. Yet that was anger and pride. It was resentment, a many-headed snake that Olivier knew still dwelled in him for all that years ago he had decided to take the other road. One decision, though, did not choose the cast of an entire life. He would have make that same choice again, as many times as it took. So he breathed out, and forced himself to calm.

“You have qualms, evidently,” Olivier said. “Express them properly so that they might be addressed.”

“You have made yourself into the lord of this little town’s wizards,” Morgaine said. “With good reasons and intentions, but you have made yourself a lord still. We are beholden to you, you settle our troubles for us and we ply our magic on your behalf.”

She expected you to make yourself into a sort of lord, using the mages as your enforcers , Alisanne had said. Instead Morgaine thought him to have made himself lord of only the mages, and this it seemed she could not suffer.

“Is this your own belief,” Olivier asked, “or that of all mages of Beaumarais?”

“The sentiment is shared by many,” Morgaine said. “Ask, if you do not believe me, though I imagine some will be afraid of being tossed out if they truly speak their mind.”

He would not take her word for this – she’d done nothing to earn that sort of trust from him – but neither would he dismiss what she’d said outright. That would be dangerously complacent.

“The nature of the arrangement that brought you to Beaumarais is not something I can change,” Olivier frankly said.

“No,” Morgaine softly said. “I imagine not. But for all that it is your name on the parchment, it need not remain so.”

His brow rose. That he might sign over the shop to her was a suggestion both foolish – the House would not accept it – and personally ruinous. He’d invested most of his coin into the venture and drawn on his personal connections extensively. It was also exceptionally presumptuous.

“I do not mean to steal from you,” Morgaine said. “Only that, while keeping your shares of profit, you might eventually pass the reins to someone who might truly make this a home for our kind.”

He frowned.

“And who would that be?” he asked.

“Your brother,” Morgaine firmly said.

Oliver started in surprise.

“Roland does not know how to run a shop, much less deal with the House,” he said.

“He is young,” the dark-eyed sorceress said. “You can teach him.”

That was... not untrue. And it would keep the shop in the family, which settled some of Olivier’s troubles with this. Yet he was balking at the notion, some part of him refusing to even seriously think of it.

“Consider it,” Morgaine quietly said. “That is all I can ask.”

She left him to the silence of the darkened shop, lost in thought.

Interlude: Paragons

“To offer forgiveness to the unrepentant is as the sheep embracing the wolf.”
– Hektor the Ecclesiast, Atalante preacher

Hanno had underestimated the depth of the troubles in the Arsenal.

It had already been an unpleasant surprise for providence to have failed him, not offering even the slightest of nudges otherwise when he’d decided to wait a few days before heading towards the Arsenal, but now it seemed that initial mistake had allowed several streaks of unpleasantness to take root. That Catherine would be as a scalded cat was only to be expected, given that she’d pitted her wits against the Wandering Bard and there was no victory to be had without a cost there. That could be worked around until it passed, which he trusted it would. That there would be distrust and discontent boiling up within the heroes as was not something he’d foreseen, at least not to such a grave extent. That Christophe de Pavanie’s name never seemed to be far behind whenever a spot of discord was there to be found was even more unfortunate.

It had become the White Knight’s habit to arrange for a great talk with all the heroes of a region whenever his travels allowed, so that they might vent their grievances before they could grow into formal complaints and frictions of character could be caught before they escalated, and it was without hesitation he followed the habit after coming to the Arsenal. There were nine heroes within these walls who bore Names, and most made good time when he sent for them. Still, extracting themselves from their occupations took longer for some than others. Hanno was not displeased by that, as them coming with waves allowed him to take a look at the currents binding them to one another. Roland, for example, came with the Vagrant Spear and the Forlorn Paladin.

The latter two of those three had spent more than a year as part of the Archer’s band, while the Rogue Sorcerer was perhaps the hero who best got along with the Woe in particular and villains as a whole. There were some who called him soft on Below because of that, though his distinguished record had ensured it was just idle talk. That the Dominion heroine would keep company with Roland and the Forlorn Paladin was interesting, however. If she had felt uncomfortable under the Archer, starved of respectable company or mistreated, she would not have chosen those particular companions. As for the Forlorn Paladin himself, though he remained improbably cheerful despite his Name it was clear that he felt lost and that the Vagrant Spear was serving as an anchor. Hanno sympathized.

He had more memories than any man alive, and their loss was something he dreaded like little else.

The White Knight spoke with the first three heroes to arrive, little more than small talk about what they’d seen and done since their last parting, but before long others began to wander in. Though the Kingfisher Prince was not someone Hanno had ever met in person before, the Prince of Brus was hard to mistake for another – between the fanciful Alamans clothing and the elaborate hair ribbons, there was simply no other hero he could be mistaken for . The man had a reputation for charm that must have been true at least in part, for the often-taciturn Bitter Blacksmith was laughing as some unheard jest as he gallantly opened the door for her.

Though Hanno did not particularly consider himself the host of this gathering – he had not fetched the refreshments himself, or done anything at all save requesting the help of messengers and attendants – he still welcomed the pair into the room, returning the Prince of Brus’ firm arm clasp and congratulating Helmgard for her impressive work on the sword he was not learning had been named the Severance. A shame. He’d been rather partial to the ‘Severity’, himself. It seemed a truer homage to the woman it had been forged from. There was hardly a ripple as the two Named joined the others, cordial smiles being offered up by those whose character so inclined them.

The Mirror Knight arrived rather late, considering that Christophe had been eager for a meeting like this one when they’d last spoken, but it was easy to see why. When the dark-haired hero arrived, it was with the Blessed Artificer and the Blade of Mercy at his side. He must have wanted the three of them to come together and so waited, though Hanno found that the Mirror Knight looked rather jittery underneath his attempt so seem calm. The White Knight almost frowned when he saw how uncomfortable young Antoine was, avoiding looking at the end of the table where Roland and the two heroines he’d come in with sat. Not, not Roland, Hanno decided. It was Sidonia in particular the younger man was avoiding looking at.

The Vagrant Spear did not gaze in their direction at all, as if noticing them was beneath her.

The Blessed Artificer strode forward with little apparent awareness of her companions’ discomfort, offering Hanno himself a nod before settling in the chair by the Bitter Blacksmith’s side. The two began to talk animatedly, and Christophe look almost miffed before he came to make his greetings. The White Knight took the time to speak with young Antoine for a bit, but the Blade of Mercy remained stiff and tight-lipped. Twice, in mere idle conversation, he redirected a casual question of Hanno’s to the Mirror Knight. The Ashuran filed that away, refraining from making assumptions but equally disinclined to simply ignore an oddity.

The Blind Maker was the last to arrive, the older man having been in the middle of delicate work when the messenger came and so unable to extract himself easily. He apologized, but no one felt slighted and so the matter was waved away. Hanno caught himself looking at the door, as if still waiting, and felt a pang of grief when he understood why. Nephele would not be coming, for she was dead. She’d perished in the fight against a demon, mere days ago, and so Hanno would never see his friend again. Hear her laugh, enjoy the sight of how she had come to thrive in the very place she had died defending. The dark-skinned man did not shy away from the grief, instead leaning into it. Let it pass through him.

The White Knight could not change what had been done, but he could keep Nephele alive within himself. Hanno’s mother had been fond of a verse from her homeland, one that claimed all were born to two deaths: one in the flesh, one in the memories of those left behind. It was not in the Ashuran knight’s ability to unmake the end of flesh, but in memory at least he could honour the woman who had been the Repentant Magister. Yet there was a time for grief and a time for the present, and now Hanno was called upon by the latter to set aside the former. He did so.

“I see were all here,” the White Knight said, standing at the head of the table. “I am not unaware that there are many demands on your time, and so I thank you for indulging my request.”

“We were long overdue a council of the Chosen, anyhow,” the Blessed Artificer said.

Adanna of Smyrna had spoken with characteristic bluntness and so Hanno knew better than to take offence, though that did not stop some from eyeing her with irritation. Or dislike. Heroes were not above the vagaries of human interaction in the slightest. They were, if anything, more prone to falling into them. A consequence of strong personalities, Hanno had often thought, which were those that tended to come into Names to begin with.

“A council over what?” the Forlorn Paladin asked. “The messenger never said.”

From the corners of his eye, Hanno saw that the Kingfisher Prince was carefully studying the heroes in the room. Looking, the White Knight suspected, for the invisible web of alliances and enmities that Alamans considered to be the foundation of all society. This one was a hero, the White Knight thought, but a prince as well. It would not do to forget that. The blue-eyed Prince of Brus caught Hanno’s own watchful eye, and with a quirk of the lips offered a wink.

“This is to discuss the fate of the Red Axe, obviously,” the Mirror Knight said.

“What is there to discuss, exactly?” the Rogue Sorcerer flatly asked.

“These talks are meant to allow you all to air grievances and worries,” Hanno cut in as he sat down, voice serene. “If such worries concern the matter of the Red Axe, you are of course free to voice them.”

“There’s grievances enough for twenty to be aired,” the Blessed Artificer said. “Most of them about the Black Queen’s atrocious behaviour.”

Hanno cocked his head to the side.

“The reports I received must have been incomplete, then,” he said. “For I have read them and found little to fault her with.”

That made a stir, though not a large one. He’d hardly said anything incendiary, besides. If Catherine had genuinely been at fault, it would have been his duty to act on it. If he had not, the reason why ought to be self-evident.

“This is ridiculous,” Roland said. “We heroes in our little hidden room, discussing the Black Queen like we’re some sort of secret cabal. If it came out, we’d be a laughingstock – or worse.”

“You worry too much of how things might look, Rogue Sorcerer,” the Mirror Knight said, contempt clear in his voice.

“You don’t worry enough , Christophe,” the Bitter Blacksmith sneered. “I don’t care if she stepped on your toes, she’s also sent troops to fight up in Twilight’s Pass. You don’t get to fuck that just because no one bothered to beat humility into you as a child.”

The Mirror Knight looked not only surprised by Helmgard’s words, but almost hurt. They were friends, the White Knight distantly recalled. But right now the Bitter Blacksmith was just seeing yet another Alamans posturing while her people died in droves, and that pulled on an older and deeper loyalty that anything friendship might earn of her.

“I choose not to believe that expecting civility of each other is being too ambitious,” Hanno calmly said.

The Blacksmith looked away, but not without embarrassment first painting itself across her face. Christophe looked pleased and almost vindicated, though, which had not been Hanno’s intent at all. It worried him that the other man seemed convinced that there were sides to take instead of disagreements to be had. The difference might slight, at first, but the longer the path was the starker the difference would grow.

“Impugning each other’s character is no more civil than insults,” the White Knight plainly said. “I will add, however, that expecting Catherine Foundling to withdraw the aid she has offered because her actions are being questioned is not a defence of her. It is, in fact, the contrary.”

The Kingfisher Prince cleared his throat.

“Considering grievances have been mentioned, I am curious to hear them,” Prince Frederic Goethal said. “I was part of the defence myself, after all.”

“You failed to hide the Red Axe from mere guards, then were laid down by your own ward,” the Blessed Artificer said. “Hardly a participation.”

Every single Alamans at the table looked appalled at her words, Hanno noted, though not necessarily because they disagreed with them. The Prince of Brus had an impressive martial reputation in the north, but he’d worked with few other Named and his showing during the assault on the Arsenal had been lackluster by some ways of looking at it. Hanno’s esteem of the man had raised at his restraint when faced with bare swords and threats, but even on the side of Above there were some who measured success largely through body counts.

“Adanna, you’re being insulting,” the Bitter Blacksmith told her.

The golden-eyed artificer looked surprised.

“I meant no insult,” she assured the prince. “Only that-”

Mercifully, Helmgard elbowed her before she could launch into an explanation that Hanno suspected would offer several additional insults. The dark-skinned man actually sympathized with Adanna a great deal, since he understood exactly where her occasional maladroitness came from: it was rather typical of Ashurans in general and citizens from higher tiers in particular. High Tyrian was a highly blunt language, compared to some on the continent, and most Ashurans who learned a second tongue had to unlearn habits that made them come across as very rude. Those born to higher tiers were also raised into believing that criticism of lower tiers was a civic duty, which could combine in unfortunate ways with other Ashuran customs. Captains, traders and diplomats were naturally taught how to avoid those pitfalls, but the Blessed Artificer was unlikely to have rubbed elbows with any of these in Smyrna – she would have moved in different, higher circles.

“No offence was taken,” the Kingfisher Prince said, and it he was lying he hid it well. “Yet my question stands.”

“I am curious as well,” the White Knight said. “Though I want it to be clear that you are all free to speak, and I will not take you words as a formal complaint under the Terms unless you explicitly state otherwise.”

“I was threatened with execution,” the Blessed Artificer said.

The Rogue Sorcerer laughed, and not kindly.

“Tell them why,” Roland said.

“It hardly matters,” Adanna said. “The threat is the reason of my complaint.”

“She nosed about an Arsenal project the Grand Alliance is going out of its way to keep secret, and then tried to bully the Black Queen into speaking about it in front of what turned out to be at least two traitors ,” Roland his aggressively even tone making it clear what he thought of the entire affair. “The specific threat then involved first gaining the approval of the Grand Alliance for your execution by the lawful means, as I recall.”

Hanno’s brow almost rose. It had been a misjudgement on Adanna’s part to believe that the Black Queen would respond to this sort of a pressure, and an even greater misjudgement to resort to this sort of thing against an ally at all. He’d expected better of her.

“I can confirm there are projects under such stark secrecy that exist,” the Kingfisher Prince said, “though I am not conversant with their exact nature.”

The Blessed Artificer’s lips thinned, though she did not argue.

“I have a complaint of my own,” the Mirror Knight said.

Eyes moved to him and the dark-haired man smiled thinly.

“About the Rogue Sorcerer, and how he might as well be the mouthpiece of the Black Queen in this room,” Christophe continued. “Go where you belong, Sorcerer. Go sit at her side, and let us get on with our duties at last without your help .”

Roland’s fingers clenched at his face paled in anger. Hanno genuinely could not remember ever seeing the mild-mannered man this furious.

“I do not know you, Alamans,” the Blind Maker calmly said, his thick Arlesite accent tinging the words, “but your words fall well short of the chivalry your Choosing boasts of.”

“That was ill-said,” the Forlorn Paladin agreed, face grown serious.

Some were less courteous in their chiding.

“Fuck you, Christophe,” Sidonia hissed. “I’ve been with the Lady for more than a year now, does that make me traitor too? Who the Hells are you to tell anyone to leave?”

Hanno pulled on his Name the slightest bit, then slapped his hand against the table. The sound was like a thunderclap in the small hall, and it drew shocked silence from all in it.

“Civility,” the White Knight reminded them. “Be clearer on the nature of your complaint, Mirror Knight. Are you accusing the Rogue Sorcerer of having fallen from grace and become one of the Damned?”

That would, in fact, be a valid reason to ask for Roland’s exclusion from this meeting. In practice it would be difficult to prove either way, but it hardly mattered since Hanno doubted the Mirror Knight would pursue his hasty words to the end. It was a profoundly serious accusation and there would be consequences to using so frivolously. That the Principate had used such methods frequently against heroes of opposing nations was one of the reason it had such a poor reputation with Named, and for a Proceran hero in particular to be seen using the same means would see him made a pariah among their kind.

“I did not speak those words,” Christophe de Pavanie stiffly said.

“Then you should be more careful when you address others,” Hanno frankly said. “If you did not mean to make that accusation, then all you did was offer an insult.”

The Mirror Knight looked like he’d been slapped, but then he’d offered the same to the Rogue Sorcerer with intent nowhere as kindly meant. He must be made to understand that he should be choosing his words more carefully, not blurting out offences and then apologizing for them.

“Everyone knows the Sorcerer’s thick as thieves with the Woe,” the Blade of Mercy spoke up. “It’s not a crime to say that, is it?”

“No,” Hanno serenely replied. “Though neither is it a crime to have a cordial rapport with an ally, Antoine.”

In truth, it would be a poison to this alliance if heroes came to believe that being on good terms with villains was a sort of betrayal. Perhaps if bands of five had remained entirely Below’s or Above’s it could have been borne, but that had not been the case for some time now. The ability to forge a band out of Named of all allegiances was simply too potent a tool in the war against Keter to be easily discarded, and that meant heroes and villains must be able to maintain a degree of respect for each other.

“I have a grievance of my own, as it happens,” the Rogue Sorcerer coldly said.

The anger was still in him, the White Knight saw. That boded ill, for Roland was sharper with wits and tongue than many were with steel.

“Why is Christophe of Pavanie still strutting about with the Severance?” Roland asked. “More than half a dozen of us worked on it, and a fortune was spent forging it. The peril has passed, Mirror Knight, so why do you still carry that priceless artefact with you like some ceremonial blade?”

“I am safekeeping it,” the Mirror Knight harshly said.

“We’ve found no one else capable of using it,” the Blessed Artificer shrugged. “Where else should it go?”

“It’s an artefact meant to kill the Hidden Horror,” the Bitter Blacksmith disagreed, “it should be under lock and behind wards, not lugged around.”

“It hasn’t been observed since it was taken up, has it?” the Blind Maker mused. “It should be, or we will not know how it takes to being used.”

“It was taken up in a battle against great foes,” the Vagrant Spear said. “And used worthily. It would be a grave dishonour to claim it back now.”

The Mirror Knight threw her a look as surprised as it was grateful.

“Hear hear,” the Forlorn Paladin said. “It is not a deed to be lightly gainsaid.”

“Seven demons were slain with the blade in the Mirror Knight’s hand,” the Blade of Mercy fervently reminded them. “ Seven . What fool would now give it to another, or put it back to rest?”

“I agree that Christophe is most fit to wield the Severance, given its temperament and his own talents,” Hanno said. “I have already informed the Black Queen as much.”

There was a moment of stillness in the room. Dismay on the Rogue Sorcerer’s face, triumph on the Mirror Knight’s – or was it relief?

“It must be returned, however,” the White Knight continued. “It was taken up during a crisis for laudable reasons, but the crisis has passed. Until it is formally bestowed upon someone, it belongs to the Grand Alliance.”

The scene of a moment earlier, reversed. Nothing about this, Hanno thought, ought to be taken personally. Diplomacy was setting the beat to the tune, not lesser and pettier considerations. He knew better than to believe it would not be taken personally regardless.

“The First Prince shares that belief,” the Kingfisher Prince said. “I do as well, for that matter. You’ve fought mostly in Cleves, Mirror Knight, while the sword might be needed elsewhere. That front is the mildest of the three.”

Christophe cast the prince an unfriendly glance, then turned to Hanno.

“Is this an order, White Knight?” he challenged.

He wanted, the dark-skinned man sensed, a confrontation. To make this about the two of them. That was disturbing, considering the White Knight had no enmity towards Christophe de Pavanie and had believe the opposite to be just as true.

“No,” Hanno said. “I have told you my opinion. It will become an order if the signatory members of the Grand Alliance so decide, likely by vote. I expect the Severance will be assigned in the same manner.”

The Vagrant Spear laughed.

“Should have been more careful who you insulted, Christophe,” she said. “Even if your First Prince takes a shine to you, that’s two out of three who’d rather burn than back you.”

“I am sure Her Most Serene Highness will see reason, when properly made aware of the facts,” the Mirror Knight said.

There was a certainty to his voice that Hanno would have found admirable were he not certain it was unwarranted. Though the White Knight had not lost the respect he’d found for the First Prince during the defense of Cleves, he’d since tempered it with appropriate caution. He could respect Cordelia Hasenbach without losing sight of the truth that she loved Procer more than she did most anything. It was why she now wanted the Red Axe to stand trial before the Highest Assembly, ignoring the protection promised the heroine by the Terms. The First Prince would not find many allies in this, unless he’d gravely misread Catherine so at the moment she was also highly unlikely to take a chance on championing Christophe de Pavanie.

“The Hasenbach will do what needs to be done,” the Bitter Blacksmith bluntly said. “Whether it pleases you or not. That is their way.”

There was an undertone of pride to the words, not quite hidden. Christophe looked upset, which led Hanno to suspect he had come into this hall expecting that Helmgard would support him in all things. The Ashuran was not the only one to notice.

“Is it because you’ve been fuckin Damned that you’re so traitorous?” the Blade of Mercy bit out.

There was a beat of silence, the half a dozen people started talking at the same time. Sidonia was loudly laughing instead, Hanno noted, while the Kingfisher Prince was looking rather interested even as he kept his silence. The White Knight struck his palm against the table once more.

“Order,” Hanno said. “Antoine, please apologize.”

“I think not,” the Blade of Mercy coldly said. “What did I say, save the truth?”

“So she took the Hunted Magician to bed,” the Blessed Artificer replied, dismissive. “What of it? He’s a comely man, and rather skilled in bedplay.”

Several of the heroes choked in surprise. Hanno did not share their shock, benefitting from the perspective of a shared homeland. Adanna of Smyrna would likely equate having sex with a villain to a citizen of a higher tier doing the same with one of a lower tier, and so see nothing there to raise an eyebrow over. Considering marriages across tiers were exceedingly rare such affairs were usually purely physical, and the Blessed Artificer would be highly insulted should someone imply her judgement – or that of a friend, which Helmgard was – might be affected by such a thing.

“Is he?” the Vagrant Spear asked, leaning forward eagerly. “Elaborate.”

The White Knight could not blame the Archer for that behaviour, sadly. She’d been this way since they first met and actually tended to be significantly worse when Rafaella was around for them rile each other up. The Dominion spirit of competition did not exclude revels.

“Adanna?” the Mirror Knight said, sounding horrified.

“I took up with him myself, for a while,” the Blessed Artificer said.

“He thought we didn’t know,” Helmgard grinned. “We kept making appointments at the same time, you should have seen him panic and make those tortured excuses.”

The White Knight cleared his throat.

“How any of us choose to share our beds is not anyone else’s concern,” Hanno said. “And not to be subject to insult. Antoine, apologize .”

For the first time that day, his voice hardened. The younger man froze at the sound, eyes going wide.

“He meant no insult, Helmgard,” the Mirror Knight said, addressing the heroine directly.

The Bitter Blacksmith spat to the side.

“Only a boy needs others to speak for himself,” she said, but curtly nodded.

Hanno caught her eye, raising an eyebrow in question, but she shook her head in denial. If she was satisfied, then he would pursue the matter no further.

“Are there any further grievances?” the White Knight asked.

“The Black Queen should not be a high officer of the Grand Alliance,” the Mirror Knight flatly said.

The entire room went silent, as if breathing in simultaneously.

“That is not a grievance,” Hanno noted.

“She’s corrupt,” Christophe de Pavanie said. “She made a deal with the Hunted Magician to let him off-”

“The Hunted Magician is to stand trial within the week,” the White Knight corrected. “I am to be a member of the tribunal.”

“Don’t be obtuse,” the Mirror Knight insisted, “she alone gets to decide the sentence, and she was arrogant enough to take her bribe while I was in the room. She thinks herself untouchable, White Knight.”

“She alone stands as judge over the Damned, by the Terms we all agreed on,” the Kingfisher Prince said. “To argue against that is to argue against their very existence.”

Which by the way his tone had cooled, was not a stance that would endear anyone to the prince.

“What meaning is there in the Terms, if the one enforcing them on villains abuses her office?” the Mirror Knight said. “We’ve offered amnesty to a parade of rapists and murderers but the Damned holding their leash is just as corrupt. Is it any wonder that the likes of the Red Axe strike against us?”

Christophe de Pavanie rose to his feet, animated and angry. The emotion did him no favours with some at the table, but it caught the attention of others. There had been doubts about the Terms from the beginning, after all, and two of the heroes who’d most stringently argued against their current form were in this hall – both Adanna and Christophe had been deeply opposed to the principle of villains policing themselves through the Black Queen. Enough that they’d threatened to walk, though it’d been an empty threat. It had been a point of principle back then, however. It’d since grown into a genuine belief for the Mirror Knight, it was plain to Hanno’s eyes.

“We are losing the mandate of the Heavens,” the Mirror Knight warned. “Every time we care more about the letter of a treaty than doing good, we lose ourselves a little more. That is Below’s subtlest scheme: to make us embrace one evil in seeking the destruction of another.”

Hanno had heard many people claim they understood the designs of the Heavens, over the years, and what their mandate for their children was. It was unfortunate that no degree of certainty seemed to prevent them from error, or mutual exclusivity in their claims. His attention, beyond the words being spoken, was on the heroes in the room. Some were skeptical, the White Knight thought as he studied the Named, but others were visibly in agreement. The Blade of Mercy, the Blessed Artificer. Reluctantly, the Bitter Blacksmith. Given the deep enmity she had with her brother, Hanno suspected that her leanings there were personally driven. She must be troubled by the thought that the reason she’d refrained from fighting her brother to the death, the Terms, might have been some trick of the Gods Below.

“Horseshit,” the Vagrant Spear said. “The Red Axe killed the Wicked Enchanter. He was an animal of the worst kind, but what does that change? She gave her word. We all did. And now you’re trying to wriggle out of it, like a worm on the hook.”

“She got Nephele killed,” Christophe de Pavanie hissed.

“No,” the Blade of Mercy burst out.

Astonished, the Mirror Knight turned towards the younger man.

“I was there, it wasn’t like that,” Antoine insisted. “She lost soldiers, too, and it was the Hierophant who caught the demon. Not her, not us, him.”

“Hierophant hasn’t enough interest in people to get them killed on purpose,” the Bitter Blacksmith grunted. “And he liked Nephele, I remember.”

“Praesi hide their intentions skillfully,” Adanna said.

She then withered under Helmgard’s skeptical gaze.

“It is perhaps unlikely,” she conceded. “And though she is a vicious brute, I’ll admit I have some doubts the Black Queen would have attempted to arrange the death of an ally in the middle of a fight with a demon. She is a practical sort of monster, and more careful with her life than her cavalier manners would make you believe.”

On the account of the pragmatism and cavalier manners, Hanno tended to agree. Catherine was also savagely protective of those she considered in her care, whether they were objectively deserving of that protection or not, so that she might have arranged for Nephele to die was... improbable. Not impossible, of course, and he was willing to hear out Christophe, but he was more inclined to believe in a misunderstanding than a conspiracy.

“What leads you to believe that the Repentant Magister was the victim of a plot?” the White Knight asked.

The Mirror Knight blinked, biting his lip.

“A library was burned, and in it there were two false Revenants who attacked us as we tried to rescue the Doddering Sage,” he said. “It must have been the Black Queen and one of her servants, who else could it have been?”

“Even if you were right, how would that lead to scheming Nephele’s murder?” the Rogue Sorcerer asked.

“She lied to us,” Christophe said. “Do you not see?”

The Blind Maker cleared his throat. The Mirror Knight’s face tightened with anger.

“And now you mock me, just as she did,” he said. “Does no one else understand what she’s doing to us even now?”

Hanno chose his words carefully, but perhaps too slowly. He was not the first to answer.

“So here we are,” the Rogue Sorcerer quietly said. “The truth comes out at last. Nephele died and your pride was hurt, so now you’re throwing a tantrum painted over with righteous speech. The part that disgusts me most, Knight , is that you are pretending you actually knew her. The way us here at the Arsenal did, we who shared years with her. You swagger around arrogating the loss of others, as if it makes you important and worth listening to.”

Roland cast a look of icy contempt at the other hero.

“All it makes you is the most despicable sort of braggart,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “Have the decency of silence, Mirror Knight, and sit in your fucking chair.”

“ Roland ,” Hanno sharply said. “That’s enough. Being insulted is no reason to return the treatment in kind, not amongst allies.”

“You’re a disgrace, Sorcerer,” the Blade of Mercy spat.

“Swallow your tongue, boy,” the Bitter Blacksmith harshly said. “You have already given away your right to speak.”

“I will not speak to the Rogue Sorcerer’s anger,” the Forlorn Paladin said, “but his doubts I’ll admit to sharing. You cast grave accusations, Mirror Knight, but offer no proof. Even a villain is due more than that.”

“This is all pointless talk, anyway,” the Vagrant Spear exasperatedly said. “Even if every word you spoke was true, Christophe, what is it that could be done? You want to spank the Black Queen’s bottoms until she learns about virtue? The moment one of us – any of us – attacks her, the Kingdom of Callow‘s armies will leave and let Procer burn to the ground.”

“They have a duty,” Christophe tightly said. “And I do not speak of forcing her to abdicate her crown, Sidonia. Is Lady Vivienne Dartwick not her heir? Let her replace the crooked queen as representative for the Damned, then.”

“That is enough of that,” Hanno said.

Eyes turned him.

“We do not rule the Grand Alliance,” the White Knight evenly said. “We do not settle its affairs for it, much less meddle with its constituent crowns. We are servants of the Gods Above who have sworn an oath of war against the Hidden Horror.”

Hanno swept his gaze across the room.

“We must remain aware of our limits,” the White Knight said. “We are not deciding the fate of the Queen of Callow between us, or the fate of the Severance, much less who the representative for villains would be under rules that we have already given our oath to observe. If you have concerns, I will hear them. I you have grievances, I will act on them. But do not delude yourselves, not for a moment, that we can dictate terms to half of Calernia bound in alliance.”

Few looked like they wanted to object, and none who dwelled in the Arsenal. They understood best, Hanno thought, the actual scale of something like the Grand Alliance. They’d seen it at work, when this unearthly place had been carved out of nothing in less than a year. The others knew only their front, their battle, their struggle. It was human nature, Hanno knew, to reduce things to something that was easier to grasp. That did not make you uncomfortable about how very small you were. The Seraphim had stripped him of that, among their many gifts. The White Knight perfectly understood how insignificant a speck of dust he truly was, and that had allowed him a certain... clarity of sight, in some ways.

“You’re going to kill the Red Axe.”

Hanno turned a calm gaze to the Mirror Knight, whose green eyes had gone cold.

“I am,” the White Knight agreed. “If a law cannot be borne, let it not be borne. I will not worship at the altar of our imperfections and pretend it is infallible. But if it is to stand, if it is to be heeded, there cannot be exceptions .”

Hanno did not judge, for that was not his place even bereft the guidance of the Seraphim, but he was neither blind nor deaf. He would act as he must, knowing his actions to be blind and imperfect. Christophe de Pavanie rose to his feet. Slowly, inexorably.

“No,” the Mirror Knight harshly said. “I will not allow it.”

Those were not, the White Knight thought, words that could be taken back.

Interlude: Epitomes

“For though the Gods Above laid down the path of righteousness for all to see, so did the Gods Below then lay down a hundred others that look just like it.”
– Extract from the ‘Truths of the Shore’, a collection of the teachings of Arianna Galadon (considered holy text only in Procer)

Hanno would have to be very careful, to ensure Christophe de Pavanie was alive by the end of this.

Even as half a dozen shouts erupted in the wake of the Mirror Knight’s challenge, the dark-skinned man wondered if he should first have spoken with the other knight alone. No, he decided. That, too, would have been a mistake. It would have been treating Christophe like a sickness to be quarantined instead of comrade whose doubts needed to be allayed. Hanno was no more lord over heroes than heroes were lords over Creation, and though the demands of experience often saw him walk the fine line between stewardship and government he must never cross it willingly.

“ Sit down , Christophe,” the Vagrant Spear called out, “this is-”

“- ful Gods, I will punch the sense back int-”

“Silence,” the White Knight said.

The ripple of power in his voice sucked the cacophony out of the room, as if by magic. The Mirror Knight stood ramrod straight, as if the outpouring of anger had been a matter of indifference to him, but the slight hunch to his shoulders spoke otherwise. Still, for all the red colouring his cheeks Christophe did not desist. Pride was the stone around his neck, and now Hanno would have to find a way do ensure it did not end up drowning him. First, however, the venom must be drawn out. The White Knight did not rise to his feet, or react beyond turning his head to properly address the other Named. Christophe watched him with strained eyes, his light brown hair harried.

The angle of his arms ensured the polished bracers he wore on his wrists reflected only a muddled haze.

“Let us avoid misunderstandings,” Hanno calmly said. “What is it that you mean, Christophe, by ‘I will not allow it’?”

“How many of us need to die before you face the truth of what you made us part of?” the Mirror Knight said. “The Exalted Poet was shot in the back by one of the Woe, and who here has said even a word of it?”

“He was a traitor,” the Blessed Artificer coldly said. “Good riddance.”

She looked more conflicted that her words might indicate, Hanno thought, but here and now she’d chosen anger over qualms. Few in the rooms shared her apprehensions, given that the man had been seen working with the fae of the Court of Autumn. Whatever his reasons, he’d sided with creatures that had slain soldiers and broken works dedicated to the end of the Dead King. That in the process he’d tried to betray two heroes had seen his memory grow increasingly reviled: the Vagrant Spear’s face had gone icy at the mention of the Name, for she was Levantine as well and had taken the betrayal as a slight on the honour of Levant as a whole.

“Traitor to what, exactly ?” Christophe de Pavanie said, voice just short of a shout. “To the rules and designs of a Damned? To ‘terms’ that would see us murder a woman for slaying her own rapist?”

“You have not answered the White Knight’s question,” the Kingfisher Prince cut in, voice measured. “Are you threatening to take up arms to enforce your will, Christophe de Pavanie?”

The fair-haired prince’s hand had slipped, ever so slightly towards the sword at his hip. Hanno thought better of his comrades than to expect they would brawl like tavern drunks but, should there be fighting, he suspected it was not the Prince of Brus that would be the victor there. The Kingfisher Prince’s role was a martial one, but also soldierly in nature. He could turn a company of riders into an unbreakable lance or fight as a champion for his host, but he would not be the equal of the Mirror Knight in a duel.

“Let him speak,” the Forlorn Paladin hesitantly said. “Or has it now become a sin to even speak against the Terms?”

“Why bother? This isn’t a vote,” the Bitter Blacksmith bluntly replied. “No point in pretending otherwise, the Terms are there to stay. We can whine about it all we like, but at the end of the day I’d rather share a room with a villain than a Revenant.”

“How often are we going to be made to bow our heads using that argument?” the Mirror Knight asked, turning to her and sweeping the room with his gaze. “Accept this, or the Dead King takes us all. So first we welcome crooks. Then we welcome thieves, then rapists, then murderers – and Gods only know what comes after that. What single thing can we not be made to swallow, when it is put to contrast with the end of days?”

“Spoken like a child of summer,” the Bitter Blacksmith said, tone gone hard. “There is no bargain to be had with the night: do what needs to be done or disappear.”

She was not the only here there to have doubts, though Christophe’s appeal had not been without impact. Neither was it without sense, Hanno knew. It was all to easy to justify all manners of cruelty by drawing some invisible path linking their avoidance to the victory of Keter. Yet that was no excuse to ignore what still lay just beyond the horizon, waiting for a misstep. It did not surprise the Ashuran that it was Roland who gave further answer, for few among them better understood what still lay ahead of them all.

“We contrast with the end of days,” the Rogue Sorcerer thinly said, “because the end of days is looming. It is not a rhetorical device, Mirror Knight. It’s what happens this winter if we make too many mistakes.”

“We’ve won wars like this one before,” the Blessed Artificer disagreed. “And won them without destroying what we are.”

“We haven’t,” the Vagrant Spear said. “This many soldiers, this many Bestowed, and all we can do is hold? No one’s had a war like this in, maybe not since the Empress Most Dread.”

Even in Levant the memory of Triumphant had not quite faded. Hundreds of thousands had died in the creation of the Titan’s Pond, and most of them had not been Gigantes. Neither had they been Levantines, not exactly, but they had been kin to those tribes that would one day become the Dominion of Levant. It was a good conversation to have, what was being said, and a necessary one. Yet it had strayed from the words that first set it into motion. This was not happenstance.

“Fear, Christophe,” Hanno said, and his voice cut through the room. “That is what I see now. You spoke words, and now you fear them.”

The green-eyed man turned a burning glare towards him.

“You can retract them,” the Ashuran man continued. “Spoken in heat, they can be set aside as the heat fades. Or you can stand by them, if that is your choice. But this pretence that they were not spoken is beneath everyone in this room. Let it end.”

He simply could not leave the venom to linger in the flesh, much as it would be painful to squeeze it out. Else Christophe would leave this room believing that he could keep challenging the powers of the Grand Alliance without consequence, that a Name and a sword made him invincible. He was failing to see the power of the enemies he was making, how even the popular sentiment attached to his fame could turn with the wind. If the Army of Callow and the Firstborn left the fronts over his affronts and it was made known why, how long would it take for every throat from Rhenia to Tenerife to begin howling for the blood of Christophe de Pavanie? There were some who believed that the Black Queen had gone tame, lost her bite, but the White Knight knew better.

There was a saying, in Ashur, that a lioness in her lair was twice as deadly as one in the field.

“I will not allow anyone to kill the Red Axe,” the Mirror Knight said, “not when-”

“That is treason,” the Kingfisher Prince flatly interrupted. “You would be taking up arms against the First Prince and the Highest Assembly, never mind the rest of the Grand Alliance.”

It was a mark of the respect afforded the man by those in the room that no one had even considered complaining that he was the First Prince’s eyes and ears here, even though he’d more often mentioned the opinion of Cordelia Hasenbach than his own. Of course, those that did not notice would be more inclined to take it as their man in Highest Assembly sharing knowledge with them than the other way around. Which made it all the more pointed that the Rogue Sorcerer, by simple virtue of speaking up for restraint and the Terms, had been accused of being Catherine’s creature. The taint associated with magic in these lands was, the White Knight had often thought, one of the most insidious poisons he’d ever seen.

“Taking up arms?” Roland quietly said. “No. Taking up arms is for an army, or at least an armed band. When a single man does it, that’s just called committing a crime.”

He’d meant to impress the pointlessness of such a stand, perhaps, but for once the other hero had misread the room. It’d been taken as a challenge instead and Named were taught to answer challenges only one way. Another chair clattered back.

“He would not be alone,” the Blade of Mercy said.

The young man looked both thrilled and terrified, taking a stand with someone he admired yet uncertain as to the consequences. The heat was rising in the room, and even those not all that inclined to agree with Christophe’s arguments would be feeling a strange leaning towards him right now. Adanna, Sidonia and even the Forlorn Paladin looked troubled by the turn things had taken. We are trained to this , Hanno thought. Conditioned. To side with the underdog, the dark horse. Most of us have been in that place, once in our lives, and it calls to us still. This, though, he could and would nip in the bud.

“How,” the White Knight calmly said, “will you prevent the execution of the Red Axe?”

There was a heartbeat of stillness. Hanno deliberately looked at the pommel of the Severance, leaving his gaze to linger.

“Is that how?” he asked. “Will you cut me down, Christophe?”

“I will not kill you,” the Mirror Knight said, “unless you force me to.”

And like that, he lost the room and the story along with it. He was no longer the rebel fighting tyranny: he was a man threatening to kill a comrade to get his way.

“Do you so badly crave to be part of injustice, Hanno of Arwad?” the Mirror Knight said. “They wouldn’t even let me speak with the Red Axe, did you know? Black Queen’s orders. She’s to be butchered in some dark room-”

“After a trial is held,” the White Knight calmly replied. “After I listen to the evidence, determine guilt, pass my sentence and carry it out. Which will be, almost certainly, death. That she killed the Wicked Enchanter and attempted to kill the Kingfisher Prince is not in doubt, it is established fact.”

The latter man was keeping a close eye on them all, Hanno found. He’d spoken little but missed nothing. Frederic Goethal, the White Knight decided, had not come today to steer the conversation one way or another but to mark the positions and allegiances of his fellow heroes. And while the man was as canny as any prince of Procer, Hanno had no doubt that this was the stratagem of shrewder mind still. Cordelia Hasenbach liked to know the full lay of the board, before she cast her dice.

“She was used by the Wandering Bard,” the Mirror Knight said, “as many of us were. And yet Chosen must die for this offence, while the Black Queen will let off her Damned with a slap on the wrist. And these are the rules you would have us heed?”

Hanno cocked his head to the side. There was no point, he thought, in continuing to argue that Catherine had yet to render any judgement and that she would be holding trials over rather different breaches of the Terms besides. Continuing to drown in details would resolve nothing, for the Mirror Knight was not truly looking to debate anything. His fingers were grasping for a stone to throw, not an answer to consider.

“Yes,” Hanno said.

Christophe visibly stalled at the unexpected reply.

“I will pass judgement over the Red Axe, and carry out the sentence,” the White Knight explicitly stated. “In this matter I cannot be swayed or bargained with. It will be done, that is all. Do you now intend to kill me, Christophe? I will not be fighting you, if that is your choice, so strike at your leisure.”

The eyes of every single person in the room went to the Mirror Knight, whose face had gone red. His hand was on the pommel of the sword, but he’d not unsheathed it. Even the Blade of Mercy took a step back form him. Antoine was not the sort of young man to let even admiration overcome a reluctance to kill in cold blood.

“Let us assume you do kill me,” Hanno gently said. “What happens then, do you think? Will the Grand Alliance let the Red Axe go free?”

“It is the representative for the Chosen that would pass sentence over her,” the Mirror Knight harshly said. “Do not now pretend otherwise.”

“And killing me would make you the representative?” Hanno asked.

The dark-haired knight took a step back, as if struck.

“They would have to,” he said, stumbling over the word. “It would be obvious that...”

“You would need the agreement of every constituent crown of the Grand Alliance,” Hanno said. “Given that you believe the Black Queen to be scheming against us, why would she agree?”

The dark-skinned man leaned forward over the table.

“If she refuses,” Hanno asked, “will you kill her too?”

“She’s Damned,” the Mirror Knight defended.

He took a step back anyway. Giving ground it had become impossible to defend. He would feel it, the way the room was turning against him. Even those he had considered to be his own followers, warped as such a thought was to even entertain.

“And if the First Prince refuses?” Hanno continued. “If the Holy Seljun does, after that? What then, Christophe? How many heads will you have to take before no one is left to argue with you?”

“I haven’t killed anyone,” the Mirror Knight said, voice gone faint. “It doesn’t have to be me, the representative. It could be any of us so long as they see what you won’t. What you can’t, anymore.”

The dark-haired knight’s fingers tightened around the hilt of the sword. Hanno did not tense. Why would he? At the end of the day, he simply did not believe that he was facing someone capable of killing an unarmed man in cold blood.

“You are no longer the Sword of Judgement, White Knight,” Christophe de Pavanie said. “The Seraphim have gone silent, you do not speak with their blessing. What sets you apart from any of us now, Hanno of Arwad?”

And there was his mistake, laid bare. The belief that the justice had ever been in Hanno, when it had always been in the Seraphim. Hanno had not become any blinder, by simple virtue of always having been blind.

“What sets us apart,” Hanno of Arwad replied, “is that you are on your feet, with your hand on your sword.”

The Mirror Knight flinched, fingers leaving the hilt of the Severance as if burned. It would be enough, Hanno prayed. Being shown himself in a mirror, bereft of all the little lies people told themselves to soften the edges of the world, it would be enough. Christophe was not a bad man, even at his worse. His mistakes were sculpted by pride and fear, but they rose from a bedrock of good intentions. And if it ended here, if Hanno had correctly walked the line once more, then this could end without any blood being spilled. Catherine would return to her usual mercenary pragmatism the moment she no longer felt cornered, the First Prince would withdraw if she felt the situation handled and there was simply no one else that would care to contest with him over Christophe. Hanno caught sight of his own face on the Mirror Knight’s bracers, the reflection fleeting but troublingly vivid for the moment it lasted. He had looked calm, the dark-skinned man thought, but also aloof. Almost indifferent.

The Ashuran felt the turn of the tide in the air, even thousands of miles away from any sea at all.

“You are not the only one allowed principles, White Knight,” Christophe said. “You are willing to die over this? So am I. And if you will not free the Red Axe, I will .”

The Severance cleared the scabbard with a rising whistling sound, as if it were cutting the very air of the hall. The Mirror Knight’s sleeve tore with fine cuts that looked like veins, but his polished braces remained untouched. Already he was learning to use the artefact, Hanno thought, though if not for the whistling the Severance would hardly have looked like one. The arming sword, for all its power, was not a fantastical sight. Its steel was fine and touched with small, shadowy patterns like trails of smoke that could hardly be seen with the naked eye, but it neither glowed nor shone, or boasted some fanciful enchantment. The guard was straight, the pommel an angular globe, and the handle covered by an iron grip. The sheath was an ornate thing, but the sword? No, the sword would not have suffered ornament. There was still enough of Laurence de Montfort in there such frivolity would have been carved right through.

Three people rose to their feet in quick order – Sidonia, first, then the Kingfisher Prince and lastly Roland – but Hanno was not of them. He only met Christophe’s green eyes, unblinking.

“Nothing of what you seek can be obtained using that,” he said, gesturing towards the blade.

“You’ve drawn steel on allies,” the Vagrant Spear said, tone icy as she palmed a knife. “Sheathe now, or you will be treated as a foe.”

The Kingfisher Prince drew as well, sword coming out with a muted ring, and Roland pushed back his chair so he could have a clear line of fire for his sorceries. The Blade of Mercy had only a hunting knife at his hip but he drew that, falling to Mirror Knight’s side and covering his flank.

“This is madness,” the Blind Maker said. “We are Chosen, not-”

“Sheathe the sword, Mirror Knight,” the Kingfisher Prince coolly interrupted. “And put it on the table: you have proved unfit to bear it.”

“Enough,” the White Knight said, finally rising to his feet. “Christophe-”

Hanno saw, from the corner of his eye, Helmgard’s eyes go flinty as she glared at the Mirror Knight. He was, damn him, still just a little too slow. The Bitter Blacksmith kicked the table into Christophe, half-flipping it, and the Hells broke loose. Hanno tried to catch it but it slipped through his fingers, and before he could do anything more the Severance had carved an eerily neat path through it. The Vagrant Spear was halfway into a leap, knife raised, but the Blade of Mercy made to stop her even as the Blind Maker scrabbled to get out of the way. Helmgard had already snatched up half the table and she swung it with little skill but enough strength to shatter stone – the White Knight, Light flickering around his hand, shattered it in her grip.

Antoine made to avoid the blind old man between himself and Sidonia and succeeded but at the cost of a stumble. The Vagrant Spear’s foot hit his jaw and the young man went down, but before Sidonia could try to move on the Mirror Knight a streak of Light tossed by Adanna passed in front of her – it hit the edge of Christophe’s left brace and most of it careened away, though the metal glowed with heat. The Kingfisher Prince weaved through the chaos with a dancer’s grace, ducking under a flailing Helmgard and coming up against the Mirror Knight’s flank. Sword met and the Alamans prince parried adeptly enough his sword was not simply sliced through, but in matters of might he was outmatched and had to take a step back.

Hanno did not let him press his attack, grabbing him by the back of the neck – the man started in complete surprise – and tossing him towards the back of the hall unceremoniously. The Blade of Mercy had gotten back on his feet and he tried to force back the Vagrant Spear but she turned the blow, caught his shoulder in a hold and forced him to his knees. Passing the knife into her free hand she twirled it as she readied a blow. Hanno, from where he stood, could see she meant to strike Antoine’s temple with the pommel of her knife after flipping it. Yet from where the Mirror Knight stood, all that could be seen was the Blade of Mercy on his knees and the Vagrant Spear drawing back her arm for a blow.

The White Knight saw it all come together, as if he were looking down at it from above. Christophe’s wrist rising as he prepared his own blow, stepping forward through flying shards of wood. Sidonia seeing the movement at the edge of her peripheral vision and her body trying to react – she lost her rhythm, and what would have been a blow of the pommel as it went down instead remained a strike with the point of the knife. And in turning towards the blow, what would have been a cut through her wrist instead passed through the front half of her face. It would kill her, sure as day, even if it had not been meant to.

The window to act would be slight, for all here were Named, but he was not among the least skilled of his kind. The White Knight moved with purpose, balancing it all on the span of a single breath. His left hand caught Sidonia’s wrist before it could come all the way down, leaving to prick Antoine’s skin just lightly enough no blood was drawn. And with his right he turned aside the Severance, forcing it to the side so that no life would be taken. The edge of the sword carved through the first two phalanges of his middle finger and through his ring and little finger before veering off, the Mirror Knight ending the blow before it cut into the ground.

Hanno had yet to draw his sword.

“No,” Christophe hoarsely shouted, drawing back.

The White Knight’s fingers dropped to the ground. The cut had been clean and painless, but it might still kill him if – Hanno resorted to an old trick let out a pulse of blinding Light, brute forcing the healing and hardening the skin irreparably. There’d be no mending what the Severance had cut, anyhow.

“Sheathe your blades,” Hanno said, and his tone brooked no argument. “Every last one of you.”

It had taken more than just Christophe de Pavanie for it to come to this.

“I-” the Mirror Knight stammered, “I didn’t mean to-”

And before anyone could speak so much as a word, he bolted for the door. Hanno almost cursed. He’d expected anguish, not flight. This was potentially much worse. The door opened the other way but it had not been meant to resist Named and it broke with barely a touch as the Mirror Knight pushed through, the White Knight forcing aside the Vagrant Spear as she moved into his way. He flicked a glance back to the assembled heroes.

“By my authority under the Terms, I order that you all return to your quarters and remain there until sent for,” Hanno said, tone forcefully calm.

He did not stay long enough for anybody to begin arguing, instead stepping into the halls of the Alcazar and catching sight of the Mirror Knight turning the corner. Christophe would have no destination, right now, but Hanno knew that the longer he ran with the sight of burning bridges at his back the more the Mirror Knight would look for a way to justify all of this, any of this. And that mean, right now, the Red Axe. If Christophe hurt or even accidentally killed guards breaking her out, Hanno knew there would be no saving his life. There would be no deal to be made, no bargain when so many heroes had broken so many roles. The tolerance from the Grand Alliance would run dry.

As things stood, there was only one way to settle this.

The White Knight breathed out and let Light flood his veins, hastening his steps. He scarred the stone as he turned the corner, Christophe not far ahead, and unclasped his sheathed sword from his belt. The Mirror Knight glanced back just in time to see the strike coming and twist around to face the White Knight, narrowly avoiding the blow at the back of his knee that would have had him tumbling.

“It didn’t have to be like this,” Christophe pleadingly said. “You could have listened, and you can still-”

“I’m sorry,” Hanno said. “But now it has to end a certain way.”

If I do not show them I am capable of handling you physically, this can only end in your death. Christophe did not truly want to fight, even if his body reacted to being attacked, so his initial reaction was sloppy. The Severance was swung quickly and powerfully but with little skill, trying to cut through Hanno’s own sheathed blade, but strength without precisions was meaningless. The White Knight took half a step back, then use the backfoot and a flicker of Light in what had once been the Flawless Fencer’s favourite trick: the side of his sheath struck the Mirror Knight on the left cheek, smashing him to the side. The pain returned Christophe de Pavanie to the there and then, his eyes hardening.

“You lost a hand,” the Mirror said. “Retire, before I must hurt you.”

Hanno had lived through so many memories he hardly recalled whether he’s originally been left-handed or right-handed, not that it mattered. He was perfectly capable of using either hand to wield a sword.

“Your worry does you honour,” Hanno evenly said, “but it is unnecessary.”

Something like anger flickered across the other knights’ face and he rushed forward. A simple swing forced the White Knight back and with a half step he feigned use of the same trick – yet when Christophe threw a punch where his face would have been were he reiterating, instead the other man caught the Mirror Knight’s wrist with the hand he’d freed by dropping his sheathed sword. Light scouring his veins, Hanno clenched his fingers around the bracers until they crumpled and threw his hip. Lifting Christophe de Pavanie, he smashed the other hero into the ground like a mace. The stone cracked rather than the Mirror Knight, but the tremor toppled several of the magelights hanging above. They toppled, several cracking and the light of the hall began flickering. Christophe shouted, Light glimmering over him, but Hanno called on it as well and threaded the two together.

Before the Mirror Knight understood what was happening, he seized the now single-entity Light and used it to strengthen both his kneecaps as Implacable Monk had been fond of doing – he then hammered his boot down into Christophe’s throat, knowing that the Mirror Knight was too tough for it to kill him. The other man choked and Hanno repeated the process thrice, each time increasing strength as the stone fractured beneath them and the ground shook. The Mirror Knight’s hand seized his ankle after the third time and he swung the Severance upwards and half-blind. Hanno leaned down, snatched up his sheathed sword and pragmatically slapped the other man in the eyes with the side of the sheath. Christophe yelped and released the foot, which returned to kick his chin at full strength.

The White Knight had not strengthened his kneecap this time, unfortunately, so while the strengthening on his limb held fine he felt the bone of his knee crack.

Pushing down the wave of pain he drew back a step, waiting for the Mirror Knight to get up on his knee before sweeping it – and, this time, smashing down on the wrist with his sheathed sword. The Severance clattered on the floor and Christophe screamed in pain and anger, catching the sheathed sword in his grip and effortlessly crushing it. Hanno released the hilt, but not quickly enough: he was tugged down enough that the Mirror Knight caught his tabard and dragged him even further down. Aware that wrestling with a man who might as well be made of steel would be foolish, the White Knight used his still-bloody mutilated hand to hook a finger into the Mirror Knight’s mouth and drag the other man’s face straight into his knee.

Christophe’s nose broke, but so did Hanno’s kneecap.

It bought him long enough, however. Catching the bloodied man by the back of the neck even as he dropped to his knees in pain, Hanno let the Light run loose through his veins until he could feel it filling him to the brim. He smashed the Mirror Knights head into the ground, repeatedly, as Christophe struggled against the other hand keeping him from turning properly to fight. Hanno felt several of his bones fracture from the other hero’s twisting about, but on the sixth impact Christophe de Pavanie finally fell unconscious. The Light slowly left him, leaving behind only waves of pain as the lights continued flickering and casting the fractured and bloodied stone into strange reliefs. The White Knight breathed in and out slowly for some time, but the sound of boots forced him to open them again. Gingerly, he took the sheath of the Severance from the Mirror Knight’s side and slid the artefact back into at the costs of only a few shallow cuts on his fingers.

Soldiers poured into the hallway from both sides, staying in the steady lights.

The legionaries of the Army of Callow were the easiest to recognize, the painted shields and red tabards that heralded some of the finest professional soldiers of Calernia putting a name to them just as surely as the unique mixture of orcs and humans of different hues. Yet there were other soldiers there, in colours less straightforward to place even though their long mail coats, coiffe and broad rim helm marked them as Proceran. Swords and spears came to the fore in good order, the now infamously deadly Callowan crossbowmen spreading out in the back. Quite a lot of trouble, Hanno thought, for only two men – only one of which was conscious, besides. Admittedly, he tiredly thought, they had made something of a ruckus.

Unfriendly eyes remained steady on him as he rose to his feet with a swallowed moan of pain, but the White Knight was hailed by no officer. He’d not expected to be, as it happened. There were only two people in the Arsenal who would have had the authority to mobilize troops like this, and it was unlike the First Prince of Procer to be so heavy-handed. With the crisp sound of steel-clad boots hitting stone, the legionaries smoothly split to the sides and a shadowed silhouette began limping her way towards him. Even through the helmets Hanno could glimpse the burning, violent devotion those soldiers had for Catherine Foundling. It was in the way they looked at her as she moved past them, in the way the stood taller and with straighter backs for her mere presence.

Some of the White Knight’s colleagues worried of the Black Queen’s power, of her fearsome mastery of Night, but that’d never been anything to him. It was strength, and strength failed. But the look in those soldiers’ eyes, those orcs and Taghreb and Soninke and Callowans? That was a dangerous thing. Hanno knew faith when he saw it, after all. Faith in their saint of impossible victories, in their hard-handed goddess of blood and mud. That look in their eyes would still matter long after strength had faded into irrelevance.

Catherine Foundling limped forward, the uneven steps somehow ominous even without the sharp contrast of her absent staff against stone. The Queen of Callow was, to his great surprise, wearing a dress. Long-sleeved and lightly touched with silver thread, the black velvet suited her well and was even accented with a set of silver bracelets. The dark fabric complimented the tan of her skin, and her braid was rather more elaborate than the simple ponytail she usually kept her hair in. It was an odd sight, in the sense that he was unaccustomed to it, but it was returned to a semblance of normalcy by what followed.

The Archer, who sometimes filled Catherine’s shadow in place of the Adjutant, stepped out from behind her queen and flicked her hand. A small packet was caught by the Queen of Callow, who then produced seemingly from nowhere a long pipe of Hanno suspected to be genuine dragonbone and began stuffing it with wakeleaf. The White Knight studied the Archer, whose bow was not yet strung, and decided this would not be a confrontation. Deadly as the Ranger’s most famous pupil was with her blades, it was a paltry thing compared to the threat she was with a bow in hand. Falling in slightly behind the Black Queen, the hard smile the Archer was offering him was revealed by the sudden flicker of flame of Catherine lighting her pipe. Within moments, she spat out a thick stream of acid smoke as the red embers lit up her face.

Wreathed by shadows and smoke, Catherine studied him with cool eyes as she closed the last of the distance. A moment of silence took hold between them, and she was the one to break it,

“Busy night?” the Black Queen asked, smiling as if she’d spoken a jest only she knew.

Chapter 34: Quickening

“If you want something done right, steal it from someone who did.”
– Dread Emperor Malevolent I, the Unhallowed

I’d become unfortunately familiar with a certain feeling over the years that was hard to describe, at least in Lower Miezan.

It was that mixture of relief and wincing that came from looking at a debacle but knowing at least it wasn’t a catastrophe. Like if you came back one evening to find your barn was on fire, but at leas the livestock wasn’t in it. I’d told Akua this, once, after one too many times looking at the near wipe of a forward patrol that’d still caught a probe from Keter before it could do damage, and she’d answered with amusement that there was in fact an expression in Mthethwa for it. Kutofa ushidi , which more or less translated to ‘victory in failure’. It was a recurring theme in Praesi plays, particularly their comedies, with the traditional protagonist of those being Dread Emperor Baneful – who’d never actually been emperor, only one of the claimants during the War of Thirteen Tyrants and One. He was notable mostly for somehow having managed to hang on until nearly the end with only a string of mitigated defeats to his name.

Akua could actually quote some passages from one of the more famous plays, The Long Road to Ater, and it’d been as endearing as it had been surreal to hear her chortle about Baneful accidentally poisoning his cousin instead of his husband – only to later find out that she’d been about to betray him. He had, Akua had gleefully explained, avoided his own assassination but only at the price of a feud with his distinctly unimpressed warlock brother-in-law, who promptly cursed him. Any play with that much murder in it would probably have been a tragedy instead, in Callow. Except if it were foreigners doing the dying. Which was why I had rather mixed feelings, looking at the mutilated White Knight and the bloodied, unconscious body of the Mirror Knight. The Severance had been returned to the sheath and was now in Hanno’s hands, but there was less of those than there used to be.

Three fingers lost on his right hand, though at least he’d kept the thumb and index. He’d still be able to write with it even as he waited for a prosthetic, though I did believe he was ambidextrous regardless.

“You might say that,” the White Knight serenely replied.

Not quite so serene he was able to hide how he was trying not to put too much weight on his knees, gingerly shifting his footing. Though the cracked stone floor and the lack of cuts spoke to an overwhelming victory by Hanno of Arwad, I suspected it’d been a closer thing than it seemed. How many bones had he cracked just by hitting the other man? If the Mirror Knight had not fallen unconscious, it would have been the beginning of a downwards slide for the Sword of Judgement: I knew for a fact that his healing was shoddy, and not without adverse effects. Mind you, I thought as I pulled at my pipe and eyed Christophe de Pavanie’s blatantly broken nose, he’d still won. And without using a blade, by the looks of it, which was impressive. You were making a statement , I thought, studying him openly . That you can handle him on your own, and so there is no need for anyone to step in.

It was about three fingers too late for that.

Indrani, who’d been at my back this whole time, let out a low whistle.

“Nice scrap,” she praised. “But you missed a spot.”

The way she trailed a finger across her throat while looking at the Mirror Knight made it clear what she meant by that. I didn’t correct her, or indeed say anything at all, simply watching Hanno. I’d be a grave misstep for me to have even the slightest and most indirect of hands in the death of Christophe de Pavanie, as even the appearance of my involvement with the killing of a heroic opponent of mine would blow up in my face like a crate of sharpers. If the White Knight was the one who took his head, though, that was a different story. While an argument could be made that the Mirror Knight was simply too useful and powerful a Named to execute, I was lukewarm to the prospect of keeping the man alive. Part of that was that he was a very direct threat to me, but there was also the fact that he’d just fucking cut up the representative for the heroes under the Terms.

The White Knight hadn’t said anything, but after days at Hakram’s bedside I was painfully familiar with what cuts made by the Severance looked like.

“The Mirror Knight breached the Terms,” Hanno said, ignoring Indrani outright and looking straight at me. “But he has been subdued without lasting harm being done. I will now take him into custody, if you have no objection.”

I spewed out a stream of smoke, watching it spin and writhe before me. I didn’t want – and couldn’t afford – my hands on any of this, but I balked at simply leaving the Mirror Knight in a cell without further supervision than what Hanno might judge fit to provide. On the other hand, what were my alternatives? I couldn’t put him under a guard of my own without it looking like a villain had taken a hero prisoner and I sure as Hells wasn’t going to leave him loose in the Arsenal. Besides, the White Knight might have asked if I had objections but he wasn’t simply going to do whatever I asked. He’d listen to any grievances I had and try to address them, but Hanno wasn’t going to roll over something like this and I had little appetite for picking a fight. I still tapped the side of my own hand, where the dark-skinned hero was now missing fingers.

“That requires consequences,” I warned. “And do not expect to find much mercy in me.”

Or Hasenbach, for that matter , I thought. The First Prince would have taken it a greater victory to bring the Mirror Knight to her way of seeing things than to quell him, until now, but this little episode would change things. The baggage he’d be bringing with him when going under her wing would begin outweighing his uses, to such a canny princess’ eyes: anything he did after becoming an ally would reflect on her, and her position was too delicate to be able to afford much bumbling. Considering I spoke for Callow as well as Below’s lot and the Dominion had little reason to be fond of the Mirror Knight, that boded ill for the man in question. Hanno would be the one to pass the sentence, in the end, but the White Knight no more operated in a vacuum than I did.

Hanno did not blink in the face of my stare, unmoved.

“The Terms will be upheld,” the White Knight answered. “I will not let intentions excuse actions.”

But , I thought, for though his eyes were calm they had hardened.

“But make no mistake, Catherine,” the Sword of Judgement continued. “I will not sacrifice a good man for the sake of convenience. The Terms constrain, but they also protect.”

“At three fingers the chance taken on a fool, you’ll run out of one long before the other,” Archer sardonically said.

Well, she wasn’t wrong. I breathed in a mouthful of wakeleaf, savouring the burn I’d not allowed myself to indulge in when sharing a room with the First Prince out of politeness. Through flickering lights, rows of soldiers on both sides awaiting only my command to bare steel, I watched the White Knight. Even without armour, even without either of the swords on him having left their scabbards, he felt dangerous. Not like a blade at my throat, for there was not a speck of hostility in his stance, but like a sharp stone under water. It didn’t look like much until you tried to step on it, and by the time you felt the pain it was already too late. I’d trust him, I decided, at least for tonight. He had yet to disappoint me, and I’d not break that streak by forcing a fight that was not necessary. I hoped it would never be. But if it ever were, I would pick my grounds better than this.

I spat out the smoke, making my choice.

“I won’t war over what might be,” I said. “Take him, Hanno. But don’t forget how many eyes are on you, either.”

He inclined his head the slightest bit, not in concession but in acknowledgement.

“Have the Severance back in its room before night’s over,” I said, and it was not a suggestion.

On that I left him to his bloodied and bloody fool, Archer offering a singsong and almost taunting good night , and limped back to the ranks of my legionaries. They closed behind me seamlessly and I took aside the commanding officer long enough to order a line be sent to escort the White Knight as he carried the other Named to his holding cell. Some Proceran soldiers, I saw, were missing.

Cordelia would be getting a report soon enough, and tomorrow would bring consequences for all.

—

I woke up around what would have been dawn, were we still in Creation.

For all the weight of what had taken place yesterday – as much my conversations with the First Prince as the Mirror Knight’s beating and imprisonment – I found relatively little to do when I woke. I broke my fast quickly and retreated to Hakram’s room in the infirmary to see to what few affairs I had. I penned a recommendation to the First Army’s general staff for Lieutenant Inger to be promoted to captain, for her exemplary service when commanding against a demon, knowing it’d likely end up on Juniper’s desk. The First Army had been gutted to fill all sorts of needs, from garrisoning the Arsenal to organizing training camps and providing escorts for supply trains, which my marshal had been less than pleased by. It’d still been the natural pick, even she had admitted that, considering that Juniper still couldn’t work for more than a few hours a day without having... episodes.

Malicia had a lot to answer for. Tariq had seen to my old friend personally and assured me that eventually the damage that’d been done to her mind by the Empress’ planted controls would mend itself, but that it would take time. The Hellhound still got more done in a slice of a day than most people did with a full one, and had violently resisted the notion of resting more fully even though it’d accelerate her recovery, but these days she was forced to rely on her general staff too much for the First to be a functional battlefield command. I could have named someone else to serve as general under her and lead on the field, but why offer that insult when I had need of soldiers for all sorts of detached duties? At this point even if tomorrow she was healed her soldiers would still be more useful in their current assignments, so it’d change nothing. Mind you, if we were to assault northern Hainaut come summer I’d want her to be part of the planning so she might have to leave her staff behind for a bit. Aisha would be politely furious at me for making her travel, but there was no helping it.

I saw to some minor correspondence after that, the sort that seemed to accrue like dust wherever I stayed for more than a day, and wrote a formal request for the Arsenal to begin working on prosthetics for Adjutant. I’d already gone to the Named directly and found both the Blind Maker and the Hunted Magician highly amenable – the latter in particular, since he wanted to buy his way back into my good graces – but it would be easier to shake loose rare substances if this was made formal. As Queen of Callow I had no problem paying for any of this from my treasury, but a lot of the more precious materials in the Arsenal were bought through the Grand Alliance instead of anyone’s personal agents. It was half past Morning Bell that Archer strolled in to tell me of the day’s first arrival, which I’d been expecting for some time: Vivienne was, at last, about to get here.

To my surprise, Masego had roused himself to welcome her in person as well. The three of us set out together, which drew eyes enough as we made our way through the halls. The Woe had something of a reputation.

“I’m glad you made time for this,” I told Zeze. “It’s been a while since you’ve seen her, right?”

“We scried a fortnight ago,” Masego contradicted.

He was, I supposed, technically correct. He usually was, especially so when it was most annoying for everyone else.

“In person, I mean,” I specified.

I’d not seen Vivienne in person for... a little over a year, now? There’d been that conference in the Brabantine heartlands last winter, when I’d gone down in person to hasten along the negotiations over how the refugees were to be settled – the new Prince of Lyonis had been pushing for forced conscription of all those of fighting age, which would have been a disaster – when she’d sent word the process was being stalled. In all fairness, the Procerans hadn’t even been the most obstructive people in that conference. That honour had belonged to the delegates for the Dominion, who’d been trying to argue that the mass of displaced were an issue of the Principate alone and not worth discussion by the Grand Alliance at all.

We’d been in the same small city, Malben, for about a week before I returned north to prepare for the offensive. We’d spent a few hours together on several evenings, aside from the time duty ensured we’d spend side by side, but in truth we’d simply been too damned busy to spend much time together. She just as much as I, which not that many people could claim. I’d effectively dropped all Callowan affairs and foreign diplomacy into Vivienne’s lap, and while she’d taken to both admirably in tidier times both those duties would have warranted different appointments by sheer virtue of the work they represented. There was a reason that her personal staff had swelled by more than a dozen times over but I’d never once balked at signing onto the costs involved.

“Under those terms, it has been seventeen months,” Hierophant replied. “Not since her official visit to the Arsenal.”

“She actually likes the place, unlike some,” Indrani said, glancing at me sideways. “Mind you, that might just be the Thief in her salivating at so much nifty stuff being kept in the same place.”

“Vivienne would not steal from the Arsenal,” Masego firmly said.

Aw , I thought, looking at him fondly. The faith there was a little touching.

“Given the authority Catherine has granted her, it would only count as a requisition,” Hierophant told us.

A little less touching now, admittedly. Indrani snickered.

“Don’t Procerans have a saying about thieves and crowns?” she said.

“Petty thieves hang, the great wear crowns,” I quoted in Chantant.

Archer grinned at me.

“Give it a few years,” she said, “and we’ll proving that true.”

I snorted, mildly amused. I’d never made a mystery of my intention to abdicate in favour of Vivienne after the war, at least not among the Woe – though it wasn’t common knowledge outside them, to this day. It’d been with a mixture of pleasure and irritation that I’d realized that few of them actually cared. Archer was largely indifferent to crowns, and I suspected she fully intended on continuing send up bills to the royal palace even after it became Viv’s, while Masego had actually been pleased . It’d give me more time to help him with a few things, he’d been happy to tell me. We’d never made a proper study of Night, and since I’d have no use for all that power I wielded he did have a few projects that could use the fuel... At least it’d not been too difficult to talk him into setting up shop at Cardinal when it was raised, which as a side-benefit ensured Indrani would have a permanent anchor there no matter where the wind ended up taking her.

“I’m still glad you made time,” I told Zeze. “Unlike some here, you’re actually busy.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Cat,” Indrani blithely said, “I’m sure that whole queen thing will pay off eventually.”

“It pays for you , sullen wench,” I grunted back. “Though I’m beginning to question the wisdom of that.”

“I’ve never bought a drop of anything with Grand Alliance gold,” she righteously assured me.

I raised an eyebrow. Did she really expect I’d fall for that?

“How about silver?” I pointedly asked.

A heartbeat of silence passed.

“Zeze’s only here because he accidentally broke his spheres bothering elves,” Archer said, shamelessly selling him out without even a speck of hesitation.

I mouthed at her she was not yet out of the woods, then turned a cocked brow to Masego.

“I made the spheres,” Hierophant told me, a tad smugly. “And the spell that broke them. Therefore I did, in a sense, make time.”

Huh. I’d be damned. Compared to his usual brand of sneakiness, that was positively devious. I was inclined to blame Roland for this. The Rogue Sorcerer was pretty tricky sort, for a man who went around in a leather coat shooting fire at people.

“You’re spending too much time with Alamans,” I told him.

“The only thing you should listen to them about is the kissing,” Indrani agreed.

I shot her an amused look. Having recently basked in the luxury of displays of affections from her partner, it looked like she wasn’t willing lose the goods quite to soon. The braided mage cocked his head to the side.

“But it was from two of you I learned to dissemble,” Masego said, looking puzzled.

I swallowed a startled noise that was as appalled as it had been amused, because he’d been completely earnest about that. It was truly his most dangerous magic, I thought, that damned disarming earnestness.

“Catherine’s a bad influence,” Indrani told him. “The Grey Pilgrim said so that once, and that’s basically just like angels saying it.”

“Hear that?” I said, and allowed for a moment of silence. “That’s the sound of your discretionary funds getting audited, Archer.”

Naturally, she called me a brutal tyrant and the three of us managed to keep bickering all the way to the plaza where Vivienne would be translating in. Gods, but it was good to be home. It wasn’t the same with just Indrani or Hakram, though they tried. We’d simply gone through too many crucibles as a band of five for it to ever feel truly complete without all of the Woe there. Not that we would be, even when Vivienne got here. Adjutant had yet to wake. With that thought dampening what had been a rising mood, I found myself limping down the same bloody set of stairs for what felt like the hundredth time. Wasn’t there another access point without quite so many of those?

“It should all be slopes,” I muttered under my breath. “Nice, gentle slopes.”

The murderholes, siege engines and well-armed soldiers could stay, though. Those were always a good investment, in my experience. Indrani pretended she hadn’t heard me, hiding her smile in her scarf, and the three of us settled at the bottom to wait for Vivienne. It would have been convenient for her to arrive immediately, but instead it took long enough we ended up playing dice on the floor to make the wait tolerable. Masego cheated with sorcery borrowed from one of the silver trinkets in his braids, but that was fine: they were Indrani’s dice anyway, so they were loaded, and I’d yet to throw them without first weaving an illusion guaranteeing me the numbers I wanted.

Lady Vivienne Dartwick, heiress-designate to the crown of the Kingdom of Callow, arrived to the sadly not unprecedented sight of the Archer threatening to rise in rebellion if I didn’t stop abusing my powers to make her roll snake eyes – only to then roll another pair, as Masego was evidently finding her anger quite amusing and wasn’t above using an aspect for petty indulgence.

“This is Grand Alliance property, you filthy gambling vagrants,” Vivienne called out. “I’ll have you tossed out.”

The four mages that’d made the translation with her looked terrified, at least until I began laughing.

“She’s cheating, too,” Indrani complained. “It is a sad day indeed for the House of Foundling, that its head would resort to such sordid treachery.”

“We were all cheating,” Masego happily said, “you were simply the worst at it.”

An offended squawk was his answer and I left them to it, instead turning to have a better look at my friend. I was struck, once more, with how little she now resembled the woman I’d first met in Summerholm all those years ago. In principle not much had changed: her hair was still dark brown, her eyes that pleasant blue-grey tone and her slender frame had yet to thicken. The hair was even longer than when I’d last seen her, and as was her habit kept in a milkmaid braid that evoked a crown, but it was the little details that made all the difference. She’d aged, not by much but enough that her face had grown mature. And though she was visibly tired, even in her blue riding dress and trousers there was a lightness to her that was the burning opposite of the anger she’d carried with her everywhere during her eyes as the Thief.

Losing her Name had been good for her in a lot of ways.

I limped up to her, leaning on my staff, and she met me halfway. I pulled her in close for a hug, enjoying how she was one of the few people close enough to me in height it felt like there was little difference there. Her grip was firm when she returned the embrace, and I noted with approval she’d kept in shape. Just because she’d traded the respectable form of theft that was burglary on rooftops for the organized form of theft that was taxation from a palace was no reason to let herself go. Mind you, Vivienne had always been whip-lean in a way that was from breeding as much as an active nightlife of skulking through alleys.

“Catherine,” she smiled, after drawing back. “It’s good to see you.”

It’d been a while since I’d last felt pangs of attraction towards Vivienne, but now and then when she smiled like that I remembered why I’d felt them. It was a done thing, but not unsweet to look back on for all that it’d been entirely one-sided.

“And you,” I replied. “Would that you could have gotten here sooner. I heard something about rains?”

She nodded.

“They flooded the roads,” Vivienne said. “There were levees but they broke – no plot there, simply gone unrepaired for too long.”

I grimaced. I doubted it’d be the only place where something like that had happened. Considering the dark picture that Hasenbach and Frederic had painted for me on the state of the Principate, I suspected that a truly staggering amount of maintenance work must have gone undone because there were more pressing needs to fill.

“We’ll have our fill of plotting in here anyway, I think,” I sighed. “Things had been moving quickly enough in here that I suspect even you won’t have heard all of it.”

The Jacks had people in the Arsenal, naturally, as did the Circle of Thorns. The Dominion did not have designated spies so much as captains sending regular reports, which was perhaps not too surprising – it was a lot less centralized than either Callow or Procer, and if I’d learned anything about spies since becoming queen it was that they cost a lot of fucking money. A lot more than, say, one of the major Levantine lords would be able to afford tossing into such an enterprise if they didn’t want to fall behind their neighbours when it came to fielding soldiers. The Old Kingdom hadn’t been all that different, even though the Fairfaxes hadn’t been the largely symbolic leaders the Isbili still were. Nowadays we could afford the Jacks in part because nobility wasn’t there to drain the pot anymore, so to speak. Callow hadn’t gotten much richer, but a lot of more of its gold ended up in the royal treasury than before.

“I’ve no difficulty believing that,” Vivienne grimly replied.

We parted ways entirely just in time for Indrani to squeeze in between us, throwing out her arms around our shoulders.

“Vivi,” she grinned. “Long time no see.”

The former thief snorted.

“Last time you gave me that grin it was after emptying my liquor cabinet,” Vivienne said. “Though I’ll admit it was a nice touch to fill the bottles back up with water.”

“A lot harder than you’d think, too,” Archer cheerfully said. “Especially considering how drunk I got from drinking all your liquor.”

Masego’s long fingers were laid on Indrani’s shoulders and he gently moved her aside, freeing Vivienne at the price of leaving me stuck with a pouting Archer. Hierophant offered her a smile and, as ‘Drani and I watched expectantly, bent down to kiss Vivienne’s cheeks one after the other. She froze, not answering even when Masego welcomed her to the Arsenal. The flabbergasted look on my fellow Callowan’s face had been well worth the wait, I decided. She threw Indrani a confused and almost pleading look, which Archer answered with her usual shit-eating grin. She turned towards me after, perhaps expecting a greater degree of helpfulness coming from there.

“Zeze’s been rubbing elbows with Alamans,” I sagely said.

Which explained the kissing, at least, though the initiative to start doing it was all him.

“People keep repeating variations on that sentence,” Masego said, sounding peeved. “As if it were some sort of conversational panacea. Shall I obtain such an elbow and carry it around so that I can behave outlandishly without facing questions?”

“There’s probably a few still lying around the Graveyard,” Indrani mused. “Couldn’t be that hard to get our hands on one.”

“I see that in some ways remarkably little has changed,” Vivienne drily said, catching my eye.

I shrugged, offering her a small grin. If her days were anything like mine, and they most likely were, then this... lightness must be a balm on the soul. After hours of deciding life and death for thousands, of making ugly compromises and closing your eye to small evils, there was nothing quite like ribbing and idle talk with people you loved to remind yourself you were alive. A person, too, not just a collection of necessary decisions given a frame to inhabit. The four mages that’d translated with Vivienne had given us a wide berth, accurately guessing that the reunion of four of the Woe wasn’t something to just stand around listening to, but she left us for a bit to thank them and request that she be informed when her personal affairs arrived. She’d come with several wagons, apparently, and only pulled ahead of them and her entourage when it came to crossing into the Arsenal itself. Zeze and Indrani took the lead in going up the stairs, leaving us behind in a conversation that was unlikely to be of much interest to either.

“We’ve got lots around the corner,” I told her as we began our way up. “And it’ll be coming at us quick.”

“The trials, for one,” Vivienne agreed.

She’d know about two, the Red Axe and the Hunted Magician, but there might be a third on the horizon she wouldn’t have heard about. Whether the Mirror Knight would end up before a tribunal or not I couldn’t be sure, but I suspected he would. Hanno would want the Grand Alliance to have the opportunity to speak, if not sentence.

“The war council, too, which will start when Lord Marave gets here,” I said.

She nodded.

“I take it the First Prince has spoken to you on the subject of the Mercantis troubles as well?” my heiress asked.

“She did. Their envoys due here in a few days, Hasenbach and I are to dazzle and scare them so they continue coughing up coin,” I replied. “You heard about the Gigantes?”

“The Arsenal seemed like the natural location to entertain their envoy, this Ykines,” she confirmed. “Considering they requested the White Knight personally it was almost a given it would have to happen now, before the two of you return to the front.”

“I’ve limited hopes there, but even their scraps would be damnably useful,” I said. “Talked about them with the White Knight, he has good insight. Hard to say when they’ll get there, but I’m betting after the trials.”

“Quite a few weeks,” Vivienne drily said. “And to think we used to have the occasional restful month, you and I, where there was no especially urgent fire to put out.”

“A lot more ground to cover these days,” I mused, “and a lot more fires with it. There’s also a last thing, now that I think of it, which ought to be soon-”

Behind us sorcery roiled as another translation into the Arsenal began. Ah, of course Creation would deign indulge me now . A moment later the Painted Knife and her band of five passed through the gate, bringing with them a secret the Dead King believed would chill our blood.

Well, I supposed it’d make something to chat about over lunch.

Chapter 35: Portents

“One who rears a tiger should not complain of stripes.”
– Soninke saying

The Painted Knife’s band had been one of the first we’d assembled, back in the first days under the Truce and Terms.

I’d been a given that a hero would have to lead it, as even with Hanno and the Pilgrim backing the Terms there would have been desertions if a villain had been put in charge of Above’s precious little bastards. The Painted Knife, whose name was Kallia, was a tall woman who wore elaborate red face paint and had been Tariq’s personal recommendation for the task. A heroine but not from one of the Dominion’s great lines, and one who tended to be more comfortable on the prowl than standing shoulder to shoulder in a shield wall. I’d wedged in a Proceran villain I’d thought it best to keep out of sight for a while, the Poisoner, since amnesty or not she’d killed a lot of nobles. She was a decent alchemist besides, which tended to be useful in all sorts of ways, though naturally to keep an eye on her the heroes had pushed for a Proceran hardcase known as the Relentless Magistrate to be added to the band.

The man was deeply unpleasant to anyone he considered to be a criminal but obsessed with respecting the letter of the law and a prodigious investigator, so I’d made my peace with it. To add a bit of bite to the band we’d rustled up the Grizzled Fantassin, though we’d had to appropriately pad her retirement fund to get her on board, and since I wasn’t sending anyone hunting for old secrets without a dedicated mage I’d reluctantly parted with the Royal Conjurer. The Helikean mage was an escapee from Kairos’ rise to power and remarkably flexible in ability – he was a more than decent combat mage as well as capable of subtler touches – so it’d been a real loss sending him out. He would have been a good fit at the Arsenal, or any of the fronts for that matter, but in my experience sending a band of five digging into ancient mysteries without some sort of magical support tended to result mostly in corpses.

Yet they’d returned, at long last, and all five of them were alive. Not without some missing parts – I saw with dismay that the Grizzled Fantassin was missing a finger, and from what I remembered of her contract that was going to put a dent in someone’s savings – but the way they held themselves as they strolled out onto the expanse of stone caught my eye. Wary, yes, but that wariness was aimed outwards. The Poisoner, a plump and smiling middle-aged woman, stood close to the skinny and permanently stubbled Relentless Magistrate whose gaze was sweeping their surroundings without an eye being kept on the criminal he’d once been so scathing about. The Royal Conjurer was trusted to stand at the back without anyone feeling nervous, and the Grizzled Fantassin was standing next to the Painted Knife instead of slightly behind so that she’d be the one to eat an arrow if they got ambushed.

I knew that look, that way of standing together. How could I not, when the mere presence of three of the Woe at my side had me feeling lighter on my feet than I’d had in months? Those five gone through the crucible and come out on the other side changed. Bound to each other in some intangible way, and though it wouldn’t make them like each other it had brought trust with it. A lot more precious a thing, that, in my opinion.

I liked a lot of people, after all, but trusted only a handful.

I wasn’t the only one to see it. Vivienne had turned when I did, but it wasn’t her who let out a low whistle. Archer, ever more perceptive than she seemed, was watching the five Named with narrowed eyes.

“Those five have had an interesting year, I bet,” Indrani murmured.

I’d expected the Royal Conjurer would be eager for a different assignment, after this, but now I doubted it. A proper debrief would be needed, at some point, but I was personally more inclined to find something else important to send a proper band of five at than try to break it up. Practical considerations aside, my heart clenched in excitement. A band, a real band, with villains in it. That was... there were precedents for temporary truces, even the occasional cooperation, but never anything like this. Not that I knew of, anyway, and I’d made it my business to know.

“Catherine’s associate is making his way here,” Masego noted.

I flicked a glance upwards and found him at the top of the stairs, burning glass eyes staring at the unseen through the walls of the Arsenal.

“Which one?” I asked.

“The tolerable Ashuran one,” Hierophant said, then added, “By which I do not meant the Blessed Artificer, to be clear.”

Three amused looks were turned onto Zeze. His continuing feud with Adanna of Smyrna, now drained of the dangerous underlying tensions, had resumed being entertainingly petty. He meant Hanno, presumably, who I really should have expected to turn up the moment the Painted Knife’s band came through. The White Knight had a general knack for being in the right place at the right time, even more so than most heroes. Mind you, providence was not absolute. It could be gamed, if you knew the right tricks. I looked down at the gathering Named, speaking with the mages who’d spelled them through, and grimaced as I realized it’d be rude not to greet them down there and instead continue up and wait there. Which meant I was going to have to go up and down these fucking stairs again .

Forget the Dead King: if I didn’t get to take a sledgehammer to these... tyrannical stones before I died, I might just have to come back as a vengeful spectre.

“’Drani, go tell him to get a move on,” I said. “Vivienne, do you remember their Names?”

Blue-grey eyes turned to me and she grimaced the slightest bit.

“All but one,” she admitted. “The smiling one who looks like the village baker?”

“The Poisoner,” I said, enjoying her slight wince. “One of mine.”

“You don’t say,” Vivienne drily replied.

Admittedly the Name was not one that, uh, invited nuanced interpretation. The

“I don’t know any of them,” Masego informed us.

Neither of us bothered to pretend we were surprised. Painted Knife and her companions had begun the walk across the floor but we got to the bottom of the stairs before they did. The red-painted heroine offered me a salute, a fist against the chest, that I vaguely remembered being a gesture of respectful acknowledgement among Levantines.

“Black Queen,” the Painted Knife greeted me. “We return.”

“And I am glad of it,” I replied, offering her a nod before turning my gaze on the others. “What you have found is eagerly awaited.”

Especially since they’d refused to commit it to either scrying or letters, which would have gotten it to us months ago.

“Ah,” a voice came from above. “I had been wondering why I was here.”

Hanno looked pleased but not entirely surprised as he came down, Indrani idling at his side and only parting ways at the bottom to throw an arm around a tolerant Hierophant’s shoulder.

“White Knight,” the Painted Knife greeted, significantly warmer.

Still the same salute, though, so I decided not to feel too insulted. The Grizzled Fantassin cleared her throat, freeing her grey hair by removing her helm.

“This is all lovely, but after this long on the road I’d knife an angel for bed and a warm meal,” she said, her Arlesite accent light and pleasant.

“Contrition’s your choir,” Archer advised. “Steer clear of Mercy, though, they’re a little...”

I cleared my throat. The old soldier looked mostly amused, and Hanno patiently forgiving, but the Painted Knife was waiting to see if the Peregrine’s own Choir was about to get insulted. Would a Levantine fight an honour duel over an angelic choir’s reputation? It said a lot about the Dominion that I could not reply with an immediate and definitive no, to be honest.

“We’ll get you settled in,” I said. “But for a few hours at most. There will be a council to receive your findings by Afternoon Bell at the latest.”

Considering how the First Prince tended to pack her hours even more tightly than I did, I suspected she’d have trouble shaking loose the time for a proper debriefing before then anyway.

“Will Kallia speak for all of you?” Hanno asked. “Or will the report be given as a group?”

“As a group,” the Painted Knife said, and there were nods all around.

I caught the Royal Conjurer’s eye, cocking an eyebrow in question, but the tanned old man discreetly shook his head. No need for a separate talk between us, then.

“Good, it will simplify matters,” I said. “Messengers will be sent to you rooms to inform you of when the council will take place.”

I paused for a moment.

“Water’s rationed in the Arsenal, but feel free to ask to be drawn a hot bath anyway,” I said. “Under my authority, if need be,”

Groans of anticipatory pleasure were my answer.

“Many are temptations of Evil,” the Relentless Magistrate gravely said.

His tone was serious, but the slight quirk of his lips gave the humour away.

“I assure you,” the Poisoner said, “evil paid much better than the Grand Alliance.”

Fair , I admitted even as the band let out the kind of small chuckles a fond but worn joke would get after a few months or a year of being bandied about. Exhausted as they were, we didn’t linger around for small talk.

Ultimately my pride was my downfall, as I decided that asking Masego to levitate me over those fucking stairs would be too undignified.

—

I’d either overestimated how full Cordelia Hasenbach’s schedule was or I’d underestimated how much she wanted to hear the report from the Painted Knife’s band, because as soon as an hour past Noon Bell our little council was seated in one of the formal halls of the Arsenal.

We’d kept the numbers relatively low, since this was unlikely to be the sort of thing we wanted spread around and numbers were always the death of secrecy. There were three seats filled as a given – mine, Hanno’s and Hasenbach’s – but after that it’d been on strict basis of need. Vivienne, while tired and fresh off her own travels, was my heiress-designate so she’d naturally been brought in. Masego was as well, as my advisor on sorcery and the eldritch, and he’d not even needed to be talked into it. Hierophant had no interest in politics, but he’d always been like a magpie when it came to secrets. Hanno had brought in Roland and the Blessed Artificer, both of which had been hard to argue with. The Rogue Sorcerer was a generalist, when it came to magic, and Adanna of Smyrna understood Light in ways few others could.

I was pretty sure that the only reason she and Masego weren’t trying to stare each other down was that the Artificer knew he didn’t blink.

The First Prince had brought in Frederic, and I’d had a hard time placing why at first. The Prince of Brus was popular and a Hasenbach loyalist, but he wasn’t exactly in the running for the throne even if she stepped down from it. Malanza was all but certain to get the chair, if it came to that. I liked Frederic, our little affair aside, but as far as I knew he didn’t bring much to the table. Except, I realized after a moment, security. He was a Named that the First Prince knew would be on her side, if anything went wrong in this room where no guards would be allowed in. Given that he was a prince it was hard to argue with his presence, regardless, and one might argue that anyhow I’d already put my faith in the... discretion of the Kingfisher Prince. Hasenbach’s other seat had been given to a middle-aged man by the name of Alvaro Corrales, who was introduced as a scholar and one of her secretaries.

He’d be taking the formal notes for the session, though Vivienne would be taking notes for my side as well.

Since Lord Yannu Marave had yet to arrive, the Dominion would go without a representative today. It wasn’t ideal, but to be honest there simply wasn’t anyone high-ranking enough from Levant on the premises. Anyone brought in – one of the few captains, most likely – would be lost for most of the conversation and require access to several more well-kept secrets just to understand most of what was going on. It wasn’t going to be happening, Hasenbach and I had agreed. We’d keep the Painted Knife and her band here long enough that the Lord of Alava could hear the same report we had, if a little later, and maybe offer a polite apology for the haste. Not a very sincere one, though. No one had been particularly inclined to delay until Marave got here, given the potential importance of the report and how long we’d been waiting for it. Sparse small talk was had as a courtesy for the short while we waited after the coming Named, but it’d barely gotten past greetings by the time the five were brought in.

A few hours of rest had visibly done them some good, I thought. Months on the road couldn’t be cured with a catnap, but at least it’d taken the edge off and allowed them to change into clean clothes. By habit my eye sought weapons and found none, not that Named could ever truly be harmless. After the attendants escorted them down to the lower table – ours was up on platform, in a bit of pageantry – and the Painted Knife offered greetings for the band as a whole. Hasenbach took the lead in answering, even as I studied the five Named. The Poisoner looked uncomfortable, which was only to be expected since she’d once accepted a tidy sum to kill the First Prince even if she’d ultimately failed, but that the Relentless Magistrate looked the same caught my attention.

Whatever it was they’d found, it didn’t sit well with the man.

“- if my fellow high officers have no objection?”

I’d kept half an ear on the talk, so I wasn’t caught unawares. Cordelia was trying to move this along.

“None,” I said.

“Agreed,” Hanno replied.

The Painted Knife breathed out, and I wondered how much nervousness the thick face paint was actually hiding. The people in this room, the people she’d be addressing, were not without power or influence in the wider world.

“The mandate given us by the White Knight and the Black Queen was to find the truth of what took place long ago in the place known as the Verdant Hollow,” Kallia of the Knife’s Blood began.

It was Neshamah himself, during the conference in Salia, who’d suggested we should look into a place where the first Grey Pilgrim would have ‘slain many men’. Paired with the insinuation that we owed Kairos Theodosian all our lives and that the Wandering Bard had been playing us for fools, it’d warranted investigation. Tariq himself had known of the existence of the hidden valley, this Verdant Hollow, and even negotiated with the Holy Seljun on our behalf to access the records of the secret records Isbili when it turned out that the White Knight could not see a single thing that’d taken place within the valley grounds through his aspect. After a look through the records the band of five had chased after the trail like bloodhounds, but I’d heard very little of how they’d gone about it.

“We first tried the Verdant Hollow ourselves, using sorcery to try to bring forth a shade from those ancient days,” the Painted Knife said. “It did not succeed.”

She glanced at the Royal Conjurer, who cleared his throat and asked for permission to speak.

“Granted,” I said.

“Old battlefields and sites of slaughter usually have stray spirits even when shades have faded, as the former often feed on the latter,” the old man said, offering a grandfatherly smile. “There was not a trace of either, however, and my attempts to conjure up the dead failed in a manner that can only be called absolute.”

At my left, I saw Masego lean forward in his seat.

“ Tabula rasa ?” Hierophant asked.

The wrinkled old mage nodded.

“Indeed, Lord Hierophant,” he replied. “I drew the obvious conclusion.”

“Angelic intervention,” Roland said, voice quiet and troubled.

I sagely nodded, as if I’d known that all along. Although, the tabula rasa thing did vaguely ring a bell. Akua had once mentioned that the touch of angels on Creation tended to ‘renew’ the fabric of the Pattern, often erasing old damage, which was why even though Callow had been subjected to more than a few rituals it wasn’t up to its neck in fae and devils all the time. Still, this was hardly a great revelation. If the first Pilgrim had called on an angel to tip the scales against a villain, it wasn’t exactly unprecedented.

“It was clear there would be no shortcut, so we followed our other lead,” Kallia of the Knife’s Blood said. “The records of the Pilgrim’s Blood spoke of survivors that fled north, into the Alavan hills, carrying wounded with them. We looked for graves along that path, combing the countryside.”

A sideways look at the Grizzled Fantassin saw the older woman salute – towards Cordelia in particular, I noted – and speak out in a cadenced tone I recognized from my own years on campaign.

“There weren’t any Dominion graves, Your Highness, but I recognized old markers in the tradition of the southern companies,” she said. “It was my kind that got butchered in that valley, and they buried their own as best they could while running away.”

I’d not guessed it would be fantassins that’d gotten killed by the first Pilgrim, but that it would be Procerans had been something of a given. The founders of the Blood, immortalized in the epic poetry of the Anthem of Smoke, had been rebels against Proceran occupation.

“We attempted to summon forth the spirits form the graves, but there was a complication,” the Painted Knife said.

“Someone had beaten us to it,” the Royal Conjurer said, sounding amused. “Necromancy had already been used there, and recently.”

“How recently?” Masego asked. “For how many corpses?”

“A month, five corpses,” the old Helikean mage replied.

Zeze scoffed, and I let out a low whistle myself.

“That’s a hell of a bleed,” I said.

From the corner of my eye I saw Roland lean to the side to explain to the First Prince in a whisper what I’d learned from my own lessons in the Art. Usually the turn of the moon dispersed weak magical residue, so for it to still have been detectable after a month when there’d only been five corpses to raise meant that the caster had grossly overcast their spell. Usually either the mark of the incompetent and ignorant – Masego’s own conclusion, obviously – or of people with a lot of power but little control.

“Fortunately, we were able to track the risen dead through the gift Bestowed upon of one of our own,” the Painted Knife said.

The Relentless Magistrate, who I could not help but not had yet to shave, rose to offer us all a stiff bow.

“We followed the trail to a fishing village south of Malaga before it went cold,” the man said, his strong Alamans accent showing even when speaking Chantant. “Upon investigation, Your Highness and Majesty, it turned out that villages in the region all had a few missing individuals. While the locals were disinclined to answer the questions of a Proceran magistrate, Lady Kallia’s stature as one of the Blood bridged the gap and we figured out the common link was access to boats.”

My brow rose.

“The Royal Conjurer and my humble self meanwhile found out that graves were being robbed in the area,” the Poisoner tittered. “Which painted a damning picture, yes?”

Considering I’d heard that poisonous things tended to grow around Dominion barrows, I decided not to ask exactly what they’d been doing when finding that out.

“When another young man was abducted we followed,” the Painted Knife said, “and after borrowing a boat and sailing across the Pond we made shore south of the Brocelian.”

Which was, from what I recalled, one of the last largely unexplored stretches of Calernia by virtue of most people going into it dying ugly deaths. Ventures in there were profitable if you could handle yourself, though, given the amount of magical creatures and rare resources. The city of Tartessos should be an impoverished hole in the ground, going by simple geography, but trading in Brocelian goods had instead made it one of the great cities of Levant.

“Didn’t even get to find our way before we got ambushed by undead,” the Grizzled Fantassin sighed. “Although that was still better than the damned boat reeking of fish.”

“It was clear we were on the right path, if the enemy was attempting to obstruct us,” the Relentless Magistrate smiled, a small slice of teeth and malice.

“The Brocelian is not a forest to be tried without preparations,” Hanno said. “Did you seek a guide?”

“One of the ambushers was a living man,” the Painted Knife said. “And though terrified of his ‘master’ he agreed to serve as our guide after some convincing.”

The Poisoner tittered, smiling girlishly.

“It is easier to bargain when one has the only antidote to be found for a thousand miles,” she said.

That’d been an impressively creepy titter, I mulled to myself. The woman was talented.

“Ten silvers it was some Named undead trying to gather an army on the sly,” I muttered under my breath.

“I will take that,” Masego decided. “No one with that much bleed could possibly be competent enough to lead an army.”

Ha, the sucker. Although it’d better not come out of the Arsenal budget, since that’d just be cycling my own coin around.

“Twenty it was trying to take over Levant,” Vivienne offered under her own breath.

The White Knight turned a steady gaze onto us, and I felt vaguely ashamed at having been caught betting on this.

“I’ll take the bet on the twenty,” Hanno softly said, leaning towards us. “And thirty it has Barrow in the Name.”

It was probably some sort of heresy to gamble with the White Knight, I thought, but then I had been Arch-heretic of the East. They couldn’t reasonably expect me not to dabble at least a little.

“I’ll take that bet,” I snorted. “We’ve already got a Barrow Sword, the Gods Below wouldn’t be that uninspired.”

“It’s Levant,” Hanno drily replied, “there’s always a barrow involved somehow.”

A few gazes had turned towards us at the continued whispers, so I painted a solemn look onto my face. It’d been a serious, professional conversation we’d be having and there was no reason to even suspect otherwise.

“We pushed on into the woods, meeting little opposition as we went,” the Painted Knife said.

“About a hundred zombies and just the most horrid manticore,” the Grizzled Fantassin corrected.

“It was unusually unpleasant even by manticore standards,” the Royal Conjurer agreed.

“We then found an army of the dead being gathered in the depths of the Brocelian, thousands of corpses being armed in the shade of the trees,” the Painted Knife continued.

I cocked an eyebrow at Masego who looked mightily disgruntled at the revelation. Ten silvers for me, that was.

“We knocked out the prisoner and infiltrated the camp, where we learned that it was one of the Bestowed who was gathering a host,” Kallia of the Knife’s Blood said. “Though long dead, it had once been of the Tanja and wanted to claim rule of Malaga once more – Lord Razin Tanja was only titled through a loophole, it argued, and so it would rise the same.”

It made me feel a little dirty inside to refer to Praes laws on anything, but for once the Dread Empire might just be the leading light there: it had pretty strict laws cutting out the undead of both inheritance and holding titles at all. It’d only taken like three civil wars to get there, too, which by Praesi standards was basically unanimous consent. Hanno glanced at Vivienne, who was to embarrassed to curse in front of the Sword of Judgement but looked like she very much wanted to. Malaga wasn’t all of Levant, after all.

“He had proclaimed himself to be lord of the dead,” the Relentless Magistrate said, sounding offended by the pretension.

“She,” the Poisoner corrected.

“They named themselves the Barrow Lord,” the Painted Knife cut in.

I cursed in Kharsum, which drew some gazes. Including the First Prince’s. Really , Below? That was why Good kept winning, because they were such shits about it all. Now the White Knight was the one who’d won the most out of this whole blasphemous sidebar, and let that be a lesson: Above would always win so long as Below wasn’t willing to spring for some proper Names. Barrow Lord , I scathingly thought. They might as well have just named the poor bastard ‘Grave Noble’, it was about as clever in the greater scheme of things. People were still looking at me, so I cleared my throat.

“I grieve for the people of Levant,” I said, which strictly speaking wasn’t a lie.

“I thank you for your kindness,” the Painted Knife said, sounding surprised. “But the five of us were able to defeat the old dead. Though it refused to rest even when broken, the Poisoner was able to find a way to destroy it.”

“Manticore venom is a powerful acid, when mixed with blood and rhododendron,” the Poisoner smiled.

Well, that was an image. Masego and Roland both looked interested but were aware enough not to indulge their curiosity just now.

“And the corpses you had come there to find?” the First Prince calmly asked.

“We had destroyed several without knowing it,” the Painted Knife admitted, “but the fifth made itself known.”

“It proclaimed itself the new Barrow Lord,” the Grizzled Fantassin snorted. “Which several other undead saw fit to argue with. It was all very Highest Ass-”

The older woman paled.

“-League of Free Cities,” she hastily corrected, glancing sideways at the First Prince of Procer.

I was rather amused she did not so much as glance at Frederic, who was a sitting member of the Assembly as well.

“You captured your corpse, however, I take it?” Hanno asked.

Subtle laughter rippled through most of the band.

“I arrested him,” the Relentless Magistrate defiantly said. “For false arrogation of noble title, which is a crime under Proceran law.”

I choked at the bold assertion and was not alone in my surprise.

“Dead or not, he was a Proceran subject,” the man insisted.

I was a little disturbed to see that Cordelia Hasenbach was beaming down at him, or at least as close to that as her face would allow.

“Is it actually illegal to be undead under Proceran law?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“It would fall under the heresy laws, in most cases,” the First Prince told me. “Though in the four northern principalities undeath is considered high treason and acted upon as such.”

“It’s illegal for undead to do manual labour under the Accords, by the latest draft,” Vivienne noted.

“We’re going to need to make sure I don’t accidentally qualify under the wording, given how often I’ve died,” I told her under my breath.

“The ancient dead was convinced to surrender to the authority of the magistrate,” the Painted Knife said. “After some aggressive persuasion. And after we ran away with him tied to the Grizzled Fantassin’s back, we finally had our answers.”

That caught everyone’s attention.

“The mercenary companies were led by the White Knight of the time, a woman of Procer,” Kallia of the Knife’s Blood said, “and had been hunting the Grey Pilgrim for some time. They caught up to him and his fellow rebels in the Verdant Hollow.”

Wait, it was a heroine he’d been fighting? I’d known that in the past the Principate had fielded the occasional hero when taking a swing at its neighbours, but I’d not expected a damned White Knight to end up serving as a bloodhound for insurgents. By the look on Hanno’s face, he was less than happy to hear this but not outright surprised. I supposed he’d seen too many of the lives of his predecessors to hold any illusions about their infallibility.

“The fight went in the favour of the Pilgrim,” the Painted Knife said. “Yet the White Knight would not have it. When defeat seemed to be looming, she called on the help of a Choir.”

Oh, fuck . I did not like where this was headed. I did not like it at all.

“Which one?” Hanno calmly asked.

“Mercy,” the Relentless Magistrate quietly said. “I... glimpsed, and it must have been Mercy.”

Considering how brutal Tariq could get in the pursuit of greater goods, I could actually believe the ancient White Knight had been backed by the Ophanim in her quest. Suppress the rebellion and reform from the inside, maybe? It was an uncomfortably familiar refrain, and it might just be I was painting my own history on a blank canvas there. But she’d led fantassins instead of regulars, so perhaps it had been unkind to assume she’d been with the rapacious princes occupying Levant back then.

“And what happened after that?”

“Angels came,” Kallia of the Knife’s Blood said. “But a woman stepped in, and then the angels left .”

Chapter 36: Trepidation

“It is traditional to kill to preserve your secrets, but I have found it more efficient to instead kill everyone who would be offended by the revelation.”
– Dread Empress Massacre

A claim like that required elaboration and it was had. The long-dead fantassin had apparently been quite the chatty fellow once he got talking, so even though the Relentless Magistrate had only been cut into a few of his memories a fairly complete picture of the events could be had. None of us were all that concerned with the history of it all, though, not right now. So when the floor was opened for questions, it began with Hasenbach asking for more details about the intervention by the ‘unknown woman’.

It was the Bard. Of course it was the fucking Bard, and I wasn’t sure why any of us were wasting our time pretending otherwise.

“The White Knight called on the Brighteyed Lords,” the Painted Knife said. “Those you know as the Ophanim . And they came down in a wave of burning light, to strike down the Grey Pilgrim, but even among the blinding radiance a silhouette could be seen to have appeared.”

That had Intercessor written all over it, as far as I was concerned. There weren’t a lot of people who could take a hit from an angel – I certainly couldn’t, at least not without Sve Noc and the right story behind me – but the Wandering Bard was certain to be one of them. Even if it killed her, it wasn’t like she’d stay dead.

“Was the woman ever identified, by either your prisoner or any others in the valley?” Hanno asked.

I snorted, ignoring the looks I got from some in the room.

“We all know who that is,” I said, “and faces don’t matter a whit to her. She’d had more of those than we’ve had meals.”

“If I can hear even a fake name, I can search through old lives for a connection,” the White Knight reminded me.

“I think you underestimate how good the old bird is at hiding her tracks,” I bluntly replied. “But be my guest.”

I’d have to remember to ask if they still had the dead fantassin about, though, since I could probably take those memories through Night and make of them something that could be seen by multiple people. Could be useful. The Painted Knife had patiently waited for us to finish speaking, but it was actually the Magistrate that she bid to answer Hanno’s question.

“The prisoner never saw a face, though the silhouette was definitely a woman’s and the timbre of her voice supports this,” the Relentless Magistrate seriously said. “The Grey Pilgrim was not in the field of vision of the prisoner when this took place, as he was looking at the White Knight, which leaves us instead with an impression of her face as she reacted.”

My brow rose. They’d been very thorough, I noted appreciatively, and they weren’t hiding the imperfections of their results as some might be tempted to in front of such an influential audience.

“She looked surprised,” the Relentless Magistrate said. “And she spoke, though the noise of Mercy’s descent drowned it out. I believe, however, that by reading her lips I have pieced together what the word was. It is not, however, a certainty.”

“Your work has been exemplary so far,” the First Prince said, “and certainty is a rare thing indeed, in these matters.”

“Agreed,” I said, drumming my fingers against the tabletop. “On both counts.”

The Royal Conjurer looked pleased, though the Poisoner was harder to read. My approval was something of a mixed bag for the rest, not unexpectedly.

“It was in Chantant,” the Relentless Magistrate said. “ Trouveur .”

Which meant ‘finder’. Huh, not exactly something I’d associate with the Bard. Not all at the high table seemed to share my opinion, though. At a glance both Proceran royals, Roland and the White Knight all seemed to be varying between grimness and understanding.

“I’m guessing I missed something,” I noted.

Considering only the native speakers and Hanno – a filthy cheating cheater who cheated, because his aspect was bullshit – seemed to have caught it, I’d guess it was something Proceran. Probably specifically Alamans, as the scholar with the Arlesite name didn’t seem to know about it either.

“In older Alamans traditions, a trouveur was something like a troubadour,” the Rogue Sorcerer told me.

Oh, Roland. Both reliably competent and socially skilled, why hadn’t Zeze figured out a way to make more of him yet? Still, would you just look at that. It might be a few centuries late but we’d caught the tail of the Wandering Bard at last. Whatever it was that’d gone down in the Verdant Hollow, she’d clearly not wanted anyone to know about it.

“I will attempt to confirm this independently,” the White Knight said. “It may take some time, but it should not be impossible to learn more. Until then, however...”

“I am willing to operate on the assumption that it is the Intercessor we are dealing with,” Cordelia agreed. “Queen Catherine?”

“I was sold the moment someone stepped in on Mercy in smiting mood,” I drily replied. “But consider me formally in agreement, if that’s what you’re after.”

It was, so we moved on with little ceremony. Masego had questions but no burning desire to ask them himself – at least not right now – so I did on his behalf.

“On the subject of the Ophanim being made to ‘leave’,” I said. “I’ve inquiries about some of the details.”

It was the Magistrate who fielded answers once more, and he began by striking a cautious tone.

“The prisoner saw nothing of what took place after that, not until the light had dispersed and the soldiers fled,” the dark-haired hero said.

Which their report had made clear enough. The fantassins led by the White Knight had skirmished with the warrior band led by the Grey Pilgrim over the span of an afternoon before it turned into a proper battle over a grassy slope. The battled had turned in the favour of the Levantines. Their training and equipment were both flatly inferior but they were much better at skirmishing than the mercenaries, so they’d softened up the fantassins over the afternoon.

When the fight had gone south for the Procerans, the White Knight had stepped back from the frontline and called on Mercy, which was when our old friend had stepped in. Our sole witness had gone temporarily blind and only got his bearings later, running away with the survivors and wounded after they found the Levantines had not taken the opportunity to slaughter them while they were blind. Hierophant didn’t want me to fill in the blanks in the history, though, he was after something else.

“I understand that,” I said. “But, to be clear, even after the silhouette was seen the light did intensify?”

The man frowned, collecting his thoughts for a moment.

“That is correct, Your Majesty,” the Relentless Magistrate said.

Masego let out what someone who loved him less that I did might have called a cackle.

“A limitation,” Zeze said in Mtethwa. “Finally.”

A surprising amount of people spoke that tongue, considering the side of the Whitecaps we were on, but it was still far from a full roster. I cleared my throat.

“Lord Hierophant has deduced something of import from the detail,” I said. “Which he will now share with us.”

Masego’s Chantant was significantly better when listening than speaking, so it was in Lower Miezan he addressed the high table.

“The Choir of Mercy did strike at the valley,” Hierophant said. “It explains the presence tabula rasa effect observed in the valley by the Royal Conjurer, which would not have been there if the Ophanim had not fully aligned with Creation.”

Hanno was fairly learned in matters of sorcery, at least as much as someone without the Gift could be, but unlike me he didn’t have the benefit of being familiar with the Praesi parlance in the art.

“If I understand correctly, Hierophant,” the White Knight slowly said, “you are stating that Mercy did smite the Grey Pilgrim?”

“Yes,” Masego bluntly replied.

Surprise flickered across half a dozen faces and from the corner of my eye I found that the Painted Knife was grinning, muttering honour to the Blood with an awed look on her face. Must have been nice for the national pride that the original Pilgrim had walked off Mercy’s attentions – and where Procerans would have considered it an indication of virtue, with the Dominion it was a flip of the coin if they’d decide it’d been about pure strength instead. I was pretty sure we were about to get into the specifics of being smote by angels, which should run afoul of at least one Proceran heresy law, so I decided to give a warning.

“Deeper explanation will require drawing on learning that some deem to be blasphemous,” I said. “I tend to find the academic tone there refreshing, but I’m not unaware that others differ in opinion.”

Cordelia flicked a discreet glance at her secretary, who ceased writing.

“Given the situation, I believe such objections can be set aside,” the First Prince of Procer mildly said. “Lord White?”

“I’ve no objection,” Hanno said, sounding faintly amused.

Considering he’d once told me his own mother had kept to Below, I suspected he’d be harder to shock theologically than people would expect of him.

“Try to keep it concise,” I told Masego in Kharsum. “And please don’t talk about dissecting anything someone prays to.”

“My children will eat your goats,” he replied in the same, sounding a little miffed.

I threw him an offended look. There’d been no need for that sort of language, I was just giving advice. Given how important cattle was to the Tribes, that was actually a pretty brutal putdown for them – I’d seen orcs brawl over less. I bet it was Robber who’d taught him that one, though. The malevolent imp had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of taunts and insults in every tongue he was even slightly proficient in. I caught Hanno covering his mouth as if to hide a yawn – or a chuckle, I realized, since I’d forgotten he actually knew Kharsum.

“Angelic power is fundamentally like any other,” Masego told everyone. “It has fixed rules and properties, however esoteric, which allows it to be measured and predicted. In this case, the tabula rasa observed means that there was a strike in the valley. That it does not seem to have caused any deaths means a property of that power was amended.”

The First Prince of Procer observed him carefully.

“And that is... feasible, even for one who is Named?” she probed.

“I cannot think of another who could do this,” Hanno admitted.

The Fallen Monk had been able to screw with Light, from what I recalled, but having fought him my opinion was that a scrap between him and an angel would have begun and ended with the sound ‘splat’. The Intercessor wasn’t some second-stringer with a grudge against priests, though.

“She’s not like other Named,” I said. “We’ve known that for some time. It’s the reason we’re tugging at threads that are literally centuries old.”

Mind you, if it wasn’t an aspect that let her do that I’d eat my own fingers. The Intercessor might be in a class of her own in some regards, but she wasn’t beyond the constraints of being Named. Beating her thrice forced her away, she’d avoided the Hierarch like the plague and my money was on her having only three aspects just like the rest of us. One was the wandering trick, coming and going everywhere, and another had to be her sight for stories. That left whatever the Hells this was to look out for.

“Yet it is telling that the strike did land,” Masego continued. “As she clearly did not want it to. It implies she does not have the ability to outright command angelic entities.”

Which was the good news. So now came the bad ones.

“It does seem, however, that she is able to affect the properties of angelic power,” Hierophant continued. “Be it directly or indirectly. Which property in particular was tinkered with I cannot say, as there are too many possibilities. Reduced potency, different parameters for harm, different manners of harm...”

He trailed off, shrugging, as he’d made his point. The specifics didn’t actually matter all that much when it came down to it. Whatever the form it was a problem, to say the least, that if a metaphorical angelic arrow got shot the Bard could decide what kind of an arrow it became.

“Are you saying that the Intercessor has the ability to... reforge angels as she wills?” the First Prince said, sounding appalled.

“No,” Masego said. “In a sense it is impossible to affect an angel directly – even those that are said to be ‘dead’ and have left behind a corpse remain in their Choir and unchanged. The Choirs are fixed entities. As befitting the way that she has been named an intercessor , I would theorize that what she affects are the ‘senses’ of angels. Not unlike coloured glass tinting one’s perception of the world when that world itself remains objectively unchanged.”

“So Mercy struck,” I said. “But it didn’t kill anyone, because simultaneously it saw that there was no one it should be killing.”

“In essence,” Hierophant agreed.

If the lever could be pulled down on that, though, it could also be pulled up. Which would be something of an issue if someone had, say, an angel corpse lying around that they’d unwisely made a weapon out of, Cordelia . That wasn’t a conversation that needed to be had in front of the Painted Knife and her fellows, though, so instead I asked if anyone still had questions for the band. The First Prince apparently shared my curiosity as to the fate of the dead fantassin, but we were both to be disappointed: it’d been the sorceries of the Barrow Lord that kept him moving and aware, so within a few days of the villains’ destruction the corpse had begun breaking down. The aftermath of necromancy tended to be rough on bodies, from what I recalled. Made sense. You could only shove so much magic into even a living body before things started going south and corpses were even less flexible.

“He was given a marked grave in the way of the southern companies,” the Grizzled Fantassin said, almost challengingly. “He kept his contract to the end, and deserves the long peace same as any of us.”

It might have been possible to extract a few things out of the remains of the remains, in practice, but it honestly wasn’t worth the effort considering it’d require either myself, Akua or one of few oldest Mighty in Cleves to see to that extraction in person. Being halfway decent people, the rest of the high table weren’t inclined to argue in favour graverobbing anyway. Hanno made plain to the thee heroes that he’d want a more in-depth talk about their investigation at some point, and I casually informed my pair of the same, but aside from that we were done here. With the questions, anyway. They were released to rest and recreation, and within moments of the door closing we were dealing in state secrets.

“The crown of Callow has already made known its concerns regarding Procer’s continued custody of the corpse of an angel,” Vivienne said, leading the offensive. “After today, the dangers of continuing down that path should be even clearer.”

Not what Hasenbach wanted to hear, I saw on her face – practiced a diplomat as she was, she’d spent too much time around me. Enough I’d learned some of her tricks, and that’ pleasant yet distant’ smile on her face tended to come out when she was feeling pressed.

“Secretary Corrales,” the First Prince said, “if you would speak the appropriate part from the transcript of the Dead King’s words at the end of the Salian conference?”

The tanned man sharply nodded. Idly I noted that Hasenbach had not said read and that the man was not looking at any papers. She was fond of precision, the First Prince.

“- and it will tell you, should you be clever enough, of the doom you all so narrowly escaped by the grace of Kairos Theodosian ,” the secretary quoted.

“Thank you,” Cordelia smiled. “Now, should we take the Hidden Horror at his word then there seems to be different trouble here than the risks inherent to the Principate’s possession of a large-scale defensive weapon.”

Hasenbach wasn’t a fool, much as her insistence to keep the corpse still angered me. It wasn’t like I didn’t understand the temptation of keeping the angelic weapon around. She’d only seriously consider using it if the Grand Alliance were already collapsing, anyhow, so from her perspective there really wasn’t anything to lose in keeping it except some unease from my camp. It was a card up her sleeve in case the night got too dark for the dawn to pierce through, and unlike Named and coalition armies it was also something she had complete control over. No one would be pulling that trigger without her say-so, at least in theory. That had to be reassuring, considering that in practice Cordelia Hasenbach was sharing the reins over the war that would decide the survival of her nation with more people than any ruler would like.

My issue with this whole blunder had previously been that doomsday weapons were disaster magnets no one could ever really control – and were prone to backfiring massively – but with Zeze’s words there was fresh unease to add to the brew. A weapon that answered to someone else first was best snapped over your knee.

“The Dead King implied that Kairos spared us something,” I agreed, “which fits with the end of the Salian Peace. The angelic remains dredged up are allegedly from one of the Seraphim-”

“They are,” Hanno flatly said. “You may take my word on it.”

This might be a tad of a sensitive subject for the Sword of Judgement, I thought, but there weren’t ways to tiptoe around it that I could see.

“I will,” I agreeably replied. “So we’ve got a Seraphim corpse and a confirmation that the Intercessor can affect angels. The Tyrant of Helike then masterminds the Hierarch rising to... obstruct the Choir of Judgement, so to speak, and in the wake of that the Dead King speaks of us being spared doom by Kairos Theodosian’s actions. The picture there is pretty clear, as far as I’m concerned.”

If Cordelia had pulled the trigger on the Judgement corpse before Judgement got walled off by Bellerophon’s maddest son, the Bard would have had a degree of control over what happened. Now, though, the corpse could have no tie to the Choir – even Hanno, its champion on Creation, could not get a peep out of them as far as I knew. If Masego was right and the Bard worked over angels by screwing with their ‘senses’, then the current state of the weapon was a dead end for her. She couldn’t trick an inanimate object, after all. The Tyrant of Helike had, true to form, solved an old headache by leaving us with a fresh one: right now, no one had any fucking idea what would actually happen if Cordelia pulled the trigger. Gods, but sometimes I wished I’d killed the little bastard myself. It’d at least give me something to look back to fondly when sill dealing with the fallout of his actions several years after his death .

“By the Dead King’s own admission, the danger has been averted,” the First Prince noted.

“Are we now to take the word of the Hidden Horror for truth, Your Highness?” Roland politely asked. “Let us not pretend the creature will not serve its own interests above all.”

“If the weapon is a threat to the Dead King, his interest is in discrediting it,” the Kingfisher Prince pointed out. “Which he has not, strictly speaking, accomplished here.”

In the sense that the Bard wouldn’t currently be holding the reins, he had a point. On the other hand, Neshamah had neatly soured us on the Bard with this and further deepened my already deep objections to Hasenbach keeping that looming disaster of a weapon around. He’d gotten his gains, as he tended to.

“He hates the Intercessor like poison,” I said. “Insofar as he’s damaging her in our eyes, I’d tend to take him at his word. He’s too canny of an old thing to try a lie there, there’s too many Named in play for one of those to actually work for long.”

The Intercessor herself would delight in revealing the inaccuracies, if only to further establish herself as the Dead King’s ancient sworn enemy that we should all be listening to. After all, if the Hidden Horror was going out of his way to discredit her then she must be a threat. Truth be told, I did believe her to be that. Only to more than just Neshamah.

“Adanna,” Hanno said, voice clear and calm. “If the remains of the Seraphim were used in a ritual and the Wandering Bard amplified the effects as much as she could, what sort of a scale would we be looking at?”

“I am uncertain,” the Blessed Artificer reluctantly admitted. “Though as a rule, the greater the quantity of Light the simpler the purpose it can carry. At a greater than regional scale, harm is likely the sole effect that could reliably be had. I do not have the proper references to hazard a guess at the scale of propagation.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Masego finishing a flourish of the wrist with a wooden stylus that’s somehow written in dark letters over the tabletop. I leaned in closer, glancing at equations that were giving me a headache just to try to parse.

“Masego?” I asked.

He breathed out a little noise of triumph.

“The Whitecaps are the limiting factor,” Hierophant called out. “Assuming there is a hard limit to the power a Choir can wield and the source would be in central Procer, we are looking at an estimated two thirds of Calernia being affected. Rhenia and parts of Hannoven would be untouched, up north, while the eastern limit would be the Whitecaps down to the Stygian border with Delos. Assuming a dilution effect by large bodies of water-”

“At such a scale, there would not be,” the Blessed Artificer told him. “A higher threshold of propagation, but that’s all.”

Masego let out a noise of grudging appreciation.

“In that case,” he continued, “the city of Levante might be unaffected, and the mountainous parts of the Titanomachy would certainly be. Everything else would be within range.”

“Ashur?” I faintly asked.

He shrugged.

“Fifty-fifty odds,” he admitted. “The sea is an unpredictable boundary.”

Utter silence followed in the aftermath of his words. Putting together the words of Masego and the Artificer, the picture painted was... horrifying, for lack of a stronger word. More than nine tenths of Procer and Levant dead, the better part of the Free Cities – including its two largest cities, Helike and Nicae – and even odds on the complete annihilation of the Thalassocracy. An end to the ratlings, and at the moment the Firstborn as well. Callow and Praes would get to hide behind the mountains and four of the Free Cities were far enough east to be spared, but the sheer loss of life... Fuck .

“It would end the armies of the Dead King as well,” the Blessed Artificer quietly said. “And most likely destroy the Hellgate in Keter.”

At the cost of what, two thirds of the population of Calernia? The Dominion wasn’t densely populated, but Procer sure as Hells was and the Free Cities were aptly named. No wonder the Hidden Horror had believed everyone would turn on the Bard after learning this.

“Removing the hard limit in power, the Whitecaps will eventually be vaporized and we’re looking at full saturation of the continent,” Masego noted. “Including through the ground into the Kingdom Under, though that will take up to days longer.”

“Even under your limited model the crater in central Procer is likely to touch dwarven tunnels,” the Blessed Artificer condescendingly said, “and they’d be looking at the loss of a few principalities’ worth of territory as well.”

Ah, I thought with fixed smile on my face, would you look at that. They’d actually made it worse, which I’d doubted was possible. Now we also had to worry about the dwarves considering the weapon a threat and deciding to strike first.

“Merciless Gods, Hasenbach,” I feelingly said. “How much more will it take to convince you to drop that fucking thing at the bottom of the Skiron Ocean?”

“The Kingdom of Callow has grave concerns about the keeping of such a potentially calamitous weapon,” Vivienne said, translating my words into something more diplomatic.

“Much of what was said here is speculation,” the First Prince mildly replied. “And even this speculation points to the risk having passed.”

“If a proper method to wield the remains is created, it is the sort of weapon that could win us this war,” the Blessed Artificer agreed.

“Or it could kill us all,” the Rogue Sorcerer gently reminded her.

“You have personally patronized the Quartered Seasons weapon, Queen Catherine,” Cordelia reminded me. “Which carries great risks as well, to my recollection.”

“I’ve limited information on it, but it’s ultimately a Grand Alliance initiative and not a purely Callowan one,” I replied. “I’ve been preparing the results for perusal, as a matter of fact, now that tangible progress has been made. I can’t say the same about that corpse you’re dragging around.”

“Then your issue is the lack of Callowan observers, not the weapon itself,” the First Prince said.

My brow rose. This kind of wordplay might be useful in a place like the Highest Assembly, where appearances were everything and such little victories counted, but she ought to know better than to try to finagle me. I was in no way above using a bloody hatchet where a stiletto failed to get the point across.

“No,” I bluntly said. “My issue is with anyone’ possession of a weapon that could potentially wipe out two thirds of Calernia. There’s no equivalence to be drawn there, First Prince. If Quartered Seasons goes wrong it’ll be a disaster, but a survivable one. Your ‘large-scale defensive weapon’ is a blade put to the throat of millions, and I did not torch such a weapon in Praesi hands only to meekly accept your keeping the same.”

A bit of an exaggeration there, since Black had been the one to destroy Liesse while I’d actually been inclined to side with Malicia in the heat of the moment, but it wasn’t like anyone else here knew that. Blue eyes stayed on me as Hasenbach attempted to gauge how serious I was being, and I hid nothing: this was genuinely unacceptable. It’d been a liability before, but now it was something a lot worse.

“We have gone far beyond the remit of this council,” the First Prince eventually said. “If there are grievances to be had, there are mechanisms to address them under the treaties binding the Grand Alliance.”

My eyes narrowed. The diplomatic thing here would have been implying it was up for negotiation before brushing me off, opening the path for later private talks if she wasn’t willing to hash this out in the open here. The First Prince had not done that. She was sending the message there wasn’t room for compromise there, and coming from a diplomat of her calibre that surprised me. What was driving her to keep her finger on that trigger at all costs? I glanced at the White Knight and found him looking remote, almost absent-minded. Whether it was because Judgement had been spoken of or because he saw the disputes of crown as beyond him, I could not be certain. Either way it was less than helpful.

“It might allay some unease if specialists were allowed to take a look at this weapon and ascertain its possible effects,” Vivienne suggested.

A fair suggestion, I thought, but not a tempting one for Procer. In our case said specialist would be Masego, which I somehow doubted they would go for. They weren’t idiots, they had to know that letting the Hierophant riffle through anything miraculous was as good as allowing him to shut it down at will.

“Something to discuss under different circumstances, Lady Dartwick,” the First Prince politely replied.

Huh. Really not giving even the shadow of an inch, was she?

“White Knight?” I tried.

If he wasn’t going to step in by himself, I’d drag him into the melee by the scruff of the neck.

“It would be unwise to further debate this without having sought more information,” Hanno eventually said. “This council has served its purpose, I believe, and need not be further prolonged.”

I hid my displeasure. Not what I’d wanted to hear, though I supposed it was much like him to keep silent until he’d dug through enough memories he had a better idea of what he was dealing with. The White Knight disliked rushing to decision when there were still cards yet to be revealed. Though he didn’t show it, I suspected he was a lot warier of making mistakes now that the Seraphim were no longer looking over his shoulder. With both Hasenbach and Hanno supporting this all coming to an end there was little point in pursuing the opposite, so I folded and we called the meeting to an end. The First Prince caught my eye as we began to disperse, however, and her secretary passed along an invitation to walk with her a span. Before long we were sharing a stretch of hallway between my limp and her measured stride, Vivienne and the Kingfisher Prince trailing behind us.

“I have concerns,” the First Prince told me with unusual forthrightness.

For her to drop the more elegant methods she preferred, they had to be some pretty dire fucking concerns.

“You’ve heard mine,” I said, frowning. “I’m all ears for yours.”

“The Truce and Terms are proving to be highly unstable,” Cordelia Hasenbach said. “An uncomfortable number of collaborators were found by the Intercessor among both Chosen and Damned, and now the White Knight himself was mutilated by one of his subordinates. I am forced to wonder if these trials are not simply the act of gilding a sinking boat.”

Fuck , I thought. All this time I’d been worried about keeping my villains in line and Hanno’s lot from stepping on mine, but I’d not stopped to think about how the Principate would see it all. Hasenbach was still being asked to ignore attempted regicide of one of her princes so that the authority of increasingly bloodied Terms might be preserved. The more their credibility was damaged by little things like the Mirror Knight cutting up a high officer of the Grand Alliance, the less she’d be inclined to bend her neck. I studied her from the corner of my eye. Given how useful Named still were to the fronts, she was exaggerating to some extent there. Even if the Terms had been much worse, from a pragmatic perspective they’d still be a net advantage when it came to survival – and that was the way Hasenbach had to think, right now. She was drawing my attention to this to make a point elsewhere.

Considering what we’d just finished having a council about, it was not hard to guess.

“There are some matters that can be gambled with,” I slowly said. “There are others where the simple act of implying a gaming mood loses trust in a way that cannot be mended.”

I would not haggle over the custody of the doomsday corpse, not when it’d been made clear that there might be millions of lives hanging in the balance.

“I will not allow policy to be dictated by pissing matches among Named, Queen Catherine,” Cordelia Hasenbach coolly said.

It was the crudest thing I’d ever heard come out of her mouth, and that was enough to give me pause.

“The coming trials will clarify whether Chosen and Damned can be trusted to oversee themselves,” the First Prince of Procer warned. “And if your kind proves to be running wild unchecked, Black Queen, if they cannot be counted on?”

She met my eyes.

“Then the Principate will do what it must to survive, no matter whose feathers it ruffles. On that point there can be no negotiation.”

Chapter 37: Trying

“A man should beware of praying for justice when he truly wants vindication. He might just get what he asked for, and it is never a pretty thing when we all get exactly what we deserve.”
– King Pater of Callow, the Unheeding

There were too many parts in motion for me to keep track of them all, and I did not like the feeling in the slightest.

Late in the night Lord Yannu Marave arrived in the Arsenal, though given the hour I elected not to reach out to him until morning. Now that the representative for the Dominion was there, the right amount of high officer for the Grand Alliance had gathered and the trials could begin. A round of messengers sent to all involved saw me get answers as I broke my fast with Vivienne just before Morning Bell, the two of us catching up over warm pastries by Hakram’s bedside. The necessary official talk we’d gotten out of the way the day before, at least when it came to getting me up to speed about all she’d been up to, so we’d allowed ourselves the luxury of an hour or two for ourselves. It ended up being less than that, inevitably, as the last messages came while she was on the tail end of a rant about living so close to the seat of Proceran power.

“If I receive another subtle yet suggestive poem from a secret admirer, I’m going to start setting the Jacks after them,” Vivienne told me, at least halfway seriously. “I’m actually pretty sure two of them actually hired the same poet to write for them because the rhymes were suspiciously similar.”

I answered with an amused snort.

“Any fish work hooking in there?” I teased.

“Please,” she dismissed. “Like taking a Proceran to bed wouldn’t be horrible politics even if those trying their hands weren’t either ambitious fools or spies.”

“Terrible politics,” I agreed, without the faintest hint of irony.

I’d been taught by some very fine liars, after all. And it had truly been that to dally with Frederic, admittedly. Terrible, delightful politics that did that delicious thing with their hips. I seemed to have gotten away with it, though, so I’d not get greedy and ruin it by dallying again even if the thought was occasionally tempting. A knock at the door was followed by another messenger being allowed in, passing along a written response. Hanno had been the last to answer, not by lack of punctuality but by being the hardest to find. His agreement to the first trial – the Hunted Magician’s – being held half past Noon Bell was dropped by Cordelia’s impressively prompt one and the Lord of Malaga’s slightly slower answer.

“So?” Vivienne asked. “Are we starting today?”

“This afternoon,” I replied. “All agreed.”

In the wake of wrapping this up, I’d spring on them the Concocter’s own punishment. None of this was supporting Hasenbach outright, but prompt and severe consequences for my Named who’d stepped out of line ought to make it clear the reins were still being held. As long as the trials for Above’s didn’t end up spoiling the brew, anyway. The Mirror Knight had not tried to escape imprisonment and the Severance was back under seal, but my polite inquiries had made it clear that Hanno did not see a trial as something to discuss in advance. I’d expected as much, honestly, given that I was dealing with the Sword of Judgement. I still didn’t like that I’d be going in blind there, but there wasn’t really anything I could do there – under the Terms this was the White Knight’s show, and no trespass of mine there would go without swift and severe answer.

“Yannu Marave’s considered a pragmatist by his countrymen,” my dark-haired heiress said. “Not aggressive by nature, though he’ll be extremely thorough in answering slights. So long as you don’t end up touching the Dominion’s bottom line, though, I don’t see him being trouble.”

Hasenbach had intimated as much, but it was good to hear the same talk coming from a source I could trust wholeheartedly.

“The crowns do matter,” I admitted, “but it’s the White Knight that’ll be the keystone.”

The Terms were, ultimately, a treaty between Named. The nations that’d signed on did so mostly as guarantors of rights and privileges, not legal authorities – Procer, Callow and Levant all had a seat in the tribunals but in the end it was the White Knight and the Black Queen that passed sentences. It’d have a lot more of an impact if Hanno had issues with my rulings than if nation did.

“True as that is,” Vivienne calmly said, “what is left to do now, save pulling the trigger?”

I’d never won much arguing with the truth, so I let the conversation end on that.

—

Putting the staff together for this hadn’t been all that difficult, since the members of the Arsenal could serve as a ‘neutral’ entity to draw people from. Not the Named, of course, but the scholars and mages and priests. I’d decided to avoid any trouble by drawing on scholars for the scribing work, and from Vivienne’s own staff for the rest. The ever-useful Lady Henrietta Morley – these days no mere landless aristocrat but instead Viv’s own private secretary – was recommended to me as someone capable of handling details and timing, so I put her in charge of handling transcripts and evidence.

For all that this was a formal trial under the Terms, it appeared somewhat haphazard at first glance. At the high table the tribunal sat, with Vivienne representing Callow and the rest as expected: Cordelia Hasenbach for Procer, Yannu Marave for Levant and Hanno for the heroes. They’d all been provided with a list of the accusations laid at the Hunted Magician’s feet earlier today, which weren’t actually all that numerous. ‘Aid to an enemy of the Grand Alliance’ on one count, for having cooperated with the Bard against the Arsenal, then one count of ‘unprovoked assault on allies’ for the gas canisters he’d opened in the Stacks and one count of ‘accessory to attempted murder’ for the illusions he’d woven when attempting to help the Red Axe get Frederic killed.

I’d spoken with the Concocter, who would have had a right to lodge a complain considering the gas in those canisters had been her work in the first place, but she’d declined to pursue the matter. Through me, anyway. No doubt she’d be making a deal of her own with the Magician without my being involved. Of those charges the ‘aid to an enemy’ was the most severe, the deceptively mild wording mostly a result of it not being possible to call it treason when there were so many different crowns and jurisdictions involved. It was still considered just as severe, though, and it’d be the driving force behind the harshest part of his sentence.

The Hunted Magician had come dressed soberly but smartly, having put on an embroidered pale green vest over a white long-sleeved shirt and loose dark trousers. Like most the times I’d seen him, he looked more like a wealthy nobleman in casual clothes than any sort of mage. It was all well-cut without being ostentatious, which was halfway clever of him: it was a shallow thing, but people tended to favour those who looked well. Look too rich, though, and pretty or not that appreciation tended to turn to antipathy with some. He’d straddled the line well, which only had me further convinced that he was highborn and not from a lesser line. In Procer in particular, the difference between those who dressed well but subtly and those who were garish with their wealth was one of the ways to tell apart those whose ‘nobility’ was an old thing, often preceding the Principate itself, from those who’d risen to higher station more recently by sword or coin.

I’d already been on my feet when the Hunted Magician had been escorted in, made to stand on bare stone as behind a set of wards and guards the assembled high officers of the Grand Alliance sat and watched him approach, so I only needed to limp a bit before I stood by his side. The man turned dark eyes on me, face blank, and I leaned in a little closer.

“Keep your head,” I murmured. “They’re not out to get you but no one here wants you to wiggle out either, least of all me, so take your lumps and walk away.”

“I helped your man,” the Magician murmured back. “Do not forget it.”

“I forget little, Hunted Magician,” I coldly replied. “And never aid given to my enemies. Best you don’t forget that either, yes?”

He’d been well-taught enough not to grimace at the reminder that even the help he’d given Masego when it came to Quartered Seasons hardly made up for the hand he’d had in the storm that’d swept over the Arsenal. A great deal could have been mitigated, if he’d not decided it would be the height of cleverness to make a deal with the Wandering Bard. Mind you, if Tariq hadn’t insisted we hedge our bets when it came to her such a deal might have smelled of the noose enough the Magician wouldn’t have dared. Past a certain point, fault became such a many-faceted thing there was little practical point in pondering it. I turned away from my charged and faced the tribunal. Cordelia was unreadable, Hanno lightly frowning and Yannu Marave looked already bored. Vivienne, clever thing that she was, was spending more time looking at the other members of the tribunal than anything else.

“I’ll not trouble you with an excess off ceremony,” I said. “You’ve all already been made aware of the breaches of the Terms the Hunted Magician has been accused of. For the sake of formality, I will list them once more: aid to an enemy of the Grand Alliance, unprovoked assault on allies and accessory to attempted murder. As representative for the villains under the Terms, these are the charges I will lay against him. Do any of you intend to present further charges, or contest those I have laid down?”

“I do not,” the First Prince calmly said.

“No,” the Lord of Alava bluntly said.

Vivienne silently shook her head, but like me her eyes were on the White Knight.

“Yes,” the White Knight said.

My fingers clenched around the length of dead yew in my hand.

“Elaborate, White Knight,” I said.

“Your charge of ‘accessory to attempted murder’ would attaint the Red Axe of said attempted murder before she’s stood trial of her own,” Hanno said.

Which was, I grimly though, actually a good point. Sure any idiot could tell I was right to call it that – there wasn’t a lot of room for interpretation in the act of hacking a sword at Frederic’s neck – but the Terms functioned because I passed judgement for villains and Hanno for the heroes. Neither of us could or should trespass beyond that boundary.

“I’ll not withdraw the charge,” I said, “but I would offer assurances that I would not consider the Red Axe in away attainted by it.”

“Callow agrees with such a compromise,” Vivienne calmly said.

It was a cheap trick, agreeing with me quickly to put the pressure on others, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be effective.

“Levant agrees as well,” Lord Yannu dismissed.

Cordelia’s cool blue eyes were slightest bit narrowed in thought, but she did not hesitate as soon as she was satisfied she’d parsed out the implications.

“The Principate is in agreement,” she flatly stated.

Eyes went to Hanno, whose frown has deepened ever so slightly.

“I am wary of influencing opinion in another trial even with such a compromise,” the White Knight said. “Yet I can recognize that opinion is not bound to be settled by law, and so it should not be objected to on such grounds. Under such an assurance, I withdraw my objection.”

Well, first hurdle passed. From there, it was mostly a matter of presenting to the tribunal what I was making my own judgement on. By Henrietta Morley’s practiced hand my witnesses were brought in one after the other, those made to present in person at least. Unprovoked assault was the easiest to prove, so I started with that: two scholars who’d been made unconscious by the gas, a healer to certify none of those affected had any lasting consequences – which would have made it more than mere unprovoked assault – and the Magician confessed to the theft of the canisters and their use when pressed.

“If the canisters were stolen, why is theft not being laid as a charge?” the First Prince asked. “I believe those were property of the Principate, as well.”

The Concocter had made those as a possible tool for Cordelia to quell riots bloodlessly, apparently, and created them using Proceran coin. But I’d known about this in advance and prepared for it.

“The canisters remained the Concocter’s property so long as they were in the Arsenal, and she’s declined to lodge any grievances,” I said. “Lady Morley?”

The noblewoman had a signed statement by said Concocter backing up my words brought forward, and after it was made clear that the loss of the canisters and their content would be folded into the repair budget for the Arsenal after the raid instead of forcing Procer to pay for the same goods twice she had no further objection. We moved on to the slightly trickier one, accessory to attempted murder. Two officers – one Levantine and one Callowan – were brought to describe the illusion woven, which had been of the Prince of Brus acting and speaking aggressively. Marave spoke up for the first time, just to make sure his countrymen would face no retribution for baring steel on a prince of the blood, and lost interest as soon as he was reassured this was the case.

My case for this was weaker, and in truth some would have folded it into ‘aid to an enemy of the Grand Alliance’, but I was actually doing the Magician a favour here. By making him part of someone else’s attempted murder, in this case the Red Axe’s, I was preventing him from being accused of having tried the same thing only on the Bard’s behalf. Trying to get a prince of the blood – and hero – killed for the Intercessor would warrant steep consequences, while helping a heroine in her own fumbled attempt was not quite so grave. He wasn’t a fool, and he obviously knew the Terms in and out, it was almost eagerly that the Hunted Magician confessed to an act I had only moderate proof of him having carried out. After Yannu Marave watching out for his fellow Levantines I got no interruption, and we swiftly went on to the last of the charges.

“First, I want to remind you that even at this very moment the Wandering Bard has yet to be designated an enemy of the Grand Alliance,” I said. “It was not a breach of the Terms to have dealings with her when the Hunted Magician did. What was a breach, however, was how information like the location and inner dealings of the Arsenal – a secret location – were revealed to an outsider. It was when the Bard then masterminded an assault here that the Magician’s actions became ‘aid to an enemy’. In this light, it seems appropriate to water my wine.”

“Traitors should only know one kind of mercy,” Yannu Marave replied.

Most people in the room knew enough about the Dominion that he didn’t have to slide a finger across his throat to actually spell out what he meant. That he didn’t bother to do it anyway made him a fairly subtle man, by Levantine standards.

“It is not appropriate to speak of the sentencing before the trial is finished,” the White Knight cut in, tone even. “Is there a reason for it, Black Queen?”

“Informing deliberation is part of her responsibilities as representative for Below’s champions,” Vivienne coolly replied. “Failing in that duty would truly be inappropriate, unlike what you’re currently fretting about.”

The Lord of Alava let out a chuckle, looking more interested than he’d been in the better part of an hour.

“Fighting words,” he approvingly said.

I cleared my throat.

“I spoke to this to make clear that I believe the Hunted Magician’s breach of the Terms was done not out of malice but out of ignorance and incompetence,” I said.

The man stiffened behind me but had enough sense not to argue my words.

“Indeed?” the First Prince of Procer said, eyebrow quirking.

I suspected that, after the last few weeks, Cordelia was rather enjoying watching one of we troublesome Named squirm in discomfort.

“Absolutely,” I told her. “The Magician’s fault came as a result of wildly overestimating himself, when in fact his arrogance and simplicity allowed a genuinely malicious entity to make use of him as a tool.”

The Magician twitched at my words but kept his mouth shut. Maybe he wasn’t entirely beyond salvaging, then. Evidence over his conspiracy with the Bard was sparse as wheat fields in the Hungering Sands, but that was seen to by the simple magic of having told him in advance that if he took his fucking lumps and confessed I wouldn’t need to treat him as a liability. Through gritted teeth, the Proceran confessed to having had dealings with the Bard. He left out as much as he could, as I’d expected, but even the bare bones were damning enough. His saving grace here would be that he hadn’t actually killed anyone here directly, which hadn’t actually been all that difficult to prove: all our dead and wounded were accounted for, the reasons for their state more or less clear. His responsibility there was indirect, which left me some wiggling room even with the gravity of the aid charge.

I‘d finished making my case, so without further ado I asked the tribunal if they wanted to deliberate before recommendations were made to me. Hanno did, but no one else was in favour so he conceded and we went on straight to the tribunal offering its recommendations.

“I trust in the judgement of the Black Queen,” Cordelia said, opening the game with a measured smile, “and I expect that her sentencing will be fitting.”

Easier to say, I supposed, when you already knew what that sentence was. Still, she’d left herself some room to manoeuvre just in case what I’d told her I’d pass as a sentence wasn’t what I’d actually say now.

“We should be fitting his head for a pike,” Lord Yannu said. “But if he’s just an idiot, as you say, it’d be a waste. Levant will settle for flesh instead of a skull, Black Queen.”

I nodded. Not exactly a push for moderation, that, but it was signaling that the Dominion would be satisfied so long as the punishment stung. The details of that punishment, though, they hardly cared about. Vivienne did not speak, since it would have been quite the empty game if she’d pretended she had the right to speak with Callow over me, so it was Hanno that spoke next – but only after a long silence spent carefully choosing his words.

“There must be visible consequence to aiding a common enemy,” the White Knight eventually said. “And given that the breaches seems to have been committed on personal grounds, the consequences should be personal as well.”

Mhm. He’d been careful not to actually suggest a sentence – knowing that whether I then followed his suggestion or ignored it there’d still be trouble from some quarters – but it was clear he wanted a few metaphorical fingers broken. Nothing permanent, I meant, but at the very least lasting pain. The tribunal would have the right to comment once more once I’d offered the ‘draft’ of my sentence, and I suspected he was keeping his comments limited until we got there. Nothing I’d heard now went against what I’d planned, so it was a simple thing from there: I simply shared the sentence I’d already told Hasenbach I planned to hand down. Loss of the right to refuse assignments, then a fine equivalent to the sum of the damages done to the Arsenal repeated for every signatory member. Pensions for the families of the dead got a grunt of approval from Lord Marave, but otherwise he seemed skeptical of the punishment until I specified the fine could be repaid in work.

The prospect of Levant having access to a highly-skilled Named enchanter brightened his eyes, especially considering that with the established debt there wouldn’t be a need to pay that enchanter.

The Hunted Magician himself looked appalled, at first, but as the initial surprise passed he looked thoughtful. He’d figured out the advantages for him, then – ties to three crowns, and good reason for each to ensure he stayed alive after the Truce and Terms ended and the Accords replaced them. Satisfied he wouldn’t be a stick in my wheel going forward, I returned my attention to the tribunal. The First Prince, content I had kept to my word, gave her seal of approval promptly. The Lord of Alava was not far behind, and mostly symbolically Vivienne agreed for Callow. The last to speak was once more Hanno, and he was studying the Hunted Magician closely.

“It is a measured punishment,” the White Knight said, “but it lacks consequence.”

My brow rose. I’d been pretty severe already, so I wasn’t exactly inclined to bite there.

“Coin is coin,” Hanno said. “But such a failing should not be kept under wraps. Let his breaches be made known to all Named. Let sunlight burn out the rot, so that something wiser might replace it.”

Mhm. Well, it’d be a humiliation for the Magician but it wasn’t like the specifics of the assault on the Arsenal were going to stay secret forever. He couldn’t lose respect the heroes already didn’t give him, and my own lot would be more inclined to mock a failed plot that condemn it on moral grounds. I could actually kind of see what Hanno was going for, there: if the Named under the Terms became a community, then reputation would start being worth a lot more more. It’d become something worth taking small losses to preserve, if it was actually useful, and serve as an incentive to keep one’s word. It was worth encouraging, and not unreasonable to ask.

“Agreed,” I said. “The breaches and sentence will be made known to all Named under the Terms, if not the details of the trial.”

He nodded in thanks, and another round of consultations got me the unanimous seal of approval from the tribunal that I did not need but had definitely wanted. This had, to my surprise, actually gone pretty well. The Concocter’s own punishment wouldn’t require a trial like this, but I’d wait until later to make it known to the high officers seated in the room – there was no need to muddle the waters by doing too much at once. A semi-formal occasion sometime this week would do just as well, with an opportunity to voice issues should there be any. This wasn’t like hitting a tavern with friends, so when the business was done we all parted ways after the proper courtesies were offered. I’d intended on thanking the staff I’d borrowed personally, including Vivienne’s own, but the White Knight lingered long enough to catch my eye so I passed that duty along to Vivs and accepted the implied invitation to go on a walk.

Considering Hanno had made it clear he wasn’t going to be discussing the trials in advance, I was pretty curious about what it was he actually wanted. I was doing a lot of limping in hallways with important people these days, I mused, to discuss all sorts of concerns. I was going to have to see about getting some of this done seated, or else I’d need to arrange for more of the brew that made my leg sufferable without drawing on Night.

“Your leg is paining you,” Hanno said, eyes narrowing as he studied me.

Not the start I’d expected, but true enough.

“That’s what legs do,” I dismissed.

“I will refrain from small talk,” the White Knight told me. “We can slow, if you prefer.”

“Thought you said we wouldn’t be doing small talk,” I grunted back.

I’d never learned to take pity all that well, even when it was kindly meant, and I was starting to feel to old to try. The dark-skinned hero didn’t even blink at my bite. I supposed he was used to it, by now.

“The First Prince has approached me several times now,” Hanno said. “She has several intentions, but foremost among them is securing agreement for the Red Axe being tried under Proceran law instead of the Terms.”

I didn’t bother to fake surprise. Even odds he’d be able to tell even if I did, and we were largely on the same side besides.

“I’ve heard the speech as well,” I said, then after mulling it over threw him a bone, “from both her and the Kingfisher Prince.”

The White Knight did not look all that surprised, but he nodded in thanks anyway. Yeah, I wasn’t surprised that the First Prince hadn’t tried to win him over through Frederic. The Kingfisher Prince was his subordinate, in a sense, and it would have tripped a lot of those Proceran unspoken law to bring attention so clumsily to the divided loyalties of Prince Frederic of Brus.

“I would not impugn your character,” Hanno delicately said, “yet I imagine a diplomat of Cordelia Hasenbach’s skill would have not prepared an offer easy to refuse.”

I decided to be amused instead of insulted, after a beat. He was asking whether or not I’d been bought by whatever it was Hasenbach had offered me for my agreement, in this case Procer’s seal of approval on the Liesse Accords as they currently stood. Hanno had been right in both suspecting an offer would be made to me and that it’d be a very tempting one, so I’d forgive him on account of that and the delicacy of inquiry.

“I didn’t bite,” I bluntly told him. “My priorities haven’t shifted, White Knight. First is winning this war, second is establishing the Liesse Accords. Most everything else is noise.”

Not entirely true, since my neck would bend some when it came to the preservation of Callow, but in essence I stood by my words. I’d rather fight this war in Procer now, even if it got ruinous to my kingdom’s treasury, than on Callowan borders in a decade with fewer allies and resources to call on. It wasn’t going to make me popular, but I could live with that: there was a reason my abdication was set in stone.

“I believed this would be the case,” Hanno admitted, “but I had to ask. The intensity of Procer’s overtures over this worries me. It smells of desperation, and despair makes for a poor councillor.”

“She has reason to be worried,” I admitted. “We both had traitors, White. If it’d been only my lot she might have been able to write it off as Below’s usual perfidy, but yours have arguably been making more trouble with her. Add to that the three fingers calling the Mirror Knight to heel cost you, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. We’re not looking all that reliable.”

And, in an ironic twist, for once it was the heroes who were looking like the problem child. Between killing villains, bleeding princes and dabbling in coups, it had to be said that Above’s champions had not come out of the last month looking pristine. My lot looked better in comparison, amusingly enough, but much as it pained me to admit it that might not necessarily be a good thing. Villains weren’t the ones bringing the trust to the table, when it came to nations backing the Terms. A risk had been taking on Below’s folk in large part because I was riding herd of them and I’d shown a lot of goodwill to the leaders of Levant and Procer. That and I’d established early on that I was perfectly willing to kill villains if they stepped out of line. In the end, though, it was the heroes that brought trustworthiness to the Truce and Terms. It was their reputations, their record, that justified all the twists and turns and compromises that were being had to keep Named mustered and pointed at Keter.

If they were no longer trusted, we had a problem.

“I have worries myself,” Hanno frankly replied. “Most urgent among them the First Prince keeping the remains of one of the Seraphim. Even were she not attempting to make some sort of sordid weapon out of it, I would be troubled: such a thing is not to be trifled with.”

I grimaced. Glad as I was that the White Knight shared my misgivings there, there were risks to making common front. We were already refusing Hasenbach over the Red Axe, and then we’d be trying to pry what she probably saw as her weapon of last resort from her hands. I was pretty sure Levant could be convinced to back us over this, through Tariq if nothing else, but I was wary of going through with this. Like Hanno had said, Procer was starting to smell of desperation. I’d heard in Frederic’s voice and seen it on Hasenbach’s face, so I was wary of pushing the Principate when it already felt cornered.

People did stupid things, when they felt cornered.

The hardest lesson I’d learned since putting on the fancy hat and eating a season had been that just because you could win a fight didn’t mean you should be fighting it. There was already too much fighting going on among people who should all be on the same side, and it was like the assault on the Arsenal had shone down a light on every fracture that lay at the heart if the Grand Alliance. They were growing bigger, I could feel it, and yet caution was stilling my hand: a hasty move, now, could do untold damage. And yet waiting too long will do just the same , I thought. We needed to finish those trial as soon as possible, then tie up Mercantis and the Gigantes. Gods, all this trouble and we’d yet to even begin the godsdamned war council for the actual fucking war we were fighting.

“Give her time,” I said. “She’s a pragmatic creature, there’s only so many bridges she’ll be willing to burn over this.”

“It will have to be addressed before our time at the Arsenal ends,” Hanno said.

“Agreed,” I reluctantly said, then cast him a dark look. “And you need to get your house in order, quick, before we lost more trust. I doubt Procer will try to outright axe the Terms, but there’s lesser measures it can take. They could restrict access to cities, assign escorts – Hells they could just begin funding Named on their good side and only them. This isn’t a flip of the coin, White Knight, they have more than two options.”

Poor choice of words there, I realized a heartbeat later with a wince, but he did not comment on it.

“Then the Mirror Knight can stand trial tomorrow,” Hanno offered instead.

“Good,” I nodded. “Once that’s out of the way, we can sit down with the First Prince and find a way to settle the trouble over the Red Axe.”

“I will not discuss sentencing, Black Queen,” the dark-eyed man flatly said. “I have already told you this.”

Gods save me from heroes, all prickly as cats and half as sensible.

“Then don’t,” I sharply said. “Talk about how we arrange this so she doesn’t have to deal with a revolt in the Highest Assembly, something that we cannot afford . I’m not great admirer of her princes, White, but your girl cut a prince of the blood that was trying to protect her from harm. They’re right to be on pins and needles about it: nobody wants a young Regicide walking around, only this one protected by treaty. I won’t argue to throw her to the wolves, we have to clean our own houses, but we have to give them something .”

The White Knight considered me for a long moment.

“I do not see what we can, Black,” he finally said.

“Then pray, hero,” I said, baring my teeth. “And I’ll see what I can get done down in the mud.”

Chapter 38: Tantamount

“A diplomat without a general at his back is just a polite man no one heeds.”
– Exarch Acantha of Penthes

Within an hour I received a formal message asking for my agreement to hold the Mirror Knight’s trial tomorrow. I sent back said agreement immediately and I must not have been the only one to be prompt, as within an hour of that the White Knight sent along the formal charges that Christophe de Pavanie would be accused of. I narrowed my eyes at the paucity of them: assault of an ally and insubordination. That was it. No mention of the fact that he’d kept the Severance at his hip long after the crisis had passed, though Hanno might make the case that since no formal demand to return it had been made of the Mirror Knight it hadn’t actually been a breach of the Terms for him to keep it. It wasn’t even unprovoked assault of an ally, I noted with distaste, but instead a lesser sister-charge.

I’d reserve judgement – no pun intended, Sisters preserve – until the trial took place, but I wouldn’t consider this an auspicious beginning.

Intriguingly enough, I got a third message in the wake of the first two and not from someone I’d expected to be reaching out. After I’d sat down with Vivienne to go over the possible outcomes of tomorrow with a cup of wine in hand, our talk was interrupted by a message from Lord Yannu Marave. He was overseeing the sparring of his sworn swords in the Revel’s arena, and he’d invited me to come have a look. It was a threadbare excuse to have a private talk, but that he might want that talk at all surprised me. I shared the thought with Vivienne.

“They call him Careful Yannu, back home,” she mused.

My brow rose.

“He did not strike me as all that careful a man, during the trial,” I said. “Juniper has some respect for his skill as a general and I’ll not argue there, but he’s not particularly impressed me otherwise.”

“The Dominion doesn’t do politics like we do, Cat,” Vivienne reminded me. “They often duel, when they disagree, and they’re cautious with risking their honour. He didn’t particularly care about the trial because by Levantine ways he shouldn’t have been in the room – villains are yours to discipline, as your ‘sworn men’.”

My forehead creased in thought as I considered him again with fresh eyes. He’d spoken in favour of death, when the time came for recommendations, but to Levantines things like betrayals tended to be seen as matters of honour. Honour was usually settled by blood on the floor, back in Levant, so for a lord of the Dominion to express surprise this didn’t start and end with putting the Magician’s head on a pike made a brutal sort of sense.

“Careful Yannu, huh,” I murmured.

I wasn’t entirely convinced, but best to watch my step anyway. There were damned few situations where it wouldn’t be a good idea to do that, so what was there to lose?

“There’s an emerging pattern of the Dominion reaching out to us amicably,” Vivienne thoughtfully continued. “When they suggested we arrange formal ambassadors I thought it might be leftover goodwill from your saving the Pilgrim, or perhaps courting your support in keeping their villains from making trouble, but now I’m not so sure.”

“They’ve been wary of making deals with me,” I slowly said, “but at the highest rungs of Dominion leadership they’ll be aware of my eventual abdication. You’re a lot more palatable, from their perspective.”

A former heroine with some impressive deeds to her name, nobly born but not afraid to get her hands a little dirty? That sort of reputation would go over very well, down in Levant.

“They also remember how quickly Proceran gratitude fades,” Vivienne murmured. “And how a First Prince can withdraw from the treaties signed by a predecessor. A treaty of mutual defence between our realms might appeal to their Majilis.”

“I’d think it more likely they want an informal alignment within the bounds of the Grand Alliance,” I told her. “They don’t want it to become a vessel for Proceran interests any more than we do.”

“They’ll be in no hurry to seal a pact, regardless,” Vivienne noted. “Bargaining done with an ally is expected to be gentler, and the negotiations over the Accords is the greatest leverage the Dominion has over us at the moment.”

True enough. More than once I’d wondered if Procer and Levant were actually drawing those talks out so that they could bribe me with ‘concessions’ when they wanted something from me. Not a pleasant thought to entertain, but even if it turned out to be true there honestly wasn’t much I could do about it.

“No reason not to take up Lord Marave on his invitation, then,” I said, draining the rest of my cup before rising to my feet.

No reason to waste time, either, so I got to it.

—

I wasn’t one to complain when offered up the sight of two dozen very fit men and women half-naked and laying hands on each other, but it lost some of the charm when they were doing their best to pummel each other unconscious. I’d been in a few brawls myself, back in the day, so I could tell that no one was taking it easy down there: those blows weren’t being pulled in the slightest. If the personal sworn swords of Yannu of the Champion’s Blood had been ‘sparring’ with blades instead of fists, there’d be corpses on the sand by now. As it was, I saw only blood and broken bones. A pair of young Levantine healers – who amusingly enough wouldn’t be considered real priests in the Dominion even though they used Light, as unlike the Lanterns they did not battle against evil – mended the fighters during their breaks, but did not otherwise involve themselves.

Yannu Marave himself sat besides me on the rafters, drinking deeply from a waterskin. He’d been down there fighting with the others when I got there, and only come up after one of the healers set a broken finger and bathed it in Light. The Lord of Alava was still barefoot and clad in only loose trousers and a sweat-soaked tunic, neither of which hid the fact that the man was a towering slab of muscle. He was tall, for a Levantine, and unusually for one of their men close-shaven instead of bearded. His colours were not currently on his face, but instead discreetly painted in intertwined threads around his wrist. After emptying what must have been half the skin, the Lord of Alava sighed in pleasure.

“I thank you for your patience,” Lord Yannu said.

“I didn’t send a messenger ahead to warn of my coming,” I dismissed with a shrug.

There’d been others up here when I first came, who’d invited me to take a seat on the bench where I still was, but they’d withdrawn when their lord came up. Now he glanced back at them meaningfully and they reached within the leather bags at their side, fiddling with something within. A moment later the small tingle of a ward coming down over the area passed over my skin, and I eyed the men speculatively. They wore armour, both of them, which was rare in mages aside from those in my army and the Legions – and even there it was a lighter kit than that of the regulars. They might not be mages at all, though, or just practitioners with a meagre Gift: it did not take much to wake the wardstones the Blood used. Gifts from the Gigantes, they were a wonder to behold and one I remained deeply envious of.

“Hiding stones,” the Lord of Alava said, noting my interest. “We will not be heard, not even by the men carrying them.”

“Useful,” I said.

Hopefully it wasn’t too obvious on my face that I’d trade the Blessed Isle for a reliable way to get those. Not that I currently owned the Blessed Isle, but that’d never stopped me before.

“I will not waste our time with small talk,” Lord Yannu said. “We both know what this is.”

I hummed, inclining my head in unspoken agreement.

“We’re not happy with Procer having an ealamal ,” the tall man said.

“I’m not familiar with the term,” I said, “but I can guess what you’re referring to.”

“The angel-corpse, you have called it,” Lord Yannu said. “That is the word for such a thing in Murcadan.”

Ealamal , huh. It had a ring to it. Less ungainly to keep mentioning, too.

“Understood,” I said. “I’m not happy about it either, as you already know.”

“I do,” he said. “And the heads of two lines of the Blood vouch that your word has weight, so now we speak. Procer is a great but dying beast, and I do not advise forcing its lair, yet for that same reason we must act. An animal bleeding out cannot be trusted with the likes of an ealamal.”

He paused there, as if to invite me to speak.

“I’d prefer the weapon scrapped,” I admitted, “but I agree that no good will come out of pushing the Principate too far. The reasonable compromise would be having people of our own near it, so that it can’t be used without our agreement.”

The tanned man nodded.

“I speak for the entire Majilis when I say this,” Yannu Marave said. “We want the ealamal to be made a weapon of the Grand Alliance, like the Severance.”

“I don’t see Cordelia Hasenbach going for that without assurances,” I said. “At a guess, Procer keeping the most boots on the ground around it and maybe even controlling who has access.”

Rubies to piglets that the First Prince would cut off a finger before letting Masego anywhere near her angelic doomsday weapon.

“We’d agree to limiting Bestowed access,” the Lord of Alava said, “by making it subject to a vote needing to be unanimous. But we want Binders and Lanterns there, so that we can know the nature of the threat. I will not accept our first warning being a tide of burning light on the horizon.”

“Preaching to the choir there,” I grunted back. “I’d agree to limiting Named under those terms as well, but I want your support in pushing for the Rogue Sorcerer to have a look.”

Roland was in that narrow category of people who were both likely to understand what they were looking at and then share that information with me. The Lord of Alava studied me closely.

“Agreed, if you support the same for the Forsworn Healer,” he replied.

I hid my surprise. The man was from Atalante from what I recalled, not Levant. And he served up in Twilight’s Pass, where no Named from the Dominion had been assigned. There were Levantine troops up there, though, led by Itima of the Bandit’s Blood. Might be there was a tie there that’d slipped me by: there were few of my lot in Lycaonese lands, and none I was close to. Either way I had no reason to refuse his terms.

“Bargain struck,” I replied, offering up my arm to clasp.

“On my honour,” Yannu Marave agreed, taking the arm.

Good, that tended to be reliable in Levantines.

“All that’s left is deciding how we approach her,” I said. “It will have more of an impact coming from Levant, I’d say.”

“If Callow is the one to approach her, she will sound us out and find the door closed,” the Lord of Alava replied. “A softer creep, yes?”

“If she doesn’t already know we’re talking, I’ll put up my crown for auction in Mercantis,” I snorted. “Besides, soft won’t get this done. It needs to be made clear to her she’d standing alone in this, and that her allies are not pleased.”

“A common front, then,” Lord Yannu said. “Wearied comrades coming to her together.”

Interesting. He really didn’t want to be the one to swing the sword on this, did he? Worried about the appearance of siding with a villain, or some of the undercurrents of the Dominion’s own politics tying his hands? It was a shame that the Jacks knew so very little of the powers that moved Levant, but given the distance and the youth of their organization it would have been foolish to expect them to have spread their net that far.

“That could work,” I conceded, sensing pushing for more would get me nowhere. “A dinner tomorrow, after the trial?”

“No point in letting her dig in,” the Lord of Alava agreed, sounding amused. “I will make the arrangements, Black Queen, if you have no objection.”

“I entrust my honour to your hands,” I replied, nodding.

Surprise flickered across the man’s face, and though he tried to hide it the courtesy had obviously flattered him.

Lord Yannu of the Champion’s Blood would be less flattered if he knew I’d learned the words from the Barrow Sword, I suspected, but I had no intention of telling him.

—

I’d expected to derive some pleasure from this, to have to hide it, but when the time came I found that I got no joy from the sight of Christophe de Pavanie being pilloried.

Metaphorically so, that was. Aside from being unarmed and heavily guarded the Mirror Knight wasn’t bound in any way. He still looked like a beaten dog as the Sword of Judgement briskly went through the charges laid against him, face bleak as he remained silent unless spoken to. No one wanted to drag more Named directly into this, so the testimony of heroes had been offered in written form instead and the entire affair took no more than a quarter hour. The White Knight made his case methodically, laying no accusation that could not be proven and justifying his charge of ‘assault on an ally’ instead of ‘unprovoked assault on an ally’ by specifying that there’d been some fighting between heroes and that he himself had not done as much as he could have to prevent violence from erupting.

It’d keep the Mirror Knight from more severe consequences, but even as I watched the First Prince’s face subtly harden I decided it’d been a strategic mistake on Hanno’s part. Admitting to heroes brawling amongst each other only helped make them seem less reliable in Hasenbach’s eyes, damningly enough not without reason. That my own lot was looking better in comparison was darkly amusing, considering they tended to be significantly worse people. They were, however, much better at hiding their misdeeds. The most fire that was squeezed out of the Mirror Knight was when he was probed over his reasons to have acted in such a manner by the First Prince.

“I sought only to prevent the scapegoating and execution of a Chosen,” Christophe said, voice defiant. “I took the wrong path in seeking this, I’ll not deny it, but the intention itself I will not apologize for.”

Cordelia warmly thanked him for his candor with a smile and he looked both surprised and rather charmed. I wasn’t fooled, myself. I knew that glint in her eye, as it was cousin to one that’d often gleamed in my own. The First Prince of Procer was looking at a Heavens-ordained victor still insisting even now that his own half-baked sense of justice should trump laws and treaties, and finding indignation rising within her. I suppressed a wince. Those two sentences had probably done as much damage as the rest of this trial put together. Now she had to be asking herself how many heroes like Christophe de Pavanie there were, for each one like the White Knight.

I could only begin to imagine her horror at the thought of that sort of strength and ignorance bolstering the position of some Highest Assembly cutthroat.

With the charges fully presented and little doubt left as to the truthfulness of them, Hanno asked if the tribunal wanted to deliberate. I was still gauging the risk of being seen as overstepping if I pushed for that when the First Prince voted in favour. I quickly added my vote for to the tally and the Lord of Alava belatedly voted that way as well, looking more curious than anything else. With a majority secured the Mirror Knight was sent out of the room to a nearby one where he could wait until deliberations were finished, and within moments of his departure Arsenal mages put a privacy ward over the room. Cordelia opened the dance without being coy about it, much to my pleasure.

“Before punishment is decided by the White Knight, I have relevant facts to present to the tribunal,” the First Prince said.

“By our own rules of procedure, these cannot be charges,” Hanno told her.

“They are not, Lord White,” she calmly replied. “If I may?”

The dark-skinned knight nodded.

“Christophe de Pavanie has involved himself with the royal family of Cleves, the House of Langevin,” Cordelia said. “He has taken for a lover the daughter of Prince Gaspard Langevin and become associated with the plots of that line, though his exact degree of awareness there has not been made clear.”

The drow hadn’t seen him backing the plot to knife them in the back, that much was true – if Sve Noc had that kind of leverage, they would have given it to me. But he’d not outright refused either.

“Neither taking a lover nor the plotting of others is something that the Mirror Knight can be castigated for,” Hanno replied, just as calmly.

Yeah, no one was going to get anywhere trying to get the Sword of Judgement to spice up a sentence according to political necessities. You might as well ask Archer to settle down or the Pilgrim to deal in casual cruelty.

“Ignoring the full circumstances when passing the sentence would be dereliction of duty,” I said instead. “You’ve clearly established the man to be lacking in judgement through your charges, his association with known schemers has to be taken into consideration when addressing the consequences of that lack of judgement.”

“Well said,” the First Prince of Procer added. “Justice dealt without thought to consequence is no more than the arithmetic of law.”

A little rich coming from a woman famous for her mastery of using the Highest Assembly’s procedural laws against her rivals, but I’d not answer wind in the sail by poking a hole in the damned thing. Yannu Marave’s face had gone cold, though I noticed only when he leaned forward.

“You both seem in agreement that Gaspard Langevin is scheming,” the Lord of Alava. “What is the nature of this scheme?”

I cast a look at Cordelia, silently ceding her the right to speak. I was the closest thing the Firstborn had to a representative in this room, but the House of Langevin was her headache – and a little goodwill gift now and then helped grease the wheels of this relationship, anyway.

“Designs have made on lands that were promised to the Empire Ever Dark for its contributions to the war,” the First Prince said. “Though the plans remained imprecise, and no concrete measures were ever taken.”

If the Lord of Alava’s expression had been cold before, it was now freezing.

“That such an honourless man still lives, much less still wears a crown, is repugnant,” Lord Yannu spelled out with excruciating care. “With this scheming against allies he dishonours not only Procer but this entire alliance.”

I said nothing, less than inclined to take that bolt for Procer when I pretty much agreed with the man.

“Measures are being taken,” Cordelia evenly replied.

“Then let them be taken soon,” Yannu of the Champion’s Blood replied. “I will not lead my captains in the defence of such a man and his holdings, First Prince. We will not die by the hundreds so that your hungry princes can sink their teeth into new lands.”

It would have been inappropriate to let out a whistle there, but I was tempted. The Lord of Alava was being heavy-handed, but given how much honour mattered to the Blood he might be genuinely offended by what he’d learned. Or, I mused with Vivienne’s words in mind, Careful Yannu might just be preparing the grounds for our common offensive at dinner tonight. He was in full face paint today, which made reading his expression rather harder.

“We have strayed from the purpose of this deliberation,” the White Knight said.

With that call to order we let the subject drop, though it would not soon be forgotten. I’d said what I’d wanted to and the First Prince had proved true to her word by actually addressing the Langevin troubles, so when the deliberations were called to an end I did not argue against. The Mirror Knight was brought back in and Hanno called for recommendations to be made by the tribunal.

“A public lashing and four fingers,” Lord Yannu flatly said.

The Mirror Knight paled but did not speak.

“Reassignment to Twilight’s Pass until the end of the war, subordinate to another,” the First Prince suggested instead. “After his deeds being made known among all Named and a month in a cell.”

He made an uglier expression at that than the prospect of losing fingers, which I supposed said much about how other heroes would respond to his action. A month was a fairly specific length of time to ask for, though. I suspected that it would line up very well with a sentence under Procer law, by mere happenstance of course.

“I’ll second Twilight’s Pass and the subordination,” I said. “As for the rest, I’ll trust in your judgement.”

A month in a cell would be a waste, so I’d not argue in favour of it, but I was actually in favour of making it known Christophe had tried his hand at a coup. It would bottom out his reputation while the way Hanno had handled him would gild his own. Given the silence of the Choir of Judgement, the occasional reminder that the White Knight was not someone to fuck with had its uses. I didn’t want to be seen arguing for the public shaming of an opponent, though, so it was best for Cordelia to be the one doing that – not that I’d missed she was trying to send her inconvenient native hero up in Lycaonese lands, where her support ran strongest, and squarely under the Kingfisher Prince’s military command.

My eyes stayed on the White Knight, though, whose serene face I found unreadable.

“Christophe de Pavanie’s breaches of the Terms will be made known to all Named,” Hanno said. “He will offer apology and restitution to all those harmed by his actions, after which he will be apprenticed to the Grey Pilgrim for the span of a year so that he might learn from his mistakes.”

My brow rose. Was that all? I was relieved when he began talking again.

“After the year has passed, the Grey Pilgrim will give his opinion on whether further action is required,” Hanno asked. “If he believes it to be so, this tribunal will be assembled again so that appropriate sanctions might be considered.”

I breathed out shallowly. Fuck me, but he’d stepped in it there. From the corner of my eye I saw Hasenbach’s back go straight as a spear, and the fact that her anger was that that visible meant she must be furious . From a Named perspective, Hanno’s sentence was solid work: Tariq, for all his flaws, had mentored dozens of heroes over the years and had an aspect that would allow him unearthly insight into what needed to be mended in Christophe. Honestly, after a year under Tariq I fully expected the Mirror Knight to come out of the experience a better man. But the Grey Pilgrim had also butchered an entire village of Proceran civilians in order to catch Black, back before the Salian Peace, which Hasenbach still despised him for. Now a brewing threat to her authority was being sent to learn at the foot of the same Peregrine. It... wasn’t a good look.

“Wisdom was shown,” Lord Yannu commented.

Yeah, none of the Blood were going to argue with a sentence that put the Pilgrim in charge of a problem child. He had a steady hand with those. Was this enough for me, though? From the corner of my eye I watched Cordelia and saw clouds looming on that horizon. Time to throw her a bone, maybe.

“I give no objection to this, so long as the Principate is also satisfied,” I mildly said.

The First Prince glanced at me, accepting the gesture for what it was – a largely symbolic one, but not entirely without meaning. If she wanted to fight this, I’d lend a hand. Within reason. A long moment of silence passed, the Mirror Knight visibly getting uncomfortable the longer it lasted, until the First Prince finally spoke.

“I will accept this sentence, if the Grey Pilgrim sends monthly reports to the high officers on the subject of this ‘apprenticeship’,” the fair-haired princess said.

Hanno mulled over that a moment, then nodded.

“That is reasonable,” he replied. “It will be so.”

And so the trial of the Mirror Knight came to a close, having lasted not even a half hour from beginning to end. It didn’t take long afterwards to agree that the Red Axe’s own should be tomorrow, though late in the evening.

And yet, for all the smoothness, I could not help but feel there was the scent of a storm in the air.

—

It was an amusing novelty to be more at ease in a diplomatic situation than Cordelia Hasenbach.

When the Lord of Alava had said he’d make the arrangements to receive us for dinner, I’d not expected him to actually throw what looked like a genuine Levantine meal. One of the nice halls put together in the Proceran manner had been stripped of its decorations, painted shields having been hung up in their stead. The heraldries had been skillfully painted, I found. My own Crown and Sword had been perfectly presented in black and silver, while the golden towers on blue of the House of Hasenbach drew the eye with their neat arrangement. The colours of the Valiant Champion’s Blood were red and orange, but to my understanding the pattern changed from ruler to ruler. Yannu Marave’s own was simple but elegant, bold strokes of orange evoking a helmet with a smiling slice beneath it.

The First Prince was clearly familiar with Levantine ways, so she’d come dressed in a fine brigandine of Rhenian colours with a sword at her hip and her hair pulled back in a long three-strand braid. I’d kept to a simple grey tunic myself, though paired with bracers and greaves, and brought a short blade at Vivienne’s recommendation. Hasenbach was the first to hand over her sheathed sword to the Lord of Alava when he welcomed her, only to have it handed back as gesture of trust, and though she did not fumble handling the weapon I’d noticed she was not used to having it at her hip when she walked. My own blade was returned with the same formula of ‘your honour is known under this roof’, which while mostly symbolic was still nice to hear.

Unlike the elaborate affair of when the First Prince had entertained me over dinner, this was to be a simpler arrangement. Levantine ways in some ways reminded me of those of the Taghreb, in the sense that hospitality mattered a great deal to them and that courtesy was demonstrated personally instead of through formal etiquette. It was an honour, for example, that there would be only the three of us at the table and no servants to pour or serve. The Lord of Alava would do so for us himself, showing much more respect than if a stranger were doing it in his stead. The fare was simple but tasty: slices of dried pork ham, a mix of beans, chickpeas and eggs touched with spices and oil, good white bread with some sort of tomato paste.

Lord Yannu was generous in pouring wine, strong red stuff from southern Levant, which did wonders for my appreciation of the meal. Conversation started light and stayed there for some time as we dug in.

“Do you actually know how to use that?” I eventually asked Hasenbach, flicking a glance at her sword.

She’d kept drinking, bound by the rules of courtesy, so I believed the flush on her cheeks to be entirely genuine.

“I can hold a wall, if need be,” the Lycaonese princess replied, “I am a Hasenbach. My skill is middling, however. I was always better with a bow.”

Didn’t have the callouses of someone who shot regularly, though, I couldn’t help but notice. Probably didn’t have the time with her duties in Salia.

“Good bowmen are always useful,” the Lord of Alava said in approval. “It is unfortunate they are not as useful against the undead as the living.”

“Swords for the Dead, arrows for the Plague,” Hasenbach quoted. “There is a proper use for all things.”

That was as good a segue as we were going to get, I suspected, and I wasn’t the only one to figure that out.

“Some weapons are best left in the sheath,” the Levantine lord said. “And there are some who even sheathed cause the wise to be wary.”

The First Prince wasn’t an idiot, and not interested in pretending otherwise, so instead of playing off the comment she dabbed her lips with the cloth and washed down the last of her pork with a small mouthful of wine. Only then did she answer.

“There are many wise in Levant, I imagine,” she said.

“I have known this to be true,” Yannu Marave said, face pleasant but eyes cool.

The First Prince glanced at me.

“I don’t claim wisdom,” I said, “but wariness is dear as a sister to me.”

“It pains me to see my allies troubled,” Hasenbach mildly replied. “Though I am wary, myself, of troubling the princes sworn to me.”

“Your princes trouble me ,” the Lord of Alava replied, dispensing with the pretence. “I have broken bread with Gaspard Langevin, never knowing he was plotting betrayal of an ally. I will never share a table with any of that line again.”

Godsdamn , I thought. While I was fairly sure he was feeding the flame some, the spark at the heart of it struck me as a genuine thing. The twist of those lips was just a little too tight for it to be otherwise.

“You’ve expressed concerns about the reliability of Bestowed,” I said, “and perhaps not without reason. You can understand, then, our concerns about an ealamal possibly falling in the hands of less honourable elements within Procer.”

She didn’t like it, I could tell, but she couldn’t afford to antagonize Procer’s only two allies by brushing us off. It must not have been a pleasant turn, I thought, to be the one on the outside for once. I was rather enjoying being the one with backing, though. I could get used to this.

“Let us discuss then,” Cordelia Hasenbach said, “how all our concerns might be allayed.”

After that, all that was left was bargaining over terms.

Chapter 39: Transliteration

“A sinking ship knows no captain.”
– Ashuran saying

I wondered if Hasenbach was getting as tired of this as I was.

Probably not. Ruling in Procer involved a lot more wrangling than it did in Callow, or at least the Callow I’d risen to rule – one where most great nobles had been stripped of their lands, and the armies of all but the crown had been severely curtailed. Outside her own Rhenia, the First Prince of Procer’s authority had rarely ran further than what she could sway others to grant her. Which must have made it all the more galling that, after years of staying one step ahead of her opponents at home and abroad, she was now getting cornered again and again by a bunch of yokels with swords. I supposed if I’d been fuller of myself than I was I might have started to believe that Hasenbach was losing her touch, or that I was a fine schemer indeed.

I was not so deluded, thank the Gods. The First Prince was being forced to give ground again and again because the Principate was collapsing under her, not because she’d proved to be blind or a fool. The crushing pressures within her realm where simultaneously forcing her to take unwise stands – like trying to claim the Red Axe – while robbing her of the clout that a First Prince with Procer firmly behind her would be able to wield. It was a deathly downwards spiral I’d begun to glimpse, one where to keep her head above the water she had to risk ever taller waves and even one grave misstep might be enough to see her drown. Still, she was not the only one who had demands made of her. There were matters I could not compromise over.

Trying to keep to that while preventing Procer from bursting open like an overripe fruit was why I’d sought Cordelia Hasenbach out for a private audience and insisted that the White Knight come along. Hanno’s dedication to trials under the Terms being treated as genuine exercises of justice was laudable, if occasionally inconvenient, but even he knew that worrying too much about appearances when the hour of need was upon us could only be a recipe for disaster. And so the White Knight had agreed to discuss the upcoming trial of the Red Axe, if not her sentencing, and to try to find a compromise with the First Prince. He was a reasonable man; it’d not been hard to exact that promise from him.

But I also knew that, like all Named, Hanno of Arwad would have lines that his very nature would not let him cross. Hasenbach and I, ultimately, were practical creatures. Our lines were born of practical concerns, either the feasibility of the Liesse Accords or the salvation of the Principate. The White Knight, on the other hand, was a principled man. The lines he would refuse to cross were moral ones, and while I could not find it in me to look down on that neither would I pretend that it did not make him unpredictable to deal with.

“This is nostalgic,” Hanno smilingly said, setting down his cup of tea. “I’ve not had this brew since I was a boy.”

Oh, good. Then if I got lucky I might never again have to force a smile after having a sip of this stuff. Even the Firstborn made better tea, and their version of it involved no leaves as well as more fluorescent snails than anyone should be comfortable with.

“I have an appreciation for Ashuran leaves,” the First Prince smiled back. “Though I will confess this particular sort was tricky to obtain.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Hanno snorted. “Few Ashuran merchants would willingly sell copper tea. It’s not a true leaf, you see. They make from the leftovers and low-quality batches of harvests that can be sold abroad.”

“Even your copper tea would sell for more than its weight in gold, back home,” I shrugged. “Luxury is in the eye of the beholder.”

While by the look on his face I suspected that Hanno would have genuinely enjoyed a conversation about this, it wasn’t what we’d come for and so after a few more courtesies the cups went down – mine only lightly touching my lips once more out of politeness, though I did not actually drink – and we got to business.

“Neither of us is blind to the damage the Red Axe’s trial could wreak on the Principate,” I calmly said. “And no one wants the situation to get out of hand. We’re looking into way to mitigate the issue.”

I wouldn’t back giving the heroine to the Highest Assembly to try, even the series of recent diplomatic reverses Procer had suffered weren’t enough to get me to consider such a thing, but I’d meant it when I’d told Hanno that Hasenbach needed to be given something . The question now was what she could safely be given, and while I had my own notion of what that compromise might look like it would be... contentious. I wasn’t sure either Procer or the heroes would go for it. Better to let Hasenbach out one of the contingency plans I did not doubt she had up her sleeve. The First Prince’s glance at the White Knight was measuring, in the heartbeat of silence that followed.

“The Terms cannot be twisted or turned aside,” the dark-skinned knight said. “That would be a severe breach of faith. Yet, as the Black Queen has said, I am aware of the difficulties this trial poses to Procer. I would not cause undue harm if there is a way to avoid it.”

There, what she’d wanted: confirmation that this wasn’t just me dragging Hanno in by the ear so that he might go through the motions of making nice with her. Not that she’d been inclined to think poorly of him, I believed. I’d never deeply discussed either of them with the other, but to my understanding there’d always been a degree of mutual respect there. Not closeness, though. The White Knight encouraged heroes working with the authorities, but never to the extent of becoming part of them. Even the little I knew about the Thalassocracy told me where he might have gained a taste for that distinction. As for Hasenbach, she was understandably wary of the armed Heavens-blessed demigods traipsing around her realm that considered themselves only loosely bound to its laws – and so she must be wary of their leader as well, regardless of his general amiability.

“The trouble in in the primacy of the Terms over our laws,” Cordelia said, “even when applying to individuals of Procer who committed crimes against other Procerans.”

The Red Axe was from the southern outskirts of the Principate, it was true. The Wicked Enchanted had been Proceran as well, and Frederic still was. All three were also Named, though, which complicated things a great deal.

“The matter of the attempted regicide, in particular, will be a contentious matter,” Cordelia continued. “If even rulers anointed by the House of Light can suffer assassination attempts without Procer being able to give answer, there are some who might argue that we have all been made subservient to the Chosen.”

“The Highest Assembly approved of the treaties establishing this,” the White Knight reminded her.

“Those treaties were approved when it was believed that the Chosen would not resort to attempting the murder of princes,” the First Prince flatly said. “We have been... disappointed, in this regard.”

Harsh but fair, I thought.

“Middle ground can be found, I expect,” I intervened. “The Terms were not made to last, and we did not expect they would stumble into such challenges. It’ll require everyone to bend a little more than they’d like, but that’s the nature of compromise. I’m sure you have suggestions, Your Highness, as to what my ally the fears of the Highest Assembly. I’d be interested to hear them.”

I found her hard to read, in the moments that followed, as she studied us both. Hesitating, or gauging how far she’d be able to push this?

“As the concerns come from the forced impotence of Proceran law, I would suggest that the Red Axe be made to stand trial before the Highest Assembly,” she said.

My brow rose. She wasn’t a fool, so that couldn’t be all of it.

“The sentence passed would, undoubtedly, be death,” Cordelia said. “Its application could be suspended, however, until she has also stood trial under the Terms.”

Ah, there it was. If both Procer and the White Knight condemned the Red Axe to death, who was to say what sentence was being carried out when the blade was swung? If Hanno did the deed, or a Proceran executioner, then the balance would be made to swing either way. But there was a candidate to keep the weights even, as it were.

“You’d make Prince Frederic do it,” I quietly said. “Since he straddles both worlds. That way everyone can go home with a win to tell their people about.”

It’d eat up the man inside, though, I thought. He’d wanted to avoid taking her life. But while I liked Frederic Goethal, his peace of mind was not worth what it would cost.

“A compromise I could live with,” I said.

Some of the more paranoid among my charges would smell a rat, but with the Red Axe dead at the hand of the same hero she’d tried to kill I shouldn’t get too much pushback. There would be some who’d have wanted me to bleed the heroes dry over this, but they’d be few and not popular among our kind – the likes of the Headhunter and the Red Knight were powerful, but usually without many allies.

“What is being suggested,” the White Knight coldly said, “is not just.”

My fingers clenched under the table. Hanno’s face had gone hard as stone.

“I will not promise a sentence or an executioner before a trial has been held,” the White Knight said. “This is not a compromise, it is a perversion of the oaths we all swore. It does not matter what the Red Axe has done: she has rights under the Terms, and among these is a fair trial.”

A steady look was fixed onto the both of us.

“What you are speaking of,” he slowly said, “is not a fair trial.”

And that was that, wasn’t it? As far as he was concerned that settled the matter. And for all that Hanno had gone cold, I thought, the look on Cordelia’s face was no warmer.

“Compromise requires both sides to give, Lord White,” the First Prince of Procer said, frigidly polite.

“There is no justice to be found in denying the rights of one to safeguard those of another,” the Sword of Judgement evenly replied. “All that is accomplished is the shifting around of injustice.”

“If a right is abused, then the abuser is no longer deserving of it,” the First Prince said. “Else it becomes a tool of oppression.”

A little rich coming from a princess of Procer, that, but most of the time I still liked that lot better than Above’s so I’d let it slide. At nineteen the scene unfolding before me would have me giddy: the Principate and heroes, both bitter enemies of mine, were at each other’s throat. But years had passed, and these days I had too much use for both to be glad of this.

“A mechanism has been established to deal with such abuses,” the White Knight bluntly said. “It has yet to fail, in my eyes, and so your treatment of it strikes me as unwarranted.”

He wasn’t going to give an inch on this, I sensed. It just wasn’t in his nature to give that inch over something like this, when he knew himself in the right and all those involved had taken the oaths with open eyes. And Gods, part of me agreed with him. The fucking Principate was quick to cry foul about the rights of its peoples being ‘trampled’ these days, but that conscience had been nowhere in sight when it’d been Callowan freedoms on the line. And even now that half the continent had gathered to keep it from burning still it insisted on throwing tantrums over gift horses, never mind looking them in the mouth. Hanno was looking after his own, people whose calling and service he respected and honoured, and aside from all the greater considerations he simply wasn’t going to dent his principles over something like princes being uneasy.

The White Knight did not believe it his charge to soothe princes, and so he’d not sacrifice things that he did consider his charge in order to do so. It was a fair way of looking at it, if you were a hero.

I wasn’t, though. I’d been one of Below’s since age sixteen and more importantly these days I was a queen. So while the White Knight wasn’t wrong, I did not believe that the First Prince was either. She wasn’t throwing a fit over this for pleasure, or even for principle – if Hasenbach’s objections to this were personal in nature, she would have stowed them away by now. This wasn’t a winning fight for her, and the fact that she was still picking it anyway meant that she was afraid of what would ensue if she didn’t. More afraid than of the consequences of the mess before my eyes, too, which was more than a little worrying. If the First Prince was coming out swinging this hard, then at a guess I’d say word about Frederic being bled had already leaked to the Assembly. There’d be pressure at her back to do something about this, and while I doubted that unseating her was in the cards there were other ways this could all go to the Hells.

If southern principalities started ignoring her orders because they no longer believed her to be a worthy leader for Procer, the Grand Alliance was in trouble. Weakened as it was, the Principate was still the main source of coin and goods for the war effort and those sure as fuck weren’t coming from the war-ravaged north. And while it might have been years since Black torched the heartlands, those lands had never truly been allowed to recover: continued conscription, high taxes and rationing meant some of the richest lands in Procer had never actually gotten back to their old prosperity. No, Hasenbach wasn’t worrying about things like authority and legitimacy because she was some over-proud highborn twit. She was worried about those things because if she lost them then Procer might start coming apart at the seams.

If she didn’t come through for her princes, if she damaged their privileges and all the while made heavy demands of them, then why should they keep listening to her? Especially if she lacked the means to force them to.

Sentimentality had me on Hanno’s side, but sentiment had to be left a door in matters like these. The needs of the queen took the victory once more, as Akua might have said. And if these two weren’t going to reach a compromise by themselves, if there was no pretty stainless solution to be had, then all that was left was the cheap tricks that’d been my trade since long before I put on a crown.

“Procer could be allowed to dispose of the body as it wishes, at least,” I said, and sighed when Hanno began to respond, “In the eventuality that there is a body, yes, not to make assurances either way. But if there is a corpse, White Knight, can it not at least be ceded to the Highest Assembly?”

“It would be a petty thing for a heroine’s corpse to be parade like a trophy,” the dark-skinned knight said, tight-lipped.

“Petty’s not unlawful,” I said. “So unless your feelings have become rules...”

His lips thinned even further. It’d been a hit below the belt, but then if the Gods Above had wanted me to fight clean they should have shelled out for another five inches at least.

“In principle, I would have no objection,” Hanno eventually replied.

It would have been undiplomatic of Hasenbach to point out that this was such a paltry concession as to almost not be one at all, especially given that I’d secured it on her behalf, but from the cool serenity of her face I got the message anyway. She wasn’t going to be appeased with a few metaphorical coppers flipped her way. If she didn’t get meat to throw her princes, it would be on her they turned their fangs. I angled my face so that Hanno wouldn’t see and cocked a brow at her.

“It appears we have reached the end of what can be settled today,” the First Prince calmly said. “I thank you both for calling on me, but I believe there is nothing left to say on this matter.”

“That seems to be correct,” the White Knight said, tone regretful.

Not enough to bend his neck, though, so what did regret matter?

“While I have your ear, Your Highness, I had a few questions about the issues Mercantis,” I idly said. “If you’re willing, it shouldn’t take too long.”

Hasenbach considered it for a moment.

“I had anticipated a longer conversation,” she said. “I have the time to spare if you do.”

Hanno cast me a searching look and I shrugged. He and I had already talked about Mercantis some, and he’d made a suggestion I was warming to – sending the Painted Knife’s band there to keep the merchants honest – but Named arm-twisting was only a small part of the matter and he had little to do with the rest. It wasn’t his wheelhouse, and if it grew to concern him I’d make it known.

Not that I actually intended to talk about Mercantis.

I gave him nothing to work with, so the White Knight made his courtesies and left. In the silence that followed his departure I glance at the cup of tea I’d barely sipped at, choosing my words as the First Prince’s expectant gaze found me.

“There’s a way for you to get what you want,” I said. “Though I expect you won’t like it.”

Blue eyes found mine, unblinking.

“Yet here I am,” the First Prince of Procer calmly said, “listening.”

—

Murder of an ally. Attempted murder of an ally. Aid to an enemy of the Grand Alliance.

The Red Axe would stand trial accused of those three breaches of the Terms, and that the equivalent of a treason charge was the least of the three meant the affair begged for a blood end. The Wicked Enchanter had been an unrepentant monster, but until he stepped out of line again he’d been under protection: his killing must be punished, and as the representative for the villains under the Terms there was only one punishment I was willing to accept. I still had the smoldering remnants of sympathy for the heroine on trial, but she’d known how this would end before she took her first step down this road.

The Red Axe herself seemed utterly unworried when she was brought in. Unlike the Mirror Knight when he’d stood in the same place her hands were bound by shackles and she was chained to a steel ring set in the ground. Masego and Roland had personally traced the wards that would keep her out of the back half of the room should she get free, though it was a lot more likely that the crossbowmen and armed guards surrounding her would get to it first. It would have been counterproductive to gag her, I knew, but as I looked at her calmly expectant expression I found I itched to have it done anyway. There were few things more dangerous in life than someone with nothing left to lose.

I’d expected some ceremony out of Hanno, given his years as the champion of the Choir of Judgement, but instead he was brisk and business-like.

“The charges against the Red Axe have been made known to you,” the White Knight said. “Do any of you intend to lay further ones, or contest those I will pursue?”

Denials all around. Mine was barely more than a mutter, my eyes remaining on the heroine.

“Then I will proceed,” Hanno calmly said.

The Red Axe laughed.

“Gods, but what a pretentious waste of time,” she said, her Chantant lightly accented.

The White Knight looked unmoved.

“Do you understand the charges laid against you under the Terms?” he asked.

“To the Hells with your Terms,” the Red Axe said. “They’re expedience made law and just as ugly as that sounds. I renounce them, and for you fine people who think you have rights over me, I add this-”

She spat on the stone, offering up a hard smile.

“Are you requesting that the protections of the Terms be withdrawn from you?” the First Prince calmly asked.

Not surprising. Hasenbach would definitely try to get her hands on the heroine outright, if she could at this late hour, regardless of any deal she and I had made. What I’d offered was barely palatable, while this would smack to her of a clean win. Wouldn’t work, of course. I wasn’t a fucking idiot, so I’d told Hanno of my conversation with the Red Axe and made sure he spoke with her as well.

“Whether she desires this now or not is irrelevant,” the White Knight said. “She agreed to the Terms as made understood to her by the Archer and had not renounced them when she committed the breaches for which she is now being charged.”

“Your rules never meant a thing to me, Sword of – sword of what, these days, I ask?” the Red Axe said. “Not Judgement, and nothing I see in this room makes for a good replacement.”

“That your word means little does not mean you are exempt from holding it,” Hanno replied without batting an eye.

Cordelia glanced at me, but there wasn’t a lot of hope on her face and I didn’t add any with my own bland expression. Procer would get no help from me if she made a play for snatching now, and Lord Yannu did not speak a word to deny the White Knight’s claim. Hasenbach let it go, and we moved on. The first hurdle had been passed.

“Given the number of eyewitnesses to the killing of the Wicked Enchanter, I saw no need for spoken testimony,” Hanno continued. “I’ve selected and now provide thirty different written accounts, which should prove sufficient. If there are any doubts among the tribunal, there are more that can be sent for.”

I’d already read some of those parchments and the facts were not in doubt, so I offered the writing only a few looks before setting it aside.

“I confess,” the Red Axe said.

A moment of silence. Eyes went to the heroine, which only seemed to encourage her.

“I confess I put down a monster,” she said. “ That I killed a rapist, a murder and something worse. I confess I would have made it slower if I could, that-”

“Guards, please silence the accused until she is called on to speak again,” Hanno said.

Spells wouldn’t work on her, so it was a gag they had to use. She fought them, and the sight sickened my stomach – all those men in armour around a girl, alone and unarmed and tied up. Named, I reminded myself. One who’d done things that might yet kill thousands, in full knowledge of the risks. The White Knight continued to make his case, as if never interrupted. The Kingfisher Prince’s personal testimony was a written one, as he’d decline to stand before the tribunal, but witnesses among my soldiers and the Levantines gave damning account of the attack on the Prince of Brus. The Sinister Physician came in to speak as to how dangerous the wound had been and was followed up by two priests who’d handled the later parts of Frederic’s recovery.

With attempted murder of an ally solidly grounded in proof, it was ‘aid to an enemy’ that was approached. Proof was difficult to establish, when it came to the Bard, and while I recounted my conversation with the Red Axe it wouldn’t be enough to damn her. Fortunately for Hanno, once relieved of her gag she was eager enough to handle that herself.

“You want to accuse me of working with the Wandering Bard,” she said, amused. “It’s a crime now, is it? I didn’t. She worked with me .”

The Red Axe shrugged.

“I wasn’t tricked, if that’s the story you want to spin,” she said. “I knew what I wanted, and she wanted me to get it too. None of what she told me was even a secret. It was just names and places, that’s all.”

“To be clear, you admit to collaboration with the Wandering Bard?” Hanno asked.

“She talked and I listened,” she said. “Sometimes I talked too. Call that whatever you will. Not like it’ll make a difference in your little puppet show, is it? You’ve already got what you need for blood.”

Lord Yannu let out a harsh bark of laughter. Well, she wasn’t wrong. In principle even just killing the Wicked Enchanter would be enough to get her executed, much less the rest. With yet another confession on the record, the trial was effectively at an end. Hanno asked us if we wanted to deliberate, but there were no takers. Recommendations followed.

“Death,” the Lord of Alava said.

“Death,” the First Prince of Procer said.

“Death,” I echoed.

The Red Axe mockingly laughed. She’d not been gagged, I supposed because of discomfort at the idea of ordering this woman’s death without letting her speak in answer to it.

“Half the world clamoured for her death,” she said. “What an eulogy that will make.”

She wanted, I felt, someone to answer her. To engage. This was the culmination of her story, wasn’t it? The moment where she was sent to her death because of her principles, where defiant and dry-eyed she cursed the wicked kings doing her wrong. But no one answered. Because to the rest of us the Red Axe wasn’t a righteous heroine about to shame us for our misdeeds, she was the woman who’d endangered one of the treaties keeping the Dead King from winning this war and sweeping over Calernia in a tide of death. No one here was enjoying this, I thought, but ashamed ? No. We were a long way from that. So instead of a cruel jest or a justification, as she would have gotten in a story, the Red Axe got silence and then Hanno passing her sentence.

“Death,” the White Knight echoed. “By beheading, to be carried out by my own hand tomorrow at Morning Bell. The accused will be granted a night to make her peace with the Gods Above, but kept detained until then.”

“Pathetic,” the Red Axe said. “You’re all-”

Hanno called for her to be gagged again, and as soon as it was done asked for the comments from the tribunal. Lord Yannu agreed, sounding largely indifferent, but when it was my turn to speak I had more to say.

“I am satisfied with death,” I said, “but today’s proceedings should be put under seal instead of made known.”

“On what grounds?” Hanno frowned.

“On the grounds that the details of this will make it known to every Named that has issued with the Terms that they’ve got an ally they can plot with,” I said.

“The Wandering Bard is to be declared an enemy of the Grand Alliance regardless,” the White Knight said. “What is there to hide?”

“That the Bard is after the Terms themselves, instead of the ringleader of a plot against the Arsenal,” I said. “If she just helped thrash the Arsenal, no one will see her as an ally. If this was all a plot against the Terms, though? That’s a banner, and those always gather people.”

The White Knight cast a look at the other two members of the tribunal, who did not seem to object. I could see him weigh the costs of refusal here and then decided it wasn’t worth it.

“Agreed,” the White Knight said.

“I am satisfied,” the First Prince calmly said.

The Red Axe, even gagged, was laughing convulsively. People did get more perceptive, when standing in the shadow of their gallows. Had she figured it all out, or just that Cordelia and I were acting in concert? Didn’t matter, I thought.

It was already too late.

—

I’d not slept well, even with Indrani sharing my bed, and rose early.

I left Archer to sleep and slipped on my clothes, learning when I limped to an early breakfast that it was just shortly past Early Bell – there were still about three hours left before the execution happened. I asked for porridge, the bland but filling kind that remained a Legion staple to this day, and silently sipped at an herbal infusion that’d soothe my leg. It was an odd mood that’d taken hold of me, but I did not fight it. It’d pass soon enough, I knew, and I owed it to the woman I was about to see killed to at least look what I was doing in the eye. I ended up wandering away afterwards, eventually coming up where the killing was to be done. These were not, I thought, awe-inspiring grounds. More abattoir than gallows: a stretch of naked stone, an executioner’s block and a few seats on raised platforms.

Yet for all the bare bone nature of the place I found it carried a sort of cold, impersonal dread to it. Not unlike the Terms themselves, if one chose to look at it that way. The Mantle of Woe pulled tight against me, hood up, I tucked myself away in a shadowed nook and lit a pipe. A stream of wakeleaf gently rose, and I allowed my thoughts to drift. I wasn’t sure how long I stayed like that, absorbed in my silence, but when the sound of steel and leather boots came reached my ear I did not need to guess who it was that’d come. There were too many guards for it to be anyone but Cordelia Hasenbach. She approached me without escort and I flicked her a look from beneath the hood.

She’d dressed in dark colours today, if not outright black. They did not suit her well, but cosmetics and jewelry hid the fact decently enough. She came to stand by my side, reflecting my silence with her own. I’d worn no crown, and she only a simple circlet of white gold. My eyes were on the block, and without turning I somehow knew so were hers.

“She is right about one thing, at least,” Hasenbach murmured. “It has been an ugly affair.”

I breathed out smoke, letting it rise in curls. It was a calming sight, familiar.

“I’ve made a lot of ugly choices, over the years,” I said. “I believed them necessary, when I made them. More often than not they truly were.”

“It is the exceptions that stay with you,” the First Prince said. “A hundred victories will fade, but that sole stinging defeat will sink its hooks.”

I smiled bitterly.

“Can’t save everyone,” I said. “And if you try to, usually you don’t even get to save most.”

Nauk. Ratface. Farrier. Anne Kendall. There was always a price to trying to make a change. And keeping it standing, when it got done? Oh, that was even costlier.

“Duty is a bed of thorns,” Cordelia quietly said, “but someone must lie in it.”

“Oh, there’s not enough kindness left in me to flinch at this I don’t think,” I mused. “I was just wondering at how things change, over the years.”

“How so?”

“The first two lives I ever took were those of a rapist,” I said, “and his accomplice.”

She said nothing.

“I wonder if I’m still the one holding the knife,” I murmured, “or if another role does not suit me better, these days.”

There was a word, for those who protected the likes of the first man I’d ever killed. Accomplice.

The silence held until the room began to fill with the few dignitaries who needed to be there. The Red Axe was brought in after the White Knight had already stepped up to the block, a longsword at his hip. She wore only a brown shift, walking barefoot, and though escorted to the fore she went freely. Unafraid. The White Knight gestured for her to kneel, but she refused.

“On my feet,” the Red Axe said. “To the end, on my feet.”

The White Knight slowly nodded. The heroine turned towards us, gaze lingering on my hooded and smoking figure besides the First Prince’s dark-clad paleness.

“I go with all my accounts settled,” the Red Axe said. “And no regrets.”

She did not close her eye, even when the blade went through her neck with a flash of light. A clean cut, made that way by the searing Light on the edge of the blade. She wouldn’t have felt a thing. The head fell, neck burnt on both ends, and the body toppled. Hanno caught her and laid her down, unclasping his cloak and laying it over the corpse. His expression was tight as he rose to his feet, eyes searching for Hasenbach and finding her. His stride was quick.

“The corpse is now passed into the custody of the Principate, as was asked,” he stiffly said.

“We thank you for the courtesy,” the First Prince replied.

He grimaced.

“What will you do with it?” he asked.

“That is no longer your concern.”

Hasenbach’s tone was not harsh, but neither was it one that would suffer further questioning. The White Knight’s eyes went to me, but I did not meet them. I breathed in the smoke, spewed it out, and waited until he’d left. The room slowly emptied, in the end leaving only the First Prince and her guards along with me. Leaning on my staff I limped up to the body veiled by the White Knight’s cloak, Hasenbach keeping pace with me. I laid down a hand on it and hummed. Yes, it could be done.

“Step back, if you don’t want to leave the room,” I said. “It won’t be easy work raising her coherent enough to stand trial before the Highest Assembly.”

Chapter 40: Campaign

“A war is not always won with daring, but it is always lost without.”
– Florianne Goethal, Princess of Brus

When the First Prince left the Arsenal, it would be with a talking corpse in a locked box.

The work on my end was done, and it’d been exhausting enough that I slept fitfully for a few hours after returning to my rooms. Archer kept watch, and intercepted messages and reports before they could reach me. I woke up halfway to Afternoon Bell with a stiff leg, the undead Red Axe remaining as a little bundle of senses in the back of my mind I could look into if I so wished. I could snuff her out again with a snap of my fingers if I so wished, a precaution I’d judged necessary given who the heroine had made deals with when she still breathed. Let Procer have its trial, and Cordelia settle her princes. I’d made it clear it was the last favour I’d be doing her for some time, and that now it was her time to deliver.

Among the messages Indrani passed me was one from her, which turned out to be a good start on that. She’d officially ratified a treaty making the ealamal a weapon under the Grand Alliance, if not a weapon of the Grand Alliance. Yannu Marave and I were being invited to post up to three hundred soldiers each to stand guard over the weapon, with Procer itself promising to limit its own garrison at five hundred. Twenty slots for ‘scholarly observers’ were offered for each us, with access to the doomsday weapon, though if Named were to be part of that twenty it would require unanimous approval by a vote of the signatory members of the Grand Alliance.

All this we’d agreed over the Lord of Alava’s strong wine, but the added list penned by Cordelia’s own hand of all Named she was willing to grant access was an unexpected boon. As I’d expected Hierophant wasn’t on it, but both Roland and the Forsworn Healer were. Only a few villains were among them: the Harrowed Witch, the Forgetful Librarian, the Royal Conjurer and the Hunted Magician. Three out of four were Proceran, but honestly of my lot they were the most decent folk that’d be able to get something out of looking at the corpse. The Affable Burglar was the only Named she went out of her way to specify would be allowed under no circumstance, which honestly was fair.

Aurore was delightful, but she had the worst of Vivienne’s old habits paired with a moral compass to make a priest weep.

I penned a quick diplomatic thank you note for the First Prince, then a longer message for Lord Yannu mentioning I was still willing to back up his nomination of the Healer if he was willing to do the same with mine of the Rogue Sorcerer. I was willing to get it all going this very evening, if he was. Most of the other messages were minor, the only one of decent importance a formal confirmation that the war council would begin tomorrow through the Mirage. I’d already agreed to that, though, so it wasn’t a surprise. What was, however, was the official report I got from the Arsenal research council that a functional, usable Unraveller pattern had finally been made.

Mind you the estimated costs for one were still higher than I’d like – about the same as a good horse – but it’d be worth the coin if they worked as advertised. I’d spend a good horse’s worth of gold on an artefact capable of destroying a beorn or even a turtle-ship with a single touch without hesitation, considering how necromantic constructs tended to be the Dead King’s means of shattering shield walls. Hells, with a decent supply of those the Lycaonese would be able to hold Twilight’s Pass until the Last Dusk – they were a damned stubborn folk, and their fortresses would hard to invest without Keter’s monstrous siege engines.

“We’ve got Unravellers,” I told Indrani, grinning. “We still need proper field testing, but they seem to hold up. The Blind Maker had a breakthrough while we were busy politicking – apparently wood soaked in Arcadian water works just as well as that murderously expensive stuff we were bringing in from the Waning Woods.”

It was easy to forget that, for all the intrigue permeating it at the moment, the Arsenal remained first and foremost a research facility. That’d not stopped just because nobility had swarmed all over it.

“I want a full quiver,” Archer replied without missing a beat.

I snorted.

“Sure, if it comes out of your pay,” I said. “Even for your beast of a bow the size of the thing will be a little hard, though.”

I passed her the report, which included dimensions, and she looked disgruntled. Yeah, that was more a lance than a javelin. She might be able to throw them – scratch that, she’d definitely be able to throw them – but unless she had a bow made specifically for firing Unravellers she’d not be able to use them as arrows.

“Alexis’s silver bow will be able to handle them,” she reluctantly admitted. “It’s a Gigantes artefact, it can change its shape some.”

Huh, good to know. Just for that the Silver Huntress had earned a guaranteed place among the Named that’d be joining the offensive into Hainaut. Assuming said offensive was agreed on by the Grand Alliance, though I expected it would be. That bridge the Dead King was building didn’t leave us much of a choice. I had a few questions for Indrani – including whether or not she could spare the Harrowed Witch, now that her old band had been gutted – but we were interrupted by a messenger. The White Knight was requesting, firmly but politely, a moment of my time. I didn’t allow myself to sigh until I’d sent back an affirmative that Hanno could call on me.

“Want me to stay?” Indrani offered. “If you want a loomer, I can loom.”

“I won’t be needing a loomer, no,” I amusedly replied.

“I’ve been practicing this thing with the knives, too” Archer told me, “Where I’m carving away all casual at a piece of wood, but then I change the angle and it makes this sinister scraping sound-”

“You’re not going to intimidate the White Knight with sinister wood scraping, ‘Drani,” I told her, lips twitching.

“You can’t know until we try,” she insisted, then peered at me piercingly. “Good to have that chat alone, then? Shiny Boots is bound to be a little miffed over your latest bout of corpse-snatching.”

“He’ll have to get over it,” I said. “I broke no laws.”

“Because that argument always works with heroes,” Archer drily said. “I guess you haven’t had a polite and oddly preachy argument in too long, something’s got to be done to scratch your itch.”

“Out with you,” I grinned.

“But what about what’s right , Catherine?” Indrani said in a deep voice, looking at me stoically. “Have you thought about the children, or how this will make angels sad?”

I bit down on my laughter, since otherwise it’d just encourage her.

“Away, witch,” I said. “Go chuck terrible sculptures at Masego.”

“Heard that might get illegal soon,” she replied, cocking an eyebrow at me.

I let out a startled laugh. I’d forgotten my teasing promise to Zeze from when we’d been mopping up the last enemies in the Arsenal, but I shouldn’t have expected him to – or to have failed to inform Indrani of it.

“I’ll make you royal art thrower,” I promised. “Court title with a legal exemption and everything.”

“Make sure it sticks under Vivienne too,” Indrani requested, “I’m fairly sure the wench likes him better than me.”

I managed to keep a serious face at that, which was quite the achievement, and ushered her out before the White Knight could arrive. I was a lot more dishevelled than I would have allowed myself to be in front of Lord Yannu or the First Prince, but unlike them Hanno had seen me on campaign. Staying in a tunic and comfortable boots wouldn’t be taken as an insult by him. I poured myself water waiting for him, and before long an attendant was knocking at my door. I dismissed the young woman in question at the door and welcomed him in myself, gesturing for the salon in front of my room. The White Knight was dressed just as fancily as me, his tunic grey to my green, and if anything his boots were more worn than mine.

I found Hanno’s face hard to read as he entered and sat, though his continued silence save for simple courtesies did not bode well. He sat and declined the water I offered, expression calm. I lowered myself on the seat on the opposite side of the table, raising an eyebrow to invite him to begin.

“You made the body of a heroine into an undead prop,” the White Knight said.

Calm, but it wasn’t a friendly kind of calm.

“Legally speaking, Procer did that,” I noted. “It employed my services in doing it, true, but I acted on its behalf.”

“I expected better of you,” he said.

“Oh, fuck off,” I flatly replied. “I wouldn’t have had to step in if you’d compromised with Hasenbach yourself. The way I asked you to.”

“What she asked for-”

“Was hard to swallow,” I interrupted, “but she asked it for a reason. Refusing her is fine, Hanno, but if you do then something has to be done to address those reasons. You can’t just call it politics and say it’s out of your wheelhouse, not when your heroes are half the reason we’re in this mess to start with.”

“There was no call to compromise, Catherine,” the White Knight said. “If the Principate is proving incapable of fulfilling basic treaty obligations it agreed to, it should not be further indulged with concessions. You are acting in a manner that will secure signatures for your Accords but destroy any trust there might be in them.”

“I’m acting in a manner that keeps Principate conscripts, food and coin flowing,” I said, voice grown cold. “You know, those things we need if we want to have any chance at all of beating Keter. What was done breaks no laws and did not interfere with the sentence you passed under the Terms. You have no grounds on which to complain.”

“You could have told me of your intentions,” Hanno said. “You chose, instead, to scheme.”

His eyes narrowed.

“I am not blind,” he said. “You pushed to have the details of the trial placed under seal so that word of the trial in the Highest Assembly will spread among the people of Procer long before the one in the Arsenal does.”

“Named will be able to ask about the sentence passed on the Red Axe, as is their right under the Terms,” I replied. “They will be told, if they do, that you personally executed her.”

It’d come out eventually that Procer had tried a walking corpse, that much was certain – there were too many Named for loose lips not to eventually spill the truth, and the Arsenal itself was not airtight – but by then it wouldn’t matter. Hasenbach would have had town criers all over Procer spreading her story first, an apparatus that no Named could hope to match in speed and scope. The people of Procer would treat is as rumours, not the true story, while Named would have the White Knight’s own word of having killed the Red Axe to count on. Hanno’s own reputation was being used to anchor this, which I suspected was part of the reason he was angry.

“You build your tower on a foundation of lies and confusion,” the White Knight said. “It can only crumble.”

“If this was about ten people, or even a hundred, you’d be right,” I said. “When it comes to a few hundred thousand, though, to millions , then all those stories in the back of your head stop mattering. The scope is just too large for a pattern like ‘the secret coming out’ to make a dent. Even if rumours linger, more rumours can be seeded to dislodge them.”

“More lies,” Hanno said. “Making a game of treaties can only lessens them, Catherine.”

His expression tightened.

“There was a moment, in that room where we had come to speak with the First Prince, where you decided I had become an obstacle,” the White Knight said. “Already you had it planned, suggesting that Procer to get custody of the corpse.”

“I’m not one of yours, Hanno,” I mildly said. “You got in your own way and it needed to be done , so I did it. If you want pretty ends, get them yourself. Below deals in much, but rarely that.”

“This has cost you trust, Black Queen,” he said. “From heroes, and from me. You made the choice to go behind my back instead of working together.”

And that was true, I wouldn’t deny it. But this pretence that I was just a scorpion stinging out of habit was infuriating me, because I wouldn’t have had to do anything of this if he’d godsdamned handled it himself.

“This has cost you respect, White Knight,” I replied, voice gone hard as steel. “Because the longer you speak, the more I can’t help but notice that for all your whining you haven’t given a single alternative .”

The conversation ended there, which was for the best.

—

Sometimes I thought about how much gold had been sunk into building the ‘Mirage’ and winced, but I had to admit that at least it looked impressive.

It wasn’t that the room itself was large, or all that richly decorated: it was a circle with a radius of maybe a hundred feet, and the place was aggressively bare of ornaments. Nothing had been brought into here that might interfere with the enchantments, and even we had been warned to keep our clothing simple. No jewelry, and no weapons were allowed in – and for me in specific, neither my yew staff nor the Mantle of Woe. At the centre stood a great table of stone, carved with small runes that could be touched to silently signal you were requesting the right to speak, and around said table twenty seats of stone had been assembled. Those seats were within boxes of clear glass, which would serve as the medium for the magic, but in truth the entire room was an intricate ritual array hid under the floor tiles.

With all the glass and the strange table, surrounded by smooth walls of polished stone, the Mirage made for an unusual sight. I claimed my seat with a limp, letting a mage attendant close the glass panels behind me, and breathed out in surprise when within moments I began to saw around the table people that were thousands of miles away. The illusions were damned convincing, too: I could see the flush on Rozala Malanza’s cheeks, and the details of the folds on Itima Ifriqui’s skin. It was a shame that there would be no refreshments offered at this war council, given how long it was likely to last, but Hasenbach had suggested that after an hour we vote on taking a pause so at least I wouldn’t stuck in this box forever. It was going to get warm in here, I suspected, considering the openings in the glass were small and meant more to let in air than address heat.

There were too many commanders in the Grand Alliance for them to all fit in one room, much less warrant the expensive arrangements necessary to be connected to the Mirage, so it was only the very highest rung of command that’d been invited to this war council. For the front in Twilight’s Pass the Kingfisher Prince had come in person, while an illusion Lady Itima Ifriqui of Vaccei stood in for the Dominion troops in the region. For Cleves, an illusion of my old foe Princess Rozala Malanza of Aequitan had been conjured up while Lord Yannu Marave had claimed his seat in person. For Hainaut, grizzled old Klaus Papenheim has been brought in phantom form while the Kingdom of Callow had its representative in my person. Though not a general, the First Prince naturally had a seat of her own as the highest military authority in Procer.

Going by numbers Callow’s presence in the room was almost slightingly small, and in truth I’d been offered the right to bring in an Army officer from the Pass to even the numbers a bit, but I’d declined. Dragging Pickler or Kilian into this was unwarranted for essentially the same reason that neither Razin Tanja nor Aquiline Osena were in attendance even though they fielded troops in Hainaut. Hells, it was why General Pallas wasn’t here even though her Tyrant’s Own numbered more than the troops Lady Itima had brough up north. None of those commanders were of the highest authority in the front. If I told Razin to send out his foot, the boy did it. If the Iron Prince wanted the kataphraktoi to screen the flanks of Alamans skirmishers, screen those they did.

While all those people would be told of the decisions made, and participate to the planning of the campaign itself, the hard truth was that none of them were influential enough to warrant a seat here. And not all seats were equal in here, either. I spoke for the entire Army of Callow and was the informal representative for the drow as well, which meant my word weighed heavier than that of any single Levantine or Proceran save perhaps Cordelia herself. Their authority was diluted by their numbers, not strengthened: Itima Ifriqui could not speak for the captains under another of the Blood, and Malanza couldn’t speak for the Lycaonese holding the Pass. My army’s chain of command was fundamentally unlike theirs, when it came down to it. Theirs forces were a messy patchwork of personal noble troops and free captains answering this way and that, while mine had been inherited from the relentlessly professional Legions of Terror.

Given the difficulties Cordelia still had in getting her princes in line I might actually have more soldiers under me than she did, regardless of Procer fielding a significantly larger force overall.

There was no small talk, and barely even greetings. Once the spells were stable and the mage-attendants had made sure the links were matched silence was given without even needing to be called for. Everyone knew why they were here, and how serious the matters at hand were. It was the kind of weight that tended to make small talk feel like whistling in a graveyard. Hasenbach did not let the silence linger for long, opening the council with a few brisk courtesies and then getting us started in earnest with the unfortunate realities of our war.

“All of you have, by now, received the information that the Witch of the Woods obtained during her sally beyond enemy lines,” the First Prince said. “The Dead King is raising a bridge in northern Hainaut, in the flatlands known as Thibault’s Wager. Troops are being massed on the northern shore, and fortifications have been raised to harden the site against assault.”

Itima Ifriqui of the Brigand’s Blood rapped her knuckles against the table before her, requesting the right to speak and having it granted immediately.

“Did we get hard numbers on what is being massed?” the Lady of Vaccei asked.

“The initial report by the Witch estimated around two hundred thousand on the northern shore,” the First Prince replied, “but that was more than two months ago. We have not been able to scry the location since.”

“I mean no disrespect to the skills of the Lady Witch,” Princess Rozala said, “yet it occurs to me that the Hidden Horror might well have allowed her this vision. I won’t argue against the necessity of break that bridge, but it seems to me we are being provoked to battle on his time and terms.”

She was right about that much, in my opinion. While I honesty doubted Neshamah had given up the game with the bridge on purpose – he wasn’t infallible, we took him by surprise sometimes – he was aware that we knew about his bridge and couldn’t afford to let it stand. He knew a battle was coming in this ‘Thibault’s Wager’, and he’d be prepared accordingly.

“I’ve been sending native outriders and Helike cataphracts deep into enemy territory,” the Iron Prince told us after being given right to speak, “and the reports from the survivors all speak to the same truth: the Enemy is withdrawing deeper into Hainaut. We still get regular raids on our lines but the army Old Bones wanted to strike with while the plague ravaged our backs broke into smaller forces. We think at least half of them are headed north.”

I touched a rune on the table with my fingers, which drew Hasenbach’s attention, and she gave me the right to speak a heartbeat after.

“It’s a safe bet he’s fortifying the Wager,” I said. “The longer we wait to make our offensive, the more heavily dug-in the dead will be. Revenants, constructs, earthworks. He’ll make that place into a fortress.”

Possibly literally. The flatlands would become even more strategically valuable after the bridge was built, should we fail to stop that, so it would be a sound use of resources to raise a fortress there. The right to speak passed back to Lady Itima.

“A surprise strike through the Twilight Ways is the answer,” she said. “A strong force with Bestowed can shatter the works and retreat.”

“And the moment the dust settles on that raid, the Dead King will begin raising a new bridge,” Frederic pointed out. “It would be worthwhile for him even only for the forced attrition – how many elite troops and heroes will we lose with every attack?”

“The work can’t be done in a day,” Princess Rozala disagreed. “It will slow him down enough that we’ll get breathing room to muster a proper answer.”

“Your theory rests on the Hidden Horror’s means to build staying the same,” Prince Klaus retorted. “They won’t. The longer this goes on, the more bodies he can mobilize.”

“If we strike at all, it should be to win lasting gains,” Lord Yannu said. “There is only so much blood we can afford to spill over that bridge.”

“The strategic reality is that a raid is just pissing away lives,” I bluntly agreed. “We have to be able to hold the region, or we’ll be doing this again and again. Even if we make this Wager impossible to build in, what prevents Keter from starting work on a bridge a hundred miles upriver?”

“We would be committing to a major offensive entirely on the Dead King’s terms, Queen Catherine,” Princess Rozala replied. “And if a severe enough defeat ensues, it seems likely that the Hainaut defensive lines will be unable to withstand the counterattack.”

“If Ol’ Bones gets two hundred thousand of his finest on the south bank, we won’t be able to withstand a plain attack,” the Iron Prince grunted. “Your instincts are good, Malanza, I mean no slight to them. It’ll be a nasty piece of war to slog through, for sure. But I don’t see that we have a choice. The Black Queen put her arrow in the eye: this is going to keep happening until we secure the shores of Hainaut.”

“It would make the principality easier to defend,” the Kingfisher Prince noted. “Barring disaster, having a moat between Hainaut and Keter should offset the casualties taken winning it.”

“A plan that accounts for victory but not defeat is not a plan, it is a daydream,” Lord Yannu said. “If disaster does happen, how does Hainaut hold?”

“I will be bringing reinforcements from Callow,” I said. “The Duchy of Daoine has agreed to send six thousand men, under condition that they are used purely for defensive warfare. Lady Dartwick will hold the command.”

Duchess Kegan had been willing to shake loose some of her soldiers, if they were used only to man the defensive lines. I didn’t even grudge her the limitations, considering those lines were going to have to be manned regardless: skilled as Deoraithe fighters were, on the field I would rather have more legionaries in the ranks. I would have liked some Watch, mind you, but Kegan had been understandably unwilling to let any of them near the greatest necromancer to ever live. I didn’t want Neshamah to get his hands on that mass of souls the Watch got its powers from either, so I’d live with the disappointment. Besides, if they stayed in Callow then they were for Malicia to worry about – and given how few troops were left to defend my borders I wanted her to worry as much as possible.

“Six thousand will not hold back the tide, Your Majesty,” the Princess of Aequitan said.

“Neither will hiding behind our walls,” I flatly replied. “And even if we suffer a defeat, the Ways mean there will always be a path of retreat the enemy can not follow us into. That will mitigate casualties, and the defeated force could then retreat to the defensive lines faster than the dead can march and replenish its ranks with the reinforcements from Daoine.”

“Companies of volunteers are also being raised from the refugees in Brabant,” the First Prince said. “Though they will not be ready in time to participate in a summer offensive, they can at least serve as a strategic reserve.”

“Starvelings in dwarven tinpots,” Lady Itima snorted. “How many of those poor souls are you raising?”

“Between ten and fifteen thousand,” the fair-haired princess replied.

A pretty number, especially when you added my six thousand Deoraithe to it, but no one here was fooled. How many of those ten to fifteen would truly be fighting fit, instead of sickly elders or children too small for the breastplate? If it was even half I’d count us lucky. Procer was at least a year past scraping the bottom of the barrel when it came to recruitment, these days it was digging into the floor under the metaphorical barrel. Still, warm bodies with spears could hold the defenses we’d raised. Not well, but long enough for reinforcements to arrive. And with Named to stiffen the backbone, we should be able to avoid a general rout the moment the volunteers first saw what an offensive by Keter looked like.

“Ten thousand starvelings can hold a wall, Itima, if they have a Callowan backbone spread through their ranks,” the Lord of Alava said.

“Might be,” the Lady of Vaccei grunted back.

“Though our hand is being forced, there is another reason I’m in favour of an offensive in Hainaut,” I said. “The Hierophant is close to a breakthrough on a weapon that would make an attack on the Crown of the Dead feasible – and reclaiming Hainaut would be necessary before such a step.”

It was good news I’d given them, and it was treated like it. Only Hasenbach knew of Quartered Season in any depth, though both Malanza and Marave were aware that I’d had Masego working on something since the foundation of the Arsenal. Klaus Papenheim, in particular, had finally traded that grim Lycaonese scowl for a distinctly wolfish smile.

“Within three months we should have the artefact itself,” I continued, “and though the time required to make it a fully functional weapon is uncertain, it would be ready for use by next summer.”

Meaning if we took back Hainaut this year and dug in over the winter, we could attempt to end the war in a single stroke the following year.

“Might we expect a fuller understanding of this weapon soon, Your Majesty?” Princess Rozala asked.

“Once the initial trial is complete, in three months, a briefing will be arranged,” I said. “Before that I will only fully inform the First Prince herself and a designated high officer for Levant.”

The Levantines shared a look.

“I will be that officer,” Lord Yannu said. “It will be confirmed by the Majilis before the end of the day.”

I inclined my head in acknowledgement.

“In light of what I’ve said, I’d like you all to reconsider how you’re looking at the offensive ahead of us,” I said. “While it’s true that Keter will be expecting us to attack, at this time I don’t believe the Dead King will be expecting an all-out and sustained offensive to reclaim all of Hainaut. This could be an opportunity for us to do real damage.”

“You’re suggesting we destroy the Enemy’s forces in Hainaut,” Frederic said. “Bold.”

“I’m suggesting that if this is to be our last offensive before we move against Keter itself, it’s in our interest to destroy as much of the Dead King’s armies as possible,” I said. “Better to face them on the field than behind the walls of the Crown of the Dead.”

That siege would already be hellish enough without Neshamah being allowed to pull back his armies in good order and turning his capital into even more of an impregnable nightmare.

“We don’t have the numbers for that kind of campaign in Hainaut,” Prince Klaus pragmatically said.

“The Firstborn forces under General Rumena are willing to participate to that offensive,” I said. “And I’d like for commanders on the other fronts to consider sending reinforcements.”

“The defense of Cleves will be made significantly harder by the absence of the Firstborn,” Princess Rozala said.

“Perhaps that will remember Gaspard Langevin the realities of his situation,” I said, tone gone sharp. “Sve Noc’s patience is not without limits. Besides, it is Twilight’s Pass I would expect more soldiers from.”

“Holding the grounds we’ve taken is not leisurely, don’t let the stalemate fool you,” Lady Itima said. “Your raiders ought to have told you this much.”

“You believe the Unravellers will stabilize our front enough we can afford to thin the ranks,” the Kingfisher Prince said, eyes narrowing.

There was some undisciplined talk at the talk of the artefacts, since to my surprise the news hadn’t made it everywhere. Lady Itima had held no idea, and to my surprise neither had the Iron Prince – he must have been away from reliable scrying relays.

“I wouldn’t take my mages from you, but Special Tribune Robber and Sapper-General Pickler would both be of great use on this campaign,” I said. “Not to mention a few hundred Lycaonese foot.”

Prince Klaus looked a little flattered, I saw from the corner of my eye. Well, he knew what I thought of his people as far as soldiering went. Lycaonese fought fierce and rarely broke, there were few better men to field against the dead. Frederic’s horse was famous as well, but they were mostly retinue troops and Hainaut was already well served in cavalry by my reckoning. Between my knights, Lycaonese cavalry and the kataphraktoi we had a fine array of heavy horse, while Alamans horsemen made for fine skirmishers and outriders.

“If the Unravellers prove reliable, I would agree to lending troops to the offensive,” the Kingfisher Prince said.

Not that he could keep Pickler or Robber from leaving if I recalled them, but it would be undiplomatic to withdraw my soldiers without first consulting the commanding officers of the front.

“You don’t need my lot, not when you’ve got Tartessos screamers,” Lady Itima noted. “I’ll send Moro and a company of sworn blades, but no more.”

“I would be willing to contribute Alavan captains,” Lord Yannu said. “Should the campaign be soundly planned.”

More heavy foot, these, allegedly the finest in Levant. I nodded in thanks at both Levantines.

“If the Firstborn leave and our Levantine friends split their forces, I do not believe I can spare much men,” Princess Rozala said, tone faintly regretful. “And of that little no horse, if the drow no longer screen the coasts.”

“Setting aside the details of the offensive,” the First Prince said, “I now ask formally: is this is council in favour of a summer offensive in Hainaut?”

The vote was unanimously in favour.

Charlatan IV

“We like to tell each other devils are the true face of wickedness, for it makes evil into a monster we can vanquish. A sword cannot settle the banal cruelties decent folk inflict on each other, you see, though these do more evil in a day than a flock of devils in a year.”
– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

Spring had brought troubles, at first, but what followed was stranger.

The ice broke and melted, and it was as if the world had been uncorked. A hundred things were pouring out onto sleepy little Beaumarais, each coming quicker than the last. First the muddy mountain paths found early travellers, another pair of mages from the low country, and Olivier was barely done settling them in a house when word came that a company of riders from Apenun was headed the town’s way. Lady Mireille Lassier, Alisanne’s mother and the ruler of the city, had heard rumours and sent some of her men to have a look at the town. It was the same highborn officer as last time who led them, Captain Alain, and the man developed an interest in the arrangement around the shop that had Olivier wary. They were not yet ready, he felt, for such scrutiny. Alisanne was of a different opinion.

“Now is the time to make bargains,” she told him. “Your numbers a rising but still small, you’ve proved you are able to settle affairs with townsfolk without resorting to unsavoury means and the shop is popular with the people of the town. You will never have a finer hand to play, Olivier.”

He could not refuse to speak with the captain, anyhow, so there was little choice to be had. The officer asked probing questions but to the younger man’s surprise he was polite and respectful throughout. A degree of surprise must have shown, for Captain Alain amusedly addressed it.

“Lady Alisanne has taken a shine to you, all agree, and she has been part of this from the start,” he said. “I would not harbour great hopes there were I you, but I’ll not act the bull over a matter where one of Lady Lassier’s daughters has been so involved.”

Olivier managed not to blush, wondering if the other man knew how much of a shine had really been taken, and the implication of marriage he chose not to address. He’d never had any illusions there, so there was no hope to disappoint. The captain requested to be allowed to visit the shop and see some of the enchanted wares that had already begun to sell and seemed rather impressed.

“The wizards we’ve in Apenun insist only spells can chase away vermin properly, not artefacts,” he told the younger man. “Many will be pleased to hear the truth is otherwise. There is much coin to be had there, Master Olivier.”

Though Alisanne had not been part of the conversation of the visits, keeping to at least a thin pretence of not being his accomplice in every way, Olivier wasted no time in calling on her as the captain retired for the night. Though the febrile energy that’d taken the both of them was first spent in a more pleasant way, they spoke at length after. The young man admitted to a fear this entire arrangement would be shut down, or at least severely curtailed, but Alisanne enthusiastically disagreed.

“Wizards are dead useful to nobles, Olivier,” she said. “The issue is that much of the taxes levied on them are levied by the Highest Assembly, so neither princesses nor ladies can waive them. That and no one is comfortable allowing the old guilds to rise again. There is only so much influence to go around, and what they might gain will have to be lost by someone.”

“If we grow too much, shop or not we will be as a guild,” he pointed out.

“The House of Light already has hooks in you, so you won’t seem a threat,” the grey-eyed beauty smiled. “And you won’t want to keep all the mages here forever, will you? There’s only so much use for them in a town the size of Beaumarais, and too many will make the people uneasy.”

Olivier’s brow creased in thought.

“You would see us turn into a school of sorts,” he said. “Teaching mages profitable skills then releasing them into the world.”

“Even that drunk Maxime would have a use, if you go down this path,” Alisanne said. “He knows war, for all his empty bragging, and a few wizards so trained would make even a country lord’s retinue something to reckon with.”

“The House will object,” he said.

“The priests will want the right to dictate where those wizards go, no doubt, but too many in the higher ranks will see the use of this,” she denied, shaking her head. “Magic made to serve the influence of the House would be a delicious turn in their eyes, I imagine.”

Everybody would benefit in the world she painted with her words, Olivier thought. Everybody, though perhaps the mages the least of the lot. You have made yourself into the lord of this little town’s wizards , Morgaine had accused. And here was now, plotting to barter away their hours without consulting even one of them. There’d been just enough truth to her words, he thought, for them to sting. Yet the thought of simply handing this all over to someone else was an ugly one, and perhaps deep down handing it over to Roland made it worse. What had his brother done to deserve being given all this? Olivier had thought himself beyond those old jealousies, but perhaps he was not. It had been one thing, when he had a path of his own, but not Roland was encroaching on even that and this was a harder pill to swallow.

He told Alisanne none of it, for the thoughts shamed him, and instead simply held her close.

Captain Alain left within days, away to report what he had seen to Lady Lassier in Apenun but his parting words to Olivier were encouraging. It was more than a month before he returned, and in that span yet another mage came over the mountain paths. It was more practitioners than Olivier could ever recall hearing of being in the same place, save in old stories. It was exhausting to organize it all, to keep incidents from happening in the first place instead of simply reacting to them, but it needed to be done. When Captain Alain returned it was with a royal magistrate and a certain Brother Elian, whose name Sister Maude went stiff at. Olivier was brought in for a more formal conversation at the mayoress’ own home, though she was gently evicted for the duration of it.

Brother Elian was one of the greats of the House in Apenun, while the royal magistrate was the one who habitually dwelled in the same city. This would be, Olivier understood without being told, the moment that determined how this would all end. He felt ill-prepared for such a trial, but he would not flinch away in the face of the unexpected.

Though he left convinced he’d doomed them all, the evening brought different results. A glowing Alisanne ambushed him with an enthusiasm that saw them distracted for some time before telling him she’d just spoken with Captain Alain and learned he had, somehow, convinced these people that he knew what he was doing and it was a worthy enterprise. Both the royal magistrate and Brother Elian had given their blessing to the arrangement, though already there was jostling about how the services of certain mages might be ‘leased’ and who should get primacy over the other. Beaumarais’ sudden rise in importance was expected to be bringing people and coin to the town, as well, and it would be quietly arranged that it would get an appointed magistrate and eventually elect its own.

“Apparently my mother has decided this means I am not entirely bereft of political instinct,” Alisanne wryly told him. “I have been recalled to Apenun, where my fate going forward is to be decided.”

Olivier had known it was only a matter of time, yet he was startled by how grieved he felt at the thought he might never see her again. He’d believed himself hardened to the prospect, but perhaps that was simply a lie he’d told himself. He would not make a scene, the young man told himself. It was beneath them both.

“I will miss you sorely,” Olivier quietly said.

Grey eyes turned to him, confused.

“It will only be for a month or two,” Alisanne told him, stroking his side. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

He blinked in surprise.

“You intend to return?” he asked, sounding like a fool even to his own ear.

“There’s more than sharing your bed that keeps me here, Olivier,” she said, tone cooling. “Though I had expected even that might mean more to you than it seems it does.”

“You would be giving up a wealthy and exciting life,” he slowly said.

Apenun was not a grand city, in the greater scheme of things, but it was still as another world from the likes of little Beaumarais nestled in the mountains.

“I’ll be wealthy regardless, and you overestimate the excitement there is to be had as the seventh child of a noblewoman,” Alisanne said, eyes searching his face.

She paused.

“Did you really think I would cast you aside as soon as the call to return to Apenun came?” she asked.

The answer to that now shamed him, so he did not answer.

“I have feelings for you,” Olivier artlessly confessed, “but I harbour no expectation of permanence. It would not be difficult for you to find better prospects.”

“I’m not offering marriage,” Alisanne frowned. “But you have been my lover for near half a year now, Olivier. It is not a small thing and I’d not have it treated as such.”

“I would not have you feel bound to something you began away from home and bereft of company,” he plainly said.

“I can decide for myself whether I should feel bound to something, Olivier,” she said, and if her tone earlier had been cool it was now frigid. “I do not need you to settle my own affairs for me.”

It is a well-meaning condescension you offer, but condescension nonetheless , Morgaine had accused. Making decisions for others without truly understanding them, what they wanted. To see that sentiment reflected in Alisanne’s grey eyes made it impossible to deny the sorcereress’ words.

“I meant no offence,” Olivier said.

“You have given it regardless,” Alisanne evenly said. “Perhaps it would be best for us to be apart for some time, yes?”

It was not truly a question but he nodded in assent, hastily dressing himself from the clothes littering the ground. She looked at him as he did, and for a moment hesitation flickered in her eyes.

“We will speak when I return,” the grey-eyed beauty said, face conflicted.

She did not stop him when he left, and he did not try to stay.

—

It took six months for Alisanne Lassier to return to Beaumarais.

Six months where Olivier grew increasingly restless, his hours always fully used yet somehow never in a way that felt satisfying. Another four wizards and witches came over the span, and there were now simply too many to host even when spread out between the shop, the family home and the house they’d bought at the edge of the town. After consulting with Mayoress Suzanne, they’d agreed it would be best if a house was raised away from Beaumarais. The townsfolk were growing uncomfortable with the amount of practitioners around Beaumarais: too many had come, and too quickly. In a twist of irony, the location that was settled on was the Knightsgrave. The small valley wasn’t too far from the town, it had a small river for drinking water and no one used it as grazing grounds because of the old legends.

Eager to avoid old mistakes, Olivier put it to the mages themselves. The notion was a popular one – in some ways the practitioners were just as uneasy about the townsfolk as the townsfolk were about them – though there would have to be rotations in who got to sample the comforts of the town instead of staying out in the mountains. The greatest matter of debate was the shape the lodgings out in the Knightsgrave would take.

“It should be a tower,” Morgaine said. “There are many magical reasons why this is preferred dwelling of our kind, and so close to the mountains we will not lack for stone.”

Olivier thought the raising of a mage’s tower out in the wilds was a lot more likely to bring unease than a hall or cottage would have, but Morgaine’s suggestion was highly popular and he would not deny these people without a good reason. Not after having asked them what they wanted. Coin was sparse but a loan was extended by the House of Light through Sister Maude, as the priests were eager to demonstrate that it was they who were the patrons of this arrangement and not the rulers of Apenun. Olivier found his brother began to come around more frequently, though never as much as when they’d been younger. The relationship felt only half-repaired, but neither of them had the time to spare for more. Roland simply had too much to do, too much to learn. He was a student to half a dozen practitioners now, not merely their parents and Morgaine.

They saw him as their future, Olivier realized. Someone who would be able to speak for them yet be one of them. Morgaine had not lied on that night.

Before winter the magistrate Apenun had assigned them arrived, along with a small retinue. They were put up in the temple until more fitting lodgings could be raised. Olivier called on her the evening of their arrival, heart split.

“Did you miss me?” Magistrate Alisanne Lassier smiled.

He had, more than words could properly express. They got to work together again, and already the old tension hung in the air between them. The same way it had before they’d begun. Before they’d quarrelled, too. When spring came Olivier took the first good excuse he found to return to the road, lest he find himself making an inevitable mistake.

—

The road did him good.

Out there he went, sifting through towns and countryside looking for mages who had not yet heard of the refuge that could be found in Beaumarais. He obtained contracts for enchantments against vermin, for tools that would not rust, for brews that would help childmaking or prevent it. And he returned to Beaumarais, often but not for long. There the town grew to thrive, the coin poured in by peddlers seeing houses raised and shops open. People came to live in Beaumarais who had not been born there, or been brought in by kin and wedding, for the first time in living memory. Magistrate Alisanne saw to the order of it all with bewitching grace, her natural aplomb a fair match for the demands of the office. The tower out in the mountains slowly grew and the practitioners were drawn towards it. The shop would be how they won their coin, how they afforded to live, but the tower would be their home .

Olivier stayed on the road, drawing the closest towns and villages into the fold of what was being built. Justice need not be sought in Apenun now, not when there was a magistrate in Beaumarais. All manners of old disputes could be settled at last. Those few he’d taught how to read and write remained bound to him by gratitude, and they were all from families of importance: the town of his birth was, slowly but surely, becoming the heart of the settlements in the Vermillion Valleys. Olivier longed for grey eyes and a quiet laugh, but found himself reluctant to return to what the two of them had once been. She must have been as well, for while they lingered close to one another neither ever reached out through that slight, final distance separating them.

These days he felt reluctant to stay in Beaumarais at all. Out there Olivier found he thrived: wherever he went, he found success. He talked around peddlers and craftsmen to bring Beaumarais into their routes, secured a proper mason’s help for the tower. He even picked up a few disaffected fantassins ready to turn bandit and convinced them instead to turn into a company under contract by half a dozen towns to keep the mountain paths clear of bandits. Even the House of Light was danced with, as Sister Lucie of Grisemanche was recalled in disgrace when she was found to have taken payment for healing travellers instead of offering it freely as was her duty. It was all exciting . Something he was good at, something he’d been meant to do. Unlike looking over the shoulders of mages in Beaumarais, something they resented of him and he disliked doing in the first place.

By the second year the practitioners had taken to pooling their knowledge and a library was being assembled in the more than half-done tower, and while Olivier would have loved to read through the books there he often felt unwelcome when he visited. The mages who nowadays stayed in the Knightsgrave, having raised tents and small huts there, had started to think of themselves as a small village of their own. They did not like the notion of being beholden to anyone. Morgaine and his brother had taken to staying one week there and another in town, and eventually given Olivier’s frequent absences it became natural for Roland to be given the responsibility of seeing to the affairs of the valley. It was better this way, Olivier told himself. He closed his eyes to Roland being rather well versed in poetry, these days, and spending much of his time in Beaumarais calling on Alisanne.

For three years it all grew. The town, the tower, the profits. Rumour had spread that enchanted wares could be bought in the mountains and so now a caravan of peddlers came every spring, while the highborn of Apenun had their orders conveyed by riders along with the payment. Beaumarais had swelled, and these days Mayoress Suzanne and Magistrate Alisanne were considered the grandees of the region. Olivier himself was known, but not as much. He preferred it that way. There was talk that soon a petition to the court of Prince Arsene of Bayeux might be arranged, requesting that someone might be raised to formal rule over the Vermillion Valleys, and Alisanne’s name was the one bandied about. The notion found some popularity even away from the town, largely because the magistrate herself was popular.

Winter was ever the season Olivier spent in Beaumarais, and on that third year he’d come a month early as he had a few affairs to see to in town. It was his habit to call on Alisanne the day he returned, no matter the hour, but he was surprised to see his brother leave her house well two hours after sundown. Roland looked just as surprised to see him, and for a moment Olivier was taken aback by how much taller his little brother had become. Roland had grown into a man while he wasn’t looking: his shoulders had broadened, he had a short beard and even wore a knife at his hip. The wonder went away when he remembered where he’d just seen his brother leave, and at what hour.

“Olivier,” Roland smiled. “Back so soon, this year?”

The smile was, he thought, too stiff.

“Out so late, Roland?” Olivier replied, and did not bother to smile.

“There’s no call for that face, brother,” Roland said. “I was only having dinner with a dear friend. We share great hopes for the future of Beaumarais.”

His little brother, still taller than him, began to walk past Olivier but paused.

“Besides, even if I did have other designs are the two of you not done?” Roland asked. “There would be no call for bruising.”

Olivier’s eyes narrowed.

“I sometimes dislike the man you’re growing into, brother,” he said.

“Then perhaps you should have been around more, brother,” Roland replied.

He walked away and did not turn back. Olivier breathed out, calming himself, and only then called on Alisanne. He was ushered in by the servants and brought to her small parlour, where she was having a glass of wine. Alone, he noticed. There was no second, empty glass. It could have been removed.

“Olivier,” she smiled, waving him in and inviting him to sit. “Back early, this year.”

“So I’ve been told,” he said. “Twice now.”

Her brow rose. He bit his tongue. He had no right to feel jealous, he reminded himself. They had not been lovers for years now.

“Your brother is the soul of persistence,” she said. “It is somewhat flattering.”

“Is it?” he quietly asked.

“None of that now,” she replied, just as quietly. “For years I thought you might apologize, that we might begin anew. You never did. Our friendship is dear to me as well, Olivier, but it is not a friend who speaks to me now.”

“No,” he admitted. “It is not. Do not think too badly of me for it.”

Alisanne kept silent for a long moment.

“Jealousy is something, at least,” she said, eyes unreadable.

She drank from her cup, then rose to pour him one as well. His lips felt parched when he drank.

“I am not involved with your brother,” Alisanne said. “Nor have I ever been.”

Relief. Relief, however guiltily it might come.

“He has, however, been courting me for years,” she continued. “And tonight he sought my hand in marriage.”

His fingers clenched around the rim of the cup.

“Tell me you refused him,” Olivier prayed.

“I did not answer,” Alisanne said. “Too swift a refusal would have been indelicate.”

He drank deep to hide the way his hand had trembled.

“He is not in love with me, Olivier,” the grey-eyed beauty mused. “He his taken with my looks and thirsts for lordship over these mountains, which he fancies wedding me might grant him.”

“I did not think him so ambitious,” he confessed.

“Morgaine has been fanning those flames, along with the dream of a hidden city for mages,” Alisanne said. “Though I’ll not blame her too much for that: there were already embers there to fan.”

“I’ve let a lot of things grown rotten, haven’t I?” Olivier softly said.

“There’s a light in you, on those days you come back from the road,” Alisanne said. “A glow almost. When you’ve traipsed around like a rogue, tricking and helping and trading in knowledge. It was hard to grow angry with you, when what you did make you so blatantly happy.”

“It has,” Olivier admitted. “Yet I regret what I left behind.”

She studied him again, silently.

“Apologize,” Alisanne ordered.

“I am sorry,” Olivier said, “for how it ended between us. And for every day since.”

“Good,” she said, and kissed him.

—

It was a soft night, after that. Patient and tender, almost like a goodbye. They slept in the same bed for the first time in years and neither woke until late in the morning. Olivier woke first but waited until she did, moving as little as possible to not wake her. Eventually her eyes fluttered open, and they stayed nestled together for a long time.

“You’re going to leave, aren’t you?” he asked.

Alisanne sighed.

“Three years is long enough,” she said. “Beaumarais is now capable of electing its own magistrate.”

“And you are growing bored,” he said.

“I am,” Alisanne admitted. “The tower is nearly done, the affairs with the mages quite settled and the rest is... middling.”

“When do you leave?” Olivier asked.

“In a few days,” she replied. “I might return come summer to oversee the election, but it is not certain.”

He breathed out.

“Would you stay, if I asked?”

His own question startled him, but embarrassed as he might be to have asked he did not regret having done so. Grey eyes met his.

“No,” Alisanne said. “But it doesn’t need to end, Olivier. Come with me to Apenun.”

“I cannot,” he replied instantly.

“Think about this, actually stop and think ,” she insisted. “You’d go mad, staying here all year, and I’d not stand to be your port of anchor when it’s too cold and nothing more. But in Apenun, you could thrive . Already your work here has made you known in some circles, opportunities could easily be arranged. I’ll find an occupation of my own, and we can live as we want to live. Not bound by half a dozen uneasy threads, forever defined by your family.”

“I can’t abandon all we built here, Alisanne,” he said.

“Then don’t,” she said. “Roland wants it, so let him prove he can lead. You’ll still have shares of the profits, coin to live comfortably, and you can return in a year to see how he’s done without you looming over him.”

And Olivier wanted to object but the truth was that he was already gone most of the year, wasn’t he? What was it that was lost if he left? The more he thought of it, the less he had to say. He did not agree, leaving their bed later and burying himself half-heartedly in the shop’s bookkeeping, but the thought did not leave him. He returned to Alisanne’s home that night. She knew his answer before he spoke it, as she often did.

A hundred things would need seeing to before then, but when she left he’d leave with her.

—

Olivier woke up to screaming on the night before their departure.

He’d slept at the shop, as he’d been there until late seeing to the last details, and he dressed hastily before slipping into the street. Beaumarais was ablaze, he saw. Armed men on horses were tossing torches onto houses. The militia had come out, but it was a small thing these days and Olivier saw several of them were already corpses. The horsemen were eerily silent as they went around burning and killing, and it was hard to tell how many of them there were. A dozen, two? One of them was knocked down by a vivid red fireball, as Maxime Redflame came out of the tavern drunkenly bellowing and waving about his arms, and they all turned towards the threat. Olivier took advantaged of the distraction to sneak past the nearest raider, towards the east of the town.

Alisanne’s house would be there, along with her small but well-trained armed retinue. The House of Light was close as well, and these days Sister Maude had help from other priests capable of wielding Light. Except that when he got there, the house was strewn with corpses. Soldiers and servants, even a young priestess. Olivier frantically looked through the butchery, but of Alisanne there was no trace. Or of the raiders themselves, though from the way the blood was spilled at least some of them must have been killed forcing the house. Had she been taken? Livid with fear and rage, Olivier stumbled onto a mess in the gardens that looked like it’d been made by someone struggling as they were dragged. The were horse tracks leading away from there, away from the town. Into the mountains.

Olivier followed.

The horsemen had not been careful when they left. Only a few had left by the path, two or three, and though on a rocky stretch Olivier lost their trace he knew well these mountains. This path in particular, which he’d first tread as a boy. Once upon a time, it had been a rite of passage among the children of Beaumarais to sneak out in the night and steal a flower from the valley known as the Knightsgrave. Stomach dropping as unwelcome but inevitable suspicions took hold of him, Olivier sped through the dark mountain paths. Above him the moon lit his way, and vigour like he’d never known before made his stride long and sure and tireless. Before long he stood above the stretch of a small valley filled with tall grass and red flowers by a mountain spring, though now there was more. Tents and huts, close to the shore, and a stout tower jutting upwards that was now nearly done.

The Knightsgrave was almost empty, Olivier saw.

Of the near dozen mages who lived here even in winter there was no trace. Two raiders stood silent in the night, their tall form a stark contrast to the red flowers around them, while their horses drank from the mountain spring. The tower’s door was open, and torchlight flickered within. Olivier no longer had a boy’s body, but he was still spry and the raiders were both eerily still and inattentive. Too still, he eventually realized. They did not breathe at all. Undead , he thought . Merciful Gods, Roland, what have you done? He snuck past the standing corpses, sticking to the tall grass until he was close to the tower. He peeked within and found only a single silhouette within. Morgaine. Sitting in an armchair, looking down at the fire roaring in the firepit.

Anger seizing hold of him, Olivier slipped into the tower and crept upon the sorceress from behind. There was a small paring knife on a table and his fingers closed around the hilt. About to place the blade against the throat, he stopped when he got a look at more than Morgaine’s side. She was burned, heavily. Most of the left half of her torso was a blackened ruin and her breathing was laboured. The sorceress’ dark eyes fluttered open and she caught sight of him. She let out a small, bleak laugh.

“You,” she said. “Of course it would be you.”

“Where is Alisanne?” he asked.

“Upstairs,” she croaked. “Gods, the folly. It all went wrong.”

“You did this,” Olivier hissed.

“No,” she denied. “It was not the plan at all. They were supposed to attack as you left. We would drive them away, the girl would...”

Morgaine let out a dry, rasping cough.

“The girl would owe us,” she said. “Her mother. Roland would be a hero, the natural magistrate.”

“You raised corpses,” he accused. “So that they would serve you.”

“We,” she snorted. “Me, him. For protection. This place was already a grave of knights, we just needed to dig.”

“Your protection is burning the town,” Olivier snarled. “You have destroyed everything with your madness.”

“You did this,” Morgaine hissed. “He went mad when he learned the girl would leave with you. That he’d never be lord, that he was just a fool. It was all you. My plan would have fixed everything, but he lost it. Sent our soldiers for the girl, and when I tried to stop him...”

Olivier looked down at the sorceress, burned by her own pupil and pride. Even now it was all his fault in her eyes, wasn’t it? And maybe it was, in a way. Because he’d chosen the thrills of the road and the chase rather than stay here and see this through. Because he’d chosen to be someone at the expense of being a brother. Maybe he’d had a hand in this, if not the one she thought. And the truth he knew, deep down, was the same truth he’d known since he was a boy: no one else was going to fix this. To try to make it right. It was not his place to pass judgement over that dying woman before him, for he was neither a lord nor a magistrate, but it still needed to be done. And he’d had a hand in this, in the magic that had gone to wicked use here, and so he would also have a hand in ending it all.

“Too many people have died, Morgaine,” Olivier said.

She tried to raise her hand, lips beginning an incantation, but however quick her magic it was not quicker than a knife. It went straight into her heart and Morgaine gasped out her last breath with a hissing curse. Olivier ripped out the knife, bloodying his hand. It was the first time he’d ever killed. The anguish he’d expected to feel from having taken a life did not come, even after a long moment passed. He felt tired, mostly, and sad that a woman who’d been exceptional in many ways had come to die like this. It’d been a bitter flame at the heart of her, and it’d ended up eating her from the inside. We lit it , Olivier reminded himself. Magic hadn’t done that, men and women had. With the ways they treated each other, with the slow strangling grasp of something subtler and deeper than sorcery could ever be.

Bloody knife in hand, he looked at the stairs. This might not be the last life he took tonight. Even as he went up the stairs, Olivier’s mind dreamed up what a monster his brother might have turned into. A raving and ranting madman, or a warlock wreathed in pale lightning.

Instead, what he found was Roland on his knees and weeping.

His little brother looked terrified, the look on his face making the beard he’d grown and the broadened shoulders look like they belonged on someone else’s body. Alisanne had been laid down on a cot in a corner, her hands folded over her lap with delicate care. She was slumbering too deeply for it to be anything but the result of a spell. He could have snuck in, Olivier knew. Roland was lost inside himself, he wouldn’t have heard it. Merciful Heavens, his brother wouldn’t have noticed a thing until the knife took his life. And it’d be safer, wouldn’t it? If Roland’s magic could defeat even his old teacher’s, what could a peddler with a paring knife do against it? But that would mean that his brother was his enemy. And fool that he was, Olivier could not accept that.

He set down the knife on a table and knelt by his brother’s side, pulling him close. Roland did not fight him, let it happen, but his eyes were unseeing. It was only after some soothing that sense returned to them.

“Ollie?” his brother asked, voice hoarse from the weeping.

“I’m here,” Olivier quietly said.

“I-” Roland said, then his voice broke. “Gods, what have I-”

He violently retched, breaking out of his brother’s embrace and throwing up on the floor. Looking scared and ashamed, Roland backed away from him afterwards.

“The magic,” he said, “it was worse than wine. I was in a haze, and I was so angry ...”

“Your undead attacked the town,” Olivier said. “Morgaine is dead.”

“Morgaine,” Roland hissed, “ Morgaine . It was her who convinced me. Who told me we would never get our dues fairly, that we needed to raise the corpses. I never wanted to, you have to believe me.”

It began, slowly, to dawn on Olivier. But he did not want to look it in the eye, fought it tooth and nail.

“Alisanne,” Roland suddenly said, “what-”

He glanced back and relief touched his face when he found Alisanne was asleep on the cot.

“She won’t wake until the spell is broken,” Roland said. “She... she doesn’t need to know. Olivier, you have to help me. I never meant to hurt anyone.”

He was aching behind the eyes with the effort of not seeing it, but he was losing the war. It felt inevitable, inexorable.

“What do you want me to do, Roland?” Olivier softly asked.

His brother did not notice the soft, steely undertone. Perhaps he would have tread more lightly if he had.

“Morgaine is dead, or good as,” Roland said. “And it was her idea from the start. We can tell people... Alisanne is the magistrate, and she trusts you. If you tell her it was all Morgaine she’ll believe it.”

Dragged up by the hair and forced to look the truth in the eye, Olivier saw it plain for the first time: his brother was not a good man. Magic had nothing to do with it, or little enough it hardly mattered. The older brother stayed silent, trying to fight the revelation but finding little to fight it with . Roland’s eyes went hard when he got no reply.

“Trying to get rid of me, are you?” Roland said. “Now that you have all you wanted, time to do away with the mage brother before you buy yourself a title. You owe me, Olivier. If you hadn’t taken her, I never would have-”

The other man bit down on the sentence, but the hardness in his eyes did not waver. It was never the magic, was it? It was you, Roland. All along it was you.

“It’s your fault,” Roland harshly said. “You know it is.”

“I do,” Olivier quietly replied.

And it truly was . If Olivier had not left the family home as quick as he could, if he’d not left his brother behind, it might not have come to this. But he’d avoided the place as much as he could because it brought a bitter taste to his mouth. Because he wanted to leave it behind. And he had, but he’d also left behind more than the house. There were so many ways this could all have been avoided. If he’d not taken to the road, if he’d not left so many things half-said, if he’d found it in him to not see, deep down, his own brother as a rival. He’d left Roland to stew in a cauldron of anger, and so anger was what Roland had learned.

Too slow to notice, too slow to act.

All that was left, now, was to look at a man who had used his magic to throw a murderous tantrum when denied what he wanted. And the thought disgusted Olivier, because in the end it would be others who paid the price for this. When it came out Roland had raised the dead, had been responsible for so many deaths, then the House of Light would smash all of this to pieces. And their town would be spoken of as an example as to why mages could never be trusted, never be listened to, when the lot of wizards was next questioned. Have you heard of the fate of Beaumarais, my child , a thousand Sister Maudes would say, tutting about how it was so sad but you just couldn’t expect differently of that sort .

“You can’t have done this,” Olivier finally said. “It would ruin it all.”

“Yes, exactly,” Roland said, licking his lips.

It couldn’t be Morgaine, either. She was too well-known, it would be almost as damning. The undead were the keystone, for what Proceran mage would dare dabble in necromancy? There was a ready-made culprit on the other side of the valleys: Praesi warlocks with their wicked arts, who had wanted to ruin the good work of reliable Proceran wizards. Olivier himself had once falsely claimed that bandits who’d robbed him had been in the pay of Praes, the precedent would make it more believable to highborn always keeping wary eye on the east.

“There is a spell that could make her more suggestible when we wake her,” Roland told him. “Nothing untoward, just as if she’d had a large cup of wine. It would-”

“You should not have magic,” Olivier said, and believed every word.

No more than he should have a sword or a lordship, had he been born to either. His fingers itched with the truth of it, as if something were trying to claw its way out from beneath the skin. Roland cracked a scornful smile.

“It should have been you, right?” he said. “You manage to go a great many years without saying it, brother. I’m almost impressed.”

“You have abused your power,” Olivier said slowly, as if testing out the words. “You no longer deserve to hold it.”

“I was born with it, Ollie,” Roland hissed. “There it is, the simple truth: I was born with it and you weren’t. And you’ve been trying to take things from me all my life to make up for that, but it won’t ever do anything because the Gods Above already decided which of us would matter when they gave the Talent to only one of us. Allow me to demonstrate -”

It was all, in that moment, clear as crystal. Every detail of the world around him, from Alisanne’s steady breath on the cot to the slight coating of dust on the bookshelves to the flush on his brother’s cheeks. And Olivier knew, with unearthly certainty, that it could be done. He’d spent all his life taking knowledge and putting it to use, and wasn’t the knowledge always the hard part? And so when he saw sorcery flare around his brother’s hands Olivier brushed his own against them, and took the magic. No, not took. He was not a wanton thief, stealing away whatever he wished. He had done this because the magic was being misused.

Confiscated, he thought. He had confiscated the power.

The word felt right, like an old friend he’d never met.

“What have you done?” Roland shouted. “What have you done, Olivier? Did you destroy my magic ?”

No, Olivier knew. He hadn’t it. He could feel something within him, like a bundle of warmth. Or perhaps a spool of wool, one that he might yet learn to unspin.

“It’s over, Roland,” he said. “You won’t escape the consequences of this.”

A shout was his answer, and to his surprise his brother charged him. Roland was taller and had caught him flatfooted, so Olivier stumbled backwards into the table as his brother grabbed him by the hair and smashed his head against the wood.

“It will come back, if I kill you,” Roland seethed. “Won’t it?”

Olivier felt daze and his hands scrabbled for leverage so that he could throw back his brother, but his head was smashed again. Blindly groping, his fingers closed around something hard. A knife, he realized. The same bloody paring knife he’d killed Morgaine with. And if he struck now, while Roland had not noticed... And still he balked. Roland noticed.

“A pushover to the end,” Roland sneered.

He ripped out the knife from Olivier’s grip and tossed it behind him. The older brother closed his eyes and desperately reached for the bundle within him, the Talent, but there was something missing. He could not touch it, could not understand how . He was thrown down against the table again, head rapping against the wood, and his vision swam as he felt a hand close around his throat. There was a gasp, and the hand trembled as it loosened. Olivier kicked his brother away, gulping air desperately, and as his vision came back he found that Roland’s mouth was open in a silent moan.

Alisanne Lassier, standing tall and cold-eyed, stabbed the paring knife in his brother’s lungs a second time.

The death was startlingly quick. A few heartbeats was all it took before Roland slumped to the ground, first on his knees and then all the way down as the light left his eyes. Olivier found he could not look away, and that though Alisanne was speaking he could not seem to hear her words. It was as if the whole world had gone still and silent and dark, save for the sight of his brother’s face in a growing pool of blood. Someone was touching him, he realized.

“- are you all right?” Alisanne said. “Did he hurt you?”

Olivier blinked, as if waking up from a deep sleep.

“No,” he said, touching his throat and wincing at the bruising, “He didn’t – I’m all right.”

“We need to leave this place, Olivier,” Alisanne told him, tone gentle but urgent. “We don’t know if anyone else was helping him.”

“We can’t leave,” Olivier tiredly replied. “Not when it’s like this.”

She looked askance at him, wary and confused.

“It can’t have been them,” Olivier said, hesitating. “It has to be me, Allie. It can’t have been them, or everyone will pay.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Alisanne slowly said. “You’re in shock, Olivier. We need to leave .”

Lies wouldn’t be enough. Magic could, if it was the right kind, and Olivier had read the books. He knew the principles. Yet that perfect sphere he could so easily imagine – so easily he was not certain it was imagination at all – seemed beyond his reach. There was power there, but he could not use it. Frustration mounted in him. What had been the point, if he couldn’t do any good with this? If he couldn’t use his talent to do anything but subtract from the world? He had to be able to use it, or so many people would suffer for the madness of so few.

The world shivered.

Oh . It couldn’t be about him, could it? It couldn’t be selfish. There had to be a purpose. Thinking of what would come to pass, Olivier reached out for the sphere within himself and gathered the slightest lick of power. One of the easiest tricks of any mage was the making of fire, he’d heard. And as Olivier raised his palm a small trail of flame grew on it, though he snuffed it out even as Alisanne let out a loud gasp and stepped away.

“You’re a mage?” she asked.

No, Olivier thought. Not even now that he had magic.

“I am a charlatan,” he bitterly smiled.

He reached for the power again, and it came more easily this time. Even with his eyes closed to concentrate, it took him three times to successfully weave the illusion. He watched comprehension dawn in her grey eyes, watched the horror rise.

“No,” Alisanne quietly said. “No, please . Olivier, don’t do this. Don’t take his face.”

“Olivier de Beaumarais died,” he replied. “Slain along Lady Morgaine by the Praesi warlock who raised the dead and set them on the town and tower. He will be buried here.”

Roland’s body could fill the grave.

“Roland de Beaumarais heroically drove back the Praesi but failed to kill him, and now pursues him to avenge his brother,” he continued. “He wills all his possessions to Alisanne Lassier, to dispose of as she sees fit, as he will never return to Beaumarais.”

The deception would not hold, were he forced to uphold it around people who’d known them both. Illusions could only do so much.

“And when authorities seek out Roland to interrogate him?” Alisanna asks.

“He will not deign to be found,” the man who was now Roland de Beaumarais sadly smiled, “What do the wishes of men matter, to a rogue sorcerer?”

Chapter 41: Coterie

“The only thing more inconvenient than being part of an alliance is not being part of it.”
– Prince Luis of Tenerife

The last time I’d seen anything near this scale had been the Doom of Liesse, when every major Callowan and Legion force west of the Hwaerte had engaged the Praesi and wights under the Diabolist. Yet, however apocalyptic that day had been, in the end it’d been only one day. The Grand Alliance’s attempt to reclaim Hainaut would be a great deal more sustained than that.

The numbers were staggering, when put to ink and impossible to ignore. The Army of Callow would be fielding, in this campaign, a little under thirty thousand soldiers – the entire Second, Third and Fourth Army. Counting only the forces of Lady Aquiline and Lord Tazin the Dominion would be offering up at least twenty thousand, but if Lord Yannu’s promises of Alavan captains came through the numbers should end up closer to twenty-five. General Pallas had seven thousand in fighting fit, though before mustering the full roster of the Tyrant’s Own she’d want horses brought in since the kataphraktoi were running low on remounts. General Rumena still had thirty thousand to pledge to the offensive, the thinned numbers having actually strengthened the southernmost host of the Firstborn in several ways.

The exact numbers of the Proceran forces in Hainaut were harder to determine, on the other hand, since their chain of command was the stuff of nightmares for any Legion-taught officer. As in most things warfare, the Lycaonese were a notch above the Alamans: the armies of Hannoven and Neustria were under the combined command of the Iron Prince, they shared supplies and kept track of their casualties. While they relied a little too heavily on the nebulous rank of ‘captains’ for my tastes – officers that could command anywhere from a hundred to a thousand foot, horse or even a mixed force of both! – but they were typically well organized and well trained. The northern royals fielded, between the two of them, a solid eighteen thousand. Including four thousand of that solid Lycaonese heavy horse we could never have too much of.

The Alamans forces were contrastingly disorganized, which to my admitted surprise hadn’t even proved to be entirely their fault. The last Princess of Hainaut – elder sister to the current one – had hired every fantassin company she could get her hands on the moment Keter began to stir, but a lot of those had taken severe losses failing to defend the northern shore. Half the originally contracted companies no longer existed or no longer fielded the amount of men they said they did, and maybe a quarter of the current mercenaries in Volignac service were ‘successor-companies’. Those were, essentially, mercenary companies raised from the survivors of broken ones and laying claim to an old contract under a different name as the successor of the disbanded company.

The mercenaries were trouble, and not just because they were fiercely independent. Fantassin captains habitually lied about their numbers so that they might claim more supplies from the Grand Alliance, or bargain for better remuneration, and weren’t above lending each other soldiers to fake their way through inspections. We hung the captains we caught at this, but that tended to lead to desertions so we had to be careful. It didn’t help that even the principality Alamans troops had their issues. There were the forces of three royals serving in Hainaut: Prince Etienne of Brabant, Prince Ariel of Arans and naturally Princess Beatrice of Hainaut. The Arans soldiery was steady, but also under the prince’s personal command and he was often reluctant to take risks. If Hainaut fell his principality was the next on the block, he often reminded us, but for all that the Brabant folk were arguably more trouble.

Not because they were as cautious, on the contrary: Prince Etienne had bankrupted himself arming everyone he could in his principality and sending them north when the situation in Hainaut first went bad, which while a brave and necessary gesture was also the source of the trouble. Maybe a third of the Brabantines were actual trained soldiers, even their ‘officers’ were green as grass and though when they had the upper hand they were enthusiastic fighters their morale was otherwise... fragile. I’d not call a coward anyone who took up arms against Keter, but when you put shoemakers in armour and sent them to fight the likes of beorns they had a distinct tendency to rout. The conscripts had to be closely watched, and carefully used.

The forces under Princess Beatrice Volignac were the fewest, since they’d been bled hard failing to defend their homeland, which I found a damned shame as, practically speaking, it was a force entirely made of veterans. They fought hard, mercilessly, and with a burning spite I could only admire. They were also in some ways the least well-equipped, and the heaviest draw on Grand Alliance resources of the forces in the region: the capital of Hainaut had fallen, as had most its largest cities, so there was little coin behind them and only sparse land to feed them. At this point, the House of Volignac had more fortresses under its rule than towns – and its armies weren’t even the largest force within those fortresses.

Accounting for the inevitable lies and grandstanding, our estimates had the total Alamans forces in Hainaut at around forty-one thousand. Fantassins companies made up for about fifteen thousand of that, and the Brabant conscripts maybe another ten to twelve thousand, so that meant more than half the number was less than reliable. If we got lucky the armies of Twilight’s Pass would be able to send around ten thousand our way, mostly Bremen and Rhenia men with maybe a few from Brus. Which meant that at the end of the day, when all those forces would be brought together, there would be around one hundred and sixty thousand soldiers on the field. And that would be on the Grand Alliance’s side alone. We were, typically, outnumbered at least two to one by the dead.

The campaign hadn’t even begun and already the numbers involved were giving me a headache, so naturally I’d consulted the finest military mind at my disposal as soon as she was fit to be scried.

“It’s logistically impossible for you to feed that many soldiers as a single force,” Marshal Juniper of the Red Shields bluntly told me. “You’ll have to separate them into several armies or you’ll run out of supplies after a month or so.”

“Our scouts have confirmed the Dead King left the roads mostly intact,” I pointed out. “If we march along Julienne’s Highway and spread out to prevent raiding, we could have an active supply line.”

Named after an ancient First Princess of Procer, the highway was one of the major roads of northeastern Procer: it began in Salia, headed east through the city of Aisne, up into Brabant through the major trade city of Tourges and ended up north in the city of Hainaut, capital of the eponymous principality. It was large, made for wagons and very well-maintained. The Dead King had skimped on the upkeep some, our scouts had said – which made sense since he didn’t usually use wagons of his own – but ensured it remained in state to be used by his troops, and therefore ours. It was pretty much impossible to feed this large an army without using carts and wagons to bring in rations so I expected we’d need to do some repairs while we campaigned, but my sapper corps should be capable of handling that much.

“The Hidden Horror will ruin that road the moment it becomes obvious it’s the axis of your offensive,” Juniper growled. “Think, Catherine. His priority is stalling us while he finishes his bridge, he’ll pull out every stone from the defensive line to Hainaut if that’s what it takes.”

“That’s just as much of an issue if we split our force into smaller armies,” I pointed out. “They’ll have to follow roads as well, if smaller ones. And we might move quicker, with the Twilight Ways, but he’s got better awareness out on the field. If one of our forces pulls ahead of the others it’ll get surrounded and annihilated.”

Or worse, slaughtered and raised anew. Sure, we could open gates into the Twilight Ways – but we could only open so many, and only make them so large. An army trying to retreat from an active battle would lose most its numbers to the retreat, assuming it could even pull one of those in good order. My legionaries and the Lycaonese probably could, but the Levantines and the Alamans? They were brave and hardy fighters, I meant not disrespect there, but they weren’t disciplined .

“You’re looking at it from the wrong way,” Juniper said. “Going up the Highway you’ll get stuck in one of the natural bottlenecks. The dead could mass in Lauzon’s Hollow-”

It was the name of a natural ‘pass’ leading the highway into the hilly and rocky highlands of Hainaut, which while not exactly narrow was steep-sloped and easily defendable. Last year during our offensive we’d taken the dead by surprise there, smashing the force defending it with a deep raid of kataphraktoi backed by Named and then held it open long enough for our army proper to arrive. That trick, though, would not work twice.

“- or the overpass fortresses at Cigelin,” she finished.

Fortresses was something of an oversell there. Les Soeurs de Cigelin , or the ‘Cigelin Sisters’, were a pair of large towers overlooking a dip in the hills the highway passed through. They’d been built atop very abrupt slopes at the point where the dip was deepest, one on each side, but the real danger was the chain-gate they commanded. A massive chain allowed a portcullis of enchanted steel to be raised or lowered across the road, and while it was hardly an unbreakable obstacle given enough mages or sappers it would be a costly strongpoint to force. Last time we’d used the Ways to go past it and then struck the garrisons holding the towers from the back, after drawing them out, but it’d slowed us down by at least a sennight. There wouldn’t have been nearly as many nasty surprises waiting for us near the capital if not for that delay.

We’d torn down the fortresses and the chain-gate as we retreated, of course, but I knew better than to expect not to see them standing again this summer.

“We need those places under our control, Juniper,” I pointed out. “By the time we get to the capital it’ll be filled to the brim with corpses led by Revenants, which means a siege unless we want to throw away several dozen thousand soldiers storming the walls.”

And we couldn’t have a siege without supply lines to feed our soldiers, that much went without saying. Julienne’s Highway was our best bet at such a thing.

“You are throwing away your only strategic advantage, superior mobility, to turn your army into a lumbering battering ram you want to smash through every gate until you reach Hainaut itself,” the orc growled. “Losing scrying is making you too cautious, Warlord. If you split your army in three along three lines, the first taking the blue road towards Luciennerie in the west-”

I kept an eye on her profile in the mirror but the other was on the map spread out in front of me, displaying northern Procer. Luciennerie was a minor fortress by size, but it was the key to western Hainaut and more: holding it would give us control of the blue road when it went further west into Cleves, and so allow us to anchor our flank to our allies there.

“- the second marching up Julienne’s Highway in the centre and the third going east by the old mining roads, aimed at Malmedit-”

Malmedit was a city, at least in principle, though even before the war against Keter it’d been turning into an empty husk. The city had grown out of multiple mining towns fusing into a single larger one, and lived off the ore trade, so when the ore had run out the people left for greener pastures. The Dead King had dug tunnels from further north that connected to the old mine shafts and he used the city itself as a staging area, since the lands beyond Malmedit itself weren’t really fit to march an army across. If we took the city, though, we could collapse the mine shafts and shut the door on Keter’s fingers.

“-then all three losses would be severe enough he’ll have to commit to battle,” I finished with a frown. “But he won’t shy from that, Juniper. He has the bodies to spare, and he knows that if he defeats even one of those armies he can turn this entire campaign into a rout by collapsing that flank.”

If either the eastern or western army was beaten back, the central one would have to withdraw or see its supply lines cut by raiders. If it was the central army that was beaten back it’d be even worse, as both other armies would have to retreat for the same reason.

“So he’ll commit forces against all three offensives,” Juniper said. “He’ll be going after that victory hard, because if he wins it and finishes the bridge he has a decent change of overrunning as far as southern Brabant before a defence can even be mounted. And when his armies are committed, his reserves emptied, then the fourth army – the one you kept back, kept quiet – take the Twilight Ways and hits the capital directly. While it’s been stripped of defences.”

My eyes narrowed as I stared hard at the map. It was a bold plan, it was true, but then that tended to be Juniper’s preference. And the basics of it held up to scrutiny, I thought. Once the dead committed to the battles, once they sent their soldiers out, it would not be possible for them to be recalled in time. They’d have to race across broken terrain, often without roads, while we cut through with the Twilight Ways. The army that assaulted the capital would be taking a risk, but if it paid off... We could keep a strong garrison in Hainaut then send forces to hit the enemy in the back as they tried to hold off the army going up Julienne’s Highway, taking the dead in a pincer. Victories there, which should ensue swiftly, would open the road to the capital and allow for supply lines to be established.

Hells, with the dead out west and east stuck defending fixed positions we might even not suffer too badly from raids on it.

“It could work,” I admitted. “And the smaller armies would lessen the burden on our logistics a great deal. Mind you, that’s also thrice as much supply line to defend.”

“I’d wager they won’t even raid, at the start,” Juniper grunted. “Keter will want you in deep before striking, it won’t want to risk spooking you. After that, well, that’s what you’ve got all that Alamans horse for. It sures as Hells isn’t to win battles.”

I snorted. The Hellhound’s enduring dislike of Proceran light horse continued to amuse. Especially since she’d several times suggested Callow acquire its own in the past, should we ever get the means. Juniper appreciated the value of light cavalry on the field, which was hardly surprising given her taste for winning by manoeuvre. It was just that she believed, and I tended to agree with her, that Alamans light horse was useless against most kinds of undead. Unlike Proceran peasants the skeletons wouldn’t break and flee when charged at, and the riders just weren’t armoured heavily enough to withstand staying in melee long. As skirmisher, outriders and patrols they were still leagues better than anything else we had but given how many of them we had I’d have eagerly traded a few thousand for their equivalent in northern horse.

“It needs refinement,” I said. “And I’ll need to take it to the other commanders. But it sounds like the bare bones of a plan.”

We didn’t leave it at that, of course: I still had at least two hours before crippling headaches indisposed the finest general of my generation, and I intended to use every moment of them.

—

It was another five days until the delegation from Mercantis arrived at the Arsenal.

I was not part of those who received the six merchants lords led by an ambassador. Given the amount of gold the crown of Callow still kept in the city – from the coin the dwarves had paid me for my... mediation down in the Everdark – I’d been expected to, and my absence did not go unremarked. I left them to the First Prince, knowing that as long as I kept handing her such pretty hooks there were few fish she would not be able to catch. My hours were spent arranging the upcoming campaign, consulting both Vivienne and Juniper when I could and then taking those increasingly refined plans to the regular war council. Prince Klaus had his own notion of how the campaign ought to be conducted, but they were not incompatible so steady progress was being made.

After two days of being ignored, the diplomatic party from Mercantis realized that I had not the slightest intention of reaching out to them. They tried to arrange something through Cordelia, who to my great amusement ‘declined to interfere in Callowan affairs’, so when faced with that failure they finally took direct steps. It wouldn’t be that easy, though. When the merchants sought an audience with me I passed them off to my designated heiress Lady Vivienne Dartwick instead as a calculated insult. They’d walked out of the room as soon as it was halfway polite to do so, Vivs told me afterwards. Good. I wanted them angry: anger would dull their edge, and dullards was what I wanted to deal with. The letter I received from Cordelia that evening was short and unsigned, but undoubtedly hers.

They want you at the table , the First Prince said. They want something from you. Anger them further.

It was heartening to see that these days Hasenbach knew me well enough not to even doubt my ability to infuriate other people. I was no noble, and I was hardly a deft hand at the games of those born to that station, but when it came to giving slights it must be said that I was rather well learned. I sent a messenger to arrange a meeting with the head of their delegation, Ambassador Livia – making sure her name was misspelled, a detail as petty as it was personally satisfying – but sent Lady Henrietta Morley as the Callowan representative. Vivienne’s secretary was known as a lady as a courtesy title, as while she was the heiress to Harrow she had no lands of her own, and she held no formal position in my court. I was later told that sheer disbelief that she’d be snubbed this way had Ambassador Livia stick around for nearly half an hour before she left in a fury. I received a formal letter of complaint about my rudeness from the Mercantians, and without missing a beat responded by handing it over to Archer so that she could do a theatrical reading of it in the meal hall.

Indrani got a few Alamans priests to sing as a background chorus while she declaimed it in the style of epic poetry, which I thought was a nice touch. It was the little pleasures that made life worth living.

I knew Hasenbach had read them prefectly when they still tried to get me in a room after that. Mercantis officially requested an audience with the high officers of the Grand Alliance, to speak of the large loans it had extended over the war effort, but to my amusement this time I didn’t even have to do a thing. Lord Yannu flatly refused to have the matter considered a Grand Alliance one, since neither Levant nor Callow had taken loans. So what was it that Mercantis wanted from me sorely enough they’d suffer repeated insults and still try to have talks? The merchants lords of the City of Bought and Sold were a proud lot, and not afraid to make their displeasure known when provoked. Whatever it was they wanted, they mustwant it very badly .

The following day I threw in another slight for good measure, requesting that they be contained to lesser parts of the Arsenal while war councils were held through the Mirage, and it must have done the trick because that afternoon I got another letter from Hasenbach. They want Cardinal , it said. Owned or buried . It took me, I had to admit, almost entirely by surprise. But it shouldn’t have, looking back. A neutral city at the crossroads of Calernia, whose neutrality would be backed by several realms and a treaty binding Named? It was a natural rival for Mercantis, who would still benefit from the ease of transport over lake and rivers but lose out in most other regards. Cardinal would be, to the Consortium, the death knell of their influence.

It would do worse than destroy them, in their eyes: it’d make them just another of the Free Cities, another squabbling city-state the great powers would run roughshod over with little consequence.

“Owned or buried,” Vivienne repeated.

I’d shown her the letter before consigning it to flame.

“Buried begs no explanation,” I grunted. “So long as the Red Flower Vales remain a fortified border instead of a city, Mercantis is still presumably the main trading partner for Callow.”

Trade with Procer had, even back in the days of the Fairfaxes, never been widespread. It’d been mostly restrained to luxuries, and even that much had died after the Conquest when Praes shut down the borders. Mercantis’ days of influence over my home were soon to disappear anyway, though. Even if Cardinal never saw the light of day, I intended on seeing peace between Callow and Praes: my homeland’s grain would start heading east instead of downriver, and the need for a middleman starkly decline.

“Owned is trickier to ascertain,” Vivienne frowned. “The land for Cardinal will have to be ceded by Callow and Procer, so they can’t possibly think to buy it. At a guess, they want control of the trade in the city.”

I slowly nodded. It made sense. The concessions needed for the Consortium to have such a stranglehold would probably involve privileges granted by laws and treaties, which they could not help to secure without Callow’s assent. They had leverage on Procer given how it was in debt to them – though thanks to Cordelia’s caginess they likely didn’t realize quite how badly indebted the Principate was – but they had little they could realistically strongarm me with. The Callowan gold in the vaults had been placed there by the Kingdom Under, so they couldn’t do a thing there without angering the dwarves. That left pretty much only threats to sabotage the finances of the war effort as a whole. After all, while the defensive fleet of Mercantis meant it would be hard to attack militarily the city had so few mercenaries left to call on at the moment that the thought of it attacking Callow with any degree of success was laughable.

“So we know what they want,” I grunted. “And why, at least in part. Now we move on to the trickier parts.”

We had their aim and their angle of attack. In a sword fight that would be enough for any halfway decent blade to settle the match, but diplomacy was not so clear-cut. Hasenbach would have sweet-talked them into a degree of trust towards her, by now, since she was good at being mannerly and they believed they had a knife at her throat. The nature of this game was that the First Prince just wanted to settle this to everyone’s satisfaction – but mostly Mercantis’ – while the Black Queen was just being the worst sort of ruffian. Catherine Foundling, right? What a wench. Have another cup of wine, ambassador, and tell me more about what you want so that I might help you get it. No, on the silk glove side I considered us to be well handled. It was the steel I’d have to bring to bear, and that was more delicate than you might expect.

Too much steel and you had a fight on your hands, too little and they shrugged you off. There was an art to it.

“It can’t be anything physical or provable,” I mused. “Else we’ll have a legitimate diplomatic incident on our hands.”

My being a prick to their diplomats wasn’t that, even if they liked to pretend otherwise. I was in no way obligated to grant them an audience if I didn’t feel like it, though after my slights if the shoe was ever put on the other foot they’d be perfectly within their rights to humiliate me just as publicly. Assaulting the diplomats, though, would be something altogether graver. It’d soil my reputation, Callow’s and push them closer to Malicia.

“Don’t forget the Tower will likely have a man or woman in the diplomatic party,” Vivienne pointed out.

I didn’t bother to say that we couldn’t prove that, since even if I had doubts that Malicia had outright subverted one of the merchant lords into her service I had no doubts whatsoever that she’d bribed at least one to spy on her behalf. There was a reason they’d been brought in through a fake location and kept blindfolded through the translations. So the enemies to beat here were fear and greed, I thought. Fear of being left behind by the world that would rise from the fall of Keter, greed for gold and influence and power over others. I didn’t have the know-how to craft an acceptable settlement deal with Mercantis, but that wasn’t to be my role here anyway: the First Prince would see to that end of it. My part was forcing the merchant lords to back down from their ambitions, so that Hasenbach could slide in and offer them that alternative.

“So it will,” I murmured back, then shook my head. “I need to talk to Masego.”

Vivienne cast me a wary look.

“Why?”

“Because he knows the wards of this place inside out,” I said.

Including those protecting the diplomatic quarters where our friends would be sleeping.

“Make it known to the First Prince I’ll need a few days,” I told Vivienne.

I did not insult her intelligence by specifying this should be done secretly. It was important that she and I not be seen to be collaborating, as part of out strategy rested on the appearance of us being at odds. If I was out of control, Cordelia could not be asked to prevail upon me with sweet reason. Why, I was trouble for her as well! I’d wager some of them would suspect something was going on, but the cordial working relationship between Hasenbach and myself wasn’t exactly public knowledge. And it couldn’t be denied that my stint as the Queen of Winter had left me with a... reputation. I was not above using that, if it came down to it.

“I’ll handle it,” Vivienne said, then cocked her head to the side.

She hesitated.

“Yes?”

“What for?” she asked. “The days, I mean.”

I hummed, considering.

“Best you don’t know,” I finally decided.

“That reprehensible?” she asked, brow rising.

“It’s better for the both of us if you keep your hands clean,” I patiently said. “You know that.”

She breathed out, as if gathering patience of her own.

“I know you’re trying to smooth the path of succession,” Vivienne said, “but this is getting out of hand, Cat. I don’t need to be protected.”

“A lot of your appeal as a queen will be that you’re made of paler cloth than me,” I bluntly replied. “It would be counterproductive for you to start tainting your reputation.”

“I ran with you for years as the Thief,” she said. “That ship has sailed.”

“You also fought in a rebellion against Praes,” I pointed out. “Look, Vivienne, I didn’t pick your name out of a hat. I can trust you to take care of our home, and I respect your ideals. But we have to be practical about how this gets done or there’s going to be trouble. I’m a warlord with no real claim to the throne, and you’re deriving your legitimacy from the howling void that is mine. If this is going to hold without a civil war, you need to be popular enough no one wants to fight you. That means sometimes you’ll have to be distanced from necessary evils so your reputation stays clean.”

“There’s no one else here, Cat,” Vivienne calmly said. “For whose watching gaze are we doing this distancing?”

My irritation mounted.

“If you’re not going to be involved, there’s no reason for you to know,” I said.

“To give advice,” Vivienne said. “To provide a second pair of eyes. To make suggestions. Unless you no longer consider me fit to serve these purposes.”

“I didn’t say that,” I sharply replied.

“I know,” she said. “But you’ve been using this as a reason to take a step back from me, Catherine. For some time now.”

That sounded like an accusation, even if she’d tried to make it otherwise. It was also infuriatingly vague.

“What are you saying, exactly?” I asked, frowning.

“That it would be natural if it stung,” Vivienne delicately said, “that even after all you have done, since the truth about Diabolist has been known, there are some among our countrymen who would rather see me reign than-”

My fingers clenched.

“Enough,” I cut in. “ Enough. We are not talking about this.”

She looked at me, and it burned that Vivienne looked not angry but instead tired and a little sad.

“We will have to, sooner or later,” she replied.

“I have actual real problems to deal with, Vivienne,” I told her through gritted teeth as I rose to my feet. “Instead of... whatever this is. Handle what I asked you to.”

I didn’t wait for an answer. I left the room limping, headed for Masego and the answers he’d have for me.

It felt like fleeing.

Chapter 42: Castigation

“Do not look down on fear, my friend: it is the rare case of a voice in your head actually helpful to your survival.”
– Dread Empress Prudence, the ‘Frequently Vanquished’

I’d seen some profoundly beautiful things over the years. I sometimes liked to remind myself of that when the bad days came. I’d seen the first breaths of Liesse reborn under twilight, the peace born of a good man’s sacrifice. I’d walked the ancient cities of the Everdark, where flowers lit up the dark and poetry paved the streets as a riot of colours claimed the rooftops. I’d been hosted in the finest palaces of Salia, felt a storm sweep over me from the heights of the Tower and strolled through the mad bazaar at the heart of Skade. I’d even glimpsed the last glory days of Sephirah, before death came for it. I’d seen wonders enough to fill two lifetimes, and perhaps before I died I might see yet a few more. It felt good to remember that, to believe that.

But I’d known terrors the likes of which few could fathom, too, and it was those I would be calling on for this kind of work.

There was no lack of them to draw from. Black had preferred. I recalled, to use fear as a watchman’s cudgel: sparingly, measuredly, and always bluntly. He’d seen it as a tool, and not a particularly good one. But while my father had been my first teacher, he’d not been the only one. I’d learned from the Empress and the Diabolist, exemplars of the most horrifying Wasteland virtues, and then from even harsher creatures. The King of Winter and his patient, farsighted cruelties. Shrouded Sve Noc, a godhead born of fear and blood and kept hallowed through the same. Even the Dead King had, in his own way, been a teacher: you could not fight such a monster as long as I had without learning some of its ways. And so, honouring those many tutelages, I set to crafting horror.

I began with the smell.

Death had a particular reek to it. It came to the aftermath of battles along with the rest of the carrion, that stench of blood and shit and steel – with the rotting of flesh never far behind, even as the crows gobbled up the dead and flies burrowed into the flesh. I drew from the Doom, from the Battle of the Camps, but it wouldn’t be enough. Death come to a city wasn’t quite the same, even before stone and flesh began to burn green. A hint of the Hierarch’s madness spread through the streets of Rochelant, red hate bleeding out of every pore, and more from the burning blaze of green that’d begun at my very feet and devoured a fourth of Summerholm. All this I wove together and made my own, then slipped into the sleeping mind of Ambassador Livia Murena.

Her sleeping self sunk into the dark and gave me my opening: a glimpse of the winding streets and beautiful avenues of Mercantis. Night coursing through my veins like a river, eyes closed as I cut myself off from my senses and skimmed around the edge of the wards protecting the ambassador just the way Hierophant had taught me, I smiled and sunk my teeth into the older woman.

I began with murder. Livia Murena felt warm blood splash her face as a drow in the colours of the Losara opened the throat of a man with an obsidian blade. The ambassador screamed and stumbled away, wiping away with her hands and finding them soiled red. There was no relief to be found away from the drow. She turned the corner into an avenue only to find it burning green, legionaries dragging people out of houses and butchering them in the streets, eyes cold and hands steady. Livia Murena ran, finding a large plaza with a sprawling marble fountain, but painted Levantines of the Brigand’s Blood were there. Some amused themselves by drowning people, holding their heads under the water until the panicked scrabbling against the stone died, while others were pulling down a great statue with hammers and rope. Livia Murena let out a strangled sob, and as she did a painted warrior threw a barbed javelin at her that tore through the flesh of her shoulder.

Bleeding, in pain, she ran again.

She found only horror. Orcs tearing at the corpses of merchant lords with hungry fangs, armoured ogres smashing through villa gates to rip apart those huddling behind them, Taghreb and Soninke making bonfires of paintings and tapestries to roast the loot they’d ripped out of pantries over the corpses of their owners. Goblins made servants race only to shoot them in the back with crossbows, the drow blinded the young and let them bleed out screaming, jeering Callowans dragged entire families to the gallows to hang. Livia Murena wept but kept running until she found a tall house. Hers, I intuited, but it was not the house she sought. A wife, and though the face did not come to my mind’s eye long blonde tresses and fair skin did. It was enough.

Green flames and heavy smoked filled the halls of Livia Murena’s home as she raced through them and up, up the stairs and at the end of a too-long hallways where finally her great bedroom could be found. Relief as she found her wife standing there, besides the great canopy bed. Cassia , she exclaimed. With a crisp, resonating twang a coin went spinning. Livia Murena’s eyes went to it, spellbound, watched it rise and fall and land onto the open palm of the Black Queen, who had been sitting in the dark. The coin, shining gold, had landed on the side showing crossed swords.

“Do you believe in fate, Ambassador Livia?” I asked.

And before she could answer, her wife burned green. I drew on the screams from Three Hills, for that. I remembered those well. Cassia screamed and screamed and screamed , until mercifully she died. I met Livia Murena’s eyes and smiled, thin and sharp like a blade slid between the ribs.

“Not the right answer,” I told her. “Let us go again.”

And we did.

Mercantis was put to the sword and the coin showed swords and Cassia burned.

“Not the right answer,” I told the weeping ambassador. “Let us go again.”

And we did.

And we did.

And we did.

Nott until dawn did I let her learn the lesson this had been meant to convey. Cassia burned, the screaming having grown more vivid as the sleeping ambassador filled the gaps, and Livia wept exhaustedly as she fell on her knees. Like an old friend I leaned forward, offering a girlishly mischievous smile.

“Fate’s a trick, Livia,” I told her, and showed her the coin.

It had the crossed swords on both sides.

“The only way not to fall for it,” I said, gently smiling, “is not to flip the coin at all.”

I left her dreams alone, after that, but she slept not a wink anyway.

—

I was in Hakram’s infirmary room more often than my own quarters, or the offices made available to me – I’d pretty much handed those over to Vivienne – so it was there that messengers came to find me. It was the same with Archer, when she returned from the little errand I’d sent her on. I dipped my bread in the warm potage that was to be my morning meal, cocking an eyebrow at my friend.

“So?”

“Didn’t drive her mad,” Indrani replied, settling into the seat by my side, “but I’d bet it was a close thing.”

I popped the bread into my mouth and chewed on my mouthful thoughtfully. I’d walked the line just fine, then. If I kept doing this for too long I’d probably break the ambassador, which wasn’t the objective here, but I wanted at least one more night of this. Once could be dismissed as a fluke, but twice? Twice was a warning.

“What’d she look like?” I asked when I’d swallowed.

“Exhausted and twitchy,” Indrani said. “You really didn’t pull your punches there.”

“She needs to be more scared of me than she is of Malicia,” I replied, “and if we’re to get through this without Mercantis trying to blackmail the Grand Alliance, then I need that fear deep enough in the bone that they know exactly what the consequences of that would be.”

“Hey,” Archer shrugged, “you know me – I could care less if you want to turn the lot of them into gibbering wrecks. I’m just surprised it’s the two of us alone having this conversation, I guess.”

I threw her an unimpressed look. That had been less than subtle.

“If you have something to say, say it,” I told her.

She sighed, passing a hand through her long dark hair. Unbound, today, and a little messy. It suited her.

“You been fighting with Vivienne?” she asked.

My fingers clenched. She noticed it, unpleasantly perceptive as she was.

“So that’s a yes,” Archer mused. “I’d ask you if you want to talk about it, but I don’t think you’ve ever actually answered that question with a yes in your life.”

“That’s pretty rich, coming from you,” I flatly said.

Our last tense heart to heart had required half a fistfight to get started. She looked more amused than offended, waving the reply away.

“Sort that shit out, Cat,” Indrani said. “I won’t try to use sweet reason with you, because Gods know the odds on that are steep-”

“ Hey ,” I reproached.

“- but her sister cold-hearted logic will do,” Indrani blithely continued. “It’s too late for you to dismiss Vivienne from her place as your heiress: she’s got support, and when it comes to us she knows where a lot of bodies are buried. So if you won’t talk to her because she’s your friend and you’re being pissy for things not really her fault, then at least do it because otherwise you’re being a pretty terrible queen.”

I grimaced. Archer didn’t really care about Callow except maybe in the sense that a lot of her stuff was there and it’d affect some people she cared about if it got destroyed, but that didn’t mean she was unaware it was good angle to take with me. She wasn’t wrong, at least, that I couldn’t just let this go forever.

“I don’t like that I have to do things, now,” I admitted.

Indrani’s brow rose. I snorted.

“I mean that, when we disagree, I have to compromise with her now,” I explained. “Not always, and not on everything, but it still irks that I have to do it at all. I gave her the title in the first place, and ‘Drani it’s not that I think she’d done badly with it, on the contrary-”

“But she’s got power of her own now,” Archer finished. “And she doesn’t always agree with you.”

“I can’t just tell her to fuck off either, when we disagree,” I tiredly said. “If I do that in public she’ll lose a lot of support in the Army of Callow, and if she loses the Army there’s a lot less dissuading nobles from taking a swing at the crown down the line.”

It wouldn’t be a sure thing, and I was doing my best to polish her military record so that she’d have some reputation with the soldiers, but at the end of the day Vivienne just didn’t get on with them the way that I did. On occasion I’d taken some petty satisfaction in that, given how the nobility made no qualms of its preference for her and more people back home that I was comfortable with shared that opinion, but it was a hollow thing to embrace. After putting her in that position in the first place, how much of a prick would I have to be to relish her difficulties? It wasn’t a minor matter, either. There weren’t Dartwick household troops for Vivienne to call on, she had no personal holdings and most noble forces had either been abolished with their titles or curtailed under Imperial law. Within Callow, after the war it would the army Juniper and I had built that’d stand as the largest amount of people with swords.

My banner had the sword weighing more than the crown on the balance for a reason.

“I bet it’s like a burr in your boot that some of the folk back home like her better now,” Indrani knowingly said.

I breathed out, keeping my face calm.

“I’m starting to get tired of hearing that,” I evenly said.

She squinted at me.

“Yeah, that’s about the face you would have made,” Archer said. “And Viv’s never been great at handling your moods, so now you two fine ladies are in snit. Lovely.”

“It’ll pass,” I grunted.

“It’ll pass when you have a drink with her and you spell it out,” Indrani said. “But you already know that, Cat, you just don’t want to do it. I’m guessing you’ll get to it once you’re done tripping over the pride you keep claiming you don’t have.”

I flipped her off, but without much heat, and she took it in stride.

“Go find out what the Mercantis delegation will do to proper up their defences after tonight,” I said, having tired of this conversation the moment it began. “I want to know as soon as possible so I’ll know how to get around it.”

Another night of this, maybe two, and then I’d be ready for the talks. Even as she left, I began to consider the shape of the nightmare that would plague Livia Murena tonight.

It was not going to be any more pleasant that the last.

—

I’d let Hasenbach pick the room where, at long last, the diplomats would get their meeting.

I went to visit it beforehand though, to have a look at what I’d be working with. It was yet another hall from the seemingly endless supply of them the Arsenal had to offer, though this one was clearly not meant for meals. Multiple tables facing each other in half-circles, enough room between for servants to pass and no less than six ways in – as much for refreshments as the fetching of documents, I figured. Well lit, but with chandeliers and mage lights. I could work my way around both of those, I knew the tricks. It would do. I’d need to strike the right tone from the start, though. Come in alone and with not a thing in hand, when they’d be laden with attendants and papers.

I trailed a hand atop the smooth surface of the table, enjoying the grain of the wood, and frowned in thought. Ambassador Livia had only gone though another night of my tender attentions before I – Archer – had judged her to be on the ragged edge. Not a faint-hearted sort, that one, but I suspected a great deal more used to doling out cruelty than suffering it. Part of me wanted to throw in another night just to be sure, but there would be risks to that: the protective amulets the ambassador had worn after the first time might not have been a match for Night paired with the Hierophant’s eyes, but if the Mercantians asked for heroic protection this would get trickier. No, best to end it here.

Today, this very evening.

I napped through most of the afternoon, as using Night had been less than restful, and woke less than half a bell before we were due to hold the meeting. The clothes I was to wear were only of middling import, a simple grey tunic and matching trousers, but I made sure to wrap around myself the patchwork banners of the Mantle of Woe and set a jagged iron crown on my brow. With the last errand I’d asked of Indrani tucked away into my pocket and my dead staff of yew in my hand I limped to our appointed time, though with careful timing so that I would be the last to arrive. Not so late that it would be remarked upon, but just enough to be mildly insulting. The doors were opened for me by attendants, and even as my name and titles were announced I flicked an assessing glance at the people within.

That Cordelia Hasenbach had brought a number of scholars and secretaries was nothing unusual, but that she’d brought a full fifteen people with her was . She must have pieced together that she’d be handling the actual negotiations here mostly on her own. My gaze did not linger on them, instead moving to the delegation from Mercantis. Ambassador Livia Murena was easy to pick out from the rest: she sat at the centre, and her ostentatious gold and ivory chain of office was hard to miss. On the ivory medallion at the end of it thirty silver coins had been carved, the ancient crest of the merchant lords of the Consortium. Seven golden braids hung from her left shoulder, over a robe of deep blue silk that made it plain the ambassador was overweight.

Most of the diplomats were as well, for fat was considered a sign of wealth and power among the merchant lords of Mercantis. All wore blue silk and the seven braids denoting that they were here on the behalf of both Merchant Prince Fabianus and the Consortium itself – the prince’s business could carry three braids of gold, and the Consortium’s seven in silver, but only both in agreement could command the seven golden stripes – but for all the riot of bracelets and rings dripping from their arms and ears laden with and precious stones, no one save Ambassador wore anything around the neck. Each diplomat had an attendant standing behind them, all of them young and beautiful and utterly still. Mercantis did not practice slavery, it was said. Of the Free Cities, only Stygia still kept to that horror.

Yet Indrani had been raised a slave there, and called such, though no doubt if pressed her owner would have had papers proving it was mere bonded service. All very legal, nothing at all like slavery . That was the trick, you see: the ‘servants’ began with the debt of the sum it had cost to acquire them, and though they were paid for their work the roof and food they were provided cost them money. The debt increased, and the service continued until death – and then was passed onto children, for debts always carried in Mercantis. I kept that knowledge in mind, looking at the dark rings around Ambassador Livia’s pale brown eyes that cosmetics did not quite manage to hide, and found that guilt never came for the torturous horror I’d put this woman through.

I’d done worse to people a great deal less deserving.

“Queen Catherine,” the First Prince greeted me amiably. “I am glad of your presence.”

“Your Majesty,” Ambassador Livia said, tone even, “we are-”

“Let’s wrap this up quickly, Your Highness,” I interrupted, looking at Cordelia. “There’s a war on, in case you forgot.”

The ambassador was well-trained, so she did not betray her offence at the casually offered insult. It wouldn’t be the first I’d thrown her way since this started.

“I assure you, Your Majesty, that I have not,” the First Prince replied, eyebrows rising the faintest bit.

A warning to tone this down? No, I decided after a moment. She would have had other ways to reach me if restraint were called for. I slid into the seat at the edge of the part of the half-circle kept empty for myself and my delegation, seeing from the corner of my eye the dismay that flickered across some Mercantian faces when they realized I had come alone. That was not the mark of someone taking all this seriously. I drew lightly on the Night, softly, and wove a thread that slipped into the shadows beneath the table and to the side. It remained hidden, waiting. I leaned back into my seat, looking impatient, and waited for someone to speak.

“I must protest the insults you keep offering us, Queen Catherine,” Ambassador Livia said. “Has the Consortium not been a generous and understanding ally? What have we done to earn such treatment?”

This was the part, I thought, where I was supposed to demur and weave and bob and all those little diplomatic dances. So we could keep talking in precise truths and pretty lies, keep this all civilized as we tried to a war of words just as dangerous as one of steel. I did not bother.

“Either you genuinely don’t know the answer to that question,” I said, “and speaking with you is a waste of time. Or you do know the answer to that question, and you are still wasting my time. Which is it, Ambassador Livia?”

Her face tightened for the barest fraction of a moment before going almost unnaturally slack. That one had stung, huh. I glanced at the First Prince, whose face was the very definition of polite serenity.

“Is this serious?” I asked.

“It is, Queen Catherine,” Cordelia amiably replied, then half-glanced at the diplomats. “Though perhaps we should see to the purpose of this meeting, given the demands made by circumstance on all our hours.”

Under the table, she traced with a finger a Y against the Night. Yes , it meant. I was not to keep pushing them, she wanted this to advance.

“That would suit as well,” the man to the ambassador’s side smoothly said. “If there are no further objections?”

An expectant gaze went to me. Ambassador Livia had regained her calm on more than a surface level, so it was her I replied to.

“By all means,” I drily said. “The suspense has me all atwitter.”

“Given information recently acquired by the Consortium, it has become necessary to revisit the matter of the loans extended to the Grand Alliance,” the ambassador said.

N , Hasenbach’s fingers traced against the table. I pushed back my chair and rose to my feet.

“There are no such loans,” I flatly said. “As Lord Yannu Marave made exceedingly clear, I believe. This meeting is at an end.”

She looked, to my faint amusement, genuinely surprised. For career diplomats, they really weren’t catching on to this game quick. It wasn’t that they were fools, I thought, but simply that they weren’t used to so bluntly being dismissed . Mercantis might not be a power in the leagues of Praes or Procer, but it’d always been influential – and when crossed, it was not above spending coin to make its displeasure known.

“Perhaps the honourable ambassador refers to the loans extended to the Principate and its constituent principalities,” the First Prince mildly said. “I am sure the unfortunate wording will be rectified, Queen Catherine, if you give the ambassador opportunity to do so.”

I cocked a brow at the ambassador.

“We did not mean to imply that the Kingdom of Callow is indebted to the Consortium, Your Majesty,” Livia Murena lied. “My apologies for the misunderstanding.”

Barely refraining from rolling my eyes, I settled back into the seat.

“As was mentioned by our esteemed ambassador,” the man at Livia’s side said, pouty red lips offering up a smile, “the Consortium has learned of the particulars of Proceran debt. Given the almost... reckless borrowing practices that were used, doubts have been raised as to the capacity of the Principate of Procer to repay these debts.”

“Gods Below and Everburning,” I said, tone openly contemptuous. “You really are going to insist on being the Tower’s borrowed knife, aren’t you? No matter how many people warned me, I’d genuinely not believed that the Consortium would make that glaring a blunder.”

“A hollow accusation,” Ambassador Livia replied. “And one thrown very carelessly, I might add. There are limits to our tolerance, Queen Catherine.”

Y , Cordelia wrote. I changed course, snorting in feigned amusement.

“You know what?” I mused, “Maybe you’re right. I just assumed that you lot are going to try something as hilariously ill-advised as attempting to coerce an alliance that commands more soldiers on a single front than there are people in all of Mercantis. That was premature of me. Go on, then. Speak.”

I thinly smiled.

“Prove me wrong,” I said.

There was a beat of silence.

“We recognize the heroic contributions made by the Grand Alliance, and Procer in particular, to the safety of all Calernia,” Ambassador Livia said. “It is why we have been so willing to extend loans, and at rates with little precedent. The Consortium will continue to support the war effort however it can, rest assured that this is not in doubt.”

“That is most pleasing to hear,” Cordelia mildly said. “His Grace Fabianus has reconsidered my request to expel the Praesi embassy, then?”

I smothered a grin. She had them there, considering Malicia was the Dead King’s open – if rather lethargic – ally.

“The high court of the Consortium is debating such a measure, Your Highness,” Ambassador Livia smiled.

“Indeed,” Cordelia Hasenbach smiled back, just as pleasantly, “yet I recall hearing the debate was to be set aside indefinitely. Has this measure been revoked?”

“That is quite possible,” the ambassador evaded. “Given the length of our journey here, our news are grown quite out of date.”

“You were leading up to a ‘but’, Ambassador,” I said. “Do get on with it, instead of insulting the intelligence of everyone in this room.”

“While the Consortium remains firmly behind the war effort,” Ambassador Livia said, tone aggressively calm, “given the financial troubles of the Principate and its extensive amount of loans it has been suggested that assurances must be sought. Else a collapse of Proceran commerce could feasibly, in the coming years, bankrupt Mercantis itself.”

“A reasonable worry,” the fair-haired princess replied. “I have pondered this issue myself, as it happens. The Highest Assembly is willing to sign a treaty guaranteeing a set portion of the taxes collected by the office of First Prince until the debts are settled. Would such an assurance be acceptable to you?”

Promising coin that had yet to be collected, huh. I supposed that was one way to make up for lack of revenue. Mind you, if Cordelia’s eventually successor refused to pay up there honestly wasn’t that much that the Consortium would be able to do about it. Unless the treaty is guaranteed by the Grand Alliance itself , I thought, and glanced at Hasenbach. Even the most firebrand of First Princes would hesitate at antagonizing its two most powerful allies in such a way. Canny woman , I thought, not without fondness. It wasn’t like myself or the Dominion would refuse to be guarantors of this: it’d give us some leverage over Procer after the war, which given how short-lived Proceran gratitude tended to be would prove most welcome.

Somehow I doubted it was a coincidence that this arrangement would end up soothing some of the lingering fears about Procer belonging to the two nations Hasenbach wanted to keep as close allies. Circles within circles within circles, with this one.

“It would go some way in abating worries, Your Most Serene Highness,” Ambassador Livia replied, “yet to invest more coin into the war, the Consortium seeks more practical dividends.”

Ah, and there we were. Her eyes went to me but did not linger. She never looked at me for long, I was beginning to notice. Even when she was talking to me. The nightmares had left a mark, as they were meant to.

“It has come to the attention of Mercantis that plans are being drawn for a city to be raised at the heart of the Red Flower Vales,” the diplomat with the pale brown eyes said. “Cardinal, is it not?”

I drummed my fingers against the tabletop in open impatience.

“We recognize such a city for the opportunity it is,” Ambassador Livia said. “And so in place of further loans, the Consortium seeks instead to purchase monopolies on the trading of certain goods in Cardinal.”

I cocked my head to the side. Huh. That was cleverer than what I’d been expecting, actually. They had to know that purchasing land ceded by Callow and Procer was not a suggestion that’d go over well, but monopolies over trade that did not yet exist was another story. By putting up gold now they could get a stranglehold on certain kinds of trade down the line, effectively pushing out any competition by being the sole providers for long enough that people would grow used to relying on them. It was their old role as middleman made anew, I thought with a touch of admiration. The merchant lords were a greedy but they were not without wits. This was actually halfway reasonable, as far as demands went, which had me rather wary.

“And how long would these monopolies be expected to last?” the First Prince asked.

“Permanently,” Ambassador Livia said. “This would reflected in the price offered for them, naturally.”

I did not need Cordelia’s finger to trace the N to know this was not to be tolerated. So this was to be the pivot of this little adventure. Now they would push, or be pushed.

“Mercantis,” I said, enunciating the word slowly. “The City of Bought and Sold. The most impartial place there is to be had on Calernia, for coin is queen and it claims no party.”

“A lovely compliment, Your Majesty,” Ambassador Livia replied, smiling like a shark.

“Spell it out,” I said, learning forward. “What happens, when I laugh at this and tell you to crawl back to your island.”

I drew on Night. Slowly, quietly. The shadows of the room began to lengthen, in the spaces between the glow of the mage lights and the chandeliers.

“There is no need for such hostility,” the diplomat said. “We will not withdraw our support for the war effort, as I have said. Yet it would be difficult for the Consortium to consider extending further loans when it would be courting its own bankruptcy.”

Which sounded all nice and reasonable, until you knew what we knew. Hasenbach had told me that Malicia was almost certainly aware that Procer needed the flow of gold from Mercantis to keep its head above the water. Malicia had in turn told at least some of these fine fellows the piece of information. This had the Empress’s touch all over it, the more I saw the more it was obvious. As usual, Malicia had played to all the angles. Merchants not in the know would not consider ending loans to be enemy action, and if the Grand Alliance reacted harshly they might turn to the Tower for protection against our perceived tyranny. Merchants that were in the know, and there were bound to be a few, would consider us to be deep enough in the hole that they could extract concessions from us if they didn’t push it too far. No doubt the Empress had made promises of protection to encourage that perception, and leaked information about where our armies were.

Very far from Mercantis, the bottom line was.

“I’m curious,” I said. “You must believe – I can’t understand this, otherwise – that you have the upper hand here. And I have to ask, Gods, I really have to ask-”

The Night deepened, the light dimmed.

“ Why? ” I coldly asked. “Why is that you think that, exactly? Explain it to me.”

“No threat has been made, Queen Catherine,” the ambassador said. “Your behaviour is-”

“Let me tell you what happens,” I softly interrupted, “if you choose to become my enemy.”

I met Livia Murena’s eyes. Darkness deepened around us, and came a faint sound like the dying whisper of a scream.

“I will not be civilized,” I gently told her. “I will not keep to laws and treaties, to decency or the milk of human kindness. If you become the tool of a woman who has allied herself with the King of Death, if you willingly make that choice, then I will visit a ruin on you that will still haunt the sleep of men in a hundred years.”

She looked away, towards the First Prince.

“Your Highness-”

“Don’t look at her,” I said. “It won’t help. She can’t stop me, and she doesn’t particularly want to.”

The ambassador’s pudgy fingers tightened around her chain of office and she turned back to me, gathering her courage, but my hands had slipped in the pocket where I had stowed away my last surprise.

“Do you believe in fate, Ambassador Livia?” I asked.

She did not answer, eyes fixed on the golden coin in my hand. There were crossed swords on the side that could be seen. The other woman’s breathing went uneven, her hands trembled, and still I waited. Sweat drenched the back of her neck, smudged the cosmetics on her face, and in her eyes I saw reaped the terror that I had sown.

“Yes,” Livia Murena hoarsely answered. “Yes, I do.”

“Then let us keep to laws and treaties,” I said, my smile never reaching my eyes. “To decency and the milk of human kindness.”

Or else , I did not say. She heard it anyway.

I did not speak another word for the rest of the meeting, or need to.

Chapter 43: Conclusions

“I have been assured that my enemies lie behind every shadow, which is why they will henceforth be illegal.”
– Dread Empress Sinistra III

During one of the first conversations I’d ever had with Black, he’d told me that he did not believe rule through fear alone could be sustainable. I found it one of those lovely little ironies of life that my first teacher had arrived by cold pragmatism to share that belief with Cordelia Hasenbach, who’d gotten there largely on account of being a halfway decent person. Whatever the reason, in practice it’d ended up meaning that while we could have bullied Mercantis into withdrawing with nothing to show for its efforts they’d instead been thrown red meat. Not in the quantity or quality they’d wanted, but enough that they’d have something to chew on besides their pride.

In the event of a lapsed debt by princes, Hasenbach committed the office of First Prince to taking up the debt in their name and repaying it from diverted taxes at a fixed rate. She also guaranteed payment in goods if coin was not forthcoming, for up to a third of the worth of debts and offered that both commitments she’d just made would be guaranteed by a treaty under the aegis Grand Alliance. To sate the hungriest of the merchant lords, she even sold a handful of monopolies as well: only for a duration of ten years, however, and they would solely be enforced in Proceran lands.

Mostly it was monopolies on goods in which Mercantis already dominated trade – perfume, cloth, dyes and enchanted luxuries – that were sold, which would essentially serve as a ten-year stay on competition in those goods whether or not the monopoly was enforced in Callow. My kingdom had neither the skilled artisans to begin trading in such goods nor the gold to sink into building the workshops necessary for their creation. In time we might, but the merchant lords would have quite the head start by then and no competition from the greatest realm on the surface of Calernia while they took it. My people lost nothing with this and might yet gain, though. The audience ended coolly but not with hostility, and the matter was considered settled.

For now.

The following days went by quickly, the last stretches of haggling over how the Hainaut campaign was to be raised and waged – Malanza was still trying to trade back some of the drow sigils for Arlesite foot and horse, the Iron Prince wanted fewer prongs on the attack than Juniper’s suggested three – occupying my hours along with regular meetings with the White Knight to discuss which Named should be assigned to the campaign. So far it was skewing a little heavily favour of heroes for my tastes, but we were starting to figure out what a functional roster would look like. A haze of anticipation hung in the air of the Arsenal, as all awaited the arrival of the envoys from the Titanomachy.

They were the last loose end left to tie up, and when they were tied we’d return to the business of war.

—

When the Gigantes did arrive, they startled me with their swiftness.

We had less than a day to prepare between the first warning that the three giants had reached Iserre and their unexpected arrival in the Arsenal. The fortress in Iserre where they’d appeared was used to cross into the Twilight Ways but wasn’t actually one of the translation points, just a shortcut to head towards one in southeastern Salia. Which made it all the more of a surprise when the three giants emerged in the translation room of the outer gatehouse to the Arsenal most of a day later. Neither the swiftness of the march nor the direct crossing into the first level of Arsenal defences were something any of our people would have been able to replicate, Hierophant privately admitted to me.

I got the message the Gigantes were sending, as I expected the Procerans and Levantines did as well: there were mysteries at their disposal we could only dream of, and we should not get too cocksure even after all we’d managed to build.

The hastily arranged welcoming party for the envoys ended up being a headache to wrangle. The Titanomachy still did not have any formal diplomatic relations with the Principate, and while it was dubious they’d attack the First Prince if she stood before them that did not mean they would be willing to speak with her. Which meant Hasenbach couldn’t come, and if Procer couldn’t have someone in attendance then to save face it would be best if the Grand Alliance simply ‘elected to send a single representative’. I voted for Lord Yannu Marave to handle it, given the Dominion’s cordial if distant relations with the Titanomachy, but he voted for me and the First Prince abstained.

A round of bickering later, I ended up sent out when the whole matter was settled by our being notified that Hanno intended on going to greet the Gigantes himself. If the heroic representative went so must the one for villains, while Lord Yannu and I could not both go – it’d make Hasenbach’s absence all the more glaring. Masego tried to be there as well, rather transparently so he could have a look at the Gigantes from close with his magical eyes, but I turned him away. He could try his hand at that later, when the diplomatic claptrap was over with. And so I found myself standing once more atop the stairs leading down to the stone floor where the translation ritual would take place.

At least I wouldn’t have to go down the damned stairs again, so there was that.

I wore formal clothing in black and silver, a crown set on my brow and the Mantle of Woe on my back as a pointed reminder of the two offices I was standing for here. The White Knight was in plate with a sword at his hip, though he’d chosen not to wear a helmet. We’d exchanged a few courtesies after I arrived, a dozen attendants from the Arsenal staff standing behind us, but while there’d been no brusqueness from either part we’d quickly lapsed into silence anyway. Neither of us were in much of a talking mood. There was a little more to it than that, of course. Since our conversation over the fate of the Red Axe, we had not once shared words save in our official capacities.

There was a price to everything, I’d learned that lesson early – and never forgotten it since, as fate went out of its was to refresh my memory every few years. My thoughts did not get to linger on the subject, as a shiver of power in the room warned that the Gigantes were soon to be among us. Leaning against my staff, I had a look over the edge from the high vantage point.

Immediately it became clear that this was not the usual ritual. The gates in and out of the half-realm that served as the funnel into the Arsenal had a particular look to them, like a cut into the fabric of Creation that rippled outwards, but the large gate beginning to open was nothing alike. A broad and tall rectangle bordered in shining glyphs came into being at once, with a muted blast of air, and along the inner side of the border there was a small tremor. The filling of the rectangle wavered, and I realized it had been almost like a cut as the layer between the Arsenal and the travellers crumpled and shrivelled into nothing. Slower than our own method, I noted, but it looked more stable and their gate was perfectly aligned with the ground on both layers of reality.

I wasn’t sure that was actually possible under the laws of Trismegistan sorcery.

The Gigantes came in without fanfare, or for that matter human mages guiding their translation. I’d not been sure what to expect, as I’d never seen any member of their race before and illustrations in books tended to vary wildly. Their height was impossible to miss, of course. The tallest must have been thirty feet tall, and the others but a few feet shorter, which had them standing taller than the ledge I’ve been using to overlook the platform. Though there was some variation between them, their skin was a deep brown and looked rather coarse. Though shaped not unlike humans in much greater proportions, there were easy differences to pick out: they had long, powerful legs and their necks were noticeable shorter.

Their clothing was light, eerily beautiful white cloth which had no stitches but instead complicated folds that revealed a triangle of brown flesh beneath the neck and went down in a tunic that covered down to the lower legs. It was belted with flashing bronze, fashioned as a hundred little cards of the metal interlinked, and the short-sleeved cloth revealed arms covered by winding, curling patterns of flowing gold. It was the same with the parts of their legs bared, and their sandals were polished stone bound by sinuous copper strings. Two had beards, of the same dark brown as their skin, which were without a moustache and went down to their chest in luxuriant curls – to the side they went up to where ears would have been on a human, though on the giants there was only smooth skin and a small cartilage-like ridge.

All of them had shaved their heads in part, though the one without a beard instead had a long stripe of hair beginning near his – – her? Hard to tell, I saw no difference in body shape – brow and going all the way down to the back. Their eyes were startlingly human-like, though, I found. Perhaps a little pale for our kind, but otherwise much the same as ours and similarly topped by eyebrows.

The gate collapsed into the ground behind the giants without a sound, and there was not a trace of it in the heartbeat that followed. They took slow steps forward, careful of the arched ceiling above, and the tallest of the three – he had a beard, and unsettlingly luminous blue eyes – subtly moved his head and arms while his body otherwise remained eerily rigid. Hanno moved, at my side, the way his own head moved to the side displaying what I believed to be friendliness and deference. The Gigantes shot me a cursory look, which I returned with a face like a blank mask.

“I am Ykines Silver-on-Clouds,” the giant said, his Lower Miezan only slightly accented. “Amphore for the Hushed Absence, envoy of the Titanomachy. I greet you, Queen of Callow.”

I’d not expected him to recognize me, to be honest. It unsettled me some, even though I could reason it away at the cloak and crown being rather distinctive. Amphore wasn’t the title Hanno had called this one by, I thought with a frown, when we’d last spoken of the Gigantes. It’d been skope , I was certain. From context I’d gathered that amphore was a higher title, though I was uncertain as to what it entailed. Before I could answer the greeting, the envoy turned towards the White Knight. They moved their bodies in ways that were too quick and slight for me to really catch any of the nuances.

“I greet you, Guest of the Nine Peaks,” Ykines said.

“I welcome you in peace,” Hanno replied.

“Indeed,” I said, forcing myself not to cock my head to the side. “You are all welcomed to the Arsenal, as guests of the Grand Alliance.”

“We receive your hospitality,” Ykines Silver-on-Clouds said. “Slumber will be required for some hours. After, the Titanomachy can be heard and hear in turn.”

Blunt, though I didn’t particularly mind. I didn’t hound the envoys with small talk, instead passing them to the awaiting attendants. Most of the hallways of the Arsenal were too low even if the giants bent their bodies, so it would be a specific itinerary they had to follow. Their rooms would be fitted for them, at least, though they’d be lodged in the Repository instead of the Alcazar. Their ‘quarters’ were a repurposed warehouse, though it’d been decorated richly enough I wouldn’t have believed it if told. Following through exactly on their word, the Gigantes disappeared into their quarters and did not stir in the following hours. Knocks on the doors were not answered.

It’d been early morning, and it was only mid afternoon that they emerged. Lord Yannu’s presence was requested, as was the White Knight’s, and for a few more hours the doors closed. They broke only for a communal meal – Gigantes apparently did not eat much meat, to my surprise – and then cloistered themselves away for one last hour. The two humans left after that, and I was not entirely surprised to receive a messenger from Hanno soon afterwards. I agreed to meet without delay and limped my way to one of the Alcazar halls not too far away.

He’d changed out of his armour, I noticed, and settled into his usual grey tunic. A few papers and scrolls took up part of the table where he’d sat, as well as a quill and inkwell, but it looked a light workload. The White Knight duly rose to his feet when I entered, which I dismissed with a grunt as I took a seat on the other side of the table. Hanno had asked for the meeting, so as I sipped at the glass of water he’d poured for me I waited for him to speak.

“The Myrmidon has volunteered to participate to the Hainaut campaign,” he told me. “Since the Grey Pilgrim will be participating as well and the Mirror Knight will be with him, the Anchorite must stay in Cleves. The principality grows too lightly defended otherwise.”

My brow rose. Not the conversation I’d expected, though it wasn’t unimportant either. Cleves was admittedly getting low on Named, since both the Exalted Poet and the Maddened Keeper had come from that front and they wouldn’t exactly be coming back.

“I can leave the Red Knight there, if you’re worried,” I said. “Though not the Headhunter, that tracking trick is much too useful.”

The Red Knight was one of the finest killing Named on my side, but she was also deeply unpleasant in a lot of ways. There were only so many times you could be told that the weak should die and the strong take what they wanted before it became more than slightly grating. No, given the difficulties inherent in juggling a coalition of Named it might be wiser to leave her regardless – I could even cite Named running thin in Cleves as the reason why when she inevitably complained about being left out of the offensive.

“That would be appreciated,” he nodded. “I also intend to reassign the Stained Sister from Twilight’s Pass to the Cleves theatre, unless you have a major objection.”

My brow rose.

“She’s been doing well there, last I heard,” I said.

Hard old girl, the Stained Sister, and her affinity with Light made her very useful against the massive necromantic constructs that the Dead King used as siege engines up north.

“I need someone to take up leadership in Cleves,” the White Knight admitted. “With the Mirror Knight gone, the eldest hero in the region is the Anchorite and they are... not a good fit.”

Yeah, spending forty years in exile in the mountains did not tend to do wonders for one’s social skills. The Myrmidon was probably second in the heroic pecking order there, right now, but while an impressive fighter all her languages except some obscure Penthesian dialect were a little shaky. She also despised the Red Knight, a feeling violently returned, which made her even worse a fit. The Knight wasn’t exactly a leader of villains – I’d assigned mostly Named with an independent streak in Cleves partly as a way to prevent her from gathering a power base – but she was the strongest of my lot in the region, which carried some weight.

“You need someone good with Light assigned to the Pass,” I said. “We’re already pulling out the Forsworn Healer, they’re starting to look a little bare up there.”

Of the three villains in Lycaonese lands – the Bitter Blacksmith, the Affable Burglar and the Skinchanger – only the last was truly fighting fit in my opinion. From Above’s lot the Daring Pyromancer had proved worth twenty times his weight in gold since he’d come from the Free Cities and the Bloody Sword’s appearance as the first Lycaonese hero of the war had been a massive morale boost for his countrymen, but for all their skill neither of them could smash a beorn the way a Light-wielder could.

“The Stalwart Apostle will be heading there, the Astrologer has agreed to take charge of her,” he countered.

Ugh, that Ashuran lunatic. I didn’t care how often she’d predicted storms, what she did was just specialized scrying and not some sort of unearthly discipline. Still, she was older and not prone to getting herself killed. There were worse mentors to have. Like the Skinchanger, who the Lycaonese would probably have gone wild over as their first Named in at least half a century if she’d not also been a shapeshifting cannibal. That, uh, tended to put a damper on things.

“The Unravellers are proving effective, so I’ll make my peace with it,” I sighed. “You hear back from the Swaggering Duellist?”

“He still considers his honour sworn to the protection of the First Prince until next winter solstice,” Hanno replied, “even if she personally orders him north. We’ll be without him.”

Shame, the man might be next to useless in an actual battle but he’d be a right headache thrown at Revenants.

“The roster’s taking shape,” I mused. “Archer is leaning towards releasing what’s left of her old band, right now. If she does, I take it you want the Paladin for up north?”

“His presence would neatly fill the niches left empty by the departure of the Stained Sister and the Forsworn Healer, when combined with the Stalwart Healer’s assignment,” he agreed.

Replacing strong hands with weaker ones, but then if we wanted our finest fighters in Hainaut we couldn’t then complain they weren’t elsewhere. I sipped at my water, and a moment of silence I offered as an opportunity to speak up ensued. We were done with Named, then. Good.

“How’d the talks with the Titanomachy go?” I bluntly asked.

“Fruitfully,” he replied. “A formal proposition will be made to the Grand Alliance this evening.”

My brow rose.

“Good news,” I said. “What are they offering?”

He met my eyes calmly and did not reply. I knew instinctively, from the start, that this wasn’t the silence of someone choosing his words. I still waited.

“So it’s going to be like that,” I eventually said, voice gone quiet.

“You cannot have it both ways, Catherine,” Hanno simply replied. “Lord Marave will soon attempt to arrange a formal meeting of the Grand Alliance, during which he and I will present the offer made by the envoys of the Titanomachy. That is all I have to say on this matter.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to correct him, to say that he should be calling me Queen Catherine then, but I mastered my temper. I would not further salt these fields out of petty spite. I breathed out, studying him. I felt, I’d admit it, a tinge of sadness over this. We’d been friends, in our own way. It had been a friendship with many boundaries, but a friendship nonetheless. Perhaps we might be that again, someday, but even if we were it wouldn’t be the same. I looked for an echo of the same thing in him but found only a tranquillity that now seemed... cool. Distant.

Perhaps it always had been, I thought, and I’d just been too busy staring at my reflection in the pond to notice.

“Then we’re done talking,” I said. “I will see you when the proposal is made, White Knight.”

For a moment I thought he might speak, but instead he nodded.

I had neither the words nor the right to change his mind, and so I simply left.

—

The message came within moment of my having returned to my quarters, and I wasted no time agreeing to the time suggested – a little after supper, this very night. A note from Vivienne was awaiting me also, as it happened. Her people in the Arsenal staff had seen Lord Yannu and the First Prince having a private meeting that began not long after my own with Hanno. The Levantine lord made no such effort with me, I could not help but note, and somehow I doubted it was because he’d expected the White Knight would fill me in. Hanno had, after all, taken pains to make it understood that he would not meddle in the political affairs of the Grand Alliance.

Was Marave showing goodwill to the First Prince, to make up for the times we’d made common front to leverage her? Callow had common interests with the Dominion, it was true, but my kingdom was far and Procer was close. Careful Yannu might simply be living up to his name once more, hedging the Dominion’s bets when it came to its alliances. It was unpleasant to be the one left out of the loop this time, but I would take it as a helpful reminder that my influence within the Grand Alliance was not something everyone enjoyed. I’d concentrated a lot of power in my hands by virtue of being both Queen of Callow and representative for villains, and while no one was trying to replace me that didn’t mean no measures would ever be taken to check me.

The council came quickly, and after an afternoon’s worth of anticipation I found the proceedings rather anticlimactic. The White Knight standing as witness, Lord Yannu brought out written transcriptions of the proposal made by Ykines Silver-on-Clouds on behalf of the Titanomachy. The goods offered were well worth a second look, I silently admitted to myself. Two hundred wardstones, around a hundred artefacts suited for fighting and the temporary services of ten artisans from the Reticent Fidelity – a Chorus whose preoccupation was such artefacts, and whose members were some of the most frequent traders of their kind with Levant – to adjust them before they were used, as well as lend their expertise on the fronts so long as it did not involve combat.

In ‘exchange’, the Gigantes required two of their spellsingers – whose identity had yet to be determined – to have full access to the Arsenal, its resources and all its public projects. They also wanted formal recognition by the Grand Alliance of their people’s right to use the Twilight Ways.

Tempting as the artefacts were, I was honestly inclined to hold out for better terms given what was being asked of us. The Arsenal had cost a fortune to make and carried the research of some of the finest minds on Calernia: we ought to ask for more than trinkets if we were to share it with the Titanomachy. Then Lord Yannu put the final part of the offer on the table, and I was glad to have held my tongue.

“The Titanomachy acknowledges the threat of the Dead King’s rising,” Lord Marave said, “and though they will not make war at the side of Procer, they offer instead a gift: a great warding, raised along the shores of the Tomb, that will turn away the dead.”

I saw the hunger in Hasenbach’s eyes at the words and knew the giants had us. I set aside the strategic implications of such a gift, instead wondering that the Gigantes knew to make it at all. It was not yet common knowledge that we were to have an offensive in Hainaut. I eyed the White Knight and the Lord of Alava, wondering how much they’d told the giants, before admitting to myself it didn’t matter. The Gigantes might have made the offer meaning to begin the work in Cleves, were the shores were somewhat secure, and going east along the water with our armies in support. Besides, even if it turned out these two had been overly chatty the results they brought more than justified it.

It was tempting. Gods, but it was damned tempting. If we took back Hainaut all the way to the shore and behind that wave the Gigantes came in to raise wards rivalling the quality of those beneath the Red Snake Wall, the nature of this war would change. The heavily fortified Lycaonese lands would become the main path of invasion for Keter, and the lakeside fronts would stabilize almost overnight. Enough that it might be possible for us to take a stab at the Crown of the Dead itself, should Masego come through with Quartered Seasons.

“Gigantes do not bargain,” the White Knight told us. “This is the only offer there will be, and I ask you consider it seriously.”

Hasenbach thanked him, and it was agreed that we would reconvene tomorrow after having ‘considered’ matters, but everyone in the room knew how this was going to end. It was just a matter of how long we’d delay before accepting so we wouldn’t be looking too desperate.

—

There were still a few days left to my stay in the Arsenal, but it was swiftly coming to an end.

As soon as the treaty was the Gigantes was wrapped up and my own few affairs settled, I’d be returning to Hainaut to begin arranging the campaign from there. Indrani would be coming with me, and perhaps eventually Masego as well – it depended on how the Quartered Seasons project was looking – but there were others I would be leaving behind. I was looking at one that’d sting the most, once more settled in the same old infirmary seat that’d become as a second bed for me. The only sign that Hakram was healing was that the healing mages had removed the breathing spell, trusting his lungs to carry him without the help now. Otherwise, his sleeping form had not changed.

“I’m going to have leave you behind,” I quietly said. “’Drani’s right. I could stretch out my stay by doing some planning from here, but it’d just be delaying the inevitable.”

It still sickened me to think that I’d be abandoning him to this little bed in this little room, when the only reason he was wounded at all was that he’d fought for me. A knock on the door jolted me out of my thoughts, though it also irked me more than a little. I’d instructed my people not to disturb me.

“Come in,” I said, tone forcefully even.

I’d give whoever had the come the benefit of the doubt, if they were willing to interrupt against my clear instructions. It was not some nervous messenger who came in, though, but Vivienne Dartwick. I immediately bit down on the sharp words already on the tip of my tongue. Vivienne did not look nervous, not exactly. It’d take more than our current disagreements to make a woman who’d faced down a Princess of Summer feel nervous. But she did look... cautious. Hesitant. And she’d noticeably dressed down.

In Salia she’d gotten into the habit of wearer nice dresses. Nothing extravagant – she was Callowan, and we were at war – but there’d been a distinct noble tinge to it. It made sense. Her father had been a noble, if one stripped of his lands after the Conquest, and she must have worn clothes not unlike those when she’d been younger. I’d never occurred to me how different it made her look until just now, when I saw her for the first time in ages in something closer to the leathers she’d worn as the Thief. There were still skirts and leggings beneath the long shirt, but this was a notable departure from usual.

“Cat,” she greeted me. “Do you have a moment?”

She had a bottle in hand, I noted. The glass was of poor quality, so it was probably Callowan. Vale summer wine? She’d come prepared. Or trying to bribe me, like I was a drunk that could be bought with a favourite poison.

“I asked for-” I began, and saw something in her face close.

I bit down on the sentence. The hesitance, the dressing down, the wine. Gods but she was trying, wasn’t she? When it wasn’t even her fault. And there was something about the change clothes that left me a sour taste in the mouth. It felt a little like abasement, and I did not like what it said about either of us that she’d thought it might work. Poor timing was no reason to bite her head off.

“Never mind,” I said. “Come in, close the door behind you.”

She nodded, but the wariness did not leave. She looked a little at a loss as to what she should say, even as she sat down at my side in the same chair Indrani usually did.

“I was saying my goodbyes,” I told her. “Or maybe warning him they were coming, I suppose.”

I wasn’t going to leave tomorrow, after all, even if the date was not far in the future either.

“I still can’t believe he was wounded this badly,” she admitted. “He was never our finest fighter, but he always seemed so... solid.”

I grunted in agreement.

“Nobody’s solid against demons,” I said. “At least the Mirror Knight cut him before the taint could spread.”

Otherwise... I thought of Nephele’s pleading eyes, and my staff coming down. I closed my eyes for a moment and breathed steadily, in and out, until the cold fear that’d seized me ebbed low. Gods. Even just the thought of having to do the same to Hakram...

“It’s been a long few years, hasn’t it?” Vivienne said, tone almost thoughtful.

She was looking at me with an expression that was hard to read. My jaw clenched in embarrassment.

“For everyone,” I said.

“For you more than me,” she said. “We’re both tired, Cat, but it’s a different kind of tired.”

“A hollow excuse,” I said.

The heights where I now stood had been reached through a pile of corpses. I would not spit on those deaths by moaning about the burdens of authority . Vivienne said nothing for some time. It did not mind, though the silence was not exactly comfortable.

“I have been putting together a census of Callow,” she suddenly said.

My brow rose in surprise. I’d not actually heard about that.

“The Fairfaxes only held them infrequently and by unreliable methods, but under the Carrion Lord the Empire gathered a great deal of trustworthy information,” Vivienne continued.

Black had probably been most interested in population numbers and what the local trades were, I thought, since that information would allow him to follow the flow of coin. Lack of gold where there should be plenty would have told him which nobles were trying to raise troops to rebel.

“What do you intend to do with it?” I asked.

“I want to fund workshops and guilds to foster certain trades,” she said. “We have the materials to make dyes and the manners of cloths that have enriched Mercantis. Royal coin could help our people enter the trade. And we could organize much, through guilds: the lumber from Holden and what was once Liesse would be worth a fortune out east, where they so sorely lack it. Trading cattle with the Clans upriver for amber and fur would not only enrich us, it would give the orcs a reason never to resume raiding.”

“You need peace for that,” I gently reminded her.

For there to be any trade with the east, to have the coin to make any of this at all.

“I know,” she assured me. “I really do. I understand that the war with the Dead King is what matters right now.”

She met my eyes, the blue-grey of them grown pale under the glow of the magelights.

“But I need you to know that I won’t be a... parasite,” she said. “I won’t just coast to the throne on your reputation and then do nothing with this. You put trust in me, Cat. And I know some of it is because I learned to see what you see – how much more we could be, if we stop seeing greenskins as the enemy – but I want to believe you saw in me the makings of a good queen.”

Her voice had grown raw. I held my breath, somehow afraid it would be enough to interrupt.

“I want to live up to it,” Vivienne said, eyes gone hard as stone. “I will live up to it.”

Slowly, I breathed out. She did not speak a word more, only searching my face with something like desperation.

“I know,” I quietly said. “I never saw you as a...”

I did not stay parasite , though the word echoed in the silence anyway. I passed a hand through my hair, mulling over my words. However inarticulate my first words had been, I saw on Vivienne’s face they had at least taken the edge off of the apprehension. With clumsy hands I ended up reaching for my pipe, that old gift from Masego that had become so dear to me, and filled it. Moments later, a touch of Night was enough for me to breathe out a long stream of wakeleaf. Vivienne had been patient, and so I talked.

“I believe you’ll be a good queen,” I said. “I genuinely do. And while I have been an able warlord, I don’t think the talents that helped me there would suit peace times.”

I’d grown too used to having my orders obeyed without questioning. I’d grown too used to resorting to violence to get my way, to schemes and assassinations and all the bastard ways to see your will done. Those methods had their place for any queen, but they’d come to be just a little too close to my hand. Too easily grasped. I liked to think I had done the best I could for my people, but I would not deny I had done it as a tyrant. Vivienne was not weak, but even as a heroine she’d disliked killing. It would not be her first resort. And the plans she was already making only reinforced my belief I’d made the right choice of successor.

“That’s part of what makes me angry, I think,” I admitted. “I know my name will make it onto the pages of history books, Vivienne. But back home, I can’t help but suspect I’ll be remembered as the dark days before you took up the crown.”

I smiled, a tad bitterly.

“Necessary days, most will agree,” I murmured. “They were savage times and so Callow required a savage queen. But we were well rid of them and her, afterwards, so that a more enlightened era might take their place.”

That enlightened era, I thought, was sitting next to me with something like grief on her face.

“It won’t be like that,” Vivienne fiercely said. “You know I wouldn’t let them...”

I took her hand for a moment, clenched it in a gesture too hard to be gratitude but too grateful to be anger.

“I can already see the current,” I gently told her. “And its inevitable end.”

It wasn’t without reason it was happening. This had not sprouted from thin air as if by divine intervention. Deciding to keep Akua in my service had cost me much esteem among even my most loyal, and back home sending Callowans to die on foreign fields against the Dead King had become increasingly unpopular as the soldiers stayed abroad and the taxes stayed high. I wouldn’t face revolt over this, I suspected at least in part because anyone who might feasibly lead one was either dead or part of my armies. But I’d turned Callow into a cradle of armies, and only that. My only legacy among my people would be the victories and defeat I had led my soldiers through.

It was not an enjoyable thought.

“Archer chewed me out,” I admitted, “in that way she does when she pretends it’s not what she’s doing.”

“Because Indrani is much too tough and aloof to care about it when her friends quarrel, naturally,” Vivienne amusedly said. “It would be beneath her to ever meddle in such things.”

I grinned, though it faded after a moment.

“She was right, though,” I said, “when she castigated me for clutching to my pride when I like to claim I have none. I’ve said for years I was ready to abdicate, Vivienne, and I thought I meant it. But then I had to deal with genuinely sharing power – not just delegating it – and it got stuck in my throat. It matters more to me than I like to admit, the authority.”

“It’s all right, you know,” she said. “To be hurt that after all you’ve sacrificed, the gratitude passed so quickly.”

I breathed in sharply. That was perhaps, I thought, the closest anyone had come to actually reading me right when it came to this.

“Maybe it is,” I said. “But all these years, I’ve always told myself I was taking that next step because it needed to be done. That I’d surrender it all the moment I was no longer necessary. And maybe that’s half a lie, always was.”

The words came out in a stumble, perhaps more honest than I would have liked.

“But I’d like to live up to it, Vivienne,” I softly said. “I’d like to be the kind of woman who genuinely believes that.”

I gathered myself, after a moment.

“I’m sorry I took it out on you,” I said. “It’s not your fault, and it was ill-done of me.”

“I’m sorry too,” Vivienne replied. “For what this will do to you, before it’s all over.”

A knot I’d not known was in my shoulders loosened. I smiled, and she smiled back. Sometimes, I thought, the things that mattered could still be fixed. Sometimes you got to them in time. A hoarse breath sounded, which I realized a heartbeat later that was neither mine nor Vivienne’s. I hurriedly rose to my feet, wincing in pain at my bad knee, and arrived just in time to see Hakram’s eyes flutter open.

“Cat?” he groaned.

“I’m here,” I told him.

It’d been a hard few years, there was no denying that.

But sometimes, just sometimes, we got lucky.

Interlude: Ebb

“The highest form of victory is not mere triumph over another, but to use such a triumph as the foundation of your own. This way superiority is demonstrated not only over one defeated but also one victorious, proving your own cunning to be beyond both.”
– Extract from ‘The Behaviours of Civil Conduct’, by High Lady Mchumba Sahelian

There were some who called Mauricius indolent but he preferred think of himself as patient.

The expensive chilled wine – genuine Baalite red, not the imitation the Ashuran brewed on this side of the sea – before him slowly warmed, the coating of frost on the goblet slowly dripping down onto the table. He had yet to touch it. His eyes remained on the lights of the city instead, on the warm glow that set jewels to the dark and the heartbreakingly beautiful mosaics of the Irenian Plaza displayed below the hidden balcony. It was a common tale in Mercantis that Aeolian himself, the famous Tormented Painter, had died moments after putting the last touches of colour on the work. Mauricius knew the truth behind the unspoken boast, for he’d cared to learn it.

Aeolian had been eighty-three and dying when he’d begun the work, debt-ridden to the extent that he’d been willing to spend even his last days on the mosaics if it meant his children would not inherit the crushing burden of his lifetime of indulgences. Yet the City of Bought and Sold preferred the shorter tale, the one that claimed to own a work so beautiful it had taken the life of a Named to make it. It made the mosaics no fairer to behold, Mauricius thought. They were, regardless, a wonder of this world: moving with hour and sun, a living story of interwoven sorcery and skill. But buying the life of a Named spoke of power, and for the merchant lords of this city there was nothing more intoxicating than that.

Mauricius ought to know, as the eldest of the living merchant lords.

Behind him, past the sculpted marble arch bearing a discreet muting enchantment, the shadowy silhouette of a waiting attendant stood still. The service in Sub Rosa was second to none, even in this island where every delight could be bought, though the truth was that Mauricius had taken a balcony tonight largely for the view. Few people even knew that this place existed, hidden behind wards and secrecy as it was, and most believed the Irenian Plaza to be entirely surrounded by the three edifices that were the heart of the Consortium’s power in this material world.

The Forty-Stole Court, the Guild Exchange and the Princely Palace.

Power, wealth and influence – all nestled closely together like chicks gathering for warmth. Knowing what was to happen tonight, Mauricius had thought it fitting that he should be close to the beating heart of Mercantis. Two men were to die tonight, after all. The merchant lord slid a finger along the rim of his goblet, watching as beads of condensation slid down the sinuous length of silver. Even now, in manses across the city, his fellows would be scheming behind closed doors. Dear Livia’s return from this Arsenal bearing the answer of the Grand Alliance had thrown the Consortium into disorder.

Several of the most influential among them had voiced a belief it was treason for Ambassador Livia Murena to have agreed to such unfavourable terms when half the City knew that the Principate was so deeply in their debt it couldn’t even see daylight. It was said that there’d been foul play. Given that Livia had not let her wife out of her sight since returning to the city, Mauricius believed there might be a thread of truth there. Not that the opposition cared. The Consortium buried bleeding hearts long before they might rise to a position where their words might matter, but there were some who objected to fleecing the Grand Alliance on more practical grounds.

If the Dead King won, they first said, we would rue our schemes. That found little purchase, for this was not the first crusade to struggle against the undead. Always these ended in bloody sacrifice and the resumption of the ancient stalemate, as the aftermath decided which among the living nations had been the winners and the losers of this particular iteration. Yet when it had been argued that in the aftermath of the Grand Alliance’s victory a burning gaze might be turned to Mercantis, more had bought into the argument. Cordelia Hasenbach was a civilized woman, and her anger could have been appeased should it prove lasting, but it was not so with her allies.

The Dominion was a pack of savages that killed each other on a whim, and Callow was a cauldron of long hatreds. There was a reason that the Consortium had never tried to seize Callowan lands, though it had often had the strength to do so and feasibly keep them. The scheme of taking Dormer and adding it to the holdings of the City had long been discussed, but never once undertaken. The lesson had been learned well from the Brief War, when Atalante had tried to annex part of the Callowan south after buying passage for its war fleet from the Consortium. Jehan the Wise had butchered the invaders, which had not been unexpected, but he’d then began to raise ships for a retaliatory attack on Mercantis itself. Which had been.

Embassies of the Merchant Princess Clarissa had made it known that the City was not involved in the invasion beyond having sold passage through its waters, but the Callowans hadn’t cared . When Daoine ships bearing soldiers of the Watch began docking in Dormer, Clarissa had realized that the Callowans would go through with an invasion even if they were likely to lose, even if the mere undertaking of it would bankrupt them for a generation. She’d emptied the coffers of Mercantis appeasing the king of Callow, and no merchant lord had ever seriously talked of taking Callowan land again. Jehan the Wise had been a Named of heroic bent, the practical sorts were now eager to remind the City.

The Black Queen was a monster that gave even the Wasteland pause, and the Consortium wanted to extort her?

Mauricius had been privately amused by that rejoinder, for the Black Queen did not truly give the Wasteland pause in the slightest. Some days he wondered if anything ever did. Poor Fabianus had been stuck in the middle of it and lost what few feathers he’d still had. Their Merchant Prince was first tricked into keeping the First Prince’s secrets, and then was pushed so strongly to reveal them that he’d preferred to recuse himself of such matters entirely than continue to be involved. Given that Fabianus’ office held little direct power but a great deal of influence, that decision had practically ended his reign in every real sense.

Mauricius smiled and looked at the shadowed mosaics down below. A decade ago, most of the city had thought him the strongest contender for that very same office. He was among the wealthiest few – trading arms in the Free Cities was ever a tidy profit – of the Consortium, he’d served in the Forty-Stole Court for over a decade and save for that little offence when he’d had his first wife’s lover and the man’s entire family sold into slavery, there were no black marks on his record.

He’d made sure they all ended up in Stygia, so that they were actually slaves even in the legal sense. He was not a forgiving man, and preferred his revenges to be of the through kind.

Though Mauricius was reputed to be somewhat indolent, back then that’d been in his favour. No one in the Consortium wanted too motivated or skillful a prince lest the days of the Caepio, who had ruled as kings in all but name, return. He’d campaigned for the office, of course. Sunk a fortune into buying the love of the streets, the votes of the Lesser Courts. But he’d not fought for the support of other merchant lords. Indolent , his supporters had mourned in the years that followed. After Fabianus was elected the office. None of them ever learned that he’d never sought the title at all: while most saw the elections as a gaping pit for coin, he’d been after a profit. Mauricius had required twice as much as he’d invested in the election as a bribe, to let Fabianus win.

He’d kept a single gold coin from that bribe, as a sentimental token, and as the lights of Mercantis shone in the distance the merchant lord took it out of his robes and idly toyed with it. The luster of it brought out a hunger he knew would never be entirely sated, but Mauricius was a patient man. He’d learned as a boy that the patient always got their day, if they picked the right opportunities. And what was this era of chaos, if not a great banquet of opportunities? The Consortium was fighting itself, the recklessly hungry and the cravenly cautious at odds in the markets and the courts. Praesi gold set tongues wagging, or silenced them, while the long shadow of the Grand Alliance blotted out old certainties.

Mauricius had taken the Dread Empress’ bribes, of course. And he’d listened to the honeyed words of her envoys, to the schemes she wove even here in the City. He was not in the habit of refusing coin, though her plots he’d been lukewarm to. At least until it had all unfolded exactly as she had predicted: dear Livia scared into a barely acceptable settlement, a band of Named coming to keep the City under the boot and the armies of the Grand Alliance charging into Hainaut. Far away, and soon to be bloodied. All the while Consortium had turned on itself in bitter infighting, needing the guidance that its Merchant Prince had surrendered the right to provide. And so Mauricius had agreed to the plot, seeing the need for it.

In the distance, what he had been waiting for all night finally appeared: a red light blinked into existence atop a tall tower, for three heartbeats before disappearing.

Merchant Prince Fabianus was dead.

Indolent, patient, Mauricius waited. It was the better part of an hour before a messenger for the Forty-Stole Court found him. Fabianus was dead, he was told, and elections would need to be had. An emergency session of the Forty-Stole Court was to be held soon. And still Mauricius waited. It was almost another hour before he was presented with a second cup of chilled wine, and only then did the merchant lord smile.

“Thank you,” he told the shadowy servant.

Prosperus Soranus was dead. That was what the cup had told him. And with him gone, Dread Empress Malicia had lost her puppet candidate to the office of Merchant Prince. All that gold she’d sunk into preparing his election would be gone unless she found another flagbearer for her interests. And even if she tried, that candidate might just lose to Mauricius should he try his hand at being elected. The Empress would suspect his hand at work, but she was a practical woman in her own way.

More gold was coming his way, and soon.

Merchant Prince Mauricius would walk the line, prevent debts being called in early but refuse to extend ‘dangerous’ loans. Negotiations would be opened again, seeking better terms. Malicia would get what she wanted, a Mercantis unwilling to meekly serve as the coin purse of the Grand Alliance, and the Grand Alliance would be pleased by the rise of a Merchant Prince willing to actively steer policy to their advantage if certain terms were met. There was wealth to be made, standing between the Tower and the West, and even more between the West and annihilation. Mauricius slowly rose to his feet, finally ready to attend the emergency session of the Forty-Stole Court. He was eighty-three, today, and so when he looked down at the mosaics of the Irenian Plaza it was with something like understanding.

“You’d understand, wouldn’t you?” Mauricius mused. “You died clutching your brush, after all.”

—

Leo had been raised to revile the name of Hypathia Trakas.

His mother had hated it before him and her father before that, a chain going back all the way to the first Trakas to have inherited a mutilated throne after Basilea Hypathia lost the ancient rights of their line. There was a time , Mother had taught him as a child, where we shared power over Nicae with none. In those days the Trakas had ruled as kings, titling themselves Basileus not out of humility but as a means to claim descent from the legendary emperor Aenos Basileon – and so primacy over all other crowns come from the collapse of his ancient empire. But Hypathia Trakas had been arrogant, and unwise. She had made such disaster of the Second Samite war that a swaggering thug of an admiral had been able to carve her throne in two: thereafter, there would be a Strategos as well as a Basileus.

Yet the truth was that, for all the bile that Mother had passed onto him, neither of them had truly expected that they would be able to right this ancient wrong in their lifetimes. They had been taught the dominance of their enemies when Leo’s own father went to sea and never returned, taken by ‘Stygian pirates’ on one of the safest stretches of water of the Gulf. Father had been of a military line, an old one and more importantly one foe to Strategos Nereida Silantis. The warning was heard clearly, and the alliances carefully sealed by Mother withered on the vine. The Trakas had tradition on their side, hallowed blood and the sacred duties only an anointed Basileus could undertake. They even had deep influence in matters of stewardship.

Yet the Strategoi had swords, and without those what was the rest worth?

Leo Trakas had been fresh to the throne when the war with Stygia and Helike erupted, though of course it was not so simple as that. In private the war had been a cause for despair, for when steel was out the Strategoi had excuses to meddle in every matter be they high or low. Leo’s palace would be filled with spies, appointments stripped away and granted instead to supporters of Strategos Nereida and the treasury of the office of Basileus plundered at will for war funds . Silanis had even developed ties to the First Prince of Procer, who now showered her with silver and soldiers even as the latest Theodosian madman set the Free Cities aflame. The years ahead looked grim.

And then the armies of Helike and Stygia encamped beyond the walls of Nicae, and Leo realized he’d underestimated the threat of the enemy being fought. Penthes had collapsed into civil war, Atalante outright capitulated and Delos so badly mauled it was good as out of the war. Bellerophon was busy somehow failing to invade the territories of a city at war with itself, as was the wont of the People, but that was hardly a relief. Nicae stood alone, and in the streets the people were afraid . Even the arrival of a band of heroes – and Leo would not soon forget they had gone to Nereida, not him, even though the Trakas stood closest to the Heavens by Nicean law – had done little to improve the mood.

This was no danger to Leo Trakas, for his strengths were not the kind that could be unmade by the displeasure of the people. His blood was in his veins, his authorities writ into immutable law. It was not so with Strategos Nereida Silanis, whose authority came from the sword but also from the love of the people. Strategoi hated by the commons had a tendency to take sick and die, so that the old families might elect a more suitable replacement in their stead. And so Leo Trakas sent what few servants were still solely his to whisper in the right ears, to wonder if once-bold Nereida had not gone craven in her old age. The whispers took, for Nicae’s strength had stayed behind its walls during the war, and when the enemies assaulted the wall the Strategos fought in the ranks.

It amused Leo Trakas a great deal, in private, that though he had paid a man to kill her during the battle the assassin died to a stray arrow and the Strategos was still killed by a Helikean blade.

Leo surrendered to the Tyrant of Helike himself, the red-eyed monster humming and grinning like a lunatic all the while before offering terms that were highly generous: the only concession required of Nicae would be its vote in the election of some nobody Bellerophon diplomat to the office of Hierarch of the Free Cities. Unearned as the acclaim was, the city thrummed with praised for his ‘having tricked’ the Tyrant into gaining nothing of worth from Nicae for his victory. And so when the opportunity had come, when the old families had come to him and asked for him to officiate over the ceremonial council that would elect the next Strategos, he’d done what every Trakas since Hypathia’s own daughter had craved like a drowning soul craves air.

“ No ,” Leo Trakas had smiled, savouring the word like fine wine.

They cajoled and whispered sweet promises, at first. And when that failed, oh but how they raged and threatened. Yet it was all but air, for Leo was beloved of the streets – fickle as they were – and they were not. To Nicae, it was a Strategos that had made a disaster of this war. They were not clamouring for another, not yet. And Leo Trakas intended on having seized power properly, by the time it occurred to them that they might want to. At first he courted the First Prince’s support, for Cordelia Hasenbach had wasted no time in initiating correspondence, but when he saw the wind turn against Procer in the councils of Kairos Theododian’s puppet Hierarch he leaned into it.

There was nothing the people of Nicae loved more than a good settling of scores with the Thalassocracy, and such a war would put him at odds with Procer regardless. That lion was getting old anyway, he’d heard: there were rumours of the Dead King raiding to the north, even as Praesi and Callowans smashed Proceran armies left and right. The League of Free Cities was riding high, in contrast, and Theodosian was a madman but he was a successful one. He was also not as wary of his ‘allies’ as he should perhaps be, for when Leo began reaching out to the other cities for alliances he found more takers than he had expected. Basileus Leo Trakas had already restored the old powers of his blood, but still he hungered for more.

Was his line not descended from Aenos Basileon himself, who had ruled over the great cities that did not yet call themselves free? There were none more fitting than Leo to rise to prominence in the League, to replace Helike and its twitching goblin of a king as the power behind their simpleton Hierarch. Gods, but in those heady days he’d come so very close to getting all he wanted. How had it all gone so wrong?

“The rioters have seized the amphitheatre, my lord Basileus,” Captain Attika told him.

Leo looked down at the kneeling captain of his guard, letting the calm on her face settle his own unease. The game was not yet over, he told himself.

“Better that than the treasury,” the Basileus finally said. “Have the Valeides and the Petros answered my messengers?”

“They have not, my lord,” Captain Attika admitted.

It was a grim tiding, when even his closest allies within the old families were not willing to consider lending soldiers to keep order in the streets – or at least prevent looting of the granaries and the island-gardens. Most of Leo’s soldiers we bound to guard the palace and the treasury, which limited his ability to enforce peace in the streets.

“Two days,” Leo said. “In two days we will receive the Stygian grain and the dole will appease the people. We only need to hold for that long, Attika.”

His captain grimaced.

“I fear that the riots might be as much from the northern news as the rationing, my lord,” she admitted. “And Stygian grain cannot mend such accusations.”

“Hasenbach,” the Basileus hissed. “Her work, this. None of the others have the subtlety for it.”

When the threat had first come through the Grand Alliance – that band of robbers – that Leo might be named a friend of the Dead King if he did not surrender and come to terms with ‘Strategos’ Zenobia, he’d laughed at the letter. Procer was too busy warring against the dead to meddle in the south, and the Black Queen had proved a rather distant patron to General Basilia. As for the Dominion it was a pack of squabbling tribes that the only civilized lot among them, the Isbili of Levante, had little control over. They couldn’t agree on the colour of tablecloths without honour duel, much less genuine diplomatic policy.

There was a lot less to laugh about now that word of the condemnation had been smuggled into the city and riots shook the streets. Zenobia Vasilakis might be a mere country landowner, well beneath any of the old families that tended to claim the office of Strategos, but she had partisans anyway. Though with no real ties to the ruling naval elite of Nicae, the Vasilakis family did have a record of meritorious service in the army – which had often been neglected in favour of the fleet, over the years. Army folk kept tight loyalties, which was half the reason Leo’s own mother had taken a husband from one such family.

The Vasilakis reputation had won Zenobia sympathies, even before the Grand Alliance’s official recognition of her as the legitimate ruler of Nicae cemented her status. Leo’s attempts to present her to the old families as a country agitator out to replace the influential lines from the city had been largely successful, but after such honours from great crowns it wouldn’t matter. Grand Alliance backing made them as powerful as any of them, in practice, and ties to General Basilia’s Helike only added bite to her candidature. Zenobia had not been elected under the proper ceremony, which would have required Leo to officiate, but fewer people cared every week.

“I cannot speak to that, my lord,” Captain Attika said, “but I will say that should we lose the grain to rioters, it will deal your reign a great blow. I wager they will call it Zenobia’s dole instead, and the streets will sing her name.”

“The docks are also guarded by our... friends,” the Basileus said. “They would not hesitate to disperse riots.”

The thrice-cursed Dread Empress of Praes had massacred and stolen his fleet in the same stroke, but there was nothing Leo could do about that. What he could do was trade the Praesi access to the port for repairs of the ships in exchange for them funding Stygian grain shipments and providing the coin that let him keep paying his army even after the collapse of trade in the Samite Gulf. If Ashur weren’t fighting a very polite civil war with itself Leo might have been afraid of reprisals for the sacks of Smyrna and Arwad he’d ordered, but until the Thalassocracy dealt with its succession crisis Nicae would remain safe.

“I fear that would only incite further unrest, my lord,” Captain Attika said. “Would the sight of the dead slaying the living not seem to put truth to the accusations of the Grand Alliance?”

Leo’s fingers clenched. He’d not considered that. Any thinking man would grasp that the Dead King fielded no armies this far south, but angry mobs were not renowned for their wisdom. No doubt his enemies would seize on the opportunity presented regardless of the truth, too.

“Then we must secure the docks with our own men,” Leo reluctantly said. “All is lost, without the grain.”

He peered at his kneeling captain.

“Where would you suggest the men be taken from?” he said.

She hesitated for a moment.

“The palace,” Captain Attika finally said. “It is much easier to defend, and less likely to be attacked. Greed will lead rioters to try their hand at the treasury sooner or later, my lord.”

“Agreed,” the Basileus said.

Or rivals from old families under the guise of rioters, even. None of that lot was above plundering the coffers of the state to fill their own.

“See to it, Captain Attika,” he ordered.

“My lord,” she replied, saluting.

After the door closed behind her, Leo Trakas sat alone on the throne he’d been the first of his line to ever fully reclaim. And still the thought niggled away at him – would the Trakas of days yet to come name him as another Hypathia, another fool who’d wasted the gifts of fate? The long tapestries and slender columns around him gave no answer to his musings. No, Leo told himself. The game was not yet over, and this could yet be salvaged. Once the grain ships had come many of the rioters would disperse and he could finally suppress the riots. After he regained control of the city, he could come to terms with ‘Strategos’ Zenobia.

To his knowledge she was still unmarried, if a decade older than him, and perhaps the surrender being forced on him could be turned into a marriage alliance instead. He doubted Zenobia was any more eager to be under the Grand Alliance’s thumb than he was to be under Malicia’s. A united Nicae would be able to force Helike to end its incessant war-making, especially if it clasped hands with Stygia, and Leo could count his debts to the Tower settled if he made that savage Basilia cease attacking the reign of Malicia’s Penthesian puppet Exarch. Perhaps sending for a painting of Zenobia was in order, he thought, so that he might have a notion of what he’d be in for.

With Captain Attika gone he’d expected servants to begin attending him again, but the hall was instead eerily silent. Leo frowned. Was something wrong, or did someone simply need to be switched? The Basileus became uncomfortably aware that his regal clothes came without a weapon, or more protection than a few layers of cloth could afford him. There were armoured statues here in the hall, though, bearing the gilded armour of his forbears and matching ceremonial blades. Yet if he were to leave here having strapped on such a sword and there’d been no trouble, if servants saw him... Laughter was the death of fear, and much of his reign now depended on fear.

Silence lingered throughout his thoughts, and that as much as anything else made the decision for him.

The blade of Basilea Sousanna Trakas came clear of the scabbard with a hiss. It fit his hand well, as Sousanna had been tall for a woman. As he recalled she was best known for her victories against encroaching Stygia and having extracted tribute from the hill tribes later to become Helike, so at least half of the old use might see the light of day again. Sure-footed even if it had been years since he’d last held a blade, Leo pushed open the great gates of the throne hall and slipped into the corridor beyond. Still not a soul in sight, he saw with dismay. That was not natural.

Had his own servants begun to flee the palace, abandoning his cause?

More worryingly, there was no trace of his personal guard. There should have been four in the corridor, awaiting his orders, but instead only further silence awaited. Leo decided to head for his quarters in the deeper palace, where more guards should be awaiting him. Tense moments walking through deserted hallways came at an end when he found the butchered corpse of one of his soldiers on the floor. Stabbed in the back, he found, and the body was still warm. It was a coup, must be, and by heading to his quarters he’d be putting himself into the hands of his enemies.

He must turn back now, find the barracks and convince soldiers to escort him to the manse of an allied family. The Valeides might have denied him more men, but they could not refuse him shelter without dishonouring themselves: his father had been brother to their patriarch’s wife. Discarding the last pretence of being in control, Leo ran for it.

He heard it as a whistle first. A the tune of a half-familiar song, though he could not remember the name of it. The Basileus abandoned the corridor it came from, banking left to shake whoever was whistling. Except the same slow, mournful whistle awaited him there. Dead end after dead end, until he began to hear the words.

Did we not lose,
A hundred times?
Did we not win,
A hundred times?

His blood ran cold. And as the snare tightened around him, Leo Trakas ran until there was nowhere left to run. Cornered in his own palace, surrounded by tapestries speaking to old glories as slowly the sound of hooves on stone came closer. The scent of blood was in the air. Back to a splash of blood-red silk, a golden sword in hand, the Basileus of Nicae stood his ground as rider came into the flickering torchlight. Her voice was clear, strong.

“For we did lose,
A hundred times,” General Basilia sang, a sharp smile on her face.

Her sword was already in her hand, dripping red on the stone. Behind her, a pack of riders followed her into the corridor – red-handed savages, defiling a palace older than their entire misbegotten city.

“And we will win,
A hundred times,” General Basilia sang, the smile fading form her lips and sinking into her eyes.

She leaned forward on her saddle.

“You warned of me consequences once, Leo Trakas. Shall we now finish our talk?”

The Basileus of Nicae spat to the side, defiant.

“Once a hound, always a hound,” Leo said. “You will fail your new masters, just as you failed your last.”

“Where was that spirit,” General Basilia laughed, “a year ago?”

Her blade rose, and so did his. She spurred her mount and he ran forward, ran and yelled until the horse was past him and he felt a flash of heat across his chest and face. Blood, he found as he stumbled onto the tapestries.

“‘till falls the age,
And end the times,” the general softly said.

Darkness came. And just before it, dread. Gods, if they’d taken the city – the undead the Tower had left, would they not burn the city as they fled? Malicia would not suffer the port to stand, if she could not use it.

Leo Trakas’ last word was a rasping gurgle as he tried too late to speak a warning.

Chapter 44: Cliff

“I am only seen when blind
And dawn always kills me
My omens can be divined
But my gifts are all empty.”
– Taghreb riddle

Neustal had been little more than a tower by the road, once upon a time.

It had since become the end of the grounds held by the living in the war for Hainaut, that little crumbling watchtower raised into a stout keep by the sappers of the Army of Callow. From it the fortifications of the Grand Alliance spread out like spiderweb, filled with steel and people and wood. Hainaut was too large for a wall to be raised across its entire lowlands, at least by human hands, but we’d done the next best thing: a series of trenches to defend in depth, as deep as we could dig them. The defensive line was not straight, no single stroke of the quill on a map, but instead just as chaotic as a coastline. The trenches bent and twisted to reach fortifications already standing or avoid swamps, or hard stone or hills.

Even if we’d raised a wall across all this land, we wouldn’t have been able to defend it. It’d simply too long to be manned with the numbers we’d need to turn back a proper attack by the dead, our forces spread thin where Keter would concentrate as will. Instead we had the trenches and the knots, the strongholds along the line where troops were massed and kept vigilant. Patrolling along the desolate length of the trenches companies went with carts carrying along an ingenious Lycaonese invention, what they called the holzburgen : the parts of a small wooden fortress made easy to assemble with nothing more than nails and sweat, cleverly using the carts themselves as walls.

When too badly outnumbered by raiding undead the patrols would fort up and send up signals should scrying be scrambled, bringing in the second line of defence. Further south, along scrying relays, we had established large mobile reserves that could be mobilized without prior warning. Each counted a vanguard of horsemen and kept several mages capable of opening a gate into the Twilight Ways, which meant most of the time our people arrived in time to relieve the patrolmen. We rotated which soldiers were assigned to the reserve as well as the location of said reserves, lest the Dead King be able to map out our ability to respond to his attacks.

The reserves had been half-emptied when I’d had to hastily assemble an army to deal with the undead plague that’d emerged behind us, but they had since been filled anew. Not for long, though. We would be moving into the lands held by the dead, soon, and to get the knockout blow we wanted we would need as many soldiers as we could field. Already many were here, and the stronghold splayed out below felt like a living, breathing creature: a great beast of old with a thousand hands and feet, twisting and turning and bleeding out fires from its skin.

As the wind passed through my hair, I let the thoughts pass through me. Neustal’s roof was lead, and sharply angled so that rain would slide off, but there was just enough room for someone to stand at the edge of the ledge. It’d rained the night before, and the tiles were still slippery, but my footing was sure. It was not my first time standing here.

The moon was nearly full and glaring down at us all through the cover of dark clouds, and there was a cloying humidity to the air that told me more rain was coming. It was enough to frizzle my hair as it was blown forward in strands – the wind was at my back – and have sweat bead the back of my neck. The sensation was not unpleasant, feeling the wind flow around the Mantle of Woe as I closed my eyes and slowly breathed in and out. Try as I might, I could not reach it again: that elusive moment in the Arsenal when my Name had stirred awake, when I’d felt my hold friend bare his fangs again. I suddenly opened my eye. My ears did not tell me she was here, though they did not need to: we were bound by something altogether more intimate.

I said nothing, only taking in the sight of the dark plain and the shifting moonlight that stretched out beyond the bustling walls of the stronghold. Eerie as they were, the lowlands of Hainaut were beautiful to behold.

“It is a strange habit you’ve picked up of late, dear heart,” Akua Sahelian said.

“Is it?” I softly laughed. “I’ve had stranger, I assure you.”

The shade stood at my side, undaunted by the heights. They weren’t something that could kill either of us, although... I put my weight in my good foot the slightest bet, felt the tile begin to slip, and my stomach tightened. And in that moment before the drop, in that instinctive fear that was ingrained in our hindbrain, I felt like I could almost touch my Name. Almost.

“You told me you feared heights, once,” Akua said.

“I did,” I acknowledged.

“Yet you confronted that fear,” she said. “Mastered it.”

“Mastery is a bold claim,” I smiled into the dark.

I’d stood on the edge of the orphanage’s roof, night after night, until I could stand through the trembling. Until I no longer felt like throwing up. And I’d beaten back the fear, eventually. And yet even after all these years, in that blind moment before the drop, still my stomach clenched. No, mastery was much too bold a claim.

“A strange habit, and a strange mood to match it,” Akua softly said. “I do wonder, Catherine, what fear it is that brings you to the ledge this time?”

I did love it, against my better judgement, that sometimes she just got it without needing to be told a single thing. I hated it as well, of course. It was like being naked, and while I was not shy about my skin my thoughts were a different matter. I’d been warned not to let Akua in, of course. Not to let her slither into my inner circle, else I find I had made a nest of my bones for this most beautiful of snakes. It was too late for that now, though. I’d already made my choice as to how this would end, and there would be no turning back. Too many prices had already been paid.

“I’ve been having this dream,” I idly said, closing my eyes.

I extended my arms to the sides, like a Levantine ropewalker preparing to cross above the pit, and without a sound found that the shade had moved out of the way.

“I always stand on the edge,” I said. “But it’s rarely the same. Sometimes it’s that roof from when I was a girl, but more often something else.”

My arms had opened my cloak and so the wind traced slow fingers against the hem, setting it aflutter.

“It’s been that glacier at the heart of the Fields of Wend, with the dark waters below,” I said. “It’s been that drop into the tunnel to Liesse, during the Doom. The walls of Keter. The end of the Laure docks, on a moonless night. There’s always a drop, and darkness below.”

I was awake. My eyes were closed, but I was awake.

“Then how do you know you’re not asleep, right now?” she murmured into my ear.

The hair on the back of my neck raised. I smiled, slowly breathed out and opened my eyes. I leaned forward, arms still extended, and risked the edge of the ledge. My stomach clenched with that familiar streak of ice, but still there I stood.

“In the dream,” I confessed, “I always fall.”

My feet grew numb as lead, and down into the dark I went. And never did a scream leave my throat as I tumbled into the quiet stillness, the cool peace of utter night.

“Not tonight, then,” Akua murmured.

Damn her, I fondly thought, for understanding every part of it. She was standing at my side, now that I’d brought back my arms to my chest, pretending she had never gone behind me and spoken into my ear just the way she used to when she was still but a spirit bound to the Mantle. We both knew otherwise, but we left that truth untouched.

“Not tonight,” I agreed.

Tonight my feet did not slip. My leg throbbed with pain but still I looked up at the half-veiled moon, breathing out. In and out, calm. My Name did not stir, though it felt frustratingly close.

“There is a place outside the walls of Wolof,” Akua eventually said, “where old stone were raised in a circle for some long-forgotten ritual. Water flows beneath the earth, so great clusters of Wasaliti lilies – purple and pale – grow there among the grass.”

She looked out into the night, faintly smiling.

“When the moon is at its highest,” she said, “you can lie among the lilies and grass like a bed, and the shadows they cast look like the great ribs of a giant.”

I studied her for a long moment.

“It’s not a place of power,” I said.

“No,” she quietly said. “I found it, as a child, and shared it with no one. I have not been there in many years.”

A secret for a secret, I grasped. Had she known I’d spoken to no one else of the dreams, or simply suspected? No matter. A secret for a secret, I thought once more. It sounded like the way a Praesi would think of... well, that word was best left out of this. Too dangerous for all sorts of reasons, the least of which the stories it brought with it. The silence we kept clung heavy to the air, carrying with it an offer. She had made it to me before, though rarely in too explicit a manner, but it’d been a while since I’d been genuinely tempted. Killian had taught me to value trust over the press of flesh, bittersweet as the lesson had been to learn. If I turned my head to meet Akua’s eyes, it would be accepting the offer. Falling off the ledge, just a little bit.

I leaned forward. The fear came, and I did not fall.

“We are who we are,” I said without turning.

I was many things but a Callowan most of all, and she was the Doom of Liesse. Forgiveness was not the stuff my bones were made of, and a hundred thousand souls were still waiting for their long price.

“So we are,” Akua Sahelian agreed.

Her tone I could not read. Disappointment? Frustration? Even long gone form the Wasteland, she was still a daughter from that circle of Creation’s finest liars.

“Why did you come?” I asked.

Safer grounds. Like a slap on a butterfly, my words tore through the last remnants of what had been hanging in the air.

“One of the patrols came back mauled,” she said.

I cocked a brow. Hardly unusual. Keter had gotten bolder in prodding out defences over the last month – the Iron Prince believed we were being tested to see if we were building up to an offensive, and I tended to agree – so it was not the first time blood ended up on the ground. We’d already begun to raise the numbers on the patrols, it was a good way to blood our conscripts before the looming battles.

“Razin Tanja was on one of them,” Akua said.

Not wounded, I decided, or she would have told me immediately.

“Hard losses?” I asked.

“Near half,” she said. “The dead got to them before they put together their wooden fortress.”

“It shook him,” I said.

“So Adjutant’s watchful eyes reported,” Akua agreed. “I believed it might be of interest to you.”

“You were right,” I said, taking a last look down.

Not tonight , I thought. There would be a night, sooner or later. Everyone got one. But it would not be tonight.

We’d see about tomorrow.

—

The Lord of Malaga was in his quarters, they told me.

We’d held Neustal long enough that what had once been a sea of tents with palisades had become closer to a fortress-camp, barracks being raised in stone and timber while smaller houses were raised in a sort of separate officer’s district. In those muddy ‘streets’ nobles and career soldiers from places spanning half of Calernia were made to rub elbows, which had been fascinating to watch when it didn’t end up involving loud arguments. It would have been an exaggeration to say that the timber house where Razin Tanja lived was part of a ‘Levantine quarter’ within the district, I reflected, but not a a claim entirely without foundation.

For practical reasons – being able to find officers easily, ease of supply and security – we’d gone along with the natural tendency of people to stick to their own, so it was no surprise that warriors in the colours of the Binder and Slayer’s Bloods were all over the street when I limped my way to Lord Razin’s abode. A Binder asked me to present my wrist before I was allowed in, so that she might ascertain I truly was who I appeared to be. The Levantine mages might be rubbish at illusions, but Binders dealt with blood from the moment they began in their trade: what flowed through my veins was proof enough of my identity, as far as they were concerned.

I was not announced in, though neither did I catch the young lord by surprise. I’d half-wondered if he would be drunk by the time I arrived, but he didn’t look it – morose, sure, but then I’d be the same if I’d had to watch half my patrol get butchered by undead. He was seated and did not rise when I entered, though he offered a nod.

“Black Queen,” Razin of the Binder’s Blood greeted me.

“Lord Razin,” I replied, brow pulling into a frown.

He was bruised on the cheek, a purple shiner crusting around the edges. It made him look younger, and more beaten down than one of the five most powerful nobles in Levant should ever feel.

“Did your watchers not mention I am unharmed?” he drily asked.

“Not wounded is what I got,” I admitted without batting an eye. “Though that hit on your face will het nasty if you don’t attend to it.”

“It has been cleaned,” he dismissed.

“You have healers,” I pointed out.

And even if somehow none of the Dominions could be stirred to heal one of the head of the greatest lineages of the Blood, he could have borrowed some from another army. The aristocrat smiled bleakly at me, and I was once more reminded of how few battles he’d seen before our first meeting in Iserre. There’d been an arrogance in him then that’d been cut down to size since, I thought, though the remnants of it lingered. Funny things, people. So fragile in so many ways, and yet even the starkest of lessons found it difficult to change what lay at the heart of us. Like hardy weeds in a garden, the worst of us was often the most deeply entrenched.

“I am aware, Your Majesty,” he said. “This is a choice. The bruise will fade, but the ache will be... a useful reminder.”

I wanted to chide him for that indulgence, but how could I when my leg still ached from standing atop the keep? Hypocrisy and I were not unacquainted, but I tried not to seek her company. I claimed a seat at his table, since it was clear he was not going to invite me, and it was telling that a tired grunt was the most objection he was able to muster.

“What happened?” I asked.

“That poor orc you strapped to a wheelchair will have the report by now,” he acidly replied.

He probably would. Hakram was doing his best to replace his missing limbs with those of a hundred busy attendants, and Hakram’s best tended to see things through.

“And I’ll read it,” I said. “But that’s not what I’m asking. What happened, Tanja?”

The young lord looked aside. Not to a window, for we had not made those – too dangerous, given the risks of infiltration – but to a tapestry-covered wall. It was a while before he answered me, voice exhausted and raw.

“We didn’t see them until it was too late,” the Lord of Malaga said. “The skeletons were far and slow, so we took our time. Even considered duels.”

My brow rose. He knew I disapproved of those.

“My cousin Alis was with us, fresh from home,” Razin said. “We were close, as children.”

His fingers tightened, almost imperceptibly.

“She is also without the Talent.”

A sting that’d followed him all his life, I knew, as the descendant of the most famous mage lineage in Levant. Blood were raised to try to emulate their ancestors in all things, so that they too might prove worthy of the same Bestowal. It would have been hard on a youth, understanding that even if he did everything right an accident of birth meant he’d never be fully able to live up to his legacy. Someone sharing that hardship would have been a dear friend.

“One of our riders saw our line’s colours on the armour of one of the skeletons,” he said. “Enamelled scale. The pattern was an old one but undeniably Tanja, One of our own, snatched up during some crusade and now fielded as a footsoldier!”

His smile spread, and grew bleaker.

“Alis has – had – no deeds to her name, Black Queen,” Razin Tanja told me. “Levant is united against Keter, our people no longer fight honour wars. She lost her finest warring years in obscurity. And so I thought I could do this for her, give her...”

“A duel that’d make her reputation,” I quietly finished.

To Blood, honour and reputation often mattered more than gold. A grand gift for an old friend.

“The skeletons were barely more numerous than us,” Razin said, “and they would not have engaged wooden walls. I delayed to bait them, sent out our horse to take the flanks at a distance to prevent them from retreating when they got close.”

“It was a trap,” I said.

“Ghouls had burrowed beneath the earth,” the Lord of Malaga said. “So when the skeletons were close and we began to make the walls, they rose in ambush.”

I let out a long breath. Shit. Yeah, that was classic Keteran tactics. The ghouls would have done some damage, surprising the Levantines like that, but there couldn’t have been too many of them or the digging would have been easy to notice. No, they’d been a unit sacrificed to prevent the holzburg from being raised before the skeletons closed the distance. With numbers like that, the dead had never been going to win the skirmish. The Dead King had just traded corpses for corpses, knowing he could afford to bury us one patrol at a time. Rough night, going through that. Especially if it got your favourite cousin killed, which by the look on his face I was guessing it had.

“Alis?” I asked.

“She died after having slain three ghouls single-handedly,” Razin said. “Her deed was deemed worthy of being added to the Rolls.”

I remained silent. I’d not known her, so even commiserating with his loss seemed like a lie.

“Go on,” Razin bitterly said. “Have you not warned us again and again that there is no honour to be found in this war, Catherine Foundling? That our ways are that of fools, when kept to in the shadow of the Crown of the Dead, and that we must discard them or suffer loss.”

His teeth gritted.

“As I have,” he said. “As I might again.”

I could have excused him, I thought, spoken of good intentions and everyone making mistakes. But I was not his mother, or his friend, and what he had done should not be excused. So instead I leaned back into my chair and sighed.

“I was sixteen,” I quietly said, “the first time I made a decision that got people killed.”

His stiffened, dark eyes narrowing in on me.

“I’d killed before,” I noted. “But this was different. I didn’t swing a blade at them, it was just... consequences.”

“What happened?” Razin Tanja rasped out.

“I spared a man,” I said. “Not out of mercy, but because I needed him to escape and cause great troubles. It’s not only your people who make their reputations by putting down lions on the loose, Razin. I spared him when I could have taken his life, and because of that people died.”

I half-smiled.

“It could be said they hanged because they chose to scheme rebellion,” I said. “Or that they hanged because the Carrion Lord ordered they would. The choice I made wasn’t the only one that led us there.”

I traced the wooden surface with my fingers.

“But when I was made to look at those corpses hanging from the gallows,” I said, “I knew it was on me. That the decision I’d made had its hooks in all the others, that maybe I wasn’t guilty but that I was at least responsible .”

God, there’d been a barmaid who’d flirted with me. The look in her eyes, before the drop... For the life of me I could not remember her name, and it made me feel oddly ashamed.

“So what did you do, after?” the Lord of Malaga asked.

I’d wept, that was the truth of it. Wept in an alley where no one would see me, afraid and alone and a long way from home. And in the weeks that’d followed I’d come close to abandoning my path, until my confrontation with Akua had the Blessed Isle granted me... perspective of a kind.

“There is not panacea to this, Razin,” I told him. “You grow number to the losses, eventually, but it never entirely goes away.”

“Some wisdom, this,” the younger man scoffed.

“Remember tonight,” I told him quietly. “Beyond the bruise. Remember the mistake, how it felt as it rippled out into the world and took something dear from you. And use that to never make the same mistake again, Razin.”

His jaw set, and slowly he nodded.

“There will be other mistakes,” I said. “Other defeats. Own them too, Razin Tanja, use them to rise – or you’ll be mourning a great deal more than a cousin.”

He chuckled, though the sound was mirthless.

“The more I gain, Black Queen, the more I am afraid,” he said. “What was there to fear losing, when I had nothing?”

You and me both, kid , I thought. Yet I had said all that I had to say, and if there was someone who would ease his grief it was not me. The most kindness I could offer was to leave and make room for them to step into the space I was occupying. I rose to my feet, feeling my leg throb and offered him a nod. He did not object to my departure.

“Black Queen,” Razin of the Binder’s Blood said, sending me off with a sharp nod.

I hesitated, fingers lingering against the table.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I finally said.

The silence followed me out.

—

Hakram’s people found me before I’d even made it out of the officer district, before my feet had found a destination – I felt too restless for sleep, even this late – and the news were whispered directly into my ear. I thanked the messenger absent-mindedly, my thoughts already racing ahead of me. Finally. It was about time he arrived. That they’d not caught sight of him before he was already deep in the stronghold was not unexpected, if hardly pleasant to hear, but his destination at least was predictable. It was always the first part of any camp he visited, unless prior demands on his time had been made. Night settled on me as a veil as I limped out, not to make me invisible to eyes but to mask my presence.

It was a weave taught to me by Andronike herself, a use of Night inspired by a spell that’d once been a favourite of the Twilight Sages: I would be seen as unremarkable, and details of me would be difficult to remember. Adjutant had called it a poor man’s Scribe , which had the benefit of being both amusing and pretty accurate. In the soldierly parts of the stronghold I would not have bothered, for my face – or more accurately my mantle and staff – was a key that opened gates and lowered wards. But no stronghold as large as Neustal, whose span occupied several tortured miles, could be filled entirely by soldiers. We had cooks, launderers, sutlers and peddlers.

A few brothels as well, though after a few incidents were laundresses were harassed by soldiers we’d confined them all to a particular district. That way there could be no confusion as to what services were by offered by whom, and there would be no qualms about flogging anyone who didn’t understand what ‘no’ meant.

The Legions of Terror and the Army of Callow both forbade camp followers, which these people effectively were, as they slowed marches and drained as much resources as they provided. Here it would have been a fool’s errand to try the same, though, considering Proceran armies had them in spades. I’d first believed the Lycaonese didn’t, but it turned out they just armed them like they did essentially everyone they could afford to. These helfer and helferin only fought under specific circumstances, and otherwise essentially served the same purposes. The Levantines had brought few aside from warriors up north, but their rank and file had been eager enough to partake of the creature comforts.

If the civilians were to stay then there could be no question of them staying outside the walls where they might would be vulnerable to raids by the dead, so Neustal had whelped civilian quarters to stash them away in. It was towards these I headed, limp and all. In particular towards the long loghouse that was the busiest brothel in the stronghold, though I did not take the entrance a patron would. I went to the back, and slipped past the hired toughs guarding the entrance. The man who was arguably the most famous hero of our age was smiling and laughing with the brothel girls and boys as he deftly wove Light to heal their pains and sicknesses.

The Grey Pilgrim looked utterly at ease around them, and more surprisingly they around him. I’d started near enough the bottom of the ladder to know that just because some smiling highborn was comfortable around you didn’t mean the feeling was reciprocated. Peregrine was the name they used for him, so they knew who he was, but for all that they did not seem intimidated. And they really had no reason to be, didn’t they? Unlike kings and Named, they were not of that small slice of the world that Tariq Fleetfoot kept a wary eye on. They really did have nothing to fear from him.

Not unless their deaths would prevent a greater evil, anyway.

I waited until he was done. Unlike soldiers, these people wouldn’t have the benefits of priests and mages to call on for healing – not by right, anyway. If the Pilgrim wanted to do a little good here, far be it from me to stand in his way. The night was long, and I was not yet tired. They pressed a cup of wine on him before he left, which he only half-drank, and when the Peregrine wandered back onto the streets I was but a step behind him. There was no question that he had not known of my presence, for even if he’d somehow missed the Ophanim would not have. He did not turn or look at me, but something in his bearing acknowledged my presence.

“There are others in need of healing,” Tariq said.

“There’s always people in need of healing,” I replied. “Hurt is tireless.”

“Too often it is those who offer comfort, north of Levant,” he said. “It is shameful how the occupation is treated by some.”

“We’re not targeting the brothels, Pilgrim,” I sharply said. “Or even civilians. But I won’t assign healers to these districts that would instead be with patrols or manning our infirmaries.”

We already had too few, be they priests or mages. I’d not forbid any volunteering their hours, so long as it did not result in exhaustion, but I’d not command the death of soldiers fighting Keter to accommodate people who’d come here knowing this was a war front. We were a stronghold, not a town. I was not unreasonable for denying something they had no right to ask for.

“Then do not deny me my works, Catherine,” the Peregrine replied. “If I can allay suffering, I will.”

“No lack of that going around, these days,” I grunted.

“Denial or suffering?” he asked.

“No danger of either running out, I reckon,” I shrugged. “But they’re not why I sought you out. We’re overdue a talk.”

He cast a searching look on me, and I was unsurprised to realize that my veils of Night were nothing more than puffs of smoke to those eyes.

“You have held to your word when it comes to young Razin and Aquiline,” he said. “I take it you now want them removed from your care.”

“That’d be nice,” I said. “Though on occasion they forget to be a pain in my ass, so I don’t mind lending the equally occasional hand.”

“Headstrong youths can be troublesome, it is true,” the Peregrine said.

I eyed him, almost amused. How many decades had it taken him to get the art down of saying something like that without even the faintest hint of irony?

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “But your headstrong lordlings aren’t why I’m here.”

“Ah,” the old man calmly said. “It’s to be that talk, is it?”

“Yeah,” I grimly replied, baring my teeth. “Let’s talk about the Wandering Bard, Tariq.”

Chapter 45: Progress

“- one might then wonder if a kingdom’s sufferance of a tyrant for a decade is not worth the inevitable successful uprising by an usurped relative and the golden age it will usher. Given the frequent petty cruelty and mediocrity of kings, might it not be worth inducing a great tyrant so that a great ruler will follow them?”
– Extract from the controversial treatise ‘Ethics of Fate’ by Kalchas the Gadfly, Atalantian philosopher

The tavern had closed hours ago, as it was the middle of the night, but the Peregrine had a knack for getting into places he shouldn’t and I had a Night-trick decent with locks. I snapped my fingers and a few streaks of black flame sputtered to life in hanging lanterns, revealing a dirt floor to the large room. Just like the one we’d had in the Rat’s Nest. Feeling just a tad nostalgic, I limped up behind the bar – a nice large oaken piece – and went looking through the bottles after leaning my staff against the sude. Whoever ran this place kept a cudgel under the counter, I noted with approval. Good form.

I snatched up a bottle of what looked like genuine Neustrian schnaps, pulling the cork and taking a sniff. Apple, maybe? It’d do. Klaus Papenheim loved the stuff, and he’d offered it to me enough I’d acquired a taste for it. I took up one of the wooden cups and filled it, cocking an eyebrow at Tariq when he sat himself on the other side of the counter.

“What’s your poison, Pilgrim?” I asked.

“I don’t suppose there’s a pear brandy lying around?” the old man asked. “Alavan, if possible.”

I looked through the stock but there wasn’t, sadly enough.

“Closest they’ve got is some sort of berry brandy,” I told him, “and it looks Arlesite, though Gods only know from where beyond that.”

“Now you have me curious, I’ll admit,” the Pilgrim said. “If you don’t mind?”

I deftly set the cup down on the counter without turning as I took the bottle – some things never quite went, huh – and poured him a finger. I sniffed the bottle discreetly afterwards and almost gagged. It smelled like a whole bush had died in there along the promised berries. This might be the Grand Alliance’s camp but I wasn’t a robber queen, so I placed two golden crowns where the bottle I’d taken had stood. I cast a look at Tariq, who looked faintly embarrassed.

“I have been travelling light,” he admitted.

He wasn’t so crass as to actually outright request I pay for his drink, though, I noted with amusement.

“ Heroes ,” I sighed, teasing.

I was actually out of crowns by I had a Praesi aurelius and a Proceran gran , which should more or less cover the costs. The gran was less pure, and so worth less, but some places refused imperial coinage as they believed it to be cursed. I vaguely remembered that one of the Dread Emperors had in fact tried to drive a chunk of Callowan nobility mad by cursing coinage a few centuries back so I couldn’t even blame them.

“You’re covered for the bottle,” I said, and raised my cup.

He matched it with his, and the drink went down. I laughed after it went down, my throat aflame. Damn, but the Lycaonese liked it with a kick. Orcs would actually enjoy drinking this, which was a standard rarely met.

“Business, then,” I said.

“Business,” Tariq agreed.

I said nothing, only cocking an eyebrow as I leaned against the counter.

“I will assume,” the Grey Pilgrim said, “that your intent is not to gloat.”

“I like to think I’m above such things,” I lied.

“Naturally,” the Peregrine seriously agreed.

A beat of silence passed.

“That said,” I thinly smiled, “I fucking told you so.”

He sighed, but did not disagree. That was already promising. I’d not been sure exactly what to expect, as the silence and eventual assent from the Dominion when I’d gotten the Wandering Bard to be designated as formal enemy of the Grand Alliance had only told me he’d abstained from getting involved. His actual thoughts remained unknown to me.

“It is possible that the attack on the Arsenal was meant to aid in the long term,” Tariq said, then grimaced and poured himself another finger of brandy. “But that is irrelevant. She has forced us to take her as an enemy through her actions, regardless of whatever intent might lie behind them.”

“There’s precious few acts you can’t justify by saying they’ll help down the line,” I flatly replied. “That does tend to be the convenient thing about using the future for proof.”

“Peace, Black Queen. I am not attempting to justify the Wandering Bard’s offences against us,” Tariq tiredly said. “Merely struggling to reconcile the woman I have known for a very long time with the one who is now my foe.”

Much as I hated it’d taken him this long to get here, it was starting to look he actually was there so I swallowed the many barbs still on the tip of my tongue. Rubbing salt in the wound would get me nothing save a fleeting moment of satisfaction.

“Then we’re in agreement that she’s kill-on-sight,” I said. “And that an order ensuring as much comes down on both your side and mine.”

“You are unlikely to actually kill her, using such means,” Tariq said. “But I do not disagree with the principle: her power comes from access to and influence over Bestowed, stripping her from these strengths is sensible.”

“Sensible,” I slowly repeated. “Yes, I believe so. Another sensible thing would be, for example, how you came to be so certain she won’t die. I know why I think that, Peregrine, but you’ve been less than forthcoming about your ties with her.”

“Should I complain to my representative under the Terms and being so clandestinely approached?” the Pilgrim drily said.

I filled my glass, conspicuously.

“This is just two old friends having a drink and a chat, Tariq,” I toothily smiled. “Not an interrogation. Skirt around the letter of the law, me? Perish the thought.”

He cocked a brow.

“Perish is the right word,” the old man said. “How does the Red Axe fare, these days?”

“I believe they went with decapitation,” I said. “’twas a little late to boil her alive, admittedly, and a brisk hanging would have been good fun but little else.”

I suspected that Hasenbach had been amused, in that discreet way of hers, that from now when the execution by sword of the Red Axe was spoken of there would be a great deal of trouble over the nomenclature. Mind you, that it would add a dash of confusion to any rumours about the execution in the Arsenal was a more likely culprit for why she might have arranged that.

“You lost trust when you arranged that,” Tariq said. “Some with our Bestowed, more with the man who leads them.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I replied, almost rolling my eyes. “You disapprove, I take it?”

He sighed.

“No,” the Grey Pilgrim finally said. “It helped stave off the collapse of Procer at otherwise minor costs. I only wish it had not forced a distancing between yourself and young Hanno, though perhaps it is for the best.”

I drank of my cup, silently inviting him to elaborate.

“The cordiality of the relationship between you two has much been commented on,” he said.

“If this is going to turn into another polite request I don’t sleep with him, I’m going to get miffed at having to repeat I’m not interested,” I warned him.

“I believe you,” Tariq replied, sounding like he meant it. “But friendship is already seen as dangerous enough. You represent interests, the both of you, and those interests are often at odds. Friendship complicates that.”

I waved him down.

“Bullshit,” I frankly said. “If anything liking him made dealing with him significantly easier. But it’s no longer an issue anyway. Let those fears be buried, and instead of dealing with fish market gossip we can perhaps deal with the endless undead armies trying to kill us all.”

“I have yet to witness any power in this world or the next that quell gossip,” Tariq amusedly said, “but your point is taken.”

“Good,” I said. “I believe we were talking about the Bard?”

The Grey Pilgrim conceded with a nod.

“We first met in the Free Cities, when I intervened in a spot of trouble within the Helikean royal family,” he said. “I took her for a simple Bard, that first time, but recognizing her under a different face a few years later put paid to that notion.”

Yeah, that’d do it. I still wasn’t sure what his reading aspect exactly was, but it was frighteningly sharp even when the Ophanim weren’t actively whispering secrets into his ear.

“And you knew she wasn’t strictly one of Above’s,” I pointed out. “You weren’t surprised when I told you I’d seen her work on Below’s behalf.”

Blue eyes sad, he nodded.

“That much became beyond dispute when she disrupted my pursuit of a villain in Lange within a decade of our first meeting,” Tariq said, “forcing me to retreat from the Principality entirely and so lose the trail.”

I whistled.

“And you didn’t, you know,” I delicately said, slicing a finger across my throat, “try to Mercy her afterwards, so to speak.”

I glanced atop the hero’s sparse crown of white hair apologetically.

“No offence meant, fellows,” I added.

I didn’t get smote, so I decided to ascribe a passable sense of humor to the Choir of Mercy. The things you learned, huh?

“None was taken,” the Pilgrim informed me. “Though after your... colourful conversations with Contrition and Endurance, that could be seen as favoritism.”

I winked above his head.

“Don’t spread it around,” I loudly whispered.

Long-suffering, he sipped at his drink and sighed.

“I did, in fact, try to kill her,” Tariq said. “It did not take, evidently, and the misgivings of my patrons in pursuing her demise gave me pause. As did the eventual realization that the young villain she’d helped escape me had within the year died fighting another villainess, in the process exposing her schemes in Penthes.”

Ah , I thought. There it was, the first of the missing pieces. Tariq trusted the Ophanim, and we’d already established that the Intercessor could affect angels.

“You thought she was another like you,” I realized. “Only subtler and older.”

“It was my belief that she was not a willing servant to Below, and so that she ensured all the victories arranged in their name would lead to starker defeats down the line,” the Pilgrim admitted. “I suspected her forced service to be a consequence of the nature of her Bestowal, a storyteller’s duty to attend to the foe as well as the hero.”

“She’s not like us, Pilgrim,” I said. “Named, sure, but I get the feeling there’s a lot less between her and the Gods than there is for the rest of us.”

“The sufferings she attended to are on a scale we can hardly imagine,” Tariq softly agreed. “And so I did not judge, Catherine, to borrow another man’s words. Even with the wisdom of the Ophanim close to me, I cannot begin to understand the crushing burden of her purpose. Weighing the suffering of a century knowing it might spare another, patching and bleeding nations to prevent greater horrors – a millennia of ugly choices, one after another.”

He looked grieved.

“And still she did good whenever she could, I have seen this,” the Pilgrim said. “It was she who led me to heal Laurence after her duel with the Ranger, did you know?”

I blinked.

“I had no idea,” I said.

I’d known about the duel between a younger Saint of Swords and Ranger, since Indrani had told me what she knew, but I’d never known the Pilgrim to be involved.

“I trusted her,” Tariq admitted, “to see a path out of the dark even when I did not.”

I’d never really had that kind of trust in me, but then I supposed there was a reason I’d become a villain and not a heroine.

“I still believe she seeks a better future for Calernia,” the Grey Pilgrim admitted. “But that is not enough. I have seen the world we would make, through the Alliance and the Accords, and I am willing to fight for it. If she seeks to darken that path, then she is my enemy regardless of her intent.”

Not exactly the ringing endorsement of killing the Intercessor first change we got I’d kind of been hoping for, but life was all about tempering your expectations. I’d settle for a grief-stricken fight between past comrades if that was all he had it in him to summon up.

“More will be asked of you,” I bluntly said. “I know there are dangers, but by the White Knight’s sentencing you’ve gained a pupil in Christophe de Pavanie.”

“I am aware,” Tariq frowned.

“What you’re not aware of is how he’s tied to that mess in Cleves,” I said. “You know, the House of Langevin being made to eat crow.”

“He’s the reason Prince Gaspard abdicated in favour of his son?” the Pilgrim asked, sounding surprised.

Hasenbach had wasted no time spending the political capital she’d gained through the trial, though at least she’d been subtle about it. Gaspard Langevin had, officially, taken a bad wound and passed the burden of leadership to his younger and more vital son. It’d been an unpopular move in Cleves, where the man was respected, but Hasenbach had privately marshaled the Highest Assembly using his ties to the Mirror Knight as an anchor around his neck instead of the trump card Gaspard had likely seen them as. The army under General Rumena then leaving regardless of protests had made it very clear to him that he’d made more enemies than his house could afford, driving the final nail in the coffin.

“Not exactly,” I said. “But he was involved.”

I elaborated quickly, laying out the concerns Sve Noc had brought to me along with the plot and the difficulties the situation had represented for the First Prince: stark consequences to acting, worse if she did not.

“I’m assuming Hanno will speak to you as well when he arrives with the Mirror Knight,” I said. “But I wanted you to know the nature of what’s being dropped on your lap. He needs to be straightened up before he blunders into another mess like this, Pilgrim.”

I grimaced.

“He’s still the best match we have with the Severance,” I reluctantly admitted. “And I’d be a lot more comfortable trusting him with that power if you were able to first look me in the eye and promise be he wasn’t going to shit the bed with it.”

If anyone could do it, mind you, it was the Peregrine. As far as heroes were concerned, he was the mentor. To Tariq’s honour, he did not balk or try to pass the responsibility to another.

“How long would I have with him?” the Pilgrim asked.

“If things go well, we want to try Keter next summer,” I said. “I know it’s not long, but...”

“I will do all I can,” Tariq simply promised.

“Hells,” I grimly said, “that’s all I can ask, isn’t it?”

And on that we toasted, cups rising in accord and going down with the same.

—

It was probably a good thing that our attendants were far enough behind they couldn’t hear us speak as watched over the entrance of the reinforcements into the stronghold with threadbare ceremony.

“I don’t know what my niece has been bribing the Levantines with, but I hope we have more in stock,” Prince Klaus Papenheim appreciatively said.

The older man was eyeing the rows of heavy Alavan foot with an almost hungry look. I snorted at the sight. I’d found it difficult not to like the grizzled Prince of Hannoven from the start, even knowing he’d almost been one of the leading generals in the invasion of Callow. He was from a mould I was familiar with, that I’d spent most my life around: an old soldier, a veteran who’d spent almost as much time on the saddle as reigning in his capital. My reputation with Lycaonese tended to be decent, for a servant of wicked power, but I’d not expected the old prince to take to me as well.

“Having infantry envy, are we?” I mused. “That ought to be a familiar feeling by now.”

More a tease than a truth. An open ground exercises my army tended to trounce his own, but the moment the terrain got difficult the balance tended to swing harshly the other way. It’d been about as I expected, given the difficult of using classic Legion tactics in the mountains when they’d been designed to win wars on the plains of Callow. On those plains, though, Black’s war machine still reigned queen despite the best efforts of the opposition. The Lycaonese were good, but they hadn’t mastered the tactics of the Reform yet.

They’d find it difficult to catch up there, since their lack of mage was even worse than my own. Unfortunately for them, they wouldn’t have the workaround of having stolen a Legion or two as I’d done when founding the Army of Callow.

“Talk to me when your lot use a goat path without waking up all of Ashur,” the one-armed prince scathingly replied.

The obligatory trading of insults having been seen to, I took a better look at the six thousand troops Lord Yannu Marave had sent our way. Most of them Alavan, by the colours on the shields and faces, but I was hardly complaining about that: the Champion’s Blood coughed up to arm its heavies in good mail and plate, and they fought ferociously with their swords and shields. Two thousand of the Levantines were lesser captains sworn to the Holy Seljun instead of Alava, though the pattern for why they’d been chosen was neither the size of their warband nor their origins. Instead they were all, in majority, made up of slingers. Less a boon than the heavies, these, but still very much a boon.

The Dominion’s armies were inferior to those of Procer and Callow in several regards, but they were also the only standing force that still fielded slingers – whose thrown stones had proved to have a great deal of bite against the undead than arrows.

“That was the last major force we were waiting on,” I said. “The White Knight will arrive with Named and the latest from the Arsenal in a few days, which has us almost ready to begin the push.”

“Weren’t you waiting on some sort of Levantine bounty hunter?” the older man asked. “I was warned she might be trouble by the Silver Huntress.”

“The Headhunter’s a prick,” I conceded. “But they’re a prick with the finest tracking chops in the Grand Alliance. Archer went to fetch them, and they should both be here by dawn.”

The Prince of Hannoven cocked a brow.

“They?” he asked.

“Fluid,” I explained.

He grunted in understanding.

“I want to split the Dominion forces between the armies when we move out,” Prince Klaus said, “You know their discipline holds better when they’re kept apart.”

“I also know it’ll be a cold day in Ater before you get Tanja and Aquiline to split,” I snorted.

“They listen to you,” the older man said.

“When it suits them,” I shrugged.

“Then take them both with you,” the Prince of Hannoven said. “And leave me the Alavans.”

“Fat chance,” I replied. “I’d get both a guaranteed headache and fuck all slingers, Papenheim. Aren’t your people supposed to be all about giving people a fair shake?”

“And yours are supposed to spend their days trampling Praesi out in Streges, but it’s a strange new world,” he grunted back. “I’ll take the larger slice of fantassins and give you with Princess Beatrice if you agree.”

Now that was a tempting offer. My officers just didn’t have the knack for dealing with Proceran mercenaries without it going badly – falsifying a report in the Army got you caned and demoted, when it was considered common practice among those fantassin companies who even bothered with reports. Some poor Arlesite bastard had even tried to bribe an orc lieutenant, which got him his throat ripped out and ten more people hanged in the aftermath of the vicious brawl that ensued.

“Gods, you must really hate dealing with the Blood,” I said. “That leaves you who to run the Alamans, Prince Arsene? The man’s got all the boldness of a wet towel and I’ve never seen him send out his soldiers when he could pass the fight to others.”

Never to the extent that it was insubordination or harmful to the war effort, but the Prince of Bayeux was very clearly trying to make sure his forces suffered as few casualties as possible even if that meant other forces would suffer instead.

“I’ll have Mathilda breathing on his neck and fill his days with petty mercenary squabbles, it’ll keep him too twitchy to be a load,” the Prince of Hannoven said. “I can’t do either those things with your lordlings.”

I hummed pensively, the two of us watching the brightly painted ranks of Dominion soldiers streaming in. I’d theoretically be leading the Second and Third Army on my prong of the offensive along with the lion’s share of the Firstborn, so in truth I wasn’t badly in need of more heavy foot. If I got the army of Hainaut I’d get what I considered to be the cream of the Alamans forces in the region as well as their finest cavalry captain, which gave me a solid force to work with.

“If I were selected to lead one of the offensives,” I said. “That might be a tempting offer.”

The older man spat to the side.

“You’ll get one prong and me the other,” Prince Klaus said. “It’s a done deal, and I won’t hear it otherwise. The lordlings are still too green and the only other one I’d trust with a large force is Volignac.”

Prince Beatrice Volignac wouldn’t be getting a command that size, though. Not only was most of her principality already occupied by the dead, the appointment of two Proceran commanders would go over... poorly with the coalition forces in Hainaut.

“You didn’t agree outright,” he said. “So out with it. What more do you want in the stew?”

“I want first pick of the fantassin companies,” I said. “If my flanks are held by Levantines, I can’t afford runners in the mercenaries.”

“You’re a cold one, Foundling,” the grey-haired man said. “Sticking me with both the company dross and the Brabant conscripts?”

“I’ll cede General Rumena in return,” I offered. “It’ll keep your sigils in good order.”

Unlike the Prince of Hannoven, I could handle the Firstborn just fine on my own. Mighty Jindrich could hold field command and I’d handle the rest. Offering General Rumena was not a small concession to make, given its known power and its standing as the finest commander among the drow, and I could see the older man was tempted.

“Agreed,” Prince Klaus said, and spat into his palm.

I did the same and clasped his hand.

“May the Heavens strike a liar,” the Prince if Hannoven said.

“Crows take the oathbreaker,” I replied, and we shook on it.

I could feel he was just as eager as me to get started on his planning, but to our common frustration there’d be no going anywhere. The Levantines had yet to finish coming into the stronghold, and it’d be poor politics to slight them by leaving early.

Gods if it wasn’t boring as all Hells, though.

—

“Glaring won’t add lines to the report,” Hakram said. “Though I praise the quality of the effort.”

I sighed and dropped back into my chair, blowing at an errant strand of hair that’d slipped out of my loose ponytail and gotten into my face. Sinfully comfortable as the seat liberate from Arcadia was, it did not improve my mood.

“It’s ridiculous that we still have so little reliable information on the fantassins,” I complained. “I know we’re thin on Jacks, up here, but this isn’t even bare bones. It’s bare bone , maybe, and even then I’d argue it’s not a full one.”

I’d sent for all we had on the fantassin companies of the Hainaut front after returning to my tent – which I still used for work, if not always to sleep in – and even as the parchments flooded in my despair at what little we actually knew increased. Half of this was rumours – many reported by our soldiers, sure, but that didn’t magically make them more than rumours – while the solid information was... sparse. Company names, captains and numbers. A few records, including who had gotten commendations for bravery, and a few bits about which companies were known to hate each other or to have bad blood with the Army of Callow. The three largest of the companies had a little more on them, a bit about the leading officers and their reputations, but I had to admit this was largely a pile of nothing.

“I fucked myself negotiating with Papenheim,” I noted. “I might have first pick of companies, but I can’t even be sure what companies I should pick.”

“Neither would the Iron Prince, dearest,” Akua said.

Where Hakram had claimed a corner of the tent with several smaller tables set around his wooden wheelchair – though it was not all wood, and Masego had laid so many enchantments on the thing that wards sometimes confused it for a mage – Akua had instead claimed a seat around the table Indrani was still carving for me, and was lounging on it with a cup of wine in hand.

“Useless consolation,” I replied in an irritated tone. “My favourite, how did you know?”

“I shall endeavour keep this revelation in mind, my heart,” Akua silkily replied, “though it has nothing to do with the point I was making.”

“ Ah ,” Hakram exclaimed. “Beatrice Volignac. Clever.”

I frowned. What did the Princess of Hainaut have to do with – oh . Shit, I hated it when Akua was right just after I’d gotten snippy with her. The Lycaonese weren’t that much better at dealing with Alamans than my own officers, so the Iron Prince usually delegated that sort of thing to his most trusted among the Alamans royals, the Princess of Hainaut. The Prince of Hannoven wouldn’t be able to pick the companies any better than I, but Beatrice Volignac very likely could. She’d be assigned to my part of the offensive, too, so she’d have motivation not to be half-hearted about this.

“Set up a meeting with her, Adjutant,” I said. “It’s the kind of thing that needs to be asked in person. Tomorrow morning – wait, no, early afternoon.”

It’d break one of those unspoken Alamans rules to ask her to do me that favour before she was officially folded under my command by our morning war council, even if the matter was effectively already settled.

“I’ll see to it,” Hakram said, his long and skeletal fingers jotting notes down on parchment. “You still need to decide where you’ll be addressing the villains, Catherine. The earlier we settle that the better.”

I grimaced. I’d wanted to wait until the White Knight was here to hold that, to ward off the perception that we might be plotting, but now that the last two of my lot were arriving with dawn the Named I represented under the Terms were due a proper council. Some were getting restless, too, so I was wary of delaying further. So far I’d put them off by saying all was best addressed after the war council settled broader affairs, but that excuse would be expiring tomorrow morning as well. That meant I’d be meeting with the villains assembled in Hainaut before sundown, like it or not.

“I would suggest far from anything expensive,” Adjutant dryly suggested, a peek of fangs revealing his amusement.

His face hadn’t changed much, I thought. So when he was seated, when the fold of his clothes hid the missing arm and leg and meat, it was almost possible to forget. Almost.

“Outside would be best,” I agreed. “Though I don’t want eavesdropping, which limits our options. There’s not a lot of places here warded up right for that.”

Most of them were war rooms, personal quarters or other places of import. None of which I particularly wanted to shove a bunch of rowdy villains into.

“Make a request to borrow wardstones from the Gigantes,” Hakram suggested. “This is Terms business, not personal, so you would be within your rights.”

“There any left so spare?” I asked. “I know we restricted who can make requests, but they still go fast.”

“I’ll know within the hour,” Adjutant promised. “If it is feasible?”

“Then do it,” I ordered.

Which handled the privacy issues nicely. Leaving actual location as the last hurdle.

“In the country will have to do,” I finally said. “I’d rather not do this in the stronghold proper, if I have a choice.”

Obviously we wouldn’t be doing this on the Dead King’s side of the trenches, so it’d have to be south.

“Akua?” I asked. “You’ve flown over the region often enough.”

“There’s a large hill with a fire pit perhaps an hour away from Neustal,” she noted. “Formerly used by shepherds, I believe. No other larger significance.”

Mhm. Using somewhere with a little more weight to it would please those who liked to feel important – the Rapacious Troubadour and the Summoner came to mind – but I didn’t necessarily want to encourage the perception that this was a council momentous in any way. It was a relatively large assembly of Named, but it should be nothing more than that.

“It’ll do,” I said, then sighed. “All right, what’s next?”

The night was still young, and so there was still work to be done.

Chapter 46: Vestibule

“I make it a habit to kill all the people at court who do not want to usurp me, as they are principled fellows and so eminently more dangerous than your average conspirators.”

– Dread Emperor Iniquitous, first of the ‘Mayfly Emperors’

As of dawn there were eleven villains in Hainaut, if I was considered to stand among their number even with my Name not yet fully formed.

We didn’t even make up half the Named currently in the principality, though at least we did count for more than a third, yet I honestly couldn’t think of many occasions were so many villainous Named had gathered together in the same place at the same time – much less while being on the same side. Not unless Revenants counted, anyway, which in my opinion they did not. It was a lot easier to herd cats when they were dead. This was not the sort of thing to approach half-cocked, but I found there was a remarkable scarcity of knowledge on affairs this: even more than heroes, Below’s lot clutched their secrets tightly.

Fortunately for me, I had to the former heiress to Wolof in my service. And considering that Akua had once intended to rule all of Calernia, she’d paid even closer attention to the underlying currents of villainy that your average Sahelian scion would have. She’d wanted to avoid the mistakes of her predecessors, after all. Her ambition itself might have been foolish, but I had to concede she’d not gone about pursuing it foolishly. Save for one or two exceptions. When I brought up the subject in my tent early in the morning, over my breakfast, I found her almost eager to talk about it. It was subject of long-standing fascination for her, as it turned out.

“Alliances between villains have not been studied in great depth outside of Praes,” Akua told me, still sounding pleased by the line of inquiry. “And aside from the Tower itself, there are none who can rival the records of Wolof on the subject. It was of great interest to my predecessors, as you might imagine.”

Wasn’t hard to. I’d seen enough corpses I barely needed to try.

“I recall hearing the Sahelians haven’t raised the most tyrants, among the old families,” I noted a tad more diplomatically. “Though you’re up there for Warlocks, right?”

“The Mirembe of Aksum are not far behind us on the latter count,” Akua said. “Six less, I believe, though it might have changed since I absented myself. They raised very different practitioners from my family, however, and their arts have not well adapted to modern warmaking.”

I cocked an eyebrow, curious as to what Praesi highborn might consider sorcery aging poorly. Devils didn’t exactly get dusty.

“Impractical?” I asked.

“Aksum was once known as the Cauldron of Beasts,” she said. “The Mirembe have long been known for their interest in the crafting and alteration of life.”

Monster-making, she meant. Charming.

“They dabbled in heredity as well, and created the first known stable breeding program,” Akua continued. “The practices have since shifted, of course, but their work remains foundational.”

I could see why their specialties had not aged well. In the old stories the Praesi always came at Callow with a few horrifying monsters that one of our heroes ended up killing, and the stories about the orcs that could breathe under water and the sentient tigers were infamous even out west. Not a lot of those had been successes in a more than marginal sense, though, and the Reforms would have been the final nail in their coffin – especially so after the Conquest proved that the Legions as envisioned by Grem One-Eye and my father were highly effective. And since every High Seat and more than a few lesser lords now ran their own breeding programs, it’d not given the Mirembe a lasting advantage.

“That aside, I would caution you to think of raising too many tyrants as a crown worth contending for in the eyes of the High Seats,” Akua said. “The Yeboah of Nok once succeeded at claiming the Tower three generations in a row, but none of the oldfamilies were willing to allow rule of Praes to be clutched too tightly. Their lines was exterminated to the last, and the Sesay were installed to rule the city.”

“I get your point,” I drily said. “It wasn’t in the interest of the Sahelians to win too much, even when they could.”

“Exactly,” Akua smiled. “Though even over periods of relative humility my ancestors were not the kind of people to suffer lack of influence. As the Empire often boasts the largest concentration of allied villains on Calernia in any generation, grasping the nature of such alliances was a necessity.”

“Allied might be a bit of a stretch,” I snorted.

Back in the old days Praes had usually counted more Named than the kingdom, but they’d so frequently lost in part because they were as interested in backstabbing each other as actually stabbing Callow.

“Perhaps not to the extent of the Calamites,” Akua noted, “but you would be surprised. The most famous example would be the Black Knight and Chancellor of Malignant the Second, who all histories agree loved him deeply. It is why the man reigned a full decade and a half while his handling of the Empire can most charitably be describe as occasionally benign ineptitude.”

There’d been a sprinkling of occasions like these throughout imperial history, she told me, but the pattern that emerged to my ear was that the bonds were usually between smaller groups: a pair or maybe three Named, often who’d come up through a transitional Name together. About half of the time they ended up offing the ruling tyrant and putting one of them up on the seat instead. Being a tightly bound band of five, and one essentially loyal to the ruling Empress to boot, was where the Calamities had broken fresh grounds.

“The Empire usually waxes and wanes between three and eight villains at any time,” Akua said. “Though only four Names are considered to be part of the fabric of Praes.”

I didn’t need her to tell me which. Dread Emperor, Chancellor, Warlock and Black Knight. The four roles that’d been at the core of the Empire’s way of life for centuries, Yet I was now learning that there were much more nuances to those roles than I’d believed. For one, not all Names came with every generation. Praesi highborn usually saw which had had come and which had not as an indication of what should be expected from a reign.

“It is usually seen as the mark of a weak tyrant to have a Chancellor but no Black Knight,” she told me. “On the other hand, one who claimed the Tower with both a Black Knight and a Warlock but no Chancellor will be expected to aggressively contest influence with the High Seats – often with a measure of success, historically speaking.”

“But you get other Named as well,” I said. “There’s been other Assassins – in other places too, but more in Praes – and old Callowan histories speak of Necromancers too.”

Unfortunately the skill of Praesi in that branch of sorcery paired with the relative magical ignorance of my countrymen meant that old records could often only guess at if they’d been dealing with a necromancer or a Necromancer.

“Indeed,” Akua nodded. “Before the Wars of the Dead it was common for a Lich to exist, and since the heyday of fighting arenas in Maleficent the Second’s reign we’ve had recurring Gladiators. The latter is even more common in Stygia, however, and so somewhat looked down.”

“Of course it is,” I sighed “I take it Names without much precedent are also considered pedestrian?”

“The Captain and the Scribe were once underestimated for this very reason,” Akua said, then looked chagrined. “I was not immune to some shade of that foolishness, I’ll admit. I once thought very little of the Scribe.”

“She cultivates that impression actively,” I said with a kernel of sympathy, though it really had been a mistake.

The Scribe’s spies had been instrumental in keeping her contained, back when she’d been Governess of Liesse, and that was just a drop in the bucket of the quiet work done to hasten her downfall. The bloody coup against Hasenbach in Salia was a good example of what Scribe could when let off the leash, and its aftermath was still haunting the First Prince even years later.

“So I’ve head,” Akua neutrally said. “Regardless, the Empire’s traditional position as the leading light of villainy-“

Did that count as blasphemy, I wondered? Probably not unless she was talking about Light.

“- has meant that foreign villains whose defeats were not mortal have often fled to Praes for refuge. Treatment varied according to who held the Tower, but some rose quite high when the Dread Empire was expanding and looking for champions. Sorcerous, in particular, opened his court to many and gave them great authority.”

My brow rose.

“I don’t recall hearing of any foreign villains in Praes during my lifetime,” I said. “Which surprises me, considering the Grey Pilgrim has been terrorizing villains out west and south. There were bound to have been a few who wanted to get out before either he or the Saint strolled into town.”

“The end of the last two gave pause to any possible takers, I expect,” Akua drily said.

A beat passed.

“Black killed them, didn’t he?” I bluntly said.

“They came in the decades preceding our births – the Reaver from Penthesand the Blue Mage form Ashur, to be specific – but they were brought in as helpers for the Purebloods,” Akua elaborated. “Naturally the Carrion Lord brutally murdered them at the first halfway decent excuse and extended the purge to anyone associated with them. An entire branch family of the Niri of Okoro was forced to eat until their stomachs burst in what he called a warning about ‘overly ambitious appetite’.”

I coughed to hide the way my lips were treacherously twitching upwards. She noticed.

“It’s considered one of the reasons for the later succession crisis in Okoro,” Akua reproached.

“Very sad,” I got out soberly. “Not at all ironic, or in any way cathartic to hear about.”

I changed the subject before that woeful look she was giving me could lead to a reproach about the importance of not killing Wasteland aristocrats in amusing ways. Talk about not knowing your audience.

“Praes isn’t the only place to have had villain alliances, though,” I said. “We had the Sable Order, in Callow, and the Free Cities were whipped by the League of Rogues for a while.”

The Sable Order had been a chivalric order led by four fallen heroes who’d gathered a lot of disaffected knights, bandits and penniless soldiers in an army and brought the kingdom to its knees. They’d had the run of the countryside for years, until the Albans managed to finally beat them on the field. The League of Rogues – although they’d never called themselves that, and the name had come with later histories – has been even more successful, the seven villains having occupied half the Free Cities for over a decade and cowed even Ashur for a time. About two centuries back, I figured?

I remembered them in part because they’d surprised me, as a kid. They’d been unusually steadfast allies even when they began losing ground, supposedly because they’d taken oaths of mutual loyalty to each other guaranteed by devils. I’d wondered why every villain do that for two months, until I got my hands on the second volume of Wicked Deeds and learned about the very ugly way the last two had died when the devils came to collect.

“The Iron Kingdoms are arguably a greater success story than either of these,” Akua replied.

I blinked in surprise.

“Those collapsed almost immediately,” I slowly said. “And they were a refuge for villains, but hardly led by them.”

It’d been one of the history lessons from the orphanage tutors instead of one of my private forays, but I distinctly remembered being told this.

“That is what Proceran histories insist, yes,” she amusedly told me. “And so most everyone believes. Fortunately one of my ancestors, Elimu Sahelian, served as court mage to ‘Queen’ Alandra so we reliably know otherwise from his memoirs.”

“He served aswhat now?” I flatly asked.

“Court mage,” she repeated. “It is an old practice of my family, dearest. We’ve gathered many secrets and artefacts this way, leaving with them when the cause collapse. We did the same thing with Theodosius the Unconquered himself, and a dozen other lesser hegemons.”

I was quite itching to get my hands on the memoirs of whoever the Sahelians had sent to advise the man that was arguably the greatest military mind in Calernian history, but that could wait until later.

“So the Iron Kingdoms were a villain alliance?” I frowned.

These days some scholars even argued that the name ‘Iron Kingdoms’ was meaningless, that it’d simply been a very chaotic period in Proceran and Levantine history where rule of law had frayed nearly beyond repair in a certain region, but that wasn’t yet the traditional view. Properly speaking, the words referred to a bunch of bandit fiefdoms that’d briefly seized control of most of current Valencis as well as the adjourning Brocelian Forest and Cusp.

“It was led by nine bandit and raider Named,” Akua agreed, “the remembered kings and queens of iron. And while three of the ‘kingdoms’ collapsed swiftly, as you said, others fared much better. It was nearly nine years before Valencis was fully reclaimed, and it took over two decades before the five kingdoms in the Brocelian were brought down by heroes.”

I let out a thoughtful noise. Yeah, I could see why Procer in particular would have wanted to keep that story quiet. These days the Principate went all Damned this and Damned that when Named got inconvenient, but it’d been a lot younger back then. It would have been a bad blow to its prestige if a pack of villains had been able to seize one of its principalities. The kind of blow that made fresh conquests consider rebellion and borderlands mull independence. The histories I’d been taught would be a lot more palatable to the Highest Assembly, and safer to own up to.

“Neither Praes or these alliances really fit what we have as a precedent,” I finally decided.

“This is true,” Akua easily said, “but attempting to establish direct precedents when multiple Named are involved is foten a fool’s errand regardless. Valuable insight can still gained from observing what led to the victories and the failures of these arrangements.”

“Infighting,” I drolly said. “And heroes. Occasionally armies paired with the previous too.”

“Yes, very clever,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “About what I might have expected, given your terrible essay on the Licerian Wars.”

I gaped at her. Wait, what ? Shit, no, it atcually made sense that she might have read that at some point. Sure, it was a piece of homework I’d written half-drunk in the backroom of the Rat’s Nest, but Malicia’s spymistress had gotten her hands on it back in the day – she’d even mentioned it, when we’d first spoken in the Tower. The Sahelians had infiltrated the Eyes and the Tower, back in the day, though I was never sure to quite what extent. Merciless Gods, though, was this the only piece of writing that I was ever going to be known by?

“At least Hasenbach won’t know about it,” I mused.

“Mother sold quite a bit of imperial intelligence through Mercantis when her coffers ran low, so she actually might,” Akua amusedly replied.

Goddamn Sahelians , I uncharitably thought. Given my luck, that fucking thing was going to end up my only written work to be passed down the ages.

“Regardless, my heart, you are correct that infighting is recurring pattern,” the shade mused. “Arguably the most important. It has been the end of a many a skillful reign in Ater, and certainly precipitated the fall of the Iron Kingdoms.”

“That’s the nature of villainy, to an extent,” I said. “You don’t become one without being hard-headed, and unlike heroes we tend to see each other as potential threats instead of potential allies. That’s a recipe for blood on the floor at the first disagreement.”

Heroes did kill each other on occasion too, I wouldn’t ignore that, but it was significantly rarer.

“Ah, but there lies the area of interest,” she smiled, golden eyes alight with pleasure. “What aspect of villainy in particular drives us to conflict amongst ourselves? I have pondered this long, Catherine, as when I dreamed of empire still I believed that the governors of my Calernian empire must be villains. It was imperative that I understand how to keep them from turning on each other as well as myself.”

I drummed my fingers against the table absent-mindedly as I thought. Villains tended to be more prone to violence, broadly speaking. They also tended to just be worse people than heroes, but that was a weak argument. Most people on Calernia were worse than heroes, by the same measure, and they weren’t as prone to infighting as villains. Names did tend to magnify your flaws as well as your virtues, but that was a weak argument as well. Villains weren’t all cut from some universal cloth, in either personality or objectives, so the consistent infighting of their alliances couldn’t really be traced back to some universal flaw we all shared.

But then that was looking at the individual, when one of my first lessons had been that the system often had the greater impact.

“Villain stories tend to reward conflict and acting decisively,” I finally said. “It’s an incentive. If it makes you stronger, helps you to win, most people will lean into the traits. When unchecked and become reflexive, that tendency results in poor decisions like backstabbing a nominal ally while heroes are at the gate.”

“Squire to the end, I see,” Akua murmured, sounding thoughtful. “An interesting answer, and not one I necessarily disagree with. Yet I arrived to a different conclusion myself. I believe that ambition is the keystone.”

“Not all villains are ambitious,” I pointed out. “It’s not like every Black Knight eventually made a play for the Tower.”

“Ambition can be a nuanced thing,” she replied, leaning forward in animation. “A Black Knight’s ambition could be to stand the greatest hero-killer of the age, or to lead the Empire to military victory. Rule need not be the driving force of them. Ambition is, to my eye, the seeking of excellence. The nature of that excellence varies with every Named.”

There was a refrain of old Praesi pride in there, I thought. The old guard of tyrants had often claimed that they were seekers of excellence, that their philosophy was one of advancement while the Gods Above were enemy of all change. Like most philosophical arguments preached by people who practiced mass human sacrifice and casual assassination, I tended to be skeptical of their claims. If anything it was the Praesi circular circus of usurpation and civil war that was stagnant, whatever the adherents of ‘iron sharpens iron’ might claim. I didn’t entirely disagree with her assertions, though.

“I’ll agree that Named tend to be driven people,” I conceded. “But I don’t buy the rest of that. There’s outliers, sure, like the Tyrant of the Hierarch. But someone like the Harrowed Witch isn’t trying to be the best anything – she’s trying to not get eaten by the brother she murdered and bound, and maybe trying to move up in the world when there’s nothing more pressing.”

“She improvised the spell that bound her brother’s spirit, highly advanced necromancy, with few resources at hand and no margin of error or time to spare,” Akua stated in reply. “One might argue that her ambition is survival in difficult times, and that she has proved highly able in pursuing it.”

“Or she was already skilled, and just got desperate and inspired,” I replied. “But fine, for the sake of argument let’s say I agree with you. Where is this headed?”

“Conflicting excellences are the cause of strife between villains,” she said. “Unlike Above’s champions, who seek not excellence but a particular outcome, rivalry is natural between us. And given the rewards of violence, as you have put it, villains are more prone to disposing of rivals and obstacles than reach peaceful accords even when these might be more practical. It is why Procer can be the region that has the most villains on Calernia, by simple numbers, but alliances between them are nearly unheard of.”

I took me a while to place the expression on her face. She was enjoying this, I realized. The discussion, the debates. I did not let it distract me, or allow my thoughts to meander down the path of who she might have been if she were not the Doom of Liesse.

“Without a common framework keeping us bound,” Akua continued, “like the Dread Empire or a greater common ambition in the vein of the League of Rogues and the Iron Kingdoms, villains will nearly always default into competition.”

Mhm. The argument somewhat held even when looked at closely, I decided. The infighting in villain alliances tended to crop up when the shared ambition was collapsing, not in the initial string of victories that most villains got to taste before their comeuppance.

“And how did your great Calernian empire propose to get around that flaw?” I asked.

It’d been idle curiosity that made me ask, but suddenly there was a weight to the tent. To this conversation. We had not often talked of the Doom of Liesse, of her plans when she had been the Diabolist. And never this explicitly. She did not openly show hesitation, but her silence and calm face made it plain to me anyway. The golden-eyed shade knew me well, these days, but that blade cut both ways.

“By making more of you,” Akua eventually replied. “Client queens and kings that were genuinely invested in the rule of their province, and capable of dominating Named within their realm. So long as my fortress stood, fear of Greater Breaches being opened in retaliation to treachery would have prevented most forms of rebellion – and I believed myself capable of triumphing in the inevitable ensuing shadow wars.”

“It was a shit plan,” I frankly replied. “You gave yourself a single point of failure and left each of your ‘clients’ a powerbase to consolidate. The moment the fortress was out, your entire empire would immediately collapse.”

“Which was why I intended to build several more,” Akua admitted, “once I had the resources of Callow and Praes at my disposal.”

I breathed out. Shit. I’d never actually considered that. Would it have worked? No, I eventually decided. The moment she got Malicia and I to surrender, Diabolist would have stood as a beacon for every hero on the continent. I’d had to bend over backwards to avoid that, and she wouldn’t have been able to manage while standing atop a fucking doomsday weapon. She’d not last long enough to make a second fortress, or it’d get destroyed while still incomplete. The Diabolist would still have made a horrid mess on the way out, though, possibly afflicting several parts of Calernia with permanent Hellgates before dying. Gods, Second Liesse had been a nightmare but it was still better than... this. I forced myself to think of something else.

“A framework,” I evenly said. “The Truce and Terms are one of those, arguably. As is the war against the Dead King.”

“The Truce and Terms are and should be considered a construct to help to wage war against Keter,” Akua said.

It was quiet, but I could hear the muted relief to her voice. Like we’d both stepped away from a ledge.

“It is the war that has gathered Named,” she continued, “and in my opinion it should be considered the ‘alliance’ within which villains will be jostling for position.”

“Jostling only to an extent,” I reminded her. “I’ve avoided a lot of fights by having such a strong position that potential rivals didn’t want to take the risk of a challenge.”

More than a few villains coveted my seat as our representative under the Truce and Terms but they were also aware that I had an army, Named allies and the Kingdom of Callow’s power backing me. It wasn’t full-proof, of course. Some had tried to take that swing anyway, unable to deal with being the second in anything. The Red Reaver had been one, and I’d made an example of him. Others, like the Barrow Sword, had picked a fight to test my strength and then fallen in line almost amicably when I’d proven I was not to be trifled with.

“Several sources of your current influence are temporary,” Akua pointed out. “Your position as representative, your queenship over Callow, your positional advantage within the Grand Alliance. They can serve as a defensive asset, prevent others from striking at you, but they should not be confused for a way to make people listen to you. If you want obedience of the villains you have gathered here, and for them to bind themselves to your Accords, you must find a way to help their own ambitions within the frame of your own greater one.”

I did not immediately reply. As it happened, I was not under the illusion that my current influence among my kind would carry beyond the war against Keter. I was in a unique position at the moment but sooner or later the stars would fall out of alignment and my authority would wane. For now, though, I still had it. And I fully intended to use it as much to carry out the war as to prepare the peace that’d follow it. Akua was still thinking of this as a warlord would, though or perhaps a Dread Empress – like a centerpiece binding important assets to her by giving them what they wanted, and pairing that fulfillment to service.

But I couldn’t think like that, not if I wanted my work to survive me. If I wanted villains to embrace the Liesse Accords, that meant convincing them that submitting to some rules was worth the benefits the submission would earn them.

“Turning wolves into wolfhounds,” I mused.

“One piece of meat at a time,” Akua Sahelian softly agreed.

—

The morning’s war council yielded no surprises. The Iron Prince and I would hold command of the two offensives, and General Pallas broad authority but not actual command over the reserves. I’d wasted no time in politely requesting of Princess Beatrice of Hainaut, freshly under my command, that she ‘make suggestions’ about the fantassins companies that would best suit our needs. I made it clear I wasn’t trying to leave Klaus Papenheim with only dregs, but that she shouldn’t feel shy about taking the better cut either. She was amenable to the request, and gave the impression she amenable to my being in command period. I had hopes of a good working relationship.

Mind you, she was an Alamans of royal blood. I fully expected she’d be able to put a smile on surrendering to Malicia.

With that settled, I turned to the looming matter of the council of villains. The hill Akua had told me of turned out to be more than serviceable, and so we went ahead with using it. The firepit was cleaned and deepened, then ten high seats brought out in a broad circle – Hakram would not need one, bringing his own. Seating would be assigned, I’d decided, to avoid chaos breaking out immediately instead of eventually. I considered the known tapestry of grudges in silence, looking at the seats. The Barrow Sword and Headhunter couldn’t be too close without fingers being lost so I put the fire between them, and leaving the Summoner by either the Beastmaster or the Berserker was a recipe for a snide comment preceding bloodspill so they’d have to be split up.

Hakram on my left and Indrani on my right was only to be expected, but the seat to their sides would be taken as signs of favour so I had to be careful who got them. The Rapacious Troubadour would have to get the seat by Archer, I thought. I’d left him to handle Named-finding out here with little prior warning and he’d done well, so it was owed. It would be the Berserker by Adjutant’s side, though, I eventually decided. She was fresh to Hainaut, and I’d only met her the once before leaving – just long enough to send her beyond the trenches to hunt with the Silver Huntress – but during my absence she’d apparently killed a Revenant and wounded another, which merited encouragement.

That made five seats settled, and I leaned on my staff as I worried my lip and considered the rest.

“Where do you intend to place the Headhunter?” Akua asked.

I did not glance back, having known she wasn’t far. I would have brought Hakram as well, but he wasn’t exactly in a state to make the trip quickly. Indrani was currently sleeping, having travelled a full day and night over the last stretch to get here in time, so of my inner circle it was only the two of us here.

“Between Berserker and Beastmaster, I think,” I said.

The Levantine villain wouldn’t be able to easily mess with either, considering neither was a slouch up close or a stranger to violence. She nodded, eyes pensive.

“Barrow Sword by the Rapacious Troubadour?” she suggested.

I hummed. Ishaq tended to get along with people who weren’t of the Blood – or whose savagery he did not consider to be damaging his own chances of becoming one of the Blood, namely the Headhunter – so I was actually wary of placing him too early. He was valuable because of that relative lack of enmities. Still, he had to sit somewhere .

“Then Concocter by him,” I said.

‘Cocky’ was both sharp-tongued and not physically powerful, so I had to be wary of where I placed her. If she mouthed off to the Berserker she was liable to lose a few teeth, not to mention the bloody scalp the Headhunter would be after. The Concocter would likely have pockets full of poison, I further considered, so if she retaliated the escalation would be steep and immediate. Best to avoid the trouble entirely by giving her mild-mannered neighbours.

“Summoner by her,” Akua said. “He will enjoy word of the Arsenal, no?”

The man was still miffed he’d been assigned as a combat sorcerer instead of a researcher, as I recalled, but he’d never hidden his continuing fascination for the Arsenal. It was a good pick. With a little luck he might even be too busy talking to her to insult anyone else for at least part of this council.

“Agreed,” I grunted. “Which would leave the Harrowed Witch between Summoner and Beastmaster.”

“She was in Archer’s service for some time,” Akua noted. “That should ensure civility of the Beastmaster.”

Or encourage him to lash out at the Witch as indirect vengeance on Indrani, I thought, since her connections made her very risky to take swing at these days. It’d not escaped me that Archer’s fellow pupils under the Lady of the Lake did not have the fondest memories of their time together, though Beastmaster had always struck me as indifferent where the Silver Huntress and the Concocter had been venomous. It was a measured risk, I decided. The worst the Summoner would send the Witch’s way was likely to be a few snide words about hedge wizardry, and I trusted her to be able to ignore that. She’d struck me as being steady of temperament, back in the Arsenal.

“It will do,” I said.

My gaze swept over the seats. It would have to. Soon enough we would be going to war, and I wanted every sac of venom emptied before we were on the march.

Interlude: Reprobates

“And so Dread Emperor Irritant did shout thus: ‘Leave him to me!’ And then he did ignore the Knight Errant, and brawled with a common soldier instead, and triumphed over him.”

Extract from Volume IX of the official Imperial Chronicles

He’d been among the first few to arrive after the Black Queen and her attending pair, so the high seats were still largely empty, yet he was not disappointed in the slightest. Instead Lucien Travers, who some knew as the Rapacious Troubadour – though he personally left the epithet out of the introduction unless pressed – studied those empty seats circling the crown of the hill with great interest.

Many of his fellow Damned would not spare a look for the arrangements beyond learning where their seat had been placed, but Lucien would not make that mistake. The Rapacious Troubadour knew himself a feeble enough sort compared to many among his kind, and so it behooved him to always consider the undercurrents of the situations he involved himself in. Lucien was all too aware that his skill with the sword was no match for the likes of the Red Knight, or his dabbling in sorcery more than a pittance compared to the arcane powers of a man like the Hierophant. He’d always been a man of scattered interests, and so while his learning was broad it might be said to be comparatively shallow.

It was his eyes he’d paid for with his travels, his ability to read a room and the underpinnings of it.

Some arrangements were only to be expected. The mark of favour he’d earned through his labours in Hainaut, the seat by the Archer’s own, was one such. The Black Queen was not shy in offering honours to those that served her purposes well, so long as they played by her rules as well. The rumoured red hate between the Headhunter and the Barrow Sword had led to them being split apart, and the Troubadour was amused to see that the Summoner had been neatly contained between two scholarly sorts. Dear Cedric did have a sharp tongue, it must be admitted. That his Callowan ancestry had failed to bring about favoritism at his advantage remained a frustration to the wizard.

It was the layer beyond the obvious that was interesting. Once it was grasped who their common shepherd saw as the individuals in need of containment, from their surroundings it could be deduced who she saw as reliable – the true favoured, not those merely honoured in public. The Concocter and the Harrowed Witch, it seemed. Both of which had ties to the Archer. Ah, how he admired the Black Queen’s cleverness in expanding her influence: if she’d gathered attendants herself it would have had the Chosen up in arms, but who would suspect the Archer ? The Beastmaster was still out of favour, which was pleasing, but the Berserker’s placement was what drew his attention.

She was fresh blood, and her seat of honour not unexpected given her record against Revenants, but that was mere window dressed. She has been seated by the Adjutant, who was now a mere crippled shadow of his old self. A test of restraint, perhaps, of attitude? It would pair nicely with having given her the notoriously unpleasant Headhunter as a neighbour on the other side. The Berserker might just be undergoing an audition for greater trust and responsibility, Lucien mused. That made her someone worth keeping an eye on.

The Rapacious Troubadour strolled to the highest of seats, the Black Queen’s own, approaching under the calm, cool stare of the greatest villain of the age. Two great crows were perched above her shoulders, their feathers as if woven from shadow. The slight tension at the knowledge he was occupying the full attention of the same woman who’d been the architect of both the Princes’ Graveyard and the Salian Peace was delicious, for all that the fear behind it was genuine. Lucien was not a man who’d been born for dull times, for pedestrian appetites or the safety of righteous choices. What worth was life, if not lived on the razor’s edge? He swept back his long hair as he offered a deep bow.

“Your Majesty,” the Troubadour smiled. “It is ever a pleasure to be in your presence.”

“Rapacious Troubadour,” the Black Queen replied as she cocked her head to the side, her Chantant easy and lightly accented. “You seem in a pleasant mood. Finally back in familiar waters, yes?”

Seen through already? He’d been in too fine a mood, it seemed. Gods but how delicious it would be to have but the slightest taste of such a soul, barely more than a nibble really – Lucien felt the attention on him, and turned to meet the Archer’s unblinking gaze. The sharp-faced woman offered him a lazy grin, all the while idly tapping the side of a knife against a finger. He doubted that grin would waver in the slightest as she slit his throat. Ah, he’d ben forgetting himself.

“Who would dare claim familiarity as such a gathering, Black Queen?” Lucien smiled. “I am simply looking forward to the night’s festivities.”

—

The Berserker did not know how to read. Had the servants not told her where her seat was she wouldn’t have known, and she thought she saw a mocking glint in the man’s eye. Her fist was already clenching when she remembered who was looking at her, that small woman on the seat with the huge dark crows and the dead wood staff. Temper, Zoe reminded herself. There would be better fights to pick tonight than some mouthy nobody. She dropped into her seat, sending for ale. The sooner they got to grievances, the sooner she could crack her knuckles on some fucker’s jaw.

—

The Summoner’s lips thinned in anger. He was not late, he wasn’t , but everyone else had come early and so he’d been made to look in the wrong. Again. Just another injustice in the long line of them forced onto Cedric Ackland. He never got his dues, always got cheated of what was rightfully his. He gathered his robes and hastened up the hill onto the last empty seat, between a disturbingly silver-haired woman and that idiot peasant who’d cursed herself with her own brother’s ghost.

“Is he always that slow?”

The Summoner turned a glare onto the person who’d spoken. Some ruffian in cuirass and cloth, with knotted brown hair freed from an ornate spiked helmet and three leathery heads hanging from their belt. The Headhunter, he realized with distaste. Their reputation preceded them.

“Silence is preferable to empty words,” the Summoner sneered back. “A lesson you ought to learn.”

The savage – only now did he realize the brown lines sliding down the edge of their hair were brown paint and not dirt – laughed, reaching for one of the dozen knives and hatchets at their side.

“Insult was given twice, once for lateness and once by wagging tongue,” the Headhunter said. “I will collect on your behalf, Black Queen.”

Cedric’s magic roiled at his fingertips. The things he was going to unleash to discipline that wretch would... his anger was interrupted by a slight sound, fingers being drummed on a wooden seat’s arm. The Black Queen was studying the Headhunter was a mildly bored and irritated look on her face, as if displeased by the noise someone’s dog was making.

“And who are you to me, Headhunter, to be collecting anything on my behalf?” the Queen of Callow softly asked.

The savage’s cheeks reddened and the Summoner grinned. Finally he got the support he was due by virtue of his Callowan blood. Has his own father not once been a lord under the Fairfaxes? Cedric should have a seat at her inner circle and his pick of assignments, not this mere pittance, but it was a start.

“I only meant-“

“We know exactly what you meant to do, Headhunter,” the Archer smiled. “So shut the fuck up, yeah? Before we decide it’s worth taking issue with.”

The Levantine prick rose in anger, baring a long knife and reaching for a rope.

“I will not be threatened by the likes of you,” the Headhunter barked. “A hound gone tame-“

“Sit down,” the Black Queen said.

The Headhunter turned their gaze to her and hesitated.

“Sit down,” Catherine Foundling mildly said, “before I make you sit down.”

They swallowed their pride and did.

Perhaps there had been advantages to have arrived last after all, Cedric decided as he smugly settled into his seat.

—

The Barrow Sword silently cursed.

The Headhunter hadn’t been enough of an idiot to get himself – for the shape of the face paint told Ishaq they were a him, at the moment – killed to make an example, or at least crippled, which was a damned shame. It meant the old dogs in the Majilis would still be able to point at the Headhunter and then wag their finger disapprovingly at the bloodlust of those Bestowed by Below, helpfully ignoring anything the Barrow Sword himself had ever done in favour of tossing them all in the same cauldron to boil. There just weren’t enough of them that weren’t head-cutting lunatics for the Blood to hesitate at crossing them, to his continuing frustration.

The Marauder was a lot more careful than her Bestowal would imply but she’d still killed an Osena – on behalf of the Bandit’s Blood, she said, but it couldn’t be proven – so she was easy to dismiss, and the Grave Binder was both reasonable and amenable but also... less than personable.The smell of living rot could be off-putting, not that Ishaq was one to judge for the consequences of going barrow-raiding.The closeness of the Bestowal to that of the Binder’s Blood had also triggered harsh enmity from the Tanja, who considered it a desecration of sorts, but they’d not dared push the enmity too far when their young lord was so close to the Black Queen.

The Foundling Queen was known for keeping to a hard sort of honour, after all, and she was not one to lightly cross. She was also beginning to speak, so Ishaq set aside the thoughts and pricked his ear.

“There’s only been a few times in the history of Calernia,” the Black Queen said, “where so many of our kind have gathered. Consider that, before we begin addressing grievances. Remember that the last time so many villains were gathered around the same firepit, nations trembled.”

Ishaq grinned, watching the dark-haired queen closely as she spoke. All knew that the Queen of Callow had been the one to tame the lord and the princes, to force the hand of the Peregrine and the Sword of Judgement, and so the achievement she called eyes on reflected glory onto her. You sit here fat and safe instead of hunted because of me , she was reminding them. That dangerous little bastard the Rapacious Troubadour was leaning forward on his seat to Ishaq’s right, as if getting closer would let him get his paws on the soul of the villainess, but he was hardly alone in that. The Black Queen had a fine speaking voice, and a reputation that demanded attention.

“There’s enough skill and power assembled here tonight to topple a kingdom,” the Black Queen said, a hard smile touching her lips. “That it has been not been enough to break the Dead King over our knee should serve as a reminder of what still lies ahead of us.”

“War on Keter,” the Archer called out, baring her teeth.

Ishaq laughed and joined his call to hers, as did half a dozen more. The shouting would buy him time enough to figure out how to bury the Headhunter all the way to his neck instead of merely his knees.

—

The Beastmaster eyed the great shadow-crows again, biting his cheek in irritation.

Their form, the power he could feel pulsing within them, it all called to him. Yet Lysander had found that he could not Master them, not even the slightest bit. His power was no immediate yoke, taking time and skill to settle properly into the beasts of his menagerie, but when he used it there was always a... bite. Not here, though. He had heard it said that the crows were shards of drow goddesses, not true living creatures, but he’d not truly believed it until now. Wild gods sometimes touched animals with their power, remaking them into something more without fundamentally changing their essence, so he’d expected this to be case here.

Not so, it turned out, and now the shadowy things had turned their black eyes on him. Had they noticed? He could not tell, but caution was in order. This was not the Woods, where he knew the paths and dangers. Boldness had to be measured, lest it cost him more than he was willing to give. The Beastmaster drank from the ale horn the servants had passed him, wiping his mouth afterwards and listening without much interest as the parade of grievances began.

“- deferred to her even though she is fresh to the front, and I was in command,” the Summoner whined. “There must be punishment for this.”

Gods , Lysander thought, what a useless prick. His dislike for the man had grown stronger with every comparison between them. The Beastmaster brought servants to the fight as well, but unlike the mageling he wasn’t useless if someone got to him – he fought with his menagerie, not behind it.

“Are you,” the Barrow Sword said, tone slightly disbelieving, “complaining about Dominion warriors deferring to the Valiant Champion ?”

The Beastmaster grunted in amusement. Ishaq had a good head and a better swordhand, a respectable man. Too close to the Black Queen’s party for comfort, but without having turned into a minion.

“I held command,” the Summoner insisted.

“No one who has to say that holds anything,” the Headhunter dismissed.

There was a murmur of agreement around the fire. The Headhunter wasn’t liked – no one wanted to ally with someone who’d stick you in the back for your head and a shadow of your power – but he wasn’t wrong. Lysander glanced at the Black Queen, who was lounging on her throne and idly sipping at a cup of wine. She seemed less than impressed.

“What’s your exact grievance under the Terms?” the Queen of Callow asked.

“It was disrespect,” the Summoner angrily replied. “Against the Terms.”

“Disrespect is not against our laws,” the Black Queen said. “Were your orders disobeyed or contradicted?”

The Beastmaster chuckled under his breath, as all here knew the answer to that. The Summoner went on to bluster for a bit before it became clear the villainess patience had been exhausted. She glanced at Indrani, who cleared her throat loudly and called for the next grievance to be spoken. Lysander’s eyes narrowed at the sight. He wasn’t Alexis, to rage at the sight of that or even Indrani at all, but it was still hard to believe Archer had bound herself to others in such a way. The Beastmaster had long believed that Alexis might have inherited the Lady’s thirst for challenges but that it was Indrani who’d learned their teacher’s restlessness, her wanderlust. It was a belief difficult to pair with the reality of her serving as the Black Queen’s enforced, and it had done much to unravel the respect he’d once held for Indrani.

“I have a grievance,” the Concocter spoke up.

Lysander’s brow rose in interest. Cocky was not one to dip her toe into these things without reason, so this ought to be interesting at last.

“Did you lose a cauldron?” the Headhunter jeered. “It’s not like you know how to use anything else.”

The Beastmaster’s knife came down on the arm of his chair, blade biting into wood with a hard thunk, and the Levantine’s own hand twitched towards his blade as he turned to match eyes. Lysander shrugged.

“My hand slipped,” the Beastmaster shrugged.

Fucking Dominion shithead. Lysander wasn’t some sentimental pissant, but there were lines. Cocky was a lot more useful to have around than a second-rate tracker who used an aspect to make up for lack of skill.

—

The Harrowed Witch winced.

Merciless Gods, why did all these people have to be so violent? Julien’s shade muttered angrily in her ear, his half-heard imprecations rather distracting, but she focused. If this turned into a brawl, she’d throw herself backwards and flee under cover of illusion – the latter part of which would take some concentration. Although, she thought, it was not the Archer who led here but her own mistress. Unlike Lady Indrani, who enjoyed a spot of mayhem between ‘comrades’, the Black Queen was known for her stern disposition and sharp tongue. Perhaps she’d take this all in hand.

“Your grievance, Concocter?” the Queen of Callow asked.

That bear of a man, the Beastmaster, ceased glaring at the Headhunter and they returned the favour. Both pretended nothing had ever taken place between them. Sweet Providence but Aspasie had lucked out with her seat, having the rough woodsman between her and the Headhunter. Even Julien’s shade avoided getting too close to that one.

“I have had supplies brought in from the Arsenal,” the Concocter said. “And twice now the crates have been opened and inspected by Proceran soldiers before being passed on to me.”

Aspasie felt it more than she saw it. Like the weight in the air before a storm, a pressure had gathered atop the hill. The fire dimmed and breaths came shorter as the Black Queen straightened from a lazy sprawl to sharp-eyed alertness. The Witch had seen it once before in the Arsenal, the subtle metamorphosis that turned a mouthy young woman into the Arch-heretic of the East. It was all in the way she held herself, in the intensity of her. The roiling power around them that had them all shuffling uncomfortably in their seats, those dark eyes – almost black, in the evening light – growing cold with displeasure at what she had heard.

“Those crates, had they been inspected and sealed in the Arsenal?” the Black Queen asked in a clipped tone.

“Yes,” the Concocter replied, tone admirably steady.

“You will pass on descriptions of those soldiers to Adjutant,” the dark-eyed queen said, drumming her fingers against the arm of her seat. “They will be swinging from gallows by dawn, and your supplies will never be touched again.”

Aspasie shivered, for she did not doubt the other woman’s word in the slightest.

—

The Rapacious Troubadour weighed his options.

While he’d be most pleased by a greater monthly supply of Binds to take from – their souls were ancient but worn, tasteless and colourless – he doubted that the Black Queen would be amenable to the request. She’d never hidden her distaste for his inclinations, and she’d been quite blunt in warning him of the costs of returning to his old practices. A restriction that he chafed under, even knowing it was only temporary. Still, Lucien was not an unreasonable man and he knew that the Terms and their looming successor, the Liesse Accords, were much to his advantage.

He thrived in society, when navigating hierarchies, and the Black Queen’s ambitions would herald the creation of a society of the Damned. The sheer potential of that had him giddy, sometimes. So long as he was able to limit his predations to victims deemed acceptable under the rules, heroes would have no real call to hunt him and he’d even be able to move through the civilized world without fear of being hunted. No, the prize was well worth a few years of lean and tasteless pickings. He ate more than enough to avoid desiccation, and he’d begun to pick out the people that would be of use after the war.

Gluttony would not help him here. It’d be much more useful to earn a favour or two from his fellows, and he had just the trick for that. One need not be brilliant to realize that the Berserker was itching for a fight, and she was not so thuggish as to fail to understand when she was being helped. It’d give him an in with the Barrow Sword as well, if he played it well.

“I have a grievance as well, if we are to clear the air,” Lucien drawled.

Rather obvious bait, but given the precedents...

“A bard insists on speaking,” the Headhunter snorted. “There’s a surprise.”

Like a fish on a hook.

“This,” the Troubadour airily said. “This is my issue, Black Queen. The constant pricking from the prick, so to speak. Can they not be disciplined into a semblance of politeness?”

The Foundling Queen eyed him for a moment, and Lucien felt naked. As if seen through once more. It was exhilarating, in a terrifying sort of way.

“I’m not here to hold your hands,” the Black Queen acidly said. “Petty disputes are not breaches of the Terms, they are yours to resolve.”

“Ha!” the Headhunter sneered, “You-“

Lucien discreetly winked at the Berserker, whose flat face and broken nose split into a brutally gleeful grin as she grasped the chance she’d just been given. A heartbeat later the Headhunter’s jaw popped with a beautiful sound as the Berserker’s knuckles smashed into it, the seats of the two warriors toppling as they brawled.

—

That Troubadour was a useful sort for a fucking singer, Zoe approvingly thought as she let out a hoarse shout and smashed the Headhunter’s head through the seat even as they slipped a knife into her ribs. She’d remember the good turn and return it in kind. As she was thrown off by the Headhunter the Berserker felt her back begin to crack as the Haze seeped into her, shuddering into her limbs as the strength and anger hardened her muscles.

The Headhunter got to their feet again, as did she, and Zoe ripped out the knife in her side before letting out a blood-curling scream. Finally she could cut loose and just Rage .

—

The Barrow Sword turned to study the man sitting by his side, a dark-haired sort with insolent good looks and slightly crooked fingers. The cithern strapped to his back seemed as natural to him as the sword on his hip, and though the Rapacious Troubadour did not have the reputation of a great swordsman, there were many kinds of battles. The way the Berserker was spasming wildly and turning red even as the Headhunter stuck her full of knives and hatches to little avail made the point plainly enough.

“Have you ever been to the Dominion, Lucien?” Ishaq casually asked.

“I’ve not had the pleasure,” the other man replied with a slender smile.

“You should visit, one of these days,” the Barrow Sword said. “I’m sure you’d find much there to your liking.”

If he could not find enough allies within Bestowed of Levant, Ishaq thought, then perhaps it was time to broaden his horizons.

—

The Summoner laughed at the brawling fools, voice high and mocking. The Headhunter had been thoroughly obnoxious and the Berserker was a rude thug, so he had no horse in this race. Let them smash each other to pieces, for all he cared. His mood significantly improved, he offered a charming smile to the silver-haired woman at his side. The Concocter, she was called. She’d taken his rightful place in the Arsenal – her or one of her colleagues – but Cedric was willing to set that aside for the sake of polite conversation.

“I am told you have spent much of your time in the Arsenal,” the Summoner said.

Her eyes, he only noticed then, were not of the same colour. One was silver, the other blue. It was disturbing to behold, though he was well-bred enough not to comment on this.

“I have,” the Concocter said. “And I am told you sought admission there yourself?”

He grit his teeth.

“Mere rumours,” Cedric dismissed. “My talents as a war mage are too precious to squander, I’ve always known this.”

“Are they?” the Concocter said. “I have not been told of the shape of your Gift in any detail.”

Was she doubting him? Cedric scowled. A demonstration was in order, then. Hand rising, he seized the threads of his sorcery and pulled out one of his lesser summons. He might as well force apart the two brawling idiots while he was at it, and establish his skills for all to see.

“Come forth,” the Summoner intoned.

—

Merde , Aspasie thought.

Magic to her right and a violent death match to her left: the Harrowed Witch had no intention of staying in the middle of this. She tipped back her seat until it fell and crouched behind it, just in time to see some sort of leonine creature in a shimmering ghostly glow leap out of blue circle hanging in the air. The summon would have tackled the Berserker – now red-veined, hulking and screaming – from the back if a sinuous thing had not suddenly struck at it in midair, sinking fangs into its flank. It shimmered out of existence. A snake, Aspasie realized. The Beastmaster had hidden the largest snaked she’d ever seen under his furs, and it’d attacked the leaping summon without hesitation.

“You trifling sneak,” the Summoner snarled.

The snake, striped and sinuous and looking all too smart for such a creature, retreated and loosely coiled around the Beastmaster’s neck.

“Say that again,” the large man challenged. “See what happens.”

At the bottom of the hill, Aspasie felt creatures begin to stir. The Harrowed Witch began to weave the strands around her, ignoring the furious wails of her brother’s shade even as she drew on the essence of his death to hide her existence. The two who’d begun brawling, the Headhunter and the Berserker, had almost tumbled off the edge of the hill. Though the Berserker had clearly hurt the other villain, punching in a rib, the Headhunter had sunk over a dozen blades in their opponent’s flesh. Even now they were trying to tie the villainess limbs with some sort of rope, though the Berserker’s strange spams made it difficult to achieve.

Something was slithering along the grass atop the hill and for a moment Aspasie thought it was yet another snaked, but in the heartbeat that followed strings of shadow shot up. They latched onto the Headhunter, who jerked in surprise and tried to rip away their hand only to find that the string moved with them. Yet it tightened, after, almost like toffee. Within heartbeats the Dominion prick was covered in shadowy strings and vainly struggling on the ground, mouth covered. The Berserker milled about uncertainly, then let out a furious scream and turned towards the nearest target: the Adjutant. The crippled orc in his wheelchair did not so much as bat an eye while on the ground under the Berserker a shimmer passed. The Witch caught a glimpse of something and the Berserker was gone . As if fallen into the ground.

Dusk had arrived, Aspasie saw. The world was dimming. And nowhere was it darker than around the Black Queen on her throne, looking bored as she rested her chin on her palm and watched them all.

“Summoner,” the Black Queen idly said. “Beastmaster. The two of you appear to have left your seats, no doubt by mistake.”

The magic that had been sharpening the air with the smell of ozone winked out. The creeping creatures that had been making their way up the hill froze, then withdrew. The Beastmaster offered a jerky nod and slumped back onto his seat: the snake disappeared under his furs, as if it’d never been there at all.

“Your Majesty-” the Summoner began.

There was a sound like a rope being tightened, and the Headhunter hoarsely screamed.

“I dislike,” Catherine Foundling said, “repeating myself.”

The Summoner sat down. The Harrowed Witch dragged her seat back up and sat down on it, hoping no one had taken notice.

—

The Black Queen had seen through him.

The thought struck the Rapacious Troubadour and would not leave him even as he studied the Headhunter’s futile struggles against the shadow bindings. Her putdowns had been too smooth, too perfect. The gate beneath the Berserker had already been woven, just left dormant. She’d known Lucien was going to incite a brawl and let him, so that she might use the erupting chaos to her own purposes. What these purposes were he did not know, but he was hungry to find out. If she’d planned it all ahead this far... A dangerous woman, this orphan queen. She’d played the oldest living hero of Calernia like a fiddle, it was said, and so far they were faring no better against her wiles.

A dragonbone pipe in hand, she leaned to the side so that the Adjutant might strike a match and light it for her. Taking a deep breath, silence falling among them as she did, the Queen of Callow spat out a long stream of smoke. She flicked a wrist. A slit opened in the air to the side of the hill and the Berserker came out screaming, hitting the ground as if she’d been thrown down from a cliff instead. There was a crack of broken bones and the villainess ceased moving. Not dead, he thought, but her legs had broken even with all the power of her rage strengthening her.

“Archer,” the Black Queen said, “drag that enthusiastic young woman back to her seat. I still have a use for her.”

The tall villainess rose to her feet with a lazy grin.

“Nothing like two broken legs to put things into perspective, I’ve found,” the Archer mused.

The Berserker was dragged by the crook of her neck, hair gone wild and looking in a great deal of pain but not entirely displeased with the way her evening had gone regardless. Shadow strings dragged the Headhunter back onto the wreck of their seat, and only then left withdrew. The armoured villain cast wild-eyed looks all around, as if trying to find where the strings had gone, and their breathing was unsteady. It’d escaped absolutely no one’s notice that it would have been trivial for the Black Queen to snap their neck, if she’d felt like it.

“I find myself disappointed in you all,” the Queen of Callow slowly said, trails of smoke curling up above her. “The information’s there to be found, I made sure of it, so it must mean that not a single one of you thought to look.”

The Archer leaned back in her seat, looking amused. The Adjutant remained the same mirror he always was, unreadable. Lucien watched the others, but found only puzzlement and veiled faces. No one was quite sure what she meant, then. Good, he’d not been left behind.

“How many villains have signed onto the Truce and Terms?” the Black Queen asked. “Does a single one of you know?”

Lucien hid a frown, counting silently. At least twenty, he thought, but he was uncertain of the numbers in Cleves so it was likely higher. Besides, had the First Prince not taken one of the Damned as an adviser? She had kept this quiet, but not so quiet the likes of the Troubadour could not find word of it.

“Twenty eight,” the Adjutant said, his voice like rough gravel.

The Troubadour blinked in surprise. Was this true? It seemed...

“Some of you are putting it together, I see,” the Black Queen thinly smiled, eyes passing over him and then to his surprise onto the Headhunter. “There are seventy-four Named who have signed onto the Terms, you see.”

Less than half. Lucien would admit he was surprised. He’d expected, if not quite even halves, then at least something close to it. This was sharply imbalanced in their disfavour.

“And what is that to us, Black Queen?” the Beastmaster replied.

“Look around you,” she replied. “Then think of the heroes and their own firepit. How, unlike you, they are making allies .”

—

“Let them hold hands,” the Headhunter dismissed. “It will not save them when the night gets dark.”

The Barrow Sword almost laughed, for as usual Saidi was missing the point. All that power, all that skill, but not a bushel of wits to go with them. When the war on Keter ended, things would not return to what they had once been. That was what the Queen of Callow was telling them. How many of these Bestowed by Above would have met, if not for this war? Now they knew names and faces, had struck friendships and alliances. When the war ended, when the truce came at an end, the heroes would prowl in packs . Magelings from Ashur allied with duellists from Procer, priests from the Free Cities with the Blood of Levant. They would be fighting an enemy that had learned, that had grown, that was ready for them .

“You warn us of annihilation,” Ishaq bluntly said.

—

“Petty alarmism,” the Summoner said. “They cannot turn on us after we carried the war against Procer. It would be dishonourable.”

The Harrowed Witch swallowed a hysterical giggle. They were going to bet their lives on honour ? The man was blind. She’d not thought it before, but the Black Queen was right. They must come to terms with the Chosen, or perhaps band with a few others for protection. If they were too many to be easily slain, or perhaps hidden...

“The Grey Pilgrim would poison every single one of you and lose not a wink of sleep over it,” the Barrow Sword flatly replied. “We all know what the years before the Uncivil Wars were like. The Peregrine and the Saint, picking every flower before it could bloom. They’ll do the same now, only with bands and training and coin.”

—

“There’s no need to fight them,” the Beastmaster said.

And meant it, too. Lysander saw no need to spill hero blood, or have his own spilled by them. What did they have to fight over? Let them keep their cities and their temples, his own home was far beyond their reach.

“We can keep to our places, and they to theirs,” the Beastmaster said.

“And so we go back living in a fucking hovel in the woods?” Cocky said.

He blinked in surprised. Had her years in the Arsenal truly softened her so much, weakened her so much?

“They’ll keep it all,” the Concocter warned. “The Arsenal, the secrets and the libraries and the wonders we made. If we disperse back into the wilds, after the war, then they keep the world and we exile ourselves to the fringes.”

“The Accords ensure they cannot simply hunt us,” Lysander sharply reminded her.

“You depend on ink for safety, now?” Cocky replied just as sharply.

—

“The Accords don’t say we can’t fight,” the Berserker said. “They only say how we can’t. They’ll come for us, Beastmaster.”

Zoe would never have considered signing them, if they did. It was a pack of rules about how violence could be done, and much about magic, but the only parts that concerned her were no different from duelling rules. She could stomach that.

“She’s right,” the Headhunter said, to her surprise. “There are some among them who will want to hunt. They’ll follow us, wait for an excuse.”

“And they’ll have backers in the courts,” the Rapacious Troubadour added. “Nobles behind them, soldiers and safe places. We all know the Mirror Knight was in bed with the House of Langevin, and he won’t be the last.”

Fucking nobles , Zoe thought, anger welling up. With their tricks and their lies and their... biting into her lips, she forced herself to push down the rage. The Black Queen was likely to do more than just break her legs, next time.

—

“They know who we are, now,” Ishaq said. “Don’t forget that. They know our names, where we rose to power. They will know where to look for us.”

That struck home with more than a few, he saw on their faces. It was a dreadful thing that’d been revealed to them, the Barrow Sword thought, but it was also an opportunity. There were some here who would make useful allies, and to who he would be of use in turn. Bargains could be had, favours traded.

“It’s worse than that,” the Concocter flatly said, pushing back her silver hair. “Think of the weapons the Arsenal has been able to make in just a few years. They have the numbers and the coin to keep making such things, greater ones. What do we have, a handful of forges and libraries dispersed across half the continent? How many of us even have a roof to sleep under?”

Ashen Gods , Ishaq thought. A grim truth, that. He had territory in the Brocelian, but it was only his so long as no other Bestowed came to take it from him. He looked at the three on the other side of the fire, the dark-eyed queen and her hands on each side – the fang and the steel, waiting and silent and expectant. They had known all this from the start. Where this would lead them. The Black Queen was waiting for them at the end of this road.

“You have shown us a doom, Black Queen,” Ishaq said. “Will you also show us how to avert it?”

—

Lucien leaned forward, eyes alight. Now was the time for the reveal, he thought.

“After the war, under my auspices a hall will be founded in Cardinal,” the Black Queen idly said. “It will have workshops and armories, libraries and artefacts. Its doors will be open to any of Below’s who sign the Liesse Accords and agree to a few additional... rules of engagement.”

The Summoner began to speak, but the Archer’s black glare silence him.

“This hall will also offer its services as intermediary between all who belong to it,” the Queen of Callow said. “Should they seek allies within our kind, or to trade favours. It would serve as guarantor of any such deal made, naturally.”

And so enable the making of alliances through the threat of the Black Queen herself taking offence at the breaking of a pact made under her auspices, the Troubadour thought. He could not resist, letting out a soft peal of laughter. This would not disappear all their troubles, but it would give them the tools to solve them by their own hands. And all it would require of them was to follow the Black Queen’s rules, to heed her Accords so that they might all reap the benefits of her peace.

All hail the queen , Lucien Travers amusedly thought.

“I might be interested in such an arrangement,” the Troubadour said.

—

It could be of use, the Summoner thought. Since the Arsenal was barred to him, and likely to remain so...

—

If nothing else it would make the trading of favours a more reliable thing, Lysander admitted to himself.

—

Word of who to hunt, and who to avoid, the Headhunter thought. Always the hardest of knowledge to gather. It would depend on these rules, but as things stood...

—

The Concocter would have opened a newborn for what was being offered, what were a few damned rules to her?

—

The Berserker frowned. More rules. Not pleasant to hear, but if this let her avoid being hunted by the White Knight after the war she would have to consider it.

—

It would let her find another band, the Harrowed Witch realized with a sigh of relief. Safety in numbers, with a powerful patroness behind them.

—

“Oh yes,” the Barrow Sword grinned, all sharp teeth bared. “This would be of interest to me as well.”

—

As the pieces fell into place Catherine Foundling blew out a stream of grey smoke, and smiled a devil’s smile.

Chapter 47: Methods

“A plan of war is the inevitable victim of circumstance; methods of war are superior, for they are the mother of many a plan.”

Extract from the ‘Ars Tactica’, famed military treatise of Dread Emperor Terribilis the First

Seventeen fantassins from three different companies hung from nooses, the wind making them swing slightly as the sun rose. Bloody fools , I thought at the sight of them, not a single speck of sympathy emerging even at this late hour. The lot of them had been from three middling companies, not one of them numbering a thousand men and each of them with several cases of corruption on their record. It’d not been difficult to track them with what the Concocter had told us, not once Adjutant put his army of helpful hands to the task. Names were obtained within the first bell, though I had to send in armed companies to make the arrests as the mercenaries were reluctant to give up their own.

Interrogations had been brisk, and hadn’t even required much coercion. The idiots hadn’t known they were trying to rob shipments earmarked for a Named, they’d thought they were just skimming Arsenal equipment. The part that’d infuriated me was when I’d realized that guards had been bribed for the fantassins to get access, and some of those had been mine. Two Callowan legionaries were being flogged as we spoke for trading shifts without officer permission, and the Third Army had lost a sergeant when it turned out she’d been in on it from the start. I’d let her captain handle the discipline, but I did not need to look to know she’d be hanging from our own gallows about now.

The regulations were crystal clear.

“I do not question the justice of this, Your Majesty,” Princess Beatrice said, “but it will not help relations with the companies.”

The Princess of Hainaut was a better rider than me, though given Zombie’s undead placidity an outside observer would have found it hard to tell when we weren’t moving. I’d not expected that when I first met her, as Beatrice Volignac was also very much overweight. My people did tend to look down on those wasteful enough to grow fat, but I’d since revised that first opinion of her: while I didn’t share Prince Klaus’ high opinion of her as a general, it couldn’t be denied she was a fine lance and probably the finest cavalry commander in Hainaut. She was also my intermediary with Proceran mercenary companies, at the moment, so I’d best not ignore her warning.

“They had to hang,” I bluntly said. “They broke into sealed crates, if they didn’t hang the effects on discipline would be disastrous.”

“I’ll not argue this,” the Princess of Hainaut agreeably replied, “but it plays into common fears that you intend to treat the fantassins as you would legionaries, subject to the same rules. It is a highly unpopular prospect and there has been grumbling of contract breaches.”

My brow rose. If they tried to pull that it’d not go over well, since the Highest Assembly had decreed that abandoning mercenary contracts during this war would be legally considered the same as desertion, but I knew better than to ride unwilling soldiers too hard. Pressure on soldiers with good spirits got results, but it broke those who were already demoralized.

“I have limited concessions to offer them,” I admitted. “I’ll not compromise in ways that weaken us ahead of hard battles. Can their appointed representative in my councils not address their troubles?”

The Princess of Hainaut only smiled politely, which I took to mean she’d tried to lead me to a conclusion and I’d failed to get there on my own.

“If I might make a suggestion, Your Majesty?” Princess Beatrice asked.

Yup , I amusedly thought. Definitely missed a hint there. On the other hand it meant she was treating me much like she would Proceran royalty, which was good even if I was missing subtext that royalty would grasp. It spoke to a degree of respect, which was a good sign coming from a woman in whose hands I’d placed a lot of influence.

“Please do,” I said.

“An appointed representative is a Callowan manner of approaching this,” she delicately said. “Orderly and efficient, but relying on trust that is absent. Expanding the fantassin seats in your war council to two and allowing the companies to elect those who will fill them would do much to assuage fears of... overstep.”

I squinted at her a moment. They could have a dozen seats and it’d give them no more influence in the decisions, we both knew, since this was very much to be my campaign. On the other hand, it would be a gesture and it’d give them a degree of power over their own situation – which the Princess of Hainaut had gently been trying to explain to me they were afraid I’d summarily strip away from them.

“Agreed,” I sighed. “Though make it understood I’ll not suffer foolishness even if it is elected foolishness. I expect either skill or silence.”

“A reasonable request,” Princess Beatrice said, inclining her head. “And if I may ask about why the corpses will not be returned to the companies?”

The Concocter had lost several ingredients through the actions of greedy idiots, which had caused her to run late on some brews. For that inconvenience I’d given her leave to harvest what she wanted from the hanged mercenaries before their corpses were burned.

“You don’t really want to know the answer to that question, Your Grace,” I calmly said. “Actions have consequences, let’s leave it at that.”

It was a grim note to start the day on, but no less true for it.

—

It would have been a lie to say that particular reunion wasn’t one I’d been looking forward to.

“Ivah,” I smiled, offering my arm to clasp. “It’s been too long.”

My Lord of Silent Steps’s fingers lightly touched my forearm as I returned the gesture affectionately, and only then did it retreat a step to offer a respectful bow. Ivah had not changed a whit since I’d last seen it, still tall and slender with an ageless youth to its face under the silver and purple paint of the Losara sigil. Its soft leather shoes had not made a sound when it stepped back, and never would: the title it had gained during my days of warring against the Everdark had left its mark, which would never entirely fade.

“I am glad to return at your side, Losara Queen,” it replied. “It has been too long since I warred besides you.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt we have plenty of that ahead of us,” I drily said.

I then flicked a glance at the other drow in the tent, who returned the gesture with silver-blue eyes and a cocked hairless eyebrow.

“I see you’ve yet to get yourself killed,” General Rumena said. “Odd, given your fondness for the opposite practice.”

Rumena the Tomb-maker was still a striking sight, in these sense that it was one of the only Mighty I’d ever met who actually looked old . Standing stooped in his ringmail of obsidian, the old drow was a deep well of Night as well as one if the finest tacticians of its kind. It was also kind of a prick, and one I’d yet to get the better of through words.

“One of these days I’m going to make you into a vest,” I told the bastard. “Crows know you already look like you’re made of leather.”

It respectfully bowed.

“It will change nothing, First Under the Night,” the Tomb-maker replied. “As you have never needed an opponent to lose.”

In the back of my mind, I heard Komena let out a snort of laughter. Godsdamned goddesses, I thought. They shouldn’t play favourites unless that favourite was me.

“It’s beneath my station to argue with a subordinate,” I airily replied.

“Your skill in retreat remains unrivaled,” the old drow praised.

That fucker. I flipped it off, which only got a cackle out of it.

“Enough pleasantries,” I said afterwards. “I did have a reason to call on you two.”

The old drow nodded.

“Sve Noc has told me of your pact with the Papenheim,” General Rumena said. “The sigils are to be split between your armies when we sally out.”

“I don’t intend to meddle in the details of assigning the sigils,” I said, “but you’ll be personally leading the third that goes east with the Iron Prince.”

It didn’t look surprised.

“Some of the fighting to the east will be done underground, I understand,” the Tomb-maker said.

“Once you get to Malmedit, yes,” I agreed. “Ideally you’d collapse the tunnels the Dead King is using to keep funnelling in troops, but the decision will be left to the Prince Klaus’ discretion.”

I couldn’t think of a decent reason why we’d not want those tunnels shut as quickly as possible, but it didn’t pay to tie the hands of your commanders before they even set out. The Prince of Hannoven knew his business and had been making war on Keter since before I was born, there was no need to breathe down his neck.

“That is pleasing to hear,” General Rumena said. “It has been too long since we have fought beneath the Burning Lands. Do you intend a particular Mighty for command in my absence?”

“If you don’t have a recommendation, I was considering Jindrich,” I said.

It shook its head.

“I would take Mighty Jindrich with me,” Rumena replied. “It is a skillful vanguard, and less likely to grow... unruly than it would away from my gaze.”

I hummed.

“I could see that,” I finally said. “You have a commander for me, then?”

“Several,” the old drow replied.

“All qualified?”

“It is so,” Rumena agreed. “Shall we discuss them?”

I bit my lip. I wasn’t unaware that one of the reasons Sve Noc had been on board with the Firstborn serving in Cleves instead of Hainaut was that it’d let the drow grow into themselves on the surface without my meddling too much in the process. The Sisters could still call on me when there was trouble, as they had when the Langevins had been caught scheming, but it’d always been pretty clear that I was to be a herald and an advisor and not Queen of the Firstborn. Much like with Callow, part of my use would be bringing about my own uselessness.

“Let them choose their own commander,” I finally said. “As they now choose their own sigil-holders.”

The grey-skinned general studied me a long moment.

“You have grown, I think,” the Tomb-maker thoughtfully said. “This war has done more than simply scar you.”

“Don’t get sentimental on me now,” I teased.

It snorted, dismissing me.

“It will be as you say, Losara Queen,” Rumena said.

“Good,” I sharply nodded. “Ivah can keep me informed and serve as liaison.”

Though my Lord of Silent Steps had remained silent as I spoke with the general, as Firstborn ways... discouraged intervening in the conversations of one’s superiors, it now nodded with visible pleasure.

“It will be good to resume my duties,” Ivah smiled.

—

I spoke with the White Knight at least once a day as he approached Neustal, bringing with him the last few Named who’d join the campaign as well as the latest goods from the Arsenal. Much of it was enchanted weapons and wardstones, but there were some greater prizes as well: Unravellers, tested successfully and so brought to the front by the crate, as well as a set of five pharos devices. Most of the latter would be going to the Iron Prince’s host and the reserves, since they’d be of greater use there, but my own forces would get one. It was the kind of the trump card that could tip a battle our way, if used well.

Most of the conversation covered how Named should be assigned, and where. Hanno himself would be going with the Iron Prince, but there would be villains with that host as there would be heroes as part of mine. We wanted to be able to field multiple bands of five should the situation on either prong ask for it, but not all Named were field capable so in practice the numbers did not quite align even though in principle there were twenty-eight Named in Hainaut. Haggling ensued, since some of our kind were a lot easier to place in band than others, and though on paper I won by securing sixteen Named in reality I got the bad end of the stick.

I’d gotten most the Named who could not fight and two of three transitionals, not including the one who was actually good in a fight – the Young Slayer, although apparently he might have been trouble with Aquiline so it might be for the best – so my fighting numbers were actually smaller than Hanno’s in reality. Still, when it came to Named it was all about finding a use for talents. At least I’d gotten Roland as part of my lot and got the White Knight to take on the Grey Pilgrim – and so the Mirror Knight, his latest pupil – so it wasn’t all bad.

Archer would be happy I’d secured the Vagrant Spear, too. I’d even managed to leverage a half-hearted effort to claim the Witch of the Woods into keeping all the heroes that’d spent time on the Hainaut front over the last few years, which meant the core of my heroic lineup would be one I was familiar with and on decent terms: the Silver Huntress, the Silent Guardian and the Sage. A shame I’d lost the Barrow Sword, but the logic that Hanno needed someone to lead his villains was hard to argue with – and got Ishaq away from the Blood, which was probably for the best.

By the time the White Knight’s convoy left the Twilight Ways and began its way up the road to the stronghold, I had already begun to plan the best use for my Named. It was not one day too soon, for before long we would all be on the march.

—

As far as war councils went, I found twelve a reasonable number of people to seat. The great table Indrani was still carving for me – the latest addition being Hakram’s fight with fae at the Arsenal – could handle that many, though given the amount of maps I’d had stretched over the surface of it it’d been necessary to set down smaller side tables for drinks.

That Adjutant would be seated at my side was a given, but occupying the rest of that side of the table were the foremost officers from the Army of Callow that’d hold command in the coming offensive. General Hune of the Second Army, towering above us all with those intelligent eyes set in a brutish face. General Abigail of the Third Army, already into her second cup of wine and her third attempt to let Hune represent the entire Army of Callow contingent. Last but not least Grandmaster Brandon Talbot of the Order of Broken Bells, ever impeccably groomed and currently eyeing the fantassin part of this council with barely-veiled contempt.

For the Dominion stood the rulers of two lines of the Blood, Lord Razin Tanja and Lady Aquiline Osena, in full war paint and armour. Both of them were taking this seriously enough that they’d even ceased flirting, which was nice to see. By them sat the representative for the drow, silver-eyed and calm. My suggestion that the Firstborn elect their own representative – it was only fair, if the fantassins got to as well – had paid unexpected dividends when they’d chosen an old friend: my own Lord of Silent Steps, Ivah of the Losara Sigil. The intricate beauty of the paint on its face was a rival for that of the Dominion pair, to my quiet sastisfaction.

As in most things the Procerans ended up the complicating part, for while Princess Beatrice Volignac of Hainaut held sole speaking rights for her army the fantassins companies had elected two very different people to stand for them. Lady Catalina Ferreiro, a beautiful scarred woman in her thirties, was the Captain-General of the Ligera Bandera. It was the largest of the fantassin companies, numbering two thousand and three hundred. Captain Reinald of the Folies Rouges , on the other hand, was soft-skinned nearly as fat as Princess Beatrice and his company numbered only six hundred foot. The Folies Rouges were an old and respected name, however, and their captain was known for his shrewdness.

Last of all, for the heroes, the Silver Huntress had come. Alexis had been the natural pick, even the White Knight had agreed. We’d worked together in Hainaut for more than a year without any real trouble between us, I’d entrusted her with independent commands out of my sight several times and my force’s path into Hainaut would be encountering more hardened defences than the Iron Prince’s – which would make her skill with a bow even more valuable. The Huntress was rather plain-faced, a tall redhead with blue eyes who kept her hair in a bun and whose nose had visibly been broke several times. She had a startlingly girlish voice, high and sweet.

Archer would be coming with me and the two of them couldn’t stand each other, so I’d have to be careful to keep them apart, but aside from that little complication I was rather looking forward to having the Silver Huntress along.

The first half hour of the council was spent in idle talk, which I tacitly allowed. The Procerans lived and died by this stuff, so it’d help bring them into the fold, but there was a little more to it than that. The officers in my tent would be side by side in the field for months, and in a coalition force like mine I’d learned the hard way that if a degree of trust and amicability wasn’t maintained between the leading commanders it led to blunders. I took the moment to study the officers myself, noting the ties and attitudes. Both my Dominion ducklings got along strangely well with Hune, and had for some time now, so they gravitated towards her. To my lasting amusement the two of them were also subtly intimidated by Genera Abigail’s reputation, and usually avoided her. Princess Beatrice was trying to engage the woman in question in conversation, which had my fellow Callowan regularly shooting me anguished looks as if to assure me that she was not committing treason by plotting with foreign royalty.

Captain-General Ferreiro had worked with the Silver Huntress before, which I vaguely remembered hearing about, but I was surprised to hear that the heroine was also acquainted with Ivah. A few warbands out raiding under the Losara apparently pulled the Huntress’ team out of bad spot when she’d gone out to Suifat to have a closer look at enemy landings – an early run-in with the Stitcher, by the sound of it – and they’d left on good terms. The other fantassin leader, Captain Reinald, approached Brandon Talbot to my surprise. The Folies Rouges, I overheard, had apparently fought at the Battle of the Camps.

The Grandmaster of the Order admitted to recognizing the banner, and visibly warmed to the conversation when the mercenary good-naturedly admitted having been whipped by Nauk’s soldiers on the right flank – to his luck, he claimed, as he’d pulled out just before the Hellhound’s water trap and goblinfire ate up the company that’d advanced in his stead. Reinald then adroitly manoeuvred the conversation to the respective merits of the Liessen charger and the Aisne destrier as a fighting horse, correctly betting on Callowan nobility’s endless appetite for speaking of horses, and my brow rose. That man bore watching.

Hakram’s wheelchair was not great in such small spaces, despite Masego’s best efforts, so he was limited in speaking to the Army officers and the Blood. I put my trust in his eyes to catch anything I’d missed and went around. I traded an anecdote about shortly fighting the Stygian Spears at First Liesse with the Silver Huntress and Captain-General Ferreiro, since it turned out the Ligera Bandera had fought against Stygia when the League invaded in the run-up to the Graveyard. I commiserated about College war games with Hune to the amusement of the Blood.

Apparently Hune’s tenure at the head of Tiger Company had been a mixed bag, as an early winning streak had seen her consistently targeted by rivals afterwards.

Eventually Adjutant caught my eye and I heard the unspoken signal that we’d tarried long enough, moving back to my seat at the carved table. The most socially aware among the gathering – which included all three Procerans, to my mixed amusement and exasperation – followed suit, which was enough to begin a chain of the same. Within moments most everyone was standing before their seats without my having had to say a word.

“I’ll spare us a meandering speech,” I said. “We all know why we’re here. Not all of you will be aware, however, that we’re to set out early next week.”

I flicked a glance across the lot of them, finding mostly practiced calm and the occasional sprouts of eagerness.

“I will be holding the command for our section of the Grand Alliance forces,” I said. “And so it is my responsibility to brief you as to the nature of this offensive.”

I waited a beat, then pulled my chair to sit and gesture for all others – save one – to do the same.

“I can’t and won’t claim to be the mind behind our campaign plan,” I told them. “It was crafted through the labour of many of our strategists, foremost among them Marshal Juniper of Callow and Prince Klaus Papenheim.”

“Your humility does your honour, Your Majesty,” Princess Beatrice said, “but the Iron Prince has claimed your hand to have been as much as work here as his own.”

My brow rose in genuine surprise. The old flatterer. I’d helped tinker with this some, but I’d not consider this plan to be my baby. Mostly I’d served as a bridge between him and Juniper.

“Far be it from me to contradict Old Klaus, then,” I drily said. “Especially if he was in a pleasant mood.”

That got some laughter, though most of it polite, and at least one muttered saying in Tolesian about ‘something Lycaonese tooth iron something’? My Tolesian was, well, to be honest it mostly wasn’t .

“The forces represented by the people in this room will number around seventy thousand souls,” I said, “but we are to be only a single prong of the offensive. The other will be commanded by the Prince of Hannoven, while a third force will remain behind as a strategic reserve under General Pallas of Helike.”

Under was a bit of an exaggeration, since no one had really wanted to give her command over their own countrymen, but I’d left the Fourth behind with orders for General Bagram to support her within reason.

“Apologies, Your Majesty,” Captain-General Ferreiro said, “but I was under the impression that the sum total of soldiery in Neustal numbered one hundred and fifty thousand?”

“One hundred and sixty,” I corrected, “but yes, you’ve put your finger on the pulse of this. Our will be the largest force of the two setting out by a fair margin, because we’re expected to be hitting the harder targets.”

Also because seventy-five thousand was the apex of what we believed to be capable of feeding through our supply lines. And that was an estimate, so when the Princess of Hainaut had come to me with slightly fewer fantassins than expected – none of the smaller forces were worth the effort, in her opinion – I’d not argued against it. Best to have too many supplies than too few.

“None of you are fools,” I said. “So you know what that means: we’ll be going up Julienne’s Highway.”

There was a rippling murmur. Not of surprise, for it’d not been empty flattery when I’d gauged that a room of hardened veterans would be able to guess our path upwards, but of... consideration. Everyone was aware there would be rough battles ahead.

“Prince Klaus’ force is to serve as a distraction?” General Hune asked.

I nodded at the towering ogre.

“That’s part of it,” I acknowledged. “He’ll be taking fifty-four thousand up the old mining roads to the east, and taking his time in doing so. The reason for that is the latest scouting report form the Silver Huntress, who once more deserves our thanks.”

The redhead looked awkward when all eyes turned on her, jerkily nodding back.

“I took the Sage and a war party of Osena slayers,” she said, slowing her words so her voice would sound less high-pitched, “to have a closer look at the fortress-town of Juvelun. The withdrawal of the dead towards the north was an opportunity to venture further than usual.”

I offered her a sharp nod.

“The Huntress confirmed what we’ve been suspecting for some time: Keter has amassed a large force in Juvelun, at least a hundred thousand with several Revenants to lead them,” I elaborated.

Idly I wondered where I’d put the markers we used for enemy armies, but when I turned to look Hakram was leaning over in his chair and handing me the black iron blocks. I smiled in thanks as I took, plopping one down on Juvelun. By now everyone was starting to put it together. Neustal, the stronghold where we currently stood, was more or less in the centre of the Hainaut lowlands and sat astride Julienne’s Highway – which would go all the way to the capital, up north. Meanwhile our other army would go up the eastern path of the mining road, further along our defensive line, and begin a quick march up into northeastern Hainaut.

The Iron Prince’s target was the small city of Malmedit, since the Dead King was using it to funnel troops into our eastern flank through old tunnels, but the road would take his army past a branch that led to the fortress-town of Juvelun slightly to the west. We were hoping that would draw the undead army there into a battle, since losing Malmedit would be a major setback for Keter. If the dead gave battle, and we expected they would, then the force there would not be able to reinforce the closest strategic location: the city of Hainaut itself, the capital that was the ultimate objective for my own push.

“We’ve identified four other large Keteran forces,” I continued. “One is holed up out west, in Luciennerie, where it sits defensively on the blue road. We believe it’s between one hundred and one hundred fifty thousand. It’s also getting steady reinforcements, and we’re not sure from where exactly. “

I’d simplified a bit there, I reflected as I set down the corresponding block of iron. While that army was strategically defensive, it was also the force that kept flooding the western side of our defensive line with raiders and small attacks. The only reason the Dead King hadn’t pushed further was that if he did there was a risk the armies under Malanza would sally out from the town of Coudrent, to its west, and try to anchor our flanks together. It’d take a lot of pressure out of the both of us, which was why Juniper had originally wanted to split our forces in three and take a swing a Luciennerie as well.

Talks with other strategists and fresh information had since made us revise that first plan she’d suggested, but the bare bones of it were still essentially the same.

“Another large force is north of the previous and beyond the highlands, in Suifat,” I continued, placing the black iron. “Though it was previously around seventy thousand, they’ve had a flood of reinforcements and we now believe them a match for the Luciennerie force in numbers. Thankfully for us, that army is now on the move and marching to try and retake Trifelin.”

It was the Dead King’s armies that would be in for a rough time there, for once. Malanza has suffered a stinging defeat there early in the war for Cleves, so when she’d finally taken back the town she’d fortified every nook and cranny of the region. Gods smile on whoever tried Rozala Malanza on those grounds, because she ready and she was angry .

“We’ve all been aware of the army waiting between the Hollow and the Sister for some time,” I said, easily plopping down a block there. “We still believe it to be a little under a hundred thousand, and it has been keeping a purely defensive stance.”

It would be our first opponent, one way or another.

“The last known force, and we believe it to be the largest, is somewhere north of the capital,” I continued. “Two hundred thousand, some of the finest troops in the service of the Dead King. We last saw them around the Prisoner’s Mercy, but we’re not sure where they might have march since – save for one detail, we are certain they’re not in the capital.”

We had the Augur, the Wise Astrologer and the Enigmatic Prophet in agreement on that, aside from our own risky Named scouting through the Twilight Ways.

“The offensive’s basic shape is as follows,” I said. “To the west, allied forces based in Coudrent will go raiding down the blue road to pin down the army in Luciennerie, while a significant slice of the Grand Alliances forces of Cleves concentrates in Trifelin to hold it.”

It’d be tight, given that Malanza had lost some forces to us, but so long as there wasn’t a major offensive through the lakes – and we’d not seen the build-up for one, not for lack of looking – then she would be able to succeed at both those tasks.

“Out east, Prince Klaus will march up the mining roads and attempt to bait out the army in Juvelun,” I said. “If it refuses to give battle he’ll move against Malmedit itself, which will at the very least force pursuit by the Juvelun army.”

Ideally he’d take the old mining city quickly and then hold it against the pursuing dead, but I doubted it’d end up that clean.

“Meanwhile, at the heart of it all, we’ll be marching on Lauzon’s Hollow,” I continued. “We’ll be doing so at the quickest pace we can manage, to threaten to take the Hollow before Keter can move its nearby army to hold it.”

“That stratagem worked last year,” Lady Aquiline said. “Which means the Hidden Horror will expect it now.”

“That’s our intent,” I bluntly said. “Once that force moves to defend the Hollow, it will leave the Cigelin Sisters vulnerable. Our reserve of twenty-eight thousand will then strike out from the Twilight Ways and seize it.”

“If they split their forces?” Hune asked.

“Then we force the Hollow,” I shrugged. “They won’t be able to bleed us with so few.”

General Abigail looked at the map and frowned.

“What happens if the undead in Luciennerie ignore the raids and attack our defensive line instead?” she asked.

“The reserve defends,” I said. “It only needs to hold for some time, as we have reinforcements from Callow and southern principalities already on the way. Then Keter loses Luciennerie and we pincer the attacking force between Cleven reinforcements and our own defenders.”

It’d mean a very different campaign, but it was also one we were capable of fighting.

“It would still mean no reinforcements for the battle at the Hollow,” Captain Reinald pointed out.

“In that situation,” I replied, “we would reassess and consider if Prince Klaus’ army using the Ways to attack the Sisters instead would be feasible. If it is not, our objective would change to securing the east and Juvelun in particular.”

It’d give us a shot at the capital, and from there we’d be able to muster a truly brutal offensive against the Hidden Horror on three sides. A siege of Hainaut would become inevitable, it was true, but while we’d wanted to avoid that we couldn’t always get what we wanted. Would that war were so polite. My gaze swept the table and found a great many questions, but no one outright disbelieving that this could be done. Good, I thought as I cracked my neck.

“All right,” I said, “if you have inquiries, now is the time. We can move on to the marching order afterwards.”

It was going to be a long night, but better to talk now than to bleed later.

Five Stories

“Fate is as a towering tree: we see only the branches and the leaves, never guessing at the roots that tangle us all together.”

Eudokia the Oft-Abducted, Basilea of Nicae

There is a tale, in Levante, about vengeance.

Once, long ago, an aging lord with three daughters ruled over a castle. This lord was a kind man, a just man, but also a weak man. And so when a cruel warrior grew hungry for his lands, the kind lord was slain by the warband and his castle taken as a prize. The three daughters were made into servants, and treated little better than slaves.

The eldest daughter was brave, and so one day she took up the sword and claimed the right of duel in honour. Bravely she died, for the warrior was cruel but he was a killer without peer. The second daughter was clever, and so one night she tipped poison into the warrior’s wine. Cleverly she died, for the poison was not swifter than the healer and the warrior knew no mercy.

The youngest daughter was patient. She swore to the warrior she would never seek to take his life, and to prove this she took up neither iron nor the pouring of wine. She became instead a painter of hues and her skill was great, so she was praised and forgiven the trespasses of her kin. And patiently, every day, she painted a hidden knife within the work she gave the warrior.

And so the warrior grew wary, for from the corner of his eye everywhere he saw knives. Then he grew fearful, for the longer he sat on the lord’s seat he had taken in blood the more knives were pointed at him. The warrior grew irate and capricious, his warband grew unruly for the mistreatment. Until one day the knives were not painted, for the warband rebelled and slew the warrior.

The youngest daughter stole his corpse, as the warriors fought for the lord’s seat, and took him not to a barrow. Instead she painted a red knife across his throat, and left him for the wild dogs to tear at.

This was a well-known tale, fondly told by mothers to their daughters when blood grew heated and patience called for. It was not a grand tale, no Anthem of Smoke or Odes of Honour, but it was known . And so when Kallia of Levante burned her father’s corpse and stirred the ashes into paint, when she traced a red knife on the door of the cruel Lady Abril, her declaration of war was heard across the entire city.

—

Helike was a city like a spinning coin, Rhodon had been taught as a child.

Every time a Theodosian came to rule, the Gods gave that coin a toss. Sometimes it led to a good king, a powerful king, and Helike thrived. Sometimes it led to a bad king, a weak king, and Helike was buried by its rivals. But sometimes, oh so rarely, the coin landed on the side and the whole of Calernia shivered as it whispered the word tyrant . It was all very poetic, Rhodon thought now that he was a man, but these days he was rather inclined to believe the Gods didn’t even bother with a toss.

Mediocrity was the stuff of men, not divinely ordained. And such mediocrity did he behold! Rhodon Kabasilas was a young man of ancient lineage, a lord in his own right and descended from Theodosius the Unconquered’s favourite mage, so his skill with sorcery had ensured he would have a prominent place at the court of King Peithon Theodosian. Old Peithon then started a war with Atalante, kept it going long enough to lose a major battle to their mercenaries and then inconveniently choked on a mouthful of olives.

Half the palace screamed of assassination, the other half began plotting a coup. When Rhodon was asked to examine the corpse the dead king’s brother, Lord Timaios, heard his verdict that this had been a genuine accident and smiled before suggesting he reconsider. Perhaps it had been poison, Lord Timaios suggested. Perhaps the evidence even pointed to the king’s young son and heir, Prince Amyntas.

Rhodon was interested in keeping his throat from being slit, so he politely agreed, but he discreetly sent warning to the young prince to hedge his bets. He decided he’d made the right choice when Amyntas escaped the city – helped, it was said, by a stranger in grey – and began gathering an army in the country. Lord Timaios fatally blundered when he struck a very unpopular peace deal with Atalante, ceding farmlands, and within the year Timaios was dead and Amyntas on the throne.

King Amyntas’ very second act when he took the crown, just after offering amnesty to a few powerful nobles, was naming the loyal sorcerer who’d saved his life to the highest mage title of the court.

And just like that, Rhodon Kabalisas became the Royal Conjurer.

—

Alain considered his father to be an inspiration.

Magistrate Thibault Monduc was known as a fair and learned man, and this had been known far as far as the capital: Prince Amadis of Iserre had called Alain’s father there, so that he might surrender his elected charge and instead become a royal magistrate of the Prince of Iserre. It was a great honour, Alain’s father told his family, and they must live up to it in all things. They might be highborn but they held no lands and little wealth, and so their armour must be strict adherence to the law.

And so Alain set out to live up to his father’s words. He took to his lessons with discipline, never lied nor cheated nor disgraced himself in any way, and he revelled in the pride he found on his father’s face when he announced he wanted to be a magistrate as well. His father asked a favour, and Alain went to study under another magistrate as a scribe and attendant. Royal Magistrate Cristina was cold, but she was also experienced and willing to teach. He thrived as one of her attendants, and left her service with a commendation.

Not yet a man, Alain Monduc found that his family had fared very well in his absence. They now lived in a manse in a better part of the capital, and both his sisters were in talks for very advantageous marriages with young men of noble blood. His mother told him his father had bought into a fresh trading company, and struck gold. His sisters told him that their father had made friends at court who’d tipped him off to opportunities. His father chided him for speaking of coin, for it was crass trader talk, before simply saying he had made lucky investments.

And all the while, the lessons Alain had learned under Royal Magistrate Crisitina ticked in the back of his head.

The investigation itself was hardly difficult. The trading company existed, but traded no goods, and the other owners were all nobles and men with commands in the city guard. It was a smuggling ring, and his break-in into the warehouse revealed to Alain that the goods were largely Taghreb silverwork – illegal, the Dread Empire had been under embargo for over a century – and Ashuran spices. The spices were heavily taxed, so that would be the lucrative part.

The jewelry would be the difficult part, as there was precedent for the breaking of an embargo decreed by the Highest Assembly to be taken as treason. He wrestled with the decision for days. His father’s guild was not in doubt, but he could truly condemn the man to certain disgrace and possible death? And yet Alain knew he must: adherence to the law was not negotiable . This was wrong .

His father hanged, four courtiers were whipped out of the city and an alleged member of the Eyes of the Empire was caught. Alain Monduc was made a royal magistrate for his honesty, hollow as the title and praise felt. Our most relentless magistrate , Prince Amadis had apparently named him in court. It was an honour but also fetters, but he would not be the second Monduc to disgrace the name in this lifetime.

Alain still considered his father to be an inspiration, in a way.

—

Angelique hadn’t meant to end up a poisoner.

It had been a very measured act, in her opinion. That little prick Henri was humiliating her brother – his lawful husband! – by running around with other men, getting drunk and fucking them in taverns like he was some sort of lord whose name would make him beyond reproach. Henri’s family was very rich, it was true, and Angelique’s had been bakers for as long as the family tree went back. Perhaps he’d thought he would get away with it.

So Angelique, chubby little Angelique with her rosy cheeks, who everyone always talked down to because she was a plump baker with a cutesy name – and didn’t that mean she was a sugary idiot who could do no harm? – had slipped a few coppers to a man in the right tavern and arranged for a little something to be added to Henri’s wine. He’d get a scare, learn no to go tramping around when he had a perfectly lovely husband waiting at home, and it would all be settled instead.

Henri got dead instead, which to Angelique’s surprise turned out rather well for everyone else.

Her brother Jacques inherited Henri’s wealth, the tavern was closed down after being accused of having had diseased wooden barrels and no one ever suspected a thing. Well, save the man she’d paid to slip a little arsenic in the ale and who had very clearly put the whole vial in there instead of the mere drops she’d told him to use. He tried to blackmail her, to get at Jacques’ newfound wealth, so Angelique appeased him with baked goods fresh from the oven and told him she’d speak with her brother.

The idiot ate two pastries full of nightshade before even leaving the shop, which left with Angelique with no loose ends save a fresh body to get rid of. Still, even as she debated the respective virtues of using the oven or dragging the corpse to Old Julie’s pig pen after dark, it occurred to her that there might just be a great deal of coin to be had in being a poisoner.

More than in baking, anyway, so why not?

—

Teresa became a veteran when she was thirteen.

The Princess of Segovia had, in her deep wisdom, realized that the towns and cities in the plains of Laranta should be paying taxes to her and sending the silver of the mines to her coffers. Alas the Prince of Orense has failed to share this opinion, and so a polite disagreement involving armies had ensued. Teresa herself was from Salamans and so cared not a white for the squabble, but she did care about not being married off to the farrier’s only son.

So she’d signed on with the Ten Thousand Blades and developed a burning enthusiasm for the cause of Princess Luisa of Segovia, Gods preserve her. The ambitiously named ‘Ten Thousand Blades’ had numbered three hundred fantassins when she signed on, but after participating in a battle in southern Laranta they were forty-four. Captain Leonte had been dismissive of pikes, much as the cavalry of the Prince of Orense had been dismissive of the notion of not trampling Captain Leonte. Teresa made a kill, took a wound and played dead for the rest of the battle.

She rose a decently wealthy woman, as Princess Luisa gallantly paid wages even after the disastrous defeat, and after taking her cut promptly moved on to a company slightly less likely to get her killed. The Iron Brotherhood had a good reputation, and a good captain: she served a full two years there. Officer’s rank was kept within a circle of Cantal families, though, so she signed on with the Glorious Lions and was a serjeant when the company disbanded a year later after the captain bought a noble husband and retired.

She made lieutenant under the Grey Banners, deserting when the Prince of Tenerife refused to pay and the captains decided to turn bandit, and served two years as Captain Julie’s second in the Folies Rouges. Things were looking up, she decided. Teresa then went bankrupt after founding her own company, the Salamanders, and immediately getting stiffed by Atalante – the priests had made sudden peace with Helike, and were not inclined to pay for mercenaries they wouldn’t be using no matter what the contracts said.

She had to spend a year under a merchant lord in Mercantis training city guards until she was able to gut the bastard, rob his vault and blame it on one of his rivals. When Teresa returned to Procer, now twenty-two, she realized that most of the fantassins she’d come up with were dead or retired.

Youngbloods were now looking at her the same way she’d looked at grizzled fantassins, once upon a time.

—

First, Kallia came for them.

The guards wouldn’t help, and the Old Palace didn’t care. Lady Jibril was of the Blood, however meagre the line and its deeds. But Kallia was her father’s daughter, quick and sure-footed and very good with a knife – it had taken four men to kill him, she remembered with hard pride, and one of them had still died – so she sought vengeance through the deeds of her own hand. She was told names, for in Levant the avenging of one’s blood was a sacred thing, and she went on the hunt.

The first one was a boaster and a drinker, so he was easy to find leaving a tavern. And still she almost died. Kallia had never taken a life before, and found that her hand hesitated when the moment came. A scar on her side taught her never to repeat that mistake. The second she slew coming back from a brothel, smoothly and from behind. By the third she had grown bold enough to slice open his stomach in a crowded marketplace, feigning an embrace as she silenced him.

Each time she traced a red knife, a painted knife. There were some who might have ended the vengeance here, who would have counted it even with the death of her father’s killers, but not she. The lips that had spoken the order still drew breath, and there would be no peace until Lady Jibril of the Slinger’s Blood lay dead. But Kallia had forgot the lessons of her story. She had been brave and clever, like the sisters told. But it was not enough, she learned when she returned to see her home burning.

Second, they came for Kallia.

—

As the years passed, Rhodon found that he was not a patriot.

Not in the sense that orators used, those brave lads and lasses read to sacrifice life and fortune for the sake of Helike. Yet he’d been named the Royal Conjurer of a young king’s court, and King Amyntas did have ambitions the mage respected. More importantly the young man had a practical bent, enough to know that if he was to ever curb the nobles he would need to marry into a strong alliance. The king’s marriage to Lady Roxana was unhappy, and did not yield a child for years, but it did yield coin and steel.

Rhodon leant his skills to the cause of reform, weaving sorceries to spies on Amyntas’ enemies and crush the spellcraft of their pet sorcerers. The king found victories at court, and his Royal Conjurer the same in the halls behind those of power: where men like him plied their dark tricks, and the battles were of subtler cast. His reputation rose and he found magic came... easier. Especially when in service of the king. So when Amyntas first asked him to make a bastard child of his disappear, Rhodon did.

Lady Roxana had not yet given birth to a child, and Helike’s successions tended to the bloody even when there were no such complications. It all went wrong: a rebellious noble found the boy and had him seized, so Amyntas was unable to simply put him on a boat to Ashur to be forgotten abroad. It got messy, and the Royal Conjurer unleashed his power without a thought to finesse – seventeen died, and the boy himself took a curse meant for another. He died on the way to the palace.

“You did what you had to, Rhodon,” King Amyntas murmured into his ear. “Your loyalty to Helike is beyond question.”

No, the Royal Conjurer was not a patriot. What was there to love? Under the gilding everything in Helike was rotten, not the least himself.

—

Relentless , they called Alain.

Some meant it as a compliment, others as an insult. None denied the truth of it, not even Royal Magistrate Alain Monduc. He must be relentless, tireless, or else what had he sent his own father to the noose for? He’d killed the man for the principles the same man had instilled in him, and it would kill him in an entirely different way if he now failed to lived up to them. Alain had caught Prince Amadis’ eye, with that act, and now the Prince of Iserre considered him a curiosity of sorts.

One he meant to make use of, however, and this Alain embraced. In his first month he unearthed a ring of servant-burglars who’d been robbing the nobility for years, and discreetly enough few had even noticed. At the border with Cantal he caught fantassins under a false flag, pretending to be bandits, and even seized one of them to bring back to the court. He hunted deserters and thieves, killers and spies, and always he brought them to stand before the law. Every single time.

His fellow magistrates called him mad for the risks he took, the hours he kept, but they did not understand that if Alain failed in this then he was already dead. So when murders began to crop up around the capital, it was only natural for the prince’s favourite hound to be called in. Yet this one was different, Alain realized. The killer slew for pleasure, and did it through impossible means: it was as if they could walk unseen and swift as the wind, as if they could bend steel with their strength.

And the killer knew of him, relentless Alain Monduc learned, when the first victim was dropped on his doorstep.

—

As it turned out, Angelique was very good at murder.

It was trifling easy to use her savings to buy a wagon, especially now that her brother had recently come into money, and she was hardly unusual in deciding to take to the road as a baker. It was a trade that saw her travel between cities quite a bit and meet all sorts of people, which in turn allowed her to find individuals whose life would be distinctly improved by a spot of murder. Assassin was a bit of a misnomer, really, as she preferred to use intermediaries or simply provide the means to the more entire enterprising sort. Still, it could not be denied she as very much a poisoner.

A rich poisoner, however, and one with many grateful patrons. In certain circles her reputation grew, and she began outright buying shops in certain cities as the means of her patrons – some of which now sought her out themselves! – grew along the reputation. She’d yet to kill royalty, though several people had approached her over the life of the First Prince, but she suspected it was only a matter of time.

Angelique studied the art and found she had knack for making her own poisons, even those written of on no pages. She was... unnaturally good at it, really. It was as if there was something guiding her hand, and it was the same when she was attempting to find servants and kinsmen who would turn on a target. Her instincts had always been good, and her demeanour did not invite suspicion, but these days success came easy.

Which is why it was a particularly unpleasant surprise, when one evening she found a kindly stranger awaiting her in her shop. An old man in faded grey robes, with soft words and smiles but eyes like death.

“You are nearing a crossroads, dear girl,” he said. “Consider retirement, before someone less restrained takes notice.”

It was not a suggestion, though he was polite enough to pretend otherwise.

—

The Great War did not come unbidden.

All the fancy scholars said it did, but Teresa knew otherwise as did many fantassins – though few as grizzled as her. The wars came easier than they had when she’d been girl, the princes were growing restless. Some talked of striking out east, against Helike’s young king, but the First Prince would not hear of wars against the League. So instead the princes fought with words in the Assembly, and with companies on the field.

Iserre fought Cantal for rule of a river too shallow to bear fish. Aisne and Bayeux had three wars in nine months, each ending in brotherly peace. Brus, Lyonis and Lange tussled over a single silver mine. Teresa lost friends in each of those pissant wars, to nothing causes for feckless crowns, but was this not the trade? She marched under one banner after another across the span of Procer, learning all that there was to learn about dying.

Blood was in the air, Teresa could smell it. Even away from battle, passing through towns and wheat fields. The princes had grown hungry for more than the thin strictures of just war could give them. The aging fantassin was not surprised when the First Prince’s sudden death was like a struck match, armies sprouting across the land like green shots after rain. This war would not be like the others, she could feel it in her bones.

She warned the others, but when had youngbloods ever listened to a grizzled old fool like her?

—

They took her, falling on her as she watched her home burn with the last of her family, and then Kallia knew only darkness. She woke in a dank and silent place, behind an iron-banded door. Once a day a pair of warriors came in and hurt her. She was not bound, and so she fought, but she was only healed enough not to die between the fights. After the pain, when she could no longer move, Lady Jibril always came to visit.

“Ask me to die,” the cruel woman always demanded.

And instead Kallia traced her face with red, with her own blood.

“One day the painted knife will bite,” she always replied, fingers coming away still-

—

-red, Gods there was so much blood on Rhodon’s hands it was never going to wash off.

His king had finally fathered a son on his wife, a boy named Nicanor, but his reforms were stalling and so he turned to his Royal Conjurer to grease the wheels with red. Rhodon strangled with shadows and drove men mad with devil-dreams, but it was not enough. King Amyntas’ fires weakened with every setback, until he was but a spent shadow of himself. He took to drinking dallying with dancing girls, sinking into pleasures.

When Lady Roxana tried to kill her husband and seize the throne for Nicanor, it was Rhodon who caught it. At the last moment, and the knife was already in her hand so there was no time for delicacy . Fire and air in a tight orb caught her shoulder and Lady Roxana’s torso burst like an overripe peach. Amyntas wept into his arms, the both of them covered in red and flesh.

“You are the only man I can trust,” the king bawled. “That I will always trust.”

The man that had once been Rhodon Kabalisas was dead, he thought as he patted the other monster’s back. There was only the Royal Conjurer left.

The office left room for –

—

– nothing else. Nothing else could claim even a sliver of Alain’s attention as the royal magistrate hunted the killer that was taunting him. He burned bridges at court when he force a search of nobles’ quarters but got only a cooling corpse for it, the ambush he tried by the river got a dozen of the prince’s men killed and all he learned was that he was facing one of the Damned. It was not enough. Noises were being made about taking him off this hunt at the court, now, so his hand was forced.

Alain took risks. He arrested a smuggler, claimed him to be the killer, and stashed him away in a cell in a guardhouse. And then he waited for the real monster to come, the Cutthroat he’d been hunting all this time. But the killer had been hunting him just as relentlessly all this time, he had not grasped. It was not for the bait the Damned came, but for him. The window opened without a sound, and all he caught was a glint of –

—

– steel. Teresa caught the glint of steel in the noonday sun as the great armies moved into place like lumbering beasts. On the plains of Brabant proud princes and princesses had gathered to pressed claims to the greatest throne of Calernia, a most deadly affair. Teresa was a lieutenant for the Belles Lucioles now, in the service of Prince Etienne of Brabant, but she frowned as she realized the glinting of steel came from the wrong way.

There were horsemen coming towards the company, and so she roused the men to raise theirs spears and stand in ranks instead of mill about, but not enough listened. It was the pennants of allies that were seen in the wind, even if the horsemen were riding hard. When the riding did not slow, panic came, but by then it was too late. The battle would be called the Waltz of Fools, Teresa did not yet know, for this had been incompetence and not treachery.

Yet as the grizzled fantassin watched splendidly-clad horsemen break through an uneven row of spears, she could not help but ask herself why she was-

—

-still doing this. Angelique asked herself the question again, even as she considered how the poison might best be administered. Why was she still doing this? She was already wealthier than she’d ever dreamed she would be, connected to some very powerful individuals and courted by a great many pretty men. Interested more in her coin than her smile, perhaps, but it was still a pleasant diversion. It was a good life, a comfortably life.

So why was she risking it all by taking this contract by a mere country lord’s second son, a nobody trying to claim his sister’s inheritance by a drop of poison? Yet she’d not been able to refuse, even deathly afraid as she was of the old man with the blue eyes who’d smiled and warned her off the trade. It was not for profit, she was being forced to face that. Neither was it of a taste for killing, for the murder was largely a matter of indifference to her.

Angelique looked at her own face in the mirror. Red and plump cheeks, watery eyes. Titters came easy to her, and always would. There was nothing of herself she disliked, she’d admit to herself. But how it made people react to her... the dismissals, the condescension, the patronizing tones . These she could not stand.

“I am a poisoner,” Angelique tried out, meeting the eyes of her reflection. “I am a poisoner, and I will not stop because I am-“

—

“-good at it,” the Cutthroat smilingly said. “Do I need a deeper justification than this, my good magistrate?”

Alain struggled against the woman, the Damned, but her grip was unnaturally strong. Slowly the knife in her hand was coming close to his throat, but they both knew she was taking her time. Gloating, savouring his impotence and fear.

“You won’t win,” Alain hissed. “Even if I die. All you are is a child flailing in the dark. I am a royal magistrate of Procer, there are a hundreds who can take my place. Continue the work. You do not fight a man, you fight the law. And the law does not relent .”

The blade pricked his skin, drawing a bead of blood as his teeth clenched in pain, and the Damned chuckled.

“There,” she said. “For all your talk, so very-“

—

– mortal,” Lady Jibril mocked. “Day after day you swear vengeance on me, and nothing happens. Do you not worry that I will lose patience, Kallia? That I will simply kill you?”

Kallia laughed in the other woman’s face. All these days here in the dark, tasting pain and left alone with her thoughts, but she had not gone mad yet. Because there was a sister left, in the story. Because sometimes patience bore fruit, because sometimes the Ashen Gods answered . And these days, when she dreamt down here, she dreamt of a painted knife and the way she held it.

“Then I will win,” Kallia said, and believed every word of it.

Lady Jibril frowned.

“Mad, then,” she said. “That is disappointing, but the Peregrine has returned to Levant so we must cut this short. I’ll not risk his attention for a diversion.”

Kallia’s enemy came forward, a curved knife in hand, intent on death. She could feel it in the air. Her limbs were broken, her breath weak, so she did not resist when Lady Jibril dragged her up to sit against the wall and set the knife against her throat. Kallia rasped out a wet laugh.

“There is a tale, in Levante, about vengeance,” she whispered.

“Mad,” Lady Jibril repeated with a sigh, and slit her throat.

And yet it was Jibril who bled, a line drawn in red across her throat by the Painted Knife.

Sometimes the Heavens-

—

– smiled on you, Teresa thought as she woke up. Why else would she still be alive? Her company lay around her as a carpet of corpses, swept through by a friendly cavalry charge and then by a brutal and chaotic melee where friend and foe had been indistinguishable. Half a day thebutchery had lasted, until soldiers collapsed in exhaustion, and now the crows picked at them all. Teresa, her leg broken, crawled around a dying horse and gasped as she looked up at the sky.

Eventually, she bound her leg and dragged herself up with a hoarse scream. Still alive. She’d lost her sword so she took another from a corpse, and stole boots to replace her own slashed-up ones. Teresa breathed out, and grasped that she was perhaps the only living person for a mile. There was fighting in the distance, but her entire company lay dead around her. And she saw, in that moment, the future that lay ahead of her through this great war and those beyond.

She would survive, again and again and again. Teresa would survive until she the only old hand left in this fucking trade, and she was not simply a grizzled fantassin but the grizzled fantassin. And when the thought came to her, she knew it to be true in a way beyond her understanding. Shivering, exhausted, the Grizzled Fantassin began limping towards the nearest town.

The business wasn’t over yet, and she was still under-

—

– contract. It was regrettable that Angelique would have to leave town and break it, but she’d heard rumours of an old woman with a sword having come from the country and begun asking questions about a poisoner. An old woman who’d casually snapped the arm of a guard, when he’d tried to force her out of town for having come in without paying at the gates. That was not the kind of enemy Angelique fancied confronting, so flight would serve.

And yet, even as she planned her escape, the poisoner found she felt... excited. Alive. It might be that the authorities would hunt her and the Chosen with them, but even if she feared this it also pleased her. It was like discarding a mask and finally revealing her face to the world. She’d held back for so long, hadn’t she? Clutched wealth and comfort at the expense of what she truly desired, who she truly was.

Angelique’s blood stirred more at the thought of finally attempting to poison First Prince Cordelia than it did at the thought of buying a another shop, so why had she so long clung to the latter at the expense of the former? No, she was not a baker or a trader or a socialite.

She was a Poisoner, and when she finally admitted it to herself the world shivered to the sound of her damnation.

What a relief, to look the truth of what she was-

—

– in the eye. Rhodon found that admitting he was a monster had made him a worse man, but one more at peace with himself. And that peace seeped into every part of him, even as with an indifferent eye he watched Helike decay. The king’s son Nicanor eventually fathered a son of his own, another boy named Dorian, but Prince Nicanor was as fond of revels as his neglectful father and snapped his neck in a drunken accident.

King Amyntas’s grief startled some vigor back into him for a few years, until he fell in love with a dancing girl by the name of Thais and got it into his head to marry her after having gotten her pregnant. She died giving birth to some misshapen little creature the king was too disgusted to name – Rhodon stepped in, whispering Kairos to the scribes – and Amyntas promptly sunk back into his old vices with a vengeance.

By then, Rhodon had been the Royal Conjurer for decades. He’d been a staple of the court for so long it did not remember the times before him, and that had... weight. The mage was not unschooled in such matters, and so he realized the pull when it came. Becoming Named, he found, was not some grand turn of fate. He’d simply settled in the groove, slowly but surely, over decades of being who he was. One day, when he thought of himself as the Royal Conjurer, the world simply thought it with him.

Sometimes that was all-

—

– it took. Keep faith with the world, and the world kept faith with you. Alain’s fingers closed around the wrist of the Cutthroat and he began pushing her back. The knife left his throat. Her face darkened in anger and surprise.

“You struggle in vain,” she sneered. “I need only take this seriously and-“

She pushed, but his strength matched hers. There was something in Alain, something that burned .

“It was always serious,” the royal magistrate said. “It was never a game.”

“Fuck you, prince’s dog,” the Cutthroat snarled, “your moralizing means nothing. You’re the servant of a man just as bad as-“

“I serve the law,” Magistrate Alain Monduc interrupted, snarling back, “I serve the people of Procer. And until I see justice done by them-“

His strength, for the slightest moment, overpowered hers. It would have been child’s play to take the knife, he somehow knew. To seize it and slit her throat in the same smooth stroke. And the thought called to him, it did, for he was just a man. But Alain was still inspired by his father, both by the man who’d taught him and the man who’d failed him. So he took the knife, but it was his fist that struck the Damned.

“- I will not relent,” the Relentless Magistrate swore, and placed the Cutthroat under arrest.

—

Many years later, five people stood in the same room and were sent on an important task by a black-clad queen and a white-clad knight.

It was an ending but it was also a beginning, for stories never truly end.

Chapter 48: Hilltop

“Faith is not an act of surrender but of conquest, for doubt lies within us all.”

Daphne of the Homilies, best known for ending hereditary rule in Atalante

Arranging it had been simple, in a sense. Just a matter of timing, of sensing what people would want and how they went about getting it. When you had that, as I’d once been told it was all just... objects in motion. And it’d had to be that, because more direct manipulation would have been sniffed out in a heartbeat by the people involved. That was the trouble with trying to beat people at a game they were better at than you. I wanted answers, though, and I wanted them in a way that wouldn’t scar what I wanted achieved. And so here I was, in the darkened warehouse standing before an open crate and holding an artefact in my hands.

It didn’t look like much, for such a dangerous thing.

A Callowan knight’s lance was usually around nine feet in length but the kataphraktoi used longer ones, closer to twelve. The unraveller I held in my hands was shorter than either, perhaps a little over six feet in height, and lighter as well. It was easy enough to see why, as unlike a lance of hardened wood the unravellers were partly hollow: at the heart of them was a tunnel that went from the top to the bottom, with a thin wire of cold iron hung up. The outside of unraveller was touched with coin-like patches of metal, mostly bronze and brass, which themselves were connected to thin metal wires within the wooden shell.

The most expensive part was the sculpted amethyst ring at the bottom of the lance-like artefact, like a pommel to the wooden handle, which even at rest hummed with magic. The rest was runic carvings in the wood to stabilized the product, and a steel tip at the end of the unraveller that was very carefully linked with the central cold iron wire without compromising the artefact’s ability to, well, be used as a weapon. It needed to bite into bone or flesh before it disrupted the sorcery, which was unfortunate but couldn’t feasibly be fixed.

It wasn’t that we weren’t capable of it, just that the materials required would multiply the cost of production by at least ten. We’d not be able to fill entire crates with unravellers, which would defeat the entire purpose of that artefact’s existence: having an answer to necromantic constructs that we could mass-produce.

In the lamplight of the supply warehouse I studied the artefact closely, testing the weight and the way the grip handled. Archer would need to tinker with hers before she found a way to fire them by her bow, and likely the Silver Huntress as well – whose own silver recurve was shorter than Archer’s absurdly large longbow, but only in the sense that it was the size of an actual longbow. I’d need to have half a crate set aside for them to tinker with, and maybe lend them Roland when they got to it: the Rogue Sorcerer was only a passable enchanter, but even Masego praised his artefact-handling.

“I don’t get the cold iron wire,” I admitted out loud. “I’ve done the readings you suggested, I get why the patches are there and at different metal purities: it pulls at the spell structure in different ways, makes it unsteady. But cold iron isn’t supposed to be conducive to magic so why put it at the centre?”

The stuff hurt fae, because having it worked without the heat of a forge meant it didn’t lose properties through the transmutation affect – which I’d been chuffed to learn even Praesi recognized had been discovered by a Callowan wizardess, Blaine Caen! – so it was still ‘of Creation’ in a way that forged or wrought iron just wouldn’t be. But all I’d read about the stuff said it was kind of standoffish to magic, which was why people used it to make boundaries in rituals so often.

“Because the Hierophant is a singularly brilliant mage,” Akua said, frank with her praise.

She’d chosen to stand at the edge of the lamplight and the shadows, where the play of light and dark on her form was almost like a veil thrown over her clothes. Tonight she’d chosen a simple sleeveless, neckless silver dress in a wavelike pattern interrupted by slightly more ornate stripes – all of it covering a base of dark cloth. A thick silver choker and a hat of silvery tinsel stripes ending in dark gauzy veil completed the ensemble, making for a striking sight. It was one of her finer picks since I’d known her, and by the occasional smirk she’d clearly noticed my appreciation.

“I’m aware Zeze is a genius,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “If I could get an actual explanation, though?”

She smiled.

“Cold iron is resistant to magic, not repellant,” Akua said. “And it is an unnaturally stable material, in the sense that it will take to all forms of power by the exact same proportion – Cosmas’ Constant. In this case the wire serves two purposes. First it stabilizes the magic coming from varying metal purities as it is sucked into the amethyst ring, which is why the unraveller does not simply explode in a shower of shards when it is used. Secondly, it actually enhances the destabilizing effect on a necromantic construct: the iron wire’s resistance to magic means more of the construct’s invested magic is sucked in without it ever reaching the amethysts, and some of the runes carves ensure that ‘wasted’ magic does not turn to heat.”

Akua paused pushing herself off the wall and more fully into the light.

“It is an inspired solution,” the woman who’d once been the Diabolist admiringly said. “And not one I would have considered in his place. I’ve always sought the elimination of waste in artefacts and rituals, it would not have occurred to me to actively pursue it instead.”

“Masego has his moments,” I agreed.

I set down the unraveller atop the open crate, over the eleven remaining ones cradled in cloth and straw. The real breakthrough had been the amethyst ring though, or so Roland had implied, and that’d been a contribution of the Blessed Artificer. It was a relatively cheap precious stone, in Procer, which was why some Ashuran ship mages liked to buy them in bulk in Valencis and enchant them to hold winds. The ring structure was even an invention of her own, though it’d had to be slightly reworked since it was being used to anchor an enchantment instead of Light. While I might not get along particularly well with Adanna of Smyrna, I was not complaining that she’d ended up as one of the heroes assigned to my army.

“The Dead King will know we have these,” I finally said, “or at least suspect. We’ve done enough field tests he can’t have missed it.”

It was hard to notice something the size of a beorn or a tusk get struck with a lance and then... collapse, barely a heartbeat later as the necromancy animating it shattered like glass. We’d been afraid that the Dead King’s necromancers would be able to raise them right back up, but we were pretty sure by now they couldn’t . The Arsenal specialists believed it might take as much as months of rituals to raise those creatures, imbuing the different parts with different spells as they were being assembled. It just wasn’t something that could be done in the field and on the fly, not even with massed mages.

“You were careful to use the prototypes only sparingly,” Akua pointed out. “Hiding we have these was always a fool’s errand, but we can still take him by surprise with the sheer amount that can be fielded. He will be expecting these to be Named-work, not a pattern that trained mages and artisans can make on their own.”

Named were still arguably the source of the labour, since they’d been the one to train these mages and artisans when it came to making these, but her point stood. By now almost a full third of the Arsenal was dedicating its time to producing stockpiles of these to send to the fronts. There’d even been talk of starting workshops in Procer, though I’d balked: the Dead King and Malicia both had spies, and if either got their hands on the plans it’d make it much easier to figure out a countermeasure. I wanted to extend our window of effectiveness with the unravellers as long as possible, especially if it coincided with the offensive for Hainaut.

Ideally, the Gigantes would then raise massive wards on the coasts that’d keep the dead out and we’d have breathing room to make a counter-countermeasure in time for the assault on Keter itself.

“We’ll see,” I finally said.

We’d only caught the Hidden Horror flatfooted a handful of times since we’d unveiled the pharos devices, so while I was hoping to repeat the experience I wasn’t going to be relying on the hope. I cast a last look at the lances, snorting.

“Something amuses, my heart?” Akua asked.

“For all the cleverness that went into these fucking things,” I said, “they still have to be stabbed into the enemy. There’s something almost reassuring about that.”

Even when you put all the brilliance in the world into an artefact, in the end you still had to find some thug to stick it into your foe. At least folk like me would never be entirely out of work. I felt a tug against my little finger, and I knew my patience had finally borne results.I’d traced tripwires of Night around the warehouse entrances – though no more than that, or I’d risk irritating the wards – so I knew it the moment the door opened even without needing to turn. Akua cocked a brow in my direction, her superior senses having caught the sounds without needing any such tricks. It was two people who were joining us by navigating through the darkened maze of crates, it was easy to tell when I pricked my ear.

I hoisted myself up to sit on the edge of the open crate before as they strolled into the lamplight, Akua moving to lean against the side to my left. Covering my bad leg as well as implying she was my left hand all in the same gesture, I noted. Fucking Praesi , I then added, but not without fondness.

“I’ll take it as a courtesy you tripped the wire at all,” I called out.

Especially given who I was addressing.

“You overpraise me,” the Grey Pilgrim drily replied, stepping into the light.

“There is no point in skulking around allies,” the White Knight pointedly told him before following suit.

Tariq had a way of slipping past any and all measures I wove around myself with Night. He couldn’t fool the Crows, at least, but the Peregrine’s habit of turning up unexpected and without warning was not abated by anything else I could call on. He’d not been anywhere this good at it back around the days of the Graveyard, but then if I could learn about heroes they could most certainly learn about me.

“Though I wonder that you saw fit to place such a measure at all, Your Majesty,” Hanno said, sounding genuinely surprised.

“Named are a nosy breed, Lord White,” Akua smiled. “And there are a great many of them in Neustal. As always, it is a pleasure to see you.”

“Lady Sahelian,” the White Knight blandly replied, inclining his head the slightest bit then turning to me. “The Adjutant pointed me here when I sought a conversation with you. Is now an agreeable time?”

Of course it was, I’d picked it.

“If you don’t mind my shadow,” I shrugged.

“Such sweet things you call me,” Akua drolly noted.

“Could you not send her away?”

I turned a steady look on Tariq, who did not look apologetic in the slightest. And though I could have chided him, as it was rude to ask audience and then quibble over the given terms – even more so for two heroes to corner me in the dark and ask me to send away my only nearby ally – I held my tongue. I’d gone to a spot of trouble to arrange a pit fight between two of the finer speakers I knew, so I was in no hurry to spot it. Akua took my half-beat of silence as the open field it was, and took to it without any visible hesitation.

“I assure you, Peregrine, that no disease will come of addressing me directly,” Akua smilingly replied.

I kept my expression blank. The danger with getting answers Akua had always been that she was a better manipulator than me – it meant I couldn’t put my finger on the scale, try to guide an outcome, without her likely noticing it. But Tariq was perfectly capable of matching wits with her, and in his own way Hanno could be said to be even sharper. It’d taken me long to learn the lesson that sometimes doing nothing was the best way to get what you wanted, but I’d gotten there eventually.

“If you’d prefer,” Tariq politely acknowledged, turning to face her. “I distrust you, Akua Sahelian, and do not want you to be part of this conversation. Please leave.”

She hid the surprise skilfully, but I knew her well. A Praesi blind spot, this one: the Pilgrim just wasn’t proud in that way that the Named of the Dread Empire were. On the contrary, in his own way he was humble enough he was perfectly willing to make a request like this without batting an eye. It made a lot of her usual social arsenal effectively useless, since he simply did not care about the hierarchal nuances she was so adept at using. Now came the interesting part, though, how the shade would deal with the challenge. Conflict was always told the tales that smooth faces hid away.

“I recall no reason for there to be distrust between us, Grey Pilgrim,” Akua replied. “And your companion’s silence beg the question of whether your opinion is shared.”

Mhm , I thought. Better than kicking this back to me as the person who could dismissed her – not that I’d expected her to, she’d be well aware that if I’d wanted to intervene I already would have – but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the answer. The first part floated, but the second still smacked too much of trying to turn heroes on each other. But was this old habits dying hard or just social ploy to suss out where the White Knight stood? I couldn’t quite tell yet.

“You are a criminal, Lady Sahelian,” Hanno frankly replied, “but your sins were committed against Callow and you are in the custody of its queen. It is not my place to meddle in this. I would caution you, however, against confusing respect for your warden as tolerance for the most egregious mass-murderer of our age.”

The Sword of Judgement wasn’t one to pull his punches, it had to be said. But there was a reason I’d wanted him as part of this conversation: unlike the Grey Pilgrim, whose own dabbling in horror might have made more wary of bringing up the Doom of Liesse, Hanno absolutely could and would go there. That was a sting I’d wanted Akua to feel so that I might see what it brought out.

“I neither seek nor expect your esteem, Lord White,” Akua said. “But I had hopes for courtesy, at least. Or is it too much to expect of a hero?”

Good, I thought. She’d not countered by going after the bloody records of heroes like the Saint or the Pilgrim, even though it was the easiest and most effective parry. Tariq would answer he’d killed to prevent suffering, the debate would get religious – for lack of a better term – and enter grounds where no one could truly win. It also meant that, deep down, Akua did not think of the Folly as something on equal footing with Tariq seeding innocents with the plague to catch Black. Or, at least, she recognized it was not an argument that could be made and be considered to hold water.

That’d be a lesser prize, but still a prize. A few years back, she wouldn’t have cared that people believed her to be wrong when she was espousing Praesi – more accurately Praesi highborn – philosophies. She would have said the words anyway, and should circumstance prove her right down the line pointed to that as evidence of the Wasteland’s dark but undeniable wisdom. Now she was avoiding that sort of talk even when trying to win the argument by other means. Her definition of winning, of how it could be achieved, had shifted. And not because she was being coerced or fearing punishment.

It’d sunk into her, the act. Maybe no more than the slightest drop, but that was all it took.

“It is unpleasant to talk of butchery,” the White Knight calmly replied, “but it is not impolite. The burden of snuffing out a hundred thousand lives is yours to bear, Lady Sahelian, and your discomfort with the truth of that is of little import to me.”

“You know very little of what you speak of,” Akua quietly replied, “yet display great certainty. There are many sayings on people who behave in such a manner. What do you know of my follies, save what others have told you?”

“I know enough,” Hanno simply said. “And this conversation is waste of time.”

“Is it?” she mused. “The two of you have decided I am to be dismissed, and there is nothing more to be said of the matter?”

She clicked her tongue.

“Though my hands are dripping red, White Knight, and I’ll not deny this or quibble over it, I have dealt fairly and openly with you and yours,” Akua said. “I have no expectation of ever seeing the scales of Liesse settled, but that sin is not yours to ask answer for – so what have I done to you, to deserve this scorning?”

Ah , I thought. And there it was. I’d been right, then, this conversation had been needed. The nudge over the crest of the hill was still required so that she’d finally be able to see the slopes on both sides. Some part of her, perhaps the same that she allowed to enjoy the companions she’d made, still thought that so long as the mountainous horror that’d been the Folly remained far away and she was good and loyal and lovely she could have her warm place in the sun. She spoke the words as I’d said them to her, but it’d not really sunk in that Liesse wasn’t something that could be atoned for .

That even if she saved ten lives for every one she’d taken, she would still be the same woman who’d murdered an entire city.

I couldn’t be the one to lead her there, though. I couldn’t deny it either – it was true, all other considerations aside – but to keep my role I could only agree to this and not be the one that brought it up. Otherwise she’d know there was a deeper game, beyond the one I’d admitted to. The long price that had yet to be paid. I couldn’t be the one to blot out that hazy hope, otherwise she’d ask herself why I would do that. Why, if I was manipulating her, I’d do away with the mirrored oasis that was being genuinely one of us. And I couldn’t have her ask that question, not yet.

I reached within my cloak, the gesture drawing no attention.

“I’ve known a great many monsters,” Tariq pensively said, “but in your own way you are among the most tragic – how you were raised, how you were shaped, it robbed you of the ability to understand what you did even as you did it. But it has begun to dawn, I think. The scale of the evil in something like the Doom, the way it ripples out into the world. How ugly such a thing fundamentally is, so unlike the stories of glory and triumph.”

The thing that made Tariq dangerous, I thought, was that he was being sincere. This wasn’t a veiled insult or a threat or some stratagem: he was genuinely grieved by what he saw in Akua. How accurate what he saw might be remained debatable, but the way the shade’s face went solid for the fraction of a moment – as if she was locking it by will – told me she’d read his sincerity and it’d struck deep. I’d been in her place before, as it happened. There’d been a reason I wanted Tariq here.

“Fair dealings and courtesy change nothing, Akua Sahelian,” the Peregrine said, almost gently. “You killed a city. There is nothing to be done, in the wake of that, that will buy you trust.”

She did not look at me, but I felt her attention shift my way. I forced my face into stolid blankness but just a beat too slowly – not even on purpose, it’d been simple luck.

“I believe you might even care for a few others,” Tariq said. “But there is nothing redeeming in this, my dear. Even the most terrible of us can love.”

“I am not your anything, Peregrine,” Akua replied, tone forcefully cold.

Overcompensation, I decided. She didn’t control her voice anywhere as well now that she was a shade, though she’d gained in other ways.

“Then I withdraw the address,” the old man said. “It is not enough to avoid doing evil, Akua. You have to do good. Even when there is no reward. Especially when there is no reward.”

I almost smiled. There went the last piece I’d been waiting for. Selflessness, the greatest of virtues in someone like the Pilgrim’s eyes – a virtue he clutched most desperately, I expected, considering some of the things he’d done over the year at the behest of the Choir of Mercy. And Tariq had spoken of it just after effectively telling her that the Folly was not something she should ever expect to dig her way out of. And now , I thought as I watched Akua Sahelian, you see the view from atop the hill. One slope goes back down the way you came, into the beliefs of the Truebloods. But the other one feels just as pointless, doesn’t it? Because you know there’ll never be a payoff, a redemption, a settling of accounts.

But she stood atop the hill now and her eyes had been opened to the choice. She knew she’d have to make it, sooner or later.

That’d been what I needed from these two. I’d been... lenient, perhaps. I’d let us get comfortable, too used to tiptoeing around the lines while indulging in the unsaid. It would have been too easy to stay there, if the bleak light of truth hadn’t been shone down on all of this again. But it didn’t feel good. I’d not really grasped, when I first conceived of my revenge, that it would punish me as well. Maybe it was better this way, I decided. A long price should cost you something to, require that you put something of yourself in it. It was too easy to get drunk on the bloodletting otherwise. What I’d wanted from this has been delivered, though, so there was no need to drag this out any longer. I struck a match on the side of the crate, lighting my pipe and pulling at the mouth.

It got their attention, shaking them out of the conversation.

“You wanted to talk,” I told the heroes, blowing out a ring of smoke. “So talk.”

Hanno looked mildly irritated, but spoke up anyway.

“There are two major matters,” the White Knight said. “The first is the missing army of two hundred thousand undead. The Iron Prince mentioned that our oracles were all in agreement that it was not in the capital, but there are ways to fool soothsaying.”

“There are,” I agreed.

I was hardly unaware, given that Black had run a game against the Augur for months by moving his army fast and picking his battles at the last moment. I raised an eyebrow, inviting him to elaborate.

“An army unseen is the blade of fate,” the Pilgrim said. “For those Bestowed by the Heavens most of all, but any Bestowed can try that luck.”

Meaning that force was bound to appear where and when it’d fuck up our plans the most. They’d come to me instead of Prince Klaus with this worry because I’d been Named, and understood the tricks of fate. The Prince of Hannoven would listen to them, he was not fool, but not necessarily believe or understand in the way that I would.

“It was kept in mind when the campaign was planned,” I assured them. “There’s only so many places that army can be, right now, and while I agree it’s probably not guarding the bridge as would be most convenient there are limits to the pull a pattern like this has. I’m not dismissing your concerns, to be clear, but you have to understand him having the wind in his sails won’t work like it would with a living army.”

Confusion on both their faces, which wasn’t unexpected. Both of them were experiences heroes, and familiar with war, but neither had ever commanded troops.

“The d dead will get fewer supply accidents on the move and maybe good weather,” I mused, “but it won’t be a great uplift like it would be with a living army. Undead armies already don’t tire and don’t have to worry about morale, there’s just less for providence to give them. Besides, to be honest the wind’s more in our sails than the Dead King’s.”

I pulled at my pipe, then spat out a mouthful of smoke.

“We might not have a story we can ride,” I elaborated, “but we’ve got a lot of godsdamned heroes to weigh in on our side of the scales. That counts. Believe me when I say that, because unlike everyone else here I’ve fought armies with that many heroes attached before.”

Hanno cleared his throat.

“To be clear,” he said, “you have a contingency?”

“Several,” I replied.

Not the kind of stuff you talked about at a war council, but I did have pieces in place. Hasenbach had been more than willing to indulge my paranoia, considering our common opponent was the Hidden Horror.

“Then I will put my trust in that,” the White Knight said.

Tariq looked less convinced.

“It is a strong story,” he reminded me.

“How’d it work out for you, at the Graveyard?” I pointedly asked him.

Thousands of cavalry from all across Procer, readying for a surprise charge out of Arcadia into my forces, had instead been tossed back into Creation in a murderous tumble of panicked horses and broken bones. It was a good trick, I wasn’t going to argue against that – I’d used it myself against Summer, during Five Armies and One – but it wasn’t as foolproof as he was making it sound. Especially not when the other aside had superior mobility, as we did against the dead.

“It took a third party to make it fail,” the Peregrine said. “There is no third party here, Catherine.”

“I’m not sharing the contingencies,” I bluntly told him. “Lord Yannu was brought in on the relevant ones, as the strategist sent by the Dominion to the Arsenal, but I’m not thinning the secret by further spreading it. If you can’t deal with that, take it up with the appropriate authorities.”

The old hero sighed.

“You are the appropriate authorities,” Tariq reminded me.

“And I’m telling you it’s handled, so don’t worry your pretty little head about it,” I replied with a winning smile.

While no general, the Pilgrim could at least recognize a lost battle when he was fighting one.

“The other matter is the one I would prefer privacy for,” he said.

He didn’t flick a glance at Akua, but I did. She’d been silent, her face like a mask, but those golden eyes missed little and she’d been listening closely.

“That’s nice,” I commented.

A beat passed and I cocked an eyebrow.

“So, what is it?”

Hanno looked mildly amused as he answered in the other hero’s place.

“We followed the First Prince’s suggestion and it bore the results she predicted,” the White Knight said. “With a hero handling the scrying ritual and myself serving as the interlocutor, the elves finally accepted to talk.”

Unlike when it’d been a hero making the ritual but someone else serving as the diplomat, which got us a beat of connection with the sorcery before it was shattered, or when Hanno had first attempted to make contact through the ritual of Arsenal mages and the elves had simply warded against the ritual. Of course the finicky little pricks wouldn’t bother to answer to any less than the appointed leader of Calernia’s heroes, with his busywork done by another fucking chosen of the Heavens. They might be even worse vultures than the Choir of Endurance, who’d at least not been so godsdamned pretentious about it.

“Let me guess, they’re keeping the Spring crown?” I drily said.

“In essence,” Hanno admitted. “They’ve agreed to make sure their ritual does not destroy the surroundings, or damage the fabric of Creation, but my attempt to discuss alliance against the Dead King were brusquely rebuffed.”

Typical. Well, they’d had a border with the fucker for like a millennium so I supposed I shouldn’t be too surprised.

“The return of the Spellblade’s body was remarked upon,” Hanno then told me. “It was implied that to return the courtesy no claim would be made on the crown of Autumn.”

“All heart, those elves,” I grunted.

Well, at least we weren’t dealing with a war on one more front. That was always worth celebrating.

“Ah, and one lasting thing,” the White Knight said. “They asked if the Ranger is part of the Truce and Terms, and when I informed them she is not warned us against allowing her to sign them. They would take this as an act of war.”

I closed my eyes and sighed. Well, it wasn’t like she’d been going to sign those anyways. They involved too much not-killing-strangers-for-fun for the Lady of the Lake, by my reckoning.

“Duly noted,” I said, opening my eyes.

As expected, news about the crowns – which I’d learned there would be from Masego this morning in a private chat, hours before this lot got it going – had prompted the Pilgrim to want to expel Akua. I’d not been sure as to what the news would be, but in the end that’d not really mattered had it?

“We’re done here, I believe,” I said

Neither saw fit to argue the point, though by the look on the Pilgrim’s face this wasn’t the last I’d be hearing about contingencies. Good luck to him, since he was headed out with the eastern army and they’d be leaving in two days – before my own force set out. I suggested to Akua we return to my tent to take another crack at planning our route, which we’d taken a break from to visit this warehouse in the first place, but she begged off.

“The new wardstones for the Third require adjustment, dearest,” Akua told me. “I will see to that first.”

Lie , I thought. You just want to be alone. I didn’t call her out on it. Why would I? My plan was working.

It brought me no joy, but my plan was working.

Chapter 49: Association

“There are two ways to interpret a prophecy: the way that spells your doom and the wrong one.”

– Dread Empress Dismal

I knelt, pushing down a twinge of pain, and squinted closely at the copper wire.

Obviously my quarters had been trapped, but how ? The wire was of the finer kind Pickler had come up with during my time in the Everdark, but even though pushing fully open the door would definitely pull on it – and so on a contraption tied to munitions, hopefully but not necessarily College-grade instead of military – the angle was all wrong for a sharper or a brightstick. Sure, a full brightstick would shatter my eardrum from this close but I wouldn’t be blinded. And I’d lose what, at most a shredded ankle to a sharper? This was amateur hour. Where was the triple-wire spring with the overhead sharper? No, I was being screwed with. This was bait.

The foundations of my house in Neustal, which I didn’t actually use all that often compared to my tent, were stone raised above ground-level as was standard in areas where the Dead King might attempt assassination. It meant I had a single ‘step’ to take going into the house, in reality just a small extension of the foundation beyond the walls. And when I leaned closer and smelled that step, I found a familiar scent: stone dust and sapper’s plaster. That little fucker had put in a weight-sensitive demolition charge after hollowing out the step, hadn’t he? The copper wire had just been to draw my attention away. Narrowing my eyes, I used my staff to hoist myself back up on my feet.

I wasn’t going to let this ambush pass without a bit of a rap on the knuckles, of course. It was good for my sappers to occasionally be reminded I was just as shameless as them and twice as mean.

“Special Tribune Robber,” I called out. “Report.”

There was a beat of silence.

“It was all Borer’s idea,” a voice cheerfully called out from inside. “I tried to stop him, Your Maleficence, but with his brute strength he overwhelm-“

“I asked for a report,” I mildly said. “Come out and deliver it.”

I pulled on Night the slightest bit, just in case. Special Tribune Robber, who’d held his rank for several years now, had visibly aged since I last saw him. That was often the way with goblins, whose lifespan was much shorter than most other races’. How old was he now? Near twenty, I imagined. Over the hill by the standards of his race, who quickly began going decrepit past thirty when they lived that long. He was distantly of a Matron line, I knew, so I held out hope that his face grown even gaunter and the pulls of skin around his yellow eyes were not warning signs.

Deftly the sapper came to stand on the stone, and offered me an offensively terrible salute paired with a smug grin of white needles. I could not help but notice the distinct lack of him exploding. Vexing.

“Reporting at your leisure, Your Wickednousness,” Robber cheerfully said.

I cocked my head to the side.

“Fine-tuned it to trigger only above your weight?” I said.

“No idea what you’re talking about, ma’am,” he assured me. “Although, while we’re at it, I’d like to report Captain Borer for wanton mutiny, assault of a superior officer-“

“How long did it even take you to hollow that thing out?” I asked, reluctantly impressed.

“Pickler made this stone-eating acid while we were up north,” Robber said. “Works like a charm. Based on some Lycaonese alchemy they use to keep their ramparts clean.”

There was a beat of silence.

“Is what I would say were I Captain Borer, who is obviously responsible for-“

“How strong are the munitions?” I mildly asked.

“Like the gentle caress of a breeze,” he lied.

A slender tentacle of Night pierced through the fresh plaster, triggering the munitions within, and the little bastard fell into the step with little burn but large billows of a pungent black smoke. I took a sniff and almost gagged. Leftover smoker ingredients mixed with something rank, I’d guess. Robber had always been a deft hand with munitions, especially recipes that weren’t on the record. Even as the goblin tumbled forward at my feet, coughing, I leaned against my staff and cocked an eyebrow.

“So what have we learned today?” I asked.

“You are an implacable foe to all goblinkind,” he croaked out. “And take pleasure in persecuting your poor, innocent, loyal servants.”

A grin tugged at my lips.

“I did saddle Borer with you,” I conceded, “so I suppose an argument can be made for the second.”

“You could offer me healing, at least,” Robber complained, then faked a few fresh coughs. “Aren’t you some sort of fancy priestess these days, Boss? First Into The Pie or something like that.”

I knew he was full of shit, because the Sisters were actually wildly popular with the sappers and even goblins in general. It was almost like, culturally speaking, they were very comfortable with the idea of unknowable female eldritch entities of murder and theft standing above them . Go figure . I wouldn’t call them converts to the Tenets, which were much too drow in nature to ever really find takers beyond the Firstborn, but these days sappers liked to mark their equipment with the Crows and the occasional rabbit or bird was bled in their name before being tossed in a cookpot. Andronike was rather charmed by the practice and had sounded me out on the subject of bestowing Night – I wasn’t opposed, so long as she knew what she was in for. Komena was lukewarm at the notion of branching out too much from the drow, though, so it’d gone nowhere.

“You’re right,” I mused. “Silly of me to forget.”

Quicker than he was able to dodge, I rapped the top of his hairless head with the side of my staff. He yelped and paddled back.

“How is that healing?” he accused.

“Well,” I shrugged, “you’re not thinking about the cough anymore, are you?”

A heartbeat later he was cackling, and I shared in the laughter. He darted in to clasp my arm in a legionary’s salute, close but light-touched, before backing away.

“It’s good to see you, Boss,” Robber said.

“You too,” I smilingly replied. “You malevolent little shit. Was this just a heads up you got in, or did you have a reason to seek me out?”

“Pickler wants to see you,” he said. “Sent me to get your attention.”

I snorted.

“Haven’t been able to get more than three words out of that one in the weeks she’s been here, but now she feels chatty?” I said. “Let me guess: she’s finally finished her latest tinkering trip and she wants to show off.”

“You’re the one who named her Sapper-General,” Robber shrugged. “Then you compounded that by throwing a mountain of coin and artisans at her. She’d been on a two-year tinkering binge, Boss. I had to assign someone to making sure she ate.”

I winced, though I was not entirely surprised. In theory Pickler was the head of all the sappers in the Army of Callow, which had been made into a separate military order not unlike the Order of Broken Bells – I just didn’t have enough sappers to use them the way the Legions did – but she was utterly uninvolved with field command. Even company assignments were largely handled by her second, Commander Waffler, with her only occasionally meddling in matters. Her efforts had been on making war engines for this new war we were fighting, and Twilight’s Pass has been her both her testing and proving grounds.

“No one told me was quite that bad,” I admitted, faintly apologetic.

Robber had always been sweet on his old commanding officer, in a goblin way. It was unlikely to ever go anywhere, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t hold a torch. We got moving as we talked, him leading the way as I limped to the side.

“She’s pleased as a raider on a moonless night,” Robber dismissed. “I’m not irked about that part, just that she’s learned some bad habits. Nobody seems to care since she’s spitting out wonders keeping to those hours, but it’s not good for her health.”

He looked at me from the corner of his large yellow eyes.

“She’s been wildly happy since you freed her from field command and let her loose, Boss,” the Special Tribune said. “And she’s grateful, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Buy you know she’s always been like this.”

I softly smiled. Look at him, all these years and he was still quietly cleaning up behind Pickler the same way he had back when we’d just been a bunch of kids fighting in College war games. Some things never changed, huh?

“We’re all creatures of habit, in our own ways,” I drily said. “I know better than to take offence, Robber. Not seeing you two for a few years won’t change that.”

Hells, I didn’t have enough friends left alive to start getting petty with them over little things like, say, Pickler’s inability to pretend she cared a whit about niceties when instead she could be attending glorious machinery . Reassured, Robber caught me up on gossip from Twilight’s Pass as we walked with great relish. No doubt he was making up half the tales. I choked, though, when he mentioned the supposedly fierce debate among the northern armies about whether Prince Frederic and Prince Otto were close friends or secret lovers.

“You met the man in the Arsenal, didn’t you?” Robber asked. “Did you get a read on whether he’d enjoy that sort of lance-handling?”

The goblin obscenely wiggled his hairless brows, startling a laugh out of me. I could have told him that Frederic was actually a more than decent jouster, but that was best kept quiet even among my closest.

“Alas, I only ever got to see him use a sword,” I sighed. “A tragedy, Robber. You know what these pretty boys do to me.”

He wrinkled his nose in disgust, not even entirely feigned.

“Humans,” he sighed. “It’s all fluids with you lot – and not even the fun ones, like blood or goblinfire.”

I made a somewhat unkind comment about the sexual attraction the average sapper might feel towards a crate of munitions, which devolved the conversation into bickering all the rest of the way to where Pickler was holed up. A shooting range, I discovered, or at least the battered remnants of one. Targets had been blown through in ways experience allowed me to match with ballistas, but it’d been more than just stone that’d done this. The grounds and wooden targets were scorched, like they’d been set aflame. I frowned as I limped to the edge of the firing range, interested enough I didn’t stop to chat with the sapper crews fielding the three ballistas on the range.

I knelt slowly, leaning on my staff, a trailed my fingers against the charred wooden remains of a target. Bringing them close to my face, I took a whiff and immediately let out a noise of surprise.

“ Aha ,” Sapper-General Pickler of the High Ridge Tribe enthused, popping out without warning. “You get it, then. I knew you would.”

She forgot to tack on even a ma’am at the end, but I was excited enough it barely registered.

“That wasn’t done by sorcery,” I said. “There’s no ozone smell, like there would be with an enchanted stone blowing up.”

Having appeared out of hole in the ground – not metaphorically, it’d been an actual hole and she’d been in it – Pickler offered me an excited grin that was like a clacking mouthful of white needles. Like Robber she’d aged, yet while like him her face had grown gaunter her frame had actually thickened. She was only a little taller than the last time we’d seen each other, but her shoulders and hips had grown broader. Her amber eyes looked even larger, now that the skin was pulled taut around them, and they shone with manic zeal.

“It’s Light,” she said, confirming my guess.

I let out a low whistle.

“We’ve been trying to get that to work for years,” I said, honestly impressed. “Multiples stones were fired here, Pickler. You really managed to get several shots out without scrapping the engine?”

Stones with a Light infusion weren’t new, everyone under the sun had used those at some point. They’d been a known part of Calernian arsenals since the First Crusade, when trying to take heavily warded Praesi cities with inferior mages had forced the crusading armies to find an alternative to simply dying by the dozens of thousands storming the walls. The problem with those munitions was that they tended to wreck whatever siege engine they were thrown out of, as Light was highly unstable when shoved into things. There was a reason the foremost artisan in Light of our generation was the Blessed Artificer, who’d gotten a fucking Name out of her skill at it.

Usually larger stones were more stable, so trebuchets and catapults could be relied on to toss a dozen stones before being seriously damaged. It made their use viable. The smaller the engines got, though, the more the Light in the projectiles screwed with them. Scorpions and ballistas were sometimes made unusable by as much as a single shot, the javelins and stones having bent the wood they were on. The Lycaonese, who loved ballistas as much as the Legions of Terror – even though they used dwarven models, the poor fuckers – had long been bitter about this, as they could not afford to buy replacements and lacked the mages to turn to a magical solution instead.

“We have to put a copper casing on the stones,” Pickler hedged, “but once that safety is observed, yes. It had been an unequivocal success, Catherine. And the amount of Light that emanates is battle-appropriate, it has a decent shot of destroying even a construct.”

“Gods Below, Pickler,” I laughed out. “That...”

Changed things, to put it lightly. Most constructs were too damned quick to be threatened by something like this, and those that weren’t were much too big , but the amount of Light she was talking about would utterly wreck most undead infantry. It might even finally give us a way to deal with the Grey Legion that wasn’t ‘soldiers praying Akua, the Witch or me got there in time’. Even Hanno had found those fuckers a hard nut to crack.

“I thought it might please,” my Sapper-General said, smiling a smile as girlish as goblin teeth allowed.

It would have made a cat flinch, I suspected. And wisely so, given that goblins liked them in a stew.

“It has,” I said, almost touching her shoulder before I refrained.

It, uh, was usually taken as an advance by goblins. Robber had been trained out of that by his years rubbing elbows with other races, but Pickler wasn’t as social.

“Have supper with me tonight,” I said. “You can tell me more about it there. But until then?”

She watched me, amber eyes alight with expectation.

“Take what you need, Sapper-General,” I grinned, wolfish. “On my authority, requisition any bloody thing you need to make sure we have as many of those modified ballistas and... copperstones as we can when we march.”

She didn’t protest the name, improvised as it was, so it might just stick. The two of us grinned at each other again, and it felt like the day had gotten just a little bit lighter.

—

I swung by my tent, afterwards, to follow through on what I’d just promised. I doubted Pickler was going to be shy with requisitions if she was rushing things before our departure, so I’d better ensure she actually had the recognized authority to make those. Thankfully Adjutant was waiting there, seated in his wheelchair and dictating notes to three attendants in the green-and-grey livery that signified they were directly in his service. Two humans and one goblin, I noted, by the looks of it a young Soninke woman and an older Callowan man.

All three bore a discreet painted iron pin in the form of a curled skeletal hand pointing its index, the enchantment laid on it serving only to prove it was authentic. On the rolls these constantly-swelling ranks were called the adjunct secretariat, and their stated purpose was to serve as a mix of my personal bureaucracy and messengers. And while they did serve those purposes, and well, that was only the official part of their duties. In practice people had taken to calling the ‘phalanges’ after the pins, and they served as Hakram’s eyes and hands.

Some of them had been invested with authority on my behalf, able to make inspections of Callowan and Grand Alliance property and soldiers to unearth treason and corruption, but there was also an entire armed wing that’d expanded out of the first tenth of legionaries I’d long ago put under Adjutant to ferret out Heiress’ rats in the Fifteenth.

Grandmaster Talbot had approached me and expressed, in confidence, a degree of unease over ‘the Adjutant’s private army of soldiers, sneaks and scribes’. If he’d know that Hakram had heavily recruited from the parts of the Assassin’s Guild that’d not been a good fit for the Jacks, I suspected he would have been outright worried. I’d appeased the commander of my knights by assuring him there were non-negotiable limits to the amount of coin dedicated to the adjunct secretariat, which would restrict its size permanently after a little more growth.

I got the sense Talbot had wanted some Callowan oversight over the phalanges, either through Vivienne or my Queen’s Council – though the latter would have probably meant Vivienne also, given that my Council was currently in Laure and answering to Duchess Kegan – but that wasn’t going to be happening. When I abdicated I’d be taking the phalanges with me to Cardinal, so I wasn’t interested in giving Callow too deep a peek at their inner workings. If I wanted them to survive as a Cardinal institution, I couldn’t let them slide into being just a chapter of the Jacks by another name.

The three phalanges saluted as I limped in, but I gestured for them to keep jotting down Hakram’s orders as I made my way to my liquor cabinet and poured myself a celebratory finger of aragh. The copperstone munitions were worth a drink for more than me, I decided, so after a moment I poured a finger for Adjutant as well.

“- and have another look into Captain Garrick,” Adjutant said. “That’s twice now he’s splashed coin around, we still don’t know if it’s inheritance or he’s been taking bribes.”

The goblin licked her lips, as the others nodded.

“And my own find?” she asked.

“The Jacks have been in touch, she’s already one of their informants in the ranks and she warned them of the contact,” Hakram said, sounding chagrined. “Start over with another company.”

I sipped at my aragh, watching as he finished the last round of instructions and dismissed them. They saluted, first to me and then to him, and within moments we were left alone. I pressed the small cup into his only hand, the skeletal one Masego’s father had crafted from him what felt like a lifetime ago. The orc – still so tall, even wheelchair-bound – let out an approving rumble. We clinked our glasses and drank.

“Pickler’s work proved worth all the mess?” he asked afterwards.

“And more,” I replied. “She managed to get Light-infused projectiles working for ballistas, though she has to tinker up both. Dips the stones in copper, which means they’ll be hard to make out on the campaign trail.”

Hakram’s eyes widened, his fangs clicking together thoughtfully.

“That is fine news indeed,” he said. “We only have enough goblin munitions stockpiled for one last campaign, even used sparingly, so a substitute is long overdue.”

More like two pitched battles than a whole campaign, in my opinion, and I wanted to keep a decent quantity at hand for when we moved on the capital so really more for one battle. Our initial hopes that the Confederation of the Grey Eyries would be able to push out the Matron who’d betrayed them, currently styled High Lady Wither of Foramen, out of said city had turned out to be... overly optimistic. Wither had little Legion support, but the Confederation’s armies weren’t the kind that could take a Praesi city except by surprise.

Which High Lady Wither wasn’t going to fall for, since she’d taken the city this way from both her predecessors the Banu and then the Confederation itself.

The Grey Eyries were hardly at risk of falling, since the traitor tribes couldn’t really afford to chance anything aside from a defence of their seized territories, but without control of Foramen the Confederation could no longer sell us goblin munitions. Some mountain routes had been opened but the quantities that could be taken through them were paltry and the Eyries themselves were full of creatures that preyed on goblins. We still got the occasional wagons from Callow, as much from old Legion caches as what the goblins got to us, but it wasn’t enough.

I’d forbidden use of munitions, lest attrition at the defensive line empty our stock long before a decisive battle could be fought.

“Agreed,” I said. “I ordered her to stock up as much as she can of both ballistas and copperstones, so she’ll need my seal and a Grand Alliance warrant.”

He nodded.

“It would be polite to inform the other commanders in advance, since she might requisition from them,” Hakram reminded me. “No need for much, just a courtesy letter.”

“I suppose,” I muttered.

Might as well smooth the feathers before they ever got ruffled if it could be done. Bone fingers came to rest on the side of the wheelchair, clutching around the grip, and Adjutant wheeled himself to the side. Tried to, anyway – the left wheel got caught on a rock that’d bene pushed into the ground, and while the chair was too well-built to flip it did get stuck. Hakram grunted with effort as he tried to force it, but all it did was get the rock stuck between the wheel and the protective sheathing as earth sprayed. I stood paralyzed, wanting to help but certain he’d take it as an insult. He finally let go with a half-swallowed roar, the dead hand slamming down onto the arm of the wheelchair.

Hakram looked to the side, as if unwilling to face me.

“I can send back for secretaries,” I delicately said.

Some part of me dimly suspected that my helping him instead would go over very poorly. It... wasn’t how we did things. Never had been.

“No,” Adjutant roughly said. “The seal and warrants are under lock, and there’s none close that have the clearance to touch them.”

“An exception can be made once,” I tried. “While we are here.”

His fingers clenched until even the enchanted wood under them creaked.

“I wrote those safety rules, Catherine,” Hakram bit out. “I won’t break them because of a fucking rock.”

Quietly I drew on Night, wondering if I could slip a tendril near the chair and-

“Stop that,” Adjutant sharply said.

Lips thinning, I released the power. I did neither of us the disservice or pretending I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“It will be easier when the prosthetics come from the Arsenal,” he tiredly said. “I’ll be out of the chair, able to walk again. It will take longer to be able to fight but-“

“Hakram,” I said.

“There are shields built for men with only one hand, Catherine,” he told me. “I have looked into the matter. It will take training, but it can be done.”

My heart clenched, but I couldn’t just let him keep on telling himself that lie.

“Hakram,” I quietly repeated, “you know it can’t be like that. It’s done, the old fights. Maybe in a few years you’ll be able to handle soldiers, but not Named. Not for a long time, if ever again.”

He’d have to make a fighting style nearly from scratch, learn to compensate for several glaring weaknesses while having few strengths to call on. It wasn’t impossible, and men that had half his courage and discipline went back to fighting after losing a hand, but he’d lost a great deal more than that. Prosthetics relying on magic would make him brutally vulnerable to heroes that could wield Light, which was most of them, and a skilled mage without even a Name would be able to meddle with the enchantments on them.

“I will not be put out to pasture, Catherine,” Hakram rasped out. “I won’t allow it.”

“I haven’t stopped relying on you,” I insisted. “You lost some aptitude in swinging around a stick with steel stuck onto it, that’s all. If anything I’m running you too hard, considering you’re recovering from severe wounds.”

He studied me for a moment, dark eyes calm and all too knowing.

“You are closing the door,” Adjutant said. “To my ever standing by your side in battle again.”

I opened my mouth to argue, hadn’t I just said that – but he raised his hand, and so I swallowed my tongue.

“Maybe not with words,” Hakram said. “Or with deeds. But in the back of your head, you have.”

My lips thinned. I’d never liked being told what it was that I was supposedly thinking, even coming from my closest friend in the world.

“You know my aspects,” the orc tiredly said. “One felt mockery, when it sunk in what I had lost, but then I thought it might instead turn into a key.”

Rampage, Find, Stand . The last must have felt like a bitter joke after losing his leg. With the way the Severance’s cut had carved into his hipbone, he couldn’t even try to get around on crutches – even with painkillers the pain was simply horrendous. Only surgical spells that deadened pain worked, and those could damage nerves if they were kept on for too long.

“But it hasn’t,” I said.

“It is fading,” Hakram replied, then corrected himself. “No, perhaps not quite that drastic. Losing luster? Losing potency, certainly. As if there was no longer a call for me to use it, or a place where I would.”

My stomach dropped. He was implying that I no longer thought of him as someone who’d fight by my side – and Gods, I had carefully kept the words out of my mouth but they were not untrue – so his Name, ever so bound to my service, was no longer trying to help him in that purpose. Even when he wanted it to. I drew back as if struck. It was only a theory, this, but Adjutant had good instincts. And it had that damning ring of truth to it.

“I haven’t,” I blurted. “I mean, I can’t...”

I did not quite know what I was trying to say, and an odd shame was eating at me from the inside for it.

“I am not accusing you of malice,” Adjutant spoke into my flustered silence. “Or trying to shame you. But you were not going to admit it unless told. And now that you know, perhaps if you shape your thoughts...”

I hesitantly nodded.

“I don’t know if it would work,” he admitted. “If it can . But what else is there but to try?”

Making peace with having lost something , I wanted to reply, but how could I? It was serving me he’d lost it, while I was getting clever playing shatranj with the Intercessor. Now I was looking at the consequences of my decision every day, and it was not a pretty thing to behold.

“You need a helper while we’re out there,” I forced out. “Someone who’ll take care of little things for you and keep an eye out for enemies. Neshamah will come after you, he knows how important you are to the war.”

And to me, which would have been enough for the Hidden Horror to aim for his head without all the other good reasons for it.

“I have my secretaries,” Hakram replied. “Some of them have better grips on swords than quills.”

“You need more than that,” I said. “I’ve talked with the Silver Huntress and then with the girl herself: the Apprentice could be suborned to you for the offensive, to learn from you and lend a hand.”

It’d been surreal looking at some slip of a girl from Ashur bearing Masego’s Name, much less one who considered herself a heroine, but I’d managed. The Apprentice badly wanted a term of service in the Arsenal, and I’d offered it a bribe after this campaign if she accepted. She’d still get lessons from the Sage, it was the reason she was out here on the front in the first place, but the hours would have been cut while we were on war footing anyway so serving as Hakram’s assistant would not be to her detriment.

It also put a skilled practitioner by his side during most of the day. The Apprentice had previously been studying with an eye to become the Silver Mage, one of the Ashuran wizardly mantles, but she’d abandoned the healing arts after most her teachers got killed during the sack of Smyrna. She’d picked up a lot of quick and cheap war magic since signing onto the Truce, and while her spellcasting was still pretty simple it was also swift and highly destructive. Nothing short of a Revenant ought to trouble her if she saw it coming.

“And what did it cost you to convince the girl?” the orc drily asked.

I shrugged. We both knew I wasn’t above sweetening the pot for someone when it served my purposes. I could read him well enough to know that the offer wasn’t making him happy, but he didn’t refuse outright.

“I’ll think about it,” Hakram finally said. “That’s all I can give you.”

I bit my lip, tempted to push since I sensed he was leaning more towards accepting than refusing. If I gave him too much time to ponder, though, he might just talk himself out of it. I breathed out. Trust, I told myself. We weren’t going to get through this intact without trust.

“Have an answer for me before we set out,” I nodded. “I’ll want to speak with the White Knight before making the final arrangements.”

“I will,” Adjutant gravelled, then hesitated.

He sagged into the seat, as if tension had drifted out of him.

“I’ll take care of the warrant and seal,” he said. “I only need one hand to fake your signature.”

“I leave it in your hands, then,” I said, then paused. “And Hakram?”

He turned darks eyes onto me.

“I love you,” I said. “You know that, right?”

The orc breathed out.

“I know,” he said.

I’d not asked for forgiveness and he’d not given it. It wasn’t in me to ask, and he’d be insulted if I did. But it was something, to say the words. A paltry offering, I couldn’t help but think as I left my tent, but what else did I have to give?

—

When the moon rose, it found me once more standing at the edge of the roof.

Summer heat had lingered even after dark, the breeze bringing the distant scent of the swamplands in the distance. Green and mud and life, all intertwined with something like sweet rot. I stood at the edge, letting the wind curl around me, and closed my eyes. I flinched in pain a moment later. Like nails driven into my temples. It wasn’t an attack, I realized, but a Night-working. One I’d laid myself as a precaution two years back. I pulled back the string of it again, but left the working in place.

“The trick’s not quite as good,” I said, “once you know what to look for.”

Her steps were quiet, but not so quiet I did not hear her deftly make her way down the tiles to stand at my side. First time I’d ever caught her out, wasn’t it? My contingency must have triggered when I’d closed my eyes, prompted by a power I’d not noticed and had felt entirely like my own whim. What a dangerous aspect hers was.

“The same can be said of all tricks,” the Scribe replied.

This, I suspected, was going to be an interesting talk.

Chapter 50: Mores

“Villains often try to get clever, to stump me with philosophical questions like ‘what is evil?’ To which I answer ‘generally, people asking me that question’, which somehow they never see coming.”

– Aldred Alban of Callow, the Prince Errant

The moon hung above us like a nasty grin, the drop was precipitously close and past the lights of the stronghold below there was only a dark and desolate stretch: a proper backdrop for ominous talks with a woman that was neither a friend nor an enemy. The Scribe had picked her moment and her place with care, I decided, to frame this conversation in the way she preferred. And what did we do, when an opponent expressed a preference?

“Eudokia,” I warmly smiled. “How lovely to see you, it’s been much too long. How have you been?”

That’s right: slit open its throat and set the corpse aflame. Scribe showed no visible sign of surprise and what little I could see of her from the corner of my eye, ink-stained hands and/

/Gods Below and Everburning but I hated that fucking aspect. Even knowing about it the best I could do was work around the effect. Trying to remember anything about her was like clutching sand, with the same few grains left behind every time. Still, even though I might as well try to read emotion into a puff of mist the beat of silence that followed smacked of surprise to me.

“I have been well,” Scribe said, then paused. “... and you?”

“Oh, you know, doing this and that,” I drawled. “Been thinking about getting another pair of boots, since mine are a getting worn, but I like the leather better soft.”

Befuddled silence in the face of my boot-talk – a real decision in need of making, actually, and one I’d be willing to hear her advice on – followed and I swallowed a grin. When I’d been a girl the Calamities had seemed like all powerful figures of legend, and by the time I’d learned better most of them had died. It was deeply satisfying for the kid I’d once been that the woman I now was could afford to screw with one of them like this.

“I approached you to speak on matters of grave import,” Scribe said.

“It better not be the Dead King, then,” I idly said. “I won’t stand for puns, Eudokia. Debated making them illegal once, you know, but it was a little too Sanguinia the Second.”

What a brave soul, that one. I too would outlaw being taller than me, if it wasn’t certain to lead to the rebellion of an insultingly large portion of Callow. Aside from the deep satisfaction inherent to pulling the leg of someone I was on less than decent terms with, I did have a purpose to this. Scribe had spent a very long time in Black’s shadow, hidden by its span but also protected . She’d been the monster in the night, or at least on its side, for so long she’d no longer be used to being toyed with.

That was going to piss her off, I was betting, and anger always made you sloppy. If she was running a game on me, why shouldn’t I run one on her right back?

“Lack of discipline was always your greatest flaw,” Scribe curtly replied. “I came in good faith-“

I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth.

“You came here to use me,” I easily corrected. “And that’s fine, so long as I also have a use for you. But don’t pretend you’re doing me favours, Eudokia. We both know coming here isn’t your first choice.”

A shot in the dark but one I was confident about. Black had decisively cut her loose from his service after learning she’d acted behind his back to ensure he would be forced to fight Malicia, and while I’d not forgotten the low he’d hit that night he wasn’t one to walk back a decision so severe. At a guess, she’d tried to mend the bridge with him and been rebuffed. What interested me was what else she might have been up to in the meanwhile: it’d been two years since the Salian Peace.

If I’d been right about her relationship with my father remaining a wreck she didn’t show it. With her first approach – the one lending her importance, I now grasped, making her seem if not like an equal then at least someone of power and influence – having stumbled, she smoothly pivoted to another.

“If you are not interested in the information I have to bring, then you need simply say so,” Scribe said. “I can depart.”

Transparent, but a ploy didn’t have to be subtle to be effective. Likely she was well aware that the most I’d gotten out of the Wasteland was wild rumours and some of the ups and downs of the civil war between Malicia and Sepulchral. I was thirsting for news there, and she knew it. But she was after something too, wasn’t she? Her first tack tonight had been one that leant her presence, weight, but that wasn’t something she’d need if this was a simple transaction.

She wanted something from me, something that perhaps I wouldn’t want to give. So she’d puffed up like a bird trying to look bigger for a predator and hoped it’d give me pause. That made it clear what my answer needed to be to her challenge.

“The closest gate is that way,” I replied without hesitating, jutting a thumb west. “If you hurry you’ll have enough of a head start the Pilgrim won’t bother to pursue.”

Tension hung in the air in the moment that followed. It’d been a tactical mistake to make a bluff I was willing to call so early in the game. Now there was no recovering her position. I turned a sharp, toothy grin onto the Scribe.

“Yeah,” I murmured. “I didn’t think so. So why you don’t you tell me what you came here to say, only without all the empty posturing.”

Anger. I could hardly even look at her, much less read her, but I felt anger wafting off Scribe’s silhouette like smoke. Whether it was at me for being bluntly high-handed or at herself for the missteps I didn’t know, and probably didn’t matter. The gesture stiff, she reached into her robes and removed three small letters. She handed me the first and I opened the fold, scanning the contents. It was tradertalk – the eastern dialect of it, peppered with Aenian terms – excerpts with translations into Lower Miezan.

“Leo Trakas is dead and half Nicae a ruin,” I frowned. “The undead mentioned there, from Malicia’s fleet?”

Originally the war fleet of Nicae, but use of Still Waters had seen to that.

“To an extent,” Scribe replied. “Supporters of Strategos Zenobia opened a gate in the night and let in her troops as well as a contingent of Helikeans under General Basilia herself. The conspirators promised them a bloodless victory, so when the wights attacked the Helikeans claimed treachery. In the chaos parts of the city were torched and sacked until Basilia restored order personally.”

I hummed thoughtfully. The First Prince’s diplomacy had borne fruit, then. I’d thought it drastic to condemn Leo Trakas as an ally of the Dead King, and only reluctantly voted in favour when the moment came, but Hasenbach had been right: it’d moved enough people to turn on him for the stalemate to turn in our favour without troops needing to be sent. Nicae falling wasn’t only good news, though. Stygia had been quietly meddling to keep the wars within the League going, but with one of them settled the Magisterium might just come out swinging.

“So Zenobia’s crowning herself a princess?” I snorted, reading the last excerpt. “That’s new.”

That came an intercepted Nicaean courier, so it probably reliable. It was also noted that several of the Trakas from lesser branches had escaped Zenobia’s attempted purge of the family after the fall of the city, which was a Name in the making if I’d ever seen one. I found it mildly amusing that she’d discarded the title of Strategos for something more royal, but it wasn’t of great import: the office had essentially ruled Nicae like a royal house for decades, and I had doubts she’d make bloodline inheritance stick. Royalty wasn’t unknown in the Free Cities, Kairos himself had been king of-

I paused, then frowned.

“Basilia still hasn’t crowned herself queen, has she?” I asked.

“She has not,” Scribe confirmed.

Was she really that ambitious? Zenobia had been backed to the throne by General Basilia, but when she’d given herself a royal title it had only been that of princess . Why not queen, if she had royal ambitions?

“Fuck me,” I murmured. “That’s why Basilia doesn’t care Stygia’s an enemy, why she sent me all the letters making clear they’re the provocative ones. She doesn’t want to avoid that war at all, and she’s not a queen only because she wants to be a bloody empress .”

Empress Basilia the First, with her vassal Princess Zenobia of Nicae and whoever she’d end up installing as puppets after she toppled the Magisterium and finished off Penthes. I was impressed but also skeptical. She’d managed the politics of this well, since no one in the Free Cities could really ally with her enemies without siding with either Stygian aggression or Malicia’s southern meddling, but the Spears of Stygia were a fine army and the Helikean host bloodied.

“If we survive Keter,” I sighed, “the next great war will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Free Cities.”

I took the second letter when it was offered to me. Tradertalk again, but this time towards the Ashuran end of the stick. I couldn’t parse the High Tyrian any better than the Aenian, but at least I got the Mtethwa loanwords. We’d known for some time that Magon Hadast, the ruler of the Thalassocracy was dead, that was old news. Killed by Assassin, if the Augur was to be believed. Bitter disagreements had since kept Ashur from recovering from its defeats at League and Praesi hands, but the nature of those had been opaque to even Cordelia’s spies abroad, the Circle of Thorns. Not so for Scribe’s people, it seemed.

“So it’s a glorified inheritance dispute,” I bluntly said.

“The dignitaries in the two camps often divide their allegiances by provenance from Arwad or Smyrna,” Scribe noted. “It speaks to a deeper divide in Ashuran society.”

The Arwad committees mentioned tended to be from slightly lower tiers, I noted, and many sounded mercantile in nature. They were backing a distant relative of Magon Hadast for ascension to their highest citizenship tier by virtue of blood, since the main Hadast line had been extinguished. The man in question had married a noblewoman from Levant, though, which disqualified him in the eyes of the Smyrna crowd. They wanted instead to send a ship across the Tyrian Sea to import a ruler from Ashur’s nominal overlord, the Baalite Hegemony.

So far the conflict had seen no battles, only skirmishing in streets and countryside, but by the looks of it positions were hardening on both sides. I could not help but note that by the sounds of it an awful lot of people with the last name Hadast had died not too long after good ol’ Magon himself.

“Assassin’s work?” I asked.

“Evidently, without orders he went... somewhat overboard,” Scribe said. “He was caught and slain by the Blue Mage last year.”

I rolled my eyes.

“And I’m sure this time it took,” I drawled. “Pull the other one. Where is he?”

“I’ve not been in contact since he set out for Ashur,” Scribe replied.

I eyed her skeptically but let it go. If I was to start digging at that particular secret, it wouldn’t be in so haphazard a manner. Without a word I was handed the third letter. This time it was Lower Miezan, and a simple phrase ‘the crown was obtained’ along with a bell and day noted. I mastered my surprise, slowly folding the paper back. Fuck. I’d hoped we would keep the Eyes, if not entirely out of the Arsenal, then at least out of the most critical projects. I now had evidence otherwise.

“It went well?” I calmly said, as if this was not an unpleasant turn.

“I had no eyes at the location,” Scribe said, “It was a scried report that was intercepted, and I expect it is making its way towards you as we speak. The ritual appears to have been a success and the nearby gate is still functional.”

I pushed down the urge to snatch her by the throat and dangle her above the drop until I got names. It wouldn’t accomplish anything, I reminded myself. Angering her was one thing, but an attack was another. I had no need to cement an enmity tonight. Not yet, anyway.

“You’ve made your point,” I noted. “You know our allies better than we do, your people have access places where we don’t and you have eyes even in the Grand Alliance’s most guarded sanctum. Now that you’ve proved you have something to bargain with, what is it you want to bargain for ?”

Scribe went silent for a moment.

“I wish to sign onto the Truce and Terms,” she said.

I snorted, ignoring what I suspected was an unfriendly look my derision earned.

“There was no need for the song and dance to get that,” I said. “And we both know signing won’t open many doors for you.”

The First Prince had not put a bounty on her head, but according to Vivienne she’d also put the matter of forbidding such a thing to the Highest Assembly and purposefully lost the vote. Both the Proceran House of Light and more than a few highborn wanted Scribe’s head on a pike for the mess in Salia, and the Principate wouldn’t stand for her gaining access to Grand Alliance secrets even as a signatory were I inclined to push for it. I was not.

“You picked a fight tonight aiming for something , Scribe,” I continued. “So out with it.”

She sighed.

“I was not picking a fight,” the Webweaver replied. “I was making a bid for a position.”

My brow rose and I almost laughed until I realized she was deadly serious. Gods Below, I thought, how badly had it gone with Black for her to come to me ? We weren’t exactly bosom friends, Eudokia and I. My reflex was to refuse her, and not politely, but I tamped down on it.

“I have questions,” I mildly said.

“Understandable.”

Interrogating one of the most skillful living spymistresses of Calernia would require skill and subtlety, I mused. Unfortunately I lacked those, so best swing the other way around entirely.

“What have you been doing for two years?” I bluntly asked.

“Fighting for control of the Eyes of the Empire,” she frankly admitted. “I knew Ime would overtake me closer to Praes, so I concentrated on taking over the edges of the network and damaging records in the Wasteland so she wouldn’t know what was lost. My agents were purged or suborned most places east of the Whitecaps, but elsewhere I have established control.”

Fuck , I thought. That meant Malicia was firmly back in control of the Eyes in Callow, not exactly great news. Still, at least I’d gotten a list of imperial agents in my kingdom from Scribe as reparations during the negotiations for the Salian Peace. Duchess Kegan had sent the Watch to purge everyone on it when I’d passed it on, so at least the foothold of the Empire would be damaged. It also meant that the leader of the largest spy network on Calernia not directly in service of a crown was standing next to me. Worth a second look, that.

“If you’re going to try to sell me you didn’t reach out to Black, you’ll need a better pitch,” I noted.

I felt her breathe in even if I didn’t see it.

“How casually you pick at the wounds of others,” Scribe said. “Of course I sought him out, Catherine. I still have the scar from where Ranger’s arrow took me. Half an inch to the side of the heart. She likes to think she’s funny, you see.”

I shared a moment of silent appreciation with her about just how much of an asshole the Lady of the Lake was. I suspected she didn’t even have to try, it just came naturally to her.

“He was quite apologetic about the arrow,” Scribe sighed. “But there would be no making amends.”

I frowned. That... did not sound like Black. It was a half-done job, and he abhorred those. She was leaving things out. I said nothing, only cocking an eyebrow. Eudokia sighed again.

“He said he had done me wrong, by taking me into his service,” Scribe murmured. “That his ambitions had devoured mine, and we’d both suffered for it.”

I almost winced. That sounded more like my father, admittedly: genuine care, but handed out along with brutal honesty.

“He won’t have left it at that,” I encouraged.

“You must find your own way,” Eudokia softly quoted, “your own ambition. And I hope that, when you have, one day our paths will lead us to standing side by side again.”

I breathed out in surprise. That walked the fine line between kindness and cruelty. And now, having eked out as much of a victory as she could in the war for the rule of the Eyes, Scribe had come here. A colder part of me noted she’d missed Black’s point entirely, if she’d come looking for another master to follow. But cold wasn’t always right, was it? My Winter days had made that much exceedingly clear. And my father could preach whatever he wanted, but he wasn’t the one making decisions for Scribe.

“You think we’re going to head east, don’t you?” I said.

I felt her smile.

“Or the east will come to you,” she shrugged. “It makes no difference.”

I thoughtfully hummed. I glanced down at the drop, leaning forward, and felt my stomach clench. There was a weight to the air tonight. Not a pivot, no. It wasn’t enough for that. But this would... matter. Reverberate. I let the fear of the fall sink into me, clear away all idle thoughts. It was refreshing, in a way. And it made how the choice needed to be made crystal clear.

“Would you betray me to him, if the call came?” I asked.

“Probably,” Scribe replied without batting an eye.

I smiled.

“Ah,” I said, “but would you betray me to anyone else?”

She chuckled.

“What would they have to offer me?” the Webweaver asked.

“Good,” I said.

I withdrew from the edge.

“I expect you in my tent at Morning Bell,” I said. “I’ll want a full report on the Praesi situation then. See Adjutant about signing onto the Terms and your assigned lodgings.”

Her control wavered for a moment, overtaken by shock.

“You do not jest,” Eudokia stated, sounding surprised.

I turned to her and gently smiled.

“I’m not seventeen anymore, Scribe,” I said. “I’m already using people a lot more dangerous than you.”

I turned my gaze back the night sky, the dismissal clear, and she quietly withdrew.

—

An hour before Morning Bell, my effective royal council these days sat around the sculpted table in my tent with steaming mugs in everyone’s hands. It was early, so Indrani looked haggard even as she sipped at her Nicean blackleaf tea, liberally flavoured with honey. She’d been out drinking late, and though not hungover she was a little ragged. Hakram’s own mug was filled with a fragrant gift of the First Prince – Hasenbach had noticed he enjoyed her abominably spicy brews and sent him a small coffer full of assorted leaves – and he’d deigned to share with Akua, who these days took more pleasure in scent than taste.

I’d stood on a rooftop like an ass for an hour last night, so unsurprisingly I was now drinking Masego’s personal brew for pain and hoping my leg wouldn’t swell too much.

“The Crows are keeping an eye out,” I said, “so we can feel free to talk.”

“Ominous,” Indrani grunted. “What are we on about, Cat?”

“Hakram already knows some of it,” I said, nodding at the orc. “Last night I was approached by Scribe.”

Akua leaned back into her seat, looking interested,

“News from the Wasteland at last?” she said. “I had wondered at the continued silence from the Carrion Lord.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“The Scribe has signed onto the Truce and Terms,” Hakram said. “Or she would have, if I’d then passed on the parchments properly. They were mislaid.”

No one here bothered to comment how unlikely it was for someone with Adjutant’s quite literally supernatural organisational abilities to lose anything this important.

“You want to open her throat?” Indrani asked, sounding surprised. “Thought you were keeping a light touch with the east.”

More like I couldn’t afford to take a hard stance with the east, considering that most of Callow’s armies were abroad and wouldn’t be returning anytime soon. Vivienne and I had been clear with Kegan: there’d be no rolling over for the Tower, but neither should she go on the offensive. Considering the largest military force still in the kingdom was the Duchess of Daoine’s own army, she’d not been hard to sell on that.

“Scribe requested a position under me,” I informed them, though Hakram had already known. “No word was spoken of Callow in particular, and I suspect that she is a great deal more interested by my position in the Grand Alliance than my crown.”

“So you want our advice on whether to accept?” Indrani mused.

Akua’s golden eyes narrowed.

“She already has,” dark-skinned shade said. “She is simply uncertain as to whether or not she meant it.”

I raised my mug in a toast.

“In an hour, the Scribe will enter this tent to give us a report on the state of the Dread Empire,” I said. “I want your opinion on, when she finishes, whether I should give her a position or slit her throat.”

That got me some surprise, but I thought more at the bluntness of the statement than the morality inherent. I wasn’t a fool, so there’d be no talk of keeping Scribe prisoner and extracting information out of her – she’d escape, sure as night, and be out for revenge. If I could not use her, could not employ her within the frame of the Terms, then she needed to die. Quickly, cleanly and without fuss. I let my words sink in for a moment, then glanced at Indrani with a cocked brow. She sipped at her tea a little longer, then snorted.

“Slice her,” Archer frankly said. “She’s too dangerous, and she’ll never be loyal to you or anything you make. We can deal with that when it’s a nobody villain, but she ain’t one of those. She’s got spies and gold and skeletons in people’s closets – best she’s taken off the board before you found your Cardinal. We don’t really need her, anyway.”

“One can never have too many spies, Indrani,” Akua chided her.

“Come off it, Dressing Ghoul,” Archer replied, rolling her eyes. “I’m not going to pretend the Jacks are the sharpest operation out there or that it’s not awkward to rely on Procer for the goods, but what does more sneaks really do for us? It’s useful, sure but it doesn’t bring anything new to the table.”

“According to the first reports she’s fed us,” Adjutant said, “she has eyes in Ashur. We yet lack those, and it is the same for the First Prince.”

“Look,” Indrani said, “I’m not trying to be an asshole here. I’ve got nothing against Scribe. But Ashur , really? When the fuck was the last time those guys mattered? It scratches our nosy itches to learn what happens there, but the poor bastards are out of the war. Who cares what goes on there? On the other hand, she’s the godsdamned Scribe. You let her into something like the Terms and she’ll be handling half our villains’ money by the end of the year and reading the letters of the rest.”

That was a fair point, I mentally noted. Scribe would take to the Terms and their intended successor, the Accords, much like a fish to water. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Archer as underselling her value as an asset, though, in my opinion. Still, I’d decided before starting this talk that I’d hold my piece until I’d gotten the advice I asked for.

“The Carrion Lord ruled Callow for two decades without ever having a formal capital,” Akua said. “I have been heiress to a High Seat and Imperial Governess, so believe me when I say that is deranged. That such a nomadic bureaucracy was even attempted is absurd, but that it worked is testament to the sheer use that can be had from someone like the Scribe.”

“So she’s real good at paperwork,” Indrani said, sounding skeptical. “Hooray. We get us a shitty, untrustworthy Hakram. There’s a coup worth the trouble, Gauzy Ghost.”

“We have not yet identified through what agent the Wandering Bard managed to incite the Mirror Knight and his allies to head for the Arsenal,” Akua pointed out. “The Jacks don’t have the formation to attempt an investigation like this, and the heroes have produced no results on their own. That is already a use for the Scribe, and hardly the only one there is.”

“She’s expressed enmity for the Intercessor before,” Hakram gravelled. “I’d agree we can rely on her against a common enemy, at least.”

“Look,” Indrani sighed, “I’m not going to argue for an hour we need to open her throat. It’s starting to feel like I’m going after her, when I don’t particularly want her dead. You wanted my opinion, Cat, and you got it: she’s a risk, and I don’t see what she brings to the table that warrants taking it.”

I slowly nodded, drinking of my herbal brew, then turned an expectant gaze onto Akua.

“Killing her would be unwise,” Akua said. “For one, it would have consequences: villains would hesitate to sign onto the Terms, if they knew being snuffed out was a possibility should they be judged unfit.”

“The Scribe attempted to infiltrate our camp before the offensive and resisted when caught,” Adjutant mildly said. “We had no choice but to kill her. In can have every written evidence otherwise burned within a quarter hour and she’s only dealt in person with the adjunct secretariat. Secrecy is possible.”

“Hasenbach isn’t going to argue with her corpse, that’s for sure,” Indrani snorted. “She’s dreamed of seeing it often enough. The Highest Assembly might even throw us a parade.”

“The Dominion has no reason to care,” Hakram added. “And even less to investigate. Praesi villainy is largely seen as our backyard, and ours to deal with as we see fit.”

“The Terms are a covenant of Named, not nations,” Akua replied. “Belief in it has already been undermined by the second trial of the Red Axe and the prior wave of betrayals in the Arsenal. Further fraying the fabric of it without a decent motive, which I have yet to hear, would be irresponsible.”

“She has a significant portion of the Eyes, Akua,” Adjutant calmly said. “And we have no real understanding of what she wants, or what loyalties she keeps. Her Name will thrive in the environment of both the Terms and the Accords – practically speaking, she represents an immediate threat because she is a way for villains to gain and consolidate power that we have no control over.”

“She did not approach as a contender for influence, Hakram,” Akua said. “She requested a position under Catherine. Scribe can and should be considered a potential threat, but those are thin grounds to kill on. Even more so when those very same qualities that make her a threat also make her a potential asset of great worth.”

Which wasn’t wrong. Unlike Akua, I’d actually ruled Callow. She significantly underestimated how difficult it had been for Black to rule the kingdom on the move, even with the imperial governors handling most local matters. It was telling that our most comprehensive record of Callowan laws and noble privileges wasn’t the old Fairfax records that’d survived the Conquest but a neat set of manuscripts titled with the numbers I to VI in Scribe’s personal handwriting. She’d put together the records of half a hundred families and the House of Light so well that even Kegan, who despised everything Praesi, was in favour of having the books copied and used to govern.

“Thought you’d be all about strangling the viper before it could bite, Akua, I’m not gonna lie,” Archer frowned. “This isn’t about how we picked you up, is it? Because that’s not the same at all. Look, you were a bloody horror back in the day and our resident Callowans are still going to scrape you raw for it – but you’re not like Scribe .”

She leaned forward, earnest.

“We wouldn’t off you like that,” Indrani assured her. “It’s been a few years since we got past that. Hells, I’d probably miss you some if you got your ass exorcised.”

Coming from Indrani that was actually a pretty warm endorsement.

“While I am touched, Archer,” Akua drily replied, “I am not so confused or sentimental.”

“Refraining from killing her out of fear of it being outed is acting on sentiment,” Adjutant gravelled. “If not in the sense you implied.”

“So is acting to kill Scribe out fear of what she might do,” she replied without batting an eye. “We do not know her desires, what of it? Few allies are so helpful as to tell us these outright, and we have other Named just as dangerous in our menagerie of the damned.”

“If we come in conflict with the Carrion Lord, or he is made hostage-” Hakram began.

“- would we not act in accord with the man regardless, or seek to free him?” Akua interrupted. “Let us not pretend we seek enmity with the Carrion Lord, or that in his own way he is not a reasonable man. Was he not our candidate for the Tower, once upon a time? The scheme might have faltered, but the underpinnings of it remain unchanged.”

Which was a solid point, and a reason I’d been willing to consider taking on Scribe in the first place: what did I care if she’d betray me to Black, if I never got in conflict with him? Eudokia wanted nothing to do with either the Dead King or Malicia, my two most prominent enemies, which was a major point in her favour. Unfortunately while I agreed with Akua that she was a very capable woman, that only made it worse that I also agreed with Hakram: we knew fuck all about what Scribe wanted, and with that in mind I was very wary of letting her loose into the Truce and Terms.

I wasn’t worried about sabotage, if so she’d already be dead. But I was letting a fox into the henhouse, there were no two ways about it.

“Let’s not pretend we can take her in and not use her,” Indrani pointed out. “We take her, she’s not going to be a messenger girl: it’d be dangerous to use her like that, spit on what her Name’s worth. I don’t think it’s much, but it’s definitely more than that.”

“Her resources could be used in Mercantis to combat Malicia’s influence,” Akua said, speaking directly to me. “To hunt the Intercessor’s agents, to help provide the Arsenal with exotic assets, and that is only the use of what she leads. As a Named, she can smooth essentially any task she is assigned to. Are we not ever drowning in disasters?”

Archer eyed her with surprise, as if she couldn’t believe would care enough about this to speak this vehemently. I was a little surprised myself, to be honest. The Calamities had long been her enemies, and she had no reason to love Scribe,

“If she does become what was described as a threat,” Akua continued, “That is, a banker and facilitator for villains, imagine how useful she would be as such a broker yet in your service! It would be wasteful to kill her, Catherine. Consider whether the Accords you envision, the Cardinal you would build, can really thrive if you are afraid of letting in talent.”

That... was another good point, actually. The counter-argument came easy, that the Accords were years in the future while taking in Scribe was a risk in the present, but that last tirade should have weight on the scales. I’d heard from the other two, so my gaze moved on to Hakram. He’d already served as a goad for the other two, so he was due to actually speak his own mind.

“On purely practical grounds we should kill her,” Adjutant calmly said. “Her death would leave a large segment of the Eyes leaderless and easy to pick off for the Circle of Thorns. She would undeniably be useful if properly employed, but that would involve giving her access to our inner workings while she’s not been proved to be trustworthy.”

I’d argue it was debatable how much access she really needed to be given, if she’d learned about some details of godsdamned Quartered Seasons on her own, but otherwise his points stood. I cocked an eyebrow, as we both knew he wasn’t done.

“No one here is a saint, Cat,” Hakram said. “I won’t pretend we’re above slitting her throat and disposing of the body, or that showing kindness will make her one of us – she already has a home, a cause. But I hear us talk, sometimes, and wonder how often our words have been spoken.”

He bared a hint of fangs, teeth like white knives.

“If Dread Empresses have not sat with their Chancellors and Knights, with their Warlocks, they too deciding that someone needed to die just so they could rest a little easier,” Adjutant gravelled. “Did we fight all these years, Warlord, so that we could be just another spoke in the same old wheel?”

I’d been an idealist as a girl, hadn’t I? In my own way. Gods, I hardly remembered what that felt like. Too many compromises since, too many ugly choices, and I knew deep down that following principle once would mean nothing. Change nothing. But I looked at Hakram of the Howling Wolves, crippled in his wheelchair because of an ugly choice I had made, and found I could not argue with him. Not for guilt, though that would stay with me until I died, but because he was a reminder of a simple truth: this had to be about more than just winning.

If it wasn’t, it would all end as I stood victorious in the ruins of the world.

And so when Scribe stood before us, come Morning Bell, I tossed her a small painted iron pin, in the shape of a curled skeletal hand pointing a finger.

“Congratulations, Scribe,” I said. “You are now officially a member of the adjunct secretariat.”

Slowly she nodded.

“Good,” I smiled. “Now report.”

Chapter 51: Endwise

“And so Maledicta said: ‘All the world had denied us, so let it all be damned and we with it. This wasteland of our own making, it will kill us or we will kill it.'”

– Extract from the Scroll of Misfortunes, thirteenth of the Secret Histories of Praes

Before the Conquest my people’s maps of Praes had tended towards imprecision when it came to the interior of the Dread Empire, with only the western parts well-known to the Old Kingdom and the details of the eastern coast usually being cribbed off of Ashuran maps. I’d never dealt with that difficulty, as even before my time in the War College had given me access to standard Legion maps I’d been given the luxury of using Black’s own whenever I wished – though I’d not understood quite how much of a gift he was giving me, back then.

Only when Juniper and I had gotten around to raising the Army of Callow had I realized how troublesome it was to get any good maps that weren’t in noble hands or Legion-made, much less sets as good as those Black had kept for Praes and Callow. Back in the day I’d suspected the cartographers that were an official part of the Legions – under the Kachera Tribune of any legion’s general staff – weren’t the only reason my father’s charts were so exactingly precise, and now I was getting confirmation.

The leather-bound scroll that Scribe unfolded across the table was no larger than a saddle length but I openly lusted for what I saw displayed on it: a map of the Dread Empire, showing not only cities towns and villages but also the roads and typical regional weather. The last of these had been the death of many an incursion into the Wasteland, given how centuries of reckless rituals had turned it into a deathtrap of sudden storms morphing into burning heat or freezing cold on a whim. Gods but I wanted a dozen of these.

“When we’re done with this, we’ll be talking about your upcoming contributions to my personal map collection,” I noted.

She shot me a look, a face I glimpsed to be lightly tanned giving me the impression of disconcertment. Had those been brown eyes I saw? Already my recollection was fading.

“Sometimes you do remind me of him,” she admitted. “Though nowhere as much as some people like to claim.”

“We’ve all got some of our teachers in us,” I shrugged. “And he’s been more than just that to me. But I interrupted, my apologies. Continue.”

She nodded, then idly set down painted iron blocks – regular Army of Callow issue for our general staffs, I noted with some chagrin – on two cities: one black and over Ater, one white and over Aksum.

“On the surface, the situation in the Dead Empire is a classical Praesi civil war,” she said. “Being waged between empress-claimant Sepulchral and empress-regnant Malicia.”

“You even us the proper terminology,” Akua said, sounding surprised yet pleased.

I snorted. Yeah, I supposed considering how often someone raised a rebel flag in the Wasteland to take a swing at claiming the Tower the Praesi would have been forced to develop a very specific vocabulary to address the situation. Would have gotten real awkward in conversation otherwise.

“I have spent longer in Praes than the Free Cities, Sahelian,” Scribe chided. “Few even remember I was not born of the Wasteland. Your preconceptions aside, I was setting out the factional lay of the land. Both empresses have, naturally, gathered supporters.”

A single smaller white block went on the city of Nok, where High Lord Dakarai Sahel ruled. Nok was traditionally considered the weakest of the High Seats, as the Kebdanas of Thalassina had long been kings of the sea trade and dominated overland trade towards Ater even though Nok was physically closer. That said, with Thalassina now largely vapour High Lord Dakarai now sat atop the only major remaining Praesi seaport. His support was no small thing.

“Hardly a surprise,” Akua said. “Dakarai has been looking for a way to get a foothold into a reigning coalition for decades. It is a matter of pride, for him, and pride matters much to the man. He made sure to oppose Mother in public frequently simply to make plain that the Sahel origins as a branch family of the Sahelians did not mean she held influence over him.”

The man had never been a friend to Malicia, I recalled, or at least not been counted among her supporters. Considering the High Lord of Thalassina had been one of her most ardent partisans, there was little need for an explanation as to why.

“It is as tight an alliance as can be had in the Wasteland,” Scribe informed us. “His daughter Hawulti is now wed to Sepulchral’s appointed successor to the High Seat of Aksum, her grand-nephew Isoba.”

Hawulti Sahel , I mused. I’d heard that name before, hadn’t I? I glanced at Hakram in question.

“She was once one of Heiress’ retinue, recalled to her father’s side after First Liesse,” he provided.

“You threatened to have her soul cut out by Lord Masego to coerce her father into supporting the establishment of the Ruling Council,” Akua amusedly reminded me.

I had, hadn’t I? It’d been a while. I could hardly recall her face, or that of her father’s for that matter. I’d only spoken with the man the once. I’d also gotten a little more cavalier with souls in the following years, so the threat hadn’t exactly stuck with me.

“Someone we should be worried about?” I asked.

“Ambitious but cowardly,” Akua assessed. “A born follower. Her father sent her to me for hardening, as she is the only one of his children to be born with the Gift and he favours her for it.”

That’d be a no, then. Probably why Sepulchral had been willing to twine their lines too, which Praesi high nobles were notoriously careful about: they hoarded the secrets of their blood most jealously.

“Malicia’s support, as empress-regnant, is significantly stronger,” Scribe continued.

Black blocks went down, one after another. Wolof, where Akua’s cousin Sargon Sahelian ruled now that her mother was dead. Okoro under High Lord Jaheem Niri, which had been a political nonentity in Praes for most of my lifetime due to the brutal succession crisis that’d eventually put the man on the high seat. Kahtan under High Lady Takisha Muraqib, now the last High Seat in the hands of the Taghreb. The Northern Steppes, where Malicia had raised the chieftains of three southern clans to the office of Lords of the Steppes and charged them with keeping order and collecting tributes. And last of all Foramen, where the former Matron Wither now ruled as High Lady. Pickler’s mother had backstabbed her fellow goblins brutally, and gotten an unprecedented title for it.

“She’s also still got most of the Legions,” I pointed out.

While maybe half of the former Legions-in-Exile had deserted in the wake of the dirty trick that’d brought them home, the forces that’d already been in Praes had stayed largely loyal and absorbed the soldiers that hadn’t deserted. As far as military might went, even if you left noble allies out of it Malicia had a larger stick to wield. Sepulchral was relying on a kind of army Black had built the modern Legions of Terror to beat, too, which was one of the many reasons why she would be avoiding giving battle.

“And that’s where it gets complicated, right?” Archer said, eyeing the map with mild interest.

Wasteland games were no real concern of hers, unless I made them to be otherwise, but Indrani did like an occasional spot of theatre and even at its worst the Dread Empire tended to deliver on that.

“Indeed,” Scribe said. “The first illusion to discard before the situation in Praes can be understood is that there are only two sides in the civil war.”

She set down a small red iron block on the edge of the Green Stretch, where thousands of deserters from the Legions-in-Exile had raised reportedly raised a great camp.

“Lord Amadeus’ army?” Adjutant asked, dark eyes watching Scribe closely.

I watched them flick away more than once, no doubt prompted to do so by her aspect, but they always found her again. It was the obvious guess, now that I was learning more about the situation. Dread Empress Sepulchral’s ability to outwit the Legions on the march, if not beat them, had led many – including me, once – to believe that my father might be behind her. The way this was being described though, made it seem much less likely. Black would have gone for the throat by now, not kept maneuvering in this empty stalemate.

“I’d presumed so as well,” Scribe admitted. “But I have found no evidence of it. The leaders, General Mok and General Sacker, seem to have been acting without orders and out of a degree of genuine disgust for Malicia’s actions with the control contingencies – though Sacker, at least, has sympathies in the Grey Eyries and rightfully fears being killed by Malicia or Sepulchral if she lays down arms.”

It also meant that leadership of the deserters was nonhuman at the very top rung, I mused, since as I recalled General Mok was an ogre. No doubt that was making the two Soninke fighting for the right to rule over them more than a little wary.

“Lots of ogres in charge now,” Indrani mused, narrowing in on the same detail. “Isn’t the last Marshal one too?”

“Marshal Grem is under house arrest in Ater, not dead,” Scribe corrected. “But you are correct that the commander of Malicia’s armies, Marshal Nim, is an ogre as well. It is the most influential their kind has been in imperial affairs for centuries, if ever.”

“But there’s no black block over the Hall of Skulls,” I said.

A grim name for the sole ogre city on Calernia but then they tended to be a grim people all around.

“The ogres are hedging their bets,” Scribe frankly said. “As they always do. It is why no attempt was made to recall your own General Hune. It has historically been their policy as a people to have someone already lodged within every side so that they have a foot in the winning one, whichever it might be.”

And I could see how that spared them crackdowns, I thought, but it’d not really paid off for them either had it? Required military service quotas under Malicia and Black had been lower than under Nefarious but they’d still existed, and there’d been no major push to increase their status as a people within the Empire like there’d been with greenskins. Part of that was numbers, since there were so few of them compared to the constituent peoples of the Dread Empire, but those alone weren’t good enough an explanation. Hune had always been bluntly frank with about her people being on no one’s side because they saw no one as being on their side.

“I can understand the deserters making Malicia wary of overextending,” I said. “Explains why there hasn’t been a serious attempt to siege Aksum yet even though it falling would end Sepulchral. But she should be winning this pretty decisively with this many supporters to call on, Scribe, so what are we missing?”

“Her coalition is fragile,” Akua murmured, “and at odds with itself.”

Scribe nodded in her direction.

“Kahtan eyes High Lady Wither, now the last of the Taghreb bastions, and begs off committing soldiers to Malicia’s war,” she said. “High Lady Takisha ponders her blood ruling both Kahtan and Foramen, and supports Malicia only because Sepulchral has no better offer to make. Wither herself is mired in war with the Confederation, while a combination of mismanagement and hatred makes the humans under her rebellious. There have been riots.”

Off the map went the blocks for Kahtan and Foramen.

“Okoro backs the empress-regnant, but her freshly-raised Lords of Steppes are pulling at the leash,” Scribe continued. “The Niri must keep men out on the fields, lest the Blackspears take to raiding again. Their contributions are measured, mage cabals instead of battalions. And the Clans are pushing back against these lords they did not choose – Grem’s old clan, the Howling Wolves, are at war with the Graven Bones and sending envoys to other clans to assemble a coalition. The Red Shields burned the holy grounds of the Stag-Crowned, and denounce them as traitors to orckind. The warbands that were sent to serve Malicia stayed, but there are no more forthcoming.”

Only a single block was removed, the one in the Steppes. Okoro was committed, if not as much as Malicia probably wished it to be.

“And so Wolof remains,” Akua quietly said. “She owns Sargon, then?”

“I believe she has soulboxed him,” Scribe replied.

I’d never head of the term before, so I cocked an eyebrow at Akua.

“It is much like it sounds, dearest,” she told me. “His soul was severed from his body by ritual and placed in an enchanted box. It is difficult to kill through this, but by sorcery atrocious pain can be inflicted. It is tradition, however, that the box be sealed for only so many years.”

She turned her gaze to Scribe, her silence an unspoken question. Wolof had taken a beating when Sargon overthrew Tasia Sahelian, Akua’s mother, and it’d been the Legions of Terror under Marshal Nim that ultimately re-established order there. With Malicia’s soldiers in the city the freshly-risen High Lord Sargon would not have been in a great bargaining position, so I doubted the length of time would be small.

“At least ten years,” Scribe said. “Perhaps as much as three decades.”

Akua sighed.

“He’ll try to steal it back,” she said, “but with Mother’s spies in disarray the Eyes will have gutted them. Sargon will not turn on the Tower so long as she has the box.”

“Wolof is still handling demonic taint from its latest contested succession,” Scribe said, “and so it has offered few troops, but those it sent are elites. They have been raiding the hinterlands of Aksum with great success, stealing people as much as wealth. High Lord Sargon intends to fill his city anew.”

I drummed my fingers against the table, frowning. All right, so I could see how the stalemate had come into being. Sepulchral couldn’t afford a field battle against the Legions of Terror, she’d lose and her cause would die. Yet since it stood between Askum and Nok, Ater had to be garrisoned with reliable soldiers – which meant legionaries, not household troops with ever-dubious loyalties. That’d peel soldiers off of Marshal Nim’s army, enough she’d be careful about sieging the rebel High Seats and all the nastiness that implied. If she lost too many soldiers storming a city, she risked being caught by Sepulchral and smashed in a war that was frankly hers to lose.

And all the while the deserters were looking on, keeping everyone from taking hard risks lest they intervene and finish off the weakened victor.

The balance of the power was in the south, I thought as I stared at the map. Foramen and Kahtan, the forges and the armies. If High Lady Takisha could be convinced to call on her many vassals and make war for Malicia, Marshal Nim would have troops to throw into the breach when attacking a High Seat. But it was not something the High Lady of Kahtan would be eager to grant the Tower when instead she could try to cement the Muraqib legacy and have her family rule the last two great cities of the south. Which led me to another question.

“How can Malicia afford to make trouble for us abroad, with all these fires in her backyard?” I frankly asked. “She should not have the time or gold to spare.”

“Kahtan and Foramen still pay their taxes, fully and promptly,” Scribe replied without batting an eye. “So do Okoro and Wolof, though their caravans are larger and armed. The Tower has undertaken no rebuilding of Thalassina, so Malicia’s treasury is filled to the brim by taxes and decades of Callowan riches. What can she spend her wealth on, if not trouble for the Grand Alliance? There are no more mercenaries to buy, and the gold does her no good sitting in a vault.”

Huh. That was one way of looking at it, I supposed. And from her perspective the Grand Alliance wouldn’t stop being an enemy if it wasn’t fought, it’d just have more allies and resources to spare when it finally turned its gaze on her after the war with the Dead King was done. But this did raise the veil on a situation that had largely been opaque to us so far, which was more than a little useful. If nothing else, it made it clear what the state of the opposition truly was. I shared a look of understanding with Hakram.

“Malicia’s position is much weaker than it seems from the outside,” Adjutant stated. “And though the military advantage is with her, so long as she cannot bring Sepulchral to battle it means nothing.”

They could keep marching back and forth across the Wasteland for years and little would change. It was hard to tell whether a long stalemate would favour Sepulchral or Malicia, though I was inclined to believe it’d help neither so long as the High Lady of Kahtan kept sitting the fence. I suspected the bribes being offered to Takisha Muraqib were rising by the day, but with riots in Foramen making it clear Wither’s grasp on the city was loose there would always be a greater temptation to the south.

“So where’s the Carrion Lord?” Indrani bluntly asked. “It’s all pretty stuff, this story, but it doesn’t mean shit if he and the Lady aren’t accounted for.”

I glanced at her in surprise.

“You’re not that flattering when speaking of him, usually,” I noted.

She grimaced.

“If the Lady’s stuck with him for two years, they’re up to something that caught her interest,” Archer said. “Her interest isn’t easy to catch, Cat.”

True enough, I thought. Though I’d been given to understand there was actual sentiment between them too, which was bound to weigh on the scales.

“The man does command a remarkable amount of loyalties within the Legions and the bureaucracy,” Akua warily agreed. “It seems odd he has not called on them.”

“I found him near Hospes, on the southern shores of the Wasaliti,” Scribe said. “Without attendants or even companions save for Ranger. He was travelling south.”

“And I’ll believe that’s all you know when it snows in Levante,” I said. “Go on.”

“Before Ime’s purges began to seriously hamper my ability to gather information, I confirmed he’s been in both Foramen and the Grey Eyries,” Scribe said. “I cannot be certain as to why, however. There are also semi-reliable sightings of him much further north, to the west of Okoro.”

Which meant close to the Steppes, where he was a lot more likely to find allies than at a High Lord’s court. I made sense, but I wasn’t buying it. Black had always been popular with greenskins, but stripped of command over his Legions it was almost predictable for him to try to raise fresh armies in the Steppes and the Eyries. My teacher was a lot of things, but predictable was rarely one of them.

“He will be using the Twilight Ways, if can move so quickly and discreetly in a war-torn land,” Adjutant said.

I nodded in agreement after a moment, gauging the distances involved mentally. Yeah, there weren’t a lot of other credible explanations for that. We’d been pretty sure that was how he’d left Salia, as he would have been caught riding through the Proceran countryside otherwise, but confirmation was always useful.

“As for why the two of them have been so discreet,” Scribe continued, “I do have an answer. Or at least part of one.”

She came forward to offer me a folded parchment, which I opened with impatience. To my surprise it was something I’d heard before: wild rumours from the Green Stretch about pale ghosts being glimpsed off the roads. A number had supposedly been put to them: ten. So it wasn’t even Black and Ranger that’d been sighted. I passed the parchment to Hakram, who after a puzzled moment passed it to Akua. She looked equally bemused, and passed it to Archer absent-mindedly. It was Indrani who went still after a casual glance, cursing in what I was pretty sure was High Tyrian.

“Ten. Fuck. You’re sure ?” Indrani asked Scribe.

“There have been several independent sightings,” Eudokia confirmed.

“Anything you’d care to share?” I mildly asked.

“There’s ten Emerald Swords,” Archer said. “And when the Forever King gets in a mood and decides it’s time to start trying to kill the Lady again, they’re who he sends. He hasn’t tried anything since the dwarves told him if his people stirred up shit near a dwarven gate they’d take it as an act of war – it’s why people called us a protectorate of the Kingdom Under – but she’s left Refuge behind now. It makes sense they’d go for her again now that she’s low on allies and the Tower can’t do much but complain even if the Swords are seen.”

I hummed. That rang true, considering Hanno had just passed along a reminder from the Golden Bloom that they were going to take it very badly if we let Ranger into the Truce and Terms. They’d want the old thorn in their side as isolated as possible, not under the protection of treaties binding together half of Calernia. Considering the general uselessness and unpleasantness of the elves while we’d been waging a war for survival against Keter, I found myself in the surreal position of actually rooting for Ranger a little bit.

Gods but these were strange times.

“The Carrion Lord cannot formally seize command of an army, else the Emerald Swords would converge on it looking for the Ranger,” Akua lightly said, sounding mightily amused. “Ah, the fickleness of fate.”

I didn’t particularly share her amusement, as if my father had seized the Tower we’d have the east settled instead of this fucking mess going on for forever and a half. He could have signed onto to the Terms and brought the Legions of Terror north instead of playing hide and seek in the Wasteland while trying to get something rather nebulously defined off the ground. Mind you he’d had her father killed as she watched, so I could forgive some manner enjoyment at his expense. Akua could claim Praesi mores as the source of her indifference there all she wanted, she’d actually loved the man who’d died.

No one got over that quite as neatly as she liked to pretend she had.

“Anything you would care to add?” Adjutant asked Scribe.

“Not at the moment,” she replied.

For a moment I considered dismissing her until we were done discussing Praes, then I figured there would be little point: she’d learn what was decided in here sooner or later, anyway, and we might need to call her back in if we had questions.

“Take a seat,” I ordered her.

I didn’t bother to check if she did, already turning towards my councillors.

“So,” I thinly smiled, “the Praesi situation. Thoughts on what our response should be?”

It was not a long debate that followed, or a particularly contentious one. It wasn’t for lack of opinions, though. Archer’s take on what our involvement should be east of the Wasaliti was essentially a shrug, with an added suggestion that the Tower should be made aware of the presence of the Emerald Swords – whether it’d harm the elves or Malicia she cared little, since she smiled on both outcomes. Akua and Hakram were both in favour of intervention, but in different ways and seeking different outcomes.

Adjutant suggested Callow begin providing arms to the Clans fighting Malicia’s appointed lords in the Steppes, noting that my kingdom had much to gain from closer ties to a victorious orc uprising: it could serve as a point of pressure against whichever empress edged out the other, and broadly speaking favoured a faction that in turn favoured Black. Hakram agreed with me that my father in the Tower was our best outcome in the Wasteland, though he wasn’t as inclined to see him as an ally. If we wanted the Dread Empire at peace with Callow and willing to fight north, though, there was no denying that Black was the best choice.

Akua favoured backing Sepulchral instead, though not enough to make her win. She argued that a bolder, better armed Dread Empress Sepulchral might be tempted to give battle to the Legions of Terror – and that ensuring no one won a decisive victory there was Callow’s gain, since casualties and desertions would weaken both sides. She advised leaning on Cordelia and the Dominion to have Sepulchral recognized as ruler of Praes and attempting to broker an alliance between her and the rebel orc clans in the Steppes. Her approach was cheaper on our coffers than Hakram’s, but it carried other risks.

Callow couldn’t afford to get dragged into fighting out east right now, we just didn’t have the men to spare. And adventurism in the Wasteland was brutally unpopular a notion back home, especially now that it’d come out that Malicia’s deal with the Dead King supposedly ensured his undead would not attack us so long as she lived. It was only after they’d all spoken that I turned to Scribe.

“Suggestions?” I mildly repeated.

She stayed silent a moment.

“It is my understanding that the Army of Callow is severely lacking goblin munitions?”

My brow rose.

“True,” I admitted.

“Then I would suggest reaching out to High Lady Wither,” Scribe said. “Who has a large stock of these she is not using, while she could use shipments of grain to quell the riots in Foramen. Rationing is one of the causes of unrest.”

It also meant helping Pickler’s mother, to some extent, while we were nominally allies with the Confederation of the Grey Eyries. Which she was at war with, after having betrayed them. Was I comfortable with that? Not really, but then I wasn’t any more comfortable with my sappers having empty hands.

“Something to consider,” I acknowledged. “Go on.”

“Reach out to General Sacker,” she said. “The defeats she inflicted Sepulchral are what made her desperate enough to rebel, and she is close with the same Matrons who rose against Malicia in addition to being an Amadeus loyalist. Neither empress will suffer her to live if the deserters disperse, which means she is very much in need of a patron.”

My eyes narrowed. That camp was bound to be full of spies, both Eyes of the Empire and Sepulchral’s own, but so long as I didn’t actively support a rebellion against the Tower – which the fighting up in the Steppes was, effectively speaking – I doubted Malicia would make aggressive moves against Callow. She’d be throwing away the advantage she bought with making known the terms of her treaty with the Dead King if she did. It also opened the door to recruiting many of those soldiers if things went bad for them in the Wasteland, which they yet might.

Shit, I thought. Akua had been right, it really would have been a waste to kill the Scribe. A handful of sentences and she’d both given me a shot a steadying my munition problem and figured out a palatable alternative to being a mere watcher to the mess unfolding in Praes. I turned to look at Hakram.

“Can Duchess Kegan be trusted to negotiate with Sacker?” I asked.

It was tacitly accepting Scribe’s suggestion and did not pretend otherwise. The orc’s face tightened a moment, but it went away almost immediately. A spasm of pain? I’d thought his wounds under control. I’d talk to his healers tonight about the dosages in his potions.

“I am uncertain,” he admitted. “She would see the use in it, but she is less than fond of both goblins and Praesi. I’d advise naming a negotiator ourselves instead and putting them under Kegan’s nominal authority afterwards.”

I nodded thoughtfully.

“Have five names for me by nightfall,” I said. “And forward word to our contacts in the Grey Eyries: I want to broach the subject of buying up Wither’s munitions to our friends the Matrons. Just sound them out for now, gauge how bad the fallout would be.”

I doubted the Matrons would be all that offended by backroom dealings even with their sworn enemy – those were a proud goblin tradition – but I’d rather keep things above board so they wouldn’t suspect I was softening on Malicia. Without Callow’s support their situation looked much grimmer, and the Tribes had ended most their previous rebellions by cutting a deal with the Tower when things looked that way.

“Send reports to Vivienne about all of this, please,” I added after a moment.

I would have liked her in the room for this, I thought with a pang of regret, but there’d been no anticipating that Scribe would suddenly come to us. And by the time word got to her, we’d be out on campaign so it would be exceedingly difficult to discuss affairs like this – outright impossible, when we got deep enough in the Dead King’s territory and scrying was broken up.

“I’m sure those will make for a pleasant reading with her breakfast,” Indrani drily said.

I suppressed a grimace. Without meaning to, Archer had reminded me I was slipping back into old habits – keeping Vivienne out of the loop, out of major decisions. I wasn’t doing it for petty reasons this time, but I was doing it anyway.

“You’re right,” I told Indrani, who blinked in surprise, before turning to Hakram. “Arrange a scrying session with her tonight, I’ll tell her in person. Tell her it’s urgent, worth cancelling prior engagements for.”

And we could discuss her suggestions, if she had any, before I handed her the reins on this. Someone was going to have to handle it while I was gone and it might as well be her. She’d be handling the fallout long after I’d abdicated.

“It’ll be done,” Adjutant said.

I nodded my thanks, eyes finally turning back to the still-seated Scribe.

“So let’s talk maps,” I smiled.

Adding another few to my growing collection would give me something to ponder about, when we began the march north.

Chapter 52: Sortie

“Swift wars are long in the making.”

– Stygian Proverb

The army set out from Neustal on a warm, sunny morning.

I’d been up since before dawn, when our outriders had set out – the Osena and Volignac light horse – so I was well into my day when the columns got moving. The Dominion forces of Razin and Aquiline served as our vanguard, an ‘honour’ they’d asked for and few had cared to contest. Given how light on their feet Levant infantry could be, raiders at heart that they were, my main concern had been that they’d get too far ahead of the rest of the army. To ensure otherwise I’d put General Hune and her Second Army behind them, since the lordlings were likely to curb their enthusiasm if they were leaving her in the dust.

Behind the Second I put our Alamans forces, the veteran Volignac army and the fantassin companies Princess Beatrice had picked in my name. With the Firstborn under my Lord of Silent Steps behind them, they made up the ‘centre’ of our army on the march. At night I’d let the drow loose on my enemies, but during day marches they needed to be protected. While beyond the drowsiness around dawn the Firstborn weren’t harmed by daylight, it really was a waste to have them fighting by day considering how much more effective they were by night.

Our rearguard would be the Third Army under General Abigail: if there was anyone likely to see an ambush coming a mile away and leave no stone unturned looking for it, it was my sole Callowan general.

The Proceran troops were still filing out of the front gate in a semblance of good order – it looked like Princess Beatrice had spread out her own infantry between fantassin companies, using the rhythmic pace-setting of her drummers in an attempt at setting a marching beat for all Alamans soldiery – under my watchful eye when Hakram came to see me. Not in the stronghold as I’d claimed one of the watchtowers overlooking the trenches, half a mile away from Neustal, as a temporary base while the army got moving. It was a good vantage, and I’d been killing time talking with Pickler when Adjutant arrived.

There was no real way for him to come up, considering the top of the watchtower was accessible only by ladder, so I wove myself a few solid tendrils of Night. I anchored them to the edge of the tower rampart and went over the edge, guiding them to gently lower me in a landing before the orc. The sight was common enough that my escort – knights of the Broken Bells – did not even visibly react. Night was a lot less eldritch a power to their eyes, these days. People could get used to anything if it happened regularly enough.

“Catherine,” Hakram greeted me. “Here are the last dispatches before we leave.”

He offered me a few parchments with his skeleton hand and I took them. I noticed the Apprentice wasn’t around, even though he’d ended up accepting her presence as a helper. He must have left her behind for the trip.

“Thanks,” I replied, folding them open one after another.

The first was ordinary diplomacy: well wishes from Hasenbach and the Highest Assembly in our offensive. The second slightly more important, word from the Iron Prince that the dead had begun testing his army with large-scale night raids as it went up the mining roads. So far his pickets had caught them in time, but Prince Klaus believed it likely that his preparedness for a battle was being measured. That was promising, considering we quite wanted the undead army holed up in Juvelun to come out and fight him.

The last might be the most important of the three, though it was by far the least ornate. Just two sentences scribbled in a familiar handwriting: It went well, the work has begun. I am on my way. I allowed myself a thin smile. Good, that was a load off my back. I passed the parchments back to Adjutant.

“We’ve sent word to Papenheim we’re on the move, right?” I suddenly asked.

“I handled it this morning, as soon as the first soldier walked out the gate,” he agreed.

Thank the Gods he’d handled that, it’d entirely slipped my mind. Looking at him I began to speak then closed abruptly closed my mouth. My conversation with Vivienne last night had been fruitful, including her finding a candidate for talks with General Sacker – the steward I’d left to rule Marchford in my name, who was both minor nobility and fluent in Mtethwa as well as familiar with goblins from the tribe settled in my holdings – and suggesting the Jacks begin infiltrating the deserters’ camp. The part that’d surprised me, though, was that she’d also been in favour of arms sales to the orc clans rebelling in the Steppes.

She’d even urged me to discuss the matter more in depth with Hakram instead of dismissing it as I had, something that’d weighed on my mind since. Vivienne might not have stated it outright, but there’d been more than politics behind that piece of advice. Was now really the time, though, just as our offensive was beginning? If I don’t make the time, I’ll never have it , I chided myself.

“Adjutant,” I said. “When we discussed our options in the Wasteland, yesterday-“

“The decision was made,” Hakram calmly cut in. “There is no need to revisit it.”

“Maybe there is,” I said. “Put in an hour for it tonight, in my schedule. Give me an idea what the monetary costs might be of selling or sending armaments.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Vivienne is meddling,” the orc gravelled.

It wasn’t a question.

“She made a suggestion,” I shrugged. “I found worth in it.”

His face grew very hard to read for a moment.

“Pity is a poor basis for a queen’s decisions,” Adjutant stiffly said.

“That’s not what this is,” I sharply said.

“Have your reasons for choosing differently yesterday become any less true?” Adjutant said. “No. Nothing has changed, save that you spoke with Vivienne.”

“I’m not saying I’ll do it,” I bit out, “I’m saying I might have dismissed the possibility too quickly, and I want to know more about what would be involved.”

I was trying to stay calm, but it was like he was trying to put the worst interpretation possible to anything I tried. I’d had to deal with that from others, but coming from Hakram of all – I made myself breathe out. That was kind of the problem, wasn’t it? I wasn’t used to this from Hakram because he’d always made it easy for me. Having this conversation with someone else wouldn’t have felt nearly as grating. I was not sure I liked what that said about either me or him. He studied me, face once again unreadable.

“I’ll see to it,” Adjutant said. “I have two subordinates in the adjunct secretariat capable of making the proposal skilfully. They can handle the matter.”

The tone had gotten challenging by the end of the last sentence. The unspoken part was easy enough to parse: if this is a legitimate interest, it won’t matter I’m not the one doing the talking. And if it wasn’t a legitimate interest, then he wanted nothing to do with it. I forced myself to remain expressionless and nodded in agreement.

“Is there anything else?” Adjutant asked.

“No,” I quietly replied. “You can go.”

I shouldn’t have listened to Vivienne, I thought. This path was a dead end. I couldn’t use the authority of the queen to fix the troubles of the woman. I clenched my fingers as he wheeled away downslope, towards the two phalanges waiting to help him into the litter he used to get around where the chair wouldn’t work. It was not a pleasant, realizing that I had no idea how to even begin to mend this. If it can be mended at all , a treacherous voice whispered in the back of my mind. No amount of gestures would grow his limbs back or change that he’d lost them in my service.

Forcing a calm expression back on my face – people were watching, people were always watching – I pulled on Night and went back up the watchtower. I still had a war to fight, and it cared nothing for my worries.

—

By Noon Bell we were all on the road and the first reports from the outriders were trickling back in.

I’d abandoned the watchtower as soon as the drow were out of Neustal, instead taking Zombie on a ride and joining the Second Army. Morale in the ranks was high, though considering the backbone of the Second had been with me since before the Tenth Crusade I’d expected as much. I traded jokes and wild boasts with soldiers as I rode at their side, a Taghreb sergeant startling a laugh out of me when he confessed he’d promised his wife a mansion in Keter after the war – his fellows jeered it was why he was still here, afraid to come home and face her displeasure at failing to deliver – but eventually moved to ride at General Hune’s side.

The ogre was not one for small talk but I hardly minded. She wasn’t Juniper or Aisha, I had no good old days to get misty over when it came to Hune Egelsdottir. In a way it was refreshing, the simple clarity of our relationship: queen and subordinate, nothing more or less. It was with her I entertained the first reports from the outriders. The Volignac horsemen had gone east and west, since as natives to these lands they knew the grounds better, while the Osena had been sent straight ahead up Julienne’s Highway. The benefits of the road ensured the latter came back first even if they’d gone further out.

There were few dead ahead, they’d told me. Three different warbands of maybe a hundred skeletons had been glimpsed about two hours of riding ahead, but no larger force. A band of two hundred riders under a cousin of Lady Aquiline had decided to forge further ahead to see how far he could go before encountering resistance, though only after swearing once more to obey my orders against skirmishing: he’d turn back the moment fighting became inevitable. The Beastmaster had kept going with him, so I was likely to get a good look ahead out of the venture. The Volignac scouts returned later and with uneven timing, bearing equally uneven news.

To the west the lowlands seemed empty save for small undead warbands like the Osena outriders had seen, though there’d been half a dozen instead there instead of a mere three. The Hainaut lowlands were full of small hills and dips, though, and the Dead King a patient foe: it was a favourite trick of his to hide small bands like these and then suddenly assemble them in a larger army to hit a weak point in our defences. This time, though, the threat seemed to be coming from the east. A Volignac captain reported seeing a force of two thousand undead, mostly skeletons and Binds with a few ghouls, wandering to our northeast.

“Most likely a force meant to ambush one of our patrols,” General Hune rumbled, and I agreed.

In a way that was a good sign: the detachment wouldn’t be out here if Neshamah knew we were coming, as with our numbers and equipment we could easily smash it with paltry casualties. The Dead King was not so wasteful as to throw away two thousand for no gain, profligate as he was with bodies. I asked the captain if the undead had seen his riders.

“I do not believe so,” the mustachioed man replied, “but the Enemy is a cunning foe, Your Majesty. I cannot be certain.”

I wanted the Dead King unaware of our march as long as possible, even though it’d been impossible to hide that we were gathering troops in Neustal. Part of the reason the army under the Iron Prince had begun to march a week before us was to draw the enemy’s attention, after all. The trouble was that the Hidden Horror could see through the eyes of his undead, and the moment he got a look at the army marching up Julienne’s Highway he was going to send his closest army to halt our advance at the natural pass called Lauzon’s Hollow.

We wanted that to happen, as if that army wasn’t drawn forward our surprise strike at the Cigelin Sisters behind it would likely fail, but we wanted it to happen as late as possible. We didn’t know exactly what Neshamah had in reserve, so if he had too long to prepare a response it wasn’t impossible for him to fortify both Cigelin and the Hollow. That wouldn’t necessarily make it impossible for us to win, but it would make that victory... costly, to say the least.

Fortunately we’d established Neshamah could only ‘see’ through one corpse at a time, as it required a focus of his attention. But the Arsenal – more specifically the Repentant Magister and Hunted Magician – had also proven there was a working seeded inside Binds and Revenants that allowed them to ‘call’ for the attention of their master if they believed it warranted. So the tightrope to walk now was how we could wipe out that force of two thousand undead to our northeast without prompting them to tattle to their master. If we sent too large a force they were sure to do so, and if our heavy hitters – Akua or myself – went out personally the result would be the same.

We couldn’t just ignore it, though, since with Binds in command they were sure to scout in our direction sooner or later. A pack of zombies or bones could be counted to display staggering stupidity, but Binds could actually think. There was a reason it was standard Grand Alliance tactics to target them first if we could find them among the horde.

“If we wait after nightfall the drow can wipe them out cleanly,” General Hune suggested.

“That’s rolling the dice,” I replied. “There’s no guarantee they’ll wait that long to move towards us, and half the day still lies ahead.”

The undead did favour night fighting when they had the choice and Binds around to make it, since unlike humans the necromancy that allowed them to see was not particularly affected by the dark, but it was hardly a rule. So far the Dead King should not have been alerted to our advance, as riders on the distance were hardly anything new. The Grand Alliance fielded regular mounted forays into the territory he held. Yet there was always the change he’d notice that a lot of his warbands had seen quite a cumulatively large amount of outriders today. There was no way to tell if that was the case, though, so no real point in worrying about it.

“A Dominion raid, then?” Hune said.

Could work, I mused. The Osena elites, the slayers, they were skilled at ambushes. And with one of Razin’s kin having died in ambush recently, Keter might even buy this was just a vengeance raid if we added some of his warriors to the force sent out. It thinned our vanguard, though, which I didn’t like even if the road ahead was supposedly bare. I had other tools to use, though.

“We’ve got raiders of our own,” I replied. “Send for Special Tribune Robber, would you? And Sapper-General Pickler as well.”

Robber’s band of marauders was still a mere cohort of two hundred, though the audacity of his raids with them meant few of the goblins in it were the same as when he’d first been given the command. I wouldn’t send him alone against two thousand undead, though, especially given that ghouls were just as quick on the feet as goblins and a lot meaner in a fight. It was time we gave Pickler’s new copperstone ballistas a proper trial in the field – which Neshamah should buy as a reason for a raid north, if he ended up looking in – but to add a bit of muscle I’d throw in regulars backed by Levantines.

They’d get pissy about honour otherwise, so I might as well borrow a warband of two hundred Osena slayers as well as an escort for the engines in the form of a cohort of regulars from the Army of Callow. That’d mean around nine hundred soldiers, which I was comfortable sending out considering they were drawn from several parts of my column instead of thinning out one in particular.

I spoke to my goblins first, Robber proving eager for the task and Pickler insisting on going along with her ballistas. I couldn’t deny having her there would be useful when it came to assessing their performance, so I allowed it. Hune detached a cohort of regulars and briefed them herself while I went to the Levantines. Aquiline proved flattered that I would call on her elites in particular, which meant she was disinclined to argue when I requested her officers heed the instructions of the senior Army officer on the field – in theory Pickler, though in practice it’d be Robber. The forces were mustered within an hour, my Special Tribune running off ahead to pick his grounds.

Eventually the rest of the forces mobilized set out east after him and I stayed seated on Zombie, resisting to urge to ride her up in the sky and have a quick look. I had another ride with the ranks just to distract me with the urge. I missed fighting, I could admit it to myself. I’d learned to use other means, as violence had so rarely been enough to get me through the kind of messes I stumbled into, but there’d always been something viscerally satisfying about smashing your enemy personally. Instead I had to wait like a decorative lump as Noon Bell slowly crawled towards Afternoon Bell, receiving continuing outrider reports and waiting for news of the skirmish in the northeast.

Robber came back half an hour before Afternoon Bell, dusty but flushed with preening malice, and I knew it’d gone well before the little shit even opened his mouth.

“They fell for it, Boss, like Alamans told there’s a wine cellar at the bottom of the well,” my Special Tribune cackled.

It’d gone off without a hitch, he explained. His raiders had harassed the dead by snipping at their flanks with a few ambushes, then fled into their chosen killing grounds as the enemy ghouls pursued. The Osena slayers hidden along the paths had scythed through the ghouls like wet parchment, then joined the flight with just enough of a delay that the commanding Binds were tempted into committing the entire force to pursuit. That brought them to flat grounds where Pickler’s waiting ballistas pounded them to smoldering dust with their copperstone munitions. The regulars came forward to prevent the dead from leaving the flat grounds, hitting from the front while the slayers and goblins turned to hit the flanks.

It’d been a massacre.

Maybe two hundred skeletons led by the last Bind had fled but they were being pursued even now and bones were slower on the feet than even tired goblins. The entire affair had cost us fewer than forty casualties, making it a remarkably one-sided beating. When word spread through the ranks, I thought, it would raise morale significantly. There was nothing like an early win to make soldiers eager for further battles.

“I guess you get to eat with people instead of the horses this week, then,” I mused. “Congratulations on the victory, Robber.”

“I was going to what now?” the Special Tribune said, sounding alarmed.

“Don’t worry about it,” I winked. “I’m sure your right to eat anything other than oats is not at all contingent on bringing me more victories.”

I winked again, just to piss him off, and ignored his increasingly loud attempts to question me over what he’d done to warrant this treatment. Verbally stepping on him put me in as good of a mood as the victory itself. It really was the little things in life, wasn’t it? I didn’t bother sending someone to ask Pickler for a report on the performance of the copperstones, as to be frank I’d be getting one whether I wanted to or not. The smile stayed with me until I got a visit from the Silver Huntress.

“There are dead on the horizon, Your Majesty,” the Huntress said in that startlingly girlish voice of hers.

I cocked a brow. Like Indrani she had an aspect related to sight over long distances, but I’d kept the two of them close to the van to sniff out ambushed instead of sending them out too far. For the first day, at least, I considered that a better use. So how had she seen something no other Named – or myself – had?

“You saw them?” I asked.

“Word from Beastmaster,” Alexis replied, shaking her head. “He sent a falcon.”

“Ah,” I hummed. “In that case, if you’d elaborate?”

She pointed a finger upwards. To the sky. Shit.

“Buzzards or vulture?” I asked.

The former weren’t much of an issue, just large undead birds the Dead King liked to use as scouts. A ‘vulture’ was a necromantic construct, though, and though much smaller than a wyrm we’d seen a lot more of those on the Hainaut front. For their size – none was smaller than a house – they were damned quick, and hard to put down. Usually Keter used them to pick off patrols or strike behind our defensive lines, but on occasion they could serve as a sort of heavily armoured scout.

“One vulture,” the Huntress said, “with a flock of buzzards around it. Headed straight towards us down Julienne’s Highway, he says.”

And there went my good mood. The Dead King had noticed something was up, then, and he wanted to confirm the nature of threat with eyes up in the sky. I closed my eyes and thought. Those couldn’t be allowed to come too close, but at least the Huntress had warned us with time to spare. If we smashed the flock and vulture we’d still keep Keter from having direct eyes on us. Our overall campaign plan wasn’t threatened, I thought. Even if the Hidden Horror knew my force was going up the highway, it wouldn’t take away the strategic threat that was Prince Klaus’ host taking Malmedit out east and collapsing the tunnels there.

Now that Neshamah had caught on to my own army’s advance, though it was effectively impossible to beat his own force to Lauzon’s Hollow. The force Keter had stationed between Cigelin and the Hollow was under a hundred thousand, we believed, but it was a mere three days’ march between those two fortresses and the dead could walk through the night. It’d take them a day at most to move to one to the other from their current camp, hence why I’d wanted surprise on our side: even after today’s march, our quickest possible pace on Creation would take us another six days getting to Lauzon’s Hollow.

That was not truly a setback: that Keter would find my army had been a given, even if this was much quicker than I preferred. You couldn’t walk seventy thousand people up a road and expect them to go unseen. By swatting the birds out of the sky we could still keep our numbers somewhat obscured, anyway. And strategically speaking my entire army was bait, in a sense, since the first blow in the offensive would actually come from our reserve sallying from the Twilight Ways and taking the Cigelin Sisters while my host drew the defensive army into Lauzon’s Hollow.

Nothing had truly been lost, I knew, save that the Hidden Horror had more time to prepare his defences than I’d wanted to give him. So why did I feel so uneasy?

“Go find the Summoner,” I finally said, opening my eyes. “And tell him I have need of his services: something that can fly and carry two people.”

The Silver Huntress slowly nodded.

“Am I to go with him and destroy the dead?” she asked.

She seemed rather pleased at the thought of combat, if not the company.

“Not alone,” I replied. “They’d see you coming from miles away and scatter.”

She cocked her head to the side, waiting for me to continue speaking, and I was startled with how closely it resembled the way Archer did it.

“I’ll be going as well, to weave an illusion that’ll hide us,” I said. “Archer will share my mount.”

If the Dead King was going to learn something was headed his way no matter what, I grimly thought, I might as well give him something to really worry about.

—

All my affairs had been packed off for the road, so I had no tent to use.

I rode up to one of two wagons holding my affairs, though, and asked the phalange handling the reins to slow for a bit. I made my way inside, waking the magelight and going through my clothes. I no longer wore plate, these days, but I’d not forgotten my growing fragility: I dug out a plain steel breastplate and a helmet from a coffer. The helm was a nice bit of smithing, open-faced in the legionary manner but worked to have subtle golden inlays above my head evoking a crown. It’d also been forged to accommodate a ponytail, since I wasn’t going to be fighting anyone with loose hair.

The wagon was shaky even at the reduced pace and armour was always tricky to put on alone, so I waited for Indrani join me – I’d sent for her before coming here – and instead grabbed something else from the coffer: a sword belt, with a sheathed blade on it. I slid the goblin steel out an inch, fingers tightening around the longsword’s grip. Well-weighted, made especially for me. I’d refused a sword once, in Liesse-Become-Twilight, and I would not walk back that choice. But this was war, and sometimes a staff and a prayer were not enough. I slid it back into the sheath and was tightening the belt around my hips when Indrani entered.

She cocked a brow at the sight.

“So it’s a fight, then,” Archer grinned.

“Help me put my armour on,” I replied after hesitating a beat.

I’d almost not gotten the words out. It was not her, who usually helped me with this. Perhaps sensing she was treading tender grounds, Indrani was efficient about it. The breastplate settled comfortably over my torso, and after I tightened the clasps on my helmet she made sure the ponytail went out through the proper furrow at the back of my neck.

“War boots,” Indrani reminded me after.

I’d still been debating that, as it happened. I’d never been a splendid rider and I was more comfortable in the saddle without steel on my boots, but then Zombie was not a difficult mount. Might as well. I sat on a trunk and reached into the pack by the side of it, only to freeze in surprised. There were my old campaign boots there, those I’d been dragging with me since I’d emerged from the Everdark, but also another pair. New, by the look of the leather, but pressing on them with my hands it was clear they’d been broken in. Scribe , I thought. It’d been idle talk when I’d mentioned the detail to her, but details were her trade.

“Cat?” Indrani asked.

They were just boots, I told myself. And still I took the old ones.

“Give me a moment,” I replied. “As soon as we’ve got these on, we’ll gather our war party and head out.”

—

The Summoner was a backbiting, entitled prick but he did have a lot of combat utility.

Masego had been fascinated by his magic – said the man had, in a sense, failed so badly at both diabolism and fae-binding that he’d ended up making something entirely different from both – but also added it’d be effectively impossible for anyone but a dedicated apprentice to learn, so the man had stayed on the front instead of heading to the Arsenal. His ‘summoning’ was effectively shaping creatures out of magic that had limited sentience, with those summoned repeatedly gaining greater substance and intelligence as they ‘hardened’.

It didn’t sound like much, until you realized that given access to enough time and magic the man could make effectively any kind of creature he could think of. We’d later learned he had limits to the quantity of magic he could actually sink into a summoning, which did set a ceiling to the possible size of the summoned creature. His bigger ones tended to be highly unstable, too, so it was often better to aim below the ceiling and end up with something of better quality. Considering the man was whiny and grasping but not particularly violent, I might have ended up halfway fond of the Summoner if he’d not also kept insisting he was Callowan. What he actually was, though, was the son of a nobleman gone into exile and a Proceran lady. He’d never even set foot in Callow.

All his hinting that as a Callowan villain he should be my favourite achieved was increasingly strain my patience. Today, though, I had good reason to cut through the stupidity without coming across as overly high-handed. His summon, a wyvern-like creature without scales and imbued of a ghostly glow, was eerily. Not one he’d used often, then. I cast a curious look at it, then at the villain who’d crafted it and the Silver Huntress by his side. I reined in Zombie by their side, Archer in the saddle behind me. She waved at the Silver Huntress, whose face tightened in reply, and I elbowed her sharply.

It didn’t do shit through her mail, but the message was received anyway,

“Your Majesty,” the Summoner smiled. “I am pleased that you found use in my-“

“There will be time for courtesies later, Summoner,” I said. “The enemy is on the move, and we do not have the time to spare. I need you and Lady Alexis on the back of your creation, and close to me: I will weave an illusion with Night that will obscure our approach.”

Indrani snickered behind me, not all that subtly, but the look on my face clearly did not brook argument. They climbed the creature, the Summoner nestling close to the neck and the Silver Huntress further back. Zombie eyed the other mount involved with disdain, horrible little snob that she was. I spurred her to get closer and she obeyed even as I began to pull heavily on the Night.

“I have tread black stone and halls grown cold, freed of restraint by the blessing of my patron,” I murmured in Crepuscular, weaving the Night around us, “Though feeble, I have devoured might. Though listless, I have stolen the wind. I call on you, Andronike, to veil eyes and ears so that I might triumph in your name.”

The Night pulsed with approval, and I felt a breath around the back of my neck as the eldest of the Sisters leant her touch to the blessing. The air in a wide sphere around us, at least forty feet in diameter, grew hazy and smoky. The Summoner let out a little gasp.

“Stay close and don’t leave the sphere,” I ordered. “It won’t last forever, so let’s get moving.”

Zombie’s wings opened with a flourish, the wyvern-thing hastily imitating her, and with a gallop she began our rise upwards into the afternoon sky.

Chapter 53: Joust

“War, that most glorious of horrors.”

-Bastien de Hauteville, Proceran general

Keeping pace turned out to be pretty tricky.

Zombie’s wings weren’t actually what allowed her to fly, since they were nowhere strong enough to actually lift a horse her size – much less with two riders on her back – but Masego had never actually been able to give me a clear answer about what exactly did allow her to fly. There’d been a lot of talk about natural domains and the inherent structural differences of the fae, but the bottom line was that he couldn’t really explain it. There was at least some grounding in Creational laws, though, since Zombie did use the wings to steer around and adjust her flight. It made her flight pleasing to the eye, an extraordinary thing but not unnatural to behold.

The Summoner’s creature was his own work, on the other hand, and not a being stolen from Arcadia. It was his own craftsmanship on display and it hardly equal to even a lesser god’s, to say nothing of Above and Below. His wyvern-thing’s wings moved, but the advance of the creature itself was jerky and only tangentially related to the way they batted. If anything the sight brought to mind the way I’d used to shape footholds out of ice in fights, if said footholds had then been forcefully dragged forward by magic. The flight was largely stable, though, and the Silver Huntress had a lot more room to stand at the back than Archer did on my own mount.

I suspected frequent use of this construct would make it more ‘natural’, as if the repeating conflict between magic made flesh and Creation was grinding the shape down into a compromise appeasing both.

For now, though, my main concern was ensuing that when the wyvern-thing pulled forward it did not take the other two Named out of my Night-working. If they left the illusion, our enemy was likely to scatter into every direction: it’d be impossible to stop them from flying over the column then, we just didn’t have the flyers for it. The sun was eating away at the illusion, slowly but surely, but I’d woven it with the personal blessing and attention of the eldest of the Sisters: it’d hold until I no longer needed it. Which promised to be soon, as the enemy’s shapes grew from blots on the horizon to discernable silhouettes.

Leaning forward against Zombie’s mane as Indrani’s arm around my belly loosened to let me, I began to count to the smaller undead birds. The buzzards had been raised from the remains of birds, it was visibly true with each, but they’d not all been of the same size and so Keteran necromancers had expanded the frames of those who’d been too small. Made of bare bone and ‘feathers’ of dead wood framed with dulled copper, they were quicker and tougher than the actual dead birds the Dead King occasionally threw at us in flocks. I found thirteen, taking my time to find them all. None strayed far from the fat construct between them, the vulture .

At least a dozen feet tall, all bristling bones and thick folds of dead animal skin, the abomination watched the world with too-large wet red eyes: old blood long gone sour, made into something farsighted by ugly rituals. Its large and leathery wings beat the air, not quite hiding the rows of insect-like segmented legs under it. Each ended in a long spike of steel, which the construct could strike forcefully enough with to punch through plate – I’d seen it run straight through a knight, once, and toss her away like a ragdoll as the horse panicked. It was the ‘bald’ patch atop the head, where plaques of iron had been nailed into the skull to protect it from easy shattering, that’d earned the creature the sobriquet of ‘vulture’. It was no wyrm, capable of tearing through an entire battalion in moments when catching it unawares, but vultures were no laughing matter.

“Thirteen buzzards,” I called out. “Think you can handle that much?”

“Please,” Indrani snorted into my ear. “It could be twice as many and it’d make no difference. Should I put an unraveller in the vulture just to make a point?”

“We’re keeping them a surprise still,” I declined.

A sharp whistle – it would not leave the sphere of my Night-working and give us away, the miracle was a very cleverly made one – drew my attention. The Silver Huntress wanted to speak, it seemed, and so I pulled at the reins to bring Zombie closer to the Summoner’s creature. The wind would make it hard to understand the heroine, otherwise.

“There’s something hidden on the vulture’s back,” the Huntress called out. “A refraction trick, I’ve seen it used by the dead before.”

I did not ask her how she’d picked the detail out at such a distance, since it was exceedingly rude to ask another Named about their aspects.

“Does it work up close?” I called back.

“Yes,” she shouted. “Needs disruption. Light works.”

I frowned. There weren’t a lot of things the Dead Kings would bother to hide on the back of something as visible as a vulture. Either he’d sent out mage Binds, which he was always careful about protecting, or there was a Revenant riding that thing. The first we could handle easily, the second might get... complicated. Some Revenants were no more dangerous than a necromantic construct, simple champions to use against Named, but there were some who’d kept the better part of their fangs even in death.

“Archer will handle the buzzards,” I yelled. “Disperse the trick on my word, we’ll attack together.”

Zombie knew Indrani well and even liked her – she kept offering her oats that the godsdamned dead fae horse did not need – so there shouldn’t be an issue leaving her on my mount’s back. The Silver Huntress gestured to make it clear she’d heard, then retreated further on the wyvern-thing’s back. Like Archer she’d come with her bow already strung and a quiver of arrows that were more or less the size of javelins. Unlike Indrani, though, she preferred a short spear to a pair of longknives. It was just as silver at the bow, and no doubt just as heavily enchanted.

I waited until we’d gotten within a hundred feet of the enemy. By then I could almost make out the trick the Huntress had mentioned: there was a... glimmer on the back of the vulture, whenever it shifted one side or the other. I leaned back towards Indrani.

“You ready?” I asked.

“Give me a moment,” she said, pressing a kiss into the side of my neck for good luck.

She put a hand on my shoulder to help herself upright, standing on the saddle with a gleeful grin and nocking an arrow. Gods, I hoped she wasn’t about to die a very stupid death just so she could have a better field of vision when shooting. She tapped my shoulder to tell me she was finished, and I turned to find the watchful eyes of the Silver Huntress.

“ Now ,” I shouted.

She nocked an arrow of her own and smoothly drew, silvery Light gathering at the point like a blinding star, then casually released. My working shivered under the cold burn of her power, hollowing from the inside even as the sun attacked it from the outside, and shattered entirely even as the arrow left the confines of my illusion. In the heartbeat that followed, things happened so quickly I almost couldn’t parse them – the buzzards began to scatter, Indrani loosed an arrow, the vulture tried to evade to the side and the silver arrow struck true. Two silhouettes were revealed, and neither looked like a Bind. Fuck.

I cursed in every tongue I knew. Time for a brawl, then.

I breathed out to steady myself, then threw myself to the side. Swallowing the scream that was trying to fight its way out, I forced my eyes to stay open and gauged the distances even as I drew on Night. One, two, three, four and... there . The gate into Twilight opened below me me even as a second silvery arrow swatted a leaping Revenant back onto the vulture and a fourth buzzard dropped. I dropped through the warmer sky of the Twilight Ways for a heartbeat before pulling at the Night and wrenching open another gate, resuming my fall about two feet above and three feet in front of the vulture.

That repositioning trick had been a bitch to learn even with Komena helping me.

I dropped down, eyes wide open and cloak trailing behind me, and before I’d even landed atop the construct my enemies gave answer. A blackened longsword’s point came at me in a thrust, exquisitely timed to go straight through my unprotected throat even as my feet touched the ground: I slammed my dead wood staff against the ground first, and the clap of Night that rippled out messed with the timing. Before the armoured Revenant – in impeccable knight’s armour, I glimpsed, down to the faded heraldic swans of House Caen on the shield – could properly turn the thrust into a cut I landed in a crouch at its feet, fingers sliding down the length of my staff.

“Afternoon, Neshamah,” I drawled, and rolled forward before the Revenant could bash in my head with its shield.

Right behind the first enemy the second had been waiting for me. Tattered robes and a breastplate of dull green light were all I caught before the points of the trident coming for my chest got a lot more pressing a consideration. Laughing I leaned back, earning myself half a moment – just long enough to unsheathe my own sword and slam the side of it into the blow. The dead Named pushed the lock one way and me the other, only my grunt breaking the silence. The Revenant was stronger than me, pale dead eyes staring down through a ratty hood, but Night pulsed through me and with a savage grin I slapped aside the blow – just in time to see the Dead Knight about to run me through the back most unchivalrously.

Silver light rammed into the side of its head, blowing off half the steel helm and revealing blond locks on a beautiful face.

Dead Knightess , I mentally amended, and deftly twirled my staff to smash it into the exposed flesh. Too slow, I cursed, her shield coming up and even the Night I’d slid down the staff splashing out harmlessly against it. I narrowly parried a thrust from the trident and withdrew to the side prudently – that light breastplate wasn’t that of a warrior-Named by my reckoning – but not quite swiftly enough. When lightning streaked down the trident’s length and lashed out at me, it caught the edge of my cloak. The Mantle frizzled the magic, but did not shatter the spell: it twisted around, answering the Revenant’s will, and struck my sword-hand.

I bit down on my scream, limbs convulsing, and dropped my sword against my will.

A blow from the back hammered into my shoulder, cutting deep as the Knightess put the full weight of her strength into it. Blood spurted and I was driven to my knees, but I let out a bark of laughter through the sting: painful as that had been, it’d broken the lightning spell’s hold on me. The hand freed by dropping my sword went up as I drank deep of the Night, then closed my fist. As if a dragon had breathed in the air was sucked in by the funnel I’d crafted, drawing both Revenants in, and with a hard grin I spun my staff: blackflame roared out in a wheel. Both retreated, Robes doing being than Knightess whose exposed face was caught, but their relief was short-lived.

With a furious cry, the Silver Huntress entered the fray by smashing a shining spear into the Knightess’ side. Pulling at my breastplate so it’d stop digging into my wound, I rose and offered Robes a wink.

“Hey,” I said, “do you want to see a magic trick?”

The Revenant stiffened for a moment. Wait, was this one of the perfectly conscious ones? They were exceedingly rare.

“No,” the Dead King replied through another mouth.

In the same moment, uncaring that there were also Revenants atop it, the vulture flipped upside down. Gods, Neshamah really was such an ass even when you discounted all the horror and mass murder. The Huntress still blew part the Knightess’ shield in a streak of silver, scoring deep burns into the plate behind it, but I had to trade taking a shot at Robes for crafting a tendril of Night and catching the heroine by the waist, throwing her upwards. That cost me, as Neshamah-in-Robes got off a spell before I finished crafting a veil of Night for my own defence: there was a boom of thunder that struck me like a physical blow, rattling my bones, and then my vision went white as a column of lightning erupted.

Would have caught me for sure, if a creature looking like a large ghostly pufferfish hadn’t suddenly formed right in the path of the spell.

Shit , I thought, changing the veil from a defensive one form one that’d obscure my presence before I was done changing it. I might actually have to be polite to the Summoner for that. From the corner of my eye I caught one, two, three silver streaks – the Huntress had somehow taken her bow even while being thrown upwards and her arrows hammered into the Knightess mercilessly. Neshamah-in-Robes did not bat an eyes, beginning to weave a large web of lightning streaks around the lot of us – like a large, loose net. Clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth disapprovingly, I opened a small gate into Twilight near the edge of the net and allowed it to close.

The Dead King, visibly irritated through his puppet’s face, gathered the lightning streaks into a spear of spinning threads and tossed it at the Silver Huntress. I let myself keep falling, Mantle of Woe flapping around me, and pulled on the Night. I grinned as a silver arrow tore through the point of the lightning spear, hollowing out the centre, though it was an unpleasant surprise to find that the outer layers had kept shooting forward. I saw movement from the corner of my eye again, though, and kept working on my miracle with a pleased smile. Zombie glided down past the Huntress gracefully, Indrani catching her old comrade by the scruff of a neck.

They went into a dive before the spell could catch them, though the Dead King was already preparing another spell – lightning was pulsing around him, erupting from the frame of the Revenant in spikes. And still I waited, carefully shaping the Night.

The vulture swung around, one of those deadly legs catching the Knightess and slamming her onto its back before moving so that the Dead King’s puppet could lightly land on the back. Just before the feet of Neshamah-in-Robes could touch the vulture they threw their spell – a ball of lightning that began to expand massively the moment it left his hands – I struck at last. Thin tendrils of Night shot out of me by the hundreds, ripping through my veil and revealing my position, but even as the Dead King turned towards me the first tendrils sunk into the flesh of the Revenant he was using. He began to cut at them with the trident, but there were too many and he was too slow.

“Here it is anyway,” I smiled, and snapped my fingers.

Robes’ silhouette shivered for a moment, then grew sunken as I hollowed it out from the inside with acid. Without bones and runes to anchor the necromancy, the Revenant collapsed within moments and there was simply nothing the Dead King could do about it. Which was good but I was still, unfortunately, rapidly hurting towards my death. That, uh, hadn’t stopped while I was scheming. Fortunately others had noticed, and within moments the Summoner had brought around his wyvern-thing and even guided it to sweep me so I wouldn’t break my legs landing on it. I gave him a thankful nod, then breathed out and opened a gate into Twilight in front of me.

A heartbeat later I stepped out of another gate onto the back of the vulture even as the Knightess turned to face me, longsword raised. She was a better swordswoman than me, I figured, and at the moment I didn’t even have a sword. The Revenant reached behind her back, beneath a faded cloak, and to my surprise unsheathed another longsword. But instead of approaching me with both blades, she threw the fresh blade at my feet.

“A knight even in death, is it?” I mused out loud.

I was offered a salute, flat of the blade against her forehead, and nodded in return. I bent down to pick up the blade, shoulder wound stinging and already pulling on Night, but the expected betrayal never came. I was tempted, for a moment, to just blast her anyway. She might have been Callowan, once upon a time, but now whatever she might believe she was only a tool of the Dead King. And yet, as blood seeped down onto my breastplate and I watched this fair-haired killer standing across from me, I realized with a start that I wanted to beat her with a blade in hand. Wanted to give her that bit of dignity before oblivion took her, if I could. I spun the longsword, once and slowly, and though the weight was a little off it was no great hindrance.

“Catherine Foundling,” I introduced myself. “Queen of Callow.”

The pale dead face twisted into a smile.

“Aubrey Caen,” she rasped. “Knight Errant, once.”

I left my staff of yew standing, knowing it would not fall, and took a limping step forward. The air was crisp, this far up, and the afternoon’s fading light cast us in relief as the wind howled around us. She took a step of her own, grip two-handed and pommel held above her head as she approached. I kept my guard low, knowing I’d not be faster than her to the strike – my kill lay in avoiding her blow and striking while she was extended. And beyond the cold bite of the wind, beyond the howl, I felt a warm breath against the back of my neck. A large thing looming behind me, fangs bared and eyes patient.

I smiled. Approve, do you?

The woman who’d once been the Knight Errant darted forward and struck with blinding quickness. I pivoted to the side, the same way another Knight had once taught me, and let the blow pass me – but one of her hands left the sword and she elbowed me with a steel-clad elbow. Or would have, if I’d not pressed the flat of my blade against the blow and pushed her back. She almost stumbled but turned it into a lateral swing. It found a parry waiting as I turned her blade and ripped it off her grasp. She was Named, even if dead, so she snatched it out of the air: but not before I slashed at her exposed face, drawing a deep bloodless cut across it.

I watched her, eyes unblinking, and felt something well up in me. Not Night, not power that was borrowed. It was all me, something born of Catherine Foundling and nothing else. My limbs felt limber, my hands steady, and when the Revenant struck again I knew she’d move before she did. The overhead cut was slapped aside, falling harmlessly beyond my shoulder, even as I struck her chin with the pommel and then, as she rocked back from the strength of the hit, measured my killing stroke through the neck. Or would have, had she not gone eerily still.

“I am not so helpful,” Neshamah said, “as to provide you a whetstone for your Name.”

The woman who had once been the Knight Errant sagged as he released her, falling to her knees, and her dead flesh began turning to flakes within her armour. She looked up, eyes almost pleading, and I breathed out.

Teeth gritted, I decapitated the Revenant.

Her head rolled and the Beast laid its head on my shoulder, its warmth approving. It was not a knight I was becoming, I thought. My old friend had not come out for the fight, but for what it stood for: me, standing in judgement over others. Delivering it sword in hand. And it had earned weight, that the Knight Errant had once been Named. I sighed, letting the wind ruffle my hair. To my left, I found Indrani seated on Zombie’s back and gesturing to catch my attention. She’d transferred the Huntress back onto the wyvern-thing, it looked like. I curtly signalled for her to ride towards the back of the vulture, then limped in that direction and snatched up my waiting staff. The construct began to spin, in attempt to throw me off, but it was too late.

Absent-mindedly I pulled at Night, weaving a gate into Twilight right in front of the construct as it sped forward, and leapt off its back.

Zombie caught me, Archer shuffling backwards to make room, and after some difficulty I sat the saddle. The longsword the dead woman had given me was not an exact fit for my scabbard, but it fit. It would have to suffice. A heartbeat later the vulture’s momentum forced it to try to pass through the gate, where it suffered instead the Grey Pilgrim’s burning hatred for the Dead King and all his works. Quite literally, as furious white flames devoured the necromantic construct until nothing was left but a handful of ashes scattering in the wind. I flicked my wrist, closing the gate shut, and finally allowed myself to feel pain and exhaustion.

“And now?” Archer asked.

“Now we head back,” I replied. “And tell the army it’s time to pick up the pace.”

The Enemy knew we were coming, so the race against time had begun.

—

I clenched my jaw so I would not hiss as Senior Mage Jendayi healed the wound on my shoulder. I could have asked one of our priests to handle it instead and it would have been painless, but being healed with Light tended to screw with my ability to handle Night afterwards. Not majorly, but enough that precision work became difficult. Better to let one of my mages handle it, even if it stung as the flesh knit itself back together. Still, if nothing else the pain kept my mind focused on the here and now.

“Thank you, Senior Mage,” I said, nodding my gratitude. “It was smoothly done.”

Not compared to what Masego would have done, of course, but I’d been made clear to me over the years that this was a completely absurd standard to hold people to. The dark-skinned woman smiled and left the tent after requesting a check-up later tonight, leaving me to combat report turned war council unfolding around me.

“- the Black Queen personally slew the last in an honour duel, blade against blade,” the Silver Huntress said.

She shot me an admiring look at that, and to my amusement so did Tazin and Aquiline. I became a little less amused when I considered how that little detail might have done months of work in trying to wean them of that practice.

“A whetstone for my Name,” I dismissed. “Which slowly becomes clearer in shape.”

And Gods Below, how large would the scope of it be for it to take so long to coalesce?

“Regardless,” I continued, “the Dead King rode both Revenants at different times. There can be no denying that he is now aware of the existence of our column.”

Even our most conservative estimates had been that we’d get two days before he caught on, so that wasn’t a pleasant surprise. All those forward patrols we’d sent to sweep the lowlands in the last few months had failed to pay off, mostly out of what I’d consider bad luck. That force of two thousand that Robber and the rest had wiped out had clearly not been sent as scouts, after all. They’d not been the right make up of dead for that at all.

“Your presence will have told him this is a serious thrust,” General Hune said. “Though we’ve kept our numbers unclear through your actions, so he won’t be sure where our troops have been sent.”

By which she meant he wouldn’t be sure if our force, the visible one, was a distraction while another one stalked the Twilight Ways. Which was the case, but our numbers – seventy thousand men – were meant in part to dissuade him of that. Our reserve was less than half of my column, after all, and about that for the Iron Prince’s army. When he got a good look at both our armies, which I intended to make him bleed to get, his conclusion should be that the numbers in the offensive meant we’d bet it all on two quick thrusts backed by Named.

“Agreed,” Princess Beatrice said. “Though I’d recommend we make haste towards Lauzon’s Hollow regardless. It is crucial we dictate the tempo if our surprise attack on les Soeurs Cigelin is to bear fruit.”

I frowned. I was wary of hurrying forward heedlessly, as it happened. If the siege of the capital of Hainaut, our ultimate objective for this part of the campaign, was to be a success then we needed our supply lines clear up Julienne’s Highway. Getting sloppy about clearing the lowlands as we advanced towards the Hollow was a good way to get sprung a nasty surprise when warbands of undead lying low united, though.

“With all due respect, ma’am, the reason we’re not using the Ways to attack in the first place is that we need the highway clear for our supply lines,” General Abigail quietly said. “There’s no point getting to the capital if we starve while sieging it because the bread gets burned on the way.”

I hid a smile. She was growing into the rank better, I decided, without my looking over her shoulder. Akua had been right about that.

“Then we split our forces,” Lady Aquiline suggested. “Send out large warbands to clear the countryside of the enemy while the main column continues its advance.”

“Split our forces while already outnumbered?” General Hune said. “A recipe of the enemy to roll us over piece by piece.”

“We are outnumbered in principle, not in...” Ivah began then stopped, biting its lips. “These are not the correct words.”

It turned to me, speaking a few sentences in Crepuscular. I nodded.

“The Lord of Silent Steps means were are outnumbered in a strategic sense, not a tactical one,” I clarified. “I tend to agree. With the Twilight Ways we’re quicker on the move than the dead, so we’d be able to afford sending out detachments to clear the countryside and still be assured we can concentrate the column before giving battle with the central enemy force.”

At this point there was no denying that the enemy would move into the Hollow long before we were in a position to contest it. I’d be surprised if those one hundred thousand dead weren’t already on the march as we spoke.

“If the Enemy fights as we want him to, and sends his soldiers to the man the Hollow,” Captain Reinald pointed out. “This assessment depends on the Hidden Horror holing up in his defences instead of taking the field.”

The two fantassin captains had been quiet in this council, aware that out on march their influence was not the same as in camp. Not even the snippiest of mercenaries would seriously threaten to walk in the middle of an offensive into the territory held by the Dead King. It’d be a death warrant for them, if nothing else.

“He’s right,” the Silver Huntress said. “We haven’t gotten eyes on the enemy yet, Your Majesty. I’d like your permission to take a band out for a deep reconnaissance.”

I mulled over that a moment. By a band she meant a band of five, so that was more or less a third of the Named with this army that’d be risked on this jaunt. Mind you, having actual hard information about where the enemy army was would be damned useful and sending heroes into an adventure of this sort a lot less dangerous in practice than it sounded. I eventually nodded.

“You’ll take the Headhunter with you,” I said. “Any preferences for the rest?”

“The Vagrant Spear,” she immediately said, “and the Silent Guardian.”

She paused for a moment, deep in thought.

“And the Rogue Sorcerer, if you have no other use for him?” she tentatively asked.

“Take him,” I agreed. “In and out, Huntress. Don’t let yourself be drawn into a scrap.”

“As you say, Black Queen,” she smiled, offering a quick bow.

She offered another one to the room at large, and departed with haste. My gaze returned to the rest of the war council.

“You’ve convinced me with the war parties, Lady Aquiline,” I said. “I’ll detach ten thousand drow under Lord Ivah to sweep the lowlands, as well as a fighting escort that can handle the daytime.”

It couldn’t be the Levantines, I decided. They were good at light warfare, I wouldn’t pretend otherwise, but they were also a lot more likely to let themselves be drawn into unnecessary battles than a more discipline force. I wanted them close so I could keep an eye on them.

“I would volunteer for such a task if you’ll allow it, Your Majesty,” Captain-General Catalina spoke up. “My company can discharge these duties skillfully.”

I glanced at Princess Beatrice, who subtly nodded. Good, she agreed this seemed like a decent idea then.

“Take your pick of the companies, no more than eight thousand total,” I said. “You will be sharing command with Lord Ivah, I’ll leave the details of the sweep to you.”

“By your command, Your Majesty,” the fantassin replied.

“Chno Sve Noc,” Ivah simply said, inclining its head.

I rolled my shoulder, finding it stretched taut from the healing but no longer painful. Good work by Jendayi, that.

“As for the rest of us, we’ll continue our advance at the quickest sustainable pace,” I said. “Let’s get to it, people – the Enemy won’t dawdle, so neither should we.”

Chapter 54: King’s Fianchetto

“That there is little reason to war should be no surprise, for war is never the choice of reasonable men.”

– Basileus Stavros Trakas of Nicae

It wouldn’t be cheap.

The pair from the adjunct secretariat had been dismissed, leaving me with a pile of papers where the words ‘maybe’ and ‘should’ came up uncomfortably often. While the phalanges who’d spoken to me – an orc and a Callowan, nice touch that – had been well-versed in the details, looking at the plans I recognized the careful method that lay behind them. This was Hakram’s proposal, and not one he’d begun working on recently. Too much groundwork had been laid, and some of those numbers would have taken months to get. I was honestly astonished he’d managed to get his hands on estimated fighting strength for the greatest of the Clans, as the Jacks were completely blind in the Steppes.

As far as proposals meant it was well-crafted, and made it clear that not only was propping up an orc state in the Steppes achievable but it would benefit Callow in several practical ways. Establishing treaties with orc leadership and trading ties with western clans would ensure that raiding of my kingdom did not resume down the line, while a mutual defence pact would mean that if the Dread Empire turned on us both Wolof and Okoro would be knocked out of the war before the first sword was drawn. The Clans weren’t rich in much besides amber and fur, but trading those goods south in Mercantis would mean steep profits for Callowan traders given the demand for both.

There’d be no need for actual Callowan military involvement either, as simply arming the Red Shields and the Howling Wolves up to Army of Callow standards would allow them to sweep through Malicia’s allies in the Clans and become a thorn in the Tower’s side in northern Praes. From there different manners of support could be offered, grain and cattle and craft goods, while the Clans stabilized as an independent polity and pressured the Wasteland with their raiders.

But there were... issues. For one, orcs didn’t have a great record when it came to keeping to treaties – especially treaties binding multiple clans, considering the independent bent of their chiefs. The trade outlined would become profitable in the long term, yes, but in the short one it was a drain on the already strained treasury of Callow. It’d also represent an escalation of our current manner of war with the Tower, struggles abroad through intermediaries, to something significantly more aggressive. There was a difference between backing rival parts of the League and arming rebels in Malicia’s backyard. This would prompt retaliation, one that Callow was currently ill-equipped to handle.

And the truth was that, in the end, I couldn’t be sure the orcs even would stay an independent nation for long. If Black claimed the Tower then given his popularity up north he shouldn’t find it overly difficult to bring the Clans back into the fold. Meaning I would have pissed away gold, political capital – it was going to be a difficult sell in Laure to arm greenskins largely at our expense, to say the least – and risked retaliation all to strengthen soon-to-be Tower loyalists. Sure they’d be a pain in Malicia’s neck for a while, but was that small a gain really worth such a significant investment? Much as I would have preferred for the answer to be a different one, deep down I knew it was not. I sighed and leaned back into my seat, the lights of the camp around me dimly visible through the entrance flaps of my tent.

I poured myself a finger of brandy, and tried to think of a reason for me to back this that wasn’t just making Hakram happy. He’d been good, for a very long time, about never putting me in a position like this – having too choose between him and duty. So damned good I’d allowed myself to forget he wanted things at all. That was a dangerous thing to ignore in my right hand, the keeper of so many of my secrets. But I couldn’t just empty my kingdom’s coffers just to please him, could I? Gods I rather wanted to, if only so things between us could go back to normal, but it wouldn’t be that simple would it?

No, I suspected that if anything accepting when I had so many qualms would only make things worse.

I cast a baleful look at a sheet of parchment detailing the costs and benefits of arming orcs in Callowan steel instead of sending them shipments of dwarven armaments bought in Mercantis, passing a hand through my hair. I’d refrained from calling on Akua when considering this, wanting no contrary opinion tainting my thoughts, and forced myself not to send for Scribe – even though she’d likely have better force estimates for the Clans than anything my people had been able to dig up, on top of the lay of the more recent politics.

“I can’t accept this,” I admitted to myself quietly.

It was a stark enough admission that I punctuated it by guzzling down the brandy, the burn in my throat and belly distracting from the unpleasantness. I wiped my lips afterwards, reaching for a quill and inkwell, and pawed around until I found a sheath of parchment I could use. I couldn’t accept this, I thought but I could at least make it clear why I couldn’t accept it. It was better than just refusing, and letting silence have the day. The words came easy, when I got into it, and I found further reasons to hesitate even as I wrote.

For one, the Clans were currently dependent on Praes for many goods and the northernmost Soninke holdings much closer than Callow – how could I be assured the Steppes wouldn’t just be pulled back into an eastern alliance down the line by simple dint of needing what the Wasteland could provide quicker than my people could provide it? Callowans were not known as great merchants, and there was no port up the Wasiliti for our river barges to land that wasn’t in Praesi hands. I needed answer to more than a dozen questions just as crucial, and so I asked them all. I cannot in good conscience commit to this proposal at is stands , I added at the end. I would, however, be willing to entertain a revised one addressing my concerns.

I bit my lip, a few drops of ink dripping down as my hand hesitated. I look forward to seeing your work , I began, then crossed it out. I expect I will soon see... No, I thought, and crossed it out again. I hope that , crossed. I believe that there is merit to this , I finally allowed, and look forward to the improvements.

The queen would not allow the woman to say sorry, so this was as close as I’d ever get to saying the word to Hakram.

—

I slept uneasily and woke up already tired.

Though we both knew he’d read my answer, Adjutant did not speak a word of it as we ate breakfast and I did not press the matter. While I’d slept the campaign had continued, the ten thousand Firstborn still with my army hunting down nearby wandering bands of undead in the lowlands and wiping them out under moonlight. They’d retreated back to camp before dawn and were now sleeping through it as the remainder of our column prepared to resume the march. I’d be leaving the Third under General Abigail to protect them while our march picked up again, the Levantines once more serving as vanguard.

I’d pulled at the leash yesterday and gone out to fight, but I’d not get such an opportunity again anytime soon. There was no Juniper for me to hand command to as I went hunting for trouble, much to my displeasure – it was my command, for better or worse. The detachments of fantassins and drow we’d sent out yesterday had dug in through dawn but would begin sweeping the region clear of undead soon enough: I got regular reports from both Ivah and Captain-General Catalina about their progress. It looked to be slim pickings, with the enemy force holed up in Luciennerie having sent no raiders down the blue road that we could find.

That worried me.

Why was the Dead King not reacting to our advance? There were three forces that were in position to prove a threat for the offensive. First was the hundred thousand army ahead of my column, no doubt well on its way to Lauzon’s Hollow by now. Another of at least one hundred thousand was holding Juvelun to the east, but we were trying to bait it out with Prince Klaus’ army. A force at least as large as the others was in Luciennerie, though, and while Princess Rozala was supposed to send raiders out to worry it the absence of reaction from there was raising my hackles.

Luciennerie was a fortress, it wouldn’t be easy for raiders to take even if a few dozen thousand dead were sent down to march on our defensive lines north of Arbusans. It was what I would have done, in the Dead King’s place: mounted a large enough assault on that defence that my column was forced to strip away detachments to reinforce. It’d weaken us before the clash at the Hollow, and in the worst possible case the Dead King would break through the fort and force our arriving reinforcements from Callow and Procer to face him in a costly field battle before his marauders were driven back.

So why was there only silence from the northwest?

My Lord of Silent Steps had correctly estimated that east of Julienne’s Highway was the region I wanted cleared most thoroughly, and it had acted consequently: the Firstborn had gone out there in force overnight and savaged the enemy warbands in the area thoroughly. They’d also paid particular attention to keeping the connection between the mining roads of the east and the Highway clear, which I send a commendation for. So long as that road remained open, the Iron Prince could keep sending us messengers even when he got into territories where scrying broke down. My column’s advance went uncontested through the rest of the day, the field ours in every direction according to the reports of my scout. Some of my commanders came to believe we’d caught the Hidden Horror by surprise with our advance, that our timing had been apt.

He might have been focusing his attentions on the offensive against Cleves, they said, the one headed towards Trifelin. Our two-pronged offensive might have caught him with his forces deployed in the wrong places. Some of General Hune’s staff argued for us to increase the speed of our offensive because of this theory, and the notion was popular with Princess Beatrice and her army. They were eager to reclaim their capital from Keter, it was a point of pride for them. I stamped down on their ardour, as unless their guesswork was confirmed I saw no reason to change our campaign plan. Just because we could not see the Dead King’s preparations did not mean they weren’t waiting for us.

On the third day of the march, early in the morning, I got word from Prince Klaus. When he’d sent his messenger his army had just passed Juvelun, where to his dismay the enemy army had refused to engage even when he’d skirmished provocatively. Our early hopes that the raids on his army were the prelude to a greater attack seemed in vain. With the hope of baiting the enemy into a field battle easily gone, he’d followed our contingency plan and begun a forced march towards Malmedit. That would force the enemy army to either follow or risk losing the tunnels there, but noted it would not be difficult for him to keep in contact with my army form now on.

He wished me luck, and in silence I wished him the same. It was not without risks, marching on Malmedit: it left his supply lines open for the enemy to raid, or to block entirely if they decided to leave Juvelun and advance against his back.

It was only half a bell before sundown that I finally got an explanation as to why Luciennerie had gone silent. Princess Rozala sent word by scrying that not only had Keter begun the expected offensive against Trifelin, where she’d fought a field battle and was now suffering a siege, but that there seemed to be another attack afoot. The raiding detachments she’d sent to harass the army in Luciennerie had been ambushed and driven back, but not before catching sight of a Keteran host marching towards the fortress they’d come from. The same one anchoring her eastern flank, Coudrent. My fingers clenched until the knuckles went white when I heard the news.

If the fortress fell, Cleves was in trouble. The dead would have access to the soft underbelly of the principality, and not only would they be able to cut the supply lines of the far-flung capital of Cleves but they’d also be able to strike at the besieged army in Trifelin from behind. It’d be a crippling blow. One that could potentially turn our currently steadiest front into a howling disaster over the span of a bare few months. There were Named in Coudrent, though, and a significant defensive force. The fortress would not fall easily. Still, it now looked like the Dead King had decided to gamble on breaking Cleves before we could retake Hainaut.

He must have realized that we’d weakened the defences there to strengthen our offensive here, in troops and Named. It was a bold strategy from an opponent usually more inclined towards patience, but then he could afford the losses better than we could: every battle refilled his ranks while ours dwindled. It would have been a mistake to hide this from my highest officers, so on the same evening I called another war council. It was taken with equanimity on the surface, but it was only skin deep.

“It might be best to end the offensive for now,” Razin Tanja reluctantly said, “and instead reinforce Coudrent through the Twilight Ways.”

I cocked an eyebrow, almost impressed. It’d be a strategic blunder to do that, in my opinion, but it showed forethought on his part that’d been entirely absent back when we’d tangled at Sarcella. He could recognize, at least, that losing Cleves would be a greater loss than winning Hainaut would be a gain.

“The Hidden Horror could be baiting us,” Aquiline reminded him. “We do not know much of what happened out west for certain.”

“If anything this reinforces the need to advance swiftly,” Grandmaster Talbot argued. “If we smash our way up the Highway, the enemy might be forced to withdraw the forces they sent out or face losing Hainaut largely uncontested.”

“Beg your pardon, lord, but it’s only uncontested if the army in Juvelun does what we want and chases the Iron Prince,” General Abigail said. “Might be we could take that for granted before, but I’m not so sure we can now.”

“Agreed,” Princess Beatrice said, startling my general. “Though I would suggest that is even more of a reason to push forward quickly. Unless we become a serious threat on the Enemy’s hold of Hainaut, he has no reason to reconsider his offensives. The army in the Hollow needs to be shattered, and soon.”

I stayed silence, wanting all here to air their thoughts, but I tended to side with Beatrice Volignac in this. There were still four days of marching between us and the Hollow, if we stayed on Creation, which was starting to look like too long. The Dead King wouldn’t have made a move against Coudrent if he didn’t believe he could take the fortress, Named or not, and to be honest I was starting to suspect the attack on Trifelin was not to take the place – Rozala Malanza had made it into a butcher’s yard for anyone trying to take it – but instead to pin down the Princess of Aequitan’s army so it couldn’t relieve Coudrent.

“We can’t fight a battle with our column spread out as it currently is,” General Hune pointed out. “We’ll need to recall the drow and the mercenaries first and that’ll take at least a day.”

A generous estimate. The distances involved were not small, there were no real roads to speak of out there and the forces in question were significantly spread out. Even if we sent the order in an hour, I doubted we’d gather everyone here by tomorrow. I’d bet the morning after, the dawn of our campaign’s fifth day, if we were lucky and the fantassins ran themselves ragged.

“It will slow us down to wait for them,” Aquiline pointed out.

“Attacking an entrenched force with superior numbers without our full strength would be foolish,” Hune bluntly replied.

“We don’t need to launch an assault outright,” I noted. “We can set up camp facing the Hollow and prepare for battle, and order the detachments to catch up to us there.”

It’d have the benefit of having those detachments sweep through the upper lowlands on both sides as they joined us, flushing out undead warbands still in hiding.

“And if the enemy comes out to fight?” Princess Beatrice asked.

“Gods, if only,” I wolfishly smiled.

General Abigail let out a small trilling laugh, which sounded either keen or terrified. Her fear aside, I strongly believed that in a field battle we’d smash right through the force the Dead King had sent to hold the Hollow. It was one thing to assault a strong position, another to face bones and Binds on the plains – where our cavalry could come into play and we could force them to come to us as our engines pounded at them.

“Send out the recall orders, we’re to gather directly before Lauzon’s Hollow,” I ordered Hune, then turned my gaze to the rest. “As for our column, prepare your forces for a march through the Twilight Ways. Morning Bell tomorrow is the timeline for beginning to open the portals.”

Which meant we’d probably start moving around Noon Bell, realistically. Even the simplest of things became incredibly complicated to achieve, when out campaigning, and time was always the first casualty. My tone was firm and there was no argument, the war council dispersing to see to their orders. We could all feel it, I thought, how much more had come to rest on our shoulders with the latest news. If we failed and Cleves fell, then the Principate would follow. Maybe not the same year, but it would all be downhill from there.

“So we don’t fail,” I murmured.

The words were cold comfort as I went to sleep.

—

Noon Bell turned out to have been wildly optimistic. For once it wasn’t even the fantassins that ended up being a pain in my ass, it was the drow. With Ivah gone their discipline had thinned and they dragged their legs when it came to getting their supply carts in order. Which in turn slowed down the Third Army, which was meant to march into the Twilight Wats after them, and when it became clear that halfway to Noon Bell we were still far from marching the armies that’d gathered had to be released – we couldn’t just make the soldiers stand in the sun for hours like scarecrows, hundreds would get heatstroke and discipline would break down.

The upside was that when the Silver Huntress and her party returned from their jaunt into enemy territory, just a little after Noon Bell, I was still there to take their report. Haranguing sigil-holders had stopped being a productive use of my time about two hours ago, so I’d sat down for lunch and had covers set for the Named so they could join me as they gave their account. Unsurprisingly, the tore at even such plain fare with great enthusiasm. I waited until they’d filled their stomachs some before nudging the Silver Huntress into starting to talk.

“We got close to the Hollow,” Alexis the Argent said. “It was swarming with soldiers, so even sneaking near the road wasn’t an option, but we went up into the hills to the east so we could have a look from there.”

She paused, swallowing a piece of jerky and washing it down with a mug of ale.

“The Headhunter was the one who found the goat path that allow us to,” the Huntress conceded. “She did good work.”

The villain in question only grinned at me, showing crooked but white teeth.

“The rise we found overlooked the army, Your Majesty,” the Vagrant Spear said. “The dead are raising fortifications, making ready for us.”

Bad news, but not unexpected ones. The dead tended to do as much when they had the time and expected to fight a defensive battles. Unlike the Army of Callow, though, Neshamah’s undead hordes did not usually have dedicated engineers or artisans that could serve the same purpose. Sometimes Binds with know-how managed something a little more elaborate than raising palisades and digging ditches, but it was rare.

“Anything to worry about?” I asked.

“Ditches and walls, the usual,” Roland told me. “They are concentrating on where Julienne’s High passes, but there were several layers being dug when we had our look.”

All the more reason to move on them soon, I thought. Even without giving actual battle, when we got close I’d be able to send raiders to disrupt their preparations. I glanced at the Silent Guardian, but though she was clearly paying attention she had nothing to add by gesture. There’d be no talk out of her, of course. Her Name was not an exaggeration – she’d been born mute, way I heard it.

“The Grey Legion was there,” the Headhunter said.

She grinned at me again, as surprise appeared on the face of her companions. Evidently, she’d not informed them.

“You saw them?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I have a Mark on two different soldiers of it,” the Headhunter said. “Both were in range.”

I nodded. She’d always been vague about what her range actually was with the aspect, or how many of those marks she could have simultaneously, but I’d gathered it was at least several miles.

“You never said a word,” the Vagrant Spear indignantly said.

“I’m not your mother, Bloodlet,” the Headhunter sneered. “I won’t hold you by the hand when you fail.”

I whistled sharply, which interrupted before that lovely little spat could escalate.

“You can wait until I have my report to tussle,” I bluntly said. “Do you have numbers for me?”

“Around ninety thousand infantry,” the Silver Huntress said. “Mostly skeletons, though there was a large contingent of ghouls and we won’t have seen them all.”

“Constructs?” I asked.

“Two wyrms,” she grimaced. “And the usual for a frontline force: beorns and tusks, a few vultures and irregular horrors. At least a hundred total, and more they’ll have kept hidden in reserve.”

Not as bad as I’d expected, although the wyrms would be a problem and the Grey Legion was going to complicate everything just by being there. Either Akua or myself would have to be kept in reserve and fresh for when they came out, else that was going to be a damned costly battle. There just wasn’t anything our infantry could do against those things, not even my legionaries.

“Anything else come to mind?” I pressed.

“There were Revenants there,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “At least ten. And there was a shape in the distance, behind the Hollow, that I believe might have been a Crab.”

That got my attention, since we’d ever only had unverifiable reports about those existing.

“How sure are you?”

The Headhunter snorted contemptuously.

“Not sure enough to want to risk venturing too far,” the villain said.

“Our orders were to avoid combat,” the Silver Huntress sharply said. “And we obeyed them. As to the Crab, Your Majesty, it was impossible to tell if it truly was one from so far. There was magical interference as well, we believe.”

A ‘Crab’ was what we’d called the method the Dead King used to keep his armies halfway functional out in the field, when he had no cities to support them. It was a massive skittering necromantic construct, but not one meant to fight: the inside of its armoured shells was supposedly filled with forges, workshops and warehouses. A small moving city meant to allow repair, the creation of fresh constructs and safely carrying necessary goods. Masego believed they were also one of the methods the Dead King used to scramble scrying, as a sort of moving ritual site. We’d never gotten a close look at a Crab, though, as they tended to be kept relatively far behind enemy lines and jealously guarded.

I’d be a significant blow to the Dead King’s ability to wage war in Hainaut if we destroyed one, though. There wouldn’t be a swift replacement either: Given how expensive and difficult making a construct the size of a small city would be, we were pretty sure there were no more than ten of them in existence. My eyes moved to Roland.

“You didn’t answer the question,” I noted.

He hesitated.

“I strongly believe it was one,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “The spell I used is essentially a Baalite eye made through sorcery, and though it doesn’t show much at great distances what it does show is reliable.”

I nodded in acknowledgement, drumming my fingers against the table. I tended to put trust in Roland’s judgement, cagey and tricky bastard that he was. While bagging the Crab wouldn’t be a greater priority than, well, actually beating the enemy army ahead of us I’d keep its existence in mind. It’d be quite the prize to destroy one of those.

“Noted,” I said, then changed the subject. “Our approach to the Hollow has changed, we’ll be moving out through the Ways as soon as possible and leaving our detachments to catch up to us near the enemy. That makes planning our answer to the Revenants and the enemy’s trump cards – the Grey Legion and the wyrms – all the more important.”

“There could be more Revenants,” the Silver Huntress reminded me. “We cannot be sure.”

“That’s war,” I shrugged. “You can never be sure. But we can plan for what we do know. I’ll want a more detailed report on the Revenants you saw once you’re done eating, and I’ll be calling an assembly of all Named with the column tonight.”

That got their attention, considering they were all included in that.

“We’ll be discussing match ups for the Revenants,” I told them, “and how we might best deal with the constructs you’ve identified.”

Much as I’d prefer not to, we might have to reveal the unravellers to deal with the wyrms if we couldn’t get a clean kill otherwise. I’d not get soldiers killed to keep the element of surprise – in other situations I might be willing to make that trade, but not when preserving our strength was so important. The battle ahead of us wasn’t the last we’d fight this campaign, and likely not even the hardest. I’d intended on hearing our suggestions from them ahead of the assembly, but it was not to be: before I could prod of them into giving an opinion, Adjutant wheeled his way into the tent.

I caught his eyes, and he indicated for us to move outside.

“You all did good work,” I told the seated Named, rising to my feet. “And brought back knowledge that might be the key to victory in the coming battle. The Grand Alliance thanks you all, and you will commended at the assembly tonight.”

It was easy enough to take my leave, since even the most polite among them were hungry and in front of a meal, so I left them to it and joined Hakram as he wheeled his way out.

“Word from Neustal,” he said. “Fresh from a runner. The Gigantes wardsmiths have arrived.”

Finally, I thought. The Titanomachy had been slow in coughing those out, at least when it came to the Hainaut front. Those who’d gone to Cleves had arrived almost a month ago.

“Good new,” I said.

“Their leader sent word to ask whether they should follow behind the column or stay in Neustal until sent for,” Hakram told me.

I mulled on that a moment. Was it worth the risk? Honestly, yes. I’d probably be able to squeeze a few things out of them if they were there when we attacked the capital, and until then they’d be useful in repairing and fine-tuning the artefacts they’d already sent us.

“How many of them are there?” I finally asked.

“Twenty-two,” Adjutant replied.

I let out a low whistle. That was more than I’d expected, at least the Titanomachy wasn’t being stingy with manpower – which, if what Hanno had told them about them was true, was the single they prized the most. There honestly was no way that our troops had missed anything numerous or powerful enough to threaten twenty-two Gigantes when sweeping through the lowlands here, so there went my last qualms.

“Send them up,” I said. “Though with warnings that this is still a war zone, if one we believe secure. If they want to wait until the next supply convoy so they can share the escort, they should feel free to.”

They’d still get to the city of Hainaut around the same time we did, by my reckoning.

“I’ll see to it,” Adjutant replied.

I opened my mouth, to ask about my answer to the proposal, then closed it. I’d already made things worse by pressing too hard once, I thought, it might best let him set the terms of engagement going from here.

“I’ll see you later then,” I simply replied.

It ended up being near godsdamned Afternoon Bell that the last of our soldiers entered the Twilight Ways, which was the final nail in the coffin of my optimism for this campaign.

Chapter 55: Queen’s Pawn

“Let there be no talk of mercy after the ram has touched the gate.”

– Queen Elizabeth Alban of Callow

Of all the gifts the Sisters had given me, the peculiar sense I had for the coming of dawn and dusk remained one of the most useful. It would be a little under a bell before sundown, in Creation. Not so here, of course, for the Twilight Ways knew no such change. The timing of this undertaking had been chosen very precisely, as it was no longer a few warbands hitting our dug-in positions that we’d be facing: we were about to come out swinging in front of a field army of the Kingdom of the Dead, the Hidden Horror’s host forewarned and prepared for our coming. It was going to be an ugly fight, before we got our defences up.

Spread out on the green and sloping hills of the Twilight Ways, the warriors mustered to take the van in the coming battle were tightening their ranks as the gate-mages finished the last few syllables of their spells. Masego’s formula was the one being used, universally so even if it wasn’t necessarily the best formula possible for each mage. It was however, the one formula that more than seven in ten of the sufficiently powerful mages of the Grand Alliance were able to use. Numbers had a strength of their own, especially when it came to war. The pharos devices wouldn’t work anywhere as well with disparate formulas, anyway , I idly thought. Not that we’d be using our only one tonight, if I had my way.

The evening air grew thick with sorcery and silence spread as the mages each finished their incantation and shaped their sorcery before withholding the last syllable – a guttural sound in the mage tongue that echoed of something like krakh. It would only be spoken when I gave my command, painted the night sky with my signal to begin the crossing. Mounted on Zombie and perched atop a hill I held good vantage, and so allowed myself to sweep the assembled forces with my gaze one last time. It was an unfamiliar sight. Our strength had been mustered not in the shape of an army ready for battle, but according to the new rules that warfare through the Ways demanded.

Standing in bands among the hills, near the gates-to-be, the painted warriors of Malaga and Tartessos were waiting to serve as the tip of the spear. Led by Blood and backed by four Named – Vagrant Spear, Headhunter, Sage and Silent Guardian – they would seize the grounds we needed as our first wave. If they got through in the time they’d been given, anyway. Behind them the Second Army stood in good order, ranks of red painted shield and polished helms glinting in the twilight. General Hune’s hulking silhouette towered above the ranks, a siege tower made woman. I’d lead the first rank personally, when we sallied out.

The holding action would be ours.

To the left and right of the Second Army our horse was milling about, one wing led by Grandmaster Talbot and the other by Princess Beatrice. A few mages with them ensured we’d have some measure of flexibility in the coming engagement, though only within limits. Our fantassin companies, under the consolidated command of Captain Reinald, were waiting behind the Second and intermixed with Volignac infantry. It was the Third that’d serve as our reserve: I was counting on Abigail of Summerholm’s knack for calculated risks. She’d commit if and when it was needed, but not a moment before. At the back of everyone else stood the drow, a sea of sigils that was not so much a reserve as another force entirely. Their time would come, but they would not share this battle with us. It would have been too much of a waste.

“Into the breach, dearest?” Akua Sahelian idly asked.

I glanced at her. No dress tonight, no silks or velour. The shade had taken the appearance of a daughter of Wolof gone to war, beautiful lamellar plate in red and gold beneath a curved helmet and an aventail of mail that could be fastened with a piece shaped like a black swan. I was in no mood for banter, tonight, and did not pretend otherwise.

“Find your mages and waste no time,” I said. “Your hands will decide how much the butcher’s due tonight.”

“Then luck in battle, my heart,” Akua smiled.

“Luck’s for the other side,” I replied. “We make due with plans.”

And as she melted into the shadows, I raised my staff and pulled at the Night as I unleashed a great spurt of power. The bright light that bloomed in the sky exploded in silent streaks of colour, and with that unmissable sight the battle began. Mages finished their incantations, magic held back at last unleashed: the Twilight Ways shivered and seventy-two different gates into Creation opened. Most weren’t even large enough for two people, with a mere twenty of proper size to let carts and engines through, but that was why we were sending the Levantines out first. They were quick on their feet and used to fighting without formations.

Clamour in Levantine tongues went up, war cries filling the air as the warriors boldly went forth through the gates. Honour to the Blood , they clamoured. Honour to Levant, honour in strife. I’d found a thick shield and a knack for ducking more useful than honour, as a rule, but I would not deny their ways when they lit a fire in their bellies. I kept my eyes on the bands filing through, counting down as the warriors passed. The Enemy was slow, tonight, or we got lucky: it was thirty one heartbeats before Keter gave its answer. More than half the gates – but not the large ones, thank the Gods – flickered, shredding whatever flesh and metal had been going through in a red spray.

So that was to be the first beat of our dance tonight, huh. Thirty one heartbeats. The Dead King’s mages were getting sloppy, if it’d taken them this long to disturb our gates with their counter-rituals. Banners were raised by the gates and drums brought to the fore, so that through their beating the rhythm could be kept. For thirty beats Levantines continued to cross, then halted. The gates rippled again, taking the leg of some screaming young warrior who’d been foolhardy enough to try the odds. It wouldn’t be the last time today it happened. The bleeding man was dragged through and the crossings resumed.

For now I was not needed. The first hour belonged to the Dominion of Levant, tasked to clear the grounds in front of us so that when the Second Army began its crossing we had room enough to set down wards and protections undisturbed. Depending on what the enemy had waiting on the other side, that hour would either be a pleasant moonlit walk or a bloody horror of screams. The lagging counter-rituals gave me hope for the former, but hope would not serve me well in a battle with Keter. I’d learned that the hard way. Time dragged forward as the warriors passed through the gates in a trickle – hundreds, then thousands – but I watched in silence. My escort dared not disturb me. It was only when I sensed the time nearing that I headed out, spurring Zombie forward. An escort of twenty knights form the Order of the Broken Bells behind me, I headed towards the Second Army at a brisk trot.

Soldiers under half a hundred different banners cheered sparsely as I went by, for even though few of them were mine I was known as a good woman to have on your side when the steel came out. Though later I would fight on the front, for now I went to Hune. Looking down at me, the ogre have a brisk salute.

“First reports?” I asked.

“The enemy was already mobilized,” General Hune said. “We’ll be doing it the hard way: ghoul packs were already afoot so it was contested from the start. Keter has pulled in every patrol in a radius of miles to slow us down. We’re looking at thousands, not hundreds.”

My lips thinned. I’d known that Keter would be expecting us to pop out soon, but not anticipated large enemy forces this far out: our beachhead was at least ten miles away from Lauzon’s Hollow!

“If it were an easy war, we would already have won it,” I said. “Watch your back, general.”

“Good hunting, Your Majesty,” Hune replied.

Dismounting Zombie and handing her reins over to my knightly escort, I went to stand with the front rank of the Second. The company was under the command of a Captain Bolah, a dark-skinned veteran who’d once served in the Legions, but it was her young Callowan lieutenant – Alfred of Ankou, he eagerly introduced himself as – who stood closest to me. Before long the two Named that were to serve as my retinue for the fight made their appearance, having been lingering nearby but away from my troops.

“I don’t believe we’ve ever shared a battle before,” Roland noted, coming to stand at my left.

He’d prudently added a helmet to the mail and longcoat he refused to set aside.

“Not on the same side, at least,” I aknowledged.

The Beastmaster, on my right was not inclined to idle talk. His eyes stayed on the banners near the gates.

“Time will run out soon,” Lysander grunted.

I nodded in agreement. It was unfortunate, but it didn’t look like the Dominion would be able to get all their warriors across in the time we’d allotted for it. Before long trumpets sounded, signifying the warriors of Levant were to move to the sides and clear the gates, which got... contentious. None of that proud lot wanted to be denied the opportunity to battle because they’d been a little too slow, and some gates had to be forcefully cleared of Levantines trying to force their way in. Behind us the Second Army raised its banners, horns were sounded and the advance began.

Unlike the Dominion forces, my Army of Callow had standard company sizes and officers ensuring order so instead of a mess of warbands it was neatly filed lines matched to gate sizes that approached specific gates. My own company, Captain Bolah’s, was bound for one of the larger gates – part of the reason I’d picked it – and before long we were standing in front of the transparent veil, the mage maintaining it standing to the side with closed eyes and two assistants. On the other flank the drummer kept pace, while a Proceran held the banner telling us the number of the gate and a young woman by his side shouted at us hurry.

A heartbeat later we were through and the cool evening air of the Hainaut lowlands washed over my face. Shit , I immediately thought, even as Beastmaster contorted and a veritable flock of birds erupted from his furs to fly above. I could now see why the Dominion had found it hard to get people through, and it wasn’t just inferior discipline. The gates has all been opened along the same axis, though the line itself was wavy from imprecisions, and near the left side of that axis bands of Dominion were being hard-pressed by a surprisingly large number ghouls. There just hadn’t been much room for more people to pour through, even when there’d been time.

Streaks of Light told me the Lanterns were in the thick of it, as was their wont, but their tricks weren’t the ones I’d been looking for.

“Beastmaster,” I said, limping forward as the legionaries advanced behind me. “Where’s the Vagrant Spear?”

She should be handling that flank along with the Headhunter, but I saw no sign of her. The other villain’s steps slowed a heartbeat as he saw through the eyes of one the birds in flight, then he pointed to the left.

“There,” he said. “Pulling one of your lordlings out of trouble, looks like. Osena. Wounded. I see blood.”

I swallowed a curse. Already? No, that was unfair. Likely the dead had gone specifically after her, knowing her death would brutalize Dominion morale. The issue was that there would only be Lanterns near and that lot couldn’t heal. The Forsworn Healer was on his way, but he was with the third wave of Named near the back of the Second Army.

“Roland,” I tightly said. “Go patch her up.”

“On it,” the Rogue Sorcerer nodded.

He was gone in a moment, stride near a run as his long coat swirled behind him. Gods, if only I could have a dozen more of him.

“With me, Beastmaster,” I said. “And I want a warning when the first tide gets close.”

“I see it approaching already,” the man murmured. “Hurry, Black Queen.”

A quick look behind me told me all of Captain Bolah’s company had crossed and it was now in good order, waiting for my instructions even as another company began to emerge behind it.

“With me,” I yelled. “We’ll set the boundary.”

I got a roar back. Good, they’d need the spirit before this was over. Much as I would have liked to head to the left flank and stabilize our lines there, I had other duties. Besides, we had a contingency that should take care of it before long. A messenger should have gone through the dedicated gate by now. A hundred legionaries in tight formation behind me, I limped to the front. The Dominion had formed up into three large clumps of warriors after crossing– shield walls that’d suffered under ghoul assaults, most likely – with the two more or less to the right having held well and only the one to the left having gotten mauled by the dead.

Out of the seventeen thousand Dominion warriors maybe ten thousand had gotten through in the half hour they’d had, a testament to their light-footedness given the situation. There couldn’t have been more than three thousand ghouls and maybe half that in skeletons out here right now, all spread out, but up close ghouls were bloody and hard to kill even. We’d be winning this fight, for sure, but it would cost us precious time and keep us from seizing the territory we wanted before the first tide hit. I grit my teeth, in a black mood, and led my company three hundred feet out before calling a halt.

“Here,” I shouted. “Form up.”

Maybe twenty feet ahead of us the Tanja forces were cleaning up the last of their undead. Among the ranks I glimpsed the Sage and the Silent Guardian, whose assigned flank this was. On the other left side four large gates opened and our first surprise of the night came out at a gallop: Grandmaster Talbot led out the Order and some Dominion light horse in wedges, smoothly coming around to hit the ghouls that’d been chewing up the Osena in the back. Long lances skewered the creatures and Levantines butchered them after they were pinned, leaving the Order free to peel off the engagement quickly and with few casualties.

They retreated the Twilight Ways without wasting time, as the last thing we wanted was to risk them out here for too long. Cavalry was not easily replaced, and the Dead King was always hungry to steal it for his own armies. With the pressure taken off of them, the Levantines on the left flank pushed forward at last. I worried my lip, eyes on the moving soldiers. Using my location as the yardstick the Second Army had begun taking position in a broad hollow square, but the left third of that square was noticeably lagging behind the rest. It wouldn’t be ready in time, would it?

“Beastmaster?” I asked.

“You’ll start seeing them in a moment,” he replied. “And hearing them not long after.”

“Fuck,” I snarled. “They’ll hit us long before the cabals are in position.”

Much less the wards, whose raising would be further delayed. Akua was good, and I’d glimpsed her crossing through with mages and wardstones, but she couldn’t conjure up a stable array out of thin air. She needed room that she just wouldn’t have. Beastmaster’s warning proved true moments later: in the distance I saw what I might have taken as a swarm of insects, were it not too far out for their size to be reasonable. Birds, they were birds. Not buzzards, which were specially-crafted dead, but just any bird the Dead King had been able to get his hands on. His forces slaughtered and poisoned all wildlife wherever they went so that they could use this very tactic: throwing massive flocks and herds of them at us as skirmishers.

Like a tidal wave filling the sky, they came.

“I’ll handle it myself,” I finally said.

There went one of the two large workings I’d be able to throw around in daylight.

Striding forward with more anger to my stride than I’d care to admit, I left behind my legionaries after a curt gesture signifying they shouldn’t follow. Beastmaster kept pace with me, looking oddly at ease in the middle of mayhem. The warriors from Malaga had been thorough about putting down the dead, but sloppy with clean up: with my staff I shoved aside a painted warrior before the back of her knee could be stabbed by a crawling half-broken skeleton, my boot going through its skull with a wet crunch. I ignored whatever she said to me in Ceseo and kept limping ahead. The Levantines split for me, almost respectfully.

By the time I got to the front, stepping away from my armies with no one but Beastmaster at my side, the tide of undead birds was closer. Close enough no one could miss them, close enough that the beat of their wings and their ceaseless screeching hit our ears like a drumbeat. One coming ever closer as dead things filled the horizon. The birds would only be the first tide, I knew. They were just the quickest to make their way to our lines. Behind us I felt the Dominion warriors shrink. I’d seen some of those same people leap into a siege tower on fire without batting an eye, face Revenants with gleeful whoops, but this breed of horror always hit them hard: what honour could there be in being shredded by dead birds?

Neshamah had made of study of us, of what got into our heads and put lead in our legs.

“You have means to deal with them?” the Beastmaster asked.

“Sure,” I replied with a hard smile, “it’s called force .”

To my surprise, that startled a laugh out of the usually humorless man.

“Don’t let me get into your way then, Black Queen,” Lysander said.

A snort was my only answer. As if. I took another few limping steps forward, loosening my shoulders under the cuirass and taking a good look at the advancing tide. Hadn’t rained in a while, had it? I knelt down, leaning my staff, and traced the ground with a few fingers. Dry. I hoisted myself back up with a grunt.

“You never taught me a prayer for this,” I said in Crepuscular. “An invocation. I imagine there isn’t one.”

I smiled at doom coming on darkened wings.

“Shall we make one together?”

On my shoulders I felt sharp talons dig into the skin, almost enough to draw blood. I had their attention and, closing my eyes, I breathed out and sunk into the Night. I pulled it deep into me until it was writhing in my veins like serpents of smoke.

“I have come a long way, through winding paths,” I murmured, and cocked my head to the side to better hear them.

It was neither a murmur nor the beat of wings, and somehow both.

“Yet behold,” I said, Andronike’s cool disregard given voice, “this barren realm, this crown of ruin!”

And her sister was not far behind, leaning close to hisper into my ear – every syllable a caw, a greedy call of carrion.

“Let me match horror with horror, might with might,” I said, Komena’s poisonous pride made verdict. “And know no master in this.”

The Night roiled, the sea boiling out of me in dusky vapour, and I almost smiled. They had left me the honour of the last touch.

“So let the sun weep and the Crows have their due,” I spoke in a rasping laugh. “For in the end, all will be Night.”

I felt the Sisters smile against the sides of my neck. This one, they whispered, would be known as mine. Catherine’s Tears . Above the tide of carrion birds the sky howled with gales as the Night left me, leaving me buckling down to my knees and hollowed out. My vision swam, but not so much I did not see my work: the power forming into a great sun of black flames, pulsing and screeching almost as loud as the undead. And the tide moved to split around it, but it wouldn’t be enough. I pushed myself up with my staff, and raised a trembling hand.

I snapped a finger and all the Hells went loose.

The black sun blew up in a wave of heat, long streaks of dark flame lashing out and carving streaks of ash through the undead. Like black comets seething strokes shot out, burning as they went and smashing into the plains below with enough might to have the ground shivering even where I stood. Droplets of black fire fell like rain, igniting the carrion dead, and I watched with a cold smile as entire swaths of the enemy burned. Soon the smell of burning bone and flesh would come to us with the wind, but for now I turned around and began my limp back to my lines. The Beastmaster’s followed, face gone blank.

A sky-shaking roar came as the Dominion and the Second Army gave their approval to my work, but no smile touched my face. I’d dug deeper than I’d planned to – my legs still shook and my arms felt numb – so I could not guarantee I’d be able to pull something on the same scale again. Not anytime soon, anyway.

It’d not been enough to blot out the birds, but it’d slow them down. The undead things had scattered every which way, so they’d take time to regroup, and I could generously be said to have at most destroyed half of the lot. It’d be long enough for the Dominion left to have put itself in position, hopefully, because otherwise there was going to be an awful lot of blood on the floor and soon. My face grew grimmer as I got closer to our formations and saw we were still behind. The Second Army wasn’t entirely on the field yet, and that meant we’d be understrength when it came to priests – the kind that could make shields, anyways.

While I could have gone to the command node of the Second, all I’d do there was get in Hune’s way. She already knew the damned plan, she’d helped make it. Getting too close to Akua’s work would be a risk as well, since I was pretty much a moving mass of Night even when not actively using it, so the frontline was the best place for me. The Second Army had moved into cohorts, with furrows behind them, and as I got back to Captain Bolah’s company the first trumpets sounded. The Dominion moved down the furrows to stand behind the Army of Callow formations, with some relief I fancied.

The winged undead were already beginning to gather in great swarms. As soon as the Dominion was behind them, the Second Army’s standards were raised and horns sounded: the lines closed and shields went up, a solid wall of steel becoming the frontline as mage cabals got into position. Ahead of us, the tide had entirely formed anew. It was closer now, and the cacophony of screeches was once more deafening. Four hundred feet , I thought, watching. Three hundred feet . Around me legionaries shifted uneasily.

“Steady,” I called out. “Trust in your officers. We’re ready for them.”

That got a few shouts back, and swords were hammered against shields. Two hundred feet. The shrill screeches washed over us like a physical wave. Screams erupted behind us, not of fear or dismay but battle cries as the House Insurgent slashed out with Light. Callow , some simply shouted. Cries of For the Kingdom or Gods Unforgiving with them, and even a few Only to the Just . Like a volley of arrows javelins of Light went flying, prayers to Above brightening the air. One hundred feet. One, two, three volley followed and then at fifty feet, when the noise was like a rolling thunder in our faces, transparent panes of sorcery bloomed in front of us. Like a sorcerous tortoise formation, the rectangular angled shields came down as armour and muted the cacophony.

It was not airtight. Some birds went through, and with a tired hand I drew my sword to hack at a rotting blue jay as its talons clawed pointlessly at my cuirass, but those few were a pittance compared to the angry tide hammering at the magical defence. In some places the shields flickered or outright broke under the pressure, but we had mage reserves and the House Insurgent had been tasked with purging breaches.

Captain Bolah’s company was untroubled, so I clapped her young lieutenant’s shoulder and called for Beastmaster to follow me. We would be most useful plugging breaches for now. The Second Army finished ferrying across its numbers early, but still too late: by then the second tide had struck. Insects, come on smaller wings. Flies and hornets, until larger things like beetles and stingers and butterflies came up. Unlike the birds, they were capable of digging under the rim of the shields and going up. Twice I torched a stretch when swarms became large enough they devoured soldiers alive, Roland coming back to my side for the grim business after having healed Aquiline Osena.

Sappers came forward and burned the insects out with torches and pitch, but it wasn’t enough. We had to pull mages from shielding to defend against the insects, and it shrank our defences. More panes began failing when our intricate patterns began losing strength, dozens of soldiers dying to every breach before the House Insurgents and the Lanterns, come to reinforce them, could purge the invaders. The third tide hit just as the first Procerans began crossing through, and to my relief Juniper – Hune, I caught myself, it was not the Hellhound in the deeps with me this time – had called for priests to cross first.

When vermin and wild animals began to hammer at the shields and wriggle under them, less numerous than birds or insects but much stronger, we finally got to dismiss entire sections of the defence and remake them anew in pale yellow Light. It burned the dead when they touched them, though not as much as more concentrated amounts would have. We focused our defenses anew, breaches becoming rarer as the work became more distributed, and in some places our people even began to lower panels to bait the dead into dedly Light volleys.

“It’s turning in our favour,” Roland told me, panting and sweat-soaked.

“For now,” I grunted back. “Still an hour and half before sundown”

“They’ll pull away before that,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “They have to.”

He might be right, I thought. The Dead King had to know we had Firstborn with us, and on weak undead like this roving packs of Mighty would be pure butchery. But the assault from the hordes wasn’t slacking and that boded ill. He had at least one last nasty trick left for us, and I could hazard a good guess at what it might be.

“Send for our sword,” I told Roland. “I expect we’re about to have an unpleasant turn.”

It didn’t make me a prophet to predict hard times when fighting Keter, but I felt a sliver of dark satisfaction anyway when the hammer blow did come. With so much magic and Light out in the air, it’d been damned impossible for even Named to smell it when a force had approached us under the Dead King’s favourite hiding enchantments: we didn’t realize a thing until a wave of skeletons broke through a weaker section of the shields and hit the Army of Callow’s shield wall. The swarms poured in with them, a potential catastrophe, but Hune responded as swiftly and ruthlessly as she’d been taught in the War College.

The entire beachhead was purged in a wave of fire and Light, including at least half a company of our own soldiers. We would have lost a lot more, I told myself, if the gap had spread.

I’d not intervened yet because I didn’t believe that was the last blow, and once more I was proved right: an entire section of our defences shattered a heartbeat later as half a dozen vultures with Revenants on their backs broke through the ‘ceiling’. I wasn’t close to enough to help much, to my irritation: I only got off a few shots of flame from a distance, and by the time Zombie came to my side the Revenants were already on the ground. I’d had a band of five waiting for this, our sword. Archer and the Silver Huntress were among them, but while they went through the vultures like butter the Revenants were another story.

They didn’t stay and fight the Named, they just killed .

The dead Named butchered their way through the Levantines and my soldiers, each heading out towards a different part of the shielding even as masses of birds poured through the gaping hole they’d made in the ceiling. The sorcery and Light that shot up in answer wasn’t enough, like someone trying to stop a river with a spear stroke. I almost reached for Night again, I was recovered enough to do something , but breathed out in relief when massive spinning blades of Light erupted just above our troops and began shooting upwards.

The Blessed Artificer had come through the gate, arriving with the third wave of Named.

Enough dead had flown through already that dozens more soldiers died before the carrion could be destroyed, and we did not catch a single fucking Revenant as they fought their way out – and, even worse, opened breaches as they did. Fuck, and we’d barely learned anything about what they could do too. I secured two breaches with my escorts as the shielded ceiling was painstakingly restored, and a moment later Creation shivered. I grinned tiredly: Akua had finally anchored the wards, thank the Gods. Unlike the first few times the Dead King wouldn’t do us the favour of grinding his expendables to dust on our defences, so to the ragged cheering of the army the swarms went still and then began to retreat.

Half an hour left until sundown.

Still on Zombie’s back, my face was grim as I looked around us. Though the battle had gone well, better than we’d expected even – there’d been no need to commit the Procerans or even the Third to very risky flanking actions – we’d still lost more than a thousand, at a glance. At least half over that in wounded too, though the priests would see to that some. As night began to fall and the hard work of building the camp into a defensive position was undertaken under torchlight and magelights, I found myself approached by a silent ring of thin silhouettes with painted faces. The sigil-holders of the Firstborn bowed when I turned to them, and I offered a hard smile.

“Prepare your sigils,” I said. “We raid, Mighty.”

The answering smiles were fearsomethings, for these were a fearsome lot.

It was our turn, now.

Malanza

“It would be a curse to be born Good. If virtue were easy, if doing right was painless, Creation would have no meaning: what worth is there in a trial that does not try you?

– Extract from the ‘Truths of the Shore’, a collection of the teachings of Arianna Galadon (considered holy text only in Procer)

I

The statue was titled ‘ Lorenzo Triumphant’ .

There were eleven statues of the famous Lorenzo Malanza within the city of Aequitan, and every single one depicted the man with long flowing locks and youthful good looks. Rozala, who had long admired the brilliant general who’d made the Malanzas into the rulers of Aequitan, had been disappointed to learn the depiction was something of a lie. By the time Lorenzo had been winning the great victories in Levant that ultimately raised him to princeship he’d been forty, balding and with a severe limp from a lance wound he’d taken in the leg.

Lorenzo Triumphant somewhat acknowledged the last detail by depicting a stylish bandage over the young conqueror’s leg, but it only served to enhance the brimming heroism of the victor of Tartessos and Lazar Valley. The marble had been beautifully carved, though it was kept bare instead of the gaudy Free Cities painted manner, and the lance he raised manfully towards the sky was worked in gold leaf. Rozala had always hated the bloody thing, as it stood in the Shaded Courtyard. Where Mother made her wait on the bench near the wall until the Princess of Aequitan was finally ready to receive her.

Rozala had never once been made to wait here except when she was about to be punished, so that cursed marble statue was as ill an omen as there could be.

It was different today. Rozala had spent most of the last hour looking at the statue and the orange trees of the courtyard, wracking her mind to come up with a misdeed she’d done warranting punishment, but there had been nothing. She’d dumped worms in Hernan’s pillows again, but the little shit hadn’t caught on yet and now that he was nine he’d grown too proud to rat her out as eagerly as he used to. He’d asked for it, anyways, mocking her for having a hard time memorizing the first stanzas of the ‘Tragedy of King Konrad’. Reitz was hard , and unlike her brother she wasn’t getting any better at it.

The day broke from precedent again when instead of one of Mother’s attendants it was Mother herself who came to find Rozala. Aenor of Aequitan, Rozala thought with pride, was still known as one of the great beauties of the south even in her dawning middle age for good reason. She didn’t need glittering jewels or powders to impress, just a well-done braid and an elegant silken dress. One day, Rozala promised herself, she would be just as beautiful. Mother offered her a lovely smile before sitting by her side on the bench.

“Is there anything you would care to tell me, Rozala?” Princess Aenor meaningfully asked.

“Nothing at all,” Rozala lied.

The tanned princess looked faintly amused.

“Your delivery needs work,” Mother said.

Rozala said nothing, primly looking ahead and hoping if she did not move the subject would be dropped. Her mother was a skilled interrogator when she put her mind to it.

“But that is not why I sent for you today,” Mother lightly added.

The ten year old girl breathed out in relief.

“May I know why I am here, if not to be punished?” Rozala asked.

“Most of your tutors will be dismissed this evening,” the Princess of Aequitan said. “I will be taking care of your education personally, at least in some regards.”

Though thrilled, Rozala forced herself to remain calm.

“Sister Lisella said last week that I was not yet ready for such tutelage,” she said.

Mother looked at her with approval.

“I am hurrying the transition,” the Princess of Aequitan agreed. “There are... growing undercurrents to the Ebb and Flow, my darling. I’ve come to believe the years ahead will bring with them great perils.”

“Through peril, rise,” Rozala replied without hesitation.

The words of the House of Malanza had been drilled into her since she could walk, along with the duty she had to her family and her people. Mother simply nodded, as if the answer had been a given.

“There will be opportunities,” Aenor Malanza agreed, eyes coming to rest on the statue of their famous forbear. “Of the very same kind he found, I expect.”

“It will be war, then?” Rozala softly asked.

“It might yet come to that,” the Princess of Aequitan said. “So let us learn the lessons of Lorenzo’s life, yes?”

Rozala turned attentive dark eyes onto her mother, waiting for the wisdom she had to impart.

“Have you ever seen a statue of Juan Osuna?” Mother asked.

The young girl startled in surprise at the question. The last name she recognized – how could she not, when the House of Osuna had preceded the Malanzas on the throne of Aequitan – but the given name took her shamefully long to place. Prince Juan Osuna was mostly known as Juan the Abjurer’, in the histories, for he had been the last prince of the Osuna and abjured his right to throne before fleeing east into Salamans.

“I have not,” Rozala admitted.

“The question was a trick,” Princess Aenor easily said, “for you pass by such a statue every time your ride through the eastern gate.”

The young girl blinked, and only then put the pieces together.

“The Wicked Elder is meant to represent him?” Rozala said, doubtful. “But the statue is of an old man, decrepit and... impious.”

There was something unsettling about the statue’s gaze, and the unseemly face it stared out of. It was somehow ribald and heinous at the same time. The young girl frowned, drawing back a strand of hair.

“I’ve been taught that Juan the Abjurer was fifteen, when renounced the throne,” she added.

“He was,” Mother thinly smiled. “And yet he lost, and so when he was still remembered at all it was as a hideous figure. While Lorenzo, who was nearly thrice his age, won and is now depicted as a golden youth all over the city.”

The Princess of Aequitan continued to stare at the statue.

“It is the victor who decides who was wicked and who was righteous, in the end,” Aenor Malanza told her daughter. “When that statue was first raised, my lovely, it was known as a lie. But who remembers it now save a few scholars?”

Rozala almost shivered, though the afternoon heat was stifling even in the shade.

“But we’ve lost wars, haven’t we?” she softly asked. “In the years since. And it did not destroy us like it did the Osuna.”

“Because we did not flee, my darling,” Mother smiled. “We abjure nothing, we Malanzas. When the sun dims, when hard ends find us, we embrace the dark. We survive, whatever the cost, and through peril-“

“Rise,” Rozala finished in whisper.

“Juan Osuna fled east and ever returned, Rozala,” Mother said. “He might have won, had he fought. Had he had the stomach for the fight.”

Instead, Rozala thought, all that was left of the man was a half-forgotten lie. It was the first lesson her mother ever taught her.

She did not forget it.

—

IV

Cordelia Hasenbach had been crowned First Prince of Procer but there were some who argued, and not without reason, that it was Prince Amadis Milenan of Iserre who had won the Great War. What else could it be called but a victory, when without his lands having ever known war a man rose to become one of the great powers of the land? Prince Amadis did not hold the highest office in the Principate, but he had not beggared himself and his allies to seize it as the First Prince had. And down here, in the south, old blood knew the strength of patience. The Lycaonese despot would fall sooner or later, and when she did the Prince of Iserre would rise in her stead.

Rozala Malanza, made Princess of Aequitan by her mother’s decree before she drank the regal mercy, had heard much of this sort of talk in Salia. Not in the streets, of course, for the people were jubilant at the election of a First Prince and the end of the Great War, but behind the doors of great mansions in the city. Rozala had remained aloof, even when invited to attend dinners, preferring to study the currents at the capital from a distance. Hasenbach was not as weak as was argued, she saw, and there was wishful thinking clouding the judgements. She had the votes in the Highest Assembly, and the bite of her armies would not be soon forgot. For now, she had the run of the Principate.

And she was comfortable enough in her seat to make gestures, such as refraining from contesting Rozala’s acclamation as princess before the Highest Assembly. It was tradition, when a princess of the blood took the regal mercy, that their choice of successor not be challenged. Yet tradition was only that, not law, and Hasenbach had the strength to dispense with it should she wish it.

It had burned Rozala like acid, kneeling on the floor of the Highest Assembly as she faced the cold-eyed savage that’d made her mother drink poison. The hate clung at her insides like a thousand hooks, and these days fear was beginning to do the same. For Hasenbach had been merciful, yes – wasn’t it the talk of city, the virtue and kindness of their fresh young ruler? – but she had not been soft . Rozala wore a crown but her young brother Hernan, the same little shit who’d tattled on her as a boy and tried to steal her throne as a man, was now a member of the First Prince’s court in Salia.

Tread carefully , Cordelia Hasenbach’s cool blue eyes had told Rozala as she knelt. Tread carefully, or else.

Yet she could not. Gods, how could she? Mother was dead and now the savage had put a knife at her throat. She would not be called to heel like a dog, browbeaten into obedience. Yet the House of Malanza had few friends, these days, for it had come close to the throne but in the end it had lost . No one wanted to share the taint by association, not even those who had been her mother’s most ardent supporters. And so Princess Rozala Malanza at last accepted an invitation to taste the latest Iserran vintages, finding herself seated across Prince Amadis Milenan. A handsome man, the Prince of Iserre, and well-spoken.

“I’d despaired of ever having the pleasure of your company, Your Grace,” Prince Amadis smiled, pouring her a second cup with a steady hand and offering it. “Yet I suppose allowances must be made for grief.”

Allowances, he had said. The chosen word was not happenstance. There was only one master in the alliance that Amadis Milenan was gathering under his banner, and he would not suffer any talk to the contrary. His protection, his help, would come at a price. It ate at Rozala’s pride, and she almost turned back, but she could not. Rozala Malanza would not go into exile, abjure the death of her mother and the answer it must be given. She had the stomach for this fight. And so she smiled, thanked the prince for his courtesy and took the cup she had been offered.

Through peril, rise , Rozala swore, and drank deep.

—

II

The First Prince died and the Highest Assembly gave answer. Too many answers, in truth, and there lay the tragedy: seven growingly urgent sessions were held, and even at the end of the seventh no one had the votes to sit the high throne.

Princess Constance of Aisne – no true princess, not even born to the House of Groseiller but to a branch family of a different name – claimed regency and rule of Salia until a First Prince could be elected, claiming it her right under ancient laws as the closest kin to the buried First Prince. Rozala’s mother laughed and walked out of the Hall of Assembly without another word, Dagobert of Lange and Fabien of Lyonis not far behind her. It would be war, then. Regretful, Rozala’s mother said, but it’d all be settled in a few years after battles separated the serious contenders from the chaff and compromises were forced.

The people bled. The people sang, growing quiet when riders neared. It was a new song, but in a sense it was also as old as the Principate.

Princess said she had a right , it went.

Princess said it’d be a fight

Now princess are all aflight,

And the pot it is boiling.

Rozala Malanza learned war in the saddle as a girl barely grown, taking lesson from fantassin captains and highborn generals as she wore mail and rode under the banner of the House of Malanza. She took her first life at fourteen and Mother’s smile when she returned bloodied was luminous.

“You will be what I cannot,” Aenor of Aequitan said, stroking her hair. “I am no warrior, it is not in my nature, but you are taking splendidly to it.”

One day mother would rule in Salia, Rozala at her side, and bookish Hernan would be made steward of Aequitan as Rozala herself was schooled to ensure the dawn of a Malanza dynasty on the high throne. But it was a golden dream, and the Gods ever laughed at such designs. First defeats in the east, as Constance the Usurper drove back an offensive into Orne at the Battle of the Swallows. It stung, but the war continued. And when the first of the Great Claimants was smashed up north, Fabien of Lyonis kneeling to another’s rights, the armies of Aequitan and its allies marched north to prevent Dagobert of Lange from consolidating power.

The Sack of Lullefeuille decimated Aequitan’s army, cunning Prince Dagobert and his Goethal right hand penning it up in the city and smashing it piecemeal. Rozala broke the encirclement, leading out a few thousand haggard survivors, but it was an unmitigated disaster. Yet Aenor of Aquitan’s tongue was silver, and her treasury overflowing even in defeat, so armies were raised again. The war was not over. When word came of the savage Lycaonese sallying south, it was considered an amusing anecdote. Then Brus fell. Then Lange surrendered, as Segovia and Lyonis knelt.

The anecdotes were no longer amused.

It still shook Rozala to the bone, when she saw that Mother was entertaining envoys from Constance the Usurper. Secretly, but the wind was turning and alliance was in the air. Only for so long, but this Cordelia Hasenbach – who most of Procer had barely heard of a year ago, back then know only for the fanciful tales of Praesi manipulation she’d sent letters about – was scaring the opposition. The Great War was entering its last stretch, and neither Aenor Malanza nor Constance Groseiller had broken a dozen armies to end up allowing some slip of a girl from the edge of the world to claim the high throne in their stead.

“It will be done, my darling,” Mother told her one night. “The alliance is agreed upon, all that is left is haggling terms.”

“I had twenty cousins when this war began, Mother,” Rozala harshly replied. “I now have three.”

And these only because even Constance the Usurper would not blacken her name by having toddlers and newborn babes murdered.

“You would break bread with the woman who ordered this?” Rozala asked. “Share a cause with her?”

The very thought was enough to make her sick.

“I have not forgotten a single thing, Rozala,” Princess Aenor harshly replied. “But I am a princess, not a swaggering duellist: there are times when honour must be set aside. When the deaths are blindly dealt and so pride must be swallowed. Sometimes we make bargains with those we hate, when duty demands it of us.”

—

V

Weeping Gods, but it had all gone wrong.

The Army of Callow should have been in no state to fight after the bruising clashes of the previous day, but Rozala’s belated suspicions had proved true: even as the dead rose from the water, hammering home the gravity of her mistake, the legionaries of the Black Queen had struck. Where the day before had been a dance of manoeuvres and daring, and the day before it a terrifying battle of Chosen and Damned, this one was nothing so clean. It was a blind melee, vicious and messy and chaotic. Exhausted and bloodied by the days of fighting, the Army of Callow and the crusaders went at each other like ragged dogs.

And silently, eerily, the blue-eyed dead kept coming in waves.

The Chosen had gone out into the waters to fight the Black Queen: ice raged in the swamp as spurts of sorcery lit up the morning sky and screams echoed from afar. Rozala would pray for their victory, but not count on it. The battle did not grow any less nasty as the hours stretched, she found, for while a desperate defence was mounted by the soldiers from Orne and the enemy kept from sweeping the camp, the Army of Callow settled into a brutal slugging match with the crusaders – a slugging match Rozala could already see would turn in favour of the enemy eventually, for the dead were coming by the water and the lines holding the shore slowly buckling.

Thrice she traded a charge with the Order of the Broken Bells, hoping her more numerous horse would shatter the enemy’s knights and allow her to strike the flanks, but the Callowan knights were hardy and unflinching. She was forced to withdraw when the left flank of her shield wall, too close to the swamp, began to collapse and rout. Rozala rode there in haste and brought fantassin reinforcements, but all it did was restore the stalemate: her attempt at a push into the enemy’s lines was swiftly answered with goblin munitions and heavy foot. Not long after some of the Chosen return to her side, the Pilgrim and the Saint foremost among them, while others went to bolster the army.

It gave the men spine, Rozala saw, but it wouldn’t win the battle.

“Where is the Black Queen?” the Princess of Aequitan urgently asked, shouting over the sounds of battle.

If she was dead, then this could still be turned around. But before the Peregrine could say a word, a shape was glimpsed riding a winged horse above them and Rozala got her answer. The Enemy approached on graceful wings, bringing death with her, and the heroes at Rozala’s side readied for the fight. Legends, both of them, and still they looked grim. Yet when the Black Queen threw herself down into a hard landing, it was not to fight.

“Truce,” Catherine Foundling claimed. “I’m here to talk.”

And the heroes hemmed and hawed over this, over continuing the fight even under truce flag, but all Rozala could think of was that there would be no winner today. In this brutal mess of mud and blood, no one would win . No matter who claimed mastery of the field at the end of the day, both armies would be broken. And so, when the Chosen spoke pretty words to talk themselves into the killing, Rozala listened to an older voice speaking older words. She was a princess, not a swaggering duellist.

“Stop,” Princess Rozala Malanza ordered, and took off her helmet.

It was a monster she was facing now, one it disgusted her to think she might strike a bargain with, but the Princess of Aequitan had a duty.

–

III

The Great War ended on the fields of Aisne, not in the thunderous clash of arms but in the quiet hours that followed the end of the battle.

Unerring, eerily precise, Cordelia Hasenbach’s riders had found the princes and princesses fleeing the catastrophic defeat. Rozala took dark amusement in the way that Contance of Aisne and her party had been seized before the Malanzas were. The House of Malanza might not have won the war, but at least it could be said that their claim had outlasted that of their most hated rivals. The few months that followed were spent in comfortable but thorough captivity as Cordelia Hasenbach herself journeyed down from Rhenia to formally accept the surrender of her captives and the acclamation of her allies.

Mother’s attempts to get messages out without the knowledge of their captors had resulted only in two servants hanged and their party being stripped of ink and parchment, the Iron Prince not even bothering to tell them in person before giving the orders. The Lycaonese were living up to their rough reputation. Though Rozala insisted, screamed and then even begged, Mother refused to allow her to sit in on the conversation with Prince Cordelia – who was not yet First Prince, for all her high-handedness. Aenor of Aequitan was subdued when she returned, sapped of her usual boundless spirit.

The Princess of Aequitan formally surrendered the morning after and sent orders to her assermenté in Salia to vote in favour of Cordelia Hasenbach’s candidature to the high throne. After making a few public oaths, she was allowed to return with Aequitan with her household, no ‘escort’ accompanying her or ransoms being demanded. Rozala found herself quite startled. These were very lenient terms of surrender Prince Cordelia had accepted, unlike what the Malanzas would have demanded were the positions reversed. The heiress to Aequitan found she rather admired the Lycaonese for her restraint, her mercy.

That last word turned to ash on her, when they returned home and the real terms of surrender were unveiled. Aenor of Aequitan would drink poison, recalled early to the feet of the Heavens. The regal mercy , some called it.

Rozala boiled out with rage. She tried to raise the palace to war again, but the halls with empty with the losses of too many defeats and the eyes of the commanders gone gloomy. There was no stomach left for the fight in Aequitan. And still Rozala raged, for what else could she do? But the march forward of fate was inexorable, and Mother now seemed so... tired. Rozala did not refuse the summons when they came and the servants led her to the ancient throne room of Aequitan. Mother sat the throne, a cup of wine in hand.

“You will have to be wary of your brother,” Aenor Malanza said. “He was raised to rule Aequitan for you as you followed me to Salia. That power is not a prize easily relinquished.”

Rozala nodded, mute from the grief that had snared her throat.

“It was the price for rule of Aequitan staying with our line instead of passing to a lesser branch, my darling,” Mother gently said. “And perhaps it is better this way.”

“There is nothing better in this,” the hard-eyed daughter replied.

“There are deeds, days that demand an answer, Rozala,” the Princess of Aequitan said. “The Ebb and the Flow rule us all, but sometimes... sometimes there are higher callings. Listen to them, my darling. Heed them, and in time you will live up to what I see in you now.”

“Mother,” Rozala begged, tears in her eyes, “there must be another way.”

Her mother stroked her hand gently.

“Through peril, rise,” Aenor of Aequitan whispered. “Go, Rozala. While I still have the strength.”

Aenor of Aquitan took the poison exactly a day after Constance of Aisne was made to do the same. And with that cruellest of mercies, the last defeated claimant to have fought in the Great War died. An era had come to an end. Long live First Prince Cordelia , the people shouted in the streets. Rozala thought of the sound the doors of the throne room had made closing, and polished her sword.

–

VI

Princess Rozala Malanza stood as the only princess, the only royalty of her people, in all of Iserre.

This night, this graveyard of princes, had been a madness beyond what the Ebb and the Flow could frame in understanding. Legends had died who’d been legends for longer than Rozala had been alive. Angels had touched the world, the Dead King been forced to stay his hand and some magnificent eldritch realm had been born of trickery and sacrifice. And of all the western crowns that had sat brows when steel was first bared, only hers remained. Handed back to her by the Black Queen, terrifying praise from a terrifying foe.

Rozala Malanza alone of seven did not flinch, when sacrifice was asked , the Arch-heretic of the East had said, eyes hard and judging. For that, she keeps her crown.

It had been a grand gesture, the Princess of Aequitan thought. One made for honour, not advantage, for there were other crowns that would have been more useful for Catherine Foundling to preserve. So when in the wake of the gesture Rozala’s own kind had begun to squabble like dogs worrying a bone over how the given grace could be traded and twisted, she’d felt something deeper than disappointment course through her veins. It’d been like scales lifted from her eyes.

She saw the contempt in the eyes of the Chosen, the way the Tyrant of Helike grinned at them all with something akin to fondness. Gods, but how petty they must all seem to those eyes. Arrayed against the Principate were Theodosius the Unconquered’s mad get and the greatest warlord of their age, how was this the best to be mustered against them? Even their allies were led by the likes of the Peregrine, royal blood hallowed by angels. Procer had been challenged to meet the hour of doom thrust upon it, to match the calibre of the great men and women standing with and against the realm.

And Rozala Malanza saw, in the eyes of those same people, that Procer had failed to meet the challenge.

It burned that she could not deny it. Even as the hour grew late and the Black Queen played them all for fools one last time, bringing back alive a dead man. Even as the great lords of Levant swore oaths atop the hill, straight-backed and solemn.

“Let it be remembered,” the Grey Pilgrim said, shining bright with pride, “that when the Enemy came for the world, Levant did not shirk its duty.”

Rozala grieved the sight, for what had Procer done to warrant such friendship? Nothing and less. It burned still, that feeling she could now name as shame . Because she knew the honour of tonight might be betrayed in years to come. That her people might live up to the worst of themselves instead of the best. Was that not the nature of the Ebb and Flow? So I beg you, Merciful Gods, could we not rise above ourselves? Even if only one, just once. But the Heavens did not answer any more than they had when she’d been but a girl stewing in grief and rage. Silence. But there were days, deeds that demanded an answer.

And if the Gods would not give it, then she would. So Rozala’s fingers closed around the hilt of the same sword she’d once polished, dreaming of how it would cut through Cordelia Hasenbach’s neck.

Princess Rozala Malanza bared her blade and heeded a higher calling.

–

VII

Once she’d marched on Trifelin and suffered a stinging defeat.

The second time she’d marched there, she’d eked out a bloody victory.

Now the Princess of Aequitan watched the endless spread of the dead marching against her , a shambling tide of steel and darkness. Slowly she unsheathed her sword and raised it, thousands answering her with glittering steel and torches.

“Through peril,” Rozala Malanza screamed.

“ Rise ,” the people screamed back.

She had been a slow learner, in many ways, but Rozala had never ceased to learn. And the third battle of Trifelin would be hers body and soul, this she swore.

One day she would teach her daughter about it.

Chapter 56: Repertoires

“There is no such thing as an unusable army, only armies that are not properly used.”

– Aretha the Raven, Nicaean general

We did not come as an army, not the kind I’d raised and led and fought against. The Firstborn followed in my wake like a trail of colourful armed gangs, advancing without formation and answering to no single general. Ten thousand of the Firstborn had come raiding with me, the eerie grace of their stride belying the disorder of their advance. Few of their sigils resembled each other, be it in looks or composition. My old servant Lord Soln now led hardened elites in steel and obsidian, its circular sigil of grey and red painted over faces and mail, while the numerous sigil of Mighty Kuresnik eschewed armour entirely in favour of long barbed spears and dyed green hair like their sigil-holder.

Through the winding hills of the Twilight Ways they followed me in silence, my dead mount’s gallop keeping me ahead of even the quickest among them. Of the sigils that had answered my call, the greatest Mighty were Soln – once a lord in my short-lived Peerage, and still instinctively deferential to me even when it preferred otherwise – and Sudone, who back during the Iserran campaign had once challenged me and since been taught better. Three days stripped of all Night had humbled it, but though fear had given way to insolence it loved me not. No matter. When it came to commanding loyalty among the drow, fear was more than enough. They would both serve as my captains when the time came.

And it would come soon, for our departure had been swift. It had left all the work that inevitably followed the end of a battle in the hands of General Hune and the Blood, but that’d not been a choice born of shirking but of a pragmatic consideration: so long as we took the Twilight Ways, we’d reach the enemy’s camp before the Revenants could return. Stripped of their vulture mounts by Archer and Huntress doing, they’d have to make their way back on foot and stuck on Creation. Less than an hour had since been spent treading the paths of Twilight, but already I could feel we were reaching the end of our journey. Just a few more hills and we’d be there, which meant it was time to appoint my captains.

I stroked Zombie’s mane, silently instructing her to slow her gait, and shortly closed my eyes. In a twist of will I pulled at Lord Soln and Mighty Sudone through the Night, as if tugging a bridle, and before long tendrils of shadow trailed Zombie’s hooves along the ground. The Mighty smoothly leapt of the darkness, each landing at a full run and never breaking stride. But a heartbeat later we were atop a hill overlooking a small vale where I could sense our crossing awaited, so bade Zombie to halt and the drow smoothly mirrored her. With them no longer moving, I got a better look at the pair I’d summoned.

Soln’s sigil, a ring of swords with an open mouth at the centre, had been enameled into the side of a helmet of clear Proceran make. It hid its eyes from sight, if not the long pale hair that went down its back. Beneath that affectation it wore ornate ringmail under its obsidian cuirass, going down into knee-length mail skirt ending in obsidian greaves covering leather boots. Soln had a martial look to it and bore both sword and spear, two of the three traditional arms of the Firstborn. Like most of those who had once been in my Peerage, my once Lord of Shallow Graves had thrived in the war against Keter: taking Night and loot from the dead had allowed it to slowly turn its sigil into a hardened and finely equipped warband. Its sigil-oath, I’d been told, related to the sharing and obtaining of such equipment: even dzulu were promised mail and steel weapons. It was not a grand oath like Rumena had made, but it had made the Soln an attractive sigil for many in this time of war.

Sudone’s appearance was rather more lavish. Its sigil was woven into many tresses as small coloured stones that made the wavelike blue and green patterns look like they were following some eldritch tide, almost hypnotic to look at. Its ‘armour’ was a decorative breastplate of dyed leather so heavily encrusted with lapis lazuli as to be useless even if it didn’t inexplicably have a neckline. Beneath it were only long gauzy robes in shades of blue and green, though there were enough layers its body could not really be made up beneath – but the different colours made it look as if it were rippling, likely the intent.

It was impressive and unique, as had often been the way with sigil-holders in the Everdark.

Sudone’s only weapon was a long obsidian-tipped glaive and like many traditionalists it disdained the ‘new ways’ learned in the Burning Lands, mocking armour and ‘dressing up dzulu’ as being some kind of perverted fixation for Mighty grown feeble in the head. The Sudone and other traditionalist sigils often took harder losses in battle, but the old-fashioned way they distributed Night also tended to mean they had more powerful Mighty. Those two were, in a way, emblematic of the currents that were beginning to pull Firstborn society two very different ways.

Mind you, the traditionalist here did not have the better reputation of the two. Sudone was taller than Soln in body, and perhaps stronger in the Night, but it was also what the drow called radhular. It translated roughly to ‘glad-joiner’, and was an insult some Firstborn used for Mighty who preferred to act through cabals and alliances instead of picking an honest fight. The connotation was that drow like Sudone only fought when the odds were on their side, something most Firstborn would be quite offended to be told. The essence of the Tenets of Night, after all, was to rise in power by taking it from others.

I’d been silent for too long, I realized, lost in my thoughts as I’d been. Both were looking at me without hiding their wariness.

“Watch closely,” I said, “as neither of you were with the host when we took Lauzon’s Hollow last summer.”

Lightly tapping the dewy grass of the hill, I let Night ripple out and shaped it as the broad strokes of what the location we’d be raiding would look like. Julienne’s Highway, going from south to north, would furrow between steep-sloped and tightly nestled hills.

“The Silver Huntress and her cabal tell us that the entrance has been fortified by the enemy,” I said.

My staff traced ditches and walls not only in the furrow between the hills, but also in a broad half-circle in front of them. Keter had not spared work in preparing for us, though these defences were not yet finished.

“Deeper in, we approach the Hollow proper,” I continued.

Night continued to slowly ripple forward, depicting the way the furrow would continue into the hills until it reached a bowl-like valley, its surrounding slopes so eroded by rain as to be nearly vertical walls.

“There was once a village there, Lauzon, for which the hollow was named,” I said. “Some structures should still stand, and the enemy is likely to be using them as warehouses. There will be many undead here, and perhaps even Revenants.”

In fact the village was named for a folk heroine named Lauzon who’d supposedly beaten back a great army of bandits here and then founded a village when the prince gave her the land as a reward, but I saw no need to needlessly confuse the matter. Night continued to crawl, shaping the latter end of the pass: a wavy, hilly road with several large alcoves that eventually led back to open grounds.

“There will be enemies on the road,” I continued, “but the larger part of the enemy’s camp is out in the open beyond the pass.”

There just wasn’t enough room to cram a hundred thousand people in the pass itself, even if Keteran armies didn’t have to deal with the usual disease outbreaks that came from cramming soldiers tightly together for long times. The two Mighty were watching closely, and not only because I’d ordered. There were no sigil-holders alive who were not practiced raiders, aware of the importance of knowing the lay of the land.

“We will split our force in three,” I said. “So that we might make the most of this night.”

“Wise,” Mighty Sudone muttered. “We will not find a soft belly twice.”

I nodded, then turned my gaze to the other sigi-holder.

“Lord Soln,” I said, and watched the title ripple through its frame. “You will take to a third of our force and strike at the enemy’s fortifications.”

The bottom of my staff tapped the entrance of the pass, in particular the walls and ditches nestled between the hills. Pickler’s engines would be able to reduce fortifications out in the open, but further in it’d get tricky. Best take care of that potential bottleneck now, as no one did attrition warfare like Keter.

“Leave no wall standing and sweep all in your way,” I ordered.

“It will be as you say, Losara Queen,” the drow that had once been my Lord of Shallow Graves replied, pressing hand over heart. “The dead will die once more.”

My gaze moved to Sudone, whose silver-blue eyes watched me unblinkingly.

“You will lead one third of our force as well, Mighty Sudone,” I said, and tapped the northern edge of the pass.

Near the open grounds where the camp lay, but not too far out.

“Your duty is hunt down the Enemy’s ritual-makers and destroy them,” I bluntly said. “Sow ruin where you may, but it is those skulls above all others I require of you.”

It was a fantasy for the raid to be able to rid us of Neshamah’s mages, but we could at least hamper is ability to hammer away at us with rituals. It was always Binds who were capable of magic, never the lesser undead we called Bones, so great concentrations of their kind were usually knots of sorcerers – when they served as officers for his armies, the Dead King used them rather more sparingly. Made sense, considering he had a limited stock of Binds and massive hordes of Bones. Just because Keter’s logistics were different than ours didn’t mean its armies were entirely without them.

“You word is that of Sve Noc, First Under the Night,” Sudone replied, mirroring Soln’s own salute. “Their will be done.”

It would do. Sudone was a better match for the mage-hunt, given that Soln was a great deal more prone to... blunt approaches. It was no Jindrich, mind you, but Sudone was a lot less likely to end up overreaching when it hit the edge of the enemy camp.

“I will lead the last third myself,” I said. “You may pick whatever sigils you like to assemble your war party, but I claim three for myself: Brezlej, Randebog and Kuresnik.”

A pair of eyes, a shield and a swift spear. Those three, as much the Mighty as the sigils they had shaped, were at the heart of my plan for my part of the raid. Neither of the three were considered among the greatest Mighty of the host, either, so it wasn’t even like I’d be stepping on the toes of my two captains by claiming them.

“And should we both seek the same sigil?” Sudone asked.

I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth.

“I would expect the matter to be settled in concord between you two,” I said. “I have no patience for foolishness tonight.”

“As you say, First Under the Night,” Mighty Sudone murmured in reply.

Not convinced, that one. It would have preferred a fight. Sudone’s sigil had grown smaller in the years since the giving of sigil-oaths had become a law of the Firstborn, for its rule was particularly brutal to dzulu. Yet those that remained, and those that had since joined, were hard-nosed traditionalists. That lesser Mighty and even dzulu would be willing to become Sudone knowing they’d be treated like expendable things had startled me, but then the Everdark’s traditions were not something easily set aside even when those traditions were at your expense.

“Might this one ask what deeds you will seek tonight?” Lord Soln delicately asked.

Flattery and not genuine deference this time, I gauged. Not that it made any difference.

“Havoc,” I replied, baring my teeth as my staff came to rest on the valley that had given the pass its name. “Havoc is my business tonight, Lord of Shallow Graves.”

While they went about their sabotage, I was going to return to my roots: I’d make enough of a bloody ruckus that Keter would not dare to look elsewhere.

“Is it not always, Losara Queen?” Mighty Sudone laughed.

It bowed to me, allowing the gesture to end its presence as it dissolved into shadow.

“Our deeds will be worthy,” Lord Soln promised me, “of an empire ever dark.”

It followed suit, though not quite as smoothly. As for me, I closed my eyes and let Zombie guide me towards the last of the distance to the needle-hole that would take us out of the Twilight Ways and into the heart of the enemy camp. Letting the Night flow through my veins, I listened through the sea of thoughts and emotions as my two captains picked their sigils. They went swiftly, the unspoken competition having hurried them as I had wished, and when the last of the sigil-holders, a Mighty Finarok, went over to Sudone I leaned forward with a smile. The darkness came eagerly when called.

“You ride with me,” I murmured.

It carried through the Night, like a whisper into the ears of my raiders. Fear and excitement bloomed, along with an undercurrent of hunger . Oh yes, I mused, these would do nicely. The sigil-holders among them I pulled to me as my mount slowed and then stopped before the very stretch of grass where we would cross. First those I had wanted most: wary Brezlej, grizzled Randebog and bold Kuresnik. But the others as well, the whole throng of them, with only the most eye-catching standing distinguished from the rest. One-armed Vudaga bedecked in jewels, Darissim with the bone-white tattoos and its ebony spear, even bloody Ogoviz – smaller than me, almost childlike, and having never worn paint not made of Mighty’s blood.

Even the least of them had been around for a century, and there some here who had been blooding their spears for longer than anyone save elves could live.

“Sudone has been made a hunter of hunters,” I told them. “And Soln will destroy the works of the Enemy. Ours is to be the hour of the sword, Mighty. Bare and bloody.”

I swept the sigil-holders with my gaze, holding them there look enough for them to look away.

“We will war in the manner I have arranged,” I said. “Listen close now, for you will bring those words to your sigils.”

Nothing too sophisticated would work with Firstborn. They weren’t trained soldiers, and though by now they were veterans one and all it would be decades before a proper drow war doctrine could be made – just adapting the Legion one to Firstborn peculiarities was bound to fail, and spectacularly. So it was tactics in broad strokes I presented them with. Skirmishers out front, the sigils heavy on them taking the vanguard when we crossed. After the first few exchanges armoured sigils would strike in the thick of the enemy, and those few small sigils that were heavy on Mighty were to hunt constructs and Revenants at the exclusion of all else.

The tactics were not new to them, and I trusted they would be carried out skillfully. The dismissal was swift, save for three I held back. Brezlej, Randebog, Kuresnik. I met their eyes, sensing their unease in the Night.

“I have a particular use for you,” I smiled.

They listened, and when I was certain they’d understood I dismissed them as well. Not a moment too early, either. Our way out was just before us, and the forces of Soln and Sudone were nearing their own ways out. Orders trickling down form sigil-holders to sigil, my third of the forces gracefully repositioned into the rough order of battle I’d outlined and resumed its advance. We would be the first into the fire, to draw the most attention.

Within moments crossed, and the hour of the sword began.

—

Two hundred of us, Mighty and dzulu, slipped into Creation.

By the time feet had touched solid ground, the first volley had already been thrown. Keter did not field many bowmen – bows required too much upkeep – but that hardly meant the armies of the Dead King were without ranged weapons: iron-tipped javelins came down as a rain. Two dzulu were unlucky enough to take a sharp tip through the chest before they could liquefy into shadows, but they were the only casualties from the first round. Drow skirmishers were damnably hard to kill. I batted aside the sole javelin chucked at me – it would have punched through my shoulder, by the angle – with my staff and took an assessing look around.

I almost let out an impressed whistle as a second wave of drow came into Creation, for Keter had been busy . All around us the dead turned to match the threat. Already a second volley of javelins was in flight even as drow began to emerge from the shadow tendrils closer to the enemy, but the sigil-holder for the Serbanad howled as it unleashed Night and the javelins froze in mid-air, momentum stolen from them. They clattered to the ground a moment later, even as I pulled Night to my eyes and tried to figure out the lay of the enemy’s fresh works. The abandoned village of Lauzon had been rebuilt into fortified stone warehouses, but that wasn’t unexpected.

The surprise was the scaffolding going up the eastern and western sides of the hollow, intricate sets of stairs and even pulley-lifts. In the darkness I glimpsed hulking shapes atop the hills where the scaffolding led, not constructs but instead engines of war. My brow rose, as those were rare – Neshamah usually preferred his horrors, as they could be used in more ways than simple engines. Which meant, I grimly thought, that these were unlikely to be simple engines at all.

We had maybe half an hour to spare before this got too dangerous to continue, so there was no time to waste. My skirmishers were already on their fourth wave through and they’d closed the distance with the dead, going up close with the skeletons in mismatched armour the Dead King had crammed here. More threatening were the warbands of heavy infantry near the entrance to the hollow: tall skeletons in heavy armour, wielding long spears and greatshields. If my vanguard got in close with those it’d be slaughter, so I breathed out and let Night flood through my veins. A few javelins were thrown at me, but two ispe in Volvich paint had stayed as guard dogs and they shredded the projectiles with howling bursts of air.

I struck the ground with my staff, letting Night crawl out in thin tendrils like spiderwebs along the ground. With every heartbeat more of the hollow was covered, until the crisscrossing covered the full grounds. Firstborn stepped on the darkness without consequences, which had been the tricky part, but where the undead made contact they found the working stuck to them like glue. Much less exhausting than a destructive miracle, and almost as effective: given the size of the heavy infantry and their lack of finesse, most of them were caught within moments. Those that weren’t found their fellows served as the wall they were meant to be, only this time to Keter’s detriment.

“Slayers, begin,” I called out in Crepuscular.

Acknowledged bloomed in the Night as the last of my skirmishers hurried through and armoured drow began sidling into Creation. All around me the hollow had become a nightmare made melee, deft drow dancing around clumsy corpses – many stuck to my miracle – and reaping death as they moved with fluid grace, slipping into shadows and striking with unnatural strength. I waited until two sigil-holders I’d decided on earlier came through, then finally set out.

“Krakovich, Prosij, with me,” I ordered.

I limped towards the old village of Lauzon, the two of them trailing behind me without a thought to disobedience.

“Mighty Krakovich, I am told you know the Secret of Great Gales?”

“It is so, mighty one,” the sigil-holder acknowledged.

“And you, Prosij, are reputed to hold the full suite of the Secrets of Ruin,” I noted.

“A feat long in the making, Losara Queen,” it proudly replied

Good. The Ruin Secrets were on the subtle side, compared to most Secrets, but I’d found them very useful – the trick that’d killed the Saint of Swords was derived from the Secret of Marching Ruin – against most conventional defences. There just wasn’t a lot of sorcery using similar means, so most wards and enchantments didn’t account for them.

“Good,” I smiled. “Mighty Prosij, I want you to use the Secret of Ruinous Downfall on those stone houses.”

I pointed at the warehouses Keter had raised from the old village, sidestepping a skeleton swinging a sword as I did and leaving Krakovich to absent-mindedly slap its head off. Its fingers trailed down the bare spine after, and there was a soft touch of power as Night was stolen from the corpse and added to its own. Prosij looked pained, as if it wanted to contradict me but did not dare.

“There are too many, Losara Queen, and the sum is too large,” Prosij finally hazarded. “It will not be a success.”

“It’s not meant to,” I grunted. “Krakovich, be ready to call on the Gales soon.”

Mighty Prosij, either reassured or wary of arguing further, heeded my command. Biting deep into its own thumb it drew intricate patterns on its bare arm, the Night shivering in them, and only then did it begin to call on the Secret – a stabilizer, the patterns, as the Ruinous Downfall was particularly difficult to maintain. It was based on the principle of entropy, like most Secrets of Ruin, but this particular one had a vicious bent: it went for the weakest part of what it meant to unmake and poured the curse there. In people, that usually meant bursting eyes or the brain, but anyone with Night could fight the curse off so it was usually used on artefacts or structures instead.

When it got unleashed on a dozen stone warehouses instead, it proved thin. Weakened. Which didn’t matter because I’d never meant for the Secret to actually break the stone: what it did, what I’d wanted it to do, was find the weak parts of the buildings and then attack them. Sorcery immediately flared as the defensive wards laid into the stonework by Keteran mages protected the structure, neatly informing me of both the strength of the enemy’s defences and where the weak points were. Masego much admired the Dead King’s wardwork, as it was reactive instead of uniform – it concentrated power where the strike was made instead of leaving it spread out.

This once, though, for someone who could smell out the sorcery it was like shining a light on the weaknesses.

“Keep it going,” I ordered, and let loose the Night.

Veins writhing with power, I grit my teeth and went about it methodically. Shaping a great spike of Night, angrily roiling power, I rammed the strike straight into the weakness of the ward. The warehouse blew as if struck by the hand of an angry god, clouds of a disgusting green miasma erupting as a plume.

“Krakovich,” I snarled, already shaping a second spike.

The Secret of Great Gales were meant to shred entire warbands approaching through tunnels, but it wasn’t the force I’d been after when I’d chosen someone who could use it – it was the size. Correctly divining my intent, Mighty Krakovich drew the cloud of poison that would have spread across the hollow and guided it up into the sky where it could not massacre my entire raiding force. The Dead King did like his poisons, and he would have made sure to keep those both close to the front and under a roof, where the containers would not be damaged by the elements. We went about it in good order, smashing one warehouse after another.

By the last one Krakovich was panting heavily and Prosij looked about to pass out, but we’d left only rubble and poisoned sky where Keter’s poisonous munitions had been held. That alone would make the raid worth it.

“Well done,” I said. “Retreat to your sigils. This is about to get a great deal more unpleasant.”

How many dead had there been in the hollow when we’d first come? A thousand, I figured, maybe two. Not as much as could have been placed here, even though it was a significant amount. By now most the last waves of my raiders were almost done coming through and we’d effectively taken the hollow, though of course trying to keep it would have been madness. We were a cork on a river, not a dam, and Firstborn were not good defensive fighters. The last few holdouts of the dead were heavies, pockets of a few dozens being taken apart by lesser Mighty and drained of Night, but I knew better than to think this a victory. There had been no constructs here, no Revenants. We’d not been contested, and though the poison had been a loss for Keter it wasn’t a major one – if they truly had a Crab close, then not only would they have replacements but they could likely make more. It’d been bait.

Lauzon’s Hollow was defending itself too poorly. Mighty Soln would be hitting the positions ahead of us by now and Mighty Sudone be sowing chaos near the enemy camp, but that wasn’t enough to excuse the poor performance of Keter tonight. It’d all make sense if we had taken them by surprise, but they had to have known a retaliatory strike by the Firstborn after dusk was a possibility. Were this the first year of the war, I might have been on the enemy miscalculating and believing that Ivah’s ten thousand out in the lowlands were all the drow there were on our side. I knew better by now, though.

When Neshamah made mistakes – and he did, like everybody else, for brilliance was not omniscience – it didn’t look like this. This was a trap. One I’d caught in advance and entered willingly, with an eye to the escape, but it would have been a dangerous delusion to believe we actually had the upper hand right now. Making my way back towards the heart of the hollow, where Julienne’s Highway passed, I idly flicked a hand over my shoulder. The western scaffolding went up in black flames, and with a sharp twist of will I subjected the eastern to the same. Petty vandalism, but sometimes it was the little things that made life sufferable.

“Spread out,” I called out. “Prepare for assaults from the front and back.”

Skirmishers took the front on both sides, heavier sigils setting up behind them, but I did not supervise – with Firstborn, doing so was often more harmful than helpful. I pulled at Mighty Ogoviz and Darissim through the Night, called them to me. I did not waste time with courtesies when they rose from shadow.

“There are engines of war up on the hills to the east and the west,” I said. “Go there, and learn of them. Destroy the Enemy’s work if you can.”

I dismissed them curtly, and in silence they melded back into the shadows. I doubted the Dead King would leave those as unprotected as they looked, but it was worth a try. And if it went bad, as I suspected it might, those two sigils were known as being rather quick on their feet. Unlike with humans, the drow conception of honour in no way precluded running away when the opposition was stronger than expected. Safely at the heart of the milling sigils, I wove myself a few protective workings in Night – an illusion, a sharpening of my senses and a trip ward – and straightened my back. It wouldn’t be long now, I figured.

Above, on the hills, the two sigils I’d sent ran into what sounded like entrenched defences. There was fire and light, sorcery as well as clash of arms. And still I waited, almost with baited breath. Ogoviz retreated from the western heights, going down the heights as shadow strands with most of the force it had taken up there, when finally Keter closed its trap. With a bone-shaking hum, wards went up over all of us. Idly, already knowing the outcome, I tried to open a gate into the Twilight Ways and found a lock had been placed over the area.

“The first part,” I mildly said. “Now for the second, King of Death.”

As if called forth by my words, two hulking shapes rose from where they had been lying among the hills. With horrid roars, the great undead dragon creatures we called wyrms spread their wings as their eyes glowed with eerie power. There was a great clamour as the drow who had gone up to the other heights fled in disarray, a tall silhouette in armour standing over the edge and bringing up a bloody head. Mighty Darissim, I recognized. Revenant . I cracked my neck to the side and grinned. Good, Keter had finally played its hand.

Now the fun could begin.

Chapter 57: Battery

“Fear not defeat, for defeat is the mother of learning. Many a time will you be asked this question: are you worthy? Many a time will you have to deny it, until at last you do not.”

– Extract from the Tenets Under the Night, Book of Losara

Mighty Brezlej , I spoke into the Night, begin.

Brezlej Hundred-Eyes was an oddity by Firstborn standards. Most sigil-holders prioritized obtaining fighting Secrets, but Brezlej had instead begun picking up sight-related suites as far back as when it’d been ispe. It had since survived not by being slaying all its rivals but by dint of the unnaturally good timing those Secrets leant it. Its sigil had been shaped in the same image, sharp but fragile and relying heavily on its keen perception. What I wanted from Brezlej was not one its more famous tricks, like the Farsight or the Nine Pridnis Foretelling, but instead one that’d been considered near useless back in the Everdark. The Source-Finder, it was called, and up in the Burning Lands it had found a use at last.

Mighty Brezlej signaled agreement and submission, and I dismissed the matter from my mind. It would reach out to me when it had results and the other two sigil holders I’d hand-picked would hang back until the preliminaries were done. Now, stuck under ward with our backs to the wall, was the time to make asplash.

“SA VREDE?” I asked in a roar.

Are you worthy? The gospel I had first passed on to the Firstborn under twilight glow, long grown into something greater than the sum of my words. It might have been my lips that spoke it then, spoke it now, but the words did not belong to me. They belonged to the grey-skinned silhouettes standing in the dark of Lauzon’s Hollow, those fresh faces bedecked with ancient glories come to wage a war against Death tonight. And they answered, for I’d given them the first half of the prayer but the second was of their making.

“CERA AINE!”

The nuances bloomed in the Night: shame, fond amusement, hard-toothed pride and grim determination.

Are you worthy? I had asked them.

Ask tomorrow , they replied.

An oath, a threat, a boast. They were not yet worthy, but the night was young. I did not often like them, these strange and vicious souls that cruel goddesses had placed in my hands, but there were times where I could not help but love them. How could I not, when I had spent my life taking in lost souls and broken things as my own? Perhaps it was that the Crows had seen in me when they stole me back from the brink, that I would not able to use them without coming to care for them. Even the worst of Firstborn was beautiful in its own way, and when time came for another to stand as first under the Night I would not part with the mantle embittered from my years under it.

The drow had screamed their defiance into the starlit sky but it could not answer. The Hidden Horror did , with fury and crawling madness.

With a deafening crack the sides of the hills broke open in showers of stone, horrors crawling out with ear-splitting shrieks. Above us the stars were blotted out by great wings as the wyrms roared, spewing out clouds of poison onto my raiders as the great war engines atop the hills began to ponderously turn towards us. Over the edges tides of undead were unleashed, leaping down into the hollow – ghouls and skeletons and mages lit in ghostly green, spells already aflight. Among them a handful of silhouettes stood tall, Revenants clad in faded things and awaiting to unleash old horrors. The head of Mighty Darissim was thrown into the throng, leering in death, even as the first strike of the drum was heard.

Deep, slow and unrelenting it shivered through the air. Sorcery flared. Doom , the faraway drum promised. Doom. And through the sound fear and fatigue slipped into the ears of all who heard, sorcery just as poisonous as what boiled within the belly of the wyrms. Sve Noc stirred in the distance, ever jealous of the souls of their flock.

“You’ll have to do better than that, King of Death,” I laughed, Night gathering to me like rivers to the sea. “Let me remind you which of us it was, old bones, who once reigned over the night.”

I had no use for subtlety, not when I was making a point , so it was an arrow of screaming Night that shot up towards that insolently-close wyrm above me – it spun as it shot up, siphoning ever more Night from my veins as Komena’s harsh glee howled against my ear, and the abomination screamed when it pierced its belly. The Night did not fade after, staying a solid length rising straight from the tip of my staff to dozens of feet above the dead thing. Poison oozed down the length of the spike as I shifted my footing, grunting with effort even as a second hand came on my staff and Night surged through my limbs.

With a savage whoop, I slammed the dead dragon into one of the western engine turning towards us.

The belly burst open, unleashing a tide of steaming poison, and though the thing was not destroyed I had shredded its wings and body with the fall. I let go of the Night, gasping, and watched as pillars of wind turned back the cloud of death that’d come for my raiders. Eagerly, a whirling storm of obsidian and steel met the walking dead. I glimpsed only parts of the maddened melee, the nightmare suddenly turned real. Rylleh and sigil-holders split apart Tusks even as they trampled dzulu with impunity, ispe flickered from shadow to shadow as they danced the blades with sharp-fanged ghouls, javelins ripped through ornate breastplates as sorcery and Night traded deadly volleys.

Night had fallen, but there was light enough one would have been forgiven for believing otherwise.

There would be no gate into Twilight to take me up to the heights above, but then I had other ways. I whistled, with a flick of the wrist unleashing a rolling ball of blackflame that tore a hole through a tightly-packed shieldwall of armoured dead giving trouble to the Vuraga dzulu, and lightened the pain on my leg so that I might leap when Zombie passed by my side at a gallop and took flight again. Settling into the saddle I unsheathed my sword and savoured the ring of well-crafted goblin steel. With my knees alone I led her to take me to the eastern heights, where the Revenant that’d slain Mighty Darissim still stood, and my mount’s long wings flapped as she hoisted us upwards in a spiral. Striking at the wyrm had dispersed my protective illusion, but it was not with surprise that I greeted the enemy’s first volley. I’d been well aware it was coming.

Ghostly green flames flew at me in winding streaks, following even as Zombie dipped and twirled, while javelins and arrows came in swarms. Were I tired, were I spent, these could have been a threat. I was neither, for the night was yet young, and so I crushed them head on. Their dead flame I drowned out with my own, and no arrow was so well-crafted that it would not turn to ash when swallowed by blackflame. We came down on the enemy in a storm of fire, my mount whinnying with glee at the sight of the mayhem, and as her hooves touched the rock a circle of dead-become-ash burned around us.

“Come out, Revenant,” I idly called out. “That won’t have been enough to destroy you.”

The noise was soft, under the roar of flames, but not so soft I did not catch it – eyes flicking to the side, I saw the spinning throwing axe about to bury itself in my chest. Swallowing a curse I leaned back and swatted at it with my staff, narrowly landing the blow. But I was looking the wrong way, as a flicker at the edge of my field of vision told me: the Revenant was coming from the other side. Zombie kicked at the enemy but I saw an axe come down and go straight through her leg. Shit , I thought, throwing myself down so she could flee. The Revenant was quicker than her. I glimpsed a blur of pale plate and then a large two-handed axe as it went down her back, splitting her in two.

“ No ,” I screamed, Night already at my fingertips.

I lashed out with darts of shadow but the Revenant met my eyes for a heartbeat – a pale brown, somehow sympathetic – and stomped down into the ash. The erupting cloud covered his retreat, leaving me with the horrible slight of Zombie cleaved in half. The pieces fell, after a moment, with sickening lurch. Destroyed beyond repair, whatever light there’d been in her eyes gone from a single stroke. Swallowing the grief I’d not expected to come, I laid a hand on her flesh and dragged the remains into the Night. I could dispose of the flesh properly, at least. There was no time for more, as another muted woosh tipped me off the enemy was after me again.

This time I ducked below the throwing axe, sharpening my senses further so I might hear from where the Revenant would come. Left , I thought, and lashed out with Night. A ghoul went up in black flames, then I caught sound from the right and burned up another. I was being toyed with. It was only luck that let me catch a glimpse of moonlight on steel and realize that, utterly silent, the Revenant had somehow gotten behind my back and was leaping towards me. A working would be too slow, I thought. Night burned in my arm as I twisted around and met that great axe with my sword and staff, being forced back as pain burned white-hot in my bad leg.

The Revenant withdrew his axe and I struck, sword flicking out, but even with Night along the edge the steel found no purchase in the plate. It’d been bait, and when I blocked the following blow with my staff – spell-forged steel or not, the Revenant’s blade bit not a whisper into the dead yew I’d been gifted in the depths of Liesse – I gave under his strength, stuck on the defensive long enough for him to take off a hand and sock me in the stomach. I spat out blood as a rib broke with a sharp snap, giving ground as I fled backward and flicked off the Night on the edge of my sword at the Revenant in the form of black flame. That white plate, though, was not so much as darkened by the heat of it. Dangerously well-crafted.

“Who were you?” I gasped out.

“Adehard Barthen,” the Revenant replied in stilted Chantant, his voice deep and pleasant. “Once the White Knight, now a hound to the Enemy. Run while you still can, Callowan.”

A White Knight using an axe? Hells, an Alamans using an axe? He must have been quite the odd duck.

“Not in the cards,” I rasped.

The hand taken off the great axe reach behind his back. Another throwing axe, I decided, and threw up a quick gale of wind. But there was a flare of sorcery and it was another great axe that was revealed, one in each hand as he sped towards me. I shaped a tendril of Night and sunk it into the ground right before him, then detonated. He leapt up, just in time for my staff to smash his armoured stomach and forced him back to the ground. I swallowed a scream, my broken rib digging deeper into my flesh. I struck out with my sword, looking for a weak point closer to the knee – if I found flesh, I could burn him inside out while avoiding the enchanted plate...

An axe came down to force aside my blade, goblin steel stubbornly matching Keteran spellcraft, and he swiftly pivoted on himself with his axe spinning with him and aimed for my throat. Gods but he was quick for a man his size. I formed a tendril of Night, curling around my own abdomen and had it drag me out of the axe’s swing faster than I could move, then hammered his helmeted head with the tip of my staff: Night blew up in a heated detonation, but while the helm shook from the impact Sve Noc’s power did not bite into the steel as it should have. Fuck me, but this one was a hard nut to crack. I stole the pain out of my rib, as it was getting too much to bear.

Completion sounded a clarion call into the Night: Mighty Brezlej was done. And it had answers for me.

Though I itched to continue the fight with this strange White Knight who’d already cost me too much, I’d not come here for revenge or a pissing match. My staff struck the ground in front of me, smoke billowing out, and even as a great axe went spinning through where I’d been a heartbeat earlier I weaved an illusion around myself. Lesser undead came flooding the edge of the broken hill, as if answering the Revenant’s call, but I was just one limping step ahead. I skipped off the edge, calling Night to myself. Tendrils of darkness rose from the ground, forming into a flat bar I landed on and then stairs I strolled down as the workings of Mighty covered my back from the shots of the undead.

Mighty Brezlej knelt as I approached, so unusually short and stout for one of the Firstborn – I’d not seen many who could be called fat, though Brezlej fell well short of that – and its gaudy golden trinkets dangled on their strings.

“We have found three sources, Losara Queen,” Brezlej said. “I offer these sights to you.”

It offered up its palm, a small sphere of Night atop it. With a nod of thanks I took the sphere in hand and crushed it. My vision wavered as the memories I’d been given settled into my mind. It took me a few heartbeats to place the three ward anchors Mighty Brezlej and its sigil had found. One in the enemy’s camp proper, beyond the pass – I sunk that memory into the Night and passed it to Mighty Sudone, along with the curt order of destroy – and another closer to the front, close to where Lord Soln was fighting. Its raiders were actually in the memory, getting the worse end of a tumble with ghouls and beorns. I passed along an order to break that anchor as well, Soln replying with a sense of acknowledgement.

“You believe the third anchor is the key one,” I noted.

“It is the source of sources,” Mighty Brezlej agreed.

And it was the one closest to me: not far beyond the hollow, into the winding pass and tucked away behind secondary wards obscuring what defended the anchor. It had trap written all over it, but it needed to be sprung anyway. Fortunately, I’d already handpicked –

“No you fucking don’t,” I snarled.

The wyrm I’d downed had been patched together by necromancers just enough to start moving around again, and now instead of massacring anything daring to climb its hilltop it was getting back on its feet and preparing to bound down into the hollow. There its weight alone would kill hundreds if not thousands of my warriors before it was itself ripped apart by the Mighty. Above us the other wyrm made a pass, spewing clouds of poison and tying up Mighty with defending against them. Too many for comfort, every one of those wasn’t handling more mundane javelin volleys killing the dzulu.

The poison will win, in the long term , the cold voice in the back of my head assessed as Night raced through my veins. The gales were not dispersing the clouds, just pushing them higher. Already a dome of death was beginning to form above the hollow. The thoughts had flickered as my will shaped Night, weaving it into a cable stronger than steel. Without asking I snatched a javelin from Brezlej’s back and bound the working to it before sheathing my sword and leaving my staff to stand unnaturally still. The downed wyrm was not a difficult target, so strength without skill was enough to have the barbed javelin sink into its side.

The cable went from before me to the wyrm, protruding from a rippling sphere of Night, but I wasn’t intending for a repeat of the last time. I ripped out the other end of the cable from the sphere, spinning it out and adding a hook to the end. The downed wyrm leapt, after having batted ineffectually at the cable and found it would bend but not break, but I was swifter still: the other wyrm was making it pass and the hook clipped its belly. Both wyrms roared with dismay as the cable pulled taut, forcing the flying dragon into a fall and snatching the leaping one before it could land atop my warriors.

They both fell on hillsides out of sight, writhing angrily, and without batting an eye I wove a fresh cable and tied if halfway through their shared binding. The other side of that fresh cable I tied to a javelin – offered up solemnly by Brezlej – and with a snap threw it at the hulking shape of Keter’s untouched siege engine on the eastern heights. A hard smile stretched my lips as I felt the steel bite into something solid and the Night sink roots, just in time for the wyrms to try to peel away: one went back up in the air, the other circled west to return to the hollow. Both pulled at the second circle with massive strength. With a thunderous crack the engine was pulled up, and it was with pleased chuckle I saw that the base of the platform had been fused into the rock. The wyrms cracked the hill open like an egg, undead falling below as part of a rain of rock.

That ought to slow the enemy down some.

A tide of dust washed over us and I pulled my hood down, calling Mighty Randebog and Mighty Kuresnik to my side. In the distance I felt an anchor break. Mighty Sudone’s work, and not its only doing by the rising columns of smoke in the distance. The ward cutting us off from the Ways thinned, especially around where the anchor had been, but it did not break. Most likely it wouldn’t until the main anchor lay shattered.

“Brezlej,” I mildly said. “You have tactical command until I return. Aim the Mighty to keep back the poison-cloud and make the wyrms trash everything you can.”

“Chno Sve Noc,” Mighty Brezlej fervently swore.

Randebog was a stately one, wearing a black cloth mask going down to its lips. The yellow cape on its back somehow accentuated the tall silhouette bedecked in boiled leather painted black, and it bore a long curved sword at its hip. Kuresnik was the opposite, if anything: though just as tall, save for its dyed green hair it wore not a thing above the waist. It’d similarly eschewed boots and wore only a skirt of long metal-tipped leather strips as clothing. It had a wild look to it and its vivid green sigil was tattooed on its face, mixing with intricate tattoos of the same hue covering most of its grey-skinned body.

“Open your minds,” I ordered.

With restraint but not gently, I pushed into them the sight Brezlej had shared with me: the main anchor, nestled in the pass and awaiting our destruction. Both drow shivered as the sensation, as the Night that I wielded came straight from Sve Noc and apparently felt... purer that most. Raw.

“Kuresnik?” I asked.

It clenched its jaw, as if straining.

“I can take us close, Losara Queen,” Mighty Kuresnik eventually agreed. “But not there directly. There is a boundary.”

Around us their sigils had been gathering, still fresh and eager from having been kept in reserve all this time. Maybe seven hundred in total, most of them Kuresnik – their sigil was one of the most numerous in my army – though their lot was admittedly thinner on Mighty. The Randebog had never been many and their chosen specialty had not leant itself well to thriving in the war, but their core of twenty one Mighty were what I’d been after all along.

“Do it,” I bluntly ordered.

Mighty Kuresnik slammed the butt its long barbed spear into the ground, Night rippling out, and a heartbeat later its sigil followed suit. Kuresnik, that bold soul, had taken to the new ways with great relish: it was the first of my sigil-holders to have ever taken a Secret it owned and taught it to its own, spreading it around until its entire sigil could use the Secret of Long Strides. Not all Kuresnik were able to use it properly, but enough minds had pondered the matter that while trying to make the Secret easier to use they’d ended up making another entirely. The Secret of the Shadow Road, as they called it, was more or less a communal version of the Long Strides – one that could, with sufficient numbers, be extended to cover people who did not know either Secret.

To my eye it looked like a mirror made of darkness was opened in front of me, and after a wary glance I limped through. A tunnel, I thought, one in which I stood alone. The dark silently roiled around me, swallowing up all sound, but I could glimpse a patch of night at the end of the tunnel that was lighter in shade. It felt like I’d walked for an hour when I strode through the waiting dark mirror at the end, but my sixth sense told me that dawn was barely any closer – mere moments had passed. And still I now stood among a throng of drow, mostly Kuresnik, while ghostly fire rained down from above and sorcery crackled angrily in the air.

“ Forward ,” I bellowed in Crepuscular.

“ Cera aine ,” they shouted back.

The Dead King had known we were coming, and so made this place into a killing ground. The bend in the pass had been turned into a bastion, eight sets of increasingly tall and thick ramparts with the last reaching the height of the surrounding hills. Ghouls screeched as they leapt into the charging Kuresnik, claws and barbed spears tangling savagely, and knots of Bind mages scorched the air with their eerie flames from behind the safety of skeletons so heavily armoured they boasted more steel than bone. Lizards, rare among constructs, lay on their bellies atop the ramparts and spat gouts of flame and poisonous smoke. It was a tide of death, but it was met with vicious valour.

Shaping Night into a great spike, I hammered at the ramparts even as the Randebog began to emerge from the Shadow Road. The walls shook, but they had been warded up to the gills: I turned undead to ash but did not shatter stone. We’d have to do this the hard way. This was an ambush in more ways than one, of course. My Firstborn had emerged just outside the bend, scything through the few dead on the road and immediately turned against the heavily fortified bastion, but Julienne’s Highway continued towards the enemy camp. Reinforcements poured in so swiftly they couldn’t even be called that.

A wedge of Tusks, those great boar-like abominations with bellies full of stone, took the vanguard but behind them a flood of Binds and Bones was coming at a run. On the heights above, to the east, I caught sight of a silhouette in pale plate. Mounted atop a horse entirely of bone, now, but there was no mistaking that great axe. The Revenant who had once been the White Knight bellowed no war cry as he led his mount to skip off the edge of the hills, lesser undead trailing it his wake.

“You again,” I coldly said.

This might have been trouble, were I a fool. Mighty Randebog answered my summons, having been close and waiting.

“Randebog,” I hissed, “ now .”

It nodded, its Mighty gathering around it to lend power.

“I am the curate of forgery,” Mighty Randebog prayed, voice clear and beautiful. “I bear empty sacraments and offer neither rise nor fall, only the bitter deception of the road winding ever round. Hallow me, Sve Noc, and so permit me to share your gloom with all the world.”

The dead knight raised his axe, sensing the power, but it was too late. Before the hooves could touch the ground, darkness billowed out from Mighty Randebog in a great ring. It swallowed whole the Revenant and the tip of the coming reinforcements, before coming at a sudden halt. Within the ring, only my force and the enemy bastion could be seen. No one else would intervene so long as the Secret of the Lesser Gloom held sway over these grounds: round and round our enemies would go, finding nothing but where they had come from. Now , I thought, all that’s left is smashing that fucking bastion to pieces.

I felt triumph in the Night and the wards shivered: Lord Soln had destroyed its own anchor. All on us, then.

Some mageling tossed a fireball at me, curving it past my warriors, and I casually swatted it aside as I took in the sight of the assault unfolding. Normally I’d consider sending light foot into a dug-in position to be throwing away lives stupidly, but the Kuresnik were a different story – nimble as wasps, they flitted from place to place in no way impeded by the heights and the walls. Already they’d swarmed through the first two walls, but looking at the meat grinder that ensued I wondered if that might not be by design: the third rampart was further back than the others, giving a clear line of sight, and the dead took full advantage of that.

With heavies out in the front and some sort of ward stunning the drow when they went up as shadows, they third rampart was proving the cliff to the sea of the Kuresnik. They won footholds, but did not keep them long. How many had died already? A third of the force at least. Lucky for them I’d come along.

“Randebog dzulu, with me,” I shouted.

Even as I limped to the front of the offensive, drow parting smoothly for me, the enemy began to focus their fire on me. Ghostflame and curses, javelins and arrows and stones. I raised my staff, pointing it forward, and wove Night as a vortex of wind sucking in the deadly rain. Within moments the winds were howling with fire and steel, burning bright, and with a grunt of exertion I shaped the wind into a sphere and smashed it down on the third rampart. Sorcery and hot steel erupted, carving a hole in the enemy’s defences, while I dragged myself up to the first rampart with Night tendrils and the dzulu followed with nimble leaps.

The dark filled with nightmarish visions that came almost too quick for me to react. A ghoul fell on me from above and I unsheathed my sword just in time to carve through it, staff coming forward to send a streak of blackflame into some Bind’s leering skull before it could tighten a curse of decay around my throat. The Kuresnik surged forward in the hole I’d blown from them, one even smashing the wardstone that’d been giving them trouble, just in time for the enemy to toss down great pillars of rock. I would have laughed at the absurd mundanity of that tactic, but Neshamah didn’t do mundane.

To the utter surprise of the Firstborn, Night wavered around the pillars – now shining with runes – and those that tried to escape into shadow instead of dodging were crushed. The third rampart, not even fully taken, became yet another killing floor.

Tentatively I chucked a spear of blackflame at the fifth rampart and found it became unstable just before hitting the enemy javelinmen perched there, though it still torched a few. There were more, then, and direct workings were doomed. I’d have to pull something heavy and risk the vulnerability. I called Mighty Kuresnik itself to me, signifying I was in need of a bodyguard, and let the Night roar inside the back of my head. I’d drawn heavily on my well, tonight, and though it was not empty – could not empty, not when the Sisters smiled on me as they did tonight – I was beginning to near the limit of what my body could tolerate using. It was time to wrap up this raid.

As if sensing my intent, Keter pulled out all the stops. Stones shifted and a terrible screech filled the air, swarms of insects emerging from the sixth rampart like a tide and descending. Distantly, I heard Kuresnik fending off arrows and worse. Swallowing a curse I adjusted the working I’d begun to weave on the fly, forced to adapt as the first ranks of dzulu were devoured alive and the Mighty began to torch swarms and drow alike with black flames of their own. A dark shape, vaguely rectangular, began to shimmer into being above the enemy. Sweat beaded my brow. A headache was already pounding at my temples: Merciless Gods but I hated shoving imperative properties into things.

I only had the barest understanding of them through my patronesses, so pulling on one of them always had that horrid bleed. Back when I’d been smoke and mirrors I was able to shrug that off, but these days I was at a risk of my brain beginning to boil if I trifled too much with things beyond my understanding.

It worked, though. I’d pretty shamelessly stolen a favourite trick of Radhoste the Dreamer, the Sixth General, but with my own twist on it. Rhadoste like to make large miracles with magnetic properties, since it could foresee the enemy’s approach and arm its own forces appropriately, but simple imitation wouldn’t help me with the swarms. So instead of a simple magnet, I’d leaned on the Sisters to allow to ‘understand’ a nameless property. It was, essentially, ‘bodies with Night and bodies without Night’. As my miracle flared, the dead – ghouls, swarms, skeletons – were slammed against their own ramparts as a great force repelling all bodies without Night exerted its strength against them.

“Quick,” I gasped. “Clear the ramparts, I won’t last long.”

It was all butcher’s work after that, killing enemies that mostly couldn’t fight back. The pillars that troubled Night were tossed aside with simple strength and the ways cleared as Mighty took the time to get inventive now that they were no longer being shot at. Acid and fire and curses that turned bone to dust lashed out, clearing one rampart after another as the dzulu advanced. I released my working as soon as we began storming the last bastion, spent and covered in sweat, and though there were a few last nasty surprises one of the Kuresnik eventually shattered the last anchor with a well-placed blow. The invisible weight went off our shoulders and I breathed out in relief. We’d lingered long enough, the swarms and Revenants couldn’t be far by now. Retreat , I spoke into the Night, putting an end to our raid.

Bodies were picked up where we could, and within thirty breaths of my order there was not a living soul left in Lauzon’s Hollow.

Chapter 58: Prophylaxis

“One can no more win a battle than one can ‘win’ a hurricane or a house fire. It can, at best, be a disaster withstood better than some others also suffering it.”

– Dread Empress Sanguinara, the Shrewd

The blades had gone back to the sheaths, so as always the generals were left to the grim business of counting the corpses.

With the protective wards set down the rest of our army had crossed into Creation and a camp begun being built, but even so General Hune had prepared casualty reports by the time I returned. A little over nine hundred dead for the fight taking the beachhead, more from the Dominion than the Army of Callow. Significantly more wounded, but we weren’t low on priests so that ought to be a temporary measure in most cases. Given that there was sure to be fighting tomorrow, our standard orders that mages would not currently offer advanced healing stood. Not too unexpectedly, the raid I’d led into Lauzon’s Hollow had turned out more costly than the first battle of the day.

Almost twelve hundred drow had died on those grounds, Lord Soln’s battle claiming the largest share of dead – it’d run into heavily entrenched positions and waiting Revenants. A costly affair, losing more than a tenth of our current force of Firstborn on the first stroke, but the payoff had been worth it. We couldn’t be sure of the enemy’s casualty numbers but around six thousand at the hands of my raiders was a conservative estimate, and that was without taking into consideration the targeted objectives we’d gone after.

On wyrm was destroyed entirely, stormed by a hunting pack of Mighty while I’d been gone, and one of the siege engines made essentially unusable. Soln had devastated the enemy’s fortifications in the front and one of its sigil-holders slain a Revenant, while Sudone had done more damage than the two of us put together. Three ritual sites had gone up in flame along with the mages manning them before it found a fourth too well-fortified to assault and turned instead to setting fire to every structure in sight. It’d even collapsed the mouth of the pass leading out of the Hollow on its way out, which if nothing else ought to slow down the enemy’s repairs overnight.

I sat down with Senior Mage Dastardly from the Third to get my rib seen to as I heard Hune’s assessment of the situation in camp. We were building quickly but too fragile for her tastes, not that there was much of a choice. While Dominion folk and Procerans – the Volignac soldiers and the fantassins drew lots – could be put to work digging ditches, most couldn’t be trusted to raise palisades or assemble watchtowers. It just wasn’t the way either of their peoples waged war, they had no training in it. I called a war council after thanking Dastardly for his work, first to reiterate the watch arrangements – goblins and drow would take the first few shifts, but as soon as we had enough torches and magelights up the forces that’d not fought today would begin sending watchmen – but secondly to share what I’d learned during the raid.

“The surrounding hills have been hollowed out,” I told them. “To what extent I can’t be sure, but at the very least the valley where the village once lay is significantly larger now.”

Meaning the enemy would be able to cram a lot more soldiers into it when we tried to break through.

“More worrying is this,” I continued, pulling at Night.

I drew out the silhouette of the two siege engines I’d never quite gotten a look at.

“Larger than even goblin works, much less those of the dwarves,” Princess Beatrice observed.

Spoken like someone who’d never seen an actual dwarven army on the march, I thought. The stuff they peddled up here was the dregs of their arsenals.

“What does it do?” Lady Aquiline more bluntly asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Neither fired, and they were slow in turning towards us. I’d wager they were being pointed at the grounds in front ahead of the Hollow and that the machines are slow to turn.”

“Not surprising, given the size,” General Abigail muttered. “Old Bones doesn’t usually use this stuff either, Your Majesty, it’s all monsters and spells. I don’t like the looks of it at all.”

Several people leaned forward as the Callowan general, famed for her sharp military instincts, expressing such wariness. They’d not been taking it all that seriously until now.

“Do we have a way to silence it before the assault?” Lord Razin asked.

“We can’t take horses up those hills,” Grandmaster Talbot said. “Gods know we tried, last year. We never found any proper paths for soldiers to go up, either.”

“I intend to send Special Tribune Robber into the hills to see if there are paths to use,” I said. “But I’ll not pin great hopes on the attempt. The area will be swarming with undead, regardless: even Mighty in the fullness of night were unable to seize those positions.”

I hadn’t been able either, and lost Zombie in the process, but I wouldn’t admit to that in front of these people. The myth of my unconquered strength was much too useful to begin chipping at now.

“It might be worth trying a second raid will the full strength of the Firstborn when the detachments return,” Captain Reinald suggested.

“Playing the same trick on Keter twice always ends the same way,” Razin Tanja firmly said.

Good boy , I thought. He was learning, our Lord of Malaga.

“The detachments will begin arriving tomorrow afternoon at the earliest,” General Hune said. “And it would be ill-advised to attack before the following morning. We still have time to consider other methods.”

“The Dead King won’t wait until then to begin attacking,” I said. “Don’t rely entirely on the common watch, you should all keep your own as well. Tomorrow we’ll begin bombardment of the entrance to prevent fortifications from being raised again, but in essence our position remains defensive. We are preparing for a decisive thrust, not spending our strength.”

The trouble would be figuring out how to make our thrust decisive, I’d already gleaned. The Dead King had struck with all his might against Cleves in the west, betting that he could break through there before we could reclaim Hainaut, so he wouldn’t be looking to outright win the battle here: just delaying us for too long would be victory enough. It was hard to dislodge a skilled enemy waiting you out in a fortified position like the Hollow even when they weren’t outnumbering you, and attempting to force the pass would be bloody business. There would be a need for some cleverness here.

The only good news so far was that there was no hint our enemy had caught on to our reserve using the Twilight Ways to strike directly at the Cigelin Sisters, behind our current tussle. I was actually temped to just trade artillery shots with the undead here until the Sisters were seized, actually, since their fall might force the enemy to move from the Hollow. That was just me getting squeamish about casualties, though, I suspected. At the moment time was more precious to us than soldiers, ugly as the truth was. I called the war council to an end shortly after, exhausted but not yet done with my duties.

I held back Princess Beatrice, since I had a question for her.

“Ever heard of a Chosen named Adehard Barthen?” I asked. “He would have been a White Knight.”

“I have not, Your Majesty,” Beatrice Volignac admitted. “Though history was never my strong suit. The name sounds northwestern but that might not mean much: the Principate is not a small realm.”

“It was worth a try,” I sighed. “Kindly ask around if you know anyone of such scholarly incline.”

Might be worth sending word back to Neustal to see if Salia or the Arsenal could dig up anything for me. It’d been a while since I’d lost a fight that badly, and this White Revenant wasn’t even supposed to be the main threat here: that would be the Prince of Bones and his Grey Legion, neither of which had yet made an appearance. Which was worrying me. The Headhunter had not been able to confirm their marks were still there, as I’d not risked Named too close to the enemy defences yet. The last fucking thing I needed was a fresh Revenant with knowledge of my war plans.

Hakram was in not long after, the Apprentice trailing his shadow as agreed. The Ashuran was young, and her face of a cast too hard for people to call it pretty. I sympathized, having been there myself at her age – only without magical powers to make up for it, unless you counted compulsive mouthing off as one. Adjutant came with a mug of hot tea – sweetened with honey – and reports I’d been wanting. I drank of the first, enjoying the warmth seeping into my bruised lips, while gesturing for him to summarize the second.

“Start with the Rapacious Troubadour,” I said.

“As ordered, the Vagrant Spear preserved a Bind and delivered it into our custody,” Hakram gravelled. “The Troubadour then interrogated it in his particular manner.”

“He means the Troubadour ate the soul and went sifting through its memories,” I idly told the Apprentice.

“That is revolting,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

I hummed in agreement.

“Damned useful, though,” I said. “So, what did her get?”

“Confirmation that the Grey Legion and the Prince of Bones are here,” Adjutant. “Eyes on at least twelve Revenants. He also believes, form the movement of troops glimpsed, that the Dead King has been waiting for our offensive.”

I grimaced. Much as I hated to hear that, it fit what we’d seen: the strikes to the west into Cleves had come too quickly after the beginning of our offensive for it to be a coincidence. He’d waited until our armies were committed elsewhere to attack.

“Speaking of Revenants,” I said, “I want you to look into a name: Adehard Barthen. White Knight, possibly from the northeast.”

“I’ll see what I can dig up,” Hakram gravelled. “Difficult foe?”

“Couldn’t crack him before I withdrew,” I admitted. “And Zombie’s gone.”

He let out a soft noise of sadness.

“I’d begun to think that malevolent old thing was unkillable,” Hakram said.

“So had I,” I murmured.

I shook it off, sipping at my tea. This was no time to get sorry over a dead horse dying again, there was a war on.

“Firing platforms?” I asked.

“Pickler says they’ll be ready by morning,” Adjutant replied. “Our artillery will be in place by Early Bell at the latest, though come daylight she maintains her request for Named spotters.”

“I’ll think about it,” I grunted.

I hated to use any Named like that, as it felt like using a magic wand as an arrow, but some of our less combat-ready contingent might be gainfully used that way. I wasn’t going to be sending the Page out into the fray anytime soon, for example, so an argument could be made there.

“The trouble, sir,” Apprentice reminded him.

“I had not forgotten,” Adjutant replied, sounding somewhat amused.

He was in a much better mood than when I’d last seen him, I noticed, and I didn’t even know why.

“The Blessed Artificer went to have a look at our wards,” Hakram said. “Or tried to. Akua sent her packing, in her own polite way.”

“The Artificer has threatened to lodge a complaint under the Terms,” the Apprentice said. “It’s been the talk of the Named in camp.”

“Akua Sahelian is not Named, which makes that threat utterly meaningless,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “And if the Artificer wanted a look at our wards, she should have sought permission from the appropriate officers first. This isn’t the Arsenal.”

“Don’t I know it,” Apprentice muttered under her breath.

I smothered my amusement. Evidently, while pragmatic about trading the assignment as Hakram’s bodyguard and assistant for my backing in being reassigned to the Arsenal afterwards she wasn’t quite as sanguine about the trade as she’d been pretending. I hardly minded, if anything it’d keep her motivated to ensure Adjutant made it through this in one piece. After downing the rest of my tea and dismissing the two of them, I crawled into my cot and tumbled straight into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

I woke up much too soon, one of the Night-workings I habitually lay around my tent having been tripped. When an attendant came into my tent moments later and I slipped back my knife under the pillow, it took his announcing of Scribe as the courtesy it was: the villainess would have been perfectly capable of coming in without tripping a damned thing, or being seen by my guards. The nights were cool enough I’d gone to bed in a shirt, which cut down on dressing time, but I’d not washed before sleeping so I was unlikely to be smelling of roses. Eh, she’d deal.

“I”’ generously assume you woke me for good reason,” I bluntly said, sliding into a seat.

“News from the west,” Scribe replied. “From Princess Rozala.”

I grimaced. Yeah, that was well shaving an hour off my bedrest for.

“Hit me,” I sighed.

“You might recall that the diversionary force Princess Rozala sent out of Coudrent to pin the enemy army at Luciennerie was routed,” Scribe said.

“Not before seeing the Dead King was on the march, though,” I said. “I take it the siege of Coudrent has begun?”

“It has not,” Scribe calmly corrected. “In fact, the last reports from outriders insist there is no trace at all of an offensive against Coudrent.”

I blinked in surprise. Wait, what? It wasn’t that a feint was impossible there – I could think of half a dozen ways it could be done without even using magic – but rather that if that one hundred and fifty thousand strong army wasn’t headed west, where the Hells was it ?

“Is it coming down the blue road instead?” I asked.

Vivienne was in for a ride, if that was the case. We had a stronghold straddling the blue road, north of Arbusans, but even with reinforcements holding it against such numbers was going to be rough. I frowned before Scribe even replied, already suspecting what the answer would be.

“There have been warbands, but no sign of an army,” Eudokia said.

Less than three bells ago, I’d been convinced that the Dead King’s plan had been to strike hard into Cleves while delaying us in Hainaut so that whatever gains we might make were made worthless by an entire front collapsing to our west. But that only makes sense if he attacks along both lines , I thought. Even if Trifelin fell right now – and it was by far a harder fortress to force than Coudrent at the moment, to boot – Cleves would be able to rally and mount a defence.

Which meant I had been gravely, utterly wrong about what Neshamah’s campaign plan was.

“ Fuck ,” I cursed. “We were had. I don’t know how yet, but we were had.”

Dragged into full wakefulness by dread, I turned a hard eye to Scribe.

“Wake up Adjutant,” I said. “I want my full war council up and here within the hour.”

The Scribe nodded, but did not immediately depart. My brow cocked with impatience, as I probably needed to get some pants on if I was going to be entertaining royalty. I had fond memories of doing otherwise, admittedly, but it was best left as a one-off.

“I hear you have been asking about an Adehard Barthen,” Scribe said.

I gestured curtly for her to go on, since it was a rhetorical question we both knew the answer to.

“Though I cannot speak to this Adehard in particular, the House of Barthen is ancient Proceran royalty,” Eudokia said.

“Unless I missed a name when I made myself memorize the Highest Assembly – and I did not – you mean ancient in a very literal sense,” I noted.

“Relatively so,” Scribe hedged. “It preceded the House of Goethal on the throne of Brus, but collapsed after the death of nearly all adults of the line in the Sixth Crusade. In the short-lived civil war that ensued, the Goethals seized power while having essentially no real claim to the throne save force.”

Well, I thought, that was something.

“Anything related to them and a greataxe?” I asked.

It was an unusual enough weapon for an Alamans noble it was worth asking. She stilled a moment, as if deep in thought.

“The heraldry of House Barthen was a white axeman on green, wearing armour,” Scribe finally said. “And their words translated roughly to ‘None May Mar’.”

My eyes narrowed. I’d not scored so much a single wound on the dead White Knight, had I? And my inability to damage his plate – mar it, so might say – might have a deeper source than simple sorcery.

“Talk with Hakram,” I said. “Look into it together. Artefacts like a set of pale plate and a greataxe would be details of interest to me.”

If I was going to be fighting this one again, I wanted all the knowledge I could on my side. Scribe took my words like the dismissal they were, leaving me to limp around looking for a clean pair of trousers and quickly wash myself of the worst of the dried sweat from the night’s fighting. My hair went into a loose ponytail and I went looking through my desk’s drawers for nuts and dried raisins, which while far from a meal would have to suffice until something more filling could be arranged. I unrolled my maps of Hainaut on the carved table, setting down painted iron blocks for the forces once more.

I wasn’t seeing the solution, and it was like an itch I couldn’t scratch. I honestly couldn’t make sense out of the Dead King’s campaign plan here. The army here in Lauzon’s Hollow to stop us made sense, no arguing with that, but the rest wasn’t adding up. There were too many little details going against the grain. Like Prince Klaus’ best efforts to bait out the army holed up in Juvelun failing even though at first his advance had been harassed quite aggressively, for one. The way that attack on Trifelin, which Princess Rozala had turned into a bloody fortress, had been obvious enough in coming we’d known it would for weeks if not months.

And not the supposed march on Coudrent turning out to have been a feint, which made some sort of sense, but less so that there’d apparently been no follow-through . Where had the army in Luciennerie gone? It should be hurrying down the blue road at breakneck pace right now, in an attempt to move quickly enough even through the Twilight Ways we’d be too late to reinforced. Instead an army of hundred and fifty thousand had disappeared. In principle, going into the countryside and off the roads it was possible to cut through the hills and reach Cigelin or the capital from Luciennerie.

In practice, that same lack of roads meant that the journey would be so slow that if my army broke through Lauzon’s Hollow in the next three days we’d still get to the capital ahead of the Luciennerie reinforcements, and with time to spare. My host was capable of beating such a force on the field, especially from a fortified position like the walls of Hainaut. Would the army in Juvelun move to the Cigelin Sisters and try to slow us down there instead? But that’d be throwing away another army , I thought. Neshamah had bones to spare, but he wasn’t exactly in a position to be pissing away armies like this either.

Honestly, even just taking Hainaut back up to the Cigelin Sisters while sealing the Malmedit tunnels out east and investing Luciennerie to the west would be a major victory for us. It wouldn’t deal with the bridge up north, which would still need to be destroyed, but that could be attempted from our new fortified lines – which would include, for the first time since the beginning of the war, a shared frontline between Hainaut and Cleves through Luciennerie. That’d be bad fucking news for the Dead King, and this entire gamble did not seem like his kind of stratagem at all. Which meant I was still missing something.

It had to be about that force of two hundred thousand, the one still missing. It’d last been seen north of the capital, and obviously it wouldn’t be able to move quickly when it was so large a force, but maybe it’d gone west? It might hit Trifelin, still being besieged, as a second wave. Hells, it might even try to attack the shore elsewhere entirely by going through the bottom of the lake. I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them. No, I decided. That wasn’t it. There’d be sense in that strategy – the Luciennerie army would then finally attack our defence lines after having delayed, forcing us to commit there and not reinforce Malanza – but that was, as the Intercessor had reproached me, still thinking like a general. Neshamah wasn’t trying to win a war, not like we would.

He was trying to exterminate vermin.

Battles and strategic victories meant little to him, it was only the destruction of our forces that mattered. And he wasn’t going to get that out west in Cleves, not when so many of the prominent Named and our finest armies were here in Hainaut and taking risks . The killing blow would come here, on this front. I could feel it in my bones, even if I still could not discern the shape of the doom to come. My war council filed in just as warm meals and steaming mugs of tea were brought in for everyone – Hakram’s eye for detail had not failed me – and I filled them in as everyone dug in. Not everyone understood the trouble we were in, unfortunately.

“I’ll not complain at fighting fewer enemies,” Captain Reinald said. “Let the Princess of Aequitan turn them back from her nice, cozy fortresses.”

“The dead will not grow wings, Black Queen,” Lord Razin said. “We’ll find this missing army sooner or later.”

I eyed him with displeasure.

“Or they’ll find us , Tanja,” Lady Aquiline flatly said. “This is grim news.”

Good girl , I fondly thought. She was learning, our Lady of Tartessos.

“In the worst case scenario,” General Hune said, “the force that routed the raiders from Coudrent could have been a simple large detachment – fifteen or twenty thousand, enough for a full-scale assault to be inferred by scouts – while the rest was already marching east. They could already be closing in on the capital, or even the Cigelin Sisters.”

I hadn’t even considered that, in truth. I nodded appreciatively at the ogre, even though she’d made it plain we might be in more trouble than I’d thought.

“Word should be sent to the Iron Prince,” Princess Beatrice suggested.

“It will be,” I said, “but there’s no guarantee the messengers will make it there, much less back to us with an answer. He’ll be north of Juvelun and approaching Malmedit by now.”

Meaning his back would be very much exposed, and the roads about as safe as having a drink in the Tower.

“No point in talking much about it, is there?” General Abigail shrugged. “Only one thing left to do.”

I suppressed a grin at the sight of every eye in the room turning towards her. See, the thing about that little jewel of a find was that while she was deeply paranoid – a healthy survival trait, in the Army of Callow – and just a little on the side of cowardly, she was also a significantly better commander than she believed she was. Her trouble was, in essence that her points of comparison were the finest generals of our time. She had the stuff, though, the spark that meant you had the potential to be one of those. The War College couldn’t teach you that, and while today Hune might be the better commander in every regard a decade from now I’d bet on Abigail of Summerholm nine times out of then. Something like anguish struck the other woman’s face when she realized that her conclusion had not, in fact, been obvious to everyone else in the room.

“Proceed, General Abigail,” I drily said.

“If we can’t figure out what the Dead King’s up to, then we have to punch through as quick as possible,” she hesitantly said. “Doesn’t matter what his plan is, if we throw a sharper in the middle of it.”

She’d put her finger to the pulse of it. Tempting as it might be not to act until we’d figured out what Neshamah was up to, it was too late for that. The armies were already marching, the bets had been put down. Now the only way out was through.

“My thoughts exactly,” I agreed. “It has now become imperative to break through even before the reserve strikes at the Cigelin Sisters.”

It’d allow us to secure the lands between the Hollow and the Sisters swiftly, and make sure the army holding Lauzon’s Hollow was annihilated instead of dispersed. I had no intention of allowing chunks of it to break off after we won the field and cut our supply lines after we moved on. We’d bottle them up in the lands between the two armies and eradicate them before moving on the capital together.

“Prepare for battle,” I ordered my war council. “As soon as the artillery is ready to begin firing, we will begin probing for a weakness to assault.”

There was no arguing with that, so as soon as the meals were finished they returned to prepare their men. I’d been blunt with my commanders mostly for the sake of clarity, as hurried or not I did not intend to throw soldiers into the meat grinder of a straightforward assault of the Hollow. It had become undeniable, however, that we no longer had the time to be too sly about forcing out the enemy. I was left to rely on the possibility that my first leanings might have paid off, so when a bone-tired Robber returned to camp an hour after dawn I had him brought to me directly. Dusty and bloodied, he still came in with a swagger. It did not hold for long when I asked for a report, though.

“I’ve got something,” Special Tribune Robber admitted. “But I’m not sure you’ll like it, Boss.”

“It beats the nothing I currently have on the table,” I frankly replied. “Talk.”

“There’s no goat paths left,” the goblin told me. “Keter got clever about it, broke up anything that might serve as a road soldiers could use coming from the outside. Went over the hills by climbing, but the place is full of ghouls and mages. I lost most of a line to some pretty well-hidden wards.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“Blew up the dead,” he said. “Keter’ll get no word out of my lot, even in death. It was the sharpers that let us find out what we did, actually. You mentioned the hills were hollowed out some, Boss, but it’s a lot more than that. They made the sides of the pass into a massive cavern camp, I reckon.”

I grimaced. I’d not thought that the Dead King would have invested so long in building up the Hollow, or that we would have missed it. Hells, with work of the scale he was mentioning the dead must have been at work even before we seized the pass last year. They’d hidden their tracks well, if even heroes had missed them.

“You can get in there?” I asked.

“Sure,” Robber of the Rock Breaker Tribe grinned. “We know a thing or two about digging, goblins.

He elaborated further under my questioning. Having assessed that trying the hilltops any further would just get more of his people killed to no gain, he’d instead spent most of the night getting a sense of the lay of the structures under the hills. The malevolent imp had three points of ingress for me and a sketch of what he believed the lay of the artificial caverns might look like – a copy of which was already in Pickler’s hands. Good, that’d spare me sending him to do that afterwards.

“Taking those would get real messy, Boss,” Robber told me. “Legions don’t do well on grounds like those, not against things like Tusks and Beorns. We need an open field for our mages to handle their like.”

“I’m aware,” I mused. “But if you’re right, the enemy will have hidden a significant part of its army under the hills.”

Waiting to surprise us after we’d taken the hollow, I decided. First they’d bleed us taking the entrance, and after we pushed the dead back beyond the old village they would have sprung the trap. The raid of last night paired with my favourite marauders had sniffed out the jaws, though, so we might be able to turn this on them. I drummed my fingers against the table, closing my eyes and forcing myself to think. The Dead King’s army had a superior position, superior numbers and it’d been preparing for this fight for long enough it’d still have a few nasty surprises up its sleeves. What did my army have that could overturn all those advantages?

“Maybe they’ll turn around and walk home, if we’re lucky,” Robber mused. “Stranger things have happened.”

My eyes opened. That was an answer, yes. Luck and goblins .

Didn’t sound like much, but you could do a lot of damage if you used those right.

Interlude: Old Dogs

“I fear our tyrant in the east, but dread I reserve alone for what staying on our knees would make of us.”

– Queen Eleanor Fairfax, founder of the Fairfax dynasty

General Abigail looked into the Baalite eye again, wishing generals didn’t have to be on horses.

It made her stand out, and people who stood out did have that unfortunate tendency to get shot. She couldn’t even use the damned thing to run away, because it made her stand out so people would bloody well notice. It was the sixth time since the Third Army had begun to mobilize that she was having a look at the enemy positions, but repetition wasn’t improving her prospects any. The drow had done good work, smashing up the enemy’s walls and collapsing their ditches, but the corpses had worked tirelessly overnight. The walls had been rebuilt into little more than stacked stones, more like a cattle-fence than a fortification, but the nice thing about cattle was that it wasn’t usually trying to stab you.

Somehow she doubted the undead would be so congenial.

“At least they’re low on bowmen,” General Abigail muttered. “Javelins aren’t as bad when it gets down to it.”

They did a number even on plate and they could scrap a shield, sure, but the range was lesser and you couldn’t carry anywhere as many of them.

“I don’t understand why Keter fields so few,” Staff Tribune Krolem gravelled at her side. “With their numbers, mass volleys would be near impossible to deal with.”

Except with them mage shields, of course, but those would be needed for the more exotic stuff the enemy had up its sleeves.

“Their dead are too dumb,” Abigail absent-mindedly told him. “The Binds, the one with souls still nailed to the corpse, they’re as clever as people. But the Bones? They can’t maintain gear for shit, certainly not something as finicky as a good bow. Javelins are simpler, and easier to make too.”

She glanced at her right hand, the tall orc looking like he was spoiling for a fight. It wasn’t his fault, Abigail reminded herself. Orcs were just born that way, with more teeth to compensate for the absence of the part where good sense went. Besides she’d probably like fighting more if she got to eat the losers afterwards, she figured. Tavern rates these days were basically robbery, so greenskins were definitely coming out ahead there.

“We’ll wait until the Sapper-General finishes her bombardment to advance,” she told Krolem. “And send our bloodhounds out, would you? I want this field cleaned up before our shield wall starts advancing.”

“On it,” the Staff Tribune saluted.

Good man. Some would have called Abigail paranoid for the precaution, but they couldn’t. Largely on account of them all being fucking dead while she was not. A nice empty field all the way to Lauzon’s Hollow, after Keter was allowed time to work its wickedness? Yeah, she wasn’t falling for that one. Her ‘bloodhounds’ were a suggestion she’d made to the Black Queen last year that got approved, to her surprise: mixed crews of regulars, priests and lesser magical talents that could sniff out the kind of hidden devilries the Dead King liked to leave lying around before her people walked into them. Leaving them to do their work properly would slow the advance, but Abigail didn’t exactly mind. She looked into the Baalite eye again, silently bemoaning her fate.

While it’d been a relief to learn that the Black Queen’s battle plan wouldn’t require the Third to charge at the mouth of Lauzon’s Hollow under enemy fire, she’d still ended up stuck leading the vanguard. Her inexplicably enthusiastic soldiers might think it was an honour to serve as the foremost meat shields – Dauntless , they’d all cheered, like the word meant they were no longer the people standing closest to swords trying to kill them – but General Abigail was not fooled. When you tangled with Keter, the front was the last damned place you wanted to be. Nowhere near was her own preferred locale, but she’d not had a great deal of success getting there.

Gloomily, the general leaned back on horse as the wings of the assault assembled to the east and west. The Second Army under General Hune would stay behind her and serve as both the reserve and the escort for the siege engines, while to the left the Procerans had assembled under Princess Beatrice and to the right the two leading members of the Blood had been granted a shared command. It made the west the weak flank, not as steady or numerous, but the Black Queen had sent most of the alliance’s horse there to prop them up. It would be some time yet before they had to advance, General Abigail knew, and when they did she’d at least have Named with her.

It was still with despair that she realized they’d somehow got her again.

She’d had a plan, a solid one. It was too late to back out of this whole general business now, as a pragmatic soul she’d been forced to recognize as much. Besides, Abigail of Summerholm hadn’t stuck out this bloody nightmare of a war to not retire with a full general’s pension: when she got home, she fully intended to never lift a finger again for the rest of her days and maybe drink herself into an early grave. It was her godsdamned godsgiven right to do so . So the plan had been adjusted. Abigail was going to make herself just enough of an embarrassment that they’d reassign her back home where she couldn’t make the Black Queen look bad in front of all the fancy nobles by being a lout.

It would be a delicate line to walk, being embarrassing enough to be sent away but not enough to be demoted, yet as the daughter of a long and storied line of loutish drunks Abigail had trusted in her blood to get her through this. It, uh, hadn’t panned out quite how she’d expected. People kept laughing when she said terrible things like ‘sure the Dead King horrid, but in his defence he’s been stuck living next to Procer for centuries’ and ‘makes sense the lake by the Dominion is from a hole in the ground, that’s pretty much the rest of the country too’ and instead of being made of pariah the amount of invitation to parties had tripled.

She’d dug deeper into loutishness, trying things like saying ‘you people’ and repeating the filthiest stories you could hear living in Summerholm as a brewer’s daughter, but it turned out these fancy Procer folk were shocking hard to, well, shock.

The only upside had been that these days Abigail might have to worry about nooses and the Black Queen eating her soul, but at least she didn’t often have to worry about being stabbed! Best thing about being a general was that when you got to a nice safe spot away from the frontlines, you got to call it strategizing . Very fond of strategizing, Abigail was. She did as much of it as was humanly possible. But now, as the Third Army spread out on the plains before Lauzon’s Hollow, the dark-haired woman finally understood the final treachery of her rank: even if she stood at theback of her army, that army could still be made to stand at the front of the coalition. She’d been had again.

The general looked into the Baalite eye again and sighed. It really was a shame about the horse, she thought. They might not have noticed her slipping away otherwise.

—

Though Robber had been told that his assignment was to serve as Pickler’s bodyguard, he suspected that what he’d actually been sent here to do was make sure that the Sapper-General of Callow did not end up murdering her assigned spotter: the honourable young lord Gaetan Rocroy of Cantal, also known as the Page. Robber admired the young man in a deep and sincere manner, which he’d not hid in the slightest. It’d taken him years of work to able to get under the skin of everyone he met, while the boy was pushing through on natural talent alone. It was a wonder to behold, really.

“Praesi measurements are quite inadequate,” the Page blithely said. “Outdated, even. It is the Salian paume that should be used, not the-“

Sergeant Snorer, who had been a sapper for more than decade, twitched so violently he snapped the thin copper wire he’d been adjusting. Crows, but the boy was an artist. The talent could not be suppressed, Robber would not allow it. It had to be encouraged, nay, cultivated ! It would be a loss for Creation otherwise.

“Fire,” Pickler coldly ordered.

The Page had not quite got out of the way, so when the trebuchet’s counterweight came down he had to hurriedly hop to the side.

“Eyes on the stone, lordling,” Robber called out.

The hero glared at him for the presumption before doing what he was supposed to and serving as a good little spotter for the sappers of the Army of Callow. The boy’s eyes narrowed after the stone hit the side of a steep-sloped hill to the left of the hollow’s entrance.

“It shook,” the Page said. “Stone shattered on the surface. No large crack, though, you’ll need to get closer.”

There was a shared sigh by everyone here who’d studied ballistics. Eight hundred feet was well into the range of an imperial trebuchet, which was the model the Army of Callow used. If the stones weren’t enough to crack open the hills at this range, then ballistas – which shot further, but with significantly smaller projectiles – would do next to nothing if deployed. The choice left was either to keep hammering away with the trebuchets for hours or start pulling out more interesting ammunition. The Boss had made it clear that she wanted those hills torn open for her plan, and she hadn’t looked like she was in mood for an argument as to the practicalities involved.

“Iron framework inside, do you think?” Robber asked Pickler.

She licked her chops thoughtfully, chewing on the thought.

“If your assessment of how hollow the hills are is even remotely correct,” Pickler said, “then it is the most sensible theory. It could be wards, I suppose.”

“Boss mentioned when one of the siege engines they’ve got was ripped away, the top of the hill came clean off with it,” Robber noted. “She thought the platform was sculpted from the stone, but maybe...”

“It was simply anchored in metal beams that crisscross the summit of those caverns,” Pickler approvingly said. “It would be metal strengthened with spellcraft, to have had this particular effect, so more likely steel than iron.”

Long, spindly fingers – she had sapper’s hands, Pickler, delicate and deadly – drummed the side of the closest trebuchet thoughtfully.

“We’ll keep hammering away at the eastern hills,” the Sapper-General decided. “Nothing we have will crack the western ones right now. I dislike relying on sabotage, but it seems necessary this once.”

Without even a need to be ordered, the sappers around them heeded her words: the nine trebuchets were prepared for concentrated fire, pivoted on their platforms. Like a swarm of ants, the goblins to work. The Page looked quite discomfited, staring at them uneasily, so Robber decided to lend his help. Sidling up to the boy, he offered a wide and fanged grin.

“Do tell me about these paumes , good sir,” Robber asked. “Unlike my ignorant and hidebound colleagues, I am always open to heeding superior Proceran learning.”

The boy’s face lit up with enthusiasm, and from the corner of his eye Special Tribune Robber caught sight of a lieutenant kicking a trebuchet stone in fury.

Would Catherine be open to permanently assigning the boy to him, he wondered?

—

Roland de Beaumarais suspected that many would have envied the surface of his current situation – namely, walking forward slowly as four beautiful women were pressed up against him. The whole part about it also involving a tricky illusion spell and being surrounded by undead desiring to kill them all might have been considered something of a drag, mind you, and sadly he wouldn’t even be able to remember the experience fondly. Not when Sidonia kept elbowing him, as the Levantine heroine just had the most horridly bony elbows, or when the Silent Guardian was not stepping on his feet for the eight time.

Gods that plate armour was heavy, aside from the fact that the Guardian herself was in no way a small woman.

“My foot,” the Rogue Sorcerer croaked out in a whisper. “ Please be careful.”

To the Silent Guardian’s credit, she looked somewhat apologetic and tapped his shoulder in apology. That already put her ahead of Sidonia, who’d just snickered when told she kept elbowing him.

“Stop whining,” the Blessed Artificer said. “You’ll give us away.”

That Adanna of Smyrna spoke the reproach without so much as a hint of irony to her voice was, in its own way, impressive. Roland made himself count to five so he would not indulge in a retort and then they resumed their slow advance. The paths that Catherine’s worrying goblin lieutenant had found proved true eventually, the third attempt allowing them to slip into a crevice that led into the great caverns below the hills. There’d been difficulties on the way, of course, but between Roland’s knack for ward-breaking and the Silver Huntress’ keen senses they’d managed to avoid giving themselves away.

It was inside they’d been forced to stay under illusion, as the place was crawling with undead. Even in the rare hallways Binds were always patrolling, and Roland pressed close to the wall as the other Chosen did the same to once more avoid the edge of his illusion being touched by a patrol of thirty undead soldiers in pristine armour. The caverns were shaking from the pounding of the Army of Callow’s engines was giving the surface, but while sometimes stones were loosened the place seemed in no danger of collapse. He could understand why Catherine had taken the risk to send them here, now.

Only a band of Chosen would be able to see this through halfway quietly, or without everyone involved dying in the process.

“We’re close,” the Silver Huntress murmured. “Only one level left. Adanna, you’re sure you can’t do it from here?”

The device the Blessed Artificer had prepared ought to be able to collapse the cavern’s ceiling, but she’d insisted it ought to be triggered as close to it as possible. There were hallway rings going up the sides, fortunately, and four nerve-racking levels up the five of them now stood close to the highest they’d be able to stand. There was a fifth level, but it seemed narrowed than the others.

“I could have done it from the bottom,” the Artificer peevishly replied, “but that would be rolling dice. I can only guarantee results from the level above us.”

“Then we go,” the Huntress sighed. “Steady and careful, all.”

The illusion Roland was currently using covered sound, so long as it was of sufficiently low pitch. It was why he’d picked something otherwise so unstable and finicky among his repertoire. Which was why when a great axe sunk into the wall just above his head, a tall Revenant in pale plate smiling mirthlessly as the spell shattered, he was rather surprised.

Halfway quietly was out, the Rogue Sorcerer mused. Time to see if ‘without everyone involved dying’ could still be salvaged,

—

There was a moment of silence as a massive lance of Light tore through the hilltops on the left side of Lauzon’s Hollow, spinning up in the sky like some behemoth’s spit until it thinned and vanished into a shower of motes. Trails of smoke followed behind, the heat from the priestly power having set small fires and scorched rock.

“You know,” Robber said, looking at the rising smoke, “when the Boss told me there would be sabotage, I figured it would be something a little more...”

“Subtle?” Pickler suggested.

“Yeah,” he faintly replied. “That works.”

Was that from the woman that looked like Wasteland get? Gobbler knew it couldn’t be the Vagrant Spear or the Silver Huntress – the former would have had Archer bragging up a storm, while the latter would instead probably have tried to kill Archer by now. The Rogue Sorcerer was a skillful meddler but no used of Light, and the Silent Guardian was by reputation a solid warrior but not particularly powerful. That left only the woman with the Ashuran accent and those golden highborn eyes that had Robber feeling wary every time he saw them. People with them were usually quite dangerous, when they got to live up to the Blessed Artificer’s age.

“It will do the trick, regardless,” Pickler shrugged. “Shame they didn’t get the enemy engine, but I supposed it will have to do.”

In front of them, the trebuchets snapped into motion. One after another they pounded at the hillside, until finally the thunderous crack the sappers had been working at for an entire bell finally resounded. The Page excitedly informed them there was a large fissure now. Another seven stones and finally the side of the hill collapsed. The iron bones that’d held it up were could still be glimpsed in the rubble, twisted and bent but rarely broken. The sight matched that on the eastern slopes, which had been smashed a more than half a bell ago.

“Hold fire,” the Sapper-General ordered. “The trebuchets are done. Begin advancing the copperstone ballistas as soon as the Third advances.”

Ignoring the Page who was asking whether he could finally leave, Robber picked out one of the trebuchets and began to climb his way up the beams. Unlike his fellows, he had an inkling of what was coming and he wanted as fine a seat to witness is as he could. Deftly raising himself atop one of the legs supporting the pivot, he watched as a great wyvern took to the sky from near the frontlines. Not a real beast that one, it didn’t move quite right, but his sharp eyes caught sight of two silhouettes on its back. The Summoner would be one, he knew, but he wasn’t sure for the second.

Archer ought to be with the Third, since it’d serve as vanguard, but you never knew with the Boss. Not like she was low on Named these days, anyway. The speculation served to entertain him as the wyvern flew forward, swarms and a wyrm rising to meet it in the distance. A death warrant for the two Named gone out, if it’d been meant to be anything except a distraction. It wasn’t, though, and with a pleasurable shiver Robber felt the air begin to thicken. He gulped down his breaths as if struggling against an unwilling Creation, the sheer powerbeing gathered always surprising him. It was good for this army to be reminded exactly what the Black Queen was now and then, the Special Tribune felt.

Cat played nicer, these days, so sometimes the westerners forgot who it was exactly that’d won the Tenth Crusade.

A large circular gate winked open in the sky above Lauzon’s Hollow, and to Robber’s delighted surprise a heartbeat later a second one did. Sahelian was finally earning her keep, then. The hollowed out hills on both sides of the pass had been torn open at the top and smashed in the front, so now all that was left was using that broadened field of engagement and giving a pitched battle – or so conventional wisdom would have suggested. That wasn’t the Boss’ way, though, not at all. She rarely settled for a single knife in the kidney, it was one of the more charming things about her.

So it was with utter glee that Robber began cackling when he realized that the gates in the sky weren’t connected to the Twilight Ways at all. The way water began pouring out of them was something of a hint.

—

Roland pulled deep on one his strongest offensive magics, forming fire and turning it dense and liquid before tossing a hundred droplets of it at the mass of skeletons coming after them. The Vagrant Spear, pulling the unconscious Adanna closer to her, turned just long enough to send a blast of Light at the armoured Revenant still pursuing them, cursing angrily in Ceseo when the dead hero shrugged it off like he had everything else they’d thrown at him. Nothing made a dent: not steel, not sorcery, not even Light. The Silent Guardian had managed to throw him off the ledge earlier, the most success they’d had, but he’d been back before long.

With more Revenants, of course, for the Gods despise Roland deeply and wanted him to die screaming.

Alexis put a seventh arrow in the shield-bearing titan of a woman coming after them with a halberd, that Revenant’s unsettling laugh echoing across the cavern even through the cacophony of an entire army mobilizing to kill them. Arrows clattered against the wall as they passed by a pillar, just a second too slow to catch any of them, but already they were being charged at by armored skeletons ahead and javelins were in flight from somewhere he’d not even looked at yet! Swallowing bile, already feeling the raw sting of his aspects being leaned on too harshly, Roland conjured a shield to take care of the javelins.

The Silent Guardian plowed into the skeletons a heartbeat later, smashing everything aside like a bull in a house of glass, but deep down the Rogue Sorcerer knew it wouldn’t enough. It was still two levels down before they’d get to the crevice they’d squeezed in through and there was simply no way they were going to last that long : opposition was hardening the further down they got. The Guardian screamed when a great barbed arrow punched through her mail, shot by some distant Revenant with a black iron bow, and though the Silver Huntress managed to turn aside a blow of the Revenant in pale plate and throw him off the ledge again, it was a temporary relief at best. Already the one with the halberd was coming at her, and now that the Silent Guardian was wounded and was going to start struggling with their front it would all be-

A wall of water came down from the sky, smashing through the holed that’d been melted through the ceiling of the cavern. The halberd Revenant was caught by a stream and smashed into the wall as the Huntress danced away just in time.

“That also works,” Roland admitted.

Mind you, if they didn’t figure a way out of this soon they were just going to drown instead. Still, this was already a distinct improvement. Thank you Catherine , he mused. Very timely of you. Screaming at each other so they could hear over the roar of the falling waters, the Rogue Sorcerer and the Silver Huntress agreed on a plan. If you could call an agreement to get the Hells out of here as quick as possible that. Water was beginning to gush down with them, and to their horror it was already filling the crevice they’d used to come in. They’d need another way out. Thankfully, even as they were wondered what in the Merciful Heavens that would be, scaffolding on the level above them collapsed.

A large flat piece of wood, one that must have served as a work platform, bounced down and rolled slightly downhill until the wounded and white-faced Guardian caught it with a hand. It was large enough for all of them, Roland noted, and quite likely to float. He met Alexis’ eyes, then shrugged.

“Do you have a better idea?” he asked.

She didn’t.

—

General Abigail shivered.

It was not the first time she’d seen this horror unleashed. Even if her memory had allowed her to forget the first day of the Battle of the Camps, her nightmares would not have. The gates did not look the same, now sleek rinks of darkness rather than the thin slices into Creation the Black Queen had once wielded, but then as now the sky had opened and wept. Abigail remembered the hate that’d simmered under the fear, back in those days where it’d been the Principate they’d fought. The way she’d known that their queen was a monster but she was not a monster who had sought this war, that it had been forced on all of them by a handful of rapacious princes in their palaces across the Whitecaps.

But not even then had she believed the invaders deserved that cold, brutal and senseless end.

Not the sky wept again, two gates torn into the fabric of the world high above, and like jugs being filled the hills that’d been ripped open by siege engines received the deluge. Even stone shattered, when the water came from so high, and before long the hordes the Dead King had hidden within his caverns began pouring out on the tide half-smashed. The water rushed out of the broken hills, taking with it rocks and corpses and steel, and began to spread into the plains below. In the sky above Named skirmished with horrors and Revenants, Light streaking bright as the flood gates were protected from disruption. It wouldn’t last forever, Abigail thought, but it wouldn’t have to. That’d never been the plan.

Water stormed out of the pass itself now, having overrun the hills themselves and swept into the hollow between them, the tide bowling over the undead and smashing the fortifications at the mouth of Lauzon’s Hollow. The mud would make for unpleasant fighting grounds, Abigail thought, but it would hinder the undead as well. And it was the cost for something almost priceless: right now, as the waters kept hurling down from the gates, the Dead King’s waiting army had been essentially dispersed. All preparations, positions and traps and been unmade by the brute force of thousands of tons of water coming down from the sky. It would not win them the battle by itself, but as far as first strokes went it was a masterful one.

Let it not be said the Black Queen had come by her reputation dishonestly.

It was not even half an hour before the first enemy got through and took a swing at a gate, making it stutter, and within moments both gates had winked out of existence. Water kept pouring from a blue a cloudless sky, jarring to behold, but General Abigail knew what was required of her now.

“Krolem,” she said. “Have the advance sounded.”

“Ma’am,” the orc saluted.

Water still flowed but the plains were large and it had not rained in days: the earth would drink the tide in full, and it would not take so long as one might think. Abigail would not waste the advantage she had been given.

“Good, you’re not dragging your feet.”

The dark-haired woman almost fell down her horse, utterly startled, and froze in a different kind of fear when she saw exactly who it was that’d addressed her. The absurdly large bow would have been answer enough, even if the dark linen scarf and long coat had not been just as telling a sign. The Archer was not an uncommon sight around the camps of the Army of Callow, though Abigail preferred to avoid Named like the plague when she could.

“Pardon?” General Abigail got out.

“You’re attacking,” the ochre-skinned villainess said, smiling pleasantly. “Like Catherine wanted you to. Don’t be afraid to press your luck in the assault, general, we’re not done with surprises for the day.”

“I, uh, of course,” Abigail stammered. “You are to be the Named that comes with the Third, then?”

“Something like that,” Archer grinned. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.”

Abigail noted that her horse was looking at the villainess with fear-tinged distrust as well. A wise animal than she’d believed, she conceded.

“I’ll see you around, general,” the Archer winked. “Don’t go disappointing me, now.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Abigail replied, a lot more honestly than she’d meant to.

Luck was on her side, and so the Named drifted away as she laughed. The general took the time to gather herself, straightening her back and breathing out. She had a battle to get through. In the distance in front of her, horns sounded as the Third Army’s ranks tightened into a shield wall and it began to advance. Noting its unease, General Abigail patted her horse’s neck and mercifully ignored the attempt to bite her fingers she received in return.

“If you get through this, Boots, I might take you with me when I retire,” Abigail of Summerholm muttered. “If you’re unhappy about being in this mess, that already makes you the second smartest animal in this bloody army.”

Onwards they went anyway, to swift death and graves shallow.

Interlude: New Tricks

“Surprise is not a fixed quality. Yesterday’s coup is tomorrow’s blunder.”

– Theodosius the Unconquered, Tyrant of Helike

Princess Beatrice Volignac of Hainaut believed in being honest with herself even when it was painful to do so.

Particularly when it was painful. Even when back when she’d only been the sister of the ruler of Hainaut, she had known that there would be great dangers in refusing to look the realities of Creation in the eye. It was why she did not bother to pretend that she was anything but fat, even when her high birth meant that flatterers offered up sweet lies insisting otherwise by the basketful. She was fat and she would not slim up. It was the way of things, something she did not like but would have to live with. Allowing herself to indulge in a fantasy world at the expense of reality was just being childish, and childishness in a woman of her rank was the road to an early grave.

And now she was not a mere princess’ sister anymore, she was the Volignac. Julienne had gone off and chased a death worthy of song, leaving Beatrice with two grieving nephews as well as a crown she’d never expected she would have to wear. This was Procer and here blood mattered – especially when it was as old as that of the House of Volignac – so Beatrice was still being treated as royalty, but she had no illusions about what she truly was: the leader of a large armed gang, dependent on the charity of the high throne and foreign powers for her survival. She was royalty only so long as no one cared to challenge it, and should the army she’d salvaged from ruin perish it would be the end of Hainaut as a realm. There could be no return when one’s rule extended only to ashes and refugees.

And so Beatrice had thought herself cleverer than those Langevin whoresons in Cleves, at least, whose smidgeon of safety had deluded into thinking that they could afford to plot when the very end times were at their doorstep. The staggering stupidity of Gaspard Langevin’s manoeuvering still surprised her – had the man truly forgot that more than half the forces defending his lands were foreign, that some of the very same Firstborn he wanted to slight had bled for Cleven grounds? It’d been a comfort, cradling that knowledge. And yet now, as Beatrice Volignac’s fingers tightened around her lance, she was forced to acknowledge that in some ways she had been a fool as well.

Queen Catherine Foundling of Callow was an easy-going woman. That temper was legend, true, but it was not easily provoked and when in a good mood the young queen was both amiable and impulsively generous. She was free with honours others in her position would have clutched tight. The Queen of Callow’s obvious lack of schooling in the mores of one of high birth was an occasional figure of fun in Proceran circles, for she was cunning in the way that a peasant or a tradesman was cunning – without polish, without elegance. Beatrice was not fool enough to consider the Black Queen of Callow a mere savage, but between the cordiality and the lowbrow habit she’d come to forget who it was that she was dealing with.

Then hills were cracked open, the sky opened and an army was smashed by celestial deluge all in the span of an hour.

Beatrice remembered the stories, then, of the Battle of the Camps. Of the Doom of Liesse, of what Callowan veterans fondly called the ‘Arcadian Campaign’ – as if it were not utter howling madness, to have invaded the realm of the fae – and at last of the Princes’ Graveyard, where sport had been made of her kind as none had dared since Theodosius the Unconquered. The Black Queen did not bother with the proper courtesies, Princess Beatrice remembered, because after the Graveyard there was not a living ruler left who could demand them of her. The Princess of Hainaut let that sink truth sink into her bones, breathed deep of it. It would not be forgot again, she swore.

Princess Beatrice let the fear settle down, reminding herself that this once the horror was on her side, and turned her gaze to the enemy. Already the Third Army under its canny fox of a general was advancing at a brisk pace, red-painted shields locked tight in a shield wall. The waters had not yet finished flowing, but they’d slowed and would soon die out. Behind them would be left muddy grounds and a roiling mass of undead, an unprotected and hindered formation that the Army of Callow was already punishing with sustained artillery fire. The rumoured ‘copperstones’ fired by the Sapper-General’s ballistae burned with bright Light where they hit, incinerating bone and unmaking necromancy.

The battle plan, as it currently stood, dictated that the flanks of the coalition army would wait a span before advancing as well. Beatrice understood the purpose, for she had made some study of war: it was hoped that the enemy reinforcements already pouring out from deeper in the pass could be drawn back into the water-emptied caverns by the Third Army’s hasty advance, in an attempt by Keter to pincer that force as it pulled ahead of the rest of the coalition army. This was a risk, on the surface, but in truth it was the Black Queen’s attempt to limit casualties on their side as much as possible. She wanted, in Beatrice’s opinion, to draw the dead into fighting her at the mouth of the pass.

There, where Keter’s number could not be brought to bear as they would in a broader field, the Queen of Callow wanted to eat up an army of one hundred thousand one bite at a time. The battle lines would stabilize once the flanks caught up to the Third Army, and when they were the artillery could be brought to bear on the massed undead facing the coalition. In a very real sense, the Grand Alliance soldiers would not be the executioner’s axe but the chopping block: their purpose would be drawing out the enemy and keeping them in the artillery’s killing field, not necessarily to do a great deal of damage themselves. The young queen’s art of war was not famed without reason, though the Princess of Hainaut did not believe it would be quite so simple.

It never was, with Keter.

Yet blind worries were no reason to stand paralyzed, so when Princess Beatrice Volignac received the word from their supreme commander she passed down the order to her captains. Trumpets sounded, a bright clarion call, and the drumrolls began as the last army of Hainaut began its advance intermixed with companies of fantassins. To the east the Levantines mirrored her advance, and just as the Third Army reached the edge of where the waters had touched – where the dead had been swept up – the march of the flanks finally began. The Queen of Callow’s plans were proceeding nicely so far, Beatrice saw. A stream of reinforcements had hurried out of the deeper pass to prevent the Third from just sweeping through, and when finally it made contact with the shield wall of the Third Army both forces slowed in the morass of mud and steel that the water had made. The undead did not have sharp enough teeth to smash a Callowan shield wall, though, so the stream split.

The caverns, torn open for al to peer into them, were beginning to fill with undead attempting to go around the enemy’s shield wall. Instead of just fighting in front, the dead were trying to bring their numbers to bear by attacking on the flanks as well – for now only splashing harmless at the sides of that stout eastern square formation, but the undead were gathering numbers to mount more serious assaults. The enemy was moving too quickly, Beatrice thought as she watched with narrowed eyes. Light skeletons, without armour and barely armed, had been sent out first and en masse as they were not so prone to getting stuck in the mire.

The Princess of Hainaut sent for one of her captains and ordered that the roll of the drums be quickened, setting a quicker march. If she waited too long, she feared that the Third Army might be entirely surrounded before reinforcements arrived. That would be a disaster, especially should the well-armed Callowan soldiers rise in the service of Keter. No wonder Callow was bereft of all beauty, she sometimes thought when looking at the pristine armaments of the Army of Callow. All the wealth there had gone into war. Would that Julienne and their father before her had practiced that same folly, which in these dark times was no folly at all. The House of Volignac had more use for plate than palaces these days.

The Princess’ eyes drifted to the hills in the distance, beyond the fighting, where she had been told that a great siege engine still awaited. It had yet to fire a single shot, but as far as she knew the Chosen had not destroyed it. What was Keter waiting for, then?

—

“We’re through with the easy part now, ducklings,” Sergeant Hadda growled. “Shields steady and mind your right. Don’t get smart, it doesn’t pay off against the skellies.”

Edgar breathed out, feeling the usual tremor of fear going down his spine. He’d be all right when the shield wall made contact with the enemy, but until then he knew from experiences the nerves would stay with him. Orders had come from above for the fourth cohort – of which Captain Pickering’s company was the second company – to move to from the back to the left flank, to prevent the enemy outflanking the army. Felt odd to be turning his back to the dead in front of them, coming out of the Hollow, but then Edgar was just turning to look other undead in the face wasn’t he?

“Liked it better when we were just smashing the downed bones,” Edith muttered at his side. “Like a dangerous chore, but still better than the fucking shield wall.”

Edgar snorted. A dangerous chore had been a good word for it. The Black Queen had called forth the tides to smash the enemy’s hidden army, and when it’d washed up in a sea of mud and roiling undeath the front ranks of the Third Army had sent forth the priests of the House Insurgent. Streaks of blinding Light had hit the struggling skeletons and ghouls, carving smoking furrows into the mud, but it’d been the task of the legionaries following behind them to shatter any bones they saw sprouting out. Not harmless work, this, for sometimes skeletons played deaded than they were and nasty surprises of mud and steel came at you from below. But like Edith – surprisingly sensible, for a Liessen girl – had said, still a damned sight better than the shield wall.

There, sometimes luck just meant you didn’t get back up in the Enemy’s service when you died.

The company moved into place as smoothly as was possible on muddy ground, a line of twenty moving to the front. Edgar’s own line made up the second rank, which meant they’d see fighting before long. Over the shoulder of a shorter soldier, he saw pale bare skeletons with only spears in hand deftly going through the mud. Companies filled in to the side of Edgar’s own, broadening the shield wall before the enemy could sweep around it, and he breathed out quietly. If he’d been in the first rank, he wouldn’t have dared to take his eyes off the enemy even when he caught movement above. In the second, though, he risked a glance.

It wasn’t the Summoner and another Named engaging vultures up in the sky, as now that the flood gates had closed they’d fled. Too low, anyway, and too quick. It was with quicksilver surprise that Edgar realized he was looking at artillery fire. Some sort of enormous spear had been fired, or perhaps a pillar? Whatever the truth of it, a great length of dark stone fell into the back ranks of the Third Army, killing a dozen with the impact. Edgars’ fingers tightened with fear at the tight, for the black stone was glowing with runes. A heartbeat later, there was a crackling sound and a burst of sorcery followed by screams, half a company dying in a heartbeat in a mess of lightning.

Another pulse, and the dead rose.

The companies in the back of the Third turned to face the fresh threat – and while another pillar was shot at them, it burst in midair as if artillery fire of their own had somehow caught it – but the pulses kept coming. Always the same two, lightning and necromancy, but it was a potent combination and the streaks of Light and sorcery thrown at the pillar did nothing. Edgar of Laure breathed out and looked away. Fear ran in his veins as the distant sound of great drums began to thrum, but he could no longer afford to look anywhere but forward. The first wave of skeletons charged forward in utter silence.

“ Dauntless ,” Sergeant Hadda screamed.

“ Dauntless ,” they howled back, and for a moment the boast chased away the gloom.

—

Gods , Indrani grimly thought. That’s a new one.

What the Hells was that pillar? She recognized the stone from their trip into the Crown of the Dead a few years back – she’d never seen that exact tone of black anywhere but in the deepest reaches of the Dead King’s fortress – but it was the first time she’d ever seen this particular breed of nastiness. It was a pretty simple setup, but the alternating pulses had already chewed through two companies and all attempts to handle the situation ended up turning into oil tossed at the flame. Not that she could afford to spare much time looking. The enemy’s siege engine was still firing the damn pillars, and there were only so many heavy arrows in her quiver – three, actually, and she was already on her last. That would mean three pillars swatted out of their trajectory, at least, but somehow she doubted Keter would be running out of ammunition the same time she did.

Nocking the last heavy arrow, Archer suppressed a grimace as she saw another blackstone pillar let loose. She breathed out, steadied her aim, then drew and released. Indrani didn’t even bother to watch if she’d hit, already knowing she would. Normally she’d have a few more heavy arrows, but today Cat had sent her out to handle constructs so it was unravellers she’d loaded up with. Useful things, those, but unlikely to dent a pillar. Pickler’s copperstone ballistas were still chewing up the undead coming out of the pass so the Third wasn’t in danger of collapsing anytime soon, but casualties were already mounting and that slippery eel General Abigail had left Archer behind at some point.

Glancing ahead, Indrani found that beorns were massing in the pass. House-sized abominations resembling bears, damned hard to put down and surprisingly agile for their size. They also carried bellyfuls of undead soldiers, which made them a bloody plague for regulars: it was like a living battering ram spewing out soldiers. Archer bit her lip. She couldn’t anything more about the pillars, it’d have to be one of Catherine’s contingencies that handled it. She could begin hammering away at the constructs, though, so even as another pillar was shot in the distance Indrani reached for an unraveller and nocked it.

In that, at least, she could tip the scales.

—

You have no assignment , the Black Queen had told him. Follow providence where it leads you.

Balzer, who men now knew as the Sage, had done so without qualms. Even the Peregrine had been burned by that villainess’ wiles and he would not gainsay them when they stood on the same side. So the Sage had retreated into himself, closing all shutters so that nothing might obscure the sensation of the slight nudges of Fate. And Fate had led him not to stand with the Dominion’s warriors, with whom he shared blood, or the Procerans he had sworn to protect from the Enemy’s attentions. It was with this strange Third Army that his steps had taken him. Not even to fight on the front, though Balzer knew many secrets of destruction beyond those of his fists, but to stand at the back.

He understood why only when black stone fell from the sky as a pillar and death bloomed around it.

Balzer had learned many secrets, for which some called him wise and others had decreed him a sage – even Sage, in time. But enlightenment was not a shared road, it was the struggle within: lonely, endless, forever reaching for unattainable perfection. So he was not surprised when the priests of the House Insurgent molded their faith bright and threw it against the black stone to no avail. No candle could light up the ink-black sea. And what could sorcery do, be it flame or thunder? Only a fool sought to beat a devil at devils’ tricks. In this, though, he could lend aid. The Sage waded through the fresh undead, smashing skulls through helmets as he glided through their ranks, and before long beheld the pillar from up close.

“What a malevolent thing you are,” the Sage murmured, eyes narrowing.

Kill , the black stone sang. Take. Kill. Take. Its insistence washed over him like morning mist, even the touch of lightning – the Light within him was greater than what the Enemy’s work could bring to bear. Balzer pressed his palm against the stone, disliking its feverish warmth but not lingering on such ephemeral things. Like the river, he must flow and never cease. It was the opposite with this thing of stone and dread, for it was a shell hosting pulsing hate and greed and nothing more. Shells always had weaknesses, and the Sage found this one’s before long. Undead grasped at his back, but he was swift and his oneness with Light blinded their eyes.

“Begone,” Balzer ordered, and struck.

In his right hand he held the power to Destroy , learned from years of studying the lingering wisps divine wrath had left behind on this world, and it was this he unleashed against the work of Trismegitus. The black stone shattered under his fist, revealing a howling sorcerous heart, and this he snatched and snuffed out. For a moment, when it died, he thought he had heard a word. Not enough to Divine anything from it, but perhaps with meditation... The sky above spewed out another pillar of black stone, falling among soldiers to deliver thundering death. Ah, opportunity. The Sage smiled.

Today was a good day, he decided, and sought the next pillar of black stone.

—

Lord Razin Tanja of the Binder’s Blood threw down his shield, for the javelin might not have punched through but it’d made it good as useless anyway. That was the third shield he’d gone through since the battle began, and he’d already had two horses killed under him: Keter was in fine form today. His sworn swords, which had served as the vanguard, were holding steady ahead of him. Malaga was upholding its honour today, though it was Aquiline who was adding deeds to the Rolls for her Blood – she’d taken a few slayers and Lanterns to kill a Tusk that’d passed by the Archer’s punitive barrage, giving the killing blow herself.

It ought to put her in a better mood, wiping away the disgrace that’d been getting wounded on the first real day of fighting of the campaign.

The dead were holding firm under the assault of the Dominion, the Lord of Malaga found when he scrutinized the battle lines. The warriors of Levant weren’t making enough of a dent to push back the enemy, though they were themselves in no danger of losing ground. Much as Razin would have preferred a more glorious bent to the battle, he could not deny that the Black Queen’s plan was working: the copperstone ballistas of the Army of Callow were tearing through entire companies of the enemy as they poured out of the pass to reinforce, focusing on the centre in front of the Third Army.

It was not a great honour for his warriors and Aquiline’s to be used as mere hooks keeping the metaphorical fish from wriggling out of the ballistas’ reach, Razin Tanja thought, but if it led to victory he would make his peace with it. The Procerans had been tasked with the same on their wing, anyhow, so there was hardly a surfeit of honour to go around – only Abigail the Fox, that ruthless and cunning general who’d bled his binders so starkly at the Graveyard, had claimed any by being given the pivotal role of the day. Still, there was no reason for the Dominion not to try to seize a better position. Razin sent for his captains and ordered a push at the very edge of the right flank, led by Lanterns and axemen. One of his sworn swords brought him his fourth shield of the day, and the Lord of Malaga pondered whether he should rejoin the ranks. The men fought better when he fought with them.

The decision was stolen from him when Keter acted first. From the broken ceiling of the caverns a great cacophony came as a devilry kept back was suddenly unleashed: the surviving swarms from the first day, birds and bats and insects, flowed out like a tide with ear-breaking shrieks. The Lord of Malaga swallowed a curse. Of all the armies of men, the Dominion struggled with these horrors the most.

“BINDERS,” Razin Tanja screamed. “BINDERS, ON THE SWARMS.”

—

The Summoner snorted derisively when he saw those Dominion savages fumble around with their so-called sorcery. Half-baked diabolism was what it was, this use of souls as anchors for bodies made of their surroundings – in this case, largely mud and stone. Not all the binders could forge flying creatures, either, further proof of their fundamental incompetence. Cedric reminded himself that not all could equal his own mastery, but it was a half-hearted thought and almost more a boast than a commiseration.

“You are certain your creature is capable?” the Concocter asked.

Beneath them, his summoned wyvern batter of her wings as she sped towards the undead swarms. The Summoner cast his colleague a scornful look.

“A little late for asking, yes?” Cedric sneered.

She rolled her eyes, the insolent wretch. Gods, but the Black Queen simply did not recognize his worth – always she used him as a horse-handler for some inferior Named, when he could have done it all on his own.

“My concoctions will work as promised,” the Concocter flatly said. “The only possible point of failure here is your work.”

The Summoner scoffed.

“My works is always beyond reproach,” he said. “It is why I have been judged too valuable to send to the Arsenal, unlike some others.”

She probably would have argue with this self-evident truth, so Cedric ordered his summon to bank hard upwards and leaned closer to its neck. The containers the Concocter had loaded its belly with made the construct less manoeuvrable, but he’d learned to compensate. It would not matter, anyway, he thought. Unlike what his colleague believed, the containers would not simply be spat out. Cedric manipulated his summon to constrict its ‘stomach’ when they neared the edge of the swarms, breaking a container even as it opened its mouth. Like the old dragons of legend, his summon breathed out a gout of something – though it was a gas instead of fire, rather lessening the effect.

The gas did its work, the Summoner was forced to admit even as he began leading the wyvern into making a long pass through the mass of undead creatures, spewing out clouds all the while. The brew attacked the necromantic constructs almost as holy water would have, eating at them and disrupting the spell holding them together – it was particularly lethal on insects, but even the birds collapsed after a heartbeat of exposure.

Yet another victory to be laid at his feet, the Summoner thought with smug satisfaction.

—

General Abigail figured this must be a little like how a chicken would feel, if it were still alive when you put it on a spit to roast.

Just enough movement to give you the illusion that you might make it out, when in fact you were just spinning around so that you could be roasted more evenly. Sadly still on her horse, the general hid another wince as she watched another pack of ghouls leap over the shield wall at the front and land atop the shield panels of the mage cabals, then wiggle through a weakness in them. The Third Army was being made to stand and take the bloody hits to the Sapper-General of Callow could pound the enemy into dust with her ballistas, a strategy that Abigail would admit to herself she would have been very fond of if it didn’t involve her standing so close to the killing field.

Boots, that bloody horse, seemed to have grasped that they were in it together at least until the end of the battle – it was cooperating, and had not tried to bite her in at least an hour. From that unfortunately dangerous vantage point, General Abigail watched the field. It’d been hours since the battle began, long enough that some of the mud was beginning to dry, but for all the efforts on both sides it remained a stalemate. Revenants had tried to smash the front lines a few times, but Named had met them head on and gotten the better of them. Most the time, anyway. Some devil in pale plate had killed a villain and only retreated when the band under the Silver Huntress reappeared to force him back.

It’d be a while still until sundown, Abigail figured, but there would be no clear winner today. The trouble was that even with rotations he people were getting damned tired, and the Procerans likely had it worse on their flank: half of them were mercenaries, and unlike the Dominion on the right they didn’t have the numbers to be able to keep back a reserve. It might all turn nasty, if they weren’t careful, and even with the Second Army still being held in reserve a lot of damage might happen very quickly if the left flank went sour. The trouble was that, when it came to what she could actually do to help prop up the left flank, General Abigail saw only the one option and she wasn’t exactly eager to take it.

“Might not be as bad as what happens if we wait, though,” she muttered at her horse.

She considered the risks. Gods, much as she hated to admit it doing nothing might be the more dangerous of the two. The Volignac soldiers were a hardy lot, but the mercenaries didn’t have the same stomach for the right. If some started running... Abigail still held back on doing anything until she saw the first fantassin company break, cursing and giving orders to her general staff even if the mercenary company managed to rally and return into position. It was only going to get worse the longer she waited, and with Abigail’s luck everyone up here was going to pull a runner except her own damned army.

After dismounting she gathered as many companies of heavies as she dared to pull to her and arranged for a wedge. She sent for the Third Army’s standard, picked some poor bastard to carry it into battle and waited for the orders she’d given to trickle down to the House Insurgent and the mage cabals. The change was noticeable, when it happened: from defensive to offensive. The priests struck out with mass volleys as shields winked out and were replaced by great spears of flame either.

“Gods,” Abigail faintly muttered. “How bad could it really have been, being a tanner?”

Too late to back out now, she knew. After pulling all those heavy companies to her, if she gave the command to someone else they’d turn on her for cowardice. Ah , she realized with a start, but there was a way to avoid fighting. She found the poor bastard she’d given the army standard too and sent him back to the ranks with a smile, taking it up herself. See, with that thing in hand she wouldn’t be able to use a sword so no one could expect her to – shit , Abigail, realized, she could no longer use a sword. And Keter might go after the standard to hurt morale. She’d made herself a target again.

“Are you ready, general?” Krolem asked.

They were all looking at her, Abigail saw, waiting for her order. The swallowed a whimper, which came out sound a little like a giggle. Some of her officers looked impressed.

“Forward,” General Abigail ordered. “Into the breach, Dauntless.”

For once, she was lucky: the answering roar of approval drowned out how shrilly terrified her voice had really been.

Chapter 59: Materialism

“Victory in war comes by three parts: fighting, diplomacy and strategy. No single third is sufficient to bring victory alone, and each is neglected at great peril.”

– Extract from the ‘Ars Tactica’, famed military treatise of Dread Emperor Terribilis the First

It was a nice afternoon, if you discounted all the dying.

As the opening strokes of the second battle for Lauzon’s Hollow fought under my command began to reverberate, I sat on high chair and watched as I absent-mindedly tore into a late midday meal. A meat pie, still warm with the juices splattering on my armour when I bit deep. The prelude had, to my mixed pleasure and wariness, unfolded largely as I’d planned. The band of five under the Silver Huntress had blown open a hole on the top of the western hilltops, allowing for both gates opened into Arcadia to hit the armies hidden beneath the hollow hills directly. Pickler had cracked open the hills beforehand, of course, since I wasn’t in the market for just making cavern lakes: the entire point had been to wash out the enemy army.

“How many inside, do you think?” Akua said. “At least twenty thousand by my count.”

The shade stood upright at my side, in an intricate gold-accented dark dress and veil whose occasional flickering betrayed the gate had taken a lot more out of her than she liked to admit. It’d taken even more out of me, of course, since Akua drew Night through my own connection to it. She could manipulate outside stocks of it just fine, as she had at the Princes’ Graveyard when she’d called the eclipse, but otherwise she was also limited by what my body could stomach. Which was, at the moment, essentially nothing. Two large gates, precisely aligned to parts of Arcadia and for some time? And in broad daylight, to boot. No, I was effectively out of the fight until sundown and that meant so was she.

“Between that and twenty-five,” I replied. “They weren’t making full use of the caverns as a tactical asset otherwise, it would have been a waste.”

“I wonder what general it is that faces us today,” Akua mused. “Not Trismegistus himself, surely. He rarely takes the lead in such a direct manner.”

Not that the Hidden Horror’s consciousness wouldn’t be flitting around the battlefield all day, anyway, along with his will. But Akua was right, Neshamah didn’t usually serve as his own general – with good reason, since he was not a particularly outstanding one. Undead did not truly learn, after all, and he’d not been a military man while alive. His tactics were all imitations, something he was aware of and meant he usually used Binds or Revenants as generals instead. It was typical of his brutal streak of pragmatism that the Dead King would raise anew the commanders that’d been most troublesome to him and bind them to his service. I did not doubt he was the overall strategist of the Kingdom of the Dead’s campaigns, mind you.

On the grand scale, the one beyond tactics, there really wasn’t a thing in existence that could think the way the King of Death could.

“The Prince of Hannoven mentioned the Princes of Bones usually commands all local undead as well as his own Grey Legion,” I noted. “But I’ve seen no sign of him. It might be the Pale Knight, though admittedly he seemed more a champion than a general to me.”

Or it could be a hundred other unseen trembling souls, none of which we’d even slightly sniffed out. We’d not yet dug so deep in the reserves of Keter that the Dead King had to be stingy with generals, to my enduring displeasure. I kept tearing into the meat pie as the battle began in earnest, the Third Army under General Abigail sounding the horns and beginning to advance. By now the tide of water flowing out of the caverns and the hollow was beginning to die out, swallowed by the thirsty ground and turning it to mud.

“Maybe ten thousand scrapped by the water,” I said, sharpening my eyes with Night as I studied the field. “I’d hoped for more.”

“The remainder are buried in mud, in disarray and often weaponless,” Akua replied. “Your hunting hound in the Third will make good sport of them.”

“She’s meant to a lot more than that,” I muttered.

Mind you, I didn’t expect the Third to wipe out all those downed undead. The Third Army only made up the centre of my host’s formation, with the Procerans under Beatrice Volignac making up the left wing and the Levantines under their Blood making up the right. I expected she’d bite off a hard chunk while advancing, falling upon it while it was not yet recovered, but she’d have to spread out the Third to get them all and that was the last thing either she or I wanted. After all, in the end the Third Army was bait .

“I was not brought into the full battle plan,” the shade idly said, “but it seems to me that you are taking great risks with the array of your forces. The Third is pulling heavily ahead, and your left wing is... undermanned.”

She wasn’t wrong. Black would have blanched at this kind of battle array, which was a stark departure from the traditional Legion doctrine. My centre was a steady ten thousand legionaries and my right wing a wildly overstrength seventeen thousand Levantines, while my left wing was a mere six thousand Procerans. Mostly Volignac soldiers, principality troops, with some fantassins. The rest of the Proceran troops had been sent out to clear the lowlands with the drow under Ivah, after all, and had yet to return to the field. But then the three minds behind the modern Legions, Black and Grem One-Eye and Ranker, had built that model to smash mortal armies.

Fighting the Kingdom of the Dead was a different kind of war. One where the enemy did not tire, where being outnumbered at every turn was a near certainty and the enemy’s arsenal bore a few more nasty surprises tailored to undermine your strength with every passing battle. I’d adapted to this war, though. Learned how to wage it.

“We came to Lauzon’s Hollow to achieve two things,” I said. “Seizing the pass itself and destroying the army defending it.”

We couldn’t just do one, unfortunately. Even we forced out the army and took the Hollow, we needed to destroy the enemy’s fighting force here: even it retreated weakened, we couldn’t afford to have it at our back while we moved on the capital. It’d be child’s play to cut our supply lines if even just a few thousand raiders stayed loose around the Hollow, and we were already outnumbered by the enemy so I was reluctantly to shake loose a garrison force to leave behind.

“The single worst way to achieve those objectives is assaulting Lauzon’s Hollow,” I said. “Taking fortifications is a war of attrition, and the moment the battle ends up in the narrow pass this becomes a slugging match that Keter will win nine times out of ten.”

I’d seen battles turn that way before. The Dead King and his generals just began throwing corpses at us, well aware that even if the battle itself was lost they’d still win the war by effectively destroying our army in the trade-off. No, fighting in the pass was something I wanted to absolutely avoid – it was why our original campaign plan had called for the forces under General Pallas to strike at the Cigelin Sisters further north tomorrow and then swing south to pincer the enemy here as soon as they’d secured the fortress. That plan had obviously gone out the window since, but the underlying reasons for making it remained.

“Yet you are, in fact, assaulting Lauzon’s Hollow,” Akua drily pointed out.

“No, I’m not,” I grunted. “We cracked open the hills, Akua, so now instead of fighting just at the mouth of the pass the battlefield got extended. These are proper grounds for classic Legion warfare, they just happen to be at the front of a pass.”

“Which the opposing general will notice,” the golden-eyed shade said. “Why prevents from retreating deeper in, where the pass narrows and your advantages evaporate?”

“Bait,” I grimly smiled, “set out in two parts.”

I finished the last of the meat pie, scarfing it down and licking the warm juices off my fingers. I pretended not to see the disapproving look thrown my way under the gauzy veil. In the distance, as the Third Army began plowing through the dead washed up by the waters, reinforcements began pouring out of the pass. Skeletons, yes, but also constructs. It’d be a hard fight. And as the dead who’d washed up on the flanks of the Third clawed their way out of the mud, still a disorganized horde, the enemy general did exactly what I’d wanted them to do: they sent out the horde in waves, trying to flank and even envelop the Third Army before the reinforcing wings could arrive. The enemy had committed.

The enemy’s siege engine atop the hills began unleashing some deadly surprise, pillars of black stone, but Archer was with the Third and I’d left heroes floating: one of them would nip this in the bud before it turned too bad, providence good as ensured it.

“You seem pleased, which implies this dawning rout is exactly what you intended,” Akua noted. “Which fits better with my appraisal of Abigail of Summerholm than that of the overeager general who struck out too far ahead I am currently looking at.”

I shrugged.

“It holds up, you know, for someone who’s looked into our armies,” I said. “If someone else had rushed too far it might be a trap, but the Third ? I named them Dauntless personally, they’ve served as my vanguard in half a dozen war and they’re commanded by a rising star among my commanders – but a young one, who never went to the War College. Malicia will have records of that, which means the Dead King has them as well. If this were Hune rushing it’d be suspicious, but this ?”

I grinned.

“Why, Akua, this isn’t a trap,” I said, “it’s an opportunity. One Keter has seized quite eagerly.”

So the dead had come out swinging from the pass in the distance, pouring reinforcements and trying to swallow up the Third before the seemingly feet-dragging Procerans and Levantines caught up and handled the flanks. From an outside eye, that tortured formation – one wing too storng, the other too wing – would have been forced on me by politics and a fear of trouble in a shared command structure, not more tactical considerations. I’d split the wings by nation of birth and was now paying the prince for it, neither Levantines nor Procerans too eager to follow the lead of a reckless Callowan general.

But the Third held, because the Third always held, and so the jaws of the trap closed.

“So now you hurt them,” Akua said.

As if bid by the hand of gate, the ballistas of the Army of Callow began to sing. I saw the understanding dawn in Akua’s eyes, for though she was not exactly a veteran commander she was clever and well learned in matters of warfare. The enemy had to reinforce through the pass, its entrance now stripped of all fortifications by the thorough work of Lord Soln, which meant my sappers knew exactly where the killing fields ought to be set up. The copperstone ballistas pounded the enemy into dust, again and again and again, as the flanks caught up to the Third and tore through the still ill-prepared undead brought there by the waters.

And so the enemy general slowly came to realize it had been baited into filling a box – the once-caverns, the mouth of the pass – where its numbers were being made into a disadvantage. The fighting with blades, after all, only happened between the first ranks of the dead and the living. The fire of my siege engines burned swaths behind this, and would cost Keter easily fivefold the casualties the rest of my army would cause it. Akua stayed silent for a long moment, taking it in.

“I sometimes forget how deeply unpleasant a general you are to face,” Akua mildly said.

I snorted. We’d never faced each other as commanders of armies, actually, as she’d been the general of her forces at neither the Dead Dawn or the Doom.

“An inspired trick,” she continued after a moment.

Such direct praise was rare, coming from her, and I allowed myself a sliver of enjoyment before setting it aside.

“I’m hardly the first to use it,” I dismissed. “Jehan the Wise did the same with the banks of the Wasaliti at the Battle of the Sparrows, and Terribilis to the Third Crusade at the Danse Macabre.”

“Both being famously unskilled generals, of course,” Akua amusedly replied. “What terrible company you keep.”

“Battle’s far from over,” I grunted. “Bit early for boasting.”

My eyes returned to the field as time inched forward torturously. By now, I thought as the lines held on both sides and the copperstones burned bright, the enemy general would be realizing this was not a sustainable position for them. I still hadn’t sent out my reserves, the entire Second Army and nine thousand drow, and there was no sign of my running out of copperstones. On their side the horrible siege engine atop the hills did not have an angle to fire down on my troops, and if the fighting continued until after dark – which it seemed like it might – then I’d have nine thousand Firstborn to send after them.

The obvious answer would be to retreat deeper into the pass, since it restored the reason why the enemy army was at Lauzon’s Hollow in the first place: being able to hold us off with the pass. I’d turned it around on them by baiting them to fight at the mouth of the pass, but they could write off what they’d committed and retreat, resuming the defence deeper in.

“Why aren’t they retreating?” Akua said, putting her finger on the pulse of the question.

“Can they afford to?” I replied with a hard smile. “Count the corpses, Akua Sahelian.”

The enemy had outnumbered us one hundred thousand to seventy thousand, when the campaign began. After the first day of fighting at the Hollow, we’d lost a little over two thousand and the dead a minimum of six thousand along with a significant portion of their swarms. Now throw in the ten thousand or so they would have lost to the water, then maybe another ten thousand lost in the killing box over the early afternoon. Meanwhile, I’d count maybe another two to three thousand dead on our side over those same hours, which meant we’d be down to around sixty five thousand while the enemy had been brutally dragged down to mid seventy thousands. If my opponent wrote off the troops holding the mouth of the Hollow and retreated, my side might have numerical superiority when the assault continued deeper in.

“They overcommitted,” Akua breathed out. “If they retreat now, they might no longer have the numbers to hold the Hollow against us regardless.”

I turned to glance at her and caught her eye, reading there an expectation of agreement.

“Gotcha,” I said. “You just lost the battle.”

I enjoyed the surprise that flickered through before she suppressed it more than I had the praise earlier, so at least there was that.

“That’s the deeper trap,” I said. “That instinct not to sacrifice those troops anyway. I want the enemy in that killing box as long as I can possibly keep them there, Akua. It’s the absolute best exchange rate of casualties I’ll be able to get on this field.”

Her lips thinned.

“I am used to considering troops valuable,” she said. “The source of my mistake, perhaps. It will not be shared by the commander of the dead.”

“Probably not,” I admitted. “I expect they’ll hesitate but come to the same conclusion soon enough. Which is why I told you, earlier, that my bait is in two parts.”

What would convince my opposing general it was worth sticking it out in there? It’d have to be a prize worth those mounting casualties. Just the losses involved in the lizard cutting off its tail to escape wouldn’t be enough to dissuade a Keteran general for long, so I’d set out fresh bait for them to bite: my left wing, the Procerans. Under Princess Beatrice’s command stood only six thousand souls, fewer by now. Hardy Volignac foot, mostly, but that only counted so much in a fight like this. A wing undermanned, as Akua had earlier said. Fragile. Foolish, and I did not have a reputation for that, so even counting on the impression that this was a political decision instead of a tactical one I’d also gilded the bait by putting my entire horse contingent behind Princess Beatrice’s wing.

As if expecting a breach, expecting to need buying time for my reserve the Second Army to come prop up that failing flank.

“Come on,” I murmured, looking at the ranks of the dead. “Bite, my friend. You know you want to.”

And I laughed, laughed until my throat hurt, when Keter fell for it again. Reinforcements kept pouring out of the pass and into my killing box, scores dying to every copperstone, and the undead sent their full wrath against the left flank.

“Akua,” I said. “Pass a message for me. I want these two to prop up the left wing: Headhunter and Forsworn Healer.”

“As you say, my heart,” the golden-eyed shade replied, bowing.

I barely spared her a glance, my own gaze still on the battlefield. Those three should be able to prevent the Revenants I suspected the enemy was about to send from shattering the left flank. That was the bet of my opposing general, after all: that it could break the left wing and manage to collapse the increasingly exhausted Third by overwhelming its flank and back in a massive sweep rightwards. Even if I sent out my cavalry, at that point, the battle would be lost. Keter’s game afterwards turn to trying to inflict as many casualties as possible while my army fled back to camp, a particular specialty of the Dead King’s army. I was not unaware this could still turn south on me, though I trusted the lines would hold. If it got rough, I still had some cards to play.

Beastmaster had already gone to reinforce Archer, a deadly combination that’d allow her to kill constructs even beyond her sight, and now that the Summoner was back I was keeping him in reserve with the brew I’d had Concocter working on. The remaining swarms had yet to be unleashed: most likely my opponent was keeping them back, since they’d be brutally efficient at turning a break in my lines into a rout if they were properly employed. When Hakram wheeled his way to my side, I held in a wince. Not because I was unhappy to see him, but because if he’d come to deliver the news personally they wouldn’t be good.

“Beastmaster’s dead,” Adjutant told me, blunt and to the point. “The Pale Knight slid behind the lines.”

My fingers clenched.

“Indrani?”

“Broken army, already fixed,” Hakram said. “The Silver Huntress’ band reappeared just in time to drive him away, no further Named casualties.”

“Fuck,” I murmured. “Too close.”

“Orders for the Huntress?” he asked.

“None,” I said. “She’s free to follow providence and judgement as she pleases.”

That was the main reason I’d sent out a band of five heroes , after all. Some villains would have better rounded out their band, but it would have diluted the effect of providence. Best to have an imperfect force at the perfect time and place than the opposite. Hakram stayed at my side afterwards, letting his helping hands carry the rest. We stayed silent, but not uncomfortably so. We both had our minds on the field in the distance. Not long after, to my surprise the Dominion began pushing into the undead lines ahead of them. They were fresher than either my Third or the Procerans, admittedly, and significantly more numerous. I’d genuinely not expected they would, though, so I was unprepared when the enemy general decided to set them back with a decisive stroke.

The swarms came loose from the broke ceiling of the caverns, coming down as screeching tide as the binders did their best to keep them at bay.

“Summoner and Concocter,” I curtly ordered Hakram.

The messenger was moving before I was even done speaking. I’d positioned them closer to the left flank, expecting the strike would come there, so my fingers were raking the arms of my seat while the two silhouettes on wyvernback went up from too far away as the first ranks of the Dominion were engulfed and shredded. It got handled, in the end, but not quickly enough. The dead pushed hard into the Malaga section of the shield wall simultaneously to the swarm assault and it would have turned into a rout without what I suspected to be Named intervention. Couldn’t be sure at this distance, not with armies so large and the constant streaks of Light and sorcery.

The next helping hand that came to report to Hakram was Scribe, which told me there were grimmer news yet.

“The Sage stabilized the break in the Levantine line,” Scribe told us.

“And?” Adjutant gravelled.

“The moment after the shield wall closed up, he was sniped by an archer Revenant,” Scribe told us. “I believe he might have used his three aspects over the afternoon’s fighting, and become vulnerable as a result.”

“Tell me they recovered the corpse,” I said.

“Lady Aquiline Osena saw to it personally,” Eudokia said.

I blew out a breath. It could have been worse. There weren’t clean victories outside the stories, I reminded myself, and stuck the course. When the Proceran flank began wavering despite the best efforts of Beatrice Volignac and the desperately fighting Named there – the Headhunter slew two Revenants and claimed their heads, according to the reports Hakram received – I did not panic or send orders to my cavalry. Instead I smiled and sent for Senior Mage Jendayi, Hune’s senior spellcaster.

“Send word to Lady Catalina to prepare for the crossing,” I ordered. “We are nearing our moment.”

This very afternoon, after all, was when the detachments we’d sent out were due to return. Instead of letting them come openly across the plains, I’d instead requested for Ivah and the fantassins under Lady Catalina to take the Twilight Ways – I could, that way, unleash them as a surprise when the time came. Keter would have accounted for our own mages, there was no hiding them, but not for those that’d left with our detachments. I could, because of this, bet on surprise with good odds. It’d help with Proceran morale as well to be pulled out of the fire not by foreigners but by their own kind. After the battering they’d take today, it would do them some good.

When the first fantassin company on the left flank broke, I immediately gave the order for the reinforcements to begin crossing into Creation. I jolted in surprise, though, when the Third Army’s shields winked out and they began shaping offensive magics instead. Wait, had General Abigail guessed my plan? I studied the Third’s movements carefully, noting the massing of heavy companies around the standard, and decided that she hadn’t. The gates were just now beginning to open, after all, to the cheering of the Procerans behind them. More likely she’d been worried about the left flank collapsing on her and acted to cut off the threat at the source. I chuckled.

Regardless of her intentions, the timing for that charge was actually perfect: I’d gotten what I could out of my soldiers for the day, it was time to wrap this up.

“Send word to Summoner to pull back from the right flank and help with the charge instead,” I told Hakram.

“Cut loose Apprentice as well,” he suggested. “She’ll thank you for it.”

I mulled over that a moment then nodded. He was by my side and deep behind our lines, and while there might not be such a thing as safe when fighting Keter he was not at so great a risk he could not spare his bodyguard and assistant for a bit. I settled back into my seat, watching the last few exchanges of the day unfold. It went better than I’d dared hope, in truth. The enemy centre, while steadily reinforced over the afternoon, had also steadily been culled by hours of copperstone bombardment. I’d not anticipated that would mean it was thin on Binds – they’d need more Light to be destroyed, if anything – but that was the only explanation that came to mind as to why the undead centre shattered like a rotten egg when the Third charged into it.

I watched the enemy ranks break apart under weight of the heavy companies and almost asked Jendayi to send a signal for General Abigail to pull back, for she was getting too far ahead, but she stopped on her own anyway. Good, I thought. I’d kept the Grey Legion out of this so far by making the ground muddy and so effectively making it impossible for infantry that heavy to accomplish anything save get stuck in a mire, but there were drier grounds further in. I had a lot of faith in the Third Army, but there was a reason the standard order for mundane troops encountering the Grey Legion was ‘retreat’. General Hune, sensing like me that the battle was coming to a close, came my way. She made her courtesies to myself and Hakram, then got into why she’d come here.

“Congratulations are in order, Your Majesty,” the ogre said. “Another victory to your name.”

I didn’t disagree, even though there was still fighting on the field. With the Third having claimed the head of the narrowing in the pass, enemy reinforcements were cut off so the left and right wings were just pushing up pockets of undead against the walls of the caverns and systematically exterminating them. It’d take a while, and the Third would have to hold until they were done, but with the amount of Named we had on the field we should be able to deal with any nasty surprise the enemy had left to unleash. All that was left was for someone to sabotage the enemy’s siege engine on the hills before we could retreat, which I was already mulling sending word to the Silver Huntress’ band to do.

A moment later there was a great burst of Light in the distance atop the hills, followed by pillars of flame, and I was once more reminded that the Heavens had a sharp sense of humour.

“It’s only half the battle,” I finally replied. “We still don’t hold the Hollow itself.”

“Given Keter’s casualties today, and the raiding the Firstborn will no doubt undertake tonight, there can be no question of the dead still holding the pass by tomorrow afternoon,” General Hune said. “The last swordstroke has not been granted, but it is a victory all the same.”

We’d be out raiding in force overnight, and with the full strength of the drow: nearly twenty thousand, including several hard-hitting Mighty. I fully intended on savaging the enemy army as brutally as I could before dawn came and the fighting resumed tomorrow.

“We’ll see it if pans out that neatly,” I replied, “but I take the congratulations in the spirit they were meant, regardless. Thank you, General Hune.”

She didn’t linger after that, leaving us to our thoughts. I watched the last gasps of the battle far away without truly looking at them. Hakram cleared his throat.

“You look worried,” he said.

“I am,” I admitted. “Something about this smells off to me.”

“It was a hard-fought battle, even if it went well for us,” Adjutant said. “It is not always a trap, Catherine.”

“Then where has the Grey Legion been?” I quietly asked. “The mud kept them out, but halfway into the battle Keter should have spit out a ritual that steadied the ground so they could fight.”

Mighty Sudone had slaughtered a great many of Keter’s magelings, but not so many that they would not have been able to deliver that particular ‘surprise’. I’d had an answer waiting for it, admittedly, but with no certainty it’d work. They’d never come out at all, though, which had my fingers clenching and unclenching.

“Has anyone seen the Prince of Bones?” I suddenly asked. “We’ve seen the Grey Legion yes, but the Prince himself?”

Hakram paused a moment.

“I’ll find out,” he promised.

“Do,” I muttered.

I closed my eyes. I was missing something, I could feel it. Roland had reported seeing a Crab, a while back, I suddenly recalled. Something to do with that, perhaps? I couldn’t see any obvious links, though.

“It’s not that I don’t think this isn’t a victory,” I said. “But there will be more to this, Hakram. We’re not dealing an amateur, Neshamah plans for both outcomes. He’ll have gotten something out of even a defeat.”

He had no answer to that, and so I left him to his work. By sundown I had estimated casualties for both sides of the battle, rough as they were. My armies had around eight thousand dead and maybe another thousand crippled beyond the current ability of our priests and mages to repair. That took us to an army fifty nine thousand strong, perhaps even a little lower. The enemy, though? Keter had begun holding Lauzon’s Hollow with an army of one hundred thousand, and now it had barely half that: fifty to fifty five thousand left, we believed, though the Grey Legion counted among them. My soldiers had, without even our full army being on the field, fought like lions and won the day. A heroic victory, some would call it.

Now we just needed to win another hundred, and never lose.

Welcome to war with Keter.

Chapter 60: Zwischenschach

“In war and politics, we are all as men sharing the same dark cave and stumbling along blindly. The keys to victory in either matter are patience and seeing just a little further ahead than your opponents.”

– Luc Monseiller, thirty-second First Prince of Procer, largely remembered for the Great War that followed his assassination

A brawl. The last blows of the battle not even an hour past, and now they were brawling .

Sometimes I sympathized with Cordelia Hasenbach, for though I had fought her tooth and nail to keep the Truce and Terms from being beyond the reach of temporal laws I didn’t entirely disagree with her when it came down to it. I bent the rules for Named all the time, didn’t I? I’d made them beyond the authority of all but two of their own kind, allowed them to wield power over others and invested them with weighty responsibilities. But sometimes, Gods sometimes, they just went and did something that made it feel like I was biting down on a mouthful of embers. I knew the names and the Names, could discern the source of this stupidity, but to understand was not to excuse.

If they’d been soldiers under my command, this would end with a flogging and a demotion. If it had been allied officers, even nobles, I would have had them removed from command and sent away. But Names were rarer than noble blood, the power they gave more highly prized than titles in these days where the end times were howling at our door, so instead I would have to be lenient . To chide and discipline, as if dealing with children instead of hardened killers empowered by Creation. What hope was there for the Liesse Accords, when not even the Dead King at our gates was enough to force reason onto us?

I wrestled my mounting fury down as I limped through the dusty grounds of our camp, knowing calm would serve me better. It was exhaustion and anger talking, I told myself. There would be good days and bad ones in the era to come and no treaty could change that. It’d never been their purpose to fix the world, for that was too ambitious a charge for anything made by my hand. The Accords would do what they were meant to, and Calernia would muddle along with a few less atrocities splattered across the pages of its history. That alone would already be a better legacy than I had any right to claim, some would say.

In the distance, as I turned a corner, I heard cheering. The Night boiled in my veins, answering the livid streak of anger that seized me, and the closest legionaries shivered. I’d sent for a full company of armed soldiers, phalanges one and all, to accompany me. They were to serve as either escort or mailed fist, depending on my orders, and my mood was feeling more and more like clenching fingers. The cheering itself wasn’t bad, it was what it meant: that Named had decided to fucking brawl in public in front of any soldier that cared to watch. On the same day as a bruising battle with the Kingdom of the Dead, our corpses not even all burned. My fingers clenched .

Well, at least one was going to be one of mine so maybe flogging wasn’t off the table yet.

It was with that hard stomp particular to soldiers meaning business that my company entered the picture. A large crowd of soldiers – a few hundred, a thousand? – had gathered in a great ring. By their looks and armour they were from half a dozen different armies and oaths, a clean slice of our coalition shouting hoarsely as five Named brawled and coin changed hands. A quiet fell in the immediate surroundings of the phalanges, soldiers paling and hastily getting out of the way of authority having come to call. There was just enough of a quiet I finally made out one particular thread from the cacophony. An old ditty I’d learned as kid in Laure, beautifully sung by a cold-blooded monster.

“Maiden Mary, fair and merry

Your tears make poets sigh

But for a smile given sweetly

Tall banners will kiss the sky.”

The Rapacious Troubadour had a nasty sense of humour, it seemed. ‘Maiden Mary’ was a children’s song, but it dated back to the War of the Cousins – the civil war that’d put on the throne the same branch of House Fairfax that my father had later ended – and the Mary in question was Mary the Claimant. Queen Mary the Third, most scholars called her, as her Eastern Bells had won over the Southern Bells just long enough for her toddler son to die a crowned king and another cousin succeed him. I would have been impressed about the Troubadour knowing the song at all, if he’d not also been the same shit playing a song about civil war while Named fought in front of a crowd of rowdy soldiers.

There was blood on the floor, I saw, but at least no one was dead yet. Archer and the Silver Huntress were both bleeding, and I knew the look in Indrani’s eyes – she’d take a killing stroke without hesitation if she got the opportunity. The Silent Guardian and the Headhunter were both in better shape, the Guardian having nothing but marks on her plate while the Headhunter had suffered only a small cut on their cheek. The only voice of sanity in there was Roland, even now trying to force everyone apart and largely failing.

“- settles nothing ,” I caught the Rogue Sorcerer saying. “You are only making it worse for-“

“Do it to ’em, Lady Archer,” someone with a heavy Liessen accent shouted. “Callow! The Sword and Crown!”

“Huntress,” an Alamans accent shouted back. “For grace and Heavens, Silver Huntress!”

The crowd roared, the crowd cheered, and the Rapacious Troubadour was still playing that fucking song.

“Maiden Mary, bright and lovely

What groom did you embrace?

Hand in hand, wooing roughly

Your troth is kingdom’s grace.”

Enough was enough. The mood might still be more joyous than bloody at the moment, but crowds were mercurial beasts – this could turn sour very, very quickly. I was still damned winded from the gates Akua and I had opened, but not so spent I couldn’t muster a resounding thunderclap when I struck the ground with the butt of my staff. The clap rolled across the ring, drowning out even the cheers, and I limped forward as the phalanges roughly shoved aside the few onlookers and gambled still in my way.

“Disperse,” I said, voice cold as steel. “ Now , and I will not bother with arrests.”

A shiver went through the crowd, though my eye was on the fighting Named – which had ceased actively trying to stab each other, but were still close and holding weapons – and the mood was doused rather comprehensively. I’d half-expected someone to protest and to have to make an example, but instead already the edges of the crowd were fraying as people made quiet escapes. Like a crumbling stone, the whole ring would fall apart before long. There was a flicker of remembrance, just as the edge of my mind, as I recalled when I’d been a slip of a girl in Laure and I’d watched Black empty a hall’s worth of lords with but a handful of words. I’d sworn, that evening, that one day I’d have that power too.

It had taken years, but I’d gotten there. I wondered, though, what that wary wild girl from the orphanage would think of the woman I’d grown into. I thinly smiled, knowing that she might well have added me to the list of monsters in need of killing.

“Queen Catherine,” Roland started, “this is-“

“Utter stupidity,” I mildly said. “But your role in it was minor and well-meant. Walk back to your tent, Rogue Sorcerer.”

He caught my eyes, for a moment, and whatever it was he saw there it told him not to argue. My gaze lingered long enough to acknowledge his bow, then moved to the four remaining Named. I couldn’t see the Silent Guardian’s face under her helmet, but her stance was sheepish. As for the Headhunter, they – no, he if I understood the face paint correctly – looked rather unapologetic and entirely unembarrassed. He had an excuse for butting in, then , I decided. Which left the two who would have been the spark for the entire mess. Archer and the Silver Huntress.

“Who struck first?” I asked.

“She did,” the Huntress said, her high-pitched voice grown shrill with anger.

“I scored first blood,” Indrani dismissed. “You swung at me first, Alexis.”

“That is true,” the Headhunter jeered. “On both counts. And the Guardian couldn’t resist backing up her friend, could she? Hardly sporting, two on one.”

My gaze returned to Silent Guardian, who took off her helm and revealed a tanned and dark-haired head. While she looked like she rather wanted to smash in the Headhunter’s skull, to me she bowed in apology.

“You only intervened after blood was drawn?” I clarified.

She nodded. I hummed, eyeing the Headhunter.

“And you intervened out of your abiding love for fairness, I take it?” I mused.

“You have me pegged,” the Headhunter grinned.

“You tried to stab me in the back, you-“

The word the Huntress used was in tradertalk, but by the tone it wasn’t a compliment.

“You’re both dismissed,” I said, ignoring the Huntress. “For having participated in a brawl, you’re both docked pay for five months and you’ll be assigned menial work under an officer of my choosing.”

The Headhunter glared at me, opening his mouth, but his gazed dipped to my side – where my fingers, without my notice, had taken to clenching and unclenching. His mouth closed.

“ Dismissed ,” I coldly repeated.

The Silent Guardian offered a bow first, which I returned with a nod. The Headhunter did not go quite as politely, elbowing some of the last remaining soldiers in his way as he went. Of the Rapacious Troubadour there was no sign, I noted. The clever little shit had made good on his escape before I could rap his knuckles. Indrani and the Huntress were still facing each other weapons in hand, long knives for Archer and the spear for her old acquaintance. I cocked an eyebrow.

“Is there a particular reason you two are still holding weapons?” I mildly asked.

I saw Indrani suppress a wince. She knew better than the Huntress that particular tone of voice did not herald a good mood on my part.

“If she puts away her blades,” the Silver Huntress began, “I will-“

“If I must make it an order, Alexis the Argent,” I lightly interrupted, “I might just lose my temper and fucking drum the two of you of this army before the eyes of gods and men.”

With a quiet sliding sound, Indrani’s long knives went back into the sheaths. I turned a dark eye on her: she’d timed that, I knew, just so that the Huntress would look like a recalcitrant malcontent and she the obedient subordinate. Unlucky for her, I wasn’t buying it. The Silver Huntress blinked in discomfort, then reluctantly stabbed her spear into the ground. She folded her arms over her chest, looking rather defensive.

“I’m going to ask you two questions,” I said. “You will reply to them calmly and concisely, without interrupting each other.”

I got nod. Indrani’s almost playful, as if it were set in stone she’d get out of this without losing any feathers. My irritation spiked.

“Huntress, why did you attack an ally?” I bluntly asked.

She grimaced, though I’d wager more from the phrasing than remembrance of the punch thrown. The Lady of the Lake had not raised those girls to shame easily.

“She got Lysander killed,” Alexis the Argent harshly said. “Same old story: Indrani has a lark and one of us bleeds for it. Only this time it didn’t stop with bleeding .”

The anger in her voice was a hard, cold thing. I found the hate threaded in it unsettling, as it was too strong to be a fresh – this was an old poison, just brought to the fore with a fresh wound.

“I assigned her to the Third Army myself,” I evenly said. “And by the reports I’ve read, she fulfilled her duties admirably. As for the death of Beastmaster, I understand she fought and had an arm broken trying to prevent it.”

The Silver Huntress’ eyes hardened, turning to Archer.

“Ranger, Black Queen, it makes no difference,” Alexis bitterly said. “You’ll always find skirts to hide behind, won’t you?”

“Say that again,” Indrani hissed, hand going for a knife.

“Watch your tongue, Huntress,” I sharply said. “And Archer, I ordered you not to interrupt. Don’t make me repeat myself again.”

She looked mulish but did not argue. She’d been more interested in protecting her pride than my ‘honour’ there, I thought, so my sympathy was limited. I felt a faint breeze against my neck, gone in a moment, but did not let it distract me.

“Archer,” I said. “You were struck with a fist. Why did you answer it with a knife?”

Indrani’s lips thinned.

“I was insulted beyond reasonable expectation of restraint,” she said.

“You lying-” Huntress began.

My anger, never far, burned cold and sharp as once more an order I’d given within my rights was disobeyed. This, this I was done tolerating. The breeze came back, but it’d never been a breeze at all: it was a breath. Warm, coming through an open maw.

“Be silent,” I Spoke.

The Silver Huntress fought it. But as the Beast leaned over my shoulder, hacking out a laugh, even as she struggled her mouth snapped shut. I felt a vicious twinge of satisfaction that I did not indulge, but did not ignore. Archer’s face was slack with surprise.

“The two of you are damned disgraces,” I said. “On the same day where thousands fought and died turning back the Enemy, you attacked each other like drunken bulls before we’d even finished burning the corpses. Shame on you both .”

Indrani reared back like I’d slapped her. With a twist of will, I peeled back the order I’d Spoken at the Huntress. Her lips parted and she breathed out in pants.

“Huntress, you are no longer commander for the heroes in this army,” I said. “The Rogue Sorcerer, who tried to put an end to this bout of idiocy, will take your place. The White Knight will handle the rest of your disciplining. I offer him this as a courtesy, but should you break the Truce again I will have no choice but to cease being polite.”

My eyes moved to the other offender.

“Your pay is docked for this entire campaign,” I told Archer. “You are not to speak with any hero outside of official duties without the explicit permission of the Rogue Sorcerer or myself. If you draw a blade on an ally again, I’ll send you south like the child you insist on acting as.”

Her hands clenched, but she stayed silent.

“You’ve also lost the right to refuse assignments for six months,” I finally said. “You’ll be accompanying the Firstborn on the raid tonight, so return to your tent and prepare.”

Both of them glared at me sullenly, in that heartbeat eerily resembling each other for all their starkly different appearances. Grief was a bitter brew, I knew that better than most, and they were both fresh off the death of someone they’d cared for in a very complicated way. I understood why it’d come to this, I really did. But I was also a high officer of the Grand Alliance, sworn to enforce the Truce and Terms – which they had just broken in a spectacularly public and untimely manner. My duty was clear, and my anger not faked in the slightest. I stared them both down until they left, not bothering with a proper dismissal. The moment they left the Beast brushed against my shoulder, almost affectionately, and without a single lingering wisp it was gone.

I could Speak again, I knew. It hadn’t been a fluke. I could feel the way my will once more struck against Creation like a queen’s decree. One step closer , I thought, and breathed out. To what I did not yet know, but the shape I was beginning to discern was not unpleasant to my eye.

—

“Bleed them,” I ordered the Firstborn. “Under this moon, your only mandate is the reaping of deaths.”

With nightfall had come our opportunity to savage the Dead King’s forces badly enough that tomorrow’s fighting would be the final stroke of annihilation. The Twilight Ways would allow the drow the harass the enemy’s camp on the other side of the pass from every direction, all the while staying out of the jaws of the trap that’d been sprung on us the previous night: here would be no wards to keep us penned in, this time. Only skirmishes in the manner that’d been the lifeblood of the Everdark for a millennium, perhaps the only manner of war in which the Firstborn could be said to be the most accomplished of all Calernian peoples. And out the sigils went, under the command of Ivah and its subordinate sigil-holders.

We went with them, a band of Named under my own lead. Archer, naturally, for I meant to keep her out of trouble and the camp for a span. To some a place in such a raid was considered a prize and so I awarded it accordingly: the Vagrant Spear came with us and the Headhunter as well. Roland I’d dragged along mostly on account of his expertise in breaking magics, knowing it was never wise to bet on Keter not having that one last trick up its sleeve. The choices had also been a balancing act, which naturally some noticed.

“I’m sure it’s just a coincidence,” Archer sardonically murmured, “that your picks are even on both sides of the fence. Ever the diplomat, eh?”

It was not an approving tone. Even the band was a good one, well-fitted, I suspected that in her eyes politics having had a say in making it tainted it irremediably.

“Are you complaining I’m calming waters you helped unsettle?” I replied.

“I didn’t pick that fight,” Indrani told me flatly.

“You still fought it,” I said. “You could have taken the lump, walked away.”

Her face tightened with genuine anger.

“I don’t owe you that,” she said. “I don’t owe anyone that.”

“Then spare me the comments,” I curtly replied. “I’ll take shit for you, Indrani, but I won’t take it from you as well. If you want to talk of things owed, best remember that.”

Not the most pleasant exchanges to precede going into battle, though only Roland seemed to notice the tension between us as we sidled through the Twilight Ways. He did not ask, that very Alamans instinct for discerning when a question would not be well-received sparing me the irritation of having to offer even a cursory explanation. Before long we were back in Creation, anyhow, and the raid claimed everyone’s full attention. I’d left the command in Ivah’s hand, knowing my Lord of Silent Steps was perfectly capable of leading sigils in war without my breathing down its neck, so I had the freedom to pick where I wanted to meddle. I had some thoughts already.

I rather itched to get rid of the Pale Knight, if it could be done without paying a ruinous price.

That plan went the way of dust, though, the moment we emerged from the Ways and found that the enemy was retreating . The pass was still in the hands of undead forces, and if anything the northern end of the passage was more heavily defended than before, but we’d come out to the north of the enemy’s camp – in the flat plains between Lauzon’s Hollow and the Cigelin Sisters – so it was impossible to miss that there were departing columns. I sharpened my eyes with Night, seeking numbers. Maybe ten to twenty thousand massed to hold the pass in case we struck overnight, but the rest were mobilizing to leave. Hells, there were already scouting detachments north of us in the distance.

“Leaving?” the Headhunter sneered. “Fools. We’ll catch up through the Ways.”

She – it was she, tonight – would have been right if our soldiers were things of stone instead of flesh and blood, but it wasn’t the case.

“I’m not sure we can,” the Rogue Sorcerer replied. “Not after today’s battle.”

One of these days, I was going to have to ask Roland exactly what kind of an upbringing had forged a man like him. He was surprisingly well learned in a variety of subjects, including quite a few that mages in the Praesi mold would have considered beneath their notice.

“He’s right,” I said. “Our army’s fit to battle, tomorrow, but not to march.”

Practically speaking parts of the army would be – the Second Army and the Proceran detachments freshly returned, as well as a healthy chunk of the Dominion’s warriors – but it’d be risky to engage in pursuit with low numbers and it’d leave the force behind us very vulnerable. Unlike us, though, the Dead King did not have to give a shit about wounded or exhaustion or supplies. He could just order the march. There were three days between the Sisters and Lauzon’s Hollow, so if we took a day to recuperate and immediately marched maybe we’d arrive at the Sisters before he did. Maybe . But it’d be risky. If the Cigelin Sisters had been reinforced, we might end up walking into a positional disaster.

“Then what is to be our purpose this night, Black Queen?” the Vagrant Spear asked.

I chewed on my lip. I wasn’t comfortable risking a night battle with Keter, even assuming I could muster enough of my army to wage one alongside the Firstborn. That left only one logical move.

“We’ll not be hunting Revenants, after all,” I said. “Damage is our purpose. We thin their numbers as much as we can – Binds over Bones, constructs over anything else. We avoid Revenants unless they’re alone and keep close as a band. Understood?”

Archer, even after our terse exchange, remained entirely dependable.

“Understood,” Indrani replied, stringing her bow.

“We hunt,” the Vagrant Spear agreed.

Roland sighed, offering a nod, and the Headhunter rolled her eyes.

“I’ll take a kill if it’s offered,” she insisted.

“By all means,” I mildly replied. “Though if you disobey my order I will, naturally, discipline you accordingly.”

The Levantine villain met my eyes and I smiled thinly. I’d killed harder women than her, and without too much trouble. After a moment she nodded.

“Good,” I said. “Let’s get to it, then.”

It’d be a stretch to say that what followed was boring – the danger might be limited, but it still existed – but it did get... repetitive. And it was dull from the start. Moving on foot we struck hard at the enemy’s columns, targeting Binds and the occasional constructs or supplies before retreating back into the Twilight ways and popping out elsewhere. We were quick enough no Revenants came even close to approaching us, though part of that must have been from the Firstborn being a larger and significantly more damaging threat. We saw, maybe two hours in, that things were actually turning starkly in favour of the drow.

Mighty were burning entire swaths of the enemy with impunity and casualties were mounting among the dead with only paltry costs to the Firstborn. Some of the sigils got too bold, though, it cost them. Revenants, at first, but the struck sigil doubled down and called allies – only for the Grey Legion finally to make an appearance. It was a major enough development that I parted ways form my band temporarily and called a sigil-holder to me for a report. Lord Soln bowed deep, but talked briskly. It wanted to return to the fray.

“The ironclads unmake the Night, Losara Queen, much as the carved pillars did during our previous raid,” Lord Soln said. “It appears they have also been invested with a ward that prevents access to the Twilight Ways. That surprise was... costly. Between them and the Revenants, we were forced to pull back.”

“Give me a look,” I ordered, extending a hand.

The sphere of Night was promptly offered and my damning suspicions were confirmed. I’d seen the Grey Legion before, those hulking dead encased in armour so thick it more of a rampart. Those armours had been well-maintained and quite distinctive, so it was easy to tell that the Grey Legion had been quite recently refitted. So that’s what you got out of this, Neshamah , I thought. You tested the pillars and wards on our Firstborn, and when they proved effective you used that Crab lurking around somewhere to refit your Grey Legion into drow-killers. It wouldn’t matter much here, where we could harass away from their ranks and avoid them, but there would come a time in this campaign when the drow would have to stand and fight.

And when they did, the Prince of Bones and his legion tailored to kill Firstborn would be waiting for them.

“Go,” I told Soln. “Return to the fight. Pass my order that the Grey Legion is to be avoided, lest we allow the enemy to further refine ways to kill us.”

It was worse than those troops just being a hard counter to drow, I knew. It also meant that two of the three assets we had at hand that could possibly deal with the Grey Legion without horrendous casualties – namely Akua and myself – had just been made equally obsolete. Some tricks would work to a limited extent, like flood gates, but I wasn’t confident in smashing them by myself anymore. And our last answer to their kind, the Blessed Artificer, worked exclusively in Light. I was not so confident that the Dead King did not have something to counteract that as well, considering how much he’d invested in building up this army. Fuck.

Unpleasant as the revelation was, there was nothing to do but to continue our raiding. I returned to my band and we resumed our attacks, continuing to inflict bloody noses wherever we went until around Early Bell. We were all beginning to slow, close calls were getting closer and victories getting sloppier, so I called it at an end. The Firstborn remained until a full hour before dawn, only then retreating into the Twilight Ways. I slept for as long as I dared, which wasn’t much, and woke all too soon to be presented with corpses. Named and Revenants, this time. I took two aspects from the Beastmaster before it grew unfeasible to do more, but unfortunately I did not have the rights to the Sage’s body.

The way the Headhunter took heads from the foes they defeated fucked with my ability to steal aspects, I discovered with displeasure after a very frustrating hour pawing at Revenants fruitlessly, but I still got two out of the kill the Vagrant Spear had made. Disappointingly weak, those two, but I was never one to sneer at having another artefact up my sleeve. When the war council held session afterwards, once more with the full roster, there was no real disagreement over the decisions to be made. The morning’s scouting parties and found Lauzon’s Hollow abandoned, so we’d send out Named to smell out the traps no doubt left behind and after them a forward force to hold the end of the pass.

The full army would only begin moving tomorrow at dawn, when we took to the Twilight Ways in an attempt to catch up to the enemy. If we were lucky, our surprise strike would seize the Cigelin Sisters before the enemy arrived and we’d be able to pincer the Dead King between the fortress and our field army. If not, we’d have to get... inventive. There were still too many unknowns for a proper battle plan to be made, unfortunately.

There was a bit of a commotion before Noon Bell when the Gigantes delegation finally caught up to us, but the giants were polite and it did wonders for morale. I was sent a polite yet firm reminder that the Gigantes would not fight unless attacked, and could not be used as war casters by my order, but I had no qualms with that. Just as ward-makers they’d be worth a dozen times their weight in gold, which would be no small sum. The Gigantes, though, had been largely expected. I’d known they were coming from the messages received from Neustal. When there was once more a commotion at a sudden appearance though, it came as a genuine surprise to me. I figured it might have been an early supply convoy, at first, but Hakram swiftly send a phalange to inform me otherwise.

It was Scribe herself who escorted the surprise arrival into my tent, helping him into the chair with surprising gentleness. I dismissed her with a look afterwards – Hakam I’d trust with such a conversation, but she was not Hakram.

“Catherine,” the Grey Pilgrim greeted me tiredly.

Tariq looked a month past exhausted and all too frail even for a man of his age, which did not bode well. He was also supposed to be with Prince Klaus’ army, which boded significantly worse.

“Tariq,” I quietly replied. “Can I offer you a drink?”

I did not bother to ask if something had gone wrong, for he’d not be here otherwise. To my surprise, he took me up on my offer.

“Something stiff,” Tariq Fleetfoot asked. “It will keep me awake long enough to get through this conversation, at least. I’ve not slept in weeks.”

I silently revised my estimate of the trouble from ‘pretty bad’ to ‘fuck’ as I poured him a full glass of brandy and pressed it into his hand. He drank deep and offered thanks.

“We finally learned why the army in Juvelun did not chase us when we marched past it towards Malmedit,” the Grey Pilgrim told me.

“Did you,” I said, already grimacing.

“We also found that missing army of two hundred thousand,” the Peregrine mirthlessly smiled. “It was, after all, waiting for us in the latter city.”

Chapter 61: Adouber

“Fear is the prerequisite to any genuine learning; anything that can be learnt without questioning the foundations of your world is essentially decorative.”

– Dread Emperor Sorcerous

It was easy to forget that the Grey Pilgrim was, for all the power of his Name and the favour of the Ophanim, very much mortal. An old man with an old man’s frailties, whose relentless march towards my camp had brought to the brink of collapse. His loose grey robes looked half made of dust and even drabber than usual, his rheumy blue were clouded with exhaustion. It made me uncomfortable to look at, someone of that strength so openly at the end of their rope. His brandy was sipped at carefully and he declined my offer of sending for a warm meal, claiming that exhausted as he was he’d probably retch it right out. After gathering his bearings some, the Peregrine needed no prompting to begin speaking.

“The campaign went well, at first,” Tariq said. “The Enemy’s raids were heavy and sustained, but we held strong through the days and the nights belonged to the Firstborn.”

I’d poured myself a cup of brandy as well before dropping back into my seat. I had a feeling I was going to need a stiff drink before this conversation came to an end, and maybe second when it had.

“The last messenger I got from your column told me the army was preparing to pass Juvelun,” I said.

The Iron Prince’s part of the campaign plan had been relatively straightforward, when it came down to it. His smaller column – fifty-four thousand to my seventy – had left days earlier than mine from one of our defensive strongholds to the east of Neustal, just north of the town of Cassain. It’d then quickly advanced north along the old mining roads. Our intention had been for Prince Klaus’ army to draw the undead army at the town of Juvelun into battle, as the town sat over a passage through the hills towards the central valley where the capital lay, the army holding it also being the undead force closest to said capital.

Unfortunately the army in question had refused to leave Juvelun, instead remaining in a dug-in and defensible position that it would be difficult for Prince Klaus’ numerically inferior army to invest. We’d anticipated that was a possibility, though, and planned accordingly. To the north, further up the mining road, lay the city of Malmedit. To the Dead King it was a place of some strategic importance, as the mine shafts surrounding the city had been connected to tunnels he’d had dug through the northern hills and he now used Malmedit as a major staging area to pour warbands into the lowlands of Hainaut.

If the Iron Prince made it to Malmedit he could collapse the tunnels, which would be a significant setback for Keter. Knowing that, our working assumption had been that if Prince Klaus’ army kept marching north towards the city the undead army in Juvelun would have to engage him: the Dead King would just be pissing away his eastern road into Hainaut otherwise. Yet we had, it seemed, made a grievous mistake along the way.

“The plan seemed a success for the first few days of the march on Malmedit,” the Peregrine said. “Raiding parties began harassing our supply lines, and though young Hanno kept them open sword in hand our generals believed this to be the prelude to an enemy attack against our back.”

The old man paused, pressing down an errant tuft of white hair from the sparse crown around his head and sipping at his brandy.

“Yet the days passed,” the Grey Pilgrim said, “and that attack failed to take place.”

I grimaced. That’d be the point where I would have smelled a trap, so I refused to believe that a commander as experienced as the Prince of Hannoven had not.

“I’m guessing he ordered a heavy war party forward as reconnaissance,” I said.

Suspicious as he would be, Prince Klaus wouldn’t have turned back at the first suspicion. The Dead King could have been bluffing, or simply writing off Malmedit as a lost cause while focusing his attention elsewhere. In his place I would have encamped relatively close to the force I knew I could handle in a pitched battle – the Juvelun army – and sent out a strong contingent to probe the enemy’s defenses ahead.

“Six thousand horse,” Tariq agreed. “With the Witch of the Woods as magical muscle and two champions to escort her. One day shy of Malmedit itself they ran into the enemy’s own vanguard.”

I drank from my cup, fingers tight around the silver. With horses and that calibre of sorcery on their side, they would have gotten away mostly clean. It was the strategic situation being described that had me aghast. The Grey Pilgrim had earlier intimated that the army two hundred thousand we’d thought in the far north of the principality had been the one waiting for our eastern column in Malmedit, which meant pressing an attack forward against it would have been suicide. The Iron Prince would suddenly have found himself stuck between a massive force to the north and a smaller one to the southwest, the latter even being able to cut his supply lines if it was willing to bleed for it – and when was Keter ever unwilling to bleed?

“How bad was it?” I grimly asked.

“Even using the Twilight Ways, the war party only returned quickly enough to give us two days of forewarning,” the old man said.

Which sounded like a lot, if you’d never commanded an army. But I had and so I knew they were ungainly, lumbering things. Especially when being made to turn around.

“You retreated, I assume,” I slowly said.

“That was our intent,” Tariq said. “Until the Young Slayer and the Harrowed Witch found an enemy raiding party to our south yet strangely heading away from the army, further south. They followed it down and-“

My eyes narrowed. The pieces were falling into place.

“- found the dead dismantling the mining road,” I finished quietly.

The old man nodded. So that’d been Neshamah’s game: by ripping up the road, he was making sure that even if the Iron Prince’s army tried to march back to our defensive lines it’d be slowed enough that his large ambush army marching south from Malmedit would be able to catch up to it. That left only the Twilight Ways as a way out, but even that was... risky. Not on a tactical level, I meant. With two days of warning, an evacuation would be quite possible: so long as he wasn’t under attack, with a pharos device Prince Klaus should be able to shift his entire army into the Ways in a few hours. On a strategic level, though, his disappearance could lead to a disaster.

If the Iron Prince bailed on the eastern theatre of our campaign entirely, there would be nothing standing between a massive army of two hundred thousand – maybe even three hundred thousand, if the army in Juvelun joined forces when it passed near – and our dangerously bare defensive lines. Our reserve was already marching on the Cigelin Sisters, meaning all that was left there was the reinforcements from Daoine under Vivienne and a fresh wave of Proceran conscripts. Klaus could instead take his army back to our defensive lines, but if he did then he was leaving my column out to hang: all enemy armies would converge on my army and even with the Ways there was no possible way for him to reinforce me in time.

He read us like a book , I admitted to myself. The Dead King had seen us coming and now we were being made to bleed for it. I couldn’t even claim that at least that fucking surprise army in Malmedit had flushed out Keter’s hidden hand: we’d found that missing force, sure, but only after the other force of one hundred and fifty thousand in Luciennerie had vanished into thin air. The wily old monster had managed to keep the story of his ‘hidden threat’ going even after revealing another hidden threat – he’d baked a second cake while eating the first one, so he quite literally got to eat his cake and have it too. Gods but I hated fighting the fucking Dead King.

Tariq had kept silently sipping at his drink, letting me wrestle my thoughts into place, but when he saw my attention fully return to him he set the cup down.

“And after?” I simply asked.

I’d been able to make decent guesses as to what the Iron Prince would have done until then, with the benefit of multiple sources of information and insight, but now we were out in the wilds. I’d never fought the old prince on the field, and records of his campaigns against the ratlings and the dead were near nonexistent – Lycaonese marked only victories, defeats and tallies of the dead. Anything else was considered pettily boastful. And while the Iron Prince’s victories during the Great War were much better known, they’d been won waging a very different sort of war. I wasn’t sure what I would have done in his place, much less what would have gone through the Prince of Hannoven’s mind at that crossroads.

“A war council was called,” Tariq said. “And after some debate, it was agreed on that the wisest course would be to attack the enemy army in Juvelun to break through.”

My brow rose and I forced myself to think. I could see the sense in it, squinting a bit, from his point of view. Assuming my column broke through with swift victories at the Cigelin Sisters and Lauzon’s Hollow, seizing Juvelun would allow us to link our armies in the central valley of Hainaut. The undead army from Malmedit would still be able to march south on our defences, but at that point our unified force could answer by leaving a strong garrison at Cigelin and then outmarch that army of the dead through the Ways. A neat trick, turning the destruction of the mining road against those who’d done it. Sure he’d take losses taking Juvelun from pushing out the dead, an uncomfortable amount of them, but it would salvage the strategic situation.

The problem was that Klaus Papenheim didn’t know that the army in Luciennerie had disappeared: I’d tried to send messengers, but I very much doubted they’d made it through the gauntlet the Grey Pilgrim had described. Another army had vanished into thin air, and rubies to piglets that it was going to reappear near the capital around the time we finally took the Sisters. You know, right between a bloodied Papenheim and my own forces as the even larger Malmedit army marched on the Iron Prince’s back. That was going to turn into a bloody, ruinous mess.

“You were there for the battle?” I asked.

“I left before,” Tariq said. “Of all our Bestowed it was agreed I had the best chance of making it to you unharmed and in good time, so the duty fell to me. The battle for Juvelun will have taken place by now, but the outcome is known to neither myself nor the Ophanim.”

I slowly nodded.

“You arrived in time,” I admitted. “What you just told me will influence our pace quite a bit: I can no longer afford to take my time wiping out the remains of the enemy here and reducing the Sisters if the other column is in danger of a wipeout. We’ll have to hurry forward.”

Which was compounding risks with risk, I grimly thought. Already the Iron Prince had rolled the dice on taking Juvelun, and now I was going to have to rush taking Cigelin or his efforts might be in vain. The illusion of control we’d had when this campaign had begun, that bold armada of plans and schemes, was now dead and buried. We’d gained tactical victories but we were headed towards a strategic disaster. The only way to salvage this now was to push forward and through. If we don’t, all that’s left is measuring the scale of the losses we’ll incur. I drained the rest of my cup, letting the warmth pour down my throat, and set the silver down.

Gods, silver. Who would have thought I’d end up drinking in that one day, when I’d first started sneaking sips of beer at the- I froze. Oh, oh . Fuck me, I’d had the clues all along hadn’t I? I knew the movements, I even knew how the enemy thought of us. I’d just not put them together, taken that last step.

“It’s a rat trap,” I murmured.

Limpid blue eyes narrowed at me, the exhausted old man turning back into the Peregrine in a heartbeat. The marks of bone-deep weariness were still there, but the flame had lit again.

“Explain,” Tariq demanded.

“Back when I worked in a tavern,” I said, “the owner would make these little rectangular boxes with the front almost open and bread at the end. It’d have a ‘door’ angled like this-“

I formed a roof with one palm, and angled another palm inwards to represent the door.

“- so that the rats would go after the bread and push the door up a bit. Only when they were inside the box-“

“They found the ‘door’ couldn’t be pushed to let them out, as the wood only bent one way,” the Grey Pilgrim quietly interrupted. “I’ve seen their like before, they are used in Levant as well.”

“That bridge up north is our bread,” I said. “It’s not fake, I wouldn’t think. If it does get built we’re in a load of trouble, and we might actually lose this war the regular way. But that’s not why the Dead King built it.”

“He wanted us to enter the trap,” Tariq said.

He wasn’t getting it, though, I could hear it in his voice. A trap was a trap, to him, and it’d never been in doubt we’d fallen for one. I spelled it out more bluntly for him.

“You don’t make a rat trap to protect the bread, Pilgrim,” I said. “You make it to kill the rat .”

The old man frowned.

“He means to destroy our armies,” the Grey Pilgrim slowly said. “The battles, the bridge, even the capital – none of it means anything to him. Even if he loses all of Hainaut, so long as our armies are destroyed he doesn’t care.”

“It’s all expendable,” I agreed. “The army that disappeared from Luciennerie could be assaulting our defence lines around now, with an even larger army headed down the mining road to attack the eastern strongholds – with our own armies so far, and kept in the dark by lack of scrying, he might actually have had a shot at breaking through and into Brabant. But he didn’t even try, because what he wants is to trap us in the central valley and annihilate us. Not in one big battle where the odds are so utterly stacked against him-“

Which we’d probably win, given the amount of heroes in our ranks.

“- but in smaller engagements that will bleed us dry, be they victories or defeats,” Tariq muttered.

He didn’t disagree with my assessment, finger circling the rim of his cup.

“But why the sudden obsession with the armies in Hainaut?” he finally asked. “What changed?”

I’d been wondering the same thing.

“The Gigantes came up on our side,” I tried.

“Not in force,” Tariq said. “They commit to help, not alliance.”

“He might not know that,” I said.

“Might is a thin foundation to build on,” the Peregrine said. “Perhaps the Hierophant’s work in the Arsenal?”

“It might spook him into coming after us this hard,” I admitted. “Masego knows a lot more about him than can be comfortable for the likes of the Dead King. But the secrecy around Quartered Seasons was well-kept, Tariq. We were paranoid, and there’s been breaches but I don’t believe Malicia got through and so he should still be largely blind.”

The Peregrine smiled sadly.

“You fight the Bard, Catherine,” he said. “Neither walls nor locks nor oaths are enough to keep her from learning secrets if she wishes to know them.”

I blinked.

“You think she sold us out to the Dead King?” I skeptically said. “If there’s one person I’d buy she wouldn’t sell us out to, it’d be him. What would she even-“

I froze the dreadful thought that came all too soon. The Grey Pilgrim sighed.

“So he comes after us with his entire hateful might,” Tariq said. “So we suffer a stinging defeat at his hands and, like children in the dark, we pray for deliverance by our own guardian angel.”

I rose to pour myself a second goddamn drink, and when the Pilgrim silently extended his own empty cup I filled it without qualms.

“I thought you trusted her,” I finally said.

“I did,” Tariq tiredly said. “And now I don’t. If you live long enough, Catherine, you will find that time warps even the bonds you believed unshakable. And that we are never so wise as we think, even when we believe ourselves to be fools.”

I held my tongue, even though it would have been pretty easy to stick a dagger or two in him now considering how badly we’d butted heads over the Intercessor over the years. It’d been a rough year for everyone, and there was no need for allies to make it worse.

“I got the shivers when you said that,” I finally said, “and it makes me sick to even consider. So I’d tend to think you read this right. But he’s not coming at us with his full might, Tariq. I’ve seen the battles up north he wages against the drow, and they’re...”

I blew out a breath. In the back of my mind old words came to me as a harsh refrain. Where are the devils, Catherine? the Intercessor had once asked me . Where are the hosts that darken the skies, and the demons he has kept leashed for centuries? Where are the rituals that poison the land and the sorceries never before seen?

“Well, he’s pulling out tricks there we haven’t seen down here,” I said. “And I know he has more: we haven’t seen either devils or demons yet, for one, and he’s perfectly capable of calling on both.”

The old man shook his head.

“He cannot use either,” Tariq said. “It would represent too steep an increase in strength on his side of the scales, Catherine. Providence would allow us to bridge the gap, and the last thing the Dead King wants is a war of equals with such power in play: it would put his forces at a genuine risk of annihilation.”

The Grey Pilgrim leaned back into his seat.

“He has been most careful to limit his efforts to grinding us into dust by attrition for good reason,” Tariq continued. “It is a method of victory that involves very little risk for him and has proved difficult to handle.”

I frowned. That... held up somewhat, I supposed. I honestly wasn’t sure what providence would be able to spit out to even the odds, but arguably that was rather the point. I’d known for a long time there was a risk to villains winning by too large or obvious a margin – invincibility as a prelude to failure, my father had once phrase it – but I’d not considered that on the scale the Pilgrim had. It was the crusading mindset, I supposed. It was not only battles and Named that had a story, but the crusade itself. It was what I knew of the Dead King’s rise to power that had me inclined to believe the Peregrine: carefulness had always been his priority back then, even if it meant slowing his advance.

He’d always preferred giving his enemies no opening to swift victories.

“This changes things,” I finally said.

He wetted his lips, sipping at the brandy.

“Does it?” the Peregrine asked. “Retreating serves no purpose. We are committed to war, even knowing his intentions are different than we’d expected.”

I went rifling through my pockets for my pipe, the long shaft of dragonbone that Masego had gifted me years ago comforting to the touch. A packet of wakeleaf, still from the White Knight’s gift, was carefully stuffed and I lit the leaf by tapping a finger against the rim and letting black flames slither in. I breathed in deep, the acrid smoke filling my lungs before I breathed out a long stream of it upwards.

“If it’s our armies that are in his sights, it means he’s gotten sloppy elsewhere,” I said. “His resources aren’t unlimited, and while it might seem like this trap has been years in the making I’d wager it’s a lot more hastily assembled than that.”

“The Intercessor would not have wanted him to win cleanly, that is true,” the Pilgrim mused. “The more costly the victory to him the better, in her eyes, and that means a warning as late as she could feasibly give it.”

I grunted in agreement, pulling at my pipe and blowing out a ring of smoke.

“We thought he’d guard that bridge up north like it was his own baby,” I said, “but I’d wager it’s been stripped clean. Sure we still can’t account for the Luciennerie army, but it can’t teleport – there’s no way it could have gone all the way up there so quickly.”

“You’re suggesting a raid,” Tariq said, sounding genuinely surprised.

“I am,” I replied. “First we’ll need to reunite with Prince Klaus’ army, but when do I believe we need to send at least one band of five up north to demolish that bridge. We won’t get that opportunity twice.”

“You suggest sending away five Bestowed, and they would have to be among our most powerful to have a real chance of succeeding, before a series of battle that promise to be the decisive clash of this war,” the Pilgrim slowly said. “That is... bold.”

Which meant he’d wanted to say foolish, I amusedly thought, but my favourable record against him had earned a more diplomatic phrasing.

“We can argue the point later,” I dismissed, “but I’d be a mistake to find out at this late hour we lack the stomach to take opportunities when they are afforded us. Regardless, we now need to move forward as quickly as we can and link with Prince Klaus’ column. If you rest through the rest of the day, will you be fighting fit tomorrow?”

“A few hours will have me back on my feet,” Tariq hesitatingly said. “I have never needed much sleep, and less so after I was blessed with the friendship of the Ophanim.”

He kept hesitating, so I cocked an eyebrow at him. It finally moved him to speak.

“You seem... invigorated,” the Grey Pilgrim said, and raised a hand as if to ward off a protest. “I mean no ill by it, only that a conversation that would have set others to despair seems instead to have lit a fire in you.”

Had it? I pulled at my pipe, considering it, then ultimately shrugged.

“This is the most confident I’ve felt about this campaign since it started,” I admitted.

The old man started in surprise.

“I take it you’re not making sport of me,” Tariq said.

I nodded and, to my own surprise, he snorted.

“Ashen Gods, why ?” he asked. “I do not believe this will end in tears, though many will be shed along the way, but little of the news I brought you strike me as sources of confidence. The Enemy has fooled us and led us into great peril.”

“It was always going to get ugly,” I frankly said. “But now we knew the forces in motion, Pilgrim. We know – or have a good guess, at the very least – why the Dead King is acting now, what it is he is after and where all those things sit in the greater tapestry of the war. For the first time since our armies went marching north, we are no longer blind. We can finally find a way to win, and I mean properly win. Not just survive by the skin of our teeth or settle for a bloody draw.”

My fingers were already itching for ink and paper as well as a quiet place to think. Oh, we were in the pit for sure. I was pretty sure the Iron Prince was about to get stuck between two large armies while I caught up, and if either of us made a mistake then this could turn into the single worst military defeat the Grand Alliance had suffered since the beginning of the war. Hells, it could turn into the kind of defeat it was simply impossible to recover from by sheer dint of lives and resources lost. But this pit, it was an old friend. I’d been here before, through my own mistakes and the machinations of others, and the feeling of the bottom of the barrel under my feet did not scare me.

I grinned at the Grey Pilgrim, baring my teeth ferally.

“It’s the eleventh hour, Peregrine,” I said. “Midnight Bell is on the verge, and when it rings we’ll all have to pay our dues, but the song isn’t over. Not yet.”

“You have a plan, then?” Tariq Fleetfoot asked.

Blue eyes in a tanned face met my gaze, and in there I found a light that was not Light – no, that one was entirely his own. It was cold and patient and ruthless in a way that even some of my kind would blanch at, qualities that a lifetime of service to the Choir of Mercy had sharpened into a razor’s edge. There wasn’t a lot a man like the Grey Pilgrim wouldn’t do, for the sake of the world. Looking into those eyes, I wondered if there was really anything at all.

“I have the bare bones of one,” I said. “It begins by taking back the initiative.”

“There are still enemies ahead of you,” Tariq said. “The remnant of the army that held Lauzon’s Hollow, as I understand it, now heading towards the Cigelin Sisters.”

“And that force needs to be destroyed,” I agreed, “but I don’t need our entire army to do that. Not when our reserve under General Pallas will be joining the fray as well.”

“You would split your host in two,” the Pilgrim said. “And then take half to relieve the Iron Prince?”

“We’re going to do better than that, Tariq,” I said, rising to my feet.

I went looking through my desk, opening drawers until I found what I wanted: a small scroll, inked by Scribe’s own hand. It was a neat, lovely map of the Principality of Hainaut whose accuracy meant it was probably worth as much a herd of horses. I unfolded it across the table, gesturing for the Pilgrim to come closer as I set down a bottle on one corner to keep it down and an empty inkwell on the other.

“If Prince Klaus won the battle for Juvelun,” I said, tapping the town with a finger, “then right now he’s marching into the central valley of Hainaut, what the locals call the highlands.”

“And you believe an enemy army, the one that was once in Luciennerie, will have travelled unseen to strike him by surprise there,” the Pilgrim said.

“I do,” I said. “But I also think that the Dead King believes us more conservative in our attack than we actually have been: there’s nothing about the way his troops are moving that even hints at his being aware that the Cigelin Sisters are about to be attacked by General Pallas. So from his point of view, even if a hero likes you manages to bring word about what happened to the Prince Klaus’ column I’ll still be stuck here clearing out the dead heading towards the Sisters.”

It actually shed some light on why the army defending Lauzon’s Hollow had been so willing to retreat, even considering the bloody nose I’d given it. At this point holding the Hollow was no longer a strategic priority for him, it was a lot more important to tie down my army for a few more days while he finished mopping up Klaus Papenheim’s column. And the worse was that the Dead King wasn’t even wrong about my needing to clear out the dead ahead of us. It wasn’t a force that I could afford leaving at my back while taking the Ways to reinforce the Iron Prince. If I did, I would then be stuck with a massive army behind enemy lines and with no supply lines. Hells, at that point he would barely even need to fight: he could just keep harassing us and let starvation do the work for him.

Fortunately, General Pallas was still in the wind and about to make her bite felt.

“I’ll be leaving behind the Third Army and half the Firstborn along with some of the Proceran fantassins, but most of my army will be headed...”

I trailed off, leaning forward and squinting at the map before finally laying a finger at the height of halfway up the stretch of Julienne’s Highway connecting the Sisters to the capital, but a little to the east.

“There,” I finished.

The old man’s gaze followed my finger, taking in the map as he considered it all in silence.

“And what is it that you intend to do in the middle of nowhere?” the Grey Pilgrim finally asked.

I breathed in deep of the wakeleaf, enjoying the burn and taking my time before spewing out a stream of grey smoke. I smiled coldly at the Peregrine.

“Why, Tariq, but we’re going to ambush the force about to ambush the Iron Prince.”

Chapter 62: Adjournment

“Empires die to wars, emperors to knives.”

– Free Cities saying

General Abigail of Summerholm, I’d noticed, always entered a tent like she expected it was going to be filled with a pack of hungry wolves. Or maybe just mine , I mused. She’d never quite managed to hide that she was rather terrified of me, which made toying with her something of a guilty pleasure – kind of like ringing bell near a particularly twitchy rabbit. With the seemingly permanently sunburnt cheek and watery blue eyes, the first Callowan general since the Conquest didn’t look like much. That delicate little nose made her look almost dainty, and the messy hair was seemingly match with dark rings around her eyes that over the years I’d seen thin but never entirely go away.

She was also one of the sharper field commanders in the Army of Callow, though I doubted she’d agree if asked. I’d not bet on her against Hune, not for a few years yet, but General Bagram of the Fourth had some bad habits from his Legion days – too prone to being defensive, too fond of using his heavies as a hammer to smash everything – to match the experience those years had given him, so that fight would be a much closer one. Mind you, it had to be said that this was true in part because the Army was horribly thin on senior officers. Hells, it’d been thin on those even after it’d cannibalized two full legions in the wake of the Folly and we’d taken considerable losses since then.

If Juniper and I had been able to spare a few years between wars to build off a proper officer corps she’d merely be one of the finer youngbloods, marked for advancement but still needing seasoning. As things stood, though, the decision to appoint her as the head of the force that’d hit the Cigelin Sisters wasn’t me playing favourites with a fellow Callowan: I was genuinely putting the person in charge I believed was the finest pick. Hune herself might have been even better, but I’d need the Second with me. Though the sapper corps was now nominally separate from the rest of the Army of Callow, in practice the largest part of it had been lodged with the Second Army for years.

General Abigail saluted, biting the inside of her cheek, and approached my personal desk. At my side I felt Hakram shift in his wheelchair, trying to hide his amusement at the sight. The phalanges regularly seeded flattering rumours about Abigail to facilitate my long-term intentions for her – I’d need someone with an unimpeachable reputation and absolutely no ambition to hold the Army of Callow for Vivienne, when she became queen – and I knew for a fact that he’d indulged some of his gossipy tendencies by crafting a few himself. I was pretty sure that delightful yarn about the good general having impaled a Revenant with the standard of the Third was his work, for one.

“Your Majesty,” Abigail of Summerholm said. “I came as summoned.”

I leaned back into my seat, regarding her gravely, and drummed my fingers against the desk. The general visibly wilted.

“That is cruel ,” Hakram said in Kharsum, tone appreciative.

“You’re right, Adjutant,” I somberly said, “it’s best to get this over with.”

The rabbit whimpered and I was a bad, bad woman. I wasn’t going to stop, this was much too entertaining, but dues where they were due.

“Ma’am?” Abigail squeaked out.

“You know why you’re here, general,” I severely said.

The other woman twitched, like nervousness made into a body spasm, and out the stream came.

“I’m sorry,” General Abigail stammered, “I know it’s Proceran wine, and that makes me unpatriotic, but it’s just so good -“

I sat back in my chair, smothering a grin.

“- I didn’t even know they were loaded die, I got them from this goblin sergeant in the Second and-“

Oh Crows, she was still talking.

“- I wasn’t sure if they were really flirting, I mean they’re Blood and they’re engaged-“

Had I broken one of my most valuable officers? Had I finally taken this too far?

“- in my defence Brotel is a very confusing name for a town, especially with Alamans pronunciation, and I didn’t know he was an actual lord-“

Nah , I decided. This was just my reward for suffering through the last few weeks of soul-grinding warfare. It was like having a good smoke, only better because it came at someone else’s expense. It occurred to me, after that thought, that perhaps the company I had kept over the last few years had not done wonders for my moral character. It was probably Black’s fault if you went back far enough, I reassured myself. Not at all something I’d picked up all on my own.

“- I didn’t really mean that we should eat all Proceran children, I mean how would we actually do that – okay, so maybe if we did like another sort of magistrate dedicated solely to baby-eating, but that would be really expensive and I don’t think the House of Light would-“

Hakram cleared his throat, which silenced her in a heartbeat.

“You know what must be done now, I think,” I solemnly said.

“You’ll send me back home, where I will officially be a general but in reality stripped of all authority,” General Abigail hopefully said.

“Even better,” I said. “Adjutant?”

He wheeled up to her, passing her a folded parchment which she opened warily. Her eyes widened when she caught sight of the royal seal at the bottom.

“Congratulations, Lady Abigail,” I said. “You’ll have to pick a last name, now that you’re a noble in the formal peerage of the Kingdom of Callow.”

“What,” Abigail weakly said.

“Quite right,” I agreed. “It’s not a landed title, mind you, but I’ve made my stance clear on handing those out.”

I’d largely inherited a nobility with its back broken from my father, but Gods knew I would have gotten rid of even my last few northern barons if I could. I had no issue with court titles and even knighthoods, but the notion of legitimate rulers whose only talent was having the luck of being born to the right womb still rubbed me wrong. The governorships weren’t a perfect system, but they were a damned sight better than the labyrinth of noble laws and privileges that’d preceded them.

“I don’t understand,” Abigail tried again.

“In recognition of your bold and heroic charge at the Second Battle of Lauzon’s Hollow,” Adjutant said, visibly enjoying every moment of this, “you have been made a noble of the Kingdom of Callow. The crown rewards exceptional service, General Abigail, and yours has not disappointed.”

It also cut off any avenue of retreat if she tried to retire. Being a noble war heroine would make her one of the most eligible women in Callow after the war – she’d be dragged into the kingdom’s affairs whether she wanted it or not.

“I,” General Abigail hesitantly said, “thank you?”

“It was my pleasure,” I grinned.

I meant every word, if not necessarily in the sense she might expect. It looked like she was trying to convince herself she was out of the woods, so immediately I hit her with the second announcement.

“It was also my pleasure to name you as the leading commander of the force that will continue with the assault on the Cigelin Sisters,” I casually added.

Abigail froze.

“I don’t mean to question your judgement, Your Majesty,” the general delicately said.

“I don’t think anyone’s ever told me that without adding ‘but’ afterwards,” I noted, and cocked an eyebrow.

She swallowed.

“ However ,” General Abigail gallantly tried, “would General Hune not be a better fit for this appointment?”

“I’ve got other uses for her,” I dismissed.

“It is only natural the command should fall to you, general,” Hakram gravelled. “You are, after all, a member of the formal Callowan peerage.”

I hid a grin behind my hand, admiring the sheer bastardry involved in that sentence. He hadn’t lost his touch, evidently. General Abigail glared at the parchment that’d turned her into a noble as if the sheer depths of her hatred would be enough to set it aflame, though sadly for her Creation did not deign to indulge her.

“Surely Princess Beatrice-“

“Coming with me,” I idly said, “you’re getting the fantassins, though.”

She paused a moment, considering the odds of my agreeing to pass overall command to mercenaries before rightfully dismissing the notion.

“Grandmaster Talbot?” she attempted, with remarkable tenacity.

I looked at her steadily and she deflated. The Summerholm girl gathered her courage though, and back into the breach she went.

“Perhaps the Dominion should-” she began.

I watched the wheels turn as she weighed whether Razin or Aquiline being in charge was more or less likely to get her killed.

“- leave a few companies of scouts behind, to compensate for the departure of the goblins,” she hastily adjusted midsentence.

“Poor lordlings,” Hakram amusedly said in Kharsum. “That’d sting, if they ever got wind of it.”

“Quite right, Adjutant,” I happily said. “She should get Firstborn instead. Ten thousand under Mighty Sudone and Lord Soln will do the trick, I would think.”

She stared at me woefully.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” General Abigail said, in the tone of someone who’d just been asked to kiss the axe about to take their neck on the chopping block.

“I understand I’ll be putting something a burden on you, as you’ll still be commanding the Third while leading this part of the campaign,” I said. “For that reason, I’ve assigned you an assistant you should find helpful in many regards.”

With impeccable timing the guard outside my tent parted the flap to introduce the newest arrival, the young orc announcing the entrance of ‘Secretary Elene’. Scribe had objected to our using her true name, if ‘Eudokia’ truly was that. It’d been the name she used as a Calamity, at least, which counted for something. I found it fascinating that though Scribe’s aspect – Fade , she’d eventually told me, though it could be a lie – was pulsing as it always did and Abigail was in no way proof for it, the general’s perpetual wariness meant she kept noticing that she wasn’t noticing much about Scribe every few heartbeats.

A fascinating demonstration of the virtues of paranoia when you... oh Gods I was starting to sound like my father wasn’t I? I cleared my throat, addressing both women.

“General Abigail, allow me to introduce you to Secretary Elene,” I said. “She is a member of the adjunct secretariat.”

Which was true, she even had a salary. I’d already ordered her pay docked twice for ‘indecorous skulking’, which was an official breach of regulations in the Legions of Terror because it was an institution that’d had goblins in its ranks for over two decades.

“I mean no offence, Your Majesty,” General Abigail said, “but is she perhaps a magical assassin meant to kill me if I displease you?”

I choked on a startled burst of laughter. My lack of immediate denial had those sunburnt cheeks turning pale.

“For shame, general,” Adjutant chided. “We don’t enroll our magical assassins in the phalanges, it’s the first place people would look. We’re not amateurs .”

“That makes sense,” the dark-haired woman muttered, actually brightening some. “So this whole magical whammy I’m feeling is, uh, accidental?”

“Secretary Elene is Named,” I said. “But I’m speaking for her too much already. Why don’t you introduce yourself, secretary?”

“I am Secretary Elene of the adjunct secretariat,” Scribe told Abigail in a tone so dry it rivalled the Hungering Sands. “Pleased to meet you.”

“And you,” the general replied, seemingly by reflex.

There was a pregnant pause.

“She’s shy,” I confided. “You might know her better as the Scribe.”

General Abigail blinked in surprise.

“The old one’s finally dead?” she asked.

“There’s no need to be insulting,” Scribe mildly said, “I assure you I am still quite spry.”

“You’re a Calamity ?” Abigail wailed.

“Retired,” Scribe noted. “I am now gainfully employed by the Kingdom of Callow. Which has my adequately remunerated loyalty.”

“You conquered the Kingdom of Callow,” the general said, voice gone shrill with dismay.

“It’s a fair point,” I admitted.

“She has you there,” Adjutant agreed.

Scribe shot us a look that was deeply put-upon, though I’d met the godsdamned Calamities so if she was going to try to sell me she was used to less fucking around she was going to have to do better than that.

“I promise not to do it again,” Scribe tried.

“See,” I beamed, “already we’re all getting along. I’m sure the two of you will both bloom from the cooperation.”

Abigail twitched.

“Of course,” she said. “I’m sure you’re right, Your Majesty.”

“I’m glad of your support for the notion,” I said, “I wouldn’t have forced it on you otherwise.”

I’d never seen someone die a little inside before, it was quite riveting. I dismissed them both afterwards, and by the time they were walking out already Scribe was asking questions about the supply situation that the general was clearly lying her way through answering. A promising pair, I decided. Abigail of Summerholm was too used to scraping by when the danger wasn’t immediate, which having Scribe keeping her on track should fix, while Scribe was too used to being the enabler of someone’s grand design: it would be a genuine challenge for her to assist someone as inclined to improvisation as General Abigail.

Named liked a challenge, deep down, and I suspected that having one would do more to keep Scribe bound to us than everything else I’d done so far.

With them leaving Hakram and I were left alone, though only momentarily – within moments one of his helping hands drifted in, bringing a report. He looked through it and dismissed the man, wheeling up to the desk where I was pouring myself a finger of brandy. I raised an eyebrow questioningly and he nodded, so I rustled up a cup to pour another.

“Roland’s band has killed the last creatures previously bound to Beastmaster,” he said. “Casualties among the companies that accompanied them were light, mostly caused when the manticore went berserk.”

The least dangerous of the creatures the man had mastered had either fled or grieved, but those who preyed on humans had instead gone violently rabid. Fortunately standing orders had been for Beastmaster to keep his menagerie far from where the Dead King could weaponize it, so it’d not turned into a costly rampage. Not that the hunts had been bloodless, for all that the Vagrant Spear had been wildly enthusiastic and the Blood had treated it like the social event of the decade.

“Burn the corpses and go through the standard measures to ensure none of it ends up in the Dead King’s ranks,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Archer’s drinking,” Hakram said. “Heavily. The Concocter joined her not long ago.”

I grimaced, considering what heavily would mean when it was Indrani doing the drinking. I’d have to dip a toe there later and see if my presence was welcome. I’d not been light-handed while handing down discipline, so it might be that even though grieving she genuinely would not want to see me. Still, that she’d broken out the strong stuff before night even fell was not a good sign.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “But it seems delicate situation to step into.”

He hummed in agreement, offering up his cup. We knocked them and drank, the gesture smooth and practiced from years of repetition.

“She rarely talks about Refuge,” Hakram said afterwards, “it’s not shame, I think, but perhaps the absence of pride.”

“She talks about Ranger all the time,” I grunted.

“She mentions the Lady of the Lake,” Adjutant corrected. “When does she ever speak of the woman beyond a few words? Even Vivienne shares more easily.”

It had admittedly occurred to me in the past that Vivienne had been the Thief – a sneak and keep of secrets – and my enemy for years, and yet I’d still known her name before Indrani’s. For someone so outwardly rambunctious Archer actually kept her card pretty close to the chest.

“It’s how she is,” I eventually said. “We’re not all built for deep talks and scrutiny, Hakram. Some people prefer their dark corners without lights shined on them.”

“I’m not sure that is truly the case,” he gravelled. “Maybe a few years back, but now?”

He hesitated.

“Since the Everdark,” Hakram specified. “And I don’t mean because you two started sharing a bed down there.”

“Great Strycht,” I murmured.

Where I had died and risen again, First Under the Night. Where Archer had fought in my name against Mighty by the battalion, only to end up drowned in ice when my arrogance saw me eviscerated by the Sisters and Winter’s power spill out like a sea. That near-death, one that she’d admitted she would not have been able to avoid even if she’d known it was coming, had shaken her greatly. She’d grown past it, past the fear, but it had changed her nonetheless. Sometimes just seeing what lay past the door was enough, even if you managed to close it after.

“She’d never have admitted a thing to Masego, before that,” Hakram said. “She would have figured there was time enough later, and eventually that it was too late. No more, though. And I think it will be the same with Refuge, if the right person asks.”

“That might not be me,” I bluntly said.

The orc shook his head.

“It’s different, what she has with Masego,” Adjutant said. “He wouldn’t judge, it’s why she wouldn’t mind speaking. But you’re the one she confesses to, Catherine. Not me, not Vivienne, not the ties she’s made since she became a captain of Named.”

I leaned back, passing a hand through my hair.

“We’ll see,” I finally said. “I had to bring down the hammer on her yesterday, Hakram. It won’t have gone over well.”

The trouble was that, the way I figured, Indrani had joined the Truce and Terms largely because she was already part of the Woe and it was what we were doing. But the way I’d run the Woe wasn’t the way I had to behave as an officer of the Grand Alliance, and even if it was tempting I couldn’t just mark ‘the Woe’ as a different category within the Named I had authority over. It would undermine all I was trying to do if I treated them differently when it came to my duties. I wasn’t sure, though, how much Indran actually cared about the Terms – or even the Accords, in the long view. She’d not take the lash for a cause she was indifferent to, that much I knew.

It just wasn’t in her nature.

“You do her disservice, I think,” Hakram thoughtfully said, “but I understand why you would. Sometimes it’s more comforting to pick at a wound than have it healed.”

My lips thinned in irritation. It was not a charitable interpretation of this, and it would have earned more than a scowl for anyone else.

“I’m not sure what wound you’re supposed to be talking about,” I said.

“That she’s going to leave, eventually,” Adjutant calmly said. “That she made that choice long before she made the one to love you.”

I almost cursed – and not amusedly, not in poor humour. I almost cursed because that was the reflex, when something suddenly pricked you. I’d forgotten how sharp Hakram’s truths had a way of being.

“Figured it all out, did you?” I said, tone a tad bitter.

It was not a pleasant part of me he’d dragged up to the light of day. There’d been a reason I’d pushed it in a corner where the day didn’t reach.

“It was not insight, Catherine, but recognition,” he said.

His licked his chops then stayed silent for a moment.

“I have done the same,” Adjutant abruptly said. “With... this.”

He gestured all around us, encompassing everything as I went still. We’d not even come to close to addressing the subject since I’d refused the proposal to support the Clans in rebellion against the Tower as it currently said.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I carefully said.

“I needed to know,” Hakram quietly said, “if it was trust in principle or in truth. If you’d make a mistake simply because I asked you to, out of pity. More than anything else, that would have been intolerable.”

My eyes narrowed.

“Your proposal,” I said, “you botched it on purpose. It was never meant to be accepted.”

“I hacked away what might make it feasible,” he admitted. “And had them present you with what was left.”

My fingers clenched, but I forced myself to breathe out.

“I don’t think you understand how difficult the position you put me in was,” I said, tone forcefully calm.

“I do,” Hakram replied. “But I will not apologize for it, no more than you will apologize for barring from the battlefield and saddling me with a Named bodyguard.”

“That’s different,” I hissed.

He bared his fangs the slightest bit, but his neck remained straight – not bent to the side, which would imply apology or submission. He was unmoved.

“You did it so you’d sleep soundly at night,” Adjutant said. “So did I. And I will forgive you your shade of selfishness, if you forgive me mine.”

It wasn’t the same. I knew it stung, that I was keeping him away from the blades and saddling with what someone might consider a minder, but I was doing it so he wouldn’t get killed. What he’d done... But he doesn’t want to stay in the chair, Catherine, I reminded myself. He wants to risk the steel. And it was a decision I considered stupid and unreasonable, more a spasm of empty pride than anything with sense to it, but it wasn’t mine to make. Not really. He’d bent his neck because it would help me sleep at night, and now he was asking me to do the same. It tasted like ash, but I would not deny he was not asking more of me than I had asked of him.

Perhaps less, even. That tended to be the way with us.

“It stings,” I finally said. “That you didn’t trust me.”

He slowly nodded. I sighed and looked way.

“But maybe you’re not wrong, about picking at wounds,” I admitted. “Half the anger is fear that I could have failed the test.”

“You didn’t.”

It was simply said, without frills or false promises. It did not reassure me as much as I would have thought it would, for all that.

“It’s not going to be the same, is it?” I quietly asked. “Even when time passes. When it’s not so fresh.”

“Things change, Catherine,” the orc replied. “We are not the same people we were when this all began.”

Grief seized me by throat, as much for what had been done as who we’d once been. It had my eyes burning, for the first time in years.

“It’s not a failure, Cat,” Hakram gently said, taking my hand. “It’s what we were after from the start. We can’t change the world without changing with it.”

“Yet it feels like a failure,” I murmured, “doesn’t it?”

Like I’d broken something. Those days in the Arsenal had cost us all more than I’d first understood. As all things touched by the Intercessor, they were poison in every way.

“We pay our prices,” Adjutant simply said. “That’s what victory is, even at its finest.”

I blinked and rubbed at my eyes, parting my hand from his. My throat felt raw, like I’d swallowed glass and some had stayed lodged.

“So it is,” I breathed out.

He patted my leg, then took his wheels in hand and began to make his way out of the tent. He paused, though, after a few armfuls.

“One last thing,” Adjutant said, turning just enough to meet my eyes.

I waited in silence.

“If you ever speak to me of debt, Catherine,” Hakram of the Howling Wolves evenly said, “I will leave and never come back.”

It felt like a gut punch and I took it about as well, fingers clenching as he wheeled himself out of the tent without turning back. Gods. He’d said that and meant every word, hadn’t he? The fear that flowed through my veins at that realization was almost paralyzing, and it was with trembling hands I reached for my pipe and lit up a packet of wakeleaf. Fuck . I’d known that nothing was absolute, that everything had a breaking point, but for him to just say it outright... I stayed alone on my tent, eyes closed and seeking calm that would not come.

After most of an hour passed I gave it up for the lost cause it was, and forced myself to seek out Indrani. Just because I felt like someone had yanked out the ground from under me didn’t mean I could afford to stop moving.

—

I’d not been sure what to expect, exactly, when I entering the tent where I’d been told Indrani and the Concocter were drinking together. The two empty bottles of Creusens red abandoned on the ground were hardly a surprise, but I’d figured they would at least be seated. Instead the two women were leaning back against a flipped table, toppled chairs around them, and between the two of them a large glass bottle containing what looked like boiling water – though inexplicably the inside of the tent reeked of cherries – and half a dozen shoddily-made clay cups that were chipped from use.

Indrani, out of her armour and in a rough linen tunic with little usual scarf hanging loose around her neck, was very sloppily pouring herself some of the transparent boiling liquor and spilling more than she realized. The Concocter, on the other side of the flipped table, took a moment for me to recognize: every hair on her body was now coal black, and her eyes the darkest I had ever seen. She was seemingly a lot more invested in mocking Archer’s pouring skills than noticing there was a third person in the tent, so it was Indrani who noticed me.

“Cat,” she breathed out. “You’re here.”

She started, then scowled.

“Cocky’s a villain,” Indrani said. “I didn’t break your rule.”

“I’m not here for that,” I assured her, then glanced at the other woman. “Concocter, always a pleasure.”

“The very same,” she replied, in the slow and careful tone of someone trying to seem less drunk than they actually were. “Would you like to sit, Your Majesty?”

“She hates nobles,” Indrani confessed to her. “It’s hilarious, she can never resist stepping on them even if she’s the big noble now.”

“Nobles are always big,” Concocter solemnly replied. “Fat. Fucking Consortium pricks, they always gouge me on prices. S’why I sell them mostly poisons.”

“We’ve been drinking, I see,” I said, reluctantly amused. “Thank you, Concocter, I will.”

I grabbed a chair, though instead of setting it aright I kept it on the side and pulled back my cloak as I sat down on the ground and leaned back against the legs. My leg twinged with pain, but it passed.

“See,” Indrani slurred. “I told you she’s not prissy.”

“I never said she was,” Concocter said, sounding irritated. “You always put words in my mouth.”

I felt a pang of envy. Much as they seemed to genuinely rub each other wrong, there was an underlying closeness that I’d never really had the likes of. I’d made my own family, when I got older, but those two looked nothing all and yet in that moment of familiar irritation they’d seemed like sisters.

“So what are we drinking?” I asked. “Smells strong.”

“Orchard Elixir,” Concocter proudly said. “My own creation.”

“Kickin’ Cherries,” Archer snickered. “You gotta call it that, I keep telling you.”

“I would rather kiss John,” Concocter replied.

A heartbeat passed, and then laughing drunkenly they loudly shouted ‘and he’s dead’ together.

“Gods rest his soul,” Concocter added. “So pretty. So dumb.”

“Ah, Tinkles,” Indrani breathed out, still laughing a bit. “At least he went out like a champion. It was a good scrap, Marchford.”

“If you’re going to keep laughing that loud, I’ll require a glass of that elixir,” I said.

I ignored Indrani’s accusations of treachery and leaned forward after Concocter poured me a glass more deftly than I would have expected. When she took the clay cup in hand and began to pass it to me, though, she froze. So did Archer. They were both looking at the cup, the laughter gone.

“Fuck,” Archer sighed.

“I’m missing something,” I noted.

“Lysander made those,” Concocter said. “We must have been what, twelve?”

“He was a little older, but yeah,” Indrani sighed. “He needed help for his first shot at a pack of stryxes, so he made these little gifts for everyone.”

“It’s tradition when you’re asking a favour, in some parts of the Free Cities,” Concocter told me. “Shows goodwill. He was from there – outskirts of Atalante, he figured, but he was never sure. His family were hunters, moved around a lot.”

“I got a leather bracelet with stones sowed on,” Indrani said, half-smiling. “It was shittily made, like the cups, but...”

“He’d put in effort,” Concocter echoed. “It was hard to say no after that. We weren’t as hard with each other, back then.”

“I don’t have to drink from it if you don’t want me to,” I gently said.

“No,” Concocter softly said after a moment, pressing it into my hand. “It should be used. It’s what it’s for.”

I took it up and nodded thanks, taking an experimental sip from the transparent liquor – which was, even now, popping small bubbles like faintly boiling water – and immediately choked. The taste, Gods, the taste. It was exactly as strong as it smelled, and kicked just as strongly as aragh.

“Sisters,” I cursed. “That is abominable .”

They both cackled with laughter.

“I usually cut it with fruit juice,” Concocter smirked. “I could always fetch something lighter if you’d prefer, Your Majesty.”

“Call me Catherine,” I snorted, waving dismissively. “And I’ve drunk worse for worse reasons, Concocter. I pretty much switched exclusively to aragh after I ate Winter, and I think it might burn even worse.”

“She pretends she’s all tough, but you should see her guzzle that Vale summer wine,” Indrani said.

The traitorous wench. I drank from the cup again, and it wasn’t as bad. Presumably the first sip had killed everything inside my mouth capable of feeling taste, so this was just flogging a dead horse.

“I should have let the Prince of Nightfall have you when we first got to Skade,” I said. “It would have saved me heaps of trouble.”

“I’ll toast to that,” Concocter drily said, raising her cup.

Even Indrani drink, because evidently it was that kind of a night. Well, afternoon anyway.

“This is our wake for Lysander,” Indrani told me afterwards. “Such as it is.”

“Never drank much, Beastmaster,” Concocter said. “Didn’t like the loss of control. He was that kind of a prick.”

“I’ll toast to that,” Archer said, and again we drank.

I didn’t actually talk that much over the following hours. I didn’t need to: they were, I grasped almost eager to tell their stories to someone who’d not heard them before. I suspected that the Concocter was a lot lonelier than she seemed, for all that she proud as a cat. On occasion I used the power of being less drunk than the others to steer away from squabbles, but the two of them proved surprisingly amiable with each other. Eventually the Concocter fell into a drowse, slumping against the table, and Indrani rested her head against it as well. She closed her eyes, and I almost figured she’d fallen asleep as well until she spoke.

“I’m glad you came,” Indrani quietly said.

“So am I,” I replied, just as quietly. “Almost didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Figured you might not want me there, after yesterday,” I admitted.

She snorted.

“Silly,” Archer said. “Not angry about that. You were fighting for your way.”

“Not yours,” I said. “And I had to rap your knuckles.”

“It’s just what happens, in those situations,” Indrani said.

The well of gratefulness I felt at her words did not quite silence the curiosity.

“Thought you’d be angry,” I said. “You don’t really care for the Truce and Terms.”

“I don’t,” Archer easily said. “Don’t mind them either, they’re not likely to get in my way. But they’re your way, Cat. Your mark, what you want to get done. I stepped on that, even if I didn’t mean to. I’d do the same if it was the other way around, if clapped chains around my feet.”

I slowly nodded. Hakram did have, I thought, that nasty habit of being right.

“You going to be all right?” I softly asked.

Silence followed for a long moment.

“Yeah,” Archer finally said. “I just... I thought there was still time, Cat. To make something new.”

She smiled bitterly.

“Stupid,” Indrani said. “Should have learned better, after Great Strycht.”

“I get it,” I said. “Nauk wasn’t what he used to be to me, not at the end, but when I heard he’d died at Sarcella...”

We shared a comfortable silence after that.

“He wouldn’t have been as easy to live with as the image in my head,” Indrani smiled. “I know that. Probably wouldn’t even have worked. So I guess it’s just having the possibility that I’m really grieving.”

“It’s still something, ‘Drani,” I replied.

“I guess it is,” she murmured. “I guess it is.”

After a moment her breath evened out, and I realized she’d fallen asleep. Reluctant to wake her so soon, I stayed seated even if my leg was beginning to ache and polished off the last of that atrocious Orchard Elixir. I was keeping an ear out for breathing, which was how I realized that the Concocter was no longer asleep almost immediately.

“It’s a nice thing you did,” Concocter whispered. “Coming here. Taking here of her.”

“She’s one of mine,” I simply said.

“She used to be one of ours,” the dark-haired villainess said, “but nice was never our game of choice. It’s done well by her.”

She sighed.

“ You’ve done well by her,” Concocter said. “The Woe.”

“She’s done well by us,” I said. “Miss her?”

The other woman snorted.

“No,” Concocter said. “She was fucking horrible, you know? To all of us. And we were horrible right back, but she had this need to win and...”

She shook her head.

“But it was us, at the start,” she murmured. “The five of us. Other students came and went, but it was us and the Lady. It counts for something, even if we don’t want it to. Lysander was a vicious shit of a man, Catherine. Selfish and brutal. But I miss it too, just like her. The... possibility.”

“You weren’t asleep,” I said.

“Only half,” she shrugged. “Drifted in and out. But I don’t miss her, no. Maybe I’ll see her again in the years to come, and maybe I won’t. I’m not sure if I forgive her, or if there’s anything to forgive. But I like...”

She softly laughed.

“I like that I have the possibility, now,” Concocter said. “So thank you for that, Catherine Foundling. Because she wouldn’t have gotten there alone.”

“She would have,” I replied, meaning every word.

“And believe that, I figure, is what made her want it in the first place,” Concocter murmured.

I wasn’t going to argue the point, not with a grieving woman whose history with Archer was even more complicated than my own, so I stayed silent.

“The Huntress,” I said, “will she be all right?”

“Alexis never learned to cope with anything but her fists,” Concocter said. “It does her no favours, when tragedy strikes. But she’ll get better, if you keep them separate. They’ve always brought out the worst in each other.”

“Thought you might go see her instead if Indrani, at first,” I said.

“She’s with her friends right now,” the dark-haired Named shrugged, “people she actually likes. I’ll look in on her tomorrow. I don’t expect much to come out of it.”

“I thought you two were closer,” I frowned.

“You measure us all by your band,” Concocter murmured. “You shouldn’t. It’s rare, what you have. I’ve seen the other side lives, Catherine, and they don’t get it handed to them either. It’s rare, and it’s precious. Don’t let it go easy.”

“I won’t,” I quietly said.

She nodded, and made herself comfortable against the table. I waited until her breath was even again, then slowly pushed myself up to my feet. Night had fallen, and with it the time I could spend here. I would soon be needed. Still a little drunk, I limped out into the dark. The time agreed upon was soon, very soon. I wasn’t surprised when a grey-clad wanderer crept out of the shade, falling in at my side as I headed to the edge of the camp.

“Do you even know why you’re here?” I curiously asked.

“Not yet,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

I snorted. Fucking heroes.

“You asked me what my contingencies were, once,” I said. “You’re about to see one.”

And at the edge of the wards, the two of us stood in the dark until Creation was opened with a slice and a dark-clad man strode through the opening. He smiled at seeing me. I smiled back.

“Welcome back, Hierophant,” I said.

Disjunction

“Hate, earnest hate, requires understanding of yourself and your enemy. Anyone can despise a scarecrow of their own making, but to truly loathe another you must first recognize in them some part of yourself that you deeply detest.”

– Extract from ‘The Covenant of Iron’, a philosophical text by Dread Empress Foul II

People were already calling it the Peace of Salia.

The capital letter rolled off the tongue, as if the Gods themselves had designated this particular to be more momentous than old ones. Now the Principate’s capital was celebrating that peace with great enthusiasm, for a city that’d been aflame not a month ago. The streets had been adorned with flowers and streaming banners, tables brought out from houses and taverns and shops as the people gathered under torchlight. Simple but plentiful foodstuffs – paid for by the First Prince, under her title of Princess of Salia – had been freely distributed, and everywhere cellars doors were cracked open and a few choice bottles produced. It was as if the capital had turned into a massive summer fair.

The Peace had been a balm for the Principate’s soul, one direly needed for these days Procer was feeling rather more fragile than it was used to. For the greatest empire on the surface of Calernia, that was a shock difficult to swallow. Unlike her own people, it had been centuries since the Procerans had been made to look the possibility of annihilation in the eye – save for the Lycaonese, of course, though that people had never hid their disgust for the behaviour of their southern kin. For now the fear had made honest folk of these princes and princesses, but the heiress knew better than to expect that would last. The fear would fade with time, and when it did the scheming would begin again.

When it did she would be ready. Part of that, unfortunately, meant doing violence against her own patience.

Vivienne would have preferred taking to the streets with the commons, but as the heiress-designate to the throne of Callow her absence at the ball would have been very much noticed. Catherine’s clever, bloody gift from the Princes’ Graveyard carried few privileges that Vivienne Dartwick had not already possessed, and brought with it many, many duties. In a twisted way, it was why Vivienne considered it a gift at all: her queen, her friend, only ever thrust such heavy burdens onto those she trusted. The warmth of that trust still lingered and made the evening slightly more tolerable than it would otherwise had been.

Still, even so spending a few hours surrounded by drunk Blood and the cream of Proceran nobility wasn’t exactly Vivienne’s idea of a pleasant evening. Cordelia Hasenbach could throw a party, mind you. The food and décor made up for the chore to some extent, since if she was to dirty her hands smiling at fools at least it would be in beautiful surroundings. Le Palais Joyeux , this place was called, which if she remembered her Chantant well meant ‘the Joyous Palace’. Unlike most kinds of Proceran ostentation, which the baron’s daughter in her could not help but find garish and vulgar, she could not help but find this particular indulgence striking.

Save for the great marble pavilion at the heart of the palace, the grounds were entirely a great open-air garden. Terraces and gazebos provided islets of food and drink, but the talking and even the dancing was done on the grassy green. Topiaries and sculpted flower beds – prizing pale and purple blooms above all – sprawled out in loose rings emanating from the great pavilion, occasionally revealing bronze statues whose rust has been artfully and carefully managed. Lanterns hung from great ropes above, cast warm light, and enchanted motes of light drifted across the night like little stars. It was quite the enchanting sight, and for all their many flaws the western nobles had come out just as beautifully adorned.

Fortunes had been spent on brocade doublets for the men, as they were the current fashion in Salia, while the women favoured instead layered dresses with split skirts and long stockings. Powders and cosmetics were used to accentuate beauty, for few here were ugly. Visibly so, at least, for though Procerans nobility publicly held distaste for mages it was quite eager to use their sorceries on matters like appearance in private. Still, for all their splendour the Procerans were not the centre of attraction: it had been a very long time since either Blood or Callowan highborn had visited Salia, and so both were treated as something between prey and honoured guests.

“- it was added at the order of First Princess Armande Rohanon, in truth, who it is said was very fond of le Palais Joyeux ,” Simon de Gorgeault finished.

Armande Rohanon, Vivienne dimly remembered, had been the last ruler of Procer before the one whose death had begun what the westerners called the Great War. The last of the three from the House of Rohanon to have claimed the high throne in row, explaining the line’s sharp descent in fortunes since – since the death of the last Merovins, the princes of Procer had not been inclined to allow another house among them to rise too high again. Vivienne’s eyes moved away from the statue she’d inquired about, a piece allegedly meant to represent Clothor Merovins but carved in a style so severe it was nearly Callowan. It was why she’d asked about it in the first place.

“I have never known a man to have even half as many statues as the Principate’s founder,” Vivienne dryly noted. “They would make a forest of their own, put together.”

“Procer is the youngest of the great realms in some ways,” the lay brother smiled. “Even the Dominion can claim descent from the Eighteen Cities, after all, while no single predecessor state ever occupied more than third of our lands. Our shorter history has accrued much gilding to offset that... insecurity.”

He really was good, Vivienne thought. Simon de Gorgeault, whose company she much preferred to younger men incapable of understanding she had no interest in a flirtation, was at first glance at an attractive older man with a pleasant speaking voice and interesting conversation. He was also one of the three highest-ranking spymasters in Procer, though his Holy Society was more diplomatic in nature than its rival Silver Letters and Circle of Thorns. He’d also emerged from the botched attempt to removed Cordelia Hasenbach from the throne as a very influential man high in the First Prince’s trust, on account of the red-handed loyalty he’d displayed to her during those mad hours.

He was charming enough it was easy to forget he was here to take her measure and report every word and nuance to Cordelia Hasenbach.

“Not a word I would have associated with your people until tonight,” Vivienne mildly replied, “but I thank you for the insight.”

The silver-haired man looked faintly amused.

“You don’t trust us at all, do you Lady Dartwick?” Simon de Gorgeault asked.

Vivienne smiled pleasantly, knowing it would not reach her eyes. I trust your rapacious pack of fellows not a whit, spymaster, she thought. I haven’t forgotten that even begging was not enough to stay your hand, when you thought you were winning . There was a greater war than any mortal squabble waiting up north, but she would not let that delude her as to the nature of the empire she was clasping hands with. Its only saving grace, as far as she was concerned, was that it was not as prone to doomsday horrors as the one laying to the east of Callow.

“Trust is much like this grand garden, Brother Simon,” she calmly replied. “Years in the making, even when carefully tended to.”

It was a diplomat’s answer, but then they were both diplomats of some stripe. The man excused himself with a bow, sensing the conversation was at an end, and Vivienne took to the garden paths again. Catherine was easy enough to find, considering there was never anything less than a crowd around her. Her victories on the field followed by a sudden turn allying with Procer would have made her fascinating to this lot even if she’d not been wildly charismatic – and, in small doses anyway, that she was ‘Damned’ only leant a scandalous appeal to her company. With a bottle of wine in her and Hakram at her side, though, Cat would be able to handle it.

The wave of laughter that passed through the assembled crowd of Proceran hanger-ons and Blood in her pavilion suggested that the Queen of Callow might have dusted off a story perhaps best left buried, but then that wouldn’t be the first time. And Vivienne was inclined to bet that it’d been a calculated move if she had.

Catherine Foundling had been eerily prescient since joining the fray in Iserre, and measured in a way she’d not been before. The Everdark had changed her, and perhaps everyone else who’d gone down there with here. Indrani’s changes were perhaps more subtle in nature, but nothing to be sneered at either. Vivienne had once doubted anything of what lay between her and Masego would be voiced before the Last Dusk, but even if she’d not been the mistress of the Jacks she would have noticed the changes slowly taking place there. Though Vivienne was not certain Zeze had it in him to offer what Indrani wanted of him, she wished them well in the attempt.

It seemed to make them both happy, which settled the matter as far as she was concerned.

Vivienne knew her station had obligations, and that it was important to forge ties now so that she might have existing relations with the princes to the west of Callow in years to come, but at the moment she’d had as much of this as she could stomach. She’d been a thief long before she’d been the Thief, so it wasn’t too difficult to slip into an elegant hedge maze and shake off her few ‘pursuers’ – nobles a little too eager to speak with her, or a little too drunk to realized she was not interested in flirting with bloody Procerans. The maze wasn’t too difficult to figure out, as though the walls were tall there were towers and bridges to orient herself with. Twice Vivienne kept to the shadows as she passed couples a lot more interested in each other than their surroundings, which gave a good hint as to what all these alcoves maze might actually be meant for.

She’d skimmed the edge of the labyrinth while allowing herself time to breathe, so eventually Vivienne was forced to admit that duty beckoned once more. There was only so long she could allow herself to disappear for. From what she recalled glimpsing from one of the higher tiers of the garden, one of the several way outs of the maze should be not too far ahead. When grassy grounds gave way to small tiles – checkered black and white, an unusually simple pattern by Proceran standards – she knew she was on the right track, as the tiles were surrounding a small fountain of silver and marble. Vivienne’s steps stuttered, however, when she saw who was waiting by the edge of the fountain.

The shade sat by the water, trailing gloved fingers against the surface as she sat artfully arranged on the chequered stone. The long wrap dress she wore was more Praesi than her usual fare – the vivid patterns of red, yellow and blue drew the eye to the slim waist and the red sash below it, tumbling down into a large patterned red skirt. Matching elbow-length gloves and veil coming down an elaborately tied head wrap finished the ensemble. Akua Sahelian was an eastern dream, tucked away in a hidden corner of a western court. Vivienne felt her fingers twitch, wishing for a knife.

“They’ll really let anybody in, these days,” Vivienne drawled.

The shade turned eerie golden eyes to her – a shade unnatural, that no mortal should have – and offered a charming smile under the gauzy veil.

“Lady Dartwick,” Akua pleasantly said. “What a fortunate happenstance.”

“It’s neither,” she replied. “What do you want, Sahelian?”

“Why, can I not simply seek the simple pleasure of conversation with a peer?” the shade asked.

“I’ve yet to see another snake in the garden,” Vivienne coldly replied, “but should that change, I’ll be sure to send it your way.”

And yet she did not move to leave. Not because she enjoyed insulting the other woman, although she did, but because she very much doubted that Sahelian’s presence here was without purpose. Vivienne would not take off before having first learned it – or, should the opportunity appear, frustrate it instead.

“I thought we might reach an accord,” Akua Sahelian lightly said. “If not for each other’s sake, then for what it might cost others for us to remain at odds.”

Vivienne laughed. It was sharp and immediate, withholding no barbed bite in its utter scorn.

“It’s a clumsy game you’re playing,” she replied. “You’ll not muzzle me through Catherine, Sahelian. If my gaze burns when she enjoys you, it is because she knows it should .”

Not that the dark-skinned shade could understand that. It wasn’t the Wasteland way for the empress to suffer judgement from one she ruled, and Akua Sahelian remained the Wasteland’s creature beyond even the calls of flesh and blood. Vivienne watched the golden eyes, saw how the skin tightened around them as the – heiress, the diabolist, the – shade mastered her irritation. As always, the thief itched to peel back that control layer by layer until irk turned to anger and the garter snake at last revealed its viper’s fangs. The shade smiled, fingers coming down across her long veil and unmaking it in wisps wherever they touched.

The bare face left behind was lovely, but it was a poisonous sort of loveliness. Not the kind that Vivienne would ever find herself envying in another woman.

“I’ve always wondered at the hate you keep for me, Vivienne Dartwick,” Akua mused. “You claim it a matter of principle, earned by my folly, but I know what personal tastes like.”

The smiled broadened almost mockingly.

“And this, my dear lady, positively reeks of the intimate,” the golden-eyed shade said, her voice smooth as silk.

“That so,” Vivienne said, unimpressed. “Well spotted. Putting that expensive noble upbringing to good use, you are.”

“Your compliments mean the world to me,” Akua assured her, tone without the faintest trace of irony. “After all we’ve had such entertaining talks, you and I.”

What was it she was after? Going round and round in meaningless spars would accomplish nothing but wasting the time of the both of them. The dark-haired heiress saw no need to step lightly, though, which simplified things.

“What do you want, Sahelian?” Vivienne repeated. “And try a drop of honesty, this time – I know it doesn’t come naturally, but you ought to be able to fake it convincingly by now.”

“I have always been honest with my desires, if not how I intend to seize them,” the shade easily replied. “Is it so unbelievable I would seek at least a truce between us, even if peace is beyond our reach?”

Vivienne’s eyes narrowed. True, she figured, or close enough.

“A truce,” the dark-haired Callowan slowly said.

“I understand that there is bad blood between us,” Akua calmly said. “I would have it set aside, at least for the time being. And so I wondered how I might make redress, but found answers eluded me. Who then to ask but the woman herself?”

She shrugged, languid, and for a heartbeat Vivienne grasped why Catherine’s eyes so often strayed in that one’s direction. She was utterly disinterested in the fairer sex, herself, but even so the fluidity of the movement had caught her eye. There was more to seduction than sex or showing skin.

“You remind me of a girl I used to know in Southpool,” Vivienne smiled. “She, too, somehow came under the impression that when she threw coin at trouble she’d cause it made up for the act.”

“I offered no such thing,” the shade said, tone grown sharper.

Offended that Wasteland pride, had she? She’d get over it. Or not. Hardly her problem either way.

“A bribe’s a bribe,” Vivienne flatly dismissed. “You want to know what it’ll cost you to buy civility between us, let’s not pretend this is anything more.”

“Ah,” Akua hummed, voice melodious, “but let me ask you this – if it had been, would you have cared?”

“No,” Vivienne replied, bluntly and immediately.

That took the other woman aback, though she hid it well.

“There’s nothing you can do to dig your way back to daylight after the Folly, as far as I’m concerned,” the heiress to Callow said.

Elegantly, the shade rose to her feet. She took a step to the side, light, and Vivienne matched her the other way.

“There must be some bare measure of courtesy offered and received,” Akua said. “Else all we do is darken our standing in our queen’s eyes.”

Vivienne smiled, a cold slice of pale teeth bared.

“I used to be afraid that you’d edge me out of the Woe,” she idly said, watching the other woman’s attention sharpen. “That you’d slither your way into their affections and then steal my place among them.”

“No longer?” Akua asked, just as idly.

“It was weakness,” Vivienne said. “I didn’t trust myself, didn’t trust them. I should have known better.”

It’d taken Hakram carving through his own hand to yank her out of the downwards spiral, but he had. And now she was no longer afraid of shadows she’d painted in the corners with her own hands.

“Heartwarming,” Akua said. “Perhaps you might, then, from the depths of-“

“You haven’t slept with her,” Vivienne suddenly said. “You wouldn’t be...”

This afraid , she didn’t say, this insecure, if you’d shared a bed. The shade leaned forward, eyes mocking. But the mockery was brittle, the heiress decided.

“Would you have been jealous, if I had?” Akua asked, tone suggestive. “It must have been flattering, all those lingering looks. Even if you weren’t interested. And it must have stung when they ceased.”

She could have lied, or refused to answer, but why bother? The truth would not hurt her, not here. There was nothing about that relationship she was ashamed of, and she felt more certain of it than she ever had before. Catherine had entrusted her with Callow . Merciful Gods, what could any words or doubts possibly mean in the face of that?

“I missed it, at first,” Vivienne shrugged. “But even when I still did, never as much as I enjoyed our relationship being simplified.”

Catherine had never made advances and Vivienne never refused them, but the attraction had not been hidden either. It’d been a relief when it had faded as she’d figured it would, freeing her from being unable to return the feelings of someone she cared deeply for in other ways. It’d never been love, anyhow, just a passing torch. And while it had never been unpleasant, or made her feel pressed, she was glad the complication was gone.

“You want it to be a loss, something you took,” Vivienne continued. “But there was nothing there to lose. We are not in competition , Akua Sahelian.”

“You asked an oath for the end of my existence,” the shade replied. “We very much are, though you might prefer to pretend otherwise: you never were much good with a knife in hand, were you? That sort of work was always best left to others.”

A comment that would have drawn blood, a year ago. No longer.

“What I had to say on the matter of your fate, I have said,” Vivienne said. “It’s out of my hands, now, and entirely in hers.”

She was surprised to found she meant it. She’d spent most her life trying to take from Praesi to make for what they took, trying to get even with hard words and grasping hands. But she’d left that life behind, she really had. Her Name would not have left her otherwise. Tormenting Akua Sahelian, taking vengeance on her, wouldn’t make her home better. And she was, in that moment, glad that the long price there was not hers to take. Because it would be a burden, a vengeance of that magnitude. A crushing gone.

“You’re not my rival, Akua,” Vivienne said. “You’re not even my enemy, not really. You’re just someone else’s charge, until you get what’s coming to you.”

She almost laughed, feeling oddly uplifted by it all. It was matched only by the fury she saw on the face of the woman she’d dismissed. And it’s working , she thought, watching those troubled golden eyes. Whatever it is Catherine’s doing to you. Else you would not have come here tonight, unsure why you did. She’s turned you all upside down. And that might have given you a hold on her, because this is a two-way street, but if the emotions are genuine she’ll always win. Because she can kill her own heart, if she needs to, and you don’t even know what yours is.

“And once again, your pretty pale fingers stay clean,” Akua Sahelian said, eyes hard. “What a comfort it must be, to have always had others to bleed and be bled for you.”

“You’re going to cost her things she loves,” Vivienne quietly replied, ignoring the slight. “Respect she took years to earn, trust she’s still not entirely sure she deserves. You’ll cost her Callow, too, in some ways. She’ll stand by you anyways.”

“Why?” the dark-skinned woman asked.

It was, Vivienne thought, the rawest she’d ever seen Akua Sahelian. The eagerness, the desperation, the dread: they’d all had a piece of that one word, like hounds gnawing at the same bone.

“I don’t know,” Vivienne softly laughed. “It is not my price to exact, however long the taking. And why would I tell you, Doom of Liesse, even if I knew?”

The shade’s smiled turned rueful, her face mastered once more. The mask had returned and it still fit, however cracked it might have gotten.

“I could have every Choir and every Fairfax from Eleonor to Robert singing of my redemption before you,” Akua said, “and you would still not care a whit, would you? You do not believe the scales can move.”

“It’s not something you can learn, Sahelian,” Vivienne said. “It’s not a trick or a spell, to become more than the sum of what they made you. You’re trying to stay the same and be loved, hoping charms and favours will get you there, but that’s not how this works.”

She shrugged.

“You have to genuinely want it,” Vivienne said. “To do good, even if it does nothing for you. And for all your brilliance and your poisonous cleverness, Akua, at the end of the day I just don’t believe you have it in you.”

“You know precious little of me, Vivienne Dartwick,” the golden-eyed woman replied.

Her face had gone blank, like a mask of clay.

“Prove me wrong, then,” Vivienne smiled.

And she had, at last, what she came for. So Vivienne left, whistling a jaunty tune, and returned to the evening awaiting her. Behind her reigned only silence, though an even more careful ear would have heard a fait sound. A step.

Like the first step going up a hill.

Interlude: Theism

“Seventy-four: if your lover does not have martial training have a rescue plan ready and waiting, as the eventual abduction by your nemesis is essentially inevitable.”

– ‘Two Hundred Heroic Axioms’, author unknown

Klaus breathed out, quashing all hesitation, and struck.

The axe-blade bit deep into the skull, killing Ratbiter before the horse realized what was happening. The Bremen stampfen dropped, mercifully, but the spray of blood still went high and hot. Messy thing killing a horse, even when done right. Some would have said that the Prince of Hannoven should have ceded the duty to another, that the arm he’d lost in the fall of Hainaut would make a clean kill harder, but he’d refused. Klaus Papenheim had ridden that horse through death and doom too long to let someone else swing the axe. Wiping the bloodspray off his cheek, the prince knelt by his old friend’s corpse and laid a hand on the unmoving flank.

“Rest, old friend,” the Prince of Hannoven murmured in Reitz. “And if there is a place for you on the other side, I will find you there.”

Klaus Papenheim was, in the end, Lycaonese. He’d miss Ratbiter, but he would not burden the army with a lame horse. His people knew well that hesitation in the face of the dead only deepened the losses, and the virtues of pragmatism had been ground deep into their common soul. Sentiment was of no use from the grave, or from the uglier end of walking death. The old general forced himself up, feeling his knees groan under the weight. Behind him, two bodyguards and a pack of army cooks were waiting.

“Butcher and skin him,” the Prince of Hannoven ordered. “Throw the bones and offal in the disposal pit.”

Pitch and magefire would make sure the Dead King found nothing there to use. Klaus passed the axe’s handle to one of his bodyguard – Dieter, whose scarred scalp had turned white as he became just another boy aged too soon by this infernal war – and strode away. His steps took him down the slope, towards the heart of the beleaguered army’s camp as his bodyguards followed in his wake. His parents would have disapproved of it, his leaving. If they’d thought they glimpsed squeamishness they would have made him watch, if not take up a skinning knife himself. A Papenheim cannot hesitate , Father had always said. A crown is a cage of hard choices , Mother had whispered, tucking him in a child.

Both had set out to burn weakness out of him so that Hannoven would not perish under his watch.

The white-haired prince almost smiled. It’d been many years since he had last thought of Ludwig and Sieglinde Papenheim, neither of which were remembered fondly by many of their kin. Klaus had come to understand, as a ruler in his own right, that much of what had seemed cruelty as a child had in truth been cold pragmatism of the breed necessary to survive at Keter’s gate. He’d even come to be grateful for the hard lessons, in time. Yet the passing of the years had not made him love the imperious and high-handed pair any more than he had whilst they still lived. Ironically enough, he figured neither would have minded: what did his aversion matter to them, when their ways had become his just as they had wished? Some legacies were insidious, he’d learned, and all the harder to shake for their quiet creep.

There were songs, among Klaus’ people, about the love he’d borne for his late wife. How even as a man in his prime he’d never considered remarrying. The truth was not as clean as that. Part of why Klaus had never remarried after Suse’s death had been his many failings as a father. He had, without even noticing, become his parents come again. No wonder Wilfried had pressed that charge too far against the ratlings: when had he ever smiled at his eldest save when the boy came back bloodied and victorious? And Gregor, his sweet secondborn he’d tried to harden for the days ahead, had hidden the sickness until it’d been much too late for even the priests.

Would he have, if he’d not been convinced his own father saw him as a weakling?

And so Klaus had decided he would not fail any more children, that legacy would die with him. Margaret had been the one to draw him out of the darkness of those days, after she gave birth to her own little daughter. His sister had been a hesitant mother, and sometimes distant, but rarely unkind: in this she had fared the best of the House of Hasenbach. All it’d taken was for Klaus to hold that bundle named Cordelia in his arms once and he’d been lost, besotted with the little blonde curls and at the laughing eyes. She’d been a merry child, his niece. Prone to gurgling at strangers and trying to eat her uncle’s beard.

More than once Klaus had found his hand reaching for ink and quill, after the talk that had buried their closeness. Where the First Prince of Procer had sent him to fight and die and Hainaut, ordered him to abandon the principality – the people! – he’d sworn to defend. Always he’d drawn back at the last moment, and only official reports had left for Salia. Yet he often found himself writing that letter in his mind, when he had a spare moment. Bits and pieces of it. Sometimes, niece, you remind me of your grandfather , Klaus would write if he took the quill today. When I was a boy of nine, Prince Ludwig Papenheim ordered the town of Ebelburg burned when he heard ratling warbands were two hours away.

If he hadn’t, the townsfolk would have insisted on fighting and standing their ground , the white-haired prince wrote in his mind. They would have said the children could not run quick enough, that the elderly would not survive the trip. Instead he had torches thrown, and four hundred people were saved. They did not thank him for it, Cordelia.

Klaus still remembered the soldiers talking when they returned to Hannoven, the way they’d described his father. Carved in iron, they’d said, and it had been as much invective as praise. Yet they had respected him for it, he remembered. Even the townsfolk he’d burned out of their own homes and brought back to his capital even as a larger force assembled to drive back the ratlings. So I understand it, the decision , Klaus Papenheim silently penned. It’s in our blood. But I am the townsfolk of my childhood, niece. I cannot thank you for having ordered the torches thrown at Hannoven. The old prince knew his home would have fallen even if he’d ridden out to defend it. He’d read the maps, counted the days. Hannoven had been doomed the moment this war began.

And yet Klaus Papenheim had not been there to fight for it, and this he could not forgive himself – or anybody else.

The old general found his tent nestled near the bottom of the hill, surrounded by sworn swords from Hannoven. There the rest of their makeshift war council still held session, sifting through heap of troubles that the last bloody push to take the town of Juvelun from the dead had brought down on them. His second, Princess Mathilda Greensteel of Neustria, was sharing the table with Captain Nabila of Alava – a short, stout woman with a heavily painted face – as the Dominion’s man and Prince Arsene of Bayeux held down his own corner as the voice for the Alamans and the fantassins.

The last two men stood for smaller forces, but in their own way crucial ones: freshly back from healing the White Knight sat with a pleasant smile as he methodically ate his way through an apple, commander of all Named with the army. For the Damned it was the Barrow Sword that had been elected to stand. Klaus counted the man a rogue and a vicious specimen of the breed, but he was also solid in a fight and a devil against Revenants – the Prince of Hannoven was willing to forgive much in favour of that. The Dominion villain often clashed with Captain Nabila, but it seemed more like sparring than the venom Catherine Foundling had warned him might ensue.

The Gods only knew where General Rumena had gotten to, for it came and went as it pleased, but in its absence it had left behind a dark-skinned drow that spoke perfect Chantant and called itself Mighty Sagasbord. It was both habitually sardonic and eerily knowing, which usually made for good advice unpleasant to hear.

“- then we should split our forces and strike now, else the enemy will delay us further,” Captain Nabila insisted.

“We’re still uncertain how many escaped into the valley,” Prince Arsene skeptically replied. “We could be headed into-“

“She’s right,” Klaus cut in, striding into the tent.

The splatter of blood on him got a few surprised looks as he lowered himself into a seat at the table, but nothing more. Everyone here had gotten their hands bloody taking Juvelun, and if they were to survive this trap it wouldn’t be the last time.

“Dare we hope for an elaboration, Prince Klaus?” the Prince of Bayeux testily asked.

“We took the town but the dead retreated in good order,” the Prince of Hannoven replied. “It could be ten thousand made it out, it could be thirty thousand. Either way, every drifting warband in the central valley of Hainaut will be headed that way now. If we don’t strike before the enemy musters up properly, we’ll lose the battle ahead of us.”

It’d taken three days and night of brutal fighting before Juvelun fell, the ditches and walls dug by the dead stormed at all too high a cost. Yet there’d been no final keep to assail, no last redoubt: instead the undead had retreated under cover of night, leaving behind a token force for the drow under General Rumena to annihilate. Though their scouts had insisted that a hundred thousand undead had been holed up in Juvelun, in practice the Prince of Hannoven suspected they’d fought around seventy thousand at most. The rest had been kept back, and most likely were down in the valley preparing to prevent Klaus’ army from linking up with the Black Queen’s. Should the enemy succeed in that design, no one in this tent would still be drawing breath by the moon’s turn. They’d make a fight of it, the Prince of Hannoven knew, but it’d be a defeat engraved in stone.

“Strike hard, then keep moving,” the Barrow Sword approvingly said. “A sound notion.”

Dominion officers always thought like raiders, the old general deplored. It wasn’t always a weakness, as there were similarities between the glorified raids that the Levantines called ‘honour wars’ and an offensive into enemy territory. But the distances and numbers involved meant a lot of their instincts pulled them the wrong way. It’d been too long since the Dominion of Levant had been in a real war, one that didn’t end with a summer’s fighting and a few promises traded between Blood.

They lost the learning , Klaus thought. The Army of Callow had gone through a bevy of rough campaigns and sharpened the skills with war schools while Procer had been given a refresher in the art by the Great War and the latest round of the Uncivil Wars, but the Dominion had nothing of the sort. All their learning was done on the field, with bloody costs for every mistake.

“We’re not in fighting fit for a pitched battle,” Princess Mathilda of Neustria bluntly said. “It’s been a day since we took the town and the priests are still overwhelmed with wounded. We lost a dozen soldiers to infections this morning because the healers would have died if they kept drawing on Light.”

“I forced the Stalwart Apostle to drink a concoction that’d make her sleep,” the White Knight admitted. “She’d still be in the tents otherwise, and burned out permanently.”

She was a good kid that one, Klaus thought. A little soft and with too much faith the Heavens would swoop down and fix everything, but prayer had never gone amiss when things got dark.

“Exactly,” Prince Arsene said. “Are we to send forces into a battle without priests and mages, Your Grace, or consign wounded to death so that our hasty vanguard is not bare of protection?”

This is why your people lost the Great War , Prince Klaus Papenheim thought. Why none of you were able to win it, beyond the Tower’s manipulations. None of you were willing to pay what it would have cost you.

“We will consign wounded to die,” the Iron Prince flatly said. “If the Enemy still has swarms to spare, we would be facing a potential wipe without priests and mages to compensate.”

“The Witch of the Woods-“

“- will do what she can, but cannot be relied on,” Mathilda Greensteel interrupted the White Knight, nodding at Klaus. “If Revenants come after her, the protections she has to offer will not be enough.”

“This is madness ,” Prince Arsene insisted. “We are to leave our own to die and risk it all on battle with a force we know little about?”

“Would you prefer to be besieged in this lovely ruin of a town?” the Barrow Sword drily asked.

“ Yes ,” Prince Arsene emphatically replied. “We still have supplies for a few days – more, perhaps, considering our losses – and if we dig in the Black Queen can come relieve us as soon as she has secured the Cigelin Sisters.”

“What impressive eagerness to die,” Mighty Sagasbord noted, laying its chin on its palm. “Your confidence surprises, Prince of Man. We took this Juvelun from a numerically superior force, yet you now believe that should we be besieged by an enemy many times our greater we will prevail?”

“Our men are worth easily three of the dead,” Prince Arsene harshly said, pride clearly stung. “ Ours anyway, dark elf.”

“No Firstborn will ever take your life, Prince of Man,” Mighty Sagasbord smiled, without a single speck of friendliness to it.

The Alamans prince looked surprised and confused, but those more familiar with the ways of the Firstborn winced at the bald insult. The drow ate the skills and knowledge of those they slew, Klaus knew, so the Mighty had been implying that there was nothing worth taking from Arsene of Bayeux. Best to step in before this went further astray, the Prince of Hannoven thought.

“We might be able to hold the down, if we can put up defences before the dead arrive,” Klaus admitted. “For a few days. But they won’t fight us, Prince Arsene. They will surround us and wait us out instead. The Hidden Horror is patient, he will starve us into the grave.”

The army that’d come out of Malmedit like devils pouring out of a Hellgate was not far behind them. Three, four days at most. If Klaus’ army stayed in Juvelun, it risked annihilation: the enemy in the valley would pen it in from the west, the great host of Malmedit from the east. If that happened, even using a pharos device to escape wouldn’t be enough. The dead would strike in force the moment the gates opened, on both flanks, and the more of Klaus’ soldiers made it into the Twilight Ways the higher the risk of those staying in Creation being overwhelmed by sheer numbers and horrors.

They’d ran the games, him and the Marshal of Callow. Any army trying to evacuate through the Twilight Ways while giving battle was facing at least half its number in losses, and more frequently up to two thirds. There came a tipping point early in the process that made it impossible to maintain cohesion in the ranks, and the moment panic set in a massacre was inevitable. No, Klaus Papenheim would not allow the enemy to slip that noose around his neck. Better the wounded perish today that a hundred times their number tomorrow.

“The Black Queen’s column will relieve us,” Prince Arsene pointed out. “With her numbers-“

“She does not have the supplies to feed us, Your Grace,” the White Knight calmly said. “Her force is even larger than ours, and stretched the Grand Alliance’s capacity to supply. Even if she empties all her stores, all she can accomplish is join us in our starvation after a few more days.”

The Prince of Bayeux’s face soured, but he argued no further. The man was overly cautious, but not a fool. He understood what a combined army of over a hundred thousand, surrounded and far behind enemy lines without any supply lines, meant in practice. The Prince of Hannoven’s insistence to take Juvelun had not been, contrary to what some wagging fantassin tongues insinuated, out of desire for a victory to gild his name. The other choices had all been worse: either turning back to the defensive line, and so tossing the Black Queen’s army to the wolves, or allowing a massive army of two hundred thousand to march down on threadbare defensive lines.

By taking Juvelun and smashing the army holding it, Klaus had forced the Malmedit army to pursue him west into the valley. He’d bled his army achieving this, but it was better than the disaster that would be the destruction of Catherine Foundling’s army or the end of Procer that the defensive lines breaking would represent.

“I have voiced my thoughts on what must be done,” Captain Nabila said. “And I do not take back these words. Yet I add this: if there is no appetite for the fight, we must withdraw. Take to the Twilight Ways and leave. I will not swear the warriors of Alava to a desperate end in Juvelun.”

Prince Klaus kept his face calm. That had been, however delicately put, a threat that if the army stayed in Juvelun the Levantines would take to the Twilight Ways and leave them all behind. His control over the coalition was slipping, the old general realized. Eyes turned to Prince Arsene of Bayeux, whose face had grown conflicted. The man, Klaus knew, did not enjoy being at odds with most of the table when it came to making war plans. But he saw it as his duty to speak not only for the soldiers of Bayeux and Brabant but also for the fantassins companies, which meant espousing their causes even when they were unpopular with other commanders.

“I’m not certain if an order to march towards another battle would be followed,” the fair-haired prince admitted. “My men will follow me, but the Brabant conscripts have been unruly since Prince Etienne died and half the fantassins are mutinous. They were hard used with the breaches on the second day, and have not forgot it.”

“Alava led the charge on the first, and the Lycaonese on the third,” Captain Nabila harshly said. “What sets them apart from us, I wonder?”

The appearance of cowardice was like throwing red meat at a starving dog, for Levantines. They couldn’t resist sinking their teeth in it, and they were especially quick to point those fingers when it came to Alamans.

“The hardest defences to assail were the second day’s,” the Iron Prince acknowledged. “And their losses were significant. I have not forgotten that.”

The other prince looked relieved.

“It is not mutiny, Your Grace,” Prince Arsene said. “Your command is not contested. They have simply reached their limits.”

It was a mutiny, whether the other man wanted to admit it or not. It was simply not yet an open one, not that illusion would survive his giving an order. The rank and file did not understand why they were here fighting and dying, could not grasp the broader theatre of war. That was why trust between soldiers and generals was so important: they had to trust in the person commanding them to steer them right even if they could not understand what was being done and why. It now seemed like trust in Klaus Papenheim was running out. What was it that’d done him in, he wondered – the darkly comical march to and away from Malmedit, or the brutal fighting taking a heavily defended town seemingly in the middle of nowhere? Either way, the horse had grown lame from the hard riding.

“They must be made to understand what is at stake,” the Iron Prince said. “Gather the officers for me, Prince Arsene. I will address them personally.”

The other man looked unconvinced. Klaus did not have a reputation as much of an orator, it was true. The only vote he’d ever personally cast in the Chamber of Assembly instead of letting an assermenté do it for him had been the one that’d put his niece on the high throne. Still, Prince Arsene nodded in assent. Likely he figured that after the old general failed to sway the vacillating captains discussion of a compromise could begin in earnest.

“Let us part ways until then,” Klaus said. “There is no need for further discussion.”

The Prince of Bayeux took his leave, and after a lingering look Captain Nabila did the same. Mathilde slowed as she passed by his seat.

“Veitland?” the Princess of Neustria asked.

“Hauptberg,” the Prince of Hannoven replied.

She nodded, and strode away without another word. Nothing more needed to be said. Klaus found that the Barrow Sword was looking at them, eyes considering.

“Nabila is young to the Lord of Alava’s service, did you know,” the bearded Damned casually said. “Only a decade as one of his captains, most of them spent far from Yannu Marave himself. She rose to her position on merit, not closeness or years.”

“She has proved a fine officer,” Klaus replied, for it was true.

“There’s a reason she held borders, back home, and did not stay at her lord’s side,” the Barrow Sword smiled. “In Levant, authority flows from either Blood or blood.”

The Prince of Hannoven met the other man’s gaze, unblinking. It would take more than cryptic talk from a mouthy grave robber to impress him.

“I do wonder how you’d do there, Iron Prince,” the Damned chuckled.

Someone, Klaus thought, ought to have beaten the smugness out of that mean by now. He gave no reply to the villain, who seemed to take it as a victory and left the tent. Behind stayed only the White Knight, whose look of unruffled patience had not changed a whit.

“You have something to say?” Klaus asked.

“The Enemy breathes down our necks,” the White Knight said. “I do not understand its great designs, for I am no general, but the jaws of the trap are closing on us. That much I can sense.”

“We reach the turning point soon,” Klaus quietly agreed. “One way or another. There is a battle taking shape in Hainaut that will decide the fate of the Principate.”

“Not here in Juvelun,” the White Knight mused. “It has not come together properly. And you might be surprised, Prince Klaus, by the roar of this army should it allow itself to be surrounded here. There is a... power behind such stands. Even more so when there is salvation on the way, awaiting the darkest hour to deliver dawn.”

“There are not many things I would not trust the swords of the Lycaonese to prevail over, White Knight,” the Iron Prince replied, “but steel cannot triumph over hunger. There can be no victory over an empty belly.”

“So I’ve gathered,” the dark-skinned Chosen amiably replied. “And so now we must prepare for the storms on the horizon and pray that the most terrible of our allies will come to our aid.”

The old general stared at the other man, wondering at the tone used when speaking of the hero’s equal and opposite under the Terms. He’d never put any stock in the rumours about the Black Queen and the White Knight, but like many he’d always been unsettled by the cordiality between the two of them. Often the warmth in the voices when they spoke of each other had startled him, but now he heard no hint of it in the White Knight’s words. There had been a distancing there, he thought. Not enmity, but a cooling of relations. Merciful Gods, what was it that’d really happened in the Arsenal?

The rumours spread by the dozen, each wilder and more fanciful than the last, but truth was in short supply.

“We will have order,” Klaus Papenheim simply said. “And we will march west, as we must.”

“I expect we will,” the White Knight tiredly said. “I will ready my Named for the march, Iron Prince.”

The white-haired prince looked askance at the other man, almost surprise.

“That is all?” he said.

“I do not judge,” Hanno of Arwad said, rising to his feet. “This has not changed, and never will.”

The Chosen left the tent after offering a small bow, not speaking another word, and Klaus dragged himself upright once more. His day was far from over. The old prince attended to the army of Hannoven, speaking to his captains and preparing them for what was to come, and awaited the word of the Prince of Bayeux. Yet it was not another Proceran who came for him first but something altogether more eldritch. General Rumena, the only drow in all of the army come south to bear such the title, was stooped and old in a way that Firstborn never were. It was ancient, Klaus knew, in a way that it was hard to truly understand.

The fucker was also a bastard soldier of the old breed, so Klaus Papenheim had never found him difficult to deal with. He’d yet to manage to talk the other general into no longer invading his tent whenever it felt like it, but aside from that their relationship had been rather amiable from the start.

“You have something for me?” the Prince of Hannoven asked.

Complaining about the habitual intrusion would be wasted time in a day that already had too few hours.

“We went down to have a look in the valley,” General Rumena agreed. “The dead gather, Hannoven Prince. The valley had been stripped bare of warbands – Losara Queen’s work, I wager – but the dead salvaged a host from the fall of Juvelun. Perhaps thirty thousand, though they are not yet properly mustered for battle.”

Klaus grimaced at the news. He’d hoped for closer to twenty thousand, fool’s hope as it had been. That much could have been handled without leaning too heavily on the Alamans to supply soldiers for the force that would sally out.

“How long do we have?”

The wrinkled and grey-skinned creature considered that a moment.

“The dusk of tomorrow,” the drow finally said. “They will be ready for war then, and waiting for you. The disarray from the fall of Juvelun will last no longer than that.”

Klaus stiffly nodded.

“My thanks,” he said. “Will your sigils be in fighting fit tonight?”

“We always are,” General Rumena smiled unpleasantly. “Chno Sve Noc.”

“So your lot keep telling me,” the Iron Prince grunted back. “Get ready for a strike after dark. We can’t afford to linger here much longer.”

“Do your people not have a saying about the weakest link?” General Rumena mused.

“A curse,” Klaus corrected. “May you be the weakest link in the Chain of Hunger.”

“Yes,” the old drow nodded. “That is not us, Hannoven Prince. See to your own sigils, before speaking of dragging feet.”

And just as boldly as it’d slipping into his tent, the Firstborn strolled out after seizing the last word. Klaus could have fought it, but what would be the point? Better to let it keep its prize and remain pacified. His pride was not so overgrown as to be unable to tolerate the occasional pointed quip from a peer. It still took half a bell after that for the Prince of Bayeux to send a messenger to him, giving word that the other royal had at last gathered the captains in need of swaying. The reason for the delay became clear when the Prince of Hannoven headed to the pavilion mention by the messenger.

That it was a pavilion and not a simple tent where the talks were to be had said much about the numbers involved.

Twenty handpicked Hannoven armsmen followed him inside, his bodyguard, but there must have been almost a hundred men and women already packed tight within. Fantassins captains, mostly, but many peasant officers from the Brabant conscripts as well. Prince Arsene himself stood to the side with a handful of bodyguards, as if to make it clear he was not one of the wavering souls. From the start Klaus found that the mood within was mutinous. He spoke clearly and concisely, avoiding frills and japes out of respect for the grim deeds he was asking for, but twice he was interrupted by a challenge from a captain and more often than that by jeers.

“To stay in Juvelun is death,” the Prince of Hannoven told them. “We will be surrounded and destroyed.”

“And where would we go instead, bloody Keter ?” a woman called out.

“Retreat,” another voice called out. “We must retreat .”

“We must go west,” Klaus roared, his voice rising above the din. “General Rumena has reported to me that the remnants from the defenders of Juvelun are gathering in the valley, and we must strike west to disperse them before they can mount a true threat.”

The shouts of dismay were deafening, interwoven with jeers and calls for retreat or holing up in the town. There would be no convincing them, the Prince of Hannoven thought. It was Prince Arsene who called the crowd to order, in the end.

“Hauptberg,” the Iron Prince spoke into the silence, “is the name of a town two days away from the Morgentor by horse.”

His bodyguards had closed ranks around him when the crowd had grown wild and stayed in formation since.

“My people,” Klaus Papenheim said, “know it as where the first of the Iron Kings, Alrich Fenne, was crowned ruler of all Lycaonese before smashing the ratling hordes in Twilight’s Pass.”

There had been seven kingdoms back then, though in time they became the four modern principalities of the north. But the first of the Iron Kings had not used to sweet words to convince the other royals to kneel to him, on that day. The truth was altogether bloodier. On the last day of the talks held at Hauptberg, none of the kings had been willing to swear to another and stand as a single force against the implacable foe coming their way.

And so Alrich Fenne had, in the dark of night, killed them all.

“Sometimes,” the old general said, “someone has to order the torches thrown.”

He curtly brought his hand down and the head of his bodyguards screamed out the order. Like a tide of steel, soldiers of Hannoven and Neustria began pouring into the pavilion.

“Arrest those who kneel,” the Iron Prince ordered. “Kill the rest.”

Interlude: Ietsism

“There is a natural order to the world and the peoples of the world must reflect it through law. Should all serve as ordained by the Heavens, all of Creation will be as a garden without sin.”

– Extract from ‘Ten Scales’, by Madrubal the Wise

They were not alone out here.

Leaning against the tall rock, the White Knight reached for the coin that was never far from his hand and palmed it, deftly sliding it between his thumb and forefinger. With a satisfying twang it went spinning upwards and for a heartbeat his heart soared before he mastered it. His fear was proved true a heartbeat later, as the coin ceased spinning at the apex and simply hung there as if frozen in amber. After a few heartbeats, it simply dropped down and back onto his palm. At no point did either the laurels or the swords take primacy, as the Hierarch of the Free Cities would brook not even the shadow of a verdict to be passed while he watched. Flicking his wrist with a defeated sigh, Hanno of Arwad disappeared the coin once more.

“Stern Singers again silent, huh,” Rafaella said, peering down at him from atop the stone.

“Anaxares the Diplomat is proving to be remarkably obstructive man,” Hanno replied with forced calm.

And on occasion he had proved more than simply that. That over the last three months the coin had begun to occasionally be seized instead of simply inert had been worrying enough, for not even the Grey Pilgrim knew whether it meant that the Hierarch was fading with a last hurrah or gaining ground against the Seraphim. Rather more troubling had been the word that’d come to Hanno that for the first year after the Peace of Salia, the heads of Bellerophans who had broken the city’s laws had taken to spontaneously exploding. Not for every infraction, but frequently enough that rumours had spread out of even the famously closed republic. The madman had succeeded at arrogating the powers of the Choir of Judgement, if only for a brief time.

“Bellerophon like bag of wet cats,” the Valiant Champion sympathetically said. “Never good idea to put hand in.”

“So I’ve been told,” the White Knight mildly said.

Catherine had graciously refrained from reminding him that she’d attempt to warn him off the course of action that had seen the Choir of Judgement sealed whenever they disagreed, but Tariq had not been shy in voicing his own opinions. Evil knows Evil in ways that we cannot, the Grey Pilgrim had chided him. To refuse expertise leant in good faith is not wisdom, it is vanity. Hanno had accepted the reproach for it was: not the lesson of a would-be mentor, which he would have cared little for, but the frank assessment of a peer. Few ever cared to offer those to him, which made such talks all the more precious.

“It seems our friends are not biting today,” Hanno added, changing the subject. “Any sign of the Hawk?”

“Just Wolfhound,” Rafaella sighed. “And he still boring loaf.”

Hanno cocked an eyebrow.

“Loafer?” he suggested. “Or perhaps oaf?”

“This too,” the Valiant Champion agreed.

Rafaella turned to look downslope, among the rocky expanse leading into the valley where central Hainaut awaited, and waved her greataxe eye-catchingly.

“Hear this, Wolfhound?” she yelled. “Fight me!”

The White Knight, though mildly amused, was now forced to admit that their little incursion looked like a wash. He’d thought it possible to bait the trickiest of the Scourges now that the camp was about to look vulnerable, but the Hawk had refused to bite. Even putting out the Young Slayer as well as the Valiant Champion had not moved to Revenant to try an attack. Hanno pressed against the stone to his side with his boot, and with a heave have himself just enough momentum he was able to leap out of the dip where he’d been waiting and join Rafaella atop the stone. Further downslope, the sculpted iron helm of the Wolfhound could be glimpsed among the rocks as the Revenant studied them unmoving.

He seemed unmoved at the notion of being alone around three Named with significant bite to them, not that Hanno was surprised. Of all the Scourges, that one had proved the hardest to put down save perhaps the Prince of Bones. Not that ‘Scourges’ were a formal band of any kind, mind you. They were, in essence, a loose designation for the Revenants that the heroes fighting on the lakeside fronts found to be the greatest threats. Each among the greatest of their kinds, they were considered to require either a full band of five or one of the greatest champions of the Grand Alliance to handle. Who actually counted among their number was the subject of lively campfire debate, though there were at least ten that all agreed on.

Nine now, Hanno mentally corrected, if word about the Stitcher being destroyed by the Firstborn was to be believed.

“Slayer,” the White Knight called out, “return. We’re done here.”

There was no sign of movement until the young hero seemingly popped out between stones, stalking towards the two heroes without a sound to his steps. The Young Slayer was tall for a Levantine and unusually slender as well, but the lithe build leant a grace to his movements that was almost fluid. Armed with a slayer’s arsenal, all hooked swords and darts and ropes, the dark-haired youth was among the more promising of the upcoming heroes. One of his aspects allowed him to most forms of armour as he cut, which had proved deadly against Revenants preferring close range. He was also something of a political headache, as it happened, which was why he’d been assigned to Hanno’s care.

The Young Slayer came from a family rival to the Osena, the descendants in Blood of the Silent Slayer, but had come into a Name that was widely considered to be the transitional one leading into the highly regarded Name of Silent Slayer. For the Osena this was something of an embarrassment, and though Lady Aquiline Osena had not proved outright hostile to the young hero she’d also made it clear there was no place with him in the ranks of the warriors of Tartessos. Hanno had promptly passed him into Rafaella’s care as much for the shared heritage as the fact that the Valiant Champion had managed to remain on good terms with Lord Yannu of the Champion’s Blood without being married into the Marave.

“Our hunt was fruitless, Lord White,” the Young Slayer sighed as he returned to their side. “For all we know, the Hawk is-“

Providence nudged at Hanno’s hand before his senses could, and he followed the current without resistance. His sword left the scabbard in a clean, crisp arc and cut through the arrow a hair’s breadth beyond the arrowhead. The Young Slayer flinched, the harmless steel arrowhead falling against his leathers with a slap instead of piercing through the back of his neck.

“Hawk still there,” Rafaella cheerfully noted.

“As a rule, it is unwise to tempt irony without being prepared to meet the consequences of it,” Hanno calmly told the younger man. “When you have come into the fullness of your might perhaps you will find the opposite tack to your liking, as it can prompt the Enemy to move at the timing of your choice, but until then I would advise a more restrained approach.”

The Young Slayer swallowed loudly.

“I understand, Lord White,” he feebly said, making the Mark of Mercy against his chest.

Promising but still so very young, Hanno thought as he sheathed his sword. There was still no sign of the Hawk out there, and now even the Wolfhound had disappeared into the rocks. Fighting against the Revenant he believed had been an Archer whilst she still drew breath had made the White Knight dimly grateful for having never fought the Woe in earnest. For all that the powers of the Black Queen and the Hierophant drew the eye the most, he suspected that it was Indrani the Archer that would have been the deadliest of the lot. The Hawk – named for the feathers she liked to fletch her arrows with – had certainly proved to be among the most lethal of the Scourges.

Christophe would have died during the taking of Juvelun if the Stalwart Apostle had not been by his side, and Prince Etienne of Brabant had died. The Hawk might not be as visibly destructive as the Archmage or the Unseelie, but she’d done more damage to the army than either so far. While Antigone fought the former and Hanno the latter, the Hawk had set about methodically killing her way through the captains and commanders of the Grand Alliance’s army. It was the Hawk’s head that the White Knight had been hoping to take today, betting on the disorder of the camp being enough to tempt her into an attack. Yet it seemed she was not to be baited into exposing herself.

The deadly arrows would resume when they went on the march, then.

“Back to camp,” the White Knight ordered. “We’ve lingered out here long enough. Best be gone before they bring in other Revenants and the hunt turns around on us.”

It was not a long walk, but it somehow felt like it anyway.

—

While Hanno had not reddened his blade today, the same could not be said of others. The pavilion had collapsed, its drapes drenched with blood. Half a hundred men and women, several bruised and cut, knelt outside in the mud surrounded by a ring of bared swords. Behind them Lycaonese armsmen, bearing the colours of Neustria and Hannoven, set to the work of dragging away the corpses with brisk efficiency. Few of the northerners had died in the ambush, having gone in fully armed and ready while most of the Alamans captains had kept swords and daggers but few bothered with even chainmail. Not a quarter hour had passed since the last of the steel was sheathed, but already the camp was like a kettle about to boil over.

Rumours had flown with swift wings, for the Iron Prince’s seizure and killing of the mutinous officers had been impossible to hide. Already two fantassin companies had holed themselves up behind their carts and hollered loudly at treachery and breach of contract, but they would not be the last. Lycaonese respected ruthlessness suborned to greater purpose, and in matters of law the Prince of Hannoven had been within his rights, but to southerners this was a grave overreach. Hanno had already sent the Balladeer and the Harrowed Witch, two of the more level-headed among his Named, to prevent that particular situation from spinning out of control.

Respect for the Chosen would stay hand and the Balladeer was highly popular besides, while the Witch had the means to quickly send word to him if need be. In truth, though, the White Knight did not believe that this would escalate much beyond the current trouble. The Prince of Hannoven had been hard-handed but also clear-sighted. There was no real support for the would-be mutineers among the broader army: the Lycaonese remained loyal to their rulers, the Levantines seemed to approve more than not and the Firstborn were either indifferent or amused. Hanno had spoken with their General Rumena on several occasions over the last month, and found the ancient drow to be contemptuously amused with what it deemed to be ‘human foibles’.

Its interest in the politics of its allies began and ended at their intersection with the interests of the Firstborn.

The Barrow Sword’s footsteps were not as quiet as the man believed them to be, but Hanno did not give it away until the bearded villain was almost close enough to be struck. Rafaella had twice warned him of how dangerous this one truly was, and she was not one to hand out such praise easily. She’d also had a few unkind words about the Black Queen’s protection of him, but then Hanno figured that the Barrow Sword would have had a few of the same to Catherine Foundling about his own protection of the Valiant Champion. That tended to be the way, with the Truce and Terms.

“Ishaq,” the White Knight acknowledged without turning. “Come to have a look?”

“Something like that,” the other man drawled. “Wasn’t sure the old man had it in him, truth be told.”

More the fool you , Hanno thought. The Lycaonese were a strange folk at first glance, but not so difficult to understand when studied in depth. In some ways their culture was more permissive than that of the Alamans and the Arlesites, especially when it came to privacy – though with the unspoken understanding that anything done in private could not be a danger to the community – and mores, but their land had made them a hard people. None of the northern soldiery had been affronted by the Iron Prince’s ambush today because, in their eyes, it was his undeniable right to act this way. They had never taken fully to Salienta’s Graces, up north, where instead it was strong rulers and hard choices that were trusted to get them through the dark.

The Iron Prince had never acted the tyrant before because he’d never seen a need to. It was as simple as that. Not all ruthless men needed to trumpet about their ruthlessness.

“It will be settled soon,” Hanno said.

The Barrow Sword let out a noise of disbelief.

“There’s four companies barricaded now,” Ishaq said. “And there’ll be more, mark my words. He only sent a few envoys there to inform them their officers had been arrested for high treason and they must set down their arms before letting them stew. He’s lucky they didn’t lynch any of them. Not the wiliest of schemers, our Prince of Hannoven.”

Hanno glanced at the other man, whose neatly-trimmed beard and elegantly subdued facepaint were both twisted by a jeer as he watched the bodies being stripped naked and dragged to the disposal pits. The Levantine villain did not seem to share the enmity much of his countrymen held for Procerans, but his general callous disregard for life meant there was little difference in practice.

“Not a schemer,” the White Knight agreed. “Yet not a fool. Where are the rest of the Hannoven armsmen, Barrow Sword, if they are neither here nor forcing the fantassins in line?”

Pale brown eyes flicked to him, narrowing in thought.

“Ah,” the Barrow Sword exhaled. “The conscripts. Not a fool indeed, while I have been yapping my jaw like one instead.”

Hanno bent his head in acknowledgement. The Prince of Hannoven had, correctly he believed, decided that the conscripts would be easier to get in line and so focused his efforts there. It went with the way Brabantines – and many Alamans armies – appointed their officers. A prince would usually name most his relatives and closest highborn allies to a command, but when the stock of those and trusted career soldiers were exhausted it was tradition for levies and conscripts to elect their officers from their own ranks. Given the high rates of attrition and the realities of raising an army by conscription, it had in truth been mostly lowborn captains who’d been in the tent.

And so by seizing or killing the Brabantine captains in the tent, Klaus Papenheim had effectively removed all the men and women who would have had the popularity and leadership to rouse the conscripts into organized resistance against him. His actions would still breed deep resentment and involved killing trusted officers shortly before seeking a pitched battle, but for now though the conscripts were mutinous they were a disorganized sort of mutinous. The kind that could be herded into companies and forced to prepare for a march west by Lycaonese soldiers, as was currently taking place while the fantassins failed to realize they were being isolated.

It wasn’t that the Iron Prince was unaware that a third of the camp now despised him, Hanno mused, but that in the old prince’s eyes that mattered little if no one here was alive to hate him in a week. He was not wrong in this.

“I take it we’re not going to intervene either way?” the Barrow Sword asked.

Hanno almost smiled. The man’s reason for seeking him out finally became clear.

“There will not be a need,” the White Knight said. “I have sent Antigone and Christophe to oversee the capitulation of the conscripts, and anything other than our visible presence would be interference beyond our mandate.”

The Barrow Sword turned to study him for a long moment.

“Huh,” Ishaq idly said. “Thought you’d be up in arms about all the killing, White Knight. It seemed like the kind of turn you might flip a coin over. So to speak.”

Hanno turned to level a calm stare on the villain, who met it defiantly. He said nothing, simply waiting in silence until the other man looked away.

“No offence meant,” the Barrow Sword said.

“Of course,” the White Knight mildly replied. “A good evening to you then, Ishaq.”

The bearded man balked at the implied dismissal but did not contest it. It would have been easier, Hanno suspected, if they had fought. It would have allowed the Barrow Sword to place him as the more powerful among them, and so end the incessant challenges that uncertainty in this matter drove him to attempt. Yet Hanno was a high officer of the Grand Alliance, and the Barrow Sword was not one of the Named in his charge. Duelling the villain, even if Catherine would likely end up excusing the matter, would be an act with repercussions. Gods but there were a great many of those, these days. His world had grown increasingly complicated since the inception of the Truce and Terms.

Duties had grown like weeds even as old certainties now passed like sand through his fingers. Hanno reached for the coin that was never far from his palm, though it had never been found by another, and closed his fingers around the silver. Laurels on one side, crossed swords on the other. The only verdict the Seraphim ever cared to give. Watching the corpses be dragged away in silence, the White Knight casually flipped it. It spun, a blink of silver, and landed on his open palm without anything beyond Creation’s laws having moved it. A relief, almost. At least it was not a spurt of the Hierarch’s madness again. It still left him feeling unpleasantly blind.

It was not that the White Knight believed himself to be unschooled in matters of law or in matters of right and wrong. He knew better. His interest in both matters – sometimes aligned, sometimes opposed – had begun early. As a boy, Hanno had once been a court scribe for the Outer Tribunal of Arwad. The courthouse of Halan District had been a minor one even among the lesser of the Thalassocracy’s two tribunals, but it had often deal with foreigners and their laws, as well as possessed a surprisingly large scrollhouse that the senior scribes and archivists had been lenient in allowing a young Hanno to use.

These days, when looking back in search of the first steps taken in becoming the man he was today, the White Knight had often lingered on that alignment of coincidences as a likely source. He had learned of many laws while quite young, not only those of his native Ashur but also those of Free Cities – Nicae and Delos, mostly – as well the southernmost of the Proceran principalities. He had also seen judgement given day after day, the law measured and applied by the tribunes of the courthouse for which he had kept records. It had fostered in him an interest in justice and law long before injustice slew his father and befell his mother in the wake of that death.

He’d read the famous treatise on Ashuran law, the Ten Scales of Madrubal, as much out of curiosity as because he had nursed ambitions to one day become an archivist at the courthouse. That same abundance of knowledge had come close to leading him astray, when he had sought the Riddle of Fault and earned the attention of the Seraphim, so in a sense it was not without peril. It was all too easy to become drunk your own learning and confuse it with wisdom. Yet Hanno had continued to learn, over the years that followed, for though it was not his place to judge there was rarely virtue to be found in willful ignorance. And so he had sought knowledge of the laws of Calernia, sifting through them in search of wisdom.

He had found sense in some places, be they the graces the Principate granted to all from princes to beggars or the shrewdly even-handed way the Tower collected taxes, but always it had been... situational. Impermanent. Nothing at all like the timeless wisdom of the Choir of Judgement. And more often Hanno had found the laws twisted and turned into a tool of oppression by those who made them. The Magisterium of Stygia made property of men while calling it a godgiven right, Callowan nobles inherited the right to pass judgement along with their titles and Ashur in the same breath condemned slavery while buying foreign criminals whose sentences would be spent labouring in the Thalassocracy’s mines.

Watching soldiers in mail drag butchered naked corpses way, Hanno considered justice. Law, it could not be denied, gave the right to Prince Klaus Papenheim. Yet justice was not the same thing, and it rarely nested on the side that dragged corpses into mass graves – for all that the appellation of ‘disposal pits’ tiptoed around that words, that was what they were in truth. No, Hanno would not put blind trust in laws. Men were flawed and that imperfection bled into all that they made it was the simple way of things. Even laws. Especially laws, perhaps. So the White Knight had observed those that he could while pursuing what he knew to be right, and ignored those that he must while doing the same.

It was a straightforward path, in a way. While he was as blind as anyone else on Creation, he’d had the light of the Choir of Judgement to heed and follow instead. That had removed uncertainty. Allowed for purity of purpose, if not always action. Hanno had been blessed enough to benefit from the wisdom of the Seraphim since his first breath as the White Knight, and in a way the coin that represented it had become as much a part of him as his hands or feet. Even when he had not called on the judgement of the Seraphim, not tossed the coin, that he still held it at all had been a reassurance. A sign that he had not lost his way, that as the instrument of Judgement he still brought good into the world.

Now all that was left was a coin more silver than miracle and the growing awareness of his own imperfections.

Hanno’s hand went to trace the stumps of his missing fingers. He had not grown to question the worth of that bargain, but there had been other doubts that crept to his side under cover of night. The end of the troubles at the Arsenal had been no such thing, simply a transmutation of one form of trouble into another. And though the White Knight knew better than to linger on the attribution of fault, he had wondered much over the last months of how the parts of the blame there should be assigned. Some of it was his, but how much? Hanno had refused to bend on the principles at play because those principles simply could not be bent if the Truce and Terms were to remain worth enforcing.

But he’d not conveyed this properly to the First Prince and the Black Queen, and so they had joined hands to work around him.

It had stung. Not that they’d treated him as an obstacle, for he had absolutely been one. But rather that two women he’d held in high regard had so utterly failed to understand that the Truce and Terms were already a compromise on principle and they’d been asking him to compromise those even further . Behind all the talk of necessities and dues, what they’d wanted of him was to go back on the rights and protections promised to someone in his charge, with little more justification for it than ‘the fears of the Highest Assembly require quelling’. Which, while likely true, was not a valid reason to break half the oaths that made up the foundation of the Truce and Terms.

It was as if they’d believed he was being inflexible for the pleasure of it rather than because it was the only morally potable stance to take in that position. Even from a long-term perspective, a willingness to discard any Named that became inconvenient at the first... Hanno breathed out, reached for the calm. He would not fall into the trap of the backbiting, into the inherently losing game of beginning to think of this in terms of victory and loss. Yet he’d allowed the eminent reasonableness of the foremost villain of their age to lull him into a sense of comfort, and that was an illusion that must be discarded. While the trick with the corpse of the Red Axe had been disgraceful, it had mostly served as a reminder of a simpler truth.

Catherine Foundling did not have lines in the sand that she would not cross, if she thought it necessary. It did not erase her virtues, but neither must Hanno ever allow himself to forget that all that stood between the Black Queen and atrocities was the perception of need.

It was Cordelia Hasenbach’s complicity that had most troubled him. The White Knight was not an utter fool, he grasped that regardless of her character her position would make demands of her. Yet Cordelia Hasenbach had, once, been on the verge of being Named. The Heavens themselves had measured her being and not found it wanting. He’d honestly not believed, deep down, that she was someone who would put political needs over doing the right thing. He’d been wrong. The grim theatre of the desecration of young girl’s corpse, a trial that was a farce going back on the Principate’s own word – that Named alone would stand in judgement over Named – had proved otherwise.

Cordelia Hasenbach had and would place the preservation of the Principate of Procer above all other callings, no matter how wicked or virtuous they might be.

It had been a disappointment. One less person he could trust among a number already exceedingly small. And there were even fewer he could both trust and be challenged by. The Grey Pilgrim was one, but Tariq was deathly afraid of stepping back into the role he had as a younger man and that made him... hesitant to speak up, sometimes. And so few of the other heroes ever cared to question Hanno’s actions, his reasons, save for those that questioned them badly . Or worse, for the wrong reasons as Christophe de Pavanie once had. The trust that had grown strong between the keystones of the Grand Alliance at the beginning of the war was fraying, slowly but surely. It was, Hanno had found, an unsettlingly lonely feeling.

And so now it was alone that Hanno of Arwad looked at the last of the corpses being dragged away, knowing he had tactically allowed this to happen. Veitland , Princess Mathilda of Neustria had succinctly asked. A cliffside village halfway through Twilight’s Pass, where Iron King Konrad had once shamed fleeing armies into turning around and facing the enemy. Hauptberg , Klaus Papenheim had just as succinctly replied. A small dip into Recall had been enough to confirm what he’d already suspected, that there the bloody birth of the Iron Crown had begun in murderous treachery. Even the Barrow Sword had sniffed out the nature of what was coming, giving a warning about Captain Nabila being a skilled captain but green to the Dominion’s bloody politics.

“It was lawful,” Hanno murmured, eyes lingering on the streaks of red trailing the ground.

But was it just? His hand itched for the coin, but the coin was just that now. A coin. The White Knight why this had been done, and that some restraint had been shown. He agreed with the Iron Prince that if the army stayed here, it would most likely perish. The Dead King was too canny an opponent to give them the kind of hopeless battle that they would end up winning. Which meant they must win in the mundane, in the dirt, and that meant marching west even when thousands among this army were unwilling. Leaving the mutineers behind would not have been possible, Hanno also knew. They would have been eaten up in a day and risen as soldiers in the service of Keter. These, the dark-skinned man knew, were all good reasons.

That this had been necessary was, in truth, difficult to deny. But had it been just ?

No , his heart whispered. It wasn’t .

There had been better ways. If he had stepped in, involved himself regardless of authorities and restraints and how it would be seen as overstepping, there might be fewer corpses in the pit. Or none at all. And the heart was just as blind as the rest of him, but these days what else did Hanno have to follow? It would have been a mistake to step in. It had been a mistake not to step in. If he had acted, lives could have been saved. A simple answer. If he had acted, the potential ramifications might have killed rather more than fifty people. A complicated answer. Hanno knew himself to be in the right place, for he was the White Knight and doom was creeping across the land. Between it and Calernia was where he must stand

Sometimes, though, he wondered if he was there right man to be standing there.

The thought came lightly, and left just as easily, but it was not far. The White Knight eventually forced himself to look away, for soon the fantassins would be called to heel and he intended to be there to keep an eye on matters personally. Likely, he thought, the Prince of Hannoven would try to begin an early march west so that the mutinous soldiers felt like there could be no turning back. The afternoon air was chilly and so Hanno called Light to him, letting it warm his bones as he had learned from the life of a Paladin long dead.

It came slower than it used to.

Chapter 63: Dynamism

“Not quite what I imagine my father meant, when he said I should find a talent that would set me apart from my brothers.”

– Basileus Ioannes Trakas of Nicae, the Patricide

“Rocks,” Masego said, wrinkling his nose. “Bogs. More rocks.”

He turned to glance at me, a gesture he rarely bothered with these days.

“Why is it that you want to reconquer these lands again?”

At least the Princess of Hainaut wasn’t there, as I suspected she would have been less than enchanted by Zeze’s stark description of her principality. He wasn’t wrong, mind you. I’d visited the great valley – in reality more like a dozen or so smaller valleys whose boundaries melded into each other’s – before but it’d been closer to the capital, through the west and the heartlands. There was a reason the eastern parts of the great valley were more lightly settled than the rest: they were a damned dreary and inhospitable place. No doubt the Dead King had worsened things by killing everything that crawled or grew in the region, but somehow I doubted there’d been all that much to kill in the first place.

“Strategic reasons,” I replied.

It wasn’t like the fields and mines of Hainaut were going to turn the tide of the fight against Keter, even if we got both in a usable state again. Which we wouldn’t, as I didn’t expect there’d be any people moving back into the highlands aside from soldiers and camp followers after we took back the grounds. It was mostly the advantage of holding the shore against the dead instead of our defensive line in the lowlands that was the attraction, one made even more appealing by the Gigantes offer to set down great wards along the shoreline to keep out the undead.

“You’d think forcing people to live here would lower morale, not improve it,” Masego muttered.

“Says the Wastelander,” I snorted back.

The principality of Hainaut might not be a green garden of luxury, but at least it wasn’t filled with murderous monsters and afflicted with weather that changed on a whim. Hierophant turned to look at me in genuine surprise, as if he could not quite believe what he’d just heard.

“The Wasteland has all the best libraries,” he reminded me.

“People don’t usually live in those, Zeze,” I pointed out.

“I know,” Hierophant sadly replied. “I asked.”

It said a lot about him that I had no trouble believing that. I was just lucky Warlock must have talked him out of asking the Sahelians, back in the day. And he must have, for Masego would have asked on his own and I had absolutely no doubt that Tasia Sahelian would have given Zeze access to the infamous Wolof spell repositories for the cheap, cheap price of marrying her only daughter. My blind friend shifted about, his shining glass eyes turning in their sockets and studying something behind him before returning.

“Company?” I asked.

“The Grey Pilgrim has it-“

There was a soft flash of Light, gone in a heartbeat, and the air filled with the scent of incinerated flesh. Ghoul, probably, if it could still smell like that. Skeletons had their own distinctive stink when burnt.

“- handled,” Masego finished. “Interesting. I do believe he changes the properties he assigns Light nearly at will, Catherine. It’s not unheard of, but that sheer verisimilitude certainlyis.”

“Having angels around for a few decades will let you pick up all sorts of tricks, I imagine,” I shrugged.

The Peregrine’s tread was light, but he wasn’t trying to hide as he made his way up the rocky path to join us. That made it easy to pick on, for people with senses like ours.

“Light is the divine facet of faith,” Tariq Fleetfoot mildly said as he came to stand by our sides. “It has few limits save those that mortal hands impose on it.”

Masego look highly interested.

“So if I obtained fae hands in sufficient amounts-“

“You’d still be missing the faith,” I interrupted, hoping to distract him before he gave offence.

Back when we’d been younger, tripping him over small details had usually been enough to distract him.

“It wouldn’t be hard to insert into a captured fae, Catherine,” Masego chided me. “It’s not fundamentally different from any other kind of delusion.”

I might have made a small tactical mistake there, I mentally conceded. Tariq cleared his throat, but though he did not look amused he didn’t look all that angry either. Masego glanced at him through the dark eyecloth, entirely unabashed.

“Mathematically speaking, the chances of your particular interpretation of the Gods Above being correct of all-“

I cleared my throat. I did it twice as loud, when he kept trying to kindly explain to Tariq that basic applications of mathematics indicated that his entire life was probably a lie.

“How are the preparations going, Hierophant?” I asked.

He cocked his head to the side, burning eyes swivelling about to study the distance.

“Indrani is nearly done installing the columns,” he said. “We’ll be ready to proceed with the Respite ritual in about a quarter hour.”

“I’ll leave you to it then,” I said. “I know you like to make sure the alignments are as precise as possible.”

He smiled happily at me, which even now was enough to make me feel a little guilty.

“I appreciate it,” Masego said, then glanced at the Pilgrim.

He nodded at the man.

“ Comparative Numerics , by Marcellus the Elder,” Hierophant suggested. “It’s all quite simple, really, when you consider the-“

“I think I see ‘Drani spinning a pillar about,” I lightly interrupted.

Eyebrows widening in dismay, the man who even without magic to call on remained one of the finest mages in Calernia stomped away to prevent his partner from ‘misaligning the constrictive forces’. His grumbling wafted up to us on the breeze even when he disappeared behind the rocks below.

“Quite a bracing young man,” Tariq evenly said.

I winced.

“He means no harm,” I said.

“If I believed he did, we would be having a very different conversation,” the Peregrine said. “I’ve no qualms entertaining doubts, Catherine. Indeed, in different circumstances I suspect an evening talking with the Hierophant would make for fascinating conversation.”

He’d not said ‘safe’ or ‘religiously acceptable in any way’, so I’d give him that.

“But,” I said.

“But at the moment, perhaps a reminder that a certain moderation of words is in order would not go amiss,” Tariq gently suggested. “Others of faith might have more of a temper, and I do believe he’s been in three screaming matches with the Blessed Artificer since he arrived.”

“I’ll speak with him,” I sighed. “But you know the Blessed Artificer situation isn’t his fault alone, or entirely driven by either’s character.”

Their Names were clearly nudging them forward there, turning every small irritation into a slight and every disagreement into an argument. The fundamental nature of the Roles behind them were too opposed for there to be any hope of cordiality there: the Hierophant was a vivisector of all things divine, while the Blessed Artificer forged in what the Peregrine himself had called ‘the divine facet of faith’.

“I am aware,” Tariq said. “I have known rivals as well, Catherine, and not forgot the taste of it – and never did the enmity between my Bestowal and another’s run as deep as it does between those two.”

I glanced at him with interest.

“Anyone I’d have heard about?” I asked.

“They died,” the Peregrine serenely said, “long before you were born.”

Yeah, I just bet they did. It was good, now and then, to be reminded that the wrinkly old man in the grey robes had a body count in Named probably rivalling that of the Calamities. I’d yet to see a Revenant manage more than to mildly inconvenience the Grey Pilgrim, and it sure as Hells wasn’t for lack of trying. My gaze drifted downwards, following the curve of the rocky slope. We’d left the Twilight Ways in the driest part of this little mess of bogs, as the ritual would need solid grounding, but the marshlands were spread out in every direction with only a few hills rising from them on occasion in mounds of mud and rock. The bog water was foul-smelling and filthy, but the Concocter had already confirmed it’d not been poisoned or cursed so the worse we’d had to deal with was a few bands of undead.

The entire region seemed to be crawling with them, which boded ill for the Prince of Hannoven’s army. A decisive victory at Juvelun wouldn’t have left this many warbands out and about, so it was starting to look like Keter had bled the Iron Prince raw for that little town. Worse, it would have salvaged large enough a force that Prince Klaus would have to handle it before linking up with my incoming reinforcements. And worse than worse was that we still had little idea of where the Iron Prince’s host was, what kind of a force it was facing and exactly where the missing Luciennerie army would be relative to us, Papenheim or whoever the Hells it was he was scrapping with.

Time was of the essence if I wanted to rescue an army instead of broken remnant. Fortunately, Masego was finally back on the front at my side and he’d provided a solution for our current troubles. He called it a ‘respite’ ritual, though the name was catchy enough I figured he probably wasn’t the one to have come up with it. It was that very ritual that we’d crossed back into Creation to enact, with as light a presence as we dared. Only Named had come, all of them save Adjutant and our two youths.

Most our finest killers were out and about, combing through the mire to make sure that nothing snuck up on us and interrupted the ritual, but we’d clearly draw some enemy attention. Undead were starting to converge, which meant we needed to hurry. Thankfully, we were nearly ready. Roland had already sent word that the secondary arrays were ready – and Masego hadn’t even felt the need to check on his work afterwards, which had nearly seen me gape – and now that Indrani had finished setting up the seventh ring of pillars on our little hill there was not much left to do but the sorcery itself.

Hierophant had come loaded with artefacts that were effectively just receptacles filled with magic he could wrest for that purpose, but just in case I’d assigned the Summoner to stay at his side. We were fencing with rituals against Trismegistus himself, no matter how certain Masego was of his formulas I wanted him to have an additional source of magic at hand. I’d not phrased it to the Summoner that way of course. He was witnessing the Hierophant’s work personally so he could give me his opinion on it later, though of course I’d requested that if something went amok he lend his magic to my court mage to solve the trouble.

It was known in the right circles I’d been Queen of Winter once upon a time, he really should have known better than not to look twice at that phrasing.

“Eastern winds, when will you blow

And return my love to me?

His lack falls like winter snow,

Cruel torment made decree.”

The Rapacious Troubadour did have a lovely voice for an unrepentant monster, even when it was put to use singing horrid noble crap from back home. Archer’s inexplicable fondness for the Lay of Lothian’s Passing, a traditional ballad about the rise and fall of the love of Sir Lothian and his ladylove Eveline, remained a genuine puzzle to me even after years of knowing her. Mind you, it was a common enough personality defect back in Callow as well. The only reason I’d ever sat through the renditions of it at summer fairs had been that there were some pretty nifty fight scenes against Praesi – under Black, singers had prudently changed the word to ‘enemy’ instead – and Baroness Fallon, the scheming noblewoman trying to trick Lothian into marriage.

“You ever notice how it’s always barons and dukes that go bad in stories, but almost never counts?” I mused.

That was unfair, as in my experience most nobles were terrible regardless of their relative position of their rung in the social ladder.

“Baronial titles are at the bottom of the Callowan peerage, I believe,” Tariq said, “while ducal ones are beneath only royalty. I expect both of those positions tend to... excite ambition.”

Technically there were knights and lords beneath barons, but I got his point. Neither of those kinds of lesser nobles tended to ever be trouble for anyone aside from the greater nobles they were sworn to.

“I expect the Dukes of Liesse aren’t going to be trouble for my successors at least,” I darkly muttered. “So there’s that.”

Tariq, to my surprise, looked amused for a heartbeat before mastering himself.

“I know you care little for my opinion in this, and rightfully so,” the Grey Pilgrim said, “but your choice of successor is to be commended, Queen Catherine. Vivienne Dartwick will make an exceptional queen.”

I shot him a curious look. Tariq’s reluctance to be in the vicinity of anything even remotely akin to rule meant that he usually kept his piece when it came to this sort of thing – for example, I suspected he would very much prefer Rozala Malanza reign over Procer rather than Cordelia Hasenbach – so I was surprised he’d even admit to having an opinion on the matter of Callowan succession.

“She has the right qualities,” I warily agreed.

“And she will chase your shadow for the rest of her life, scouring her clean of the weaknesses that many crowned heads accrue,” the Pilgrim said. “Unlike many before her, I doubt she will ever cease to strive her utmost to do good: doing so would be a betrayal of not only herself but the trust you extended her.”

My lips thinned and I looked away. It wasn’t that I was unaware that Vivienne and I had a complicated relationship, or that it pulled at us both in ways that were usually to our betterment – if not necessarily through healthy means. To have the darker aspects of that bond dragged out in the light of day by a man who might be an ally but was definitely not a friend was not a pleasant experience. The Grey Pilgrim’s eyes had always seen too much for comfort.

“Lothian strove and mighty slew,

A score wicked enemies

Seven lords he cut in two

And settled great enmities.”

Poor dumb Lothian. When intriguing baronesses trying to get your lands offered to let your repay your family debts by valour on the battlefield, they weren’t actually trying to let you off – they were just baiting you into getting in over your head so they could bail you out and leverage you with a life debt on top of the rest. I’d occasionally wondered over the years if the enduring popularity of the ballad – and play, there were like ten different versions of the story including the one in inexplicable Old Miezan – in Callow was due to the cultural resonance of a martial noble covered in glory out east getting fucked over by a more high-ranking one the moment he returned to the kingdom.

For all that we deservedly complained about the Praesi and the Procerans, my people had always been capable of being terrible to each other without anyone else’s help.

“I fear I have given offence,” the Grey Pilgrim finally spoke into the silence.

“No,” I said. “Only discomfort. And not unearned, in the greater scheme of things.”

There was a pregnant pause.

“I sometimes forget that your Woe love each other,” Tariq admitted. “It is unusual, in a band of villains. Yet these are changing times. I meant my words as a compliment, however short of that they might have fallen. You found a protector for your home, and set her on a path that promises distinction.”

“Then I will endeavour to remember your words as they were meant,” I said.

There, and to think some people said I wasn’t diplomatic. The old man ruefully smiled.

“It is a bad habit,” the Pilgrim admitted.

Thinking the worse of us? It was, and often tiring to deal with, but he was hardly the worst of his kind when it came to that particular sin. That he faced and fought it already made him among the finest of their number when it came to address it, so I would not whine. Besides, I held no illusions about the truth of villainy on Calernia. Though in time it might be sanitized, turned into something worth embracing, at the moment it was the side that counted cannibals and rapists among its ranks. I would not moan about the distrust of villains when I hardly trusted any of them myself. As a woman of refined tastes, I preferred my hypocrisies to be at least somewhat deniable.

“There are worse to have,” I said. “I’ve dabbled in a few myself, Peregrine.”

“The mistaken comparisons to others I have known is certainly one such habit,” the old man said, “but as it happens I meant another. I was leading up to making a request, you see. Yet, as young Indrani once made clear to me, it is not for me to pull and prod at you: straightforward honesty will always fetch better result.”

Huh , I thought, glancing from the corner of my eye. When exactly was it that those two had had that purported conversation? I didn’t mind, but Archer had never mentioned it to me.

“I like to think so,” I finally said, a little taken aback. “I’m listening, Pilgrim, though I make no promises.”

As far as I was concerned, Razin and Aquiline were once more his problem. I’d only agreed to keep an eye on them as a temporary favour, not to forever be their guardian devil. They were way too much of a headache for me to be inclined to renew that promise anyway.

“I would request that you keep your distance from the White Knight, when our armies are joined,” Tariq said.

I frowned. This again? I’d thought that the old snickering rumours about Hanno and I being more than simply friendly were dead and buried. Hells, we weren’t even friendly anymore.

“I’ve told you before that-“

“And I believe you,” the Grey Pilgrim calmly interrupted. “This is unrelated, Catherine. Before I left the army, I glimpsed in the Sword of Judgement the beginnings of a crisis of faith.”

I fixed the old man with a steady look.

“This not the time for the White Knight to stumble,” I bluntly said.

Even when he disagreed with me, even when we did not get along, his participation to the Truce and Terms alone leant it an amount of legitimacy that we badly needed. I wasn’t going to pretend that one of the first things we hammered into heroes hesitating to sign up was’ the Sword of Judgement is part of this’.

“On that we must disagree,” the Pilgrim frankly said. “This is precisely the right time for the White Knight to stumble.”

I blinked. Right, fucking hero logic. It had all the hallmarks of madness, except for the part where it worked.

“You’re going to have to walk me through that one,” I admitted. “In my experience, when one of yours doubts they either die or lose their Name.”

“We are all tested, sooner or later,” Tariq said. “Often this begins with a loss of potency, brought about by doubt or fear, but should we rise to meet that test we do not simply resume what we were: we rise above it.”

My eyes narrowed. That came uncomfortably close to ‘iron sharpens iron’ in some ways, which made it all the more distressing coming from the eldest living hero on Calernia. Mind you the test as he described it wouldn’t necessarily be another person, which in the central philosophy of the Praesi highborn it always was. To the old guard of the Wasteland, even fighting off an invasion was just a setting for another duel against your rivals.

“I’m not too clear on what it is that Hanno has to doubt,” I frankly said. “He’s been mostly getting his way, except when it’d cost too much to others if he did. He’s an intelligent man and reasonable enough for one of your lot, so he shouldn’t be expecting much more of us wicked sinners.”

“His thoughts are his own, and not mine to divulge,” the Pilgrim said, “yet I will speak to my own. Hanno of Arwad is split between the man he wants to be and the man fate demands he should be.”

That did not sound like a particularly pleasant place to be in. I stayed silent, waiting for Tariq to elaborate, and he did not disappoint.

“He is the Sword of Judgement by choice,” the Grey Pilgrim said, “but he is the White Knight through the workings of fate.”

“There’s not supposed to be a difference between the two,” I pointed out.

“Yet there is,” the old man said. “The Sword of Judgement is growing increasingly unable to stomach the deals the White Knight has been forced to make to ensure that we survive this war. And soon that disparity will come to a head.”

I studied him for a bit, parsing his words. By ‘Sword of Judgement’ I figured he was actually referring to Hanno’s comfortable embrace of his role as the designated hatchetman of the Seraphim. It did tend to be what he defaulted to being when in conflict, I’d noticed, even now that Judgement had grown quiet. What was meant by ‘White Knight’, though, was a little more nebulous to my eye.

“Hanno the man who believes in Judgement,” I tried, “and Hanno the man who is an officer of the Grand Alliance.”

The Pilgrim gently smiled at me.

“The latter is a mortal tie, Catherine,” he said. “It would not bind him. It is, rather, Hanno the man who has sworn his faith to the Seraphim and Hanno the man who leads the heroes of our age.”

“I will not mistrust, said she,

And never shall I despair

Tenderness will set me free,

To lovers the world is fair.”

I mulled that over a while. Tariq was, in essence, telling me that the while Hanno might have been a good fit for the Name of White Knight in certain circumstances they were not the current ones. He fits the Name but not the Role , I tried out. At least not the Role the war has forced on him. He commanded obedience, through charisma and respect, but I could see how an argument could be made that Hanno didn’t particularly want to be in charge of heroes, or really of anything at all. He tended to see leadership as a burden, and only took it up when he perceived it at as his duty to do so. Which, given that this war was vaguely crusade-shaped and he was the White Knight, must have been a lot more often than he was comfortable with.

Throw in the Hierarch silencing the entire Choir of Judgement for what was, as far as I knew, the first time in recorded Calernian history? I could see why Hanno was having some troubles coming to terms with who he was turning into. Which tended to be a costly kind of doubt, for Named.

Our time at the Arsenal looks different seen through those eyes , I thought. What I’d seen as inflexibility and even obstructionism on his part took instead the shape of the White Knight considering the troubles in the Highest Assembly as a Cordelia’s sphere of trouble to deal with and not for him to meddle in, much like the Red Axe had been his sphere of responsibility where we should not have trespassed. That seemed overly simplistic to me, but then I was in a pretty unique situation wasn’t I? I’d accumulated influence until I’d come to sit on every council as both Queen of Callow and representative for the villains. I’d not really seen a difference because to me there really wasn’t.

Frankly, I still thought he was wrong. The moment the Red Axe had tried to kill a Proceran prince of the blood it had become problem that involved more than just heroes whether he liked it or not. But seen from that perspective, both Cordelia and I would have overreached and meddled in his sphere when he’d been scrupulously careful about never touching ours . And I just bet if things had gotten bad after we obeyed those invisible lines and Hasenbach had said she needed his help, he would have given it without hesitation, I ruefully thought. Because he would have been invited to step beyond his sphere, while on the other hand the First Prince and I had simply worked around him to get what we needed.

It was that fucking hero mindset, I silently cursed. He didn’t see something like the rebellious whispers in the Assembly as a real problem, because in his experience if he kept doing the right thing and trouble came then continuing to do the right thing would get him through that as well. Why compromise and dirty his principles, when the moment it all went to shit he could instead make an inspiring speech to the rebels and Creation would bend over backwards for it to work? There were godsdamned good reasons I was still trying to keep Named from being able to be rulers, even if my failure there was all but writ in the stars. There’d been blind spots all around, I finally admitted to myself, and they’d neatly fit into our worst expectations of each other.

Merciless Gods but that felt like something the Intercessor would have arranged. Surely even she couldn’t manipulate us this precisely, though. Right? I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. It was always the necessary degree of paranoia that was difficult to gauge with the Wandering Bard, not whether or not it was necessary at all.

“All right,” I said. “Say I buy that. What does it get the Heavens for their favourite knight to doubt his place in Creation?”

“Times are changing,” Tariq softly said. “And while I have grown distressed by the echo of truth there has been to the words of your once-teacher, I will not shy away from the truth: though it can be said that Good triumphed in the Age of Wonders, in this dawning Age of Order is it Evil that has seized the lead.”

“It doesn’t have to be a competition,” I began, then bit my tongue.

I sighed.

“It does,” I admitted. “It does have to be competition, that’s how we were made. But it doesn’t have to be the kind of wars it’s turned into, Tariq. The ones that shatter cities and break nations. It can be made, if not civil, then at least civilized.”

“I do not know if I believe that,” the Grey Pilgrim quietly replied.

I winced at the blunt admission.

“But I recognize that you believe it,” Tariq Fleetfoot continued. “And in that I can put my trust. The truth is, Catherine, that I am an old man. Set in my ways. And I will try to change them to better ones, so long as there is breath yet left in this carcass, but I have fought Evil for many years and it has taken its toll. I am not certain there would be a place for someone like me, in the world you seek to make.”

The Grey Pilgrim mirthlessly smiled.

“That is, in a sense, the highest compliment I can pay your dream,” the Peregrine said. “But I will not be alone in this, Black Queen. I am not alone in this. Consider Hanno of Arwad, the man as you know him, and tell me that if he had been born two centuries past he would have been the kind of hero we would still raise shrines to.”

“He would have made mincemeat of most Old Tyrants,” I agreed. “Your point?”

“That there are no longer Old Tyrants to fight,” the Grey Pilgrim honestly replied. “And so we must change with the times, or become relics. His struggle is not his alone, Catherine. We must, all of us, reconcile the wild heroics of my youth to what would be allowed in the world to come – as young Hanno must now reconcile the unalloyed purpose the Seraphim taught him and the demands made of a White Knight in a greying world.”

“You think he’s going to set the path,” I slowly said. “Carve the groove others will flow into.”

“I do,” Tariq said. “And so I ask you to leave him to his test, that he might find an answer that is his and his alone.”

Which meant, beyond the all the flowery talk, that he didn’t want me getting my hands anywhere near Hanno while he transitioned into... whatever it was that lay ahead. I doubted it’d be a new Name, but perhaps a second flowering of his current one was not out of the question. I forced myself to step out of my own perspective and consider what was being asked of me. Meddling in Hanno’s ‘test’, if he was really undergoing such a thing, could potentially yield advantages for me. It seemed possible to at least nudge him in a direction that wasn’t adversarial to my own. On the other hand, wasn’t that very kind of meddling something providence was bound to punish me over? Villains that thought they were the cleverest thing since Traitorous tended to end up in some pit or another, one that they’d even dug themselves most of the time.

It’d be damned easy to misstep and become the proverbial devil on Hanno’s shoulder, or worse the enemy he defined himself through. It might come to that anyway, I honestly admitted to myself. We were both prominent Named as well as representatives of a larger amount of Named. Yet so long as the enmity was one of means and ideals rather than, you know, demons and calling down Choirs I could deal with it. And I was honestly inclined to believe that the less I was involved the friendlier the end result would be: I doubted the Heavens would take kindly to my meddling with the tempering of their designated champion. If he was truly that, I reminded myself. I would not take the Grey Pilgrim’s opinions as facts, no matter how wizened and wise the old man was.

“Our duties will still see us working together,” I eventually said.

It was tacitly accepting his request, and neither of us pretended otherwise. Aside from all other considerations, antagonizing the Peregrine over something he believed to be this important would have been a blunder.

“Adjacency,” the Grey Pilgrim replied, “is not intrusion.”

Fair enough. So long as I didn’t actively meddle, he wouldn’t consider it meddling. Pretty fair terms, though admittedly these days Tariq wasn’t in a position to ask much of me that I didn’t want to give.

“I’ll look forward to the ending, then,” I said.

“So will I,” the Peregrine smiled. “I expect that light will burn bright, Black Queen, and come just when the night has grown darkest.”

That old trick again, huh? Kairos had liked to always have a fresh enemy to make, but Tariq had a favoured trick of his own: to keep a journey ongoing and undefined, so that providence might lead it to end at precisely the right time. It’d bit him in the ass at the Graveyard, but the old man was pretty much the patron saint of timely arrivals so I could see how leaning into that groove would have paid off for him over the years. That Hanno’s journey here would be a metaphorical one wouldn’t matter, as far as the Pilgrim was concerned.

Fate, to his kind, was a book writ from ending to start.

It was not an answer I shared. Fate is a tug of war , I’d once heard a madman say, and for all that madness he had not been wrong. By our own hands we would make or break this world, and if either gods or Gods disagreed then let them bite their tongue bloody.

“Let me die then, Lothian said

I choose doom, end in honour

Many seasons my heart bled

As my oath kept me from her.”

The song, beautifully played as it had been, ended abruptly after the last note preceding Sir Lothian’s getting himself killed in battle before he was forced to marry Baroness Fallon. The Rapacious Troubadour, like us, had felt the power gathering. Below us sorcery flared as at last began the ritual we’d been awaiting. Our respite. Chords of magic, thick and burning, began to flow along the trajectory the columns had set as the smell of ozone filled the air and a dim pressure began to mount. The dead god on his throne in Keter had blinded us, here in Hainaut, but his hollow miracles were not beyond us.

Hierophant laughed, exulting as the ritual took, and ripped open an eye in the sky.

Chapter 64: Candidate Moves

“To rule is to drag a lion by the whisker.”

– Helikean saying

Truth was, even now Masego hadn’t found a way to genuinely break the rituals that the Dead King used to prevent scrying in the territories he held. For two years the Arsenal had tried, after we made it it clear to some of the finest magical minds of Calernia that regaining that capacity would be militarily invaluable, but no working counter-ritual had come of it. We had brought together exceptional people, but our enemy was more than just that: he was the Hidden Horror, the exception itself. So Hierophant, for all that he’d suffered a god riding his mind for most of a year and studied the wards at Lyonceau – where the Tyrant had borrowed from the Dead King’s work, among other things – had not been able to overturn the weight of the millennia’s bearing down on us. Zeze was brilliant, but there were some things beyond brilliance.

So Hierophant had stolen a mystery from an entity that could win.

The clouds in the sky spun like a whirlpool, swallowed by the great eye that our ritual had opened high above. Even for me, the empty howling void was an unsettling sight. Sorcery burned loud and bright, the stone pillars we’d driven into the ground buzzing like hornets as they fought the enchantments that blanketed most of Hainaut and suppressed scrying. Hurrying, I limped my way down the rocky slope towards a box of burnished bronze and electrum that stood taller than me. Nestled against the hill, anchored with enchantments so it would not move so much as a hair’s breadth, the arcane patterns of electrum on the sides were now glimmering with eerie light. The bronze was warm enough that I could feel the heat just from passing my hand close, and it would only get warmer.

The front of the box was the most complex part of it: a harsh, labyrinthine electrum pattern that usually closed together like a puzzle box but had now been carefully pried open. Slender gaps had been bared in the pattern by the manipulations, their rims covered with small bronze-inscribed runes, and through them I glimpsed that within the box there was a cube of pure white marble. Without my noticing it Roland had returned from his work on the hill to our east, and now stood by Masego’s side close to the box. The sight was almost amusing, Hierophant being at least a head taller for all that the Rogue Sorcerer’s longcoat and layers made him seem larger, but the intent focus both displayed had me reluctant to disturb them with even a snort.

“Roland?” Masego asked, burning eyes on the box.

“Almost there,” the Rogue Sorcerer replied, his own gaze on a slender baton of obsidian in his hands where I glimpsed a few burning marks. “Five, four, three, two-“

As soon as the Proceran mage got to three Hierophant raised his arm, wresting sorcery from a small cube he held in his fist, and a circle of golden runes flared around his fingers.

“Discharge,” Masego warned.

Sorcery pulled towards us for half a heartbeat, as if the currents had reversed, and the flow was sucked into the box where I saw terrible fires bloom before the moment passed and the eye in the sky screamed anew. To the west of us, a hill blew up in a thundering rain of rock and mud.

“Our bleed margin is much too high,” Roland said. “We won’t make it to four instances.”

“Three will be enough,” Hierophant replied, leaning over the box.

With his bare hands – he’d known fires hotter than this, and even now their reflection burned in his eyes – he began to manipulate the top of the box, extracting what looked like a large gear before turning it briskly. Within the box, the marble cube turned to match and presented a fresh and unmarred face to the open gaps. The gear was pushed back down after adjustment, and within twenty heartbeats another discharge followed. The hill to the east of us blew up, but I had closer perils to worry about: the stone pillars anchored on this hill were vibrating so quickly and intensely it seemed only a matter of time before they shattered.

“Masego,” I asked, shouting over the din. “How safe are we on the hill?”

He turned towards me, offering a boyish grin.

“Not at all!” he shouted back, and raised his arm.

A fresh cube held in his fist, golden runes formed in a circle as Roland protested with a shout that the build-up was not yet done.

“ Discharge ,” Hierophant cackled.

Cackling wasn’t usually a good sign, in my experience, so I wrapped myself up in Night the moment before the sorcery could be pulled in. The magic blew in, pillars popping as it passed them – ah, they’d somehow been built so the shards would go up instead of all around – and hammered into the cage. Some bits of stone fell on my Night-cloak, but nothing I couldn’t handle so I risked a glance at Roland. Whose obsidian baton was cracking, the burning runes on it going wild.

“ Oh merde ,” I heard him curse, throwing away the baton.

It blew up in a great gout of flame maybe three feet above his head, liquid drops of obsidian hissing against mud and stone as they were sprinkled everywhere. Masego, though, ignored it all. He was trying to vent the contents of the box, where the fires had somehow gotten caught. He opened fresh gaps on two sides before the glimmer of the electrum patterns turned into a glare. The tall mage finally stepped back.

“It’s done?” I called out.

“In a manner of speaking,” Zeze calmly noted, continuing to move away. “I would recommend taking cover, Catherine.”

“You little-” I began, throwing myself behind a jutting stone just in time for a great crunching sound to resound.

Oh dear. That had sounded like the box crumpling inwards. Then there were a pulse of flame and metal shrapnel as the box blew up while I hid under my cloak. I waited ten full heartbeats before popping out for a look, and I saw with a dry swallow that the explosion had outright melted the top of the hill. The Grey Pilgrim had gotten off first, right? That was, uh, going to be tricky to explain to the Dominion otherwise.

“Anybody dead?” Roland called out, popping out from behind his own rock.

“A pointless question. It would require necromancy before-” Masego replied.

“I think everyone’s fine,” I interrupted before he could really get started. “Did it work?”

“Of course it worked,” Hierophant said, sounding offended. “Who do you take me for?”

“Ask me that question again when I don’t have melted rock all over my nice cloak,” I grunted. “You’re not fishing for a nice answer otherwise.”

I broke cover, brushing myself off, and the three of us came to look at the results. The marble cube was seared on three sides, but it’d not just been fire thrown at rock. It’d been a sculpture, in a sense: the central valley of Hainaut and some of the outskirts, as seen from the sky. Each of the three facets had captured that sight for the blink of that great eye above and seen it seared onto the marble. There were imprecisions, of course. The Dead King’s rituals had muddled it up some. But that was the entire point of having several discharges, as there’d be very few places on our ‘map’ where the imprecisions had taken all three times.

“So this is what the world looks like through a Choir’s eyes,” I said.

“Not exactly,” Roland told me. “Think of angels as seeing the world through a lens. What you can witness seared here is what we mortals would see when looking through that same lens.”

“Humans don’t have the parts necessary to observe Creation as a Choir would,” Masego absent-mindedly noted. “Even soul scaffolding wouldn’t be sufficient, it would require complete essence reconstruction. As Duchess of Moonless Nights we would have been able to replace the marble with your mind and allow you to look directly, as the damage would have repaired itself, but as you currently are you would not survive the experience.”

I still remembered how much of a pain just stealing Ashkaran from echoes in Arcadia had been, so I suspected that he was downplaying the difficulties involved when he simply called it ‘damage’.

“Good to know,” I muttered. “I believe we can work with this, Masego. We’ll need magnifying glass for some of the details, but I can already make out the bare bones.”

Such as they were, which was pretty worrying. I limped back and forth between the facets, narrowing my eyes at what I saw. If I correctly understood where we were, then at the moment we were... north-west of what had to be the Iron Prince’s army. Unfortunately, that put us in the wrong place. Ahead of the Prince Klaus’ column was a large force of undead, but not so large he shouldn’t be able to defeat it on the field. Behind it, though, was what had to be the missing Luciennerie army. By the looks of it it’d divided into three smaller forces: one was headed south towards the Cigelin Sisters, but the other two columns were marching straight towards where the Iron Prince was going to have to give battle.

That put them square to the south of us, and went some way in explaining why this part of Hainaut was swarming with warbands. Worse, it looked like my allies had left part of their forces behind: to the west of Juvelun there was something that looked like a camp. Hard to tell numbers without using something to magnify the details, though, which could wait until we’d gotten back to camp. I straightened, casting one last lingering look at the marble. For all that what I’d learned had not exactly good news, that I knew it at all was a great coup. If we’d gone about this blindly, the damage could have been... significant.

“Good work,” I said. “Both you.”

“It was,” Masego replied, clearly pleased I agreed with his own assessment.

“The Pilgrim and the Artificer will handle wiping all trace of what we did here with Light,” I said. “As for us, though, we’re done here. Let’s load up our rock on a cart and head back.”

“I’ll be glad to,” Roland admitted, casting a wary look at the mire. “I suspect we’re about to have a great deal more company.”

“Ain’t that always the way, with us?” I snorted. “It’s all about staying that one step ahead, Roland.”

Well, that or you died.

—

Adjutant had transcribed seared stone into what looked like a halfway decent overview of central Hainaut in less than an hour with only one hand to use. A useful reminder that, even when crippled in a wheelchair Hakram could do the work of several people in a fraction of the time it would have taken them with objectively superior results. Masego was making noises that the prosthetics would soon be sufficiently attuned to the orc’s body for surgery, so he might even be out of that chair soon – though he’d have to learn to walk all over again, and likely keep using crutches for months. I’d used the span of time where he worked to have a wash in the river we’d camped near in the Twilight Ways, so it was feeling quite refreshed that I returned to my tent.

Our venture of the morning had been rather productive, but now that we had the bird’s eye view of this campaign it was time to decide exactly how we were going to fight it. My initial notion had been to lay an ambush for the Luciennerie army, but I wasn’t sure how viable that would really be at the moment. I had a bottle of wine opened and sent for what was definitely not a war council: Indrani, Masego and Akua. Hakram was already at my side so there was hardly a need for an engraved invitation there. I rather wished Vivienne could have been there, as it’d been too long since all of the Woe had gathered, but she had duties of her own.

Besides, without wanting to sound grim would have been gambling on my part to have my successor and I in the same theatre of war.

“You know, when I blow up mud hills I don’t get commended,” Indrani complained the moment she drifted in. “It’s all ‘that was valuable ammunition, Archer’, or ‘stop using our trebuchets outside battles’.”

“Your point?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow.

She slid into a seat on the other side of the table, Akua and Masego following her into the tent with long strides, speaking in Mthethwa – something about ‘complexity returns’, whatever those were – and settling further down, Zeze taking the place at Indrani’s side as if it were his natural one. I hid a smile.

“It’s favoritism, is my point,” Indrani said, jabbing an accusing finger at me.

“You’re right,” I admitted.

The surprise on her face was quite delightful.

“I do like him better than you,” I breezily added.

She gasped in half-genuine offence.

“Hakram, jot that down,” I mused. “We can look into having it made a royal decree.”

I didn’t go quite as far as jokingly offer Masego to blow up any hill he liked, because I was worried he might actually take me up on that offer. And, like, I did have a lot of hills in my demesne in Marchford but they weren’t exactly a renewable resource so while I wasn’t outright saying ‘never blow up my hills’ I’d at least want a reason first. I felt like that was a justifiable stance to take, all things considered.

“I’ll see about having the list ranking us in the order you like most made official,” Hakram idly said.

There was a heartbeat of silence.

“She doesn’t have that,” Indrani said, narrowing her eyes at me.

“Of course I don’t, number si- I mean, Indrani,” I replied with a smile.

I winked, botching it just because I knew it being half-assed would piss her off even more.

“ Come on ,” Archer complained. “There’s no way I’m last.”

“That you think that is why you are, my dear,” Akua gently smiled.

I did admire how genuinely benign she could look while purposefully turning the knife in the wound, it was pretty impressive,

“That sounds very useful,” Masego said, sounding approving. “Could I have a transcript, along with the criteria for ranking?”

“I’ll think about,” I lied.

Adjutant cleared his throat, a call to order before this ended up into a pleasant waste of several hours. Archer avenged herself on me by pouring herself a cup of wine and filling it up to the rim, like a savage , while Akua considered me with golden eyes. A dress in red and white today, which while unable to decide whether it was a ballroom gown or a tabard remained quite flattering no matter the attached interpretation.

“I heard through the grapevine that your adventure back on Creation was a success,” Akua said.

“Heh,” Archer snickered, elbowing Zeze. “She called you a plant.”

“It was a metaphor,” he revealed to her. “... I think. I don’t believe even Wolof ever got the spell to work for a living person.”

“They haven’t,” Akua assured him. “Corpses only. Am I to take it, then, that this is to be a council of strategy?”

It was a rhetorical question, we both knew, but one that’d push us into the meat of this meeting. She did like to provide these helpful light touches, though when Hakram was there she was much more careful about their use – I got the feeling she was being exceedingly careful about never stepping on his toes. Likely she figured that trying to step into the position of my right hand was a fool’s errand, which to be frank it was. Akua was a lot of things, many of which were technically curses, but socially blind wasn’t one of them.

“We have a bit of trouble,” I said. “The Iron Prince is a long way from shore, and the tide’s getting rowdy.”

“Have even ever been on a boat?” Indrani skeptically asked.

“A fishing boat, yes,” I smugly replied.

Only when it’d been docked and to get handsy with a boy, but she didn’t need to know that.

“By custom she’s also high admiral of Callow unless the title is otherwise assigned,” Hakram noted. “Which makes her the finest sailor of all assembled here by far.”

“I’ve helmed sailing ships on the Wasaliti at least twice a summer ever since I was-” Akua began, tone irritated, then her face blanked and cleared her throat. “Yet I believe there will be no ships involved here beyond the metaphorical, so-“

I met Indrani’s eyes across the table, sharing triumphant grins. It was always a rare treat to bait out of her a genuine reaction. Back when we’d started she’d often fake those to fit in better, but these days when she tried we could usually tell.

“Why are we here, then?” Masego asked me, cutting through Akua’s verbal retreat. “Most of us don’t have military training, or at least not military officer training. Would you not be served better by a war council of your highest commanders?”

“I already know what needs to be done,” I honestly said. “Might have to move the numbers around a bit, but there’s not a lot of room for manoeuver when it comes down to it.”

I leaned forward over the ‘map’ Hakram had put together from the seared stone, tapping a finger on the representation of Klaus Papenheim’s army. The part of it on the march, at least.

“We need to reinforce those as they give battle to the undead ahead of them,” I said.

“No need to explain this for my benefit,” Masego frankly said. “I will only pretend to listen to regardless.”

Well, at least he was being honest about it.

“ I want to know,” Indrani piously said. “Because I care about you, and I’m a good friend.”

“A valiant effort, number six,” Akua murmured. “If stunningly transparent.”

“That’s rich coming from you, Shifty Spectre,” Archer muttered back. “I bet if I shone Light at you it’d go straight through.”

“Since Indrani requests it, a quick summary,” I said.

I glanced at Hakram, who kicked Zeze under the table. Good man.

“This,” I said, as I put down my finger on the Iron Prince’s army, “is the other Grand Alliance army in Hainaut. We want to save it, because if we don’t we’re fucked for the year – if not for much longer than that.”

I moved my finger slightly west on the map, maybe a day’s march away from Klaus’ army.

“This is an undead force, which has to be at least twenty thousand and probably more,” I said. “The Iron Prince is marching on it, and will probably beat it in an open battle, but it represents a trap.”

I moved even further west, still at the same height. There three forces could be made out, but I ignored the one headed south towards the Cigelin Sisters. That one was General Abigail’s problem, or if she got lucky her prey: should the Sisters fall before those reinforcements arrive, Abigail of Summerholm would be in a very good position to simply smash that army when it arrived before her. It was always pleasant to be reminded that, for all his advantages over us, the Dead King had limits to his sight as well.

“This is an army that used to be far to the west, in Luciennerie, but marched east to surprise us here in the valley,” I said. “It’s large, at least a hundred thousand, and odds are it’s going to hit the Iron Prince’s army just the day after it fought a battle against the undead force I mentioned previously. That would be bad .”

Not only had the Prince of Hannoven left part of his army behind, which meant he’d be understrength – I was guessing casualties had been rough taking Juvelun so he’d been forced to leave behind troops to protect a large amount of wounded – but the dead would strike after our very mortal enemy had finished fighting another battle, with all the casualties and exhaustion that involved. No, if the Luciennerie columns actually reached Prince Klaus’ army then it would be a disaster.

“We are here, more or less,” I finished, pointing to a spot on the map.

Northwest of the Iron Prince and the undead he would soon fight, north of the Luciennerie columns. I’d hoped the Twilight Ways would allow us to steal the march on those, but the Dead King hadn’t kept a sedate pace. Splitting into several columns would weaken him against an ambush, but it had also allowed the large army to march quicker. When you had the kind of numbers Keter could boast of, often timing was more important than formations.

“That does not seem like the right place to be,” Masego assessed. “We should perhaps move towards the Iron Prince, who we are meant to save.”

A conclusion I’d not dragged him towards, though I had perhaps gently taken him by the hand and walked him there.

“Which we’ll do,” I said. “But it can’t be only that. If we just reinforce Prince Klaus with all we have, the advancing columns will hit us not long afterwards. That’s not a battle I want to give, not right now.”

If we got there in time to reinforce our allies, which it was a coin toss we would, then we’d have numbers on our side for the first battle. We’d still take losses, though, and tire our men. Then for the battle that followed we wouldn’t have the numbers, and we’d have all the damage done by our first fight weighing us down. I honestly believed we’d be able to win that battle too, but the costs would be hard to bear. We’d want to have that fight when we were prepared and well-rested, not buried in blood and dust. As it happened I knew exactly where I wanted to fight that decisive battle: the city of Hainaut, the very capital of the principality.

Which meant I had to prevent the Luciennerie columns from reaching that battlefield, and there honestly weren’t twenty ways to do that.

“Which is why-“

“I see,” Masego sagely nodded.

I paused. Was he just going to say that at regular intervals in the hope I’d figure that meant he was listening? I glanced at Archer, who offered me winsome smile. Ugh. She hadn’t been listening either, had she? Gods, those two had gotten even worse now that they were together. It was like they’d crossbred their character flaws into one single great malevolent chimera.

“Hakram,” I sighed.

Masego yelped as he was kicked under the table, and though Indrani smiled mockingly and tried to move back her chair she found that shadows had mysteriously kept it stuck where it was. She glared at Akua.

“Praesi treache- ow , Hakram that was my knee you prick!”

“I’ve no idea what you could possibly mean, darling,” Akua smiled, sipping at a wine glass she’d never poured.

“Which is why we will be fighting a holding action against the enemy columns,” I said, “while the majority of our army reinforces Prince Klaus. At the moment, I’m inclined to field only the Order and the Second Army. We’ll take a few Named as well, but once more the majority will be headed towards the Iron Prince.”

“Ah,” Masego frowned, “I must have missed something. Or is the plan truly to fight the largest enemy army with the small force you mentioned, while the rest all gathers to fight together a smaller army that the Prince of Hannoven could likely beat alone?”

“No,” I mused, “that’s a fairly apt summation actually.”

He frowned further.

“How many bottles have you had ?” Zeze severely asked.

Indrani cackled in laughter, while even Hakram cracked a smile. Only loyal – treacherous – reliable – well, relatively speaking – Akua did not descend into opportunistic mockery.

“We slow the enemy by a day, perhaps two, and then retreat as the Prince of Hannoven will during the time we bought him,” she noted. “It seems achievable. Where is it that you intend to make our stand afterwards, Catherine?”

I tapped a finger on the capital, meeting her eyes.

“Bold,” Akua noted.

“Symbolic,” I said. “And, aside from that kind of consideration, it’s finest set of fortifications in the valley. Our best bet by far.”

Abigail would have the Cigelin Sisters secured by then, taking the pressure off of our defensive line, and from behind city walls we’d be able to supply ourselves through the Twilight Ways. If not necessarily for long, given the difficulties of feeding so many people by convoys. Neshamah was after our extermination, so he’d come for us in Hainaut sure as dawn – he might not ever again get this good an opportunity to wipe out our full forces in this front. The great army that’d chased after Prince Klaus from Malmedit would be drawn into this as well, and at the capital of the fallen principality we would roll the dice on the outcome of this campaign.

“It’s a delaying action we’ll be fighting, Zeze,” I added for his sake. “The objective here isn’t to win the battle, it’s to slow down the enemy while losing as few people as possible and making it away safely.”

“I see,” Masego said, and I narrowed my eyes.

It seemed like he meant it this time, though, so I let it go.

“I am still unsure why you gathered us here,” he then admitted.

“’cause we’re all going to be with her in that scrap,” Indrani casually said. “So she wants to hear us first. What we need, which Named we want to keep. That about right?”

“It is,” I said. “I’ve an idea or two to slow down the enemy while avoiding a bloody fight, but I’ll be relying on all of you. I’ll likely be on the field, which means Hakram will be holding command over our Named in my absence while General Hune and Grandmaster Talbot will handle the manoeuvering.”

“How many Named do we get to keep?” Indrani asked.

“Four, five tops,” I said. “Aside from the people here, of course.”

“Then we should bring the Blessed Artificer,” Archer bluntly said. “I know she’s not exactly the favourite of anyone at this table, but-“

“Large-scale workings, even in something as limited as Light, will be of great use,” Masego calmly interrupted. “I agree. I would request the Summoner, myself. His branch of sorcery is highly flexible, and unlike Roland there would be no complications in wresting his magic for use of my own should there be need.”

Why was it that the most useful Named so often ended up being the most unpleasant ones? Still, just because I personally disliked both people mentioned did not mean they’d not been brought up for good reasons. The Summoner, in particular, was someone I’d been inclined to bring in. While tiresome he wasn’t too difficult to handle, he really was just that damned useful to have around.

“Who will be leading the Named reinforcing Prince Klaus?” Akua asked.

“Unless one of you requests him, it will be Roland,” I said.

The shade cocked her head to the side.

“Not the Grey Pilgrim,” she observed.

“I have a use for him, as it happens,” I smiled. “Unless one of you objects?”

None did. I doubted Tariq would be hard to talk into it, if he needed to be convinced at all. This sort of stand was right up his alley, and while the Forsworn Healer brought similar strength in healing – superior when it came to groups actually – to the table, there were few Named who could boast of sharper bite than the Peregrine. That made three down, so we still had room for some. I glanced at Hakram.

“I would keep the Apprentice,” Adjutant gravelled. “She has been of use, and I have a particular idea in mind.”

That had a promising ring to it. Both this talk of idea and Hakram no longer talking of having the young girl along through his teeth.

“Do you now?” I muttered. “Done, then. I’ll look forward to it.”

My eyes moved to Akua, who had laid her chin on her palm and seemed deep in thought. She worked differently than I did, I’d noticed, when it came to laying schemes. I preferred to have someone to speak with, as I’d found that the back-and-forth and other set of eyes usually helped me find angles, but silence was her own way. I sometimes wondered how much of that had been that, as a girl, there simply would have been no one she could afford to trust with her thoughts.

“I take it you do not have a precise role in mind for me already?” Akua asked.

“No,” I said. “I expect I’ll be moving between places putting out fires, and I had a thought you might be the solution to my inability to be in two places at once, but that’s not set in stone. If you have a proposal, I’m all ears.”

“Very forward,” Indrani said, not disapprovingly.

I ignored her.

“I have a notion, perhaps,” the shade mused. “It have been considering the nature of our enemy, and how best it might be struck at.”

“So you have someone in mind,” I said.

“I do,” Akua Sahelian smiled. “I’ve a use for the Rapacious Troubadour, my heart.”

I blinked. That, uh, had not been the name – Name – I was expecting. But that actually made it easier to claim five Named, since neither the Apprentice nor the Troubadour were considered major battlefield assets. Mind you, if the Doom of Liesse has a use for a singer I doubt it’ll be because she has a hankering for a tune , I thought.

“You have him, then,” I said. “Which makes five.”

We had our roster, our plan and our enemy. There’d be a war council later to hammer all the details together, but as far as I was concerned the essentials were settled.

And just like that, to war we went.

Chapter 65: Cross-Check

“Victory lies in understanding the intentions of the enemy. Therefore, a general with no intentions cannot be beaten.”

– Isabella the Mad, Proceran general

“So what is this place called again?”

“Maillac, my queen.”

I idly glanced at the man who’d replied to my question. Sir Brandon Talbot, Grandmaster of the Order of Broken Bells, had not been much changed by the war. I was often surprised by that. His once-long hair had been cut short but the beard and the strong build remained just the same as when I’d first met him, sitting in a cell where Juniper had tossed him. Many of the great officers of the Army of Callow and other hosts strained under their burden of their position, but on the contrary Brandon Talbot had taken rather well to this war. It helped, I suspected, than this was all simpler the kinds of war he’d known before – be it the Folly, where he had fought to maintain Praesi rule under my banner, or the Tenth Crusade when he’d followed a homegrown villain against invading heroes.

There was no one alive who could bring horrors to bear that would rival the Dead King’s, but for all the madness this was the kind of war that my people were most comfortable waging: black and white, no truce with the Enemy. I sometimes envied that he was not in a position to truly grasp the kind of ugly dealings necessary to keep something like the Grand Alliance afloat. A great good too often came at the costs of a hundred petty evils, like a saint standing on a pedestals devils had paid for.

“Gods, and to think someone believed it a sound notion to build a village here,” I said. “They must have been drunk.”

The dark-haired nobleman – one of the few of the breed I caught myself occasionally liking – let out a small amused noise.

“Some of the land north of Harrow is not so dissimilar, I am told,” Brandon Talbot said. “I was taught as a boy that the people there are usually poor but skilled hunters and fishermen. As bowmen they have a high reputation in certain parts, though the Deoraithe are a hard shadow to escape in that art.”

“Not much left to hunt or fish here,” I replied. “Usually isn’t, after the Dead King had a go.”

If the Second Army was to make a stand against a wildly larger amount of enemy soldiers without getting butchered and overwhelmed, picking the ground it was going to make that stand on was crucial. We’d dug through maps and records as well as the officers from Hainaut that Princess Beatrice had leant me before picking the abandoned village of Maillac, and for all that the place was a hole in the ground for our purposes it was perfect. See, for all that undead had less trouble with difficult terrain than living soldiers they didn’t actually get to ignore that terrain. Swamps, bogs, or other combination of mud and scrum water and crawling things were easier for undead to go through because unlike people they wouldn’t get cold or tired or sick – or even attacked by animals, usually.

But in no way did that mean a swamp was something easy for undead soldiers to march through.

The skeletons still wore armour, still weighed heavy, and as a rule tended to be significantly less deft and agile than living soldiers besides. Marching through a mire would wreak havoc on their lines and they’d be damned slow going through mud – or, if they weren’t, would be so lightly armoured that our priests would scythe through them like wheat with volleys of Light. It was a comparative advantage the undead had, not an absolute one. And that meant that a place like Maillac made for very good grounds to defend: the village had stood on a relatively large peninsula surrounded by swamplands in every direction but the southeast, and with few trees in the immediate area that would obscure line of sight when the dead came from the west.

We wouldn’t be able to fit the entire Second Army on the peninsula that locals apparently called ‘the Boot’ – seen from a high hill in the distance it looked vaguely boot-like, I’d been told after asking – as ten thousand soldiers would be much too many, but we could fit at least half and then position the rest on the broader solid grounds behind the peninsula, which were thankfully rather difficult to access. To the north and south there were rock formations and deep water, both of which would screw with enemy advance even worse than the swamps. That meant that open grounds around the Boot would be the best approach for the dead, short of circling rather far around.

Which sounded like a good idea for them, at first glance, as it would allowed them to attack us from solid land an attempt an encirclement of our army divided between the Boot and the broader shore. I almost hoped they made the mistake of attempting that, though, as the amount of time it would take them to both gather large enough forces and circle around us meant my army would get to delay the dead long enough for Prince Klaus to get away and then escape ourselves without even giving battle. While I might have chosen Maillac as a battle site first and foremost, I wouldn’t complain if we got to evacuate it without first having fought said battle.

Not that we’d be so lucky. I’d stripped ten thousand legionaries and my finest horse from the rest of the army before dangling them like juicy bait out here in the wilds, the Dead King wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to bloody us a bit. Still, I’d not come this far by leaving things to chance.

“I can see little use for the Order in the battlefield you have chosen us, Your Majesty,” Sir Brandon admitted. “Yet it is not your habit to act without purpose, so I must presume there is one.”

“The swamp would be hell on the horses, and you’re much too heavy,” I agreed. “But I don’t actually intend for you to fight here , Talbot.”

Blue eyes brightened with understanding.

“We are to go a’raiding, then,” the Grandmaster smiled.

“And I with you,” I agreed. “We’ll be taking the Twilight Ways. Once the Second Army has begun setting up here, you and I are going to make such a nuisance out of the Order in these parts that Keter will have to come and give us a fight.”

“To vex the Enemy is always a pleasure,” the bearded knight said, sounding pleased. “Even more so if we confound him into an even greater defeat.”

I looked at him, for a moment, and glimpsed the part of his kind that my people had loved for so long. That fearless, hardy breed of nobles that’d known sword and spear just as well as dances and laughed as the charged under the banners of the Fairfaxes and the Albans to turn back the invaders of the east and the west. War wasn’t a trade to him, I thought, not like it was to the Legions and so many in the Army. War was part of who he was, just as much as his name or his blood. War isn’t just what we do, Catherine, it’s what we are , Juniper had once told me. She’d been speaking of her own people, that night, but so often I found that Praes and Callow were more deeply intertwined than either care to admit.

“I mean to do more than just vex,” I said. “Half the world still sits up when our war horns are sounded, Talbot. I mean to brand that fear anew in the legions of the dead.”

His fist struck his breastplate over his heart, the thump pleasantly solid to the ear.

“We are at your command, Queen Catherine,” the knight said.

For a few years yet, I thought. It would be enough.

I would make it enough.

—

Sapper-General Pickler, whose notion of the decorum due to her rank usually varied between ‘sounds like Commander Waffler’s problem’ and ‘if I’m not covered in dust I’m no doing this right’, crouched down on the shore and dipped a crooked green finger in the mud. After taking a long sniff, she licked it and hummed.

“So?”

“Rich silt,” Pickler told me. “Good material. Mind you, mudbricks in this humid a locale would be foolish. There’s clay, though, and we can use that for fired bricks. The trees in this dump aren’t for much of anything, though. I’ll need companies out foraging for decent firewood if we’re going to be cooking bricks.”

It was in moments like this that I was awe at what something like the War College actually stood for, what it achieved. That little exchange we’d just had alone was something that’d be impossible to have in most armies of our age. See, there were engineers in the ranks of Procer and the Free Cities with knowledge much like Pickler’s. Neither goblins nor Praesi had a monopoly on such things. But none of these had the rest . Pickler had been taught about mages, so she understood that we couldn’t just use spells to make her fired bricks: we’d half-kill our mages with exhaustion before we were anywhere done. Pickler had been taught about defensive tactics, so she knew how quickly I’d need the bricks and that if I didn’t get enough making any was a waste of time: that meant making many fires, and firewood.

Pickler had been taught about limited manpower logistics, too, and so combining all these teachings in a few moments she’d put together a proposal. One tailored to the rough amount of people I’d be able to spare, and how many would be needed to achieve what needed to done in our current time strictures. In effect, several companies of regulars on rotation with attached mages for Twilight Ways access.

Most of the contemporary armies of my allies and enemies had all this knowledge, in practice, but none of them had it concentrated in the same person. Maybe a few exceptional fantassin captains might have most of these competences, or rare Helikean generals, but those individuals would be rare. My father had made the War College into a place that could make entire companies of those rare individuals every year . There were many who still thought the Conquest had been an outlier, an anomaly made possible only by the genius of the Black Knight and the Marshals of Callow. Those people were fools. The Conquest had been won in stone classrooms a decade before armies lined up on both sides of the Fields of Streges.

“You’ll have them,” I said. “How much can you fortify in two days?”

“The Boot will be walled up, and we’ll have platforms for those of my ballistas you didn’t hand off to your toy general,” Pickler replied, a tad peevishly. “We’ll have to use palisades for the part stretching between the end of the boot and the deep waters to the south. We won’t be able to put up anything else in time.”

I slowly nodded, fixing the picture in my mind’s eyes. The peninsula was where I wanted clay walls the most, since it would be suffering the brunt of the enemy assault. Palisades to the south would get rough, given that Keter usually was capable of toppling those by throwing enough corpses at them – to say nothing of constructs or Revenants – but we weren’t trying to make an invincible citadel out of this chunk of swamp. Favourable fighting grounds would have to be enough.

“And the northern grounds?” I pressed.

The peninsula on which Maillac was built looked like a boot fitted to a particularly fat foot, but it wasn’t jutting out of perfectly straight dry – well, dryer anyway – land. To the south a wavy shoreline connected to the top edge of the boot kept going for about two hundred feet before jutting rocks and deep water made the grounds impractical to pass. As Pickler had said, we’d cover that stretch with palisades. But from the uppermost top edge of the boot the shoreline instead went straight for maybe forty feet before jutting upwards for a hundred feet and curving east into the second mass of rocks and deep water that were the reason I’d picked Maillac as our battlefield in the first place.

It meant there was a stretch of water between the Boot and the shore, which to make things even worse wasn’t even particularly deep. Skeletons coming through the mire would use it as a ramp to flood our northern flank, it was pretty much a given.

“If we had a week I’d sink a stone wall and drain it,” Pickler replied with a sigh that rattled through her teeth, “but we don’t. The mud is too soft there, Catherine, and unlike the Boot or the deeper shore there’s no solid layer to steady a palisade on.”

I grimaced.

“So we make a fort deeper in and dig in for a rough fight,” I summarized.

“I can make fortified nests for scorpions, with an eye to firing on anything that emerges from the water,” my Sapper-General said. “But anything beyond that would take more time and hands than we have to spare.”

She sounded almost apologetic, which was rare for her.

“These are imperfect grounds,” I said. “I didn’t expect you to wave a magic wand and make them into an impenetrable fortress. Already you’re doing wonders, Pickler.”

And I wasn’t lying for her benefit there: that in the span of a mere two days my sappers would be able to turn this defendable stretch of swamp into a makeshift fortress was beyond impressive. When I’d made the decision to use only the Second Army and the Order as delaying forces, I’d been able to make that decision comfortably because I’d known almost half of the sapper corps remained with me instead of manning the siege engines that by now General Abigail would be using to reduce the Cigelin Sisters. I relied on my sappers a great deal, which I knew they took pride in, but I would not let the burden of unrealistic expectations crush them.

“I want to do more,” Pickler admitted, to my surprise. “There won’t be another war like this in my lifetime, Catherine. This is the one I’ll get to fight, the one I’ll get to make my teeth on.”

She clicked her teeth, the flash of needle-like row betraying what had to be genuine irritation. Goblins were easier to read than humans, in some ways – most didn’t bother to hide their body language the way a deceitful human would, since most of my race never learned goblin body subtext.

“I work with imperfect tools, the way all my predecessors have,” Pickler said, “but it... irks, that I know we could be better. That we could match Keter blow for blow, if we had the time and the coin.”

I hid a fond smile. Leave it to my Sapper-General to be irked by being on the lesser side in an arms race with the Hidden Horror. Even most heroes, those chosen few blessed with the belief of promised victory, usually limited their ambition to survival and eking out a win when it came to the Original Abomination. Yet Pickler of the High Ridge tribe had been forged of goblin steel tempered in Wasteland fire, kept sharp by the whetstone of the Uncivil Wars. When faced with dreadful might, the Sapper-General of Callow’s nature was not to cower but to crave to surpass it.

“War’s not over,” I said. “One day it will take us to the gates of the Crown of the Dead itself, Pickler.”

I offered her a smile.

“On that day, I expect you will find your coffers filled to burst and few requests beyond acquiescence,” I said.

“Gobbler grant me breath until then,” Pickler of the High Ridge tribe grinned, all teeth and malice, and offered a quick bow. “I’ll get started on the work, Your Majesty.”

I nodded back, mind already moving. The Order of Broken Bells was already mustering for the raids, picking out targets with General Hune and Hakram, and now my Sapper-General had assignments and hands to see it through. It was time, then, to see to the... irregulars.

—

I’d begun with Masego because I’d figured it would be less unsettling to look at than whatever it was that Akua wanted the Rapacious Troubadour for, but alas it seemed that hubris had come around to bite me in the tit. That Hierophant would be standing atop a flat floating stone was sadly not unexpected, nor were the smaller rocks circling around him with visibly shifting runes carved into them. That the Grey Pilgrim would be stand with him there, though, head cocked to the side as if he were listening to someone talking as he corrected some of the runework, very much was.

“- being very helpful,” I heard Zeze say, tone appreciative. “I could talk to Catherine about remuneration, if you’d like, or draw from Arsenal discretionary funds.”

Well, that was nice of him.

“A kind thought,” Tariq drily replied, “but the Ophanim require no compensation for their help.”

Wait, had he been talking about paying the Choir of Mercy? Godsdamnit, Masego, we definitely didn’t have room for that in the budget. I cleared my throat as I got closer, as it seemed both of them were too involved with their work to be paying attention to their surroundings.

“Catherine,” Hierophant greeted me. “Come to have a look?”

“You might say that,” I replied. “Pilgrim, always a pleasure to see you.”

I did not bother to specify that I’d not actually expected to see him, though, as it was pretty much implied by his mere presence here.

“And you,” the old man said, sounding amused. “We have been lending a hand to the Lord Hierophant, you see, as his work has proved to have... surprising provenances.”

“I figured out how angels smite people,” Zeze said, sounding very pleased with himself. “More or less. When the Ophanim tried to kill us all at Lyonceau I got a good look.”

“That was not their intent at all,” Tariq sighed. “The death of the Tyrant of Helike – a necessity, I’m sure you’ll agree – was all that was sought.”

“By smiting,” Masego helpfully specified. “Which I am now reproducing, only without the angels.”

“Are you now,” I faintly said. “How lovely.”

I looked to the Pilgrim, expecting an elaboration but receiving only a blithe shrug.

“It’s not an inaccurate description,” Tariq said. “They’re very interested in seeing if it works.”

“Are they now,” I said, tone grown even fainter. “That’s nice.”

“Now,” Masego said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

He tried to lean against a rotating stone but mistimed it and almost stumbled off the floating stone, the Pilgrim discreetly pulling at his robes so he wouldn’t.

“I doubt that,” I noted, “but go on.”

“If a Choir does not power the smiting, what does ?” Hierophant enthusiastically asked.

“The bone-deep existential dread of all who witness your works?” I suggested.

“Too narrow, but you’re along the right path,” Masego encouraged me.

I glanced at Tariq.

“I thought you Light-wielding types had objections to blasphemy,” I said.

And this felt, like, maybe two or three steps past simple blasphemy. I’d say we were uncovering fresh new heretical horizons, but that was always a hard claim to make for anyone remotely familiar with Praesi history.

“Smiting is being used as a purely technical term here, with no religious connotations,” the Grey Pilgrim serenely replied.

Tariq, you shit , I uncharitably thought.

“Besides, if this endeavour succeeds it may be possible to reproduce it purely using Light,” the old man airily continued.

Meaning that Zeze’s brain was being utterly terrifying, as usual, but that in this particular case it might lead to a skill usable for heroes down the line – and Crows, wasn’t that particular prospect worth a fucking shiver or two? – so he was willing to not only refrain from objecting but actively help. I narrowed my eyes at the smiling old man, knowing Goods might just be getting the better bargain here. There was no guaranteed that Hierophant would ever be able to pass this down to anyone else on my side, so the knowledge might very well die out. The Choir of Mercy, though, would not forget a damned thing.

And the Ophanim were not, in my experience, shy about handing out this sort of knowledge to their favourites.

“How fortunate,” I replied with a grunt. “What is it you’re using, Masego?”

“I had thought to use Night, at first,” the dark-skinned mage idly said, “but Sve Noc did not seem willing. So instead we will draw on Arcadia for power and use runework to give the power shape.”

I blinked.

“And that’ll work?” I asked

“Should it not, I expect the result will be a large explosion followed by temporary instability in the weave of Creation on a local level,” Tariq noted.

“We can use that too,” Masego happily told me. “So there’s really no downside.”

I closed my eyes and breathed out. Well, he wasn’t exactly wrong . Mind you, Zeze tended to be very reasonable even when suggesting utter lunacy so that wouldn’t be a first. And this seemed like a functioning weapon, if an unstable and dangerous one. I opened my eyes.

“This won’t hurt our own?” I asked.

“No,” Masego replied, tone serious. “Precautions were taken. It will not kill your soldiers.”

“Then all hail the mighty smiters,” I drily said. “Have fun, you two, and try not to bring down Arcadia Resplendent on our heads.”

Which might have been a tad hypocritical of me to say, I mentally acknowledged as I limped at and left them to their work, since I was the one who kept stealing lakes from there.

—

I caught a few bits of the song on the wind before I saw either of them, the almost mournful tone of the Troubadour’s voice matching the sad strums of his cithern. The tent was wide open, leaving the song to take to the sky unhindered.

“- we of steel,

Forged in the east

As turns the wheel

And carrion feast.”

I knew precious few Praesi songs, unless you counted Legion ones, but this one I’d heard of before. The Tyranny of the Sun , it was called, an old war song from the days of the Sixty Years War. It’d been banned since, but banning a song only rarely succeeded at stamping it out. Making it forbidden tended to raise interest, if anything. The few Praesi tunes I’d heard – Count the Nights , Upon All the World and Burning Kiss – tended towards the boastful or the romantic, not the almost wistful beat of this one. It was, I suddenly recalled, a favourite of my father’s. Given that this had to be a request if Akua’s, I almost smiled at the thoughts.

Neither of them would be particularly pleased to hear they had something in common, even something as small as a liking for a song.

I found the both of them seated inside. The Rapacious Troubadour was sprawled indolently in a chair, long crooked fingers dancing across his cithern as he smiled. Dark-haired and pale, the man would have been handsome if nor for the too-red lips and insincere eyes. Though he wore armour when battle was at hand, he rarely bothered without immediate danger to move him: his tunic and cloak were of tasteful cut and good make, in shades of purple, while both trousers and boots were leather. He’d been looking at Akua with something like hunger in his gaze when I entered, though he immediately averted his eyes. Ah, but is it the looks or the soul that draw your attention?

The shade herself had claimed a small table and a folding chair, leaning forward with quill and parchment in hand – which bared an interesting expanse of smooth skin, given the generous neckline of her red dress patterned with what looked like peacock feathers in blue. I’d seen enough of Akua actively trying to appeal to suspect she wasn’t even trying to be enticing at the moment. She was just good-looking enough that even at work it looked like she was posing for a painting.

“Dearest,” the devil in question said, raising her head to smile at me. “How kind of you to visit.”

The Troubadour eased into an interruption of the song, the notes fading naturally, and then offered me a short bow.

“Your Majesty,” Lucien greeted me. “Ever a pleasure.”

“Is it now?” I mused. “Good to know.”

“Do not bully my singer,” Akua chided me. “He has been singing the loveliest songs.”

“The Tyranny of the Sun?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“Somewhat maudlin, I know,” she smiled, “but it has such a pleasant melody.”

I smiled at her, knowing something she did not and amused by the secret.

“Got anything out of it?” I asked, glancing at her parchment.

A magical formula, by the looks of it. I could recognize certain parts of it from our lessons – wait, no, this was a ritual but it was meant to be used with Night. It just looked like sorcery because she was basing its workings on Trismegistan principles. I leaned in, frowning as I took a closer look. The scale of the power used would be large, since she was using the notations that meant every number mean should be multiplied by a thousand, but the duration would be... short? Maybe just a few breaths. And I wasn’t recognizing the end of her formula at all, there wasn’t even a boundary strength or an allowed variance.

Mind you, for all my lessons I was still essentially a drunken monkey trying to decipher the works of one of the greats of our age so my incomprehension should not be a surprise.

“I believe so,” Akua smiled. “It occurred to me, my heart, that the strengths of Night lie in its flexibility. Yet this comes at the price of a weakness, namely that it is only ever second best in all the many things it can accomplish.”

If even that , I thought. I called it the power of a thief for a reason. She wasn’t wrong, though, and if anything she was underselling it: given equal Night and Light on both sides of a struggle, Light would win ten times out of ten. Entities wielding Light and Night weren’t necessarily bound to that outcome, mind you, but in a straight fight it had to be said that Light always won. Considering that the prevailing theory was that Light had been made by the Gods Above when Creation was first built and that Night was only indirectly the work of the Gods Below, that made a great deal of sense to me.

“Let’s say I agree,” I replied. “What follows?”

“A great deal of power that could benefit from a... more defined method of channeling,” Akua said. “One more deeply aligned with Creation.”

I studied her for a moment, then discreetly flicked my eyes towards the Rapacious Troubadour. Her smile widened.

“Huh,” I said. “Is that... wise?”

She read between the lines, catching on to my very delicate question of ‘are you sure using the soul-eating villain as a Night-channel isn’t going to fuck us over?’.

“It is my ritual,” she easily replied. “It remains in my hands from beginning to end.”

Meaning that the Rapacious Troubadour would be a ritual component more than an active participant. Ah, I was already slightly more comfortable with this. Still not exactly eager, but damned few of the tricks we needed to win this war were anything that could reasonably be called safe.

“And you’re sure you’ll get results,” I said.

“I have proved the underlying principles,” Akua said, and leaned back as if to offer me a closer look at her notes.

Yeah, that would serve no real purpose. I had an almost decent handle on basic Trismegistan spell formulas these days – might not be able to make one, but was reliably able to pick out which part did what – but taking a gander at the kind of work that lay behind crafting an entirely new ritual, one working and Night and somehow involving a Named, would be absurd. I did not have the knowledge to parse the knowledge necessary to grasp the principles behind the basics of what was involved there.

“I’ll take you to your word,” I easily said. “But what is it your ritual will do, exactly?”

She gestured for me to come closer and whispered the answer in my ear. I drew back with a startled look.

“You’re sure?” I asked.

“The effects could be inferior to my expectations, but there will be effects,” Akua calmly said. “Of that there can be no doubt.”

I let out a low whistle.

“Well, here’s hoping it takes fully,” I said. “It would make a real difference, and not just in the coming battle.”

“I expect Trismegistus will mend the weakness eventually,” the shade shrugged. “Yet for now we have the element of surprise, so a success can be reasonably hoped for.”

Mhm. She’d not used that name as a coincidence: it was a veiled reminder that there was a reason Praesi magic was called Trismegistan sorcery. We were using his own methods against him, which meant our advantage was likely to be quite temporary.

“I’ll dare hope for it, then,” I said. “Did I glimpse correctly that you’ll be using a song?”

“Indeed,” Akua said, sounding pleased. “Do you have a particular preference? Lucien has proved to have a remarkable repertoire at his disposal.”

I glanced at the smiling man in question. Yeah I figured he would, what with all the godsdamned souls he’d eaten.

“It’s your ritual,” I said. “Let it be your song as well.”

“You do me honour,” the golden-eyed beauty said. “As it happens, I did have a thought.”

“Oh?”

“ Stars From the Sky ,” Akua said in Mtethwa. “It is ancient, but remains sung for good reason.”

“Never heard of it,” I replied, “but I’ll look forward to mending that.”

She inclined her head.

“I will endeavour,” Akua Sahelian smiled, “not to disappoint.”

Chapter 66: Blind Pigs

“I climbed the Tower at seventeen, Chancellor, and for ten years I have held it. So before you bare your knife at my back, ask yourself this – would you really be the first to try?”

– Dread Emperor Nihilis I, the Tanner

Flat and open grounds sat before us, the earth black and musky.

The sun peeked out solemnly from behind the cover of clouds, a wet and lazy breeze licking at the skin as the summer heat saw droplets gather and slither down the armour of my knights. Hidden near the edge of a thicket of oak and poplars, we watched as in the distance as a warband of armed corpses shambled forward. They were taking the same eastward trail that a hundred other like them had, over nights and days. There’d been no need of a tracker to find that well-beaten track. There was a name, I idly remembered, for this place. There was a village not too far, a mark on a map where men had lived and a lord had ruled. It slipped my mind, despite my best efforts, but I did not grieve myself the lapse. We had fought a dozen skirmishes in as many different places since morning, and by now they were beginning to meld into each other.

“Seven hundred or thereabouts, my queen,” Sir Brandon Talbot said. “And our outriders are adamant the closest warband is the better part of an hour away.”

I laid a hand on the neck of Zombie the Sixth, feeling him breathe in and out slowly. The stallion was a pale brown Salamans zancada , a breed favoured by both leisure racers and the light cavalry that Arlesites were so fond of. A gift from Princess Beatrice Volignac, and not an inexpensive one. I supposed I did qualify as light horse nowadays, since all I wore for armour was a breastplate with tassets and upper vambraces over an aketon – and the Mantle of Woe, over it all. It was a waste to give such a fine horse to a rider as ferociously average as myself, in my opinion, especially when I usually preferred riding dead horses to live ones. Yet it would have been unmannerly to refuse it, and while the Order had remounts they were from lesser breeds so I didn’t even have a good reason to do so.

I fully expected Zombie the Sixth to die before the end of the day, though, which would properly earn him his name would solve the issue anyway. I’d seriously debated killing him and raising him before Hakram got me to admit it would be somewhat unpolitic of me.

“Then we take them,” I said. “Have the horns sounded, Grandmaster Talbot.”

“It will be my pleasure,” the bearded knight replied with a hard grin.

He pulled one-handed on the reins of his purebred Liessen charger, leading away the large horse at a trot and shouting out his orders. The knights carrying long banners, both the Order’s own cracked bronze bells on black as well as my own Sword and Crown, brought the silver-banded horns hanging around their necks to their lips and blew. One, twice, thrice. The deep call echoed across the grounds of Hainaut, giving that age-old order my people knew the way they dawn: all knights, charge . I watched, hidden in the shade of a tall poplar tree. The dead had enough Binds among them that they began to mobilize before the Order had even begun to emerge from the cover of the trees, but the warband had been spread out in a loose column for the march. They would not gather quickly enough. Split into four wedges of five hundred, two on each side of the path, my knights lowered their lances and broke into a gallop.

My staff of yew resting against Zombie’s neck, my sword still sheathed, I waited with the remounts and the squires in the woods as the Order fell on the dead like packs of wolves. It was with a twinge of satisfaction that I watched lowered killing lances, engraved with hymns to the Heavens, scythe through the thin ranks of the enemy as large armoured horses trampled the surprised undead. All four wedges broke through the enemy lines, not allowing themselves to be drawn into melee but instead punching straight through. In good order, they gathered again and wheeled around to charge anew from fresh angles. Most undead were incapable of so much as denting the armour of my knights, and this column was low on javelinmen: maybe a score wounded and fewer dead were all it took before most the Binds were dead and the warband dissolved into a disorderly mass of corpses.

From there the knights of the Order of the Broken Bell went at it with cold and practiced efficiency, using the tactics developed over years of fighting Keter. A wedge skimmed the edge of the mass of the dead, drawing the enemy forward, only for two others to flank it with deadly charges. Before a protracted melee could ensure, all three wedges withdrew and the fourth wedge of unengaged knights went forward to serve as fresh bait for a repeat of the manoeuver. Binds would have punished such a repetition, but skeletons simply did not learn from their mistakes. It was grim and bloody work that followed, but repetitive and the danger involved was not as great as might look: unless pulled down from their mount, few of my knights were truly at risk unless the enemy got lucky.

It had all been going quite well, which was why I half-expected it when horns sounded from the woods on the other side of the open grounds. There would be squires and horses in that opposite thicket as well, though I could hardly see any of them, and it must be one of their number that was blowing the call for danger – two short, sharp sounds. My staff left Zombie’s neck and I spurred him forward without a word, ignoring the squires asking after me. Talbot had named ‘officers’ among them, lead squires, so it was not my job to hold their hand. My horse’s long and certain stride took us out of the woods and slightly downslope onto the battleground even as I kept an eye on the currents there. Talbot was in command, and he’d prudently ordered two wedges to draw the skeletons away while assembling the other two to head back to the squires.

Quick as he’d been, the enemy was quicker still. Panicked horses, the remounts of a thousand knights, were led hastily out of the woods by mounted squires in mail even as screams and the sound of fighting came from deeper in. I led Zombie into a hasty gallop, trampling a skeleton that tried to stand in my way in a crunch of steel-clad hooves, and broke into the shaded thicket even as another pack of squires fled it. They parted around me, and I glimpsed shame on some of those faces. Given what I glimpsed deeper in, though, there was truly none to be had. It was a man, if one long dead. The shoddy hide armour – little more than a vest – he wore over tattered shirt and trousers did nothing to distinguish him from the zombies Keter threw at soldiers by the hundreds, but the long blood-red hair and ancient claymore were... distinctive.

He padded forward on bare feet, blood dripping from the edge of his great sword as a smile accentuated the vertical tattooed red stripes around his mouth. The Drake, we’d taken to calling him. Against a Revenant of that calibre there was nothing my soldiers could do but die.

“Retreat,” I ordered the remainder, voice laced with power.

The squires scattered to the four winds, save for one who’d been too close – the Drake approached and the girl swung down her sword at his head, but the Revenant easily stepped around it. Zombie’s stride had not slowed and my staff rose as I gathered Night around the tip, but even that was too slow. In a single casual stroke, the Drake swung down and blood sprayed as he carved through the squire and the horse beneath her. I grit my teeth, letting loose a spinning javelin of Night at the Revenant that caught him in the ribs and shredded flesh and bone. The impact smashed him into a tree, making it crack, and the hide armour was smoldering around the edges. It wouldn’t do shit to this particular horror, though, I well knew. I passed the falling halves of the dead squire, unsheathing my sword as I began gathering Night again, but already flesh and bone had knitted themselves back together.

The Drake, laughing, cracked a shoulder and wrenched himself free of the tree.

“Black Queen,” the Revenant nonchalantly greeted me. “Yours, then?”

Five times I’d tried to kill that murderous cockroach, and never managed it. Once I’d so thoroughly incinerated his corpse that all that’d been left had been a single hand, and still he’d walked out of that battlefield on two feet. Whatever it was the Dead King had done to this one, it’d made him durable beyond reason. Even wounds inflicted with Light came back in a matter of moments. His capacity to recover from damage might genuinely surpass what my body had been able to do at the peak of my time holding Winter.

“Drake,” I coldly replied, deadwood staff levelled at him. “They were. Burn .”

A howling gout of blackflame erupted from the tip, swallowing him whole before beginning to spin on itself at my direction. I heard bits of crazed laughter through even the roar of the dark fire as used my knees to guide Zombie away from the blaze. Fuck , this one was always a pain to contain. I had enough hard-hitting ranged tricks that if I could catch him at a distance he wasn’t a major threat, but I’d yet to find anything that could actually put him down for good and not for lack of trying. Time to pull out my forces and find a softer target. Zombie slowed on the turn and I leant to the side to better slam the butt of my staff against the ground, drawing deep on Night and hastily shaping it. Thin threads of darkness skittered along the ground, running up trunks and binding trees as they hooked themselves deep.

The Drake leapt out of the flames, naked and burnt but already healing, just in time for me to wrench with my will and smash him down into the ground with a dozen bound trees. I heard bones break and organs pulp, his broken body stuck under the massive weight. That ought to slow him for a span, until I could get something sterner in place.

“That-” the Revenant began, then paused to spit out a thick glob of blood, “-that was unkind.”

Of all the dead Named in Keter’s service he might just be the chattiest, and the Dead King did seem to have left him most of his will and wits. It made him more flexible – the same tactics rarely worked twice against him – but it also meant he fell more easily into distractions. Getting him talking tended to work, especially if it was about himself.

“I’ve been curious,” I idly asked, drawing on Night. “How long did it take, before you turned?”

One more working to keep him stuck there for a bit then I’d retreat. The sooner I got my knights away from him the better. It might be worth coming back afterwards to have a crack at destroying him, though, I silently considered. Better here and now than at Maillac.

“Fifty three years,” the Drake amiably replied. “Would that I had bent at forty, that last decade was... inventive.”

I knew from experience that impaling him wouldn’t work for long – his healing was so aggressive that it shredded whatever went through him by sheer pressure – and that quartering only held him so long. He’d been physically strong even by Named standards, I suspected. It was burying alive that’d worked best so far, so I got to it methodically. Shaping Night into large blades I manipulated to cut a rough cube into the ground, I then shaped another working and ripped out the loose earth as if with great claws. I’d need to drag him into the hole before burying him, though, so best get the strings spun out already. I wasn’t always quick enough to snatch him when I wove them on the fly. Still, thank the Gods I’d caught him in the woods instead of on an open field. He was much hard to deal with without terrain to use. I spun out five threads, then threw in a sixth just to be sure and thickened them, then –

Darkness fell over the woods, pure and inky black. Shit , I thought, immediately releasing all my workings. Mantle’s here too . Was this an ambush? I threw myself off my horse, ripping my boots out of the stirrups, and felt Zombie kick about in a panic. I slapped his rump with the side of my staff so he’d know to run before spinning it about, smashing it into the ground. A tremor of Night shivered across the forest floor, sending the earth I’d loosened flying in a rain that should obscure Mantle’s vision just as she’d obscured mine. My consistent inability to see through her darkness while it did not impede her was one of the many reasons I fucking hated dealing with that particular Revenant. Still, this made it two from the nebulous roster that our heroes liked to call the Scourges. It really was beginning to smell like ambush to my nose.

I’d begun to count in the back of my mind the moment things went dark and I kept it up even as I threw up an obscuring veil of Night around myself and ducked behind where I remembered to be a tree. The tree blew up a moment later, though I heard no noise and only knew because I felt the shiver and wood shards ripping into my cloak. I slid further down, closer to the roots, as something whizzed near my head, knowing a helmet would have made no difference if a curse hit but still chastising myself for the lack of it anyway. Cocky gets you killed, Catherine , I reminded myself. You don’t grow back limbs anymore. The last three beats separating me from the count of sixteen passed agonizingly slowly, but when the timing struck I was ready.

The darkness winked out, revealing the Drake halfway through a leap in my direction with his claymore raised high and his crimson hair trailing behind, but I wove a thread of Night around his foot and without missing a beat I tossed him in the direction the strike on my tree should have come from. I knew I’d got it right when something ripped through my thread a moment later. Mantle had been some sort of priestess when she lived, and in death those gifts had turned towards the use of curses. Most of them worked against Night, which meant her specialty was shredding my own workings while being twice my size and heavily armored. I liked fighting Mantle even less than I did the Drake, and with her addition to the roster this was starting to look a mite risky. If it’d been a more vulnerable pair I would have embraced an occasion to try knocking off a first-class Revenant before the Dead King could put them to even sharper use, but this wasn’t a good match up for me at all.

It was, to be frank, suspiciously bad. If Tariq or Masego had been around to counter Mantle it might have been tempted to roll the dice anyway, but as things stood... No, I wouldn’t let pride get in the way of good sense here. Our objectives for this raid were either already achieved or beyond reach, so it was time to get the Hells out of here.

I opened a gate into Arcadia about six feet behind me and twenty feet high, making it broad and linked to water: the deluge pouring out served as my cover as I forced myself up and limped away. A wave of heat followed by the hiss of vapour told me the nature of Mantle’s answer, but I did not stop to glance back. I wouldn’t outrun either of them, given my limp, and just fleeing into Twilight wasn’t acceptable when the Order would be relying on me to return there. So when I opened a gate into the Twilight Ways, it wasn’t to go in: it was to allow something out . The ghostly blue wyvern that squeezed its way through lowered its wing so I could go up it and slid me onto its back by angling it. My water portal, though, could only buy me so long.

I felt it get shredded, and a heartbeat later a wide net of crackling shadow flew towards us. On the ground I glimpsed the Drake hastening towards us, so swift-footed his claymore dragged behind him.

“Up,” I ordered the wyvern, already drawing on Night.

I detonated the air in front of the net thrice, in a broad line, but though my enemy’s working wavered it did not break. That was fine, since all I’d wanted was to slow it. The Summoner’s wyvern-thing shot up just in time to avoid the net, batting its wings to pierce through the summit of the trees, but we weren’t done yet. Dark grey clouds began to form above us in a ring, and I held on for dear life I shouted for the wyvern to bank away. It did, narrowly, and only the tip of its tail touched the clouds. I’d seen this one before and... wait, what? The tail was just fine. Fuck , I thought as I glanced down and saw the Drake flying through the air towards us. It’d been a trick, she’d been buying time to throw him.

I loosed two spinning missiles of the same make as earlier, hoping to knock him back down, but he batted one aside – the claymore was enchanted, it didn’t even get a scratch – and spun on himself to narrowly avoid the other. If we’d kept going straight we would have avoided him, but Mantle’s bluff had paid off. Gods but I hated fighting clever opponents. There was no way I was allowing myself to be forced to engage the Drake up close, much less atop a moving magical construct, so with a grimace I glanced down at the woods and breathed out before taking a leap. Hopefully the wyvern would slow down the Revenant some. I wove a veil around myself on the way down, which proved to be a sound precautions when a spray of shard-like pieces of darkness tore through the air coming from below.

I flared out my cloak to slow my fall some, letting them pass below, and only then broke the veil to form tendrils of shadow that anchored themselves on one of the rapidly approaching trees. Using those I threw myself towards the open grounds, just in time for the tendrils to be torn through by Mantle as above me the wyvern-thing screeched. A glance told me the Drake had ripped into its belly and it was quickly falling apart. The dead priestess had never unmade the second gate I’d opened, though, the one the construct had come through, and a heartbeat later she was made to pay for that oversight. A ring of dark clouds that’d been forming ahead of me – the genuine acidic version this time, I was guessing – suddenly dispersed out as Archer made her presence known.

I heard a cry of anger, but I couldn’t see what was going on from up here. Still, given that Indrani was involved it was safe to assume that Mantle was having a bad time.

I had other priorities anyway, to be honest, though before shaping a way to slow my descent I still took the time to form a thread of Night, snatching the Drake’s foot after he leapt off the shattering wyvern-construct and throwing him deeper into the woods. It had little room for manoeuvre, afterwards, so I brute-forced the landing by smashing the ground beneath me and then using the blowback to slow my fall. I swallowed a scream as my bones rattled and my bad leg burned with pain, but I landed on my feet and only stumbled after taking three slow steps forward. I swallowed a curse and a moan of pain, picking up the sword I’d dropped to sheathe it and forcing myself up by leaning on my staff. In the back of my mind I finally felt my last portal get shredded.

Not that it mattered. From the woods ahead of me, where the Order was gathering to retreat, I saw three arrows arcs upwards in quick succession. Archer was a prodigy at sidling, she’d be able to slip in and out of this battlefield more or less at will and shoot from her pick of places. The last of the undead had gone off to chase my knights in the distance, so unless the Revenants caught up we were safe to retreat. Best hurry just in case. I wasn’t looking forward to limping all the way, but – huh . Zombie the Sixth nonchalantly trotted up to my side, seemingly unworried by the skirmishing that’d taken place since we last saw each other. The purebred zancada slowed at my side, as if inviting me to saddle up again.

“Good horse,” I praised, genuinely impressed.

Might be I’d still get some use of him living after all. I slid a boot into a stirrup and dragged myself back into the saddle, speeding away back into the woods. With Archer harassing the enemy we ought to be able to retreat in relative peace, I figured, but there was no point in wasting time.

We still had a few raids in us before exhaustion set in.

—

“There’s a saying in back home, Catherine,” Adjutant gravelled in Kharsum. ” It goes ‘a hunter cannot carry a cookpot’.”

I leaned back into my seat in the tent that soldiers had raised for me in the heart of the Boot, along with those of a few other high officers. Sipping at a mug of tea, I was wishing I’d taken up Indrani on her offer of a massage even though odds were that would have devolved in more strenuous activity. After most of a day riding and fighting, my entire body felt like one throbbing bruise and no quantity of herbal brew was going to fix that.

“I mean, depends on the hunter,” I mused. “But I’m guessing I’m missing some of the nuances.”

Hakram was seated in his wheelchair, but all the same he was looking rather different: he had, after all two legs again. The prosthetic leg looked grim, all grey iron and leather, but it was him who’d chosen the appearance – he’d turned down the appearance of flesh or even a more polished casing in metal. It was still closed enough I couldn’t see the enchanted strands of copper that’d been tied to his muscles, fooling his body into thinking there was still a flesh leg to use, but the articulations around the ankle could be glimpsed. Now and then he moved the foot, as if to check that he still could. He couldn’t actually walk on this, not yet. There was still need of an operation on the hip to fix the cut bones there and shore it up so the pressure wouldn’t damage his side.

This was a first step, and the operation had been done in part so see if there would be any trouble with his body acclimating to the prosthetic. Masego would have preferred starting with the arm, but Hakram had been adamant otherwise. I could see both sides. Zeze wanted to minimize the risk, as if disease or spellrot took the arm would be much easier to heal, while Adjutant knew that starting with the arm instead of a leg meant at least two more months before he could begin trying to walk with crutches. Masego had insisted on leaving time for recovery between the surgeries so the body would be strained as little as possible and the chances of rejecting the limbs were lowest. Still, in the end it was a choice that was Hakram’s alone to make.

So long as he knew the risks, it was not my or anyone else’s place to gainsay his decision.

“It is a figure of speech,” Hakram said. “Those specific words for hunter and cookpot were picked because they sound like those for swift and slow, respectively. It means even victory weighs you down, if you’re not careful.”

Cookpot, huh. We both knew it wasn’t just mutton that ended up in there. Ah, implied cannibalism. That backbone of ancient orcish wisdom.

“Not the most promising of segues after I asked you to summarize our scouting reports,” I drily noted. “Shall I take it things aren’t exactly looking up?”

“This isn’t the war to fight, if you’re looking for pleasant turns,” Hakram snorted. “And my people are still taking in reports as we speak, so take all this with a grain of salt.”

My brow rose.

“Wow,” I said. “It must be really bad if you’re prefacing this much.”

“You did exactly what you set out to achieve,” Adjutant gallantly set. “Which was provoke the columns headed towards the Iron Prince into battle here.”

“So we drew them in,” I warily said. “That was the plan. What’s the issue?”

“You drew them in,” Adjutant repeated.

I blinked.

“And?”

“You drew them all in,” Adjutant clarified. “As far as we can tell there’s not a single warband, battalion or even individual construct east of us that’s not headed towards Maillac as quick as its legs can carry it.”

I paused, glancing down at the mug of tea that was inexplicably not aragh. A shameful oversight, that.

“Well,” I faintly said. “Klaus and our reinforcements should be winning their battle handily, at least.”

I’d been a little worried that even the raids by the Order of Broken Bells wouldn’t be enough to convince Keter to keep its eye on us, that the Dead King would write off the losses and still try to concentrate his forces against the Prince of Hannoven while we bled him, but it seemed like my seasoned pessimism had come all the way around and somehow become a different kind of naïve optimism. It was almost like doing magic, I thought, except for the part where every part of this was terrible.

“I have mastered a new and terrible art,” I mused, going fishing through faded lessons on Old Miezan. “Fortunomancy, I believe it would be called.”

“That would be luck magic,” Hakram commented. “Which would be useful, and I believe is actually practiced in some parts of southern Procer under a different name. You’re looking for infelicitomancy, which would be the branch of sorcery entirely about bad luck.”

“Thank you, Adjutant,” I gravely replied. “I would offer you my blessing for your service in this matter, but I fear a lightning strike would not be far.”

“They never are, when Masego’s around,” he agreed. “Though considering we’re about to be swimming up to our necks in undead, perhaps we could do with a few more.”

I grimaced, because that was too true for words.

“What kind of numbers are we looking at?” I asked.

“Depend on how long we fight,” Hakram said. “The first skirmishers will arrive by Early Bell, we reckon, but the first assault shouldn’t come until midday. Maybe twenty thousand, for that first wave?”

We could handle twenty thousand. Even if you discounted the Order of Broken Bells entirely, it was only a two to one numbers advantage for the dead while my people were properly dug-in and ready. The trouble would be that this wasn’t the whole battle, it was just the first fucking wave. It’d get worse, much worse. And unlike the skeletons my people would tire the longer it lasted.

“Do we have an opening for retreat?” I asked.

That would be the key. If we were at genuine risked of being surrounded and wiped out – or close enough – during a retreat into the Twilight Ways then I’d have to call an early retreat. Which might be the point , I thought. The Dead King’s calling my bluff, and if I retreat now he’ll hack at Klaus’ back while having lost less than a day’s worth of march.

“Between the second and the third wave, there should be a beat of four to six hours before the enemy can gather sufficient strength to be a threat,” Hakram gravelled. “If we use our pharos device it should be enough.”

Given our very limited stock of those I was always reluctant to use them, but this was a dire situation and the Iron Prince would have several of them with his army anyway. I’d swallow the loos, considering the circumstances.

“Second wave?” I asked.

“Thirty to forty thousand,” Adjutant said. “At least. Constructs in significant numbers. And while I cannot be sure, I’d be surprised if most of the Revenants with the columns couldn’t make in there in time as well.”

So, to make it out without being badly mauled then we would need to beat two armies outnumbering us significantly in the same day, and beat them badly enough that the losses inflicted meant the enemy would not have the numbers to press us significantly while we retreated back into the Twilight Ways. We would, no doubt, also be facing the latest batch of horrors from Keter and some of the Dead King’s finest Revenants. I set down my mug of tea, my hand surprisingly steady considering what lay ahead of us.

“Well,” I smiled, hard and toothy. “You know our policy when it comes scraps like this, Adjutant. I see no reason to change it at so late an hour.”

He laughed.

“Let them take a swing?” Hakram Deadhand asked, baring sharp fangs.

“Let them take a swing,” I softly agreed. “There are still graves we have yet to fill.”

Chapter 67: Isolani

“Kill a man and they will call you a murderer. Kill a hundred and it is a massacre, slaughter a thousand and it will be war. But kill a hundred thousand, a million? That carnage is the sole province of gods. Ancient Keter revealed this truth for all to see: apotheosis is simply bloodshed beyond mortal ken.”

– Kayode Owusu, Warlock under Dread Emperors Vindictive I and Nihilis

I slept through the beginning of the Battle of Maillac’s Boot.

Adjutant’s prediction of the first enemy skirmishers arriving by Early Bell proved to be somewhat optimistic, as the first skulkers were caught half past Midnight Bell instead. Ghouls out front instead of skeletons, a sure sign that something with brains was planning out the offensive – they were significantly better at keeping out of sight. Pickler’s wall on the peninsula was done and the palisade raised to the south but the fort guarding the northern shore had not yet been finished and so it was there that the ghouls tried to slip in. They got caught by goblin legionaries, fangs and claws proving no match for knives and crossbows when they came attached to a pair of eyes that could see in the dark.

It was only the first of the enemy’s probes at our defences under cover of night, which my commanders had well known. Watches were doubled and magelights brought out as lone ghouls turned into packs swimming through the muck and skeletons began to march at the bottom of the swamp. An assault on the palisade was handily thrown back, though worryingly enough the ghouls had been more interested in clawing at the wood than climbing up to assault my soldiers. The Boot itself was only tried more cautiously, ghoul packs revealing themselves several times in the distance in an attempt to bait out fire from our engines.

Pickler’s boys had better discipline than that, thankfully, so despite their efforts the enemy were kept in the dark about our range and the nature of our engines. One of Hune’s legates, who went by the name of Paltry, had been in command at the time and he’d requested the Order of Broken Bells to send patrols along the shoreline just in case. They found no enemies, however, and the dead bade their time with only a few more minor attacks under cover of dark. The first genuine assault came halfway past Early Bell, and even if I’d not already been breaking my fast while reading reports the ruckus of it would have woken me.

I hastily scarfed down the rest of my eggs – weren’t as good now that Hakram wasn’t the one cooking them, no one else got the seasoning quite right – and snatched up my staff before limping out in to the cold morning light, running into the secretary from the phalanges that Adjutant had sent to speak to me. An assault on the palisade, the young woman told me, by skeleton mages and ghouls.

“Reinforcements were already being sent in when I left,” she said, tucking back a curl of dark hair just a little too long to be allowed under Army regulations.

The adjunct secretariat weren’t part of the Army of Callow, though, I reminded myself. They were Hakram’s and no one else’s, though he’d often drawn on my armies for recruitment.

“The assault will have been driven back by the time we can arrive, Your Majesty,” she continued, “so the Lord Adjutant suggests that you finish your breakfast instead of-“

“I left a mug of tea in there,” I mused, “have it brought to the palisade, would you?”

I tore open a gate into Twilight and stepped through, the warmer breeze of that journeyer’s realm a pleasant change from the clime of Hainaut. While limping my way there would have taken me too long and there was no denying it, I had a shortcut at hand. Wasn’t hard to make it there, the starlit compass guiding my steps, and I limped out of a portal to the sight of a dozen crossbows and twice as many swords pointed at me. I smiled approvingly at the sight, eyes scanning our surroundings for a threat.

“At ease,” I said.

I’d aimed to come out at ground level, since there might be fighting on the palisade walkway, but there was no sight of the dead there. Wasn’t hard to hazard a guess as to why, given that the Grey Pilgrim was up there and healing a captain whose eyes and cheek looked like it had quite literally been bitten off. I left him to that for the moment, instead looking for an officer among the crowd just now beginning to put away their weapons. There was a sergeant, stout orc lad with dark green skin and the kind of vivid scar across his nose that his people highly prized as display of strength.

“Sergeant, your name?” I asked.

“Alvar, ma’am,” the lieutenant hastily replied, throwing in a formal salute.

His example was followed by the rest of the line, as if they were only now remembering they were in front of a queen.

“Sergeant Alvar, report,” I ordered.

“At least two hundred ghouls and a tenth of mages, ma’am,” the orc said. “Ghouls came out first, to draw fire from our mages and crossbows, then the skeletons popped out to lob fireballs and rot curses at the palisade. The Grey Pilgrim popped up to smash them, though, took barely a moment.”

My eyes narrowed. Had Keter narrowed in on here being the weak point of my defences, then? Ten mages wasn’t a large amount, in the greater scheme of things, but the generals of the Kingdom of the Dead were not usually prone to tossing their like into the grinder without purpose. Mages were a lot harder for the Dead King to get his hands on than footmen, and in some ways they formed the backbone of his armies.

“How’d the palisade hold up?” I asked.

“Our sappers say the wardstones dulled the curses but the fireballs scorched the wood some,” Sergeant Alvar said. “If this place weren’t so wet the wood might have caught fire.”

“Lucky us I picked this miserable hole to fight in, then,” I drily said. “We’ve got swamp water enough to drown the work of a hundred mages.”

“Wouldn’t mind fighting on a sunny Free Cities beach one of these days, ma’am,” a soldier called out. “Just saying.”

“You and me both, soldier,” I snorted. “But if the Enemy was smart enough to head there, wouldn’t it be smart enough to avoid fighting us in the first place?”

That got a few appreciative laughs along with blades on shields. Bravado was always a hit with my rank a file, and it wasn’t like they’d not earned the right to brag. What other army of our age could boast campaigns to match those of my Army of Callow? I clapped Sergeant Alvar’s shoulder and sent the soldiers back to their duty, as from the corner of my eye I saw that Tariq was done healing my captain. Good, hadn’t wanted to get in the way of that. If the man could get treatment from the finest living wielder of Light instead of one of our own priests, far be it from me to spoil that. Fine healers as the priests of the House Insurgent were, they weren’t the Peregrine.

It wasn’t a long walk, even hobbling, and I wasted no time. When the freshly-healed captain began to head my way I shook my head, having already gotten as much of a report as I needed to. Tariq didn’t even look like he was out of breath, ever spry for his lengthening age. I broke the silence first.

“My thanks for healing my people,” I acknowledged.

“Would that I could do more,” the Pilgrim said.

In most people I would have called it a courtesy, a formula, but when it came to the old man I suspected it was entirely sincere.

“The tide’s pulling in,” I said. “Our foe took the bait.”

“So I’ve heard,” Tariq murmured. “Scourges, too?”

“Drake and Mantle,” I said. “But there’ll be more Revenants.”

There always were.

“More of the Scourges as well,” the old man said. “A third to round them out, that is the Enemy’s way. Varlet or the Archmage.”

Right, heroes insisted on calling Tumult the ‘Archmage’, as if that description didn’t also fit quite a few of our own finest practitioners. I’d grant them that the Revenant in question had an uncannily broad arsenal of sorcery to call on, but his particular fondness for large-scale workings that caused chaos in the ranks meant my own people’s name for him seem more apt in my eyes.

“I’d say we’ve seen no sign of Varlet,” I sighed, “but that’s rather the point with that one, isn’t it?”

The Thief of Star had been like Vivienne back in the day, befitting the common root of their Name: unnaturally skilled in stealth and infiltration, but not all that difficult to deal with in an open fight. The Varlet, as we called that grey-cloaked thing, had clearly been more on the assassin end of the sneaky Named scale. It would have been a fucking headache to deal with even if it didn’t drench everything it used in particularly lethal poisons. At least we shouldn’t be dealing with the Hawk anytime soon. After she’d handily lost an archer’s duel against Indrani the Dead King had sent her out east instead, to be Rozala Malanza’s headache instead of mine.

“They will come for you, Queen Catherine,” Tariq quietly said. “You have become one of the keystones of the Grand Alliance, since the Peace of Salia. Your death would damage it deeply.”

“They always come,” I shrugged. “I yet draw breath anyway, and I’ll not tremble at the shadow of dead Named.”

“I meant no offence,” the Pilgrim said, “only that wherever you make your stand, foes will be drawn.”

“I planned with that in mind,” I assured him. “Which brings me to a request.”

“I’m listening, Black Queen, though I make no promises,” the old man said, faintly smiling.

I somehow got the impression he was having a laugh at my expense, though I couldn’t quite pinpoint how.

“I want you to stay here, during the battle,” I said. “I know you like to wander and that the real blow might just fall elsewhere in our defences, but your presence would anchor this flank.”

“In matters of war, I am at your disposal,” Tariq frankly said. “I have never led armies, while your skill in such endeavours is well-known.”

I nodded my thanks, but before I could speak I caught movement from the corner of my eye. Ah , I thought. Timing’s about right I suppose . A dark-haired young woman hastily made her way up the ramp, the skeletal hand she wore as a pin revealing her rank among the phalanges, and with a relieved expression pressed a steaming mug of herbal tea into my hands.

“Just in time,” I smiled as she bowed. “Thank you.”

The Grey Pilgrim cast me a look that did not know whether it wanted to be impressed or disbelieving.

“Always one step ahead, Tariq,” I lied, and sipped at my tea.

—

The dead had begun massing in significant numbers halfway past Morning Bell.

Skirmishes had kept happening along our defence lines – mostly the Boot and the palisade so far – even as I sat in on a meeting of the Second Army’s general staff, letting the well-oiled machinery that General Hune had turned them into go through the necessary motions. The Second was my force that’d stayed closest to the original mould of the Legions of Terror, both because of Hune’s personal leanings and because a lot of its high officers were originally from the Legions of Terror. And not the Fifteenth, which had come up with me, but those legions that’d joined me after the Folly. The rank and file were much like that of other hosts in my service, a backbone of legionaries bolstered by larger numbers of Callowan recruits, but the culture among the officers here was still very much that of the Legions. It was at once familiar and discomforting, like seeing an old friend in a nephew’s face.

Indrani helped me put my armour on, something that still felt half-wrong. I’d likely never return two wearing full plate, much as I occasionally wished I could, but I’d managed to strike a balance between protection on compromise. Over an aketon I kept to a cuirass and upper vambraces, with a long tasset and a pair of good greaves. An open-face barbute with slightly gilding evoking a crown over my brow finished the set, without even a gorget to link the breastplate and the helm. Any more weight than what I wore and my limp would start becoming a hindrance. The Mantle of Woe closed over my shoulders, hood down and with an affectionate kiss on the side of the neck Archer left me to my duties while departing for hers.

A bare hour before Morning Bell, under bleary morning light, the dead began their advance. I’d drifted towards the miraculous wall built by my sappers on the shores of the Boot so that I might have a better look at the enemy’s offensive, and the walkway there did not disappoint. Wherever the water was low and mud shallow, skeletons in arms could be glimpsed marching through the mire. Where the bottom was deeper sometimes all that could be seen was the tip of spears and helms, dragged forward against the muck. The attack came in three prongs, I saw the advance continued. The largest of the forces was coming for the Boot, straight at us, but another was headed south towards the palisade.

The third looked ready to skim the ‘sole’ of the Boot so it could dip down into the shallows between the peninsula and the northern shoreline, which had me grimacing. Our fort there was finished but I’d been hoping the roundabout route to there would convince the enemy to focus their efforts on the better-defended Boot instead. The enemy general was not unskilled, then. Still, I saw no reason to leave my position at the moment. With the Pilgrim bolstering the palisade and the Blessed Artificer at the fort, or flanks should be solidly anchored for now. It was only when the opposition got serious about cracking our defences that the real trouble would start.

“Ma’am, it looks like the enemy’s in range of our mages.”

I glanced at the captain addressing me, a young woman by the name of Jules Farrier – no relation to the man who’d once been the commander of my Gallowborne, I’d asked – and cocked an eyebrow.

“It’s your command, captain,” I said. “I’m only here to keep an eye on things. The order’s yours to give.”

“Yes ma’am,” she stiffly replied.

I left her to it, eyes still on the dead approaching through the swamp. Captain Farrier had been right, now that the skeletons were reaching swamplands where the depth left their upper body visible it was time for the fireballs to begin. All along the baked brick wall that Pickler had raised, incantations rose and fire bloomed. It was a work of art, the fireball formula that the War College taught. Masego liked to rag on in, but he was coming at it from the wrong direction. He saw one spell being used for a variety of purposes improperly when he knew a spare formula more apt to each purpose, but then he was the Warlock’s son. The former Apprentice. Even among highborn mages, nine tenths would not get an education to equal his. The Legion formula was, on the other hand, simple enough that every mage in the service could learn it yet flexible enough that it could be adapted to dozens of different situations. Fighting skeletons, fire itself was only of limited use. Scorching bone and armour accomplished little.

Yet the formula could be tinkered with so that the fireball grew dense, the impact more powerful, and that made a dent into the Bones.

Like a wave of fire the spells went out, smashing into the skeletons and splashing into the scum water with hissing vapour. The enemy’s advance staggered, but we had too few mages and there were too many enemies: they could not be stopped like this, only slowed. It was still enough to set up a good killing field for our siege engines, our copperstone ballistas beginning measured fire into clumps of skeletons. Given how many undead we’d be facing before day’s end, we couldn’t afford to just shoot at every shadow.

It would have been easy to see the casualties mount on the enemy side without them even getting close enough to swing at our walls and take it as the herald of overwhelming victory. I knew better. For one, it was telling that even in such small numbers – there couldn’t be more than three thousand divided between the three offensive – we couldn’t outright dam the tide. More and more skeletons were slipping through our fire with every heartbeat, coming ever closer to the walls. But beyond that I knew well that in war there were precious few absolute advantages, mostly comparative ones. Our advantage here and now, the walls and the terrain and the preparations, they weren’t something to sneer at.

But they were needed to make up for the overwhelming numbers and tirelessness of our enemy in the first place, to make this battle more than a ceremonious suicide, so those initial beats of the battle when our advantages came into play and the enemy’s hadn’t weren’t to be counted on. This was going to get ugly when the bolts ran out, when the magics fizzled and my people were exhausted from hours of hard fighting. Anything before that was just our attempt to inflict enough damage on the enemy we got to survive the hard part. By either luck or fate, the first skeleton to make it to the bottom of our wall started scaling it not even a foot to my left. Liming to the edge of the rampart, I pointed my staff downwards and offered a rueful smile.

“Bad luck,” I told it, and let loose with Night.

—

It was mostly luck that I was in the fort when the attack hit.

The fighting at the walls had remained steady but the peril was not great: between the concentration of mages and the rotations of fresh soldiers, we were keeping the dead at bay handily. I’d gotten a report that it’d been trickier at the palisade, but between a company of heavies being brought out and the Grey Pilgrim intervening they’d kept it under control. The assault from the shallows had been comparatively easier, the numbers of the attackers having been thinned by fire from the Boot before they got there. It was the sole front where I’d never gone, though, so I’d elected to have a look. More for morale purposes than because the fight needed me, but morale would count for quite a bit in the coming hours.

The fort itself was of classical Legion layout, square with a forward palisade and a bastion deeper in. Gates on four sides so that legionaries could quickly deploy and in our case two smaller barricades had been added on the sides so that scorpions could be raised on heights and pointed at the shallows. There was some fighting on the shores when I stepped out of a gate within the fort, but nothing all that threatening – the dead were just keeping up the pressure by tossing corpses at our shield wall defending the shore. The Blessed Artificer had stepped in to bring down a great lighting strike of Light at enemy mages, but not involved herself since. I could only approve, given the finite nature of what she could contribute to a fight, and told her as much.

“It seems callous not to use all that I can,” Adanna of Smyrna admitted. “There have been deaths, and some of these I might have prevented.”

My opinion of her character went up a notch.

“They know the risks of their trade,” I replied, not hiding my pride. “They’re Army of Callow, they understand sometimes you have to bleed early to win the fight.”

The dark-skinned heroine looked unconvinced, but not even her remarkable amount of gall would allow her to argue with a queen about her own soldiers.

“If you sa-“

Her answer was interrupted by crashes and shouts coming from the shoreline, both out heads whipping about. I couldn’t see it all from where I stood, even with the front gates open, but I could see that some sort of large snake construct had just emerged from the shallows and was now unhinging its jaw.

“Later,” I cut in, already limping forward.

Legionaries parted for me as I made my way out of the fort, even when they were hurrying out as reinforcements, and I hastened to take a better look. I cursed in Kharsum. A new kind of construct, by the looks of it: much smaller than the great snakes used in the sieges of Twilight’s Pass, but built along the same lines. More a carrier of troops and battering ram than anything else, but no less dangerous for it. Half a dozen had hit the beaches simultaneously and were now pouring out skeletons into the gaps of my shield wall. These were made for the swamps of Hainaut , I thought. An answer to both the difficulties of the terrain and our growing advantage at range. We hadn’t been the only ones to prepare for this campaign.

“Hazaak,” the Blessed Artificer snarled, raising a short copper spear.

She’d caught up to me without my even noticing. Not to be outdone, I drew deep on Night even as Light bloomed around the short spear. Where the Artificer struck with burning might, a great crackling spear of roiling Light falling on one of the snakes, I instead took a more measured approach: shadows slithered along the ground and suddenly thrust up, threading through the open maws of three of the constructs and forcefully snapping them shut.

“Priests, on the three bound,” I calmly said, pitching my voice so it’d be heard.

The House Insurgent dutifully obeyed, Light begin to tear at the wiggling great snakes in sharp spears even as Adanna reached for another of her instruments. I began to shape a great ball of blackflame so ram down the maw of one of the remaining snakes when I caught sight of flicker of movement to my left. Instinct had me redirecting my fire there and I caught the Revenant in the stomach, scorching its thin frame as it stumbled on the ground. It looked like any other Bone, little more than a corpse in ancient armour, but none of those would have withstood the quantity of blackflame I’d just tossed at it.

“Revenant,” I noted. “Won’t be the only one.”

Already I was weaving a follow-up, threads binding the legs of the down Revenant together as I prepared a larger mass of blackflame above its body – which exploded, a curse tearing through them.

“Mantle,” I snarled, eyes flitting about.

I found her in the water, only the upper half of her armoured form above the mire. The dull, black plate steel plate set with emeralds and silver inscriptions couldn’t be confused for anyone else, not the thick green cloak whose hood obscured the visor of her helm. Another snake went up in a pillar of white flames, the Artificer striking without hesitation, but during my heartbeat of distraction the Revenant on the ground had broken its bonds. With surprising fluidity it struck out at the heroine, shortsword arcing for her neck, but my hand was steady and my aim true – my own blade caught it in time, an inch from biting into Adanna’s unprotected flesh.

Gods, would it kill the woman to wear some fucking armour?

“I will take the fallen priestess,” the Blessed Artificer mildly said. “I take offence the use her powers have found.”

“Be my guest,” I grinned. “I’ll handle our little friend here.”

The Revenant withdrew its blade and took a step back, but it’d forgotten this wasn’t a duel and it was behind my godsdamned lines: two big orc heavies smashed into its back with their greatshields, making it stumble, and I took the opening. I struck high and in a heavy chop, which it caught with its blade and deftly slid so my momentum dragged me into its guard, but before it could rotate its wrist and disarm me my deadwood staff smashed into the side of its head. Though beyond paid it still stumbled, and with a grunt I drew back my blade to strike again – weaving Night along the length. With a clean cut I sent its helmeted head rolling, even as Adanna was wreathed with blinding light.

I shielded my eyes with my hood, offering a grin to the two heavies that’d come to help.

“This one counts as half-yours,” I told them. “Tell your lieutenant you’re up for commendation.”

Both grinned back like big ugly green cats, returning enthusiastic calls of Warlord , but even as I bumped shoulders against them in a friendly manner I was already taking in the few bits of fighting I’d missed. Mantle had ripped up my working on the snakes, though I’d been too distracted to noticed, but the fight with the Artificer wasn’t going well for her at all. She’d already been forced to pull out a globe of smooth, mirror-like darkness I’d only ever seen her use when hard pressed. Meanwhile, between the Artificer and the House Insurgent there were only to great snakes left and the mages were focusing their efforts on plugging the breaches so that the heavies could fill them. With a triumphant cry Adanna crushed a glass baton in her fist and a rain of Light spears fell on the globe of darkness, shattering it with a keening scream. Under it there was no trace of Mantle, who must have legged it when the attack began going south.

I glanced at the Blessed Artificer appreciatively.

“You’re definitely worth keeping around,” I said. “She’s a tricky opponent, for me.”

Adanna of Smyrna straightened proudly.

“It is my duty to-“

In the distance, to the south, a few gouts of red went up. Signal spells, asking for reinforcements. Shit , they must have hit the palisade as well.

“Later,” I amusedly told the Artificer, opening a gate and stepping through it.

—

The first thing I heard stepping out of the Twilight Ways had an involuntary shiver going up my spine.

“ Shine ,” the Grey Pilgrim coldly said.

I shielded my eyes with the flat of by blade, but not quite quickly enough the terrifyingly bright light I glimpsed did not blind me. I cursed, head ringing and eyes burning, and almost stumbled into a soldier. I must have come out near a formation. It was too long for comfort before I could see again, but when I did what my restored vision showed was a mixed bag. On one hand, there was a gaping hole in the palisade about ten feet wide. Broken logs had been brought forward to plug it, but the undead were trying to push through the opening and only narrowly being held back by a hasty shield wall. On the other hand, the smoking skeleton at Tariq’s feet that was still holding a familiar claymore could not be anything but the Drake.

It looked like getting a blast of the Peregrine’s most powerful aspect from up close was too much for even that monster’s regeneration to take, because while some specks of flesh were reappearing on the bones it was nothing more than that.

“Your Majesty,” Tariq mildly greeted me. “If you would handle the breach, I am not yet finished with this one.”

“Hey, I’m not one to argue with a smoking corpse,” I shrugged as I began to gather Night. “Do as you will.”

I was in no way inclined to keep to subtle means when dealing with an outright breach, so this time I simply began to gather a few dozen great balls of blackflame above the undead trying to mash through my shield wall. Impatiently I struck at the ground with my staff, the balls smashing downwards and exploding in great gouts of black fire. Immediately the pressure slackened and my soldiers pushed the enemy back, enough that sappers were able to bring out panels and began repairing the breach. I tossed another great gout of fire at the dead to push them back in the water long enough for the holes to be plugged, then let the captains in charge to handle the rest. I glanced at Tariq, who’d nailed the remains of the Drake to the ground with nails of Light and was now opening a gate into the Twilight Ways beneath him. That might actually do the trick, I mentally conceded. A sudden contortion had the skeleton’s skull snap upwards and something that glinted in the light flew. A tooth?

I immediately wove Night to catch it, even as Tariq kicked the skeleton into Twilight and the bones turned to dust, but someone else beat me to it. One of my soldiers, a young man who grinned at his own swift reflexes. He twitched, a heartbeat later.

“ No ,” I snarled.

The soldier smirked at me and winked, then ran for it. I sent a javelin of Night into the back of his knee, my soldiers crying out in dismay at the sight of one of theirs getting shot in the back. But though the soldiers stumbled the shredded flesh grew back in a heartbeat. The Pilgrim’s beam of Light incinerated armour and muscle alike, but it wasn’t enough. Still burning with pale flames as he deftly avoided the Night harpoon I threw at his back, the reborn Drake threw himself over the edge of the palisade and into the mass of undead. I went up the ramp and took out my anger on the undead in a storm of black flames, but the bastard was in the wind. Again. My fingers clenched around my staff until the knuckles went white.

My soldiers gave me a wide berth, but Tariq was less wary of the dark mood laid bare on my face.

“It’s not the last of him we’ll see today,” the Grey Pilgrim simply said. “And we know the trick, now.”

I made myself breathe out, reaching for calm, and looked up at the sky. The sun had risen higher than I’d expected, we must be close to Noon Bell by now. Gods, barely noon and the fighting was likely to last until dark. Above the Boot, streaks of yellow went up. Constructs sighted . I squared my shoulders.

“Next time,” I agreed, and opened a gate.

As always, there was to be no rest for the wicked.

Chapter 68: Opposition

“No matter how long you glare at the sun, it will not blink first.”

– Taghreb saying

I missed using a shield.

It didn’t really fit with my fighting style anymore – digging in when you had a bad leg was a good way to trip and stumble into a very stupid death – but there’d been something both comforting and satisfying about having a large slab of metal to put between myself and the enemy. Now I had to keep my eye on the enemy at all times, to gauge and parry and manoeuver without rest. Just taking the hit and then smashing my foes had been both simpler and, honesty compelled me to admit, viscerally satisfying in a way that all this finesse and calculation wasn’t. I knew a thing or two about pulling strings, these days, but I suspected that deep down it was the lessons of the Pit that’d always stay engraved in bones: blood and sinew, the vicious satisfaction of just decking someone in the face .

Still, it felt good to engage sword in hand. I slapped aside the skeleton’s blow – strong but slow, and so very predictable – and smashed its bare skull with the pommel of my sword, a shiver of Night accompanying the crack of bone breaking. The necromancy keeping it animate broke and the pile of bones collapsed, leaving me free to cast a glance around. The enemy had successfully scaled the wall in the centre stretch after making a ramp out of dead, wet ghouls that fireballs couldn’t touch but the other two attempts at the extremities of the Boot’s ‘sole’ had failed when the Light of House Insurgent incinerated the attempts in a way that magefire could not.

Now even here, where we’d been taken by surprise, the last of the dead were being put down as I watched. It’d not been a major setback, all in all, with perhaps only two hundred skeletons and ghouls making it up here before they were surrounded and contained, but it’d had the potential to turn dangerous. If the enemy had kept pouring troops there, it could have turned into a beachhead. Yet I found, even as my soldiers began to cheer our temporary victory, that my heart did not lift. My eyes remained on the silhouettes in the distance, the utterly still ranks of the dead standing just outside of the range of our ballistas.

Even though this had been a weak foothold, and made in a place where my army would have rather sharp teeth in its counterattack – our defences were geared around holding the peninsula first and foremost, since we’d known it would likely face the worst of the assaults – it had been a foothold. The first the enemy had managed to keep since they’d begun their attacks this morning. Yet the enemy general had not reinforced his attacking force after sending that first wave of three thousand or so, leaving the three prongs to fail and be wiped out. Most of the enemy army had never engaged, and was watching us in silence even now. Waiting, patient as only the soldiers of the grave could be.

“What are you up to now?” I murmured, leaning against my staff.

The general I was facing this time was canny in the way that the intelligence behind the Second Battle of Lauzon’s Hollow hadn’t been. That thing with the ghoul ramps? It’d been an adaptation to the fact that, as long as Archer had unravellers to use as arrows, she was a hard counter to Keter’s usual tactic of using large constructs as siege ramps and troop transports. The artefacts were too precious to be used on ghouls, especially when they were being used by the hundreds here. In fact the only constructs we’d seen used so far had been the great snakes that’d beached near the fort, and those had stayed under the water until the very last moment.

We are being tested , I thought, eyes watching the rows of the dead. Three thousand of the most expendable among the undead gathering to face us as Maillac’s Boot had just been tossed at my defences like scraps off a plate, just to test the strengths and weakness of our arrangements. And you sent a handful of a Revenants out , I then thought, to probe what kind of Named there are on our side too. It was a good thing, I grimly thought, that I’d always intended to keep Masego and Akua back as long as possible. Even just the awareness of their presence might have been enough to forewarn my enemy some.

The cheers washed over me and I painted a smile on my face, raising my sword in victory to roars of approval, but the joy did not reach my eyes. I wasn’t so sure we’d truly gotten the better out of this round, not in the way that mattered, and that unsettled me. Still, I could hardly bemoan about what looked like a win to most of my soldiers. I went around and gave praise and encouragement where they should go, limping along the rampart to harden the spine of my soldiers before the next assault. Time passed and the sun kept rising in the sky, the hour slowly edging away from Morning Bell and towards Noon Bell, and though the quiet on the fronts was pleasing to my soldier it had dread slowly settling in my stomach.

We’d been seen through.

Under the excuse of having a drink of water – the sun was hammering down hard, and we were all baking in our helmets – I left the wall and settled further in, having discreetly sent for General Hune. I stood in the shadow cast by the ogre, pulling at a canteen, and wiped my mouth as I nodded back to her greetings.

“They’re not attacking,” I bluntly said.

I wasn’t saying anything she or anyone with eyes didn’t already know, but the two of us knew the danger represented by that sentence. We’d been counting on our enemy hitting us as soon as it could assemble a wave, trying to grind us down through constant battle, but instead the opposition had called a halt after a single major assault.

“They must be waiting for the second wave to arrive,” General Hune said. “That complicates matters, Your Majesty.”

It fucking well did. For one, we wouldn’t be dealing with twenty thousand undead and then later that day thirty – or perhaps even forty – thousand more. The opposition was gathering for a single sweep, an overwhelming wave. That was... problematic. It wasn’t like we’d not considered the possibility that the enemy would try to besiege us instead of battle on our terms, but we’d never meant to actually stay here long enough for it to be an issue. The plan had been to break the first two waves and then evacuate before the third could arrive, using the pharos device to open a large enough amount of gates for it to be feasible, but this changed things. The moment we actually used the device, now, then the enemy would begin its attack. Whoever the leading commander on the other side was, they’d clearly grasped the core weakness of my position: an evacuation through the Twilight Ways when under assault meant that at least my rearguard was going to get slaughtered.

Facing fifty thousand dead, though, and all the horrors Keter had to unleash? Shit, we’d maybe lose a third of the ten thousand soldiers of the Second Army on our way out.There’d be a point in the battle where three thousand or so soldiers would be trying to squeeze through the gates while surrounded on all sides and without the support of the rest of the army. Juniper had run war games, and when that tipping point was reached what ensued was... grim, to say the least. Fuck . If the dead had been intending on standing there and doing nothing as we left I would have waved them on my way out and called it a day, but there was no way they’d be willing to do me that favour.

“Your opinion?” I asked.

“We must prepare for a fighting retreat into the ways and use the pharos device the moment our forces are in place,” General Hune replied without hesitation. “Within the hour at most. The second wave will begin arriving soon, and it will only get worse from there.”

I hummed noncommittally. I got from her words that the ogre general was seeing this as a choice needing to be made between two fighting retreats: one begun now, while the enemy was not yet fully gathered, or one begun later when it had. There would be no extracting ourselves from this without losing a few fingers. Much as I did not like to consider it, I honestly wasn’t sure she was wrong. We’d made plans for the enemy showing restraint, so it wasn’t like we were going into this blind – officers had been briefed, we’d even planned out which parts of the defences should be abandoned first – but we’d never really considered that the enemy would just toss three thousand expendables at us and then just... stand there.

Even our worst case had the enemy pulling out after effective losses of half its number, choosing to bolster the second wave rather than waste the rest of its numbers on a fruitless assault.

“We could attempt to break out towards the east,” I finally said.

“I will obey that order if it is given,” General Hune blandly replied.

I cocked an eyebrow.

“But,” I said, invitation implicit.

“It is my opinion that we would find ourselves in the same situation as now in a day, only without the fortifications and retreat plan,” Hune said. “Even going on the offensive and attempting to smash the first wave before the second arrives would be a superior option, to my eye. We would incur losses, but should we then retreat to our fortifications our original plan could then be resumed, if at a disadvantage.”

I grimaced. Taking a swing at the dead in the swamp wasn’t really something I wanted to do unless there was no other option: the undead would be better at fighting in the muck, and it wasn’t like Keter had even been shy about poisoning water. No, an attack of my infantry into that mire was a dead end. And yet I had some difficulty resigning myself to making a decision that would be, in essence, writing off a third of the Second Army. The thought had me clenching my fingers, even though the cold thing that lay at the heart of me knew that I’d give the order if I had to, but I would not bend my neck to this ending before first attempting otherwise.

“We’ll attempt to force them into an attack first,” I said. “My people have been working on a project that might leave them no other option – and even if they manage to withstand it, we’ll first be able to thin the herd before retreating.”

General Hune’s eyes narrowed.

“Then Your Majesty agrees that a retreat is in order,” she said.

“I do,” I admitted. “And you’ll need to inform your officer cadres we might be headed there. But first I want to see if the dead can be strong-armed into wasting themselves on our walls.”

“And might you do that?” the ogre skeptically asked.

“By making it clear it’s the least wasteful option left to them,” I replied with a hard smile.

It was time to for Masego to come out.

—

“I’ve not managed to increase the effective range,” Hierophant admitted, “not laterally, at least.”

“Which still leaves vertically,” I grunted. “If the Summoner makes a flying beast and we strap your platform to the back, can you cast?”

He mulled over that for a moment.

“Yes,” Masego finally said. “I cannot promise the same degree of precision that the solid ground would allow for, however.”

“If there’s one good thing about our situation, Zeze,” I said, “it’s that even if you miss, you’ll hit.”

“That sounds like a blatant logical contradiction,” he noted, “but I will take your word for it.”

“Kind of you,” I drily replied. “I’ll be handling the Summoner, so ready your affairs and wait for us on the Boot.”

The Summoner’s reaction to the order was mixed: on one hand, he had cowardly tendencies and preferred not to put himself in great danger. It’d already spread through the ranks that some of the Scourges were here. On the other hand, I’d made it clear that this was a crucial task I’d attend to as well and that’d flattered his self-importance. Still, there was no arguing with a direct order from me when it came to battlefield affairs. The wyvern-construct still had that unearthly glow, but it looked much more sharply defined now. I could make out the shift of muscles when it moved, and there was an animal cunning in its eyes. It was also smart enough to be terrified of Hierophant, which was plain good sense.

The Summoner had warned me that it might get unruly when Masego tied a flat circular stone atop its back, but instead the construct did not dare move a muscle. It behaved around Hierophant the same way a deer would around a lion – frozen and hoping the predator wasn’t hungry today. We took flight without much fanfare, to sparse cheers from my soldiers. I wove an anchor for my feet on the wyvern’s back and added a transparent bubble to shield me from the winds. The Summoner led us towards the enemy ranks, as I’d asked him to, but stayed high in the sky. We’d yet to see buzzards in the area so our flight was not contested, though I doubted that would last forever.

We circled slowly atop the front ranks of the enemy, Masego wresting magic from a few spare artifacts so he might steady himself atop the circular stone. A bubble rather similar to mine formed around him, and I shouted for the Summoner to halt the construct’s flight and make it stay in place. Long, deft fingers began to trace runes in the air as I risked a glance downwards. The dead were splayed out for what must have been the better part of a mile but none were paying attention to us at the moment. Safety through heights? It was true that without buzzards around Keter would find it hard to contest our presence up here. We were high up enough that neither arrows nor javelins were a worry, and magic would be seen long before it became a threat.

“Abyss and firmament,” the Hierophant said, and though his voice was quiet it rippled . “I take the shape of the star and the depth of the pit, borrowing laws high and low.”

Below us, moving as a single entity, seventeen thousand undead heads turned to gaze up at us.

“That can’t be good,” I muttered.

“I have woven curses into hymn, stuffed a heart with straw,” the Hierophant called out, voiced cadenced. “That which is hollow I have raised onto the dais, revered as glorious under three skies and revered by nine corners.”

From below a tide of darkness rose, but I realized after a heartbeat that it was not a ritual. It was a few thousand curses, thrown at us together from as many hands. I clenched my staff closely, hoping to the Hells that Masego was done with that incantation soon.

“Behold,” the Hierophant said.

I winced, covering my ears at the horrid grind that lay behind the word. The Sisters murmured uneasily in the back of my mind.

“Behold,” the Hierophant said, “all ye with eyes, for I have made a god of clay and it is an idol of wrath .”

The sky screamed. There was no other word for it. The air wavered and shrieked and twisted, an alien gleam filling my vision as I pulled down my hood to shield my eyes. As if a god had breathed out in front of us, the wyvern banked wildly and had to struggle not to fall – the Summoner screamed, voice shrilly – but after less than a heartbeat the pressure was all gone. I first glimpsed Masego, panting as he stood surrounded by fading runes, and only after making sure he was fine did I glance down. Gods , I thought. There was a smoking crater in the swamp, maybe a hundred feet wide, and though water was streaking back in it looked like the... smite had baked the very mud. How many undead had been vaporized with that, I wondered. Two, three hundred? Likely more, and a great wave was going through the swamp that toppled more than a few soldiers. Of the curses that had been rising to hit us, there was no trace. Much like, I thought, a child throwing a pebble into the path of falling mountain would not be able to pick it out afterwards.

“Can you do that again?” I asked, tone calm.

“I believe so,” Masego noted. “Though not many times.”

“Then do it,” I ordered with a hard smile.

Power began to gather again, and below us I found exactly what I’d wanted: advancing as one, the dead were headed towards the Second Army. Decisive , I silently praised the enemy general. The moment they’d realized that it was possible we’d just stay up here and hammer them into nothing, they’d abandoned the notion of sieging my army and begun to close the distance. If the dead were too close to my own troops, after all, it’d be risky to keep using this. Still, they weren’t out of the woods yet. I wove Night over my ears and dug my feet in, as Masego’s voice swelled in incantation again, wondering how many shots we’d get in before he was too exhausted to continue.

The answer, as it turned out, was six.

It didn’t matter, as by then the enemy was committed to an assault on all our defences and all that pulling out would accomplish was allow us to smash the undead army as it retreated. We flew back to the Boot, and though I was wary the whole way back there was no ambush. Bo buzzards came out of nowhere, no Revenants were tossed up in the sky. It made sense, I admitted to myself, since we weren’t fighting a field army here so much as a bunch of warbands and marching columns tossed in our direction when we popped out. I supposed it was a testament to how fucking unpleasant of an adversary the Dead King was that even when luck allowed us to get one over him I still ended up unsure it wasn’t a ploy on his part.

“Your service in this campaign has been exemplary,” I told the Summoner after her dismissed his wyvern.

Much as I disliked the man personally, he’d ended up consistently useful. Being unpleasant didn’t mean he shouldn’t get praised, just that it’d irk me to dole it out.

“I am pleased to have my worth recognized by my queen,” the Summoner replied, smirking. “I hope to continue to be of service after these trifles, of course.”

My eyes narrowed. The little shit had been born and raised and Procer, as far as I knew, but he had been insisting he was Callowan for some time. The offer of ‘continued service’ was pretty straightforward, meaning he wanted to settle in Callow after the war and probably expected a lordship to be tacked on to sweeten the deal. Considering he wasn’t all that difficult to deal with and his ambitions seemed relatively limited, I wasn’t necessarily opposed to that. So long as it was a court title with no lands attached. Mind you, that wasn’t my decision alone to make. I wasn’t foisting him off on Vivienne without giving her a say in the matter.

“I look forward to it,” I mildly said, “and will pass along your sentiments to Lady Dartwick.”

“It would be an honour,” the Summoner said, “to make her acquaintance.”

Yeah, that one definitely wanted to settle in Callow after the war. I wasn’t sure I could blame him, considering short of Praes it’d probably end up one of the nations that least minded villains. So long as he stayed loyal to crown and country, it was not an inaccurate assessment for him to figure he’d not only be tolerate but actively protected. If he was loyal then he would be considered as an asset, and Vivienne was of a practical bent when it came to protecting Callowan interests. Some of the decisions I had made she would not ever repeat, but that did not meant she was naïve – just that she was not as good as ignoring the whispers of her conscience.

I escorted Masego to a healer’s tent so he might rest, ignoring his protests, and only then went to join the battle. His exhaustion was not a threat to his health, but the healers were unlikely to let him out of a bed in his state and Zeze’s fathers had drilled into him the paramount importance of not ignoring what your healer told you. It’d been with the addendum that priests were fumbling ignorant cheats and this rule mostly applied to mage healers, but I liked to think the years had mostly weaned Masego out of that instilled disdain.

There was no lack of enemies for me to fight anywhere along the defensive lines, but it was on the Boot that I stayed. Even as swarms of skeletons and ghouls assaulted the walls and my soldiers stubbornly held on the walls, retreating only when officers pulled on their whistles and fresh troops were rotated in, I smothered a smile. This was hard fighting, but it was also a victory of sorts: the enemy and I had stared each other down across this swamp, and with Masego’s help it had been the enemy that blinked first. Now it was bleeding away its strength failing to take our walls, and though it was not without casualties on our side the advantage was decisively ours.

For every soldier we lost they lost four, and our wounded weren’t left to die – they were pulled back, brought to the healer tents. I moved along the wall, sticking to wherever the fight was hardest, and through thrice the enemy earned a foothold atop the wall thrice that foothold was clawed back. As the time passed, though, the lack of Revenants entering the fray began to weigh on me. The opposing general was keeping its trump cards away from us, unwilling to risk them before what was likely to be the decisive stretch: the assault of the second wave. Still, this round went well for us. When it became undeniable than any more lingering would lead to a complete wipeout the enemy broke away, limping back into the swamps under the fire of our mages and the House Insurgent.

I headed towards my general’s tent when the last of the dead walked out of range, intent on hearing casualty reports. Though the official reports were still incomplete, Hune already had estimates when I found her: at least five hundred dead and seven hundred wounded. Even for a well-prepared defensive action, I found the numbers astonishing and told her as much. Her general staff preened, but she was unmoved.

“It is only initial reports, Your Majesty,” General Hune said. “We will see if the real figures remain so flattering.”

“I expect they will,” I said. “The Second Army had yet to fail a single expectation I set out for it.”

Not that I’d set out many, but a little praise could go a long way. Officers gossiped with officers, and that gossip had a way of trickling down to the ranks. After that, though, I headed to my own tent. I’d been fighting sporadically since early morning and drawing on Night regularly, so I was damn exhausted. Since Archer was keeping an eye out for necromantic constructs, still on her perch, it was one of the phalanges that helped me out of my armour. It was now almost an hour past Noon Bell, I learned, and I recalled that we believed the second wave would begin arriving slightly before Afternoon Bell. That still left me at least an hour and change to nap, which I hoped would refresh me when the next round of fighting came.

Gods knew that my leg ached like a bloody wound, at the moment, and staying on my feet would only make it worse. I crawled into bed with strict instructions to wake me if there was another assault, but otherwise leave me to my slumber for at least an hour. Clutching a blanket, I spent the first few moments wondering what my enemy’s plan were and if I would find sleep at all, but before I knew it exhaustion had triumphed over worry: I fell into a deep, dark slumber.

—

I woke up tasting my sweat against the roof of my mouth, likely stinking all the way up to the Heavens. Most of my affairs were already packed, in deference to the rapidly approaching need to evacuate this place, but there was still a bowl of water for me to rinse myself up a little. It was hardly a wash, but what would be the point? I was headed back into the thick of it anyway, and the afternoon soon would be no more kind than the morning one had been. I’d woken before any of the phalanges could wake me, and found a pair of them standing guard outside my tent.

“I’ll need one of you to help me back into my armour,” I said. “And reports, meanwhile.”

As it turned out, during my hour of sleep I’d missed little. The enemy had pulled back even further than before, and while General Hune believed that the vanguard of the second wave might have begun to arrive early there’d been no way to be sure. Sending scouts into that swamp, even our nimblest goblins, would just be throwing away lives. I decided to speak with Hune before returning to the fronts, to get a read on when she believed we should pull the trigger on the pharos device, and inquired as to her whereabouts as I fastened the Mantle of Woe over my armour.

“She is in her tent, Your Majesty,” the young phalange told me. “Speaking with her staff tribune, I believe.”

Good, at least I knew the way. Though my limp was not quick it was steady, and with my sword back on my belt I made my way to the tent. I was a mere thirty feet away from it when a splash of red in the sky to the south caught my attention. A signal spell, I thought. An attack on the palisade? An assault would have been seen coming, though, and I would have heard of it. Unless it was a strike by Revenants, I thought, but it seemed a bold and unnecessary gambled on the enemy general’s part. Perhaps a force had been snuck out under an obfuscation spell. Regardless, with the Grey Pilgrim there and reinforcements no doubt already on their way I had little to worry about.

Two guards were standing outside of Hune’s tent, but their stances were natural. It wasn’t that that gave it away. It was the scent . I’d known enough battlefields that I would recognize the scent of fresh blood anywhere. Stomach dropping I hurried forward, tapping one of the guards gently with my staff only to see the armoured orc topple – already dead, just propped up to look as if still alive. The scent of blood was even thicker inside the tent, I smelled as I forced open the flap, but it was my ears that I was relying on and it saved my life. I heard the spin of the throwing knife that should have buried itself in my left eye and hastily ducked down, just in time to see a grey-cloaked figure turn away from me.

The Varlet. I’d recognize the cloak anywhere.

And just as I drew on Night, spinning up a work, I saw the Varlet dance around a blow of the tall, roaring Hune – made silent by some aspect, for all her shouting – and flicker forward to carve open my general’s throat.

Chapter 69: Book Draw

“Courage is not a virtue, is it a bridle forced onto fear.”

– Stygian saying

It was an almost comical sight until the blood sprayed. Hune was at least twelve feet tall, and even unarmoured she was massive – the Varlet would not have been able to reach her throat without leaping if the ogre hadn’t leaned down to strike it. But she had, and the serrated dagger opened her throat before I could do more than draw on Night.

“ No ,” I hissed.

I struck out furiously, a jet black spit of darkness tossed out in a heartbeat, but the Varlet’s grey cloak swirled as it slipped behind a stumbling Hune smoothly and used her mass for cover. I had to disperse my own attack, already moving deeper in, but my general screamed hoarsely as the blade bit into her again from behind. Fuck, one poison I might have been able to slow but two ? Past subtlety, I wove hooks into the tent’s ceiling and ripped the whole thing down on where I believed the Varlet to be. Success, at least for a heartbeat – a shape swallowed up by the canvas and wooden frame struggled to get out, even as Hune fell to her knees. The ogre rasped out a breath, her limbs trembling.

The slit throat would kill her even if the poison didn’t, so I began weaving Night into the surrounding flesh to halt the bleeding. Just a time-buying measure, but it was a start. General Hune turned burning eyes towards the shape cutting its way out of the canvas, and in a croaking voice forced out a few words in a tongue I did not know. She choked on blood after that, but whatever it was she’d said it... reverberated. I felt a shiver of power – not Light, not Night, but something... older. Deeper. Like cool and dark water from a lake so deep its bottom had never known the light of day. Even as the Varlet’s blade finally cut its way through the canvas the Revenant was brutally smashed into the ground by some invisible force.

Bones cracked and the dagger was shattered, but in the moment that followed Hune’s face paled.

“Stop that,” I snarled. “It’ll kill you before I can-“

Not one to waste time, I laid a hand on her exposed wrist as even when she was on her knees her neck was too high for me to reach. I pushed Night into her veins, looking for the poisons, and within a breath I’d found it. Clenching my teeth, I steadied my stance and grasped the substance tight – I’d have to rip it out, if she was to live. Instead, the moment Night touched the poison the substance erupted. It turned into some sort of virulent acid, and I withdrew my power with a sympathetic scream of pain as I felt the poison hollow her out from the inside. I opened my eyes in time to see the tall ogre spasm violently, once, and her eyes roll up to show the whites. Like a great tree, she toppled forward.

General Hune was dead before she hit the ground.

The Varlet, though smashed, was snapping tits limbs back into place and crawling out of the pile of canvas. Snarling, I formed a ball of blackflame large as a horse and smashed it down onto the Revenant. It would keep, at least for a bit. Instead it was my general I limped towards, feeling sick in my stomach. I’d killed her, trying to meddle with that poison. If I’d held my hand, a healer in sorcery or Light might have attended to her instead and... Damn me , I silently swore. Damn this . The closest I’d ever come to what I was considering was Warlock seeing to Nauk, and that’d gone wrong in distressing ways. But it was my hand that’d killed Hune Egelsdottir, in the end, and that meant I owed. I drew deep of Night, deeper than was wise with a battle still to be fought, and knelt to lay my hand against the side of the fallen ogre’s neck. The last wisps of life were already fading, but the soul would not be far.

“Rise again,” I murmured, the power singing in my blood.

It coursed through the large body, muscles twitching, and rose to snatch the soul. I held it, for a moment, and that was enough to draw attention . Something unspeakably larger than I found my threads settling around the soul of Hune, and its disapproval was as a physical law. I remembered, dimly, once seeing the ogre kneeling before a bowl on a Callowan field. She’d spoken prayers, and the bowl had emptied. I withdrew the Night, the backlash still shaking my bones, and bowed my head in acknowledgement. My interference here was neither needed nor welcome, for wherever it might be that Hune Egelsdottir was headed she was in favour.

Below, for all its horrors, always paid back its dues in full.

I set aside the torrent of emotions that wold only distract me, eyes returning to the Varlet at the exact moment that the grey-cloaked thing emerged from my black flames. It was an artefact, that cloak, which seemed to have a bit of resistance to everything but brute force. The hood was up but in the shadow of it I still glimpsed calm red eyes and an ornate half-mask of jet and silver. There was an air of elegance to it, and to the Varlet’s demeanour as well: it moved like a courtier, if a very deadly one. Unfortunately for the Revenant, I was also entirely out of patience with its existence. It produce a long curved knife, though its stance implied it was about to run for it. Not that it mattered.

“There’ll be none of that,” I coldly said.

In my hand a golden chalice filled with red sand appeared as I drew out an artefact from the Night. I tipped over the sand and the red was caught in the breeze, to seemingly no effect. The Varlet stepped back, just as the first red gain touched the blackflame.

“ Surge .”

The black fire roared out, exploding in a column that rose high in the sky and swallowing up the Varlet whole. It’d been a warrior’s aspect, meant to strength a body or a blade temporarily, but the property of strengthening had been rather broad in nature. It’d been the better of the artefacts I got out of the Revenants slain at Second Lauzon, though it was still relatively weak. Still, feeding a stolen aspect into one of the most dangerous uses of Night saw me get my due: the aspect that’d maintained a bubble of silence containing us ended, and I suddenly heard the bustled of hundreds of soldiers converging towards us. I paid them little attention, slowly limping forward.

The Varlet struggled against the flames, trying to slip out, but I made them follow. Leaving my sword sheathed, I idly spun my staff and used the motion to guide the black flame into a tightly-packed sphere that caught the Revenant and lifted it from the ground. I grit my teeth, feeding more power into a working I was finding increasingly difficult to control – the aspect had made the fire wilder somehow, more willful as much as more powerful. A heartbeat later the sphere was... snuffed out, suddenly, as the power of an aspect flared and gutted out. The cloak fluttered down, but when I threw a javelin of Night at it I saw it was empty.

The Varlet landed in front of me, and I finally got a good look at it. Though the corpse was severely burned, there were still a few dark tresses of hair and the remains of an elegant doublet in the scorched ruin I had made of this one. It struck out with yet another knife – straight and thin, a stiletto this time – but I caught its wrist with my free hand. It was stronger, but what did that matter? Before it could power through and sink the blade into a junction of my armour near the belly, I left my staff to stand and plunged my free hand into his chest. The Revenant twitched, freezing, as I went looking for an aspect to rip out. Three left, I felt.

One that was like an ever-shifting fang, another like utter stillness and the last... a hundred eyes, never blinking? I snatched the fang, hand withdrawing to find my fingers clutching a long wyvern’s fang so thoroughly covered with overlapping runes that there was no trace left of the original untouched paleness. Harm , I grasped in the same moment I stole it. So long as something drew breath, this aspect would birth something capable of killing it. Endless possibilities flickered through my mind but the Varlet was already drawing back so I simply picked one close to the surface. The fang went back into the Revenant’s body with a wet squelch.

It screamed, its ability to impose stillness gone as the poison coating the fang destroyed yet another aspect.

The Revenant flailed at me, which forced me to draw back, and tossed a knife so I ducked in a way that painfully pulled at my bad leg. By the time my gaze went back up, the Varlet was nowhere in sight. Fuck. If I’d been able to choose the aspect I harmed it would have been the eyes, they were the obvious pick of the stealth one, but it’d not been that discriminating a weapon. I smacked the butt of my staff against the ground, Night shivering out as I looked for a trace of the Scourge, but I found nothing. I almost snarled, my anger flaring hot. Another loss, another one I’d known for years gone and what did I have to show for it? I forced myself to breathe out, suddenly aware of the hundreds of soldiers looking at me.

The ranks parted for an officer, a tall dark-skinned woman in her forties with a fleshy face and eyes of a tinge that bordered on amber. She wore her armour like the veteran that she was, and I gave her a jerky nod as she approached.

“Legate Zola,” I said, keeping my voice calm.

“Your Majesty,” Legate Zola Osei replied, her lightly accented voice pleasant to the ear. “You have avenged our loss.”

My eyes went to the unmoving form of Hune, toppled down unceremoniously. We’d never been friends, she and I, and I’d not been blind to the fact that she’d only stayed with me because the ogres wanted someone well-placed in the camp of every possible winner of the conflicts in the east. But she had been with me for a long time, since the start almost, and that... mattered. How many of those were left, these days? With every battle, there were few less.

“No,” I grimly replied, “I haven’t. But by the day’s end, perhaps we will have given her a fitting pyre.”

The legate saluted, fist over heart, and to my surprise more than a few of the soldiers around us did the same. My voice must have carried further than I’d expected.

“You have seniority among the Second Army’s legates, if I recall correctly,” I said.

“I do,” Legate Zola quietly replied.

I closed my eyes, breathed out and centred myself. Grief, however complex its nature, could wait until tomorrow.

“Then you have command, General Zola,” I said, opening my eyes. “Confirm your replacement legate quickly, and have the announcement sent to all the appropriate officers.”

There was no argument. I looked around, and for one dreadful heartbeat I recognized no faces. Some were young, some were old, and they came from places that spanned half of Calernia’s length, but there was not one among them that I knew. I lead an army of strangers , I thought. And no amount of salutes or cheering could obscure that bitter truth. I mastered the spasm of unease, forcing myself to move so it would not show as much on my face. My eyes drifted down and I caught sight of the Varlet’s grey cloak, laying abandoned on the ground.

“Someone take that and throw it into a warded chest,” I ordered.

It was sooty and rumpled up, but no broken. If Hierophant found no trap woven into its fabric, I might gift it to Indrani so that at least one smile came out of this fucking horror of a day. I limped away, feeling like screaming. Breathe in, breathe out.

There was still a battle to win.

—

When they came for us again, it was without holding back. There were no tactics to speak of, no elegant manoeuvres and clever traps. On the other side of the murk stood over forty thousand of the walking dead, while the bloodied remains of my ten thousand stood behind walls and palisades like rocks awaiting the tide. And to the sound of rippling drums, a deep rumble that had my soldiers shivering even when they stood behind wards protecting them from the fear-inducing sorcery, the enemy began its advance.

I awaited them on the wall, cold-eyed and patient.

Through scum water and mud, endless ranks of skeletons marched in silent ranks as magic rippled in the distance, Keteran rituals birthing columns of billowing black smoke that rose into the sky like pillars trying to support the very heavens. The deafening screeches and buzzing of swarms filled the stagnant air, clouds of insects so thick they seemed solid shifting around cacophonous flocks of dead birds. Vermin scuttled through the swamps, rats and other crawling things, a tide that swum and skittered around the footsteps of steel-clad dead. Hulking shapes stirred out of the water, snakes long as streets and crocodiles large as houses, each bearing in their belly more of the hungry dead. Ghouls prowled the host in howling packs, passing below great skeletons bearing large ladders of black iron, and among it all a single great banner flew from an iron mast taller than the tallest of trees: ten silver stars set on a deep purple, perfectly circling a pale crown. It looked like the Dead King had deemed this battle worth the flying of his banner.

It was, I would not deny, a fearsome sight. An army like this would have been a terrible foe even with twice our numbers, well-rested and behind walls of stone. Instead the legionaries of the Second Army stood on baked mud and wood, clutched their weapons as they looked at the ripples in the water that the dead’s approach was enough to cause. The cacophony of screeches and buzzing filled the air even as the smoke began to obscure the sky, the great pillars forming a ceiling above us. The noonday sun fell into shade, and as the hideous drums of Keter sounded the shivers settled into the bones of my men. This was not a battle that a reasonable woman would ask them to win. They were tired and few and a very long way from home.

Hune Egelsdottir was dead and the army she’d led for years was still reeling from the loss.

As always, Keter’s blade had struck true. I looked at them, and now behind grim faces I glimpsed the first seeds of defeat. Not yet sprouted, but there nonetheless. Their general was dead, and though the way of the Legions and the Army after them was to that every officer could be smoothly replaced there was still something missing at the heart of the Second Army. Hune had led these soldiers from the moment there’d been a banner for them to fight under, and that was not a shallow bond. If I wanted them to win today, the fire gutting out in their bellies had to be lit anew. I sunk deep in the Night and called it close to me, let it swim through my veins and thread into my voice so that whatever I spoke would carry to every ear.

Limping, tired, I climbed up to the edge of the rampart and turned to face my men.

“I am told,” I said, and before the third word was finished not soul in the army spoke, “that there has only ever been one legion in the long history of Praes that ever dared to take the cognomen now borne by the First Legion: Invicta .”

I smiled meeting the eyes of the soldiers around me.

“Undefeated, it means,” I told them. “It was a heady boast to make even when it was conferred in the shadow of the surrender at Laure – a feat the Tower only ever achieved twice, over many years of striving.”

And not striving gently.

“Yet that’s always the way that it’s been: the deed is done, the laurel bestowed,” I said. “We do not give out a steel avenue before the victory has been won. Even in our bragging, we remain humble.”

I laughed in contempt, and at the sound I saw a subtle current go through my men.

“Today is not such a day.”

Then went still, and the weight of so many eyes turned on me was almost crushing.

“I already know who you are,” I said. “I know it because I knew you , back when you were a mere two thousand – half of you snatched from gallows, the rest having never reddened your blade.”

The Fifteenth had tasted of war before it was even fully grown, hadn’t it? Our roster had still been half empty when we first knew battle.

“All over the world,” I said, “wise lords and clever princesses dismissed the thought of you. A bastard legion, they said. A stillborn mistake. And then you won at Three Hills.”

I let silence set in for a moment.

“Luck, they argued,” I idly said, then paused. “So you won at Marchford.”

A battle that’d seemed apocalyptic, long before I’d known the true meaning of the word.

“Again and again they sneered,” I said, “and always through the blood and mud you rose. Dormer. Liesse – twice! – and even the green fields of Summer. You broke the back of a dozen princes at the Camps, then humbled the other half at the Graveyard.”

And the First Army had, in time, laid down its arms and left the fronts. Not so with the Second: under Hune they had neither withdrawn nor flinched no matter what came calling.

“I have never set an expectation that the Second Army did not surpass,” I told them, meaning every word, “not across a dozen ruinous fields of war. In all things, in all strife, your excellence has prevailed.”

My gaze swept the soldiers assembled before me, that tapestry that made up the east of the Whitecaps – orc, goblin, Praesi and Callowan – and I honestly could not bear to lie to them. To embellish with some patriotic turn of phrase, to speak of the good of mankind. Not when they had already given so much, and asked so little in return.

“And the truth is,” I quietly said, “I have asked of you more than a queen has the right to ask.”

I gestured towards the swamplands behind us, towards the encroaching nightmare.

“This day, this place, are beyond the duty of your oaths,” I admitted. “You stand halfway across the world, surrounded by death and smoke on all sides, after having already won too many wars under my banner. You have already paid for peace in blood, and yet here you are again: down in the mud, standing alone as horror comes.”

My fingers clenched around my staff.

“So I the cognomen I grant you now is not for victory this day,” I said, “for have you not already won me victories enough? I name you Excellens , in the old Miezan, to acknowledge what you already are: surpassing excellence, a neck that was never made to bend.”

Indifference would have had a bite, here, but that was not what I saw in them. It was... hesitation. Uncertainty as to the nature of the gift they had been handed, what it meant.

“I quibble not over this honour,” I said, “because it is your due. A settling of accounts. I would have been ashamed to keep it back any longer.”

But now that I had ended the matter, ceased using it as a bludgeon to get them to fight, I could talk to them without the... pretence. The insincerity.

“And freed of this, without right or call, I ask you once more,” I said. “Fight, and win.”

My voice rose.

“Even though the day is dark and the enemy is great, even though all the world would call it folly to even try, I still ask you,” I said. “ Fight, and win .”

What I saw in their faces then, I did not have a name for. It was not pride, but it was not far from it. It was not bitterness, but it was not far from it. Maybe it was a little of both, over the years grown together like ivy and oak: inseparable.

“I can give you the word, you know, but it was never mine,” I told them. “It was always yours, and in the end the only people who can decide what it means will be you. Now, for good or ill, is the moment where that decision will be made.”

In the distance, behind me, I felt the ground tremble under the drums of Keter. Silence and a sea of faces beheld me.

“So what,” I softly asked, “will it be?”

The silence stayed. I breathed out, slowly. It had been all I had to give, save for strength of arms, and that they already had of me. I watched them, and my eye caught sight of a pair of tall orcs. Heavies, in dirtied armour. I’d seen them before, I thought, when fighting on the shore. One of them met my eyes, dark to brown, and struck his sword against his shield. It rang out, somehow piercing the cacophony of horror marching against us. It sounded, I thought, like a plea. The answer came further down the line, from another face I recognized – a Taghreb soldier I’d once joked with on the march, who had promised his wife a house in Keter. The sword went against the shield, ringing out again. It was a fair-haired girl, after, the Liessen looks writ strong in her face.

And the sound rose, one sword at a time.

With it the answer to my question came. Fight, the Second Army said. Fight, the Second Army screamed. Fight , the Second Army thundered, until the very air shook with it.

“Once more,” I quietly said, as the clamour washed over me and drove back even Keter’s screeching for a heartbeat. “Once more.”

And I would ask again, I knew that just as they did. And perhaps that on day they would refuse me at last. But today, they would fight.

With the song of ballistas unleashing death, it began.

—

It was all screams and blood and steel. After a while, I could barely tell the difference between one fight and another. I stood ankle-high in mud, sword in hand and hoarsely shouting as a tide of vermin and ghouls crawled through the muck and toppled the tight ranks of a shield wall.

“Hold,” I shouted, staff scattering black flame among the mass. “ Hold .”

They held and they died, unflinching, until the Blessed Artificer scoured herself raw unleashing a cage of Light that bought us a reprieve. The cloudy sky – black smoke had swallowed it all up like a hungry maw – lit up in the distance with red, a warning of danger, and I ripped myself clear of the muck to limp away.

Gate.

The palisade exploded in a shower of shards, wards shattered as skeletons poured through the gap and our mages desperately struggles to bind fresh wardstones. I charged into the stream of dead, a line of heavies following me as we desperately scrabbled with steel and Night to plug the breach long enough for the Pilgrim’s light to incinerate the lizard abomination climbing the wall and a volley of fireballs to buy us just long enough for the sappers to bring down logs in the way.

“Half a cadence,” I exhorted. “That’s all we need to buy them.”

My sword bit into flesh, a ghouls drawing back with an ugly shriek, but a javelin went through the eye of the sergeant to my left and two more were butchered by blades after skeletons entangled them. Through the hole in our wards, a deafening swarm of insects began to pour through. I screamed, tossing a ball of blackflame into them, and Tariq deftly leapt atop a falling log. Light poured out of him in waves as he broke the dead beyond the breach and our wards came back on, cutting off the swarm.

The threat had passed. I was needed elsewhere.

Gate.

Even burning, the snake allowed dead to charge up to the summit of the wall. A massive undead crocodile’s jaw ripped at the baked mud, bricks flying every which way, but an arrow hit right between its eyes – an unraveller, too long to be a mortal archer’s work – and it dropped lifelessly. I kicked the Bone back down the wall, letting it drop onto another skeleton trying to climb out of the muck, and swept the bottom of the bricks with blackflame.

“Priests concentrate on the ramp,” I screamed. “We need to keep them below.”

Light came in streams, scything through the skeletons trying to claim a beachhead atop the wall, and when a massive bird made of ghostly blue sorcery struck at the burning snake construct the entire damned thing collapsed as the magical construct exploded.

“Summoner, there you were,” I laughed. “ Good man . We sweep the top, no holds barred.”

With power and steel we scattered the enemy, and the moment the crisis was averted-

Gate.

“Keep them in the funnel,” I screamed.

The hole in our wards at the centre of the camp was made to look like a great black whirlwind, for it had filled with black smoke and screeching birds. Our mages were fighting back the attack, some sort of devouring spell, but birds were still slipping through. A pack of a dozen slipped out of the roiling smoke, headed towards us, but hellfire lashed out in a cloud of brimstone and Hierophant disappeared them with a slash of his hand.

“It is the smoke,” Masego shouted back over the din. “It hides the ward-breaking formula, prevents us from attacking it.”

“I have this,” the Apprentice claimed, eyes hard as she incanted in a resounding voice.

From her hands glimmering red light poured out, crossing into the black whirlwind and becoming part of it. She kept up the spell, the red glow lending a hellish tint to the Enemy’s work but also revealing all the secrets held within.

“Superb,” Masego praised her with a grin, glass eyes glinting so warmly it singed the edges of the eyecloth. “And now that your work is revealed, Trismegistus, all that awaits is Ruin .”

The aspect rippled out, tearing through a spell only he could see, and suddenly the hole filled up. The birds were instantly incinerated, but the smoke stayed – I’d already seen men dying in agony after inhaling it, so with a working of Night I sucked it all into a great ball and passed it off to Masego.

“Do what you will with it,” I said.

Gate.

Iron ladders dug into the walls of the fort, skeletons swarming the top of them, and even as my staff slammed into one’s side and dropped it below I saw one of the scorpion nests get overwhelmed – goblins killed, engines smashed. The Artificer had taken a wound driving back the Drake, and I was getting tired: we were taking back the fort, but the shore... Three long calls of the horn sounded, and with disbelief I heard the hooves of the Order of the Broken Bells as they counter-charged the dead pouring out of the shallows.

“With me,” I shouted, gesturing at the closest line. “Those ladders are ours.”

The dead fought hard to keep us away from the iron ladders, and one of those great skeletons nearly mad me fall off the wall before Adanna carved it in two, but between the two of us and the honest muscle of my soldiers we trashed all four of the damned things. Below us the Order of the Broken Bells withdrew as reinforcements for the mauled shield wall on the beach began to pour out of the fort, but with the knights here the danger had ebbed low.

Gate.

No, gates .

I’d not been the one to open them this time. There must have been almost a hundred, all large and stable even through Keteran counter-rituals. The pharos device had been used, I realized, likely at Hu- General Zola’s order. Or maybe Adjutant’s. Neither would have pulled the trigger early, though. Gods, we must have fought for so long delaying any longer would have exposed us to the risk of fighting the third wave as well. Yet we were still hard-pressed by the enemy on all sides, I saw and retreat would be... costly. Maybe if they were coming at us mindlessly, but they had enough Binds to keep them clever enough that they’d do more than mindlessly rush the positions we’d prepared to enable our retreat. I cursed. This was going to get...

The low strum of a cithern went through all of us, as if played straight into our ear. The dead, for a heartbeat, froze. They began to move again, and did not cease even when the melody began in earnest. It was I who froze, though when the singing began.

"Long have I walked the shore
Known ruin, drunk bitter wine
Brewed in dying light of yore
Before triumph did resign."

I had expected the Rapacious Troubadour to sign, but it was a woman’s voice. One I knew well. And it angered me, just a little, that Akua Sahelian was apparently just as good at singing as she was at damn near everything. It passed, though, as much because of the gentle sadness of the song as what it was accomplishing. I could see it already, though the detail might have been hard to pick out for some.

Not a single Bind was moving.

"In shaded Wolof I knew
Rest beneath the sycamore
Yet as the western wind blew
My heart cried out for more."

The orders came down, by my hand and that of others. We would not waste the opportunity: full retreat into the Twilight Ways began.

"Born grieving, I will die
Holding naught in my hand
So why not reach out and
Pluck stars from the sky?"

Stand by stand we began our retreat, funneling the dead into killing zones as the House Insurgent unleashed Light and we drew back to one holdfast after another. Already our supply train was passing through the gates, we only needed to last a little longer...

"I have known kings, petty men
Of pettier kingdoms still
Clutching tight their stolen wen
Using them up to their fill

And the poets weep, when did
We become a people ruled?
The empire folly undid
Was raised by people subdued

Born grieving, I will die
Holding naught in my hand
So why not reach out and
Pluck the stars from the sky?"

The shores were empty, the palisade and fort abandoned and what engines had gone unsmashed being dragged through the gates. The Order would go through next, leaving behind an ever-narrowing square of infantry.

"So let me dance with ghosts,
Beautiful, hungry devils
Let me face great hosts
In dark and bloody revels

I will tread the isle blessed
I will burn the fields of red
And should arrant come the west
The river will be fed

Born grieving, I will die
Holding naught in my hand
So why not reach out and
Pluck the stars from the sky?"

The fighting grew increasingly furious, the dead rushing at us in blind waves as our last redoubts wavered. But they were almost done, we could see the light in the horizon: the endless ranks of skeletons had ended, ground into nothing by the unflinching valour of the Second Army. And we retreated inch by inch, back to the gates as the Doom of Liesse sweetly sang.

"I have shared a bed with doom
Danced with death as a lover
Long have I dreamt of my tomb,
And no dream lasts forever

But now that the night has come
I raise my hand to the sky
And one last time I succumb
To that old, beloved cry

Born grieving, I will die
Holding naught in my hand
So why not reach out and
Pluck the stars from the sky?"

The last gate closed behind the last living soldier, and so ended the Battle of Maillac’s Boot.

"So why not reach out and
Pluck the stars from the sky?"

Colossal I

“You who name yourselves Titans desecrate what the word once meant. You make yourselves petty tyrants over children and break bones for hollow works, greedy as the wyrms we overthrew. Are you not ashamed at what we are become?”

– Antigone Strides-Ever-Unyielding, amphore for the Chorus of the Gentle Hand

She was cold.

It had been the howls in the distance she’d feared enough to run deeper into the woods, through thick brush in places where no moonlight reached, but now it was the cold that threatened to swallow her whole. She was shivering, shaking, and twice now she’d tripped on a root. Her knees were skinned and her arms bruised. The child had gotten lost in the dark, and the panic that followed that realization only made it worse. She ran back, branches raking her skin, but she did not know where back was anymore. She was tired and, sometimes she could hear things moving around her.

Monsters, creeping close. She fled those with all that was left of her strength, stumbling into a thornbush whose harsh bite set her weeping again as she crawled away and through the muck and leaves. Hands groping blindly she found a way up the fallen trunk blocking her way, hearing breaths coming ever closer to her, and when she reached the summit- beautiful , she thought. A clearing that was a perfect circle of green grass touched by pale moonlight, the silver painting tall stone slabs standing upright like silent sentinels.

She stumbled forward, onto the grass, and shivered under the cool wind. Holding herself with hands scraped raw, trying to keep what little warmth remained from leaving her, she tread across the soft grass and closer to the stones. The noises, the things in the woods, did not come closer. Was this a sacred place, one that would scare the creatures? Perhaps the Gods were safeguarding her. Hesitating but unwilling to stay out in the open, she went further in. The moonlight sliced in between the silhouettes, and as she approached for the span of a heartbeat she thought she saw a door.

There was nothing between the stones when she went there, though, only a play of light and shadows. Trembling, she extended a hand and gasped when it disappeared. It was as if she was going through a veil! And the air beyond was warmer. Biting her lip, she went through.

It was a room of stone, bare stone carved with strange symbols every which way. She’d come through a door, but immediately she knew this was not a refuge: there was something else inside, a hulking shape seated and breathing shallowly. Its eyes opened, each larger than her head, and she shrieked out in fear.

“Small-child,” a deep voice said, a voice like a mountain would have if they could talk, “how did you come here?”

She knelt, her knees knocking.

“I’m sorry,” she shivered, “it was an accident, I was cold and-“

She yelped in surprise when the hulking shape rose, revealing itself to look like a man. A giant. They ate children, she had been told. Ground their bones for flour and... a large palm settle gently atop her head, patting it.

“Do not fear,” the giant said.

She mutely nodded.

“The Pattern does not know coincidence,” the giant told her, tone thoughtful. “This was taught.”

She didn’t know how to reply, and the great one sighed.

“I must consider the portents,” the giant said. “You may remain, small-child.”

She stayed on her knees, trembling, as he bent down and passed through the veil into the night. It was a long time before the shakes ended, and longer still before she fell asleep.

—

She thought the giant would never come back, and wept bitterly not knowing whether this was a blessing or not.

The day passed in fits of tears as she huddled within the hidden altar, too afraid of what awaited in the woods to risk leaving. Warm sunlight passed through the veil, revealing strange symbols on the ground and shifting as the hours passed. Yet when dusk came and darkness spread over the land – the Gods Above had closed their eyes, her father had once told her, and the Gods Below stolen the sky in their slumber – soft, lumbering footsteps returned. As the stars shone down on the circle of stones and the altar hid within them, the giant returned.

His hair was long and dark, its face fiercely bearded but bearing gentle eyes and though it robes were pure white and long, dragging across the ground, there was not a speck of dirt on them. The giant bent down to peer at her, great eyes unblinking, and after sniffing her raised its hand. She choke on a scream of fear, but no pain came: a gargantuan hand gently patted the top of her hair, ruffling her ratty hair.

“Small-child,” the giant said. “I greet you.”

She mumbled back a greeting of her own.

“Have you eaten?” the giant asked.

“No,” she whispered.

“Then follow.”

His back straightened and slowly it moved away. She hastily followed, taking care not to step on the trailing robes whose white knew no taint. She hesitated to pass the threshold, knowing what lay past it. The beautiful circle, but also cold. The creatures that prowled the night. Terror and dark and pain. A great palm settled on her head, as gentle eyes smiled at her.

“This is,” the giant said, “a good place.”

Eyes watering, she nodded and she followed. She gasped when she found that the air outside was not cold, as it had been the last night, but instead of a soft warmth.

“A good place,” the giant repeated, “and it likes you.”

It was beautiful, she thought. The stones dipped in silver moonlight, the soft green grass and the... perfection of it. Like the two halves were perfect mirrors, like the little clearing was a single whole and it was complete . The giant gently nudged her along, though he did not seem displeased by her staring, and the two of them went to the edge of the clearing. There shapes were moving in the underbrush and she shivered, hiding behind one of his great legs. A great muzzle peeked out, sniffing at the wind, and out of the dark came a wolf so large it could not be called a wolf. In its jaws, it bore something large and bloody.

It smelled of death.

She whimpered, but the giant was not troubled. He hummed three deep notes, and the world hummed along with him. The stones echoed of it, the sound rippling between them until it faded away. The great wolf bowed its head, placing on the ground what it had held in its mouth. A great stag, she saw in the moonlight, with antlers and hooves of glittering bronze. The giant bowed his head at the wolf, which raised its own and withdrew into the dark.

“The Pattern is a balance, small-child,” the giant told her. “This night, the she-wolf feeds us. One day we will return favour for favour.”

She mutely nodded. The giant smiled.

“Good,” he said. “We must pursue completion in all things, for a soul without balance weighs down all the world. This was taught.”

She nodded again. The giant was pleased.

“Now, we eat.”

The great stag was brought within the circle, where she sat as the giant reached atop one of the stones and took a bronze knife that had been hidden there. He skinned the stag as she watched, trying not to retch and backing away until she was resting against one of the stones. The stag was run on a spit of moonlight, made to hang in the air, and pale flames bloomed below it. The giant reached atop another stone and brought down a broad silver bowl, with water within. He drank deep if, the set it down before her. It smelled like rain.

“Drink,” the giant said.

She did, and it was sweeter than any water she had ever drunk. She felt cleaner, even if she was still caked in filth, and her knees no longer hurt. It was a relief, the absence of pain almost like a pleasure. Suddenly tired, she leaned against the stone and felt her eyes begin to close. The warmth of the fire, the smell of the roasting stag, it was all lulling her to sleep. Almost smiling, she breathed out three notes. The last, faintly and to her surprise, echoed among the stones.

Utter stillness followed.

It only lasted for a heartbeat. After it passed, the giant began to turn the stag on the spit again. And the echo it’d died immediately, almost been snuffed out. Not at all like a real one. The giant finished the roast and cut her a large piece, which she dug into with relish, while he ate the rest until there little left but bones. When their bellies were full, he spoke again.

“Small-child,” he said, “do you like this place?”

After a moment of consideration, she nodded. It was beautiful, and she was safe here. She almost asked a question, but bit her tongue. People did not like it when you asked questions.

“Ask,” the giant gently said.

She bit her lip, then spoke up.

“What is it?” she mumbled. “This place?”

“A shrine,” the giant said.

She nodded, for this was sensible. Gods must be honoured, or they would take away the day and let the land dry up.

“To what god?” she asked.

The giant laughed, a kind and rumbling thing that tasted not of mockery.

“To me,” the giant said.

She looked at him with awe, for she had never seen a god before. The god considered her thoughtfully, stroking his beard.

“Would you like to stay here?”

A sob ripped its way out of her throat.

“ Please ,” she pleaded. “I don’t want to leave.”

The giant-god patted her head again, gently.

“Then you will not,” he said. “But you will not idle. I will gave you tasks, and teachings. You will attend them.”

She nodded. Anything, to avoid going back in the woods. The giant-god seemed pleased.

“Small-child,” he said, “do you have a name?”

She shook her head.

“I had one,” she said. “My father gave it. But the men with the cranes took it. They made us drink something and...”

Her heart seized. Nameless dread came upon her, even in this gentle place.

“Then I will give you one,” the giant-god said.

Silence as the great being watched her. His eyes were piercing, at first, but then they softened with something like grief.

“Antigone,” the giant said. “Your name will be Antigone, in honour of another. She who taught without ruling, disdaining the greed of titans and scorning the apathy of grief. Eighteen cities did she found, never once straying from the path she decided on.”

Antigone shivered. The night was still warm, but somehow she’d felt cold creep up her spine. The god, though, was looking up at the sky.

“You look sad,” she quietly said.

“I am,” the god said.

“Do you miss her?” she asked.

The god smiled softly, eyes on the stars.

“Every day.”

—

“Show me,” the god said.

Antigone stood with her hands linked behind her back, wearing the new woolen tunic she had been given. She’d never had new clothes before. It was grand gift, and she would not disappoint the god. Eyes on the symbols carved into the standing stone, she sang them in the order they were written. Each glimmered with moonlight as she awaked the letters, her pronunciation perfect until she tripped over ai-si-e, fumbling the last syllable, and the glimmer died. She bit her lip, ashamed.

“Try again,” the god encouraged.

One the second try she got all eleven letters of what the god called the Shallow Reflection, and he was pleased. Together they read words from slates of stone, the giant explaining their meaning, and under the moonlight Antigone learned her lesson. Soon, the god said, she would know enough to read. When she was ready he would give her scrolls and she would be able to read them during the day. It would give her more to do, he said, than to keep the shrine clean and eat.

“I’ll read all the words,” Antigone ferociously promised.

He patted her head with what she thought might be affection. They had already eaten, taken from the pack that the god had brought and drunk from the silver bowl that rainwater filled. There were remains from the meal, enough for her to eat tomorrow during the day and not be hungry. It was a great luxury. And yet Antigone sat down and could not help but wiggle a bit, because after the lessons came her favourite part. The god looked at her, chuckling, and sat down as well.

“Where did we leave off, Antigone?”

“The great drakon sundered the land with its wrath, splitting the earth and making two shores with a great island between,” Antigone excitedly said. “But Okeanos called forth the waters to rise and bind it, dragging it to the crushing depths where many songs were sung and the drakon was stripped of its power and made a petty beast.”

“It was a great victory,” the god agreed. “Yet many defeats had come before it, and the cities of the children knew great ruin. You see, the drakoi could not truly die until they had spent long enough as beasts that the Pattern forgot their divinity, else even in death they would only rise anew with terrifying splendor.”

Even as he spoke the shimmered with mirages, Antigone’s eyes going wide as she saw a great winged dragon, its wings large as a city, slain by a great bolt of lightning. But the dragon came back in a great storm of flames, blighting the land around it.

“But the Titans had a plan,” Antigone said.

As it always did when she spoke the word, the mirage shifted. There were a lot of silhouettes in the background of the group of people shown, but there were fifteen in front that could be made out clearly. Some of theirs names she already knew – Okeanos, with the wild temper and the words of the sea, Kronia with her cold stare and deadly sickle – but it was always the same one she reached for with her fingers. Tall and beautiful, with long silver hair and a kind smile, Antigone’s namesake seemed close enough to touch. The mirage would disperse if she did, though, so she held back.

“Vainglorious fools that they were,” the god agreed, “they had a plan.”

He told her of the fall of the Mirror-City, that night, of how the last cries of the children there drew in the hungriest of the drakoi and they Titans fell upon it as it slept after having fed on the dying. How it struggled mightily, flattening hills into plains, and how as it was stripped of power its blood flew and the hunger sunk into the land itself. It was thrilling story, and Antigone listened to every word avidly. She’d grown sleepy by the end, though. Not so sleepy she forgot to ask this time, though.

“May I ask a question?” Antigone dutifully asked.

The god nodded, as he always did.

“When you show the Titans,” she said, “there’s always one whose faces I can’t make out. Like it’s in shadows. Who is it?”

The giant-god was silent, for a long moment.

“Kreios,” he finally said. “His name was Kreios.”

“Why don’t you show his face?” Antigone sleepily asked.

“Because he was the worst fool of them all,” the god said, and they spoke of it no more.

—

It changed when Antigone realized that when spoke, the world listened.

It wasn’t the same as when the god did it. The stones did not sing for her the way they did for him, every word an echo and with the rights words those echoes turning into a melody that always made her weep when she heard it. But even when it was Antigone putting together the letters of the Shallow Reflection together into words, when she tied the together neatly and spoke them into the Pattern, there was... something. She could not feel what it was, could not see it the way she thought the god might under moonlight, but she knew it was there.

At first she thought perhaps she could figure it out if she just spoke words until she saw something, but Antigone hesitated. That felt wrong somehow. Like she’d be wasting a gift. The god always said that the Pattern was a balance. Wouldn’t she make things crooked, if she just spoke all those words uselessly? No, she decided, she wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t be wasteful. Instead Antigone sat in the grass and tried to find a worthy purpose. Something worth doing. Something that deserved to have a reflection in the Pattern.

And after thinking about it for days, Antigone found her answer. On the second night she had ever spent here, a she-wolf had gone hungry so that Antigone and the god could eat. A favour had been done unto her. So now it was her turn. Over more days she saved up food from the packs, going slightly hungry, choosing things that wouldn’t go bad if they were left. If the god saw, he said nothing. When she had enough to make up for part of a great stag, Antigone put it together on a blanket and brought it to the edge of the circle. The woods were never silent, but neither did she hear something come. So Antigone knelt, and she waited.

It was long hours in the sun that passed, as sweat trickled down her brow and her legs ached, but still she knelt. There would be no sincerity, otherwise, and somehow she though that speaking words without meaning them would be a very grave mistake.

And as the sun began to slowly crawl downwards, at last the great she-wolf came.

She was taller than some of the trees, Antigone saw with awe. Her fur was thick and grey, kissed by scars and marks, and her eyes were of a deep yellow. The she-wolf watched her for a long moment, panting softly as she stood just before the edge of the clearing. Her breath was warm as it washed over the small girl who did not know her own age. The she-wolf licked her chops, expectant. Antigone slowly bowed forward, still kneeling.

“Thank you,” she said.

Immediately she bit her lip. Not, it hadn’t come out right. The world had not listened to the words. The she-wolf eyed her patiently. She thought of the letters, then, and fixed them in her mind. And though it hurt, she kept them there.

“ Thank you ,” Antigone said, and the world heard.

A shiver went through the air, an expectation, and the she-wolf grinned with bloody fangs. To Antigone’s utter surprise, the great wolf stepped into the clearing. Her paws touched the grass and Antigone froze in fear. The god was not here. She was alone with a great and hungry wolf, that somehow she thought she might have let in. And as the wolf opener her maw Antigone closed her eyes, body clenching together, but the pain did not come. Instead she wailed in discomfort as a great wet tongue licked her face. Antigone backed away, trying to wipe away some of the stinking drool, but there was too much for her hands to make a difference. She shot an aggrieved look at the great wolf, who only panted amusedly.

Adding insult to injury, the she-wolf then bumped her chidingly with her nose and whined, as if to reproach her this entire idea.

“I was returning favour for favour,” Antigone sulkily told her.

The she-wolf considered that a moment, the leaned forward and pinned her down to lick her face again. Shrieking with laughter and disgust the girl tried to wriggle out, but it was only after the she-wolf decided sufficient cleaning had been inflicted that she was freed. Getting back on her feet, Antigone pulled close and tried to wipe herself clean against the fur. It was a vain hope that smudged dirt and leaves over her, and the she-wolf strolled away. Turning, though, the great wolf leaned close to the little girl’s ear and breathed out.

Lykaia , Antigone heard, though the word had not been spoken.

“Is that your name?” she asked.

The she-wolf snorted, slinking away. She also, Antigone noted, took the food on the blanket in a single snap of her jaw. And back into the woods she went, leaving the girl standing bemused and stinking of drool.

—

The following morning, when Antigone went out from the shrine into the sunlight, there was a great wolf lying on the grass and waiting for her.

Chapter 70: Solved Game

“Beware of they who laud war, for one who loves the locust cannot love the crop.”

– Extract from the transcript of the ‘Sermon of the Shores’, as spoken by Sister Salienta

Usually the Twilight Ways were a beautiful place, but this time they were as a sea of the wounded and dying.

We did what we could. What few mages were still capable of casting spent themselves raw in the healer tents, the healers among the House Insurgents moved wearily from one half-corpse to another and I demanded the same of every Named that could still move. Tariq, looking himself a step into the grave, moved tirelessly even and he grew more and more wan. Masego – borrowing the last gasps of the Summoner’s sorcery – taught the Apprentice emergency surgery on the most brutal of the beds, snatching the slightest sparks of life and fanning them back to a flame. Even Akua, though some refused her help and I had to surround her with a protective detail. I went as well, of course. With Night little more could be done than delaying death, but that served a purpose.

Every hour meant one more priest Light was no longer burning up from the inside, one more mage whose limbs ceased trembling enough for them to be able to cast. I couldn’t save them, for Night would ever be the power of a thief, but I could steal them enough hours that someone else might be able to. Time grew clouded, the kind of mist where one could get lost for a lifetime going around in circles, and I went from blood to blood. Soldiers with faces chewed off, with limbs ripped and bones that’d pierced through the skin. And the screams, Gods, the screams . I pulled out poison and curses, slowed the flow of blood to a crawl and forced hearts to keep beating, Night coming to my hand sharp and steady.

I lost myself to the beat, knowing that General Zola and Adjutant would see to the needs of the Second without me.

It was only when the power grew sluggish in my hands, when my weave slipped and I almost drew poison into a young goblin’s heart instead out of his veins, that I forced myself to stop. Night didn’t heal in the intuitive manner that Light did so any mistake on my part was likely to kill the wounded involved. I limped away after passing my patient to a priest who couldn’t be older than seventeen – I have taken a generation of my people to war , I grieved, harvested them like a farmer reaping wheat – and leaning heavily on my staff. My leg throbbed so harshly I felt like I might weep, and now that I had released Night my vision was swimming. One of the phalanges, who’d been following me like loyal hounds all night, came close to offer me an arm to lean on. I gestured curtly for her to leave me be.

I forced myself to ignore the moans and weeping from the tents, the soldiers that would not be saved because we did not have enough left in us to save them. The wind kept carrying them to my ear, though, and so further and further away I went. I found a grassy hill, past the outskirts of the camp, where I slowly slumped into the cool blades of grass. Faintly I saw the phalanges beginning a watch around me, but they were not obvious and I made myself not notice them. I leaned in the grass, staff at my side, and looked up at the twilit sky of this strange realm we still understood so very little. I rested my eyes but did not sleep. I was, somehow, too tired for it. I couldn’t be sure how long I stayed like this, but eventually I heard footsteps coming up the hill. Not Hakram , I thought, and immediately felt guilty. If the phalanges had not gotten in the way there was nothing to worry of, so my eyes remained closed.

I was only when they lowered themselves into the grass by my side and groaned in pain that I recognized who it was. Tariq’s joints were, I had gathered, sometimes even worse than my own bad leg. Not even the favour of angels could entirely protect one from the ravages of time: the Grey Pilgrim was as perfectly hale as one of his advanced age could be, but he was still very much that age. Heroes didn’t get to cheat aging the way my side did, forever frozen at the apex of our growth and power.

“The Apprentice has retired as well,” the Peregrine said. “Though the Hierophant continues. He is a young man of remarkable willpower.”

I half-smiled.

“He is more mind than body,” I said. “Always has been.”

I suspected it would appeal to him a great deal, to become entirely an intellect and be stripped of all the weaknesses and needs of the flesh. The smile faded soon enough, though. I could not hear the wounded from here, the wind prevented it, but I could imagine it so vividly only concentration kept their cries from reaching my ears.

“There is no other army like this,” the Grey Pilgrim eventually said. “I have seen many battles, Queen Catherine, but none ever spared so much thought to keeping its own alive.”

I would not claim to be the spirit behind that, not when all I had done was imitate the Legions of Terror while being in the position to recruit priests as well.

“There’s always too many dead,” I tiredly replied. “Always, Tariq. Even when we win.”

The old man laughed, and while amusement would have infuriated me there was not a trace of that in the sound: there was enough grief in the sound to drown a dozen men.

“There are some foes that cannot be won against, Catherine,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “All we can do is worry our hands to the bone and bury the dead, hoping we saved as many as we could have.”

This isn’t a plague , I thought. It’s not the banal malevolence of the world that killed them, Tariq. I brought them here. I led them to this place, so far from every home they ever knew, so they could die for strangers. For a greater good. And so they’d come, and so they’d fought, and so they’d died. In droves, scared and in pain. Some of their bodies, those we’d not been quick enough to burn, we would see again standing under the banners of Keter.

“I used to hate you a little,” I quietly said, “for that night in Callow. The one where you refused to help me as we stood at the crossroads of the things to come.”

The old man did not speak, but even with closed eyes I felt him bend as if under a great weight.

“But,” I continued, “I think I understand it better now, why the thought of sitting the Tattered Throne so terrified you.”

All hail Queen Catherine Foundling , they’d said as they put the crown on my head . First of Her Name, anointed Queen of Callow. I was a warlord on a queen’s seat, my boots still dusty from the road and my sword reeking of blood, but in that room where Fairfaxes and Albans had ruled they’d anointed me. And my people had followed me into horror ever since, unflinching. And my legend, my story – my lie – it was a young one. I had been a glimpse of spring after a long winter, and so more hopes than I deserved to bear had been set on my brow. Tariq Isbili’s legend was old, older than even this old man, and it was dyed in the bone of what it meant to be of the Dominion of Levant. My people had, in the years after the Folly, followed me into the dark without flinching.

Levant would have followed the Peregrine into anything at all, even if it shattered them to follow.

“Even your kindness bruises,” Tariq finally replied, after a long silence passed.

I inclined my head in concession, as he was not wrong.

“One day I’ll ask too much of them,” I said, my tone announcing the subject was at a close.

I was not certain what scared me more: that on that day they would refuse me at last, or that they wouldn’t . In a rough pang, I missed Vivienne. She would have understood, I thought. In a way that no one else could, not even the rest of the Woe.

“Or one day they’ll asks too much of you,” the Peregrine replied, tone strangely gentle.

We left it at that, the two of staying in silence in the grass, until at last I fell asleep.

—

I woke to a warm meal and mug of tea, Adjutant’s wheelchair wedged into the slope of the hill at my side and the Grey Pilgrim nowhere in sight. Hakram let me shake off the last dregs of sleep at my own pace, only beginning to speak once I’d dug into the porridge and warmed my bones with the herbal brew.

“General Zola has the casualty reports,” he said.

It was almost enough to put me off eating, but I’d found after a few mouthfuls that I was positively starving. I still set down the spoon, blowing at the steam coming off my tea.

“How bad?” I quietly asked.

“One thousand nine hundred and seventy four dead.”

He’d not cushioned the blow, which I appreciated. My fingers clenched around the mug, the too-warm ceramic burning my skin. I pushed through the pain. Almost two thousand dead. A fifth of the Second Army had died at Maillac’s Boot.

“Permanent wounded?”

“Seventy one,” Adjutant said. “Between Masego and the Peregrine there was little that could not be mended. Mind sicknesses, mostly, come from head wounds that themselves were healed.”

I breathed out, relieved. In this, at least, we had been exceptional. It was rarer than rubies for an army to be able to walk away with so many fatalities but so few casualties. I drank down tea, still digesting the scope of what we’d lost. It wasn’t the outright one third that just retreating through the gates without preliminaries would have cost us, and we’d certainly mauled the armies that’d assailed us badly – something that we wouldn’t have accomplished with a premature retreat – but a fifth of losses was not something to be shrugged off. The Second Army as it was right now, should it be made to fight the battle we’d just fought, might fold before the second wave even arrived.

As an independent force, it was now too dangerous to let it fight a peer army. It’d need to be paired with another set of troops, preferably one that could soak up most of the deaths for my soldiers. And we’ll have lost veteran officers , I thought. Sappers and mages and other specialists I can’t replace. The heart of the Army of Callow and its component armies remained the infantry trained in the Legion methods and those I could still recruit, but all the specialized troops that allowed the Army to maul superior forces were either difficult or outright impossible to replace. Like the goblin munitions that’d allowed me to seize so many victories from the jaws of defeat, they were slowly running out.

“We got bled deep,” I finally said.

“And made our foes pay high price for every drop,” Adjutant gravelled back. “Every corpse we put to final rest at the Boot is one that we won’t be facing at the capital.”

It was true, though I still felt like arguing. Instead I polished off the rest of my porridge, that eternal legionary’s fare. The tea was not far behind. Hakram’s continued silence did not go unnoticed. I glanced at him, finding his face hard to read, and frowned.

“So what is it that you decided to sit on until I got through my...” I trailed off, unsure how much time had passed and so what meal this was.

“Early breakfast,” he provided. “And it is not necessarily a problem, Catherine, though the situation will require careful handling.”

My frown deepened.

“Not army-related,” I decided, “or at least not principally. So this related to my other authority.”

High officer of the Grand Alliance, representative for the villains under the Truce and Terms.

“Someone came into a Name during the battle,” Hakram said.

Huh. I supposed it’d been brutal enough a grinder to provide that spark, given the right materials to work with.

“Brandon Talbot?” I guessed.

He stood at the alignment of a couple of stories, if you looked at it the right way. Old blood, valiant in battle, about as principled as a nobleman could be while still being a nobleman. Back in Callow there was still a lot of faith bound to what he represented, in certain parts. I’d not caught scent of anything forming there, but sometimes the final stretch of coming into a Name could be quite sudden.

“No,” Adjutant said. “Though from the Order of the Broken Bells. A young man who was unhorsed during the countercharge near the shallows and made it back to the ranks on foot after that flank retreated, gathering other survivors to him.”

Huh. Fair enough, I supposed. Crows knew it wasn’t always the old names that got the nod from Above or Below.

“What are we looking at?” I asked.

“Sixteen, from Laure. Raised at an orphanage before being recruited into the Order three years back,” Hakram said. “I’m still finding out which. His name is Arthur Foundling.”

I froze in surprise. Foundling. It’d been a long time since I’d last heard that surname tacked on to anyone but me. Yet I had no sole claim to it, as Creation had just deemed it right to remind me. An orphan, huh. I wasn’t sure whether that had me wistful or troubled. Then one last detail sunk in.

“Sixteen,” I slowly repeated. “That means he’s still...”

“A squire,” Adjutant gravelled. “ The Squire, as of yesterday.”

I softly laughed, though there was little mirth to the sound. It seemed Above and Below had at last decided that I’d strayed far enough from the last Name I’d held that another had been allowed to fill those worn old boots. Fuck , I thought. A Squire. That complicated things. Not necessarily immediately, but certainly down the line. It wasn’t even directly relating to me: while I didn’t even know which way the boy was leaning at the moment, either way I had no intention of falling into the trap of offering more than cursory mentorship. Yet a squire, as Malicia had once told me, must one day become a knight. And my people, we liked our knights. Sang songs about them, told stories. Followed them into battle.

Sometimes we even put crowns on their heads.

Sixteen, I considered. Vivienne was older, but not by that much. If this Arthur Foundling became the figurehead or even the genuine leader of a force within the Kingdom of Callow, marriage to cement her place on the throne wouldn’t necessarily be impossible. I might be looking too far ahead, worrying about things that might never come to pass, but my succession was not something I intended to leave to chance. I clenched my fingers. If he became a threat... God forgive me, but I’d killed boys of sixteen before. It might not come to that, I reminded myself. Yet this stank of the Heavens staking their claim on my home again, and I did not like the shape of it at all.

“What did the phalanges dig up on him?” I asked.

“His past is a dead end, but we have people in the Order,” Hakram said. “Popular with the other squires, considered reckless by the knights. The knightess he squired under died at the Boot, and there’s been talk of him swearing the oaths to Brandon Talbot instead.”

“Not happening,” I flatly said.

I liked the grandmaster, but he’d also been part of the Regals – an ill-fated noble faction at my court – before I dismantled them. House Talbot had ruled Marchford as counts once, and had been distinguished among the upper tiers of the Callowan nobility for their wealth and ancient blood. Even stripped of lands and riches, Sir Brandon still had deep connections with parts of the kingdom’s nobility that’d never taken to my rule. And might object to my handpicked successor taking the throne after me, highborn or not.

“The chatter did not come from Talbot himself, who instead noted that being Named places him foremost under the authority of the Truce and Terms,” Hakram clarified.

Mhm. Admirably restrained of him, though I wasn’t sure if his hopes would truly toe that line. Talbot knew where my bottom line lay, though, and what the consequences of crossing it would be. That’d keep him in check for a while.

“Personal life?” I asked.

“He was involved with another squire, who died in the retreat,” Adjutant said. “The other boy was highborn – House Bickham, landed knights formerly sworn to Dormer. Poor and only nobility for a generation prior to the Conquest.”

I grimaced, both at the generous heaping of grief that Fate had seen fit to offer Arthur Foundling and an inconvenient detail just revealed.

“Do we know if he keeps to only men?” I asked.

“Unsure,” Hakram admitted.

“Find out,” I ordered. “It would close some doors.”

Like the possibility of Vivienne wedding him, should it come to that. Dynastic marriages along those lines had happened before, but they had poor reputations for a reason and issue would be, well, an issue.

“Vivienne,” Adjutant slowly said, seeing right through me. “That’s putting the cart two towns ahead of the horse, I’d argue.”

“We’re far from a situation where it would even be considered,” I agreed, “but I want all angles accounted for.”

He nodded. I sighed, stretching my arms.

“I’ll have to take his measure in person as well,” I said. “And speaking of measure.”

I glanced at him with a quirked eyebrow.

“General Zola has proved competent in discharging her duties, though not exceptional,” Adjutant said. “Some minor mistakes, all of them swiftly corrected.”

“She’s been in command for less than a day and got promoted halfway through a battle after her predecessor got assassinated,” I flatly said. “She’ll settle into the rank, Hakram.”

“I’m not impugning her abilities,” the orc calmly replied. “I’m trying to temper your expectations, Catherine. She promises to be a solid commander with a good grasp on logistics, but she will not be Hune. She’ll be another Bagram, not the kind of rare talents we picked up early in our career.”

My fingers clenched. Hune’s reputation was not as widespread as Juniper’s – the Marshal of Callow had been the face of the military under my reign, and been visibly tied to my campaigns since the first days of the Fifteenth – but it could not be denied she had been highly talented. It had not been without reason she’d been the second highest officer in the Army of Callow. I jerkily nodded.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “And I do have a curiosity, actually.”

I tapped my temple lightly instead of asking the question outright. That Zola Osei had Soninke highborn eyes – more amber than golden, but then the gold was relatively rare – had not escaped my notice.

“Sister of the current Lord Osei, sworn to High Lord Dakarai of Nok,” Hakram said. “Not an old line, but they’ve been in favour for some time and married well. She was on the losing side of the succession conflict after her father died, and she enrolled in the Legions to avoid assassin blades. Used to be General Afolabi’s supply tribune, it was us that promoted her to legate.”

The last part didn’t particularly surprise me, all things told. One of the great enticements we’d had for the officers of the legions we absorbed after Akua’s Folly was that the Army of Callow was so starved for veteran hands that any officer that went over was nearly guaranteed to go up at least a rank. The Legions of Terror in the decade leading to the Uncivil Wars had been relatively slow to promote, too, so the temptation had been even stronger.

“Dakarai is Sepulchral’s main supporter, so we’ll have to keep an eye on that tie,” I said. “She might not be in a position to cause us trouble, at the moment, but that doesn’t mean her alliance won’t try to get hooks into the Army of Callow.”

While I was broadly inclined to back Sepulchral over Malicia, I had no illusions about the kind of viper I was dealing with. I’d known Abreha Mirembe when she was still merely High Lady of Aksum, and back then she’d already been shockingly coldblooded even by Praesi standards. Having an eye on the Tower would not improve her character in the slightest.

“It will be looked into,” Adjutant said. “We inherited the work the Eyes put in her, but I will get in touch with Scribe when feasible to see if she might have additional insights.”

“Good,” I said, groaning as I dragged myself up.

My rest had been, as always, all too short. I stilled, though, when I caught sight of Hakram’s face. I liked to think I knew him the way few people did – he was, even now, perhaps the person I was closest to in all of Creation – and I’d certainly gotten better at reading him over the years. Earlier he’d delayed giving me news on purpose, but now his silence was different. He was, I thought, hesitating.

“There’s something else,” I said.

“It is not news,” Hakram said. “Not like the others.”

I slowly nodded.

“And yet?”

He licked his chops, still uncertain.

“Masego says that the leg prosthetic has taken well,” Hakram said. “He still requires a few days of observation, but he is considering accelerating the timetable for further cuttings.”

“The hip,” I said.

“I could walk,” he said. “By the time we get to Hainaut. Not well, not quickly, and only with crutches but...”

“You could walk,” I finished with a soft smile.

He nodded, almost as if at a loss for words.

“I just wanted you to know,” Adjutant said.

We took our time going down the hill, between his wheelchair and my limp, but I found the silence between us lighter than it had been in some time.

—

I needed to take exactly one look at Arthur Foundling to know he was going to be a hero.

The boy was almost offensively heroic in appearance, like some higher power had taken the mould of ‘young hero’ straight of out Callowan culture and poured materials into it. Dark-haired and blue-eyed, with an angular face and strong shoulders, I could already see he was going to grow into a handsome man. He knelt before me after being ushered into the tent, sheathed sword scraping at the ground from the haste of his movement. With a touch of amusement, I saw his jaw twitch from a suppressed wince. Still, after a moment of taking him in I decided he looked... gaunt. Tired. Grieving. He’d lost a mentor and a lover the same say, Adjutant had told me. Under the composure, I suspected there laid a roiling ball of pain and anger.

“Rise,” I said.

The young man did, this time careful not to drag his sheath on the ground. He looked unsure, jaw locked tight. He had, I realized in a moment of bone-deep sympathy, likely not been taught the etiquette involved in a royal audience.

“Which orphanage raised you?” I casually asked.

He started in surprise.

“Er,” Arthur Foundling got out, “It was Queen Mary’s Home for Errant Boys, Your Majesty.”

I laughed out in disbelief.

“Wait, you’re from Queenie’s ?” I said. “They try to make all their wards into scribes and priests. Gods, do they still have that crabby old sister? I can’t remember her name-“

“Sister Jessica’s still alive, as far as I know,” the squire said, in the tone of someone trying very hard not to speak ill of the clergy. “She, uh, did not approve of my joining the Order.”

I wondered how he’d react if I told him that said Sister Jessica had once rapped me on the knuckles thrice with a stick for having thrown a snowball in her face. I’d actually been aiming at this little shit who’d kicked in the wall of our fort three streets up, but I’d missed him and she’d opened the door just then. She’d had a pretty sharp hand for an old lady, it’d stung for several days. Hells, she must be pushing seventy by now.

“Our matron at the House would have sent me to the cathedral for remedial moral education if she’d known I wanted to go to the War College,” I drily told him.

I’d never found out who it was at my orphanage that was the spy – honestly, knowing Black there’d probably been several – for the Empire, but it’d not been her. My orphanage had been founded and founded by Praes, but the matron herself had not answered directly to any Praesi. The dark-haired boy looked at me hungrily at my words, like he was drowning and I’d just tossed him a rope.

“It’s true, then?” Arthur Foundling said. “Your Majesty. That you came from Tit – from the House for Tragically Orphaned Girls?”

“You can call it Tittering House,” I snorted. “Nothing I haven’t heard before.”

The boy’s orphanage down the street – not Queenie’s, which was in another quarter entirely, but the Laure Shelter for Forsaken Boys – had coined the nickname, warranting the reprisal of theirs being called Flaccid Shelter.

“You really did,” the boy said, tone almost awed. “I mean, the stories said, but they say so many things...”

Fuck , I thought. I’d known, on parchment, that there would be similarities. That they might pull on my heartstrings some. Yet I’d honestly believed it’d be easy to ignore, to set aside. Instead I was looking at a boy who might grow up into a threat to the legacy I meant to leave behind and seeing a shade of myself at sixteen, all bruised knuckles and fresh out of the orphanage gates.

“It’s true,” I said. “But it’s not me we’re here to talk about.”

His face locked up tight. I wondered, idly, if that was what I’d looked like when Black was talking to me back in the day. Always straddling hopeful and afraid, guarding my own thoughts so fiercely I might as well have worn them on my sleeves.

“I know about the Truce and Terms, Your Majesty,” Arthur Foundling said.

“No,” I bluntly replied. “You just think you do. Unless I’m very mistaken, you’re leaning the way of the Heavens-“

“I’m not a heretic ,” the boy said, sounding miffed.

“- which means you’re going to be in an inconvenient situation,” I finished, cocking an eyebrow at the interruption.

His face blanked again, but he did not apologize. I could appreciate a spine, so long as he understood when he was overstepping.

“As a heroic Named, you representative under the Terms will be the White Knight,” I said.

He did not well hide his surprise. I got where he was coming from, of course. A Callowan hero grown in the wilds would not have considered themselves bound to me save perhaps in enmity, but this one had been a squire in my own knightly order for three years. He wouldn’t be seeing this in terms of hero and villain – I was both his queen and an older Named, in his eyes I would have been the natural authority. Perhaps not one entirely trusted or obeyed, but undeniably an authority.

“You’re the Queen of Callow, though, Your Majesty,” he hesitantly said.

“Yes, and unless you intend to renounce your oaths as a knight of the Order of Broken Bells-” I paused there, and he empathically shook his head, “then I still remain your commander. Hence the inconveniences. For now the troubles are minor, but once we rejoin with our sister host I will have to speak with the White Knight about this.”

My eyes narrowed and I studied the boy.

“You have intentions,” I said.

The Squire paled, his limbs stilled, but he did not deny it. He would not have come into a Name if there had not been something burning in his belly, and we both knew it.

“I thought I knew where my life was headed,” he bitterly said. “And now Sir Alexis is dead and...”

His lips thinned and he held his tongue.

“You’ve been looked into,” I gently said. “We know about your lover.”

“I had hoped to keep that grief my own,” Arthur Foundling said.

And for a moment, as his face grew solemn, I glimpsed the make of a Knight in him. The potential was there. Whether it made him a boon or a danger, though had yet to be decided.

“That possibility went up in smoke,” I honestly said, “the moment when you became the Squire. You have eyes on you now, Arthur Foundling. Your actions will have repercussions.”

“I just wanted to be a knight,” he tiredly replied. “To bring back the banners that the Praesi buried and you left in their grave, Your Majesty.”

Now was not the time, I thought, to have a conversation about the difficulties inherent to assembling a large mounted force – particularly one made up largely of lesser nobility whose allegiance to me would vary between shaky and nominal – in the Callow I’d come to rule after the Doom of Liesse. Maybe one day, if the boy was destined to be anything but a man on a horse very good at righteously killing people, but not today. I was all the more wary of teaching him the way Black had once taught me because I rather wanted to. I remembered what it was like, standing in those shoes and feeling both more capable and more lost than you’d ever been before.

Part of me itched to pass those lessons on the way they had been passed to me, and that was a dangerous thing.

“I left them there for a reason,” I said, “but that is a conversation for another day.”

I drummed my fingers against the side of my staff thoughtfully. Best to carefully control the amount of time I spent around this one.

“Adjutant will go over the details of the Truce and Terms with you,” I said, “so that you may fully understand your rights and responsibilities. Until then, you remain a squire in the Order of Broken Bells.”

He pressed his fist against his heart in acknowledgement.

“You won’t be swearing squire oaths to another knight until I have, at the very least conferred with the White Knight over the matter,” I added. “Your position is already too complicated for my tastes.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” he acknowledged.

“Good,” I said. “Then you are dismissed, Arthur Foundling.”

He bowed, but after straightening hesitated instead of leaving. I cocked an eyebrow again.

“The stories,” the boy said, “they say you used to be the Squire as well.”

“I was,” I agreed, cocking my head to the side.

“So you had them too,” Arthur said. “The dreams, I mean.”

Huh. Name dreams already.

“I had dreams,” I said, “but likely not the same as you.”

Although, Hells, I’d been the last Squire hadn’t I? Was he going to get Name dreams from my years bearing the Name? I was still alive, but Black had been as well when I’d gotten glimpses of his life. Unless he was going to get dreams from a Squire that’d been headed Above’s way, and I’d only gotten my father’s career in my sleep because he’d been the last Squire headed into a Name sworn to Below. I didn’t actually have an answer to that. Crows, it would have been effectively impossible to get answers about this a few years ago: heroes and villains hadn’t exactly sat down for pleasant chats about the nature of Names, back before the Truce and Terms.

They still didn’t, honestly compelled me to admit, but at least the thought was no longer so glaringly absurd.

“So you didn’t dream about the sword, then?” the Squire asked.

“Which sword?”

“The broken one,” he hesitantly said. “The pieces are in far places, but always deep below water.”

I kept my face calm, though I felt a surge of both fury and indignation. Fucking Hashmallim , I cursed. Fucking Choir of Contrition and their grubby meddling hands. I’d snapped the Penitent’s Blade in dozens of pieces and scattered some of them them as far as the Tyrian Sea, I wasn’t going to let that damned sword get reforged. Someone wielding it anew had my death written all over it. I was going to have to talk to Hierophant about the practicalities of expressing my displeasure there.

“I knew that sword before it was snapped,” I said. “It is best left scattered, Arthur Foundling, lest you want Contrition to sink its hooks into your soul.”

He didn’t look like he entirely believed me, but my warning hadn’t gone into deaf ears either: the young squire had looked distinctly unenthused at the notion of being bound to angels. This time he took his leave for good, leaving me to lean against my desk with a conflicted look on my face. The Squire seemed like a good kid, honestly. A little rough around the edges, but it was nothing he couldn’t grow into.

I hoped I wasn’t going to have kill him, before this was all over.

—

On the first day the Second Army rested. On the second it marched, and on the fifth we found the other column.

From there, I knew, there was only one place to go: the capital, where it would all be won or lost.

Chapter 71: Eschatology

“An enemy may suffer a hundred defeats yet avoid being defeated; seek not victories, only victory.”

– Extract from the ‘Ars Tactica’, famed military treatise of Dread Emperor Terribilis the First

I’d barely set foot back in Creation and already I was itching to return to the Ways.

The Second’s outriders had run into a patrol of Prince Klaus’, bringing back the uplifting news that the Iron Prince had crushed the dead in a decisive engagement. Soldiers had named it the Battle of the Pools, as it’d been fought near a dry bog where the mud had hardened and stagnant water remained trapped in pools. Way I heard it told, Old Klaus had baited the dead into open grounds with bold skirmishing by Dominion slingers and then forced a clash of shield walls while his cavalry went to hit the flanks. It’d been a close-run thing even so, before the reinforcements I’d sent under Princess Beatrice were found by the White Knight and led into a charge that hit the enemy in the back and completed the encirclement. That’d secured a full wipe of enemy forces, which had numbered more than thirty thousand. It was the kind of clean successes that came rarely in this war.

It’d brought some cheer back to the Second Army, as had the prospect of soon being reunited with the rest of the coalition forces. Klaus Papenheim’s reputation as one of the finest military commanders of our age had been proved as well-deserved once more, considering he’d led his beleaguered army in securing two major victories against numerically superior enemy armies – and the first time the dead had even been entrenched! I’d expected that it was a triumphant war camp we’d link up with, perhaps even with ale rations having been let loose in celebration of the victory. Instead, as the Second Army began to cross back into Creation, the word that trickled back to me was that of a somber, tense camp. The fantassin companies with the Iron Prince were, I was told, on the verge of mutiny. They were refusing to march until officers that had been arrested were returned to them.

There’d been trouble, it seemed, within the other column. I got the lay of the land before crossing, wary of putting forward my foot without a good idea of what it was I was headed into. Apparently the Battle of Juvelun, where Prince Klaus had pushed the undead out of the eponymous village where they’d dug in, had been a rough affair for the fantassins and gotten Prince Etienne of Brabant killed. The dead had retreated from the defeat with some semblance of order and began to muster further into the valley for a counter-attack, which had forced the Iron Prince to strike at them before they could mass enough to prove a threat. Except part of his army had balked at the order. The mercenaries felt they’d been ill-used and might be once more, while the Brabantine conscripts weren’t eager to march out tired into another bruising engagement when they’d lost their prince in the last one.

There had been stirrings of unrest, so the Iron Prince had arrested or slain the potential mutineer officers and promptly forced a march against the enemy before the situation could further worsen. It’d worked, at least to the extent that this kind of measure could work. They’d fought, for lack of allies or other options, but the moment the dust had settled the mutineer sentiment returned – only twice as hardened, as they’d been browbeaten last time and were wary of a repeat. The conscripts had been settled somewhat, temporary Lycaonese officers having been forced on them while their formations got mixed – to prevent cliques sticking together – and separated in different parts of the camp. It’d not entirely worked, though, as some clever soul had found a loophole in Proceran desertion laws. It was, technically, no such thing if you signed on with a fantassin company sworn to the same fight. There’d been an influx of fresh ‘recruits’ after word was spread, which had only raised tensions.

Still, while I saw the sense in some of the grievances voices my sympathy was significantly dampened by the fact that the fantassins had effectively slowed Prince Klaus’ march west to a crawl for several days before refusing to march entirely. What little time we’d managed to gain on the enemy through bloody losses and use of the Twilight Ways had been effectively lost. Even if we began the march on Hainaut city this very evening, we wouldn’t arrive there more than a few days before the dead. I’d been hoping for a significantly larger margin so that we might repair the defences of the capital as much as possible before Keter besieged us there. Even now, every heartbeat wasted limping through the muddy camp grated at my sensibilities. Each beat saw the dead grow closer, saw our lead narrow and our hopes of victory dim.

The chatter died when I hobbled into the pavilion. I leaned on my staff, step after step, and felt the eyes of all assembled fall on me. I saw the Iron Prince first, at the end of the long table: the white-haired general had risen to his feet and he offered a short bow, to which I returned a nod. The Heavens had their men as well, a tired-looking Hanno of Arwad on his feet besides Tariq. Their greetings were silent and I returned them just as quietly. The last man at the table seemed like he’d aged a decade since I’d last seen him, as if some capricious god had kicked the vigour out of his bones, but the dark hair and elaborate moustache of Prince Arsene of Bayeux could not be mistaken. He did not seem pleased to be here, I decided, as was only fitting.

Old Klaus had raised him to his war council with the understanding that the Alamans would be able to handle his own people, even the fantassins, and in that duty he had failed most utterly. Little of this reflected well on him, in either our eyes or those of the officers he’d stood for. The Prince of Bayeux had been able to keep his soldiers and reputation off the chopping block in this war, until now, but it seemed that at last the blade had pricked the skin. He wasn’t going to get out of this without losing a few feathers, I thought, though it was not my place to go pulling at them.

My eyes then swept to the rest of the men and women in the pavilion, of which there had to be at least forty. None of them were seated, though neither were they shackled as I’d half-expected them to be. There were a few Lycaonese guards around, but not many – I supposed there would have been no point, with the likes of Tariq and the White Knight in the pavilion. The arrested officers did not look like they’d been mistreated, the only bruises I found being faded, and though they were visibly filthy I saw no trace of sickness among them.

“Your Majesty,” the Prince of Hannoven greeted me. “Your return is a pleasant turn.”

“So was the news of the victory at the Pools, Your Grace,” I replied.

Only two of my guards followed me in, looming silently behind. I turned a steady eye to the assembled prisoners, noting several bowed.

“Yet this was not,” I mildly added, “how I expected my time to be spent after our hosts joined again. The request I received was rather mild on details, in truth. If one of you would elaborate?”

“Your Majesty,” the Prince of Bayeux spoke up, calling my attention with a bow of his own. “If I may?”

“Do.”

“At the behest of these officers in the service of the Grand Alliance, I carry a plea for your judgement,” the prince said.

He had a nice speaking voice, I thought. Practiced, but the smoked honey in there was a natural gift. Didn’t make me like what I was hearing from in the slightest. I cocked an eyebrow.

“It was my understanding that the Prince of Hannoven, who held command, already passed judgement on them,” I said.

“This is true,” Prince Arsene agreeably said. “However, no formal trial was held and as both the supreme commander in Hainaut and high officer of the Grand Alliance your authority supersedes his.”

Meaning they didn’t like what Old Klaus had decided, so they were coming to me in the hopes of a milder sentence. If not an outright amnesty.

“In principle that is correct,” I noted, then glanced at Hanno. “White Knight, a question if you don’t mind?”

Hanno slowly nodded.

“Did these officers refuse to obey a direct order from their lawful commander?” I plainly asked.

The White Knight looked like he’d wanted to grimace but held back.

“They did,” Hanno admitted.

“Then the matter is settled,” I coldly said, eyes returning to the prisoners. “Hang them all.”

There was moment of utter surprise in the room, until the officers began to clamour. I picked our pleas, in Chantant and Arlesite, but also curses and insults. Some even tried to argue, yelled that there had been a mistake, but all I saw when I looked at them was three days lost. The deaths that the time pissed away would cost us. I mutilated the Second Army for you, you fucking vultures , I thought. And now you want to mutiny and wiggle your way out? I’d slit the throat of every last one of you and not lose a wink of sleep over it. The yelling continued with no sign of abating, even the guards tried to restore order, and I lost what little patience I had left.

“ Shut up ,” I Spoke.

With a snap their mouths closed, like puppets whose strings had been pulled. I felt the gazes of both heroes in the tent move to me in surprise, which surprised me in turn. The Pilgrim, at least, should have known I could now Speak again. I had disciplined the Silver Huntress using the talent. Yet after a glance their way, I saw that it was not the Speaking itself that’d startled. His mouth had wavered. Just for a heartbeat, I figured, but for the barest of moments my words had had an effect on the Grey Pilgrim. It was me who was astonished, as I’d not tried to exert my will against him in the slightest. The rules behind Speaking were opaque even to me, but usually it only worked on people weaker than you. Even then it wasn’t a guarantee, some sort of claim to authority over them tended to make it easier. And I’m not much stronger than the Grey Pilgrim , I thought, if I am at all.

What that implied...

I withdrew any strand of will lingering against the four men at the table, freeing them of struggle. The Prince of Hannoven looked wary, but Prince Arsene was outright gasping. He rasped out a breath.

“Your Majesty,” he got out. “This is a mistake. You did not...”

“I see no reason to change my judgement,” I mildly said. “Mind you, it was never formally requested or given. If this talk of appeal was revealed to be only a tasteless jape...”

I shrugged.

“Then I would walk out of this tent and leave this in the trusted hands of Prince Klaus Papenheim,” I said. “I imagine you could appeal to him for mercy, were he in the mood to grant it.”

I glanced at the prince in question, raising a questioning brow. He gave a discreet nod, to my mute surprise. So he was willing to find a use for this lot that didn’t involved feeding crows. Fine. They were his, and his to deal with as he wished.

“Perhaps,” Prince Arsene said, “that would be best.”

I watched him, saw how now that his breathing was in order he was once more mastering himself. Saw how he was looking around trying to look for an angle, for a way to still come out on top. And maybe on another day I would have said nothing. Let it go. Procer would be Procer, and not even the end of times would make saints out of princes. Instead I found my fingers drumming against my leg the first few beats of Stars From the Sky , and I ground my teeth. I could almost smell the mud and blood and ash, hear the screams as the Second Army retreated foot by foot under bloody onslaught.

“Say it,” I quietly ordered.

The dark-haired prince blinked in confusion. I met his eyes, unsmiling.

“Your Majesty, I do not und-”

“Say it,” I repeated, and my tone was cold as ice.

His lips thinned.

“It was,” Prince Arsene of Bayeux got out, “a tasteless jape.”

I let silence linger a moment so that the embarrassment could properly sink it.

“Don’t ever waste my time like this again,” I said.

I turned and limped out of the pavilion without speaking another word.

—

It wasn’t a formal war council in the sense that we wouldn’t be tactics or arrangement tonight. When it came to that, the crowd of captains and commanders involved would require a far larger tent than this. Instead it was the keystones of the various forces within the Grand Alliance army defending Hainaut that’d been assembled for the talks. For the Dominion stood Lord Razin Tanja and Lady Aquiline Osena as well as the commander the Lord of Alava had sent to lead his warriors, Captain Nabila. For the Principate three royals had come: Old Klaus for the Lycaonese, Princess Beatrice of Hainaut and Prince Arsene of Bayeux for the Alamans. For the Firstborn, both General Rumena and Ivah had shown up. Rounding up the hosts, Calm-faced General Zola stood for the Second Army while I held claim on both Callow and Below.

As the heroes had sent both the White Knight and the Grey Pilgrim, I’d also called for the Barrow Sword to stand for villains – as far as I was concerned he’d proved himself as a lieutenant during his tenure as part of the Iron Prince’s army, and I fully intended to keep using him in that capacity. In other circumstances such a gathering of the prominent would have led to an inevitable amount of chatter and hobnobbing, but not this evening. All of us felt the cold breath of Keter against the back of our neck and it had cut through the usual practices. Already skirmishing with undead warbands was starting, a sure sign it was time to get the Hells out of here and into the Twilight Ways before we had another battle on our hands. One we might not win, this time. I cleared my throat to call for attention, the panoply of warlords and royals granting it.

“We’re all here, so let us begin,” I briskly said. “No one in this room requires introduction, so we’ll directly attend to the matter at hand.”

Adjutant had arranged for our maps of the principality of Hainaut and its outskirts to be sent, and attendants had artfully displayed them on the great table around which all of us were arranged. Much of where the enemy was shown by markers to have armies was now guesswork, considering three battles had been fought in quick succession over the last week – General Abigail’s assault on the Cigelin Sisters, the Second Army’s holding action at the Battle of Maillac’s Boot and the Iron Prince’s fresh victory at the Battle of the Pools. We still didn’t known if Abigail had taken the Sisters, but given her forces and the reinforcements involved she ought to have succeeded. Casualties involved on either side were unknown, while the Second hadn’t exactly had the time to count corpses as it retreated into the Ways at the end of the battle.

By now the great valley of central Hainaut, a great bowl in which the capital of the principality stood near the centre, would be a tumultuous mess of warbands and marching columns and smashed undead armies. Out east the great undead army of at least two hundred thousand that’d pursued the Iron Prince since his ill-fated march on Malmedit was gaining on us, likely past the village of Juvelun by now. Our reunited army needed to get moving and fast, if it wasn’t going to get stuck between the great force coming from the west, which the Second had bled to delay, and the even greater army pouring down the heights of Juvelun. The only question that remained to be answered was where our coalition army should march to. I believed the right answer to that was the city of Hainaut, the capital itself.

Yet while in principle I had the authority to simply give the order to march and expect to be obeyed, in practice trying to cram my plan down the throat of the people in this tent was only possible if they were inclined to swallow. That meant convincing them, or at least settling their most pressing objections.

“As all of you can seen, the valley of Hainaut is swarming with undead,” I bluntly said. “Soon there will be a strict minimum of about four hundred thousand corpses running around the region. Remaining where we are now encamped is a recipe for disaster, as it would ensure we would be harassed and ultimately encircled by a massively superior enemy force.”

None argued the fact, as it was plainly on the maps and markers to any eye practiced in the trade of war. I swept the council with my gaze.

“More concerning is the fact that we are now running low on supplies,” I said. “The column under Prince Klaus was entirely cut off from its supply lines for over a week, so it burned through its entire reserves. The forces I brought north will be sharing our own supplies, naturally, but that’s not a solution – it’s throwing a cup of water at a bonfire.”

And that was after we’d even cheated a little when it came to supplies. Unlike us General Abigail was still going have access to the supply line coming up from our defensive lines to the south, so I’d stripped the larders of the Third Army and its fantassin helpers dangerously bare before marching north through the Ways. It’d felt like kicking her in the ribs at the time, but I was now rather pleased I’d decided to play it safe.

“The adjunct secretariat, after collating the numbers given by all you, believes we have around six days before rationing becomes necessary,” I said. “After that, we have perhaps a week at half-rations before our larders are empty.”

“And if we begin rationing from the start?” Prince Klaus asked.

“Three weeks, maybe a little more,” I replied.

Half-rations, though, meant that our people wouldn’t be at their sharpest. Given that our main advantage against the dead lay in the qualitative superiority of our rank and file against theirs, that was a bold gamble to make.

“We must act, and act now,” I told them. “That much can’t be argued with. What must be done, however, deserves a degree of argument. The floor is open to any who wish to speak.”

There was a beat of hesitation, as if no one was quite certain they wanted to be the first to put a foot forward.

“You will have a plan, Losara Queen,” Ivah said. “As is ever your way.”

“I do,” I agreed. “But this council is meant to be a fair hearing for any of you with an answer to give.”

Captain Nabila, who I could not help but notice was only a few inches taller than me – if significantly broader and more stockily built – cleared her throat.

“I was told that Abigail the Fox took the Cigelin Sisters, along with the forces we had held back until now,” she tried.

“We can’t be sure she did, but the odds are good,” Prince Klaus told her.

“Then we should thrust westwards, towards Cigelin,” Captain Nabila said, tone firming. “The dead are in disarray, and we have great numbers. We can smash lesser warbands on our path, and when we arrive at the Sisters supplies can flow in from the south again.”

The Princess of Hainaut stirred.

“They’ll tarpit us if we try that march, Captain,” Princess Beatrice said.

“I do not understand your meaning,” the painted Levantine frowned.

“They will fight like barrowmen,” Aquiline Osena clarified. “Throw corpses at us to slow us down until they gather a great enough force to slay us in one stroke.”

The captain hummed in understanding, nodding decisively.

“If we stay in the countryside we’ll be going through bogs and swamps,” Princess Beatrice added. “We’ll be moving slow regardless. And if we cut to Julienne’s Highway as quickly as possible, our line of attack becomes glaringly obvious.”

And predictable tended to get costly, when you fought Keter.

“It seems wise to cede the grounds,” Razin agreed, eyes narrowing. “We cannot take or hold them. Yet the westward march itself is a sound idea, I would argue. If we retreat to the Cigelin Sisters through the Ways, we can muster with the forces of General Abigail and prepare for a decisive engagement there.”

“Keter will not grant it,” General Rumena said. “It will withhold the blow and leave hunger to disperse us without a single blade being raised.”

Razin, I thought with a degree of approval, had good instincts. If smaller armies had been involved, his answer would have been a good one. The problem was that, as the Tomb-Maker had pointed out, we wouldn’t actually be able to feed that army if it was gathered together. It was one of the reasons we’d split our offensive into two columns in the first place – the force I’d originally advanced with, some seventy thousand soldiers, had been stretching the limit of what our logistical train was physically able to provide for. All armies involved had taken losses, sure, but at the end of the day we’d still be asking of that same apparatus that’d struggled with my column alone to now also handle the second column and our reserve on top of it. No, Razin had good instincts but it showed that the Levantine wars he’d been raised to fight just didn’t involve the same scale of armies being dealt with.

“Turning back towards Juvelun would be suicide,” Prince Arsene said. “No doubt our pursuers from Malmedit have already restored the fortifications there. We would have to take those grounds from a larger army once more, only this time while being struck at from behind as well.”

“Juvelun is lost ground,” Prince Klaus agreed. “And it no longer has strategic value even if we did take it – we forced that gate to be able to march into the valley, but it’s too late to try and keep it closed for the army that pursues us.”

“We could still attempt a strike at Malmedit,” General Zola said.

That got the attention of most everyone here, including myself.

“If the burden of numbers is too much for our supply train, we must split our forces again,” the dark-skinned general said. “A large detachment can be sent to strike in surprise at Malmedit and collapse the tunnels, as was originally meant, while we consolidate the rest of our forces at the Sisters. If this draws the dead to us at the Sisters, as seems likely, that same detachment can then march in haste to Juvelun and seal the valley around the dead.”

There were some murmurs of approval, and I cocked my head to the side. It was the answer of a classic War College general, I thought. Strategic goals had been sent and were to be met, using our relative advantages – mobility by the Twilight Ways, in this case – over the enemy, and concentrating strength at where we were weakest to negate the enemy’s advantages. It was the kind of war that Black and Grem One-Eye liked to fight, measured and clever and very well-organized. Her answer, however, was also wrong. General Zola Osei understood war through the eyes of a professional, so it was only natural that it was the complete opposite that would find the fault in her answer.

“That’s a dead end,” Aquiline Osena said.

Surprised eyes turned to her, several disapproving. The Dominion had impressed with the bravery of its warriors, during the war, but not the acumen of its generals.

“She’s right,” I agreed.

Aquiline offered me a smile that might have passed for grateful, if you squinted a little. I winked back.

“It’s a clever trick, but it doesn’t win us anything,” the Lady of Tartessos said. “The tunnels at Malmedit are useless now, there’s no army left to go through them – we know where all of them are. Even if it works and we close the valley by holding Juvelun, what does it get us? The dead are already where they want to be.”

“It’s an approach that tries to mitigate the damage, not achieve victory,” I agreed.

If we were trying to mitigate though, it was a solid plan. It would secure us a very advantageous position for an offensive next year and ease the burden of our defense by giving us chokepoints to defend instead of a long line in the lowlands. The issue was that the payoff would come next campaigning season. See, Black and Grem they’d taught a generation of officers to fight their way – as I’d thought earlier, measured and clever and very well-organized. Except that we couldn’t afford to fight this clean, this careful. If that bride up north got built, we’d be losing Hainaut. We needed to win the campaign now, before winter came, and that meant we’d have to take risks. The same kind of risks that my father abhorred, that would have gotten him killed if he’d tried them against a hero at my age.

But I wasn’t him, and the war I was fighting wasn’t the same either.

The Iron Prince sighed, looking at the maps.

“Agreed,” he finally said. “If we don’t win this campaign now, we might not have the warm bodies to do more than hold come next summer.”

Grim, but he wasn’t wrong.

“ Can victory still be achieved?” Princess Beatrice calmly asked.

If anyone else here had spoke those words, I thought, half the people in the tent would have marked them a coward. None dared, though, when the woman speaking them was the princess of this very land we stood on. Few of us here had more burning hatred for the dead, or lost more at their hands. Idly I wondered if she was asking the question because she had genuine doubts, or simply because she’d recognized that if she didn’t ask it no one else would dare to.

“Yes,” I calmly replied.

“Then where is that that you would have us march exactly, Black Queen?” Prince Arsene impatiently asked.

“Hainaut,” the White Knight quietly said. “The capital, that is.”

Hanno had remained silent for so long I figured half the people in here had forgot he was even there. As for Tariq, as far as I could tell he’d spent more time using that nosy little aspect of his to have a look at the insides of the people than actually listening. I smiled mirthlessly at the hero, knowing that it wasn’t military learning that’d led him to the conclusion. After all, it was not only strategy that’d led me to decide the capital was our shot at winning this.

“The capital is where I would have us march,” I agreed. “As soon as possible – tomorrow at least, tonight if at all possible.”

“Would the issue of supplies not remain?” Razin Tanja asked. “The grounds between the Cigelin Sisters and the capital are still in the hands of the dead, and I had thought it impossible to arrange a supply line through the Twilight Ways.”

“It is,” General Zola frowned. “Your Majesty, I have seen the same numbers as you. We simply do not have enough mages and priests for this – past a certain distance and a certain amount of soldiers, the amount of wagons we are able to send at the speed we can send them mean keeping the force supplied is not possible.”

“That is true,” I said, “so long as you need individuals capable of making gates to actually take the journey.”

Meaning, if we had to send a priest or mage with every wagon – more realistically, a few priests and mages with every caravan of wagons – then there came a point where, if we kept sending wagons, all the available priests and mages would be in the Twilight Ways. Either headed to the place getting supplied, or heading back to the place where the supplies were being sent for. If the army was small and where it was camped close to where the supplies came from, that wasn’t an issue. The journey was quick, and you could either avoid having a stretch of time where there were no more supplies coming in or make it so short it hardly made a difference. The trouble came when the army was large, as ours was, and the distance between the origin of the supplies and their destination was large. This was, unfortunately, also the case.

You got rid of that problem, though, if the gate-opened didn’t actually need to make the journey. If the wagons could simply get there on their own.

“But that is needed, my queen,” General Zola said.

“Unless we open a permanent gate within the capital,” I said.

The room went still. It would be a risk, I’d not deny it, because if we lost the capital afterwards then the Dead King would have a gate into the Twilight Ways to study. On the other hand, the capital of Hainaut was probably the single most fortified city in the principality and once my sappers got to work it’d become even more defensible. We’d also be able to feed a significantly larger force in the city than our physical supply train would allow for. All we needed for the journey was for someone to open a gate near wagons somewhere in Procer and thread into it the destination of the ‘Hainaut gate’, and those supplies would get to the capital eventually. We wouldn’t hold the road to the capital but it wouldn’t matter, because so long as you had a mage around everywhere was a road to Hainaut.

“Those are difficult to make, I was told,” Prince Klaus said. “Could we even make one quickly enough?”

“Us, I’m not sure,” I admitted. “But you might remember we have fresh allies, since our summit at the Arsenal.”

“The Gigantes,” Princess Beatrice breathed out. “Is that why you sent them with my forces when we relieved the Iron Prince?”

In part, though I’d also been worried about exposing them to the dangers the Second Army had been about to face – or leaving them with General Abigail, where there would be no Named to pull them out of the fire if Revenants attacked in surprise.

“The Dead King might not assault the walls even if we seize the capital,” Prince Arsene said. “A long siege to grind us down would suffice.”

“A siege with its back to the army at the Cigelin Sisters,” Klaus Papenheim replied. “And all the while we could sally out at will through the Ways, with strong walls to return to after. We can only hope they will try what you suggest.”

“They will not,” the Grey Pilgrim said, breaking his silence at last. “Mark my words, and that of the Choir I am sworn to: once the gate is opened in the capital, the enemy will know no rest until that city is razed to the ground.”

No one, I noted with grim amusement, saw fit to argue with that . There was some more talking, afterwards, but I had them and most of the people in the tent knew it. By the hour’s turn I had the agreement of everyone there. So on we went to Hainaut, to the last flip of the coin that would decide whether this summer was the dawn of the Grand Alliance’s victory or defeat.

That in the city doom awaited none would deny, but like everyone else I rather wished I could know ahead whose doom it was going to be.

Chapter 72: Omen

“As the long summer dies the wolves will dance with the sons of the king, and though cities will fall in the end the only victor will be death.”

– Extract from the prophetic ‘Book of Manifold Dooms’, by the Augur Kaspar Reitzenberg (widely considered useless, as it foretells events both past and future without drawing distinction)

The city of Hainaut was a beautiful sight.

When I’d first laid eyes on it, last summer, the majesty of it had startled me. The capital had been built atop a tall and precipitously steep plateau – at its highest point it must have been at least three hundred feet going down in a straight line – that jutted out of the valley in more or less the shape of a hand laid flat, with the fingers in that description representing a gradually declining slope headed down towards the valley floor. A butte, which was the Proceran name for a hill so tall and narrow it was almost as a pillar of rock, jutted out slightly to the left of where the ‘fingers’ began, almost like the point of thumb. The most eye-catching part aside from the height, though, was the pale white wall circling around the city occupying the plateau heights. From closer up the ramparts of pale granite were revealed to be more of a pale grey with impurities, but at a distance and in the morning light it looked like the capital was crowned by walls of white stone.

“It is grand city, this Hainaut,” the Apprentice said in a hushed tone. “I studied among the schools in the high hills of Ashur, yet even their splendour pales in comparison.”

“It’s pretty enough,” the Squire conceded. “Seems like a lot of trouble, though. I hope they have good wells, or it’s going to be a bloody walk down and back up that slope every morning with full buckets.”

I swallowed a grin and Hakram gave me a rather droll look. I’d made a comment not too dissimilar after having my first look at it. I suspected the shared of experience of having had the water chore – fetching buckets for baths or cleaning – had led to a shared skepticism of living anywhere water would need to be brought uphill.

“There is not a speck of romance in you,” the Ashuran mage reproached him.

“Romance I want out of a lover,” Arthur Foundling snorted, “but out of a city, I much prefer functioning sewers. Gods, just imagine if it doesn’t rain up there for a month and the drains go dry. The stink .”

I cocked an eyebrow at Hakram. Boy had a point. Mind you, the Vaudrii – the Alamans tribe that’d first settled here – had not been idiots. They’d not just picked the place because it’d look nice from a distance.

“Almost a fourth of the plateau, like a teardrop at the centre, is taken up by a great pool that the locals call le Bassin Gris ,” Adjutant informed both the young heroes. “It is fed by rain, which is frequent in these parts, but also by several great underground aquifers. Though you cannot see it from where we stand, near the back of the city there is a waterfall going over the edge of the cliff.”

“See?” the Apprentice triumphantly said. “It was a sound notion, and soundly executed. You simply cannot stand to seen anyone spending coin anything but a good horse or sordidly unseasoned meat stew.”

“If I seasoned it the way you do, Sapan, my skin might just turn permanently red,” the Squire drily replied. “And a good horse is a sounder investment than white walls by any reasonable measure. The wall’s stuck in the same place, and you can’t ride it.”

Hakram cleared his throat and both youngbloods immediately went silent, looking somewhat guilty at having bickered into front of us even if it’d been amicably. The orc was only amused, though. He’d been in a good mood all morning. Some of that no doubt had to do with the way that he wasn’t sitting in a chair and instead standing on his own, though he was leaning heavily against iron-bound crutches. Even the leg he’d not lost had become weak in the time he’d spent without using it, so standing for more than a few moments at a time was both tiring and painful to him. Leaning on the crutches took the edge off that, though Masego had ordered me not to let him do it for too long. Orc musculature was different from that of humans, so doing this would actually begin pinching a muscle in his armpit that humans didn’t have.

“Princess Beatrice told me that about a century back they had to make laws about not throwing filth and detritus into the Bassin Gris,” I idly added. “It’d gotten so tainted the locals were calling it the Brown Basin instead, so now there’s a designated point for that near the waterfall. All the sewer drains lead there as well.”

“ See ,” Arthur Foundling smugly grinned at the other Named. “I told you-”

Adjutant cleared his throat again, which killed that in the crib, and glanced at me reproachfully. I shrugged, unrepentant. Laure rats stuck together, at least to the extent that wasn’t going to get me killed. The White Knight had rather frankly told me that there simply was no one in a position to take the Squire as even an informal apprentice, at the moment, so he saw no need to move the boy form his current placement. For the moment at least. That’d been with the understanding that I wasn’t just going to put Arthur in a padded box somewhere into total isolation from other Named, though, so I’d arranged to have him introduced to a few people. Apprentice, whose given name I had recently learned was Sapan, was one of them. On the heroic side, I’d also presented him to both Roland and the Silver Huntress.

I wasn’t going to pretend I’d not chosen those names and Names carefully – Apprentice both young and based far away, the Silver Huntress raised by Ranger and uninterested in power games, the Rogue Sorcerer both charismatic and opposed to certain aspects of traditional heroics – but I’d been careful never to actually hinder him in any way. I was well aware of how badly that story could turn on me if I dipped my toe in it. Apprentice was a peer in age and power, Roland was highly distinguished as both a researcher and a combat mage as well as one of the most broadly travelled of the heroes, the Silver Huntress was a frequent leader of bands of five. All of these connections might one day be of use, to a young man with ambitions to make a name for himself.

That they were also unlikely to be connections that came around to bite either myself or my legacy in the ass was, of course, a mere fortunate coincidence.

In the distance there were sudden flashes of light that caught everyone’s attention. They were coming from atop the butte on the side of the plateau, a thick pillar of stone topped by a tall watchtower that was best known by Hainaut folk as la Veilleuse. The prelude to our retaking of the capital had begun. A small mixed force led by Named – the White Knight, the Silent Guardian and the Vagrant Spear – would come out of the Twilight Ways, a frontline of Osena slayers brutally scything through whatever dead held the place. In small, tight places like the halls and stairs of a watchtower I’d seen few warriors more deadly than Lady Aquiline’s nimble pack of killers. Robber, who’d skirmished at their side more than once, had admitted to me that even goblins were wary of getting in close with that lot. The slayers were unusually quick, for humans, and years of monster-hunting meant that those with bad habits had already been thinned from the herd.

“Can I ask,” the Squire hesitantly began, “why we are bothering to take the watchtower?”

I hesitated. Teaching that one anything would always carry risks, and as long as he didn’t have a formal mentor the risks were even sharper.

“I am curious as well,” the Apprentice admitted. “There are barely any dead in there, I was made to understand. Should our efforts not be concentrated on the gates?”

I decided, after a heartbeat, that shared curiosity diluted this to an acceptable level.

“The gates are what we’re aiming at by taking the Veilleuse ,” I said. “It’s because of the way Hainaut was built.”

“There is only one way in and out of the city,” Adjutant told them. “The Ivory Gates, a set of seven great gates. When the city was still inhabited they were each dedicated to allowing certain people in our out – one of the gates, the one in the middle, was even dedicated to solely the Volignacs and those they favoured.”

“Very orderly,” the Apprentice said, sounding pleasantly surprised. “I’d heard of the Ivory Gates in my lessons, but the Rogue Sorcerer never mentioned this.”

Ashurans , I thought with distaste. I expected they wouldn’t even mind the Hells too much, if they were set up with proper citizenship tiers and open for trade.

“The city was built with the expectation it would have to be held against raids and armies,” I said. “So beyond the natural defences the ancient Volignacs laboured on the land some. It used to be that the slope going up to the walls and the gates was relatively even all around, but over the years they dug a much steeper slope and left just a broad ramp going up to the gates. Actually taking this city, when it’s being defended, is bloody work. I’m told the last time the Princes of Arans tried to storm this place, the Volignacs just pushed great round boulders over the walls and let Creation do the rest.”

Both young heroes winced at the thought. Yeah, even I had been impressed by that particular historical anecdote. It was typical of the line, apparently. House Volignac was noticeably poorer in coin and manpower than all three of its neighbouring royal rivals, but it’d not lost a significant amount of land to any of them in about a century. As far as I could tell, they’d remained in power largely by being utterly savage at anyone who crossed their borders while simultaneously marrying into the royal houses that were enemies to their enemies.

“That’s almost in the same league as Summerholm,” the Squire said, visibly impressed.

“No,” I replied, shaking my head. “It’s significantly inferior, and that’s actually what got Princess Julienne Volignac – Princess Beatrice’s sister and predecessor – killed. Those gates and that path are the only way in and out of the city. So when the dead broke the Iron Prince’s defensive line up north and poured into the central valley, the city was a nightmare to evacuate.”

Hainaut city wasn’t that large by Proceran standards, maybe sixty to seventy thousand people, but that was a lot of scared civilians wanting to keep their earthly possessions going through the same cramped streets to reach the same seven measly gates. The way Klaus Papenheim told it, at the height of the panic it had taken literal days to get a cart from the centre of the city to the Ivory Gates. People had slept in the streets instead of their homes so no one would take their place while they were gone.

“Julienne Volignac rode out with most of her mounted retinue to buy enough time for her people to flee,” Adjutant soberly said. “Not a single horseman from that charge returned.”

That put a bit of pall on the mood, so I moved on quickly.

“Essentially, going up that ramp and taking the gates from Keter would be a messy business,” I said. “The moment our presence was revealed, the dead moved most of their garrison to defend those gates and the plaza behind them. While we could use the Ways to enter the city directly, the Dead King has proved in the past that he’s capable of putting a temporary lock on gating in the region so it’d be a risk – it could close after our vanguard got through and then the troops would be stuck in the middle of an enemy-held city.”

“I still do not see the use of taking the watchtower,” the Apprentice admitted.

“The upper half of the tower,” I told her, “is significantly higher than the rest of the capital.”

Arthur Foundling started.

“Engines,” he said. “You had siege engines moved in through the Ways as well as the soldiers.”

I smiled. Clever boy.

“Before long our sappers will have them in place and we will be able to begin firing,” I confirmed. “Straight into the undead so very tightly packed into the plaza right behind the gates.”

The enemy had meant to make that place into a meat grinder that it would cost us dearly to clear, focusing on causing damage to our army rather than defending the city properly since the garrison the Dead King had left in here was simply too small to hold it against us. We’d been disinclined to allow that, though the watchtower tactic had actually been suggested by Lady Aquiline. Girl had a knack for sliding the knife in where it hurt, couldn’t deny that. Dominion leadership was coming along nicely in some ways, and I suspected that after all this should some Arlesite princes try their hand at a border war with Levant they would be in for a rude awakening. The Blood hadn’t stayed in charge of Levant as long as it had by being slow to learn lessons.

“What happens if they then retreat into the city itself?” the Apprentice asked. “Would it not be hard fighting to clear the capital street by street?”

“To some extent, but less than you believe,” Hakram told her. “If they abandon the Ivory Gates then we will take them, and the moment we do sending soldiers into the city through gates is no longer as risky.”

“Ah,” the Apprentice murmured. “Because even if the ritual lock is deployed, the forces in the city will be able to reinforce the vanguard by foot.”

I nodded in approval. That was pretty much it. If the enemy dug in further into the city, using street barricades and ambushes, we could essentially overturn that entire set of tactic by gating in soldier behind the chokepoints they were trying to hold against us and striking at them from the back.

“It seems like a flawless strategy,” the Squire admitted.

I winced.

“Don’t say that,” I said, and he jumped in surprise. “ Never say that.”

“I... apologize, Your Majesty?” he tried.

“There’s no surer way to get Fate to piss on your plans than calling them infallible,” I sharply said. “I once saw the Tyrant of Helike tip a winning fight the other way just by boasting about how godsdamned invincible he was.”

The little bastard had done it on purpose, but the point stood.

“Same goes for you,” I told the Apprentice, tone softening. “You lot won’t get your knuckles rapped as immediately as a villain making the same boast would, but there’s a reason that most heroes are intimately familiar with the concept of tragic irony.”

They both mumbled chastened agreements, and for a moment the entire situation felt like some sort of fever dream I’d stumbled into. Hakram, ever a prince among men, delivered me from that unsettling sensation.

“We’re due for a show soon, so I’d keep your eyes on the sky,” Adjutant gravelled. “Our ram is about to strike.”

I cocked my head to the side, taking a sniff from the air, and nodded in agreement. Yeah, I could feel it too. Like a storm in the making.

“I’d not heard about the Volignac men taking siege weapons with them,” Arthur said, sounding surprised. “The opposite, in fact. The sappers were vocally disapproving.”

Which usually meant insulting deeply limericks, if they were feeling nice.

“While I mean no insult to the siegecraft of the Army of Callow, rams and trebuchets won’t dent a structure enchanted the way the Ivory Gates were,” the Apprentice said. “I am told the foundational enchantments were laid by the famous wizard Yvon de Grandpré himself. The gates were made beyond decay and strength of arms, Your Majesty, so mere engines could do nothing.”

She paused.

“Unless the Rogue Sorcerer is sent out,” Sapan added. “He is a noted spellbreaker.”

“The enchantments don’t actually make the gate unbreakable, Apprentice,” I noted.

In the abstract, according to Trismegistan principles it was possible to achieve but the degree of power and precision required would be impossible. Akua had noted that ‘physical invincibility’, as she had termed it, would require an empire’s worth of sorcery simply to empower a handkerchief. And that was just the formula itself, never touching the trickier issue of materials: almost every substance known to us would shatter under that kind of strain, or some cases be outright disintegrated. And while Jaquinite magic did work in some wonky and counter-intuitive ways – it was godsdamned ridiculous that imitating the cadence and syllables of certain passages of the Book of All Things should empower and stabilize a spell – its fundamental limits weren’t actually too different from those of Trismegistan sorcery.

“There’s protections against entropies – rust, erosion, rot – and the centrepiece is the famous ‘dual enchantment’ that made Yvon famous,” I said.

Famous mostly to avid scholars of magic, but I did have a distressing amount of those in my circle of closest friends.

“The strengthening of material and the reflection of force,” Apprentice admiringly said.

Basically what good ol’ Yvon whatshisname had done was he’d made the gates and surrounding stonework denser than those materials actually were, which in practice made them much tougher. But that wouldn’t be enough to actually stop something like, say, a wyrm if the construct decided it really wanted to go through those gates. So another enchantment, bound to the other one – that was the impressive part, supposedly, since it ensured that since the magics were linked they’d never clash and erode at each other – had been laid that reflected physical impacts when they struck at the Ivory Gates. There was a hard limit to how much power could be reflected, but it’s still been very clever: a trebuchet stone tossed at the Ivory Gates would actually lose a lot of its momentum from the reflection, so it wouldn’t be powerful enough to dense the denser materials.

It also gave a pale sheen to the materials when they were touched by light at certain angles, which had earned them the eventual name of ‘Ivory Gates’.

Masego had noted the pairing to be quite clever, allowing the enchantments to effectively replicate the effects of much stronger spells for significantly less power expended – meaning there’d be a lot less decay in the magic over the years. The enchantments would have faded some over the years, of course, that was their nature. It was why both Praesi and my people usually preferred wards when it came to permanent defences. Wards were a set boundary forcing certain properties onto Creation and requiring a physical anchor, but they were also static. So long as the anchor was undamaged, any idiot with magic could add magic into the wards to keep them going. Enchantments, on the other hand, were an investment of sorcery into matter to achieve specific properties. Eventually that initial investment of sorcery would fade, and while the enchantment could be restored by another mage it was kind of like repainting a faded painting.

Unless you had a mage of similar or superior talent who understood exactly how that initial enchantment worked and what it meant to do, then there were going to be imprecisions and those were going to keep accumulating and diluting the original effect.

“Yup,” I said. “We figure that since it’s been about two hundred years since those enchantments were laid there’s got to be at least six to ten major imprecisions from patch-up jobs by other wizards. Most of those are bound to be centred about the ‘reflection’ enchantment, since it’s the most abstract and difficult of the two.”

“You lost me some time back, Your Majesty,” the Squire admitted.

Fair enough. At his age I’d not more or less fuck all about magic too. The wind began to pick up around us, as far away in the distant sky red eddies of power rippled. Among them I could seen a faint dot around which the eddies were concentrated.

“There we go,” I said, pointing at the dot. “Here’s our ram.”

“Nothing that small could break the gates,” the Apprentice skeptically said.

The Squire laughed.

“I’d heard about this,” Arthur Foundling said. “But I didn’t actually think it was true.”

The heroine shot him an irritated look and I took pity on her.

“It’s not a thing,” I said. “It’s a person.

She started in surprise.

“That’s insane, who could actually-”

The eddied of pulsing red contracted, spinning on themselves, and with a deafening detonation the Mirror Knight was shot down at the Ivory Gates at a speed that would have been enough to shred most Named to pieces. Unfortunately we didn’t have a great angle from where we stood, so we didn’t get to see him hit the gates, but there was a heartbeat of silence and then a detonation even louder than the last as all seven of the Ivory Gates went up in a cloud of stone and smoke and power.

“What?” Sapan croaked out. “ What?”

“The Mirror Knight has an aspect related to reflection,” I mildly said. “So when that nifty little enchantment reflects force outwards, it just goes right back.”

“That was enough for an explosion?” the Squire asked, impressed.

“Aspects are finicky creatures, as you will learn,” Adjutant gravelled. “In this case, after study the Grey Pilgrim determined that not only does the aspect slightly raises force before reflecting it but, by one of those caprices of Names, it counts every ‘threat’ individually.”

We’d lost Arthur again, but the young girl gasped.

“Yeah,” I coldly smiled. “So each of those patch-up jobs tacked onto that original reflection enchantment counted like a different ‘threat’ to reflect, and since they all drew on the same investment of power the Mirror Knight ended up hitting maybe six seven times harder than he should have because of that heartbeat of reflection games. Comparable to being hit by a mountain in the shape of a man, I’m told.”

So Christophe de Pavanie had shredded the enchantment trying to contain him with that excess of force, which in turn had unwoven the enchantment that was bound to that reflection enchantment – the density one. With that suddenly coming loose, massive force and a bunch of sorcery bursting out the results were the plume of smoke and gravel going the better part of a mile upwards.

“That’s really neat,” the Squire said.

“And completely insane ,” the Apprentice heatedly added.

“Look, over the years a lot of people are going to tell you that something always wins,” I said. “Power, cleverness, brute strength, preparations. And it’s all bullshit.”

I jutted a thumb at the desolation we’d dealt in about the time it took to boil a kettle of water.

“That looks like the work of two Named,” I said, “but that’s all it is, a look. It took half a dozen people to achieve that. The Mirror Knight and the Witch of the Woods went through the fact, but behind that? It was the Pilgrim that figured out the peculiarities of the aspect. It was the Rogue Sorcerer that was familiar with the enchantments, and the Hierophant that ran the numbers so we were sure that the gates would be smashed without it killing the Mirror Knight. And it’s not just Named, either.”

I leaned forward.

“Princess Beatrice was the one who was able to tell us how many times the enchantments would have gotten worked on, and how good the wizards paid for would have been,” I said. “Without that, the rest was just air.”

“So what does win?” Arthur Foundling quietly asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “There is no single thing that gets you there, Squire. No one has the skills to do it all on their own – even my teacher, a man who spent his entire life learning how to twist and turn stories, got his heart ripped out in the Free Cities because he was facing someone who just... knew more. You want to know what the trick is?”

I shrugged.

“Don’t do it alone.”

I gestured at the smoke again.

“See, maybe I could have battered down those gates using Night,” I said, “and maybe the Witch of the Woods could have ripped them off the ground, tossed them up in the sky. Maybe the White Knight could have carved his way through with Light, or the Rogue Sorcerer broken the enchantments and so an assault could follow. All of those answers, though, would have cost us in some way.”

I forced myself to refocus on the pair instead of simply the orphan watching me as if spellbound, the Ashuran mage studying me closely as well.

“So instead half a dozen people sat down, kids,” I told them, “and talked. Shared skills, shared powers, shared knowledge. And then we smashed those fucking gates without losing a single soldier.”

I let that sink in for a moment.

“It’s a big world,” I said. “There’s more than one pair of shoulders keeping it from falling. You don’t have to do it all alone.”

In the distance, a banner rose. A golden griffin rampant on blue, crowned by three golden daffodils. And under the ancient banner of House Volignac boots hit the ground at the bottom of the ramp leading up to the smoking gates, the men and women who’d fled this place with bitter tears three years ago returning to the city they had lost.

Swords cleared scabbards, glimmering under the sun, and with a roar the last soldiers of Hainaut came home.

—

We held the city by midafternoon.

There were still undead in hiding, waiting to serve as spies and inside forces when the Dead King came to besiege us, but the streets were ours and we were combing the capital for the infiltrators house by house. When it’d became clear the fight was over the dead had turned to sabotage, lighting fires and fouling the Bassin Gris, but it’d been nothing unexpected. There’d been fires when the capital was first taken, so the most flammable of the neighbourhoods had already gone up in flames and the humid summer air meant it was not easy for the arson to spread. As for the great pool of water, we’d put our mages to purifying it under Hierophant and already there’d been measurable success. With constant rotations of mages for the ritual, Zeze was confident that by dawn the pool would be fully restored.

Princess Beatrice gallantly offered to cede me the right to live in the ancient palace of her house, as I was the highest ranking noble and officer in the city, but I declined. I’d rather let her savour the comeback, and besides the place was too large for my comfort. I’d rather a smaller, more easily defensible place I could cover in layers of wards. I put Robber on the task, shaking him loose from Pickler – who was designing a replacement for the Ivory Gates with Akua and Roland as designated magical specialists – and was rather pleased with what he found me. It was a large guildhouse for what had been a guild of cheesemongers, with a small adjoining estate and two side wings. Well-located, in the southeast of the city but not too close or too far from the water.

Adjutant had begun rustling up mages to install wards and organizing guard watches before Robber even told me of the place, so I left it in his hands and instead headed to the open plaza that Princess Beatrice had suggested as the most fitting location for a Twilight Gate being raised. It’d been a good pick, exactly as the princess had described: Althazac Square was large and about as square-like as the name claimed. More importantly, it was located at the confluence of four major avenues, including the great street that circled through most of the capital like an unfinished ring. Supply wagons would be able to flow in without getting stuck in sidestreets. I sent a runner to give me agreement to the location, hoping the Blessed Artificer would be as up to it as she believed she would be.

I’d wanted Roland to be the one opening a gate, but he’d been quite firm in declining. Something about his talents being poorly suited to it. He’d seemed genuinely worried about the outcome, so I’d let it go. Masego and I had already forged a gate together and the Ways got... snippy when you tried to do it more than once, so like it or not Adanna of Smyrna was our best bet. I sent for her and we were discussing how long it would take her to begin the attempt – apparently a lot less than anticipated if healing priests and the Pilgrim leant a hand – when warning horns were sounded from the very same watchtower we’d taken that morning. An army approaching, it meant. I left the Artificer to it and saddled my horse, riding for the closest rampart and intercepting a report on my way. It was not an enemy army, I learned, but a surprise nonetheless. The Fourth Army, which should be at the Cigelin Sisters right now, had emerged from the Twilight Ways and was now approaching at a brisk pace.

That much was already unexpected, but even more so a particular detail I picked out after limping my way to the edge of the rampart. There was a banner flying above the advancing vanguard of the Fourth that I knew well, for it was my own – the Sword and Crown. That was not unusual, as every host within the Army of Callow had received one such standard when first founded. This wasn’t a standard, though, but a formal banner.

Aside from me there was exactly one person alive that had the right to fly it, and her name was Vivienne Dartwick.

Chapter 73: Signs

There’s nothing impressive about oracles, Chancellor. All that’s needed to foretell the future is a fool and a tiger pit.”

– Dread Emperor Malignant III

I’d never seen Vivienne in armour before.

Mind you, she wasn’t exactly barded for war and wearing full plate. She’d put on a blue riding dress, then accentuated that with a good steel breastplate topped by matching spaulders and a loose gorget. She’d not bothered with a tasset to cover thighs, preferring only a broad belt, and the lack of greaves and gauntlets softened the look. It was a good choice, I’d decided. Playing the warrior queen outright would not have suited her, but a martial touch that added to her increasingly regal manners would toe the line just right. It was a reminder that she might not be a soldier, but that she’d ridden out some of the worst scraps the Woe had ever been in without being dead weight. Considering Vivienne had spent most of her adult life wearing loose leathers and treading rooftops without ever developing an interest in fashion that I’d noticed, I could only praise whoever it was in her service that’d made the suggestion.

“Too much?” Vivienne asked, taking off her riding gloves.

Dry as the tone had been, I suspected that the slight undertone of abashment I’d picked up there wasn’t just me looking for pearls in a pigsty.

“It suits,” I replied, shaking my head. “And I notice you made sure you’d be able to fight if you had to.”

The riding dress wouldn’t mess up her footing too much, and she was a nimble one even without a Name to heighten the talent. I did not hide my approbation. There was no call to ever feel safe north of Salia, no matter what we liked to pretend.

“It’s the classic Summerholm cut,” she told me, sounding amused at my ignorance.

I snorted. Yeah, if there was one city in Callow where there’d it’s be a fashion staple to be able to fight in your dress it’d be the Gate of the East. I probably would have had to learn about this stuff if I’d ever held a proper court, with all the attached feasts and festivals and formal receptions that involved, but my kingdom had half on fire and on permanent war footing from pretty much the moment the crown was set on my brow. Mind, you as the daughter of a minor baron who’d held the title mostly in name since the Conquest it wasn’t like Vivienne would have been swimming in new dresses. It’d been a wealthy of upbringing, but that wealth had begun dwindling before she was ever born and the noble title had, as determined by Tower law after the Conquest, died with her father. There was a reason I’d had to raise her back to the formal Callowan peerage.

Black had preferred leaving my people’s nobility to wither on the vine with their titles intact rather than strip those outright, you see. It was less likely to lead to conspiracies, with all those suddenly landless knights and barons instead worrying about how they were going to pay for the upkeep of those mansions my father had so mercifully left them to own.

“The cloak goes with everything,” I shrugged. “What more do I need to know?”

“I still remember when you avoided wearing black like the plague,” Vivienne smiled. “How the times have changed.”

I grimaced, as this was a bit of a sore spot. I’d gotten used to the darker colours, in truth, but I did still have the occasional craving for a pretty sundress or a tunic in a tone you’d seen on a rainbow that’d not been cursed by some fucking warlock. The trouble was that the ‘Black Queen’ couldn’t be seen wearing those things, it’d take a bite into a reputation that’d come in too useful too many times for me to be able to justify wearing a dress that’d not been rolled in a barrel of soot beforehand.

“When I retire,” I told her feelingly, “I will wear nothing but pastels for a year. I solemnly swear.”

“I’ll look forward to the Mirror Knight expounding on how the pink dress is really a hint of your many perfidies to come,” she snickered.

We shared a moment of quiet amusement at the thought. I’d seen precious little of ol’ Christophe, as it happened. The White Knight had not been softhanded in making it clear that he’d disgraced himself, which had seen his popularity dry out some. Even those who would have been inclined to still lean his way had been kept away by the neat trick of there being no one really willing to argue with the Peregrine when he told you to go away. Tariq was proving a finer check on the Mirror Knight than I’d anticipated, though I still had to wonder if even the Grey Pilgrim was going to be enough to set that man straight. The chuckles faded, though, and I did not resume banter. It was Vivs here, not an officer or a ally, so I didn’t bother with subtlety.

“Why are you here, Vivienne?” I bluntly asked.

“Always a pleasure to see you too, Catherine,” she replied.

The way she tucked in that perfectly fine milkmaid’s braid told me that, once more, she was a little more nervous than her tone and face would imply.

“Don’t give me that,” I dismissed. “You know well that the only reason I could even spare you from your duties in Salia was because we need you with some battle honours to your name before you succeed me. I’m happy to see you, Vivs, but we’re not really in a time and place where happy’s what takes the day.”

“I know,” she admitted with a grimace. “And the truth is, my reasons for coming are thinner than I’d like. I take it this is just going to be the two of us?”

She gestured at the solar around us, situated in the same guildhall that Robber had found me hours earlier. Adjutant had accurately deduced that I’d want this solar – nice windows but not too large, sun-facing and with room enough inside for multiple desks and chairs – for my own and made warding it with our usual suite of protection a priority. He was still arranging the last details for the rest of my new lodgings and headquarters, but he’d be on his way soon.

“Hakram’s coming as soon as he can,” I told her. “Zeze’s got duties for a while still, and I left word for Indrani but I’ve no idea where she is in the city.”

Hunting for undead, I suspected. It was all a little too cat and mouse for my own tastes, but Archer had always liked a hunt and Keter’s last infiltrators made for interesting – if not overly dangerous to a Named – quarry.

“I was asking whether you wanted to bring in allied commanders, actually,” Vivienne said, “but I suppose you answered the question regardless.”

I shrugged. I wasn’t going to keep anything from them unless there was a call for it but I felt no need to include them into what was, on the surface, a purely Callowan matter. Both the Fourth Army and Vivienne herself were of my lot, it was to myself they answered first and foremost. Being in the room for this conversation was not a courtesy I felt I owed them.

“You were meant to command the troops at the defensive line down south,” I noted. “If General Abigail did take the Cigelin Sisters-”

“She did,” Vivienne confirmed. “It was a rout. The Tyrant’s Own under General Pallas baited the dead out of the defences with a feigned retreat, and when the battle was engaged the fantassins under her command found a way through the hills the dead hadn’t. They were struck in the sides as well, and their lines collapsed. Some five thousand withdrew, and the relief force the Dead King sent decided not to risk taking back the Sisters from her.”

Huh, fancy that. My nervy little general had come through once more. I’d expected a victory out of her, but this was more decisive than I’d anticipated.

“Good, then we should be establishing contact soon,” I grunted. “Doesn’t explain why you’re here and not commanding the Deoraithe and levies that we funnelled up to hold the defensive line.”

The Daoine troops I trusted to handle themselves, but Proceran levies had a nasty tendency to run when things got rough. Wasn’t some deep moral flaw, even if some of my soldiers like to pretend otherwise, but more or less what you should expect when you put a spear in a shoemaker’s hands and told him to fight something like beorn.

“The Augur believed that if I was not here by the moon’s turn, and the Fourth with me, then Procer would fall within the year,” Vivienne bluntly said. “The Astrologer wasn’t quite so sure, but she agreed that the storm about to come for Hainaut is going to be a horror and the signs are largely against us.”

“The Augur can’t see the Dead King,” I pointed out. “Or myself, for that matter.”

She could also be outmanoeuvered, as Black had proved during his ill-advised Proceran campaign. Her long-term predictions tended to be vague and her shot-term ones only mattered when they got where they needed to be in time for them to be useful.

“The First Prince saw fit to reveal that the Augur been working with the Forgetful Librarian to find a way around her blind spots,” Vivienne said. “It’s a process of elimination, or at least Hasenbach hinted as much. Every time I’m not here before the whiteout, after it the Hainaut front collapses.”

I frowned.

“The whiteout?”

“All our prophets encountered something similar,” Vivienne said. “Trying to peer into what happens during the coming battle here is somehow blinding for oracles. They’ve theorized it’s because there are too many entities involved who resist or outright muddle foretelling.”

Huh. I supposed we had gathered a significant amount of Named, which would pretty much twist Fate into a knot. On top of that there were Choirs involved – at least Mercy, possibly Judgement if it triumphed over the Hierarch at a critical moment – here on the Dead King and my own’s ability to screw with predictions. That was a lot of moving parts for a mortal oracle, maybe more than they would be able to physically comprehend all at once.

“The Astrologer insists that the stars indicate the Gigantes will be critical in what is to come,” Vivienne added, “but that one might be muddled. She’s also sure they’ll be crucial to something in Twilight’s Pass, and there’s barely any of them there.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“I wasn’t aware there were any at all,” I said.

“Hasenbach wrangled further concessions out of them through the Dominion,” Vivienne said. “She had to first get the Highest Assembly to vote a formal apology to the Titanomachy for the Humbling of Titans, though, which cost her some support in the south. Among her prizes is that the Gigantes sent a group to fortify the Morgentor, with an eye to doing the same to the rest of the fortresses in the pass.”

Well worth some Arlesite grumbling, in my opinion, but then I wasn’t the one that had to keep the shitshow known as the Highest Assembly in a semblance of functioning order. Somehow I suspected that if we’d not cooperated to let that same Assembly try the Red Axe for attempted regicide Hasenbach would have had a harder time getting that vote passed. It was easier to get princes to bend their proud necks when you’d proved you were willing to cross Named to protect their lives.

“We do have Gigantes in the city,” I said, “mind you, at the moment they should-”

The air shuddered, and for a moment it was as if all the world had gone still. As if I was a fly caught in amber, as if all the empty spaces of Creation had chillingly filled. And when that power released me, as primordially indifferent as the wave that could guide the sailor ashore or drown him, I found myself gasping as I leaned against the table. Vivienne was looking at me in a panic, already on her feet.

“Cat, are you all right?” she asked, taking my arm and supporting me.

I closed my eyes, focusing on breathing in and out. The urge to empty my stomach passed.

“I’m fine,” I got out.

“You’re not fine ,” Vivienne bit back angrily.

I gently pushed her away, still leaning against the table slightly.

“I’m not being stubborn, it passed,” I said. “And it won’t happen again.”

Blue-grey eyes examined me, as if looking for a lie.

“You didn’t feel that?” I asked her.

Slowly she shook her hand.

“Feel what?”

“I’m guessing,” I sighed, “that was my first taste of what Gigantes spellsinging feels like for someone... attuned to the parts of Creation I am.”

“Bad?” Vivienne quietly asked.

“What the Witch of the Woods does is a pale imitation,” I ruefully said. “They tap into something larger, Vivienne. It was like standing next to Sve Noc if they were losing their temper, but less... targeted.”

Masego has once called the godhead a trick of perspective, as the Hierophant’s eyes had always seen further than those of other men. I’d once been such a trick, when I had scavenged my way to rule over Winter, but it’d been blind flailing. It was not without reason that the Dead King had described my apotheosis as ‘accidental’ when we’d first met in Keter. These days I could touch those deeper rules on occasion, as I had at the Second Battle of Lauzon’s Hollow, but my understanding was limited and the use was rough on me. What the Gigantes had just done – and it must be them, for no one else in the city should be capable of this – had... ridden such rules, for lack of a better term. Like a ship on the tide, using the sea without mastering it. It was not they way I did it at all, but that I had the capacity in the first place must have been enough to make me... sensitive.

Hierophant would have been as well, I figured, but no one else in Hainaut.

“I’ll be ready next time,” I told Vivienne. “It was the surprise that left me vulnerable.”

Like a sucker punch in the gut, though they’d probably not meant it to be.

“Perhaps they could be prevailed upon to give warning, next time,” she mildly said.

“Yeah, I’ll ask the White Knight to pass the request along,” I softly laughed. “Shit, it’s been a while since something took me this badly by surprise.”

An overdue reminder, perhaps. It was a big world, and I’d not seen all there was to see in even my little corner of it. We resumed the conversation until Hakram joined us, but there really wasn’t much to add to what she’d already said. Vivienne had come to the capital with the Fourth largely on the word of the Augur and the Astrologer, and though she had freshers news than we about the going-ons in the south she truthfully didn’t have much to add. She was just as lost as we were, only now in addition to our uncertainties about the defence of Hainaut there was a hanging sword above our head to remind us that oracles were pretty sure if we lost here the entire war was lost. Lovely.

At least we had Vivienne with us, so even at the bottom of this freshly dug pit things were looking up.

—

There was need for a war council, as there so often was these days, but we went about it briskly. General Bagram, a large and aging orc who’d been the right hand of Juniper’s mother for decades before becoming a general in his own right under the Army of Callow, was added to that ever-expanding roster of people with a seat at the table along with my designated heiress, Lady Vivienne Dartwick. Discussions were without frills, as we all felt the invisible noose of Keter’s advance tightening around our necks, and there were few arguments. Given the very real possibility that we were going to lose either the gates or the walls at some point, Princess Beatrice gave formal permission to my sappers to prepare the streets to repel invasion. Pickler was still busy replacing the Ivory Gates, but no doubt she’d be delighted when informed.

Quartering was revised to accommodate the addition of the Fourth Army, which had blessedly come with an overfill of supplies that’d allow us to avoid rationing before the first supply wagons arrived through the Ways. I’d been right twofold, as it turned out: it’d been the Gigantes that had startled me, and the gate they’d helped the Blessed Artificer make was already technically finished. It was recommended it still go unused until dark, though, as apparently the parts where they had melted the veil between the Twilight Ways and Creation were still ‘cooling off’. Fucking Hells, the more I learned about Ligurian sorcery the more it fucking terrified me. And Triumphant had gone toe to toe with those people at their peak? Gods, what an utter monster that one must have been.

By sundown we all left the palace that Beatrice Volignac seemed so deeply happy to have reclaimed, most of the practicalities of our defence hammered out into a working shape. It was the Pilgrim and the White Knight who reached out to me afterwards, though, to arrange a formal council of Named as well.

“It can be considered a given that every Revenant in the principality, including the Scourges, is now headed our way,” Tariq said. “We need to prepare accordingly.”

“Agreed,” I said. “We need to divide our people into bands. And more importantly-”

“Your insistence that a band of five needs to be sent after the bridge immediately,” Hanno frowned. “Yes, I was told of it.”

“A heroic band of five,” I said. “Given the steep odds and how it’ll be impossible to really prepare, it’s the only setup with a chance of getting it done. And if Tariq told you about that, then he told you I’d like for you to lead it.”

It’d be a loss, because the White Knight took to most Revenants like a sickle to wheat, but I had doubts about any band led by a lesser hero succeeding. The Grey Pilgrim might make it as well, maybe, but Tariq always shone most when he was in a supporting role and that would muddle things up some.

“To clarify,” the White Knight mildly said, “on the eve of a battle prophesized to be decisive for this entire war, you request that I leave .”

“Yes,” I bluntly said, “and the Witch as well, you’ll need her.”

A light touch on my arm interrupted me, and I turned to find Vivienne cocking an eyebrow.

“I will leave the three of you to your conversation,” she easily said, “but if I might make a suggestion?”

She gestured at our surroundings, namely the now dead gardens leading up to the front gates of the Volignac family palace.

“There are perhaps more appropriate venues for you all to talk,” Vivienne finished.

“Common sense,” Tariq ruefully murmured. “Such a rare, precious thing. My thanks, Lady Dartwick.”

“I still feel the urge to take to rooftops on moonlit nights,” she replied, “so do not bestow upon me a surfeit of honours, Peregrine. Lord White, Catherine, a pleasant evening to you.”

Hanno returned the courtesy, while I cocked an eyebrow at her. She had a deft hand with heroes, as she’d just reminded me. I sometimes forgot she’d been part of William’s band, back in the day, and had been a decent fit there from what little I knew. Heroes tended to be split between those who considered her a fallen heroine, just punished by Above in the form of losing her Name, or those who essentially considered her a retired heroine who’d embraced other duties. Tariq tended to lean that way, though I’d never quite been able to pin down Hanno on the subject.

“I’ll see you later,” I told her. “It’s been too long.”

“Agreed,” she feelingly replied. “I’ll try to see if I can rustle up Indrani from whatever winesink she’ll have stumbled into by now.”

“Don’t bribe her with my liquor cabinet this time,” I warned, “it’s impossible to get the good stuff this far out, and...”

I suddenly coughed, feeling the distinctly amused gazes of two of the most prominent heroes of the age as I argued with the heiress to Callow about the fate of my booze stash.

“Carry on,” I said, vainly trying to claw back a bit of gravitas.

It, er, might take a while. Vivienne took her leave and I went for a walk through a garden of dead things with the Pilgrim and the Knight. To my surprise, I found the sight oddly troubling. I’d thought myself well acquainted with death, for how could I not be? I’d waded through it on too many battlefields to count, and thrice I’d come close to staying in those cold arms forever. I’d deal it out and suffered it, used it as a tool and flinched from it. If my throne had been set upon a foundation of anything, death was it. And still, limping through the garden, some part of me was dismayed. It was all dead. Ever tree gone grey, ever flower wilted every blade of grass frayed. Black earth had gone fallow, covered by dead leaves and insects forever still. This wasn’t the coming of winter or even some black tragedy. Intent had done this. Thorough, patient intent to kill every living thing there was to kill.

There was bare, graven beauty to the garden that felt like a knot in my throat. Was this the world the Dead King wanted? A field of grey from shore to shore, so utterly barren that even the sea grew lifeless lapping at it. I forced myself to set aside the thought. Stroking the thought of failure instead of tending to the needs of the moment was as good a way to see them turn true as any.

“It has to be you,” I said, standing in the shade of a leafless tree.

“I am not certain we need to send a band at all,” the White Knight calmly replied. “It would strip the defence of much-needed strength, and there will be time enough to attend the bridge after victory is secured here.”

“If victory is secured here,” I pointed out.

“In this, I believe the Black Queen to be correct,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “We should not bet the fate of all Calernia on our ability to win in battle against the hordes of Keter. It would be dangerously irresponsible.”

I nodded in appreciation at the old man’s words. Not that he was speaking them for my sake – Tariq had never been shy about disagreeing with me on anything at all, to my occasional displeasure.

“It weakens our ability to win that battle to send Named away,” Hanno flatly said. “In particular fighters as apt as Queen Catherine seems intent on assigning, in all humility.”

“Smashing that bridge isn’t going to be a pleasant autumn stroll, White,” I said. “I mentioned you and the Witch of the Woods because the job needs a captain and the power to collapse a bridge. To add survivability, I’d throw in the Forsworn Healer and pack the rest of the five with one set of muscles and a specialized killer.”

The kind that’d be able to kill something that couldn’t be killed conventionally, like the Painted Knife or the Rogue Sorcerer.

“There I must disagree,” Tariq said. “Not with the necessity of power, but with the White Knight’s presence being required. His role would be better suited to a situation like the approaching battle.”

Fuck , I silently thought. Part of me wanted to get snippy that the Heavens got to have two people around for this talk, but honesty compelled me to admit that there really wasn’t anyone else who would have made a difference. Hanno took advice from many parts, but it was my understanding that people who could make him actually reconsider a decision were few. The Pilgrim was as close to a peer as I’d be able to rustle up in Hainaut.

“You genuinely believe in the wisdom of thinning our forces before a major engagement?” Hanno asked Tariq, frowning.

“Empty prayers birth no miracles,” the Grey Pilgrim replied.

I cocked my head to the side. Huh. Yeah, that was solid namelore even if he was coming at it from the other way. He meant, I gathered, that for a prayer to be answered it would need to be sincere. In this case, that meant sending Named even when it would be costly. Black would have phrased it more along the lines of Creation being a machine that gave out according to what you gave it, while I myself preferred to think of it in terms of weight: you couldn’t topple a wall with a pebble. If you wanted a trebuchet stone, you needed to use a trebuchet in the first place.

“That only reinforces that we do need to send him,” I insisted. “We can’t half-ass this, it’ll backfire on us.”

“This isn’t a ritual field and we’re not bleeding prisoners to make a tower fly, Your Majesty,” the Pilgrim flatly replied. “There is no need to open our own throats to make this work.”

I bit out the very unflattering answer I had on the tip of my tongue, as I was pretty sure he knew the Kharsum words for both mother and goat.

“I remain unconvinced this should be attempted at all,” the White Knight said, frown deepening, “but when the two of you are in agreement you are rarely incorrect. I’ll concede to sending a band, and a heroic one.”

That was a start.

“I appreciate that,” I said.

“But I am horrendously wrong, and you must now tell me why,” Hanno drily replied, and I remembered why I liked him in the first place.

“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” I said, since the truthteller couldn’t read me. “Look, I’ve seen you ride this horse before. Picking out traps with the Fortunate Fool, picking fights specifically because they put you at a disadvantage.”

“Heroes placed in situations where it is possible but unlikely for them to triumph buck the odds more than they should,” Hanno agreed. “It is the way of stories, and stories have power.”

“But that’s the thing,” I said, “in those stories, you don’t send some nobody to kill the dragon and win the princess’ hand. Sure the guy seems like a nobody, but we know he’s not because the story is about him. He’s really a prince, or a knight, or fated in some way.”

“Your argument is that we must look for a specific manner of fate, then?” Hanno curiously asked,

“No,” the Grey Pilgrim quietly said. “It is that the dragon’s lair is full of skeletons whose mishap was being... insufficiently fated, yes?”

“Weight,” I said. “See, the bridge looks wide open right now: all armies are accounted for and far, we know where it’s being built and where most of the Scourges are. But it won’t actually be open.”

They were both looking at me like was belabouring something very obvious, which I supposed for heroes I was. Villain lairs were always trapped and vicious, while heroes didn’t really have those.

“So there’s going to be a fight,” I continued. “Which you figure you can win sending some solid heroes while keeping here our finest. That’s a mistake, though, because that bridge is something that could lose us this entire war. It’s the reason we began this campaign in the first place.”

Hanno’s eyes narrowed.

“Weight,” he repeated. “You imply that if we do not send shoulders capable of bearing the burden of this entire campaign, all they will be is... skeletons in a dragon lair.”

“I do,” I said. “And that means it has to be you. Because pretty much the only other person in your camp with that kind of pull on the war is the Grey Pilgrim, and no offence Tariq but-”

“No, I agree I would be ill-suited to the task,” the Pilgrim murmured. “Perhaps if Laurence was still with us it would have been different, two of us ancients with three younger, but as things stand the forces within the band would not be in harmony.”

“So you agree,” I pressed.

“I don’t,” Tariq replied. “You see this weight as a scale that must evened, when instead it should be seen as a crucible to help the rise of another great character. We should be discussing who among the servants of Above in the city could benefit from this opportunity, not entertaining sending away the White Knight before a pivotal point of a crusade.”

Godsdamned heroes. There was a point where optimism became delusion, and thinking every test was some sort of ladder was well past it. Sometimes you just failed , because you hadn’t been prepared enough and you’d underestimated the foe.

“This isn’t a fucking crusade, Tariq,” I said, exasperated. “I know it’s more comfortable for you to think about it that way, but my side of the fence is here too and we count . The role of a White Knight isn’t the same it would be in-”

“Enough,” Hanno said. “I understand the need for a swift decision, but I will not let myself be strongarmed before considering this properly.”

“We can’t afford to wait long,” I bluntly said.

“The discussion can be resumed tomorrow, after our council of Named,” the White Knight said. “I will sleep on this, at the very least, and consult with others I trust.”

Not what I’d wanted to hear, but I could already see that pushing any further now would just burn goodwill for no gain. I suppressed a wince, looking back on how I’d gotten drawn into an argument about ‘the role of a White Knight’ with the Pilgrim while said White Knight was right in front of me. Hanno was remarkably even-keeled, but that probably hadn’t done me any favours. It’d been a mistake, too, since the man I actually needed to convince hadn’t been the one I was arguing with. I snuck a look at Tariq. Had that been on purpose? Getting my thoughts out so the White Knight could see them splayed out without having been drawn into the thick of it.

“By all means,” I said. “We can continue this when everyone’s rested.”

“A good evening to you, then,” Hanno said, inclining his head,

I returned it, and he bade a significantly less formal goodbye to the Pilgrim. Who stayed behind, as I’d hoped he would. The two of us continued the walk towards the opposite end of the garden, his slow gait and my limp evenly matched. Neither of us pretended this was about anything but continuing the conversation that’d just abruptly ended.

“He is in a pivotal moment of his journey as one of the Bestowed, Queen Catherine,” Tariq said. “Sending him away from the battle could have deleterious effects.”

“Or it could be exactly what he needs, Pilgrim,” I replied. “We don’t know , either way.”

“His own leanings-”

“Are a consequence of his character, not some arcane working of fate,” I bluntly interrupted. “If he had some instinct niggling at him that this was a mistake I’d reconsider, but he argued based on logic. He thinks his place is here in the thick of it, herding heroes, so that’s where he figures he should be.”

“Because that is his place,” Tariq just as bluntly replied. “He is the White Knight, and the hordes of Evil has come.”

“Maybe that was true a century ago,” I said, “but you gave me a whole speech about how he has to find a new way, Peregrine. What you’re describing is more of the same.”

“This new way you argue for is also your way, Black Queen,” the old man said. “Not his. If this were his own notion I too would reconsider, but it is not.”

I grimaced. Yeah, I could see that from his perspective this was meddling on my part.

“It’s a strategic decision I’m pushing, not a personal or even a story one beyond my understanding of forces that need to be addressed for the operation to be a success,” I said.

It wasn’t exactly an apology or a justification, but it flirted enough with both he should be able to understand I wasn’t unaware of where I was treading.

“I believe you to be acting in good faith,” the Pilgrim acknowledged, “but that does not mean it would not lead to error.”

I breathed out.

“All right,” I said. “Then I’ll back off and stop pushing, if you do the same.”

He cocked an eyebrow, clearly less than inclined to agree. I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them. I was going to have to pay for the goods.

“I’m calling in my favour,” I said.

I’d not agreed to keep an eye out for Razin and Aquiline without putting a price on it. The old man’s face remained calm, but he studied me for a long moment.

“I will not argue for something I believe to be a mistake,” Tariq Fleetfoot said.

“I’m only bargaining for silence,” I replied.

He didn’t look happy about it, but then favours weren’t supposed to be things you were inclined to give in the first place.

“Then the bargain is struck,” the Grey Pilgrim reluctantly said.

We shook on it, wrists clasped, and broke off the grip as we reached the end of the path.

Leaving the garden of death behind, we went into the city and instead saw to the living.

Chapter 74: Herald

“It is not the grand choices of our lives that determine who we are. It is the small acts of small days, the quiet kindnesses and cruelties, that shape us like a smith’s hammer. And when those grand choices come calling we are already formed, already shaped, and we understand that it was never really a choice at all.”

– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

I’d returned to the cheesemonger guildhall with what I believed to be pretty sensible hopes.

By now Adjutant ought to have gotten the first set of wards anchored around the property and the watches set up, so I’d be able to steal a few seats and drag my friends into the solar for our first homecoming in much, much too long. A quiet evening before the storm blew in would do us all some good. Instead as I limped my way down the cobblestone road leading to the hall, cloaked under a veil of Night, I found that the place was swarming with activity. Wagons were being dragged by oxen into the estate, some filled with live chickens and the occasional goat while others were crammed fit to burst with barrels bearing the seal of my army’s ale rations.

Soldiers and officers from both armies that’d come to the capital were all over the grounds, seated at tables or on dead grass, talking and drinking and eating their fill. A few pits had been dug and pigs were roasting as well as a few birds, while sergeants stood by open ale barrels and marked tankards with red stripes after filling them – making sure no one emptied a keg on the own, I figured. Magelights had been put up, hanging from ropes crisscrossing the grounds, and braziers had been spread around to beat back the coolness of the night. It looked like a festival, honestly, and pretty rowdy one.

Some fighting circles were already emerging, greenskins and humans brawling under the eager shouts and bets of their fellows, and some mages had set up a pair of tables for an old Wasteland sparring game called achoma – kettleburn, in Lower Miezan. It was a Legion favourite, since all you needed to play it was six small cauldrons and five marbles. Two teams of three mages were trying to shoot the marbles into the cauldrons of the other side, using only low-grade fireball spells to both attack and defend. Anyone whose cauldron got scored on had to take a drink, which meant games tended to end with a need for healing by a still-sober practitioner.

To my amusement, I saw that some boys and girls from the House Insurgent had dragged up tables of their own and were trying to mimic the game using Light tricks instead. Mind you, what drew the crowds wasn’t any of those but the unholy melding of my own people’s proclivity for open-air plays and puppet shows during fairs and the goblin tradition of takha . A Taghreb word, that, since the Tribes had unsurprisingly never shared their own for it. It meant ‘jeer’ and stood for the way goblins tended to put on farces making fun of other people’s traditions, typically stealing the structure of an already existing play or story and then twisting it into a parody of itself.

Blending my people’s tendency for spite and the typical goblin fearlessness in mockery had birthed shows like the one I was currently looking at. They were called trick plays, or sometimes ‘Barber and Edward’ plays after the two characters that were a recurring motif in every show: the cunning goblin sergeant Barber, whose beauty always caused suitors to swarm after her, and morose young squire Edward, who always ended up winning and then losing a fortune before the end of the show because of his need to settle every slight. The two of them always ended up triumphing over the damned foreigners, usually by getting one of Barber’s suitors killed and Edward sacrificing his latest gain to screw over his latest enemy.

And so, surrounded by a drunk and cheering crowd, half a dozen Callowans and goblins were putting up a play on a table that, by the sounds of it, claimed to be a recreation of the Princes’ Graveyard. Gods, I really hoped there weren’t any Procerans or Levantines around. Trick plays did tend to be harsher on nobles than soldiers, but they weren’t kind on anybody . Not even me. In at least one of them, set after the Folly, Barber stumbled onto ‘me’ having nicked the standards of the Sixth Legion and painting them blue to use them for the Army of Callow, hoping no one would notice.

Which, you know, fair.

“- so we should just cut them!” a goblin wearing a tabard shouted.

Half the audience shouted it with her, as it was apparently a recurrent line, and I realized with a start that she was supposed to be the Saint of Swords. The real laughter came when the ‘Saint’ turned towards the ‘Pilgrim’ and found him asleep again, though, having failed to notice Edward stealing his staff with the intention of pawning it off to some Procerans. It uh, wasn’t an interpretation of the Graveyard real flattering to anyone who wasn’t part of the Army of Callow. There was a swift scene change, with a mage tainting the magelight green instead of blue to signify it, and I was treated to the sight of the Tyrant of Helike – played by a young Liessen girl – duelling one of his own gargoyles as played by a grizzled sapper.

The both of them, I grasped from context, sought Sergeant Barber’s hand in marriage. I smothered a laugh, still under my veil. The wretch would actually have gotten a kick out of that, I figured. I lingered long enough for the Tyrant and the gargoyle to defeat each other in a draw and was about to leave when the scene was changed once more and Edward ran into a cloaked shape, dropping the staff and when picking it up accidentally taking up the other person’s instead when he scampered off. Wait, that was a patchwork cloak even if the colours were faded. And a staff ?

“I swear I’ve seen this somewhere before,” the Black Queen on the stage observed as she looked at the Pilgrim’s staff, to the hooting laughter of the crowd.

My character then proceeded to go through an overlarge laundry list of foes real and imagined it could belong to, always with a second line dismissing why it couldn’t be them. I couldn’t help but smile when it came to the Lone Swordsman and the line went ‘ alas, ‘tis too long a stick to have been the one up his arse’ . Meanwhile Edward, on the other side of the stage, lost ‘my’ staff while in a panic and began deploring his upcoming executions by various methods in between foe couplets declaimed by the Black Queen. It ended with him imploring whatever Gods might be listening to bring the staff back, which a goblin with hands painted black making crow noises seemed about to answer.

On a whim, I drew on Night and wove two shades of darkness into crows. I passed them my staff of yew and let them fly, dropping it on Edward’s head. The crowd went utterly silent.

“And don’t lose it this time,” I sternly spoke through the Night, before unmaking the crows.

Half the actors looked like they weren’t sure whether they should be awed or terrified, but the crowd was not so ambivalent: there was a deafening roar of approval, followed by cheering. The play was waylaid for a bit, and with a satisfied smirk I left them to it. I’d send someone to get the staff back later, but there was no harm in it serving as a prop for a bit. Drifting away from the crowd, my attention was caught by a figure at the outskirts of it. Wearing a hooded cloak, it was lingering at the edges and sniffing about as if looking for someone – but never actually looking at people, as far as I could tell. The silhouette was hard to make out under the cloak, but those careful steps I knew well. I extended the Night veil to cover the both of us after hobbling close, which was nit immediately noticed.

“Taking a walk, Vivienne?” I idly asked.

She didn’t start, or even look particularly surprised, which kind of took the fun out of it. Bringing down her hood, she shot me a put-upon look.

“I had people waiting for you on the road, but you never showed up,” she accused.

I shrugged.

“Got curious,” I said, and gestured at the festivities around us. “Your doing, I take it?”

“It’s been a long war,” Vivienne said. “And it’ll get dangerous to cut loose when the dead start arriving.”

Fair enough. I wouldn’t begrudge my people a night of rejoicing, even if I’d not been the one to order it. With the supply wagons coming in through the Ways, we could afford to bite into our reserves a bit.

“It’s a good call,” I said. “Maillac’s Boot was rough on the Third, and the Fourth has known little but Twilight and battle for a month.”

“Hakram described that one as a little more than just rough ,” she grimaced. “And General Hune dying’s a blow. I know you weren’t close, but...”

My fingers clenched. It wasn’t always about closeness or friendship. If people stuck with you through long hardships, sometimes that alone was enough to be a bond. I’d trusted Hune, even while aware her allegiance was not deep, because I’d known her in ways I now knew the leading figures of the Army of Callow less and less. The circle that’d come up with me through the ranks was dying off.

“If we look back, all there is to find is ghosts,” I quietly said. “Forward we go, lest they catch up.”

The sounds and lights of the feast reached us through the veil of Night, muted as if belonging to another realm entirely. I sighed.

“I need a drink,” I said.

“That I can provide,” Vivienne amusedly said. “Brought a crate of Vale summer wine, too.”

“You give the best bribes,” I praised.

“You’re just a cheap date,” she snorted, linking her arm with mine. “Even the wakeleaf’s not that expensive, for a royal vice.”

I smiled, both at the repartee and the subtle way she’d made herself into a support for my bad leg now what that I’d leant out my staff.

“You’ve seen the treasury, Viv,” I drawled, “if I were an expensive drunk, Mercantis would own the country by now.”

“I like to think that, as a kingdom, we could afford to help you drown yourself in at least second-rate wines,” Vivienne solemnly replied. “That it what it means to be a patriot, Catherine.”

My lips quirked. I’d missed this more than I’d realized. Even after we’d settled some of the tensions between us at the Arsenal, there’d not been much time to spend together. And while most of the Woe had been with the army since the campaign began, I’d spent most of my hours in war councils, fighting or scheming – with a lot less of a reprieve for sleeping than was probably healthy. It was Hakram I’d seen the most, and over the last few months that relationship had grown... complicated in ways it’d not been when we were younger. From the corner of my eye I noted we were drawing away from the lights, past the guildhall itself and into the adjoining property.

“So where is it you’re taking me?” I asked.

“We made a fire,” she easily said. “Indrani found a good place and Hakram gathered everyone.”

My steps stuttered. Even leaning against her arm that led to a painful twinge, so I pull Night from the veil to smooth the sensation away as I gathered myself.

“Cat, are you all right?” Vivienne asked.

I nodded jerkily, righting myself up. I couldn’t quite grasp why that had blindsided me so much. It was the first night in ages we were all in the same place, it was only natural we’d have a fire. If I’d not been busy speaking the White Knight and the Pilgrim, I would likely have arranged one myself. Maybe that was it, I thought. Had we ever had one of these without my arranging it before? I couldn’t recall a single instance. It wasn’t like I should feel insulted by this, and I didn’t, it was just... I breathed out, somehow gladdened and saddened at the same time.

“You don’t usually keep your thoughts to yourself like this,” Vivienne said.

She tried to make the tone a teasing one, but it did not seep all the way through. I was smelling smoke and our steps had brought out as the edge of a cove of dead trees and skeletal bushes, so we couldn’t be far. I could almost see the fire’s light, the shadows it cast against the darkness.

“You ever feel like the world’s passing you by?” I quietly asked.

Our steps slowed, and she slid her arm out of mine. Smoke came on the wind, and the distant sound of talk and laughter. I could see the edges of the warm light, licking at the dark we were still cloaked in. It touched the side of Vivienne’s face, framing its shape. The dainty nose and heart-shaped chin, the cheeks that had lost some of the hollowness they’d born when she was still the Thief. And those piercing blue-grey eyes, considering me in silence.

“I used to,” she said, leaning back against the tree. “After joining the Woe. I didn’t know it, at first, because there were always so many things to learn, to do, to see. But it sunk, in eventually.”

“Not anymore, though?”

She smiled.

“I figured out what I want to do,” Vivienne said. “It was easier, before we met. I didn’t need to think, not really – I knew the Lone Swordsman was a hero, so his cause was just. If I fought for that cause then, I would be just as well. There was no need to look further.”

“A lot of the things he wanted were good,” I softly admitted. “I just didn’t think his way of getting them would work.”

“That’s always the trouble, isn’t?” Vivienne ruefully smiled. “The means. Everyone likes the dream, but no one can agree on how to get there.”

“Didn’t you?” I asked.

She snorted, shook her head.

“I know I want to see our home safe and happy and prosperous,” Vivienne said. “And I figured out, before it was too late, that being the Thief wasn’t going to help me with any of it. Once I knew who I wasn’t, it just... didn’t seem to matter as much that I didn’t know who I was.”

She leaned her head back, against the bark, looking up at the night sky.

“I wasn’t going against the current anymore,” she murmured. “I wasn’t drowning.”

Though her lips quirked into a smile, it was mirthless.

“Hakram saved my life, that night where he cut off his hand,” Vivienne said. “He shocked me out the nightmare. And every time I felt the urge to go back, to dismiss it, I saw the blood again. The bone and the flesh. And words can lie, Cat, but not those.”

We let the silence lie between us for a moment, almost comfortable.

“I don’t think I can do this for strangers,” I quietly admitted. “Maybe when I was young and it still burned in me, the knowledge that I was right and I was going to fix it ... maybe back then it was enough, just the principles. The ideal. But now it’s the people that bear me through it, and with every year there’s a few less.”

My fingers clenched.

“You are bearing me through this,” I said, “and it is breaking your backs.”

And at the end of the road, what will I find? I did not voice did, did not dare to, but terror coiled in my guts like a snake as the thought came unbidden. A world of strangers, and a graveyard where everyone I ever loved lies sleeping the dreamless sleep. Vivienne learned forward and slowly reached up her hand. I froze, wondering if she was going to cup my cheek, but instead she flicked my nose. I started in surprise and outrage, wrinkling it.

“Don’t be so arrogant,” Vivienne Dartwick chided me. “Do you think the banner’s yours just because you raised it, Catherine?”

My mouth closed. I was taken aback enough to be speechless, for once.

“We’ve all stayed with you for our own reasons,” she said. “For oaths or causes, because we believe in the woman or the dream, because we have our own pride. You don’t get to take that from us, Cat. It never belonged to you.”

“It’ll get you killed,” I hoarsely replied.

“There are things worth dying for,” she calmly said. “It’s not all on your shoulders, Cat.”

She looked at the light of the campfire in the distance, the drifting sounds of what seemed to be Indrani loudly singing. I followed her gaze.

“Sometimes other people can light the fire,” Vivienne gently told me. “You’re not the only one it keeps warm.”

She offered up her hand, slowly, and like a lost child I took it. She tugged me along, and as the veil of Night fell I let her take me home.

—

“- you take that back,” Robber said, tone deadly serious. “Sallastus?Really, Sallastus ?”

Akua Sahelian, somehow making a fallen log look like a sofa to lounge on, cocked an imperious eyebrow.

“His comedies were among the finest Miezan works that remain to us,” she replied.

“Oh Gods,” Indrani said, grinning like a loon, “you actually sound defensive.”

I pulled at my bottle – like most evenings whose bounty was arranged by Archer, it was heavy on bottles but low on cups – and shared a look with Pickler, who was rolling her eyes. It was always unsettling on a goblin face, especially at night when their eyes got somewhat luminous.

“I hate it when they talk theatre,” I told my Sapper-General. “I don’t know half the names.”

“My mother made me read some plays so I wouldn’t look like a fool if I participated in a takha ,” Pickler admitted, “but I always despised the stuff. I might as well have spent the time clipping my nails, at least it’d have improved my life somewhat.”

She was drinking from a tankard of dark beer that was about as large as human head, and so a significant chunk of her chest, which someone had painted the side of with a very nice, if threadbare, rendition of a human being set on fire. There were also notches around the rim, which I decided not to think too much about. There were a lot more than I’d anticipated.

“Neither of you have a speck of culture in you,” Hakram mourned, seated to my side. “It’s sad what this army has come to.”

“You read Proceran bodice rippers,” I sneered. “I take no commentary on taste from you at all, buddy.”

“Gobbler, Hakram, why ?” Pickler asked him, sounding genuinely puzzled. “It’d be like reading about mountain goats mating, only with pretensions of sentiment.”

“Hey,” I objected.

“No, she has a point,” Masego noted.

“- Augustina ?” Akua hissed, sounding outraged. “Perhaps if you want to hear Aulius Blandus’ verses as butchered by a second rate-”

A heartbeat passed, eyes moving towards the irritated-looking orc.

“Hierophant’s a member of an Ashuran love cult,” Hakram revealed, shamelessly betraying a comrade.

“I am?” Masego asked, sounding surprised.

Vivienne coughed, sounding a little embarrassed.

“It is possible as fee was paid in your name so you might be added to the rolls of the Covenant of Gasping Ecstasy,” she admitted.

Indrani, leaning her head backwards over Vivienne’s shoulder, wiggled her eyebrows.

“All right, you now have my undivided attention,” Archer announced. “Continue.”

“Tell me you didn’t use treasury funds for that,” I begged.

There was a beat of silence.

“It was from Indrani’s pay, she’s still stealing it,” Hakram said.

“Hakram, you treacherous whore,” Vivienne cursed, as I began laughing convulsively. “I knew it was a mistake to bring you into this.”

Indrani, not unexpectedly, was more amused than offended by the fact that Vivienne had continued robbing her for years. It wasn’t like she usually touched the coin I had kept in her name, anyways. Masego cleared his throat, cutting though my snickers and Vivienne’s continued tongue lashing. Indrani flopped gracelessly over Vivienne, landing on the dark-haired lady’s lap and then extending an empty hand – only for Masego to fill it with her bottle without even turning to look.

“Are there obligations attached?” he seriously asked. “I do not want to be a feckless associate.”

“He’s right,” Archer approved. “What did I even pay for? There better be naked parts.”

“I don’t believe participation in the yearly pleasure festival is mandatory,” Vivienne said.

“Are you quite sure?” Indrani hopefully asked.

“The priests have their sermons compiled every few years,” Adjutant told Zeze. “I’ll try to get you one of the scrolls.”

“That is very kind of you,” Masego beamed, but then his expression turned shifty. “Though am I to understand that as a trick this is an acceptable specimen?”

“For a human, maybe,” Robber said. “Not enough blood.”

“I am human,” Zeze helpfully reminded him. “Good, then. How might I go about making Adanna of Smyrna a member?”

Indrani, useless as always, began belly laughing and even Vivienne couldn’t hide a smirk. Neither of the goblins were inclined to intervene and I’d recently been informed that Hakram was a treacherous whore, so that left either me or Akua. I glanced at her, finding her looking mightily amused and very much disinclined to help.

“Zeze,” I said. “That, er, might be misinterpreted.”

He looked at me in surprise.

“How?”

“You’d be trying to make her part of a love cult of which you are also part,” I slowly said.

Indrani contributed a gestured that, while accurately representing what I was getting at, was very much less than helpful.

“This is why I call you a wench,” I told her.

“Ugh,” Masego said, wrinkling his nose. “How could anyone make that mistake? She is terrible. And she must know she is, as I frequently tell her so.”

Yeah, I had no trouble believing that. The frequent screaming matches were something of a hint.

“I do believe it is possible for Ashuran citizens to become parts of a prestigious ship’s crew in an honorary manner,” Akua idly said. “On occasion even ships that have sunk. Perhaps that might make a more fitting present, Hierophant.”

“Oh,” Masego muttered, “it would be as if I were telling her to go to the bottom of the sea. That is clever.”

He actually seemed pretty enthusiastic at the prospect of trying to get one over the Blessed Artificer, which was kind of heartwarming in a very Praesi way. The conversation drifted towards some of the more elaborate slights we’d seen dealt out over the years, something Robber was quite interested in arguing with the rest of us, and Vivienne eventually got tired of Archer being sprawled over her so she pushed her to the ground. Pickler had moved to sit on the other side of Hakram to discuss something about a fellow War College student I’d never known who’d recently gotten promoted back in Praes, so Vivienne slid into the spot by my side with a bottle of her own in hand. I offered up mine and we toasted, drinking down.

“I’m surprised we’re all here,” I said afterwards, eyes flicking on the other side of the fire.

Akua was telling a story about some ancestor of hers who’d drowned a Stygian slaver in melted slave chains, to the vocal approval of some around our circle.

“It’s out of my hands,” Vivienne murmured. “And I have made my peace with it.”

I hid my surprise. Forgiveness was not something either of us would ever offer over the Doom of Liesse, so I was not sure of her meaning. She must have sensed my uncertainty.

“I don’t deal in absolution,” she said. “Not for me, not for you, and certainly not for her. The Folly must and will have an answer. But it’s not for me to decide what it will be.”

She half-smiled at me.

“You’ve trusted me with a lot, Catherine,” Vivienne said. “And it’s not a tie that goes only one way. I trust you with this – I believe you’ll see justice done, in the end, or something like it.”

“I have you an oath, once,” I quietly said.

“I relieve you of it,” she said, without a speck of hesitation.

I went still with surprise, which had her smiling.

“What good would it to, for me to demand her suffering?” Vivienne murmured. “Would it unmake the tears of a single orphan, mend a single inch of blighted land? Liesse was lost, and all who dwelled within it, but I’ll not chase vengeance of healing.”

“I have not forgotten the Doom,” I said.

“I don’t expect you will,” she said. “It lingers in your dreams more than mine. Worry not of me, Catherine, when you see to this. I would be quite the fool, to need twice to learn the lesson that no amount of taking can ever set things right.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to answer to that. It felt like getting her blessing, somehow, but also like she was... washing her hands of it. As if it no longer concerned her. Troubled and yet dimly relieved, I sunk back into the warmth of the conversation instead. It was not long before my bottle was empty and the smile back on my face, the ebb and flow of conversation with old friends filling me whole. The hours passed, long into the night, and most of us stayed around the fire instead of returning to the guildhall. Indrani had brought blankets, and though Robber disappeared into the dark it was only after tucking in a very drunk Pickler affectionately. I drifted into sleep easily, but woke while it was still dark. There were still hours left until dawn, Sve Noc’s first gift told me.

I tried to stay under the blankets, by the dying embers of the fire, but I got restless. Taking care not to wake anyone I snuck away, finding my staff propped up against a tree not far. I couldn’t remember if I’d actually asked Hakram to see to that, but I suspected that even if I had not the dead yew would have turned up on its own. It was not an artefact, not exactly, but it was not a simple staff either. With the moon hung in the sky above us and a cool wind beginning to blow, I found my steps leading me to the guildhall. Not to find a bed, no, but to seek another old friend: the roof. It was flat atop, easy to tread, and easier still to limp to the edge.

I could not see the great valley that’d be spread out below around the plateau, but I could fix it in my mind’s eye. I breathed out and learned forward, as if tempting the fall. The streak of ice, that fear I would never entirely master, came as bidden. Like an old friend. Not the only one, though friend was not the right word for her.

“Do you still have the dream?” Akua softly asked.

I’d not heard her come, but I had known it. We were bound, she and I, had been since I ripped her heart out of her chest and stole her soul. Though she was next to me, I did not turn.

“Yes,” I murmured. “Though I came here, I think, because I am curious.”

“Of what?”

“If you stand at the edge of the cliff a hundred times, or a hundred times that,” I said. “Does the fear ever go away?”

I felt her gaze on me.

“Does it?” Akua asked.

I half-smiled.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Maybe it’s something that can be taught, with time and will. Maybe it’s just nature, Akua, and the best we can ever do is put a bridle on it and hope it doesn’t pull too hard.”

“Then why do you keep coming here, dearest?”

“Because I don’t know the answer,” I said, and turned to meet her eyes.

Lovely in the gloom, as she was lovely everywhere. And I felt it my clenching stomach, the fear of the drop, but it did not rule me. Not tonight. So I reached out, slowly, and as her gaze widened in surprise as I cupped her cheek. It was not a loud thing, or one requiring much power. Just will and knowledge. My fingers withdrew, having barely grazed her skin, and she went still.

“What have you done?” Akua Sahelian asked.

“I no longer have power over you,” I said. “You are bound to neither my mantle or my power, and Sve Noc has no purchase over your soul save what you give them.”

“You are mad,” she faintly said. “I could leave, right now. Even without Night, I know such tricks that...”

“I know,” I agreed.

“Then why ?” she hissed.

“Because I don’t know the answer,” I said and turned away, closing my eyes.

For a long time I stayed there, the wind in my hair, and let silence keep the night. When I opened them, Akua was still at my side. I almost smiled. Wasn’t that something?

In the valley below, far from my sight, the dead began to gather.

Chapter 75: Desolation

“My dear Chancellor, I am most disappointed in you. If she escapes the crocodiles before the rope snaps, then of course she will go free. What does it matter, that she will oppose us again? Only the fearful insist on winning every game of shatranj they play.”

– Dread Emperor Malevolent I, the Unhallowed

I didn’t know which part should rightfully be considered the miracle: that we’d managed to cram this many Named into one hall, or that a brawl had yet to ensue.

“Some among us call them the Scourges,” the White Knight said.

The tone had been calm, unhurried, but the words alone were enough to kill every whisper in the ruined basilica where we’d gathered. There were nearly thirty Named were here – twenty-seven, if you counted my own coalescing claim – but Hanno had the undivided attention of every last one. Revenants were never pleasant surprises on the battlefield, but most people here had run into one of the Scourges at some point. Some had walked away with scars or dead friends, and even those who’d gotten lucky to be spared either now knew better than to believe the Dead King was without champions of his own.

“That is not without meaning,” Hanno of Arwad said. “You all understand, as few ever do, that names have power. That they bind us to Creation and bind it in return.”

The dead had not been kind to the Basilica of Perceval Martyred. Neshamah had made sure that no holy grounds remained in the capital after taking it, and it would take long before the priests were able to consecrate this place again. The defilement had been... thorough. Dust, soot and ash now painted once-pale walls, and there was hardly a single pane of tainted glass that’d not been shattered. An entire hunk of wall had been ripped out to the side, reduced to rubble, and the front gates were unusable from the bell tower that’d been smashed down against them. Even the ceiling had not been spared, some kind of great horn piercing at it, and so sunlight came down in dusty rays on the tall terrace where the White Knight stood.

Below the rest of our Named were gathered in small gaggles in gangs, keeping to circles of their owns even within the greater allegiance to Above or Below – however loose it might be – and seated on the same ornate stone benches where the mighty and wealthy of the city of Hainaut had once sat to be lectured by priests now long dead. I stood above on the terrace as well, leaning against a sloping arch with my staff of dead yew resting against my shoulder, but I liked the coolness of the shade better. I’d looked like a right idiot if I had to pull down my hood because the sun was getting in my eyes, and I could only be amazed by the way that the White Knight could stand in a sunbeam and apparently not mind in the slightest.

Truly, his powers were beyond the reckoning of mere mortal such as myself. Hanno glanced at me, either smelling out the sarcasm or to indicate I should pick up where he’d left off. We’d not planned this out in great detail, but it was true in a way I had more experience with this part than he did. I pushed off from the arch, limping to the edge of the terrace.

“Naming them gave them weight,” I said. “Part of that was in your minds, holding up as something to be dreaded or fought, but what truly matters is the weight it gave them on Creation. A Revenant belonging to their number is no longer simply one of the Dead King’s stolen corpses, it is now a Scourge .”

I let the word ripple out, enjoying the way it reverberated in the hall even now that there was a gaping hole in the wall. Say what you would about Alamans, they knew how to build temples.

“That story will be as wind in their sail,” I said. “They’ll be harder to destroy because of it, a little luckier and a little sharper. More than that, they’ll find it easier to kill you .”

No one argued with what I’d said but I found some faces growing blank or, for the less practiced, outright skeptical. Mostly on the heroic side, as my lot rarely needed much convincing that the world was out to get them, but the Berserker and the Headhunter stood out in their almost-derision. Irritated, I struck at the stone with my staff once and let the clap jolt half of them.

“Don’t be fools,” I said, tone grown sharp. “You think you survive falling off cliffs and make it through blood-curling curses because you’re just that good ? As Named we are not only subject to the common rules of Creation, but those of our kind as well. Sometimes that is a shield, but if you act like a strutting boy it will bury you.”

I swept the crowd with a look and this time found a more receptive audience. Good. I wasn’t going to tolerate our losing Named just because the world had not yet gotten around to beating some measure of humility into their bones.

“If we raise the Scourges above our other foes, as we have, then Creation will follow,” I said. “And the least of the ways they’ll be raised is in the way that all those little fortunate turns, all those coincidences in your favours? They’re gone. ‘The Scourges can kill Named’. That is the very bedrock of the story we made about them.”

I flicked a glance at Hanno, who took back the torch, and retreated back to my more comfortable nook as he stepped into the light again.

“Yet we can kill them as well,” the White Knight calmly said. “Names, Bestowals, Choosings – however you would call what we are, it is a nature that thrives when overcoming adversity. All that the Scourges represent is an adversity to overcome.”

I almost cursed, since that kind of ‘life is a trial we are destined to win’ attitude being reinforced by the fucking Sword of Judgement was the last thing we needed before this scrap, but I was pleasantly surprised after a moment.

“Make no mistake,” Hanno continued, “the Black Queen did not misspeak. Fail to heed her warnings not only at your own peril but at that of everyone here, and millions more across Calernia. Yet in raising our opposition higher, we have also given ourselves deeds to strive for.”

He smiled, face serene.

“Great foes are overcome,” the White Knight told them. “That is the shape of such stories.”

Well, that or you died. I could see how that wouldn’t be the greatest speech to give on the eve of battle, though, so I’d let it slide. I stayed back and let him keep at it a while longer. We’d already tended to the few complaints under the Terms there’d been, which for once hadn’t mostly been backbiting between his folk and mine. My armies hadn’t been the only one to enjoy a night of drinking and festivities, after the Fourth arrived, and in the drunken celebration that’d ensued a great deal of... indecorous behaviour had ensued. It was worth hearing them out just for the petty pleasure I’d felt at Hanno making the Page admit that the ‘desecration of his affairs’ he was talking about was some drunk Volignac trooper taking a piss on his saddlebags. The mood had been pretty lighthearted, even through the inevitable amount of sniping that ensued when Named were forced to sit in the same hall, but moving on to the meat of the reason we were here had doused that. Revenants were rarely a laughing matter, and the Scourges never.

“- by joining the combat and eyesight reports, we have determined which of them are likely to be participate in the coming battle for Hainaut,” Hanno said, then paused. “Our thanks to the Adjutant for this work, as it was him who saw to the work and found signs of the Tumult having operated on the outskirts of Prince Klaus’ column.”

There were some murmurs of appreciation, several grudging, and stone silence from others. I drummed my fingers against the side of my staff, committing those faces to memory. One of them had me sneering: like I’d needed more of a reason to dislike the Valiant Champion.

“So how many are we in for?” Roland asked.

“Eight,” the White Knight calmly said.

Yeah, that did little to raise spirits. Each of those Revenants were dangerous on their own, but several became significantly worse when they were paired with proper allies – the Hawk and the Mantle in particular. The Berserker let out a low whistle and grinned.

“Eight out of ten,” she said. “Keter really wants us dead, looks like.”

“Eight out of nine,” I corrected, pushing off the arch. “The Firstborn got the Stitcher up north.”

That was well received. The Tumult was more of a danger, practically speaking, but the Stitcher’s tendency to turn up in a dragon’s worth of animated dead bodies was more of a horror to behold than the Tumult’s own preference for tossing storms at soldiers.

“The Seelie is missing,” the White Knight said, “but we believe her to out east, leading the assault against Princess Rozala Malanza. Every other known Scourge has been encountered by one of our columns as they advanced, and they should all be within marching of when we believe the battle in Hainaut will happen.”

I smiled, beginning to methodically stuff my dragonbone pipe with a packet of wakeleaf.

“So now we talk about the pleasant end of the business,” I idly said. “Namely, how we’re going to destroy them all.”

Even coming from the – former, thank you Cordelia – Arch-heretic of the East, that won some cheers both sides of the gallery. Hanno picked up the thread as I passed my palm over the bowl, lighting the leaf with a small flicker of flame, and I breathed in the smoke with a small pleased sigh.

“We have some knowledge of the abilities of all eight, and will speak of them in order,” the White Knight said. “Beginning with the Wolfhound.”

There was a beat of silence, then I cleared my throat.

“Hierophant,” I prompted.

Masego started, as if surprised. My eyes narrowed and I threaded small tendrils of shadows along the arches going up the ceiling. He’d not had an open book in hand, no, but looking at it from above... that sneaky little shit. Three rows back there was an open book in Mthethwa, which I was pretty sure he’d been turning the pages of discreetly with wrested magic. He’d been using the clairvoyance of the glass eyes to look through the back his own head and the rest of the things in the way, reading without even giving a visible hint. I gave him a look making it clear we’d be having words about this later even as Indrani, seated at his side, snickered in amusement at his expense. She did deign to tell him whose likeness had been asked for, at least, and Zeze had an illusion of the Wolfhound up in the blink of an eye.

It was pretty obvious why the Revenant had earned that sobriquet: a sculpted helmet of iron in the shape of that animals head had been its signature since its first appearance, though he also seemed to prefer using a sword a board when it had the choice. Armoured from head to toe, the Wolfhound’s face had never been seen, though he’d spoken with Named on occasion.

“Most of you will have encountered the Wolfhound at some point,” Hanno said. “He is, by our reckoning, the Scourge with the fewest deaths – Named or not – to his name. That is because he is rarely out alone.”

“He’s a bodyguard,” I bluntly said. “And one of the better Revenants when it comes at taking a blow. He seems able to see through illusions and able to partly shrug off aspects. As I understand it, the Mirror Knight experience this firsthand.”

Christophe the Pavanie, seated near the back of the heroic side and with only Tariq sharing his bench, looked surprised to have been called on.

“I did,” he replied. “We’ve clashed... six times, now? One of my aspects allows me to reflect the blows of my enemies, to turn them back, but it did not affect him the way it should have. The strength was weakened before it touched him.”

“It has been the same with magic,” the White Knight added. “He is not immune to spells, but they do seem to weaken when turned on him.”

“Weaknesses?” Roland called out.

“We haven’t found any,” I admitted. “He doesn’t seem to have any great offensive talents, but when it comes to the defensive he doesn’t seem to have any great flaw. It’s why we usually see him partnered with another Scourge, they’re expected to be handling that aspect.”

“The Twilight Ways would destroy him,” the Grey Pilgrim said.

I nodded.

“They would,” Hanno agreed. “For those of you who are able to open gates, it is a valid tactic. Still, as with all Revenants I would warn you of mobility – even the slow are quicker than they seem, and they appear to be able to feel the forming of a gate into Twilight.”

Which did make an unfortunate amount of sense. Creation liked balance: the Ways were deadly to Revenants, so the Revenants could smell them out. I would have appreciated the Gods suspending that rule until the lives of everyone on Calernia were no longer on the line, but deities did tend to be inconsiderate shits. Except for my own splendid and flawless patronesses, of course. I felt Andronike’s unamused touch brush against my mind, the divine equivalent of a half-hearted glare.

“We do have some other talents we believe would go through his defences,” I said. “Among them, the Rapacious Bard is capable of affecting souls. That should ignore the protection.”

“Overwhelming physical strength works as well,” Hanno said, a tad drily.

Between the Berserker, the Champion and the Mirror Knight we had that covered.

“The partner is usually the trouble,” the Barrow Sword pointed out. “Whoever runs into him needs to expect a hard knifing.”

“Colourfully put,” Hanno said, “but essentially true. So far we have seen him paired with the Hawk-”

I saw the Mirror Knight winced, as if still hurting, and Archer smile unpleasantly. She’d not liked that the Hawk had gotten to escape from their duel in the slightest.

“- the Mantle and the Varlet,” Hanno finished. “We should not dismiss other possibilities, but Keter does tend to favour certain sets of tactics.”

I pulled at my pipe, blowing smoke upwards. The White Knight was right. It was, I suspected, because Neshamah was undead. He couldn’t really learn anymore, even when infusing himself with the knowledge of his latest acquisitions. So instead he let his Revenants find approaches that work and then used his wits to make openings for that knife instead – a skill he’d mastered while still alive.

“We burned two aspects of the Varlet’s at Maillac’s Boot,” I announced. “So I won’t count them out, but they’re got a lot less of a bite now.”

“It’s the sneaking aspect that’s left,” Indrani said. “So watch for daggers in the back, it’s what it has left.”

It was a spirited decision that ensued, moving through one Scourge after another. The Hawk, deadly at range and harbouring an aspect we believed have her the simple ability to ‘kill’. It was why her arrows, even though often made up of mundane material, could wound even someone like the Mirror Knight: there was nothing that she could not, in principle, kill. She was weak up close, though, and tended to leg it when Named closed range. The Drake, though very difficult to kill by most villainous means, fared poorly against Light and Tariq had teased out of him at Maillac’s Boot what we believed to be his last survival trick. The Mantle shared the weakness against Light, at least great quantities of it, but was capable of hamstringing practitioners the same way she did me.

The Tumult – or Archmage, as heroes insisted – was a spellcaster on par with both Masego and the Witch of the Woods, meaning if we didn’t want casualties to start shooting up the moment it showed up we needed to field either against it immediately. Its fondness for using storms and weather meant most of our fighters struggled to close range. Indrani couldn’t do shit to him even using See to aim. The Axeman, as they called the Pale Knight, hadn’t been encountered frequently save by those who’d served in the Cleves front. While he was just as frustratingly hard to scratch for everyone as I’d found him, the Headhunter pointed out that the way he’d always avoided the Myrmidon and the Red Knight in fights meant he must have some weakness to his armour. The Mirror Knight noted he seemed to often serve as leader among not only Revenants but the lesser dead, a tactician as much as champion. There was little to say on the Varlet, save that not even our finest wards seemed entirely capable of stopping its sneaking about, which left us with only one left.

The Prince of Bones.

“Light can make a dent,” Hanno said. “Though only so much.”

His stance had loosened over the length of the conversation, first going from calm to easy and then all the way to him sitting at the edge of the terrasse. I was, myself, leaning against a half-broken stone pulpit and pulling at my second packet of wakeleaf.

“He can close Twilight Gate, if they are still forming,” the Witch of the Woods flatly said.

I cocked a brow. She’d not taken off her painted clay mask, but I gathered that under it she was frowning.

“Mine as well,” the Pilgrim agreed. “Though not quickly, and it can be fought.”

“Sorcery doesn’t work either,” the Harrowed Witch volunteered. “Mine, anyways. I can dent if I put my full strength into the spell, but think we’d have to strip him layer by layer to get anywhere.”

I didn’t seen an obvious solution to the Prince of Bones either, to be honest. The illusion of him Masego was providing made it clear why: we were dealing with, essentially a corpse encased in what had to be a few hundred pounds of steel. It looked like armour, but it wasn’t. Just layers upon layers of metal, moved by the necromancy buried safely deep within. Worse, that steel was layered with enchantments and whatever devilries the Dead King could muster. Running away wasn’t usually an issue, the Prince was slow on the move, but when you couldn’t run? Even the Pilgrim hadn’t been able to put him down, and the man had a Choir whispering tricks in his ear.

“The Firstborn tell me it’s essentially the same with Night,” I offered up, having never fought him myself. “And he usually sticks with the Grey Legion, so he won’t be easy to pick off.”

“We just need to crush him head on,” the Berserker insisted.

“Crush what, solid steel?” the Barrow Sword mocked. “No, what we need is the right blade.”

A few looks were flicked the Mirror Knight’s way. The Severance hadn’t been a secret since the incident at the Arsenal.

“We mean to use it for the Dead King alone,” the White Knight said, “lest he find a way to overcome its edge.”

“If it comes to that, we’ve been able to bury him before,” I said. “The Witch of the Woods has done it. It’s not a killing stroke, but we can keep him out of our hair long enough for enough Named to gather something will stick.”

It wasn’t the most confidence-instilling of suggestions, but at the moment it might genuinely be the best we got. And, to be honest, if we could deal with the Grey Legion for good the Prince would be much less of a threat. I pointed out as much, which Tariq backed to the hilt.

“Alone he is a slow, lumbering monster,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Much of his power comes from his legion – the Hashmallim believe some of his Bestowal is invested in his soldiers, and that they in turn empower him.”

“If it comes to that,” I finally said, “I’ll authorize the last of our goblinfire to be used.”

That cheered some but other less. Not only because the green flames were notoriously prone to spreading out of control but also, I realized in a startling moment, because some of the people here believed the Prince would actually survive the fires. Most of them had never encountered the substance, I reminded myself, but I still found myself shaken by the skepticism. The conversation stretched out for another hour, mostly when Named were willing to share particular talents that made them well-fitted to fighting one of the Scourges, but eventually we called the council at an end. I kept Ishaq back, as the Barrow Sword had essentially been confirmed as my lieutenant among villains when I kept bringing him to war councils, while Hanno was instead accompanied by the Pilgrim.

“Some bands seem like natural fits,” the White Knight said.

“Agreed,” I grunted. “Troubadour, Summoner and Guardian?”

The Silent Guardian had signed that she believed she’d be able to handle the Wolfhound, due to an aspect of hers, so the Summoner for mobility and the Troubadour for the killing stroke were the obvious additions.

“Either Huntress or Sidonia with them,” Hanno replied, nodding in assent.

“Huntress,” I said. “I know for a fact she’s not only competent at range but trained herself in tactics against archers.”

By which I really meant Archer, but it’d work against the Hawk as well and she could imbue her arrows with Light so that’d be trouble for Mantle too.

“The Young Slayer with them,” Tariq suggested.

I cocked a brow, but Ishaq was stroking his beard in agreement.

“As a spotter and a skirmisher both, the boy has talent,” the Barrow Sword said. “If you desire the Huntress to be one of the strikers, then you need a replacement.”

I glanced at Hanno, who after a moment nodded.

“Sold,” I said. “Mirror Knight for the Prince of Bones?”

“There’s no one else who would be able to take a hit from him,” the White Knight replied. “Who to pair him with is the issue. I would argue against a full band here.”

The Barrow Sword, I saw, was watching us both like a starving hound being shown into a larder. Why? After a moment I realized that even as I thought the question, Ishaq had asked it out loud.

“Because Hanno doesn’t think we can kill the Prince of Bones,” I said, “which means investing a full band there would be a waste. A partner, though, is pretty much a precaution to keep the Mirror Knight alive.”

“I do not understand what makes him different from the Wolfhound,” the Barrow Sword slowly said, “save perhaps greater strength.”

“The Prince of Bones is a hammer,” Tariq calmly said. “We can dull the blow, but it will fall. The Wolfhound, and whoever will accompany him, are blades we can break.”

“It’s going to go the usual,” I explained. “You know, the beats – we win, we lose, we win again. Only with Wolfhound and partner, like Tariq said we have a good change of rolling those two Scourges up outright. Kill them clean. We don’t have that with the Prince. Instead we use those beats to pull out the Mirror Knight when this goes south on him, and we just need a partner for that. Not a full band.”

The Barrow Sword looked at us, smiling in glee and yet somehow almost frightened.

“Is it always like this?” Ishaq asked. “Battles between Bestowed. Like... shatranj for the mad, with half the rules unknown and the rest shifting?”

I cocked my head to the side. In my experience?

“Yeah, pretty much,” I shrugged.

I turned when the heroes chuckled, met with almost fond looks.

“The Black Queen has sharpened herself against exceptional opponents,” the Pilgrim said. “I have known few Bestowed, either by Above or Below, whose knack for stratagems was stronger.”

The Barrow Sword had the gall to look kind of relieved, the shit.

“If this practice is to be considered an art,” the White Knight said, “in all humility you might be considered to stand before some of its finest living practitioners.”

Compared to the Intercessor we were all rather lacking, but then I supposed that was rather his point. I cleared my throat.

“I was thinking Stalwart Apostle,” I said. “I’m told she’s worked with him before, and though she’s hardly a veteran-”

“I must disagree,” Hanno said.

“Indeed,” the Pilgrim said. “Christophe is a remarkably enduring young man, but the foe is not one to underestimate. The Forsworn Healer would be a more appropriate partner.”

“That leaves you as our primary healer, Tariq,” I said. “Which is a fucking waste, considering your striking power.”

“More lives will be saved by your hand red than pale, Peregrine,” the Barrow Sword said.

There was a challenge in the tone, but Tariq seemed disinclined to address it.

“We can revisit,” the White Knight said, correctly ascertaining I wasn’t convinced. “For the Axeman – the Pale Knight, if you insist, though we seem to have a profusion of knighthoods these days – the Headhunter and Vagrant Spear seem like our finest foot forward.”

I mulled that. The Headhunter knew their way around fighting the Pale Knight, and Sidonia had a knack for killing things she shouldn’t be able to. Neither were good at taking hits though.

“Needs muscle,” I said. “Berserker?”

“I had thought to leave them a pair,” Hanno admitted. “If we use bands to go aggressively after the weaker elements at first...”

“That’s a recipe for bodies on the floor,” I grunted. “Two pair against two of the Dead King’s heavies? We’re losing at least one of those for sure.”

“The Hierophant against the Archmage seems a match all can agree on, at least,” Tariq stepped in.

I inclined my head to the side.

“I was considering going after them with the full Woe, actually,” I said.

“Not Lady Dartwick, surely?” the Pilgrim asked.

“No,” I said, “we’d need muscle instead. I have candidates.”

One was by my side, but the downside to taking Ishaq was that he was a natural captain: he’d be a lot more useful as the head of a band of five. That left two other options, each hard to swallow for different reasons. The Valiant Champion was honestly probably the finest shield left, with both the Guardian and the Mirror Knight already assigned. I just happened to despise her. And the other was, well, the Squire. Between Arthur and Indrani we’d be able to hold a line up close if we had to, while Zeze and I could slug it out with the likes of the Archmage without missing a step. The issue, though, was that Arthur Foundling himself might be a threat to our lives. His story was not one that seemed all that friendly to the continued survival of the Woe.

“I would agree in principle,” Hanno slowly said. “The Archmage is the Scourge I would like dealt with soonest.”

It was all haggling after that, were I began to discern different strategies. Ishaq was fresh to this sort of planning so he tended to fall back to the Levantine conception of a band of five, the same that’d founded the Dominion itself: Champion, Slayer, Binder, Brigand and Pilgrim. Which wasn’t a bad instinct, in most circumstances, but he needed to wean himself off it. When facing the unknown balance was useful, but when planning the destruction of a known quantity it was better to tailor the band to the foe. Tariq, on the other hand, was coming at it from another angle entirely: he was setting things up to keep Named alive. Not because the old man was a soft touch, although when he could afford to be he was, but because in the Pilgrim’s experience if heroes fought an enemy for long enough they won .

I wasn’t going to argue with that too much, but there were risks to that kind of thinking. Both sides of the fence were playing here, and I’d proved at the Battle of the Camps that some calibre of foe time wasn’t enough to overcome. Yet theirs, were in away, the old conventions of Named warfare. Hanno and I had been raised by our teachers to approach those fights differently. The difference between us, I began to notice, was that he seemed much more inclined to take risks. I chalked it up to the habit of having providence on his side, at first, but eventually I was forced to concede otherwise. I was just used to planning from the starting position that I was going to lose something before it was all over, while the White Knight had known the kind of full-throated victories that’d been so rare in my career. He’d known them pretty regularly, too, with the defeats at Black’s hands being pretty severe departures from the norm. We settled what we could for today, agreed to speak again tomorrow and broke off.

Except he didn’t leave and neither did I, because I’d noticed something and he’d not tried very hard to hide it.

“Witch of the Woods,” I said. “Valiant Champion. Stalwart Apostle, and last of all the Merry Balladeer.”

Names he’d been careful never to let drawn into an assignment, along with his own. A pretty neat band of five, though the Apostle was young and Hells if I knew what he wanted out of the Balladeer. No Named was every truly without strength, but as far as I knew she was a bardic Named without any standout talents.

“I did not mean to hide it,” Hanno said. “It was simply not a discussion I wanted to have with company.”

My brow raised, as did my wariness. I’d already sworn oath to Tariq that I’d not meddle with how the White Knight overcame his doubts, and that meant not letting myself be drawn into too pivotal a conversation.

“It’s a band of five,” I acknowledged. “I’m simply not sure what you mean to do with it.”

North, to end the threat of the bridge that was still looming tall in the distance? Or to lead them here in the city, a blade against the Scourges. Hanno chuckled, though the days where the sound would have carried that undertone of serene amusement seemed pass. Whatever certainties it’d been that’d lain at the heart of the calm, they had been shaken. Shit , I thought, Tariq’s right . I’d still half-believed, deep down, that the old man had been exaggerating. Not so much, looking at the unease on the White Knight’s face now.

“I was not so certain myself, when I woke up this morning,” Hanno said. “But it is going north, Catherine. It must be the north.”

I slowly nodded. It was what I’d wanted, only now getting it was making my fingers twitchy. Unsure if a mistake had been made or not.

“The bridge at Thibault’s Wager must be broken,” I finally said, choosing my words.

“How carefully you speak around me, these days,” the White Knight wanly smiled.

I did not answer. I knew a dead end when I saw one.

“I do not know,” Hanno finally said, “how much good I can truly do here in Hainaut. You are a capable leader and tactician, seasoned in leading Named.”

“Your departure would be a loss,” I honestly said. “And not just because of your skills in combat. But I still believe it to be a necessary one.”

“I imagine you do,” the White Knight said, “though that is not what moves me to go.”

He looked up at the ceiling, where the afternoon had turned the lay of the sun. Shadows gone bright, light swallowed up by the shade.

“There are goods I do not know if I should strive for,” Hanno of Arwad said. “If I can achieve, even if I did.”

He breathed out.

“So I will start, perhaps, with the good of which I am certain,” the White Knight said, meeting my eyes. “It will be north, Catherine Foundling, and the light that still lies within my grasp.”

Chapter 76: Rapt

“Princes dream of victory, farmers dream of peace.”

– Proceran saying

There would be no hiding the departure of the White Knight, so there was no point in even trying. We did the opposite instead: all but threw a godsdamned parade for his band, gallantly going into the unknown as they were. We rustled up a crowd drawing from all armies, got them cheering with a few speeches about heroism and how of course we were going to win, just look at how Evil that fucker the Dead King was. Paraphrasing as I might be, I liked to believed I’d seized upon the essence of the oration. If you filled the belly of soldiers and opened up casks of booze they’d cheer at pretty much anything, in my experience, so I had it arranged. Because the cheering was what mattered, you see. It was what would stick in their heads when they thought back about this.

The White Knight and four other heroes were leaving in broad daylight and the streets were half a festival, so of course it was a good thing. Not something to get angry about, or afraid. Hanno and the Witch of the Woods were both major losses from the perspective of defending this city, and soldiers would know it deep down, but so long as we set the tone on how they should think of their departure it shouldn’t result in a morale loss. I supposed it would be in poor taste of me to hope that the Valiant Champion got herself killed during the adventure, you know in a magnificent sacrifice for the sake of the world and all that good stuff.

Thankfully I’d never been above bad taste, so I hoped my petty little heart out.

We had fresher cats to skin, though, so I did not spare much thought for the matter as I had no doubt that Hanno would smash that bridge to pieces. Besides, perhaps removing himself from the turbulence of politics for a while would help the White Knight settle his doubts. There was nothing like a straightforward, hard-earned win to help the world make sense again. The defence of the capital would not be as straightforward an effort, and there was no doubt that a defence would soon be needed: the dead were gathering in the plains below. Like rivers coming down the hills circling the great valley at the heart of Hainaut, undead came flowing at our feet.

We conducted sorties, at first. Every day or so we sent a few thousand horse through the Twilight Ways and attacked some of the smaller packs of undead, striking quick and hard before withdrawing into the Ways before the enemy could gather in sufficient numbers to force a melee. Even a run-in with the Archmage wasn’t enough to get us to stop: the Blessed Artificer and myself took to accompanying the sorties, and we were usually enough to stalemate him. But after a week, we were forced to admit that sorties were no longer really feasible. Adanna took an arrow from the Hawk about half an inch to the left of her heart, which was an unpleasant wakeup call, but beyond that the tactic itself was no longer viable.

There were just too many of the dead.

I’d never really seen it put to us so starkly, how much more of the enemy there were. Yet the city of Hainaut stood atop a tall plateau, and it made the truth impossible to deny: the capital was like a rock surrounded by the tides, a sea of death gathering below us. We couldn’t pick at the enemy because there wasn’t anything like enemy formations to pick at. Just a mass of walking corpses that covered the land like a carpet of iron and bone, standing terrifyingly still. The sight of it was... not good for morale. It was one thing to know that we would have to defend the city against at least fourfold our number, it was another to see that fourfold standing silent on the field. Waiting, watching, dreaming of that final stillness. As was so typical of the Dead King, he’d drawn first blood before the battle even started and no cost to himself.

Shaping our mundane defences was not difficult, or at least not complicated. There were four stretches of wall to defend, the four cardinal directions, and a fifth force would have to be kept back as a reserve. The Alamans, now consolidated behind Princess Beatrice Volignac – who was the least powerful of them in truth, but remained the ruler of these lands in principle – tried to push for the ‘honour’ of defending the northern stretch, the great gate, but were refused. That task would go to the Fourth Army, as the Army of Callow’s siegecraft was superior to that of any other force here. We gave them the west, instead, since the dead were certain to try to use the butte known as the Veilleuse to take a proper crack at overwhelming that rampart. The Levantines got the east and the south, as the latter was little more than a sheer drop and so would be easier to defend.

The Lycaonese and the Second Army were kept back as the reserve, in deference the casualties they’d already taken in the campaign. As for the Firstborn, though on parchment they belonged to the reserve as well we had particular duties for them. We were not blind to the Enemy’s favourite ploys, or above turning them to our own advantage.

It had been in the air for days now, but it was the Crows coming that told me we had reached the knife’s edge. The Sisters had first come to me in my dreams, always perched on my shoulders as I stood on the edge of a hundred different drops and flying away as I fell. Then one fateful dusk it was all with eyes who were able to see them circling the skies above the capital. Sve Noc had come to Hainaut in the... flesh, for lack of better term. Though I was First Under the Night, it was the Firstborn they’d come here to tend to – as was only natural, considering near every drow south of Serolen was currently quartered within the walls of the capital. The Firstborn were largely holed up along the eastern shore of the Bassin Gris, the broadly oval pool of water at the heart of the city and feeding the waterfall at its southern tip.

Rumena had pushed for it, mentioning that most drow had once lived in cities or towns that’d been near underground lakes or rivers in the Everdark. It’d been a risk putting them near the Levantines, considering the Dominion folk were just as touchy and prone to duelling, but putting them with the Alamans near the western shore would have been even worse. Alamans reputation among the Firstborn had taken a sharp dive downwards after it became broadly known that the Langevins of Cleves had planned to backstab them over territorial gains even while they were fighting to defend the lands of that family. Not that the Firstborn were usually above a spot of backstabbing, famously, but even by their standards that’d been a tad egregious.

The cohabitation with the Levantines had actually gone rather smoothly so far. It probably helped that they mostly came out at night, taking up the majority of the watches during the dark, and so the hours spent out and about only partially overlapped. The relative peace there was a relief, as there always seemed to be a hundred things in dire need of getting done and I was ever moving from one to the next. Hakram and Vivienne did what they could to lighten the burdens, but I still felt like I was being pulled a dozen ways at any moment. Still, I could justify setting aside time for a meal with the Woe at least once a day on the basis of needing to prepare stratagems against the Archmage and I embraced the justification wholeheartedly. How much planning was actually done varied between some and none, but it was still a balm on my day to spend at least an hour talking with people I actually liked. But there had also been... changes recently, and though Akua had not acted on them immediately – or even shown much of a change at all – eventually it came to a head.

“Your patronesses have offered me power for fealty, did you know?” Akua asked me one evening.

We’d already polished off dessert and both Indrani and Masego had wandered off – they had shared quarters, but neither of them actually slept there regularly – after Hakram went to solve a jurisdiction dispute between Princess Mathilda Greensteel and the Fourth Army over a Lycaonese soldier in her service who’d palmed some of our supplies. Vivienne had excused herself after I opened a second bottle of wine, noting she still had correspondence to see to, and that’d left me alone with Akua Sahelian.

“I figured they might,” I noted. “They tried the same with Masego.”

And I expected Akua to decline for much the same reasons he had. Praesi had no issue with gaining power through contracts and sacrifices, but submission was another thing entirely.

“Alas, I am not so eager to surrender my soul anew,” Akua said. “Though given my current straits the offer was more tempting than it would have been once upon a time.”

I half-smiled, sipping at my wine. Some pale Proceran thing, from somewhere in their south.

“Is it really that hard?” I asked. “Power always comes with strings. I always thought it’d be restful, to be without them for a while.”

She dressed, I had noticed, somewhat more modestly now. Still with an eye to grandeur, she’d always had that much, but the red and white gown she wore tonight was high-necked even if it was closely cut. I’d been somewhat surprised she could still change her shape even without Night, but Masego had been all too willing to tell me that was actually a consequence of her nature as ‘shade’ rather than anything born of Winter or Night. In most circumstances a soul split from a body, which was what Akua was, would either pass into the world beyond or be remain as either some sort of diminished apparition. Those rules, though, applied largely to people who hadn’t cut out their own soul the way Akua had when she’d been a teenager.

She was stable, and even somewhat in control of her own nature – her appearance and movement at least – because the split had not been accident. She had taken a knife to her soul long before I put a bloody hand through her chest.

“Hypocrite,” Akua chided, though with more amusement than anger. “You have clawed desperately for power ever since your first taste of it, Catherine. Your only doubts were I finding a form of it that was not personally distasteful to you. You rhapsodize on powerlessness like a queen lauds the virtues of the common farmer – but without, I notice, ever retiring to live on a farm.”

I flipped her off, earning a smug smile, but did not outright deny her words. While I might be intending to abdicate queenship over Callow, I didn’t exactly intend to make my sword into a ploughshare afterwards. I still had a few decades in me handling the rise of Cardinal and the steadying of the Accords. I drank of my wine, leaning back into the seat I’d years ago stolen from Arcadia, and cocked a brow at her.

“So what are you going to do?” I asked.

She went still, as if surprised. In that moment, it struck me that I’d not seen Akua wear any jewels since that night on the rooftops. A riot of elegant clothes yes, and the occasional veil, but never once adornments of silver and gold. Golden eyes watched me, hooded, and I stopped to wonder at the fact that even dressed in a simple gown she still looked as much royalty as any woman bearing a crown I had known.

“You do not offer words of caution?” she asked. “Warnings about the price of seeking power?”

Thin veil that they would have been, covering up the fear of what she might do should she gain strength again.

“It’s not another cage, Akua,” I said. “Only larger and with bars harder to see. I meant it.”

“And should I desire to leave, here and now?” she harshly asked.

“You are,” I simply said, “not my prisoner.”

Her hands clenched, those long and deft fingers you saw so often on mages.

“Would you have spoken the words,” Akua bitterly said, “if you thought I might leave?”

You will , I thought. Before it’s all over, you will. Because that’s what fate is, Akua Sahelian: the recognition that, no matter how many doors there are, there was only ever one you were going to take.

“If it is my blessing to leave you want,” I said, “then you have it.”

Without another word, she rose from her seat. I met her eyes in silence, not moving a finger, and she left the room without a single look back. I poured my glass full again and waited, but she did not return. I wasn’t sure how long passed as I stayed there, seated and silent. I wondered, for a moment, if she’d truly left Hainaut. No , I eventually decided. She’d not yet the crossroads in her story. I finished my glass and hoisted myself up, wandering under moonlight. I could have gone to have a look at Adjutant’s arbitration, but why bother? It was Vivienne I sought instead. She wasn’t far, considering she was quartered in the same guildhall as I was: easier to guard, if we were both there, and it wasn’t like we were lacking room. It might have been for letters that she left, but it wasn’t what I found her doing.

Magelights lit up the salon she’d claimed as her work room, but instead of being seated at a desk she was on her feet. A thick plank of wood with targets painted on it, circles and squares of various sizes, was propped up against an empty bookcase and I watched with a cocked eyebrow as the heiress-designate to Callow palmed a knife and threw it. It spun with a sharp sound, the tip tearing in the middle of a painted red circle at least half an inch deep. I clapped and she turned to roll her eyes at me.

“It’s a knife trick, that’s all,” she said.

I shrugged. I was a decent hand with a throwing knife myself, but not as good as her – not without relying on the unnatural dexterity and senses a Name could lend you.

“I didn’t know you were keeping your skills sharp,” I said.

I’d known she still carried knives, obviously, but that was just plain good sense.

“Knives are easiest to practice,” Vivienne admitted. “Henrietta Morley has been on me about learning to use a sword passably, but I’ve only kept at it long enough to avoid skewering myself.”

“I still have sword spars with my guards on occasion, but I’m not as keen on it as I used to be,” I admitted. “I don’t fight the way I used to when I was seventeen.”

“Knives always came easiest to me, back when I was the Thief,” she said. “Mind you, I learned more out of a month of regular lessons on that with Robber during the Iserre campaign than out of several years of kicking around as Named.”

I stared at her. She’d picked up lessons from Robber ? Well, she wasn’t going to be winning any prizes for chivalry anytime soon but I figured she’d probably be quite good as slitting throats if she were ever in a bind.

“What’d you even bribe him with?” I curiously asked.

“Two months of knowing where Hakram kept his aragh stash,” she grinned.

“That would have done it,” I snorted.

I limped across the panelled floor until I could run a finger against the knife stuck in the plank, easing it out and testing its weight. Well-made, and if it wasn’t goblin steel I’d eat my own hand. I flicked it at her, and to my pleasure she snatched it out of the air.

“So why’d you start?” I asked.

More than once I’d tried to push her into picking up a weapon, back when she’d been the Thief, but she’d always been reluctant. Even back when she’d despised the Legions, she’d been less than sanguine about killing us. I honestly couldn’t remember her ever seeing her take a life outside of a battle.

“The same reason I started learning Mthethwa,” Vivienne said, sitting against the edge of her desk. “I used to be envious of how the rest of you got it spoonfed, did you know? Masego was raised by the Warlock and ‘Drani by the Ranger, you got the Carrion Lord as a tutor and Hakram had an entire aspect prodding him so he’d always know what you needed him to.”

She smiled mirthlessly.

“Me, all I got what the scare of my life from the Assassin and a few years of running, making sure never to stay anywhere long enough the Eyes would be able to find me easily,” Vivienne said. “Gods, Indrani was raised in the middle of the fucking woods and somehow she still knew four languages and her classics in Old Miezan. So I was a little bitter about it, but mostly I used it as an excuse for why I was dragging behind.”

I hid my surprise. I’d known she’d had some issues with how she felt different from the Woe, but honestly I’d figured it came more from her late arrival and well, to be blunt, being used to siding with people that were just better than us. Morally speaking, at least.

“But then Masego kept devouring books,” Vivienne smiled. “Indrani started spying on woodworkers in Laure, you and Hakram started studying Chantant. And what did I do?”

“You essentially put the Jacks together from the ground up,” I pointed out.

Courtesy of Aisha and Ratface we’d long had some contacts in Callow and Praes, but we’d been hopelessly outmatched by the Eyes and the Circle until Vivienne folded the Guild of Thieves and the Guild of Assassins into her Jacks and began turning our old mess into a proper network of spies.

“And I did good work,” she agreed. “But you were all improving yourselves , and I was spending more time on excuses about why I wasn’t than figuring out how I could do the same.”

I wouldn’t throw stones there. I might not have enjoyed learning Chantant, but part of the reason I’d been able to force myself to was that the other most arguably useful thing I could teach myself was basic magical theory and I would have preferred eating a ball of goblinfire. If Akua hadn’t been particularly skilled at keeping the lessons I requested of her interesting, I’d probably still have some major swaths of ignorance there.

“After Hakram got through to me, I guess it was harder to swallow the excuses,” Vivienne continued. “So I started looking at doors I’d left closed. This was one, so was Mthethwa. It’s also when I set to thinking about what good could be brought to Callow, instead of lingering on all the evils still needing to be cut out.”

I slowly nodded, clenching my fingers and unclenching them.

“I’m sorry, Vivienne,” I quietly said. “I had no idea.”

“I’d hope so,” she smiled, “you were the last person I wanted to know, Cat. You’d just taken me in, I didn’t want to be the dead weight.”

“You never have been,” I frankly told her.

The smile turned fond, but it was nothing more than that. It was, I thought, a devil she’d already faced. There was no uncertainty left there.

“It was hard to be angry with you about it, when you shared secrets so readily,” Vivienne said. “I’d been with a band before, and even among heroes tricks are not often simply given when asked. It was one of the first things I liked about you, that you didn’t hoard your knowledge.”

“They weren’t my tricks to start with,” I shrugged.

She shook her head, as if amused.

“It’s one of the reasons follow you, Cat,” Vivienne said. “You don’t think of it as cheapening you, when you help others get stronger.”

I cleared my throat, almost embarrassed.

“And to think I’m the one who’s been drinking,” I teased.

She chuckled.

“Get the bottle, then,” Vivienne said. “I’ve got a letter to Duchess Kegan to finish, but when I do it occurs to me it’s been ages since we’ve played shatranj.”

Gods, I was definitely finishing the bottle then. I’d take away from the sting of defeat. And still, as I limped out of the room, I found I was smiling.

—

I did not see Akua the following day.

Much as the thought dug at me from the side, I let it pass. Thankfully, there was quite enough to busy myself with. We’d sent a few outrider companies far in the valley through the Ways to have a look at the situation there, and the answers were not promising: the dead were almost finished gathering. We’d be facing an assault soon. I delegated more and more to generals and commanders, instead focusing on the Woe. If we wanted to kill the Archmage without losing one of ours in the process, we needed a solid plan. Thankfully I’d had a few ideas, and there was a reason that even now he’d finished working on the new gates Masego barely bothered to sleep. I’d asked him to make anew a breed of artefacts his father had once made for the Calamities, and later on once for myself at the Camps, and he’d taken to the request with a grief-tinged fervour.

“The spellcraft behind these is fundamentally akin to scrying,” Masego said. “Which means they won’t work outside the walls.”

Proper scrying didn’t even work within the walls, even behind the cover of the city wards, but as I understood it the ‘paired stones’ worked just differently enough the interference would be minimal.

“The Lady mentioned the Carrion Lord liked to use these,” Indrani mentioned, chin resting on her palm.

On the table were four pairs of polished, smooth stones. One was meant to be kept inside the mouth and the other in the ear, the former to speak and the latter to hear.

“Father made them at Uncle Amadeus’ request,” Masego agreed. “Though he found them an interesting challenge, he always said. Their limitation as an artefact was that there was a single ‘master’ pair, which was the sole that could both receive and send sound to every other pair.”

Which Black wouldn’t have minded, since his core strategy when the Calamities fought was typically to keep Warlock out of sight and call him down like some sort of magical artillery. The master set went to the Sovereign of the Red Skies, and there was really no need for anything more complicated. My father had always been wary of complexity, when Named fought. Fragility was to be avoided at all costs in his tactics.

“Yet you’ve improved the design,” Hakram said.

Masego clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

“I have changed it, certainly,” Hierophant said. “Improved is a premature assessment.”

The other object on the table was, I suspected not by coincidence, something that rather looked like a legionary’s backpack. The resemblance was only a surface one, however, as though there was straps to make it easier to carry the artefact itself was mostly wood and copper. A sort of large rectangular box, it was covered with neat sets of runes set around incrusted stones. By the box a flat stone with carved Miezan numerals from one to four was waiting, and what looked like the mouth-stone from a paired set. The Warlock Wekesa had preferred a simple, smooth design to his artefacts as that fit the tactics and philosophy of the Calamities. Masego, at my behest, had created something a little more sophisticated. Aware of the fragility of such designs, we’d acted accordingly and focused it all in one place: this master box, until someone found a better name for it.

“So this lets us talk to each other instead of simply to the master set,” I mused, eyeing the box.

“Inaccurate,” Masego sighed. “Which is why we will require Hakram to field it.”

Adjutant had been studying the box all the while, eyes narrowed.

“The incrusted stones each pair with one of the ear ones for you?” the orc asked.

Zeze smiled, visibly pleased.

“Correct.”

“The box is relay of sorts, then,” Hakram mused. “Only there will be a complication, one that requires active administration.”

“Isoka’s third principle of scarcity,” Indrani drawled. “Can’t use two spells that use the same parts of Creation in the same place at the same time.”

Masego beamed at her and she preened.

“So the spells that transmit the sounds can’t be used simultaneously,” Adjutant said. “You will need me to either serve as a relay for planning, or establish a connection between two sets of stones.”

“That’ll be one part,” I said. “Our great trouble with the Archmage so far has been that it’s fucking impossible to get at it. When it knows Named are close it puts up a storm around itself, and then it usually falls into a certain pattern.”

“One major offensive spell at a time, keeping an eye on the opposition in case it can breach its defences,” Adjutant slowly said.

“We’ll be coming at it from different angles, simultaneously,” I said. “That means we need someone who can actually figure out what it’s preparing to hit us with, and where. That will be you.”

As additional prizes, it would also significantly lower collateral damage – if we could catch large-scale spells before they wrecked the inside of the city, we could counter them – and keep him out of the direct fighting. Hakram wasn’t a fool, he was aware that he was in no shape for a scrap with Named, but this approach meant that he was still fulfilling a role and an important one to boot. I’d not invented this for him, I’d just told Masego that we were in a position to have someone dedicated to handling the core artefact if it improved its uses. Adjutant looked at me for a long time, then slowly nodded.

“My Name seems to approve,” he gravelled, then shook his head and changed the subject. “Have we decided on a final roster for the combat?”

“Everyone in this room,” I said, “and one more.”

“Akua?” Indrani asked. “Viv’s not in a place to brawl with a Scourge these days.”

“I was considering the Squire,” I admitted.

“No,” Hakram said, without missing a beat.

“Look,” I said, “I know-”

“ No ,” Indrani flatly said.

I scowled.

“No,” Masego snickered.

“I didn’t even say anything,” I protested.

“The kid’s not ready for a fight of that calibre, even if he wasn’t a replacement the Heavens are trying to line up for you,” Archer said. “It’s not happening, Cat, let it go.”

I grit my teeth, but found no takers at the table. Fine. I’d find another use for him.

“The either we bring in Ishaq or Akua,” I said.

“Akua’s a stronger hitter,” Indrani frowned. “And muscle’s useful, sure, but the Barrow Sword’s not used to working with us the way she is.”

“I cut Akua loose from the Night,” I said. “Along every other binding I had on her.”

A flicker of surprise form Archer, but that was all.

“Good,” she simply said. “About time.”

Tense, I studied the other two. Masego looked puzzled but largely indifferent, while Hakram... thoughtful, but not angry or disappointed. Either of those would have stung. He gave me a look that made it clear we’d be discussing this at some point, but did not otherwise pursue the matter.

“I’d still prefer Akua either way,” Indrani added. “That’s why she’s not been around, isn’t it? She went to find some fangs.”

“Good odds,” I agreed. “Though she didn’t tell me before going. She could just have left.”

Indrani rolled her eyes.

“Sure she did,” Archer said. “Zeze?”

“I would prefer her to the Barrow Sword as well,” Hierophant said after a moment. “Even if she regains only middling power, her state as a shade means she can ignore a great many traditional magical defences.”

My gaze moved to Hakram.

“I prefer Ishaq in the abstract,” Adjutant said. “You already have spells, steel is what you lack. But in practice, he’ll be more useful as the chief for a band of five.”

I breathed out. Well, that was a rather strong endorsement for her.

If she returned.

—

Dusk found me on the ramparts, looking down onto the plains below with company.

“The Dead King’s making a mistake,” I said.

Tariq stood at my side, rheumy eyes on the sea of death below.

“Is he?” the Grey Pilgrim mused.

“It’s a pivotal battle with our backs up against the wall,” I said. “We’re surrounded and outnumbered. I know I warned your lot about getting cocky, Pilgrim, but I expect that they’ll cut through the lesser chaff of Revenants likes knives through butter.”

That was the way those stories went, wasn’t it? The lone company of paladins on the hill, scattering the faceless evil hordes. The few stubborn souls on the wall, keeping dawn from failing one more time. Creation loved a last stand, loved to turn them into victories – ruinous ones, often, but victories nonetheless.

“I am not so certain, Black Queen,” Tariq said. “You knocked a gate into the wall we have our backs against.”

I cast a look at him, found his face solemn.

“You think the gate tips the scales the other way?” I frowned. “It shouldn’t. We could flee through those, sure, but we’re not getting reinforcements. What we have is what’s here, and we’re severely outnumbered.”

“It is not as simple as that,” the Peregrine murmured. “It is not about what the gate brings as much as its existence. The stands we make, Catherine, they are not... strategic. Measures. That is what brings them power, you see. It is not a scheme, a trick.”

An empty prayer , I thought.

“So you’re saying that the gate muddles that,” I tried.

“Is the Dead King trying to take Hainaut to destroy us and blow out the last candles of hope,” the Grey Pilgrim said, “or because a twilight gate is a great war prize?”

I took a moment to let that sink in, reaching for my pipe and stuffing it. I had to turn around, as the wind blew back the first mouthful of smoke into my face, and I leaned against the crenelated rampart as Tariq kept looking below.

“If it’s the candles, we win it,” I finally said. “But a prize? He gets to win those. He has won them before.”

I pulled at the wakeleaf, troubled. It was not an angle I’d considered.

“Creation is a fickle mistress,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “It can be hard to tell what yarn it is she will spin. We are not without a tale of our own, I reckon. One about how a defeat here is the end of the Principate, the first step to the ruin of Calernia. Such stakes bring attention, and attention here is to our advantage I would think.”

He glanced at me, arching a white brow.

“It’s been hinted to me that Below’s less than fond of the Dead King,” I acknowledged. “Mind you, he’s one of their greats. If they put the finger to the scales here, which I’m not sure they will, I don’t think it’ll be in his favour.”

He nodded, as if he’d expected every word. Considering the angels whispering in his ear, he might have.

“And so it is not a mistake, I do not think,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “It is a gamble, instead. A roll of the dice. And even in defeat, he loses nothing here he cannot afford to lose.”

I almost objected that if we deal him grievous losses defending the city we’d be able to roll up and expel him from the entire principality of Hainaut, hopefully as a prelude to the Gigantes warding up the shore, but I got what Tariq actually meant. There was nothing down on the plains below that wasn’t ultimately expendable to Keter, because everything but the Dead King was expendable to Keter. If this war ended with every undead made ash save for Neshamah himself but all his opposition buried, that was still a victory for the King of Death. His empire of death could always be rebuilt. He had all the time in the world. Us? Not so much. Even a sufficiently costly victory for us here played to his advantage. Every veteran soldier we lost here was one more conscript in the ranks when we came for Keter, every trick and artefact used here one fewer up our sleeve.

Attrition had always been the Dead King’s favourite trick, that slow and insidious poison for which there was no cure.

“It still feels like a mistake,” I murmured. “I don’t know why, Tariq, but it does.”

Like I was standing on the edge again, cold fear in my stomach as I looked down at the drop.

“He trains it in us,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Finding the shadow of our defeat in every action we take. It must be fought, Black Queen, else the war will be lost in our heads long before he wins it on the field.”

I breathed in deep of the smoke, blew out a long stream of smoke that the wind curled away into nothingness. Tariq was not wrong. I knew that, agreed with it even.

And still it felt like the damned dreams, right before I fell.

Chapter 77: Tribulation

“I agree that outliving your enemies is the greatest of revenges, my friend, but we seem to have something of a philosophical difference about how that is to be achieved.”

– Dread Empress Maledicta II

There was a pond on the guildhall’s grounds.

Like everything else in this cursed city, it was dead. The weeds in the drab water had withered, the grass around the rim blackened. Even the mud at the bottom looked darker than it should. But the water was warm, having soaked in the sunlight of the day, and it was a pleasant sensation when I soaked my bad leg in it. I left my boots in the dead grass and looked up at the sky through dead branches reaching out like fingerbones. Something ghosted across the tripwire of Night I’d woven around the thicket, giving me a name before I ever saw a face. It was a short list, the people who would be able to pass with so light a presence. I clutched my silence tight, staring up at the cloudless blue sky as I waited patiently.

“How very carefree,” Akua said. “I am surprised you did not send for a bottle of wine as well.”

I chuckled, eyes staying on the blue.

“I still have duties this evening,” I said, “and drinking half a bottle would make me want to take a nap.”

It was a tempting thought even knowing I did not have the time to spare. Leaning back on the soft ground, my feet in the water and with a belly warmed by wine? It’d be a pleasant way to spend a summer afternoon, even one soon to be shadowed by war. I heard Akua come closer, wondering if the way I’d heard a sound at all was a concession on her part. Back when she’d still had hooks in the Night, her steps had made no sound and left behind no trace. Now, though, who knew?

“Are you done making plans of war, then?” she idly asked.

A little too idly, I decided.

“No,” I said. “We want you with us when we go for the Archmage. Masego made paired stones.”

“You’d have no use of me,” Akua said. “I am without power.”

I blinked in surprise. I’d thought for sure that getting fangs of her own was why she’d disappeared. Peeling my eyes away from the endless blue expanse, I turned and found her leaning against a beech tree. It was a long black dress she wore, with elaborate patterns looking like sunflowers across it all the way to the straps that kept it fastened against her collarbone. Her hair was styled in a manner I’d never seen on her before, closely cut on the left and sweeping towards the right. As was often the way when she preferred her thoughts obscured, her face was unreadable. I cocked my head to the side.

“Are you?” I asked.

She smiled viciously, all the more beautiful for the anger she bared.

“Is this when you speak of the powers of love to me?” Akua asked.

“It’s not a force to be underestimated,” I mildly agreed.

It had kept the Dread Empire of Praes together for forty year, after all, made it the most powerful it had been in centuries. Without Black and Malicia, the genuine trust and affection between them, it would have all collapsed years before the Conquest could begin. And without the Conquest, neither of us would be here under the afternoon sun in faraway Hainaut.

“You do not love me, Catherine,” she said. “In any sense of the word. I am not your friend or your companion, I am the woman who butchered a hundred thousand of your people. I am the doom of Liesse, the mother of the folly you have hung around my neck.”

Her fingers clenched.

“Let us not pretend otherwise,” Akua harshly said. “I tire of the game.”

I studied her for a long moment, finding the anger boiling in her. The confusion too, or perhaps the shame? Even when sentiment peeked through clearly, she was more nuanced a woman than most.

“You know better,” I simply said.

It wouldn’t work if I were lying. If there was not a genuine affection, a genuine attraction. I was not skilled enough a liar to be able to fool her for long. She knew this, too, though she did not want to believe it. But this wasn’t really about me, I decided. It was about her. You are afraid , I thought.

“You made a choice, didn’t you?” I mused.

She flinched. My hands clenched, as I tasted the heady brew that was triumph and grief so deeply intertwined as to be indistinguishable. I’d done it. From here to the end, now, it was all writ.

“I sought the fae,” Akua quietly said. “Through eerie paths. And I found what I wanted: one of them blinded by story, who would not see the knife until it was too late.”

“Power through blood,” I murmured.

Masego had firmly rejected the notion of making up for the loss of his magic by acquiring another power, be it Night or something usurped from some lesser god. It’s not power I want , he’d told me. It is magic, Catherine, and for that there is no replacement. Yet it was not in Masego’s nature to seek dominion, not the way it was in Akua’s. For all that they were both the children of two of some of the most powerful figures in the Wasteland, they had been raised in fundamentally different ways.

“Through murder,” Akua thinly smiled. “As much the transgression as what is offered up. It would have been a... beginning. Once I devoured that strength, it would have been easier to gain more.”

“And yet you didn’t,” I said.

Her face closed.

“I still might.”

I half-smiled. She was always easiest to grasp when she was similar to me, and when I had I ever been above threatening to cut my nose to spite my face?

“And what would that prove?” I asked.

“That I am not weak,” Akua coldly said.

“You say that like there’s only ever one way to be strong,” I replied.

She hesitated. Once upon a time, she might have dismissed that. It was too late now, though. She’d strayed too far from the invisible fences of the Wasteland, seen the greater world beyond and the myriad strange and terrifying entities that strode it. She had seen powers rivalling the greatest of the Old Tyrants, not a single one having walked down their path.

“There’s only one way to claim the Tower,” she said.

Praes has failed , I could have said. Or, why would you want to? Or, why does your mother still rule you?

“And will that satisfy you?” I asked instead.

She did not answer, looking away. The silence stretched out until it was so taut I feared it might snap.

“Your way,” Akua finally said, “it gives nothing. I came back empty-handed.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I murmured. “You came back after having made a choice, Akua.”

“Is failure a choice, then?” she scorned. “What great revelation did I drag back with me, fleeing like a fearful child?”

I thought of a few moments stolen away before dawn, in the Graveyard’s wake, of the same woman now before me standing above Kairos Theodosian with burning eyes. Of the words she had spoken then, addressed as much to herself as to the Tyrant.

“That you are more than blood,” I said. “That you are more than what they made of you.”

I saw something like hate in her golden eyes when she faced me, but for who I could not tell.

“It wasn’t you,” Akua quietly said. “So do not gloat, even where you think I cannot see. It wasn’t you at all, Catherine.”

I slowly nodded. Her face fell and she looked down at her hands.

“It’s never just power,” she said. “In that much at least you were right. I wanted to take from the fae and wield it as I once did sorcery, but in the end...”

She softly laughed, as if appalled at herself.

“All I could think of was those lessons with my father,” Akua said. “The joy in him, when he shared magic with me.”

She looked away again.

“It would have been ugly, replacing that with a thimble of power earned through cheap murder,” Akua quietly said. “Ugly all the way down.”

You told me about your cradle-sister, once, I thought as I watched her. A girl called Zain, whose throat your mother made you cut when you were barely eight years old . And you told me, after, that your regret about that day was that you cut her shallow. That she bled out slower than she needed to because your hand hadn’t been steady.

“And so now I return to Hainaut, empty-handed and fool,” she scoffed.

Deftly, I went rifling through the many pockets of my cloak until I had what I looked for: two small stones, enchanted by Masego’s own hand. Her set of paired stones. She went still as I reached out, slowly prying her fingers open and pressing them into her palm.

“You returned to us,” I corrected.

And golden eyes searched me, looking for the lie and finding only truth. I had meant every word. And I also thought: if you had to cut her throat again, right now, your hand would tremble.

Her fingers closed around the stone. I withdrew my hand.

I looked up at the blue sky, winning and lost.

—

“The city was made to be held,” Sapper-General Pickler said. “And if simple force of arms decides this, it will hold. You have my word on that.”

I cut into my slice of beef, chewing thoughtfully. I’d not necessarily meant our shared meal to be about our duties, but I honestly couldn’t recall ever having a meal with Pickler where business wasn’t touched on at some point. I’d never taken it personally, of course. Pickler didn’t draw the line between duty and her personal life the way most people did. To her it was the work that was the centerpiece of her existence and all the rest was secondary. I sometimes wondered if that was why Robber’s long-lasting affections for her had never been reciprocated: romance just wasn’t something she cared enough about to ever put above her tinkering.

Mind you, the goblin ways of romance were alien enough to me that even if they were engaged in a torrid affair I’d find it rather hard to tell. For one, their culture typically drew no direct link between being a romantic couple and being physically intimate. Sex was about breeding and arranged by the Matrons to strengthen bloodlines or alliances, nothing else. My understanding of it was that goblins didn’t really feel physical desire the way most humans or orcs did, so the... impulse just wasn’t there. It was pretty much unheard of for one of their kind to seek a brothel or a fling. It was more of an abstract craving of the other person for them, an itch that didn’t require skin to be scratched.

It’d made me rather curious about exactly what it had entailed when Nauk had been courting Pickler, considering he must have known at least as much about goblins as I did, but I’d never quite dared to ask back when we were at the College. And nowadays, what would be the point? He was long dead, and that wound would never heal if I kept picking at it. It wasn’t mine alone, anyway. For all that Robber had once made sport of Nauk at every occasion, considering him a rival for Pickler’s affections, I could not recall him ever speaking ill of the other man since he’d died. Enemies or not, they had been Rat Company.

That still meant something, to the few of us left.

“It’s different when the enemy doesn’t break,” I reminded her. “The ramp that gets them to the gate is a beautiful killing floor for your engines, but the dead won’t ever flee. It’ll not be waves so much as a wave, uninterrupted.”

“The skeletons aren’t the trouble,” Robber said, unusually serious. “We can handle the Bones and the Binds, Catherine. The constructs will be a little trickier, but you finally let my people off the leash for a reason.”

He bared needle-like fangs in approval. By that he meant I’d cleared all sappers for use of our last goblin munitions, to their riotous cheering. Goblinfire was still restricted, but officers of the rank of tribune and above were allowed to request its deployment in a limited fashion. We’d set aside part of the stock for that purpose, around a third. The rest we had more interesting plans for than just propping up the defence.

“It’s not Hannoven or Rhenia,” I sighed. “The Volignacs didn’t count on the walls cliffside being scaled, or things like beorns and wyrms coming out to play. It’s not the gate I’m worried about so much, it was built expecting a fight. It’s the rest.”

The city of Hannoven was, tales said, essentially a set of ever-taller walls circling a lone mountain. It was widely considered one of the greatest fortresses in all of Calernia even if it had fallen multiple times to ratlings and the Dead King. Rhenia had fallen to neither and was even more daunting a prospect to take: it’d begun as a fortress carved into a cliff but then become a city almost entirely dug within a mountain of solid rock that could be sealed up at will. Both of those great cities had been built without any great weaknesses because the people who’d built them had learned that Keter aways punished weakness. But Hainaut just wasn’t built the same, for all its striking presence.

It just hadn’t had to withstand the same kind of sustained, brutal warfare the Lycaonese cities had. Most of the time undead invasions that’d crossed the lakes and pierced into southern Procer hadn’t even bothered to siege the capital, just gone around the plateau and let the Volignacs hole up in their fortress-city up high. Princess Beatrice had admitted to me that there might actually be some truth to the old unpleasant rumours about some of her ancestors outright letting the dead through when the principalities to the south got too troublesome to deal with. I hoped none of the Lycaonese royals ever heard about that, because it was the sort of thing they would take very badly .

“There’s not much to be done with walls atop a cliff,” Pickler frankly said. “They built with quality stone and saw to the upkeep decently, which passed solid defences on to us. I stand by what I said, Catherine: we can hold this city, so long as Revenants don’t pry it away from us.”

An expectant gaze followed.

“I won’t say the Scourges will be easy meat, or even just the other Revenants,” I told her, “but I believe we can win that fight. We prepared, and we have gathered significant Named talent.”

I held no illusions that we’d win this without casualties, though. At best we’d lose at least a band of five’s worth, but I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if it were more. We were aiming to snap the Dead King’s finest blades, that deed wasn’t going to come cheap. And I’ll bet one or two of the Scourges will get away whatever we do , I thought, so that they can come back to haunt us if our armies ever make it to Keter.

“If you say we can, then I expect we will,” Pickler said, and I started in surprise.

That was pretty effusive by her standards. She’d never been heavy handed with praise, at least outside her fields of interest.

“I do wish we had Juniper and Aisha with us, however,” she wistfully added. “Generals Bagram and Zola are skilled, but it isn’t the same.”

Preaching to the Choir, there.

“Agreed,” I murmured.

“Bagram doesn’t even inspect kits personally,” Robber told us, like this was a great offence.

Way I heard it Juniper had picked up that habit from her mother, General Istrid Knightsbane, but while Bagram had served as Istrid’s right hand for over a decade he did not seem inclined to continue the tradition. Juniper famously had been, and the chewing outs she’d given recruits who got sloppy were still legend among the old crowd from the Fifteenth.

“Juniper’s doing better,” I volunteered. “Last word I got was that she was now able to go several days without episodes.”

By year’s end she should be fit for field command again, though I wasn’t signing off on that until Aisha agreed regardless of what the healers might say. The Hellhound wasn’t above bullying priests or mages into saying what she wanted, but Aisha wasn’t the kind of woman to let herself get forced into saying a damned thing.

“The Peregrine shortchanged us, if it took this long,” Pickler coldly said.

“More like Malicia put her back into fucking with her mind,” Robber darkly replied. “Another account to settle out before the knife is sheathed, Boss. The old girl bled us a few times too many.”

“Praes will be settled,” I evenly said. “By treaties if I can, by the sword if I must.”

A shiver went up my spine and for an instant I almost felt like someone was looking at us. I pricked my ears with Night, but we were alone. My sudden distraction had been missed by neither of the goblins, Robber having already discreetly bared a knife under the table.

“False alarm,” I said, shaking my head. “The wait’s driving me mad, I think.”

“Won’t be long now,” Robber said. “It’s in the air, yeah?”

Pickler bared pale, sharp teeth.

“They have never fought a proper siege against our sappers before, Catherine,” the Sapper-General of Callow said. “And after this, they will never try to again.”

We drank to that, and the meal finished on the high note of Pickler showing me her latest improvements on the contraption of leather bands and steel that she’d first made for me years ago, the device that would send a knife up against my palm if I flicked my wrist just right. They helped me try on, and it was with a smile and a flourish that I revealed a sharp little rib-sticker in goblin steel. It would do nicely, I thought, watching my reflection in the side.

Gods knew I’d not lack use for it.

—

The moon was out in full.

It’d been days since anyone had glimpsed a single cloud above the capital, day or night, and this high up the sights bared by that absence were always striking. The rampart where I had gone to stand had become my favourite for the way it have me a good look at both Hainaut itself, the island of lights and flames that an inhabited city at night turned into, and the vast expanse of sky above. The stars were visible in a way that they rarely were when standing in a city this size, for the valley around us was a ring of unbroken darkness. The dead saw the same be it night or day, and the forges they used were hidden from our sight. If I let my mind wander I could almost imagine that the city was just an island drifting under the stars, the dark around us nothing but dark and deep waters.

Shadows moved against the darkness, cutting out the lights wherever they passed, but I was not afraid. I knew them too well for that. Two great crows, whose feathers somehow seemed darker than the night sky itself, circled slowly above. They were careful never to leave the sky above the city, where wards made it difficult for the Dead King to attempt anything against them, but that was the only concession to prudence they made. I stayed beneath them, the warmth of the Mantle of Woe pulled tight around me as I pulled at my pipe and let curls of smoke rise up like some fleeting offering to my patronesses. They came to me when they’d had their fill, and in Komena I found vexation at having been denied something to hunt.

The Dead King had robbed the Sisters of any prey they might have sought, killing everything that crawled or swam as far as the eye could see. Their talons had not been red into too long for the Youngest Night’s taste. Sve Noc took to the rampart I was leaning against, each landing on one of my sides in a smooth flurry of feathers, and I almost smiled when I heard those sharp talons rake at the stone. There would be marks. They seemed in no hurry to talk, so silence hung between us for some time as I breathed in wakeleaf and spewed it out over the edge of the wall. There was hardly even a breeze, tonight.

“The war does not go well,” Andronike said.

My fingers tightened around the dragonbone pipe Masego had gifted me. I forced them to loosen, even though what I had been told was nothing less than deadly serious. It was not the war here in the south that the oldest of the sisters would be speaking of.

“How bad?” I quietly asked.

“We sent Vesena Spear-biter and its sigil into the lands of the dead to ravage and draw attention from your own campaign,” Komena said. “All souls were lost.”

I softly swore. The Vesena had never particularly impressed me even before their last defeat, but they had been led by the Seventh General and been one of the great assets of the Empire Ever Dark.

“Radhoste and Jutren were lost as well,” Andronike said. “The Dreamer to a breach in the Gloom, Jutren to an ambush as it pursued.”

That made it the Sixth and Tenth General dead as well. Fuck, the finest of the Firstborn were dropping like flies. I’d thought the northern front halfway under control, what the Hells was happening? The goddesses had never been shy about looking at my thoughts, so I did not need to ask the question to get an answer.

“The Dead King has perfected his answers to Night,” Andronike said. “With every battle fewer of the Secrets work unimpeded. The war cannot linger, First Under the Night.”

“If it lasts too long, we will die out,” Komena harshly said. “Our losses are becoming too great and there are...”

“Concerns,” Andronike finished.

Not here, I would have been tasked to address them. That meant up north again, and there were not many who might trouble the Sisters among their kind.

“Kurosiv?” I quietly asked.

“It is now the First General,” Komena said.

That wasn’t an agreement, not quite, but hardly a denial. I grimaced. Kurosiv the All-Knowing had long been considered a leech by the two Sisters, but not one that it would be easy to remove. It was only going to get worse with time, though. The same stuff of which the apotheosis of Sve Noc was made was what Kurosiv was now hoarding, and though that made the drow powerful it also made the Sisters uniquely vulnerable in some ways. I suspected that swallowing Winter had made them more vulnerable in some ways. That power was not one used to being ruled by the same face for too long, and now that it had been devoured by goddesses of theft and murder expecting loyalty out of it would be naive.

“If we win here decisively, then we can have Hainaut secured by winter,” I said. “After that, when the snows clear, it is Keter we turn to.”

“We are aware,” Andronike said. “It is why we have come, Catherine Foundling. This battle has our full attention.”

My heart skipped a beat and I set down my pipe, studying the crows closer.

“You’re not the same crows that were here before I left for the Arsenal,” I finally said. “How much of you is actually here, Sve Noc?”

The great crows laughed, the sound of it eerily like caws.

“Half,” Komena said.

I froze.

“Of everything ?” I hissed out.

“This battle,” Andronike mildly repeated, “has our full attention.”

They had said what they wanted to say, and so found no need to linger. Without bothering with anything as petty as goodbyes, the Sisters dropped off the edge of the rampart and took flight. With dark wings they rose, cutting out even the insolent silver light of the moon as they passed before it. I found my hands were shaking when I picked up my pipe again. I filled it anew, more to have something to do with my hands than hunger for another packet of wakeleaf. Half, Gods save us all. That was... Well, I didn’t have to worry about any of the Firstborn here being raised from the dead at least. The Sisters would nip that right in the bud. And Night taken from the undead would form quickly and smoothly, so there was that as well. It was still a heavy investment on their part, to send half of their divinity so far from their seat of power, and I was not quite sure what had driven them to it.

If Komena alone had come I might have called it recklessness, for she was the more hardheaded of the two, but for Andronike to have committed as well? It meant that they no longer considered the war up north one they might feasibly win alone. They were betting on the Grand Alliance because it was the only good bet left to them, not because they felt a particular fondness for our collection of human realms. I let the smoke calm me, thoughts following down the cascade of consequences that Firstborn reverses implied for the war. It might make the dwarves more reluctant to intervene, I concluded with a grimace. The Kingdom Under wasn’t interested in picking a fight with Neshamah on behalf of an alliance that was losing, they’d made that much clear: a clear shot at the Crown of the Dead was their prerequisite for sending in their own armies.

With the drow front facing defeat and our three southern ones varying in degrees of deadlock, we did not look like a good horse to back from the dwarven perspective. Better for them to avoid all-out war with the Dead King and instead concentrate on the strategy of underground containment they’d been implementing for centuries. I breathed out the smoke, eyes closed. Yeah, with that in perspective I could see why Andronike would agree to investing so heavily here in Hainaut. We were highly unlikely to win this war without dwarven involvement, and if we lost the battle over the capital the chances of the Kingdom Under joining the dance were pretty much nonexistent. They’d be rushing to finish their containment, not sparing time for dying human petty kingdoms.

Gods Below, there was even more riding on the Battle of Hainaut than I’d thought.

I stirred myself out of the contemplative daze I’d been falling into. Hakram would still be awake, I figured, and I wanted to pick his brains about this. Not only would his insight be welcome on the consequences of the drow being driven back, but there might still be time to prepare some last defences for Hainaut. An idea or two were beginning to coalesce in the back of my head, and – and the city light up, flares of red light going up in the sky as trumpets sounded.

Hainaut stirred awake and from the corner of my eye I saw a patrol of fantassins bearing torches run towards me, but it was not them I paid attention to. Hand against the crenellation, I leaned over the edge of the wall and looked down. And there they were, keeping to shadows as they moved: pale skeletons beginning to climb the cliff, like a swarm of ants going up a wall. And beyond them the entire sea of deaths stirred, thousands upon thousands of corpses and monsters all moving as one. Roars shattered the quiet of the night, a chorus of wyrms announcing their presence and their hunger for the destruction to come, and below great ladders of black iron were brought to the fore as Keter began unleashing its preparations.

The battle for Hainaut had begun.

Colossal II

“Why should the world balk at returning what it cost us to break its chains? It is not tyranny to receive our due, only the achievement of balance. There can be no shame in this, only in allowing empty charity to stand in the way of what can still be done.”

– Kreios Maker-of-Riddles, amphore for the Sublime Auspice

Antigone was no longer afraid of the woods.

Barefoot, for her sandals were little more than rags and the god had not seen fit to replace them, she walked on soft moss and rocks. Through brush and bushes, following little rivers and climbing trees. Antigone had dreamt of this, of knowing the world beyond the shrine without fear in her heart. Yet in the dreams she had only ever ceased to fear the woods when the woods came to fear her . When she slept she wielded the powers of the god and all the world bent as she wished, warm and bright like firelight. Instead, the girl knelt by the river and drank of the clear water as the great she-wolf Lykaia watched over her.

“It doesn’t look the same, by day,” Antigone told the wolf.

The great wolf whined, cocking her head to the side. She did not know whether Lykaia was a clever as a human or a god, but Antigone knew that the she-wolf was no simple beast. The girl could remember someone telling her a story about a great wolf, once, a wolf that prowled the sky and ate the sun to make it night. The great fire burned its stomach and it spat it out, come morning, but try as she might Antigone could not remember who had told her the story. It had been... it had been a man, she felt sure. Someone warm, someone she had trusted? But she could not remember a face, or a name. It worried her, but not for long.

If she were sick the god would have healed her, so she could not be sick.

“I thought this was a fearful place,” Antigone told the wolf. “That it was... desperate.”

The she-wolf whined in conclusion. She bit her lip.

“I thought it was a place of death,” Antigone finally said.

That it had been filled with nothing but it, like a slaughterhouse covered by tall branches. Lykaia snorted, then drank of the river too. It did not look like she disagreed with the description.

“But it isn’t,” Antigone told the wolf. “Not really. There is death here, but there is death everywhere. And there’s so much more!”

She looked around, thirsty even though she had drunk her fill, and a glimpsed it all. The redbirds singing, the snake coiling on the branch. The moss in the shade of trees, the rotten carcasses where mushrooms grew. The tall branches blotting out the sun, the deep roots seeking water. The forest was not just life or death, it was both. Always both. Like a snake eating its own tail, or a wolf swallowing the sun only to spew it out. It was terrible and it was beautiful, it was loving and it was merciless. It was, she thought, in balance. The thought shivered within her, and Antigone stumbled. Suddenly dizzy, she had to lean down in the grass and wait until the world ceased spinning. Lykaia nudged her, eventually, and she leaned against the great she-wolf as they returned home to the shrine. The strange dizziness had passed by the time the god came to visit her but somehow he seemed to know.

“It is remarkable,” the giant-god rumbled, gently holding her chin.

“What is?” Antigone asked.

“You understand,” the god said, “better than any of your kind should. They teach it out of you, Antigone, as you grow. The true way of seeing things. And yet your eyes are opening.”

She shivered again.

“No matter,” the god finally said, releasing her chin. “Answers always come to willing ears. We must be patient, you and I.”

“I will be,” Antigone promised.

The god looked amused.

“The she-wolf will teach you if you are not, I think,” he said. “She is wise, even for her kind.”

They ate together, and when the time came the god told her again of old and far off things. The menace of the drakoi had been ended, the god told her, but it was not the end of the story.

“Stories never truly end with victory,” the god told her. “We only cut them there so that they might be easier to swallow.”

Antigone sagely nodded. She, too, knew the peril of taking bites that were too large.

“It was a different world we found around us,” the god said, rumbling voice sounding wistful.

His power sang out, thrumming along with exhale of the once-god’s breath. Like heat mirages, thoughts and memories danced in flicked among the raised stones.

“The Long War had lasted for a thousand years, Antigone,” the giant said. “Waxing and waning between truce and strife, and while we shattered ourselves putting an end to the tyrannies of the drakoi all manners of creatures had sprouted underfoot.”

The girl shivered, as for an ephemeral moment every painted thought shimmering between the stones had been a red and bloody ruin, fire and screams and smoke. She had seen the silhouettes of great cities torn apart, old and merciless things sleeping among the carnage. But the wrath had passed, and beyond it the world looked... young.

“The stouts and the stalkers we had long known as peoples cowering away from the wrath of the drakoi in their deep caverns,” the giant-god said, his words reflected by the sight of short bearded folk and nimble small green creatures. “The cautious greys that had hidden below tall peaks we did not often find, but they were known to us as well. Yet with the old tyrants gone, they all crept out of their hiding places.”

Like green sprouts after winter, Antigone saw them. Walking ashen grounds with childlike wonder as they looked up at the sky and saw nothing.

“Yet not all children were so cautious,” the giant rumbled. “Out east by the sea, we found some fresh race – fangs, we named them, for their ferocity – had been birthed in the steppes and gone south, daring even to claim the ruins of the Windless City.”

Intricate towers, Antigone glimpsed, that fire had licked and force of arms shattered. Among them, like filth on snow, swarms of large greenskins raised tents and banners. The fought and burned and forged, butchering animals and each other. She was not of the once-god’s people, but even she found a deep sense of revulsion welling up in her throat at the sight.

“Yet most astonishing of them all was your own kind, Antigone,” the god said. “Humans had long been known to us, but never like this. While our cities burned and we murdered gods, a race of hunters that had been as much animals as horses and wolves had begun tilling at the land.”

Huts of mud, Antigone glimpsed. Fences and cattle, fields where green things grew. And the lands they changed, but everywhere humans were seen.

“All these ungrateful children were sinking roots into the ruins of our great works taken from us,” the once-god rumbled, with the faded trace of a great and terrible anger in his voice, “spreading like weeds across lands we had destroyed ourselves to free. And of them all, humans were the worst.”

The mirages flickered and for a moment Antigone wondered what it must have been like, looking at her own kind through the eyes of a god. Knowing that all that stood between you and the death of those fragile things was your unwillingness to pick them up and squeeze .

“You spread far and wide,” the god said, “and unlike older peoples did not seem to shun any parts of the world. You found ways to thrive in heat and cold, among heights and caverns. You swam lakes and crossed rivers.”

It was not the way of the Titans, this. Antigone had learned it. A people whose words reverberated in the world like theirs did, whose very will was power, would not change themselves for the land. They would change it to suit them, and never even consider there might be another way.

“In the hundred years that followed,” the giant quietly said, “whenever we returned to our abandoned cities we so often found humans scuttling in their shadows like rats it became... expected. Always pawing at our creations, sometimes in greed and sometimes in worship.”

A hundred ephemeral glimpses of people standing in the shadow of great towers and temples, works that bent sunlight and soothed deserts with rain. She understood, deep down, why the ancients would have sought to cling to the greatness of an older people. Was Antigone’s own life really so different?

“Our children, they who called themselves the Gigantes, saw this and knew rage,” the god said. “They knew fear, they knew dismay, and most fearsomely of all some of them saw this and knew avarice.”

The once-god’s tone was heavy, pained.

“No longer were the young races called children as we called ourselves, siblings under the Makers,” the giant said. “They had names, from then on. And the creatures we named we thought to have power over.”

Not, not pain, Antigone thought. Shame. And between the stones danced lights showing three great crowds, each standing facing each other in the backlight of a great cloudy mountaintop.

“Some called for a purge,” the giant said. “A thinning of the herd, like pruning errant growths.”

The horror of that sunk in, over a long moment, and Antigone found that in the pale light of the mirages she could almost glimpse scarlet, bloody veins.

“They were few,” the god said. “We were not so far fallen. But others desired to reclaim our ancient cities and close them to our lessers, leaving the young races to die in the mud, and that chorus was sung by many throats.”

Hidden cities, Antigone glimpsed, shrouded by mists and winding paths that no mortal could pierce through no matter how arduously they tried.

“Yet there were even more who beheld the young races and spoke of rule ,” the god said. “Were the young races not the ones who came to us, sleeping in the shade of our wonders and worshipping our works? Why should we not let them serve us, let them repay us for the freedom we had won them at so steep a cost?”

Every word grew more mocking than the last, though by the last one Antigone felt there was as much bitterness as mockery to be found.

“And so the last of the Titans met,” the giant said, “we last few of the few, so that a path might be found that would not further sunder an already sundered people.”

One by one the mirages died, like candles snuffed out, until only the last fading embers of the fire remained.

“We would fail in this,” the god simply said.

He spoke no more that night, and Antigone did not ask.

—

Antigone was growing.

Her clothes were getting too small, and the god often brought new ones. He taught her and showed her the stars, how they moved and how they sang, and by day while he was gone she studied her lessons and walked the forest. The woods were as a second home to her now, even without Lykaia at her side. She knew other beasts now, cats with shining eyes and snakes that talked like humans without a mind. She had sung with three-colour birds until the rain came and nestles deep in the heart of old trees with affectionate foxes in her lap. She had even glimpsed strange creatures, at times, that looked like humans but sang with the world in the way that the god told her humans did not. Beautiful and terrible the creatures had been, wicked in a way that beasts were not.

Of those and the thin places from which they came, Antigone steered clear.

She had thought herself in a place beyond the reach of humans, so it was with utter startlement that she learned otherwise. Come a sunny morning, she found a band of them moving through a clearing. They wore steel and leather, were armed with hooks and swords. Their steps were the steps of hunters and they eyes moved without pause, but they chattered like songbirds. Antigone, seated in a tree, eyed them curiously. Lykaia had gone to hunt, she was waiting for the she-wolf to return with red fangs before heading back to the shrine.

“Alas, I do not see the promised riches,” a man said. “Just a lot of fucking things trying to kill us very hard. Are you sure of the tale, Almera?”

“It was one of the Binder’s Blood that told it,” a woman replied. “They do not err in such things.”

Some of them did a sign with the hands after that, to Antigone’s wonderment. She felt like she might have seen it before, but she was not sure where. After all, she knew nothing of her life before she had found the shrine. She mulled over the matter, and decided that this might be a hint as to where she had come from. It was worth speaking with these, and perhaps trading.

“What are you looking for?” Antigone asked from the tree.

Several jumped or cursed, and all brought up weapons. She crawled forward on a branch, head popping out from between the leaves, and asked the question again. Some loosened their grip on their steel when they saw her, but not all.

“What manner of spirit are you?” a man asked.

“I am a girl,” Antigone patiently said. “And I know things.”

“Do you?” a woman smiled. “How lucky for us, darling. We are looking for an old place, made of stone.”

“The bald barrow?” she asked. “I know where it is.”

“No,” another woman cut in, tone curt. “It would be a temple. Answer us, spirit, where is it?”

She blinked.

“The shrine?” she skeptically asked.

“ Yes ,” the woman hissed, excited. “The temple to the Maker of Riddles. You know where it is?”

Antigone frowned.

“Why do you want to know?”

She must have said something both wrong and right, as several of them looked excited as well but all five raised their weapons.

“I asked you a question, spirit,” the same woman said. “Answer it or suffer the consequences.”

“You don’t have good intentions,” Antigone said, cocking her head to the side. “That won’t go well for you.”

Several laughed.

“If you were mighty among the Splendid, you would not have tried such a feeble bargain,” a man mocked. “We have cold iron, creature, do not try our patience.”

Antigone’s fingers clenched.

“ Leave ,” Antigone said, and the world heard.

There was a ripple in the air and the humans screamed in fear. One of them, who had a spear raised, began bleeding from the ears. The girl drew back in shock and horror. She’d not meant to...

“You little witch,” the woman who had called her darling earlier screamed. “ What are you ?”

One of them threw a javelin at her and it sunk into the wood next to her calf after nicking it, but Antigone let out a breath of relief when she saw a streak of grey move at the corner of her eye. Lykaia fell onto the humans without pity, smashing one into a tree and ripping open another’s throat in the blink of an eye. It was too much: the rest fled. Lykaia, red in tooth and claw, wanted to pursue. Antigone felt exhausted and strangely sad, however, and so she insisted they return home instead. The she-wolf reluctantly agreed, leaving the bodies for the scavengers. She told the god everything when he came that night, though as she had expected he already knew it all. He did not seem angry that deaths had happened, instead patting her head comfortingly.

“Most of your kind are petty creatures, Antigone,” the god said. “Do not expect much of them.”

She solemnly nodded, and after a moment the god softly laughed.

“Not that my kind are of superior make,” the giant said. “The Gods abhor perfection, child. It leaves nothing for us to seek.”

“Were they really looking for the shrine?” Antigone asked.

“It has happened before,” the god rumbled. “This place was once known to others of my kind, and the knowledge will have trickled down to some of those they taught.”

The god watched her with a smile.

“It seems you learned the name I was once known by,” he said. “You had some gain from the bargain.”

“Maker-of-Riddles,” Antigone murmured, speaking the words correctly.

He nodded.

“It has been long since I last heard those words,” the god said. “It is a strange thing.”

He sounded almost sad again, as he had often been since the night he’d told her that the council of the Titans would fail. He’d not continued the story since, speaking only of older matters and strange legends.

“Grief, but not so sharp as I had thought,” the god murmured. “So perhaps I will speak, after all.”

“Of after the Long War?” Antigone quietly asked.

After a long moment, the giant-god nodded.

“When the Titans met that night,” the god said, “among us, seven spoke of dominion and only one disagreed.”

There were no mirages this time, not swirls of colour. Only soft words by starlight, with the tall stones circling around them like a mother’s embrace.

“It was not that we shared the avarice of the children,” the god said. “It was that were was so much to do, Antigone, and so few of us left to do it. We thought – I thought, for that night my voice was foremost among the follies – that it would be... transitory. We had connived a way to return all we had lost. Service need only last until we had returned to our old glory, and then the bonds could be released.”

The giant sadly smiled.

“One would not brook this,” the god said. “And you bear her name. In her fury she cursed us all fools and monsters, drakoi in children’s flesh, and to neither argument nor censure did she bow her head.”

The god looked up at the stars, wistful.

“Seven of us against one, and she did not bend an inch,” the giant said. “And so compromise was struck. She would have leave to go west and found cities as she wished, where it would be her gentle hands that set the laws, and in our old cities instead it would be avarice that held the reins.”

He looked back down at the earth, and Antigone somehow felt like weeping. There was sorrow in the retelling, sorrow that was older than stone or wind.

“I was fool twice over, child, for it was my foolish conniving that we attempted,” the god said. “Even as she went west and founded eighteen cities, we built atop mountains of broken backs until I had crafted a riddle I could ask of all the world.”

The god shook with anger.

“And even though she despised the entire bloodsoaked altar, when I called she returned,” the giant said. “And the Titans met one last time, that together we might move the Pattern itself.”

A long, desolate silence followed.

“The Fall broke many things,” the god softly said. “Places and peoples, cities gone in the blink of an eye or never made at all. So much was lost, in that moment of utter folly. And the worst will always be that of the seven and one that stood together that night, the sole who survived was the least worthy.”

Antigone’s throat tightened as the colossal silhouette turned to look down at her.

“I am Kreios Maker-of-Riddles,” the giant said. “I was once a god among many, and our demise broke this land in ways that echo still. My children thought me a god still, in the wake of our ruin, and so I left them to find their own way, their own choruses to sing.”

She swallowed.

“So why did you come here?” Antigone heard herself ask.

“There was a city not far from here, once,” Kreios softly smiled. “One of eighteen. And when the moon was kind, and our prides allowed, I sat among these stones to speak with a dear friend.”

“I cannot be her,” the girl murmured, terrified of disappointing him. “I never knew her.”

“Be who you are, Antigone,” the Maker-of-Riddles spoke in a rumbling voice. “Without lie or apology. Without fear or regret. Of you I will never ask more nor less.”

He laughed again, bathed in starlight.

“Do this, my child, and you will have done more in the span of your short years to honour her than I did in the crawling eternity of mine,” Kreios said. “I never understood it before, you see. That was it always about learning when the torch must be passed.”

“I don’t know who I want to be,” Antigone confessed.

The old god smiled, heartbreakingly gentle.

“Let us learn, then,” Kreios said. “Together.”

—

Over the many seasons that followed, sometimes humans came to the clearing again.

Seeking, it is said, a witch of the woods.

Interlude: Blood

“Honour is neither reputation nor law. It cannot be borrowed or bought, bent or bargained with, for it comes from a place that is beyond deception. Fidelity to virtue belongs only to yourself and the Gods, and needs no other witness.”

– Extract from the book ‘Reflections’ by Farah Isbili, second Holy Seljun of Levant

The roar shook the sky, trembling through the starlit dark and down the bones of all who heard it. Razin Tanja of the Grim Binder’s Blood, Lord of Malaga, grit his teeth.

“Binders to the bastion,” he shouted over the noise. “That is where the beorns will strike first.”

He met the gazes of the last of the practitioners that had come north with his father, feeling a pang of pain at the absences he saw in their ranks. Razin had never loved the binders, envious of the talent he had been born without, but he’d grown on the same grounds as them. Most he’d known by name, and a few of the younger he’d gone on skirmishes with. Few were left, and fewer with every battle.

“Do not try to destroy them,” he reminded his mages. “Sweep them off the walls as quickly as possible, that is all.”

Destruction was better left to the Lanterns or warriors trained in the use of pitch and flame, Razin and his captains had learned. The binders were weaker in traditional offensive spellcraft than Callowan and Proceran mages, but their blood-bound spirits were able to physically push back Keter’s monsters in ways that other sorcerers could only dream of.

“We will return victorious, lord, or take the short path home,” Ganiya Hundred-Ghost, eldest of the remaining binders, solemnly promised.

Razin sharply nodded.

“Honour to Levant,” he said.

“Honour to the Blood,” Ganiya fervently replied.

They were gone within moments, fleet-footed on the stone as they sped towards the bastion where the first of the enemy dead would reach the top of the walls. Razin’s sworn sword kept close around him, and the Lantern that had taken oath to protect him for the battle as well, as he went to the edge of the eastern rampart and looked over. The dead were coming in waves, he thought, eyes narrowing as the moonlight revealed the abominations of bone scaling sheer cliffs. The skeletons were many but also slow and they would not reach the wall for a long time. It was the monsters scaling the cliff that would draw first blood, the massive bear-like abomination called beorns that were clawing their way up. Inside their bellies they held companies of lesser dead which they vomited before rampaging, and for that reason it was the great bastion to Razin’s north they would target.

They’d want flat grounds and room to spew out their soldiers, to create a beachhead atop the walls. Keter usually preferred taking ground than lives, early in fight, knowing it could afford the losses to get into a superior position before the fighting became heavy. It also meant that Razin Tanja had been entirely aware, even if many of his captains had not been, that the warriors he had sent to guard the bastion were not being rewarded with hours by fires in a place where the wind did not bite too deep. The warriors in the bastion were going to die. Perhaps not all of them, but most. The Lord of Malaga had made his decision with that knowledge in the back of his head, whispering. And of the three captains regularly commanded warriors in the bastion, he had chosen one who was of his great supporters and two who were not. His loyal captain he had sent to obscure his intention, should men think on this later, and now that decision was like ash in his mouth for it was that man who now held the bastion. This, he suspected, would follow him in his dreams for months to come.

It had been easier, back when Razin still believed war to be a glorious thing.

A game of daring and cleverness that the sharp stakes only further gilded. That was the way it was, in the old stories, with the victors returning home covered in loot and honour and the defeated slunk away to lick their wounds until a chance to even the score came. Warriors died but they died in honour, proving their worth, and the deeds done in war made them immortal – perhaps not worthy of the distinction of being added to the Rolls, but kept alive past the end of flesh through stories and songs. Razin had believed in this, he’d begun to realize, much like a man dying of thirst would believe that beyond the hill lay a river. Razin Tanja of the Grim Binder’s Blood had not a speck of the sorcery that had made his line famous: war had been the only way he was ever going to be able to distinguish himself, make up for the lack he’d been born with.

And so Razin had embraced the ways of blood and steel, devoted himself wholeheartedly. He’d practiced with the blade until his palms bled and bones ached, he’d learned to move captains with words and sung the praises of the honourable ways of the Dominion of Levant. Of their inherent savage virtue, born of stripping away all the pretty lies and false righteousness the nations around Levant coated their own ways in.

Then he’d watched Careful Yannu kill his father in an honour duel, and it was like scales had been ripped off of his eyes.

“My lord,” one of his men quietly said, shaking him out of his thoughts. “We must move. We have stayed in the same place for too long, Revenants might come for your head.”

Razin gave the horrors below one last look, hand resting against the pommel of his sword. They’d be here before too long.

“We will do our part,” the Lord of Malaga murmured. “On my honour.”

—

The vulture had broken itself forcing its way through the wards that protected the skies above Hainaut, but it had gone through.

Though it was in freefall, the necromantic abomination no longer animated, it had still served the Dead King’s purpose with success: on the creature’s back, Tariq glimpsed the shape of a Revenant huddling close. It had infiltrated the city, and when it reached the ground would no doubt begin to wreak havoc. The Grey Pilgrim watched the vulture drop like a stone for a heartbeat, then lengthened his stride. The Enemy would not have risked one of the Scourges so carelessly, but there were no Revenants that were not dangerous. Even one whose Bestowal had been weak whilst they lived would still be able to cause a great deal of chaos and death, if left unchecked.

Tariq let the pull of chance guide his path through the city, passing by the orderly ranks of Callowan companies heading for the gates and bands of haphazard fantassins being exhorted to move quicker by their officers. Few saw him, for he did not care to be seen. The old man’s face tightened as the Ophanim whispered in his ear, warning him that he would not arrive in time. He’d been close to where the vulture and Revenant were to fall, but not quite close enough. He was two blocks away when the large shape smashed into a house with a thunderous crash, though not so far that he could not discern that the Revenant had nimbly leapt away before the impact. So where had it gone?

“Rooftops, do you think?” he asked his old friends.

The Ophanim murmured their agreement.

“The furtive sort always take to the rooftops,” Tariq complained. “It is unkind. My knees aren’t what they used to be.”

A passage through the Ways would allow him to close the distance, but also reveal his presence – most Revenants could sense the touch of Twilight on Creation. He would have to move the old-fashioned way. Tariq went through the house that had been smashed, using the ruin as a path to the roof, and before long he was on rough tiles and cocking a white eyebrow at his surroundings. He’d found the cloaked silhouette almost instantly, skittering atop another roof as it was, but not only had it yet to notice him it was also... a streak of fire coming from down in the street interrupted his thoughts, and promptly solved the mystery of why the Revenant had been paying closer attention to the streets below than its immediate surroundings.

The Revenant ducked under the flame, proving it had kept exceptional reflexes even in death.

The mage that’d tossed a spell at the cloaked Revenant cursed loudly in High Tyrian, warning the two warriors by her side that they were going to have a fight. Tariq moved silently across rooftops as the Revenant hesitated for a moment then leapt down, moving in a streak of speed. Not so swift that one of the two warriors – boys, he now discerned – did not move between it and the mage with a raised shield, forcing it back with a measured swing of his sword. The other boy darted forward as the Revenant drew back. A straight-edge sword was swung out, but the dead Bestowed revealed a blade of its own in a glimmer of moonlight on metal and caught it.

“ Incise ,” the Page disdainfully said, adjusting his blow and shattering the Revenant’s sword.

It had not been simple strength, Tariq caught, but instead precision. With the point of his blade, the Page had struck at the weakest point of the sword wielded by the undead and struck it with all his might. An adjustment done in a fraction of a moment, too. Impressive, for one his age. But he was still green. Having moved behind the Revenant, hidden by the shadow of a tall chimney, the Pilgrim watched as the Revenant abandoned the blade and simply slugged the young Proceran in the face with inhuman strength. The Page rocked back, and when a knife flicked out in the Revenant’s other hand came close to getting his throat cut – the Squire, stepped in once more, taking the blow on his shield and forcing back the Revenant.

The Apprentice, with a triumphant cry, landed a spell on the cloaked figure’s side: a streak of blue flame ate up the entire cloak in second, forcing the Revenant to throw it away even as the Squire closed distance and battered him down with strikes of his shield. Though it was a brutal and inelegant method, Tariq noted that it succeeded at putting the Revenant on the ground and keeping it there.

“Come on , Gaetan,” the Squire hissed. “I don’t have anything that can-”

“ Incise ,” the Page panted out angrily, severing the Revenant’s head.

Sharpness and precision, Tariq decided. That was the nature of the aspect. The Ophanim murmured what their own sight revealed, which had him cocking an eyebrow. ‘Incise’, it seemed, would be significantly stronger when dealing wounds than killing blows. There was a sense of frivolity to it, of defiance. The Page’s nose was bloody, and he would likely get a black eye out of this if he wasn’t healed. The Pilgrim, after a moment, decided not to reveal himself. A black eye was always a good lesson, for a young Bestowed, and he would not rob them of the pleasure of their victory by revealing he’d watched over them as they won it. He had, after all, been entirely unneeded here.

Providence pulled at Tariq’s feet and he slipped away in the dark, feeling a call towards the east. The old man’s lips tightened. That was the wall, he knew, that was held by his countrymen.

The Grey Pilgrim took back to the streets, fleet of foot and clad in dusk.

—

He turned aside the skeleton’s sword with his buckler, letting it scrabble against the hide-covered wood, and placed his strike: the blade ripped into the bone of the neck, severing the spine after two wild hacks. The skeleton collapsed, necromancy unmade, and Razin Tanja breathed out. He did not have long to rest, as a flicker of movement to the side had him ducking to avoid a well-thrown javelin that bit into the shield of the sworn sword to his right.

“Forward,” the Lord of Malaga shouted, “forward for Levant!”

A roar answered as the last of the dead the beorns had spat out were driven back from the bastion by a tightening shield wall, those that weren’t smashed instead pushed off the edge so that might be broken by the fall. It was a small, petty victory but the warriors had won it and they shouted themselves hoarse afterwards. Razin raised his blade, claiming his own share of the acclaim, but then praised Captain Alezon – who’d held the bastion until reinforcements could arrive, and died holding to that duty. Razin had liked the man, counted him almost as a friend. And he had sent him here to die. Sometimes he wondered if he was truly better than what he wanted to replace, but when he did the searing clarity of that night after the Graveyard came back to him.

How clear it had been, in that moment, that the Blood were no longer what they had been meant to be. How much difference was there really, between the red-handed sons and daughters of the Blood and the rapacious princes their sacred ancestors had risen in rebellion to drive out? With the Procerans gone the blades had not been sheathed. They’d just turned them on each other instead. Like dogs in a too-small kennel, snapping and snarling. It must end, Razin had realized, or they would ruin their homes and the Dominion with it. Yet for all that he had tried to embrace this truth, the practice of it had been... difficult. Dreams were always prettier before they were dragged to the ground, where all the mud of practicalities sullied them.

Razin Tanja had not become Lord of Malaga – the first ever elected away from ancient Tanja grounds, through a trick of procedure – without incurring debts and troubles, which now both had to be settled. There were captains in his service who would not hear of straying from the old ways, of making pacts of peace and ending raids when they returned home, and he could not yet afford to lose their support. His humiliating defeat had Sarcella, even if dealt by the hand of the Black Queen herself, remained a scar on his reputation. And though some here and at home had well received the announcement of his betrothal to Aquiline Osena, others were openly dubious.

Tartessos and Malaga had long fought over wealthy territories laying between them, he had been reminded, what was now to be of them? What of the deaths come of the last wars, must they go forever unavenged? There was no honour in these surrenders, warriors grumbled.

Aquiline had admitted to him in private that some of her captains had been mutinous over the notion as well, in no small part because as long as she had been unwed her hand in marriage had been considered the greatest prize that a captain in the service of the Osena might hope to win. Worse, the most ardent supporters of their union tended to be captains who backed the marriage because it would secure the southern border of the Osena and allow them to send their full might to war against the Ifriqui of Vaccei, their old enemies of the Brigand’s Blood. Sometimes it felt like every step forward they took was followed by two steps back. Yet Razin knew nothing but rain came from throwing curses at the sky, and so he used what he had at hand: the war. It was ugly work, but Razin and Aquiline traded blood for hope.

The captains that would never bend were granted the honour of leading vanguards, men and women more farsighted raised to replace them. With steel and deeds they bound warriors to them, by oaths and debts and the hard companionship of those sharing battle, and inch by inch they had gained ground. Lady Itima Ifriqui of Vaccei would be an enemy so long as she lived, but she was old and her heir Moro amenable to a peace. Careful Yannu loomed tall over them all, undefeated in honour duels, but for all that the older man was accruing honours like speaking for Levant at the Arsenal, he had no allies beyond his own kin. And though they were all wary of the Holy Seljun, beyond Wazim Isbili lay a greater power still. The Peregrine smiled upon their efforts, his approval as the blessing of the pilgrim’s star.

And still it was damned ugly work, trying to move Levant. It cost too much blood, and Razin almost missed the days when the scales had been over his eyes and he’d still believed there had been glory in sending men to die.

“Prepare yourselves,” Razin said. “It will be a long night, and there are many victories yet to claim.”

Already he could see a beorn attacking positions to the south of the bastion, aiming perhaps not to take the wall but instead to spew out its load of soldiers in the city itself, and he could only hope that Aquiline would send the Lanterns there on time. His binders were resting and the priests from Procer had yet to arrive, save for the healers that were already preparing beds for the wounded in the nearby barracks. As for himself, he would stay here until the next batches of pitch arrived at least. Longer than that would be risking – a man in shoddy hide armour, barefoot and armed with a great sword, landed in a roll among the warriors nearest to the edge.

“Good evening,” the Drake grinned.

—

The Barrow Sword squinted.

“That’s not the Pale Knight,” he finally said.

“Your wisdom is peerless,” the Vagrant Spear solemnly replied.

Ishaq rolled his eyes. Sidonia was not entirely unpleasant, for one of the Blood, but she seemed to believe it her oathsworn duty to needle him at every opportunity.

“It’s just the Drake,” the Berserker said. “We can take him.”

Of that Ishaq was not so certain, but he would not outright disagree. The three of them were strong in close quarters, and not without talents that would allow them to stem the tide of that Scourge’s healing. More than that, the last two members of his band of five had teeth beyond what mere blades could bring to bear.

“Um,” the Harrowed Witch hesitantly said. “Shouldn’t we... do something? He’s killing soldiers.”

The Drake had wasted no time in beginning to cut up anyone that moved around him, it was true. With that greatsword of his he smashed through shields and blades alike, slaughtering with ease even as warriors kept trying to close around him on all sides so he’d not have room to swing the large blade. Useless, when the Scourge was probably capable of shattering a shield with a kick anyway. It was like ants trying to wrestle a lizard.

“We are meant to handle the Axeman,” the Blessed Artificer regretfully said. “If we spend ourselves against another, there will be a gap in the defences.”

“He’s a Scourge,” Sidonia grunted. “Killing him is still a win. We should strike.”

The Berserker nodded in fervent agreement. Sentiment was in favour, Ishaq decided, but should he give the order? Much as he disliked to admit it, he probably couldn’t afford to let the lordling ruling Malaga get himself killed. It would deal a hard blow to the morale of the Tanja warriors, and the Black Queen would have Ishaq’s hide for it. On the other hand, letting Tanja warriors die would win him favour with the Grave Binder – who the Binder’s Blood despised – and even if he intervened there was no guarantee that the young man would honour him for it. Blood only ever felt the need to owe debts to Blood, like honour was a drink only they could partake of. It’d be bad tactics to do nothing , Ishaq finally decided.

“We strike,” the Barrow Sword said. “As was planned.”

He half-expected the Artificer to argue with him, but though she looked displeased she refrained. Perhaps she was sensing her opinion was not share by most. No challenge was offered, though, so Ishaq rose from his crouch and took the lead. Sidonia was quicker on the run, but also a lot more fragile. The ancient armour of bronze around him moved without a sound, smooth as if oiled from enchantments older than he dared to imagine, and the Barrow Sword unsheathed Pinon. The ancient blade hummed, tasting of the death in the air, and without a word Ishaq leapt from the rooftop to the edge of the rampart. From the corner of his eye he saw a warrior thrown in the air, missing an arm as she screamed in pain. The Drake was merciless.

As he began to push his way through the throng of warriors he heard the Spear and the Berserker land behind him, Zoe snarling at the Malagans to get out of her way. Beyond the ring of shields he glimpsed binder-magic at work, creatures of dirt and ash trying to drive back the Scourge, but it was a bad match. The Drake was both strong and difficult to kill, the spirits did little but rip up flesh that healed within a heartbeat and they were failing at pushing him over the edge. Now, though, he was here. Steps measured as he advanced the Barrow Sword breathed deep of the evening air. Ah, opportunity. Was there ever anything that tasted sweeter? A spirit-wyvern was cut in half, the blade that did it biting shallow of the stone beneath them, and the Drake slunk out. Grinning wildly, his hide armour already tatters, the Revenant glance at Ishaq curiously.

“Villain?” he asked.

It must be the beard, Ishaq decided. Surely he did not look that villainous?

“You wound me, friend,” the Barrow Sword smiled, tapping his ancient blade against his heart.

Pinon hummed at the touch, thirsty beast that she was.

“That’s the plan,” the Drake agreed, darting forward.

Ishaq raised his sword, but the speed had been enough that the Revenant might have startled him into an unwise parry if this hadn’t been what he was after in the first place.

“ Honour to the Blood ,” the Vagrant Spear gleefully howled, smashing into the Drake’s side.

Light roiled and screamed as she severed an arm, but the Revenant only laughed – abandoning is greatsword, he caught his own limb and threw it at her face as a fresh one grew anew. Ishaq, though was not intending to just stay and watch. Sidonia was forced back by a wild swing of the greatsword, retreating smoothly with both hands on her spear, and before the backswing could return Ishaq closed the distance. The Revenant struck at his armour but the ancient bronze mail took it without flinching, and the mistake allowed him to get a good cut of his own in: across the face, through one eye and the mouth. The Drake was unmoved but Ishaq stayed in close, elbowing the wrist trying to get the greatsword around him and hammering forehead to forehead to drive the Revenant back.

Which he did, eyes wild as he put fingers to his already-healing wound.

“That sword’s not Dominion work,” the Drake coldly said.

Pinon sang, devouring the last bits of soul it’d managed to pull away from the Dead King’s bindings.

“There are all sorts of treasures in barrows, if one has the nerve to take them up,” Ishaq smiled.

Not that he would have been able to put his sword down now, even should he wish to.

“Well,” the Drake said, “it’ll make this a little interesting, at least.”

The Malagan warriors had withdraw, wisely, though more likely it was because to their eyes the affair looked closed enough to an honour duel. Those were not interfered with without incurring great shame, and did Ishaq’s entire homeland not just quake at the very shadow of shame? Like hound on a leash, only so enamoured of the prison they sang its praises in song. He glanced at Sidonia, who nodded back, and as one they struck. The Drake howled in laughter, and the dance began anew. The Scourge was fast and strong, nimbler with that monstrous sword than he had any right to be, but they were neither of them unskilled. The Vagrant Spear feigned a low bit only to snake a hit at the throat, forcing the Drake to bat it away, and without batting an eye Ishaq slashed at the undead’s back.

The flesh grew back. The soul did not, and Pinon sang with glee. It liked taking from souls already claimed best, preferring Binds and Revenants to the living.

Ishaq withdrew, though not quite quickly enough for his face to be spared the edge of the returning greatsword. A thick cut across the cheek, dripping blood against the edge of his mouth. He swallow a lick, smiling, and saw fury bloom in the Scourge’s eyes. It did not like losing parts of itself, no matter how small they might be.

“That’ll be enough, children,” the Drake said. “I’m being told to stop playing.”

And behind him, as if summoned, the hulking shape of a beorn climbed over the ledge and looked down at them through a gaping maw, roaring out.

“You have a bear,” the Barrow Sword, conceded. “But we have her .”

He jutted a thumb behind him, where the Berserker was slowly advancing. Her body was jerking wildly, eyes turned bloodshot and hair looking like it’d been shot through with thorns. Muscles grew, and as her face turned monstrous the Berserker hacked out a breath.

“ Rage ,” she snarled.

The beorn swatted at her, but she caught the paw with the flat of her blade. Both wavered, for a moment, before she smashed the great limb into the floor with a triumphant howl. The Drake looked a little unnerved, and Ishaq frankly couldn’t blame him. Zoe wasn’t particularly able to tell friends from foe in that state and shaking her out of it tended to be... difficult.

“I always get the worst assignment,” the Drake sighed. “Would it kill that prick in his fancy armour to take the vanguard, one of these days?”

“I sympathize,” Ishaq smiled. “Please, friend, allow me to relieve you of your burdens.”

The Barrow Sword moved, and the Vagrant Spear with him.

The dance resumed.

—

It was a good fight, Sidonia thought as she pricked the Drake’s neck and send Light howling into his body.

Though bones snapped and flesh burned, the Revenant swatted at her and she was forced to withdraw a few steps until the Barrow Sword commanded their foe’s attention. It was a fight worthy of being added to the Rolls, even though Ishaq was one Below’s and so sundered from honour. The Berserker was ripping into the beorn that’d come up over the ledge, now with her bare hands since she had used her sword to nail shut the beast’s maw, which left the two of them room to handle the Drake properly. The abomination was still far from death, but then they had yet to reveal their own killing strokes. The Scourges always had surprises, and so their opponents must have some as well.

They went another round with death, this time Ishaq taking the lead. The Drake was wary of the Barrow Sword’s blade, which though grave-goods and so proscribed seemed particularly suited to slaying Revenants. Ishaq went forward aggressively as Sidonia circled around the back, baiting the Drake into a warning swing, and immediately the Vagrant Spear struck. Three quick steps and extending her body like the spear she wielded, the tip of her steel finding the back of the Revenant’s head – only he danced to the side, sword flicking back to bat away her spear before he caught Ishaq by the edge of his mail even as the Barrow Sword carved into his flank.

“That’s all we’ll get,” the Drake said. “Get on with it.”

With a heave, he threw the Barrow Sword upwards into the sky and turned to Sidonia with a hard grin. Half a heartbeat later a black-feathered arrow sprouted in Ishaq’s throat as he still rose in the air. And as if a veil had been torn down, an undead drake was revealed. Batting its wings half a hundred feet away from the bastion, above the height of the fight. Atop the creature stood a single archer. The Hawk , Sidonia thought, and felt a glimmer of fear. She had no time for more, as the Drake was on her and he was not an opponent she could afford to be distracted against. Still, Zoe must be warned as much as she could be in the throes of her rage.

“The Hawk is here, Berserker,” Sidonia shouted. “Watch-”

An arrow sprouted in the villainess forehead even as she threw the beorn off the wall, staggering her for a moment. Ashen Gods , the Vagrant Spear thought. Mere moments and already two of her band were dead. Only, instead of collapsing the Berserker screamed in utter fury before ripping off one of the crenels and tossing the large stone at the drake.

“Impressive,” the Drake complimented even as he struck.

Sidonia let the worries sink away into nothing. She would not survive this, if she let the world command her attention. Eyes on the enemy’s blade, she nimbly withdrew two steps and smiled. Yes, this was better. Her and the foe, nothing else. If death came through arrow, let it. She would end her life in honour. Breathing out, she circled again as the Revenant studied her. He feigned with a brusque step forward but she did not bite, choosing her angle. Right behind the shoulder there was a point where the Scourge could not even parry, the arm simply did not bend right. If she could get him to move... She rushed forward, earning a swing, and slid under the horizontal strike.

She rolled around the kick that followed, coming up in a crouch with the point of her spear upwards. At precisely the right angle Sidonia rose, and to the strike she added the secret Creation had bestowed upon her: that so long as you struck with the soul instead of the hand, there was nothing you could not Pierce . The blade of her spear slid through the armpit, shearing through flesh and muscle and bone as blood sprayed and she bisected the Drake. Her spearhead emerged through the other armpit and she ripped it free as she stepped back, blood flecking her face paint. Only, she realized with dim horror, just enough had healed by the time she withdrew the spear that strings of skin had kept the severed parts together.

“Good blow,” the Drake praised. “My turn.”

The angle was wrong. She knew it even as she struck at the swing coming at her, trying to change how it would strike. Instead the spearhead scraped along the side of the greatsword, changing nothing, and with a swallowed scream she felt her enemy’s edge cut halfway through her arm and outright through the shaft of her spear. The Drake snorted, socking her in the stomach and letting her stumble to the ground.

“The Tanja lord, Hawk,” the Scourge called out. “I’m not in the mood for pursuit, get him now.”

And from the corner of her eye, Sidonia saw the arrow fly. Finding a path through the press of bodies and shields with impossible accuracy, as if eager to snatch out the life of the Lord of Malaga. And it made it but an inch away from the Tanja’s throat, before the sour-faced spectre of a young man became visible and unhinged his jaw to swallow it whole. The Harrowed Witch, Sidonia realized with dim relief. She rolled to her feet, bleeding but unbowed, and breathed out. She still had two aspects to use. Only the Drake seemed disinclined to allow her to use them, already on her and swinging. Barren Mercy, Sidonia thought. She would have to cushion the blow and she raised her hand...

The point of the Barrow Sword’s eerie blade punched through the Drake’s belly, Ishaq looking bloodless but very much alive.

“Gods but I hate dying,” the Barrow Sword hissed. “Do you have any idea how many souls that sets me back?”

Well, Sidonia thought, rising to her feet with the two halves of her spear. Perhaps today’s deeds would not have to be added to the Rolls by another’s hand, after all.

—

Razin had known this fear before.

During the battle he had not yet known would be called the Princes’ Graveyard, witnessing the Firstborn unleashed under cover of the dark. The way death had just... ensued, and they’d all been powerless to stop it for those few Bestowed with the privilege of doing otherwise by the Ashen Gods. It had stuck in his throat then, that fear, and it did now even as his life was saved from some Revenant’s murderous whim by the whim of some clever Bestowed using a ghost. And he knew, he did, that the intelligent decision made was to leave . To stay behind a shield wall and retreat out of sight, where the archer could not easily pursue beyond the city wards. And yet instead, Razin Tanja felt his jaw clench . Is this the sum of us ? We die in droves while the demigods settle the score, little more than an afterthought for either side.

No, he thought. Enough.

“Warriors of Malaga,” he shouted, “ shield wall .”

They would not be ghosts before death even bothered to find them, spectators to the end of times. If they were to stand here tonight, it would be sword in hand. A shiver of surprise went through the warriors, of hesitation, but in the end he was the Lord of Malaga and this was war. The shields went up, sword rose.

“Binders, on my word,” Razin said. “Knock that drake out of our fucking sky.”

An arrow streaked towards him again, but the apparition swallowed it once more. Who did it belong to, he wondered? He would have to find out. Thanks were in order.

“Forward, sons and daughters of Levant,” Razin Tanja screamed.

“The Blessed Artificer requests that you unleash the binders right before she acts, your lordship.”

Razin almost stabbed the woman who’d just addressed him in surprise, as a heartbeat ago he would have been sure there was absolutely no one standing next to him. Ashen Gods, how long had she been there?

“And when is that?” the Lord of Malaga asked, steading his breath.

“In...” the young woman addressing him trailed off, cocking her head to the side, “seven heartbeats now.”

Cursing, Razin immediately ordered for the binders to strike even as his shield wall advanced. Bound spirits flew out, gathering substance from their surroundings as they did, and struck at the archer and the undead drake in a storm. On the ground the Revenant was carving at the shield wall, slicing through shields like butter, but with the Barrow Sword and the Vagrant Spear striking at him he could not afford more than a few idle blows and he was steadily losing ground. Now there was little but a strip at the edge of the bastion left to fight over, and there the monstrous Bestowed the other had brought was still raging. It snatched the Revenant by the foot and started wildly smashing him around, the other two Bestowed backing away carefully.

“Gods, let this work,” the young witch by his side murmured.

The sky lit up with Light. Streak after streak gathered in a circle, like ceiling made of spears, and every last one was angled down at the storm his binders had made. The spirits, he now grasped, had not been meant by his allies to kill the archer but to blind it.

Light shone until it blinded them all, and like a tide it fell.

—

The Grey Pilgrim’s steps stuttered.

It was, Tariq thought, almost like getting a glimpse of years to come. The devastation visited unto the bastion seemed like a small thing, compared to the cheers of his countrymen defending it. The sky was filled with smoke and the Drake was still there, pinned to the ground by sorcery and swords and the bruising grip of the Berserker, but it was the living that had caught his eye. Razin Tanja, the young man that was half the hope he saw for his home rising above itself, reluctantly but honestly clasping arms with the Barrow Sword as he just had with the Vagrant Spear. Warriors roaring in approval. It was a different world, he thought. One he had not been born to.

He’d come here to take care of Levant, but Levant had taken care of itself.

It was pride he now felt welling up in his belly, but grief as well. There was still some aid he could lend, at least, and that much he would offer. The Pilgrim made his way through the crowd, warriors respectfully parting for him, and though offering smiles and nods where appropriate his stride led directly to the Drake. The Berserker had just pulped his stomach, but those eyes were wide open and aware. They also filled with fear, when he approached, as they should.

“Drake,” Tariq gently smiled.

“No,” the Revenant hissed. “Not you, I was so close I was-”

Light lashing out, the Grey Pilgrim pulled open a gate into Twilight beneath the Scourge. He struggled, but there was no avoiding this while bound. Screaming, convulsing, the Revenant fell into the gate and turned to ash. And this time, when the tooth flew out towards the edge of the rampart, Tariq was ready. He snatched it out of the air and the Ophanim hissed with anger at the abomination, their will joining his as he wove Light and tightened his grip. Dust flowed out from between his fingers, slipping into the gate before he finally allowed it to close. The Pilgrim opened his mouth to speak into the hushed silence that’d followed, but it was a great roar that broke it instead.

The Berserker spasmed in pain, half a dozen arrows stuck in her body and three through her forehead, but from the monstrous shape she’d turned into she slowly turned back into a woman. The Ophanim whispered and Tariq’s hands tightened.

“Is there anything we can do?”

Silence. There was no. The Berserker’s rage ended, leaving only a mortal behind, and that mortal did not breathe. Only the wrath had kept her alive.

Keter always had the last word.

Interlude: Song

“I wrote this work because it is our habit as a people to ignore the worst of our history and gild its mediocrities, and to speak against this practice will see you castigated as unpatriotic. This is more than wrong, it is dangerous. We must not snuff out the lights of our common soul by placating the darkness, else what manner of a world are we laying the foundation for?”

– Extract from the conclusion of ‘The Labyrinth Empire, or, A Short History of Procer’, by Princess Eliza of Salamans

Her lips had gone dry, so Beatrice Volignac made herself drink from her cup so it would not show. The wine was watered, she was not foolish enough to partake while a battle was being waged, but the taste of the stout Cantal red was bracing anyway. The Princess of Hainaut, or more truthfully the capital and a thin stretch of the old southern borderlands, set down her golden cup after having wet her lips and leaned down to look over the maps she’d had her footpads being to the war room years ago. This was not a war council, for there was precious little planning left to be made, but given the prominence of the people seated in the salon where Beatrice’s ancestors had once received visiting royalty any decision made here had the potential to make or break the defence of the city.

Everyone had a man or a woman at the table, so to speak. The Army of Callow in the city was led by the seniormost of their generals, an aging orc who went by the name of Bagram, but while the general was here his authority was mitigated by another’s presence: Lady Vivienne Dartwick, heiress-designate to the throne of Callow. That the former heroine only rarely used her authority in military matters only reinforced its weight when she did use it, an elegant sort of artifice worthy of a woman with Lady Dartwick’s excellent reputation with the Highest Assembly. There was some rejoicing among Beatrice’s fellow royals at the notion that Lady Dartwick might be sitting the throne in a few years, though no doubt the prospect of no longer having to deal with someone who could drown an army when cross had played a role as well as Dartwick’s personal qualities.

For the Dominion it was Captain Nabila, the stout commander of the Alavan forces within the alliance, who was well-understood to be the least of the three great Levantine commanders. Both Aquiline Osena and Razin Tanja were Blood, it lent a lustre to their authority that the other woman could not hope to match. The Iron Prince himself was here too, having left the command at the southern wall to Princess Mathilda of Neustria, with his empty sleeve folded over the arm he’d lost defending this very city three years back. The sole representative for the Firstborn was a certain Mighty Sagasbord, dark-skinned and quiet with a bent for the sardonic when it did break its silence. Prince Arsene despised it, Beatrice had learned, not that the dark elf particularly seemed to care. Theirs was not a culture that quailed at the thought of making powerful enemies.

It gave her the creeps.

“- eastern wall drove back an assault by Revenants and beorns,” Captain Nadila shared. “Lord Razin led the defence, with assistance from a band of five Bestowed under the Vagrant Spear.”

Beatrice’s eyes sharpened. From what she recalled, that was the band with the Barrow Sword. The same man the Black Queen plainly meant to make her lieutenant. Somehow the princess doubted he’d been put under the command of another. That had the smell of Dominion politics, something she figured she ought to have as little to do with as possible.

“Only assaults on the walls,” General Bagram growled. “Like we called it right. They won’t touch the front gate until they’ve drawn out as many as our soldiers as they can.”

“They’ll keep testing us with Revenants,” the Iron Prince said. “To suss out what Chosen we have at hand. Old Bones like to know the face of the opposition before he puts his back into the swing.”

“The Revenants will be handled by Named,” Lady Dartwick calmly said. “A defence plan was designed by Queen Catherine and the White Knight, before his departure. Our concern is to be the traditional forces.”

Beatrice cleared her throat, claiming attention.

“Have our Firstborn friends confirmed our suspicions?” she asked.

Mighty Sagasbord coolly smiled. Its Chantant when it spoke was eerily perfect, and Beatrice knew enough of drow to know such proficiency could only be gained by wholesale slaughter of her countrymen. As always, that serene mask over the madness made her skin crawl.

“We dig for truth still,” Mighty Sagasbord said. “But the Tomb-Maker itself leads us, Hainaut Princess. There is no need for... uneasiness.”

That it could tell she feared it only made it more unpleasant to deal with.

“There’s not much to do but wait,” Prince Klaus Papenheim gruffly said. “No dishonour in that, it’s the way war is. Some of us should try to get some sleep: the dead will try to run us into the ground, it’s one of Keter’s favourite tricks.”

As all here knew, but when such a renowned veteran spoke the words it gave others the opening to do so without shaming themselves. The Iron Prince was not without his kindnesses, for all that like most Lycaonese he cared little for social graces.

“I may retire for a few hours, then,” Princess Beatrice said. “It would be better to be fully rested when I relieve Captain-General Catalina from her command on the western wall.”

Captain Nadila snorted, eyeing her with open disdain.

“Will you be returning to your palace for it, Princess Beatrice?” the painted Levantine asked.

The orc on the other side of the table chuckled. General Bagram received a cocked eyebrow from Lady Dartwick for it, but she took no further issue and he looked undaunted. It was the Iron Prince’s unsurprised face that stung the most, though. Like he’d expected her to be the first to retire. Beatrice’s fingers closed around her cup. Perhaps he had. It was not disdainful, but even now the Iron Prince thought of Alamans as soft – always it was they who balked, who slowed, who mutinied even as others bled to drive the dead out of their lands. And that belief, Beatrice Volignac found it reflected in the eyes of everyone here. She’d had it directed at her before, the look, when people though that because she was fat it meant she was weak or stupid. But it wasn’t about her this time, was it? Not really.

It was all Alamans that were being looked down on. And she could see the shape of it, almost. What great names had come of her people in this war? Cordelia Hasenbach was Lycaonese, Rozala Malanza was Arlesite and even the Kingfisher Prince, Frederic Goethal, preferred the company of northerners to his own kind while openly disdaining the games of the Highest Assembly. And it was unfair, Beatrice thought, for her people were brave. They were gallant and stubborn and love freedom more fiercely than any other under the sun, but what did it matter to these few before her now? All they saw was an Alamans shackle around the Grand Alliance’s foot. And this was larger than Beatrice, than House Volignac or perhaps even royalty, but here and now it was her that the looks stung.

“I am not yet sure,” Princess Beatrice evenly replied. “Regardless, I will first go to our rampart and assess the situation there.”

It was her home being fought for, she thought. Sleep could wait for a while still.

—

Catalina Ferreiro had become Captain-General of the Ligera Bandera a mere two years before the war against Keter began, an appointment that had been like a noose around her neck ever since. She had been a compromise candidate, she knew, that her decent battlefield record and noble lineage had seen her elected by the officers because they have her more respectable standing in the eyes of the rank and file. The powerful banner-captains of the Ligera had meant to use her as a figurehead while they privately continued the same infighting that’d paralyzed the greatest fantassin company of the Principate so badly it had been unable to even take a contract for the Tenth Crusade. Catalina had thought herself clever, playing off Vargeras against Capistrant until they’d spent themselves against each other and she had enough support to muzzle Garrido on her own.

The prize she had won, unfortunately, was uncontested command of the largest mercenary company on Calernia just as the first signs of the end times were glimpsed the north. As Old Teresa was fond of saying, the Gods never missed an opportunity to piss in the gruel of fantassins.

“Pitch and torches,” the Captain-General bellowed. “Burn that thing or we’ll lose the bastion.”

Catalina preferred the spear, but it was a useless weapon against the dead so she’d taken to the halberd instead: with a grunt, she smashed the axehead into the flank of the skeleton coming for her and toppled it over the edge of the rampart. Her personal guard swept forward, smashing into the loose formation of undead trying to keep her from reinforcing the bastion where the Folies Rouges were being hacked apart by ghouls and the beorn that’d carried them up the cliff. Captain Reinald had done well against the first wave, but the second had caught him by surprise and now the entire western wall was at risk. If they lost that bastion... already the dead were trying to land ladders to solidify the beachhead. Flicking a glance back through the sweaty locks matting her helmet, she caught sight of the approaching torches. No more time to waste.

“ Ligera ,” Catalina shouted.

“ Faith kept through fire ,” her soldiers shouted back,

They charged against into the dead, whose formation the undead officers had not been quick enough to salvage. The Captain-General paced herself, picking her foes carefully – a thrust of her halberd pushed another corpse over the wall, a sweeping descent shattered another’s helmet and broke the foul magics keeping it moving – even as the front ranks of her mercenary company plowed through the enemy line. A clear path to the bastion, she thought.

“Torchmen,” she screamed, “with-”

Her words were drowned out by a thunderous roar as the beorn that’d been tearing at the fantassins in the bastion abandoned its playthings there, instead leaping down onto the rampart and casually sweeping half a dozen men off the wall into the city below. Some might survive, Catalina though, though they might not wish they had.

“Aim for the beorn,” the Captain-General of the Ligera Bandera calmly said. “On my signal.”

Another seven men dead, the great abomination crushing them as easily as a boot would an ant.

“Hold,” Catalina Ferreiro said.

Another handful dead, the beast enjoying its rampage. With only a thin stretch of wall to maneuver with and other soldiers behind them, her men could do little but stand and die.

“Hold,” she repeated through gritted teeth.

And finally, crushing a young woman like a pulped grape, the beorn came close enough.

“ Now ,” the Captain-General hissed.

Torches were put to the earthen jugs of pitch just before they were thrown, of the ten thrown nine splattering across the monster’s large form. Flames burned clear and bright, spreading as they ate at dry dead flesh and the beorn howled.

“Halberds to the front,” Catalina ordered, breathing a sigh of relief.

The halberdiers hurried forward, hacking at the creature even as it was destroyed by the flames and ensuring it would not smash into their formation. It toppled into the city below and the fantassins hurried to reinforce the bastion even as Catalina stayed behind long enough to arrange for the wounded to be sent back. Her bodyguards closed in around her as she followed into the bastion, finding the situation there had turned around. Captain Reinald had holed up his men in corners while the beorn rampaged but they’d come out swinging as soon as the beast was gone so the ghouls were already on the backfoot when her reinforcements arrived. She left the clearing out of the stragglers to her soldiers and took of her helmet, seeking out Captain Reinald.

She found the fat man conversing with his wizards, an untended wound on his arm that’d been inflicted through now-ripped mail. The captain of the Folies Rouges dismissed his casters when he saw her approach, offering a grateful nod.

“My thanks for drawing it away,” Reinald said. “All our pitch was spent on the first three and we hadn’t gotten fresh jugs yet.”

“I expect you’ll have to return the favour before this is over,” Catalina replied. “Have you heard anything from further north?”

“The Bayeux footmen are holding strong,” the older man replied. “Prince Arsene made it clear he’ll tolerate no retreat.”

Catalina breathed out a snort as Reinald smirked. Prince Arsene Odon did not have a particularly inspiring reputation as a military commander, though he wasn’t as bad as some other royals. Still, he would never have made it above company-captain in the Ligera.

“We’ll need to start bringing in the smaller companies to freshen up bloodied positions,” Catalina said. “I don’t want to dilute our ranks too much, but...”

“No, I quite agree,” Captain Reinald said. “If we bleed our finest soldiers dry too soon there’ll be nothing but the dregs left fighting come sunlight.”

She nodded in agreement. It might seem callous to dismiss some of her fellow fantassin companies with so contemptuous a term, but some of them were honestly no better than levies. Which brought to mind yet more trouble.

“We’ll need to keep a close eye on the Brabant conscripts,” she sighed. “They keep breaking.”

“Prince Etienne croaking it did a number on them,” Reinald sympathetically said. “That man was his principality’s backbone. Didn’t help that the Iron Prince decided to pick them up by the throat afterwards.”

“He did what he needed to,” Catalina replied, but her tone was lukewarm.

That Klaus Papenheim was one of the finest generals alive was not in dispute – though the Arlesite in Catalina had her fancying that Rozala Malanza might give him a closer match than most – but that he’d acted like a... Lycaonese wasn’t either. The northerners liked their tyrants, glorified them, but their southern cousins had never shared the fascination. Tyrants there got knives, not statues. Had this been another war, another man, many a company would have put coin together to hire assassins over a man who’d arrested so many officers on such spurious grounds. These were desperate times, of course, and the officers had been out of line. It was still a bitter pill to swallow for all of them, Catalina thought, that the Iron Prince’s heavy-handed actions had not earned so much as a raised eyebrow from any other great name.

Mind you, whoever it was that’d figured appealing to the Black Queen over an issue of military discipline was a good idea should be sent to Keter for raising in the hopes that the stupid was infectious. Catalina liked the woman more than she figured she would have, being a murderous heretic, and considered her a generally reasonable superior officer. She was also someone who hanged her own soldiers when they got sticky fingers and whose answer to a mutiny was a lot more likely to be crucifixion than sympathy. It had to be the Joyeux Chevaliers that’d pushed for that, having some many noble brats within their ranks had them believing they were clever manipulators instead of expendable Highest Assembly catspaws.

“Sure he did,” Captain Reinald grunted. “Let’s hope he doesn’t find it necessary to do it again.”

“We wouldn’t have so weak a position if we could agree on a representative,” Catalina pressed. “I know the Grizzled Fantassin turned us down-”

She’d named an exorbitant price first, then noted that unless the Grand Alliance itself could be outbid there was no point in trying to buy her services. Old Teresa was said to be out in Mercantis these days, that floating pleasure house of a city. Hard terms to beat, admittedly.

“- it can’t be you,” Captain Reinald frankly said. “The Ligera has too many enemies, you’ll never get the votes.”

“It has to be someone , Reinald,” she exasperatedly said. “If not me then another. And quickly. We are...”

Words failed her, for a moment, as the thought was hard to express. It was not a particular indignation that had been weighing on Catalina Ferreiro’s mind but a hundred little signs, as if had some unknown prophecy on the tip of her tongue but could not bring herself to speak it.

“We’re dying, Reinald,” she quietly said. “Fantassins, our trade. You’ve seen the armies the rest of the world fields, now. Do you think we could handle the Second Army or a few sigils of drow? Gods, even the Levantines are making something of themselves.”

We don’t have mages and priests , Catalina thought. We don’t have sappers or Chosen. War is leaving us behind. And the Principate had been hardened by the war too, she could feel it. See in faces and hear it in words. No one spoke of war as a part of the Ebb and Flow now, as the game of princes where glories and fortune were wagered. Even princes had grown harsher, and the wars they’d wage would grow harsher with them. Would veterans of the war against Keter really hesitate to torch a village? It had been against the unspoken laws of war in Procer, once, but what did those childish things matter to someone who’d spent three years fighting howling corpses as madness twisted the land around them? There would be no return to the old days, after this came to an end.

For better or worse.

“You’re not wrong,” Reinald muttered. “Some of the things I’ve heard... But this is a discussion to finish when the enemy is no longer at our gate, perhaps.”

Catalina nodded, then smiled.

“Tarry not,” she hummed.

The other mercenary snorted, recognizing the words from the old song everyone in their trade, from the greenest of boys to the most grizzled of warwives, had heard at least once.

“Or we’ll be dead,” Captain Reinald finished.

Over the edge of the rampart, a skeleton dragged itself halfway onto solid ground before a soldier smacked it down. The climbers were beginning to reach the top, she realized with dread.

The skirmishing was over at last, and the battle had begun in truth.

—

Well, Roland thought, this was going to be a problem.

“So that’s why they kept dropping vultures and Revenants through the wards,” the Headhunter said.

He – Roland had asked, as he couldn’t discern the differences in her facepaint that heralded either gender – was looking at the same thing that he was: a gate into Arcadia opening in the middle of a city street. Which shouldn’t be possible, the Rogue Sorcerer thought, considering this city was thick with wards. But the dead had years to meddle with the city after taking it , he reminded himself. The Grand Alliance reclaiming Hainaut and then repairing the old foundations as well as slapping on fresh wards was not a comprehensive fix, despite the frenzied efforts of their mages. At least it did not seem to be without costs for the Dead King: the gate had only opened by subsuming a Revenant and was opening rather slowly. They could not be opened with a snap of one’s finger, which was good news tacked on to the bad.

“We need to close it,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “And find out any other gate that might have been opened out of sight.”

“The city’s bleeding magic everywhere, wizardling,” the Headhunter skeptically replied. “We might as well look for a particular needle in a box full of them.”

“Keter needs Revenants to make these,” Roland replied, shaking his head. “There won’t be many, and we’ll have seen them falling.”

“There could have been more than one Revenant by bird,” the Headhunter shrugged. “And they can run anywhere after the fall. We’ve only caught one so far.”

Fair points, but only so long as providence refused to put a finger on the scales. Roland would have to hope otherwise.

“There’s another band out there roaming,” he reminded the other. “We can only hope they will catch what we don’t.”

He rose from his crouch before the Headhunter could answer, expecting that otherwise he would be served a sermon on the subject of why the three young souls with transitory Named also assigned to keeping the streets clear were weak and so naturally doomed to failure. The other man’s opinions were more strident than thoughtful, in Roland’s opinion, but he saw nothing to be gained by arguing. The Headhunter’s ways had paid off for him, and people with full pockets didn’t usually tend to abandon the ways that’d filled them. A long casting rod of sculpted ivory in hand, the Rogue Sorcerers leapt off the edge of the roof and landed on the cobblestone street. The gate into Arcadia, a broad rectangle at least twelve feet high and twice that in length, was pulsing. Still stabilizing , Roland thought. He brushed a hand close to the surface, mustering his will.

“ Confiscate ,” he murmured.

It took, he found with some relief, but not as much as he would have wanted it to. He was drawing from the active spell, but not the foundations. The light of the portal began flickering wildly. All he was achieving was further destabilizing the gate, not breaking it. Movement from the corner of his eye had him drawing back, but not quite close enough. A javelin, he saw just a heartbeat before it bit into his first defensive enchantment and shattered it. A shell of light became visible for a moment before shattering. A second flew out, but by then the Headhunter was there and he swatted them down with insolent ease.

“Gate’s not closed, wizardling,” the Headhunter grunted. “Get the Hells on with it.”

I’m not sure I can , Roland thought. If he could not confiscate the sorcery, then he had to either overpower or shatter the gate – which would require strength he did not have or for his knowledge to be superior to that of the Dead King . He was going to have to improvise. If he couldn’t break the gate itself, what were his options? He cast a glance at the Headhunter.

“You have the head of a Damned who could empower magic, correct?”

“Amplify,” the Headhunter corrected. “And the heads only give weaker imitations. What are you scheming?”

“I want,” the Rogue Sorcerer boyishly grinned, “to make this a much larger gate.”

He felt like tapping his foot, like humming an old song. He was only a few mistakes away from dying, but wasn’t that where he did all his best work?

—

Princess Beatrice Volignac of Hainaut went utterly still, her horse following suit.

Frost spread across the cobblestones like the breath of some wintry beast, steam curling above it like fading stripes of lace as ghostly lights set the shadows to dancing. It was as if a hole had been cut out in the world, revealing some fantastic winter vista hidden behind the curtains of Creation, and yet what had come out of it was not some strange monster or fair lord. It was an intimately familiar sight. The banner was what Beatrice recognize first, stirring as it was in the wind. A golden griffin on blue, crowned by three daffodils, but it was not the heraldry that made it distinct. It was the long haft of forever unrotting whitewood it hung from, ending in a grown of pure gold set with sapphires. Even streaked with ash and dust, Beatrice would have recognized the royal banner of the House of Volignac anywhere.

Riders streamed out of the pale plains of snow on the other side, ranks upon ranks of silent souls in beautiful enameled armour that rode steeds of the finest coats. Their lances were raised tall, a forest of sharp steel held up by unwavering hands, and at their head rode a beautiful woman. Skin pale as milk could be seen through the open visor of her helm, golden hair in a long braid going down her back. The armour she wore was a gift from Beatrice’s father, a family heirloom of blue-painted steel etched with enchantments, and at her side the ornate wooden sheath of the ancient blade of House Volignac, Mordante, rested against her hip. And on her brow, atop her helm, a crown of gold had been inlaid into the steel for her name was Julienne Volignac and she had once rule Hainaut.

There was a gaping, bloody wound where her heart should be.

“Sister,” Beatrice softly breathed out. “Gods, what did they do to you?”

She had taken a mere hundred riders with her as an escort when heading for the western rampart, a pittance compared to the thousands Julienne had taken with her on that last doomed charge to delay the dead long enough for their people to escape. But only a few have crossed , Beatrice thought. We can hold them at the gate. She looked around and found only fear on the faces of her soldiers. As much at the sight of who it was they were fighting as the numbers, the princess thought.

“Bastien,” she said, raising her voice as she addressed the captain of her bodyguard. “Go for reinforcements. Hurry.”

“Your Grace,” the man replied, hesitating, “what is it you intend?”

Beatrice Volignac breathed out, watching her sister’s golden hair across the street.

“I have you an order,” she harshly said. “Go.”

She heard him slink away, chastened. In the distance, Julienne Volignac met her sister’s eyes and smiled sadly. She brought down her visor, lowered her lance.

“Look ahead,” Princess Beatrice said, voice ringing out. “That is what Keter means to make of you.”

The Princess of Hainaut lowered her lance, and after a terrifying heartbeat saw that her retinue followed suit.

“They gave their lives for everyone here,” Beatrice said, throat clogged up. “So we could live, crawling through ash and dust to return home another day.”

She pressed her knees against her mount, the destrier breaking into a trot. Her retinue followed. The enemy, on the other side, lowered their lances and began to advance.

“We’re home now,” Beatrice Volignac shouted. “We’re home, and tonight we lay our ghost to rest .”

Her soldiers roared, the thunder of hooves crashing against cobblestones drowning out battlecries even as the two lines of horsemen rammed into each other.

—

Catalina was not sure who it was that began to sing.

The world had turned black and white, chopped into moments of violence and moments of relief, but through both songs had begun to wind their way. There was nothing, the Captain-General thought with an exhausted smiled, that Procerans loved more than a song. Even the ever-cold Lycaonese thawed, when the time came to sing. There were more singers than birds in Procer, it had once been said, and for every season and hour there was a song. Or a poem, or a dance or another gesture of beauty returned to the Creation that had given birth to all of them. And wasn’t that, in the end, the most beautiful thing about her home? Even in the dark, they sang.

Perhaps in the dark most of all.

The dead came over the rampart, silent and relentless. Catalina battered them over the edge, hacked and split and felt cold iron sink into her arm when tiredness slowed her, but the tide would not end so neither would she. And all around her, the Captain-General saw only bastards. Mud nobles and cutthroats, peasants and shopkeepers, the leftovers of a great realm with blades in hand. And still they held, her thousands of brothers and sisters who too bore the name of fantassin , her fellow fools who traded life and limb for coin and a few boasts. And so when the song poured out of her throat, she did not fight. What else was there to do, when the world was so ugly, but to bring a sliver of beauty in it?

“My father wept for a prince

And died with a spear in hand.”

The man by her side, covered in sweat and filth, shot her an incredulous look and began laughing before cracking a skeleton’s skull. He joined his voice to hers.

“My mother hasn’t wept since

Or left a god un-damned.”

It spread like a fire, snaking along the rampart and the bastion until a thousand throats sang it, that old bastard song, the Sun In the West .

—

Beatrice Volignac was in the heart of the whirlwind, dancing with many smiling deaths.

They fought desperately against the honoured dead, trading lances with corpses until all were spent and furious melee with sword and shield swept across the cobblestone. There was something burning in all their bellies tonight that had devoured whole the fear, replaced it with clenched teeth and hard eyes. Before them was the mockery Keter had made of the finest gesture any of them had known, and what could they do but quell it? Nothing less could be tolerated. So Beatrice traded blows with a corpse in armour, ramming her blade into the throat and throwing it down its undead mount before pushing forward. A blow glanced off her shield and she answered with a hard cut, but it found no purchase in the enemy’s armour.

They were losing, the Princess of Hainaut knew. The charge had not been enough. They had slowed the enemy’s outpouring through the gate but not cut it, and now they were being drowned. Yet she found, queerly, that the thought did not mover her to fear. It would be a worthy death, Beatrice decided, and such a thing was not to be feared. She was a princess of the blood, a Volignac: what did she have to fear in this world or any other, save for dishonour? So when the song came on the wind, drifting like curl of smoke, the Princess of Hainaut laughed. She, too, had once dreamed of being the one who would once again bring the sun to west. A good song, she decided, to die singing.

“Maybe I’ll go east, they say

Swords there can win a crown.”

Voices joined hers, as the dead hemmed them in and the last of them gathered around the banner. The enemy were coming for them, for the killing stroke. Through her visor, Beatrice met her sister’s eyes as Julienne approached with the ancient sword of their shared blood.

“Rule king a year and a day

Be buried with great renown.”

—

Roland hummed under his breath, one hand on a desiccated human head and the other on a portal through which a great many people were trying to kill him.

It was just going to be one of those nights, he figured.

“Is it working?” the Headhunter asked with a grunt.

He carved through another skeleton’s neck, kicking it into another’s path as it tried to cross. The villain had, impressively enough, been holding the gate single-handedly all this time.

“Well,” the Rogue Sorcerer mused, “if it is, then-”

There was a deafening keening noise and the gate double in height before beginning to shake.

“Wonderful,” Roland grinned.

The Headhunter turned around, throwing an axe at him that cut through the javelin someone had very unkindly thrown at Roland’s chest. Keterans, a people truly without manners.

“It’s gotten bigger,” the Headhunter noted, unimpressed. “Is that it? I thought it was-”

What looked like the maw of a beorn began to pass through the gate, roaring angrily and cutting off the conversation. Rudeness upon rudeness, truly. The other Named pulsed with a stolen aspect coming from a head and tried to force the construct back, but Roland kept pushing sorcery into the gate and amplifying the flow with the human head. Soon, soon it would be ready. Mind you, he’d best not tarry long. How did the song go again?

“Long ago, the tale goes,

The sun rose in the west

It might be it will again:

Tarry not, or we’ll be dead.”

The Headhunter was thrown back into the street, hitting the wall of a house and breaking through it, but Roland only smiled even as the beorn turned towards him.

—

Beatrice’s horse had died on the third pass, but she’d knocked her sister down from hers so it had evened out the affair.

They had sparred on occasion, while they both lived, though in those days Beatrice had not taken the blade all that seriously – it had been the horse and lance she preferred, finding bladework to be an ungainly and sweaty affair. The spars had been measured, almost fond, more shared time than any genuine test of each other. This was nothing like it. Beatrice desperately brought up her shield as the family sword, Mordante, bit at the painted steel and let out a flash of light and frost. She swung at Julienne’s head, but her sister’s shield was already in place and they collided with each other as each tried to make the other trip on the blood-strewn ground

“I will free you,” Beatrice gasped through her helm. “Gods, Julienne, I swear. I will not leave you like this. ”

The enchanted sword kissed the top of her helm, freezing the visor shut, but the Princess of Hainaut began hammering at her sister with her shield. Julienne had the strength of undeath to her, the tirelessness, but Beatrice was fat . She was heavy, and muscled, and when she struck her sister shook form the impact. Once, twice, thrice until Julienne slipped on blood and bone and Beatrice followed her down. A lance passed above her head, forced away by one of her last men at the last moment, but the Princess of Hainaut’s eyes were only for her sister. Mordante bit into her side, frostburn creeping through her mail, but Beatrice ripped off her sister’s helm and met those blue eyes with her own as she drew back.

“The fire turns to ember,

I wake from a sorry dream

Morning rides in pale splendour

Chasing down a fading gleam.”

“We will meet again,” Beatrice whispered, “in a better place.”

And down her sword went.

—

Roland of Beaumarais, nothing but a – borrowed – human head in hand, smiled at the monster forcing its way out of the gate into Arcadia.

“This should do the trick,” he announced, removing his hand from the portal at last.

The magic he’d been drawing on stuttered, the bundle nearly empty, and the Rogue Sorcerer offered the beorn as deep a bow as he could without making the head dangle. The construct swatted at him, but he stepped away even as the Headhunter rose from rubble and the clawed limb came well short. The beorn seemed confused, as well it might be.

“The gate’s frozen,” the Rogue Sorcerer told it. “Brilliant man, Masego. His work his comprehensive .”

Roland hadn’t even noticed when that derivation had been added to the ward schematics, but then that didn’t matter. What did matter was that the Dead King was not the only brilliant Trismegistan sorcerer in these parts, which meant that what had been used here to make the gates was a technicality and not a flaw. The last of the magic he’d fed the portal was absorbed at last, and with a loud keen the portal’s length began to extend. It managed to grown another five feet, before the blind spot in the wards laid down by the Hierophant was entirely outgrown and they triggered with a vengeance.

“To borrow from a friend,” Roland smiled, then raised his hand and snapped his fingers.

The portal exploded in a pillar of power and light, the city wards crushing it into nonexistence without mercy, and Roland de Beaumarais was once more left to wonder at just how much he loved magic. There was always something new, wasn’t there? The Headhunter caught up, looking at him warily.

“Come on,” the Rogue Sorcerer idly said. “There will be other portals.”

And, hands in pockets, he began to make his way down the street as he sang the song that’d been on his mind all evening.

“The road is long and winding,

Though I did it love it once

And tread it still, searching

The bottom of many cups.”

Sometimes, even charlatans got to have a good turn.

—

Gods, but they were holding.

The Captain-General watched as ladders were brought to the walls and undead scaled the cliffs. Stones and logs were thrown at them, burning oil poured on ladders and Light filled the air as priests began turning the wrath of Above on the dead. It was a narrow, wavering thing but they were holding. And now the reinforcements were pouring in, lesser companies freshening the ranks of the greater and bringing with them well-rested hands. Mages were beginning to rotate in, cadres trained in the Arsenal, and though their magics were simple when turned on a single great monster in concert they were also often successful. Catalina withdrew from the rampart, exhausted enough her vision swam, but after a tonic and rest she would return.

She sat by a fire, her bodyguards close around her, and drank deeply from a waterskin. She smiled as she hear the chorus of the song rise again, perhaps the tenth time it had been sung tonight. The Sun In the West was often sung as wistful or angry – there was a reason it was familiar to taverns but rare in courts – but tonight it was, instead, almost defiant.

“Long ago, the tale goes,

The sun rose in the west

It might be it will again:

Tarry not, or we’ll be dead.”

Our sun has faded , Catalina thought, but it has not yet set. There was still blood in the veins of the lumbering beast known as the Principate, and perhaps after the war... Lightning struck at the bastion and a howling gale swept over it, hundreds dying in the blink of an eye as Catalina was thrown against a wall and bit her lip as she felt her collarbone break. The storm screamed, and two silhouettes landed on the stone.

The Scourges had arrived.

Interlude: Woeful

“Hardship does not create valour any more than rivers create fish. It is simply a circumstance where the valorous reveal themselves, and it would be a mistake to believe that what misery or ruin unveil could not also be brought into the light by love or duty.”

– King Albert Fairfax of Callow, the Thrice-Invaded

Guillaume screamed in terror as he scraped desperately at the floor, trying to keep the winds from snatching him up in their like they had Leonie. His fingers were raw and bloody, the cut on his face was aching something fierce, he’d dropped his sword and Heavens it just wasn’t going to be enough . He could feel the wind pulling at his feet, as if trying to drag him into the sky. The gales were thick with ash and dust, hard to peer through, but Guillaume had seen his friends go up into the whirlwind and never seen any of them return. It would be death if he went up. So he kept crawling forward as the cacophony of wind blotted out the rest of the world, like a fish fighting the current, but he was feeling a tug on his legs as the strength of the storm grew and – and, somehow, his hands had reached into a bubble of calm.

He did not waste time questioning the miracle, only dragging himself forward along the floor with the last of his strength as he panted and grunted and half-wept in relief. A hand grabbed him by the collar and he started in surprise, but he did not resist after realizing he was being dragged further into the bubble. There was not a trace of the winds here, he realized, and even the screams of the storm were muted. Guillaume looked up, his face covered in cold sweat and his arms still trembling, following the sight of a bracer-clad arm over a black gambeson up to a steel cuirass and then something that was impossible to mistake: a great black cloak with a patchwork of many colours stitched on, banners and stranger things.

The Mantle of Woe, he’d heard Callowans call it. And so it was the Black Queen’s brown eyes considering him, set in a hard and angular face that seemed like it had been shaped to keep a frown. Guillaume shivered. They said the Queen of Callow was kind to the commons, but she was still one of the Damned and who would tell if she decided to take his soul now?

“Your Majesty,” he stammered, “I-”

Idly she flicked a finger at his forehead, the lights dimming around them, and Guillaume felt something cold slither through his veins and all the way up his face. Like a coiled snake, it waited under his cheek near his wound.

“That’ll stop the bleeding,” the Black Queen said, in slightly accented Chantant. “But you’ll still need to get it healed or it’ll infect.”

Guillaume dragged himself up halfway to sitting, gingerly touching the edges of the deep cut on his cheek and finding that it no longer bled or stung. There was a cool, pleasant numbness instead when he prodded. Thanks stumbled out of his mouth and she offered half a nod before rising from her crouch, leaning heavily on a long staff of dead wood that gave off a sense of... solidity that one did not often find in dead things. The queen suddenly cocked her head to the side, as if she’d heard something he had not. He pricked his ear even as he pushed himself further away from the edge of the bubble, but he heard nothing aside from the distant screaming of the winds.

“Good, the Drake was overdue,” the Black Queen said, speaking to thin air. “And Ishaq said they got the Hawk as well?”

There was a silence, then the queen grimaced.

“I don’t care what the Artificer says, Hakram,” she said. “Even if the Hashamallim themselves came down from the Heavens and personally pissed that Light, unless we see that body burn with our own eyes then the Hawk isn’t dead. Pass the word to keep an eye out for her.”

Merciful Heavens, Guillaume shivered. Were they all doomed, had the Black Queen had gone made and now spoke to the wind? Or had her powers grown so fearful that she could speak to others who were far away? He was not sure which thought scared him more.

“Your Majesty,” he tried. “I do not-”

Dark eyes turned to him.

“Be silent for a bit,” the Black Queen said. “No, not you. There’s this-”

She cocked an eyebrow.

“What’s your name?”

“Guillaume,” he slowly said.

She cast a glance at his equipment, the worried gambeson and dull cuirass that looked so shoddy compared to her own.

“Brabantine?” she guessed.

“I am,” he said.

“A conscript named Guillaume stumbled into my stillness bubble,” she told the air. “But never mind that. Does Archer have eyes on them?”

After a moment, she blinked in surprise.

“The Archmage came up himself?” she said. “Shit. They’re going for a major breach, then, he wouldn’t come personally unless he expected to have room to cast in. Who’s the other one?”

Guillaume had, without even noticing it, lowered his guard. He must have, or else why would he feel his entire body clenching at the sight before him? The easy expression on the Black Queen’s face went up in smoke, revealing a face that was all hard iron. Starlight dimmed around them, as if shying away in fear.

“Meant for Ishaq’s band to get him, but we’ll do,” the Queen of Callow evenly said. “’Drani knows?”

A heartbeat, then she nodded.

“Good,” the Black Queen said. “She can take the vanguard.”

—

“ Sahelian confirmed it ,” Hakram’s voice spoke into her ear. “ It’s the Pale Knight with the Archmage. Catherine leaves the vanguard to you.”

Indrani hadn’t needed Flighty Fantom’s say-so to be sure of what it was she was looking it at, but Cat letting her start off the waltz was good news. So long as that damned storm was swirling about, she couldn’t do much with her bow anyway. After the first and only time she’d been able to put an arrow in the Archmage by Seeing a weak point in the winds, the Revenant had rebuilt his usual storm defence from the ground up so there would be no repeat. The most irritating part seemed that the Archmage was now seemingly able to bring other Revenants into its storm to protect them, which he hadn’t been able to a few months back. The defences had improved again.

She was going to have to carve an opening with her swordarm.

“Got it,” Indrani quietly replied, letting the paired stone carry her words.

She unstrung her bow, as it’d make for too easy a target otherwise, and slid it against her back in the leather sheath she’d made. Crouched atop the bastion to the north of the one that’d fallen to the assault of the Scourges, Archer studied the grounds she was going to have to assault once last time. The ramparts of Hainaut had fewer bastions than most walls, though she wasn’t Cat or Hakram so she had no real idea why, but the way they were made was pretty straightforward. Two levels: the lower one accessible from the rampart themselves through gates on each side and the upper one accessible through stairs leading up from inside. Easy grounds to defend.

Trouble was that the dead had come from above, directly on the flat grounds of the upper level, so it was them that were defending. Might still be some soldiers huddled up below, since the Revenants seemed more interested in allowing iron ladders to land on the wall than pushing their advantage, but they wouldn’t last long one the dead got to clearing them out. Indrani wasn’t worried about the skeletons coming up the ladders, but she didn’t like the look of that storm: not only was it spreading out from the bastion on which it was centered, the winds seemed to be getting stronger. If she tried to walk her way to the lower bastion, she risked getting caught up in that.

She narrowed her eyes, trying out a Stride along the path. The feeling wasn’t as clear as when she used the aspect when journeying, but it still tended to give a hint – and this time, the sensation was that of a broken path. Yeah, like she’d thought those winds were going to be a headache. Fortunately, just because she had to go on foot didn’t mean she had to take this particular. Between See and Stride , finding the thin places between Creation and the Ways had always been staggeringly easy to her and tonight was no exception: a little below her perch, two feet forward and five feet off the ground, there was a weakness. Someone must have used powerful magic there earlier, it had that kind of a taste.

Would it get her where she needed to go? Indrani listened to the pulse of her aspects carefully, then nodded in satisfaction. Close enough.

“Going,” Archer told Hakram through the stones. “I’m using the Ways, and tell them to be careful with those winds. I think the storm is growing.”

She did not wait for an answer before leaping down, tumbling through the thin veil on the Pattern even as she reached for her longknives. The Pale Knight was at hand, finally.

Time to teach the Scourge that killing Lysander had been a very fatal mistake.

—

The connection severed itself before he could sever it, which Adjutant took to mean Archer had entered the Twilight Ways.

It wouldn’t be long before she popped out in the middle of the enemy then, as had been her wont since she’d learned she had a knack for ‘sidling’. Unlike using gates it wouldn’t forewarn the Revenants, another reason that Indrani was best suited among them to taking the vanguard. Even if he’d still had both his legs, he wouldn’t have been able to... Hakram forced himself to concentrate on the here and now. Too often these days did his thoughts take him down fruitless paths. Fingers pressing on another stone, the orc linked to Catherine.

“Indrani is moving, using the Ways,” he told her. “You need to prepare.”

“ I hear you ,” she replied. “Is Masego ready as well?”

That was the essence of their striking plan, after all. Indrani was to interrupt the Archmage’s casting of the storm, freeing Catherine and Masego to hammer both Scourges immediately with strong workings. From there the plan grew... fluid, as things grew harder to anticipate, but there were ideas that’d been discussed.

“All he needs is my signal,” Hakram replied.

“ Then let’s get this going ,” Catherine replied, severing the link.

From her tone, the orc decided, she’d be smiling. He found he was as well. Grim as the circumstances were, it had been too long since the Woe had fought as one. That Vivienne’s skulking would be replaced by Akua Sahelian’s was not an improvement to his eyes, but these days Vivienne had duties of her own and – and it seemed that Sahelian wanted to speak. He touched the corresponding tone, and immediately her smooth speaking voice resonated in his ear.

“ I have eyes on the undead climbing the ladders ,” the shade said. “Most are unarmoured, not shock troops, and they appear to be bringing up barrels. Should I risk a closer look?”

In most battles, it was Catherine that would have made such a call. Weighed the risks and benefits, then send out another to see her will through. Tonight, though, the burden fell on him. With the Woe being split among so many places, there could be no easy coordination save through the artefact Hierophant had crafted for that very purpose. That also meant that the one handling the artefact would make decision that would, typically, belong to the leader of their band. Hakram had been unsure of his own feelings, when Catherine had pressed the duty onto him. On one hand, it was a mark of great trust on her part. On the other, it seemed like an assignment perfectly tailored to keep him away from the fighting.

“Do it,” Adjutant gravelled. “Archer’s going in, we need no surprises.”

“ As you say ,” Sahelian replied.

It had been the delayed realization that someone would have to take up this task even if he refused it that settled the matter for him, in truth. And that anybody but him would either understand the Woe less, be distrusted by Catherine to see this done properly or be Vivienne Dartwick, who was needed to keep an eye on the Army of Callow in their stead. That the work existed beyond him, that it was not simply made to tuck him aside safely, had soothed the ugly assumptions that had been lurking in the back of his mind. He was shaken out of his thoughts by footsteps, one of his goblin attendants scuttling up the ladder leading up to the belfry overlooking the western rampart where he’d set up.

“Word from the streets,” Lieutenant Tweaker called out, popping her head over the edge. “All invading gates are closed but two, and Beatrice Volignac is wounded but alive.”

Hakram nodded.

“Time estimate for the last two?” he asked.

“The Rogue Sorcerer is headed for the first one, so not long,” the goblin replied. “The other is still disgorging soldiers, though, so only when the Levantines get to-”

The head popped away and there was some chatter further down before it popped back up.

“The Peregrine took care of it,” Lieutenant Tweaker corrected. “Only the Sorcerer’s left now, a half hour at most.”

“Keep me informed,” Adjutant simply replied.

“That’s the aim, sir,” the goblin grinned.

He snorted, eyes returning to the rampart where a storm still raged, but the calm was not to last.

“ Ah ,” Akua Sahelian suddenly breathed into his ear. “ There appears to be something of a complication, Adjutant .”

“Define complication,” Hakram warily said.

“ I have obtained one of the barrels in question ,” the shade said, “ and just opened it. While I’ve no alchemical kit at hand, I do believe this is highly concentrated poison gas.”

It fell into place a moment later. The storm growing, how the Scourges had been remarkably defensive in stance after their initial overwhelming strike. The Archmage had not begun to unleash offensive magics because he was about to turn his storm into one, by making the winds poisonous.

“Can you delay this?” Hakram asked.

The fingers of his dead hand, one of two, drummed against the end of the arm of his wheelchair – a small sculpted skull that Masego had been kind enough to add at his request.

“Unlikely,” Akua Sahelian replied. “My acquisition of the barrel did not go unremarked, and I am now pursued by an entire flock of –”

There was a loud screech on the other side, followed by some very unflattering comments about vultures and baldness in Mthethwa that he suspected the shade had not actually meant for him to hear. Either way, it was now clear who the information needed to be passed on to.

Hakram’s fingers found the stone and the dance began anew.

—

Guillaume would, in the safety of his own mind, admit to being curious as to why the Black Queen was just standing there and waiting. He wasn’t fool enough to ask, though, or to look in the mouth the horse that was her continued presence here warding danger away. Guillaume had been born in a proper town, been taught some letters by the House of Light, so he wasn’t some countryside yokel. Most of the stories about the Black Queen had to be guff. Tales swapped around camp fires, getting bigger with time or just invented wholesale – for some reason, some of the easterners kept insisting the queen had castrated an ogre in single combat. There had to be some truth to them, though, ands Gods knew there weren’t a lot of monsters out there that the Queen of Callow wouldn’t make think twice.

That was reassuring, in a grim sort of way, which had Guillaume wondering if he had not ferreted out the quintessence of what it meant to be Callowan.

“You’ll need to run when we lift the storm.”

Jolted out of his philosophical musings, Guillaume started and turned to look at the Damned that’d addressed him. The queen looked tense, face set in that frown again, but not otherwise particularly concerned. It was kind of soothing, to have someone around looking at the end times like they were some sort of irritating inconvenience instead of the end of the world.

“You don’t need to tell me twice,” Guillaume feelingly said, then bit his lip. “I didn’t ask, Your Majesty, but my company...”

“If they were on the rampart, they’re dead,” the Black Queen replied, not unkindly, suddenly then raised a finger to silence him. “I’m listening.”

There was a long pause.

“And Akua thinks the winds will carry it?” the queen quietly asked.

Guillaume blinked in confusion. He’d never heard of anyone of that name, though he then reminded himself it was exceedingly unwise to eavesdrop too hard here. Boys from proper little towns like him weren’t meant to hear royal conversations.

“We’ll only get one clear short at the two of them,” the Black Queen reluctantly said. “What’s the risk it could spread into the city?”

A grimace ensued.

“Archer should be able to burn out a single breath’s worth,” the queen muttered. “And she’s got the scarf to filter, afterwards. Shit. How many survivors left from that first strike, do you think?”

Even as she leaned against her staff, the Black Queen – Merciful Heavens , Guillaume thought as he realized with a start that he was probably taller than her – worried her lip. One of her hands was twitching, he noticed, fingers curling into claws as they clenched against her palm and then slowly unclenched. Brown eyes swept across the winds, and then moved to him. He looked away hurriedly, and three long breaths passed.

“Fuck it,” the Black Queen sighed. “We’ll improvise. I’m going in, let Hierophant know.”

Somehow dimly relieved, Guillaume risked a glace at the villainess. She offered her him a wild smile, for a heartbeat turning that dour tanned face into one that had him blushing.

“Hang on tight, Guillaume of Brabant,” she said. “This is going to get rough .”

—

“Why even bother making a plan, if she was going to discard it?” Masego complained.

“We hadn’t accounted for the gas,” Hakram replied. “If it gets into the city, this battle’s over.”

“As our defeat,” Hierophant hazarded.

It seemed a reasonable guess, considering.

“Yes, Masego, as our defeat,” Hakram amiably agreed. “Catherine’s striking, are you-”

The connection between the two paired stones fizzled for a moment, dimming the last of his words as in the distance Hierophant’s glass eyes glimpsed Night rising up in a great tide of darkness. Catherine was putting her back into it, if the reverberations from her working affected even active spellcraft in the area. An interesting phenomenon, and he itched to have a closer look at that in more contained conditions where the extraneous factors could be filtered out, but alas it would have to wait. Glints of a faded summer sun lighting up every dark, Masego studied his friend’s attack curiously. It seemed a brutish thing, at first glance, a mere tide of shadow slammed into the Tumult’s storm.

That the Scourge immediately answered with light magics, cutting beams of glowing power that tore into the darkness, was yet another reason why the Revenant was utterly underserving of being called an archmage . The effrontery was galling, truly. Someone with proper master of the higher mysteries would have noticed that Catherine, ever clever behind her pretence of thuggishness, hadn’t just gathered Night and tossed it at an enemy working. The light cut through so easily not only because of its properties as one of the classical elements but also because that wave of Night was meant to be broken. It shook the storm some, when impacting it, but when the winds unmade it the darkness allowed itself to be carried by the gales like smoke.

Within thirty heartbeats, the entire storm was filled with a thick haze of Night. Masego felt a sliver of pride had how well she’d learned the foundational principles of Trismegistan sorcery: the essence of magic was, after all, usurpation. Akua Sahelian was to be commended.

“-are you ready?”

“I am,” Hierophant replied. “You may tend to the others. My attack is at hand.”

Surrounded by three dozen barrels of bronze rods positively dripping with invested sorcery, Masego had not held back in Wresting what he required for a fitting admonishment. The magic was thick and pure, its tint strangely similar to that of a thin layer of oil atop water, and it was slowly circling around him according to his will. In the distance, his eyes piercing through the veil of Night surrounding Catherine, he found her silhouette raising her staff into the air. Good, she was about done then. The moment it struck down, to Masego’s unspoken glee, the Night spread out within the storm roiled for one moment as the Tumult had his own spell stolen away from his control. Just long enough for Catherine Foundling to disperse it, abruptly breaking the storm into fading wisps of wind.

“And now my turn,” Masego murmured, robes stirring in the evening wind.

Like a streak of lightning the sorcery shot forward through the sky. Hierophant’s concentration stumbled when he saw Indrani walk out of thin air – she must have sidled through the Ways – behind the Tumult, who did not notice. The Pale Knight did, however, and before a heartbeat had passed the Scourge had his great axe in hand and was moving towards her as he shouted a warning.

“Too slow,” Hierophant spoke through clenched teeth.

The filaments of magic snaked forward, sliding between them, and with a curt gesture of the wrist Masego shaped the sorcery into one of the first formulas he’d ever learned: out of the end of the filament a textbook prefect magic missile erupted, splashing harmless against the Revenant’s armoured helm but blinding it for a moment. Archer ducked under the burning flame unleashed by the Tumult before he even turned completely, circling to stay behind his back, even as Hierophant began shaping the sorcery again. That missile had cost him, he estimated, one part out of a thousand.

Time to see what he might achieve with some halfway decent spellwork instead.

—

Of course Cat had gotten it into her head that was Indrani clearly needed was for her cover to be snuffed out just before she came out of the Twilight Ways. You know, just so she could be extra visible for the fucking Pale Knight and all. Gods, what a wench. Archer caught the axe between the edge of two knives, struggling against the Scourge for a moment before hastily stepping back when it became clear she wasn’t going to win on strength alone. The bastard was even stronger than she’d come to believe from their first tangle at Lauzon’s Hollow.

“This was unwise,” the Pale Knight said.

“So was that second bottle of red last night, but that’s life for you,” Indrani agreeably replied.

He might have continued the conversation, but instead a streak of colourful magic darted in behind his head and seven wisps of hellflame shot out. The Revenant batted at them with the side of his axe, smothering a few, but more snuck around and slithered into the gap of his armour where they burst. With the Pale Knight distracted, Indrani went back on the offensive and moved to put him between her and the Archmage – which wasn’t enough, damn it, the seventeen arrows of silver light that shot out from the top of the Scourge’s staff curved around his ally. Shit, she was going to have to- and a gate into Twilight shivered to life right in their way, swallowing them all up. Archer grinned. Good, Cat was finally back in the fight.

She stepped around the gate, ducking under a swing of the Pale Knight’s axe and darting forward. The undead in his pale plate tried to knee her at the junction of the shoulder and neck but Indrani tumbled forward and under him. Her longknives cut at the back of the knees as she rose, where most armours had a weakness, but she found no purchase as her blades scratched only steel. That they scratched at all was an improvement on her previous record against the armour, so- ah, she’d been right. There had been a weak point in the armour dead, it was just that the Revenant had had melted steel poured into the back of his knee. Still a weakness with the right tool, then.

And one more strike for Cat’s theory that the Pale Knight’s strange immunity was related specifically to his armour.

Archer kept moving forward, letting her enemy’s backswing pass less than an inch behind her quiver, and got to the Archmage’s flank. The Revenant was struggled with Zeze’s latest bout of cleverness, a pool of raw magic he’d Wrested and was using to pump out spells from a distance by giving shape to parts of the pool – at the moment it was shooting out small tendrils of darkness that Indrani’s Name screamed at her to avoid, so probably some kind of nasty Wasteland curse. The Archmage was frontloading a shield to deal with it, a pane of transparent light, and while its attention was there... ah, not so much of a sucker. Her attempt to sneak a blade into its back was met by a rippling circle of space that almost blew the longknife out of her hand.

And now the Pale Knight was on her again, only for a gate to open in front of him. Indrani went around, putting the gate between herself and the Archmage, which allowed her to see Catherine come out with a bare sword and sock the bastard in the side of the head with her pommel.

“Took you long enough,” Archer said.

Cat snorted, the two of them eyeing the Pale Knight as he steadied his footing and the gate closed behind them.

“Took the scenic route,” Catherine Foundling idly said. “It’s such a nice night out.”

And behind them there was a scream as the wind began spinning above the Archmage, who never did like fighting without a storm to cover his –

—

Hierophant cocked an eyebrow. Did the Tumult take him for an utter fool? Certainly he could not Wrest to separate entities at the same time, but what kind of a second-rate conjurer would he be if he’d not accounted for such a weakness in his chosen strategy? He set the magic he’d gathered to spinning around itself, slowly feeding a spell that made it rotate as a globe to insignificant costs, and dug into his aspect with relish as he reached for the dawning storm and-

—

A column of condensed lightning struck the Archmage three times, and Indrani’s heart skipped a beat. It simply could not be denied she had good – nay, exquisite – taste in men. The Pale Knight suddenly went stiff, turning towards, Catherine and in a strange voice spoke a single word to her in a language that Archer did not recognize.

Catherine went still.

—

“ I can’t stop them any longer ,” Akua Sahelian said. “They have enough casters concentrating on me that should I linger capture is certain.”

Hakram grimaced. The shade had done well at keeping anyone from climbing the ladders and joining the melee atop the bastion, but it’d only been a matter of time until Keter put together a force capable of dealing with her. He’d honestly not expected her to last so long. Much as he disliked the woman, Adjutant would still acknowledge the skillful performance she had offered tonight given her... reduced capabilities.

“Retreat,” Adjutant gravelled. “Are Revenant coming up?”

“At least two, neither Scourges,” Sahelian replied.

“I’ll pass it along,” Hakram said. “You know what to do.”

She did not acknowledge his words, only severing the connection, a sure sign she was being attacked by enemies but trying not to show it too obviously. Hearing someone come up the ladder, Adjutant turned to see Lieutenant Tweaker’s head pop over the edge.

“Movement at the front gate,” she told him. “At least three wyrms seen, and it’s looking like an all-out assault.”

Hakram, idly, touched his prosthetic. A beautiful piece of work by Masego, that. He laid a finger against a groove in the wood, as if to scratch at a phantom itch.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Tweaker began, “should we-”

Skeletal fingers closing against the length of wood, Hakram whipped out the wand and pressed his thumb against the rune sculpted into the side. There was a ripple of kinetic force as the enchantment was unleashed, the lieutenant’s shape fading and turning into a misshapen Revenant halfway into a leap at him. Adjutant dropped the wand, hand finding the skull on the arm of his wheelchair and drawing out the axe it was the pommel of. He rose with the movement, Name pulsing with joy, and the blade split the skull in half as the undead’s iron claws failed to pierce his chain mail. The Revenant dropped to the ground twitching as the necromancy tried to assert control of the limbs again. Half his body felt aflame, but he steeled himself through the pain.

“You got a goblin’s speed right,” Adjutant clinically assessed, “but not the weight. Sloppy.”

The axe went up, the Revenant’s eyes going wide, and Hakram of the Howling Wolves bared his fangs.

“Next time, Dead King? Send a Scourge.”

The axe went down.

—

It was the aptness of the counters that allowed Hierophant to understand what he had been dealing with all this time. It was obvious, in retrospect.

The Tumult had answered the Liessen Chisel with a perfect shield in the Pelagian school, hellflame with a Stygian dry dousing developed during Maleficent the Second’s wars against the League, used Jaquinite uncertainty principles to disrupt the magic he’d wrested halfway through a spell. The uninitiated among the heroes had insisted on calling the Revenant the ‘Archmage’ because of its broad variety of masteries in magic, but they’d never noticed that the masteries were impossibly broad. The only individual Masego had ever seen use so many different magics was the Rogue Sorcerer, and if he had never met Roland he might have dismissed this interpretation as him misreading the enemy’s spellcraft. His eyes opened at the possibility, though, it was impossible to miss the telltale marks. This should not, however, be possible. Roland used a great variety of principles, but he had the protection of an aspect and though knowledgeable he was not a master .

The Tumult, however distasteful an entity, was.

Which was absurd, because those masteries could not have been acquired after death: the dictate that undead could not learn was not as absolute as some seemed to believe, but understanding the mysteries of an entirely new school of magic definitely qualified. And it was highly unlikely to have been achieved by living, as Hierophant was rather skeptical that someone capable of mastering multiple schools of magic, whether it drove them made or not, would not have made it into the pages of history. Which meant he was missing something. On a hunch, he tried a repeat: sending both a Liessen Chisel and a spurt of hellfame at the enemy from opposite ends of the massed sorcery. And he got his answer, at last.

The Tumult did parry both, but when it did it used Pelagian shields for both instead of the apter answer he had shown himself capable of using. Moreover, the Tumult had already shown he could cast two spells simultaneously so there was no reason for it not too. Unless it could not . He can only use one school of magic at a time , Masego deduced. And there was an obvious explanation as to why. He reached for his paired stone.

“Hakram,” Hierophant said. “I have a theory about the Tumult.”

“I’m listening,” Adjutant replied.

He sounded a little out of breath, strangely enough.

“It is not a single Revenant,” Masego said. “It is a multitude of dead spellcaster souls stitched onto the same corpse, likely with an oversoul – perhaps the body’s original one – handling matters of control.”

There was a moment of silence.

“If we target that oversoul?” Hakram asked.

“The King of Death is a skillful necromancer,” Hierophant reluctantly replied. “It will not destroy the Revenant. It should, however, make it highly erratic as different souls struggle for control.”

The orc chuckled.

“Well, let’s see what we can do about that.”

—

They’d taken too long to put down the Scourges, so now it was all going south. Indrani backpedalled, letting the axe pass half an inch away from her chin as behind her a blue-tinted shield took the impact from the four black streaks of sorcery that’d been aimed at her back. She flicked a feint at the Pale Knight’s face that the Revenant didn’t even bother to parry, ending up touching his helm, but the shaft of his axe was smashed into her elbow and she was forced to abort her actual blow and scuttle away as she swallowed a scream. Fuck, was it broken or just sprained? Either way, it strung like a bitch. She spared a glance for Cat, who’d just set a Revenant aflame and blown a few skeletons off the bastion but had just been forced to coat herself in a bubble of Night as a pack of undead mages tossed fireballs at her.

Indrani’s straying eyes were not, to her surprise, rewarded by the Pale Knight pursuing. Instead the Revenant was going for... shit, barrels? As in those things full of poison Hakram had mentioned? One, two, three, strokes and three were split open as grey fog came billowing out. She hastily pulled up her scarf, trusting the enchanted weave to filer to toxins, which was long enough for the Archmage to attempt birthing another storm and Masego to shut him down. Unfortunately, the figure in grey and purple robes seemed indifferent to the lightning that was cast down on it. It flickered down the robes, grounding itself into the stone floor, and the Archmage began casting again . Keeping Hierophant tied up , Archer decided.

On the bright side, Indrani had just been given a moment to breathe so she reached for the pouch at her side and carefully unfolded the green cloth folded within before sliding it down the length of both her blades and tossing it to the side. It left them coated in a heavy transparent film, as she’d been told it would. Breathing deep, she went for the fog even as Cat wove some kind of bubble of darkness to suck it out and keep it from spreading too far. As she’d expected, the Pale Knight came out of the smoke aiming at Catherine’s flank. Indrani sped forward, leaning into Stride to quicken her steps, and had to leap when just before she got into range the Revenant turned and swung at her. Catherine hammered at the Pale Knight’s knee to hinder him, but a lesser Revenant was going after her again with a spear so...

Flow , Indrani thought, letting the aspect fill her up.

The axeblade went up, but she slapped it aside with a longknife and spun on herself. She landed on the Pale Knight’s shoulder, tempted to attack but knowing that if she ended movement the aspect would end with it. She slid down the Revenant’s back at is tried to catch her foot, landing behind it in a crouch and smoothly stabbing into the back of both knees. She found only a little bite, but it would be enough. The Pale Knight turned and struck at the same time, sweeping along the ground but she rolled between his legs and emerged in front of him. His extended arm was an opening, and she swiped the flat of a blade against the armoured elbow. The kick caught her in the ribs and one broke, but it was with a smile of triumph that she rolled against the ground and drew herself into a crouch.

The Pale Knight froze for a moment, before dropping his axe and pawing at his elbow as her aspect flickered out.

“Bad choice,” Archer said. “The doses on the knees have had longer to spread.”

Idly, she reached in the pouch and picked out a white cloth she used to wipe her blades clean with.

“What did you do ?” the Pale Knight asked.

He stumbled, finding his footing hard to maintain.

“Delivered to you with the Concocter’s regards,” Indrani coldly said. “An alchemical acid that devour only bone and steel, repelled by all other substances.”

The Pale Knight collapse to the ground, the only think keeping his upper legs connected to his thighs the stretch of pale plate covering them.

It was, Indrani thought with a hard smile, just the start.

—

Hierophant Wrested control of the storm again, jaw clenched, and shattered the spell.

How very irritating. Having grasped that he was facing a superior practitioner, the Tumult no longer even tried to do more than toss the occasional spell the way of Catherine and Indrani: instead he now repeatedly spent his power trying to birth another storm, not in hope of success but because doing so would command Masego’s attentions. Hierophant himself rarely had long enough to do more than to form the occasional second-rate spell and send it flying before he must focus his attentions on the spell again, and the repeated struggle of wills against the Revenant was starting to tire him. Unlike the magic taken from inert objects, the Scourge’s own must be forcefully usurped.

Masego felt sweat beading his forehead and going down his back. No, this stalemate was not to his advantage or that of his companions. The Tumult indicated the rhythm of their clashes, which meant he had an easier time sending spells at Catherine and Indrani than Hierophant had of defending them. The last three times it’d begun using increasingly obscure curses, and for the last Masego would admit that he’d been largely guessing when he’d used Sisi’s Sphere as a defence – he’d not been certain it would actually work. He must regain the momentum, and that meant one thing: when the storm next began to form, Hierophant let it.

Instead he gathered all the sorcery he had left in a spinning globe, shaping it in one great working.

“Seven pillars hold up the sky,” he began.

The world shuddered, seven wooden pillars forming out of raw magic around the Tumult. The Revenant tried to abandon the spell hastily, but Masego smiled. It is too large, he thought. And it takes you a moment to change between schools. Four runes formed above the Revenant’s head, linked by a circle of pale light.

“Four cardinals, one meridian,” he continued. “The wheel unbroken, spokes that are not. Thou shall not leave the circle.”

And that , Hierophant decided, was a stalemate he could live with.

—

“Funny thing,” Catherine Foundling said. “It was actually the Mirror Knight that helped me figure out how to kill you.”

The Mantle of Woe fluttering around her Cat – no, in that moment Indrani could only think of her as the Black Queen – parried the last lesser Revenant’s spear blow and severed its head with a brutal riposte, ripping out the blade and kicking the body over the edge of the bastion and onto a skeleton trying to climb up. The Pale Knight tried to push itself up with its axe, but Indrani kicked it away. The Revenant fell to his knees. She stepped away, sheathing her blades and reaching for her quiver.

“It’s the Named you avoided in Cleves,” the Black Queen idly continued. “The Red Knight and the Myrmidon. The Red Knight I understand – Devour is a headache and a half to deal with, but the Myrmidon ? I couldn’t figure out why.”

The Pale Knight brought out another axe but Indrani had an Unraveller in hand – a great javelin artefact, one she’d adjusted so it could be fired from her bow but still very much a javelin. A swipe had that axe clattering away again and Archer added a smack against the helm so he would fall down on his back.

“But then I remembered that I never struck at you without adding Night to the blow,” Catherine added, Night gathering to her like rivers to the sea. “And it fell into place. It’s strength you have trouble with. Of that front, aside from the Mirror Knight who’s damned slow those two are the physically strongest Named.”

It was kind of hot, Indrani admitted to herself, when she monologued. She got that gleam in her eye, like she... well, maybe after this if they could spare the time. Probably counted as a form of healing, if you squinted a bit. Night caught her by the shoulders and tendrils began hoist her up into the sky. Higher and higher and higher, until the Pale Knight was barely more than a silhouette trying to get up, and then the darkness seized her tight.

“And down we go,” Archer manically grinned.

She angled the unraveller downwards and the tendrils of Night drew back a bit before throwing her down. Eyes wide open, silent as she went down, she watched as the Pale Knight hacked away at the tendrils of shadow tripping him and slowly began to rise just in time to look up and see her. She met his eyes a heartbeat before the impact, too late for him to swing at her, and she slammed the unraveller through his throat through the gorget of pale steel. The Scourge gasped and she leaned in, ignoring the tremors of pain going down her legs from the landing.

“His name was Lysander,” Indrani whispered. “Where you end up, carry that with you.”

And with a final wrench she severed the head clean. Panting, Archer tried to get up but stumbled only for Cat to reach her side and help her stand. She also, bless her petty soul, kicked the Revenant’s head. Indrani cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Fucker killed my horse,” Catherine said, unrepentant.

Indrani saw that already undead were coming over the wall, the iron ladders steadily disgorging their lot, but it was the Archmage her gaze strayed to. Though bound by Masego’s miracle, the Scourge had barely scuffed his robes throughout the fighting. For a bastard who preferred to fight at range, he’d proved remarkably resilient up close.

“Still need to finish that before we retreat for healing,” Catherine muttered, “though at least he’s still-”

A wooden pillar loudly cracked.

“Fuck,” Cat said, “I really ought to know better by now.”

Three of them blew and the Archmage’s hand swept out, but no magic ensued. Indrani pushed away and reached for her longknives even as Cat struck out with a spear of Night, but a shape moved in the way before it could hit the Revenant. Akua Sahelian, dressed in threads of shadow, moved stiffly so stand between the Archmage and the Night. Cat pulled the blow at the last moment.

“Go through,” Akua said through gritted teeth. “I’ll-”

Her mouth shut. The last pillars shattered one after another and the Archmage shook free. Masego struck from a distance with brilliant blue flames but they splashed harmlessly on a shield, and when Cat threw a few threads of shadow they were carved through with arrows of silver light. Archer cautiously approached, keeping an eye on Akua as she did. They couldn’t let the Revenant flee, as it was obviously ramping up to. The Wastelander must have been sneaking up on the Archmage and gotten caught, she thought, only that didn’t seem like Akua at all. Weapon-wise, if the Archmage put her in the way it shouldn’t be an issue. She had only a silver dagger in hand, enchanted by the looks of it, but wait wasn’t that a –

A flock of yellow bee-like spurts of flame from Masego had the Scourge putting up a swirling ball of power to suck them up, while Catherine’s curving arrows of darkness were met with matches in silver light. And with both hands occupied, the Archmage had nothing left to spare when Akua Sahelian thrust a ritual dagger into his left eye.

“Please,” the shade amicably smiled. “As if I would allow myself to be snatched like some petty errant soul. For that presumption, allow me to take one of yours.”

The Revenant screamed with a dozen different voices as she ripped out the knife, its blade glinting with eerie light, and the Wastelander smiled in triumph. Indrani hurried forward. If they could finish the Archmage here and now... All Indrani saw was a flicker, but she was the Archer and so she knew what she’d glimpsed. An arrow. And, heart clenching, she knew where it’d been aimed. She turned, watching a circle of Night flare around Catherine but failing to stop the black-feathered arrow that punched into the side of her face. Cat fell the floor, spurting blood, and even as Akua let out a scream of dismay the Archmage leapt off the edge of the bastion.

In the distance, two crows screeched in agony.

In the sky above Hainaut there were great rumbling sounds as power gathered, thousands of mages in the plains below unleashing their rituals at least. One after the other, three great gates above the city.

And water began pouring out of them.

Interlude: Sigil

“Peace is death, stagnation of the soul. Peace is a child closing their eyes to the truth of the world: the great will partake of the small, until they falter and they too are partaken of. Strife is life and death, and there can be no more evil in embracing it than in the act of breathing.”

– Extract from the ‘Tenets of Night’, ancient Firstborn religious text

Rumena waited, patient.

Many of the Mighty were growing restless, eager to seek excellence through strife as the... cattle around them did, but the once-and-again general knew better. The Enemy had sent hordes to batter the walls and the gates, but the Pale Crown was not one to seek triumph through brute strength. The killing knives had yet to be bared. The Mighty studied another of its kind, Mighty Borislava, as it sat on the bares stone of the street with its eyes closed. Night pulsed from it in weak waves, a feat of control considering the strength of the Secret being used. Borislava suddenly breathed out, its silver-pierced face twisting into a smile.

“They are found,” Mighty Borislava rasped out. “The tunnels expand too quickly to be dug by hand or pick. The Enemy has brought acid-worms.”

Rumena nodded, expressing no displeasure. That worms were not unexpected, though this marked the first instance they were used on any front but Serolen or the Pass. This cattle-city of Hainaut was as jaws of steel, the general had come to suspect, a trap laid for any unwary foot willing to step into it. Soon enough they would begin to feel the bite of those teeth,

“How many breaches?” Rumena asked.

“I have found seven, General,” Borislava said. “Five of these along the western shore of the basin.”

Reluctantly, it added that it might have missed a few tunnels whilst looking. Good, Rumena would not need to discipline it again. Borislava usually required such a firm hand only every half century or so, and had earned that raspy voice the first time it had allowed its pride to delude it into thinking it might replace Rumena as sigil-holder, but its usefulness in the southern expedition was feeding the pride again. Perhaps the old Firstborn would not need to end it before they reached their fourth century together.

“Zarkan,” the general called out, without turning

The rylleh had been still and silent, knowing that even though bearing the title it was the weakest of its rank among the Rumena and should be wary of giving offence. Wise, though lacking in audacity. The mark of one who was to be slain and harvested before it could reach any significant measure of power. Night rewarded the knife that struck, not the knife that waited for the opening.

“Whisper into the Night,” Rumena ordered its messenger. “Tell Mighty Jindrich that it is to begin attac-”

The wave rage that roared through the Night staggered them all for a heartbeat. Sve Noc were furious , their earthly forms in the sky above cawing in pain and anger. The general knelt, mastering the feelings not its own, and sent its humble regards above. Its goddesses deigned to answer, sending a flicker of thought: the First Under the Night. face ripped apart by an unnatural arrow. Near dead, though not quite. Already Sve Noc had sent had servant to see to the matter, moving with swift and silent steps, and the Eldest went with it. It was the Youngest, who had ever favoured Rumena and commanded its own affections in return, that bade the old drow to turns its eyes to the sky. Where sorcery made the firmament creak and groan, opening three great gates above the city.

Strike , Komena ordered.

The old drow breathed out, and Night flooded its veins. It filled it to the brim, seeping into the flesh and the organs as Rumena drew on a power it had not deemed worth using in seven hundred years. The Secret of Tolling Wrath was but a mimicry of something the Firstborn had been able to craft at will, ancient engines of destruction that the general had once turned on the unbreakable ranks of the nerezim as their relentless advance broke one city after another, but in the old nights it had taken a company of sorcerers and a Sage to guide them for the ritual-engine to be used. The Tomb-Maker could now do the same with but an exertion of will and power, as if a company of one. The Night vanished from it without warning, as the Secret took its final shape, and Rumena shivered.

It would not be able to call on the Secret twice tonight, it decided. Once had already set its bones to aching.

In the sky above, water had begun to pour from the gates. The Youngest cared not to suffer this affront, so see the wiles of her First Under the Night turned against a city under its protection, and so it had struck as well. The great crow had was growing, turning from a small blot of darkness in the sky to a great nightmare blotting out the stars themselves. It was, Rumena thought, beautiful to behold. And at last the Secret of Tolling Wrath finished shuddering its way through the air, striking the side of one of the gates with a sound like a bell. Power tore at power, tearing at the edge of the sorcerous gate, and it was with amusement that Rumena saw a long beam of Hateful Light spear upwards from somewhere in the city, cutting at the edge of another gate. The Peregrine was a reliable foe even as an ally.

It was after the Light faded that the Youngest Night struck, the great crow’s wrath covering the sky as its wingspan streamed with the sea of water she had flown in the way of. Bending under the weight of the water’s strength, the great crow raked her talons against the third gate and there was an immediate eruption of power. Rumena’s crooked fingers tightened as it saw the Youngest Night tumbled downwards, her shape diminishing until she was simply a crow once more and she began circling above the city once more. There had been something in the gate that had hurt its goddess, the general thought. At least all of the gates were now – another one blinked into existence, Rumena’s sharp eyes catching the side where the Peregrine’s Light had cut it.

The same gate, not completely destroyed?

Whatever the truth of it, it began pouring water again and the old drow watched as the torrent fell like sea of stones on the Fourth Army of Callow. The shields made by sorcery were not enough, breaking instantly under the impact. Soldiers died, engines were shattered and the repaired gate shuddered. Before the annihilation could be complete, however, the side cut by Light snapped and the gate exploded in burst of sorcery that lit up the sky.

“Mighty One,” Zarkan quietly said. “Mighty Jindrich has claimed the right of vanguard and begun assault the tunnels. I have word from other sigils of dead erupting from other places within the city.”

“Then whisper this order to all sigils, Mighty Zarkan,” Rumena said. “Strike now at the dead, and hold nothing back.”

“Chno Sve Noc,” Zarkan fervently replied, and others with it.

Rumena the Tomb-Maker did not say more. Instead it walked to a stretch of starlight on stone and softly spoke a word of power, its will reaching for the deepest depths of its shadow where it kept only things it had not meant to see Creation while it still drew breath. Yet it would make an exception, tonight. It would have been arrogance to refrain when its goddesses took the field.

It would put on, one last time, the armaments it had once worn as a general of the Empire Ever Dark.

—

Ivah of the Losara Sigil, Lord of Silent Steps, moved with purpose.

The Eldest Night had sent it to seek its mistress’ side with all haste, and so it skimmed along the edges of the Pattern to quicken its pace. It was not a fortress or a fight Ivah found when its steps slowed but instead a house. Masses of water falling from the firmament had devastated swaths of the city, including most of this street, but though Ivah saw fighting on the ramparts to the west there seemed to be no immediate threat here. Instead a fire had been lit inside the house, and Night whispered to the Lord of Silent steps that Losara Queen was within. It rapped knuckles against the door, as was the human way, and only then opened it.

This was no great palace or library, simply a hovel of humans, and so within there was only one room. The lit hearth did not catch its attention, not when instead it saw Losara Queen wan and bloodied on a mattress of straw. By her side sat the shade it knew as the Mighty Akua, though no longer did she have the scent of one who could draw on Night. Curious. The shade did not turn and so Ivah took a step forward, closing the door only to then turn to the sensation of a blade resting against its neck.

“Don’t move,” the Mighty Archer said, eyes hard. “There’ll be no vulture’s meal tonight, Ivah.”

The Mighty would strike him down without batting an eye, for though human she was admirably ruthless even with long acquaintances, but Ivah shook his head. The edge bit into the throat of its skin, but only shallowly.

“This is not my purpose,” Ivah said. “I have been sent by Sve Noc.”

The Mighty Akua finally turned towards it, her eyes like golden flames. Its face was not composed as the Lord of Silent Steps had always seen it before. It was... drawn.

“This one’s not looking to wet its beak red, Archer,” the shade said. “It enjoys its place too much.”

The blade moved away slightly and Ivah nodded, pleased to have been properly understood by such a dangerous creature.

“Service to Losara Queen is pleasant and I could not sit her throne,” Ivah told the Mighty Archer, slightly embarrassed as it was rather forward of it to speak so plainly. “I seek not Night in this house.”

“I would hope not,” Mighty Archer smiled. “You wouldn’t live through an attempt at harvesting it.”

It was always rewarding for Ivah to see others proclaim such loyalty for Losara Queen. To serve an accomplished sigil-holder was rewarding, for who should the Firstborn learn from save the great?

“Can you help?” the Mighty Akua asked. “Hierophant did what he could and I have further slowed the spread, but we’ve not turned the tide.”

“We sent for healers,” Mighty Archer quietly said, “but she’s in no state to be moved. We can’t do shit but wait, at the moment.”

“I have no such talent,” Ivah of the Losara Sigil said. “This matters not, for I am the tool in the hand of a greater power.”

The blade was sheathed, a tacit permission, and Ivah approached the bedside. It unwove the bandages delicately, revealing the deep wound below, and unexpectedly found its heart clenching. Losara had... done much, for Ivah. Opened its eyes to paths that could be tread, raised it to a position of trust and power. It did not please the Lord of Silent Steps to see the sovereign it had once sworn oaths too so harshly hurt. The left side of Losara Queen’s face had been torn through by an arrow, ripping through her eye and cheek as well as shattering the chin bone. Not a mortal wound, perhaps, save if the arrow were invested with power. It must have been, for someone had clearly tried to heal the wound with sorcery and it had opened anew since.

“Poison,” Mighty Akua said. “It got into the blood. And something more, too. An aspect.”

It nodded, closing its eyes and breathing deep.

“I know nothing,” Ivah murmured in Crepuscular. “I am nothing. I am a vessel, filled with Night.”

Power surged, power beyond Ivah’s understanding. The Lord of Silent Steps felt the house around it shudder as the Sve Noc herself came upon it, flowing through the cracks and forming anew on the drow’s back as a great crow. Her talons dug into its skin, drawing black blood, and it breathed out raggedly.

“Fuck,” Mighty Archer muttered, voice shaken.

The golden-eyed shade stared at the goddess, unmoved.

“Your intentions, godling?” Mighty Akua asked.

“I will see to my chosen,” Sve Noc said, voice like the cawing of crows. “Do not think to interfere in this, shade.”

“We will trust in your intentions,” Mighty Akua smiled, a cold thing. “Trust in ours, Sve Noc, should you overstep .”

Ivah swallowed a gasp as talons sunk deeper into its skin, tearing at flesh as a mind infinitely greater than its own moved its hand to rest against Losara Queen’s forehead. Night flared, moving into the First Under the Night’s body, and knowledge came to the rylleh.

“It is a poison that resist sorcery,” Ivah spoke for its goddess. “And it was empowered, as was the arrow, by an aspect.”

Night slithered down the veins of the unconscious queen, feeling out the transcendent nature of the wound, and Ivah cocked its head to the side.

“Murder,” the Lord of Silent Steps conveyed. “That is the essence of the trouble, the concept that seeks to kill her even now. This ‘Hawk’ was no servant of the Pale Gods when she still drew breath.”

“But you can fix it?” Mighty Archer pressed.

“It can be done,” Ivah agreed, bowing to the pressure in its mind. “But it will not be a panacea. The eye is gone for good, and a scar will remain.”

“Fuck,” Mighty Archer cursed. “Would the Pilgrim do better? He said he couldn’t, when he came to pick up Masego, but if we lean on the Ophanim through him...”

“It will make no difference,” Ivah regretfully said. “An aspect is an aspect. Sve Noc must see to it now, before the wound worsens, and you are given warning that it will be hours before Losara Queen wakes.”

The two humans traded glances, Mighty Archer hesitating.

“Go,” Mighty Akua said. “I will stay.’

“You sure?” Mighty Archer asked.

“Trust me,” the shade replied, wryly smiling.

There was a heartbeat of silence between them, until Mighty Archer nodded.

“I do,” she said, sounding almost surprised. “Take care of her, Akua.”

The shade went still, and somehow looked pained. Mighty Archer offered them all a hard smile.

“Meanwhile, I’m going to go express my displeasure to the Hawk.”

—

Mighty Jindrich picked up the corpse by the throat, idly tossing it down the tunnel.

Its armour clattered as it toppled another few skeletons, the lot of them ending up in a writhing pile. Jindrich advanced on two legs, head slightly bent for the height of the tunnel, and fell upon the pack. One strike was enough to plaster a skeleton into the stone of the wall, another was stomped to dust and out of bored disgust the sigil-holder smashed the last two’s heads into each other until both broke.

“Disappointing,” Mighty Jindrich said. “There has not been worthy strife since we slew the worms.”

“We could head back,” Mighty Lasmir said. “Head down another breach, see if there is stiffer resistance there.”

Lasmir was sill growing back the arm it had lost to the acid spit, having not found enough dead flesh to devour for the Secret of Consumption to truly show its worth. There was a reason Jindrich had never bothered to kill Lasmir for it even before the First Under the Night had decreed that Firstborn of the southern expedition could not slay each other.

“No,” the sigil-holder decided. “The Tomb-Maker implied there would be worthy strife, should we push far enough. We will quicken the pace instead.”

The rylleh bowed, passing the order down to the rest of the sigil as it had been meant to. The breach they’d forced had been a pleasant fight, but below the cattle-city the dead had seemingly dug a maze of tunnels. Jindrich found the feeling of treading underground stone once more sweet, yet it had found little opposition aside from a continuous flow of skeletons. Even splitting the sigil down several tunnels had not yielded greater prey, but the sigil-holder was wise to the Enemy’s ways. Once, a very long time ago, Jindrich of Great Strycht had wielded a pick and dug tunnels for souls it had believed to be wise. Sve Noc had shown it a better path, the true path, but it had not forgot. These tunnels were for moving around, but there would be somewhere further below where the broken stone would be dragged so it could be thrown away instead of clog up tunnels.

There, Mighty Jindrich decided, there would be enemies worth destroying.

Its sigil moved swiftly after the order was given. They ran into undead, a larger battalion standing together – forty dead, armoured and armed – which was a good sign and decent entertainment. Mighty Draha was allowed to use the Secret of Impalement to stick them all in a line before they were smashed into the walls until destroyed. Always good for a laugh. Until then the tunnels had been a slope, but after this they were a sheer drop with an iron ladder going down. Promising , Mighty Jindrich decided, and leapt. It landed atop the helm of a skeleton, crushing it with its weight, and let out an approving noise at what it beheld: a great cavern that was a hive of tunnels, swarming with corpses and dead stitched-up monsters. Even a few of the Greater Dead, these who had been Named in life, if its eyes were not being fooled.

The sigil-holder smiled, power thrumming in its flesh as it began to let it loose.

“You will be Night,” Mighty Jindrich promised.

“You trespass on the realm of the dead,” a voice replied. “And so will join them.”

A tall silhouette, in heavy armour and bearing a large morningstar, strode forward.

“You are the one they call Mantle, yes?” Jindrich grinned.

The Greater Dead spoke not a word, but the sudden darkness not even Mighty could see through was answer enough. Mighty Jindrich laughed, letting Night rip through it and rent its body asunder before reforming it with a shell of Night.

Finally , strife worth having.

—

The lamellar of steel and obsidian still fit as it had when Rumema had been young, tightened at the hip with a belt, and the red-plumed helmet was still comfortable around its long pale hair. The marks of the ancient honours bestowed on it under the Empire Ever Dark, that of Great General Who Shook The World and Victorious Commander of the South, each claimed a shoulder with twisted braids of gold and iron. And at General Rumena’s hip, the long single-edged sword of steel it had once borne into battle rested comfortably. Waiting, eager to be used at last after all this time. Sighing, the old drow straightened its back and heard it crack as if someone were treading on twigs. It popped its shoulders, loosening them, and only then did it lay a hand on the pommel of its sword.

“Mighty Borislava,” the general said.

“I listen, Mighty One,” Borislava cautiously said.

None of Rumena’s sigil had ever seen it wear the armour. It had even the strongest of its rylleh feeling... cautious. A refreshing feeling, it would admit.

“You are to command the sigil in my absence,” Rumena said. “Look for breaches and settle them, ensure the cattle are not overwhelmed.”

“It will be done, Mighty One,” the other drow replied. “If this one may enquire, what is it the Mighty One intends?”

Rumena’s fingers tightened around its sword, and slowly it unsheathed the blade.

“Do you know why they call me the Tomb-Maker, child?” the general said.

“The tale is well-known, Mighty One,” the Mighty said. “You slew many a sigil, in your pursuit of Mighty Kurosiv’s end.”

“The truth is older than that,” Rumena chuckled. “Ysengral, I am told, meant it as a compliment.”

And it flicked the blade downward, not to cut but as the focus of its will as it called on the Secret of Stone. The stone below its feet parted like a receding tide, and General Rumena walked into the earth. It closed behind its footsteps, a sealed tomb, and with a hunter’s smile the Tomb-Maker burrowed deep into the earth. It felt the first tunnel within moments, moving to emerge into it and stumbling into a heated strife between dzulu and corpses. Rumena wasted no time, heading to the fore and closing the tunnel behind it with a glance. Slapping the head off the nearest skeleton, it walked back into the earth after closing the rest of the visible tunnel on the dead with a flick of its sword. The dead had dug beneath the city like ants, and now were crawling like them.

Rumena was not above stepping on the likes of them.

It wove between tunnels, closing them and burying the dead wherever it passed, until it reached a tunnel where some enchanted spikes digging into the earth resisted its will and kept it from moving the nearby stone. Unimpressed, Rumena seized the stone at the edge of the sorcery’s range and moved the spikes close to the surface by indirect pressure before collapsing the tunnel. It took the time to clear the western side of the shore before moving further down, finding sheer drops leading into a large cavern where a sigil had already arrived. The fighting was heavy and the general recognized the enraged roars, having shared a city with Mighty Jindrich for some years once upon a time. It was far gone, to be this loud.

Rumena landed softly on the floor, knees creaking, and eyes the deep darkness around it with irritation. Some Greater Dead was playing a trick. The Mantle, yes? Losara had spoken of her. This war would be well rid of her continued presence. The general sped forward, knowing the darkness would be fixed in range, yet it died before the old drow even reached the edge. Unimpressed, it leapt over Jindrich – now the size of a house, half an insect and killing even its own sigil when it strayed too close – and swept a wave of blackflame through the throng of corpses on the upper floors where javelineers were massing. They went up like dried leaves, though the use of Night caught Jindrich’s attention. It struck out with a long, articulated leg but Rumena only sighed and caught the end of it. It shifted its footing, tossing the other Mighty deeper into the enemy ranks.

That ought to keep it busy for a while.

Streaks of black smoke snaked along the ground towards the general, leading back to an armoured silhouette it decided must be the Mantle. Some middling thing with a helmet looking like a hound charged at it as well, a sword and shield in hand. Disinclined to play, Rumena sunk into the stone instead of moving out of the way. Cursed spike went into the floor not long after, but it was already moving and too deep below besides. The cavern seemed to a major outpost for the dead, the source feeding all the breaches to the west of the city’s great basin. Clearing it out in a single stroke ought to end the better part of that offensive in its tracks. Slowing its heartbeat the old general sunk deep into the Night and let the Secret of Stone settle at the heart of its soul.

Slowly, carefully, it began to sink Night into the bedrock beneath this city of Hainaut. As it did, extending fingers outwards, a greater force reached out and clasped its hand. The Youngest Night, talons puncturing skin even when the touch was meant to be tender, touched the general’s soul. She was wroth, and her anger was cold ruin inflicted unto the world: her hands guided its own, her eyes seeing beyond the reach of what any mortal might, and together they made for the Enemy an answer. Tunnels moved, closing and then weaving themselves anew as an intricate web leading to the five great caverns dug far beneath the city. And then, one by one, the two of them bound the ends of the web to the bottom of le Bassin Gris , the great water basin at the heart of Hainaut.

Water began to pour, and with panting breath Rumena leaned against stone as it felt Komena begin to withdraw from it. Begin and then stop. No, the Tomb-Maker realized with dread, not stop.

Fail.

—

Ivah of the Losara Sigil went still, as two goddesses screamed and the city shook.

It had found the waterside, returning to its sigil after the Eldest Night had ended her use of its body for the mending of Losara Queen, but the once-still waters were now as a sea taken by a violent storm. And the ground shaking had not ceased, as if some titan was hammering at the city from below with desperate strength. It turned to the terrified drow looking at it for answers, knowing it had none save for the furious howling of the goddesses in its mind.

“Disperse,” Ivah ordered the sigil. “Survive.”

They scattered to the winds. The Lord of Silent Steps could afford to spare them no more thought, for now the attention of its goddess was once more hammering at its mind. The rylleh stumbled forward, ending up on its knees by the shore of the basin. The waters were not only roiling, it realized with distant horror, but lowering. As if emptying. Before the revelation could sink in, talons punctured Ivah’s shoulders once more and the Eldest Night screeched in its ears. The wrath that bled into its mind made the world go white and brought it to the brink of unconsciousness, until those sharp talons brought it back with sharp pain. Service is required of you, Ivah of the Losara , a voice whispered into its soul. And though the talons were sharp, the voice was... cool. Soothing. A companion that Ivah had kept all its life without ever knowing it.

“We are born under Night,” Ivah murmured. “We die under the Night. All that I am belongs to it.”

The answer pleased the goddess. The pain of talons was fading, replaced with a pleasant coolness instead. Power intertwined with Ivah’s own, like a sea pouring into a lake. And the binding was deep, so deep that the Lord of Silent Steps... glimpsed. There was another crow, trapped deep below in a cage of curses and spells. Bound to the Tomb-Maker, the Youngest Night was striking at her surroundings with impotent fury. And though the plateau shook, it did not shatter. And looking closer, Ivah saw... hooks. Someone was binding the crow, containing it. Its mind was wrenched away from the sight forcefully, made to look upon the power being poured into its frame. Veiled Gods, so much Night. More than a hundred lifetimes would have let it win.

“Why?” Ivah croaked out. “It is... it is too much .”

Footsteps sounded behind it, but it was too exhausted to move. It felt as if eve twitching a finger would be enough to kill it, and still the Night would not cease pouring into it. A shape formed before it, a drow with silver eyes and ornate robes. It – no, she – bore a silver mask at her hip.

“You come at an inauspicious time,” Andronike said. “Return when we are less occupied.”

“One of you was caught.”

The voice of an old man. The Peregrine.

“It will be dealt with,” the Eldest Night said.

“Then why are you cramming your godhead into this one?”

A younger voice, calm but curious. The Hierophant. The Eldest Night did not answer.

“The Dead King is usurping the Night,” the Peregrine said. “Of that, the Ophanim are certain. You are losing.”

“If our First Under the Night was awake, it would not be so,” the Eldest Night furiously replied.

“Your weakness exists regardless of Catherine,” the Hierophant evenly said. “Do not blame others for your shortcomings.”

Ivah felt a sudden surge of mind-shattering pain, the Night’s flow into its body flowing, and it let out a hoarse scream. It was... Night was being pulled at from another side, through the other crow.

“He has his hooks in you,” the Peregrine harshly said. “This can no longer be allowed. If he devours your power whole, it means our annihilation.”

“We are,” the Eldest Night said, sounding pained, “still fighting. The strife has not yet come to an end.”

“We cannot allow him to devour you,” the Peregrine said, voice gone eerily calm. “You know this. Better to end Night than that.”

“You would kill them all,” Andronike hissed.

“No,” the Hierophant said. “There is another way. One that leaves enough they will live, if only as mortals. And with what you have put aside in this one, you will still be goddesses as well.”

“Paltry things,” the Eldest Night said. “Remnants.”

“Time,” the Peregrine softly said, “is running out.”

There was a long silence, and in its soul Ivah of the Losara felt goddesses speak words only they could understand. Eyes closed, it saw the truth of things: a crown of obsidian, skeletal fingers wrapping around it.

“Do it,” Sve Noc spoke as one, and offered up a hand.

A dark-skinned finger was laid against it.

“ Ruin ,” the Hierophant said, and Creation obeyed.

Night broke, and the city broke with it.

Interlude: Kingdom

“Fifty-seven: the greatest of powers is not an enchanted sword or cataclysmic spell, it is simply to be in the right place at precisely the right time.”

– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

The Black Queen’s own favourite trick had been turned against the Fourth Army, and the results were a bloody ruin.

At least two thousand dead in less time than it took to boil a cup of water, that much again in wounded and even worse: siege engines, as well as the sappers who manned and built them, had been pulped by the great sheets of waters that had fell like a wave of stone from the Heavens. The Dead King’s sorceries had been aimed foremost at the positions above the rebuilt gates of Hainaut, the siege platforms Sapper-General Pickler had ordered built before the enemy came, and there was not a soul left alive there. The results of that were immediately disastrous, for though the Fourth Army was hastening to reinforce the lost grounds the enemy had not missed the opening: beorns were already there and emptying their bellyfuls of soldiers, as great snakes of dead flesh bit into the wet stone and opened their maws to make themselves into siege ladders.

Worse, a pair of wyrms had landed atop the siege platforms and was terrorizing the attempted reinforcements. They monstrous dragons of flesh and bones, magnificent examples of what the greatest necromancer to ever live could achieve at the peak of his skill, were shrugging off Light and sorcery alike. It would take concentrated volleys of either to drive them back, and the Fourth was still on the backfoot: with so many officers dead, it was struggling to move priests and mages where they needed to be. It was a miracle, General Zola Osei thought, that the Fourth Army hadn’t outright routed. Nearly every other army on Calernia would have, after seeing nearly half its number killed or wounded in so short a span. But the soldiers, first hardened on the grounds of Arcadia and then against the horrors of the Folly, held.

For now, at least. How long would that last? General Zola Osei of the Second Army of Callow let the urge to wince pass through her, refusing to indulge, for it would not do to show weakness to her staff when disaster loomed so tall. She set down the Baalite eye, choosing her words carefully as her staff tribune and senior mage awaited her opinion.

“If we do not immediately reinforce, the gate is lost,” General Zola said.

“If fully commit, we risk losing the gate anyway and being swept away entirely in its wake,” Staff Tribune Adnan frankly said. “I would argue in favour of ordering the Fourth to retreat while we fortify the entrance to the city and prepare for battle there.”

“Should the Dead King hold the gate, the city’s wards are at risk of collapsing entirely,” Senior Mage Jendayi replied, shaking her head. “I won’t pretend that it will not be bloody to take back the gate, but even on purely tactical grounds it is the superior decision.”

They were disagreeing, Zola considered, because they were starting from entirely different premises even if neither had stated as much: Adnan considered this battle lost, and was now looking to mitigate, while Jendayi still believed victory achievable and so was willing to spend lives to reach that end. General Zola herself was not yet certain which way she leaned, though she was aware a decision needed to be made urgently. Already she had sent her two senior legates to prepare the grounds behind the city gates in case of a breach but now she either needed to send companies into the stairs leading up to the siege platforms, which the dead were certain to turn into a meat grinder of brutal proportions, or send messengers to the Fourth before it overcommitted. And the truth was that, even beyond tactical considerations, Zola was not certain if the Second had the stomach for the kind of fight taking the gates back would mean. Not since Maillac’s Boot.

The general had always admired the Black Queen’s almost alchemical knack for transmuting battles into loyalty, but the Boot had left scars in the Second. Losing General Hune had been a blow, even for Zola herself, but the casualties taken that day... Many still had nightmares of the hordes that never ceased coming, of the things crawling out of the much and in those dreams the gates into Twilight always closed too early. If Her Majesty had been there with them, perhaps, but now? The rumours had spread. The Black Queen was wounded, unconscious, and now her armies were wavering. Catherine Foundling had never been defeated on the field, but that legend did not apply to the Army of Callow when it stood without her. If I don’t give the order to take back the gate , General Zola thought with cold clarity, then I have declared this battle a defeat. It will not be possible to win, afterwards.

Before she could speak, however, she caught sight of strange movement atop the gates. An eddy in the flow of the dead. Zola’s grandmother had been a Mosa, and though the blood had since thinned she could still perceive motion uncannily well even in the dark. She pressed the Baalite eye against her face again, the enchantment lending her better sight through the dark, and started in surprise.

“General?” her staff tribune worriedly asked.

“Mad,” Zola Osei softly said. “Utterly mad.”

Goblins, it was goblins. At least a cohort’s worth of them, maybe more, but it was not a battle they had come from. Zola saw as they climbed atop the great necromantic constructs – the beorns and the snakes and even one of the wyrms – as lesser dead clumsily tried to pursue. Nimble and utterly fearless the sappers, for those bags they bore could not be mistaken, spread out and every heartbeat a few more of them died from being shaken off monsters or caught by undead. And still they went, until a horn was sounded and like candles in the darks the monsters lit up. One after the other, matches struck and devices triggered as jets of green flames burst and Keter’s great beasts screamed.

Robber’s Marauders were not a legend without reason.

“We go forward,” General Zola Osei said, throat tightening. “The Second will take back the gate.”

The Army of Callow had not yet bent the knee to even odds overwhelming. It would not break that custom on her watch.

—

Like most great catastrophes, Adjutant thought, it had not been neatly done. The Grey Basin – le Bassin Gris, to the locals – had occupied maybe a fourth of surface of the plateau on which the city of Hainaut had been built, an uneven oval that began south where it ended on a waterfall over the edge and went up the middle of the capital until it ended at the beginning of the great district facing the city gates. The basin had been a major boon to the city, for both sanitation and drinking water purposes, and it’d been kept full by both underground aquifers in the rock below and regular rainfall. It was also, as of a half hour ago, entirely gone .

It had been expected that the undead would dig under the city, for it was one of Keter’s favourite tactics and one of the few weaknesses of the city-fortress, and the Firstborn had been the natural answer to such an assault. They too were familiar with fighting underground, Night was well suited to such skirmishes and unlike humans they could see perfectly in the dark. And as far as Hakram could tell, when the dead had finally dug their way up into the city the fight had gone overwhelmingly in the favour of the drow. On all fronts they’d either held or outright beaten back the dead, in some cases even counterattacking deep below where the dead were massing for their offensive. And then it had all gone horribly wrong, somehow.

Sve Noc had been caught in a trap, of which the nature and purpose was still unclear, and it seemed that to free themselves from it the Crows had made sacrifices. Swaths of dzulu had suddenly fallen unconscious, and even Mighty had seen their powers suddenly falter. Worse, the angry throes of the goddesses had shattered the bottom of the Grey Basin and the water had poured into the tunnels dug by Keter. They too had broken, in some places too fragile, and it had begun a disastrous chain of collapses that’d essentially hollowed out the heart of the city. Now where the Grey Basin had once stood there was a sheer drop of a at least a hundred feet instead, with massive rubble and the corpses of both drow and broken undead strewn everywhere.

“Hard to tell how many died,” Secretary Amelia said. “The Firstborn are shit at coordinating with other forces, they never told us how many they sent down into the tunnels.”

“Concentrate on finding the Losara,” Hakram said, leaning on his crutches. “They are most likely to have numbers for us.”

“The curves of the cliff seems to curve inwards,” Secretary Prattler noted, crouching at the edge with an interested look. “Dangerous. The plateau’s structure became unstable.”

“And the tunnels?” Hakram asked.

“They didn’t go anywhere,” Prattler, once a lieutenant in the sappers, replied. “If the dead climb the side of the drop, they’ll be able to access them and enter the city by other paths than the edge. We need to close them as soon as possible.”

“Send word to the sappers,” Adjutant ordered. “Save for the situation at the gates, this is the highest priority.”

“Won’t be many left of us, but I’ll see what I can do,” Secretary Prattler saluted.

The reports from his phalanges were increasingly staggered, but the flow had not yet been impeded. The difficulty at the moment was keeping the Alliance high command informed, and Vivienne in particular. Irritatingly, the situation with the Firstborn remained unclear. The nature of the consequences of what had happened save for a fourth of the plateau shattering were still to be determined. Night had weakened, observably, but was that it? Answers came when his picket informed him that Masego and the Pilgrim had strolled out of the dark, that overly ambitious creature Ivah with them. Hierophant looked invigorated, the Pilgrim wearied, and neither wasted time on niceties as the ‘Lord of Silent Steps’ stood in the distance and seemingly entranced.

“The Dead King laid a trap for Sve Noc in a cavern below the city,” Hierophant said. “And through the sister he captured, he attempted to siphon the Night.”

Hakram’s jaw tightened. That would have been too disastrous for words.

“Did he succeed?”

Hierophant shook his head.

“I was invited to use one of my aspects onto the Night through one of the sisters,” Masego said. “What Trimegistus seized, I ruined.”

“Along with most of the Night itself,” the Peregrine quietly added. “The Crows hid away a portion of their power in a mortal receptable beforehand, but most of the Night itself was unmade.”

“It was a measured action,” Hierophant calmly said. “It will have hit dzulu the worst, as they had reserves of Night but none of the protections of the Mighty. Nisi will have gone entirely unharmed.”

“And Mighty?” Hakram asked, licking his chops.

“Weakened,” the Pilgrim said. “Significantly so.”

Then the Gloom that defended Serolen was likely gone as well, Adjutant thought. Dark news.

“When will the Sisters return to the field?” he asked.

“That is why we are here,” the Pilgrim admitted. “You are, as always, the man who can find the needle in the haystack. The Sisters cannot reclaim their power, Hierophant tells me, until their imprisoned half is freed. Else we risk simply resuming the disaster on a smaller scale.”

Hakram blinked.

“One of them’s still trapped?” he flatly said.

“Yes,” Masego said. “The ritual was quite comprehensive, though I expect it was primarily meant for a godhead shard and not the possession the net caught. It allowed the halves of Sve Noc to keep communicating.”

“It is,” the Grey Pilgrim said with grim face, “still down there.”

He pointed down below, into the field of soaked rubble, and for a moment Adjutant’s mind went blank. Saving someone down there? Impossible. Not, he adjusted, merely impractical. Which meant... mhm, perhaps he would be able to Find a solution after all.

—

“The Second Army has engaged at the gates,” General Bagram grimly announced. “It is gaining steadily, but there is no telling the outcome of the engagement.”

“And your Fourth?” Prince Klaus Papenheim asked.

“We’ve stabilized the flanks and are focusing on evacuating the wounded,” the orc replied. “The situation is stable.”

Vivienne let out a long breath and spoke the truth no one else seemed to want to.

“It has been confirmed that the Grey Legion is approaching the gates, the defences of which are still in enemy hands,” she flatly said. “I am the least seasoned military leader at this table, but it seems to me that those gates are about to be smashed open.”

Just a few soldiers of the Grey Legion, hulking masses of moving steel that they were, were enough to serve as a battering ram. The entire frontline of that silent army hitting the seven gates as once would be worse by an order of magnitude.

“We can still hold,” General Bagram insisted. “So long as the walls do not fall, the enemy can be bottlenecked in that district.”

“The east holds,” Captain Nabila said. “No beachheads remain and we have mastery of both rampart and bastions.”

Proud as Vivienne was of the Army of Callow, she had to admit that in the battle for Hainaut the Dominion that had distinguished itself. Almost half the western rampart, held by Alamans troops, had collapsed after being struck by Scourges until Catherine had led the Woe – and Akua Sahelian – to slay one and drive away the other. Unfortunately, the reinforcements led by Princess Beatrice had never materialized as instead they’d run into enemies in the streets of the city. They’d won that clash decisively, at the price of the Princess of Hainaut being wounded, and at the moment it was Prince Arsene of Bayeux that was theoretically the commander of that flank.

The man was not here, however, having instead sent his niece Lady Marceline to speak for him.

“The Brabant levies broke and ran,” Lady Marcelline frankly said, “but we’ve contained the breach to a single bastion. Captain-General Catalina survived the attentions of the Archmage and she’s leading the local effort while my uncle oversees the norther stretch of the rampart.”

“Anyone would have buckled, hit by that kind of magic,” General Bagram said with rough sympathy. “But can the mercenaries clear the enemy’s foothold? If they’d don’t, this all falls apart.”

“Perhaps if Chosen were to lend their strength the matter could be settled more easily,” Lady Marceline leadingly said, turning her eyes towards Vivienne.

It rather amused the heiress that even though she had not held a Name in years, by simple virtue of having once been the Thief people believed she still had influence over Named. As if even Catherine – Vivienne’s heart clenched, but Indrani had promised she would survive – Catherine, with all her strength, did not struggle to keep their kind in even a semblance of order. The privileged information that Vivienne Dartwick did hold in regard to their kind was not a consequence of her thieving past at all, but of Hakram Deadhand being fiercely meticulous even when calamity was at the gate.

It was not sorcery but regular messengers, which admittedly some might argue were harder to arrange in a city besieged.

“They’ve had heavy casualties,” Vivienne said. “On the Silver Huntress survived out of her band after they were caught in that ambush, and only barely. It might be possible to request the Headhunter and the Rogue Sorcerer lend a hand, but they have been highly mobile so mustering them may take time.”

It’d been a slaughter, according to the report she’d gotten. A well-crafted ambush by what had appeared to be a half a dozen Revenants in a narrow street had taken a lethal turn when the Prince of Bones had torn through a wall and pulped the Young Slayer’s head with a single blow. A black-feathered arrow had taken the Summoner in the throat almost simultaneously, and the rest had been overwhelmed. The Grey Pilgrim and Masego had arrived in time to save the Silver Huntress’ life, but both the Silent Guardian and the Rapacious Troubadour had been lost.

All that with nothing to show for it, aside from a few destroyed lesser Revenants. The Prince of Bones had managed to retreat into Arcadia under fire by both the Peregrine and the Hierophant, indifferent to even their harshest attacks, while the Hawk had been long gone by the time those two arrived. The gate the Prince of Bones had used had been found and closed by the pair, but it was expected by everyone in this room that the Scourge would be back to lead his Grey Legion when it breached the city. Lady Marceline made a moue at Vivienne’s answer, displeased.

“Perhaps the band of the Barrow Sword instead?” she asked. “The Blessed Artificer alone-”

“The survivors of that band are already tasked, by order of the Adjutant himself,” Vivienne mildly said.

The mildness was not one that invited further argument, and with ill-grace Lady Marceline accepted the help on offer instead of the one she’d wished for. Vivienne sent out the messenger promptly, even as argument resumed as to whether or not the battle for Hainaut could still be salvaged. There was some optimism that it still could, so long as the drow managed to rally and help the Lycaonese keep walls of the pit created by the collapse of the Bassin Gris from being climbed by the dead. For now the sheer quantity of rubble and water was making it effectively impassable, but it would not last forever.

“The Neustrians could reinforce,” Lady Marceline said, “at the moment they are not-”

It was like an itch, Vivienne thought. Or perhaps simply the slightest of pressures, tickling like a feather. Not the first trick of the sort she had learned, back when she was the Thief, but the first she had been taught . That was almost nostalgic, in a terribly dangerous kind of way. Vivienne Dartwick kept her breathing steady, concentrating as the talk of the commanders washed over her, and listened to nothing save the sound of her own breath. In, out. In, out. There, the itch again. The... weight. She had not been wrong. Idly, the heiress-designate to Callow pushed back her chair seemingly to make room for her legs as she reached for a carafe of water. Leaning covered one of her arms from sight, gave her free hand, and a heartbeat later she was moving.

The knife flew, perfectly thrown, and would have caught the hooded figure in the throat if it’d not been parried by a serrated dagger.

Prince Klaus, who’d been about to get his throat slit, was the first to draw his sword. General Bagram was but a heartbeat behind, and even as Lady Marceline backed away so she’d have room to draw her rapier Captain Nabila palmed a throwing axe. Vivienne, though, had already leapt atop the table with a fresh knife in hand. The Revenant flickered, as if made of heat mirage, and for a moment her eyes stung but she focused through the pain and flicked a second knife. It was parried, but the flickering ceased.

“Varlet,” the Iron Prince hissed, striking hard.

The Revenant turned the blow aside, punching the old man in the stomach hard enough it emptied his lungs, but Bagram hacked at its shoulder and it was forced to step back. The orc’s blade bit into the Prince of Hannoven’s shoulder but only shallowly, and Vivienne reached for the back of her belt where she kept a pouch even as she finished crossing the table. Captain Nabila’s throwing axe was swatted aside and General Bagram’s charge ended badly, the Varlet sweeping his legs and tossing him at the table. Vivienne’s fingers closed around a handful even as she leapt, the table flipping below her as Bagram stumbled into it, and she watched as the Iron Prince’s swing was not only parried but riposted with a vicious cut that ripped across his face.

And the Varlet turned to her, even as she flew through the air, but Vivienne Dartwick smiled unpleasantly and threw a handful of golden dust into her face.

The Scourge hastily retreated but it caught her anyway, the Revenant screaming as the Concocter-made compound burned at the dead flesh and glowed brightly. Let her try to disappear with that . Vivienne tumbled into the animated corpse, the two of them landing in a sprawl, and as she slid out a third knife the other tried to slice open her throat. She caught the wrist in time with her free hand, struggling to keep the blade from going into flesh, but she was losing in strength and she had to abandon her knife to help with her second hand. She was losing anyway. Fortunately, the Iron Prince then kicked the Varlet in the head.

She fell to the side and Vivienne snatched up her knife, stabbing into her foe’s wrist even as the Revenant tried to punch through the back of Klaus Papenheim’s knee. She nailed the dead flesh, preventing the blow, and by then Captain Nabila had joined the fray with a war axe. Vivienne backed way so they’d have freer hand, getting back to her feet as General Bagram brushed past her to lend his sword to the cause of keeping the Revenant from rising. Lady Marceline, though armed, was staying far away from the foe. Vivienne threw her a scornful glance, passing the fallen table to snatch first a magelight globe from the wall and then a candle from a candlestick. She deftly turned back just in time to see Bagram rip through a wrist and then hold down the limb.

“Keep her from moving,” Vivienne ordered.

“She-” Captain Nadila began.

“Do it,” the Iron Prince grunted, hacking at the hood.

They managed, barely, and even then Vivienne had to dodge a kick as she approached.

“You will-” the Varlet began, but the words were interrupted by someone shoving magelight in her mouth.

“I could sneak better than that at eighteen,” Vivienne Dartwick scathingly said, pressing the candle’s open flame against the magelight globe. “You ought to be embarrassed .”

And after five heartbeats exposed to fire, exactly as Masego had shown her it would, the Jaquinite magelight exploded with a loud pop . The tongues of flame exploded outwards, incinerating the Revenant from the inside as a jet shot out from her mouth and Vivienne avoided it by reclining her head to the right. The heat licked at her face, but she did not close her eyes. The Revenant, head mostly consumed save for charred bones, stopped moving.

“Decapitate it to be sure,” Vivienne said, drawing back.

Captain Nabila did, rather eagerly, and the corpse fell listlessly. Feeling the eyes of everyone in the room on her, Vivienne cocked an eyebrow. Had they believed her harmless because these days she wore dresses instead of leather? She was able to fit more knives in a gown than she’d even been able to in trousers. I spent my fighting years as one of the Woe , Vivienne thought, matching their gazes. Does even a single one of you grasp what that actually means? She picked up one of the knives she’d thrown, carefully placing it back against the hidden strap.

“General Bagram, I leave this in your hands,” she said. “I’ll be heading out.”

The orc slowly nodded.

“Where to, my lady?” Bagram asked.

“Where the hammer will fall,” Vivienne replied. “The gates.”

—

Amusingly enough, the Barrow Sword was the only member of his band who turned out to be useless to the purposes for which it had been sent for.

Ishaq took it in good humour, proving to be in a rather amenable mood overall. His successes before members of the Blood, his usual foes, had put him in a fine mood. Hakram spent little time speaking with the man, instead guiding the efforts of the rest of the band. No one was inclined to climb down, especially now that dead from the plains below had begin to crawl all over the rubble, but the Harrowed Witch was the solution to that: the bound soul of her brother, which she could sometimes force to obey her commands, had been sent instead. With the help of Hakram’s own aspect the place where General Rumena was buried had been found, which had been when the Vagrant Spear moved out.

Passing through Twilight, as she was a fair hand at sidling, she emerged even as the Blessed Artificer began raining down Light on the dead in a hail of javelins. Striking with Light and the power of her Name she’d quickly pierced through the mass of stone, allowing a haggard Mighty Rumena to stumble out. The first stumble was an appearance by the Hawk, who from her high perch atop a vulture let loose an arrow. Aimed at Mighty Rumena, Hakram discerned, but it was not to be. Another arrow hit it mid-trajectory, Archer having finally found trace of her prey, and before a second could be loosed both the drow and the Vagrant Spear disappeared into Twilight.

The Firstborn could see to themselves, then. He had done what he could. An opinion seemingly shared by Masego and the Grey Pilgrim, who had lingered talking to each other quietly but were not clearly intent on leaving. Hierophant absent-mindedly bade his goodbyes, mentioning he was headed towards the gates, but the Peregrine stayed for a longer conversation.

“The Firstborn situation seems as settled as it can be,” Adjutant said.

“We but tied a bandage over a gaping wound, but it is better than nothing,” the Peregrine quietly replied. “I am simply glad that we were able to free Sve Noc.”

The tired-look old man, Hakram considered, had been fully prepared to kill the two goddesses rather than let them fall in the hands of the Dead King. Soberingly, he seemed to believe he would have been capable of the act.

“Losing the Firstborn entirely might have lost us the battle,” Hakram warily agreed.

There was a long pause as the old man studied him, those rheumy blue eyes piercing in ways that were beyond simple sight.

“The Ophanim believe the battle is lost regardless,” the Grey Pilgrim murmured.

The orc’s pulsed quickened.

“And do they care to share their reasons why?” Adjutant calmly asked.

The situation was not favourable, to his knowledge, but it was not yet disastrous. The walls largely held, and though the gates were threatened they were yet to fall. In the longer view the great pit that had replaced the Grey Basin was a liability, but salvaged sigils and the still-fresh Lycaonese should be able to hold them. The battle had certainly grown more arduous, but it seemed to early to write if off.

“There is a Crab,” Tariq Fleetfoot said. “It nears. They can feel it approaching.”

Hakram froze. The massive necromantic creatures were as moving small cities that the Dead King used to keep the armaments of his armies in fighting fit. They were a massive resource investment, and so jealously guarded that few had even been seen, but one had been seen earlier in this campaign. The Rogue Sorcerer, when scouting Lauzon’s Hollow, had believed he’d glimpsed the spells keeping one invisible to the naked eye. And though it was not the purpose of that construct, given its sheer size it would represent not so much a siege tower as a siege fortress .

“Masego and yourself are both capable of destroying constructs of that scale,” Hakram finally said.

And perhaps the Blessed Artificer as well, or Catherine were she awake, but there were not certainties with either.

“A monster, yes,” the Pilgrim sadly smiled, “but a city, with wards and protections as this Crab will have? No. Already the Ophanim tell me their influence is being restricted by some working of the Enemy’s. The battle is lost, Adjutant.”

His bone hand clenched.

“You want us to begin a retreat,” he said.

“That I leave to military minds,” the Peregrine said. “But I say this: we cannot leave a twilight gate in the hands of the Dead King.”

“We can’t afford to lose this battle either,” Adjutant growled. “If we do, Hainaut collapses. Perhaps all of Procer with it.”

And if Procer fell, the rest of Calernia would not be far behind.

“There is a way,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “It would be ruinous, but there is a way.”

Adjutant’s brows knotted.

“What is it you want of me, Peregrine?”

“We need to wake up Catherine Foundling,” the Pilgrim said. “And for that I require your help.”

—

They had taken the gates, inch by inch.

General Zola had watched as the army already bloodied at Maillac’s Boot bloodied itself anew taking the same wide stairs that Callowan sappers had built but days earlier, tight ranks of legionaries heaving and screaming and they drove back the howling dead. Nothing was held back. Sharpers were thrown freely, shredding the enemy’s tightly packed hordes, and fireballs struck in volleys as spears of Light tore into the side of massive monsters. And the Second Army, living up to the excellence for which the Black Queen had honoured it, bled and won. The bodies fell, until all that was left was green flames and corpses no longer moving. Zola gave her orders, connecting her lines with the Fourth Army’s and evacuating the wounded through the twilight gate. There were no longer mages to spare to send them back into the fight, as too few healers.

Then the gates broke.

The Grey Legion strode through the wreckage, ranks and ranks of silent steel bearing thick shields and great weapons. Light barely bit into them, sorcery was useless, but munitions made a dent. Goblinfire most of all, though the dead simply made some of the legionaries lie over the flames so they would not spread and walked on. Through traps and pits, through caltrops and spikes, lumbering but indifferent. And when the Grey Legion reached the barricades, the lines wavered. Thousands of pounds of stone and wood were shattered in moments, and then great swords and hammers scythed through the frontline of the Second, but still the Second Army held . Zola Osei rode up and down the line, sending heavies into the gaps and ordering concentrated fire from the priests. Ineffective as they were, they still fared better than swords.

It tightened her stomach, watching orcs and humans and goblins pile themselves on the steel-clad dead to topple them and die and drove to destroy even a single one. Spells and Light came down in volleys from the ramparts and even the burning gatehouse, lines from the Fourth having dared to venture there, but it was not enough. The Grey Legion was pushing them back, slowly but surely. Blood and guts flowed down the street until the pavestones were so slick her men tripped on the entrails of their comrades, until smoke and ash stung their eyes to weeping and munitions slowly began to run out. A barricade collapsed entirely, a street routed, the shield wall collapse and then as if by a spell the breach was closed.

The Mirror Knight had come.

General Zola had heard the man called a fool by people high and low, but in that moment she felt only awe. That sole silhouette, marred by smoke and dust, smashed into the Grey Legion as if a cliff had decided to turn back the tide. He shone brightly, glimmer of Light, and as he advanced the enemy bent around him. Steel shells cracked, armoured dead went flying and an army of one sent the darkness howling back. Zola shouted herself hoarse organizing volleys to support him, sending in heavies to hold the ground taken back. Gods, they could still win this. They could still turn this around. Slowly, one at a time, the numbers of the Grey Legion were dwindling. The Second Army would not bend before they did. And forward the soldiers went, screaming their songs in defiance.

Then the Crab came, and the hope went out of them like a candle snuffed out.

Every gain made over hours of fighting gone, just like that. The monster-fortress stood above the ramparts, ramps coming down with iron hooks to disgorge undead atop the gate wherever the goblinfire had not spread. The shape blotted out even the sky, a tall shadow belching out acrid smoke the mage lines of the Fourth fled but not always quickly enough. The spell volleys sputtered out, and below the Grey Legion smashed into the ranks with fresh ferocity. The Mirror Knight was, before too long, a sole island of resistance in a sea of steel. And he fought on, but he could not win the war alone. Perhaps before Maillac’s Boot they would have been braver, Zola thought. Perhaps if the Black Queen had stood with them, as she had through the last nightmare.

But Maillac had happened, and the Black Queen was not there. The Second Army broke.

It was a retreat, at first. Almost controlled, soldiers edging away from the enemy. But the panic spread like a stain on lace, and steps turned into a run. And once a few had begun to run, thousands did. The Grey Legion were terrifying even as part of a shield wall, who wanted to fight them without it? The streets and barricades clogged with soldiers trying to flee, and in the wake of the Second breaking the remains of the Fourth Army broke as well. The only saving grace was that the Grey Legion were too slow to capitalize and that the streets were too narrow for the rout to make it far. The same barricades meant to be held against the dead instead bottlenecked fleeing soldiers, the blind panicked stampede killing hundreds.

General Zola had ordered spells fired into the broken ranks to turn them around, at first, but it changed nothing and she would not be party to butchering her own soldiers like animals. She tried to organize two fresh lines of defence but both buckled under the sheer mass of the routing soldiers who were in no mood to listen to shouting officers. There was, she bitterly realized, little she could actually do. She’d lost control over her army. They might as well be utter strangers now, for all the sway she had over them. Should she arrange for a more orderly retreat? The battle was good as lost now, but perhaps she could still salvage an army out of this. The sun shook out her out of her thoughts, absurdly enough. The sun , in the middle of the night.

And still there it was, hanging in the sky above them, red and burning and casting golden light. A miracle, Zola thought, and remembered the strange lights that burned under the eyecloth of the Hierophant. They were, she thought, eerily similar to what now shone above her army. Which slowed in its flight, confused and worried. And slowly, as General Zola watched, something changed. One of the barricades being toppled calmed, and when she sought the sight with a Baalite eye she found that a banner had been raised. The Crown and Sword, the Black Queens own, but it was not the Black Queen flying it. Lady Vivienne Dartwick, armed and armoured and mounted as the Order of Broken Bells rode around her, headed into the fray.

And wherever she went, under that burning sun that somehow had the Grey Legion buckling, the terror turned to shame. And shame turned into determination, soldiers streaming behind her.

The tide slowed.

The tide halted.

At last the tide turned around, and as the broken armies headed back into the fight General Zola Osei thought that while Callow might only have one queen this night it had gained a princess.

Interlude: Lost & Found

“To sacrifice is to embrace end for the sake of beginning.”

– Daphne of the Homilies, best known for ending hereditary rule in Atalante

Special Tribune Robber of the Rock Breaker tribe threw himself to the side, landing in sprawl as the dead scrabbled at him. No point in even stabbing at those, he figured, there were too many for a knife to do any good. Nails ripped at his face before he bit the fingers off and spat out the fouled blood, wriggling through the hands and blades of the writhing mass of undead. A sharper went off close, biting thunder in a ball, and it was an opening. Tripping through shredded flesh and iron, sucking deep of the smoke, the goblin crawled beneath some Bind in bronze armour and tumbled down the stairs. He reached for a sharper of his own but found his bag ripped open – half his munitions were gone, and he’d spent most of the other half.

Cackling out a curse, Robber ducked under some skeleton’s axe swing and pushed the dead down onto the corpse on the stair below it. A blade rang against his back, biting at the mail, but he scuttled down the corpse he’d pushed and leapt off the makeshift ramp. He landed among a pack of ghouls, all of them turning like bloodhounds with bared fangs, but there was a flash of heat as a streak of flame coming from above cut through a few. Claws ripped at his side, but these creatures he could wound. He stabbed the ghoul’s eyes twice, moving so it shielded him from the others as it screamed, and made a run for it down the cobblestone road as a volley of shining spears began to fall from above.

There were still a few skeletons in the way, but Robber slipped by after hamstringing one from behind with a laugh. The barricade was covered in soot and blood, but the legionaries manning it seemed in a decent enough mood as the opened their shields to let him through. Catching a few whispers of his name, Robber took a moment to preen under their gazes before getting to business.

“I’m looking for Poulain street,” the Special Tribune said, dusting off his shoulders. “Happened to get lost on the way. Don’t suppose any of you have directions to offer?”

“We’re two blocs west, sir,” a young lass answered. “It’s the next barricade, can’t miss it. We had to collapse the street in between when the lines buckled.”

When the lines had broken, more like, but that wasn’t the kind of talk the officers would be encouraging. Robber had been extracting himself from enemy lines while that disaster had come home to roost, but he’s still been able to spare a glance or two for the sight of the Second and Fourth legging it. Someone – probably one of the Woe, it was usually a safe bet when it came to shit like this – had since hung a sun in the sky and what was probably Vivienne had led a countercharge that’d ended the rout. How long that would last, though, was a question digging at him. It’d take more than a lightshow and a banner to turn this around.

“Good, I was already getting bored,” Robber grinned. “Do finish that Bone I stabbed earlier, would you? I hate to leave the work half-done.”

A few laughs, some solemn vows, but some of them wanted more. Aside from a few stray attacks at their barricade they must not have seen much action tonight, considering they were too far to the east of the where the Grey Legion had struck.

“Preparing another spot of goblinfire, sir?” a sergeant asked. “Most the city saw your last one, it’ll be hard to beat.”

Not exactly. The barricade on Poulain street was where his cohort was meant to rally after it had scattered during their deep strike on the constructs. It was where the goblin would learn how many of his marauders had made it out – one in five, one in ten? For all he knew, he might be the only survivor. There’d been close calls, making his way back to safe grounds. Borer at least ought to have made it back, he decided. The good captain was already dead inside, Keter’s boys wouldn’t even notice he wasn’t on their side.

“Half the fun’s in the surprise,” Robber chided. “Any of you lot heard where Lady Vivienne would be at?”

“Word is the princess is out west, with the Hierophant,” the same lass from earlier said. “They’re driving back the Grey Legion.”

The princess ? He eyed the others, and though some eyes had been rolled at the title no one had apparently cared to contest it. Not even the few orcs in the crowd, the lot that tended to get touchiest where the Boss was involved. Dartwick wouldn’t knife Catherine, mind you. Didn’t have the stones, and she had the crown neatly lined up in a few years anyway. Her little charge tonight had made a splash, though, and that devil wasn’t ever going to get shoved back in the circle. All above his paygrade that, so he didn’t spare more thought for it. He took his leave instead, taking to the rooftops instead of sticking down in the streets where the dead swarmed. It was a good city for that, built mostly in stone instead of wood, and there’d been plenty of slate for the roofs.

It was easy to find where sappers had blocked off the street in the middle, since they’d knocked down houses on both sides until the street reached a temple of the House of Light with a small belfry jutting out. It was through there that Robber passed, lingering beneath the bells so he could have a proper look at the battle below.

Almost immediately, he let out a whistling hiss through his teeth. Looked good, at first glance, but he’d been in a battle or two since the College. The eerie sun up above was keeping the Grey Legion bogged down and the centre of the Army of Callow’s line had steadied, but he wasn’t seeing a lot of holes in the ranks of the steel-clad dead and that was bad news. Meant once Ol’ Bones broke this binding, and he would, it would start smelling like rout again. The flanks, which were all Fourth army, were being pressured as well. The Crab was spitting out dead by the hundreds through ramps docked against the gates and the ramparts, and the only reason the lines hadn’t shattered was that the bastions and ramparts were good bottlenecks.

The trouble with bottlenecks was that Keter tended to throw constructs at them ‘til they popped, and Robber wasn’t seeing much that’d be able to handle them. If a few Named were to pop up, maybe, but with the entire city being squeeze tight at the moment there was no guarantee of guardian devils – or angels. Special Tribune Robber, for the first time in years, allowed himself to curse quietly in the stonetongue. At this rate, the battle was lost. To that he only knew one solution: he’d pick up what was left of his cohort and find the Boss.

—

The Black Queen was as a needle in a haystack, were the haystack aflame and swarming with soldiers. It should have been impossible to find her, for the shade left to guard over her would be hiding her from the enemies still seeking her death, but in truth it was merely improbable.

To Tariq Fleetfoot, that change of word made all the difference

The Adjutant was not swift on his crutches, but that did not matter when their steps were guided by something greater than they. Listening to his instincts and the whispers that went beyond them, the Grey Pilgrim led them down alleys and through broken shops, weaving trough smoke and screams as the city began to die around them. The western wall was going to fall, the Ophanim whispered. Soon. Time was running out. It was in a pleasure house they found the Queen of Callow, the establishment long empty and closed save through passages that the dead would not find easily. Not so for the Pilgrim, who led the Adjutant down them until they were intercepted by drow in the colours of the Losara Sigil.

From there it was not a long walk to the madam’s room, where Akua Sahelian was zealously keeping watch over the unconscious body of Catherine Foundling. As always the shade’s emotions were difficult to properly Behold , as if muted by night or smoke, but Tariq found both anguish and a shaded sort of pride there. As if she herself had done something worth lauding, though a feeling of... transgression? Yes, transgression was threaded into it. She also held sway over the drow, who cleared the room when she asked them to and left the three of them alone with the slumbering Black Queen. Tariq was somewhat amused to see that even in times of hardship she made a point of greeting the Adjutant formally and first before cursorily acknowledging his presence.

“And what is it that brings you here?” Akua Sahelian asked. “It will be some time before the way to the next safehouse is clear, we can afford to speak some.”

“The Peregrine,” the Adjutant growled, “claims he has a way to wake Catherine. A ruinous one.”

Wariness, in this one, but also expectation. Tariq was perhaps not trusted, but at least trusted to deliver. The insult, though, he would not let pass quietly.

“You mistake me,” the Grey Pilgrim said, tone sharp for all the calmness. “Am I some petty conjurer, to pay my debts in the blood of others? I am a servant of Mercy, now and in all things: I will visit no ruin on others I am not willing to visit on me and mine.”

The orc studied him a moment, then inclined his head.

“You have my apology, then,” Adjutant said.

It was sincerely meant, and so Tariq let it end at that.

“I can wake the Black Queen because the Ophanim will lend me their hand in the work,” Tariq said. “And when she wakes, I am to offer her a bargain.”

The shade studied him.

“Were they not willing to lend their help earlier?” Akua Sahelian asked.

Tariq did not answer, which he supposed was damning enough. The Ophanim would not be moved to lend their help to one of Below’s, even one allied to them, were the consequences of refusing that help not calamitous. It was not simply in their nature to do so, to abet greater suffering to come for the sake of lesser suffering taking place. The greatest concession they could make was absence of action. Tariq had asked back then and they had refused, only for him to find his own skills with Light insufficient for the task. Even now, when they had conceded after he asked a boon of them, it ran against their nature to accept his request.

“Charming,” the shade said, tone dripping with aristocratic disdain. “Still, better late than never I suppose.”

The Adjutant cleared his throat.

“And what was is my presence required for, Peregrine?”

Tariq cocked an eyebrow. He had believed it obvious.

“Because you are the person Catherine Foundling loves most in the world,” he said. “If I were the one to call her out of her slumber, I would be refused. You will not be.”

Something golden bloomed inside the Adjutant, in the wake of his words. Love returned, but there were shades to it. Relief, guilty surprise, shame, vindication? For all that they were often shallow, the orc’s emotions were among the most complex that the Grey Pilgrim had ever seen. The Adjutant nodded, face grown taut.

“What must I do?” he asked, his voice rough.

Before Tariq could answer, he was interrupted.

“She will lose nothing through this ritual you press on her?”

Akua Sahelian did not quite believe him, it seemed. She had not been raised to believe in fair dealings.

“It is not a service I render her to wake,” Tariq plainly said.

“Speak the words, Pilgrim,” the shade said, golden eyes gone hard.

“She will not be harmed by this,” the Pilgrim flatly said.

The dark-skinned woman eyed him for a moment, then sighed and moved away. Frustration bloomed in her, regret and resignation warring. Heeding Tariq’s instruction, the Adjutant took the hand of his mistress with his fingers of bone and held it. Eyes closed the orc began to breathe in and out evenly. The Ophanim murmured uncertainly in the Pilgrim’s ears as he approached, but he reminded them of their promise. He laid hand on the Black Queen’s neck, grimacing at the sight of the fresh scar she’d earned tonight. That eye would not be returned to her, not if it had been taken by an aspect. Enough distraction , he chided himself. Turning his attention inwards, Tariq sunk into the Light.

He did not draw it into him, to be wielded or shaped, but instead immersed his own soul into the light of the Heavens made manifest. Earthly senses began to fade even as the voices of the Ophanim became clearer, louder. They guided his hands, patient teachers that they were, even as he shared a shard of the Light with the Black Queen’s body. She was not entirely human, he saw with startlement. Differences had been made, set into the essence of her body. The work of the goddesses of theft and murder she worshipped, the old priest decided, for this seemed not dissimilar to the boon that kept the Mighty ageless: Catherine Foundling’s lifespan had been stretched out, as if every day she had been born to live was to take a hundred instead to be spent. And there was more, a deeper shaping that he found only as the shard of Light found its way to what he sought.

The very soul of the Black Queen.

It was still the same mangled thing it had been since that first time he glimpsed it by campfire, scarred and cut and hacked away at. The difference was that it had been... facilitated towards Night. It had helped the stretching of the lifespan, the Ophanim spoke in their coldly ringing voices, but it had not been the purpose. Catherine Foundling could hold more Night than a mortal should, absurdly more. More than she would be able to wield, Tariq thought, which meant wielding had not been the purpose. A receptacle, the Ophanim said. A vessel. Not for possession, but for the hiding away of their power and godhead should it be threatened. It no longer seemed words of simple trust, when the Eldest Night had told him that had their chosen been awake the Dead King’s trap would not have been a threat.

Tariq went deeper still, finding the great wisps of the Bestowal shaping itself around the unconscious woman. It tasted of authority, he thought, as if the commanding ring of her words had not told him that already. Of steel. And of something else, something that eluded his understanding. East, the Ophanim said. What would birth her Bestowal lay in the east, not this endless nightmare war. And it was a purpose bound to another, like bound stars, calling and casting away. Is this what is to come? The Ophanim could not tell. The future was clouded, darkened. And the Pilgrim’s flicker of Light went deeper still, until it touched the sleeping mind of the queen. The consciousness swatted away the touch, as hard-bitten in the throes of dreams as it was when awake.

So Tariq left another to the work, simply bringing forth the presence of the Adjutant and the Black Queen he served. What was spoken there between souls he did not watch, for it was not his place, but as the Grey Pilgrim emerged gasping from the Light he heard another gasping breath along with his. Catherine Foundling, helped into a sitting position on the bed by Akua Sahelian, was opening her eyes. Eye, now, he supposed. He watched the realization of that particular change sink in as she groped at her face. Her lips tightened, then she breathed out. Tariq was surprised to realize that he could sometimes glimpse the outermost edges of her soul now, of her emotions. The protection of the Crows had weakened.

“Fuck,” the Queen of Callow cursed. “I got shot by the Hawk, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” Hakram Deadhand fondly rasped. “Even after all that talk about keeping an eye out.”

“Hey now,” Queen Catherine blearily muttered, “did I do hand jokes?”

“Yes,” the Adjutant said.

“Constantly,” Akua Sahelian agreed.

“It was one of the first things you said to me after your return from the Everdark,” the Adjutant noted.

Tariq kept silent, letting her draw on the comfort of their company without spoiling it by reminding her of his presence, and she gathered herself with a sigh as the shade pressed a cushion under her back.

“That one’s going to sting, and the Night feels like it’s gone through a wringer,” the Black Queen frowned. “Don’t suppose you could bring me up to speed, Tariq?”

“We have,” the Grey Pilgrim simply said, “lost the battle.”

Disbelief, tempered by what he suspected was a reminder to herself about patience. It had that self-inflicted note to it.

“Breaches?” she asked.

“There have been,” Tariq says. “And there will be more.”

“That can be turned around,” the Black Queen said. “Even if your Choir disagrees.”

“The Crab has made an appearance,” the Adjutant gravelled. “The Grey Legion breached the gates and the Fourth and Second routed until Vivienne rallied them.”

That gave her pause, Tariq saw, though her soul was obscured to his sight.

“Your opinion?” she asked the orc.

“If we do not retreat,” the Adjutant said, “we risk annihilation.”

Tariq watched the shudder of fear and fury and recrimination go through her, taking no pleasure in it. He, too, understood what this night would cost them. What it had already cost them. The queen glanced at the shade, who shook her head. Her opinion was no different.

“I reserve the right to change my mind,” the Black Queen coolly said, “but let’s say I believe you. You didn’t spend time and tricks in the middle of this nightmare to wake me up so we could have a pleasant chat, Pilgrim. What is it you want from me?”

She thought differently than the Black Knight did, Tariq noted. He tended to begin with larger concepts and then narrow in, while she instead went down winding but narrow paths. That way of silencing almost all of their mind in order to focus on the opposition, though, was eerily similar.

“There is something that can be done,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “Something that will deny the Enemy its victory. But the price of it will be, as I have told the Adjutant, ruinous.”

“To you,” the Black Queen said, eyes narrowing.

And that is why half the world fears you, child , Tariq thought, not without fondness.

“Yes,” he simply said.

“The price?”

“Blood and smoke.”

She breathed out shallowly.

“A dear price,” the Black Queen murmured. “And so now you would bargain.”

She paused.

“Your prayer, it will end this?”

“As if it were written in the stars,” Tariq smiled, amused at his own expense.

“What do you want for it?” she asked.

“Three boons,” the Pilgrim said, “Once before, I entrusted you with the two I believe will be the future of my home.”

“Those troublesome lordlings,” she frowned.

Underneath it, though, he glimpsed a flicker of affection threaded with irritation. They had learned more from her than she knew, though she had never claimed them as students.

“See them through this war,” Tariq quietly asked. “And when they take leave of you, see them off ready to face the trials that lay ahead.”

She considered him for a moment, that sole eye cold and measuring. Slowly, she nodded. There was something of a commotion outside the room, but Tariq paid it no mind. Nothing could be more important than this single conversation.

“Make peace with the White Knight,” Tariq asked. “That this civility may one day pass to all in service of Above and Bellow.”

He glimpsed her soul the briefest moments, seeing it weigh... consequences, stories? Dozens of them in a moment, keeping and cutting and settling on an answer. The old priest found it as frightening as he did fascinating. The Queen of Callow nodded once more.

“Two boons,” she said. “Your last?”

“The Ophanim will sing with me,” the Grey Pilgrim said. “I alone do not have the strength. Yet the Dead King has brought with him one of the fortresses that moves, a Crab. These bear wards and enchantments, among them a great working that restricts the touch of angels on Creation.”

“I do not have the strength to bring it down anymore,” the Black Queen admitted. “Perhaps if Sve Noc were with me, but even so I’m not sure my body can take the strain. The poison left marks.”

Tariq shook his head.

“They know where the magic was laid that fights them,” the Pilgrim said. “In the belly of the best. I require of you someone that will journey there and destroy it.”

She went still as stone.

“There will be no coming back from that,” Catherine Foundling said.

“No,” Tariq quietly agreed.

“You want me to send one of the Woe ?” she hissed. “Fuck you, Peregrine. I’d rather roll the dice on fighting. If you really-”

Akua Sahelian gently laid a hand on her wrist. The queen paled, teeth clenching.

“No,” she said.

“It would be just,” the shade softly said. “Or close enough.”

The Adjutant, tellingly, spoke not a word. His soul had measured deaths, and found this one the most acceptable.

“I said no , Akua,” the Black Queen harshly repeated. “You don’t get to just jump off a bridge and call it quits, that’s not-”

“Well now,” a voice drawled. “Looks like I came in at just the right time.”

Tariq turned, brow raising when he saw a goblin covered in soot, blood and dust swagger in. A sapper, he recognized, and he’d even seen this one before. Special Tribune Robber, he believed? He was rather famous in the Army of Callow as one of the Black Queen’s finest men.

“Robber, what are you doing here?” the Queen of Callow frowned.

“Volunteering,” the goblin grinned. “Sound like a proper evening, it does. Raiding a Crab, destroying ancient magics, calling down the wrath of angels? Can’t believe I almost missed it.”

Yet he had not. Whose hand had it been, Tariq wondered: Above or Below’s?

“Come off it,” the Black Queen sharply said. “Your cohort-”

“Only thirty-two of us left,” Robber said. “It’s not even a company. But we’ll do, Boss. For this, we’ll do.”

“The war’s not over, Robber,” she tried. “There’s still battles-”

“That’ll be more glorious than this?” the goblin laughed. “Doubt it. Wouldn’t matter even if there were, Cat. This one’s got our name written on it.”

“Why are you all so fucking eager to get yourselves killed?” Catherine Foundling roared out, lights dimming in the room. “Robber, I swear on the Gods Below that-”

“It’s settled, Boss,” the goblin smiled, almost gently. “We’re going. Even if you tie me up, you know I’ll slip the bounds and go. It’s done. The arrow’s been loosed.”

The anger went out of her like a flame guttering out. The glimpse of her soul that Tariq found had him looking away. He’d not seen such violent, exhausted grief in a long time. It was... not pleasant to behold.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” the young woman said, voice raw.

“Only cowards live to fifteen, Cat,” Special Tribune Robber said, smiling. “It’s been coming a long time, tonight.”

Tariq closed his eyes, knowing it had come to a close. The pieces were falling in place. One more, now, and it would begin.

—

The clouds of acidic smoke that the great undead dragon spewed out were so large they must have been visible from the other side of the city.

The mages would do what they could – the Rogue Sorcerer had gone to lead them – but the damage was already done. The Brabant conscripts, freshly returned back to the rampart, broke and ran again. The officers that would have been their backbone laid dead in a marsh to the east of Hainaut, where Klaus himself had ordered them burned. Panic was a vicious thing, in a battle, worse a killer than any sword, and tonight it bit deep at the men holding the western wall. Once the conscripts fled the fantassin reinforcements they’d been screening were left exposed, and as another wave of beorns came over the walls to protect the ladders being secured the fantassins began to waver as well. They were not cowards, that lot, but they were stuck between two strengthening enemy beachheads with no real way out.

The original order likely had been to clear the bastion the Archmage had hit earlier, as it was the easier flank of the two, but it all went sour when the dead began striking at their back as they fought. The dead in the bastion withdrew just enough that the fantassins would be able to flee down into the city, and flee they did. The last stretch of the western wall, to the north, was still in the hands of the Prince of Bayeux and holding strong. Even if they held, though, it would change nothing. All that Arsene Odon would achieve was preventing the dead from hitting the back of the Army of Callow by the rampart, with the rest of the wall in the hands of Keter they were free to push into the city itself.

Prince Klaus Papenheim knew better than to shy away from uncomfortable truths after swords left the sheath, so he did not flinch away from this one: the battle for Hainaut was lost. It was now his duty to act so that the nature of this defeat did not end up destroying the Principate and the rest of Calernia with it.

He ordered barricades raised to block most streets along the line of the fallen rampart, manned by soldiers of Hannoven that would not hesitate to kill anyone trying to force their way, but left two large avenues free for the conscripts and mercenaries to feel down. He sent for Princess Mathilda, and so received his first blow of the night: the only answer brought back by his captain was a black-feathered arrow, sodden with blood. Pushing down the grief – he still remembered her as a girl, close as sisters with his own – the Iron Prince forced himself to keep his mind on the battle. He sent the Neustrians to secure the gate into Twilight, and his most trusted captain to make sure that the Gigantes were out of the city before they could be killed and raised.

Word was sent out east to the Dominion informing them of the situation and warning that an orderly retreat was the only path left to them if the Grand Alliance did not want to turn Hainaut into the doom of the continent. Klaus sent word to General Bagram so that the Army of Callow might join the effort, learning that while the Second Army still held the Fourth was buckling on the walls. If they broke too early, the Prince of Hannoven knew, then this would turn into a massacre. The surviving parts of the Fourth Army held the bastions on both sides of the gates that were preventing the dead from striking at Prince Arsene and the Dominion form behind. Bayeux would fold in mere moments should that happen, if they hadn’t already, and the Levantines were already seeing redoubled assaults on their positions. They were at risk of breaking too, should they be flanked, and if they did break then the battle would grow beyond salvaging.

“We need to bolster the positions of the Fourth,” the Prince of Hannoven told his captains. “If we do not, this city takes us all.”

“Horse won’t cut it for holding a bastion,” Captain Engels said. “And we can’t move foot quickly enough, my prince, even if we can even move it at all. Callowan lines are bunched up, they can barely even move their own troops.”

“We could cut through the Bayeux positions,” Captain Abend suggested.

“If they rout while we cross, or even after, then we’ll be trapped there,” Captain Tietjen objected.

There was no easy answer, the Iron Prince thought, and the longer they dithered the fewer options they would have left. And yet he found himself at a loss. His army was already stretched too thin, and the Neustrians needed to keep the gate. Could the Firstborn be called on? They seemed to have rallied enough to aim fire at the undead scaling the pit sorcery had made in the heart of the city, but they had lost a step. Worse, General Rumena missing they had no leading officer: only a mass of bickering tribes which it might take to long to gather into cohesive reinforcements even if they were inclined to lend a hand. They would have to risk it, Klaus finally decided. What else was left?

The answer of the Gods came in the face of another weary old man in faded grey robes.

“Prince Klaus,” the Grey Pilgrim tiredly smiled.

“Peregrine,” the Prince of Hannoven replied. “You bring word?”

“I bring death,” the Pilgrim said. “Nothing more or less.”

The old general softly laughed.

“Death is our sole birthright, Peregrine,” Klaus Papenheim smiled. “It’s why it matters to spend our lives well. It will be a good one I hope?”

“Among the finest,” the Grey Pilgrim tiredly smiled, and told him the plan.

—

Between his height and the orc’s crutches, they had about the same pace.

“Did you know,” Robber idly said, “that you were the first person I ever spoke to, at the College?”

“Liar,” Hakram snorted. “I heard you picked a fight with Yagin from Tiger Company while you were still waiting in line for dormitory assignments.”

“It’s really quite unpleasant how hard you are to lie to,” Robber complained.

“It’s not easy, you’re just a naturally honest man,” Hakram assured him.

Mortally offended, the goblin gasped and put a hand over his heart.

“Fighting words, greenskin,” Robber said. “The honour of my deep and ancient house-”

“Your tribe is called the Rock Breakers,” Hakram skeptically noted.

“Because even our newborn babes are mighty enough to split a boulder with a single punch,” Robber lied.

Hakram looked him up and down, then cocked an eyebrow. He said nothing, which made it even worse.

“Don’t think I won’t stab a cripple,” Robber warned. “We do it all the time, it’s much easier than stabbing people who aren’t cripples.”

“Have I lately mentioned my deep respect for you culture?” Hakram gravelled.

Magnanimously, Robber only kicked his chin. Godsdamnit, the bloody thing was armoured. That prick.

“You’ll be one of the last to die when the Great Goblin Conspiracy finally takes the world,” Robber conceded.

“Merciful,” Hakram praised. “You are in a fine mood indeed, Lord Robber of the House of Lesser Footrest.”

The goblin preened, glorying in the way that he’d worked himself back up to Lesser Footrest last month. His was an ancient and honourable title. And when Hakram leaned over to slip something into his munitions bag, he was even in a good enough mood to pretend not to notice. They’d reached the end of the path, anyhow. The last of his cohort were gathered, Borer having just come back with a fresh loadout of munitions. Now all that was left was for the Lycaonese to open the dance. The two of them lingered in silence for a long moment.

“Anything you want Pickler told?” Hakram quietly asked.

“There’s nothing to tell,” he said. “I left her a letter, though. Make sure she gets it?”

His friend – his oldest friend, perhaps even his first friend – nodded.

“I won’t say it’s been an honour,” Hakram smiled.

“Gods forbid,” Robber grinned back, then hesitated.

He looked to the side, embarrassed.

“We had... we had times, didn’t we?”

“The best,” Hakram replied, voice hoarse.

They stayed like that for a longer while still, until the sound of horses nearing told them time had run out.

“Make sure Cat doesn’t let it eat at her,” Robber quietly said. “It’s not about her, not really.”

“I know,” Hakram said.

They met eyes, the goblin and the orc, and clasped arms.

“Somewhere, somewhen,” Robber grinned.

“We’ll meet again,” Hakram finished, smiling.

They let go of their arms and not another word was spoken.

—

“Strike hard and do not slow,” Prince Klaus Papenheim said. “Stay with your captains. If you are split from your company...”

He paused, raising an eyebrow.

“Find a nice place to die,” he suggested.

Laughter shook his riders. The jest was an old one, well-worn gallows humour of the kind his people tended to prefer.

“Our duty is not to be victorious,” the Prince of Hannoven said, “for there is no victory to be had there. We open the way for the handpicked sappers of the Black Queen, that they might destroy the enemy’s sorcery and free the Pilgrim to strike down evil.”

The answering cheers were hoarse, but they were wholeheartedly meant. There were less than a thousand of them left now, even after they’d taken southern horses to fill the ranks. The Prince of Hannoven looked at them with old affection, that old soldierly lot that’d followed him through a hundred battles on a hundred fields. Not so young now, for he was long past his own youth, but though the faces had grown wrinkled and the hair had gone white the eyes remained iron.

“We’ve had battles,” Klaus Papenheim said. “And we have kept the oaths we swore. I’ll not preach to you what is at stake, sons and daughters of Hannoven. Haven’t we all heard that song a hundred times already?”

The world was always ending, one piece at a time. There was always a doom over the horizon, taking its first newborn steps even as you buried the last.

“Behind us is spring,” the Iron Prince said. “Ahead of us is the Enemy. You are Lycaonese, so what more is there to say?”

Klaus Papenheim, Prince of Hannoven, unsheathed his sword. A thousand riders did with him, the steel bright under the stars of the Twilight Ways. Before them the gates yawned open, revealing a city devoured by nightmares. Horns sounded, defiant in the gloom, and backs straightened.

“Forward,” the Iron Prince shouted, and forward they went.

—

Tariq sat, not in a dignified stance as some straight-backed sage but instead like an old man lowering himself against the broken wall of a temple, his bones aching. He would not be found easily, he had been promised this. He sunk into the Light, as easily as taking breath, and let it fill him. The Ophanim, his old friends, were close. Yet they could not help him through the last step, not yet. All that was left to do was wait.

Wait and trust in the valour of others.

—

They plowed into the enemy ranks, smashing and hacking as they went. Through the flat grounds of the gatehouse, green flame licking at their sides as they rode through death and broken engines, trough ghouls and skeletons and even a roaring beorn. The old banner of Hannoven held high in the wind, the lone spearman on the wall and the old boast of the House of Papenheim beneath it. War cries resounding through the night as hooves thundered, Klaus Papenheim and his thousand rode up the ramps leading into the Crab. That city-monstrosity, laden with monsters and corpses it was pouring out into Hainaut. Undead and horsemen tumbled down below but they pierced through the dead and took the ramp, clearing it for the sappers to follow them. But a few of them, small creatures that they were, and so quick on their feet.

They would make it to the end, if the Iron Prince and his riders died loud enough.

Curses streaked at them in swarms, arrows and javelins flew, but tonight the Heavens were with the Lycaonese. The wind turned, the Crab shook, and onwards the riders went into the city. A thing of iron and bone, of stone and dead flesh, and the fumes it belched out billowed foul as the horsemen pressed through. Pikes came for them first, gathered hastily in a street, but Klaus Papenheim laughed and began to sing.

“ The moon rose, midnight eye
Serenaded by the owl’s cry
In Hannoven the arrows fly.”

Voices swelled his own as the refrain came and their riders fell into a wedge.

“ Hold the wall, lest dawn fail.”

They punched through, pikes skittering against heavy armour or finding enough purchase that horse and rider tumbled into the mass and broke the formation. The rider went on, down the street and towards the burning forges ahead.

“No southern song for your ear
No pretty lass or merry cheer
For you only night and spear.”

Too few pikes, the second time, but the Enemy laid the ranks on thick. As if to make a rampart of bone and armour, a barricade of writhing dead. Skeletons raised swords and axes, put up shields and their ranks kept swelling. But it would take greater wheat than this, to dull their scythe.

“Hold the wall, lest dawn fail.”

Screams as javelins and curses came at them from the sides, biting through even plate, but even as the riders died the ranks of the dead shuddered under the impact of a thousand heavy horse. It was in the hands of the Gods, for a moment, but even through the melee the Lycaonese pressed until there was only room ahead once more.

“ Come rats and king of dead
Legions dark, and darkly led
What is a grave if not a bed?”

The forges were deeper, into the belly of the beast, and their fires burned bright as a noonday sun. It was a place precious to the Enemy this, and it mustered a worthy defence for the last hall barring entry to it. Undead by the hundred, and looming above them were monsters. Beorns and great snakes, even flocks of cacophonous buzzards. And above them all, the mightiest wyrm that the Prince of Hannover had ever seen. A hulking beast, large as a fortress and with blood-red eyes.

“Hold the wall,”Prince Klaus shouted, “lest dawn fail.”

It was to be their last, he could feel it in his bones. The wyrm spat out poisonous green flames and fumes, sweeping through the front ranks, but even the panicked and dying horses tumbled forward into the tightly packed ranks of the dead. Buzzards came down in swarms, sorcery lashed out with eerie screams, and the last riders of Hannoven smashed into their enemies. They were too few, too tired, and still they pressed on. A spear killed Klaus’ horse under him and he fell on his stump, screaming hoarsely, but he rose before he could be slain and fought on sword in hand. They sang still, but the voices were fewer. The charge spent.

“Quell the tremor in your hand
Keep to no fear of the damned
They came ere, and yet we stand.”

One corpse after another, his arm was burning his face bleeding from half a dozen cuts. He’d taken a spear in the side, a wound that would kill him before long, but still Klaus Papenheim pushed through. And again and again and again, until a roar shook his bones and a gaping maw opened to reveal the flames igniting within. The Iron Prince struck with all his might, with all his rage and his sorrow and his pride, and with a great crack a fang broke.

“So we’ll hold the wall,” the Iron Prince murmured, “lest dawn fail.”

The fire swallowed him whole, and the last though Klaus Papenheim ever had was for his niece.

–

It was an entire city trying to kill them, even the stones and the streets., and Robber could not remember the last time he’d had this much fun .

Tabler croaked it when something that liked looked like a massive bone scorpion speared her through the stomach with a stinger that was screaming, which was a very sporting heads up from Keter that their infiltration had been noticed. The dead were thousands they had nasty little critters, but what was that to a sapper of the Army of Callow? They were quicker, better at scaling walls and objectively prettier in the eyes of the Gods Above and Below.

“Mind you,” Robber told his flock, “Borer does bring down our hallowed company’s average in that regard.”

“I apologize, sir,” Captain Borer dutifully replied. “Shall I write myself up for distractingly ungainly looks again?”

“Eh,” Robber mused, “we’ll see how I feel about it tomorrow.”

That had them all cracking up, of course, which got Wiggler a javelin in the throat but that was a cheap price for comedy of such quality. The Pilgrim had burned where they needed to go into their minds, though the old man had refused to entertain the Special Tribune’s inquiry about whether being marked by angels in such a way could be considered theologically inappropriate workplace touching, so there’d be no getting lost. Brasser died blowing himself up so that a flock of buzzards wouldn’t kill them as they crossed a makeshift ladder-bridge, but that was a sign they were making progress!

It was fairly dickish of the Dead King to begin setting fire to buildings so they wouldn’t be able to cross the rooftops, in his professional opinion, but that was nothing that liberal use of sharpers and a healthy disregard for personal safety couldn’t fix. You absolutely could blow up a fire, if you had enough munitions at hand. They lost Racker to the beorn awaiting them on the other side of the explosion, though, which was a genuine loss since with her gone there was no one at hand that everybody else disliked the most among them.

Unfortunately, it seemed like the streets ahead were now swarming with dead and buzzards. Fortunately, there was a solution: they used demolition charges to blow through the layer of stone and bone beneath them, then slunk down a rope onto the lower level. They only had enough charges to do it once more, so naturally they immediately repeated their exploit. Grabber stayed behind just a little too long, though the greater tragedy was that Lilter’s joke about ‘grabbing the opportunity’ was better than the one Robber had been mulling over about grab-bags.

The ran into devils when they got close to the ritual chamber, which was a nice change of pace. Not even the Praesi kind, these ones were like pulsing pustules of flesh whose proximity alone was enough to cause intense pain. Lilter blew herself up to make them a path, which had the secondary benefit of ensuring that Robber was once more without the contest the funniest of their little band. There were only seven of them left, by then, but they were nearly at the chamber. Trouble was that literal hellhounds were on the trails, by the barking and smell of sulphur.

You learned to recognize all sorts of stuff, if you spent enough summers in Ater.

“We’ll hold,” Captain Borer said, sword in one hand and sharper in the other. “Go ahead, Special Tribune.”

Robber met his eyes, surprised even though he shouldn’t have been.

“You were a treat,” Robber finally said.

“Always thought you were a prick,” Borer cheerfully replied. “Go die like a sapper, Rock Breaker.”

He grinned back, scampering away before he could be caught up in the coming mess. He found the chamber below, just the way the Pilgrim had seared it into his mind. No more mages around, just a massive chamber of obsidian with carved runes everywhere. Gingerly he tried a foot first, and when it didn’t burst into flame went further in. His own bag had been filled, from the start of this waltz, purely with goblinfire. And one more thing, he recalled late, that Hakram had slipped in. In the distance he heard the crack of sharpers going off. Little time left.

It was a scroll, Robber found out. A fancy one, there was even a seal at the bottom. He scanned the contents, curious, and froze. By my authority as Queen of Callow, I so raise Robber of the Rock Breaker tribe to the title of noble, under the aforementioned honour: Lord of the House of Lesser Footrest, to be held in perpetuity. It was the royal seal below but there were fresher words, the ink a little smudged. No matter where you end up , Catherine Foundling had written in that ugly scrawl of hers, you will be one of mine. Sooner or later, I will come to collect. Screams, fighting. The devils were close.

Robber’s throat closed as he traced the words with a trembling finger.

“The best,” he whispered.

He struck the match, the parchment taking fire, and with a wide grin he plunged the burning scroll into the bag. He closed his eyes, feeling the burst of fire washed over him, but it didn’t hurt at all. He thought, somehow, that even in this deep place he was hearing something.

Robber died hearing the wind.

—

The sky cleared, and Tariq looked down from above.

All those who would be able to escape tonight had. There was no more call to delay. The Ophanim, the companions of his life, laid their hands on him. They were sad, grieving, but he smiled.

“It is a beautiful thing,” Tariq Isbili said, “to die smiling.”

Tariq of the Grey Pilgrim’s Blood breathed out, the world breathing out with him, and let his blood sing out into the world. The oldest treasure of his line, the secret of the Shine . The pilgrim’s star, his people called it, and they spoke truer than they knew. Every Isbili that ever lived had it coursing through their blood, the blessing of that star. It was a tie, and though Tariq could no more move the star than an ant could move a tower he was not alone.

The Grey Pilgrim pulled, and the Choir of Mercy pulled with him.

The warmth filled him, pleasant at first but soon burning. Searing. But he was in a place beyond pain, filled only with light, and so Tariq Isbili did not flinch. Not even as he felt the burn spread through the bloodline, through every last one of his kin. Through everyone with so much as drop of Isbili blood. And the Ophanim threaded their fingers through his, heaving even as his insides charred and his kin turned to ash, until at last the sky gave.

In the darkness above, a star went out.

The Grey Pilgrim opened his eyes, looking down at the city below and the hordes of the dead. And though her bore the weight of many griefs, in that moment it was not his many sins he thought of. It was a balcony in Alava that came to him, the pears trees beneath and the woman he had once loved. Perhaps, he thought, he might yet see her again.

Tariq Isbili saw streaks of white pierced through the night sky and died, smiling, as stars began to fall.

Chapter 78: Keter’s Due

“The parity of light and darkness is a false perception. Light is transgressive, an imposition on the natural order, and so will always spend itself into nothingness. Be as the dark and you will be beyond struggle, ever returning when the flames die out.”

– Translation of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness, widely attributed to the young Dead King

The turn of the year had begun with a boy I’d thought I might save, and then a hard lesson remembered to me by the Dead King. That this was not a war as I had known wars before, that there would be no miracles or saving graces to this ugly, brutal, exhausting struggle to the death we were having. I thought of that night again, as I watched stars fall on the city of Hainaut, and the lesson echoed once more: sometimes we just lost.

Masego’s spell was little more than a window between Twilight and Creation, but what it showed was... I knew the forces at work, but still the sight caused me in me a sort of primal awe. The meteors, shards of a broken star, were massive. The first that struck toppled half the city in a streak of dust and white flame, scouring it clean of life, but the rain did not end there. Again and again the capital and the valley around it were struck until there was nothing there but barren glass, and still in the distance stars fell. How much of Hainaut had been scoured in the span of a few moments, I wondered?

It’d not been undead alone that’d still been in the city when the star fell. The Fourth Army was gone, as were most of the Hannoven men and the Prince of Bayeux’s army. Almost all of the Alavan troops had been lost as well, since they’d served as the Dominion rearguard, and at least half the Firstborn with them. It had been a cruel defeat before the Pilgrim began his last hurrah, but after the star had struck the results could only be called disastrous. Not a single army in fighting shape had made it out of Hainaut except maybe the Neustrians, and they’d just lost their princess.

I couldn’t even blame the Pilgrim for when he had begun to call down the wrath of the Heavens, he’d not had any choice. There would be no repeat of the sacrifices – my heart clenched, my nails dug into my palms – that had bought him that opening, and risking a longer wait might have made it all worthless. He’d done what he could and turned this into a disaster for both sides at least. The Dead King, for all that he was the victor of the field, did not have an army left in all of Hainaut. The meteors had seen to that. Much as I itched to blame Tariq for what I’d lost tonight, it would have rung hollow to try it when he’d died trying to save all of Calernia.

And he had, Gods forgive me. If we’d simply evacuated, fled back to our defensive lines, then the simple amount of corpses swelling Neshamah’s ranks would have been enough to overwhelm us to the south after we retreated there to lick our wounds. And once the Dead King pierced into Procer, got his hands on cities and teeming masses of refugees, then it was all over. The Peregrine had averted that doom for us all, and I held that truth close as I watched the pieces of a dead star rain own on Creation.

“Some of the Scourges will have made it out,” Indrani quietly said. “The Hawk for sure, maybe the Prince of Bones as well.”

“The Grey Legion’s good as gone,” I replied, forcefully calm. “That, at least, is a gain.”

There had been few enough of those tonight that I would the find silver linings where I could.

“The Crab is destroyed as well,” Masego noted. “Though it likely was in a practical sense even before the meteor struck it, given the amount of goblinfire burning within.”

My fingers clenched. Blood dripped down from my palm onto the soft grass.

“It was a good way to go,” Archer murmured. “They will sing songs of him, Catherine.”

I would rather they didn’t, I thought , so that I might hear him sing again instead. But I’d known deep down that Robber would find his worthy death on some battlefield or another. He’d been looking for years, trying ever starker odds against ever sharper foes. You would have hated peace , I thought. Despised it to the bone. A long silence trundled along, the only sound that of our steady breaths. My cheek clenched in frustration as I tried and failed to blink an eye I no longer had.

“It will end soon,” Hierophant said. “The power is spent.”

I nodded. The pale streaks were waning, growing rarer. Even the might of the Choir of Mercy anchored on the death of a great man was not a force without limit.

“Your officers want to speak with you,” Indrani reminded me.

“They can wait,” I said.

General Bagram was dead. Vivienne has saved his life from the Varlet only him to die trying to rally the Fourth mere hours later. General Zola was now in overall command of my remaining soldiers, something eased by the hard truth that aside from the remains of the Second I had few of those left. Later I would speak to her, but for now I saw no point. Indrani brushed a hand against my arm, startling me as I’d not seen her coming. I had blind spots now, I reminded myself. I’d need to learn to compensate for them. I shook away the touch, even if it was meant in comfort. Archer knew me well enough not to take it badly. She left me to the way I had always preferred to handle my grief: alone. Her footsteps were soft against the grass as she left.

Masego stayed, but his eyes were on the vista revealed by his spell. He’d always been the most accommodating of my friends when it came to sharing solitude. It made him the easiest to be around when grief was still raw.

The last streaks of light softly died, leaving behind only a darkened sky and one fewer star than there had been at the beginning of the night. Hainaut was a ruin. The city itself was shattered, blackened stone smooth as glass rising in jagged pillars that looked eerily like teeth. Smoke and ash were on the wind, swirling thick. The land around the capital was no less a ruin, the plains scoured down to burnt bedrock as far as the eye could see. Nothing would live here for decades, centuries even. Of the armies the dead there was not a trace left, not even of that behemoth Crab that had tipped the scales in the Dead King’s favour at the end. It was all dust on the wind, hundreds of thousands of souls released back to whatever Gods they had kept to.

There was a terrible peace to it all, I thought. Masego turned towards me, raising an eyebrow in silent question. I nodded and he let the spell die. It ended in time for me to hear footsteps approaching, the cadence of them telling me who they were before I turned. That hobbling walk was Hakram on his crutches, while the still unnaturally smooth stride was Vivienne’s – she had once walked rooftops as other women did streets, and the touch had never quite left her. Leaning against my staff, I watched them approach with apathy. Vivienne looked away when I met her gaze. Trying to avoid looking at my eye, I realized, and suddenly felt self-conscious. I would have brought down my hood, were it not too obvious a reaction.

“Catherine,” Adjutant greeted me. “The starfall has ended?

I cocked an eyebrow at the empty talk, gaze moving to Vivienne.

“What is it that you two need of me?” I plainly asked.

She grimaced, and this time did not flinch away from the sight of the gruesome scar I had instead of my left eye.

“You need to hold a war council,” Vivienne said. “At least for Callow. General Zola’s keeping it together, but she doesn’t know where to go from here.”

“It’s obvious,” I tiredly said. “We lost the battle but the Pilgrim salvaged us an opportunity with his death. If the White Knight succeeds to the north then we will escort the Gigantes to the shore and ward Hainaut from the dead. If he has lost, then we retreat for the Cigelin Sisters and fortify what we can against the coming onslaught.”

I did not doubt that even as we spoke the Dead King was marching troops through the bottom of the lakes to our north, trying to turn the setback into an opportunity. We’d destroyed the Twilight Gate here along with the rest of the city, but we still had pharos devices for mass-deployment of our remaining forces. Returning to Creation at the moment would be pointless, especially since the ruins were still hazardous and there was no water left to drink, so we would be staying in the Ways until the sun came up if not even longer. There’d be no point in leaving the Ways just to enter them anew when we marched either north or south.

“It might be obvious to you, Catherine, but not others,” Hakram calmly said. “More than that, you must be seen. The Lycaonese lost both their rulers in the span of a single night. The Alamans are shamed and desperate, with only a destitute Princess Beatrice to calm them. The Dominion mourns the Grey Pilgrim without even a body to burn. The Firstborn huddle among themselves and speak to no one. And the Army of Callow broke tonight, for the first time since it was founded.”

“You’re needed, Catherine,” Vivienne said. “The Black Queen is needed.”

When fucking wasn’t she? My fingers balled into a fist, blood sliding down the skin from where my nails had bit through skin. Hakram’s eyes flicked there, though with his nose he would have smelled the red long before that.

“Enough,” Masego said, voice grown hard. “If you have the voice to ask, use it settle the troubles you bring her instead.”

I started in surprise, half-turning.

“Masego-” Vivienne began.

“She should be asleep, Vivienne,” Hierophant said, eyes burning. “She insists on remaining awake, so she will, but do not mistake this for her being in a fit state. You ask too much.”

I found myself both warmed and irritated.

“I can speak for myself, Zeze,” I said.

“Then do so,” Masego bluntly replied. “But I will not let this war drag you into the grave, Catherine. I have not forgotten what Aunt Sabah’s death did to my family, and I will not allow Robber’s death to bloom that sickly flower twice.”

I might have taken issue with the tone if he’d not spoken the words that followed. I remembered it too, the brittle look in Black’s eyes after Captain was killed. I had not loved Wekesa the Warlock while he lived, but I would not do the man’s shade disservice be denying he had cared for Sabah just as deeply. That evening in the Free Cities had left scars on all the Calamities, even if some had been subtler than others. I would not blame Masego for dreading the only family he had left might come to the same end. I sighed, drawing their attention.

“There’s nowhere for them to go,” I said, gesturing at the Ways around us. “And it will take more than my carcass being paraded through a camp to fix this. I’ll see to the Army of Callow later, but the rest can wait.”

Masego beamed at me, which was comforting even tough I knew this was probably the wrong decision. I was tired enough that I found it hard to care: there was only so much beating that this thrice-dead horse could take. I met Hakram’s eyes and found surprise there, but he nodded. Vivienne was harder to read. Was she disappointed? If she was, I’d cope. The legend I’d set was not one I could live up to. l If this campaign should have made anything painfully clear for all the world to see, it was that I didn’t always have the answers. I’d pushed for this offensive from the start and even if I’d not been the only one to do so my influence had objectively been key. This catastrophe was on me, if it was on anyone at all.

Most the people I could have shared the blame with were dead.

“Leave me,” I said. “I-”

My sentence went stillborn when I felt a shudder of indignation through my tenuous bond with the Night. Sve Noc were enraged, and though I found the shades of emotion difficult to parse I did pick up that this wasn’t about the Firstborn. In the distance, two great crows took flight. Masego was not far behind them, wrested sorcery already opening anew the same window into Hainaut he had allowed to lapse. The spell was not as stable as the last time, the edges buzzing and the spell itself letting out trails of smoke here in Twilight, but what we saw could not be missed. Among the great fangs of black glass which were all that remained of the city of Hainaut, a great spell was stirring up a storm of ash.

It was not one of ours.

“Hierophant, what am I looking at?” I calmly asked.

Masego remained silent for a time, golden glass eyes darting back and forth as they parsed the glimmers of the spell that could be seen through the ash. Thick, curving cords of runes spinning in cycles without making a sound, a dull but growing pale sphere at the heart of them.

“I am... unsure,” Hierophant admitted.

The Crows plunged through the night sky in a precipitous glide, Andronike and Komena claiming my shoulders and sinking their sharp talons into the steel of my pauldrons. They hissed urgency at me and I raised my bloodied hand to clutch my staff.

“Whatever it is, we can’t let it finish,” I said. “I’ll open us a gate, and-”

I glanced at Hakram and Vivienne, lips thinning. No more risks tonight.

“- you and I will go,” I told Masego. “Archer too, if we can-”

This time it was someone else who cut in, and before either Adjutant or Vivienne could object too. I was pleased to see Archer striding towards us on the grass, but surprised to see her scarf was already pulled up and her bow strung. She’d been expecting trouble already.

“Cat,” she said, “we have a problem.”

“I’m aware,” I replied, jutting a thumb towards the spell-window.

She took a glance, then grimaced.

“Cat,” she said, “we have two problems.”

Fuck me, I thought. Hadn’t this night been enough of a malediction already?

“I’m listening,” I said.

“The Gigantes are gone,” Archer said. “All of them. I think they went back into Creation.”

I felt a moment of blind panic at the notion of Keter getting its hands on Gigantes spellsingers, Gods would even the Ways be safe anymore now that Tariq was dead – but the talons of the crows pricking at my skin drew me out of it. I breathed out.

“Hierophant, is this their work?” I asked.

“No,” Masego immediately replied. “This is Trismegistan, Catherine. And I understand why it unsettled me. The elements I found familiar were of my work and Akua Sahelian’s.”

I blinked.

“The Dead King cribbed from your spellcraft?”

“I suspect,” Hierophant softly replied, “that it was the other way around, Catherine. However unknowingly. It is not without reason that the very magic we practice bears the name of Trismegistus.”

“Shit,” Archer said. “This is his spellwork, isn’t it? His actual hand weaving the spell, not some intermediary’s.”

Well, would you look at that. It had somehow gotten worse. There really wasn’t any time to waste if Neshamah himself was making a play, so I stiffly swept my staff across the air and ripped open a gate down into Hainaut. A howling gale swept ash and smoke towards us and I glanced at Archer and Hierophant.

“You two, with me,” I ordered, and went into the storm.

—

The winds slashed at us angrily, bludgeoning us with ash and sharp pieces of gravel.

With the Sisters themselves on my shoulders I could almost call on Night the way I’d been able to before it was ruined, but my body was weak. Aching and too close to collapse. Even with Komena banishing the sensation of exhaustion, I could feel a tingle at the edge of my senses warning me how close to unconsciousness I still teetered. The bubble of stillness I wove around us flicked in and out, becoming harder to maintain the higher up the slopes we went. It was Archer that guided us, pathfinding through the jutting blades of glassy stone with their sharp edges that dug into our boots. She took us through detours that saw the stone protect us from the wind, but even with all our haste it was frustratingly slow going.

I clutched the rope when it came down after Masego had finished climbing, passing mastery of the bubble to Andronike as I concentrated on hoisting myself up. My muscles burned even when Indrani came to stand at the ledge and began to pull me up, grunting with effort, but after an eternity of labour I was over that too-sharp edge and falling on my knees atop the stone. My bad leg was pulsing with agony, but it was dull and distant. The Sisters did not want me distracted. I had left my staff down there, beyond the bubble, but it still stood perfectly still as if untouched by the storm. I extended my hand and moments later it was slapping against my palm, the dried traces of my blood rubbing against my palm as I pulled myself up.

The crows returned to my shoulders, never having strayed far. They seemed wary of leaving us behind, my patronesses burned by what it had cost them to face the Dead King while I slept. Hierophant was standing at the edge of the stillness, black robes in disarray and those long tresses woven with silver trinkets swept to the side. He was looking out into the distance, standing beneath two great fangs of stone crisscrossing as in the distance the Dead King’s magic slowly revolved. Archer had found us the right place, I thought, sending her a thankful look. Decent shelter and a good vantage point, it was exactly what we needed.

I limped to Masego’s side, not that he gave a visible sign he’d hear me coming.

“So?” I asked.

There was a tense silence.

“I believe,” Hierophant murmured, “that he is opening a Greater Breach.”

I screamed out the vilest curses I knew at the sky until my voice went hoarse. Archer came to stand by our side, silent as she warily eyes our surroundings.

“Can you Wrest it?” I asked.

“I have been trying,” Hierophant conversationally said, “for fifty heartbeats now,”

His shoulders were trembling, I noticed only then. It was hard to see under the ash-dusted robes. And though he was not grimacing, there was a line to his mouth. Tension. I dared not speak another word, even if he’d not said the distraction would be harmful, instead listening as Komena whispered into my ear. I heard not a word but something greater, and my vision swam until I glimpsed a part of what the goddesses were seeing. Wills at war over the sorcery raging ahead of us, those slowly spinning circles of runes and the sphere within them. Like ink in water, Masego was trying to spread his will through the gargantuan amount of power but it was not enough.

There was too much water.

“His perspective is still too narrow,” Andronike whispered into my ear, regretful. “He has not witnessed enough.”

It was hard to deny the truth of that when it was before my eyes. Hierophant was failing and would fail. Did we have anything else that might destroy this? Night would not be enough, not when I was falling apart and the enemy’s raw strength was so great. Did Archer have an arrow that would – no, that was thinking about this the wrong way. The Intercessor had mocked me, in the Arsenal, asked me where Neshamah’s devils and ancient sorceries were. Well, they were here now. Why? More importantly, why now? But I’d already been given the answer to that, I belatedly realized, by an old man that was now a dead one. He cannot use either , Tariq Isbili had told me, speaking of devils and demons. It would represent too steep an increase in strength on his side of the scales.

The Pilgrim had meant in the sense that if the Dead King used devils, then the heroes of the Grand Alliance would in turn get to call in angels as a superior counterstroke. Except we’d struck first, hadn’t we? The Grey Pilgrim had died intertwined with the Choir of Mercy calling down his dead star, it was our side that’d broken the seal. The story’s not on our side , I realized with dread. Even if Masego had proved to have the capacity to Wrest the spell, he still would have failed – the scales were tipped in Neshamah’s favour for this to work, he had earned it. Fuck. And I couldn’t believe it would be only the one gate either, it wasn’t the Dead King’s way.

“Can you see afar?” I asked Sve Noc. “Look for other gates like this, still forming.”

“It will be difficult,” Andronike cawed.

“But not impossible,” Komena noted.

It would require enough of their attention that I’d be on my own, though, their minds brushing against mine made clear. Wouldn’t matter, I decided, power wouldn’t get us through this. They seemed inclined to agree, and on my shoulders the weight of them waned. As if much of them had gone elsewhere. The glimpses they had granted me ended too, but Masego had been about to be evicted – diluted into effective nothingness, more accurately, but the practical result was the same – from the spell, his aspect stuttering to a stop. He breathed out raggedly moments afterwards, body shivering. Indrani moved to help him up.

“You’ll be fine?” I asked.

“I withdrew before it could be turned against me,” Hierophant hoarsely replied, nodding. “But though defeated, I have learned some of his secrets. It was impossible not to, when my will was coursing through his work.”

He coughed, as much out of exhaustion as the heavy and ash-laden air.

“It is imperfect,” Hierophant croaked out. “Unlike the closed circle that Akua made of Liesse. Not only will Keter’s Due spread, it was made worse . On purpose, I think.”

My stomach dropped.

“How much worse, Masego?” I quietly asked.

The last time the Dead King had opened a Greater Breach, he’d blighted most of the Kingdom of the Dead doing it. It was the reason the phenomenon was known as Keter’s Due in the first place.

“I can’t be sure,” Masego admitted. “Perhaps as far as the defence line to the south?”

That was, I thought, perhaps nine tenths of Hainaut that he had described. Made into a howling wasteland by the spell ahead of us, those spinning circles whose rotations were beginning to quicken. My bloody hand left the staff and I looked down at it, feeling numb. This was... Tariq had died for this, and a blighted Hainaut with a permanent hellgate in the middle was what would be achieved? I grasped for a story that could turn this around, but what was there left? We had spent all our miracles, our strength, our last chances. We had bargained ourselves away until only a remnant’s remnant remained, and still it had not been enough. The two of them looked at me, somehow expecting I would turn it around, but to my horror there was nothing.

My bag of tricks was empty.

“I-”

I swallowed. The words tasted like ash in my mouth but I forced them out anyway.

“I can’t stop this,” I quietly admitted. “I have nothing.”

I looked away, afraid of what I might see on their faces at that admission. What I found, instead, was a tall shape standing alone in the winds. Down there, away from our shelter. Troublingly close to the spell. Indrani began to say something but I raised a hand to interrupt her. Was this the Dead King, inhabiting a favoured corpse and giving silent invitation by his presence? Talon sunk into my flesh once more, the Sisters returning from their spirit-journey at last.

“There are two more,” Komena said.

“One close, to the west, and one far in the northwest,” Andronike said.

The other two southern fronts. Cleves and Twilight’s Pass. Neshamah did not just intend to win here: he was going to win everywhere and all at once. Not, not everywhere, I almost immediately corrected. That would have been a mistake, overreaching. Enough of an opening for the Heavens to put their fingers to the scale. He’d not touched the front against the Firstborn, trusting in his crippling of the Night and his ability to triumph in a battle of Evil against Evil.

“Catherine,” Indrani said. “It’s all right. Your armies are still in the Ways, all we lose is-”

“That’s not a corpse,” I softly said, sole eye still on the silhouette among the storm.

I glanced at my companions.

“Hierophant, can you shield the both of you?”

“I can,” Masego slowly replied.

“Then do it now,” I said, and walked over the ledge of our perch.

Magic bloomed behind me even as I fell, Hierophant weaving transparent shields as the ground hurried towards me. I barely drew on Night, instead letting the Crows slow my descent. They were uneasy, but I slipped through the storm and limped my way to the lone figure. It was even taller than I had thought. Almost thirty feet tall, his deep brown skin just as indifferent to the elements as the still-pristine white tunic the Gigantes wore. The giant cared not for my approach, and I saw no other of his kind around us.

“Can you end it?” I asked.

The screams of the storm drowned out my voice, but I trusted I would be heard regardless. The Gigante glanced down at me, his short neck bending unnaturally.

“We cannot,” the giant said, voice even.

Hope I’d not quite allowed myself to feel died out.

“So what are you doing here?” I asked.

“I wait,” the giant said. “I witness.”

“Witness what?” I pressed.

“The end,” the Gigante said, “and what will come after. Send away your followers, Queen of Callow. Soon the Young King’s circle will close and they cannot withstand what will follow.”

The spell was ending soon, then. He was warning me that Keter’s Due would kill Archer and Hierophant if they stayed. Masego would know as much, and I suspected he would lead Indrani out whatever I said, but I wove a snake out of Night and sent it towards them bearing an order to retreat just in case. I could have gone and done it myself, but it felt like a mistake. My instincts were screaming at me that if I left, I would miss something important.

“There are other gates,” I said.

“We know,” the giant replied. “There, too, others will witness.”

There was a pause.

“Prepare yourself,” the giant said.

The world went still, for a terrible moment, and then the storm exploded outwards. Even with all the Night I could spare holding me down and the guidance of Sve Noc, I still fell down on one knee. The power was blinding, staggering, and I could feel it sink into the earth as well as the air. Whether it lasted for moments or hours I could not tell, my body and mind bitterly arguing what was true and false, but eventually the storm passed. It left behind only a perfect circle of runes hanging in the air, a perfect gate into some distant Hell.

A heartbeat passed, and nothing came out.

“What did you do?” I rasped out.

“It is called,” the giant said, “the Riddle of the Lock.”

My heartbeat quickened.

“It’s a gate,” I said. “Are you telling me your mages locked it?”

“Our singers are dead,” the Gigante said. “I witness only the work they gave their lives for.”

My fingers clenched as I remembered that while the Gigantes had sent people into Cleves there had been no bargain for the Pass, that – I stopped. But there had been, I realized. Clever Cordelia had spent the goodwill she had won executing the Red Axe a second time to move the Highest Assembly to apologize to the Titanomachy for the Seven Slayings. They’d sent people into the Pass to fortify the Morgentor. If the Gigantes had locked all three gates, perhaps the war was not yet lost.

“We are in their debt,” I carefully said.

“Aid was promised,” the giant said. “Aid was given.”

I nodded.

“And how long will their gift last?” I asked.

“A year, a month and a day,” the Gigante said.

In the distance, dawn began to break. The giant glanced at me again.

“I will return home the corpses of my companions,” he said. “We will not meet again, Queen of Callow.”

“Then take you leave with my thanks,” I said, meaning every word. “Your people have given Calernia a chance.”

Even if both Cleves and the Pass were blighted by the rituals too, we had been pulled back from the fall to the brink.

“We have given them time,” the giant said. “What might yet fill it is in your hands.”

And without another word he strode down into the restless ash, leaving me behind as he moved into the shrinking darkness. I stayed standing there for a long time, until even the Sisters left me. Dawn rose, slowly, and with it came shadows. My own found me before too long, her steps soft on the ashen ground. Her gaze followed my own, coming to rest on the Hellgate.

“It is oddly beautiful,” Akua Sahelian said, “for such a terrible thing.”

I didn’t answer. The Severance, I thought, might destroy such a gate. If we were lucky, it might even be able to do it through the locking spell the Gigantes had laid so that we would not have to wait until it ended. If we used it, though, the sword would be spent. Perhaps not materially, but as a story: it would be diluted, no longer the blade fated to kill the King of Death. I went through every Named I knew, every trick and spell and use of Light, and found nothing that could be relied on. There were only two Greater Breaches on Calernia, one in the heart of Keter and the other bloomed in the shadow of the Doom of Liesse – but there was no Warlock to divert it, this time, and even that trick had not been a true solution. The gate itself still existed in the heartlands of my kingdom, even if did not lead into them. It had no remained there for lack of trying otherwise on our part. One after another, the solutions fell away until one remained.

“We need diabolists,” I said. “Hundreds of them, thousands.”

Enough that every devil that came howling through those gates could be bound and dismissed, that a more permanent solution could be devised.

“There is only one realm in Calernia, Catherine, that is the home to so many of them,” Akua said.

There was an expectant shiver in her voice, halfway between fear and desire. Praes. The Dread Empire. The first crucible of my life, the fires where I had been forged. I closed my eyes, letting the rising sun wash over me, and let the decision settle.

I was headed east.

Grand

“The reed survives the storm, but only in the shadow of the oak.”

– Proceran saying

Princess Adeline’s hospitality had been flawless, but it was still with some irritation that Cordelia left the grounds of her Salian estate. Neither the wine nor an exquisite rack of lamb had loosened the Princess of Orne’s tongue enough for her to reveal where she stood on the matter of the provisional superintendence. The other woman had greatly risen in influence in the east since the disgrace of House Odon of Bayeux during the coup had ended the family’s former prominence. Her position was further strengthened by the unspoken truth that Princess Adeline was Rozala Malanza’s voice in Salia, which have her some draw over the other members of Princess Rozala’s bloc in the Highest Assembly. That she’d been noncommittal at dinner was not promising.

Riding briskly through the darkened streets of the capital, the First Prince of Procer mulled over the issue as her escort swept ahead to clear the way. She had spent a great deal of goodwill forcing through the measures that had bought the help of the Titanomachy, but not so much that she should be seeing opposition for opposition’s sake at the moment. Considering that Rozala and her followers were usually broadly in support of motions that would secure further funding for the war effort – as granting the office of First Prince the right to appointed superintendents to temporarily supervise the princely collection of taxes doubtlessly would – the hesitation must be coming from the perspective that having such a right would grant Cordelia herself too much power.

Perhaps a compromise could be arranged, the fair-haired prince mused. One of Malanza’s supporters appointed to the head of that newly founded office, and a motion in the Highest Assembly legally binding the measure to the end of the war against Keter? There was some shouting ahead and Cordelia spurred on her mare, only good manners keeping a frown away from her face. Four of her personal guards were arguing with what looked like an officer of the Salian city guard, tones rising. The First Prince approached, dismissing the young guard who tried to argue that it was all being handled, and reined in her mount just in time to hear the source of the argument.

“- coming back from a ceremony under House auspices, I can’t let you disperse them,” the Salian officer was heatedly saying. “You’ll have to go around.”

“Do you quite understand exactly who it is you’re speaking to?” Captain Anton flatly replied.

It would be good for her reputation to give way to the commons if nothing else, Cordelia thought, and painted a soft smile on her face as – the only warning was the glint of torchlight on steel, behind the shutters. Without a single word of warning the three shutters on the house to her left were torn down, clearing the way for crossbows that promptly fired. She threw herself back, so that her horse might take the bolts instead, but her reaction had been too slow and... A pale red blade carved through the air with a whistle, the Swaggering Duellist cutting down the projectiles with impossible swiftness. Landing poorly on her elbow, Cordelia still had enough of her wits about her to keep her voice calm as she gave her orders.

“Catch them,” the First Prince of Procer said. “Alive.”

Agnes had been right, Cordelia Hasenbach grimly thought. They had finally learned to get around her foresight.

—

“Two of them swallowed poison,” Louis de Sartrons, head of the Circle of Thorns, calmly said. “The third man knew little, even when put to sharp question, but we confirmed his identity. His husband was arrested, we will see if there is more to be learned.”

Cordelia slowly nodded, sipping at her lemon water. Uncle Klaus would have teased her for not even reaching for a proper bottle after a brush with death, if he still spoke to her at all.

“Praes?” she simply asked.

“It was a sloppy operation, by the standards of the Eyes, but I will not dismiss the notion,” the skeletal old man said. “We gutted their ability to operate in the Principate after the coup, it could be a reflection of that diminished ability.”

The Prince of Rhenia prided herself in her ability to read others, and though Louis de Sartrons had always been a difficult one – as was only befitting of one of three great spymasters of Procer – in this particular instance his thoughts were not deeply hidden.

“You do not believe that,” Cordelia said.

“It might have been Praesi crossbows used, but the Silver Letters got their hands on some stock after the Black Knight was captured,” the older man said. “Some leftover rebellious elements seem a more likely culprit to me, though they will have a backer.”

A Proceran backer, he left unsaid, and that meant a crown. The finest of her spymasters believed that someone in the Highest Assembly was trying to kill her. The blonde Lycaonese hid her dismay by sipping at her lemon water once more. Even now? Gods, even now ? She snuffed out the anger that rose before it could turn into something uglier, something dangerous. Cordelia set down the cup, mistress of her own mood once more.

“Keep me informed,” the First Prince said. “That aside, the original reason for this meeting still applies. You have word from the League?”

Louis de Sartrons, thin as a stick and balding, spent a moment watching her before finally his lips quirked.

“Indeed,” he said. “The Magisterium of Stygia is reaching out to us through informal means. They are interested in the Grand Alliance, and Procer in particular, brokering peace in the region.”

Of course there are , Cordelia thought. Were she a less courteous woman, she would allowed herself a nasty little smile. General Basilia, fresh off her success in installing Princess Zenobia as ruler of Nicae, had negotiated a truce with the rulers of Atalante and with her northern flank clear had begun to march into Stygian territory. She’d not even waited for the Magisterium to declare war on her, catching them by surprise, and several of the small cities that Stygia and Nicae regularly fought to rule over had immediately rebelled at the news. The chaos had the magisters unnerved, and rumor had it that Delos was not only disinclined to help but looking at snatching a few border territories for itself.

The Secretariat, for all its scholarly reputation, was just as opportunistically cutthroat as the other rulers of the Free Cities.

“Allow me to guess,” Cordelia airily said. “We must help them, lest wicked Basilia take all of the Free Cities, and they will offer a few concessions to sweeten the bargain.”

“They offer to break ties with Dread Empress Malicia,” Louis de Sartrons replied, sounding faintly amused. “And not to make offensive war for twenty-five years following the peace, save for the four thousand soldiers they would lend to the Grand Alliance for war against Keter. The usual bribes and gifts were added, of course, as it their way.”

In other words, the Magisterium wanted to hide behind a treaty for a quarter century as its rivals returned to warring against each other and wanted to buy this at the cheap price of abandoning an ailing ally and sending the oldest of their slave phalanx to die up north instead of disposing of the aging soldiers themselves.

“Put them off,” Cordelia ordered.

It was tempting to try to make a bargain while the alliance they backed – Basilia and Zenobia – was on the rise and before it dissolved into backstabbing as most Free Cities alliances did, but it would be a mistake. If Stygia lost a battle or two on the field as well as a deeper cut of territory, it would offer much better terms. Besides, the First Prince would not intervene too deeply in the region without first holding council with the Queen of Callow. General Basilia was under Catherine Foundling’s patronage, containing her without the Black Queen’s assent would be... indelicate.

“I will see to it, Your Most Serene Highness,” the spymaster replied. “As for Mercantis, we have confirmed that Merchant Prince Mauricius is taking bribes from the Tower.”

Cordelia’s teeth clenched, though she hid it. Bribes, so that he might help along the end of the world? The utter selfish madness of that was infuriating. What good would gold do when the Dead King was at the gates of Mercantis? Did Mauritius believe he’d be able to buy a peace with death?

“He is not their man, however,” Louis de Sartrons noted. “We intercepted some communications of the Eyes, and it seems that Malicia is rather displeased that he is taking the coin without delivering on what is asked. Though the man remains untrustworthy, Your Highness, I believe that his intent is to play us against Praes and enrich himself as much as possible in the process.”

Which, while morally repellent in every war, was something that the First Prince could work with. Procer was already deeply in debt, but Cordelia had been gathering resources for this very eventuality. Artworks, artefacts, ancient treasures that her predecessors had filled palaces with. There would be talk in the Highest Assembly at a Lycaonese like her ‘pawning off’ the wonders of her southern precursors, but let them talk. If it kept the Principate afloat, she was not above allowing the edges of her reputation to be tarred.

“Find out the price,” the First Prince of Procer evenly said. “But pass word along to the Painted Knife: she now has free rein to hunt Praesi agents in Mercantis as she wishes.”

The City of Bought and Sold could do with a reminder that the Grand Alliance had teeth of its own. Cordelia drank the last of her lemon water, slowly so that the angle of her arm would never be boorish, and allowed herself a long breath as she set the cup down. Tired as she was, there was more yet to do.

There was always more to do.

—

It was embarrassing for Cordelia to be forced to mediate in the matter, not because her authority had been called on but rather because the dispute involved one of her closest allies.

Prince Renato Braganzo of Salamans, who had followed his brother into being one of her partisans and bared sword in her defence during the botched coup. The mustachioed Prince of Salamans had been painstakingly polite since he had been invited to sit but could not quite his anger for the man across the table. Prince Salazar Arazola of Valencis, eldest child of Princess Leonor and her successor since her abdication at the Princes’ Graveyard. The young man was more aggressive than his mother had been – Leonor had been careful never too lean too closely the way of the First Prince or her opposition – but he’d also signaled an open mind to aligning himself more closely to Cordelia’s politics than she’d been willing to entertain.

Which made it all the more unfortunate that the two princes were one the edge of open war.

“There isn’t a noble south of Cantal that doesn’t know the Bonito Finales are in the service of the Arazola,” Prince Renato bit out.

“The crown of Valencis holds no such contract, as I have told you more than once,” Prince Salazar evenly replied. “Further accusations, Prince Renato, would be a matter of honour.”

Renato was a seven-sun duellist, from what Cordelia recalled, but while Salazar might still be on his fourth sun he was a reputation as a sharp sword and his lesser rank was rumoured to come largely from his lack of formal matches. The First Prince had been following the dispute long before it reached her seat of power, the Silver Letters – temporarily under the authority of Louis de Sartrons, making him the most powerful spymaster in the history of the Principate – having tried to ferret out the truth of the claims made on each side. Prince Renato was understandably furious because a dozen towns in western Salamans had been extorted by a fantassin company, the Bonito Finales, who had even dared to sack a town when it refused to ‘pay extraordinary taxes’.

Said company had been in the pay of the House of Arazola for decades but never formally, as it was used largely for strikes at its Valencis’ neighbours that the princes of Valencis did not want publicly tied to them. It was an open secret in Arlesite lands who the Bonito Finales answered to, however, which meant that though difficult to prove by legal means Prince Renato’s anger was well-founded.

The trouble was that, according to the Silver Letters, Prince Salazar had not ordered the mercenaries to attack Salamans. The fantassins had not been paid in six months, which Cordelia’s agents believed to be the reason they’d taken to extorting towns. Prince Salazar, however, could not admit as much without also admitting to House Arazola having attacked its neighbours for decades with the Bonito Finales. With the younger man’s hold on his throne still shaky and his treasury near empty, admitting to that was the kind of mistake that would see him overthrown by an ambitious cadet branch of the Arazola. Worse, Prince Renato had sent some of his horse too unseasoned to campaigned against the dead at the border of the principalities and done some provocative forays into northeastern Valencis as a sharp warning. No skirmished had ensued for now, but Cordelia knew it was only a matter of time if this kept up.

“I am sure His Grace only meant to express frustration at the raiding on his lands, Prince Salazar, not to impugn your honour,” the First Prince warmly smiled. “No doubt you would be just as incensed had a Valencian town been sacked, as any worthy prince would.”

The young man eyed her warily but slowly nodded. Good, Cordelia thought. So long as Salazar recognized that extorted tribute could be repaid but a sacked town was a much starker offence, this could be salvaged. People had died, but the First Prince must ensure than this conversation would not end in a way that made the number swell.

“These... animals came from the south,” Prince Renato said. “From Valencis. Do you deny that too, Your Grace ?”

“These are troubled times,” the Prince of Valencis replied. “Neither roads nor countryside are settled. If bandits passed through my lands I offer my apologies, but who is to say if this is true? They could have come through Aequitan instead. Princess Rozala took much of her soldiery north, her holdings have grown turbulent.”

So had everyone else’s, Cordelia knew. With so few armed men remaining in the southern principalities and such heavy burdens being forced onto the people, an increasing amount of commoners preferred to riot or turn bandit rather than let themselves be squeezed any further. And though Salazar might think himself clever, trying to push the blame onto Princess Rozala – a common adversary to Cordelia and Prince Renato – he had blundered. The Prince of Salamans reddened at the sight of what would seem to him the younger royal trying to slither out of paying for his crimes, and the First Prince simply could not allow one of her finest generals to be troubled over a matter to which she had no real relation.

Besides, the backdraft in the people’s opinion should Rozala be recalled or condemned over something like this would be... severe. Her popularity had only risen since her stunning victory at Trifelin.

“One cannot bring such an issue to trial before the Assembly without evidence,” Cordelia said, her tone a warning to the furious Renato. “Though I expect, Prince Salazar, that you understand hosting such reprobates would be worthy of censure.”

It would not be treason, not even under the terms of Cordelia’s yet-to-be-repealed crusade authorities, but it would represent a failure of a prince’s sworn duty to ensure the safety of the lands he ruled over. To depose a prince over something of this sort was not a precedent anyone would want to set, given that every principality deal with banditry to some extent, but censure would pass without trouble given that it was a largely symbolic measure. Or would be, the First Prince knew, were Prince Salazar’s hold on his throne secure. A censure would do just as well as a confession of misdeeds, for the ambitious cousins of the Prince of Valencis seeking a pretext for overthrow.

“Of course,” the young man replied, bowing his head. “I would not tolerate the presence of murderers in Valencis.”

Cordelia smiled pleasantly, knowing she’d led him to stand where she needed him to. Should the Silver Letters come through, as Louis de Sartons believed they soon would, then this could be settled neatly. Presently, however, Prince Renato looked on the verge of speaking in ager. Best to end this before he could. The First Prince elegantly wielded her precedence over the two in etiquette to prevent them from directly addressing each other until she called the conversation to an end, hinting at Salazar that he should depart first. Perhaps sensing he had made a misstep, the young prince followed the unspoken suggestion and left her to speak with Prince Renato a little longer. The older man calmed, after being offered a second cup of tea, but the anger was still in him.

“I will not let almost a hundred deaths go unanswered, Your Most Serene Highness,” the Prince of Salamans told her. “Justice must be had.”

“And it will be, rest assured of that,” Cordelia calmly replied. “War, however, would be disastrous.”

“I dare not recall my riders until those mercenaries are hanging from gallows,” Prince Renato replied, a tad coldly.

“I would ask no such thing,” Cordelia smiled. “It seems unwise, however, for them to continue their forays into Valencis. They only serve to warn the bandits of their arrival, making the coming hunt more difficult.”

The mustachioed prince, for all that in some ways he was more openly emotional than most Arlesite royalty, was no fool. He grasped the message she had sent: that there would, in fact, be a hunt.

“Perhaps there is truth to what you say,” the Prince of Salamans reluctantly said, then sighed. “You have been a true friend to the House of Bragzanzo, Your Highness, and so I will take you to your word. The order will be sent.”

“You have my thanks,” the First Prince said, inclining her head. “I understand the trust that has been extended.”

The older man looked faintly rueful.

“Then allow me to offer words on wisdom as well, Your Highness,” Prince Renato said. “The opposition to the matter of provisional superintendence you mean to bring to a vote in the Assembly runs perhaps deeper than you know.”

Cordelia maintained her calm with great effort, face betraying nothing. Her silence invited elaboration.

“I have been approached,” the Prince of Salamans said, “by other sitters of the Highest Assembly. Concerns were expressed as to the power such a measure, even if temporary, would concentrate in the office of First Prince.”

The fair-haired prince did not bother to note that the measure could be enshrined by law as limited in length, knowing the objection went deeper: it was the precedent that her fellow princes were uncomfortable with. They saw it, she suspected, as the first step towards making her office as a queenship over Procer. Power granted in a crisis could be granted anew, with lesser pretexts, or simply never set down at all. The worst of them would be the most scared, she thought. Those who had been underreporting the taxes due to high throne for years, if not decades, and were now afraid that their crimes would come back to haunt them.

As if Cordelia wanted to start a civil war in the middle of a struggle for the Principate’s very existence, as if she did not simply want the princes and princess of Procer to simply obey the laws they had agreed to . The surge of fury kept her from speaking for a few long moments, revealing more than she would have wished. The other prince looked, she thought, almost sympathetic.

“No doubt there is truth to what you say,” Cordelia Hasenbach echoed, her smile a careful artifice.

—

Once she knew the right questions to ask, answers came in battalions.

It was a conspiracy, but not the kind that Cordelia was used to breaking. It was not the old politics of the Highest Assembly, the tiresome but predictable factionalism that came of jostling for prominence in that hall, but an altogether older game. It was fear not of the implacable for in the distant north but of the very high throne she sat, of what it meant. Her reforms, though passed into law by vote after vote, had stoked that fear to new heights and it had spread like a sickness to even people she had considered close allies. Princess Isabelle of Tenerife, a steady supporter since her ascension, had turned on her. So had Sophie’s younger brother in Lyonis, even as he swore by letters to follow his abdicated sister’s old friendships.

Orense, Arans, Bayeux – so much for Arsene Odon returning the mercy she’d shown him in the wake of the coup – Segovia, Cleves and finally Orne, the very same Princess Adeline who’d hosted her on the night where assassins had struck. Adeline was, her spymaster believed, if not the leader of the conspiracy then at the very least its most influential member.

“It is a large bloc,” Louis de Sartrons said, “but not large enough to defeat a motion in the Assembly you might put forward.”

“It is,” Cordelia replied, shaking her head. “While I have patronized most of the fresh sitters in the Assembly, they will not remain under my guidance forever. When an opposition bloc this large is unveiled, it is certain to draw in some of them.”

If nothing else, some of the crowns in her debt would seek to free themselves of her influence by aligning with her opponents. Worse, the moment she no longer had a clear majority in votes several of her looser allies would reconsider lending their own. The Lycaonese vote was solid, as were Brus and Salamans, but aside from that perhaps the only one she could rely on if hard-pressed was the Princess of Creusens.

“You are certain that Rozala Malanza has no role in this?” Cordelia asked, indulging in a rare instance of repeating a question already asked.

“We have personal letters of Princess Adeline specifying that she was not to be informed,” the spymaster said. “It appears to be the Princess of Orne’s own initiative, and she believes that Malanza would not react amenably.”

Cordelia dismissed the older man, needing to be alone with her thoughts. The nights of Salia had warmed, allowing her to have her windows opened for the breeze to whisper through, and the First Prince of Procer leaned against the windowsill as she looked out at the city below. When had Princess Isabella turned, she wondered? Had it been forcing Gaspard Langevin to abdicate for scheming to betray their allies in the middle of a war that had done it? Or perhaps evern earlier, the decree that’d obligated every prince to make the sum of their debts and the identity of their debtors known – a necessity, if Cordelia was to bargain with Mercantis for the realm. It could have been the Principate-wide restrictions on exported metals, the ordained sale of all grain reserves beyond a certain amount to the high throne, the tax of on the sale of any warhorses sold outside the war effort or even the repeal of the ancient ban on silver from the Dominion being allowed into legal Proceran coinage.

Necessary measures, Cordelia had argued before the Assembly, and always they had agreed.

And now nearly a third of that same Assembly was scheming to defeat her proposal for superintendence, even now reaching out for support among her own allies. It was not a negotiation that Princess Adeline was attempting, that much was clear: the numbers she’d already gathered would have been enough for Cordelia to take her seriously, for a genuine attempt at a compromise over terms to be made. The Princess of Orne wanted her to lose a formal vote on the floor of the Highest Assembly for the first time since the failed coup, a stinging and public rebuke.

“Was I truly so much of a tyrant, Adeline Sauveterre, that you could not even attempt words?” Cordelia murmured.

And she had been careful, so very careful, not to step on toes beyond what survival demanded. For every decree passed Cordelia Hasenbach had set three aside, never brought them to light out of a desire to avoid being seen as taking advantage of the crisis to push through her reforms. Many would have helped, cut away some of the many tumorous growths the Principate had accrued over centuries of venality and corruption, but the First Prince had chosen to use her influence only sparingly. Gods Above, she had fought the White Knight and bargained with the Black Queen to preserve the rights of the same royals now sharpening knives for her back. Had she truly been so domineering that this should be seen as earned, as courted?

Cordelia placed a hand over her heart, where the last words her cousin would every write her stayed with her. How many of her kin, of her people, had she sacrificed for the preservation of the Principate of Procer?

Enough , Cordelia Hasenbach thought.

The First Prince sent for the same spymaster she had dismissed, as she had orders to give.

—

Prince Salazar was smiling, expectant. He had reached out through intermediaries to inform the Silver Letters of the same conspiracy that Prince Renato had told her of days ago, adding that it had approached him. No doubt he expected his support was about to be bought with a resolution of the dispute in his favour. Cordelia instead had her attendant – Léonie, today – present him with three parchment sheaths.

“A gift, Your Highness?” the Prince of Valencis gamely asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” Cordelia replied. “Two of these are transcriptions of letters your mother exchanged with Captain Raoul of the Bonito Finales, regarding raids into Aequitan and Salamans that were undertaken at her explicit order.”

The young prince went very, very still.

“Fakes,” Prince Salazar hotly said.

“The signature is an assumed name, but the handwriting is hers,” Cordelia said. “Your cousin, Lady Francisca, has attested to this by oath sworn under the auspices of the House of Light.”

“A transparent plot to ruin my good name, surely Your Highness can see this,” the Prince of Valencis tensely replied.

“The third,” Cordelia said, “is a letter you will receive by noon from a captain in your service, reporting that he has found the same company holed up in the town of Salanera. Near the border with Aequitan, I believe. They appear to be in collusion the ruling lord, having bought his friendship with a cut of the loot from Salamans.”

The young prince paled. This was, they now both understood, not a negotiation. It never had been.

“Your principality troops will join those of Prince Renato in capturing these bandits,” Cordelia said. “The crown of Valencis will offer appropriate reparations to the crown of Salamans for the extortion and the sacked town, which took place due to its negligence. It will also send the ruling lord of Salanera to Prince Renato so that he might be tried in the royal court as accomplice to all these deeds.”

Prince Salazar’s brow creased ever so slightly as the younger ruler grasped that he was not going to be personally being attainted for any of this. That no mention of his mother’s letters had been made. Cordelia pleasantly smiled.

“I understand you were approached for an alliance by interested parties,” the First Prince said.

“I have, it seems, already chosen my side,” Prince Salazar said, a tad drily.

“So you have,” Cordelia evenly replied. “Accept it regardless.”

The Prince of Salamans was no Arnaud Brogloise, monstrously ruthless in the service of the greater good of the Principate, but he would serve her purposes regardless.

“What a lark that will be,” the prince sighed, accepting the brisk turn of the Ebb with some grace. “And what I am to uncover your behalf, Your Highness?”

“Do you know, Your Grace, what the legal definition of warfare is according to our laws?” Cordelia asked.

Prince Salazar cocked an eyebrow. It was elementary knowledge, to a prince.

“Action undertaken on behalf of a crown that meets the requirements of violence, trespass and righteousness,” he said.

“Indeed,” the First Prince said. “That is, at least, one of them.”

“I do not follow your meaning,” Prince Salazar admitted.

“This definition came after the reforms that followed the teachings of Sister Salienta,” Cordelia said. “The powers granted to the office of First Prince in time of crusade were determined much earlier in the history of the Principate, and so function under an earlier legal definition of warfare.”

Proving this beyond dispute had been difficult, but then the First Prince did have a particularly skilled Librarian at hand. The fair-haired princess amiably smiled.

“You are to find me treason, Prince Salazar,” she said, “that does not know what it is.”

—

“Prince Florimont Langevin,” Louis de Sartons said.

The name echoed in the silence of the parlour. The Prince of Cleves, it seemed, had not forgiven the forced abdication of his father. That it had been made necessary by a nearly disastrous bout of stupidity that had not only embarrassed the Principate and burned goodwill with some of its most important allies but also nearly drawn in Chosen into Proceran territorial disputes was evidently of little importance. It must be, else why else would the son of Gaspard Langevin not only join Princess Adeline’s alliance but go even a step further and even attempt Cordelia’s assassination?

“He was approached by the last vestiges of the rebellious Silver Letters, not the other way around, but he appears to have embraced the opportunity eagerly,” the spymaster continued.

Prince Florimont had been busier than Cordelia ever knew, it seemed. She had wondered at his lingering in the capital even after the Highest Assembly confirmed him as Prince of Cleves, but believed it to be mere courting of a place as one of Rozala Malanza’s followers through Princess Adeline. What an ambitious young man he had turned out to be.

“Do we have proof?” Cordelia asked.

“Enough to stain his reputation, should we release it,” the skeletal old man said. “Nothing that would sway the Highest Assembly, however. It is all circumstantial, or lesser proof.”

Nothing material and evident, the last meant, or testimony only by individuals who could not take an oath under House auspices – because of past criminal offences, contradicting oaths or possession of magic. It was a dark irony, Cordelia considered, that the last of these three was an injustice she had several times restrained herself from undoing because she’d believed it would have caused too strong a resentment in the Highest Assembly. Neither just nor unjust, she had instead straddled the line and reaped only the worst of what she had sown. A lesson, the First Prince of Procer thought, that was worth learning.

“Reputation is not enough,” Cordelia said.

“I assure you, what we have is suggestive enough the House of Langevin would be made into pariahs,” Louis de Sartons said. “They would be stripped of all allies.”

“Arsene Odon was without allies, after the coup,” Cordelia said. “And now here he is again, dogging my footsteps as part of the conspiracy of Princess Adeline.”

“You spared Clotilde of Aisne as well, and she has held true,” the spymaster noted.

Ah , Cordelia thought, but for how long will she hold?

“Florimont Langevin is not cut of the same cloth as she,” Cordelia said. “You know this to be true. To corner him and let him stew in his resentment would be recklessly neglectful.”

Louis de Sartrons studied her for a long moment, eyes shadowed.

“A decision of sone weight,” the spymaster said.

“It can be done?” Cordelia asked.

“It can,” the old man said. “Should it?”

She met his gaze, unblinking.

“If you remain of the same mind on the morrow,” he finally said, “then I will obey. Yet I request, humbly, that you reflect on this. It is not an order that should lightly be given.”

He took his leave soon after, leaving her to her thoughts. Cordelia had duties she ought to see to, her hours never empty, but instead she had her maids fetch her a shawl and headed for the garden. It was a pleasant enough night out, though not so warm that the First Prince would have gone without the shawl, but that mattered little to Agnes Hasenbach. She wore a long pale dress, already stained from grass and dirt, and the sensible shoes that Cordelia had gotten her last winter solstice. She was also seemingly lost in thought, seated on her favourite bench and looking up at the stars. Cordelia sat by her cousin’s side, letting the silence stretch out.

It was almost restful, to be with someone who required nothing of her.

The Augur emerged from her thoughts after a long while, that short bob of blond hair turning in startlement when she realized she had company. Agnes’ eyes – Hasenbach blue, cold and clear – were confused for a few heartbeats, until her mind returned to the here and the now.

“It is taking longer than it once did,” Cordelia quietly said.

Her cousin sighed.

“Snow falls, rivers flow,” Agnes Hasenbach simply said.

An old saying of their people, warning that rage against the inevitable was wasted breath.

“I have favours that could be called on,” Cordelia murmured, “among Chosen and Damned alike.”

And those that she had not traded with, she could be introduced to. Neither the White Knight nor the Black Queen would be the kind to refuse her this sort of boon.

“It avails us nothing,” Agnes said, sounding surprised they’d not already had that conversation. “It only... ah, it is not winter yet?”

“No,” Cordelia gently said. “It is not.”

“I was following far threads,” Agnes said. “In the south. They grow clearer now, fates are precipitating.”

There was a beat of silence.

“Did you come to ask about Hainaut?” her cousin asked. “It is only light, Cordelia. Blinding. It does not change.”

The First Prince of Procer smiled, the first time today the gesture felt genuine.

“I had though to ask you for advice, in truth,” Cordelia admitted.

“Owls are gossips,” Agnes helpfully replied, “but you can trust a pigeon, so long as it is well-fed. Those of Salia are very nosy, but they do not spread the secrets.”

It was unfortunate that only Agnes seemed able to speak with birds in such a manner, as the blonde princess suspected that pigeons would be staggeringly successful spies should they be put to work. Some of Cordelia’s peers seemed to favour friendships with martial Chosen and Damned, but to her this was frank stupidity: the most useful of such souls in her service was the Forgetful Librarian, who while barely able to use cutlery instead brought to the table the ability to see through ever single correspondence cipher under the sun. Her own spymaster had broached the subject of permanent employment there, and she was inclined to agree.

“There is a choice that must be made,” Cordelia told her cousin. “And I do not know the face of the right answer, should there even be one.”

Agnes studied her a moment.

“This is not a question for the Augur,” she finally said.

“No,” Cordelia quietly agreed.

It was a question for one of the last people in this world she could trust with her thoughts.

“I do not know of Ebb and Flow,” Agnes hesitantly said. “We never learned, any of us. There was always you for it. It was a relief, that it could all be entrusted to you.”

“I sometimes wonder how much I truly learned, Agnes,” Cordelia said. “Every mercy I give is repaid with treachery, every striving for reform met with sullen resentment. It is not that I am unskilled at this game, I know better than that. I simply seems...”

She bit her lip.

“As if, sometimes, I am the only one in that hall that sees Procer as in need of mending,” Cordelia said.

“The Assembly changes too quickly,” Agnes muttered. “Gives me headaches.”

Even odds, the Prince of Rhenia mused, whether she meant their futures or simply their names.

“But when I make choices,” Agnes quietly continued, “I have a rite.”

Cordelia’s smiled eased, and she met her cousin’s eyes seriously. Agnes nodded, satisfied.

“I make myself remember who I am,” the Augur said. “Where I am, when. And then I ask myself what it is I want.”

And Cordelia’s heart broke a little bit for the cousin she’d known since they were both but girls, for the way her expression wavered when she admitted she so often forgot all these things. But she would take it seriously, the First Prince told herself. She closed her eyes, breathing out. She knew who she was, for it might as well have been branded into her soul Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer, Princess of Salia and Prince of Rhenia, Warden of the West and Protector of the Realms of Man. She sat here in Salia, the heart of the Principate, as the realm faced the coming of the end times. Knowing all this, embracing it, what did she want? Survival, for Procer and for herself, but that was not a want so much as a need. She dug deeper.

“I want to make Procer what it should be,” Cordelia Hasenbach quietly said. “What we promise the world it is, only to so utterly fail.”

Agnes nodded, eyes already half-gone.

“Then you know,” the Augur said, “the choice you must make.”

She turned to look at the sky again, going silent, and Cordelia breathed out shallowly.

So she did.

—

The timing had to be particular so that the proper effect would be achieved. The session for the vote on the provisory superintendence was called at the end of the month, as had been announced, but in the few hours that preceded the royals or the representatives setting foot in the Chamber of Assembly a few events took place in quick succession.

First, as she participated in the charitable distribution of bread to the impoverished people of the Silenin neighbourhood the First Prince of Procer was shot by a crossbow in broad daylight.

Second, Prince Florimont Langevin of Cleves took a crossbow bolt through the back of the head as returned from a visit to an upscale brothel.

Before the hour had passed Salia was a city-wide riot. The Dread Empire was blamed, but there was talk of there being traitors in the Highest Assembly that had helped the easterners. “Too Many Cooks” was heard sung in the streets shortly before cobblestones and rotten fruit were thrown at the mansion belonging to the Prince of Bayeux, though Arsene Odon was far from the capital.

Third, formal messengers were sent to every royal and assermenté in the city to confirm that the First Prince lived and the session of the Assembly would still be held.

Fourth, a mere hour before the session was to be held every member of Princess Adeline’s conspiracy save the princess herself received two scrolls. One held evidence for the dealings of Florimont Langevin relating to an assassination attempt. The other laid out the legal case for treason committed by Adeline Sauveterre.

Fifth, the Pilfering Dicer was tasked with stealing the luck of one woman in particular until misfortune plagued her like fleas might a dog.

And so when the First Prince of Procer entered the Chamber of Assembly, her torso bandaged more for effect than out of need, it was to silence. Every whisper had died the moment she came into the hall. There was still one of them missing, for Princess Adeline of Orne had been unfortunately delayed after she was thrown by her horse, but the session began without her.

“As First Prince of Procer,” Cordelia Hasenbach said, “I declare that every vote held this evening will be entered into the formal public record.”

It was the Alamans here who first understood the threat, not her own countrymen or the Arlesites. It had always been the people of the lakes, of the heartlands of Procer, who best understood the weight the opinions of the people carried. It fell into place, after that, one stroke at a time. Prince Salazar of Valencis brought forth the accusation of treason against Princess Adeline, making the faces of more than a few conspirators pale in dread. Evidence was brought out, mere technicalities – movement of troops through the territory of another prince without explicit permission, an act of war under ancient laws, and the hiring away of fantassins already in the service of another without reparations being offered – but enough that the legal requirements were met.

These were, every soul in this room understood, almost laughable charges. Only a First Prince with unshakable support in the Highest Assembly, with power and influence at their zenith, might feasibly attempt such a transparent ploy without being run out of the Chamber. And still, after the evidence was laid out, only silence followed. And in that silence the howls of the people echoed loudly, the riots that had yet to end. Cordelia Hasenbach watched the Highest Assembly with cold eyes. Which of you , she asked them silently, wants to be known to the mob as the traitor that helped shelter treason? Which of you wants to be known on every whisper as the Praesi hireling, as the turncoat that bickered with the First Prince of Procer while her breast was still bloodied?

Princess Adeline of Orne stormed into the Chamber but moments later, unannounced by heralds, but before she could so much as speak a word Cordelia Hasenbach addressed the Highest Assembly.

“I now call for the vote on the charges of treason laid against Adeline Sauveterre, Princess of Orne,” the First Prince calmly said, voice echoing across the hall.

One after another the votes came, and Adeline went from mocking to defiant to deflated and finally to shaking . Falling on her knees. She was condemned unanimously.

“See her out,” Cordelia ordered the guards.

She called the vote on the provisional superintendence, then, and after not a word of debate it passed unanimously. She saw then in their eyes the belief that it was done, that they were free of this drumming. Cordelia Hasenbach did not free them. Instead she called for a vote on the repeal of the law preventing magicians from taking oaths under the auspices of the House of Light.

By midnight, she had passed every single reform she had ever wanted to pass.

They would unseat her for this, in time, but what of it?

Cordelia Hasenbach knew exactly who she was, and what it was she wanted.

Interlude: Flow

“If you are to win the most then you must win always, else you will find a hundred more knives pointed at your back for every victory. This is both the promise of imperial greatness and the fate of imperial death.”

– Extract from ‘The Behaviours of Civil Conduct’, by High Lady Mchumba Sahelian

The fighting had broken out at midday and lasted until half a bell before nightfall.

Neither the Magisterium nor General Basilia had wanted to roll the dice by continuing the battle in the dark. Helikeans kataphraktoi harassed the retreating Spears of Stygia as they retreated, loosing arrows in the back of the phalanx, but after the day’s losses those were but a drop in the bucket. It wasn’t like the phalanx could break, either: the leather collar around the neck of every single slave soldier served as a reminder that the displeasure of their masters would be both swift and final. Magister Andras sent out crossbowmen to chase them away, but like mayflies the famous cataphracts of Helike simply danced away and found somewhere else to sting.

Magister Zoe Ixioni set down her glass of wine, having drunk as deep as she dared given the night still ahead of her. The viewing pavilion that had been raised for the members of the Magisterium that accompanied the Stygian army but would not be involved in the day’s fighting – the majority of them – was rather luxurious and privately paid fund, a gesture of thanks from Magister Andras and Magister Kyra after they were appointed to command of the Stygian army. The twins had sent most of their time in the Magisterium as part one of its the lesser parties, the Herons, but they were not fools or unskilled at games of power. They were making the most of the opportunity they’d been given.

“We hold the field,” Magister Gorgion murmured, drawing her attention. “Is that not... worrying?”

The young man was prodigiously fat, which Zoe had once noted to run in his family, and though he was now the head of what remained of the Laskaris she had several times regretted bringing him into the fold. Though a steady ally – he was terrified of being assassinated should she withdraw her protection – he was also nervous and hesitant, requiring constant reassurance. Would that it had been his older brother that their mother had left in Stygia, when she went out on campaign. The older Laskaris would have been a more fitting partner than the dregs the White Knight’s wrath had left Zoe to work with.

“It does not matter,” Magister Zoe quietly said. “This, too, serves our purposes.”

The ranks of the Magisterium, by tradition, could never number higher than ninety-nine. In practice actual membership usually fluctuated between seventy and ninety, only every rarely approaching that limit, but these days their ranks were rather more thinned. The White Knight and the Ashen Priestess had slain over a third of the Magisterium in a single day during Kairos’ War, and though replacements had come forward further losses had since been suffered to war and intrigues. Considering those slain by heroes had been the finest war mages of Stygia, and a great majority of the Black Vines party that had effectively ruled since the Carrion Lord’s intervention decades ago, the ensuing politics had been... fluid.

As a member in good standing of the Black Vines, Zoe had certainly felt the ground grow unsteady under her feet.

The coalition that’d succeeded at taking the reins and stacking the Courts and appointments had then promptly collapsed in the wake of the disastrous campaign into Procer, leaving as successor an even shakier alliance. The Ivory Tile party had widely been seen as the only rival to the Black Vines, before the last few years of war, but they’d lost too many of their prominent members to either heroes or defections. They’d survived long enough to be the tallest dwarf, however, and to burnish their reputation in this time of danger to Stygia they had allied with the only real military party left in the city: the Herons. Though the lesser of the two partners, the Herons had only been brought into the fold at the price of their leaders, the twins of the Sideris, being named commanders of all Stygian armies in the coming campaign.

Already there was talk of formalizing the alliance, of merging into a single greater party, and in Zoe’s opinion there was sense in it. The Herons typically advocated that Magisters should train as generals instead of simply leaving such duties to slaves, while the Ivory Tile was the champion of the politics of Haides the Elder – that balance in the League must be maintained, at the price of war if necessary. There was compatibility in ideals, even in the long view, which made such a merging possible. And after the leaders of the Herons had today scored a draw against General Basilia, perhaps the finest commander to come out of the Free Cities this generation, they would now have the prestige to take such a step without simply being gobbled up by the Ivory Tiles.

It was near enough to decided who the rulers of Stygia would be in the coming decade, bar disaster. Magister Zoe Ixioni watched the corners of the pavilion, where other magisters were speaking to each other in low murmurs, and smiled at nervous young Gorgion.

“Aretha the Raven, who twice defeated a Helikean field army using mostly sailors and whores, once said that in the Free Cities a general has more to fear from victory than defeat,” Zoe softly said. “Commit the words to memory, Magister Gorgion.”

She rose to her feet gracefully and took her leave from the young man, refusing the serving slave that came to offer her a full glass of wine and instead leaving the pavilion entirely. There was another tent, close by, where one could relieve themselves in privacy and relative comfort. Zoe began to head there but slowed her steps as soon as she was out of sight and then stopped. Before long, the woman she’d been waiting for arrived. Magister Phryne’s gaunt face was said to have been made this way by the strange magics she delighted in using, for she had once been a great beauty. Whatever the truth of that, Zoe had always found her appearance unsettling. Her politics, though, were almost painfully straightforward.

“The Pale Chariot will lend its support,” Magister Phryne said, with remarkable bluntness.

Zoe nodded. She’d expected as much the moment it became clear that the Herons were headed for positions of influence. The Pale Chariot as a party boasted only a half dozen reclusive mages whose personal cause was the safeguarding and improvement of magical knowledge in Stygia, so they tended to be left outside of political calculations. Which meant relatively few people bothered to notice that the only appointments they every sought outside the Court of Arcane was a single seat in the Court of Trades, which they always fought hard for. It was meant, Zoe Ixioni had bothered to notice, to safeguard their common interests in the steelworking industries whose profits happened to pay for all these costly experiments they liked to indulge in.

A detail of little import, unless you also knew that the leading Herons had strong investments in the very same trade and would not hesitate a moment to use their newfound prominence to stack the Court of Trades and award themselves all those lucrative contracts currently funding the Pale Chariot coffers.

“For which you have our gratitude,” Magister Zoe said. “The Keepers?”

“You have ours,” Magister Phryne said. “Amyntor Eliade is not affiliated with us.”

No , Zoe thought, but he does happen to be my cousin . The magister offered a demure smile and nothing else, for over a decade of diplomacy had schooled her well in keeping her thoughts hidden.

All that was left, now, was to take the plunge.

—

Merchant Prince Mauricius did not have an office, not in the sense his predecessor did.

Though the Princely Palace was his since he had been elected to the ancient and respectable office he now held, the old merchant had bought enough servants on those grounds to know it was as a leaking sieve. Perhaps he would see to mending that, should the mood ever take him, but until then he saw absolutely no need to keep any private papers and affairs out of his manse. Instead, when he was not attending sessions of the Forty-Stole Court or giving audience in the palace he preferred to retreat to his favorite establishment – Sub Rosa, tucked away near the Irenian Plaza at the heart of power in the City of Bought and Sold. There the merchant prince sipped at his Yan Tei rice wine, imported from across the sea and served warm.

A fine delicacy, he decided, and an interesting experience. The latter was perhaps more important, to a man of his advanced age. Novelty often interested him more than simple luxuries. What point was there in being one of the wealthiest men alive, if he did not use that wealth to experience everything under the sun? This particular evening, however it was not simply for the service he had come to Sub Rosa. The obsessive secrecy of the establishment was what he had sought it out for, not the foreign drink, for the diplomats he was to meet were not of the sort that it was diplomatic to entertain these days. The Tower had few allies left, and if Mauricius was reading the currents to the south correctly it was soon to have even fewer.

When the servants finally ushered in two unremarkable young men, of dark hair and simple clothing, the merchant prince cocked an eyebrow.

“That is an impressive glamour,” Mauricius greeted them.

He could almost see something around the edges giving it away, though, and held back a frown. He had begun to see much too well for a man his age, even one who had access to some of the finest enhancing rituals on Calernia. He was not certain whether or not to be pleased by the implication of that.

“Your compliment does us honour, Your Grace,” a pleasant speaking voice replied. “This one humbly accepts the praise on behalf of his mistress.”

The glamour fell, revealing a young man – though in a Praesi with golden eyes, as this one was, that semblance meant little – in fine red silks, dark of skin and finely formed. A Wasteland aristocrat, unlike the formal ambassador of the Tower in the city, and Dread Empress Malicia’s personal envoy. The other figure remained cloaked and hooded, standing still as the envoy slid into the seat on the other side of the table. The young man had not waited for permission, Mauricius noted, for all that he was using that obsequious Praesi formal diplomatic language.

“You forget your courtesies,” the Merchant Prince mildly said.

“This one was wary of waiting, Your Grace,” the envoy pleasantly smiled. “For this one’s mistress has grown uneasy of... long waits, in beautiful Mercantis.”

It was said that the Dread Empress of Praes knew black arts that let her make a puppet of a body far away, Mauricius knew. There were a hundred rumours of the like about every one of the madmen who claimed the Tower, of course, but this one had been repeated across enough years that it had the ring of truth. Was one such body, then, under the cloak?

“Pull down your hood,” Mauricius bluntly ordered.

The stranger obeyed, but it was not some dark-skinned homunculus that the Merchant Prince was gazing upon. It was, he found with a shiver, his own face. Immediately he reached for the rune carved onto the side of the table, which would-

“Freeze.”

Mauricius froze. The face of the insolent youth with golden eyes was as a blank mask.

“I dislike handling such matters personally,” Dread Empress Malicia calmly said. “But the free rein you have given the band of Named in the city forces my hand. I congratulate you for that much, Mauricius.”

The Merchant Prince fought, strained to break the spell.

“A Name?” the Dread Empress said, sounding surprised. “Or a claim, at least. Either way, it means that Ruling you is unfeasible in the long term. Which leaves me with only the less civilized path to take.”

Mauricius tried to scream as the thing wearing his face eagerly came forward, and even let out a small hiss when it lunged forward with a lamprey-like mouth and tore out a chunk of his throat.

“I do apologize,” Dread Empress Malicia conversationally said, “but my diabolists assure me that you must be devoured whilst living for the surface memories to be absorbed and the shape to become permanents. I would have had you poisoned beforehand otherwise, Mauricius.”

Pain, Gods the pain .

“Farewell, Merchant Prince,” the Dread Empress of Praes said. “May you choose your enemies more wisely in your next life.”

—

When the Magisterium appointed generals, by ancient custom these hallowed individuals were bestowed with a whip.

The reason why was simple: by law, no freeborn Stygian could serve as a soldier. To hold a military command was to rule over slaves, for which the proper tool was not sword or spear but the simple whip. Magister Zoe Ixioni has served as a diplomatic envoy for the Magisterium for over a decade and served on the Court of Manners for two consecutive terms as the formal representative to League councils – which while without practical power, was a very prestigious position – so she was quite aware of how the rest of the Free Cities thought of Stygian armies. The finest soldiers that were ever badly led , Theodosius the Unconquered had famously called them.

It was true that the Magisterium tended to choose its appointed generals for their skill in magic or intrigue rather than more straightforward military skills, which the oldest of the slave-officers of the phalanx were expected to be able to discharge on behalf of their masters. By association, interest in military matters was seen as either eccentric or outright distasteful. It was slave-work not fit for freeborn Stygians, much less members of the Magisterium. It was one of the reasons why the Herons had been a minor party, never swelling beyond nine sitters in Zoe’s lifetime. Now Andras and Kyra Sideris, the same twins leading the party that had lingered in irrelevance for decades, were being welcome into the camp to raucous cheers.

Giving away all their weapons save the whips to serving slaves with great ceremony the twins took off their helmets and let the glorious black locks whip free. They were a handsome pair, nearing middle-age but still in the prime of their life and wearing their armour with an ease that hinted at the truth of the old stories saying they’d spent a few years in Proceran fantassin companies during the Great War. The Spears of Stygia that had fought and bled during the day were not granted the same welcome, simply allowed to file in through side gates so the wounded might be tended to and the irreparably crippled discreetly poisoned.

Zoe left the Sideris twins basking in their glory, instead considering the nature of what some Atalantian philosopher-priest had named the ‘dilemma of the sword’. If authority came from the sword, then who could rule save soldiers? Like most claims out of Atalante, it was empty air when the priests claimed to have thought up the question: it had been at the heart of Stygia for centuries, a millennium almost. In the days after the fall of the great empire of Aenos Basileon, it was the eldest daughter of Aenia that had first risen to prominence. Ancient Stygia, under the patronage of the great cranes Retribution and Redress. The ruling polemarchs raised a great standing army and crushed the haphazard militias of their neighbours, forcing them to pay tribute, and for a time the Free Cities had been in Stygia’s palm.

Until the army deposed a ruling polemarch and installed in her place a popular officer instead.

The aftermaths of the coup, which ultimately failed, broke the back of the Stygian Empire. Delos and Atalante regained their independence, the tribute system collapsed and it was made law that never again would a freeborn Stygian serve as a soldier. Slaves, owned by the council of leading sorcerer-nobles that had succeeded the polemarchs, would be the city’s only warriors. Much time and thought was spent on how these Spears of Stygia would be kept under control, the methods crafted being wide and varied, but the most important of them was the collars. Enchanted leather bands that every slave-soldier would wear around their neck, which were linked to two greater artefacts: the Leashes. Through the Leashes, sorcerers could choke or kill a single soldier or a thousand with but a word.

This had solved the dilemma of the sword, some argued, but in truth it had simply moved around the pieces. It was barely a century before the first general tried to use the Leashes and command of the Spears of Stygia to take over the city by force, only stopped when the Magisterium instead choked every single soldiers in their own army to death by spell. Chastened and wary, the Magisterium ruled that no appointed general would ever be allowed to hold the greater artifacts and created the position of Keepers of the Leashes. Two Magisters, never of the same party or kin by three degrees of the appointed general, would be charged by the Court of Honours to serve as guardians and wielders of the single most important artefacts in Stygia.

Over the years additional precautions and checks had been added to the nature of the position of Keepers, but the institution had largely functioned as intended.

“It is madness, you know.”

Zoe glanced at the man at her side, eyes lingering on the noble lines of his face. Amyntor Eliade was a well-formed man, for all that his family had been disgraced when his eldest sister, a recently seated magister, had attempted to abolish slavery and destroy the Leashes. Nephele Eliade had so despised chains, it was said, that the Gods Above had granted her a Name for it. Zoe, who had ounce counted her as a friend as well as a cousin, knew better than to believe it simple hearsay. That bout of futility had destroyed Amyntor’s chances at amounting to anything in this lifetime, but Zoe’s cousin had decided to redeem the family name for future generations by seeking an appointment as one of the Keepers. He would, he had told the Magisterium in a passionate speech, dedicate his life to preserving what his sister had sought to destroy.

“The world has gone mad,” Zoe replied. “We do what we must to weather the storm.”

“It will threaten the very foundations of Stygia,” Amyntor warned. “What is it that has so moved you to act, Zoe? You have always been cautions. It cannot be the would-be Tyrant, we have known hundreds, or even the alliance with the Tower – your own Black Vines were ardent partisans of it for decades.”

Magister Zoe Ixioni thought of that stately hall where the First Prince of Procer had entertained the greats from all over Calernia, where powers had sparred and found victory or loss. She thought of what had followed in the wake of those days, the Peace of Salia with its Truce and Terms. The world is changing , she thought. There would be no returning to the old ways after this, no matter what some of her colleagues might delude themselves into believing.

“The tide rises, cousin,” Zoe murmured. “We may either rise with it or drown.”

And Zoe Ixioni had not spent decades climbing her way to power so that she could see it all collapse over her head. Amyntor sighed.

“So be it,” he said. “I expect Nephele would have smiled of it, if nothing else.”

Zoe was less certain, as Nephele Eliade had been surprisingly farsighted for all her moral naivete, but she knew better than to voice the thought. She parted from her cousin, meeting Magister Phryne’s eyes as she passed the other woman and receiving a nod. It was done, then. Magister Zoe passed through the crowd of servants and magisters, both parting for her, and was received with wary eyes by the Sideris twins. They had come down from their great war chariot, but both lingered near it. The prestige of the gilded thing was impressive to those easily impressed, which these days was too many of the Magisterium.

“Magister Ixioni,” Kyra Sideris greeted her, tone friendly in a way her eyes were not. “Do you come to offer congratulations?”

“I do,” Zoe said. “Your conduct of the battle was exemplary. All of Stygia is in your debt.”

Surprise from both twins, and the wariness thickened.

“You overpraise us,” Andras Sideris carefully said.

“If so, that is fortunate,” Magister Zoe replied, “for you are now both relieved from command.”

There was a heartbeat of surprise, then Kyra began to laugh. Her brother did not, eyes darkening.

“Such a dismissal would require a vote of the Magisterium,” Andras began, then froze.

All around them the Spears of Stygia began to stream in. Armed and ready, pushing the surprised magisters that had not been part of the conspiracy away from the edges of the forming circle.

“This is treason,” Kyra hissed, and she raised her whip.

The enchantments laid on it found no purchase on the collars binding the slave-soldiers, for the sorcery of both Leashes had already been used to sever the control of all lesser artefacts in the camp on the slaves.

“Surrender,” Zoe gently said. “While you still can.”

“We are winning , Ixioni,” Magister Andras urgently pressed. “Even now the Helikeans will be considering terms-”

“Terms have already been reached with General Basilia,” the diplomat said. “We will, tomorrow, offer our formal surrender and submission in exchange for which we will allowed to rule Stygia largely as we wish.”

Some small cities taken by Nicae would be returned as well, which would serve as a useful sweetener for the people when they returned home.

“That treaty will be worth nothing, when Basilia next grows hungry,” Andras scorned.

“It will be guaranteed by Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer,” Zoe Ixioni smiled.

The utter startlement on their faces was a pleasure to behold. The Spears began to arrest members of the Ivory Tile and the Herons, the few magisters who’d sat the fence of the coup – for this was very much a coup – looking on nervously.

“You lie,” Kyra Sideris accused. “She refused the Magisterium when we reached out, what could you possibly offer that would be worth her while?”

“The Magisterium,” Zoe said, “will formally abolish slavery.”

In name, at least. There would be no more slaves, but there would be a great many indentured servants – it would be easy enough to simply pay slaves less than their upkeep required and let that debt trickle down to their children as it did in the laws of Mercantis. It would maintain the old practices with a deniable veneer, not unlike the practices of Ashur. If there were some troubles, well, it would not be difficult to pass laws through the Court of Order that stripped debtors the rights reserved for free citizens of Stygia and further tilt the advantage away from the freed slaves.

“You’ll die for this, Ixioni,” Kyra Sideris raged, fingers tight around the whip. “I’ll have my revenge, I swear it.”

Magister Zoe considered that for a moment, then nodded and walked away.

“Kill them both,” Zoe ordered a slave-officer as she passed him.

She did not stay to see it unfold, for she had a formal letter of surrender to draft.

—

It was as the White Knight had suspected: the Merry Balladeer’s song did not simply reach ears, it reached souls directly.

In other circumstances that would have been a mere interesting fact, but Antigone had been taught the ‘ways-of-seeing-the-world’ – there was no word in any language knew that accurately translated the word in the tongue of the Gigantes – and that meant she could follow the resonance. The Balladeer’s song, a cheerful ditty from Salamans about a priest and the three goats outsmarting him, marked out every ensouled undead in hearing range for the Witch of the Woods to smash without needing line of sight. Two Revenants died before they even realized what was happening and with every Bind in a range of a mile crushed to dust the lesser dead were nothing more than a witless horde.

They had struck hard and struck fast, but there came a time where the dice had to be rolled anyhow. Only Antigone had the strength to destroy the bridge the dead were raising, but it would take her time to perform such a great working. That meant it was time for blades to talk. They found a hill with a singe narrow path up and Hanno, tired of the elaborate schemes that seemed to plague the world, instead made it all simple: he and Rafaella held the path, the Stalwart Apostle saw to healing and the Balladeer sang. The White Knight raised his sword and shield, his missing fingers itching at the stumps, and let death come knocking as Antigone’s spell swelled behind him.

It was the simplest kind of fight there could be: the dead came and they were funnelled up the path. And they kept coming, corpse after corpse. Revenants, eventually, but paltry things compared to the Scourges, and Hanno’s sword bit deep. The Valiant Champion tossed away the born that tried them, crawling up the slope, and even as a great wyrm followed by flock of buzzards came down screaming on them the sorcery of the Witch of the Woods was unleashed. Hanno felt the Light coming, swift and clean in a way it had not been in too long, and even as in the distance a pulsing black sphere spun and began to swallow up the half-finished bridge he climbed the wyrm.

It ended with his sword going through the skull as Rafaella dragged an entire flock of buzzards into her domain, emerging bloodied and wounded but victorious even as Hanno crawled up the broken remains of the wyrm and came to stand atop the skull where his sword was still stuck up to the hilt. The Valiant Champion climbed up to his side, still bleeding even after the finest healing of the Stalwart Apostle. Some of the wounds would scar, not that Rafaella was likely to mind. The two of them stood together and watched hundreds of pounds of stones being sucked in by Antigone’s great spell, ripping to pieces a great bridge of stone that must have been the better part of a mile long.

“We will have to sweep the other bank,” the White Knight said. “Else they will be able to simply resume the work.”

“Tomorrow,” Rafaella grunted. “We fought good, but tired now. No wine here, very dread.”

“Dreadful,” Hanno absent-mindedly corrected.

“Not full,” Rafaella reproached. “This the problem, Hanno.”

He chuckled, the smile staying with him. It was an old game they were playing, but one he regarded fondly. The Valiant Champion was the sole survivor of the band he had led to defeat in the Free Cities, perhaps his oldest friend in the world after Antigone herself.

“Let’s see to the others,” he finally said. “We can retreat into Twilight afterwards, when-”

He froze, something flickering at the edge of his vision, and turned.

In the distance, far to the south where Hainaut lay, the night sky lit up with falling stars.

Epilogue

“And so Maleficent the Second said: ‘If I must burn half the realm to save the rest, then kneel before the empress of ashes.’”

– Extract from the Scroll of Restoration, fortieth of the Secret Histories of Praes

The Vogue Archive did not sleep and tonight neither could Cordelia Hasenbach.

Numbly, she walked down the mostly empty hall past the great tables bearing maps of the realm she ruled and the smaller bureaus – where, at hours other than the middle of the night, some of the finest minds in Procer tended to its regions. There were a few mages of the Order of the Red Lion tucked away in corners, having retreated after greeting her and now again simply waiting to be of use, but aside from them the oft-crowded hall was quiet. Fewer than a dozen men and women were within it, sometimes reading through the odd reports that had come in the night but more often tidying up the numerous scrolls and reports that’d poured in during the day.

Cordelia made for the back of the hall, the raised dais where her handpicked analysts were charged with sifting through a sea of ink and parchment so that they might find the catastrophes on the Principate’s horizon in time for them to be averted. The First Prince had chosen five such individuals, but at this hour there was only one awake and present: a woman of an age difficult to parse, rather dowdy in appearance and of generally unremarkable looks. The sole eye-catching part of the Forgetful Librarian’s appearance was her oddly beautiful eyelashes, as if they had been borrowed from a more striking woman and set on this one’s face.

She looked, Cordelia had come to realize, rather like the manifest ideal of someone’s reclusive, scholarly aunt. It was an appearance that would invite dismissal from many, hiding the sharp mind and utter lack of morals of the Damned. The Librarian was an exceptionally talented woman as both a scholar and an advisor, the First Prince had learned, but she was best used as part of a larger council that would temper the ruthless pragmatism of the solutions she tended to propose. The other woman did not rise as Cordelia approached, remaining engrossed in a book as she cradled a steaming cup of chamomile.

It was a small slight the Damned liked to give, one of the little games she seemed unable to stop herself from playing even when there was no conceivable benefit for her to gain, but it had remained an irritant. Usually the First Prince took the time to consider whether a threshold had been reached where the other Proceran needed to be reminded of the hierarchy between them, but not tonight. The disrespect slid off her like water off a duck’s back. It seemed such a small, petty thing to eve spare thought for after the news she had received.

The First Prince of Procer instead slid into one of the seats she’d had brought here, exemplars of comfort given the long hours they would be used for, and leaned back. She closed her eyes, wondering if the Heavens would take pity on her and let her fall asleep instead of remaining like... this. Numb and exhausted, feeling as if she was somehow too tired to sleep. There was a muted clap as the Forgetful Librarian closed her book – though not before placing a bookmark, the parts of Cordelia that never rested noted, which was interesting given that most Chosen and Damned seemed to have enhanced memory – and set it down, sipping with uncouth loudness at her chamomile.

The Librarian was Alamans and of good birth, meaning she was being unpleasant very much on purpose.

“Long night?” the Damned idly asked.

Cordelia did not answer for a very long time, yet she did not hear the book creak open.

“I have been told,” the First Prince finally said, “that no less than three Hellgates were opened across the breadth of Procer.”

And that was not why she grieved, for sorrow was a nation’s due but grief could only ever be personal, but it was an answer of enough gravity that it would obscure what was truly moving her. The Forgetful Librarian breathed in sharply but did not answer. Cordelia opened her eyes, finding herself being closely studied.

“All three were temporarily sealed,” she continued, “though at the cost of the lives of every Gigantes that came to our aid.”

The villainess hesitated, for though she was not a moral woman neither was she the manner of monster that bargained with devils for the lives of thousands.

“And Keter’s Due?” the Librarian asked.

In proper Proceran scholarship the phenomenon was known instead as ‘the desolation’, but since the Arsenal had begun to train wizards the Praesi terminology had seeped through. It could not be denied that Proceran sorcery had a rather religious turn to it, and as Cordelia understood it the ‘desolation’ was considered to be as much theological in nature as it was magical – a punishment by Above for the ruinous overreach of mortals. What disgusting idea , the Lycaonese thought. To punish thousands for the crimes of one, who would not even be moved by the sight of such cruelty regardless. The very definition of pointless suffering. No, Cordelia would take no issue with the use of ‘Keter’s Due’ at all.

“There are reports from both the Hierophant and the Grave Binder that suggest the effects of the Due were purposefully worsened,” the First Prince evenly said. “In each case, most of the surrounding region was blighted.”

The curse had flooded outwards. To the north the losses were acceptable, for Twilight’s Pass had already been bare rock while the swaths of western Hannoven and southern Rhenia that had been lost had been poor farmlands. In the case of Hainaut, where the blight was said to have spread down to a natural fortress named Lauzon’s Hollow, the loss was one still to be felt: those lands had been in the hands of Keter for most of the war. In Cleves, however? The Hellgate had been opened at the fortress of Trifelin, where Rozala Malanza had won a great battle mere weeks before, and the Due slain a few thousand soldiers out in the open where there had been too few wards. That had been the least of the losses there in truth.

The blight had also swallowed most of the fine lands along the length candle road, snuffing out the principality’s breadbasket.

That meant that Cleves would have to be fed by southern principalities, which where already buckling under the strain and rebellious besides. It meant dozens of thousand of refugees forced to flee south into lands grown increasingly hostile to them. It means that Procer would have to either beg for parts of the harvest of the Kingdom of Callow which it could not afford to buy – not with Merchant Prince Mauricius having clearly laid out there would be no more loans until some unacceptable conditions were met – or there would be starvation in the heartlands of the Principate. Hannoven was ash and ruin, ruled by the dead. Of her own Rhenia no lands save the city-fortress itself remained, her own people huddling in the dark beyond those impassable defences while death roamed the countryside. Now Cleves and Hainaut as well were a ruin.

The armies that had been supposed to turn the war around, to push the dead back into the lakes, had delivered instead one of the bloodiest stalemates in the history of Calernia. And Cordelia’s own uncle had died in some ill-fated last charge without the break between them ever having been mended, nothing but harsh words left to part on. She forced herself to breathe slowly and steadily, else she knew she would tear up. There were too many people looking. There were always too many people looking, and she could not afford to show weakness after having forced the hands of the Highest Assembly the way she had.

“Was Hainaut a defeat, then?” the Librarian quietly asked.

Cordelia Hasenbach allowed herself a bitter smile.

“The Black Queen won the field, though the field was but a smoking ruin and many died,” the First Prince replied. “Among them the Grey Pilgrim. The White Knight broke the Dead King’s great bridge in the north, so the campaign can still be settled in our favour.”

She knew better than to name such an outcome a victory, however. Nearly half the Army of Callow was gone, the Lycaonese forces on the front mauled and leaderless and general casualties had been atrocious for everyone save the Levantines. Who had not been spared, either, though in a different way. The Dominion was in uproar, as at least a few hundred of its Blood had died turning to ash without warning on the evening of the Battle of Hainaut. Cordelia’s spies believed that everyone who could have a feasible claim to being an Isbili had died, around the time the Peregrine himself had died and brought down the pilgrim’s star on Hainaut.

With the Holy Seljun dead, no legitimate successor in sight and all remaining major nobles up north fighting Keter the resulting chaos already promised to be crippling. Another nail in the Principate’s overly burdened coffin, she thought, for the Dominion had been one of the last few nations with which Procer could trade to keep afloat: the coming tide of squabbles and ‘honour wars’ would strangle those routes soon enough.

“Trouble in Levant,” the Forgetful Librarian frowned, tracing the rim of her cup with a finger. “I’m not so sure we can afford that – economically speaking, anyway. We will have to lean on Helike and her dependents to compensate.”

“It will not be enough,” Cordelia tiredly replied.

General Basilia, who was now quite openly mulling claiming the title of empress after having so long deferred taking up the queenship of Helike, had made great strides forward with precious little outside help. Cordelia herself had served mostly as a diplomatic broker in the matter of settling hostilities with Stygia, and now that Basilia had most of the western Free Cities under her and a sworn peace with Atalante her rise seemed difficult to stop. Luck was even on her size, as word was that Bellerophon had once more declared war on Penthes, belatedly seizing an opportunity to attack their old rival that the People had failed to recognize. It further tipped the balance in General Basilia’s favour, though given the fluidity of wars in the League there was no certain outcome. Not that Cordelia expected the war to continue much longer.

Delos was too great a fortress to easily fall, but it would not stand alone against three cities and the priests of Atalante had no yearning to break a holy oath freshly sworn. It might not be that Basilia would hold all of the Free Cities, as the Republic of Bellerophon at least would fight to the death over submission, but it seemed likely that a tributary empire centred on Helike would be emerging from the aftermath of that war. Given that Basilia was friendly to the Grand Alliance and hostile to the Tower as well as eager for trade to resume, this seemed like a saving grace for Procer’s ailing coffers. Except, of course, that General Basilia had spent two years ravaging the Free Cities with her wars.

Trading with a broken land not yet recovered from the last civil war that’d ravaged it was not going to be sufficiently profitable in the immediate future, not when the only Free City whose coffers had swelled was Mercantis and it was hoarding the wealth. In a year, perhaps two, this could be the miracle that Cordelia needed should the nascent empire of Basilia not collapse.

The Principate of Procer did not have a year to spare, much less two.

“Shall I send for the others, then?” the Forgetful Librarian asked. “If there was ever a reason to wake them in the night, this would be it. I have refined my proposal for the invasion of Mercantis as a stopgap solution, besides, so it might be the time for Your Highness to genuinely consider it.”

She still believed, it seemed, that there was room to maneuver. That there was still a game afoot.

“One year and twenty-eight days,” Cordelia Hasenbach softly said. “That is how long we have before the seals on the Hellgates break.”

And what could be done in so little time? Queen Catherine had left one of her foremost generals, Abigail the Fox, to handle matters in Hainaut with the returning White Knight and bluntly informed Cordelia that she saw only one solution: she was headed for east, for Praes. She would be taking the Marshal of Callow and the remains of the Second Army with her, as well as the reassembled First. A few Chosen and Damned as well, as she intended on settling the war for the Tower and returning west with mages in large enough numbers the Hellgates could be handled by Praesi magics. The Black Queen had not pretended that anything Cordelia could say might sway her form that decision, but the part that had truly cut had been the seemingly heartfelt condolences about Uncle Klaus.

It had seemed obscene to Cordelia that the Queen of Callow had spoken more to him than she had, this last year. That she... The First Prince mastered herself, evenly breathing. The east was beyond Cordelia’s grasp, it was no longer her trouble. She would see to the west as much as she still could, to her last breath, even though she knew in the deepest of her heart that the outcome was already decided. Procer would fall because it was simply no longer capable of standing. If the war was not won soon it was going to break, and the war would not be won soon. In truth it might be that victory was no longer possible, Cordelia admitted to herself. Or that if it were achieved, the Principate Procer would not live to see that achievement.

And facing that brutal truth was part of her duty, to plan for it. So Cordelia Hasenbach’s mind slowly stirred awake from the numbness, considering how any part of Procer might still be saved from the coming onslaught – how its people might be saved. And there was a darker duty still, one that she despised but must consider anyway. Should the Enemy triumph, should it all come to the worst of all ends...

“Send for the others,” the First Prince of Procer finally said, tone steady. “And for mage of the Red Lions as well, if you please.”

The Forgetful Librarian slowly nodded, then rose to her feet to see it done. Cordelia would need to speak with a man she had hoped she would not see again before the war was at an end. Not out of distaste for him, but because of what she had sent him to guard: the ancient corpse that had once lain in the depths of Lake Artoise, and the weapon that had been made of it. For Cordelia was a Hasenbach, in the end.

If it came to it, she would do what she must: better that some of Calernia survive than none at all.
—

It was a delicate balance to maintain, to keep a civil war going without ever being at genuine risk of losing it.

Malicia liked to think of it as painting with her own blood, drawing on the famous turn of phrase by Maleficent the Second. Every success in guiding the war according to her design came at the expense of carving away a sliver from the pedestal of her perceived superior position, and should the game be kept going for too long – or defeats not of her own making be inflicted upon her – then she ran the risk of that pedestal truly being toppled. It had not come to pass, of course. The Dread Empress of Praes had begun to prepare for this conflict several months before the first sword was drawn, and she’d had contingencies in place regarding civil war for decades prior.

Agents seeded and left to grow, traitors and assassins and impostors. Bribes and blackmail, debts to call on and more highborn in the palm of her hand than anyone alive might suspect. High Lady Tasia Sahelian had seen through parts of the preparations, in olden days, but now Tasia was dead and Wolof ruled by a young man she had personally seen soulboxed. High Lord Sargon Sahelian was, amusingly enough, one of her most ardent partisans well beyond the influence she could truly exert on him. He had bloodied Wolof taking it from his aunt, so he now craved years under the protection of a greater power to rebuild his domain in peace.

And, for all that Abreha of Aksum – Sepulchral, as she now styled herself – remained breathing, east of the Wasaliti there was no greater power than Dread Empress Malicia. So long as I do not slip , Alaya reminded herself, studying the board before her. She’d always enjoyed shatranj, even when she had still been her father’s daughter and not a prisoner in a golden gaol. It was a game of logic and sequence, of anticipating the movements of your opponent, which had always appealed to her. Wekesa had enjoyed the occasional game with her when he’d visited Ater, the two of them spending more time playing and gossiping over their common companions over wine than attending to the matters of state Alaya had claimed the time for.

These days, though, Malicia played mostly against herself. The Dread Empress of Praes considered the lay of the pieces, the disarray of black and white that signaled the tail end of a match closely fought, and slid her last black mage down a diagonal. Soft footsteps told her that Ime had joined her without the need for the empress to look away from the board. This was not her bedchambers, simply a study, but her spymistress was one of the very few people who had access to the enchanted secret passage whose door opened behind her.

“Speak,” Malicia said.

“Our people in Procer confirmed that Queen Catherine is headed for Praes,” Ime said. “Already orders have been sent to Laure by the Black Queen to prepare the supplies for a campaign in the Wasteland.”

Malicia cocked an eyebrow.

“They cannot afford one,” the empress said.

The intricacies of the internal politics of the Grand Alliance aside, Alaya was speaking to the plain realities of hard coin. Callow was not flush with gold, having already spent most of the coin it had received for brokering a peace between the dwarves and the drow, and Procer was so beggared these days that it was often resorting to paying in goods rather than gold for the Callowan grain and cattle it so desperately needed. In practice, the Kingdom of Callow was simply not wealthy of enough to afford a war on a second front. It did not have the steel, the gold or the manpower to attempt such an enterprise. That had been part and parcel of Malicia’s strategy to contain the Black Queen from the very start: make dealing with the Tower a choice between diplomacy and bankruptcy.

“They’re pulling out the First and Second Army from Procer,” Ime replied. “As for coin, Duchess Kegan was instructed to borrow from the northern barons if need be.”

They’d have wealth tucked aside, Malicia reluctantly admitted in a mental calculation. The lands under the baronies of Harrow and Hedges had been only lightly touched by the Tenth Crusade and their rulers had made a tidy profit selling their goods to a beleaguered south during the reconstruction of Callow after Second Liesse. More than that, they would be willing to lend. The barons were not unaware that their adversarial relationship with Catherine Foundling had barred them from the Callowan halls of power, so they would be eager to get a foot in – particularly if the debt was to be ultimately shouldered by the much more friendly Vivienne Dartwick.

No doubt a few handsome spare sons would be sent along with the coin, bearing hints that a newborn Callowan dynasty could do with an infusion of fresh noble blood. Malicia was not unfamiliar with the tactic, her hand having been sought with varying degrees of aggressiveness over decades. Organising particularly painful deaths for those who dared to insist too much had been one of the few instances in which Malicia had worked closely with the Scribe. Eudokia was no friend of hers, but the other woman had inherited that very Delosi penchant for meticulous punishment of the contemptible.

“Who will hold command?” Malicia asked, eyes still on the board.

She moved a pale knight, venturing deep behind an arrant line of pawns.

“Abigail the Fox has been left in command of the Third Army in Hainaut, so she’d dredging up Marshal Juniper herself,” Ime said, tone wary.

The empress was not so affected.

“She is a skilled tactician,” Malicia calmly said, “and a general to take seriously, but her reputation is exaggerated. Rozala Malanza would have beaten her decisively in Iserre if the Black Queen had not intervened at the last moment. Marshal Nim should be her match, if it comes to that.”

Given a decade perhaps the ‘Hellhound’ would fully grow into her talents, having been seasoned by the Uncivil Wars, but for now the experience of the commanders that had served since the Conquest was difficult to match for such a young woman. It would tell, particularly in treacherous grounds like those of the Wasteland. Still, Malicia did mourn that such a talent had been stolen away from the Empire. It had been a stroke of terrible luck, that General Istrid would die during Second Liesse and so leave her daughter adrift and her old legion easily led astray. Not the greatest misfortune to come out of that battle by any measure, but a misfortune nonetheless.

“She will be coming personally, Your Majesty,” Ime quietly said. “The Black Queen. And she pulled away two of her armies from the war on the dead, against our expectations. She is taking a much harder line than we believed she would.”

Her spymistress was not incorrect, Malicia thought as she moved a black tower near the centre of the board. The Dread Empress did not find it entirely surprising that after what the Callowans had quaintly named the ‘Night of Knives’ their queen would balk at a diplomatic resolution of their disagreements, but she had expected that Cordelia Hasenbach would push for such an initiative. The burdens of the war should have rent Procer asunder by now and forced the First Prince to seek terms, even if behind the Black Queen’s back, but out of Salia there was only silence. Scribe had seized the reins of the remaining eyes in Procer, which meant information trickled east only at a glacial pace. Alaya slid a white mage, taking a pawn.

“She cannot afford a battle with either the Tower or Abreha,” Malicia said. “The ensuing casualties would make impossible an assault on Keter. It is posturing, Ime.”

“She thinks us weak,” Ime said.

“Which will make all the stronger an impression on her when it is revealed otherwise,” Malicia said. “I have no intention of offering onerous terms to turn on the Dead King, the shock and an amenable bargain will see us through.”

The priority would be dismantling the Grand Alliance as continental power. So long as Callow was leveraged to leave it after the war Alaya expected that old rivalries between it and Procer would resume, most likely through competing commercial interests, and it would be child’s play to cause incidents at the border between Procer and the Dominion. Her plans had not all gone perfectly, of course. The matters down south had turned against her and she would admit that the Stygian coup had been a complete surprise, but General Basilia’s victories brought opportunity with them. Sponsoring an eastern alliance within the Free Cities to rival the western Helikean bloc would check Grand Alliance influence in the region.

Already the Secretariat was willing to privately entertain her envoys, worried that Delos would be gobbled up by the victorious marauding general.

“Or she could try to enthrone another in your place,” Ime murmured.

Alaya’s fingers tightened around a black knight. Malicia cocked an amused eyebrow.

“He has no armies, little practical support and fewer allies than I have fingers,” the Dread Empress of Praes said. “Amadeus has not returned to my side, but he has not raised a rebel flag beyond that unfortunate lapse at the Peace of Salia.”

Reconciliation might still be possible, she left implied. And Amadeus was in Praes, that much had been confirmed, but her once Black Knight had not made many visible waves. He had not sought allies within the highborn, reached out to the self-proclaimed Dread Empress Sepulchral or even come out of the woodworks to lead the deserter legions in the Green Stretch. The last in particular was a shame. It would have simplified things a great deal in some ways. Malicia was inclined to believe that Ranger had been an anchor around his neck, this time: for all that she was a fearsome force of violence, at the moment the half-elf was also being hunted by the Emerald Swords.

So long as she remained his companion, Amadeus could not come into the light without having those ten monsters coming for wherever he dwelled. Alaya released the knight, turning to meet her spymistress’ eyes. Ime looked troubled, as she often was these days. She was growing old, for all that rituals still kept the worst ravages of time away, frailer in both body and mind than the bold woman she had been in their youth.

“You have concerns,” Malicia said.

“In understand why we cultivated the perception of our weakness,” Ime said. “So long as we were a genuine military concern for the Grand Alliance, I agree that we ran certain... risks.”

Like Catherine Foundling gating in through the Twilight Ways and beginning to drown cities, driven to hard measures by the fear of the Grand Alliance buckling under a war being fought on two fronts. Much easier for Praes to be beset by civil strife, a threat still but only a distant one. Not urgent, an enemy that outright threatened the survival of Calernia. Not that Malicia herself did not genuinely believe that the Dead King had any real chance of winning, for Evil did not win wars, but then it was not her soldiers dying in droves. She had ensured that the Praesi civil war under her watch was to be largely bloodless, mostly fought through raids and maneuvering.

“Yet that perception may yet come back to haunt us,” Ime continued. “She despises us, Malicia. She might refuse to deal with the Tower even if it’s the safer path, so long as there is another path at all. Another credible candidate.”

Malicia studied her spymistress. It was not assassination being alluded to here, of course. Ime had argued for it in the past but Alaya was still unwilling. Such an attempt would be laughably unlikely to succeed, besides, so long as he had Ranger by his side. Why even consider the option, with that in mind? No, it was a different sort of measure that Ime was arguing for. Alaya looked down at the board and rested a finger atop the black knight she had left behind, thinking for a moment. Sometimes childish dreams had to be let go of, she thought. Even when it was painful. There would be no returning to the way things used to be, and pretending otherwise was embracing the noose.

She tipped over the knight with a flick of her finger, the ebony piece clattering against the board.

“Your advice has merit,” Dread Empress Malicia said. “Send for Marshal Nim.”

Her spymistress watched her carefully.

“You’ll do it, then?”

“Yes,” the Dread Empress of Praes said. “I will recognize her as my Black Knight.”

—

It was a pleasant night out, especially with a bottle of wine and stolen roasted chicken to gnaw on.

The hinterlands of Aksum seemed perpetually doomed to being set aflame, Amadeus of the Green Stretch mused, since a mere few decades after he’d torched them on his way to besieging the city the High Lord of Wolof was now doing the same. Young Sargon was also abducting people to fill up the city that his aunt had mutilated on her way out, however, which Amadeus found an interesting variation on the usual Praesi civil war. It was important to keep those things fresh, he felt, and Gods knew that the Dread Empire had a great deal of practice bleeding itself. The dark-haired man chewed on his second chicken leg thoughtfully, watching the smoke rising in the distance. Another village burned. They ought to get moving soon, he figured, else they would risk running into raiders.

Amadeus wasn’t exactly afraid of the outcome that would ensue, but it wouldn’t be subtle and that lack was a lot more dangerous than those raiders could ever hope to be.

He wasn’t even halfway through the leg when he first glimpsed Hye coming up the path, noticing the splash of red blood on her sleeves when she got closer. Ah, fruitful talks then. She’d always been such a skilled diplomat, if one with a particularly narrow repertoire. He let himself drink in the sight of her for a moment, the long locks framing the high cheekbones and those clever dark brown eyes. Amadeus had seen her in everything but bare skin and moonlight to mail and cloak caked in filth, and even after all these years the faint note of wonder had yet to fade. The love of his life approached, taking a long look at him and narrowing her eyes.

“You ate both legs, you jackass,” Hye Su, who some knew as the Ranger, noted.

“So I did,” Amadeus, cheerfully replied. “You should have stolen your own chicken, if you wanted the choice cut.”

Though he had once been known as some manner of knight, he’d never bothered with chivilary: to add insult to injury, he also tossed the bones of the first leg he’d eaten at her and watched as she easily dodged. Her lips twitched, though.

“I should leave you hanging for this,” Hye complained.

“You won’t,” Amadeus smiled. “You got to kill something, it always puts you in a chatty mood.”

“I don’t get chatty ,” Hye denied, deeply offended.

“Of course you don’t,” Amadeus pleasantly smiled.

He had to duck a chicken bone, but it was a victory in every way that mattered. Though huffing while she did, she dropped at his side and the both of them sat back against the tall milestone that some ancient High Lord of Aksum had raised on the hill near the road. Hye naturally helped herself to the rest of the chicken, producing a knife so she could pop the juicy but cooling pieces into her mouth, and the two of them sat closely together under the night sky.

“So I was talking with this fae,” Hye said.

“As one does,” Amadeus amiably agreed.

“He had this friend that knew a friend,” Ranger mused. “And they’d heard that the Black Queen, out west, she’s headed our way.”

“To clarify,” he said, “was this helpful rumour shared before or after you started stabbing him?”

“Eh,” Hye said. “You know how it is with fairies. There’s stabbing and then there’s stabbing .”

Sadly, Amadeus of the Green Stretch did know how it was with fairies. It was only marginally better than dealing with Wasteland highborn, something that had driven him to some fairly infamous bouts of stabbing over the years.

“Shouldn’t be a long journey through the Ways,” he said. “Two, three months at most.”

“Sooner, if Indrani’s guiding her,” Hye said. “She’s always been a natural at pathfinding.”

Amadeus hummed, amused at the understated pride in her voice. Though Hye did not visibly play favorites among her pupils, she’d always favoured those who used bows slightly over the rest.

“It is time for us to surface, then,” he said. “We need to get the last pieces in place before my own former pupil arrives.”

Hye grinned, all teeth and malice, and he felt his heart skip a beat. Even now, after all these years... well, he was not as young as he’d once been, but she did not seem to mind so what did he care? If anything she seemed to like the grey in his hair, which he had not known he was worried about until he felt relieved she did. It had been some years since Amadeus had last felt insecure, even unknowingly, and he had found it almost refreshing.

“Finally,” Ranger said. “I’ve been enjoying laying low, Amadeus, but sometimes you just need to bite down on something you know?”

“I do,” he replied in a murmur. “And this is long overdue.”

He looked east, where in the distance waited the gargantuan shape of the Tower jutting out from Ater, and he raised his half-empty bottle of wine in a toast. When was he to settle his accounts, if not the end times?

If the song refused to leave him, then he would silence it.

Prologue

“Twenty-two: do not forget the rest of Creation in the pursuit of your nemesis. Small kindnesses are the seed of grand consequences. Evil stays, Good compounds.”

– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, unknown author

The entire Hirshwald, where she had once hunted with her cousins, was now painted grey. Teurshen and its lively muddy streets, Kleinach with its pretty green houses, Senken River where every spring people from miles away had come to fish. It was all grey.

Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer, watched day by day as her realm died on beautifully painted map.

Word trickled in from every front, following the scrying lines she had laid down through the Order of the Red Lion, and with every dawn the court painter drew a few more leagues of the Principate grey on the map at the heart of the Vogue Archive. Hannoven was now bare of life, likely beyond recovery in this lifetime. Her own Rhenia was entirely in the hands of the dead save for the besieged city-fortress that was its capital. Only its first two layers of defence had been lost, last she heard from her commander there, but scrying had since been cut. Twilight’s Pass still held – the Morgentor had been lost twice, but the Kingfisher Prince and Otto Redcrown had led daring offensives to take it back both times – yet that was meaningless when the last fortresses of the Hocheben Heights had fallen and the dead were pushing deep in Bremen.

Ashen grey, death’s breath grey, spread through towns and villages that Cordelia had ridden through as a girl.

“The north fell the moment the Heights did,” the Forgetful Librarian told her the day the news came, bluntly but not cruelly. “There won’t be a living soul north of Brus come next winter.”

Cordelia thought of striking her but held back. It was not untrue, and these days she had come to rely on the Librarian’s propensity for brutal truthfulness. Most people would have held back when warning her of the effective end of her people as more than refugees and soldiers of fortune, but Cordelia no longer had time to spare for being handled. Clarity was a priceless luxury when every hour, every decision had lives on the line.

Saale, a small fortress first raised under the Iron Kings. The seven adjoining villages called the Shwestern, which Cordelia had once developed with coin in the hopes that they might grow into a small city. The valley of Kaninchenbau. Grey spread on the map, like a maw opening to devour the world whole.

“The refugees cannot stay in Brus,” Cordelia said, watching the end times take shape.

Her eyes had misted, when she’d heard that Frederic Goethal had opened his gates wide to all Lycaonese. Brus was not rich, its lands hardly any better than those of its northern neighbours’, so the Prince of Brus had effectively bankrupted himself when he’d welcomed four principalities’ worth of teenagers and children. More than that, too. Every piece of bread shared with her people could not fill the belly of his own, and these days no one had granaries to fall back on. He had sacrificed a great deal for innocents. A crown is not a privilege , she’d once told Frederic when they’d been younger. Unsure of their power, of where they stood. It is a duty. He’d not asked a damned thing for any of it, the Kingfisher Prince.

Cordelia had known few men worthier of being a prince than Frederic Goethal.

“Brus will soon begin seeing fighting,” the Librarian agreed. “The captains in Neustria sent too many reports of their fortresses being bypassed by raiders. We send your refugees further south, then. Segovia?”

“The ships will make a difference in evacuating further south still, should the principality collapse,” Cordelia mused, and so it was settled.

The Highest Assembly had voted her emergency powers allowing her to settle refugees wherever she wished in the Procer, so long as part of the financial burden was shared by the high throne. She’d nearly faced a revolt in the Chamber over the motion, which stepped on the neck of all traditional conceptions of royal sovereignty, but they’d not quite had the nerve. Cordelia had unearthed too many of the skeletons her princes had buried for them to want to risk it. When she’d passed a measure allowing her to appoint superintendence supervising the collection of princely taxes, the First Prince had gotten a closer look at their finances than any of them were comfortable with.

No wonder they’d been willing to fight her tooth and nail over the motion: a little over half of them had been cheating the high throne on taxes. In times of peace that would have been a minor scandal, but in times of war? Cordelia had the authority to have their heads for it, and that wasn’t even the part that terrified them. All she needed to do to ruin them was spread word to the street: entire cities would riot, screaming for the blood of the traitors. The way she kept ramming measures through was making her no friends, and even losing her allies, but Cordelia Hasenbach was not reigning for pleasure or friendship. If there was enough of Procer left to rebel against her after the war ended, she would walk to the headsman’s block with a smile.

The Lafran Stretch, Belles Collines, Faudefer and Patrin. The last two had still been full of people when the dead tunneled under the walls. Grey spread across the map, and not only to the north.

Cordelia’s dying homeland was but a third of the war, if even that, and dooms never came alone. Hainaut had come out the best of it, irony of ironies. The Black Queen had stripped the principality of most her armies before retreating, but she had left her last general – Lady Abigail Tanner – in a solid defensive position at the Cigelin Sisters. The grounds won against the dead by the victory at Hainaut had been promptly lost anew, the dead claiming them quicker than they could be defended, but the White Knight had broken the bridge to the north and so ended the immediate looming threat.

The Chosen had followed that up by scoring an upset victory at Malmedit that collapsed the tunnels and anchored the eastern defence line before dedicating himself body and soul to the war on Keter. He had led regular sorties into enemy territory to break up their forces before they could mass in large numbers, to great success. The White Knight had in truth been so effective there’d been talk of trying to seize and fortify the ruins of the capital to secure the locked Hellgate there, though General Abigail had forcefully stamped out any such notions. Once Cordelia would have enjoyed the White Knight’s successes, the way they proved Damned were not the only ones who could lead in dark times, but no longer.

Hanno of Arwad had crossed a line in the Arsenal, when he’d made the choice to stand in the way of the preservation of Procer. If it had been only a moment of hard-headed principle divorced from the realities of the situation, in time Cordelia might have grown to forgive it. Trust would not have resumed, but wariness would have ebbed. But it was not as simple as that. Cordelia could not think of the way the White Knight had refused to negotiate, to compromise, without hearing in those terse answers the echo of another Chosen’s voice. Laurence de Montfort, the Saint of Swords, feet on the table as she told Cordelia that the Procer must burn so something better might come of it.

Would Hanno of Arwad let them burn too, for his principles? Cordelia found she was not sure of the answer, not anymore. There could be no trust there, no relying on the Chosen. As in so many things she stood alone.

“The Heights were a body blow, but it’s Cleves that will kill us if anything does,” the Librarian sighed on a cold winter morning, sipping at a mug of tea.

The third and last front, Rozala Malanza’s. For years it had been the story of victory, the proof that the dead could beaten back that’d been so instrumental in keeping Procer from sinking into despair. And to her honour the Princess of Aequitan had stubbornly held even in the face of a Hellgate yawning open while she still suffered the siege of a great army of the dead. She could not be everywhere, though. The northern point of Cleves still held, and parts of the eastern shoreline as well, but Keter had swept out of Lake Pavin and devoured whole the western shore.

Tertre, Sengrin, Lagueroche. Grey spread like a sickness in the blood.

The walled city of Atandor was now under siege, and should it fall then the dead would have a way into the lowlands of Cleves. More terrible still, the forces of the Kingdom of the Dead would find nothing in their way as they spilled further south onto the plains of Brabant and Lyonis. And Atandor would fall, in three months at the latest. Agnes had been clear on that, as clear as the Augur could ever be. Its defenders had not run out of valour, but they had run out of food.

When the dead made it that far south, the war was over. Even if all they did was burn the crop fields before retreating, the ensuing starvation would collapse the Principate. Then even should the Kingdom of Callow be willing to starve itself feeding Procer, which was highly dubious, in practice the grain simply could not be moved and distributed quickly enough. There was a secret truth behind it all, though, one Cordelia had grasped in the wake of her uncle’s death at Hainaut: the war was already lost. For Procer, anyway, if not yet the rest of Calernia. This was no longer about winning, it was about saving what she still could. Who she still could.

“We will have to recall Princess Rozala and her army before Atandor falls,” the First Prince said.

It was giving most of Cleves over to the grey, but then it had already been made into a wasteland by Keter’s Due when the Hellgate was opened near Trifelin. With so many of its best farmlands blighted, the principality could no longer feed itself.

“If she puts up a defence line around Peroulet it could hold for a few months while the dead are still massing,” the Librarian muttered. “It won’t be a popular decision, mind you, but it’s the right one.”

It was more than the army Cordelia wanted to salvage. Should she get assassinated – and it was becoming more likely that she would be with every measure forced through the Highest Assembly – then the only other royal in Procer that could feasibly be elected to the high throne without too much quibbling was Rozala Malanza. The Princess of Aequitan might be one of the finest generals left to Procer, but she was now simply too valuable to keep risking in Cleves. Malanza would hate her for the order, but what did it matter? She had hated Cordelia to the bone since the Great War, and there would be no mending a hatred born of a mother’s death.

“Gods forgive me,” the Librarian suddenly said, “but we’re not going to win this war, are we?”

Cordelia went still, for a heartbeat. She had not thought anyone else had noticed, not quite so soon. She needed a few months still before it became known, before panic and chaos spread-

“It’ll be out east it’s decided, in Praes,” the Forgetful Librarian continued. “If the Black Queen can bring back diabolists and reinforcements in time for a strike at Keter to still be feasible.”

The First Prince did not allow her relief to touch her face.

“Catherine Foundling will do what she must to settle the East,” Cordelia said, dimly surprised to find she meant every word. “We must simply keep Procer afloat until she returns and the last gamble of this war can be taken.”

That, though, was a lie. There was one last gamble awaiting beyond that, if arms failed and it all came down to the spectre of annihilation looming over all of Calernia. The First Prince had found the funds and the men, ensured all that could be done was. The corpse that had been dredged up from the depths of Lake Artoise could be awoken, the priests had promised her. It could be used as a weapon. One that would destroy Procer, perhaps, but Procer was already halfway into the grave. If it all else failed, Cordelia Hasenbach was not only the First Prince of Procer: she was also the Warden of the West. She had a responsibility to ensure at least some of Calernia survived the Dead King’s fury.

And that responsibility, now, was as a finger laid against a trigger.

—

Alaya did not enjoy war.

It’d surprised her when she had understood as much about herself, as she’d believed herself a harder woman than that. No tyrant had ever climbed the Tower to less than a stairway’s worth of corpses and she had certainly been no exception, so she’d wondered what it was about war that made her balk. It was not the violence, surely, for Alaya was no stranger to the use of it. Rarely by her own hands, but to a Dread Empress of Praes assassination was no less a necessary tool of ruling than laws or taxes. Was it the magnitude, she had wondered? Edmund Inkhand had once written, in that sardonically pointed manner so typical of his journals, that men only disapproved of murder so long as it did not involve banners and great numbers.

Yet though Alaya had enjoyed reading the old king’s writings as a girl and then differently so as a woman, she simply did not have it in her to care for people – strangers, people in the abstract – the way that he so obviously had. Grief at the human condition was not burden she had to bear, so what had been the source of her unease? It was the indiscriminate nature of it all, Alaya had later come to understand after decades of wondering. The Conquest had been one of the cleanest, most efficient wars in living memory: it had been largely soldiers that died during it, no cities were sacked and the countryside was not ravaged. And still the entire exercise had been like a stone in a shoe.

War could not be controlled, not really. It could not be contained the way that assassination and intrigues could, risk and results balanced like lines of a ledger. To Alaya’s eyes, using war to achieve one’s ends was rather like setting fire to a house to kill a man: dangerous as much to you as the enemy. No without reason was it an old saying in the Wasteland that a lit blaze knew neither friend nor foe.

Knowing all this about herself, Dread Empress Malicia found herself darkly amused that she had regardless spent the last five years and change at war with other powers to various degrees. Most ironic of all was the civil war that Praes was still in the throes of, which she had spent no small amount of effort to start and then maintain in order to preserve her interests and that of the Empire. Perhaps that was why even going from success to success had somehow only increased her unease.

The dark-skinned beauty ran a finger across the obsidian table at which the Imperial council sat in session, admiring how it was all sculpted out of a single piece. Reputedly it was the work of Regalia II, carved when she’d been out campaigning in Callow. Given her death abroad it’d never been used by the empress herself: it was her successor, Maledicta II, who’d been the first to sit at it. In some parts of Praes there was even a turn of phrase about the tale: ‘carving an empress’ table’, which meant undertaking an effort that would benefit only your successor.

Alaya was not particularly fond of the sculpted rim, which was a parade of twisting devils and kneeling foes, but she had fond memories of the table itself. She’d spent many hours seated at it during some of the best years of her life, those heady days after she had climbed the Tower and she had set to reforming Praes with the people dearest to her in the world. Back then the heart of her council had been made up of a trusted few: Amadeus, Wekesa and Ime. On occasion others had been brought in for a few months or years so that particular issues might be settled with their expertise, but they had always been temporary additions.

Nowadays Alaya found her council was little like the old one, for all that Ime and a Black Knight still sat on it.

The mirror above the ever-burning fireplace in the back subtly fogged over, the polished bronze growing clouded as the old enchantment bound to the hallways outside the council room were triggered. Malicia retreated towards the end of the table, ensuring she would be seated by the time the first of them entered – she took the time to array herself in the throne-like seat, draping the folds of her bronze and green dress in a way that she knew lent her a regal air. Ime was the first to enter, as was her habit. Malicia’s spymistress was visibly aging these days, the alchemies and spells that had slowed the ravages finally unravelling.

It was not an unusual thing in highborn, who all suffered the same fate when their flesh inevitably grew inured to the alchemies and began rejecting the spells. Some became desperate and began dealing with devils then, but only the foolish dared and Ime was nothing of the sort. It was a graceful aging, too, for all that the spymistress resented it: though her hair was now turning white and her skin creasing, she remained in good shape and firm flesh. Not that Ime would see it that way, of course.

Alaya was well aware that Wasteland aristocrats had an instinctual disgust towards the signs of old age, most of them having come to associate it with the lowborn as a consequence of being raised by ageless and seemingly forever-young relatives. It was a self-reinforcing shame, as highborn visible aging tended to retreat from good society to maintain the illusion of agelessness through their discretion. Malicia’s spymistress offered a short bow, her modest blue robes whispering against the floor as she did, and wordlessly headed for the seat to the empress’ left as she had for decades. The other woman she had been awaiting took longer to arrive, and took a different route.

It was necessary, given that Malicia’s current Black Knight was an ogre and so physically incapable of squeezing through most doors.

High Marshal Nim – raised above other marshals after coming into her Name – was a very deliberate individual. The eastern door had been heightened and broadened for her but even so the ogre opened it slowly, as if she were afraid of slamming it into the wall. The Black Knight lowered her head to pass the threshold and only straightened when she was under the heigh ceiling of the council room, her plain armour of dark steel plate pulling taut against her. She wore no helm, leaving bare two dark braids framing a tanned face as the rest of her hair went down her back untied. Her large eyes were a pale brown that leaned into pink, and her face seemed pulled into a permanent frown that made her large nose even more prominent.

She looked like something of a brute, as all ogres did, but Malicia knew better. Amadeus, on one of their evenings drinking terrible wine together, had noted that while Grem One-Eye was likely the finest general in the Dread Empire the ogre was a closer match to him than Ranker by a significant margin. Nim inclined her head and chest in the approximation of a bow, taking her prepared enchanted steel seat at the end of table facing Malicia. If there were others the Black Knight would have been seated at the empress’ right, as was customary, but there was no need for such pageantry when it was only the three of them. There would be no fourth: Malicia had not allowed the honour of the Warlock’s seat to any of the mages serving her.

The empress opened the council herself, voice ringing out.

“We have word from Foramen,” Dread Empress Malicia said. “The Confederation of the Grey Eyries was... emboldened by news of the Black Queen’s coming. They have resumed their attacks against Foramen and High Lady Wither.”

Nim grimaced, thick lips pulling at thicker skin. All expressions looked exaggerated on ogres, by virtue of their size. It often made them seem foolish or stupid, so most who left the Hall of Skulls learned to school their faces into neutrality to avoid the impression – and so now their kind was known as being inexpressive instead.

“That tangles up the entire south for us, Your Dread Majesty,” the Black Knight said. “Wither won’t move while the enemy is at her gate, and Kahtan will be looking to sink a knife in her back.”

High Lady Takisha of Kahtan would no doubt phrase it differently, Malicia thought, but Nim was essentially correct. With Thalassina a blackened ruin and Foramen in goblin hands, Kahtan had become the last high seat in the hands of a Taghreb highborn and so incredibly influential among their people. High Lady Takisha was much more interested in putting that influence to use in reclaiming Foramen for one of her kin that fighting battles on Malicia’s behalf, not that the empress had pushed hard for such contributions. Until recently, it had suited her for Kahtan to largely sit the war out: it lent credence to the perception of stalemate between Sepulchral and the Tower that had been the keystone of her diplomatic strategy. Malicia has bled Kahtan dry of gold and mages as recompense for the feet-dragging, too, both of which had been useful in pursuing her plans abroad.

“High Lady Takisha has called her vassals to Kahtan,” Ime shared. “Most Taghreb nobles in Praes will be there, considering she’s the last human high seat in the south. We could skip her and attempt to muster them directly when they’re gathered.”

“It would be hasty to attempt as much,” Malicia said. “We’re not intending on extended fighting against the Grand Alliance.”

And once peace was made the empress would be able to use Takisha Muraqib’s absence as a reason to draw heavily on her troops for the Empire’s contribution to the war on Keter. It would weaken her significantly going forward, hammering down one of the last nails that might potentially stick up to challenge Malicia’s authority in Praes.

“We can settle this without the Taghreb,” the Black Knight calmly agreed. “The key is making sure the Black Queen doesn’t end up backing Sepulchral for the Tower. That would be an alliance difficult to beat on the field.”

“From what we’ve intercepted of their correspondence,” Ime said, “it seems like the Grand Alliance is keeping High Lady Abreha at a distance. Not hostile, but hardly allied.”

“That could change,” Malicia said, “should we damage Foundling’s armies too much. If Amadeus were there to back I could not fathom her choosing Sepulchral’s candidature over his, but he remains in the wind. Incidents will have to be arranged to turn that distance into enmity.”

And sometimes Alaya did wonder if that wasn’t the very reason Amadeus was absent: so that nothing could coalesce around him too early. If he was not putting pieces into place without binding himself to them, getting forces in motion without himself needing to be at the helm. But if that was truly the case, where was he? Even now, with his old apprentice at the gates, there was no hint of a plot in sight. Malicia knew better than to believe a man like him would disappear quietly into obscurity. It was worrying, that even Ime’s best efforts had not been enough to find his trail.

“Assuming Callow begins by linking up with the deserters in the Green Stretch, as is most probable, I’ll have infiltrators in place by the time the Army of Callow begins marching north,” Ime said. “Given the positions our people in Sepulchral’s ranks, arranging those incidents is achievable.”

“It won’t be enough,” the Black Knight said. “Foundling didn’t fight half a dozen wars to roll over for the Tower at the first sign of trouble, Your Dread Majesty. We’ll have to bloody her before she even considers terms.”

“It will take more than that,” Ime frankly said. “It’s been personal for her since the Night of Knives. If she’s not forced to choose between drastic consequences and dealing with us, it’s my belief she will absolutely keep pushing.”

Neither of the two looked at her, even though the so-called ‘Night of Knives’ had been ordered by Malicia personally. It’d had unfortunate long-term consequences, she would admit, but the notion had been sound at the time. It’d been only tangentially a reprisal for Foundling’s assassination attempts of her in Keter, after all. The most important motives had all been political in nature. After securing the Dead King’s aid to keep Procer in check, Malicia had believed that the last major loose end to handle was Callow. She’d had allies in the Free Cities and ways to collapse that alliance’s coherence, meaning that the last potential territorial threat to Praes had been a resurgent Kingdom of Callow under Catherine Foundling.

Decapitating the small but skilled cadre of individuals that the young queen had been relying on to rule her realm and carry out her reforms had only been logical, and in that aspect worked exactly as intended. Unfortunately, instead of returning home and licking her wounds the Black Queen had instead disappeared for a year and re-emerged as high priestess of the drow with a set of fresh armies at her back. There had, in Alaya’s opinion, been no way for her to really predict that. It had effectively set the balance of power in the other direction and begun a cascade of events that’d made Callow into the most influential member of the Grand Alliance, which had in turn forced the empress to implement drastic measures to compensate.

And it might have been dangerous, it might have been hard and Alaya had more than once hesitated, but her plans had borne fruit. Foundling was now here in Praes, on grounds Malicia had prepared for years and desperate enough to accept terms when she was brought to the table. Now Malicia only needed to walk the path a little further still and it would all fall into place – she was, in other words, in one of the single most perilous positions of her entire reign. The last inch to the finish line was always the most treacherous. Alaya would know, considering how many people she’d killed there.

“I do not disagree,” Malicia finally said. “I naturally leave picking the battlefield entirely to you, High Marshal. All of the Tower’s resources are opened to your office in the pursuit of bringing Foundling to the table.”

“A great honour, Your Dread Majesty,” the Black Knight said, bowing her head.

Ime seemed about to speak when she suddenly closed her mouth, and a heartbeat later there was a polite knock at the door. Malicia’s spymistress glanced at her and the empress nodded permission. Ime slipped out a few moments and Malicia made small talk with Nim about her eldest son, who had recently wed, until she returned. Both women gave the spymistress their full attention when she did.

“The Black Queen has arrived in Praes,” Ime said, closing the door behind her.

Malicia smiled. Finally.

“How close to Satus did she gate out?” the Black Knight asked.

Ime’s lips thinned.

“She is not in the Green Stretch at all, High Marshal,” the spymistress said. “The word came from High Lord Sargon: she’s less than a day’s march away from Wolof .”

Dread Empress Malicia went still. Wolof, which was on the other side of the empire from any sort of ally of Callow’s. Wolof, whose high lord she held in her thrall. Wolof, where Malicia had laid seeds for a great victory – the filling of a fourth seat at this very table.

Someone had just made a mistake, and to Malicia’s sudden disquiet she was not certain whether it had been her or the Black Queen.

Announcements

Hi!

And with this chapter we’re started on Book VII, the last of the series. I hope you’ll enjoy reading the last stretch of Catherine’s journey as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thanks again with all of you reading and supporting the Guide, especially those of you who’ve been here from the start.

This month’s extra chapter won’t actually be one of the Guide, it’s instead the first two chapters of the project I’ll be working on when the Guide ends. The series called Pale Lights, and you’ll get to the summary of both the series and the first book by clicking here. Table of Contents gets you to those two chapters. Have a look, you might up enjoying the new work! I’ll be returning to regular updates after that until the end of Book VII.

While on the subject of extra chapters, I’m making official a change. As those are a Patreon reward in the first place and they’re not necessary to understand the books, I’ll be making them Patreon-exclusive from April forward. That means they’ll be posted only on my Patreon, accessible only to people supporting me there. The extra chapters already currently up on the site will be staying there.

EDIT

Slight adjustment to the policy outlined above: as an additional perk for the people supporting me financially, which extra chapter is next written will be decided by a patron-only poll on Patreon where anyone can vote on a selection of options. On the flipside, once Book VII is finished its extra chapters will be added to the rest on the public site. Think of it more as an advance for supporters than a paywall.

Hoping you’ll enjoy the last book,

E.E.

Chapter 1: Debut

“The trick is to always invite an unrelated highborn idiot to every council. When you inevitably execute them, all the other highborn idiots will behave for the rest of the discussion.”

– Dread Emperor Vindictive I

It was an impressive watchtower. All red brick and stone, three stories high and jutting out of the hills with an elegant silhouette. It’d fallen victim to that unfortunate Praesi tendency of having an open-sky spellcasting platform instead of a rooftop, but that was the most common practice in the Wasteland. The Sahelians had clearly shelled out good coin for this place, which made it all the more amusing that they’d not done the same for the force garrisoning it. The two dozen soldiers had prudently begun to leg it long before my first knights reached the bottom of the hills, so now it was my personal banner flying in the wind.

The phalange who’d pulled down the golden lion banner of the Sahelians and replaced it with the Sword and Crown was gone, leaving the four of us to look out at the view spread out below, and even though it was a thing of beauty I found myself growing irritated. No, not ‘even though’. Because.

Wolof was beautiful, and it kind of pissed me off.

“This is ridiculous,” I complained. “I read the reports, they had a goddamn demon loose in the streets just a few years ago.”

“Ah, the old Wasteland special,” Her Grace, Princess Vivienne of Callow, drawled.

I rolled my eye at her. Being a magnanimous soul, I was not bitter in the slightest that she could wear a nice pale blue dress with simple silver circlet over her milkman’s braid instead of, you know, being stuck in full regalia and the Mantle of Woe. Truly, why would I envy anyone the privilege of not wearing a fucking cloak in the Wasteland’s heat? It wasn’t like I’d seriously considered weaving a miracle that’d warm her with Night, much less almost done it twice.

I was a better person than that, and also she’d probably notice.

“That’s actually civil war,” Hakram noted. “Though considering the demon incident came at the end of a brutal war of succession, you’re not entirely wrong.”

Adjutant was standing on his prosthetic limbs comfortably, not needing to lean against the crenellation in the slightest, and like it often did the sight had my lips quirking into a satisfied smile. He wasn’t going to be winning footraces anytime soon and I’d not send him into too rough a fight, but Hakram was far gone from the days of hissing pain and being wheelchair-bound. Masego’s work on the arm and leg had been extraordinary, the shifting parts of steel and leather that mimicked muscles returning much of what he had lost to the tall orc. He no longer wore the whole set of burned plate he’d once been known by, instead keeping only the breastplate and the skirt, and his black hair was worn shorter than I’d seen it in years.

“You can never go wrong betting on civil war, when it comes to Praes,” Vivienne conceded.

“Don’t you two go pretending this is normal,” I insisted. “I mean, look at the place!”

Almost half of Wolof’s population had died when Sargon Sahelian rose up to overthrow his aunt, Lady Tasia, and the situation had gotten bad enough in there that the Legions of Terror had seen no choice but to forcefully invest the city. Something their doctrine specifically warned against attempting unless there was no other choice, when that city was a High Seat of Praes. Now, though? You’d never know unless you were told. Tall walls rose elegantly from the dusty ground, all sun-drenched stone and pale red brick, but from our position here atop a distant hill we could see a stretch of the city itself and it was impressive .

Wolof as it now stood had little to do with the village sprouted around a ritual site it’d supposedly grown out of. The modern city had actually shed those old grounds, part of them ending up as a handful of riverside villages that served as an informal port called Sinka and the rest now a closed compound to the north of the city that the locals called Zaman Ango: a great mass of mazes and pyramids hidden behind mud brick walls, ancient places of power that the Sahelians kept to themselves and their favourites. The actual city, surrounded by the greater walls, had instead been cut away at and remade until it was as glorious as its rulers believed themselves to be.

Broadly speaking, Wolof was a thin half-circle with the flatness facing north and two parts jutting out of said flatness: towering noble palaces and the set of fortifications surrounding an aqueduct. Avenues criss-crossed the length of it like arteries, tying together gates and districts by a pleasing design, while that great aqueduct – much too ornate to be of Miezan make, with its stele-like pillars – swept down from a great hill to the north-east like a raised river of stone. Cisterns and smaller water funnels covered rooftops, spreading out like a web of stone and copper, while three-story houses on tall steps stood so close together their backs were as walls. Windows were curved and often thick pillars of stone jutted out of walls, like strange handholds for giants to climb.

It was the colour that staggered me, though. Wolof was said to be the greatest vault of magic in all of Praes, its libraries and spell repositories rival to the Tower’s if not even greater, and unconsciously that’d made me think of it as dark and dreary. Black magic made into a city. Instead it was a riot of red and yellow, some paints fading but others biting fresh, and everywhere subtle lines of green were woven in. Rooftop gardens gathered around cisterns and pools were adorned with bright banners – green and yellow, orange and purple, cream and blue – hung to look like shivering walls. It was a gorgeous, thriving city that somehow made Laure look like half a hovel even after being half-razed by godsdamned demon of Madness. It was infuriating as it was impressive.

The last of us, correctly interpreting my vehemence as a polite and reasonable request of explanation, broke the almost melancholy she’d been in as she watched her childhood home in the distance.

“My cousin Sargon was made to study wards as a young man,” Akua said. “For a time it was a fad with the great families, after Wekesa the Warlock came to prominence. Everyone fancied they would raise a mage to beat him at his own game.”

I snorted. Yeah, they would. Never mind that Masego’s father had been apprentice – and Apprentice – to the last Warlock as well as a frankly ridiculously talented man in a lot of regards. No doubt there’d been an expectation that gold and a noble pedigree would beat out any peasant mage’s effort at anything.

“How’d that go?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“Corpses and screaming, mostly,” Akua noted. “Warding becomes a rather dangerous art when one reaches the heights of High Arcana.”

“And this leads to the city looking pristine how?” Vivienne impatiently asked.

My successor, made a genuine princess by some truly inspired wrangling of Callowan law courtesy of Hakram, kept a civil tone as she spoke. Much of the venom had gone out over the years, though Vivienne quite clearly despised the Doom of Liesse – who was not particularly above needling her when she could, I’d admit.

“Though Sargon was only ever a passable practitioner of the Art,” Akua continued, “he did take to the paired engineering studies impressively. He was often called on for work in Zaman Ango because of this, and evidently his experiences there proved of use when rebuilding the city.”

A grunt of acknowledgement was her only answer, while I allowed my own gaze to wander around.

It was a nice morning, I thought. The sun was warm, the wind lazy and the company more than decent. It was hard to enjoy nice mornings, though, when I knew the world was coming closer to toppling into the dark with every breath we took. Hasenbach was still keeping Procer together, but the cracks were spreading and I couldn’t be sure how long it would be before the Principate collapsed. Still, at least the view was stunning. The watchtower the four of us stood on was maybe an hour’s ride away from the city, set on few hilly sloped. South of Wolof, these were as close to heights as you could get for a dozen miles.

Behind us the Army of Callow and its auxiliaries were encamped in force, palisades already half-raised, while to the west the raging waters of the Upper Wasaliti roiled. The east led deeper into the Wasteland, into the lands of the closest families sworn to the Sahelians, while between us and the city there was nothing save roads and farmland. Not the kind of fields you’d see in Callow, though. Small hills of stratified stone and dust rose gently, with vividly green small ‘valleys’ filled with orchards or crops nestled in between. I couldn’t see much wheat here, but sweet potatoes and cucumbers were common and I saw fruits that would be worth a fortune in Callow – lemons, dates and pineapples, to name just a few.

“Those small green nooks,” I said, studying a few of the closer ones with a narrowed eye. “There’s raised stones around them. Those aren’t wards, though, are they?”

It’d be a frankly absurd amount of magic, if they were, and even people without the Gift or my sensitivities to power would have been able to feel it.

“Not exactly,” Akua hedged. “It is the setting of a metaphysical boundary, but nothing as... decisive as a ward. It is meant to keep the magic of field rituals contained when they are used.”

Right , I thought. They’d need to, otherwise the inefficiency of trying to make the ground cultivable would be a nightmare. The amount of wasted power would make the rituals nigh unusable, and probably wreck the soil too. There was a reason magical healing was dangerous when you did it too much in the same place, and the principles involved here weren’t all that different.

“You’re saying all those gardens of green were made with blood?” Vivienne asked, sounding horrified.

“The grounds around Wolof are not so poor,” Akua replied, shaking her head. “Perhaps a tenth of these are made fertile by ritual killing, on a good year. It is only when the weather spoils crops or the ground sickens that widespread sacrifices are required.”

“And the Sahelians are said to have the finest rituals in Praes,” Hakram gravelled. “Fewer deaths required and the ground is healed longer.”

Akua laughed, the motion pleasing to watch in the conservatively cut but tightly fitting blue and orange dress she’d elected to wear as her form. As had become her habit she wore no jewels, even her black and orange cloak kept closed by a simple iron brooch.

“You can simply ask, Adjutant,” she said. “It is true enough my kin’s ritual rites are superior, though the mages of Kahtan yet make our attempts to manipulate the weather look like the work of fumbling children. My ancestors parlayed their advantage into expanded influence: we could usually afford to spare sacrifices as gifts, which in turn spared lords the costs of relying on the Tower instead.”

As a young girl I would have been sickened to the bone by the thought of human sacrifice, and in truth part of me still was. Akua was talking about trading people like cattle – and the laws that restricted that fate to criminals only were rather recent to Praes – and consigning them to ugly deaths so magic could be squeezed out of their lifeblood. I’d sent too many people into the grinding gears of wars to be able to speak on that without the hypocrisy choking me, though. How many people would a Praesi lord kill like that, in a lifetime’s span? A hundred, three hundred? I’d spent more of my people on skirmishes leading up to battles without batting an eye.

I could tell myself it was soldiers I’d spent and I’d not opened their throats like lambs headed for the spit, but that was just dressing up the truth. And so I stayed silent, did not allow my lips to curl in disgust. If a practice offended me, I ought to either act to end it or shut up. Empty condemnations served no purpose but patting yourself on the back. Establishing a solid grain trade between Praes and Callow would do more to kill the practice than the most convincing sermon in the history of sermons, and I fully intended on securing that by treaty before I left the Empire. Among other things. Praes had been left to moulder for too long. That mess didn’t look like it was going to fix itself, so all that was left was getting my hands dirty.

“Horrid,” Vivienne flatly replied. “Though it seems to have bought loyalty. My Jacks believe none of High Lord Sargon’s vassals have turned on him.”

“Not openly, anyway,” I muttered.

“Scribe was in agreement, before you sent her away with Archer,” Hakram reminded me.

“Scribe lost control of the Eyes in the empire to Ime,” I said. “She’s got people around here, but she’s not all-seeing.”

The Webweaver, like every other kind of spider, needed a web to crawl on.

“In the wake of my mother’s death and the financial difficulties that preceded it, I expect the Tower’s spymistress to have sunk deep hooks in the region,” Akua sighed. “My cousin proved to be a fine enough lord, but his seat was shattered and he had to spend time to consolidate power. The Eyes will not have missed the opportunity.”

We weren’t blind in the region, far from it, but it couldn’t be denied the opposition had better eyes on most everything. That was fine: I’d gotten used to fighting that sort of war. The trick was to hit hard and move quicker than the enemy could follow.

“The real question is how many of his vassals will bring their armies if he calls,” I said. “Only a third of his personal forces are with High Marshal Nim’s field army, but that doesn’t make what he’s got here a large force. He’ll need his lords if he wants to do more than hide behind his walls.”

We believed Sargon Sahelian to have forces in the area of five thousand soldiers in the city and its outskirts, which in most cases would have been a pittance compared to the sixteen thousand Callowans and auxiliaries I’d brought with me. The trouble was that this wasn’t a petty border fort, it was Wolof. If we tried to take that city by force our numbers might genuinely not be enough. High Seats were always full of nasty surprises, and this one would be worse than most.

“If it comes that, we’ll have to take the city before they get here,” Vivienne said.

“I do not recommend trying the Sererian Walls,” Akua frankly replied. “Repairing their wards will have been my cousin’s utmost priority after his ascension, it will be long done. His mages will hammer away at any force we send from behind their protection.”

“Juniper doesn’t believe we can take the city in fewer than six months,” Hakram noted. “Even if we seize the fortress in the northern hills and cut off the aqueduct there, there are too many wells inside the walls. We would be betting on food running out instead of water if it comes to a siege.”

Which would be quite the gamble, considering we had no supply lines of our own. We might end up hungry before the enemy did. My army was carrying its foodstuff with it, in the Legion manner, but aside from the rare convoy through the Twilight Ways there wouldn’t be more coming. If we’d emerged further south, closer to the Blessed Isle, it might have been possible to arrange a supply line out of Callow. I’d chosen otherwise, though. First because down south was exactly where Malicia and Sepulchral wanted us, but also because I didn’t want to set up that supply line in the first place. I couldn’t really afford to, when I needed all that food and people headed west instead for the greater war still being waged there.

So instead we’d emptied granaries and grabbed everything we could before moving out east. In practice we had about six month’s worth of food with us, though with the planned convoys we would maybe manage to stretch that to seven in a pinch. That would be enough if everything went according to plan, which pretty much meant it wasn’t enough. So the Hellhound and I had gotten... inventive.

“We don’t actually need to take the city,” I said. “It’s not what we’re after here. There’s going to be a battle before this campaign is over, but it won’t be in Wolof unless something goes catastrophically wrong. We’re here to rob Sargon Sahelian, not kill him.”

Funny thing about Wolof, these days: it was probably the only High Seat in the whole of Praes that had a significant food surplus. After its losses during the war of succession its population had been massively lowered while its farmland remained largely untouched, and it’d kept trading heavily with Callow until relations broke. Throw in that the field force it’d had to feed had been relatively small – by virtue of large chunks of the Sahelian household troops either dying at Second Liesse or when the Fourteenth stormed the city – and the city was currently the Wasteland’s undisputed queen when it came to the fullness of her granaries.

I wanted that grain to feed my army, so naturally I was going to trick a High Lord of Praes out of it.

“Banners are approaching,” Vivienne sharply said.

I followed her gaze, eye narrowing as I found what she meant. Riders, maybe twenty of them, and a half dozen banners between them. I murmured a short prayer to the Crows before drawing on Night, a sluggish handful of power answering my will after a moment. I sharpened my eyesight with it, wasting not a drop, and studied the approaching men. The golden lion of the Sahelians flew highest, standing out starkly on the elaborate banner of that line: an oval filled with curved swaths of black and red, stripes of small white teeth cutting through looking outwards. I saw a blue stork and purple dog flying lower, while the other banners were entirely patterning of colour.

“The stork and dog are the Bassa and the Chenoi,” Akua explained after I shared. “The two closest houses to the east. They must have already had a presence in the city when we arrived.”

So Sargon was sending us a message that he wasn’t standing alone. I rather admired how quickly he’d gotten over the surprise of our arrival, considering my army had begun moving out of the gates south of Wolof barely an hour before dawn and it wasn’t even noon. In a few hours he’d put together enough of a plan to feel comfortable sending an embassy to me, which I took as a healthy reminder that underestimating anyone who’d been able to claim and keep a High Seat of Praes was a good way to end up dead. I watched the riders approached and smiled, rolling my shoulder as if to limber it.

“Finally,” I said. “Let’s go see what your cousin has to say, Akua.”

—

I waited for them at the top of the shallowest slope, easy to see from a distance.

Hakram and Vivienne stood at my right, Akua at my left and around us the Order of Broken Bells sat the saddle in utter silence. Like statues armoured in shining steel, lances raised like a whispered promise of violence. The envoys dismounted at the bottom of the hill. Not all of them, though, only three: two men and a woman, all Soninke and no older than thirty. Akua leaned closed to whisper in my ear.

“The man in the centre is Chikodi Sahelian,” she said. “He is my cousin twice removed, but more closely related to Sargon. They were at odds as children.”

I inclined my head in thanks, her breath still warm against my cheek. The other two were nobles too, going by the golden eyes, so at a guess I’d say they were from the Bassa and the Chenoi. The rest of the delegation stayed mounted like my knights, their horses well-disciplined and their colourful scale armour of fine make. Career soldiers, those, career killers. That was fine. I had those too, and mine were better. Chikodi Sahelian, a strikingly good-looking man almost as tall as Hakram, took the lead of his party and rose halfway up the slope before offering a perfect courtly bow.

“This one humbly greets you, Queen of Callow,” the noble said.

Ugh. I glanced at Akua, who looked amused. She’d only ever used formal Praesi diplomatic language with me the once and it’d been mostly to mock me, something I found myself belatedly grateful for. Not the mockery, the other thing. If he stuck to that the whole time this was going to be irritating.

“So, out of curiosity,” I said, allowing a Laure drawl to slip into my voice. “What is it you did that made you so eminently expendable you got picked?”

Chikodi’s face blanked. Ah, how nostalgic. As if him aggressively not giving me a reaction wasn’t already one.

“This one begs your pardon, mighty one,” Chikodi calmly said, “for he does not understand your meaning.”

“He used to shove Sargon down the stairs in the Western Palace,” Akua noted. “And spill ink on his parchments just before we had assignments due. There was also enmity between their fathers over the position of seneschal of Sinka, I believe.”

“And Sargon sent him here over that, knowing there was a decent chance I’d just crack open his skull and rip out whatever I wanted to know?”

Chikodi’s face did not change, though a slight tremor went up his leg. Akua elegantly shrugged.

“We are Sahelians , dearest,” she reminded me.

“Cold,” I replied, not without appreciation.

Small slights and all that. I’d never been one to mind a bit of petty retribution.

“Gods Below,” Chikodi hoarsely said. “It is true. You really are Lady Akua returned, as the stories said.”

The woman at his side, soft-skinned but sharp-eyed, let out a small hiss of surprise. I glanced at her hand and found a few fading motes of magic there, reluctantly impressed she’d been able to use even a minor spell without my noticing.

“And unbound,” she said. “A shade, yet unbound.”

The conversation might have unravelled further, if someone hadn’t stepped in.

“You used a spell on one of us under truce banner,” Vivienne said, tone even.

All three of them froze. It wasn’t necessarily a breach of truce terms to do as much, in truth, but it was... toeing a line.

“Not on any of you, not directly,” the woman began, but I interrupted with a snort.

“What an auspicious start,” I said. “Fine, I’ll let this one go.”

She looked relieved for a moment, before smiling and bowing and thanks.

“Break your fingers,” I casually said. “Five of them. Same hand.”

The smile went away. A moment of silence passed, all eyes on me. I cocked an eyebrow.

“Well?” I asked.

Golden eyes sought me out and found not a speck of sympathy. You couldn’t let Wasteland nobles get one of you, not even a small thing. And you could never just let it go without answer – they’d lose all respect for you immediately, see you as someone that could be crossed with impunity. The fingers would heal easy enough, she might even be able to do it herself if she was a fine enough mage. It was the pain that was the price I was asking. The pain and the humiliation. She looked through the rest of us and found no purchase, no willing intercessor, and her face stilled.

“As you say, Black Queen,” the mage replied.

There was a sharp crack, as she began with her thumb and swallowed a scream. Granting her no further attention, I moved my gaze to a shaken Chikodi.

“You’ve got my attention,” I said. “What does High Lord Sargon want?”

“The High Lord desires only peace and friendship, mighty one,” Chikodi said. “And shares that this is the will of Her Dread Majesty herself, not merely his own wish.”

“Huh,” I replied, unimpressed. “That’s quite polite of you, really, but I happen to have come over for a spot of war. Whether or not that involves me sacking your city and putting every Sahelian not in my service to the sword is up to Sargon, but I’ll be honest – we’re not looking good at the moment.”

It was surprisingly cathartic to threaten Praesi nobility like this, I found. I really should do it more often.

“The Sererian Walls have never fallen,” Chikodi evenly said. “This would be-”

“They fell to the Legions, when your lord was raised,” Adjutant interrupted.

Anger flickered on the nobleman’s face, the most visible reaction so far. It took me a heartbeat to understand why he would likely be more offended at Hakram interrupting than the rest of us, and my fingers tightened around my staff when I did. Ah, Praesi. The remembrance of why I’d despised so many of them as young girl had begun to fade but here they were, so kindly restoring it for me.

“They have never fallen when the city was not at war with itself,” Chikodi curtly said.

“Not quite as impressive a boast,” I noted. “All right, this is beginning to turn into a waste of my time. What exactly is it that Sargon’s offering as terms so I don’t torch his home to teach the Tower a lesson?”

Chikodi’s eyes moved to Akua, but she only faintly smiled. She had asked no mercy of me when it came to Wolof or her kin. I was still uncertain whether that was before she did not believe it would be needed or because she did not believe it deserved. I glanced at the mage, who had finished breaking her fingers, and coldly smiled. She flinched.

“High Lord Sargon requests nothing of you, mighty one,” Chikodi said. “He only offers tokens of his friendship and esteem, as well as his help to achieve your intent in these lands.”

“So a bribe,” I said, rolling my eye. “Disappointing. Give the numbers on offer to Adjutant, I’ve been bored enough for a day.”

I didn’t even bother to give goodbyes before turning my back on him, limping away. It was hard to see properly under the helms so I couldn’t be sure, but what little I could glimpse told me that more than a few of my knights were grinning like sharks under their helmet. For all that they looked dignified, they must have been enjoying seeing Praes being under the boot after keeping it on our throat for over half my life. Vivienne fell in at my side, abandoning the talks just as indifferently. We’d never had any intention of negotiating with the first envoy the High Lord sent us.

“We’ve given enough slights that Sargon should be livid when he hears,” Vivienne said.

Which was good, because right now we wanted him angry.

“He’s a Sahelian,” I reluctantly said. “He won’t be that easy to bait.”

If he were, he’d be dead by now. I had little good to say of the way Praesi highborn raised their own, but I’d not deny that their methods were cruelly effective at weeding out those who could easily be manipulated.

“That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Catherine. I know Juniper wants him goaded into an attack, but we don’t need that to get what we want,” Vivienne said. “So long as he believes you meant what you said, that we came for Wolof to burn out Malicia’s allies, we have our foot in the door.”

That had been the point of mistreating and mocking the delegation so much, after all: getting across the impression that was utterly uninterested in talks. Making sport of envoys was the sort of thing a half-mad warlord might do, if she really had come here to sack the city so that Malicia would lose her strongest northern supporter. Why bother to keep to the niceties when you were talking to torch fodder? What Juniper had wanted out of this was more military in nature. She was hoping the insults would either anger Sargon enough to risk a night attack on our camp or make him desperate enough that he resorted to one anyway to improve his bargaining position.

We’d be waiting for him if he did.

“If we catch him out while he’s trying a sortie and wipe the attacking force, it only strengthens our hand,” I said.

The first part of robbing someone was putting their knife at their throat. People were disinclined to part with gold and goods unless you made it clear they had something a lot more precious to lose. It was why the Army of Callow had crossed into Creation so early: I wanted our fortified camp built, finished with some time to spare for the men to rest. My soldiers wouldn’t be getting a full night’s sleep: under cover of dark, we would be going on the offensive.

“So long as we come out on top of that skirmish,” Vivienne said. “If we lose, it’s us who’s pushed on the backfoot.”

“Best we don’t lose, then,” I simply said.

Wasn’t that always the way? Some of my officers still insisted that the Battle of Hainaut had been a victory, but I knew better. In a strategic sense, the battle had brought us to the ragged edge: a major defeat either here in Praes or on any Proceran front was now all it took for the house of cards to come tumbling down on our heads. Besides, there was another plan behind all this that my friend didn’t know. One I was keeping closer to my chest: it had not been a mistake that Akua was there for the envoys to see, so verifiably unbound. I was dangling bait for someone to catch.

“More than you know,” Vivienne said. “I got word from Archer before joining you with the delegation.”

My limping steps stuttered to a stop.

“And?” I asked.

“They’ll be here tonight,” the blue-eyed princess said. “I expect losing a fight while they’re watching would rather undermine our cause, so caution is in order.”

I grinned. Splendid timing, this. A little too splendid to be natural, in this case it was no accident: I’d sent Archer and Scribe ahead counting on ‘coincidence’ ensuring they came back at the right time. I’d not yet known what the right time would be, but what did that matter? The day didn’t matter, so long as I knew where the step was in the dance. I knew my grin had turned a tad savage, but I didn’t mind. This had been overdue. Malicia had had herself a grand old time these last few years, lighting fires in all our backyards while she rode out the messes she caused hidden in the Tower. Safely away from the fray.

It was time I returned the favour and started lighting fires of my own.

Chapter 2: Perplex

“People are never easier to fool than when they believe they’re fooling you.”

– King Alistair Fairfax, the Fox

When was the last time I’d gone even six months without sleeping in a tent?

The thought amused more the more I thought about it. Elizabeth Alban, the ol’ Queen of Blades herself, had conquered the closest thing there ever was to a Callowan empire before the Watch slit her throat in her bed. My war record had led people to compare us on occasion – apparently there was a ballad and everything – but I actually figured I had more in common with her successor: Richard the Elder. They only started calling him the Elder in later histories, see, after he named his eldest son Richard as well. At the time they’d called him ‘Richard Saddlesore’. The sobriquet was well-earned, considering he’d spent nearly all his reign moving from one side of his realm to another putting down rebellions.

Most everything the Queen of Blades had conquered west of the Whitecaps rose up the moment she died, and then Callowan nobles afraid of the growing power of the Albans promptly crowned his cousin the moment he crossed the mountains to handle said revolts. Praes had inevitably thrown its hat into the ring when they smelled blood, of course, never mind that they’d just gotten whipped back into the Wasteland under Regalia II. King Richard the Elder had actually done pretty well at staving off the collapse of his inherited ‘empire’ for a generation, only ceding independence to a few western territories, but by the time he’d died in his late thirties it’d been almost a decade since he’d last set foot in his own capital.

It’d been much shorter than that, for me, but I couldn’t deny that I’d spent most of my reign as Queen of Callow outside my kingdom. There was always another fire to put out, wasn’t there? I raised a small cup of wine in the air, drawing a raised eyebrow from Akua.

“You and me both, Richard,” I muttered. “May we rest our buttocks in the next world.”

There was a moment of silence.

“I’m not touching that,” Vivienne decided.

Hakram, the sole loyal soul in this nest of traitors, raised his cup of water to match my toast and we drank. The four of us had convened in my tent, around the beautiful table that Indrani was still adding to. The last relief was parts of the Battle of Hainaut, and I was always careful to sit on the other side. Robber would have loved the sight of him striking a match and the Dead King’s plans going up in flames, but I still couldn’t look at the carved goblin face without my gut clenching. There were quite a few seats prepared, since even before most of us stayed for the upcoming war council we had a report to entertain. We couldn’t really finalize our plans for the night without Masego’s seal of approval.

The phalanges had notified us he’d returned through the Ways and Zeze wasn’t the type to go wash and change before reporting, so I wasn’t even halfway done with my cup by the time he swept in past my guards. His informal pupil followed, my waved hand stopping the legionaries from taking issue with it, and I rolled my eye at Masego as he dropped himself into the seat across from me. The black robes he still wore had a subtle gold filigree, nowadays, but aside from that little of him had changed since he’d first become the Hierophant.

He still bore the same long braids inlaid with trinkets, wore the same black silk eyecloth over his burning glass eyes – nowadays a match to the one I wore over the eye the Hawk had taken from me – and wore the same comfortably worn old boots. The only change was that he’d begun to grow a beard: still glorified stubble, for now, but it rather suited his face and made him look older. A little like his father, actually, though the Warlock’s beard had been much fuller. He looked tired but in a good mood, which I took as a good sign.

“The warding scheme has changed from what you outlined, Akua,” Hierophant said.

Behind him, already forgot, his recent shadow was shuffling about on her feet awkwardly. The Apprentice, the young Ashuran mage known as Sapan, was coated in dust from head to toe and visibly exhausted. He’d probably made her do all the groundwork, I thought with a twinge of amusement. She looked hesitant to take a seat at my table without an explicit invitation, so I took pity on her and caught her eye before nodding in invitation. She bowed her head in thanks, sliding into a chair even as Masego helped himself to a pitcher of magically cooled water with equally magically obtained lemon quarters floating in it.

If you counted sending a cohort of goblins to empty High Lord Sargon’s orchards as magic, anyway.

“It was a possibility, as I mentioned when we discussed the matter,” Akua replied. “Yet the central patterns remained the same, I expect?”

Masego drank deep of his cup of water, filling it again almost immediately and not noticing Apprentice’s hand inching halfway towards it before she drew back with a sigh.

“More or less,” Masego agreed. “They mostly made changes to more strongly close off entry by Arcadia or the Ways. Recent modifications, about as old as the Arsenal. I imagine the city will have received the same work.”

We’d expected as much, but it was useful to know both those options were off the table if it came to an assault on Wolof.

“You managed it anyway,” I said, half a question.

Under the cloth he rolled his eyes at me.

“It was not that sophisticated a ward,” Masego said. “Of course I cracked it, Catherine. It’s done, and it was subtle enough they won’t notice.”

He mulled over things for a moment longer, dutiful in his attempt to make a report – though apparently not dutiful enough to ever read the text about how to give them the Legions had written. Not for lack of opportunity, since Juniper still had a scroll thrown into his tent at least once a month. I was pretty sure Indrani was making a pyramid.

“Sapan crawled uphill for half an hour under an illusion to place my artefact against the bottom of the wall,” Hierophant noted. “She did well. She should get a raise.”

Apprentice look startled and a little flattered, but there was one detail wrong there. I cleared my throat, but Hakram took one for the team and spoke up first.

“We don’t actually pay her,” Adjutant informed him.

Masego eyed me skeptically, brow rising.

“Is that slavery?” he asked. “We’re against that, I feel. I’m against that.”

“We’re against slavery,” I confirmed. “There’s laws and everything.”

He seemed pleased at me personally, like I actually had anything to do about that.

“Experience could be considered to be her compensation,” Akua suggested.

Well, she had been Evil for decades. That was bound to leave marks.

“Spoken like someone who’s never had to pay taxes in their damned life,” I muttered under my breath.

Her lips quirked in a sly smile but she did not deign to answer my accusation. Gods, now I had to pay the girl otherwise fifteen-year-old me would have slit my throat over it. Mind you, that girl had never been one to mind a bit of knifing so it wasn’t as strong a remonstration as you’d think.

“We’ll put aside a stipend for you on top of what the Grand Alliance already offers,” I told Apprentice. “Your help in this is much appreciated, Sapan.”

The dark-haired girl licked her lips, nervous, and nodded.

“May I – Your Majesty – could I... trade that for an hour a day with Lord Hierophant’s grimoires?” she hesitantly asked.

I turned an eye to Masego, who actually looked rather charmed. He’d taken well to her since Hainaut, I suspected it was half the reason Hanno had agreed to lend her to us – the other half being Arthur had come along too and the two were thick as thieves.

“Keep her out of the dangerous stuff,” I said.

“Of course,” he immediately agreed, sounding surprised.

Ah, my mistake.

“Akua,” I said, “please go with them and tell him what the dangerous stuff is.”

“I feel like the situation has gone in someway disastrously wrong, when I am called upon as the voice of sorcerous restraint,” the golden-eyed shade noted, but she was still smiling.

“Tell me about it,” I sighed.

She rose smoothly, offering me an ironic bow I rolled my eye at, and linked an arm with Masego as he did the same. They immediately started arguing in Mthethwa about what qualified as ‘safe’ – Zeze was insisting that the smiting spell was exactly that, so long as you kept it aimed at the enemy – while Sapan followed suit after affording me a deeper bow.

“I’ll see to the stipend,” Adjutant gravelled. “And extract a fuller report out of them while you two handle the war council.”

Though the Night had been shattered and broken first by the Dead King’s sorcery and then Hierophant’s even harsher mercy, I had still been bound to the power in a deep and intimate way. Night came slower these days, and it was granted only by the will of the Sisters where once it had flown freely, but the mark of Sve Noc on my soul had not waned. I could still sense the coming of night like a sixth sense, through that strange instinct that was inhumanly accurate. And what I sensed told me that, as usual, Hakram was right. Nightfall was only two hours away, which meant we’d be cutting it close if we didn’t split to attend to our duties.

“Much appreciated,” I replied.

We rose to follow the others after scratching a few notes on parchment with his bone hand, sending in a few phalanges after him to prepare the tent for the war council. Juniper, as was her habit, came in half an hour early to make sure everything was to her tastes. I’d forgotten how tall she was, in our years physically apart: she still had almost two feet on me, and she was built thick . With that grim, broad face and the sharp white fangs she made for an even more imposing sight than before now that we were older. Which made it all the more of a contrast when Aisha followed in behind her, the very picture of a quintessential Taghreb beauty with her carefully styled hair and elegant smile.

“Move the maps away from wine carafe,” Juniper ordered a phalange in a growl. “Whose bright idea was that?”

“Good evening, Catherine,” Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara greeted me.

The faint exasperation at her friend and superior’s growling about was a worn and beloved habit, almost made a game between them from years of use.

“Aisha,” I grinned back. “Juniper.”

She turned to look at us, almost surprised, and nodded.

“Catherine, Vivienne,” she curtly replied.

Vivienne was no more offended than I, the two of us well used to the Hellhound’s ways. At times, though, it felt like she was being twice as hard as she used to be to make up for the way she’d been knocked out of the war for two years. Even now Aisha had told me that she visibly trembled when exhausted and slept uneasily at least a few nights a month. I wouldn’t have placed her in command if she were any worse, even if she would likely never have forgiven me for that, but sometimes I was still... concerned. I kept it to myself, though. There was no doubt in my mind that she’d see it as an insult.

Our war council streamed in, either early or on time. General Zola Osei, Hune’s successor who’d ended up as Juniper’s second in the cobbled together First and Second Army we’d taken east – some had taken to calling it the Fifth as a jest. Grandmaster Brandon Talbot for the Order, and for the Dominion the two lordlings that Tariq had placed in my care before his death: Aquiline Osena and Razin Tanja. Named, too, though their seats were lesser ones. Alexis the Argent, the Silver Huntress, and Arthur Foundling with her. The Concocter didn’t usually show to meetings like this, but the Barrow Sword did and seated himself by Vivienne. Ishaq would have been a good pick to leave out west, but I had a purpose for him here: it wasn’t a coincidence I kept making him work with the Blood. The Grey Pilgrim had asked three boons of me, and I intended on seeing all of them through.

“Let’s not waste time,” Marshal Juniper of Callow began, voice rough. “Night’s coming and we have a schedule to keep. We received confirmation from Hierophant that the assault on Jinon is feasible, so we’ll be going through with it.”

Wolof was, in part, fed water by an aqueduct whose source was in the hills to the northeast of the city – the Jinon Hills. The place where the structure connected with the city walls was fortified, naturally, but so was the source in in the hills that the water flowed from. A small but solid and heavily warded fortress had been raised there, over an underground basin where overflow could be directed to when heavy rains struck the aqueduct hard. There shouldn’t be more than two or three hundred soldiers there but all my officers were in agreement that the fortress of Jinon – I’d yet to get a definitive answer on whether the hills were named after the fortress or the other way around – would be a nightmare to assault.

Tall and heavy walls, steep slopes all around and there was bound to be a heavy mage contingent garrisoned. We could take the fortress by assaulting the walls, there was no doubt about that. We had the numbers. But it would be very costly in casualties and we honestly couldn’t afford that. We were already going to be starkly outnumbered in the latter parts of this campaign, throwing away lives on a hard assault would be sheer stupidity. We did need the place, though, in part to pressure Sargon and also because it was crucial to some other schemes I had in mind. Which was why I’d sat with Juniper and Pickler to plot Jinon’s fall, and then sent Masego ahead to make sure what we intended was possible.

“I’ll be leading that part of our offensive personally,” I said. “For that purpose, I’ll be taking two cohorts, our false guards and whatever warband Lady Aquiline deems fit to grant me.”

Which, given how Levantine honour worked, would lead her to...

“I will go myself,” Aquiline Osena replied without hesitation. “And take my slayers as retinue.”

There we go , I thought. One of them with me to keep an eye on, and I’d pass off Razin to Hakram and the Barrow Sword.

“Good fit,” I nodded, and she straightened her back some.

It was true, even if it wasn’t the only reason she’d picked her most prestigious unit to take into battle with me. Levantines were surprisingly good at night work and surprise approaches, I’d found, which I really should have expected given that they spent most of their time raiding each other back in the Dominion.

“Taking Jinon will be tricky work,” Juniper said. “It could go badly for us if Wolof tries a sortie at our back while it happens. Which is why we’ll be drawing Sargon’s attention elsewhere as that attack happens.”

She tapped a finger on our map of Wolof and its outskirts, everyone’s eyes following towards the west. It was the fishing villages by the shore of the Wasaliti she was indicating. Sinka, they were commonly called. There was no port proper for Wolof – nowhere near enough river trade to warrant it – so it was all very informal, with the Sahelians effectively owning one of the villages and keeping their own barges there while the rest of the villages were left in the hands of merchants and locals under the loose supervision of an appointed seneschal.

“The Sahelians no longer have a significant river fleet, courtesy of Princess Vivienne during the Liesse Rebellion,” Juniper continued, which drew some laughs and cheers, “but Sinka is still a major asset to the city. It’s a source of fish and lumber – they send people across to cut from the Greywood – and they import goods from further south through it. It will be a blow for them to lose the district. Fortunately, its defences are limited. General Zola, if you would?”

The dark-skinned woman cleared her throat.

“Our scouts have confirmed a garrison of around five hundred, most of them household troops,” General Zola said. “The walls are mud brick and wood, and only three of the five villages have them. The barracks are reinforced, however, and built to be defended. There are also two watchtowers, so we can safely assume we will be seen approaching.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Arthur leaning forward, itching to ask a question but holding himself back. Going wider, I saw incomprehension in the eyes of the Blood and even Ishaq. I raised a hand, stopping Zola before she could continue her briefing.

“Squire,” I said. “Out with it.”

His eyes widened for a moment, but he gathered himself quick.

“Why are you so sure we’ll be seen, ma’am?” he asked the general. “It’ll be under cover of dark and we have scrying countermeasures.”

Ah, so that was it. I glanced at Zola, silently indicating I was going to cut in. I forgot, sometimes, that he was young. And that some of the people at this table had never truly had to consider what it would mean, going to war with Praesi.

“Aisha,” I idly said, “would you please put your hand to a candle?”

A few people raised their voices to object in surprise and she gave me a dry look for the dramatics, but the tent went silent when she placed her hand over the open flame without so much as a twitch. She drew it away after a few heartbeats, revealing to all smooth skin unmarred by burns.

“This is the Dread Empire of Praes,” I flatly said. “We’ve gotten used to having the upper hand in sorcery, fighting out west, but leave that behind you: we’re now facing the makers of all the spells we cribbed. It’s in the blood here, Squire. If they don’t have a spell then they’ll have someone whose blood lets them see in the dark, or a monster that smells the wind, a pack of flying devils or a hundred other things. They’ll see us coming, count on it. It’s what they do .”

I’d not meant it to, but I caught a certain amount of pride in the bearing of my Praesi officers after the tirade. I couldn’t begrudge them that, I thought. Where you were born, is stayed with you. Good and bad. And in the end, I had not forgotten it was not only my countrymen who had joined the voices to the tune of In Dread Crowned when we marched on Dormer. There was a difference between hating the high lords of Praes and hating Praesi. I passed the proverbial baton back to Zola, who finished outlining what we knew of Sinka’s defences as well as the plan of attack.

It was a fairly simple straightforward thrust with three thousand foot from the south, led by Vivienne but commanded by General Zola herself, with a screen of goblin skirmishers up front. Another two thousand foot, half of them Levantine and under the overall command of Razin Tanja, would move between the city and Sinka to dissuade a sortie. They’d have the two thousand horsemen of the Order of Broken Bells waiting in the wings for support. We’d keep a loose reserve of three thousand to throw at either battlefield, just in case. Afterwards it came to distributing Named, and there I took the lead again.

“The Silver Huntress will lend her skills to our skirmishers, though she will remain an independent command free to act as she sees fit,” I laid out. “Squire and Apprentice will accompany Princess Vivienne, under her authority. The Barrow Sword will go with Lord Razin. The Hierophant will be accompanying me, and as usual the Concocter is not to be considered a combat asset.”

Lady Alexis worked better when left alone when she wasn’t the leader, I’d found. Not unlike Archer, though both would resent the comparison. As for the two young Named, this was as much about them keeping Vivienne’s head on her neck as it was the other way around. Admittedly, when it came to Arthur I did have other motives. Getting him used to obeying my chosen successor was a necessary precaution, as far as I was concerned, especially now that the Jacks had established that a dynastic marriage was a dead end should he become a locus of opposition. Finding that out had been relatively simple: we’d sent one of the Jacks around his age to make advances, he’d gently let her down by telling her he was not interested in women that way.

Adjutant had insisted I could have simply asked , but this was probably safer. The Squire might not easily figure out why he’d been asked the question, but he’d know people with stronger insights into Callow’s politics who very much would.

“Expect surprises,” Juniper gravelled, concluding the council. “We’ll be surprising them too, but don’t forget for the moment they had the same day to plan that we did.”

I toasted to that, finally polishing the last of my wine, and to war we went.

—

I didn’t like being blind, and I didn’t mean in the losing-an-eye-sense.

Although, to be fair, I wasn’t enamoured with that one either. What I meant, though was that I’d gotten used to being able to rely on Night to get a good view of the battlefield even as fights were happening. Unfortunately, drawing on that kind of power so close to mages of the calibre Wolof was going to field would be like unveiling a lantern in a black pit. Impossible to miss. Being robbed of that view was making me restless, though, especially since I was distinctive enough in appearance that I couldn’t be on the front seat of either of the large ox-drawn wagons going up the smooth hillside path. It was pretty comfortable huddled out in the back, at least, except for the part where Masego was absolutely demolishing me at shatranj.

“How is everyone I know so good at this game?” I complained in a whisper, losing my last mage to a pin.

“I still play with Indrani regularly,” Zeze informed me just as quietly. “Although you have always been terrible at this.”

“I’m pretty widely known as a cunning schemer, Masego,” I told him, a little affronted.

I sent a knight forward, hoping to at least make my death throes interesting. If I had to lose to him a fourth time in a row, someone was going to get killed.

“Yes,” he happily acknowledged. “One who just lost her chancellor. Kingtip in three.”

I cursed, and it was an awfully close thing when I decided against the cart suddenly shaking and toppling the board by happenstance. Damned thing was enchanted to stick anyway, I wouldn’t be fooling anyone. The two of us were playing in the dark, since it was as day to our common sum of exactly one meat eye. We were nestled between the kind of barrels and crates that Wolof used to send oil and foodstuffs up to Jinon, though naturally they were actually full of soldiers. Who I hoped we’d been whispering quietly enough had not all heard me getting repeatedly brutalized at shatranj by my own court wizard.

There were only twenty soldiers by wagon, since more would drag noticeably on the road, but we had more forces at hand. Some of them were even visible. Armours the Callowan treasury had kept since the Doom of Liesse had been brought out of the vaults and polished up, meaning that the thirty handpicked Soninke legionaries making up our drivers and foot escort of the wagons were in genuine Sahelian household armour. That ought to sell the illusion some, though I wouldn’t be relying entirely on it. We had more forces out there in the hills, hidden. Part of it was a cohort of regulars we’d walked out of the Ways out of easy detection range and then snuck closer to the fortress, while the rest was Aquiline Osena’s handpicked slayers. Two hundred of them.

Those moved around like shadows, probably the finest human sneaks I’d seen – not quite in the league of goblins, but close.

Our wagon began to slow and I cast a glance at Masego, whose eyes swivelled in their sockets. He nodded. We had arrived. As Hierophant began putting away the shatranj board I swallowed a groan of pain and began wiggling around until I had my elbows on a crate and could discreetly look out the front of the wagon. Sergeant Kadeem was a large and bulky man, enough so that I’d heard a few jokes about him being a dark-skinned orc, but he was deft with the reins. His family were travelling traders, apparently. Moving slightly to the side of him to get a better angle, I had my first close up look at the fortress of Jinon. Heavy stone blocks, I noted, granite that looked to have been fitted together without mortar.

No wonder Pickler had been adamant trebuchets wouldn’t do much.

I studied the gatehouse that’d be our way in closely, as it was the key. Two squat bastions crowded a gate wide enough for a cart to pass and then some, pale yellow magelights hovering above it. There were two sets of gates, both thick wood barded with steel, but they were open: only the portcullis in front of them both was down. From above, the gatehouse rampart, I hard voices hailing us in Mthethwa. It was Captain Diara who answered them – we’d picked her because she was native to Wolof and cold-blooded by reputation – and she put irritation in her voice as she told them to hurry up so she could unload the goods and leave. Masego got closer to me and I glanced at him curiously.

“My amendment to the wards appears to be intact,” Hierophant murmured.

I nodded. So far, so good. The guards above insisted there had been no planned supply run, which was true, but we’d thought ahead: Captain Diara waved around papers she informed them were proof, signed by her superior in the city. Hakram was a splendid forger and Akua had helped get the details right, should they actually bother to look at them. See, if we were infiltrating a Proceran fortress then the papers would be what they looked at. This was a Praesi fortress, though, so when the agitated guards went to get their office the man in question scoffed and ordered one of them to go tell a scrying mage to contact the city for confirmation.

This would be where the plan fell apart, if I hadn’t brought Hierophant along.

We waited for some time, Masego’s eyes on the sky, and eventually there was a subtle ripple of power as Hierophant wrested the scrying spell the slightest pit, pulling apart the magic so it failed. Thrice more they tried it, and Masego played it artfully: on the second try he let it pass through for a moment, severing the connection late. We were pretending that the city was under magical attack, that it was why the spells weren’t working. Captain Diara, meanwhile, pretended to grow increasingly agitated. She asked for names, claimed she would speak to her relatives in the High Lord’s service about this, cursed them for lazy incompetents. I was impressed, she was definitely getting a commendation. We’d been at this for more than half an hour now, so the officer who’d ordered scrying fell back on the tried and true method of all career soldiers: he kicked the problem up the ladder.

“Describe me the armour of the officer they went to get,” I asked Masego.

He did, quietly, and my lips thinned. That was the fortress’s commander, for sure. They’d not wasted time going to the top, then. The woman in question, who introduced herself to Captain Diara as Lady Semira, proved to be a calming presence. She ordered for soldiers to take position behind the portcullis and then told Diara to come forward alone with the papers proving she was truly here under orders. So now we’re putting Hakram’s forgeries to the test , I thought. Diara didn’t hesitate, passing the papers before the portcullis closed anew and they were sent up to Lady Semira.

“These appear to be in order,” Lady Semira said, looking down from above.

If I bent, I could make out a glimpse of her standing above. Tall and imperious, with eyes a hue between yellow and brown.

“Is there a particular reason, Captain Diara, that this run was not handled by Tabansi instead?” she asked.

I tensed.

“Didn’t ask, my lady,” Diara replied. “If it doesn’t help me get back into bed, it’s not my concern.”

“So I see,” Lady Semira replied, tone amused. “It will only be a moment, captain.”

I breathed out. Had we gotten away with it?

“She is gesturing at soldiers,” Masego told me, studying the scene with his eldritch eyes. “One just went towards the barracks. Others are being told to... head towards the gate?”

Evidently we had not gotten away with it. It was the second string to our bow that’d make or break this.

“Progress?” I quietly asked Hierophant.

“Not there yet,” Masego replied.

Sighed. That meant there was only one thing for me to do. I cracked the side of my neck and dragged myself up.

“Signal me when the time comes,” I asked him.

I dropped into the front seat next to Sergeant Kadeem, who hid his startlement well. I pulled the Mantle of Woe tight around me and went rifling through the pockets, finding my pipe with a little noise of satisfaction and unceremoniously beginning to stuff it with wakeleaf. I handed Kadeem a match and he gallantly struck it on his arm before lighting my pipe for me. Good man.

“Tell everyone to be ready to fight,” I murmured around the rim. “Soon.”

He froze then nodded, retreating into the back of the wagon and leaving me to pull at my pipe under the stare of the soldiers up on the rampart. I breathed in deep the of the acrid smoke, letting it sear my lungs before I spat it back out in a stream. Up there, behind the crenelation, Lady Semira was watching me through narrowed eyes as her fingers tightened around the stone until the knuckles paled. Even out east it seemed that my reputation preceded me.

“Black Queen,” the commander greeted me, voice laudably even. “It seems we now dispense with the deceptions.”

I shrugged.

“What was it that gave it away?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“Captain Tabansi was publicly drowned last week, for having stolen Sahelian goods and sold them on the black market,” Lady Semira said. “The entire garrison was made to watch.”

Which, admittedly, would make it difficult to lead a supply run. Not impossible, mind you. This was Praes.

“That’d to it,” I ruefully said.

If we’d had Scribe with us I might have heard of even a relatively minor incident like that, but I’d sent her off with Archer. It had paid off in other ways, but there were costs to everything.

“I am under orders to avoid fighting you if I can, Your Majesty,” Lady Semira told me. “Your ploy was well-crafted, but it has failed. My soldiers are on the walls and my mages awake. I would invite you to withdraw, and offer my oath no attempt will be made to hinder your departure.”

I smiled, because I knew something she didn’t. When I’d sat with Pickler and Juniper to figure out how we might take Jinon as bloodlessly as we could, eventually we’d stumbled unto an interesting question: where did the shit go? Jinon had one source of water, and they couldn’t foul it. It fed right into the aqueduct that Wolof used. So a pit under it? The fortress had existed for several centuries, though, it would have filled by now. If this were Callow it would be a matter of chamber pots and dumping them somewhere far enough the smell wouldn’t reach the walls, but Wolof was rich . Nobles served in its garrison too, people not used to roughing it.

So instead they’d had built latrines, sophisticated little things that dumped their filth neatly outside the fortress into a series of pits.

“You’re polite,” I said, approvingly. “So let me make an offer back: if you and your garrison surrender, you will be treated under Callowan terms for prisoners. No mistreatment, regular meals and you’ll be offered up at the first prisoner trade with your sworn lord.”

It was Praesi who’d built the latrine, so of course it wasn’t that simple. They were a paranoid bunch, Wastelanders. The latrines tunnels were too small for someone to crawl up and they were warded in case someone tried to send devils through instead. The Sahelians had, however, made a small mistake. I breathed in the smoke, the end of the pipe burning like a red eye in the dark, and when I breathed out I let the grey drift upwards. No wind, tonight, so it stayed around me like a crown of fumes.

“I do not deny your power, Black Queen,” Lady Semira carefully said. “Yet the wards of this fortress are old and powerful. You will not find them easy to batter down. And steel will not carry this day if your might cannot. I can only-”

A hand tapped my shoulder. Masego, giving me his signal. I smiled. I’d kept her talking long enough, baited enough soldiers to the walls.

“It’s over,” I interrupted. “You’ve lost.”

Her face tightened with anger.

“Close the gates,” Lady Semira ordered.

There was a long heartbeat of silence as nothing happened. Then I put fingers to my mouth and whistled, meeting her eyes. Barrels and crates cracked open, soldiers crawling out armed to the teeth, and out of the dark came marching the first of the two cohorts I’d brought. Aquiline and her slayers crept up the hill, still unseen. But the killing blow was something else entirely. There was a distant sound of cackling, and a heartbeat later the portcullis began rising to the vivid horror of the Sahelian soldiers manning the gate. The cohort of goblins I’d sent up the latrines had seized the most important room in the gatehouse, the one controlling the portcullis and gates. There would be no preventing our entry. To hammer that point home, Hierophant came out of the wagon to sit by my side and put an end to any hope of wards or sorcery stopping us.

See, the latrines were too small for humans to crawl up them. And the wards had been meant to stop devils going up, not goblins, because the Grey Eyries were on the other side of Praes and no Sahelian had ever had to defend this fortress against them. All it had taken to make my cohort’s infiltration entirely unseen was Masego disabling the small part of the wards that would trigger an alarm if something large entered through the latrines, the kind of small detail that it would take an in-depth check of the wards to notice.

But, as this land of diabolists ought to know, the devil was in the details.

“Sleight of hand, Semira,” I told my enemy, not unkindly. “If you’re watching me, you’re not watching where you should be.”

I breathed in deep of the wakeleaf, then blew out one last breath.

“So,” I said. “Are you going to surrender now, or do I need to... how did you put it again? Ah, yes.”

I met her eyes with my own.

“ Batter you down ,” I coldly said.

The possibility of violence hung in the air, thick as smoke, while the noblewoman weighed her chances. She eyed my forces once again, then finally grimaced.

“Jinon is yours, Black Queen,” Lady Semira said.

Well , I thought as my men began cheering, it’s a small victory, but it’s a start.

Chapter 3: Wage

“I was privileged to receive audience with a shaman of the Red Shields clan, who after receiving gifts was willing to indulge a few of my questions. My attempts to understand the lay of her people’s statecraft, however, were met with a simple laugh and the quote of a Kharsum proverb that translates as such: ‘throw meat or be meat’.”

– Extract from “Horrors and Wonders”, famed travelogue of Anabas the Ashuran

Jinon fell to the Army of Callow at the price of twelve dead and five wounded.

Three wounded and two dead were of ours. One of the former was, I’d been told, a legionary from the regulars cohort who’d tripped going uphill and broken his foot. He was now being mercilessly mocked by the rest of his tenth, who had tried to get him officially commended for ‘heroic injuries sustained in the line of duty’. I was giving it serious thought – laugh aside, playing along with this sort of thing tended to be good for morale. Most the corpses and wounds had taken place when my goblins infiltrated the fortress, silencing witnesses and taking the gatehouse. That left me to handle the two hundred and forty-three members of the Jinon garrison that had surrendered, a number that included seven minor nobles sworn to Wolof.

One of them was a branch Sahelian, their head mage, and she’d been trying to barricade herself in a fortified room when Hierophant came and stomped out the notion by casually wresting her sorcery away from her. I’d left him to interrogate her and gone to supervise the movement of the prisoners instead. We’d made a gate into Twilight right outside the walls and we were herding the disarmed prisoners across by groups of twenty, into the tender waiting embrace of legionaries waiting on the other side. We’d be marching them straight into a warded prison pit that Juniper had ordered dug inside our camp, where the Jacks and the phalanges would begin interrogating them for news about the state of the city.

I was now leaning against stone on the same parapet Lady Semira had stood on when we’d talked, watching it unfold as I chatted with Captain Diara.

“- moved them to a freehold in the Green Stretch as soon as I could afford it,” she told me, speaking of her parents. “My brother’s still out east in one of the Bassa towns, I think, but we haven’t talked in years.”

“I hear it’s good land down in the Stretch, so long as the levees don’t break,” I said.

“It is, but there are dangers. People were worried it was going to be trouble when you first took the throne, Your Majesty,” Captain Diara admitted. “That’s passed, of course. Now they know that even if comes to steel there won’t be paladins knocking at the doors for ‘tithes’ and pointed questions about troop movements.”

The Order of the White Hand were still considered heroes, back home, tragically destroyed by my father in the first stroke of the Conquest. The freeholders of the Green Stretch had been significantly less convinced of the heroism of said paladins, not without reason. Callow had been occupied by the Dread Empire for so long it was easy to forget that the Old Kingdom hadn’t been saints. It’d not been worse than most nations out there, but it’d not been any better either.

“It’s the Tower my dispute is with,” I said. “It’s the Tower I’ll settle it with.”

The captain slowly nodded, expression hard to read. Whatever she might have said was not to be, as Masego strode out of the stairway with his robes sweeping behind him. He looked in a fine mood, and I could smell the scent of power still on him. He was holding magic.

“Time for me to check on my sergeants,” Captain Diara tactfully said. “It was an honour, Your Majesty.”

“It was my honour to hear you harangue those poor bastards for half an hour,” I replied with a smile. “See you around, captain.”

She offered a salute to Hierophant as he passed, which he returned with an absent-minded nod before coming to stand at my side.

“Got anything good?” I asked.

“Several of the ciphers the Sahelians use when scrying,” Masego said. “It will be of use when intercepting their communications.”

“Cutting High Lord Sargon off from Malicia would be ideal,” I admitted. “It’ll be easier to force his hand that way.”

Malicia had soulboxed him when she’d put him on the High Seat, which meant she could effectively torture him with impunity and at will, but that was the kind of tool she wouldn’t use blindly. If he wasn’t contradicting an explicit order from the Tower when he surrendered his granaries to us, the ruler of Wolof was a lot more likely to fold. There wasn’t a lot I could threaten him that would be worse than what Malicia could do with half an hour and an incantation.

“It will do Sapan some good to study higher order mathematics,” Hierophant mused. “I’ll make her work on the ciphers with me.”

“Surprised she doesn’t know about those already,” I said. “Ashurans are famous sailors and navigation’s all about numbers and stars, way I hear it.”

“She meant to be a healer, so what they taught her of mathematics at that academy in Ashur was insultingly limited,” Masego said, sounding peeved. “Sabrathan sorcery encourages specialization, Catherine, as the knowledge overlap between its different disciplines is supposedly very limited.”

I hummed in understanding. For all that Hierophant had always rather looked down on the sorcery the Thalassocracy of Ashur practiced, what I’d heard of it was rather impressive. They had finer healing mages than the Praesi and they could whip up winds and storms out of blue sky. Sabrathan magic did seem to have pretty stark limits on what could be done well with it, though, so I wasn’t surprised Masego held it in such low esteem. He’d been raised to treat magic as something more than just a tool, a philosophical quest for the truth of Creation. There was little chance of him respecting people who, in his eyes, willingly chose to cripple themselves before even beginning that quest.

“Tell me how it pans out,” I shrugged. “I’m curious how much she’ll take to your teachings.”

I was more curious if she was going to end up a long-term threat to people or places I cared about, to be honest, but Zeze enjoyed talking about his pupil and I enjoyed indulging him. While Masego cordially disliked teaching large groups, the way he had when I’d asked him to make my Legion and later Army cadres into mages capable of battlefield ritual magic, he seemed to be relishing teaching a single highly skilled pupil. It was the kind of teaching he was likely most familiar with, I’d eventually realized. Just like Warlock had done with him.

“I will,” he assured me. “Though none of this is why I came. You earlier mentioned intending to scry Juniper for news of how her warring went. Shall we, before I must release the magic I wrested?”

I’d actually figured it would be one of our mages I relied on for that, but if Zeze was volunteering I wasn’t going to complain. And if this marked yet another instance of him keeping someone’s magic in his hands just a little longer than was strictly necessary, well, part of loving someone was knowing when you needed to avert your eye.

“Please do,” I replied.

It didn’t take long to get a hold of my marshal even though the night’s action was far from over, as she’d been expecting me. After the fortress was invested one of our mages had sent word that things had gone well, but not gotten much in exchange: the offensive had still been happening. After a few moments Aisha’s face appeared in the mirror-like circle of magic that Masego had drawn in the air, offering me a smile before disappearing and being replaced with the Hellhound’s thicker features.

“Warlord,” she greeted me.

“Marshal,” I replied. “How did the attack go?”

“We hold Sinka,” Juniper said. “The garrison in the villages began to retreat after skirmishing against our vanguard and we caught fewer than fifty of them. We didn’t get any trouble out of the people themselves, the seneschal fled after leaving orders to surrender without violence.”

Huh. That was unusually caring, by Praesi standards. Most Wasteland nobles would have sent their people into the grinder without a second thought, thinking a few of my soldiers killed a fair trade for bleeding the populace of a port they no longer held. High Lord Sargon’s orders, or the small rebellion of a decent man in a bad position? Hard to know.

“Any moves from Wolof?”

“They tried a sortie,” Juniper acknowledged. “Two thousand household troops, with mage support and about a hundred walin-falme for vanguard. They hit our screening force head on and withdrew when the Order flanked them. They sacrificed the devils to eat the charge and retreated into the city.”

“That looks like a straightforward blunder,” I frowned. “Only two thousand? It’s a large chunk of their forces, but they have to know we’d eat that on the field. Especially when we have cavalry and they don’t.”

My marshal looked pleased, licking her fangs in approbation.

“It was a pin,” Juniper said. “They were tying down our screening force while they hit the men I sent to take Sinka. They waited until after the surrender, when we’d begun to split the force into the smaller garrisons we’ll be leaving.”

My brow rose. That implied they’d managed a night ambush on open grounds while we fielded goblins.

“They had illusions good enough we couldn’t see through them?” I asked.

“The attackers were in the river,” Juniper grimaced. “Deep enough our first sweep with mages didn’t catch them. They had boats hidden on the far side of the Wasaliti under illusions and some kind of half-fish devil in the-”

She turned a moment, leaning towards someone I only dimly heard speak before nodding thanks.

“Sahelian sends word the devils are called nikyana , and that Wolof usually keeps a few contracts but nowhere as many as we saw tonight,” the tall orc growled. “At least seven hundred of the bastards popped out of the river on our flanks and they would have caught us entirely by surprise without the Silver Huntress giving alarm They don’t use weapons but they’re quick and strong, we lost almost a full cohort before we realized what was happening.”

I winced. Caught out of formation, my legionaries would have had a hard time handling devils. Like with heavy horse, you needed thick ranks and spellfire to handle a charge of those.

“And bleeding us wasn’t even the point of the attack,” Juniper revealed.

My brow rose.

“They infiltrated a mage cadre with escorts to try to grab Vivienne in the chaos,” Juniper said. “The Squire and the Apprentice drove them off, but apparently it was a close thing. The moment the grab failed the entire attack was called off and they retreated into the river.”

I let out a low whistle. That’d actually been a sharp play from Sargon, assuming it really was the young lord’s plan. Vivienne was one of the few people in my army I couldn’t afford not to bargain for, if she were taken prisoner. Should Sargon threaten to put her head on a pike unless I retreated, he would have me in a very tricky position.

“Total casualties?” I asked.

“Between Sinka and the plain, we lost three hundred and twelve,” she said. “Cost them at least two hundred where Tanja held command on top of the forty and so we captured, so there’s that, but they’re keeping to standard Praesi tactics when it comes to soaking up casualties with devils.”

Forty years ago, before the Reforms, orcs and goblins would have been right with the devils eating those Callowan blades, I thought. Bleeding so that their betters wouldn’t. Looking at the hard cast of my marshal’s face, I suspected I wasn’t the only one who’d thought that. I quickly went over the fall of Jinon for her and concluded with the prisoners now headed her way.

“Good news,” Juniper said. “I have mages and the Huntress following the diabolists on the river. We’ll try to hit them before they can retreat to Wolof.”

“Take prisoners if you can,” I said, “but our people come first.”

I wanted diabolists, but I didn’t need them that badly. A handful grabbed off the field weren’t going to be enough to handle the Hellgates, I was going to need a genuine diplomatic concession to secure that many. Juniper nodded, offering me a crisp Legion salute before the spell died and the magic displaying her face dissipated. I rolled my shoulder, sighing. It was already a long night and it was still far from over. I turned to Masego.

“Assuming the prisoners are out, I’ll need to help establish our own garrison here,” I said. “Do you think you could check the wards for nasty surprises?”

The Concocter would be coming along later too, to see if my idea about how get into the city was feasible.

“I will,” Hierophant said, burning eyes swivelling lazily in their sockets, “but I expect you’ll have more pressing matters to attend to.”

“Like?”

“Aunt Eudokia just walked through the gates,” Masego said, “and she looks in a hurry.”

—

Scribe looked both healthier than when I’d last seen her and deeply exhausted. It was the good kind of exhausted, though, the kind you got from putting all of yourself into something you loved. Her back was straight and though as always my attention slid right off her – save for the same detail, the perennially ink-stained hands – I got a sense of vitality from her that she’d lacked when she had first reached out to me in Hainaut. I had come to believe that, more than anything, Scribe thrived on being useful. The cause didn’t matter much, it was about stretching her abilities to the limit. In a way it was like Ranger’s thirst for worthy fights, though neither woman would thank me for the comparison.

“Queen Catherine,” she greeted me, shortly bowing.

“Scribe,” I replied. “Pleasure to have you back with us, though I expected it would be back at the camp.”

“There has been a change of plans,” she said. “The envoys heard there would be an assault on Jinon, and they insisted on speaking with you here.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“They want to see if I’m strong enough to beard the Sahelians in their own backyard,” I said.

Which was fair enough. Nobody liked backing a losing horse. Besides, orcs respected strength above all and this bunch was more opportunistic than most.

“How long until they’re here?” I asked.

“A quarter hour at most,” Scribe said. “I requested of Archer that she slow their passage through the Ways, but there are limits.”

“She’ll do what she can,” I muttered.

My mind was already racing ahead, putting the pieces in place. I would have preferred having Vivienne here for this, since any deals made would be inherited by her, but that’d be hard to arrange. This wouldn’t end with a single conversation anyway.

“Indeed,” Scribe said. “A stark improvement on her predecessor in every regard, Archer.”

I eyed the villainess amusedly. She’d been less than fond of Ranger even before the Lady of the Lake had put an arrow an inch away from her heart.

“Thanks for the heads up,” I said.

“There is more,” Scribe said. “I received word from my agents in the northeast: the fortress of Chagoro has fallen.”

I took me a moment to place that name in my mental map of Praes. It was one of the main fortresses north of the High Seat of Okoro, an important strategic position since it was close to the two easiest passes into the Northern Steppes. It was the keystone of Okoro’s northern defences, and supposedly one of the thornier fortresses in the region.

“Who holds it?” I frowned. “It is one of the Clans?”

High Lord Jaheem Niri was one of Malicia’s supporters and his domain has been largely spared the depredations that most of Praes had suffered, so this was something of a surprise. The Niri could still field one of the largest private fighting forces in the Empire, and they wouldn’t skimp on their northern defences when there was trouble in the Steppes. A surprise attack by supporters of Sepulchral, maybe?

“No one holds it,” Scribe evenly said. “It is full of corpses.”

My thoughts ground to a halt. What?

“My agents confirmed that the killing was done by blade, over the span of less than an hour, and that the assailants took no casualties,” she continued.

“That’s absurd,” I bit out. “How many soldiers were there in that fortress, Scribe?”

“A little over a thousand,” she replied.

“It can’t be the Dead King,” I frowned, “he’s bound by oath to attack neither Praes nor Callow. Who could-”

I closed my eyes, abandoning the train of thought. It was a dead end, there were too many monsters out there in the wilds that I knew little about. Capacity for destruction, for killing, was not that uncommon. It would instead be much more useful to figure out who gained from Chagoro falling. I did, since it made Okoro a lot more vulnerable to attacks by the Clans, but this hadn’t been a scheme of mine. Sepulchral benefitted as well, arguably, since anything weakening a backer of Malicia’s helped her cause. She shouldn’t have assets capable of something this flashy, though. Could the Empress herself have done it? She certainly had the ruthlessness, but I wasn’t seeing a gain for her to make. Even of Jaheem Niri had been about to turn on her and she wanted him kept busy, there were better ways.

And this timing, I thought, it was too good.

I wanted to bring the Clans into the war, specifically for them to fall on the back of Malicia’s northern allies, and the High Lord of Okoro had been a major obstacle in that regard. With a major gap in his defences, however, there were now chances that orc clans would go raiding even if it had nothing to do with me whatsoever. And it was coming at a precisely the right time, while I was mauling Wolof with the Army of Callow and Malica’s armies were still making their way up from down south. Okoro stood alone and with its pants down. That wasn’t a coincidence, it was too precise for that, and-

“Black,” I murmured. “ Black did this.”

“Ranger is powerful, but not so powerful as that,” Scribe objected.

He shouldn’t have the resources to pull off something like this, that much was true. It was pretty much just him and the Lady of the Lake out there, wasn’t it? He’d not even picked up that nice army of deserters waiting for him in the Green Stretch – though I had my doubts about that, it seemed a little too convenient – and taken them in hand. Archer and Akua had believed, I recalled from the last time we’d discussed the matter in council, that he couldn’t take up such a position. It would be a death trap to be visible, since Ranger was being hunted by the Emerald Swords. My thoughts stalled for a moment after that, as the realization sunk in, because surely he hadn’t.

It was the kind of reckless play I would have made, nothing like the calculating and cold-blooded man who’d taught me. And yet.

“Eudokia,” I quietly said. “Your agents, they said it was done with blades. Did they get a read on the number of assailants?”

“No,” Scribe admitted. “All they could give me was that it looked like halfway through the fight soldiers began fleeing and they were run down to the last.”

And that wasn’t much, wasn’t a confirmation, but it fit.

“Fuck me,” I said. “He used Ranger as bait , Scribe. The Emerald Swords did this. He drew them there to clear out the fortress.”

She blinked in surprise, then after a long moment sighed. Tellingly, she did not disagree. Silly me, how could I not have expected my father would find a way to turn his sole companion being hunted by ten of the most dangerous people on Calernia into an advantage . I’d come by my bastardry honestly, I shouldn’t have forgot. And against my better judgement, I found my lips twitching. Welcome to the war, Black. Finally making your move, are you?

“So he wants the Clans going on the offensive too,” I mused. “Interesting.”

What exactly my father wanted and how he intended to achieve remained unclear to me, and likely would for some time. If he’d wanted to speak with me, he would have by now. I cast a look at Scribe, who had remained silent as I thought.

“If you offered your services again,” I said, “I’m not sure he would refuse you a second time.”

I was under no illusions that our months of collaboration in any way trumped decades of close friendship. The Calamities had been tightly bound, before they began dropping dead.

“You worry of my loyalties,” Scribe said.

“I don’t,” I said. “I know exactly where they lie. And it’s not empty words when I say that there would be no rancour, should you-”

“I am not a good or pleasant woman, Catherine Foundling,” Eudokia the Scribe said and for a heartbeat I saw brown eyes flashing with anger, set in a tanned and freckled face. “I do not pretend otherwise. I have little use for the morals you espouse or the causes you champion, save when they intersect with my own diversions.”

“But,” I said.

“But I am a woman of my word,” Scribe said. “I believe in contracts and the worth of promises. Even should I decide to leave your side – and if I do it will not be like this , like some beaten dog crawling back to her master’s feet – even then, I would no more reveal secrets learned in your service than I have revealed you those I learned in his.”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them. How much of that had been truth and how much of it a lie? It was the proportions that made the difference between poison and medicine.

I was going to be betrayed at least once before the month was out, but would Scribe make the second?

“I believe you,” I lied, and we prepared for our guests.

—

Sometimes diplomacy was about making a point.

That was why, when five orcs passed through the gates of Jinon following Indrani, they stopped and stared at the sight awaiting them for a beat. It was not the throne that caught their eye, though shaping it out of roiling Night had lent it a certain imperious look. It wasn’t the deadwood staff across my knees either, or crow-shaped shadows perched above my shoulders. It was the piles of arms and armour that filled the courtyard, glittering and ornate Praesi armaments spread around like a carpet of steel. Hundreds of swords and shields, of cuirasses and helmets, and not a corpse anywhere around to be seen. Only steel and silence, with the moon high above and dark walls around us.

That was my point: I took this fortress, and I did not even bleed for it.

Archer was hiding a smile as she walked to us through the path. I had a small honour guard around me, a simple line of regulars, and though Hierophant was somewhere above on a parapet it was Scribe who stood behind me on my left. There were five seats awaiting, for the five orcs that the clans I’d reached out to had sent. Scribe whispered the names into my ear even as they approached, their body language wary. Asny of the Graven Bone Clan, taller than even Hakram and sister to her clan’s chief. Valborg of the Stag-Crowned Clan, stooped but strong and eldest raid leader of the Stag-Crowned. Skarod Longaxe, the small but nimble husband to the chieftain of the Blackspear Clan. The twins Sigvin and Sigvun of the Split Tree Clan were the last, rumoured to both be shamans and shapeshifters.

It was the clan I needed on my side the least that’d sent two envoys, ironically enough. The Blackspears, the Graven Bone and the Stag-Crowned were the three largest southern clans, but that wasn’t actually why I’d reached out to them. I had decent relations with the Red Shields and the Howling Wolves – Juniper and Hakram’s clans – and they were among the great orc powers too. No, those three were here because Malicia had raised them over other orcs by ennobling their chiefs as Lords of the Steppe and empowering them to collect tribute on behalf of the Tower. The Split Tree twins, on the other hand, were here for slightly more complicated reasons.

Their clan was respected and well-connected, boasting a number of genuine spellcaster shamans, and it’d made the Split Tree Clan an important part of the alliance that’d formed around the Lords of the Steppes. Those three clans had... mixed reputations. The Split Tree being part of the alliance lent it respect it badly needed, considering when the Howling Wolves – currently the largest and most well-respected of the clans – were at the head of the alliance opposing the Lords of the Steppe. For me that meant having them on board was much to be preferred, if a bargain was to happen, but they weren’t strictly required. Archer left their side after offering me a grin, coming to stand at my right. As the orcs approached a legionary came forward with a plate holding a large cut of salted pork and a mug of beer.

“I offer you meat and drink from my table,” I spoke in Kharsum.

They each took a bite and a sip – I noted that the Blackspear envoy, Skarod Longaxe, went first – and only then did the wariness leave them. I’d just formally given them my hospitality, and though the custom was not as ironclad with orcs as it was with Taghreb it wasn’t something to lightly cross.

“Good, we’re done with the shite then,” Asny of the Graven Bones grunted, spitting to the side. “Hail, Black Queen.”

“Hail, Asny of the Graven Bones,” I replied, faintly amused. “And to you all.”

It got growls in answer, rough acknowledgement.

“You wanted to have talks, Black Queen,” Skarod Longaxe said. “Talk, then. You’re not the only one with a war on.”

“That one’s her war too, unless she’s stopped trading weapons to our enemies,” Valborg of the Stag-Crowned peevishly said.

I hadn’t. Hakram’s revision of the proposal that’d troubled me so much had proved viable in arming the clans we wanted armed in the Steppes. We’d taken to buying dwarven weapons through Mercantis, which while relatively low-quality were cheap and came in large crates. We traded them to friendly clans in the north for amber, furs and raw iron ore – which we then traded back to Mercantis at a mark up, making a small but tidy profit. We could sustain that trade route for years, considering Callow had nowhere enough trading barges to flood either market to the extent that prices would lower. The kind of diplomatic flourishes I’d gotten used to trotting out in Procer would be useless here, so instead I leaned into my natural instinct.

“You hitched your chariot to a dying horse,” I bluntly told them. “It’s time to cut loose before it drags you down with it.”

Asny barked out a laugh.

“You’ve got guts, Queen, I’ll give you that,” she said. “But it’s a little soon to make that claim, yeah? Tower’s still standing.”

“There are many who have fought Dread Empress Malicia, over the years,” Sigvin of the Split Tree said, voice soft for all that she was built like barn door. “Some even had the better of her, for a time. None still remain.”

I smiled at them, all teeth and malice.

“If my armies are at the gates of Ater, what use do I have for any of you?” I said. “When the Tower falls – and it will – what reason do I have to care about your enemies butchering every last one of you? If you’re of no use to me, you’re meat. Now is when you earn your worth.”

Skarod Longaxe, envoy for the Blackspears, spat to the side on some soldier’s shield.

“So you want us to kneel to your little favourites,” he said. “Which will you crown, Black Queen, the Howling Wolves or the Red Shields?”

He bared his teeth, contemptuous.

“Will you make one of your servants chief first, just to tie it up neat?” he mocked. “Your own little puppet king in the Steppes, ready to do your bidding.”

“Fuck that,” Asny of the Graven Bones growled. “We’re too many corpses deep in this feud to roll over for the Wolves.”

“Little has been offered,” Sigvun of the Split Tree Clan mildly said. “Much has been demanded.”

I drummed fingers against the arm of my throne.

“Did I ever speak of surrendering to anyone?” I asked, irritated. “The next person to put words in my mouth will be made to swallow them.”

“We’re under hospitality,” Skarod Longaxe harshly said.

“Hospitality keeps you your life, Longaxe, not your teeth,” I replied.

Asny and Valborg laughed, though the twins looked unamused.

“Are these talks not meant to broke peace between us and the Howling Wolves, then?” Sigvin of the Split Tree asked.

“I’m here to broker a war,” I said. “If you want to make peace with the Wolves, make peace with the Wolves. It’s the business of the Clans, not Callow.”

I stared them down from my throne, the crows stirring at my shoulders. The attention of the Sisters was not in the shards, leaving them as little more than creatures of shadow, but they still made an intimidating sight.

“What I want to know,” I said, “is why you’re fighting other orcs for snow and grass when you could be biting deep in the riches of Okoro instead.”

“We didn’t choose to feud,” Skarod Longaxe snorted. “The Wolves did.”

Bullshit. The Blackspears had wasted no time in using the powers Malicia granted them to try to extort all their neighbouring clans, they’d known it would come to war. They’d just figured they were going to win it.

“Okoro’s belly is well-guarded,” Sigvun of the Split Tree pointed out. “Much of its armies have remained north, its walls are tall and its devils many.”

“We could take them,” Asny of the Graven Bones scoffed. “If we didn’t have to keep half our warriors home to fight off raids, we could smash through Okoro.”

“The only thing you’d smash in Okoro is your skull on Chagoro’s walls, pup,” Valborg of the Stag-Crowned dismissed. “That fortress has broken more warbands than you’ve had lays.”

“Chagoro,” I calmly said, “has fallen.”

Five pairs of eyes went to me, stillness hanging in the air like haze.

“There is nothing left between those walls save corpses,” I said. “Do I now have your attention?”

“You lie,” Skarod Longaxe accused.

I glanced at Scribe, who took a single step forward.

“It is the truth,” she said. “My agents have confirmed it.”

That took the wind out of Longaxe’s sails. The Calamities weren’t necessarily loved by orcs, but they were respected . Scribe putting her weight behind this wasn’t something they’d dismiss. Hells, it was the reason I’d sent her with Archer into the Steppes in the first place. Indrani wasn’t known up there, but the Calamities? That name still turned heads, even with most of them in the ground. It’d made them take me seriously enough to send envoys in the first place.

“That changes things,” Valborg of the Stag-Crowned admitted, clicking her fangs in hesitation. “Without Chagoro in the way, we could make it past the fortress-lands.”

“We can’t mount a raid worth a goat’s spit with the Wolves up our asses,” Asny of the Graven Bones said.

“Okoro’s wealth isn’t worth kneeling to our enemies,” Skarod Longaxe said, but his tone was more careful now.

Less hostile, I decided. He still didn’t think much of me or my offer, but the thought of raiding Okoro’s holdings appealed. As I’d thought it might.

“Offer truce,” I said. “If you do, I will back you under threat of ending sale of arms.”

“Truce isn’t peace, but it won’t be easy to swallow,” Asny growled.

“Fight for a thousand years, for all I care,” I snorted. “But do it rich . Do it with great herds of cattle, with granaries of grains and the wealth of a hundred tributes. Do it wielding enchanted blades. You think you’re the only ones who want to sink their teeth there? How many warriors from the Shields and the Wolves do you think would rather raid south than fight you ?”

That was why I was sitting with these five instead of clans I could more easily have made allies of, in the end. I could back those friendly clans all I wanted, but it wouldn’t cost Malicia anything. What did she care that there was a civil war in the Steppes, so long as it didn’t spill over anywhere that mattered to her? It wouldn’t conclude quickly enough to be a threat. I actually suspected she’d meant her raising of the Lords of the Steppes to trigger that very civil war, since if the orcs were fighting each other they weren’t making trouble for her. She’d picked clans with badreputations to raise, too, and that didn’t look like a coincidence to me. They were the same clans that were almost guaranteed to have gone raiding at her unprotected back, were they not busy defending their noble titles.

If I turned these, though, not only would the betrayal be a public slap in her face but close to the full might of the Clans would come into play in the greater Praesi civil war.

“And if this truce was sought by your alliance,” Sigvun of the Split Tree said, “you would support it?”

“I’ll even send an envoy at the talks,” I smiled, hiding my triumph.

I said it like it was a concession. Like it wasn’t what I’d been after from the start. Like the moment the rest of them began to agree, as they hesitantly did, I’d not gotten exactly what I wanted: an army that, though it didn’t know it yet, was going to march on Keter with the rest of us.

Now I just needed to figure out why my father had wanted this too, and if the two of us were at war too.

Chapter 4: Stock

“It is unseemly to poison an ally in the first month, wear white at an assassination or use the same curse more than once per decade. Fashions will change with year and season, but always these three will be a mark of crudeness.”

– Extract from ‘The Behaviours of Civil Conduct’, by High Lady Mchumba Sahelian

The way Indrani and I kept sharing a bed was the longest I’d ever been involved with anyone.

It wasn’t a love affair, at least not in the sense that I was in love with her or the other way around, but it was no less meaningful for it. More than that, it’d become a creature comfort of sorts on top of being very enjoyable. My part of the arrangement was probably the easiest to navigate, which honesty compelled me to admit might be for the best considering how things had ended with Killian. My time with my former Senior Mage had ended with frozen silence and avoiding each other, which didn’t bode well since aside from the occasional tumble before I became the Squire that was pretty much the sum of my relationships. Indrani didn’t ask much aside from a place in my bed, which was just fine by me. That much I could handle.

It was what bound her and Masego that I found interestingly nuanced. The two of them were distinctly ‘involved’, but it was more an intimate partnership than anything like the chaste marriages people without inclination to sex sometimes entered in. Masego wasn’t inclined towards that either. Zeze seemed happy with the arrangement, anyhowm, and Indrani certainly was. While she’d let him set the lines, aware he hadn’t been made of quite the same clay than she and I in this regard, she’d not been afraid to speak up when she wanted something. It was how they’d come to share rooms in the Arsenal. Masego also considered anything she and I got up to as not related to him in the slightest, I’d confirmed on the one awkward instance where I’d tried to broach the subject with him.

He’d been confused at my bringing it up in the first place, since it struck him as a private affair, and once I’d made sure he was both aware and indifferent I’d been more than happy to drop the matter entirely. It’d been a relief. I didn’t count myself as particularly shy, but as I aged I’d noticed that I was getting more closed up about intimacy. There were just too many ways it could be used against me if it came to light.

Indrani’s part of this that was the trickiest. She was the one who had to draw lines and figure out limits. Distinctions. It was in the small things, like the way that after returning from a long trip, as she had yesterday, she always spent the night with Masego. She’d also been out in the wilds for about two months, though, so pretty early the morning after she came to visit me and I strengthened the privacy protections around my tent with Night. Quite a while later, we had a breakfast together. I was seated at the end of the table on my favourite seat, picking at the plate of sliced fruit my attendants had brought in and occasionally passing Indrani a cut of mango or passion fruit while I read through the papers Adjutant had sent me.

High Lord Sargon had sent a messenger to arrange talks, much as we’d expected he would, and they’d been set for midday on relatively neutral grounds. The envoys from the Steppes were settled in, I read, and soon we’d have the second round of talks so we had all the details hashed out before they left. Hakram would have to be there for those, as I fully intended for him to be my envoy up north.

Indrani was sitting cross-legged on the ground, absent-mindedly munching on the pieces I put on a plate in hand’s reach as we chatted and she carved at the underside of the table. I was careful with my sleeves as I devoured the mango – one of the few sweet things I liked, and so rare back home – since the green tunic I’d put on had long ones. It was a little warm for this weather, but I didn’t feel like having to explain the slight rope burn around my wrists should someone see it. Especially when the reasons for it had me in such a boneless, lazy mood. It was a rare enough these days, I wasn’t going to spoil it.

“So the two ducklings you picked up,” Indrani began, knife chipping away out of my sight.

I finished a piece of passion fruit, licking my fingers clean.

“Sadly,” I slowly replied, “you’re going to have to be more specific than that.”

She snorted.

“Really living up to that whole Queen of Lost and Found title, huh?” Indrani said.

I rolled my eye at her.

“Which ones do you mean?”

“Razin and Aquiline, the duckling lords,” Archer elaborated.

“What about them?” I said, cocking an eyebrow.

“Shouldn’t they be married by now?” Indrani said, then clicked her tongue.

She dipped deeper under the table, knifepoint scratching against the wood furiously. Missed a detail, had she? I pushed a few more slices of fruit onto her plate and slid it across the table closer to her.

“They’re going through with it after we take Keter,” I informed her.

“Bold,” Archer said, tone approving.

Actually very cautious of them, and so likely Razin’s idea. He tended to be better at that part. If they got married right now, they’d be a power bloc that the other two great lines of the Blood – the Champion’s and the Brigand’s – would feel strongly threatened by. With the Pilgrim’s Blood gone the way of dust, the Dominion no longer had an even theoretical ruler. Which meant after the war Levant would either fracture into smaller warring fiefdoms or another bloodline would take the Tattered Throne. An alliance between the Osena and the Tanja would be the clear frontrunner in the race, always a dangerous position to be in. As things stood, though, Lord Yannu and Lady Itima were a lot more likely to bet on one of them biting it in the war than try a knife in the back.

Why take the risk, when the Dead King might yet do the work for them?

“It’ll make for a damn good story, if they pull it off,” I admitted.

It was the kind of foundation a dynasty could be built on if they played it right. Indrani made an approving noise.

“You ever wonder what stories they’ll tell about us?” she asked, tone light.

“Probably that fucking story about me castrating an ogre,” I grimly said. “That one’ll follow me into grave, mark my words.”

“Don’t undersell yourself,” Archer said, and I heard the grin.

There was a beat of silence.

“You castrated him in single combat ,” she said. “That makes it all the more impressive.”

I groaned, making an obscene gesture she didn’t even bother to look at.

“Our jaunt to Keter’s going to make a good one, I think,” Indrani mused. “It’s got all the good ingredients. The five of us and Akua, a journey into the Hells and the worthy enemies.”

Metaphorical Hells, since it’d been Arcadia we traipsed through. Hopefully chroniclers wouldn’t ask too many questions about the plan in Keter. I’d yet to live it down, though in my defence it had sort of worked?

“The Princess of High Noon,” I suggested. “That was a good one for retelling. Masego found his eyes and all five of us had a hand in that win.”

It’d ended on a sour note, but that was war for you.

“Still can’t believe Vivienne didn’t even try to pawn that sun,” Archer grumbled. “What kind of a thief was she? It would have fetched us a fortune in Mercantis.”

“I think in a way she did,” I said. “It’s on her personal arms now, did you know?”

A white sun on Fairfax blue. If there was to be a Dartwick dynasty after me, I figured they were as good arms as any.

“My sources informed me,” Indrani mysteriously said.

The effect was somewhat spoiled by the way she groped blindly above the table to steal a few pieces of fruit I’d laid out to scarf them down noisily. Well, that and we both knew that by sources she just meant Hakram. The gossipy bitch.

“After Zeze pulled out that echo of the sun in Hainaut, people started telling the story again,” I mused. “Pretty sure it’s spreading quicker than it naturally should, too.”

Indrani’s head popped over the edge of the table, brown face openly curious.

“Hakram’s building her a legend?” she asked.

“He probably is,” I said, “but I don’t think it’s entirely natural , if you catch my drift.”

Names could form in a lot of ways, but one was the most common: like a boulder rolling downhill, gathering weight and momentum. In that moment in Hainaut, when the hour had been at its darkest and she’d ridden out to turn the tide, I believed Vivienne had sown the first seeds of a Name. I had mixed feelings about that, to be honest. It would be the final nail in my hopes of having the Liesse Accord ban Named rulers, should my guess turned out accurate. But if I was going to trust anyone Named with my home, it’d be Vivienne Dartwick. And the chances of that measure going through are getting slimmer by the day, so I might just have to water my wine there.

“I did notice people called her a princess even before you made that official,” Indrani said. “But it can be a thin line between the start of a Name and simple reputation.”

I grunted in agreement.

“Pretty sure I’m standing in its way, whatever it is,” I admitted. “I think it’ll only coalesce properly when she’s got the crown.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Archer said. “You’re looking at Names and Roles of Old Callow, and sure enough she doesn’t fit those properly, but if you go simpler -”

A guard popped in his head through the tent’s flap, and I realized with mild embarrassment I’d never loosened the Night-workings I’d put around the tent. I wouldn’t even have heard it if there was a hurricane outside.

“The Concocter to speak with you, Your Majesty,” the legionary said.

Ah, good. She’d finished her tests then.

“Let her in,” I replied.

The Concocter’s appearance had changed since she’d accompanied us to Praes, which I’d been told was a regular occurrence with her. Her hair was now aquamarine blue, pulled up in a bun behind her head, with matching lips and golden-yellow eyes. Though often sullen, for once the alchemist seemed in a pleasant mood. She offered me half a bow and Indrani simply a droll look, which Archer returned with an indolent wave of her hand before helping herself to the rest of the fruit.

“Your Majesty,” the Concocter greeted me.

“Concocter,” I replied. “You have results for me?”

“I do,” she said. “Of the three products we salvaged from Sudden Abjuration before shutting it down, two proved functional in the water of the aqueduct. The amaranthine salt rock dispersed too easily, however, so I would recommend the use of the evanescent powder instead.”

I pushed down a grimace. The salt rock would have bee easier to carry and less would have been needed, but I wasn’t going to be take risks with this. Well, not more than the plan involved in the first place anyway. It, uh, wouldn’t be the safest thing I’d ever done.

“How many bags of powder will be necessary?” I asked.

“At least eight, standard Arsenal measurements,” the Concocter said after a moment, calculating in her head. “Assuming the dimensions given by Lady Sahelian are accurate.”

“They should be,” I said. “Just in case, I’d request you make us ten bags. Better to have a margin of error.”

“It can be done by tomorrow morning, if I don’t sleep,” the villainess replied, sounding almost enthusiastic the thought. “As for the breathing potions they’re already done. Four doses, as you asked.”

Good, it was all coming together. Indrani let out a noise of surprise.

“The underwater breathing brew, you actually got it working?” she asked.

“I did,” the Concocter preened.

“Damn,” Archer said, sounding impressed. “It’s been what, over ten years? Congratulations. What was missing?”

The Concocter cleared her throat, seemingly embarrassed. I could understand why.

“Powdered dragon bone,” she said.

Which made each of those four vials she’d brewed me worth more than their literal weight in gold. My pipe was dragonbone, and that little artefact alone would be enough to buy you a large mansion in Ater. Thankfully, at least part of the bill for this was being covered by the Grand Alliance. Indrani laughed at the answer and the Concocter subtly tensed.

“Yeah, not a lot of that going around Refuge,” Archer said. “Makes sense you wouldn’t have figured it out there.”

“I’d had good results with drake blood, it was a hint,” Concocter admitted. “Mind you, those pigs still drowned.”

The tension in her shoulders loosened, and I wondered if Indrani realized how precarious the entente she’d reached there still was. Having the Silver Huntress in camp had been as much a help as hindrance there. Cocky and Alexis tended to argue when left to their own devices, and the Concocter then often sought out Indrani, but the Silver Huntress was openly resentful of that and it was leading to friction between the three – Archer wasn’t the kind of woman who took kindly to being snipped at when she didn’t believe she deserved it.

“Encouraging,” I drily said, and she looked a little embarrassed for a moment.

“It’ll work, Your Majesty, I tested it myself,” the Concocter said.

“Your work has given me no reason to doubt you,” I calmly said. “Kindly send me word as soon as you’ve finished preparing the powder.”

The other villain understood it as the dismissal it was, and after the usual round of courtesies she was on her way out. I’d kept Indrani’s attention, though. I’d figured mention of the water breathing potion would do the trick.

“So, I see you’ve got plans,” Archer said. “Going somewhere, Cat?”

“I am,” I said. “And taking people with me, too.”

“Oh?” Indrani said, with transparently affected nonchalance.

The potion would be a new experience, something she craved like a drunkard craved the bottle, and on top of that she knew I wouldn’t be mauling my treasury paying for those for just any old place. I was going somewhere interesting, and she wanted in. Which made it good thing I’d planned to bring her from the start. While I could have teased her and strung this out, I decided to reward her having interacted with a fellow pupil of Ranger without anyone getting angry or bitter.

I was going to train it into her, I swore.

“Hey,” I asked with a winning smile, “wanna to come with me and Akua to rob a secret Sahelian vault full of horrors beyond comprehension?”

She choked in surprise and delight, hazelnut eyes alight with pleasure.

“You say the sweetest things sometimes,” Indrani grinned.

—

There was no one in the world like the Soninke and their highborn gloried in that.

Our party had come to the orchard first so that we would be able to look for traps before High Lord Sargon arrived. Hierophant led a mage cadre in combing through the spread of tall lemon trees, boots crinkling against the dry earth as the sun pounded down on all our heads. There was not so much as a hint of breeze today, the heat was suffocating. We’d agreed on bringing no more than thirty guards each, so twenty knights of the Order of Broken Bells sat the saddle in good order behind me. Inside those shells of polished and hymn-inscribed steel they must be cooking alive, but they made for an impressive sight. Decked in plate from head to toe, their chargers wearing carapace in black and bronze, they kept their shields close and their lances raised. Their banner hung by my own, dead for the lack of wind.

Masego had wandered off to sit under a tree after looking around, popping open a book larger than my head in what looked like an older dialect of Mthethwa, which left Akua and I to stand under the shade of a tall lemon tree halfway through the orchard. She had decided to wear my colours, today. The dress was a long one, going down to her feet, and it was of a traditional Wolof cut: the neckline was narrow and though it went beyond her collarbone it did not venture far. It clung loosely to her body, tied up at the waist by two sleeves of cloth that were part of the dress. It was black, though from the top of her collarbones to well below her tight there was broad silver-and-gold embroidery. It looked almost like a stole, though it was part of the dress, and the intricate patterns there matched those at the end of her sleeves and the cloth tied around her waist.

There was, as had become her habit, not a single piece of jewelry on her.

Stunning as she was, I might as well have worn rags for the difference it’d make. Still, I’d humoured the notion of royal splendour: though I wore a breastplate and greaves, because I wasn’t a fool, I’d put my hair in a long braid and worn my crown. The Mantle of Woe and my staff served as the regalia of my rule, truer to me than anything I might have dragged out of some dusty Fairfax vault, and instead of an aketon I had worn a thick black tunic touched with silverwork around the edges. Nothing as intricate as what Akua had on her, but then my bloody clothing wasn’t made out thin air. We made a memorable enough sight, I figured, and drew the eye enough that the little surprise I’d kept up my sleeve shouldn’t be noticed.

Then Sargon Sahelian’s party came riding into the orchard, and it was an effort not to stare.

All thirty of the high lord’s bodyguards were mounted on pale horses, a breed short-backed with a high-set tail, but little of the coat could be seen: long quilted armour in red, black and white covered them all the way down to the lower leg. The patterns were eye-pleasing, sharp triangles and long stripes colourful enough the thin strands of copper woven into the quilt were hard to make out. Enchanted, I thought. Those were definitely enchanted. The riders themselves were no less splendid. Their segmented steel lamellar bore a single pauldron on the right shoulder lined with lion’s fur, while from the left hung a long sash whose patterns matched those of horse’s armour – if you did not pay attention, your eye might be tricked in thinking them a single creature.

They each bore a spear, a shield, and curved sword and three javelins. All glittered with rubies and ivory. Light cavalry , I thought. They’d break under a charge of my knights, but my men would die of exhaustion before catching up and those javelins looked nasty. Javelins could punch through plate, if you knew how to throw them. Ornate helmets added the final touch, rounded tops bearing bright red feathers with an eye-catching mouthguard made of two ivory tusks atop a coloured veil of mail.

Splendid as they were, though, the soldiers were nothing to the three nobles that had come. To the sides of Sargon Sahelian were mage nobility, amber-eyed and smiling. Over silk coats they wore breastplates entirely decorative – they went only halfway to the belly – but beautifully crafted, inlaid with gold filigree and rib-like white enamel stripes. They wore gorgeous red cloaks bordered in gold, and at their sides were jewel-encrusted swords too pristine to have ever seen use. Each wore a king’s ransom of artefacts as earrings and bracelets, necklaces and trinkets. Beautiful and poisonous, they laughed as they pressed forward their horses.

The High Lord of Wolof made them both look like beggars. For half a heartbeat I thought he had dressed severely, a simple painted scale armour over a red coat, but then the ‘scale’ caught the light. It wasn’t painted, I realized. It was made of precious stones, every last scale: garnets and tourmaline and rubies, sapphires of every tone and colour, onyx and chalcedonies and amethysts. I found the sheer waste fascinating, in a repulsive sort of way. The hem and sleeves of his coat were embroidered with black and white maze-like patterns that were dizzying to look at – enchanted, probably – while High Lord Sargon’s shoulder-length black hair was flecked with pale feathers longer than any bird I knew could grow.

Golden eyed like his cousin, the High Lord of Wolof rode in the shadow of the lemon trees and his retinue followed. The dappled light danced lightly across the colours, making it seem as if they shivered like waves on a pond, and my breath caught in my throat at the sight of them all. Beautiful and terrible, as Akua had once proclaimed at the Doom. There really was no one in the world like the Soninke, was there? Sometimes, about some things, their arrogance was not unwarranted. One of the two nobles peeled ahead of the rest, reining in his mount thirty feet or so away from us. I felt the weight of his gaze sweeping across us for a moment before he offered a short bow.

“You stand before High Lord Sargon Sahelian of Wolof, he who rules over the temples antediluvian and the vaults of forbidden knowledge,” the man announced in Mthethwa, his voice pleasantly rich. “You may kneel in awe.”

How nice of him to give us permission. We were a stiff-kneed bunch, Callowans, so no one took him up on the kind offer. To my surprise, Akua took a step forward. The noble’s eyes moved to her, gone wary the way you would when encountering a venomous snake.

“You stand before Queen Catherine Foundling of Callow, the Black Queen,” Akua announced, tone light and amused, “she who has broken gods and bargained with them, stolen the sun and contended Choirs three. Your boasts are shallow , Naiser Mutinda.”

The man sneered down at her.

“The once-proud daughter of Wolof returns a lackey,” he said. “Disappointing.”

I drummed my fingers against the side of my staff.

“You’re wasting my time,” I mildly said, staring at the man.

He hesitated but Naiser, since that seemed to be his name, wasn’t quite brave enough to mouth off to me to my face.

“High Lord Sargon blesses these talks with standing of truce,” the nobleman said.

The actual reason he’d come, this. Making sure we couldn’t take swings at each other without consequences.

“So do I,” I said. “Now let him talk for himself, lackey, before I begin to lose patience.”

“There was no need for that sort of talk, Naiser,” an urbane voice chided. “My cousin’s return is something to celebrate, not take offence to.”

Sargon Sahelian had dismounted while we entertained his man, the noblewoman to his side having followed suit, and as Naiser deferred to his liege lord I took a moment to study him more closely. The precious scale armour somehow didn’t look ridiculous when worn on foot, which surprised me, but not as much as the realization that the High Lord of Wolof wasn’t actually good looking. His chin was a little weak, the arch his eyebrows uneven and his nose too large for his face. He was far from ugly , but I’d gotten used to unearthly beauty being the norm among Wasteland aristocrats. The pageantry called attention away from it, though, and for a moment I thought of Cordelia Hasenbach.

“Do I pass muster then, Black Queen?” the High Lord of Wolof amusedly asked me.

Huh. It’d been a while since someone had called me out on studying them.

“I’m just amazed your armour doesn’t actually seem to be uncomfortable,” I replied, half-serious.

He laughed, revealing white but slightly crooked teeth.

“My great-grand uncle was vain but not foolish,” High Lord Sargon said. “He knew he’d have to wear the artefact after ordering it crafted.”

“He also ate tiger hearts for supper every other day,” Akua noted. “Let us not hasten to the conclusion of wisdom.”

While I was morbidly curious as to why anyone would eat a tiger heart, much less a regular supply of them – I bet it was a virility thing, always was with wealthy older men – Sahelian family anecdotes weren’t why I’d come out here. I lightly slapped my staff against the side of the tree I stood under, claiming their attention.

“You wanted talks, High Lord,” I said. “You have them. I recommend against wasting that chance.”

The dark-skinned aristocrat nodded, seemingly unconcerned.

“I could dance with words over Wolof not having warred on Callow under my rule, but I imagine that would go against the spirit of your recommendation,” Sargon said.

“Malicia’s my enemy,” I said. “You’re one of hers.”

If Wolof followed the Dread Empress of Praes, I would treat it accordingly.

“That is unfortunate,” Sargon said. “Though I would convey that she does not wish to be at war with you anymore than I do. She seeks to offer peace terms, Queen Catherine.”

“It’s more than a few corpses too late for that,” I sharply replied.

“Are you truly so petty you would not even listen to the terms, Catherine?”

My fingers clenched. Among the riders, one of them had taken off her helmet. It wasn’t Malicia’s real body but the cadence of the words, the presence? The body she was possessing with that ritual of hers smiled at my anger, but I didn’t let it burn hot. It went cold instead, frozen, and I raised my hand to snap my fingers. Malicia’s mouth opened, but before she could speak so much as a word there were a few flickers of light. An arrow streaked through layers of enchantments and tore right through her throat. She fell over, gurgling, and already halfway into the grave. Archer did not miss, not at this range. Even as the retinue began to raise their spears and my knights lowered their lances, I met Sargon Sahelian’s eyes.

His calm had not broken and neither had mine.

“I trust you have a good reason I shouldn’t just burn you all alive for bringing her to these talks,” I conversationally said.

He didn’t even flinch, which reluctantly raised my esteem of him a notch.

“I have on my person three artefacts known as the Weeping Snares,” Sargon replied. “They contain demons, and I have had an artificer bind all three seals to a command artefact in my possession.”

“I have the Hierophant,” I said. “Any leash you have on them will be mine before the first incantation’s finished.”

“There are no leashes on them, Catherine,” Akua quietly said. “It is why my ancestors left them in the vault instead of using them for war. They are simple containers, forged in cruder times.”

I hummed and thought for a moment, Sargon never blinking as he watched me. I could see sweat beading on the back of his neck. Not worth the risks, I eventually decided. Even should I weight that it was worth the damage to my reputation to break truce and kill the High Lord of Wolof, there was no guarantee that his successor would be more pliable – or that they’d negotiate with me at all.

“Clever,” I finally said. “Talk, then. We both know you came to make an offer.”

“You have seized Sinka and Jinon,” the High Lord said, “and this tightens the noose around my city. Yet we are each aware that Wolof could withstand a siege for longer than you can afford. I do not believe that you want to storm my walls anymore than I want them stormed, Black Queen.”

He shrugged, offering a disarming crooked smile.

“Would you be terribly offended if I offered you a bribe to go away?” he baldly asked.

It’s the teeth that give you away, Sargon , I thought. They were just one step too far. Even in Callow there were hedge mages in some cities that could straighten your teeth. There was no way that the High Lord of Wolof couldn’t get his own fixed, which meant keeping them was a choice . How many of your countrymen fell for that little smile, Sargon? Its just honest enough to trust, to believe coming out of a lesser branch’s son. How many saw it coming before you slid the knife? Aisha had warned me once, about charming Sahelians and the dooms they wrought.

“We can call them war reparations, somewhat overdue,” I mused. “I’m interested.”

“That is... pleasing to hear,” Sargon admitted.

He looked faintly relieved, though I wondered how much of it was feigned.

“I’ll want your granaries,” I idly told him, “your treasury and a pledge that Wolof will withdraw from the civil war.”

With each addition his smile grew more strained.

“Some of this can be haggled,” Sargon tried. “The last cannot. If the Webweaver is truly one of your followers now, I imagine you know why.”

Malicia had soulboxed him and was unlikely to be pleased if he abandoned her cause. Terrible torture would ensue, presumably. It was an opening I’d been waiting for, though, and half the reason I’d made the demand in the first place.

“Hierophant can cut the city off from scrying,” I said. “She wouldn’t know until much too late.”

I saw him hesitate a fraction, then push through.

“Wolof has secrets beyond the ken of Wekesa the Warlock’s knowledge, or that of his son,” Sargon said. “Your premise is untrue.”

I hid a smile. I’d given something by revealing Masego could put them in a box if I wished him to, but without knowing it he’d given me something too: he was afraid of Malicia personally , not as an abstract. Not through scrying, assuming I even believed his vague talk of secret Wolofite magics that Hierophant couldn’t dismantle. She still has another body in Wolof , I thought. My fingers clenched with something that was neither quite fear or triumph. It was too strong an investment for me to be the sole reason for it. I had put out my bait in the right place.

“It seems we’re at an impasse, then,” I shrugged.

“I can still offer great... reparations of gold and foodstuffs, Queen Catherine,” High Lord Sargon said. “Can a bargain not be had?”

“Of course – I’m a reasonable woman, High Lord Sargon,” I lied. “I just want your entire treasury and all your food.”

I paused.

“And also the armour you’re wearing,” I whimsically added. “As a polite reminder that if you ever try to bring a Named capable of mind control to truce talks again, I will brutally murder you as an object lesson.”

I was going to have to get everyone checked for hooks in their minds, which would be a pain. That’d cost him.

“Well,” High Lord Sargon muttered, “at least it is a succinct sort of extortion.”

“And to think they tell me I can’t do diplomacy,” I brightly smiled.

“I can’t imagine why,” Sargon amiably replied, not batting an eye. “I will have to discuss your terms with my advisors, Queen Catherine. Perhaps negotiations can resume at a later date.”

I shrugged.

“If you want,” I said. “Until then, I’m under oath to offer you an exchange for the prisoners taken in Jinon. As you have none of mine imprisoned to trade, I’ve set ransoms instead. Akua?”

She offered the scroll, which without hesitation the High Lord of Wolof took. He unfolded it, eyes scanning the lines. I’d set truly extortionate rates, ten year’s pay for every soldier and officer as well as massive lump sums for every highborn. Even for someone as wealthy as the High Lord of Wolof, it’d be a costly racket. My bet was on him bringing home only the highborn, part of the reason I’d jacked up their ransoms on principle. The rest was that I had a godsdamned war to pay for, and it wasn’t going to pay for itself.

“Yes,” Sargon Sahelian briskly said. “I’ll send the sum to your camp by cart before nightfall. I trust you will return them to the city at the earliest convenience.”

I hid my surprise, but not quite quickly enough he didn’t notice it.

“We’re a greedy breed, Sahelians,” the High Lord crookedly smiled. “The coin I’ll make again in time, Black Queen. People are not so easily replaced.”

Huh. That was the closest to respect I’d felt for him all day, even knowing he might be playing me. The talks ended without further ceremony, and it was in a pensive mood that I rode back to camp. I felt like I’d missed something, though I couldn’t put my finger on what.

So far, we hadn’t missed a beat.

—

I woke up in the middle of the night to the screams and smoke.

Chapter 5: Incursion

“The Heavens pick the victor, my friends, but the Hells detail the aftermath. How else can it be explained that when a battle is won we most commend the general – that is, the only man in the army that can be relied on not to have picked up a weapon?”

– Captain Thierry the Acerbic, addressing his company before the Battle of the Twelve Routs

It was tempting to just run out sword in hand to find out what was happening, but I resisted the urge. I’d learned the hard way that recklessness could have permanent costs – like half someone’s total supply of eyes, for example. I put up my hair in a loose ponytail and strapped on my armour, not without fumbling, and only after putting on a helmet did I finally limp out. Sword at my hip and deadwood staff in hand, I looked out into the night and found entire swaths to the south of my camp aflame. Had Sargon played me with the ransom payment? It shouldn’t be. Hierophant had inspected the ingots personally and they were in a warded pit anyway. It made no sense either, considering I hadn’t even given him back his prisoners yet. I’d kept them overnight as a precaution against foul play and he had to know I might hang them as an object lesson if he tried something.

Sargon Sahelian hadn’t struck me as the kind of man who pissed away either gold or lives.

I made my way to the tent closest to mine, where Adjutant had placed a station of his adjunct secretariat, but there were no phalanges there. I found a line of regulars hurrying south through the dirt avenue passing by my tent, however, and wasted no time approaching the lieutenant in charge. A young Taghreb, no older than twenty and rosy -cheeked.

“Your Majesty,” he breathed out, before snapping into a more professional salute.

“Lieutenant,” I said. “What’s happening? I’m not hearing the alarm wards.”

“Our wards are down, ma’am,” he replied. “All of them. And we’re under attack by giants.”

Our wards were down ? I felt a shiver of unease. Not even the Dead King had managed that so easily. The mention of giants, though, had me skeptical. I seriously doubted the Gigantes had anything to do with this. Ogres, though, I’d be willing to believe. I had less than a tenth of ogres left in the entire Army of Callow – our campaigns had not been kind, and none lost were ever replaced – but the Dread Empire would not be so limited. That would mean a Legion raid, which did nothing to settle my discomfort. I’d learned enough at the feet of the Legions of Terror to know how brutally skilled they were at what they did.

“What did they hit?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Your Majesty,” the lieutenant admitted. “My orders are just to head at the southern rally point with my line and await further orders.”

I smothered my irritation. It wasn’t his fault I wasn’t aware of what was going on and taking it out on the kid would help no one.

“Let’s go then, lieutenant,” I evenly said. “There’s no time to waste.”

I pulled at Night – and how crisply it came now that dusk had passed, almost as easily as before the Ruination – and killed the pain in my bad leg so I would be able to keep up with the brisk pace of the legionaries. We passed through a sparsely manned checkpoint, but there was no way the sergeant in charge would know more than the lieutenant I was with so I pushed on. At the second checkpoint, I found Adjutant waiting for me. He was armed and armoured, with an axe in his dead hand and a broad shield in his steel one.

“Catherine,” he gravelled. “Apologies, by the time my phalanges reached your tent you’d already left.”

I waved it away and didn’t bother to ask how he’d known where I would go. There were lines between us where there once had been none, but he was still my Adjutant.

“What’s happening?” I bluntly asked.

“The Legions of Terror are hitting us,” Hakram gravelled. “Less than a hundred, nearly all ogres. They gated out of Twilight a foot away from the outer palisade and smashed through, then used some sort of artefact that fried our wards. Hierophant and Akua are working on getting them up again.”

“Fuck,” I eloquently said. “Do we know what they’re after?”

“They split into two forces,” Adjutant said. “The one lighting the fires is going straight for our supplies and Juniper’s mustering men to drive them out. The other force – smaller, we think – is headed west.”

My eyes narrowed. West had Sargon’s soldiers and the rest of the warded pits we’d dug. Was this a rescue operation? That made little sense. The High Lord of Wolof had already paid their ransom and they’d be handed over come morning. Something didn’t fit, and that made the second force the odd hand. The one to watch out for.

“That’s the one we’ll intercept,” I decided. “Where’s Archer?”

“She’s-”

“Disappointed you didn’t hear her coming, is what she is,” Indrani drawled.

My hand was halfway to my sword when I recognize her voice, and my muscles stayed tense until she’d moved out from the tent she’d used as cover for her approach. There was some alarm as legionaries began to notice her, but it didn’t last long. She was a known quantity for my soldiers.

“That’s what we have you for,” I retorted. “Vivienne, Huntress, the kids?”

“Vivienne is with Juniper,” Hakram said.

“Alexis went to guard Cocky,” Indrani said. “I’m not sure for the kids.”

For a moment I almost sent Adjutant to look for them – he had the right aspect to Find the needle in the haystack – but I held back. He might see it as him being sent away from the fight, one which would be hard enough without shedding off a third of our Named before we started.

“Send one of yours to Vivienne,” I ordered Hakram. “I want them kept from getting into too much trouble.”

Entirely out of trouble was sadly more than could be reasonably asked for, given that they were Named. Hakram nodded and saw to it, even as I checked my gear one last time. I made a note to have a bag of goblin munitions prepared for me and kept in my tent. Now that Scribe’s scheme had paid off and we’d essentially bought out High Lady Wither’s stocks of munitions – with the blessing of the Matrons, who saw it as weakening her military strength even if our grain helped her maintain control in the short term – I could afford to start using them again. The moment Adjutant was back we headed out together, moving fast. Since our wards were down and we had an idea of where our enemies were headed, we took a shortcut through the Ways to try to intercept. We sidled through instead of using a gate, since Indrani found us a path in moments, and it allowed us to skip over all the barricades, checkpoints and mustering soldiers.

The advantage of fighting people as tall as ogres was that, given the average height of tents in our camp, we could easily see them from a distance. Within moments of leaving Twilight I had my eyes on maybe twenty towering silhouettes, all decked in pitch-black plate engraved with runes and wielding massive flanged maces. Those were not Legion heavies, not any kind I’d ever seen.

“Archer, go around,” I said, already pulling at the Night. “Begin on my signal.”

“Gotcha,” she said, pulling down her hood.

She slipped into the shadows, swift-footed even as she began to string her bow.

“Adjutant,” I said, shaping the Night, “I want you to bait them. Take the front and draw them in.”

“Warlord,” Hakram replied, flashing his fangs happily.

I finished the last touch on the ‘eye’ of Night I’d made and threw it up in the air. A shadow on black, it remained unseen to our foes even as I closed my physical eye and made myself see through that one. It didn’t tell me much more about the enemy force itself, but it did give me a bird’s eye view of them moving around the camp. They’re not headed towards the prisoners , I realized. They’d walked right past an avenue that led to their pit, and I doubted it was because of the two lines of regulars manning the palisade around the prison pit. They were after something else and moving like they knew they layout. Which they would, of course, since the Army of Callow pretty much used the Legion layout with a few modifications. It sunk in a moment later.

The ransom. It was further east in a guarded pit as well, and the group – twenty-one ogres and two humans, I counted – would soon get to an avenue that’d lead them straight there. But why the Hells would Malicia care about the gold? The empress still collected taxes from most of Praes, she was positively rolling around in coin she couldn’t spend for lack of friendly neighbours. I set the question aside for now, as I had more urgent cats to skin. I checked Adjutant was on the right path to reach the enemy, which he was, and then prepared to disperse the eye. There was no point in even trying to find Archer, I knew that from experience.

Then the night lit up with a flash of sorcery as streaks of flame hit one of the lead ogres, scarring the black plate, and I caught sight of two small humans getting in the way of the enemy.

“ Fuck ,” I cursed.

The kids were there and getting in over their heads. These weren’t Bones or a handful of necromantic monsters, they were a well-armed Legion strike team. I broke into a run without hesitation, knowing that if I lingered for too long they might be dead by the time I arrived. So much for springing an ambush. Calling on Night, I formed a rough wedge of power in front of me and ran straight through the tents in my way. It was a quick approach but not a subtle one, as was made clear when one of the ogres grabbed a javelin the size of a small tree and threw it my way.

I twisted the Night into a different working, catching the weapon in flight and turning it around before tossing it back. A miss, I saw, but hopefully it’d discourage a repeat. I formed another wedge and immediately another ogre threw a javelin at me. I cursed, resorting to the same trick and this time scoring a glancing blow against an ogre’s breastplate. They weren’t trying to kill me, I grasped, they were slowing me down. The bastards weren’t even intending to fight us, were they? They’d just do what they’d come for and then retreat.

Gods but I hated fighting against well-trained soldiers.

Thankfully, I could fall back onto the sage lessons of my childhood: if the other guy had a better plan, you just had to sock them in the face real hard until they forgot it. I abandoned the idea of the relatively harmless wedge and instead of drew deep on the Night, waves of heat emanating from me as I formed a massive ball of blackflame and tossed it in a straight line in front of me. It burned through tents and barricades, clearing me a straight path and smashing into one of the ogres. Even as I ran, my brow knotted when the flames cleared and I saw my working hadn’t actually broken the ogre’s plate. It’d blackened it further, half-melted it, but the fire had only gone through the armour’s visor. It was still enough to have the soldier screaming and clawing at his face.

Archer put an arrow between the hands and straight into the skull a moment later, dropping the ogre.

I unsheathed my sword as I crossed the last of the distance separating me from the melee, the flash of flames flickering at the edge of my sight and bathing the silhouette of the closest ogre in light. The great flanged mace rose, and Night or not there would be no parrying that. I struck out with my staff, black flames boiling out of the top as I aimed for the visor again, but I was forced to abandon the working when another ogre used drove a javelin like a spear into my flank. I hastily backpedalled out of range, almost eating the mace blow from the first as I did. Redirecting the black flame into striking the side of the mace’s head got me out of it, but the ground shook as the flanged head tore into the earth besides me. Worse yet, more and more of the ogres were converging on me.

A few I could handle, but ten? That was going to get tricky.

Then Adjutant came out swinging from their left flank a heartbeat later, proving once more that splendid timing was written into his very Role. The surprise earned me a moment to shape Nigh,t in between ducking away from a wild mace swing, and I threw up another eye so that I could see through it and grasp the lay of the entire melee. It was only the beginning. Power coursed richly through my veins even as I saw one of the ogres draw back his arm to throw a javelin, but I grit my teeth and kept weaving my miracle. My eye in the sky stayed focused on my enemy’s arm, spellbound. Almost there , I thought, watching as the plate-covered arm flexed and the tree-sized javelin went flying. I breathed in and out, listening to the instincts trained into my body by years of war.

A half-step to the side, the movement precise enough I felt the steel head of the javelin brush against my side, but I’d done it. I was finished.

“Bang,” I grinned, staff coming down against the floor in a strike.

I kept the eye for just a second, long enough to place the ten orbs I was capable of handling at one time. Night formed out of thin air in front of ten visored faces, looking like spinning orbs for half a heartbeat before they burst and air was sucked in. I’d first used the air explosion trick against demons at the Arsenal, but I’d improved it in the months since. This time, at the heart of the ‘orb’ there was a seed of blackflame. The air getting sucked in pulled in the ten ogres, just in time for the blackflame to grow unstable and explode in their faces along with the sharp burst of air. The result was a brutal blow of physical strength and fire that dented the visors before delivering the blackflame through the opening. Most of the ten died instantly and those that didn’t began to scream in pain.

From the corner I saw Adjutant take a blow on his shield, aspect pulsing as he withstood the strength as if it were a breeze. He struck with perfect timing as the ogre withdrew, toppling his foe down into an already-trampled tent. He had that under control, I decided. I could push through to the kids.

I ran past a slowly falling ogre, clutching at her broken and burning face, and as she struck the ground behind me like a small earthquake I found myself frowning. There had been two humans earlier, mages presumably, but I couldn’t see them in the melee at the moment. Where – the only warning I got was the feeling of the air being moved, and I wasn’t quite quick enough. My staff was struck as I got pushed away, the silhouette of an ogre coming into sight for a flickering second as I was blown of my feet and my staff went clattering in the distance. Fuck , I thought, rolling away as I felt the air move again and the ground was hammered in front of me. One of the mages was using illusionary enchantments. I rose back to my feet lurching about, grasping a handful of Night and throwing it blindly ahead.

It stuck, as I’d hoped, and a blotch of darkness appeared on what looked like the side of the mace trying to smash me to bits. It’d do. Slicing behind me with my blade, I opened a gate into the Ways and stepped through. I glimpsed greenery and felt gentle wind before crossing back into a warm Wasteland night, coming out on the side of the mace I’d tagged and spinning out chords of Night. I hooked them around the mace, forcing it and the ogre back into flickering visibility, and then wrapped the chords around the shoulders and helmet of the ogre. Hands tight on the bonds I twisted, Night obeying my will as the ogre struggled to keep the mace away from their helmeted head and I tightened the noose. I was cheating, of course. It wasn’t strength I was using to tighten the chords but willpower, weaving Night, and the limits on my will were lesser than those on the soldiers’ body.

With a third twist of the wrist I tightened the chords into a vise and the side of the mace went through the helmet with a loud crunch. I wasn’t sure how far it’d gone into the skull beneath it, but the ogre was out of the fight regardless. That freed me to go forward, where I saw Arthur Foundling being battered down with brutal efficiency by an ogre. His shield was already a crumpled ruin and one of his shoulders obviously broken. The Apprentice was shooting darts of fire and spears of lightning at the ogre, but all it did was slow them some. Not even a mark was left on the armour, which had me staring. Even enchanted plate would have marks after that, and my heartbeat quickened when I saw the ogre kick Squire in the stomach when Arthur tried to slide behind them.

He’d been moving with Name quickness, unnaturally swift, but his opponent had begun moving the exact moment he did. No one was that fast without a Name, I knew, without leaning on that set of reflexes that came with a martial Role. From the corner of my eye I saw an arrow hit a man in the throat, the spell he’d been halfway through – aimed at Adjutant’s back – dying with him, but I looked past the corpse and found that four ogres were covering the last mage’s hasty retreat. I moved to the side, climbing over an ogre corpse to get a better vantage, and cursed. The pit where we’d left the ransom gold was now empty. They’d brought a caster that could use High Arcana and shoved all the ingots into a pocket dimension, the tricky fuckers.

As if I’d allow that. I drew on Night.

I heard Arthur Foundling scream as he was smashed into a barricade by a blow, and for a heartbeat I weighed the choice. The gold might keep a lot of my people alive, keep them fed and armed for the war on Keter, and the Squire was still a potential threat to Vivienne in the coming years. If I pursued the last mage instead now... The thought was ugly, but ugly wasn’t enough to stay my hand anymore. I needed better than that – Name , I thought, mind racing. He was in a fight of Named, one he’d stumbled into through heroic providence. That could be a potent tool, used right. Eye tearing away from the fleeing mage, I broke into a run. Ribbons of lightning struck at the back of the tall ogre with impotent fury, making the enchanted steel glow but little more as I shaped Night into thick tendrils.

The looming ogre raised their mace as the Squire rolled to the side, grasping for his sword. He’d be too slow. The flanged mace came down and the boy’s face paled but his fingers closed around the handle of his blade anyway. He’d die trying. Or not die at all, preferably. I struck out, tendrils of shadows layered over my arm like some sort of skeletal armature, and the strength of it was just enough to slap aside the mace before it could crush the boy’s skull. I stood between the two of them, Night wafting off me like smoke as I prepared another trick, and cocked an eyebrow.

“So Malicia’s picked up a Named,” I said. “Which one are you, I wonder?”

Our foe – a woman, I glimpsed through the visor – did not answer. She raised her mace again, drawing back to make space for a swing, but I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth.

“Not Warlock,” I mused, “or you would have seen that coming.”

The Night-smoke I’d had trailing along the ground solidified around her feet as shackles, so when she finished the movement of striking the imbalance tripped her. I stepped to the side as she began to topple forward, tapping the side of my sword against Arthur’s flank tell him he should follow suit. An arrow whistled, aimed straight at the gap in the plate between the neck and the helmet, but with unnatural deftness the massive mace swept up to bat the killing blow away just before the ogress hit the ground face first.

“Martial, and not a transitional Name if you have control that fine,” I noted.

I raised my sword, calling Night to it even as the ogre grunted with effort and burst through my shackles with brute strength. And yet I was not worried in the slightest. I knew, somehow I just knew , that the timing would work out perfectly. I could see it as if it were written in the air, as if it were inevitable. As if some grinning devils down Below had put their coin on me and their fingers on the scale to match.

I was following my Role, and so the tide of Creation was on my side.

“None of that,” I chided my foe, bringing my blade down on her back as she tried to raise.

The Night struck out from the point of my sword like a needle, shattering the backplate, and then like cracks of ice my power went skittering in every direction and shattered the enchanted steel. The ogre was smashed back down into the ground. I heard bones break and froze in surprise. I’d not hit her that hard, not for a Named, and that was the moment if fell into place. My limbs grown strong with the touch of my growing Name, I moved forward and flipped over the gasping ogre. She did not resist, broken. I stripped off her helmet and a single look at those dark eyes was enough to confirm my suspicion: the power in there was fading. Not because I’d killed its wielder, but because I’d damaged the vessel too badly.

“Black Knight,” I greeted. “So what’s the aspect you’re using, I wonder – something like Deputize, Mandate?”

I wrinkled my nose.

“No, you’re clearly Legion,” I said. “You’re using mostly ogres, too, so I’d guess you’re Marshal Nim. ‘Commission’, maybe?”

It clearly wasn’t her full strength she’d put in the body, else the kids would be dead twice over. The ogress hacked out a cough, dying, and I sighed. Wouldn’t get anything out of her. I sheathed my sword, but halfway through the gesture the almost-corpse suddenly lunged. A single massive hand reached over my shoulder, grasping the Squire’s throat behind me, and she began to squeeze – I felt horror swell, I wouldn’t be quick enough with the Night I was reaching for – she went still. It was not luck that did it, but the eerily silent arrow Archer had loosed that went through her eye. I roughly dragged Arthur away by the scruff of his neck as the body dropped, the boy moaning in pain. As well he should, he was basically a mass of bruises and bloody wounds. He sagged against the ground.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” he got out. “I owe you-”

“Nothing,” I cut in, tone sharper than I meant it to be.

I refused to feel guilty. I was long past the luxury of clean choices, and just because today I’d chosen to keep him alive didn’t meant that tomorrow would see me make the same decision. The boy looked like I’d slapped him and I sighed again.

“Consider this a wake-up call,” I said. “This is what fighting with real Named and not Revenant puppets feels like. The Black Knight on the other side used a single aspect, not even in her real body, and she still nearly pulped you.”

“You’re not going to tell me it was foolish to fight?” the boy asked.

“It wasn’t a foolish fight, you just fought foolishly,” I corrected. “You likely saved a lot of soldiers’ lives by stepping in, the part that needs work is the one where you almost died doing it. You won’t be helping anyone when you’re in a grave, maybe keep that in mind.”

“Nothing we did got through her defences,” Arthur admitted. “Even at our best we were simply holding on.”

And in that sentence, in the anger – the unspoken urge to do better next time, the certainty that there would be a next time – I saw an opportunity. A tool. And I was enough of a monster to make use of it, even when I was using a boy barely more than a child.

“So prepare yourself,” I challenged. “Train. Make tactics.”

He was silent for a moment, exhausted and in pain, but eventually his blue eyes went steely. He nodded, brushing back a black lock stained with sweat and blood.

“I won’t lose, next time,” Arthur Foundling swore.

And with those words I’d invited, with the weight of them spoken by his lips, I knew I had made myself a sword. Because unless I was wrong, a Squire and a Black Knight had just fought. And the Squire had begun that fledgling, fragile pattern with a defeat.

If I stoked those embers just right, that story would end with my enemy’s blood on the floor.

—

In the wee hours of the morning, I sat with Vivienne and Juniper to go over the butcher’s bill. The good news was that, as far as dead bodies went, our losses were light.

“Ninety-three dead,” the Hellhound said. “Most of them regulars. We can thin some cohorts to make up for it, we still have the numbers to absorb that.”

“And we inflicted eighty-two casualties ourselves,” Vivienne noted. “Considering it was a surprise attack fielding almost entirely ogres, we made off decently in that regard.”

I grunted in agreement. The attacked had escaped, but not without taking losses equivalent to about eight out of ten.

“We’ll see if Masego can crack the enchantments on the armours,” I said. “It’s unlikely there will be enough of those to equip more than a handful of elite units, but that would be troublesome enough on its own.”

I got grimaces of agreement. Ogres were bloody difficult to kill, unless you had either magic or munitions to deploy against them. It was a clever decision for Marshal Nim to focus on stripping the sorcery option from us, considering the Army of Callow had been in chronic munition deficit for essentially its entire existence.

“Losses in supplies were not as grave as they could have been,” Juniper continued. “We changed the layout of the supply depots compared to standard Legion camp templates-”

She had, actually, making a point of it before we began marching, but my marshal wasn’t the boasting type.

“-so our current tallies have the losses mostly in dried meat and grain, about a third of our total stock,” she continued. “If our numbers stay roughly the same, Catherine, we’re now down to roughly four months of food.”

From six to four, huh. Four months for an army that could use the Ways was a very different beast than for an army that couldn’t, but this had still been uncomfortably costly. A lot of food had gone up in flame tonight.

“If you had to guess,” I said, “were they able to figure out what our total amount of supplies would be?”

She flicked her fangs uneasily.

“It’s likely,” Juniper admitted. “They might be slightly off, but the quantities were roughly even between depots and there are only so many places in a camp to put those.”

Which meant that by morning High Lord Sargon would know that we couldn’t afford to siege Wolof if we were going to do anything else this campaign season. There just wasn’t enough food in our possession to spend months besieging him and then war elsewhere. In other words, our negotiating position with him had just been dealt a severe blow.

“We’ll hit Wolof tomorrow, then,” I said. “There’s no more time to waste. The moment the Concocter is done with the powder I’ll set out.”

“It’d be for the best,” Juniper agreed.

“Sargon’s unlikely to ask for talks when he has the advantage, so in a way this lends us an additional dose of discretion,” Vivienne noted. “Yet that brings me to the last of our outstanding issues: the prisoners for Wolof.”

“They’ve been ransomed,” I said, though my tone was neutral.

It wasn’t a commitment so much as a statement. The High Lord of Wolof had paid the gold I’d asked for, and promptly too.

“We don’t have that ransom anymore,” Juniper said, “and it was taken by his empress. That’s on him too.”

It was, I wouldn’t disagree with that.

“You want to keep them?” I asked.

“That or hang them,” Juniper bluntly said. “We’ve been taken for a ride, Catherine. Maybe a point needs to be made.”

“I don’t think Sargon actually has anything to do with this,” I admitted. “This has all the telltale marks of a Legion operation and he would have no pull there. This seems like an attack by Marshal Nim on our supplies that got a secondary objective tacked on.”

“Malicia would gain from our going back on our word here,” Vivienne said. “It would make Praesi lords warier of striking bargains with us.”

My eyes narrowed as I followed the threads.

“She wins if we give them over too,” I spoke through gritted teeth. “Rubies to piglets that ransom gold is going straight back to Sargon’s coffers, and very publicly. She’d be proving she can score victories against us and that she’s still protecting her vassals.”

Hells, the way it neatly landed her a win no matter what we did had me more convinced this was a Malicia ploy than anything else I’d heard tonight. It was exactly the kind of plot she liked use. I passed a hand through my hair tiredly.

“We release them come dawn, as I promised,” I finally said. “I’d rather let her flash her feathers than risk burning bridges we’ll need to cross when treaties are made.”

For all that I’d come here with an army, it wasn’t conquest I was after. And if I started letting Malicia bait me into hanging prisoners, she’d keep doing that until Praesi considered me not worth negotiating with. Or I’ll have to let things ago after taking a hard stance the first time and changing tacks will make me look witless. Fucking Malicia. She really was a devil to deal with, when she had a good general to play off of. I could only imagine how much worse it would be if she still had Black under her. Angry as I was at how we’d been had, I mastered myself. Fine, she’d stuck a knife in us and it had stung. This was the kind of game she most excelled at and we were in her own backyard.

Tomorrow, we’d do things my way.

Chapter 6: Retaliation

“And so a great host came to stand before the Sererian Walls, led by four kings and three queens who meant to raise Aslam Isbili as king over Wolof. Their envoys were scorned by High Lady Akua of the Sahelians, and so in great anger did they storm her walls. Seven times and one was the army driven back, broken by sorcery until corpses stood tall as hills. Only then did High Lady Akua answer the envoys, speaking thus: ‘Have you come to win a crown, or lose seven?’”

– Extract from the Scroll of Ruin, twenty-fifth of the Secret Histories of Praes

There were eleven different secret passages into the city of Wolof and all of them were traps.

Akua had told me that one of her distant ancestors, after discovering several made by disloyal vassals aiming to overthrow the Sahelians, had decided instead of walling them up to make several more. High Lord Kofi had then seeded rumours about their existence, fake traitors and secret scrolls, and sat back waiting for all his enemies to come at him by where he’d see them coming. The number of passages had grown over the years as people outwitted Sahelians for a time, but in the wake of those victories the family always reclaimed the fresh weakness and added it to their centuries-old ploy. I’d been halfway to admiring High Lord Kofi, until Akua noted he was also famous for his habit of throwing one of his cousins in a maze every summer solstice. Along with starved lions. It kept everyone on their toes, he’d claimed.

Praesi .

If there were no secret passages to use and storming the walls was too costly for us, then that left us few options to enter the city. Sneaking in as part of a delegation had been considered, but we’d be watched like hawks and likely kept under wards the whole time. Assuming we weren’t just betrayed. Pickler had narrowed in on the aqueduct that fed the city as our way in, but her suggestion had been... overly bold. She’d wanted us to cut the water and send in goblins with munitions through the stone channel. They’d blow their way through the wards at the end and we’d funnel troops into that foothold by the dry aqueduct, taking enough of the city by surprise that Sargon was forced to either negotiate or suffer a sack. Problem was, I had my doubts that we could secure that foothold.

The aqueduct whose source was deep in the Jinon Hills was squatted over by the fortress of the same name, then whipped across the valley in straight line, but welcoming it into Wolof was yet another set of fortifications. The Sahelians weren’t fools, they’d known the running water was the weakness in their wards. The place was fortified thoroughly and garrisoned through day and night: even if we did take the soldiers there by surprise, I figured it was a toss up whether we’d win the fight. And if we lost it, well, that’d get bloody . So a somewhat quieter way in was needed, which had led me to our current scheme. Namely, my old Everdark crew resurrected for one more jaunt: a more subtle infiltration of the city through the same weakness Pickler had identified.

I’d needed the Concocter to make it feasible, since without the ability to breathe in water that was a very long swim, but those vials and ransacking through the remains of the old Sudden Abjuration project had gotten me the right tools. Cordelia had been the one to most benefit from the emptying of the Arsenal, since she’d been able to take all the half-finished projects and throw them at the Dead King on various fronts, but taking the Concocter east had paid dividends for me. I knew the First Prince appreciated me not drawing too heavy on the pool of heavy hitters among Named, too. She’d not be so grateful if she knew I’d not shortchanged myself in the slightest, simply picking mine for stories instead of raw war potential. The Barrow Sword so that I could tie him up with the Blood, all of Ranger’s surviving pupils for when it inevitably came to blows with her, two kids approaching the time of their transition into a more settled Named – hanging swords I could bring down, pulling at the right strings. It was a pretty little arsenal, though it would not be of use here in Wolof.

No, here it was an older company that’d be taking the field again.

“I’d always imagined that if I crossed the Sererian Walls again it would either be as Empress or as bones,” Akua said, eyeing the shape of the city in the distance.

“Well, you’re slightly bones,” Indrani mused. “You know, in a poetic sense.”

“Ah, bones,” the woman who had once been the heiress to Wolof drawled. “Those famously incorporeal body parts.”

She made her shape turn shadowy for a moment to hammer the point home before returning to her usual guise.

“Poetry’s all about metaphors, Heirloom Haunt,” Indrani sneered. “It’s a mark of your inferior education you don’t know that.”

Akua’s face creased with what appeared to be genuine outrage.

“You were raised in the woods ,” she replied.

“I guess it must just be the gap between our natural talents, then,” Indrani airily replied.

“There was a time where I would have had had you drowned for that sentence,” Akua noted.

“Well,” Indrani said, eyeing the aqueduct. “Day’s young. Give it a shot.”

Idly, I wondered if it was too late to replace one of them by Hakram. Sure, given how much metal he wore these days he’d swim about as well as a rock but I was having to weigh the prospect of dragging him along the bottom the whole time against at least a day of this.

Convenience narrowly won out.

“All right, let’s get this going,” I said. “The timing will get tricky if we linger.”

I got a mocking salute from Archer and a graceful nod of acknowledgement from Akua, sparing one last look for the distant shape of Wolof before I left. The ramparts up here did have an amazing view during the day. We headed down into the belly of the beast, and I split from them to have a short conversation with the commander leading the garrison. He confirmed that Hierophant was already getting started on his ritual, which meant we needed to get going. I ordered him to get the gears moving and followed my companions below, to the source feeding the aqueduct.

It was bare-bones, for such a crucial location, a cube of stone split in the middle by a rectangular ‘river’ that fed into the channel that would lead all the way to Wolof. The water actually came from further out, an underground spring deep in the hills, and this room had been raised for maintenance purposes. The stone conduct on raised steles – Pickler had commented unkindly on the way the Sahelians had been forced to fortify the stone with enchantments to compensate for not using arches the way the Miezans had – was dotted with warded “hatches” on the ceiling through which mages-engineers could enter to have a look at any blockage or foulness, but it wouldn’t help the three of us: there wasn’t enough space between the top of the channel and the water for anyone to be able to breathe reliably.

I would have been able to get around that with Night, probably by making a bubble around myself that let in air but not water, but the garrison would have seen us coming if we did. It would have tripped half a dozen wards on the aqueduct and destroying those would have tripped further defences. No, to go in quietly the solution was the water breathing potion. The three of us did a last check on our equipment before going into the water, professionalism finally shining through. Archer had been forced to abandon her usual bow, as it would be too large as well as enchanted, so she had a simple waxed shortbow with the backup strings stashed in a watertight bag along with her arrows. I’d shed the Mantle of Woe for this, settling for a simple grey cloak over my usual sword and armour.

Akua’s clothes were sedate, and what she carried was not equipment meant for herself. The Concocter had finished the last of the ten bags of evanescent powder I’d requested half a bell ago, and they’d been brought straight here. The shade had them all, held in segmented bags held by complicated knots. One pull at the right place and they’d spread out while the bags opened, which was our way in. Sudden Abjuration had been the Arsenal project to create an alchemical substance capable of mimicking the effects of holy water. We’d never managed to make one that’d make it affordable to go through with the plan behind the project, turning all the lakes between us and the Dead King into holy water, but we’d had some successes nonetheless.

The evanescent powder, for one, would wash out active sorcery on contact. Like wards and enchantments trying to keep us out of Wolof.

“Everyone ready?” I asked.

“Bit of a swim without the potion, Cat,” Archer grinned.

I rolled my eye, then glanced at Akua.

“At your disposal, my heart,” she said.

“You should be more like her,” I told Indrani.

She let a deeply insulted gasp, as I’d known she would, and I shoved a small glass vial into her hand. I’d thought about throwing it, but I was not going to roll the dice on this entire operation just to be flippant. It’d taken the Concocter long enough to make four doses – two to enter, two to leave – that I was not going to risk it all just before we left. I took out my own vial, glancing at the pale blue liquid inside. It looked almost milk-like, which was not appetizing in the slightest given the hue. I uncorked it and raised the vial in a toast that Indrani met, and it was bottoms up for the both of us. The entire thing tasted foul, like chalk cut with refuse, but I forced myself to swallow. I breathed in a few times, trying to get myself used to it.

On the surface it didn’t feel like anything changed, but my lungs felt... heavier. Like something had grown.

“We only have an hour,” I said. “Let’s not waste it.”

I want first, even though I wasn’t the strongest swimmer – Indrani – as I saw best in the dark. And it was only moments before it was all pitch black, all the worst parts of swimming and crawling in a tunnel put together. A few strokes forward and already my lungs were burning, and I find myself fighting breathing in the water even though in principle I knew that I’d survive it. I ended up swallowing it all in a gulp, but the water didn’t go any further than my mouth: a thin membrane had sprouted and it served as a filter, letting through air and not water. It was uncomfortable, unnatural even, but it worked so I grit my teeth and kept swimming forward. I could feel Akua right behind me, patiently waiting.

Shades didn’t need to breathe, which at the moment I felt to be somewhat unfair.

Like most adventures, it didn’t feel all that exciting as we did it. It was work, tiresome swimming through a tunnel-like channel of fresh water. I was wet and cold and my arms quickly grew tired. Now and then we encountered small lights as we passed under maintenance hatches in the stone, which were warded instead of sealed tight, but aside from that it was swimming forward in a gentle, almost unnoticeable slope. It was hard to tell how long it took us. We’d estimated half an hour at a brisk pace, maybe three quarters of an hour in practice, and my finely detailed sixth sense telling me how close I was to dawn and dusk helped measure how long we were taking.

We were slower than anticipated, so we had about a quarter hour left before the potion ran when we finally arrived at the gatehouse. I gestured for the other two to stop, studying the steel grid in front of us. The builders of this gatehouse had been faced with a problem when raising it, namely that you couldn’t actually raise wards over running water. There were wards on both sides of the channel I could see going into the gatehouse, a large stone room where I could glimpse torchlight through the water’s surface. In the water itself, though, the Sahelians had been forced to instead use three enchanted metal grids to prevent infiltrators going through.

That was our opening, actually. As with all fortresses, its true weakness was not in the walls or the gates but in the petty demands of maintenance. In this case, should debris large enough to go through the bars of one grid got stuck on the bars of another grid there needed to actually be a way for someone to get it out . Preferably without, you know, this turning into a major undertaking involving knocking down walls or parts of the aqueduct. So the builders had put ‘doors’ in the grids, large enough for a small person to swim through if they held themselves horizontally. Those doors were held fast with very physical steel padlocks and more eldritch keyed enchantments, and they were our way into the city of Wolof.

Archer swam forward, elbowing me in our narrow confines, and had a close look at the pair of padlocks on the door. She offered me a nod, which was a relief. She believed she’d bee physically strong to pry those open using her Name, then. Tempting as it would have been for her to try it, we couldn’t afford to right now: the damn things were enchanted to glow if anyone touched them. Sahelian paranoia was truly inspiring. The two of us awkwardly made room for Akua to swim past us, which she did with unearthly elegance in the middle of this cramped hellhole, and golden eyes met mine to ask for the permission to begin. I nodded and the shade turned her back to the grids before pulling at the right rope, releasing all the knots holding closed the bags of evanescent powder.

It wasn’t all that flashy a sight: the pale powders spread out in great clouds that faded quickly, and then the only sign they’d been used was that the water looked slightly thicker. The current guided it down, past all three grids and then beyond. Akua withdrew without a word, making room for Archer, and I clenched my fists as I watched her dart forward. After an agonizing moment she closed her fingers around the padlock and nothing happened at all. No glow, no alarm. I grinned. It’d worked. Indrani ripped open the padlocks methodically and swam through the door to get working on the second grid. Even after the unpleasantly long swim, I now felt full of energy: I took my sword off my belt, pulling it close so it wouldn’t get in my way when I swam through.

Ahead, Indrani broke the last padlocks and I was gesturing for Akua to go ahead when I caught sight of shapes moving above the water. Hissing in dismay I flattened myself against the side of the channel, Akua doing the same behind me, but it was Archer in danger of being discovered. If she’d been in the dark she would have been fine, but moments later a long wooden staff was plunged into the waters and I saw that at its head was a stone enchanted to glow with light. Indrani had moved before she could be seen, hiding on the side of the wall in the dead angle, but the grid... I started with surprise. Oh, that canny wench. While I’d been panicking, she’d put the padlocks she’d broken on the last door back. They were still busted, but she’d hung them at an angle where it was hard to see.

There was the indistinct sound of people talking, at least three voices, and one seemed to be mocking another. The staff was suddenly withdrawn and I sagged in relief. If it’d come to a fight here , it might have gotten ugly. We waited as long as I dared, far after the voices had gotten distant. Our last quarter hour was thinning out dangerously and there was still more swimming ahead of us, so reluctantly I gave the signal again. Archer opened us the path through and we got moving, myself last and hanging the padlocks behind me as I closed the doors so that it would be hard to tell we’d passed. We had an even better cover for our tracks coming, but best not to get sloppy.

Hugging the bottom of the channel we went past the open channel in the torchlit room, into a squeezing tight tunnel that dropped downwards precipitously. Barely swimming at that point, I let myself be dragged forward and then swam up when we ended up where we’d meant to: the first of the three great reservoirs where the water from the aqueduct would be kept before going out into the city itself. The reservoir, little more than a large cistern, wasn’t entirely full: I breached the surface to moist air, finding Akua and Archer already climbing up towards the hatch at the top.

“Fuck me,” I muttered, “it actually-”

I bit my tongue at the last moment. I refused to tempt Fate like that.

“You’ll be all right climbing?” Archer asked in a murmur.

I glanced at the handholds they were using, little more than indents into the side of the wall – people had to be able to come down to check for leaks or trash – and grimaced before I nodded. The herbs I’d taken for the pain in my leg were beginning to fade, but I’d make it up. It just wouldn’t be pleasant, during or after. Indrani tried to push open the stone hatch but it didn’t move. I cursed under my breath. Breaking that open wouldn’t go unnoticed. Akua, however, had a solution. Her arm turning to mist, it slithered through a crack and I heard her work on the hatch from the outside. Moments later it was hoisted open, Archer catching it and popping her head out to look.

She gave us a nod and a grin: the way was clear.

Indrani went out first, leaping down soundlessly, and Akua followed as I climbed up. My bad leg was burning, but only dimly. I closed the hatch behind us, twisting it into some sort of rough lock, and just like that we were in the city. Well, a fortress within Wolof anyway, but as far as I was concerned it counted. We were dripping all over the floor, save for Akua, who covered out tracks: she passed a mist-like hand over us and we found ourselves mostly dry. She pulled the same trick with the trails of wetness we’d left, and though we were still damp at least we wouldn’t be leaving tracks.

“You remember the way out from here?” I softly asked.

“I’ve never been in this part of the fortress,” Akua admitted, “but I have memorized the plans, same as you. It will be enough.”

I nodded. It’d have to be. We were in a closed off section inside the fortress, but one that was relatively close to a way out. There ought to be a hall outside the reservoir room that’d go straight to a crossroads. Taking a left there would lead us straight to a bastion, and from there it was possible for us to leap down three levels into a large courtyard whose gate would lead us out in the city streets. The issue was that we hadn’t known the guard schedules, so there was no telling if there were people in that bastion or not. And we couldn’t afford to take our time here, because soon the Army of Callow was going to ‘attack’ the city.

“Take the lead, then,” I ordered.

She nodded, her form rippling into that of a young Soninke soldier in Sahelian livery. Archer and I wouldn’t be half as inconspicuous, unfortunately, so she’d be going ahead alone. The two of us hid behind the reservoirs, waiting for what seemed like an hour. She returned, footsteps silent and with a grave expression on her face.

“Only three in the bastion, but one is a mage,” Akua said. “I would like Archer to kill him, I am at... risk otherwise. If he’s a skilled enough caster, he could tap into the fortress wards.”

“Indrani, you’re up,” I said.

“Ah, that ought to be bracing,” she grinned. “See you in a bit, Your Graceful Regaliness.”

“I hope you get caught,” I sweetly replied, “so I can consciously choose to leave you behind.”

She flipped me off, a sure sign of surrender if I’d ever seen one. The two of them disappeared into the hallway, eerily silent, and I was left to bite my thumbs. It’d been a while since I’d had to rely on others to do the dirty work, hadn’t it? In Wolof, though, I would have to. In the city proper I’d be able to use Night again, in small doses, but in the heavily warded parts like the fortress it’d be like sending up a flare. I’d forgotten how boring actually doing things the right way tended to be, I thought with half a smile. I was considering how to dispose of the corpses – if we dragged them out of the wards, we could stash them in my shadow – when I heard the sound.

Someone was tuning a lute.

My hand dropped to the grip of my sword. The sounds of strings being plucked at methodically continued to echo in the room, and though I was tempted to remain hidden there was no point to it. The Intercessor already knew I was here, else why would she be? Pushing off the wall of the reservoir I’d been hiding behind, I loosened my cloak around my shoulders and took my hand off my sword. What would a blade do against the likes of the Wandering Bard? Putting a lazy smile on my face, forcing the tension out of my shoulders, I strolled out of hiding. She was not difficult to find. The Intercessor was seated on top of a reservoir, legs dangling as she finished tuning that shoddy lute. Fair-haired, this time, with deeply tanned skin and starry blue eyes. She was barely taller than I was, if at all, though she had curves I could only envy. And when I came out she raised a finger, putting that old silver flask to her lips and drinking deep. I waited, but the finger stayed up and she kept drinking. I cocked an eyebrow.

After an insulting amount of time, she pulled away the flask and smacked her lips before letting out a pleased sigh.

“Alavan pear brandy, Catherine,” the Intercessor revealed. “Gotta drink while it’s still the good stuff, you get me?”

“Never took to brandy,” I idly replied. “Though I once knew a man more than passingly fond of that particular drink.”

It’d been a barb, a test, and for it I got a pained grimace.

“I actually thought of him as a friend, you know,” the Intercessor said. “Tariq was one in a thousand, even for Named. Even when every part of him was worn down to the bone, he never lost that thing . The spark. The part that makes a man take the lash so someone else doesn’t have to. I don’t think any of you ever appreciated how staggeringly rare that is.”

“He probably would have kept kicking around a few years more, if you hadn’t given our plans in Hainaut to the Dead King,” I harshly said. “How many graveyards’ worth of friends have you buried, Intercessor?”

She pulled at a string, smiling at the broken side.

“More than you’ve had meals, Catherine Foundling,” the Intercessor said, not denying or admitting a thing.

And the horror of it was that I believed her, believed her with bone-deep certainty. How many people you loved could you bury, before the only human thing about you was the guise you were? A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand? In that smiling woman’s shadow was an empire’s worth of graves.

“I’m a little disappointed the Arsenal only bought me a year without you,” I said.

More or less, leaning on less.

“Praes is where the fun’s at, these days,” the Intercessor shrugged. “All those fires full of irons, all those old wounds never closed. It’s in the air here, you know? The... sincerity . The Tower’s the closest thing Below has to a smile. If you wanted me out of your hair, you should have kept away.”

“Had a thing or two to get done hereabouts,” I replied. “What – actually, have you got a name for me to use nowadays?”

She plucked at a string.

“Yara,” the Intercessor smiled.

“Of?” I pressed.

“Oh,” she shrugged, “nowhere in particular.”

Well, wasn’t that just fucking ominous.

“So what are you dropping in for, Yara?” I asked. “You got a horse in this race?”

For a moment her face was split between wonder and surprise. I hid my confusion, and like a firefly’s flicker in the night her expression was wiped clean. Almost quick enough to make me wonder if I’d really seen anything at all.

“Eh, you could say that,” the Intercessor said.

“Malicia or Sepulchral?” I asked, tone forcefully nonchalant.

It wouldn’t be my father, if he became Dread Emperor he’d put an entire division of mages on figuring out how to permanently kill her. Captain’s death was not something he would ever forgive.

“Oh,” the Bard smiled. “That’s cute. You think I give a shit about who’s screaming their lungs out from the top of the Tower. I really, really don’t.”

“Come for the weather?” I drawled. “I suppose they do have a bit of everything, if you stand in the Wasteland long enough.”

“You know, this is usually where I get cryptic,” the Intercessor mused. “Give out a few hints – most of them lies, just enough truth I don’t get bitten for it – and send you chasing ghosts while I line up the knife.”

“But not this time?” I pressed.

“There’s really no point,” the Wandering Bard smiled, strumming the lute. “See, when you drop two starving hounds in a pit the time for subtlety is past. Now is the hour of tooth and claw.”

“I killed you last year,” I said. “Crows be my witness, next time I’ll make it stick .”

“That’s the stuff,” Yara of Nowhere laughed. “Come at me, Foundling. You want to know why I dragged my carcass to Praes?”

My answer was the whisper of my sword leaving its scabbard. Lute tuned at last, the Wandering Bard played the first few notes of an air I recognized, the beginning of ‘Stars From the Sky’ .

“The only reason I’m here is to kill you, Catherine Foundling,” the Intercessor grinned. “We’re done fucking around, now. There’s no more room in this game for the likes of you.”

And though I had never seen her wield a blade, never seen her do a single thing other than speak words and drink, in that moment I felt a shiver go up my spine. She had always been my foe, but this was... different. This was war, without pretence otherwise. Yet I would not be cowed, not today and not by the likes of her. I met her eyes, brown to blue.

“Take a swing,” I smiled back, all teeth and malice. “ See where it gets you .”

She laughed, loudly, and then swept into a drunken bow. She fell forward, off the reservoir, and as she did she screamed out at the top of her lungs. I struck out at her, blade aimed for the neck, but before she could touch the ground she was gone.

A heartbeat later, the alarm wards triggered with a loud screech.

Chapter 7: Expatriate

“A journey ends with two strangers: time changes the hearth no less than the traveller.”

– King Richard the Elder of Callow

What else could I do but run?

I shot out of the reservoir room, sword in hand, and into the hallway beyond. A dozen strides had me at the crossroads I’d spied on the fortress plans, where I slowed for a heartbeat as my cloak swirled around me. A squad of armed guards – good mail and helmets, longswords , the calm part of me assessed – was hurrying towards me from the right side, blades bare. I was already pivoting towards the left, though, down another hall that ought to be bring me to the bastion that was our way out. The door to it was open and it looked empty, not a single rack of spears disturbed or table toppled. Archer’s head popped out with a wary look on it a heartbeat later, which at least told me the two of them had won their scrap inside.

“Bard’s here,” I hissed, rushing through the doorway.

Three corpses, cleanly killed, waited for me inside along my two companions. Archer began stringing her shortbow, a grim look on her face. Akua was leaning over the edge of a bare stone window overlooking the courtyard, the rope end of a fastened grappling hook in hand. She withdrew, cocking a questioning eyebrow at me.

“Bard,” I simply repeated. “Courtyard?”

“Unfortunate,” she said. “Seven guards. There were more but the alarm ward drew them in.”

That was a sort of silver lining, I supposed. I hesitated for a beat. Keeping the corpses in my shadow was now meaningless, since the defenders already knew there’d been intruders. Discretion was out. This could still be salvaged if we got into the streets and hit the ground running, though. Wolof was a big city and Sargon’s people couldn’t be everywhere. Besides, our arranged distraction should be starting any moment now.

“We punch through,” I ordered. “Leave the bodies.”

Akua nodded.

“Two mages,” she said, glancing at Archer.

“Got it,” Indrani easily replied.

She took the rope Akua offered her and hoisted herself atop the windowsill before dropping down.

“I’ll go after,” I said, idly closing the door into the bastion behind me. “Bring the rope when you follow, would you?”

“How very frugal of you,” she replied, eyes amused.

I toppled a table, shoving it in the way of the door, and rolled my eye at her. What, did she think this stuff grew on trees? Good rope was expensive . I sheathed my sword, hearing the sound of hurrying soldiers catching up, and headed to the window. I got to the edge just in time to see Archer leap out of a smooth slide down the rope, an arrow nocked and loosed before anyone could notice. By the time I’d begun climbing down she’d landed smoothly on the ground, having loosed a second and killed twice. There was shouting from the rest of the guards. Without the mages in the way, though, Akua could move freely. I let myself go into a controlled slide that burned at the palms of my hand, hearing the door burst open when I was barely halfway through.

Swearing, I looked up and saw Akua flow over the edge of the window. She dislodged the hook, narrowly dodging a sword blow, and I swore even louder as my slide turned into a freefall. I pulled at motes of Night, whispering a curt prayer – grant me at least a beggar’s miracle, you stingy carrion sisters – and dragging the slightest bit to me. I shaped a thin downwards panel of darkness and angled my fall, tumbling down atop it into a disastrous roll that scraped my trouser against stone. It’d shaken and almost broken: the fortress wards were disrupting it, making it unstable. I rose to my feet, bad leg burning, and even as the Night-working evaporated behind me I was forced to hurriedly unsheathe my sword.

I caught the blow at a weak angle, the side of my own blade almost biting into my shoulder, but I spun as I took a small step to the side. The pressure from the taller and larger dark-skinned soldier trying to hack at me was turned against him, making him stumble, and I finished it with a manoeuvre I must have practiced a thousand times. As he stumbled forward I finished my spin and withdrew my sword, so that when the soldier steadied his footing and began to turn I was already hacking into the exposed side of his neck. It was a quick blow, and quite lethal. Without batting an eye I moved on. Archer had killed two more before a survivor got close enough to make her drop her bow and unsheathed her longknives, I saw, and the last one was coming for me.

Brave of him not to run, I thought, but not particularly wise.

Akua landed behind me, the soft noise of it entirely on purpose, and in the moment that drew his attention I struck. He was a big man, muscled, but clearly used to fighting with a shield he didn’t currently have. When I feigned at his left he overcommitted, hacking at a blow that didn’t come, and instead I quickly stepped into his guard and slammed the side of his chin two-handed with the pommel of my sword. He dropped, stunned but still conscious. From the corner of my eye I saw movement at the window above, but the arrow that was fire was knocked off-course by the one Archer loose in answer. Too quick to even be able to tell who they’d been aiming at. Time to go.

I glanced down at the soldier below, saw the fear in his eyes and hardened my heart. No witnesses: the guards above hadn’t seen us up close and we wore cloaks, but this one would have descriptions. My arm rose, but a soft hand laid against it. I looked at Akua with surprise.

“There would be no point,” she spoke in Kharsum. “Sargon will have the corpses upstairs raised to interrogate them.”

I hid my startlement. It was not so rare a thing for her to preach mercy, not compared to the way she’d been when we were younger, but I’d not expected it here and now. I looked at the soldier, lowering my arm.

“Looks like it’s your lucky day,” I said in Mthethwa.

He grimaced, mouth bloody form my blow.

“I traded for this shift,” he replied. “So not that lucky.”

I grinned, brushing past him, and overheard him whispering something to Akua as he inclined his head. Miyetham Sahelian , or something close to it. No idea what it meant, aside the fact it looked like he’d guessed Akua’s identity even through her disguise appearance. People spoke Mthethwa differently here than they did in Ater and among the Legions, I sometimes had trouble with their pronunciation. She did not answer and we wasted no time fleeing into the street before the archer up in the bastion could start shooting at us again. The street outside the bastion was board, almost an avenue, but mostly empty of people. The two young girls carrying urns of water made themselves scarce when we came out, Akua wordlessly taking the lead.

We’d barely run ten feet when lights began pulsing in the sky above the fortress. I almost grinned. The timing was a little off, but it looked like our distraction was finally happening. Hierophant would be hammering at the city through a ritual using the waters of the aqueduct as a battering ram to smash the inside of the fortress, even as troops began emerging from the Ways in a position to capitalize on the breach should it happen. The plan was for the Wolofites to repulse the assault and blame any damage on the aqueduct grids we’d nipped coming in on Masego’s assault, but we’d strayed off path some. Still, the threat of an outright attack ought to bump us down Sargon’s priority list a bit.

At the very least we’d have fewer pursuers, since the commander there would want to avoid thinning their garrison.

Pursuit still poured out of the same gate we’d used before we’d even turned the corner. I wasn’t much of a runner these days, but I grit my teeth and pushed through the pain as we followed Akua into the neat labyrinth that was the streets of Wolof. Our enemies weren’t any slower than we were, but we could take shortcuts they couldn’t – three brave souls followed even when Archer took me by the waist and leapt atop a wall, climbing as quick as they could, but we lost them three streets down when we got to a rooftop. It was one of those gardens I’d seen from afar, a lovely little shaded enclave where flowers and cabbage grew, and the three people in it when we intruded froze.

The oldest among them, a white-haired old man, deliberately looked away from us and began to speak of the weather with the younger pair. I snorted, taking it as the tacit invitation to move on that it was. The old man ignored Archer’s friendly wave, stubbornly looking away, and Akua guided us southwards through rooftops and streets until we found a deserted corner. We paused there, catching our breaths and allowing our heartbeats to slow.

“We are near a bazaar, unless Sargon change the trade-rights for this district,” Akua said. “The two of you will be able to change clothes there.”

“You could go buy them for us,” I suggested. “It’d draw less attention.”

She shook her head.

“There are city guards at the bazaar,” she said, “and it is only a matter of time before the fortress garrison sends warning to all companies, if they haven’t already. There are scrying posts at regular intervals in the city, all with runners at hand. They will begin looking around soon, and this is not a true hiding place.”

I felt a sliver of envy at the system described. Laure was nowhere as well-organized. It wasn’t that we didn’t have the ability, at least not in principle – we had the people and the magic. Callow just didn’t have the coin to spare for something that sophisticated, not when there were a hundred other things being neglected that were arguably more important.

“I’m not keen on splitting up,” Archer said, “but in that little description you did mention that there were guards at that bazaar you want us headed to.”

“Only entrances and exits, most likely,” I noted. “She thinks it’ll be easy to disappear into the crowd and come out less conspicuously dressed.”

“My very thoughts,” Akua smiled.

It always startled me how easy it was to understand her, to think along the same lines. Hakram probably knew me better, but sometimes I wondered if I didn’t understand her better than I did him. It made him a better right hand, of course – his ability to think differently than I did, to see what I didn’t, was a priceless asset – but the ease with which I could follow Akua Sahelian’s thoughts felt oddly intimate. It made it dangerously easy to feel close to her.

“It’s boring when you two agree,” Indrani complained, then turned serious. “Let me have a look at that entrance, at least. I want to be sure they’re not already looking for us.”

“Good idea,” I admitted.

Akua offered no objection, and after she gave a brisk description of the easiest path to the bazaar Archer was gone. I leaned against a rough brick wall, earning a raised eyebrow for it. Even when it wasn’t her face it was still her mannerisms, which made it a little uncanny to look at.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Just curious,” I grunted. “The guard we spared, what was it he said? In don’t know what ‘miyetham’ means.”

“It is an archaic form of the words,” Akua said. “What he said was ‘mile thaman’.”

My brow creased.

“Always good?” I hazarded.

“Ever worthy,” she corrected, then hesitated. “It is a turn of phrase here in Wolof. It is... praise for my family, in a way.”

Ever worthy, Sahelian , I mentally completed. That was what the man had said. Considering she’d likely saved his life I wasn’t inclined to argue.

“I sometimes forget your High Seats are actually liked by the people here,” I admitted. “I’m so used to seeing them as the enemy that it’s hard to conceive of anyone looking up to them as protectors.”

“We know better than to be devils to our own, Catherine,” Akua smiled, almost ruefully. “It is why we do best with enemies. That we may pour the venom outwards, while the wonders we bring back to our homes.”

“Dragons risible

Our claws, swords

Stealing miracles

To better hoard,” I quoted, the Taghrebi stiff on my tongue for lack of practice.

Something like delight flicked across her face, gone in a wink.

“One of Sherehazad’s,” she said, approving. “Not without reason was she titled the Seer.”

A moment of comfortable silence passed.

“You ever miss it, this place?” I asked, half on a whim.

Her expression was hard to read, and not for the shade of the alley.

“Sometimes,” Akua quietly said. “Parts of it. Others I am not so sure I could suffer now that I have known the world beyond the Sererian Walls.”

I slowly nodded.

“And you?” she smiled. “Do you miss Laure?”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“No,” I admitted. “Laure’s just a different fight to me, now. It’s the court and trying to keep Callow whole. I miss the parts I loved when I was a kid, but the city? No.”

It hadn’t been home in a long time, though it galled me to admit it even in the privacy of my own mind. I’d never felt as more than a guest in the old palace of the Fairfaxes, a child putting on adult’s clothing, and these days what I loved most in the world was condensed into the shape of a few people. I was still fond of the city, it had been my home once, but I would not weep to leave it after the war ended. The conversation ended with Archer’s sudden return, but to me it felt only half-done. Like we’d left bits of it still hanging in the air. Now was not the time, though, so when Indrani informed us that the handful of guards at the bazaar entrance looked too bored to have been warned I went with the flow.

We were waved through nonchalantly by the pair of guards standing in the shadow of the arch leading into the marketplace, neither bothering to look if we were armed. Akua noticed my surprise as we entered the bazaar and leaned close for an explanation.

“Our clothes are of fine make,” she explained. “It is expected of us to bear weapons.”

“They thought we were highborn?” I asked.

“Not that fine a make,” she laughed. “They believed us mfuasa, likely. Some lord’s retainers.”

I nodded and follower her, letting the noises of the bazaar wash over me. I’d thought it would be a strange and exotic place, somewhere out of a dream, but I found the reality of it rather more sedate. The stands were a great deal more colourful than back home, and often made with only bare bones of wood while walls and roofs were dyed cloth, but aside from that it was mostly the goods sold that made a difference. There was no food to be bought here, as sale of such goods was strictly regulated in Wolof and contained to specific markets in every district, but there were enough spices on display to make a Callowan merchant weep for the wealth.

Jewelry was terrifyingly common too, copper and silver most of all but some gold and precious stones as well. Everyone seemed able to afford it. Clothes and cloth hung everywhere, small glassworks and the kind of petty trinkets that every market in the world must sell. The other great surprise was the sale of enchanted goods, and I wasn’t talking about magic swords. For every glinting dagger there were a dozen ever-sharp kitchen knives. I saw stone coldboxes engraved with runes, prettily sculpted magelights and even alchemical brews. They were bartered over like cabbage in swift-spoken Mthethwa, like it was the most natural thing in the world to have a cure for the cold bottled in a bazaar stand. Maybe it was, I thought. There were no priests here – where else were people meant to go, when they were sick or wounded? It was still surreal, to see magic taken as something so... common. Nine in ten of those people wouldn’t be mages either, it was just that magic was utterly mundane to them.

Perhaps the bazaar was a strange place after all, under that veneer of familiarity.

Akua took the initiative to buy us clothes and cloak and I was disinclined to argue. Or particularly surprised she did not even need to press clothes against me to know whether or not they’d fit. We paid in Imperial coinage, silver denarii that Malicia herself had pushed into Callow some years past in a bid to bind us more closely to the Tower, and Akua got us bags for our old clothing too. I left in a burnished yellow cloak and matching tunic, keeping only my boots and trousers, while Indrani ended up in a nice pale green. I got the impression from some of the looks the merchant gave us that he believed us to be, uh, consorts that that a young noblewoman was dressing more to her tastes. We picked up a few tricks to hide our appearance too, cosmetics that were quickly applied.

We slipped out of the market through another entrance and took to the streets, the two of them already knowing where we needed to go without my saying: we’d come to steal two things, after all, and one would be easier to get at than the other.

—

Within moments of having a good look at the granaries, it was plain we weren’t getting into them today.

The Sahelians had their own private reserves near the palaces, according to Akua, but the ‘city’ granaries were a set of seven large interlocking warehouses surrounded by a low stone wall. There were three large avenues leading out, each large enough for two wagons to pass on them simultaneously, and a handful of smaller doors. The whole place was warded up to its neck, though it wasn’t all about keeping people out. A lot of it was mundane utility: wards against vermin, or to keep the warehouses dry and cool. The thresholds weren’t too strong, considering wagons had to be able to come in and out easily for distribution, but the walls were anchors for some pretty nasty stuff even by Praesi standards.

Still, we’d planned for this. The granary was one of the few places that’d been kept entirely intact during the mess that saw Sargon replace High Lady Tasia, so the wards there hadn’t changed in the slightest since Akua had last seen them. We’d schemed a way in a weakness, as with use of the right magical trinket we believed we could trigger the ward in very specific manner and cross before it reset, and even prepared an escape plan. It was all useless now. The entire district was on high alert, even a fool could have seen it. Hundreds of household guards had come to reinforce the garrison and what must be a staggering amount of mages with them: there were balls of light hovering ten feet above the wall, at least a hundred of them, and the spell was one known to Akua.

“The colour will change if there is movement where the light extends,” she said. “It should last for at least an hour, and if they’ve any sense they will have staggered putting the spells up so that they can be smoothly replaced.”

High Lord Sargon had been distastefully competent so far, so I’d go ahead and assume they had. I still sent out Archer to have a closer look. Even if I had my doubts she’d find a blind spot, learning more about the defences in place couldn’t hurt. There was no way to tell how long Sargon would keep the reinforcements there and we could only risk staying in the city for so long. Our foes were looking for us, and eventually our luck would run out. Archer came back after half an hour, looking displeased.

“The place is sealed up tighter than a tomb,” Indrani reported. “They’ve actually closed up all the small access doors, the only way’s in through the big gates now.”

“That’s a problem,” I admitted.

We simply did not have the strength to smash our way through here.

“Did you get close enough to eavesdrop?” Akua asked.

Archer nodded.

“Nothing too exciting, the usual whining and a bit of fear at the notion of facing us,” Indrani said. “I think I’ve figured out why the bazaar guards hadn’t been warned yet: a lot of them complained about being yanked away from other assignments in the city and sent here in a hurry. I’m thinking Sargon put his scrying stations to work sending people to this place instead of looking for us.”

My lips thinned. I did hate fighting clever opponents, they were always such a pain. Akua’s cousin was proving to be one of that breed, having correctly deduced what we’d come here for and that it was a better bet to protect it than comb through half the city looking for us.

“We’re not going to make it in there,” I finally said. “And I’m betting he’s going to be willing to keep his people here as long as it takes while he’s looking for us.”

If we were threatening an assault on his walls it might force him to pull away people, but we both knew the Army of Callow wasn’t going to try anything of the sort. He could afford to keep his mages here instead of manning the ramparts, the tricky fucker.

“He will have the treasury vaults under reinforced guard as well,” Akua quietly said. “This is something of a setback.”

It was. We’d come here for grain and gold, and now it was looking like we were going to have to leave without either. Considering Marshal Nim had torched a third of our supplies, coming out of here empty-handed was going to be a blow. Not necessarily the end of our campaign, but it’d stiffen odds that were already against us. Even aside from simple logistics, running away from Wolof with our tail tucked after we’d swaggered wasn’t going to be a good luck when we were courting allies. Some of the Clans might reconsider raiding, if it looked like Malicia was winning this war, and I needed the orcs south for more reasons than I’d admitted. I bit my lip, mind spinning in circles. I couldn’t see another way, much as retreat would be a bitter pill to swallow.

“We shouldn’t stay here,” Archer said. “Let’s find a place to settle for the day, yeah? We can figure out our next move then.”

I nodded, silent, and followed them deeper into the city. There had to be a way, right? I tried to put together another plan, another trick, yet all I could think of was the sound of an old monster tuning a lute.

—

The search was spreading out.

There were parties on the streets now, squads of twenty with two mages. The caster regularly stopped and cast a spell with no visible manifestation save a spinning circle of golden light, and it was magic none of us knew. Archer wandered close once or twice as we headed towards the southwest of the city, but she got nothing out of idle chatter.

“I’d wager the circle is a focus mark, not unlike a rune,” Akua mused. “The purpose remains rather more elusive.”

“It’s got to be a detection spell of some sort,” I said. “Sargon has to know finding us in a city this large will be Hells otherwise, especially when we have you guiding us around.”

“What it might detect is the question, then,” Akua said.

We had no answer, so steering clear was the best move. We were nearly at our destination anyhow. When I’d first been told that Wolof did not have slums, I’d naturally been pretty skeptical. All cities had slums, even walled ones, it was just a matter of how large they got. Wolof wasn’t as much of an exception as Akua believed it to be, but she’d not been entirely wrong either – even Scribe had agreed. The Sahelians had a pair of districts called the Yumban in the southeast of the city, where people who’d usually end up on the streets or in slums were assigned to live. Accommodations were provided, if very basic ones, and food from the city granaries regularly doled out. It all sounded very charitable, which naturally meant it wasn’t the whole story.

Any people who lived there were essentially at the mercy of the Sahelians. By law they could not refuse military service if called on, or a servant’s station, and they could even be traded to other lords so long as work was guaranteed by the receiving lord. People regularly made it out of the Yumban into higher station – mages in particular – and Wolofites were proud of such success stories, but the truth was most people didn’t. By design, presumably, so that if the Sahelians ever had an urgent need of manpower they had a source at hand that drawing on would not cause unrest. Conscription in the city would be taken badly, but who would object to the Yumban being emptied? It was clever, in a heinous sort of way, which I was coming to learn was the mark of the must successful nobles of Praes.

Most of the people in the Yumban now weren’t actually from Wolof, though. I caught the difference as we crossed into the edge of the districts. They favoured greens and dark oranges over the yellows and reds I’d seen earlier, the cadence and wording in Mthethwa was different – easier to understand for me, it was closer to the Ater-and-Legion standard I’d learned – and there were almost no weapons anywhere. Sargon had taken to raiding the northern hinterlands of Aksum on Malicia’s behalf as part of his support in the civil war, and I was looking at part of the loot he’d carried back with him: people. It wasn’t just Aksumites, of course, that was a riot waiting to happen. But I’d wager that we were looking a the ‘prizes’ who’d not had a trade he could offer them a shop for

Day labourers, farmhands, those whose trade was not lacking in Wolof.

They were not mistreated and I saw little resentment, not the kind you saw back home when a town despised their lord, but I could almost feel it from the air that Sargon Sahelian’s authority ran thinner here. Perhaps not much hatred, but not much love either. Their abductor had not delivered them unto a paradise. There was a lot of room, at least, since entire streets of the Yumban were still empty. The city had not entirely required from the brutalities of Tasia’s fall. Akua guided us carefully, keeping out of sight where we could as she explained what she was looking for.

“We’ll pick a place near a kufuna ,” she said.

I knew the word, though I’d never seen one myself. Black had mentioned that sometimes people from them had trouble adapting at the War College, where the ways were rather different.

“Those are the noble-backed schools, right?” I asked.

The Tower had ‘free’ schools of its own, where people could be attend in exchange for sworn years of service – it was how Tyrants could recruit mages without asking them of High Lords or drawing on Ater – but kufuna belonged to noble houses, without anyone else having a say in their running or what they taught.

“It is more nuanced than that,” Akua murmured. “But you are not incorrect. People in those streets will be used to strangers coming and going, less likely to pay it attention.”

“Never did get to see one of those,” Archer mused. “We should have a look.”

She demurred, but I was curious myself. We settled on studying one from a distance, but it turned out to be even easier than that. Such a ‘school’ was in session on large paved open grounds between two sets of houses and we found good lodgings in a second-story place that had a window looking down over the lesson. It was little more than a large room meant for eating and two adjoining smaller nooks for people to sleep in, but the narrow stairs to the rooftops had us sold. Building were smaller in the Yumban than in the districts around it – I felt, impossibly that the rest of the city was somehow looking down on us – but within the districts themselves it’d be a good way to get around. After dark, anyway.

We dropped our packs and settled in, quickly figuring out why both stories of the building were still empty even though the convenience of closeness to the kufuna must have made it in demand: one of the nooks had been fouled by an animal pretty disgustingly. That could have been cleaned, even if it hadn’t been, but the way the light pit in the middle of the combined house had a wooden cover that moved in the wind and slammed with a bam-bam-bam sound out of nowhere sometimes would have been trickier to handle. I could already tell it was going to get on my nerves. I went into the clean nook, which had the overlooking window, and cast a curious look.

It wasn’t that large a window, so when Indrani and Akua came too we had to squeeze pretty tight.

They were doing mathematics, the poor fuckers. Maybe thirty ‘students’ whose ages looked to vary between eight-ish to fourteen were sitting on the ground, using nice writing slates and chalk. The teacher was an old woman at least into her sixties, who leaned on a cane – lucky her, hadn’t been able to bring my staff – and had cataracts in her eyes but looked pretty spry otherwise. She guided her students through the end of a lesson on multiplication, and it was when students were called on to answer questions that the difference to what I was used to came in.

“The only a kid handling with the black stone can answer,” I muttered. “Why?”

It wasn’t always the same, either. Sometimes children answered two questions in a row before passing to another, sometimes it was immediate but never once did the teacher actually order it passed.

“It is because of jino-waza ,” Akua said. “I am not surprised the rules are unclear to you.”

I frowned. It was familiar, the words. I’d read them before, if only in passing.

“The clear-eyes,” Indrani snorted. “The Lady talked about it. It’s a little like the way we did thing in Refuge.”

“I can’t see them keeping score over anything,” I said. “What’s it do?”

“It is not a game, not exactly,” Akua hesitated. “It is philosophy, at least in part. To display your skills, your knowledge. To assess where you stand in regard to your peers. The stone and questions are just a tool to ease this.”

I studied the students, eyes narrowed.

“They’re all eager to answer,” I said.

Which was not my experience with studies. The tutors the orphanage made us sit in front of were used to squirming pupils wanting to be elsewhere, and they used questions as a way to keep us in line. Listen, learn, or you’ll look like an idiot in front of the others.

“So they win something by doing it,” I said. “Esteem, maybe? They can’t trade that for something useful, though, and it’s a little abstract for kids.”

“It is training for the world beyond the lessons,” Akua said. “The teacher, she will remember the one who distinguish themselves. What they are good at. And when my family – or someone with a trade and no children – sends someone, wanting a candidate for a scribe’s apprentice or kitchen attendant, she will give those names. She holds opportunities.”

I chewed my lip.

“So the stone, it’s part of the test too,” I finally said. “ Jino-waza . Sure, a clever kid could keep it for a long while – but then you hog the opportunity, and no one will ever pass you the stone. They’re trading it like adults would trade favours.”

“Exactly,” Akua grinned. “A student who oversteps might even find themselves sabotaged, as it often is with those who act in such ways in higher stations. It teaches balance, to take opportunity without making enemies.”

“Teaches who’s worth making allies with, too,” Archer quietly said. “Not everyone’s good at the same things, you can scratch each other’s back in a way that everyone wins.”

She had a strange, almost fragile look on her face as she looked at the kids. Was she thinking of Refuge? I spoke up to move the conversation along, even knowing that Akua was unlikely to ever be so uncouth as to comment on the look that’d seized our friend’s face.

“Everyone you’re allied with, at least,” I scoffed. “It’s not without sense, but it’s a very Praesi way of doing things.”

“I have seen the schools of your people, dearest, what few you have,” Akua reminded me. “They are as menageries. Kufuna are a better way. Your nobles have their tutors, as we do, but learning is simply not prized west the Wasaliti the way that it should be.”

“I came out of my schooling just fine,” I replied, a tad defensive. “And orphanages gave educations even before Black stepped in, he just ensured they were good ones.”

He’d also raised the number of them tenfold, but that was another discussion entirely. It wouldn’t do to forget that my father had made a lot of Callowan orphans along with those orphanages.

“Come off it, Cat,” Indrani snorted. “How much of what you came out having learned you learned in classes? You’re like a truffle pig, you just dig into books about the stuff that you want to learn about and ignore the rest. You barely even had help when you learned Chantant.”

“Thank you for the description, woman I will never sleep with again,” I drily replied as she stuck out her tongue at me. “And I could have gotten more out of those classes if I’d cared about them. It was my choice not to gain, because I thought it was pointless – it’d be the War College that was make or break for me.”

“Failure to motivate your student to learn is very much failure,” Akua replied. “ Jino-waza ensures that every student knows the worth of their lessons.”

“It also teaches your kids to always compete with each other,” I flatly said. “That they’ll need to squabble with each other to gain the attention of the highborn, that it’s the only way up. It sets in the bone that you swing at the people around you, not upwards. It teaches skills, too, I won’t pretend otherwise. But I’m not exactly surprised those schools are backed by nobles .”

“You do not understand,” Akua gently said. “Jino-waza goes beyond the schools. It is everywhere, applies to everything. The lack of a stone does meant it ceases, the stone is a teaching tool. It is how a family knows which of them should benefit if a favour is called in, whose marriage should have the most coin spent on to arrange, who gets to eat the most when the months are lean.”

“ Parents do this?” I replied, aghast.

“Well, yeah,” Indrani said, brow creased. “Makes sense, I’m not sure why you’re so offended. If you get a windfall, you don’t waste it on someone who won’t do shit with it. Even parents can tell who’s going places, Cat.”

“You’re not supposed to play favorites,” I bit out. “Everyone gets a fair shot, that’s how people who aren’t obviously good at things get their chance to shine.”

Did they not realize that what they were describing, it only ever benefitted the slightest bit of the people involved? Talented people would band together and help each other up while having all the incentive to kick everyone else down. And above those games you had the highborn, playing an even more lethal take on it with each other – and the ingrained notion that they should never, ever let anyone below them come up. It could only be at their own expense.

“That’s nonsense,” Indrani bluntly replied.

“She is Callowan, Indrani,” Akua said, and when I turned on her a thunderous scowl she raised a hand in appeasement. “I mean no insult. I am only saying that it is because you come from a land of plenty that think this way, dearest.”

I blinked at her. A land of plenty? Had she seen what they sold in the bazaar. Not even the enchanted stuff, just the spices and dyes would – I stopped, elbowing aside the sharp irritation and forced myself to look at it from the Wasteland’s eyes. Food, I got almost immediately. She meant food.

“It wasn’t your nobles that made this,” I finally said. “It’s a survival teaching.”

“When is the last time Callow had a major famine?” Akua asked. “It is different here. We kill to eat, to drink – the Taghreb fight wars to steal clouds from each other and make them into water! You come from a place that has the luxury of fairness, but Wolof does not. Few parts of Praes do.”

“That’s not the way to do it, though,” I said. “You don’t claw at each other, there’s no winning that when it starts. You sit and figure it out together. Ration, share. Something like a famine, you’re all in it together.”

Splashing the mud on the others so they were deeper in wouldn’t actually get you out of the pit.

“It a pleasant sentiment,” Akua replied, “but it does not help to choose which belly should be filled by the rice bowl. Jino-waza does. It lets you make the decision with clear eyes – and they will have to make it in their lifetime, Catherine. Everyone in this city older than forty, before Callowan grain was brought in, has known hunger.”

“Not the nobles,” I sharply smiled.

“Not my kin, the Sahelians are too wealthy for it,” she agreed. “But lesser lords, ruling over poorer lands? It is not as uncommon as you think. The fields feed everyone, Catherine, and no granary lasts forever. We make many wonders, but not even we can make wheat sprout out of rock.”

It would have been a better use of their skills in magic to learn that rather than fucking diabolism, I thought, but that was unfair. Destructive magic was easier. You needed to know a lot less to toss a fireball than, say, heal a broken bone. I could see it writ in the long of history, how it would have gone: the people and places inclined to the peaceful solution, to make wheat sprout from rock, they wouldn’t last. Not when a less scrupulous rival could come in, throw a few fireballs and take everything. It wasn’t as easy as raising castle walls with this. Magic was expensive , and Praesi were rich but not with bottomless purses.

So you got better at the magics that could protect you and destroy your rivals, and then maybe if you rose high enough that you were beyond most threats you could afford to go looking for wonders. Answers beyond eating the other crabs in the bucket. It was not happenstance, I thought, that the Sahelians had the finest field rituals in Praes. But by the time you got safe enough to look for those wonders, were you still the same people who’d wanted them in the first place? I felt an unpleasant shiver of sympathy at the thought. I was not an unfamiliar tale I was spinning there.

“It doesn’t need to stay like this,” I said. “Older than forty, you said. We had two decades of peace and trade, and that changed things.”

“It did,” Akua murmured. “Mother used to think it softened us, made us lose our edge, but I disagree. It freed us to pursue different things. To consider beyond the immediate.”

I cast a long look at the kids below, fingers tight against the windowsill. The teacher had move on from mathematics, she was speaking of early Praesi history – the campaigns that brought the Grey Eyries into Praes not so long after its founding – as she regularly stopped for questions and jino-waza considered to unfold before my eyes. I couldn’t have fixed this place even if I thought it was my duty to do it, I admitted to myself. There was so much of Praes that was still unknown to me. Parts of I knew like the back of my hand, the Legions and the lore and bloody embrace with my own home, but it wasn’t enough. Akua had thought I might be Dread Empress once, climb the Tower, but it would have been madness.

I was glad I had not heard the song in years.

No, what I was meant to do out east was not put on some saviour’s cloak and pretend I had the answers. I was here to bind the Dread Empire to the Liesse Accords, to the war against Keter, and to topple the empress who’d been such a thorn in our sides. Beyond that, I must remember restraint. It was not my land here, and in some ways I just... thought differently. And did not quite understand how they did. There was more to the differences between Callow and Praes than weather and colours. I shook my head, shaking off the thoughts.

“We should plan out our next move,” I finally said, pushing away from the window. “We’ll want to move under cover of dark.”

“A shame I cannot use the family library,” Akua said. “Half an hour there and I would know the nature of the spell the patrols are using to hunt us.”

Indrani snorted.

“Yeah well, if we were in there we could just stroll up to the gold and take it,” she said.

I smiled, only half-listening.

“The library is in an entirely different wing than the treasury vaults,” Akua chided. “It is much too-”

I turned to look at her so quickly my neck almost cracked.

“Wait,” I interrupted. “The library, you told me it was over the vaults.”

“The artefact vaults, yes,” the shade said. “The treasury is nowhere near these. It is not the cleverest of notions to keep demons near one’s coinage.”

Oh, I thought. Oh . Sargon thought we were going for the grain and the treasury, so that was the parts he was protecting. But he had to be stretched tight with people, going all out on the defence of those two places and looking for us in the streets with yet more mages. He couldn’t cover everything, so he’d focused on guarding what we were after. That meant thinning the defences elsewhere. And though we could get to neither the granaries nor the treasury, what was more important than either of those things to the enduring power of the Sahelians? I met their gazes with my eye, grinning wide.

“I have a plan,” I said.

Well, I could have done without the groaning.

Chapter 8: Access

“Note: Cousin Onoko’s assertion that ‘blood is thicker than water’ was in fact correct, despite my initial assumption otherwise. Add in the silence that followed the experiment, and it can be considered an unequivocal success.”

– Extract from the journal of Dread Emperor Malignant II

The ruling seat of the Sahelians was called the Empyrean Palace. Pretentious fucking name really, even if it was probably as fancy as it sounded, but no one had asked me. Not that it’d ever stopped me from sharing my thoughts before, or in this particular case. Strangely enough, Akua disagreed with me. The palace’s foundations were the oldest in the city, and though it’d begun small over the centuries it had turned into a real behemoth of a place. That was an advantage in the sense that it was difficult to entirely prevent entry into it, as there were simply too many entrances and too many people using them, but the rulers of Wolof had seen to their defences with characteristic thoroughness. Akua drew at knifepoint in the dirt of our quarters’ floor, first outlining three squares in a loose but noticeable curve.

“The Empyrean Palace is divided into seven different wings,” she said. “These three are the outer section, the easiest to access. The central wing contains greeting halls, but the rest is places of little importance – servant quarters and stables, courtyards and gardens.”

“We’d planned to go through the eastern wing, right?” Archer asked, crouched over the drawing.

With her unstrung bow kept on top of her knees, she looked like she was crouching by a campfire instead of a loose plan.

“We did,” I agreed. “And odds are we still will. It’s heavy on gardens, so it’ll be easier to sneak through.”

“The difficulty begins when we are inside the western wing,” Akua said.

She drew small lines connecting the three squares, standing for open paths and halls.

“Getting into any of these wings from the outside is achievable, but movement between the wings is strictly limited,” Akua elaborated. “Each of them has its own largely independent staff, largely to prevent infiltrations like ours – unknown faces are simply not allowed through. Which leaves us only one direction to go in.”

She drew a rectangle vertically, nestled against the squares like a hammer’s handle, and the deftly connected the three squares to it by single strokes.

“This is the Grand Gallery,” the golden-eyed woman said. “It is the sift through which sneaks and agents are removed before they can reach the vital sections of the palace. It bears the great hall where formal banquet are held. Adjoining it are both the public kitchens and a set of private parlours. No guard or servant can enter the Gallery without holding an enchanted token, given out by the steward of another wing. Being caught without one means arrest if you are lucky, but most often summary execution.”

I went fishing through the bag where the last two vials of the water breathing potion were and produced three small copper amulets. Detailed engravings were around the rim, and at the centre a single pearl bore a small enchantment. I set them down besides the plan.

“Scribe obtained these tokens for us,” I said. “They’re imitations, but very good ones. Eyes of the Empire have used them with success in the past.”

The enchantments usually changed every few months, I’d been told, and Sargon had kept to that pattern. In the wake of his chaotic ascension to power, however, the Eyes had been able to subvert people in a few key mage cadres. The fakes were current, as even though Scribe had lost control of the spy network in Praes to Lady Ime she still had... contacts. Favours for call in that she’d kept for a rain day.

“That gets us into the Gallery,” Akua agreed. “But not forward. To leave the Grand Gallery and move deeper into the palace, one must pass through one of the three threshold-gates. Each is warded, and there is no enchanted ward key: the only way not to be affected is to be keyed in with blood at the appropriate ward stone well beyond the corresponding gate.”

She drew three small arcing slices above the rectangle, then a square facing each. The moment she finished, she cut through the left square with a decisive stroke.

“Issa’s Garden has served as the personal quarters to the ruling Sahelian and their direct family for the last century and a half, but it was where my mother made her death-grounds,” Akua calmly said. “Even after years of ritual purging, there are still motes of taint and so the ruins remain unused.”

She drew a stroke through the centre square.

“The Empyrean Hall is the heart of the palace,” she continued. “It holds many of the wonders my kin have accumulated over the years, including the enchanted ceiling for which the palace is named. Sargon will be using the old formal living quarters that were raised there and it is also where the treasury vault.”

“We had an in there,” I said. “I have a bottle of blood from a servant who is keyed into the wards, and I’ve learned a Night-trick that could exploit that to sneak us in with a little help from my patronesses. The trouble is that right now that place will be fucking packed to the gills. Forget the wards, it’s the guards that would be a problem.”

Akua withdrew her dagger, smoothly rising to her feet. As if to distance herself from the entire mess, she even took a step back to lean against the wall and arc an eyebrow at me.

“So you want us to hit the last wing,” Archer nodded, looking at me.

“The Vaults,” I said. “It’s partially a mage village, partially a large library and underneath are all the artefacts the Sahelians believe too precious to see the light of day.”

“Or too dangerous,” Akua pointedly said. “If Sargon succeeded at binding Insipientia again, its artefact-prison will be there. The Weeping Snares he used when he came to parley are kept in a vault there, and so are over a dozen other makings in the same league.”

“So we what, release all these beasties into the library?” Indrani asked, frowning. “I guess it’d be a kick in the guts – Hells, if they get loose it’ll bring the city to its knees – but it doesn’t sound like your usual plans. Gonna be a lot of dead servants to go with the dead soldiers and the dead mages.”

A lot worse than that, should a demon be loosed in the city once more.

“No,” I said. “We’re going to steal the library, Indrani. All of it. And then, to make it clear I’m in a foul mood, we’re going to rob the artefact vaults too.”

Indrani laughed, openly delighted, but this was a more calculated move than she might think. I’d be holding two knives at High Lord Sargon’s throat by clearing those out, though he wouldn’t realize quite how bad it was until we sat at the negotiating table again. Akua cleared her throat.

“I have no opposition to such a plan in principle,” she said. “But in practice, I have a question: how are we going to get past the ward?”

She pointed at the threshold-gate leading into the Vaults. You know, that gate we didn’t have a handy blood vial for that’d maybe allow us to trick the wards. Servants never got keyed into two wardstones, presumably in case of this very sort of situation.

“I don’t have a way to get us past the ward,” I bluntly said.

The admission took them both aback.

“But,” I continued, “I know some people who can get past them.”

The Eyes of the Empire had people in the mage cadres that enchanted the tokens for the outer palace, and those mage cadres lived in the Vaults. Meaning that the Eyes had an in. And, as it happened, we knew where their safehouses in Wolof were – it paid to have the woman who’d first set them up in your service.

“And how are you going to get them to help us?” Akua skeptically asked.

“I am going to use,” I toothily grinned, “tact and diplomacy.”

—

Night sunk deep into the wood, spreading out in wavy cracks, and a heartbeat later the floor shattered.

We dropped down in a rain of shards and broken floorboards, landing in the middle of what looked more like some tavern’s common room than the spy hideout it was. I landed on the table, swallowing a moan of pain – Gods but I wished I could have brought my staff into Wolof – while Archer threw herself on a surprised man and knocked him down. Akua already had a knife at the throat of a second when I checked, which left me the two seated at the table on which I now stood. Wait, no, only one. The woman in the dress had been knocked unconscious by a falling floorboard. That left only the bearded man in front of me, who was currently gaping and bleeding from the face where a wood shard had flown into his cheek.

“Good evening, Eyes of the Empire,” I cheerfully said. “Who’s in charge here?”

The young woman – barely more than a teenager – that Akua had a knife on began tearing up. She was shaking, obviously terrified.

“Please don’t hurt us,” she hurried out. “We’ll be Eyes if you want us to, I’m sure you’re right.”

“ I curse you to be silent ,” I spoke in Crepuscular, and Night flared.

Her mouth kept moving, but not a sound followed. The flash of horror in her eyes then was significantly more genuine than the previous theatrics. The man at my feet had his hand on the handle of a knife, but he stopped short of unsheathing it when he saw I’d caught him.

“So not her,” I said, cocking an eyebrow. “Did she seriously think that would work?”

It wasn’t like we’d picked this place out of a hat.

“She is young,” the bearded man sighed. “Good evening, Your Majesty. For the sake of this conversation, you may consider me to be in charge.”

Meaning he likely wasn’t. I glanced at the unconscious woman to his left and then at the poor bastard that Archer had in an absent-minded stranglehold, then decided there was no point in pushing for someone else to speak.

“Name?” I asked.

“I am Ekon, Your Majesty,” he said.

I met his eyes with mine.

“If I have you a choice between doing me a favour and having your soul fed to Sve Noc, Ekon,” I said. “Which would you end up leaning, d’you think?”

He swallowed drily, but his face remained admirably calm. He must have been his forties, I thought, but his age was not wearing hard on him. Spying must pay well.

“All things considered, Your Majesty,” he said, “I would be inclined to the favour.”

“Good man,” I smiled, and moved to easy myself down the table.

I dropped down the floor by the unconscious woman, studying her in passing just to be sure she wasn’t faking. No, it looked quite genuine: her head was swelling where she’d been struck, which would be very difficult to fake, and her hand was not clutching a knife but a... pipe? I leaned in close and sniffed. Well, I’d be damned. For the what, probably the third time now? Still, Below was smiling on me tonight. I snatched up the pipe, which was already filled with wakeleaf, and offered my good friend Ekon a smile.

“Don’t worry about it, I’m not asking you to turn on Malicia,” I said. “Nothing quite so troublesome.”

“I am glad to hear it,” the man cautiously ventured.

I passed a hand over the pipe, fire flickering in its wake, and grinned around the mouth of my pipe as I breathed in deep of my vice. Ah, that hit the spot.

“Now,” I said, “let’s talk about how you’re going to get us into the Vaults.”

Huh, I’d never seen a spy freeze in horror before. That was probably a good sign, right?

—

Ekon had been most helpful, for a man who was going to betray us before this was over.

Under cover of dusk we crept through the gardens, weaving through pools and flowerbeds laid out intricately under the shade of old, twisting trees. Stretches of lilies in pink and pale, delicate orchids in beds whose every rock was sculpted, hibiscus and hyacinth and candelabra flowers. Among them were more... exotic breeds, flowers whose petals slowly changed colours or who moved without need for the breeze. Some even had veins of light, or sweated droplet of mist-like purple instead of dew. We steered clear of the menagerie, for it was well-guarded and there were creatures within that even we should stay wary of, and past a curving pool whose waters were full of nenuphars we took a servant’s entrance into the western wing.

The pair of guards by the door studied us as we came in but said nothing. We wore servant’s livery, after all. I had discarded my eyecloth in favour of a painted stone replacement from the bazaar for my missing eye, knowing it might get me recognized otherwise, and a touch of cosmetics had seen Indrani and I pass as vaguely Taghreb. The days out in the sun had tanned my skin deeper than usual, it was more the cheekbones than the colour that gave me away as being of Deoraithe extraction.

Once we were inside the western wing proper, not the outside part, we hugged the length of the servant quarters as we headed deeper in. At this time of the evening they were mostly empty, save for the children and the kinsmen raising them, so simply looking like we had a purpose was enough for the few servants we encountered to steer clear of us. Twice we encountered patrols, a handful of soldiers in Sahelian livery who lost interest in us immediately the moment Akua showed them a fake token. I was too on my guard to truly allow my gaze to drift around, but I did get glimpses of our surroundings. Tapestries were common and colourful, with complicated patterns whose motif changed from corridor to corridor. Painted wood was used as a sort of gilding along walls, and we had yet to encounter a single torch: it was all magelights.

It was almost bafflingly easy to make it into the Grand Gallery. We showed our tokens to the guards manning the hallway leading to it, faked smiles when a young man tried a joke about our ‘coming here often’ – he was eyeing Indrani pretty hard, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of inspection we should be worried about – and were sent in. Within half an hour of having set foot in the Empyrean Palace, we we’d reached the Gallery. Akua had only described it in passing as having statues of her ancestors, but she’d undersold it significantly. The Grand Gallery was at least half a mile long and maybe half that in length? More than that, the ‘statues’ were in full armour and almost eerily lifelike. They were on tall pedestals, and a quick glance at the names under them told me what I was looking at: former High Lords and Ladies of Wolof.

I didn’t dare linger, moving across the white and pink marble floor as quickly as I could without drawing attention. There were more people here, but the Gallery itself wasn’t really bustling: it was the side parlours and the kitchens that were alive, swarming with people. I leaned closer to Akua, eyeing one of the statues wearing colourful scale and a short sword that looked like a decent fit for me.

“Think we could grab from those before we head into the Vaults?” I murmured.

We’d had to leave behind arms and armour, which had me feeling very naked at the moment. The servant livery was pretty nice, red and white cloth with black accents, but it wouldn’t stop so much as a kitchen knife – much less good steel.

“It is all cursed,” Akua replied in a murmur of her own. “Every single piece. It is a rite of passage for any Sahelian capable of magic to devise a curse of their own and replace one of the fading ones when they are fifteen.”

Of course it was all fucking cursed, I sighed. Mildly curious, I cast a look around.

“So who’d you curse up?” I asked.

“One of my namesakes,” she smiled. “The third of that name, and most distinguished – she held Wolof against foreign armies in the wake of First Crusade.”

“So what’d you put in?” Indrani asked, looking enthused. “Is it rot? It’s always rot with you Praesi types.”

“Partial bone liquefaction,” Akua replied, sounding proud. “And I tweaked the curse so that the most common counter-spells would work, but then trigger a second curse that liquefies the skin instead.”

I wrinkled my nose even as Archer let out an impressed noise. Nasty stuff. Definitely a no on nabbing weapons. We got stopped five times. The first was a simple token check, the second a warning by a pair of guards to avoid the Green Parlour – noble guests were using it – but the third almost outed us. Not because of an interrogation, but because an older servant ordered us to help him and another man carry a large wooden table into a parlour. The weight on my bad leg was atrocious, and though I kept the pain from my face the older man complained of our slow place several times. Akua begged us off as needing to report to the Master of Ceremonies as soon as she could and we made a getaway.

Twice more we were asked to show tokens, and I noticed we were being asked more frequently than the people coming and going. I pointed out as much to Akua, who nodded.

“Our guards are trained to ask the token the moment they do not recognize a face,” she explained.

Made sense, and so far the deception had held. We could only hope it’d continue to. It was near the end of the corridor, by the statue of High Lord Nassor, that we waited. Archer asked, and so we learned that the man was Akua’s great grand uncle, whose daughter had been assassinated and usurped by Akua’s own grandfather. Amusingly enough, Sargon was related to the man through his own mother and so it could be considered that their branch had somewhat returned to power. Sahelian family politics were like a rolling wheel of murder, it sounded like. I caught sight of someone passing through the threshold-gate to the Vaults from the corner of my eye and stiffened.

“That’s her,” I said. “Green stone necklace and grey robes, like our friend said.”

Taiwo Bauna was a stout and respectable-looking woman into her middle age, with pale brown eyes that often saw her taken as more highborn than she actually was. By all reports, she was a fairly skilled enchanter with a good position among the enchanting cadres of the Sahelian vassal mages. She also liked losing a dice games and racking up debt doing it, apparently, which had been how the Eyes got to her. There were two guards by the door, and neither spoke a word as she passed them. She found us without difficulty, having been told of where we would be waiting. Her face was blank as she took us in, not bothering with greetings.

“You’ll be bringing treats the kitchen I ordered,” she said. “Honeybread, which they don’t make in our own. Follow and be silent. I can only buzz the wards for three heartbeats before it triggers one of the deeper alarms, so you’ll have to cross quickly.”

“Understood,” I simply replied.

It must not have been the first time she did this, I thought, for the wrapped and warm honeybread was waiting for us when we arrived in the kitchen. My leg complained of having to double back halfway through the Grand Gallery, but I kept myself under control. We were close, now was not the time to whine. She led the way as we returned to the threshold-gate, where we slowed. Moments before she crossed the gate, colourful lights began to swirl in the open air. The guards glanced at each other, then her. Taiwo sighed.

“I’ll talk to Lord Luba,” she told them. “It’s been happening too often for it to be happenstance, the anchor patch must have been flawed.”

“Please do,” a tall man said, voice smooth. “I apologize for the delay, but you will have to wait until the lights fade before crossing.”

None of us argued, and moments after the last splash of colour faded we followed Taiwo past the threshold. There was no smell of ozone, no movement of power, not a damned thing. We were in . We walked quickly, hurrying down an ornate hallway until we’d reached a great antechamber that Akua had described as the beginning of the Vaults. Taiwo turned towards us, snatching the wrapped honeybread out of Archer’s hands.

“Tell Alazi that this settles the debt,” she said. “And if she hasn’t arranged someone to take the fall, I’ll be selling you all out before I’m even thrown in a cell.”

“Of course,” I replied. “She’ll be in touch.”

“She better not,” Taiwo Bauna darkly said, and walked away.

Well, I thought, it was a good thing we already had someone who knew her way around here. I unwrapped the honeybread, biting into the warm loaf and feeling it crunch under my teeth pleasantly. I grimaced a heartbeat later, though: way too much cinnamon and honey. Too sweet for me. I passed it to Archer, who took a bite of her own and let out a little moan of pleasure. We hadn’t had time to eat, so I really wished Taiwo had picked up bowls of stew or something instead.

“Let’s get moving,” I said. “Akua, you know the way to the library?”

“In my sleep,” she drily replied.

Not exactly a surprise. Much like Masego she was a natural talent in matters of magic, but talent wasn’t enough – to become as good as she had been, when she’d still had magic, you needed to work . We followed her. Archer ate the entire honeybread, purely to avoid question being asked she assured us, and I let my gaze wander through the empty halls of the Vaults. Most of the mages would be eating around now, or out on duty: it was some time before we encountered another soul, and even then it was another servant.

There were no tapestries here, the walls adorned instead with mosaics and steles in a style I did not recognize – it wasn’t from the Free Cities, there was no paint, but it was strikingly vivid anyway – while the ceiling above us arced gently into what appeared to be the night sky. It was a lesser form of the enchantment covering the ceiling of the Empyrean Hall, Akua told us, one that changed only between night and day. It was used by younger mages as a practice before they were allowed to work on the real masterwork. How long was it before we reached the library? I wasn’t quite sure, I was tense enough time was hard to parse without focusing. Whatever the truth, we eventually came to stand before great iron gates. Twice as tall and tall as a man, they were sculpted with the figures of twisting devils offering knowledge to men and later being made to kneel to them. I remained at a wary distance, remembering how I’d once nearly gotten myself killed by mouthing off at the Tower’s front door.

“And our way in?” Indrani asked. “I’m not seeing knockers or a lock.”

“It requires a spell,” Akua said. “A variation on a formula taught to all who have the right to enter this hall, and which changes twice a day. Fortunately, there is a trick to it.”

She laid a ghostly hand against the iron door, near a grinning devil’s face, and closed her eyes. Her arm became as dark fog, flowing gently along the iron. The fog narrowed into small tendrils that went along certain lines of the sculpture – a face there, a staff or horns or a tower – and after a long time she breathed out.

“There,” Akua Sahelian said, smirking a moment before a small click was heard at the gates unlatched.

I breathed out, rolled my shoulder.

“All right,” I said. “Archer, you know what your job is.”

“Clean-up,” she grinned.

That was one way to put it.

“Akua, with me,” I said. “I can’t hold the entire thing in the Night, and there’d be no point. It’s not the common works we’re after, it’s those that aren’t in anyone else’s library.”

“I know the sections,” she agreed.

And their defences too, which would be important. There was simply no way that the gates were the entire set of protections on something as essential to the Sahelians as this library. I’d bet they even encouraged young mages to sneak it past this door to sharpen them up a bit. The good stuff, though, would be kept away from where people could easily get at it.

“Then let’s go,” I ordered.

Archer took the lead, opening the door just enough we were able to slip through. I wasted half a heartbeat to the wonder of what I was looking at – this was large as a cathedral, and most of it books! – before focusing on the immediate. Which was a handful of white-robed scholars congregating around a great table near the entrance and paying us no attention, while a squadron of twenty guards kept watch from a raised platform to our right. Those did notice us, but the initial alarm at the sight of us somewhat faded at the sight of Akua following us in: she had changed her appearance to be matching the white robes of the scholars here. We still got a pair of guards coming down our way, frowning.

Akua and I moved towards the scholars and Indrani towards the pair, pace brisk. I scanned the room around us, taking in the tower stacks in the middle of the great hall and the upwards layers on the walls – almost like the inside of a ship – but I found no one looking at us from there. So far our only witnesses were the people I’d seen. Four scholars, I saw, and as we approached one of them turned to us with a cocked eyebrow. He was looking at Akua, trying to place her face and failing. I was, meanwhile, looking at the table. Not the books but the rest. I found something suitable, a paring knife for quills next to an inkwell. Less than a dozen feet between us and the scholars now. From the corner of my eye I saw Indrani pass behind tall stacks, the guards catching up to her there. There wasn’t a sound, but a few heartbeats later she moved out quickly and with a sword in hand. The guards above hadn’t noticed a thing, and likely wouldn’t until it was too late. Only a few feet away from the scholars now, and another one was looking at us with similar confusion.

“My apologies,” the first man said, “but why did you bring a servant here? You ought to know they are not allowed, save with a Sahelian. What is your name?”

Ah, the poor fucker. He’d handed her a line and not even known it. Akua met his eyes and smiled, that pretty little number she liked to pull out when she was about to ruin someone’s day.

“Akua,” she said, hand coming to rest on the neck of a scholar with her back to us, “Sahelian.”

Fear flooded the man’s face, even as the shade idly snapped the scholar’s neck. Calmly, I snatched the paring knife and flicked my wrist after taking a heartbeat to aim – it went right into the man’s eye, and he fell down twitching. Well, at least it’d spare him the embarrassment of admitting that Akua had technically been allowed to bring us here. Talk about awkward. One of the survivors squawked in terror, the other one tipping as he backed away from the table hastily, but we were already moving. Akua flowed over the table smoothly, dropping down on the one who’d tripped, while I claimed a silver inkwell and smashed it into the side of the squawker’s head.

He tried to ward me off with raised hands, but a jab in the stomach had him dropping his guard and I finished the job with another blow on the temple. He was unconscious, not dead, so I went to get the paring knife and finished the man off with it while Akua strangled the last one. I allowed myself one breath of relief after it was done, only then turning to look at the platform above. There’d been no alarm raised while we killed the scholars, which was a good sign. As if prompted, Archer appeared at the edge of the platform with a sword in hand – and going through a guard’s stomach. The man slumped and tumbled over the railing, falling below with a dull metallic bang. I winced at the noise.

“Go hunting,” I said. “We can’t afford being caught too early.”

I was not yelling, but she was Named: she’d be able to hear me anyway. She nodded, vanishing behind stacks.

“Can you hide the bodies?” I asked Akua.

“I suppose,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I’ve never had to dispose of my own kills before, dearest, much less someone else’s.”

I rolled my eye at her.

“I’m sure you’ll manage somehow,” I said.

“And people wonder why we build tiger pits,” Akua muttered.

I hid my amusement, instead closing my eyes and finding my calm. I began murmuring prayer in Crepuscular, Night flowing freely through my veins. I could feel the attention of the Sisters, their eagerness and their hunger. Good.

Now it was time to rob this place blind.

Beatification I

“To know one thing perfectly is to know all the world.”

– Extract from “Ten Sun”, famous swordsmanship manual of Saint Felipe the Duellist

Montfort was a dead place.

It was a pretty little town by the river, near sunlit woods rich with fruits and game. The harvests were lush, the weather good and the taxes low. The town was close enough to the good road north for peddler caravans to pass, but not important enough to pay it attention when wars swept through. There were some who might have called Montfort a taste of the Heavens in the mortal realm, but to Laurence it was bloody torture. Nothing ever happened here, save for the same things as last year with some slight deviation. Someone’s son married someone’s daughter, the same feasts were thrown on the same days and the same peddlers came out to sell the same trinkets.

Laurence thought it must be the deadest place in the world, like an apple with crinkling flesh but only dust at the heart of it. None in Montfort seemed to agree with her, though. She was the cradle maker’s daughter, and she was proud of her father’s work – he made these beautifully sculpted cradles entirely by his own hands, even cutting the tree himself – but she had no interest in taking up his trade. Neither did she want to follow in her mother’s footsteps, to run a household and raise children. And they tried, they did, but they worried that without a trade or a family she be imperiled when they passed.

There were only so many times Laurence could be introduced to young men or asked to help in the workshop before wanting to scream.

And she knew what she wanted to do, she did. Laurence might only be thirteen, but she’d felt her calling: she was going to be a swordswoman. A three-sun duellist had blown through town, when she’d been younger, and she still remembered the way his blade shone in the sun as he demonstrated his skill for the townsfolk. She wanted it for herself, the masterfulness he’d shown that day. It was why she had begun to chop firewood for her family and the neighbours’ as well – a swordswoman would need muscle – and she had traded with the blacksmith for him to make a sword out of scrap iron. It was not much, but she could practice swinging with it and wasn’t that a start?

She’d thought her parents had made their peace with it, but she’d been wrong.

“It is time to set aside that silly toy,” Mother firmly told her, on a summer morning. “You will be a young woman soon, we can no longer indulge your fancies.”

“It is not a fancy,” Laurence bit out, mortified. “And I am not playing .”

Yet Mother was unmoved, and when she appealed to her father he was of a similar mind.

“There is no need for a swordswoman in Montfort, Laurence,” Father told her. “It will not feed you, child, and we have not had a militia since before my birth. I will not force you to follow my trade or wed, but you must find some sort of occupation.”

It was unfair and they understood nothing, but Laurence bit her tongue. They loved her, and she them, so she would not speak words she’d regret. Instead she bade her time, and when the caravan came in the weeks before the summer solstice she spoke with the hard-eyed woman who led it.

“You hire guards, I hear,” Laurence boldly said, and showed her sword. “I would offer my services.”

She kept the blade in the sheath she’d cobbled together, so that the older woman would not see it was iron instead of steel. The merchant looked as if she would laugh, for a moment, but mercifully she did not.

“You want to leave Montfort?” she asked.

“I do,” Laurence fervently replied.

“I would have too, at your age,” the woman said. “But I have no need for more guards.”

Laurence’s heart fell.

“I’m told you work hard, though,” the merchant said. “Chop wood and fetch water. I could use another pair of hands to handle chores while we travel.”

It paid with nothing but meals and a roof, though Laurence was promised coppers if she helped move merchandise and raise stalls when they passed through towns. It was not the glorious beginning Laurence had wanted, but it was a beginning.

When the caravan left a sennight after the solstice fair, she left with it.

—

It was months of hard work without the slightest glamour to it. Laurence walked besides the wagons and did as she was told, sometimes scraping together a few coppers always spent too soon. She tried to talk some of the caravan guards into teaching her a few tricks, but they looked down on her. Just a servant, they said, and that she had no business pretending to be like them. The sole one who warmed to her was an older boy with Thierry, and it turned out it was not the metal kind of sword he was interested in teaching her to handle. She scorned him harshly when he grew too insistent, which further soured the caravan guards on her when a reprimand came from the caravan mistress in the wake of the scuffle.

It was in the town of Souquet that she found her opportunity. Well, her and half a dozen of the guards. Souquet was but a small town on the side of the road in southern Lyonis, one rumoured to be on terrible terms with the lady ruling it from a nearby estate, but it had come to host a duellist. A five-sun duellist, Laurence overheard in the tavern, and one who was about to open a school in town with the local lady’s own blessing. There would be a public test on the morrow that all were invited to attend, and among those who did well Master Guillaume – the duellist – would choose pupils. The test was at midday and the caravan left with dawn, however, so Laurence had a choice to make.

The months on the road had not quelled her conviction: she took the chance without hesitation. It was fate for her to be chosen, though she rather hoped that fate did not end up saddling her with Thierry as a fellow pupil. He was among the six guards that left the caravan to try their luck the same as her. The guards had some silver, though, so that night they slept in rooms after a nice meal while Laurence swept the floors and did the dishes in exchange for being allowed to sleep in the stables afterwards. She even had to mop up when an old drunk threw up on the floor, some ragged one-handed fantassin that was said to wander around drunkenly during the day and return on evenings for his drink. Laurence had seen he had a well-worn scabbard and figured his spirits might just have been broken in war so out of pity she dragged him into the stables too, in the stall next to hers.

The test came at noon, as had been ordained, and Master Guillaume strolled in with the air of a proper duellist. He was a tall and muscled man, his cuirass and coat pristine while his broad-rimmed hat was extravagantly large and the swords at his hip bejeweled. He played to his audience, which consisted of mostly of travellers and would-be-pupils like Laurence. Few townsfolk came, and all those wary. Laurence had overhead last night while working that the duellists’ endorsement by Lady Ninon had the townspeople suspicious of him. After a speech and some displays, Master Guillaume got on with presenting his test.

“I am a practical man, but I have studied deep of the philosophies of my art,” Master Guillaume said. “And so I cut to the heart of it with this test. Footwork and technique can be taught, but swordsmanship needs one thing of all its students: the willingness to cut .”

And so the duellist had a menagerie led out into a pen he’d erected in the public square. There were two sickly pigs in there, several hens past their prime and even an aging dog gone blind. Laurence had thought there would be fighting or perhaps a test of pain to measure their determination but it was not that the duellist asked of them.

“To all those that would become my students, I give you this task: cut and cause death,” Master Guillaume ordered.

There was rippling unease in the small crowd for a long moment before the first woman stepped up with a hard laugh and bared a blade. After that it was as if a dam had broken, nearly all of the fourteen people who’d come to be students stepping up. Laurence lingered with the two who backed out, hesitating for a time, but then she forced herself. Already the pigs had been butchered under the assessing gaze of Master Guillaume, the hens running away as the dog began to growl in a corner. Laurence unsheathed her iron sword and stepped into the pen, but she could not make herself go through with it. What kind of a sick test was this?

She was to be a duellist, not a butcher. A sword should not be used for the likes of this. Yet she was the last who’d gone into the pen not to have struck any animal, and now all that remained was a hen bleeding out from a blind hack at her wing. All eyes were on her, even Master Guillaume’s. Hands trembling, Laurence strode back out of the pen.

She did not know who started laughing, but the sound was as a lash against her back as she fled back to the tavern so she might hide.

—

All was not lost, Laurence learned. One night’s labour in the tavern had turned into a way to have a roof over her head and the coppers she was saving up were not meant to get her back to Montfort. Master Guillaume had, while scornful, still informed her that though she was not to be one of his true pupils should she save enough coin she could pay for the right to sit in on his lessons. And she wanted to, for though the test had been ugly the duellist was said to have chosen his students with care. He’d not picked those who butchered the most beasts but those who had struck most ably, most precisely. It had been a test to weed out the fumblers as much as the faint-hearted, the townsfolk gossiped. Thierry had made the cut, along with three more of the caravan guards. They made up a significant part of the twelve pupils chosen, so when one day Thierry greeted her loudly by saying, ‘ah, but is this not the fool who cut nothing?’ the mockery took.

It was not repeated by the people of Souquet, who had become sullenly resentful of the duellist school ever since Lady Ninon leant coin to raise a hall for the duellists even as she still refused to help fund the town militia, but it was how all of Master Guillaume’s students had taken to greeting her. Somehow, Laurence came to grasp that mocking her had become one of the bonds that kept their lot together. The lot of them were certainly prone to quarrelling among themselves, and with townsfolk as well. Yet Laurence would not be cowed and so she put her back into the work that saw coppers slowly accumulating in her bag.

Work always came easier to her when it was a fight, and it was a fight she had on her hands in Souquet.

The days and nights passed, somehow both too quick and too slow, and Laurence did not slacken in her training even after gruelling days of work. Nighttime in the stables saw her take up her iron sword and try to mimic forms she’d seen the duellist pupils use during the day, and though it was frustrating she thought she was beginning to grasp some parts. The one-handed drunk she’d helped on her first night disagreed, and often made fun of her from the stall where he had continued to come in to sleep. Laurence had taken to bringing him the scraps of her meal, since he blew all his coin on drink and she’d never seen him eat otherwise. His name, he told her, was Ortega.

“Sounds like a surname,” Laurence said.

“It is,” the drunk agreed. “Lost the other one.”

It was the kind of things drunks said, she figured. She had no idea what the man did during the day, it was like he just went wandering off. Ortega was usually decent enough company, but sometimes his teasing got on her nerves. And one night, after a day where some of the pupils had come at the tavern just so they could drink a single ale and pass an hour ordering to fetch things, she lost her temper when he mocked her guard as being more open than a barn door.

“If you can do better, why don’t you show me?” she snarled. “Unless that sword you’re lugging about is just rust in a scabbard.”

“It’s worthless,” Ortega shrugged. “And your Master Guillaume, he’s all over the place. The stance is Miroir Verdant, those monastery monklings, but he drills his pupils the same way the Sparrow School in Cantal supposedly does.”

She started in surprise.

“Were you really a fantassin?” she eagerly asked.

He bore no suns, so he could not be a duellist, but there were others ways to make a living with a blade.

“I fought in battles,” Ortega said. “A long time ago. I did not care for it.”

His tone had become rougher near the end and Laurence winced in sympathy. He must have been on the bad end of a rout, to become like this. She could not ask him to teach her, not if it was going to get him to drink himself into the grave. So when he offered a few words about how to fix her guard before retreating into his empty stall with a bottle of cheap swill, she did not ask for more. However it was he’d lost his hand, she doubted it’d been pleasant. Instead she spent her days working and her evenings practicing, counting down the days until she could afford to pay for proper lessons. There was some trouble when a young boy disappeared after having gone to fetch water one afternoon, and Laurence heard of it for a week when townsfolk came to vent over drinks.

It was not the first disappearance, she heard. Over the last few years six more children had gone, taken by bandits or animals, and the town was boiling over with anger. People wanted a militia to make the region safer but they needed the coin and permission of Lady Ninon to raise one and she’d denied both. The mayor had tried to convince Master Guillaume to go looking, but he’d refused and it had only embittered the town to the presence of the duelling school. Coin that could have been spent making them all safer instead, folk said. Laurence thought it unfair of the lady to behave this way, but it was not her trouble and she would not go borrowing it.

She would only stay in Souquet until she had learned enough to be taken on as a caravan guard and she could join one to find a better school to study under.

Laurence was only three coppers away from her first lesson when the world went mad. Just after sundown some servants from the estate came running, claiming that Lady Ninon had been murdered by some assassin and that no one was safe. Her guards, they claimed, had gone mad with grief and now knew neither friend nor foe. They’d killed other servants, some of which had family in town. The mayor was furious and called for all able men and women to take up what arms they could, which was trouble. Laurence dipped out of the tavern to go take her things, just in case, but when she went to the stable she found people already there. Three men, including a smiling Thierry who had her bag in his hands and was riffling through it.

“How dare you,” Laurence hissed.

One of them looked guilty, but none chastised.

“We heard you’ve been stealing from patrons,” Thierry informed her in a righteous tone. “Looks like it’s true.”

He was shaking the coppers she’d painstakingly saved up, a smug smile on his face. Laurence shifted. They were large and she was not, all three armed when her iron sword was still in the hay.

“They’ll string you all up for thieves,” she bit out. “If you don’t drop that and-”

“Who will?” Thierry smiled. “Lady Ninon, the corpse? Or a pack of shopkeepers and an idiot mayor? Best you shut up now, Laurence, before our school takes offence to your accusations.”

“Could be trouble,” one of the others muttered. “All this for coppers?”

“One thing’s still true, Thierry,” Laurence snarled. “I would still rather fuck the wagon, splinters and all.”

Ugly fury streaked across the boy’s face and he threw down her coin, reaching for the sword at his hip. Before he could bare it, though, someone stumbled through the stable doors. Ortega, still messy and unshaven and stinking of wine, came to a sudden halt as he took in the situation. He had a slender longsword at his hip, and the same old battered scabbard slung across his back.

“Run,” Laurence hissed. “Get help.”

“Enough,” the largest of the three men snarled, unsheathing his blade. “You, the drunk. Drop to the floor. And you, girl-”

Casually, moving with unearthly lightness, Ortega punched the man in the throat. He dropped like a sack of flour, choking, and it was with calm eyes that the harmless drunk Laurence had befriended considered the other two.

“Take him and get out,” Ortega said, tone even.

Not even the slight slurring of the words was enough to entirely unmake the impression that single casual strike had made.

“This isn’t over, cripple,” Thierry sneered.

The other man, warily, picked up their accomplice.

“I know your type, boy,” Ortega snorted. “You’ll die young and ugly. Hurry out of here and to that end.”

Angry as hissing cats they were, but the duellist pupils still retreated with their moaning friend in tow. In shock, Laurence was staring at the man she’d thought she had pegged.

“What,” she began, and stopped.

She had so many questions she was choking on them.

“Ran a little late,” Ortega shrugged. “Ninon was a better enchantress than I’d figured, and those guards were mad in the head. Time to leave, girl. Take your things, we’re heading east. Heard interesting rumours about a town in Brabant.”

“Why do you think I’ll go with you?” Laurence replied, falling back to the comfort of defiance.

“Those little shits will beat you and rob you blind,” Ortega said. “You know it, I know it.”

“I want to learn the sword,” she insisted. “And for that-”

“So you’ll learn the sword,” the one-handed drunk said, tone entirely sober. “I’ll teach you to the best of my abilities, I swear it on the Gods Above.”

She shivered, for that was not an oath lightly taken. Yet she was not of a nature easily moved.

“Why?” she asked. “Why now, why make the offer? I did nothing but wield a broom and wash dishes for week.”

“Because you did not cut frivolously,” Ortega said with a smile, “and stayed true to yourself in the days that followed.”

Laurence hesitated, then bit her lip and nodded. She shoved back her coin purse into her bag and snatched up her sheathed sword, turning to tell the dr- her teacher now, she supposed, that she was ready to leave. Instead, she caught sight of tall silhouette strolling into the stables. Master Guillaume idly tossed his large hat to the side and offered them a toothy smile. Behind him, crowded near the door, where his twelve pupils. Thierry was among the closest, grinning nastily.

“I hear that you assaulted my pupils while they apprehended a thief,” the duellist idly said.

“Liar,” Laurence snarled. “You fucking liar.”

Ortega cocked his head to the side.

“You’re not a fool, so why?” he asked.

“Reputation is a fragile thing,” Master Guillaume said. “It must be carefully tended to, lest it wilt.”

Laurence’s would-be teacher frowned.

“If you bare that blade,” Ortega said, “you’ll be a man willing to kill the innocent for the sake of reputation.”

“What else is worth killing for?” Master Guillaume laughed.

“And you lot?” Ortega asked. “Do none of you balk?”

“Teach them their place, Master,” Thierry called out.

Others jeered and laughed, and though some looked uncomfortable none objected.

“So be it,” Ortega shrugged. “Name yourself, duellist.”

The tall Alamans jolted in surprise, eyeing the cripple with some degree of wariness.

“You have a sun?” he asked.

“I do,” Ortega said. “Speak, before your honour wilts along with your sense.”

Anger did away with Master Guillaume’s hesitation.

“I am Guillaume of Sarcella, and I bear five suns,” the duellist said, hand on his sword. “I have studied under Mistress Joannie Sandrault of the Sandrault school and earned all my marks in killing duels.”

He sneered.

“And now you, cripple,” he said. “So I might have you buried under a name.”

“I am Saint Ortega,” the one-handed drunk simply said. “I studied under many masters, killed many men. I named my school Lament.”

Master Guillaume flushed red with anger or fear, baring his blade without waiting for the beginning.

“Blades out,” he screamed at his pupils. “All of you, help me with-”

Laurence froze, a gentle hand being laid atop her head as Ortega smiled down at her.

“Watch closely,” he said. “And listen. Try to hear the Breath.”

He unsheathed his sword, then, and moved. As if bespelled, Laurence did not move a hair. Her eyes were wide, her breath so distant it did not feel as her own. She felt Ortega – who had named himself Saint, those hallowed few who stood beyond even the tenth sun – move before his limbs did, a smooth and lazy river that swept forward. Over the span of fifteen breaths, thirteen men were killed with a single stroke each.

Laurence de Montfort had found herself a teacher at last.

—

They’d fled under cover of dark, hitting the road east. To Laurence’s displeasure, the drunkenness had not been playacting – when they stopped, it was to drink in taverns or buy drinks from taverns. Ortega, who refused her the right to call him a saint, spent coin on drink freely but was stingy with lodgings and food. Still, even though they often ate slop Laurence never went to bed with an empty belly.

“Why are we headed to Brabant?” she asked. “What’s there?”

“A beautiful man whose voice bewitches all who hear it,” Ortega said. “I believe him one of the fae, slipped out of Arcadia and making sport of mortals. They say he sows discord for amusement, ordering families to fight for his love while he holds courts with animals in the woods.”

“Fairies aren’t real,” Laurence flatly told him.

“They aren’t?” Ortega asked, sounding pleased. “Lovely to hear. I expect I’ll be getting my name back any day now, then.”

Laurence gaped at him, for he seemed entirely serious, but aside from the jibe he gave her nothing when she pressed. Instead he began to train her, which she’d been awaiting eagerly. Only he did not teach her guards or stances, but instead the ‘proper way to walk’. And when she failed to do as he did, he threw pinecones at her.

“Duels are won and lost on distance,” Ortega said. “And you are, again, dead .”

Laurence was beginning to despise pinecones. But she was not a quitter, and she kept at it. And though he was always drunk, the few times he’d sparred with her she’d not come even remotely close to landing a blow. She’d noticed one detail, though.

“Why do you always use the same sword?” Laurence asked. “The plain steel one.”

“Did I not tell you the other one is worthless?” Ortega smiled.

“You say a lot of things that are only true in a twisty way,” she frankly replied.

He laughed.

“It is worthless to me, though I paid a great deal for it,” Ortega conceded. “I keep it with me only so that I might one day finish a conversation.”

“So you’re not going to teach me a two-sword style,” Laurence muttered. “Good to know. So when am I going to meet your other students?”

“My other students?” he repeated, sounding surprised.

“You said you had a school,” Laurence reminded him. “Called it ‘Lament’.”

He laughed, belly-deep and genuinely delighted.

“My dear,” Ortega said, “you are half this school, and speak with the other.”

She grimaced. So half the school was drunkards, then.

“I thought schools were supposed to have lots of people,” she said.

“Most do,” Ortega agreed. “But I was, in my youth, known as the lone swordsman.”

Laurence almost mocked the shitty sobriquet, until she felt the way the world shivered at the words. No, he’d not been the lone swordsman. He’d been the Lone Swordsman . Chosen. Ortega had been of the Chosen, once upon a time. Awe almost still her tongue. Almost but not quite.

“Was,” she said. “No longer?”

“Now I am a drunk,” Ortega grinned, raising a bottle. “Much better, in my opinion. But it is enough of me, my dear. Close your eyes, we will try for the Breath again.”

“Again?” Laurence whined. “It never works.”

“You felt the shiver when I spoke the Choosing, yes?” Ortega smiled. “You are not deaf, then, simply obstinate. We will break through your block.”

She wore the eyecloth and tried to feel what was in front of her, but to no avail. She bruised her forehead on an oak tree. Master Ortega said that hearing the Breath was what separated wheat from chaff, that no one could become a Saint without it, but Laurence simply could not. She thought perhaps she had on that first night, when she’d felt him move before he did as he cut down those men, but not since. The failure was frustrating.

“You cannot force it,” Ortega chided her.

Their campfire was warm and the stars bright above them. It would have been a beautiful night, if not for the anger in her belly.

“What’s it even supposed to be ?” Laurence bit out.

“The breath of the world,” he replied, suddenly serious. “Everything breathes, Laurence. Most of us stumble through Creation blindly, but for the few who can listen? It is... beyond what words can explain. As if you suddenly cease to move against the current of the river and instead move with it.”

The simple reverence in the way he spoke gutted her frustration.

“How did you do it?” she asked. “Learn how to listen?”

“I tried many ways,” Ortega said. “I was young and skilled and thought I could force understanding. I bargained to learn the sword under the Prince of Nightfall, at great cost, but it was not enough. I thought perhaps an artefact would allow me to surpass myself, but it was utter failure – and that debt is yet unpaid. In the end, Laurence, I learned to listen after I buried my father.”

She clenched her fist.

“Grief?” she roughly asked.

“In a way,” Ortega smiled. “I drank myself unconscious after, and in the moment just before I fell unconscious I heard... everything. As if a veil had been lifted.”

Laurence’s eyes moved to the bottle in his hand, horrified.

“My body is too loud, you see,” he said. “I need something to silence it, and only then can I... drift with the current.”

“I don’t even like wine,” Laurence confessed.

“It is a different path for everyone,” Ortega dismissed. “You will find your own, my dear. There can be no gain in trying to fit your boots to my footsteps.”

And on they went, following the road wherever it took them. In Brabant they slew the fae, Laurence holding back a thrall while her teacher tore through its veils and took its head, and from there they moved south. In Aisne they fought a tax collector who turned into a wolf at night and ate travellers, in Bayeux they broke a curse that made maidens drink the blood of their beloved. In Orne they took the head of a lord who raped young men and had them hung as thieves afterwards.

“He wasn’t magic,” Laurence quietly said as they fled afterwards. “Not like the others. Nothing made him like that.”

“He made himself like that,” Ortega replied. “There are three enemies with which no truce can be had, Laurence: time, love and evil. Do not forget that. The only one of these that can be struck down we must, wherever we go.”

For two years they followed the road, and with every day Laurence felt herself... sharpen. As if the travelling was whittling away at her, taking away the impurities. She was a fine sword now, good enough to shame even two-sun duellists in display duels, but it was not enough. Master Ortega kept trying to teach her how to hear the Breath, and she kept failing. They tried everything. She was put under a spell that took all her senses away from her, she was made to drink a brew that gave her strange and wondrous dreams, she was made to fight nine duellists in a row – and there almost touched it, she felt, but not quite – and twice she ran until she fell unconscious.

Nothing.

“These are not failures,” Master Ortega insisted. “You learn the limits of yourself. The broader your mind, the broader your sword.”

Laurence agreed, of course, but knew better in the deep of her own mind. She must try harder. Yet in the month just past their second year together, as the first winter snows began to near, Master Ortega told her that they must head to Iserre.

“Why?” Laurence asked. “That rumour about the manticore was from Aequitan, by the lakes.”

“I have a debt I must settle,” Ortega softly smiled. “It will be my fiftieth nameday soon, you see.”

“Fae?” Laurence asked, hand dropping to her sword.

She would not let the creatures take her teacher from her, no matter what bargain had been struck.

“Oh no,” Saint Ortega smiled. “Something altogether more dangerous. She is known as the Ranger.”

Chapter 9: Vault

“Eighty-seven: the secret passage your nemesis will use to escape the fortress can be used to enter that same fortress. They never consider that, for some reason.”

– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

I kept my arms open wide and my hands flat, as if I were holding open a bag, but all that lay in between my fingers was shadow.

Akua stood slightly ahead of me, dropping one book after another into the dark. Without a sound they disappeared into the hungry maws of my patronesses, the two of us clearing out row after row as quickly as we could. We’d gone for the restricted sections, the forbidden ones: there was no point in my taking books that’d be in every other great Praesi library. Those sections were all trapped and warded, but I was being guided by someone who knew those traps and wards intimately. We’d been at it less than half an hour, as Archer hunted for anyone we might have missed out in the stacks, but already I’d sent hundreds and hundreds of tomes into the embrace of Sve Noc. Akua almost reverently dropped into the dark what looked like the handwritten notes of someone called Olowe, emptying the last of the shelf, and we stopped.

I looked back at rows and rows of empty shelves behind us, what had once been a section on dimensional mechanics and the technicalities of making a Breach. Not a book left, same as we’d done with necromancy, curses, High Arcana conjuration, three sections on diabolism and a dozen more branches of sorcery. It would have been missing the point to say we’d taken a fortune in books, because what we’d stolen was essentially priceless. There was no replacing any of this for the Sahelians.

“That is the last of the sections I would consider essential,” Akua noted. “Unless you want to acquire more common tomes, we are finished.”

“That was it?” I asked, skeptical.

“My family has a personal library, naturally,” she dismissed. “And the most dangerous volumes will be down in the hidden vaults. Yet for the library, I would consider nothing else here irreplaceable.”

I supposed it would have been greedy to ask for a thousand priceless books instead of just a few hundred, I mused, not that it was stopping me. I folded my arms, left over right, and brought them to my chest as I slowly eased my grip on the Night and the darkness faded. The working hadn’t been all that strenuous to maintain, but it had taken concentration: I was glad it was done.

“I’ll take you word on it,” I replied.

If we’d had more time I would have considered emptying the entire place just to make a point, but we didn’t. I was, to be frank, surprised the Eyes hadn’t betrayed us yet. My bet was on there being another game at play here, one I hadn’t quite figured out yet. That tended to be a safe bet when the Intercessor was around. Regardless, we needed to get a move on if we wanted to clear out the artefact vaults as well before this all came down on our heads. We took the stairs down and I cursed every few steps the absence of my staff and the apparently deep and abiding hatred Praesi architects had for handrails. Seriously, would it kill whoever kept building these ridiculous places to throw up a few of those? Take out two of the fucking egg-sized rubies encrusted into one of the wall frescoes and you could pay for those to be done for the entire damned palace. Some of my thoughts came out as grumbling under my breath, I figured, since Akua looked highly amused and offered me her arm for the last few steps. I took it with ill-grace, looking away. I got cackled at for that immediately, Archer popping out from behind stacks with a grin.

“Aw, isn’t that cute,” Indrani grinned. “If we get to robbing the Tower, is it going to make you hold hands?”

She smelled faintly of blood, I noticed. I cocked an eyebrow at her and she threw me a sheathed short sword about my size.

“Lots of stragglers?” I asked, ignoring the jibe.

I drew the blade, testing the weight, and found it good enough. Not as good as something fitted for me, but it’d do. As I fitted the sheath at my belt, Indrani passed a blade at Akua who nodded thanks in return and got a smile for it.

“Five,” Archer replied, “but one of them was a mage. I had to get tricky.”

The edge of one of her sleeves was slightly singed, I found with closer study.

“Good work,” I simply said. “We’re hitting the hidden vaults now. You good to fight?”

“I was promised horrors, Foundling,” Indrani grinned. “Hells, why do you think I’m even here?”

Ugh, I bet that pun was even intentional. I truly did have terrible taste in women.

“I’d assumed because you were dared while drunk,” Akua drily replied.

“Hey,” Indrani replied, offended. “That only works like, a third of a time.”

I loudly coughed.

“Fine, maybe closer to half,” Archer conceded.

Immediately after she turned to Akua with a scowl, jabbing a finger at her.

“And don’t you dare cough too, Petty Poltergeist,” she growled. “Half is all I’ll go up to.”

“I would never dare,” Akua lied, smiling prettily.

It was in a better mood that the three of us moved out towards the back of the great library, where the returned once-heiress to Wolof told us that the easiest path into the hidden vaults lay. I’d expected some sort of archway full of damned souls or a corridor swarming with enchantment, but what our quick march there revealed was actually just a set of tall golden doors. Nicely sculpted, if a little heavy on the Wolof-and-particulary-the-Sahelians-are-the-best-look-at-all-these-fools-we-crushed slant. To my admitted bewilderment, Akua then simply grabbed one of the large iron rings on the doors and pulled one open. It revealed a short hallway of bare stone, leading to a steel grate.

“Wait, is that it?” Indrani asked.

She sounded a little cheated.

“That’s got to be a trap, right?” I asked, cocking my head to the side.

“Oh, it is,” Akua flatly agreed. “There is a secret entrance thirty feet to our left that would allow us to avoid the first two killing rooms, but it would require us to pass through the terror room – and without the proper protective amulets, that would be... unwise.”

“Terror room, you say?” Archer idly repeated, sounding dangerous interested.

Of course she would be.

“Magical terror,” Akua specified. “As close to the demonic emanation as my forebears could manage. Most people die of a stalling heart within the first ten heartbeats. No, the front path is best suited to our needs.”

I considered the stone hall for a moment, humming.

“Floor trap?” I guessed.

“Hand me a book,” Akua asked.

Snorting, I grabbed what looked like a primer on the classical elements – could have used you a few years back, buddy , I thought – and began to pass it to her before pausing and glancing at Archer.

“Don’t tell Zeze,” I said.

“I’d be counted as an accessory,” Indrani solemnly replied.

The book went to Akua’s hand as she rolled her eyes, tossing it carelessly into the hallway. I glimpsed iron spikes emerging from the walls before the golden door shut. Huh. Akua, looking somewhat aggravated, wrenched open the door again and I stood there to watch as the spiked walls slowly closed in on the middle of the room. Door probably couldn’t be opened from the inside, I decided. We stood for a while longer, waiting. Sometimes the walls quickly lurched forward for an inch or two, but most of the time they just... slowly advanced.

“Now that’s just asking for a hero to find a way out,” I sadly said.

“The mechanisms that make the walls move are deep in the stone,” Akua said, sounding a tad defensive. “They can’t be changed without load-bearing walls being knocked down.”

“How do we get through?” Indrani asked, more pragmatically.

The shade stepped into the hall fearlessly when the walls were near through, slipping around the edge of the right one and disappearing. A few heartbeats later there was a metallic wrenching sound, maybe a lever being pulled, and the walls stopped. They stayed extended, leaving a path maybe a foot wide between the iron spikes that led straight to the door in the back. You could have at least pushed the door to the left so it’d be covered when the wall advanced, you hacks , I silently thought. Akua slipped back around the edge of the wall, reappearing with a smile as she dusted herself off.

“And to cross that?” I asked, pointing at the steel grate.

“The Archer key,” the shade gracefully replied.

The Archer in question snorted, stepping forward – Akua flowed around her – and pushing to the end of our little narrow passage. One, two, three, four. On the fourth Name-assisted kick the steel grate toppled down, ripped right off the hinges. I cocked an eyebrow at Akua.

“It is enchanted against blades and lockpicks, not mules,” she shrugged.

“ I heard that ,” Indrani called out.

Swallowing a grin, I shimmied through and followed the shade over the fallen grate. It brought us to another stone hall, this one rather more ornate than the last. The walls were covered with mosaics in the Sahelians colours whose patterns felt... oddly fascinating – I wrenched away my eyes forcefully – and whose floor was checkered marble in black and white. At the end I saw an open stone doorway and what looked like curving stairs going down. The three of us were huddled in a small antechamber between the halls, and out of curiosity I looked up. Yeah, as I’d figured the stone archway here had small depression in the rocks.

“Stone door falls down here and over there,” I mused. “I’m calling... pit trap?”

“Oh,” Indrani gurgled. “That’s an old one. Is it the black or white tiles that make it work?”

“There are triggers under both,” Akua sighed. “And the floor itself is not trapped. Once the doors close, the mosaic shifts in some places and begins releasing alchemical gas.”

“What’s it do?” Archer asked,

“It was a forgetfulness mixture, when I left,” Akua noted. “Prevented memory recall longer than five heartbeats. It could be anything now, of course.”

“And we beat this how?” I asked.

It was too long for us to jump our way across, although maybe if I used Night...

“The stone doors open again once the monitoring enchantment senses that there is no longer gas in the air,” she said. “I know where the openings are, so Catherine and I simply need to block them until the trap begins to reset. We’ll have a window of four heartbeats to cross.”

“That’s very unsporting,” I approved.

She pointed out where in the mosaics – near what looked like a swirl of pale eyes – we’d need to act and then we moved out. The doors immediately fell down from the ceiling, blocking the paths out, but what followed what almost absurdly mundane. I did not use Night or a Name trick, simply jamming my thumb into the opening and then waiting for a while as the doors began to rise again. We ran, Indrani snickering the whole time, and made it to the stairs before the trap activated again. We went down slowly, catching our breath, and I cast a consternated look behind us.

“I don’t understand why your ancestors didn’t just layer a hundred wards,” I admitted. “This stuff can be beaten, a hundred different layers of protection changed every few years can’t.”

“We are in the Vaults, my darling,” Akua replied. “It is presumed that anyone who made it this far into the Empyrean Palace has the help of traitors within our own. Wards can be crossed in the snap of a finger, with the right helper. This? This cannot.”

I was about to object some more when she silenced me with a finger.

“These were the easiest of rooms, my heart,” she said. “Now that we are below, tricks such as I used will find little bite.”

Straight from the start we were faced with a crossroads, the paths going to the left and right. The left side, Akua explained, was where the other entrance above would have led to directly. The terror room.

“And where we’re headed?” I asked.

The hallway here had mosaics much like those above, dangerous to look at for too long, which I figured was actually pretty clever on the part of the builders. You couldn’t see the traps coming if you couldn’t risk looking at your surroundings for long. Wouldn’t want to be one of the poor fuckers in charge of cleaning this place, though. Maybe they had wards in place to prevent it getting dusty?

“Straight into the illusion room and the duelling room, then we may access the first vault,” Akua replied, leading us to another steel grate.

It required Archer’s tender attentions once more, but when forced off the hinges it did not fall into the room beyond it. Anchored by enchantments, our guide noted, and so we ‘opened’ the broken thing as if we’d used a key. Beyond was a hall that was entirely mosaic, that confounding little number we’d been walking through. Here it covered the floor and ceiling too, though, and led to another steel grate. I risked small glimpsed at the floor, finding pale eyes there like those that’d covered the gas exits above us, but I bit my lip. Something was wrong here, itching at me. I felt the presence of the Sisters fill me like cold water, Komena nudging my chin to look right instead of- the illusion broke and I let out a gasp.

“Fuck me,” I murmured. “The spell here makes you twist left and right for up and down.”

“Yes,” Akua said, sounding pleased. “And so draw the eye away from this...”

She shimmied in front of me, dipping her foot into what my mind still insisted was the right wall, and the mosaic vanished. Under it was a sharp drop and even sharper steel spikes. Ah, lovely.

“There’s a safe way through?” I asked.

“Indeed,” Akua replied. “Archer?”

I turned to look at Indrani, who had her eyes closed and was muttering under her breath. She opened her eyes once, quickly glancing at the floor and then closing them again. Twice more she did that, looking angrier and angrier, until on the third she drew back her sleeve and bit her forearm hard enough blood came out. She looked again, eyes hard, and only then offered me a wild grin.

“It’s fine, ladies,” Archer said. “I can See it now. Mind couldn’t get around trying to believe two things at the same time.”

It was useful now and then to be reminded of how fucking dangerous Indrani actually was. Akua had been raised here and I had goddesses helping me see through this. Her? It was Name and grit that got her through. And somehow, now that she’d seen through the spell, I suspected that no other one like it would ever fool her again. We crossed the floor like children holding hands in dark woods, moving across the complex back and forth pattern that Akua unerringly led us through until we’d reached the door on the other side. Solid copper, this one, and our guide opened it by ghosting a hand through the lock and picking it with her own ‘fingers’. It popped open, revealing another short antechamber leading into another hall.

This one, which she’d called the duelling room earlier, was little more than bare stone and mosaic walls save for the five longswords that’d been sheathed in stands of copper. It was a thick steel door that awaited us at the end of the hall, with no visible lock or pull.

“So we draw a sword and fight an opponent for each one we draw?” Indrani guessed.

“Not at all,” Akua laughed. “Pulling swords only makes parts of the floor fall away into spikes when the monster is unleashed. It is the touch of flesh on the door that begins the duel.”

“And how does the door open?” I asked.

“An enchanted key, which we do not have,” Akua said.

I glanced at the steel door in the back and Archer did the same.

“I’m not sure I can force my way through that with brute strength,” she admitted.

“We will not need to,” the shade said. “The swords are, naturally, all cursed.”

“Naturally,” I drily echoed.

“The second blade from the right should have a particularly nasty rotting curse on it that I believe will damage the door enough to reveal the lock, if pressed in the right place,” Akua said. “I should be able to pick said lock from there.”

“And you have no flesh to rot,” I mused. “All right, that’ll work. That leaves Indrani and I to handle whatever creature comes out. You have any notion of what it’ll be?”

“It used to be giant scorpion, but it should have died by now,” Akua noted. “It shouldn’t be too difficult an opponent, given the breakdown of relations with Aksum. That is where all the most... difficult creatures tend to come from.”

I nodded.

“Can we use the other blades against the beastie?” Indrani asked.

“Alas, it is always bespelled to be protected when put away here,” Akua said.

It was typical of Praesi highborn, I thought, that though a great many of them were utterly and irremediably mad their madness somehow turned out to be in some ways sensible and organized. It was a through sort of lunacy, and all the more dangerous for the thoroughness being married to the absence of sense in most other ways. I unsheathed the blade at my hip, rolling my wrist to limber it and stretching my limbs carefully. Archer gave me an amused look but did the same, Akua patiently waiting for us to be done.

“Where’s it going to come from?” I asked.

The shade simply pointed upwards. Of course it was, I sighed. I looked at Archer, who nodded in approval.

“Get us started, Akua,” I said.

Smoothly she walked up the swords and pulled out her chosen one from the copper stand, darting away afterwards. There was no visible sign of the curse she’d mentioned on the sword, but I could smell the scent of power in the air. She’d not lied when she called the enchantment on that nasty. Three heartbeats passed before a floor panel of about nine feet by three shattered into neat pieces and revealed a spiked pit below even as the ceiling shifted above us. There were three birdlike screeches as a massive form – Gods, large as two oxen as least – dropped down from above between Indrani and I. Two thoughts came to me about at the same time. First off, Akua had been rather optimistic when she’d assumed that the giant scorpion had died of old age.

Second, this was not a noise a scorpion should be able to make .

“Why does this thing have faces on its back?” I asked.

“Better question,” Archer mused, “why are they all screaming?”

I ducked away from a lightning-quick strike of a stinger the size of my head, the massive scorpion trying to trample Indrani as it kept me away. She slid under it, laughing in glee as something in its belly began spitting out acid that she only narrowly avoided, and I chopped away at one of its bony legs to distract it. Bony was the right term for it, I found out, the bloody carapace was hard as bone. And that was just the leg, the body would be worse. That left the eyes to strike at or, urgh, the... faces. Which were still screaming, looking like damned souls sown into chitin and singing out their eternal torment. Hells, they actually might be. It turned its attention to me as Archer put distance between her and the tail, pincers twitching. I kept close to the wall, throwing myself to the side at the last moment when it struck and smiling at the screeches of pain it let out when the pincer hit solid stone.

“I am working the lock,” Akua calmly called out.

“Archer, let’s not fight the damn thing,” I screamed.

“Boo,” Indrani screamed back.

Her shout drew back its attention and it stabbed away at her repeatedly with the stinger, growing angrier as she kept dodging at the last moment, and I darted close to its face to make sure it had to keep its attention divided. The pincers came at me from both sides, but the anglers were predictable. Anger was making it sloppy. It grew even angrier a moment later, when Indrani finally baited it into a stinger strike at the angle for her to cut off the entire thing after she dodged. Even as it screeched I took the opportunity to land a few hacks at its eyes, black fluid dripping everywhere, and retreated as it began to attack blindly.

“Around the spikes,” I yelled at Indrani.

There was a narrow strip between the walls and the floor that’d dropped, and with the scorpion partly blinded now was the time to make us of it. I began to cross towards the latter half the hall, where Akua was kneeling before the door, and Archer did the same a moment later. With any luck the bloody thing would try to follow us and fall to its death. Halfway through I turned to have a glance and had a moment of triumph when I saw the monster was following us, but it was short-lived. The scorpion’s legs unfolded further with a wet wrenching side, and hoisted him up by pushing against both walls. Oh fuck me , I thought as it began to walk on the walls to catch up to us.

“Akua,” I screamed.

“I am nearly done,” she replied.

The tail Archer had cut was leaking black blood everywhere, but it could still serve as a whip. As I discovered when it snapped after me, forcing me to hop forward on my bad leg and nearly fall to my death.

“ Akua ,” I screamed.

“And done,” she replied.

I heard the door open with a click and threw myself on solid ground, landing in a painful. Archer was already there and she helped me up, dragging me as we broke into a run towards the open door. The monster was behind us, pincers lashing out as it landed on the solid stone with a clattering sound, but Indrani threw me through the doorway and I heard her stumbled through as I flopped on my belly. Akua slammed closed the door, not quite quickly enough to silence the screeches of rage from the monstrous scorpion. All three of us dropped to the floor for a while after that, catching our breath.

“So the scorpion might still be alive,” I solemnly told Akua.

There was a moment of silence, then all three of us began laughing in spasms. The merriment passed, but it’d done us some good. Even better was that we were now going to get into our first vault of the night. The room we opened did not look like the fabulous gold-and-gem-laden treasury my imagination had conjured up. Disappointingly enough, the large vault looked more like an orderly storage house than anything else. The goods were interesting, at least. A dozen enchanted swords and twice as many armours, a bow made of dragonbone – which Indrani pawed lustfully at – and several banners whose cloth was woven with spells that inspired either valour or fear. There was also a saddle made of what I suspected to be human skin, which I almost hesitated to take. Well, the Sisters probably wouldn’t mind even if it was. It was minor artefacts aside from that, mostly enchanted jewelry and amulets.

“Prestige pieces,” Akua told me. “All were crafted by famous practitioners. It is a traditional way to reward a subordinate without overly empowering them.”

“Well,” I shrugged, “into the Night they go.”

It didn’t take long to clear it all out, Archer reluctantly parting with the bow when it was pointed out to her that she did not have arrows to go with it.

“Left now,” Akua said. “It will bring us to three adjoining vaults.”

Huh, that did sound rather tempting.

“What’s in the way?” I asked, and before she could answer I got my response.

It was, uh, remarkably straightforward.

“This is an acid pool,” Archer said, looking down at, well, that .

“So it is,” Akua cheerfully replied.

It was maybe three feet below the threshold we stood at, and there was no way to tell how deep it ran. The length of the hallway was at least thirty feet, which made it a laughable notion to try jumping.

“How do people usually get through it?” I asked.

“They bring a specially crafted silver bridge,” Akua smiled.

“With a mage around you could make a bridge across out of shields,” Indrani noted.

A heartbeat later, there was a little shiver across the room as a pulse of... something went through the air. I cocked an eyebrow at Akua.

“Raw magic,” she said. “It would disrupt any ongoing spell formula. Anyone trying to cross on a shield panel would...”

She glanced meaningfully at the gently simmering acid. Lovely.

“I’m pretty sure Night won’t be disrupted,” I frowned.

“My ancestors did not, in fact, plan for the human herald of drow goddesses to infiltrate their vaults and then use a largely unheard of and poorly understood power to make a bridge across their acid pool,” Akua confirmed, her tone holding the faintest note of sarcasm. “How short-sighted of them indeed.”

I coughed in embarrassment, then got to work. The wards over the palace were still making it hard to call on Night even though we were well past nightfall, and I found the magic pulse harder to deal with than I’d thought it would be. Had to do double layers to avoid a thinning, which made it take longer than I would have liked. It was with sweat beading the back of my neck that I brought us to the other side, where Archer promptly kicked her way through the steel grid. How had the godsdamned acid pool been the trickiest of these so far? It was a good thing the wards hadn’t been updated here in a while, I thought, because a few more layers of whatever made it hard to shape the Night might have managed to lock me out from using it in practice.

Akua stopped us before we could enter the traditional antechamber, dragging an ethereal foot over the floor. Headsman’s blades came out from both sides, cutting into nothing but thin air, and they began to withdraw. Well, that’d been bracing. They’d been building up the impression that the antechambers were safe this whole time, hadn’t they? Tricky fuckers. The hallway beyond was unlike any we’d seen before, which I did not take as a good sign. Every part of the walls, floor and ceiling was covered with angled mirrors, giving the impression that we were standing on the inside of a gem. The uncovered parts were the doors in and out, and somehow I suspected that was only a temporary state of affairs.

“Enchanted mirrors?” I asked.

“They induce nightmare-filled sleep if stared at,” Akua said, “but it is the doors to watch out for. They will shoot out burning rays of light, which then...”

“Reflect every which way,” Indrani finished, sounding a little impressed.

“The enchantments in the mirrors amplify the heat,” Akua said. “There is an upper limit, of course, but after seven reflections it would be enough to incinerate an ogre on contact.”

Given the kind of people these defences belonged to, I suspected it was not a figure of speech she’d used there.

“Night’s not great against fire,” I admitted. “So that’s a problem. How do we get through the door on the other end?”

It was a copper one and Akua had picked one of those earlier but I didn’t want to assume.

“I can get us through the lock there,” she said. “But not before at least a dozen spells have been shot out.”

“These rays, do they reflect off anything or just the mirrors?” Archer suddenly asked.

I breathed out in understanding and so did our guide.

“The side of a sword should work,” she replied.

Indrani shot me a smile, which I forced myself to return. I was getting closer to my Name, but the reflexes weren’t quite there yet. I began to draw Night into myself, murmuring prayers in Crepuscular. At the very least quickening my limbs ought to help. Our swords were bared a moment later and as I grimaced we darted forward. Before we’d even made it a foot forward mirrors moved to cover the entrance we’d left and three spells shot out from the polished copper door. Whooping with glee, Indrani casually batted one away while Akua and I instead prudently moved to the sides. She went straight for the door, even as it began spewing out a second volley, and I took up a position guarding her back.

I narrowly caught a ray that would have hit my chest, reflecting it upwards and then into a wildly careening trajectory. The trouble with all those fucking angled mirrors was that it was hard to guess what path the spell would take when it came back. Archer was still in the middle of the room, moving with a dancer’s grace as she reflected spells in what was too measured a way for it to be random. Eyes narrowed I tried to follow what she was doing, but only figured it out after the third volley of spells came out and two of the rays hit each other in midair, bursting into a ball of flame and smoke. Fucking Hells, was she actually making them hit each other? I could barely keep up with the ones actually coming for me.

That moment of inattention cost me, even my quickened limbs not quite quick enough when a ray I avoided was reflected right back into my shoulder from behind before I could blink. I managed to get it to clip the shoulder instead of bite into the muscle, at least, but I swallowed a scream as a parchment’s depth of my shoulder just turned to ash and the livery over it vanished. Fuck , that hurt. Akua came through for us moments later, the copper door opening, and I was quick to retreat behind it. Archer took her time joining us, twice more slapping away spells before slipping behind the door as I slammed it closed. Her eyes dipped to my shoulder, but like Akua she said nothing. I called on Night to kill the pain and we moved on to the vaults awaiting us.

The first vault looked very mundane, until you had a closer look. The neat piles of wood were all atrociously expensive sorts from the Waning Woods or beyond, the blocks of rock and the gems all gave off the scent of magic without being enchanted – which meant inherent sorcery – and the sealed copper boxes here were all filled with living plants I did not recognize. There was a single potion rack, with maybe sixty vials in whole, but my jaw dropped when I saw a whole half-dozen of them were as red and faintly glowing water.

“Are those actual healing potions?” I croaked.

“They are,” Akua said. “And not even the most precious of the lot. The bottom row is the elixir of long life. Drinking it adds at the very least forty years to one’s lifespan.”

I’d keep one of those for Vivienne, then. I shook my head, still in shock that I was looking at the little red potions that were said to be the closest thing to a panacea that alchemists had ever achieved. They were also said to require the blood of a dragon taken while it still lived to be brewed, which had seen them placed squarely in the realm of legends. The last Callowan ruler said to have drunk one was Elizabeth Alban . It was with petty glee that I cleared out the room into the Night, being careful not to break anything. We wasted no time hitting the second vault, which was significantly less worth smiling about.

Rooms full of demons tended to get that reaction out of me.

I saw the same three Weeping Snares the High Lord of Wolof had stood me off with and promptly stashed them away, to the reluctant acceptance of the Sisters, but they had significantly less qualms taking in the rows and rows of grimoires that Akua told me were contracts with devils. Two silver jigsaw puzzles that supposedly could give a glimpse into how to make a Great Breach when completed went into the Night as well, as well as a dozen more of what Akua called ‘insight’ artefacts, but when we came to a simple copper crown on a pedestal the Crows sent me a wave of wariness.

“Insipientia,” Akua reverently said.

My Old Miezan was rusty, but not that rusty.

“It’s a bound demon of Madness,” I said. “The same one your mother unleashed?”

“Yes,” she replied. “My family has held other demons, over the years, but never was there a binding quite so thorough or a demon quite so mastered as Insipientia has been. Centuries of foes have tried to free and turn it against us, ever to no avail.”

I reached out for it, but the Crows balked. There was something about the crown that spooked them, and I wasn’t one to gainsay the instincts of my patronesses when it came to demonic taint.

“It stays,” I said. “Vault’s clear, what’s in the third one?”

“Nothing, presumably,” Akua shrugged. “It is almost never used. It is the guest vault, and my family has rarely granted the honour of its use to anyone.”

“Hey, worth a look anyway,” Indrani drawled. “Maybe there’ll be loose change there we can toss into the Night.”

I rolled my eye but did not disagree. I wanted to be as through as possible when clearing the vaults. Akua informed us there were only two more left after this, and the paths began to grow complicated- we’d have to double back over the acid pool – when we forced open the warded door, revealing a sight that gave paused to all of us. In the bare stone room there was an altar and a sleeping body on it, but that wasn’t the part that gave us pause. It was the fact that we were looking at a perfect reproduction of Akua Sahelian when she’d died. A shift modestly covered the body, but I’d seen enough of Akua over the years to know that this was looking at a twin. One that was breathing . The shade, face unreadable, took a few hesitant steps and laid a hand on the body. After a moment she gasped.

“What is it?” I quietly asked.

“She has magic,” Akua said. “No mind or memories that I can feel, but the Gift is there.”

Ah , I thought, and the pieces fell into place. The guest vault, huh. So this was the work of the sole person in Praes who might feasibly make this request of Sargon: Dread Empress Malicia, First of Her Name. There’d never been any need for me to lay out bait, I now understood. Malicia had always intended to take it. She was in need of a Warlock and of someone who had a good handle of me and my plans, so she intended to secure both in a single stroke. And there was the deeper game here, the one I was beginning to glimpse. The Intercessor, who had outed us in the fortress but not gotten us captured. The Bard had made sure that Sargon would cover the treasury and the granaries, figuring out one step of me that it would leave me only one place to go.

That the Intercessor too had wanted Akua to be in this room, at this moment, sent a shiver of dread up my spine. Did she know something I did not? Had I made a mistake? Or did I, for once, better understand the nature of the woman we were dealing with than either my opponents? My fingers clenched, then unclenched. None of us would know the answer to that until the very last moment, I suspected. Besides, now that we had seen what we were meant to the Eyes – the dull throb of magic filled the air, a ward being tripped. There you go , I thought, as troubles as I was vindicated. And still I couldn’t shake the impression that I was missing something. That I was still underestimating my opponents somehow.

“We need to get out,” I said. “They know we’re here.”

“Fuck,” Indrani cursed. “Think we should grab the...”

She hesitated. I glanced at Akua.

“No,” she decisively said. “It will be a trap of some sort.”

I nodded.

“We’re still using the way out in the Empyrean Hall,” I said. “Can you lead us there quick?”

“Very much so,” Akua replied. “There is a hall that leads there directly.”

I didn’t bother closing the door behind us as we filed out. We took a left at the end of the hall where the vaults were, which brought us to another large hallway where aside from the mosaics the sole decoration was a tomb of stone.

“That doesn’t look good,” Archer muttered.

“There is no need to worry,” Akua snorted. “For this, I will require neither of you.”

Taking her at her word we followed her in, and predictably enough the tomb’s lid began to open. A strikingly good-looking man in bronze armour began to rise out, smiling eagerly, but the shade met his eyes and straightened her back.

“I am Akua Sahelian,” she said.

The man froze. His eyes were blank, I noticed only then. And I had yet to see him breathe. Undead of some sort? I glimpsed a slender sword in the tomb with him, already half-drawn.

“No,” the man hissed in Mthethwa. “Not after-”

“I am of the blood of Subira,” Akua said, tone flat. “By the ancient compact, I bid you to return to your sleep and grant us passage.”

“Insolent child,” the man bit out, “how dare you-”

And yet, for all his complaining, his limbs were moving. He lay back down into the tomb, and even as he cursed Akua profusely he closed the lid over himself. There was a moment of silence, then Archer cleared her throat.

“So, uh, what was that exactly?”

“Dread Emperor Revenant was not the first Soninke to attempt to rule forever,” Akua replied with a smile. “Merely the most successful. And some of my ancestors had an... interesting sense of humour.”

Well, didn’t that sound ominous. Still, I counted our blessings and followed our guide as we left. The door wasn’t even locked from outside, meant to keep people out instead of in, and we hurried through only occasionally trapped sets of stairs until we emerged above in what looked like a large marble hallway. Above us I caught sight of something staggeringly beautiful: the night sky in all its glory. It wasn’t like the lesser version of the Vaults, this was the real one – the very wonder this palace was named after. I could almost feel the wind looking at the ceiling here, see the clouds move and even the occasional bird fly. It was one of the most magnificent works of magic I’d ever seen.

“We are close to the passage,” Akua said, breaking me out of my thoughts. “Let us hurry.”

Yet even with her navigating for us, this part of the palace had been on high alert. It was mere moments before we came across a servant, who screamed out in alarm at the sight of our swords, and soldiers were on our heels in moments. Arrows and spells streaked behind us as we ran, clattering against tall marble columns and setting tapestries aflame. How many were there? At least sixty, I thought. Archer took an arrow in the arm but she ripped it away without batting an eye, cursing as she did, and twice streaks of flame went through Akua. She came back... weaker each time she reformed afterwards. Tired in away I’d never before seen her be as a shade.

We remained narrowly ahead of our opponents, until we reached the statue of Subira Sahelian that was the mark of one of the eleven secret passages into Wolof. Akua pushed the crown the man held in his hand and the statue began to move, revealing a narrow set of stairs, and we wasted no time heading down. The soldiers were close. The statue moved back behind us, though, which ought to slow them down some. The oppressive weight of a new set of wards washed over me the moment I got onto the stairs but I grit my teeth and quickened my pace. We’d planned to leave through here from the start, though initially it would have been after we robbed the treasury instead of the vaults. See, like all of the eleven secret passages into Wolof this one was a trap.

The narrow stairs flared out into a larger platform where we all paused, and hastily I took out our last two water breathing potions. Indrani idly took two steps down the platform as I did, to trigger what we all knew was coming: moments after her foot touched the lower stairs water began pouring from the ceiling. It was a flood corridor, see. Either the pressure of the flood or drowning would take care of anyone who came through here. Except, of course, if they had prepared potions for this very eventuality. It’d never been an option to come back by the aqueduct again: we would have needed to swim uphill and against the current, and break through the enchanted barriers there again without the evanescent powder to do the work for us.

“Bottoms up,” Indrani said as I gave her a vial.

We toasted and knocked down the drinks. I breathed in, limbering my shoulders for the coming swim. Sooner or later the guards would come down the stairs and try to snatch us with spells even if proper pursuit was impossible, we needed to get a head start. We waited a few heartbeats. And then, hideously, nothing happened at all. The potion did nothing.

“Cat,” Indrani slowly said, but I did not answer.

Instead I closed my eyes. And there it was, the missing piece. Malicia had wanted Akua to see that body down in the Vaults, it was why the Eyes – who had no doubt reported to her body in the city the moment they’d been sure I could no longer kill them for it – had waited so long to pull the alarm. But it’d not made sense to me that she would then simply... let us go. Much as I despised the empress, she was one of the cleverest people I’d ever met. Malicia had been fine letting us go, I now realized, because she’d known we weren’t going anywhere. The return vials of water breathing potion had been sabotaged before we ever left.

Had she gotten to the Concocter? No, I thought, she shouldn’t have the leverage for that. Mostly likely just spies that’d had access to the vials at someone point before they got to my hands. A few foreign reagents would have been enough to fuck up a brew this complicated. And it didn’t matter how it’d been done, I forced myself to acknowledge, just that it had. The Intercessor knew from the start , I put together as my stomach dropped. It was Malicia’s plan, and Malicia is Named. So the old monster had just come in at the right time and the right place to nudge us so her favoured outcome came about. My fingers clenched.

Figuring out my enemies was useful, but what I needed right now was a way out.

“Akua,” I said. “When we came out the reservoirs, you dried us. Do you think you could keep a bubble of air around our heads as we swim?”

There was a long moment of silence, then she shook her head.

“I do not think I am strong enough for two,” the shade admitted. “Not after the spells I was struck by, and perhaps not even at my best. Around one of you, if I meld closely, and even then it will be difficult.”

So Akua and one of us could still make it out. Not quickly, though, I thought. Which meant the person staying behind would have to keep the soldiers off their back for a while. Could I work around this with Night, steal air to bring with me? I murmured a prayer, reaching for the power, but though I felt the Crows reach out to me our fingers... missed. The wards were too heavy here, I realized. Night wouldn’t get me out of this.

“You can’t use Night, can you?” Indrani said, eyes sharp.

I shook my head.

“That settles it,” Archer said. “It’s got to be me. Your Name’s not there yet. I’ll keep them off long enough and you can trade back for me later.”

I breathed out, looking for calm. Forcing it.

“Yeah,” I said.

She slowly nodded, then turned to ask Akua something, and without missing a beat I struck the side of her head. She was quick, and strong, but I was both too and she’d not been expecting it. I caught her in my arms before she could collapse, golden eyes following me all the while.

“They can’t kill me,” I said. “Malicia knows she’d be risking handing the Dead King a victory if she did.”

There was simply no one else that could keep the Firstborn bound to the Grand Alliance and Callow in the war the way I could. Vivienne could maybe talk our soldiers around, but the drow? No, Malicia wasn’t after my life here. She wanted me in her grasp.

I intended to make her rue that notion to her dying day.

Above us the statue began moving, and I handed Archer to Akua. The shade took our friend, coming so close to me for a moment it would have been the easiest thing in the world to steal a kiss from my lips, but she refrained. Shouts from above. There was no more time, and if I was going to make it out of captivity I needed... something. A plan, a workaround. And it came to me, in a flash, as above the first arrow was fired loosely in our direction.

“Takisha Muraqib,” I hissed. “Make the offer for it. And the rest Sepulchral.”

Her hand touched mine, impossibly warm, and she nodded.

“I will,” Akua Sahelian swore.

Moments later she was in the water, bringing Archer with her, as spells began to light up the hall and I turned towards the enemy. Well, Night or not I had a sword and a long history of stabbing people with those.

Time to see how long I could buy them.

Chapter 10: Parley

“Diplomacy is as sailing, catching the way the wind blows.”

– Ashuran saying

There was something deeply disorienting about waking up after having been knocked out. It wasn’t like falling asleep, there was this sense of... confusion, when where you were didn’t match what you last recalled. So when my eyes opened, I made myself breathe in and out slowly as I forced myself to be calm. I did not know this bed, or these sheets – silk – or this room around me, lit with magelights and open windows giving a beautiful view of Wolof spread out below.

I rose from the cushions I’d been leaning on, soft and plump and exquisitely embroidered, and to my surprise my limbs did not pain me. I could feel my left arm was tender, the skin pulled taut in that way it was after mage healing was used on flesh, but even the ever-present dull ache in my bad leg had been made quiet. My clothes were not the ones I had last worn, loose yellow cotton trousers and a matching robe patterned in green, but they were a comfortable fit. I padded onto the stone floor barefoot, finding that a beautifully carved cane of red mahogany awaited my hand. I tried it out and it fit perfectly, the spread wings of the ravens sculpted on the handle comfortably matching my grip. Leaning on the cane, I cast a more elaborate look around.

It was a square room, and though the floor beneath my feet was covered in tiles and my surroundings were panelled in wood I caught it was all stone beneath it. Ignoring the slippers – was that lion’s fur ? – that’d been laid out for me, I ignored the rich furnishings of what was no doubt an elaborate prison cell and limped my way to the windows. Three large glass panels, open just slightly but enough that I could feel the faintest breeze coming through. I flicked fingers at them and was not surprised in the least when the illusion flickered and a flat panel of bronze covered by a book’s worth of runes was revealed for a heartbeat. The illusion resumed the moment my fingers ceased contact with the bronze, returning the false but beautiful view of Wolof under afternoon’s light.

I reached for the Night knowing what awaited, and I’d been right: I could not quite grasp it, layers and layers of wards preventing me from drawing it close. The Sisters reached out towards me as well, and though our metaphysical fingers failed to connect their presence was a manner of comfort.

“Is my mind intact?” I asked them in a murmur.

Andronike sent a sense of reassurance, and from Komena I felt only cold anger at the thought that mere mortals might have tried to meddle with their First Under the Night. I let out a soft breath of relief. My thoughts and memories were still my own, then. I remembered fighting in that secret passage, keeping close to the wall to prevent the mages from getting a clean shot at me, but after the first few lives I’d taken it was... something of a blur. I’d been knocked unconscious at some point, presumably, and brought here. I drummed fingers against my cane, letting out a small hum. Had I held long enough for Akua and Indrani to escape? Yes , I decided after a moment. I should have gotten them enough of a head start if the guards had needed to dig me out with swords.

The goddesses in me withdrew, as if coming close had been an effort, and I offered the illusion of Wolof a wan smile. I’d not planned for this little venture to end in my being a prisoner, but I could deal with the change of plans. If Akua had grasped what I’d meant with those few words, near the end, then my sappers were already digging at the foundation of my captivity. Why, I just needed to bet it all on the strength of the understanding of myself between a woman I hated as much as I loved – and who would, before the moon’s turn, betray me sure as the coming of the Last Dusk. Until then, though? My gaze swept the room again. My captivity came with a small rack of wine bottles at least, I found, not to mention bowls of assorted nuts and fruits.

I found a pair of books, too, atop a pretty cabinet. One was a book by a Mistress Adad titled ‘Great Works’, which a quick thumbing revealed was about ancient Soninke architecture. The other, to my reluctant amusement, was a Praesi highborn etiquette guide. Fair. Following the teaching of my Callowan forbears, I picked the book about architecture out of contrary spirit and limped to the table. Huh, was that a fully-stocked writing desk too? Nice. I picked up a bottle of wine on my way, refusing to take one of the gold-rimmed crystal glasses by principle, and wrenched open a bottle of what looked like a Nok red before dropping into a seat and cracking open the book.

It ought to tide me over before Sargon came to talk, I figured.

—

The time of the day displayed by the illusion did not match what my sixth sense told me of the passage of time. It would have been a clever trick to disorient me, otherwise. Before I saw either hide or hair of High Lord Sargon or Malicia – who would be coming sooner or later, I knew – I first encountered servants. Veiled and silent they came thrice a day to bring out delicious four-course meals, fill my wine rack, empty the enchanted water cabinet in the corner. Heated water for washing was in the morning, after breakfast, and not once did any of them even twitch at anything I said. I even shouted at the top of my lungs once, to see if I’d at least get a reaction, but nothing. They might have been deaf, I thought, or at least bespelled for deafness.

I found had little to do but eat, read and drink for a whole day. Though I got restless before the first bell had passed, in a way this was also... relaxing. There was only so much I could do from in here, and how long had it been since I’d had so few demands on my time? Still, I wouldn’t simply resign myself to it either. I inspected my cell but found no opening to it save for the hidden door the servants used, which led to a stone passage I only ever saw lead to a closed steel gate. I wasn’t going to be popping that open with a cane, I knew, though it might be worth checking if I could touch Night while in the passage. Somehow I doubted it, but why leave the question unasked?

On the second day of my captivity, before I could find a good opportunity to try the passage, a servant in Sahelian livery came. No veil on this one, and unlike the others he was feeling chatty.

“This one bears the words of High Lord Sargon Sahelian, Queen of Callow,” the man said.

“I’m listening,” I replied, cocking an eyebrow.

Sargon was asking whether I’d agree to have my midday meal with him, as it turned out. I was tempted to decline just to see what would happen, but I held back. I wasn’t sure if he’d left me to stew in the room for a day just to make sure I’d be inclined to talk, but if so I had to admit it’d worked. I took him up on the offer and was promptly afforded the services of a tailor, which I bemusedly agreed to. The clothes I’d been provided were comfortable enough, tunics in green or yellow with a Callowan cut, but I wouldn’t turn down free clothes. Deciding to indulge a whim I ended up wearing a soft yellow sundress, paired with a short frock in pale green and comfortable shoes. Alas, Sargon was warned well in advance so I did not get to see a look of surprise on his face but the momentary blankness was enough to have smiling as he sat across the table in my cell. He was not so ornately dressed as when we’d last met either, his white and red tunic rich and well-cut but otherwise unremarkable.

He was dressed in that way that those whose family had been rich for generations got dressed, when there was no longer a need to trumpet about the wealth.

“We will be having fey fowl as the main plate,” the High Lord of Wolof amiably told me. “One was caught last month a few miles to the south.”

“I’m going to assume we’re not eating an actual fae,” I replied, cocking an eyebrow.

He chuckled.

“We are not. The birds are descended from experiments of Dread Emperor Sorcerous’ that his successor loosed into the wilds,” Sargon said. “It is said he was attempting to infuse birds with the powers of Arcadia, but only ever succeeded with the basest of their kind. The first specimens were highly toxic, but not so their progeniture.”

“Huh,” I said. “They taste any good?”

“Delicious when braised and served with zaze sauce,” Sargon smiled. “I don’t believe you’ve ever had it before.”

The man kept a damn good table, I’d give him that much. The first two plates were warm herbal bread served with sauces and a spicy but refreshing broth, followed by the fowl-on-rice with the zaze sauce that proved exactly as good as he’d boasted it would be. It ended with a creamy, sweet pastry that tasted of eggs and cinnamon I found paired well with my wine. And none of it was poisoned, an additional point in its favour. The conversation had been enjoyable but light, the two of us pretending I wasn’t a prisoner in Wolof and discussing what I’d read in ‘Great Works’ – I suspected his enthusiasm there was not feigned in the slightest – and a few anecdotes about the city itself. All of it very tame.

When a servant brought me a pipe stuffed with wakeleaf and refilled my wine, though, I knew the real conversation was about to start. Sargon gallantly struck the match for me and lit it, himself indulging instead in a small cup of an amber liquor that smelled strongly of peaches.

“This morning I threatened to have you executed should your army not retreat,” Sargon conversationally said, “but your marshal declined rather rudely.”

“Juniper knows an empty bluff when she hears one,” I shrugged, pulling at my pipe.

Praes couldn’t afford to kill me right now. Much like I was pulling my punches fighting them, as I wanted the Empire’s martial strength mustered against Keter, they too had to pull theirs. If Malicia killed me, there was a very real risk that the western fronts would outright collapse – and much as she liked to pretend otherwise, the empress didn’t actually want the Dead King to want any more than we did.

“Sadly,” Sargon sighed.

I breathed in deep of my wakeleaf as he sipped at his drink.

“I have been advised to torture you publicly in order to force compliance, naturally,” he conversationally added.

I blew out a small ring of smoke, shaping it by making my lips pop. I did not answer. He chuckled, revealing that slightly crooked smile again.

“I know better than to attempt such a thing, of course,” High Lord Sargon said, “though you do not seem worried in the slightest.”

“I had my soul eviscerated by lesser gods once,” I idly replied. “Came out of it mostly sane. Not a lot of torture than can beat that, even if you get inventive.”

And neither Juniper nor Vivienne would fold at the sight anyway. They both knew I’d tan their hides if they did. All it’d win Sargon was my genuine enmity, which he was taking pains to avoid earning.

“I would not dare claim that I can imagine,” the golden-eyed man amiably replied. “You will understand, naturally, that holding the head of a host besieging my holdings prisoner is something of complicated situation.”

Meaning some of his people wanted me dead or at least with fewer things, and that refusing them while my army was camped outside the gates did him no favours. Amusingly enough, it could be argued that in several ways his position had been worsened by capturing me.

“Must be frustrating, having Malicia dictate to you in a way that goes against your interests,” I said.

He thinly smiled.

“Not executing you is in my interests as well, Your Majesty,” Sargon replied. “Greater implications as to the fate of Calernia aside, should I murder the most distinguished Queen of Callow in two centuries I will have heroes coming for my head every spring until I die.”

He sipped at his liquor, sighing.

“I expect several of my more short-sighted cousins are pushing for your execution in the very hope that the Woe will murder me in turn,” he admitted. “Yet I would argue that my greater frustration in all this affair is that I would much prefer to be at peace with you, Queen Catherine.”

“That’s easy enough,” I frankly replied. “Turn on Malicia. You’re only in my way so long as you’re one of the pillars propping her reign up.”

The dark-skinned man laughed, the merriment of it lighting up his eyes. Akua’s cousin, yet so little like her. Even at her most carefree she held something of herself back but Sargon Sahelian was... less restrained. He allowed himself to feel more genuinely, I decided. Would she had been like that too, if she’d not been raised to be the monster of monsters among this most terrible of families?

“I will be honest with you, Queen Catherine,” Sargon grinned, “as every report my spies have brought me insist that it is the approach you best respond to.”

The worst part of it, I thought, was that even knowing what he was doing I still found my lips twitching. Sargon Sahelian might be a monster, but he was a charming one.

“I find it saves times,” I shrugged. “By all means, my lord of Wolof, lay it on me.”

“I am not a good man, Queen Catherine,” Sargon indifferently shrugged. “So long as my city is left to me, so long as my domain is unmolested? I do not much care what happens to Praes, or even Calernia at large.”

Much as I would have liked to damn him for petty apathy while the world was falling apart a mere two nations west, I held my tongue. How much worse was he than Proceran princelings, in truth, or even the squabbling League of Free Cities? I doubted he was any better than them either, but I would not pretend that the careless disregard on display here was some unrivalled pit of evil.

“My support of Dread Empress Malicia rests on two pillars,” Sargon continued. “The first is that, for all her flaws, she remains the individual in Praes best able to deliver a resumption of order.”

She was at least half the reason order needed resuming in the first place, as far as I was concerned, but that was why he’d begun this by making his indifference clear. What did Sargon care that much of this was on Malicia’s hands, if she were still the woman best placed to ensure it wouldn’t spill over anywhere that mattered to him? I puffed at my pipe, blowing out a stream of smoke to the side.

“And the second is that she has your soul in a box,” I finished.

“Indeed,” he politely agreed. “I am loyal to her in the sense that a noble of the Wasteland is loyal to anything or anyone – that is, only so long as the balance of consequence and convenience is not greatly moved in disfavour of continued loyalty.”

The unspoken part was that an army outside his gates, on top of the messes that my presence kept heaping on his lap, was pushing on that balance noticeably.

“Which leaves one important question before this conversation proceeds,” Sargon Sahelian said. “Can your patronesses free my soul, Black Queen?”

I’d known that was coming. It was an obvious bribe to approach him with, a good way to flip a High Lord against the Tower without much military power needing to be exerted. Which had been why I’d first asked Sve Noc as much months ago. It’d not been a coincidence that I’d not made the offer.

“Not from here,” I said, “and not without a price.”

The Crows were sure his soul was being held in the Tower, and they weren’t going anywhere near that place if they could help it. I honestly wasn’t sure even a Choir would be able to bring the seat of Praesi power down – it’d taken the armies of two thirds of Calernia and entire battalions of heroes to get it done, last time.

“Unfortunate,” the High Lord of Wolof murmured. “It would have simplified this all a great deal. I am, alas, not eager to trade a single mortal mistress for a pair of immortal ones.”

“You’d find the payment much more agreeable than expected, I’m sure,” I easily replied. “But that is your right. We will speak again should an opportunity arise.”

“Of course,” Sargon said, inclining his head. “And so while we remain so refreshingly bound to honesty, I am compelled to ask-”

He leaned slightly forward, drink in hand.

“- what is it that you want , exactly?”

I snorted.

“There’s a broad question,” I said. “Right now? Vale summer wine. Or maybe the journal of the warlock your ancestors placed at the side Theodosius the Unconquered.”

“I can have the latter brought easily enough,” Sargon waved away. “And as you no doubt grasped, I mean to ask what is it that this entire Wasteland campaign of yours is trying to achieve. You’ve not the strength or inclination to occupy Praes, that much is plain, so what is it you do want?”

I set down my pipe, amused at the boldness, and smiled at him over the rim of my glass before taking a sip.

“Arguably, as one of Malicia’s backers you’re one of the last people I should tell,” I pointed out.

“On the contrary,” Sargon said, shaking his head. “Unless you intend to purge the empress’ supporters among the nobility, I am one of the individuals you most need to convince. Even if you kill the woman in question, Queen Catherine, what she represents does not disappear.”

“And what does Malicia represent, exactly?” I asked.

“A strong Tower with no taste for foreign adventures. Power being concentrated in Ater through the Imperial Court and the bureaucracy,” Sargon replied without hesitation. “It comes at the price of curtailing many of the old privileges and ennobling greenskins, but many still consider it an acceptable trade.”

“Nok was sacked,” I flatly said. “Thalassina is dust. Foramen is held by High Lady Whither, the Grey Eyries outright seceded, the Steppes are in civil war and two of the High Seats are openly backing another Dread Empress. Half the army that’s supposed to serve her deserted . You call this a strong Tower?”

“The Dread Empire of Praes turned back the Tenth Crusade with Thalassina as its sole permanent loss,” Sargon countered. “Foramen was brought back into the fold bloodlessly. Sepulchral’s rebellion has stalled and the only reason it ever gained grounds was that the Carrion Lord’s attempted coup – which failed, half the Legions staying loyal to the Tower even after decades of other loyalties being cultivated among their officers.”

My eye narrowed. They were blaming the messes on Black. Of course they would , I thought. He’s Duni, the nobles despise him and they’re not wrong about him having added to the chaos in the first place. I wondered how much of this was decades of hatred between my father and the aristocrats given voice and how much of it was opinions Malicia had seeded herself. It would hardly be the first time she blamed the unpopular parts of her reign on Black and the tactic tended to be a successful one.

“As for the Clans, Queen Catherine,” he continued, “that they would war on each other is only to be expected when some among them were raised above others. Strong Lords of the Steppes will emerge from the violence, able to ably discharge the duties that were passed onto them.”

I hummed. There was no point in arguing this with him. I wasn’t even sure he believed in the first place, anyway.

“Let’s say I buy that, for the sake of argument,” I shrugged. “She still needs to go. She’s been an aggressive ally to the Dead King while the rest of Calernia has been fighting for survival. She fucked us in the League and in Procer, and even before she antagonized every single other ruler on the continent the grab she made for the doomsday fortress that was made of Liesse made it clear she can’t be trusted to remain in power. Nobody wants the Tower with a weapon that makes Hellgates, Sargon. Nobody .”

“Considering all the nations so antagonized have been at war with the Empire for years,” he drily said, “one might argue she was in fact rather rest-”

“You’re being obtuse,” I flatly interrupted. “Even if there weren’t a hundred reasons to put her head on a pike, and you know there are, at the end of the day she had to die because we can’t allow the precedent . If the Grand Alliance doesn’t cut her head off then we’re telling the world that we can be backstabbed while fighting existential threats without there being consequences. And there’s not a single signatory that’s willing to swallow that, Sargon.”

“This is a compelling argument,” Sargon Sahelian mildly said, “largely for people who are not Praesi.”

I sipped at my wine to hide my expression. That was a decent point, actually. We didn’t actually have a lot to offer people who weren’t already rebelling against Malicia. The truth was that the people currently backing her reign would lose out when she got deposed. They wouldn’t gain from what I wanted to achiever here in Praes. One the other hand, the fact that those same people couldn’t give less of a shit that Malicia’s plots abroad had caused thousands of deaths and risked the annihilation of Calernia didn’t particularly endear them to me. They didn’t get to pretend they were being unfairly victimized after turning a blind eye to that. If you threw stones at bears for long enough, you got mauled.

There was no deep lesson behind that except that you shouldn’t fucking throw stones at bears.

“We’re a few knives in the back past lectures from your side, Sargon,” I flatly replied.

“Praes would be a silent place, if that were the case,” the High Lord laughed. “Though you have me curious now, I’ll admit. Who is it that you mean to replace Her Most Dreadful Majesty?”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“The Carrion Lord?” Sargon tried. “He is disappeared, if not dead. And Sepulchral is unlikely to remain a steady ally to your Grand Alliance for long, for all that she now courts your friendship.”

Abreha Mirembe being a snake was hardly news to me, but the first half of that was rather amusing.

“It never ceases to fascinate me,” I said, “how large of a blind spot you highborn have when it comes to Amadeus of the Green Stretch. It’s like we’re talking about different men.”

“Half the High Seats would rebel at the mere idea of Duni ruling over them,” Sargon said, eyes narrowed as he studied me. “Yet you know this, I think. And so I wonder if you do not play a longer game than any of us had considered.”

I leaned back into my seat.

“Oh?” I said. “What game would that be?”

The dark-skinned man raised his glass, the last wisps of amber liquor swirling.

“Mile thaman, Sahelian,” the High Lord of Wolof toasted.

I smiled and spoke not a word. If he wanted to believe I had come east to raise Akua Sahelian as empress, let him. He drained the cup.

“It would be an interesting time to live in, if you got your way,” Sargon admitted. “It is almost a shame you will not.”

“I’ve heard that before,” I said.

He looked faintly amused.

“I’ve a great deal of respect for your abilities, Queen Catherine, but this once luck was not on your side,” the golden-eyed man said. “There is little you can do from captivity.”

I met his eyes with mine, baring my teeth in a malicious smile.

“Before the week’s end,” I said, “I am going to walk out of the front gates of Wolof with everything I want. And the both of you are going to let me.”

So ended my first meal with Sargon Sahelian.

—

He sent the journal, as he’d said it would. Made for interesting reading, with a surprising amount of steamy bits between the battles and commentaries. Kojo Sahelian had gotten around and not been shy in writing about it. I sat and read and waited, knowing this was only beginning.

—

When Malicia came she did not bother with charm.

She knew better than to believe relations between us could be mended, I supposed. It was the following morning, shorty after breakfast, that she was announced by a servant in livery. I didn’t bother to study the last meat puppet she’d decided to wear in any great detail – what would be the point? She wore a woman’s form, Soninke and tall, and besides that I did not bother to take her in. I stayed standing as she stepped in, cane in hand as I leaned against the wall. The illusion of Wolof behind me showed an early afternoon, so the light came through at my back. It’d make it hard to look at me properly. The Dread Empress of Praes sat gracefully at the table, not waiting for my invitation, and set a single parchment scroll on the table. She said nothing, waiting. After a bit I snorted.

“You know, I figure I could play that game,” I mused. “Ignore you or insult you, the works. But it just sounds tiring .”

I pushed off the wall.

“Say your piece,” I simply said, “and get the fuck out.”

“Your manners have not improved,” Malicia calmly replied.

“Could I beat you to death with my bare hands before they came in to restrain me?” I asked. “I’m not sure. If you test my patience, though, we’ll find out.”

I’d lied, of course. If I was to kill her puppet, I’d definitely use the cane.

“It would avail you nothing,” Malicia said. “You were captured, Catherine. This particular game you have lost.”

“It’s Queen Catherine to you,” I smiled, all pretty and friendly and utterly false.

“If I gave you the courtesy, would you return it?” Malicia said. “I think not. Yet I will overlook your many and varied insults, as I have for some time, for you have once again made yourself into an important enough piece you cannot simply be ignored.”

Implying that I should treat her the same way. Good luck with that , I drily thought.

“I’m still waiting to hear what you want,” I said. “To be honest, this is being something of a bore.”

“We had a conversation, some years ago, that I believe you must have forgot,” Malicia said. “Not so long before Akua’s Folly. You asked me about Still Water for the first time.”

I did recall that, more or less. I’d warned her that if she’d been behind all of it then she had best watch her step from now on or there would be blood. We’d discussed politics abroad, too, but what did any of it have to do with this? It’d been the Hierarch and the Tyrant that’d been the thick of the talk, and one was pissing off an entire Choir while the other was years dead.

“I told you why Wekesa insisted on trials, that he believed they would revolutionize our understanding of rituals,” she prompted.

I frowned, scrounging through my memories. I had pretty good recall, but it’d been years and my Name memories weren’t as crisp since the Sisters had brought me back from the brink.

“I asked if it really had,” I slowly said, “and you replied...”

“That what he learned would allow us a fighting chance against the Dead King, should he ever wage war upon us,” Malicia calmly replied.

Ah , I thought. And there it was. The way she believed she could barter herself out of the grave she’d dug. She had a weapon, maybe even more than one, that she thought could win us the war. Cordelia and I might despise her, but we were pragmatic women at heart: we’d choose survival over hatred. But that went with the assumption that we needed Malicia herself to have those weapons. That my father becoming Dread Emperor wouldn’t get us all of it anyway without all that it would cost us to let an empress who’d knifed us at every opportunity walk away with a slap on the wrist. Malicia was no fool, I thought, and so she would have seen the flaw in that plan.

“So what did you do?” I asked. “What poisonous little precaution did you take so you could threaten us with it?”

She’d already done it before, after all, when she’d spread word that by the terms of her treaty with the Dead King so long as she lived the dead could not invade Callow. Taking her own life as hostage was a favourite trick of hers, the kind of signature that Name tended to take on after years of settling into their Role.

“There was no need for anything too elaborate,” the Dread Empress said. “My death would result in all the necessary knowledge burning green, that is all.”

Which just meant she had to be taken alive. Had she prepared contingencies for that too? Probably, but I figured there simply wasn’t a lot anyone could plan against having Sve Noc peel open your mind before rummaging about for the useful stuff. We’d just have to be quick and careful.

“It’s all on the scroll, I take it?” I asked.

“Indeed,” Malicia smiled. “Along with a possible solution to the Hellgates issue as suggested by a mage in my service.”

“Good,” I said, “good.”

I moved quickly enough that the cane caught her on the side of the mouth before she saw it coming, but though she fell it didn’t make her bleed. Ugh, she’d come decked out in artefacts. I tried to strangle her, but soldiers poured in and wrestled me down before I could get it done. She was ushered out, breathing hard, and I waved mockingly.

“There’s always next time,” I cackled right before the door closed behind her.

—

I read the scroll that very afternoon.

It was in Malicia’s interest ton exaggerate what her weapon could do, but she also had to know that Masego would be able to see through anything to egregious in a matter of moments. To my distaste, this might actually work. Wekesa the Warlock had been a brilliant man, and Still Waters had only been used in its most straightforward of applications so far. He’d believed that his creation would be able to turn the tide in two ways.

The first had been that soldiers fighting the Dead King would be made to ingest the alchemical compound and then prepped with the right spell so that when they died they would immediately rise as undead in the service of the Dread Empire. He’d believed that with the right dosages and sorcery it was possible to keep those soldiers largely the same as before their death, nothing like the mindless wights I’d fought at the Doom of Liesse. It would make armies that, even when slain, would rise against just as tireless as their foe and significantly better trained.

The second was more of a gamble. By modifying the alchemical compound so it could enter through the skin, Warlock had believed that necromancers could potentially usurp control of corpses from the Dead King. The strength of Still Water was that it wasn’t really a ritual, that the active magic was simply an ignition while the alchemy did all the heavy lifting. Which meant if it worked as Warlock had thought it might, we might be able to steal entire armies in moments. I doubted it would go that smoothly, but the prospect of finally having a way to turn the Hidden Horror’s endless numbers against him was deeply attractive.

And given that we were well past the days where anything but a direct strike on Keter could win us this war, what was written on this scroll could be an edge that made the difference between the life and death of nations. Malicia was not one to come to a bargaining table poorly armed.

What I read of the proposed solution for Hellgates was largely gibberish to me, and so likely meant for someone better schooled in magic to read over. The only part that was understandable was the one that talked about raising fortresses over the gates after the first rituals were done, to make sure they wouldn’t open again. That and the estimates for the number of mages that would be required, which was around two hundred per gate. There simply wasn’t anyone but Praes left who could field that many well-trained practitioners, especially since there would need to be some able to use High Arcana.

Another pointed reminder by Malicia that we needed her.

—

On the third day, mages sworn to Wolof came into my cell.

It was all done very properly and politely, but I was still bound while a dozen men and women inspected every inch of me with spells and tried to access the Night. One got bold and tried to see into my mind, but the Sisters took offence to that and melted his eyes. I complained about the smell after they dragged him out, mostly to fuck with them, but several of the mfuasa actually smiled and one cast a spell to clear the air. They left after a few hours, carrying back to Sargon Sahelian the answer he’d been hoping they would not give him.

They had not found a way to access the Night through me.

—

I decided that, since I had so much time to spare, I might have a crack at writing my memoirs.

You know, for posterity. Sadly after a single page about my years at the orphanage I got horribly bored and started sketching out the troop movements for the Battle of Three Hills instead. It was pretty hard stuff, memoirs, I was impressed Aisha had gotten so far in hers. In the end I dropped the subject entirely and instead wrote a scathing critique about the defences of the Vaults, with a particular eye about how easily heroes could have gotten through some of those. I doubted it’d ever amount to anything, but it did make me feel oddly satisfied.

It also allowed me to sharpen a quill until a weapon could be made of it and secrete it away.

—

On the fourth day, I had supper with High Lord Sargon Sahelian. The meal was delicious, he was a delight to talk to and he’d somehow gotten his hands on a bottle of Vale summer wine. Once more wakeleaf was brought to me and I duly indulged, leaning back against the very comfortable seat.

“I offered Princess Vivienne to ransom you back,” High Lord Sargon said. “She declined.”

“Yes, she would have,” I faintly smiled.

“You do not seem displeased,” he said, sounding wary.

My smile broadened.

“What is it you asked for – the artefacts or the books?”

A moment of silence.

“The artefacts,” he finally said.

Ah, it’d been Malicia’s idea then. The books would have been more important to him.

“When I named Vivienne Dartwick my successor,” I said, “I didn’t pick her name out a hat.”

And that was all I said on that. His polite sideways inquiries about my accepting my own ransoming for his library back were just as politely ignored.

—

One the fifth day there was something of an incident.

Or at least so I assumed, as around noon forty armed guards crammed themselves tight in my cell and wards were put up to prevent anyone coming in or out. I finished my meal and, because I was never one to miss an opportunity to be a wretch when it was on the table, I took up Kojo Sahelian’s journals and began reading them aloud with great enjoyment – especially the explicit bits, which by the looks of it made more than a few of these nice soldiers uncomfortable. An hour and a half later they left, but the guard remained doubled and from now on even the veiled servant came in flanked by an armed pair.

Idly I wondered who it was that’d tried to rescue me, and how close they’d gotten. It was only going to get worse for Sargon from now on. That was the trouble when you couldn’t kill your prisoner: people would keep trying to free them, knowing there couldn’t really be any consequences for it.

—

One the sixth day they were desperate, which I knew the moment Malicia’s puppet walked in.

Why else would she be here again? Four soldiers came with the empress, faces hidden by helmet, and they had shackles that I was expected to put on nicely. I had last time, when the mages had come to poke and prod looking for a way into the Night. I knew why the Dread Empress was here, though, and I wasn’t going to be anywhere as nice. I pretended to cooperate, at first then the quill I’d sharpened days ago went into the slight gap between helmet and armour and got the first man in the throat. Another I broke the neck of, smashing him into the table, but Malicia ran out before I could get my hands on her.

My cell , and for all the gilding it had never for a moment been anything else and never had I fucking forgot that, my cell was flooded with guards and mages. They got me after I nearly smashed the last of my table legs on scale mail and broke my hand on a helmet. The got the shackles on me and did not heal me. Again there were only four when Malicia came back, face a blank mask.

“Well,” I smiled at her through bloodied teeth, “there’s always next time.”

She went still for half a beat but it was enough. I might be the one bleeding, but I wasn’t the one afraid.

“This brings me no pleasure,” Malicia said, looking down on me. “It is of your own making.”

She did not speak a word, not with her lips anyway. The world pulsed with the echo of it anyway. Aspect , my instincts whispered. And in the instant that followed a power seized me by the throat. I gasped out, writhing in my shackles, as a will tried to wrest mine into submission. I was being ordered to do something. Deep inside me the Sisters stirred, their anger a cold and burning thing. They were jealous goddesses, my Crows. But it was not them that calmed me. My fingers clutched at thin air, but still they caught something. Fur, deep and matted and warm. I laughed, dragging myself up by pulling at nothing. Malicia took a step back, eyes wide.

I felt a great maw open by my head, fangs being bared. My Name had not taken kindly to being given an order. No, more than that. It was not one that recognized the rule of another over me.

“ Mistake ,” I hissed at her in Mthethwa.

The guards were moving, but they didn’t get it. They moved to restrain my limbs, to push me down, when they should have gone for my mouth. My eye found Malicia’s and I grinned red even as she opened her mouth.

“ Be silent ,” I Spoke.

Her mouth closed. The guards forced me down, but I laughed.

“You overstepped,” I told her. “I wonder, does it work only on this body or your real one too? How long are you going to be fighting-”

Finally one of them covered my mouth, shortly before I was gagged, but no matter. The damage had already been done.

It was almost over now.

—

The first time I’d heard about soulboxing, that evening I’d wondered why Dread Emperors did not force it on every High Seat at their coronation. There was, of course, an answer.

On the seventh day, after I had breakfast the veiled servants came and laid out different clothes for me. Black trousers, a black tunic, a black cape and a black eyecloth: all exquisite and embroidered with silver thread. And with them came a circlet of silver, an elegant crown displaying flying crows. Matching silver shackles too, little more than bracelets, but still a symbol of my captivity. I was helped into the clothes by attendants after being informed that I was to be give audience in the Empyrean Hall, and before long I was leaning on my cane and limping down the halls of the palace where I had been held all this time.

Forty soldiers armed to the teeth escorted me, in plate and capes. Ten mages kept an eye on me, amber stares unwavering and their magic so close to them I could taste it in the air. Limping across marble tiles I breathed in the air, stretching under my cape, and I felt Sve Noc reach out for me greedily. I let the Night billow out of me even as shouts echoed across the hall. Swords left their sheaths as the soldiers spun into a circle, runes of light filling their air as incantations reverberated. I closed my eye, smiling, and struck the ground with my cane once.

Shadows spun close, threading themselves through my clothes until it was not mere dark cloth I wore but darkness itself. My foes had thought to dress me, to measure me, but my patronesses had willed it otherwise. I opened my eye, studying my escorts. They were still as stone, but there was a scent in the air I was most familiar with. Fear.

“Ah,” I smiled. “ Much better . Take me to your lord, now.”

And they did, wary but obedient. I’d thought the halls I’d run through at night had shown me the splendour of the enchanted ceiling for which the palace was named, but I had been wrong. The Sahelians had kept the heart of the wonder for where they received guests and supplicants, a great hall that was as another world. I stepped across the span of the noonday sky, clouds beneath my feet as my cane cracked against the enchanted stone. The Sahelians had aptly named their hall: I stood here as if I was striding the very Heavens, the sun above and the world below.

On the sides, hidden behind veils, people stood. Sargon’s court. Golden-eyed nobles even more beautiful than their clothes, lesser nobles of military turn and even those who wore their sorcery as their signature. Guards, too, and war mages whose eyes missed nothing. I advanced with my escort around me, all leading to the man at the end of the sky. It was against the laws of Praes for any but the Tyrant in the Tower to sit a throne, and so the Sahelians had followed the letter of the law: though Sargon sat a great seat of stone atop a dais, roughly hewn into the shape of roaring lions, further steps still led to a great ornate seat of gold where none sat.

That one was the throne, of course, which meant Sargon’s was a mere seat.

No sign of Malicia, I thought. Was she hidden, or had it struck even deeper than I thought when I Spoke? I looked forward to finding out. My escort led me to the feet of the thrones before spreading out, thin invisible barriers that could only be wards separating me from Sargon Sahelian. I stood alone in the silent court until a woman with a beautiful speaking voice broke the stillness.

“Her Majesty Catherine Foundling, Queen of Callow, First Under the Night.”

Sargon’s face was as a clay mask, all thought and emotion smoothed away. I hummed the first few notes of Two Dozen Snakes A Knot Do Make , casting an unimpressed look around. How many of the watching snakes were Sahelians, I wondered? Had to be at least a couple dozen. All of them hungry , waiting for the man on the lion throne to falter.

“Quaint,” I drawled out.

Oh, they didn’t like that at all. But that didn’t matter, because even as they murmured their disapproval and glared I kept close to me the answer to a question. Why didn’t Dread Emperors soulbox all their high nobles the moment they climbed the Tower? Sure they’d be hated for it, and it was certainly tyrannical, but what would most of those madmen have cared? They’d know that the greatest threat to them was the High Seats, that it was well worth the hatred of a few who would likely seek to kill them regardless. The answer was around me, watching the High Lord of Wolof rather than the queenly captive brought before him. The two dozen snakes that made a knot. The Sahelians were a family, not a man.

And none of them would tolerate Wolof being made a tool for the sake a single man, one whose seat they craved like a drowning man craved the shore.

“You are summoned to speak terms of trade, Queen Catherine,” High Lord Sargon said.

See, for all their many flaws the Wasteland high nobles they loved their family. Not their actual kin, the institution of the family. The High Seat of Wolof, here, and the power that came with it. They were willing to sacrifice a lot to preserve the power of their family, its importance. For all that the great bloodlines of Praes constantly murdered each other for power, they’d also keep a breeding program going for centuries – they knew how to think long term in a way that few actual royal dynasties could. It was bred in them, taught to them. They were Sahelians, and only the power of the Sahelians mattered. Nothing else.

I hummed, cane clacking against the floor as I moved and the guards moved with me – like minnows around a shark.

“What need is there for that, High Lord Sargon?” I replied. “If you seek terms, I already gave them when last we parleyed.”

“They were frivolously given,” Sargon said, voice thundering.

I laughed in his face. Just because he was charming, did he think I’d forgot he was my enemy? That I would safeguard his reputation anymore than I would some other leech’s?

“Then let me repeat them, since you have been slow in learning this lesson,” I drawled. “I want your treasury. I want your granary. And I want to walk out the open gates of Wolof.”

Now the thing was, Sargon didn’t want to take this deal. At the start, he’d not actually been worried about what I had stolen and put away in the Night. Sure it was missing right now, but he held me captive and he could wait out the conflict. When I was forced to make a treaty with Malicia, she’d bargain on his behalf for all of it to be given back. Except that they hadn’t counted on Akua. Beautiful, clever Akua who had heard me ramble a few sentences and understood everything I meant. See, we weren’t threatening to torch the library and the artefacts. That would have been bad enough, but it wouldn’t have lit a fire under them like this did.

Akua had reached out to High Lady Takisha Muraqib of Kahtan and offered to sell her the entire private library of the Sahelians. Because High Lady Takisha was a supporter of Malicia and the last Taghreb high noble in all of Praes, if we actually did sell those books to her Malicia wouldn’t actually be able to get them back later . It would be a guaranteed rebellion of the entire south of her realm. The Taghreb noblewoman would not doubt have been skeptical, but I was guessing that the Crows had gotten out a book or two for Akua and they’d been sent as a token of goodwill.

The step just past that had, naturally, been to make this known to Wolof.

I could see the layout of it in my mind, clear as if it were ink on parchment. On the third day of my captivity, I thought, Malicia had learned of the offer. It was why the mages had come to look at me, try to get at Night. On the fourth, Sargon had. It was why he’d tried to ransom me to Vivienne and probed my interest in such a deal. On the fifth day, the Woe had tried to free me. It had put the pressure on them, made it clear that sooner or later my people would get me out and they’d be even worse off. On the sixth day, I thought, word of the offer had spread through Wolof widely enough that Sargon’s situation had become dangerous . And so he’d gotten desperate, agreed that Malicia should try to force me to spit out my loot with an aspect. But that’d failed, badly, and so now here we were. The High Lord of Wolof, the man who’d usurped Tasia Sahelian, looked down at me with burning eyes.

And I knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth, because if he didn’t he was going to die.

“Your schemes ran deep, Black Queen,” High Lord Sargon Sahelian snarled. “We will bargain. Arrangement can be had, should you sign the proper pact.”

“My word isn’t enough?” I grinned, badly faking surprise. “Oh dear. I suppose I could sign a pact, if you insist.”

The only bone I’d throw him, just enough that he could do this without entirely losing face. Humiliating him entirely would just serve to corner him enough he might do something stupid. He was already going to have a rough few months ahead of him. See, the reason that Dread Emperors didn’t soulbox all the High Seats was that no family strong enough to be one of those would ever tolerate being led by a pawn. The moment the High Lord went against their family’s interests, they got their throat slit. And what I’d stolen? It was the foundation of Sahelian power. The secrets that kept them one step ahead of everyone, that kept the finest mages of Praes in their service.

And instead of burning them, I’d threatened to sell them to the High Seat that was the second best at magic in the empire.

The artefacts that kept their rivals wary, their enemies from picking fights? Akua had offered to sell them to Dread Empress Sepulchral, demons and all. Even Malicia had to have found that an unpleasant surprise. No matter how many spies she had in that camp, three boxes holding demons and enough materials to make a dozen more artefacts was going to be trouble.

And so the Sahelians were looking at Sargon looking at me, because not a single one of those golden-eyed monsters was willing to ruin the power of their centuries-old family to keep High Lord Sargon in his seat. He could accept my terms, or he could have his throat slit before one of his cousins accepted them in his stead. And Malicia would bend here, not just because otherwise the other woman claiming to be Dread Empress would buy a terrifying arsenal but because if she didn’t bend then Sargon would die. And she would not have the soul of the next High Lord of Wolof in a box.

“One day, Black Queen, this day will come back to haunt you,” High Lord Sargon coldly said.

I eyed him up and down, then snorted.

“I beat Akua Sahelian,” I said. “Should I now tremble at the shadow of her shadow?”

—

On the seventh day, I walked out of the gates of Wolof with everything I wanted and they let me.

Chapter 11: Descent

“Loyalty is not opposite of betrayal, but in truth adjacent: to truly place a person or principle above all others is to promise injury to a thousand others.”

– Extract from the prisoner’s memoirs of Princess Eliza of Salamans

My soldiers cheered as I rode back into camp.

I’d had a party waiting for me shortly outside the gates, led by Vivienne herself. She’d pulled me in tight for a hug, to my surprise and pleasure, before we took the saddle and headed away from the prying eyes atop the walls of Wolof. I’d expected there to be something of a strange mood in camp after I’d spent a sennight in captivity, but if anything my sudden return seemed to have been expected. Like I’d been a given that I would pull a trick, find a way out of the pit. It was as once oddly touching and brute burden. Sooner or later, I thought, I would lead them to a doom there would be no bearding. The thought of the look on their faces then had my stomach dropping.

It wouldn’t do to return grim-faced, though, so I smiled and laughed and stopped to speak with men and women I recognized. There were more than I’d expected. The First Army had pulled heavily from rank and file of the Fifteenth, back when it’d been first raised, and in some ways it had seen less action than other parts of the Army of Callow. There were fewer holes in the ranks here than there would have been in the Third or the Fourth.

When I first got to my tent it was to a warming sight: all of my closest companions had gathered there. Gods, even Pickler had come and it was even more of a chore to pull her away from her work since Robber had died. Akua kept to the back, tactfully keeping away from Vivienne, but I found her eyes and inclined my head. I’d speak no more of it for now, but I’d not forgot whose scheming it would be that got me out of that cell. Scribe was keeping her company, anyway, another whose presence surprised me. Wine was poured, though little of it – it was before Noon Bell – and I was asked about my time imprisoned. There was a great deal of outrage when I explained I’d pretty much lived in the lap of luxury, with good wine and interesting books.

“It figures even in a cell you’d stumble into a better bed than us,” Indrani complained.

“Even got to maul Malicia twice,” I cheerfully added.

I had a thousand questions to ask them, but before getting to it I wanted a wash and a change of clothes. Pretty as mine were, I wasn’t going to keep wearing what my foes had given me. Masego insisted on inspecting me for illness or enchantments, which I agreed to once I was clean from the dust of the road, and most of them took the hint that I wanted to wash immediately. Hakram lingered, no doubt to brief me on all that I’d missed, but to my surprise so did another.

“A private word, if you please?”

I eyed Scribe with surprise. Over the length of our association she’d made it a point to avoid getting Adjutant out of the room whenever she reported to me, as if to make it perfectly clear that she was not trying to usurp his position at my side. I doubted she would have broken that custom without reason, so I slowly nodded before glancing at Hakram.

“We’ll talk before the evening council,” I said. “I need to be caught up.”

“And more,” Hakram gravelled. “The envoys.”

Ah, that. Yeah, it made sense the orcs wouldn’t begin the journey back to the Steppes until I was out of Wolof. Not only had we been meant to speak again but there would be no point in making a deal with me if I were to stay Malicia’s prisoner.

“Bring in Vivienne for that, then,” I said.

“I’ll see what can be done,” the orc drily replied.

He gave Scribe a nod before taking his leave, limping away on his iron leg. That left me alone with the Webweaver in my tent, for the first time in what must have been ages. I poured myself a cup of water with lemon slices in it, asking if she wanted one with a cocked eyebrow. She declined, standing rigidly before my desk. I still couldn’t see her face in more than small glimpsed, always half-faded, but from the way she held herself I would have thought her nervous – or at least as close to it as a woman like Eudokia ever came.

“Now you’ve got me curious,” I admitted. “This isn’t professional, is it?”

“Not entirely,” Scribe admitted. “I would like to make a request of you.”

My brow climbed up. That would be a first. I’d sometimes wondered if there was still a woman under the Name or if she’d died when the Calamities had split.

“What about?” I asked.

I wouldn’t accept or decline without knowing more, but I didn’t actually believe that’d been what she was baiting with her lack of elaboration. She was, I was growing certain, genuinely uncomfortable having this conversation. Was it about Black? No, we’d talked of that before. Of loyalties. It wouldn’t make her like... this.

“You still have in your possession the corpse of the soldier that Marshal Nim possessed,” Scribe said.

“Marshal Nim can’t possess shit, Scribe,” I amiably said. “The Black Knight did that.”

Neither of us were particularly comfortable matching that Name to anyone but Amadeus of the Green Stretch, but best we got used it. I did not think it likely he would ever resume his old Name, which meant that even if Marshal Nim survived the tussle over the fate of Praes someone else would step in and fill those shoes. Scribe conceded the point with a nod.

“I would like for it to be passed into my custody,” Eudokia the Scribe said.

I blinked. That, uh, hadn’t been what I was expecting. I wasn’t sure what I actually had been expecting, but it was emphatically Not That.

“Masego’s studying it,” I finally pointed out.

Or at least he’d been doing so when I’d been captured. It’d been too much to hope he would be able to give me the aspect that’d done this, but I wanted at least an understanding of the mechanics involved.

“He believes he has already learned all he can,” Scribe said. “I believe he would be amenable to closing the matter, should you ask him.”

Huh. She wouldn’t even have needed to spy on him for that, I reminded myself. Zeze considered her like an aunt of sorts, he would have simply told her if asked.

“So I feasibly could give you the body,” I acknowledged. “And we’re going to walk right past why I should – for now anyway – to ask instead why you’d want that corpse in the first place. What are you going to use it for?”

She had to know I’d ask, I thought. I was not exactly known for my policy of handing over dead bodies to Named without asking questions. She had to have known, and still she hesitated before answering. That was fascinating to me , given who I was dealing with.

“I want to Inscribe it,” the Scribe said.

I swallowed a grin. Oh my, that’d definitely been an aspect. I was finally getting a peek at the juicy secrets of the Calamities, was I?

“And what does that do, exactly?” I asked.

“When I first began to us the method,” Scribe quietly said, “it was little more than a trick. I could make my words... weigh more than those of others. Make them linger where they were written.”

But tricks improve , I thought, and this one she’d refined until it became an aspect.

“By the time I met Amadeus,” Scribe said, “I could make eyes and ears of vermin. Sometimes I could even Inscribe instructions onto others that they would be beholden to obey.”

I calmly set down my cup on the desk. Living people, living creatures. Yet she was now asking for a corpse.

“You can make corpse-puppets,” I said. “And the higher quality the corpse, the better the results.”

“The first one I made was a puppet,” Scribe said, and I glimpsed a faint smile. “Little better than undead. Yet when I was destroyed, I retrieved the corpse and found that what I had inscribed could be retrieved. That there was more. The inscription had changed. I used the changes, and so the second was... something more.”

I breathed out a soft, incredulous laugh as it all fell into place.

“Gods Below,” I said. “You madwoman. You actually made a Named , didn’t you? By fucking accident.”

“We began calling him Assassin after the fourteenth iteration,” Scribe told me. “Wekesa helped me with the inscriptions that made it coherent enough for sapience, based on the contract Tikoloshe was bound by. Quickly enough we realized that the primary limitation was the quality of the base material. Most bodies could only carry part of the inscription before they began to wither. “

“So you used dead Named,” I said.

Assassin had died over the years, I thought. Dozens and perhaps even hundreds of times. And every time the Scribe had retrieved the corpse, ripped out the inscription and shoved a refine version into another dead hero’s corpse. Gods, had that been what my father did with all the Callowan heroes he’d nipped in the bud? Dropped them in some crypt, stashed away until Eudokia needed more materials? I was as appalled by the desecration as I was impressed by the brutal pragmatism.

“This one was possessed by a Black Knight,” Scribe said. “I will only be able to Inscribe seven parts in ten, at most, and there will be need for extensive... surgery so the resulting entity has a human silhouette. But he would be a match for the Assassin we were using in the decade prior to the Conquest, by my estimation.”

I could think of a way or two to use such an asset, I thought, but I still far from sold. It would, for one, not be my asset.

“How much control on the entity do you have, after you Inscribe him?” I asked.

“It cannot refuse a command from me,” Scribe said, then grimaced. “I fear you do not fully understand, Queen Catherine. I do not simply write words on dead flesh when I do this. I give of myself. It is the wholeness of the aspect. He cannot act against what I make of him, because there is nothing else to the entity.”

When I had fought Akua in the depths of Liesse, when I had passed through the Fourfold Crossing she laid out before me, I had glimpse of a life in which I had kill the Assassin. Goblinfire had done it, masses of it. It’s not a metaphor when she says she invests her aspect , I realized. It’s physically in the corpse. Practically speaking, it was probably why the construct could mimic Named abilities to some degree. The ‘Assassin’ wouldn’t have aspects of its own, but it wasn’t just flesh and power either. Not exactly. So if the body’s destroyed with goblinfire or demons it probably ruins her aspect too , I decided.

“Does Malicia know?” I asked. “Ranger?”

“Ranger does,” Eudokia said. “Malicia does not. She is aware that Assassin has ‘died’ in the past, but believes him to be a manner of wraith possessing bodies.”

Which wasn’t even entirely wrong, as tended to be the case with the best lies. Huh. That would be a trump card up our sleeve dealing with the empress. Which was probably why Scribe figured I might agree to let her make it. And it wouldn’t be a real Named , I thought. That had implications, considering the other opponent I was facing here in Praes. An entity with some of the abilities of Named but who could not be manipulated or predicted the way they could? That was a rather more tempting offer than just another knife to pull on the Dread Empress of Praes. The trouble remained, of course, that in the end it wouldn’t be my sleeve that card was up in. It’d be Scribe’s tool, and Scribe’s loyalty to me was not on solid foundation.

Her enmity with Malicia was very real, though, I judged. It was what she’d broken with my father over. And she despised the Intercessor as the architect of Sabah’s death. Could I trust her, though, to use this almost-Assassin to match those threats instead of pursuing her own goals? I took my cup, sipped at it for a bit as I felt her study me.

“And what do you want to us the thing for?” I asked.

“I would like to assassinate Malicia,” Scribe frankly said, “but I recognize that there are political realities and that the Tower is likely too well-defended for an incomplete Assassin. Instead I would commit him under your command to offensive operations against her cause.”

That was believable enough, but why would a lie from the Webweaver’s mouth would be anything else? Best to be blunt, I decided, and avoid misunderstandings.

“I’m not comfortable with giving you that kind of power when you have no personal loyalty to me,” I honestly said. “Especially when we’re in Praes. And while I don’t doubt you could grant me partial control, I don’t have the time to handle that on top of my other responsibilities.”

To my mild surprise, she nodded without seeming particularly offended.

“I understand,” she said. “In other circumstances I would have offered that Adjutant be placed in stewardship over the entity, but given his coming departure I would venture that Vivienne Dartwick is now the best candidate.”

First my right hand and now my successor. She’d picked the names well, couldn’t deny that.

“And you’d surrender part of the control without argument?” I said, somewhat skeptical.

“I recognize the investment in trust and resources you are making,” Scribe calmly said. “I will not pretend offence, though I will remind you I can do significantly more damage to the Grand Alliance with a few letters bearing your fake signature than a dozen Assassins.”

I was not unaware of that, but ‘I didn’t cut your throat with this knife’ wasn’t much an argument for giving someone a sword either.

“So what is it you do want?” I pressed.

“The right to brief Princess Vivienne on operational opportunities and present targets of my own,” Scribe immediately said.

Ah, there it was. Even after she’d been evicted from leadership of the Eyes here in the Dread Empire by Malicia’s own spymistress, the Webweaver still had more spies here than Callow did. That meant she’d be able to indirectly guide what we used Assassin for by simple dint of often having better information than we did. I hummed. She could also simply go back on her word and use the entity for whatever the Hells she felt like doing, of course, but that wouldn’t be like her. And though you might yet betray me , I thought, even if you do it will be to Black. I simply couldn’t believe he’d order her to use something like the Assassin on anyone dear to me.

“Hierophant will supervise,” I finally said.

As much because I wanted someone I trusted in that room as because if I robbed him of the opportunity of witnessing that he’d sulk at me for months. Even through the aspect I saw a surprisingly girlish smile light up Eudokia’s face, as she eagerly agreed and began to thank.

I could only hope, I thought, that I had not just made a grave mistake.

—

The gold and grain began reaching us half past Noon Bell, after I’d washed and Masego had declared be to be in the fullness of health.

It was only good sense to check the merchandise when you bargained with Praesi, so I unleashed Zeze and Akua on the goods while I got caught up with my informal council. There’d been next to no skirmishing in my absence, as it turned out, and Juniper believed what few blows had been traded to have been accidental. Patrols running into each other by happenstance, nothing intentional. As I’d expected it had been Akua – with Vivienne along for formal authority – who’d conducted the negotiations that’d pressured Sargon into my release. High Lady Takisha had been most eager to get her hands on the Sahelian library.

Akua had even tied up the affair neatly by ensuring the three tomes she’d sent south as proof that we did have the library were precious enough the High Lady of Kahtan wouldn’t be too miffed by our ending the negotiations. It was a nice touch, and I told her as much.

Sepulchral had been handled more by Vivienne, though, and there the talks had been rockier. Not for any misstep on my heiress’ part, but because Abreha Mirembe had wanted more than simply the arsenal the Sahelians kept in their vaults: she’d wanted a formal alliance between us, as well as the backing of the Grand Alliance. Vivienne had put her off by saying we couldn’t agree to that without the First Prince’s permission and the backing of all four remaining great lines of the Blood, which Sepulchral had recognized for the putting off it was.

“She warned us that the time for sitting the fence is coming to an end,” Vivienne told me. “That the civil war will be coming to a close soon, one way or another.”

“Or another yet,” I mildly said.

High Lord Sargon hadn’t been wrong, when he’d implied that Sepulchral was about as trustworthy as a hungry tiger. I’d been happy to throw her the occasional bone so far because she was a thorn in Malicia’s side, but I was not enthused as the notion of Abreha Mirembe holding the Tower. She’d probably hold off on backstabbing us until the end of the war on Keter, I figured, but she’d be trouble in the years that followed. Dread Empress Sepulchral would have no real interest in reforming the empire into something less poisonous to everything it touched, and I honestly suspected that she’d pull out of the Liesse Accords at the first opportunity.

That was not acceptable to me.

“We will need to take inventory of the coin and grain as they come, Catherine, but I believe in both cases our expectations were lower than the reality,” Aisha told me. “Wolof’s treasury, in particular, appears to have been fuller than we thought.”

“My cousin has been sacking the hinterlands of Askum rather relentlessly,” Akua noted. “It would not be surprising that he aimed to steal wealth along population.”

That or Malicia had been propping up his reign with gold. As had been pointed out to me last year, given that she still drew taxes from most of Praes, half her army was gone and most foreign markets were closed to her the empress was actually sitting on a lot of gold she didn’t have that many uses for. Solidifying the position of the High Lord she’d soulboxed would have been a good investment for her.

“How much are we talking, Aisha?” I asked.

“If the wagons are all carrying the same amount of coin, we would be looking at around a million aurelii,” the Staff Tribune replied.

I let out a low whistle. In the year after Second Liesse, when the shock of the second largest city in all of Callow and the crisis that’d followed was still hitting us the hardest, my tax revenue for the entire Kingdom of Callow hadn’t actually been much higher than that. I let that sink in for a moment.

“Well,” I finally said, “I suppose that makes up for the ransom money being stolen back.”

That got some smiles, the good mood infectious. It’d been a long while since out treasury had been quite so full.

“We’ll give a cut of the loot to Razin and Aquiline,” I decided. “As they helped us take it.”

Maybe a tenth? Much like my own countrymen Levantines tended to get pissy about anything they saw as charity – the pride of our fellow poors, I amusedly thought – so I might have to end up calling it an early wedding gift. The gold ought to help them strengthen their position in Levant after the war, too, assuming we all made it there. I would repay my debt to Tariq Fleetfoot in full, one bite at a time.

“So who was it that tried to rescue me, by the way?” I asked.

“Indrani led the attempt,” Vivienne said. “But Masego, the Silver Huntress and the Barrow Sword went as well.”

I let out a small whistle. Not a bad lineup, for a jaunt like this. I’d have to ask Archer how far she’d made it, for Sargon to find it worth filling my cell with guards.

“I suppose I ought to encourage that,” I drawled. “And since we’re rich, we ought to throw a feast before all the gold’s gone. Tonight.”

“A fire?” Juniper asked, leaning forward.

“It’s been too long,” I agreed.

My soldiers would get rewards of their own, extra rations and ale casks being broken out to celebrate our successful ‘siege’ of Wolof, but tonight I’d share a fire with my friends.

—

We did it proper .

Akua found us a good place, slightly away from the camp but not too far. Indrani and Hakram dug the pit, Vivienne got the benches and Pickler started the fire. I went with Aisha to obtain a few drinks – some of them smuggled, but we knew those tricks – while Juniper began to roast the pig. Masego rustled up a few wards, just in case, and we got old Legion cooks to make us a pot’s worth of the old staples from the War College. By the time the sun came down, we’d claimed our hilltop and seats as Juniper began cutting into the pork and the usual haggling began.

“I am a princess, nowadays,” Vivienne attempted. “Of Callow, too. Arguably-”

The rib chops were dropped unceremoniously into her plate as I cackled along with Indrani.

“This is borderline treasonous,” Vivi whined. “What do I have to do to get a shoulder cut?”

“Be named Aisha Bishara,” Hakram drily noted.

“It’s a little sad when being royalty doesn’t even get you on the right side of nepotism anymore,” I said, but then I caught Juniper’s hard stare being turned on me, “-is what I would say if I shared her opinion, which is obviously wrong.”

I got a satisfied nod for that, letting out a breath for that. I’d gotten used to juicy tenderloin cuts, I wasn’t going to let pride get me demoted back to chops. After we’d gotten our plates filled according to the arcane and mysterious system Juniper had developed over our years of companionship – Zeze got downgraded to leg for having suggested using a magical fire while Indrani got bumped up to fillet for having actually listened during briefings for a whole week – the bottles got opened the drink flowed freely. Aragh and ale, mostly, but some wine too. Nok pale for Akua, to Aisha’s profuse mockery, and Vale summer wine from my personal stock.

It was a reality that invitation to these little fires had come to be seen as a prize, a mark of favour from the Black Queen and her inner circle, so while I wasn’t going to spoil the whole thing I’d made some concessions to the inevitable. People came by, staying for a time before leaving. Razin and Aquiline were first, curious to try pork cooked in the orc way, and though they wanted to hear of my captivity at first the ended up spellbound by a tale Aisha told about ancient Taghreb legends that claimed her people had some kinship with those of Levant, that they’d been brought west on great ships by strange and cruel gods. It was why Taghreb disliked ships to this day, she told them.

I thought it more likely that the whole living in a desert thing had inspired a healthy dislike for seafaring, but what did I know?

The older Named came by, after that, and with them both Grandmaster Brandon Talbot and General Zola. The Refuge crowd, Silver Huntress and the Concocter, kept close to Archer. Akua caught the latter’s interest by speaking about some of the potions her family had accrued over the years and they ended up in an animated discussion in what I believed to be tradertalk, but Alexis the Argent and Indrani mostly spoke to each other in stilted, stiff tones. They didn’t argue, I saw, but it was hardly a triumph of diplomacy. They’re trying, though , I thought. Or at least Indrani is.

Juniper and I got into it with General Zola, who’d fought at the Doom of Liesse under General Afolabi. She’d been a supply tribune, then, but their legion had gotten into enough a mess during the battle that it’d been all hands on deck. Pickler actually seemed to be enjoying a talk with Brandon Talbot, to my surprise, though what little I overheard told me why. Marchford had been his home long before it was my personal fiefdom, and it was Pickler I’d once ordered to rebuild the defences there. The walls had been pulled down after the Conquest, but I’d had no intention of leaving my holdings so vulnerable.

Hakram and Ishaq were quietly talking on the other side of the fire, which I considered to be a situation well in hand. The Barrow Sword saw Adjutant as a peer of sorts, and that meant Hakram could work him I ways I could not. I wanted him disposed to pitching in for the peace in Levant after the war, so preparing him for it early was important.

The last to visit were the kids, well after the others, and though I’d expected Sapan to stick to Masego’s side as a barnacle the way she usually I instead found that she and Arthur Foundling wanted to hear from me. Like the lordlings my captivity was of interest to them, but more than that they were rather excited by the way High Lord Sargon had been forced to release me even as I lay in his power.

“Look,” I said, “there’s nothing wrong with a good sword. Stabbing the right people can get a lot done, don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise, but if you want a win that lasts longer than a season you’ve got to use other levers. The stuff that actually makes the world go round.”

“Was it not your use of the Night that forced him to surrender?” Sapan skeptically asked.

“I could have stolen his treasury with Night and it wouldn’t have done a thing,” I shrugged. “The man who taught me, he was a stark believer in the victory of cleverness over power. I’m not as much of a purist – Gods know I use artefacts much more than he’d be comfortable with – but he was right that power doesn’t mean much unless you know how and where to apply it.”

“Because it was politics that forced the High Lord to bend,” Arthur Foundling frowned. “Not power.”

I nodded.

“Night let me take his library, clean out his vaults,” I said. “But I knew what to take because I knew what was important to him. The power wouldn’t have meant much without the second part.”

“The Carrion Lord taught you this?” Sapan asked, a little hurriedly.

As if she’d been going through with it before she could think better, I decided with a grain of amusement.

“He did,” I replied. “I’d say it’s a shame he’s mostly remembered for the number of Named he’s killed, but that would be ignoring the fact he probably cultivated that reputation very much on purpose.”

“He conquered Callow, ma’am,” Arthur quietly said. “They say it was the governors that did most the ugly deeds, afterwards, but he’s the one who handed it all to the Empire.”

“He’s a monster,” I calmly agreed. “But he’s also one of the cleverest men I’ve ever met, and ironically enough perhaps the best chance we have for peace between Callow and Praes in the coming decades.”

It was why I meant to see him climb the Tower, even now. I could trust my father with the Dread Empire, to curb its worst instincts and tangle it so deeply into the bonds of peace with Callow that it would not be able to free itself of them without breaking. Neither Malicia nor Sepulchral were acceptable alternatives. The trouble was that I was not so sure the man in question wanted to claim the Tower. Maybe at the Salian Peace he had, but it’d been over a year since. And the way he’d left...

The conversation strayed to lighter subjects after that and eventually we sent the kids to bed. That left only us, as it was meant to be, and a second round of bottles was opened. I clenched, suddenly, when I felt Robber’s absence like a gut punch. How many ghosts were out there, just beyond the light of our fire? Nauk. Ratface. Hune. I pulled at aragh to chase the thought away and had succeeded in claiming a pleasant degree of inebriation when I caught sight of one of the phalanges approaching Hakram to whisper in his ear. Seeing he had my attention, he gestured for us to move away from the fire and dragged in Vivienne as well. Once we were slightly away from the others, he wasted no time.

“Word from Scribe and the Jacks,” Adjutant said. “Armies are moving towards us.”

My eyes narrowed. He wouldn’t be meaning the forces under Marshal Nim, which had already been headed our way for some time.

“Sepulchral?” Vivienne asked.

He nodded.

“But more,” Hakram said. “The deserters as well. They’ve decamped from the Green Stretched and they’re in close pursuit behind the loyalists and the rebels.”

Well, it looked like I was overdue a talk with General Sacker. Half the point of becoming her patron was being warned of things like this in advance. I breathed out, trying to parse it out in my mind’s eye. The armies of the empresses would reach us weeks before the deserters were in sight, if not months, but they wouldn’t have begun to march without a reason. They wanted a piece of this too, in some way or another.

“Northeast of Askum, northwest of Ater,” I finally said. “That looks to be our battlefield.”

Deep in the Wasteland, which was bloody campaigning grounds for all involved. I wasn’t looking forward to that.

“Agreed,” Adjutant said. “And it means I can no longer delay my departure. Come morning, we must speak with the envoys and I will leave with them come noon.”

I grimaced. I wanted to refuse. I’d just come back and already he was leaving, but I knew it was not a sensible answer. There could be no replacement for Hakram, no one who would mean what he did to his people or who would know my mind as well.

“Tomorrow,” I reluctantly agreed.

He must have caught my displeasure, for he squeezed my arm comfortingly with his skeletal hand.

“We still have tonight,” Hakram said. “Let’s not spoil it yet.”

I silently nodded, and after a moment he moved away. Vivienne lingered. I looked up at the night sky, the stars spread out as far as the eye could see and the moon glaring down as a pale eye. At least these days I did not feel irrational hatred at the sight of it.

“Beautiful night,” Vivienne quietly said, looking up as well. “Moon’s almost full.”

“It is,” I murmured. “It’ll turn soon.”

Tonight or tomorrow, but no later.

—

Well past Midnight Bell we began winding down, the drink and heavy meal taking their toll.

Usually we would have slept there, and some of us had fallen asleep, but we were outside the camp and in enemy territory still. Wards or not, it would be a risk. So instead everyone was roused and we began making our way back to the palisades, Hakram carrying a half-asleep Vivienne on his back to Indrani’s vocal amusement. I hung back with Masego to make sure nothing had been left behind, and after he took down the wards I torched the entire hilltop with blackflame. We were mere miles away from Wolof, the beating heart of sorcery in Praes, so I wasn’t going to be taking risks. I was mostly sober by now, having tapered off drinking near the end, so I did not feel vulnerable enough to rush back. I’d intended to walk back with Zeze after he took his last look, but when he did I found that someone else had stayed behind. Atop the burned hill, a golden-eyed shade was standing among the ash. My heart clenched.

Tonight, then. I’d almost hoped it would be tomorrow.

“You go on ahead,” I told Masego.

He frowned at me.

“Are your certain?” he asked.

He could see her as well, of course. But it wasn’t Masego’s way to meddle in what he saw as the personal affairs of his friends. I breathed out.

“I am,” I told him.

And he did not ask again. Hesitantly he brushed a hand against my arm and I smiled at him. Nodding and wishing me a good night, he began trodding back to camp. I murmured it back then turned to the hilltop. I limped my way back up through the ash, falling in at Akua’s side as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The two of us stood there for a moment, looking up at the night sky. She was the one to break the silence.

“There is a place I would like to show you,” she said. “Not far from here.”

“Cityside or waterside?” I asked.

“Closer to Sinka,” she said, and her eyes asked the question again.

I nodded. It had, I thought, the weight of the inevitable to it. We made our way through the darkness, sure-footed on small and winding paths. It was beautiful, out here. The sight of the orchards touched by moonlight, dappling the ground, the lights of Wolof in the distance as we went downhill towards the Wasaliti. There was little wind but the night was cool, and the thin breeze was enough to lazily stir leaves. We’d not broken the silence as we moved, her leading and I following, but as we crossed a cove of palm trees she began to talk.

“I did not find it myself,” Akua said. “It was shown to me, when I was a girl of thirteen.”

“Who by?” I asked.

She laughed, the amusement lighting up golden eyes as I caught a flash of pearly teeth.

“Some boy who thought he might become my consort,” she said. “Alas, his hopes were greater than his charms.”

“And I bet you were just the sweetest girl,” I drily replied.

“I was not so terrible, back then,” she smiled. “Not so artless as to be taken in, yet hardly the sharpest of irons.”

She would have spoken the last part of that sentence with a touch of reverence, once. No longer. It was, if anything, disdain. But then Akua Sahelian was, in her own way, one of the finest liars I had ever seen. She had made a game out of charming my inner circle, and largely succeeded even when some of them had spent years despising her. As Aisha had once warned me, that was the famous peril of the Sahelians: they were so charming and so useful that even the cleverest let them in. And then they turned on you. So how much of it was Akua’s truly held beliefs and how much of it the face she wore when around us? There was, in the end, only one way to tell.

The crucible. Trial by fire.

“I barely remember what I was like at thirteen,” I admitted. “Feels like a world away.”

“Much like you were at seventeen, I imagine,” Akua mused. “Swagger covering vigilance, looking every gift horse in the mouth twice. And, in your own way, dangerously insightful.”

I coughed to hide my embarrassment. That was the closest she’d come to giving me a genuine compliment – one not wrapped in anything else, honest praise – perhaps since we had first met.

“And terribly easy to embarrass, of course,” she teased.

“I wouldn’t have been that easy to fluster,” I snorted. “For one, unlike you I was the one taking the boys to dark corners.”

Girls, too, but not as many. I’d tended towards boys when I’d been younger.

“And yet I’m told the redheaded mage you took as a lover had to be the one to seduce you,” Akua said.

I’d noticed that she usually avoided using Killian’s name. Or talking about her at all, really. Not that it was hard, considering most of my closest friends tended to avoid the subject. Even Juniper, who was not known for shyness or tact, had not hazarded to venture an opinion on that whole debacle.

“It’s different when it’s someone under your authority,” I replied. “I thought there was something there, but I didn’t want to...”

“Overstep?” Akua suggested.

I hummed, not disagreeing. In a way. From the moment I’d held command of the Fifteenth I had been both a villain and the apprentice of the Black Knight, both positions that in many ways made me untouchable. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to abuse my position if I cared to, and arguably I had. I’d been very much against Legion regulations to sleep with my own Senior Mage, for one, but rules applied to Named in Praes more or less only when people higher up the ladder said they did. And in my case, Black had been more supportive than anything.

“I’m also not great at taking hints sometimes,” I admitted.

“Truly?” Akua said, tone drier than a desert.

I rolled my eye at her. We swerved to the north well before reaching the shore, to my surprise, still we into the cultivate parts of Wolof’s surroundings. The side of the hill where she led me, though, was cracked. Old scorch marks still blackened the stone, from some ancient battle, and she guided me through the broken grounds until we reached a tall flat stone covered with moss. Akua passed a hand against it affectionately.

“You’ll have to help me move it,” she said.

Interest piqued, I put my back into it and we toppled the stone to the side. It revealed a narrow, uneven passage going deeper into the hill. Akua glanced up at the sky, as if checking on the height of the moon, and nodded.

“Now is the best time,” she said. “Come.”

It was uncomfortable squeezing through the passage and the stone tore at my clothes some, but aside from the burn of my bad leg there was little to hinder me. To my relief the passage led to some sort of broader room, pitch dark – not that the darkness was trouble for me, blessed by the Sisters as I was. Here I could stand to my full height, and Akua almost, but it was still small. She showed a low fold in the stone to our left, though, and after crawling for a foot or so I followed her into a small cavern. I stopped almost immediately after rising, stunned.

It was not a large cavern, perhaps twenty feet wide, and most of the ground was covered by water. The sides had been scarred by spells, like the outside, but here the heat of the spell used has turned entire swaths of stone into something like smooth glass. And what brought it all together was the long opening in the ceiling that looked up straight at the night sky: the moon and stars were reflected perfectly on the water and the walls, as if we had crawled through the earth only to somehow stumble onto a slice of firmament. Akua leaned against wall, water lapping at the stone not far from her feet, and offered me a gentle smile.

She did not say anything, or need to.

I came to stand at her side, enjoying the coolness of the stone. There was no warmth from her, either, though we were almost close enough to touch. She was yet a shade, and a shadow had no warmth to share. We stood there for a long moment, silent and unmoving, as the stars and moon ghosted on stone and water. Eventually I felt her moving closer to me, and said nothing. My stomach tightened.

“Until tonight,” Akua quietly said, “I was the only person in all of Creation to know of this place.”

I did not ask what had happened to the boy. It was Praes. I knew well what had happened to the boy who had once wanted to be consort to a Sahelian. And I knew, too, what it meant that she had brought me here. Shared a wonder and a secret with me, asking for nothing. But, perhaps, hoping. We had toed the line closer and closer, as the years passed, but the line had always been there. Tonight she had not even touched me, and still somehow it felt as if it had been crossed. I turned enough to look at her but not to invite more. She’d always been gorgeous. I’d thought as much from the first time I’d glimpsed her in that tent.

Often, though, she made a spectacle of it. Magnificent dresses and jewelry, seductive smiles and teasing words. Right now, though, I found not a trace of it on her face. I could barely even make out what she wore, save that it was a dress, and there was nothing seductive about the look on her face. It was, I thought, longing and perhaps something like hunger. There was nothing veiled about it, and the nakedness of that realization had my stomach clench with desire and something else. I did not move, either closer or further away. A moment passed, heavy, and my arm tensed as she slowly began to lean closer – eyes on mine, asking. And I answered the question by turning away, looking down at that field of stars she had stared with me. I did not see her expression. Did not let myself see it, else I hesitate.

I must carry it out to the end, even if it stung. Especially if it stung.

“Even now?” Akua quietly asked, voice ailing.

“Even now,” I got out.

“I had thought it would be different,” she whispered. “There is... I chose you over my family , Catherine. My home. Everything I’ve loved since I was a girl, save for my father – and even his death I set aside, refusing vengeance on your own for it.”

“I know,” I said, wretchedly.

But her folly had been the death of Liesse. One hundred thousand lives, every single one of them in my care. My care . Even if the Gods Above and Below had demanded of me forgiveness of Akua’s folly, it would have been the same answer. I was who I was, and in the end that was a creature of long prices.

“It’s not something you can win,” I murmured. “That’s not how this works.”

Because that was the last thing that needed to be stripped away from her so she could truly enter the crucible: the thought that if she was kind, if she was good, if she fought for the cause the two of us might have a future together. It tasted like ash in my mouth to rip that out of the unspoken between us, but it must be done. The silence stretched out.

“There is no end to it, is there?” Akua finally said. “The shadow cast by that day. No sun that will chase it out.”

I smiled mirthlessly.

“We all live in it still,” I replied.

And always would. I still avoided looking at her, oddly ashamed, and so it was in utter surprise that I felt soft, cool lips press against the corner of my mouth.

“So we do,” she said, moving away.

Her golden eyes shone. Could a shade cry? I did not know.

“I would like you to leave, please,” Akua Sahelian said.

I didn’t argue. All I could wonder was if this was the way Hanno had felt, back in the day, when he flipped his coin and it spun in the air. Before it had landed.

—

By morning she had not come back, as I had known she would not.

Interlude: West I

“Terror is the hand that rips away the masks. What stays when it has stripped away all the civilized lies we tell ourselves is our truest face, ugly as it is.”

– Alrich Fenne, first of the Iron Kings

Life was full of ironies, Prince Frederic Goethal had found.

Death too, he supposed, though circumstance dictated that one’s enjoyment of such humour would be severely curtailed. For this jest, however, the Gods Above were yet smiling down on them. The endless armies of the Hidden Horror had smashed themselves against the walls of the Morgentor again and again, hordes beyond counting and horrors beggaring nightmares. The last fortress of Twilight’s Pass had held back the madness, as Lycaonese grimly had for centuries, but all the world had known that it was only a matter of time until the Morgentor fell.

There were simply too many of the dead and too few soldiers to stop them, no matter how sharp the courage and tall the walls. All of Procer, perhaps even all of Calernia, had turned its eye to fortress in the frozen north where horror was yet dammed. Like a face cringing away from a blow yet struck.

Yet they had done it. Against the odds, against the night and the fear and the endless cruelty of Evil, the Morgentor had held. Towers had fallen, even the fortress itself for a time, but always the armies under Otto and Frederic had taken it back. Even now, as the morn’s light fell on the stony grounds below, Prince Frederic stood atop the tower known as the Westenhaupt and knew the living to be the masters of the field. The dead were scattered and burning, the miraculous engines known as Pickler’s Nails – picklernagel – pounding away at their retreating mass.

Balls of pitch hit the ground, tossed by spindly catapults, spilling blackness where they landed and spreading the flames everywhere. The changes goblin engineering had made here... The Dead King’s commanders had grown wary of committing beorns to the first wave of the assault, after the fourth time they died without even touching a wall. Wary! The absurdity of that old monster’s generals being wary of anything at all had been as fine wine.

It had been night and day. Even after the Hidden Horror plied fresh tricks and opened a gate into the very Hells, the lines had buckled yet stubbornly refused to break. With valour and fire, the armies of the west had held back the tide even as all the world expected them to fall. But life was full of delightful, cruel ironies and so it had not mattered. To the southeast the Hocheben Heights had fallen: the dead were now pouring into Bremen like an unstoppable tide, burning and killing as they went.

The Morgentor had not fallen but it was going to have to be abandoned , lest the dead march north and surround it entirely.

The Kingfisher Prince looked down at the fleeing dead, sword in hand and fingers tight on the grip. Two years he’d fought here. Bled here, with the hard-faced soldiers at his side. The Morgentor was hundreds of miles from the borders of Brus, but he fancied he now knew the fortress as well as if he had been born here. It was not his home, but Frederic had well thought it might be his grave before it all ended. It was... frustrating to abandon it like this. The prince knew well the strategic necessity – already it would be a hard campaign to push south through the enemy invading Bremen, to be enveloped here was death – yet what the mind knew the heart disavowed. It tasted like defeat, leaving.

It was in the soldiers around him too, he could feel it. Aid fluttered in him like butterfly wings, urging him to help but not quite knowing how. Westenhaupt was heavy on Neustrians, whose home was south of Bremen was now next to fall, but that stern lot was no more inclined to leave than the rest. Garbed in steel and iron the soldiers milled about the rampart, talking in terse Reitz and keeping an eye on the wyrms in the distance. Even Frederic’s own retinue was in a dark mood. Such a small thing, pride, but was it not the smallest of axles on which the world rested? Small wounds could kill an army if left to fester.

Yet what could he do?

“It is finished for the day, my prince. The curs will not return until they have greater numbers than this to field.”

Frederic glanced at his captain – a distant cousin of his, he’d been given to understand – who’d addressed him and nodded agreement.

“They’ll be back under cover of darkness,” the Prince of Brus said.

Even with goblin spotters, night had the living at a disadvantage. The span they’d just bought, however, would be the opportunity of their departure. The armies had been ready to decamp and march south for days, it was only the constant assaults of the Enemy that’d kept them still. A fighting retreat all the way to Bremen would be... difficult, even for veterans like these. The soldiers around them had been listening without even the pretence otherwise and a familiar officer stepped forward, Captain Fredda of the Neustrian royal army.

“It is done, then,” she said. “We will flee south?”

The question was blunt, but more importantly reflected on the faces of most around them. Aid fluttered in him still, insistent. The Kingfisher Prince looked away, down at the fleeing throng of corpses. What could he claim?

“We will be back,” Frederic said. “And so will they.”

Grim nods, but the arrow had missed. The Kingfisher Prince thought, for a moment, of what Otto would say in his place. Something stern, do doubt. They were a stern and unflinching lot, the Reitzenberg. The Prince of Bremen was called Otto Redcrown by men for the proof of that, the same stubborn charge that’d killed his father and two elder sisters before the crown passed to him and he carried it to its end. And like that, Frederic found his answer.

“It begins now, our war,” the Prince of Brus said.

That claimed their attention.

“We will march south,” Frederic Goethal said. “Through Bremen and Neustria, through my own Brus in time, but though battles await us on that path it cannot be called a campaign.”

He smiled.

“It is a muster ,” the prince said. “The last muster we have in us, the last gasp of Procer. And you all know where we will strike, once the strength of the east and the west is gathered.”

The Kingfisher Prince raised his sword, pointed it east. Where, beyond mountains and lakes and clouds of poison, lay the Crown of the Dead. Keter, the Hidden Horror’s seat of power.

“You call it fleeing,” the Kingfisher Prince laughed, “but you should know better, Fredda. Today, at long last, we begin our march on Keter.”

And inside of him the wings ceased fluttering at last, a smile from Above, as all around him backs straightened and stares hardened. Frederic had not lied, after all. The dead would chase them south relentlessly, until the time came for the last battle of this war. Frederic Goethal watched the corpses fleeing below one last time, fingers tight around his sword. Doom had come for the Principate of Procer, doom as no realm of man had ever known before.

They would meet that end, the Kingfisher Prince swore, straight-backed and proud.

—

The blow had split open her helm.

A shallow cut, she’d been lucky, but head wounds always bled ugly. Rozala Malanza, Princess of Aequitan, ripped off the straps of her helmet and tossed it away. It was useless now anyway and shaking free her sweaty hair was a small pleasure. Irritated at the delay, she glared at the priest laying his hands on her back.

“Hurry up, would you?” the dark-haired princess bit out.

A cleared throat followed and she glanced guiltily at Louis Rohanon, the former prince of Creusens who was now her formal secretary. And something rather more thrilling, in private, though that was best kept quiet.

“It would be easier if you dismounted,” Louis mildly said.

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to get back on my horse if I do,” Rozala admitted.

Russet eyes narrowed, but he knew better than to argue against her getting back into the thick of the fight. The Princess of Aequitan was not the kind of general that shied away from the melee: it was why men followed her into the dark. She asked them to brave no peril she was not willing to risk at their side. Louis simply nodded, even though he disapproved, and she felt a sudden swell of affection. He was a wonderful lover, but she had often thought he could be more should politics allow. Perhaps even if not. She had come to suspect there might be... other considerations. The dark-haired princess laid a hand on her belly. It was still too early to tell, but there were signs.

“The Levantines are still holding strong out west,” Louis told her. “But the Red Knight sent word that the Hawk has been nipping at them all afternoon. Lord Yannu took an arrow but he still lives.”

Rozala grimaced, the Light wielded by the priest at her side finally reaching her scalp. The wound began to mend.

“Someone really needs to kill that thing for good,” Rozala cursed. “And the eastern flank?”

“Still harassed by skirmishers, but the Cleven horse is scattering them,” Louis said. “If we can push through to the south, we have our path to Peroulet.”

Where the last line of defence for the principality of Cleves would stand. How quicky the wind had turned against them, Rozala thought. But a few months ago she had triumphed at the Battle of Trifelin then resisted the siege that followed in the victory’s wake. Even the opening of the Hellgate had not been enough to dislodge her. Yet the Hidden Horror, while losing battles, had found ways to win the war. As he had done to the Lycaonese up north, he had done to her here in Cleves: when the neck did not bend, he had struck the ribs. Rozala had lost the western coast while pinned in Trifelin so and seen herself at risk of being surrounded should the city of Atandor fall.

Cordelia Hasenbach had sent the order to retreat south to Peroulet before she could even consider a stratagem to turn this around. And though part of her had wanted to fight the First Prince’s command to retreat, Rozala had known it to be the right decision. Cleves was good as lost and there would be no reinforcements coming until it was far, far too late. It had been good that she’d not dallied out of pique, for Atandor had fallen earlier than anticipated and the army that’d taken it had swung north to attack her from behind as she already led her armies into a fighting retreat. For three days now her forces had been fighting the dead in heavy skirmishes, the Hidden Horror trying to mire her out here in the open instead of behind the walls of Peroulet.

She would not give the old monster his wish.

“Find me a helmet,” Princess Rozala asked her lover. “And a fresh lance. We must pierce through, else half of us will be corpses come morning.”

“Both are already on their way,” Louis replied, ruefully smiling.

Rozala almost leaned down to kiss him, holding herself back at the very last moment. His lips quirked anyway. Rising her saddle, caressing her charger’s neck, she turned her gaze to the field in the distance. They would make it to Peroulet, that much she would swear to any Gods that cared enough to listen. After, however... That fortress would be the last holdout before the hordes of the Dead King broke into the plains to the south. And if they do then Principate is dead , Rozala thought. It was a harsh thing, to realize that she had already given all the ground that she could afford to give. The moment she raised her banner over Peroulet, Rozala Malanza’s back would be to the wall. And the terrible truth was that, beneath all the oaths and speeches, the Princess of Aequitan was not sure she could hold the city.

No, that was a lie. She knew she would lose those walls. It was only a question of how long she could eke out before she did.

Breathing out, Princess Rozala Malanza accepted the helmet her lover pressed into her hand, setting it atop the crown of her head. A lance filled her hand, familiar weight, and she looked up at the sunny afternoon sky. They must first survive today, she reminded herself, before being troubled by tomorrow.

“One miracle at a time,” Rozala murmured into the wind, and rode back to war.

—

The First Prince thought it would look much like this, if an empire could see the headsman’s axe coming down on its neck.

The Morgentor had fallen. Rhenia had fallen. Bremen was halfway into the grave. The sole major military force left in northern Procer, under the command of the princes of Brus and Bremen, was fighting through the horde so it could make it to the temporary safety of Neustria. Cordelia had done all she could to evacuate her people further south, into Segovia, but many had stayed. Too many. Lycaonese, she should have remembered, were a stubborn lot. They were not retreating, not leaving. They would fight the dead fiercely for every league of stone, every river, every hill and forest and muddy road. It was the old fight, the old duty. The walls must hold, lest dawn fail.

That pride might yet kill them all, and with every passing day Cordelia Hasenbach could do less to ward away that fate.

Cleves was holding better, but barely. A ring of forts had been raised along the line drawn by Peroulet, after Cordelia drew from the refugee camps for labour. Food and places on carts headed south for the families of those who accepted had earned her enough volunteers that pits could be dug, palisades raised and stones stacked fast enough it could almost be called a miracle. The First Prince knew better. If there was one thing the Principate still had plenty of, it was hands that could be put to work. The entire effort had felt much like raising a sandcastle to stop the tide, but the fair-haired princess had gritted her teeth and seen it done regardless. Despair was not worth a whistle. If Cordelia failed, it would be after she had moved Heavens and earth trying.

Even from Hainaut the news was grim. General Abigail had been dislodged from the Cigelin Sisters by an enemy offensive, though she’d retreated in good order to Lauzon’s Hollow after covering her retreat with swaths of goblinfire. The White Knight’s crushing victory at Juvelun had secured the eastern passage, for now at least, but all of Cordelia’s generals agreed it was now only a matter of time until the Army of Callow was pushed back to the old defence lines at Neustal. And once that was the case, once all that stood between Procer and annihilation was forts from the hills of western Cleves to eastern Hainaut, then it would be the beginning of the end. The Dead King would hold the shores of the lakes and be able to cross unimpeded.

Looking at the grey stealing inch after inch of the exquisite map at the heart of the Vogue Archive, Cordelia Hasenbach could almost hear the whistling sound the axe was making as it came down on the neck of the Principate of Procer.

Though tastefully clothed and as rested as she could afford to be, Cordelia could not help but feeling worn to the bone. It showed, too, in some ineffable part of her. She’d glimpsed it in her looking glass, that subtle quality that came from a tool being worked ‘til it was near breaking. Yet the fire in her belly would not let her close her eyes, not when every missed opportunity was a few hundred more of the people in her care sent to the grave. The First Prince heard the Forgetful Librarian approach, recognizing the footsteps, and afforded the other woman a questioning glance.

“Word from the Dominion just came,” the Damned said. “It worked.”

Cordelia did not hide her surprise quite quickly enough.

“They agreed to the oaths?” she pressed.

“Every major line of the Blood swore oaths that the seneschal of Levante is to hold the city until the end of the war, when the Majilis will convene to settle the succession of the Isbili,” the Librarian confirmed. “The peace-oaths were not as widespread, but the rumours the Circle seeded seem to have moved public opinion where you wanted.”

This time it was a smile she hid. Cordelia had ordered that word be spread the Grey Pilgrim had died wishing for peace between Levantines before his sacrifice at the Battle of Hainaut, which would have meant little in Procer but carried a great deal of weight in the Dominion. He had been revered as half a god, in those parts. There would still be bandits and raiders that took advantage of the chaos, but the spectre of the Peregrine’s disapproval would stay many a hand. Perhaps, if she were lucky, enough that the Dominion of Levant did not collapse into utter anarchy. Methodical anarchy, at least, she would be able to prop up for a little longer still.

Long enough that if she no longer could, it was because Cordelia could do nothing at all.

“We can turn our attention to the League, then,” the First Prince said. “Have our envoys to Bellerophon sent word back yet?”

“Yes,” the Librarian grimaced. “That they have yet to be received by the expedition’s generals.”

The Republic of Bellerophon had, to almost universal surprised, succeeded at assembling an army and sweeping over the last holdings of Penthes. Unfortunately, the victorious citizen-soldiers had then begun a siege of the city-state that they were very unlikely to be able to carry out successfully. Cordelia would have had little issue with this, had General Basilia not been leading a coalition army east with the intention of besieging that very same city only to find that there was already an army camped beneath its walls. Given that Basilia had bought dwarven engines so that she would at least be able to breach the walls of Penthes and put an end to the war she’d begun, this was a... frustrating situation.

The Secretariat of Delos had invited her to mediate a peace between the parties involved, but while Helike and its vassals were amenable the Republic was proving to be rather more obstinate. The People had voted that Anaxares the Diplomat yet lived, and so was still Hierarch of the League of Free Cities. As a consequence, it was illegal for them to receive foreign envoys. The situation in the south had therefore turned into a farce of standoff under the walls of Penthes, General Basilia having refused to give battle and instead sent war parties to pillage the Penthesian countryside. She was, Cordelia suspected, trying to earn back what she had spent on those dwarven war engines.

“Then we lean on Atalante,” the First Prince said. “If they consent, Delos could at last call a formal session of the League of Free Cities.”

The end of hostilities that entailed could be used to force Bellerophon back to its territory, given that the republic still claimed to be loyal to its lost Hierarch. If General Basilia could steal a march on Bellerophon when hostilities resumed after, she could claim the siege first and finally bring the civil war to an end. Beginning to consider how the ruling priests might be convinced to end their self-imposed isolation, Cordelia ceased when she saw a messenger come for her. She glanced at the Librarian, who snorted before taking the offered scroll for her. It was given unto her afterwards, however, and she frowned. The head of the Circle of Thorns, Louis de Sartrons, claimed he had urgent news.

And to think she had almost begun to find a silver lining to the cloud.

Cordelia wasted no time in heading towards the salon where her spymaster would be waiting. The conversation would trouble her carefully arranged schedule if it ran for too long, and she had an obligation that could not be put off later that evening, but she would have to adapt. Louis de Sartrons was not the kind of man to call anything urgent without good reason. Within moment of sitting across from him and taking a polite sip at the served tea, the skeletally thin older man spoke a sentence that chilled her blood.

“The Dead King is looking for the ealamal.”

Cordelia carefully set down the cup, painted porcelain of exquisite delicacy. She did not ask whether or not her spymaster was certain, as it would be an insult to the both of them.

“Has he found it?” she asked instead, forcing calm.

“I believe not,” Louis de Sartrons replied. “A Revenant was caught in southern Lyonis and another was seen in Lange, but the facility in Brabant has not been breached.”

It would not be catastrophic even if it were, Cordelia reminded herself. Brabant had been judged too close to the enemy, and so the weapon had been moved into southeastern Aisne.

“Destroy it,” Cordelia ordered. “We must be sure the Enemy learns as little as he can.”

“I will see it done,” her spymaster agreed, then thinly smiled. “It may very well be only a matter of time until it is found regardless of any measure, Your Highness. Unless we let Chosen see to the defences-”

“We will not,” the First Prince sharply interrupted.

She would not let the White Knight usurp control of the weapon. It had been made of the corpse of an angel of Judgement, there could be no pretence of Hanno of Arwad not becoming its master as soon as he laid hands on it – and he would, if any of the Chosen took up guarding the ealamal. The loyalty of the heroes went first to their champion, and the White Knight had already proved himself untrustworthy in the Arsenal. Cordelia would not make the same mistake twice.

“Then the best we can deliver is delay, Your Highness,” Louis de Sartrons blandly said. “And I would consider Sister Alberte’s proposal that a limited test be attempted. Otherwise we know too little of the weapon for it to be considered usable, in my opinion.”

The First Prince hesitated, staying silent. It had been the question that plagued them all ever since the Salian Peace. What would a weapon made of a fallen angel of Judgement do, if Judgement was kept silent by a madman? The Hidden Horror himself had claimed that the Tyrant of Helike had spared them all a great doom by arranging for the Hierarch to do this, and the secrets unearthed in Levant last year had borne this true in part. If the Intercessor truly could influence angels, using the ealamal would have been a mistake. It would have given that enigmatic monster power of life and death over half of Calernia. Yet with the Hierarch staying true to his course of obstruction, the situation had changed again.

If the ealamal could be used without the Intercessor’s meddling, then Cordelia still had a way to prevent the fall of Calernia. If. Only none could tell her what the weapon might do without the guidance of angels behind it, and there was no known precedent to draw on. What way but a test was there to gain an answer? A small use, limited in scope, but still a use. The First Prince was inclined to agree with her spymaster of the necessity, but it was not so simple as that. There was another crowned head whose assent must be gained before that, lest in chasing ghosts Cordelia make an enemy of the living. Catherine Foundling had not been shy in voicing her disapproval of the entire affair, and absurdly enough the Black Queen was now Cordelia’s closest and most important ally.

“I am to speak with the Black Queen tonight,” she finally said. “The subject will be broached.”

“That is all I can ask, Your Highness,” Louis de Sartrons said, bowing his head.

—

The parlour had been refurbished from floor to ceiling when it was first dedicated to a new purpose, that of serving as the scrying room the First Prince of Procer would use to speak with the Queen of Callow. An entire wall had been covered by a beautiful silver mirror while the plush sofas had been replaced by a beautiful yet severe set of Lycaonese armchairs and tables. Bureaus had been filled with papers which might be of use in discussion, the latest reports and predictions, while the walls were covered with maps and tapestries. Every detail had been tailored according to what her agents believed to be the preferences of Catherine Foundling.

Though Cordelia doubted their common amiability could be traced back to these changes, it had to be said that at least the change of furniture had ensured that the Black Queen would no longer eye the more elaborate Alamans furnishings with barely veiled disdain. The First Prince was in some ways rather amused by the other royal’s disdain for luxuries, considering that for all her severe inclinations she was likely one of the wealthiest women in all of Calernia these days.

The First Prince of Procer poured herself a cup of mead and set the pitcher down on the table before slipping into the armchair – discreetly made more comfortable with cushions – and allowed herself to take a sip. Unlike the Black Queen, who usually guzzled wine as if it were water while they talked, she moderated herself. It made it all the more frustrating that the drink usually came to redden her cheeks before it did the other ruler’s, to be frank. Before she had even set down the cup, the surface of the mirror before her rippled. It took a moment for the wizards of the Observatory in Laure to bind her to the Hierophant’s spell in Praes, but hardly more than a few breaths.

On the other side of the mirror the Black Queen, looking as tired as Cordelia herself felt, offered her a lopsided grin.

“Your Highness,” Queen Catherine of Callow said.

“Your Majesty,” First Prince Cordelia of Procer replied.

Catherine Foundling could be striking on a good day, but this did not seem to be one of them. Her clothes were ruffled, her expression drawn and there was no sign of the ruinous charisma that had drawn so many to her causes – fair and foul. The cloth covering the eye she’d lost in Hainaut was slightly askew, which made her shark cheekbones stand out more than usual. Cordelia almost wished she had not taken the time to put on a fine dress in Rhenian blue herself, but only almost. Even if Foundling noticed the difference between them, which a slight frown told Cordelia she had, the queen was was always easier to deal with when the Lycaonese princess was dressed becomingly.

The Black Queen’s wandering eye was well-know, and Cordelia had not gotten where she was by refusing to use the arrows in her quiver.

“A trying day?” the First Prince asked.

The tanned woman – even darker of skin, now that she campaigned under the Wasteland sun – barked out a laugh.

“In a way,” the Black Queen said. “I have what I came for: High Lord Sargon’s granary and his treasury are secured and ready to be moved. I can begin heading south for a decisive battle.”

“A great victory,” Cordelia said, meaning every word.

The city of Wolof was famous even in her native Rhenia, known as a great fortress that’d broken the same armies that had taken Ater and brought down the Tower. That Foundling had beggared it without even having to storm the walls or losing more than a handful of men was the kind of feat a reputation could be made of, were the Black Queen’s own not far beyond such tales nowadays.

“So they tell me,” Catherine Foundling tiredly said. “Akua Sahelian left my camp two days ago. Our spies in Wolof tell me she has entered the Empyrean Palace.”

Cordelia, knowing the Doom of Liesse to be a thorny matter, took a sip from her mead as she chose her words.

“Her desertion is as you predicted,” the First Prince said. “And planned for.”

The other woman winced.

“If I might give you a word of advice?”

Cordelia cocked a brow but nodded.

“I wouldn’t ever say anything that could be construed as a variation on ‘just as planned’,” the Black Queen said, and she seemed completely serious. “That never ends well.”

The blonde princess leaned back into her seat. It was absurd enough advice, on the surface, but it was no fool giving it.

“One of the obscure rules of... Named, I take it,” Cordelia said, deciding using Chosen or Damned would be undiplomatic.

“More for villains than heroes,” the Black Queen said, “but it’s best steered clear of across the board. Sharp irony tends to ensure.”

“I will keep it in mind when dealing with Named,” Cordelia replied.

It was useful information and there was no denying that in these matters Catherine Foundling was a great deal more learned than Frederic Goethal, who Cordelia had attempted to learn from only to find his knowledge of the affairs of Chosen to be rather shallow. The likes of the Peregrine and the Black Queen seemed, unfortunately, to be quite rare.

“Might be useful for you to keep in mind period,” the queen drawled.

“While I appreciate the implicit compliment, I am not Chosen,” Cordelia flatly said.

The other woman leaned back into her seat, inside that campaign tent of hers. She took up a goblet of what looked like that truly horrid orcish liquor – aragh – and knocked it back, offering a toothy smile afterwards.

“Maybe not right now,” the Black Queen said. “But I wouldn’t bet on that staying true forever. Vivienne tells me you’ve gotten Levant back into a semblance of order.”

The heiress to Callow would have read the report earlier. It seemed an odd change of subject, but likely wasn’t. These little detours were a staple of conversation with Catherine Foundling, she had learned.

“Lady Itima’s contributions were key,” Cordelia said. “But I will agree that the Dominion has somewhat stabilized.”

“Yeah,” the Queen of Callow drawled, rolling her eye. “I’m sure Itima Ifriqui was the one who came up with that oath and propaganda plan. Seems right up her alley, that play.”

Cordelia’s lips thinned.

“You have a point, I imagine?”

“You got Levant in order,” the Black Queen said. “You’re keeping Procer from falling apart and taking the lead in the fight against the Dead King. There’s a title for someone who does that, Hasenbach.”

Ah, were they now dispensing with titles? Foundling usually on began that a few drinks in.

“Is there?” the First Prince replied, skeptical.

“Sure,” Foundling shrugged. “Warden of the West. What a fun coincidence that you happen to already bear it.”

“That door lay open before me once,” Cordelia coldly said. “I did not step through the threshold. It is not a choice I regret.”

“You didn’t take the Name, maybe,” the Black Queen said. “But the Role, you made it yours anyway. There’s not a pie west of the Whitecaps you don’t have your finger in. Might take a year, might take twenty, but Creation will answer to the truth of that.”

She smiled, looking fearsome and sympathetic both.

“You can swim against the river all you like, Cordelia Hasenbach,” she said. “It won’t get tired before you do.”

The genuine sympathy in the other woman’s voice made it a harder blow than if she’d been cruel. It sounded like something she truly did believe. And though this talk of Name and Role was... esoteric, there seemed to be some manner of logic to it. However tortured. And though you are a madwoman , Catherine Foundling , Cordelia thought, you might just be the cleverest madwoman alive. This was not an assertion to be lightly dismissed.

“I will heed your warning,” the First Prince said, politely calling the subject to a close.

Foundling nodded, looking almost nonchalant. She was... loose tonight, Cordelia decided. Less controlled than usual. And for all her drinking and seeming carelessness, the Black Queen usually kept close mastery of herself. This, though, seemed unguarded.

“Does Sahelian’s betrayal truly trouble you so?” the fair-haired princess quietly asked. “You told me of its coming months ago.”

“It stings,” Catherine Foundling artlessly confessed. “I didn’t think it would. Wasn’t sure it would, maybe.”

“And still you went forward with this scheme,” Cordelia said. “Why? There are less convoluted ways to take revenge, Foundling. And I did not question your plans, for this is an affair of Named and Callowan besides, but I will admit I find what I know of this to be baffling.”

The one-eyed queen’s lips quirked. That had, somehow, pleased her to hear. She truly took as compliments the strangest of things.

“It’s not just about revenge,” the Black Queen said. “It’s... hard to articulate.”

Cordelia was not so sure. She thought it might instead be that it was the simplest thing to articulate in the world, but that the queen across the mirror would resist speaking those words to the bitter end. It was a shocking thought, that Catherine Foundling might have affections for the woman that’d destroyed Liesse, but in a way fascinating as well. Cordelia was not certain whether it was the tint of tragedy to the whole affair or simply that she had never before met someone with such spectacularly terrible taste in women before, but the perhaps the truth lay somewhere in the middle.

“A strange revenge indeed, to return her home and to the Tower’s service after having been one of your inner circle,” Cordelia mildly said. “Unless you have sabotaged her prospects?”

The Black Queen grinned, a vicious slice of ivory.

“Oh, not at all,” Catherine Foundling said. “She is going to get everything that she ever wanted.”

The queen poured herself another cupful of liquor.

“But that’s the thing with Praes, see,” she continued. “You get whatever you want, but never the way you want it.”

“It is your campaign to lead,” Cordelia finally said. “And I cannot gainsay your results so far.”

“It’ll be a battle next,” Foundling opined. “A convergence. The fate of Praes going forward is going to be wrestled over. And after that...”

“Ater,” the First Prince completed.

“It ends there,” the Black Queen said. “I’ll get it done, Cordelia. I know the stakes. I’ll muster the East and we’ll come with its full array of war.”

And the truth was that the First Prince believed her. Because the two of them had grown beyond enmity, even as enemies, and though they were not friends – would never be – a trust had grown between them. You could only share the burden of the world on your back with someone for so long before you took to them, even a little.

“We don’t have long left,” Cordelia quietly admitted. “We are giving ground on all fronts now. And the southern principalities are beginning to buck my authority, slowly but surely. I expect there will be defections before you return.”

There was only so long people were willing to have the lifeblood squeezed out of them to support a war they’d never seen with their own eyes. And though Cordelia had pushed through the Highest Assembly measures that would buy the realm a few more months, the hard measures she’d relied on to see it done had made her enemies.

“You’re keeping up the sky with your back, Hasenbach,” the Black Queen replied, tone oddly gentle. “I don’t expect the impossible of you. If it were anyone else in your seat, this war would already be lost.”

“We might lose it anyway,” Cordelia said, and hesitated.

It was now, she thought or never.

“The ealamal,” the First Prince said. “I want to find out what it does with Judgement silenced. In case...”

In case they lost the war, she left unsaid. The Black Queen grimaced.

“You want a test,” she said.

Cordelia nodded. Added nothing more.

“Fuck,” Catherine Foundling cursed, leaning back into her seat.

There was a long moment of silence.

“Crows take me. Do it .”

Interlude: East I

“As a rule, principles are trouble. If you have them, unprincipled men will despise you. If you do not have them, principled men will despise you. My advice, my son, is therefore to choose terribly mediocre principles but keep to them religiously.”

– Extract from the infamous ‘Sensible Testament’ of Basilea Chrysanthe of Nicae

“And the nature of her alliance with the First Prince?”

Akua Sahelian had found that betrayal was not unlike putting on an old dress. The cut did not quite fit as it would have once did, but there was a certain comfort in the... familiarity of the object. Sargon had been dear enough to grant her use of the family’s finest scrying mirrors – ancient artefacts, tall as a man and twice as broad – so the illusion that she was seated at a table in the same council room as the Dread Empress of Praes was rather convincing. The clarity of the spell allowed for the game to be played as if they were in person, Malicia reading her face as she read Malicia’s. It was rather invigorating to fence this way with a woman of the empress’ calibre.

“Largely a result of common interests,” Akua said. “There is a surprising degree of trust there, but that is not unexpected after Catherine’s restraint during the Peace of Salia.”

Callow had been well positioned to extort Procer when the time had come for bargaining. There was not much the First Prince could have afforded to do but bend, given the imminent collapse of her realm if she did not, but Catherine had instead chosen to court goodwill. Given how important the trust between the two greatest rulers of the Great Alliance had become, and the veiled frustration on Malicia’s face when she spoke of Procer, Akua was inclined to believe it had been the right decision to make.

“There has been some method to her recklessness,” Malicia conceded. “Your opinion, then, on her relationship with Yannu Marave and Itima Ifriqui?”

Oh my, she truly was frustrated. Mentioning those two names – the two heads of the great lines of the Blood that were not Catherine’s informal pupils – was a tacit admission that Malicia was trying to get a peace here in Praes by getting the broader Grand Alliance to twist Callow’s arm into accepting it. No doubt she’d already tried Cordelia Hasenbach and been rebuffed, so she was now looking for other angles of approach. Unfortunately for the empress, the Dominion was dead grounds in this regard.

“She is highly respected, due to her role in the Grey Pilgrim’s resurrection after the Princes’ Graveyard,” Akua said. “I don’t believe she has spoken much with the Lady of Vaccei at all, but she has a solid accord with Lord Yannu.”

Akua decided to keep it up her sleeve that not a single one of the Blood would dare to cross Catherine at the moment. Not while she had the Barrow Sword at her side and they very much wanted to avoid her protection of him extending beyond the confines of the war. If she kept meddling in the politics of Levant that might change, but for now having both fear and respect at her back meant that Malicia would find no purchase with the Levantines. It might be amusing to see her fail in the attempt, however, so Akua offered her empress a pleasant smile instead of potentially useful information.

“Her talent for ingratiating herself to key individuals is proving to be an obstacle,” Malicia deplored.

And perhaps Akua would have agreed, as a girl, when she could only think of strength through the Empire’s conception of it. An outlook that would claim Catherine was ahead because of a superior quality. In this case, Malicia seemed to have decided it was talent for making alliances at the highest rungs of power. To triumph over her the Dread Empress would have to bring her own superior qualities to bear and decisively beat her opponent. Yet the old certitudes no longer rang so true. Praes is so deeply despised out west nowadays that Hasenbach could not agree to a bargain even if it were advantageous , Akua thought. That is not of Catherine’s making.

The Dread Empress had won too many battles, ceasing to question if they needed to be fought at all. Victory was a heady brew, Akua knew better than most, but she was surprised that Malicia would fall prey to such a mistake. The empress had always struck her as being an exquisitely self-controlled woman. Then again, the Carrion Lord was involved. It was always harder to see clearly when the cut was so close to the heart.

Akua knew that too, and learned the lesson roughly enough it still left the edges of her raw.

“The Dead King has forced together strange alliances,” she simply said.

Malicia looked amused, understanding the sentence for the veiled reference that it was.

“How have you found the body?” the empress asked.

Akua closed the fingers of her right hand into a fist, enjoying the sensation of skin on skin. It had been almost overwhelming at first: her time as a shade had blurred the memory of what sensations actually felt like. Returning to the real thing after the pale shadow she’d lived with had needed some adjustment. There was an even greater boon attached, of course. Akua murmured a single word in the mage tongue, opening her hand into a flat palm, and a dot of hellfire bloomed above it.

“More than satisfactory,” she said. “A princely gift, Your Dread Majesty.”

“I reward loyalty, Warlock,” Malicia smiled. “And sometimes even the anticipation of it.”

The Named being spoken aloud earned a small shiver from Akua every time. She was not a claimant for it, not yet, but Creation was recognizing the... possibility. That the potential was there. Neither of them mentioned the spells Malicia’s mages had hidden that would allow the empress to kill her with a word, though they both knew they were somewhere in the flesh. As always, the Dread Empress’ words had two meanings: if loyalty earned reward, then disloyalty earned punishment. The mere anticipation of it would too, as Malicia had subtly warned.

“I’ve no doubt ours will be a close relationship, Your Dread Majesty,” Akua lied.

“Oh, I agree,” Malicia lied back.

The empress deigned to take a sip from her cup, some dark liquor cut with water.

“My decision to place trust in you is why I have decided to assign you to the Black Knight’s command for the coming battle,” Malicia continued. “Your unique insights into the adversary will be of great use, I am sure, but I most look forward to seeing your magic on display once more.”

A transparent enough ploy, but that was on purpose: the empress was asserting control. As the first measure of that control, she wanted Akua to kill enough of the Army of Callow with sorcery that the bridge back to that side would be forever burned. There was not a ruler worth their salt on the continent that did not know Catherine Foundling loved her soldiers just as fiercely as they loved her.

“Of course,” Akua replied, not batting an eye. “In that spirit, I would seek your permission to obtain artefacts from my cousin. The Sahelian arsenal is best put to your service, not left to gather dust.”

“If he is amenable, I don’t see why not,” Malicia smiled.

A lie, Akua decided. The answer had been too smooth, too unthinking. Sargon must have already been given strict instructions about the calibre of what he was allowed to lend her. The empress feared she might be able to slip the leash too early, then. Interesting.

“My thanks,” she said, bowing her head.

“Think nothing of it,” the empress dismissed. “Are you confident, with such aid, of being able to match the Hierophant on the field?”

“It would depend on the amount of magic he first ingests with Devour ,” Akua said, feigning reluctance. “I have not seen his upper limit as a thaumatophage. Placing mage circles under my command or moving me to Marshal Nim’s side early so that I might begin preparing rituals would increase my chances.”

She liked Masego. He was a fascinating conversationalist and Akua had something of an inherited fondness for tactless mages. It had been marrying convenience to her own preference to lie about his abilities. With the Tower under the impression that he could simply suck dry entire battalion of mages if they were in sight, he’d be treated as an entity to be avoided instead of a Named that could be fought. And if Malicia’s most sensible answer to this was placing greater power in the hands of another special asset – like an incipient Warlock, just for example – then was it not the best of both worlds? The Dread Empress studied her for a moment, then conceded with the slightest movement of the head.

“I will speak with my Black Knight,” Malicia said, committing to nothing. “Expect to depart soon.”

A moment passed.

“Great gifts bring the expectation of great results, Warlock,” the empress added.

Meaning that should she be granted her request failure to match the Hierophant would have... consequences. Ah, how very old-fashioned of her. Akua found it rather charming.

“That is only natural,” Akua easily replied.

The empress chuckled. It was a languorous sound, and though it had little effect on her Akua could appreciate the artistry as a fellow seductress. Dread Empress Malicia was almost inhumanly beautiful, of course, but in truth that ran rather somewhat contrary to Akua’s tastes. She had spent many years surrounded by the perfect and the splendid, eventually growing tired of the fare. She preferred character nowadays, the interestingly imperfect. The empress was simply too exquisite to qualify. Besides, women were rarely of interest to her. She could count on one hand the number she’d been attracted to. She caught the scent of smoke.

Looking down Akua saw her hand had closed into a fist, smothering the hellflame. She’d not even realized she’d done it. The growing pains of a new body, she told herself.

“I do enjoy conversing with you, Akua,” Malicia lightly said. “They are always interesting, our little talks.”

“I aim to please,” she replied.

The empress smiled and Akua could feel the conversation was now to end. They had reached the end of their business for the day. And it was a whim, to ask, but she did not kill it when it rose. She had wondered from the moment she’d realized that work on the body awaiting her in the depths of the Empyrean Palace would have begun months before she ever set foot in Praes.

“How did you know?” Akua asked.

The Dread Empress of Praes studied her with dark eyes. Not a speck of gold in them. Blood as muddy as the land she’d been born of, running through the veins of the longest-reigning tyrant in the history of Praes.

“That I would turn on them,” she said. “I did not, until the very end. How did you know ?”

Dread Empress Malicia’s smile was sad, she thought, and perhaps the sole genuine emotion she had shown this entire conversation.

“You came too late,” the empress said. “Even if some loved you, and I expect they did. You came to them too late, Akua. They were never going to forgive you for what they might have forgiven each other. There was no becoming one of the five.”

Her face went blank, like she was some kind of tipsy debutante. It was still better than the spasm of pain that would have shown on her face otherwise.

“In the end, darling, you were always going to come back,” Malicia gently said. “This is the only home you have.”

Sorcery rippled across the mirror, turning it back to simple polished silver, and Akua was left to wonder whether it had been kindness or an assertion of power to end the spell on that sentence. Perhaps a little of both, she decided. Though the dark-skinned woman knew she could have risen to her feet and distracted herself with movement, with pouring herself a cup of wine from the carafe or biting into a pear – the sheer pleasure of proper taste , after all this time – she did not. Instead she sat there and closed her eyes, thinking while it was all still fresh.

She had just fooled the empress successfully for the first time, after days of being interrogated for every scrap of knowledge on the Army of Callow and the Grand Alliance that she cared to divulge, but it did not feel like much a victory. She would admit it had been enjoyable, sparring with the empress. Sharpening iron with iron, the two of them knowing a single misstep would be enough for the other to pounce. Yet now that it was over, looking at what had been done, it felt... childish. Gaudy. No, neither of those were exactly right. More like she’d been indulging in something particularly-

“Wasteful,” Akua Sahelian murmured.

Scrapping iron for no real purpose save vanity. What had been gained from it all, really? They had circled each other like crocodiles snapping at each other’s tails, a triumph only of showing teeth. If instead they had sat and spoken plainly for even an hour, understood where they differed and where they might concur, would it not have – ah , she thought. And there it was. That old Sahelian greed, whispering again in her ear: she had left the fire for the dark, but she wanted all the pleasures of both. Akua rose to her feet at last, drawing back the chair and gliding past the wine carafe. It was the long window at the back of the room she sought, great panes of glass that could be pushed open to pair a lazy evening breeze with the view. She leaned against the windowsill, enjoying to the touch of the wind on her face, and lost herself looking at the distant silhouettes of Zaman Ango. The ancient maze, the sloping pyramids of mud.

Malicia had been right, she thought. This was home. The warmth of the fire had lulled her into indolence, but she’d snapped out of it at last. She would not forget that moment in the cave, where it had at last sunk in that nothing would make a change. That Akua could turn on her family, on her people, on everything she believed in and had ever loved since she was a child, and still it would not be enough . Because her folly had been the doom of a city, of a hundred thousand souls, and while the Gods knew of forgiveness Catherine Foundling did not. Had that been the revenge, she’d wondered then? Making her... and then ripping away the curtain, leaving her to look a merciless truth in the eye.

Maybe it was. Dartwick had wounded more shallowly when she’d made her rip out the eye instead.

And the worst of it was that, even now, part of her ached to leave. To return. It would not go without comment, her absence, and yet Akua thought she might be able to talk her way out of the worst of it. And she’d still have the evenings spent designing wards with Masego, the drinks and lurid gossip with Indrani. Even those cautious, almost Praesi talks with Adjutant – who wanted to learn all she had to tell of the highborn of the Wasteland while giving back as little as he could for it. And another, of course, the one she’d left behind most of all.

Akua had thought to kill Catherine Foundling, once. To slay her and claim all she had built, perhaps even wearing her face. When she had still been a prisoner of the Mantle of Woe, sent back to the maddening boredom of nothingness in between brief tastes of Creation. Ah, but what interesting tastes they had been. Grandiose plans of war against half the continent, diplomacy with the most powerful people on Calernia. Then even more terrible sights, on the way to Keter. And even as she was dragged from wonder to wonder, there was the once-Squire in the middle of it all. Now a Black Queen, turned into everything Akua had thought she might become.

Fascination had been the doom of many a Sahelian.

“But it doesn’t matter, does it?” Akua said to the wind.

There was no joy to chase at the end of that path. No long-awaited delight, nothing to suffer for. She would not be forgiven, and even a lifetime of saving strangers and helping fools would not see her redeemed in anyone’s eyes. She had been chasing ghosts the entire time. So why stay? Why not come back to the home she had sold for nothing , to the destiny that had been taken from her? Warlock, yes, for that was Malicia’s offer. But why stop there? Sargon wanted her to free him of the soulbox, and so she could use him to free this body from Malicia’s yoke. Beyond the walls of Wolof, Praes was a cauldron about to tip over and in such chaos a clever woman could rise far. If she was to have a foot in the Tower, why not climb all the way to the top?

If none of it mattered, why should Akua Sahelian not get everything she deserved?

A voice she was learning to hate whispered that perhaps she already had. She ignored it. It was the voice of weakness, of the lion gone tame. She could see it in her mind’s eye, the path up the stairs. It began with the Black Knight, Marshal Nim. The key to the Legions, not that Malicia seemed to have grasped that. Her only Black Knight before Nim had the loyalty of the Legions for having reformed them, but the bond ran deeper than that. Black Knights were the champions of the Tower, commander of armies and killers of heroes. There was a Role: Malicia had done more than simply name a new champion when she had recognized the ogre’s claim. Should Marshal Nim prove less than utterly loyal, why, it might just be that the armies of Praes would split between following the old Black Knight and the new.

Did that not simply reek of opportunity? Yes, she decided, it was the beginning of a plan. One that would allow her to sit on the sole throne in all of Praes, before all was said and done.

So why, Akua Sahelian wondered, was she not hearing the song?

—

Amadeus had always enjoyed looking at the Hungering Sands as night fell.

It was a pleasure to the eye, the way the sky turned to vivid purples and yellows with not a cloud in sight. The way the shadows lengthened among the dunes like slithering snakes. Even the coolness was pleasant, when wearing a cloak. That much had been a necessity, given that it was only feasible to meet the woman he’d come to see under some cover of darkness. He’d not seen her in at least fifteen years, by Amadeus’ reckoning, but neither of them would forget the other. Lady Layan Kaishi had once been Commander Layan of the Third Legion, before she came to rule a prosperous little town at the outskirts of the Hungering Sands.

She’d lost an arm at the siege of Laure, and not in a manner where it might be replaced, but the Legions had not abandoned her. When she’d sought a discharge and returned home to settle accounts with her family, ‘volunteer legionaries on leave’ had accompanied her. Lord Kaisha had fallen down some stairs, as had his young wife – Layan’s own age, he’d heard – whose luck in birthing a son possessing the Gift had first seen Layan given the choice of the Legions or the grave. Some of those legionaries had even returned after their terms were over, stayed on as household guards, and though the holdings of Lady Layan were not large or rich they were known to be orderly. It’d drawn people to her town, as safety always did in troubled times.

Layan had not forgotten whose help it was that’d seen her made a lady: when Amadeus had contacted her, she’d agreed to lend a hand without hesitation. It had not been an onerous favour he asked for, anyway, simply the use of one of her family mages for a scrying ritual. Sometimes the dark-haired man wondered if anyone aside from Eudokia really grasped the sheer number of veterans he’d settled across the breadth of Praes. Most of them were not lords or ladies, of course – a campaign to stack the nobility with his veterans would have caused rebellion – but he’d seen to their livelihoods. Appointments in the local bureaucracies, free land leases in the Green Stretch, cushy posts in city guards or advantageous trade permits.

The Legions of Terror had bled for him across a dozen fields. Amadeus would not let their legionaries tumble into destitution after they left the ranks. And now, in his own time on need, he had found many doors still open to him. It was not the same as when he had been able to call on the Eyes, when Eudokia and Ime had left no stone unturned and council unheard, but he’d learned he still had friends in many places. Not a net of them, but it was better that way. Ime would have been able to infiltrate an organized apparatus, but she could not track entire decades of friendships and loyalties forged through two wars. So long as Amadeus remained quick and careful, so long as he kept moving, the Eyes would stay one step behind. It’d be enough.

In most fights, one step’s worth of distance was all that he needed.

Layan had aged gracefully, hair threaded with silver and skin wrinkled but staying fit in form. She’d come to him out in the sands with her mage, as the odds were good that there was at least one traitor in her keep, but when they met she had hesitated before clasping the arm he offered. Amadeus’s lips quirked in amusement. She had not been the first of his veterans to react this way.

“The beard?” he teased.

“And the grey,” Layan admitted. “Never thought I’d see you with either, sir. No offence.”

“None taken,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many reacted the same.”

She snorted.

“With all due respect, sir, no I wouldn’t,” Layan said.

For all the levity, her eyes had sharpened when he’d mentioned others. She hesitated, then spoke again.

“Is it true?” Layan asked. “That out west you made a claim on the Tower?”

“Rumours fly far and swift, I see,” Amadeus noted.

“Rashan up north was a captain in the Fifth,” Lady Layan said. “His kid and one of mine are married. Lady Salah’s husband, out in Jubar, he’s the brother of the Second’s last quartermaster. We talk, sir. And not just us. There’s a lot who came home after the wars who’re still around. And a lot of us who have kin in the Legions and the Army.”

It still filled Amadeus with a rueful sort of pride, every time he heard the army raised by Istrid’s daughter and his own spoken of as a peer to the Legions he’d given so many years of his life to.

“I spoke words at the Peace of Salia,” Amadeus said. “I stand by them still.”

Layan Kaishi nodded, eyes hooded in the unfolding dark of the evening.

“There’s a lot of us who’ll come, if you call,” she quietly said. “More than you know. Not just veterans and our families.”

She hesitated.

“It can’t go on like this, sir,” Layan said. “This chaos . Ashur burns our coasts and now we play parlour games pretending they’re allies?”

She spat to the side, into the sand.

“Fuck that,” Layan cursed. “And whatever the Hells is happening with Sepulchral up north should have been stamped out years ago, not left to burn for whatever scheme this is. The empress is getting lost in her plots, sir. Doesn’t matter she keeps winning, we’re just tired of the games.”

And in a way, Amadeus thought, those few sentences he’d just heard were the most damning a verdict passed on Alaya’s reign he’d yet to hear. Because when the Tower was losing people like Layan, who was neither rebellious nor ambitious by nature, who most wanted out of a ruler competence and order, something had gone wrong. Were you always like this, Alaya, and I simply never wanted to see it? No, he did not believe that. They had lost perspective, over the years. He as much as she. They’d spent too long sitting on high seats, forgot what the view from the mud was like. Like all empires, like all rulers, they had reached their zenith and begun to decay. Old mistakes were yet in need of mending, and Amadeus of the Green Stretch would not relent until he had laid them all to rest.

That much he owed, to all and to himself.

“I am already a rebel, Layan,” he faintly smiled.

“We can be too, if you want,” his veteran boldly offered. “And there’s enough of us we can get High Lady Takisha behind you if you toss her a few bones. It’s not just us old hands who want an end to the messes. We’ve got support.”

The High Lady of Kahtan would turn on him the very moment she felt she was in a position to claim the Tower for herself, of course. They both knew that without Layan needing to speak the words.

“Another banner raised won’t end this,” Amadeus gently declined. “But beyond your help tonight, there is something that can be done.”

Layan Kaisha was almost seventy. She’d not been in the Legions of Terror for over twenty years. And still, the moment he finished that sentence, she snapped at attention like a cadet fresh off the College rolls. Some things just stay with us, don’t they? he fondly thought. Amadeus understood. He, too, had never quite shaken the stray dog out of his bones. He still found it easier to bite than kneel.

“High Lady Takisha has gathered the nobles of the south to her court,” he said. “Do not let them disperse. Take them north: Ater is where this all comes to a close.”

Layan slowly nodded.

“So long as the Grey Eyries are rebelling and Old Wither’s holed up in Foramen, many will balk at leaving the Sands,” she said.

“The Tribes won’t move,” Amadeus said.

It was not a prediction or a promise. It was a statement of fact. Her eyes widened in surprise.

“Are they- no, best you don’t answer that,” she decided. “They can’t get out of me what I don’t know.”

It was rather heartwarming to see that the safety protocols Ranker had designed were still being kept to. Her contributions to the Reforms had been more discreet than his or Grem’s, but no less crucial for it.

“I’ll spread the word, sir,” Layan said. “We should have enough pull for it.”

And Alaya would want the nobles close, even if she lost the battle taking shape in the depths of the Wasteland. The starker her disarray, the closer she would want them to the Tower: troublesome as they would be in its shadow, it was nothing to the trouble they would make out of her reach. So even if the Eyes learned he had a hand in this, and they would, Alaya would allow it. She would trust in her mastery of the Court to triumph against whatever scheme he might have arranged.

“There’ll be a battle, before it ends,” Amadeus said, offering his arm to clasp.

“Then we’ll meet again, sir,” Layan smiled, taking it. “I still fit in my armour.”

She cast a look around, glossing over the young mage she’d brought as he requested – he had long prepared the ritual, needing only a word to begin – and casting about for another shadow in the gloom.

“I’d heard the Lady was with you,” she said, a question in her tone.

“Ranger’s out and about,” he smiled. “Checking to see if there are any rats.”

“I pity them if there are,” Layan muttered.

With one last glance they parted ways, Amadeus sliding down the side of the hill to speak to the mageling in neat robes awaiting by a simple scrying bowl laid atop a rock.

“I can begin at your pleasure, my lord,” the young man said. “Though the key you gave me is utter nonsense, so it ought to do nothing at all.”

“Then it will do nothing,” Amadeus serenely replied. “The spell, now.”

Though somewhat put out, the young sorcerer duly spoke the incantation and the spell shivered across the air. When the water’s surface rippled the mageling gaped in surprise. Amadeus’ cool stare shook him out of it, making the dismissal clear. He bowed, then ran off after his aunt into the sands. The green-eyed man passed a hand through his hair, which he decided was getting a little too long, and waited for the ripples to cease. It took nearly a quarter hour for it to happen, and only then did a face appear in the water. Deep-set yellow eyes and wrinkled skin that looked like brown-green leather swam into focus.

High Lady Wither of Foramen, formerly Matron of the High Ridge Tribe, looked highly irritated until she realized who it was she was looking at. Then her face went blank, mouth closing shut with a snap.

“Good evening, Wither,” Amadeus smiled, showing only the faintest slice of teeth. “It’s been some time, hasn’t it?”

The old goblin hissed in displeasure through her teeth, almost like a whistle. Obtaining the key to her private scrying bowl had not endeared him to her, evidently.

“Never long enough, Carrion Lord,” she said. “Come to threaten me into changing sides?”

“I usually threaten only people I intend to later kill regardless,” Amadeus noted. “Fear is a poor incentive for alliance. I suppose I could bluster a bit, if it will make you feel better about what is to follow.”

“And what’s that?” Wither mocked, flashing her teeth mockingly.

“I am going to tell you a story,” Amadeus amiably said, “and you will then give me what I politely ask for.”

“You’re getting thick in your old age, Carrion Lord,” Wither said. “My defences are fine enough Ranger didn’t even try for my life when you two passed through Foramen. You have nothing to threaten me with, and any offer you make the Tower will double without batting an eye.”

Ah, Wither. For all that she was the first Matron to truly enter the highest reach of Praesi politics, she’d yet to learn to think beyond the goblin conception of conflict. Amadeus had never attempted to lay a hand on the High Lady of Foramen because what he’d come for had been of much greater value than anything an assassination might bring about. The green-eyed man had promised his old acquaintance a story, however, and so he would tell it.

“After the fall of Summerholm, during the Conquest,” Amadeus said, “it took less than six hours for the first rebel group to form.”

Garrison soldiers and a hedge wizard that’d escaped the Fields of Streges, planning to go to ground until most of the Legions left the city and then strike out at the invasion’s supply lines while the siege of Laure began. It had been a reasoned and practical plan, in Amadeus’ opinion. He’d appreciated the professionalism of it. Unfortunately Wekesa had spared the mage on purpose at the Fields, marking him with a discreet tracking spell, so they’d all been executed after interrogation.

“Three more emerged the following day,” he continued. “Even with Scribe personally overseeing the Eyes in the city, it quickly became clear that the situation was not tenable. Sooner or later we’d miss the cabals and the push against Laure would be endangered. Something needed to be done.”

Some had suggested mass executions of former soldiers, but Amadeus had found that ill-advised. It would simply replace known possible insurgents with military training for thrice their number in grieving relatives inclined to methods of insurgency that were harder to put down. If not worse. Callowans had long proven that they were perfectly willing to torch their own towns and cities while invaders were in them, should they be pushed far enough.

“The grey’s brought rambling with it,” Wither snorted. “You’re turning into a joke, Amadeus.”

The dark-haired man’s friendly smile did not waver.

“It occurred to me, then, that fighting the inevitable was pointless,” he said. “There would be rebel cabals. This was not an issue, however, so long as they were manageable rebel cabals.”

“So you started making your own rebel groups,” Wither dismissed. “Where spies were in the ranks from the start. I know the tale, Carrion Lord. It’s an old one – have you run out of cleverness, to be boasting of tricks decades old?”

“Ah,” the Carrion Lord said. “So you do remember.”

He cocked his head to the side.

“Why, then, did you old witches believe I wouldn’t catch you out using the same trick?”

Wither’s face went blank.

“Come now,” Amadeus murmured. “Alaya never bothered to understand your people beyond the levers that could be used to move them, Wither, but I made a study of you. Did you really think I wouldn’t figure out the Tribes have been making their own traitors for centuries?”

On the surface, the goblin custom of constant backstabbing and treachery was remarkably similar to broader Praesi philosophies: iron sharpening iron, echoes of jino-waza. But that was a surface resemblance only. Goblins always preferred taking from outsiders than each other. Competition was brutal within units – within a family, a tribe, within the Tribes – but unlike the governing philosophies of Praes the Tribes did have a concept of the ‘common good’ of their kind. They could and did sacrifice, if not for each other, then for the sake of their race. When the Goblin Rebellions became losing proposition, the Matrons always made the same decision: one or more turned traitor, the rest were butchered to appease the Tower.

There must always be someone in the Grey Eyries that Ater could deal with, else the talk might turn to annihilation instead of vassalage.

“You are grasping at straws,” Wither dismissed, “your position has become des-”

“It was cleverly done,” Amadeus honestly praised. “Whoever wins the war, wherever the balance of power lies, the Tribes will gain. Either Alaya keeps the Tower and you are confirmed the first High Lady of your kind, or the Grand Alliance prevails and the Confederation of the Grey Eyries is recognized as a sovereign nation by more than half the continent.”

It had been, in that classically goblin way, a viciously executed gambit. Because whether it was Wither that was the face of goblinkind going forward or the Confederation, the ‘loser’ would have to be drowned in blood. The deception risked being found out otherwise, the truth that the Matrons had planned this entire civil war of theirs from the start and that Wither was still very much one of them.

“You have nothing,” Wither said. “Not a thimble of proof to back this, because it is complete lunacy .”

“You played it too straight, Wither,” Amadeus told her, not unkindly. “That is what gave you away. We came to Foramen and there was not a single secret line of communication between you and the Matrons.”

He saw the realization sink into her, the way her large eyes narrowed in dismay. They had overcorrected in cutting off ties entirely. The Matrons should have been secretly negotiating with Wither if this was a genuine civil war. They’d wholly cut ties because they did not want the Eyes to catch them talking and figure out the entire affair was a ploy, which had been the very detail to confirm for Amadeus that it was all a ploy. Alaya would understand it too, if it was brought to her. Wither knew that.

And so she knew that Amadeus now had his fingers around a throat: hers and all the Tribes’.

“You sat on that for more than a year,” Wither finally said. “You’ve not simply been wandering around drinking and fucking the Lady of the Lake.”

Well, he’d not done just that.

“In the spirit of our understanding,” Amadeus amiably said, “I would like to make polite requests of you.”

“What is it you want, Carrion Lord?” Wither hissed. “You’ve turned the knife enough for a night.”

“I would like you to refrain from sallies outside your territory.”

“Fine,” Wither said, with ill grace.

“I would like use of your smuggling routes into Ater.”

She began to speak, but Amadeus raised a hand to interrupt her.

“I know the Matrons’ own were closed, but also Alaya left you your own as a reward,” he said. “Don’t bother.”

Wither grunted.

“Anything else?” she mocked.

“Oh, just one last thing,” Amadeus nonchalantly said.

The friendly smile turned thin and blade-like.

“I would like every last drop of goblinfire in possession of the Tribes.”

Chapter 12: String

“There are three decisions that can only be mistakes: trusting a peace in the Free Cities, intervening in an Alamans succession and campaigning in the Wasteland.”

– Queen Matilda the Elder of Callow

It was General Sacker I’d wanted to talk to, as her informal patroness, but instead I found all three of the leaders of the Rebel Legions sitting on the other side of the scrying bowl.

That made an amusingly odd trio to look at, I must admit. Sacker was still the same old sack of wrinkles that looked deceptively half asleep, but General Mok was even larger than Hune had been on top of having half his face severely burned with spellfire. The difference in size between them somehow made the last of three stand out even more: General Jaiyana Seket of the Second Legion, a dark-haired and grey-eyed Taghreb in her late fifties. She’d been the only general already in the Wasteland to desert Malicia after the empress pulled her mind control trick a few years back. Only a little over half her legion had followed her, though, the rest sticking with the Tower.

That made the junior of the three generals in their informal hierarchy, considering that Sacker had filled her legion’s depleted ranks from deserters and the Jacks had reported that Mok’s own Third Legion now fielded six thousand soldiers instead of the standard four. Being the one with the relationship with Callow – and therefore its forges and foodstuffs – had put Sacker more or less on equal footing with Mok, however, so it wasn’t quite as straightforward a balance of power as one might think. General Seket tended to be the kingmaker in contested decisions, after all, which was a form of influence as well. It’d all worked out as being surprisingly communal for a military hierarchy, no one making a push for primacy.

Which unfortunately meant that I wasn’t negotiating with one person but three.

“I understand that the Grand Alliance has interests in Praes,” General Mok said, voice rumbling, “but it doesn’t get to impose terms here. Who rules in Ater is not to be determined in Salia or Laure.”

I wasn’t sure whether not mentioning Levante – the Dominion’s capital – reflected good intel about the fate of the Pilgrim’s Blood or simple dismissal of Levant, but either way he wasn’t wrong. These days the Blood wasn’t agreeing on much of anything, except fighting the war to the end.

“That ship sailed the moment Malicia began actively warring on us through proxies and attacking our diplomatic efforts,” I curtly replied. “She is, even now, the ally of the Dead King . Sovereignty’s all well and good, but it doesn’t buy you the rest of the world pretending nothing’s happened when you piss on the common table.”

General Seket looked amused at the turn of phrase – not a noble flower, this one, but a former bandit who’d chosen the Legions over the noose – and Sacker continued looking at me through those half-lidded eyes. Mok was getting angrier, though. I got the impression that out of them he most believed in the Dread Empire that’d been sold to the Legions after the Reforms: a place of order and rough fairness, where peoples that’d once been left out in the cold were slowly brought into the fold instead. It’d been the mind control he objected to on a fundamental level, not necessarily Malicia calling the Rebel Legions to heel. Sacker stepped in before Mok could speak again, perhaps sensing my irritation with the ogre was rising. I had little patience for people who let their ideals get in the way of looking at what was actually happening around them.

“No one is denying that you have a right to retaliate for attacks on the Grand Alliance,” Sacker said. “Our concern is that it seems few of the decisions relating to the empire’s future will be made by Praesi.”

“That Malicia has to go isn’t even something even worth arguing about,” I bluntly replied. “I will cheerfully massacre anything and anyone who gets in the way of that. If your issues are with the details of Malicia’s succession , however, then we have a lot more room for compromise.”

“We did not leave the empress’ service to now defend her,” General Seket said. “The matter my colleagues are tiptoeing around is different: to be frank, none of us want to raise a sword to win Dread Empress Foundling the Tower.”

I almost laughed in their faces, fighting that down to a snort with great effort.

“If that’s you worry, then we have no issue,” I said. “I have no interest whatsoever in climbing the Tower.”

“Akua Sahelian would not be a more acceptable candidate,” General Mok plainly said.

Huh. First Sargon had guessed that, now the Rebel Legions. The High Lord of Wolof I could forgive, but some of these people had served in Callow over the years. Did none of them realize that if I were known to have backed the Doom of Liesse for rule over the Wasteland I’d get strung up in the streets by my own people? It wasn’t like the Folly was some old wound barely remembered. Almost everyone in Callow had lost at least a distant relative when a city the size of Liesse got murdered.

“I’ve no interest in backing her claim either, assuming she makes one,” I replied just as plainly. “If I am to support anyone’s claim, it will be that of Amadeus of the Green Stretch.”

“You have been talking with Sepulchral for years,” Sacker pointed out.

“And we already discussed all this years ago,” I waspishly replied. “Why are we revisiting these grounds now?”

“Years ago you were not leading an army invading Praes,” General Mok replied. “We require different assurances now that battle is on the horizon.”

A little rich to say that, considering that they were at least three weeks behind Sepulchral’s army on the march and she was herself at least a week behind Marshal Nim. Maybe closer to two.

“I’m not interested in putting Abreha Mirembe on the throne,” I explicitly spelled out. “I see no need to make war on her, however, and she was a convenient ally against Malicia. Should she surrender to whoever claims the Tower peacefully I’ll even argue for leniency on her behalf.”

I actually believe she might take that deal, and so did Scribe. Sepulchral had rebelled because Malicia had cornered her, not because she’d intended to make a play for the Tower. That attack from Malicia had come because High Lady Abreha had been muscling in on the empress in the first place, of course, but that was Praesi politics for you. It was Malicia that Sepulchral couldn’t afford to surrender to, she wouldn’t be so constrained if someone else held the Tower. And someone who hadn’t been rebelled against could afford to offer her amnesty without taking a major hit to their reputation with the nobility. Looking closely at the three, I could see that General Seket was leaning the way of taking the bargain I’d offered: joining our armies to defeat the Loyalist Legions together, guaranteeing them a seat at the table in the aftermath. Mok was still very much against, and Sacker hard to read as she’d ever been.

“I cannot agree to putting imperial forces under the authority of a foreign nation,” General Mok finally said. “Not even in this manner.”

Sacker did not contradict him, a silence that rang loudly. I eyed the three of them coolly.

“Then it’s my turn to ask questions,” I said. “If not to reinforce my expedition, why is your army marching north?”

“You are not owed an answer,” the ogre general flatly replied.

“You weren’t owed food and steel,” I sharply said. “You still got it. Careful about what bridges you burn, Mok. There are no second chances at this game.”

“No offence was meant, I’m sure,” General Seket intervened. “We set out to march, Queen Catherine, because if we do not the civil war will end without our having ever raised a sword.”

I eyed her, distinctly unimpressed.

“So you’re either foolish enough to march an army without a campaign plan or baldly opportunistic enough to want to sit out the fight and leverage your numbers for concessions afterwards,” I said. “Which is it?”

“You put a hard slant on trying to avoid fratricide , Black Queen,” Sacker curtly replied. “You blame us for not being eager to fight legions still filled with friends and kin, comrades we have fought with for decades. With the situation on the knife’s edge, we will first attempt diplomacy.”

My fingers clenched, then unclenched. I did not like the sound of that.

“Elaborate,” I said.

“We will speak directly with the Black Knight,” General Mok said. “And offer simple terms: should Dread Empress Malicia abdicate, we will return to the fold and crush Sepulchral together.”

“Malicia will never take that deal,” I replied without batting an eye. “Or if she does, it’ll be as a trick to get you to dispose of her enemy before getting around to you.”

“It’s not her we’re offering the deal to,” General Seket said. “Nim is as good as her word. If the last legions turn on the Tower, Malicia will have to abdicate. All she has left in Ater are the First and the Fourth, which went skeletal from desertions.”

“And should the Black Knight refuse you?” I asked.

“She won’t,” Mok confidently said.

Ah , so that was it. Sacker genuinely had been on the fence, I just hadn’t offered enough to convince her. Mok had been against our armies joining from the start, though, because he’d already had a plan that was more palatable to him: cutting a deal with Marshal Nim.

“But if she does?” I pressed.

“Then you get your way, Black Queen,” General Sacker said, showing pale needle-like teeth. “Long live Dread Emperor Amadeus. In the defence of his cause, we will seek friendship with the same Grand Alliance that recognized him in Salia.”

I drummed my fingers on the table. The tremor had the water rippling, their faces rippling with it. And with that easy questions settled there was only one left to ask.

“And if the Black Knight does takes your deal,” I asked, “where would that leave us?”

“The Legions of Terror are the sword and shield of Praes,” General Seket said, tone conciliating, “but it doesn’t need to come to blows between us.”

“What it means is that there’ll be no more talk of you dictating anything, Queen of Callow,” General Mok rumbled.

Huh , I thought. This might just be the first time I’d been the hand that fed instead of the biter.

I wasn’t enjoying the change of pace.

—

There was need of a fresh war council after that. Yet I found that, in practice, learning that there was a chance the Rebel Legions might turn on us did not affect our plans much.

“Being generous,” Juniper said, “the rebels are a month behind the battle unless either we or Marshal Nim start wasting time. It’ll be settled by the time they get there.”

“If they can take the Twilight Ways they could cut ahead of Sepulchral, at least,” I pointed out.

Dread Empress Sepulchral’s army could not practically use the Ways, according to our spies. Some of its mages could access them, but they couldn’t yet make stable portals. The Rebel Legions were another story. I glanced at Vivienne questioningly, getting an uncertain palm wiggle.

“The Jacks aren’t sure either way,” she said. “They have enough mages in the ranks for it to be possible, but it’s not knowledge that grows on trees. I’d tend to err on the side of caution and assume they have some capacity with the Ways but not enough for their entire army.”

“That could still be trouble,” Grandmaster Talbot said. “Should we defeat the Black Knight in battle only for her to retreat in good order, a sudden swell of reinforcements could tip the balance against us. How large are their numbers, now that they’re finally marching?”

“Thirteen thousand legionaries,” I said. “They should have little to no goblin munitions, at least, unlike the Loyalist Legions.”

For the same reason the Army of Callow had finally filled its own stocks: I’d bought theirs.

“I do not understand this hesitation on your parts,” Lady Aquiline admitted. “We are yet sixteen thousand, or close, and the Black Knight commands only twenty-three thousand soldiers. I have seen the Army of Callow triumph against steeper odds than this.”

“You haven’t,” Juniper bluntly informed her. “You’ve seen us beat inferior or borderline peer armies, Lady Aquiline. You have never seen us fight a force that is at least our equal and possibly our superior.”

She wasn’t wrong, even if she was being pessimistic. We did have some advantages going for us. There were five legions marching with the Black Knight – the Eight, the Eleventh, the Thirteen, the Fourteenth and Nim’s own Seventh – but the Legions of Terror didn’t typically field cavalry. The Thirteenth did, having been raised from Callowan bandits and rebels, but only six hundred horsemen or so. The vast majority of Nim’s three thousand and change cavalry was auxiliaries. Taghreb and Soninke light horse sent by nobles, which my Order of the Broken Bells could shred if they engaged in melee. My entire army was made up of veterans, while the Legions would have fresher recruits, and we also had a decisive Named advantage.

On the other hand, the officer corps of the Legions would be flatly better than ours and we’d be down on mage firepower as well as general numbers. It was still very much a winnable battle, in my opinion, but there would be no repeat of the Third at Sarcella or the ridiculous odds against undead my soldiers had frequently taken on. We were facing the same army that’d held the Vales against the greater strength of Procer, and I had no reason to believe it’d lost a step since then. Throwing another thirteen thousand veteran infantry down on the Black Knight’s side of the scale would make for... hard odds, to say the least. At a minimum, it’d take field battles off the table.

To minimize the risks, we had to finish it before the Rebel Legions got there.

“Perhaps we should seek allies,” Lord Razin suggested. “Would Dread Empress Sepulchral not be amenable to helping us against her rival?”

“It was my instinct as well,” I told him, “but she’s broken off talks with us. At our best guess, she’s hoping we’ll clash with the Black Knight before she gets there and she can pick off the weakened Loyalist Legions.”

It would have been damned useful to string Abreha Mirembe along, but the trouble when dealing with people who’d survived at the top of the Wasteland for decades was that they tended to be rather hard to fool. Sepulchral had correctly assessed I wasn’t going to help put her on the throne, so she’d decided to use me to weaken her enemy and finish climbing the Tower on her own. Odds were she figured I wouldn’t actually fight a war to keep her off the throne, especially if I’d first taken losses casting Malicia down from it. To my distaste, she was fairly accurate in that judgement. I didn’t want to march west again until my father held the Tower, but if Sepulchral dug in and offered good terms I might not have a choice.

How large a portion of Procer was I willing to sacrifice to get my chosen candidate on the throne? Abreha wasn’t just a cutthroat snake: she was an old cutthroat snake. In Praes those were rare for a reason. She knew how to survive when the storms came calling.

“That’s another twenty thousand we have no certainties about,” Aisha noted. “We need to have a good grasp on the pace those force march at at before engaging, else we will be taking risks.”

“Half of Sepulchral’s army is levies that’ll break under steady munitions fire,” Juniper grunted. “But the other half is dangerous enough, I’ll grant.”

Like my Marshal of Callow, I could admit that I wasn’t worried about fighting Sepulchral’s army on the field. She had a little over six thousand household troops, which would be tough customers as that breed always was, but we had twice her horse in better quality. The thousand wavemen her allies in Nok had sent might be some trouble, true. They were supposed to be the finest archers in Praes, using great horn bows and honing their trade defending the ships of the House of Sahel. We were fighting the former High Lady of Aksum so naturally there’d be monsters too. It was what the city was famous for. But after having faced the Hidden Horror’s own menagerie of nightmares, I did not expect Aksum’s to impress me much.

“Unless the enemy tempo changes, it looks like our best shot at solving this cleanly remains a decisive victory against Marshal Nim,” I finally said.

If we forced the Black Knight’s army to surrender, the Rebel Legions would sink back into irrelevance. And Sepulchral couldn’t take a swing at us lightly: it’d put her at war against the Grand Alliance. Much more likely she’d march straight on Ater instead, and I had no real issue with that. I was skeptical she’d be able to take the City of Gates, but more than willing for her to soften up the capital some before the Army of Callow took a crack at it.

“Agreed,” the Hellhound replied. “I’ll want reports from the Jacks about the pace of every army to ensure we give battle with the best margin possible, but in around three weeks seems to be that window of opportunity.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Well,” I said, “council’s done, it seems. Get your affairs in order, ladies and gentlemen, because come dawn we begin our march south.”

—

Even in Hakram’s absence his phalanges were functioning like a well-oiled machine.

That left me in the odd position of, well, not actually having anything to do. It would be a week at least before I next spoke to Cordelia Hasenbach, Indrani was spending the evening with Masego and Vivienne was busy twisting arms are making promises through the Observatory to secure names for a plan she’d come up with that might kneecap the Black Knight in the field. Feeling restless, I took to the night and the dirt streets of our camp. Whenever I stopped moving it felt like I was losing ground: even when I stayed still, the world kept moving around me. The first act of my Praesi campaign had been an unequivocal victory, for all that Malicia and her Black Knight had scored blood of their own, but from now on things would get... complicated.

The number of moving pieces had increased and this wouldn’t be the Graveyard all over again. I wouldn’t be able to predict the whole array of leadership I was fighting the way I’d been able to read the Tyrant, Pilgrim and First Prince. Too many people, not enough of them Named. Legions rebel and loyalist, Sepulchral’s would-be army of conquest and hidden behind them all whatever my father’s scheme for this fight would be. I knew better than to believe he wouldn’t be putting a finger on the scale of the battle that would determine the fate of Praes for the coming decades. That he had yet to truly come out of the woodworks worried me more than I cared to admit. He wasn’t proud, as a man, at least not in ways that got in the way of him achieving his goals.

So if he’d not reached out to me, made common cause, it was because some of our objectives were at odds. I was not so arrogant as to pretend that the prospect of the fighting the man who’d taught me did not inspire in me a... healthy amount of caution.

The sound of steel on steel drew my attention as I drifted close to drilling grounds. There shouldn’t be any legionaries out at this hour, and a few steps confirmed there weren’t. The two people moving swiftly back and forth across the dusty ground weren’t my soldiers. The Silver Huntress deftly flicked her spear, barbed tip tickling at the Squire’s shield, and as Arthur Foundling took a cautious step back she circled around him to probe his flank. I approached quietly, laying my staff against the side of the fence before resting my elbows atop it. The Squire was being careful, keeping his shield up and only venturing out of his shell to try to rush her and leverage his advantage close up, but on open grounds like this the tactic was a mistake.

I winced as I saw him try a charge, banking on the Huntress being slow to retreat her spear after a feint, only to find out that Alexis was quite light-footed of maintaining their distance. She feinted his leg, then darted back up to slap the side of his helm hard when he lowered his shield to cover himself. The boy winced at the pain but did not complain. As well he shouldn’t: if that blow had come from someone out to kill him, it would have gone right through his throat instead. If Arthur was to ever to score a blow, I thought, he needed to pressure her from the start. Push forward steadily, learn to tell apart the feints from the real attacks and close the distance while she was committed to striking him.

I watched in silence as the two continued to move across the dust, the Mantle of Woe’s hood warm over my head, and to my pleased surprise I saw that the Squire was learning. No more bull rushing out of him, though he wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to parry a spear with a sword. You couldn’t, really, not reliably. From Named to not, sure, but not between peer opponents. The Huntress worked him through a pretty straightforward sequence – shield edges the spear to the side, sword lunge for the throat as you dart forward – and he began trying it out. He took to it quickly. Unnaturally quickly, really, I decided as my brow rose.

His reflexes weren’t getting sharper or his footing more flexible, but with every try he moved a little faster through the sequence. A little smoother. By the eighth attempt his execution was impressive enough I would have thought he’d spent months drilling it. Name , I thought. Has to be . The spar ended after Arthur finally scored a blow on the Silver Huntress’ breastplate, though I suspected she’d actually allow him to land it. He was a quick lad, but Alexis the Argent wasIndrani’s superior in close combat. The two of them seemed surprised when they noticed I was there. Night was a friend to me in all sorts of ways. I clapped politely, to the older heroine’s amusement, but Arthur looked embarrassed.

They had water and cloths on a stone near the fence, so when they came to quench their thirst and get ride of the worst of the sweat it was only natural that we chat a bit.

“I’m rather ashamed you saw that, Your Majesty,” Arthur said. “I have been meaning to expand my experience fighting Named, but it is slow going.”

“In terms of pure swordsmanship you’re actually better than I was at your age,” I noted. “Not as good as the Lone Swordsman was, maybe, but there’s a reason I relied on tricks to kill the man.”

“It’s empty whining on his part,” the Huntress scoffed. “He improves daily. The Lady’s the only person I’ve ever seen pick up drills that fast.”

“The Ranger?” Arthur breathed out. “That’s... I’ve always admired what I heard of her in stories, truth be told.”

Oh dear. I shared a look with Alexis, the two of us silently agreeing it would be for the best if he never met the woman in question. The Silver Huntress had a much harsher opinion of the Lady of the Lake than Archer. I’d learned as much because she was not shy in expressing it even to strangers. It’d made for pleasant common ground over the months of campaigning. Still, I couldn’t let myself get distracted by this little detour. I’d had a nugget of information I wanted to dig for.

“Were you always this quick to catch on?” I casually asked. “It seems like the sort of thing the Order would have reported on.”

He ruefully smiled.

“No,” Arthur admitted. “It was after the fight with the puppet of the Black Knight, Your Majesty. The way it handled Sapan and I, then the way you stepped in and took care of it...”

His gauntlets clenched tight around his sword.

“I had believed myself a fine blade, but after that I couldn’t deny I stillhave so much to Learn ,” the Squire said.

Ah, an old friend had returned. Was he leaning on that to improve his fighting? I’d not been able to do the same, back when I had the same aspect. Fighting had been the one thing it didn’t help me with.

“Aspect,” I noted, seeing no point in further subtlety. “Have you seen the same kind of leap forward in your studies?”

He looked baffled.

“No,” he said. “Should I have?”

I hummed, shaking my head.

“It’s somewhat reassuring that you did not,” I said. “There’s a balance to these things, Squire.”

The Silver Huntress grunted in agreement.

“No power comes without a hook,” Alexis the Argent said. “Beware of anything that pretends otherwise.”

Still, the Gods Above liked their nasty surprises, didn’t they? The Squire had gotten a flavour of the aspect attuned to martial pursuits after a defeat against the Black Knight, while being guaranteed weeks if not months of a relatively safe environment filled with veteran Named to train with. By the time Nim encountered the boy again for the continuation of their pattern, he was going to be a regular fucking monster. In an abstract sense my sympathies lay with Marshal Nim, because this all felt very much like the Heavens hooking an Evil fish and reeling her in, but in a practical sense our little Squire had my backing to the hilt. I’d put Indrani on training him too, maybe see if the Barrow Sword was amenable to pitching in.

“I know to be wary of shortcuts,” Arthur promised, then sent me an almost shy look. “Perhaps we may spar one day, Your Majesty? Many consider you among the finest swords in Callow.”

“My tricks are best kept up my sleeve,” I drily said. “We’ll see about getting you a few sessions with Archer, though. She tends to be my better close up.”

The boy did not quite manage to hide his disappointment but I quashed the pang I felt at the sight. I already walked the line perhaps a little too finely when it came to teaching Arthur Foundling. An occasional distant instructor tossing a few lessons his way shouldn’t be too prone to ending up story fodder, I figured, but considering he had a draw with the Black Knight coming up the last thing I wanted was stepping into a formal teacher’s role. That was a good way to stumble into buying his draw with my death. The Squire retired after chatting a little longer, but to my surprise the Silver Huntress did not. Had I offended her by mentioning Indrani training someone she was already training?

No, I decided, looking at her tense face. That wasn’t the tension of someone keeping a lid on their anger but the gritted teeth of someone forcing themselves to venture into uncomfortable grounds.

“I want to talk,” Alexis the Argent said, then bit her cheek. “Please.”

My hand found the staff of dead yew never too far from my hand, closing around the rough wood. I’d gotten used to the contrast between the Huntress’ startlingly girlish high-pitched voice and her rough appearance – broken nose and plain face, the messy bun of red hair and calloused hands – but I’d noticed she tended to speak slowly and curtly to take the edge off it. No doubt she’d been mercilessly mocked for the contrast as a child: it was the kind of thing even my fellow orphanage girls would have narrowed in on, much less children as skilled at cruelty as the Refuge kids had been. This time, though, the curtness was not an affection on her part. She was fighting the words as they came out.

I couldn’t think of many things I had a hand in that’d get this much emotion out of her.

“I’m listening,” I said.

Her lips pressed tight, like she was trying to clench them.

“The Lady’s in Praes,” she said. “With the Carrion Lord. Your spies said so.”

I nodded.

“You think we’re going to fight her?” the Huntress asked.

“I’d prefer not to,” I admitted. “But I don’t think she’s going to give us a choice.”

At some point, my father and I would clash. His continued silence spoke to that. And when that moment came, I did not believe it would be armies that marched. It would be a war of knives, not battalions, and the Ranger was the finest knife at his disposal. On my end of things, it was not a coincidence that all the surviving children of Refuge were with my host. I had planned for this eventuality in my own way.

“She won’t,” Alexis roughly said. “That’s not how she...”

She hesitated, stumbling over words before abandoning the sentence entirely.

“I hate her,” the Silver Huntress candidly admitted. “I honestly do. But I won’t lie. She didn’t think she was being cruel when she worked us. She thought she was toughening us up for the real world, so we could live like she does.”

“But you don’t buy that,” I murmured.

“We came out of Refuge fine killers, Black Queen,” Alexis said. “For that I’m thankful. But she was also trying to make us all into these... she has this idea, this ideal, of ‘full’ persons that need no one else. That bind with others only because they want to, not because they ever need to.”

She spat to the side.

“And that fucked us,” the Huntress bluntly said. “Cocky still hasn’t told a living soul her name. John got himself killed because he thought he thought he needed to prove he was our equal. Lysander once spent most a year learning how to make shoes, when we were kids, because he thought just buying them would mean he was weak.”

I watched her silently, waiting for the last two names. Named. The last of the band of five that had never formed.

“I fight when I shouldn’t,” Alexis the Argent reluctantly admitted. “Because it feels like backing down if I don’t. But Indrani’s the worst off, because of all of us she’s the one that bought into it.”

“I think the woman you knew,” I gently said, “only shares so much with the woman I know.”

She didn’t like that.

“I know,” the Huntress bit out angrily, slamming a fist on the groaning fence. “I know, fuck .”

I let it go, this once, but my eye narrowed. It did not go unnoticed.

“She’s not the same as she was when she left to pick up John,” Alexis forced out. “She tries. I can see it, Black Queen, that sometimes the urge is there but she fucking bites down on it.”

“You don’t have to forgive her,” I quietly said. “She’s not owed that.”

The Silver Huntress faintly smiled.

“Sometimes I still wonder if Lysander got killed because Indrani went soft from her years with the Woe,” she confessed. “Whether it’d have gone down different, if she’d not turned into the kind of person who tries.”

Sometimes, looking at what Ranger had left in the children she’d raised, I wondered what it was Amadeus of the Green Stretch had left in me. What curse, what scar. That there would be one I had no doubt: one did not learn from a madman without learning some manner of madness with it.

“She got to us deep, the Lady,” Alexis tiredly said. “Even where we think she didn’t. But maybe that’s what we have – scars from the same fang. That’s for us to handle, anyway. It’s not what I came to you for.”

“Then what did you come for?” I asked.

“When Ranger comes for us, and she will,” Alexis the Argent said, voice eerily calm, “she’ll strike at every weakness. As hard as she can. She’ll try to break us.”

My fingers clenched.

“It’s how she believes love works, I think,” the Huntress quietly said. “To make someone stronger, even if it hurts them. So she will come for us, Catherine Foundling, with loving cruelty. To crown us, welcome us as women. Peers.”

Peers, the way she’d treated the Calamities in my Name dreams as the Squire. The way she treated those, I thought, that had not needed her hand to come into strength. There were people, I thought, that Ranger might be lovely to. My father was one of them, because there were things about him she admired. It excused none of it, as far as I was concerned.

“She is not my peer,” I coldly said. “And I’ll teach her why, should she come for any of you.”

“I can take care of myself,” Alexis brusquely dismissed. “But Indrani...”

The Silver Huntress bit her lip.

“That’s what I want from you, Black Queen,” she finally said. “Don’t let the Lady turn her back into who she used to be. That’s all I ask.”

A moment, as she choked on the word.

“ Please .”

The moon glared down at us, a full circle wreathing us both in pale.

“I won’t,” I swore.

Chapter 13: Footing

“To hold a strong defensive position is not enough. You must force the enemy to attack it, which is the difference between tactics and strategy.”

– Extract from ‘Considerations on Warfare’ by Marshal Grem One-Eye

We made good pace.

The Army of Callow had been hammered into a host that could move on the quick by years of campaigning abroad, and for once we weren’t too starved on trained officers: the combination of the First and Second Army that Juniper commanded had benefitted from the officer pools being combined. It’d be Hells to split the armies back up when it was done, of course, but that was a problem for the future. There simply weren’t enough potential soldiers left back in Callow for the First and Second to be raised back up to full strength separately anyway, they’d be staying combined until the end of the war. The ‘Fifth’ Army, as the rank and file had taken to calling it, wasn’t going anywhere for some years.

The Levantines under Razin and Aquiline weren’t a drag on our pace, the way they’d sometimes been in Hainaut. Now that they were relying on our supply train instead of their own, the Dominion warriors were as cut free from a tether: they were usually quicker on the march than my legionaries now. The lighter armour and years of raiding had trained it into them. The Twilight Ways made for a pleasant reprieve from Wasteland weather, even if we’d only ever tasted the outskirts of that, and we advanced faster than Juniper had anticipated. We had to slow down around the end of the first week, waiting for reports about the march of the other armies.

Marshal Nim and her legions kept to the same brisk pace they had so far, which meant in about two weeks both our armies would be forced to emerge from the Ways or face the possibility of a contested crossing should we be beaten to returning to Creation. The surprising part was that Dread Empress Sepulchral seemed to have been gaining on the Black Knight: she was in hot pursuit, still a week behind even though the Legions were using the Ways and she was not. It seemed impossible, and the Jacks confirmed there was more to it a few days later. It was not Sepulchral’s entire army that’d been keeping up that breakneck pace but instead a large vanguard.

Two thousand household troops and her entire cavalry contingent, Vivienne’s people believed.

“She’s trying to keep up the pressure on Marshal Nim by having a force nipping at her rear,” Juniper opined. “They won’t engage, but they’ll raid her supply lines and try to hammer any detachment she splits from her main host.”

“If the Jacks have people in Sepulchral’s camp able to learn this, the Eyes will too,” Vivienne noted. “I have no doubt Malicia informed her Black Knight of the plan before it even began.”

I snorted.

“Old Abreha’s counting on it,” I said, reluctantly admiring. “She’s trying to goad the Black Knight into engaging us hastily.”

Sepulchral had nothing but gains to make from the Loyalist Legions and the Army of Callow getting into a messy, ill-planned battle.

“It’s cleverly done,” Juniper admitted. “If Nim sends a force south to make the vanguard back off, she has to either leave it there – and weaken herself just before she fights us – or slow her march so it can rejoin. Which would buy time for the slower part of Sepulchral’s army to catch up.”

I shared a look with my marshal. It was an inspired tactic, playing to the strengths of her army and the weaknesses of the Black Knight’s positions. It was, in other words, not a tactic that Abreha Mirembe or her generals had likely come up with. Sepulchral was a skilling intriguer but a solidly average battle commander, looking at her record. And as far as we knew neither Aksum nor Nok had any noteworthy military talents in their upper ranks. So who was planning Sepulchral’s campaign for her? I glanced at Scribe, who had been silently keeping notes as we spoke.

“Make it a priority to find out who’s been giving out those orders,” I ordered her. “The last thing we need is for Sepulchral to become a genuine threat.”

“Ime has been concentrating on putting out the last gasps of my influence in the Wasteland,” Eudokia said. “It might be possible to find this out, Queen Catherine, but I will have to burn most of the agents I have in Sepulchral’s camp.”

Meaning she would no longer be confident of catching anything going on there afterwards. We’d be relying solely on the Jacks, and Vivienne’s spies had been playing catch-up with the Eyes since the moment they were first raised without ever quite touching that prize. I hesitated, then turned to Juniper.

“How confident are you of beating that army if you know who commands it?” I asked.

She did not answer immediately, considering the question seriously.

“Seven parts in ten,” Juniper of the Red Shields finally said.

I nodded. Good enough for me.

“Do it,” I ordered Scribe.

Aside from that little surprise, the beginning of our southern offensive was trotting along nicely. As the second week since we’d left the outskirts of Wolof began, it looked like as if our preferred outcome would come to pass: a decisive pitched battle with the Loyalist Legions at least a week before anyone else was close enough to intervene. There’d been no real hiccup to our advance so far, which only made it natural that Creation would then promptly snatch the ground out from under our feet. Unlike some of the past instances of the Gods pissing in my morning gruel, however, this time the snatching was not a fucking metaphor.

Half-past Morning Bell, as we marched along the Twilight Ways, the ground literally fell out under my army.

Great cracks spread across the ground, fast enough my officers had time to do little more than shout warnings, then great chunks of the Ways fell down into Creation like shattered glass panes. It was all the more hellish for the suddenness of it: there’d been no warning, not ominous sign. In thirty heartbeats my army had turned from a smoothly marching column into a groaning and wounded beast, spread out in chunks in the middle of a particularly vicious Wasteland dust storm. There was enough order in my ranks that I managed to rustle up two mage lines and Hierophant to form a shaky protective ward around the column, keeping the whipping dust out of our faces long enough that priests from the House Insurgent could begin seeing to the wounded and dying.

I ran around trying to get proper wardstones in place, hindered by the fact that they’d been built to protect the shape of camps and not columns, but before I got anywhere the storm suddenly died. It’d lasted perhaps half an hour after my army fell, and just as suddenly as it had come it was gone. Clenching my teeth, I got to finding out the damage. It’d been a short fall down, at least. That’d taken off the edge some. Hardly more than four feet in most cases, and the Order of the Broken Bells had been in the vanguard ahead of the fall so it’d mostly been remounts that’d broken their legs falling.

The grassy grounds from the Ways that’d fallen with us began to decay quickly and the emanations were somewhat toxic so we had to move away and reform, but order was getting restored as lieutenants saw to their lines. Numbers for casualties and wounded quickly made it up the chain, eventually getting to Juniper and myself: only seventy-nine dead, but almost three hundred wounded. We’d also lost enough horses for the Order that their staying power was compromised for longer-term engagements. Not necessarily an immediate concern, but by the time we got to Ater any knight who lost a horse would be fighting the rest of the campaign on foot.

There’d been more painful damage in a strategic sense.

“We’re paralyzed for at least two days,” Juniper bluntly said. “That we still have any supply wagons capable of moving is a miracle, and if the healers can’t fix the oxen pulling them we’re going to have to kill the beasts.”

Which would further slow us, for all that it’d add to our meat reserves. We could compensate by putting the Order’s remaining remounts to work pulling the wagons and arranging relays of legionaries – mostly orcs, given their greater body strength – but it’d still be a blow to mobility. Hopefully our healers could salvage at least some of the beasts of burden while our sappers repaired the broken supply wagons. The only silver lining was that Pickler’s obsessive care for her field engines meant they’d been insulated from shock well enough the fall had caused need only for minor repairs and replacements. We wouldn’t be headed into battle with the Legions of Terror without working war engines.

“We need to find out where we are,” I sighed. “And if returning to the Ways will just see this happen again.”

I’d already asked Masego to look into it. Wasteland weather was infamously dangerous for good reason, but ripping an army out of the Twilight Ways was going too far. My instincts screamed enemy action, but which enemy?

“I’ve sent out scouts,” Juniper said. “I’ll send someone to fetch you when they begin coming back.”

“I’ll see what Hierophant has for me, then,” I said, groaning as I got back to my feet.

I’d almost lost Zombie the Sixth to this mess. He’d broken a leg and bucked me off, but the priests seemed to think he could be made better. I’d be stuck borrowing a mount from the Order until he was fit to ride again, though. Masego wasn’t hard to find, considering he was still exactly where I’d left him. The hastily raised tent was kept standing more by wards than wood, not that he seemed to notice. Earlier he’d been using scrying rituals with some difficulty, going through the Observatory, but now he was instead running spells on the storm dust he’d sent Apprentice out to gather. Though the outer ward would have warned him of my entry he did not immediately turn. I left him to his spells, waiting in silence as I leaned against my staff. He turned to me when he was good and ready.

“It was a ritual,” Hierophant said.

I glanced at the dust but he shook his head.

“This is simply dust,” he said. “We are near the Gust Ribbon from what I gathered while scrying, so the dust storm itself was drawn out of it by the first part of the ritual and only then empowered. There are striations in the magic saturation of the dust that make the sequence plain to see.”

Near the Gust Ribbon wasn’t saying much, as it was a winding and moving region that stretched across the northwest third of the Wasteland. Wasn’t overall reassuring, though, considering it was called that because it was plagued by sudden and powerful storms that had a nasty tendency to spill out in every direction. It wouldn’t be safe to stay here long even if we didn’t get hammered by another ritual.

“So someone leashed a dust storm, empowered it with a spell and sent it our way?” I asked.

“It was quite brilliantly done,” Masego said. “The dust, you see, solved the issue of air being able to hold too little magic for most large-scale ritual work. The storm was turned into an array that thinned the boundary between the Ways and Creation – which is already very thin – until it was on the very edge of shattering.”

“Are you telling me that the physical weight of my army is what shattered the Twilight Ways?” I flatly asked.

“As I said,” Masego smiled, “quite brilliantly done.”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“This is Malicia,” I said.

It had to be. People had been telling me again and again that weather sorcery was the specialty of Taghreb, and there was only one army out there that fielded a significant amount of high-calibre Taghreb mages. More than that, we’d known for months that while High Lady Takisha of Kahtan had played coy with sending the Tower actual troops she’d not been shy with providing mages instead. It’d take more than just a few cadres of talented mages to pull off something like this, though. I knew that and so did he.

“This is Akua Sahelian,” Masego corrected, confirming my fear. “There are maybe four other practitioners in Praes capable of such a ritual, but there appears to have been an uncontrolled surge in the middle of the span – I suspect mages grew exhausted and their replacements had inadequate control – that was masterfully redirected instead of allowed to collapse the entire working.”

He paused.

“I would be capable of this,” he said, without a hint of a boast. “My father was, and so was Dumisai of Aksum. I would not bet on Naziha Sarrif being so capable, however, and she is the finest mage in the south. There is only one woman in all of Praes with the talent and schooling to do it.”

His face was calm.

“I have already told you her name.”

That was what happened, I told myself, when you let someone as dangerous Akua go to your enemy’s side. She didn’t stop being dangerous, it was just turned on you instead. I breathed out, suddenly tired. I had seventy-nine names to learn. I owed that, and truthfully more than was possible to repay.

“I found something interesting, however,” Hierophant said. “The way the boundaries of the ritual array were defined was... peculiar.”

I cocked an eyebrow at him, silently urging him to continue.

“Much more of the Ways fell than was necessary,” Masego said. “Without looking at the equations myself I cannot be certain, but it seems to me that the power could have been made... narrower. Concentrated on ensuring there would be a faller from higher up instead of such a large swath of territory.”

My fingers clenched.

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“That no one capable of crafting such a ritual,” Hierophant evenly replied, “would have made such a mistake in ignorance. It was a choice.”

A pulled punch, he was saying. Seventy-nine dead, my entire army paralyzed, and still a pulled punch. Not without reason had we once named that woman the doom of an entire city. I silently nodded, at loss for words. Glowing, fiery eyes studied be from beneath the eye cloth.

“I do not understand why she is no longer with us,” Masego admitted. “Is this about revenge? Indrani tells me that in Hainaut you had the opportunity to let her go to her death. I had thought – and she – that you refused because you were letting go of all this long prices business.”

He paused.

“She is no longer here,” Masego plainly said, “and so I am confused.”

“One hundred thousand dead, Zeze,” I quietly said. “She doesn’t get to have that swept under the rug. Nobody does.”

“So it is revenge,” Masego mused, brightening for having understood. “Why let her go to the Tower and become the Warlock, then? It does not strike me as a very good vengeance.”

“Because she’ll hate it,” I quietly said. “It will be everything she has been taught to want, but even as she gets it every victory will taste like ashes in her mouth. And when reaches the end of that line, of that dreadful dream, it will not be joy she feels.”

It would be horror, I thought. Horror at the prospect of spending the rest of her life wearing shackles around her wrists that she would have put on herself. And the moment she understood that, understood that she wanted to be better than the girl she’d once been instead of simply an older, crueller version of her, I would be there. Waiting with an offer that she would accept.

“And after?” Masego asked.

“She trades a broken dream for a broken crown,” I murmured.

I did not believe we could destroy the Hidden Horror, not truly. Not now and even less after we gifted him the crown of Autumn. So he would need a prison and a warden. A box he would surely break in time, a pit he would dig himself out of, but a realm of endless paths? That might do the trick. There he would be cursed to wander forever alone, as a broken queen on a broken throne kept him imprisoned until the end of times. And that queen’s throne would lie in the heart of the city she had doomed, perched atop her very folly as she kept the peace of Twilight. She would make the choice herself, willingly and without coercion. That was the retribution I owed a hundred thousand screaming souls: an endless vigil holding back a greater evil, knowing every part of it was of her own making.

I was Callowan. My prices were long, and paid twice.

—

The first scouts returned with word of a town to our southeast. Scrying wasn’t working well in the region, which Masego believed to be because of the same ritual that’d brought us down. To sum up a quarter-hour explanation, ‘much magic in sky dust makes magic in sky difficult’. I shared this summary with the table, which prompted him to admit he wished he had a way to disown me. On the bright side, he also believed that while it was still unsafe to return to the Twilight Ways for at least two weeks it was unlikely that we were going to be hit with a storm again. The same phenomenon that screwed up scrying would make it ‘astronomically difficult’ to get another ritual going. I’d intended on going back into the camp after the conversation, but Juniper had notions of her own.

“You’re pacing back and forth like a tiger in a cage,” the Hellhound said. “Make yourself useful instead. Take knights and have a look at the town, find out where we are.”

“I’m not pacing ,” I reflexively defended, but she had a point.

I took thirty knights of the Order and Scribe too, since she was the woman with the maps. Eudokia didn’t recognize the region itself, though she did note that the dusty and rocky grounds here would be a good fit for certain parts of the Cradle: a rough square of land near the middle of the Wasteland that had fairly steady weather but got the spills from more... exotic parts. We rode out briskly, finding the town the scouts had marked in less than an hour. It wasn’t anything all that impressive, I saw as we got closer. A walled town large enough to hold maybe a few hundred souls, surrounded by sparse farms and skeletal orchards. We found several wells on the way, though, which was good news. Too many of our water barrels had broken during the fall.

The gates were closed when we got there, an iron-barded set tall as a man but too cramped for most carts. No great traders, then. The walls weren’t anything I’d have a hard time smashing with Night if I put my back into it: six to eight uneven feet of stacked stone and mud with wooden spikes on top. Over the gates, an old dark-skinned woman in faded robes was waiting for us. Spread out further atop the walls were maybe a dozen archers and an unarmed pair of middle-aged siblings that must have been the town mages. They weren’t the ones in charge, though, as was made clear when we reined in our horses at the edge of bow range and got called out by the old woman.

“State your business,” she demanded. “Are you with the army to the north?”

I blinked. My knights carried the royal banner with them, which usually got recognized and took care of most questions before the talking began. Not so this time, evidently. Seeing no point in subtlety out in the middle of nowhere, I went with straightforward instead.

“I am Queen Catherine of Callow,” I called back. “I only want to talk and buy goods.”

There was some consternation atop the wall, several others coming close to the old woman before she angrily waved them away.

“There’s nothing worth burning here,” the old woman yelled out at me. “Go away.”

I sighed. Why was it never the useful parts of my reputation that preceded me? Deciding to make a point, I murmured a prayer to the Crows and let the Night sluggishly wake to my words. I went for something loud and dangerous looking over actually dangerous, blasting a chunk of the countryside in a whirl of black flames. I let silence follow in that sights’s wake as it sunk in that I could wield the same power against their wall to fairly predictable results. I then politely requested to be let in so we could talk and I could arrange the buying of goods, which after some arguing between the ‘warriors’ was granted.

The gates swung open and we were ushered through deserted dirt streets to a hall of stone. There the old woman from earlier received us by a great fire and extended hospitality in the name of the town, Ogarin. We refrained from accepting food or drink anyway. She introduced herself as Anan, the current haku to the town. Bailiff was probably the closest equivalent to the title we had back home, from what I understood, as a haku’s authority was centred around arranging the collection of communal taxes and work levies in the name of the local lord. The town was part of the territory of a Lord Abara, she informed us, who ruled from a fortress called Kala further to the southeast and situated at the bottom of the eponymous Kala Hills.

“I’ll bargain so the town does not get sacked, Your Majesty,” Anan said, “but we don’t have much to trade. We already sent our crop tax south to the fortress. There’s been a food levy across the Wasteland.”

I frowned.

“Who does Lord Abara swear to?” I asked.

She snorted.

“His uncle swore to Wolof, but that was in High Lady Tasia’s day,” she said. “Now he’s sworn to no one. It was the Tower that came to collect.”

So Malicia – more likely the Black Knight through her – had been emptying the Wasteland of food, to feed Marshal Nim army and make sure my own wouldn’t be able to add to its supplies from the local stores. Not without starving towns and villages, anyway, which aside from being deeply distasteful to me was likely to mean resistance to my troops from locals. No one liked having the table robbed by a foreign invader, as my childhood in Laure had intimately taught me. We got a little more out of Anan about the region we’d ended up in with some wheedling. Ogarin was at the northwestern edge of Lord Abara’s lands but linked by a dirt path to a better road that Anan called the ‘half-road’. I asked, naturally. It was a name that pretty much demanded it.

“We’re between imperial highways,” Anan said. “One of the old Abara – in my great, great grandmother’s day – swore himself to Aksum, and to make it stick he planned to connect Kala to the highway between Ater and Aksum. It was going to make us rich, he claimed. Only he died before it was done. His daughter instead went back to the Tower’s protection and pocketed the gold, leaving the job half done.”

The half-road wasn’t properly paved, she explained, just made of stone. While usable for carts it tended to be rough on the axles. It went towards the southeast, eventually coming close to the Moule Hills. Those were a bunch of steep slopes, so in practice the road was nestled in a valley between the Moule Hills to the south and Kala Hills to the north. North of said Kala Hills, she continued, was the small Nioqe Lake and the other town sworn to Lord Abara, Risas. Further north than that was the southern edge of the large Jini Plateau: all cliffs there, nothing we could travel through.

The way I figured, the sooner we got on the half-road and began moving south the better. I’d suggest a detachment head out to Nioqe Lake to see to our water situation, but there simply weren’t enough water sources in the region to sustain the presence of an army as large as mine for long.

As for trading, strictly speaking it was treason for the town to bargain with us while we were at war. I allowed the shadow of a possible sack to loom over the negotiations, though, which motivated the town to do it anyway. It wasn’t my intention to go through with it, but if my reputation was black in these parts then I had no qualms in using that. There wasn’t much food and Anan was reluctant to part with was left, but tools and wood were on the table – armies chewed through those like hounds through meat – and I promised to restrain my soldiers from robbing farms or entering the town. I even paid a generous fee for use of their wells, which Anan did not need to know was from the Wolof treasury.

When we were done talking I stretched, groaning, and offered her a friendly smile. We’d been at this for over an hour now, and I was ready to leave. There was still one little detail to take care of first, though,

“So,” I said, “how likely is it that some of your dimmer boys and girls are outside and planning something unwise?”

Her creased face tightened.

“Not unlikely,” Anan finally said.

“I still remember what it’s like, wanting to put down monster to make a name,” I said. “So I’ll let that go.”

I met her rheumy eyes with mine.

“If it ends now.”

She swallowed. Anan preceded us outside, and while there was some shouting and a small scuffle it ended without corpses on the ground.

Three cheers for diplomacy, I thought, and got back on my borrowed horse.

—

We got some trouble with the locals the first night after we crashed, but not the two-legged kind. Our palisade, which had been hastily raised, was hit just after Midnight Bell by what we first believed to be enemy soldiers but turned out to be a coordinated attack by a pack of tigers. The unreasonably astute animals actually hit another spot in the palisade as a distraction while the rest dug their way under, attacking horses and cattle. Archer and the Huntress got themselves a few pelts for the trouble, but of the dozen tigers that came six still survived and ran away with full bellies. It was only to be the beginning of our troubles, I found out to my dismay.

A colony of head-sized scorpions took offence to our presence the following day and began attacking legionaries whenever they stepped outside the vermin wards, which thankfully held them back. It only stopped when I set out with a mage line and torched their underground lair, to a disquieting amount of chittering screams. A decision was made not to openly prevent my sappers from going into the charred ruin and stealing some eggs, considering scorpion fights tended to be good for the morale of the little bastards.

Then the soldiers that went to fill up water barrels at Nioque Lake – under the wary eyes of the townsfolk of Risas, whose homes were on the opposite shore – were ambushed by some sort of shrieking freshwater squid that dragged two men under before the Squire and the Apprentice killed it. Its flesh was apparently considered a delicacy in the Wasteland, Aisha informed me, because everyone in this bloody place was completely mad . I refused to have a bite out of principle, though Masego assured me with guileless malice it was delicious.

Archer was having the time of her life, at least, and came dragging back the carcass of what looked like a cow-sized lion with bat wings and a stinger-tipped tail the following afternoon. Masego was delighted enough when she offered him the venom glands that he enthusiastically kissed her cheeks, which had her in a terrifyingly good mood the rest of the day. I was only glad she’d killed the damned thing while out hunting and not after it’d flown into the camp and eaten a few of my soldiers. Not that our short turn in luck stopped a flock of blood-drinking bats that spat out paralytic venom – charmingly called something that translated ‘night kissers’ by Soninke, Aisha said – from attacking one of our night patrols.

The entire Wasteland was a fucking death trap.

It looked like we were going to be ready to march by Noon Bell on the third day, though, so I sat with Juniper to put together a vanguard. Two thousand light foot from Levant would do, we decided, with Archer and I accompanying them. Razin Tanja, whose forces were chosen to march, was pleased to be given the front as Levantines always were when awarded the possibility of being the first to be shot by arrows. Took all sorts. The Dominion warriors had taken well to the Wasteland, to my amused horror, Lady Aquiline even admitted it made her a little homesick. Fewer trees here than the Brocelian, she said, but the animals had a lot in common.

No wonder Levantines raided so much, I unkindly thought. I’d get out of the house as much as possible if my home was full of godsdamned bloodsucking bats, and fight for the privilege too.

We set out in passably good order just after Noon Bell, largely as we’d planned and to the palpable relief of many Callowan legionaries. I rode out with Razin and Archer for company, to a surprising chill under the afternoon sun. A cold wind was blowing in from the northeast, over the Jini Plateau. An hour got us to the half-road and from there we quickened the pace going southeast, until we came in distance of the Moule Hills and I was forced to call a halt. Not because three hours of marching had tired us out, but something entirely worse. On the steep northern slopes of those hills a fortified camp had been raised, wooden walls bristling with scorpions and catapults as six banners flew above them in the wind.

One for each of the five legions under Marshal Nim, one for the Tower.

Chapter 14: Nock

“The right kind of defeat can be more useful than a victory.”

– Dread Empress Prudence, the Frequently Vanquished

The two of us reined in our horses a prudent hundred feet away from the bottom of the slope.

A fortified camp looked down at us from the heights of the Moule Hills, raised grounds with a palisade and a dry moat. There were artillery platforms looming beyond the wooden rampart, at least two that I saw, and more than a dozen scorpions glaring down at the Army of Callow’s vanguard from atop the palisade. My lips thinned as I took into consideration the steep slope leading up and the length of it going up – at least a few hundred feet – and how bloody taking that camp was likely to get should we try. I’d lose a hundred men for every foot, I darkly thought, the moment Marshal Nim brought out her crossbows.

“That wasn’t there yesterday,” Archer muttered. “I didn’t come too close, Cat, but I would have seen it in the distance.”

“They did it overnight, maybe?” I guessed. “Goblins can work during the dark, we’ve pulled that trick before. Then they bring in orc and humans after sunup when the foundations are laid.”

That might mean they’d not finished the works too long before we arrived. And possibly that the defences weren’t as thorough as it would seem from down here. Archer was visibly itching to ditch the horse and go have a closer look on foot but she restrained herself. Instead I felt the world shiver ever-so-slightly as she drew on an aspect, leaning forward on her horse.

“Moat’s not even,” Archer said, eyes distant. “And there’s still goblins working on the side of the camp to make it go fully around.”

I wouldn’t be able to match her sight without drawing on Night and I’d rather not draw on that frivolously under the afternoon sun, so I simply took her word for it.

“Definitely overnight, then,” I mused.

That made what they’d gotten up in time even more impressive. Much as it stung to admit it, the Army of Callow wouldn’t have been able to manage the same. We lacked the sappers and the expertise: a lot of my legionaries had spent no more than six months in training camps before being considered ready for war. The Legions regularly trained and drilled their soldiers in ways the war against Keter had simply not afforded me the time to do. My people were veterans, but they were veterans of a very particular kind of war.

“Your rider will get to Juniper soon,” Indrani noted. “We waiting for her orders or heading out to tickle the devils up early?”

I grimaced. Taking light foot up a hill into a hardened Legion position wasn’t going to achieve much except corpses. She’d not meant taking the Malaga troops, though, but the two of us. Thing was, I wasn’t sure we should. Not when the Marshal Nim would have a bunch of high-class mage cadres waiting and Akua Sahelian leading them. The odds of something nasty waiting for us up there were about the same as those of the sun rising tomorrow.

Might be it wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

“I’m not touching that camp without a bigger crew than just the two of us,” I said. “And I’ll let you loose to scout, since I know it’s a lost cause to stop you, but I want you to promise to keep your distance.”

Indrani considered me a moment.

“Worried about the mages?” she finally asked.

“They know which Named we field now,” I reminded her. “Nim and Malicia aren’t idiots, they’ll have spent time and coin figuring out how to kill all of you.”

“I’ll be a good girl, then,” Indrani drawled. “Promised.”

I rolled my eye at her, feeling a pang of discomfort when I realized I was facing the wrong way for her to be able to see it. All she had to look at was an eye cloth over a hollow socket. It was the little things that distressed me the most, somehow. Wounds I knew, had learned to live with. Limp along with. Losing an eye had been... more than that, in a lot of little ways. Archer waited until we’d returned to the ranks of the vanguard before passing off her horse, wandering off to find a way to sidle into the Ways. Though it was still dangerous to travel those and it’d still remain that way for the better part of two weeks, it was the sort of environment she thrived in.

A broken-down patch of the Ways where a single misstep might see her falling through the sky? Archer would take to that like a fish to water. It was when she’d be back in Creation that worried me.

Not that I had a lot of time to spare on that. The Levantine warriors that made up the vanguard of the Army of Callow had been advancing in a broad column until we’d caught sight of the enemy camp, going down the half-road, but when I’d called a halt Razin had pulled them out of marching order and begun ordering them into warbands. It was the right instinct, because right now the army behind was spread out along that road like a snake. Juniper would put the column into battle order soon enough, I thought, and I didn’t think that the Black Knight would have staked out that position in the heights to then abandon it at the first opportunity.

But there were troops Marshal Nim could throw at us without abandoning her position, and sure enough as I rode through the throng of Levantine warbands I heard exclamations of surprise from the ranks. From the eastern face of Moule Hills horsemen were pouring out in neat ranks, though where they’d emerged from was hidden by a large fold of rock. Hundreds, I counted, then more than a thousand. Fuck, was Nim throwing her entire horse at us? If so, we were in deep shit. The last reports had her at three thousand light horse to our vanguard of two thousand and a half-thousand of heavy horse from the Thirteenth to throw in should she feel like it.

“Razin,” I shouted over the din, forcing people away with my staff. “ Razin .”

The sound of my voice caught his attention over the din, drawing his eyes to me and away from his advising captains.

“Shield wall now ,” I called out. “Pack it tight or we’re all dead.”

If Nim had sent goblin skirmishers I would have advised we retreat instead, but we wouldn’t outrun cavalry on flat grounds. To Razin’s honour, he wasted in time in following through. Shouting in Ceseo he got his captains moving, the quick-footed Levantine warbands gathering into a fat uneven circle. I dismounted, heading for the front as shields were raised. In the distance, across the grounds, the enemy horse advanced at a brisk trot and formed into four slender wedges. They were long and thin, so it was hard to tell how many riders there were. More than a thousand, at least, but how many more? I found good solid ground to stand on, slightly away from the shields up front, and after making sure the warriors around were giving me a wide berth I closed my eyes and began to pray to the Sisters.

“Wake up,” I murmured in Crepuscular. “We have a war on our hands and I need a miracle to teach the enemy to fear me again. Wake up, carrion crows. There’s blood in the air.”

As I continued to murmur the Night began to move, lazily slithering into my veins, reluctant to brave the heavy sun. I kept drawing it in, murmurs flowing freely as the power began to accrue. There were shouts in Ceseo as the Levantine captains whose men had slingers among them – a lot of Dominion warriors had picked up the habit of carrying slings as well as their usual arms in Hainaut, since they were so useful against the dead – told them to get ready. A few heartbeats later the enemy closed the distance, Taghreb and Soninke in vividly coloured scale and cloth. War cries sounded on both sides, and though a few stones split open heads it was nothing to what we suffered in return.

Our shield wall was tight and packed, which I’d asked of Razin to discourage the enemy charging us. Light horse wouldn’t want to get mired in our ranks, it’d be like a mud pit for them. The downside was the same as the upside, unfortunately: the shield wall was tight and packed. So when the enemy cavalry began throwing javelins with all the strength of a charge behind them, those steel-tipped killers found their marks and then some. Shields splintered and broke, men fell with screams and I got my first good look at well-trained Wasteland horse making war. All four of the wedges that’d threatened a charge stopped well shy of our ranks, instead splitting to the sides and riding backwards smoothly.

The riders at the front threw their javelin and then retreated, making room for a fresh horseman to toss their own. The impact was... bloody. Worse than arrow fire would have been, if not as sustained.

I’d gathered power enough to give an answer, though. Night flared up, wreathing me in shadow, and above the enemy horse I began to gather specks of black flame. I wasn’t going to bother with subtle here: if I could burn through a chunk of their cavalry today the Loyalist Legions would be significantly easier to handle going forward. To my surprise the horsemen did not disperse at the sight, continuing their deadly javelin fire, and I saw why a moment later. There was a great surge of sorcery up on the heights, two transparent but roiling rings beginning to form. I stole away a sliver of the Night running through me, sharpening my eyes, and almost cursed. That was raw kinetic power they were gathering; I’d seen the likes of it before.

If that hit the ranks of the vanguard javelins would be the least of our problems. With the shield wall broken, we’d just get run down by the cavalry like animals.

Whoever had designed that trap had an uncomfortably good read on my abilities. I couldn’t abandon my working with the Night and rustle up another to handle this, not at this time of the day, which meant I’d have to break it apart and remake it. Gritting my teeth, I did. The black flames gutted out into smoke, the power instead expanding those puffs into great tendrils of dark mist. The kinetic rings flew out, the sound they made comically wobbly, but I moved the mist in the way. The working devoured the sorcery as it went through, leaving little more than a short burst of wind to reach our ranks. That wasn’t a victory, though, when the horsemen had been hammering at us all the while.

At this rate they’d run out of javelins before we gave an answer.

The Levantines were itching to ditch the shield wall and charge, given how close the riders were – another trap – but discipline held. Razin went through the ranks giving encouragement even as I began gathering Night again, his captains forcefully pulling back warriors that began to break the ranks. I’d have to let the Levantines take the hit, I realized. We could probably survive the magical bombardment, but if I didn’t hit the horsemen they were definitely going to overrun our position the moment they got done softening us up with javelins. It was a shitty choice to make, but I didn’t have a better one on the table. Best make my miracle count, then.

I had an idea or two in mind and I took to weaving even as power began rising atop the heights again – only to suddenly fall apart. I blinked in surprise, confused, only to then let out a sharp laugh. Archer . Archer had put an arrow into whoever had been leading that ritual. This was as close to an opening as I’d get.

Then the ground behind us began trembling. Yet it was not cries of dismay that greeted the change. I glanced back, finding the banner of the Broken Bells flying tall in the wind as they rode hard to relieve us. Juniper must have sent them out before we even caught sight of the enemy cavalry, for them to get her so quickly. The arrival of other horsemen saw the Legion auxiliaries lose their taste for the skirmish, unloading another few javelins our way spitefully and then smoothly pulling away. My knights began pursuit, passing by our position at a gallop, but they weren’t going to catch up to light horse and they knew it.

Brandon Talbot pulled the Order back when the enemy was driven most of the way back to their camp. I kept an eye on the heights all the while, waiting for magic to erupt again, but no ritual followed. I released the Night, feeling a wave of exhaustion, and the bloodied vanguard began its retreat back to the rest of the army. We’d survived, I told myself. Marshal Nim had given us a black eye, but we’d survived.

It wasn’t much, but it was something.

—

“The best we can say is that it stopped shy of being a disaster,” Juniper bluntly assessed.

Three hundred and sixty-three dead, almost twice that wounded. Over half of our two thousand strong vanguard had been shredded over the course of a skirmish that’d lasted maybe half an hour. There would have been a lot more corpses on the ground if we’d not been able to retreat to healers, but that was cold comfort considering we were unlikely to have all the wounded back on their feet before nightfall.

“The Black Knight caught us with our trousers down,” Aisha admitted. “Our scouts had no idea the Legions were here, much less camped above the only road. It is a major failure of our forward elements.”

That was a very polite way of phrasing ‘we stumbled in blind and got spanked’, but the lovely Taghreb did have a way of doing that.

“We turtled up after we got hit in the Ways,” I said. “And it cost us. Now two ways about it.”

I wouldn’t pretend otherwise.

“But now we know Nim’s here, so she’s shot her arrow,” I reminded them. “She won’t catch us out like this again.”

It’d been less than an hour since the enemy cavalry had retreated. We’d used that time to form up the Army of Callow and its auxiliaries in a battle line across the half-road, facing the fortified camp in the hills, but the Legions of Terror showed no inclination of coming down to fight us. It was just Juniper and Aisha here with me here in the field tent, General Zola being charged with handling affairs on the front, so none of us bothered to put a better face than was true on our current situation.

“We can’t attack that camp,” Aisha said, voicing an opinion we all shared. “It would be throwing an egg at a wall.”

“We need to turn her position,” I said. “Either to the east or west. So long she’s the one sitting on top of the half-road she can keep bringing up fresh supplies and water to her camp while we’ll be eating into our own reserves.”

“That’s the trap, Catherine,” the Hellhound growled. “She’s making it seem like she’s ceding us the initiative by staying up in her camp, but she hasn’t. We can’t leave through the Ways and we’ll slow to a crawl if we leave the road.”

I cocked an eyebrow at her.

“The grounds are too rocky west of Moule Hills,” Aisha told me in her stead. “Unless we put the sappers to making a path for us, we’d just be wrecking the wheels we just got done putting back on.”

Might still be possible to do it if we moved really slow, but if we did we’d get hit. She’d harass us with skirmishers and cavalry from a safe distance, bleeding my army out one cut at a time. And while it would be possible for the Army of Callow to advance ahead of its supplies at a quicker pace, it would be a very bad idea. We were tethered to those wagons, because the alternative was the Black Knight’s three thousand cavalry sallying out and torching the wagons carrying all our food and water. Marshal Nim was living up to her reputation as one of the three most decorated officers in all of Praes: she’d found a way to hem us in without even setting foot outside her fortified camp.

“That leaves only the half-road,” I said, openly unenthused.

It’d mean marching down the valley between Moule Hills and Kala Hills with a larger enemy force on our flank that was set up in entrenched high grounds. We’d be doing that on open grounds all the while, while the enemy had their war engines pointed at us from above. It had disaster written all over it.

“It might be possible to keep close to the bottom of the Kala Hills and make it south without a battle ensuing,” Aisha argued. “It’d be a risk for her to try us: in an enclosed space like the valley we could maneuver to negate her advantage in numbers.”

“And on tight grounds the Order would punch much harder than her own horse,” Juniper grunted. “But it won’t work, Aisha. She’ll just decamp and use the road to outpace us going south. Then she’ll set up at Kala Fortress with stone walls to defend from and her supply line still safe at her back.”

Which would just be moving the problem a few hours south, assuming it even worked. Which I was significantly less inclined to believe than Aisha was.

“We could march back north,” I suggested. “Go around this entire region, find another way through.”

“We’d be rolling dice,” Aisha grimaced. “We can’t go back into the Ways and if the Gale Ribbon spits out a storm at us the results could be almost as bad as a defeat.”

She wasn’t wrong, though it might honestly still be better than engaging the Black Knight on her chosen grounds. Unlike the Legions of Terror, after mauling us the storm wouldn’t pursue .

“North is right,” Juniper gravelled. “But into Kala Hills. Northeast.”

“Those are a dead end,” I frowned. “Even if we set up a camp on those heights facing hers, all we do is run out our supplies while she watches us.”

Nim wouldn’t be any more eager to attack our camp than we were to attack hers, we wouldn’t bait her into making that mistake. Especially not when Malicia and her Black Knight were well aware that I could only spend so long settling affairs in Praes. It was to their advantage to wait me out without even giving battle, since without a decisive victory against the Tower my bargaining position was weak.

“Are they a dead end?” Juniper replied, clicking her teeth thoughtfully.

She went looking through her papers, eventually taking out a parchment sheath she pressed into my hands. It was a report, I saw, from the captain that’d overseen the detachment that had gone to Nioqe Lake to fill water barrels. A significant chunk of it was spent going over the freshwater squid attack and praising the two young heroes that’d killed the creature. I glanced at Juniper, unsure why she’d hand me this. I’d already told the kids they’d done well.

“What am I looking for?” I asked.

“Captain Henry mentions seeing locals on the opposite shore,” Juniper said. “Fishermen, as is to be expected of a lakeside town, but also those bringing cattle to drink.”

I scanned for the line, eye narrowing when I found it. The officer had mentioned seeing sheep, specifically, and I finally found my marshal’s line of thought.

“Goats they could feed on scraps, but they’d need grazing lands for sheep,” I muttered. “And we haven’t seen any suitable grounds on the other side, so you think they’re-”

“In the Kala Hills,” Juniper finished. “And that means shepherd paths, maybe all the way through.”

Even if we found those paths they wouldn’t be broad enough to let our army cross, but that was why we had sappers. Should we cross the hills and march south it was almost certain that the Legions would still beat us to Kala Fortress, but it wouldn’t matter as much. We wouldn’t be bottled up in the valley anymore, we could swing wide to the east and go through the rainlands until we eventually found another stretch of the half-road to march on. Marshal Nim would have to come and fight us on our terms; otherwise we’d cut her supply lines and have freedom to march on a lightly defended Ater even as Sepulchral caught up to the Loyalist Legions.

“It is already too late in the afternoon for giving battle to be anything but risky, regardless,” Aisha noted.

No one argued with that. The Black Knight had the Eighth Legion with her, the Trailblazers, and General Wheeler’s ranks were heavy on both goblins and skirmishers. If fighting continued after dark we’d be at a stark disadvantage.

“Kala Hills, then,” I agreed.

—

The slopes weren’t as steep here as they were on the Moule Hills to the south, but the stone was softer. Easier to use as foundations. The Kala Hills were also covered with brushlands and Pickler assured me having local wood to cut made building the camp much easier. The work only began midafternoon, which was uncomfortably late, but the Black Knight hadn’t just sat in her camp looking pretty as we moved. Skirmishers were out and about with the hour’s turn, harassing our retreat as we marched away. Juniper sent out the Levantines and our own Army skirmishers to match them, but the Order stayed put. We needed the knights ready in case Nim sent out her own cavalry, we had nothing else that’d be swift enough to stop her from chewing up our light foot.

This once the fight went our way, at least. I was done fucking around after the mauling we’d taken, so I sent out Named in force. The Silver Huntress was like a thresher in a wheat field, fighting skirmishers, and she had a lot of anger to work out. The Squire got himself two crossbow bolts in the stomach after getting cocky but with the Apprentice at his side it was far from enough to kill him. He’d eat only broth for a week, I thought, and be a wiser man for it. Just because goblins were half his size didn’t mean that charging crossbowmen on foot was any less foolish. The Empire had designed those things to punch through plate, knight-killers.

The enemy broke off shortly before nightfall, their cavalry having never come out. Another hundred dead on our side, but we’d inflicted easily twice that. Nim would think twice about testing us like this in the future and the Malaga warriors raised their heads for having avenged their honour in the rematch.

I stayed back to level hilltops with Night so our sappers would make progress quicker but it was still frustratingly slow-going. There’d be no dry moat for us and the palisade was patchy in places: we’d put a priority on getting the wards in place, since the last thing we wanted was to suffer magic bombardment in the middle of the night. Nightfall saw the Army of Callow retreating into its half-done camp, tents raised and fires roaring. Come morning I’d take Archer and the Silver Huntress out in the hills, looking for paths, but after the exhausting day I just wanted to sleep . My head barely hit the pillow before I blacked out.

Cruelly, I was awakened what felt like a single heartbeat later.

Alarm wards were pounding away at the night air. I dragged myself into trousers and hastily put on my armour, snatching my sword and staff as I exited only to almost stumble into a large orc sergeant.

“Report,” I ordered, tightening my sword belt.

“Under attack ma’am,” he gravelled.

I rolled my eye. Yes, I’d deduced as much somehow.

“Who, where?” I pressed.

“They came from the hills, behind the camp,” the sergeant said. “Staff Tribune Bishara claims it’s the Eleventh Legion.”

It took me a moment to place that. Cognomen ‘Tenebrous’, led by General Lucretia. The sole officer that’d been a general in the Legions before the Reforms and stayed one after. Also a vampire, some sort of flesh-eating undead. Her legion had been under Grem One-Eye during the Conquest, attacking the Wall, but I couldn’t remember anything in particular that’d distinguished it. The Eleventh stayed in the Wasteland ever since, so I’d never had to deal with any part of it. My belt was comfortably set, so I laid a hand on the pommel of my sword and straightened my back.

“All right, sergeant,” I said. “What’s the situation?”

“Marshal Juniper requests that you head to the breach,” he said.

“Let’s get to it, then.”

The camp was in decent order, considering we’d gotten attacked right after Midnight Bell. My legionaries were gathering briskly for a counter push, the element of surprise having passed. It was only when we got to the breach that I winced. The Eleventh hadn’t hit the Army of Callow, I saw, but the Levantines . The chunk of the patchy palisade that’d been broken through with now-abandoned rams had led straight to where the day’s wounded were kept. The same warriors that’d bled down on the plains. Legionaries with shields painted in green and black had overwhelmed the tents and slaughtered the surprised Dominion force, but by the look of the bodies and scorch marks a force of Lanterns and Osena slayers had stopped them in their tracks. By the time I got here, the Legion incursion – a mere five companies, by the looks of it – was being driven back even if most of the Dominion warriors were only half-dressed.

The trouble came from further back: deadly crossbow volleys were being poured into the shield wall from a hill in the distance. We’d stemmed the tide, the camp was in no danger of being overwhelmed, but bodies would keep piling up until we cleared out that fucking hill. That’d be my job, looked like. Razin and Aquiline were easy to pick out from the throng, just by the way their people rallied to them, and I saw that both the Silver Huntress and the Barrow Sword were with them. Deciding I could use the help, I limped my way to them. I quickly exchanged greetings with the lordlings, then the Named.

“Black Queen,” Ishaq greeted me, grinning. “Nice night, isn’t it?”

“They disturbed my beauty sleep,” I flatly replied. “ Someone’s going to die for that.”

Some chuckles, but Alexis was grimly serious.

“Orders?” the Silver Huntress asked.

“I want you two and a good line of twenty killers,” I said. “We’re going to silence those crossbows.”

“It would help,” Razin admitted. “Marshal Juniper is sending crossbowmen of our own but they have yet to arrive.”

“I’ll go,” Aquiline said. “My retinue will serve.”

I wanted to argue, but that glint in her eye told me she was going to be obstinate and we didn’t have the time .

“Fine,” I grunted. “Lord Razin, you have the command.”

He nodded, then snuck a kiss to his fiancée.

“Do try not to get another scar,” he teased her. “You know how jealous I get.”

“No promises,” Aquiline grinned.

Ugh, young love. I shared a disgruntled look with Alexis, though for some reason the Barrow Sword was looking rather fondly at the pair. I didn’t want to take slayers with us, I made clear to Aquiline, so she drew twenty sword and board men from her retinue instead and we circled the melee at the gap. The Barrow Sword opened a path through a weak patch of the palisade with a mule kick, large enough for us to make it out onto the hills. All three of us Named could see in the dark at least decently, so we guided the Levantines through the sloping brushlands. Several times we had to outright climb up, so I had to kill the pain in my bad leg with Night, but we made good pace anyway.

The enemy had chosen a tall, flat-topped hill to position their crossbowmen so they weren’t difficult to spot. Two hundred of them, firing in rotation to obscure their numbers. They were probably hoping to bait legionaries into exposing themselves before unleashing proper volleys, I thought. I was not much enjoying fighting the Legions of Terrors. I’d much preferred having that particular war machine on my side. Still, the reason I grimaced and gestured for our warband to crouch into the bushes wasn’t the crossbowmen: it was the few skulking shapes at the bottom of that same hill. Goblins. Sappers .

“We have to hit the hill from here,” I whispered.

I got odd looks for it.

“There’s sappers afoot,” I flatly stated. “Every approach to that hill will be mined to the Hells and back. We try to walk through a field they set up and maybe two of us will make it there.”

Maybe. If the sappers were having an off night. Names helped you against a lot of things but stepping into a gout of goblinfire wasn’t one of them. We found defensible grounds, a dip between to hills that had just low enough a rim that I could look at the enemy crossbowmen and aim, and Aquiline’s men spread out around me in a loose circle. I silently gestured for Ishaq to keep an eye on the Lady of Tartessos when she wasn’t looking but kept the Silver Huntress close. She had sharp reflexes and I’d not be able to move much while weaving Night. I breathed out, looking at the sky, and struck my staff against the rocky ground.

“Sun’s gone, Sisters,” I spoke in Crepuscular. “Let’s play, yeah?”

The power came eagerly when I called, as if to make up for its sluggishness during the day. In a low murmur I spoke my prayers, shaping the working as I drew more and more Night into myself. I’d expected the enemy to catch on to our presence sooner or later, but that wasn’t exactly what we got. Suddenly – when I had gathered enough Night into one place, I guessed – there was a ripple of magic in the air and a red circle of light formed about two hundred feet above our position. You know, revealing it to anyone looking. I paused in my incantation.

“Fuck you,” I feelingly told the sky, and also Akua Sahelian.

The enemy must have been expecting us because it couldn’t have been longer than a hundred heartbeats before they struck. They came out of the night like ghosts, a single line of twenty legionaries. But these were not regulars or heavies, I thought. Their armour was light, leather and breastplates, and none of them wore helmets. Their hair flew freely in the wind, long and dark and oddly animated. Each bore a single sword and a long spear. They... didn’t move right. They were beautiful, I thought, dark-skinned and dark-eyed but with impossibly smooth skin. My mind was being clouded, I recognized. After I bit my lip hard the beauty waned. Their skin was smooth as corpse’s because that was exactly what they were.

Not a single one of them breathed.

They struck in silence, three warriors dying before Alexis could warn them we were under attack, but I kept whispering my prayers. Almost there. Aquiline and Ishaq took on one of the enemies together, the Osena hooking his spear and dragging him close enough the Barrow Sword could take off his head. The legionary exploded into a spray of dust and rotten flesh, armour falling into the rocks. The Silver Huntress parried a spear tossed at my side then threw her own with a flash of Light, slaying the sender without batting an eye. The proximity of Light almost destabilized my working, but with a soft curse and desperate haste I compensated. Just a moment now, aligning it just right...

“Burn them all,” I hissed in Crepuscular.

The circle of black flame erupted around the crossbowmen, rising the height of three men before spinning inwards. The crossbowmen died screaming, but I was not done. The circle kept spinning on itself, until I snapped my staff against the ground and it exploded outwards in a wave. I heard screaming from legionaries not mine as munitions began to explode, the brush burning bright as the wave of incineration continued outwards until it gutted. I breathed out, brow touched with sweat, and drew my sword. The animated corpses that’d been attacking us – vampires? – were retreating, I found. Half the Levantines that’d come with us were dead and Ishaq was bleeding from a bite mark on his face, but otherwise we’d made out decently.

Eye scanning the night, I found that in the hills there were glints of steel under moonlight. More legionaries. Pulling back , I realized. And so were those that’d been fighting in the breach, though the Dominion pressed them close and the crossbowmen Juniper had sent took their toll. Maybe a fifth of those five hundred would make it out. But why were they retreating already? It made little sense. If they feared what I could do with the Night, why attack after nightfall in the first place? Feeling like I’d missed something I led us back to camp in a hurry. And there was something wrong, I noticed it immediately. Too many legionary tents were empty, and those that weren’t were being brought down. Packed away.

I found Juniper and with her my answers. My marshal looked wretched. I thought it was a wound, at first, but her body was fine.

“She played us,” Juniper got out, words tumbling out of her fanged mouth like a confession. “She left her camp, Cat. The Legions are marching on us right now, they’re most the way across the valley, and we can’t fight. Not with the entire Eleventh out in the hills waiting to flank us.”

My fingers clenched.

“You’re saying we need to retreat,” I slowly said.

“We’re in disarray, flanked and our camp fortifications are incomplete,” the Hellhound said. “If we fight, we’ll lose .”

I rocked back in shock. She knew, and I knew she did, that a retreat at night with the enemy nipping at our heels was going to get bloody. Goblin skirmishers were going to scrape of our rearguard raw, and we’d be both slow and vulnerable on the move. That she was still arguing we needed to retreat could only mean that she was genuinely afraid that our army was going to get destroyed if we did not.

“Where would we even go?” I got out.

“Further north,” she said. “Near the Jini Plateau, close to Nioqe Lake.”

That wasn’t a strategic position, I thought. Or even a tactical one. There were no real gains to be made by going there except not being crushed. That was how bad out situation had gotten. Numbly, I nodded my permission. I needed a drink, I thought, before we got going. Gods but my leg hurt.

I could not remember the last time we had been this brutally outmaneuvered.

—

We cut our losses and ran. It was not as hard a retreat as it could have been, Marshal Nim perhaps wary of engaging in a full pitched battle in the dark, but it cost us more than I cared to admit. As we fled I looked back and froze, for in the distance I saw the Black Knight’s fortified camp was burning bright under the starry sky. It took me a moment to understand. Of course she was burning that camp. She no longer needed it, after all.

She’d just taken ours.

Chapter 15: Pull

“Only a child pretends there is value in defeat. Fool they who praise a bleeding wound.”

– Dread Empress Massacre

Since we’d come crashing down into this godforsaken region three days ago, we had lost one thousand six hundred and thirty-two soldiers.

The last count came in from the Dominion midmorning, as they were less used to counting their dead. The Levantines had borne the brunt of those losses, almost a quarter of the men they’d brought east now dead. In the exchange we’d killed maybe a quarter of that number in enemy soldiers, mostly through skirmishes that had gone our way. The best that could be said of the last few days was that we’d avoided a rout, not that this narrow avoidance meant our situation was anything less than terrible. We’d camped near the northern shore of Nioqe Lake, beyond the long shadows cast by the Jini Plateau, and while we were somewhat safe at the moment our strategic situation had taken a sharp turn for the worse.

The mood was grim when our war council assembled. The usual few slunk their way into the tent: Vivienne and Brandon Talbot, Juniper and Aisha, Zola Osei. Of the two lordlings only one showed today, Razin Tanja. Aquiline was attending to their captains, who were not pleased with the way this campaign was going. It’d not escaped anyone’s attention that the Legions of Terror seemed to be focusing their efforts on the Dominion, which had brought old tensions to the fore – there was some talk in Levantine ranks of my Praesi legionaries being traitors, of there being some conspiracy afoot, and it needed to be stamped out. Aquiline tended to be more popular with their warriors, so it was only natural that we’d ended up with Razin.

“It is no longer feasible to take back our camp,” General Zola crisply said. “I can only argue in favour of retreat now, west to the half-road and then further north to grounds less at our disadvantage.”

“That marches us straight into the Gale Ribbon,” Aisha said, shaking her head. “Even with wards prepared we’ll take losses.”

“We could attempt to take the burned camp in Moule Hills for our own,” Brandon Talbot suggested.

“They’ll have mined that,” I grunted. “If not worse.”

It was against Legion regulations to use devils but I wasn’t sure how closely followed a rule that would be without my father around to enforce it. A lot of high-placed officers had shared his opinion, but many of those were now dead. I wasn’t sure the Black Knight would push back if Malicia insisted, which she might. The Empress would prefer burning contracts to losing men, at this stage of the war.

“And even if we swing wide away from Kala Hills to avoid giving battle, there is nothing to stop her from simply marching down and getting into a position to flanks us,” Aisha said. “Lady Black has made it clear that she will not let us entrench.”

“Is a ramp to access the plateau feasible?” Razin asked. “We could avoid the valley that so troubles us entirely by accessing the heights.”

Looks were shared. That was the closest thing to a good idea we’d heard so far.

“I’ll consult with Sapper-General Pickler,” I said.

“Even if it is something our sappers can accomplish,” General Zola began, “Marshal Nim will not leave us to build that ramp unmolested. We would need to stake out a more defensible position.”

I glanced at Juniper, who sat at the other end of the table in silence. She had been following the conversation attentively, but there was a peculiar look on her face. She had not once opened her mouth to give an opinion this entire council and did not break the streak to answer Zola.

“Send out riders to find one,” I ordered the general. “Even if Pickler says it can’t be done, it’ll be useful information to have under our belt.”

“I will see to the roster,” Aisha volunteered, smoothly rising to her feet.

She threw a worried glanced at Juniper, who did not meet her eyes. The council ended without much ceremony, the tent emptying until there were only three people left: Vivienne, me and the still-silent Hellhound. Brushing back a strand that’d slipped her braid, the princess was the first to speak up.

“You haven’t said a word all morning,” Vivienne stated.

Juniper let out a long breath, chair creaking under her.

“I haven’t,” she said.

A moment passed. She did not continue.

“We’ve had setbacks before,” I finally said. “And we’re far from defeated, we just-”

“I should resign,” the Hellhound interrupted me. “I can’t, I know it would be a bad look in the middle of a campaign, but I should. Command should informally be passed to Zola regardless.”

I balked.

“That’s not even slightly a good idea,” I said. “Zola’s solid, but she doesn’t have the spark. Nim will eat her alive.”

Hakram had been right when he’d warned I should temper my expectations of Zola Osei, as he often was. Hune’s replacement was not her equal, much less Juniper’s. She was the kind of commander that made for a respectable general but fell short of marshal talents.

“Nim is eating me alive, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Juniper barked out. “How many times are you going to make excuses for me, Catherine? I’m losing .”

“I’m not making excuses,” I flatly replied. “We’ve made some mistakes and paid for them but-”

“I should have asked you to send Named out in the hills, not just scouts,” Juniper growled. “The Eleventh wouldn’t have caught us out. The Order should have been out near the vanguard, not near the supply wagons – they could have chased Nim’s horse before they shredded the Levantines.”

“You’re not an oracle , Juniper,” I bit out. “We’d be having a very different conversation if she’d sent the horse after the wagons instead, and she might have attacked the moment we flushed out the Eleventh so-”

“I am not,” Juniper of the Red Shields quietly said, “equal to this task.”

I slammed my open palm onto the table.

“What the fuck is this?” I snarled. “She played her cards better, Juniper. We lost a few hands. So what? The goddamned pot is still on the table for anyone to take.”

I heard her hands creak as large fingers tightened into fists.

“I’m not sure it all came back,” Juniper hoarsely said. “After Malicia pulled her hooks. That I’m still all of me.”

And just for that look in my friend’s eyes, I wished I could kill Alaya of Satus twice.

“It did,” I flatly said.

The Pilgrim had told me as much and I had no reason to doubt him. There’d been physical scars it would take her years to overcome, but her mind was fine.

“I will not be another orc cripple for you to lug about, Catherine,” Juniper hissed. “Don’t you see it’s even worse if it’s all there? It just means I was never in the same league. If I’m no longer fit, if I ever was in the first place, and-”

“Do you genuinely believe I wouldn’t have advocated your removal if I believed you unfit for your office?”

Vivienne’s voice cut through our rising anger like a knife. Juniper rocked back like she’d been slapped, but she was listening.

“Catherine loves you like family,” Vivienne calmly continued. “She might excuse weakness out of sentiment. Would I, Hellhound? We have an understanding, but we both know I would not put you above Callowan lives.”

“You’re not a general,” Juniper replied, but it was weak and by the tone of her voice she knew it.

She just wasn’t convinced. Didn’t want to be, maybe couldn’t be. I grit my teeth. Though I was not unfamiliar with the flagellant’s whip, this was not the time for my marshal to indulge in it. We were already in deep enough trouble without losing our finest military mind halfway through a campaign.

“Neither are you, at the moment,” Vivienne evenly replied. “Perhaps you should attend to those duties before further defeat ensues, Marshal Juniper.”

The orc’s voice was stilted as she excused herself, almost fleeing the tent. I slumped back into my seat. Vivienne rose to pour two glasses of wine, pressing one into my hand.

“Fuck,” I eloquently said.

It’d not been good in the first place, but I suspected I might have made it worse.

“I can’t fix this,” Vivienne told me. “It’s not who we are to each other. She doesn’t call me Warlord, or ever will.”

I drank, biting down on my first answer. It was bitter enough on my tongue it almost spoiled the wine.

“I’m not sure how to fix this either,” I said. “Winning? If we could beat Nim so easily we’d already be doing it.”

“There are some who agree with her, you know,” Vivienne murmured. “Not just our countrymen, who sometimes mutter for the wrong reasons. Officers that were brought in from the Legions. They say she came up too quick, more out of closeness to you than merit. That a few College tricks and being Istrid Knightsbane’s daughter aren’t enough to warrant her being raised so high.”

I scoffed.

“I didn’t pick her name out of a hat, Viv,” I said. “Just yesterday she saved us a rout. How many officers would have figured out the Order needed to be sent to relieve us before the enemy cavalry even came out? It’s not her that’s the problem, it’s that we’re fighting the Legions of Terror on their picked grounds with the deck stacked in the favour. This was never going to be easy .”

I’d ridden Legion war doctrine like a warhorse over the back of half the fucking continent. It wasn’t going to stop being effective just because I wasn’t the only one on the field using it.

“I know that,” Vivienne said. “So do most people who matter.”

My heiress paused, offering me a wan smile.

“Does Juniper?”

—

“You might as well be asking me to build a ramp to the moon,” Pickler bluntly told me.

“I’m sure Ol’ Sorcerous would appreciate the way down, but my ambitions are slightly more grounded,” I easily replied.

Well, more or less. I only wanted to bind the entire continent to a treaty that would fundamentally change how Named would operate. You know, summer fair gift stuff.

“Funny,” my Sapper-General said, tone dry as sand. “I can’t do it, Catherine, at least not in the time you want it done. We didn’t have the wood to build a ramp that size in the first place and we lost too many of our stakes when we abandoned the camp last night. Unless you want me to build it out of stone we cut from the cliffside, it can’t be done.”

I eyed her with alarm. I’d not known our situation was so bad with the sudes . If we lost too many of the large stakes my legionaries carried to easily raise palisades then we’d be dependent on local wood. Of which there wasn’t much. The most we’d seen was the brushlands in the Kala Hills, which the Loyalist Legions now held.

“We can still raise palisades properly, can’t we?” I asked.

“Camp size’s been reduced. We’re toeing the line for sanitation,” Pickler admitted. “If not for the priests we’d be at risk of sicknesses.”

Well, it’d been a day for pleasant surprises so far. Why break that lovely trend?

“We need to do something , Pickler,” I got out.

“We’re not reaching that plateau, Catherine,” she said, then hesitated. “But I have an... idea. I need to look at some things first, though. See if it’s truly viable.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“You’re not going to give me more than that?”

“No point in raising false hopes,” Pickler said. “I’ll find you when I’m sure.”

I was inclined to poke at her for at least a few scraps, but she was saved by the appearance of a phalange. The young Taghreb informed me that Archer was back in camp and she’d brought a package with her, which spurred my curiosity. I met with Vivienne as I limped my way back, as she’d been sent for too, the pair of us entering the tent together to the sight of Archer dumping a large cloth sack on the carved table. I paused.

“Is whatever’s in that bag breathing?” I bluntly asked.

“I would hope so,” Vivienne said. “That’s one of the abduction bags for the Jacks, if she got blood all over it I’ll be cross.”

Ah, Vivienne. Sometimes she said these things and I acutely felt the loss it was for my gender that she was only interested in the other one.

“Why, hello Archer,” Indrani brightly said. “Lovely to see you, how did your night go?”

I raised my staff then poked experimentally at the bag, ignoring her entirely.

“I think it’s a person,” I mused.

“She might have finally snapped and done in Masego,” Vivienne suggested. “There’s only so many times a woman can have her words nitpicked before blood ensues.”

“If you don’t stop I’ll put him back where I found him,” Indrani threatened.

I had to bite down on a ‘Masego? It’d be a walk, but I suppose you could’ that very much wanted to wriggle its way past my lips. It was rare that I got to gang up on one of the Woe instead of getting ganged up on, so it was only with reluctance that I moved on to business.

“And where would that be?” I asked.

Theatrically, Archer opened the bag to reveal the bruised face of an unconscious dark-skinned man in what I’d guess to be his early twenties.

“Kala Fortress,” Indrani said. “You’re looking at Sokoro Abara, third child of Lord Abara of Kala. Caught him while he was serving as a go-between between the fortress and the Legions.”

My brow rose. That was quite the catch. More than enough to make up for her absence last night, considering she wouldn’t have made much of a difference in the fight. I stayed silent a little longer, choosing my words.

“I know that look,” Indrani accused. “I did good but you want to insult me anyways so you’re moving around the sentence.”

“Of course not,” I lied.

“You did good, Archer,” Vivienne told her with a warm smile.

Indrani preened.

“You know,” my successor casually added, “for a sullen wench.”

I grinned even as wails of Callowan treachery began filling up the tent, already thinking about all the answers we were going to get out of that man.

—

Sokoro Abara was going to be a hard nut to crack, I figured.

Akua had once told me that a lot of Wasteland nobles trained their children in methods to resist torture and in my experience Praesi aristocrats needed to be made brutally aware that their situation was desperate before the veneer of arrogance even began to break. So we did the works: put him in a tent enchanted for darkness with the sole magelight facing him, had the Concocter feed him something to keep him slightly dazed and I handled the interrogation personally with only Vivienne at my side. Sokoro Abara woke up, blinking away the sleep, and then took in the sight of my being seated across from him and Vivienne standing behind me.

There was a pregnant pause.

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” he swore.

Well. I was feeling a little cheated, but there was a saying about gift horses. The young noble was quite frank about how he was not even slightly interested in dying or being tortured for his family’s sake, and instead offered information quite freely when asked. His position as the envoy between the fortress and Legions – he informed us quite bitterly that such a task had of course been beneath his elder half-siblings – and his confessed tendency to open sealed scrolls to read them meant he’d been in a good position to learn about the unfolding debacle.

“The Eleventh was in the hills for two days before you marched there,” he told us. “They went through Risas, using the shepherd paths. The Black Knight wanted them in position to strike at your army from behind should you fight in the valley.”

It was an odd feeling to know that our disastrous vanguard action had still been better than the likely alternative: picking a fight with Marshal Nim in the valley and getting smashed in the back by a full legion. Though it’d been a costly thing to learn that General Lucretia was hiding in the hills, better we learn it now than when a battle was on the line. He also had actionably useful information, of the recent kind.

“Lady Black ordered that the wells to both the east and west of the Kala Hills should be poisoned today,” Sokoro told us. “She had to ask us permission first, as it is still father’s land, but he bent over backwards to agree. Lady Warlock has offered to broker entering under Wolof’s protection on very favourable terms, so there’s little he won’t do to please her.”

My lips thinned. I could deduce why Marshal Nim would give the order easily enough. She wanted us to be stuck near Nioqe Lake, knowing that if we strayed too far from those shores we’d have no water source to draw from. Now that the Black Knight had put us in a corner, she meant for us to stay there.

“What do you know of Marshal Nim’s plans?” Vivienne asked.

“Not much,” Sokoro admitted. “She was raised under the Carrion Lord, you know. Like all his old soldiers she has high-handed manners even in the lands of her betters.”

I doubted this man was Nim’s better in any possible sense of the word – except passing through small doorways, maybe? – but I’d gain nothing from telling him that.

“Not much is still something ,” I smiled.

He smiled back and asked for assurances about his captivity. I guaranteed him absence of torture and fair treatment if he talked – which he already had, but apparently did not know – yet when I offered right of ransom he scoffed.

“Father won’t pay,” Sokoro said. “I’d rather you promise wine instead, I imagine being a prisoner will be dreadfully dull.”

“We can arrange that,” Vivienne promised.

‘Not much’ hadn’t been him playing coy, unfortunately. He’d overheard useful bits but no plan. Nim’s legionaries were apparently convinced that she wanted to avoid giving us a pitched battle, which I had no trouble believing. The most interesting morsel was that apparently General Wheeler had been asked about raising field fortifications that would hem in the Army of Callow around Nioqe Lake. It was not a sure thing, but in my opinion it seemed likely she actually intended to try. Malicia did not want to wreck my army, just put me in a position where I was forced to negotiate. Bottled up against the shores of the lake with a larger force or impassable terrain encircling me as my supplies ran out would achieve that.

The best possible outcome of being forced into that corner was managing a stalemate until Sepulchral and the Rebel Legions arrived, but I had my doubts we’d manage as much. Besides, if it was the fight Marshal Nim was after then it was the last one we wanted to give her. Which meant moving before we got cornered.

Time to see if Pickler had a way for us to slip the noose before it got tightened.

—

“I told you that I can’t get us on that plateau,” Pickler hissed out in irritation.

“But you have something else,” I pressed.

“It’s a gamble,” my Sapper-General admitted. “But I believe it’ll work.”

She showed me to the inside of a tent where a tenth of sappers were chattering away as they worked, cutting away at wood and hammering in nails. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at: one of our supply wagons, stripped of its wheels and bound tighter. Was that wax I was smelling?

“I can’t get you on the plateau,” Pickler repeated, standing at my side. “But there’s another way east. Nioqe Lake.”

“You want to make a pontoon bridge across,” I realized, then frowned. “We have enough wood?”

“If we use every supply wagon,” she replied. “And a significant portion of our stakes.”

She’d not been underselling it when she’d called that a gamble, then. If the enemy sunk that bridge, or even just prevented us from recovering it after we crossed, we’d be in heaps of trouble. As in, might seriously have to consider cutting a deal trouble: without wagons to carry our supplies we’d slow to a crawl even using roads. Out there on wild land, where there weren’t any, we’d be snails to the Black Knight’s hawk.

“How long would it take you to get it done?” I asked.

“We made a pattern, so I could have it ready for deployment by sundown if you don’t steal any of my sappers,” Pickler said. “Trouble is, Catherine, I don’t have a way to prevent them seeing us make it.”

Which would allow Nim to contest the crossing, the last thing I wanted. I clenched my fingers then unclenched them. There was a way. I didn’t like using it as a ploy, it felt disrespectful, but I’d do it anyway. The question was, then whether it was truly our way out. Sure, it’d get us out of Marshal Nim’s planned encirclement and on the other side of the lake if things went fine. What would we do once there, though? Taking a gamble to flee blindly was exactly the kind of mistake the Black Knight was waiting to capitalize on. She’d pushed her army hard, striking at us repeatedly over the same day and night, because she knew that our officer corps and general staff were of lesser quality than hers. We were, as an army, simply more prone to making mistakes when time grew short.

That was the difference training made.

The way I saw it, the point of crossing Nioqe Lake would be marching south afterwards. I’d been Juniper’s original plan to do as much, if from a significantly better position, and I still believed it was a sound notion. The problem now was Kala Fortress. It was a certainty the Loyalist Legions would move to cover it faster than we could get there – needing to fish out and rebuild our supply wagons ensured as much – so Nim was likely to entrench by the walls. That’d been true in the original iteration of the Hellhound’s plan as well, but our answer to that had simply been going around the Legions by marching further east before cutting south. That was no longer an option, because as I’d recently learned from our prisoner the Black Knight had ordered all the wells east of Kala Hills poisoned .

I wasn’t sure how far that order would be applied in practice but given that Nim had light cavalry to spare I wouldn’t bet on it being a small slice of land. We could last maybe two weeks without refreshing our water supplies if we began rationing immediately and nothing went wrong, which made risking an eastern march rolling the dice. If we got lucky it might rain and be the drinkable kind of rain instead of the brimstone kind that burned – a legitimate worry in these parts, Aisha had informed me – but that was a large if . Especially when the mage cadres of the Loyalist Legions had shown they were capable of large-scale weather manipulation rituals. Even if rainstorms gathered, there was nothing to prevent the Legions from just dispersing them.

No, the reliable water was south and down the half-road. And there was a set of fortifications on top of that road: Kala Fortress. If we could take it before Nim got there, we’d be in a very defensible position and sitting over her supply line. We’d be putting her in a corner instead of the other way around. I could maybe sneak a small force to that keep before the Black Knight got there, I finally thought, but nowhere large enough to actually take a well-defended castle. Which meant I needed to figure out how to bust open that lock before we got started on this plan.

“Catherine?” Pickler hesitantly asked.

I had gone silent for a long while, I supposed. I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them. Taking Kala Fortress wasn’t really the issue, was it? As in, it did not need to be in the Army of Callow’s possession. I just needed it not to be in the hands of the Loyalist Legions. And that was something I might just have the tool to achieve.

“Get started on the work,” I said, then bit my tongue. “Talk to Juniper and General Zola first, but you have my full backing for this. Unless they object stridently, it’s happening.”

Leaving her quite bemused at the sudden turn, I set to talking around the key to the lock.

—

Sokoro Abara widely smiled, showing slightly yellowing teeth. His breath smelled like the wine we’d promised him and Vivienne had evidently delivered on.

“I do have some friends behind the walls, Your Majesty,” he said. “Though it behooves me to ask why I should introduce them to you. I am, after all, a prisoner.”

“You misunderstand me,” I said.

He flinched, as if preparing for a blow, but none followed.

“There would be no need for an introduction, as you would be the one speaking to them,” I idly continued.

His eyes narrowed.

“You’d release me?” he asked.

“Release is a strong word,” I thinly smiled. “Tell me, Sokoro, how would you like to be Lord of Kala?”

He stayed silent a moment, considering. If the Army of Callow put him in that seat Malicia might take offence in the aftermath should she beat us, but that was a relatively distant concern. He could place himself under a High Seat’s protection should he grow too worried of retribution.

“Part of the castle and the soldiers would back me over my siblings,” Sokoro finally said, tone even. “Not over my father. He is a well-respected man. I also have... concerns about my mother’s safety.”

“Your father is an eminently mortal man,” I said. “And we can whisk away your mother before we strike.”

Scribe had gotten to make her latest Assassin. We’d use it. The dark-skinned man’s eyes brightened at my words. It was what he’d wanted to hear. Wasn’t like he was ever going to rise high except through my good graces: everything he’d said about his half-siblings implied a degree of enmity. He might get cast out after the death of Lord Abara, and that was assuming none in the castle decided to... err on the side of caution.

“And what would you have of me in return?” he asked.

“All I want is a friend ruling that fortress,” I smiled. “Perhaps your help in learning the lay of the land. Nothing onerous.”

He looked hesitant. Right, Praesi. I’d get more trust out of him if I bled him some.

“Full use of your water is what I want most, of course,” I said. “I’ll not require your soldiers to fight by the side of the Army of Callow.”

“I might be amenable to such an arrangement,” Sokoro Abara lightly said.

“Good,” I smiled, and to his alarm the darkness began thickening around us.

Faint sounds could be heard, almost like cawing, and my smiled broadened.

“I’ll want an oath out of you, my friend,” I said. “Just in case, you see. Trust is hard come by in these troubled times.”

“It is only natural,” he stiffly replied. “On what would you have me swear?”

Night began filling the room, Sve Noc granting this a sliver of their attention, and I answered him.

—

In a ring outside our camp, one thousand six hundred and thirty-two corpses were dragged out on the plains and assembled in great piles. Mages came out in lines, setting fire to them with what little wood we could spare for this – which wasn’t much. As a result they had to stay and keep feeding more mageflame to the dead bodies, which took powerful flames to burn. The result was plumes of thick, guttering smoke that rose up into the afternoon sky. Enough of them that it was as if a curtain had been pulled in front of the camp.

Pickler’s sappers had their cover.

Meanwhile I set about giving the enemy something to react to, instead of leaving them to operate unhindered. I first picked a place on open grounds with a good view at the Black Knight’s fortified camp. Hierophant came with me, in expectation of the enemy’s answer, and the two of us stood out like black-plumed birds out on the rocky plains. A bodyguard of twenty knights had ridden with us, but I’d refused more. There would be no point. I took the lead, pulling down my hood and beginning to murmur under the pounding sun. Night was like a lazy brat refusing to get up, but I had time to spare. I coaxed it out properly and the Sisters helped me with the alignment. Zeze could have done it through the Observatory, but I wanted him free to act.

The same ring of red light as last night appeared over our heads, but I’d told Masego to leave it. No need to warn the enemy of his presence too early. Once I’d gathered the power to me, though, I told him to get ready.

“I am all eyes, Catherine,” he replied.

High above the enemy camp I ripped open a gate into Arcadia. There was a reason we’d not tried to keep moving through the faerie realm after being stranded: out here it was a nightmarish mirror of the Wasteland. Impossible storms that toppled mountains, landslides that charged like armies and rains that drew furrows in the ground. That was without even getting into the... fauna. Maybe a few Named could slip through, but entire companies? It’d be madness to even try. There was no lack of water, though, and that was what I’d been after. After a few heartbeats a flood began pouring, just in time for power to begin rising in the enemy camp.

Time to see what Akua had cooked up to handle my signature trick. I let out a startled snort when, instead of some fancy spell, what appeared was instead another gate. About the same size and placed below mine, like a bucket for the flood to be poured into. Well, that was certainly a solution. Nice sorcery, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.

“Zeze?” I asked.

“ Wrest ,” Hierophant replied, and the world rippled.

The enemy gate rippled but did not break. I saw Masego frown and dimly felt power bloom in the distance again.

“Clever mage,” Hierophant murmured. “They are feeding the gate further magic so that I cannot fully wrest it-”

“Keep them stuck, then,” I grunted.

I was not without tricks of my own. My gate began to pull together, like a ball of twine being rolled up, and the flood of water ended. But with a grunt of effort I dragged the ‘twine’ to the side and down, only to begin unfolding it again. Sweat soaked my back and the gate was noticeably smaller than my first, but before long the flood began pouring again. About a hundred feet above Loyalist Legion camp, it hit transparent panes of sorcery. They buckled but held. Water began sliding down, revealing the broad shape of a dome. Masego tutted.

“The structure is too simple, Sahelian,” he said. “Here is why we want more intricate escapements.”

His hand whipped out, the ripples of his aspect strengthening, and the enemy gate blew up in blinding flash of light. The air thrummed with power as there was a sound of thunder, the enchantment protecting the camp shivering – and, in patches, failing. I’d kept my gate opened, and like an avalanche of bricks the water fell down on the enemy through a doze holes. Mages patched up the hole quick enough with shields, but not before we did some damage. I kept the gate open as long as I could, Hierophant swatting down a few other attempts to block it, but their mages were focusing on protection so there was no further break.

Didn’t matter. I’d got what I came for: I’d rattled their cage and something else they’d not notice until it was too late.

“The angle for your adjusted gate was far from the best you could have used,” Masego noted. “Too much to the east of the camp.”

“I aimed at what I wanted, don’t you worry about it,” I smiled.

I’d emptied half a lake on the eastern part of the camp, and though it’d rolled off the dome the important part was where it’d rolled off. Into Kala Hills, into the same paths the Eleventh had used to attack us last night. The same that Nim might be tempted to use as a shortcut to attack us when we crossed the lake.

Now they were a mess of mud and water, impossible to march an army through for at least a few days.

—

We launched a night attack.

It was the best way to cover our crossing, General Zola said. Marshal Juniper did not object. Five thousand of the Army of Callow and a thousand Levantine skirmishers marched out, every Named at hand save for me going with them. They were to shake the enemy and then retreat, actually fighting as little as possible. I even poured Night into a trinket and left it for Hierophant to wield: that ring of red light was a good way to feign my presence where I wasn’t. The Loyalist Legions would be very wary of attacking me after dark now that I’d had some time to prepare.

It was nerve-wracking to watch them march out without going with them, but I had other duties. Sokoro Abara was put on a horse and we kept our most mobile force in reserve: the moment the pontoon bridge was finished, the Order of the Broken Bells would ride across in full force. The knights were our change to get to Kala Fortress before the Black Knight could, much as they might be needed in the small battle about to take place in the plains.

It took hours, to my rising restlessness, before the bridge was done. We didn’t wait until it was; as soon as Pickler told me they’d reached the shallows on the other side, I saddled up and led the Order across. There’d been no news about the battle in the plains yet. We rode through the shallow water and then up the beach, the townsfolk of Risas barring their gates and hiding as we rode past. After that, the hasty ride in the dark was surprisingly boring. Sometimes a horse fell and a knight had to pull back and change their mount, but otherwise we went untroubled.

We rode down the eastern length of the Kala Hills, then swung around west to approach the keep itself. We rested the horses before coming into sight, not only to allow the beasts to catch their breath. Scribe and her almost-Named had come through for me: waiting for us in a fold of the rocks was Sokoro Abara’s mother, as I’d promised. I gave him a moment to reassure her – and confirm through someone he trusted we truly had assassinated his father – and then we saddled up again.

Kala Fortress was a grim old thing propped up against the side of the eponymous hills, with tall and thick wall of stones surrounding the small town at the bottom of a squat castle. Sokoro went in ahead with Assassin secretly shadowing him and contacted his partisans. There was some violence before they seized control of the outer gates, but once they were swung open my knights flooded into the town. We struck quick enough the castle gates were overridden before they could be closed, and with Sokoro serving as our emissary a surrender was not overly difficult to secure.

I had to blow up his sister’s head, she was the fight-to-the-end type, but the sight of that cooled ardours among the hardliners. Within the hour he was Lord Sokoro Abara and his half-brother in a cell, which was when I finally left out a breath of relief. Our part of this, at least, had gone well. It was past Early Bell, but we’d taken the fortress. Now all we could do was wait .

I got the news in waves. The first rider was sent by Juniper once the force we’d sent to stir up Nim had begun to retreat. The skirmishing had gone well and it looked like the Black Knight had preferred marching out with her full strength arrayed rather than pursuing us half-baked. She must have thought we were baiting her into a trap. The second rider informed me that the Loyalist Legions had sent out their entire horse to harass us when they’d realized we had raised a pontoon bridge but that our rearguard was holding. The crossing had begun and it was expected that the Army of Callow would be across before the enemy infantry arrived.

The third rider wasn’t from Juniper at all, it was from the Black Knight. We caught the man and killed him, but all it’d do was slow the realization that we were now at her back. The fourth rider brought harsher news: the enemy cavalry had set fire to the pontoon bridge before the last of my men crossed, leaving three companies stranded on the wrong side of the lake. General Zola had ordered them to surrender, which they had. The rest of the Army of Callow, however, had crossed. A detachment would stay to try to salvage as much of the bridge as possible, but the march to Kala had begun. The Black Knight sent a pair of companies to check the fortress, in the hours after, but I sallied with the Order and rode them down.

There were no survivors and Marshal Nim did not try us again.

By dawn my army was camped beneath the walls of Kala Fortress, the few sappers Pickler had been able to spare looking into setting up defensive positions. By Morning Bell our supplies had caught up. By Noon Bell horns sounded to call the beleaguered Army of Callow to fighting positions, because our forward elements had brought word: the Loyalist Legions had formed a battle line in the valley and were now beginning to march towards us. Lady Black had decided she’d rather fight than let herself be cornered.

An hour past Noon Bell, as I sat on Zombie’s back, I looked at the retreating Loyalist Legions and laughed until my belly hurt. It wasn’t us that’d given them pause, no. We were in good battle order, ready to receive them, but it was a banner that’d done the trick. Atop Moule Hills, on Nim’s left flank, a banner had been raised: a vulture cradling a white skull, with green and yellow lines emanating from it. And under the colours horse and infantry stood, poised on the heights and looking down at us.

Sepulchral’s vanguard had arrived even earlier than expected, and now everyone’s plans were merrily burning under the afternoon sun.

Beatification II

“To fear death is to grant it power over you. To welcome it as an old friend is to escape the shackles forced on you at birth.”

– Irmingard Fenne, the Bloody Sword

Laurence had only known the road for two years, and yet already she could conceive of no other way to live. It seemed a distant thing, the town she had come from. Montfort might as well be in another world entirely. These days she found an urge began to itch if they even stayed in the same town for too long, as if slowing burned at the soles of her feet. Yet this journey of theirs, it was making her restless in another way entirely. Her teacher had said that they were travelling to Iserre to meet an old foe of his, the Ranger, but not why. Laurence was not one to let questions go unasked, though, so she pressed every time they made camp.

“Is it because she is your lover?” the young girl bluntly asked.

Men did stupid things, when cocks got involved. Sometimes stupid in a good way, but usually not. Saint Ortega, ten-sun duellist and sole master of the Lament school, choked on his bottle of swill as he began hacking out a wet laugh.

“Gods forbid,” Ortega finally got out. “She is a woman besides, Laurence. My tastes run otherwise.”

She’d not so much as guessed. He’d never shown much interest in anyone, really, though Laurence suspected some of that had to do with the amount he drank. It’d always been too much, but since they had begun their journey south he was as a one-man brewery.

“Then why go at all?” Laurence asked. “Never seen you answer to anyone before.”

Ortega wiped his face, sparse beard still dripping with wine.

“Nor will you ever,” the Saint said, the calm sound of his voice beyond boasting. “There is simply a conversation waiting in Iserre that I wish to finish.”

Laurence’s eyes narrowed.

“You said something just like that, when I asked you about the sword,” she accused.

Not the slender longsword he used, but the other one. The beaten-up scabbard and ratty leather-wrapped hilt he carried around on his back but she had never once seen him draw.

“I’d hoped you forgot,” Ortega casually admitted.

Laurence of Montfort really wasn’t the kind of girl to ever forget anything, so the joke was on him. Still, he was her teacher. Her master. Respect was due, even if he insisted on being a drunken vagrant.

“I know I’m a student,” Laurence said. “That I don’t get to make demands. But it doesn’t feel like our other journeys, this one.”

If he still drew a line after that, she would find her silence. She owed too much to do otherwise. The older man sighed, tucking the half-empty bottle into the crook of his handless arm. He went groping behind him, into the grass, and in the moment that followed the beaten-up sword was on his lap. The bottle went down into the grass, sloppily corked, and Ortega considered her seriously.

“You are my student,” the older man said. “So I will show you this, once, and tell you its tale. But no more than that.”

Laurence gravely nodded. He unsheathed the sword, slowly, and to her surprise and fascination it was no wreck. It was the finest longsword she had ever seen, its steel pale as milk and perfectly smooth. There was no guard, but peeking out from under leather wrap was a grip made of something that looked like bone.

“This blade,” Saint Ortega told her, “is known as Sublevacion. In the legends of my people, it is known as the Sword of Rebellion. The tales claim it was forged by Fortun Arles himself, from the bones of a great giant he slew before leading his kin into rebellion against the Gigantes. It will never grow dull nor break so long as its wielder does not lose will, and there is not a thing in Creation it cannot cut. Be it magic or Light, all knows its bite.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” Laurence admitted.

“It has been lost for centuries,” Ortega said. “And so the legend it hardly known beyond my people. But many a real – and later prince – in the south have claimed to have found in years past. There are still many who believe wielding Sublevacion is a mandate to lead all the peoples that were once the Arlesens Confederation.”

A king’s sword, she thought. So what was he doing, dragging it around like a lump of wood?

“How did you come to wield such a blade?” she asked.

“I went looking for it,” Ortega laughed. “When I was a young man, the Lone Swordsman still. It is a long story, and grim in many ways, but I sill simply say that my first attempt to retrieve it from the deepest depths of the Brocelian was a hard defeat.”

Laurence could not quite believe him, even though she knew it must be true. She had never seen her master defeated, not even once. Most of the time he did not even take the fights seriously.

“Yet I believed I needed it, that having it would make me the finest swordsman alive,” the older man said, pulling deep at his wine. “That it would let me hear the Breath at last. So I made a bargain with a most dangerous woman for her help.”

“Ranger,” Laurence whispered.

He nodded.

“And the repayment of that favour,” Ortega said, “is to come on my fiftieth nameday. I am many things, Laurence, but above them all I am a man of my word.”

She clenched her fingers. Perhaps it would not be wise, to cross a woman sounding as dangerous as this Damned was, but she disliked the thought of giving in to Evil so easily.

“You must be too,” Ortega gently told her. “Else what clouds you will cloud your blade as well. Steel has no patience for liars, my dear.”

He polished off the last of the bottle and tossed it behind him, sheathing the sword. Laurence had found it hard not to stare at the blade. It was, she thought, the single most beautiful thing she had ever seen. But she had asked as much as she dared, and so the conversation ended. They moved deep into Iserre as the days passed and winter came knocking at the door, to the eastern reaches that bordered the Waning Woods. It was wild lands here, little like the tame and wealthy places that the House of Milenan ruled over closer to Lake Artoise. They found a pretty grove away from the road where there was little to hunt but many chestnuts to roast and made camp there.

Ortega drilled her relentlessly, harder than he ever had before. Thrice Laurence thought she’d been about to die to his blade before he finally deflated and ceased sparring entirely.

“I had thought fear might undo your block,” he admitted. “Yet is seems not. It is no worry, Laurence, no failure. Yours is simply to be a winding road.”

For all his reassurances, she could not help but feel she’d let him down. She sulked for most a day before returning to camp, finding him seated in the afternoon chill by the fire. It had snowed for two days, lightly but enough to blanket the world in pale, and now after a quiet morning it was beginning to snow again. Her teacher looked serene in the dappled evening light. His haggard green coat was pulled tight around him, close enough Laurence would not have known him to be missing a hand, and though he had a flask of liquor in hand he was smiling softly as he watched the snowflakes drift through the woods. The beard and long matted hair leant him a noble mien, if you didn’t look too closely.

He made for a striking enough sight that Laurence hesitated for a moment, long enough for someone else to step into their small clearing.

A woman, tall and slender. Black of hair and almost golden-skinned, but for all the grace of her movements she was barely better dressed than Ortega – tanned leathers and a brown cloak, a vest over a shirt of silver mail. She had two short swords at her hips and a longbow on her back, a side quiver hanging off her belt. The Ranger barely left footsteps in the snow as she walked, as if somehow she’d become light as air. Laurence’s teacher glanced at her, unsurprised, and smiled. He raised his flask, which drew a light laugh out of the stranger.

“Are you offering?” she asked.

“I’ve drinks enough for two,” Ortega smiled.

More like two hundred , Laurence uncharitably thought. Her feet shifted, and though no branch cracked the Ranger glanced in her direction before cocking a brow.

“Not so Lone anymore,” the Ranger said.

“Days pass,” Ortega shrugged. “You might say I am now Drunk instead.”

Laurence swallowed a gasp. Gods, how had she not seen it? He had claimed to no longer be the Lone Swordman, but he had never claimed to have ceased being of the Chosen.

“You’ve gotten interesting,” the Ranger noted, then looked Laurence’s way. “Stop hiding, little mouse. No point to it.”

“I’m not a mouse,” Laurence growled, boldly coming out. “And I wasn’t hiding.”

The Damned looked faintly amused, but after a cursory glance stopped paying attention to her. Not wanting to shame her teacher, Laurence went so stand behind him properly. Ortega smiled at her, then tossed the flask at the Ranger. She pulled at it, letting out a pleased little sigh afterwards.

“Brandy?”

“From up north,” Ortega said. “No one makes it quite like the Bruseni.”

He rolled his shoulders, afterwards, and it parted his cloak slightly. Enough that, for the first time, his missing hand was revealed. The Ranger stilled, flask still in hand.

“Fought one of the Slayer’s Blood near the Brocelian,” Ortega idly said. “Didn’t see the sword hook coming.”

The Ranger sighed, then tossed him back the flask. He caught it easily.

“Sometimes the bargains don’t bear fruit,” she said. “We’ll call it done, then.”

Hard, cold anger flashed across Ortega’s face.

“Repeat that insult,” he said, “and we’ll be fighting for a different reason entirely.”

The Ranger did not speak, but the look she gave him was skeptical. Laurence puffed up with anger too, even though she would rather he didn’t fight the Damned at all. She felt... dangerous. Like a mountain path on a moonless night, or a swim too far from the shore. The dark-haired man unsheathed the legendary blade on his lap, Sublevacion, and tossed away the sheath. He left the bare blade, perfect and pale, across his lap.

“You asked me once,” Ortega said, “what I thought such a blade would do for me.”

“You gave me your answer,” the Ranger reminded him.

“And now I have another.”

Stump and hand went to the flat of the blade, smooth and sure, and the Drunk Swordsman pressed down . After a moment of utter stillness the perfect white steel broke, shattered in two, and the halves of a priceless blade of legend fell into the snow.

“Not a thing,” Saint Ortega said, meeting the Ranger’s eyes evenly.

Slowly, the woman began to smile until it split her face like a scar.

“You have gotten interesting ,” she repeated.

The bow was tossed to the side, and with it the quiver went. Laurence’s teacher rose to his feet, taking up his simple steel longsword as the hem of his green coat brushed the snow. He turned to pat her shoulder, smiling.

“Watch,” Ortega said. “Listen. Learn.”

“I will,” Laurence quietly swore.

And when they left here, she would be able to hear the Breath. It was another great gift he was giving her, to be able to see a duel between Chosen and Damned. If she could learn nothing from that, what could she learn at all? Her teacher kept the sword at his hip, sheathed, but offered the Ranger a grandiose sweeping bow that she returned with a laugh.

“Shall we do it properly then?” he asked.

“By all means,” the monster smiled.

“I am Saint Ortega,” the Drunk Swordsman said. “My school I named Lament. I claim no other honour.”

The Damned unsheathed her blades, one after the other.

“I am the Ranger,” she simply said. “I hunt those worth hunting. Rejoice, for you qualify.”

And then they were moving, without so much as a word. Like ghosts in the falling snow, the Ranger first darting in close but then giving ground when Laurence’s teacher nearly took her head off with a blindingly quick unsheathing stroke. The monster was smiling. So was the saint. Back and forth they paced, never leaving the clearing or missing a step. It was the Drunk Swordsman who first drew blood, a cut on her cheek that should have gone through her eye instead, but three passes later she sliced deep into his leg. Yet he was winning, Laurence thought when she could see them at all and not simply a whirl and snow and movement.

The Ranger was quicker and stronger, but her teacher was... she’d never seen anyone move like that before. It was as if his every stumble was blessed by the Gods, sparing him steel or setting him up for a stroke, and even when she disarmed him with a clever trick of blades he drunkenly laughed and speared her belly with the empty sheath before snatching the sword back from the air and smoothly pivoting into another blow. He was winning. The third would was suffered by the Damned, a thrust on her flank that went through the mail, and she let out a little gasp before she laughed.

“Ah,” the Ranger said. “ Tricky . But I have it now.”

And she did. First she began to parry the blows she’d once had to avoid, as if she could now see the odd angles her teacher struck by coming, and then it got worse. She began moving just like him, blow for blow, and Ortega was not as skilled defending against it. He took the fourth wound, then the fifth. And as he slowed from the blood, panting but clear-eyed, the Ranger shook herself as if she’d been asleep the whole time. And when they exchanged blows again, she was somehow better . Her movements were quicker, the evasions even more closely chained, the timing just a tad more finely picked. And with her own teacher’s swordsmanship she slew him.

“Almost nothing to transcend,” the Ranger praised, and ran him through.

Laurence did not realize she was screaming until the sound had ripped itself out of her throat, her teacher falling to his legs with a wet gasp. The Damned slid out the short sword and took a single step back, flicking away the blood on the snow and Laurence ran forward. She knelt by her teacher as he began to topple, smiling faintly as he turned to her.

“Did you?” he rasped.

Never had Laurence felt so ashamed in her life, but all she had heard was grief and fear and the pounding of blood in her hears. She shook her head. But he did not curse her, did not look disappointed even as the light died in his eyes.

“My dear,” he said, chin resting against her shoulder. “What a wonder you will be, when you learn to listen.”

And he rasped out a long breath, leaning against her. He never breathed in. Eyes stinging, holding her teacher’s corpse close, Laurence met the calm gaze of the monster studying her. And the fear was there, still in her, but something hotter burned in her gut. Indignation at what this... thing did, what it was. What it so carelessly took from others for its own obscure purposes.

“I’ll kill you for this,” Laurence harshly swore. “I’ll kill you, one day.”

The Ranger smiled, as if pleased.

“Your name?”

“Laurence de Montfort.”

“You know my Name, Laurence de Montfort,” the Ranger said. “Take your time. Ask for me when you’re ready.”

The monster laughed as she walked away, vanishing in the snow. All she left behind was her parting words and small footsteps soon filled by the falling snow.

“I’ll be waiting.”

—

Saint Ortega of the Lament School was buried in a small thicket, his grave marker a slender longsword driven deep in the ground. His only student took to the road with the broken halves of a legend in her pack, wandering wherever the wind took her.

—

It was some months before Laurence realized she was not simply a wanderer but the Wanderer.

There had been signs. Odd coincidences. It grew beyond denial when a river bridge broke and she was forced to stay overnight in a town, wandering in just before nightfall and finding herself hosted by the only family willing to take in a stranger – hours before a crazed fantassin who’d been attacking the townsfolk broke through their door. She took the man’s head after a duel, finding him utterly made but an even finer sword for it. Laurence had never given her name, so they called her ‘wanderer’ instead when giving profuse thanks, and the word felt like a pleasant finger being trailed down her spine. She had been, in her own way, Chosen.

Even the fucking Gods wanted the Ranger dead.

Laurence often let the road guide her, but it was southwards she travelled. She followed rumours of monsters and rogues, slept under trees often and in stables when she could. What little coin she had she won from the people grateful she had stepped between them and danger, as well as the occasional sword trick to entertain children. That got her into trouble with a five-sun duellist who accused her of ‘dishonouring her sword’, so Laurence de Montfort beat him soundly and marked his face before ripping the embroidered suns out of his tunic. She was the last of the School of Lament, she would not let her teacher’s name die by staying unranked. Her limbs were quick and sure now, her stride like a cat and her senses sharp, but the Wandered did not go hunting for Damned. Not yet.

First she had to see about getting Sublevacion forged again. Her master had snapped the legendary blade before duelling his foe, but Laurence would not make that mistake. Ortega had been... gallant, in the way that stories told you about. Romantic, in his own cynical way. If there was a speck of romance in Laurence’s soul she had yet to find it, so if putting that sword back together would help with her shot at the Ranger it was what she do. Fair play, gallantry? Madness. Someone people just needed killing, it was pointless to make a game of it.

Yet no simple smith would do for the task of forging anew such a sword, Laurence knew, so as she moved southwards she pricked an ear for rumors of Chosen on the discreet end of things. Those that could craft wonders, she’d been made to understand, tended to keep it quiet. Otherwise kings and monsters got a little too interested. One lead was more promising than the others, near the border between Creusens and Aequitan, and she followed it to the end. What she found was... not what she’d wanted. Bandits and criminals had gone missing from nearby towns, but not to the kind of hard-handed justice that her teacher had introduced her to.

They were being kept in a lair, in cells . Being experiment on. Laurence had not set out to find a Damned, but she had anyway.

It was no epic fight between Good and Evil. She killed his two mercenary guards over the length of three passes, then kicked down the door to his quarters. It was just a boy, she found. Sixteen, seventeen? The Salutary Alchemist, he said he was. And going through his lab, she saw that while his basement was a dark thing he was trying to make good out of dark gifts. Antidotes and plague cures, potions that could mend wounds even Light could not. And still she came to stand over him, sword in hand.

“They warned me it would end like this,” the Salutary Alchemist rasped out, resigned.

His eyes were red. He’d wept and tried to hide it when she returned.

“Go on, then,” he said. “Get it over with.”

There were three enemies no truce could be had with, she’d been taught. Time, love and evil. Only one of these could be cut, and so it must be wherever it was found, but still Laurence hesitated. She thought of small town to the north, of the trial she had taken in Souquet and failed. The willingness to cut, Master Guillaume had demanded of them. She had refused, that day. Refused to cut chickens and pigs and a stray dog. Was she now to cut a boy instead, murder him in cold blood?

She gave him a black eye instead.

“Give your prisoners to the nearest gaol instead,” the Wanderer said. “And from now one you use animals , Alchemist. Else I come back for another visit, do you understand me?”

She left him to his promise of doing better, feeling lighter for it, and returned to the road. That first encounter had lifted a veil of sorts, for she began encountering Chosen and Damned afterwards. Laurence travelled the south, going from one evil to another. Always there was some corpse, some monster, some criminal that no one else could touch. And though she kept to the ways that Ortega had taught her, she lent her blade to more than that. She helped the Unconquered Champion put down the flock of rampaging wyverns that were ravaging Orense, then battled the Wicked Binder at his side. When the Exarch of Penthes sent the Myrmidon to hunt down the daughter of a disgraced rival in Salia, she duelled him thrice and forced him to withdraw.

In Tenerife she ran into the Drake Knight, a tall stout man by the name of Isodorios, and together they unmasked a merchant lord and warlock trying to start a war with Helike. Three villages were burned by mercenaries, an eerie ritual trying to wake ‘the shadow of an ancient dragon’ was stopped and in the wake of it all Laurence took her first lover. They parted ways on good terms, a few weeks later, and she returned to her wanderings. Years passed, bringing with them monsters and heroes and always fresh blood on the floor. The Wanderer’s legend grew until it outpaced even her feet, her reputation spread far enough that others sought her to fight evil.

Through it all, Laurence de Montfort asked for neither gold nor titled nor songs praising her name. All she wanted for the help she gave was the simplest thing. She’d look the Chosen in the eye and ask a simple thing: teach me a trick . She learned the flicker-blade from Isodorios, to strengthen her limbs from the Hunter, to parry arrows from the Knight Errant and fight blind from the Duellist. With every passing season her arsenal grew, but the thing she wanted most still eluded her. Laurence had toppled three official schools and in doing so earned nine suns, but the masters of the trade refused her the tenth: only those who could hear the Breath could claim to be Saints, and she could not.

She settled for second best instead. She sailed to Ashur where the Blacksmith, an exile from Foramen in the Dread Empire, forged anew Sublevacion.

The Wanderer should have known better than to take that as a simple boon. Mere days after the blade was made whole again, she stumbled across a trail of odd tales from eastern Valencis. Strange creatures seen wandering the night, leaving no tracks, and entire villages disappearing without warning. Emptied without a trace. She pursued, for there was the scent of evil to it all, and after a month of chasing fae stories and a brief diversion to accidentally topple a bandit clan she found what she was looking for: the dead. It had been a mage behind it all, one who’d found fragments of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness. A monster who used spectres to smother entire villages in their sleep and raise them as servants.

The Necromancer was raising an army, for she had ambitions of empire.

It was the most brutal fight Laurence had ever been in. To reach the Necromancer in her fortress in the Brocelian she had to cut her way through an army, then through ghosts and ghouls and monsters as she attacked the keep. Only for the Necromancer to mock her, even as the Wanderer cut through her spells to open her belly with a blow.

“I won’t die,” the Damned laughed. “ I am made of death , Wanderer.”

It was no idle boast. Though Laurence broke the army and fortress, the Necromancer was back half a moon later and slaughtering villages again. Laurence caught her on the move, ran her through, but it didn’t stick . She spoke to priests but they had no answers. A wizard she trusted, though, had a hint: she must have bound her soul to her works, he said. Instead passing on, the soul moved to inhabit another corpse. And it was true. Six times more Laurence slew the Necromancer, but every time she returned in a different corpse. And when the Wanderer came for a seventh, at last her strength failed. It had been an ambush, and she’d been run through a gauntlet of monsters all night. As dawn slowly approached, the Necromancer came and gloated. The fear had gone out of the Damned a little more with every fruitless death.

“It was amusing, our game, but I tire of it,” the Necromancer told her. “I have great works ahead of me and your meddling keeps me from them.”

Panting, on her knees, the Wanderer weakly leaned against Sublevacion.

“I am a sword,” Laurence of Montfort forced out, “in the hands of the Heavens. You will go no further.”

Yes, she thought. That was right. All her life, she had tempered herself into a blade. She had not proved worthy of the tenth sun, of hearing the Breath, so she was no true swordswoman. But a sword, oh she could still be sword.

“You have remarkable talents,” the Necromancer said. “I would offer you service, but it would almost be a waste. Would you not agree to a truce, Wanderer? We need not be at odds.”

“A truce?” the Wanderer rasped.

“Indeed,” the Necromancer replied. “Shall I perhaps take my campaign to Orense instead of Valencis? I will not stray beyond those borders, if you leave my work uninterrupted.”

“Do you think it makes a difference,” Laurence of Montfort quietly said, “where you butcher innocents?”

The Necromancer sighed.

“And how many of those have you saved, with all your sword-swinging?” the Damned said. “Precious few. What have you achieved save for carving away at their corpses? Innocents die, Wanderer, a thousand a day without Creation ever batting an eye. I give them a purposeful death, at least, as the foundation of a new and better world.”

Laurence felt sick, for the Damned was not entirely wrong. How many empty villages had she walked through? Too many. Every corpse she’d cut was someone she had failed to save.

“A truce, Wanderer,” the Necromancer gently suggested again. “Orense, yes, and perhaps only one village a month? I am not unwilling to compromise.”

It’d be fewer deaths, Laurence knew. Even if the Wanderer now rose to her feet and won it all, toppled the odds, the Damned would be back. It was the sensible thing, to take the deal. It’d save lives. And still, the words would not leave her lips. Laurence de Montfort looked at the Necromancer, tall and hooded and too pale to be alive, and she saw a hundred foes. Fae and monsters and men, all with a smile and a story and a reason. All with blood at their feet that she had come too late to stop them shedding. A truce? She felt like throwing up. How could there be a truce with people who were at war with all the world, who ate away at Creation like wild dogs tearing a child?

She thought of her teacher, standing in the snow as he was run through. Saint Ortega had lived as himself, never once compromising even in the face of death. And Laurence, Laurence wasn’t the same as her old master. She knew that. He’d known that. But she would heed that lesson, now. She would not die as anything less than herself. Slowly, leaning on her sword, she rose to her feet.

“Pointless,” the Necromancer sighed. “Wasteful. What can you do, even if you cut me?”

Spectres and corpses advanced, a tide of fang and sword. Laurence took a stumbling step forward. The Damned wasn’t wrong. How many times had Laurence cut her, only for the monster to return? And still she stepped forward, light-footed under the stars. The dead came for her but the Wanderer wove through them, a ghost among ghosts, and came with a raised blade for the Necromancer’s head. The mage smiled mockingly at her, unmoved.

“Nothing,” the Damned said. “You can do nothing.”

Laurence laughed.

“I was once a fool,” she said, “who cut nothing. Let us see if I am still that fool, at least a little.”

And it wouldn’t be enough, to just cut her, but Laurence would swing her sword the way she always had. Sublevacion could cut anything, her master had once said, but it’d not been true. There were things you couldn’t cut. You needed a stronger hand than that. Not to wound or carve of cleft but to... sever. Yes, Laurence thought even as she raised her hand.

She would swing and sever.

It was a prayer under starlight, a wish whispered to night. Laurence de Montfort swung and Sublevacion sang, passing through flesh and... something more. The Necromancer screamed, screamed in fear, and there was a billowing of black smoke.

Oh, Laurence thought as she dropped to her knees. The dead dropped with her. It’d been only a single note, but she had heard it. Beautiful.

Her soul had whispered, and the word it had whispered was Sever .

—

She limped back to Valencis, looking for the Salutary Alchemist. There were wounds on her that would scar badly, if not tended to with potions. He’d moved to the capital during the secant plague and was good about giving potions to Chosen without asking for coin, so it was a touch of luck she’d not been too far. She didn’t find him, though. Instead she found guardsmen grabbing a homeless man off the street in the middle of the night. An abduction. And once she began pulling at the threads, the whole rotten city came falling apart.

The Salutary Alchemist had begun experimenting on people again and they were all covering for him. Soldiers, merchants, magistrates, nobles, priests . They began hunting her, naming her a murderer, and Laurence was left to wonder how far up it really went. One corpse at a time, pushing through traps and lies, she got to the end of it. The Prince of Valencis himself. The prince of rot and blood, half a corpse and kept alive by potions only one man could make. She dragged him out of his bed. On his own throne, in the dark of night, Laurence beat him bloody until he spat out where the Alchemist was hiding.

Good, she could end it now.

“You laid hands on royalty,” the man hissed through broken teeth. “It will be the end of you, Wanderer. I will see to it that-”

Sublevacion swung down, a head went rolling across the marble floor and Laurence became a regicide. She did not look back. The hunt was not over. His lair was beneath the city, through the sewers. She waded through poisons and monsters, but in the end she found him. The trembling, sickly boy that’d become a trembling, sickly man.

“I could make us all immortal,” the Salutary Alchemist screamed, scuttling away through a sea of broken glass. “Laurence. Laurence, please . I didn’t really mean to hurt anyone. A year, a year is all I need and I can make us all-”

She thought, then, of a pale face under starlight. A truce , the Necromancer had offered. Only one village a month . Evil made orderly, pretending to be civilized. She knew better than to hesitate, now.

“There can be no truce,” Laurence de Montfort snarled, “with the Enemy.”

Blood splashed. It did not wash out the river already spilled. She had been, as always, too late.

—

“I hear you’ve been asking for me.”

Laurence was soon to be thirty. She had learned what she could from all the teachers she could find and the Breath still eluded her. It was time, she’d decided. Time to settle accounts with the Ranger. Yet before she’d found the Damned, damnation had found her. The woods were quiet in the afternoon gloom, eerily empty of life. The Ranger had made no noise as she approached, wearing a tattered old cloak over her leathers.

“So I have,” the Wandered said.

“Are you ready, then, Laurence de Montfort?”

Sublevacion left the sheath with a hiss.

“Try me,” Laurence said, baring her teeth.

The cloak whispered as it fell to the ground, the Ranger baring her blades as the two of them fought to be the first to close the distance. The Wanderer pulled out all her tricks, every last thing she’d learned in years of dragging herself from one horror to the next. Isodorios’ flicker-blade was the first – her sword rippled then struck as a snake, an application of Choosing-strength that often took an enemy’s head before they’d realized they needed to parry.

The Ranger mirrored it perfectly.

“Free Cities,” she mused. “Heard you’d visited.

She swept down her sword with impossible strength, scattering leaves and dirt to blind them both. The Ranger matched her fighting blind, then threw in a kick to the stomach. Laurence tasted iron against the roof of her mouth. The Duellist’s favourite trick-parry, slapped aside. She lost out in brute strength and reflexes both. She cut a tree and the Ranger cut at her through it. One after the other, she emptied every single trick of the trade she’d learned and her enemy contemptuously swatted them aside. The Ranger was growing increasingly irritated.

“Is this it?” the Damned scorned.

“ Sever ,” Laurence hissed.

She cut the air, a tree and one of the Ranger’s blades with the blow. The Damned sighed, rolling her wrists as she made.

“Even at your best, all you do is cut with blind hate,” she said.

Yet there was wariness in her face as she eyed the screaming cut that still hung in the air. Laurence grinned, focusing inwards again as she raised her blade and – the broken blade went through her stomach, then ripped down. Her fingers fumbled against Sublevacion’s hilt, the Ranger ripping it out of her grasp. Laurence fell to her knees. The Damned considered the blade, for a moment, then with wistful look she snapped it. The pieces she dropped, casting a look down at the Wanderer as she bled out. The look in those eyes... Is that all , it whispered. Is this the sum of you? And with one last sight, the Ranger walked away.

Dropping down into the earth, Laurence felt her strength ebb away. More that that. Her Choosing, too, the favour Above had shown her. Nose in the ground, she looked at the two pieces of perfect white steel abandoned before her. Darkness was closing in, a foe she could not defeat. She breathed out raggedly, eyes closed, and in that moment at last she heard it. The Breath. The current of Creation, revealed to her as she began to leave it. Was it the end? It did not matter. It burned in her gut, the callous cruelty she’d seen in the Ranger. That no one would ever call her to account for it. Resolved hardened as she looked at the twice-broken sword – once by a good man and once by an evil woman.

Steel, even steel of legend, always broke. There was only one way through, and in this world or the next, she would see it done. It was not an oath or a promise, not anything less than a decree.

Laurence de Montfort would make herself into a sword that would destroy all Evil .

Interlude: North I

“You cannot flee from fate, it is the road beneath your feet.”

– Levantine saying

The grass was coated with dust, blown in from a southern storm. It made for slippery footing and that was Borghold Bluesmile had tried her luck: she’d thought the dust would make it harder on his prosthetic leg. As if Masego would ever make such shoddy work. Hakram slapped away the other orc’s axe with his own, nimbly letting her pass by him, then flipped it in his hand and tapped her shoulder with the butt from behind. There was raucous laughter from the circle of warriors around them, fists thundering against shields. It’d been an insult to hold back the blow, a sign of disdain.

Adjutant had implied he was teaching a child, not duelling an equal.

“You fucking tame dog,” Borghold furiously snarled, turning around. “Servant to wallerspawn, whore for-”

She struck at him when he took a step forward, hard and blind, but he didn’t even bother to avoid it. He adjusted the angle of his steel limb, let the blow bounce off, and his dead hand snatched her throat. He squeezed hard enough the insults replaced by a gurgling choke, raising her high enough her feet left the ground. He met her eyes with his own, patient, and let the fear seep in. Then his bony fingers tightened , a hard warning, and he dropped her. Borghold fell in a sprawl, coughing spittle through her blue-painted teeth.

“Howling at the moon doesn’t turn a hound into a wolf,” Hakram snorted, then spat to the side.

Fists on shields, the sound drowning out even his opponent’s coughing. He did not bother to help her up, as he had some other foes. The Brass Wings Clan was no enemy of his, this was not a test or declaration of enmity. Borghold Bluesmile had just wanted to raise her reputation as a champion by bloodying him in the wake of so many more famous names failing. Hakram left the circle, shields parting for him but even as a few eager young greenhorns sought to offer him celebratory aragh he caught sight of a man waiting for him.

There were few orcs as tall as Hakram and even fewer still that were taller, but Oguz the Lame was one of them. Juniper’s father had been known as Oguz Sharphand once, one of the most famous champions of the Steppes until both his legs were broken in a fall. Even with a shaman’s attention they’d never healed quite right, ending the warrior’s stride just as he hit his pride. Still, he’d kept the edge he’d had when he’d given Grem One-Eye his sobriquet and served as the chief of the Red Shields in all but names for decades while General Istrid served in the Legions.

He’d been proclaimed her successor, after her death, which Hakram counted as a blessing. Oguz the Lame made as useful an ally as dangerous he would have made an enemy. Adjutant drank a mouthful of aragh, slapping the stripling’s shoulder in thanks as he returned the skin and heading straight for the chieftain before warriors could try to rope him into a bout of celebratory drinking. Oguz, leaning on his slender blackwood stick, eyed Borghold with scorn.

“Kids,” Oguz the Lame rumbled, shaking his head. “There are times to make a reputation. A taratoplu is not one of them.”

It was an old term, that one. In translation it would mean truce-gathering but that would be missing a crucial nuance. In Old Kharsum, what the clans of the far north still called the noble tongue, taratoplu was the first of a pair of bond-words. The second was ordutoplu , which meant camp-gathering. The Miezans had only ever bothered to learn the first and in their records they’d matched it to one of their own words after unwarrantedly making it a masculine: turbelus. Horde , in Lower Miezan. Though it had been laziness that’d led the conquerors to make that mistake, they’d stumbled into a partial truth. Taratoplu was as day to the night of ordutoplu, the gathering under truce meant to lead to the making of a great war camp.

Not even when the Steppes had been filled with talk of breaking ties with Ater under Grem One-Eye had a taratoplu been called. If the tales were to be believed, none had been called since the day the Broken Antler Horde was smashed into dust.

“We are what we are,” Hakram grunted back.

The older orc scoffed.

“They put too much in your heads, at the Carrion Lord’s college,” Oguz said. “Too many words meaning too little. The Blackspears aren’t wrong about that, even if they’re the bloody vulture whoresons.”

“The Blackspears would sell a wolf to a goat and boast of it,” Hakram snorted.

A favorite expression of his mother’s, implying terrible bad faith and shamelessness.

“And it’s serving them well,” Oguz the Lame replied, sucking at his fangs in displeasure. “Walk with me, Deadhand.”

Around the tall walls of the fortress of Chagoro, a sea of tents had spread out. Once the great warring clans had called a truce and gathered for talks, the others had flocked from all over the Steppes. Even some of the faraway clans who’d only ever known the Golden Bloom and other orcs had come, drawn by the rumours of a Horde gathering in the south. Never had Hakram ever seen so many of his people in one place: over two hundred banners reached for the sky, more than a hundred thousand orcs swarming under them. Not all warriors, but many. Hard to find out numbers when the camp was violent mayhem, not a semblance of organization to it.

Just finding your way to where you needed to go was a struggle: there was a reason the talks between the clans were held within the fortress, none allowed to set tents within.

“The Winter Hooves changed sides,” Oguz briskly said. “Their champions now drink with Troke’s and swear his fights will be theirs.”

Troke Snaketooth, chieftain of the Blackspear clan, was proving to be a problem. Hakram had not anticipated that the man would be so able at making allies, much less as ambitious as he was proving to be. The man had ridden the story of being the maker of this truce to greater influence, painting his greatest rivals – the Red Shields and the Howling Wolves – as warmongers who would rob all the Clans of the wealth of the south. Worse, his deeper game was only now starting to emerge. There had been no chief that could unite enough of the clans to have a claim at being acclaimed Warlord, not even Troke whose clans still had many enemies, but the Snaketooth had traded axe for arrow. He had put it to the clans that, in the Praesi way, a High Lord of the Steppes should be elected to lead the Clans into war south. Avoiding the title of Warlord, couching it all in terms of Praesi authority, had made the affair more palatable to clans who would have balked at proclaiming a Blackspear their Warlord.

Many had taken up the banner in the weeks since. Too many, and more were rallying by the day.

“The Winter Hooves were friends to the Howling Wolves,” Hakram quietly rumbled. “What changed?”

“They were friends to Grem One-Eye,” Oguz corrected. “They wanted him as Warlord, in the old days. Now there is no getting him back: even if the Tower returns him, how are we to be sure it is not just some creature riding his skin?”

There was an undertone of relish to the other orc’s word at the ruin of his old foe’s reputation, Hakram noted. That enmity had never quite faded, not helped by the old rumours that Grem was Juniper’s true father. Empty words, as far as Adjutant knew, but it was too tasty a slander not to be kept moving from mouth to ear.

“You’re saying they care more about the throne than who sits it,” he slowly said.

“Talk about thrones and you’ll get your throat ripped out,” Oguz warned. “But they’re looking for a stallion to ride, that much is true, and Troke’s the one prancing. They’re not the only ones, Deadhand. Praes is looking ripe but no one wants to try the Tower without a firm axehand to follow.”

On Rule , the fascinating treatise on politics that so many Procerans treated as a second Book of All Things, described this very phenomenon. In times of crisis , it wrote, authority will move from the periphery to the centre. In times of plenty, it will move form the centre to the periphery. Hakram had seen it unfold with his own eyes, the way a parade of enemies had pushed Callow deeper and deeper into Catherine’s embrace. Now, to his displeasure, he was seeing an opponent sail the same current. Clans would back Troke Snaketooth not because they were ardent supporters but because he was looking like the rising candidate.

The deed wasn’t done, though. And Troke had made that old and most unforgiving of Wasteland mistakes: you never wanted to be the one looking closest to claiming the Tower until you were ready to actually take it.

“The Hooves will bring over maybe three clans with them,” Hakram said. “That brings Troke to over sixty backers, by my count.”

“Just about,” Oguz said. “If he gets to eighty the tide will carry him over, mark my words. No one wants to be the last to proclaim a Warlord.”

That Troke would be High Lord of the Steppes instead would matter not a bit in practice, Hakram knew. Once he was in the chair, people would obey. It was what orcs did when someone was raised above. The Blackspear clan would make promises of lesser authority, of limits and restraint, but the moment Troke Snaketooth had a few victories under his belt he’d begin taking it back. And the Clans would let him, so long as he kept their axes red and their bellies full.

“Sixty is enough that the Weeping Arrows will be scared,” Hakram said. “They’re going to start bleeding clans and Inge Farsight knows if she drops under forty she’s done. She’ll negotiate now.”

“You want us to back her?” Oguz said, tone unconvinced. “Dag is still our man.”

“Unless you want your clan to serve as Troke’s footrest for the next twenty years, you don’t really have a choice,” Hakram bluntly replied. “Dag’s a hawk with lead wings, Grem’s cousin or not. He’s a solid champion but he’s not even chief to the Howling Wolves.”

The Howling Wolves clan was still led by Grem One-Eye, who they refused to name dead, though in practice much like the Red Shields had spent the last two decades led by Oguz in his wife’s name Dag Clawtoe had led the Howling Wolves as chief in all but name for his cousin.

“That lot is prickly,” Oguz warned. “They won’t like going from rider to wolf.”

“So we marry Dag to Inge,” Hakram said.

“She killed her last husband,” Oguz the Lame flatly replied.

“I’m sure Dag will enjoy the challenge,” Adjutant lied.

It needed to be done. The alliance between the Howling Wolves and the Red Shields was holding steady at forty clans but it’d not grown in days. Dag was respected but seen more a steward than a lord, to use Callowan parlance, and Oguz couldn’t be put forward because no one would follow a cripple. Their clans were by far the two largest of their alliance, and the warriors would not hear of putting forward the chief of a weaker clan as the figurehead for the alliance. Hakram knew there was no point in forcing the matter. Even if it worked, challenges would see the chief slain by his own allies before the day was out.

The bloody Blackspears were making gains, in large parts due to the skilled diplomacy of their Split Tree Clan allies. Hakram had been somewhat disposed to making peace with their ascension, as his and Catherine’s plans did not necessarily require the Wolves or the Shields to be raised as the highest of the clans, but Troke’s plans were a problem. The Snaketooth did intend to burn a swath through the lands of Okoro, but he’d called it madness to try the walls of a well-armed and forewarned High Seat. He had promised instead to keep raiding southwards, towards Nok.

Whose defences had been weakened by an Ashuran sack and who had sent many troops out west to fight with Sepulchral.

No doubt it was just happenstance that such an attack would cripple a rebellion against the very same woman who’d raised Troke to the rank of Lord of the Steppes and might just make her inclined to confirm him as High Lord of Steppes should the war end in her favour. Most of the Clans didn’t give a shit about that, though. What they saw was that Troke wanted to take them after a softer but still rich target, which was a pleasant song to the ear of many.

“I fucking doubt that, boy,” Oguz snorted. “But let’s ask him.”

Dag did not, in fact, enjoy the notion of that challenge. Hakram sold him on it anyway by pointing out that if he wed Inge Farsight even should his cousin return to become chieftain of the Howling Wolves he’d still have a high position as husband to the High Lady – or Warlord, depending on how things fell out – of the Steppes. Ambitious bastard, Dag, though personal loyalty to his famous cousin had kept that in check. A chance to step out of Grem One-Eye’s shadow, though, was not an opportunity to be lost. All that remained was selling to Inge and the Weeping Arrows.

She’d see reason, Hakram thought. Like most of the prominent chiefs, she had to know that food was beginning to run out. The countryside had already been stripped bare, Okoro no longer sent patrols that could be slain to eat and the clans had brought only so many herd with them to butcher for meat. Much as the chiefs would like to argue forever, someone would need to be acclaimed in Chagoro before the month was out or simple hunger would force the gathering to disperse.

Within moments of getting to the great tent of the Weeping Arrows, Hakram found trouble. Trouble looked back at him with a come-hither glare, going by the name of Sigvin of the Split Tree Clan. One of the twins that’d come as speakers for their clan to Wolof, Hakram had gotten to know her better since. She had these long fangs and wore tunics that prominently displayed ritual scarring on her shoulders, and Hakram had always had a weakness for dangerous women. It’d only made the fucking better to know that they both knew she was trying to turn him to her side, which might have been while they’d kept doing it.

Not that hers was the only bed he’d rolled in. Being the first Named of his kind in centuries and an unbroken streak of duelling victories had made Hakram a desirable orc. He wasn’t one to say no when the question was asked right.

Sigvin was leaning against a marking post outside the tent. Inside was a lot of shouting, not a pot he wanted to dip a toe hastily, so he came to lean on the other side of the post. Silence held between them, Hakram pricking an ear to try to discern what was happening in the Weeping Arrow tent. Names were being shouted, but also oaths and insults.

“If I didn’t know better,” Adjutant said, “I’d say it sounds like the acclamation of a chief, in there.”

The early part of it, at least.

“You haven’t heard?” Sigvin said, flaring her teeth provocatively at him. “Inge Farsight got killed. Some feud with a Black Tongue champion that went hard.”

The Black Tongue weren’t backers to Troke Snaketooth, from what Hakram recalled. At least not officially. How many knifes like that had the Blackspears kept in wait?

“No telling who they’ll raise now,” Hakram said.

Inge had led the clan almost twenty years but had no clear successor. Those kinds of acclamations always got messy and often left clans divided in their wake.

“Except that it won’t be Inge Farsight,” Sigvin laughed.

She met his eyes boldly.

“One step behind, Deadhand,” she said. “Might be time for you and your queen to talk with Snaketooth instead of keeping lead weights on your feet.”

Swift as a doe, she pushed away from her side of the post and swatted at his buttocks.

“Don’t worry,” Sigvin said, “I’ll not kick you out of my bedroll even after you lose. It’d be a waste.”

Hakram took the time to enjoy the sway as she strolled away, for he was only mortal, but as soon as she was gone he turned cold eyes to the tent. That was a setback. The Weeping Arrows were done, their alliance would collapse. The practical thing would be to take the offered branch the Blackspears had sent through Sigvin and have private talks with Troke. He would only pull further ahead in the coming days, and even if he couldn’t be turned against Malicia he still needed to be sounded out over... other matters. As the Adjutant, that was his duty. Much as it irked to have been outplayed, he had been. Now he needed to make sure Catherine’s plans were not too heavily damaged. Yet Hakram found his feet refusing to move. He thought, suddenly, of Scribe. Of the look she’d had on her face, that night he had taken her by the throat with a ghostly hand he could no longer make. How the glint in her eyes had scared him for the way he could so easily understand it. He looked down.

The grass at his feet was coated in dust, blown in from a southern storm. Tricky footing.

Just a few more steps, he decided.

—

The night sky would have been beautiful, were it not for the plumes of foul smoke clawing across it. The Dead King’s devilish machine, the dragon-furnace that had been meant to incinerate the armies that’d held Hainaut, had not ceased burning after being toppled. Miles of land had turned into a sea of fire as black pitch spread, and though the fuel was running out it was as if a curtain of black and pungent smoke had been drawn across the world. The kind of sight that would make men mutter about the end of the world, had they not already all known it had arrived.

“In Ashur, Speakers do not like to deal in simple truths,” Hanno of Arwad said. “Simplicity is a brittle thing, they claim. What lessons they have to share, they prefer to share through stories. To let us find our own meanings.”

“I hatred riddles,” Rafaella admitted. “And poems. Even Hidden Poets. Words trying to get clever.”

Hanno shifted in his seat, wincing as the bandages pulled tight against his wound. The priests had seen to his impalement as best they could but the enchantment on the Revenant’s spear had fought the Light. It would be days before he was truly fit to fight again.

“Cleverness isn’t the point,” he told his old friend. “It is a mark of respect, I always thought. A recognition that few truths are true for all.”

“Stories not about truth,” the Valiant Champion chided him. “They about glory and sex. And killing. Sometimes Gods, but mostly other three.”

He chuckled.

“But you can speaking bad Ashur story,” Rafaella allowed. “I am best of friends, will pretend to listen.”

“Convincingly?” he teased.

“Am not that best a friend,” Rafaella replied without batting an eye.

But he knew her enough to see she was curious, under the ribbing, so Hanno idly thumbed the stumps of his missing fingers and chose his words.

“There is one that I cannot seem to shake, lately,” he admitted. “It is a story about the Patient Man.”

“He villain?” Rafaella asked interestedly.

“I am not sure,” Hanno murmured. “Which I suppose is the point.”

In the distance, red lightning crackled across the sky. The aftermath of Antigone’s duel with the Archmage had left great scars on an already devastated land: power still lashed out wildly where they had clashed.

“In the far land across the sea, in the city of Akra, there was once a Patient Man,” Hanno said. “He was a man of faith and wisdom, who had grown wealthy before retiring and raising his two daughters. In time Akra went to war with the city of Yane, and so his eldest asked his blessing to fight. The Patient Man hesitated, for war is a dangerous trade and he did not want her to perish but neither did he want to shame the courage that made him proud. Knowing not which was the just course, he kept silent.”

The cadence came back to him easily, tradertalk having enough of High Tyrian to it that the tales he had learned a child could be recited to the same beats he had once learned. Hanno had never found the tale put to writ anywhere, and not for lack of looking. Like much of the wisdom of the Speakers, it was estranged from ink. Tales were living things, to the masked priests of Ashur, and the corpse of them on parchment would be almost as sacrilege.

“The eldest went to war without his blessing, captaining her ship, and though the city won the war her ship was lost,” Hanno gravely said. “Dead, they said, but the Patient Man did not yet grieve. His younger daughter grew wroth and cursed his silence as heartless. She blamed many for the death of her beloved elder sister but none more than the rulers of the city whose greedy ways had led to war. So that no sister would be lost again, the younger daughter sought to become a ruler herself.”

Rafaella had never been one to hide her thoughts, for all that she delighted in feigning false ones, so it was easy to see how she approved of the eldest daughter who had gone to war and less so of the youngest who sought to rule. Violence was familiar to the Valiant Champion. She had won her Name triumphing over others in honest battle, but it was no coincidence she had then left the hills of her native Alava. To stay in the lands of the Champion’s Blood would have seen her drawn into the feuds and schemes of the dynasties of the Blood, made precious by her inheritance of Bestowal.

It was a hard irony, that the same character that had made her the Valiant Champion had led her to want little to do with the Valiant Champion’s Blood.

“The younger daughter sought the Patient Man’s blessing and the help of his riches. This would be a long and arduous path, the Patient Man knew, for rulers do not like to share their power,” Hanno of Arwad said, with a wry twist of the lip. “Yet he held in esteem the conviction of his daughter and desired not to stand in the way of it. Knowing not which was the just course, he kept silent. Once more his daughter cursed him and rose to rule without help, but in rising she forgot her conviction and grew wicked.”

Hanno paused.

“To punish him for his silence she swore never to hear a word from him again, but the Patient Man did not yet grieve.”

“Good,” Rafaella grunted, speaking of the daughter and not the father. “Silence for silence. Honour in balance. Good girl.”

Rafaella had never once, in all the years they’d known each other, spoken of her family. It was not unusual for heroes to be born of tragedy but Hanno had long suspected that was not the truth of this. Sometimes he wondered at the kind of mother and father it would have taken, to raise a woman like Rafaella. Who could claim and hold such a hallowed Name at the age she had: seventeen, barely a woman grown.

“There came a day where a man came from the city of Yane,” he said, ignoring her guffaw and muttering of Yanu, “who was from there a prince, and he sought audience with the Patient Man. The man had been a captain for his kin in the war and found the shipwrecked eldest daughter. Falling in love, he wed her and had spent time gathering great gifts to bring the Patient Man to ask his blessing. A ship was sailing, with the eldest daughter and the gits among it, and the old man sent a messenger to his younger daughter to tell her of this wonder. It was a merry day, but the Patient Man did not yet rejoice.”

Rafaella’s brow tightened. Heroes did not live as long as either of them had without learning to catch the scent of tragedy in the air.

“The following day his younger daughter sailed into the harbour, bringing with her what she claimed a great war prize,” Hanno said. “A ship whose hull had been filled with great gifts and hated enemies from Yane, which she had all slain with her own hand. She had refused to hear the Patient Man’s messenger, keeping to her oath, and so in ignorance slain her own beloved sister. The prince was furious with grief, named her a kinslayer and swore revenge. He asked that the Patient Man condemn her, to show not all Akra was wicked, but the old man kept to his silence and so there was war.”

He’d told Antigone the story once, long ago in an airy city where they had been the only humans to be seen, and this had been where she balked. The Patient Man is made wicked by this , she had insisted. He and his daughter both deserve to be slain as reparations to Yane, for one committed a great crime and the other abides it. Rafaella did not balk, for her world was a vastly different one. The Dominion was bound as much by ties of blood as it was feuds between families: many a time would Blood forgive or ignore their trespasses of their own while the same dealt by the hands of their foes.

The Ashen Gods of Levant were not as the benevolent Hallowed of Procer or Callow’s stern Heavens. In the Dominion, the Gods were partisans. They had favourites, they took sides.

“Yet the younger daughter, broken by her crime, found her old conviction again,” Hanno continued. “She offered herself to the city of Yane as a penitent, and the truth of her earnest grief moved the hearts of the people. In time she was wed to the prince, who forgave her, and the cities of Akra and Yane were bound in peace and friendship. The Patient Man died in his bed, father to a grave and a woman estranged.”

His voice trailed off, leaving thoughtful silence in its wake. Rafaella was frowning, then eventually she sighed.

“Fucking hate riddles,” the Valiant Champion said. “Patient Man fool, good daughter dead bad daughter should have become priest?”

“That is an answer,” Hanno agreeably replied.

She sharply elbowed him.

“Is it right answer, though?” Rafaella asked.

“I was once told there are as many answers to that tale as there are Faces,” Hanno smiled, thinking of the masks hanged in the temples of Ashur and the priests who wore them. “You’re not any more wrong or right than any of us.”

Rafaella looked skeptical.

“So what’s your answer?” she seriously asked.

Hanno breathed out, looking at the marred sky.

“I don’t have an answer,” he quietly admitted. “All the story ever taught me was a question.”

He felt her eyes on him even without turning to look.

“Is it a greater evil to act unjustly,” the White Knight asked, “or not to act at all?”

The Patient Man might have saved his daughters great pain, even death, had he spoken. Had he grieved or rejoiced. Yet in keeping his silence, in trusting the Heavens, he had lived to see the birth of peace and friendship between once-warring cities. Was that great good worth the little evils caused by silence? The Choir of Mercy would say it was, had made a sword and law of that belief. But Hanno of Arwad was not the Sword of Mercy . And there had been a time where he had held an answer to the story, the one shown him in the depths of that unearthly place where he had become the White Knight. Mortals could not be just, he had been shown. Not truly.

They were flawed, blind creatures and even their finest intentions were blades without a handle. He could trust instead in the judgement of the Seraphim, impartial and farseeing. There was justice, beyond the fallibility of men. Hanno of Arwad palmed a small silver coin, one side bearing crossed swords and the other laurels, and deftly flipped it. It went spinning, a glint of silver in the dark, but it held no answers for him.

The Seraphim were yet silent.

“It true the coin woke?” Rafaella quietly asked.

Hanno caught the coin, snatching it out of the air.

“For a moment,” he said. “Would that it had not.”

The hope had burned, after the years left adrift. And burned harsher still when Hanno had understood what had truly happened: somewhere in the south, hidden away, Cordelia Hasenbach had ordered that the corpse of an angel be desecrated. Ealamal , such a corpse was called in the Dominion. Priests and mages in the service of the First Prince had meddled with something beyond mortal understanding, tried to turn the remnants of a Seraphim into a weapon. And the shadow of a shadow had woken for the barest of a moments without calamity ensuing. It had lit up like a beacon in an empty place within Hanno’s soul, blaring to him a warning of how far and fast the First Prince was falling.

Twice over her had been stung, in the Arsenal, and much had he thought of those days. Considered how he might have done things differently, looking into past lives for guidance – for the man he could have been and had failed to be, the one who would have passed that test. He had found no answers, the search only dwindling his power in the Light even as he warred against the dead, left to study only with his own meagre eyes. Catherine Foundling had startled him out of their pleasant détente, that day, but his anger there had waned. What wisdom was there in blaming a scorpion for striking? He would not allow himself to be lulled into complacency again, but neither had he misread the Black Queen as he’d once feared.

He had simply never been at odds with her before. It had been a lesson well worth learning, and cheap at the price.

Yet Cordelia Hasenbach had been looked upon with approval by the Choir of Judgement once. Her convictions been judged worthy, even as she denied the Name was her rightful mantle to bear. A scant year later and the same woman had been reduced to someone feeding people into the grinding gears of the Principate of Procer so that the machine’s wheels would be kept wet. Hasenbach had no ideals, only an ideal Procer. And though that land would be a beautiful thing to behold, Hanno thought, it would be grimly built and as Evil made it slip further and further away the First Prince was dipping her hands deep in the red.

Already she was up to her elbows, how long before she began to swim ? Conviction and despair had been mothers to many a horror.

“Truth then,” Rafaella grunted, studying him. “Talk of ealamal.”

“It is,” Hanno simply said.

The Valiant Champion weighed him with her eyes.

“That why you been middling?” she asked.

He blinked.

“Meddling?” he suggested.

“Middle, meddle, muddle,” she growled. “Tradertalk is fool tongue. You understand, Hanno. Now you finger on scales.”

Her face grew serious.

“Time was you did not.”

He did not deny it.

It had begun as a small, simple thing. But then was the same not true of the first pebble before the avalanche? There had been trouble in the army, after the Black Queen left. The Lycaonese had begun to elect their own leaders, after the death of the Iron Prince and Mathilda Greensteel, of marching to fight with their kin in the north. The leading captains all agreed in this. And Hanno could have stood aside and watched, as he had when the Iron Prince had hung mutineers, for it was not his place to meddle in the affairs of Procer.

But he had glimpsed the shape of it, how it would unfold. They would leave and there would be no stopping them without a battle. Hainaut would weaken, then fall. So instead of standing aside, he instead had stood to the side of those captains who shamed the others for speaking of leaving the fight. And though he had said not a word, his presence had spoken volumes. The White Knight agreed. The Sword of Judgement, like the Ashen Gods of the Dominion, had picked a side.

Once he’d dipped a toe, it had seemed pointless to balk when the Alamans princes began to bicker and their hosts to desert. He’d brokered a truce between Beatrice Volignac and Arsene Odon, exhorted the levies of Bayeux whose shame about routing at the Battle of Hainaut had been eating away. It had seemed almost just to him to speak to those levies, balancing the scale of the way he had done nothing as Klaus Papenheim slew and imprisoned their officers. He had not expected for them to look to him for command, after, but he was a high officer of the Grand Alliance – he could serve as a commander if he chose, he simply had not. They had fought like lions since, to regain their pride.

They called him Lord White, and meant it not as a courtesy.

Hanno had remembered the clarity he’d felt, when he had been fighting to the north to destroy the bridge, and then the sickening feeling when he had heard about the bloody battle at Hainaut. And with those memories following him around like loyal hounds, he had found his hand moving again and again. Stiffening General Abigail’s spine when she began to consider retreat further south, killing the dispute through a scrying ritual when the Red Knight and the Myrmidon almost came to blows in Cleves, advising the Kingfisher Prince to retreat long before the Morgentor came at threat of being encircled.

Small things, all. But many of them. And others had noticed. There was a deference to the way the princes now spoke to him that had not been there before, and it was slowly passing to Named. Many now looked to him for advice who had merely taken it when offered before.

None had noticed that his power was waning all the while, save for his closest friends. That troubled Hanno, for it would have been easy to decide from this that the Heavens were frowning on his action, but for all that he was weakening he did not feel... shunned by the Light. But it was his doubts, he suspected, that were behind it all. The end of his certainties. For Hanno of Arwad had once believed himself as a Patient Man vindicated, but as the silence of Judgement lingered his own was beginning to break. These days he often he dreamt of the story he had told Rafaella, the question burning in his mind as he woke.

The Valiant Champion had been watching him through his long silence, the sky above them alive with writhing smoke.

“Is it a greater evil to act unjustly,” Hanno quietly repeated, “or not to act at all?”

And he could not shake the fear that he had not heeded the warning of the story. That he had seeded a doom at the heart of the Grand Alliance by his action. Would Cordelia Hasenbach grown so desperate, if he had not begun to step beyond his old lines in the sand? He had proof, ruinous proof, that his actions and hers were interlinked. Yet some part of him balked at the notion that simply acting, trying to do all the good that he could, would be a seed of doom. What had he done here, save try to keep the dark from blowing out the last trembling lights in the west?

“Not fighting Evil,” the Valiant Champion said. “ Rolling over . That is greatest evil. You cannot be others, only you. That is what you owe the Ashen Gods.”

He thought on that, for a moment.

“I could do more,” Hanno of Arwad quietly confessed. “Even now, I stay my hand.”

Rafaella smiled gently, and pressed a kiss against the side of his head. He looked at her in surprise, for love or lust she had never been shy in expressing but affection was rarer.

“It’s end of the world,” his friend said. “When, if not now?”

The words lingered long after she departed, leaving him to silence and the smoky sky. When, if not now? Was she wrong? He felt as if she should be, but he could not say how. And that left only a broad, terrifying expanse ahead of him. One that could be filled with anything.

“I could do more,” Hanno of Arwad said, voice pensive.

Then perhaps he should. He already knew how to begin. Speaking with Antigone, so that she might lead him to the one who had taught her. The sole man who could bring the Titanomachy fully into the war, the last of the ancient Titans. The thought fixed, firmed, became a decision. And in that moment, Hanno felt it fully for the first time. Not in parts, in moments, as he had until now. Like a beacon. The claim that was stirring in him, to a Name he could not yet grasp. He had his suspicions, however. He was feeling another claimant, after all, to the south.

If Hanno had to put a name to where, it would be Salia.

Interlude: East II

“I will do better, said the man,
than the tyrant, who said I will

I swear, do better than
the man I kill.

the man I kill
swore to do better than
his tyrant, and I say I will
do better now than either man.”

– “Better Than”, Ater folk song (couplets meant to be repeated)

It would have been a mistake for him to watch the swords.

It was her feet that warned him, when he had any warning at all. Amadeus circled to the side, shield raised and sword low. Hye darted forward, striking high, but he did not bite. Arm tightening, he took the real hit – come by the side, a blindingly quick swing and flick – on the shield and shot into a riposte. She stepped to the side, let it pass her, and turned to swing at the arm. Cursing in silence, he struck out with his shield. He wasn’t quite swift enough to withdraw, her blade slamming into his wrist harshly enough he almost dropped his sword, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The shield slam forced Hye to step back and abandon the killing stroke she’d been setting up.

Amadeus took two steps back, his back drenched with sweat from the hour of sparring now coming to an end. He was slowing, losing his edge. Old age, he supposed, though the now grey-haired man knew he was closer in shape to a man in his forties than this true age. For now, at least.

“You get baited into that riposte too easily,” Hye said. “You got too used to being able to kill people with it when you were Named. You’re slower now, you can’t keep using it.”

“I’m still used to being able to correct midstroke,” he admitted. “I collected too many habits that relied on Name reflexes.”

She snorted, bringing her blades back to the sheaths with a purely unnecessary twirl. Her long hair was kept in a braid today and he’d always loved the look on her – especially when she had a blade in hand. Which she was perfectly aware of, from the sly looks she kept sending him.

“You’re too hard on yourself,” Hye told him. “In terms of swordsmanship, you’re still one of the most impressive opponents I’ve had. In the finest ten, at least. You just have more practical limits to deal with than before.”

“I did have a skilled teacher,” Amadeus smiled.

She smiled back.

“I speak, of course, of my mother,” he casually continued.

He got a clump of dirt tossed at his head for that, ducking away laughing. Since early in theory acquaintance Hye had insisted that there be wagers to their sparring, which had never lost him much coin but ensured he’d cooked most of her meals on the move for decades. Tonight was not to be exception, though he’d been farsighted enough to get the stew going before they began. It was mostly ready by the time he went to check on it, needing only seasoning. Only roasted greens for side dish, as... Amadeus felt his heart clench. He forced himself to finish the thought. As Wekesa was gone and would no longer assembled a makeshift oven to help him make fresh bread.

Hye sat at his side, silent. She knew how to read his moods, and so stayed close but did not impose touch. An invitation. He leaned into her side, enjoying her arm going around his waist as he leaned his head on her shoulder.

“Who?” she asked.

“Wekesa,” he said.

“He went out on his own terms,” Hye said. “For his son. Remember that as well as the rest.”

Amadeus allowed himself to enjoy the comfort a little longer then moved away. Neither of them spoke more of it. Hye was one of the people he’d met who were even more private than him by inclination, she well understood that for some the light of day burned more than it cleaned. They sat with the stew, the old lacquered bowls – whose cracks were filled, oddly enough, with silver – that she’d been using longer than he’d been alive warm in their hands.

“I did miss your stew, and that damned lentil soup,” she laughingly told him. “My pupils were nowhere as fine cooks, even though Cocky at least should have been better by sheer divine mandate.”

“The Concocter?” he asked, cocking a brow.

It was not common for her to talk of her old students, but not uncommon either. She still had much fondness for her years in Refuge, even though she had left that part of her life behind much as she had once parted ways with the Calamities. He’d always admired – envied – that in her, the capacity to walk away. He was not so blessed.

“Feral little thing,” Hye fondly said. “Never seen a Crafter that much bite to them before.”

The Teoteul, her father’s people, called Named whose Role tended to creation ‘Crafters’. In those lands they were held in great respect, she’d told him, often greater than martial Named.

“The way you raised them likely had something to do with that,” Amadeus mildly said.

She cast him a sideways look.

“You can just say it outright,” Hye said, amused.

“You already know my thoughts on the affair,” he replied. “I can understand what you meant to accomplish, but when one’s means involve cruelty to children they are best reconsidered.”

“What I did accomplish,” Ranger calmly said. “They left my tutelage with all they needed to survive and thoroughly discouraged from banding together. I didn’t coddle them like you did your girl, Amadeus, but they came out stronger for it. Named that get tucked in at night get killed in their first decade. I’ve seen it happen to more heroes and villains than you’ve put in the ground.”

“Wealth of experience tends to mean more powerful aspects,” he conceded, “and personalities less brittle. But you only painted in black, Hye.”

I’d been painfully obvious the few times he’d encountered her pupils, never more so than when he’d spoken with young Indrani. The Archer, who’d thought the way to tame the evils of the world was to make herself and her Name into the Ranger’s shade.

“It’s what I know,” she frankly replied. “And it’s what sticks.”

He shrugged, seeing no point in further speaking of it. He’d already told her his thoughts before and she’d disagreed with them then too. She respected his opinions but had never felt bound to heed them in the slightest – which was, he would admit to himself, half the reason he was in love with her in the first place.

“I suppose you think your student-”

“My daughter,” he corrected calmly, evenly.

Pointedly, too. She winced.

“Look, I’ve already apologized for that talk in Arcadia,” Hye said. “I wouldn’t have been so hard on her if I’d known she mattered to you as more than an apprentice.”

An apology which she meant, and he’d accepted, but it would not mend the broken pot. Catherine was now singularly predisposed to seeing Hye as an enemy, which might just end up being a massive headache before this was all over.

“She does,” Amadeus said, “which is why I see little point in comparing the deeds of our former students. She would not have gotten so far without your Indrani at her side.”

Hye’s lips quirked at the mention. Ranger was not a particularly fair woman and she’d never shied away from having favourites. Of her little band of Named, Archer had been the one she most liked. Not out vanity, though one might be forgiven for believing that, but because Indrani had in her belly a rare sort of fire.

“Your little queen might still kill you, before this is said and done,” Hye plainly said. “She won’t like what you’re scheming.”

“Neither do you,” Amadeus teased.

She rolled her eyes and let it go. Eudokia, for all that he loved her dearly, would not have. It was not in her nature to leave details unattended to, to embrace the unnecessary risk. That attitude had saved his lives many a time, over the years, but it should not be taken as the iron law habit had slowly turned it into. They’d gotten old, set in their ways even as their bodies stayed the same preserved statues of wax. Hye, while older than any of them by centuries, never stayed still long enough to rot. There were lessons to learn in that. In embracing impermanence. Amadeus should not have presumed he would stay the same under the face because the face did not change.

Or believe the same of Alaya.

“She brought the last of your pupils east, you know,” he said. “I am not the only one who might face a rough end.”

Hye’s face was serene as a pond, the shadows of their fading fire clawing at her cheeks.

“Have they grown enough for that?” she asked. “I wonder. I will have to see, Amadeus, who it is they have become. One last test for the children of Refuge.”

They went to bed early, for they were to begin moving before the dawn. Northeast of them was an old run-down inn owned by the cousin of a friend, and there letters waited for him. A confirmation from one of his people in Ater that Grem was still alive and writing, growing fat in his house arrest. Alaya did not seem to suspect. Yet it was the other letter, the one from the south, that set him to smiling. Nahiza had corresponded with Wekesa for decades, back when she’d still lived in Kahtan instead of retiring to her tower, and it was only out of courtesy for that she’d accepted his first letter. After that, though, it had been out of curiosity.

The problem he’d put to her was one too fascinating for such a mind to resist, and the possibility of eternal glory a temptation to her pride.

It can be done , she wrote in that terse way of hers. But only with the Tower. No one else has the mages and coin. The formulas she’d sketched out as a proof of concept he could not understand, not even after all his years of trying to understand more than the barest edges of Trismegistan sorcery, but he tucked them away in his doublet anyway. They would have a use. What he’d needed of her had been confirmation that it was possible at all: the rest was only a matter of finding the right place and right time. The last letter he read twice, to commit the words to memory. Nim had ambushed Catherine out of the Wasteland but the Army of Callow had held fast and now all the vultures were drawing in. Good, rather like he’d thought it might go.

The game he’d not seen coming was the release of Akua Sahelian to become the Warlock, but then he’d been consistently blindsided when it came to Catherine’s treatment of Tasia’s girl. That she’d not been publicly and brutally executed years ago remained a source of bemusement.

With the loyalist Legions and those that’d deserted coming ever closer, the moment of truth was drawing near. He’d sown the seeds but done nothing more than that, could not do more than that. As he’d told Layan down south, the last thing Praes needed was another banner raised. When the time came, when the blades were out, what was it that would win – the mud or the orders? Amadeus of the Green Stretch had spent most of his life betting on the mud and he had no intention of ceasing at so late an hour. Leaning forward, he put the letter from Kala to a candle. It burned bright and quick, smoke curling upwards. He caught sight of it disturbing a spider, which crawled to a corner of its webs on long legs. Smiling, he dropped the last smouldering remnants of the letter and stepped on them.

Were he a superstitious man, he might have called that a good omen.

—

High Lady Takisha Muraqib of Kahtan was to come to Ater, along with most the nobility of the south.

It was an unusual and unforeseen decision, so Malicia investigated. What dearest Takisha had wanted out of gathering the entire Hungering Sands to her court had become plain enough after a little digging: she’d been trying to rally houses to her banner for an attempt at taking back Foramen. She could have made such an attempt without such pageantry, of course, as Malicia was in no position to stop her. Yet Takisha, for all that she was an intelligent woman, was prone to dithering.

It was a learned error. Kahtan had the most vassals out of all the High Seats, which made large scale enterprises for it difficult unless time was spent wrangling support. Takisha had heeded that lesson a little too well, to Malicia’s eye, and come to avoid bold action even when it would best serve.

Yet she was skilled at wrangling, and with the traditional rivals of the Muraqib for prominence in the desert – the Banu of Foramen – dead and gone Malicia had expected her to find a measure of success. That not only she had found none but that she had been driven to take her court north had been a noticeable enough reversal that it must be looked into. Even if this was not the action of a player but instead of an undercurrent of popular feeling, clarity was required. The empress’ plans had arrived at too delicate a stage for interference to be permissible.

Spies came and went, scrying rituals crisscrossed the land. Ime was busying herself chasing Amadeus’ trail, which she had finally caught, but Malicia left the matter to her capable hands. Instead, as she sat in a comfortable salon tea in hand, she poured over lists of names. Those who had petitioned High Lady Takisha to journey to Ater and formally petition the imperial court for intervention in the south. Some of those names she well knew.

Lord Feisal Rahab, whose great silver mines made one of the wealthiest men in Praes. Lady Nawal Morcos, whose kin had skirmished with the Tribes for centuries. Prominent names, at first, but they had met with Takisha late. And more importantly, they had little to gain from the decision made. She sent for earlier reports. The first to speak with the High Lady of Kahtan were less known to her. Lady Layan Kaisha, Lord Habid Tannen, and on it went for a dozen names. Lesser aristocrats, all of them, with few common interests that she could grasp.

She sent for the files the Eyes had on them. Layan Kaisha was one of Amadeus’ veterans, it turned out. So were two of the rest, but most were not. Yet Malicia’s mind itched with intuition. This had been done in accord, she grew convinced as her Name began to swell. There was something to Connect those names even if she did not yet understand it. Her aspect had never failed her before, even though the leaps of intuition it sometimes leant her were the ficklest part of the boons it granted. She set the Eyes to digging deeper at the nobles.

Behind closed doors, alone, Alaya would admit that the aspect’s blooming was a deep relief. After the encounter with Foundling in Wolof, she had feared... Her fingers clung desperately to the cup of tea she forced herself to drink with decorum. Be silent , the Black Queen had ordered, and Alaya’s soul had obeyed. As if to be able to declare silence was the girl’s due Alaya had found that she could no longer Rule. Not in the simulacrum she’d worn, not in her own body, not anywhere . It had taken days for the aspect to return, and even now it was weakened. She could feel it in the people around her, through the connections that Connect allowed her to instinctively understand.

Her authority had thinned.

It would come back into its fullness, she thought, that was the trend. But after how long? Another month, year, decade? She’d been told that the Black Queen was not yet Named and already she could do this. The thought was... frightening. As was the memory of the girl’s mad grin as she was wrestled down by a dozen men, Alaya tasting blood in her mouth as the little monster cackled. There’s always next time, the Black Queen had laughed. Foundling was coming for her head, Malicia now understood. She would settle for nothing less if she were not forced to settle otherwise. Practicality and gains would not be enough to sway her, Malicia had misread that very badly.

Spies came and went, scrying rituals crisscrossed the land and her Black Knight ambushed the Black Queen in the depths of the Wasteland. Akua Sahelian was proving worth the investment.

“All is in place with the deserters?” she asked Ime.

“It is,” her spymistress confirmed. “We’ve prepared the scapegoat.”

Good, that was one worry in hand.

“Sepulchral?” she probed.

“We still don’t know who plans her campaign,” Ime admitted. “Not anyone openly in her service, at least. It’s slickly done, Malicia. It’s possible whoever is doing it isn’t even with her army.”

That seemed... unlikely, from what Malicia understood of military affairs. Perhaps a Named would be able to work through such constraints, but there was none around to provide such guidance.

“Best prepare for a bloody end,” the empress pragmatically said. “She has served her purpose, the time has come to pull the curtain on her rebellion.”

“Troke Snaketooth is on track to win the election as High Lord of the Steppes,” Ime said. “And he’s reiterated to our agents that the terms still stand: if we confirm him in that title he’ll lead the Clans against Nok.”

Which, combined with the destruction of Abreha Mirembe’s field army, would be enough to bury the cause of Sepulchral. The Sahel of Nok and the Mirembe of Aksum would turn on their ruling kin the moment they thought the cause helpless, and Malicia was willing to offer relatively mild terms of surrender for their return to fold. No need for soulboxing, it would be overplaying her hand. Increases on a selection of taxes would hamper their economic recovery for long enough that the empress could smother them out instead of wielding an executioner’s axe. Perhaps an expansion of the Green Stretch at the expense of Aksum, she mused, as pointed lesson.

Treachery was treachery, but no one should swing at the Tower and miss without proper admonishment.

When the in-depth reports on the few nobles she’d asked for came, she finally connected the dots. The lords and ladies that were not veterans were nearly all from border or trade holdings. The kind that would be negatively affected in a direct way by the kind of civil war that’d afflicted the Empire for the last few years. Ah , Malicia thought with a smile. It was a faction she was looking at. A very discreet one, difficult to make out on parchment, but a faction nonetheless. One that was hostile to her rule of the Tower. A rash of assassinations would not be overly difficult to arrange, but Malicia restrained herself. When one got rid of weeds, it was best to burn them out root and stem.

It was too early for blades, and she could make use of this for other purposes.

She had letters from Wasteland lords that expressed concerns about the Clans being on the move, and those concerns were slowing her attempts to put together one of the measures that would keep her head on her shoulders and her crown atop her head. The ritual that might solve the Hellgates that terrified the Grand Alliance had exhaustive resource requirements, the kind that not even the Tower’s vaults could see to. She’d had to rely on drawing on the resources of northern lords for some of the substances. It needed to be ready soon, she knew. The ritual would bind the gates to open only once every decade for seven days and seven nights, an ideal solution, but it needed weeks of preparation before it could be implemented.

“Send word,” Malicia ordered Ime. “We are holding a formal court session in the Tower. As the nobility of the south is coming, so will the nobles of the north.”

The Taghreb play had Amadeus’ signature all over it. He liked to move pieces towards the centre, were they could be more easily dealt with. He’d get his wish, Malicia decided, and more. Much more. Using the gathering of the Clans as a reason for the court session would see even the most reluctant of lords and ladies come, the empress knew, and with them would come an army’s worth of retinues. Another assurance to have in her pocket, should it come to the worst. With the Empire tended to for now, Malicia could turn her attention to further measures that would preserve her life and reign. She needed leverage on the Grand Alliance, not only Callow, and there was only one place left to acquire it.

The Free Cities, where General Basilia’s attempted unification of the League was beginning to worry the cities yet to be conquered. There was potential in that, but none of the rulers involved were willing to engage in talks with the Tower. Between Hasenbach and Foundling, the costs of dealings with Praes had been made to steep for any there to still be willing to pay them. How fortunate, then, that Malicia had replaced the Merchant Prince of Mercantis with a creature of her own.

Alaya was the Dread Empress of Praes. Should weather this storm and emerge from it triumphant, as she had all others.

—

It ought to be an exciting sort of war, but somehow it was not.

Dear Sargon had offered Akua the use of the Amaranth, a sure indication he was looking to get rid of the Tower’s leash around his neck. The necklace was a splendid thing, a collar and trailing generous expanse of beads in polished gold and onyx. Each bead held a small sliver of power, at the fingertips of whoever wore the necklace. Yet it was the pale purple precious stone set in the hollow of the throat that made the Amaranth such a powerful artefact, for within it lay a Titan’s tear turned to crystal. The purity of the overwhelming grief it emanated allowed a caster to free themselves of all feelings and doubts, leaving one’s will the sharpest it could be. Akua’s ancestors had used the artefact to make even the most middling of their sorcerer-lords seem skilled, in the past, as the Amaranth was enough to turn even a middling fool into a passable battlemage.

Having been a prodigy herself, she had found instead that the Amaranth not only ended the difficulties she’d had in acclimating in her new body but that it had allowed her to surpass some of her old limitations. The swiftness of her recovery had made spawned many a murmur that she was becoming the Warlock in truth, as was only to be expected, but Akua knew it to be otherwise. She had been Named, once, and not forgot the sensation of it – the warmth of unbroken certainty settling on her shoulders like a cloak.

It had not been difficult to prove her value to the Black Knight, though the stern Marshal Nim had treated her as a hissing viper at first. Detailed information on the spellcasting capacity of the Army of Callow and Catherine’s own limitations – which were ever-shrouded, but Akua had deduced to some extent – had bought her a place at the table. From there, it had only been a matter of finding out the Named’s weaknesses and presenting herself as a remedy to them. The auxiliary cavalry that had been assembled from highborn sons and daughters from all over the Empire had been defiant of the ogre’s authority, at first, but Akua had eased the burden. She was of the greatest of lineages herself and rumoured to be Named: within days she had them eating out of her palm.

She took one of them to bed, on a whim. A Taghreb captain with a crooked smile and dangerous manners, whose large rough hands had appealed. Not so after she fucked him. She’d had her due of pleasure, more than once, but it had not sated her. It had... lacked intensity, somehow, though she knew that to be absurd. She’d been a shade for years, the sensations should have been almost overwhelming. Akua was careful not to think of what hands might have better pleased – smaller, knuckles always half-scuffed and, no, she was not this weak . There were better uses of her waking hours than chasing the never-be.

Settling the highborn cavalry had not given her a foothold with Nim, only ensured that she was now being treated as a mildly useful rattlesnake. Organizing the auxiliary mages into proper casting circles, however, would be a step in the right direction. Akua did not even have a rival there, as the only person of Praes who might have contested her – Nahiza Serrif, widely recognized as the greatest mage in the south – had declined service in war due to her age. Dubious, that, but Serrif was famously reluctant to ever leave her mage tower and Malicia had little to gain from throwing stones at the wasp’s nest. After a few brisk duels fought under the pretence of practice, Akua broke the ringleaders of the most important cliques to her service. Most gave way with good grace, as was custom, but some did not.

Kendi Akaze fell to his knees, panting and covered in sweat. The last wisps of his spell faded away, shattered at his feet. Swaths of the ground had burned, but Akua was well-learned in curses and he had not studied them deeply. His blood was slowly boiling.

“Surrender,” Akua ordered.

“Did you even know her name?” Kendi hoarsely asked.

She cocked an eyebrow.

“Of course you didn’t,” he laughed, wetly. “Just another mfuasa. A servant. We don’t even know if she died as your dog or if the Black Queen nailed her to a cross. We weren’t important enough the question was asked .”

Akua studied him for a long moment.

“Your sister?” she quietly asked.

“And two of my cousins,” Kendi snarled. “All for your pride. So you could go on serving the enemy. We’re all just games to you, aren’t we?”

Murmurs of disapproval. It was one thing to bear a grudge for the death of one’s kin, respected even, but for a mfuasa to question their place was... disgraceful. If they had been fit to be more than servants, jino-waza would have ensured that they were.

“Surrender,” Akua repeated.

He spat to the side, struggling to rise on shaking limbs.

“Her name,” he croaked, “was-”

The roar of the flames he formed, not even voicing an incantation, drowned out his own words. There was an irony in that, she thought. A lesson, for those who cared about such things. The spell was at her fingertips in an instant, quicker than even his despair. The flames were smothered in darkness, rot writhing its way up Kendi Akaze’s arm. He howled in pain, dropping unconscious, and Akua knew he had to die. He would try again, otherwise. Some grudges could not be set aside. And still she ended the spell. Ordered him dragged to a tent. They thought she would order him tortured, she saw in the eyes of the watchers. Made an example of.

She had him healed instead. The hatred was not gone in his eyes when he woke.

“This changes nothing,” Kendi hissed. “ Nothing .”

“I did not expect it would,” Akua quietly said.

There was a long moment of silence. She looked outside the tent, hearing his steady breath.

“Why?”

She turned, met pale brown eyes with golden ones. Because you are my past made man , she thought. There is no pit in Creation deep enough I could bury you in it. Because I loved a girl as a sister, once. I murdered her, and a thousand other sisters since. Where does it end? If no one kills me, where does it end?

“Why not?” the Doom of Liesse replied.

She dreamt of her father, that night, and woke up with red eyes. Iron sharpens iron, the other mages praised her. She kept to the old ways truly, to have a kept a man who wanted to kill her alive just so she would remain sharp. Bile rose in her throat even as she smiled. This what who she was now, wasn’t it?

She did not regret sparing him.

With the mages in line, she proved her value to the Black Knight. A ritual to bring the Army of Callow forcefully into Creation, to deny retreat through the Twilight Ways. It was an inspired piece of spellcraft, she thought. And she found her hand, moving again and again. Adjusting numbers. It was pointless, Akua thought. Even if the blow was softened she would never be forgiven for it. And still. The hand moved. Some had hated her, in the Army of Callow. Many. Others had been... kind. In their own way. How many of them would she kill with her ritual?

A few less, she thought. If she could.

It worked, and the battles that followed saw her prove herself. Then there was that hard night where the Army of Callow reminded them it was still the same mule that’d kicked in the ribs of half the armies on the continent, slipping behind them. And there would have been battle, but Sepulchral surprised them all. Instead there was a tense, hesitant stalemate and Akua was at last invited to dine in private with Marshal Nim. It was a stiff affair, almost begrudged, and there was no dessert. The marshal proved remarkably forthright, by the time the plates were taken away.

“I can smell it on you, you know,” the Black Knight rumbled. “Ambition.”

Akua smiled easily, drinking of her wine.

“It seems like a singular curse to be able to smell such a thing while living in Praes.”

“You’re only charming to humans, Sahelian,” the Marshal glared. “Malicia saw use in you and she’s been proved right in that, but I still question her judgement to have taken up such a hiltless sword.”

“Do you often?” Akua asked.

The ogre eyed her in silence.

“Question the empress’ judgement, I mean,” the Doom of Liesse idly continued. “Idle curiosity, I assure you.”

“Highborn,” the Black Knight said, tone disgusted. “He was right about you all, B- Amadeus. Even if the sun fell down on us you’d jostle for the nicest place to die. You don’t know what loyalty means.”

Oh my, but what an intriguing mistake she’d almost made. Telling, too. She would not be the only to change the word halfway out of her mouth: the Carrion Lord had, for better or worse, been part of the backbone of the empire for decades. That was not a legacy easily cast out. Did it weaken her Name? It likely did. Enough, perhaps, that Catherine’s little Squire might be able to slay her given the right opening. Something to ponder.

“Interesting, this talk of loyalty,” Akua said. “There are some who would say you’ve broken faith, following the Empress over your predecessor.”

“That’s because you think like a child, Warlock,” the Black Knight scathingly replied. “Like loyalty can only be about people. You want to know what I follow? There’s no need for games, mageling, I’ll tell you. It’s not like I hide it.”

“That would be most helpful of you,” Akua agreeably replied.

“I believe in the empire promised us in the Reforms,” the Black Knight bluntly said. “A Tower that holds to law and order, that does not cater to the whims of the High Lords. A realm that is not a mangy pack of alley cats fighting over scraps.”

“And Malicia offers you this?” she asked, genuinely surprised.

Though the Empress was certainly of a mind to gather the power in Ater, she had never been one to mind a bit of intrigue. It would have been like a prize champion being shy of the arena.

“You’re not listening, Warlock,” the Black Knight bit out. “This isn’t about people. You know what the cornerstone of that dream is? The Legions of Terror. An army that can cow the High Seats, professional and modern and most of all loyal. ”

Akua studied the other woman with open fascination.

“This isn’t about the Tower at all,” she said. “This is about the Legions.”

“You think half my officers, half my men, don’t want him on the throne?” Nim said, tone hard. “She’s been good to us, Malicia. Better than most. But she’s not known. She’s the stranger in the Tower.”

“It would kill the Reforms, if you rose to help him climb the Tower,” Akua slowly said.

“We wouldn’t be an institution anymore,” the Black Knight said. “The bedrock of stability. It would make us into just another High Seat to please and defeat the entire purpose. Do you think it’s a coincidence that he’s been skulking about scheming instead of calling on the Legions of Terror? Soldiers would come if he raised a banner.”

“I have read the reports,” Akua delicately said. “That decision might not be one of principle, but driven instead by the Emerald Swords-”

Marshal Nim laughed, leaning over the table. Her breath was unpleasant.

“You think he’s the kind of man who’d flinch at killing elves?” she said mocked. “He’s got Ranger at his side. Don’t be a fool. He knows it too, what it would do to Praes to call. Just like he knows we’ll fight him tooth and nail if he comes for the Tower.”

“You sound like you admire him,” Akua said.

“I do,” the Black Knight said. “I don’t like him, Sahelian. I don’t love him either, and I fear what kind of an emperor he would make. But I do admire him. Even now, he still believes in the same dream that I do.”

The ogre bared her teeth.

“And he’d agree it matters more than any single man.”

And there it was, Akua thought. The Black Knight thought herself a fortress for her principles, unassailable to temptation because her loyalty was to something above the dross of petty ambition. She was wrong, of course. Idealists were no less fragile than anyone else if you knew the lay of their castle.

“Oh dear,” Akua sighed. “You really are going to get yourself killed, aren’t you?”

The Black Knight scoffed.

“Repeat that threat and-”

“It won’t be me , you fool,” Akua sighed. “Warlock. Black Knight. Scribe. Captain. Ranger.”

“The Calamities,” Marshal Nim said, impatient. “What of them?”

“Where are they now, Black Knight ?” she asked.

A moment of startled silence.

“Gone,” Akua said. “The Dread Empress of Praes does not long tolerate other Named at her table. Even the band that made her bid for the Tower was broken and sent out in pieces, Nim. How long do you think you’ll last?”

“Captain died abroad,” Marshal Nim flatly replied.

“On whose behalf?” Akua laughed. “Come now, you ought to know better. Did you truly think yourself so different than me in the empress’ eyes? You, too, are a hound raised to run down a particular trouble.”

The golden-eyed mage pleasantly smiled.

“And Dread Empress Malicia is not the kind of woman who keeps a hound at the table when the hunt is finished, Black Knight,” Akua said. “It is a waste, to her. She puts them down .”

The Black Knight laughed mockingly.

“And you’d never, of course,” Marshal Nim said. “So I ought to back you instead, for fear of my life. You’ve only listened to the parts you wanted to hear.”

“I have listened to everything,” Akua sharply said. “It is you who ignores the reality around you. Do you think Malicia cares a whit about your little dream, save in how it helps her maintain control?”

“Wind,” Nim dismissed, “she benefits from-”

“Not enough,” Akua snarled. “Gods, when are you all going to understand? It will not be enough, because when you hold the Tower it can never be enough . There’s always another enemy, another doom, another doubt. She’ll cut open the Legions to make what’s left her creatures. She’ll hobble them so they can’t ever raise a hand against her. Because you have ideals, you fool, and she doesn’t share them . In the back of her mind the whisper is always there: is this the line that makes them turn on me? Is this the order they will refuse? She doesn’t make decisions because they are lawful or fair or they bring stability. Malicia cares about being in control. That’s it. That’s all of it.”

She had risen to her feet, at some point, but she did not recall.

“There’s no place for your dream in that Dread Empire,” Akua said. “And there’s no place for you either, Black Knight. For a Named that will get in the way of making the Legions safe. I have a spell that will kill me, somewhere in this body, but Gods burn me if there is not a sword hanging above your head just the same. We are meant to be temporary measures .”

The armoured ogre watched her in silence, still as a statue.

“I rode that black doom to my end, once,” Akua said. “I know the look of it, Marshal Nim, and the empress is a woman in the deep throes. There was a time where I thought-”

That I spoke words like these so they would trust me , she thought. So they would love me. So that I would have a seat by the fire, until they saw through it and turned on me. Her nails bit into the palm of her hand.

“It doesn’t matter,” Akua got out. “It is all scrapped iron, that’s all. Pointless.”

“You are,” the Black Knight slowly said, “perhaps the finest liar I have ever known.”

“You want truths?” Akua asked. “You want proof? Fine. Ask someone you trust to inquire as to what a pattern of three is, Black Knight. You who fought a Squire and won.”

She smiled mirthlessly.

“Because I know,” the Doom of Liesse said, “and I assure you the Empress does too.”

And she had not, Akua knew bone-deep without even have looked, said a word. And though tomorrow they would return to war, to the bitter fruit risen of the bitter seeds Akua had lain, she knew from the look in the Black Knight’s eyes that she had just cracked the stone with the blow.

And still, curse all the Gods who listened, she was not hearing the damned song .

Chapter 16: Anchor

“To suffer defeat is not to be defeated. One is an occurrence, the other a state of mind.”

– Dread Empress Sanguinara, the Shrewd

It was as if our armies had played a round of musical chairs.

The Loyalist Legions had been camped at the tip of Moule Hills, south of us, but they’d burned that camp to force us out of our camp in Kala Hills. Then we’d gone around those same hills and stolen a march south of them, taking Kala Fortress and setting up over their supply lines. The final bit of surprise, though, had been when Marshal Nim had marched her army south expel us from our new position and instead been forced to retreat north: Sepulchral’s vanguard had popped up atop Moule Hills, threatening to flank her if she gave battle. So now here we were, the three of us staring at each other as the afternoon sun pounded down on our helmeted heads.

The vanguard set up shop at Nim’s old camp in Moule Hills, in what I could only call a fit of irony. Not without paying for the nice campsite and half-filled dry moat, though, going by the detonations and screams that’d followed the rebel forces moving there. Looked like I’d been right to think that the Black Knight had trapped the area with goblin munitions before leaving it. We were keeping an eye on both the other armies in the region, scouts out and about, but not going on the offensive. The unexpected arrival of Sepulchral’s three thousand had bought us time and we intended to use it to the fullest.

See, even after having outmanoeuvered the Loyalist Legions none of us thought it was anything but stupidity to try to go and attack them in their – formerly our – fortified camp in northern Kala Hills. And given the disparity in our numbers and the fact we’d taken some bruising losses, none of us were particularly eager to face Marshal Nim in a fair pitched battle either. The chances were high that even if we won the costs would make it a strategic defeat. If Juniper had been herself I might have risked it, but as she was... The Hellhound was still largely silent during the war councils she was supposed to be leading.

On the other hand, we couldn’t just let the Black Knight slap us out of our superior position either. We could cut off her supply lines from here and ensure we wouldn’t run out of water. So Sapper-General Pickler had given us our solution.

“We raise a wall,” she said, leaning over the map. “Between Moule Hills and Kala Hills, at the narrowest part of the valley.”

And so while half our army had gone in the rest to shade, the rest had spread out across the valley. Sappers and regulars were digging trenches, going from east to west, while palisades were being raised. Our main camp was still next to Kala Fortress, where we could use the wells and the walls, but out in the valley two makeshift forts were already under construction behind the trench line. The Legions hadn’t taken that lying down, of course. The auxiliary cavalry had come out in force the moment it’d become clear what we were doing, but we’d been waiting and ready. It’d not been lightly armed Levantines facing down the riders, this time, but a proper shield wall with crossbowmen behind it.

After a hard reminder of the difference in range and power between javelins and standard-issue Legion crossbows, the enemy horse had beaten a retreat. They kept harassing us all afternoon, though, even as the Loyalist Legions mounted their answer to our new stratagem. I was standing next to Pickler as it began to play out, sighing.

“We should have seen that coming, really,” I admitted.

She spat to the side.

“They’ll get their fortifications up faster than we will ours,” Pickler warned. “We’re outmatched in both sappers and labour.”

In answer to our containment of them with a trench and wall, the Legions of Terror had begun building their own to our north. Not even that far, damnably enough. About two hundred feet beyond our furthest crossbow range, with their cavalry waiting out in the valley just in case we got foolish enough to try a skirmishing war. Pickler was right, I grimly thought, as she tended to be when it came to sapper’s work. I could already see the gap between the capacity of our armies in action: the Legions had begun working three hours after us yet already they’d caught up to two thirds of our trench length.

“Theirs are more vulnerable,” I noted. “They still have Sepulchral’s three thousand on the wrong side of the walls.”

Which might actually be part of the plan, I thought. The Black Knight would either bait them down from the hills in an ill-advised attack or fortify around them until they became irrelevant. That might explain why she wasn’t being more aggressive in trying to get us off her supply lines. She wasn’t digging in to stay so much as putting up defences to prevent being flanked before she hammered away at us. From her point of view, this battle would be settled long before her stores of food were at any risk of running low.

“I can’t speak to that,” Pickler shrugged. “You know my interest in tactics is limited. What I can tell you, though, is that we’ll need our best skirmishers in Kala Hills tomorrow.”

I had to crane my neck more than I wanted to so I could have a look at her. She was standing on the side of my missing eye. I felt my fingers clench. It was always the little things that got to me.

“Why’s that?” I frowned.

“We don’t have enough stakes to make a wall the length of the entire valley,” she said. “And neither do the Legions. So we’re going to have to cut wood, Catherine, and the only place in the region that has any in the quantity needed-”

“- is Kala Hills,” I finished.

Plenty of brushlands in those rocky hills, some proper trees too. With this having turned into a war of entrenchments, those bushes and trees had just become as precious a commodity as water. We’d begin by cutting the wood closest to our camps, of course, but then they’d need to go south and we would need to go north. Closer to each other.

“The moment we both run out of sudes , the easiest way to slow the other side from building up is to harass the soldiers cutting wood,” I said, rubbing at the bridge of my nose. “Shit. That’s going to get messy .”

“That’s a word for it,” Pickler snorted.

She seemed amused, but her face suddenly stilled. She looked away, biting at the inside of her cheek. A long moment passed, a silence I did not dare to break. I knew whose memory had struck her like a punch in the gut.

“He would have loved it,” Pickler finally said. “The mess. The chaos.”

“The danger,” I ruefully said.

She nodded, then returned to silence. Honest emotion was not something that came easy to goblins, so I let her choose her words at her own pace without sticking my foot in it.

“After Ratface died,” Pickler said, “I thought we were done losing them. That we’d paid our due to the Gobbler, that the rest of us would make it.”

“Nauk,” I quietly said.

“He was gone long before they killed him,” she said, shaking her head. “The Warlock... didn’t bring much of him back. Not enough for it to count.”

I did not disagree, keeping my shame to myself. I’d thought, once upon a time, that Night might have mended that. These days I was not so sure, but I had clutched that hope close in the early days of my return from the Everdark.

“Then they got Hune,” Pickler continued. “That was...”

“I didn’t think you two were close,” I said.

“We weren’t. She wasn’t the kind that made friends. But she was one of us , Cat,” the goblin quietly said.

Over the years, somewhere along the line the veil that’d once separated the Rat Company cadets from the Fifteenth had fallen. There just weren’t enough of us left for the distinction to matter. With every fresh war I dragged us into, every hard stand, another body had dropped. We were a dying breed, those few that’d been in it from the start.

“She was,” I acknowledged.

Hune had not been my friend and I had never trusted her entirely. But she had been one of us anyway, in that intangible way they only ever quite became real when it started feeling like loss.

“And somehow I still didn’t see it coming when Robber died,” Pickler said, tone bitter. “He used to go around telling us he was invincible, that he just couldn’t seem to croak-”

My throat tightened and she stopped herself, looking at the men raising walls in the distance.

“I guess I believed him a little, even when I rolled my eyes. I thought that even if we all died, Catherine, he’d be the last one to bite it,” she said. “Somehow. It just never felt real that he could be... gone.”

“Sometimes I still feel like he’ll pop out from behind a stone,” I admitted. “Grinning, making fun of us for having gone soft.”

“But he won’t,” Pickler harshly said. “He won’t . And there’s so many things with him I left half done, because I always thought there’d be more time. After this battle, that plan, that book. I waited until the Gobbler took him because I was too... lazy to talk to him.”

“We always think we could have done more, when people die,” I said. “Especially people we loved. It’s not fair to either them or us.”

“What does fair ever matter?” Pickler tiredly said. ‘’It won’t fix a thing. It’s not wood and steel, I can’t take out what’s broken and make good again. Instead what I have is regrets and a letter I’m too afraid to open.”

I breathed in sharply. Hakram had told me Robber had left her a letter, but I’d not known she had yet to read it.

“Why?”

“I know what’s in it,” Pickler said, then snorted. “Or maybe I don’t. I don’t know which scares me more.”

Robber had loved her, once. When we’d been little more than children he and Nauk had both courted her attentions and fancied each other rivals, not that anything ever came of it save bickering. She’d liked the attention, but she’d never been all that interested in romance. Besides, goblins thought of love differently than humans. It didn’t mean the same things, didn’t carry the same expectations even when it was returned.

“Did you love him?” I quietly asked.

Hesitation.

“No,” Pickler replied.

Then she chuckled bitterly.

“Maybe,” she admitted. “It was... messy. I thought he’d want more than I wanted to give, so I never let him ask.”

I breathed out, hand itching for my pipe. I restrained myself.

“I think you did,” I murmured. “At least a little.”

Her shoulders tightened.

“After the war,” Pickler finally said, “I wanted us to go to the same place.”

It was as close to admitting affection as she would ever get, I thought.

“I expect we all will, Pickler,” I softly said. “He’s just gone on ahead one more time.”

She laughed, a little grimly but genuinely. Goblin humour tended to run even darker than my people’s. There was a reason they got on so well with Lycaonese, whose gallows humour was black enough even Callowans balked at it.

“It feels like unfinished business,” Pickler eventually said. “That’s all. And I don’t know how to finish it.”

Sometimes you don’t , I thought. You keep walking with that weight on your back, knowing one day you’ll buckle. My instinct was to lay a hand on her shoulder in comfort, but it would be no such thing to a goblin. Instead I gave her the sole courtesy I had to offer: work to disappear into.

“Prepare our builders for skirmish,” I said. “Draw on our reserves for regulars if you need to.”

“You’re going to hiss at the snake?” Pickler asked, sounding surprised.

Poke at the bear, I decided, only for the Grey Eyries. It always surprised me that even after all these years there were still expressions from east of the Wasaliti I’d never heard. In Lower Miezan, anyway.

“Something like that,” I said. “I figure that we’ve got one asset the Legions have no answer to, so it’s about time to use it.”

I wasn’t going to be sending skirmishers out to fight theirs in the space between our trenches, I wasn’t that much of a fool. They had crossbow companies waiting for that mistake, same as us, and my men were a lot more tired than Nim’s anyway. The Army of Callow had marched all night and not had a full eight hours of sleep since, it was on the ragged edge. Instead I sent for two people: Archer and the Silver Huntress. My instructions were straightforward.

“You see these people?” I asked, pointing north.

The two of them eyed the enemy legionaries and sappers raising a wall and digging a trench, a swarm of ants just outside the range of our crossbows.

“Sure,” Archer shrugged.

“I do,” the Silver Huntress gravely replied.

“You’ve got bows and I want corpses,” I bluntly said. “Have at it.”

That got a delighted laugh out of Indrani and a measuring look out of Alexis. Neither of them bothered to use the elaborate bows they’d received as gifts from the Lady of the Lake, instead stringing good yew longbows from Daoine after ensuring they were well provisioned with arrows.

And then, easy as breathing, they began taking lives.

The enemy were maybe seventeen hundred feet away, well out the range of even the longbowmen of the Watch. But these two were Named, sharpened to a razor’s edge in the greatest war of our time, and so they began killing their way through the enemy as if were not impossible. Archer went for officers, Huntress for the sappers. It took a while before the enemy even realized what was happening: they scrambled about looking for skirmishers that weren’t there, at first. And even when they did realize, the response was slow. Archer had killed the people who should be shouting orders. Within half an hour the regulars were in a full testudo and sappers were either huddling in their trench or gone.

At the hour’s turn the sappers came back having assembled rough mantlets, wooden walls on wheels they could bring forward and take cover behind. It was a mixed success: the two archer Named first bled the regulars that broke cover to put them in place and then ignored them entirely, curving their arrows to fall down from above. Those shots weren’t anywhere as lethal, but they still disrupted the sappers trying to get back to work. It was only half an hour after that the situation came to a close, when mage lines were sent out to raise shield spells around the sappers to protect them entirely. In the distance I recognize the woman who led them. Tall, dark of hair and with strange golden eyes. Akua looked our way as well, but nothing was spoken.

It was still too early.

“We could have at the mages,” the Silver Huntress said. “If we start using our proper bows and our stock of mage-killing arrows.”

I shook my head. I might have considered it if they were mfuasa and nobles, but these were Legion mages. We did not have enough mage-killer arrows for this to be a good trade.

“Better to let them win now,” I said. “Let them feel safe and get sloppy.”

Indrani eyed me amusedly.

“You’re sending us back after nightfall,” she said.

My smile was cold.

“Get some rest, you two,” I said. “You have a long night ahead of you.”

And I needed to get back to camp. The fortifications were a good measure to take, Pickler had been right to suggest them, but they weren’t a plan.

If we were going to win this, we needed one of those.

—

Vivienne wasn’t alone in her tent when I went to see her. I’d been about to enter anyway when I overheard the voice of who she was speaking with. The Laure drawl wasn’t rare in my army, but I knew the timbre of that voice too. I was curious enough about what had brought the Squire to her that I decided to... actively overhear. It wasn’t called eavesdropping when it was a queen that did it, there were laws about this stuff.

“-did a number on him,” Vivienne was saying. “I know there are parts of Callow where he still has a good reputation, but they tend to be the ones that saw little of him.”

“He was chosen by a Choir, I am told,” Arthur hesitantly said. “Can that truly be a harmful thing?”

“Angels are a lot of things,” Vivienne said. “Most of them are good. But do not ever, for a moment, believe them to be harmless. Even their kindness has teeth, and Contrition has little other than the teeth to offer.”

“Yet you fought with him,” the Squire said, voice daring her to deny it. “At his side.”

“Some of the things we did back then were right,” Vivienne said, tone gone quiet. “But some of the others... we weren’t fighting the right battles, and not against the right people. Doing good’s not always the same thing as doing Good.”

“There’s priests who would call that heresy,” he said.

“Heard lot of that talk, when I was your age,” Vivienne said, and I could hear the hard smile in her voice. “Heresy this, blasphemy that. What did the Praesi care? Wasn’t priests whining that got the Empire to leave. Keep to Above of you want, there’s nothing wrong with that. But like Jehan the Wise said, prayer and a sword work better than prayer alone.”

A sentiment I could get behind. The sword part of it, anyway. Deciding I’d eavesdrop- actively overheard for long enough, I made my presence known by loudly approaching. Fuck, I thought as I entered the tent, but someone was going to have to teach the kid to hide his thoughts better. He looked like I’d just caught him with his hand in a honey pot, it was painfully obvious he thought he’d been doing something bad. I wasn’t too worried about talk of the Lone Swordsman, myself. Contrition had been trying to hook the Squire from the start, but William was not a great angle for them to take. A lot of Callowans hadn’t been fond of the man.

That tended to happen when you carved messages into people’s foreheads, even when those people were Praesi.

“If you’d excuse me, Your Grace, Your Majesty,” Arthur said, bowing.

I shrugged and Vivienne waved him away. She waited until he was gone from the tent to cock an eyebrow at me.

“So how much did you listen at?”

I put a hand over my heart, deeply wounded by the implication.

“How dare you,” I gravely said, “and when you started talking about the way people remember William.”

“The end, then,” Vivienne said. “Kid’s been dreaming, but they’re all over the place.”

I frowned.

“Still the broken sword?”

I’d broken the Penitent’s Blade and good luck to anyone trying to – no, Catherine, that was a good way to get stabbed with pointed irony in a few years. Let it simply be said I had been thorough in dispersing the shards of the angel’s feather.

“He has a whole array of them,” Viv replied, shaking her head. “Different Squires. He does get the sword dreams, but I’d bet that’s Contrition trying to nudge him down that road.”

“Those nosy fuckers,” I grunted. “They need to learn when to quit.”

I wasn’t above asking Zeze to look into the practicalities of a pointed lesson for those vultures when this was all over. Malicia and Amadeus had outlawed the Name of Chancellor, when she climbed the Tower, so maybe I should look into outlawing the Hashmallim getting their sticky fingers into any of my countrymen.

“He’s not like William was,” Vivienne frankly said. “Nowhere enough self-loathing. I imagine they’d like him on the throne instead of you or me, but he’s a lot more interested in knighthood than crowns. That bodes well.”

“He’s still a wild card,” I said. “Different Squire dreams means he’s not settled, Viv. No telling what kind of a Knight Name he’ll end up transitioning into.”

It sounded a lot to me like the Heavens dangling shiny paths in front of their newest Callowan hero to find out what might stick. And there were some that I simply wouldn’t be able to tolerate. Rebel Knight, for one, Eleanor Fairfax’s old Name that’d popped up in Callowan history whenever a tyrant needed toppling. It irked me how much Name lore about the days of the Old Kingdom had been lost. I understood why my father had destroyed pretty much all he could – legacies were dangerous things when you’d destroyed the last iteration of them – but it still left me more knowledgeable in the ways of Praesi Named than those of my own kingdom.

Maybe it was for the best, I told myself. Using old tools and old means tended to lead to the same old ends.

“Lots of that going around,” Vivienne admitted. “Yours is so close I can almost taste it, Cat. You’re already starting to get the coincidences again – what were the odds of you stumbling into this talk?”

Low, practically speaking.

“I think it’ll take shape when we settle the Tower,” I admitted.

I’d know for sure if I started getting the reflexes again.

“You’re not far either,” I said. “Or he wouldn’t have been having that talk with you in the first place.”

She grimaced.

“I’m not sure what it is,” Vivienne said. “And there’s... something missing, I can’t quite put it into words.”

“You need something to take you over the top,” I said, tone clinical. “You’ve got your Role and the will, but you need weight. A story that people will talk about.”

That famous charge at the Battle of Hainaut had not been quite enough.

“I thought you might be angry,” she admitted. “I know you wanted Callow to be ruled by someone without a Name.”

I sighed.

“Those provisions of the Accords are essentially dead,” I said. “And in the end it’s not a theoretical candidate I’m entrusting that throne to, it’s Vivienne Dartwick. I stand by that choice whether it comes with a Name attached or not.”

Her eyes shone and I looked to the side.

“Thanks,” Vivienne quietly said.

I cleared my throat uncomfortably.

“I did come for something,” I said. “Your scheme in the Legions?”

“Won’t work if it looks like we’re losing,” she replied. “I’m still looking into getting in contact. It’s ready, I just need my foot in the door.”

“Hurry it up,” I asked. “I’m not sure we’ll be getting a decisive battle before Sepulchral arrives. If the rest of her army arrives in time, I want our finger ready to pull the trigger.”

“I’ll see it done,” she firmly replied.

I nodded. I was about to take my leave when I saw hesitation on her face.

“Viv?”

She brushed back an errant strand that’d fallen out of her braid. It still looked like a crown, her milkmaid’s braid, even when she did not wear the silver circlet that’d become hers when I formally named her a princess of Callow. She bit her lip.

“The Name,” Vivienne quietly said, “I do not know if it will be...”

She trailed off, hesitating again.

“I don’t think it will be one of Below’s,” she said. “Cat, I know that-”

I limped forward a step, leaning over the desk, and even as her eyes widened in surprise I pressed a kiss against her forehead. She looked up, startled, as I drew back.

“I didn’t name you my successor so you could keep making my mistakes,” I said.

There was nothing more to say, as far as I was concerned, and so on those words I left her.

—

Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara still brewed what was probably my favourite tea in the world. Herbal Wasteland stuff, nothing like the horrid imported leaves that Hasenbach was so wild about, and I’d yet to ever dislike a mug she’d made me. Not that the pleasant taste made what we had to talk about any more pleasant.

“I’ve never seen her like this before,” Aisha said. “In her first year at the College she had moments, before she found her footing, but this is different.”

I grimaced.

“I didn’t see it coming,” I admitted. “I know Nim pulling one over us twice in a row had to be a shock, but we’ve had hard rides before. What makes this different?”

Aisha elegantly sipped at her tea, which was the polite Taghreb way of gathering’s one’s thoughts without being uncouth.

“It has been coming for some time, I think,” Aisha finally said. “Looking back now. But I am afraid that the tipping point would be you.”

I froze in my seat a moment, taken aback.

“I thought I’d made it clear I still had full trust in her abilities,” I slowly said.

“Yes,” Aisha gently said. “Which made it sting all the more when she failed your trust by being defeated so starkly.”

Fuck , I eloquently thought. Had I been turning the knife without even realizing it?

“She said things, after you left,” I began, hesitant to continue.

“She’s afraid it didn’t all come back,” Aisha murmured. “Yes, she has confided as much in me before.”

“The Grey Pilgrim himself said she was all there,” I told her. “It wrecked her body to extract the commands, the hooks were deep, but the weakness is purely physical.”

“You trusted the man, which weighs on the scales, but not all of us are eager to take the word of the Peregrine for anything at all,” she replied. “It is doubts, Catherine. She believes she was either lessened by Malicia’s spells or never on even footing with the Empire’s marshal, and cannot believe in either without loathing.”

Aisha sighed and then, for one of the few times in all the years I’d known her, slumped into her seat.

“And she loathes the indecision too,” she continued, “which makes even standing still a defeat. It is... tangled, Catherine. And perhaps this was a long time coming. We all rose swiftly under you. Some might say too quickly.”

I sipped at my tea.

“I’m not one of those people,” I said. “And unless someone else has taken to wearing my crown, that’s the only trust in need of keeping.”

She met my eye, then slowly nodded. Aisha had always been hard to read, her lovely heart-shaped face ever showing anything she did not want it to.

“I am proud, you know,” Aisha quietly said. “Of the army we built, all of us. The kingdom. It was bitter and often thankless work, Catherine, but you did not pretend otherwise when you asked us to follow you. And looking at all we have done, even after all it cost us, I am deeply proud.”

She slid a finger around the rim of her cup.

“I would not let that legacy bury us,” Aisha said. “Juniper... if she fails you here, it will haunt her to her grave.”

“I don’t know how to make her eager for the fight again,” I admitted.

I’d never had to, before. Never learned to.

“I might,” she said. “I looked through her papers as she slept.”

My eye narrowed but I did not interrupt.

“She has been sketching out theories,” Aisha said. “And one stood out. I would have us show her, Catherine, that she is not blind and lost.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

And we planned, the two of us, how to follow the plan my Marshal hadn’t given me.

—

For a bit, it looked like we’d accidentally started a night battle.

Archer and Huntress had come out to reap another harvest of lives, but when they began shooting at the legionaries sleeping in forts exactly like those we’d raised – it was the same damned pattern both sides used – it looked like we’d kicked a hornet’s nest. Not only did goblins and regulars come out in force, but so did a large force we hadn’t anticipated. The entire Eighth Legion had left the camp in Kala Hills and begun marching towards the trenches. Our watches and horns did their job properly, calling for a brisk assembly, but it was clear that we’d not get to our fortifications in force before the enemy did. Not that it mattered, I thought, because the Eighth wasn’t actually there to attack us. Juniper had believed it would be two legions, but she’d written that a delaying force at least one strong would march our way.

Now there were two more of her predictions left to come true.

The first came true within a quarter bell. In perfect marching order, the Eleventh and Fourteenth Legion crossed the valley to begin an assault on the camp in Moule Hills where Sepulchral’s vanguard was now beginning to wake in a panic. Eight thousand legionaries marching against the three thousand mixed force of household troops and cavalry. If the Black Knight closed in before they were ready, and she would, it would be a slaughter. I was rather proud of how quickly the Army of Callow began gathering in the valley facing the Legions. By the time the Eighth finished living up to their cognomen of Trailblazers and took over the Legion fortifications facing ours, our own vanguard of three thousand was on its way to our side of the trenches.

“I think we took them by surprise with the harassment by Archer and Huntress,” I mused. “At a guess, because of the dark they thought it was an attack on their position.”

“Then why did the Eighth march out so quickly?” Vivienne asked with a frown.

“Dedicated response force,” I said. “Nim had them waiting for something like this. Which is why there’s only one other legion marching to reinforce them.”

I pointed in the distance, where the Thirteenth was marching to bolster the Eighth in their defensive position. The Black Knight’s own legion, the Seventh, was staying back. Serving as a reserve, most likely.

“And now the Legions gamble on our being too slow to stop them from wiping out the Askum troops,” Vivienne muttered. “Isn’t Marshal Nim afraid we’ll overwhelm the eight thousand she’s putting in our way? Sepulchral sent household troops, not the sort of men who die quickly. If we gather enough soldiers here, we could break the two legions in our way and perhaps even defeat her army while it’s divided.”

“Good instinct,” I praised. “She’s very much afraid of that. It’s why she’s kept her own legion as a reserve, it keeps her options open. That way she can either use the Seventh to shore up the defences in the valley or to give second breath to the assault on Sepulchral should it stall out.”

“It still seems risky, especially trying it at night,” Vivienne said. “What if we gather quicker than she anticipated?”

“Here’s where it gets interesting,” I mused. “See, what we sent to reinforce our trench was our readied troops. Night watch, soldiers on duty. It was a pretty solid number for an army our size. But the second wave of our soldiers is going to come slower. They’ll need to wake, put on armour, find their officers and muster before marching out. There’s going to be a beat between the two waves.”

“So she attacks us when she still has more soldiers on the fronts than we do?” Vivienne guessed.

“That’d be a blunder,” I said. “If she tries to overwhelm our trenches, she risks our people holding and her men being out of formation when our second wave does arrive. That could go really badly for her, the kind of disaster you were talking about earlier.”

“So what does she do?” the sole princess of Callow asked. “Why are we here, Catherine?”

“Because the Hellhound believes that Marshal Nim is going to make use of that beat between the waves,” I said. “Not to overwhelm our position in the valley, no, but to delay the reinforcements. To make sure that we can’t threaten to overwhelm her position in the valley while she deals with the Askum camp.”

“And how would she do that?” Vivienne asked.

I wasn’t the one who answered her. It was, instead, the thunder of thousands of hooves against the half-road. Three thousand auxiliary horse rode down the sole road of the valley, well to the west of the standoff between the Eighth and our vanguard. They weren’t heading there in slightest, after all: they were going to continue doing the road before taking a brisk turn east towards Kala Fortress, to strike at my soldiers before they could properly form up into a second wave. They’d retreat soon enough, light horse couldn’t handle the Army of Callow in a lasting fight, but all they had to do was sow enough chaos and death to slow us down before running away.

It would buy the Black Knight long enough to do achieve what she was after, removing Sepulchral’s vanguard from the board.

Of course, there was just one little bit of trouble with that. Three thousand light cavalry, packed in a tight column so they could make the best use possible of the road, were a fearsome force. But also a fragile one. So I wanted until they were in deep, too late to easily leave, and then I turned to Grandmaster Brandon Talbot. He’d been waiting all this time, listening with an eager look on his face.

“I’m going to pull down the veil,” I said. “Ready?”

“At your word, Your Majesty,” he replied.

It’d been a pain to get Masego to anchor the Night-working in a stone and meant it had been a pretty basic illusion, but it’d allowed me to get around that little trick of Akua’s with the red light circle. The Legions had gotten too dependent on that for sniffing me out, they really ought to have known better. With a murmured prayer I tore the Night out of the stone, feeling it crumbled to dust in my hand, and suddenly the moon shone pale above the glinting ranks of the Order of the Broken Bells. Lances down, shields up, the knights were in broad flanking positions just ahead of the largest cavalry force left in the Wasteland. I glanced at Vivienne, grinning and gesturing at our foes. She grinned back.

“KNIGHTS OF CALLOW,” she shouted. “FORWARD!”

Once, twice, thrice the horn sounded.

Death followed.

Chapter 17: Aim

“To be great one must stand on the shoulders of others. The difference between rule and tyranny is whether they raised or you stepped on them.”

– King Edward Alban of Callow, best known for annexing the Kingdom of Liesse

I’d not seen that many dead and dying horses since the Graveyard.

Casualties were a haphazard game, when one tried to count them in the wake of a bloody melee in the dark, but I trusted my eyes. At least half the force of three thousand that’d proudly thundered down the road now lay dead in the dust, torn through like parchment by Callowan lances. The rest had fled, panicking as my knights butchered their way through the tightly packed column, and there’d be no more fighting out of them tonight. It’d been a massacre: we’d caught them flat-footed and in the wrong formation. Even after the casualties the Order of Broken Bells had taken, I suspected we now had more cavalry left than the Black Knight. That meant we’d killed at least three horsemen for every lost knight, the kind of exchange rate utter routs were made of.

Yet as the stink of blood and shit filled my nostrils, as the death cries of men and horses joined in a strange elegy, my eyes stayed on the horizon. The Order had not pursued the fleeing horsemen, Talbot had known that it was a fool’s errand and it’d put us as risk of running into an enemy trap. The orders given had instead been to send away the few prisoners taken, execute the dying and change mounts in anticipation of another ride. It seemed, though that there would be no need to send my knights into another melee. Marshal Nim, from her perch, had decided she did not like the growing shape of the battle. Too many risks, especially now that her horse had routed in the dark and the Army of Callow’s reinforcements were marching unhindered.

If my vanguard tried to take her fortifications in the plains with the support of the Order, she might face an outright defeat here. Her forces were still split and I was the one with the cavalry advantage now. So the Black Knight did the smart thing, the prudent thing. What the Legion doctrine she’d helped write would have advised: she retreated.

The assault on Sepulchral’s soldiers in the heights was called off and the Seventh prudently moved to reinforce the two legions already gathering to face my army by the trench. Marshal Nim wouldn’t attack, though, and neither would I. Taking trenches, even only half-finished ones, would be messy. Too risky, given the exhaustion of our armies and the lack of coordination that came from fighting in the dark. Her officers were better than mine, sure, but she wasn’t going to bet on the same army that’d slugged it out with the Dead King for years being the army to break. When the going got rough and the fighting became about who had the iron to pull through? There was no beating the Army of Callow.

So instead of a battle, what we were going to get was two armies standing in battle array half a mile from each other in the dark for a few hours before both retreated. I pulled off my helmet, shaking free my wet hair. I wasn’t great with a lance, but I’d gotten in close with my sword after sowing further panic in the enemy with Night. There was blood on my armour that wasn’t mine. I looked up at the starry sky, breathing out slowly.

We’d made it through one more night.

—

Aisha had thought that following Juniper’s plan successfully would shake her out of... whatever this was, but the following morning I saw differently. I’d taken it as a good sign that she had headed out towards the frontlines, but it wasn’t to our fortifications she went. She didn’t go to inspect the trenches or the forts. Instead Juniper had headed further west, near the half-road that it would take us days to build all the way to – about six, Pickler believed, at our current pace. I found my marshal’s escort milling about uneasily on the valley floor while Juniper herself stood alone beneath a tall sycamore tree. It didn’t give much shade, its branches skeletal and bare of all leaves.

The Hellhound was one of the tallest orcs I’d met, taller than any in the Army of Callow save Hakram, and she’d always had a presence. Even as a cadet, the broad shoulders and ramrod straight way she stood had made the military in her visible to even a casual glance. I tended to have a hard time placing the age of orcs that were between their twenties and forties – before or after, the signs were pretty distinctive – but I’d known Juniper for years. Seen her grow as I grew, the lines of her broad face harden and her fangs thicken. Her eyes, black like most orcs’, were deeper set than when we’d first met. The skin around had grown greyer, too.

Yet in all these years I’d never really seen her... sag like this. It was a little subtle, could have been taken as just leaning against the tree in someone like Indrani, but to someone who knew her it was plain. Her shoulders were hunched, her expression exhausted. She didn’t greet me after I limped to her side, eyes still on the growing lines of fortifications in the distance. Dawn had passed an hour ago, both the Legions and my army were back to work in the cool morning air.

“There are better places to take it in,” I tried. “If we go near the foot of the hills to the east, we can make out the Aksum camp as well.”

She did not answer. I waited, at a loss. Juniper had never been one to swallow her feelings, so these long silences she’d taken to hiding in had me on the back foot.

“I recognized the plan,” the Hellhound finally said.

“You should,” I said, “it was yours. And it worked.”

Not my subtlest of approaches but sometimes blunt was the way to go. A surprisingly large amount of the time, really. Yet instead of what I’d been looking for, her shoulders further hunched.

“It wasn’t,” she roughly replied.

“Juniper, we literally cribbed your notes,” I flatly said.

Finally she turned to me, jaw clenched tight and eyes hard.

“You took my read of the situation and you made it yours,” the Marshal of Callow evenly said, the growl kept low in her throat. “I predicted some decisions Marshal Nim might make, like half our general staff could have had they been asked. You took those guesses and made them into a functional battle plan.”

My fingers clenched but I forced myself to stay calm. It was like she was trying to be obtuse.

“Using the Order was-”

“ I wouldn’t have used the Order , Catherine,” Juniper angrily said. “I wouldn’t have fought at all. I would have moved half the army closer to the trenches so that the Black Knight would be forced to do the same and it became too much of a risk for her to attack Sepulchral.”

I blinked, then hid my surprise.

“That would also have worked,” I pointed out.

“Your solution was better,” she growled. “You won the same prize, forcing her to back off from Sepulchral, but the Order’s ambush cost her half her horse as well. If I had given you advice, if you had taken it, it would have been an inferior result .”

I bit on my tongue before I could tell her it would still have been a good one, knowing she’d take it as a slap in the face.

“If you hadn’t predicted Marshal Nim was going to attack none of it would have been possible,” I said instead.

“General Zola believed she would as well,” Juniper said. “You simply never asked her, because you insist on pretending I am something I’m not.”

I grit my teeth. Why was she insisting on embracing the worst possible slant for everything? Fuck, she’d been outplayed by the Black Knight only twice – when had she become so fragile?

“And what would that be?” I bit out.

“A better commander than you,” the Hellhound gravelled. “Someone whose advice you should be taking.”

“That’s-”

I almost said ridiculous before biting down on it. Calling her a fool wasn’t going to achieve anything.

“- the truth,” Juniper said. “When have I ever won a victory, save when you were dragging me along?”

“You beat back Malanza at the Camps,” I said.

“I played for time until you could return,” she replied, “and would have lost if you had not. It’s been like that since the start. Three Hills was your plan. Marchford, Five Armies and One, Dormer – all the way to the Tenth Crusade. And when I did hold the command with none above me, I almost broke the Army of Callow in Iserre.”

“I handle the Named part of those plans,” I said. “The military parts were yours, Juniper. In almost all those battles, I went down in the ranks and fought. Someone needed to actually command the army and that’s always been you.”

“You don’t need a Marshal for that,” Juniper said. “You need a general, and you have plenty already.”

“I don’t agree with that in the slightest,” I harshly said. “And you’re forgetting who built this damned army in the first place, Hellhound. It sure as Hells wasn’t me.”

“Don’t you see how senseless it is?” Juniper miserably said. “We had a single draw when we were kids and it’s all come from that. Every office, every honour, every title. I am a child in marshal’s stripes facing a real marshal of Praes. It can only go one way.”

There was nothing I could say, I dimly realized. We could be at this all day, I could have the silvermost tongue in Creation or the finest rhetoric of the Free Cities and it wouldn’t move her an inch. She’d swallowed the lie, let it settle in her guts. Words wouldn’t fix this. Fuck, I wasn’t sure I could . My eye strayed to the sycamore, the shifting lay of its shade baring what I had missed: it was dead, inside. Through cracks I could see it had gone hollow, dead at the heart and the limbs simply too slow to have caught up to the truth. When I looked at Juniper she did not meet my eye.

“I will refuse a resignation if you offer it,” I curtly said.

I got back on my horse and left her to her tree.

—

The bruising night battle had changed the balance of power in the valley.

We’d shown we had teeth and the Army of Callow had managed to recover from the exhausting overnight forced march that’d won us Kala Fortress. The Black Knight wasn’t as sure she could take us on a field now. So both my army and the Black Knight’s avoided further fighting, in the valley at least. Zola ordered a permanent night watch on the Legions in case they made another move on Sepulchral’s vanguard, but like us Marshal Nim was focusing elsewhere: the valley between the hills of Moule and Kala had become a race of fortifications. I sent Archer and Huntress out to slow them as I had yesterday, hitting them at different places in the line, but even so their advantage in sapper numbers told.

They caught up to my own sappers and then began to overtake us, though not by too large a margin. Across the valley mirrored works were emerging: two lines of trenches facing each other, with palisades behind them. East to west, the both of us hurrying towards the half-road. We even took the same precautions, pulled from the same doctrine. To prevent a night attack overwhelming our positions, we raised walled camps behind our walls where we could keep protective garrisons.

It was in Moule Hills that the fighting continued. I needed all my sappers down in the valley working on the siege works, which meant I’d have to rely on regulars to actually head out into the hills and cut wood. Compared to the goblin skirmishers from that would be shaken loose to harass us, my legionaries would be at a distinct disadvantage. A protective screen had to be sent out, so I sent for the two I believed to be the right people for the job. Lord Razin Tanja and Lady Aquiline Osena came into my tent an hour past dawn, but it was not an elaborate plan I gave them.

“Kala Hills,” I said, pointing at the map. “If it’s an enemy and it’s in it, I want it dead. Keep them off our woodcutters.”

“The plan?” Razin politely asked.

“Pick your men, pick your pace, pick your battles,” I shrugged. “Those hills are yours.”

Aquiline grinned.

“You have us an honour war, Black Queen,” she said, sounding delighted.

“Honour can bite my ass,” I said. “Bring me scalps, Osena.”

The look on her face was somewhere between scandalized and gleeful, which actually did wonders for my mood. At least the lordlings could be counted on not to fall apart, I thought as I sent them out of the tent. By afternoon I had my first reports: the Dominion force was taking to the task with fervent enthusiasm, the Malaga contingent in particular. Fighting the Champion’s Blood in the Alavan hills for centuries had ensured they were well versed at fighting in this sort of terrain. It was a bloody, tribal fight just the way the goblins and the Levantines liked them. Razin himself came back near Afternoon Bell with a fresh scar and a pleased look on his face, just in time for Vivienne to ambush me as I got a cup of wine in him before sending him off to a healer.

“The commander of Sepulchral’s force sent us a rider,” she said, briskly entering the tent. “They want to meet.”

“Finally,” I grunted. “You got a name for me?”

“Isoba Mirembe,” Vivienne said.

I let out a low whistle.

“Sepulchral’s heir,” I told a confused Razin. “Her grand-nephew.”

“Does she have no closer relatives?” he asked, sounding surprised.

“It used to be her nephew, but we killed him at the Folly,” I said. “They have a time for me, Vivienne?”

“Half-past Afternoon Bell,” she said. “South of Moule Hills.”

I grimaced. Would have to saddle up soon, then. And since the young man – he was nineteen, I vaguely recalled, or thereabouts – was technically heir to both Askum and her claim on the Tower I’d have to bring enough high-ranking people it wasn’t an insult. There weren’t really many I could spare, though. Then I shot a considering look at Razin, who was noble.

“Finish that cup, lordling,” I said. “And get that wound looked at. We’re going for a ride.”

Might as well pick up the other kids, I thought. Sapan would be pissy at leaving Masego’s side – or more realistically his grimoires – but it would be good for her and Arthur to get a proper look at Wasteland high nobility. Besides, even though I didn’t believe the call to be a trap that hardly meant I trusted the Mirembe. Two more Named would be a useful precaution. Razin Tanja set down his empty cup on my carved table, standing up, and that was the sound of us getting a move on.

—

Isoba Mirembe looked a lot like I’d expected Sargon Sahelian to. Tall and with slender muscles, his face a perfect symmetry of high cheekbones under cold golden eyes. He was beautiful, but almost more like a statue than a man. It reminded me uncomfortably of the Exiled Prince, who might as well have been cut out of marble. This one, though, did not have a Name. How many potions and spells had it taken for his dark skin not to have the slightest of imperfections on it? The armour he wore was practical, at least, if incrusted with enough jewels to arm an entire company of legionaries. My escort of knights was a match in numbers for his retinue, but instead of the handful of nobles he’d brought I instead had two Named and a ruler of the Blood.

“Black Queen, I greet you in the name of Dread Empress Sepulchral,” Isoba said, breaking the silence, “and give you her thanks for your intervention last night.”

“The Black Queen greets her back,” I drily said. “You know who I am. With me ride Lord Razin Tanja of the Grim Binder’s Blood, the Apprentice and the Squire. And, of course, twenty of the same knights that ran down the Legion horse last night.”

The last part was a break in manners, but I regretted it not the slightest when I saw the backs of my knights straighten. They’d earned the praise, as far as I was concerned. Isoba introduced only the nobles he’d brought, each a ruling lord or lady in their own right. He’d not skimped on the rank of those he brought, at least, which was a good sign. With that out of the way, we got to business.

“A truce between our forces would be only natural,” Isoba suggested. “Neither Aksum nor the true empress have any quarrel with the Grand Alliance.”

“A truce is a start,” I said, “but it’s just delaying the trouble. We need to strike at the Black Knight together.”

“My aunt would welcome the official backing of the Grand Alliance as ruler of Praes,” Isoba easily replied, smiling without a speck of joy. “On such terms an alliance could be made.”

“You’re not getting that,” I bluntly said. “And you lending a hand to the business of keeping your hides from being tanned is hardly worth that asking price. Poorly bargained.”

“Why would we pay for what you offer freely?” the young man laughed. “It is in your interest to keep our force from being overwhelmed, lest you find yourself fighting the Legions alone.”

“You’re standing on quicksand, Mirembe,” I warned. “I’m not going to keep pulling you out of the fire if you’re of no use to me. Better then to let the Black Knight bloody her forces killing you all.”

That got his attention.

“Bluster,” he dismissed, but his eyes had sharpened.

I sighed. There was no point to this if he had no grasp on the precarity of his situation.

“This is why children shouldn’t be sent to negotiate,” I said. “You’ve wasted my time.”

He looked like I’d slapped him, which to be fair I pretty much had. His gaggle of nobles were studying him for a hint of his thoughts – or of weakness – but he wasn’t going to walk back his words after I’d insulted him. We’d have this talk again after Marshal Nim put some proper fear in his belly, or she killed them all. Either way, it was no trouble of mine. So long as the vanguard had a proper standing fight instead of being slaughtered half asleep, I figured they could cost the Legions at least two thousand men going down. It’d make the Black Knight’s force somewhat more manageable.

“Back to camp,” I told my people, pulling at Zombie’s reins.

My eye found that Razin, though, was looking at the other young man with an odd look on his face.

“Since I was a child I have been told of the cunning of the Praesi high lords,” the Lord of Malaga said. “And this is the truth of your blood? This is a bitter disappointment.”

“What would a savage from the edge of the world know of anything?” Isoba mocked. “The Mirembe could wipe out your misbegotten bloodline as easy as-”

“I have been on that horse, once upon a time,” Razin said, eyeing the other lord. “So I am not without sympathy for your position, for it is not pleasant. Yet even a savage from the edge of the world knew it was better to swallow pride than perish like a fool. Where is the cunning and power that your people so often boast of? All I see is an arrogant child who would kill himself and all with him out of wounded pride.”

Eyes, amber and dark, studied them both coolly. The nobles were listening.

“You know nothing ,” Isoba hissed. “Either of cunning or death. If the Legions come, they will be cowed.”

“If the Legions come, you will die,” Razin slowly said, as if speaking to a half-wit. “I am Blood, Isoba Mirembe. I understand honour, the pride of defiance. But that pride must be rooted in something more than fantasy, else you have saddled a dead horse. When the Black Knight comes you will be slaughtered to the last, and you are breaking off talks with the sole woman who can prevent this. This is senseless .”

Huh. Isoba was looking at him like he wanted to skin him alive and boil him. Shit, now I was almost hoping the heir to Aksum would live just so he’d have to keep remembering that little speech. The nobles had watched it all, and I saw now that looks were being traded. They had come to a decision.

“It was not known to us that Marshal Nim had become the Black Knight,” one of them idly said. “The situation has changed. Named are not to be underestimated.”

“Perhaps talks should be had, after all,” another said, smiling pleasantly.

Neither were looking at us. All of them, amber-eyed vultures, were looking at Isoba Mirembe. I saw it sink in, the truth that if he did not bargain Sepulchral would have another heir by nightfall. And it was hard pill to swallow, but still better than dying, so he turned to us with a mild smile and talks began anew. I sent Razin a fond look. Sat in that horse before, had he? Sarcella had not been so long ago, and still it felt like a lifetime. What did the man I was looking at now have to do with the boy I’d fought in that city?

So very little.

—

Isoba Mirembe would not concede to joining us in battle unless his position was assailed, and on that the nobles seemed to back him. Orders from Sepulchral herself, I suspected. We did strike a bargain, though: he would harass the Legions from behind, slowing their works, and in return I promised to intervene of the Black Knight tried to wipe him out again. It wasn’t what I’d wanted from him, but it was still better than them staying holed up in Moule Hills twiddling their thumbs. The second day rose to much the same arrangements as the first: in the valley walls raced east, while in the hills trees fell and blood spilled.

It was all ambushes and raids in there, not a single standing fight to be found. War parties came back with trophies or never at all. The Dominion was better up close and with javelins, it became clear from casualty reports, but the Legion skirmishers were hardened veterans with full stocks of goblin munitions. We pushed them back far north by afternoon, but it led the Levantines into a series of vicious ambushes on mined grounds that forced them into full retreat. Aquiline captured a prisoner that shed light on the turnabout: the Legions had sent for volunteers from Risas, the town by the lake, so that they might have native guides in the hills. The losses earlier in the day had been bait for the trap.

In the valley the Legions were still ahead of us, but Isoba had been true to his word: he sent out his horse to harass the enemy. Quick hit-and-run attacks on companies between Marshal Nim’s camp and the walls, burning a few carts and killing a few isolated tenths. He retreated immediately when the Legions sent out their own cavalry, returning to the safety of the camp. The Black Knight hadn’t made it a priority to bottle up the Askum troops before, but that changed with them making it clear they were willing to go on the attack. Sappers were pulled from the valley to begin raising a ring of forts near the foot of the hills where Isoba was encamped.

Good, it’d slow the Legions where it mattered.

On the third day, the situation in the valley and hills stabilized. In Kala Hills, the chastened Levantines established a cautious stalemate slightly to the north of the lines of fortifications. It left the greater part of the Kala Hills and its wooden bounty in Legion hands, but the Aquiline had sent her slayers to secure a few hidden glades to the east that kept us sufficiently provisioned in wood. Considering the disparity in numbers, I was more than satisfied with the performance of the Dominion forces and made that plain to both lordlings. It was in the valley that we pulled slightly ahead, our wall and trench passing the Black Knight’s. The Legions had carts full of what I believed to be siege engines brought to the front, though, and I ordered the same of my men.

No battle ensued, though. When trouble came it came from elsewhere. Scribe found me near Afternoon Bell and led me to a tent where two men were bound and gagged under guard.

“Who am I looking at?” I asked.

“Trusted servants of Lord Sokoro Abara,” Eudokia said. “I’ve been keeping an eye on him. They were sent to take the long way around Moule Hills and get in touch with Marshal Nim. Some information would be passed as a gesture of goodwill, ties established.”

Well, he hadn’t struck me as a particularly trustworthy man. Hadn’t expected him to try to play both sides so quick, though.

“What kind of information?” I asked.

“Minor,” Scribe said. “Troop numbers, camp gossip.”

Mhm. So nothing too drastic. He’d wanted to establish credentials, not outright jump ship. Not yet.

“He’s still got his half-brother in a cell?” I asked.

Scribe nodded.

“Take him out,” I decided. “Stash him somewhere in our camp.”

“And these two?”

I eyed them.

“Put their heads on his bed,” I said. “With a written note: no second chances .”

That should remind him in whose hands his leash was. It better, I had plans for tomorrow and wanted no distraction from them.

—

On the fourth day, I decided it was time to try to kill Marshal Nim.

Not here and now, unfortunately. I was unlikely to succeed with a nascent pattern of three nudging coincidence in her favour. But I could, at least, solidify that pattern. The veil over that knife was to be the Army of Callow going on the offensive: we were only two days away from our trench reaching the road, half the valley’s length already fortified, so the time had come to test the enemy’s defences. The Legions had mounted their siege engines, as had the Army of Callow, but neither side had begun firing. We’d not wanted to begin that slugging match too early. Until now.

My ballistae began hammering at the enemy palisade at the turn of Morning Bell. Within eighty heartbeats, the enemy returned fire.

They had us beat in numbers for traditional Legion siege weapons like ballistae and scorpions, but by doctrine a legion didn’t usually carry trebuchets unless an actual siege was planned. That gave us an edge in range and power with the three we had, but as the sky filled with stones I saw the margin was much thinner than I would have liked. On both sides mages had been brought to the fore, using shields to prop up our palisades so they wouldn’t break under hits, but the enemy’s superior volume of fire was hammering harder at us. We had fewer mages, too. I had an answer to that, fortunately: Archer and the Silver Huntress began using their proper bows.

Javelin-sized arrows began killing the siege crews and breaking the engines, our own ballista fire forcing their mage lines to stay and protect the palisades instead of covering them. The Black Knight had other mages to call on, though, and they intervened before my Named could do too much damage. A whirling wind formed over the enemy position and I grimaced. That looked simple and easy to maintain, which was bad, but worse was that neither my archer Named could land an arrow through that. Magic like shields they had arrows that could go through, but not wind. And it was exactly that, just magically induced.

Time to gamble, then. This might turn around on us if we didn’t. I gave the order and the signals went up. In the Kala Hills to the east, through a path the Levantines had found, a strike force of a thousand emerged past the enemy defence line. There was a fort in the way, the Legions had known of the path’s existence, but suddenly the wind in the sky stopped whirling and instead formed into a great spear. It hammered down into the fort, killing an entire company in a moment as Hierophant reminded everyone on the field why people avoided fighting mage Named of his calibre.

The legionaries rushed past the wreckage, heading straight for the enemy engines with two silhouettes at their head: Squire and Apprentice. Come on, Black Knight , I thought. You need to keep those engines, otherwise digging out the vanguard in the hills will get a lot more complicated. It’s only a thousand, and you can handle a mere Squire can’t you? Take your swing. Come on. A surge of power in the distance reminded me why I wasn’t with the assault, a ball of poisonous green clouds beginning to form above my own siege engines.

“Hello, Akua,” I coldly smiled, and unleashed the Night I’d spent an hour gathering.

My work was here. I’d asked Masego to keep the kids alive if this went south, it would have to do. And it was looking pretty good. The force with the Squire got to the engines and set two on fire in quick succession while I maintained a stalemate with the mage nobility and arrow fire began picking off Legion mages. Only the Black Knight wasn’t showing. Not even in a possessed body. Shit, she wasn’t taking the bait. Worse, even as my attack force began running into entrenched opposition and was forced back I found out where the Black Knight actually was: there was smoke coming from the Aksum camp. Had she hit them with an ogre line like she’d done our camp near Wolof?

Sepulchral’s men didn’t make fortified camps like the Legions and the Army did, a raid like that would go... badly for them.

Cursing, I have the order for a retreat. We’d broken at least half of the enemy siege engines, those deployed here at least, but it’d been costly. Even with Hierophant covering the retreat, we lost a little over half the thousand we’d sent. And Marshal Nim had not shown. I’d not finessed fate into killing her before the campaign was over. How had she known not to show? My fingers clenched, then unclenched. Akua, had to be. But why would she tell the Black Knight? If she was going to make a play for the Legions, and she must if she was to attempt to overthrow Malicia, she could not keep Marshal Nim alive. The Black Knight was a loyalist, the marshal that’d stayed true.

So what was her game?

It was beginning to slip out of my hands, I realized. I’d thought I had a handle on the path Akua would take, and I still believed that I did, but I had to wonder... I pushed aside the worries, attending to the here and now. With our retreat, siege fire petered out on both sides and ended entirely by Afternoon Bell. Sappers on both sides began repairing the chunks of palisade that’d been blown away, and that strange air of truce fell over the valley again. There was no more killing over the fourth day, not even in the hills.

All knew better than to believe it would last.

—

On the fifth day, Scribe brought news.

“Sepulchral’s army is getting close,” she told the war council. “If she keeps up the current pace, by evening in six days she will reach Moule Hills.”

Opinions were divided on how we should react to that.

“We should delay until the greater army arrives,” General Zola pragmatically advised. “Sepulchral will likely attempt to use us to destroy the Legions at the least cost to herself possible, but she will still broadly be on our side.”

“Or she could sit it out entirely, waiting for someone’s supplies to run out and desperate decisions start getting made,” Aisha pointed out. “We should not assume cooperation of Abreha Mirembe, she is well aware that we do not wish her to climb the Tower.”

“Even if we do want to finish off the Legions before Sepulchral arrive, can we?” Vivienne asked.

“If her vanguard helps, I believe it’s possible to win a field battle,” I said, then hesitated. “I’m not sure how decisive a victory it would be, however.”

“That would strengthen the position of the pretender empress when she arrives,” Lady Aquiline said. “Give her power in bargaining with us.”

She wasn’t wrong, I admitted. If Army of Callow and the Loyalist Legions bloodied each other just before Sepulchral arrived with her fresh force, it swung the balance in her favour. On the other hand, should we really wait six days just for this to still be true only with her camped in the hills over the battle? Aisha wasn’t wrong either, when she’d said that Sepulchral might just try to live up to the vulture on her banner. No decision was made, in the end, though I knew one would have to be soon. If we were going to attack, it would have to be somewhere over the next three days. Otherwise the margin to rest and regroup before the empress-claimant arrived would be risky.

The trenches and palisades in the valley kept steadily stretching east, and by tomorrow Pickler was certain we’d reach the half-road. Fortifications were not, unfortunately, a goddamned plan. That was our trouble here: we didn’t have a plan to beat the Black Knight, even if we could force her into a pitched battle. Which was looking less and less likely by the day.

Both sides extended their defences to the road on the sixth day, the skirmishes beginning again in earnest in Kala Hills. Weather blew in from the north-east that forced everyone to retreat by early afternoon, though with the warm morning sun being covered by clouds as the air cooled. What begin as a hard rain that sent everyone running to fill water barrels turned into something altogether less pleasant before the hour was out: rain turned to snow, and then the kind of hard hail I would never have expected of the Wasteland. Everyone was stuck in tents for the rest of the day, until the storm passed halfway through the night.

When the seventh morning rose it was to still-wet ground, the hail having melted overnight, but also to General Zola bringing me a worrying report. Two lines of scouts send to the south of Moule Hills were hours late in reporting. We hadn’t seen movement from the enemy, but the Black Knight might have moved troops under cover of the hail.

“Battle formations,” I ordered Zola. “And prepare a force to handle our eastern flank in case they went around Moule Hills unseen.”

Yet I learned, not even an hour later, that I’d been wrong. It was not the Legions that had caught our scouts. Well, in a sense I supposed it actually had been. In the middle stretch of Moule Hills, well to the south of Sepulchral’s camp and about the height of the mirroring fortified lines, banners had been raised. Legion banners: the Second, Third and Ninth.

The Rebel Legions had arrived before Sepulchral could, and the balance hadn’t swung against us so much as swung down on our heads.

Chapter 18: Release

“The trick isn’t to win battles, it’s to let your opponents lose them.”

– Aretha the Raven, Nicaean general

General Sacker came to meet me with a company of a hundred heavies and three lines of mages, the lot of them glittering with at least half a dozen defensive enchantments and shield spells at the tip of their hands. Well, would you look at. The Rebel Legions had grasped the reality that I might be somewhat cross at them. It was almost like they’d taken my coin and supplies for years before turning on me at the first opportunity. I wasn’t going to be forgetting that, or any other of their small slights.

“Hail, Black Queen.”

A mere twenty knight stood fanned out behind me. What need did I have for a larger escort than that?

“Sacker,” I said. “Fancy seeing you here.”

The goblin general had only walked up to the edge of the defensive enchantments and not a step further. I would have been offended by that if I hadn’t seriously considered slaughtering the entire contingent and ripping her plans out of her mind on the ride here. Only the certainty that it would push the rebels to allying with the Black Knight, however temporarily, had stayed my hand.

“You were warned of our march,” General Sacker replied. “We have dealt openly with you.”

“Debatable at best,” I flatly replied. “But let’s pretend I buy that, just for a moment. Keep up that alleged streak and tell me what you lot came here to do.”

“We aim to engage in talks with Marshal Nim,” Sacker said. “We have no intention of fighting you save if you force our hand.”

I snorted. General Mok’s plan to talk the Black Knight into deposing Malicia was still their play, then. They were fools if they thought it would get them anywhere. Nim was in deep with the Tower, she wasn’t going to defect now. Malicia would string them along until she no longer had a use for them, a situation I could only assume was imminent.

“And your stance regarding Sepulchral’s forces?” I asked.

“If arrangement is reached with the Black Knight, there will be either surrender or war,” Sacker said. “If not, the situation remains fluid. Regardless, we will not attack unless first provoked.”

Mhm. Then they weren’t all in on Mok’s plan yet. The vanguard in the northern Moule Hills was being used as threat on the flank of the Loyalist Legions, one they had no intention of removing before a deal was struck with the Black Knight. An alliance with the Rebel Legions wasn’t on the table – wouldn’t be unless Marshal Nim refused their entreaties outright, which she wouldn’t because she wasn’t a fucking idiot – so there was no point in aiming for that. I could, though, aim for a smaller concession.

“Then I’ll ask for your promise to stand aside should I intervene to prevent Marshal Nim wiping out the vanguard,” I said. “If not your help outright, which I would take as a sign of good faith doing much to restore your trustworthiness in my eyes.”

She hesitated.

“They are a rebel force,” General Sacker hedged. “The Black Knight’s duty is clear.”

I met her eyes and let all pleasantness drip down from my face.

“My tolerance has limits,” I said, tone so very mild.

“We are not in your service,” the goblin general snorted.

“No,” I replied, “but so far you have toed the line when it came to being my enemy . You might want to consider the price of crossing it, before you offer me another half-hearted platitude.”

“I am a general of-”

“You were a general,” I coldly interrupted. “Now you’re a vagrant that twice bit the hands feeding you. You’re out of chances, Sacker. With me, with the Tower, with everybody else.”

“Threats will not sway me, girl,” General Sacker said.

I let Night billow in my veins, coming quicker for the anger in my blood.

“A threat?” I laughed. “Do you honestly think your little spells would stop me if I wanted you all dead? If I wanted to rip out every secret from your head and make them dance before my eyes? It’s not a threat when I warn you, Sacker. You are not strong enough for my words to be hypothetical . If you get in my way, I will fucking step on you.”

I leaned forward.

“So I’m going to ask you again,” I said. “I want your promise to stand aside, should I intervene to prevent the Black Knight from wiping out Sepulchral’s vanguard.”

Still she hesitated, and a ring of red light formed high above me as Night kept coming to me. I ripped it out of the sky without even bothering to look.

“So long as no deal has been struck with the Black Knight, you have our promise,” General Sacker finally said.

“Good,” I harshly smiled.

“You are not making allies with your words, girl,” the goblin said.

“And still I somehow seem to have more than you lot,” I replied.

I cocked my head to the side.

“And Sacker, one last thing?” I added.

She watched me expectantly.

“Call me girl again and I’ll make you eat your own tongue,” I calmly told her.

Somehow, I saw, the calm gave her more pause than my anger had.

—

The Rebel Legions did two things the day they blew into our increasingly crowded battlefield. The first was send envoys to both myself and the Black Knight. The second was throw their hat in the ring, so to speak. The Loyalist Legions and my Army of Callow had dug trenches and raised palisades along two thirds of the length of the valley between the hills, all the way to the road, but the deserters sent their sappers downhill the moment they had a camp up and began digging a trench of their own. Facing mine and Nim’s, vertical to our horizontal.

“They’re digging a hundred feet past crossbow range, both ours and the Legions’,” General Zola informed us at council. “Sapper-General Pickler believes their fortifications will end up in a thin crescent facing our lines.”

“We’ll need to raise our own trenches facing theirs,” I sighed. “Or they’ll be able to flank us at will.”

It would turn our fortifications into a straight corner with one side facing the Loyalist Legions and the other the Rebel ones, while the Black Knight’s trench would end up at a much wider angle. Given their more numerous sappers, though, I didn’t anticipate them losing much of a step.

“We’re getting boxed in,” Grandmaster Talbot said. “With all these walls and trenches the Order will be made useless.”

“We can’t prevent them for raising fortifications of their own without forcing a battle,” Aisha said. “One at which we will be at a severe disadvantage, should the Black Knight reinforce them.”

Which she probably would. The deserters were still at a full force, thirteen thousand and fresh. The Army of Callow numbered a little under thirteen thousand, now, and Nim’s legions should be around twenty or twenty-one thousand. That battle would see us outnumbered more than two to one while flanked, which was a recipe for disaster. We couldn’t afford to start that fight.

“We do nothing,” I said, the words bitter against my tongue. “To them, at least. Our sappers need to prepare our flank for the possibility of assault now.”

It was out of my hands, now. All I could hope was that my enemies did not yet band together. The day passed quickly enough, laden with bad news, but the following warning ended up just as darkened. Scribe had requested the war council gather, which was rare enough I did not think twice about granting the request. What she had to say was not long, but it still hit hard.

“It cost me most of my agents within Sepulchral’s main host, but I have found out who plans her campaign for her,” Scribe said.

I laid back into my seat, already sensing this was not pleasant news.

“Instructions are received by letter, which are read out loud over scrying ritual,” Eudokia said. “The physical letters eventually make their way to Sepulchral herself, however, and my people were able to forge a decent copy of one before fleeing camp.”

She set down a letter on the table, which aside from having calligraphy small and cramped did not particularly evoke anything in me. Juniper, though, breathed in sharply.

“This is Grem One-Eye’s handwriting,” Scribe said. “He has been planning Sepulchral’s campaign for her from captivity in Ater.”

I grimaced. Well, fuck. Just what we needed, another marshal in the mix. My fingers clenched, then unclenched. Wrong way to think about this, I decided. Grem wouldn’t have had the pull to do this on his own, someone had to be helping him. Hells, someone had to have asked him to do this because otherwise I couldn’t see him helping Abreha Mirembe. And only two people were in position to do it, Malicia and my father. It didn’t fit Malicia, though, her way of doing things. Even if she’d been helping Sepulchral stay afloat with good advice, she would have cut off the flow now. She could no longer afford game this elaborate.

So it meant I had, at last, found the first trace of what my father was up to in Kala.

That somewhat improved my mood, but it passed quickly. While I’d been lost in thought I’d not been paying attention to the table, which only claimed my attention again when there was a ripple in the assembled council. Juniper had gotten to her feet.

Without a word, she walked out of the tent and did not return.

—

Once more I found the Marshal of Callow standing beneath a sycamore.

The same as last time, a bone-dry skeleton of a tree hollowed out inside. Dead and dying, the limbs having yet to catch up to the emptiness at the heart of it. Juniper’s escort had stayed far, as ordered, and as I limped past them across the dusty ground I found my eye dragged above. Sunset was painting the sky in layers, just like the stones of the hills to the west: the dark blue of night high above, with a distant moon, but then it lightened. Yellowed. Only to deepen once more, orange and red and at last a rich purple. Day died and its death throes shifted across the stone and dust, shade cutting in fluid slices as it swallowed up Creation in a never-sated maw. The Wasteland, for all its many dangers, was capable of eerie beauty at times.

Juniper was not leaning against the tree. I saw that first, even as I approached her. I had thought to find here the same hunched and self-loathing creature that’d been wearing the skin of one of my oldest friends for over a sennight, but this was... different. Her back might not be straight, but she was not sagging like withered vine. Instead she stood there with a lost and thoughtful look on her face, looking straight west. I followed her gaze, founding nothing more than the sappers of the Rebel Legions at work digging their own trench and palisade. They were skilled hands, well-drilled for all that they had deserted the Tower’s service. The three generals leading them had kept them disciplined.

I hesitated to break the silence. I’d found what I’d thought I would, and I was not sure I wanted to interrupt... whatever this was. For all the intensity of the Hellhound’s gaze, I had of late seen in her fragility that had me staying my hand. As I wrestled with my doubts, she came to a decision of her own. Her voice was rasping when she spoke. Dry, and she licked her chops before doing it.

“The Scribe, she said that Sacker’s in command among the deserters,” Juniper said. “Is it true?”

I hummed.

“Can’t be sure,” I admitted. “But the Jacks heard the same thing. I think Mok has more pull when it comes to strategic decisions, since he has the biggest army, but that Sacker’s the lead for tactics.”

Her eyes never left the sappers digging to the west. I bit my lip, then cast aside my hesitation. It wasn’t doing me any good.

“They tell me you’ve been here more than two hours,” I said. “Have you been looking at them the whole time?”

The Hellhound laughed. It was a low, rumbling thing. Not quite amused or happy, more like a... release. Vented feeling.

“Yeah, I have,” Juniper said. “Because there’s this...”

She shook her head.

“She was like an aunt to me, Sacker,” the orc said.

I did remember. It felt like a lifetime ago, but I remembered. I’d never seen her as embarrassed as she had been when I’d first seen her meet her mother and almost-aunt fuss over her after she became a legate. It’d been a memorable sight.

“Auntie Sacks,” I idly said.

“She used to tell me stories,” Juniper distantly said. “When I was small, Catherine. To make me go to sleep. That was all back in Summerholm, before I went home to be raised by my father. Goblin stories about gore and raids and little girls that got gobbled up for being too slow or too dim.”

“She seemed close to your mother,” I said.

I’d never grown to know either more than shallowly, but it’s been obvious to be even when I’d been young.

“She was probably Mom’s closest friend in the world,” she replied. “She spent more years of her life with Sacker at her side than she did my own father. It showed. Goblins aren’t usually... good with children. Sacker was making an effort.”

“She seems to have made an impression on you,” I said.

Juniper flashed pale fangs at the deepening night.

“She did,” the Hellhound said. “But not just for the stories. Did you ever hear she was meant to rise to Marshal in Ranker’s place when she retired?”

“There were rumours,” I acknowledged. “You know, back before...”

I gesture vaguely, meaning a great many things but not in particular. She snorted in amusement.

“I looked up to her for that,” Juniper said. “Even more than I did my mother, because my mother was never going to rise higher than she had. It wasn’t like Istrid Knightsbane I wanted to be when I grew up, Catherine. It was like Grem and Ranker and Nim. The Marshals. And Sacker, she had the stuff. The marshals knew it, so the Carrion Lord. If things had turned out different, it could be her serving as the Tower’s greatest captain instead of Nim.”

“A lot of things could have gone differently,” I said.

My hand half-rose to the cloth covering the eye sloppiness had cost me before I forced it down. Some mistakes stayed with you longer than others. I found Juniper’s gaze had moved to me, catching sight of the aborted movement, and I flushed in embarrassment. Those kinds of regrets I preferred kept unseen from even my friends.

“It’s an eye, Catherine,” Juniper said. “Just an eye. You could lose both and still be who you are. And that’s what eats at me. When did you know?”

“Know what?”

Her gaze was alight with something I could not quite name.

“Who you were,” Juniper gravelled. “We’ve hung titles around your neck like necklaces at a summer fair, Warlord. Countess. Squire. Arch-heretic of the East. Black Queen, Queen of Lost and Found, of Winter, of the Hunt. First Under the Night. But before that, when did you know ?”

Half a dozen answers, some flippant and others rote, came to the tip of my tongue. I could not get any of them out, not meeting her eyes with my last remaining one. Seeing the cast of her face in the last gaps of the day, the despair and the hunger that burned in her eyes. I did love her, Juniper. My own Hellhound. As deeply as I did the Woe. I’d loved her as the hard-eyed foe I had to overcome to prove myself worthy of my father’s tutelage, when we’d both been children, and I loved her now as the woman who’d built a kingdom and an army with me. So I stayed silent, for a long moment, and told her the truth.

“In the Everdark,” I quietly said. “There was...”

I swallowed. I’d never spoken of this to anyone, not even Hakram. The words did not come easy. Was there a way in any language ever made that I could truly explain what they had been, the last moments of the battle in Great Strycht?

“I lost,” I finally said, tone quiet. “They carved me open, Juniper, and all the power and the death and the madness I’d gorged myself on came pouring back out.”

I looked down and found my hand was shaking a bit. I had come to understand the Sisters, and they me, but that had been after. After.

“It was like blinders went off my eyes,” I murmured. “And Gods, but I had done so many horrible things. More of them were all I could see ahead, and I was just so fucking tired . So I went down.”

I closed my fingers into a fist, to kill the tremors.

“And I stayed down, waiting to choke in the snow.”

I heard the sharp intake of breath.

“But I didn’t,” I murmured. “It took too long, you see. Snow melted enough I could breathe. And I still wanted to stay down, to sleep, but I just...”

I laughed, as mirthlessly as she had.

“It was a choice,” I said. “And there was nothing weighing the balance either way. So I ask myself, why not?”

I tightened my cloak around my shoulders, shivering.

“And then?” Juniper quietly asked.

“And then I got up,” I softly smiled. “And I think that’s what stayed with me, Juniper. The even balance and the question and the choice I made. And it’s gone to shit since, you know. Death and doom and the age falling down on our heads. And every day the same choice is there waiting to be made: lie down...”

“Or stand up,” the Hellhound finished.

I nodded.

“I’ve stayed on my feet,” I said. “I will, until I am either victorious or I die. I think that’s what left of me, when you whittle away the rest.”

Juniper looked away.

“I thought it’d be victory,” the Hellhound admitted.

“It’s never the victories that stay with you,” I tiredly said.

Large fingers laid against the dead wood.

“No,” the Marshal of Callow said, “I guess not.”

A moment passed.

“You’re looking west again.”

“Ranker’s dead,” Juniper quietly said. “But Sacker’s here. Nim is here. And Grem uses Sepulchral’s army. Everyone who is or could be a Marshal of Praes.”

I studied her, but her expression was hard to make out and her eyes stayed west.

“There’s this thing I see, Catherine,” she confessed. “The lay of it. Two hours I’ve watched the sappers, how quick they work. How quick the work will be done. And I know how quickly Nim’s will work, and ours and...”

“And what?” I quietly asked.

“And there is a box,” the Marshal of Callow said. “Where the battle will happen. I see it. It’s where it’ll all happen and we can shape it.”

I could smell it the air, now. Victory. Yet Creation did not shiver, fate did not ripple like a lake in the wind, because this was not the writ of any Gods. It was just Juniper of the Red Shields, looking at a dusty field in the middle of nowhere and being the woman I’d glimpsed in her at seventeen.

“You want to fight,” I said.

It was not a question.

“Sacker hasn’t seen it,” Juniper said, sounding disbelieving. “She can’t have, not if she’s raising those walls. Sacker hasn’t seen it, and she could have been a Marshal.”

Large fingers clawed at the thin bark of the dying sycamore. She turned to me.

“I could be wrong,” she told me, tone anguished. “I could be just seeing what’s not there. I’ve... these have not been good days, Catherine, and I did not stand up in the face of them. I need you to know that I could be wrong. ”

I would have answered, but she was not done. The words were spilling out of her like broken barrel.

“I feel like my entire life I’ve been drawing a bow,” Juniper said. “And ever since I’ve been your marshal, I’ve just... stood there. And my hand’s been trembling. But this? This place, this box, these foes?”

The hand left the tree and she pushed away, straightening her back.

“I can release the arrow,” Juniper of the Red Shields said, pleaded. “I can win this. Please .”

And I could have taken her by the arm, brought her close and told her that she did not need to win back my trust because she’d never lost it. But I knew, sure as dawn, that it was not what she wanted. Needed. And I was my father’s daughter, so I offered her the very same grace I was once offered. My wrist snapped out and metal slapped against my palm.

I handed her a knife, pommel first.

“If you mean the words,” I replied, “commit. Carve them.”

Incomprehension, first, but I saw her eyes clear as she matched my gaze. I did not mean the plea, or the apology that came unspoken with it. Those were between us. What I wanted from her was conviction. The Hellhound leaned close to the tree, reaching inside, and carved. The strokes shook, at first, but grew certain. Her hand did not tremble. And when she withdrew, deep in the hollow of a dead tree waited these words: Marshal Juniper wins here. I smiled, startled.

“Here?” I asked, amused. “Exactly?”

“This tree is where we win,” the Marshal of Callow said, tone even, “and everyone else loses.”

She offered me back the knife, pommel first. I took it.

“Let’s go home,” I said. “It’s getting late.”

“Yeah,” Juniper said, eyes red. “Let’s go home, Catherine.”

We’d left alone. We came back together.

—

“First, we shape the box,” the Marshal of Callow said.

It was a surprisingly simple thing, when it came down do it. We had our palisade and trench from Kala Hills to the half-road, so the only way to go was south. The assumption in my head had been that it’d turn into a right angle facing the Rebel Legion line, but Juniper had seen otherwise. Sacker and her fellows had been clever in putting themselves between two forces that did not want to fight them, forcing them to dig in and confirm their position of kingmaker of this battlefield. The downside, though, was that the sappers of the Rebel Legions needed to dig their trench in both directions simultaneously . So we took advantage of that.

We began building westwards instead of south, a sloping line of defence headed towards Moule Hills. Immediately the Rebel Legions began trying to force us back by cutting through our path, keeping at the same distance neither of us had yet dared to break, but when they focused their efforts south the Loyalist Legions began pushing at them instead. Nim wasn’t any more interested in giving them leverage than we were, after all.

“The slopes grow steeper further south of Moule Hills,” the Hellhound said. “That leaves only a narrow passage through which they can move troops into the valley, if they attack. That will shape where they attack.”

“Which we don’t want them to,” I pointed out.

“Indeed. So while we raise our works we have to delay,” the Marshal of Callow said. “We must maintain the stalemate until Sepulchral’s main host arrives.”

She had notions as how that should be done, of course. The first was to put the Loyalist Legions on the backfoot by poisoning the source of water they’d been using since we cut them off from their supply lines: Nioqe Lake.

“We don’t have anything that can poison a lake that large,” I pragmatically said.

I’d pretty much kill the town of Risas as well, but I was less broken up about that when they’d been providing guides to Legion skirmishers. I’d offer them safe passage south through the territory I controlled, but I wasn’t going to weep about them being driven out if we did it. Which I wasn’t sure we could.

“We do,” Juniper grunted, “for the same reason that we had to use that lake for water. Arcadian water can’t be safely drunk.”

A hundred knights, Masego and myself went for a ride. We tore through Akua’s attempts to stop us and I opened a gate in the sky, making Nioqe Lake a third larger and entirely unusable for water supplies.

“Then slow the deserters,” the Marshal of Callow said. “The moment their walls are up they can afford to start provoking us and strongarm the Black Knight.”

She spent half a day with Pickler out in the field, studying the eastern slopes of Moule Hills, before asking me for Archer and the Huntress. Ballistas were moved, and then fired at the hillside exactly five times with the Named as spotters. The ensuing landslide didn’t kill anyone that we saw, but it did drop down a least of tone of rock right in the middle of the way of the Rebel Legions. They’d have to clear them out before they could get back to work.

“So we hit the Loyalists, after that,” I guessed.

“It’s necessary and they had to be last,” the Hellhound said. “By now they’ve used all their sudes to match our wall and the deserters’. But we don’t want them to be able to keep fortifying over the next few days, they would encircle Sepulchral’s camp with walls entirely. Thankfully, their wood reserves were used to make the ring of forts around the Aksum camp, so they are now entirely dependent on the wood cut down in Kala Hills.”

“So what do we do, drive them out?” I asked.

“That would be too costly,” Juniper replied. “There is another way. It hasn’t rained in days. All you have to do, Catherine, is live up to your reputation.”

We set fire to the damned hills. Masego and I with large columns of blackflame, but it wasn’t only us. Indrani and Alexis shot fire arrows, a raiding party with Squire and Apprentice started a swath with torches and fire spells. The blaze got out of control when the wind turned, burnt a chunk of the hills under our control as well, but for the better part of the day the wind had blown north. The Legions weren’t going to get anything but ash out of those hills.

“The Black Knight will dismantle Ogarin for spare parts,” the Marshal of Callow noted, “but that will take time and the townsfolk will resist. It should buy us long enough.”

—

It did.

Sepulchral had been six days as well, and we kept the stalemate going just long enough. Our wall was anchored on the slopes of Moule Hills, facing that of the Rebel Legions, while to the north the Black Knight had hemmed them in as well. Envoys had gone back and forth between those camps, but no alliance against the Army of Callow had emerged. We’d kept them on the backfoot until Sepulchral arrived from the west with the rest of her twenty-thousand strong army. The Loyalist Legions had not finished their encirclement of the camp up in Moule Hills, and so they were forced to evacuate the sole fort in the way of Sepulchral linking her forces together late in the sixth day.

And so, at least, everyone was here.

“My agents in the Rebel Legion camp tell me that the talks with Marshal Nim are souring,” Scribe told me the same day, in my tent.

“She’s still not budging?” I asked.

“She has promised to extract of Malicia promises to make suborning officers of the Legions of Terror with mind control spells,” Scribe said, “but she still refuses to turn on the Tower in any significant manner. Now there is division among their generals. Sacker is pushing for their force to declare in favour of Amadeus as Dread Emperor, but Mok is strongly opposed. He instead argues that if further concessions are extracted from Malicia, safeguarding the sanctity of the Legions, their reasons for breaking with the Tower no longer exist.”

“Jaiyana Seket?” I asked.

“Hedging,” Scribe grimaced. “There’s not telling which way she’ll end up leaning.”

I breathed out. General Mok was arguing to rejoin Malicia’s cause, essentially. And he’d never bothered to pretend he was anything but hostile to my presence in Praes, or indeed the Grand Alliance’s concerns about the Dread Empire. I’d warned them that my tolerance had limits.

“Have assassin kill Mok,” I said. “Frame Sepulchral for it if you can.”

“That should be-” Scribe began, but she was interrupted when Vivienne blew into my tent.

I cocked an eyebrow at my successor, who was looking rather harried.

“Viv?”

“Trouble,” she said. “I have a fresh word from the Jacks. General Mok was killed an hour ago.”

I glanced at Scribe, but she shook her head. I supposed not even the Webweaver worked that fast.

“Where’s the trouble?” I asked.

“General Seket got killed as well and they caught the people who supposedly killed both,” Vivienne said.

I swore furiously.

“They caught Jacks, didn’t they?” I asked.

She nodded.

“It’s... bad, Catherine,” she said. “There’s been brawls in their camp, people are saying this is a coup by Sacker done with our backing. That she’s planning to sell out Praes to the Grand Alliance.”

I swore again.

“If I may hazard a guess,” Scribe mildly said, “the figurehead of this belief will be the senior legate for either Mok or Jaiyana Seket?”

Vivienne looked startled.

“Mok,” she confirmed.

I leaned back into my seat, closing my eyes and rubbing the bridge of my nose. Well, that was a particularly convenient turn for the Tower wasn’t it?

“Fuck,” I said. “Malicia played us.”

She’d whipped the deserters into a frenzy against us just before a battle was to erupt and the seniormost officer with a clean reputation was most likely in her pocket. Maybe if there were a few days or a week for things to calm down this could be straightened out, but we wouldn’t get that long. Ten to one odds she had something nasty cooked up for Sepulchral’s army too , I thought.

“Tomorrow we have a battle on our hands,” I plainly said. “We need to pull off your plan tonight , Vivienne. Can it be done?”

She grimaced.

“I would have liked a day or two longer, to make contact with the right people,” she admitted. “But it is not impossible.”

“Then go get your cloak, we move with nightfall,” I said. “I’ll need you to inform Juniper, Scribe, because come dawn the blades will finally come out.”

Chapter 19: Vivienne’s Plan (Redux)

“A superior strategic plan can fail on tactical grounds should decision-making in battle be disconnected from strategic concerns. This is why training officers to understand these concerns is a priority for a modern army, and the foundation of our manner of warfare.”

– Extract from “The Modern Legion”, a treatise by Marshal Ranker

The Thirteenth Legion was something older Callowans avoided talking about.

My generation didn’t care about is as much, since we’d been raised to Legion garrisons and imperial governors, but I’d served drinks to enough soldiers that’d served during the Conquest – on either side – to hear the whole gauntlet of opinions on Legio XIII, Auxilia . Most of my people knew the basics, that it was a legion raised almost entirely out of native Callowans that’d sided with the Dread Empire either during or after the Conquest. Bandits and rebels, people called them, and a lot of things nowhere as nice. Led by General Jeremiah Holt, who’d once been Sir Jeremiah Holt, they’d not actually done much to help the fall of Callow when Praes invaded and only become a formal legion afterwards. Their main assignment over the following decades had been garrisoning Thalassina, but they’d done a few stints elsewhere in Praes. Never, however, back in Callow.

The thing was, some of the older soldiers who’d fought under the Fairfaxes actually had complicated feelings about Jeremiah Holt. The man was nearly seventy now and he’d been called a traitor for forty years but in his youth a lot of people had seen him as somewhat of a romantic figure. He’d been a rebel against the crown, sure, but before the Conquest the situation in Callow had been a lot more complicated that my people cared to remember. For all that Callowans like to pretend that the years before the Praesi rolled in had been a flawless golden age where our wise and benevolent Fairfaxes rulers had been beloved overlords, that was ignoring the realities of it. They’d been a popular dynasty, the Fairfaxes, but they’d also been two reigns removed from a brutal internal civil war and that sort of thing left marks .

The War of Cousins had shaken up the balance of power in Old Callow, with two branches of House Fairfax twining the line with respectively the Caens of Liesse and the Sarsfields of Summerholm before taking swings at each other for control of the throne. There was a lot of to say about that civil war, but ironically what mattered most was the people not mentioned in the writings about it: the northern baronies of Hedge and Harrow. They’d stayed aloof throughout the entire war, same as they’d been during the Conquest, because by the time that branch of House Fairfax my father destroyed came to the throne the north had effectively become a realm within a realm. With the power increasingly gathering in Laure, Summerholm and Liesse northerners had started resenting the authority of a distant crown that little aside from collecting taxes.

Enter Good King Robert, last true Fairfax king of Callow, and Sir Jeremiah Holt of the Order of the Antlers. The estrangement between the north and throne had sunk deep enough that Holt, a bold young knight of northern extraction, had rebelled against King Robert to seek the independence of the northern baronies and parts of the territory now under Southpool. He’d been fighting for the restoration of the ‘Kingdom of Dunloch’, the ancient northern realm that the Albans had conquered before turning to the last holdout of the Kingdom of Liesse in the south. The historical grounds for that rebellion were pretty thin, considering that before the Albans annexed the north it’d been more of an alliance under a prominent warchief than a proper kingdom and said warchief had surrendered in exchange for being named Duchess of Dunloch. Resentment of Laure had been strong enough up north, though, that Holt found more than a few knights and soldiers flocking to his banner when he raised it.

Their rebellion had been rather tame, very knightly. It’d been more a play of fox-and-hound with the Fairfaxes than the kind of violent resistance that’d followed the Conquest. Unfortunately, after a few humiliations too many King Robert had gotten serious about putting them down and bodies had started piling up. Holt lost most of his rebel troops and had to go increasingly bandit to stay in the fight, which tarred his reputation. Enter the Conquest and bandits popping up everywhere as troops marched east, leaving everyone’s holdings unprotected. A much grimmer Jeremiah Holt saw his opportunity. He’d been halfway to gathering a sizeable army of malcontents and robbers when Amadeus of the Green Stretch had reached out with an offer to him.

Self-rule for the northern baronies so long as Holt entered imperial service, as well as a formal military office for him and his men. Jeremiah Holt took the offer, famously, and slew a few hundred soldiers under the Count of Ankou before capturing the man himself and keeping the city out of the war by threatening to hang him his noble prisoner should anyone pass the city gates.

He’d never quite been forgiven for that by the older generation. Having one of their romantic heroes shake hands with the Black Knight and rise to the rank of general in the Legions of Terror in the aftermath had been one of the many hits the pride of Callow had taken after the Conquest. It’d been striking enough that I’d been surprised to learn after joining the Legions that there were songs about Holt – two of them, a sad one called ‘O Knight of Dunloch’ and a merry one called ‘The Ride at Luthien’s Crossing’ – because I’d never heard either of them sung. I tended to believe that if he’d ever been allowed to serve as a garrison in Callow his star would have risen, especially if he checked the abuse of an imperial governor, but then that was likely why my father had assigned the Thirteenth duties on the other side of the empire.

Today’s Thirteenth Legion wasn’t the same that’d formed during the Conquest, of course. Most those soldiers were either dead or retired, with the holdouts being high-ranking officers whose position wouldn’t require much fighting. But unlike other legions, the Thirteenth had become something a family trade while out east. Children and grandchildren of the original soldiers and officers made up most of the ranks, and while many of my people wouldn’t consider them countrymen the soldiers themselves believed differently. Praesi tended to call them Duni, but for all that the soldiers of the Thirteenth were now often mixed blood – not only Taghreb and Soninke but also from Ashur and the Free Cities – they largely considered themselves Callowans. An estranged tribe gone into exile, perhaps, but still Callowans.

And on that hinged Vivienne’s plan, because there was nothing more exiles wanted than to come home.

It hadn’t been easy to get into the camp. We’d approached under the cover of Night as well as night, but regular patrols and a solid ward layout had still slowed us down to a crawl. It’d been a game of patience, which had irked me considering the looming battle and how impatient to get this done it was making me. We’d eventually slipped in, though, if much later than I would have preferred: past Early Bell. Most the camp was still asleep but one of Vivienne’s spies had made contact with the legion’s junior legate, Alice Burnley, and it paid off exactly the way it was supposed to. Within half an hour of our arrival, the Thirteenth’s senior officers were shaken awake and summoned to an impromptu war council in the usual tent.

Where Vivienne and I waited seated in a dark corner, cloaked, as officers filed in one after another and the sturdy, grim-faced Legate Burnley fielded questions about the summons by deferring until the general was there. Jeremiah Holt was the last to come and I took a moment to study him from under my hood. Still built like a bull even at his late age, he was blue-eyed with a crooked nose and white hair that’d fallen atop his head. He moved gingerly but with assurance, for all that he seemed rather tired from being woken up at this hour.

“What’s this about, Alice?” General Holt asked. “Your messengers were tight-lipped about everything but the urgent need.”

His eyes moved to us, our shrouded silhouettes in the corner.

“Eyes of the Empire?” he asked.

I smiled in the dark and struck a match, revealing up my one-eyed face just long enough to light up my pipe. I pulled at the wakeleaf, breathing in deep and blowing it out in a long stream, as the half of the room that’d caught sight of the telltale details froze. Jeremiah Holt was one of them, but his surprise did not last long. He straightened, hand casually coming to rest on the dagger at his side.

“Good evening, Your Majesty,” the general of the Thirteenth evenly said.

“General Jeremiah,” I nonchalantly replied.

Half a dozen swords were out in the heartbeat that followed but their leader snorted at them.

“Put that away, you fools,” he said. “If they’d come for blood it would already be on the floor. If Alice let them in it’ll be for talks.”

His eyes went to Vivienne’s silhouette.

“Would that be the Webweaver or Princess Vivienne with you?” he asked.

Vivienne rose to her feet, pulling back her hood.

“You are quick to adjust,” my successor praised.

“I’d been wondering if one of you would come,” General Jeremiah said. “Nim believed not, but she’s always been better at reading the east than the west.”

“They’re here to make an offer, Jeremiah,” Legate Alice said. “I got oaths through the Jacks that blood won’t be spilled even if we refuse it.”

Blue eyes went to me, following the plume of smoke leaving my lips.

“And will those oaths hold, Black Queen?” he boldly asked.

“I keep to my word,” I simply said. “Good or ill. Have any of you heard otherwise?”

None refused me that. For all that I’d turned my back on the Empire, I was known to keep my promises. It was a reputation that’d cost me much to maintain but moment like this were why it had been a worthwhile investment. There were a dozen people in here, most above fifty but a few closer to thirty, and the tension went out of them all when I backed up Legate Alice’s words. The white-haired general snorted again, going to pour himself a cup of spiced wine before dropping into the seat at the head of the table.

“Let’s hear it, then,” General Jeremiah said, tone deceptively light. “What is it that you’re offering for us to tun on the Tower?”

There were murmurs, in the wake of his words, but no one bared the swords already returned to their sheaths. I laughed.

“Are you saying you no longer consider yourselves loyal subjects of the crown of Callow?” I mused. “A most surprising turn.”

There were a few chuckles but many more wolfish smiles. They had no love for my crown, these men and women. The few that’d once lived under the rule of Laure had been outlaws to it. But neither were they the Tower’s folk, because they’d never been allowed to be. The reason one legion had been left to garrison a wealthy city like Thalassina for so long without fear of corruption was that the Thirteenth was as estranged from Praes as it was from Callow. Even after a generation of living east of the Wasaliti they were still strangers in these lands, distant from its factional struggles. I glanced at Vivienne and she inclined her head. She was to take the lead: it was her plan and so hers to execute.

“You know who I am,” Vivienne Dartwick said. “I am now a princess, heiress to the throne in Laure, but I was once the Thief and a rebel of the Lone Swordsman’s band.”

“A hero who fought to restore the same throne many of us fought against,” General Jeremiah bluntly said.

“There are no Fairfaxes left, Holt,” Vivienne replied just as bluntly. “The Kingdom of Callow that will stand when this war ends will not be the same as it was in old days. Your war ended when Amadeus the Black opened the throat of the last of that line in a cradle. You have won it.”

A dark-haired man in his early fifties who by his uniform should be the senior legate of the legion, Eldon Hawley, broke in.

“Why’s it you doing the talking?” Legate Hawley challenged. “Princess you are, but it’s the queen who rules. What are your words worth, Dartwick?”

Some approving mutters followed, as well as glances at me. In the dark they could see little more than the red burn of my lit pipe and the smoke wreathing me, but it was enough. Vivienne stood in the light, upright and bearing a silver circlet, but the hard truth was that it wasn’t her reputation that had these people willing to hear us out. There was nothing I could do about that, though, without making it worse. It was a hurdle she had to overcome herself.

“I’m the one talking because I’ll be the one dealing with you in twenty years, legate,” Vivienne replied, unflinching. “You’re trying to make it a slight, but it is the very opposite.”

She did not elaborate. The general let out an approving grunt, eyes considering.

“It’s not a bribe and a pat on the back you’re offering us, then,” he said. “You’re in it for the long haul, and the long haul for Callow is you on the throne.”

Understanding spread through those that hadn’t followed along, interest coming with it. This lot had been offered many a bribe, in Thalassina. The Kebdana and their great vassals had been some of the wealthiest people in Praes. They’d not taken them then and they would not now. Gold wasn’t what any of these people were after.

“You have grievances with the throne in Laure and I’ll not speak to the justice or injustice of them,” Vivienne said. “It was before my time. But I tell you now that throne is dead and buried. What’s left behind is Callow, and it is that same land that beckons you home.”

“We’ve been out east for long, princess,” a fair-haired woman said. “Some of us were born here. We have families, husbands and wives and children.”

The blonde was Kachera Tribune for the Thirteenth, Sally Thoms, whose name might be right out of a Laure street but was deeply tanned from a Taghreb father who’d raised her in Thalassina. The city might be dead, but the ties were not. There were many in the Thirteenth so bound to Praes.

“And they will be welcome in Callow as well,” Vivienne said.

It wasn’t quite the right angle, I thought, and she saw it too from the hardening of a few faces.

“We’ve made homes here, princess,” the Staff Tribune said. “You’re asking us to abandon them and pretending it’s a favour.”

“Have you really?” I mildly asked.

Eyes went back to me. The Staff Tribune straightened, his close-cut grey hair lending him a certain presence under torchlight.

“We might not be Praesi-” he began.

“Duni,” I softly interrupted. “That’s what they call you, isn’t it?”

He looked angry at being interrupted, but none denied what I said. They’d all heard the word before.

“That’s all you’ll ever be, out here,” I said. “Useful servants. Serve for a dozen generations and it will mean nothing. You all know that already, you’ve seen it with mfuasa and they think more of those than you. Bad blood cannot be made into good blood, that’s the way of the Wasteland. You have reached the summit of what you can aspire to in Praes. So the question left to ask is simple enough.”

I shrugged.

“Are you satisfied?”

The silence was telling. Rebels and bandits were ever hungry men. I let the silence stand, passing the torch back to Vivienne.

“You sacrifice in going home, like all exiles,” the princess of Callow said, tone honest. “I will not pretend otherwise. So let me speak to what you will gain instead.”

That had a few leaning forward, those who’d struck closer to the bandit strains of the Thirteenth than the rebel ones. The ones with mercenary leanings.

“Amnesty for any crimes once committed in Callow-” Vivienne began, and already a few scoffed.

We’d known they would, but this step was necessary for the rest. General Jeremiah was studying her with a frown, as if wondering why she had so blundered.

“I take no alms from the throne in Laure,” the Supply Tribune bit out. “It was no crime to buck the tyranny of Fairfax laws then and it needs no fucking forgiveness now.”

“It does,” Vivienne replied evenly, “as by ancient custom it is forbidden for an outlaw to hold or be granted a noble title.”

That little sentence went off like a sharper in the tent. Even General Jeremiah, who’d not been known as Sir Jeremiah since the Order of the Antlers had stripped him of his rank, looked surprise. Legate Alice, who’d left our side to go stand with her fellow officers, was the one to voice her skepticism.

“Even out here we’ve heard that you two have been stamping out the old nobles,” she said. “And now you’re offering to make us of the same breed you want to smother? That seems like an ill fate awaiting us.”

I bit my tongue, for though I wanted to reply it was not me who should speak. It was Vivienne that needed to draw the distinction between what had been the policies of my reign and what would be the policies of hers.

“Nobles got in our way, after we broke with the Tower,” Vivienne said. “They were treated accordingly. Yet I’ll not pursue that enmity into my reign. The territories that were cut out as imperial governorships under Amadeus the Black will remain administrative provinces with appointed governors, but under that authority I will raise nobles again.”

I didn’t like it, I honestly didn’t, but it wasn’t the same for her as it was for me. Vivienne was a Dartwick, minor nobility but still very much a noblewoman by birth, and she wouldn’t come to the throne with the kind of baggage I brought. Orphan, apprentice to the Carrion Lord, villain. Nobles would actually be willing to work under her in a way they simply hadn’t been for me. She wasn’t going to undo the brutal work of centralization that my father and then myself had done, she knew better than that. That was the whole point of keeping governors: there would never again be dukes in Callow, that kind of power would only ever be held by the grace of the throne. Yet she was very much in favour of cultivating the presence of lesser nobles once more.

She had valid reasons to, I’d been forced to admit. Lesser nobility was how Callow had been able to maintain so many knights without bankrupting itself, pushing off the costs of that to noble families instead of making the state coffers bear it, and it was also a solution to our still chronic lack of qualified officials. Vivienne intended to turn my father’s orphanages into schools under the aegis of the crown, but that would take years and it’d never work outside the largest cities in Callow. Until then, she’d be relying on spare sons and daughters of the nobility to serve – and even after, she’d keep using them as a balance to keep the power of her own Laure bureaucracy in line. She had learned from Malicia’s reforms in Ater in a way I’d never thought to.

“Noble titles,” General Jeremiah calmly said, but I saw the huger in his eyes. “Would you care to elaborate, Princess Vivienne?”

“For you, the barony of Longcourt,” the dark-haired princess replied. “Which you might not be familiar with-”

“A week’s travel north of Liesse,” Jeremiah Holt calmly interrupted. “Known for its apple orchards, as I recall. The last baroness of Longcourt was a girl of fourteen that died at the Siege of Summerholm.”

“She was,” Vivienne said, hiding her surprise with some skill.

“The land was placed under the imperial governor in Liesse, but there are cadet branches to the family,” the general said. “That title would come with enemies.”

Vivienne smiled and so did I, pulling at my pipe. And there was where her cleverness had shined through. Because the dozen in this tent had already been high-ranking strangers in a foreign land before, made to step on toes just by being who they were. Half the reason they were even hearing us out was that they were sick of being in that role. They weren’t eager to start being the same thing only after uprooting themselves across two rivers to a land most of them hadn’t seen in decades if ever at all. Any of them picking up titles would make enemies of the relatives of the people who’d once held to those titles. This had been meant to be great hurdle, but Vivienne had instead managed to turn it into an asset.

“It does not,” Vivienne said, “but it does come with a wedding. I believe your eldest grandson is yet unmarried?”

The old man blinked.

“He is,” the general warily admitted.

“So is Holly Leyland, the eldest daughter of the man with the best claim to the title,” Vivienne said. “Both have already agreed to unite the lines, should you and your grandson agree.”

General Jeremiah seemed genuinely taken aback. My successor’s gaze swept across the rest of the officers.

“I offer twenty lordships to be divvied up among you as you wish, but in truth that is the lesser part of my offer,” she said.

She reached into her cloak, taking out a folded parchment and setting it down on their table.

“This is a list of sons and daughters from noble families in good standing that have agreed to marriage with officers of the Thirteenth or their descendance,” the princess of Callow said. “Age and rank in succession are included.”

The tent was as silent as a grave.

“This is not a trap,” Vivienne Dartwick gently said. “When I speak of bringing you home, I mean every word. I am not the Tower, to strand you among enemies and then use the fear to weaken all beneath me. Come back to Callow, and you will truly be back . All the land offered is in what was once the Duchy of Liesse and now lies empty, but this will not be solely a noble’s game. Freeholds will be provided to retiring soldiers and formal knighthood to any cavalrymen who are willing to join the knightly order I will found – the Order of the Stolen Crown.”

Kachera Tribune Thoms licked her lips then broke the silence.

“And what do you want in exchange?” she asked.

“Fight with us here,” Vivienne said. “On this field. When we march east to bury death for good, fight with us still. And when the war ends, come home . Be part of the peace we’ll all have fought for.”

She’d hit all the right notes, I thought as I watched them teeter at the brink, and still had things been even just a little different this would not have enough. But the droplet that’d tip the cup was that Thalassina was gone. It was where the Thirteenth had been for the longest, and when that city had died to the Warlock’s wrath many of the ties that bound the legion to the Wasteland had died with it. The same kin that they might have been afraid Malicia would kill as retribution to changing sides were already dead and buried. They had a lot less to lose now than they would have had five years ago and Vivienne had offered them more than they had ever hoped they might receive.

“We’ll need to talk it over,” Legate Hawley roughly said. “Bring more officers into it-”

I blew out a long stream of smoke.

“No,” I said. “Tonight. You have until the hour’s done to make your decision.”

Some looked angry, but General Jeremiah was not one of them. If anything he looked approving. Smart man.

“Any longer than that and the Eyes will be onto us,” he said. “You want us to march right now, don’t you? Smash through the palisades while we have the element of surprise and link up with the Army of Callow.”

I nodded. The moment the Thirteenth went over to our side or refused to, the Battle of Kala had effectively begun. When they moved all sides would begin to muster for combat, because to do anything else would be ceding the initiative to the opposition – and none of the four armies on the field were willing to do that, when all knew annihilation was just one mistake away.

“Come dawn there will be a battle,” I said. “Now’s the time to decide on which side of it you’ll stand. You’ve heard what Princess Vivienne Dartwick offers you. You know what the Tower will give you and the worth of Malicia’s promises. Choose .”

It was not a simple choice and they did not simply make it. They gathered among each other, talking in low voices as they argued faults and merits. Vivienne retreated, coming to stand by my side, but neither of us spoke as we watched it unfold. It wasn’t the kind of plan I would have made, and my fingers itched to see it play out. It’d give power and wealth to people that I honestly considered to be pretty shitty and untrustworthy, but beyond that there was too much... give to this. Making nobles diluted the authority of the crown. Making several nobles, all with close ties to each other and in the same region, was making a potentially dangerous power bloc. I would have preferred cornering them, burning their ties to Malicia and taking them in on my own terms.

A third Gallowborne, to match the one I’d lost and the one I’d spent.

Vivienne wasn’t me. It wasn’t that she didn’t see the same dangers I did, just that we didn’t have the same... instincts about how to deal with them. She wasn’t afraid of a Baron Jeremiah Holt because even if he grew powerful she was confident she would make him into an ally. Bring him into the fold, use that power to her advantage without needing to have something to hold over his head. And in someone who hadn’t been with me for so long I would have been tempted to call it naivete, but Vivienne wasn’t naïve. It was the same part of her that’d made her refrain from killing when she’d been the Thief, that’d seen her join the Woe when the odds were Callow would burn if she didn’t. She was willing to embrace foes in ways that I just wasn’t.

There was little of our old madness in Vivienne Dartwick, of the slights and long prices, and I could not help but feel that our people would be better off for it.

The officers of the Thirteenth chose, and they chose hope. They chose home and peace after the war. I saw it spread from one to another, the decision, until even the holdouts bents their heads and the same man who my people had once written songs about turned his blue eyes back to us.

“It has been,” Jeremiah Holt softly said, “so very long since I saw home.”

He breathed out shakily.

“An oath broken and an oath taken is a cheap price for that,” he said.

“Then kneel,” I said.

They did, but I did not rise. My hand touched Vivienne’s side and she met my eye, looking almost startled. I almost snorted. As if I would reap the harvest she had sown. No, those oaths were hers. She had won them, she would keep them. And the officers of the Thirteenth, on their knees, spoke their oaths to the princess of Callow. And with every oath the world shivered, until the same rebel who’d once fought a throne now swore to another. Jeremiah Holt spoke his oath, and when he swore to the princess of Callow the whole of Creation bore witness. Vivienne shivered too, the weight of the pivot pressing down on all our shoulders. Ah , I thought. Indrani had tried to tell me, hadn’t she? I’d gone too deep, too... narrow trying to figure out who Vivienne was. I should have known that the simplicity had been at the hear of her the whole time.

Vivienne Dartwick had entered the tent as a princess, and now stood a Princess. It was a simple as that.

I almost laughed, seeing the hope and awe in those eyes, because didn’t the Gods just love their little jests? Vivienne had once been a fine enough thief she’d earned a Name out of taking from Praes, and yet the greatest of her thefts only came now that she had left behind. As a girl, all she’d ever taken form the Dread Empire was coin and good. Now, though?

The Princess of Callow had stolen back an entire legion.

Chapter 20: Malicia’s Plan

“Do I not defeat my enemies, when I mind control them into being my friends?”

– Dread Emperor Imperious

The Battle of Kala began with three streaks of red light crisscrossing a dark sky.

Its prelude had taken place while most the Thirteenth still slept, hard men with sharp swords going into tents to end the lives of the soldiers the general staff believed would fight against rebellion. The purge was quick and bloody, followed by men being hastily roused, and the Thirteenth Legion began to move moments after a mage line sent up the lights that would inform the Army of Callow of our success. The legion left behind a significant chunk of its supplies and all of its siege engines: I’d heartily agreed with General Holt when he’d stated that the Thirteenth tried to leave with everything it would just get caught by the rest of the Loyalist Legions and rout. Treachery rarely made for strong morale, much less treachery interrupted halfway through.

The legion was not in a good position to turn on the others, no doubt a precaution of the Black Knight’s. The valley between Moule and Kala Hills had sprouted fortifications in three sets. First the Rebel Legions’, in an angled half-circle whose curve faced the east with its back anchored to Moule Hills. Then the mirroring sets of the Loyalist Legions and the Army of Callow, first running parallel from Kala Hills to the east until they reached the curve of the rebel trenches and then, still in a rough mirror, curving around the half-circle. The Thirteenth Legion, while assigned to the front, had not been posted facing us. Instead it was to hold the curve of the loyalist trenches, facing the fortifications of the Rebel Legions. That made leaving a more complicated task than we would have liked.

It might be possible to cross the trench the Thirteenth guarded and then march down the no-man’s-land down to my army’s positions to the south, but that would be... risky. The Rebel Legions might think they were being attacked and start shooting. Considering two thirds of the triumvirate of generals that’d run that army had just gotten killed and the surviving third was discredited, I was inclined to think they were nervous enough to start shooting without thinking if they caught sight of movement. That left only the option of getting out the hard way: through the camp of the Eighth Legion, which held the western half of trenches facing my army’s own. The three streaks of red light were meant to help with that chancy business and help they did.

Within moments, torches lit up the night as the Army of Callow began an assault on the Eighth Legion’s position from the front.

General Jeremiah had offered both Vivienne and I horses, but while she rode with the old man and his general staff I held back. There would be retaliation when someone on the other side realized what was happening and I needed to be ready for it. I kept to the side of the army, its soldiers giving me a wide berth, and rode slowly as I kept an eye on the distant camp in Kala Hills. The camp of the Fourteenth, holding the eastern half of the central trenches, lit up with torches first at the sound of the fighting. The camp in the distance was not far behind, though, and maybe a quarter-hour later the rebel positions were alight as well. I shaped an eye out of Night and tossed it up above, keeping an eye on the battlefield as armies began to move.

Surprise was working to our advantage. The loyalist sappers had built their walls cleverly, keeping much of the half-road behind them, but that’d been turned to our advantage. The Thirteenth moved briskly down the road and smashed into the side of the Eighth’s camp by surprise even as the legion was mustering to face an assault from the wrong direction. The rebels were staying out of it for now, probably wary of dipping a toe in this without having a better read on the situation, and I chewed on my lip as I loosely kept pace with the Thirteenth. I’d started trailing behind, wary of the hammer blow I’d expected but wasn’t coming. My little eye in the sky was beginning to glimpse the shape of a rout, meanwhile.

The Eighth had been taken by surprise, out of position and attacked from two sides. Goblin munitions deployed to hold the trenches had stopped cold the advance of the Army of Callow but General Wheeler couldn’t afford to pull away those men else General Zola would resume the charges. When the Thirteenth ran into the first few companies thrown hastily in its way it had slowed, but it had now smashed its way through them and the Eighth’s positions were collapsing. Too many of its legionaries were only half-dressed, and some enterprising souls from the Thirteenth had set fire to parts of the camp. Gods, at this rate we might actually destroy the Eighth as a fighting force. That’d be quite the coup, if one we’d not dared to hope for.

With one legion gone and one switching sides, the Black Knight would be –

“Ah,” I grimly smiled as power bloomed in the heights to the north, “ there you are.”

Night swirled around me in thick currents, terrifying my borrowed horse into trying to buck me off until I stole away a sliver to force calm into his simple mind. I wasn’t seeing magic accreting anywhere yet, but it was only a matter of time until the enemy mages- my thought was interrupted by a subtle wave of power shivering across the Thirteenth. Instant. It’d been quick enough I’d not been able to do a fucking thing. And now legionaries were dropping to the ground, one after another. Like puppets with cut strings, just... falling to the ground. Weeping Heavens , I thought. What was this? The sorcery seemed to strike as if by random: it dropped ten soldiers in one company, thirty-three in another and then none in a third. Heart in my throat, I rode to a fallen soldier and unhorsed.

The rest of his tenth spread to make room for me, faces full of fear, and I swallowed a wince as I knelt in the dust by the dead man. Except, I realized a heartbeat after I undid the straps of the legionary’s help, this was neither a man nor a corpse. The dark-skinned woman under the steel was still breathing, if faintly, though she looked sick and she was shivering with fever. I laid fingers on the side of her neck and found the skin slightly shrivelled but the pulse steady. I heard the soldiers around me began to salute and turned to cast a look at the approaching mounted silhouette of the fair-haired Kachera Tribune of the Thirteenth, Sally Thoms. She saluted me, after a beat of hesitation.

“Your Majesty,” she said, stumbling over the unfamiliar address. “The general sends me to ask if you have any insight on this curse. It is crippling our offensive.”

I looked away, my lone eye turning to the shallowly breathing woman I was still laying a hand on. Something about this was niggling away at me. The suddenness of the effect, unlike any war magic I’d ever seen, and the shrivelled skin. There was something familiar about this, somehow, but where would I have... Suddenly I breathed in.

“Tribune,” I said. “The rations your legionaries have been eating, where have they been coming from?”

She looked surprise.

“You think us poisoned?” she asked.

My look grew impatient and she swallowed.

“Part is from our own stocks, ma’am, but half has been coming from the supply depot in the main camp,” the Kachera Tribune said.

And there it was, good as confirmation. General Jeremiah had said that the Black Knight had not believed we’d approached him, but evidently she’d taken precautions anyways. And not just her, because I had seen this magic before. Just never used like this, and I moved my gaze back to the downed legionary so that the officer would not see triumph in my eye and misunderstand. I let it linger though, the taste of victory. Allowed myself to enjoy it. Because the last time Akua Sahelian had used that ritual, she’d left a few thousand Spears of Stygia dead and shrivelled husks before using the power to open a Lesser Breach. Now, instead, she had chosen to spare lives. To incapacitate instead of kill, even when the incentives were many to do otherwise.

All these corpses could be undead, right now, with the power she would have gotten back. Or she could be hammering away at the Thirteenth with a spell powerful enough that even I would struggle to protect the legion from it. Instead she has stayed her hand. Proved she was not the same woman she had been at First Liesse, even in the face of greater gains than those for the taking back then.

“I’ve seen this magic before,” I said. “It won’t kill them or continue to drain them. Light or healing sorcery should be able to fix most of the damage.”

I followed her back to the general staff, after, though I sent up another Night eye to gauge the situation. Our overwhelming advantage had turned to ash in our hands in a matter of moments. At a guess I’d say that maybe a quarter of the Thirteenth had dropped under the ritual, punching holes everywhere in its formations and causing widespread chaos. The Eighth was using the time to consolidate its position and I could already see the Fourteenth moving towards the melee to reinforce. Considering the Army of Callow’s attempts to breach the trench were still a bloody stalemate – Zola had gotten men to the palisades, but Wheeler had gotten his mage lines in position and was torching everything in sight – this now had the potential to go very badly for us.

I still had Night at my fingertips but I was hesitant to use it. It’d leave us exposed to a counterstroke from enemy mage cadres and I could solve one of our two problems at most. Either I’d slow the Fourteenth or blast our path south open, but I couldn’t do both . Now quickly enough, anyway. I was still weighing the risks when I got to General Jeremiah and found that the choice had been made for me.

“Princess Vivienne is leading my cavalry in a delaying action against the Fourteenth,” the old man said. “I if I might-”

I raised a hand to interrupt him, looking through my eye in the sky again. There she was, leading six hundred heavy cavalry against the Fourteenth’s vanguard. The enemy looked to have been sloppy with composition, they’d gone heavy on crossbowmen and too light on regulars, but she was still outnumbered more than three to one. I held back my wince. I’d have to trust her, then, and do my own part. The Night eye turned to the positions in our way south. The trench and palisade were facing the wrong way to stop us, but General Wheeler was the veteran commander of a sapper-heavy legion: already there were stakes and mantlets put up in our way. Mage lines were waiting behind lines of regulars, the enemy general’s intent plain enough to read. Now that the battle was turning in his favour, Wheeler wanted to keep us contained here until reinforcements arrived and we could be surrounded. Time for a reminder of who he was dealing with, perhaps.

“I have come a long way, through winding paths,” I spoke in Crepuscular, voice rising in prayer. “Yet behold this barren realm, this crown of ruin!”

The Night roiled around, like a wind made of darkness, and I felt talons biting into my shoulders. I felt Komena smile against the side of my neck, pleased at the destruction to come.

“Let me match horror with horror, might with might, and know no master in this.”

My limbs were trembling and the general staff had all backed away, looking at me in a mix of terror and fascination.

“So let the sun weep and the Crows have their due,” I smiled, “for in the end all will be Night.”

I’d only used this working once before, in Hainaut, and as the sky lit up with black fire I was reminded as to why. My vision swam, but I forced myself to finish it: I raised my hand, snapping my fingers, and the Hells were unleashed. A young black sun exploded, streaks of flame tearing through ground and men and shielding spells as screams filled the air. Black flame began to fall in a heavy rain, leaving only a horror of the dead and dying where once the Eighth had stood in our way.

“Your Majesty,” General Jeremiah carefully said, “are you-“

I spat to the side, wiping my mouth. It tasted like vomit, though I’d not thrown up, and this wasn’t even done. I raised my staff, the old general instantly going silent, and after pointing it at the horror swept it through. As it passed the black flames guttered out, leaving behind only great trails of smoke. I spat to the side again, leaning back tiredly in my saddle. Gods, my bad leg burned.

“Get your legion moving, Jeremiah Holt,” I rasped out. “I don’t have another one of those in me, not for a few hours.”

It was another hour before we made it to safety, a full quarter of the Thirteenth Legion left behind either as corpses or prisoners, but we made it. I waited at the edge until our Princess made it back victorious, a makeshift banner for her knightly order flying high as thousands of throats cheered themselves hoarse.

Now the real battle could start.

—

By midmorning the lines in the sand were drawn.

The wounded had been seen to, the dead burned. I did not bother to send envoys to the Rebel Legions after I saw four crucified bodies hoisted atop their palisade: the same four Jacks who’d supposedly assassinated General Mok and Jaiyana Seket. I didn’t know who was in command, Sacker or one of Malicia’s plants, but whoever it was they were hostile. Yet the rebels had not returned to the loyalist fold, if the way both armies kept the trenches facing each other manned was any indication. It’d be a battle with four sides to it, not three. Our attempts to reach out to Sepulchral came to nothing: the Rebel Legions were running patrols and west of Moule Hills and shooting at our people on sight. I sent a pair of riders to take the long way around, but it’d be hours before they were anywhere near the Aksum camp and hours more before they could return to us with anything useful. No, when it came to Sepulchral’s intentions we were still running blind. That had me somewhat uneasy.

“We’ve gamed out the engagements with all possible stances on her part,” Juniper told me, unmoved. “Whether she stays holed up or goes on the offensive, she’ll tie down largely the same number of loyalist troops anyway.”

That sounded almost absurd, considering that with the defection of the Thirteenth in fact Dread Empress Sepulchral now commanded the largest of the four armies in Kala – around twenty thousand, even with the losses of her vanguard – but Juniper wasn’t blowing hot air. The camp in the hills she’d taken for her own had easy slopes down mostly facing the north and east, approaches where Marshal Nim had built forts in a since-broken attempt to encircle the camp. We expected a single legion to be assigned to defending those forts, the Eleventh, with the reserve being kept close just in case. Sepulchral led a traditional Praesi noble army, which meant they were pretty shit at taking fortifications if magic couldn’t level the walls.

Good luck with that when Akua Sahelian was running the mages for the other side.

The Loyalist Legions certainly weren’t going to win that fight, but the Black Knight honestly shouldn’t be wrong in believing a single legion should be able to keep Sepulchral contained long enough for the fighting in the south to be settled. If no one else intervened, anyway. I sighed.

“Malicia will have something afoot in that camp,” I said.

“Let the Tower have its tricks,” the Hellhound said, “so long as we have the field.”

There was little more left to do save hope it would end up as she’d said. We’d already tossed the dice, it was too late to have qualms. The legions and our army spent the time preparing for the fight all could smell in the air, but there was an odd sense of restraint. Like no one wanted to be the first to swing a sword and get the butcher’s ball rolling. In the end, it was us who fired the first shot: Archer shot a legate from the Fourteenth who’d made the mistake of wandering too close to her range and with the woman’s death rattle hostilities began. I wasn’t actually fighting, to my mounting frustration. Masego and I were on the rampart of a fort, overlooking the battlefield and awaiting enemy magic. We were meant to be defensive assets for now, not go on the offensive, and though I knew the sense in it the sight below had my nails biting into wood.

It was a bloody slaughter.

First came the siege engines. The scorpions and ballistae of the enemy began pounding at our palisade, knocking down chunks where my mages did not reinforce quickly enough, and our own engines replied in kind. A heartbeat later the rebels entered the fray, and to my relief they’d picked a side: their own. They were firing at both the Army of Callow and the Loyalist Legions. Already I could see what Juniper had told me about, the ‘box’. It was a corner, the square-shaped area where our fortifications were facing the loyalists to the north and the rebel to the west. The weak point of our defensive setup. Bombardment from both sides was already taking its toll, the sheer number of engines that facing two different sets of legions signified having an immediate impact.

Marshal Nim theoretically had the same weakness in her setup facing our own weak spot, but in practice she was better off: the Army of Callow had fewer siege machines spread out over a set of fortifications just as long.

“Are we simply going to fire at each other with machines all day?” Masego asked me, sounding pleased. “That sounds rather civilized.”

“No,” I sighed. “Now comes the bloody part, Zeze.”

Rising from their cover in the trenches, legionaries climbed over the solid grounds and began charging at the enemy fortifications. They came for us and we for them. Across the great line splitting the valley, across the half-circle and its mirrors, men and women in legionary armour raised their shields and charged. From atop palisades mage lines began firing volleys of fireballs, crossbow companies filled the air with bolts. Down in the no-man’s-land, screams and death bloomed. It was the kind of messy, ugly butchery that only came from well-trained forces hammering at each other. Legionaries tried to form testudo formations to take the edge off sorcery and arrows, but on all sides the same model of scorpions were turned on those attempts.

Those deadly bolts punched through shield and mail alike.

“They are not winning,” Masego said.

I turned and found him frowning. Puzzled, and perhaps a little appalled.

“No one is winning,” he continued, frown deepening.

That’s war , I almost said.

“First we bleed,” I said, “and then Juniper’s plans begin.”

The priests were giving us an edge, I saw as the hours passed. The body count kept mounting and the men grew tired, but the fighting continued. Twice rituals were attempted against us, but both times we shut them down. Light healing did not need time and carefulness the way mage healing did, which meant it could actually be done on the frontlines: this was a meat grinder for everyone, but unlike our enemies we could keep some of our men in the fight. We didn’t have the numbers to fight a war of attrition against two sets of legions, though, which was why Juniper had made plans otherwise. So far everything had come down along fairly predictable lines, which meant now generalship would begin to matter.

Which turned out to be a problem, because against our predictions the Black Knight was moving the Seventh south to reinforce her battle line. Juniper and I had been sure the Black Knight’s own legion would be kept in reserve for hours yet, held back as a precaution in case Sepulchral ended up giving the Eleventh trouble. Four thousand fresh troops would be enough to breathe vigour into an attack on our defences, I thought, and already the melee between the trenches rested on a knife’s edge.

“Fuck,” I muttered, looking at the Seventh’s dust trail rising high. “What do you know we don’t, Black Knight?”

Leaving my post, I headed out to speak to Juniper and found she had an answer for me. Not out of any prodigious insight, but because the two envoys we’d sent this morning had turned back early and brought back news.

“There’s fighting in Sepulchral’s camp,” Juniper growled.

“I’m guessing you don’t mean the Eleventh is attacking it,” I said.

She glared at me. Fair enough. Whatever Malicia’s scheme had been in there, evidently it had crippled them as an army. It made sense that the Black Knight felt comfortable sending her reserve into battle if Sepulchral’s twenty thousand were basically out of the fight. That was something of a problem.

“We need to get that army moving,” I grimaced.

“Good of you to volunteer,” the Hellhound replied.

“Not even queenship gets me out of the shit jobs,” I sighed. “Should have aimed for empress.”

Juniper snorted and gave me the Order of Broken Bells to lead. My knights weren’t going to be charging trenches anytime soon, and the enemy’s remaining horse was also still at large. I wasted no time, saddling up and riding at speed full south. Going all the way around Moule Hills to get to Sepulchral’s camp would take hours, even riding horses, but there was no alternative. We passed by the silhouettes of the Rebel Legion camp in the hills, deep behind their valley fortifications, and I noted it did not look heavily defended. Sacker or whoever had usurped her command were putting their back into the valley battle. I could see the sense in it, even if it was Sacker that’d given the order.

The rebels didn’t want to win the battle, they wanted everyone weakened to their bargaining position improved. Either Marshal Nim or myself winning would be an actual problem for them, they were sure to kneecap whoever pulled ahead.

We kept riding hard to the north, eventually finding the same path that Sepulchral’s main host had taken to link up with its vanguard in the heights. There were wagons at the bottom of the slope and tents too, the camp having proved too small for the whole army of the rebelling High Lady of Aksum. We got closer and immediately I winced: not only was there no picket to see us coming but what looked like supply wagons were actually being left unguarded. There were some soldiers at the bottom of the slope, maybe a few hundred, but they were disorganized and didn’t actually notice us coming until we were in charging distance. Levies, I thought. Rubies to piglets those poor bastards were levies wanting to be left out of the mess in the heights.

Our arrival unsettled them but the shield wall they tried to make to discourage a change was visibly shaky. I hadn’t come here for a fight, though, so instead I whistled for an escort of knights to follow me and pulled ahead. It took a bit for them to realize I wanted to talk and then choose someone who would, but eventually a pair of middle-aged Soninke shuffled forward warily.

“I’m not here to kill you,” I bluntly said. “I’m here to speak with Empress-Claimant Sepulchral.”

A harsh laugh from one of the two.

“A little late for that,” he said. “The old witch’s finally dead.”

It was easy to get them talking after some prodding. Apparently Abreha Mirembe had died overnight. Some had claimed it was old age that’d done her in, but both her designated heir Isoba Mirembe and his cousin Sanaa Mirembe claimed it to be assassination. They promptly accused each other of the deed, which had seen violence ensue. Sanaa Mirembe, sister of the same Fasili Mirembe who’d served Akua and died at the Doom, had proved to have many supporters among the Aksum men. Isoba, however, was engaged to the daughter of the High Lord of Nok: those troops had largely sided with him. Fighting had been breaking out all day with short breaks to negotiate, but the breaks were getting shorter and the fighting bloodier.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. Malicia had fucked up that army pretty good. If I were a betting woman, I’d bet that Sanaa was the Tower’s ringer in that fight but I couldn’t be sure. Besides, in Malicia’s shoes I wouldn’t actually want Sanaa to win by too much if I wanted her to win at all. The costlier her victory, the less of a threat she would be after being called to heel. No, I decided, just having a ringer was too simple to be a plot of Malicia’s. Better odds she had someone under Isoba as well, fanning the flames so that the factions would keep bleeding each other instead of coming to an arrangement. Worse, I couldn’t see an easy way out of this. I wasn’t sure I had the men to force Isoba’s claim, I thought, and even if I did it’d take too long.

I needed that army to get marching an hour ago.

“Are they fighting right now?” I finally asked.

“No, they’re still in talks,” one of them said. “The moment they leave the tent and the corpse, though, they’ll be back at-”

My eye sharpened.

“The corpse is still in there?” I pressed.

They nodded.

“It’s why the truce is observed while in the tent.”

I left them to that, riding away and back to the Order. Talbot came up to me but I ignored him, closing my eye to think. Would it work? Could it work?

“Your Majesty?” Brandon Talbot asked.

I opened my eye. It was my best shot.

“Form up,” I said. “We’re going into the camp.”

I felt the weight of his gaze on me, but he did not question the wisdom of the decision. He was a reliable sort, Talbot. The way uphill was difficult, but the loyalist sappers had pretty obviously gentled the slope. It was usable, just not the kind of thing you ever want to lead a cavalry charge up through. Or any charge, honestly. We ran into actual defences the moment we reached the heights, at last. The division in the camp was pretty blatant, tents and furniture having been used to make makeshift barricades facing each other while bristling armed soldiers faced each other. I saw – and smelled, Gods take pity on my nose – that horses had been butchered by the hundreds while tied and their carcasses left to rot in the sun, but along with that horrid mess two parts of the camp were being avoided.

The first was a pavilion the size of a small castle and enchanted to look like one, which I assumed to have been Sepulchral’s personal quarters. It was now neutral grounds for negotiation, however long that would last. The second was a maze of large cages of black iron, which only people in scarlet livery every came close to. I could see misshapen silhouettes within, some of them snapping at the servants in scarlet and others trying to claw their way out of the cage. Right, Aksum. The Cauldron of Monsters, once famous for its use of monsters in battle. At least the squabbling soldiers had been smart enough to stay clear of that. Neither side moved to block us as we formed up on the heights, but the repositioned to be prepared for a fight if it came down to it.

Gods, it better not. We didn’t have the room for a charge and they’d bury us with corpses if they had to. No, I was going to put on the fancy hat and bargain my way into that tent. The Order was just here to... help temptations stay at bay. It took half an hour for all my knights to make it up in the camp but I waited it out, only then riding forward with a small escort. Someone must have warned the squabbling Mirembe, because both of them came out of the tent with escorts of their own. I led Zombie towards them, pleased I wouldn’t need to posture to get that talk after all, and sped up. Trumpets sounded, and I almost laughed at the pageantry – did I really require that kind of announcing? – before I realized they were coming from too far north.

The trumpets continued to sound the alarm.

“ATTACK,” shouts came in Mthethwa. “THE LEGIONS ARE HERE!”

Huh, that might actually end up to my- I caught sight of movement from the corner of my eye, feeling a ripple of magic. A small thing, repeated many a time. A few hundred cages had opened at once, and as my stomach dropped I saw a scaled beast the size of a battering ram slink out and taste the air with a forked tongue. Well, I thought, fuck. Magic rippled again but I almost laughed. What were they going to do, open the fucking cages twice? A heartbeat later a hold opened in the middle of the camp, the sides of it inscribed with runes.

“I really ought to know better by now,” I admitted.

At least I knew what Akua was going to do with that stolen power from earlier, I mused as a Lesser Breach screamed open and devils began pouring out. I sighed, cracking my neck and loosening my shoulder. Time to get to work, then.

After all, if it were easy what the Hells would they need me for?

Interlude: Juniper’s Plan (Redux)

“Armies, like water, take the path of least resistance.”

– Dread Emperor Terribilis II

They were wildly outnumbered, surrounded on all sides and faced with horrors most. It was, Grandmaster Brandon Talbot thought, just another day in the Black Queen’s service.

He was already looking forward to the mad caper that would get – most of – them out of this alive. He turned to look at the Black Queen, who was grinning a hard grin that swept the doubts right off the frame of any knight close enough to see it. Confidence rippled out through the Order, passed from knight to knight like a whisper. And why wouldn’t it? How many times had it seen them laugh in the face of death and leave victorious, that grin? Once more , Brandon Talbot fervently prayed. Brandon’s queen cracked her neck then sighed.

“Well,” the Queen of Callow drawled, “isn’t this a right mess, Talbot?”

He swallowed a shit-eating grin. It was going to be one of those , then.

“Positively uncivilized, Your Majesty,” he agreed.

“Ain’t it just?” she said, the Laure drawl rearing up its head. “Now, looking at this situation before us, I can’t help but feel that it’s missing something.”

“So much as a speck of godliness?” Brandon tried.

She snorted, then erupted into a small chuckle like he’d said a joke.

“Oh, Talbot,” she mused, “the things you say sometimes.”

A heartbeat’s pause.

“What’s missing, of course, is more monsters that want to kill everyone,” the Queen of Callow nonchalantly told him. “So let’s remedy that lack.”

Brandon remembered a night when he’d been a boy and he’d snuck out of the manor in Marchford with his sister. It’d been summer and they’d gone out into the hills, bravely defeating sheep-shaped with wooden swords before collapsing exhausted in the grass and looking up at a sea of stars. He remembered the breeze, how warm it had been against his skin. That was what Night felt like to him, when the Black Queen used it – that warm breeze against his skin. There were goddesses behind that power and should they frown upon him he thought it might be a terrible thing to behold.

But they were passing fond, instead, and so he felt a warm summer night’s breeze against his skin as the Queen of Callow ripped open a wide gate into Arcadia.

Just in time, for madness was seizing the enemy camp. Monsters were tearing into men, howling devils flying through in riotous flocks and for some godforsaken reason the Praesi were still fighting each other. On the others side of the gate Brandon glimpsed a screaming blizzard, but when the queen rode into the white he shouted orders to follow. The Order formed into a column and went through in good order, the edges of their formation hacking away at the monsters and devils that were already nipping away their ranks, but it was not long before all had passed through. The grandmaster had run regular drills with mages to be able to charge in and out of gates at the drop of a hat, considering how often it was being used a tactic these days.

The whipping winds almost deafened him as he cross, but not so much that when he approached his queen he could not hear her shouting. Squinting he tried to make out what she was looking at, finding with surprised it appeared to be fae. Maybe a half-dozen of them, riding on pale horses and looking utterly unconcerned by the cold. Was Queen Catherine making a bargain, an alliance? He spurred his mount closer to join her side.

“-and that smirk makes you look like an asshole,” the Queen of Callow shouted. “I could kill you and all you friends with a hand tied behind my back, even if I had no fucking eyes.”

Ah, Brandon thought. The fae were not only pale, they were utterly livid .

“How quick you are to give insult, when still protected by oath,” one of the fae shouted, “yet if-”

There was a flash of boiling-hot Night and half the fae’s face melted off.

“Boring,” the Black Queen said. “Hope you have more friends, otherwise I won’t even be able to work out an appetite for supper.”

The fae screamed, which Brandon thought might be something worth worrying about before screams answered in the distance and he decided it was definitely something worth worrying about. Queen Catherine glanced at him, having finally noticed his presence.

“Ah, Talbot,” she said. “Good, get the Order in formation. We’re going to have get out of here in a hurry, I can feel at least a hundred of them coming.”

She frowned, then cocked her head to a side.

“Damn, that’s a Duke for sure and he feels pissed ,” the Black Queen gleefully said.

“I’ll see to it, Your Majesty,” Brandon said. “Are we to be fighting an enemy in particular?”

“We’re going to take the big tent that looks like a castle,” Queen Catherine said.

Ah, the one stinking of magic and heavily defended. He really should have been expecting that. The grandmaster of the Order of the Broken Bells saluted, and rode away to muster his knights.

The storm was getting worse and the fae angrier, leaving soon sounded just fine to him.

—

It was a graceless thing, this battle.

“All this shady shit they’ve pulled and still it comes down to the melee,” Staff Tribune Ligaia muttered in disdain. “So much for the scheming witches.”

Marshal Nim Mardottir grunted back, noncommittal. Her old friend – as much of a friend as a human could be – wasn’t the first one today to grumble about the plots of the Empress and the Warlock and how they were staining the honour of what should have been a clean battle. She was, though, the first one to complain the scheming hadn’t been effective enough . In both cases, the Black Knight tended to disagree. Malicia’s surgical assassinations and hidden assets had paralyzed both the deserting legions and the Sepulchral rebels, though according to the Eyes even after being framed for an attempted coup Sacker had wiggled back her way to command by swearing to be hard on the Army of Callow. As for the Warlock’s ritual against the Thirteenth, it had done more to improve Nim’s opinion of the woman than weeks of smile and pretty talk.

It had been both effective and restrained, showing regard for the well-being of soldiers that’d served the Dread Empire loyally for decades before being led astray. More regard than the Tower had thus far shown for the legions that served it, one might argue. If one wanted to be hung a traitor.

“If we can rout Sepulchral’s brats quick enough we can win this battle before nightfall,” the Black Knight rumbled. “It’ll cost us bloody, but I can see the writ.”

A casual look at the melee raging across the valley showed only men dying pointlessly on a field. The deserters to the west, aggressively trying to bleed everyone else, while across the valley to the east the Legions of Terror and the Army of Callow lost hundreds every hour struggling over the same two hundred feet of solid ground. Casualties had been mounting all day, the Black Knight had already lost near two thousand. It was worse for the Callowans, though. Sacker was going after them hard with her siege engines and the Thirteenth’s treachery had left them underequipped and tired from the night fighting. The Army of Callow would be the first to break. The Black Knight’s gauntlet closed with grinding sound of metal on metal before she pushed down the swell of anger. She’d thought better of Jeremiah.

What had the Black Queen offered to turn him?

Sometimes it felt like she was the only person in Praes who gave a shit about the Dread Empire. Malicia was scheming herself into the grave, the Carrion Lord was setting fires left and right and all the while nobles were at each other’s throats like the middle of a fucking invasion was the time to settle their grudges. Even the Legions, which should have been a pillar of stability, were falling apart. Thousands had deserted over the mind control hook. It wasn’t that Nim didn’t understand the disgust, the sense of betrayal, but could Malicia really be blamed when half the damned Legions had gone the way of the Carrion Lord a year before? It was not madness, if it’d turned out necessary. Mok had argued it smacked of slavery, though, and not been wrong.

His offered bargain – returning to the fold in exchange for turning on Malicia – had been a damned silly thing anyway, and one Nim could not accept lest the Legions of Terror fall apart entirely. Malicia had given the order to keep stringing him along until Sepulchral was in place and Nim had done it, with a heavy heart but done it anyway. Mok had been a friend, once, but duty was duty. And when all the pieces had been in place the Empress had paralyzed one enemy army and turned another irremediably against Callow, over a day’s span turning the Black Queen’s position from superior to imperiled. No, the Empress had proved over and over that she was an able woman. But she was also one who still had implanted commands in the minds of hundreds of her own officers. They would only be removed at the end of the war. Nim should not begrudge that, given the stained record of loyalty of the Legions over the last few years. Should not.

Her gauntlets ground again.

“Ah, our beloved sorcerous overseer returns,” Staff Tribune Ligaia muttered. “What glamour, what grace, what a stupid fucking thing to wear on a battlefield.”

Snorting in an amusement, Nim turned to follow her subordinate’s gaze. Lady Akua Sahelian, who some already called the Warlock even if the Powers had not yet granted her that in truth, was wearing an ornate red dress on a field where almost all the Named present were after her head. The Black Knight could not think of a goof reason for it, save possibly because Soninke highborn were all fucking mad and this one madder than most. Nim had yet to parse out Sahelian’s game, what stood behind the warning about the pattern of three and that convincingly raw tirade about the Tower. She’d had confirmed the bit about the pattern, asked old friends who’d learned a few pieces of namelore.

Nim would have preferred relying on the learned folk of Husse-il-Ossa, what humans called the Hall of Skulls, but none of the seventeen kings and the thirteen queens had far-lore to share on Names. Unsurprising. She had risen high enough among her people to know more had been lost over the centuries than the old crowns cared to admit. Human learning had been made to serve, instead, and human learning had said Akua Sahelian likely saved her life. This was not a pleasant position to be in, but these were not times for pleasantness. The Black Knight need only look to the three armies in Legion armour hacking at each other like animals on a dusty field to be reminded of that.

“Lady Black,” the Warlock greeted her, offering a bow. “Staff Tribune Ligaia.”

“The imperial’s courts further south, in case you got lost,” Ligaia scornfully said.

“As usual, Lady Ligaia, your helpfulness is as a balm upon my soul,” the Warlock smiled back with seeming delight before her expression sobered. “I happen to bring more urgent news, Marshal.”

The golden-eyed witch – Powers, that colour was eerie even on humans – turned to meet Nim’s stare.

“The Lesser Breach has been closed,” Sahelian said. “That should mean either Queen Catherine or the Hierophant are in the camp. I cannot think of any other here with the power to so quickly achieve this.”

The ogre shook her head.

“The Hierophant’s still out there,” the Black Knight said.

She could feel him, through Survey . The aspect born out of decades of battles had become like an unearthly sense, an ability to take a single look at a battlefield and know what all the pieces in play were. The Black Knight had taken more than a week to learn to recognize the particular pulls at her instinct as being specific Named, but now that she had it took only a moment to find them. So long as they were ‘visible’, anyway, a nebulous distinction she still sometimes struggled with. The aspect had more esoteric applications besides, she’d learned, pairing with another to turn a simple trick of power into something entirely more deadly, yet such things must be used only with care. There were rules to fighting between Named that she was still only faintly aware of, no matter how many dreams of Amadeus’ life the Powers saw fit to send her.

“Then it must be her,” the Warlock said.

Nim wondered if the girl knew of the faint undertone of yearning that always crept in her voice when the Black Queen was brought up. It was the worse kept secret in Praes that the Queen of Callow and the Warlock had been sleeping together during their years abroad, but while most assumed it had been a coup on Sahelian’s part to prepare her later betrayal the Black Knight believed otherwise. That break hadn’t been a clean one, for all that the Warlock had bound her fate to the Tower’s.

“Take the mage cadres and go support the Eleventh,” the Marshal of Praes ordered her. “The Mirembe remnants pulling together would be trouble. You have my authority to take any measures necessary to ensure they do not, Warlock.”

“How exciting,” the golden-eyed witch drawled. “By your will then, o Black Knight.”

Nim waved her away irritably. Sahelian was a viper, but she was a competent viper. If the Black Knight had to be saddled with a caster of that calibre – which were always trouble, the old Warlock had been too – it might as well be one who knew her business. Her attention returned to the battle in the valley, the bloody melee in three parts. The Army of Callow had edge ahead in the morning, the Black Knight thought, but now that Noon Bell had come and gone it was increasingly on the backfoot. An hour ago Nim had allowed free use of munitions on the front against the Callowans and the difference in stocks was beginning to tell.

Juniper of the Red Shields had clearly stacked the western corner of her defensive line, knowing it was the weak point, but the Black Knight was beginning to think the other woman had made a blunder. Her eastern flank was wavering. Already the Callowans had nearly been pushed back into their own trench and the pressure was only increasing. Had the young Marshal of Callow thinned her eastern flank at the expense of her western one, knowing the latter would bear the brunt of the casualties? The Black Knight could not deny what her own eyes were seeing, what her aspect kept drawing her attention to: there was an opening to take. Nim turned an eye to Ligaia.

“Pass the word,” she said. “The Fourteenth is to mount an all-out assault on the eastern flank. Commit the reserves, mages are to turn to fully offensive fire and the siege to concentrate for a breach.”

It would not matter if Sepulchral’s brat had some sense beaten into them, the Black Knight thought. Not if the battle to the south was already won, and this campaign with it.

—

Juniper ripped into the dried mutton jerky, swallowing a mouthful of meat after barley chewing it. Gods but she’d been ravenous all day. She bit off another piece then paused halfway through chewing, turning to look at the woman to her side.

“Doesn’t taste salted,” she said.

Aisha wrinkled her nose.

“Swallow, Juniper,” she said.

The Hellhound rolled her eyes but indulged her Staff Tribune. She then turned back an expectant gaze. Aisha smiled, pushing back a strand of that soft dark hair before answering.

“I had it washed and dried again,” Aisha said.

Juniper, like most orcs, preferred meat without seasoning. It was a small thing, but it was those that spoke loudest. Juniper felt a sharp swell of fondness, one of those moments that always brought her dangerously close to thinking about biting that smooth neck and a hundred more things after that. Years of control kept her body from moving, though she noticed that Aisha had caught the glance to the neck and her lips quirked. Nothing was said of it, but the shared knowledge hung between them in the air. Dragging her eyes away, Juniper of the Red Shields turned her attention back to the battle in the distance. A look into her Baalite eye confirmed the trend she’d seen forming over the last half hour: the Fourteenth had committed to an all-out attack and the eastern flank was buckling.

As it should. She’d ordered General Zola to thin it.

“It’s time,” Juniper said, licking her chops. “Have the fallback order sent.”

Aisha briskly nodded, rising from her seat to pass the order as Juniper stayed in her own and watched the eastern flank through the Baalite eye. Concentrated ballista fire had torn through chunks of the palisade and the Fourteenth, though green, was well-trained. Their backline was already bringing wooden planks to the fore that’d serve as makeshift bridges to cross the trench and allow legionaries pour through the breaches. Flags and sorcery had Zola informed now was the time to pull out and the general did what she could. Her legionaries had been getting pushed back into their own trench by the Fourteenth and that didn’t leave a lot of room to maneuver. She got out those she could and began pulling away from the palisade.

The Fourteenth, howling and victorious, followed the retreating Army of Callow. Against most armies Juniper’s counterstroke would have resulted into a rout, but this was the Legions of Terror. The young legionaries were not baited into a hasty pursuit, instead getting shouted back into line by sergeants and lieutenants, so when sixty feet behind the palisade they found the Army of Callow reformed into a shield wall the did not get scattered. Instead the Fourteenth formed its own shield wall in time and the lines collided. Juniper sucked at her teeth. It would hold, she decided. The Fourteenth needed to cross a trench and blown-up chunks of palisade to reinforce its own shield wall, effectively slowing its advance to a crawl.

The Fourteenth would be tied down there for hours with little to show for it, should nothing change. Good.

The Baalite eye moved to the northwest, where the Seventh Legion was marching down the road to reinforce. Nim would be sending her legion to back up the Fourteenth, the Hellhound knew, unless she found a better opening. Juniper just have to give her that opening, to heat up that old veteran’s lizard blood and bait her into going after a victory. Juniper rose to her feet to give the order herself, the one that’d most matter in this entire battle. It would be a rider that carried it, not flag or sorcery. Otherwise the Black Knight might smell the trap. And away the rider went as Juniper returned to her pavilion and her seat in the shade, Baalite eye tight in grasp and Aisha returned to her side.

“This is it,” Juniper gravelled. “The knife’s edge.”

The moment that would make or break the Battle of Kala. Even as the situation on the eastern flank stabilized, the breaches stopped cold, the western corner began to waver. It’d been hammered at all morning from two sides by engines and legionaries, assaulted relentlessly. Thrice rituals had been aimed at smashing the palisades, only the Hierophant’s intervention keeping the magic from breaking the stalemate. Bravely the legionaries of the Army of Callow had held, but now they were wavering. Their eastern flank had just been punched through by the Fourteenth and enemy soldiers were spilling around the shield wall, the Black Queen was nowhere in sight and the pressure was only increasing. They broke, first in singles and then in clumps.

That was, at least, what Juniper was trying to sell.

And that was the danger, the knife’s edge, because a feigned retreat could so easily turn into a real one. Once soldiers got running, no matter the reason, it was hard to get them to stop. Juniper had built her box, even though its walls could not yet be seen, but it might yet be blown apart by the same men she meant to hold it. Pickler’s sappers did what they were meant to, carpeting the grounds with smokers that obscured everyone’s line of sight as legionaries ran and legionaries pursued. Not only the loyalist but after a few moments the rebels as well, a chunk of wall in front of them just as undefended. Sacker, Auntie Sacks, would order it. She couldn’t afford to let Nim take those fortifications, else her plan of bleeding both sides would go up in flames.

The last thing the Rebel Legions wanted was to be penned in by the Loyalists Legions, meaning they had to take that palisade so the Eighth could not.

Smoke rose into the sky in great swaths and Juniper clutched the Baalite eye so tightly her knuckles paled. What would win out, the Marshal of Callow wondered. The fear, the instinct to run and keep running, or the trust? The Army of Callow had grown to trust its commanders, fighting on foreign fields, but the fear had grown too. Hadn’t Juniper felt it herself, that poison that spread through the veins and blackened everything? More than just felt, she had wallowed in it. She’d glimpsed, though, a light on the horizon. A way to settle it all at last. The Hellhound leaned forward, jaw shut tight as she looked at her soldiers move. Haven’t you ever wondered? Where we stand, compared to the best. We’ve fought Procerans and rebels and corpses, but this? This is the standard. The reigning champion. The mother we must murder to surpass.

“Come on,” the Marshal of Callow murmured in Kharsum. “It can be done. We can beat them. Trust me and we can beat them all .”

Soldiers ran, past the lines and the officers waiting with their whistles and shouts. Juniper’s heart leapt up in throat, but it wasn’t done. The same hard iron that’d seen the Army of Callow through the Camps and the Graveyard, through the Boot and Hainaut and dozen more battles, it told. Some kept running, but some fell into line. And that was all that was needed: a few people standing. Men gathered to them like a standard, lines firming, and Juniper began to laugh. In the distance, sappers began to raise mantlets. A box, formed out of the eastern corner of trenches and palisades and the second corned the sappers were now making of wood. A box filled with smoke, and soon to be filled with only Named and her enemies. Juniper rose to her feet, passing the Baalite eye to Aisha.

“Juniper?” she asked.

“Look into it,” the Hellhound said. “Northwest.”

Aisha did.

“The Seventh Legion,” Juniper stated, “is no longer moving to reinforce the Fourteenth. It’s moving to reinforce the Eighth.”

The dark-haired woman put down the Baalite eye after a moment, smiling.

“It is.”

The Hellhound flashed her fangs at the horizon, triumphant.

“Where’s that wagon with the roof again?” she asked. “I need a nap.”

Aisha started in surprise.

“Catherine is not back from Sepulchral’s camp, we don’t know-”

“She chose me,” Juniper said. “I choose her. She’ll get it done, and that means the last decision that matters in this battle has already been made.”

Juniper of the Red Shields, Marshal of Callow, walked out the pavilion with steps lighter than they had been in years.

—

“What the fuck is happening in there?”

Ligaia wasn’t asking anything that the rest of the general staff wasn’t silently wondering. The Black Knight surveyed the movement of her own troops, but she found nothing but the obvious. The Eighth Legion had entered the smoke and was engaged in a brutal melee against the Army of Callow and the deserters, Sacker pouring her soldiers into the grinder to make sure she wouldn’t get enveloped by any single force. The Seventh was reinforcing, but the truth harder to swallow was that those reinforcements were needed . Between the casualties of the Thirteenth’s treachery and the brutal blind fighting in the smoke the Eighth was getting mauled. Nim watched the movements of the troops, towering above her officers, and her fists began to grind.

“Ma’am,” Senior Sapper Licker said, catching her attention. “We’re at risk now. The deserters are still hitting our trench but we can’t spare the men to hold it unless we send reinforcements from the Seventh. The flank’s getting stretched too thin.”

“Your recommendation?” Nim asked.

“Deploying goblinfire,” Licker evenly said. “They’ll answer in kind, but it’ll lock down that entire front. We can focus our efforts on the breach in the smoke.”

The Black Knight hesitated. Already she could make out currents in the battle. The Fourteenth was deadlocked, while her legions were pouring their strength into the smoky breach. So was Sacker, and with the main front of contention between the loyal legions and the deserters the tendency would only increase. We have the advantage , Nim reminded herself. The Seventh were fresh and the Army of Callow stretched thin, while Sacker’s rebels were tightly packed – it would be difficult for them to mount a harder push because there simply wasn’t enough room at the bottom of the hills for them to muster. Senior Sapper’s Licker was going to make the breach into the fulcrum of this battle, but it was a fulcrum the Legions were best placed to triumph in.

It would get bloody, but it would get done.

“See it done,” she ordered.

And with all of it resting on one breach, there was only one thing left. Nim would have to head into the smoke herself, lead the Seventh personally. Tempted as she was to Delegate one of her personal guard and guide them through Survey , her instincts ran against it. Half-hearted commitment here would be punished, she dimly felt.

“Ready the Warhammers,” the Black Knight ordered. “I’ll lead the push into the breach personally.”

—

The Duke of Boreal Lights had been helpful enough to die taking out the Hellgate, but Brandon found the man’s retinue decidedly less obliging.

“Why-”

He hacked into the flesh but the blue-skinned fae turned into ice, shattering and reforming.

“-won’t-”

Even cutting the bastard thing’s head off didn’t help. It turned to mist and reformed, and then it had the gall to stab at him. Brandon slapped away the spear with his shield and stabbed it in the eye because, really, where was it getting the bloody nerve? It should have been dead six times over by now.

“-you-”

Oh and now the devils wanted a piece of him as well. The grandmaster slice through the wing of the howling monkey-creature and deftly led his charge to kick it after it fell, turning to parry a spear blow and smashing the fae’s face with his shield with a grunt.

“- bloody -”

Oh, the broken nose didn’t even come back even after it turned to mist. Brandon snarled, smashing its head repeatedly with his shield as the fae rocked back in pain and dismay.

“-DIE!”

The bottom of his shield went into the creature’s skull with a wet squelch and finally it dropped to the ground. Panting but vindicated, Brandon turned to have a look around. The rebel Praesi had finally stopped fighting each other, after only half an hour of still hacking at their kin while the world went to the Hells, but the Eleventh Legion had reached the camp and even with the truce the defence was too disunited to drive it back. Outnumbered almost four to one, the legionaries were still making meat of the rebels – though it helped that the devils flying around everywhere avoided them like the plague and it’d started raining acid on their foes. That wasn’t Brandon Talbot’s problem, though. Now, where was the queen?

Ah, there she was. Near the castle-tent, fighting what looked like a pitch-black land octopus with suckers that spat out an acidic goo. A tower of black flame took care of that as Brandon rode to her side, pulling back his knights with him as he did – there was danger in stretching themselves too thin even of the rebel Praesi seemed to be avoiding fighting them – but by the time he arrived she was tossing a dead fae in the path of a devil belching vivid red flames while trying to fend off what looked like... a hippogriff? No, not quite. He might never have seen one of those outside heraldry, but while the creature had horse’s legs and tail it instead of a hawk-like appearance it had great crow’s wings and head.

It also bit off the head of the queen’s horse, before she stabbed it in the neck.

Brandon rode at a gallop, smashing into a devil that tried to fall upon the queen as she leapt with a loud grunt of pain from her dying horse to the monster and Night bloomed like a sickly wind. With a satisfying crunch he smashed the bloody thing’s skull with the pommel of his sword even as another clawed at his armour with screams of pain and the hymns burned bright. By the time he was done, the queen was sitting astride the dead crow monster with a smugly satisfied look on her face. No, not dead Brandon saw. Undead, for it blinked and let out a happy screech that had him wincing in pain.

“This is mine now,” the Black Queen happily announced, and a heartbeat later she was aflight.

Godsdamnit, Brandon thought, that was going to be just as bad as the damned fae flying horse. It’d been impossible to catch up to her when she rode that one, and at least that bloody thing hadn’t had claws . He looked up, saw she was still headed for the great pavilion and rode after her with a sigh. Some Praesi household troops were in the way but it was nothing lances and a gallop couldn’t disperse. He saw the queen disappear into the pavilion, which was a relief until he heard the fighting in there. He charged in with a wedge of a hundred behind him, smashing into what looked like a three-way brawl over a corpse. Sepulchral’s squabbling heirs and a company of Legion heavies, led by-

Oh, the most beautiful woman Brandon had ever seen in his life. Would ever see in his life. He ought to dismount and kneel, to pledge service and love and-

“General Lucretia, if you don’t stop glamouring my knights I’m going to feed you to my horse.”

The warmth went out of the world. Brandon came back to himself, sweat drenching his back, and realized with shame that he’d been halfway out of the saddle. Many of his men had been no better. His fingers clenched around his sword. Another abomination best put to the sword, this smiling woman among the legionaries.

“Black Queen,” the general spoke in a honeyed voice, “there is no need for-”

“I warned you,” Catherine Foundling said, voice echoing of distant caws. “ Bite off your tongue .”

Power rippled out, and while the dark-skinned general shrieked and fled in a flap of dark wings as she spurted blood many of her legionaries ended up struggling with the same order. Brandon looked around and smirked. Some of the Praesi seemed to be struggling as well, but not a single knight of the Order had been affected.

“Forward,” he shouted. “Forward and drive the Legions out!”

A shout forty years too late, but better that than never. Even the Praesi rebels gathered themselves long enough to attain usefulness and they helped push out the legionaries, which retreated out of the pavilion after heavy losses. That did not, unsurprisingly, end hostilities. Brandon’s queen had led her... mount near a corpse on a table made of solid gold and pearls, which seemed to rile up the Praesi. Two nobles – they had the look, the attitude and most of all the golden eyes – led the charge, loudly arguing though they refrained from violence.

“The succession of Aksum is no matter for outsiders, it is-”

“It is already decided,” the boy lord shouted. “It was made official years ago, Sanaa, that I am heir. Your grasping attempts to pretend otherwise-”

“You are the creature of Nok, not a true Mirembe,” Lady Sanaa scoffed, “and-”

“Gods Below, this might be the most terribly tedious shouting match I’ve ever heard,” the Black Queen said, Night billowing around her. “Here’s a solution: neither of you are in charge.”

The staff of yew she always carried was lightly tapped on the corpse, which Brandon now saw was that of an old woman. The pressure of the Night went out and the body shuddered. This did not, unsurprisingly, seem to please the two squabbling nobles.

“It is against law for undead to hold any noble title,” the young lord scoffed. “Do you think putting strings on a corpse will make it otherwise?”

“This is absurd,” Lady Sanaa hissed. “For once, Isobe speaks truth. By what right do you meddle in our affairs?”

The Black Queen smiled, pleasant and mild, which had Brandon tensing. That was usually the smile that preceded corpses beginning to drop. Beneath her the crow-winged chimera stirred, looking up with cruel eyes, and in the magelights of the pavilion the dark fringes Mantle of Woe seemed to meld into the creature’s feathers.

“By what right,” the Queen of Callow softly said. “You lot keep asking me that, don’t you? Nobles and officers and even Malicia herself. By what right do I meddle in the affairs of Praes, which is not mine to rule and a sovereign state beyond my reach?”

Her sole eye burned with feverish light.

“By what right?” the Black Queen hissed. “You dare ask me that, you pack of jackals who bleed Calernia as it struggles for its very right to exist, who writhe and bite and have a thousand times turned the east into a madhouse?”

The Praesi flinched away, but Brandon leaned forward with an eager smile. His knights too. They knew it well, that weight in the air. Had learned to love it, for though it was the herald of terrible things that terror was ever turned away from them. She was a queen in black, adorned in wrath and dread, but she was their queen to the bone.

Let all the world fear her, save the sons and daughters of Callow.

“ You made yourself my mess to handle ,” Catherine Foundling snarled. “That is my right. The east is your prison and I am your fucking warden, rattling the cage until you fall in line.”

Brandon felt it then, the... pressure. It was suffocating and ever soul in the pavilion seemed to be choking on it. The queen through them all with her gaze, and wherever she looked knees buckled.

“So what will it be, Mirembe?” the Queen of Callow said. “How many of you do I need to butcher before the lesson sinks in?”

Silence was her answer.

“I thought so,” Catherine Foundling quietly said. “Get up, Abreha.”

The corpse did, looking around blearily. As if she’d just woken up from a long nap.

“Your Majesty?”

“Yes,” the young woman smiled, “I am that. Now let’s get this army moving, yes? We have work to do.”

“I await your orders,” the corpse said, bowing her head.

“First we’re going to slap away the Eleventh,” the Queen of Callow said, “but after that? Well, we’re going to march.”

“Where to?” the corpse of Abreha Mirembe asked.

“We’re going to visit my old friend General Sacker,” Catherine Foundling coldly smiled. “And remind her what happens when people cross me.”

—

The hammer went down, pulverizing the sergeant and the legionary next to him. The Black Knight withdrew the weapon, shaking away the pulp as her Warhammers fanned out around her. The melee was turning to their advantage, as much as Nim could tell in this maze of smoke, but her instinct was pulling at her. Something was wrong. An arrow streaked through the smoke, which she tried to swat down but missed by an inch. One of her retinue screamed as it went through his eye, dropping to the ground and twitching.

“ Archer ,” the Black Knight snarled.

She and the Silver Huntress had been scything through her soldiers and her personal guard alike, taking lives and then melting away before they could be caught. The sole time Nim had thought she’d caught the Huntress she’d run into the Barrow Sword instead, who had somehow managed to scar enchanted armour straight out of the Tower’s vaults with a bronze sword. The Black Knight stomped through the smoke, sweeping away another handful of legionaries with a blow but finding no trace of the Archer. In the distance someone died in a flash of silver Light, the Huntress’ signature.

Nim wouldn’t fall for that again. Going hunting for them only ended up in her swinging at smoke while she took one arrow after another. None had penetrated the armour so far, but the Light would shatter the enchantment fully in time.

“Forward,” the Black Knight shouted.

Her soldiers shouted back. There were more enemies ahead, full companies now, and the sound of sharpers in the distance. The fighting grew harsh but they broke through, Nim leading the charge, until she made out distant shapes ahead. A wall? A few more steps forward, slapping away an arrow from the Archer come for her neck, and she realized it wasn’t a wall. Not exactly. Mantlets had been placed as some kind of rough palisade, and before them she saw a sea of blood and flesh. Munitions and crossbow bolts shredded anyone that came close. What was this? She took another step forward, but she felt sharp pressure from her left. Nim backed away and a spell of blue light passed through where she’d just stood.

The Hierophant?

No, she thought as pressure came from the right this time and she caught a blade with her gauntleted hand. The Squire looked up at her through his helmet, blue eyes burning, and the Black Knight felt her stomach drop. The boy had come for her, as Sahelian had warned. She tried to crush the sword but he ripped it free, dancing away from her hammer blow with speed he’d not had last the fought. Another arrow needed swatting away, and then as she tried to smash the Squire darting close a swirling spell of darkness seized her foot. She was pulled off her feet, and while she backhanded the Squire away he landed on his feet with his sword up. This wasn’t a good fight, she thought, they had her swinging at ghosts and-

The Black Knight breathed in sharply. When had been the last time she’d slain a legionary with the marking of the Army of Callow? Often it was hard to tell in the smoke, but she couldn’t recall. There’d been a few at first, isolated, but she’d been fighting for hours in the smoke now and it had been long . But no, that made no sense, why would Sacker commit so thoroughly to this breach if she was losing so many men? The Squire came for her from behind but she smashed her hammer into the ground, bumping him up and backhanding him away. An arrow wreathed in Light streaked for her side but the Black Knight screamed, smashing through it, and when a spell that was a blue drill of light struck at her armour it dispersed against the enchantments.

In the distance power bloomed, once and then twice, and though one disappeared the second struck close. Nim was half braced for a betrayal by the Warlock, but the magic that descended was not treacherous: a massive gale of wind blew, cutting through the smoke. Suddenly half the obscured battlefield was revealed, and what Nim surveyed with a single glance had her freezing. The Rebel Legions were being routed. Not only were their corpses carpeting the ground where the Seventh had broken their push, but in the distance smoke rose from where they camp was in Moule Hills. Had someone hit them from behind?

Oh , Nim thought. That was why Sacker had been committing to the push her. With her back aflame and only one way out – the goblinfire had closed the other – if she did not break through here her legions were at risk of being surrounded and slaughtered to the last. An arrow flew but this time the Black Knight saw it come from far and simply stepped out of the way, then punched through a wavy spell and swung at the Squire. The boy ducked out of the way and then slid under her, scoring a blow against her leg and cutting into her greaves, but she kicked him away and he went tumbling. She pursued, trying to end this even if lore said she might not, but he ducked behind a blood tree of all things.

Nim’s hammer went right through, wood flying as the rotten thing half-collapsed. It was hollow, and though she was already aiming another blow at the Squire her aspect tugged at the corner of her eye. Inside the dead tree, words had been carved in Lower Miezan.

Marshal Juniper wins here.

Nim breathed in sharply, the Squire retreating as she slowed her steps. Looking around, the Black Knight could not see a single company of the Army of Callow on the field. Only manning the mantlets to the south and west, and in front of them piles of bodies were piled so high they were almost a second wall. It suddenly fell into place and marshal felt like she was going to be sick. The Marshal of Callow, Nim realized, had baited both her and Sacker into pushing their main offensive here, through this... box. And then she’d withdrawn her own soldiers to the edges, and let her enemies slaughter each other under the cover of smoke. They’d been fighting each other all afternoon, ruining their armies against each other as the Army of Callow mopped up the edges and waited. The Legions had lost, Nim thought. Rebel and loyal alike, they had lost – and they would continue losing as long as they fought.

There was only one word left to speak, she knew, before this day could end.

“Retreat,” the Black Knight shouted, and it tasted like ashes in her mouth. “Retreat!”

Chapter 21: Amadeus’ Plan

“Is there not a stark absurdity to what a battle truly is? Thousands of strangers on two sides of a field, prepared to slaughter each other because half a dozen men on either side told them to.”

– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

Seen from the above, it was easy to understand why General Sacker had agreed to the cease-fire.

The Rebel Legions were like a bottled rat, now that the Black Knight had called for a retreat of her own army. Juniper had wasted no time surrounding their position in the valley, turning all engines on the tightly-packed ranks, and Sepulchral’s own army had hit them in the back even more brutally at my order. Sacker’s troops defending her camp had collapsed under the combine pressure of mage cadres and Nok wavemen, archers who lived up to their sharp reputation. It’d been a bloody business, feeding levies into Legion fortifications, but we’d caught the rebels unaware and the disparity in numbers had them collapsing in short order.

The camp was ours now, the parts we hadn’t torched anyway. That’d left the Rebel Legions surrounded between steep hills, stripped of supplies and room to maneuver as the noose tightened around them. To annihilate Sacker’s army, nothing would be required of the Army of Callow save that it hold its own palisades while at a generous advantage. All Juniper needed to do was wait while Sepulchral hammered at the Rebel Legions from behind with her great numbers and fresh troops. The rat would be pressed against the bottom of the bottle, squeeze so tightly nothing was left but ground flesh and blood. So when the offer had come from Juniper, it’d only been natural that General Sacker accepted a cease-fire and talks.

Zombie the Seventh took nothing more than the pressure of my knees to be guided into a gentle downwards glide. The creature – she wasn’t a hippogriff, not exactly, but given the similarities I was currently leaning towards ‘hippocrow’ – had proved to be eager and obedient after I’d raised her, perhaps because the Sisters had taken a personal interest in the process. Komena in particular had felt intrigued, enough to lend a hand to the process. Regardless, my latest Zombie had proved to be a very good girl indeed on top of being even quicker in flight than I’d thought she would be. Turns could get a little tricky, mind you, but Zombie clearly relied more on Creational laws than magical ones when it came to her flight.

Compared to my last flying mount, anyway.

The no-man’s-land between our position and that of the rebels had been cleared for the duration of the talks, legionaries returning to hide behind their walls, and the empty space made it all the easier to pick out the delegations. Juniper didn’t seem to have brought any officers with her, but she’d been wise enough to bring Indrani and Alexis as bodyguards. There wasn’t a lot that’d be able to get past those two. Sacker, on the other hand, had with her two men with the painted insignias of senior legates on their armour. There were half a dozen regulars with them, but they might as well be decorations for what it mattered.

I landed half a hundred feet away, Zombie’s arc smoothly turning into a run and slowing down as we approached. The Mantle of Woe trailing behind me, sword at my hip and yew staff lowered, I brought my mount to a halt before the delegations.

“Marshal Juniper,” I smiled. “Congratulations are in order.”

The Hellhound scoffed, but I could see the pleasure she was badly hiding.

“Could have gone better,” Juniper said. “But we can save that talk for the camp, Warlord. There are more pressing matters to settle.”

“So there are,” I agreed, eye turning to the three top officers of the Rebel Legions.

“Black Queen,” General Sacker blandly said. “Greetings.”

Someone had remembered my warning, I noted. Good. I’d been completely serious.

“Sacker,” I said.

“The legates with me are-”

“Irrelevant,” I bluntly interrupted.

The human of the pair, a middle-aged Taghreb, looked furious at that. She didn’t speak out, though. The orc seemed to take it in stride, which raised my esteem by a notch.

“Either you can speak for your entire set of legions or this conversation is pointless,” I said. “I did not come here to indulge in petty games.”

“I can speak for our men,” General Sacker flatly said.

A look to the legates – the light caught in her fake eye, reminding me I was not the only woman here to have lost one – served as both a quell and confirmation. Neither gainsaid her.

“Good,” I smiled.

“We’re willing to surrender,” the old goblin said, “under certain terms. Guarantees need to be made that no soldiers will be harmed. Regular food and water. We’re willing to sit out the rest of this war if-”

She was serious, I realized. How many soldiers did she have left of the thirteen thousand she’d begun the day with? Couldn’t be more than eight, after the beating they’d taken. And she still thought she was in a position to strongarm me. I’d been too soft on these people, I suddenly realize. The Rebel Legions had taken my coin and grain before selling me down the river without a second thought, and the way I’d just taken it had made them think I was easy pickings. I’d held back, out of a desire to maintain the armies of Praes for the greater war and out of respect for my father.

It was long past time I stopped.

“Archer,” I said, “nock an arrow.”

I heard a chuckle and did not need to turn to know she obeyed. I met Sacker’s eyes evenly.

“You seem to have some grave misunderstandings about the nature of your situation,” I said. “So letme be clear: if I tell Archer to fire that arrow eastwards, Sepulchral’s army will resume its attack.”

The goblin scoffed.

“You’d lose-”

“I don’t give a shit how many of them we lose,” I coldly said. “I’ll spend her entire army if that’s what it takes to break you.”

I harshly laughed.

“ Terms ?” I mocked. “You’ll sit out the war if ? I didn’t come here to negotiate with you, Sacker. I did that once before and you fine fellows me in the back. We’re past making deals.”

I struck my staff against the ground and the sound rippled out, dust flying up.

“You can surrender unconditionally,” I said. “Or Archer will shoot that arrow and I’ll fucking kill you all.”

Sacker’s face tightened, her ever half-closed eyes opening fully. She studied my face and whatever she found there had her hesitating. She turned to Juniper.

“And you have nothing to say to this, Marshal of Callow?” she pressed. “Your men will be the ones spent for this madness.”

Juniper’s face hardened and she bared pale fangs.

“Every sack of grain your soldiers ate, every crate of steel you used, could have kept some of my legionaries out west alive,” the Hellhound growled. “And what did we get for it? Be careful now of calling on sentiment . You might not like what you let out of the cage.”

Sacker flinched. Juniper had been as a niece to her, once. Maybe she still was in some ways. But personal ties cut both ways. She turned her eyes back to me, knowing better than to ask for anything out of the likes of Archer and the Huntress. Hells, of the two Alexis would probably be the hardliner. She had that traditional heroic disregard for the lives of anyone that might be considered to stand under Evil’s banner.

“Many officers will balk,” General Sacker told me. “If you do not offer guarantees-”

“So let them balk,” I shrugged. “We can have this conversation again in half a bell, when I’ve put another few thousand in the ground.”

The genuine indifference in my voice, I thought, was what got it through to her I wasn’t bluffing. I absolutely wasn’t. I’d just make sure that the household troops from Askum and Nok were the vanguard for the assault instead of the levies, to keep the casualties of the attack where they deserved to be. The goblin sagged.

“An hour,” Sacker said. “Give me an hour to talk the officers into it without bloodshed.”

I glanced at Juniper, who looked like she was biting down on the answer she wanted to give but did not have the authority to. No objections there, then. I might as well give the rebels a little more rope, lest the noose turning into an outright hanging.

“An hour,” I agreed. “If I don’t have your formal and unconditional surrender by the end of it...”

I did not finish the sentence, or particularly need to. Sacker and the legates left, tails between their legs, and returned to their lines.

I got my surrender before the time had passed.

—

“We are now victims of our own success,” General Zola sadly said.

No one in the war council – our usual, save now with the addition of General Jeremiah Holt – argued with that, because it was the honest truth. We’d forced the Rebel Legions to surrender and the Loyalist Legions to retreat to their camp in northern Kala Hills, but we now had fresh problems on our hands. Namely, seven thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine prisoners of war that we needed to keep an eye on. And keep under a roof, fed and with enough water to live. We were effectively being forced to supply a second army of prisoners and our supplies would be stretched to a breaking point if we did. Much of the Rebel Legions’ own foodstuff had been either burned or looted when Sepulchral’s forces took their camp.

Some of that I could get back from them, but I didn’t want to take too much. The Praesi law that undead could not hold noble title meant that Abreha Mirembe’s hold on her own army was painfully fragile, holding mostly because the soldiers from Nok were going to stick around as long as it looked like Isobe was still going to inherit Aksum. Otherwise those forces would be marching away by now, leaving behind them a vicious Aksum civil war. No, I had to leave Sepulchral some of the goods. Asking back for half was reasonable, I decided, and I’d set Vivienne to arranging it.

“I prefer the troubles of a great victory to those of a great defeat,” the Princess in question snorted. “We have supplies enough to push back the issue for a few days without it denting our reserves too much. We can keep our attention on more pressing matters.”

Juniper cleared her throat.

“Speaking of,” the Hellhound said. “Pickler, what is your timeline on the work?”

After the surrender came and the rebels laid down their weapons, there were only a few hours left before sundown. Since it was clear there’d be no more fighting for the day, Pickler had taken to bettering our position in anticipation of tomorrow. Companies of unarmed prisoners had, under the wary eye of our own legionaries, been set to taking down the enemy’s fortifications: tearing down their palisades and filling their trenches.

“Our palisade will be the only one standing come dark,” Sapper-General Pickler said, “but the trenches are harder work. Maybe half of it done in time, if we’re lucky. I gave orders to focus on the road, it’ll be easier for us to move troops across if we need to go on the offensive.”

“Can goblin prisoners not be put to work in the dark?” Brandon Talbot asked.

I grimaced at that and wasn’t the only one.

“They’ll run,” I said. “And do just that if we’re lucky. They’ve a lot more goblins than we do, too, so even if we put our own goblin legionaries as overseers it’d be a major risk. Better to just left the work unfinished.”

“Agreed,” Juniper said. “It is only a precaution, regardless. I don’t believe that Marshal Nim will be going on the offensive. Her losses appear to have been extensive.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“We got casualties estimates for her too, now?”

The tall orc nodded. With the casualties taken in the early skirmishes around the region, the desertion of the Thirteenth and the mauling the Eighth had taken during the night our guess had been that the Black Knight had been fielding an army about sixteen to seventeen thousand strong. How many were left now, though?

“At least five thousand and a half dead,” the Hellhound said. “Tentatively we’re pegging her current strength at eleven thousand.”

I let out a low whistle. With the Thirteenth as last moment reinforcements, this morning we’d fielded around fifteen thousand men. Our butcher’s bill had us at twelve thousand eight hundred and twelve soldiers now. Almost thirteen thousand strong. Gods, even Sepulchral had lost more men than we had: her twenty thousand had, between civil war and battle and desertions, tumbled down to maybefifteen thousand now. Gods. Our total losses had been less than half of those of every other army on the field individually , not even put together.

Juniper had, over the span of an afternoon, not upended the balance of power so much as murdered it and buried it in a shallow grave. Weeping Heavens. I found my glass of water, emptied it on the ground and leaned back my seat to grab a bottle of aragh. I poured myself a finger, then found a few grins and cups headed my way. When everyone had their own in hand, I solemnly raised my cup.

“To the Hellhound,” I said, “and the Battle of Kala.”

It was with rowdy cheer my toast was taken up, drinks going down and being poured anew. I met Juniper’s eyes and grinned, enjoying the dark flush to her cheeks. Aisha even talked her into a cup of her own. I laid back into my seat, enjoying the warmth of the tent, and breathed out weeks of worry. They could be put to rest, for a few hours. We’d earned it.

After all, for all the troubles of victory I’d rather be in this tent tonight than any of the other three.

—

With morning came the time to make the difficult decisions.

The Black Knight still had a sizeable army holed up in Kala Hills, but so long as Sepulchral remained on our side the threat was mitigated. None of my general staff had an appetite for trying to force that camp immediately, especially not when leaving the Legions in it would make them wither on the vine. We’d poisoned Nioqe Lake and Nim herself had poisoned the main wells in the region, so in at most a week their water situation was going to start getting dangerous. Only the scale of the losses they’d taken in battle would prevent it from being an issue even earlier. Taking into consideration our numerical advantage – we had the Loyalist Legions outnumbered almost three to one – and our fortifications in the valley, it would be suicide for the Black Knight to attack us. That meant we had enough breathing room to handle our own internal troubles. The most urgent of them was, unsurprisingly, what to do with the several thousand prisoners we’d taken.

“We can’t handle feeding them for the rest of the campaign,” Aisha said. “And even if we could, we need to begin marching on Ater soon. There is no practical way to bring that many prisoners with us on the march.”

“We should keep the officers of tribune rank and give the Fourth’s Justice to the rest,” Brandon Talbot advised.

Gods, that stupid name. It was what some of my men had taken to calling the punishment I’d given the Helikean cataphracts after capturing them back in Iserre: broken fingers and being stripped of equipment.

“This is a wild land,” Aquiline said. “It would be kinder to simply kill those warriors than to maim and release them. The sword will hurt less than claws.”

“It would be a death sentence to release them like that,” Vivienne agreed. “Ideally we would ransom them instead, but they’ve managed to burn every bridge they have. There’s no one left who’d pay for them.”

“Amadeus might,” I objected.

“He can’t afford the price,” she frankly replied.

“We should seek to recruit soldiers instead,” General Jeremiah said. “It would make up for our losses, and the Army of Callow has expertise in assimilating legions.”

I rather admired the entirely unashamed way he said.

“That was my thought was well,” I admitted, “and Juniper’s too. How did that go?”

The Hellhound sighed.

“Malicia poisoned the well,” she said. “Most of the rank and file are convinced we assassinated two of their three generals just before making common cause with Sepulchral after a coup failed. Maybe three hundred volunteers, and I wouldn’t trust them right off.”

Fucking Malicia. I might have given the order to kill Mok, sure, but I wouldn’t have been sloppy enough not get blamed for it afterwards.

“They might not be willing to fight for us,” Vivienne said, “but they might be willing to fight against the Black Knight.”

She paused, choosing her words.

“We could offer some of the soldiers freedom in exchange for serving as the first wave of an attack against the camp in the hills.”

I chewed on that for a moment. Juniper looked on the fence, but the idea appealed to me. Sure it’d be putting troops we didn’t trust all that much in our order of battle, but it’d also soak up casualties that would otherwise thin my own ranks. And, even better, I wouldn’t be expected to keep feeding those soldiers after they went their own way.

“We’d have to limit the numbers,” I said. “Else we’re just releasing an army into the wilds.”

“Organization will be tricky,” Juniper said. “I’ll want to position them so if they turn against us it won’t lead to disaster.”

That wasn’t a no, and after a round of debate the idea was adopted. Aisha left the tent to begin organizing it. That didn’t entirely solve our prisoner problem, though, since two thousand at most was what I was comfortable arming again. The arguments went in a circle. No one thought we should feed the prisoners or keep them with us, but most of the measures that’d make them no longer a problem for the rest of this campaign also effectively consigned to death by Wasteland. Everyone agreed, at least, that we should keep the high-ranking officers as prisoners. Execution was floated as an option – by Talbot – but even those that didn’t balk at killing prisoners thought it might lead to mass unrest among the imprisoned soldiers.

“Even arming half of them would be a mistake,” General Zola argued. “With that many soldiers, which we agreed would be needed to survive the Wasteland, they have enough men to begin seizing the private armories of nobles and towns. They would rearm and pursue us.”

“We don’t know for certain that they would,” Juniper grunted. “But I take your point. I don’t want to leave that force at our back either.”

And that was the crux of the issue, really. We all wanted to march on Ater, where the war on Praes would be brought to an end, but we needed to clean up house first. That would mean dealing with the Sepulchral situation, later today, but also tying up all our other loose ends. Marshal Nim’s army needed to be decisively broken or made to surrender, and after that was done I didn’t want Sacker’s army nipping at our our heels when we moved south. Hells, to be frank I didn’t want them involved in that siege at all. They’d not proved to be trustworthy enough to be allowed to, and they’d failed to be victorious enough to force the issue their way. I could just see them stumbling into us at the last moment and fuc- wait, no.

“We’re looking at this wrong,” I said. “Juniper, how long do you expect operations in Ater to last?”

“Two months at most,” she said.

Longer than that and we’d be forced to make a deal anyway. Procer was already buckling, if we wanted there to still be a west by the time we returned we couldn’t tarry.

“So we strand them,” I said. “We keep the officers and arm enough they should be able to survive the Wasteland, but we take all their mages. If they don’t have any access to the Ways...”

“Even at their fastest possible pace, they’ll arrive along after the dust is settled in Ater,” Juniper finished, tone considering.

“Best we end things with the Black Knight before that,” General Jeremiah pragmatically advised. “Still, seems a sound enough plan.”

Not the most elegant way to deal with prisoners, but we didn’t have time for elegance. A round of agreements, some more enthusiastic than others, saw the matter settled.

“We’ll be receiving Sepulchral this afternoon,” I said, “to confirm the terms of our cooperation. Once she agrees to lend her aid to an assault on the Loyalist Legions, I believe we should begin preparing for an attack.”

“Agreed,” Juniper growled. “We have the numbers to properly squeeze her now. I want to swing part of our force out east around Kala Hills and encircle her. The same paths they used to ambush us there can be turned against them now.”

The discussion grew animated after that, commanders pitching in for a plan to either force a surrender out of Nim or crush her army irreparably, but I excused myself eventually and Vivienne did the same. We needed to get moving if we were to be ready to receive Sepulchral.

—

Abreha Mirembe wasn’t exactly my creature.

You could barely tell even she was dead, since it was poison that’d done her in and she’d been pretty ghoulish even before biting it. I’d raised the would-be empress as undead through use of the Night, but that didn’t exactly give me control over her. I could move her limbs, sure, and inflict pain on her soul. But I couldn’t control her mind, save through coercion. She’d showed me deference since her raising, but that wasn’t the effect of the Night so much as the knowledge that I could send her back to the grave with a snap of my fingers. I was uncomfortably aware that the ties binding me to her were not meaningfully all that different from those binding Malicia to Sargon Sahelian.

I’d soulboxed a High Seat too, it just happened that said box was their own corpse.

We kept the audience private, as small as it could be. That meant two people on our side, Vivienne and myself, and three on hers. High Lady Abreha herself, her designated heir Isobe and the niece that’d tried to usurp his place, Sanaa. Considering the only reason Sanaa was still alive was that she had enough supporters among Aksum’s army and vassals that her death would caused armed reprisals, I expected relations between her and her aunt to be frosty. To my surprise, Sepulchral now seemed to be favouring her over Isobe and takin no pains to hide it. Praesi. Abreha must have decided that a closely-fought coup was a sign of talent and begun to reconsider succession. Isobe was displeased by that undercurrent, by these talks and most of all by me.

“Rumour in the camp is that he blames you for this,” Vivienne murmured into my ear.

I blinked at her.

“ Why ?”

“He lost a lot of face in front of vassal lords and household troops when you and Lord Tanja humiliated him,” the Princess said. “He’s been saying that if not for that more would have stuck with him instead of turning to Sanaa’s camp.”

That might be partially true, I thought, though ironically enough Razin had probably done more damage than I did. It was a little much to blame me for his own failure to gather a solid core of supporters, though, especially when he’d been the one starting with a – oh Gods, I’d been spending too much time with Praesi if the decisions of someone like Abreha Mirembe were beginning to make sense to me. Best get this over with. After half-hearted courtesies we got to the meat of the talks, which was defining what Sepulchral’s position would be going forward.

“I want you to formally renounce your claim on the Tower,” I said.

“That cause is lost,” Abreha conceded. “Yet renouncing it will have costs for my supporters. I’ll not lay down arms only to have a puppet ruler installed in Aksum.”

“We can understand that concern,” Vivienne diplomatically said. “I assure you, neither Callow nor the Grand Alliance intends to intervene in your matters of succession.”

The old woman laughed.

“A nothing promise,” she said. “You will have to do better than that. You want my army for your siege of Ater, and I want sturdier assurances in return.”

“We could always offer our services to Malicia instead, should you-”

Sepulchral’s hand slapped Sanaa across the face. I hadn’t even made her do that, so I cocked an eyebrow.

“Count this a favour, girl,” Abreha said. “There are some people you don’t threaten unless you’ve made the decision to go through with it. They’ll just kill you if you do.”

Sanaa liked furious and humiliated, but to her honour she appeared to be listening. Huh. Maybe I wouldn’t be having a little conversation with Scribe about her, after all. I had no intention of leaving the High Seat closest to the border of Callow in hostile hands, but if she could learn that made drastic steps unnecessary. Vivienne cleared her throat.

“Assurances of what nature?” she asked.

“I want it confirmed by whoever climbs the Tower that I’ll legally keep my title until the end of the war against Keter,” High Lady Abreha said, “with all attached rights, including that to designate my own successor.”

I traded a look with Vivienne, who nodded.

“That could be arranged,” I said. “I take it it’s a formal Grand Alliance demand you’re looking for.”

The old woman grinned.

“I want it written in the treaty that settles this dance,” she confirmed.

She really was an old fox, I thought. That way no matter how ended up ruling the Dread Empire they couldn’t actually try to oust her afterwards without bringing down the Grand Alliance on their head. She was using a continent-spanning coalition as the guarantor of her succession. If nothing else, I had to be impressed by the sheer gall.

“I can’t formally agree to that without speaking with Cordelia Hasenbach, though I expect agreement on her part,” I said. “That said, I have half the Majilis of Levant in my camp at the moment and they’ll back those terms so I’m comfortable giving you a provisional approval.”

They were amenable to helping us against Marshal Nim with just that, so it was brisk business afterwards. They departed some hours after and I caught Abreha as she left, away from the others so we could have a quiet conversation.

“So what is it you’re actually after?” I asked.

She looked surprised, like she had no idea what I might possibly be implying. It was just a little too smooth to be believable. I cocked an eyebrow and she smiled.

“Who knows how long you war will last?” she said. “It might be a different empire, by the time the dust settles.”

“All about staying in the game, huh,” I said.

Abreha Mirembe cackled.

“It’s the very thing, Black Queen,” Sepulchral said. “Perhaps even the only thing.”

—

We spent three days recovering and planning our offensive against the Black Knight, whose army had further fortified its position in Kala Hills but not since moved. There was some trouble with the prisoners, people trying to flee in the night, but we’d disarmed them and the Wasteland was not kind. Those that got out did not get far, and bringing back the mangled corpses to display them soured the appetite for that kind of adventure. Our count of recruits rose to around four hundred but came to a hard stop after that, with further efforts yield nothing. Aisha’s efforts to make ‘volunteer companies’ that would fight against Nim were more successful, though, reaching close to the two thousand that I’d been willing to allow.

The rebels might despise us but they were scarcely fonder of the Black Knight, who had spurned their offer of joining forces in favour of remaining loyal to the Tower, and many found freedom in arms in the wake of fighting ‘Malicia’s dogs’ a rough but fair deal. Juniper and the general staff were putting the finishing touches on our plan to break the Legions with as few losses as possible to us, aiming to push the deaths on Sepulchral and the volunteers as much as we could without being too obvious about it, but I flitted in and out of those meetings. Most of my time was spent with Scribe and Vivienne, scrambling to get a read on the situation in the rest of Praes.

We still couldn’t scry properly, but that was a regional effect. Sending mages further out and then arranging messages being carried by horse worked, well enough that Cordelia was able to send her assent to High Lady Abreha’s terms and secure her alliance to us. I enjoyed the relative light demands made by this on my time, but the relative sense of safety was ripped out of my grasp without warning on the morning of the fourth day after the Battle of Kala. Even if Masego hadn’t immediately come for me I would have known something was up: the amount of power I could feel coming out of the Black Knight’s camp was like a lit beacon to my senses.

“War ritual?” I bluntly asked.

“No,” Hierophant immediately ritual. “And it is two rituals. One of them, the smaller, is making a gate into the Ways.”

I blinked.

“You told me the Ways wouldn’t be usable for a few days still,” I slowly said. “That they were still too fragile for large troop movements.”

“They are,” Masego said. “Which is why I believe the other ritual is meant to stabilize them in some way, or at least accelerate the process of that recovery.”

“That can be done?”

“I cannot,” Hierophant reluctantly admitted. “At least, I have not yet grasped how it might be done. It is possible that either Akua or other talented mages have found such a solution, however.”

“So they’re trying to slip away into the Ways,” I pressed.

“That seems likely,” he agreed.

Fuck. And that would mean facing this same army again, only holed up behind the walls of Ater. I could think of few things I wanted less. Juniper was of the same opinion and we hastily mobilized. Hierophant probed with spells and figured out the stabilizing ritual would need to finish before they could begin moving out, so we had a few hours to spare at least. Enough that we arranged for the volunteer companies to be armed and put in front while Sepulchral’s army deployed on the plains below the enemy camp. It all took long enough that Masego confirmed the stabilizing ritual was done by the time we began to march in battle formations, which meant I was now fighting the Battle of Maillac’s Boot again only from the other side.

We couldn’t even muster our whole army for the attack, since at least three thousand had needed to stay behind to keep an eye on the prisoners, so this was going to get messy . Taking a fortified uphill Legion camp with only hasty preparations? We sent the rebels and the volunteer companies as the first wave. To my distaste, I saw that Abreha had sent in her levies first. I could understand the sense in that, professional soldiers didn’t grow on trees, but it would be a slaughter. Still, horns and trumpets sounded. There would be blood. Soldiers marched up the hill, and atop it a thin crest of legionaries formed a shield wall of their own. Steel glittered under the sun, a sea of it.

It was an accident when it happened. They began singing, on one side and the other, with just a few beats of difference.

“Boot goes up and boot goes down –

There goes their callow crown.”

The Legionary’s Song, most people knew it as. Some called it Swallow the World instead, but they were fewer. The legionaries which had been named rebels began to sing it, moments before the legionaries that had been deemed loyal did the same. There was a beat of hesitation, steps slowing, and the songs melded.

“And no matter how high the walls

We’re all gonna make them fall.”

The couplet ended to the sight of the legionaries that’d been climbing the hill stopping. No arrows followed, no devastating barrage of spells or munitions.

“They can send us their pretty Knight,

Their killer all decked in white,

Only now we’ve got one too –

And he always gets his due

.

They got a wizard in the West

But now matter how he’s blessed

We got a Warlock in the Tower

Who’ll use his bones for flour

.

Let them keep their priestly king

Cause no matter how sweet he sings

We’ve got an Empress black as sin

Who’ll take his throne with a grin.”

It was a happy song, or at least meant to be. And yet somehow the tune that the wind carried all the way to me was mournful. A lament.

“We’re the Legion and the Terror

They’re in the right but we’re meaner

So pray hard boy, and pay your toll –

We’re gonna swallow the world whole.”

Atop the hill, legionaries looked at legionaries down it. And someone, some faceless man or woman, threw their shield on the ground. Their sword. And something hung in the air, a weight, as armies that had been savaging each other for weeks looked at each other. Someone in the volunteer companies threw down their own shield, and then it was like floodgates had opened. Shields and swords and helmets fell to the ground. And then, in the most damning of silences, the soldiers left. Nim’s, the rebels, even some of mine – the Thirteenth most of all, but had I not devoured legions before? The Army of Callow spat back out some of those sons and daughters.

Even some of the levies bolted, melting into the river of deserters.

“-Majesty, Your Majesty,” Brandon Talbot called.

I glanced at him.

“What should we do?”

I looked atop the hill. How many of her men had Nim lost? I couldn’t tell, but it was not few. Same for us, and somehow I knew that when I returned to camp prisoners would have joined the flood as well. We’d all brought armies here, waved banners and played games. Won and lost. And after two weeks of brutality, an army was walking away. Could I really blame them? What were any of the people here fighting for ? Even those of us with causes had dragged them through so much dust they could hardly be recognized.

“Nothing,” I finally said. “Nothing. Let them go.”

Even the Black Knight what few had left to flee with. We would meet again in Ater, to end it all.

A song and then silence: so ended the Battle of Kala.

Refuge

“Nothing can ever be repaired. An object broken and mended is so made a different object.”

– Melete the Stern, Atalante philosopher

It all began going wrong when Constanza cured Uncle Tomas.

She’d not meant anything by it. Papa had... not been the same since Mama died. And Constanza had learned much at her mother’s knee, as much as a girl of eight could of alchemy, so she’d broken into the empty laboratory and spent half the night brewing while Papa slept off the liquor. Uncle Tomas, Papa’s older brother who came to check on them everyday, he had this cough. It looked painful and when she’d asked – after he’d called her a cocky little brat in a fond tone, just the way Mama used to – he’d said he couldn’t do hard labour because of it. So Constanza gave him the potion when he came the morning after, said it would take care of the cough, and though her uncle was just humouring her he drank every drop.

The morning after when he came back Uncle Tomas wasn’t coughing but he didn’t look happy: he looked scared . He shook awake Papa and the two of them had a loud argument, though Constanza was sent to her room so she didn’t know what about. Papa, that night, did not drink for the first time since Mama had died. She tried to ask what the shouting had been about, but he mussed her hair and told her not to worry.

“Your uncle thinks we should move to a smaller town, but he worries for nothing,” Papa said.

“What’s he worried about?” Constanza asked.

“Nothing, I told you,” Papa smiled, but then he grew serious. “But you have to stay out of your mother’s laboratory, corazon . It’s dangerous.”

She didn’t dare argue, not when he seemed better now and she might ruin it, so she didn’t even though he was being silly. Constanza wasn’t in danger in there. She felt safest of all in that small, cramped room where she had spent so many hours with her mother. Papa began going back to the shop and it seemed like things would get better, but odd things were happening. Priests, who had avoided the house when Mama still lived, visited several times. They always looked angry and asked a lot of questions. Uncle Tomas only looked pained when she asked him about it. And then one day, armed men came to the house and when Papa tried to resist they broke his arm. Constanza screamed and struggled, but they wrapped her in a bag and she fell unconscious.

She woke up in a beautiful room, her father nowhere in sight. Some of the thugs were there, but there was also a smiling man whose hair was turning white. She cringed away, even though he looked nice and she’d been put down on a comfortable chair.

“Do you know who I am, child?” the man asked.

She shook her head.

“I am Lord Gutierre,” he said. “I rule this town and some of the lands around it. I apologize for how roughly you were brought before me, my men... misunderstood my intentions.”

She bit her lip. It sounded fake to her, but her parents had always said to be wary of nobles. They were dangerous. Constanza nodded like she understood even though it was a lie.

“I am told, young Constanza, that you brewed a potion that cured your uncle’s cough,” Lord Gutierre said.

She nodded. His eyes turned cold.

“Use your words, girl,” Lord Gutierre snapped.

She flinched.

“I did,” she forced out.

“Good,” the lord smiled. “You do not understand quite what you did, child. Your uncle, he was not sick in a common way. He was born with it, so the priests could not cure his ill. Your potion did something Light could not. Did you learn this recipe from your mother?”

Constanza shook her head.

“I made it up,” she admitted, then bit her lip. “I used other recipes to put it together but I didn’t learn it from a book.”

The man was smiling widely, but it did not look friendly at all.

“What a miraculous child you are,” Lord Gutierre chuckled. “My own prodigious concocter.”

He rose to his feet.

“You’ll be staying in my mansion with your father,” the lord said. “Your possessions will be fetched.”

“What do you want from us?” Constanza asked.

“Potions,” Lord Gutierre smiled.

He wasn’t lying, but that didn’t make it better. She got books, those not even Mama had owned, and all the ingredients she asked for. But she had to make whatever Lord Gutierre asked, or she would not be allowed to see Papa. First he asked for little things, some way to turn his hair black again without dye or to remove a scar. Then it grew bigger. A cure for face creases, something that would keep men... vigorous, perfume that made people like you and eventually a poison that made death look like a spring fever. Constanza pretended she couldn’t make the last one, but it was a lie. Even if she hated the lord she loved the challengers, and with every success it was growing easier .

He had her beaten for her ‘failure’. That same night her door was opened and though she was terrified for a moment, it was Papa that came in. He told her to get dressed and they fled through the mansion’s backdoor. Outside waited Uncle Tomas and his family, on a large wagon pulled by two horses. They fled town in the night, but things didn’t get better. Lord Gutierre sent men after them but others began to hunt the families too. Their pursuers had drawn attention to them and now other lords looked for the wagon. Worse, too: some men working for the Royal Conjurer of Helike and a magistrate in the service of the Princess of Tenerife. They travelled east, towards the Waning Woods, and it in the end it was bandits that caught them.

The ambush hit everyone save for Constanza and her cousin Jafet in the first volley. Some men began looting the wagon, as she and her cousin ran. An arrow took Jafet in the back just as they reached the edge of the woods and Constanza was just too slow dragging him. She left him behind, laughing bandits coming after her. There was a fire ahead, the young girl saw. Someone sitting by it, looking at the slaughter through an opening between trees. She ran towards it, tripping on a root and falling to the feet of slender woman with strange skin and smiling eyes. The bandits followed, one letting out a whistle.

“Lucky night,” he said. “Two for one.”

The woman by the fire seemed amused, ignoring the killers and turning to look at Constanza.

“And who would you be, little Named?”

“I’m not Named,” she denied.

“Hey,” the same bandit as earlier said, “I was talkin’ to-”

There was a spurt of blood and his head went flying.

“Don’t interrupt me,” the stranger said. “What do you do, child?”

The other man bandit backed away, but he was already calling for help. Constanza worried her lip.

“I make a, I...” she stumbled, then a knot came undone in her belly.

The words came naturally to her, along with a shiver.

“I’m a concocter.”

“Concocter,” the stranger mulled.

“Please,” Constanza said. “ Please help my family. They’re-”

“Dead, except for the boy,” the woman said. “The last man in the cart just bled out.”

She met the stranger’s eyes.

“Could you have stopped it?”

“Yes.”

Anger surged, but she was powerless. A nothing hunted by many.

“Can you protect me?” Constanza asked.

The woman considered that.

“I have been thinking of settling down,” she mused. “Somewhere in the Woods. So I suppose I could.”

Left unspoken was a question: why should I? The stranger was not moved to protect others, else Constanza’s family would still be alive.

“I’ll work for you,” she said.

“I have no use for subordinates,” the stranger said, then snorted. “Though I suppose I could use a pupil.”

“Then I’ll be that,” Constanza swore. “Until I no longer need you.”

The woman smiled for the first time that night.

“Your name?”

You did not save them , Constanza thought. You get nothing from me, save what you have bought.

“Concocter,” she said, and the monster laughed.

—

The Brocelian loomed ahead, dark and deep and full of terrors. Alexis backed away from Elderman Xavier as he approached. He looked at her with irritating.

“Don’t blame me, girl, blame the Gods,” Elderman Xavier said. “You drew the lot, your fate is in their hands.”

Already they had painted her face silver and rubbed chalk powder into her clothes, but now the old man pressed the last part of it into her hands: a shoddy hunting bow painted silver, along with eight arrows. Behind the elderman the rest of the villagers stood with torches and spears, waiting for the hunt to begin. None looked pleased, but this was old ritual. Their ancestors had brought it from Atalante with them, though Alexis’ father had said it’d grown more savage out here in the west. The Brocelian drew out the best and worst of men.

“You know the rules,” Elderman Xavier said. “You have to keep going deeper until dawn. If you turn back before that we’ll have to kill you, the Gods will take offence otherwise. After dawn you can return, Alexis, but only then.”

“They always die,” Alexis bitterly said. “Father said it’s just a blood sacrifice, sending a girl into the woods for monsters to eat so that the crops grow better, that you’re all-”

The slap rang against her cheek and but she bit down on the whimper, gritting her teeth. The elderman glared down at her.

“If your father had been less of a fool, he wouldn’t have gotten himself killed playing fantassin and you wouldn’t have had to draw,” Elderman Xavier said. “You’ve had enough kindnesses from the village, you and your mother. Now you whine when the village asks in turn? I’ll not have it.”

“I hope you all fucking starve,” Alexis hissed, “every last one of you.”

And then she ran into the woods. It was better than getting slapped again. The villagers shouted angrily, because she hadn’t stayed and played out the play they’d made her learn the lines to, but burn them all. Torches followed her as she ran into the dark but they wouldn’t go far. Everyone was scared of what prowled the Brocelian Forest at night, they wouldn’t dare wander out of sight of the fields. She wanted to stay just out of their sight, maybe find a hiding place to sleep in and pretend she’d done their stupid ritual come dawn, but there were... things moving above in the trees. It was moving slowly, coiling around the branches, but it looked large . Heart pounding in fear, clutching her useless bow and stupid arrows, she began to run deeper in. Deeper into the nightmare.

It was like there was something about her scent that was drawing monsters to her. Things crawled and flew and ran, wolves larges as horses and little critters chittering false promises in eerie voices. Alexis ran through the dark woods, knees bleeding from where she had fallen and shivering in cold from when she had jumped into a river to escape a massive snake. Her clothes were torn and something that looked like a fox but with malevolent red eyes had clawed her side – the wound was bleeding black, ugly and painful – but she forced herself to keep moving. If she stopped, even for a moment, they would catch up to her. She had to keep running through the nightmare until she reached dawn.

And as the moon began to descend, she began to think she might have. The monsters weren’t following her anymore. She’d gone through another river and fallen down a rocky slope – her cheek was bruised and she had a black eye – but she couldn’t hear anything behind her anymore. She slowed, risking a look back, and there was nothing. Nothing at all, she finally realized. The woods were eerily silent. Stumbling forward, Alexis found a clearing where tall raised stones stood under moonlight. Instinct told her to stay clear of them and she was glad to follow it. They felt... sad. So deeply sad someone might drown in it. The sensation distracted her long enough she didn’t hear the breathing until it was close.

Something massive stepped out from between the trees. Tall as two men and bristling with anger, the monster looked like a boar. Its tusks were pale, but touched with red: it had killed tonight, and its cruel eyes said it would again. That was why the monsters had stopped, Alexis thought. Something that even they feared waited ahead. She tried to flee back the way she’d come, but the boar was so large there could be no contest. It broke through trees as she ran back up the rocky slope she’d hurt herself slipping on, but her heart seized in her throat as she saw what waited ahead. By the river, rows and rows of small creatures were waiting with cruel pale smiles.

“Safe, safe,” they chittered. “Come, come.”

“Fuck,” Alexis wept.

Was this how she died? Devoured by scavengers or gore by a boar? At the bottom of the slope the boar was waiting for her, huffing mockingly. Alexis has run for so long and now she was just going to die having done nothing?

“No,” she hissed. “No. You want me, you fucking animals? Come and earn it .”

It was a shoddy bow but it was strung, and she nocked the arrow. The boar let out a loud porcine screech but she loosed an arrow, blindly and in a panic. It sunk into an eye in a streak of silver – how, if the arrows weren’t painted? – but the monster only grew furious, smashing rocks as if it meant to destroy the very slope she stood on. Alexis let out a sobbing breath, but it got caught in her throat when a hand was laid on her shoulder. A woman was standing besides her, lovely and cold in the light of the moon.

“So you’re why they’re so riled up,” the stranger said.

“I,” Alexis choked. “You- who are you?”

The question was ignored, the woman withdrawing the hand and looking her up and down.

“Who are you meant to be?” she asked.

Alexis swallowed. The tone had been calm, but something in it warned against refusing to answer the question.

“The silver huntress,” she said, “who founded the city of-”

“-Atalante by hunting all the monsters that lived there over a single night,” the stranger finished, sounding amused. “It has been a while since I’ve seen this ritual. And longer since it’s been anything but a harvest fair.”

“It still is,” Alexis tiredly said. “They sent me because the crops have been getting worse for years.”

Below them the monster screeched but somehow she still felt calm.

“What they send you for is never as important as they think,” the woman said. “It’s what you do with it that matters. And what is it you’re going do to, child? Survive the night and return to them?”

“ No ,” Alexis snarled. “Fuck them. I’ll make my own way.”

The stranger considered her. Stones shook and shattered. The boar would soon be upon them.

“There is a way,” the woman said. “For you to be the victor of this hunt. To kill your beast.”

“And you’ll teach me?” Alexis asked, hope stuck in her throat.

“It would make you my pupil,” the woman said.

“Then I’ll be that,” Alexis replied, fingers tight around her silver bow.

The stranger smiled.

—

Lysander was a slave.

He’d not been born one. He had his feckless mother to thank for that, who’d gotten them all so deeply in debt to a magister that the entire family had been forced to sell themselves into slavery to avoid execution. Lysander didn’t hold much of a grudge for that, in truth. Hardly seemed to be a point when he’d seen her fed to a ravenous chimera. His father and siblings had taken it badly, two speaking unwisely enough they got sent to the fighting pits for it, but Lysander’s own silence had seen Magister Laskaris take a shine to him. Not so much that the man had refrained from what he must consider a jest at the boy’s expense, however: Lysander was now tending to the same beasts that had eaten his mother.

His sisters had been made servants instead, which was a position both lesser and safer. Being one of the slaves who tended to the beasts of the Menagerie was a prestigious position, for it gave rights that slaves in other stations could only dream of, but that came at a cost. Usually, at least on slave a sennight was eaten by one of the more aggressive beasts trying to either feed or wash it. Being the youngest attendant and completely without allies, Lysander found himself given the most dangerous of the assignments repeatedly: the chimeras, the fae, the Praesi tigers and worst of all the drake.

Old Beggar, so named for the white markings that made him looked like he had white beard and hair and his tendency to ask for food even moments after being fed, was the single most vicious creature in all of the Menagerie. It killed on a whim, not just to eat, and whatever sorceries the magisters had used on it to let it survive so far from Levant had made it double in size. It had to be fed five times a day, three if it was a fighting one, and the latter were the days that got people killed. Old Beggar was not above venting its frustrations by impaling servants come to wash its scales before the fight. Which was why, for ten weeks in a row, Lysander was given that assignment.

The first time he had, he’d thought he was going to die. The drake was furious before he ever entered and did not like to be washed besides, so it’d been only moments before he tore through the bucket and slammed Lysander against the wall. Knowing there was nothing he could do, the boy stayed down. Better the poisoned stinger than being ripped apart and eaten still alive. He looked up at the sky through the grid, tiredly waiting for the sting, but it did not come. Old Beggar instead loomed over him, sniffing at his neck. Then it hissed and Lysander, past caring, pushed its head away. The drake chortled, then shuffled away and began wrecking his pen to vent his anger.

Lysander dipped out, picked up another bucket under the baffled stares of his fellow slaves and returned to wash the damned drake. More baffling still, it let him. Magister Laskaris summoned him that night, another few magisters with him. They cast spells on him until a strange-looking woman began to chuckle.

“It’s not a special ability,” she said. “You broke the child, Anandos. Lack of fear pheromones did the trick, Old Beggar did not recognize him as prey.”

Magister Laskaris, fond of his little ironies, made him the designated minder for the drake. Now that’d he proved to have some use, the other slaves began speaking with him. He was not just another corpse-in-waiting, not anymore. Most of it was gossip which he cared little for, but an old woman called Phocia liked to trade his honeycakes for stories of far away. Most of what she knew was from where the beasts of the Menagerie had come from, but that was interesting enough.

“We didn’t catch the fae ourselves,” Phocia told him one day. “They’re from the Waning Woods, originally, but the Magisterium bought them in Mercantis.”

“The fat crooks captured a fairy?” Lysander replied, skeptical.

Phocia shook her head.

“There’s some mad Named who set up shop in the woods,” she said. “Made a settlement she named Refuge near a gate into Arcadia. Calls herself the Lady of the Lake, apparently, and she traded a few favours with the Consortium so they’d help her set up her place. One of them was capturing a few fae for them.”

“What did she make a settlement for?” Lysander asked.

“That’s the funny part,” Phocia said. “Some sort of school for Named and fools, they say. Apparently she teaches anyone who comes if they’ve got the stuff. Overheard some magister who was surprised how many people were taking her up on it.”

“Named and fools, huh,” Lysander murmured.

The seed was planted, though he struggled to burn it out. The idea would not leave him. There were few animals who troubled him in the Menagerie these days, as he’d found he had a knack with them, but it was Old Beggar that he spent most time with. He’d begun to teach the drake tricks when other slaves weren’t looking. Picking up a bucket, walking around in a circle, playing dead. A girl called Axia had seen him, once, but pushing her into the pen had taken care of that. The drake was no less vicious than before with people other than him. It wouldn’t be enough, though. Old Beggar did not obey the young slave, not really. It was more like indulgence in exchange for treats.

There had to be a way, Lysander thought, to convince the drake to help him. Did it not also want to leave this place, to be freed of chains? Except they weren’t the same, not really. Old Beggar was prized, pampered and gloried. Used only to slaughter fighters for the glory of the Magisterium. Lysander was the kind of thing the Magisterium stepped on without noticing while going through its day. Not all slaves were equal. And that, that angered him. In a way he’d not felt in years. The pit should be the same for everyone: rats one and all, writhing in the same dark. That even in Below’s chamber pot there would be favourites rankled. So when Lysander entered the pen and Old Beggar hissed in displeasure at his nap being interrupted, the boy went still.

He left the pen, abandoning the bucket on the ground, and headed for the stables. There he grabbed an instrument from the racks and returned to the drake. No, Lysander had never learned how to convince others to help him. That was not the lesson of the Menagerie. But down here, he had learned much of the nature of chains. The whip he’d taken trailed against the floor, Old Beggar eyeing it warily. Lysander might not know how to convince this beast, but he knew how to be its master. The whip cracked, the drake screamed, and the same day the two of them broke out of the Menagerie and the entire cursed city hosting it. They flew north.

The Beastmaster figured that if he kept heading that way long enough, he was bound to run into Refuge.

—

Refuge was a nowhere place, but it was a paradise compared to Mercantis. Indrani might own nothing but clothes on her back, but right now she was still the richest she’d ever been: for the first time in her life she owned herself . The Lady had cut her loose not long after bringing her here, indifferent to Indrani’s worries.

“There’s a shed downhill with tents and supplies that everyone can take from,” Ranger said.

Indrani nodded.

“And what are the rules here?” she asked.

The Lady of the Lake flicked her nose.

“Don’t piss me off,” she said. “What else would there be?”

There must have been maybe a hundred people in Refuge, laid out haphazardly in clumps where people had dug fire pits and raised tents or shacks, and Indrani learned after finally finding the damned supply shed that few of them were friendly- except for the few merchants from Mercantis, which were a little too friendly. Indrani kept her hand on her knife whenever she saw them. She wasn’t going back to the city, she wasn’t . She dragged her tent as far away from them as possible, heading out in the direction she’d seen Ranger disappear in. A dozen tents were already there, most with fires of their own. There seemed to be an unspoken division. One side a girl with orange hair was reading a book, another was glaring at everyone while she fletched arrows and two dark-haired boys were talking quietly as they skinned rabbits from a pile. On the other side, a dozen youths from the Free Cities were talking quickly to each other in Aenian-peppered tradertongue.

Hesitating, Indrani pitched her tent on the side with fewer people. Or tried to, at least. For some reason it insisted on staying crooked even when she hammered in the stakes just right. The two girls were laughing at her, but one of the boys rose to his feet with a sigh. Her hand dropped to her knife when he came close.

“No need for that,” the boy snorted. “You’re the Lady’s latest, right? I’m the Nightingale.”

Indrani stared blankly at him.

“The famous singer and duellist?” the boy said. “The greatest lover in Procer?”

Indrani looked him up and down, noting the scrawny shoulders, and the stare turned distinctly skeptical.

“Look,” the boy sighed, “just call me Raymond. Do you want help with your tent or not?”

“What’d you want in exchange?” Indrani bluntly asked.

“Well, someone learned the lay of this place real quick,” Raymond snorted. “Nothing onerous. Just your story, how you got here.”

Indrani bit her lip.

“Tell me about the camp too,” she said, “and it’s a deal.”

She insisted he pay up front, which was just good sense, and they sat on a log afterwards after he’d gone for parchment and a quill. Deciding to start simply, Indrani asked about the youths from the Free Cities first.

“Oh, them?” Raymond said with disdain. “Just a few enterprising souls from Helike. Rumour has it one of them is a prince in disguise, but I’ve my doubts. Now and then we get their like, noble’s children who stick it out here a few weeks so they can gloat about surviving the Lady’s training when they go back to their cushy homes.”

“So the people on our side are different,” Indrani said.

“Well spotted,” the boy cheerfully said. “Your truly is known as the Nightingale, of course-”

“It sounds like a girl’s name,” Indrani mused.

“It is a singer’s Name,” Raymond stiffly insisted. “With a hallowed history, which just happens to have been mostly held by women as a matter of pure coinci-”

“So who’re the others?” Indrani cheerfully interrupted.

The boy sighed.

“My good friend over there grimly ignoring us is the Beastmaster,” Raymond said. “Taciturn fellow, not much use for us. The glaring beauty over there is the Silver Huntress – the Lady’s favourite, but also a girl of... strong opinions. I would not suggest approaching her without reason.”

Raymond sounded like someone who’d already got socked in the stomach for trying that, Indrani decided. Her eyes flicked to the last of them, the girl with the wildly coloured hair. Her eyes were the same orange, Indrani realized with the start. Was it fae blood?

“And last is the Concocter,” the Nightingale said. “She’s good for trades but she doesn’t fight. Good person to ask when you’re getting started – she’ll loan you in exchange for a favour down the line.”

“Loan what?”

“Everything,” the boy grinned. “That’s the beauty of this place, Indrani. You get what you earn or what you trade for. What is it you’re good at?”

Singing and dancing , Indrani almost replied. The Three Dances and Seven Tongues they’d been teaching her. But that’d been the slave, not her.

“I’m learning to use a bow,” she said instead.

Raymond hummed.

“I’d advise learning to hunt,” he said. “Fresh meat is always prized. And Lysander will teach you how to skin animals in exchange for the first set of skins, I’d imagine. He did with me.”

She eyed him curiously.

“Why are you here, anyway?” Indrani asked. “You don’t seem like the sort.”

“I am a man of the world, I go where the wind takes me,” the Nightingale airily replied, then wilted under her unimpressed stare.

He cleared his throat.

“I am learning the sword,” Raymond admitted. “It so happens that there are several ten-sun duellists after my life for... various reasons. I will learn all I can from the Lady of the Lake and return to meet my fate when I am a better match for it.”

Indrani considered that.

“Good luck,” she said, and found she meant it.

“Pshaw to luck,” the Nightingale dismissed. “Give me a story instead, yours! I am in dire need of a tale worth penning a song for.”

He was enthusiastic about writing down what she thought was a rather boring story, though he was particularly interested in how Ranger had taken her from the city and the Consortium. He was muttering to himself as he flounced away, disappearing into his tent from which the sounds of a harp being plucked at began to waft. Some of the fires around had food roasting on them but no one seemed inclined to share, so Indrani wandered back down into the larger camp. There were some nuts and berries in the supply shed, which she helped herself to. It filled her stomach, but she needed to find a way to eat better soon. To her relief, though, the Lady of the Lake emerged from the woods in the afternoon. Raymond had told her Ranger had a hidden mansion somewhere further in where no one but her and her foreign lover who infrequently visited ever went.

The Ranger sat by a fire and everyone gathered to her, Indrani included. It was not a lesson she offered, though, but something more pragmatic.

“Tomorrow I’ll lead a hunt,” Ranger said. “Southeast, where the hydra’s been lairing. Anyone with a bow and a blade can come, but we’ll be going to my pace and everyone who falls behind gets left behind.”

None even tried to argue with that.

“Do well and you get taught,” Ranger said, eyes sweeping everyone. “Same terms as always.”

Indrani did not know these terms, but already knew the answer she’d get if she asked about them. What did she have to give in exchange? Not much, that was the trouble, but she needed to go on that hunt. The Lady had barely glanced at her since bringing her to camp and hadn’t Indrani just been warned? If she fell behind she would be left behind. She knew better than to try to follow as she was, though. She had a sum of three arrows, a bow with a single string and a knife that hadn’t been sharpened in a week. She didn’t even have a cloak.

Indrani decided to approach the only other archer she’d seen, the Silver Huntress, and request a loan for a favour. The girl glanced at her and, before she could even speak, tossed one of the arrows she’d just fletched her way. Indrani caught it.

“That’s all you get from me,” the Silver Huntress said. “Keep at this and the next one will come through my bow.”

The Beasthunter – no, Beastmaster wasn’t it? – was only slightly more friendly. At his feet a large hound with odd-coloured eyes loyally sat.

“You’re not Named,” the boy said. “Raymond says you’re getting there, but he’s been wrong before and I don’t trade with... visitors. Come back when you have more than a beggar’s bowl to offer.”

Swallowing her pride, she went back to Raymond. The Nightingale was apologetic but firm.

“I’ve only been able to trade supplies for myself,” he said. “I can’t spare any, Indrani, and I need to be on that hunt. It’s the way to get sword lessons without relying on the Lady’s mood.”

He let her use his whetstone out of what she knew to be pity, but she was not in a position to be proud. Her knife would be sharp, at least. At last Indrani followed the advice Raymond had given her and sought the Concocter. With that orange hair, she was hard to miss. Supposedly she had a shack of her own deeper in the woods, for brewing, but she spent much of her time in camp. It was safer here. The other girl closed the book when Indrani approached, face polite but eyes flat.

“You’re not a known quantity, so you don’t get to trade favours,” the Concocter immediately said. “If you need food or advice I’ll take labour for it. I’ve need of firewood and water from the lake.”

“It’s arrows I want,” Indrani admitted. “And a cloak to borrow. Maybe some better boots if there are any to have.”

The other girl studied her a moment.

“You’re trying to follow on the hunt tomorrow,” she said.

Indrani nodded. The book opened again, a sharp sound of dismissal.

“Come back when you’ve found more reasonable expectations,” the Concocter said. “This is a waste of my time.”

“I-“

“I said,” the Concocter sharply interrupted, “you should leave .”

Indrani was itching to punch her in the face, but... No, she thought. But what ? Indrani had asked what the rules were here, and she’d gotten little more than a shrug. What was stopping her from taking a swing if she wanted to? Always, in Mercantis, there had been something above her. If she stepped out of line she would be beaten or scolded or starved, and so she did not step out of line. Now though, there was nothing except in the way except a question. Back then, when she’d stopped, had the consequences just been an excuse? A lie she told herself about why she didn’t fight back. A reason to stay at the bottom, where you didn’t have to live with your decisions because you made none.

Indrani breathed out, closed her fist, and punched the Concocter in the face.

She wasn’t a great fighter but neither was the other girl and she had surprise on her side. Indrani got bruises and a black eye but she beat the other girl until she stopped fighting back, bruised and bleeding. Then she limped up somehow feeling the Lady’s gaze on her and took the Concocter’s stuff. Everything except her clothes, and then she went in the girl’s tent and took the potions there too. She went down in the camp and traded books for arrows, a cloak and new pair of boots. The potions she kept, stashing them in her tent. What was the Concocter do, fight her and lose again? She learned the answer to that just after sundown, when two people came into her tent.

The Silver Huntress and the Beastmaster beat her bloody, stopping shy of breaking bone but nothing else, and took everything back. Indrani was left moaning on the floor of her tent, without even the boots she’d traded for. When morning came she could barely move, much less go on the hunt, but somehow Indrani did not despair. She felt, if anything, invigorated. Choices and consequences, huh.

She could get used to living this way.

—

John wasn’t sure when it’d begun.

When he’d found the book, he figured. He could barely read but the drawings had been beautiful and one name had drawn his attention: Sir Erland Halls, the Hunter. That was his name too! Halls. His family barely used it anymore, said it was a bad time to make that sort of claim, but it was engraved on the threshold of their house. Erland Halls, he learned, had been a famous knight in the old days. He’d slain great beasts and a dragon, ridden out to the gates of faraway Aksum and dared its rulers to send their worst at him. For a whole day he’d slain one monster after another and returned home unbeaten. He’d died, the book said, killing a villain called the Diabolist during some ancient invasion of the Dread Empire.

John asked his parents about it, but they told him to forget he’d ever seen the book before putting it away in mother’s locked office. It just wouldn’t leave his mind, though, the story. So he waited until father came back from having a few drinks with friends one night and asked again, all subtle-like.

“We’re descended from him,” Father proudly said. “From his third son. Our line’s never been noble, but blood is blood.”

He then grimaced.

“Mind you, Johnny, don’t go talking about it,” he said. “The Marquess might rule but the Eyes are everywhere. The last thing we need is for them to think we have... sympathies.”

That should have been the end of it, but somehow it wasn’t. The story stayed with him, like a stone in his boot. John hated cloth and hated selling, which boded ill for the only child of drapiers. Most of his days he spent with other restless youths in the streets, avoiding his lessons, but even that was losing its satisfaction. Wasn’t there more to do? Sir Erland had been a knight and John couldn’t even ride a horse, but that wasn’t the part of the story that’d mattered. Erland had been a hunter . He’d slain beasts, done deeds worthy of being done. So John decided to try the same.

He was no good with a bow and kind of middling with a sword – Mother thought he might try for a position in the Marquess’ service so she encouraged him at first – but John found that he could make a spear sing. All he needed now was something to hunt. Vale was deplorably bereft of anything that could even remotely qualify as an adventure, so he went outside. Hunting game at first, paying huntsmen with his pocket money so they’d take him. When he got good enough he wandered off on his own, looking further and further. Boars. Wolves. Bears.

He brought home the prizes and even got himself tattooed to celebrate. Ancient Levantine tribal marks, the artist assured him. They looked pretty sick. Still, something was missing. The hunts were starting to lose their allure even as he kept at them fervently, until one day he found strange tracks. Like a wolf’s but larger, and... erratic. The creature did not avoid villages the way a wolf would. He went off in pursuit, through a thunderstorm and in the wake of what looked like a fight between the Legions and bandits, only to find his quarry: it was a greatwolf, those massive beasts orcish wolf riders used for battle.

This one was alone and half mad with grief, its rider nowhere in sight, and it attacked viciously. The fight was brutal but John prevailed by the skin of his teeth, taking hard wounds over his torso. Strangely enough, though, they weren’t paining him all that much. So it was on his feet that he stood when another young man found him in the hills where he’d made camp after skinning his prize. The other boy looked at the dead great wolf angrily, pulling at his furs.

“You did this?”

“I did,” John proudly said.

“ Why ?”

He considered that, for a long moment.

“Because I am a hunter,” John finally replied.

Simple but no less true for it. The air shivered with the weight of what he’d just said, and John wondered if his perseverance had somehow reached the Heavens. The other young man only looked more pissed, before suddenly sighing.

“I wanted it, but you got to it first,” he said. “I am the Beastmaster, Hunter.”

John had no bloody idea what was going on, so he smiled as amicably as he could.

“A pleasure to meet you, Beastmaster,” he said.

The other boy snorted, as if doubting it.

“Slim pickings out here,” he said. “You ever been to Refuge?”

This, John Halls decided, had the ring of fate to it.

“Tell me more,” the Hunter smiled.

Interlude: South

“Coincidence is just fate bereft of faith.”

– Dread Emperor Malevolent I, the Unhallowed

Kallia liked to think of Mercantis as what would happen if a city ate other cities until it grew fat.

It helped her fix the story of this place in her mind and that was the most important thing for someone who wanted to prowl its nights. Which she often did. Though the Painted Knife was the leader of the band of five that had been sent to the City of Bought and Sold, she preferred to leave handling the merchant lords to Rhodon. The Royal Conjurer had been a powerful man in the court of Helike for many years, before fleeing the Tyrant’s ascension, and he knew how to deal with the fat schemers that infested this city like maggots would a corpse. And where he struggled, well, there were few in Mercantis whose buried skeletons could not be found out when Alain and Angelique both took to looking for them.

The Relentless Magistrate had toppled three merchant lords, two of which had been members of the Forty-Sole Court, since arriving in the city. He’d done this by proving materially and in excruciating detail how they were breaking the laws in the Consortium, causing a feeding frenzy among rivals. Angelique’s own work never saw the light of day, the very lucrative – and technically legal – trade of poisons and favours she’d begun at the highest levels of influence granting her access to halls of power where no foreigners would ever be allowed to stand otherwise. Rhodon had not been shy in using them to get obstacles out of the way when it came to the task the Grand Alliance had assigned their band: burning Praesi influence out of the city.

And yet, for all the work of those three, in the end it was Teresa and Kallia who found the first hint of the plot. They’d gone drinking outside the city on one of the outlying shores, the Grizzled Fantassin calling an old acquaintance who’d ‘put on the yoke’ and become one of the mercenaries permanently contracted to protect Mercantis instead of a proper army. Teresa drank and brawled with the man through the evening, but when their glances took on another tone Kallia made herself scarce. She’d gone out to look for another place to drink – and perhaps a man of her own to throw backs with – but instead what the Painted Knife found was an assassination.

Two corpses later a grateful mercenary captain told her everything he knew, which in truth wasn’t much. Many officers had recently been offered large sums of money to accept retirement. The captain had refused, preferring the soldier’s life, and now wondered if some of the other mercenaries he’d thought uninterested in retiring were corpses instead of truly gone to Dormer. Come morning, Kallia brought the oddity up to Teresa and watched the old woman’s face harden.

“Someone’s tightening their reins on the mercenary companies,” the Grizzled Fantassin said. “Placing their own officers in key positions.”

The Painted Knife grinned.

“A plot,” she enthused. “We must defeat it.”

Finally, something she could do instead of exploring the city and struggling with the impulse to cut everyone in this place who owned ‘indentured servants’. Even Wastelanders despised slavery, for all their many other sins. They brought their findings to Rhodon, who punctured their ardour.

“It is Merchant Prince Mauricius consolidating his position,” the Royal Conjurer said. “This is not likely to be a large enough scandal to topple him should it come out, and even if it were such an outcome is not desirable. His most likely replacement is more inclined to the Empire than the Grand Alliance.”

The Consortium usually kept its Praesi clients at a distance, Rhodon explained, but the sheer amount of coin the Dread Empire poured into the city meant it tended to have friends in high places. The perceived high-handedness of the Grand Alliance and plans of a great city at the heart of the continent had only encouraged that trend.

“Seems odd he’d bother,” Angelique told them over dinner, after being informed. “The Merchant Prince already controls funding for mercenaries unless contradicted by two thirds of the Forty-Stole Court. What are these men going to listen to, if not the money?”

“Yet he is not a man with a reputation for pointless action,” Kallia frowned.

“No,” Rhodon murmured. “So what is it that has the man afraid of being contradicted by two thirds of the Forty-Stole Court?”

And so once more they went on the hunt, for anything that would turn so many of the most powerful men and women in the city against Mauricius was bound to be important. Teresa returned to the outer shores to try to get a grasp on how many of the mercenary companies were being subverted and meanwhile Kallia set her finest bloodhound on the hunt.

“The Merchant Prince’s affairs are all protected by law,” Alain Monduc said. “Even his most mundane papers are considered as being ‘of state’. There is no way for foreigners to access them, which will limit us to witnesses.”

Kallia did not know the average lifespan of a witness in Mercantis that a wealthy man wanted dead, but at a guess she’d venture days. Meaning that if Alain’s investigations were caught on to, their sole evidence was going to be swiftly disappeared.

“Ah but that’s where you have it wrong, darling,” the Poisoner girlishly smiled. “There is simply no lawful way for foreigners to access such papers.”

The Magistrate looked like he was choking on sheer outrage, to the Poisoner’s open delight, but when copies of such papers appeared on his table just before noon her mastered his anger.

“Copies are not strictly illegal,” Alain stiffly said. “And there is some leeway in the process of gathering evidence for a trial.”

Angelique looked rather robbed by the lack of explosion, which was probably half the reason the Magistrate had forced himself to be cordial. Weeks of following paper trails and Kallia being sent out to follow men and eavesdrop on their conversations at night ultimately led the Relentless Magistrate to an odd conclusion.

“Mauricius is not preparing a coup,” Alain announced, “but preparing against one. Every single measure we’ve unearthed was defensive in nature.”

Which made little sense, for the First Prince had strictly warned against trying to remove Mauricius from his position and the Black Queen had shrugged her assent. Even if Kallia did get her hands on something that could topple the Merchant Prince, she was to pass that information to the Grand Alliance instead so that it might be used as leverage in negotiations. So who was the Merchant Prince afraid would remove him?

“It could be the Tower,” Angelique said. “Rumour has it that he had murdered the man Malicia wanted as Merchant Prince instead.”

“The Empress has a reputation has a practical woman,” Rhodon replied. “It would be unlike her to force an enemy where she could court an ally instead. Besides, meddling too deeply in the affairs of Mercantis would see it react harshly. It would look for protection against her, not fall in line.”

“Let us pray the Empress fumbled the pig, then,” Teresa said. “It would be a gift of the Gods for Mercantis to go the way of the Grand Alliance. We could use the gold.”

Kallia looked questioningly at Alain, but the other Proceran seemed just as baffled by the expression. Arlesite , the man mouthed with a shrug.

“But whatever it is he’s afraid of, he’s nearly covered,” Teresa continued. “He’s got a little over half the mercenary companies in his pocket now. The key officers at least.”

“If it were a Praesi plot, he would not have spent a fortune of his coin warding against it,” Alain opined. “He would have passed the matter to us. He’s certainly not been shy about using us as bears in his pit so far.”

True enough. The verbal duels of the Royal Conjurer and the Praesi ambassador had turned into a form of local entertainment and they’d all been tacitly allowed to go after Praesi spies in the city so long as there was little collateral damage.

“There’s not many people left who could pull off a coup,” the Poisoner noted. “The Black Queen is in Praes, the Free Cities in another civil war and even the merchants would balk at taking the Dead King’s coin.”

“If there is no outside backing, it has to be an internal enemy,” Rhodon mused.

“Which makes no sense,” Angelique said. “Only the Forty-Stole Court could depose him and it’s more divided than it was before he was elected. He’s been playing the faction that wants a rapprochement with the Grand Alliance against the Praesi stooges to carve out a faction in the middle. No one has the votes to depose him, so what is it that he’s afraid of?”

Kallia sighed. She’d never enjoyed plots and schemes. It had almost gotten her killed in Levante when she’d failed to figure out whose body the Spirit of Vengeance wore during the day, if the- suddenly she paused.

“What if the vote were rigged?” the Painted Knife asked. “You said that the Empress might want to be rid of him, Angelique, and Rhodon you once told us that his most likely replacement is in the Empire’s pocket.”

The Royal Conjurer hummed.

“Mind control?” he said.

“I was thinking of possession,” Kallia admitted. “I have known spirits that could ride men unseen and nudge their thoughts.”

“It would explain why he might expect to be able to use the mercenaries against the Forty Stoles and not be murdered for it afterwards,” the Poisoner mused. “If he freed them and then made a show of returning control, it might instead strengthen his position.”

“The entire city would sing his praises,” Alain agreed. “A man can do much, with the love of the people behind him and debts of gratitude among the great.”

“The best contracts are those you snipe another company to,” the Grizzled Fantassin grinned. “Let’s see if we can’t get all that gratitude headed our way instead, yes?”

The plan was weeks in the making. Angelique had to burn through most of her favours and it still wasn’t enough: they had to knock out guards so they could enter the Court unseen. Alain guided them through the halls, as the only one of them who’d ever been in here before – when he had presented evidence in trials – and Teresa paid off the mercenaries that’d agreed to help them smuggle in the barrels over the last few days. It still almost when to the Hells when an early guard patrol ran into them, but the Painted Knife got in close and dropped them before they could raise alarm. They rolled the four great wooden barrels with them into the great hall after Alain kicked the door open, to the great anger of the merchant lords in assembly.

The Royal Conjurer obeyed Kallia’s shouted order and gathered his magic, striking down with great gouts of flame and blowing up the barrels. Mist swept over the hall, still holy and in heavy enough a cloud that it would disrupt either spells or possession.

And then, to Kallia’s horror, nothing at all happened.

The shouts from the furious merchant lords got louder and the Painted Knife wondered if she had just ruined the relations between the Grand Alliance and Mercantis when one bloodcurdling scream pierced through the din. Merchant Prince Mauricius dropped out of his seat, screaming in a way that no throat could, and when he rose flakes of his face began to crumple. Underneath was a pitch-black skin, but there was nothing human about it.

“Devil,” someone shouted.

Kallia cocked her head to the side. Huh. They’d been wrong but it had worked anyhow, so... win?

Win , she decided, and grinned.

—

Penthes’ tall walls had kept the city in the war long past the time where a man less desperate than Exarch Prodocius would have surrendered.

Penthes has lost all its territories save a few holdout river fortresses, stood without allies and the city was beginning to starve. The supplies and mage support the Tower had sent were not enough for a city-state of that size to stay fed when encircled. Now that Basilia’s army was equipped with proper dwarven siege engines, the walls were no longer a surmountable hindrance either. In truth, if not for the presence of the Bellerophon army beneath the walls Basilia would have already ordered the city to be stormed. She’d had a swath of the southern walls reduced to rubble by trebuchet bombardment, but she was wary of committing her army to investing the city if there was a chance the Republic would strike at her while she did.

Helike still had the finest army in the Free Cities, but its numbers had thinned. Basilia had long been aware that one severe defeat was all that stood between her and the Helikean army ending as a fighting force for a few years. It was why she’d been so aggressive in her campaigning: so long as she was on the offence, she could force the battles on terms favourable to her. Now that streak of victories had been dragged to a halt, first by the presence of Bellerophon at the siege and then by what had followed Basilia’s army entrenching for a few months: diplomacy . The Secretariat had been the first to send envoys, but Mercantis had not been far behind and eventually even Atalante – at the urging of First Prince Cordelia, her agents said – had sent representatives.

Nicae and Stygia already had envoys, arguably, as Magister Zoe Ixioni and Princess Zenobia Vasilakis were personally leading the troops their vassal states were contributing to the war. Not that the vassalage was official, or for that matter Zoe Ixioni’s rule. Officially speaking she was still only a magister, though one who’d been voted emergency powers by the Magisterium without an end to those powers every being specified. Basilia tended to think better of Zenobia, who at least had no pretend she was anything but an absolute ruler when she’d crowned herself princess of Nicae. Regardless of the petty details, the fact was that six cities of the League all had envoys or armies here beneath the walls of seventh and last.

General Basilia found it highly amusing that while the city of Penthes and its ruling exarch had been made political nonentities, the siege of Penthes itself had turned into a diplomatic hotbed for the entire League of Free Cities. It was the sort of irony Kairos Theodosian would have delighted in, she suspected, and might even have gone out of his way to arrange. She had not, but Basilia was no Tyrant. That was not her calling, nor did she feel as if it should be. Ye of Helike, do as you will. The testament of the last Theodosian had not invited his people to follow in his wake: they were to do as they wished and nothing else, that was the very point.

Basilia had found her own wishes leading her to the walls of Penthes, to the threshold of what might very well be the defining hour of the League of Free Cities.

It was not delusion on her part to believe that. Zenobia and Ixioni agreed: there was an urgency in the air, a desperation. At first the Atalante priest-philosophers that’d been sent as delegates had only visited to sneer and snipe at the proceedings, but now they came by every other day and were negotiation in earnest. They couldn’t afford not to, when Delos had sent one of the highest-ranking members of the Secretariat – Nestor Ikaroi – as its representative and begun to seriously back a reform of the League of Free Cities. The preachers were terrified of being left out in the cold, surrounded on all sides by states bound in alliance. Still, for all that the talks were moving it would have been a lie to say they were succeeding.

“Ikaroi isn’t moving an inch even when we give ground elsewhere,” Magister Zoe noted as the day’s talks ended. “He’s usually a reasonable man, so I expect he’s under orders by the broader Secretariat.”

Basilia made a noise that conveyed both agreement and disgruntlement.

“His current concessions are not insignificant,” Princess Zenobia said. “Formal recognition of the imperial realm of Aenia and you as its empress is not something I thought we’d get out of the Secretariat without putting a sword to their throat. The scribes hate change the way a cat hates water.”

“They would have been forced to bend on that sooner or later,” Basilia said. “I hold the land, even if they might wish it otherwise. Getting me named protector of the League is where the power lies.”

In practice it was not Basilia herself who was named but the imperial office of Aenia, which she happened to hold. It had been her notion to name the empire that would unite Nicae, Stygia and Helike together after the great Aenos Basileon, the sole claim to unifying authority in the region that predated the foundation of the League. It was the general’s intention to follow in footsteps of Basileon and unite the Free Cities once more, but she knew she must be careful lest she follow in the footsteps of Dread Empress Triumphant instead. Even if she could take all of the League by force, she could not hope to hold them. No, better to first unite the western cities – Helike for soldiery, Nicae for trade and Stygia for fields and mines – and let her successors finish the work.

For that, though she needed an edge that would prevent the four other cities from turning on her empire in a decade after the dangers had passed. Something that would set Helike apart from the rest. To secure that she’d proposed to the other cities of the League the creation of an office under its auspices: protector of the League of Free Cities. She’d been careful not to outright step on the powers of the Hierarch, instead suggesting the protector would lead the armies of the League in time of war and see to the defence if its borders against all foreign powers. Tying that authority to rule of Aenia had been the scheme, as it would ensure that Basilia’s line would have hereditary power over the League of Free Cities.

Delos was balking at that, Ikaroi’s suggested compromise of Basilia herself holding such power for her lifetime and then it being subject to election like the office of Hierarch being the most they were willing to offer. Atalante wasn’t as entrenched in its opposition but was demanding instead that anyone holding such an office must follow the House of Light, which was... controversial. Trying to throw slices of Penthesian territory at the Secretariat had yielded no further concessions, even when Basilia had gotten serious and offered strategically important border fortresses. Mercantis seemed to be playing all sides, Merchant Prince Mauricius’ envoys propping up Delos and Atalante publicly while making her assurances of support in private. So long as the privileged position of the City of Bought and Sold was maintained they would not go against her, they swore.

Considering Mercantis had served as middlemen when she’d needed siege engines from the dwarves, Basilia could not simply toss the snakes out of her tent the way she wanted to. She might need the Consortium again before it was all over.

“Delos has a particular distaste for hereditary power,” Magister Zoe said. “I am not surprised they’re proving to be the most troublesome holdout. Atalante was ruled by queens, once, but the Secretariat had held the power for millennia.”

In some form, anyway, as the scribes insisted their current government was descended from the provincial one Aenos Basileon had placed to rule over the city, thus making them the sole true descendent of that founding empire. Every city save Helike and Bellerophon claimed some kind of relation to the old empire, actually. The Trakas of Nicae claimed descent of the man himself, Stygia that the Magisterium was a regency council until restoration of the empire, Penthes that their first exarch was Basileon’s chosen successor and Atalante that the man himself had been buried under their city – and so they were the custodians of his empire, until the Gods Above raised him from the dead.

Not that the old stories had ever mattered much, save when Bellerophon tried to get the empire formally dissolved by the League every few years and those same cities balked.

“At least the Glorious Republic is staying out of our way,” Princess Zenobia drily said. “I suppose that is the best to be expected out of them, lack of direct harm.”

Everyone’s positions were calcifying, Basilia felt. She knew the feeling, knew how it could be the death of progress. She’d seen it at work in Helike, in the years before the Tyrant had restored the city: factions biting at each other around an indolent throne, no one winning or losing anything of worth. No one was going to move much from their current negotiating positions and that might be the death of this entire enterprise. Bellerophon’s absence was an integral part of the stalemate, Basilia finally decided. The Republic was made up of mobs and madmen, but they were part of the League – and without them coming out on either side, Delos and Atalante felt they still had some breathing room.

If nothing else, some form of accord with the Republic would allow her to at finish off Penthes for good and turn up the pressure.

“We’re done for the day,” the general said, rising to her feet.

“Indeed?” Magister Zoe said, cocking an eyebrow.

“I must talk to some people,” Basilia said, meaning People.

Getting to the Bellerophan camp wasn’t difficult, or even being noticed when she approached: as usual they had at least twice the number of sentries they needed. Getting one of those soldiers to acknowledge that presence was more difficult, even with a company of kataphraktoi at her back. She pounded at the gate until they were forced to admit she was there, and then a harried-looking general was rustled up to speak with her. Two blank-faced kanenas stood behind him, which no doubt did little for the man’s confidence about getting through this conversation alive.

“I seek to address the People,” General Basilia bluntly said.

“As a foreign despot-”

“I am a general in service to no crown,” Basilia corrected.

The man looked taken aback, looking back to the kanenas. Their faces were still as a pond and just as unreadable.

“There are no diplomats with the army,” the general said. “You must head to Bellerophon and make your request there.”

“That would be inconvenient,” Basilia said. “Might I not simply, under observation by the kanenas, make my address and let Bellerophans convey it to the people by scrying ritual?”

“Bellerophon does not use scrying rituals,” the man replied without missing a beat, “which are trick of wicked foreign tyrants and have never worked, may a wind of locusts blow in their faces for a hundred years.”

Basilia blinked. Bellerophon absolutely did use such rituals.

“Do you perhaps have an alternative with superficial resemblances?” she hazarded.

“Communication rituals are a recent innovation of the Republic,” the general shamelessly said. “They can serve similar purposes on occasion. It is not, however, in power to accede to your request.”

The kanenas frowned and the man winced.

“As I have no power,” he hastily added, “for it rests entirely in the hands of the People, may they rule peerlessly and without mistake for another thousand years.”

Basilia waited to see if the general was going to start bleeding from his eyes. Ten heartbeats passed and he didn’t, which was a promising sign.

“How may such a request be accepted or denied?” she pressed.

They had no answer to give her, so negotiations ended for half an hour while they went away to figure it out. Another woman entirely returned to answer, with two different kanenas at her back. Basilia decided not to ask what had happened to the general. From what she remembered of Anaxares’ mournful ramblings, that would be a good way to get the man killed.

“Your request can be accepted or denied by a provisional vote of the entire camp,” the woman said.

“May I ask for such a vote?”

An hour later she was informed that she could. It took another two hours after she did ask, and then they conceded that a provisional vote would be held. It was dark by then but while Basilia sent for food and took a pause to piss, she did not wander far. If she did, she was sure to lose these people. It took until Morning Bell until the votes were counted, but the kanenas found an irregularity with some of the ballots – some had been written in ink that came from Delos – so another vote had to be held. Three hours later, Basilia was woken up from her nap on her horse to be informed that the vote had gone in her favour. Though bone-tired and aching from the restless night, she took the only shot she was likely to have.

No doubt by next week the People would have cooked up a new law that made even her unlikely station unfit to ask questions of the Glorious Republic.

She left after passing along her message – offer, really – and crawled back into bed until noon. Delos and Atalante came later the same day to try to dig out of her what she’d been up to, but she put them off. It wouldn’t last forever, but thankfully the Republic had been quick in arranging for a general vote on her proposition. As soon as they’d held a vote about whether to hold a vote, anyway, which pushed the answer back another day. With typical subtlety, the envoys from Bellerophon walked into her tent as she was seated with those from Delos and Atalante.

“The Republic welcomes your recognition that Hierarch Anaxares is still among the living,” the man said.

There was surprise from the others, but why wouldn’t she? If there was to be a seat above her own in the League, best to leave it in the hands of a man either dead or uninterested in filling it. Permanently, if she could.

“Furthermore, your question over the status of the Dead King has been put to debate and the People have reached conclusion,” the man continued. “By popular vote, Trismegistus of Keter is declared an Egregious Millennial Despot and an Enemy of the People. The so-called Kingdom of the Dead is declared unlawful.”

She bit down on a grin. Ah, and there was the trick. Basilia couldn’t declare war on anyone, because when a Hierarch ruled foreign affairs of the League were strictly under their purview. As Anaxares himself had once said during the invasion of Procer, however, there could be no state of war against a state that was not legitimate. If, say, Basilia led troops of the League to ‘oversee the dissolution of Keter’ then by the Bellerophan definition of the term it would not be a war. By the look of the frown on Ikaroi’s face, he’d already put together as much.

“And the proposition over the office of Protector of the League?”

“Under the current terms of election, the People support the creation of such an office,” the man said.

Such terms being every city having a vote, same as the election of a Hierarch, but instead of unanimity only majority would be required here. Helike would vote for itself and its vassal cities, whose votes would be maintained as independent ones, would vote accordingly. To secure a permanent majority, all that Basilia now needed to do was take Penthes and dictate in their terms of surrender a permanent vote for the reigning monarch of Aenia for this office. And she’d be able to take Penthes now, because as of tomorrow she was going to request the help of the People in overseeing the dissolution of Keter. The same army currently in her way would serve as the vanguard of this worthy enterprise.

“I gratefully receive the People’s wisdom,” General Basilia smiled.

Already she could see Nestor Ikaroi and the Atalante priests reconsidering their position. But it would not, she suddenly realized, be enough. The shock of this turnabout hadn’t quite pushed them over the top. The mire would continue. When messengers entered the tent she was grateful, as the pause would allow her to gather her thoughts and think of a way through, but the way the faces of the foreign envoys paled caught her attention. Magister Zoe leaned in close to whisper in her ear.

“My people say that Merchant Prince Mauricius had been revealed to have been replaced by a devil,” she said. “The city is blaming Praes for it.”

Basilia let out a low whistle.

“Why are they so unsettled?” she asked, discreetly gesturing at the envoys.

Zoe Ixion grinned sharply.

“Because the Forty-Stole Court has voted unanimously to ask for an alliance with the Empress of Aenia,” she said. “They want protection.”

And so the calculations in the eyes of the envoys changed again. The mire in their negotiations now looked like the Tower’s work, to keep the south from solidifying in a single block. Worse than that, they knew that if Basilia began getting funding from Mercantis she might lose patience with them playing for time and decided that this could be settled with armies instead. And with that much coin behind her she’d be able to win that damned war, too.

“Perhaps reconsidering our position on the office of Protector is needed, considering the developments in the League and abroad,” Secretary Nestor Ikaroi calmly said.

There were some noises of assent from the Atalante crowd and General Basilia Katopodis smiled. She knew better than to think this her triumph entirely, but it was sweet nonetheless. Sweeter still was the knowledge that the Gods were blowing wind in her sail, for what else but Fate could this assembly of coincidence be? The Old World was ending, she could feel it in her bones. The age was crumbling to dust, its relics falling one after another, and now something else was beginning to emerge from the ruins. And under that new sun, Basilia thought, there would be room for a new way of doing things. The deaths throes of the Age of Wonders would change the League of Free Cities, she swore it.

The word shivered in approval and somehow she knew that, somewhere down Below, Kairos Theodosian was laughing.

Interlude: North II

“Twenty years will blend friend and foe.”

– Taghreb saying

Hakram Deadhand stood in a shadowed corner of the tent as his allies raucously argued, watching them in silence. The leaders of the dominant clans of the alliance, the Howling Wolves and the Red Shields, were trading the usual insults and boasts with the representatives of their allied clans. Dag Clawtoe and Oghuz the Lame towered above all others in that conversation, as had been the case from the start. Their clans were the largest and wealthiest, their deeds the greatest – in Oghuz’s case, anyway. Juniper’s father had been a famous champion for the Red Shields before his leg wound. Dag instead must rely on lesser deeds and the reputation of the cousin that’d overshadowed him all his life.

He was only the jemmek of the Howling Wolves, the camp-leader, even though Grem One-Eye had not returned to the Steppes in decades.

Adjutant did wade into the talks. He preferred not to. The moment to speak would come when the tent was empty and it was only he and Catherine, when he could complete her vision with what he’d seen and she hadn’t by virtue of not being so close to it all. Detachment had been in Hakram’s blood since he was but a boy but he’d made his peace with the feeling. Found the uses in having blood that rarely went red. Calm was what let you see with clarity and tonight, calmly looking at the alliance in this tent, what Adjutant saw was a losing proposition. The conversation was going through familiar, pointless circles.

It would take more than champions and challenges to cut into Troke Snaketooth’s support. It was attacking the symptom instead of the sickness: Troke was not popular because he had many champions, he had many champions because he was popular. The chieftain of the Blackspears was growing more powerful by the day, and the longer the conversation went on the more Hakram realized that none of them had any idea of what to do about it. It was not that they were fools, or dim, but that they’d never had to deal with being this position before. The Blackspears had a foul reputation, while the Howling Wolves and the Red Shields had been held in high honour for decades.

They were still popular even now, but the ground was shifting under their feet. Hakram thought that under all the boasts and shouts he might be hearing a thread of disquiet. They could feel it too, the wind turning against them.

There was no point in staying here, Adjutant realized. No solution to be found in this tent, only the same conversation had in one of a hundred different ways. Yet he was not discouraged, for Hakram Deadhand had already figured out where he would find his answer. Adjutant was one of the Woe, and so he knew that one could learn from enemies as well as allies. Still silent, he slipped out of the tent and into the muddy grounds of the great camp surrounding the fortress of Chagoro. Not too long ago, Hakram had received an invitation by Sigvin of the Split Tree Clan to begin private talks with the Blackspears in Callow’s name.

He still held no intention of accepting that invitation, but it brought something to mind: the Split Tree Clan itself.

As early as the delegations that’d been sent to Wolof he’d thought that alliance strange. The Blackspears had a reputation as feckless liars, while the Split Tree were known instead as cleaving close to old ways. They were known for their shamans, many of which could use magic, and for being willing to serve as mediators in the disputes of others. They were not a large clan, though, or one known for its warriors. So Hakram had assumed the alliance with the Blackspears to be a marriage of convenience: they were large and powerful but of poor repute and without a speck of magic to call on. The weaknesses of the Blackspears would make the Split Tree influential over them, difficult to dislodge even after Troke Snaketooth took power.

Except something didn’t fit in that story. Adjutant hadn’t noticed it the last time he’d gone to the edge of the territory claimed by the Split Tree Clan, but now that he knew what to look for it was hard to miss. Troke Snaketooth had been showering his allies and servants in wealth so that the display might attract others to his banner, but there was no trace of that wealth in the Split Tree camp. No herds of sheep put to roast, no great barrels of aragh and batak freed to flow, no baskets full of pottery and ivory and furs. No thick rings of gold and jewelled earrings. The Split Tree Clan was the most important ally to a wealthy chief on the rise, but it was not visibly gaining from that position. So what was it getting paid in, power? That was not enough.

Power might satisfy the chief and his closest circle, but a clan was more than these. They would see their friends and allies growing wealthy while they did not and there would be rumbles of discontent. So what was it that the Split Tree were getting? Hakram’s instincts told him that behind that truth lay the key to the alliance around the Blackspears, the key to understanding his foe. Perhaps even the key to turning this around. Unwilling to simply retreat after having come all this way, Hakram wandered off to the closest marketplace and bought a few skewers of horse before returning to lean against the tall post marking the edge of the Split Tree grounds. He’d been seen from the start, so he was not surprised when someone came out to meet him.

Or who it was that’d been sent. Sigvin wore one of those tunics showing a generous eyeful of her scarred shoulders, which a thick braid only drew attention to, but this time Hakram’s gaze did not stray. The calm was on him, the itch to understand what made something work. The same part of him that’d made a game about stacking stones to see how people would play it.

“If it’s my tent you’re looking for, Hakram, you’ll have to offer me a drink first,” Sigvin said, flashing her fangs flirtatiously. “And maybe tell me about Keter, since tales insist you’ve been there.”

The tall orc did not answer, continuing to look at her clan’s camp as he finished the last bits of his meat and tossed the skewers aside.

“Adjutant, then,” Sigvin mused, tone changing.

Hakram inclined his head to the side in agreement.

“You would have gone into the camp if you meant to accept Troke’s invitation to talk,” she continued, humming in interest. “So what is it that does bring you here, Deadhand?”

He had half a dozen lies ready, but what would be the point? What he wanted here was nothing for them to fear. Nothing they would not want to give him.

“I want to understand what the Split Tree gets from this,” Adjutant said. “Why this alliance, why now? Why are you so tightly bound to a clan you wouldn’t have looked at twice a decade ago?”

Sigvin did not look reluctant or cautious but pleased. He’d thought she might. And why wouldn’t she, when for the first time since Hakram had come to Chagoro he was trying to understand her clan instead of stepping over it?

“The answer is in your question, Hakram Deadhand,” Sigvin said. “A decade ago. Give or take a few years, that’s how long you’ve been gone isn’t it? Since you took to the Legions.”

“Give or take a few years,” Hakram agreed.

“The first of our kind Named in centuries,” Sigvin said. “And you never even came back to the Steppes.”

There’d been a lot of that talk when he first came here, especially as an envoy of Callow, but it’d died out after the first few crushing victories in duels. It wasn’t his people’s way to question strength.

“I wouldn’t be Named if I had,” Adjutant bluntly replied. “I found my path far from here and it did not lead back until now.”

And, for all that it had cost him and might yet, he did not regret it.

“An even more damning answer,” Sigvin replied just as bluntly. “You don’t see it because you were of the Howling Wolves and then a soldier far away, but we are not so blind: the Legions of Terror are eating the Clans, bit by bit.”

Hakram felt like scoffing but restrained himself. It was obvious she believed every word and Adjutant believed Sigvin to be an intelligent woman. She would have a reason to believe this.

“The Legions are making the Clans richer,” he replied instead, “and without the need to fight each other for that wealth. Our people return home with learning and allies. We have more influence in the affairs of the Tower than we’ve had in centuries because of the same ties you condemn.”

She shook her head.

“It’s the wrong sort of wealth, Adjutant,” Sigvin said. “It’s imperial coin, which we use to trade with them instead of each other. Our people come back using the Praesi system of measurement, building forges the goblin way, organizing warriors in companies instead of warbands. It’s hollowed out your own clan without Dag Clawtoe realizing it. The Howling Wolves don’t war for cattle and land anymore, they send their youths south and wait for the gold to return with them. Only gold’s not all that comes back. They began training their youngbloods in Legion drills a few years back, did you know? To give their youths an edge when they send them south to enrol.”

Sigvin paused, strong face twisted in disgust.

“Not if,” she said, “but when .”

There was much he could answer to that. Praesi measurements were superior in almost every regard to those used by learned orcs and them alone – horns and fingers – while goblins were the finest metalworkers on Calernia and warbands were unfit for anything but raiding as a military formation. It would have been easy to dismiss her words as that of someone from the old order, afraid of change even when that change was for the better. Except Sigvin was not a fool. So he looked at the camp of the Split Trees again with fresh eyes. Hide tents, but it was rare for a tent to be made all of the same hides. Different hunting grounds, trade with other clans. And on the people the jewelry was of many styles, be it thick torcs of the eastern steppes, the silver piercings from the headwater clans or the looping earrings of the south.

The Split Tree Clan was traditionalist, Hakram had known that, but he’d not truly considered what that would mean .

Their wealth, their gains, were made in the traditional mould of orc clans since the founding of the Empire. To the Split Tree, wealth was something temporary. Won when the clan claimed good riverside land for a season and pottery could be made from clay, when good grazing lands allowed the clan to stay long enough for smithies to be raised and weapons of quality forged. Surplus was traded to other clans to fill needs, and when the clan was in a strong position it went raiding – either other orcs or humans. That stolen wealth was brought back and used to strengthen the clan, sometimes even to absorb smaller neighbours. If things went well for a few years, the clan grew.

Clans too large were unsustainable, so the largest ones would then split into two and head different ways.

It was a rough way of life, but it had worked. The harshness of the Steppes culled the weak but it also ensured that there could never be a kingly clan standing above all others: hunger bit victors just as deep as the vanquished. As a closed circle, the old ways of the Steppes really did work. Only now the circle was no longer closed. The Legions since the Reforms were not the same as the armies of the old tyrants, which had once a reign drafted orcs by the hundreds of thousands for a campaign and then sent them back to the Steppes after the war. The modern Legions kept orcs for decades, taught them Praesi ways and enriched them before sending them home.

And Hakram Deadhand had seen this same machine at work before.

“The Carrion Lord really is a magnificent bastard,” he admitted. “I had little sympathy with the moaning of Callowans when his works were improving so many of their lives, but I understand a little better now.”

Sigvin frowned.

“I don’t follow,” she said.

“You think what you’ve found is a coincidence, then,” Adjutant mused. “That’s understandable, as you never saw the same unfold out west. But this is happening on purpose, Sigvin.”

Because that was the Carrion Lord’s way. The Clans could not truly be a part of a stable Praes as they were, so the man had set to smothering the aspects of orc culture that weren’t compatible with the Dread Empire he envisioned: the raiding, the nomadism, the factionalism. And as was typical of that particular monster, he’d gone about it through a method that the people being changed would not fight because it benefitted them. Because Sigvin was right to see the Clans being made dependent on the south, being bound tighter, but she was missing something: most orcs were better off this way. It was why the Legions and the Carrion Lord remained wildly popular in the Steppes to this day.

The Legions introduced wealth from the outside instead of the same limited wealth being competed over by clans, which meant that the Clans could actually grow now. And the way to bring home that gold was war, which Hakram’s people loved, and it just so happened that it drained the Steppes out of the same youngbloods who’d be pushing for raids and fighting between clans. And it was a form of war that required training, which took time, so why shouldn’t clans move less? They could afford to now that they were wealthier, anyway. Which they would remain, so long as they kept sending warriors to the Legions. Then once those soldiers returned home, having fought side by side with each other and humans, they found that fighting with the Clans and the rest of the Empire lost its allure.

How many of your old army friends would you have to kill so you could steal cattle worth less than a few months of Legion pay?

Hakram sighed. This wasn’t Malicia’s work. It was not the Empress’ way to change a system when she already mastered it. Yet she’d likely recognized the trend and was not against reversing it, because orcs truly integrated into Praes were yet another power block she must handle. One that espoused military virtues she distinctly lacked, to boot. Shortly before the Liesse Rebellion, Malicia had forced the Clans to pay the tributes they’d withheld during the reign of Nefarious, which had had the effect of lowering orc enrolment in the Legions. This now seemed less like an isolated incident and more the like the beginning of a comprehensive policy that had just recently received its crowning jewel.

Malicia made lords of the Steppes, Adjutant thought, which seems like bringing us into the fold but is functionally the opposite. Her lords of the Steppes did not hold land. They collected the orcish tributes on behalf of the Tower, which was an additional layer of separation between Praes and the Clans. Gatekeepers of influence who, by the very limitations of their role – duties that would see them despised by other orcs, authority that derived directly from the Tower – could never rise to be a threat to her reign. Now that elegant little twist, the gift that doubled as clipped wings, had Malicia’s signature over it. And it explained why the forces behind the Blackspears were so willing to cut a deal with the Dread Empress.

“So when Troke makes cause with Malicia, your clan backs him because he’s not just looking to be a lord of the Steppes,” Hakram gravelled. “He wants to be the High Lord of the Steppes.”

Someone in a position to undo Legion influence, who by virtue of their title could stand between the Clans and the Empire and force a heathy distance. Sigvin bared her fangs at him, openly pleased.

“So you do understand,” she said, then slightly bared her neck in a display of vulnerability. “I had feared you might not.”

No wonder the Split Tree were good as sown to Troke’s side, he thought. Both the Red Shields and the Howling Wolves were heavily tied to the Legions and had no intention of changing that policy considering how it’d paid off for them. As far as the Split Tree Clan was concerned, the alliance behind Hakram was perhaps the sole coalition of clans they could not under any circumstances allow to win. Otherwise the Legions would sink their hooks into all the larger clans and the trend would grow irreversible. Adjutant pushed off from the marking post.

“Leaving already?” Sigvin asked.

“I need to think,” Hakram simply said.

About how this could be turned around.

About whether it should.

—

It took time to gather two hundred stones, enough that darkness fell.

At the edge of the great camp that’d risen up around Chagoro, Hakram Deadhand sat alone in the dirt with a bright moon hung high above his head. Before him lay only flatlands of long grass and the distant rising expanse of the Northern Steppes, a horizon of nothingness crowned by cold stars. And just the way he had when he’d been a boy, Hakram stacked stones. Seventy in a pile to the left. A rough estimate of the clans that backed Troke Snaketooth and his Blackspears, the orcs that stood behind the dream of a High Lord of the Steppes. Forty-six in a pile to the right, Dag and Oghuz and old loyalties. The promises of the Conquest, faithfully kept, and hunger for more of the same.

In between the piles stood a sea of undecided clans, smaller alliances that a day’s turn could make or break. Orcs with their ear to the wind, waiting to hear how it would turn.

Through this, Hakram had laid out the bare shape of the taratoplu taking place at the fortress of Chagoro. This was the game he had been playing since he came here, promises and sigils and duels. It was the game Troke Snaketooth had been beating him at, would keep beating him at. Hakram did not know the lay of this land the way the Blackspear chieftain did, the friendships and feuds and shared stories that bound the Clans together as a people. Which meant, in truth, that he had been playing the wrong game. So Hakram leaned forward to trace three symbols in the dirt with a finger of bone: a helmet, a skull and a fang.

The helmet he knew best, what it stood for. The clans that had tied themselves to the Legions, to the Reforms, to the empire promised them by the Carrion Lord. The chiefs who wanted to make some camps permanent, kept through all seasons. Only part of the clan would stay at first, for forges and drilling warriors and trade, but it would grow from there. Southern wealth pouring in, ever-closer ties to the empire, old ways abandoned in favour of more practical ones. Clans that heeded this new path would flourish, those that resisted it would whither and die. That path for the Clans had its roots in the alliance under Dag and Oghuz, a tie strong enough that repeated defeats had not shattered their faction.

The skull he’d only begun to understand today. The clans that saw ahead of them a world where the Steppes were swallowed up by the Empire, where orcs forsook Kharsum for Lower Miezan and began singing of emperors instead of warlords. Where the Steppes grew ugly towns like tumours, imperial colonies of greenskin legionaries in the heartlands of the orcs. Those clans wanted disengagement. Ties with the Legions weakened and a unifying leader – be they warlord or high lord – to keep the Tower at bay so the Clans could become as a nation. Because that was what lay behind Sigvin’s talk of culture: the Steppes as a kingdom within the Dread Empire.

That path had its roots in the backers of Snake Troketooth, but would not have great loyalty to the man. It had chosen him as a candidate because he could be influenced and served their purposes, not out of any love for the cheiftain

And the last, the fang, was somehow both the simplest and the most complex of the three. It was everyone else, the chiefs and clans who cared nothing for either sort of talk. Hunger had no philosophy, for all that the Wasteland liked to pretend otherwise. The great majority of the clans would follow who promised the best plunder, the most food, who allowed them to settle grudges to their advantage and earn glory in battle. Some of these had gone Troke’s way already because he looked like the winner and they wanted to be on the winner’s side. There was no vision of the future behind them save a gaping maw biting down on the world, and more orcs thinking this way than the other two put together. It was a path without intent, the Clans remaining as they were and letting Creation pass them by. Walking away from the end of the Age of Wonder, guests in their own world.

These were, Hakram Deadhand thought, the three paths now laid out for the Clans: integration, disengagement, abstention. Only they were all flawed, he thought, and so he turned to address the night.

“You would argue for the helmet, I know,” Hakram said. “Even though you refused your own people that fate and crowned Vivienne so she could reforge the broken shards of the Old Kingdom.”

Catherine would lean the way of the Legions because the Legions were as much her home as the land she’d bled so much for. It would change the orcs, she might argue, but would it be for the worse? Raiding put the Clans at odds with everyone around them, internal wars weakened them as a people and permanent towns would make life better for tens of thousands of orcs. It would be a greater good than evil, she’d argue.

“But there will be a price,” Hakram told the night. “We will become the Duni of the north. Good for fighting and labour but not truly Praesi. We lose everything that we are without becoming equals.”

Perhaps in one or two generations if the Reforms held that would become untrue, but that was a roll of the dice. Would the Reforms hold? Even if the Carrion Lord came to rule, as Catherine wanted, would his successors continue his policies? It was betting the fate Clans on trust in a Tower whose steps dripped with the blood of a thousand coups. Hakram’s gaze drifted to the left, where another ghost waited for him to argue with. There was not a doubt in his mind that Vivienne Dartwick would be on the side of disengagement, of the skull.

“You’d argue that the Split Tree are right,” Hakram said. “That Praes would ruin us and only distance can prevent it. A High Lord of the Steppes would keep away the Tower and let us strengthen ourselves, make our own laws and change on our own terms.”

But that, too, was ignoring some truths. Because even Sigvin, who cursed the Legions with her eyes, had not spoken of ending ties with them entirely. Engaging with Praes enriched the Clans in a way that isolation simply could not. Starvation was no longer decided by the year being good or bad, by a raid or a war having gone one way or the other. Already the Clans traded almost as much with humans as they did with each other, by the estimates of the Eyes, and ending that trend would starve and impoverish half the Steppes. The Clans could live without Praes but to grow, to thrive ? The Dread Empire was needed.

As for the Praesi, the land the orcs lived in was a heavy hand on the fate of the people.

“I don’t believe we would hold, without either war or Praes,” Hakram told the night. “We are not Callow, Vivienne. Even at our peak, we were not a nation in the human way of it. We unite against something, someone – or when there is another way to gain aside from eating each other.”

How long would the closed kingdom that Sigvin dreamed of truly last once the war ended? How many clans backing Troke would stay loyal, when their bellies were full and their chests filled with plunder and there was nothing left to do but return home to the same old feuds? It was building a tower on sand. And that left only one path, the fang. Burying one’s head in the sand, failing to make anything of the great gathering at Chagoro. And so the night could only wear one face: golden eyes and dark skin. Akua Sahelian. Another who now sat at crossroads, the threshold of changes only dimly felt.

“I can break it,” the Adjutant said. “The taratoplu. I would only need to raise another two past forty stones to take the wind out of Troke’s sails, and I... know that it can be done.”

The aspect pulsed in him faintly. Find . If he went looking for the hammers that would bring down this house, he would find them. This he knew, sure as dawn. Hakram could prevent anyone from winning, play on greed and fear and hope. Had he not stood at the side of the uncontested mistress of that method for many years? And it was what he was meant to do, as the Adjutant, if he could not secure the help of the Clans for the Grand Alliance. It was better than letting them side with Malicia. And yet he did not rise.

“What is it like, Sahelian, where you sit?” he asked the night. “It is cold away from the fire, cold enough madness earns the ring of sense and certainties turn to sand between your fingers?”

Hakram had gotten a taste of what it would be like, losing Catherine. Losing the Woe. Becoming just another of those left behind, buried or forgotten. And while the shard of fear at the heart of that had been put to rest by the Grey Pilgrim as a city died around them, there could be no return to the way things had been afterwards. It was different now because he was different and she was different. Pretending otherwise did neither of them any favours. Now they both knew they could hurt each other in ways they could not, would not forgive.

There was no unlearning that.

“I don’t want to ruin them,” he admitted. “To give them a nothing-future, to rob them of the pivot everyone else was allowed.”

And this was something he wanted for himself. What a small, terrifying truth that was to be echoing so large in his mind. Because Hakram knew that, as much as he would like to blame the ghosts and the night, he was the only one here. And already he knew, deep down, that if he was not satisfied by any of the paths others would lay out for the Clans then there was only one answer left.

He just didn’t want to look that truth in the eye.

Instead he looked back at the camp, the torches lighting up the night around the tall Soninke fortress. What did he owe these people, anyway? Hakram had left for the War College and never looked back. Life in the Steppes had left him adrift, a leaf in the wind. It had been a long way from here, from this land of gnawing, that he had found a home. What did ten thousand miles of snow and the poor fools in it matter to him, that he should sacrifice for them? And it would be a sacrifice, he would not delude himself otherwise. He and Catherine had been bound by an oath under moonlight, and it would be the end of that oath. Even if it was taken again, it would not be the same.

So Hakram turned his gaze ahead, finding... nothing. Empty plains as far as the eye could see, bathed in white. The same kind of emptiness he had glimpsed in Scribe after she was cut adrift. He’d wondered, sometimes, if she had been like him from the start. If becoming one of the Calamities had been like someone blew colours into a world of grey, like finally she could taste and hate and want to be someone . Only it’d not been about the Calamities, had it? It’d been about the Carrion Lord, and the Carrion Lord had set her free of his service in an act of loving cruelty. Cat still thought Eudokia would turn on them, but Hakram knew better. No one would risk being scalded like that twice.

And had Hakram not, this very day, boasted in the privacy of his own mind that he knew how to learn from enemies and allies both? The Webweaver had been one and the other, at different times, and ever a warning since they encountered each other in Salia.

“A temple built on a single pillar will fall,” Hakram said, quoting an old Miezan proverb.

And he still did not want to ruin his kind. To make them less than they could be. There was a path to chart, he thought. One he could dimly make out in the gloom of the night. A way to take from the empire without being taken, to stand without standing alone. It would be dangerous and delicate, play great powers against each other and raise a banner that could not be easily lowered. But it could be done. Hakram just wished that someone else could do it in his stead. Yet the stones did not lie, he thought, looking down. They never did. In a game of diminishing returns there could be no winner, only shades of defeat.

And if not Hakram, then who?

Moonlight painted the empty plains pale, and the stones at his feet too. Adjutant – no, not that anymore he thought. Perhaps never again. He was not making the choice of that path. Hakram Deadhand rose to his feet, bathed in moonlight, with no one to pull him up. A western breeze rustled across tall grass, a shiver, and old words came to him. The Old Boast, which orcs had once sung blade in hand when the hands and blades were still theirs.

“I made an empire out of nothing

So,

Warring under the summer sun

Rivers ran red, the sky did weep

As I raised a city of clay

To rule men from far away.

But as my glory fades to gray

And rides to me my own red day

Now I know clay does not keep,

And that rivers, both ways they run:

So,

I made an empire out of nothing.”

Stillness reigned in his wake. Warlord , the wind whispered against the grass. The poem was an old boast, an old warning. Kingdoms came, kingdoms went and so much for their petty kings. People were never as important as they thought they were.

But if not Hakram, then who?

So he went back to the torches, to the camp.

To the work that needed doing.

Interlude: North III

“The diplomat’s victory is to let the opponent win on your terms.”

– Prince Fernando of Salamans

Hakram hadn’t put armour on.

A loose shirt, trousers and boots were all he wore as he held his axe loosely in his grasp, watching his opponent move. Dag Clawtoe had laughed off the challenge at first, thinking it a jest, but the laughter had gone away when Hakram failed to join in. The older orc was taking the duel seriously and had come in champion’s garb: helm, mail and greaves. Dag kept his shield up and his sword raised, circling as warriors pounded the ground around them. The jemmek was liked by his clan and their allies, but orcs liked a good fight even more.

“I’ll end it without killing you,” Dag Clawtoe growled.

Hakram did not answer. It was one of his weaknesses as a champion – the way his people saw it – that he had no taste for that sort of banter. The rough edge of his tongue he reserved only for people he was going to kill. The tall orc took a step forward on the black earth and without missing a beat Dag attacked as he moved. A short push forward, shield steady as the blade thrust up towards his armpit. A smooth movement, well practised, and Hakram’s limbs of steel were not as quick as those of flesh had been. It didn’t matter, because he’d been waiting for the strike: the moment his foot touched the ground he was already pivoting, carrying his momentum forward as Dag’s thrust passed him by.

His elbow smashed into the other orc’s helmeted forehead, slamming him to the floor.

Warriors roared in approval as Dag cursed and rolled away, slapping away Hakram’s light swing with his shield before rising into a crouch. He’d lost his helmet, as Hakram had wanted. The leather strap had snapped and the helm fallen into the grass, shaking free Dag’s hair – a long black braid going from his forehead to his back. Hakram almost rubbed at the elbow that’d struck the helm, but he knew he was imagining the ache. Steel did not grow tender from striking at steel. Hakram rolled his shoulder, loosening it, and waited for the wary jemmek to come for him again. Dag hesitated, but he would be jeered at by his own warriors if he looked afraid of the fight.

So he came, measured this time. A feint to the left, trying to draw Hakram’s blade, but when it passed without answer the other orc shot forward. Surprised, Hakram took a step back that saved him from being swept entirely off his feet when Dag’s shield bashed into his chest. His footing slipped but he backed away again, only to earn another bash – at the head, but he was ready this time. Hakram’s axe came down and though he’d misjudged the distance it still came down on the shield arm Dag had exposed by striking. Instead of the axe-head against mail it was the shoulder that found its mark, a clean blow that had the jemmek shouting in pain.

The arm wasn’t quite broken but it was hurt. Dag was no greenhorn, though, and pain didn’t stop him. Hakram was hit in the shoulder by the shield, forcing him in a backwards stumble, and in a discreet thrust under that cover the jemmek’s sword came for his belly. That he caught with fingers of bone, steel scraping the pale, but the other orc used the grip to tackle him. Hakram rocked backwards, swallowing a curse – if he was pushed to the ground this was lost – as Dag smashed their foreheads together with a hellish scream. He dropped his axe, useless so close anyway, but even pushing back he found that Dag had the advantage on him. Hakram growled and tried to smash their foreheads again, but Dag put the shield in the way. Inspiration. Steel fingers closed around the rim of the shield, yanking it down. The other orc roared in pain, his wounded arm twisted, and fangs flashed as he ripped through his own shield straps to break free.

That’d been a mistake.

Hakram arm rose and he bashed Dag’s head in with the freed shield. Dag drew back, yelping, but it wasn’t enough. One, two, three more hits to the head and down Dag Clawtoe went. Eyes wide and unseeing he dropped onto the black earth, only barely conscious. It was done. Hakram breathed out, tossing away the shield. Howls and shouts of approval erupted around them, dragging back Dag to some semblance of wakefulness. He rose to his knees, expression still dazed.

“Why?” the other orc asked, quietly enough he was barely heard beneath the shouts. “I’m not the chief, Deadhand. What would you take from me, being camp-leader ?”

Hakram shook his head.

“They backed you,” he said, gesturing at the warriors around them. “And they still will.”

Dag scowled, confused.

“They back you,” Hakram calmly said, “only now you back me .”

Confusion turned to anger but the other orc did not argue. It was not the place of the defeated to argue terms with the victor. Yet there was still an argument ahead of him, Hakram thought as he left the duelling circle and traded backslaps with cheering warriors. Further back Oghuz the Lame, chief of the Red Shields and the other leading light of the alliance, was waiting with a few of his warriors at his side. The old orc snorted when Hakram approached.

“You’re not a Red Shield,” Oghuz said. “Unlike Dag I don’t owe you the courtesy of accepting a challenge.”

“It’s not a fight I’m looking for,” Hakram said.

“Isn’t it?” Oghuz scoffed, but after a moment he sighed.

He barked as his warriors to give him space, room enough that the two of them would be able to speak without being overheard.

“That was a mistake,” Oghuz said, gesturing at the duelling grounds. “Dag had weaknesses as a man to front for but you have even more. You think we’ll just let ourselves be pressed into Callow’s service in, Named or not? It’s a worthy queen you’re serving, Deadhand, but she’s not one of ours.”

Hakram did not bother to answer that. It was a pit of an argument, one he wouldn’t be able to climb out of should he fall. So he took another path.

“The duel,” Hakram said. “What did you think of it?”

“You’re more used to using a shield with that axe,” Oghuz replied. “And you still cover for the metal like it’s flesh when you don’t think about it.”

Hakram waited a moment, knowing the old champion would have more to say.

“It was unkind to Dag to stretch it out,” the older orc added. “You could have knocked him half dead with that first elbow strike.”

The tall orc smiled without showing teeth.

“No,” he said, “I could not have.”

Because he could no longer feel his aspects. Could barely even see his Name through the shadow cast by what he might yet become. Oghuz did not miss the implication. There weren’t a lot of reasons why Hakram would be losing his Name, and only one that walked hand in hand with forcing himself to the front of the alliance between their two clans. The old orc let out a low hiss, worrying his lip.

“I do not seek service to anyone,” Hakram said, and like that the other man knew it to be true.

Now it was on Oghuz to decide whether or not Hakram Deadhand was someone he could live with as the Warlord of their age. Tension stretched out.

“Ours are hungry Gods,” the old orc finally said, leaning on his cane. “Best to eat our fill before they catch up.”

A look up and down.

“You’ll do.”

A pause, then a calculatingly casual question.

“Do you get on well with my daughter?”

Hakram grimaced. That wouldn’t be happening. Even if Juniper didn’t kill him Aisha absolutely would – and she’d probably get away with it too.

“Too much woman for me,” he replied, and the old man laughed.

That was one alliance behind him then, Hakram thought. Time to visit the other.

—

He was being watched.

The twins were already waiting for him when Hakram reached the grounds of the Split Tree Clan. Sigvin and Sigvun were easiest to tell apart by the ritual scars on their bodies: the latter’s looked like woven crescent moons, the former’s like crisscrossing bite marks. Sigvun had once implied he wouldn’t mind Hakram getting the sort of closer look at those scars his sister had been granting, but the tall orc had turned him down. His preferences were well set. The twin had shrugged it off and Hakram was on amicable terms with both – as amicable as one could be while trying to have opposite warlords elected, anyway. He might kill them, or they him, but it wouldn’t be killing done in the red.

“Back already?” Sigvin teased.

Sigvun cocked a hairless brow.

“Should I speak to our kin about raising a pillar?” he gravely asked.

Hakram rolled his eyes. Old-fashioned, the Split Tree. Hardly anyone still hung woven crowns on sculpted pillars anymore: weddings were family feasts under a shaman nowadays, not ceremonies to attract the blessings of spirits.

“Take me to your chieftain,” he said.

Though both kept light expressions, he could see the stiffening in the way they stood. Uncertainty in Sigvun’s eyes but triumph in Sigvin’s. She thinks she has swayed me , Hakram thought. In a way she had. The twins agreed without trouble but the light conversation died and they walked the rest of the way in silence. He spent the time considering he knew of Hegvor Allspeak, chief of the Split Tree Clan. Which was little, for though Hakram could think offhand of half a dozen feuds she had mediated and how he did not even know the old woman’s age. Much about the chief herself was obscured, which he suspected to be on purpose.

He was not made to wait long before being led to a great tent where three orcs, by the looks of them none younger than sixty winters, waited seated. Introductions were briskly made. The oldest shaman of the clan, Bjarte, sat to the right. To the left sat Gulda Hardhead, the most honoured champion of the Split Tree, and between them sat a woman of long white hair with a hard scar across her nose. Hegvor Allspeak, whose eyes were of an unsettlingly pale yellow bordering on green. Hakram was invited to sit across from them at a low table, an honour that was not granted to the twins. They sat on the ground, near the back of the tent. The two were trusted, Hakram thought, but their age meant their influence was limited.

Hegvor pushed across the table a small bowl and cut of dried meat.

“I offer you meat and drink from my table,” the chieftain said.

Brutally salty sheep and hard aragh were what Hakram wolfed down, but that was an old and well-known negotiating trick. At least they hadn’t used Taghreb spices, which would have had him panting for water throughout the entire talks.

“Hail, Hegvor Allspeak,” he said.

“Hail, Hakram Deadhead,” the old woman replied. “The twins say you ask of my time.”

“I do,” he said.

She frowned.

“Not, I think, for what Sigvin hopes of you,” Hegvor said. “So what it is you have come for, Deadhand, if not to lend your name to the better cause?”

Hakram’s dead fingers laid against the table, its intricate carvings dimly felt to his senses. Like a... pressure, nothing like what a hand of flesh had been. And the pressures were lighter now, for the same reason that Hakram thought he would no longer be able to Find something he sought.

“Before I answer that question,” he said, “I want to describe something to you.”

The bone fingers drummed against the wood, a sound like a rat gnawing.

“Within a week the taratoplu will have to disperse because it can no longer be fed,” Hakram said. “As the pressure mounts on all clans to gather behind a banner, the Graven Bone and the Stag-Crowned will cede territories to some of the clans bordering them. Those clans will then come to support Troke Snaketooth and get him elected as High Lord of the Steppes.”

The Graven Bone and Stag-Crowned were the two strongest supporters of Troke, despite being the two largest southern clans after his own, because Malicia had also named them lords of the Steppes. They would be his natural lieutenants, the highest under him after his election. That was well worth territorial concessions to their own rivals, especially when this was an offer that the Blackspears themselves could not make – if Troke was seen to be weakening his clan to rope in others, he would be made into a laughingstock.

“Dread Empress Malicia will recognize the title and formally charge High Lord Troke with putting down the rebelling High Seat of Nok,” Hakram said. “Most clans will fall in line at the prospect of plunder and even the Howling Wolves and the Red Shields will join the host.”

Utter silence from across the table.

“To secure Troke’s position after the sack, the Wolves and the Shields will be given the honour of being the first into the breach at Nok,” he calmly continued. “You’ll collude with either Malicia or High Lord Dakarai to make their losses crippling, then keep them crippled after you withdraw to the Steppes by keeping away returning legionaries.”

His fingers skittered across the wood still.

“You keep propping up Troke, after that, but begin looking to the future,” Hakram said. “Marry a rising name in the Bones or the Stags to one of your kin, then lay the grounds for them to be Snaketooth’s successor. Then you begin pushing for what you actually want.”

The tall orc showed teeth.

“At a guess? Bringing back the bronze urus as our coinage, a council of shamans to mediate clan disputes like in the ancient Hordes and fixed yearly gatherings under enforced truce,” Hakram continued. “If Troke backs you, all the better. If he doesn’t, he has an accident and you get the prepared successor in power where they will be duly grateful.”

Hakram’s dead hand went still.

“How close am I?” he asked.

A long moment of silence.

“Only one yearly gathering,” Barjte said, the shaman smiling. “We would consecrate holy grounds for the first time since the Miezans, our High Seat of the Steppes.”

Good, Hakram thought. They had, without knowing it, come to agree with one of his own notions in principle. Now he just needed to survive the rest of this conversation. His eyes were on Hegvor, so he was surprised when the answer came from behind.

“I told you, grandmother,” Sigvin erupted. “We should have tried to bring him from the start, it’s such a waste that-”

“Be silent, girl,” Hagvor peevishly cut in, “until you stop thinking with your snatch.”

Sigvin’s mouth closed with an angry click of fangs. Her grandmother – the things you learned, Hakram mused – turned a cool gaze on him.

“You’re a clever man, Deadhand,” she said. “So tell me the reason you’ve come up with that I should let you leave this tent alive.”

So much for drink and meat from their table, Hakram thought amusedly. His people were not the Taghreb, to hold the law of hospitality as sacrosanct, but that’s been a rather hasty turnabout. Still, there was nothing like the threat of death to get a man’s blood flowing.

“It won’t work,” Hakram said. “Even if you kill me and get away with it, even if I say nothing, it won’t work.”

Gulda Hardhead bared her fangs.

“You think us fools, boy,” the old champion said. “Think we haven’t thought it through, maybe, that since we keep to old ways we’re just sav-”

“I think you haven’t read reports of the Eyes of the Empire annotated by the Scribe,” Hakram calmly interrupted.

A start of surprise.

“You know things I do not,” he said. “That I could not learn or did not care to. Are you so proud to believe the opposite cannot be true?”

Because if it were so, if they were a closed door, then he would have to kill them all. Something pulsed in his belly at the thought, almost eager. A craving not entirely his. He had rustled feathers with the brusque answer, but where Gulda was growling and Bjarte looked politely skeptical their leader only looked thoughtful. Considering. Examining where she, too, might have been wrong. Something like hope bloomed in Hakram, chasing away the bloodthirst.

“Trade,” Hagvor Allspeak finally said. “You think trade will bury us, even if we restrict it.”

“You’re a decade too late,” Hakram said. “The total volume of goods traded between the empire and the Steppes is now about three fifths of what is traded within the Steppes, by the Tower’s estimates.”

Surprise from all of them, but only the chief and the shaman grasped what that implied. Hagvor grimaced.

“You can’t cut the flow of goods without impoverishing and starving too many people,” Hakram said. “Either Troke turns on you to keep his seat or he’ll be facing rebellion from half the clans.”

“An empty tent is an invitation,” Bjarte quoted.

They realized it too, then. Their measures were all sensible ones. Bronze urus could be minted in the Steppes, there were rich deposits of tin and copper barely touched, and it would mean no longer being dependent on Praesi coinage. A council to mediate disputes would clamp down on internal wars save those sanctioned by the ‘High Lord’, which would be used to purge enemies of the throne. Holy grounds bound to the title of High Lord would make an effective capital for the Clans that could serve as a place of truce and a way for the Split Tree to begin their revival of what they considered to be the heart of orcish culture.

Only none of this could be done if Troke bucked them off or the Clans fell into civil war. In Hakram’s opinion, Troke cutting them loose to keep his seat would likely result in civil war anyway – without their diplomatic support and reputation, he was a much weaker man and their people responded only one way to weakness. And while that civil war burned, Praes would turn its attention to them. It might be that the exiled orc legionaries would return with the Tower’s backing or that the Empire would raise other lords of the Steppes outside Troke’s authority, to be honest the exact form didn’t matter.

Whoever held the Tower would not tolerate a troublesome and rebellious bloc just like the Tribes existing in the north of the Dread Empire, so they’d intervene. Weaken and divide. The end result would likely be what the Split Tree were trying to avoid in the first place with their grand plan: southern clans tied up with the Legions and permanently at war with the fading clans further north. A buffer state the Tower could use as manpower for its armies and could never rise to become a threat to Ater.

“We will adapt,” Hagvor Allspeak finally said, tone weary. “Change our approach. For this chance I thank you, Hakram Deadhand.”

Hakram hummed. He did not take the implied dismissal.

“Your answer’s not in closing the door,” he said.

“It’s even less in being eaten by the Tower,” Hagvor curtly said.

“It’s too late to cut ties to the degree you envisioned,” he bluntly replied. “It would cost too much to too many people who have no reason to listen to you except force. But that’s the wrong approach, anyway, because distance isn’t what you actually want – it’s just the method you decided would get you that.”

“And what would you know of what we want, Adjutant?” Gulda Hardhead scorned.

Hakram wondered if she truly disliked him or whether this was a ploy. One friend, one foe, Hagvor striking the balance. Regardless, there was an odd pall on the room after she spoke. Most faces were touched with a frown, Bjarte even casting a wary look around. They can’t feel the Name anymore , Hakram realized. The pressure of it. The longer the conversation had gone on, the more the last wisps of his moonlit oath had gone away. Casting the Name in his face rang wrong to their ears because he no longer held it. The chieftain considered him with wary eyes. He smiled amicably, never showing teeth.

“You want a unified orc state with strong enough foundations that the empire can’t absorb it,” he said. “You want to avoid the Steppes being empty because all the youths went south to the Legions, coming back only to live in Legion towns and raise their children to do the same. You want to avoid clan weavers abandoning the trade because it’s easier to buy ten baskets from Okoro at a copper each, to avoid storytellers reading from Praesi books instead of learning the old sagas by rote. You want for there to be someone other than Soninke scholars able to read our glyphs in forty years.”

Gulda rocked back like he’d just slapped her across the face.

“I understand what you want perfectly,” Hakram Deadhand. “You’re just going about it wrong.”

His steel hand clasped the edge of the table, making it creak.

“You think that by making a few opportunities you’ll turn our people away from Praes, but you’re not looking at the numbers,” he said. “You’ll make a standing army at your holy grounds, but how many warriors will be able to be part of it? A thousand, five? The Legions will take anyone and make them rich. And maybe destroying the clans with ties to the empire would make room, free land and wealth, but it won’t work like that in practice. Not unless you slaughter the entire clans and none one has the stomach for that so they’ll move into the Empire, migrate, and then it’s the same problem you thought you avoided only the border’s thirty leagues south. Your fundamental mistake is that you are denying opportunities instead of offering better ones.”

“We cannot outbid the Dread Empire,” Hagvor quietly said.

“Then stop kneeling to it,” Hakram flatly replied. “You are trying to mend this from a position of weakness that no one has forced on you but yourself.”

“There’s not enough support for rebellion,” Gulda Hardhead told him.

Her tone was, he noted, significantly warmer than before.

“Not for secession, maybe,” Hakram replied. “But rebellion? We’re already rebels just by gathering here. How many clans do you think would scream their throats sore in approval, if the proposal was instead to march on Ater and cram our terms down the Tower’s throat?”

“Many,” Bjarte said. “But what would that solve, Deadhand? We get lenience for a generation, that is all. All the dooms are pushed back, not ended.”

The white-haired chief hummed at him.

“You want to make... opportunities,” she said. “That rival theirs. Only they’ll be ours, not the Tower’s.”

“Trading with Praes, learning from it, being tied to it – this is the trend of the Steppes,” Hakram said. “And it cannot be reversed without prohibitive costs. But none of these are unhealthy if they don’t lead to our being digested by the Empire. And the key to that is for us to offer another way.”

“There is not enough wealth in the Steppes,” Bjarte said. “Ours are not rich lands, save in grass and frost.”

“So why does the Empire care to assimilate us in the first place?” Hakram replied. “Manpower. Warriors. That is what we make that they want from us, Praes and Callow both. Orcs soldiers have been the backbone of the two most successful armies Calernia has seen since the days of Triumphant.”

Hagvor caught on first.

“Mercenaries are illegal in Praes,” she pointed out.

“Laws change at the end of a sword, in this empire,” Hakram calmly said. “All the time. Why should it not be ours, for once?”

Rumbles of approval from the twins at his back. The older heads needed more, though. Could see further.

“These armies took more than orcs to be victorious,” Hagvor said. “They make war in a new way. Companies, not warbands.”

“Let warbands do the work of warbands and companies the work of companies,” Hakram said. “If we must raid, let us raid. But battles are a soldier’s trade and best left to soldiers.”

They didn’t like hearing it, but that was the reality of it.

“Clans can’t make an army like that,” Gulda Hardhead said. “Not on the move. It takes too much training for the drills. You’d need a settlement to support it.”

“A settlement where the wealth of retiring legionaries could flow,” he replied, “and be put to use to benefit the Clans instead of unmake them.”

Many orcs who’d lived in towns and cities for decades would balk at returning to tents anyway. They all knew that. A solid roof over one’s head was a comfort few liked to let go of. And while they didn’t like the face of it – a town for Legion orcs, for those who wanted to leave the old ways – they’d already agreed to a city in principle. Their holy grounds for the High Lord of the Steppes would have been the same thing, only smaller and poorer and badly run.

“It might grow to threaten our ways, this settlement,” Bjarte said. “The sole city of the orcs yet not bound to their ways.”

“So send shamans and teachers,” Hakram said. “And if you worry of the Clans being adrift, raise your holy grounds in the Steppes to rival it.”

Hagvor’s eyes narrowed, the eerie tint of them making them look like jewels in the light.

“You speak as if this settlement would not be in the Steppes,” she said.

“No,” Hakram said, “it wouldn’t be.”

A beat as she figured it out.

“You mean to keep this fortress,” she said, sounding a little impressed.

“If the Dread Empire of Praes would keep us in the fold,” Hakram Deadhand said, “then let it pay for that privilege. Lands and rights. Is that not what all the High Seats rebel over?”

Hard smiles all around. He had them, he thought. Only the mirth went away.

“Troke has made bargains with the Tower,” Hagvor Allspeak finally said. “They would not pair with the path you describe.”

“No,” Hakram quietly agreed, “it is true that Troke Snaketooth cannot deliver this to you.”

And he said nothing else, only meeting her eerie eyes with his own unflinching stare. Silence stood, stretched, stayed. Like a physical force, strong enough to cut with a knife. Until the white-haired chieftain rose to her feet, limbs cracking and back bent. Hakram did not look away.

Risen, she knelt.

“Warlord,” Hagvor Allspeak swore, and so it was true.

Hakram breathed in as every other in the tent knelt the same, letting the feeling settle over him. The claim. Already he could feel his rivals. One the south, distant and faded. An old claim, long set aside but not quite gone. Grem One-Eye still stood with few equals in the eyes of his people. And another one, closer and sharper and just as aware of him as Hakram was aware of them. Troke Snaketooth had been further along his path than anyone else dreamed of.

And so, Hakram thought, it would end in red.

—

Within the hour Troke Snaketooth gave answer.

With unfortunately characteristic cunning, the chief struck where no one had expected him to. Four fires erupted across the camp, which was not unusual given the loose approach of some clans to precautions against this, but these were no accidents. They burned down three of the largest repositories of dried meat in the great camp surrounding Chagoro and the largest tent of the Brazen Bird Clan – whose territories near seaside salt flats made the main trader of salt in the Steppes and the sole clan to have brought a large amount of it to the taratoplu. Troke had burned the food reserves and the ingredient needed to preserve butchered animals. Clans would now live on the cattle they could butcher, which would not last a week. Three, four days at best.

Now that a rival had appeared Troke meant to force a vote while he still had numbers and the wind in his sail.

It was a good strategy, Hakram was forced to admit. The chief of the Blackspears tried to summon the clans into the fortress barely an hour after the fires, claiming they needed discussion, which would make things even worse. It would deny Hakram time to grow his support: the Split Tree were mustering like-minded clans in his behalf, but those talks would take time. Two hours was not long enough. It was Oghuz who found a solution: he ordered some of his warriors to terrify their own clan’s herds and let the cattle loose, resulting into a stampede away from the camp. The Red Shield refused the summons, as they urgently needed to gather back their sheep and pigs.

Oghuz’s champions then loudly implied that this scattering was no accident and that all of Troke’s opponents might come to face the same troubles, which had enough clans wary of the Blackspears the Snaketooth had to push back the talks until sundown.

Torches lit up the great hall of the fortress of Chagoro, which in truth had been the mess hall before being made into gathering grounds for the Clans. No more than three heads could enter by clan, which still meant more than six hundred orcs packed tight between the walls. Each chieftain came with a painted shield, their vote to cast, though counting them could get... combative. Accusations of miscounting or lies were common and usually settled in blood – every chief had come tonight with a champion among their three. The Blackspears and their allies had come first, at least an hour early, so they had the back of the hall to themselves and an imposing position. They looked many and strong, which mattered more than most like to admit.

Hakram would make Troke rue that trick before all said and done.

He came as one of the three for the Howling Wolves, standing with the clans of his birth as the shaman whose day it was to officiate – a woman from the Arrant Axes, a Blackspear ally – sang one of the old songs of praise to the Hungry Gods and reiterated these to be truce grounds. Only duels would be allowed here, no red fights. Unsurprisingly, though half a dozen chiefs clamoured to be the first to speak it was Troke who was chosen by the shaman. The chieftain of the Blackspears was a tall and well-formed orc, with short choppy hair and three golden rings in each cheek that made the pale scars on his face stand out. He was not built as thickly as some orcs, but as a warrior he was second in his clan only to his husband.

Skarod Longaxe, the envoy that had come to Wolof and now stood at his husband’s side with cold eyes. Hakram would rather avoid fighting that one. There were a lot of dirty jokes about the reason for that wedding being that Skarod should have been called Longspear instead, but the champion was one of the finest killers in the Steppes. He’d killed three dozen warriors in duels without taking a wound, it was said, and only gotten better since. Hakram was not certain he would win should they fight.

“We’re about to go hungry,” Troke Snaketooth said.

His speaking voice was smooth and carried clearly. That’d been practised, Hakram was sure of it. The man had always been ambitious. There were murmurs among the assembled orcs, but no great exclamation of disagreement or surprise. Most chiefs had either put it together or made a friend who had, by now, though only the two larger alliances would have a decent idea of the days left before it happened.

“Three days, my shamans say,” Troke revealed. “Three days before we’d forced to leave behind this fortress and the choice we’re meant to make here.”

He swept the hall with his gaze.

“Shame,” Troke Snaketooth snarled. “Shame on you, on us . How long are we going to stand here quibbling when Praes lies open to our south? Are we going to have to skulk back to the Steppes with our tails between our legs because we couldn’t agree on how to swallow the meat in our maws?”

A chief from the far north took offence to that and was given turn to speak by the shaman, but though the man was right that High Lord of the Steppes was a larger choice than what Troke pretended it was not a popular refrain with the hall. Seeing that, the man turned insulting and that was a mistake. Challenges were traded and Skarod Longaxe stepped forward. The chief’s two warriors were slain and his own leg crippled as Skarod forced three duels back-to-back. It was a statement, meant to cow smaller clans, but Hakram thought it a mistake. Skarod had taken no wound and tiredness would pass, but if Troke sent out his husband on his behalf too often he’d look like a coward.

The next challenge he’d have to field himself, Hakram thought, or take a hit to his reputation.

Other chiefs stepped forward to accuse Troke of using the situation to grab power, but all toed the line and their accusations weren’t winning the hall so they petered out. No one wanted to fight the Blackspears if it won them no support. It wasn’t going to be that easy to call for a vote, though. A chieftain from the east, baring her teeth wildly, tossed out a different sort of challenge.

“You speak for you and yours, Troke, but there are others,” she said. “Other claims. Will Dag Clawtoe not speak up, if he seeks to be our Warlord?”

That hadn’t been arranged, though if it took much longer Hegvor had seen to it someone else would speak along the same lines. Chiefs just liked seeing bears fight in the pit, so many were willing to get that fight started themselves if need be. Only this time it was Hakram who stepped forward, axe at his hip. He could feel Troke’s stare on him, the recognition of the claim. The hatred from him and soon his husband. They’d not know for sure until now, then.

“Dag Clawtoe is not who we would we acclaim for Warlord,” Hakram said. “I am.”

Surprise, some laughter – he was a cripple, after all – but more murmurs. After the initial beat, though, the sound of blades on shields. All save three of the clans that’d supported Dag for Warlord were making known their support of him. Fools had listened to the nose, Hakram knew, but the clever had been counting shields. The shaman called for silence, then reluctantly granted him the right to address the hall.

“You’ve heard of me,” he said, without false humility. “I’ve fought more battles than anyone in this hall, led armies to victory in the west. I’ve killed fae and Revenants, monsters and Named. I’ve been to Arcadia and back, walked beneath the gates of Keter and seen the First Prince of Procer kneel. I’m Hakram Deadhand.”

He stared down the hall.

“You’ve heard of me,” he gravelled.

Blades on shields, not only from his allies this time. His people did like a good boast. It didn’t mean votes, but it meant he was being heard.

“I stand for Warlord by the weight of my deeds,” he said, using the old turn of phrase. “Let them raise or bury me.”

A voice finally cut through, belatedly given right to speak by the shaman.

“You’re one of the Black Queen’s,” a chief shouted. “Are we going to kneel to Callow? Fuck that.”

“That oath came to an end,” Hakram said. “I am the Adjutant no longer.”

A beat of silence, an idea.

“Do you not agree, Snaketooth?” he added.

Troke looked unpleasantly surprised at being called on, hesitating at the answer . I win whatever you do , Hakram thought. Either the Blackspear would lie and deny their shared claim, an action that would weight on any confrontation between them afterwards – a finger on the scales, Catherine would put it – or Hakram would be vouched for by his strongest rival. A word none would gainsay.

“He’s not the Adjutant,” Troke said, and tried to speak but shouting drowned him out.

The shaman called for silence.

“He’s not the Adjutant,” Troke repeated, “but he’s worse. You’re a guest , Hakram Deadhand. You left for the Legions and now you come back for the crown Callow can’t give you. What would you know of the Steppes?”

Rumbles of approval. Particularly the northern clans, from the Lesser Steppes or close. Some of those thought it suspicious when orcs even talked to humans, much less fought at their side.

“I am an orc,” Hakram laughed. “What more do I need to know?”

That landed too, to Troke’s visible distaste. Orcs were not so united in their answers about what it meant to be one of their kind that everyone – or even most – in this hall would agree with what Snaketooth would mean by it.

“Funny, though, that making war west would make my scalp less green in your eyes,” he continued. “Do you enjoy killing other orcs so very much, Troke?”

Blades on shields. The Blackspears were not beloved even if they were on the rise. They’d crossed many of the clans closest to them over the years, some under Troke himself. The Snaketooth was wise enough not to engage in that, which left room for another chief to speak up and keep questioning whether Hakram was a Callowan spy or not. The woman insulted him quite bluntly, obviously looking for a duel, but Hakram wouldn’t fight her himself. Her clan was too small for that and she was likely looking to make a name through this. He looked back, and though Dag was visibly eager to be called on Hakram spoke another name.

“Oghuz.”

The old orc laughed, appreciative. Oghuz the Lame’s blade stayed in its sheath as he walked up to fight Chieftain Sarai of the Drifting Leaves. In front of a crowd of hundreds, the old champion brutally beat to death the challenger with his blackwood cane. All it cost him was a cut on his bared arm, which some in the hall would recognize as a habit from his old champion days: there was one such scar on his arm for every kill he’d made duelling. It was not a statement as bold as Troke’s, but it served as a stark warning for anyone trying to make a name off of fighting him: try it and you might be remembered as a figure of fun instead.

The right to speak was spread around after that, the shaman granting it to every chieftain trying to drum up support for their own candidature as Warlord – or High Lord of the Steppes, as some took a page from Troke’s book instead. Neither Hakram not the Blackspears spoke up again, not openly anyway. The alliances behind both of them sent people to speak with other clans at the back of the hall, trying to buy support of their own more quietly. For all that many oaths had been given outside this hall, there was a long tradition of deciding which horse to eat only at the very last moment.

Maybe an hour passed and people were getting restless. Dag came to him as Hakram listened to the chief and shaman of the Ice Eaters, who was promising that he knew a ritual involving bathing in human blood that would give magic to all orcs should he be chosen as Warlord. Well, he was definitely standing out from the others.

“We’re up to fifty-four,” Dag told him. “Troke’s nearing on ninety, we think.”

Hakram nodded, thinking.

“Call a vote,” he said.

Dag looked confused but nodded anyway. An allied chief asked for the right to speak after the Ice Eaters chief left in sullen silence and used it to call for an acclamation, a demand the hall took up with relish. It was rare for an assembly to last so long without a vote being called, often one was asked at the very start, to make it plain where everyone stood before the talks began. Troke smelled something was wrong, Hakram thought, because otherwise it would not have been wariness on his face. All those who would stand for Warlord or High Lord strode out, and without further ceremony shields began to be tossed as their feet. Troke and Hakram’s supporters threw their shields quickly, already convinced, but most of the hall did not. A handful of other chiefs earned about thirty shields between them, but most clans were holding off to see what happened to the leading candidates.

That patience was rewarded when the Split Tree Clan and its seventeen closest allies walked right past Troke to throw their shields at Hakram’s feet. They moved to stand with the alliance after, to roars of surprise in the hall. Hakram almost smiled, because suddenly the back of the hall that Troke had claimed and filled no longer looked like a solid wall of support. It looked a little empty while staying very, very visible. Didn’t I say I’d make you rue that trick? The final counts were hard to be certain of, but Hakram trusted his eyes: seventy-two to eighty-one. Troke had received more support than expected but the gap had closed.

Now everyone in the hall knew that this ended with one of them the victor, so the real fight began.

Champions first. It was a roughly even trade of victories and defeats, with little unexpected save that Dag distinguished himself by winning thrice – though, unlike Skarod Longaxe, not in consecutive duels. The first few duels were without rancour, but by the seventh the tone had changed. Champions went for kills, not blood, and enmities were made. Without a clear victor in the violence, the fight was passed on and so Hakram stepped out of the crowd as Troke did. Armed, both of them, but it wouldn’t begin with steel.

“Deadhand,” Troke Snaketooth said, enunciating every syllable. “Pretty name. How did you get it again?”

“When I faced a hero and lived,” Hakram replied. “Without a Name of my own.”

“When you lost a hand to a hero,” Troke said. “Only you’ve lost more than that since. How much orc is there left in you, Deadhand?”

It’d been a certainty the man would bring up the crippling, but Hakram still had to push down a grimace. He was past doubting himself over what he had lost, but his kind had poor opinions of the crippled. Having borne a Name – still having a Name, for those who did not understand the details and there would be many – made up for it some, as such things were forgiven in the renowned. Grem famously lacked an eye and was not held in contempt for it. But that was only an eye. Hakram had lost three limbs, nearly a quarter of his body was steel and bone.

Even among those who supported him, many faces agreed.

“ All orc, where it matters,” a woman’s voice called out.

Hungry Gods, was that Sigvin? Whoever it’d been there was a gale of laughter as Troke bit down on a scowl. That was one way to disarm the line of argument, Hakram supposed.

“You like to talk about who I am,” Hakram noted. “Who you are.”

“Because I don’t know you, Deadhand,” Troke said. “Who here does? You boast you’ve fought in many wars, but what I hear is that you’ve fought for everyone but us.”

Hakram snorted.

“Us, Troke?” he said. “Who’s that? How many of the clans in this hall get to be called us ?”

“We’re orcs,” Troke scoffed. “We get-”

“We’re nothing ,” Hakram cut through.

Something like glee passed through Snaketooth’s eyes as rumbles of anger passed through the hall. Troke kept silent, all the better to give Hakram enough rope to hang himself with. The tall orc cast a long look around, unmoved by the anger.

“You don’t like hearing that?” he said. “Good, you shouldn’t. It doesn’t make it untrue.”

He gestured around them.

“Look at us, huddling in a Soninke fortress arguing which Praesi city we should sack before we run back to the Steppes,” Hakram scorned. “Half the armies on Calernia are fighting the greatest war this continent has ever seen and what does Troke Snaketooth offer you – Nok ?”

He laughed, sharp and mocking.

“The least of the High Seats, and after the Ashurans already looted it,” Hakram said. “For that privilege we’re supposed to lick the Tower’s hands like loyal hounds?”

“So you want us to lick Procer’s arse instead,” Troke said. “Is that what you’re getting at? We ought to sign up with the Grand Alliance and go die for some fucking idiot princes in some nowhere out west? So much for the fucking War College.”

Laughter and blades on shields. The War College was disliked by some, Procer by nearly all. Callow was respected, in a way, but the Principate? It was the decadent idiot of orc stories, the avatar of excess and cupidity. There was not a thimble of esteem for the Principate of Procer to be gathered in this entire hall.

“Procer’s not my trouble,” Hakram dismissed. “But this kind of talk, Troke? It’s why I called us nothing.”

The Snaketooth had a wary glint in his eye. Last time that utterance had not burned Hakram like the other orc had thought it would. The tall orc instead turned to the chiefs around them, the clans.

“In five hundred years, when they talk of the fall of Keter, the war to end all wars – what will they say of the orcs?” Hakram asked the hall. “Where will the Clans be in that story?”

He sneered.

“Knifing each other over a few dozen chest of loot while the real powers of Calernia carve the land up into great realms, the empires of the coming age. That’s what it gets you, playing the Tower’s game.”

“So you want us to rebel, like Callow-”

“You talk more of Callow than I do, Troke,” Hakram cuttingly replied. “Do you need a recommendation to enrol in its army?”

Hard laughter, not kind to the chieftain of the Blackspears. It put the man on the back foot long enough for Hakram to keep speaking.

“We became part of the Dread Empire of Praes because of the promises made under the Declaration,” he said. “Do you think those promises were kept?”

Rumbles of approval.

“Well?” Hakram challenged. “ Do you ?”

Shouts, some harder to parse than others, but the screams of NO were clear.

“If the Praesi don’t keep their end of the bargain, then why are we still on our knees?”

Blades on shields. Troke’s face darkened. He was losing the hall and knew it.

“High Lord of the Steppes,” Hakram scorned. “What a way to call burying your head in the sand. Troke offers you Nok and Malicia’s blessing, do you want to know what I offer?

YES , the assembly shouted.

“I give you Ater and all the Tower owes us,” Hakram said.

A roar.

“I give you Keter , riches and glory for a hundred years,” Hakram said.

The roar grew.

“And when we come home at last, we’ll raise a city from the stones we took from theirs,” Hakram Deadhand thundered. “One great enough that even in a thousand years they will tremble at the return of our Horde!”

The roar drowned out everything, and as it rose something grew within Hakram. Sharpened, refined it. And, the tall orc thought as he met Troke Snaketooth’s eyes, the same thing was weakening inside his rival. The tide was turning, and that meant there was only one way for Troke to win now. The chieftain of the Blackspears slowly unsheathed his sword as the roar finally died down.

“Castles in the sky,” Troke Snaketooth bit out. “Their fall will kill us all. Answer for that, Deadhand, with a blade.”

“If you champion nothing, Troke,” Hakram replied as he took his axe in hand, “that is the sole prize you can win.”

The other orc was quick. Quicker than he should be, even as tall as he was. There was an unnatural swiftness to his limbs, the kind that came from a claim settled into one’s bones. Hakram was fresher to his own, but he knew Names in a way that Troke did not. The chieftain’s slash found only steel as Hakram turned and let his arm take it, while he continued to pivot and swung at the man’s head. Troke dropped below the blow before the arc had even begun and Hakram bared his teeth. He knew how to win. They broke and circled each other as feet stomped against stone and blades against shields, their steps careful until Hakram went on the offensive.

A wild chop, cutting down with the beginnings of Name strength, but Troke caught the haft of the axe with the side of his blade and withstood it. Hakram drew back and the chieftain’s footing shifted as he gathered momentum, preparing for a throat that would go through Hakram’s throat. But then the tall orc took a hand off his axe, his bone one, and slapped at the side of Troke’s head. It was a blow that’d hurt but not kill. Catherine would have taken it and finished the thrust, Indrani would already be wrenching her swords of his eyes. But Troke had not yet learned to set aside the instincts of a Name, and so he went to block the slap with his sword instead of finishing the thrust. He’d begun to move before his mind could catch up to the choice.

And so Hakram caught the blade in his dead hand and smiled. He squeezed, steel grinding against bone with a horrid sound, and then the sword broke . Troke’s eyes widened and he was pulling away, but the man found the head of Hakram’s axe resting against the side of his neck. Someone let out a hoarse shout behind them. The Snaketooth’s gaze did not waver.

“I knew it might end this way,” Troke said, grinning ruefully. “But I was hungry , Deadhand.”

He breathed out.

“No regrets. Finish it.”

That was the way, wasn’t it? The red, blood and rage and victory all in one. But he’d never had the red in his blood before, so why start? Hakram’s axe drew back and he swung, Troke’s eyes closing as the flat side of the axe head came to rest against his neck.

“It is finished,” Hakram said.

The man’s eyes opened in startled surprise.

“I have a use for you, Troke Snaketooth,” the Warlord said.

All around them shields were cast down and orcs knelt. The shaman had not called for acclamation, but some things were beyond ceremony. Two hundred shields fell at his feet, as inevitable as the coming of dawn. It was done. The Warlord thought of a moonlit oath, then, and part of him felt like weeping.

But it was done, raised and buried.

Interlude: West II

“The easy wars are the ones where one side’s right and the other’s wrong. The terrible ones are where they’re both right, because once they know that there’s no wrong they’ll flinch away from.”

– Aretha the Raven, Nicaean general

They were losing the war one victory at a time, Hanno thought.

There’d not been a defeat in Hainaut since the great battle that’d destroyed the principality, and still its defenders were losing the land. Hanno among them. Undaunted by a string of defeats in the fields, the Dead King had begun attacking with renewed vigour and it was working. The trouble was that while Hanno’s army had been crushing the dead wherever they met, it could only be in one place. It could not both prevent the dead from reopening the tunnels at Malmedit and prevent them from breaking through at Juvelun, it could not both fight the army coming from Luciennerie out west and relive General Abigail from the latest siege at Lauzon’s Hollow.

Hanno’s army was spent and exhausted, ever victorious and ever smaller. And even worse was that they were no longer truly an effective shield. The Dead King had begun ignoring the defences in Hainaut and sending large flying constructs – named Pelicans, for their head resembled those of the birds – over the walls to disgorge warbands in Arans and Brabant, where they wreaked havoc before being slain. The Pelicans themselves avoided fighting, however, and though Antigone had brought down several with storms and lighting more kept coming. General Abigail believed that soon Keter would begin landing mages the same way to create disrupting forces by slaying and raising villages.

The Fox’s instincts were sharp enough that Hanno was not inclined to doubt them.

From what he heard, it was much the same to the west. Princess Rozala and her Named had pulled off a miracle just south of Peroulet but the defence line there had still failed for a time and it’d been costly to restore it. To the northwest, the Kingfisher Prince had smashed through every army on his way south to Brus while a sea of undeath nipped at his heels. Then to win his home some respite Frederic Goethal had turned back with half a dozen Named and his retinue to destroy a Crab, getting severely wounded. He would have gotten himself dead instead, had Otto Redcrown not ridden to his rescue and led their retreat through an avalanche. The love ballad about it was highly popular in camp.

Yet for all that the singing did the souls of soldiers good, it did not change the truth of things: the defences south of Cleves were teetering on the brink of collapse and those north of Brus would not hold when the tide came. Everywhere the war was being lost, and as was always the way when doom crept close men looked for someone to blame. The Army of Callow was the least harmful, simply insisting that if the Black Queen were there the dead would already be routed, but others were not so measured. The First Prince was cursed for weakness, Amadis Milenan men lost at the Battle of the Camps that might now turn the tide and the League of Free Cities for having made it all worse.

It was worse between Procerans. Lycaonese blamed feckless southerners, having lost half their princes and all their homes defending strangers they held in contempt, while Alamans cursed the Lycaonese for having drained their lands of men to defend the indefensible and Arlesites for being miserly in helping with the defence of the realm. As for the Arlesites, more and more they questioned their very presence in these parts. Why should they stand against nightmares when their own homes were yet untouched? Should they all die and leave their homeland undefended for when the storm came? Desertions would have been common if there was anywhere safer to flee to. Hanno had kept the army from coming anywhere near Neustal, knowing he’d lose hundreds to Julienne’s Highway overnight should he approach the fortress.

Hanno had been giving hope where he could, though not always in manners comfortable to him. Too many called him Lord White, and some of the rumours from further south... He had pushed down the discomfort, it was a small price to pay for keeping the armies from despair. The Lycaonese captains he had supported when the northerners had almost split over returning to their homelands had begun to look to him for orders, like the Brabantine levies, and even fantassins now sought his commands instead of Princess Beatrice Volignac’s – she whose very lands they were fighting in. There was a time where Hanno would have taken a step back, after realizing he now led what was effectively the second largest military force left in Procer, but no more.

The Truce and Terms had been forged under an understanding: he and Catherine would see to the affairs of Named while Cordelia Hasenbach saw to the affairs of state. It was never to be a perfect arrangement, not when Catherine Foundling was also an influential ruler in her own right, but there had been a balance. All contribute, all held up their part. Only now the First Prince no longer did. Reinforcements were no longer coming, the flow of soldiers and supplies tapering off. Salia was not holding up its part of the bargain, the promise that mortal law could see the war prosecuted without need for Named to step in. So what reason was there for Hanno to step back?

He would not hide behind a broken bargain when his duty was clear.

And so he had spoken with Antigone, who had spoken in turn with the only father she remembered. Which led him to a cool morning, standing with only her at his side as in the distance the sun rose and a brisk wind twisted around them. In the distance smoke rose in curtains, Keter’s armies ever making a hundred fresh devilries to unleash, but here on the hills the only thing to mar the green grass was soft dew. Greenery and water shivered both as the Witch of the Woods finished the last of her spell, clouds high above dispersing as if they’d been swatted through. A weight settled on the world, dew turning to mist as the grass began to twist and grow.

In the rising mists stood a giant out of the old stories. Bronze-skinned like others of his kind, but none of the Gigantes would ever dare to claim kinship with Kreios Maker-of-Riddles. It would have been absurd, in their eyes, as a fly claiming kinship to a hawk. The Titanomachy kept to no king, but that was only because it kept to something simpler: a god. There had been many, once, but now only one still lived. Crippled, left a shadow of himself. And yet Hanno knew without a doubt that even the spell-shadow now staring down at him could snuff his existence out with a thought. The ancient Titans, the founders of the Titanomachy, had done a great many arrogant things.

Calling themselves gods had not been one of them.

“Antigone.”

The voice was fond, thick with affection. Hanno’s comrade shifted, head dipping down and to the side to show both love and reverence. What had led Antigone to be raised by the Titan he did not know, much less what had convinced the ancient creature to teach her of the powers of the Gigantes, but their closeness had been evident from the first time he’d seen them. The Riddle-Maker had no such fondness for him, however, and the gaze was not so kind when turned to Hanno.

“White Knight.”

“Lord Titan,” Hanno replied, simply dipping his head.

Reverence but not love. Insincerity in the language of the Gigantes was seen as highly offensive. Worse than an insult, which at least was clearly conveyed.

“I am told you would make a request.”

He straightened.

“I would,” Hanno said. “This war, Lord Kreios, is one we are losing.”

“So it is.”

The indifference was plain to hear. The Riddle-Maker did not involve himself much in the affairs of his own descendants, much less these of humans. To that pale and patient gaze, they were like mayflies: come and gone in a moment. What did petty wars matter to the last of the Titans?

“It will not be like the others,” Hanno said. “The Intercessor has meddled. Should it be lost, there will be consequences.”

The Titan’s gaze was cold.

“To you.”

“You are wrong, Lord,” Hanno replied. “If this were a crusade, perhaps, but this war is not that. The east came as well, and now the south rises. The world stirs. This war will not be like the others .”

Consideration.

“The Young King no longer withholds strength.”

A concession.

“Your request?”

Hanno breathed in. Many a time he had thought of what he might say, of what words might sway an entity that had known more years he had known breaths. A hundred speeches he had crafted and discarded, only to admit the truth to himself: there were no words that would do it. Convince the Riddle-Maker should he not wish to be convinced. All he could do was ask and hope.

“ Fight ,” Hanno of Arwad said, and the word rang of power. “Stand with Calernia, with life and hope. Stand with us and fight.”

Silence.

“All things pass,” Kreios Maker-of-Riddles said. “You and he alike. Fate cannot be gainsaid or turned back: what must be will be.”

“Apathy?” Hanno replied. “Is that your answer, last of the Titans? Is that the wisdom your many years have to offer us?”

He glared, defiant.

“I see no wisdom in this,” he said. “Only weariness, and what worth is that? Who in this world is not weary, Riddle-Maker?”

“There is no word in any tongue your mind can comprehend,” the Titan said, “that would touch a sliver of what true weariness is. How could you? You grope at a speck of dust in the face of eternity and call it an end . You are not even a beginning, child. You are the dust of dust.”

“Then what holds you back?” Hanno challenged. “If none of it matters, if we are but dust, what stays your hand?”

The dark-skinned man raised his chin, glaring up at the shape in the mist.

“Retreat from the world all you like, it does not retreat from you,” Hanno said. “It will knock at your door, Maker-of-Riddles. It may be that you would weather our destruction, but would the Titanomachy?”

“All things pass,” the Riddle-Maker simply said.

Hanno scornfully laughed.

“It may be that you are worse than the elves,” he said. “Even they, in the face of oblivion, can muster more than a shrug .”

That, at last, earned a reaction.

“If you knew the truth of your insult, you would swallow your tongue,” the Titan said. “What the Dawning King schemes is abomination. Parcelling godhead into children, forcing a spring rightfully denied.”

“And this shines kindness on you?” Hanno coldly said. “What a prize to claim, that your apathy is less a curse on Calernia than abomination.”

“Your fight means nothing,” the Titan said.

“He’s right,” Antigone said.

Silence. Surprise.

“Antigone?”

“We don’t deserve saving,” the Witch of the Woods said. “It’s still true, what you told me when I was a child: we are petty creatures, humans. Most of us are not worth the saving.”

The last of the Titans watched the woman he had raised, wearing her face of painted clay, and said nothing.

“But it’s not about us,” Antigone said. “It’s about you.”

She moved her head to the side, titled it back. Grief, question.

“You stand at the crossroads again,” Antigone said. “Do you want to be the seven or the one?”

Hanno’s eyes narrowed. He had known that pattern to be older than most suspected, but whatever ancient lore she was speaking of was beyond even the reach of Recall. The Riddle-Maker’s pale eyes stayed on the woman he’d raised, silence stretching, and suddenly the pressure vanished. The mist dispersed and the wind began to blow again. The spell-shadow of Kreios was gone.

“Will he come?” Hanno asked.

Antigone’s shoulders were tense. I don’t know , she signed. Hanno of Arwad ruefully smiled, looking up at the sky. This morning the answer had been a no, he thought.

It was a small step forward, but still a step.

—

It was Lyonis that had done it, Cordelia decided.

On the great map at the heart of the Vogue Archive, the grey of death had spread. Bremen and Neustria were both lost to the dead and already the norther border of Brus was being tested. Once the generals of the Dead King had found paths through the swamps, once the thousands of Lycaonese slain were armed and assembled into battalions, the push into Brus would begin and the death knell of Procer would ring. And yet those news had not resonated strongly, down south – only Lycaonese principalities had fallen and Cordelia’s homeland was barely considered part of the Principate in some parts.

It was when the dead had smashed through the last few strongholds in Cleves and toppled the hastily raised defences in northern Lyonis that the panic had begun to spread. Princess Rozala had done the impossible – won three battles in three days with the same army across a breadth of sixty miles – and broken the enemy offensive before restoring the defences, but some had still slipped through. For the first time since the war had begun, bands of undead had made into Lyonis. One had even made it as far south as the border of Salia before being ridden down.

Despite Cordelia’s best efforts to maintain the calm, planting rumours it’d been bandits instead, panic had spread like a disease in every direction. The people of the Principate were being confronted with the fallibility of the realm they’d been under all their lives, the thought finally occurring that this wasn’t simply another crisis: Procer would be annihilated if it lost and it was undeniably losing the war.

Riots had been only to be expected. In Salia at least Cordelia had been able to put down largely without blood using the alchemical compound the Concocter had sold the Assembly the recipe to. Elsewhere the rioting had been put down violently if it had been put down at all. Entire swaths of Iserre were now in revolt against both Cordelia and their own prince while the ports of eastern Creusens had seized grain barges meant for further north before beginning to turn away all ships. That was not the worst of it, of course. This very morning her spymaster Louis de Sartrons had brought news of a smaller but more personal grief.

Princess Francesca, her friend and ally of almost a decade, was dead. Her palace had been swarmed by a mob of rioters and disaffected soldiers, who’d dragged the sixty-four years old princess into the streets and splattered her head with a rock before displaying her on a pole. It had happened, Cordelia was told, because Francesca had refused to consider what her distant cousin and successor proclaimed within the hour: Tenerife was seceding from the Principate of Procer. Envoys were being sent, Louis had told her, to Empress Basilia of Aenia and the League of Free Cities. Tenerife was leaving a sinking boat in favour of the protection that might be offered by a rising one.

The principality of Orense had followed suit within the week, deposing its distant prince still fighting under Princess Rozala and installing his youngest daughter in his stead, a thirteen-year-old girl who signed whatever the rebel leaders put in front of her to avoid having her throat cut and her ten-year-old brother shoved into the seat instead. Those were the open rebellions, but there were those more discreet.

Cordelia’s steadfast ally Prince Renato of Salamans had regretfully informed her he would no longer be able to send food and men north. If he did, he would lose this throne within the month. Prince Salazar of Valencis had done the same thing but less honestly, speaking instead of ‘unforeseen delays’ in sending both. Cordelia’s authority strengthened the further north one went, it could be said, but even there it was thinning. Orne, Cantal and Creusens now refused refugees at their borders no matter what was ordered. The only principalities that still obeyed Cordelia were those who felt the Dead King looming over them and even that rule was not ironclad.

Panic was making men do foolish things. Prince Ariel of Arans, spooked by the growing incursions of the dead into his lands, was trying to approach Callow for protection again – and willing to go under Laure for it, should that be the price. Cordelia was more amused than offended, knowing that neither Queen Catherine nor Princess Vivienne would be remotely interested and that Duchess Kegan, the regent in the capital, was of the opinion that everything east of the Parish should be left to burn. Worse than that was the talk in Brabant, where civil unrest had been placated only by the ruling princess abdicating and promising the offer the crown to the man the people saw as their salvation: Hanno of Arwad, the White Knight.

Cordelia’s agents had told her when the Brabant levies had begun to call the man ‘Lord White’ but, now that the sentiment was spreading through their homeland, she was facing the very real prospect of Prince White. The First Prince was not sure she had the votes to prevent confirmation of such a title by the Highest Assembly if the matter came before them. It was a sign of the times. Salia’s authority was weakening and now a hundred petty kings were emerging from the cracks on a once-great realm. And yet what could she do? So very little, when it came down to it, but that was no excuse for inaction and apathy.

Cordelia Hasenbach would not stand before the Heavens having known idle hands while the Principate of Procer burned down around her.

And today she would be laying eyes on one of the ways she might yet stem the tide. The weapon had been moved out of Aisne, which was now too close to for her tastes, and brought to Salia itself. Outside the city proper, requiring an hour’s ride there and back, but Cordelia would make the time to look at the angel’s corpse with her own eyes regardless. The test done in Aisne had made it necessary: if the First Prince was to use such a weapon, she would first gaze upon it. It was the last of what was owed. The man she’d chosen to oversee the matter awaited her at the edge of the grounds, mounted as well, as Cordelia allowed herself a genuine smile: even in these circumstances, it was a pleasure to see Simon de Gorgeault again.

“Your Most Serene Highness,” the older man said.

“Simon,” she warmly replied.

She had not forgotten his actions during Balthazar’s attempted coup, or his loyal service since as her Lord Inquisitor. He’d put down the title to serve here instead, but it had taken little urging. They both knew that spending time curtailing the House of Light now be much like closing the blinds on a home aflame. Besides, she had needed someone she could trust to handle this. He led her through the small houses where the priests and soldiers lived and to the temple that had been chosen to host the corpse. Larger than such a temple out in the countryside should be, for it hosted the tomb of some distant Merovins, but not a structure of great beauty: it was all worn pale stone and tall angular ceilings.

Once windows of tainted glass would have added some charm, but over the years some had been broken and replaced by simple green glass. Yet the temple was large enough and it was placed far from prying eyes, which was what had been required.

“I would advise that you gather yourself before entering, Your Highness,” Simon said after they dismounted. “It is... an experience.”

Cordelia silently nodded, eyes going down to her palm. She could faintly feel the burn of laurels against it, a pale echo of the searing pain she had felt the night she caught the coin of the Sword of Judgement. Simon de Gorgeault led the way into the temple, guards closing the gates behind them, and silence washed over Cordelia. It was as if the air had turned to water, and though she gulped down breaths she found her heart going wild. Simon’s cheeks were flushed but he seemed otherwise unaffected, perhaps from practice. Cordelia eventually gathered her bearings, smoothing down her dress and proceeding further into the temple.

There must have been rooms and halls she walked through, but she could barely see any of them. The slipped through her mind as if it were oily fingers. All that the First Prince recalled was movement, and then she stood before it. The weapon. The ealamal. It felt like the bones of a grand creature, curving along the ceiling, but there was nothing natural in this: wings of burnished copper spread wide, touching... something. A spine, Cordelia’s mind insisted, but it was not of bone. Her eyes shied away from it and what she could glimpse seemed like stone sometimes, though impossibly small compared to the burning wings of copper, and yet at others it seemed like translucent spike of swirling colours. Her eyes watered from trying to look at it.

“Only priests capable of wielding Light can look directly at it, Your Highness,” Simon said.

“The wings seem as though they might be simply copper, but the... spine,” Cordelia quietly said. “That is not of Creation.”

“You have not looked long as the wings, then,” Simon said. “That is for the best. I have known shallower seas.”

Cordelia shivered.

“But it worked, when used?” she asked.

“It is as an amplifier for Light, and something more too,” Simon agreed. “It carries something of the Choir of Judgement within itself and spreads it wherever it goes. It would incinerate undead and devils it touches, certainly, but beyond that the matter grows complicated.”

“It did not kill anyone who could use Light,” Cordelia said.

“But it killed soldiers as well as the criminals, Your Highness,” Simon said. “Not all of them, but many. Should a wave of such power pass over Procer, hundreds of thousands will almost certainly die.”

Judgement was strict and not inclined to mercy when doling out punishment. The weapon, when used, seemed to mimic the harsh attentions of that Choir. And people were only people, with all the frailties and wickedness that implied. Should the weapon be used on a large scale, many thousands would be slain. But not all of the Principate, Cordelia thought. Many, too many, but not all . And even should Catherine’s worst predictions come true and the Intercessor seek to influence such a weapon – which should not be possible, with Judgement silenced by the Hierarch’s spirit – to spread over all of Calernia, it would not represent annihilation. Some would survive. It would be a monstrous order to give and a horrifying outcome, the First Prince would not pretend otherwise.

It would still be preferable to letting the Dead King kill every living thing on the continent.

“Have it prepared for use,” Cordelia rasped out.

The former head of the Holy Society stiffened.

“I have misgivings, Your Highness,” Simon said. “I understand your instinct: it will take months of priests pouring Light to make of the corpse something that would give the Dead King pause. Yet such power, when gathered, has a way of demanding use.”

“In five months, the Principate will collapse,” the First Prince of Procer said.

The older man paused.

“We have too many refugees, Simon, and not enough fields,” she said. “I have been staving off the end by buying every scrap of grain I can borrow and beg, but the point of no return has come and gone. We have too many refugees and not enough fields, we are no longer sustainable.”

“Can Keter not be toppled?” the older man asked.

“Undead will be at the gates of Salia by the time our armies encamp below the walls of the Crown of the Dead,” Cordelia said. “I expect by then the south will have effectively seceded anyhow. I have ensured our armies will have supplies to carry on that last strike, but I can do no more than that.”

“Can the Chosen not turn the tide?” Simon asked, almost plaintively.

“The Chosen,” Cordelia hissed, “are the backbone of our defeat. How much time did we spend wrestling them into order as again and again they threatened the foundations of the alliances keeping us alive? The Damned might be a pack of rapacious killers, but they never gave us half the trouble the Chosen of the Heavens did. The Red Axe, the Mirror Knight, even the White Knight himself.”

She clenched her fists.

“I was promised that the Named would be seen to, but in this only the Black Queen kept her word,” Cordelia Hasenbach harshly said. “The White Knight failed utterly in this, and I will not now rely on him when the fate of every living soul in Calernia rests in the balance.”

She stared down Simon of Gorgeault.

“Have it prepared for us,” the First Prince repeated, and this time the ring of an order was unmistakeable.

The laurels burned against her palm, but Cordelia did not flinch. She would do what she must so keep the west in the war until the last moment. And should it stumble, should it fail?

She would, again, do what she must.

Interlude: East III

“Red runs the Tower’s mortar.”

– Praesi saying

Within an hour of entering Ater, Akua Sahelian was sought out for a conspiracy to overthrow the Empress. By the end of the day, no fewer than seventeen such offers had been made to her.

“It is all very tasteless,” she mused. “A defeat against an invading enemy – Callowan, too, how classical – paired with a great gathering of nobles at the imperial court, everyone scheming to overthrow the Tower and a vague sense of doom looming over all these proceedings. One would be forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled into a tragedy written now by Adomako. Any moment now we will stumble into a scene of overdone symbolism.”

The golden-eyed sorceress paused.

“A wounded gazelle being fought over by lions,” Akua decided. “It’s always lions, isn’t it? There is an excessive fondness in our writing for the beasts, Kendi, given their general uselessness.”

“You are mad,” Kendi Akaze harshly replied. “And not even in the way fools honour. Do not think I will not sell you out to the Tower at the first opportunity.”

Perhaps it was the presence of the Amaranth around her neck, the way the ancient artefact drowned out all the pettier emotions, but Akua had found herself growing fond of the man. He was remarkably straightforward in his hatred of her, and though he had not attempted to kill her since their mage duel in Kala she suspected it was only a matter of time until he tried again. She did not blame him for this, of feel particularly offended. She had led the man’s sister and several of his kin to their death at the Folly they named after her, and that was a better reason for hatred than most.

“I expect several of the nobles who approached me for treachery did so on Malicia’s behalf,” Akua amusedly replied. “Not that my having committed to nothing will soothe her fear of me in the slightest.”

“And why should she not fear you?” Kendi said. “All the world knows you seek her throne.”

“Naturally,” Akua agreed, draining the last of her cup.

She had lost the habit of pairing wine with antidote. The taste was no longer familiar to her, after drinking from other bottles. Her fondness of it had thinned. Her fondness of many things had thinned, the sorceress thought, and rose to her feet.

“Let us be off, Kendi,” Akua said. “There is time to be wasted and I would waste it elsewhere.”

Out in the City of Gates, not these luxurious apartments that felt like they were closing in on her from every direction. Like a noose slowly tightening. Kendi made an unpleasant comment about her intellect, charmer that he was, but he followed. He always followed.

How else, Akua thought, could he find the moment to stick the knife?

They went into the streets of the capital, followed by a horde of shadows. Spies belonging to three dozen different lords and the Eyes, soldiers, Sentinels and two – no, three assassins. Really, an illusionary veil? Akua had first made her reputation bleeding fae , this was insulting. She informed the man as much after melting off his limbs in a cloud of acid before turning to ask her other would-be assassins to try it again tomorrow, for she was not in the mood for sport today. Her shielding spells came up quicker than the arrow came down, so a few blood-curling screams later the last remaining assassin fled.

“Someone will succeed,” Kendi told her. “Sooner or later, you will fail.”

“I can always count on you for perspective,” she replied, patting his arm fondly.

He looked like he’d swallowed a lemon, which put her in a good enough mood to make up for the sloppy assassination attempts. Even the Jacks would have done better, and they’d only been around for a few years on top of being led by a whiny heroine. Akua found, as she walked the streets, that Ater was a pot about to boil over. The capital had swelled with refugees not only from Nok and the outskirts of Thalassina but now also the swaths of the Wasteland that’d been ravaged by the civil war. It was said that the City of Gates held half a million people within its walls, but she knew that to be inaccurate – it was usually closer to three hundred thousand, only growing when famine struck other parts of Praes.

At the moment, though, she suspected that there truly might be five hundred thousand people in the city. A disastrous number to try to keep fed during a siege, no matter how full the Tower’s granaries, and the city was poorly equipped to host them besides. Large swaths of the capital were abandoned, and though it was better than living in the streets making a home in those districts was barely livable. District mages would keep the sewers working, the wards in good state and keep an eye out for epidemics but wouldn’t really go out of their way to help beyond that. There were only so many of them and the city was enormous.

It’d once been custom for wealthy nobles to patronize sections of the city, but Malicia had stamped out the habit to consolidate her control over the capital. Would she reconsider now? Unlikely, Akua decided. The situation was too volatile for the empress to be willing to take on such a risk. Her wanderings through the half-ruined streets were noticed not only by spies and soldiers but also by the refugees themselves: someone must have recognized her, for a crowd began to gather. And, as crowds were wont to be, it grew angry. At first she wondered if she would have to retreat under shield spell as a mob tried to tear her apart, but then laughter choked up her throat as she made out what was being shouted.

“Down the Tower,” the crowd shouted.

“Death to Malicia,” the crowd insisted.

And, worst of all-

“Warlock, Lady Warlock,” they shouted. “Sahelian. Save us, Sahelian .”

Save us, Sahelian , Akua dully repeated. Had anyone ever spoken more absurd a sentence? It would have been the work of a moment to whip these dirty, desperate people into a raging mob. The fear was thick here, the Black Queen’s name on half the lips. The Queen of Callow would come and kill them all, they said, like she’d done to the refugees that’d tried to cross into the Fields of Streges. She was here to bury the Empire, bury them with it, and it was all Malicia’s fault. Five years ago you would have rioted at anyone trying to overthrow her , Akua thought. How quickly gratitude faded in the City of Gates.

“They’ll turn on you too,” Kendi said from behind her. “Tear out your throat like animals. It won’t last.”

It would have been so easy, to whip them into a frenzy and send them rioting into the streets. To sow the seeds of a chaos only she could calm and through that, oh through that she would rise. Climb the Tower until there was nothing left above, no one worth bowing to. So Akua climbed a broken house, a sea of people gathered before her, and told them the truth.

“The Black Queen will not kill civilians,” she said. “The Army of Callow quarrels only with the Tower. Stay indoors, stay out of the way, and you will be safe.”

It was not what they’d wanted to hear, she thought, as a rippled went through the crowd. They’d wanted blood, wanted death, wanted something to sink their teeth into. It was easier than going back to their hovels, afraid and cold. So she gave them something more.

“I have nothing left but my magic to offer you,” Akua said, “but that much I will give you. Bring your wounded, your sick. I will see to them.”

Something more than fear and cold. The first few were children – broken limbs, coughs, lungrot – but by the time she was done with them already people had begun to act. To organize. A run-down mansion that was clean and dry was opened to her, beds dragged into the great hall and what clean linen there could be rustled up volunteered. Strangers did this who had not known each other for an hour, with a smoothness that surprised. Jino-waza . A few hedge mages came forward and she taught them a spell to boil water and conjure clean water before continuing with the work. They came in as a trickle, already a line running outside for half the district and kept in order by large men with makeshift cudgels, but the trickle never slowed.

Akua’s magic did not tire. Fingers reattached, infections burned out, broken bones soldered. Cuts closed, parasites flushed out, nerves regrown. She had done this all many a time, after the Army of Callow saw battle. With Night instead of sorcery, but she was only better for the change. She was not sure how long she healed, the faces and people blending, but eventually she found she was drenched in sweat. The Amaranth kept getting caught in the red silk collar, so she set it down to the side and returned to the work. Immediately the heat washed over her, form the fire and the people and the Wasteland’s pounding sun, but she mastered herself. A man was ushered in with his young daughter.

She had a fever, which Akua’s finding spell told her was from an infection in the stomach. It would be more tedious than difficult to heal, which she informed them of. The man – a tall, heavy sort with soldier’s scar – looked heartbreakingly relieved.

“I knew you’d come through, Lady Sahelian,” he said as she began the spell. “You’ve always done right by us.”

Curious, she spared the man a glance.

“I mean no rudeness,” she began, and he snorted.

“I was only a soldier,” he said. “But I served under you at First Liesse. Would have at the Second too, if my wife hadn’t gotten pregnant with my youngest. The name’s Kamau.”

There was, to her dim horror, open pride in his voice at having served her. How desperate must you be, that the memory of my follies is the raft you now cling to?

“I was never disappointed by any of those I led into Liesse,” Akua said, uneasy at the lie.

At feeling the need to tell it.

“It’s been hard times since,” Kamau admitted. “What with your lord cousin taking over in Wolof, some of us were sent away. We tried to head south, but it... didn’t go well.”

“The Green Stretch turned you back?” she asked.

“No, not them,” the man said. “Callowans on the other side of the Wasaliti. Just farmers, at first, but then the Legions – the Army of Callow, I guess they call themselves out west – got bloody too.”

He grimaced.

“We lost my wife fleeing back to the Blessed Isle,” he admitted. “It’s only this one and my son now. I have no words for how grateful I am you’re helping her.”

His eyes turned harsh.

“Would that you’d killed them all at the Doom, Lady Warlock,” he said. “We’d be better off for it. Next time, yeah?”

Her throat tightened, the magic flowing from her palm into the girls’ belly almost wavered. I used you , she almost told the man . I used you all, until you were spent and dead and when you were I never looked back. Can you not see that? Can you not see that soldiers swung the swords but I own every death?

“It was a bitter day for all who knew it,” Akua croaked, lips gone dry.

“Been a lot of those since you started the wars – I hear the scholars call them the Uncivil Wars,” Kamau said, but suddenly paled. “Not that I meant this was your fault at all, Lady Warlock, I-”

Could not possibly speak a sentence more damning than that one , Akua thought. But she painted a smiled on her face, moved the lips and soothed his fear.

“Need not explain anything,” Akua said, then withdrew her hand from the girl. “It is done, dear. Be careful to drink only water until tomorrow, and don’t eat anything even if you get hungry. Your stomach is very sensitive, you’ll spew it right back up and it would hurt you.”

The little girl gravely nodded, and her father led her out after another round of apologies that she dismissed. Akua felt faint, as she next man was ushered in. How many of the people she had healed today were in the capital because of an action she had taken? Her folly had been used as the pretext for the Grand Alliance to go to war, for Ashur to ravage the coasts of the Empire, but there were faults closer to home. It was her banner raised that had begun the civil wars that were still raging across Praes, her schemes that had... Akua laid a hand against the wall, dizzied. She felt Kendi’s eyes on her, considering.

Forcing herself not to move with unseemly haste, she put the Amaranth back on and let the ancient grief of the crystallized tear wipe away the knots in her stomach. She returned to the work, learning from men as she did that the High Lady of Kahtan had sent mages do imitate her and now dozens and dozens of highborn were doing the same. When finally she tired, her magic grown sluggish, she told the people as much. Some refugees wept as she went, but more cheered and even more bowed. It sickened her. She turned to the Taghreb woman who had first thought of using the mansion, had risen through the crisis as a leader of sorts.

“I am using you, you know,” Akua said. “To raise my reputation.”

It was true, she thought. It must be true. It was one thing to spare a man, a forgivable whim, but this... she had purpose, reason. She had taken an opportunity offered. The other woman shrugged.

“Maybe,” she said. “But what does that matter, to the people you healed?”

Akua flinched away from her, from it all, but she was not to be allowed to retreat in peace.

“That was reckless,” Kendi said. “She could have turned on you, told the crowd. You just came close to dying.”

“I am always but a moment away from dying,” Akua replied, forcing nonchalance.

The dark-skinned man rolled his eyes.

“Yes, mile thaman Sahelian , lovely,” Kendi said, “but I don’t mean philosophy-“

“Neither do I,” Akua curtly interrupted. “Do you think my return to flesh came without a price? Somewhere in me lies a way for the Empress to kill me with a word. I do not speak in metaphor , Kendi, when I say I am only ever a moment away from death.”

That silenced him, though she was not sure whether the quiet was thoughtful or surprised. No doubt he would soon begin to consider how the Empress might be incited to put her life to an end. Tired of it all, Akua moved towards the centre of the city. The Black Knight, at least, could be relied on for cold company. Marshal Nim was not the Legion headquarters of the capital but instead at her own manse, which Akua promptly headed to. That the servants allowed her and Kendi to enter was a surprise, but not so much of one as the fact that Nim was very obviously drunk. As mfuasa were trained to Kendi went to a corner just out of sight, where he could easily be forgotten, but his gaze missed nothing.

“Marshal,” Akua greeted the ogre. “It appears you have me at something of a disadvantage, drink-wise. Will you not offer me your hospitality?”

Only the Black Knight did not stare her down coldly, call her a snake or sent her away. Instead, to Akua’s dismay, the ogre twitched and then wordlessly gesture for her to sit. Most chairs here were built with ogres in mind, and the bottles on the table were closer to a barrel than what the sorceress would have meant by the term, but Akua found a carafe of terrible Aksum gold and a glass that was not larger than her head. She took a sip, then grimaced.

“This vintage is a war crime,” Akua noted, “and I should know.”

Marshal Nim stirred, as did the golden-eyed mage’s hopes, but they were just as swiftly dashed.

“You were right,” the Black Knight said.

“As is only natural,” she replied, hiding her alarm.

“Malicia doesn’t trust the Legions as far as she can throw them,” the Black Knight said. “I am to share command of the defences with the High Lady of Kahtan.”

Who commanded the largest of the highborn armies come to reinforce Ater as well as the largest coalition of nobles not under Malicia’s thumb. In olden days that would have made High Lady Takisha the Chancellor, but nowadays it mostly meant that the Empress was scheming to kill and discredit her.

“I can’t even blame her, after Kala,” the Black Knight cursed. “They deserted, Sahelian. Deserted !”

A bottle of wine hit the wall, shattering with enough glass spraying everywhere that it would need wheelbarrow to clean up. Akua eyed the other woman clinically. Nim was drunk, obviously, but more than that she was despairing. Not only had she been decisively beaten by Marshal Juniper on the field – which must have stung, considering the Hellhound had not been all that highly thought of among the upper ranks of the Legions – but in the wake of that defeat almost a third of her army had deserted rather than fight. Now she had only her last loyalists and the skeleton legions that’d been left in the capital, a force weaker than the one Marshal Juniper had already beaten.

The Legions of Terror she had been fighting to preserve were effectively dead. The soldiers that’d walked off the field at Kala would not be returning to anyone’s banner any time soon and the Tower would not forget or forgive that desertion – no matter how earned it had been. Even the legionaries who had stayed would be asking themselves why they were still fighting for the madwoman in the Tower that’d turned two thirds of the continent against them. Her Role was broken at Kala , Akua decided. She failed in the central conceit of it, which was ‘the general of the Empire’s armies’. She must either find a different Role or lose her Name.

And Akua, who had tried to save her life and helped at every turn, was here in her moment of weakness. I could promise you the Legions you want and mean it , Akua thought, and for that you’d follow me. It was the right place, the right time, with the right history behind it. The Gods Below were offering a Black Knight of her own on a silver platter. All it would take was making promises that Akua genuinely believed would be in the interest of the Empire: the Legions had become one of the pillars of Praes since the Reforms, they were well-worth preserving and kept separate from politics exactly the way Marshal Nim wanted them to be.

All it would take was for Akua to speak sweet nothings with a silver tongue.

“You are a fool.”

Oh dear, that’d been her speaking hadn’t it? No matter, she could still salvage this.

“Are you truly so weak-willed, Black Knight?”

Not only was this distinctly not a sweet nothing, Akua thought, but it was arguably the opposite. An insulting something? She drank a bit more war crime to wash down the taste of whatever madness had seized her. Nim was shaken out of her daze by the insults, at least, which was a form of progress. Towards nothing pleasant, but progress anyhow.

“Even if I smash your head in for that, I’ll still be dead before the month is out,” the Black Knight said. “I know what a pattern of three is, Sahelian. I have won once and since suffered a draw. That boy will have my head soon enough.”

“Then find a way to lose on your terms,” Akua harshly replied. “Are you a Marshal of Praes or a maudlin child? Defeat need not mean death. Even Fate can be gamed. As for your precious Legions, what did you expect?”

“That they would stand behind their Black Knight,” Nim roared.

“They did,” Akua calmly replied. “You are not him.”

That cut deep, she saw, but she was not done.

“Did you think this would be easy, Nim?” she mocked. “That you would earn a Name to pluck ripe peaches from the tree? You are villain .”

She threw her own glass against the wall. It shattered most satisfyingly.

“You are the Black Knight of Praes,” Akua hissed. “Have some fucking pride . You lost and your ideal is in tatters, what of it? Do you think a hundred of your Name have not stood where you do, all ashes in their hands and blood in their mouth?”

“It can’t be salvaged,” the Black Knight replied, eyes wild. “We all saw-”

“Then raise it again from the ground up,” Akua cut in harshly. “Or are you so enamoured with being the lesser of your predecessor that you can not do the same he did? This was never going to be handed to you, and it offends me that for even a breath you thought it might be. You are Named to struggle, to rise above what you were. If you cannot tolerate the way of the world, then change it .”

Marshal Nim rocked back.

“I – you,” she stumbled. “What is this, Sahelian?”

“A disappointment,” Akua scathingly said. “I thought better of you, Marshal. A petty idealist you might have been, but you did not lack for spine. The Hellhound did not take if from you on the field, so where was it mislaid?”

Nim looked as lost as she was drunk.

“I thought you would,” she said, hesitated.

Make an offer, she did not say.

“What are you, that I should?” Akua said, rising to her feet. “Naught but a broken thing which knows not what it wants or what it seeks. You have no design, no fire, not even a plan. You call yourself Named but you are a dandelion, a victim of wind and whims.”

She was panting, by the end of that. And wondering if it was the Black Knight she was castigating.

“Stand on your own feet, Black Knight,” Akua Sahelian said. “What use could anyone have for you before you do?”

And so she rose to hers, dizzy. And looking at Nim’s face she felt like cursing, like weeping, like screaming at the top of her lungs. Because when she had walked into this room the Black Knight had been a woman who might had made a deal with her, but now she looked at Akua like someone who wanted to follow her. Like ragged Kauma in the ragged mansion, handed scraps of a fate and yet so odiously grateful. Did she need to set fire to the city, before someone at last screamed enough? Akua fled.

“She will know what you are in time,” Kendi said. “And hate what she sees then.”

“She should already hate me,” Akua bit out.

By the time they got back to her manse it was dark, and so the highborn came out to play. The ones that had approached her during the day were fools and amateurs, but those who fully intended to see the Empress usurped now came crawling out of the gutters. The invitation she received was not signed, but that was the way of such conspiracies. She put on a cloak and returned to the streets, Kendi following dutifully, to see what the conspirators had to offer. One could not topple the Tower without the support of powerful backers. The heavily warded manse she was led to by a guide was dark, and she was brought to a room where twelve sat masked at a great table.

Amused, she stared down the woman at the head of tit.

“You are sitting in my seat,” Akua said.

There was a ripple. Laughter, offence, some just surprised by her gall. Kendi disappeared into a dark corner, already forgotten by almost everyone in the room.

“That remains to be seen,” an indistinct voice replied through the mask.

“Does it now?” Akua mused.

It had been hours since she used magic. She was still exhausted, but her disdain for this farce lent her strength. Power billowed out tearing through the anchored illusion forcing shadows and then, obeying her will, cutting cleanly. One after another, twelve masks dropped. Some were hastily caught, but not enough.

“High Lady Takisha,” Akua noted, locking eyes with the woman at the head of the table. “How bold.”

“I’ll have to kill you for this,” the High Lady of Kahtan coldly said.

She laughed, scornfully, in the woman’s face.

“Ah yes, so that instead these fine conspirators might instead support your bid for the Tower,” Akua said, running a finger across the table. “No doubt you gathered this little event because you were able to climb it on your own. You are known as a woman highly lacking in ambition.”

A moment of silence.

“She has you there, Muraqib” a masked man carelessly said.

“Without my support and that of my vassals, you have no chance of success,” High Lady Takisha evenly said. “This will have a price. First comes the restoration of the Name of –”

“No,” Akua said.

Startled surprise. This was not, the sorceress knew, how this conversation was meant to go.

“Pardon?” High Lady Takisha said.

Akua was so very tired of this, she realized. Of the cloak and dagger plots, of the pit of hatred and betrayal that was the Tower. Of this empire of endless teeth, guzzling down its own people not to achieve anything but for the mere purpose of continuing to exist. And they were part of it, too, these masked fools before her. Teeth in the maw.

“You do not make demands of me,” Akua said, and it felt good .

“You are mistaken if-”

“Who are you, Takisha Muraqib, that I should take heed of you?” Akua asked, honestly meaning the question. “All I see is the last rat standing. What have you won, what have you done, that your displeasure should give me pause?”

“Hard talk, coming from the Black Queen’s concubine,” a man bit out.

“I would have more power as Catherine Foundling’s bedwarmer than you ever have or ever will wield,” the golden-eyed aristocrat laughed in his face. “That’s why you’re here, all of you, in this room instead of halfway across the city plotting to back someone else.”

She swept the room with her gaze.

“So let us dispose of the pretence that you are owed for this conversation, that this is a favour done onto me,” Akua said. “You are vultures circling a wounded lion but too afraid to take the plunge. I need you?”

She moved her lips into a smile.

“You need me,” Akua corrected, “and you, High Lady Takisha, are still sitting in my seat .”

Silence stretched out, and something like relief welled up. At last, she thought, the end. They would balk and turn on her, Malicia would end it and- and Takisha Muraqib, hatred in her eyes, rose to her feet. No, Akua thought. No . How can you not seen that I have nothing to threaten you with, no one behind me? You are a High Lady of Praes, the sharpest of irons, so why are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? Why, you misbegotten Hellgods, do I keep winning? Appalled, Akua Sahelian took her seat at the head of a table where twelve of the most powerful lords and ladies of Praes sat.

“They measure your back for knives already,” Kendi told her as they left. “You will not be forgiven for this.”

“Then why,” Akua sadly asked, “did they let me do it to them?”

She returned to the manse, sagged into a seat, and closed her eyes. Exhausted beyond words. Behind her she heard Kendi moved, but somehow she was still startled when pain bloomed on the side of her head.

—

Akua woke up. The Gods were laughing and Akua Sahelian woke up. Her back hurt, and fingers found a bloody scar on it, but she was breathing and when she rose in her bed she found Kendi Akaze seated across from her, eyes smiling. On a low table before him there were two objects. One was the Amaranth, smashed to pieces. The other looked like a strip of bone, carved with so many rows of small runes that it was hardly recognizable.

“Lodged in your spine,” Kendi amiably said. “It was difficult to remove it without paralyzing you, but I managed.”

“Why?” she croaked out.

“Because you are in pain,” he said. “And I want you to drown in it without your necklace to save you.”

“This is madness,” Akua hissed.

“Is it?” Kendi said. “I followed you today. You have won the people, the Legions, the nobles. The Empire is in the palm of your hand, the Tower yours for the taking.”

He leaned forward.

“And what do you think of that, Akua Sahelian?” he asked.

He was not lying, she realized with anguish. She’d known it too but shied away from looking the truth in the eye. After a lifetime of scheming and murdering, after struggling and betraying and burning every bridge there was to burn, the Empire was in the palm of her hand. She let it sink in, settle into her mind, until an answer came from the heart of her.

Akua threw up all over the marble floor.

“That’s what I thought,” Kendi said with cold, hard satisfaction.

—

Catherine Foundling was coming to kill her.

The knowledge of that circled Malicia’s thoughts like a vulture, never close but never far. Amadeus’ little orphan, turned into a brutal warlord, was marching on Ater to kill Alaya of Satus. Malicia tried to set the thought aside, but all the news brought to her only made it stand out more starkly. Her impostor in Mercantis had been unmasked, the devil slain and now the Forty-Stole Court was maddened with rage. They had cut all ties with the Tower, placed the Empire under embargo and offered a fresh round of loans to the Grand Alliance at courteous terms. And, worst of all, they had sought the protection of Empress Basilia of Aenia.

A title the entire League of Free Cities had recognized after the fall of Penthes, along with the worrisome one of ‘Protector of the League’. Not only had the entire League of Free Cities followed Mercantis in severing ties, but now all its ports were closed to Praesi ships and the city-states were mobilizing for war. To join the war against the Dead King, Ime believed, but she could not be sure. All Malicia could know was that there was only one large military force on Calernia uncommitted to warfare, and that it was her hard-bitten foe. That hatred would linger for decades, lead the south to oppose her for the rest of her reign. If she had one.

Catherine Foundling was coming to kill her.

Ashur was still sundered in two, but it was no longer starving because Malicia no longer controlled the fleet meant to blockade it. The necromancers that’d usurped the fleet of Nicae through use of Still Waters no longer took her orders. They had taken to raiding the coasts of Ashur and the League for plunder and corpses. For now they traded with Stygian slaver ports for supplies, but that would be clamped down on by ‘Empress’ Basilia. They’d have to find other ports of call eventually, and Malicia feared that the Tideless Isles – scoured clean of corsairs by Ashur – would appeal. Her own masterstroke turned pirate might begin raiding the coasts of Praes.

Out west the Dominion had been stabilized by the First Prince’s clever diplomacy after the Isbili were wiped out in some sort of blood magic ritual, but the Black Queen had won the higher prize by making the leading couple of Levant her pupils. Procer itself was finally collapsing even in the face of Hasenbach’s inhuman efforts to keep it together – the first secession had happened six months later than Malicia’s prediction, which was a staggering delay. The First Prince had kept together her empire with little more than letters and diplomacy as it tumbled into utter ruin. Malicia was genuinely admired the feat, but Hasenbach had not lasted long enough . The collapse was happening too early, there was nobody left in the Grand Alliance in a position to contest Callow’s influence.

And Catherine Foundling was coming to kill her.

And all the ruinous reverses abroad were nothing to what trouble had now fallen on Praes. Wolof had been knocked out of the war, the alliance of Aksum and Nok subverted by a foreign power and now Okoro was cowering in its fortresses. The Clans had elected a leader, but Malicia was uncertain whether or not it had been Chieftain Troke Snaketooth. All the informants of the Eyes had gone silent overnight, and while the orc she’d made bargains with had been in the lead last she heard, there was no telling who had triumphed. Worse, the horde of greenskins was not only going nowhere Nok but it was very clearly marching on Ater, burning and pillaging everything in its path. Malicia was now facing the distinct possibility that even if the Grand Alliance retreated the Clans might still sack a weakened Ater.

Ater itself was slipping her fingers. She could feel in the way that Rule was weaking, the wat fewer people truly saw her as the Dread Empress of Praes. Sentiment in the streets was turning against her, the Legions were a mutinous wreck riddled with desertions and the nobles come to attend the imperial court had plots the way stray dogs had fleas. She’d remained ahead of them, so far, but she was a dancer with a shrinking stage to dance on. Gods, even district mages were getting murdered out in the ruined districts. With a goblin steel blade, so it was likely some Legion deserter stirring up trouble. The only force Malicia could still truly trust in was the Sentinels, and the thought had rage frozen in her throat.

These were the same soldiers that had nailed her father to the floor of his own inn, and Catherine Foundling was coming to kill her .

The brutal little bitch could not be bargained or reasoned with, she was out for blood and no matter what Malicia threw at her she seemed to come out on top. The battle in the Wasteland that should have broken her army had instead seen it reinforced , Marshal Juniper crowned the finest general to come out of the War College and Sepulchral bending the knee. It was even more ridiculous than Wolof, where even captured she’d somehow still claimed victory. Next she would be struck by lightning and somehow gain the power to call on storms, the absurd chit. There was no going around her, either. The First Prince no longer even bothered to read her letters and with Mercantis turning on her she no longer had an intermediary.

Only strength would make the Queen of Callow listen, and while the host gathered in Ater’s shadow outnumbers the Army of Callow it was not Malicia’s. It belonged to a hundred different nobles, too many of them traitors. And even if it gave battle, the empress was not certain it would win. The Army of Callow had humbled even the Legions, which had triumphed against the armies of the old Praes handily. Malicia still had the Tower’s arsenal, and for the first time in her reign she was deploying the artefacts and horrors that a thousand tyrants had sealed in deep vaults, but she had... concerns. Even should these powers bring her victory, it might be the kind worse than a defeat. Yet what else was she to do?

Alaya did not want to die, and Catherine Foundling was coming to kill her.

It was a relief when Ime came to meet with her, a distraction from her thoughts and their downwards spiral. Connect told her that her spymistress’ loyalty had weakened but not in a harmful way. The nuance was hard to read, but Malicia had learned. Ime must have thought of running, then. She had not, Malicia remined herself. For now, that was what mattered.

“Akua Sahelian spent most of yesterday healing refugees,” Ime said, moments after being seated. “She then met with Marshal Nim in her private manse. Late that evening, she disappeared into a warded location – my agents were slain trying to find out with who. There were no survivors.”

“I will summon her to the Tower, then,” Malicia said, cocking an eyebrow. “As was the intent from the start. With the alternative being death, she will give us the names and facilitate a purge of the most disloyal.”

“I thought you might say that,” Ime evenly said. “But she’s too dangerous to be allowed to live, Malicia. She has too much support while yours wanes.”

Malicia stilled.

“What did you do?” she harshly asked.

“I used the kill switch,” Ime said.

The empress mastered her anger. Only she had been supposed to be able to give that order. Yet another way her authority was weakening.

“Now we have no match for the Hierophant,” she said. “Which might well lose us the siege.”

“It’s much worse than that,” Ime said. “I used the artefact, but she’s still alive. It was removed, Your Majesty. We no longer have a leash on her.”

Malicia’s fingers clenched. The Warlock – or close enough – was now free to act against her without deterrent. And she could not simply order her killed, because even should such an attempt work and fail to trigger an uprising against her killing Akua Sahelian might well get her killed by virtue of there being no one able to stop Wekesa’s son from mauling the defences of the capital. Her mind spun, looking for angles, but there were none. No answer, no clever trick.

From her silence, Ime must have come to the same conclusion.

“I advised against recruiting her,” Ime quietly said. “She’s always been a risk-”

“I know what you advised, Ime,” Malicia barked out. “I assure you, there is no need to remind me. I deemed it necessary at the time.”

She’d meant to kill the Sahelian or surrender her back to the Grand Alliance’s custody the moment an arrangement was reached, either way ending her as a threat. Where had she found a mage trustworthy and skilled enough to find the artefact in her spine, much less remove it?

“We need to prepare to pull out of Ater,” Ime advised. “Set our enemies on each other and approach again from a better position. It might be time to seriously consider wedding either Sargon Sahelian or Jaheem Niri. It keeps them committed and us in the game.”

Jaheem Niri was already married, not that he wouldn’t murder his wife in a heartbeat to become the imperial consort. The prospect of marrying either was repulsive enough that Alaya felt physically nauseous. She closed her eyes, looking for any other way. Ime stayed silent for a long time, then rose to her feet.

“I will prepare what I can, Alaya,” the spymistress said. “Think on it, that is all I ask.”

The empress stayed alone in the council room for a long time, with only silence and that ever-present thought for company. Eventually she rose to her feet, the sky outside turned to night. Sleep, she thought, sleep would put it all in perspective. But her quarters were not empty. On the table by the enchanted window, a woman was leaning back her seat, boots against the rim of table two hundred years old as she looked down at the city. Fair-haired and tanned, she had in her hand a crystal glass from Malicia’s personal cabinet that she was refilling with wine from a silver flask. In her lap lay a lute, old and worn but still beautiful.

“I am told you are particularly vulnerable to Speaking,” Alaya said. “I wonder, would I even need to vocalize to make you kill yourself?”

The Wandering Bard turned to offer her an insolent blue-eyed grin and a sloshing toast that spilled wine on her leathers.

“Those who live by the sword tend to get killed with swords,” the Bard shrugged. “You know how it is, I’m sure.”

“You are on the Red List,” Malicia said. “Kill on sight.”

“And yet here I am,” the Bard noted, “still breathing.”

A moment of silence.

“So you are,” Malicia conceded.

The other woman laughed throatily, by the sound of it already well on her way to drunk. The empress knew better than to believe it made her any less dangerous.

“Have a drink with me, Dread Empress,” the Bard said. “I had... well, I wouldn’t call it luck all things considered, but it was a fateful draw.”

Best to humour her for now. Malicia stepped aside to take a cup from her personal cabinet, which as she’d suspected was wide open already, and took a glass match for the Bard’s own. She set it down on the table, eyebrow cocked, and took a seat of her own. Casually, as if this were not the knife’s edge. The Bard set down the lute on her lap to lean forward, pouring Malicia’s glass uncouthly full from her flask. The empress politely took her cup, breathing in the scent, and froze. She took a tentative sip. It was truly horrid wine, somehow tasting of mud, but Alaya knew it well. She’d been drinking it for years with someone now lost to her. Her heart clenched.

“Fate’s a bitch,” the Wandering Bard confessed. “I should know, I’ve served as the closest thing Calernia has to one since before... well, written calendars really. Only the Riddle-Maker’s older and his kind didn’t really bother with that sort of thing.”

Ice, let her be ice. Smooth and cold and polished enough this old monster would see only her own reflection.

“You will not distract me with interesting fragments of history,” Malicia said. “You came here with a purpose.”

“It’s the only way I can go anywhere,” the Bard snorted, then drank deep of her cup. “Gah, definitely not a lucky draw. But as I was saying, my good – well, you know what I mean – empress, I feel like the time where we were enemies has passed. At least temporarily, yes?”

“You killed Sabah,” Alaya evenly said.

“You liked her,” the Bard noted. “So did I. Most people did, I imagine, when she wasn’t eating or killing them. But she needed to die so I could get my way. So she did.”

Ice, ice. She would not think of kind smiles or the children left behind, for where would that lead her? Only ice would see her live out the year. Malicia moved her lips into a smile, did not let it reach her eyes.

“And how many of my troubles can be laid at your feet, I wonder?” Malicia asked.

“The funny thing is,” the Bard said, “honestly not that much.”

She waved a hand dismissively, trailing wine all over the table.

“I work through Named,” the Bard said, revealing nothing the Eyes had not already told her, “and Named haven’t been your problem. Your empire has been going to shit because you Role doesn’t match your Name.”

“Is that so?” Malicia politely smiled.

“You’ve been ruling like a Chancellor,” the Bard said. “But the Chancellor’s not meant to be on top of things in these parts. A Dread Empress is meant to add, inspire, create. You’ve been dividing, lessening, binding. Chancellor’s work, and that’s why it’s all been going downhill: you no longer have other Named on your side to compensate for that.”

“I told you history would not distract me,” Malicia said. “Did you think namelore would?”

“I just like to talk,” the Bard artlessly confessed. “But let’s be all business, if you want. You have a problem: Catherine Foundling very badly wants you dead and there’s no one left in a position to stop her.”

“Ater still stands,” Malicia said.

“Said every Dread Empress who ever got murdered,” the Bard replied, rolling her eyes. “It’s not a siege that’s going to decide this. You’ve got an empire’s worth of stories come home to roost in Ater, Allie, and that’s what kills or saves you.”

“And here I had thought it would be a blade,” Malicia smiled.

The Bard snorted.

“Sure, if you want to be obtuse about it,” she said. “The blade’s just the natural consequence of the story turning against you. It doesn’t drive the carriage, it’s a destination. And you’re in luck, my friend, because it happens that destination your-head-on-a-pike just isn’t doing anything for me. It’s a bit of pain in my ass, to be honest.”

“What a fortunate happenstance,” Malicia said. “I, too, would prefer to avoid my decapitation. You have thoughts on how this might be achieved?”

“I’m all about thoughts,” the Bard agreed. “Just so many thoughts. So lemme share one with you: do you know when a Named is most vulnerable?”

“At the end of a pattern of three, presumably,” Malicia said.

While those did not necessarily end in death for the villain involved, that did seem to be the prevalent trend.

“Nah,” the Bard slurred, “it’s just before they come into their Name. See, that’s the spot where they’re riding fate but they’re not really protected yet.”

The empress considered the other woman a moment, drinking shallowly from her cup.

“I am told,” Malicia said, “that Catherine Foundling is coming into a Name.”

“Defence isn’t how you win this game,” the Bard said. “So we’re going on the offensive, you and I.”

Malicia’s eyes narrowed.

“How?”

“It’s not set yet, what she’s turning into,” the Bard said. “So we nudge it so it becomes what we need. The east that is land and armies and politics, all the things that pass, instead of the East – the story, the idea. Old Evil and buried grudges, the other half of the world. She’s only as dangerous as what she keeps, you see.”

She was starting to.

“And when she transitions?”

“There’s this joke I love,” the blue-eyed Bard enthusiastically said. “It’s from Ashur so, you know, it’s not actually funny , but it’s great anyways and it goes like this – and stop me if you’ve heard it before!”

She cleared her throat, which somehow had her spilling a third of her cup over her own lute and then cursing before wiping it off effectively with her sleeve.

“Right so there’s this man who goes to a priest, a Speaker,” the Bard said. “And he says that his daughter’s taken up with some Praesi, proper smitten. So he’s come for advice because he needs a time, a place and man to officiate.”

The Bard began chortling, already taken with her own joke.

“So the Speaker gives them, only the man comes back the day after all riled up,” she said. “Says it was a disaster. Why, the priest asks. Did the wedding not go well? And then the man erupts: wedding? I was asking about-”

“-a funeral,” Malicia finished.

It was easy enough to infer from context. The Bard pouted.

“I don’t know why people keep doing that to me,” she whined. “No wonder you’re a villain.”

Malicia ignored her... ally’s petty moaning, herself taking petty satisfaction in having caused it.

“A time, a place and a man to officiate,” Dread Empress Malicia mused. “That is all?”

“That’s the good thing about Catherine, Allie,” the Intercessor grinned, all teeth and malice. “You can always count on her to bring the knife.”

Chapter 22: Advent

“Every crisis is an opportunity, Chancellor. Mostly an opportunity to die, but occasionally other things as well.”

– Dread Empress Malevolent II

“I always forget how ridiculously huge Ater is,” I said.

In the distance the tall ramparts of the City of Gates loomed, crowned with bastions atop the inner walls and the gargantuan silhouette of the Tower rising to touch the clouds. It was an impressive sight, the kind that gave you pause even if you knew – as I did – that it was rare for the Dread Empire to actually have enough military strength in the city to man the entire set of walls properly. The capital was so large that if it were not so terribly fortified it might actually be indefensible, though another school of thought back in the College had argued that the size was actually part of the defences. Tyrants in the Tower had never been shy about drawing their opponents into abandoned districts before setting them aflame.

“Surely Salia is even larger,” Arthur ventured. “It was raised in fertile lands near a river, not at the heart of the Wasteland.”

“In size Ater is larger,” I noted. “Entire sections of it are usually abandoned, though, and Salia definitely has more people in it.”

The Squire eyed the capital of the Dread Empire with a skeptical look on his face, which had me smothering a smile. Back when I’d first come to Ater I’d been too wrapped up into myself and what Amadeus was teaching me to really take it in properly, but arriving as part of an invading army was giving my fellow orphan a bit more perspective.

“I don’t see how they can feed that many people,” Arthur admitted. “Or even have enough drinking water. Is it an underground source like Hainaut?”

“Five different underground lakes,” I confirmed. “The Miezans built a bunch of enchanted funnels when they first took over the city that feed a system of fountains anyone can take from, but there’s been works since. Dread Emperor Vile made aqueducts and cisterns when the population got too large and Dread Emperor Tenebrous-”

“Isn’t that the one who turned into a giant spider?” the Squire asked, sounding amused.

“Allegedly,” I snorted. “No knows for sure, though there sure are a lot of them under the city nowadays. Anyhow, Tenebrous made an enormous reservoir to catch rain and freeze it, a reserve for when the city is in drought.”

It was a pleasant change to be able to tell when Scribe was approaching. Like a touch in the back of my mind, a star I could see shining in the black whenever I closed my eyes. One of many.

“Vile’s cisterns were dismantled under Dread Emperor Venal,” Eudokia said, standing right behind Arthur.

Who nearly jumped out of his skin, swallowing a curse. It was a nostalgic sight: she used to do the same to me back when I was the Squire.

“That’s the one who thought Ater was a shithole and tried to build his own capital, right?” I asked.

“Indeed,” Scribe agreed. “The cisterns were lined with silver for purity enchantments, he had them broken down to use the metal in coinage.”

Well, the man had come by his regnal name honestly.

“They were never replaced?” Arthur asked.

“Much later,” Scribe replied. “Maleficent the Second had the silver statues in Delos’ great library melted down and used for replacements after the Secretariat tried to refuse her access to their histories.”

She’d had a way with insults, Maleficent the Second, when she wanted to make a point. It was said she’d had the third of the Magisterium that’d refused to surrender to her enslaved and forced into the Spears of Stygia as an admonishment.

“So thirst isn’t going to make them surrender,” Arthur said. “What about food, though?”

I cocked an eyebrow at him.

“Do you want a lecture on how the imperial tax system works?” I drily asked.

“Is it murder?” the boy drily replied. “I’m guessing murder is involved.”

“Ater has the largest granaries in the country,” I told him. “They’re massive, the size of palaces.”

“Even with the field ritual gradient and rotations introduced under Nefarious, the fields around the city can only feed a little under half of Ater,” Scribe said. “The remainder comes from taxes. High Seats are charged with collecting a tenth of the harvest in their lands and that of their vassals, which is then sent to Ater.”

“Independent lords can have harsher or lighter burdens, depending on whether or not the Tower likes them,” I added, “and the freeholders of the Green Stretch are bound to sell a third of their harvest to the Tower at a fixed price.”

Less than it was worth, usually, but it was part of the terms they leased the land from the Tower at.

“Malicia improved the yields for Ater significantly during her reign,” Eudokia admitted, “by changing the laws so that lords could pay part of their monetary taxes to the Tower in food instead. Poorer lords with good years leaped at the opportunity, and with Callowan grain pouring in all the while there is a truly prodigious amount of foodstuffs in the city at the moment.”

“We’re not going to starve them out,” I summed up. “They’ve got six months in them, at least, and maybe as much as a year if they ration severely enough.”

We did not have six months, I kept to myself. Cordelia believed that Procer would finally break in five, but we had to leave Praes before that: it’d take us at least a month and a half to return west and half a month to muster for the attack on Keter. We had three months here, to be generous, but that’d be a razor-thin margin. Two was more realistic, two and maybe the odd week tossed it on top of it. Which meant we would need to either force a surrender or take the city by force, storming the walls. I was very much trying to avoid the latter, because the last of the Legions would bleed us dry for it. The entire city was a fucking deathtrap of old artefacts and half-buried monstrosities. If we didn’t get several demons tossed at us before this was over I’d eat my crown. I cast a look at Scribe.

“You needed me for something?”

She nodded.

“There is word from the High Lady of Kahtan,” Eudokia said.

Takisha Muraqib was the leader of the largest chunk of enemy troops outside the city, so I’d made a point of trying to approach her for a settlement the moment I could. If she turned on Malicia a lot of nobles would follow her example, which might well take the city for us without an assault. Loyalty in Praes was a lot like horse racing: people loved a winner, but if the champion limped all bets were off.

“We’ll talk later,” I told Arthur. “Sit down with Apprentice and figure out tactics for fighting the Black Knight indoors or on a street, it’s where you’re most likely to run into her. If you come up with something solid, we’ll try it out on Named.”

I already had several particularly vicious exercises in mind. As far as I was concerned, you’d never really had to deal with a proper ambush until you tried grounds that the only son and pupil of Wekesa the Warlock had been given an hour to trap. Last time he’d temporarily ended gravity in a warded circle, which had been spectacularly amusing to watch on top of being very humiliating for the kids.

“I will, Your Majesty,” the Squire swore. “We’ve been talking over ideas on the march.”

“I’ll look forward to it, then,” I said.

The kid – young man, really, but it was hard to think of him that way – left promptly to get to it, which left me weathering Scribe’s mild gaze. I raised an eyebrow at her. The one over the dead eye, I was trying to train myself into doing that. It drew attention to the eye cloth, made the faint-hearted uncomfortable.

“Mentorship is not without danger,” Scribe said. “Especially mentorship of a hero.”

“I don’t teach him myself,” I said. “Been careful about that. All I’ve done with him is talk, never so much as a spar.”

“Given your own teacher, I would have thought you aware that the talking is the most important part,” she replied.

“Named can learn from others without being pupils,” I said. “It’s not like every time you pick up a trick or a bit of tactics from someone you’re wedded to them as mentor and apprentice. I’ve learned things from Malicia and Captain. Hells, I learned from the Pilgrim once or twice.”

Not that he’d ever gone out of his way to teach me anything. Besides, I’d been careful to give neither tricks not tactics to Arthur Foundling. If I ever ended up on the other side of the field from the kid, I wanted as much of my repertoire still up my sleeve as I could fit.

“It’s a fine line,” Scribe noted. “I do not seek to scold, to be clear. It is your choice to make, and you have drunk from deeper wells of namelore than I ever did.”

“Always thought that was weird, to be honest,” I admitted. “The Calamities were around for almost sixty years in one form or another, it seems strange most of you never picked up more. Malicia too, I guess, but her I can understand. It’s not like any hero made it to the Tower in her lifetime.”

“It was always Amadeus who saw to those tactics,” she said, “so in a sense most of us never considered it any more necessary to acquire skill in this area than we would have thought to rival Wekesa or sorcery or Sabah in strength.”

“You still survive decades and decades as Named,” I said. “You had to have learned some things.”

“I suppose in detail my experience outweighs yours,” Eudokia mused. “Prior to the Truce and Terms being founded I’d encountered many more Named. But you’ve no doubt realized by now that there is no truly reliable method to deal with Named opponents.”

“Swords tend to work,” I drily said, “but I catch your drift. The same story you can ride to kill someone will get you killed against another.”

“I imagine I’ve read more stories and studied foreign myths than you have,” Scribe said, “for the same is true of Amadeus, but I do not have the... knack. I can make a plan and execute it, but I find it difficult to improvise and adapt a victory the way you did against the Arcadian courts, for example, or at the Princes’ Graveyard. It requires a mindset that I struggle with, as do most Named.”

“A lot of us tend to specialize,” I agreed.

“It narrows our understanding of the world and the way we seek victories,” Scribe said. “In that sense you are anomalous, though not unique.”

Yeah, I had no delusions there. My father’s way of using stories was different than mine but no less dangerous, and there’d been several points in the Tenth Crusade where Tariq had come very close to either killing or shackling me. Kairos had been up there too, the mad bastard, using the methods of the Old Tyrants with prescient skill. I also figured that Ranger had to be good at reading stories, to have survived this long antagonizing the amount of Named she had. Nobody acting like that lived as long as she had without being able to tell when a story was going to get you killed.

And there was, of course, the patron goddess of namelore waiting above it all: the Wandering Bard, the Intercessor. Who had declared war on me in Wolof only to disappear into thin air. I would have liked to call it impotence on her part, but that was the kind of delusion that’d get me killed. If I hadn’t seen her it’d been because she was moving her pieces into place, preparing her killing stroke. And since there was only one part left to this campaign, the fall of Ater, inside the City of Gates would be where she waited for me. I shook my head free of the thoughts.

“So what did High Lady Takisha reply?” I asked.

“She is willing to meet,” Scribe said. “Yet I would temper your expectations: Princess Vivienne believes Takisha won’t move unless we promise to back her for the Tower.”

“Is there anybody in this fucking country who doesn’t want me to back them for the fucking Tower?” I growled. “Any moment now some hell will spit out Traitorous so he can bloody well ask me too.”

“It is unusual that you would be so sought, in my opinion,” Scribe noted. “You have dealt with or rule over every major amalgamation of power east of the Whitecaps, an amount of influence that I some ways surpasses what Malicia wielded after the Conquest.”

I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. I’d made a claim, before raising High Lady Abreha from the grave. One of authority over others. Creation was moving to meet it. I was finding it easier to parse out what people wanted – my instincts already whispered that Vivienne was right, High Lady Takisha would not move without the Tower as a prize – but that was the lesser part of it. I could feel Named, now. When I closed my eyes, I could see them like stars shining the dark. Only it wasn’t all of them. Most heroes I couldn’t make out. Vivienne yes, and the Squire when he was close, but never the Silver Huntress. Authority, I thought. It was about authority.

And the clearest part of it was that Below smiled on me herding their own, a warden to villains.

“Influence doesn’t always pay off,” I finally said. “Let’s go talk with Juniper, Scribe. See what our options are before meeting up with High Lady Takisha.”

—

The Marshal of Callow wasn’t one to mince words, so she came out with it bluntly.

“Depends if they’re stupid about it or not,” Juniper said.

Our maps of Ater were accurate, as there hadn’t been any major works done in the capital since they’d been drawn, but they were unreliable in the sense that they’d didn’t tell us what parts of the city were being inhabited at the moment. Malicia had taken in refugees by the thousands so a lot of the empty districts would have filled up, but which and by who was anybody’s guess. Scribe and the Jacks had a few people in the city, but it was a drop in the bucket for a place that large. I doubted even the Tower had a full accounting to use, and for all her faults the empress had built up a prodigious bureaucracy in her seat of power.

“I’m not going to stand here and defend the stock of Praesi aristocracy,” I said, “but let’s assume they won’t make the worst possible choices.”

“Then we’re in a tricky position,” Juniper said. “When it comes down to it, Ater isn’t really a city that can be sieged the traditional way. It’s the incarnation of a logistical pit: to surround a city this large with any real strength, enough to keep away sorties, you need an army large enough it’s impossible to feed in this region.”

Which meant massive supply lines stretching over some of the most dangerous lands on Calernia, in constant danger in collapse before enemy soldiers even got involved. If you were a foreign army, anyway. The High Seats are much more manageable wars on their hands, which went some way in explaining why so few external enemies had been successful against Ater compared to internal ones.

“That much we’re agreed on,” I said. “We’re not going to try, and by the looks they’re well aware of that.”

Our eyes moved the map between us. Ater had nine gates, massive things that had once needed specially bred monsters to be opened or closed until they were replaced by gear mechanisms a century or two back. Of those nine gates, three were currently still open. The Army of Callow was encamped to the west of the capital, near an abandoned town that had large and deep wells, but the three gates on the eastern side of the capital were wide open. Which only made sense, given that a gaggle of nobles from all over Praes had brought around thirty thousand men from various private armies and encamped there. They’d not entered the city, as it was against the laws of the Empire to bring troops inside the capital without permission and no one was yet ready to move against Malicia, but our scouts confirmed there was constant movement through the gates.

“High Lady Abreha is but a week behind us,” Scribe noted. “Her army tips the balance of power in our favour.”

“Eh,” I hedged.

“We can likely beat the noble armies on the field,” Juniper agreed. “They have no unified command structure or proper organization.”

“And they’ve got a lot of household troops, but they’ve also got a large proportion Taghreb tribal levies,” I said. “Good raiders and irregulars, not so great in a shield wall. In a stand-up fight on plains, we’ll smash that army to pieces.”

“It will not give us that fight, I take it,” Eudokia ventured.

“They’ll retreat into the capital,” I said. “Use us as leverage for getting their troops inside without officially rebelling against Malicia. Given that her trustworthy forces are running thin, she’ll likely have to bend.”

“The remaining Legions are around eight thousand strong,” Scribe noted, “but even my people never got a good read on the total number of Sentinels. Too many of them never leave the Tower.”

“You gave us a floor of eight thousand so I’m assuming at least ten,” I noted. “I’m skeptical how good they’ll be in a fight, considering their heads are supposed to be fucked to the Hells and back to make them perfectly loyal, but it shouldn’t matter anyway considering most of them will be tied up keeping the city from falling apart. I’d be surprised if Malicia can shake loose more than two or three thousand to throw at us.”

“Pickler believes she can breach the capital’s walls, and if she does I believe we can take Ater after High Lady Abreha reinforces us,” Juniper said. “But that holds only if the nobles stay out of it. Otherwise they’ll bog us down in the outer districts and we’ll be forced out by spellfire.”

We were at a massive magical disadvantage here, even with Masego weighing heavily on the scales. The sheer amount of mage cadres we’d be facing if the enemy got to mobilize fully against us was pretty daunting. There were at least a few hundred mages capable of High Arcana in Praes, and almost all of them would be shooting at us. And that was without even getting into diabolism, which I saw as pretty much inevitable. It was a historical staple of Praesi getting cornered.

“Keeping the nobility divided and unable to coordinate defences seems a priority, then,” Scribe said. “Should I begin arranging assassinations?”

“Not yet,” I said, then bit my lip. “Assassin, could he get High Lady Takisha?”

If she got killed, her High Seat would tear itself up over succession and Kahtan would no longer be able to serve as the banner under which all the lesser Taghreb nobility gathered. And the Taghreb were where the manpower was at, right now. The Wasteland had bloodied itself with continued civil war, while the Hungering Sands hadn’t really seen any action aside from raids since Foramen was seized by surprise. If we broke up the southerners into smaller squabbling blocs and then hit Ater before someone could step into the power vacuum, it was possible they’d stay out of the fight.

“Takisha is remarkably paranoid when it comes to her personal safety,” Scribe admitted. “Three layers of amulets at all times and frequent body doubles. Even odds Assassin would get to her, being conservative.”

“We’re holding back on that, then,” I said. “Look up targets that would destabilize the coalition behind her, but I’m not pulling the trigger on that yet.”

If we took a swing and missed it’d make negotiating with her pretty awkward afterwards. Praesi didn’t take this sort of thing as personally as most people would, but it certainly wouldn’t win me any favours.

“None of that matters when we haven’t addressed the dragon in the hut,” Juniper said. “There’s an army as large as all of ours combined marching on Ater as we speak.”

“Three weeks away, at the current pace,” Scribe said. “Matters could be resolved here before it arrives.”

“I’m not sure that’d be an improvement,” I admitted. “Until we know who the warlord leading the Clans is I’m not keen on punching a hole in the walls of Ater.”

Juniper snorted.

“Let’s not take the fucking city only to have to hold its busted walls against one hundred thousand orcs,” she summed up. “The military wisdom of the College shines in us still, Catherine.”

I grinned back at her.

“Wisest heads of the age, Hellhound, that’s us,” I replied.

Scribe let out a little choking sound but did not go as far as contradicting us.

“We’ve sent scouts their way and I know Hakram’s still alive,” I said. “I’m inclined not to think the worst.”

I could feel his Name, see its star out in the black.

“If Dag Clawtoe had been elected, Hakram would have scried us by now,” Juniper retorted. “I don’t like it.”

“If the Blackspears were in charge they’d be burning Nok by now, not approaching Ater,” I pointed out. “I won’t pretend I’m not concerned, Juniper, but Adjutant will bring this home. He always does.”

“We should prepare for the eventuality that they are foes, at least,” the Hellhound pressed.

I grimaced and thought it over. It’d split our focus, but to be honest at the moment there wasn’t much for the Army of Callow to do. We were preparing an offensive for when Abreha – and High Lord Dakarai of Nok, who’d joined her with a small retinue – arrived with her troops, but it would be Pickler and her sappers handling the most of that. Charging into a breach wasn’t the kind of fighting that required extensive preparations, just guts and steel.

“Do it,” I finally said. “But make sure the general staff knows it’s theoretical. I don’t want half our camp convinced we’re going to be fighting the Clans.”

Fighting a warlord – maybe even just rumours we would – might actually cause desertions from the part of my armies that’d been the steadiest through several wars. As far as I knew, the loyalty of the Legions had never been tested in this manner and I suspected it was for good reason. A lot of orcs put loyalty to the Legions or the Army of Callow higher than allegiance to abstract things like the Tower or my crown, but I wasn’t so sure that loyalty would win out if it was their own clans on the other side of the field.

“I’ll keep it quiet,” Juniper said.

“Which leaves only one force unaccounted for,” I said. “Amadeus of the Green Stretch.”

Scribe studied me.

“You’re sure he’s here?” she asked.

“I know Ranger’s in the city,” I said. “And they’ve stayed together until now.”

I’d actually learned a little something courtesy of the Lady of the Lake, aside from her rough location: whatever it was that bound me to Named, it was possible to cut it. Temporarily, at least. The... tie began to reform after half a day had passed, more or less, and from what I could feel Ranger was becoming increasingly irritated at having to cut it off again and again. I bet Sever would have done it permanently , I thought with some amusement. I’d have to remember to tell her when we ran into each other, along with a pleasant question about how it felt to be inferior to inferior to the Saint even posthumously.

“He’s a dangerous man, Catherine, but he doesn’t have an army,” Juniper said. “There’s only so much he could do.”

I winced at that, and so did Eudokia. There was a moment of silence, the two of us waiting for something brutally ironic to happen, but nothing showed up save an increasingly puzzled look on the Marshal of Callow’s face.

“Don’t repeat that,” I finally said. “It might end up costing us.”

She still looked skeptical, but in matters of namelore she knew better than to contradict me. I dragged myself to my feet, massaging my upper leg to press down on a cramp. Had I taken herbs today? I couldn’t recall. I’d gotten too used to Hakram arranging these things for me. Might as well have another cup if I was going to be riding Zombie.

“A short detour and we’ll get moving,” I told Scribe. “Let’s go find out what High Lady Takisha has to tell us.”

—

Scribe despised riding horses even though she’d been doing it for decades, which I never ceased to find hilarious. Zombie disliked having to stay on the ground to keep up with the other Named and my escort of knights, but she perked up after I promised her meat when we returned to camp. She was unsettlingly fond of pig guts, which she ate very messily before grooming herself for hours. A truly vain creature, my mount. I approved. At this point I’d been through these little meetings often enough that I wasn’t surprised when the Praesi came in dressed richly enough to pay for a bridge across the Hwaerte and I didn’t bother to take it in the way I had with the Sahelians. No, this time it was a smaller detail I got stuck on.

I’d arranged a meeting only with High Lady Takisha, but there were three great aristocrats waiting for me.

The first was Takisha Muraqib, a handsome dark-haired woman in her fifties with a dignified air and enough gold on her it’d likely add up to several ingots if melted down. Arguably now the second most powerful in Praes, as the fall of Foramen to goblin hands had led all the Taghreb nobility to gather behind her. The second was High Lord Jaheem Niri of Okoro, a strikingly good-looking man with warm golden eyes and a roguish smile. He had to be what, in his mid-forties? He had a daughter a little younger than me, but she wasn’t his oldest. The real surprise, though, was the third. High Lady Wither of Foramen, once Matron of the High Ridge Tribe. Pickler’s mother.

Also the sworn enemy of High Lady Takisha, and according to my spies still very far away.

No wonder the Matrons of the Confederation of the Grey Eyries had sent word they were sending a delegation north to Ater to treat with me. It would be in part so they’d have a seat at the table after Ater fell, as I’d expected, but now a second reason was looking at me through pale yellow eyes. The High Lady of Kahtan might despise Wither and want to take Foramen from her, but that enmity was nothing compared to how much the Grey Eyries hated the traitor who’d turned on them in exchange for becoming recognized as High Lady by Malicia.

Still, this reception was a surprise and not a welcome one. It was taking me by surprise in multiple ways and suggesting there were undercurrents to imperial politics I’d not sniffed out. A dangerous thing, to treat carefully with. It was fortunate that I was such a dab hand at diplomacy these days.

“How long have the three of you stood so close?” I asked, cocking my head to the side. “One hour, two? And no one’s dead. That has got to be some sort of record.”

I hear the knight behind me choke down on a snort. The Praesi were less amused. Wither was impatient, Takisha sneered and High Lord Jaheem raised his eyebrows in a way that suggested rolling them without ever actually doing it. Impressive trick, that.

“We greet you, Black Queen,” High Lady Takisha began, “and in-”

“Spare me the speech,” I cut through, tone flat. “I arranged talks with you, not three High Seats. I might be considered justified to see this as a breach of our truce terms, so let’s get to whatever point the three of you made yourselves to stand together to make.”

“This is poor diplomacy,” High Lord Jaheem said. “High Lord Sargon spoke better of you.”

“Sargon was a stepping stone, not the last thing between me and the end of this irritating little war,” I replied. “He got as much courtesy as I’ll ever afford High Seat. You, though?”

I smiled toothily.

“Count yourselves lucky this doesn’t begin and end with knives.”

“You don’t have enough knives to get this done, Black Queen,” High Lady Wither said, voice startling reedy. “That is our point. If you come for Ater steel in hand, you will lose.”

“That’s arguable at best,” I noted. “But I’ll generously assume you came with something to offer, since only a fool would think I’ve come to Ater just to walk away.”

“We are willing to support a negotiated settlement with the Tower,” High Lady Takisha said, tone irritated. “So long as the sovereignty of the Dread Empire remains untouched, there is some room for compromise.”

I cocked an eyebrow over my dead eye, unimpressed by the phrasing, and to my satisfaction I saw her glance at the cloth.

“I sacked Wolof without needing to break its walls, broke the Legions in Kala and now my army is camped beneath the very walls of the City of Gates,” I said. “If some room for compromise is the best you have to offer, we’ll be resuming this conversation after I’ve killed a few thousand more of you.”

“You would refuse terms without hearing them?” High Lord Jaheem said.

“I’d refuse to humour posturing,” I flatly replied. “You’re here to do me a favour, I broke through your front door and set fire to your house. If you want me to stop torching everything in sight, make it worth my while .”

“We would be willing to support armies being sent to aid the Grand Alliance,” High Lady Wither said. “It’s an open secret you’re badly in need of diabolists.”

“That’s a start,” I noted.

“The Blessed Isle can be formally ceded back to the crown of Callow,” High Lady Takisha said.

Huh, hadn’t seen that one coming. On the surface it was a worthless piece of land, considering it was a blackened wasteland ruined by my father’s use of massed goblinfire, but that was a surface perception only. It was a strategic stronghold, the best way to keep Praes penned on its side of the Wasaliti should it decide to get unruly.

“That’s worth something,” I agreed, “but it’s not why I’m here. The Tower would need to sign the Liesse Accords.”

They didn’t look too pleased by that, but neither were they surprised.

“We might support such a thing, given the right incentives,” High Lord Jaheem said. “The text as we’ve obtained has some... concerning inclusions.”

That sounded like someone after diabolism exemptions, which wasn’t happening, but I wasn’t above throwing some minor concessions elsewhere if that was what it took.

“The final draft of the Accords has not been made,” I said. “There is still time to negotiate.”

“That is reassuring to hear, Your Majesty,” High Lady Takisha smiled.

I just bet , I thought.

“And who would it be that negotiates the terms of the Accords for you?” I asked. “Who do you mean to replace Malicia?”

Akua , I guessed. Had to be. She was the only prominent person left in Praes with enough power to be considered and not enough enemies to be too badly opposed. And what a knife in the belly it would be for this lot, when turned away from them. Just in time for me to cram my father down their throats. Silence stretched on for a moment.

“We do not mean to replace the Dread Empress,” High Lady Takisha said. “We are loyal subjects, Black Queen.”

My eye moved between them, and appallingly enough they looked serious. Not about being loyal, that was just absurd, but about not supporting Malicia being deposed. At least not here and now.

“Dread Empress Malicia has made herself too much a foe of the Grand Alliance and an ally of the Dead King to be allowed to keep her power,” I plainly said. “You might have believed this to be negotiable, but allow me to now disabuse you of that notion.”

I leaned forward, cold-eyed.

“If I have to burn Ater to the ground around her to see her driven out of the Tower, I will .”

My gaze swept over all of them.

“If I must step over your mutilated corpses to get my way, do not believe for a moment I will hesitate. The Dread Empire has been nothing but thorn in our side as most of Calernia fights to hold back the annihilation of all life on this continent,” I said. “There is not a speck of sympathy left for any of you west of the Wasaliti: I could raze every High Seat and even the fucking heroes would applaud.”

I drew back, put on a friendly smile.

“Malicia is a stone around your necks,” I said. “Put up someone else and then we can talk.”

“Your threats are empty, Black Queen,” High Lord Jaheem said. “You do not have long before you must return west with diabolists, else this campaign will have doomed your allies.”

I met the man’s golden eyes with a cold smile.

“I still have months,” I said. “It’s my patience that’s in danger of running out, Jaheem Niri. Beware of that, while you still can.”

Yet even as I spoke, I knew there were no grounds no win here. I’d made a mistake, I could feel it. Not in refusing to bend over the matter of Malicia or making it clear how far I was willing to go over the matter, but somewhere else. Focusing, I could almost feel it out. Neither Jaheem Niri nor Wither were surprised, they had expected this, so it was High Lady Takisha who’d wanted this conversation to happen. Why? What did she gain? She wants to move them , my instincts whispered, but I could not yet tell to which purpose. I almost could if I focused, but somehow I was sure that if I closed my eyes the stars in the darkness would distract me. But Takisha had gotten something she’d wanted from this, that much I was certain of.

Time to cut my losses before she got more.

“There is no point to this conversation,” I stated. “I tell you only this: when we resume it, the terms will have grown starker.”

I left them to that, casually tossing in the insult of not giving proper courtesies while leaving. Already I was frowning, lost in thought. I’d just taken a hit without knowing about it until it was too late, and I still didn’t know what it’d been for . I did not have as clean a read on the forces at play in Praes as I’d thought I had, and if I kept it up it would cost me.

It was time to sharpen the same knives I’d wielded at the Graveyard.

Chapter 23: Sung; Singer

“To fear treachery is a mark of inferiority, for fundamentally it is a fear that espouses the lie of safety. Treachery is only despised because it comes from within, from behind the wall. Only a fool believes that there is such a thing as shelter from harm.”

– Dread Emperor Perfidious

I’d not been to Spite Valley since the war games.

Its real name was Koso Valley, but no one who’d been through the War College actually called it that. The old fort that companies were assigned to hold or take during war games stood empty, Malicia’s generals past trying to actually hold the approaches to the capital, but it wasn’t there I was headed. I led Zombie downslope, past the lone watchtower and the woods until the slope began to rise again. Hills and a mess of rocky outcroppings awaited, small footpaths leading up until I found long abandoned fire pits. Rat Company had camped here, I remembered, on that first night I’d met people not yet become some of the most important in my life. Hakram. Robber. Nauk. Pickler. Ratface. Killian, once upon a time.

Nilin, too, who’d died before I found out he was a traitor.

In a way it was a little like coming home, a different one from the narrow streets of Laure but no less dear. In a lot of ways, I’d taken the first steps towards the woman I now was in this quiet valley. The shadows lengthened and night neared, and I left my escorts in the fort. I could make my own fire and Vivienne had brought cuts of meat to roast. We got to it with the practice efficiency of people who’d travelled together for sometimes months at a time, splitting up the tasks. Before long we had roasted pork and freshly picked berries for supper by an open fire as darkness crept over the horizon. In the distance I saw the campfires of my knights, but aside from that we were alone.

“Why here?” Vivienne asked. “You used the Mavian prayers near our camp before the Graveyard. Why travel hours away this time?”

“Worried?” I teased.

“I am,” the Princess baldly admitted. “Half the Dread Empire wants you dead and assassins only need to get lucky once. I don’t like that you’re so far from our wards, much less alone.”

“People would distract,” I shrugged. “And we never actually told anyone where I was headed, so there’s no secret for her spies to dig up.”

“But why here ?” Vivienne pressed.

I looked away, dragged my gaze across the jutting rocks around us. They looked like teeth, in the right light, as if we were sitting in some great beast’s maw.

“It began here, my time with the Legions,” I finally said. “And it will end in Ater.”

“Symmetry-”

“Has its uses,” I cut in. “Learn that. Creation likes patterns, Vivienne. Rules of three, seven and one, a hundred little ironic echoes. You either use that or fall victim to it.”

“I’ll not argue namelore with you, Cat,” she replied, raising her palms in surrender. “It just seems out of the way, which is unlike you. You like being at the heart of the hive.”

I sighed.

“I do, sometimes,” I said. “For this the quiet will suit better.”

The Princess frowned.

“You’re worried about the Bard,” she said.

“I’ll be worried about the Bard even when I’m sure I’ve killed her for good,” I said. “The Arsenal is the only time I’ve ever come close to pulling one on her, and I’m still not sure she didn’t get what she wanted out of that mess.”

It’d come close to costing me Hakram, and the more I heard about what was happening out west the more I wondered if I’d really been the focus of what she was after. Tensions between the First Prince and the White Knight were continuing to rise, to my worry, and I’d not forgotten it was the events at the Arsenal that’d started the enmity between those two.

“She’s not a god,” Vivienne said.

“She’s the patron goddess of stories, or close enough,” I snorted. “I actually think it’s like a domain for her, you know? The Augur insisted she could ‘see all stories’ and there’s not a lot of things for Named that give you that much power over a concept s broad.”

“Kairos Theodosian beat her,” the Princess said. “So can we.”

Ah , I thought, but did he? She’d definitely not anticipated Anaxares the Hierarch being such trouble for her, I thought, but Kairos’ scheme against Judgement? That, I was not so sure. It seemed too much of a coincidence, Cordelia fishing out an ealamal that was once a Seraphim just after the Tyrant plotted a way to shut the door on Judgement’s fingers. The Dead King had put us on the path of finding out a terrifying truth about the Intercessor, that she could influence angels and so that using the ealamal was as good as giving her power of life and death over most of Calernia, but we’d found it out after Kairos had ‘saved’ us from that peril.

And in the depths of Liesse thrice-ruined, Kairos Theodosian had been spared execution at my hand because the Intercessor had given him a way out.

I’d never learned why. He’d traded for that, I knew, but what did he have to offer? I did not think that the Intercessor was behind any of these... movements, but that wasn’t the nature of her power. She could see it all and stand where she wanted, when she wanted to be there. The Intercessor threaded the needle, that was her terrible trick, and all she ever needed to do was to follow the... objects in motion. I’d been fighting her for years, often bitterly, and to this day the only thing I was pretty sure of was that she’d tried to make me replace her at the Arsenal. Trap me into taking up her mantle as either a rival or a successor. I found it pretty telling she’d since decided to go about killing me seriously.

Almost like I was of no further use.

“Ater is the first place where it’s decided whether or not we lose the war against the Dead King,” I finally said. “If it goes badly, Vivienne, it could fuck up everything. There’s no room for mistakes.”

She hummed.

“And so you disappear into the night,” she said. “So you can scheme in peace.”

“I’m preparing,” I piously corrected. “And speaking of, did you get the sheets done?”

“I did,” Vivienne agreed, reaching for her saddlebag.

She handed me a neat sheath of scrolls. I wiggled one out, unrolling it, and found a rather good depiction of Dread Empress Malicia looking back at me from the top of the parchment sheet.

“They all this good?” I asked.

“They are,” she said. “Got an officer from the Thirteenth with some talent to draw them.”

I paused.

“Thanks,” I said.

She eyed me skeptically.

“You hate it,” Vivienne stated.

“I didn’t say that,” I protested.

“Oh Gods,” the Princess said, sounding appalled, “you actually think they’re too good, don’t you?”

It just wasn’t the same if the drawings weren’t unspeakably shitty. Last time it was Robber who’d drawn them, and I still had those parchments tucked away in a chest somewhere along with other mementos. Tolerantly amused, Vivienne took out a writing set from her knapsack and stole the scrolls away from me to half-hearted protests. She took out Malicia’s scroll first, slapped it against a stone, and whet the quill. A stick figure with a crown atop it and three strands of hair was made to represent Dread Empress Malicia, First of Her Name. I cocked an eyebrow.

“Aren’t nobles supposed to get drawing lessons?” I jeered. “She’s supposed to be the most beautiful woman alive.”

“Right you are,” Vivienne amiably agreed.

She wet the quill again and drew two circles over the stick figure’s chest.

“There we are,” the Princess said. “Like looking at a painting of her.”

I snorted.

“All right, hit me with the other ones,” I said.

Amadeus of the Green Stretch got to have a sword and a beard, the Wandering Bard got to hold an attempt in the direction of a lute. Akua Sahelian was drawn on fire, which I suspected to more of a wish on the artist’s part than an accurate representation. They each got their stone, though unlike the Mavii raised stones the outcroppings here were low. I could see the horizon over them, the deep night sky beyond.

“I still think you should have a sheet for the nobles,” Vivienne said. “Sepulchral’s out of the running now that she’s undead, but soon every remaining High Lord and Lady will be in Ater. At least some of them will be plotting to climb the Tower.”

“I’m not planning to control who climbs the Tower,” I said.

She glanced at me skeptically and I grimaced.

“I am,” I conceded, “but only because it’s accessory to what I’m actually after.”

“Which is?”

“Who’s going to dictate what Praes is, going forward,” I said. “I’m not blind, Vivi. I know that my father might not actually want to take the throne. But that doesn’t mean his philosophies can’t rule.”

She drew back, standing by the fire and taking a look at the parchments.

“Malicia has to die,” the Princess said. “She’s done too much to be left alive.”

“I won’t pursue if she crosses the Tyrian Sea,” I agreed. “Anything else gets her a shallow grave.”

“And Akua is not acceptable as Dread Empress,” Vivienne said, a hint of warning in her voice.

I shrugged.

“Which is irrelevant, because she will not accept,” I said.

I wasn’t sure how deep the temptation would run, even now. I had my suspicions – she’d always seemed to think more in terms of legacy than titles, which was telling – but I couldn’t know . Maybe the lure of power would make her blood sing, the idea that she might rule from the Tower at last. But I believed, bone deep, that when the moment came she would turn away. Recognize it as a cage made of everything she had grown to despise. And I was not wrong in this. But if I’m wrong? My fingers clenched. Assassin could not get to Malicia, protected by the Tower as she was, but Akua did not share in that safety. But I’m not wrong.

“Meanwhile the Carrion Lord is nowhere to be found and the Wandering Bard unlikely to be taken as a candidate for ruling the Tower,” Vivienne said. “Why those four, then?”

“Malicia, Akua, Amadeus,” I said. “They’re the stories that Praes can embrace going forward.”

Stasis, reclamation, reform. And each of them had enough sentiment behind them that they were genuine possibilities – Malicia’s cause was plunging downwards at the moment, but that was not because her philosophies were disliked. It was because of chaos and mismanagement. Should she win in Ater and restore order, her reign might well continue for decades yet.

“I don’t care if Sargon Sahelian himself becomes Dread Emperor,” I said, “so long as he’s following a mould I’m comfortable with. Hells, I’d take Marshal Nim if she made a move.”

“You’d prefer the Carrion Lord, though,” Vivienne said.

“Sure, I’d prefer the one man I can trust not to start a stupid war and to butcher anyone threatening the new peace,” I drily said. “But he’s playing his own game, so I’ll not count on it.”

Vivienne grimaced.

“It’s too abstract a cause for soldiers to get behind,” she said.

“Which is why I’ve been taking about deposing Malicia a lot and a little about helping up my father,” I replied. “Easier to grasp.”

She glanced at the last of the four sheets.

“And the Bard?”

“Didn’t have that one, back in Iserre,” I said. “She’s the enemy, Vivienne. There’s not a part of anything I plan that can go without an answer to ‘what if the Intercessor intervenes?’”

“But what is it that she’s after?” Vivienne asked.

“My corpse, for one,” I said. “She’s stated as much and I believe her.”

My heiress looked startled.

“She outright said so?”

“I got a proper declaration of war from her,” I said. “We’re in this to the knife.”

The dark-haired princess stepped away from the light, knelt before the sheet and wrote: kill Catherine Foundling.

“Beyond that I’m less certain,” I said. “But I think she’s here in Praes because she doesn’t want me to get the east in order. She wants Hasenbach desperate, Hanno forced to the forefront.”

“What would she gain from that?” Vivienne asked.

“Right now everyone’s a closed door for her,” I said. “She burned too many bridges, she’s an enemy under the Truce and Terms and no one has an interest in letting her back in. If it everything goes to shit, though?”

“People are forced to consider whether she should not be bargained with again, should the alternative be death by Keter,” the Princess mused. “Yet that won’t work with everyone.”

“Procer’s collapsing,” I said. “A lot of people are going to be willing to do some very stupid things when the defence lines finally break and it sinks in we’re looking at the massacre of half the continent. She’ll get enough tools to make it worth her while. Besides, compared to how she’s a pariah now what does she have to lose?”

Vivienne conceded the point with a nod. Under ‘kill Catherine Foundling’ went ‘prevent alliance’.

“And that’s all?” she asked. “It does not seem so much.”

“Which is why there’s a third line,” I said. “We’re going to call it the hidden knife.”

It went up, neatly written, and she glanced at me in a way that invited elaboration.

“She’s after something else,” I said. “It’s too small a game for her otherwise. Killing me, screwing the Grand Alliance, it’s big but not big enough. She doesn’t work with plots that don’t echo, she’s never only about the immediate win.”

“So the hidden knife,” Vivienne said.

I nodded. She moved to the closest sheet, the one where a terrible drawing of Akua stood aflame.

“And what does she want?” the Princess asked.

I leaned back, going through my saddlebags to bring out a bottle of aragh. I ripped out the cork with my teeth, then spat it to the side.

“Try it,” I invited, then took a drink.

The dark-haired princess stood with her back lit by the flames, milkmaid’s braid crowned with a small circlet of silver. I watched her watch the parchment, glare at it as if it would surrender answers.

“She wants to take it back,” Vivienne finally said. “Or close enough. I figure she’d settle for people just forgetting about it, if it were on the table.”

“Redemption,” I said. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”

Vivienne turned a hard look to me.

“Cat, I know you’re... whatever the Hells you two have been doing, but don’t kid yourself,” the Princess said. “You can’t teach her to be a good person.”

I couldn’t even teach myself that, most the time, so that was hardly unexpected.

“You’re thinking in House terms,” I said instead. “Good and Evil, good people and bad people.”

“If you’re about to tell me there’s no such thing as good and evil, you’re going to need to get me drunker first,” Vivienne said. “I still won’t buy it, but at least I’ll be drunk.”

I snorted.

“Look, we’re not really better than Praesi,” I said. “When it comes down to it, Callowans are not less selfish or wiser or inherently better. That’s probably the most important thing my father ever taught me: most people do shitty things because they’re in shitty situations.”

“In an absolute sense you’re probably right,” Vivienne said. “And I think a lot of what’s wrong with the Dread Empire can be traced back to hunger just as much as the nobility, but that’s not really an excuse. Not for Akua Sahelian.”

“You’re still falling in the trap,” I said, “of thinking about it as opposing ideologies. That’s the thing, though: there’s not really a philosophy of Evil the way the House of Light says there is. Jino-waza’s probably the closest thing in Praes and it’s not inherently bad. It just becomes that when it’s paired with, you know, desperation and a taught disregard for others.”

“Except Akua has been philosophically Evil,” Vivienne objected. “The word is something Wasteland highborn embrace and the damage she did was under that banner. Crushing her rivals, taking the Tower, conquering the world.”

“The Queen of Blades went conquering in all directions and we didn’t call her Evil,” I said. “And when Hasenbach made her rivals drink poison after the Great War, did the House condemn her? Let’s not even talk about the amount of people I killed to become Queen of Callow. We shouldn’t be hypocrites about this. It’s the means that make it something different, Vivienne.”

“And she used those means,” the Princess bluntly replied.

“She did,” I agreed. “There’s no excusing or forgiving that. What I’m saying is that she’s done evil and Evil things, but I don’t believe she’s fundamentally either because there’s no such thing as someone who is.”

Even the Dead King had made choices, known crossroads.

“And what would that change?”

“That she can be taught to understand that people are... people,” I said. “Not just in the abstract but close-up. That’s what it taught her, our campfires and the Army of Callow. That the sum of people existing in the world weren’t Named and those with golden eyes.”

“That’s supposed to make a difference?” Vivienne scorned.

“Imagine you’ve been breaking statuettes of clay all your life,” I said. “Going through them like a spendthrift to get your way. Imagine, one day, waking up to see they were made of flesh and blood .”

Vivienne’s face blanked. It was probably the cruellest thing I’d ever done to anyone, setting Akua on that path. She had begun with a ledger so filled she might drown in the ink.

“Redemption,” I repeated. “That is the word.”

This time Vivienne put it down without argument. She glanced back, silently asking for the rest.

“Reclamation,” I said. “That is where her path led her. She hasn’t renounced nobility, that’s not who she is. She’s grown disgusted with the worst parts of it, the scrapped iron she threw in Kairos’ face. She wants to take the talents of the highborn and put them to better purposes, not to undo their rule.”

It was a difference in the way we’d been raised, I thought. Akua had been brought up to see the aristocracy as the best of Praes, its foundation and virtue. I’d grown up thinking of them as parasites best gotten rid of. Unlike me, she did not consider a world stripped clean of nobles as having been improved .

“And the last?” Vivienne asked.

I smiled.

“Why do you ask?” I said. “It could be only these two.”

She frowned.

“Is it?”

“No,” I agreeably said. “But why are you so sure of that?”

She hesitated.

“It just... felt like there should be three,” she admitted.

“Good,” I said. “Your instincts are sharpening.”

If she was to found a dynasty fated to end up Named as often as the Fairfaxes had, I’d be professionally offended should it not be better than most at namelore. She seemed as irritated as she was pleased by the compliment.

“So, the last?”

“Freedom,” I said.

Vivienne looked at me in surprise, blue-grey eyes blinking.

“She just got loose after years with us,” she said.

“Did she really?” I asked. “First she was bound, and when she was freed she found herself bound still.”

I smiled harshly.

“Now she finds herself poised to take the Tower, and she realizes that the throne would be just another set of chains,” I said. “And these most contemptible of all she has worn.”

She’d be putting those on by herself, after all.

“Akua will be wanting a way out,” I said. “Craving it.”

And how fortunate for her that I already had one to offer. Freedom went up on the parchment, Vivienne applying herself so the letters would come out neat even though the stone beneath was uneven. She rose to her feet afterwards with an expectant look. Instead of answering it, though, I pointed a finger upwards. Vivienne looked up and went still in surprise. The moon was fully out, meaning we’d been at this for a while.

“You need to get moving soon if you want to be back to camp at a decent hour,” I said.

She hesitated.

“This is important,” Vivienne said.

“It is,” I acknowledged. “But is it important to you?”

She looked a little offended at that.

“Of course it is,” she replied. “I wouldn’t let you-”

“That can’t be the way you do things anymore, Viv,” I quietly interrupted. “You know that. There are other things you have to put first.”

Silence.

“I’m the Princess, you know,” Vivienne Dartwick said. “Not the Queen. It doesn’t need to change.”

“You are the Princess,” I replied, smiling, “until you are the Queen. So it’s already changed.”

She had duties now in a way she’d not had them before. Not even when she’d been my regent. A Name was a responsibility that could not be denied, not unless you wanted it to hurt you: Vivienne must act the princess now, else it would turn on her. And that meant not blowing off her duties so she could help with my own, much as the both of us would have liked her to. It was a lonely feeling, but I pushed it down. How long was I going to keep all my friends on a string, never more than a tug away? I might not like the feeling in my stomach, but I liked even less how accustomed I’d become to the people I loved taking everything on my terms. Vivienne sighed.

“We’re getting old, aren’t we?” she asked.

“I guess we are,” I admitted. “We can’t be nineteen and on the road forever. We wanted to change the world, Vivienne. It’s why we fought so had to climb.”

“Only it’s different when you’re on top,” she said.

A pause.

“I wonder if it was like them for them too.”

I followed her gaze, the way it came to rest on the two sheets left untouched. Alaya of Satus and Amadeus of the Green Stretch. The two people who’d reformed Praes into what it now was, led it to its greatest heights since the days of Maleficent the Second before it fell into the pit where it was now stuck. I shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the coolness of the night. Neither of us had an answer, and so after sharing a drink with me Vivienne picked up her bags and saddled her horse. She rode away into the dark, leaving me with a mostly full bottle and more ghosts than I cared to entertain.

It would have been easier if Hakram were here, he would have stayed by my side. There wasn’t really anyone else left, was there? Indrani cared little for this sort of thing, and I’d sent her out on a mission besides. Masego was allergic to scheming or near enough, and neither Juniper nor Pickler were really... fit for this sort of thing. Aisha might have done decently enough, but I wasn’t going to abduct my own marshals’ right hand because I didn’t want to feel as lonely. I wasn’t that pathetic. Even Ivah would have been appreciated if it weren’t up north trying to keep Serolen from further collapsing.

Gods, I realized with startlement, but I even missed John Farrier. How long had it been since I’d thought about the man who had commanded the Gallowborne? The real one, not the one I’d cut up into small companies and spent across a dozen foreign fields. I drank of the bottle again, sitting by the fire, and idly reached for my staff. Without even turning to look I slapped it down, landing on the back of the creature that’d been creeping towards me. It was... a scorpion? No, not just that. It had black fur over the shell and a catlike head. It tried to wriggle away until I flared Night, at which point it dropped ‘dead’.

“How very believable,” I said, amused, and then turned. “Were you going to warn me?”

I glimpsed a blade being tucked back into Scribe’s sleeve as she kept silent. I snorted. Was she pissy because I’d not let her make an entrance by nailing the critter with a knife? I glanced at the cat-scorpion, which had been looking at me warily. It dropped ‘dead’ again the moment it saw me looking.

“I take it there’s news,” I said.

“Sargon Sahelian has arrived,” Scribe said.

I cocked my head to the side and waited. That wouldn’t have been enough for her to come.

“There was a riot in the streets of Ater,” she said. “Citizens clamouring for Malicia to be deposed. It was put down by the Sentinels.”

I let out a low whistle. That was a euphemism if I’d ever heard one.

“My people in the city don’t believe it was a natural occurrence,” Scribe continued. “Someone incited it.”

And there were only so many people with agents in the right place for that. Unfortunately most of them had an interest in seeing Malicia thrown out of the Tower, so that didn’t exactly narrow down the list. I made myself look past the implied massacre to what it would mean.

“It weakens her position,” I said. “In front of all the nobles she’s brought to her gates.”

Scribe nodded, adding nothing. She stayed there as my eyes drifted back to the parchments. I felt Eudokia hesitate, then carefully speak up.

“Survival,” Scribe said.

I glanced at her.

“For Malicia’s list,” she elaborated. “More than anything else, Alaya of Satus wants to survive.”

I hummed.

“So why is she still here instead of on a boat to Tyre?” I asked. “She could take enough priceless things and run that the fortune would last her for five lifetimes and I’d be near impossible to stop her.”

“Because she still believes she can win,” Scribe said. “And it’s personal to her now, a matter of pride.”

I studied her.

“Amadeus?”

“Not only him,” Eudokia said. “All of us. The Calamities helped put her on the throne, so she never entirely felt like it was truly hers. Now she stands with all of them dead or turned against her. If she does not win here, she proves her every doubt right: she never was meant to rule, and it was only the kindness of strangers that saw her climb the Tower.”

I stayed silent for a long moment, considering.

“Write it down,” I finally said.

She did not immediately move, asking a question with her eyes.

“Survival and Pride,” I said. “And you better have brought a cup, Vivienne left with them.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Scribe drily said.

Her handwriting was beautiful, I thought, and impossibly perfect given the angle of her hand and the rough stone the parchment was hung on. A side effect of her aspect?

“The first?” she asked, having left the space empty.

“Stasis,” I said.

Scribe cocked her head thoughtfully.

“That is an interesting interpretation of her reign,” she said.

“You don’t agree?”

“Regardless of our personal enmities, Malicia has been an able ruler and an effective reformist,” Eudokia said. “Not all of her changes were of the Reforms – most weren’t, in fact. The reason you have been able to trample over the High Seats with an army of fewer than twenty thousand is that she has spent decades bleeding them out. There was a time where Kahtan alone would have been able to field a host twice that size.”

“I don’t mean that she’s trying to stop reforms,” I said. “I’m sure she’d be constantly tinkering with the Empire, on the contrary. It’s what at the core of her philosophy that’s in stasis: her.”

“Arguably, her philosophy as a ruler has been centralizing in Praes while using diplomatic means abroad,” Scribe noted. “It was only when Hasenbach edged her out in Ashur even after decades of work that she began resorting to... traditional imperial foreign policy.”

Doomsday fortresses and assassinations, she meant.

“You still misunderstand me,” I said. “Sure she has strategies and policies and ideas. That’s not the point. The point is that Malicia does not have a vision of Praes where she’s not in charge of it.”

I drank of the bottle, let the aragh burn down my throat.

“And I don’t mean for a few decades,” I said. “I mean forever. Malicia’s not making an empire where the power rests with the Tower, she’s making an empire where the power rests with her . She doesn’t ever intend to give up that throne.”

Scribe considered that.

“It would not be so unpopular a vision with most of Praes,” she said. “The empire’s peaks, the moments where it was wealthiest and most powerful, have generally come when an able tyrant held the Tower and concentrated power in their hands.”

“If it were unpopular, it wouldn’t be dangerous,” I said. “And it’s not like the vision is only hers now. High Seats noticed what she was doing, the way she was shaping the empire to make it easier for the Tower to stay in control. Gods Below, Scribe, she had an open rebellion in her heartlands for two years right on the heels of pretty much losing a war and she was still able to collect taxes from most of Praes. Everyone who’s noticed is licking their chops and wondering what they might be able to achieve if they take over her machinery.”

Stasis went up on the sheet. As if gathering courage, Eudokia abandoned the rocks long enough to pour herself a large shot of aragh in what I was pretty sure was an empty inkwell. She drank it down in a single breath, then squared her shoulders.

“Amadeus, then,” she said.

“First one’s easy,” I said.

“Reclamation and stasis,” Scribe mused. “For him, then, reformation?”

I smiled, nodding. We were both familiar with what my father’s story for Praes would be. The High Seats humbled or destroyed, Ater unchallenged and the Legions of Terror the backbone of the empire. The only schools for mages under the Tower’s aegis, local nobility broken and replaced by appointed governors, peace with Callow and assimilation of the forces on the fringes: the Clans and the Tribes. He’d cut out every part of Praesi culture he disliked and replace it with something he preferred. It was a stable and prosperous Praes he promised, but at the price of what was likely a decade of civil war after large swaths of the empire rebelled against his policies.

“Only that’s the story, the ideology,” I said. “In the here and now, he’s up to something as well.”

“Destruction,” Scribe said.

The confidence in her voice caught my attention. I raised the bottle, inviting her to elaborate.

“He’s never been particularly eager to rule,” Eudokia said. “So long as he has free hand to push his reforms, in truth he prefers not to. It’s why Malicia was able to trust him for so long. Even now he does not position himself for the Tower. Which means he is trying to achieve the same ends through different means.”

I grimaced.

“You think he’s going to swing an executioner’s axe at everything he can’t tolerate about Praes,” I said. “Sweep the board clean.”

“He will seek to destroy everything he believes a hindrance to a function Dread Empire,” Scribe said. “That is my belief.”

And she’d sold me on it. It made sense, with the only part tripping me up being that I still had a hard time believing he’d be willing to let the Tower fall into the hands of the people most likely to end up climbing it. Yet he’d made no claim of his own, gathered no armies to his banner. He was no closer to ruling Praes than when I’d last seen him, drunk and maudlin in Salia.

“There’s more,” I said. “Has to be. The methods he’s been using are too odd otherwise. He’s been back in the Wasteland for years while we fought out west, Scribe, he has to have been doing something all that time.”

“He has been unusual in his approach,” Eudokia admitted.

“And that means there’s something else,” I said. “An objective we haven’t figured out yet, the reason he’s been so strange.”

Scribe looked at the parchments in the firelight, falling silent. I looked at her. I still had to fight it, Fade , but it was getting easier. And the more it fought me the more I could feel it. Her Name itself, but also the three candles within it. They felt close enough I could almost reach out. Not, not exactly that. It would be... harsher if I did it. Like an order. A scream, followed by silence. I only shook myself out of the daze when Scribe went still. She was looking at Malicia’s sheet.

“Figured something out?” I asked.

She turned to me without missing a beat, tanned face pleasantly smiling.

“No,” the Scribe lied.

Ah , I thought. And there we are. The first conflict between old loyalties and where you now stand. The victor was not unexpected.

“We leave it empty then,” I said. “For now.”

She rose to her feet, writing ‘destruction’ before withdrawing.

“What follows?” she asked.

“We figure out,” I said, “where we give and where we fight.”

“The Intercessor gives no grounds for compromise,” Scribe noted.

“Which is why we’re fighting her through the other three just as much as we’re fighting them,” I said. “Frankly speaking, my father’s way forward is what I’d prefer but it’d be hard for most of Praes to swallow and he’s still keeping cards close to his chest. We can aim for him, but we can’t start there.”

She eyed me strangely, holding back on a comment, then nodded.

“Akua Sahelian, then,” she said. “Malicia is not acceptable to you.”

“We’re going to have to use Akua to topple Malicia,” I agreed. “Which means getting her noble backing, since the Legions are unlikely to back her.”

Scribe considered that.

“Assassinating some of the High Seats could create such an opportunity for her,” she said.

“It’s also risky,” I said. “So we leave that aside from now. We know we want to use Akua against Malicia, but that doesn’t mean Amadeus is going to stand aside and look. He’s going after something, someone. We need to figure out what’s that before we move.”

“Given that nearly every prominent noble in Praes and most the middling ones are either in Ater or journeying to it, they seem the most likely target,” Scribe said. “It would destroy much of what he disliked of the empire in a single stroke.”

It might. It wasn’t like killing the nobles would end their families, there’d be replacements, but the sheer number of dead nobles would throw their influence into chaos. With the High Seats dead and unable to keep their vassals in line, all the violence held back would flow and in that mess someone with a solid profession army – like, say, the Legions – would be able to decisively break the aristocracy’s power if they moved quickly enough the nobles weren’t able to get their affairs in order. Without gold and land and fortresses, Praesi highborn lost much of their danger.

“So we figure out how he’ll do it,” I said. “He doesn’t have soldiers, just him and Ranger, so it limits the opportunities he can make use of. We find out what those are and we’ll finally catch his tail.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Scribe said.

“We’ll need people in the city when it comes to that,” I noted. “Otherwise we can’t act on the information. When Indrani comes back tomorrow we’ll see about our options.”

Callowans would stand out like sore thumbs trying to enter Ater discreetly, but I had Praesi officers in my ranks. Maybe not enough to make a strike force of killers, but there was another option to consider. How many people would be able to tell apart a Taghreb and a Levantine if the Levantine kept their mouth shut?

“That is a start,” Scribe said. “But it does not explain how we are to ensure Akua Sahelian has overwhelming support among the nobility.”

I cocked my head to the side. Sometimes it wasn’t about winning, I thought.

“I know how,” I said.

Eudokia turned a questioning gaze to me and I grinned.

“I’m going to lose a battle,” I cheerfully told her, “and get betrayed.”

Chapter 24: Bequeathal

“And so, her tribe burned around her, Matron Creaker stood in the ashes and spoke thus: ‘Do you now think me cowed, Nihilis? I would have burned them myself, to be rid of you.’”

– Extract from Volume VI of the Official Imperial Chronicles

I had goblin troubles.

A third of them I saw coming, in that the Confederation of Grey Eyries had been bound to come scratching at my door so I might win them some concessions at the peace table after Ater fell. They had good reason to think I’d back them when it came down to it. Callow had played a role in the creation of the Confederation from the start: the Matrons had begun sounding me out for support as soon as it came out in the open that Malicia were at odds, even if it’d not come to anything for years. It had been under Vivienne’s regency and with Hakram’s backing that Callow had funnelled the Tribes coin and steel so they might arm themselves for a successful rebellion, then promptly recognize the newly founded nation. I’d maintained the policy since.

We’d not done it for free, of course. After the Night of Knives, weakening Malica without outright starting a war had been one of the leading goals of the Kingdom of Callow and accomplishing it like this had probably been the greatest diplomatic coup of my reign. The more immediate payoff, though, had been stocks of goods that only the Tribes could provide: goblin steel and munitions. The latter, in particular, had been necessary since the Army of Callow was still largely patterned on the Legions of Terror and their doctrine employed goblin munitions. The coin and steel we’d sent them had not been gifts, they’d been loans: the crown of Callow was to be repaid in goods.

It’d worked out more than decently, at first. The rebellion had taken the Tower by surprise and seized Foramen, taking control the imperial forges there and massacring the Banu – the noble line that’d ruled the High Seat. But then Malicia had gotten her affairs in order and sent Marshal Nim south with several legions, penning in the goblins choking out the convoys of goods they’d been sending us. We’d felt the lack of those starkly during the campaigns out west. Though in a decent position and dug-in, the Confederation had then been betrayed from the inside: Matron Wither of the High Ridge tribe, Pickler’s own mother, had allied with other tribes to take the city from the Confederation.

She’d done this so she could return to Malicia’s banner as the High Lady of Foramen, not only the first goblin nobility recognized by the Tower but the first High Seat in the history of the empire not to be human.

The situation down south had been a rough stalemate since. High Lady Wither was dug in behind her heavily warded walls and her initial trouble of riots in the streets had tapered off – due in part to the grain I’d traded her in exchange for goblin munitions at Scribe’s suggestion – but she couldn’t really venture far outside the city. The Confederation outnumbered her ten to one and the Grey Eyries were a hell to assault even for goblins, on top of another High Seat now eyeing up Foramen. High Lady Takisha had been considering reclaiming the city, it was said, to install a cadet branch of the Muraqib at its head. The Confederation was no better off, though.

The Tribes just didn’t have the kind of army that’d be needed to take a High Seat in any way except the brutal surprise strike they’d first taken Foramen through. So instead they’d gone raiding into the hinterlands of Foramen until those were turned into a barren wasteland where no one lived, then settled into a sullen stalemate with High Lady Wither. There were frequent skirmishes over convoys and caravans headed to the city, but neither side was really in a position to score a decisive blow on the other and it’d shown.

Given that the Confederation of the Grey Eyries had been perhaps not an ally but certainly a partner to Callow since its founding, it was a given that they’d reach out to me now that matters were coming to a head in Ater. It wasn’t like the Praesi were going to offer them a seat at the table, and the Matrons were canny old witches besides: from where they stood, the political considerations that’d led Vivienne to back their rebellion had not changed. It was still in Callow’s interests to weaken Praes and I still needed their goods for my armies, so when I received the Confederations’ delegation their leader spoke boldly after I got her into my tent.

“We would like for Foramen to be returned to the Confederation in the final settlement,” Matron Braider said. “Preferably along with Wither’s head in a box.”

Braider was young, my matron standards, which meant she was mostly wrinkled instead of entirely. Her eyes were a sharp orange and unblinking, her needle-like teeth tinted blue from the strange paste she kept chewing. Vivienne, seated by me, looked unimpressed.

“The Confederation has not contributed to this war,” she said, “save through irregular trade. You ask a high price for goods already paid for.”

“We don’t expect you to do it for free,” Matron Braider said. “I’ve been empowered by the Council of Matrons to offer terms. I believe you’ll find supporting us worthwhile.”

The terms she outlined afterwards were, to be honest, pretty tempting. Treaty obligation to provide a certain amount of munitions and goblin steel at a set price every year, right of recruitment in the Eyries for the Army of Callow, a mutual defence pact against Praes and a fixed take of the Confederation’s tax income pledged to building Cardinal until the city was deemed finished by a committee of Grand Alliance members. Vivienne wasn’t anywhere as tempted, but it was pretty obvious that it’d wasn’t her they’d tailored that offer for. Braider stayed long enough to answer questions and specify details before taking her leave, leaving me alone with my successor.

“The mutual defence pact isn’t a real concession,” Vivienne immediately said. “If they get Foramen they need one with us else they risk losing the city to Praes the moment it’s no longer riven by civil war.”

“So we milk them for something else,” I shrugged. “Force them to never sell more munitions to Praes than they sell us, maybe, or exempt Callowan merchants from some tariffs.”

After the wars, if the goblins held Foramen it would become the gateway to the Grey Eyries and all the ores in the mountains. Callow did not usually need to import steel or silver, but we did have a chronic lack of gold mines on top of a few other useful metals we had to get through Mercantis. Foramen would have great need of grain, given its poor lands and newfound hostility with most of Praes, so my subjects stood to make great profits there. Vivienne eyed me with some surprise.

“You’re really willing to make this bargain?” she asked.

“I’m willing to entertain it,” I corrected. “I’m not going to risk the peace I’m after for the fucking Matrons , Vivienne, but they’re good terms. If I have an opportunity I might as well take it.”

“I imagine whoever takes the Tower will have some issues with losing one of the empire’s largest cities,” the Princess pointed out.

“That’ll depend on the strength of their bargaining position, I imagine,” I said. “I’m not going to cram this deal down your throat, Viv – the defence pact would stay your problem long after I abdicate, for one – but we should at least seriously consider it.”

The second third of my goblin problems, though, I expected a great deal less. Within hours of Matron Braider being settled in a corner of our camp, one of the phalanges interrupted me halfway through supper. Our scouts had caught someone claiming to be an envoy and brought them into the camp quietly, but they refused to talk to anyone save me. I went with a chicken leg still in hand, gnawing at the meat even as I sat down across from a young goblin. Thirteen, fourteen at most. A woman, but that was only to be expected if she was an envoy. Couldn’t think of a lot of Matrons that’d entrust anything of importance to a mere male.

I glanced at the legionary behind her and nodded. The cloth over her head was ripped off, leaving a slightly dazed goblin of pale green skin with a frame large enough there was no doubt she was of a Matron line. I let her dark yellow eyes come back into a focus as I tore off all little more chicken. It was unpatriotic of me to admit it, but Praesi poultry was better than my own people’s. Probably because of some terrible blood magic a few hundred years ago, but you couldn’t argue with that tender flesh.

“So who would you be?” I asked.

“Trudger,” she replied. “And you’re the Black Queen.”

“That I am,” I replied, taking another bite. “What brings you to my camp, Trudger?”

“I have been sent as an envoy by my mother, High Lady Wither,” she said.

I blinked in surprise. Wait, this was Pickler’s sister? I didn’t even know – no, of course she had sisters. Most Matrons had a dozen children, so that the weak seeds might be weeded out. It didn’t really mean the same thing for them it would for humans. Few of them would have the same father, not that fatherhood was concept goblins put any stock in. Most of their kind would have found it obscene for a male to have a role in the raising of children, even if he’d sired the child in question.

“Pickler’s never mentioned you,” I noted.

“She wouldn’t, the bitch,” Trudger flatly said. “Why Mother is so fond of her when she took the first opportunity to flee is beyond me, but we’re not here to speak of thin blood. You were approached by the Council of Matrons, yes?”

Not much meat left on the leg, but I bit it off and swallowed.

“I’m always talking the Confederation,” I said. “We’re friendly enough.”

“They’ll have come begging for you to give them Foramen,” Trudger smiled. “I am here to deliver the better offer.”

I cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Had a little talk with your mother not two days ago,” I said. “She didn’t seem so eager to bargain then. What’s changed?”

“Malicia’s cause is dying,” Trudger frankly said. “The Warlock has been popular with the refugees for some time, but since the riots were drowned in blood many Aterans balk at supporting the empress. If she loses the capital, she has nothing left.”

“Which has me curious why you’re talking to me instead of Akua Sahelian,” I said.

Trudger smiled thinly.

“I imagine you think very little of us,” she said. “My mother and the Matrons. That we’re all the same to you, Wasteland highborn made small and green.”

“That’s a leap on your part,” I said.

But the first part, at least, was true. How could I think much of a pack of old women who spent a thousand Robbers like coppers at a fair every year? I couldn’t fix everything in the world, I’d learned my limits, but there had been a time... I had not forgotten who I was clasping hands with, the nature of my ‘friends’.

“We’re hard, Black Queen, because the Eyries are a hard place,” Trudger said. “Because the Dread Empire is a harder place still. But that doesn’t mean we’re blind .”

Something burned in those yellow eyes that had me believing, for this moment at least, that she spoke from the heart.

“We know the difference between someone like the Carrion Lord and Abreha Mirembe,” Trudger said. “You have known tyrants, Black Queen, but how often have your people been subject to them? We have, and that history is a thousand years of blood-curling screams. You want to know why we’d rather not deal with Akua Sahelian?”

Trudger bared pale, sharp teeth.

“You have proved you keep your word,” the envoy said. “You proved, in Wolof, that you know restraint. And if we had half a chance, Black Queen, we’d kill every single Akua Sahelian in this fucking empire. ”

I hummed, dropping the chicken bones into a stretch of shadow. Zombie liked to break them. I leaned back into my seat, then nodded.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s say you have me convinced you’re dealing in good faith. What does your mother want, and what does she offer?”

“We want to keep Foramen,” Trudger said, “and we want peace.”

It was a little more complicated than that, in practice. High Lady Wither intended on staying part of the Dread Empire of Praes and sitting on her High Seat, she just wanted me to make her problems go away. To broker a peace between her and the Confederation and to extract guarantees from the Tower she wouldn’t be put down the moment the Dread Empire was no longer preoccupied with civil war. I was on the fence as to whether these was harder to get done than what the Matrons had asked me: ceding territory was one thing, but Wither was asking me to end a goblin blood feud and meddle in the Tower’s authority over its own affairs. I pointed out the latter, but Trudger pointed out in reply that I’d already promised Abreha Mirembe to guarantee her title until the war on Keter was over so evidently I was willing to meddle. Which, much as I disliked admitting it, was a fair point.

“All right,” I said. “I know what you want. What makes it worth my while?”

If the Confederations’ offer had been tailored for me, then this one was tailored for Vivienne. Oh, Wither threw me a sop early on in the form of guaranteeing her High Seat would never interrupt the sale of munitions to Callow and would itself sell us goblin steel from the forges, but the rest was very much up her alley. A treaty guaranteeing Foramen would never send provide troops to make war on Callow so long as Wither’s line ruled it, goblin and Taghreb blacksmiths provided to help setting up royal forges in Callow and a secret treaty supporting Jacks operations in the Hungering Sands. The deal was arguably less risky than backing the annexation of a major Praesi city, too, which would appeal to Vivienne.

The last thing she wanted after the last decade was for Callow to be dragged into more wars.

I didn’t give Trudger an answer, nor did she expect me to. Neither did I release her back to her mother, instead stashing her away in my camp as far away as the delegation from the Confederation as I could. I asked Masego to set up wards to keep everyone out of her tent and tripled the guard around her, too, which was bound to be noticed by spies in my camp but couldn’t be helped. The last thing I needed was for Matron Braider or her cohorts to find out Wither’s daughter was my ‘guest’. I stopped by the stables to toss Zombie a few bones, which she crunched with relish, but when I returned to my tent to take care of my correspondence and read through reports I found someone waiting for me.

The last third of my goblin troubles I would not have seen coming in a hundred years, because Pickler had never before shown so much as an iota of interest in the fate of her people.

“Should I even ask how you know?” I said, limping open to my liquor cabinet and taking out a bottle of pear brandy.

I didn’t like the taste much, too sweet, but now and then I enjoyed having a drink of it. It was a way to remember a man I’d respected and detested but who’d died the same way he’d lived: trying to save others.

“I got it out of Masego,” Pickler said. “It was only a guess, but Mother was certain to send someone after the Matrons did.”

I gestured towards the brandy, and to my surprise she nodded. I poured her a cup as well before dropping down in my favourite seat. My Sapper-General drank of her brandy, letting out a happy noise at the taste.

“Better than what you usually drink,” she said.

“An acquired taste,” I said, speaking as much of the man as the liquor.

Pickler didn’t bother to ply me with small talk, which I appreciated. It would have been horrifying unlike her, and honestly made me lose some respect for her character.

“What did they want?” Pickler asked.

“The Matrons want Foramen back,” I said. “Your mother wants to keep Foramen. The rest is gilding.”

She laughed, but it was a barren sound. Without mirth.

“Of course it’s about Foramen,” she said. “Why would they care about anything but the prize?”

I sipped at my drink, swallowing quick to the sweetness would not linger.

“She sent your sister Trudger,” I said.

“Our youngest,” Pickler said, sounding surprised. “She must have killed either Salter or Folder to be trusted with this.”

A pause.

“Didn’t think she had it in her.”

“She didn’t think much of you either,” I noted. “Not exactly close, I take it?”

“I spared Salter when I had her on the ropes,” she replied. “She took that personally since the two are enemies – they were raised by matron-attendants that hate each other.”

“You never told me how you left the Eyries,” I said.

She drank deep, then set down the empty cup with a sigh. She cocked her head at me and I gallantly filled it up again.

“In age, I was the fourth out of nine,” Pickler said, then grimaced. “It’s not that age matters, Catherine – we don’t pick leaders for it – but it lets you make allies for longer. It’s an advantage. I was one of those raised by my mother, since two of my elder sisters had already been given to matron-attendants. She was...”

A moment of hesitation.

“She was proud that I was food at things,” she said. “Saw I had a talent with forces and maths, got three retired sappers to teach me. But she also wanted me to be other things, things I couldn’t be.”

“So you left,” I said.

“The College was a way out,” Pickler said. “They all wanted me to go, my sisters, because I’d have no allies even if I returned. Mother thought differently, said that there was worth in learning there and the allies that could be made. But I wasn’t one of the greenskin slots for the College, Catherine. My tribe paid so I wouldn’t be sworn to service. I was supposed to come back afterwards.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” I said.

“So am I,” she snorted. “Gobbler, leaving the Legions to go back? Madness. Mother figured out I wouldn’t during my second year, when I stopped answering her letters, but she couldn’t stop paying without losing face. She tried to get people to pressure me, but that’s how I got to know Nauk. He thought I was getting picked on by other companies so he brawled through three of them and the mages they’d bribed to help.”

They’d been in the same company for two years at that point, I thought, but I wasn’t surprised they hadn’t known each other well. There were a hundred people in every company and it was common practice for fresher recruits to be spread out so no tenth would ever be too green.

“He was a romantic,” I smiled. “As much as an orc can be.”

“He was good,” Pickler quietly said, “in a way that few of us are. I still grieve that. I’m glad you spoke for him at Sarcella, Catherine. I just wish we’d let him rest years earlier instead of dragging him back as that... thing.”

I grimaced but did not disagree. Wekesa the Warlock had done what he could, but Summer flame wielded by one of its great nobles was no petty thing. There had not been much left of him to salvage.

“I thought it could be fixed,” I said. “I thought a lot of things could be fixed, back in those days.”

“Some still can be.”

I leaned back into my seat, sipping at the last of my drink.

“I can’t answer unless you ask, Pickler,” I said.

She shook with something that might have been laughter, had there been amusement in it.

“I don’t have anything to offer you, Catherine,” she said. “I am not a High Lady or the Council of Matrons. The gold I have you have paid me, and my allies are your allies. I couldn’t threaten to leave if refused even if I wanted to – where I would I go? The Army of Callow is my home.”

“It doesn’t always have to be hard coin and favours, Pickler,” I quietly told her. “We can talk.”

“Talk doesn’t move the needle with you,” Pickler said, and before I could reply raised her hand. “It’s not scorn I speak. You are a queen, Catherine. You cannot act like other women.”

“And yet,” I said, “I’d like to hear you out anyway.”

She drank of her cup, squared her shoulders.

“They’re plagues,” Pickler of the High Ride tribe said. “Both of them. The Matrons just want a hidden kingdom in the mountains with Foramen as a trade city and no imperial leash. The shit they’ll get up to in the Eyries, Catherine, would make a devil shiver.”

“The way I hear it, it’s already no handful of roses,” I said.

“You don’t get let in on the real secrets unless you’re a Matron,” Pickler said, “but I... know things. The Tribes hold back on projects out of fear the Empire will notice and intervene. Wipe them out, even. Even now there’s a lot of Matrons who think munitions should never have been revealed. And the Council is made up of monsters, but my mother’s worse.”

“She likes knives and backs,” I conceded.

“She’s a Matron,” Pickler shrugged, as if that settled it. “But she thinks differently, Catherine. She wants to be the queen of our kind or ensure one of her daughters will be. It’s why she wants Foramen: it’s the lifeline of the Tribes. The ways my people are rich, ore and goods, they’re not worth anything if they can’t be sold to someone. So long as she has Foramen, she has them in the palm of her hand. And to get her way she wouldn’t mind starving half our people to death from behind the walls of her city.”

“I deal with terrible people all the time,” I admitted. “I even backed Helike to prominence in the Free Cities because it’d put down Malicia’s allies.”

“They are tyrants, Catherine,” Pickler said. “Leeches who drink the lifeblood of goblinkind to maintain their power and influence. And I know it is not like me to speak of them, of all they do, but I...”

She swallowed.

“I owe it,” she said. “To him. Because he was right, when you spoke to us in Marchford. When I balked at your banner rising against the Tower.”

Pickler met my eyes, the pale yellow unblinking.

“They kill us for sport.”

She bared her teeth.

“Robber spoke true when he said they’ve gotten soft,” Pickler said. “Look at them, darkening your doorsteps with deals they would have once sneered at. They’ve spent so many of us they can’t even get their own dirty work done anymore. They ate each other’s tails until there was nothing left but open maws and anger.”

“I can’t topple them, Pickler,” I said. “Not without a war I can’t afford to fight.”

“You don’t need to,” my Sapper-General said. “They did it to themselves. Do you think my people are happy they’re being used like this? The Matrons, my mother, they only own us so long as there’s nowhere else to go. And that’s something you can change.”

I blinked at her in surprise.

“You allowed the Snake Eater tribe into Callow,” Pickler said. “Let more in. Let us build without Matrons to hollow us out, without Preservers to open our throats the moment we reveal of ourselves. And they will come, I promise you that. Already the Legions and the Army are a home to flee to, but if you open Callow? Entire tribes will leave their tyrant behind.”

“If I grant lands to tribes, I’ll have a rebellion on my hand,” I frankly told her.

“ Don’t ,” Pickler fervently said. “Don’t let us forge another closed kingdom within the kingdom. Let us into your cities, your countryside, your wilderness. Let us be part of something that does not want to eat us .”

I flinched away from the intensity of her gaze.

“They’ll hate you for it, the Matrons,” she said. “For showing them they don’t own what it means to be a goblin, that just buried every other way and called it guidance. And I know it’s not what you want, not what Vivienne wants, that you have to think in kingdoms and favours and hard coin.”

She finished her drink, set it down.

“But we’ve stood behind you, Catherine,” Pickler said. “Not them, us. From the start, we’ve been with you. Sappers and soldiers and scouts, we’ve bled for you. And I won’t say it’s owed, because my people don’t believe in debt, but I need you to understand that I loved Robber – more than I thought, more than I knew – but there are fifty thousand like him the Eyries that never managed to flee. That are stuck and lost and will never see the light of day, know what the sun and the stars look like or even feel the wind on their face. Not unless you offer your hand to them.”

She left her chair, stood before me.

“I don’t have anything to offer you,” she said. “Nothing to bargain with. All I can say is please -”

I pushed back my chair, half-risen even as my leg ached, but I was not quick enough to stop her getting on her knees.

“- help us,” Pickler said. “Save us from ourselves, from each other.”

“I-” I choked out, at a loss for words.

“I think you might just be the only powerful person in the world who cares, Catherine,” she quietly said. “And I know you’re a queen, that you can’t afford to bend, but still I ask.”

She smiled, heartbreakingly.

“Please,” Pickler asked. “If not you, then who?”

I closed my eyes, almost short of breath. The stars were there, out in the black, but they felt... distant. Fading.

I had goblin troubles.

Chapter 25: Fool

“ And so Dread Emperor Irritant addressed his Chancellor thus: ‘You have moved me through argument, so I crown you in my stead. May you rule wisely.’ The day after the royal banner of Callow was seen, and soon Ater was under siege.”

– Extract from Volume IX of the official Imperial Chronicles

The first dart came from my left and I caught its glint in the morning light.

I clawed Night across the air, making a shield, but the one thrown a heartbeat later from my right I didn’t see at all until a phalange moved in the way with her shield raised. It didn’t help. Night shattered the first dart, but the second punched through steel like it was paper and then went on halfway through the orc’s skull before stopping. And it wasn’t even, I realized a moment later, the real attempt on my life. I was warned by shouts and the sound of crossbows being fired. Behind me , I thought, and turned to see a small creature leaping towards at my back. Hairy and clawed, like a toad gone wrong, but my staff was in movement and it was not quicker than me.

The side of the length of dead yew caught the creature in its distended belly, but it let out a high-pitched screech and spat out a yellow tongue that looked like a muscle. I saw something like bone at the end of the absurd length and threw myself to the side, but a legionary had come too close and he was in the way. Heavier than me. It was luck that got a fold of the Mantle of the Woe just close enough I was able to pull it closer to my body, covering my side in time for the bonelike stinger to slide off the enchanted cloth. I snarled, as much about the legionary who’d almost just gotten me killed trying to protect me as in anger. Night cascaded down the length of my staff in strings that crisscrossed the creature’s entire body in the span of a heartbeat before turning sharp .

Chunks of flesh and gore splattered the grass and I breathed out, eyes scanning for other threats.

The assassins that’d thrown darts at me had been tackled down but there seemed to be no more of the creature, which – shit, the corpse was dissolving into the ground. Ichor. That thing had been a devil. What the fuck was going on with our wards? I spared a look for the phalange that’d take a dart for me, grimacing as a hand over her mouth told me she was dead.

“Take them alive,” I shouted.

It was no good, though, I saw moments later. The assassins – garbed in regular’s armour – had stopped moving because they were dead. Poison, most likely. I’d be getting no answers out of them save through necromancy, and maybe not even that. There were alchemies that made corpses near-impossible to raise, and though they were expensive I somehow doubted that whoever had arranged this was lacking in funds. I rose back to my feet, closing the orc’s eyes. She’d taken that dart for me without hesitation, and if she hadn’t I would most likely be dead. Fuck , I thought breathing out. This wasn’t the first attempt on my life, but it’d been a while one had come so close to succeeding. If that tongue stinger hadn’t been meant to deliver a particularly nasty poison, I’d eat my shoes.

I got my people moving to cover the security breaches, because there was no way a devil should have been able to cross our wards. Before the hour was out the phalanges had caught most of our traitors alive, two trying to pull a runner towards Ater before being shot in the back. Enough confessed without need for... firm interrogation that I got a picture of what had happened. A few of my soldiers had been turned either by threats to their families or petty bribery, which had allowed a pair of mfuasa mage infiltrators in through our defences. They’d used illusions and murder to let in a summoned devil through the wards and make their attempt before being put down.

“They went for enlisted, not officers,” Vivienne said. “Not all of them Praesi, either. Two of the flipped soldiers were from Summerholm.”

I grimaced.

“This one wasn’t a warning shot,” I said. “They meant business.”

“It won’t be the last either,” the Princess said. “You’ve provoked the High Lords enough a single failure won’t put them off.”

“You don’t think this is Malicia?” I asked.

“It could be the Eyes,” she conceded, “but I have my doubts. They don’t usually use either devils or mfuasa.”

Which might be the point, putting us off the trail, but I wouldn’t argue the point. I’d certainly angered enough of the Wasteland’s aristocracy that they were as likely of an author for this nasty little surprise. I clenched my fingers. Time to make a point of my own, then. I’d need to speak with Scribe, and Archer as soon as she got back. She was a day late, at this point, but I wasn’t worried: I could still feel her star and the way it was moving towards us. She’d be there by noon.

“We’ll retaliate,” I said. “

“I expected as much,” Vivienne said. “And our traitors?”

“We have a punishment for aiding the enemy in our regulations,” I said.

My successor made a face but she did not disagree. It might have been a Legion regulation, originally, but Callowans were not much softer on treachery.

They’d be stoned.

—

Archer dragged her carcass back into camp an hour past Noon Bell, immediately heading for my tent when she did. She stank of dust and sweat but I still poured her a glass of lemon water when she dropped into a seat with a sigh, sending one of the phalanges to get her warm food. Indrani drank greedily, emptying the whole cup before letting out a sigh.

“Gods, the things you send me to do,” she said.

I dropped into a seat across from her own, lowering myself slowly so my leg wouldn’t ache too much.

“Thought you were all about travelling,” I said.

“Ater was damned interesting,” Indrani admitted. “Wouldn’t have minded staying a little longer to see the sights. There were... complications, though.”

“Ominous,” I praised. “You’ve been working on your pauses, I see.”

She preened.

“I have,” Indrani said. “I keep using them in random sentences, it drives Zeze crazy.”

I swallowed a grin. Amusing as that sounded, I had sent her out on an important errand.

“Report,” I ordered.

She leaned back into her seat, grinning in a way that did not bode well for whatever poor bastard I’d make transcribe this later, and only stashed that insolence away long enough to thank the young man that brought her a plate of greens and stew with slices of rye bread on the side. Archer wasted no time dipping her bread and scarfing down an entire slice, almost choking as she slapped her chest twice.

“Right,” she gasped. “So report. Got into their noble camps no trouble, their security is horrendously bad. The outer parts, anyway. They ward to the Hells and back little sections where the important people sleep, couldn’t get in those. Stayed long enough to learn that our buddy Sargon is here now, with a small escort.”

“Good to know,” I grunted. “We’d figured as much, but it’s good to have it confirmed.”

“It shouldn’t be too hard to get a strike force in Ater the same way I went in,” Archer continued. “Lots of servants and peddlers go back and forth through the gates every day, the Legions don’t actually watch them all that closely. The problems start in the city.”

“Heard through sources that Malicia’s pretty much lost grip,” I said.

“Yeah, she’s not real popular at the moments,” Indrani snorted. “The Sentinels followed up massacring rioters by being just as hard with a few attempts by people to get at imperial granaries, which didn’t win her any admirers.”

Unfortunate timing for her, that. I didn’t disagree with taking a hard line over food reserves with a siege possibly looming, but it was becoming clear that the Sentinels weren’t the kind of tool that could be used for delicate work.

“So who’s rising?” I asked.

“Akua,” Indrani frankly said. “She’s the city’s darling at the moment. They’re convinced she’s the only person that can beat you and she’s been making all the right moves – she’d been healing people, setting up hospitals and shelters and organizing the refugees. Even the gangs like her, Cat, it’s ridiculous. They started patrolling the districts the city guard won’t go in anymore after she asked them.”

I let out a low whistle.

“So she’s making a play for the Tower,” I said.

“Maybe,” Archer said, wiggling her hand. “She hasn’t actually gone there since coming to the city, way I hear it. She’s got this mansion that’s become like a second imperial court. There’s already a song about the ‘empress in the tower and the empress in the city’. Whatever she’s up to, though, she hasn’t actually made any moves to depose Malicia. Most people figure she’s either still working on getting the Legions on board or there’s some sort of clever plan afoot.”

“I don’t see the Black Knight flipping her way even if Malicia’s star is waning,” I said. “They get on terribly, by all a reports, and Nim’s a Legion loyalist. Without the army on her side, Akua will need major noble support before she can make a move. Won’t have enough troops otherwise.”

Support that I intended to deliver right into her hands, but was still in the making. It’d have to wait until Abreha and Jaheem Niri arrived.

“Could be,” Indrani shrugged. “Went to have a look at the defences like you asked, and it’s exactly like Juniper figured. They have a skeleton garrison on the walls facing us and the rest of the troops are at barracks in the nearby districts.”

It was the only sensible way to defend a city the size of Ater with forces as small as the Black Knight’s. She couldn’t really afford to man the entire set of walls facing us, not with solid numbers, so she’d post just enough up there and keep her real numbers near streets that could be used to quickly mobilize. That was she could be sure her soldiers were where the fighting was actually happening when we attacked. Against a less seasoned commander the trick would have been drawing those troops out by an attack on the wall and then sending a smaller force to climb an unprotected stretch while the defenders were busy, but that wouldn’t work on Marshal Nim. She’d keep companies in reserve.

No, like Juniper had said the only real way for us to take the city by force was speed. We needed overwhelm the walls before the Legions could fully mobilize, smash them while they were still separated and take up solid defensive positions before the highborn armies could intervene.

“Good,” I said. “Did you get anywhere close to the Tower?”

“Nah, they’ve locked up those districts tight ,” Indrani said. “The Sentinels have been moving wagons around, though, so I’d bet Malicia’s opened up the vaults for a few things. Couldn’t get into the Tower itself, though, not even through Scribe’s underground routes. They’re either closed or swarming with guards.”

“Ime knows her trade,” I sighed. “And my father?”

“That,” Indrani grinned, “is where it gets... complicated.”

“Now you’re just overusing it,” I chided.

“Fuck... you, Your Royality,” Indrani eloquently replied. “So, I went around looking for ye ol’ Carrion Lord like my boss – terrible woman, you know, couldn’t recognize a good dramatic pause even if it bit her in the ass – asked. I was prowling rooftops and alleys like a majestic panther, but then I got shot in the shoulder.”

“You what now?” I replied, alarm.

“Don’t worry about it, shallow wound, all in good fun,” Archer dismissed. “So since the Lady had said hello, I set fire to the house she was standing on to say hi back and we had a good laugh about it. Only that, uh, drew some invited guests.”

“Sentinels?”

“Please,” Indrani snorted, “like I’d worry about those . No, I was asking her why there was some gray in her hair now like an old granny – there wasn’t, always pisses her off when I ask anyway – but then suddenly there was just this guy there.”

“This guy,” I repeated, skeptical.

“Yeah, just standing there,” Indrani agreed. “So I was all like ‘what gives, did you maybe not notice that building is still on fire, you jackass’ and then he turns to me saying ‘Black Queen vassal. You are spared. The debt is paid. Leave.’ You know, like an asshole.”

“Indrani,” I patiently said, “did you pick a fight with the fucking Emerald Swords?”

She blinked at me, surprise.

“No, of course not,” Archer assured me. “Though that was obvious from the context.”

I narrowed my eyes at her.

“I picked a fight with the Emerald Swords and the Lady,” she proudly told me.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose, feeling the headache coming. I wasn’t even in pain yet, I could just sense its looming person like a fucking storm on the horizon.

“He’d told me to leave, see, so I did the only rational thing a woman can do in that position,” Indrani began. “I-”

“-shot him in the eye,” I finished.

“I did,” she said, pleased, then leaned forward. “Twice. And I’ll level with you here, Catherine, he did not enjoy that.”

“Go figure,” I said. “Ranger?”

“Kicked him into the fire when he was distracted and pulled down the house on him,” Indrani said. “Shot her in the shoulder but she caught it and threw it back – almost took my eye out – but then the rest of the Emerald Swords arrived and it got messy.”

“It got messy?” I drily said.

“Right, ‘cause we drew a bit of attention so the Tower dropped a demon on us,” Archer said. “Beast of Hierarchy, I think. Anyways the air started burning like oil and it spread fucking everywhere – no smoke, though, pretty weird right? – so I stabbed this elf in the back, ‘cuz he was basically asking for it, and I maneuvered backwards from the situation.”

She smiled proudly at me, the horrid wrench.

“You know, like a strategist,” Indrani said. “Which I am.”

“Tell me we don’t have a demon-tainted Emerald Sword to deal with now,” I said.

“Nah, everyone made it out,” Indrani said. “Except for the diabolists Ranger shot, I guess, but if I learned anything in our years together it’s that diabolists don’t really count.”

Yeah, and there it was. The goddamned headache.

“Anything else?” I asked, against my better judgement.

She considered that for a moment.

“I’m hungry,” Indrani shared.

I sighed.

“About your... adventure, I mean,” I said.

“Hey,” Archer complained. “If I can’t do the pauses, then you can’t either. And what happened to us, Catherine? You never ask how my day went anymore.”

I cocked an eyebrow at her.

“How did your day go, Indrani?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” she smugly grinned, shovelling a large spoonful of stew and greens into her mouth.

“How is that that I’ve met people who’ve literally eaten the souls of the innocent and somehow you’re still the worst person I know?” I asked, reluctantly impressed.

“Natural talent,” she told me through half-chewed greens.

There was nothing like spending time with my closest friends in the world to make me reconsider my position on people not being born terrible. I hid a smile, though, and drummed my fingers against the sculpted tabletop.

“It’s a good thing that you’re back,” I said. “You can rest now.”

“Sleeping in a bed will be nice,” she agreed.

“You’ll have to do it now, though,” I idly said.

She stopped eating, staring at me.

“I’ve got a job for you,” I pleasantly smiled. “You’re going back into Ater.”

“I was just in Ater,” she whined.

“Yeah, but last time was too easy,” I said. “So this time I’m sending you back with about forty handpicked Dominion warriors.”

She wouldn’t stay with them once they were in the city – anything a Named was involved in the Intercessor would know about – but that was all right, I had a different task in mind for her. Ater was no Wolof, after all, for all its formidable defences. It had fallen more times than I could count through the many centuries of imperial history.

Most of the time, from the inside.

—

It was another six days before High Lady Abreha Mirembe of Aksum – formerly empress-claimant Sepulchral – and High Lord Dakarai Sahel of Nok joined their forces to my own army. Most of their sizeable combine force had marched our way, a solid fourteen thousand. Abreha’s reins on it were nowhere as tight as before though, since the Nok soldiery now had their own liege lord along instead of simple kinsman in command. Within moments of getting them in my tent I saw the tensions between the two of them. High Lord Dakarai, a gracefully aged older man with silvery hair and the most golden eyes I had seen of any Praesi noble, now resented the woman he’d backed for the Tower.

I even knew why. One of the foundations of their alliance had been the marriage between Abreha’s then-heir Isoba and Dakarai’s daughter Hawulti, but from the High Lord of Nok’s perspective he had mismarried his favourite daughter: Isoba’s position as heir to Aksum was now up in the air. Mind you, Dakarai was here instead of talking with High Lady Takisha and the others for a good reason: it was too late for him to move to Malicia’s camp. Even if she accepted his allegiance he’d get nothing out of the switch and he was more than a little likely to get assassinated as an example down the line. Malicia couldn’t accept his return, anyway, not as things stood.

Too many of her ‘loyal’ lords had spent years waging war against Nok in her name, they wouldn’t accept a peaceful return to the Tower’s cause. If the High Seat returned to Malicia, it would be over Dakarai Sahel’s dead body and for obvious reasons that would not be terms acceptable to him.

“Your hospitality remains pleasing, Black Queen, but you asked us here for a reason,” Abreha eventually said.

“The wards against eavesdropping were something of a hint, I imagine,” I snorted. “Fair enough. I want something of you.”

High Lord Dakarai studied me calmly.

“Should you want Nok’s forces to take the vanguard in breaching Ater, there will be a price for it,” he plainly stated.

“Nothing so uncouth,” I said. “On the contrary, I think you’ll actually like this one.”

I explained exactly what I wanted out of them, and they listened with faces like masks.

Afterwards, Dakarai Sahel left my tent in a rage and Abreha Mirembe lingered a little longer before following him out of the camp. I let them go, instead calling my war council together.

We had a battle to prepare for.

—

I pressed down against Zombie’s back, squinting under the heavy glare of the afternoon sun.

The enemy was moving slower than I’d thought they would, though that was of my own making. Between Assassin, Archer and the Silver Huntress about twenty high-ranking nobles had been killed this morning. Among those we’d even caught two Muraqib and a Niri, the prize of the lot being High Lady Takisha’s husband. Just after that anthill got kicked the Army of Callow had begun marching at a brisk pace, circling Ater to the north and advancing on the camp of the noble private armies. Much as we’d expected it would, though our advance had been almost immediately seen and reported it’d still taken them long to organize. I suspected they’d prepared a makeshift command system in case we did attack them, but the wave of assassinations had upended that arrangement before it could be used. So while the nobles fought over who would lead and who would take the frontlines, the Army of Callow had marched effectively unchallenged.

Juniper didn’t like the plan, but I’d sold her on the necessity of it so she’d put her talents to work making the best of the inevitable risks. While the Army of Callow and the Akusm contingent was moving to the north of the city, about five thousand – all Nok forces – under High Lord Dakarai were circling the city’s belly to the south instead. The route was slightly longer, and I could see from above that the Black Knight had taken the bait. Seeing a smaller force split from our main host, Marshal Nim had ordered one of the southern gates open and sortied against it. The temptation to try to defeat us in detail had been too strong.

Without knowing it, the Black Knight had been courting disaster. The Nok wavemen, the famous archers I’d yet to see prove their worth on the battlefield, were served up exactly the kind of fight they shined most in: flat open fields against slow-moving infantry. Those enchanted bows proved to be brutally effective tools of war at a range at least one time and a half of standard-issue crossbows, arrows touched with magic coming down in a rain that tore through even the testudo formation of the enemy legionaries. Still, there were only a thousand of those elite archers and Nim soon had field scorpions brought out so the slaughter didn’t last forever.

It still cost the Legions a few hundred soldiers for little gain and blunted their sortie. The Nok forces kept moving east towards the nobles with only paltry losses and the Legions did not attempt pursuit. No doubt the Black Knight was wary of getting another mouthful of volleys before Dakarai retreated again and the game began anew.

Up north, the shape of a battle began to fall into place. The enemy commanders were thinking along the same lines as the Black Knight, they too preferring to fight our army split. It’d made them take a gamble: instead of staying in their camp, a decent enough defensive position, the lumbering host of thirty thousand was marching towards the Army of Callow and its auxiliaries. The general facing Juniper had decided to bet that the battle against our main army would be won or lost before High Lord Dakarai finished circling the capital and fell on their backs. From up here I could see another trap, too, this one more subtly laid: at the speed they were advancing, the noble armies would be meeting my own about at the height of one of the northern gates of Ater.

Cheeky, that. They were hoping that Marshal Nim might see an opportunity when the battle had begun to flank us from there. And more than that, I eventually decided. If the Black Knight opened the gates, the nobles could then retreat through it and into the city afterwards. Neither me nor the nobles were interested in fighting to the death while Malicia was watching us from atop the Tower like a waiting vulture. It’d be more sensible to allow whoever got the worst of the fighting to retreat, be it us or they. Even with an army marching towards you , I thought amusedly, you’re more concerned with the Tower than the steel. A shame for them it wouldn’t pan out this way.

An hour before Afternoon Bell the skirmishes began north of the city and I got involved. I made a few passes on Zombie and left trails of blackflame behind, leaving our Levantine skirmishers with a decisive advantage. An hour after that, the skirmishers retreated and battle lines formed. To the south of the city, though, High Lord Dakarai had slowed. It might be taken for resting his men, who had been marching for hours in the sun with enemies nipping at their heels, but it wasn’t. To a practised eye, he was making sure he wouldn’t be there for the battle to the north.

It didn’t matter to the rank and files on both sides, who advanced with shields raised as sorcery and arrows began to fly. Hierophant ripped through enemy rituals – Akua didn’t seem to be out there waiting to match him – so the volleys weren’t too badly against us, and we closed the distance with only slight casualties. That turned into a massacre almost immediately. The nobles had put their levies in front and my legionaries chewed through them like a knife through butter. I was pretty sure the immediacy of that took even the enemy by surprise, because they answered by hammering at where their own lines met mine with rituals and that was hardly standard tactics even for the most wasteful of Wasteland lords.

It was a mistake, anyway. Getting columns of flame and clouds of poisonous smoke tossed at them by their own lords without the protections that my priests afforded the Army of Callow was enough to turn the fear of the levies into terror, which resulted in a small and then general rout. The household troops behind them were made of sterner stuff and tried to keep them in place, but that was like trying to ride a panicked horse: they got kicked for it, and hard. To my dismay, it looked like we were actually going to win this battle. Fuck. I’d badly overestimated the morale of the levies, and so had our enemies. My eyes flicked to the northern gates, waiting for them to open, but while Marshal Nim had reinforced the walls she kept them closed. Malicia’s orders? I could only guess.

It was Abreha Mirembe who salvaged it. She’d been half-heartedly serving on the flank of the Army of Callow, fighting off the Kahtan tribal troops with a suspicious lack of rituals being thrown by both sides, when she saw the rout and ordered a general retreat of the Aksum army. I could see the dismay and fury flicker through the ranks of my men at the sight, High Lady Abreha’s order creating a massive gap that the enemy lines plunged into without hesitation. It was a strange sight, from above: the enemy centre and left were collapsing before the Army of Callow, but my own left had walked off the battlefield just on the eve of victory and so the enemy right was coming hard towards a formation unprepared for it.

I swooped down to stem the tide, carving a wall of blackflame through the Kahtan tribal levies that stopped them cold in their advance. It bought the time for Juniper to do as we’d planned and call a retreat, just as at last the northern gates of Ater began to open. Nim was, unfortunately, too late to the party. The Army of Callow began to pull back, its enemies too far or in no state to pursue, and as Zombie rose back into the sky I breathed out in relief. It might have worked out even better than I’d intended, in the end. Abreha Mirembe had not just turned on me, she’d betrayed me just as I was about to win the battle: it would win her a great deal of esteem. Good. It’d make her betrayal and High Lord Dakarai’s that much more believable.

Neither of them were in a position to go over to Malicia’s side, after all, but it was not to the empress’ banner they had flocked today. Why, they had just announced their support for the cause of Akua Sahelian by saving the entire goddamned capital.

And with that, the fall of Ater could begin.

Refuge II

“How many will ever see a devil in their lifetime? Evil first the province of men, for it is we who inflict it to each other.”

– Isocrates the Harsh, Atalante preacher

Constanza could have blamed it on the potion, but now she knew better: it’d been her. She’d gotten too comfortable, too soft. When the fat men from Mercantis came waddling into camp, asking about her latest breakthrough, she’d paid it no mind. Lysander had called her work a potion of mind reading, but it wasn’t exactly that: it didn’t narrow in on thoughts so much as desires, and only did so in a shallow way. You’d be lucky to get anything at all off someone unless they were looking at the very thing or person they desired. She told Merchant Lord Marius as much when he rudely came to her workshop and pestered her about it, but it didn’t put him off. He offered to buy her entire stock on the spot.

“No interested,” Constanza told him.

He didn’t take that well. Had a tantrum, but she bribed Archer with a philtre of warmth to toss him out and break the legs of his impolite bodyguards. A bit of a waste, she realized, since Indrani would likely have done it at half the price. Archer’s hate for the Consortium was a lazy one, rarely worked on, but no shallower for that. She’d thought it would be the end of it, but come morning Marius was bothering her again with a fresh set of twice as many bodyguards. Constanza, irritated, went to the Lady about it. Ranger was roasting manticore flesh over a cooking fire, and she deigned to listen until her midday meal was ready to eat.

“So get rid of them,” the Lady of the Lake said after the tale was told.

Constanza grit her teeth.

“Is Refuge not your domain?” she said. “Why are we even here, if not for you to protect us?”

The Lady of the Lake glanced at her calmly.

“To learn lessons,” Ranger said.

It looked like a dead end, but Constanza would wait. Maybe the great lady would be bothered to actually help out for once. Only the following day Merchant Lord Marius was back with a company’s worth of mercenaries and a smug grin.

“You’re a fool,” Constanza scorned. “You think you can come into Refuge with soldiers and do what you want? She’ll kill you all, then head to Mercantis and kill a few more just to make a point.”

“It’s you who’s the fool,” Marius laughed. “She’s not more above being bribed than anyone else. No one’s coming to help you. I’ll have your stock, now, and your oath never to sell to another.”

She told them off, raising her voice, but no one came. They battered down her door with a bench, ransacked her workshop and the Merchant Lord paged through her notes with idly interest.

“I’ll be wanting that water-breathing potion too, the moment you’ve finished it,” he said. “It was a pleasure trading with you, Concocter. I’ll be expecting ten mind-reading potions ready in a fortnight, when we return.”

He set down a single silver for every potion he’d taken, smiling pleasantly. Constanza grit her teeth, let it go, and the moment she could she ran to camp. She offered trades, very advantageous ones, but no one took her up on it. It was Lysander who explained why.

“The Lady said she’d allow it,” Beastmaster said. “No one’s willing to go against her.”

Constanza choked on her rage. All this just to teach her a lesson? The Merchant Lord and his entourage left that afternoon and life in Refuge seemed as it always had been, until Marius came back two weeks later. And, just like last time, he paid the Lady and she let him rob Constanza. Twice more it happened, until Constanza realized that the Ranger had no intention of stopping. Even when she’d refused to make potions and Marius had ordered the mercenaries to beat her every day until she did, the Lady of the Lake had done nothing. The lessons weren’t going to end. No one was going to help her. So Constanza went gathering herbs, deeper in the Waning Woods than she’d been in years, and shut herself into her workshop.

When Marius and his mercenaries next came, she opened the cauldron in her workshop and hastily drank down the antidote as the poisonous fumes killed everybody else within forty feet.

The antidote had allowed her to avoid death, but not without a price. Her veins were burning and she was short of breath, she could barely move without shaking. And still Constanza dragged herself up and she walked to the Ranger’s fire, sitting across the old monster.

“Safety at the mercy of another is not safety,” the Lady of the Lake mildly said.

“All that so I’d learn to kill?” Constanza rasped.

“Next time,” the Ranger smiled, “they will not press.”

And Gods damn her, Constanza thought, but she was right. Mercantis would never trouble her again. And worse still, she’d been right about the rest. When it came down to it, all the bargains she had made, the relations she had struck up, they’d been worth nothing. No one had helped.

She would not forget that, the Concocter decided.

—

By the time they’d crossed from Helikean territory to Nicean, Alexis had grown weary of travelling. It wasn’t that she wasn’t learning from the Lady, on the contrary: with only the two of them on the road, she’d gotten more spars and tricks out of the Ranger than she’d dared to hope for. It was just that the lands around here were, well, drab. A little further east, where the borders of four cities if the League reached the sides of the same fertile valley, at least the bland plains and fields might have been broken up by some of the raids and squabbles that stories insisted flared up at least once a month. Instead they’d kept further west, to keep to the road and make the quickest journey to Nicae itself.

The Silver Huntress had doubts that the artefact the Lady had left to obtain would be the real deal, though. The people that came from Mercantis to earn the Ranger’s favour with useful information usually knew better than to bring her anything untrue, but drow artefacts were so unheard of it was a pretty dubious lead. The Lady wanted to get past the great enchantment that kept her out of the Everdark, though, so she was willing to chase down even the shadiest of rumours. Wasn’t Alexis’ problem if it didn’t pan out, anyway, was it? She’d fought Lysander for the right to accompany the Lady on the trip so she’d be able to learn from the woman, nothing more.

A few more days and the stretch of the road took them past a few villages and near the fortress town of Alchodon, which was when Alexis got to rue her words. She’d wanted excitement and she got it: smoke was trailing into the sky as swaths of the fields behind them burned, a lumbering column of armed men marching down the road.

“Interested?” the Lady asked.

“I can’t make out who it is,” Alexis admitted.

“You can,” Ranger corrected. “Let me teach you.”

She picked up sharpening her eyesight after only three tries, which the Lady praised her for even though archery-based Named tended to find easiest. The column was all soldiers, Alexis saw, men with long spears and polished armour.

“Spears of Stygia,” she said, even though no banner was flown. “But what are they here for?”

“Look further behind,” Ranger said.

Alexis did, and found horror. Wagons of people, dragged along. Men and women and children, in heavy chains and whipped when they slowed.

“Slaves,” the Silver Huntress said. “This is a slave raid.”

She turned to look behind her, at the looming walls of Alchodon. Atop the ramparts dozens and dozens of armed men, soldiers of Nicae, were watching the smoke rise into the sky. Watching their people being dragged away like cattle.

“What are they waiting for?” Alexis bit out. “They’re headed east, Ranger, back towards Stygian territory.”

The Lady of the Lake glanced at her, looking almost amused.

“They won’t come out.”

The Silver Huntress balked.

“That’s nonsense,” she said. “There’s got to be at least as many of them as the Spears in that fortress. Why wouldn’t they come out?”

“There’s talk that Helike is on the rise again,” the Lady said. “And Atalante is already busy squabbling with Delos over trade routes, so there’ll be no help from there if Helike comes knocking at the door. They’re going to let the Stygians go because the Strategos doesn’t want to be stuck in a war with Stygia when the Helikeans start marching.”

“But the Stygians are raiding them,” Alexis said, aghast. “They have a duty. There’s laws!”

“Take that as the lesson worth learning from this trip, Alexis,” Ranger said. “There is no law, save the tyranny of the strong.”

“That’s childish,” the Silver Huntress growled.

“It’s honest,” the Lady corrected. “All these laws and treaties and oaths, they all rest on the same foundation: someone is strong enough to enforce them. The moment that’s no longer true...”

She glanced at the smoke in the distance.

“Don’t get hung up on law,” the Lady said. “It means nothing once strength weighs on the balance. My family spent years travelling across Calernia when I was young, hunted by the Emerald Swords. And always princesses and kings swore all in their cities were protected, that gifts would be repaid in kind, that there were laws about this.”

The Ranger chuckled.

“How quickly those words wilted, when bodies began hitting the floor,” she said.

“That was wrong,” Alexis said.

“You can believe that, if you want,” the Lady smiled. “Act on it, even. Change the world. But to achieve that-”

“- I’ll first have to be strong,” the Silver Huntress murmured.

And it rang true, that was the worst of it. Alexis felt a kindling of rage at the thought that even trying to prove the Lady wrong she’d be proving her right. Was there no way? No, the Silver Huntress told herself, that was the wrong way to think.

She just needed to keep fighting, and one day she would win.

—

It was hard to predict how the Lady would react to being pressed for tutelage. It changed with her mood, her whim of the moment. Lysander had seen that boldness often paid off, though, so when she asked him why she should bother to teach him how to track manticores he boldly replied.

“I am the strongest of your pupils,” the Beastmaster said. “Second only to you.”

Neither Archer nor Alexis were his match when he brought his menagerie to bear and the Concocter’s path to survival was one of utility, not strength. The Ranger smiled at his words, eyes mild, and his hopes soared.

“Are you now?” she asked.

She rose and left. He knew better than to follow, his stomach tightening with worry. He heard what she’d done only the following morning, when he went to buy a fresh set of flints from a peddler and found himself refused.

“The Lady says you’re cut off,” the peddler said. “You’re a good lad, but not that good.”

Not a soul in Refuge would trade or gift him so much as a blade of grass. Lysander struggled to understand the lesson, thinking it nothing but petty discipline, until the third day. When he’d finished the last of his dried meat to feed Old Beggar and found there wasn’t enough left for Strider, his wolf. He went hunting, but it was barely enough. And when he returned Abraxon, his Atalantian sharpbeak, had grown hungry. The Beastmaster had twelve beasts in his menagerie, the most that he could Master without strain, and now that he could no longer trade he found himself buckling under the weight of keeping them fed.

He spent all his days hunting until dark and still barely kept them sated, but the strain was getting to him. When he was made to spar against Indrani, she brutally demolished him in three exchanges. The bruises would only slow him on the hunt, he knew, and what if he’d broken something? And so Lysander limped back to the Lady of the Lake, who sat by her fire with a deer skewer in hand and watched him with mild eyes.

“I can’t,” the Beastmaster admitted. “It’s too much.”

“Borrowed strength will always turn on you,” the Ranger said. “It’s one of the first things my mother taught me. Do you begin to understand, now? If your strength relies on others-”

“- it can be stripped from you by them,” Lysander quietly finished. “Yes. I understand.”

“Good,” the Lady said. “You may trade again. Do not forget the lesson.”

Lysander wouldn’t, he swore it. He would not be had like this twice, be made a fool of.

He would never need anyone ever again.

—

“I have a test for you,” the Lady said.

“Yes,” Indrani replied.

Ranger looked at her, face fondly amused.

“Not going to ask what it is?”

Archer was not. Last time she’d taken a test she had killed Merchant Lord Septimus and taken the scarf she now wore day and night. She was, if anything, eager for another.

“I’ll find out when I need to,” Indrani said.

“It might kill you,” the Lady warned.

“So could crossing a river,” Archer said. “Fear is a shackle.”

The Lady looked approving and Indrani hid her pleasure.

“You always say the right things,” Ranger said. “Now we find out if you mean them.”

Indrani was given a single ivory token and told to bring it to the other side of the Waning Woods. It sounded easy, which probably meant it was a trap. Archer was clever enough to always have a bag prepared in case she needed to leave, though, so when a riding party of fae struck the camp in the middle of the night she wasted no time running. It wasn’t the Wild Hunt, she reassured herself, not even the Lady would use them for a lesson. Right? Whoever they were, though, there were brutal and unrelenting. They had hounds with them, great snarling beasts that kept picking up her trail through rivers and even rain, and they were never more than half a day behind.

Archer kept moving. She never slept more than a few hours at a time and rarely at night. When she used up her rations she began eating berries and mushrooms, rarely catching fish. All was eaten cold, a fire would have gotten her kill within the hour. All that stood between her and death was the movement of her legs, so Archer moved. Always forward, never looking back, as the fae pursued her to snatch back the token the Lady had taken from them.

Inexplicably, it became easier. When she learned to let go of what was behind her, of what was ahead of her, there was only a present and the present was... easy. Entertaining, even. There was a surprise around every corner: an enemy or a treasure or a cursed tree. Indrani thought on her feet and kept moving, like a fish in the stream, and found one day that she was enjoying this. She was half-dead, exhausted and filthy but she was still having fun. That the fae were never far behind only made it better, forced her to stay sharp.

When she did reach the southern edge of the Waning Woods, Archer almost didn’t cross into the plains. It would mean an end to the test, to the game. But she’d been sent here for a reason, so she did. And as the ivory token turned to dust in her fingers, Indrani stood alone with the wind in her hair as before her the sun rose in the distance over Lake Calydon, she found her breath catching in her throat. An end to the journey, a horizon she’d never seen. Never looking forward or back , she thought. Like an arrow in flight . How many more horizons like this were still out there for her to chase? A hundred, a thousand?

Archer didn’t know, but she couldn’t wait to find out.

—

John had thought that bringing down a wyvern would please the Lady, but somehow it seemed to be the opposite. He honestly could not understand why.

“How did you kill it?” the Ranger repeated for the second time.

‘With my spear’ had not been well received, so this time he elaborated some.

“I threw a spear at it,” the Hunter said. “It grew angry. So I ran through the woods and its wings got caught in a branch. It broke my second spear when I tried to get its throat, but it knocked me back into a tree rotten on the inside and it toppled down over its body. I finished it off after.”

She looked even angrier. Somehow, John dimly felt that now might not be the time to ask for the spear lessons he’d been aiming to get out of her with a wyvern head trophy.

“Head to bed,” the Lady of the Lake said. “We’re going on a trip tomorrow.”

John beamed. He was going to get that training, after all. He must have misread her. He dropped in his bedroll for the deep sleep of the righteously victorious, only to wake up in the middle of the night. He was not, the Hunter immediately noticed, in Refuge anymore. Or in his tent. The trip must have started early, only where was the Ranger? This looked like no part of the Waning Woods he had ever been in, either, and already he could hear creatures creeping closer. He rose from his bedroll but immediately froze: there had been a tinkling sound.

Silver bells had been sown into his pants, tinkling every time he moved. The sound drove the beasts around him wild.

John skewered two lynxes leaping down from above in the two heartbeats that followed, but something larger was approaching. These were not good grounds to fight, the clearing was too small and he was not on the offensive. So he ran, the silver bells ringing as he did. He ripped a few of them off in a fury after the sound drew an entire flock of sorrow birds, but they were sown deep into his pants. He kept running, the sound drawing ever more great beasts from the depths of the woods as the smaller ones attacked him from every direction. Those bells were going to get him killed, John realized.

He took a risk and ripped off his own pants, wearing little save boots and vest, but with a swallowed scream he realized it wasn’t enough. Some of the bells were directly on his skin, glued there with some sort of dark paste. He tried pulling at them, but he was afraid he might rip out a muscle getting them off so he had to give up. John tied up his pants into a makeshift skirt and began running again, his spear slick with blood and his limbs tiring. He began taking wounds, inevitably.

A great cat ripped up his shoulder, a unicorn impaled him less than an inch away from his left lung and a cursed scarab burrowed into his bare knee before he managed to rip the insect out. He was slow and wounded, smelling of blood and fear, and still the damned bells drew more beasts to him. He wouldn’t make it back to camp, the Hunter realized. He wasn’t even sure he’d gone the right way. He was going to keep running and bleeding and getting slower until a creature finally got him. He was going to die here, alone in the woods with not a soul in sight.

Fear lit a fire in him, but it could not make up for bleeding wounds. A fight with a nesting drake went south on him, his slick spear sliding against the scales, and though he blinded the creature with his bare hands it mauled him before fleeing. He could see his own ribs, looking down. John tried to get up, hearing the tinkling of silver bells, but his vision blackened.

He woke up in his bedroll by a fire, his entire body hurting. He still had traces of his wounds, but they’d been greatly healed. Concocter, he thought, but it was not such a fond thought. It had occurred to him as he ran that the dark paste that’d kept those bells on him had likely been of her making. John saw them even now, a dozen of them placed atop neatly folded clothes. He found the Lady’s eyes across the fire.

“Why?” he asked.

“Luck will get you killed,” the Ranger said. “Even providence.”

“All heroes have it,” John pleaded. “I cannot be rid of it.”

“I know,” she said. “But there is a way around that, Hunter.”

A pause, her eyes went to the bells.

“Be good enough it won’t matter, when the luck fails.”

The Hunter hesitated. They had nearly gotten him killed, these silver devils. This very night. And yet he found his hand closing around one as the Lady of the Lake watched him. Slowly, carefully, he hung it in his hair. One, he thought. Only one. For now.

He would prove them all, the Hunter thought, that he was good enough to be one of them.

—

Five people sat around a fire waiting for the Lady of the Lake.

One wore her silence like an armour, even her face changed so it could not be known.

One clutched her weapons too tight, already leaning into fights she had yet to pick.

One sat away from the flame, seeing in even warmth the shape of the cage.

One smiled a little too sharply, showing teeth always looking to take a bite.

One wore silver bells in his hair and spoke too loud to others who did not listen.

Out in the dark, the Lady of the Lake smiled. They had learned her lessons well.

Interlude: A Tower No One Could Claim

“You ask me why I never sought to claim the Tower. I ask you in turn: what great sin have I wrought, that I would deserve such a punishment as to hold it?”

– Kayode Owusu, Warlock under Dread Emperors Vindictive I and Nihilis

Akua’s shielding spell snapped in place just in time for the stone to bounce off it, rolling on the street as behind her the wall finished collapsing ahead of her. The horses had been spooked by the noise, but she was a skilled enough rider to keep her mount from acting out – some others were not, a few youths even being thrown off. A second look told her that no one seemed to have died, which made this one of the least lethal assassination attempts she’d ever been subjected to. That made it all the more ironic this had been the closest anyone had gotten since she’d come to Ater. The golden-eyed sorceress set aside the thought, shifting in her saddle to welcome the presence of the man riding up to her side.

“That seems a little too unfortunate an accident,” High Lord Jaheem idly said.

“It was no such thing,” Akua replied.

He shot her a considering look.

“You reined in your horse before the wall broke,” he noted.

“For the same reason I know it was not an accident,” Akua said. “I caught the scent of demolition charges.”

And she knew the scent well. There had been a time where Special Tribune Robber had delighted in rubbing just enough powder in parts of her tent that the smell would stick and her subconscious mind wouldn’t allow her to untense. If she’d actually needed to sleep as a shade, it would have driven her to a breakdown in a matter of months. The goblin had been an artist in matters of malignance, for all his generally unpleasant demeanour. High Lord Jaheem was impressed, though he should not have been or at least have hidden it better.

“Her Dread Majesty or Wither herself, then,” Jaheem Niri mused. “A heady compliment.”

Akua smiled, more at his reference to the famous line from ‘Maleficent the Great’ – if a woman is to be known by the quality of her enemies, is it not a heady compliment to be at war with all the world? – than the flattery. The High Lord of Okoro was known as a well-read man, fond of theatre and the classics. He’d continued to attend public theatre even after enemies tried to kill him at such performances twice.

“Wither. This isn’t Malicia’s sort of knife.”

High Lady Takisha Muraqib of Kahtan had cut into the conversation with what some might consider rudeness, but though High Lord Jaheem dislike her he let the affront pass without comment. It was not the first time and he was not the first to do so. Takisha’s face had grown hard and her temper foul since the Assassin had slain her husband. She’d been fond of the man, overly so by the standards of proper nobility.

“It seems the more likely of the two,” Akua conceded.

Sappers had done this, or at least people with sapper training. Trying to kill her with a collapsing wall required delicate timing and knowledge of goblin munitions that few who had not been in the Legions possessed.

“You always see goblin hands behind everything,” High Lord Jaheem scorned. “And no wonder why. If you had your way we’d break our armies in the Hungering Sands so your thirdborn can rule Foramen under you.”

“Matron Wither was part of the rebels that seized the city and exterminated the Banu,” High Lord Takisha flatly replied. “Of course she needs to be deposed, it was a mark of Malicia’s decline that it was ever otherwise. And as for rule, well, who has the blood for such a title now save the Muraqib?”

Akua understood well the nature of this conversation and the hundred others like it she had heard over the last two weeks. Malicia’s fall had been considered set in stone – ah, foolishness – even before two High Seats had defected from Catherine’s cause to Akua’s – highly dubious – so instead of scheming to seize the Tower the highest of the highborn were now fighting over another prize. Namely, who was to be Akua’s own Chancellor when she became Dread Empress. It was considered natural and self-evident that a Sahelian of the old blood would end the absurd decree making it high treason to hold or claim such a Name, regardless of Akua never having made such a promise.

So now the vultures showed off their plumage with little displays like this conversation, pecking at each other’s heads so that one might emerge as the natural candidate to be Akua’s treacherous right hand.

“High Lady Wither can wait,” Akua said, tone a tad short. “We came here for a reason.”

She spurred her horse forward, keeping her irritation away from her face. Such politicking did not make her kind better or worse than any other highborn of Calernia. She knew this. It still stuck in her throat that the High Seats would continue these games without batting an eye when a battle had very nearly been lost to the Army of Callow the day before, thousands of levies been mercilessly mowed down. Some of the lords and ladies on the field had been embarrassed by the way their conscripts had broken, but it was not the farmers and traders in shoddy armour that Akua was embarrassed of.

What worth, what pride was there in dying on a field for someone who would not bat an eye at continuing to scheme before your body had finished cooling?

Yesterday’s wounded had been allowed into the city against the Empress’ orders, though not the rest of the private armies, and considering how undermanned the capital’s defences were it had seemed sensible to both Akua and the Black Knight that empty barracks be turned into makeshift hospitals. She’d had to fight tooth and nail with the same nobles who claimed to support her to organize a rotation of mage healers that would see to everyone instead of simply each lord’s own wounded – if even that – and it was only after Marshal Nim shamed the entire nobility of the Wasteland by sending Legion healers first that finally they gave in.

It would have been a public embarrassment otherwise, and once again Akua’s reputation rose with the nobility for having had the ‘foresight to try to spare them such a thing’. She’d bit her lip in frustration until she could feel blood against her tongue. Every time she thought she had finally found the thread she could pull at to undo the knot, she found instead that she was tightening the noose. How long would it take, before she felt the rope around her neck and there was no choice left save the drop? Her fingers closed around the reins at the prospect. They wanted to make her empress. Dread Empress Magnificent, Akua had once fancied she might be called. She’d had plans, dreams. Now it was all within hand’s reach and she felt only fear for what she might have once acclaimed a triumph.

Her ever-present shadow led his horse to her side, leaning close.

“They would burn this entire city and all in it for power over each other,” Kendi whispered. “It is only a matter of time until instead they burn you .”

Akua looked up at the stormy skies, the clouds roiling high above around the Tower. They were never far. The honest words of a man who hated her, who wanted the worst for her, had become oddly soothing. She could count on Kendi Akaze to be exactly what he claimed to be, and that was a startlingly precious thing of late. Their party made good time to the northern districts, where a token force of legionaries kept an eye on the barracks now filled with the wounded and the dying. Akua had already spent hours there this morning, but it was not for the living she had now come. Instead she rode further still to the great plaza where oil-drenched wood rose in great piles.

Above those waited corpses, thousands of them.

High Lord Dakarai Sahel, who along with Abreha Mirembe had already been there, sought her company.

“It was cleverly done, arranging for the bodies to be brought here,” the High Lord of Nok said. “There are not many occasions aside from court where we would all gather, but who could afford to miss this?”

“It might have been for the best if you did, Dakarai,” High Lady Takisha cut in.

Akua’s brow rose ever so slightly. Others would make allowances for grief, but Takisha was being unusually bold today. Interrupting not one but two conversations with peer nobles? Akua herself might find offence in that, not just the High Lady’s rivals. You have something afoot , the sorceress thought. You are willing to risk my irritation now because you believe your boldness will pay off elsewhere soon and my memory of irritation will be transmuted to appreciation in retrospect.

“Takisha,” the High Lord of Nok gently said. “My condolences.”

The other woman’s face slacked with surprise.

“It must be galling, owing your life to Abreha and I,” he continued.

Surprise turned to fury and mentally Akua tallied a strike on Dakarai’s side of the board. It’d been an elegant bit of cruelty, turning implied condolences for her husband’s death to an open slap in the face. Takisha replied with a weaker barb about the Ashuran sack of Nok before beating a retreat, not because she was cowed but because she was having difficulty controlling her anger. Golden eyes turned to the High Lord of Nok, who was smiling pleasantly.

“I have a question, my lord, if you will,” Akua idly said.

“I have sworn to see you climb the Tower, my lady,” Dakarai replied. “I would deny you nothing, much less a question.”

“That is pleasantly to hear,” she smiled. “You will not mind, then, telling me what Catherine planned when she ordered you to betray her.”

He looked at her with convincing surprise.

“Caution is only to be expected,” High Lord Dakarai regretfully said, “but I will convince you of my sincerity in time. I had hoped that saving your cause on the field yesterday would win me some trust, but perhaps that is premature.”

Akua eyed him for a moment, then let out a few rich chuckles.

“My lord of Nok,” she said, “I once saw her order an unconditional surrender of her armies in the middle of a battle just so that she could win in the exact way she wanted . And Abreha’s claim to have found mages that could free her of the Night is patently absurd, given that I am fairly certain to lesser goddesses intervened directly in her raising as undead.”

She patted his arm fondly.

“Of course she sent you,” Akua said. “Mostly likely ordered you to support me as well. So what is it she’s after – opening gates to her armies or switching sides halfway through the battle?”

Seeing she would not be convinced, the High Lord of Nok changed his angle of approach.

“Even if there had been such a scheme,” Dakarai Sahel said, “would I be bound to it when out of her sight?”

He glanced at the pyres and the gathering crowd around them.

“You would rule well, I think,” the High Lord said. “Better than most. And we will need such a tyrant in the years to come. The world is... not what it used to be. It is larger, and much less patient of our foibles.”

Akua considered the older man, still handsome for all his grey hair.

“I had thought, once, to rise from the fields of Liesse an empress of empresses,” she said. “Triumphant come anew, magnificent in my wrath.”

“Nothing is writ until the book is closed,” Dakarai said. “I have spent over half my life failing, Lady Akua. Failing to shake off Thalassina’s yoke, to become more than a second-rater among the Truebloods, to keep the Ashurans from sacking my city.”

He half-smiled.

“But the book is not yet closed,” he said. “The Doom did not bury you. Why give it power it did not earn?”

Because it did bury me , Akua thought. I thought even failing would be a magnificent act, that my pride would shake the Heavens for an hour and it would be enough, but our stories all end when the tyrant dies. On the last defiant, maddened cry of rage. Instead she had been made to live through her folly. To sift through the ashes of a thousand dead, to see the horror of her doom ripple across the world. She’d been made to look soldiers in the eye, to see under the helmets. And now, returned to her cradle, she could not unsee it. Death was an end, for her and them. But she’d walked the hospitals now, the crying and weeping and the pain. Glimpsed the colossal number of lives, of families, she had ruined for... what?

What would the Heavens hear, a million screams or a single vainglorious shout? It’d been empty from the start. All she had left was the enormity of what she had done, and she was drowning in it.

“I give the Doom nothing,” Akua Sahelian quietly replied.

That had been the lesson of the years that followed it. Even if she saved a hundred thousand lives, it would not even the balance. What she had done to Liesse was not something that could be bought off, bargained over with angels as she had once bargained with devils. Akua gave the Doom nothing because there was nothing she could give. It was not an act that could be redeemed. And in the bleakness of that realization she had come home, for where else could she go, but she hadn’t. Not really. Home was not what she remembered it to be. She had been gone too long, now, forgot the ways of the Wasteland. They were no longer sweet against her tongue.

Now it would be a prison to be Dread Empress. A lifetime of clawing at the walls around her, bloodying her fingers trying to change the nature of stone. Back in the dark, in the cloak, only there would be no way out .

“We will speak again,” she told the High Lord, voice gone hoarse.

She was meant to speak to the assembled nobles and soldiers, to start the pyre personally. It was a good enough excuse to leave. Kendi watched her in silence, eyes smiling. He only kept silent when he knew she had already spoken worse to herself, smelling it out like a bloodhound. Like a petty thief headed for the noose, Akua walked forward. Unthinking, outside herself, as if someone else was moving her body. As if someone else was winning the Tower for her. Already she could be said to have control of all Ater save the Tower and the district around it, the run of the city, and only caution over the Tower’s ancient arsenal had prevented an attempt to seize it by force.

Speaking here today would be the first step of her climb. Her backers were pushing for a formal session of the imperial court, which they wanted to use to force down Malicia and coronate Akua Sahelian as Dread Empress of Praes. All she needed to do was whip these nobles and soldiers into a frenzy, to get them screaming the empress to give answer to her empire. Akua climbed the dais raised for that very purpose, standing tall and hollow, but at her feet there was a scuffle. High Lady Takisha Muraqib’s retinue was pushing aside everyone else, clearing a space for the ruler of Kahtan at Akua’s feet. The Taghreb noble had a hard, blazing look in her eyes as came to stand below the dark-skinned sorceress.

Takisha’s scheme had borne fruit, Akua thought. It was now ready to be revealed.

“My lady Sahelian, I apologize for the disorder but I have news for you that cannot be delayed,” the High Lady called out, voice resounding.

Bespelled so that it could be heard even from the back, Akua noted.

“Speak, then,” she idly ordered.

“As of a half hour ago, my agents seized the weather-controlling artefacts of the Tower in your name,” Takisha said. “Soon the rest of the Tower will follow, and we can-”

Thunder rolled. The clouds around the Tower had turned black and were spreading out, crackling with red lightning. A heartbeat of stillness. A flash of red struck a tall house in the middle of capital, blowing it up in a flash of red flames. The winds began to howl, growing in strength. Hail like black and hardened rocks began to fall in sheets, covering swaths of the city, and in the chaos Akua looked up at the roiling darkness.

“It can be hard, Malicia, can it not?” she murmured. “To tell the difference between a knot and a noose.”

—

“ Answer me ,” she Spoke.

A year ago, Malicia would not have needed to make a sound. Her power had weakened, grown shallower. Or perhaps I never grasped how strongly I relied on Rule when Speaking , she thought. Unfortunate as it was that she had not been able to map out the weaknesses of her aspect properly, it was not something that could truly be tested. The young Soninke lord before her choked for a moment, but then his tense shoulders loosened and he began to talk.

“She sneaks out to drink with her foster sister every few days,” he said. “They’ve been doing it for years. The guards let it happen so long as they don’t leave the boundary wards.”

Malicia flicked a glance at Ime, whose ageing face was furrowed in thought.

“We’ll have to burn a sleeper to get to her there,” the spymistress finally said. “Dakarai has been very careful with his camp’s defences since changing sides.”

The empress did not even hesitate. Now was not the time to balk at burning assets.

“Arrange it,” Malicia ordered. “You know whom to implicate.”

“ That will be much easier,” Ime snorted. “Even after Abreha’s purges her camp remains a leaking sieve.”

It had made Sepulchral a manageable threat, in those days where the High Lady of Aksum – illegally now, given her state of undeath – had been an empress-claimant. Malicia would not have risked allowing or stretching out a rebellion against if she had not been certain that she could not kill her would-be usurper whenever she desired. Sanaa Mirembe’s failed coup at Kala had been a stinging blow, given that it might have swung the victory there the other way, but her aunt’s culling of the young girl’s supporters when she returned from the grave had not caught all of the empress’ agents.

Even now, only the very highest secrecy in the Aksum camp remained beyond to Malicia’s eyes and ears.

“I’ll see if I can ease your way a tad more,” Malicia smiled, crouching before the bound man.

Her aspect pulse in her, slowly gaining in power as it fully unfolded. It felt like sliding on gloves, though to Alaya’s anger it was a tighter fit than it’d once been. Yet her Rule had not been toppled, and it was enough. The young lord’s mind felt like clay under her ghostly fingers, but she must be careful. Carelessness would just shatter his mind. Instead Malicia shaped her will, her order, and slid it into his mind like the slenderest of needles. Never to be noticed until it was pressed against. When the Dread Empress opened her eyes, which she did not recall closing, she rose from her crouch slightly out of breath.

“He will signal one of the Eyes the moment he’s aware of the girl sneaking out,” Malicia said. “Focus on preparing the assets.”

Ime nodded, looking pleased, but as Connect flickered to life Malicia saw that this was not entirely true. Her spymistress truly was pleased, but it was a small thing compared to her worry.

“You have concerns,” the Dread Empress said.

Ime did not quite manage to smother the surprise out of her eyes.

“I do, though not about this particular plot,” the spymistress said. “May I speak freely?”

Malicia glanced at the young lord, whose eyes were already focused anew. He would need either full turning or a memory scramble before he was released back to the Okoro camp, but either way it was a needless risk to keep speaking in front of him.

“Outside,” the empress said. “Our friend here still needs attending to.”

Ime nodded, the two of them leaving the comfortable cell in the middle levels of the Tower. The spymistress disappeared long enough to pass to her subordinates the necessary orders before returning to Malicia’s side, the two of them briskly heading to one of the sky rooms. Dread Empress Sanguinia had not indulged in the sort of grandiose building projects that many of her contemporaries had, but she had liked to eat her meal with views of Ater splayed out below her. Only two of sky rooms she’d built for that purpose had survived the fall of the Tower after the First Crusade and they were no longer used for that purpose but the very skilled wardwork keeping them protected had remained largely intact.

It was a good place to speak, even if the view was... temporarily indisposed.

Baiting Takisha to make a play for the Cloud Engines had taken longer than Malicia would have liked, but it had turned out exactly as planned. The High Lady of Kahtan had spent most of her hidden pieces in the Tower and badly failed at achieving her objective. Even worse, the empress had ensured that the few survivors who’d managed to flee would report that it was Takisha’s men who had damaged the Engines during the fighting and so unleashed the brutal storm still ravaging Ater and its surroundings. It had been days since the failed coup, and still the gales and lightning struck with wrath. There had been snow, hail, acidic rains and winds so scorching they burned the skin. Hundreds if not thousands had died in Ater, the entire capital grinding down to a halt.

High Lady Takisha was probably the most despised woman in the city at the moment, and that was just the beginning of her troubles. When Malicia had ordered her mages to ensure the Cloud Engines were unleashed under the pretext of some cosmetic damage, she’d ensured that the red lightning would strike a particular target: the tent of the eldest son of High Lord Jaheem Niri, the man’s wife and their two children. None had survived, and so dearest Akua had spent most of the last few days trying to ensure that two of her most prominent supporters did not begin a war of their own. Had she begun to feel the weight, Malicia wondered? Had it begun to sink in that once you had the support of the High Seats, you then had to keep the High Seats happy ?

The dark sky with crackling red light was only the beginning of it all, Malicia thought as she looked through the great enchanted windows.

“I feel like some of the plans we’re going forward with are overly risky,” Ime said the moment the door closed and the wards hummed.

“We can handle the High Seats,” Malicia replied, frowning. “That they have all essentially abandoned our cause frees us to act without many of our old restraints.”

It had been difficult to arrange such a wholesale desertion, but it had worked. Alaya had found it hard to bear to send out the Sentinels to brutally put down the riot she’d set up, but the results spoke for themselves: with most of the city turning against her, the High Seats had followed suit. Amends could be made to Ater after this all came to an end, she told herself. If she was to live to see a new moon, she needed Akua Sahelian put forward as Dread Empress at just the right time.

“Our operations to break relations between the High Seats are calculated risks,” Ime stated. “Some of them are riskier than others – Sargon could react like a cornered rat if he figures out our involvement – but I can live with the risks. It’s the other plan I have issues with.”

“Working with the Intercessor,” Malicia said.

“Devils make contracts,” Ime shrugged. “That is the way of things. We make the bargains we must. Yet what you two have been doing is dangerous to your reign.”

“Delaying until the orcs arrive is necessary,” the empress said. “The Bard insists it must be threefold motif and near every scrap of namelore I have found indicates she is not inventing the requirement. We have already thrown the goblins at her and soon the separatists will make contact. We need the Clans to close the loop.”

“I’m not happy about the separatists either, to be frank,” the spymistress said. “There’s always been sentiment in the Green Stretch, but it’s never been this well organized. Too many deserters settled down there, Malicia. They have former officers and fighting men now, not just farmers. If the Black Queen takes does decide to sponsor the Green Stretch seceding, I’m uncomfortable at the idea that it might stick .”

“The sponsorship of a corpse means nothing,” Malicia said. “And we both know Vivienne Dartwick will not go to war over the Green Stretch.”

“The lack of long-term consequences relies on the assumption of our success,” Ime insisted. “Let’s say both you and the Black Queen live. She backs the secession, and it happens in the months after we’ve thoroughly destroyed relations between most High Seats.”

Malicia’s brow creased.

“You worry there is a risk that more secessions could follow, given that my authority will be weak for the first few years following this,” she finally said.

“It’s a possibility we can’t just dismiss,” Ime said.

And she was right, in the sense that the risk existed, but that did not matter. To avoid taking the lesser long-term risk, a larger short-term risk had to be taken instead. And given that in the first instance trouble would be for the Empire and in the second it was Alaya’s life on the line, the choice made itself.

“Lost provinces can be taken back,” Malicia finally said. “Such setback would not be permanent.”

“We still don’t know where the orcs will fall in all this,” Ime quietly said. “They have a Warlord and we know it’s not Troke, so they’re difficult to predict. We are looking at a very volatile situation that could potentially result in permanent losses for the Dread Empire, Your Majesty. All this to follow the nebulous plan of an entity we cannot trust and have no real leverage over. I urge you to reconsider.”

And Malicia did, for a moment, but the reasons why she had made the decision had not changed. The Intercessor was a snake, but she was a snake who wanted Catherine Foundling dead – and the main thrust of that method of killing was to bury the Black Queen in regional disputes so that it would become the shape of her Role. A shape that could then be exploited to kill her in the moments that followed, though Malicia suspected around then would be when the Bard betrayed her. She had prepared accordingly. Until then, the disputes had to be put forward to the Black Queen and that meant following through regardless of the risks.

To hesitate here meant death.

“I understand your concerns,” Malicia said, “but I stand by the decision.”

Ime slowly nodded, face unreadable. The Dread Empress slid her will into Connect , but the aspect only flickered weakly. All she glimpsed was a vague sense of disappointment, with no real idea of the depth of it. Malicia would have to try this again later to be sure her spymistress’ loyalty remained firm.

“So long as you are aware of my concerns,” Ime said, bowing. “I’ll take my leave, Your Majesty. There is much work to do.”

Malicia nodded her goodbye, remaining before the window as the other woman left the room. The storms still raged under her calm gaze, and it would continue to do so until almost two weeks had passed. So her mages had promised. Once the Clans were close enough it would pass and the last dance could begin. Two weeks would be all that Dread Empress Malicia would need to gore the ‘alliance’ behind Akua Sahelian. Already Kahtan and Okoro were at odds, but that was only a start. High Lord Dakarai would turn on Abreha when his favourite daughter – Isoba Mirembe’s wife – was assassinated seemingly at Sanaa Mirembe’s order, as it was certain the High Lady of Aksum would not punish her favoured heir for something she had not done.

Then Sargon Sahelian would catch goblin infiltrators selling the ward schematics of his personal sleeping tent to agents of High Lord Jaheem Niri, burning two bridges at once with the spectre of Wither and Jaheem clasping hands to assassinate him. High Lord Dakarai had already begun to try buying the support of some of Kahtan’s more powerful vassals in his quest to become Chancellor, it would be child’s play to have him caught by some of Takisha’s agents – and it would play on the High Lady’s worst fear, that the grand Taghreb coalition behind her was already falling apart.

Meanwhile of them were going to have incidents with the Legions, which would be much easier to arrange now that Akua had gone ‘against Malicia’s will’ to bring private soldiers into the city and into Legion barracks. The Black Knight was wavering, but soon enough the Legions would be reminded of why they had steered clear of the High Seats for so long. And while everyone bit and everyone bled, Dread Empress Malicia would stoke the hunger with the prize she’d put on the table by making her cause seem finished: the position of Chancellor. It was in the nature of Praesi to begin squabbling over the spoils the moment victory was in sight.

So she’d dragged it into sight.

“It will work,” Alaya whispered to the storm. “Hour by hour I will pull at the knots keeping me bound, you will only know I have won when you feel the noose around your neck.”

Interlude: Burn Away What You Once Were

“Power isn’t gold or faith or oaths. Power is the moment the tip of the knife punches through. Everything else flows from that source.”

– Dread Empress Massacre

Arthur adjusted his helmet for what had to be the hundredth time, trying to keep dawn’s light out of his eyes. He hated to admit it, as it felt like he was being childish, but he was bored out of his mind. Normally he would have sought sympathy and conversation from Apprentice, but this morning she was... otherwise occupied. Sapan was looking at the new war engine hungrily as its wheels creaked against the stone and it was dragged forward by oxen. The Ashuran had no interest in the military applications of the great machine, he knew: the draw was that it was, in effect if not in principle, a massive magical artefact.

“If that thing were a woman, you would have gotten slapped by now,” Arthur drily said.

Sapan turned somewhat amused brown eyes on him.

“And what would you know about staring at women?” Sapan teased.

Arthur politely coughed. Fair enough.

“I don’t understand what’s so fascinating about it,” the Squire admitted. “It’s a drill, Sapan. A large, fat drill on wheels.”

She rolled her eyes at him, brushing back wild strands of wavy hair that no earthly amount of hairclips seemed able to tame.

“And how do drills work, Arthur?” she challenged.

He cocked an eyebrow.

“Someone moves about with their arms until there’s a hole in something,” he summed up.

She glared at him, very much aware he was actively trying to piss her off. Arthur hid his grin behind the thoughtful, pious expression that he’d honed against brothers and sisters of the House.

“Fine,” Sapan growled. “Who’s going to move about the handle to that fat drill, Squire?”

“There isn’t one,” he noted. “Which does seem like something of a design flaw, but I suspect the sappers might have taken ill to my pointing that out.”

No one made it through more than a few months in the Army of Callow without learning that getting on the wrong side of the sappers was a costly mistake. Not even the Order picked that fight without good reason.

“That’s the magical part,” Apprentice said. “At the end of the drill, that large section in bronze, it’s enchanted.”

“It’s also polished,” Arthur helpfully contributed.

“I think that’s purely decorative,” Sapan admitted. “But never mind that. Lord Hierophant and the Callowan mage cadres enchanted the insides thoroughly, it took them days.”

“Enchanted to do what?” Squire asked, honestly curious.

“It’s directed kinetic force,” she excitedly said. “But entirely self-contained. The excess that the Due should release is instead used in a secondary array that ensures centrifugal force won’t destroy the artefact from the inside.”

“So it makes the drill turn,” Arthur hazarded.

The dark-haired Ashuran eyed him like he was the lowliest sort of cockroach.

“Yes, Arthur,” she disdainfully said, “ it makes the drill turn . It’s not at all a staggering triumph of runic and mundane engineering that was believed physically impossible by most scholars until a few years ago.”

She raised her nose.

“You ignorant... horse-rider fuck,” Sapan tried.

Apprentice’s magical talents had been found very early, she’d told him – five years old – and she’d spent her entire life either in mage schools or under the private tutelage of scholarly old mages. That sheltered upbringing had left her with no real experience insulting people, something a few years around soldiers had miraculously failed to change. It really was quite impressive how terrible she was at it.

“You’re also riding a horse,” Arthur mildly pointed out.

She huffed in distaste, looking away, and the Squire smiled. He was slightly less bored now, though it would be hours yet before he saw fighting. Neither of them would be in the first wave into the breach in the eastern walls of Ater, which would be preceded by an escalade to tie up enemy mages and engines anyway. They’d be going in with the second wave, with precise objectives. The Hellhound’s plan was to break through enemy defences quickly and rush to seize defensible grounds deeper in the city before the Praesi could mount a proper counterattack. Grandmaster Talbot had approved of the plan when he’d briefed the Order, much as he tended to approve of Marshal Juniper herself.

Some among the knights had often resented that of the man, especially those of old nobles lines who still resented such a young greenskin holding such high command, but even the worst of the naysayers had been watching their words since Kala. Besides, it’d never been a popular sentiment with the army. The known faces from the early Fifteenth – the Hellhound and the Princekiller, Robber and Pickler, Ratface and Aisha Bishara – were almost as famous as the Woe and nearly as cherished. There was a certain cachet to having served under the Black Queen since the start, the kind that got people buying you drinks and asking for stories even if you’d only been a legionary.

Arthur had raged against his age, in Laure, listening to those stories and feeling like he was letting the era pass him buy. Now he’d caught up to the days, he stood in the thick of it, and it was so very little like he’d thought it would be.

“Look up,” Sapan suddenly said. “It’s starting.”

The Squire’s eyes sought the horizon. Apprentice was right. Atop the walls of Ater in the distance, in the light of rising sun, steel glittered as legionaries manned the walls. Ballistae were dragged into position, mage cabals began gathering power and as the vanguard of the Army of Callow crossed some invisible line all the Hells were unleashed. Rays of light and scores of fireballs, hails of bolts from the engines. Before the storm could hit the regulars in front, the House Insurgent made its presence known through great panels of yellow light that stopped the enemy fire cold.

Great iron ladders were rushed to the front, and the Battle of Ater began.

—

“They’re being reckless,” the Black Knight frowned. “Priests or not, the walls of Ater are not so easily taken.”

The Army of Callow was abandoning traditional Legion doctrine for this fight, which made Marshal Nim Mardottir uncomfortable. She’d already been had by the Hellhound once and she had no intention of suffering a second reverse when the stakes were so high. The enemy were still at least half an hour away from landing their first ladders on the outer walls, the first of the set encircling the capital, so the Black Knight was taking the time to properly observe their formation. Which was a mess. The enemy legionaries were breaking ranks to move faster, which meant every time something passed through the shields the Callowan mages and priests had put up it was guaranteed a casualty.

“They know the longer it takes them to breakthrough the more force we’ll be able to concentrate here,” Akua Sahelian replied, golden eyes calm. “We’ve barely a third of the Legions on the wall here, their best shot at getting into the city without massive casualties is overwhelming us early.”

There were two women that the city called ‘empress’ in whispers, Nim thought, but there was only one of them here on the wall. It was more complicated than that in truth, she knew, since Malicia would likely lose her life if she strayed too far from the Tower. And yet there was something primal and easy to understand in one being here and the other not. There was a simplicity to that, a clarity. And the Marshal had seen in the eyes of the legionaries here that it was a clarity they embraced. Amadeus had won the love of the Legions as much by fighting in the ranks with them as by the rest, and the Black Queen was no different. It was a simple thing, the Black Knight thought, but not a small one.

“It won’t work,” Nim said. “They’ll make footholds, they’ve got the belly for that, but we’ll take them back as soon as we’re reinforced. Marshal Juniper is no fool, Sahelian. There’s something else afoot.”

“I have eyes on the forces of Aksum and Nok,” Lady Akua replied. “If the expected treachery manifests, it won’t be a knockout blow. Yet they’ve made no preparations for battle or sent troops into the capital as far as I can tell.”

“Might be there will be a strike force of Named,” the Black Knight mused. “I’m surprised the Archer and the Huntress haven’t already begun returning fire against the ballistae.”

It was fucking absurd that the two women could serve as a countermeasure against siege engines by virtue of being able to shoot the crews at similar engagement ranges, but Nim had considered how to compensate for that since her defeat at Kala. Now she had wooden panels to defend and replacement sappers waiting. She wouldn’t be caught unprepared again.

“Catherine won’t depend on Named for such a critical part of the plan,” Lady Akua said, tone firm. “There’s an enemy on the field that could make her pay for such a thing dearly.”

“Then we’re still in the dark about their plans,” Marshal Nim said.

“I imagine that massive drill will have a role to play,” the golden-eyed noble noted. “If Hierophant didn’t enchant that I’ll leap down this wall. Best to assume it will go through the walls like a knife through butter.”

The Black Knight blinked.

“These are the walls of Ater ,” she slowly said. “There’s so many wards and enchantments in these walls we can’t even list them all anymore.”

“And he is the Hierophant,” Lady Akua lightly replied. “Miracles are his trade, Marshal. Gods know he’s vivisected enough of them.”

Nim had learned it did not pay to argue with the sorceress when it came to the talents of the Woe, so she kept her skepticism stowed away.

“Best hurry up the evacuation of the districts then,” the Black Knight said. “We don’t want citizens caught in the middle of whatever they’ll unleash.”

“I expect she’ll go out of her way to limit civilian casualties,” Lady Akua said, “but I agree it is better safe than sorry. I’ll send word to High Lady Muraqib that a loan of mages capable of scrying would be appreciated, it should make it easier to coordinate the movements.”

And the fucking idiot would be glad of any way to salvage her reputation, as she ought to be after having botched a coup attempt on the Tower so badly it’d wracked the capital with storms for twelve days. If the ‘empress in the city’ hadn’t stepped in to organize emergency shelter and food convoys moved under mage shields it might have been tens of thousands that died instead of almost three. Meanwhile, to Nim’s disgust, the High Seats had squabbled with each other like children and kicked up dust in the Legions’ eyes while they were at it. That lot wouldn’t be able to lead sailors to a whorehouse even with the fucking Wizard of the West guiding the way.

The Black knight’s general staff agreed that the only reason the Army of Callow hadn’t crushed them while they were busy was that it would have been charging into the storm itself and Catherine Foundling hadn’t wanted to take the risk.

Nim had only barely gotten her orders out when Captain Laughable took her aside, murmuring that there was a situation. A suspicious person had been caught and made prisoner. The Black Knight took a short detour to pick up Lady Akua, who was informing the High Lady of Kahtan with a smile that surely risking her mages was worth the love of the people, and they headed out to the supply depot below the bastion where Laughable was keeping the man. Among the crates, a poorly-shaved Taghreb was bound and sporting a purpling black eye.

“Caught him sniffing about the bastion, ma’am,” Captain Laughable said. “Said he was just waiting for a friend, but we think he might have been counting troops.”

“I take it he resisted arrest?” Nim asked.

“You could say that,” Laughable coldly said. “He knifed Sergeant Kilzi right in the throat and tired to make a run for it. We broke both legs so he’d know better than to try that again.”

Nim’s hand clenched, the steel of her armour creaking.

“Who do you work for?” the Black Knight asked in Taghrebi.

The man only laughed. Lady Akua approached, which had him tensing, but though she took his face in hand it was not to inflict a curse. Instead she studied the side of his head, picking at the sideburns, and snorted before releasing him.

“There is no point in speaking that tongue to him, Lady Black,” Akua Sahelian said. “He is not Taghreb. That man is Levantine . It’s why there are still traces of face paint in the roots of his hair, near the skin.”

“Infiltrators,” Nim growled.

“He won’t be alone,” Lady Akua said. “We should immediately-”

“Too late,” the man grinned with bloodied teeth, speaking accented Lower Miezan. “You found us too late. It’ll be over by now.”

The Black Knight seized his torso and dragged him up, anger roiling.

“What?” she demanded. “ What did you do?”

The man only laughed louder, and then in the distance there was a great grinding sound. Old gears pushing against each other, moving a great weight.

“The gates,” Akua Sahelian calmly said. “They opened one of the gates.”

The same enchanted gates that took about half an hour to fully open, that could not be stopped when they began without wrecking the machinery.

The Army of Callow’s vanguard was a quarter hour away from setting foot in the city.

—

“They’re retreating,” Alexis said, sounding impressed. “Like Marshal Juniper said they would.”

“Our Hellhound’s got a good read on the opposition,” Archer said. “It’s what she’s here for.”

Indrani hadn’t actually paid all that much attention when the plan had been explained to her and Masego had been reading under the table the whole time – he’d cunningly glued a book under with the pages hanging down and he turned the pages with a spell so he wouldn’t be caught – so she had only limited idea of what was happening. She figured the Legions had decided it was a losing fight to try to hold the walls with the gates open and two thirds of their number still on the way, so they were bailing backwards to a defensive position. Made sense, kind of? Not really her problem anyway. The three of them were after a different kind of prey.

“I’m still now sure what I’m here for,” Cocky complained. “In case you hadn’t notice, this is inside Ater.”

“No shit?” Archer mused. “I was wondering why the walls were facing the wrong way.”

Alexis actually looked like she was suppressing a smile. That or she was twitching in anger. Knowing the Silver Huntress, it might actually be the two.

“We could at least get off the rooftops,” the Concocter tiredly said. “It’s only a matter of time until someone looks up.”

That was actually untrue, Indrani thought. Most humans only rarely looked up, when something prompted them to. In her experience, skulking atop rooftops in a city was a pretty decent way to get around unseen if you put a minimum of effort into remaining unseen. She had no intention of actually telling Cocky that, though.

“Yeah, but then I wouldn’t be able to stand on the ledge and let the wind do that neat flappy thing with my cloak,” Archer sagely replied. “And that would be a net loss for Creation.”

Alexis cleared her throat.

“Patrol’s gone,” she said. “We should get a move on.”

Archer straightened her back.

“Let’s go then,” she said. “Found an old tower-shrine to Nihilis last time I came that’ll be the prefect perch.”

Cocky grumbled under her breath, but they set out. Neither of them had lost a step since Refuge when it came to sneaking about – the classic game of better-not-let-that-manticore-see-you truly was the finest of teachers – and they were better equipped now than they’d ever been before. Cat was always good for that, shelling out the coin for what her people needed. They were already past the Legion lines, but that wasn’t what their target anyway. Juniper was confident she could take Nim in a slugfest in the streets, and Archer figured the Hellhound had it right.

It was the noble armies that Cat and the Hellhound wanted kept out of this mess as long as possible, and that was why the three of them were out here. The imperial shrine was pretty easy to find, a tower of black stone three stories high that was covered with reliefs of Dread Emperor Nihilis’ victories and filled with little alcoves where people could leave offerings. It wasn’t as common a practice as it’d been in older timers, making those, but Indrani saw a few fresh copper coins and fresh flowers that hadn’t been there last time she came. Aterans said it was good for luck.

The alcoves made it easier to climb, at least, and when they all got up on the flat top – covered in bird shit, but they’d all crawled through worse – the sight was worth a whistle. It was easy to see far out into the city, until you hit the taller buildings of the central districts, and that meant Indrani got a good look at the soldiers and banners moving through the streets. Like Juniper had said she would, the Black Knight had called for noble reinforcements.

“Kahtan,” Alexis said, frowning. “Okoro and Nok. Hundreds of smaller lords”

Ol’ Abreha wasn’t taking the field then. Shame. Dakarai of Nok wasn’t as deep in their camp, he might actually intend to fight to defend the city.

“We’ve got our targets, then,” Indrani said. “We kill the bigwigs and the generals, it’ll keep them confused enough they’ll be late to the fight.”

“Archer.”

“I kind of want High Lady Muraqib,” Indrani mused. “You can have High Lord Jaheem, Lexy, unless you-”

“ Indrani ,” Cocky hissed. “Look.”

Archer followed the pointed finger to a rooftop to their west. Someone was standing there on a ledge, looking down into the streets. Her cloak was doing the neat flappy thing in the wind, which Indrani mentally applauded. The Ranger turned, met their stares and winked.

A moment later she leapt down into the streets.

“You wanted to know why Cat sent you with us, Cocky?” Indrani said. “You were just looking at the reason.”

A cleaner story, Catherine had called it, and who was Archer to argue with her? Cat might have died a bunch of times but it’d yet to stick, and that was the kind of crazy she was proud to embrace.

“We don’t know what she’s up to,” the Concocter hesitated.

Alexis’ fingers tightened into fists.

“Does it matter?” the Silver Huntress asked. “She’s our enemy.”

Archer shook her head.

“It matters,” Indrani said. “We do this all three of us or we don’t do it at all.”

The Huntress glanced at her in surprise, then slowly nodded.

“I have permission, if we want to pursue,” Indrani told Cocky.

The other woman hesitated still.

“She won’t hold back,” Cocky said.

“Neither will we,” Indrani said.

Surprise, once more.

“You want to fight her?” Cocky asked.

It was her turn to hesitate.

“I want to know where I stand,” Archer finally said.

The Concocter quietly laughed.

“I don’t care where I stand,” she said, “as long as it’s far from her. But that’s something we’ll have to earn, isn’t it? The right to put her behind us.”

Cocky breathed out, rose to her feet.

“I’m in,” the Concocter said.

A silence passed between them, not quite comfortable but not unpleasant. Determined, Indrani thought, determined might be the right word.

And so the last three students of the Lady of Lake began to hunt her.

—

A torrent of flame howled down the street, forcing the enemy to huddle behind houses, and even as the roar of the fire drowned out the clamour of the fighting the Black Knight raised her voice higher still.

“Collapse the fucking walls,” Marshal Nim screamed. “We need to slow them down.”

Lady Akua’s spell ended moments later, the fires blinking out, but the reprieve she’d bought them was well-spent: sappers collapsed two houses and a temple with demolition charges, barring the avenue with the falling stones. It wouldn’t keep the Callowans away for long, but it would slow them down enough that the Fourth and Fifth Companies would be able to retreat to the fortifications in the plaza down the street. Legionaries streaming around them, the Black Knight and the Lady Warlock retreated away from the frontline. In the time they’d spent to put out the crisis here, another would have emerged somewhere else.

“How long until the drill starts working again?” the Black Knight asked.

“Half an hour at most,” Lady Akua grimaced. “It’s devilish piece of work.”

The way the sorceress had explained it, the drill actually drained the power of enchantments it touched to harden itself and make some kind of array in its back move faster. Nim had almost doubted her eyes when the fucking thing had taken a mere ninety heartbeats to pierce through some of the finest walls on all of Calernia, stopping only because it had overheated and was at risk of melting. Worse yet was the realization that the Hellhound had never intended the thrust of her attack to be on Legion positions. While Nim had repositioned her forces to contain the disaster spilling out of the open gate, the drill had punched through the wall by another gate and the second wave of the Army had bypassed her defensive set-up entirely.

She’d lost a third of her force in an hour trying to contain that attack, which had forced her to call on reinforcements from the nobility against Malicia’s standing orders. They’d hurried enough that the fighting in the abandoned districts of the southeast had erupted before the Callowans could take the Licosian Gates, one of the chokepoint of the city the Hellhound had clearly been aiming for. It was bloody enough fighting that the Black Queen was there and slinging around Night in amount that wiped out entire companies, but the nobles were still holding. The fear right now was that the Army of Callow would just use the damned drill again to open another breach behind the defensive position of the High Lady of Kahtan to flank it.

Some of the Black Knight’s scouts up on the walls had signaled there were troop movements outside the city, so Nim suspected that unless that fucking drill was broken for good Ater would fall before Noon Bell rang.

“Then we need to hit it,” the Black Knight said. “You and I, leading a company. It’s the only way we can contain them long enough.”

And if they were contained, if they were kept bottled up in a few districts and mage fire could be brought to bear? They would be routed out of the city. Already the enemy’s priests were flagging in strength, and when they were out for the count the magical advantage would fall overwhelmingly in the favour of the defenders.

“Agreed,” Lady Akua said. “Do you, by any chance, happen to have a disreputable company of golden-hearted rogues with a chequered past who have something to prove under your command?”

“A what,” the Black Knight replied.

“It would significantly increase our chances of success,” Lady Akua insisted.

The reply on the tip of Nim’s tongue was set aside when a flare of red light caught her attention. Signals going up in the sky. An attack from behind the Licosian Gates. But the drill had not yet been moved! How ? Another flare went up, and another, and another. All in a straight line.

“Gods,” Marshal Nim Mardottir gasped, “what is this?”

—

Arthur fell down to his knees, panting and out of breath.

“You all right, sir?”

The Squire limply gestured at the sergeant to make it clear he was in no danger. Just exhausted. Running out of that house before it collapsed after the ogres knocked down the walls would have been hard even if he weren’t wearing plate armour. After a few moments to catch his breath, he dragged himself back up. Sergeant Hart slapped his back in a friendly manner.

“Back into the melee, then,” the older man cheerfully said. “For queen and country and combat pay.”

“The Black Knight wasn’t with the ogres,” Arthur said. “We need to find a scrying mage to ask for sightings again.”

Running around blindly was unlikely to let him find the Black Knight, especially if she was actively avoiding him as he believed she was. That the Doom of Liesse had been seen with her only made the prospect of facing down his rival all the more daunting. Hopefully Sapan would be able to – wait, where was Sapan?

“Sergeant, where is the Apprentice?” he asked.

“We lost her when we hit that blaze three blocks back, I think,” Sergeant Hart said. “She could be anywhere by now.”

“Then we start by finding her,” the Squire said. “We need to find an officer.”

“That one looks like a lieutenant,” Sergeant Hart said, pointing upwards. “Light armour, so probably in the scouts.”

Arthur looked up and found a lieutenant standing atop a rooftop, looking into the distance. It was a start, the young man decided, and he asked his companion to stay behind as he climbed up the side of wall. The other man glanced at him before returning to his study of the city.

“Good morning, lieutenant,” Arthur tried.

“Is it?” the officer replied, sounding amused. “You have been in the Army of Callow for too long.”

“Might be,” the Squire politely smiled.

He approached, enough to see that it was an older man he was speaking to: salt-and-pepper beard, greying hair. Likely a veteran. The goblin steel blade at his hip spoke to that.

“I am looking for a companion,” Arthur said.

“The Apprentice, yes,” the man replied. “She was headed west last I saw. I believe there’s a scrying relay there three streets back, it seems her likeliest destination.”

Well, that’d been faster than anticipated.

“Thank you, lieutenant,” the Squire said.

“It was my pleasure,” the officer replied, once more sounding amused.

Arthur began to walk away, but something was itching away his instincts. He paused.

“You never gave me your name,” the Squire said.

“How forgetful of me,” the man said, but did not elaborate.

Arthur’s eyes narrowed.

“What is it you’re looking for, lieutenant?”

“The flares,” the officer replied, pointing to the southeast.

The lights were still in air, though fading. Signals warning of attacks where the Squire knew there should be no troops.

“A bluff,” he said.

“Dismissing the unexpected is a bad habit, Squire,” the man chided.

Arthur’s hand went for his sword.

“You’re not a lieutenant,” he said.

“Did I ever claim to be?” the man replied, smiling.

He made no move to unsheathe his blade, which had Arthur reluctant to bare his own. The stranger had not yet been proved an enemy.

“What is it you’re doing here?” the Squire pressed. “Answer me.”

“Waiting,” he said. “For a little while longer. You can keep me company if you’d like.”

Arthur’s eyes narrowed.

“Why?”

“We are relations of a sort,” the man chuckled. “Besides, what else is there for you to hurry to? You won’t be finding Marshal Nim.”

His sword was in his hand before he even realized he’d bared it.

“Who are you?” the Squire demanded.

The stranger looked away, into the distance, and suddenly let out a quiet laugh.

“Ah, fateful timing,” he said. “It has been some time since I’ve last been on the right side of it.”

There was a ripping sound in the distance, then a furious screech. Arthur stepped back.

“What was that ?” Arthur asked.

“So many questions,” the man teased, “but this one I’ll give you for free.”

He turned fully for the first time since they’d been talking, and Arthur Foundling met a pale of eerie green eyes over a bladelike smile.

“That,” the Carrion Lord said, “was several hundred years’ worth of giant spiders joining this battle.”

Interlude: The Hanged All Crooning

“Would-be tyrants always snigger when a hero comes knocking, smirking at each other that if they were in charge surely they would have killed the man when he was still a callow youth. Idiots. Do you have any idea how many callow youths are out to kill me, Chancellor? If I killed them all I could make a second Tower out of the corpse pile. The best you can do is massacre here and there and hope it’s one of the dumb ones that survives all the way to your door.”

– Dread Empress Rancorous

A tide of chitinous vermin poured out of the sewers, disgusting eight-legged creatures the size of horses that screeched under the glare of the sun and spread out like a plague. And they kept coming out: a dozen, a hundred. How long until it was a thousand, or even more than that? Arthur turned a glare on the disguised man that could only be Amadeus of the Green Stretch, the Carrion Lord himself. The older man seemed as indifferent to his fury as he was to the screams sounding in the distance.

“You madman,” the Squire shouted. “You’re releasing them into the city!”

“Well spotted,” the Carrion Lord praised.

Arthur suspected he was not imagining that sardonic undertone.

“People are going to die,” the orphan bit out. “Thousands-”

“An entirely foreseeable consequence of giving battle in a crowded city,” the Carrion Lord noted. “Is it only collateral damage not of your own making that offends?”

“ Innocents will die,” the Squire seethed. “Innocents are already dying. And you’re playing word games with me?”

“You’re letting the Book do you thinking for you,” the green-eyed man chided. “ Think , boy. Where did you see signals being sent up? Where do we stand right now?”

Arthur seized his anger by the neck, slowed it, but did not set it aside. Anger was good, anger was your soul telling you something was unacceptable and you ought to do something about it. But the dark-haired orphan forced himself to think. The flares he’d seen in the sky, they’d been in a broad line going south to north across Ater. A battle line, he thought. The breaches, the place where the spiders were coming through, they were all places where there’d already been fighting. Soldiers.

“You sent them after armies,” the Squire said.

“I did,” the Carrion Lord easily replied. “I’ve known this city for decades, judging where the fighting would take place during the assault was not difficult. Thought that fascinating engine – Masego’s work, yes? – took me by surprise. I had to compensate with some heavy-handedness around the Licosian Gates.”

“You may yet ruin this city and all in it,” Arthur bit out. “Worse yet, what manner of dark bargain did you strike to get power over the spiders?”

The green-eyed man cocked his head to the side, looking amused.

“Arthur Foundling,” he drawled, “are you asking me to tell you my evil plan?”

The Squire paused, slightly embarrassed at being caught out instantly. Still, he must persevere.

“Do you not want to tell anyone of your cunning?” Arthur tried. “Surely a great deal of work went into this.”

Evil always liked to gloat, unless it was the Dead King and his Revenants, but Lady Alexis said those didn’t really count.

“I was going to use you to funnel information to my daughter, but it would be almost unprincipled of me to indulge you after that,” the Carrion Lord noted. “I’d be rewarding an unsavoury habit.”

“The White Knight told me this usually works,” Arthur replied, a tad defensively.

“Well, if the Sword of Judgement said so,” the older man drily said. “We must not make a liar out of Judgement’s favourite meat puppet, I’ll tell you everything.”

Arthur eyed him skeptically. Maybe taking him prisoners would be safer. The Carrion Lord was on the edge of the roof, his sword still in the sheath and he was no longer Named. Just an aging man in light mail. One who was looking at him with calm, cool eyes. The fight would be his to lose, the Squire thought. He’d been training with some of the finest warriors on Calernia. And yet under the weight of those pale green eyes Arthur found he was hesitating. His instincts were telling him it was a bad idea, and though his anger at the horror the old monster had just unleashed on Ater was far from quenched he would not let it bait him into making a mistake.

He must find out how the villain was controlling the horde, what power or artefact, so that the spiders could be forced back below.

“I am not the Tyrant of Helike, child,” the Carrion Lord calmly said. “You are looking for the gimmick, the toy. There is none. I murdered the men and women warding the sewers to keep the creatures out, undid their work sent my associate to stir up the hive. The scent of blood and corpses did the rest.”

The monster’s face was unsmiling.

“There is no undoing this,” he said, and it sounded like a nail hammered into a coffin.

‘’It won’t only be soldiers who die, you fucking animal,” the Squire insisted. “Do you think they won’t spill out beyond the battle lines into the city? It’s only the districts closest to the walls that were evacuated. Civilians are going to die.”

“Yes,” the Carrion Lord nonchalantly said. “Thousands of them. The city will be on the brink of collapse as the horde spreads. The Legions will dig in, the Army of Callow retreat. And meanwhile the High Seats will look at their household troops, their precious private armies so jealously hoarded, see them bleed and die to save people that are nothing to them. Even as we speak they wonder – is this worth it? What am I sacrificing my strength for?”

“You can’t be serious,” Arthur said, appalled. “You’re saying they’ll retreat?”

“They cannot afford that either,” the green-eyed man said. “Praes needs a capital that is not a smoking hovel full of giant spiders. Neither will they be willing to weaken themselves. So they will, instead, revert to... old habits.”

In the distance, the air screamed so loud that even the chittering of the horde was drowned out. Rifts were ripped open, at first only a few then dozens, and it was as if the floodgates had broken. Devils began pouring out of Lesser Breaches and sorceries fouler still: swarms of green and glittering insects, rivers of purple flame and storms in the shape of giants. And among them, things worse than any of the rest slithered. Swam amongst the spiders, turning them to horrors not of Creation.

“Takisha pulled out the storm elementals,” the Carrion Lord noted, sounding surprised. “Didn’t think she’d risk them with the number of demons that were just sent out. Someone’s in a mood.”

“Demons,” Arthur choked out. “As in plural?”

“At least a dozen,” the green-eyed man said. “Catherine will send out Masego to limit the spread, but the damage has already been done.”

“You did this,” the Squire accused.

“I’ve yet to take a life today,” the Carrion Lord replied, amused. “Besides, you miss the altar for the corpse.”

“I see exactly what you’ve done,” Arthur harshly said.

“I am not of any particular importance today,” the man dismissed. “What matters is this: in the heart of Praes, a city packed tight with men and women from all parts of the empire, the High Seats were seen to make a choice. They could have protected the people they claim are theirs, paying in blood and power to fulfill their sworn duty.”

The skyline of the city boiled, wreathed in a hundred different flavours of madness. In stopping the spread of the giant spiders, in trying to break the horde, the fearsome High Lords of Praes were shattering entire swaths of the capital. How many of them had been evacuated? Too few , Arthur thought.

“Or they could do this,” the Carrion Lord said. “Dread and hatred, burning the world so they can warm their fingers against the flames.”

“All this so you could gloat that your enemies are as terrible as you?” Arthur scorned.

The green-eyed man faintly smiled.

“I gave them the chance, Squire,” he said. “To prove me wrong, to show me that there was some truth to the stories we tell ourselves. That they are the logical conclusion of jino-waza , that their rule is more than a thousand years of fangs ripping into flesh. That they deserve the power Praes has given them.”

He looked, Arthur thought in a moment of terrifying clarity, disappointed. As if he would have liked to be wrong.

“Yet here we are,” the Carrion Lord said. “Before the eyes of all Praes, the High Seats have abdicated their right to rule. They have revealed themselves as nothing more than worms in the flesh. Of all that happens today, that is the only part that matters.”

It wasn’t about the armies, Arthur realized. Or not just about. Whatever it was the man was after, it wasn’t a victory on the field. It was... larger. And, the Squire felt in his bones, infinitely more dangerous.

“What is it you’re doing, Carrion Lord?” the Squire quietly asked.

“I am killing the Dread Empire of Praes,” the madman replied, “one story at a time.”

—

“Well,” Archer mused, “this went to shit in a hurry.”

As if to punctuate the sentence, the rooftop she was running on exploded in a pillar of blue-grey flames that smelled vaguely of saffron. She landed in a roll on the roof of the temple across the street, reaching for an arrow and halfway nocking it even as the flames across the street collapsed as if they were liquid before beginning to form into a spindly, mantis-like shape. Fortunately, Indrani wasn’t going to have to waste any more arrows distracting the construct: silver Light began to glow right behind her.

“I fucking hate those things,” Alexis grunted, loosing her arrow.

The missile screamed out with Light, blinding to look at even as Named, and hit the construct with a disappointing flopping sound, just sinking into the liquid-like flames. A moment later the entire construct popped as the Light’s continuing presence destroyed the animating spell’s framework, making the entire mass of flame drop to the ground in a smoking rain.

“Eh, after that one demon thing that was like a hundred spiders melted together it’s going to take a lot to impress me today,” Indrani said. “It was impressively creepy, and not just because it didn’t really seem to get the difference between eyes and teeth.”

The Silver Huntress snorted, not disagreeing. Alexis had significantly cheered up since they’d started killing things, although it came and went. Whenever they got close to the Lady it trended downwards, which Cocky had called ‘an apt summation of our childhoods’ when Indrani had shared the thought with her. Speaking of the Concocter, Archer glanced further back and saw that the now purple-haired potioneer was moving around the needles on that fancy little tracking artefact Cat had given them.

“Found her,” Cocky called out. “She’s not actually far, just on the other side of the Licosian Gates.”

Well fuck , Indrani thought, sharing a look with Alexis. That place had been the stronghold held by the troops and vassals of the High Lady of Kahtan an hour back, but not it was pretty much Spidertown. Spiderville, maybe, considering it was pretty large and swarming with way too many giant spiders. Last she’d seen a few pockets of troops were surviving holed up in buildings behind wards they’d put up, but the highborn had pretty much written off taking it back the traditional way so instead they’d turned to the Praesi specialty: a bunch of devils and weird magical killer things.

“That place is bad enough I think even the devils would go back to the Hells if they had a choice,” Indrani bluntly said.

“Are you saying we let her lose us?” Cocky challenged.

“No,” the Silver Huntress growled. “Fuck that. You still have a set of those blue ones, right?”

“I do,” the Concocter said. “And a full healing set.”

“We go in with a plan this time, then,” Archer insisted. “You don’t have anything that heals ‘arrow through the eye’ which was Alexis almost got last time we thought we were ambushing her.”

“She won’t get me again,” Alexis replied through clenched teeth.

Indrani felt like slugging them both in the face until either sense or teeth came out, knowing the sight of either would be a relief.

“ Listen to me,” Indrani said. “We’re not going to beat her like this. She’s better than any of us are.”

“Impressive,” Cocky said, “how you can lick her boot without needing it in front of you.”

Archer was not going to punch her in the throat, no matter how deeply satisfying it would be.

“Cocky,” Alexis warned. “She’s not wrong.”

Indrani glanced at her in surprise, the Huntress refusing to meet her eyes.

“She’s faster and stronger and she has more experience,” Archer said. “If we’re going to get her, it’s by hitting her with something she hasn’t seen yet. That means it’s not me or Alexis who brings this home, Cocky.”

This time it was her that was stared at in surprise.

“She’s taught us most of what we know about fighting,” Indrani elaborated. “She hasn’t taught you shit about brewing. What have you got that would serve as a nasty surprise?”

Cocky hesitated.

“She’s resistant to pretty much all poisons unless it’s ten times the concentration lethal in a human,” the Concocter said. “It’s an elf thing, I think. But that’s for toxins. I’ve seen her smoke wakeleaf, which is a stimulant and nonmagical. Unless she was just puffing at the pipe for the look of it, it means her resistance doesn’t apply to everything.”

“You going somewhere with this?” Alexis bluntly asked.

Cocky scowled at her, but moments later she undid a clasp within her satchel and showed them a small vial with a translucent golden liquid inside.

“This is a purified version of elegy,” the Concocter said.

Indrani’s brow rose.

“The fun times drug?” she asked.

Cocky nodded.

“It won’t harm her, but what makes elegy popular in the first place is that when you take it affects your perception of time,” she said. “I strengthened the elements that cause that and took out the ones that add a sensation of euphoria.”

“She’ll be able to burn it out with her Name,” the Huntress said.

“No quickly,” the Concocter replied with a flash of pearly teeth. “Not with how concentrated it is. There’s enough in there if I dropped in a lake I could see the water as the usual drug.”

Indrani let out a low whistle.

“She’ll need to ingest?” she asked.

“Skin contact would also work, but not nearly as strong,” Cocky said.

“Then we need to cram it in her mouth,” Indrani grimaced. “That’s you and me, Alexis.”

“I’ll take it,” the Huntress immediately said, reaching for the vial.

“It should be me,” Archer said, and when glared at shook her head. “You’re better up close, much as I hate to admit it. You’re more likely to make me an opening than the other way around.”

The admission seemed to mollify the other woman some, and they packed they gear again. Just in time, since one of those damned giant-shaped hurricanes was coming their way again. Indrani had seen what happened to the people and spiders that got sucked in, and she had no intention of being shredded to pieces. They got a move on, avoiding the streets that were entirely aflame and the roving packs of devils in the sky. The Licosian Gates had somehow gotten worse since their last trip thereabouts, which Indrani reluctantly accepted as being pretty impressive. The four massive ancient statues seated on either side of the gates were crawling with spiders trying to puncture the spell bubbles keeping the handful of soldiers atop the gatehouse roof, but that was almost wholesome compared to the rest.

Rival torrents of spiders and dog-shaped devils were ripping into each other in the streets around it, savagely devouring each other’s flesh while still alive, and some sort of ritual had gone awry enough that balls of lightning were careening across the streets, bouncing off wood and stone but searing flesh with strikes wherever they found it. Some sort of giant snake made of ice and bone had gone wild, which would not have been as much of a problem if it apparently didn’t ‘eat’ creatures that came too close to its body and then vomit them back out from the great maw as masses of leech-like bone creatures that liked to burrow inside the spiders and eat them from the inside. And at the heart of the mess, perched atop a tall statue of Terribilis the Second, the Lady of the Lake stood with her bow at the ready.

Looking bored, she let an arrow loose. it straight through a shield spell, taking a mage in the throat. The blue panel flickered out and moments later spiders began to pour in, screams following as the survivors inside were devoured alive.

“Well,” Indrani said. “Good a place as any to fight her, I suppose.”

“She’s not moving,” Cocky frowned. “Baiting us?”

“No, she’s here for a reason,” Alexis said, eyes narrowing. “Look at her face, she’s already gotten bored of this.”

Archer rose to her full height, cracking her neck.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s see if we remedy that.

—

“Our empire seems like such a fragile thing, at first glance,” the Carrion Lord said. “Always warring with itself, always eating its young. Half the reason we take the sickness abroad is that there is too much of it festering in our guts. And yet, for all its many and monumental failures, the Dread Empire has stood for over thirteen hundred years.”

“You’ve been broken before,” the Squire said. “We brought it down, your Tower.”

Eleanor Fairfax had answered the madness of Triumphant sword in hand, as Catherine Foundling had risen to cast out the chains of the Conquest. Evil could last, but it never prospered for long.

“We have,” the Carrion Lord easily agreed. “And yet once the crisis passed the Empire formed anew. Its constituent parts came together again instead of staying parted, even though most High Seats are enemies and despise the Tower ruling over them besides. Sowhy?”

“Safety in numbers,” the Squire said. “I’ve seen it out west, the strange alliances peril will forge.”

Even the vilest sorts would come to man the wall if the sky grew dark enough.

“If external pressure was the preeminent cause for unification, once that pressure ceased the unity would begin to collapse,” the Carrion Lord said. “Yet there have been long periods of relative peace with Callow and the Free Cities that saw no such thing happen.”

Arthur frowned. He had never been a great lover of history writ in the large, the wars and treaties and the trades, but that did not sound untrue to him.

“Then because the people of Praes want to be as a single nation,” the Squire said instead.

“Close,” the Carrion Lord praised. “It is because they believe they are a nation.”

“Is there a difference?” the Squire said.

“Belief is what comes after desire,” the Carrion Lord replied. “Belief has foundations . The Dread Empire stands because enough of us believe in the myths of it, the stories of it. So long as those remain, like rivers going to the sea our empire will always remake itself.”

“That’s not what fate is,” the Squire refused. “It’s not some curse that can’t be broken. If you do it clever, if you do it right, you can change things.”

“I believed that, once,” the Carrion Lord mildly said. “Then, in my old age, I looked back and found that all the terrible works of my life had been built on quicksand. It was most galling, to realize that the Tyrant of Helike was not entirely wrong when he scorned me.”

The old monster did not look all that galled, shrugging.

“But we learn or we die,” the Carrion Lord said. “And so once again I picked up a sword and a plan.”

“You want to burn it all,” the Squire accused.

“I want to take off the noose around our necks,” the Carrion Lord said. “There is no kind way to do such a thing.”

“Did you even try?” the Squire harshly asked. “You disappeared for years, and when the Black Queen came east to settle affairs you stayed a ghost. Now you reappear, and to do what?”

He gestured at the capital around them, the hell it had turned into.

“The first story is that Praes is a nation,” the Carrion Lord calmly said. “A single realm, not a pack of squabbling fiefdoms. That one was the hardest to kill, the longest. It took years to choke it out: a fourth of the Empire became a realm of its own, Kahtan rose as a queendom of the Hungering Sands and the edges of our territory broke away.”

“You didn’t do that,” the Squire said. “You caused none of it.”

“I did not need to,” the Carrion Lord said. “All that was required of me was to ensure that the hounds fighting over the carcass would never bite into the same piece of flesh. So that they could all bury their snouts in the corpse and never realize until they stood nose-to-nose.”

He paused, startled, as he realized what had been implied.

“Gods, you helped them do it?” the Squire said.

“I have been a faithful friend to even my enemies,” the Carrion Lord agreed. “The second was faster to kill, but it cost me more. It was... difficult, killing the Legions of Terror.”

“Kala,” the Squire said. “They stood and they bled and they broke.”

“Lesser soldiers would have shattered years before,” the Carrion Lord said, his pride without veil. “It took an ocean of brutal futility to end that story – it was fresher than the rest. A battle where three sisters fought, none believing in their cause or truly hating the other. A battle where weapons of war killed men by the dozens in heartbeats without swords even touching, where entire armies deserted to one side or the other. It ground the pride of the Conquest to dust.”

“And today you burn the High Lords,” the Squire said. “Half the city going with them.”

“More of a quarter, I should think,” the Carrion Lord amusedly replied.

“You could make a river,” the Squire coldly said, “of the blood you’ve spilled today.”

“Child, I have spilled seas,” the Carrion Lord smiled.

The old monster shrugged.

“And what of it? You look at today’s corpses and balk, but even if I’d put every soul in this city to the sword I would still be the lesser evil,” the Carrion Lord said. “What are a few years of my bloody hands, compared to the Tower’s thousand years of screams and darkness? How many more days like this one will you demand Calernia suffer before my cruelty becomes warranted? How more crowned butchers and torturers and madmen, how many more Triumphants?”

The orphan’s fingers tightened around his sword. Evil always had its reasons.

“The excuses of a man who knows nothing except how to destroy,” the Squire said.

“We are what we are,” the Carrion Lord said, eyes smiling. “Someone charged me, once, to become a man who deserves to live in a better world.”

“Only a fool,” the Squire said, “would have believed that you could.”

The monster looked out at the madness swallowing the city.

“You’re not wrong,” the Carrion Lord said. “Old dogs only have so many tricks in them. But I made this mess, you see. It’s mine to clean up. So now I give you a warning, one you are to carry to my daughter.”

“And who are you to warn the Queen of Callow of anything?” the Squire challenged.

“The man who forced three armies to retreat without baring his sword,” the Carrion Lord calmly replied.

Arthur swallowed that, did not deny it.

“This is not yet done,” the Carrion Lord said. “Tread carefully: I will not tolerate Praes to be handed out like a bauble, or its affairs settled as if you had conquered us. You do not rule here.”

“Threats,” the Squire snorted. “What will that do?”

“Draw a line in the sand,” the Carrion Lord said. “And you I leave with a question. You have been, after all, of great use to me.”

“I did nothing for you,” the Squire harshly replied.

“You helped me draw their eye,” the Carrion Lord said, and looked down at the street. “Did you hear me, Gods Below? I paid my dues. Three stories I burned on your altar, the pillars of an empire, and one more still lies ahead. The greatest of them, the oldest and most terrible.”

Arthur shivered, looking to the sides. Nothing had changed, not even the wind or the foul scent of smoke, but the world felt... still. As if it did not dare move.

“I gave an oath,” the Carrion Lord said. “I’ll see it through to the end.”

“The Hellgods will not save you,” the Squire got out.

“That,” the Carrion Lord said, “is rather the point. As for our debt, boy, I ask you this: why do you seek the Black Knight?”

Arthur frowned.

“We have a pattern of three,” the Squire said.

“And this makes her your enemy?” the Carrion Lord asked.

“She’s a villain,” the Squire flatly said.

“So is your queen,” the Carrion Lord said. “Her and many you’ve fought with, never against.”

“She’s the leader of the Legions of Terror,” the Squire said.

“The army defending a realm you are invading,” the Carrion Lord said. “For one of Below’s, that is reason enough. I had thought your lot to require more than that.”

“Don’t muddle it up,” the Squire growled. “She’s tried to kill me too, and I survived. You want me to just let her go now that I hold her to account?”

“I want you to answer a simple question,” the Carrion Lord said. “Why is it that Nim Mardottir is your enemy, Squire?”

Arthur’s mouth was already hallway open when the man raised his hand.

“Do not speak in haste,” the Carrion Lord said. “A squire must, in time, become a knight.”

Green eyes studied him coolly.

“Consider, Arthur Foundling, what manner of a knight you are to be.”

Arthur’s hand stayed tight round his sword.

“You think I’ll just let you leave now?” the Squire said. “That I won’t take you prisoner?”

The old monster looked up at the sky. No to contemplate, Arthur realized as he followed the look, but to look at the height of the sun. The time.

“I think you are about to be needed elsewhere,” the Carrion Lord. “And that-”

The other man’s voice had lowered, so Arthur leaned closer to try to understand even as the green-eyed man turned towards him.

That was when the brightstick went off in his face.

—

Northeast of Ater, on a low slope overlooking the distant camps of the nobles, a silhouette was cut into sight by the angle of the sun. The orc stroked the back of his mount, a great wolf large as a bull, and glanced back at the other riders behind him.

“Tell the Warlord now is the time,” Chief Troke Snaketooth gravelled. “Ater is ripe for the picking.”

Interlude: Kiss Of The Knife

“Treason is a distant thing, a matter for the histories. Betrayal is where the bile is: you have to love someone before they can betray you.”

– King Selwyn Fairfax of Callow, the Old

“Why Troke?”

Sigvin was frowning, learning forward so the noonday sun would not fall into her eyes.

“For the same reason I’ve ordered my banner not be raised,” Hakram replied.

All the way south, the place of honour – the Warlord’s place – among the banners had remained empty. The order had seen warriors grumble at the lack of pride, enough that he’d spread among the horde that he would only raise his own banner after Ater was made to kneel. The boast had limited the damage to reputation, and what he’d paid was well worth what he was to get for it now. At his left, Oghuz suddenly let out a loud bark of laughter.

“Look at them, girl,” the chief of the Red Shields said. “How thick is their battle line?”

Hakram’s eyes returned to the field. When he’d sent out his vanguard of five thousand wolf rider towards the camps to the east of Ater, the nobles in them had understandably reacted to the threat. What troops were not already fighting in the city had been mustered and ordered out, but that effort had ceased as soon as the highborn had glimpsed the banners claiming that Troke Snaketooth was the warlord of the Clans. It was, after all, an open secret among the highest rung of the nobility that Troke was an ally of Malicia’s. They were still wary, as the Clans should have gone to sack Nok instead of marched on Ater, but the tension went out of their battle line.

Troke rode forward with a few picked men, champions, and the nobles sent a party of their own. Led by a Niri, by the look of their banners.

Only the vanguard had slowed, not stopped, and the highborn realized it only moments before Troke Snaketooth’s warband smashed into their envoys and the packs of wolf riders howled a charge. Some of the mages with the troops got spells up in time, turning back the attack, but not enough. Most of the enemy soldiers had never faced great wolves up close and it showed: the great mount shattered the shield wall in moments and trampled dozens, terror spreading at the violent howls. Maybe eight thousand Praesi had mustered on the field and less than a tenth of that died under the charge, but their morale broke instantly. The army shattered, entire companies fleeing the monsters and the massive horde they could see approaching in the distance.

“Good,” Hakram gravelled. “Oghuz, take ten thousand shields and secure the camps. Capture all the highborn you can, I want bargaining chips.”

“Warlord,” the old orc replied, hand over heart.

Hakram nodded back, then turned his eye to Sigvin.

“Send word to your grandmother,” he said. “I want the Split Tree to oversee the loot. We distribute only when the blades rest.”

“It will be done,” she replied.

Overseeing the loot was a position of great trust – the old hordes had given it a formal title, one held in great respect – but Hakram meant it as a check as well as a mark of favour. It never made a clan popular for its warriors to be the ones telling other orcs they couldn’t drag away the riches they’d just won in battle. Waiting for Sigvin to finish, the Warlord watched the eastern gates in the distance. Three had been open this morning, he’d been told, but now two were closed. Not that Ater’s defenders were the ones keeping the third one open: the banner hung on the gatehouses was a vulture holding a skull, Askum’s colours.

High Lady Abreha Mirembe was said to have been raised as undead by Catherine at the Battle of Kala and she knew better than to cross her mistress.

Sigvin returned to his side and Hakram sent for Dag Clawtoe, the warrior he’d overtaken as leader of the Howling Wolves and who now led his personal guard. The three of them and two hundred shields set out towards the gate even as the Clans followed, columns of warriors sweeping the highborn camps and approaching the capital. His force was large enough, the Warlord knew, that Abreha would come to greet him personally. Praesi respected force even when it was in the hands of those they considered savages, and the once-Sepulchral was nothing if not pragmatic. Careful, too.

She came out to meet him near the gatehouse with two hundred soldiers of her own, but she had twice that waiting with bows up in the heights. Out of firing range, narrowly, but should Abreha retreat under their cover the ensuing fight would not go well for him. The old witch let out a little noise of amusement when they finally stood face to face.

“No longer Adjutant, I take it?” High Lady Abreha said.

“No longer,” the Warlord agreed. “The city?”

“Out of control,” she replied. “From the Licosian Gates to the western walls is nothing but giant spiders and things called to kill them. Maybe a fifth of the city is lost, either to flame or damages. The Legions are dug in along the Avenue of Claws and Akua Sahelian is rumoured to be mounting a counterattack, but it’s not looking good. “

Hakram snorted.

“Catherine?” he asked.

“Still near the Licosian Gates last I heard, containing the situation with the Hierophant’s help,” High Lady Abreha replied. “The Army of Callow retreated in good order to the western gates – with civilians along, when they could.”

“Quite the mess,” Hakram said.

“It is,” the old witch smiled. “So what is it that you’ve come to add, Deadhand? I must confess, it’s starting to look like we might no longer be on the same side.”

“Oh?”

“Had to fight Dakarai off to keep this gate open,” High Lady Abreha said. “I’ll need assurances before I let you through it.”

Hakram laughed in her face, then let out a sharp whistle. The Aksum household troops tensed, some drawing swords, but his own warriors did not charge. Instead they turned about sharply, beginning to march away. Wary surprise found its way to Abreha’s face.

“It need not be anything onerous,” the High Lady said. “Just oaths and hostages.”

“I won’t bargain with you, Abreha,” Hakram said. “What I wanted from you was news of the battle, and you have given them to me.”

The old woman scoffed.

“So you dragged your horde all the way from the Steppes just to sit out the fall of Ater?” Abreha said. “Try a better lie.”

“You misunderstand me,” Hakram Deadhand said.

In the distance, there was a great grinding sound. One of two western gates that’d been closed was opening again. The High Lady of Askum’s face went blank, hiding her thoughts.

“Why would I cut a deal with you,” the Warlord asked, “when I have already done so with High Lady Wither?”

—

Indrani breathed out, nocked her arrow and jumped down.

Flashes of bright light below, scarabs the size of fists burrowing into the flesh of spiders and devils only to explode out in green flame. Distractions, all of it. At the heart of the horde, the house-sized green salamander devil was laying on the broken pedestal of some dead empress and watching it all with its jutting eyes – a spider came a little too close, mouth open in a screech, and the devil’s jaw unhinged. Archer smiled. The arrow was in flight before she even knew it, her body moving by itself, and the salamander’s lower jaw was nailed down to the stone. Its spiky tongue jutted out as it screamed, impaling the spider, and Indrani landed on her knees just behind the dying creature.

She snatched the spike at the end of the tongue before it could retract, to the devil’s hateful screams, and rose to a run. Movement to the left, claws, but she went low and blood splashed on her cloak as a spider died in her stead. A jet of spidersilk brushed against the edge of her shoulder but she was already twisting, leaping – broken stone pillar to the side, base to leap even higher and fuck a devil. The coloured toucan the size of a man and made of ivory and fingers clawed at side, pale claws raking at her chain mail, and she was slammed on the side of a wall. She smacked the devil away with her bow, breaking the string, and fell back even quicker when the salamander devil tried to retract its tongue.

The bow went behind her back, just in time for the toucan devil to come back and get a knife in the belly. She wrapped her limbs around it, ignoring the horrid wiggling of the fingers, and used it as a base to throw herself atop the roof. She landed on her side, the salamander devil below screeching words in the Dark Tongue as its tongue kept extending. Almost there, Archer thought. She rolled to the side as a streak of fire tore through the roof tiles where she’d just been, breaking into a running leap at the next roof – in the distance she saw a flash of Light shine and wink out, the Lady shooting Alexis’ arrow in flight – and landing just near the edge of the last roof. Just in time for spiders to begin climbing up that edge. She couldn’t stop moving, she’d lose the momentum and then she was fucked.

So instead she sped up, and when the fat body full of mandibles went over the edge it was receive her boot in the face as she used it as a base to leap further up. Screeches behind her but she was flying, flying until she hit the wall with a gleeful laugh. The alcove in the tower was just large enough for her to stand in it after the bruising landing, and Indrani wasted no time hammering the tongue spike into it with her bare hand. Once, twice, and in it went. Deep. In the distance the salamander screamed in rage but the spike was stuck in now. Indrani reached for the vial in her bag, smashing it atop the point where the tongue went into the stone. The black good solidified in moments, making sure it’d be stuck there for good.

“Well,” Archer said. “Time to get going.”

She climbed up the tower even as began to shake, reaching the top and the wonderful view of the howling hell Ater had turned into just moments before there was a sinister crack down below. Indrani moved to the eastern edge, sheathing her knife and taking out a fresh string for her bow. Down below, the Lady still stood on that statue of Terribilis as she toyed with the Silver Huntress. Arrows were shot out in flight, Ranger shot her through cover – even when stone – and twice collapsed a building with a very precise missile as Alexis tried to cross them. The arrows wreathed in silver Light that headed back Ranger’s way never made it close. Lexy was too slow to imbue the Light, against reflexes like the Lady’s that was as good as not shooting at all.

Archer nocked an arrow, breathed out and loosed. The Lady caught the movement, swayed slightly to the left and the shot that should have gone through her spine instead caught a devil in the face down below. Ranger cocked an eyebrow at her, as if asking whether that was the best Indrani could do. She had yet to stop standing atop the head of the fucking statue she’d been on all this time. Instead of answering, Archer nocked another arrow and grinned. If she wasn’t wrong, it ought to be around – a few small cracks, then a massive one as the salamander-devil finally pulled the seven-story high tower down. Which was something of a problem for Indrani, who was standing on top of said tower, but more of a problem for the Lady.

Who the tower was falling on .

Whooping in delight, Indrani loosed on the arrow the Lady had just tried to put in her throat and hit the side, deflecting it. Even as she slid down the top of the tower, she nocked and released once more – looking irritated the Lady cut it down, but Alexis had taken the opening. Silver shone bright, clipping the edge of the Lady’s shoulder and singing her cloak. For a moment Ranger looked up, but Indrani realized with a start it wasn’t her being looked at. It was the falling tower. One of the windows, more specifically.

“No fucking way,” Archer cursed. “You can’t possibly be that quick.”

Just before the tower’s roof became a wall, she leapt away and to the side. Even as the building fell onto a mass of spiders and devils she landed through a broken tile roof and into what looked like pack of shelves which were – ow ow, fucking ow – full of bottles. Indrani took a moment to be in pain as the broken shelves and bottles fell on her head, bruised and bloody, and there was a thunderous sound and cloud of dust as the tower finished falling. Taking an experimental sniff the liquid drenching her, Indrani found it appeared to be wine. Ah, but the Gods did provide. She bit off the cork and took a swallow of what tasted like some red from somewhere, polishing off a third of the bottle because those fucking cuts on her face hurt like a bitch. Well, time to see if the Lady had actually pulled it off.

Indrani left the house only to find the Ranger smugly standing atop the fallen tower, next to what had been a window on the western side.

“Oh come on ,” Archer complained. “Are you telling me you managed to climb and cross the damn thing before it finished falling?”

“The windows on the second level faced each other,” the Lady said, amused. “You girls picked the wrong tower to drop.”

She paused to slap away a silver arrow.

“Fine,” Indrani sighed. “Next one will be bigger, and without fucking windows. You going to say why you were standing on that statue, at least?”

“So I could literally look down on your efforts,” the Lady of the Lake informed her.

“Ouch,” Indrani said. “In all fairness, you’re pretty hard to kill.”

“Is that what you’re trying?” she smiled. “I thought we were catching up.”

“Sure, but we figured it’d be better to catch you then get caught,” Indrani noted. “What errand is it you’re running for the Carrion Lord, anyway?”

Ranger cocked her head to the side.

“You’re stalling,” she stated. “Why?”

“Wine hasn’t kicked in yet,” Indrani replied, raising her bottle.

She threw it a moment later, but it didn’t work – the Lady ignored it, instead swatting the arrow without Light that the Silver Huntress had just tried to put in the side of her neck.

“Alexis,” Ranger greeted her. “You seem in a mood. Rough day?”

Lexy came out of the house she’d shot through the window of, jaw clenched.

“What is it going to take,” the Silver Huntress bit out, “for you to take this seriously ?”

The Ranger considered her.

“For you to get out of the woods I first found you running in,” the Lady said.

Oh boy, Indrani thought. That wasn’t going to end well. At least their plan had worked, though. Archer wasn’t hearing any devils and spiders fighting nearby, so Cocky should be about ready. Alexis took her spear in hand, Light flaring bright.

“I’m going to take that answer out of your fucking hide,” the Silver Huntress said.

“You’re beginning to bore me,” the Ranger noted. “Cocky, won’t you stop skulking around long enough say something? Crawling on your belly is no way to live, girl.”

Cocky did, in fact, come out of hiding. Atop the rooftop, covered in ash and dust but grinning.

“Me,” the Concocter said.

“Pardon?” the Lady said.

“You asked what she was stalling for,” Cocky said. “It was for me .”

She raised her hand, snapping the fingers, and suddenly their surroundings were filled with screams. Every devil and spider that’d been exposed to the charm potions came when called by their new mistress, prepared to kill at her word.

“So that’s your plan?” the Lady asked. “Swarming me.”

“It’s a start,” the Concocter said.

Ranger snorted, then glanced at Indrani – who’d been nocking an arrow, admittedly.

“I did come here for something,” the Lady said. “You were right.”

“And what’s that?” Archer asked.

Below them the ground began to shake. Not, not shake. Something was... hitting it.

“Let her catch my scent,” the Ranger replied.

The paved street in front of them was ripped open, a massive leg tearing through it. Merciless Gods, Indrani thought. No, that couldn’t be. Wasn’t it supposed to be just a story? Another street blew up and slowly, inexorably, a gargantuan shape rose through the foundation of Ater. A spider so large and foul it defied description, shrouded in darkness and venom that dripped like rain. Her scream, when her hundred thousand eyes found the sun, was deafening. She was sniffing at the air, looking for a scent.

“Dread Emperor Tenebrous,” Indrani whispered.

The Lady of Lake smiled at them.

“Now it’s a proper fight,” Hye Su happily said.

Slowly, she unsheathed her second blade.

“What are you waiting for? Take your shot, kids.”

—

“It won’t work,” High Lady Takisha said, tone frustrated. “My mages say-”

“Yes,” Akua impatiently said, “that the sky is too dry because of the previous rains. Which I have a solution to.”

“That offensive is suicide,” Takisha hissed. “You cannot-”

“My soldiers are at your disposal, Lady Sahelian,” High Lord Jaheem mildly said.

Akua passed a tired hand through her hair. It was telling that no one even seemed to notice it: they were all so exhausted and on edge that the usual games had gone by the wayside.

“I need more than soldiers,” Akua admitted. “I need at least three mage cabals.”

The High Lord of Okoro hesitated.

“I only have two,” he admitted. “One of which is of my retinue.”

Which he would not part with, considering that there had been two attempts to abduct him today.

“One would be a start,” Akua said, glancing at High Lady Takisha.

Who looked away. Akua could not even blame her too much for it. The Kahtan household troops had been so brutalized by the day’s fighting that there was barely a third of left of them. All of the Taghreb soldiery had been badly mauled, in truth, but the Kahtan men had led the vanguard and suffered accordingly – first against the Army of Callow, then those damnable spiders.

“I will go,” High Lord Dakarai said. “I still have nearly sixty mages, a third of which can touch High Arcana. It ought to be enough, I think.”

A moment of surprised silence. He was taking a considerable risk, investing so much of the last strength of his house in such a dangerous undertaking. Nok had been mauled as badly as Kahtan today, losing troops to both Aksum and the spiders. Abreha’s treachery had been eminently predictable, but Dakarai’s apparent change of sides was rather puzzling considering it had cost him much and might still cost him more.

“It is not certain any of us will return,” Akua felt bound to remind him.

“It is not certain any of us will live through the day, if those monsters are not dealt with,” High Lord Dakarai flatly replied. “We have already wrecked entire districts failing to contain them, and that was before...”

“Emperor-claimant Tenebrous?” High Lady Takisha suggested.

All of their gazes moved to the hulking shape of the spider near the Licosian Gates, which had already wrecked three fortified positions in its rampage. The lesser spiders had taken advantage to overwhelm the district, killing hundreds of soldiers in the service of Takisha’s vassals.

“It ought to be empress -claimant, surely,” High Lord Jaheem muttered.

“Regardless of the titles, Ater is on the brink,” High Lord Dakarai said. “You have my cabals, Lady Sahelian.”

They set out as a mixed force, High Lord Jaheem insisting he send his one spare cabal along with soldiers regardless of necessity. It was hard fighting block by block once they passed the fortified positions, swarms spiders attacking from streets and rooftops as the soldiers advanced with tightly locked shields and the mages returned fire. Akua led from the front, trusting Kendi’s sorcery to shield her as she went purely on the offensive with the most destructive curses she’d learned as a girl. Two thousand soldiers had set out, four hundred were dead by the time the expedition made it to the massive structure of bronze that she’d been leading it to. A reservoir, one of the largest in Ater.

It fed some of the aqueducts, hence the bronze – it was the easiest metal to enchant – but many of those were now broken and spilling anyway. At the moment it was nothing but an enormous amount of water doing no good to anyone. As the household troops dug in and established a defensive perimeter under constant harassment, Akua organized the cabals into two ritual sequences. The first was easy, requiring a dozen mages only because of the power requirement. Magic was sunk into the water reservoir, then over three heartbeats turned to searing heat: a massive column of vapour blew upwards, high into the sky, as Akua followed with a measuring spell. It was barely enough water, but it would do. The hail of the last two weeks had filled it to burst, it was the only reason it worked.

The second ritual took every mage left, in hexagonal nodes as power was gathered and sent up into the sky. The clouds began to form after half an hour – almost half the soldiers were dead by then, the spiders attracted by the great bursts of power – but after that it was not long. Dark clouds began crackling with power as Akua sunk deeper into High Arcana than she ever had, finding the runes came to her as if she’d been born with the knowledge. As if she were meant to succeed.

Lightning struck the tide of spiders before the main Legion position. Once, then twice. Then four times at once. Then nine. And then a howling column of lightning descended from the sky, like the glare of some ancient god, incinerating arachnids wherever it went. And Akua moved it, power dancing under a darkened sky as the column of lightning moved along the battle lines like a pencil being dragged. Before long the power began to wane, the array began to fight her and the clouds thinned, but Akua pressed on. A little more. If she kept at it little longer, she could end this. Force the spiders to retreat, to spare Ater.

And as her pores began to sweat blood, she smashed the last of the lightning onto the massive shape of the progenitor spider. It screamed and smoked, but rose from the ground soon enough. Akua dropped to the ground, spent.

“It wasn’t enough,” she panted, falling to her knees.

The last wisps of power slipped through her fingers. Someone approached to help her up, but she waved them away.

“See to those that fell unconscious,” she croaked out. “And prepare for the retreat. We’re done here.”

None gainsaid her. They looked at her with fear in the eyes, she thought, but something like hunger too. It had been a long time since Ater had seen sorcery the likes of which had just been unleashed. Within moments Akua was alone in the warm cradle of bronze, even Kendi having gone. Only the sound of her breath kept her company as her heartbeat slowed. Gods, but she wanted to sleep. To close her eyes and wake up in Hainaut, still damned but without having to look it in the eye.

“ Goddamn , but she did a number on you.”

Akua’s eyes fluttered open. Before her, leaning against the wall, a woman stood with a silver flask in hand. Hanging off her back was a run-down lute.

“I’ve been around for a while, darling, and I’m still impressed by how thoroughly Cat got into your head,” the Wandering Bard said. “It’s fucking magnificent work, pun intended. Terrible too, but that does tend to be the way with our girl yeah?”

“Go away,” Akua croaked out.

“Nah,” the Bard casually dismissed. “We’re going to have a talk, you and I. Her plan has been working pretty much perfectly, which is why it’s time for me to tell you a few truths and sent that off into the void.”

“I will not-”

“We’re going to have a talk,” the Wandering Bard grinned, “about exactly what it is that Catherine Foundling has planned for you.”

—

“I couldn’t get my hands on High Lord Jaheem,” High Lady Wither said. “He goes nowhere without a full mage cabal since his daughter was assassinated and my ambush was fought off.”

“We captured two of his children and much of his extended family outside the city,” Hakram replied. “It will have to serve.”

Getting the High Lord of Okoro to cede some of his territory was not going to be easy, but so long as the Tower was kept out of it the Clans had the stronger bargaining position. Hostages would only improve that, though exacting it as ransom from the man himself would have been easiest. Still, disappointing as the failure was it was not surprising: if High Lords were easy to capture, they would not be High Lords. Hakram looked away from Pickler’s mother and down to the city, where the unfolding battle could well be seen from the gatehouse where they stood. The staggering feat of magic that could only have been the work of Akua Sahelian had turned the tide.

The lightning storm had torn through thousands of the spiders and sent many skittering back to their hiding places below. There were still pockets of fighting between soldiers and beasts but much fewer, and already it could be seen that the Legions were going on the offensive to clear out the still-infested districts. Down south was less promising, where the High Lady of Kahtan held command and most highborn armies had gathered. The hulking silhouette of what had to be the progenitor of the infestation beneath Ater was rampaging around the Licosian Gates, swatting away at storm elementals and devils. Giant spiders were gathering to her, as if they were being called.

“It will be time to move soon,” the Warlord said.

“The longer we let Takisha bleed the better,” High Lady Wither smiled.

“Short-sighted,” Hakram said. “We’ll need those armies as fodder when we fight Keter and their nobles to handle the Hellgates. If it’s truly the Carrion Lord behind this insurgency of spiders, he disappoints me: thousands died today that could have been put to better use.”

“It’s him,” Wither quietly said. “And he’s not done, mark my words.”

Hakram did not ask how she knew. It would have been impolite and she would not have told him regardless.

“It does not change the need to act,” he said. “I want the west of the capital firmly under our control by the time the dust settles.”

“Abreha will take the safe passage to outside the city when you offer it,” High Lady Wither mused. “She’s not going to fight us for the gate, not when it already cost her keeping Dakarai away from it. She’ll move her camp to the Army of Callow’s side and stop pretending she ever switched sides. It’s Sargon that’s going to be a problem.”

“On that we agree,” the Warlord growled.

Sargon Sahelian had contributed to the defence of the capital, but most of his troops had stayed near the central districts that surrounded the Tower. Giving him the boot would not be trouble given the size of Hakram’s army, but the Sahelian was sharing those positions with the Sentinels – and Hakram was hesitant to tangle with those at the moment. Whoever first cornered Malicia would be mauled by the Tower’s arsenal, that was a role best passed to another. It was why he’d ordered his chiefs to seize the west of the city but go no further. The wealthy camps outside the city would sate the hunger for plunder for now, enough his warriors would not sack the capital against his orders.

“We’ll test their will to stand their ground with a few skirmishes,” High Lady Wither decided.

“I’m not above burning them out if I have to,” Hakram bluntly said. “We need to hold the avenues and barricade them if we’re going to keep the nobles wedged between us and the Army of Callow.”

Which was the only way he’d get them to bend without outright sacking Ater, he figured. If they had room to maneuver they’d try to run rings around him, decide they could wait out his horde. But so long as they were stuck in the capital between his host and another enemy, stripped of their supplies and at the Tower’s feet, they could be made to bend. It was either that or a massacre, which would weaken his army and taint the concessions he was here to force. Wither was in the same boat as him, which was why she’d been willing to ally: her title had been granted by Malicia, which meant it was worth less than dust the moment Malicia lost her throne. To ensure she was not thrown to the wolves by whoever succeeded the Empress, it been well worth opening a gate into the city.

One hundred thousand orcs were a heavy argument in any negotiation.

Their conversation was interrupted by a messenger, which turned out to be for the both of them. Letters with the Tower’s seal. Already checked for poison and curses. Hakram opened his own, scanning the lines, and let out a bark of laughter. Well, let it not be said that Malicia lacked audacity.

“I assume you got the same as me?” he asked.

“An invitation to a formal session of the imperial court tomorrow,” Wither said, eyes narrowed. “Malicia is playing a game again. She still thinks she can live through this.”

Hakram snorted. Catherine wanted the woman’s head on a pike, and given the situation she was quite likely to get it. There were few people left in Praes who wanted to keep the empress alive – it was more an issue of no one wanting to be the one to kill her. Cornered foxes bit deepest. The two of them left the wall to begin their preparations for the push into the city, but once more he was interrupted. This time by Dag, who quietly told him there was a messenger from the Army of Callow. The Warlord’s hand tightened. It had only been a matter of time, he knew.

Somehow he’d still been hoping to avoid it for a little longer.

The man had been led to a house on the other side of the street and kept under guard. Hakram wasted no time getting there, finding the officer was looking outside the window when he entered. The tall orc frowned. Something was wrong here. These were lieutenant’s stripes, Catherine would have sent someone higher up for an important message. The human turned, unclasping the straps of his helmet and setting it down on the table, revealing greying hair and green eyes.

“Good afternoon, Warlord,” the Carrion Lord said.

Hakram’s dead hand clenched.

“You are not here on Catherine’s behalf,” the Warlord said.

The older man conceded the point with a slight nod.

“So what is it you want, Amadeus of the Green Stretch?” the Warlord asked.

“I come,” the devil said, “to offer you a bargain.”

Interlude: Strangest And Most Solemn

“It is true it would be safer, Chancellor, to refrain from gloating. But then why even bother? If I can’t crucify whoever speaks in accidental rhyme or throw heroes to three-headed snakes or feed a baby to another baby, then why should I even want to be Dread Emperor?”

– Dread Emperor Revenant

The Carrion Lord was a greying swordsman without a sword or a Name, trapped in a small room with an armed Named orc almost twice his weight. The warriors outside the door held no loyalty to him and this entire district of Ater was under the rule of the Clans. He was completely at the Warlord’s mercy by almost every way of measuring the situation that the tall orc knew.

Hakram had not felt this wary of someone in years.

“A bargain,” the Warlord repeated.

“Indeed,” the green-eyed man agreeably replied.

There were no windows to the room, only a ragged tapestry of black and white hung on the wall and a faded magelight set in the wall – old enough its glow dimmed for stretches of time before burning bright again, moving shadows across the wall. Back and forth, like fingers clawing at stone. Amadeus of the Green Stretch looked calm, but then that was his legend. The story went that Istrid – not yet Knightsbane – had bit down on his wrist until her fangs tasted blood to see if he’d flinch and he’d not batted an eye. A hand for you would have been a worthwhile trade, the Carrion Lord had claimed. What was there to flinch from?

No wonder the Red Shields still loved him like a fucking lost son.

Hakram’s first instinct was to kill him, here and now. Lunge across the table and smash his soft human skull against the wall, rip out his throat and let the lifeblood spill red on that mangled weave of black and white. But that was the red in him, the part that hated feeling wary of a man in his power and wanted to destroy the source of that discomfort. The Warlord picked the sentiment apart, looked for the sliver of sense at the source of it. It was, he eventually decided, that he did not like or trust the former Black Knight.

In a distant way he recognized that the Carrion Lord was half of the pair that’d done more for his people on half a century than their predecessors in a millennium, but that was not something he could connect to the pale-skinned man in front of him. The deed was too large, too looming, to be tied to someone of flesh and blood. Instead the parts that came to the fore were the human ones, the glimpses he’d had through Catherine over the years. None of these particularly endeared Amadeus of the Green Stretch to Hakram. Yet that dislike was his own, not the Warlord’s, and so he swallowed it.

He would not close the door, listen to the fear. But neither would he pretend to be deaf.

“We have not spoken much over the years, you and I,” Hakram said.

Maybe a dozen conversations when Catherine was not there, none longer than the time to took to boil a cup of tea.

“You were the Adjutant,” the Carrion Lord simply said. “It was not my place to trespass.”

Hakram bared his teeth.

“I always did despise it the most,” he said, “the way that you always give her what she wants, but only ever in ways that benefit you.”

When she’d been a girl still, all swagger and distrust and fear, Catherine had wanted... room to grow. Support but from a distance, the kind of help that would allow her to still believe herself bound to nothing save her own ambitions. And she’d gotten it: her own legion, Masego and Indrani, opportunities to prove herself with no one standing above her. Only the legion had bound her to Praes, the children of the Calamities to their legacy and every victory had advanced the plans of the pale man seated across from him. A hook in every gift, and there had been many .

“That is who I am,” the Carrion Lord replied, neither proud nor ashamed. “I am long past the days of fighting it.”

“It would not be as obscene, if you did not genuinely love her,” Hakram said.

“I did not mean to,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch admitted. “But once I saw the anger that burned like a torch, it was water down the slope. Inexorable.”

“What you did today will rip back open the wounds you left after the Doom,” Hakram gravelled. “How many thousands did you burn today? So much for the coming of the Age of Order.”

Green eyes studied him coolly.

“Are you certain that is a conversation you wish to have, Adjutant ?”

The tall orc clicked his fangs. He had not forgotten what Tariq Fleetfoot had told him as Hainaut broke around them, but what had once been a comfort was now a noose around his neck. Not that he would allow himself to be cowed by the other man’s turn of phrase.

“What must be settled between she and I will be,” Hakram said. “Do not pretend understanding of it, any more than I could claim understanding of what lay between you and Scribe. It is... personal. Your madness is not.”

The green-eyed man leaned back in his seat, looking amused. Hakram itched to take an eye for it, just so that he’d be forever half as nonchalant.

“My madness?” the pale man asked.

“You fed thousands of civilians to blood-mad critters,” the Warlord said. “You weakened armies needed against Keter and broke the capital. You sit here as if it makes you a victor, but all I see in you is a Dread Emperor as this land has known by the hundreds. Why should I bargain with the likes of you?”

“Because none of these were accidents,” the Carrion Lord calmly replied.

Hakram paused. Killed the scorn on his tongue, the easy comment that if anything that only worsened his impression of the other man. Perhaps that would still be true later, but first he would think it through. See why a largely intelligent man would think this reasonable to say here and now. That meant looking at the deeds and going back, methodically. What is there to gain by today? Hakram considered the blood, for often that was where the truth of things lay. And from a cold eye this Battle of the Spiders, not quite yet finished, had bled the High Lords and Ladies the most.

Of soldiers, yes, but not so many as that. Of the thirty thousand that had first gathered outside Ater at least twenty thousand should still remain and most the dead would be levies. The household troops had lost but not been crippled. No, the cost had been subtler. The High Seats had ruined their reputation with Ater when they sacrificed almost a quarter of the city to contain the spiders, their devils and wonders killing almost as many as the monsters come from below. If any of them tried to claim the Tower, the city would riot. That would not necessarily stop them from trying, but history taught that a tyrant without Ater’s affection rarely lasted long in the Tower.

Only Ater is half a ruin now , Hakram thought, so that doesn’t matter as much. Love could be bought with food and shelter provided to refugees and the disposed, not that it would be sustainable in the long term. Hakram had experience with matters like this, having once handled the masses of refugees in southern Callow after the Doom and Summer’s depredations. The tent-cities had eventually broken up, leaving smaller towns behind as the people moved away to – Hakram paused. Not an accident, the Carrion Lord had claimed. Not the destruction, not the deaths, not even the gargantuan spider unleashed on the Licosian Gates.

“You are destroying Ater,” the Warlord said. “Emptying it for good.”

“Are you familiar with the Haunted Scholar’s works?” the Carrion Lord asked.

Hakram was and admitted as much with a nod. The man had claimed in his treatises that the instability at the heart of Praes came from the weakness of the Tower relative to the High Seats. Three burdens in particular had been identified. The Legions of Terror, which were dependent on taxes paid by nobles for their upkeep, the asymmetric accretion of power – Dread Emperors were individuals, had to build their power as individuals from scratch when they rose, while the High Seats were dynasties with permanent seats of power – and most importantly of all the capital itself. Ater, the behemoth city that could not feed itself or pay for its own upkeep or close its gates to its enemies.

“I suppose it is a sort of madness,” the Carrion Lord conceded. “But it is a methodical one. Ater must be reduced to a sustainable size if Praes is ever to be free of constant civil strife.”

The Haunted Scholar’s thesis on display. If Ater could not be held without the support of a High Seat then civil war was inevitable because the Tower was certain to be bound in the dynastic disputes of its backer.

“You haven’t solved the other two,” the Warlord said.

“The days is young,” the pale man smiled. “Shall we discuss a bargain, then?”

Hakram wanted to deny him. The Warlord considered it. It was an intricate plan, weakening the High Seats in several ways and attending to a deeper issue with a single stroke. Not the kind that someone lost to the old ways would be capable of conceiving. And that meant, regrettably, that Amadeus of the Green Stretch was still worth hearing out.

“Speak,” the Warlord ordered.

“There are three plans afoot in the capital that are not ours,” the Carrion Lord said. “Your intentions for the Clans cannot cohabit with any of them succeeding.”

“Bold claim,” Hakram growled.

“Malicia intends to stand as Dread Empress when the ashes have cooled,” the pale man calmly said. “To do this, she has driven every High Seat to such hatred of the others that none will tolerate another to rise to claim the Tower. All the while, she sunk a great deal of her remaining resources in ensuring that Akua Sahelian would be crowned empress in her stead. She intends, I imagine, to peacefully abdicate.”

“Even if Sahelian spared her, her supporters wouldn’t tolerate the loose end,” the Warlord pointed out.

“Which doesn’t matter, because Malicia believes that Catherine will kill the Doom of Liesse the moment she dares to claim the throne,” the Carrion Lord said. “Putting the empire in an... interesting situation.”

It took a moment for Hakram to put all the pieces in place properly. Sahelian dead, the High Seats livid at the offence but too deeply feuding to be able to raise one of their own instead. It would leave only one person with enough prominence to fill the seat, wouldn’t it? Malicia herself, not an hour gone form the throne and yet somehow made into the compromise candidate. And Catherine might want to kill her, but would the High Seats stand for it? Killing one empress would have them furious enough, two would be beyond the pale. Subjugation in all but name.

It might cost her the armies she’d come here to claim, the diabolists she needed.

“It won’t work,” the Warlord said.

“No,” the Carrion Lord agreed. “It is an outstanding piece of scheming on Malicia’s part, but it falls apart because she failed to properly grasp the nature of Akua Sahelian.”

“And you have?” Hakram derided.

“No,” the man easily replied, “but I understand Catherine and that is quite enough. She would not tolerate the owner of the Folly to rule Praes, no matter the nature of the deeper game she is playing with Tasia’s daughter. Which brings us to my daughter and her own plan, beginning with the crucial moment where Akua Sahelian will refuse the throne she is offered.”

He’d never heard the man claim Catherine as his daughter so openly. It felt like nails on chalk, for all that Catherine returned the favour from her side regularly. Somehow Hakram doubted either had ever spoken the words face-to-face.

“I know what Catherine plans,” the Warlord said.

He had no need to hear out a plan he’d helped make, though he was certain changes would have been made since he’d left for the Steppes.

“Which is why you are not acting hand-in-hand with her,” the Carrion Lord calmly noted. “You already know that your leverage against the Tower depends on being someone whose support can be courted against her.”

The Warlord did not deny it. If he entered the Tower as Catherine’s ally, he lost all bargaining power. The Clans became a chip on her side of the table, not players in their own right. It lost him the great influence he would be wielding in there as the only person left in the empire with an army on the field that could give the Army of Callow pause. Beyond that, he would lose the influence he would need to bend the Grand Alliance to make the concessions he needed. Much as the pale man irked him, he was not wrong. He could not go along with Catherine tomorrow.

“And the third?” the Warlord grunted.

“The Intercessor wants Catherine dead and Praes a pit of civil war, as far as I can tell,” the other man shrugged. “Her means are still opaque to me, save that she will moving through Named and pivots. Still, I don’t believe that you could ever ally with the Wandering Bard.”

“And so that leaves you,” the Warlord said. “Or so you would like me to believe.”

“Indeed,” the Carrion Lord cheerfully replied.

“Only I could speak with Malicia instead,” the Warlord said. “Or back a High Seat against the others.”

Malicia was the best candidate, save in the sense that Catherine would set fire to the Tower rather than to allow her to rule a latrine pit, much less Praes itself. Hakram was still deciding how heavily that should weight on the scales, given that he might be in a position to strongarm the issue. He was not alone in this. High Lady Wither, his closest ally, had been clear that she would personally prefer Malicia as ruler even if she was open to other candidates. Neither of them were eager to lend a hand to the man seated across the table, even knowing he was likely the most acceptable candidate to the Grand Alliance.

Hakram was able to separate his dislike from the necessities of the situation, so his reluctance was not personal. Amadeus of the Green Stretch, while popular with the Legions and the people of some regions of Praes, would not be uncontested as ruler. He was a Duni and he’d spent most of his career as the Black Knight rabidly at odds with the same nobility whose support he would need to govern, which was far from ideal. The Carrion Lord was an able enough man that Hakram believed he would be able to make the High Seats fall into line, but he also believed that achieving this would take several years and a fairly brutal war.

A war they did not have time to wage and which would draw heavily on the resources of his supporters. Neither Hakram nor Wither were particularly eager to bleed their people for that purpose. Jaheem Niri was likely their best bet, like it or not – they could trade the territorial concessions Hakram wanted and the assurances Wither wanted for their support, which he could not claim the Tower without.

“You could,” the Carrion Lord said. “Only it won’t get you what you want for your people.”

The Warlord bared his fangs.

“And what would you know about that?”

“Enough,” the pale man said. “You were seen to use both the Red Shields and the Split Tree as lieutenants outside the city, which means you’re threading the needle between the clans that want closer ties and those that want to distance themselves. You’re after major concessions from the Tower while aiming to remain part of Praes.”

Hakram’s dead hand clenched. Only a handful of people in all of the empire could have derived the same conclusions from seeing what the man had, he reminded himself. His intentions were not obvious for everyone to see.

“You tread dangerous grounds,” the Warlord warned.

“It’s habit by now,” the Carrion Lord smiled. “My point stands, regardless. Even if you can back someone to seize the Tower and they fulfill the bargain you struck, it won’t get you what you want.”

“And why is that?” the Warlord gravelled.

“Because their successor will have no incentive to keep the bargain,” he replied.

“War against the united Clans-”

“Will be the selling point of breaking faith,” the Carrion Lord coldly cut in. “You know your histories, Warlord. How many tyrants continued the policies of the predecessor they murdered? How many of them immediately threw themselves into a war with Callow or the Free Cities or any enemy at hand because a fight against a common enemy would solidify their grip on the empire?”

It had the sting of truth, but also of the inevitable.

“That is Praes,” the Warlord said.

“That is the Dread Empire,” the Carrion Lord challenged.

Hakram almost laughed.

“What else is there?”

“A bargain to make,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch said.

The Warlord scoffed. Arrogance.

“Why would your successor be better than anyone else’s?”

“Because I do not intend to be Dread Emperor,” the pale man calmly said.

The Warlord paused. Narrowed his eyes.

“So what is it you do want?” Hakram Deadhand asked.

“Your help,” he said, “and a single favour.”

It sounded too good a bargain, the Warlord thought.

“Do not be relieved,” the Carrion Lord mildly said. “The favour, I think, will be for you the heavier of the costs to bear.”

Dead fingers made by a now dead man clenched.

“Tell me,” the Warlord ordered.

—

Archer feinted to the left, then hastily drew back when the blade came a hair’s breadth away from her neck – she felt the very point scrape her skin – and shifted to the side only to eat a pommel in the stomach. Even through the mail she bent, gasping in pain as the Ranger moved around her so the Silver Huntress blow would go wide.

“Indrani,” Alexis hissed, “get out of-”

She never finished the sentence, the two of them seeing the movement coming from the corner of their eye. The leapt away before the leg tore through the house whose roof they had been fighting on, Tenebrous scattering the stone walls like they were made of parchment and dripping darkness everywhere. Like pools of ink the dark tainted whatever it touched, spreading down slopes and through crevices. Twice now Indrani had seen devils fall through a large patch as if it were a hole. Cocky had said that Tenebrous was living domain, but Archer had her doubts. Althea Maronid’s research in Ashur had decisively proved that a domain must be internal if it belonged to a living creature, else it would cause uncontrolled creational cascades.

More likely Tenebrous’ domain was physically incarnated and static, somewhere far below Ater, and she was trying to bring it up here by spreading around that darkness clinging to her hide. On the bright side, that meant climbing on top of the spider wouldn’t be like stepping over one of the pools: if the domain was external it wouldn’t work on the creature herself.

Looking through the clouds of dust and raining darkness, Archer looked for the Lady’s shape. Alexis had gone the other way, but neither of them were getting – oh, shit, she’d climbed the leg. And ol’ Tenebrous wasn’t liking that at all, by the deafening sounds of her screeching. What few windows in the neighbourhoods hadn’t been broken all exploded, and a few devils actually died. Indrani fought through the pain, then blinked as a large, winged devil with purple veins landed before her in a crouch. Cocky was offering a ride, huh? No point in declining. The devil needed a knife in the side to be guided properly, but even as Light lit up the sky and flew out in an arrow – the Lady had to stop and shoot it down – Indrani flew ahead.

The Lady killed her mount with a second arrow a heartbeat later, but Alexis had bought her long enough: she leapt off the dying devil, landing on Tenebrous’ back. The monster did not like that at all, not only starting to screech and trying to shake her off but doing... something with its body. The thick darkness she’d been stepping through turned from a misty cloud to something thicker, like mud, and the hair beneath her boots hardened like iron into a forest of needles. Fuck, that wasn’t going to be fun to fight on but it wasn’t like she had a choice: in a matter of moments the Lady had finished climbing up the leg and was looking at her from her a hundred feet away.

Now Archer just needed to distract her long enough that Alexis would be able to make it up here without getting shot.

Rolling her shoulders to loosen them, Indrani took calm steps forward. The longknives the same woman she was not fighting had gifted her in hand, the scarf they had taken together in Mercantis around her neck, she began to move quicker. Indrani didn’t like thinking when the blades were out, not more than she needed to, but her mind was ajar. Asking questions like why she was doing this, what there was to win. Alexis wanted to kill the Lady, that was no mystery, and Cocky wanted to... get even somehow. But why was Indrani here, dragged into this? Cat had asked her to find out what Ranger would be up to, and she’d found out: baiting out a huge fucking spider monster near the fortified positions of the High Lady of Kahtan. Job done, not great but still done.

So why was she breaking into a run, measuring the distance between her and her teacher?

The blades sang, steel on steel. Parry, riposte, spin. The footing shifted on them, Tenebrous raging at their presence, but even as the world shifted and great towers crashed around them they kept striking. To miss a beat was to lose, perhaps even to die. Indrani found she was smiling through her scarf. So was the Lady, for a while, but it did not last. Indrani was falling behind. She kept coming in close to make her knives count, to go against the length of Ranger’s swords, but it wasn’t enough. The Lady did not fall for feints, and when Indrani ignored what she had thought to be one she nearly lost an eye. Blood began to pour down the side of her head, kept out of her eye only by her eyebrow.

“You’ve improved,” the Ranger said.

“I don’t know if you have,” Archer admitted.

It might, she thought, be why she was fighting in the first place. To see if she could reach the end of Ranger’s skill. Whether or not she beat the other woman didn’t matter that much to her. It wouldn’t really mean anything, even if it ended in death. But knowing where she stood compared to the only person she had really wanted to measure herself up against? That was worth the blood. The Ranger studied her for a beat, slapping aside a cut from the side and forcing Indrani back with the riposte, then scoffed.

“Your mindset is still lacking,” the Ranger said.

Archer grit her teeth, feinted to the side – ignored – and with the flat of her other blade tried to throw darkness in the Lady’s face. It was cut through, and only a desperate half-step kept Indrani from losing half her face. The cut went deep, from just below her right eye to her jaw. If it’d been any deeper bone would have been scraped.

“Light as a feather,” the Lady of the Lake said.

Indrani licked away the blood pooling against her upper lip and went on the attack again. Aggressive, forcing a lock of blades and when Ranger pushed her back she tried to slide under. It got her a kick on the chin for her trouble, but she’d expected that – Cat did the same, because the Carrion Lord did the same and he’d learned it from the Lady – and she caught it with crossed blades. The Lady was forced back, one leg in the air, and Indrani lunged forward with both blades. Only to take another kick on the side of the head, tumbling against the ground with a grunt of pain.

The Lady stabbed down at her shoulder, chipping the mail and finding flesh beneath before withdrawing so Indrani’s swipe would hit only air.

“Heavy as a mountain,” Ranger finished. “You must be one or the other. Anything in between is wasted time.”

“That one’s an old lesson,” Archer rasped out, rising to her feet.

“Yes,” the Lady coldly said. “You should have learned it by now. I thought going out into the world would temper you, but I seem to have been mistaken. Instead you’ve spent your time fucking Amadeus’ apprentice and playing house with Wekesa’s boy. It’s disappointing.”

Indrani held back a flinch.

“I’ve done more than that,” she bit out.

“You have done things,” the Lady dismissed, “but you have not improved . Your mindset was not refined, your experiences did not broaden your horizons. Do you even have a reason to be fighting me?”

Archer opened her mouth.

“Do not offer me empty words, Indrani,” Hye Su warned. “Those I would take an insult.”

Archer’s mouth closed. It felt childish, while facing those eyes and those blades, to speak of understanding where she stood. Of comparison between them. Like she was a child going around in adult’s clothing.

“I thought as much,” Ranger sighed. “Go on, get out of here. I will see if the others have grown and deal with you later.”

Fuck, Indrani thought. Was the Lady right? It felt like she was. What was Archer even doing here? She’d just let Alexis and Cocky talk her into this because she felt bad about how they’d been back in Refuge, gone along with this stupid idea because of guilt she should have left behind long ago. Baggage like that was best left behind, she’d known that for year. Why was she saddling herself with it now? She’d been with Masego and Catherine too long, gotten too comfortable. She was forgetting what the real world was like.

“I-”

The silver arrow of Light thrummed with power, but it was not so swift that the Lady did not bat it aside. The Silver Huntress was already putting away her bow, short spear in hand with a snarl on her face. Indrani, though, did not move. The image had been seared into her eyes. The Lady of the Lake, knee-deep in darkness and armed with nothing but steel parrying that blinding burst of Light. Casually, as if she had never even considered she wouldn’t be able to do it. No delay, no hesitation, no questioning. Indrani had forgot what it was like, seeing the Lady in her element. Seeing who she was.

Action without doubt.

Archer attacked. She could not leave, even if she struggled to articulate why. To think of it. Blood went down her face, down her neck, but her knives did not slow. It was flashes of movement, of sight. Ranger parrying a spear and blade with a hand each, spinning to carve through Alexis’ skull – hitting hair instead, cutting through, but only narrowly. Strands of red flew as steel shone in the sun, Indrani’s knife finding mail and skidding against it as an elbow snapped back her chin. She fell but Alexis struck, hammering down, and while Ranger caught the spear burning with Light she had to take a steadying step back.

Devils began to land around them, croaking dark calls.

Tenebrous tried to shake them off again, so Indrani caught a glimpse of the blade as it came down. The elf stood behind Ranger, hacking at her neck, but she went low. A jab at the Emerald Sword’s chest as the strike went wide, their silhouette shivering. The blow touched nothing but mist, but as it reformed a step back it lost an eye to a perfectly timed follow-up lunge. The elf retreated, another shimmering into view at their side to cover them, and Ranger let out a laugh.

“Where are the other rest, Noon?” she asked. “It’ll take more than you two to make this interesting.”

“Careful what you ask for.”

A vial hit the ground and there was a small tinkling sound, like a bell being rung, that shivered across the darkness. Above them, riding a scaled devil with great wings, Cocky was glaring harshly. The darkness on Tenebrous’ back began to thicken, then move. Spin and roil, like angry snakes.

“Concocter,” Ranger greeted her. “Still relying on others to do the heavy lifting, I see.”

“Freeze,” Cocky answered.

Nothing was happening, Indrani thought, but a look told her that neither the elves nor Ranger seemed to agree. They were all having to rip out their feet from the darkness, as if it’d suddenly turned solid. The Concocter grinned.

“ Burn ,” she hissed.

The great spiders let out a scream that sounded like a laugh, and darkness billowed up in great columns of smoke. Indrani cursed, since it might not hurt her but the dark sure as Hells broke her line of sight, and broke into a run. She found Alexis, whose Light-wreathed spear was keeping the darkness at bay and they set out in pursuit together. They found an Emerald Sword, entirely by accident: they were looking the other way swung blindly backwards at Indrani’s head when she approached. She parried the blow narrowly, gritting her teeth as she was somehow driven back one-handed from behind, but the moment Alexis stepped in the fight was over.

The elf stared at her with their too-wide eyes, wrinkling their nose in distaste, then vanished into the darkness.

“Right,” Indrani breathed out. “They say they’re Good, so they don’t fight heroes.”

“Doesn’t make them less pricks, but at least they’re fighting Ranger,” Alexis grunted. “What was she talking to you about anyway?”

Indrani hesitated.

“Nothing,” she said.

Alexis frowned, then went for her side and pressed a cloth against her hand.

“Wipe your face,” she said. “The blood’s everywhere.”

Archer’s teeth grit. She knew the gesture was not condescending, that she was not being coddled. And still she curtly threw the cloth back at the Silver Huntress.

“I can handle myself,” she bit out.

Without waiting for an answer she pressed forward. They found Ranger only when then burning darkness began to disperse, already fighting two Emerald Swords. The same, different ones? It was impossible to tell, quick as they moved. Indrani glanced at Alexis, whose face was hard-set, and without a word they attacked. Archer’s hand went for the vial Cocky had given her earlier, staying back as the Silver Huntress joined the melee. It was hard to follow the movements, but Archer steeled herself and waited. When she did strike out, it was a wild blow at Ranger’s back – who parried the blade, frowning, but only too late saw the other blow.

Smashing the vial against the Lady’s neck wouldn’t have worked, so Indrani instead crushed the glass in her hand, ensuring most of the liquid within sprayed on the back of Ranger’s neck. Almost as much soaked her hand and arm, though, and immediately she began to retreat. Already she could feel the world quickening around her, her pulse going wild.

“Cocky,” she screamed. “I need an antidote.”

She felt something burn across her belly, her chain mail giving, but it was all... distant. When she came back to herself the Concocter was feeding her something from a green vial, frowning. Indrani swallowed, throat gone dry.

“Did it work?” she asked.

“Almost,” Cocky sighed. “I took enough that Alexis almost cut off her arm at the shoulder, but then she retreated.”

Archer looked down, realized that she was still standing on Tenebrous’ back. Only it was no longer moving.

“Is it...”

“Not sure if it’s her or the Emerald Swords that killed it,” Cocky said. “Either way it’s dead. I had to lift you off with devils while it trashed, it got ugly.”

“And the Lady?” Indrani asked.

“She cut out the drug from herself,” the Concocter grimaced. “The concept of it. I had no idea she could even do that. Seems to have cost her, though, she’s been slower since.”

“Good,” Archer grunted. “I can head back into the fight, then. Is she handling the elves?”

Cocky shook her head.

“They retreated after she wounded a few,” she replied. “They’ll be back, I’m sure, but it’s supposed to take them a while to make their wounds disappear. My bet is we’ll get all ten when they reappear.”

“Lovely,” Indrani drawled. “Which way?”

“Follow me,” Cocky said. “I just held back to take care of you.”

Indrani bit down on the sharp answer at the tip of her tongue. Cocky hadn’t meant it that way. It was not a difficult trip, now that Tenebrous no longer move. The two of them were righting atop at tower against which a great leg was resting, flashed of Light searing the afternoon sky. Alexis was looking worst for wear, bleeding from her gut and a leg, but the Lady still had a grievous wound on her right arm. That had to slow her down, even if it looked like she could still use it some. Indrani went in straight while Cocky took a long war around, aiming to keep out of sight. Alexis was driven back with a cut on her face while the Ranger cast a look her way, cocking an eyebrow as Indrani arrived.

“Back, I see,” the Lady said.

“Yup,” Indrani shrugged, limbering her wrists.

“And more settled,” Ranger said, eyes narrowing.

“I guess it’s just clicking into place, now that I’ve seen you again,” Archer said.

The dark-haired woman, after a long moment, smiled.

“You have found something,” she said, sounding pleased.

“I used to think I wanted to be like you,” Indrani said. “But that’s not it, not really. I get that now.”

“So what is it you do want?” the Lady of the Lake asked.

“I want to be the Ranger,” Indrani said. “I think I’ve wanted it for a long time, actually. I just couldn’t admit it.”

“It’s not something just anyone can claim,” the Lady of the Lake calmly said.

“That’s fine,” Indrani grinned. “It just means being better than you, and that’s the point in the first place.”

“Indrani, what the Hells are you talking about?” Alexis snarled.

“It’s not wrong, how she raised us,” Archer said, to the Huntress’ visible fury. “It’s not right either, though. And I think I’d do it differently in her place, so I will .”

The Lady laughed, sounding genuinely amused.

“You’ve claimed, Indrani,” the Ranger smiled. “Now follow through.”

It was the storm, after that. They were all bleeding and tired and slowing down, but one would not have known it from the blades. Indrani had never fought more aggressively, not even against the Saint of Swords, but she could feel it. The Flow . It was in her blood, in the pounding of her feet against the tiles. And it came to her as naturally as breathing, so easily she’d not even noticed she was slipping into the aspect. Ranger struggled with that, to the extent that she focused on Alexis in an effort to take her out first. Indrani cushioned the first blow for the Huntress with her own shoulder, letting the mail eat it, but the second was at the wrong angle and... a devil took it instead.

Cocky’s eyes were wild as she stood behind Ranger, hand moving as she threw a red vial at her back, but the Lady must have heard her. The devil had tipped her off. She was swinging backwards, through the vial but Indrani’s Name pulsed. It would be more than that, the angle of it and the strength... Cocky would die. It would go through her skull. But through the kill the Lady was making a mistake – there would be no coming back in time, no last moment parry. If Indrani struck now, struck at the right place, then she could win. Not a kill, maybe, but enough that Ranger would be forced to retreat. And in the heartbeat where that all sunk in, she saw the same realization harden in Hye Su’s eyes. There Indrani saw the expectation of defeat. Would it be enough to claim the Name, to make her the Ranger?

No, she thought. But it would be the first step. The most important one.

Indrani felt like screaming. She wanted this. Wanted it badly enough to fight. So why was Cocky getting in the way? She needed to think, to weigh it up, but there was no time and her body moved on its own. The blow went for the arm, the one that would have carved through the Concocter’s face, and Indrani froze in surprise even as Ranger spun away and threw Alexis at her. They fell in a tangle of limbs, pushing each other off even as Cocky backed away from the Ranger with naked fear on her face. She’d gone pale as snow.

“Disappointing,” Ranger sighed. “All three of you. Anger but no control. Hatred but no discipline. And most disappointing of all, desire with no will behind it. None of you learned a thing.”

Indrani offered her arm, dragging Alexis up, and the two of them moved shoulder to shoulder.

“Cocky, stay behind us,” the Huntress said.

“She’s done playing around,” Archer agreed.

“I am,” the Lady of the Lake agreed. “And if all these years have not made the lessons stick, this time I will have to leave a permanent reminder.”

Well, that didn’t sound great, Indrani thought. Only before anyone began to move, the sun dimmed around them. Something enormous was looming just at the edge of their senses as Indrani heard the distant cawing of crows. Besides them, Tenebrous shivered. Still dead. No longer unmoving. All of them glanced to the side, to the rising gargantuan shape of the creature, and found a woman standing atop it. Looking down at them as she leaned on a staff of dead wood. Her cloak was one of many colours, and Catherine Foundling looked down at the Ranger with a hard smile.

“ Dodge ,” the Black Queen said, and the Lady’s eyes widened.

A heartbeat later half the tower was gone, Tenebrous’ leg gone straight through it, and Indrani found that she couldn’t help laughing.

This wasn’t over but, Hells, at least they’d all live to see tomorrow.

—

“You know,” the Intercessor said, “I always kind of liked you, Akua.”

Ah, the familiar grounds of being lied to by an eldritch abomination with sinister intentions. If there were comfortable cushions, candied dates and a dozen dead bodies it would be her eighth nameday all over again.

“You once threw sand in my eyes after calling me a self-important megalomaniac,” Akua noted.

“And both of those things were well-deserved,” the Intercessor cheerfully replied. “Isn’t that what friendship is, darling?”

“Sand in my eyes?” the dark-skinned mage drily asked.

“Shit, you actually have a sense of humour now,” the Wandering Bard said, sounding impressed. “Like a functional one, not a ‘hahaha down into the tapir pit you go’ kind. You’re mostly a person these days, it’s kind of fucked up you managed that.”

“Yes, well,” Akua smiled, “have you considered-”

She was still only a thimble of power away from collapsing, but it was all about focus. There was plenty of water in the air and it was child’s play to shape some into a nail that she threw right into the Wandering Bard’s throat. Only the pest didn’t die naturally, gone before the ice even broke skin as Akua fell down to her knees. The wave of nausea had her retching wetly as she leaned a hand against the warm bronze of the reservoir walls. A heartbeat later the Bard was there again, picking up the silver flask she’d dropped fleeing.

“Aw, you made me spill some of the mignolet ,” the ageless monster whined. “Do you know how rare it is for me to get the good stuff?”

Akua forced herself back up to her feet, leaning heavily against the wall as her vision swam. Gods, she was close to falling unconscious. Worse, another spell like that and she was at genuine risk of burning out. Overdrawing on one’s magic was a particularly painful way to die even by Praesi standards.

“Yeah, I only came when you’d be in no state to stop me,” the Bard easily said.

Akua managed a glare towards the fair-haired woman. This incarnation was tanned and blue-eyed, and shapely in a lowborn way – the kind that came with the frame one had been born with, not proper meals and comfortable living. The Intercessor seemed uncomfortable with the body, though, she noted. The movements were not as smooth as they had been when the two of them last met, with none of the certainty behind the casual laziness in sight.

“Teehee,” the Intercessor deadpanned, batting her eyes. “What a coincidence.”

“It’s been some time since I’ve last wanted to kill someone this much,” Akua admitted.

“Come on now, love,” the Bard grinned. “That’s not quite true is it? You haven’t been standing on all those ledges ‘cause you like the view.”

Two words in the magetongue and a single runic line, but before the curse of silence could fly out the backlash rang up her arm. First a shiver, then a sensation like every vein was bursting as Akua swallowed a scream. She fell back down to her knees, sweating and trembling. If she’d finished the spell, she thought as her arm pulsed with pain, it would have killed her.

“So,” the Intercessor happily said, “we were talking about Cat, yeah?”

“Fuck you,” Akua hoarsely said.

Not the finest retort she’d ever managed, but her arm felt like its was bleeding acid from the pores and she once again felt like throwing up.

“My heart,” the Intercessor gently said, “if she wasn’t game to get naked, why would you think you’d meet my standards?”

Her fingers clawed at the bronze wall. There was a pause, then a fat chortle.

“That one was a little mean even for me,” the Bard admitted. “But hey, you’re still pretty terrible so I don’t actually feel bad. The important thing, though, is that you’re trying to redeem yourself! Kind of.”

It was difficult to think through the pain, to focus, but she had been trained in this. She gathered herself, got back on her feet.

“You are here because I threaten you and your designs,” Akua said. “The why or how is not particularly important, I imagine. You are trying to sway me from the path I am on, whatever that might be. You will fail in this.”

The fair-haired woman snorted.

“See, this is why I actually do like you,” the Bard said. “You’re a tragedy, Akua. But the thing is, when you watch a tragic play usually you feel kind of bad for the lead. They’re put through some pretty dark shit. But that’s the great thing here! You are – and I think I might have mentioned this before but whatever – actually pretty awful . So I can watch the tragedy and not feel bad, because you kind of have it coming. It’s the best of both worlds for everyone.”

A pause.

“Except for you,” the Bard helpfully clarified. “You definitely get the worst of both worlds. I thought that went without saying, but sometimes you’re a little slow on the uptake to I figured I’d throw it in just to be sure.”

“Considering I also have to put up with... whatever this is, my situation truly is a tragedy,” Akua mildly replied. “Of course, I-”

She lunged forward, but the Bard was already moving. Not quite quickly enough to avoid the sorceress’ hands around her throat, she thought, but then she tripped on something – the lute, the damned lute – and she was on her knees, swallowing a scream as agony shot up her arm. The Bard patted her shoulder amicably, leaning against the wall. Her lips were wet from the flask she kept pulling at, pulling into a condescending smile.

“This is actually for your own good, sort of,” the Intercessor assured her. “See, you’ve been going down this road since you got out of the cloak and it’s coming to a head. And there’s a bunch of interesting ways it could end, which aren’t unique – you’re not that special, darling – but I’ll admit that some are pretty rare. Only someone’s been paving this road for you, so you’re not actually going to the end of the road: you’re going to be yanked away just before getting there, ‘cause our Cat has a plan for you.”

“You are not nearly as interesting as you seem to believe you are,” Akua hoarsely said. “Or clever. Do you think I am unaware that she let me go ? She did it because it does not matter whether I am at her side or on the other side of the Tyrian Sea. I carry my cage with me wherever I go.”

“This is the sweet spot,” the Bard enthusiastically said. “First you had to lose. Then you questioned your beliefs. Then you pretended you believed what other people do, until you’d been lying long enough you had a hard time telling if you were lying – that one’s a pattern with you, love, you should really work on that.”

“You know nothing,” Akua hissed.

“Sure, sure,” the old monster insincerely said. “Anyways, now you’ve been freed and cut loose but you’re finding you kind of still buy in those things you insist are lies. And it’s chewing you up, ‘cause you’re horrible and for the first time in your life you actually know that. But this is the fun part! Because you’re failing at dying – also a pattern in your life, have you ever considered not failing at everything of import you’ve ever tried? – so you’re not going to be able to take the easy way out. You’re actually going to have to change. Find a path forward you can live with.”

Ah, so that was her game.

“Are you to be my personal angel, Bard?” Akua mockingly smiled. “My guide to the embrace of redemption?”

“Call me Yara. And of course not,” she solemnly said, face serious as a priest. “I would never dare meddle in the story of another Named, I’m a firm believer in the integrity of...”

The Wandering Bard cracked up, laughing until her breath was choked up.

“Oh man,” the Intercessor wheezed. “Good times. Yeah, I’m here you actually end up somewhere. Anywhere, really, I’m not super picky about what happens to you on account of not really caring about you as a person. Cat’s not interested in you having ending, my sad little friend, which does pisses me off a little. Screwing around with fate like that is my shtick, you smarmy one-eyed drunk. Can’t you go original for once?”

“Your only interest is in using me to kill her,” Akua calmly said.

The Bard grinned nastily.

“Which you don’t want,” she said in sing-song voice, “cause you’re in luuuurv.”

The kissy noises that followed were not even the worst part.

“Oh, Catherine, won’t you find a stool to stand on and kiss me,” the Intercessor continued in a high-pitched voice, then lowered it to a gritty one and closed an eye. “I can’t, Akua, even though I’ve been hinting I want to for years. Staring at your tits is definitely part of a grand master plan, and not just something I enjoy doing.”

The Wandering Bard closed her mouth, then turned to meet her eyes and pointed an accusing finger.

“This is you,” she contemptuously said. “This is what you sound like.”

Akua’s jaw clenched.

“Are you quite finished?” she asked.

“Nah, I mostly did that because kicking you in the belly emotionally is kind of fun,” the Bard easily admitted. “The thing is, Akua, this superbly accurate rendition of your innermost thoughts I just treated you to is actually kind of nonsense. It’s what you like to think is happening, because it’s a comfortable idea that you’re tortured and in love and it’s all very tragic and o Heavens, what could have been if only you weren’t just, kind of appalling!”

The old monster thinly smiled, revealing crooked teeth.

“Only what’s actually happening is that she’s fucked with your head pretty thoroughly because she doesn’t believe she can kill the Dead King so she needs someone powerful to step up and contain him,” the Intercessor said. “Used to be she was going to lean on Masego to make a seal on the Hellgate that you’d be stuck maintaining forever, but she’s gotten a little more ambitious since. She figures she can destroy the undead threat with that little Arsenal project she got Hierophant to cook up and then toss Neshamah himself into the Twilight Ways where you’re going to serve as his prison warden forever.”

Akua stilled.

“Yeah,” the Bard said, smile broadening into a grin. “That’s right. She’s going to offer you Larat’s sloppy seconds of a crown and then drop you in Liesse so you can think about what a bad girl you’ve been until... well, pretty much the end of time really. She’s been priming you to accept that role for years , my heart. I’ve been following the whole thing, not because I need to but because it’s like reading a Proceran romance serial where everyone is terrible and pretentious and you don’t even get to fuck. It’s been great , so thanks for that.”

Part of Akua felt like being angry, like accusing the Intercessor lying and being indignant. But she’d spent the months since she had left the starry cave on the outskirts of Wolof running away, and now she was simply... tired. It was true, because Catherine loved the sort of cutting irony that the punishment described here would carry and because this had all been coming for a while, hadn’t it? Maybe not this specifically, but something like it. A long price for her folly. Nothing she’d done since leaving that camp had mattered, had it?

She’d killed and saved lives, she had fought and bargained and now she was finding that the Tower itself was in her grasp – but she did not want to be here. Not in Ater, not in Praes. Not anywhere, really. Akua knew that the Intercessor had not lied because here and now, on her knees with a broken city around her, going to the Twilight Ways sounded restful . It would be a relief, to leave it all and take on a duty that was grim but also for the greater good of Creation. Not something to even the balance against the evil she had done, but something she could take some satisfaction in nonetheless.

Scratching the edges of the itch, but was that not the best she could hope for?

If that offer had come tomorrow, after the Tower all but fell in her grasp and the great lords of this empire all looked up at her with hopes in their eyes like she could save them, save anything at all, then Akua Sahelian knew deep in her bones that she would have accepted it without a second thought. And this terrified her, not because of how deeply Catherine had come to know her – even now that thought was a thrilling anguish – but because the moment had already come to her. Just now. But soon it would fade. Soon the exhaustion would leave her, and with rest the last of this sudden clarity would be gone to never return.

“You didn’t come here to convince me,” Akua quietly said. “The only reason you’re here is to spoil a piece before it all comes together.”

“Got it in one,” the Wandering Bard smiled. “But since it’s the end times, my sweet, I’ll offer you one on the house. The truth is, you don’t owe shit to Catherine Foundling. What did she lose at the Doom, except for soldiers? It’s the foundation of her reign. No, that day gives her no claim on you. It’s the people you murdered that you’re indebted to, and what the fuck do any of them care about the Black Queen?”

She shrugged.

“You probably don’t have much longer left to live,” the Bard said. “Maybe none of us do, if Nessie gets his way. So for once in your life, Akua Sahelian, won’t you actually make a decision?”

The old monster met her eyes.

“Not do what your mother burned into you,” Yara said, “or Praes or Catherine. Something that you think worth doing.”

Her jaw clenched.

“I will not be your puppet,” Akua said.

“That’s the beauty of it,” the Intercessor smiled, raising her flask in a toast. “I’m the only person in this entire empire of the damned that does not need you on strings.”

She drank deep, looking unspeakably satisfied, but Akua knew the look in her eyes. She saw it, sometimes, in her own looking glass.

“How long have you been doing this, Yara?” she quietly asked.

The Intercessor studied her.

“I remember when the first boat touched the beach,” the other woman said. “The sound their boots made on the wet rocks, the way my little brother kept tugging at my tunic in excitement. It wasn’t called Ashur, would not be for many years. The men were not yet called Aenian.”

“What happened?” she whispered.

“The same thing that always happens,” Yara of Nowhere said, “when men with swords are greeted by songs and gifts.”

“You survived,” Akua said.

“ Survived ,” the other woman smiled. “There’s a word that means nothing. You can keep breathing and have most of you waiting in a grave, Akua. If you learn anything from me, learn that. There’s no worth in just existing. You have to make it count.”

“Don’t you?” Akua asked.

The Intercessor smiled.

“We’ll meet again,” she said, “before this is over.”

She raped a knuckle against the bronze wall, a loud ringing sound, and the moment Akua blinked she was gone. Silence lingered in her wake. Eventually, the golden-eyed noble left the reservoir. Below her vultures were waiting, circling. High Lord Jaheem was the one who handed her the letter with the Tower’s seal. They’d had one of their own as well, he told her. Summons to a formal court tomorrow. Offers to allow in household troops for security.

“It is an abdication in all but name, Lady Akua,” High Lord Jaheem said, tone tight with excitement. “Malicia only seeks to preserver her dignity by being properly defeated before the greats of Praes before she surrenders the throne.”

Akua thumb slid across the smooth writing on the parchment, the words that gave a time and a place and a knife. Malicia chose this , she thought. For herself and for me. And still, looking at the letter was the first step up the stairs of the Tower, Akua wondered. It was rope she held, she recognized.

But was it a knot or a noose?

Interlude: A Girl Without A Name

“Fate is a stone made up of your every deed and hung around your neck. If it breaks your back, there is only one soul to blame.”

– Queen Eleanor Fairfax, founder of the Fairfax dynasty

Sitting on the edge of a rooftop, looking down at the long stairs of stone, the Wandering Bard began to tune her lute. This, she knew, was to be the place.

—

Ater was still as a grave.

Vivienne had last seen a city so injured in the wake of First Liesse, as she ghosted through the fallen city avoiding the Fifteenth’s goblin hunters, but the tone of the streets was different here. In Liesse the people had been happy in a bittersweet way, for though the rebellion named after their city had died within its walls the people had been spared a dark fate at the hands of a horde of devils. Here there was no joy, the Princess thought. Ater was huddling in its houses, averting its eyes even as the last ashes of the Battle of the Spiders began to cool. But underneath that fear, Vivienne thought, there was anger. Furious, desperate anger.

The High Seats had massacred thousands to contain the spiders, and while there were many who’d argued much worse would have happened if they hadn’t the opinion was not popular. Not when everyone had a cousin or a daughter or a husband who’d seen the household troops of the great nobles retreat to their barricades in good order and leave the rest of the city to burn. Reports had come overnight from the Princess’ agents that it was Malicia that was being blamed for the spiders themselves, seen as some kind of desperate attempt to destroy the capital’s current favourite: Lady Akua Sahelian.

The Empress in the City, they called her.

There had been no riots since the end of the battle, no mob had taken to the streets as the Legions moved to clear out the last of the giant spiders and seal the openings, but the anger and fear hung in the air like poison. The stalemate in eastern Ater behind the horde of orcs that’d seized the city and the noble armies that’d entered it illegally kept the people behind closed doors, afraid of another battle erupting, but it wouldn’t last. Like all leashed monsters, it would shake its way loose eventually. Someonewas going to pay for the Battle of the Spiders, but the part worrying Vivienne Dartwick was that she wasn’t sure who .

“Gods,” the Squire muttered. “The city looks empty. Not a stray cat out in the streets.”

“Assuming there are any left, after the spiders,” Vivienne drily said.

It was not yet dusk, but on the horizon the sun was dipping low. They would make good time, she thought, as their party had yet to even be hailed as it passed through the ash-strewn streets of the city. Not that many would dare make demands of the force the Princess was leading into Ater: only twenty knights of the Order of the Stolen Crown rode with her, but a cohort of legionaries from the once-Thirteenth marched behind them. Wind picked up suddenly in the distance, making strands of some sort of iridescent cloth spin under the sunlight, and half her men reached for their swords. They had come invited, but most her soldiers were Callowan: no one here put much stock in the Tower’s word.

Arthur Foundling grimaced at her answer, soft-hearted boy that he still was. Catherine had been adamant that he come with her even though Vivienne would have much preferred Indrani as an escort, but the Princess understood why. The pattern of three between him and the Black Knight was a tool that would be very precisely used so the day could be brought to the right ending.

“The Carrion Lord is a monster,” the Squire cursed.

Vivienne cocked an eyebrow.

“Water is wet,” she answered.

The young man had the grace to look somewhat embarrassed. He had an expressive face, young Arthur. That was for the best. Vivienne preferred knowing where she stood with him: the heroes that were most controlled, like the Pilgrim and the White Knight, tended to be dangerous and unpredictable. That expressive face flickered through hesitation, then the steel of determination.

“Did she know, Your Grace?” the Squire asked.

Vivienne kept her eyes from glancing at the broken districts they had left behind her. Ravaged by devils and demons and monsters of all stripes. Did the Black Queen know her teacher was going do to this? Did she allow him to consign thousands of innocents to death for some mad plan? The Princess met his eyes squarely.

“No.”

The dark-haired squire looked guiltily relieved and Vivienne was again reminded of how young he was. Young enough he’d not thought to ask the right question. Would Catherine have intervened, if she knew? Vivienne was not sure, and the thought worried at her. There had been a time where her friend would have executed someone guilty of something like the Battle of the Spiders without a second thought. Cut their head off where they stood. But that’d been before the Everdark, before the war on Keter and the dark choices it had demanded of them all. Catherine sacrificed people more easily than she once had, and it did not eat away at her so much afterwards.

It was something she’d had to learn to keep them all alive, Vivienne reminded herself.

And yet the Princess could not shake the thought. This entire campaign, beginning with the attack on Wolof and then moving through the bruising battle at Kala and now this bloody wrestling match over Ater, it felt... different. It was not being waged like older campaigns. Lives were being sacrificed for Named victories, for schemes that used the very currents of Creation, and there’d been a time where Catherine had balked at such things. If the way she’d been going about it had reminded Vivienne of the Black Knight or Tariq Fleetfoot she would have set the worry aside, but it wasn’t either of those men that came to mind sometimes.

Vivienne Dartwick was one of the few people alive to have been in a band of five with the Wandering Bard, and dreaded that sometimes she saw glimpses of one woman in the other.

“Thank the Gods,” Arthur Foundling murmured. “That would have been difficult.”

An understatement. The boy cheered up soon enough, fears alleviated for now. Lucky him.

“So how did was our invitation secured, anyhow?” the Squire asked. “I’d heard that Dread Empress Malicia wanted the Grand Alliance nowhere near her court.”

And there was the counterargument to Vivienne’s fears, brought out by the same young man who’d raised them. She slowed the gait of her horse and flicked a glance behind them. Arthur followed her gaze, both of them taking in the massive shape of the great undead spider that loomed over the eastern walls.

“I asked her why she chose to raise Tenebrous,” the Princess said. “It seemed wasteful and slow, if she only intended to fight Ranger. But it was never about that fight – she was forcing Malicia’s hand.”

Arthur looked surprised.

“The Empress is hiding in the Tower,” he said. “I doubt a simple undead monster is enough to topple that abomination.”

“Malicia herself is out of reach,” Vivienne agreed, “but what about everyone else she invited?”

That’d been the unspoken threat. If the Grand Alliance were not invited, it would have to knock. And maybe the empress could ride out that storm, but all the other guests had assets that mattered to them in the city. Would they stay and humour Malicia at court while their armies and kin were being trampled? And so Catherine had raised a city-sized spider so that she could then refrain from using it, still getting exactly what she’d wanted all along. That was the answer to Vivienne’s every fear, every worry about her friend and queen growing harsher and more ruthless by the years. She was all those things, yes.

And it worked.

The Princess breathed out, spurring her mount into a trot. It would have to be enough. After the war there would be time to learn kindness again. For all of them, not only Catherine. Until then, she would silence her doubts. And continue to carry into the heart of Praes the two deaths she had been charged to bring, one hidden and one due.

“Let’s hurry up,” Vivienne Dartwick said, looking up at the looming shape of the Tower to the east. “It begins at dusk, and it would not do to be late.”

—

Dusk was coming and with it the end of Alaya’s reign.

The Dread Empress of Praes leaned against the balcony, watching night crawl over her capital. There was no wind here, enchantments prevented it, but high above the perennial storm clouds that haunted the Tower’s heights were roiling. Five years ago she’d been the law of this land: her enemies had been broken, her influence spread to every nook and cranny of the empire. How quickly it had all gone wrong. Now she struggled to find the decision that had begun it all. Letting Akua Sahelian loose to build her weapon instead of having her decapitated head tossed into the Hall of Screams, maybe. Yet the thought was cowardice, the avoidance of a less pleasant truth.

There was no ‘one decision’ to point at because she’d been losing her grasp for years.

Alaya was not yet certain it had been a mistake the doomsday weapon. Had it not been broken during the Folly, had she had more time to lay the foundations abroad... Well, the world would never know. But looking back, it had been foolish of her to go about it the way she had. She should have sat with Wekesa and explained her reasons, asked for his help. She should not have gone behind Amadeus’ back to get it built either, for though it was her right as his empress it had also been a betrayal of their partnership. Too many things between them had been left unsaid over the years, the weight of too many private disappointments coming to crush their backs.

“I became comfortable,” Dread Empress Malicia quietly told the horizon.

And though the Tower could forgive a hundred thousand sins, never once that. No, she had made mistakes. Others had as well, but those were not hers to answer for so what point was there in listing them for the Gods to hear? Ater would need to be rebuilt, and this time Alaya would see it done right. As a capital of a great empire should be, not the horror it had been. Those who had supported her she would reward, those who had betrayed her she would bury, and beyond that there were... affairs to settle. Mistakes had been made on both sides but from them she would salvage what she could.

Though Amadeus’ stroke of madness with the spiders had become a stone around her neck, the city being convinced it was her doing, Alaya held no grudge. Even in the years of their parting, they had never struck direct blows at one another. That hope she cradled still, for all the cold of the night, and though it was not an answer for their years of bitterness it was not nothing either. A foundation, perhaps, for something new. A different understanding of who they were to each other. It would have to be revisited when she reclaimed her throne. If she reclaimed her throne.

This game was now long past certainties.

Ime’s soft footsteps shook her out of her reverie, though she did not turn to look at her spymistress. The other woman came to stand at her side instead, sharing in companiable silence for a moment before the demands of the evening forced an end.

“It is all in place,” Ime said. “They are beginning to arrive.”

Far below, Malicia could make out the distant banners of Takisha Muraqib and her many vassals. Like a river of colourful silk they streamed down the avenue, preparing to enter one of the formal gatehouses that would allow entry into the Tower.

“I might well lose, tonight,” the empress admitted. “It’s been a long time since I was so close to complete defeat, Ime. I cannot help but think it might be one many years in the making.”

A moment of silence.

“It has,” Ime finally said. “You have been making mistakes, Alaya. Embracing schemes more convoluted than they need to be, using the same tactics that put you in a corner to try to get out of it. It got worse after Amadeus left, but the tendency was there even before.”

The spymistress grimaced.

“But you kept winning anyway, so who were we to argue?” she said. “Only the victories became narrower, costlier. And now here we are, at a crossroads where there is so little difference between victory and defeat they might as well be the same thing.”

The words stung, but Alaya did not flinch away from them. She was not in a position to close her eyes.

“There will need to be changes,” Malicia quietly admitted.

Ime nodded.

“It will not be the same, after tonight,” she said. “But I would not have you forget, Alaya of Satus, that you ruled ably for forty years. Longer than any tyrant before you, perhaps longer than any tyrant ever will. Your reign waned, as all crowns do, but that does not lessen the achievement.”

“I’d thought to have eternity, once,” Malicia smiled. “Forty years seems all too few.”

“It has been a worthy reign,” Ime softly replied. “And I am proud of the part I have played in it.”

Alaya’s eyes moved to woman at her side. It had been many years since the two of them had shared a bed, and even when they had there’d been nothing more than attraction behind it. That weighed as much as dust in the wind. But the years themselves, Ime standing at her side, those mattered. More than she had ever spoken out loud, and perhaps that should end. When would she speak the words, if not now?

“You are the one who stayed,” Alaya said. “I will not forget that, Ime. It...”

She hesitated, tongue stumbling over the words.

“I am grateful,” Alaya said. “That you are with me. That you have been for all these years.”

Ime smiled, her face worn with age but her eyes still s bright as they had been in their youth.

“I don’t regret it,” she said. “Even should we lose, I will not regret it.”

Connect bloomed to life as the Dread Empress smiled back at her spymistress, a reassuring pressure against her soul. It was not a lie. Ime would not turn on her, not even now – the loyalty she felt had not lessened. Both of them looked down below, beholding the City of Gates.

“I must go,” Ime finally said. “I’ll see you on the other side, Your Dread Majesty.”

“Gods willing,” Malicia smiled.

And if not? Hang them all. Ime disappeared into the Tower, the sound of her footsteps fading away, and Dread Empress Malicia was left to her thoughts.

Somewhere below her the girl come to take her throne was taking her first steps up the Tower.

—

Akua Sahelian looked up at the dark clouds above, breathing in the evening air.

The stairs beneath her feet were smooth stone, carved into the likeness of twisted and weeping souls. Every step she took was on their backs. The Sentinels stood on the sides in eerily still rows, garbed in wrought steel as their eyes followed her from beneath the black iron masks covering their faces. Akua had been in the Tower before many a time, but this was the first time she had ever been invited to take the Tyrant’s Gate. The dark-skinned sorcerers breathed out and resumed her climb, Kendi trailing behind her like a shadow. He would not be allowed in at her side, but he would accompany her every step of the way until then. It was reassuring weight to have at her back, his hatred. Like a knife at her throat. There was not a sound to be heard save for their boots against the stone, and under unblinking stares they reached the summit.

Before them stood before an intricate puzzle of obsidian, shifting pieces of it inscribed with runes. The gate was tall as three men and half as wide, thrumming with ancient power. The brother of a woman she’d led to her death at the Folly stood by her, eyes hooded.

“It means nothing,” Kendi quietly said. “That is the secret of this place. It is an altar to Below, and you may think yourself the mistress but all you can ever be is the sacrifice.”

He leaned closer.

“Climb and bleed, Akua Sahelian,” he whispered into her ear.

She did not turn to watch him leave, disappear into the deepening shadows. She would meet him again tonight, but the crossing would be hers alone.

“I come summoned by the Tyrant,” Akua Sahelian called out, voice calm. “Gatekeeper, grant me entrance.”

The obsidian pieces shivered, twisting and turning as if it were living flesh. A terrible face emerged, its great and burning eyes the ancient runes for order, and the ancient demon that Dread Emperor Sinister himself had bound to the gate began to laugh. The sound was like rust swallowing a precious thing, the death rattle of a hundred babes.

“You,” the demon said, “are of the master’s blood.”

“True to it, my mother liked to say,” Akua replied.

The old abomination laughed again. Every instance was a fresh horror.

“I grant you entrance, Akua Sahelian,” the demon said.

She shivered. The face shattered, breaking apart in tiles of obsidian, and locks unseen began to open one after another. The gate slowly opened, revealing a floor of dark marble leading into an antechamber. Akua stepped through the threshold, eyes growing accustomed to the gloom, and as the gate closed behind her she found a lone Sentinel waiting for her. They stood at the edge of the high-ceilinged room beyond the antechamber, not far from mosaics enchanted with curses so hateful that she could almost taste the emotion in the air. Akua approached, cocking an eyebrow at the soldier.

“A lone soul to guide me up the Tower,” she said. “My own personal psychopomp, is it?”

She offered the Sentinel a smile.

“Elegant to the end, Malicia,” she said. “Shall we?”

The Sentinel nodded. Oh? Unusually expressive of it. They led the way thought the large room and up the spiralling stairs, not that Akua found it hard to keep up. She ran her finger against the scaled railings, the sculpted serpents shivering at her touch. The sorcery in the stone was older than Procer, but it purred maliciously at her touch.

“So how did you end up chosen for this, anyway?” Akua idly asked. “Picked the short straw?”

An amusing thought, a pack of eerily Silent sentinels staring at each other through the iron masks while drawing from another’s hands.

“I volunteered.”

The golden-eyed sorcerers almost missed a step. A man’s voice, that. She could make out as much even though the mask. And a very unusual Sentinel indeed.

“Alas, if you intended to seduce me then I must warn you that my heart has already been taken,” she easily said. “It should be somewhere north of Vale, assuming a wight didn’t eat it.”

The Sentinel did not betray amusement, thought it was hard to tell through that armour.

“I will have to live with the disappointment,” the Sentinel replied.

Akua’s fingers clenched. No, that wasn’t a Sentinel at all. The same sorceries that made them so unflinchingly loyal to whoever held the Tower did not allow for anything as delicate as a sense of humour to remain. Her steps stuttered, stopped. She laid a hand on the railing.

“Who are you?” she coldly asked.

His hand went up, reaching for the top of the helmet. There was a little click, then another, and with the deft fingers the man took off the iron mask. Below were pale green eyes she had seen before, though the face around them had aged since she last saw them.

“Akua Sahelian,” the Carrion Lord said. “We are overdue a conversation.”

A flash of rage seized her by the throat, clenched her muscles.

“We have more than that overdue,” she snarled.

Sorcery came to her harsh and eager. The fireball she tossed at his face was cut through – a single smooth movement from draw to strike – but she’d known it would be. It had bought her the moment she needed to sink her hooks into the railing through her hand, part of the stone smoothly coiling around arm as a fanged head emerged behind the Carrion Lord and struck. He parried it somehow, reflexes inhuman even without a Name, but it was a sword against stone. The steel broke, and when he avoided the snakes’ second attack the Duni found that the wall behind him had turned into a nest of snakes. The Tower sought her commands hungrily, like a hound starved of affection.

The snakes in the wall caught the Carrion Lord’s limbs, and as he struggled to rip himself free Akua coldly smiled.

“ Rip ,” she ordered in Mthethwa.

The snake come from the railing hit the side of the armoured man like a scorpion bolt, fangs sinking in and wrenching out an entire armour plate as well as chunk of the aketon beneath. The Carrion Lord’s jaw clenched in pain but that was only a start. Releasing the railing, Akua strode half a step and sunk her knife deep under his ribs. In the stomach. The man gasped and she felt a spurt of satisfaction.

“I could have aimed for the heart or the lungs,” Akua told him, tone even, “but you don’t get to die that quickly.”

She twisted the knife cruelly before ripping it out, enjoying the way his face drew tight.

“Did you think I’d forgotten my father’s death?” she harshly said. “The goblins might have pulled the triggers, but the kill was yours from beginning to end.”

Feeling like she wanted to rip out his throat with her own teeth, she stabbed him in the stomach again and ripped it free in a spray of blood.

“You are no longer under Catherine’s protection, you old fool,” she hissed. “And I am no longer at her side. Did you really think that without her in the way there was anything stopping me from killing you?”

To her utter fury, the man hacked out a wet laugh.

“No,” the Carrion Lord said, lips flecked with red. “But I knew you’d go for the slow death.”

“And what does that give you?” she mocked.

“Until I bleed out,” the green-eyed man replied, “to convince you to heal me.”

Akua blinked at him, silenced by surprise and utter disbelief.

“Mother always said,” she finally replied, “that you were just as mad as your predecessors. Just better at hiding it.”

The Carrion Lord slumped down against the wall, armoured boot slipping against the stone with an ungainly sound. He was, she noted, positioning himself so he would bleed out more slowly. A methodical lunatic to the end.

“This is the Tower,” the Carrion Lord said. “Where are the mad to go, if not here?”

He looked amused. Akua sliced him across the face for it, deep through the nose and both cheekbones.

“I’ve always used torturers instead of my own hands,” the golden-eyed mage said. “But for you, Amadeus of the Green Stretch, I will make an exception.”

And maybe his screams would drown out the sound the bolts had made when the volley had pierced through Papa’s flesh. A thump, she thought. Almost like biting into an apple. She cut him again, stabbing deep into his cheek until she felt bone.

“I imagine you’ll get practice enough,” the Carrion Lord rasped, “as Dread Empress.”

She laughed in his face.

“Is that what this is all for?” Akua said. “You cower at the prospect of my taking the Tower?”

What a stupid way to die, she thought. He chuckled wetly, tongue flicking across his lips but only spreading the red.

“So which was it the Bard pushed you towards?” he asked.

Her eyes narrowed.

“She wants me to take the throne,” Akua said after hesitating a moment. “I think. But as a Dread Empress Benevolent the Second.”

Dread Emperor Benevolent, the first and only hero to have ever reigned over Praes. At war with over half the realm from the moment of his coronation to the last gasp of his very grim end. There were few tyrants who could boast of having beaten Dread Empress Massacre at her namesake, and Benevolent was hallowed even among those. He’d come terrifyingly close enough to winning that he had been purged from every known record, demons of Absence being put to work to tie up loose ends. Only private libraries like those of the Vault still had mentions of him.

“Always a game behind the game with her,” the Carrion Lord said. “We haven’t seen the end of it.”

“You have,” Akua smiled.

His face had grown even paler. The internal bleeding must have been excruciatingly painful, she thought with satisfaction. May at least one of the screams he was swallowing make it to the feet of the Gods Below, so that they might pass it on to Dumisai of Aksum as his daughter’s funerary gift.

“Maybe,” he shrugged, hacking a cough after. “But that matters little. I am an instrument. If purpose is served, the outcome is acceptable. It’s you that concerns me now.”

“Oh?” Akua smiled. “How novel. Won’t you Speak to me, Carrion Lord? Ask me to knife my hand again. See what happens.”

She stuck him in the stomach again, just because she could. He gasped in pain.

“Have you decided I am not fit for the Tower?” she mocked.

He laughed.

“Worse,” the man said. “I put the nobles of the Wasteland to the test, Sahelian. Only one passed.”

Even though the implication was obvious, the sheer absurdity of what he’d said meant it took her a beat to realize. It was unthinkable. His hatred of the nobility was a keystone of his reputation, his legend. It would have been like Catherine staying sober for a month, or Vivienne Dartwick not being a disappointment in every single way she could be. Still, the sentence had her lips quirking into an unpleasant smile.

“My, but that must sting,” Akua purred. “Though if this was meant to silence me, I must say-”

“Do you want to rule Praes?” the Carrion Lord bluntly cut in.

She blinked. Hesitated.

“What is your game, Duni?” Akua finally asked.

“You could,” he said. “Maybe even well. I don’t like it, wouldn’t like what you would do with it. But you could.”

“Are you offering me your support?” she asked, voice thick with disbelief.

At least the blood loss was making him entertaining. Akua did hate a humorless bleeder.

“You remind me of Alaya,” the Carrion Lord noted. “When we were young. The best of her, and some of the worst. And there are rules. So you could claim it.”

“And what would that have to do with you?” Akua scorned.

“Is it worth keeping?”

She paused, studied him through narrowed eyes.

“You are trying to talk me out of taking the throne,” Akua said.

It was the best reason she’d heard to climb the Tower so far.

“Heh,” the man said. “No. I want more than that. But this first. You’ve been out of the cage, now. Seen the world. The Dread Empire of Praes, the way it is, is it worth keeping?”

Akua’s lips tightened. If it were, would she be so horrified at the thought of being forced to rule it?

“What do you want from me, Carrion Lord?”

“Nothing,” the man laughed, his green eyes bloodshot. “I already know your answer. Wouldn’t have passed otherwise. You see it now, don’t you? The sickness .”

“And you think yourself the man to excise it?” she laughed. “Oh, the cold man with the hard hand here to teach us his better ways. Praes is not a young widow looking for excitement, Carrion Lord. There is no appetite for Dread Emperor Amadeus.”

“It’s not about me,” the dying man said. “Or you. Look around, Sahelian. Why is this still standing ?”

“There is nothing else,” Akua said.

“Maledicta the Second,” he said. “After her assassination-”

“Haider’s Reign,” she frowned.

“The Throneless Years,” he retorted.

Both referred to the same two decades after Maledicta II’s death, though his term was the one used by the Tower’s formal chroniclers.

“You want to change Callow for Keter,” she realized.

She was reluctantly impressed by the boldness.

“No,” he coughed. “Not just that. It ended with Vindictive the First. It shouldn’t have.”

Akua breathed in sharply.

“That would not be an empire,” she said.

The man offered a sharp, bloody smile that split his face in two.

“No,” he agreed. “It wouldn’t be.”

“You talk in circles,” Akua said. “What is it you want , Carrion Lord?”

He moved and she almost slashed him against, but he didn’t even have his sword in hand. It was further down the steps. Instead he was pawing at his belt with armoured fingers, and what he presented her he was holding between his thumb and his forefinger. Akua stilled.

“Take it,” he said.

“This is a trap,” she replied.

“The trap is in not giving it to you,” he rasped. “I see that now.”

He coughed out a laugh, red trailing his face, but his eyes were clear.

“I always thought it’d be me,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch confessed. “That it was what I was for. But that was arrogance, Alaya was right. I never loved this place enough to have the right. It has to be you.”

“You despise me,” Akua said.

“Yes,” he smiled. “But it has to be you. Because you passed. Because it’s in your blood. The original murder, Sahelian, isn’t that your family’s favourite boast? You began it all.”

She snatched it out of his fingers, as if expecting to be bit, but there was nothing. No trap, no trick.

“And that’s all it takes?” Akua asked.

“A choice,” the Carrion Lord rasped. “What more could you need? It’s the only true gift the Gods gave us.”

“You don’t know which one I’ll make,” she said.

He grinned, blood-streaked and nasty to the bone.

“ Mile thaman Sahelian ,” the Carrion Lord mocked.

Her fingers clenched.

“Were you not going to convince me to heal you?” she sweetly asked.

He shrugged.

“Win some,” he began, “lose-”

She stuck the knife back in his belly.

“There,” Akua hissed. “You’ll bleed out slower, and that’s the only mercy you’ll ever have of me.”

Let him die here at the bottom of the Tower, forever reaching beyond his grasp. She kicked him away and he fell down a few stairs. She breathed out, looked down at the small thing still in the palm of her hand. She closed the fingers, breathed out and settled herself. She rose, to the distant sound of a dying man whistling the tune to an old song.

It was, Akua realized as her blood ran cold, The Tyranny of the Sun .

—

Breaking into the Tower had been shockingly easy.

Archer had felt a little cheated, even though it stood that things should be pretty much stacked in their favour. The three of them had Scribe guiding them for one – well, arguably this was about them escorting Scribe but eh – and the great difficulty in accessing the Tower from underground was gone. The giant spiders lurking in the tunnels were, you know, already topside in dead. Which meant the tunnels were moist and stinky but not actually all that dangerous and they’d made it to what Scribe claimed to be the lowest levels of the Tower, the ‘underpinnings’, without much trouble.

“The haven’t been many guards,” Cocky said.

Which was all well and good to say, when she hadn’t been doing any of the killing. That’d been Indrani and Alexis, yeah, as usual doing the grunt work.

“The Tower is as a city within the city,” Scribe replied. “Most parts of it are like small villages that rule themselves with only occasional intervention from the tyrant. I’ve had us skimming the edge of where the latrine men live. They post few guards, and the Sentinels are spread too thin to plug the gaps as they usually would.”

“I’m not complaining,” Alexis grunted. “Hopefully it’ll be just as easy getting to this Ime.”

“We’ve been lucky,” Scribe said. “She’d be much harder to get at if she hadn’t gone to the underpinnings.”

It was nice of the Huntress not to be the kind of heroine who asked too many questions when Catherine sent you to capture, interrogate an execute the leader of the Eyes of the Empire but unfortunate since Indrani did actually have questions about that. Now she was going to have to ask them herself, like an asshole.

“Do we know why she’s down here?” Archer asked.

The corridor ahead of them was empty, as the last two had been. They were large, windy and winding things that snaked towards a distant centre. The grounds above which there was an actual giant tower, presumably. The Tower was kind of like a tree, the ‘roots’ that were the underpinnings actually spreading out much further than the structure stood.

“There has been activity from the Eyes down here over the last two days,” Scribe said. “Presumably Malicia is preparing something for her guests upstairs.”

Which was presumably one of the reasons their buddy Ime was going to be interrogated before the execution. Might be useful to know what Malicia was up to except for going crazy and pissing everyone off. They switched corridors twice before finally running into people, which happened to be a pair unarmed messengers. Alexis was a softie so she knocked hers out, but Indrani wasn’t in the business of letting liabilities get up. Hers wouldn’t. They were close to the centre, Scribe told them, and it checked out: moments later they ran into the first checkpoint manned by Sentinels. Only ten of the, though, so before long the four of them were wiping their blades. and moving on.

Another two checkpoints with Sentinels, but after that it was only Eyes manning the gates and they honestly weren’t much to write home about. Like, even Cocky could handle them up close and in Indrani’s humble opinions there were some trouts in the Hwaerte that would give the Concocter trouble in hand-to-hand.

“It’s unusual,” Scribe noted. “It should be Sentinels handling this, not Eyes. Ime is trying to keep something quiet.”

“Quiet from who?” Indrani frowned. “The Sentinels answer only to the Empress, right? They’re supposed to be all brainwashed to be loyal.”

“Exactly,” Scribe replied, sounding fascinated. “So what is it that she’s trying to hide from Malicia? And more importantly for who ?”

There wasn’t time to stop and interrogate a prisoner even if they took one, since if they stopped pushing in there was a decent chance someone would find one of the older corpses and send a warning ahead, so they pressed on urgently. It went pretty smoothly until they hit a real blockade with crossbowmen and a few legionaries – unmarked, so they were likely Eyes too – that made it a proper fight. Alexis took a cut on her face and Indrani had to ask for a healing salve for her hand after she made a mage eat his own fireball. Hilarious, but she wasn’t made of fingers. Unlike that fucking toucan yesterday, there was an image that’d stay with her for a while.

Behind the blockade Scribe had told them there was one of the main water tunnels for the Tower, but the large room the entered past the corpses had a lot more than water in it. It also had what was at least a thousand magically sealed barrels, not a single of which was stacked over an other. There were even little palisades between sections: whoever had put these there had been real careful about it. That smelled of danger to Indrani, but she didn’t get to spend much time thinking on it because there was also an old woman inside the room and Scribe was looking all pleased.

“Just a guess,” Indrani called out, “but would you happen to be Ime?”

The old lady was Soninke and pretty clearly getting long in the tooth, but she was keeping it tight. Probably highborn, they tended to age better than most out in the Wasteland. The older woman glanced at her and then sighed.

“And I take it you three are the Ranger’s pupils,” she said before her eyes moved to the fourth among them. “Scribe, I see you’ve stopped clutching the Black Queen’s skirts long enough to make act of presence. We’re all very grateful, I’m sure.”

“I might clutch them,” Scribe mildly replied, “but at least, unlike some, I can claim never to have been under my patroness’ skirts.”

“Savage,” Indrani appreciatively said.

On the other hand, while Malicia was terrible and kind of evil but she was also ridiculously good looking so, you know, respect.

“I suppose it is harder to get into pants,” Ime smiled pleasantly. “Though certainly not for lack of trying.”

Indrani shared a look with Cocky, who was also smothering a grin. It wasn’t often they got to hear the old guard air their dirty laundry, this was to be savoured. Only, Gods forgive her, Archer was actually kind of in charge here and they had a mission to get done. Once they nabbed Ime and got her singing, they’d finally have an idea of what the Hells was going on here on top of neatly ensuring Malicia wasn’t going to see Vivienne coming. There was a reason they’d brought Scribe here: once the current mistress of the Eyes in Praes had gone to join her agents Below, the old one could step back into the role.

And it some of the officers hesitated, well, that was why they’d brought knives.

“It genuinely breaks my heart to stop this,” Indrani told them, “but we’re going to have to wrap this up. Ime, congratulations, you have been taken prisoner. Please don’t resist, we’re trying to wean Alexis off kicking people and it only encourages her.”

“She’s lying,” Alexis flatly said. “They’re not actually trying.”

“Charming,” Ime drily replied.

Scribe suddenly hummed, stepping back from a barrel.

“These are goblin-made,” she said. “Straight from the Eyries. What is it you’re doing down here, Ime?”

“You don’t know,” the old woman mused. “Interesting. So why are you here, if not to interrupt me?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Scribe said. “It’s finished.”

There was a long moment of silence as the two women stared each other down. Indrani awkwardly cleared her throat to get their attention and was entirely ignored.

“You’re here for me,” Ime quietly said, “because you’re trying to blind us. You smuggled something into the Tower you’re afraid I’ll catch.”

“You’re losing your touch,” Scribe smiled.

“That’s enough of that,” Archer sharply said, baring her blades. “We’re done here. Scribe, shut your mouth and Ime-”

“Assassin,” Ime hissed out. “You brought Assassin in here. You’re trying to kill Malicia.”

Fuck, that wasn’t great. She put a spring to her step even as Ime began to move away, past rows of barrel and close to the large water-filled tunnel flowing behind them.

“I’m sorry about this,” Indrani said, halfway meaning it.

“I’m not,” Ime said, then glanced at Scribe. “Do you think you’re the only one who can bargain with devils?”

Oh boy, that did not sound – Archer ducked, the arrow brushing through her air. On a balcony above, the Ranger nocked a second arrow before leaping down. She landed at Ime’s side, looking amused.

“Devils, are we?” the Lady asked. “Ime, you’re getting rude in your old age.”

“Well, we can’t all be born ageless bitches,” the spymistress flatly replied.

Cocky swallowed a laugh behind her.

“I’m calling in my marker from helping Grem get his letters out,” Ime continued. “I need to get out of here.”

“I needed to be here for the barrels anyway,” Ranger shrugged. “Go ahead.”

“That’s not happening,” Indrani flatly said.

Behind her, Alexis nocked an arrow. Tension rose.

“Hey Scribe,” Ime called out.

The villainess in question stared at the other spymistress.

“Yes?” she reluctantly.

Ime glanced at Ranger, then at the three of them.

“Mine’s bigger,” she said, and broke into a run.

It went downhill from there.

—

The twenty-fourth level of the Tower was large enough a scream would echo, the Warlord thought.

It was a striking place, as befitting of the hall that hosted the imperial court. Black marble walls rose tall, touched by plume of colours: makeshift pillars of cloth hanging from the ceiling in red, green and gold. The floor beneath their feet was a great mosaic depicting the history of Praes. It went as far back as Subira Sahelian murdering the founder Dread Empress Maleficent in order to become Dread Emperor Sinister and stretched out to events as recent as Wekesa the Warlock immolating Thalassina – the only event of Malicia’s reign depicted at all. Everywhere jewels were set in walls and furniture while gold veins dripped down stone as gilded ornaments.

The two orcs at his side, Oghuz the Lame and Hegvor Allspeak, looked intimated by the luxury. There were benches here set with enough rubies to feed either of their clans for a year. And some of the nobles wore on them more wealth than any of them would spend in a lifetime: enchanted cloths that looked like shadows, rings made entirely of rubies and even a woman in full dragonscale armour.

“There is nothing to be impressed of,” Hakram spoke in Kharsum. “What is there here that was not built on our backs?”

“Ha,” Chief Hegvor snorted. “Well said.”

“Should have taken the court instead of the camps, Deadhand,” Oghuz grinned, baring fangs at noble who’d come a little too close. “More loot here and fewer swords to defend it.”

Few of the nobles had dared approach to talk since they had come, and none since a young lady vassal to Okoro had tried to needle Oghuz and gotten an eye ripped out for it. High Lady Abreha had visited before, courteous for all that she might well be their foe now, but High Lady Wither was keeping to another part of the hall. They’d traded nods but nothing else. Nothing more was needed, in Hakram’s opinion. They were allies, not comrades.

“When is Malicia meant to come out, anyway?” Hegvor asked.

“When everyone’s here,” the Warlord grunted. “She’s taking her time, reminding everyone she’s important.”

“Can’t be many people left,” Oghuz opined. “The Callowan princess was invited into the back just now, and she was one of the last to arrive.”

Vivienne had not stopped to talk, but Hakram hadn’t expected her to. She... would not take the choice he had made up north well, he knew. Perhaps worse than Catherine would, though that might be wishful thinking on his part. Either way he’d known that she’d avoid him beyond the necessary until there was opportunity for them to speak in private. She preferred to vent her anger away from prying eyes.

“Company,” Hegvor said.

The Warlord followed her gaze, finding an old companion at the end of it. Akua Sahelian was dressed simply, for a noble, but that was a statement of power too: she needed nothing more than dress in white and gold to draw the eye. It was easy to forget how powerful a mage she’d been, but now it was impossible to ignore: even from across the room, her power filled the air. Behind her trailed a dark-skinned man with a short beard and golden earrings. Mage too, by the robes. Mfuasa? Might be someone High Lord Sargon had sent to spy on her. The hall did not quiet when Akua came to stand before him, but eyes followed. They were of interest. They were watched.

“Warlord.”

Hakram considered her. The face was a mask, as it always ways, but below that he smelled... unease. Something was unsettling her, and for once it was not him. What kind of trouble had she found, that she might then find him preferable to it?

“And what am I to call you, Akua Sahelian?” he asked.

The mfuasa at her side smiled.

“The name is enough,” the golden-eyed noble said. “It has been some time, Deadhand. We stand on grounds much changed.”

“The trick is to change with them,” he gravelled.

He stepped forward, she to the side. It was almost as if they were to begin a walk together, an illusion of companionship.

“Have you?” she asked.

Hakram studied her a moment. She seemed sincere . Not it was his turn to be unsettled.

“More than I thought I would,” he admitted.

A pause.

“You?”

“I,” Akua Sahelian, “am trying to decide.”

“That was always your trouble, Sahelian,” Hakram gravelled. “Too much red where the thinking should be. Too much thinking where the red should be.”

She grimaced.

“I’ve suffered many a skewering this week,” she said, “but not one of you has had the decency to at least stab me as well to distract from the ignominy.”

His gaze sharpened.

“Visitors?”

“An old friend,” Akua easily said. “The one who talks too much. And another since, whom I left bleeding to death in the stairs.”

Hakram clicked his tongue.

“You know better,” he said. “Unless you take the head...”

She smiled.

“Then I will get to kill him twice,” the sorceress said. “Hardly an imposition.”

The Warlord was more impressed that the Carrion Lord has survived a run-in with that one after killing her father than worried about his accomplice’s survival. Like as not, he’d planned for it. The man was the kind of clever that thought receiving stab wounds was an acceptable step in a plan, which was by far the stupidest kind of clever.

“And what did our old friend want?” he asked.

A long silence.

“I am less sure,” Akua admitted, “the more I think of it.”

That was the curse of facing the Intercessor, wasn’t it? Your reaction to her prodding might well be part of her plan in the first place. It was like facing an oracle out to get you.

“That tends to be the way with her,” the Warlord conceded.

She glanced at him, seemingly amused.

“And if I ventured to ask you for advice, Hakram Deadhand?” Akua said.

He considered that a moment and chose honesty.

“I don’t like you,” the Warlord said.

“It’s actually rather refreshing,” she admitted, “for someone to say to my face.”

“I don’t like you,” Hakram repeated, “but I did respect you, once.”

“No longer?” she asked, sounding more curious than offended.

“When you were the Diabolist, you were terrible,” he said. “But you were truer to yourself than most people ever are. That, if not the deeds of your hands, was worthy of respect.”

She chuckled.

“You’ve always had a knack for surprising me,” Akua said.

He snorted, dismissive. She’d just never learned what to expect from him.

“She only has the power we give her,” the Warlord said. “That’s her trick. Be who you are, Sahelian. Right or wrong, at least it will be true.”

Her face closed, eyes looking away. The silence stretched out.

“I never liked you either,” Akua confessed. “It was the loyalty as much as the lack of ambition. There was never a lever to pull with you, so I could never be comfortable.”

“And yet here were are,” the Warlord said.

“Here we are,” Akua Sahelian softly agreed.

She breathed out shallowly.

“Do you know what the difference is,” she asked, “between a knot and a noose?”

He laughed, to her visible surprise – which in turn surprised him. He’d thought she was making a reference.

“It’s the setup of an old joke in Kharsum,” Hakram told her. “Because the words are the same, only with a suffix added.”

She cocked an eyebrow.

“So what is the difference?” she asked.

“They’re the same thing,” the Warlord told her, “until there’s a corpse.”

Her face was a blank mask, for a moment, until to his utter surprise and that of most the hall she burst out laughing. Long, throaty and loud. She laughed and laughed, until she trailed of into giggled as she held her ribs loosely.

“Until there’s a corpse,” she repeated, grinning and shaking her head.

Unsure what had set her off, he settled for eyeing her warily instead.

“I thank you for the advice, Hakram Deadhand,” Akua said.

“Found what you were looking for?”

She flexed her palm, smiling.

“Close enough. Fare well, Hakram.”

Het met her eyes. Moments passed.

“And you, Akua,” he replied.

She left, still shaking her head and smiling. Her attendant, who she’d never introduced, waved a cheeky goodbye. The Warlord flexed his dead hand, wondering if he’d just made a mistake. Whatever the truth of it, though, it was now too late. Events were in motion, even those that had nothing to do with the sorceress. From the corner of his eye he saw that a warrior with a painted shield had come from below to speak to the chief of the Split Tree Clan in a low tone before being dismissed. The Warlord glanced at his adviser, who came closer. Hegvor leaned his way so she could whisper into his ear with her lips hidden from sight.

“We have word,” she said. “We’ve taken everything we need out.”

Hakram nodded, satisfied. On schedule.

“And our way out?”

“Waiting for the signal,” she said.

Good. Everything was in place, then.

There was nothing left but seeing how the dice fell.

—

Arthur wasn’t sure what in the Heavens he was doing here. A trophy hero, maybe? No, that thought was unkind to the Princess and she’d done nothing to deserve that. The Woe had their reputation, but he’d never seen Princess Vivienne be anything but roughly decent. Even Grandmaster Talbot spoke well of her, and when wariness was in order it was not tinted with the kind of fear that the Black Queen commanded. No, the Princess earned rue instead. Arthur would not be surprised if the barracks tale of the Thief having stolen every pair of shoe Brandon Talbot owned after he misspoke in court were actually true.

“I’d expected Queen Catherine to attend personally,” Dread Empress Malicia said. “One must wonder what preceding claim there might be on her time.”

The Squire had heard the empress was the most beautiful woman in the world and he supposed she was graceful enough, but it was a kind of put-together that put him ill at ease. Like a man too handsome and well-groomed, it hinted at artifice or vanity. Princess Vivienne had taken it in stride, though, and looked calm as a pond on a windless day.

“She likes to delegate minor affairs to me,” the Princess mildly said. “I’m sure you won’t take offence.”

It wasn’t a question. While those two continued to spar, Arthur let his eyes and attention wander. There were few people in the antechamber where they had been invited by the servants and fewer still who talked. The Princess had been allowed two guard compared to the twenty Sentinels in here, and to match Arthur himself an old foe had been summoned. The Black Knight loomed so tall he had to wonder how she’d even been able to enter the room, her heavy plate dark as pitch and polished like a mirror. The warhammer whose head rested on the ground was almost as tall as a man, and Arthur knew from experience that to take a blow from it without Name strength was to lose whatever limb was struck. She’d plowed through a line of legionaries like they were kindling back in Wolof, never even noticing that they fought back.

While their rulers talked, the two of them stood to the side like ornaments. He’d felt the Black Knight’s gaze on him several times and returned the favour when it moved away. He could not help it. Why is it that Nim Mardottir is your enemy, Squire? The Carrion Lord’s words were like a fly nipping at his neck. The man had been playing a game, pretending they were not at war and the Black Knight not Malicia’s greatest servant, and yet the hesitation remained. Because Arthur had never really questioned that he was going to kill the Black Knight before this all ended, and that admission shook him. It’d just been a given. He was the Squire and she the Black Knight.

What other way could it end?

Only now, without violence between them, he was standing next to her and noticing things. That she seemed as bored with the talk as he, that she liked to drum her fingers against the grip of her warhammer. Small, meaningless things. But it made her less a force of nature, of Evil, and more a woman in black armour. Maybe she was both, Arthur thought. Maybe that made it even worse, that she’d had a choice and still made this one, but the words felt weak. The resolve behind them was fragile and Arthur Foundling had not become a squire so that he would grown into the kind of knight that swung a sword weighed down with doubt.

So he asked.

“Were you in the streets, when the spiders came?”

His voice was quiet, so that the two rulers by them would not be drawn into it, but the Black Knight heard him. her armoured head moved to study him in silence. After a moment, she nodded.

“I looked for you,” the Squire admitted.

“I know,” the Black Knight replied. “Our pattern is not yet finished.”

So she knew, he thought with surprise. He wondered what it must be like, knowing that the very currents of fate had worn into Creation the promise of your death. Looking to the horizon and seeing only darkness ahead. It must feel, Arthur Foundling thought, a little like being alone on a shore and knowing nothing you could do would change anything. That the man you loved would still be dead even if you swung your sword until the Last Dusk. It must have had the bitter taste of futility to it.

“I wish it didn’t have to be this way,” the Squire said and found he meant it. “That it could be... fair.”

“Fair is not what we bargained for, Squire,” the Black Knight said. “We took on the mantle knowing there would be days when we taste blood, when ashes sift through our fingers. My people say that on the day we are born, out death is born as well. We run towards it, it runs towards us, and the most we can take from life is to steal a march on it before we meet.”

She sounded calm. Serene, almost, and Arthur felt a surge of disgust clog his throat. Not for her but for him. Nim Mardottir was the one with the sword hanging above her head, and yet he was the one babbling like a sentimental child. It was shameful.

“I’d thought you would hate me,” Arthur quietly said. “I almost wish you would.”

The Black Knight chuckled.

“Black and white,” she said. “That’s always been the game. Hate it or laud it, nothing changes. So why burden yourself with the hate?”

He swallowed drily. There was an answer in him, but he did not know how to voice it. Could not, and suddenly he realized there was a silence in the hall. For a moment he feared that their talk her interrupted that of their rulers, but when he looked it was not there that their attention laid. Someone had come up stairs in the back of the antechamber and was forcing their way through the Sentinels. It was an old woman, dark-skinned. Princess Vivienne went still.

“Assassin,” the old woman called out. “Assassin is here, Malicia. He’s coming for-”

One of the Sentinels behind the empress moved jerkily, blade coming out as the Callowan guards shouted in alarm and reached for their swords. Only the killer was too fast, too smooth, and even as Malicia’s eyes widened and she began to turn the point of the steel touched her back – only for a great hammer to smash through it, shattering the blade.

“Behind me, Your Dread Majesty,” the Black Knight said, moving the shaken empress.

The Assassin, still faceless and garbed as a Sentinel, immediately began attacking again.

“ Treachery ,” the Princess called out as she drew her own sword. “They’re attacking us. Squire, face the Black Knight.”

Heart in his throat, Arthur drew his sword. Was this it, then? Their ending. The orphan was not a fucking fool. He’d been sent here so that he could kill the Black Knight and clear the way for the assassin his own queen must have sent.

“Why?” he heard the empress ask her champion. “You-”

“I cannot tolerate the way of the world,” the Black Knight answered, sounding as if she was smiling. “So I must change it. I will not compromise who I am.”

It was like a punch in the gut. Why is it that Nim Mardottir is your enemy, Squire? Gods, was that who he was? The kind of knight he was going to be?

“No,” Arthur Foundling answered, biting down on his indignation. “ No .”

He moved, Name pulsing, and struck. The blade ripped through the Assassin’s hand as he jerked in surprise. The killer drew back to flee, Sentinels converging on them all as the Princess watched them all with cold eyes. But it was the Black Knight’s gaze he met, finding the silent question it held.

“Not black and white,” the Squire answered. “Right and wrong.”

It was just words, but they burned in him. Scoured his veins clean, cleared his gaze. It felt like he could breathe again, stand straight. It would stay with him, the answer. He would carry it with him wherever he went, sword in hand if he must. Because it wasn’t a game, never had been, and if for just a moment people could believe that the graveyard might stop devouring the world.

“Right and wrong,” the Black Knight quietly repeated.

And as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, facing the assassin, the Knight Errant finally found he could smile.

—

The Lady had healed up but so had they.

Scribe disappeared early, which was for the best because she’d only get in the way. Yesterday it’d been half a game, at least until the end, but today there was nothing playful about it. There was no tide of devils to put in between, no spare breath to be squeezed out as the world whirled around them. Down here there was only the stone and the water and barrels around them.

That and the years of poison they’d brought in with them.

“He was still wearing those fucking bells when he died,” the Silver Huntress snarled. “Did you know that? Did you even care enough to ask?”

Her spear skidded along the Lady’s blade, the tip exploding with Light, but she’d already shown that trick before. Creation narrowed to an edge as Ranger cut through the burst of Light with her other sword, flipping her grip to ram the pommel into Alexis’ mouth. Teeth broke and the redhead rocked back, might have gotten her throat cut if Indrani didn’t leap over a barrel to stab at the Lady’s back. Her wrist was caught and Ranger was angling to spin and tossed her into the water when Indrani leaned forward to ram their foreheads together, buying just enough room not to get eviscerated when the Lady’s blade came up towards her belly.

She was still thrown, rolling on the stone until she got to her feet. Alexis has spat out blood and teeth, her spear alight in silver as she circled around a pack of barrels to bring the fight to larger grounds. Good call. Space was better for them than Ranger, especially when Cocky was cooking up surprises behind them. A glance told Indrani she’d opened a barrel with a knife and was studying the contents with wide eyes. Archer cleared her throat, trying to draw her attention so she’d actually toss the concoctions she’d prepared for this fight, but she was ignored.

“John had promise,” the Lady calmly said. “He was sharpening. If he’d stayed a few more years instead of run off to play the hero against my instructions, he would still be alive.”

“Of course he ran off,” Alexis snarled. “You fucking hammered into his head that he wasn’t as good as the rest of us, that he needed to prove himself. If it hadn’t been the Liesse Rebellion, it would have been any other of a dozen wars. And he would have died in all of them.”

Ranger seemed amused.

“If you were so concerned, why did you not accompany Indrani when she went to fetch him?” she asked.

The Huntress’ answer was inarticulate rage, leaping forward over a barrel instead of completing a circle. Indrani cursed under her breath, hurrying up. Alexis had gotten baited and paid for it, Ranger on her before she landed on the stone and catching her by the throat. The Huntress was slammed on the floor, hard enough that her bones cracked, and would have gotten a blade through the eye if Indrani hadn’t thrown one of her longknives at the Lady’s back. Hye Su snatched it out of the air and threw it back without batting an eye, but the heartbeat was long enough for Alexis to wriggle out of the grasp and kick the Lady away. Archer caught her own blade before it could carve through her throat and breathed out in relief, hurrying to the Huntress’ side so she would be able to get up without getting killed.

“You need to stay in control, Alexis,” Indrani harshly said. “If you get angry, get stupid, you’ll die.”

Ranger sighed.

“This is sickening,” she said. “You need to make a decision, Indrani. Are you trying to win, or are you trying to be liked? Because now you’re trying to do both, and you are failing .”

“Yeah, she’s trying,” Alexis growled, spitting blood to the side. “It’s why she’s already better than you. Did you ever find out how Lysander died, Ranger?”

“Disappointingly,” the Lady said.

“Alone,” Alexis said. “He died alone, not even forty feet away from someone who would have fought at his side. That’s what you taught us. That’s your fucking legacy, Ranger. Dying alone, just like you will.”

“The difference between us, child,” the Lady of the Lake replied, “is that I do not fear it. And that’s why you’ll lose.”

And the thing was, Indrani still admired that answer. It made her blood sing, it was everything she’d decided she wanted of the world as a child. But that couldn’t be her, not anymore. Because it’d mean leaving behind Masego, never again curling up by his side to read. Never again talking late into the night. It would mean leaving Cat for good, the laughter and the warmth and the home she’d made herself into. It would mean no more rooftop skulking with Vivienne, no more dicing with Hakram. Hells, she’d even miss Akua and the way they talked trash about everybody else.

Indrani didn’t want to stand alone anymore. And maybe she’d die that way anyway, but she wouldn’t make herself pretend it’d be a good thing.

“You didn’t need to be,” Archer said. “Alone. That was a choice.”

She’d made it. But had any of them had, or had she made it for them too?

“You’ll learn otherwise,” Ranger gently said, then her eyes hardened. “Or you’ll die. One last lesson for the three of you.”

“Here’s one for you too,” Cocky said.

The thrown vial broke against the floor, small puffs of grey smoke taking to the air and then wildly swelling. The grey began to billow in every direction but neither Indrani nor Alexis hesitated to charge in. They knew exactly what this was, and they were in no danger from it. Ranger was better than either of them at fighting sightless, but there was something to even the odds: the moment she took a swing and Archer parried it, the Lady let out a soft noise of surprise and backed away. Yeah, the smoke was eating away at her gear. Figured she’d notice when blades clashed. The Huntress pushed but had to draw back when she almost lost an eye.

Indrani tried to flank, blades high, but Ranger backed away entirely out of the smoke and it dispersed after a few more moments.

“That explains the smell,” the Lady frowned, eyeing her dulled blades and eaten at cape. “You coated all your equipment in a solution to prevent it.”

“I still remember when we first met,” the Concocter said. “Do you recall the first question I ever asked you?”

“Could you have stopped it,” Ranger quoted.

“You didn’t,” Cocky said. “You let them die, because you didn’t care. And that’s all you are, isn’t it? The absence of caring. That’s the sum of you.”

“How far you’ve travelled, Concocter,” Ranger said, “to still be standing by that campfire, looking for someone to save you. Is that all you learned of your years as my pupil?”

A glanced was flicked at Indrani and Alexis.

“Different saviours to beg salvation from,” the Lady of the Lake scorned.

“No,” Cocky snarled. “I learned too much from you, Hye Su. Let it sink into my bone like a fucking disease. But I’ve given you that for too long.”

The Concocter smiled, hard and proud, and looked away from the Lady. At the two of them.

“Constanza,” she said. “My name is Constanza.”

Indrani went still. The Concocter breathed out.

“Let’s finish this,” she said. “All three of us.”

Alexis breathed out, hands shaking.

“Yeah,” the Silver Huntress got out through her broken teeth. “Time to end it. Indrani?”

Archer met the Lady of the Lake’s eyes.

“One last lesson,” Indrani agreed. “For us, and for those we left behind.”

Violence ensued. Steel sang and Cocky – Constanza, she thought with wonder – unleashed all she had prepared. The poison cloud that hurt only elves, the sentient drops of hate that hunted the sole person who’d not drunk an obscuring potion, the fumes that turned to glue and the glue that turned into acid. Ranger came for her, seeing her as the weak link, but none of them minded. It told them where the fight would be. Indrani took the first wound, a slice across the face. Cocky the second, an arrow that went through her shoulder. The Lady went third, losing her cloak and the edge of her eyebrow when Archer setup Alexis to detonate her spear next to Ranger’s head.

There was no elegance to it. It was simple, brutal attempts to kill. And Gods forgive them, but they were losing. Even with all the tricks and the rage, she was just too fucking good. No pass worked on her twice, and every time a sequence did well against her the Ranger learned in the moment that followed and turned it back against them. It was like fighting a mirror, only the reflection was better than them. Archer fell first, to a kick in the stomach as she parried her death away, but Alexis had overextended. She took a slice across her face, across her right eye, and as she drew back in pain the opening was made. Indrani felt a shout rising up her throat as the Lady darted forward past the two of them.

To Constanza, whose fingers were fumbling over a vial. The sword was swung, the arc smooth and perfect about to take the head of a girl Indrani had known since they were both children. Only it was the Lady that fell instead, taking a hit in the side as a cloaked figured stepped out of nowhere to her left. The Emerald Swords, Indrani thought as she rose to her feet. They must have used the same tunnels. Ranger swatted one away but three more materialized in the heartbeat that followed and there was no room to manoeuvre down here. Another appeared by Alexis’s side, striking her knee behind so she’d fall, and Indrani rolled to the side just in time to avoid being skewered by a sixth.

Evidently, the Emerald Swords were done fucking around.

“Cocky,” Archer shouted across the din. “This is done. We need to leave .”

She backed away from the elf pursuing her, the slender sword seemingly made of wood biting into her longknive like it was made of cheap tin. Fuck. Alexis had gotten away from hers and they came back to back, safe enough that Indrani could spare a look away. Cocky hadn’t been targeted, they weren’t seeing her as a threat, which meant there were eight of the fucking Emerald Swords fighting the same woman. And, terrifyingly enough, though Ranger was losing it wasn’t by a large margin. She was being pressed back, not overwhelmed.

“We grab Constanza and go,” Indrani said. “Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Alexis grunted.

They moved in unison, ducking beneath a blow as Alexis lit up her spear and used the flare to blind their opponents for half a heartbeat. Indrani used the delay to leap over a row of barrels, landing in a roll on the other side as a sword cut through where her belly would have been if she’d been standing. Fuck, she hadn’t even heard the elf move. Cocky was, inexplicably, dipping what looked like a long thin stick into the barrel she’d opened earlier instead of fucking running away . Another flare of silver Light, then Alexis was with them. Half her face was covered in blood from the cut Ranger had left her with, and that eye might well be a permanent loss.

“What are you doing?” the Huntress snarled, “we need to-”

Constanza reached into the pouch at her side and took out a red gem, idly throwing it at a barrel to their right. The stone hit and got stuck on the wood, then began to shine.

“Fuck,” Indrani swore, throwing herself down.

The world exploded in green. Goblinfire. Merciless Gods, the place had been loaded with the largest amount of goblinfire Indrani had ever seen. And there were explosion in the distance, like there’d been other stacks out there. She got back to her feet as Cocky smiled smugly. The roar of the flames had surprised everyone, but it looked like the Lady had been the one to pay for it. She’d gotten run through from the back, Indrani said, and another Emerald Sword had just broken her jaw. A third was about to put his blade through her heart when he suddenly backed away, a chandelier writhing with green flames falling where he’d just been.

The goblinfire was spreading everywhere but nowhere more than near where Ranger still was. Lying on the ground and bleeding out, the elves struggling to get close enough to finish her off.

“All three doors are on fire, you fucking idiot,” Alexis said. “How are we supposed to get out of here, Cocky?”

Even the water wasn’t an option. It was on fire too, because goblinfire was a goddamned horror.

“By following me,” Constanza smugly replied.

She still had that slender stick in hand, and when she pulled away she kept it high. What had to be the goblinfire from the barrel followed it, like a strand of glue, which was weird. Goblinfire wasn’t supposed to do that when inert, Indrani was sure of it. She must have done something to the substance while everybody else was looking. They followed her, and as if that stick was a magic wand the Concocter used it to part the flames in front of them. Every time she touched the green fire with the coated end of the stick, it was sucked in up the strand and towards the barrel. Which was not, as far as Indrani could see, burning yet.

“Straight path,” Cocky said. “I can only divert so much before the threshold is passed and my barrel blows too. That... won’t be pretty. Dragon blood is something of an amplifier.”

Oh, that did not sound good at all. Still better than dying in a fire, though, so on Indrani went. And the straight path they were taking through a cage of flames was, inevitably, one that led them straight to the Lady. Still lying down there, bleeding out. There was movement, the Emerald Swords coming, but Cocky was quicker: she flicked her stick, snapping the strand, and a curtain of goblinfire closed behind them. There was a thundering sound inside a heartbeat later, the barrel finally exploding. But that felt another world away, when they were here looking down at Ranger. The three of them shared a long look.

An understanding came, eventually.

“We could leave you to them,” Alexis said, crouching by the Lady’s side. “Toss you back in there to die.”

“It’d be deserved,” Constanza said, crouching on the other. “A long time coming.”

“It’s one way to end this,” Indrani said, meeting her teacher’s eyes. “To make sure you don’t come for us to even the scales for today. That you don’t decide it makes us worth hunting.”

“But I still remember when they sent me into the woods to die,” Alexis said. “The look on the elderman’s face. He thought he was doing right by the village. One girl for all of them. And I never got angry enough to forget that look, Ranger. To remember I swore I’d never be like him.”

“I could let them kill you,” Constanza said. “Like you let those bandits kill my family. But that’s just you winning, isn’t it? Me still living by your rules. And I won’t have that, not anymore. I’m going to be better .”

“There’s dues, though,” Indrani said, knife in hand. “And I have learned a thing or two about long prices. So here’s your ending, Lady of the Lake.”

The hand came down, the knife slicing deep across the nose. She passed it to Alexis, who cut deep down the left cheek. And she passed it to Constanza, who cut the last down the right cheek.

“They’ll scar,” Indrani said, knowing it to be true.

“Every time you look at them, remember that you once had pupils,” Constanza said.

“And that you might have left marks on us,” Alexis grinned through broken teeth, “but we left those on you .”

A strange expression passed in the Lady’s eyes as they rose, one after the other. Indrani did not dare put a word to it. They left her there, lying on the stone as the goblinfire burned behind her. Maybe she’d get up, maybe she wouldn’t. Either way, it was on her alone. The three of them left the same way they’d come.

Together.

—

The Dread Empress looked troubled.

Akua was not the only one to have noticed, and all who did were troubled in turn. All of the city knew that Malicia had gathered the court here tonight so that her reign could end in dignity, so that she might try to become Chancellor under the new rising power or otherwise seek mercy. Most would be disinclined to grant it, but Akua Sahelian was said rising power and it would be her decision to make. If she sought to become Dread Empress. If she cared to sit the throne that Malicia was going to empty.

Yet here the empress was, looking troubled. Something must have happened in the receiving room out back. Vivienne had left it in a hurry, and looking harried, while the young man who was the Squire these days had looked oddly serene. Power now wafted from him stronger than Akua had ever felt it, which smacked of a transition – as did the even look of respect he had traded with the Black Knight before they parted ways. A Squire no longer, perhaps. For the best. Akua had struggled to pair the Name with anyone who but the last woman who’d worn it.

What had happened in there? Akua considered her curiosity, then set it aside. It was of no great import. Events were precipitating, and after the empress glanced away her face returned as a lovely mask of control. The doubts gone, and the tension went out of the nobles. All was as it should be. The Dread Empress of Praes would present one last play, and the fate of Praes would be decided by the worthies of this great hall as it had been for centuries.

“She schemes your death,” Kendi whispered into her ear. “They all do, or will. One day they will see the truth of you, and all of Praes will recoil.”

She considered that.

“Do you like singing, Kendi?” Akua asked.

“My sister did,” he smiled, without a single speck of warmth.

“Have you ever heard The Tyranny of the Sun ?”

He cocked his head to the side, nodded.

“What would you say it’s about?” Akua murmured.

The dark-haired man held his tongue, chose his words.

“This very hall,” Kendi Akaze finally said, “seen from below.”

The Carrion Lord, she thought, really was such a terrible prick. She’d liked that song once, for all that it was maudlin and banned by decree. It had such a pleasant melody. Only now all that she could think of was that it dated back to the Sixty Years war, nearly five hundred years ago, and already the singers sounded... tired. Of all this around her, of the empire writ in dread. Of the dooms sought to the west, a hundred apiece for every ashen victory. A servant came to her, offering a golden goblet, and she almost smiled. Ah, there it was. She took it in hand but did not drink, dismissing the man. Akua waited in silence, even her supporters standing far from her now that Malicia was seated on her throne.

Out of fear, yes, but not of the empress. None wanted to steal from her moment and earn her ire for it.

“Akua Sahelian,” Dread Empress Malicia said.

Silence fell like a blanket over the court. Not a soul dared to move.

“Malicia,” she replied.

The older woman smiled.

“Am I not your empress, Lady Akua?”

Akua gently smiled back.

“Are you the empress of anyone at all, Alaya of Satus?”

A shiver in the air. Sharks smelling blood in the water.

“A bold claim,” the empress said. “Empty, if no one speaks for you.”

And that was the part where her backers were to step forward, speak on her behalf. Make boasts and promises, praise her deeds. It was rare for the throne to be abdicated with a semblance of peace, but hardly unheard of. Some tyrants could grasp that it was over before they found themselves bleeding out on the floor with a knife in the stomach. Some had even spared their predecessor instead of ordering their death as their first decree. All very civilized, an old play put on with fresh colours. And no doubt Malicia had a scheme at work. Malicia always had a scheme, it was her blessing and her curse.

But Akua had not climbed the Tower and walked through the Hall of Screams so that she could dance to the empress’ tune.

“No,” Akua said.

Surprised silence. She swept the hall with her gaze, saw wariness and greed and hate in the eyes of those around her.

“I am tired,” Akua said, and then forced herself to say more, “of this, Malicia. This... play we are to put on. The pretence that you leave this throne willing, that I take it up instead of seize it.”

“All of the empire is a stage, Akua Sahelian,” the Empress replied. “We play our roles.”

“And where did that get you?” Akua asked. “ Playing along .”

Malicia’s face, so lovely and so cold, hardened.

“Those graceless in victory,” she said, “are uglier still in defeat. Take care to remember that.”

Only, Akua realized, the empress’ attention was only half on her. How delightfully insulting. Malicia was looking around, scanning the room under the pretence of matching eyes with highborn. She was looking for someone and Akua happened to know exactly who.

“She’s not going to come,” the golden-eyed sorcerers said.

Malicia turned to her. Now she had the full attention.

“All that cleverness,” Akua mused, “turned to waste by a single mistake.”

“You-”

Gods, but she was tired. As if the Tower had eaten the marrow of her bones, left her to walk rattling. Tired and irritated, because what was even the point of this?

“Step down,” Akua cut in, “or be made to.”

The empress looked as if she had been slapped. Akua took a step forward, then two. Malicia looked so utterly at a loss that she almost laughed. The dark amusement running thick through her veins, she raised the golden goblet she’d been handed and tossed it at the Dread Empress of Praes. Who looked like she’d just swallowed a surprised yelp as she ducked out of the way. The goblet clattered against the throne of the Dread Empire, that ancient ghastly thing. The dark liquid dripped down the welded stone and iron, the ancient seat little more than a squat, ugly pile of stones.

Akua advanced, passing by the aghast Malicia without a word. She came to stand by the old thing, trailing a finger down the arm. She turned to offer a smile at the nobles below the dais.

“My ancestor,” she told them, “murdered a woman here. Before this very seat.”

Her hand left the stone.

“She trusted him,” Akua said. “And he plunged a knife in her belly. Left her to bleed out on the floor. And when the life left her eyes, he sat down on the throne and named himself Sinister.”

She had them, she could see it in their eyes. The hunger, the want. To be her, to serve her, to fuck her – to eat her whole, swallow up everything that had made her rise and make it their own. What was this empire, if not a covenant of the hungry?

“My mother used to say that Maleficent made an empire, but that it was Subira Sahelian that made it the Dread Empire,” Akua said. “She was not without wisdom. And that legacy, that blood, it carries with it a duty.”

You have the master’s blood , the demon bound to the Tyrant’s Gate had said. Her line had been there since the first stone was set over another. Masters of dread, makers of horror.

“And so here I stand, where Subira once stood, beholding his work,” Akua idly said. “And I wonder – would he still have plunged the knife, knowing what we’d become?”

The crowd shuffled, uneasy. These were not the words they had come here to hear. That was not her role in the play. They should have listened to her more closely.

“There comes a time where one must look back and ask: what purpose does this serve?” Akua said. “One thousand and three hundred years the Dread Empire has stood. Through triumph and disaster, through the darkest pits and the tyranny of the sun. And now, looking back, I ask you: what purpose do we serve?”

Unease thickened. She was mad, they thought. They had chosen a madwoman to lead them. The dark-skinned beauty laughed.

“I struggled with the question,” she admitted. “But we do find answers in the strangest places.”

What was the difference, between a knot and a noose? Nothing , Hakram Deadhand had told her, until there is a corpse. And that was the balance of it. The Dread Empire of Praes, was it a knot that could be undone or a noose strangling its people?

One need only look out the window to know the answer.

And so Akua Sahelian touched her sleeve, taking out the terrible gift her enemy had given her. Such a small thing, for the power it held. She touched it to the arm of the throne, the rough stone.

“Nothing,” the blood of the original murder told them. “We are not the masters of this place, we are the sacrifice. And so I tell you now: this Dread Empire is at an end.”

Smiling, Akua Sahelian struck the match against the throne. It burned bright and, feeling as if finally she could breathe, she dropped it on the throne. Where the goblet had spilled.

There was a heartbeat of utter stillness, as if the world itself had ceased spinning.

Then the throne burned green.

—

The world had been shattered under their feet.

Alaya was a fool. The Intercessor had never even been an ally of convenience, the old monster had known from the start that her scheme was fatally flawed and not said a word. All because she had thought she understood Akua Sahelian, that the girl was her mirror in the generation that followed. That she would want the throne, if only to mend it all. How terribly, utterly wrong she had been. Praes was a game that could be won, but Alaya had not won it. She had lost it, along with her throne, and now she was fleeing with the rest of the crowd like a rat leaving a sinking ship.

The orcs had known, she thought. They had been part of it. How else would they have a gate to Arcadia ready, would they know to herd the panicking nobles through it. They left Creation with a shiver, treading the realm of the fae to breathtaking sight. Higher than a mountain, a great tower of stone and bone rose through clouds and sky until it disappeared into the dark. The Tower’s mirror here, seeping malice and madness out of every pore. They all fled from the sight of it, hurrying along a winding path of stone, and at the end awaited a way out.

They returned to Creation as a pack of huddling refugees, eyes drawn high to a sight none of them would forget as long as they lived. The Tower was burning. Like an emerald candle in the night, green flames rose from the bottom to swallow it whole. There was not a soul in the city who would not see it. As far as the Blessed Isle, Alaya thought, they might see the green light searing the sky. Her eyes lowered, finding a silhouette awaiting, and suddenly it fell into place. They were not just below the Tower, they were at the very bottom. At the foot of the sculpted stairs that led to the Tyrant’s Gate, and atop those a man was waiting.

The tunic was a simple grey, its belly covered with bandages stained red. But there was no mistaking the man himself, for all that his hair had greyed and he had grown a salt and pepper beard. He watched them, they’d who’d been brought down below the first step one might take to climb the Tower, and smiled. His eyes were green as the flames behind him, the emerald blaze wreathing his silhouette and casting his shadow down over them all.

It slowly sunk in for everyone, as it had for Alaya, that he’d played them all for fools.

“Praes,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch calmly said, “is a mould that must be broken.”

—

And now everyone was there, the Wandering Bard smiled as she tested the string one last time. Perfectly tuned. She’d had the place from the start, but now she had the time and the officiant. All she needed was – ah, and there came the last missing guest. Catherine Foundling walked out of the dark, power still clinging to her cloak, and looked up through the gloom. Their eyes met, a moment, and she offered Yara a wink. She winked back, making herself comfortable on the stone, and strummed her lute with a practiced hand.

It was time to kill her and doom the world.

“There was once a girl,” the Wandering Bard sang, “without a name.”

Chapter 26: Singer; Sung

“There was once a girl without a name,

There was a tower no one could claim

No one remembers why she has climbed,

Or all those she must have left behind

–

The first step is hardest, they told her

You’ll have to walk into the fire

It will burn away what you once were,

And always devour a liar

–

The second is the longest, they said

You will walk under the restless dead

The hanged all crooning from the gallows –

To join them and rest in the shadows

–

Taking the third step is the cruellest –

Walk when the moon is at her clearest:

Love will end with the kiss of the knife,

Trust is the wager that takes your life

–

The last is strangest, she said to them

The easiest and the most solemn

For when the tower is yours to claim

You will have forgotten why you came

–

There was once a girl without a name,

There was a tower no one could claim

No one remembers why she has climbed,

Or all those she must have left behind.”

– “The Girl Who Climbed The Tower”, author unknown

The moment Scribe had first lied to me I’d known I was in mortal danger.

That lie, the refusal to share something with me she had grasped, was the crack in the stone. It didn’t necessarily mean that Eudokia was meant to be my enemy or even the instrument of my downfall, but because of that night I had a blind spot and the Intercessor meant to kill me with it. The trouble was, of course, that knowing I was walking into some sort of trap didn’t tell me anything about what that trap was. For all I knew, not walking in was exactly what would get me killed. Guessing games with the Wandering Bard were a good way to lose your fingers, if not outright your life, so instead of sitting in a dark tent to brood and try to make out what her plan was I’d gone on the offensive.

Even when you couldn’t find the snake in the grass, you could still set the grass aflame.

So I’d thrown my torch. I got things moving in Ater by ordering Abreha Mirembe and Dakarai Sahel to betray me then throw their support behind Akua. It was a risk, of course. I did not believe that the same woman who had once been the Doom of Liesse would now claim the Tower, but I couldn’t sure. Not when the Intercessor was out there and circumstances in the capital changed by the hour. But it was the lesser risk, so it was the one I took. Then, ‘lo and behold, after the grass took fire the snakes came slithering out. There was some sort of botched coup attempt against Malicia – by High Lady Takisha, apparently – that resulted in the Tower’s weather artefacts going wild and covering the capital in vicious storms.

On the surface that was just highborn doing as highborn did, but there’d been one telling detail: the Bard had not intervened to prevent this. Which meant she wanted the storms to delay the resolution of everything in Ater, since little would get moving before my army breached the walls and I wouldn’t attack while the capital was a deathtrap. From that I learned that the Bard’s game was about the Tower and that she wanted to delay until certain conditions were met. The next step was, naturally to try and figure out what those conditions were. I had almost two weeks to see to that while hailstorms and other unnatural weather ravaged the capital, but immediately I began to feel like I was making a mistake.

It wasn’t that we didn’t find anything. Between Scribe’s contacts and the Jacks I found out quite a bit, including what was to my eye a pretty clear campaign to make sure the High Seats were on the verge of open civil war. Over those two weeks pretty much every High Lord and Lady in Praes was given a visceral, personal motive to despise the others. No way that was a coincidence, and again it pointed at the Towe – and whoever climbed it – being the lynchpin of the Bard’s game. Only that wasn’t going to work, and I grew increasingly sure none of that was actually the Intercessor’s doing at all. This was someone else. Malicia, probably, though I wasn’t sure what she intended to get out it.

It wasn’t like the High Seats hating each other would make them like her more.

So the conclusion was that I was being had, and all these games surrounding the Tower were the red herring the Intercessor had laid out for me to pursue. I’d just arrived to that conclusion and was wrestling with the need to second-guess it when I received a gift: my camp was approached by a dozen people from the Green Stretch who claimed to be envoys. Envoys from what, was the natural question, and the answer turned out to be that many of the freeholders – swelled in numbers and skills by deserters from the Legions – had gotten tired of the Tower’s shit and they wanted to secede. I was the natural interlocutor for that, it was hard to deny it.

I was still Queen of Callow, the kingdom the Green Stretches was only parted from by a river, and my army was besieging Ater. If I didn’t back their play for independence, all they had to look forward to were a few early successes while whoever held Ater was busy settling the empire and then a brutal crackdown when the Dread Empire decided to put its breadbasket back in its place. On every level it made sense that they would come to me, but the timing was what drew my attention. I’d already been approached over the state of goblinkind, and now another chunk of Praes was looking for me to decide its fate? I smelled a rat. Someone had a hand in this.

So I heard out the envoys and then put them off, which they didn’t like but couldn’t really do anything about. Who else were they going to go to? They needed me to settle it for them, I told Vivienne when we discussed it, else nothing would change. And that was the moment it struck me. I looked for the stars again and found them faded. Grown even more distant. So that was the trick. The Role I had worn into the fabric of Creation, year after year, was that of a wrangler for Evil. I was the commander of Below’s Named, a leader of the nations that kept no faith with angels. And looking back now, when was it exactly that the Intercessor had first seriously tried to kill me?

The Arsenal, once the Truce and Terms had been in place long enough they began to have the taste of law. The Intercessor did not care in the slightest if I was influential with nations . I could be Queen of Callow or First Under the Night and she’d shrug. Kingdoms weren’t the weave for her loom. But when I’d become the representative for Evil, when Hanno had become one for Good, we’d changed things. It used to be that there were only Gods and Named, with the Intercessor in between, but that was no longer true. Now Named looked to either the White Knight or the Black Queen when they had grievances: there was another intermediary.

And how could such a thing ever be acceptable to an entity that the Original Abomination himself had called the Intercessor ?

We were infringing on her power. Reducing it in a real, practical way. Just spreading about the knowledge of her existence had been enough to hamper her severely, hadn’t it? There could be no more sneaking her way into a Band of five to tug at the strings up close and personal, not when her Name was known to everyone in our charge. Only it was even worse, because now I was directly claiming power that’d once been hers alone. More than once I’d called her the goddess of stories, but my Name was already beginning to steal fire from her hearth. I could already feel Named and I’d not even come into my mantle properly. How much more would I to do when I did?

So I must die, that much was a given. But that wasn’t enough. I had to be killed in a way that undid the groove I’d worn into Creation, otherwise she was just kicking the trouble down a few years. If someone else took up my Role it’d be just as unacceptable, so more than just slitting my throat she had to undo the very Role I’d cobbled together. Which was why suddenly everyone was knocking at my door, bringing their troubles with them and asking me to fix it all. The Intercessor’s power was not in destruction, it was in the nudge – so she was trying to nudge my Role. I was on the cusp of my Name coming together and if I settled the goblins, settled the Green Stretch, then I was forging my Name into a tool to move those forces.

About the disputes of borders and kings, the lands that had forged me into the ruler I was today. I would not be the Black Queen, that Name had been destroyed too thoroughly at the Folly, but it would not be so far. I would be a ruler over Evil. But not over Named, save those sworn to me. That was why I’d been able to feel Vivienne even though she was a heroine instead of a villain, I suspected. I would rule over some Names in the same way that a Dread Empress did, based on authority. But the sight of the stars in the dark would fade entirely away, that door closed. So I avoided speaking so much as a word to either goblins or the Green Stretch envoys, knowing it would give the Bard her victory, and looked for the final blow. There would be a third., because there was always a third. And looking back at the storm over Ater, I found my answer: the Bard had not stopped that disaster. She wanted the delay, because her third had not yet arrived.

It’d been two weeks away, the very orcish horde we’d all been following as it marched south on Ater. There was a Name among it, a powerful one, and I had thought it to be Hakram but it shone too brightly for that. Or perhaps, I’d thought, it just shone too brightly to be the Adjutant. Either way, there was only one thing to do. Against Juniper and Vivienne’s protests, I refused to send envoys to the horde as it approached and forbade the Army of Callow from approaching the Clans. If it truly was Hakram leading the orc clans, then I could not risk conversation with him. I knew myself well enough to be aware that I’d be sucked in the moment we sat at the same table and that might very well be a disaster.

To beat the Bard, I had fight the same instincts that’d kept me alive all those years and take a step back. Do nothing. How restless and unhappy that made me ended up making me more certain than ever I’d finally caught my enemy’s tail. And though there was a price to my abstention, there was also a prize. I had abandoned a path for my Name to take and embraced another, how could that be without consequence? After the Battle of Kala I’d come to see some Named as stars shining in the black, but my own Name was precipitating. Strengthening. It was more than just the stars, now, I could see trajectories . Objects in motion. And those paths were the paths their stories would take if they were not meddled with.

I’d seen only villains this way and earned splitting headaches trying to go further, but it’d opened doors for me.

When the storm ended, when the orcs approached and the confluence at the Tower neared its resolution, I acted. Regardless of the Bard trying to break my Role, she’d be using a knife to slit my throat so I set about removing them from the field. I sent the Ranger’s three pupils out in the city to face her, knowing one way or another that confrontation would remove her from play – either she’d lose and be defeated or she’d defeat them and lose interest. I sent out the Squire to collect the Black Knight’s head, but she slipped my noose after my own father let loose thousands of giant spiders into districts still full of civilians . The chaos that act of lunacy unleashed on Ater flipped the orderly board I’d been setting up.

Fine, so that round was a wash. I bailed out Archer and her companions when Ranger looked close to a win, knowing my side would benefit from there being a rematch – she struck me as unlikely to learn a lesson or come to an understanding that’d sharpen her Name, while I’d made a career out of betting on angry young women bringing it home. It wasn’t a total wash, even though the Clans stumbled into the mess and the Army of Callow had to pull back all the way to the eastern walls. I finally knew where my father was and I got an idea of what he was after through Arthur’s report, which had me adjusting my plans. I still had to avoid the Clans, and avoiding thinking about why lest I falter, but I knew where the fulcrum was now.

It wouldn’t be the battle for Ater but the Tower itself, all signs pointed to it. So far I’d avoided the Intercessor’s knives, so all I needed to do was ride this out to the end and I would get what I wanted. Which was more than just getting the East in order. Oh no, after all this I wouldn’t be settling for so small a prize. Masego and I had already faced the Bard once, in the Arsenal, and this time she would not be getting away so lightly. And what we’d get out of her might well win us this war. She had set a trap for me, but I would turn it into a trap for her.

If the Tower was to be the battlefield, then I ought to take care of loose ends. Following Malicia’s trajectory in the dark told me she was about to kill herself. Not with her own hands, but by following through a plan that’d kill her because of a fundamental mistake. I couldn’t what mistake exactly, just that the groove would be ‘villain fails to understand the other and gets her comeuppance’. Had to be either Akua or my father, I figured, but hard to tell. More importantly, it was a stable trajectory – and that meant the odds were good the Intercessor would be using it for something. I didn’t need to know for what to know it was better to disrupt it.

She was best removed from the board before the resolution came, so I sent in Assassin and then threw in Squire as well when I saw that the Black Knight had hit the resolution of staying true to her ideals. That likely meant protecting Malicia, so I could call in Arthur’s last part of the pattern of three to allow Assassin its clear shot at the Dread Empress. With Vivienne riding herd on the situation, the matter should be handled. I couldn’t step in myself, much as I wanted to. If my boots were on the ground, the chances were too high that the Intercessor would be able to entangle me. I had to keep away until the end, act through intermediaries.

The irony of needing to fight exactly like the Intercessor to beat her did not escape me.

I misliked the idea of being blind in the Tower when it was where it would all come to a head, so I sent Archer and the other two after Ime. They were escorting Scribe, who I meant to take over the Eyes after their current mistress was eliminated – once she had, I’d get the stream of information I needed. Even better, I’d know more than the Intercessor in some ways. We could both follow Named, but I’d be the one with actual spies. It was the edge I needed, and it couldn’t hurt to blind Malicia anyway. Masego I kept on task, I couldn’t spare him for anything else, and Ishaq I had another use for. Apprentice I sent out to have a look at something else, an errand to keep her busy and away from what I didn’t want the Bard to see.

With all that loosed, I found a rooftop to stand on the edge of. Waited for moving parts to come together. And my Name sang in joy, coiling around me. Began to bloom inside me. I already had an aspect almost fully formed, I found. Something I’d done again and again, something that aligned with what I saw as my Role in the great machine that was Creation. It felt deep and quiet, like the bottom of a well. But it wasn’t even that revelation that had me smiling. I could see , now. Just small things, but it was a start. I caught pieces of Malicia watching the city from above, of Archer leading her companions through the tunnels beneath Ater.

And when the conflict came, I saw that too. The trajectory of my defeat: Ranger stepping in before Ime could be taken, freeing her to arrive just in time to derail Malicia’s assassination. But I scored a victory as well, when the Lady of the Lake’s three pupils left her bleeding on the ground. She’d survive, but she was done for the night. And Archer had created an opportunity for me without knowing it, one I took even knowing it might cost me my throat. I dipped out to see to it, returning just in time to see the last pieces coming together. The Tower was burning, my father was triumphant and the last test had come upon us all. Everyone was there, nobles and orcs and goblins and even the Black Knight. I came out of the Ways in a whisper of darkness, catching a glimpse of the Bard on a darkened rooftop and offering her a wink.

I had brought three knives here tonight – one up my sleeve, one waiting and one veiled. Time to see which of us had the sharpest blades.

Scribe was waiting for me in the dark of the street, eyes patient. I pulled my cloak tight, watching the nobles huddled at the bottom of the stairs that I could see from the side.

“Report,” I ordered.

“Malicia abdicated, Akua Sahelian refused the throne and struck the match that set the Tower aflame,” Eudokia said.

I kept the triumphant smile that itched to break out away from my face. So close to the end, gloating would be dangerous. Even if I’d been right, even though I’d seen the truth of her. It had not been a mask. It had been her, and now we would begin the last part of our journey together.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Malicia’s in the crowd,” Scribe said. “We lost track of the other one. She left the Tower, though, that much I’m certain of.”

“She won’t die like that,” I quietly said. “She’ll be here. She wouldn’t-”

Movement caught my attention. She was stunning, I thought, it pale and gold. Like some ancient goddess of dusk come to witness the death of empire, a wisp of impossible beauty unmarred by the grime of Creation. And Akua, eyes hooded, gracefully folded her legs and sat at the bottom of the stairs. Lower than my father, but still higher than anyone else. And with that, the end had begun.

“Is this all your doing then, Carrion Lord?” High Lady Takisha called out. “You burned and bled us so that we would kneel to Dread Emperor Black?”

“Did you not hear?” my father smiled. “The Dread Empire is dead.”

I glanced at Scribe. I’d had my doubts his plan would work, but just in case I’d set Apprentice to look for one of the indicators that’d follow if he had succeeded.

“What did Apprentice report?” I whispered.

“Last word is that the Tower in Arcadia is aflame too,” she murmured.

I grimaced. Amadeus was calling it too early, then. Until the monstrous mirror of the real thing was broken in Arcadia as well, I wouldn’t bet on his work destroying Praes lasting too long. If he wanted to stick the landing, he still had to sell his story. To these people and to Below.

“No one here will kneel to you,” High Lord Jaheem scorned. “This is nothing more than the tantrum of a man knowing he could never claim the Tower himself.”

“What Tower is there left to claim, Jaheem Niri?” the Carrion Lord gently asked.

The sky was burning green behind him and they shivered.

“The Dread Empire failed,” he said. “And so it died. It will not return.”

“And what would you have instead?” High Lady Takisha challenged. “King Amadeus is no better than Dread Emperor Black. I’ll not have it.”

Murmurs of appreciation.

“There is a precedent,” my father said, sounding faintly amused. “This land has been ruled without a tyrant before.”

Sure, before Maleficent the First and the Miezans. It’d been a pack of squabbling petty kingdoms, much like Callow. Only somehow I doubted that was his plan, given that I’d inherited my tendency for centralizing authority from the man. Similar skepticism came from the crowd. A few scorned him out loud for wanting to split up Praes into lesser kingdoms.

“Are you so unfamiliar with our own history?” Akua laughed. “He does not speak of the Many Kingdoms. Or has Haider’s Reign already faded from all your memories?”

That was vaguely familiar, but not. I glanced at Scribe.

“The Throneless Years,” she murmured, looking spellbound as she watched the discussion. “It’s what highborn call it.”

Ah , I thought. That was why the name was familiar. Haider had been the Chancellor’s name. It was old history from the Sixty Years War, which Dread Empress Regalia II had begun by invading Callow while it was still occupied by Procer. She’d died long before its end, even as the Fairfaxes reclaimed parts of the kingdom and it became a three-way brawl, and her successor Maledicta II’s early victories ended in defeat and then assassination after repeat purges of the imperial court. Maledicta had killed most of the leading nobles that could easily take the throne, though, so it turned into a messy civil war around Ater as Callow took the time to force the last Procerans out. With no clear winner in the civil war, the Chancellor – Haider – proposed a compromise.

The lords and ladies of Praes would instead march west against Callow, and whoever distinguished themselves the most in the conquest of the kingdom would climb the Tower when the war was at an end. Haider would, meanwhile, rule as Chancellor much as he would have had Dread Emperor gone to war westward and left him in charge. The High Seats had accepted the compromise and the ‘Throneless Years’ lasted for two decades while the Praesi fought my countrymen as well as each other. As a military strategy it was a failure, since the Praesi made alliances with Callow against their rivals, but it did keep the civil war out of the Wasteland until the lord that would become Dread Emperor Vindictive I seized the Blessed Isle.

He cut off the supplies for the armies still west and closed the gates. Once his last rivals were dead beneath his walls, he marched on Ater and took it by force before crucifying the Chancellor. A charmer, that one.

And though it was thin grounds, I thought, my father was not wrong to bring it up. It was a precedent for rule by someone else than a Dread Emperor with no higher authority above them. Only what was the point of all this, if he was just going to torch the Tower and then replace one title by an another? So long as the Role beneath did not change, nothing would. And the Tower in Arcadia would keep burning, but in time the flames would fade and the old abomination would rise anew.

“There have been Chancellors before that were Duni,” Sargon Sahelian mildly said.

A wave of surprise. It was not endorsement, but it was not dismissal either. I frowned. Why ? When I’d spoken with him in Wolof, he’d made it clear that he wanted my father nowhere near any sort of throne. What had changed? My answer came in the form of a shadow standing behind the green-eyed man, an aged woman finally arrived. Ime, still mistress of the Eyes of the Empire. Who was, by the gesture, declaring the Eyes supported him. My fingers clenched. Ah, so that was why. Ime had taken out Sargon’s soulbox when the Tower burned out. It was now my father who held his leash.

“Are we going to entertain this masquerade?” High Lord Dakarai scorned. “It is becoming Dread Emperor in all but name. Just a fig leaf-”

“The days of tyrants who ruled until death are behind us. The Chancellor will rule for seven years and one,” the Carrion Lord replied. “Not dawn longer.”

My eyes narrowed. There were flaws with that, obvious one. How would the Chancellor be chosen, what would keep High Seats from starting civil wars to depose them? My concerns were shared by some. High Lady Takisha let out a mocking laugh.

“And why should any of us obey such person?” she asked. “We would be the greater in every way.”

“Because on this very night,” the Carrion Lord said, “every army in Praes save the Legions of Terror will be disbanded.”

Pandemonium. Half the nobles were screeching in anger, the rest jeering.

“A jest in poor taste,” High Lord Jaheem said. “You have gone mad in your old age, Carrion Lord, to think we would meekly bend the knee to this. Why should we ?”

The green-eyed man grinned.

“One vote,” he told them.

Oh , I thought, you wily fucker. And he’d got their attention.

“Every High Seat will get to either name a candidate for Chancellor or cast a vote in the election,” the green-eyed man said. “So will Ater, the Clans and the Confederation of the Grey Eyries returned to the fold.”

And I saw it in the crowd, the hunger. Taking the Tower by force, it was tricky business even if it went perfectly. Tricky and costly. But here he was, offering them an easier way. The High Seats would have the majority of the votes – Wolof, Okoro, Nok, Aksum and Kahtan. Assuming Foramen kept its vote, there would be two goblin votes and one for the orcs. Ater would be loose vote, a ninth one to ensure there could be no ties. They had a clear majority, but that was where he’d been tricky: you could either nominate or vote, but not both. Alliances. He was forcing whoever wanted to be the Chancellor, the power in Ater, to earn the support of a majority of Praes.

And if anyone tried to go against the result, the sole army in Praes – the Legions of Terror – would grind them into fucking dust. They didn’t get a vote, and I’d bet rubies to piglets that being part of the Legions would disqualify you from being nominated. My father was leaving enormous power in the hands of the High Seats, which had to gall him, but realistically speaking he couldn’t break their influence without twenty years of brutal civil war. Instead he was consigning their influence to the political, which there was no taking away from them without extermination anyway, and making sure they had no military power. It was the kind of compromise I’d honestly not expected him to be able to make.

“And you support this, Lady Akua?” High Lord Dakarai asked.

Vivienne believed he’d genuinely flipped to become a supporter of Akua, this one, and I was beginning to be convinced as well.

“The Age of Wonders is dead,” Akua Sahelian quietly said. “Are we to follow it into the grave? Scorn him if you wish, but I hear none offering a brighter tomorrow.”

And that was another hit. It shook them, enough that the crowd began to hesitate. They didn’t like him, didn’t like this, but what else was on the table? And they had to know that if they didn’t come to an accord, if they all fled back to their cities, Praes would collapse. Without something to bind it together, a new heart, the High Seats would turn into kingdoms and make war on each other once more. And after years of civil war, no one hear was hungry for more slaughter. Many began to discuss it, but it was High Lord Sargon who broke the stalemate.

“Wolof nominates Amadeus of the Green Stretch for Chancellor,” Sargon crookedly smiled.

It was a challenge as well as a statement. Speak or walk away.

“I nominate myself for Chancellor,” High Lady Takisha replied through gritted teeth.

Ah, and there went the southern half of Praes.

“The Clans vote for Amadeus of the Green Stretch,” Hakram calmly said.

My fingers twitched at the sight of him. There was no denying it now, was there? He was the Warlord. He was lost to me. I forced it down. I could not afford distractions right now.

“Foramen votes for Amadeus of the Green Stretch,” High Lady Wither said, then cackled. “So does the Confederation of the Grey Eyries.”

Surprise and fear. Ater could have no vote, not in this election, and so four of the eight who’d speak already had. One more and my father would be the Chancellor of Praes.

“Your opinion on the right to rule of the undead, lord?” Abreha Mirembe called out.

He grinned, all teeth and malice.

“Acceptable,” he replied.

The old corpse grinned back. I could have stopped her from speaking, I knew. Pull at the strings. But not now, not when I was so close to getting the outcome I wanted – my father on something like a throne, Praes in hands I could trust.

“Aksum votes for the Carrion Lord,” High Lady Abreha called out.

And just like that it was over. Dakarai Sahel voted for him as well and Jaheem Niri nominated himself, but it was already settled. Rising to his feet, the bandages on his side flecked with red, my father smile.

“Then for my first decree I dissolve every private army in Praes,” Amadeus of the Green Stretch said. “And charge the Legions of Terror to enforce the result of any and all elections.”

Nim stood high above the crowd, and through her helm I thought I glimpsed eyes gone watery. She was moved.

“We will take up the duty with pride,” the Black Knight replied.

He offered her a fond smile.

“As for my second decree,” the Chancellor, “we will begin negotiations to sign onto the Liesse Accords. We will bargain with the Grand Alliance.”

I swallowed a grin. I was still furious at him, deep down. What he’d unleashed on the city... But he’d always been a monster. I’d known that from the start. The reason I’d come to love him anyway was just before my eyes. He was going to do it. He was going to get Praes in line and join the war.

“Are we to bleed for Procer, then?” High Lord Jaheem coldly asked.

“We earn our place at the table, so that we might bend the terms,” he easily replied. “And if you worry of the costs, perhaps you should remember the last Throneless Years.”

Puzzlement.

“Callow was meant to be the proving grounds deciding who would claim the Tower,” he reminded them. “Let Keter serve the same purpose. When my eight years come at an end, who better than the victors of the war against the Original Abomination himself?”

Ah, the appeal to pride. No lack of that here to use. There was some back and forth, questions and answers, but my attention was elsewhere.

“So?” I asked.

“We’ll know soon,” Scribe replied.

The runner came back with word from Sapan quick enough. Scribe grimaced.

“The Tower is broken,” she said. “But it still stands.”

Fuck , I thought. It wasn’t over yet. It was exactly what I’d been afraid of: I was going to have to bless this. Like a queen kissing a baby, I’d have to signify my approval before it came to an end. And that meant stepping into it. I breathed out. Not too far from here I could feel the Night I had invested, the knot of smooth power. I’d taken the precautions I could, I reminded myself. Now I just needed to wade in and see if I’d beaten the Bard or if this was all going to turn to ash. I steadied myself, patted Eudokia’s shoulder and strolled out around the corner.

It took a moment for people to notice me. It was dark out and they were talking and there were many of them. But in time they did, and the sound of chatter died. Soon not one of them dared even to breath too loud, leaving only the sound of my deadwood staff clacking against the stone as I limped forward. Some part of me gloried in it. In the terrifying figures of my youth now going still at the sight of me. At the fear in their eyes. Once, as a young girl, I had seen my father silence an entire banquet hall simply by entering it. I’d sworn, that night, that one day I would have that power to.

I’d kept my oath.

“Black Queen,” my father greeted me.

“Carrion Lord,” I replied. “Or should it be Chancellor now?”

“Either will suffice,” he said.

“Chancellor, then,” I mused.

I swept the assembled nobles with my gaze. Only one met it: Akua’s golden eyes met mine. She was on her feet now, but her face distant. As if unconcerned with all this. Waiting for it to end.

“You speak for Praes now,” I said.

“I do,” he replied.

“Then you answer for Praes as well,” I mildly said.

He conceded the point with a half-nod.

“I am not unaware that we have earned enmity,” my father replied. “Reparations will be offered.”

“It will take more than gold to even those scales,” I coldly said.

“And I offer more than that,” he easily replied. “Our signature on the Liesse Accords, yes, but a more immediate boon as well.”

I cocked my head to the side.

“I’m listening.”

“I have a way to even the odds against the armies of Keter,” he told me.

I stilled. Well now, there was a princely offer. Below us both, some of the nobles smiled. For people who largely despised him, they were warming up to the regime rather quickly.

“A worthy price,” I said.

He cocked an eyebrow.

“But?”

“There is one thing more,” I said. “One among you allied with the Dead King even as he sought to destroy all of Calernia. One of you sabotaged and attacked the Grand Alliance at every occasion. That offence needs answering.”

“Careful now,” the Carrion Lord softly warned.

I met his eyes with my sole one, undaunted.

“Give me Alaya of Satus,” I evenly said. “Who was once empress. Give me the hand behind the Night of Knives and a hundred enmities since.”

Give me Ratface’s killer , I thought. Give me the reason I had to come to the Wasteland when the world is dying.

“The Grand Alliance,” he said, “does not get to make such demands.”

My fingers tightened.

“Careful now,” I echoed. “Do you think that, after these last few years, Praes can make any demand at all?”

“It does not have to be this way,” he quietly said.

“It does,” I coldly replied.

Because Praes had gotten away with this for too long. And I loved him like a father, even after this latest monstrosity, but that did not mean he got a pass. That burning the Tower would end it all. Praes would pay one last price in blood for the horrors it had unleashed on us all. Let the slate be called clean after that, but not before. I glanced down into the crowd and found the woman who had been the Dread Empress of Praes this morning. Alaya of Satus looked... tired. Her beauty had not waned, but the elaborate green dress hung loosely on her. She looked tired and afraid, I thought. She met my eyes with resignation. She saw her death in me.

I had thought I would take pleasure in this. Now I felt almost ashamed. It still needed to be done.

“Then I’m sorry,” my father told me.

He descended a few steps and my eye followed him down. Hakram had risen up a few steps until they stood side by side. Their heights made it look almost comical, but there was no humour to be found now. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, like I’d just made a mistake.

“No,” the Warlord said.

My face turned into a blank mask. I set aside the feeling of betrayal, raw and bloody as it was.

“Warlord?” I flatly asked.

Hakram’s face was as carved out of stone.

“I have sworn an oath that the Clans will not march against Keter if Alaya of Satus is taken,” the Warlord said. “I will stand by it.”

My father’s face was not apologetic, but there was not a speck of joy to be found in it. Behind them, I found the mood was matching. Some of the nobles were smiling, once more, and when I looked at the others – well, the orcs were a given but I found no purchase with Wither either. I had not struck a bargain with either her or the Grey Eyries, and now that decision was coming back to haunt me.

“The way to even the odds against Keter for her life,” Amadeus calmly said. “That is the bargain.”

And I considered it, for a moment. Maybe if I made a compromise, then – and immediately I let out a soft gasp. The stars were dying. The black was fading. The Name itself, after all this time, was waning. And in that moment, I finally understood the trap that the Intercessor had laid out for me. I’d told dozens of people I had come here to kill Malicia. High nobles and Named, rulers and simple soldiers. It was one the thing about this campaign I’d never wavered about or hidden. I had staked my reputation on it. And now, on this final night where my Name was to form, I was being forced to walk back those words. I had come here to assert power over the East, and now the East was throwing that claim back in my face rejecting it.

It was never only Named or nation , I realized with dim horror. I’d always needed to have both . I’d just been tricked into thinking it was a choice. And so now that I was on the verge of losing one entirely, I was on the verge of destroying my own Name before it could form. I’d understood what the Intercessor was after all this time, but I had been entirely, terribly wrong about how she was going to do it. It’d been about this the whole time. She had made sure that my father would win and Malicia would survive just to ensure that this very moment would come about. And now I had the choice to either throw away a Name that might win us the war tonight – Gods, what Masego and I had planned! – or... I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. Or assert my authority over them the hard way.

Kill them.

I had been a hard girl and I’d become a harder woman, but I still flinched at the thought of that.

“If she dies,” I quietly told them, “the war could be won tonight.”

I saw that sink in, and even as in their eyes the realization of a mistake bloomed I felt my stomach clench. How very deeply I had been manipulated. I’d kept my distance from all of them for fear of them being used as a knife against me, but that’d been nothing more than a shadow on the wall. Now the knife was being pointed at my throat precisely because I’d not spoken with either of them . I the distance I heard notes of a hauntingly familiar tune, sung by a heartbreakingly beautiful voice. The only person who’d had all the information was up there on that roof, smiling as we all stumbled in the dark. I closed my eye, then opened it. Breathed out. Found the frozen calm at the heart of me, the ice.

“Step aside,” I said, and it was nothing less than an order.

“And who are you to demand that?” Amadeus asked. “It is a conqueror’s demand, and you have not conquered here.”

The wants of the woman, I thought, and the needs of the queen. Hakram saw it in me first, took half a step back. I loved them both. Hakram more than my father, perhaps, but both deeply. But that was just me. I could make another Warlord. I could force another Chancellor to kneel. But to gain my victory over the Bard, there was only tonight. And that victory, I thought as I felt like weeping, might save millions. What we’d planned, Masego and I... What did two lives matter in the face of that? I could love them all I wanted, but I had buried people I loved before. Two lives against millions.

Gods damn us all.

“I am,” I replied, “your keeper.”

It rang out, loud and clear, without my ever having raised my voice.

“There might come a time where you earn a kind hand, a protector, but not tonight,” I coldly said. “Instead you earned me. You dealt out evil and it has been returned to your gate, but you think that at this hour of reckoning you can flee from your dues?”

I struck my staff against the steps and the stone cracked, split as if the very earth knew my anger. They backed away, both

“ Who am I ?” I hissed. “I am Below’s watchman, the enforcer of the black laws, and I tell you now that if you do not settle your debt in full then I will cast your shivering souls out into the darkness from where is no return.”

Power coursed through my veins, the open maw of a great beast just my ear. If could feel its warm breath, the eagerness in the fang. It wanted blood. An old friend returned at my side.

“I am the Warden of the East,” I told them, and it became true. “ Step aside .”

My words rang with power and Hakram had to fight it, but my father only froze half a beat. I met his eyes then. That eerie pale green, and behind them I saw fearsome thing I always had. Cold gears of steel, turning. Grinding. And the mind behind it, as he had once told me, worked only one way. In the face of conflict , he’d confessed that night, I will reduce all individuals involved to instruments, and seek what I consider the best outcome. I’d never seen it happen before, him finding its path and committing to it. Power pulsed heavy in the air. Something old and deep, something beyond even the Sisters. He was calling in his dues to Below, as Hune once had.

A heartbeat later he had a knife in hand and I flicked my wrist, the leather contraption Pickler had made me bringing his first gift to my palm.

He took half a step up, and flush as I was with the power of my Name I saw him move. My neck, the blade would bite into my neck. I took half a step down, already seeing it happen in my mind’s eye. The blow would draw blood, but not deep enough. Mine would not miss. I let out a ragged breath, half a scream, and as we embraced steel found flesh. My knife, my gift, bit deep found the heart. And I felt a cold edge against the side of my neck. No, I realized dimly. Not the edge. The side . He’d not so much as pricked my skin. I broke away, but could not part too far. He was slumping already, but on his place face I found a twitching smile.

In the distance, a lute made a false note.

“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no – Father why did you do that .”

“Forced your hand,” he murmured. “You have to spare her now. There’s no one else who can replace me.”

And he was right. The High Seats all hated each other now, there was no one else left who could possibly rule except Akua. And she would refuse it. We slumped to the ground together, my leg throbbing with pain, and I reached for Night. Tried to stop the damage. It did nothing, as if some force was devouring the power. He had, I remembered with horror, called in his dues to Below.

“It didn’t have to be this way,” I croaked.

“It’ll take blood to finish it,” he rasped. “It always does.”

“You hate martyrs,” I cursed him.

“This is Praes,” he smiled. “What is one more sacrifice?”

“You fucking fool,” I wept.

Tears. How long had it been, since I had wept tears? The lute again, in the distance. The melody was smooth.

“Proud of you,” he got out. “So proud. My daughter.”

And what kind of a man would say that to the girl whose knife was still in his heart?

“Monster,” I accused.

The green eyes softened.

“The very worst kind,” he smiled.

He clutched my hand.

“Please,” he asked. “Goodbyes.”

Face grimly set, I rose away. The knife I left in him. It was the only thing keeping him alive. Alaya of Satus came without needing to be called. There were tears, I saw at the corner of her eyes. She knelt by his side, all of us watched by a hundred eyes, and what they whispered at first I did not hear. But the end I did.

“It was both of us,” my father got out. “Both.”

It was getting harder from him to talk.

“It shouldn’t have come to this,” Alaya whispered.

“Do better,” he said. “Do it right, this time. For the both of us. Make it as it should have been.”

“I, I can’t-”

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

Her face, I thought was the picture of anguish.

“Always,” Alaya of Satus hoarsely replied.

“We’ll win,” he promised, threading their fingers. “Be free.”

In the distance, the empire burned green. With a last rasping breath, he laid down on the steps of Tower and died. I’d killed my father for the third time, and this time it was true. And I knew, without asking or knowing how I knew, that when the message from Apprentice came it would tell me the Tower in Arcadia had broken. I breathed out raggedly, and the sound of it covered the footsteps.

The knife sunk through my ribs, but it stopped before it could reach my heart.

Not because Scribe had stopped striking but because she was dead. The sword, shining red and wetly in the light of the half-moon, ripped clear out of her skull. The lasts wisps of the veil faded as the Barrow Sword flicked away the blood from the edge. Eudokia slumped to the ground, eyes lifeless. The moment Scribe had first lied to me I’d known I was in mortal danger. And now I knew what it was that she’d kept from me. That my father would, whatever the cost to him or anyone at all, keep Alaya of Satus alive. I put a hand against my side as I limped away. It came away red. I seized Night, slowed it down, but I could not heal. It would have to suffice.

Of the three knives I had brought, two had found blood. Only one remained.

“He didn’t buy you your life,” I said.

Alaya of Satus, once-empress of Praes, met my eye unflinchingly. Hers were as red as mine, but what did that change? I had loved him, but I was still the Warden of the East. I would still collect the dues.

“I thought as much,” she said. “Seven and one?”

I nodded.

“And when the first dawn of the ninth year comes,” I quietly said, “I will come for you.”

She did not answer for a long moment, looking down at his corpse.

“Eight years will already be too long,” she quietly said.

I stood in silence as I watched the greats of Praes gather again for the election of their Chancellor. The votes, this time were unanimous. It was done. Only one last thing remained. I took back the knife from my father’s corpse.

“Won’t you come out?” I asked. “You failed, Yara. I still live.”

A snort from behind me.

“Well, you’re already well on your way to being dead inside,” the Intercessor said, frowning down at my father’s corpse. “Gods, what an unreliable prick in the end. Didn’t think there was that much of a person left in him.”

“Your mistake,” I said.

“If he’d been Named it would have worked,” she sighed, “but you don’t have that many blind spots left. Balls. Next one will be our last, I think. You can have this one – you’ve got to be getting used to the taste of ashes in your mouth.”

“No,” I quietly replied.

“No?” she repeated, amused. “Then why do you keep swallowing them?”

“There won’t be a next time,” I said. “This ends tonight.”

She rolled her eyes. Then a heartbeat later, she cocked an eyebrow.

“So that’s why you kept Hierophant back,” the Intercessor said, then shrugged. “You’re getting repetitive, Cat. You gonna try your Arsenal play again? You ought to-”

The silver harpoon took her in the side. It didn’t break flesh, but it sunk deep. Eyes shining under the eyecloth, Masego ripped his way out of the Twilight Ways and strode onto Creation as the barrier between realms screamed in pain. The glass eyes lingered on my father’s corpse, then on Scribe’s.

“You-”

His long, clever fingers closed around the harpoon and he tugged. The Bard’s scream interrupted her own words.

“When I am done with you, Intercessor,” the Hierophant said in a calm, even tone, “there is nothing Above of Below that will be able to put you back together.”

I shivered, as much because of the mildness of the delivery as the words.

“You can do nothing,” the Wandering Bard hissed. “You think it’s not been tried before? I can’t die, you fools, and pain just-”

“This isn’t about death,” I said. “It isn’t even about pain. This is about loss .”

I glanced at Masego and he nodded without turning. I put a hand by his own on the silver harpoon’s shaft. The sorcery he held washed through the both of us, thundered through our veins. And I glimpsed it, just for a moment, what she saw. The lay of it. Like a city seen from the sky, a maze of turns and twists only they were all stories. People. All the stories in the world.

“As I thought,” Hierophant said. “It will take two.”

“Better this way,” I spoke through gritted teeth. “I’ll finish it myself.”

He ripped out the harpoon, and even as the Intercessor hoarsely shouted I saw half the world disappear. We’d stolen it, Hierophant and I. Half the stories in the world, we’d stolen them from her. Above’s stories were gone from her sight, from her soul. They’d make a decent enough present for the Warden of the West, but before that it was time to take my half. I took her by the throat and my beast laughed, laughed in a way that sounded like a howl.

“Can you taste them yet, Yara?” I whispered. “The ashes?”

And she opened her mouth to answer, or so I thought, but I saw only red. She’d bitten off her own tongue, I realized. And she was choking herself to death. I tried to save her, keep her alive longer, but the moment the Night touched her she was gone. I could almost feel her, feel her eyes on me. Feel the utter, absolute fury. And when I reached out for my Name, for the stars in the black and the stories they followed, I saw a shiver go through the world. They stopped. All of them, stopped. The Names still existed, but they no longer moved.

“Oh Gods,” I whispered.

We had stolen half the stories in the world from the Intercessor. And now, in her wroth, she had killed the other half . It was gone, like vanished in the air. Below’s Named were no longer bound by stories. And Above’s had been wrested from the Intercessor, but we didn’t know how to use them . I found one star brighter than all the rest, followed, and glimpsed what lay within.

A dead man sat on a throne, still as the corpse he was.

“Interesting,” the Dead King said, and if a skull could smile he would have.

Oh Gods, I thought again. Villains no longer had stories. There was no longer anything holding him back. The sigh faded, leaving me to stand alone as the sky burned green above me.

I had just doomed us all.

Interlude: End Times

“Better the tiger atop the mountain than the wolf at your feet.”

– Praesi saying

Antigone had been just a little too slow to stop it.

That would have been enough to unsettle Hanno even if he’d not just seen the Tomb, the great lake that separated Hainaut from the Kingdom of the Dead, freeze over. A horde whose numbers dwarfed the stars in the sky had already begun to march across the thick ice, a tidal wave of death advancing without anything as careful as tactics or strategy: they marched in a straight line, killing every living thing before them. Hainaut was lost, Hanno of Arwad had known in that moment. It could not be held against this, even though the Dead King might well have doomed himself with such a bold stroke. And yet, even as the dark-skinned man watched the inexorable crawl across the horizon, it was not the sights that had his attention. Or his worry.

Antigone had been just a little too slow to stop it.

It was not that providence had abandoned the Witch of the Woods, for it had not. She’d been awake and out in the hills when it happened, at Hanno’s side as they discussed whether a raid to break up the army gathering north of the Cigelin Sisters was feasible. Antigone had been, relatively speaking, in the right place and at the right time. She could have prevented it, feasibly. Looking back, Hanno was certain of that. The opportunity had been provided. And yet Antigone’s answering stroke, her attempt to inflict a flaw on the enemy ritual, had been just a little weak and too slow. She’d misjudged what was needed by a hair’s breadth, which against the likes of the Dead King was more than enough to lose.

It’d been just slightly off, and that was what disturbed Hanno. The Witch of the Woods had been nudged towards a victory, yes, but Hanno feared that her enemy had not been nudged towards defeat. That the grand scheme of freezing an entire lake through a great ritual had not been marked with doom. And the implications of that... He struggled to even grasp the scope. Had the Gods Below chosen the King of Death as their champion, intervened to protect him from the promise reverses? And if they had, was today even the only time they would step in? He almost shivered at the thought. The Dead King had been monstrous enough when he had been, if Catherine was to be believed, in disfavour with the Gods Below.

If he was the favourite son again, the war had become a manner of desperate that begged for a stronger word.

“The clouds are not receding, Lord White,” the Mirror Knight said.

Many had taken to calling Hanno by the title of Prince White, and he no longer bade otherwise, but Christophe had never been one of them. The other man had been scalded by politics, the dark-skinned hero thought, and now avoided them like the plague. And it was a manner of politics to call Hanno any sort of prince, he would not pretend otherwise. A line was being drawn between here and Salia, all of the west deciding on which side it preferred to stand.

“They’re expanding,” Hanno softly agreed.

Dark clouds had appeared in the far distance, above what he knew bone-deep to be the Crown of the Dead without knowing how or why, and they had only been expanding since. A mile every hour, perhaps? It was hard to tell from so far away.

“I fear the Dead King means to cover the entire sky,” the Mirror Knight said. “And that we’ve few means to stop him.”

Hanno could only guess at the truth of that, but it rang true to him. It was a way to block out the sun, to wither crops and force soldiers to fight in the dark. It would spread fear, too, at the simple sight of it. How many would flee just for being convinced that the Gods were abandoning them all?

“Antigone will slow him down,” Hanno replied.

Christophe turned green eyes on the once-White Knight, face grim beneath the helm.

“And how long will that hold?”

Hanno did not answer. Silence lingered.

“Hainaut is lost,” he finally said. “We cannot hope to hold it. Let’s head back to camp, Christophe, a message needs to be sent to General Abigail.”

The Mirror Knight rose to his full height, sun glinting off the polished armour.

“And what will it say?” he curiously asked.

“That she is to retreat,” Hanno of Arwad said. “As we will.”

A line of defence would be left behind, but already he knew what must be done. Most of his army would go to the muster Cordelia Hasenbach had called for, the great host being assembled for a desperate last strike at the heart of the Enemy.

To Salia they would go, and after that only the Gods knew.

—

Henriette had done well, Prince Frederic Goethal thought as he beheld the walls of Courtial.

His cousin and heiress had been charged with preparing the defences of Brus while he fought abroad and she’d seen to the duty with skill. The last wave of Lycaonese refugees from Neustria was being ferried south into Segovia even as the evacuation of his own Bruseni began, emptying the north of his principality in anticipation of the war reaching it. And it soon would: Princess Rozala had sent word that Cleves was lost and she was retreating into Lyonis, which was the beginning of the end for the defence of that front. Unlike rocky, narrow Cleves the lands of Lyonis were fertile flatlands. There were no natural defences to use against the dead and too few fortresses to stem the tide.

It was only a matter of time until the northeast of Brus began to see raids from the Enemy, probing the defences, and it already was from the northwest. The retreat from the Morgentor had been a march through nightmares, Neustria falling apart around them as the dead butchered thousands and swelled their armies with the slaughter, but the armies had made it. Frederic had risked a raid against a Crab to buy the army time to pull ahead of the tireless armies of the Dead King, but Otto had decided to blithely walk back his agreement and pull him out of the fire at the last moment. It’d been a miracle they’d made it back, much less losing as few men as they had.

But now here they were, their rearguard even now making its way through the hidden paths that led through the great marshlands to the northwest of the principality. Frederic himself had ridden with the van, as was his preference, and that’d led him to the low hill where he’d reined in his charge. In the distance the walls of Courtial, the great fortress the predecessors of the House of Goethal had raised at the edge of the swamps, rose in pale stone. There was a walled city at the foot of the fortress, a mere four thousand souls or so, but that made it the largest gathering of people in the region by far. It was why Frederic had decided on Courtial as a supply base, knowing that a host as large as his own would need the spare hands.

Of the nearly one hundred thousand soldiers that had once stood on the walls of the Morgentor only thirty-seven thousand had made it south, and of these only twenty thousand would keep marching south. Brus’ borders could not be held with only the garrisons now defending them, even if Henriette had moved Heavens and Hells to swell those ranks. Twenty thousand would have to be enough when he answered the First Prince’s call to muster. It will have to be enough , Frederic thought, for there are no more men to spare. The thought was grim but no less true for it. Passing a tired hand through his hair – the helm had ridden tight against a ribbon, tugging at it – the Kingfisher Prince allowed himself a short moment of peace.

To feel the wet wind coming from the marshes, enjoy the sight of the distant green of the rolling plains to the south. It had been years since he was last in the land of his birth. He almost felt a stranger to it.

The peace was ended by the sound of approaching hooves. Frederic felt his retinue stir at the bottom of the hill, but none called a warning. A friend, then, and not unexpected. It was not long before a dozen heavy horses barded in steel joined his retinue below, parting to allow through their prince: Otto Reitzenberg of Bremen, who men called Redcrown. Perhaps the finest friend Frederic had ever made, the man who had saved his life more times than he had fingers to count. Otto deftly guided his charger up the slope, slowing when they became of a height.

The Prince of Bremen was dark-haired and dour, with that unfortunate Reitzenberg nose and a chipped tooth he’d never gotten around to getting fixed, but you would not have known it from the way his people reacted to him. Cordelia Hasenbach was still held in high esteem among the Lycaonese, but she had not fought with her people – not the way Otto Redcrown had. When word had come that Mathilda Greensteel and the Iron Prince had died in Hainaut, the prince of Bremen had become the living banner of the northerners. So long as he stood, they would not falter. Frederic much feared what would happen were he slain, and not only because it would feel as if half his soul were lost.

“Otto,” the Kingfisher Prince lazily said. “Come to see the sights?”

“Not a mountain to be found,” Otto grunted. “It is troubling, Frederic. Like walking around with the back of your trousers missing.”

Frederic laughed. Otto had never set foot out of the Lycaonese principalities before the war, and rarely out of his native Bremen. This was the furthest he’d even been from home. A home now little more than ashes and undead.

“I’m glad you will be able to see the plains before the war reaches them,” the Prince of Brus said. “It is not the right season for the flower fields, but-”

There was a sound like a scream, if the world itself could scream. Frederic froze in surprise, but a heartbeat later his sword had cleared the scabbard. It was not only him who’d heard the noise, he saw, for Otto and both their escorts were arming themselves. The scream died as suddenly as it had come, but it left behind thick unease.

“That did not come from the swamps,” the Kingfisher Prince decided.

“Heaven’s ward,” Otto quietly said.

Frederic followed his friend’s gaze, across the distance and all the way to the pale walls of Courtial. At first he thought it was a heat haze, improbable as it would be, but it was not. The stone was twisting and slithering, spinning out in strands. All of the madness orbited a single form, a great eye of sickly green light set in a pulsing haze of purple flames.

“Demon,” Frederic rasped out, coldly furious. “The Dead King seeks to destroy the city before we can hold it. I will not suffer it.”

He cast a look at his riders.

“Raise the banner,” the Kingfisher Prince ordered. “Lord Gontrand, you will ride in haste for priests and mages. There is no time to-”

The world screamed again, wracked in pain. There was a splash of murky darkness in the heart of the fortified city. Within a heartbeat, screaming began. Terror, Frederic recognized. They were screams of utter terror. His Name flared in protection, burning away the sliver of corruption carried by the distant sounds.

“You will need the Stained Sister and the Astrologer,” Otto evenly said. “It is nothing but throwing away lives otherwise.”

Frederic bit his lip until it bled, but curtly nodded. Getting himself killed would help no one, besides – the world began to scream again. Not the city, this time. In the distance, the green rolling plains to the south lit up with red. Fire was spreading through air and ground alike, like baleful tendrils. There was another scream.

And another.

Another.

Another.

This, the Kingfisher Prince dimly realized, was no longer a war. It was an extermination.

—

It was madness, Roland thought. Impossible.

He was in Aisne, looking into the rumour a Revenant had been seen. There was all of Brabant between him and the fronts. Aisne was not safe, for nowhere was safe in these dark times, but the principality had been spared the swords of the Dead King. Even after the Carrion Lord’s depredations during the Tenth Crusade, the land here remained some of the finest in the principate: great golden plains as far as the eye could see, vineyards and orchards and merry streams. These were the heartlands of the Principate, only Cantal and Iserre fancied as richer in harvests.

And now Rogue Sorcerer was watching that same harvest die.

Entire swaths of the sunny blue sky above had broken like panes of glass, sights from the eerie horizons of Arcadia shown through the rifts, and great stones had fallen down. One through every rift, and though they fell without regard to where they might land Roland did not think that this was a mere bombardment. He hurried the closest fallen stone, riding a horse half to death, and found that death had arrived long before he could. The stone, a massive thing of granite the height and width of a dozen men, had shattered a barn that mercifully looked like it’d been abandoned. But it was not the stone that struck fear in him.

Out of small holes in granite, almost like pores, small critters were pouring out. Hardly any larger than crickets, they had a glint of copper them in the glare of the sun as they spread out like a cursed plague. They fanned out like a curtain and, instead of any sort of terrible curse, they simply spoiled all they touched. Like rippled going through the field before him, Roland watched with muted horror as in a matter of moments they made half a mile’s worth of grain uneatable. Half-rotten, perhaps even poisonous. Gathering himself he pulled at the most destructive of magics within him, spraying flame and whipping up a storm of it.

Thousands of the undead critters died in moments, leaving him panting and already half spent. There were still a few out there that he could see and he took the time to clear them out, but his mind was already awhirl at the implications.

“This will kill us all,” Roland de Beaumarais whispered.

How many of the stones had fallen? At least six here in Aisne, and the Dead King would have done much the same across all the lands that serves as the breadbasket of Procer. Cantal, Iserre, perhaps even as far west as Aequitan. He was killing the infestation here, but how many of these abominations would land days of travel away from anyone who might end them? The great stone pulsed with power, but the Rogue Sorcerer snarled in rage and snapped his wrist towards it.

“ Confiscate .”

The magic invested in it was foul, handling it felt like licking pestilence, but even as the stone went inert Roland forced himself to study the sorcery. It had been meant, he decided, to release another swarm. It had been gathering power from ambient sorcery ever since unleashing the first. Likely the stone itself was being converted into the foul critters and the spell would run out when there was no longer enough granite to sustain the enchantments. Four, five swarms , he guessed. And, even as his heart clenched and his blood turned to ice, Roland de Beaumarais corrected his words.

“This has killed us all,” the Rogue Sorcerer whispered.

Procer did not know it yet, might nor for days or even weeks, but it was starving.

—

Princess Rozala watched in mute horror as the wave washed over the rampart, sweeping men and engines away in a murderous crash.

She’d thought they had longer, that though the defensive line around Peroulet was good as fallen the city itself might hold a while longer. That it might slow down the advance of the Enemy before the army holding it was forced to retreat through the Twilight Ways into Lyonis. And was she not right to hope? The Dead King had thrown devils at these walls, and when that failed a pair of demons, but they had held. Gods, it had cost them but they had held and sent the beasts screaming back into the Hells. They’d tied down an army a hundred thousand strong by keeping the city, buying time for walls to be raised to their south, and even as the dead assaulted the walls day and night the defenders held. Exhausted and bleeding, but so very proud. Had they not held against the Enemy’s worst?

So the Dead King began to drown them all.

It was said that the Black Queen’s most fearsome spell – the Deluge, singers called it – had been used against her in Hainaut, but Rozala had not thought her own host at risk. The Enemy had never used it elsewhere, perhaps out of fear that he would be caught and the spell would be turned against him. Whatever the truth of it, such restraint was gone: a great gate had been opened at ground height facing the gates of Peroulet and within moments the blast of water had smashed them down. Water began pouring into the city, tipping over soldiers and horses, breaking houses. It had not stopped there. Another two gates were opened on the city’s flanks, higher up. The tides there were now sweeping over the ramparts, crushing whatever men had manned them.

Rozala had been commanding from the summit of the keep at the heart of the city, as she liked the vantage, but now she was being forced to watch the city drown and her army with it.

“Louis,” she said, forcing herself to be calm. “The outer city is lost. Order our priests to form shields across the streets from the height of...”

She paused, searching through her memory.

“Therrien Avenue,” the Princess of Aequitan finished.

“That’s abandoning a third of the city, Rozala,” her husband quietly said. “The one where most of our soldiers are.”

“It is either that or losing all of it,” she evenly replied. “Send the order, along with that of general retreat.”

The moment they had lost the walls they’d lost the siege. All she could do now was salvage all she could of the army and pray it was enough. Louis Rohanon grimaced, but did not argue. He’d been in this war just as long as she had, he too knew the looks of a city lost.

“It will be done,” he promised, then hesitated.

She smiled, laying his hand on her belly. It had swollen, but she was still months away from birth according to the priests.

“Go,” Rozala ordered. “We’ll live through it, all three of us.”

He laid a kiss on her hand and left. The princess avoided the amused gazes of her personal guard as her husband and secretary left. She had never been much of a romantic herself, as they well knew, but she did appreciate her husband’s continued tenderness. It was terribly Alamans, but it’d grown on her. Shaking off the thought, Rozala brought up her Baalite eye again and continued to preside over what was already promising to be one of the greatest defeats of her career as a general. The battle was lost, there was no denying that, but she must learn all she could of the Enemy’s tricks before her army retreated.

The Dead King was in fine form today, it seemed. The water pouring out of the gates had not stopped, filling the outer city so much it was not spilling over the walls and the shields raised by priests and mages were buckling under the weight. It was not the end of it, though. Great war engines not unlike oversized ballistae had been dragged to the fore of the undead army outside the city, a dozen of them, and bombardment began unceremoniously. The projectiles they shot arced upwards, above the shields her people had raised, and tore through the hasty attempts by her last spare mages to bounce them off. Great monoliths of obsidian tore into the paved roads, cleaving through the stone, and began pulsing with sorcery.

“All Named on the monoliths,” Rozala ordered. “The water was merely a strike, these are the killing stroke.”

The messenger went off at a run, but few things were faster than sorcery. Rozala had read the reports of the Black Queen’s battle at Lauzon’s Hollow and she recalled mention of pillars of black stone with a similar look, but the difference in size was stark. No mere pillars, these: they were large enough that the war engines that shot them were made of steel and large as houses. The effect, though, seemed to be similar from the description she had read. A pulse of crackling lightning slew all men in range, and then a few heartbeats later a second pulse raised them from the dead. The size, Rozala decided, was a mere consequence of the power of the cursed things having been increased. It was still fundamentally the same trick.

Cold comfort, when she saw near a thousand soldiers die in the first pulse.

Practically speaking an enemy bridgehead had been established behind her lines and, more importantly, her shields. If the dead began killing priests... If Louis were here, with his head for numbers he might hazard a guess at the strength that the great volumes of water held back by the shields might bring to bear. Rozala did not have that particular gift, though she knew enough to suspect it would be a merciless slaughter.

“Full retreat,” Princess Rozala ordered, the words like ashes in her mouth. “All forces are to immediately begin making their way towards Gueridon Plaza. The wayfarer mages are to open the gates into the Twilight Ways.”

Maybe half her army would make it out of the city, if she was lucky, and this did not seem like a day for luck. Peroulet had held for weeks only to now fall in hours, and deep down Rozala was beginning to wonder if she’d not simply been allowed to remain here for some deeper purpose. She grit her teeth, putting away the Baalite eye. It did not matter. There was only one place left for her army to retreat to.

Salia, where Cordelia Hasenbach had called for a great muster.

—

After Brus fell, it was finished.

It had taken the Dead King years to take the Lycaonese principalities, and even Neustria’s fall had come mere months ago, but now it seemed as if the Enemy was no longer restraining himself. The principality of Brus still stood in the sense that most of its lands were intact and over half of its people remained, but as a state it was finished. All its major cities had been struck by demons and only the most heavily warded of border fortresses still stood, meaning that Prince Frederic now ruled over farmland being overrun and a panicked mass of refugees.

Lyonis was being swept through, its defences overrun, and now that the White Knight had withdrawn from Hainaut the lands it had defended were beginning to break as well. Prince Ariel of Arans was negotiating with the regent of Callow for his people to be allowed across the Stairway, having been refused by the Prince of Bayeux to his south, and the Brabantine refugees that Cordelia had not welcomed into Salia had armed themselves so they could force their way into Aisne even through a closed border. The moment word of it all had spread, the First Prince of Procer had lost the last power she held over the southern Principate.

No royalty south of Creusens still answered her letters, save those who had invited her to flee to their realm and continue her rule under their protection. Cordelia had declined the offer, even when made by those who genuinely meant the words. Her duty was in Salia. She had left her own Rhenia to burn for that duty and she would not forsake it now. She could feel it in the air, the way that all the winds were blowing towards the capital. The last gasp of Procer would be exhaled here, in the same city where it had been founded centuries ago. Agnes had agreed, though the predictions she shared afterwards were troubling.

But Cordelia Hasenbach would not go gently into the night, and so she had prepared.

Salia could not be evacuated. Even if her increasingly tenuous hold on the city could be used to bend the people that way, there was simply nowhere for them to go . With the refugees pouring in from the north, there were likely now as many people in Salia and its surrounding towns as in all of Brus. If the people were dispersed in every direction most would die from lack of means, and if they remained together they would be a crushing burden to whichever principality they fled to. Cordelia, much as the thought disgusted her, knew that armies would be mobilized to massacre them before they crossed the border if need be.

A decade ago that would have been unthinkable, but after the Great War and the brutality of the conflict with the Dead King? Desperation would make for ugly deeds.

And so Salia must stand, lest Cordelia condemn hundreds of thousands to death. Her duty decided, she had set to prepare the defence and even what would come after. Armies would gather to the capital so that they might set out against Keter, but those armies would need food and steel and supplies. She bargained and begged and confiscated – stole with the fig leaf of law – to scrap together all she could, and still Agnes told her that doom was coming. The armies would not be there in time. The Dead King would strike first. And so the First Prince of Procer turned to the sole recourse left to her.

She sent all villains east into Aisne and sent Agnes away from the city, where her sight would be needed, then dismissed her servants and headed towards the Chamber of Assembly.

The seat of the Highest Assembly had little changed since the day Clothor Merovins had been elected as the founding First Prince of Procer. In a city that every ruler wanted to grace with another fresh thing of beauty, another layer of glamour and glory, the ancient hall remained untouched. Walls of whitewashed limestone, rafters of ancient creaking oak and that faint smell of wood smoke come from the fire that had caught during the second Liturgical War. In a city heavily laden with gold and marble and jewels, it was a stark and bare place – save for the twenty-four thrones that filled it. Twenty-three on the ground, one for each principality, and one for the First Prince on the dais above.

Cordelia sat on Clothor Merovins’ old throne and close her eyes. She could feel the grey granite beneath her, polished by a river but otherwise unadorned, and she set her palm against the coolness of it. In a way she had never been close to that seat, she mused. Cordelia too had been worn to smoothness, stripped of all her affectations. The fair-haired princess smiled at the thought, then in the pale light of the single lantern lit she waited in silence. It would come soon, Agnes had told her as much, and it would come here. And when her answer was given, well, she would learn something as well.

She was half asleep when the scream sounded, but ice ran through her blood and she was wide awake before the roof atop her was ripped off. Cordelia looked up at the night sky, the stars and the half-moon, but they were marred by a great gate spewing out winged abominations. A Hellgate. That was the Dead King’s bow, then, a Hellgate above the very beating heart of the Principate. Yet there was more. Ugly, unspeakable things that came creeping through the dark. That bent wood as if it were water and made of tiles wriggling snakes. How many were there? She could not tell, in the dark, but there had to be more than one.

It was a great winged devil that dared to first enter the Chamber, landing in a crouch before her. Shaped like a horned man, though broader than any man she had met, and covered with thick dark fur. Bestial and with a mouth full of fangs that it dared to grin at her with. She leaned forward, her dress of Rhenian blue pulling tight on her shoulders.

“Can you hear me, Dead King?” Cordelia asked.

The creature milled uneasily, then stilled.

“In a manner of speaking,” it replied, its voice not its own.

“Ah, I had hoped you would,” the First Prince of Procer smiled.

“You struggled mightily,” the Dead King said. “But there is no turning back the inexorable.”

“It may well be that we will fall,” the First Prince acknowledged. “But until then, Trismegistus King, do not forget one thing.”

She smiled, cold and hard and with every once of scorn every Hasenbach had ever felt for the old monster.

“This is Procer,” she hissed. “You tread here at your peril.”

Pale light washed over them all.

An eternity passed. The Light had seared Cordelia’s skin but left her strangely invigorated, and when she opened her eyes again she found... nothing. Not before her, not in the sky above, not anywhere at all. There was only Salia and her people. The ealamal had worked as the priests as sworn it would, scouring all of the principality from the Dead King and his works. It had been weakened, they told her, both in stringency and in scope. Power had been limited and been made less discriminating. Cordelia had still likely killed a hundreds if not thousands of people in Salia through that order, she did not delude herself otherwise. People who had not been tried, been judged under the law.

They had only been judged as taints on Creation by the Choir of Judgement even through all the priests had done to force mercy onto that judgement. No Damned could have hoped to survive were they present, which was why Cordelia had sent them to Aisne, for in the eyes of the Seraphim villains were scarcely better than devils or demons.

Even though there was a sliver of guilt at the deaths she had ensured, Cordelia knew that the fate her decision had spared Salia would have been incomparable. And, deep down, a part of her felt deeply vindicated. Many had tried to warn her off the angel’s corpse, called it madness or stupidity. Yet it had just saved every soul within the borders of Salia, and likely would again. Alone in the silent hall where the princes and princesses of Procer ruled but now she alone sat with silence for sole company, Cordelia Hasenbach looked up through the torn roof at the night sky. The pale stars set against the darkness, like candle lights never more than a breath away from being snuffed.

The Lycaonese princess raised a hand, as if to pluck them from the sky, and smiled.

“One more night to live,” Cordelia told them. “Dawn has not yet failed.”

She would win her people as many nights as she could, whatever the cost.

Chapter 27: Recoil

“He is never lost who has no home.”

– Orc saying

Bayeux had a reputation as one of the most beautiful principalities in Procer.

The western parts of it fed into the great fertile plains that were the heartlands of the Principate, but the eastern stretch was vividly green. It was because of the Whitecaps, I’d read, as the ice on the slopes of the great mountains melted come spring and fed a myriad of small rivers. It was all valleys and hills, greenery shining like emeralds. Even now that the Dead King’s grasp had reached as far as mere miles away from the border of Bayeux, the land had lost none of its beauty. There was probably a turn of phrase to be squeezed out of that, something about how there could be beauty even as the world darkened. My fingers clenched. Unfortunately, I’d used too many of those platitudes to still put in stock in them.

So instead I wrenched my eyes away from the distant beauty of the valleys and put my attention where it belonged. Which happened to be a tall silver mirror bordered by runes, whose surface shimmered for an instant before revealing a still eerily beautiful woman. Alaya of Satus’ beauty had not been entirely an artifice or the result of her Name. Even stripped of both and touched with the marks of aging for the first time since I’d known her – small wrinkles at the corner of her eyes, her skin being less than perfect – she remained perhaps the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. It did nothing for me. What I felt for her was hatred’s tired cousin, and it swallowed too much ground for anything else to ever be able to grow there.

“Report,” I flatly ordered.

Standing at my side, High Lady Abreha shuffled slightly on her feet. As always, she was straddling the line between being glad that I was able to order the once-empress and discomfort at the leader of Praes being ordered by anyone at all. Abreha was not such a complicated woman, once you learned to ignore the labyrinthine thirst for schemes and utterly amoral ambition.

“Your Excellency,” Chancellor Alaya of – well, that was still being debated – greeted me, bowing her head. “The third wave will be setting out earlier than we had planned. Marshal Nim’s efforts to reassemble the Legions have proved successful beyond our most optimistic estimates.”

I kept my breath steady. Every week, every cursed fucking week, we found another way that my father had played us. The Battle of Kala had ruined the Legions of Terror, broken their spirit, but it’d also kept the soldiers out of the significantly more brutal throwdown in Ater. There had been masses of disaffected soldiers for the Black Knight to recruit under her new banner. That wasn’t even entirely a metaphor, since the old banner of the Dread Empire had been the Tower in black on crimson.

“They’ll need to set out directly for Keter,” I said. “I’ve been in contact with the First Prince and the situation on the ground over here is... not promising.”

Something of an understatement, that. The Dead King had stopped pulling his punches, unveiling his full arsenal of horrors. The fronts that’d held him back for almost three years had been torn through like wet parchment in a matter of hours and Procer had effectively collapsed as a nation within two days. The only thing slowing down Keter’s armies was the sheer amount of land being set aflame, it was a full retreat everywhere. Only in Salia was there a semblance of safety and considering how Cordelia was managing that I had somewhat mixed feelings about it.

“How bad?” Chancellor Alaya quietly asked.

“Militarily, Procer is done,” I frankly replied. “The generals did the smart thing and pulled back their armies to Salia to preserve forces for the assault on Keter, but that was at the cost of effectively surrendering the country. There’s not a force left north of Iserre that will be more than an afternoon’s work for the dead.”

She nodded, once and sharply.

“I will accelerate the preparations as best I can,” Chancellor Alaya promised. “I have news from the Free Cities that I suspect have outpaced the reports from the Jacks.”

“I’m listening.”

“Empress Basilia took the armies of the League into the Twilight Ways a month past,” she said. “For war against Keter, she claims. They’ve been seen in Salamans since, but I could not obtain more. The Eyes have increasingly large gaps.”

“Let’s hope she lives up to her letters, then,” I grunted.

Basilia had been sending us – myself and the First Prince – those regularly until she marched out, to me as her former patron and to Cordelia has a fellow ruler. Most of it was just assurances of friendship and peace, but she’d also been promising to bring the armies of the League into the war. Didn’t sound promising for her to have emerged in Salamans, considering half the southern princes were considering petition for entry into the League, but I’d reserve judgement for now.

“Indeed,” Chancellor Alaya mildly replied. “May I ask as to the progress of the second wave?”

I’d been part of the first wave out of Praes. Gone from Ater before they even burned my father. Pressed for time, I’d claimed, and Procer was falling apart. Fleeing , my mind had called it, and it was the truer of the two. I’d taken with me the armies I’d brought and the vanguard of the Praesi reinforcements, a few thousand former household troops with cabals of diabolists and the first few... assets we’d raised after the dust settled in Ater. All of them led by High Lady Abreha. The second wave had set out two week later, the rest of the household troops – all currently auxiliaries in the Legions of Terror – and a ninety-two thousand orc warriors. The full muster of the Clans, led by their Warlord.

“High Lady Abreha has been handling communications with them,” I said, flicking a glance at her.

Abreha cleared her throat, an amusing affectation considering she no longer needed to breathe. Of all the undead creations I had made of Night, she was by far the most lifelike. Sometimes I even forgot she was dead.

“Their pace has been steady and the resupply in Laure did not slow them down,” High Lady Abreha said. “Duchess Kegan had the cattle ready to join the horde. High Lord Sargon swears that the Old Mothers will last until the offensive against Keter.”

“Good news,” Chancellor Alaya said. “If the armies around Salia are properly arrayed for war, it might be possible to begin the march north within days of the second wave arriving.”

“I’ll not count the cat skinned until I wear the skin,” I snorted. “Proceran armies are terrible at handling supplies and Hasenbach can only fit so many miracles up her sleeves. I’m still awe at the quantity of grain and feed she’s put together.”

She must have emptied half the granaries in the Principate for it, which would have been impressive even if half the realm hadn’t already seceded in all but name – and sometimes not even that.

“One hopes that the threat of annihilation will inspire unexpected competence,” Chancellor Alaya said, a hint of asperity to her tone.

I doubted it. Fear sometimes made people sharper, pushed them beyond their limits, but most of the time it just made them sloppy and stupid. Juniper and I were already counting on two weeks stuck near Salia after the second wave joined us.

“We’ll see,” I replied, then my gaze hardened. “So what’s this I hear about changes to the electorate?’

The Chancellor of Nobody Could Agree On What Yet dipped her head.

“The Green Stretch has been pushing for a vote of its own instead of being considered a joint territory with Ater, but there have been disagreements,” she replied. “The argument was made that procedurally speaking an even number of votes might lead to deadlock, which led others to argue the Clans should be granted a second vote.”

Which the High Seats would find unacceptable. Leaving what was effectively two votes in goblin hands – one for the Eyries and one for Foramen – was acceptable because Foramen still had a population that was human in majority and there was no guarantee Wither’s dynasty would keep its seat, but if the Clans got a second vote the greenskins would become a power bloc as powerful as the Soninke. Throw in another vote for the Green Stretch into this and the High Seats in human hands would make up only five of the eleven votes choosing the Chancellor of Praes.

“I won’t ride your back about this,” I said, “but I shouldn’t need to tell you that if this comes to blows my patience is more than spent.”

“I will not,” the once-empress calmly told me. “Negotiations are ongoing, but there is progress. Alternatives for tiebreaking are being considered.”

I sighed and let it go. I had neither the time not the inclination to look over her shoulder while preparing for a campaign halfway across the continent. I’d have to trust thatshe knew what she was doing.

“It might be of interest to you that majority vote has narrowed down the name of our nation to either the ‘Confederation of Praes’ or the ‘Republic of Praes’,” Chancellor Alaya continued, changing the subject.

I cocked an eyebrow.

“Republic?” I skeptically asked.

“There have been other republics than Bellerophon,” the Chancellor replied. “Though I lean towards Confederation myself, should the Grey Eyries be convinced to relinquish that name themselves in favour of another.”

I supposed it would be a tad awkward for the Confederation of the Grey Eyries to be a member-state of the Confederation of Praes.

“So long as it is not the League of Praes,” High Lady Abreha fervently said. “Dakarai must have been drunk when he suggested it.”

I thought, somewhat unkindly, that it was a bit much for the High Seats to look down at the League’s squabbling when the Dread Empire had managed at least as many civil wars while claiming to be a single state instead of a loose coalition.

“A conversation for another day,” I curtly said. “I believe we’re finished here, Chancellor, unless you have anything else to bring up.”

Alaya of Satus inclined her head respectfully.

“I will be arriving with the third wave,” she said. “Arrangements were made.”

My eyes narrowed, but I did not contradict her. I was not sure whether I was angry she was insisting on risking the life my father had died to preserve or pleased that for once the former empress would be getting a closer look at what a real war looked like. It was a different beast, when you weren’t looking at it from atop your tower.

“Then we will meet beneath the walls of Keter,” I said. “I’ll be expecting your report next week at the same hour.”

I met her eyes.

“Chancellor.”

“Your Excellency,” she replied, dipping down in deference.

The formal address that had been adopted for the Name of Warden of the East in Praes was the last thing she spoke before the silver mirror dimmed. I rolled my shoulder, cracking it. My limbs always felt sore these days. From too much twisting around as I slept, I figured. I’d not been sleeping well since... I’d not been sleeping well, was all.

I could not, would not look back. The moment I did the pit awaited.

“Our confederation is beginning well enough,” High Lady Abreha mused. “To think I’d see the day the Dread Empire was replaced.”

I eyed her skeptically, hiding my amusement at the way she’d avoided the more common turn of phrase of ‘living to see the day’.

“It will change,” I said. “It’ll have to. Power’s being pulled in too many directions.”

I was personally of the opinion that the High Seats would start by acting as I was sure my father had thought they would, by clashing against each other and bribing the greenskin and Ater votes with positive reforms, but it wouldn’t last forever. At some point they’d either close ranks and try to keep the office within their families – which I couldn’t see working long, given how often their dynastic interests were at odds – or they’d turn to other means to take power. That’d lead to war, one I wasn’t sure the High Seats would be able to win, and in the vacuum after that defeat my bet was that the Legions of Terror would step in. Nim was zealously apolitical, but how many of her successors would be?

Maybe if she stuck around long enough preserving the sanctity of the elections would become part of the story of the Black Knight, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Besides, the Intercessor had put an end to that sort of thing. Forever or for now I could not know, and so I’d set Hierophant to the task of finding out.

“There will be adjustments,” Abreha dismissed, “but the skeleton will hold. It answers a need.”

“And what would that be?” I asked.

I wasn’t even being snippy. Abreha Mirembe was a reprehensible excuse for a human being, but she’d stood near the apex of Praesi politics for decades. Her understanding of the Wasteland was equalled by few and surpassed by fewer. I belonged to neither category.

“Seizing the Tower by force was costly , Your Excellency,” the undead aristocrat said. “In soldiers, in coin, in contracts called upon. And it was ever a risky enterprise, even when one’s family stood strongly behind them. Holding the Tower was even more difficult: most tyrants were part of the Dark Council or at least the imperial court before they climbed the Tower. Ater has been the grave of many a High Lord.”

“So you’ll stick with the votes because they’re cheaper than war,” I skeptically said.

“Because eight years is not so long a time to wait,” High Lady Abreha smiled, baring yellow teeth. “Why raise an illegal army and risk battles and ruination when the coming election is a better way to usurp rule from your rival? No longer are we ruled until death, Your Excellency, and we live longer than lesser breeds. We have years enough that we can afford patience.”

I paused, forced myself to consider that. I’d noticed, when facing Sargon Sahelian in Wolof, that the great families of Praes tended to think over long spans. That when a High Lord could not climb the Tower, they turned instead to strengthening their dynasty. This system, with the votes, it played on that an instinct. Why should you rush into a hasty war when waiting a mere twenty years might see you elected Chancellor? Better to bide your time, forge your alliances and save up for the right bribes. You’d get your eight years, and without having risked your family. It was a system that would weed out the reckless, I realized.

Ensure the same kind of people who’d once claimed the Tower through orgies of bloodletting would never end up anywhere near the rule of Praes.

“The Carrion Lord was a vicious little shit,” Abreha said. “But brilliant too, in his own twisted way. He understood the old families better than we ever knew.”

I sighed. I was still unconvinced that this would not eventually turn into military rule by the Legions, but then I wasn’t sure that wouldn’t also be part of plan. The thought might well have appealed to him.

“We’ll see,” I finally said.

“They will be interesting times,” the undead noble. “Should we make it through the end of the world, anyhow.”

“How very hopeful, High Lady Abreha,” I drily said.

“That is-”

She was interrupted by a sound I was unfortunately familiar with: a detonation. It was easy enough to tell where it was coming from. We were standing on the outskirts of a nameless village, atop a flat slope that’d been judged a good place for receiving the Chancellor’s report, and from up here I could see a plume of smoke coming up from a large barn. Broad and dry and in good state, it was where Masego had set up for the half-day we would be spending in Creation before rejoining my army in the Twilight Ways. He’d had tests to run, he said. My heart clenched. Gods, let him not have gotten hurt. Already I had... my fingers clenched around a knife I was not holding.

Do not look back , I ordered myself. Else the pit awaits.

Masego would be fine. He wasn’t a fool, he’d have taken precautions before attempting anything risky. I still parted wats with High Lady Abreha after only cursory courtesies and hurried limped my way down, my personal guard falling in around me. The village was little more than a hole in the ground with dusty streets between the two abandoned shops and handful of houses that made it up, so there was nowhere to get lost. I found Apprentice outside the barn and on her knees when I got there, coughing profusely. A glance through the open door revealed the shape of a tall man in dark robes moving around, which released a knot in my stomach.

I stopped to speak with Sapan, whose coughing had turned into wheezes.

“You all right, kid?” I asked.

“Fine, Your Majesty,” she rasped out. “I just swallowed a mouthful of Light.”

I blinked, then cocked to the side.

“And it didn’t burn you?” I carefully asked.

“Scalded,” Sapan admitted. “It will teach me to always double-layer my shields.”

“Always a good idea,” I sagely agreed.

I patted her shoulder comfortingly, satisfied she was in no danger, and entered the barn. Immediately my steps stuttered, and not because of the limp. I’d not been able to see it from up the hill, but something a blown a ring hole right through the barn’s ceiling. By the looks of the burns around the ring, had to be Light or something like it.

“Tell me,” I said, “that it wasn’t the artefact that made this mess.”

Hierophant was leaning over a scorched stone table that’d survived the explosion and on which rested a leather-bound book. Half the barn was filled with various instruments and the enchanted trinkets he’d used to measure emanations back in the Arsenal, and a few of the former had been brought to the stone table. He was handling it with a pair of pincers, carefully turning the pages as he inspected them.

“I could,” Hierophant noted. “But you always get inexplicably irritated when you ask me to lie to you and I do.”

I sighed.

“Yes,” he happily said. “Just like that.”

“Tell me it’s not broken at least,” I said.

I limped deeper into the barn, making my way to his side.

“I do not believe that a single means at my disposal would be able to so much as notch the binding of the Book,” Hierophant said, sounding fascinated.

I narrowed my eyes at his back. I’d felt the capitalization in that.

“We’re not calling it that,” I said.

“It’s an appropriate and endearing name,” Zeze insisted. “I have this on good authority.”

“You mean Indrani,” I said, unimpressed.

“I have this on authority,” Zeze conceded.

My lips twitched, but slagging on Archer wouldn’t be enough to win me over.

“It’d be blasphemy,” I reminded him. “And we’re already treading pretty narrowly there considering we’ve stolen all the Good stories of Calernia and made a book of them.”

“ I did that,” Masego objected. “Which means I get to name it. It’s the Book of Some Things.”

Because calling the godsdamned thing a joke about the Book of All Things was going to go great with the Procerans. I could already feel the migraine in my future reaching backwards to me now, having grown so catastrophically large it had shattered the very laws of time.

“We can discuss it later,” I lied.

He turned to glare at me, which – wait what?

“Masego,” I said with forced calm, “what the Hells happened to your eye?”

Not only was his usual black eye cloth gone, one of the glass eyes he’d earned when transitioning into Hierophant was gone. I would ask where , but the bloody blackened mess that’d been made out of his empty eye socket answered the question well enough. The other eye had survived, but the glimmers of Summer sunlight in the glass had noticeably dimmed.

“Ah,” Hierophant said, sounding somewhat embarrassed. “That.”

I took his chin in hand and moved him around to get a better look at the wound. Shallow stuff. I frowned.

“Did you enchant the inside of your eye socket?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he replied, sounding offended. “Enchantments laid into flesh are notoriously imprecise and prone to mutation.”

His chin was released. I waited, staring at him expectantly.

“I inserted chips of bone into the flesh, which I then enchanted,” Masego proudly told me. “In anticipation of an eventuality just like this one.”

Yeah, there it was. He looked at me, eyebrow cocked.

“You may praise my foresight now,” he encouraged.

“New rule,” I said. “Before you stick stuff in yourself and enchant it, ask someone about it.”

“I asked Akua when designing the enchantments last year,” he informed me. “She was quite helpful. Is she our friend again now, while I remember to ask? I was never quite clear on whether we are meant to despise her or not.”

“I’m changing the rule to asking me ,” I noted. “If I’m not there you should ask-”

I swallowed the answer. He was not here, he’d left me. Do not look back , I ordered myself. Else the pit awaits.

“-Vivienne,” I finished. “And for Akua, use your judgement. You don’t have to hate her if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t,” Masego informed me. “Useful to know, thank you.”

“Speaking of useful,” I said, forcing this back to the here and now. “Am I to assume you got something useful out of the hole in the ceiling?”

“That is how I lost the eye,” Hierophant admitted. “It appears the Gods Above were disinclined to allow me to peer too closely at their work. They seemed quite cross.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“Well, at least you didn’t get smote,” I forced out. “What did you learn?”

“Several things,” he noted. “The first is that the Intercessor still lives.”

I cursed in Kharsum. I’d figured she did, even after losing the stories, but it was not pleasant to have my suspicions confirmed.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“The readings I have of the artefact leaving dormancy allowed me to establish that they shouldn’t have interfered with the secondary enchantment we laid on the Spike,” Masego said.

I frowned at him. The silver harpoon he’d used in Ater, the Spike, had been meant to do exactly tow things. Extract an aspect from the Bard using the same principles that Zeze had used to cut out my corrupted aspect in Marchford all those years ago, and then ensure that even if the Bard died she would not escape. Our solution to her disappearing at every time she bought it had been, well, necromancy. If she died with the Spike in her, she was supposed to be raised from the dead immediately. Only the enchantment had failed, because when she’d bit off her tongue she’d disappeared.

“The enchantment failed, though,” I reminded him.

“Not because of interference from the process of extraction, as I had originally believed,” Hierophant said. “Which has fascinating implications, Catherine, because it means the necromancy was beaten out by a stronger will.”

“So she refused real hard to become undead?” I asked.

“I mean will in the magical sense,” Masego clarified.

Ah, so the same exercise of willpower that allowed a mage to use magic. The Trismegistan theory of magic preached that usurpation was the essence of sorcery, that a mage was stealing dominion over the laws of Creation whenever they used magic. Which meant he was implying a stronger mage than him had fought the enchantment.

“She can’t do magic,” I frowned. “I’m nearly certain about that.”

“There are always at least two will when magic is used, Catherine,” Hierophant reminded me.

I blinked.

“You mean Creation ?” I hissed.

“I believe it is a creational law that the Intercessor cannot die,” Masego agreed. “Only conflict with a fundamental law would be able to kill her, should this theory be correct.”

Which meant sorcery wouldn’t do it, and neither should Names. Not Light or Night either. Fundamental laws were supposedly laws that applied to even the Gods, things like ‘something cannot come from nothing’ and the like, but those were more like limits. Not the kind of law you could exploit.

“Fuck,” I said. “That complicates things.”

I’d thought of stripping stories from her as the first step to getting her head on a plate, but that no longer looked feasible. I was going to need a new way to deal with the Wandering Bard.

“Containment might be a more realistic solution,” Zeze suggested.

“We’re already planning that with the Dead King,” I said. “I’m not comfortable with the number of ancient evils we’re going to be shoving into lamps. At the very least, at this rate we’ll run out of lamps.”

“I imagine given long enough I will be able to find a way to kill her,” Hierophant mused. “It is only a matter of being thorough.”

The mildness of that tone contrasted with the words sent a shiver up my spine. It was always good to remember how very terrifying Masego could be, given reason.

“Regardless,” he continued, “before the Gods Above took offence to my polite and legitimate inquiries-”

On the other side of the table, hastily swept into a mess of hay, I noticed what looked like a set of long silver needles burned and melted by Light.

“- I did succeed at part of what I was attempting,” Masego continued. “Namely, discerning the nature of what we stole.”

“Her aspect,” I said.

“Yes,” he patiently replied, “but what does that mean , practically speaking?”

“Stewardship over stories,” I suggested. “The ability to seen and influence them.”

“Yet you’ve claimed she killed the stories for Evil in Ater,” Masego noted. “That goes beyond mere stewardship.”

“We don’t know her limits,” I reminded him.

“Indeed,” he agreed. “Which made ascertaining the nature of what we stole all the more important. How powerful is she, to be able to kill half of it?”

I hummed. That would be useful. Strength in a certain way didn’t necessarily translate in others, but it’d help scope her out.

“So?” I pressed.

He wrested sorcery from a small gem sown into his belt and began to draw in the air, golden lines like his runes, but I caught his arm.

“I don’t need the equations,” I said. “They’re beyond me. What did you conclude?”

“That even assuming the Intercessor ended stories for Below only in Calernia, which has been your insistence,” he said, pausing to allow me to interject.

I simply nodded in confirmation. I’d not been able to feel stories further than Calernia, and I did not believe the Intercessor had either. Our aspects had been similar enough she’d felt threatened, that I’d been close to stealing hers. The scope had to have been similar for that to be possible.

“Even then,” Masego continued, “the amount of power involved can mean only two things.”

He paused again, which was purely for dramatic purposes and I probably had Indrani to blame for.

“The first that this there is no reason to be concerned,” Hierophant pleasantly said, “because she is one of the Gods and can destroy this continent with a wink of her eye.”

“Grim,” I appreciated. “What’s in box number two?”

“She did not destroy anything at all,” Masego said. “She has only halted the stories.”

I let out a low whistle. If that were true, then we still had a shot at killing the Dead King. If that were true.

“And what do you base that on?” I asked.

“We have only seen one instance of the Intercessor manipulating power on a large scale,” he said. “The incident with the original Grey Pilgrim in Levant that was investigated by your minions.”

My eyes narrowed.

“The White Knight smote him, but the Bard stepped in and tinkered with the angel’s power so it wouldn’t kill him,” I said. “She changed some properties, yeah, but mostly she lessened the power.”

“Exactly,” he replied with a grin. “That is a precedent. I believe that the stories are not dead so much as lessened to zero.”

I grimaced.

“That’s useful information, I won’t pretend otherwise,” I said. “But it’s not a solution, Zeze. We can’t kill her, so her death isn’t a way to end her interference.”

Masego laughed.

“That’s the beauty of it, Catherine,” he told me. “This is not an act of the Gods that happened, or an irreversible destruction. It is an act of will . And what does Trismegistus sorcery teach us about these?”

My fingers clenched.

“Will can beat will,” I quietly said. “What one does, another can undo.”

He nodded.

“Should we find the right lever,” Hierophant smiled, “we can get those stories back .”

Fettered

“Good and Evil are a false dichotomy, each claiming to perfect while the other is imperfect. Neither holds any meaning: imperfection was seeded at the heart of Creation before its first breath. The sole lucid decision that can be made understanding this is to overcome that imperfection, to transgress beyond the confines of mortality.”

– Translation of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness, widely attributed to the young Dead King

The sparrow flew up, startled by their approach. Neshamah stared at it as it fled into the blue sky, at its brown wings and hasty flight. His mother laid a gentle hand against his neck.

“It is only a sparrow,” she told him. “Why such a stare?”

He hesitated. He was seven now, and the Conclave had found magic in him. It would have felt too much like whining to speak. As if she could read his mind, his mother tugged at his ear warningly.

“Peleg says I am a sparrow,” Neshamah confessed. “That all of father’s children are as great beasts, but I am the least of birds.”

Also because he was drab and common, but he would not tell her this. His mother’s face turned guilty as she freed his ear as he had feared it would. It was not her fault. Mother was a princess, but her kin had been devoured by the Rats not long after Neshamah was born. It had made them the least of the wives and children of King Iakim, for even those of lesser birth had the strength of a family to call on. The two of them had nothing, for rule of the city had passed to another family.

“Even the least of birds is a great thing, Neshamah,” she told him. “Have I ever told you the story fetters?”

He shook his head and she smiled. She loved telling stories.

“In the days before Sephirah was thirteen, far before it was made whole again, the entire world was as one,” his mother said. “Men and animals spoke the same tongue and the Gods were not hidden away Above and Below but instead where we might see them. Atop the tallest mountain of Creation they made their home and from there ruled us wisely.”

It was a beautiful day. The sun was warm but the shade of the oak at their side lessened the sing. The breeze was warm and the whole world looked to be a paradise of green. The gardens of Keter were like none other. His mother gently stroked his hair.

“But one day a king rose among men,” she said. “And he was burning with ambition. He sought to be the equal of the Gods, to rule among them from atop the mountain. And so he went among the world, speaking whispers, and turned men and beasts to his belief. All would rule as gods, he promised, if they built stairs that could reach atop the mountain.”

Neshamah was young but he already knew what happened to those who thought to equal the Gods.

“The king turned all men and beasts to his purpose,” his mother said, “save one for the one. Sipo he was named, the Father of Birds, and the king mocked him. Cursed him a coward and to have hollow bones for lack of bravery. But Sipo did not change his mind, and he alone refrained when the tower began to rise. For a year and a day did they stack the stones, until there was only one stone left for the mountain to be reached.”

“The Gods cast it down,” Neshamah said, tone certain.

“They did,” his mother agreed. “And all who had cast as stone were cursed with fetters, forever binding them to the ground. The king, who had deceived the others, was twice cursed: he was condemned to dwell into the water, beneath even the ground, and fathered all the beasts who dwell there. Only Sipo was spared, for her alone had been faithful to his creators.”

He stirred uneasily.

“What does it mean, the fetters?” Neshamah asked.

“It means, my sweet, that of all the living things of Creation only birds are free,” his mother smiled. “That is why they alone can fly, for they are the children of Sipo. When Peleg things he insults you, Neshamah, in truth he does you great honour.”

The small prince nodded, but his eyes were fixed on the blue sky.

One day, Neshamah thought, he too would be free.

—

Sage Dimka’s dream hall was the work of decades.

The Twilight Sages were not an order allowed to hold wealth or power, the same strict oaths that had made them the trusted advisors of every king in Temen Doyov forbidding it, but here in Tvarigu there were ways around the words. The Sages had been born among the great stalactites and the city was the seat of their power – it was only in name that they did not rule the seven tribes settled here. Yet it had still taken many years for Sage Dimka to receive enough gifts to shape the dream hall to his tastes. Neshamah disliked the pillars of vividly painted wood jutting up the walls like ribs – garish – but the mosaics in white and red tiles covering every surface were striking.

The young man stepped on the cool ceramic tiles barefooted, as it would be a grave insult to enter a Sage’s dream hall otherwise. Kings and queens of the Firstborn owned the lands, ruling over tribes and cities, but in their own hall every Twilight Sage stood above even crowns. Dimka was seated across the floor, atop the dais of worn stone he had taken from a rival sage in a riddle-war, and from the rents in the floor around the dais thick white smoke wafted up. To Neshamah, bound as he was by the limitations of his humanity, the smoke reeked of sickly-sweet rot. It was finer than the finest of incenses to the Sage, however, and burnt dedesu was known to his kind into the state between life and death where they glimpsed truths.

Neshamah approached the dais and bowed low. Dimka opened sleepy blue eyes and seemed startled, as if he had forgot granting the audience. He might well have. Neshamah’s teacher among the Sages was not known as skilled speaker or guide of men. His long black robes were rumpled and stained, his grey hair ragged and his face hollow-cheeked even for a drow. He looked more a vagrant that a wise man. Neshamah cared little. He had already made a study of men, glimpsed the levers that moved them. It had been another tutelage he sought from Dimka Deep-Sleep, and he his hopes had not been disappointed.

“Neshamah,” Dimka said, sounding vaguely pleased. “Come, sit. This is a good day.”

Smoothly, the youngest prince of Sephirah obeyed: knees on the ground, feet folded behind him.

“I am pleased to hear this,” Neshamah said.

The old drow frowned, grey brow creasing.

“This is not teaching day,” Dimka recalled. “There are no lessons. Have you come, son of Keter, to spend one of your questions?”

“I have,” he replied.

His years under Dimka had not come without limits or a price. Many a secret of his people Neshamah had given over, what had been whispered in the Hall of Thirteen and the arcane teachings of the Conclave, and he had even given an oath never to lead Sephirah to war against Temen Doyov should he become king. In exchange he had been granted five years of tutelage and the right to ask for three secrets. He had already asked for two. One spent to learn that the Garden was older than Creation, that the fae had come before, and another to learn how to partake of death. This would be his last, and soon his five years would come at an end.

Neshamah had learned from the Twilight Sages nearly all he had sought.

“You will wait before asking,” Dimka said. “I was given the right to become one with the shade of Sage Nadezhda and my preparations are complete. We will discuss when I have lessened death.”

Neshamah lowered his head in agreement, though his consent meant nothing in this hall. Dimka smiled, pleased, and breathed in deep of the dedesu smoke. When he breathed out, sorcery flared. Beneath the dais would lay the bones of Sage Nadezhda, hidden but close, and as the necromancy took hold of them the very air shivered. The warmth turned to icy cold. Dimka gasped and rocked back, his eyes turning silver as he smiled in ecstasy and consumed the memories of the dead Sage. It was a great honour to be given leave to consume anyone at all instead of simply calling them, much consume one who had been of their order while she lived.

After long moments of Dimka convulsing, the Sage finally stilled and the air slowly began to turn warm again. The Twilight Sage breathed in and out slowly, resting, but his eyes were open and awake.

“How should this one referring to the Sage?” Neshamah asked.

Dimka shivered.

“I have not yet renounced gender,” the old drow said. “She died too young. I am not yet more.”

The oldest Sages, those who had eaten the memories of dozens – some even as much as a ninety-nine, which they held a sacred number – of deceased, turned strange. Abandoned gender and sometimes even their names, seeing themselves as far removed from the drow as drow were from gloom-lizards.

“Soon,” Dimka smiled. “Soon. I straddle the border now, Neshamah. Ask your question.”

“What are the boundaries of what the Gods have created?”

A question had had laboured months to craft. Not merely the boundaries of Creation, which he might find himself in time, but of all that the Gods had created. The Twilight Sage leaned back, pulling his robes tightly against his frame.

“This is not known to us,” Dimka said.

Neshamah bore the disappointment stoically. He had always known it might be the answer. The Sages made children of the wizards of Sephirah, but they were not as gods. They too were still plumbing the depths of the dark for answers.

“Through the passing of life into death we have glimpsed the borders of Creation,” the Sage said. “What separates now from after. Yet our learning is not without its shallows.”

“Someone must know,” Neshamah said. “Someone must have looked.”

Dimka slowly nodded.

“There are old tales,” the Sage said. “From a time where our people were mere children. After the dark there was a war, and in that war the Ancients fought the Wrath. It is said that the drow fled that great struggle, and for that cowardice were marked – for we were once pale as milk, as some of your kind are.”

“The Titans and the Drakoi,” Neshamah murmured.

The old drow’s face hardened and the smoke stilled around him, as if frozen.

“Do not speak those names, ignorant child,” Dimka hissed. “They are powers best left unstirred. Even the shadow of their shadow casts wide enough for a world to drown in.”

Feigning being chastened, the prince bowed his head. He waited until the Sage’s mood had settled before speaking again.

“And these great powers left behind answers?” he asked.

“It is said that the Ancients mapped out not only Creation but all that lies beyond it, for their strength came not only from this earth but the stars in the sky,” Dimka said. “They made wonders that show the lay of all that exists.”

Hunger gnawed at his stomach.

“And where might I find such a wonder, Sage Dimka?” Neshamah asked.

The old drow wryly smiled.

“At the heart of horror,” Dimka said. “Deep in the Cursed Lands, where the rats feast on one another, there was once a city of the Ancients. Look there, and answers might remain to be found.”

The prince of Sephirah smiled. He knew where he would journey, when his five years ended.

—

Was there a thing as accursed in all of Creation as the Chain of Hunger?

There were many stories in Sephirah of how the land how come to be, but the simplest and oldest remained the best known: a god had died here, and his malice seeped into the land. The curse spread to all who dwelled here, making them devour each other, until one beast rose above all others. So a rat became a Rat, and the malice of the dead god lived on. Neshamah had not believed the tale, trusting instead the learned extrapolation of the Conclave, but now that he had journeyed through the rustling plains he was not so certain. There was something here, in the air and the earth, and it was becoming stronger the deeper he went into the sea of tall grass.

A year he had spent finding the lost city of the Ancients, for not even the Twilight Sages had known the way, and though Neshamah had grown exhausted iron will commanded his body to continue. The Rats prowled these lands in packs and horse, devouring each other and all living things save the tall grass of the plains – it was poisonous to them – but the prince had learned to hide himself beneath sorcery. He would not be smelled or seen, so long as he was careful, and he was. As the months passed and the last of his food went he had learned to suffer the taste of Rat flesh, but no journey was without sacrifice. Nothing could be earned when nothing was given.

And he had found the end of his path, at last. The ruins jutted up from the ground like spires of silver and stone, the wind passing through them and leaving behind a song of mournful sighs. The sight that had him shivering was the mirrors that still spun around the spires, hundreds of them and none smaller than a man. They moved in arcane patterns, the magic that moved them undaunted even when the kingdom that had given them life had long been ground to dust. His stride long, Neshamah approached the ruins. The Rats avoided them, afraid or otherwise moved, but it was with great care he ventured through the spires.

Whatever had given the Rats pause was still there.

To grasp the purpose of this place was beyond Neshamah, but he had studied the works of the Titans. Learned some of the meanings in their strange letters. It was enough to guide him through the silent maze as a hundred reflections glared back at him, deeper and deeper until he found a stele of stone. Excitement thrummed in his veins. It was why he had come for, what the scarce tales and records he had found called a ‘Seeing of Phoebe’. He hurried through the dust and laid reverent fingers against the stele, which stood half as high as the spires and almost as broad, and felt the stone was warm. Still living.

Ten days it took him to wake the stele, and even so it was not fully woken. His understanding was too shallow. Yet Neshamah found what he had come for: a map . The Titans had felt out the boundaries of what the Gods had created and set their secrets to stone, which the prince now had laid out before his eyes. A sphere, the lay of Creation, enveloped by a circle. The Garden, the realm of the fae. To the sides were two great realms, the Heavens and the Hells, one deep beyond sight but unmoving while the other was shallow but ever-shifting. All these were put to stone, writhing in light before his eyes, but the prince was not satisfied.

“Are you incomplete?” he asked the stone.

It must be. Else where in the lay of it all would be the provenance of the great abominations, the creatures men called demons. He wandered away and back to his camp, lost in thought and the deep silences of his place. Fear had come to him. Creation, he had discerned, was as small garden in an ocean of nothingness. Created by the power of the Gods, it was their work and its boundaries had been set bound them. All the creatures they had made obeyed these laws – men and fae, devils and hallowed. Yet there must be something more, for the Twilight Sages had followed the thread of death and found that souls went somewhere beyond their reach. The embrace of the Gods, priests said, but what did that mean ? It was neither the Heavens nor the Hells, it was not a place of Creation or the Garden, so where did they go?

Neshamah had hoped the Titans would know, but what they handed him instead was a troubling thing. Demons were believed to come from the Hells, the very deepest of them, but the prince had long doubted this. The Hells were ever-shifting, while what records existed of the demons spoke of creatures fundamental and unchanging. Neshamah had thought there might be another realm, one hidden but close to the Hells, where sorcerers had learned to reach by accident. Only the Ancients did not agree, for in their map of existence they wrote nothing at all of demons. Not even among the Hells. As if they were from another existence entirely.

Neshamah returned to the stone the following day, hoping to wake up more of its secrets, but when he laid a hand against the warm stone he went still.

Eyes were on him.

The sting of the blow that came through the stone broke his jaw, his arm and both his legs. He fell to the ground, bleeding and swallowing blood, as the contempt of something greater than he whipped at his very soul. The stele cracked, the sight ripping a scream out of him where pain had not, and before he could even try to crawl towards it fell to pieces. A wonder of the world, shattered in an instant because one of its makers had judged him unfit to sift through the ashes of their people. Covered in dust and stone, slowly bleeding out, Neshamah laid there and looked up at the sky. Blue and bright, the same as that morning so long ago where the flame had been lit in him.

“I will find out,” he swore. “Deny me all you like, Titan, but I will find out if Creation is finite.”

—

Three years.

He had lied and betrayed and begged and bargained, but none of it mattered. Three years had passed since the evening where he lay in the dust at the heart of the city of mirrors and at last Neshamah had what he sought: answers. In the hidden place below the fortress he had murdered a man for, the cells had revealed truths to him. All things of Creation and the Garden were moved by the presence of demons. So were devils and objects blessed with Light, though the ways of it were different. Limited, he had discovered, as if in the very fabric of the Heavens and Hells limits had been inscribed.

And only one manner of hands could have written those words.

On the last day of the third year, the last question was answered. Neshamah had not learned where souls went after death, only that they went, but the question beneath it he had followed to the end. If the Gods were infinite, omnipotent, why was the world fettered? Why did death exist – and its existence was a choice, had to be, because fae did not die – and why was entropy was allowed to devour all of existence one instant at a time? Priests gave answers to these, but none that had ever satisfied the prince of Sephirah. To worship a riddle was to live a house without candles. And at dawn that morning, Neshamah had established that there was nothing that the presence could not affect given long enough. Not even a shard from the corpse of an angel.

The truth that followed was a horror, but he did not deny it.

He torched the fortress, all trace of the works he had wrought. He made certain nothing would crawl out of the ashes, and when he was satisfied nothing would he left the smoking ruin behind. Neshamah walked out into the wilds until he found a grassy hill with a pair of trees atop it, birds singing in the branches as the sun and wind caressed the land. The prince of Sephirah laid in the grass beneath the tree, looking up at the blue sky through the leaves. He raised up a hand, as it to reach it, and left it there. A long while passed, until to his startlement a bird came to land on the outstretched fingers. A small, drab brown thing.

A sparrow.

“A demon can affect everything,” Neshamah murmured to the sparrow, “because it is not of this existence. Not of Creation or any other place. And yet, undeniably, it exists.”

The sparrow gripped his fingers, trilled up at its fellows.

“There was another Creation,” Neshamah smiled. “Before ours. And it no longer exists, save what the Gods saw fit to take from it.”

The demons themselves. What had been their wager, he wondered? Above against Below was the writ of this Creation, the answer that would be found, but the older existence must have had a different purpose. Essence against form, perhaps? There could be no purer essence than that of a demon, which affected all it beheld simply by existing. He had moved a little, and the sparrow shuffled around on his hand.

“There was one before us,” the prince of Sephirah calmly said, “and I believe there will be one after . We are finite. It will all end.”

The sparrow trilled. He smiled and flicked his hand. The bird, startled, flew up into the sky. It was a lie, that endless blue. His mother’s story had lied. There was not a single creature born of Creation that had been spared fetters by the Gods.

But, one day, Neshamah would be free.

Chapter 28: Grieved

“Friendship is the sole gift both given and received.”

– Free Cities saying

Even nameless hole-in-the-ground villages had a temple, in Procer.

A bare bones arrangement, of course. It wasn’t like the people who’d once lived here had been able to afford bringing in stone. The House of Light was a glorified barn, with shuttered windows on the sides and a surprisingly nice thatched roof. The angle of it was gentle enough I was able to lean back into the prickly straw and leave my legs dangling over the edge. My deadwood staff I left at my side, keeping against my ribs an open bottle of wine as I looked up at the clouds. The day was waning but it was still a fair afternoon, the sun warm and the breeze lazy. I had the third of a bottle warming my belly, the taste of the red sour against my tongue, and I was half asleep already.

I’d taken to sneaking in naps when I could afford to, which was less often than I’d like. My hours were spoken for even on the road. It helped even out for my nights when I could, though. There were only so many times in a row you could wake up halfway to Early Bell and find yourself incapable of falling asleep until the lost sleep caught up to you. My Name was taking the edge off some, but it could only compensate so much: just like when I’d been the Squire, it did not prevent tiredness so much as help me work through it. Sooner or later the dues had to be paid. My fingers clenched around the neck of the bottle. And that was the very thing keeping me up at night, wasn’t it? The dues I’d paid in Ater.

There were some dreams even exhaustion was preferable to.

I brought the bottle to my lips, drank deep and forced myself to close my eyes. The nap would do me good. Only there was a scent on the wind, the last wisps of smoke from Masego’s work, and it had my jaw clenching. I would not be able to sleep here, I realized. At least not without that fucking nightmare, the way his eyes had widened just the slightest bit as the knife sunk into his chest. The shiver of pain as the mortal wound was inflicted. It’d been burning that night too, a pillar of green death going up all the way to the clouds.

It was a relief when I felt the magic thrum in the air. Masego had always been a prodigy when it came to controlling his sorcery, the impressively small amount of power lost when casting a spell, but he’d become something else entirely since losing his magic. Not there was not a drop lost, I thought. The only signs he was using magic were immanent – inherent to the formula, inevitable – with not a single emanation phenomenon. I suspected that his spells were now as close to perfect as was possible for a human when he was allowed to take his time.

I did not open my eyes to look at how he was coming up, but I heard him slump down into the thatch and wiggled around until he was more or less comfortable.

“I’ll need thicker robes,” Masego noted, “if we are to keep doing this. The straw bites at my back.”

“Send a requisition request to Vivienne,” I snorted.

I was going through secretaries quicker than I was going through swords, these days. I’d lost one to the Clans and the other to a blade in the back, leaving Princess Vivienne Dartwick to settle awkwardly into the role. She had duties of her own and she’d never been quite as good with details as either her predecessors, so the adjunct secretariat was having to pick up the slack. I’d have tried to borrow Aisha from Juniper if I weren’t so likely to lose a hand to those pearly whites in the attempt.

“We could avoid thatched roofs instead,” Masego flatly suggested. “I’ll not begrudge you the habit of finding a perch, Catherine, but you could at least find a comfortable one.”

“Slim pickings here,” I amusedly replied. “I’ll take it under advisement for the next time.”

“That is all I ask,” he replied, pleased.

There was a moment of comfortable silence, then finally I sighed and open my eyes.

“What brings you up here?” I asked.

“I’ve done as much to find our leverage as I can without my proper equipment,” Masego told me. “A purely magical ritual is not a feasible solution, as I had suspected, so I am broadening the search. The mathematics are rather challenging, it is an interesting area of theory.”

I glanced at the dark-skinned man lying at my side, the first Named who had joined me. He’d been Apprentice, back then, but that was no longer the mantle he bore.

“Who am I to ask about the arithmetic of deicide if not you, Hierophant?” I half-smiled.

I glanced to the side, finding his lips quirking, but my brow furrowed. His eye was still missing, the one he’d lost earlier. The skin of the socket was healed, but only one glass eye remained.

“Haven’t had time to repair it?” I asked, tapping my own missing eye.

He looked surprised.

“ Repair it?” Masego said. “That is not possible, Cat. It is not a crossbow whose parts can be swapped out. My eyes were unique, artefacts in the truest sense of the word. No, it is permanently lost to me.”

I started in surprise.

“Shit,” I said. “I’m sorry, Zeze. I had no idea.”

He shrugged.

“You don’t seem all that broken up about it,” I slowly said.

“One will suffice,” he said. “It serves my purposes well enough.”

“You’ve had them for years,” I pointed out.

“The loss of my eye was well worth what it allowed me to Witness ,” Hierophant said. “It is not without reason Above guarded the sight so jealously. Did I not tell you, once, that the godhead is a mere trick of perspective?”

I nodded. Hard words to forget when they’d come in the wake of him becoming the Hierophant and binding a princess of the fae standing in the fullness of her might.

“Apotheosis is not a matter of power, Catherine,” he said. “Else as the Sovereign of Moonless Nights you would have been as terrible as a great queen of the fae. It is the perception of the laws of Creation, of its underpinning, that sets aside a god from the rest.”

“And this helped?” I asked.

“I had a glimpse of work laid down by the Gods themselves,” Hierophant said. “It did more to broaden my perspective in an instant than twenty years of uninterrupted research would have borne. Once again, you have given me a great gift.”

“I know what I’m getting you for your next nameday, then,” I drily said.

He looked at me, surprised but expectant.

“I’ll pluck out the other eye,” I grinned. “See if you learn from that.”

He rolled his glass eye all the way around, which even after years of war against Keter I had to admit remained an unsettling sight.

“Lucky me,” Masego sighed, and extended his arm towards me.

I cocked a questioning eyebrow.

“The bottle,” he asked. “Unless you intend on drinking alone. Which is a habit common in drunks, I’ll remind you.”

“Well,” I grunted, “if you insist on putting it that way.”

He caught the bottle when I tossed it, because I’d yet to figure out how to fake out that damn eye. He wiped the rim carefully with his sleeve and took a careful sip, getting a smile out of me. He’d been overweight when I first met him. Hard to remember that now. Even through his high-collared robes – black, as always, but bordered in sharp patterns of yellow and green – I could see he was lean, though with barely any muscle to him. He was still very much out of shape. His long braids were woven tightly with enchanted trinkets whose magic he could wrest. His face had changed as he grew old, sharpened as the last of the baby fat melted away and his nose stood out more starkly, so now the braids made his cheekbones look longer.

“I think I prefer red wines,” Masego noted. “Though brandy cut with pear juice remains the finest of drinks.”

The Grey Pilgrim had introduced him to it while they were working on smiting ritual together. Tariq had been very fond of pear brandy but known it was rather rare outside of the Dominion and so finagled a little recipe with Proceran brandies and pears. It was so horribly sweet I almost felt nauseous just standing near a cup, but Zeze was very fond of the brew. And Indrani liked it when he drank, so no doubt in some supply wagon of the Army of Callow there would be the ingredients for it being smuggled along with actual supplies.

“Good luck getting that in a tavern,” I snorted.

“Never again,” he darkly said. “There was a rat, Catherine.”

“Come on,” I complained. “It was once and yearsago. We’ll take you to a nicer place next time.”

Indrani and I had taken him to a tavern Dockside in Laure before the Tenth Crusade, one of those dives we both loved. We’d yet to hear the end of that rat.

“There won’t be one,” Masego helpfully informed me.

I threw a few barbs his way about tender Praesi palates, he reminded me that in truth it was Callowans who had difficulties with spices, and after a while we settled into a comfortable silence as we passed the bottle of wine back and forth. I felt lighter already. He’d always had a knack for doing that, perhaps because he usually wasn’t trying to. If someone were trying to move me I’d dig in my heels, but his sincerity had a way of going right through.

“Got anything else to do before we leave?” I lazily asked.

“Sapan is overseeing the last of our packing,” he said. “But yes, as it happens.”

“What’s that?”

He turned to look at me fully instead of through his own skull, which had me frowning already.

“You need to speak with Hakram,” Masego said.

My fingers clenched. So did my guts.

“It’s handled,” I curtly said.

“It isn’t,” he replied, shaking his head. “Which is why I bring it up. Indrani tried to before you sent her off to Salia, but you distracted her with sex.”

I paused, surprised enough by the bluntness of that to be at a loss for words.

“She says you only do that when you really want to avoid talking about something,” Masego frankly said. “Which is why she let you do it. But she was worried, and so am I. You’ve been putting it off ever since you left Ater.”

I’d left before him. He’d stayed to watch my father and Eudokia be put to the pyre before catching up. I’d not asked what would be done with the ashes. I wasn’t sure I had a right to.

“I have no time for the personal,” I said, but it was a lie.

I did. I just didn’t want to deal with it. Masego wiped the bottle, then had a long sip. He set it down into the thatch carefully. He folded his knees close to his chest, like a child pulling close.

“I ran, after Thalassina,” he quietly said. “I could not face the enormity of what had happened there. I had swallowed up hundreds of thousands of souls, swelled with power the likes of which I had never known, and yet I still ran. There were... whispers in my ear. Procer would be where I found how to Papa back, where I could break the crusade that killed him. But deep down, I believe knew I was running.”

“It’s not the same,” I murmured. “You know that. They died, your fathers, but you didn’t...”

Kill them , I could not quite bring myself to say. You didn’t kill them, like I killed mine.

“An argument can be made that I did,” Masego said. “If I had not insisted to be out in the Maze, Father might never have reached for the powers that killed them.”

Them and a city , I almost said, but held my tongue. Grief didn’t work that way. You could know, in principle, that the death of a city of thousands mattered more on the scales than the pair of people you had loved. But it didn’t weigh the same. Grief, it was like a wound. It hurt when it was on you, when it was your flesh split and your bones cracked. You could see someone else’s wound, feel for them, but it wouldn’t be the same. Our pain always mattered more than other people’s because it was the only one that felt real.

“It does not matter, in the end,” Masego quietly continued. “Even if I claimed all the guilt as my own, it would not bring them back. It is just digging to make the pond deep enough to drown.”

“It does matter,” I harshly replied. “Of course it fucking matters, Masego. I put a knife in him .”

My hand swept up and I flicked the wrist, some vicious part of me hoping for a flinch but finding only unruffled patience. I stabbed the knife into the straw, felt it rip through strands of straw. Like killing a scarecrow.

All men became like scarecrows once you killed enough of them.

“That knife,” I told him, knuckles turning white from the grip. “Right into his heart. He was dead faster than a prayer, Masego. And he gave me the fucking thing the night we met, did you know?”

I could still hear his voice, the way the blade had glinted in the firelight as he spun the handle towards me. How far are you willing to go, to see it done? Far enough to kill him. Had he known, even back then? That it would end with his gift returned in red. Masego’s father had hated me once, because he thought I would be my father’s death and he had loved the man deeply. Wekesa the Warlock had always been clever. Masego shook his head.

“You never told me the story,” he said. “And when I asked him, he was...”

“Himself,” I finished, tone rueful.

My friend nodded.

“I was going to die,” I said. “I was heading back to the orphanage and I saw a guard assault this girl. I stepped in, tried to stop it, but another guard got me. He was choking me, then the Black Knight appeared.”

What a terror he had seemed, back then, death in unadorned plate. Not even Sabah, for all that she stood heads taller and broader, had filled the alley quite so much.

“We took them prisoner,” I said. “And they were going to be turned over to the city guard, only it wouldn’t stick. They’d tried to rape and murder, but they’d still get out.”

I swallowed.

“So he offered me a knife,” I said, “and asked me what I thought was right.”

That was the moment that’d begun it all, wasn’t it? There had been many crossroads in my life. That night in Summerholm where I became the Squire. The end of the Folly, when I’d embraced the depths of Winter. The battle for Great Strycht, the plea I had made to an enemy with every right to kill me. Even that nightmare in Ater, the sky burning green as I became the Warden of the East. All great pivots, days and night that had decided the lay of my life. But at the source of them all, the origin, it was that evening in Laure. The weight of the knife against my palm as I made my choice and slit two throats.

I’d begun it all in blood, and in blood was carrying it out.

“Did you find it?” Masego asked.

I was silent for a long time.

“I found something,” I murmured. “I don’t know if it’s right, but it’s something that made it worth the knife.”

“He would understand.”

I looked away from my friend.

“He did,” I said. “Does that make it any better I murdered him?”

“I loved him too, Catherine,” Masego reminded me.

The tone was calm, but there was iron beneath it. A warning to tread lightly.

“Loved them both,” he continued. “Aunt Eudokia was never close to us, to anybody but him I think, but I’ve known them since I could remember.”

My gaze was drawn to him and I found him looking east. At the distant peaks of the Whitecaps, through green valleys and heavy mists. The afternoon sun was dipping, falling out of sight. Masego’s long, lean face was composed but that was only skin deep. In the depths of the east laid the graves of the only family he’d ever known. And still he looked, with an eye of shadow and an eye of gold.

“Father once told me the day might come one of them killed another,” Masego said. “That they had won against the odds for long, but it would not last forever. That perhaps Aunt Sabah would fall too deep in the Beast, that Father would delve into things best left buried or Uncle Amadeus cross one line too many. And he made me swear, that day, that I would forgive whoever survived.”

My breath caught in my throat.

“He said,” Masego continued, “that I must. That he did not want me to lose all of my family for one death.”

“Praesi,” I said.

It was neither praise nor curse. Maybe a little of both.

“These are the lives we live, Catherine,” he gently said. “We kill and we win until we lose and we die. We are the children of the knife. And so I still love you, even though I watched the woman who used to bring me lemon tarts bleed out on the stairs. Even though you killed the man who taught me it was all right to be as I am, that I should not be fearful of it.”

It was perhaps the most loving thing anyone had ever told me. The obscenity of it made me want to throw up. I felt my fingers shaking around the grip of the knife. I’d yet to let it go.

“I thought we would win,” I croaked. “That I’d get to keep him. That we’d all get to go home. And instead, Gods...”

He laid a hand against my arm, fingers warm even through the cloth.

“I know,” Masego said.

“ Fuck ,” I snarled, fearing myself tear up. “We were so close, and he just didn’t give me another way. It was all laid out in front of me: him, them, or everyone else. We were going to end it all in one stroke and he just wouldn’t get out of the way .”

I tried to stay angry, but it came out more like a sob. Slowly, delicately, Masego unclasped my fingers from around the knife. I let him and left it in there. Stabbed deep in the straw. I felt like swinging at someone, like hitting the roof or Zeze or even the fucking sky if only so that momentary satisfaction of the hit would drown this out for just a heartbeat. Instead I choked on a sob and his hand on my arm gently tugging me forward until my head was dragged down against his leg. He ran his fingers through my hair, soothing me like a child as I bawled my eyes out. He was dead. Truly dead, no trick or scheme or last laugh. In that cruel moment on the steps we’d made our choices and I’d killed him.

I was never going to see him grow old. I was never going to share a drink with him again, sitting in a tent after dark and talking about the way the world should be. I was never again going to know someone who got the anger. Who’d felt it too. He was just gone.

When I came back to myself, throat raw and nose dripping, it almost felt like I’d fallen asleep. But I was still here, head on Masego’s lap as he gently combed by hair with his fingers. No one had done that for me before, I thought, not like this. Kilian had massaged my back, sometimes even scratched it, but never this. And Indrani had never tried it either. It wouldn’t be from her he’d learned that, I thought. It’d have been one of his fathers, both lost in Thalassina. I’d never met Tikoloshe and disliked Wekesa, but never had I doubted they loved their son deeply. I’d known that about them long before I heard of the sacrifice that had broken a city and a fleet, and their loved echoed through their son still. Through the fingers combing my hair.

“There,” Masego said, sounding awkward as he patted my head. “Better, yes?”

I dragged myself upright, tugging my clothes and wiping my nose with my sleeve. I would have cleared my throat, but it still felt raw.

“Yeah,” I rasped. “Better. A little.”

He withdrew from me, not out of dislike but because he’d never been all that fond of touching. It knew it to be a mark of great fondness that he’d kept me close for this long.

“It doesn’t stop hurting,” he said. “It merely... takes a step back. It will always be there, I think. That it what it means to have loved them.”

I exhaled.

“Thank you,” I got out, even though I didn’t want to.

Even though it felt like weakness.

“That is family,” he smiled.

And it was. I’d taken me years, but I had found a family of sorts. Made it, greedily clutched it to my breast. Masego and Indrani and Vivienne and all of Rat Company, the Fifteenth. I held as many ghosts as I did living, but they were still mine.

“So return it in kind,” Masego said. “Hakram, why is it that you won’t speak to him?”

I looked away. It was easier, when you had only the one eye.

“Vivienne thinks it’s because you’re afraid of ruling without him,” he said. “That speaking to him will make it true, permanent.”

“Talk behind my back, do you?” I said, but the anger was half-hearted.

“When you turn it,” Masego said, “where else can we?”

I winced. From someone else I’d been able to take the lick and move on, just call it a good line and dismiss it, but he didn’t play those sorts of games. Sincerity was harder to ignore. So I kept silent for a long time, choosing my words, as he patiently waited. The poison came to me first. It always did, for better or worse.

“He was supposed to be the one who stayed,” I admitted. “When all this comes to an end.”

“I don’t follow,” he said.

“You’ll disappear into a tower, Zeze,” I tiredly said. “And Indrani will keep a home wherever you are, but she’ll leave. It’s not in her nature to stay. And Vivienne, well, neither of us ever pretended we’d choose the other over Callow. She’ll have a kingdom to rule. But Hakram, he was going to stick with me. We were going to build Cardinal together, usher a new age under the Liesse Accords.”

I laughed, not hiding the bitterness.

“Only he’s bound to the Clans now,” I said. “If not for life, then for a very long time. Maybe he’ll help, and I’m sure he’ll write, but it won’t be...”

I hesitated, not quite finding the words.

“It won’t be us ,” I said. “It’ll be me and him. And I’m not sure that’s enough.”

Because I was looking forward, into what lay beyond Keter, and what I saw terrified me. They’d be gone, all of them. Not only the Woe but everyone. Juniper and Aisha and Pickler, they weren’t going to leave the Army of Callow for a city being built. Not when they’d given years of their lives building that army up from nothing. So one day, after they feasted me in Laure and patted my back and were well rid of the queen that had been necessary in the pit but was embarrassing now that peace had come, I’d begin walking west and found I was left only with ghosts. That, like my father before me, when it came down to it I stood alone.

“You are afraid,” Masego slowly said, brow cocked.

He spoke the words like they were the most absurd thing in the world. Like he’d just said water was dry.

“I think I’m past that,” I said. “I’ve seen it on the horizon for too long. Resigned, I think, is the better word.”

“Why would you think that?” he asked, frowning. “That we’d leave?”

“Because they left him ,” I harshly said. “After the Conquest was done, when the stories were finished, they split. Captain to her family, your father to his tower and Ranger had already fucked off in the woods long ago. Only Scribe stayed, and my Scribe was supposed to be Hakram. So much for that.”

“We’re not them, Cat,” Hierophant said.

“We carry the legacies,” I tiredly said. “And the writing’s on the wall. I’m not angry , Masego. I just didn’t think it through right. I carried the mistakes down a generation. Maybe the next one will do better.”

“Catherine,” he said, a hint of iron in his tone. “We are not them.”

It was easy to say this now, I thought, but it would not last. He was who he was. Here and now my fear brought him guilt, but guilt so rarely won out against desire.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “You want to know why I can’t stomach looking at him? Because he knew all this, Masego. Everything I just told you. He knew it and made his choice anyway.”

My lips quirked mirthlessly.

“It wasn’t the wrong choice,” I said. “He did a great good through it. And I should not begrudge him that.”

But I did. Because he’d left me, and I knew hundreds of thousands would be better off for it, all of the Clans. But the Clans were far and it was my flesh split, my bones cracked. The queen saw nothing to forgive, but it was not the queen who loved him. Masego studied me for a long time.

“You are keeping something back,” he said.

My eye found the knife stabbed into the straw. I reached out to touch it, but my fingers flinched away.

“That night,” I said. “In Ater.”

The golden eye watched me but the shadowed one allowed me my shame in peace. An even-handed stare.

“On the steps, I made the decision,” I murmured. “Them or Calernia. And I hesitated, I did, but it was...”

I bit my lip.

“I knew from the moment I stood at the crossroads,” I said, “which choice I would make. I hesitated the same way you hesitated before putting your finger against an open flame – knowing it’d hurt. I knew I’d kill him if it came to that. It was inevitable from the moment the choice was asked of me.”

“And you think he’ll not forgive you that,” Masego stated.

I shook my head.

“I don’t know if he will,” I said. “But I think yes. Because it took the two of us to end up standing on those stairs with a knife between us. It’s not about that. I guess it’s about me.”

The golden eye watched, impassive.

“Every time I’ll look at him,” I said, “I’ll know. That he’s probably the most important person in my life, the first and closest friend I ever made, and I still chose to kill him.”

I’d have to live with that, with the scent of it hanging in their air every time we were in the same room. I’d chosen to kill him and we both knew that. How little love mattered to me when there was a war to win, an enemy to beat.

I’d thought I had lines I wouldn’t cross.

Masego reached for the bottle and I handed it to him. After wiping it clean once again, he swallowed the last mouthful of the bottle. He grimaced after, for it had been a middling bottle and so the bottom had tasted strongly, and set it down into the thatch.

“It is you who is ashamed,” Masego said.

He added nothing, as if waiting for confirmation. Slowly, I nodded.

“Yet it is him confined to distance, even should he wish otherwise,” Masego noted.

I grimaced, echoing his own. It was as bitter a mouthful to swallow. My friend waited for me patiently, until I had finished going through all my denials and delays and settled on something I would live with.

“Salia,” I said. “I’ll join the briefings with Abreha until then, but I’ll speak to him alone in Salia. When we can be in the same room.”

“That is all I ask,” Masego said.

I slumped back down into the straw and so did her. Dusk was approaching, and with it the time of our departure. Three weeks to Salia now, perhaps one more if there were troubles on the way. My fingers found the handle of the knife and closed around it. I wouldn’t leave it here, much as a part of me wanted to. Children of the knife , Masego had called us. We’d wield them until they killed us all, that was what we’d been born to. All you got, I thought, was to choose what you did with it. If you tried to make the world bright or you tried to lessen it. It wasn’t much.

But it was something.

We lied there on the roof in silence until the sun came down.

Chapter 29: Foundation

“Who sows without wisdom reaps a field of sorrows.”

– Alamans saying

Travelling through the Twilight Ways was often as a hazy dream, but two days before we reached Salia the world caught up with me.

Archer found us an hour before Morning Bell, as the army prepared to decamp from the riverside where it’d passed the night. I decided to stay behind, passing command of the van to Vivienne, and asked the phalanges to prepare a decent meal for her while she went to bathe in the river. Indrani was in a fine mood for having washed off the stink of the road when she returned, her hair in a braid and her gait loose-limbed. She took her plate – bread and cheese with some cuts of pork – and brought it with her to the ground as she sat by the side of the carved table with a knife in hand. I got a look at the shape of the relief she was starting to carve when I brought her a glass of wine.

A tower aflame, with a man sitting on stairs below and two looming presences on the sides.

My jaw clenched but I said nothing. I ought to be getting used to talk of that night, anyhow. Gods knew my ear would be filled with prattle about it soon enough. I’d had a terse conversations about it over scrying ritual with both Cordelia and Hanno, the Bard blacking out half the stories of Calernia had made that necessary, but those had only been barebone talks. The meat of the information I’d passed on had been through written reports, so it was inevitable they’d want more out of me. I’d been there that night and known more about what was unfolding than perhaps anyone save the Intercessor. Would that it had been enough, instead of a bell being rang for the death of all the Principate north of Salia.

I waited for Archer to have crammed a few mouthfuls and washed them down before the questions began, which she seemed to appreciate.

“So,” I said. “Salia.”

“I handed back our little heroes to the White Knight safe and sound,” Indrani said. “But he was more interested in having talks with Alexis. He’s trying to get a grasp on the details of what happened out east, I think.”

The Silver Huntress had been involved in nothing I’d not already passed on word about, so if Hanno was looking for an angle he’d be disappointed. He’d already politely asked about the artefact that had ‘wounded the Intercessor’, but I’d given him nothing. As was my right. Hierophant had built it from scratch, refining the lessons we’d learned trying to trap her in the Arsenal, and he had no claim on any part of it. Even the... Book of Some Things – ugh, that name – wasn’t something he had a right to, strictly speaking. I’d set plenty of precedents for stealing aspects and making artefacts of them without anyone else having a claim on them.

No doubt he’d try to ask Sapan as well, if he hadn’t already, but that would be another dead end. Masego had kept his temporary pupil far from the work, and though an increasingly skilled mage the girl was nowhere near close to the league needed to understand sorcery of such calibre. She wouldn’t be until she either grasped High Arcana or transitioned into a Name that’d bridge the gap of her understanding.

“Let him,” I grunted. “He’s going fishing in a desert.”

There had been a time where I would not have been so wary of Hanno of Arwad, but that time had come and gone. Calernia was falling apart, that was part of it, but there was more. While I had sworn to the Grey Pilgrim that I would reconcile with the man, the word I was getting out of Salia was making that task out to be increasingly difficult. I leaned forward towards Indrani, even as she began carving out the sides of the Tower.

“And the rumours we heard?” I asked.

She grimaced, brushing back a strand of wet hair sticking to her brow.

“You know I don’t have the touch like you and Zeze do,” Indrani began. “The knack for telling if someone’s a claimant, how their Name is coming along.”

“You’ve been around Named,” I said. “You’re familiar with what mantles feel like.”

“Sure,” she waved away, “but I don’t have fancy eyes or whatever the Hells it is you use to get it right so often. It’s just impressions for me. Not saying I don’t have a guess, just reminding you it’s that.”

“Consider me warned,” I drily said.

She rolled her eyes at me, but the levity was short-lived.

“Only met with him twice,” Archer said, “but I don’t think he’s the White Knight anymore.”

“Fuck,” I said, with great feeling.

I’d been afraid of that. The point of the knife scratched against the tableside, shaving off small slivers to outline flames.

“He a claimant?”

She raised a flat palm then wiggled it, equivocating.

“He can definitely still use Light,” Indrani said. “And he’s got something . But I can’t tell if it’s the favour of the Seraphim sticking close to him or something else. My nose isn’t fine enough to be able to tell those apart.”

I sighed, sipping at the cup of lemon water I’d poured myself and wishing it were wine. There was still a day of riding ahead of me, though, and a bellyful of wine would it that a bloody chore.

“He’s a claimant,” I finally said. “Has to be. If it were Judgement, they’d have done something one of the three times Hasenbach used the ealamal.”

Salia had been beset with demons and devils multiple times until enough mages and priests were scraped together to ward the capital and begin layering the countryside with expanding protections. The First Prince had used her angelic weapon thrice to shut down the Dead King before the need passed, when the Witch of the Woods had arrived and set down a great working that would greatly hinder diabolism within the principality’s borders. Now word had it that priests were gathering to the fortified town where the artefact was kept in flocks, Light filling the sky day and night. When the ealamal was next used, Cordelia Hasenbach did not intend for its power to spread no further than Salia’s borders. Given that such a power was all but guaranteed to slay any Named sworn to Below, it should be no surprise that I was less than enthusiastic at the prospect.

“So the Hierarch is still tying them up,” Indrani noted, sounding admiring. “It’s been years, Cat. Didn’t think the man had it in him.”

“Kairos always had a knack for putting the right madman in the worst place,” I acknowledged.

Indrani set down her knife to drink and I sighed, massaging the bridge of my nose. If Hanno was a claimant to the Name I suspected that he was – and the First Prince had implied as much through her last letter – then we had trouble on our hands. I was dead certain that Cordelia Hasenbach was a claimant to Warden of the West as well. It was the Names of my lot that commonly saw claimants kill each other in a competition for the prize, with Above’s works having a reputation for being comparatively gentler, but it was a little more complicated than that.

I doubted the two of them were at risk of swordfighting in the streets, but the growing divide between them was turning into a dangerous fault line for the Grand Alliance. The competing claims over the Name were the manifestation of something altogether more dangerous: competing visions for the West. I had been made the warden of Below’s works, the guide of its champions and the arbiter of its faithful, but there would need to be another. An equal for me, someone standing on the other side. And it was beginning to look as if the claimants to the Name had very different ideas about what the Role behind it. Ideas that might be mutually exclusive.

I knew the two of them passing well, and neither of them were particularly good at bending when they thought they were in the right. The feel of the region was said to be reflection as much.

“How was the city?” I asked.

“Hasenbach is still beloved in the capital proper,” Indrani said. “She’s kept them fed while the world goes to shit and she closed the doors on demons. The streets are in her corner, even if there’s the occasional riot. But outside? That’s where the soldiers are, and there it gets muddled.”

I drummed my fingers against the tabletop.

“Hanno’s been out on the fronts,” I said. “Several of them and from the start. He’s been a lot more visible than her.”

“He’s been pulling miracles out of his ass left and right, you mean,” Archer bluntly said. “He’s popular even with your folk, Cat, and I don’t need to tell you how impressive that is.”

I nodded. Hanno had been part of the Tenth Crusade, fought at the Red Flower Vales under the Iron Prince, and my people were not the sort to easily forgive that. Not even in a hero. That he’d won so many of my countrymen over might have been a subject of genuine worry for me if Vivienne hadn’t become the Princess. I need not worry of him having undue influence when there was a Callowan heroine for my people to look to for orders.

“This ‘Prince White’ business,” I said. “How widespread is it?”

“Most soldiers call him that, and a fair few even in the city,” Indrani bluntly said. “Nobody gives much of shit that Hasenbach rustled up a few folk to sit in the Chamber and vote that a foreigner can’t become the Prince of Brabant even if the crown is offered.”

A foreigner, a growing political foe and one Named to boot. It was like some malicious deity had cobbled together a mess whose very nature was bound to make Cordelia Hasenbach see red. I’d seen her get increasingly angry at the ‘Chosen’ for complicating her efforts to save Procer as the war progressed, and now that the realm had shattered under the weight of horror the leader of the Chosen was being acclaimed as a prince.

“There’s no longer a Brabant,” I said. “The dead hold everything but the southwestern corner, and it’s only a matter of time until those fortresses fall.”

“It’s not Prince White of Brabant they call him, Cat,” Indrani said. “It’s just Prince White. And they don’t seem to concerned about where his borders lie, you get me?”

Hellgods, I did. Cordelia was right to be both incensed and worried. If Hanno wasn’t the prince of anything in particular, then he was the prince of everything. If people, nobles and armies, started acting like he really did have that authority? My lips thinned. That was not an authority that could live side-by-side with that of First Prince. One of the titles would strangle the other.

“This is more than just a heap of trouble,” I finally said. “It’s lake of it deep enough for Calernia to drown in.”

If either of them made a move against the other, there was a very real chance that the Grand Alliance would implode before we even began the march on Keter. It wasn’t the thought of either left dead on the ground that worried me, since I doubted either would go that far. But if there was a confrontation there would be a clear winner, and while most the forces would likely follow that victor the most ardent partisans of the defeated would balk. There would be a split, and we simply could not afford that if we wanted to live through the year. They’d be pushing over who got the Book of Some Things, too. Both of them were intelligent enough to know it’d be a boon for their claim and that I’d been intending it for the Warden of the West regardless.

My fingers clenched at the realization that staying out of it was not an option.

“It’s bad,” Indrani agreed, “but you had to be expecting it. We were never going to march north without an equal for you, Cat. This was always going to have to be settled.”

“It’s a choice with no good answer,” I flatly said.

“Sure there is,” Archer disagreed, cocking an eyebrow at me. “Put Shiny Boots in charge.”

I blinked in surprise.

“You’re in favour of backing Hanno?” I asked, not hiding my surprise.

“He’s a twat,” Indrani said, “but he’s the one with the sword and the cause. I know you like Hasenbach, Cat-”

I made a noise of protest that she pushed right through.

“-but she’s a peacetime queen and this isn’t peace,” Indrani continued. “Diplomacy’s done, talks are done. We’re going for the Crown of the Dead with a big fucking army and a boatload of Named, and Hasenbach’s about as useful as tits on a sparrow for handling either.”

“The reason we have armies and food and weapons is said titted sparrow,” I reminded her. “I won’t argue she’s no warrior queen, but she’s then queen that’s kept us in this war. It’s maybe not as pretty a picture as riding in at the last moment with the sun at your back, but it’s done a lot more to keep us alive.”

Indrani eyed me curiously.

“You like her more than I thought,” she said. “Which is fine, Cat. And I know you’ve never liked turning on allies, that after...”

My stomach clenched. Indrani grimaced.

“Well, you won’t be hungry to leave her out to dry is all I’m saying,” she hurriedly continued. “But come knocking at Keter’s gates, I know I’m going to feel a lot better about having the fucking Sword of Judgement in charge than I would the Queen of the Highest Assembly.”

She met my eye squarely.

“And I think, deep down, so would you,” Archer said.

I sighed. It was a fair speech, and she wasn’t wrong. But she was looking at it through the lens of winning this war and only that.

“They stand for different things,” I said. “Different Roles behind Warden of the West. And I’ll need to have a closer look, feel out the shape of it, but I’m pretty sure that Cordelia’s my bet if I want the Liesse Accords to be what they should be.”

Indrani drank deep of her wine, then sucked at a tooth.

“Maybe,” she said. “Might be you’re right there. But for any of that to matter we have to survive this war, Cat. And I think he’s a better bet for that than her.”

“It’s how we got into this pit in the first place,” I quietly replied, “winning wars and then losing the peace.”

We spoke of it no further than that. She’d said her piece, and as far as Indrani was concerned that was enough. The talk moved to lighter things as she finished her meal, travel stories and scurrilous gossip. Apparently the Concocter was scheming to get the Silver Huntress laid and failing rather spectacularly, a very handsome fantassin captain having gotten sent to the healers after an offer for a ‘spar’ was taken a lot more literally than anyone had expected. Indrani washed down the last of her bread with cold water from the river, then gracefully rose and stretched like a cat. It did interesting things to her figure, since she’d taken off her mail.

She was hesitating, I noticed.

“Did you, uh, have a talk with Masego recently?” she asked.

I half-smiled.

“Yeah, something like that,” I replied.

A pause.

“Did it help?”

I looked down at my hand. My fingers clenched, then unclenched.

“As much as it can be helped, I think,” I murmured.

When I looked up there was no pity in her eyes, which was a relief. I would not have tolerated it. She was pleased, but there was nothing condescending about it – she was just happy to have been of use. I hummed, considering her.

“I suppose good behaviour does deserve reward,” I mused.

“Is Vivienne going to stop stealing my salary?” Indrani drily asked.

I tugged the collar of my cloak, loosened it until fell to the ground. She looked at me with wide eyes.

“Isn’t the army leaving already?” Indrani asked.

And yet she did not look away as I began to pull at the laces of my tunic.

“We’re already late,” I smiled. “A little later won’t matter.”

I got no further argument after that.

—

I woke up drenched in cold sweat, choking on smoke and feeling warm blood on my hand.

My breath was uneven, panicked, and my hair matted against my head. I forced myself to steady my breathing, in and out until my heartbeat was not so wild. I tossed aside my covers and slid out of my coat, careful not to put my weight on my bad leg. A few limping steps led me to a cabinet where a bowl of tepid water and folded clothes awaited. I splashed my face and my hair, trying to get rid of the sweat, but it was a lost cause. I’d need a bath when we entered Salia tomorrow, I felt like I’d drenched myself in filth. At least my monthlies had stopped again since I’d become Warden of the East, we were right around that time and I’d always hated riding a horse while bleeding.

The Intercessor hadn’t managed to steal that particular comfort away from me, at least, which was a close to a victory as I’d found in Ater.

The gift of the Sisters told me it was past Midnight Bell, not quite halfway to Early Bell, and I sighed as I dripped water down on the cabinet. There was no point in crawling back into bed, sleep wasn’t going to come. I felt wide awake, like I’d just been in a battle for my life. I slipped into trousers and loose green tunic, belting on a sword and a good pair of boots. My hair I left loose, for once, but kept I beneath the hood of a simple grey cloak. If I lit a few candles in here the phalanges would be there in moments, asking if I needed anything, but I did not feel like answering them. Neither did I feel like reading through my correspondence for the dozenth time, so instead I veiled myself in Night and slipped out into the sleeping camp.

Even in the middle of the night there were people out and about, patrols and sentinels, but they were easy enough to avoid. We’d encamped on the shore of the same river where Indrani had found us, but much further down: it was narrower and shallower here. And a greater distance from the paths we used during the ‘day’ – as much as it was ever day in the Twilight Ways – but losing another hour setting out come morning was well worth access to running water. I slipped through the wards and headed for the riverside, following the light of distant stars. I found a pleasant nook there, a flat stone nestled in a dip between hills that overlooked the water.

The flowing water was a soothing sight, the way the light of the stars touched the water. It almost looked like fish swimming in the water, the way I’d sometimes glimpsed them near the shores of the Silver Lake back home. The wind was slow, gentle, and I could hear it move the tall grass like a finger stroking a spine. It was warm out, even with the breeze, and with a long sigh I closed my eye. Let the tension that had tightened my shoulder since I woke up leave with the wind. Tariq had made a beautiful realm. I thought of that, sometimes, when trying to understand what kind of man the Grey Pilgrim had been. He’d done dark things, crossed lines even I had balked at.

But the Peregrine had been a man capable of great beauty as well.

My sword belt was pressing against my side uncomfortably, so I unclasped my sheath. Opening my eye, I laid both palms on the pommel of my sword and leaned forward to rest my chin on my hands. I waited, patiently, for the last dregs of the nightmare to leave me. I did not hurry it, fight for it, knowing now form experience that only made it worse. I breathed in and out, letting the wind carry it away like smoke. And that was when I saw her.

I had been, you see, haunted by a ghost ever since Ater.

Not an apparition or a phantom of guilt, but rather a creature of flesh and blood. She had not followed me immediately out of the city, but she’d caught up when the Army of Callow halted in Laure for resupply. Vivienne had told me as much. But while the ghosts had never been far, she had not sought me out either. I’d left opportunities, made them even, but no implicit invitation was ever accepted. Whatever it was that had driven Akua to follow me into the Twilight Ways, she was keeping it to herself. But the journey was coming to an end now, as by midmorning tomorrow we would be gating out near the outskirts of Salia, and so at last my ghost found me.

She was no longer a shade but her steps were still so very light. Her dress was in gold and red, a riding cut for travelling but still ornate in that Praes highborn way – the collar and sleeves were touched with pearls. The cloak over it was grey, almost the same shade as mine, and her hair was kept in place by a hairpin of chalcedony. Shaped like a swan. She turned to me and my heart caught in my throat. How long had it been since I’d seen those lovely golden eyes in a face of flesh and blood? It made a difference, knowing the creature before me was more than smoke and mirrors. Made it more real. More dangerous. She approached in silence and I did not contest it.

My eye returned to the river even as she sat on the stone. By my side but not touching. I could feel every inch of the distance without needing to look. I kept to my silence, listened to the breeze stirring the grass.

“Nightmare?”

I could have lied.

“Almost every night since Ater.”

Sometimes I slept through them, but this was not one of the good nights. I breathed out.

“You?”

“I no longer dream.”

A moment.

“It reminds me too much of the Mantle,” Akua said. “Nothing, then colour again.”

I’d never asked her what it was like, being kept in the Mantle of Woe. Never quite dared to. I had known she was not truly awake but not much more than that. A lucid dream was curse enough, I thought, if you knew you could not wake from it. Silence continued in the wake of the words, but it was not comfortable. We had said so many things, the two of us, been so many things to each other, that there could be no such thing as an empty silence.

“I am glad he died.”

I snorted.

“I never quite believed you, when you said you didn’t blame him for your father,” I said.

“It was what you wanted to hear,” Akua replied.

I cocked my head to the side, a concession.

“I wish I had killed him myself,” she finally said.

I looked at the water, at the silver glint of stars.

“I wish anything else,” I told her.

“It wounded you, to wield the knife,” Akua said, considering me. “Good. Good .”

I breathed out a laugh.

“I don’t think that’s one I’ll get over,” I admitted. “I think it’ll be one of those scars that stay with you, never quite healed.”

“You have dealt out many,” she said, merciless. “It is only fair, Catherine, that you would bleed in turn.”

And how strange was it, that I found comfort in that? In the lack of sympathy, of pity. Stone was hard and cold, but there was a constancy to that. You could make walls of it, rely on it for shelter.

“The world might be ending,” I said. “Or at least our little corner of it.”

“The world is always ending,” Akua replied, indifferent. “The First Dawn promised a Last Dusk.”

I chuckled.

“Quoting the Book, Lady Warlock?”

“Even the Book of All Things has its truths,” she said. “I no longer have the luxury of blindness.”

“Did you ever?”

I felt her smile without turning.

“If I had died young,” Akua said. “But you took that from me. You made me a prisoner instead.”

“Imprisonment was the least of what was owed.”

“You made me a servant.”

“You did that to yourself. There only so many fates your people allow for scrapped iron that is not discarded.”

“And then you freed me,” Akua quietly said.

I kept silent.

“Only you did not such thing,” she said. “You taught me the prison, so that I might carry it with me everywhere I went.”

I cocked my head to the side.

“Have you?” I asked.

She did not answer. She didn’t need to. I had wanted, once, to make her the offer the very night she spurned the Empire. To offer her a way out, a way not to even the scales but put weight on the right side of them. To be enthroned in Liesse, keeper to a greater evil. That night in Salia had not allowed me the luxury, but it did not feel like a defeat. It was not scheme I had laid here. It was not a trick or a play or something that would need to rely on surprise or luck. I had laid a foundation, stone after stone, through years of patience. What did it matter, that a fateful moment had passed?

Fate was character, and I now knew Akua Sahelian’s.

“You mean me to hold the Dead King prisoner.”

I was not entirely surprised. I’d kept that almost silent and never once spoken the full intention out loud, but against the Intercessor it wouldn’t have been enough. She would have been able to follow the thread of the story that was Akua Sahelian and learn it anyway. But only, I thought, if it was likely to work. If the groove was there.

“To take a broken throne in the depths of Liesse,” I said, “and hold back the tide.”

“And should I refuse?”

I shrugged.

“Nothing. It needs to be taken willingly.”

Silence stretched out. She watched the river as well, her breathing quiet.

“I would have seen through you,” Akua said, “if you were not in love with me, at least a little.”

I kept my eye on the river.

“You do not deny it,” she murmured. “I almost wish you would.”

Then she quietly laughed.

“Will it be a wound as well, Catherine?” she asked. “Will the scar stay with you?”

It would have been wiser not to answer.

“Yes.”

I’d never quite got the hang of wisdom. Neither had she. Soft fingers – warm now, flesh and blood – cupped my cheek and I did not fight it, let myself be turned to face her. I met her gaze, felt her breath against my lips. But I had my lines and she knew them, read them anew on my face.

“In matters of self-mutilation,” Akua Sahelian murmured, “you truly have no rival.”

Her fingers released me. She rose to her feet.

“I will see you tomorrow,” she said.

I looked at the river but listened to the sound of her steps until it faded. She had not agreed, I thought.

She had not refused either.

Chapter 30: Salute

“It is tempting to think of history as a tide, for it excuses our being swept by it. I cannot agree to such defeatism, and so instead I will claim that history is a rope. It may be pulled the other way, despite the labour of your life, but that is never a reason not to try.”

– Extract from the prisoner’s memoirs of Princess Eliza of Salamans

Some dark, petty part of me enjoyed that the war had finally reached Salia.

The First Prince had rustled up a proper welcome for us, cheering crowds and soldiers in shining armour, but it was like painting over a cracked wall. The impressive numbers that’d turned up were not enough to hide that the streets beyond them were deserted, that people barred their doors and closed their windows. Fear had finally reached the capital of the mightiest realm on Calernia and it was making its people hunch. Huddle in like a child awaiting a blow. I allowed the vicious little twist of satisfaction to linger a while before chasing it away. I had not forgotten the Tenth Crusade, but these days Procer was probably my closest ally. Creation liked its little ironies.

I smiled and waved as we rode down the broad avenue, a company of knights around us. A fourth banner had been added to the three that were customary – mine, Vivienne’s and the Order of Broken Bells – as my heiress had formally founded her Order of the Stolen Crown and ordered its banner sown. I rather liked the look of the heraldry – a golden crown clasped by a white hand, set on Fairfax blue – as it contrasted nicely to my own silver-on-black as well as the Broken Bells’ bronze-on-black. The Order of the Broken Bells had been my creature, forged out of rebellion and the compromise of traitors, and so it bore my marks. My shadow.

Let the Stolen Crown take after their mistress’ instead, sharing the same gold as her Summer sun resting on the same Fairfax blue. Let them be to her what Brandon Talbot and his unflinching knights had been to me: a sword and a shield, my will made into a thousand thundering hooves.

“Huh,” Vivienne murmured. “Would you look at that? She came out personally.”

I abandoned the almost maudlin thoughts and returned to the here and now, following the Princess’ gaze down the avenue and to a grand plaza. My brow cocked. As Vivienne had said, Cordelia Hasenbach had come to bid me welcome in person. She was astride a horse of her own, one of those great chargers Lycaonese were fond of, and dressed as regally as if she intended to hold court here in the streets. She’d chosen a sweeping gown in dark blue, her riot of golden curls going down her back and held back only by a circlet of white gold, but it was the ermine-bordered cloak over it all that drew the eye. It was almost entirely cloth of gold, bright in the noonday sun.

Clever, that cloak. It drew attention to her height and straight back while hiding away the squareness of her shoulders. I’d never considered the First Prince to be particularly beautiful, but she’d certainly mastered dressing to her advantage better than anyone I’d ever met.

“A beautiful cloak,” Akua Sahelian mused. “Yet chosen, I think, more to contrast the other being worn than to add lustre to her hair.”

When the Doom of Liesse had returned to stand among my council this morning and I had not cast her out, none had spoken a word of it. Vivienne made it a point to rarely speak to her directly and never offer more than frosty hostility, but this once she let out a small noise of agreement. I could see why. Taking in the party that inevitably followed someone of Cordelia Hasenbach’s rank should they go anywhere in public, I saw more than just the expected assembly of nobles and generals. There were Named, too, and only one of them wore a cloak.

Hanno’s suit of plate was simple but beautifully made, the work of his Bitter Blacksmith, and the cloak pale as driven snow that he wore over it only added to the elegant austerity of him. His dark hair was cut even shorter than usual, little more than stubble, but it suited his plain and honest face well. With the sword belted at his hip and the ease of his carry, he looked like a warrior-king of the old breed. I could easily understand why people had come to call him Prince White. A man like that would have drawn a following even if he’d not whelped miracle after miracle in the defence of Procer as Hanno of Arwad very much had.

I could not help but note that while there were two people just behind the First Prince – dear Frederic of the pretty curls and skilled hands was one, so the solemn man whose helmet was painted with a red crown had to be Prince Otto of Bremen – the Sword of Judgement was not one of them. He’d been left in the general party, a dozen feet behind.

“By rank, he should be standing at her side,” I murmured. “He’s a high officer of the Grand Alliance.”

“What Grand Alliance?” Vivienne asked. “Procer is divided and dying, the Dominion is far and spent. This coalition lives or dies on our say. If it does not offend you, Catherine, what can anyone do about it?”

I grimaced. Razin and Aquiline were further back in our column, leading their company of riders, so at least there’d been no risk of them hearing that. It wasn’t that the Levantines had taken that many casualties, since practically speaking Procer alone had lost more soldiers in the first year of the war than the Dominion had fielded throughout it. It was more that, unlike my Army of Callow and the wealthy principalities of Procer, the Levantines had not reinforced the forces they sent north. It was a large army by their standards, involving most of their trained warriors, and if Cordelia hadn’t begun feeding them and paying for their equipment halfway through the war they would never have been able to afford fielding it this long.

Lacking reinforcements and grounds to recruit, their losses had accumulated even as their fund ran out. The end of the Isbili dynasty had only worsened their internal issues, according to the Jacks – who had stolen Proceran spy reports, since we had no eyes that far south – since even though they’d essentially been figureheads they’d still been a stabilizing influence. Now the Dominion of Levant lacked a reason to be anything more than a pack of squabbling petty kingdoms and it was only the First Prince’s intervention that’d both prevented civil war and kept some manner of commerce going on even as tensions rose. While it was underselling the Dominion to call it spent, in my opinion, Vivienne wasn’t exactly wrong either.

With every battle they had less strength to bring to bear, and there was no realistic way that trend could be turned around.

“That is the very reason such a pretty trick will fail,” Akua idly said. “When the order of things collapses, what does a man like the Sword of Judgement care for traps of courtesy?”

Her words turned out to be prophecy. I spurred on my horse, my knights parting for me, and Cordelia broke away from her two companions in the same gesture. So did Hanno, riding past a glaring Prince Otto and blank-faced Prince Frederic to catch up to Cordelia as she approached me. I rather admired that the First Prince’s face betrayed not a hint of her feelings, though I’d bet rubies to piglets that she was coldly angry. The people in the cheering crowd, shouting her name and mine and Hanno’s, they wouldn’t realize what had just happened. The nobles would, though, and they’d also see that there was nothing Cordelia could do about it. Some would instead choose to take from the sight that Hanno was rude and gasping beyond his rank, but this wasn’t peace time.

Like Akua said, courtesy mattered a lot less when the world was ending.

“Your Majesty,” the First Prince greeted me, a warm smile on her face. “Salia is brightened for your return.”

Her voice carried, all the more since the crowd had been made to settle since she’d begun riding forward. I’d never actually seen Cordelia have a genuine warm smile about anything, certainly not one that wide, so it always amused me to see how she used their like to play up our rapport in public. It helped her keep her princes in line, though, so I didn’t particularly mind.

“Your Most Serene Highness,” I replied in Chantant, smiling back and pitching my voice to carry as well. “I return with good tidings: Praes is settled, and now joins us in war against Keter!”

There was some surprise, but soon after the crowd began roaring in approval. Ah, the times we lived in. Who would ever have thought that a mob in the streets of Salia would ever shout themselves hoarse celebrating Praesi? Not me, and I’d lived a stranger life than most. Under cover of the shouts I nodded my greetings to Hanno, who had been waiting for us to finish tolerantly.

“Lord White,” I said. “I hear you helped General Abigail pull the Third Army out safely. My thanks for that.”

“Your Majesty,” Hanno replied, offering a nod. “I could not have held Hainaut had she not been the anvil to my hammer. It’s me who thanks you for lending such a sharp sword to our efforts.”

His own friendly smile was not fake in the slightest, I thought. He was not the sort of man to feign amity where it was not. I offered him a quirk of the lips, but little more. We had yet to reconcile from the aftermath of the Arsenal, the odd friendship we’d once had long in disrepair. I had sworn an oath to Tariq to mend that bridge, but I had to be careful of how I did. A misstep here in Salia could have grave consequences. With the first round of greetings done the ceremony could proceed and it began in earnest. Under the eyes and cheers of the crowd the great nobles and commanders in Salia greeted the ones I had brought, Razin and Aquiline reunited with their fellow lord and lady of the Blood for the first time in over a year.

It was all very civil and friendly – I winked at Frederic when he caught my gaze, getting a roguish grin in answer – and every inch of it had been put together so the sight of us would reassure the people of Salia that the world was not ending. It very much was, of course, but considering that with the amount of refugees we’d seen camped outside the capital had likely swelled to entail a million souls the last thing we needed was a panic. However deserved it might be. The procession continued on together, showing off how friendly and allied we all were, until we began to approach the Lineal and its bevy of palaces. There we parted ways, though not before Hasenbach took me aside for a short talk.

“I have had word from the dwarves,” she told me.

My fingers tightened.

“About time,” I angrily bit out.

The anger was not directed at her. It was the Kingdom Under that’d been taking its time, its representatives insisting that the Grand Alliance’s request for talks was not within their mandate to arrange. While it was true that in principle the half-dozen dwarves were there only to negotiate sales of arms and the granting of loans, in practice they’d been ambassadors of the King Under the Mountain. Vivienne and I suspected they’d been putting us off because they were waiting for the result of some military push they’d made underground, while Cordelia had instead suggested internal divisions.

“Indeed,” Cordelia tightly said. “Though they now act swiftly. This morning I was granted an audience with a formal emissary at noon tomorrow.”

I frowned.

“They knew I was arriving,” I noted.

“Most likely,” the First Prince agreed. “Naturally, I would request your presence.”

“Naturally,” I echoed with a smile. “I’ll dust off my courtesies in preparation, then. We doing this with a full Grand Alliance roster or appointed representatives?”

“Lady Itima and Lord Yannu have agreed that representatives would simply the talks,” she said. “It will hold, unless the other half of the Blood disagrees.”

“They won’t,” I said.

The lordlings trusted me enough to speak for the Grand Alliance, at least, though no doubt the Dominion would want a seat at the table the moment things began to get formalized. The First Prince nodded. There was a short moment of silence.

“You have, I think, grasped the lay of our troubles from that scene at the greeting,” Cordelia finally said.

“I had something of an idea even before,” I neutrally replied.

“Perhaps we ought to have tea tomorrow evening, then,” the First Prince lightly said. “It has been too long since we talked.”

It’d been like a week, actually, but I got her drift. She wanted an opportunity to speak a little more freely in private, and she wanted it as soon as possible.

“It better not be that horrible bitter stuff you love,” I warned. “I’ve drunk actual poison that tasted better.”

She smiled the smile of someone who was going to thoroughly enjoy trying to bully me into drinking it again.

“Of course, Your Majesty,” Cordelia Hasenbach smiled.

Lying, like a goddamned liar.

—

It was not unexpected that I’d get visitors not long after settling into the palace, but to be honest I’d expected it to be either officers from the Third Army or Procerans. Instead I was genuinely surprised when a servant announced the name of my first visitor: Secretary Nestor Ikaroi of Delos. Considering that as far as I knew the League of Free Cities did not yet have a formal presence in the city, I hadn’t anticipated anyone from there calling on me. Last I’d heard, the armies of the League had just begun to reach northern Iserre. I’d always liked the old man, though, and since I had no reason to turn him away I had him brought to me.

I’d been granted this palace as my lodgings every time I visited Salia and Vivienne had used it in my absence, so I had a place in mind to receive him. It wasn’t actually one of the dozen salons that infested this place, a winter palace meant to accommodate large balls, but rather one of the smaller rooms adjoining the great ballroom. See, all these fine Proceran folk come here for dancing and debauchery liked a drink. It was only natural there’d be a bar in one of the side rooms, where a wild spread of wines and liquors could be asked for. The place wasn’t fully stocked, since Cordelia had been cutting costs everywhere, but it had enough left to make it worthwhile.

Besides, there was something pleasantly familiar about standing behind the counter with the drinks.

Nestor Ikaroi was announced by a Proceran crier and allowed in by legionaries, giving me my first look at the man in quite a while. His hair was striking: long and pure white, it was kept in a ponytail going down his back. The pureness of the colour contrasted with his wrinkled skin, which had the look of old leather, and made his blue eyes stand out. On each cheek he bore two tattooed stripes, one blue and one black. The old man was a Secretary, as high as one could rise in the ranks of the Secretariat. There were only ten askretis of that rank in all of Delos and he was said to be the oldest. He looked, I thought, rather vigorous. Like the war had spared him, unlike the rest of us.

“Secretary Nestor,” I said, leaning against the counter. “Welcome.”

“Queen Catherine,” he replied, bowing low. “It is a pleasure to be in your presence once more.”

I waved that away, but I was smiling. His genuine friendliness had long kept him my favourite of the high-ranking League diplomats.

“Can I offer you a drink?” I asked. “There’s a bit of everything in here.”

“All the more luxurious,” the old man said amusedly, “for having a queen pouring them. Is it perhaps true, as your subjects claim, that you once ran a tavern in Laure?”

I scoffed. Ran a tavern? I’d been much too young and poor to own anything but the clothes on my back and the coin I’d saved up for the War College.

“I asked first,” I said.

“Are you perhaps familiar with isitos ?” he asked.

“Heard of it,” I said. “Fig liquor, usually cut with water and leaves of mint.”

“The custom in Delos is to use a quarter orange instead of the lime,” he replied, “but either way would be fine.”

I went looking and though there were lemons there did not appear to be limes. There was mint, however, and two bottles of isitos. I presented them to the old man, who without hesitation chose the smaller one. From Penthes, he told me, which for all its many sins made excellent liquor. I made two tall cups of it, one for each of us, and handed him his own.

“I was a waitress, at a place called the Rat’s Nest,” I told him. “The first roof I ever owned was when Malicia granted me Marchford as my demesne.”

Blue eyes brightened. Nestor Ikaroi has close ties to the scholars of Delos’ famous libraries, particularly those whose duty was to chronicle the history of Calernia as accurately as possible. Their histories were said to be the finest of the continent bar none. As a result, rather like a magpie the old man tended to be delighted whenever I tossed a few details about either my life or my campaigns his way. He sipped at the drink and smiled, praising it, and I tried it myself. It was actually pretty decent, I thought. Not smooth in the slightest, the burn was still felt in the throat, but the water and mint eased the taste of liquor. I could almost taste the figs.

Some idle talk was had, but I was a busy woman and he knew it. Soon enough he got to the reason he’d come here.

“I was instructed by Empress Basilia to approach you in private,” Secretary Nestor frankly said. “With the assent of the League.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“That sounds like foreign politics,” I said. “Which are the sole province of the Hierarch.”

The Republic would be furious if they learned Anaxares the Diplomat was being circumvented. Not that, as far as I knew, they were ever not furious.

“Ah,” the white-haired man smiled, “but this is a different matter. On the behalf of the Protector of the League, I am approaching an ally to discuss a common enterprise.”

Meaning they’d finally found a way to work around the absence of the Hierarch that wouldn’t send Bellerophon on the warpath and damage the foundations of the League. Basilia, as Protector, was charged with the defence of the League of Free Cities. Anything that could be made to fit under that aegis was fair game, even if it meant walking a very narrow line with the powers of the officer of Hierarch.

“That’s a lot of power you’re giving a hereditary office,” I noted.

He smiled like an old, patient shark.

“Should she overstep, a majority vote is all that is required to declare a matter under the jurisdiction of the Hierarch,” Secretary Nestor said.

Ah, so that was how they were going to keep her in line. The League wasn’t a kingdom like Callow, its laws didn’t really care for precedent. If a king was allowed a power in Callow once, it pretty much became a power of the royal house unless civil war pried it out of their grasp. In the League, though, all that was needed was enough of the cities agreeing a right did not exist for it not to. No doubt common ground was already being found behind closed doors between cities worried by Empress Basilia’s ascendancy. It’d be a struggle to the death, I thought, until either the office of Protector was reduced to a ceremonial title or the opposing cities were slowly stripped of their independence.

It was also, at least for now, not my fucking problem. For once.

“That’ll get interesting,” I said, meaning it. “I’m all ears, Secretary. What can I do for my friends in the League?”

“Given your understanding of the powers and prerogatives of the Hierarch,” he said, “you will understand, I think, that it is not possible for the League to sign onto the Liesse Accords.”

“Not at present, yes,” I said, frowning.

It’d count as foreign policy, so only their long-lost madman could actually put a quill to parchment to bring the League into the fold.

“That is an unfortunate situation, given that Empress Basilia is an ardent partisan of the Accords and many of us share her opinion,” Secretary Nestor said.

I almost smirked. Say what you would about Basilia Katopodis, but she’d not forgotten who had backed her when she’d gone off to campaign around the Free Cities. I’d been her patroness and while my leverage had weakened with her rise to prominence she had not cast aside her old debts. She’d back me for the Accords and the war on Keter, which had been what I wanted most from her.

“I do not have a reputation for patience, I know,” I said, “but you would be surprised.”

The old man bowed.

“Yet we would offer a gesture of goodwill within our means,” he said. “The members of the League, save for Bellerophon which is still putting the matter to vote, have adopted laws of the same text.”

I hummed, reluctantly impressed. That was certainly an alternative. It’d lack the teeth of the actual Accords, of course, which laid down provisions for its enforcers to be able to hunt Named breaking the terms across the territory of all signatory nations, but it would still be a great step forward. Neither villainy nor heroism would be allowed to be made illegal and there would be limitations on the use of both diabolism and angel-calling. I was, I decided, being courted. Or my goodwill was, anyway. Which meant the League was now going to ask me for a favour.

“A greatly appreciated gesture,” I said. “It shows adherence to the spirit of the Accords, which is perhaps even more meaningful than ink on parchment. Though it seems it my friends from the south helping me, instead of the other way around.”

I ended that on a smile, thin as it was. Nestor Ikaroi took my hint that I’d like to see the bill for the goods now and did not dance around, which I appreciated.

“While the League is committed to ending the threat of the Dead King,” the old man said, “concerns have been raised about the feasibility of such a deed.”

I sipped at my drink.

“I won’t pretend it will be easy,” I said. “You know better. But I wouldn’t be leading my armies into the storm if I did not believe victory possible.”

If it came to that, if all was lost and Calernia beyond reclaiming, I’d hole up behind the Whitecaps as long as possible while building a fleet to lead an exodus across the Tyrian Sea.

“The concern,” he delicately said, “is not of a military nature. It is our understanding that you have mustered great armies in the east and brought back the greatest sorcerers of Praes.”

I nodded, frowning.

“It is a political concern, then,” I said.

“Swiftly tires the horse with two riders,” Secretary Nestor quoted.

I kept my face calm. Yeah, perhaps it’d been too much to hope that the League wouldn’t have noticed the tensions rising at the heart of the Grand Alliance. Now they were wary of bringing their armies in what was beginning to have the shape of a schism just as the Dead King began devouring the Principate. That was, I grimly admitted, a fair concern to have.

“A temporary state of affairs,” I said.

“We share the opinion,” he said. “I am simply charged to express the Empress’ curiosity.”

“About?”

“Who you believe will be sitting the saddle,” the old man said.

Gods. That was what the entire reason he’d come here today, wasn’t it? They wanted to know who I’d back, if it came down to it. The First Prince of the Sword of Judgement.

“That’s not for me to decide,” I said.

A pause.

“May I be frank, Queen Catherine?” Secretary Nestor said.

I waved him on.

“While you show wisdom in not standing too close to the flame,” he said, “it is an undeniable truth that it is not possible for either to rise with, if not your support, then at least your tacit approval. Your influence is too deeply entrenched.”

And he wasn’t wrong. I’d done it on purpose, too. Being the representative for Below under the Truce and Terms, standing as Queen of Callow and First Under the Night. Warden of the East, now. I’d accrued so much authority that, while I might not be able to make the choice of who rose to command Good for the end of the war on Keter, I would be able to refuse that choice and very possibly make it stick. I’d seen this as a conflict between Cordelia and Hanno, but in the eyes of everyone else I was just as much of a danger. If I refuse to work with whoever won and took my armies home, it would not be a stretch to say that the war was lost. And trying to approach either of them might be seen as a foreign nation back a horse, so I’m actually safer for the League to talk to. Ikaroi was not, I realized, the last envoy who would approach me over this. There would be others, and beyond all the courtesies and the flattery all of them would be addressing me using the same title: kingmaker.

I sipped at my drink, hiding my dismay. I’d wanted to keep my distance as much as was possible, but it was now clear to me there would be costs to that. Would the League keep supporting the war if Procer seemed about to tear itself apart again and I was unwilling to step in? That Nestor Ikaroi was here at all spoke to hesitation. He was not so much invested in my answer as in my having an answer: someone I’d back, a designated winner. That was what Basilia and the League really wanted, the assurance that this would not get messy. Who long before Praes asked the same, or the Clans? I set the drink down.

“It has not come to that,” I finally said. “Nor will it. I intend to mediate.”

“Of course,” Secretary Nestor said, politely unconvinced. “Yet, I must ask, should mediation fail. If a choice must be made?”

I clenched my fingers, unclenched them. It was playing with fire to get too deeply involved. But I wasn’t sure it was an option not to.

Necessity, as always, was queen.

“If it comes to that,” I quietly said, “I will let you know who’s to sit the saddle.”

Chapter 31: Premises

“Thirty: while it is a viable tactic to swing using a chandelier or a rope, it is significantly less viable to wear armour when doing so.”

– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

You couldn’t use the usual sort of table when entertaining dwarves, not unless you wanted to offend them by stacking cushions on a chair.

The First Prince was a graceful host and unlikely to be the first of her office to have received envoys of the Kingdom Under, so the neat little salon where we were seated did not make that elementary mistake. Over a floor of warm-coloured wood, thick and plush Arlesite rugs had been thrown for us to sit on. Even with my legs folded – I’d drunk a brew to take the edge off my bad leg – I wasn’t all that uncomfortable, and the low table we were both seated at was a work of art. Intricately carved and painted, it depicted the making of Creation as described in Proceran texts. The scenes spiralled inwards, ending in the moment where the Gods had taken their rest.

Unlike the people of the Principate, Callowans put no real stock in Arianna Galadon’s ‘Truths of the Shore’. Which she hadn’t even written herself, anyhow, as they were a collection of her teachings written down by her followers. Callow’s own House of Light was the oldest on Calernia the way most people saw it, with only the priests of Atalante having a legitimate claim otherwise, so my people tended to dismiss anything come out of Procer as empty posturing. I largely shared that opinion, even though many of Galadon’s teachings had been sensible, but for all that skepticism I would not deny that some of the hymns written down in the book were quite beautiful.

The painted depiction on the table did them justice, not that the two dwarves seated across from us seemed to care in the slightest.

I could tell because I’d met the pair of them before. The Herald of the Deeps remained the tallest of his kind I had ever met, at least an inch over five feet and bare of armour. He yet wore the same dark green – so deep it was nearly black – colour I had always seen him in, but his clothing had grown more elaborate. I could see five different layers to the folded cloth, one almost like a tunic at the bottom while the others crisscrossed over each other at different angles and cuts. I could not quite tell where it began or ended. His beard and eyes matched the cloth, unlike the braided dark hair, and looked like strands of green set in a craggy face whose skin was as hide. In the light of the day, his eyes were unsettling large.

It was the lack of iris, I thought, it made them look even larger than they were. Owl-like.

The lieutenant seated half a foot behind and to his left hadn’t changed in the slightest, though. The deed-seeker I knew as Balasi still had so many skulls hanging off him that I could hardly see the armour beneath them. Some taken, some earned, all trophies to raise his rank. His hair and beard were yet blond, though the elaborate thick tattoo – I’d once thought it face paint, but now saw otherwise – looked different in daylight. It depicted a Horned Lord’s head and fangs, the ink still black but looking iridescent when sunlight hit it at the right angle.

I’d learned they would be the envoys within half an hour of Cordelia learning it, this very morning, which had been long enough to share what little I knew about the pair before the talks were had. The Herald of the Deeps, whose name was Sargon, had been the leader of the dwarven expansion into Everdark in both a religious and military sense. He definitely had enough pull to talk for the entire Kingdom Under, since he had when striking a deal with Sve Noc through me, but there were limits to his influence. I’d long suspected he had volunteered to lead the Fourteenth Expansion in part to get away from internal enemies, heading out to the fringes where there’d be no rival.

Unfortunately for us, that was very little to go on. The politics of the Kingdom Under were not so much opaque as fucking invisible to the nations above. We heard of it when they were making war against other underground nations – though with the drow exodus, there were now none left – and they visibly kept an eye on affairs near dwarven gates, but no one had eyes below the ground. We didn’t even know if there was truly a King Under the Mountain, whether it was a ceremonial title or one of genuine authority. Even the span of their empire was mostly speculation, with only the wildest of guesses made at their total population.

What we did know was that the Kingdom Under fully mobilized would almost definitely win a war against even a fully united coalition of surface nations. When my father had once called it the only nation of Calernia that was more than a regional power, he’d not exaggerating. Even Triumphant had been satisfied by token gestures of submission and promises of tribute when she’d been conquering Calernia. When it came down to it, if we wanted to have a real shot at beating Keter we needed the dwarves. Their armies, yes, but even more importantly their supplies .

The only way it would be possible for an army the size of the one needed to take Keter to be fed was through their tunnels, and to be honest they were probably the only nation capable of moving that much food so quickly anyway. We wanted their soldiers badly, since they had creations up their sleeves that made goblin work look like children’s toys and the heaviest foot this continent had ever known, but the supplies were even more important. We could possibly win without the help of their armies. Without a deal for supplies, though, our only choice would be storming the walls of the Crown of the Dead repeatedly until our food ran out. Formalized suicide, in other words.

So we needed the Kingdom Under and they knew it. The question that remained was, what would they ask in exchange for their help? That was the question on my mind and Hasenbach’s as the Herald set down the cup of Merovins golden wine he’d been served. There was exactly one vineyard in all the world where that wine was made, the same one where most of the ancient rulers of Salia was buried. The handful of bottles it made every year were worth a small castle each, and by custom only drunk by royalty.

I actually thought it tasted kind of sour, but it would have been impolitic to say as much.

“A rare drink,” the Herald of the Deeps said.

In Chantant. Mine had gotten good enough I was comfortable even in talks like this, and theirs was better than their Lower Miezan. It always startled me to remember that Chantant wasn’t the First Prince’s native tongue either. Lycaonese spoke Reitz. Mind you, as a princess she’d probably been taught the language as a child anyway. I’d been my own mistake to start picking up languages so late in my life.

“Bettered for the company it was poured in,” Cordelia Hasenbach replied with a distant but friendly smile.

I put my elbow on the table and rested my chin against my palm. Hopefully we’d stop with the courtesies soon, I felt like we were all more than ready. Balasi must have agreed.

“It is our understanding the Grand Alliance has been seeking to come to terms with us,” the Seeker of Deeds said.

“The Grand Alliance desires to negotiate several arrangements,” Cordelia smiling corrected, “regarding the war prosecuted against our common enemy, the Dead King.”

Balasi was unimpressed.

“We see little war,” he said, “and much retreat.”

“We’ve done a lot of dying, it’s true,” I said. “Tasteless of you to complain, Seeker Balasi, since it will have bought your people time to make your move below.”

The dwarf turned to match my eye, but I stared him down. My face was blank as a mask. After a moment his jaw tightened and he looked away.

“We have achieved much these last few years,” the Herald said. “Absent conflict in the Everdark, the Fifteenth Expansion began early and colonization has begun. After a thousand years of trials, the great encirclement is finally finished.”

I breathed in sharply.

“You’ve surrounded the Kingdom of the Dead entirely,” I said.

He looked pleased, green eyes wide.

“The fortresses still lack cities, but the circle was closed,” the Herald of the Deeps said. “Seven rings of stone and steel now contain the Dead King and his works.”

Fuck. That was bad news. Part of why the Kingdom Under had been selling us cheap weapons by the wagonload and keeping the Firstborn fed had been that we were useful to them: by drawing the Dead King’s armies to them, we allowed them to expand and fortify around him uncontested. Only my calculation had been that they’d not finish the encirclement this generation, not when their current expansion – the Fourteenth – was aimed at the Everdark. I’d badly miscalculated how capable they would be of taking advantage of Sve Noc ceding their old territories. And now, with their circle of rings of steel in stone standing, they were coming to speak to us again.

Having significantly less use for our continued survival.

“If I were to ask,” Cordelia mildly said, “when the last fortress was finally raised, I imagine it would be a recent day indeed.”

“Eight days,” Seeker Balasi said.

Yeah, the First Prince had seen it to. They’d put us off until they were sure their defensive position was solid underground, and now they were coming to talk when they had the upper hand. Hells, more than the upper hand. As far as they were concerned they had all the fucking hands, and they weren’t entirely wrong either.

“What a strange happenstance,” Cordelia said. “I must congratulate our ally on the swift completion of its defensive works.”

“All is possible in the service of the King Under the Mountain,” Balasi replied.

“Indeed?” she said. “How pleasing to hear, as we mean to discuss a bargain regarding the sale and movement of supplies.”

“You want us to feed your desperate offensive against the Crown of the Dead,” the Herald said, voice even. “Without coin to pay for it, even as your empire falls apart around you. A bold request. Some would call it insolent .”

“Nah,” I smiled, wide and without mirth. “Insolence would be offering meat to the butcher and then whining it got chopped, Herald. Surely that’s beneath everyone here.”

Cordelia’s shoulders tightened at my side, but she did not try to intervene. She trusted me to back off if I pushed too far.

“The efforts of the Grand Alliance in fighting our enemy are remembered,” the Herald finally said. “Yet much is demanded while little is offered.”

“If payment is the trouble, then there is no trouble,” the First Prince said. “Though the Principate may lack the immediate means to pay and I cannot speak for our allies, we are willing to sign a treaty of repayment and even give you access to our books so that an agreeable number of years can be found.”

“That is-” Seeker Balasi began, but she cut him off.

“Which leads me to believe, Your Eminence, that it is not coin the Kingdom Under wants of us,” Cordelia Hasenbach continued, staring down the Herald.

It my turn to tense. I could feel the Herald of the Deeps through my Name. Only dimly, and I could not trace out the manner of stories that were his bread and butter, but what I could tell was that he leaned Above’s way. Not that I was certain I would have authority over him even if it were otherwise. His Name felt... strange to me, as if it was made of crystal instead of the usual starlight. Either way, even if he was one of Above’s that did not meant he was not dangerous. When the Fourteenth Expansion had been planned, the dwarves had thought they’d end up needing to kill Sve Noc.

And they’d sent the Herald of the Deeps without another Named, which meant they had thought he had a genuine shot at killing a pair of goddesses.

Power like that married to the dwarven contempt for other races was for an unpleasant interlocutor to deal with. The green-eyed dwarf studied the First Prince for a long moment, then snorted.

“It is so,” the Herald said.

This time when Balasi spoke up, Cordelia did not interrupt. There was no reason to, since she’d already made her point: the deed-seeker might be subordinate to the Herald, but she was not subordinate to me. She spoke for the Grand Alliance just as much as I did, if not more. Sargon did not seem convinced, but he’d seemingly not wanted to argue the point either.

“There are no guarantees that the attack on Keter will end in victory,” Balasi said. “Or that nations signing treaties now will survive the coming decades. A considerable expense would be undertaken on uncertain grounds. The Kingdom Under requires more practical and immediate payment.”

Whether they actually thought Procer would splinter even if we won or if they were just pushing I couldn’t be sure, but I honestly couldn’t argue with the uncertainty there. The Principate had lost massive amounts of farmlands and been depopulated in a way that’d shift around where its traditional centres of power had been. It might very well blow up even if we did beat the Dead King.

“And what might its nature be?” Cordelia calmly asked.

“Creusens,” Seeker Balasi said. “Holden. Penthes.”

I’d been a long time since someone had surprise me so utterly I could not even begin to think of an answer. They were serious, weren’t they? The Kingdom Under was asking for cities. Creusens, the capital of the principality of the same name out in western Procer. Penthes, to the very east of the League and already near a known dwarven gate. And Holden, the seat of the former barony of Holden. A city in Callow. My fucking city . After it sunk in, it was not surprise that held my tongue. It was the certainty that if I began if I opened my mouth, I would say things and it would only end when there were corpses on the floor.

“You require that we cede three cities,” the First Prince said with admirable calm. “One of which is, I might remind you, not from a nation signatory to the Grand Alliance or in our power to deliver.”

“Yes,” Balasi replied without batting an eye. “We will provide formal terms, but I can give you the essentials before then.”

“Please do,” Cordelia smiled, hate cold in her eyes.

“The cities and attendant lands will be ceded to Kingdom Under and annexed to the territory of the nobles ruling below them,” the deed-seeker said. “Their inhabitants may stay as sworn subjects or leave. There will be no restriction of goods coming in or out.”

My eye narrowed. It wasn’t even a loose protectorate like Refuge or a close relationship like with Mercantis they were aiming for. These were permanent footholds for them on the surface. It occurred to me, suddenly, that the Kingdom Under might be thinking further on than any of us. Should the Dead King be destroyed, would it not be the master of all the underground? It would take generations to settle it all, I thought, but in time they would. And when they did, where else was there to go but up ? My fingers clenched.

“A straightforward affair,” the First Prince said. “We thank you for bringing the offer.”

Balasi looked like he might have wanted to stay and talk more, but the Herald’s eyes had found my own. Whatever he found there convinced him not to linger. They briskly made their goodbyes and were ushered out. It left the two of us seated together. My fingers closed around my cup of wine.

“Do you have any particular attachment to the cup?” I calmly asked.

She shook her head. I smashed it against the table, crushing crystal and spilling gold on the painted wood. I would have torn the fucking table apart too, but it wasn’t the furniture that was responsible for the rage in my belly.

“Those fucking rats,” I coldly said. “I ought to have ripped their goddamned heads off.”

“For the better you did not,” Cordelia noted. “It would have taken them at least a sennight to replace the envoys.”

The petty act of destruction had brought just enough satisfaction that I mastered myself. I breathed in and out, pushing down the anger. It wouldn’t help me here.

“They can’t believe we’ll accept that,” I said. “That the League would accept that.”

“I imagine they believe we will refuse them at first,” the First Prince said. “And then we will lose another third of Procer as well as a few armies and return to them appropriately chastened. Time is on their side, Catherine. The longer the Dead King devours us, the longer they have to prepare their defences against him.”

“He’s also getting stronger,” I curtly pointed out.

“It does not matter,” Cordelia tiredly said. “They are calculating, accurately so, that we will bend to their terms long before Keter becomes beyond them. I imagine they will offer to send troops as well in exchange for a fourth city, either Bayeux or Vaccei.”

Eastern Procer, right up against the Whitecaps, or the northernmost city of Levant. A loose line across Calernia, allowing them to trade for what they wanted without any possibility of a common front to check them emerging between the powers of the surface. Fuck.

“I cannot accept that bargain,” I honestly told her.

There was a long moment of silence.

“We have not yet seen the full terms,” Cordelia finally said. “They have promised to provide them promptly and I see no reason to disbelieve them. Let us not speak of this blindly or in the throes of anger. We are meeting for tea tonight, it can be seen to then.”

I jerkily nodded. She wasn’t wrong that angry as I was there’d be no point in actually discussing anything. We parted ways soon after, and I had to put a spring to my limp.

I’d gotten a lunch invitation.

—

I got ambushed.

Didn’t almost get shot this time, it wasn’t the assassin kind of ambush, but I didn’t see it coming either and I should have. When I was invited to have my midday with Razin and Aquiline, I’d expected that a couple of their captains would be there but no more. We’d had similar enough meals on campaign, they bringing their officers and me mine, and I’d thought it a nice gesture of the lordlings to do the same even here in Salia. A sign of continued fondness even now that they were no longer under my direct command. Instead, just past Noon Bell, I found myself seated with the full roster of the ruling Blood and two Bestowed.

My ducklings I knew well enough by sight. Lord Razin Tanja of the Binder’s Blood, dark-haired and sharp-faced with the last touches of youth to his cast burning as he turned into the man he wanted to be. Lady Aquiline Osena of the Slayer’s Blood, every inch of skin painted in green and bronze as she moved with the grace of an exceptional killer. The other two I knew less, but of the pair it was Lord Yannu Marave of the Champion’s Blood I was more familiar with. Careful Yannu, they called that mountain of broad-shoulder muscles. At least in his forties, and his unnatural calm put truth to the sobriquet. Lady Itima Ifriqui of the Brigand’s Blood was the last, oldest and lean and whip-harsh. She and her sons were a cunning and vicious bunch.

That left only two. The Barrow Sword, Ishaq, who stood not much taller than me but much broader. His dark and well-groomed beard was as much a signature as the two streaks of ash-grey beneath the eyes that were his face paint or the ancient bronze scale he’d robbed from a barrow along with the sword that had seen him Named. And a woman I still hated like poison, for she had killed Captain: the Valiant Champion, Rafaella. Tanned skin, like all the others, and with a braid of brown hair going down her back. She had the face of someone who smiled often and easy, like Ishaq she was a picture of classic Alavan good looks: short, stocky and built like a brick wall.

The lordlings were the ones hosting, so they were the ones to greet me and offer hospitality – which was probably the only reason a fire was lit in the hall. Like the Taghreb equivalent, Levantine guest right was heavily bound to the symbolism of sharing a fire. The serious, formulaic greeting that Razin and Aquiline had offered petered out into silence as I kept standing and did not answer. Tension rose, then I sighed. I raised a finger, telling them to wait, and went fishing through the pocket of my cloak until I had my pipe in hand. I smoothly stuffed it, passing a palm over the wakeleaf to light it. I breathed in deep, the acrid smoke burning my lungs pleasurably, and blew out.

“All right,” I finally said. “Lay it on me.”

A moment of silence.

“Can I offer you a drink?” Aquiline tried.

I flicked a glance at the Valiant Champion.

“No.”

It would be a cold day in Levant before I drank with that one. The lot of them was seated on the other side of the long table, and I drew back my chair with an eye to scraping the wood against the floor to make as much of that horrible noise as possible. Whatever their intentions might be, I’d make it clear that springing this on me by surprise was not putting me in the finest of moods. Dropping into the seat, deadwood staff leaning against the side, I leaned back and blew out a puff of smoke.

“Lords and ladies of the Blood,” I mildly said. “Ishaq. The rest. It appears this is a larger gathering than it’d been implied to me I would be showing up for. Should I have put on a crown?”

Lord Yannu shook his head.

“It is not as Queen of Callow that your presence was sought sought,” the Lord of Alava said.

They wouldn’t care about my being First Under the Night either, so that left only one hat. I rolled my shoulder and smiled. Night came to me, the power sluggish and slow in the day but never entirely beyond reach. The room cooled, its shadows deepened.

“Then standing courtesy for the Warden of the East,” I calmly told him. “Is ‘Your Excellency’.”

His eyes met mine, but I’d chided harder men than Careful Yannu. He conceded with a nod.

“Good,” I cheerfully said. “Now what can I do for you fine fellows?”

Eyes flicked to the left end of the table, where the Barrow Sword sat. Opposite of the Champion.

“I asked for your arbitration, Your Excellency,” Ishaq said. “The Dominion has agreed to entertain my demand for my deeds to be added to the Rolls, but I have some... concerns. As my representative under the Truce and Terms and a trusted mediator, you are uniquely suited to help.”

I cocked an eyebrow. The one on my dead eye, though sadly the people here were all too hardened to be moved by anything like that.

“It would be pointless for me to accept the role if all parties involved don’t agree I should hold it,” I said, an unspoken invitation.

“Malaga endorses your presence,” Razin said.

“So does Tartessos,” Aquiline dismissed, as if it had been a given.

My gaze moved to the right side of the table. Lord Yannu inclined his head.

“You have always dealt in good faith with us,” the Lord of Alava said. “Alava agrees.”

Itima Ifriqui, to his right, sucked at her teeth. The Brigand’s Blood were known for their viciousness and dislike of foreigners, though ironically enough Lady Itima was Cordelia’s closest ally in the Dominion. There was no love between us, though, and if a no was going to come it’d be from there.

“You carried the Peregrine back to us,” the Lady of Vaccei said. “Honour was earned. Vaccei agrees.”

And that left only one. Rafaella of Alava, the Valiant Champion. The woman holding the same Name as one of the legendary founders of the Dominion, what they called an inheritance in Bestowal – as opposed to the inheritance of Blood, which all here carried as descendants of those same heroes. The rare few who inherited both Blood and Bestowal were raised above all others by Levantines. Tariq had been the last, and of the greatest of the lines of the Blood too. The Valiant Champion was, in principle, Lady Rafaella yet I’d never heard the title granted to. I’d never heard of her being close to Yannu, the lord of that Blood, either and I could not recall ever seeing her wear face paint.

That did not speak to influence, I thought, but with Levantines you never knew.

“The White Knight should here be,” the Champion said.

Not a trace of a smile to be found on that face.

“That was not the question asked,” Lord Yannu said. “Answer, Lady Rafaella.”

The broad-faced woman grimaced.

“Not my placement to argue,” she said after a moment.

And that was that. Only she wasn’t exactly wrong, I thought. If I was here as representative for the villains, then it would be proper for Hanno to be here for the heroes. That he was not was... interesting. And worrying in some ways. Ishaq wouldn’t have the pull for that. I’d thrown him at the lordlings repeatedly during the Wasteland campaign, forcing them to work closely together and share dangers, but while relations there had definitely thawed there were limits. Asking to toss out the Sword of Judgement on his behalf would be crossing those, which meant it was coming from somewhere else. More interesting yet, wherever it had come from enough of the Blood had agreed that it’d actually happened.

We’d all missed some undercurrents in the Dominion.

“Then we are in agreement,” Razin said. “And the talks can begin.”

He offered me a nod, ceding control of the proceedings. If Procerans had done that I would have hesitated, but Dominion ways were refreshingly blunt. So long as I wasn’t too rude, I didn’t have to worry about fucking up some kind of obscure point of etiquette.

“Barrow Sword,” I said. “You made a demand of the Blood. State it fully and without deception.”

Ishaq’s face was calm, but his eyes kept flicking to the others. It was telling. He doesn’t know how this ends , I thought.

“I ask for my deeds to be added to the Rolls,” the Barrow Sword said. “For my honour to be seen as honour in the eyes of others.”

Except it wasn’t that simple, of course. Sure in theory all he was asking for was to be recognized, but in practice he was asking the Dominion to make him a noble. Not a high-ranking one, more a landed knight than a duke or even a baron, but still very much a noble still. And, there was the pinch, while openly keeping faith to Below. There wasn’t a way for him to be on the Rolls and not a noble without the Majilis, the ruling council of Levant, to change the laws of the land. And there was not a way to change those without violating the Liesse Accords, which forbade nations going after villains simply for being villains.

“When this matter was last brought to me, in Hainaut, it was decided that a record of the Barrow Sword’s deeds in Hainaut would be sent to the Blood for consideration,” I said. “Was this done and was it read?”

Nods all around. Good.

“Now,” I said, “before we continue, I require classification. In the absence of a Holy Seljun, are the people in this room – the four sitting members of the Majilis – able to settle this matter lawfully?”

“They are,” Aquiline said. “There may be challenge-duels, but our decision will be as law.”

“Good,” I said. “Then we can continue. The Barrow Sword’s request has been aired. Which of you would answer it?”

Some glances were traded, then Lord Yannu spoke up.

“Worthy deeds were done, this is not denied,” the Lord of Alava said. “Lord Razin and Lady Aquiline speak to yet more honour being earned out east.”

Ah, so that very blunt ploy had paid off.

“Yet it remains that you do not keep to the Ashen Gods,” he said, “and no man or woman was ever added to the Rolls who kept to the darkness.”

I cleared my throat.

“On what basis would you deny him addition to the Rolls, if he has done worthy deeds?” I asked.

That would be where this conversation would make or break, because the Liesse Accords only gave so much give there. If they dug in their heels and said worship of Below was the problem, then this was going to get nasty. Yannu glanced to his left, passing the torch.

“To be Blood is to be more than simply Bestowed,” Aquiline said, straight-backed.

I knew that look on her face, I thought. She meant every word of this.

“It is a burden and a blessing, a duty to the Dominion,” the Lady of Tartessos. “Through the Founders we inherited the charge of protecting Levant from all that would see it destroyed, and though lesser lines have since sprung they too took up that duty.”

A very idealistic way of looking at it, I thought. Mostly Levantine Named stabbed each other, went adventuring in the Brocelian and sometimes joined bands of five wandering the greater continent. When a villain became very famous some of them might try to go and claim their head, as a few had tried with my father after the Conquest, but that was not frequent. Aquiline, though, put a lot of stock in both blood and Blood. She was known as being pretty cutthroat in Levantine politics and supposedly had once almost gotten Razin killed, but that didn’t meant she wasn’t an idealist in some ways. On the contrary, it meant she was the most dangerous kind: the one with a fucking sword.

Ishaq was visibly itching to talk and the other side had been doing so for a while, so I gesture towards him.

“I have warred in the defence of all Calernia, and done so ably,” he said. “What is this, if not protecting Levant?”

It was Razin who spoke up this time, a good sign for the Barrow Sword. Razin was a lot more sentimental than his fiancée, he kept strongly to friendship when it was given. Aquiline was colder, but that wasn’t always the right choice. Razin was better at making allies for a reason.

“This question was asked of us, of the Majilis,” Lord Razin Tanja said, “and we had no answer. In shunning the Ashen Gods, did you become less a son of Levant? We cannot know your heart, and so cannot speak to that. There is only you deeds to behold, and they speak in favour.”

I cocked my head to the side. It sounded like they were going to agree to add him to the Rolls, but they weren’t actually going to do that. It would be a deeply unpopular decision back home and they’d need to allow the same of every villain who came after Ishaq. People who were likely to be a lot less reasonable and controlled than the Barrow Sword was. So what was the workaround?

“There is a lack,” Razin said. “Yet it lies not in you, Barrow Sword. It lies in those whose lesser deeds filled pages in the Rolls without ever living up to the charge they inherited. We have lessened what we are for not asking more of those who would stand high among us.”

Ah , I fondly thought. I underestimated you, Razin Tanja. Not just you but your fellows as well. I thought you lot would either bend or break, but you found a way out of it that gives him his dues without breaking what you are.

“No longer will the Rolls be open to all of the Blood, all who are Bestowed,” Razin said. “Only to the worthy, those who prove willing to take up the charge that raises us above others.”

“You would make access to the Rolls conditional,” I said. “Am I to understand this would be for all of both Blood and Bestowed?”

“It is so,” Lord Yannu calmly replied. “It was once the duty of the Isbili to keep the Rolls, but the Isbili are ash. It is the duty of the Majilis now, and so this is our decree: all who would enter the Rolls are to stand before the Majilis and ask for a duty to discharge for the good of all Levant. Only when that duty is fulfilled will one be added to the Rolls.”

The four of them and their descendants were going to send all those hotheaded killers, Named and not, to go on glorious adventures. And those that returned, that proved worthy and capable of protecting the Dominion’s interests, those few would get to be nobles. They’d not lowered the bar to become one of them, they’d raised it for everyone. Including their own families, so Ishaq had no leg to stand on if he wanted to object. Sure the children from the great families could inherit rule of their territory without being added to the Rolls, the matters weren’t legally bound, but if the choice of succession was between someone in those and someone who wasn’t?

Yeah, that decision would make itself for most Levantines.

“Do you propose to set such a duty for the Barrow Sword now?” I asked.

“We do,” Aquiline said. “And request your arbitration in doing so, that the charge might be fairly chosen.”

Meaning they didn’t want to get accused of asking something impossible of him so he’d get killed and they wouldn’t have to add him to the Rolls. Fair enough. There was one detail here that might come back to haunt them though.

“You set a precedent in doing so,” I warned them. “Those who follow in my wake, bearing my Name, might claim the same right of arbitration I was granted today.”

Meaning someone unlikely to be a Levantine might get a say in their affairs, which they were unlikely to like. None of the Blood seemed particularly eager at that, but Ishaq wanted a word.

“I believe in the good faith of all here,” he said, “but I won’t extend that trust to all those who’ll come after you. The Warden spoke it like a warning, but I say it is instead a promise: should those who come in my wake be cheated, they will have someone to appeal to.”

Ah, cleverly done. If the Warden of the East could be appealed to, it implied I wasn’t in the room when the duties were given. Which, to be fair, I would not want to be and my successors were likely to feel the same. Levante wasn’t where I wanted to spend the rest of my days. No, instead villains would be able to complain to me if they thought the Majilis were being unreasonable. Which was fair, and difficult for the Blood to argue with. They discussed among themselves, but I was given a reluctant agreement. Which took us to the last part of it. Itima Ifriqui broke her silence to offer the first duty that might get the Barrow Sword onto the Rolls.

“Avenge the Grey Pilgrim,” the Lady of Vaccei said. “Slay the Dead King.”

I almost rolled my eye.

“That sets too high a standard for those who come after him,” I said. “Who could match such a deed? It is not reasonable.”

The older woman didn’t look entirely displeased, though. I wondered what it was she’d actually been after. Was she softening me up for another ask, or had she just tried her luck at making it pretty much impossible for anyone to ever be added to the Rolls again? Razin suggested killing a Revenant, but it was considered too easy by the others. Aquiline instead suggested that one of the Scourge be slain, and that resonated with the others. It was, Yannu noted, not dissimilar to asking the slaying of a champion from a nation the Dominion was at war with. Honestly I thought it was a little costly, and unlikely to be matched by most who’d follow Ishaq, but he pulled me close.

“I would agree to the terms,” he murmured.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Could lower them, I think,” I told him.

“I am to be the first, Black Queen,” Ishaq smiled, showing teeth. “The honour I earn must be beyond question. I break the path for those who come after.”

I studied him, making sure he was certain, and when I was satisfied I drew back. It’d do.

“These are good terms,” I said. “I have no objection to them.”

Good humour all around, save for the Valiant Champion who had been seated at the right end of the table and not spoken a word all this time.

“Though I am pleased with what was done here,” I idly said, “is there a particular reason the matter had to be brought to me this way?”

Rafaella laughed, a harsh bark.

“Fool,” the Champion said. “You help them, you be part of it . Now you have to make Hanno and Grand Alliance accept it for them.”

Shit, I thought. I always hated it, when someone I despised was right.

Chapter 32: Claimant (Redux)

“Love is a powerful thing, Chancellor, but it only moves you when it is threatened. Hate is ever the bloody spur of progress.”

– Dread Emperor Vindictive II

“Not that I’m complaining,” I said, “but I’m not sure that counts as tea.”

The First Prince emptied the bottom of the flask into my cup, leaving it filled almost to the brim with the pale liquor she’d called bergmilch . My Reitz mostly wasn’t, but I was pretty sure it meant something like ‘mountain milk’.

“There are tea leaves at the bottom, Catherine,” Cordelia serenely said. “Ashuran greenleaf. It adds a bittersweet tang to the taste.”

I cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Didn’t take you for the liquor type,” I said. “Much less going for exotic stuff.”

“I am not,” the fair-haired princess admitted. “It was my mother’s favourite drink.”

I hummed. It was rare for Cordelia to speak much of herself during our little talks and even rarer for there to be a mention of her family. Rumour had it she was fiercely protective of her cousin, the Augur, and had been like a daughter to her uncle Klaus Papenheim. I’d only met Agnes Hasenbach the once and been closely supervised by her all the while, which put true to half the talk, but I’d only ever known the Iron Prince as keeping some distance from Salia and his niece. Her mother and father, though, I’d heard almost nothing about save their names and causes of death as written in ledgers. Going by the dates her father had died while she was very young and her mother while she was still shy of womanhood.

Even royalty had a way of dying early, in Lycaonese lands.

“Must have been expensive to get the tea leaves all the way up to Rhenia,” I mused.

“Princess Mathilda have her a large bag as a wedding gift when she wed my father,” Cordelia said, eyes faraway. “They were close friends as girls, rode together against the Plague.”

That’d be Mathilda Greensteel, I thought, the Princess of Neustria who’d died at the Battle of Hainaut. The Hawk had gotten her. I’d not known the woman all that well, having dealt mostly with Princes Klaus instead, but she’d been popular with her soldiers and fairly pleasant in war councils. Still, it was strange to think that all these people I’d only ever known as allies against the Dead King, soldiers sharing my war, had lived entire lives before we crossed paths. That there’d been invisible ties between people I knew I’d never even thought might exist. I leaned forward in my seat, tasting of the drink, and hummed in pleasant surprise.

Creamy and a little sugary for my tastes, but the tea did add a pleasing twist to it.

“Your mother had good taste,” I complimented.

Cordelia laughed.

“Mother had absolutely horrid taste, Catherine,” the blue-eyed princess denied. “Her notion of a ballroom dress was rabbit fur lining instead of bear, and she was obsessed with cabbage soup. She had tried one in a Lyonis roadside inn that she insisted was the finest soup ever wrought by mortal hands, so the poor cooks had to try a different recipe once every month.”

She was smiling, I thought, more genuinely than I’d ever seen her. Her eyes still had that distance to them, almost dreaminess, but there was joy on her face as I’d rarely seen in the First Prince of Procer. What kind of a life she must live, I thought, that she found more to smile among the dead than the living. Best to change the subject, perhaps. I squinted at her.

“So that’s why you’re so tall,” I accused. “Years of cabbage soup.”

A glint of amusement in her eyes.

“Our family physician used to tell me fish made people short,” she idly informed me. “Something about their oils and the Gods having cursed them to live on their bellies.”

“I didn’t even eat that much fish,” I noted. “Bread and soup in the morning, meat and beans once a week and fish from the docks whenever it was under a silver the pound.”

She looked at me in fascination, which might have been interesting in different circumstances but in these served to remind me that Cordelia Hasenbach had never been anything but royalty. She’d been born to rule, and her silver spoon might not have been quite as silvery as those of southern princes but no piece of it had ever been broken off to buy fish.

“Besides, fish oils? Ridiculous,” I snorted. “Everybody knows it’s horse meat that does it. Atrophies the muscles, you know, bunches you up like a goblin.”

I was joking, but it was an old and common superstition. It was bad luck to eat a horse, even at war.

“Your people and horses,” Cordelia drily said, “have a most interesting relationship.”

“Please, like you Lycaonese won’t slap a wolf onto anything given half a pretext,” I snorted. “I once saw a soldier from Hannoven use a laundry stick with a wolfhead on it.”

He’d gone after that tent cloth like it owed him money, half the reason I even remembered it.

“I am told,” Cordelia said, arching an eyebrow, “that Callowans do not eat poultry when geese are flying overhead.”

I glared at her. That was only once a year, when they headed back north to Daoine after winter.

“The soul might go up and entreat its cousins to vengeance,” I replied, a tad defensively.

She eyed me a long moment, then her lips quirked.

“If a woman eats a billy goat on the last day of the year, a son born in the new year will have horns,” Cordelia shared.

I let out a low whistle, impressed. I sometimes forgot that Cordelia Hasenbach wasn’t Proceran because there was really no such thing as a ‘Proceran’, practically speaking. She was a Lycaonese princess who’d adopted many of the ways of her southern subjects to better ruler them, but it wouldn’t do to forget she’d been born far from the places she now ruled. Places now all fallen to the Dead King, even if many Lycaonese had fled south to temporary safety. The King of Death’s long shadow once more soured my mood, bringing me back to the tasks at hand.

“My thanks for the tea,” I said, “but we will have to spoil it by talking of grimmer things as it is drunk, I think.”

“The curse of all affairs, these days,” the First Prince sighed. “I assume you have read the terms as proposed by the dwarves?”

I made myself drink. It was either that or cursing and I’d already lost my temper in front of her once today. The silver cup went down and I licked my lower lip clean of a droplet of creamy liquor.

“I did,” I said, tightly controlled. “They’re not asking for the entire barony of Holden, just a few miles of land around, but that’s already bad enough. It’s coppers to the gold they’re asking for Penthes and Creusens.”

Holden would barely qualify as a city in Procer, barely fifteen thousand people lived there. The amount of land needed to feed them was nowhere as much as a city the size of Penthes or the capital of Creusens would. The Kingdom Under had, accordingly, demanded much more of their surrounding countryside.

“They want Penthes for the water,” Cordelia said. “That is my conclusion. They want the trade up the Wasaliti and access to the sea. Dwarves do not sail, but they will have a large population of human subjects to draw on for the work.”

“Creusens so they get the western roads that go all the way down to the Dominion,” I said. “And Holden for Callow. That’s one a weaker gain for them, all things considered.”

“They want Callowan grain,” the First Prince said. “Though I would not be surprised if they began tunnelling through the Whitecaps within moments of owning Holden. A pass through the mountains would open eastern Procer to them.”

And do so right at the height of some of the richest parts of the heartlands of the Principate – Cantal and Iserre – which also happened to be regions of Procer the Dead King hadn’t reached yet. They wanted their finger on the pulse of the surface trade.

“This is a foothold,” I bluntly said. “They’re looking upwards.”

“In the long term,” Cordelia noted. “The preoccupation with commerce implies that in the immediate they will seek to consolidate their gains underground. A massive undertaking, one that would be made much easier should they have unrestricted access to all our markets.”

They’d hit us up for resources, food and cattle and wood, and when they’d drained us to expand their empire they’d turn their gaze in our direction. They weren’t even being subtle about this, though from where they stood I supposed they didn’t need to be. What we were going to do about it, let the Dead King kill us out of spite? We had no real leverage on the Kingdom Under to speak of.

“I’m not comfortable with kicking that problem down the line to our successor,” I said. “Look, I know that first we need to be able to have successors-”

“I absolutely agree,” Cordelia cut in. “I do not need to be sold on this, Catherine. I would have swallowed being taken advantage of in a time of crisis, as indeed the Principate has done to other nations many a time. It would have been legitimate, if infuriating. This, however, is beyond reason.”

Tension left my shoulders some. Hasenbach was arguably more farsighted than me in many regards, but Procer’s back was a lot more against the wall than mine. I’d been afraid that it might make her inclined to folding whatever the terms, figuring that anything was better than annihilation.

“I wouldn’t be able to sell it back home anyway,” I admitted. “Even if Vivienne backed me, which I’m not sure she would, a lot of my people would rather see everything west of the Whitecaps burn rather than surrender a city.”

“My grip on Creusens is loose at best,” Cordelia replied. “And I would lose all influence should I agree to these terms. No doubt they are aware of both these facts. Their interest is in having the signature, the right. They will then have leave to exercise it at their leisure.”

A pretext to swing at us if we didn’t roll over whenever they got around to taking control, huh.

“That makes more sense than them expecting us to be able to surrender those cities right now,” I admitted. “I’d figured they might expect us to keep the treaty a secret until the war was at an end, but if they’re mostly after the signature that explains why they’re comfortable pushing so hard.”

Cordelia nodded in agreement.

“Though that does raise an interesting question,” she said. “Why would the Kingdom Under need such an excuse in the first place?”

I sipped at my drink, considering that very thing. I had never particularly got the impression that the dwarves were more than slightly wary of surface powers, and only distantly worried about the prospect of a unified front emerging to face them. Which meant it wasn’t about us at all.

“They want it to overcome internal problems,” I murmured. “The Herald is an expansionist, but his faction might not have the pull to just drag the Kingdom Under into war with the surface without something solid to brandish as a pretext.”

Like a treaty promising three cities that was never fulfilled and which Cordelia and I’s successors might not be all that interested in honouring after the horror of the Dead King had passed.

“It might also be that a war of unprovoked aggression against us would be unpopular with their commons,” Cordelia noted, “but I share your conclusion. Which is good news in the sense that it shows their position is not as strong as they have been pretending.”

“If we had another interlocutor on the dwarven side we could try to go around them,” I suggested.

“It might cause the very sort of diplomatic incident that would sink our chances,” the blonde princess replied. “I am not dismissing the idea outright, but we should acknowledge the risk.”

I grimaced. Yeah, it might be the dwarves would react very poorly to even the perception of us uppity humans trying to play their internal factions against each other.

“I’m not seeing a lot of other options on the table,” I said. “We don’t have a lot to bargain with.”

Cordelia smiled.

“I have heard diplomacy compared to a game of shatranj, Catherine, but it always struck me as weak comparison,” the First Prince of Procer idly said. “I have found cards a much more fitting game.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“I’m not great lover of shatranj comparisons,” I said, “but I’ll bite. How are cards the better fit?”

“Because at cards there are two ways to win,” Cordelia said. “By reading the cards, and by reading the players.”

My brow rose even further.

“You think the Herald is their weak point?” I asked. “I might be able to take him in a brawl, Hasenbach, but it’d not be an easy ride. I’m pretty sure that unpleasant type that gets stronger the longer they’re kicking around.”

“Use of force here would be a defeat already,” she said. “What draws my eye here, Catherine, is that you told me this Herald was appointed as the head of the Fourteenth Expansion.”

I nodded.

“Which must have been a feather in his cap after I mediated Sve Noc’s withdrawal,” I said.

“Indeed,” Cordelia agreed. “And his influence must have further spread with the success of this Fifteenth Expansion, the ring of fortresses around Keter. Yet both of these are massive, generational works rather far from finished.”

I cocked my head to the side, following her line of thought.

“So why is he here ?” I murmured.

My first thought was that he’d dealt with me before so he was a good fit, but that was the wrong way of looking at this. For a surface nation, in all humility that’d be a valid reason to choose a diplomat if it were certain I’d be part of the talks. I had enough power and influence to warrant that. But for the Kingdom Under to make its choice because of that reason? No, that would be hubris. I was not nearly important or powerful enough for the dwarves to bend their politics around me.

“If these talks are viewed as important,” I slowly said, “then his appointment might be a reward for those two successes.”

“There is likely a degree of that,” Cordelia considered, “but it seems backwards to my eye. Why reward success at the frontier by a diplomatic assignment in the heartlands? Especially when the work is not finished. No, Catherine, I don’t believe he was appointed to this assignment at all.”

I frowned.

“You’re betting he fought to get the position,” I sussed out.

“That is my instinct,” the First Prince agreed. “And there may lay our lifeline.”

“If he burned favours to get this position, it’s to get something out of it,” I said. “So if we figure out what...”

“Then by finding a way to deny it, we gain leverage,” Cordelia finished.

How many people in all of Calernia, I wondered, would have been able to figure this much out from less than an hour sitting across from the dwarven envoys? A handful at most, I thought, and most of them long dead. It was easy to look at the way that Procer had spent the last few years breaking apart and take from the sight the lesson that the First Prince was not so skillful a woman as her reputation implied, but that was looking at it the wrong way. Cordelia Hasenbach was the very reason the place had spent years crumbling in good order instead of brutally snapping after six months.

It would not do to forget how dangerous this woman actually was.

“I don’t even have a decent guess at what he might be after,” I said.

“I have some notions, but I would not venture them in haste,” she mused. “Best to let time pass and consider the possibilities with a rested mind and the help of advisors.”

I conceded with a nod. I wasn’t sure it would help, but given that I was currently drawing a blank there was no harm in trying. We weren’t supposed to meet with the envoys again for a few days anyway.

“You’d think with our armies routed on every front there’d be less of this song and dance,” I sighed. “But ever since I’ve set foot in Salia it has been all schemes and politics.”

“Indeed?” Cordelia idly said. “Then which of these did your luncheon with the Blood happen to be?”

I rolled my eye at her.

“You could at least pretend you’re not spying on me,” I reproached.

“We came by that information coincidentally, I assure you,” Cordelia politely lied.

I weighed my options for a moment. I’d need to get her on board with what the Blood wanted anyway, and there was no real point in not beginning those talks now. My only reason to hesitate was that the matter smelled to me like a pivot. So did this business with the dwarves, for that matter. While it might be true that I was leaning Cordelia’s way in the matter of the Warden of the West, giving her the first bite at two pivots out of – well, I couldn’t be sure but three was usually a safe bet – might be seen as openly backing a horse in that race. If I bring in Hanno quickly enough it shouldn’t matter , I finally decided. Both issues were large enough that a single night of forewarning wouldn’t make all that much of a difference.

“I was invited to mediate a dispute between the Blood and the Barrow Sword,” I said.

She straightened in her seat.

“The request to be added to the Rolls,” the First Prince immediately replied. “They agreed?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I hedged.

I laid out the compromise that’d been reached out for her. That Ishaq as well as all Bestowed and of the Blood after him would need to undertake a trial assigned by the Majilis to be added to the Rolls, that the Barrow Sword’s in particular would be the slaying of a Scourge. And she knew, without my needing to spell it out, that by mediating the solution I had tacitly endorsed it – and so it was now on me to sell it to the Grand Alliance and whoever ended up filling the seat of Warden of the West. Because whoever that was would very much need to consent. If villainous Bestowed could appeal to the Warden of the East over unfairness by the Majilis, then it became necessary that heroic Bestowed would have the same right of appeal to the Warden of the West. If they refused to take up that duty, then it would sink the entire compromise by making it unacceptably uneven.

I had wondered, in private, if that was not Itima Ifriqui’s gamble here. Her silence had not betrayed open dislike of the arrangements, but it had certainly not been a strong endorsement. She might have been hoping this entire affair would collapse without the Blood ever taking the blame for it, keeping good relations with myself and Ishaq without needing to actually let him into the Rolls.

“Ah,” Cordelia murmured, eyes glinting with interest. “An interesting manoeuvre on their part. It solidifies the power of the Majilis by taking over a responsibility that used to belong to the Pilgrim’s Blood. They are aware of the risks of Levant splintering and acting boldly to prevent it by filling the hole left by the end of the Isbili.”

“It’s also a way to harness Named in ways that will be useful for the Dominion,” I said. “Which I don’t particularly mind, so long as it doesn’t get out of hand.”

If anything, it’d serve as a check on the excesses of more powerful Named. If you wanted to get onto the Rolls you’d need to at least not irreparably piss off the four most powerful people in Levant, which ought to provide a measure of restraint.

“I do find it fascinating that you speak of Named as oxen best put to harness when you are one yourself,” Cordelia said, studying me.

“Most of us aren’t all that more powerful than other people in most circumstances,” I said. “It’s the tenth that has too much power and too little sense that needs checking. I can live with another Fields of Streges, but I will not leave behind a world where another Folly would be tolerated.”

“Arguably you are of the tenth,” the First Prince calmly said.

“So I am,” I frankly replied. “And I have done monstrous things, I won’t pretend otherwise. Were I facing another woman like me instead of standing in her boots, I would want her dead.”

I snorted.

“And that’s why we’ll have Wardens,” I said. “One in the East and one in the West. To curtail the worst of both sides, to keep the Game of the Gods a matter for the Gods and Named.”

“The proposal of the Dominion would grant the offices more authority than that,” Cordelia said. “It would allow either Warden to overturn a decision made by the ruling council of Levant.”

“Only regarding Named, and not even in a general sense,” I argued. “The right of appeal would be specifically over the matter of the assigned trial.”

“It sets the precedent of an authority standing above nations regardless,” Cordelia said. “And puts that power squarely in the hand of a pair of Named.”

She wasn’t wrong, I grimly thought. I wouldn’t be able to assign a trial of my own to another villain, but it was pretty much giving me right of veto on a decision that’d be made by literally the four most powerful people of Levant. The thing was, I was comfortable with that principle. I liked the idea of being able to step in if the Majilis were shafting a villain for no good reason, and the more subtle power that there would be in not stepping in should they assign something suicidal to a truly horrid Named. But that comfort came from being raised in a land where Named had the run of the roost: Good Kings and Dread Empresses, Black Knights and Shining Princes.

Cordelia had not been raised in such a land and she did not share the comfort. Procer was the land of the Highest Assembly, but also the realm where people taking to the streets could end a prince. Where priests had told royalty their wars must be just or never waged at all, where Named were honoured but never allowed to rule .

“It grants Named power over Named,” I replied. “And only influence beyond that where it intersects with more earthly powers. The Principate would not be affected.”

“I have not sold the Kingdom Under three cities for salvation, Catherine,” she gently said. “Why would I then sell you all of Calernia for the same?”

Yeah, I’d been afraid of that answer. Pragmatic as she was, Cordelia was no less an idealist than Hanno. It just showed in different places. If she had no principles she held to, I thought, she likely wouldn’t have been in the running for Warden in the first place. Above had little love for those without conviction. The Sword of Judgement, I thought, would not so much as bat an eye before accepting the deal I’d laid out. Of course he wouldn’t. Hanno had broken with me – with us – when defending the independence of heroes in the face of what he saw as encroachment by the Principate. To him, giving that power to the Wardens would only be a natural extension of what we’d begun with the Truce and Terms.

“The days where I could worry first of Procer are coming to an end,” Cordelia said, finger tracing the rim of her cup. “I have worried and worried until it all came to ash, and I regret not a moment of that. Yet I will not slip into the depths of my grief and drown. If these are the end of days, I will spend my last trying to leave behind a better world than I was born to.”

“We’ve been leaving the duty of checking Named to kings and emperors for centuries,” I said. “Millennia, even. It hasn’t worked . Maybe you can pretend otherwise in Procer, where so few of the great monsters rise, but that’s not a luxury Callowans and Praesi ever had. There needs to be a check, Cordelia.”

“And so you would hand the keys of the madhouse to the mad?” she smiled.

“Is that really,” I said, “something someone trying to become one of the mad should say?”

I saw no point in trying to pretend this was not a conversation about her being Warden of the West just as much as it was about my talks with the Dominion. Maybe even more the former than the latter.

“If it must be done,” she quietly said, “let it be done right. Let us not unleash a creeping calamity on our children and their children after them.”

I gestured curtly, irritated at the implication I’d want that unleashed.

“I hear much disapproval,” I said, “but little alternative.”

“Keep the Wardens out of it,” Cordelia said. “Let the hopefuls be given the right to appoint an advocate when seeking a trial that can serve the same purpose as the Warden would have. Better yet, let the hopeful and the Majilis agree on an impartial arbiter should there be disagreement. The power does not need to be in your hands, Catherine.”

She met my eye with her blue ones, unflinching.

“It is simply where you prefer it to be.”

I tamped down on the flash of anger. Instead of leaning into it I made myself consider what she’d proposed. It was, I thought, our differences laid bare. Cordelia Hasenbach, the princess who believed in good and rightful rule, in the might of laws and the virtues of order. Me, I recognized the power in those but I just didn’ttrust them the way she did. She’d been born on the good side of them, but I’d not had that luck. My world had been a crooked city watch and a governor strangling his city, an occupying army more likely to give the people a fair shake than our own guilds. So when I had the choice between putting the power in the hands of a Role instead of a pack of greedy princes and their descendants, the choice was clear.

Cordelia believed the Majilis and the arbiters would do right by the people, because she believed that good governance was the rule and corrupt rule the aberration. I believed the same lot would fuck it all up because that was what people did , when they got to wield power without having earned it the hard way. So she put her faith in the Blood, and I put mine in the Wardens.

I didn’t argue with her. There would be no point, not when where we came from was so fundamentally apart. I could sense, dimly, that this was it. The bone that we would spend our lives picking if she ended up in the seat opposite mine, the prize we’d be fencing over so long as we had blades: where power ought to lie, between kingdoms and Named. So it would not do, I thought, to begin this half-heartedly. If she was going to lay her claim, to draw her line in the sand mirroring my own, then it must be done properly. Let her speak her words and Creation hear them, that she might stand or fall on the merit of her convictions.

“And what is it, Cordelia Hasenbach, that you would make of the Warden of the West?”

She felt it too, I could see it in her eyes. In the way that pale face hardened, those cool blue eyes burning with the same implacable that had once seen her refuse a Name. Her fingers touched a small bracelet hidden in her sleeve, a simple slip of leather set with sharp teeth. I saw them dig into the skin of her wrist, like an apple about to be bit, and she straightened to her full height as tresses fell down her back like a shower of gold.

“The First Prince of the Chosen,” Cordelia claimed. “The court of their justice, their captain in the war against ruin. And when that is not enough, when right bends and the way is lost, the wielder of the blade of mercy.”

The world shivered and I with it. And somehow, somewhere, I heard it begin. A flicked thumb, the coin going up. Spinning, spinning, spinning.

Gods help us all when it landed.

Chapter 33: Claimant (Repeat)

“Eighty-three: while it is true that tiger pits and acid floors are generally laughable, that does not mean they stop being lethal when stumbled into. Ludicrous does not equate harmless.”

– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

I’d had enough to drink that I didn’t want to head to bed immediately.

I could have burned out the last bits of inebriation with my Name – and what a luxury it was, that I could do that again – but I preferred leaving things to run their natural course. It did things to your mind to habitually ignore your body’s limits. Whether it was no longer sleeping or going from drunk to sober in a heartbeat, I suspected that the more Named estranged themselves from their mortal foundation the more their Name gained purchase on them. You couldn’t use that power constantly, bathe in it, without being changed by it in turn. Better to grow used to the occasional bout of patience instead, even when it felt like all the world was running out of time.

The palace had beautiful gardens, one of which the servants had called a ‘night garden’ in Alamans, and curiosity drove me to limp my way down that very path. The air was fresh but pleasantly without bite, which made the stroll a pleasant enough way to let the last of the drink fade away. Like so many beautiful things in this beautiful city, the night garden was a work of art. Small glass lanterns in purple and blue had been lit, revealing perfectly cut green grass and low hedges. The paths were circular, half-hidden by deep flowerbeds in wine red and golden yellow. They led to a gazebo that was all wrought iron.

Even the chairs, which seemed made entirely out of a single exquisitely folded piece of iron wire. The skill that must have taken attracted my eye just as much as the plush cushion someone had laid out on it, which spoke sweet nothings to my aching leg. Sitting at that low table with the dwarves this morning had taken a toll and the herbal brew I’d drunk only worked for so long. I still took the time to enjoy the strolls before sitting under the gazebo’s roof, looking out over the edge of the garden and onto the still-lit streets of distant Salia. I’d laid my staff against one of the iron pillars, but that didn’t mean I was unarmed.

When I felt the attention settle on me like a pinprick between my shoulder blades, I discreetly flicked my wrist under the table and felt my knife, the knife, fill my palm. I pricked my ear to try to pick up on the footsteps, but what I heard instead was a sigh.

“Fresh back to the Name, and already you’ve picked up all your old tricks,” Vivienne said. “It’s a mite unfair, I must say.”

“Fair is for children,” I quoted, watching as she came into view.

Slinking out of the shadow with the grace of the thief she had been for many years, Vivienne Dartwick did not cut a figure so different as before she had taken up her Name. She had grown no taller since becoming the Princess, and though perhaps the cut of her chin was a sliver sharper and her eyes grown a little more grey than blue, I could point to no other visible change. It was just in the way she carried who she was. The milkmaid braid on which her circlet rested could no longer be thought of as anything but a crown, and the calm she had found while I trawled the depths of the Everdark had gained... weight. Gravity. She no longer needed to frown to look serious, it was something she wore as much as her clothes.

“We’re in a pleasant mood, I see,” Vivienne drawled, drawing back the chair across from mine before sitting. “Did it go that badly with Hasenbach?”

I grimaced.

“It went well enough,” I said. “She pushed back on the Dominion’s proposal, but she did it in a way that can’t possibly be seen as Procer meddling in their affairs – she’s making sure they have more power, if anything.”

Not that a diplomat of her calibre would have made so elementary a mistake.

“So it’s the grass under your feet she wants to cut,” Vivienne mused. “Not exactly a surprise, Catherine. She’s been an advocate for keeping Named away from the levers of power since the start, and the Wardens as you’re pushing them have their hands on more than a few.”

I grunted, waving it away. I wasn’t interested in going over my talks with Hasenbach when they were still so fresh. Better to divorce myself from the moment first, let the emotions calm.

“You were looking for me?” I probed.

She nodded.

“I’ve received reports,” Vivienne said. “Masego and the Rogue Sorcerer sent word.”

My eye narrowed.

“And?”

“They’ve ‘proved the fundamental principles behind their theory to a satisfactory extent’,” the Princess quoted. “Which is a relief, I’ll admit. I don’t see a way for us to win the war without setting loose Below’s stories.”

Neither do I , I thought.

“If they proved the principles it just means that Zeze’s theory that the Bard is muting Below’s stories is true,” I said instead. “Not that they’ve figured out how to undo the muting. Did they get any further?”

She shook her head. Not good news, then, but far from bad news.

“Reports, plural,” I invited.

She half-smiled.

“The Severance is in the city,” Vivienne said. “Unless Hanno has another artefact that needs to be carried around in a sealed enchanted coffin.”

“Official correspondence did mention he’d sent for it,” I noted. “Best to have it here, I agree, with the Arsenal being closed.”

“I thought I’d mention it,” Vivienne idly said, “because an old acquaintance is on his way to Salia as well. Christophe de Pavanie was seen on the main northern road, summoned south.”

I drummed my fingers against the iron table, the cacophonous clang of it oddly satisfying.

“Let me guess,” I mused. “The Jacks also caught sight of the Blade of Mercy and the Bloody Sword obeying the same sort of summons.”

She smirked, I sighed. With the Valiant Champion already in the city, that meant all the heroes most likely to be able to survive wielding the Severance were soon to be gathered in Salia. Hanno was looking to settle who was to wield it, I thought. And he’d decided to spring that on me without warning. Anyone but a hero touching that sword will lose their hand and maybe their head with it , I reminded myself. He might not have seen it as something to warn me of because no villains can be considered candidates. I’d be brought in when the decision was to be made, not for the footwork. Or so the most charitable spin I could put on this went.

“I’m not pleased he’s looking to surprise me,” I admitted.

Vivienne studied me a long moment, loose-limbed but sharp-eyed.

“You sound almost resigned,” she finally said. “Like you’re preparing to make your peace with that and a hundred more insults.”

“There need to be a Warden of the West,” I sighed.

“And it’s either Prince White or Princess Blue, yes,” Vivienne frowned. “Yet they’re both in the running for the prize, as I understand it. So why does it sound like you think Hanno already has the bird in hand?”

“We need to win the war, Viv,” I quietly said. “And I like Hasenbach for the peace, I genuinely do, but I don’t think she’s the woman to get us to it. Indrani was right when she put it to me: when we hit Keter, it’s the Sword of Judgement we’ll want leading the charge on those walls. Not the First Prince.”

I believed, honestly, that for all my differences with her Cordelia might make the better Warden of the West. She was better suited to the role in a world where the Liesse Accords had been signed. But now that I’d walked away from the room where I had shared a drink with her, I could see the... fragility in her candidature. Cordelia was too bound to Procer and its ugly games, was not respected as a military leader and most of all she knew too little of namelore. The Book of Some Things might help there, I thought, but giving it to either claimant would be an open endorsement on my part. Something I was rather hesitant to risk.

“Indrani’s smarter than she pretends,” Vivienne finally said, “but she still thinks through Refuge.”

I cocked my head to the side.

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“It’s about the individual for her,” the Princess said. “What they can personally do. That’s enough to assess most Named, and I think she’s sharper than either of us when it comes to reading people, but it doesn’t apply to something like the Warden of the West.”

“They’re in opposition, Viv,” I pointed out. “They bring different things to the table, and when one is chosen what the other would have brought is lost. It’s the same as when I became the Squire, only with more politics and a lot less stabbing.”

“You’re underestimating the both of them,” Vivienne bluntly replied. “They aren’t villains , Cat. They’re too proud to take a loss easy, either of them, but this doesn’t end with a tantrum or a corpse. If Hasenbach takes the Name, you still have the Sword of Judgement leading the charge against the walls of Keter. He’ll just be doing it at her order.”

My lips thinned. My experiences might have coloured my understanding of this, I thought, she was right there. But she was giving too sunny a shine to the whole affair.

“That’s not how pivots work,” I replied, shaking my head. “If you don’t really lose anything by the choice then there’s no weight and it’s not a pivot in the first place. Something’s at stake, Vivienne. Maybe we won’t see it immediately, but the choices we make always come back to haunt us.”

Two Wardens, I thought, and the Dead King. Trying to end the Hidden Horror and use his bones as the foundation of a new age. That story would not end the same way for Hanno and Cordelia, my instincts told me. It felt like I was trying to catch a fish swimming underwater, seeing only the faintest hint of a quick-moving thing in the dark. I was afraid, I could admit it in the privacy of my own mind, that making the wrong choice here might lose us the war long before we ever saw the walls of Keter.

“Fate will not change their character,” Vivienne quietly said. “Don’t throw away the peace for fear of losing the war, Catherine.”

I drew back in genuine surprise.

“You think it should be the First Prince,” I said, taken aback.

My friend had never been all that fond of Cordelia Hasenbach, and though there was respect there it had always been tempered by the memory of the Tenth Crusade and who had instigated it.

“Even for the war, it should be her,” Vivienne said. “We’ve plenty of people who can lead the charge, Catherine, you not least among them. What the Grand Alliance is though, what the armies being led against Keter will be, is a continent-wide coalition.”

She paused, choosing her words.

“Most of the nations involved have been at war with each other in the last decade,” the Princess said. “Leadership will not just be swords and hope, it will be keeping the army from collapsing under the weight of its own feuds. Hanno of Arwad is respected, and even beloved by some, but charisma will not be enough to keep the wheels from coming off the cart after we take our first few punches in the stomach. His way is to lead by example, but what we’re going to need is someone who can bring disparate forces together, wrangle and move them.”

And it was not the Sword of Judgement, she did not need to say, that had spent the last decade and a half doing that with notable skill. The Grand Alliance wasn’t something I’d made, after all, it was something I’d joined. I hummed, eyes returning to the distant lights. She wasn’t wrong. Not entirely right, either, but her words rang true.

“It is all wind before I’ve seen Hanno,” I finally said.

This was too far-reaching of a decision for me to make it in haste. But if I did end up choosing a favourite... well, there were ways to nudge while mitigating the risk. Like, for example, giving the same boon to both while knowing one would benefit more than other. Vivienne softly laughed, drawing my attention. She was looking almost wistfully at the city.

“Even five years ago,” she said, “who would have thought we’d ever sit here? Scheming the fate of nations, dreaming a new order.”

“We’ve come a long way,” I smiled, “since the Thief and the Squire.”

And, I realized in a moment of aching clarity, those same paths would eventually see us part. After the war, should we win, she would reign in Callow and I would sit in Cardinal. I’d have to leave the kingdom for years, I knew that. Too many people would look to me over Vivienne for orders otherwise, no matter who wore the crown, and she must have the change to begin her reign without standing deep in my shadow. My smile turned bitter as we stared out at the city. It was not the last night we would sit like this, scheming and dreaming, but time was running out.

Sometimes I feared the peace more than the war.

—

Cordelia Hasenbach had called me to palaces, but I found Hanno of Arwad in a small farm.

It’d seen better days, the paint on the wooden shutters flanking, but it was not there that my eye lingered. The muddy path led me around the house to a cattle-wall, one shoddily made. More stacked stones than anything, and unsurprisingly large swaths of it had collapsed over the last two winters. A tall man was kneeling in the dirt, the sleeves of his grey tunic rolled up to the elbows as he stacked the stones anew. Hanno of Arwad was tall and built like a working man, muscled and calloused. The fingers he’d lost to the Severance had been severed at the phalange, leaving stumps, and he had to be careful when gripping with them.

He must have heard me coming, since I’d been hailed by soldiers in a mix of colours – Brabant and fantassins, mostly – before getting anywhere near the farm, but he kept working as I hoisted myself up on one of the parts of the wall that still stood. We’d been here before. I had first met him here at this very farm, though it had been night and instead of a white cloak hanging on the rusty hook outside the house it had been a lantern. There was another change, though, one that surprised me. As Hanno stacked the stones, he reached for a wooden bucket at his side. Wielding a spade with surprisingly skill, he slathered mortar between the stones as he rebuilt the wall.

The barest trace of a smile quirked my lips. That first night, in the dead of winter, he’d just been stacking the stones again. I’d warned him that it wouldn’t stick without mortar, that he was wasting his time. Say what you would about Hanno of Arwad, but he was not one to repeat his mistakes. I waited as he finished a row, settling the stones in the mortar carefully. When the spade went back into the bucket, at last I cocked an eyebrow and spoke up.

“So, is it me or you definitely used Recall to pick up some masonry?” I teased.

A small laugh as he rose to his feet, dusting the dirt off his knees. The Sword of Judgement was more than simply tanned, darker in skin than a Taghreb but still short of the Soninke. His mother had been one, he’d told me, but his father had been Ashuran. Hanno’s brown eyes had always given off a sense of steadiness, all the more reassuring when paired with his plain but honest face, but while they still did there was something missing now. The calm, I thought, that’d always lurked beneath. The serenity born of certainty. It was gone.

His gaze, I thought, was warmer for it.

“I asked the Sculptor,” Hanno told me. “He spent half an hour reminding me he is an artist and not a mason, but he had some very useful advice about mortar anyhow. Good man.”

He wasn’t. The Arlesite was very much one of mine. Murdering the woman who’d killed his wife had been somewhat excusable, sacrificing half a dozen people to animate the impossibly lifelike statue of her he’d sculpted significantly less so. He probably did know his way around the mason trade, though, I wouldn’t deny that part.

“He is certainly a man,” I casually answered, then cast a scrutinizing look at the wall.

Hanno smiled.

“And?”

“Won’t be holding back a Crab anytime soon,” I said, “but it looks solid. Should hold.”

He looked pleased.

“I have been meaning to repay the lending of this house,” Hanno said. “A few afternoons of work and I should have the entire wall back up.”

I snorted.

“Do make your guests help,” I suggested. “You’re bound to be swimming in nobles by now and I’d pay good silver to see their like kneel in the dirt.”

“A fine idea,” Hanno said.

His eyes were amused, I noticed.

“You can hang your cloak over mine, if you’d like,” the dark-skinned hero continued.

Ah, I grimly thought, the classic Callowan blunder. Shot in the foot by my own spite. I coughed.

“I have a bad leg,” I argued. “Surely you wouldn’t make a sickly maiden like myself kneel.”

He eyed me consideringly, as if deciding whether or not he wanted to unpack any of that.

“You can hold the bucket,” Hanno finally said.

“Eh, I’ll take it,” I shrugged.

It was pretty heavy, so naturally I cheated. I put my staff across my shoulders and hung it off the edge, moving around the angle until it was easier to bear. Hanno looked more amused than anything, beginning to work again as we talked.

“Rafaella tells me you’ve helped the Blood come to terms with the Barrow Sword,” Hanno said.

His hands moved deftly to spread the mortar, but I knew better than to think that meant he was not listening to my words.

“It’s a little larger than that,” I said. “But it went well, I would say. They’ve kept what matters to them while giving Ishaq and the others enough rope.”

“Rope?” Hanno asked.

“Rope,” I repeated. “Whether he uses it to hang himself for pull himself up is for him to decide. Either way, he has his shot now.”

The short-haired hero – it was cut even closer than last time I’d seen him, barely more than stubble – let out a noise of agreement.

“It is a reasonable compromise,” Hanno said. “And holds all those who would enter the Rolls to a higher standard, which the true gain of it all as far as I’m concerned.”

“Are you?” I asked.

He paused, turning to meet my eye.

“Concerned, that is,” I elaborated.

A moment passed.

“You wield ambiguousness as deftly as Tariq ever did,” Hanno finally replied, which was not entirely a compliment. “It was fairly bargained and no law was bent. I would have liked to be seated at the table, but I understand why I was not.”

“That is your own doing, Prince White,” I mildly said.

His growing conflict with the First Prince was, I had come to suspect, why he’d not been invited. The Blood liked him, I knew that well. As was only natural considering he was a famous warrior, Bestowed and the Tribunal’s own champion. But Cordelia had done much for them, and they had sworn oaths of alliance to her. It would have toed the line of dishonour to turn on her now and bringing in Hanno would have been an endorsement of him. Too close to betrayal for comfort, I figured. He’d begun working again, but at my words his movement stuttered.

“You disapprove?”

A simple question, calmly asked. It carried more weight than any two words should bear. I clenched my fingers and unclenched them, balancing the bucket against my shoulders.

“Haven’t decided yet,” I said.

Which was, if nothing else, true. His hands began moving again.

“I did not seek it out,” Hanno said.

“Didn’t fight it either, the way I hear it,” I noted.

He breathed out a laugh.

“No,” Hanno frankly admitted. “I did not. I could do more, so I did. I will not put on a crown, but neither will I refuse the authority when I can use it to do good.”

It was my time to pause, taken aback. The once White Knight had spent the last few years making a point out of staying out of anything resembling politics unless dragged into them. It was a very different song from the one I’d heard in the Arsenal that he was now singing. I had not, I’d admit, expected this much of a change in him even though the reports from the Jacks had hinted otherwise. Named were, for better or worse, set in their ways. Was that why he was no longer the White Knight and instead claimant to another Name entirely?

“It’s not just doing that,” I finally said. “You’re not a fool, so let’s not pretend that the struggle between you and the First Prince isn’t a crack spreading across the Grand Alliance.”

“Our differences can and will be resolved peacefully,” Hanno said. “But they exist for a reason. I do not believe that Cordelia Hasenbach should lead us against Keter, and even less that she should shape the nature of Good in the coming era.”

“That sounds,” I mildly said, “rather like a judgement.”

A pause.

“Yes,” the Sword of Judgement said. “It is. My own.”

Not the same song I had thought, like a fool, finding only the shallowest part of that. It was hardly the same fucking singer, by the sound of it. No wonder he’d lost his Name, he’d essentially discarded the central tenet of the beliefs that’d turned him into the White Knight. I bet you couldn’t even use Light for while , I thought. Until Fate could decide if you were turning villain or not. I rolled my shoulder. This wasn’t a claim, not quite – I’d not given him that opening the way I had Cordelia, the opportunity to define himself in the face of the Other – but we were on the road there. Best I even the grounds before we got there, though, else I would be seen as backing a horse.

He’d need to be brought in on the pivot the First Prince knew and he did not. He’d taken the talks with the Dominion as I thought he would, but there was another conversation happening in Salia that he’d know very little about.

“There’s something you need to know about,” I finally said.

Almost reluctantly. I knew, objectively, that I was not breaking Cordelia’s trust by speaking of this. He was a high officer of the Grand Alliance, he had a right to the information. And still the reluctance lingered. I forged through it, laying out the demands the Kingdom Under had made in exchange for supporting our attack on Keter. He listened carefully, finishing another layer of stones and beginning the mortar work. When I finished, he kept silent for a while. Considering the situation.

“The treaty you brought back from the Everdark includes an obligation for them to provide foodstuffs at cost for any force engaged in warfare against Keter,” Hanno noted. “Are they not breaking the bargain?”

“Toeing the line,” I replied. “We need reserves of food with the armies before we set out for the Twilight Ways, and they’re not technically obligated to provide that even if we could pay for it. Which, for the number of troops we’re marching north, we cannot.”

It would be the single largest army fielded on Calernia in my lifetime, if the League truly joined its forces to ours. Largest living army, anyway.

“So while they might be bound to provide foodstuffs at cost should we lay siege to Keter, by then we would have consumed our own reserves and stand completely at their mercy,” Hanno summed up.

I nodded.

“So it needs to be seen to here, before we march out,” I said. “At the latest a few days after the second wave of reinforcements from Praes arrives, which is in a week and a half. Any later than that and we begin damaging our changes of taking Keter.”

We’d be eating through our reserves without being on the march, making us ever more dependent on dwarven help which they would charge us all the more for. That and with every day another few miles of the Principate were lost, the Dead King’s armies swelling with the dead they had butchered. If he devoured enough of Procer, there was a real chance that even if we mustered the entire continent against him we’d still lose in a pitched battle. Keter was our only real shot at ending this in time, decapitating the snake. Neshamah knew that as well, of course.

He’d be waiting for us, and every day we waited his defences grew more terrifying.

“I agree that the Herald is in opposition to others in the Kingdom Under,” Hanno slowly said. “You are certain he is of Above?”

“Leaning that way, at least,” I replied. “Dwarven Names are harder to read.”

“Indeed,” Hanno gravely replied, eyes dancing, “how dare your largely unprecedented and very useful power not be universally applicable. Most unfair.”

It was hard to flip him off while holding the staff and bucket, but I was motivated enough to manage it. He laughed but turned serious soon after.

“The Herald is acting boldly because the odds are against him,” Hanno said. “I recognize the instinct, I’ve seen it many a time. By striking first and early you prevent the greater force from mustering against you. There is our solution, Catherine.”

“Going over his head?” I said. “It’s been considered. There’s a risk of pretty brutal backlash if the dwarves take offense to our trying to play their factions against each other.”

“There won’t be,” Hanno firmly said. “Already the Herald is using great misery to bring about some design, which must be benevolent if his Name has not balked. For him to turn to vengeance after being caught out abusing his power would surely see him fall from grace.”

“Those are thin grounds to make so important a bet on,” I frowned. “Not all heroes are saints, and they’re certainly not all above burning those who burned them.”

“You assume he cannot be reasoned with,” he pointed out. “I would speak to the Herald myself. “Whatever work this is all in the service of, I am sure he can be helped to find another way to it. And if he will not compromise, then there are those standing against him.”

I sucked in a breath.

“If he’s warned we’ve figured out he’s after something, we lose our only advantage,” I said. “He’ll cover his tracks, maybe even poison the well with the rest of the Kingdom Under to make sure we can’t go above his head without paying for it. That’s a lot of things risked on faith in a man who is actively using the prospect of the annihilation of the entire surface as negotiating leverage .”

“If he did not intend the betterment of Creation, the fighting of an Evil, he would not be a hero,” Hanno calmly said. “I understand your hesitation, for you have fought heroes for much of your career, and the Herald of the Deeps has not earned trust.”

He laid his hand on a stone, turning to meet my eye.

“Yet does not mean it should not be given,” Hanno of Arwad said. “Plots will not see us through this, Warden of the East. The answer lies not in forcing his hand but in freeing it to do good.”

Hanno knew his namelore well. I had not needed to offer him the opportunity: he had made it himself, by bringing my Name into this. And in the same breath, as Cordelia had revealed where she and I would struggle should she rise, Hanno had done the same. The man who had once been the White Knight believed in Good. In heroes, in the champions of Above. He believed, genuinely and deeply, that they were forces for good and that their good was a force of nature as real as the wind or the tides. It wouldn’t be over laws and rules and treaties I fought him, because Hanno didn’t particularly care about any these.

If he believed a law unjust he would not follow it, and would not expect anyone in his place to do otherwise.

That was not something he had it in him to compromise over. When he said he would speak with the Herald of the Deeps, it was because he because there was not a doubt in him that the dwarf would do the right thing once helped into it. And even if that failed, Hanno would not abandon that principle. It was the bedrock of who he was, the belief that people wanted to be Good. That they would do it if you helped them. And the thing was, he was right often enough that I couldn’t just call him wrong. I’d clash with him a fraction of how much I would clash with Cordelia Hasenbach, I thought. But on those occasions where he did choose to fight?

He would not bend. Not a mile, not an inch, not a hair. Every single time we faced each other it would be a fight to the knife, bloody and raw, a chance that the whole edifice might come falling down on our heads.

“That is,” Hanno of Arwad said, “what the Warden of the West must be. Not a king or a judge but the intercessor between necessity and faith. Neither leash nor lash, a guide to the lost and hand to faltering. And, when there is no other recourse, the sword against Evil.”

The world shivered. He would not rule them, I thought. The heroes. He would not bind or marshal them to a cause or purpose, because he trusted them to follow their own. Hanno trusted heroes, believed in them in a way that I simply could not. I had cut too many of them open to believe them anything more than men. There would be no centre under him, no throne. The Game of the Gods would have rules of engagement, but it would not change: the same old war would be fought, a hundred obscure skirmishes at a time. Hanno of Arwad stood tall in the morning light, calloused hands resting on stone. Workman’s hands, tireless in their work.

And the coin kept spinning, spinning, spinning.

Chapter 34: Movements

“At this point, it’s a matter of principle.”

– Dread Emperor Abominable, the Thrice-Struck

I knew myself to be dreaming the moment I saw the tall trees of the Duskwood.

The city stolen from the depths and brought to the surface like a haphazard pile of loot still stood, I saw, but it was no longer the spirited lakeside capital I’d once glimpsed. The labyrinthine streets that snaked through the finest pieces of half a dozen of the greatest cities of the Empire Ever Dark were no longer filled with busy drow, its rough canals nearly free of the strange stone barges that had sailed them. Serolen was not empty, behind the half-empty streets there was still life and energy, but its vigour had been muted.

“Too many went south,” Andronike murmured in my ear, voice deep and smooth as a sleep from which none woke. “We are bleeding dry.”

I breathed out shallowly, the presence of half my patronesses grounding the loose dream into something altogether more solid. My feet touched the air, which was as solid as if I stood on a pane of glass, and my fingers closed against my yew staff. The length of dead wood followed me everywhere, even in my sleep. Andronike stood at my side, draped in the long shimmering silk robes that had once been the mark of the Twilight Sages. Her hair was long and dark, and at her hip rested a silver mask. We stood side by side, my gaze following those silver-blue eyes in contemplating the city below.

“You still hold the outskirts of the forest,” I said.

“We lose more every day,” Komena scorned from my right, voice ringing of steel on steel. “The Gloom will not hold.”

Where the eldest sister wore the mark of her days as a sage, the youngest had kept into apotheosis the marks of her years of war. She wore the ancient ornate armour of the soldiers of the Empire Ever Dark, and at her hip a long blade of obsidian lay sheathed. Her grip on it was tight, her long fingers almost as claws.

“The demon-traps have not served?” I asked.

After the Arsenal, where the mere presence of a demon of Madness had been enough to send the Night into disarray, Sve Noc had understood the dangers in what they might face. Much sweat and blood had been spent finding an answer to the abominations, many weapons being made but none half as useful as the demon-traps. Simple cubes of obsidian, they had been crafted using the memories of the finest enchantments of the Twilight Sages with the sole purpose of entrapping and containing demons. They would only do this for ninety-nine years, but that was quite enough. We would be victors or dead by then.

“After we caught the fifth demon the Dead King ceased using them directly against the Gloom,” Andronike said. “Yet it does not matter. He has found ways to pierce it, built bridges through. It is a war of attrition now, Catherine Foundling.”

And no one won wars of attrition with Death.

“There are no reinforcements to send from the south,” I admitted. “Things have taken a turn for the worse here. We’re gathering all our strength for a strike against Keter but there’s trouble. The dwarves are turning the screws on us.”

I didn’t bother to spell out exactly how, knowing that the feather-light touches against my mind were the Sisters taking up my invitation to have a look.

“Greed is set in the bones of the nerezim,” Komena darkly said.

“We may be able to free a sigil for the assault on the Crown of the Dead,” Andronike said, “but do not expect much of us. Enemies beset us from without and within.”

I grimaced.

“Kurosiv hasn’t been brought to heel?” I asked.

Komena’s anger was like an open flame, warming the world of the dream around us. It was not her who answered, unsurprisingly.

“The leech learned more of power than we ever knew,” Andronike said. “It cannot be destroyed without bringing about the collapse of a great part of the Night.”

Which would be disastrous, after having lost so much of it in Hainaut already. Frankly it was a miracle that the Firstborn were holding off so well against Keter so far. Mind you, part of that had to be sheer numbers and the fact that the Dead King had to march his armies north. In time he’d mobilize strong enough forces to overwhelm Serolen, none of us were deluded enough to believe otherwise. It was just a question of whether or not we could bring the war to a close before that.

“Kurosiv refuses to fight,” Komena harshly said. “The insipid maggot. It will know agony without end for this.”

“Yet we will not strike first and begin a civil war as we fight for survival,” Andronike said, her anger subtler but no less deep. “Its sigil is as a kingdom, now, and worships it as a god equal to us. It would be costly to end them.”

I nodded. I’d taken the same gamble they now balked at, but that made me understand their reluctant all the more. It had been an... expensive thing, settling the East. I forced aside the thought before my fingers could dig too deep into my palm.

“Is there word you would have me pass to the rulers of the south?” I asked.

I fell, not fearfully but into a warm and welcoming darkness. I felt arms wrap around me, great wings flapping around us, and the whispers were spoken into my ear.

“Hurry,” Sve Noc said. “Else you will face the armies of the north as well as the south.”

I slept deeply, after that, and without dreams. It was the best night of rest I’d had since Ater.

—

“You know,” I said through a mouthful of pastry, “it’s a little screwed up that the best breakfast I ever had was when I was a prisoner in Wolof.”

Vivienne aristocratically wrinkled her nose at me from across the table.

“It’s a little screwed up that the Queen of Callow never learned not to talk with her mouth full,” she retorted.

In the spirit of love and friendship, I crammed another pastry into my mouth and leaned over so my chewing would spill crumbs all over her plate. She forced me into retreat by swatting away wildly at my head with official correspondence from Duchess Kegan, which I magnanimously allowed since I was busy choking. I swallowed it all down with cough, then drank down a mouthful of water. Alamans loved to have flaky little pastries for breakfast, often with fruits and fresh cream, but I usually found it too sweet a fare. These had been good, though, maybe baked without honey. The palace’s cooks had remembered my tastes.

It was characteristically Proceran to provide fine cuisine even in the face of the end times, I mused.

“Now that you’ve returned to pretending to be civilized,” Vivienne tartly said, “can I brief you on yesterday’s reports?”

“I was waiting for you to,” I smugly smiled.

I saw in her eyes that she considered throwing cutlery at me for a moment before reminding herself that she’d probably be seen doing it. She settled for a glare instead before she began speaking.

“The First Prince is behaving unusually,” Vivienne told me.

I cocked an eyebrow.

“How so?”

“She spent nearly all afternoon yesterday cloistered with every prince and princess in the region,” the dark-haired woman said.

“Which is only to be expected, considering her position,” I pointed out. “She needs their support if she’s to keep her hands on the reins of the Proceran armies.”

If it came to popularity with the rank and file, Hanno would likely win. That wasn’t how it worked, though. While he was popular with soldiers and officers, ultimately these were still very much private armies. Those men and women had sworn oaths to serve a crown or a company, and many would balk at following the Sword of Judgement if it meant breaking faith with their prince or captain. If the remaining royals publicly backed the First Prince, it’d turn the tide of opinion. It wasn’t like Cordelia was unpopular with the soldiers. She just hadn’t won the kind of loyalty you could only get from fighting with them in the thick of it.

“The meeting is nothing surprising,” Vivienne agreed. “The amount of time she spent on it though, is.”

I let out a noise of belated understanding. While I’d seen little of it myself – in all humility, these days when I needed to speak with someone they made the time – all reports from the Jacks agreed that Cordelia Hasenbach was an exceedingly organised woman. She measured the hours of her day and doled them out with as much precision as she could. It was out of the ordinary for her to just throw an entire half day at anything.

“You think she’s having a hard time wrangling them?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Vivienne frowned. “She’s got loyalists in that crowd, but it’s true there are those with little love for her and she has much less leverage to keep them in line now.”

“Otto Reitzenberg and the Kingfisher Prince will back her,” I said. “Our people in their army are sure and I’ve no reason to doubt Senior Mage Kilian.”

Vivienne gave me a look as she decided whether or not to make something of that, then wisely decided not to.

“They’re her only two solid supporters,” Vivienne said. “Beatrice of Hainaut has been fighting side-by-side with the White Knight for two years now and has warm relations with the man. It’s the same with the rest of the lakeside crowns: Cleves and Hainaut see him as the best bet for getting back their lands.”

That and the current Princess of Cleves, Carine Langevin, had a history of enmity with Hasenbach. She’d been the Mirror Knight’s lover, part of the plot to backstab the Firstborn after the war, and that’d been before both her father and older brother were buried by the First Prince. For good reasons, mind you, but that knowledge wouldn’t anything to lighten up the graves.

“They’re also the weakest and least influential,” I bluntly said. “They’ve lost their lands, their troops got mauled and they’re reliant on the supplies Hasenbach gives them to keep eating. They’re not going to strike out on their own to back Hanno, not if the actual players are leaning the other way.”

Partisans of the Sword of Judgement or not, they’d side with whoever had troops to pledge to get them their lands back. If that was Cordelia, like her or not they’d kneel and kiss the ring.

“And I am not convinced they will,” Vivienne said. “Rozala Malanza might have a working relationship with her, but there is no fondness there. Alejandro of Segovia will follow wherever Aequitan goes, and between the two of them they command the loyalty of the army that defended Cleves.”

There were other principalities that were still part of the Principate, of course. Arans, Bayeux, Aisne, Cantal and Lange. But those crowns were pretty much weathervanes. All of those princes and princesses were currently in their own lands, preparing their defences when they weren’t already fighting the dead, and their interest in the going-ons in Salia was minimal. Meanwhile further south Iserre, Creusens and Salamans hadn’t officially seceded, but they had stopped listening to any orders coming out of Salia so they were effectively nonentities. No, the power here laid where the armies did: on one side Prince Frederic and Prince Otto, on the other Princess Rozala and Prince Alejandro.

If those four couldn’t agree on supporting the same Warden of the West, this had the potential to get ugly.

“They have to know how fragile the situation is right now,” I said. “I have serious doubts Rozala Malanza would gamble with the fate of Procer just because she hates the First Prince.”

Vivienne grimaced.

“It’s not that I think you’re wrong,” she said, “but that I have no other explanation for why that meeting kept going for so long. They had two meals, Cat. Something was happening there.”

I grunted in assent.

“We’re missing something,” I said. “What has she been up to since?”

“Going through the Salian archives,” Vivienne said. “Or so we’re assuming, the Jacks don’t have eyes inside. She went in there and hasn’t come out.”

I couldn’t actually recall ever seeing Hasenbach read something for pleasure, so I doubted it was to indulge curiosity she’d gone in there. She must be looking for something.

“She take in anyone with her?” I asked.

“The usual servants and also the Forgetful Librarian,” Vivienne said. “The two have developed something of a rapport over the last few years, I’m told.”

Mhm. I’d left the Librarian in Salia for a reason: she had prodigious capacity to read and piece together disparate threads of information that would be but to better use in the Principate’s capital than anywhere else. That and the scope of her talents was narrow, for all that it was deep: there wasn’t much else she was useful for. So Cordelia was definitely looking for something in those archives, not using them as cover for something else she was up to. Or at least not just that.

“I want to know what she’s up to,” I said.

“As would I,” Vivienne said, “though we must be careful. Now is not the time for a diplomatic incident.”

“It’s not the time for timidity either,” I replied. “She’s beginning her move to become Warden and I need to know if the method is a problem. We’ll pull at the thread from both ways, Viv.”

I paused.

“I’ll look into what was discussed that afternoon with the other princes,” I informed her, “but I need you to find out what she’s doing in the Salian archives.”

“Those are very well guarded,” Vivienne reminded me.

I smirked.

“I’m sure they are,” I said. “Why, if only I had a professional thief I could pawn this off to.”

“ Former professional thief,” the Princess objected.

“I’ll take your word on it,” I replied with a pleasant smile, “what with you being my royal expert on theft and all.”

Our conversation devolved into name-calling for a bit, but it was eventually settled that she’d handle looking into what the First Prince was looking for in those archives. We were both done eating by then and our tea had cooled, so before we parted ways I heaped one more task onto her plate.

“If Cordelia is making a move,” I said, “then Hanno will be doing the same. I know he’s much harder to follow around, but...”

“I’ll have the Jacks look into it,” Vivienne seriously replied. “I don’t want to be blindsided by him any more than you do.”

Good , I thought. Now I just had to look up an old friend and see what I could get out of him.

—

It took me a while to find where Prince Frederic Goethal was, though after I did getting to him didn’t actually take all that long.

Like all the royal lines of Procer, the House of Goethal had a luxurious manse in the nicest part of the city that wasn’t the Lineal – which was mostly palaces and old Merovins holdings, and as such could only be entered at the invitation of whoever then ruled Salia. Frederic’s ancestors had been rather tasteful, I decided when I got my first look at the manse. Though it had that inevitable Alamans dip into the ostentatious, the property was essentially a large four-story mansion in stone surrounded by beautiful gardens. Sunny ponds and carefully tended wildflowers were the order of the day, with the touch of luxury being half-hidden sculpted kingfishers made entirely out of precious stones.

They were startlingly lifelike, I found. Also each was probably worth enough to arm a company of legionaries, which I suspected the Principate would much rather have than the pretty birds right now. There were wards in place, old magic deeply anchored in the stone wall around the property, but they were nothing too tricky to get around. The easy way through was to dump all my presence into the Night so I wouldn’t even register to most boundaries, but the top of the wall actually had a nasty little enchantment set that’d burn anyone touching it to I had to slip in through the front door. Counter-intuitive as it might seem, that was actually where most wards tended to be weakest.

You couldn’t have people going through a place all day and expect the boundary to be as firm.

I slipped into the gardens in the wake of a messenger boy leaving through the door, veiled in shadows, and took the time to enjoy the walk through the little coves. It was a restful place, all water and shade under tall weeping willows. Frederic himself was outside, on a small terrasse by the side of the manse. It was beautifully done, all sculpted wood under a roof that was a grid of wood covered in climbing ivy. The sun peeked through in dappled spots and even the slightest wind had the leaves shivering. The Prince of Brus was not seated at the glass dining table but instead in a long seat by the edge of the terrasse, overlooking the gardens.

There was a small wooden table at his side, redwood, and on it there were three things: a thick sheaf of parchments, a glass and an open bottle of brandy. To my surprise, as I slipped up the stairs and got a better look at him I found that he’d just knocked back a glass and was already pouring himself another. The papers lay abandoned as he pushed back his long blond curls, hand coming to rest on his forehead. He was just as handsome as he had been in the Arsenal, but he looked tired. Tired and haggard. I quietly limped my way behind him, hand on my staff, and leaned forward to speak into his ear just before dropping the veil of Night.

“Rough day?”

Sadly, he didn’t drop the glass. He almost choked on the brandy he’d been sipping, though, which I took as sufficient entertainment. Prince Frederic coughed, then half-turned to offer me a woeful look.

“Was that entirely necessary?” he asked.

“Nah,” I grinned, drawing back. “Just keeping you on your toes.”

I limped my way around his seat, at which point Alamans manners kicked in and he realized I did not have a seat laid out for me. The blond prince rose without batting an eye and insisted I take his seat, which was an even split of charming and annoying. Instead I nudged him back into the chair with the tip of my staff and stole his glass of brandy.

“I’ll take my tribute differently,” I said before taking a sip.

If my voice had come out a little flirtier than usual, well, there were no witnesses. He was graceful enough in defeat not to argue the point any further.

“It would be as heresy to deny any whim of yours,” Prince Frederic easily replied, a smile tugging at his lips. “You are ever welcome into my home, Queen Catherine.”

Last time he’d called me that he’d been on his back and rather dishevelled, so I probably enjoyed it a little more than I should. I sipped at my drink again. Best not to get too distracted, I reminded myself. I had come for a reason.

“Don’t make promises too quickly,” I warned, wagging a finger. “I didn’t come here just to have a look at your pretty curls, Goethal.”

“Sweet flattery by a black-cloaked woman come in secrecy,” Frederic grinned. “I do believe you might be the very sort of woman my uncle warned me about, my queen.”

I grinned back, though in the back of my mind I did not he’d said his uncle. Not his father or mother. I’d known him not to be the son of the last Prince of Brus but instead his nephew, but the exact circumstances that’d seen him rise to the crown remained shrouded. He’d been the formal heir to his uncle even before Cordelia forcefully put him on the throne after smashing through Brus during the Great War, though, which smelled of an interested tale. Maybe another day.

“I was Arch-heretic of the East for a bit,” I conceded.

He laughed.

“Knowing my uncle, he would have minded that less than your being Callowan,” Frederic ruefully admitted. “He was an admirable man in some ways, but he did have... arrested ideas.”

An opportunity to moved the conversation towards what I’d actually come here for, and smoothly offered enough that I had no doubt he’d done it on purpose. I had a lot of unflattering things to say about Alamans highborn, but I did have to conceded that they exquisitely trained in certain regards.

“Lots of those going around, these days,” I nonchalantly said. “Makes a girl curious.”

I sipped at my drink. Blue eyes considered me. Frederic Goethal had never been one of the greats of the Highest Assembly, but he’d been far from inept at the Ebb and Flow. He was a fair hand at games far subtler than those I played.

“Curiosity is no sin, I would think,” the Kingfisher Prince said. “Especially between friends.”

“Good,” I smiled. “Because I have been wondering, you see, at what might have kept so many of my... friends busy for half a day in a room where no others were allowed to enter.”

The fair-haired man looked faintly amused.

“Princess Rozala,” he said, “believed you’d wait at least two days before approaching one of us. The First Prince replied she could not be certain she would not be visited that very night.”

“Had other irons in the fire,” I said. “Went to have a look at the latest prince of Procer.”

A pause.

“You know, the one in white.”

“Hanno of Arwad,” Frederic said, “is a good man. One of the pillars keeping this war from coming down on all our heads.”

But not, I read between the lines, someone the Kingfisher Prince wanted to follow as Warden of the West. Considering the Prince of Brus had been one of Cordelia’s most ardent partisans since the Great War, I was less than surprised.

“Takes more than a pillar to keep the roof up,” I agreed. “Thing is, we’re all riding the Principate these days. It goes, so do our chance. So when that many crowned heads disappear for an afternoon, questions need to be asked.”

“The First Prince availed us of the situation and shared her intentions for the future of the Principate,” Frederic candidly told me. “Though her claim on the Name of Warden of the West was discussed, it was not the heart of the matter.”

My eye narrowed. I’d used that trick before: speaking the truth, but just the right angle of it. Something was being left out. They want to keep something from me , I thought. Which meant something in that room had been agreed to that I’d object to. I sipped at the brandy, considering how best to wheedle this out of him. Concern, I decided. That it was a genuine concern would make it all the sharper a tool.

“I need to know if there’s going to be a split in what’s left the Highest Assembly,” I bluntly said. “We can’t afford the three largest Proceran armies left being at each other’s throats.”

He opened his mouth, but I raised my hand to silence him.

“This isn’t me being nosy, Frederic,” I said. “I’ve been approached by others who are worried about this mess blowing up in all our faces, and it’s not going to help when your people disappear for half a day and I have no goddamned idea what was being discussed.”

Secretary Nestor had been more concerned by the potential blowout of a confrontation between Hanno and Cordelia, but I wasn’t even stretching the truth all that much: we were all concerned about the Principate. We were well past its breaking point and it was not the kind of realm that would make for a peaceful corpse. Grimacing, the fair-haired prince conceded the point with a bob of his head.

“Your unease is understandable,” Frederic said. “There is, however, only so much I can say without breaking confidence.”

I eyed him for a long moment, then nodded. He wasn’t the kind of man who bent his morals even when it might be convenient, which I tended to admire more than not. There was only so far he could be pushed. I let him choose his words carefully.

“Accord was reached,” the Kingfisher Prince finally said. “We are of one mind.”

I did not hide my surprise.

“My people weren’t sure Malanza would stick with you,” I admitted.

He looked, I thought, ruefully amused.

“Princess Rozala is respected among her peers for good reason,” Prince Frederic said.

I hummed.

“So I can expect a common public front?” I asked.

He nodded decisively.

“As I said, accord was reached,” the fair-haired man said. “The main concern of the talks was how Procer must be forged going forward, which is not something I can share with a foreign crown – however charming the head on which it lies.”

Well, I did like the occasional bit of flattery. Especially when it was matched with the kind of genuine attraction I found in his gaze when he looked at me. That said, I was not so easy to distract. He was talking of Procer being reformed, but it could not have been a small sort of reform if it’d swallowed up an afternoon of the most powerful people left in the Principate. And it did nothing to narrow down what it was that Cordelia was trying to find in the archives. Some kind of precedent for the Highest Assembly? She shouldn’t need one, if she had the right people behind her. A simple vote would get anything she needed done.

So what was it that’d been decided in this room and they were keeping from everyone else?

Yet I had pushed Frederic, I thought, about as far as I could. If I tried to get more out of him he’d start pushing back, or more likely simply change the subject. Mhm, I’d not gotten as much as I wanted out of this conversation but I had gotten enough. The First Prince wasn’t about to lose her seat and key royals of Procer were willing to back her openly. That’d put Hanno on the backfoot, considering how much of his strength as a claimant came from popular support. It’s also not what she’s actually up to , I thought. Hasenbach would not be satisfied with just cutting the grass under his feet. She’d want to go on the offensive, push her claim.

I still had no idea how she’d do that, but it wasn’t here I’d find out. Time to make my exit, then, I figured. I sipped at the cup again, noting a third of it was still full. He must have filled it nearly to the brim when he’d poured, which seemed unlike Frederic.

“Dare I ask what kind of reading was enough to make you drink brandy like water?” I asked, gesturing towards the papers.

He looked startled.

“You have not heard, then,” Prince Frederic slowly said.

I cocked my head to the side.

“Heard what?”

“I only just got word from the First Prince,” he said. “Segovia has fallen.”

My fingers tightened.

“How bad?” I quietly asked.

“They had enough priests gathered in the capital to hold back the demons and evacuate,” the Kingfisher Prince said, “but this morning the army lost a pitched battles in the northern plains near Leganz. It was disaster: they were encircled, then slaughtered and raised to the last man.”

Meaning the principality was effectively finished. Even more worrying was that a great many of the northern refugees – more than half of the Lycaonese that’d escaped the death of their lands – had been sent there.

“The refugees?”

“Fleeing further east, towards Creusens,” he said. “They mean to reach Lake Artoise and take barges further south.”

I let out a small breath. Cordelia’s entire people were not to be ground to dust yet, then. Thank the Gods. Still, Segovia. Fuck. That was one principality away from the northern border of the Dominion. The Hidden Horror was moving south even quicker than we’d thought.

“We’re running out of time,” I murmured.

The Kingfisher Prince sadly smiled.

“We already have, Catherine,” Frederic said. “Now we can only hope that victory will buy us back a dawn.”

Chapter 35: Catch

“Great Ones, the evidence is clear: we have been betrayed by the Cruxis Cabal. They mean to sell us out to the Emperor, and so we have no choice but to silence them before they can destroy us.”

– Archlector Analphagor of the Temple of Crespusculum, addressing the inner circle (later revealed to have been Supreme General Mendacius of the Cruxis Cabal all along, and also Dread Emperor Traitorous).

My first warning it was about to come to ahead was my being told the Warlord was about to arrive.

Hakram Deadhand, Warlord of the Clans, had decided to ride out ahead of the second wave and arrive in Salia the better part of a week ahead of the armies. He’d be there, Vivienne’s messenger told me, by early afternoon. Tomorrow. I spent an hour chewing on that and going through a bottle of wine, unsure how I felt about the surprise and how I should be feeling about it. I’d promised Masego I would talk with Hakram when he came to the Proceran capital, but it’d been a faraway thing when I’d spoken the words. Not it was at the front gate, knocking to be let in, and I had never sympathized more with the deer that froze before hunters.

I was not to be allowed to nurse my wine for long, though. I got a visit from Secretary Nestor Ikaroi, though it was not official and it was dealt with briskly. He’d come in person because my rank demanded it, not the message itself. It was certainly short enough that the walk to the Lineal from the city must have felt like a waste.

“Empress Basilia will be arriving in the capital within three days,” Secretary Nestor said. “And with her the rest of the League council.”

I made some expected noises about how I was looking forward to it and it would a pleasure to sit in the company of such an august council once more, but even as my lips moved my mind was racing. One was an oddity, two could be coincidence, but if I found a third... This was starting to look like a confluence, power calling to power, and there was only one thread of story in Salia that would demand so great a gathering to be resolved. Cordelia and Hanno had made their choices, begun their paths, and now water was flowing down the riverbed. Fuck, I’d thought I had more time. I sent away the Delosi with courtesy, polished off the rest of my glass and immediately went fishing.

If we were on the last stretch, as I was beginning to suspect, I needed to know how much time I had. Vivienne had hinted to me that she’d be trying her hand at the Salian archives tonight so she might find out what Cordelia was up to, but Hanno was proving unfortunately difficult to find for such a public figure. But first, I thought, I needed to find my third. My proof that events were in motion. And though it was tempting to think that the last part would be another surprise arrival, I dismissed the thought. Everyone that needed to be there for the resolution was already set to be, which meant I needed instead to be looking for a nudge.

One of Above’s since my half of the Gods had fallen silent. Thankfully, I had seen to that contingency already and all I needed to suffer was to limp my way up the damnable set of stairs up the eastern wing of the palace where my scrying mages had set up. I dropped down into a sinfully comfortable plush seat after having given my order, massaging my bad leg. The entire length felt like a single throbbing bruise. My mages were good at their business, and so it was only moments before the Observatory connected us to the silver mirror on the other side and Masego’s face was in front of me.

“Hierophant,” I said.

“Catherine,” Zeze enthused. “Very fine timing on your part.”

My eye narrowed.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’ve just had a breakthrough and Roland had a significant role in it.”

He looked surprised.

“That is broadly true,” Masego conceded. “He had a stroke of inspiration this morning and we just had our first results.”

My fingers clenched. Three for three, damn me. There was a reason I’d wanted the Rogue Sorcerer with Hierophant as he looked into returning Below’s stories, and it wasn’t just because Roland was one of the most learned people on Calernia when it came to magic. He was also a hero, and while my Gods had been silenced the opposition’s could still give a nudge here and there.

“Tell me,” I ordered.

“We believe the Intercessor is exerting the full strength of her aspect at all times to keep the stories muted,” Masego said. “Theoretically, with sufficient power directed in the exact right manner we could break the effort – and perhaps shattered the aspect itself in the process.”

“And we’ve got a source for that power?” I asked.

“Possibly one,” Hierophant said. “I need more time to prove it conclusively.”

And there it was.

“How long?” I asked.

“Five days.”

So that was my timeline. Five days, more or less, the Gods expected that there would be a Warden of the West seated opposite of me before we entered the last stretch of this war.

“Do what you can,” I said, and the ritual began to fade.

Five days, I thought, massaging my leg. I was not ready, but then neither were either of the claimants. And that was the part that was bothering me the more I thought about it. Hasenbach had the skills and the will to make a great Warden in some regards, but in others – direct strength, namelore – she was sorely lacking. It was the same for Hanno, whose weaknesses as a candidate were less direct but arguably even more dangerous. Neither of them seemed like a perfect fit for the Name, and though part of that might be blamed on the Role itself not having been settled yet it felt like too weak an explanation.

I’d been going back and forth between them looking for who should be backed, the rest of the Grand Alliance peering over my shoulder and wondering the same, but I couldn’t shake the impression that somehow both the choices were losing ones. That this should have been cleaner, that the angles of it were... slightly askew. My fingers clenched, then slowly unclenched. It would not do to start seeing a devil in every shadow, I reminded myself. And yet. I closed my eye, calmed my breath. My Name shook itself away, a great maw looking over my shoulder. I looked for the stars inside and found nothing, only darkness, but that was all right. The sight of them had been my Name recognizing a skill I already had and crowning it, not a gift Below had given me.

I could do it by hand, if need be, as I always had before. I would find out where the objects in motion were headed and what it meant, then lay the single finger on the scales that I was allowed. And since Vivienne was already looking into Cordelia Hasenbach, my task was clear: I was going to unearth the plans of the Sword of Judgement.

—

I went about it the polite way first, sending a rider to his war camp to ask where he might be and how soon we might speak.

The answer I got was a polite workaround giving me an actual answer, which told me that they didn’t actually know where he was right now. That was fine, as I’d not actually expected them to lead me to him: what I’d wanted to find out was whether or not they knew where he was. It did not seem the be the case, and that meant he was nowhere official. He’d gone to ground to get something done, which smacked to me of Hanno preparing his move to become Warden of the West. I’d not spent the hour waiting on the messenger idly, using it instead to cross off another possibility: more than half of the possible wielders for the Severance were in the city, so he couldn’t be holding a council of heroes over who’d get to wave it around.

I’d narrowed down the possibilities, but Hanno was still in the wind and I had no real idea of where he might be. Thankfully, in the process of finding the potential wielders of the Severance I’d also gotten my hands on an avenue to solve that lack.

“That’s a new kind,” I noted. “And I can almost smell the power coming off it.”

Adanna of Smyrna, the Blessed Artificer, looked at me smugly through her spectacles. It was a little unsettling to see those highborn golden eyes in the face if someone who wouldn’t spare a thimble of spit if every Soninke were on fire.

“The Hierophant is not the only who learns through facing opponents,” Adanna said, straightening proudly. “I have reached a deeper realm of understanding regarding the Light.”

I had no trouble believing that, looking at her newest receptacle for Above’s power: it looked like a wooden pillar about half a foot wide and seven tall, heavily sculpted and crisscrossed by rods of copper. It stung my eye to linger too long on the sculptures, which I took to mean they were sacred in some way. The Blessed Artificer’s entire workshop in the city reeked of the same uncomfortable power, but I kept it away from my face.

“I’m impressed,” I honestly said. “Has the White Knight seen it yet? He has final say over your artefacts before they become war assets.”

“Not yet,” the Blessed Artificer peevishly said. “He’s been busy of late.”

I cocked an eyebrow, making my disbelief blatant enough even she would pick up on it.

“It looks like a good shot at blowing through one of the gates of Keter,” I said. “What is it that’s more important, exactly?”

Just the right amount of disbelief and flattery, which should...

“My very opinion,” Adanna irritated said. “As if anything the Blacksmith could make would...”

Her mouth snapped shut and she eyed me warily.

“Why is it you came to visit again?” the Blessed Artificer asked.

“We need war assets accounted for before we move out,” I lied, “so we can assign them properly.”

Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly more. She didn’t call me a liar, though she was clearly suspicious, because that was very much a legitimate reason for me to be here.

“I am sure Prince White will inform you when my work is ready for such considerations,” Adanna said, emphasizing Hanno’s recent title.

Well, no need to ask who she thought should be Warden of the West. I ‘reluctantly’ conceded that she was right and I really ought to wait for him, which gave her the pleasure of having caught me out trying to go around Hanno instead of figuring out what I was actually for. I let myself be ushered out without protest. I’d got what I needed from her: my next lead. The Bitter Blacksmith was involved in whatever it was that Hanno was up to, and while the Sword of Judgement was surrounded by people who’d obscure his movements should he ask the Lycaonese heroine would be much easier to track.

There were two Bitter Blacksmiths, a brother and a sister who were respectively a villain and a heroine. Helmgard Bauerlein was the eldest of the pair and though unlike her brother she was not a mage and did not work magic into her blades she’d still been the one picked to work on Severance in the Arsenal since she was better at handling exotic materials. In a time without the Truce and Terms, I was pretty sure one of them would have killed the other by now, but instead they’d both been recruited and kept in different theatres of the war – the north for the villain, the Arsenal for her.

Going by memory, we’d sent her Rozala’s way after all with another batch of Named from the Arsenal. The Princess of Aequitan’s armies saw a lot more siege warfare than Hanno’s did, so it’d been a natural fit. That was a good turn for me, since it meant the horse the Bitter Blacksmith would have saddled to get to Hanno’s camp would be from Princess Rozala’s spare horses. Something I was well within my right to ask about as a high officer of the Grand Alliance. Took me another hour to find out, but not because I was being put off: it turned out the Bitter Blacksmith hadn’t actually ridden out from Rozala’s camp but form Salia instead, presumably using a different stable.

I picked up her trail after remembering that the First Prince had once mentioned to me in passing setting aside a dozen stables and attendant horses for Named and dignitaries, when asking me about how many villains could actually ride a horse. One of those, I found out, had loaned out a horse to Helmgard Bauerlein. I wasn’t going to get lucky enough that the Blacksmith would conveniently reveal to a stable hand where Hanno had disappeared to, but I did get something out of investigating there: the horse had been taken yesterday afternoon and wasn’t expected back until tomorrow. I thanked the girl and limped away with two answers.

First, the Blacksmith had been headed out to the countryside outside the city. This wasn’t in Salia. Second, her usefulness to whatever Hanno was up to would end around tomorrow. Meaning whatever it was it was both ongoing and incomplete. It made sense, I grimly thought. Cordelia’s own mission in the Salian archives, whatever it might be, was not finished either. Claimant symmetry.

I hit the northern gate of Salia and had the watch captain there rustle up the commander for the evening shift yesterday, but it wasn’t through there the Blacksmith had gone. I tried the eastern gate instead and found her trail there. Good. Rode straight to the Army of Callow’s camp afterwards, to get my hands on the finest map I had of the region. There I ran into a dead end, because as far as that map had to say there was fuck all east of Salia. Townships and grain fields, but the closest city was two days’ ride away and that was too long for what I’d found out. Had Hanno just been looking for a quiet place to gather heroes and solidify his backing there like Cordelia had done with her princes?

No, it couldn’t be that. Whatever he was up to was ongoing, I’d already established that. He was actively doing something out there, not just looking up a place to do something later. Which meant my map didn’t have the right information, or at least the right kind of information. So what was it the Sword of Judgement had been looking for that wouldn’t be on my campaign maps? It wasn’t like Hanno actually knew the principality, he’d spent even less time here than I had. I went through a glass of wine thinking of that until I realized the obvious: Recall. The aspect, which I suspected him to still have to some extent, gave him access to anything a human hero had ever learned about Salia.

“Something old,” I murmured. “Old enough it wouldn’t on our maps anymore.”

Hanno wasn’t a ritual sort of man, so it wouldn’t be a forgotten place of power. The Bitter Blacksmith was the key, I decided. It was a sort of place he’d need her expertise for. The odds were decent it’d be a structure of some sort and I was out of my depth, so I went to find an expert of my own.

“You’re looking at this wrong,” Pickler said.

“That’s why I’m here, yes,” I drily replied. “Now tell me something I don’t know, if you would.”

“Male goblins lose their teeth easier, but they grow back until much later in their lives than most women,” my Sapper-General helpfully said.

I actually hadn’t known that, but I still gesture obscenely at her out of principle. After having taken her amusement at my expense, she then bothered to actually help me.

“He’s not going to need a blacksmith for a structure,” Pickler said. “It’s too far out her expertise. It’ll be something smaller, Catherine. Like a trap, or maybe a lock.”

I paused, going still in my seat. A lock. Fuck , I thought. Let me be wrong . The lock wasn’t so important as what you found those on. Pickler cleared her throat loudly. I cocked an eyebrow at her questioningly.

“You’re going the I-figured-it-out face,” the Sapper-General told me, looking irritated.

“Eh,” I said. “I might have. Maybe. Why’s it making you cranky?”

“Because you didn’t tell me what you figured out, you rude fuck,” Pickler said. “Do you expect us to just read your mind?”

I considered her for a moment, cocking my head to the side, then smiled beatifically.

“Thank for your teaching me about goblin teeth, Sapper-General,” I sweetly replied.

She cursed me all the way out of her tent, as was only just. Smiling as I was, my mind raced ahead. I needed another set of maps, but that wasn’t the kind either the Army of Callow or the Legions of Terror would have. The Blood, maybe? I grimaced as I limped my way through the camp avenues. No, Levantine maps were infamously terrible. They’d actually used Proceran ones when fighting the Legions in the central Principate. The Dominion was close enough they should have the maps, but unlikely to have them. I needed people who’d been recording history for long enough that... Ah , I grinned. It happened that I did know a historian, and a pretty good one too.

Secretary Nestor Ikaroi of Delos, though in practice an ambassador from the League of Free Cities, was not officially that. So while he fulfilled the functions, the First Prince had not lodged him in one of the empty palaces of the Lineal: if she did, it’d be something of an insult when the formal diplomats arrived since they’d be put on even footing. It was already mid afternoon by then so it was with slight impatience that I found the officer of the Jacks that Vivienne had left in the palace and found out where he was being lodged. Amusingly enough it was only four streets away from where the Goethal manse I’d visited that morning was, so I rode back to the neighbourhood.

One a horse. It made Zombie jealous, but she was just a tad too noticeable and I was trying to be discreet.

Secretary Nestor received me with all courtesies, visibly expecting me to be about to tell him which claimant we should back, so he was rather surprised when instead I asked him a question as a scholar. Surprised and rather flattered, by my estimation.

“So the Secretariat does keep extensive records of the lands that became Procer even before the Principate was founded,” I said.

“We do,” Nestor said. “Nicae had extensive trade and marriage ties to many of the great reales of the Arlesite south and most of the League imported spelter from what is now Orne before it became cheaper to buy it from the Empire instead. We have a great many contemporary firm and weak sources for the chronicles, though we ever seek to refine our knowledge.”

“And what have you got on Salia?” I asked.

“Less than we’d like,” Secretary Nestor admitted. “We tried to reconcile the stories from Chansons des pierres et du vent with contemporary tribal conflicts, but there is not much to use. The region only began to rise under the Vezelons and then the Merovins, fairly late in Alamans history.”

Well, it was worth asking anyway.

“In any of your histories,” I said, “is there ever mention of a dwarven gate in Salia?”

The old man leaned back into his seat, looking very interested.

“It has been alleged,” the white-haired scholar said. “As I’m sure you know, the Kingdom Under rarely keeps a gate for more than a century or two – with the exception of the Mercantis gate – so the location of many have been lost.”

“Of course,” I smiled, not having known that in the slightest. “But there are indications there might have been one in what is now Salia?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Secretary Nestor said. “There are repeated mentions of the ‘Carrouges fairgrounds’ in different chronicles, which drew some skepticism as fairgrounds were sacred to early Alamans – it was forbidden to fight there – but there are no Mavian prayers in the region that would explain such a truce being observed.”

Dwarven presence certainly would explain the tribes being reluctant to fight. The dwarves were not shy about enforcing civility on everyone else. I leaned forward.

“These ‘Carrouges fairgrounds’, were they ever found?”

“I don’t believe so,” the old man said. “There is a town of the same name a few hours to the east of the city, I believe, but the existence of such a gate was never proven.”

Fuck , I thought, even as I felt a swell of triumph. I was pretty sure I’d just found Hanno, but what I’d found was not exactly pleasing. I took my leave from the white-haired askretis , avoiding answering when he obliquely brought up what he’d last come to me to discuss. He took that well enough, declining to press the matter once it became clear I was not ready to commit either way. I rode back to the palace and unfurled the maps there, finding what Nestor Ikaroi had mentioned: a small village to the east of Salia called Carrouges. It shared the name with a nearby swamp.

The afternoon was getting long in the tooth but there was nothing to gain by waiting, so I was back in the saddle within moments of getting some food in my stomach. I took Zombie, this time, to her vocal pleasure. Having bored of terrifying stable hands she cawed triumphantly when we rose into the sky, uncaring that I had first veiled us in Night. The roads were very good this close to Salia so I didn’t gain much time by flying instead of riding, but I did get a much better view of what lay ahead from the heights.

We were just past dusk when I led Zombie into a circular glide over what had to be Carrouges according to the map. The village was both unimpressive and empty. Parts of it had also burned down at some point, most of them around the House of Light. Considering the broken tower that’d once topped the temple was at the heart of the burnt-out husks, I was inclined to blame a lightning strike and everybody being gone for that. The Carrouges swamp , though, was swarming with activity.

It was hard to tell how large the swamp would originally have been, as it’d since been drained. What had to be maybe two hundred soldiers, by the look of the banners a mix of Brabantine conscripts and fantassins , were digging out of the dried mud a massive steel trapdoor. I saw remains of a large stone structure as well, pillars and maybe parts of a roof lying around, but that was broken. The trapdoor was still pristine, and I risked flying even lower under the cover of night. Just as I’d thought, over the steel door a solitary figure was moving around.

Trying to force open the lock in the middle, using long iron poles and what looked like a complicated system of counterweights. I had found the Bitter Blacksmith.

I did not bother to land, instead spurring on Zombie to rise back above the clouds and head back to Salia. I’d already learned everything I needed to, all that showing up there would achieve was a confrontation. When I’d spoken with Hanno, he had stated he wanted to have a conversation with the Herald. That, should an appeal fail, he then wanted to speak directly with the Kingdom Under. For both those things, though, he would need the First Prince to arrange the conversations. Now it seemed he might be digging up an old dwarven gate so he could cut out the middlewoman and make his move no matter what anyone else thought. Something had begun to feel wrong this morning and the feeling was only increasing as the evening went on.

I chewed on that all the way back to the palace, arriving near Midnight Bell, but was no closer to an answer when I found Vivienne waiting for me in the solar. By the look on her face, though, that was about to change. She had a glass of wine in hand and she drained it all when I arrived, slumped bonelessely in her seat.

“Did you ever wonder where the Tyrant learned his gargoyle trick?” the Princess asked me.

“I’d assumed Helikean mages,” I replied, sitting across from her. “Was I wrong?”

“I have my doubts,” Vivienne drawled, “since I just spent an hour avoiding squealing warthogs made of stone on the roof of the Salian archive. Have you ever seen a stone warthog, Catherine?”

“I have not,” I replied, trying and failing to keep the amusement out of my tone.

“You wouldn’t believe how quick on the hooves the bastards are, given the weight,” she muttered. “Or how goddamned loud they squeal. If I hadn’t followed Southpool tripward rules and brought two pigeons to let loose as a decoy the guards would have caught me and we would have had a very awkward diplomatic incident to deal with.”

“But you came through,” I grinned, “as I never doubted you would.”

I received an obscene gesture we’d both learned from Indrani in answer and only then did she begin aggressively slapping down books on the low table. One, two, three – seven all in all, and then one scroll she pressed directly into my hand was not a copy of something but a list. Of all the things Cordelia Hasenbach had been reading for which we did not have a tome of at hand. It was the overwhelming majority, but that wasn’t exactly unexpected. My eye scanned down, brow creasing as it did.

“Yeah, couldn’t make too much of it myself,” Vivienne said. “I got the common books, they’re the ones we have in this palace’s library.”

I hadn’t even known we had one of those, but then I’d seen barely a third of this place.

“Any common thread?” I asked.

“The books I did find in the palace are the easy part,” the Princess said. “They’re all about coin.”

I let out a contemplative noise. Huh. Hadn’t expected that.

“How so?”

“Apparently back in the early days of the Principate, the First Prince that talked the Highest Assembly into having a common currency and giving the officer control of the mints was saddled with a condition,” Vivienne said. “The princes were afraid that First Princes would just debase currency whenever they needed quick gold for a war or a palace and fuck over the rest of Procer doing it. So all the mints were to keep count of how many coins were minted and it’d be written on scrolls that the Highest Assembly would be given a copy of at the beginning of every year.”

I blinked in surprise.

“Five of those seven books are compendiums of those scrolls,” Vivienne told me. “The other two are about currency as well, but not Procer’s. It’s about foreign coinage and how much metal there was in it, how much it was worth.”

I hummed again.

“Anything that stuck out there?”

“Callow got fucked by the way the Fairfaxes kept allowing other nobles to mint their coins,” Vivienne said. “Meant no one outside our borders ever wanted to take it. The Dread Empire’s aurelii were considered more reliable even during periods when the Tower was at war with half of Calernia.”

Yeah, I grimly thought, that sounded about right. Ratface had been appalled at Callowan coinage, back in the day, and though we’d never finished edging out the other Callowan coinage I suspected that Queen Vivienne’s reign would see that work thoroughly finished.

“So she’s looking at the old finances of Procer,” I mused.

“Not just that, though,” Vivienne said. “The list casts a broader net.”

It really did. The books in there were all over the place. Going by the tiles there was stuff in there about voting rights in the Highest Assembly, Proceran trade with the League – particularly Mercantis – and more historical stuff. Like the old Lycaonese states before they were turned into principalities, chronicles about Penthes in the last two centuries, precedents for royal land grants in Procer, Highest Assembly records from Orne and Bayeux, and most strangely of all a book about the wars waged by the Republic of Bellerophon. Vivienne was right, it was a pretty broad net that the First Prince had cast.

“I’m not seeing a pattern,” I admitted.

Somewhere in this was the foundation of Cordelia Hasenbach’s attempt to become Warden of the West, but I wasn’t seeing it.

“From the list there are maybe seventy of the named works that are about trade,” Vivienne said. “Either inside Procer or with the League of Free Cities. If I had to guess, that’s the unifying thread. The coinage books are just to understand what the coin was worth, it’s all about where the gold has been going.”

Only that didn’t explain the histories, I thought with a frown. Or the sudden preoccupation with voting rights when at the moment the Highest Assembly was pretty much an empty formality. Why would she-

“ Fuck ,” I swore. “Merciless, buggering Gods fuck .”

Vivienne poured herself another cup of wine but didn’t even offer me the same courtesy, the ungrateful wretch.

“I take it you’ve realized something?” the Princess drily asked.

“We’re not seeing a pattern because those books aren’t about one thing,” I said. “They’re about two things.”

I rapped a knuckled atop the books.

“She used those to know what Procer’s coin was worth,” I said. “Then the trade books and the foreign currency books are about finding out how large the wealth of other nations was. Specifically nations that were trading with the dwarves.”

“That explains the Mercantis books and the Penthesian ones, they both have gates,” Vivienne said, “but Bellerophon-”

“Hates Penthes to the bone,” I said. “So most of the time, when they declare a war it’s attacking Penthes. That weakens trade in the region, even if they lose the war.”

She was a smart woman, Vivienne, so she caught up quickly.

“That’s what the records of Orne and Bayeux in the Highest Assembly are about,” she realized. “They used to trade raids with the Counts of Ankou through the Red Flower Vales, and whenever their holdings were hit-”

“-they complained about it in the Highest Assembly, trying to get backing from the First Princes,” I finished. “And when Cordelia sees those complains, she knows that trade with Callow was drying up since the Vales used to be our only land path to Procer. It’s about their wealth, not us.”

“It’s insane, Catherine,” Vivienne grimaced. “I know she’s an intelligent woman, but trying to figure out entire treasuries from just these records? To have even a chance, she’d need...”

“Someone capable of reading through an entire library in a day and remember every word,” I interrupted. “Like, say, the Forgetful Librarian.”

I saw the understanding sink in. Cordelia wasn’t reading those books herself, at least not most of them. She was using the Librarian to do it and then using her as a living reference book to work with. It was insane, just as Vivienne had said, but if there was one woman in Calernia who might be able to pull it off it was Cordelia Hasenbach. Who was, for all her flaws, a remarkably brilliant woman.

“She’s putting hard numbers to how much trade with the dwarves is worth,” I said. “That’s what she’s doing. She’s figured out something about what the Herald wants and she’s following the trail so she can figure out how to flip the negotiations around.”

“That’s good,” Vivienne slowly said. “Isn’t it? We’re in favour of getting the best of the Herald, aren’t we?”

“No when Hanno is going all in on a fundamentally incompatible path,” I cursed. “He’s digging up a dwarven gate to approach them on his own.”

“Cordelia’s position could accommodate that,” the Princess frowned. “She’s not committed yet, she-”

“She is,” I interrupted. “Because of the other thing she’s doing, the one you couldn’t figure out because you didn’t have the conversation with Frederic Goethal I had this morning.”

My fingers clenched.

“Old Lycaonese borders, voting rights?” I said. “Look at the shape of it, Vivienne. Hasenbach was the Iron Prince’s heiress, in principle she’s Princess of Hannoven as well as Prince of Rhenia right now. Mathilda of Neustria died in Hainaut and word is pretty much all the Siegenburg of Neustria died defending their lands. That leaves two people to hold all the north: Cordelia Hasenbach and Otto Reitzenberg.”

And Otto Redcrown had been in that closed council.

“The only reason voting rights would matter,” Vivienne slowly said, “is if she believes that there is about to be a change to the borders of the principalities.”

“The Kingfisher Prince told me this morning that the princes would stand behind her united,” I said. “I think we’ve just found out how she bought that.”

“She’s going to abdicate,” the Princess said.

“Not just as First Prince,” I said. “As Prince of Rhenia and Princess of Hannoven as well. She’s uniting all Lycaonese lands under Prince Otto.”

“Princess Rozala would dare ask as much,” Vivienne said.

“No,” I said, “but Hasenbach is smart . I underestimated her.”

I let out a sigh.

“She’s realized she can’t be a ruler and the Warden of the West at the same time,” I said. “So she’s settling all her affairs before she goes all in on her claim.”

And there would be no room for retreat, I realized with horror, after having cut away so much of what she loved. She would be in it to the knife. And so would Hanno, who fought for nothing except what he was willing to die for: he would not bend, not now that he believed he’d found a way to save us all. Wasn’t that the lesson he’d learned from the silence of the Tribunal: that sometimes you had to take it on your own hands, because no one else would? Fuck , I thought once more. I still wasn’t sure what that royal land grant book was for, but it didn’t matter.

Not when I’d just become clear that the two claimants to the Name of Warden of the West had just begun to plod down path that could not be reconciled . The differences of opinion over the Blood, they’d just been a pivot that differentiate them. The dwarves were the pivot where the knives came out and neither of them were leaving any room for retreat. Hanno was staking his entire soundness as a leader on the gambit of levelling with the dwarves, risking disgrace if he failed. Which he would if Cordelia found her solution and got to the dwarves first. If he lost there, he was done as a claimant.

The entire philosophy he’d adopted in the wake of the Choir of Judgement falling silent would be proved wrong. The judgment he’d finally begun to venture would be proved wrong at its first real test.

On the other hand, Cordelia had burned every bridge behind her before taking her leap. She was renouncing titles and wealth and rule of the most powerful nation of Calernia to become Warden of the West, which she’d prove worthy of by bending the Herald of the Deeps to her will. Something that could be rendered completely worthless if Hanno got to him first and succeeded with his appeal on emotion. All those sacrifices rendered into nothing in the span of a single conversation. My stomach tightened just thinking about it.

“They’re not just rival claimants, Vivienne,” I quietly said. “If one of them wins, it fucks over the other. Strongly. Permanently.”

She studied me with hooded eyes.

“You told me,” the Princess said, “that a pivot cannot be had without a cost.”

It’s too high a cost , I thought. Their trajectory was a collision from which only one would walk away, and I was not certain we could afford to lose either of them. Slowly I shook my head.

“This is not coincidence,” I murmured. “Or fate, and least of all providence.”

And that left only one possibility: enemy action.

Chapter 36: Reiterate

“If you cannot forgive, forget; if you cannot forget, forgive.”

– King Jehan the Wise of Callow

The morning of Hakram’s arrival, I got a visit from Archer.

Though Indrani enjoyed a good pampering most out of the Woe, she was too restless to actually stay in a palace for long. It’d been the same back in Laure, where she’d spent more in dives by the docks than in her suite. I trusted her not to get into too much trouble, and once in a while she did stumble across an interesting tidbit. Sometimes she even bothered to share those. This morning, by her sunny smile, was to be one of the lucky ones. Indrani only got that manically pleasant when she figured she’d found something of sufficient value to ask something of me in turn.

“Tell me I’m good,” she demanded, sitting on the table just to the left of my eggs.

“You’re sometimes slightly to the north of decent,” I helpfully replied. “Like, once every few years. It has happened. I’m told. In rumours. But not, like, very reliable ones.”

She wagged a finger at me.

“If I don’t get honey, you don’t get your treat,” Archer said.

Leaning forward, I offered her a widely pleasant smile and snatched a little covered porcelain bowl which I then put on her lap. There was a pause.

“There’s honey in that, isn’t there,” Indrani resignedly said.

“I think we should be talking about where my treat is, if anything,” I replied, taking a bite of my eggs.

Good eggs. They tasted like salt and a little bit of victory at someone else’s expense. She sighed, stealing a fork and then a bite of her own. Magnanimously I allowed this raider-like behaviour, even though taking breakfast from her rightful queen could be seen as treason in a certain light.

“Our little hero friends are about to meet for a Good talk,” Archer told me. “Tonight. A buddy told me it’s mandatory for any of their kind that’re in the region.”

I let out a low whistle. That was a lot of heroes. Maybe the most there’d been together in more than a century: even when we’d started the Truce and Terms, most of the people who’d signed it hadn’t actually been in the same place. There had to be at least forty heroes around Salia at the moment, since all those that’d been on other fronts had retreated to the capital with their parent army.

“Hanno called that?” I asked.

“I didn’t get told that outright,” Archer admitted, “but there’s really no one else who could give that order and expect it to work.”

Well, she wasn’t wrong there. If the Grey Pilgrim still lived he would have made a second, but since Tariq had died there’d been no potential rival for leadership on Above’s side of the fence.

“How reliable would you say your friend is?” I asked.

“She wouldn’t lie,” Indrani firmly said. “I trust her.”

Either the Silver Huntress or the Vagrant Spear then, I thought. I wasn’t sure that Alexis would come to her with something like that even after they’d buried the hatchet, though, so most likely the Spear. I took another bite of eggs, swallowed.

“Why’d she tell you?” I asked.

“Because the Blood are worried about this little tiff between Cordy and Shiny Boots going bad so they’ve had a talk with their Bestowed,” Indrani said. “Congrats, Cat, you’re now the adult in the room the rats go tattle to.”

“Ah, everything I ever wanted,” I thinly smiled.

The thought that even the Blood, whose idea of diplomatic subtlety was painting the cudgel black before hitting someone with it, could tell the situation was getting volatile rather soured my appetite. I needed to ask one more thing first, though.

“You find out where they’re meeting?”

I’d set down my fork, so Indrani did not miss a beat before helping herself to my breakfast. Refuge had taught her some very firm ideas about unattended food being up for grabs.

“Some place out in the country,” Archer said. “A village in the middle of nowhere.”

“Let me guess,” I smiled, “is it called Carrouges?”

She shoveled in the last mouthful of breakfast and eyed me balefully.

“How would you even know that?” Indrani complained through her chewing.

“I was just there last night,” I sighed. “Shiny Boots is digging up a dwarven gate there.”

Nd then dragging everyone there. That was telling: he’d get the Bitter Blacksmith to open the lock for him and then, with that open gate in sight, make his case to the heroes that the Kingdom Under should be appealed to directly. Going around Cordelia. I grimaced. Even if he didn’t get to it immediately after, if he let a few day pass, the simple act of having gotten most of the heroes to back his solution would kneecap Cordelia’s claim. Their Name was about handling heroes, and the heroes would be making their preference pretty clear. I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“I might have to do something about this,” I admitted. “If he goes through with it there’s only confrontation left.”

I wouldn’t need to warn the First Prince about it happening, not since the Kingfisher Prince would be part of the gathering and I did not doubt he’d inform her the moment he got the summons, but I wasn’t actually sure Cordelia could do a lot about this. She was a high officer of the Grand Alliance, for all that now the authority was fraying along with all authorities more parchment than steel, so it could be argued that she had a right to attend and make to them her own case. And Hanno would let her , I thought. He’d respect the right, even if it opened the door to a rival claimant.

It wouldn’t be a good battlefield for her, though. Hanno had fought alongside most those people and he was still the Sword of Judgement, two things that’d weigh the balance of opinion in his favour. And should the First Prince’s support come mostly from Proceran heroes, which I suspected it would, then it would be final nail in the coffin of her claim: people could live with a Warden who was Proceran, but no one would want a Proceran Warden. I sighed, lost in thought, and came back to the sound of Indrani slurping down the last of my tea.

“I need to find out what Hasenbach will be up to,” I said. “She’s been looking for her slayer’s arrow, but now she needs to give answer or she’ll get knocked out of the race.”

“Would that be such a bad thing?” Indrani asked.

I cocked my head at her.

“Did Vivienne talk to you about what we found out?”

“You two think this is a Bard plot,” she said. “That she somehow nudged things a while back so that it’d get ugly when they fought it out.”

“There’s something off, ‘Drani,” I said. “I can feel it. They’re both better than this, but it’s like every action one takes scrapes the other raw.”

Archer chewed her lip.

“I’ve learned not to bet against you when it comes to this stuff,” she said. “So do what you think you have to, Cat. But if you’re worried that time is running out, then you need to be careful about something too.”

I leaned back, giving her my full attention. It was rare enough for her to venture advice that when she did I always felt bound to take it seriously.

“You need to get your own house in order, Cat,” Indrani said. “You’re worried about the two of them fucking it up when someone becomes Warden of the West, but you’re not done either. You need to clean up your loose ends, otherwise it’s you that becomes the weak point.”

My lips thinned.

“You’re talking about Hakram,” I said.

“Not just him,” she replied. “Whatever the Hells you have going with Akua these days, that needs seeing to. And you made a promise to the Pilgrim before he died.”

I had made three, but I knew which one she meant. I’d sworn to Tariq that I would reconcile with Hanno. Which I very much had not, for all that our last conversation had been cordial. That’d been a veneer, a surface thing. Nothing had been aired out or fixed.

“I don’t have a lot of time, Indrani,” I quietly said. “Four days, maybe less.”

“So you best get a move on,” Archer mercilessly replied. “And one last warning, since I know you.”

She met my eye squarely.

“You like to just dip your toe in and retreat,” Indrani said. “Like you’re gauging the temperature of the water. It’s a thing you do when you’re afraid of dealing with a hard conversation, Cat, and you’ve even got the excuse of all that’s going on right now to justify being half-hearted.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Don’t,” Archer said. “You might be pissed, but Hakram’s one of us. Don’t botch this because it stings.”

My fingers tightened around the arm of my chair. She set down my empty cup and hopped off the table, throwing me one last look over her shoulder before walking out of the room.

That I wasn’t sure who it was I was angry at only made the anger burn more harshly.

—

An hour before Noon Bell I learned that my tentative steps to find out what the First Prince was planning as a response to Hanno’s summons were pointless. I didn’t have to rely on spies because it was at my own damn door that the knock came: Cordelia Hasenbach wanted to meet.

I offered to head to the archives, but she’d taken the lead already. She was out, had gone by her palace and was ready to receive me as soon as I could make the time. I didn’t bother to play coy or string it out. The sooner that talk was had the better. Word had come by scrying ritual that Warlord Hakram and a band of wolf riders were out of the Twilight Ways and making good pace, expected half past Noon Bell. I figured that the other half of the reason Hasenbach had left the archive was that she wanted to have a look at the preparations to formally receive the Warlord of the Clans for the first time in Proceran history.

So I limped my way through beautiful old Merovins halls again, led by servants to another of the pretty little parlours that seemed to grow like mushrooms wherever Cordelia Hasenbach stayed for more than a few days. I was ushered in quietly, my visit not secret but definitely less than official, and I found that the First Prince of Procer looked tired . She was impeccably dressed in grey and green, hair in a Lycaonese braid, but even though she’d tried to hide it under cosmetics I could see the rings around her eyes. Someone had been reading instead of sleeping for too long.

We got through a single round of the usual courtesies before she brought up why she’d asked me to come, which by Hasenbach standards was positively brusque. She, too, was feeling time slipping away through her fingers.

“When we first began discussing the Liesse Accords, one of the central principles was the founding of a city in the Red Flower Vales,” Cordelia said. “A centre of learning and a seat for the Accords.”

Also a way to discourage war between Callow and Procer, since it’d be standing right in the middle and sworn to neutrality. The Stairway was a second land path between our nations, but it was also ridiculously defensible and easy to close off. Geography always had a seat at the table when war was discussed, whether we liked to admit it or not. I intended to have ours strongly arguing for peace.

“As Queen of Callow I have the right to grant lands on the kingdom’s side,” I said. “My successor has sworn to abide by the grant.”

If there’d actually been Counts of Ankou around left this might have gotten messy, but they’d been unseated with the Conquest. Telling a governor I’d appointed myself that the map would get redrawn was much less complicated.

“Indeed,” Cordelia said. “Princess Vivienne was most eloquent in arguing in favour, arguments I passed to the Highest Assembly. Not enough, unfortunately, were swayed.”

If the ceded lands had come from just Orne or Bayeux it might have gone through, Vivienne had written me back then, but with two principalities losing a slice it’d turned into a slog. Ceding territory through anything but a peace treaty needed to be ratified by two thirds of the Highest Assembly and the First Prince just hadn’t had the votes.

“And you’re telling me that’s changed?” I asked.

She smiled and set a scroll down on the table between us. I popped the seal and unfurled it, reading through the dense lines carefully. Most of it was legalistic nonsense, but the gist of it was pretty clear. Since some principalities had formally seceded and some summons to emergency sessions of the Highest Assembly refused, the First Prince was exercising ancient prerogatives to establish a new principality. The Principality of Cardinal. Its borders had been decided this morning by vote in the Assembly, but there I tripped over a phrase.

“What is a ‘ vote présentiel ’?” I asked.

“Only princes in attendance or their representatives may vote, and there is no quorum to any decision so taken,” the First Prince said. “The decisions are not binding until a second vote has been taken over the matter, but to be fully overturned it would need a two thirds majority or the consent of the First Prince.”

Meaning that this morning, Cordelia Hasenbach had created a principality out of two chunks of land – one in Orne, one in Bayeux – and been made princess of them. She had then, I saw in the following lines, declared independence from the Principate of Procer. In practice the land wasn’t actually in her hands yet, but the legal foundation was there and if Rozala Malanza backed this, which by the roll count of the votes she did, then it was a done deal. So long as she held firm and refused to let the decision be overturned, the land was split from Procer and ready to be added to the city-state of Cardinal.

There had been two things I wanted most out of Cordelia Hasenbach: Cardinal and Procer’s signature on the Accords. She was already halfway to delivering that.

“That is,” I frankly said, “a very good bribe.”

She didn’t take offence, even though her nose wrinkled ever so slightly at the bluntness. We both knew that this was. I closed my eye, thinking it through. The First Prince was giving me this but she’d not asked for anything in return. So what was it that she got? I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. The timing made it clear that this was her answer to what Hanno was up to, but this wouldn’t help her with the heroes. It wouldn’t – no, I was looking at this wrong. Hasenbach was never going to win this by heroic backing, she already knew that. Her angle, her strength, it was on the great scale. The nation game, not the boots on the ground where Hanno thrived.

She hadn’t asked anything of me, I realized, because my signature was what she was after. What she wanted was the two of us working together to make the Age of Order so that she was already pretty much filling the shoes of the Warden of the West. Hanno’s opening stroke was gathering support, Cordelia was going straight for the authority. She wanted the wind in her sails before she ever stepped foot in front of the heroes, providence nudging things her way.

“Someone’s been teaching you namelore,” I finally said, opening my eye.

The blonde princess’ austere face turned anguished, for a moment. It was gone in a flicker, like it’d never been there.

“Owls are terrible gossips,” the First Prince simply said.

The Augur , I thought. Hasenbach wasn’t learning namelore so much as brute forcing through prediction what might and might not work. Gods, that must be rough on her cousin. Especially the parts that had anything to do with me, because I had it on good authority that the Augur had been unable to predict me since I became First Under the Night. Sve Noc had seen to that. So she doesn’t know if I accept this or not , I considered. She just knows that if I agree, she might be able to beat Hanno.

“I see you have concerns,” Cordelia calmly said. “Perhaps I can allay them.”

“I’m not sure you can,” I honestly said.

Her calm did not waver.

“Then perhaps it is a matter of tightening our alliance,” the First Prince of Procer said. “Let us sign the Liesse Accords.”

I paused for a beat.

“You’re serious,” I said.

“I am,” Cordelia said. “I believe the Blood is so inclined as well, and should have the hour free. It has waited long enough, Queen Catherine. Let us sign the papers.”

Fuck, I thought. I wasn’t sure it’d make her win, if I went through with this. If my instincts were right every time, I wouldn’t have murdered my own fucking father. And this, the offer on the table right now , wasn’t it what I’d been after for years? I could get the world I’d been after today. Not tomorrow, not in a year, not on the horizon. Today. Woudn’t it change what this war was, to be fighting for something? It might even help. And it wasn’t like I’d be fucking over Good, one of Above’s own claimants was asking me for this. It wasn’t a plot or a scheme, there was no reason it should...

I breathed in, breathed out. Forced the thoughts back into line. I knew myself just well enough to be aware that, given long enough, I could justify nearly anything to myself if it got me something I wanted badly enough. That’d gotten me through some hard decisions, but it’d let me make some bad ones too. And, setting aside all my worries about one claimant winning against the other, there was still one warning fresh to my ear. Archer had been right, when she’d told me I needed to see to my loose ends. Going into this half-cocked was potentially disastrous. I licked my lips. I’d not noticed them going dry.

“I’ll have to consult with my successor first,” I said, tone even.

Her control slipped just enough that I saw her eyes tighten. Dismay. Fear. She thinks she loses tonight if she doesn’t get this , I realized. That she’ll have abdicated for nothing, thrown her life and her life’s work away pointlessly. And I feared too, knowing that, as much because I was not sure I could stop Hanno as because I was afraid of what Cordelia Hasenbach might yet do, cornered.

“I see,” the First Prince replied, tone just as even.

I rose to my feet, then hesitated.

“What is it about him that you find unacceptable?” I asked.

Her face was a mask, pale and unmoving.

“Hanno of Arwad is the culmination of personal power,” the First Prince said, tone hard as steel. “He derives authority from his personal virtue, his personal strength of arms, his personal ties to a Choir. And for all his flaws, I recognize the man to be exceptional. Which is the very issue: he is an exception .”

The Lycaonese princess rose to her feet.

“He has not method, no system, because he does not use them,” she said. “His judgement, when it is not that of angels, is entirely personal. Circumstantial. And perhaps, for Hanno of Arwad, most of the time the answer will still be correct. But ask yourself this – will the same be true of his successors?”

Her blue eyes burned.

“That is why we partition power, why we share it,” Cordelia Hasenbach said. “Why we make rules all have to obey. His flaw is the same was yours, Warden: he believes, deep down, that he is capable of wielding power without misusing it. That others after him will do the same.”

Her jaw clenched.

“I have seen what that mistaken belief did to Procer,” she said. “Even when the power was in my hands. And I would not see that mistake repeated for all of Calernia. There must be rules for Named as there are for men, and I cannot brook anyone who would do otherwise.”

The queen’s judgement, I thought, against the assembly’s law. Of course she didn’t trust heroes, while she was trying to keep Procer from falling apart they kept... getting in the way, from where she sat. The Mirror Knight emboldening a prince to make a scheme that nearly pulled the Firstborn out of the war, another trying to kill a prince of the blood and then the Kingfisher Prince refusing to ask for her death. All of it, that expanding mess dropped in her lap, culminating in that moment where the White Knight looked her in the eye and refused to compromise.

A disaster that the First Prince traced back to the Chosen, and their leader had just refused to consider helping fix it.

It’d not been that that happened, at least not exactly. Not entirely. But I could so easily see how she’d come to see Named as needing to made subject to rules, and how fundamentally she would never believe that Hanno of Arwad would ever do it. If he had it in him, wouldn’t he have done it back then? It was the harshest light possible to look at the past in, but no part of it was entirely wrong . That was the problem here. When I was going to speak to Hanno one last time, and I must, I expected his troubles to be just as grounded in truth. Neither was wrong.

One must still lose, though, and so that damn coin was spinning.

“You’re not out of this yet,” I said, and left it at that.

—

I wasn’t part of the party that greeted Hakram when he rode into the capital.

Procer was the host, it wouldn’t do to step on their toes. The two of us were rulers now, I no longer had a claim on him beyond what the Warden of the East could stake. Instead of moping in a palace, I went down into the city and found a nice little butcher’s shop. They killed the pig out bad, clean and quick, and I bought a bag of salt from the owner’s brother just down the street. I put the dead pig on my borrowed horse’s back and headed back up to the Lineal. There were plenty of empty parks and palaces, so I found myself a nice little thicket of trees and hung my cloak on a branch.

It’d been a while since I’d dug a fire pit, but I still remembered how. I put my back into it, and it when it was done I went back to the palace to snatch up a spit and firewood. Blackflame would spoil the taste, so I struck Legion pinewood matches and struggled with the feeble breeze that’d shown up to fight me. I should have brought oil to quicken that up, even if it would have been cheating a bit. The pleasant thing about Name strength was that I needed no Night to shove the pig onto the spike and begin to roast it. I rubbed salt on sparingly. Orcs preferred the meat without spices.

It was halfway to Afternoon Bell when I heard the first footsteps. Vivienne had taken longer to tell him where I was than I’d thought she would. I didn’t need to ask who it was, or even turn. I might have temporarily lost the knack I’d had as Warden of the East, but I could still pick out the sound of that gait out of a thousand. There’d been a time where it had been just as familiar as my own, almost an extension of my own body. Those days were over. I still remembered.

The steps stuttered as he entered the thicket.

“Smells good,” Hakram Deadhand said, voice hesitant.

Careful. I glanced at him, turning the spit. He looked, I thought, much the same as he had in Ater. Oh the armour was off, the same plate that’d been burnt by Summer flame and he had never left abandoned, but the clothes didn’t matter much. He was still one of the tallest orcs I’d ever met, broad-shouldered and built. The arm and leg he’d lost in my service were now in steel, the finest prosthetic work Hierophant had ever done, and the hand he’d lost to the Lone Swordsman remained in bone. Deadhand they’d called him, even before they called him Adjutant.

There was still a song about it. Dead the hand and dead the man , I almost hummed. But it was a Legion song, and he was no longer of the Legions. Or one of mine at all. I had not yet said a word, and already that knowledge hung between us like a funerary shroud. I took my hand off the spit, rubbing the bridge of my nose.

“I thought,” I said, “that this would be hard in the way that picking at a wound is hard.”

Hakram stood in a tall oak’s shadow, the sun not reaching any of the limbs that would reflect it.

“But it’s not?” he quietly asked.

I smiled, a tad bitterly.

“I just don’t know what to say,” I admitted.

In a way, that was even worse. Six months ago he’d been the only person in my life I’d ever found it hard to understand. Now it was like there was a pit between who we’d become and who we’d been and anything I said would just be shouting to the shadow across the pit rather than the man in front of me. Pointless. Slowly, Hakram moved out of the shade. Eyes watching me every step of the way, as if waiting for a storm or a refusal, he made his way to the other side of the fire. There he sat, lowering himself to the forest floor.

“Then,” Hakram Deadhand said, “perhaps you should let me start.”

Strangers

“The only true kindness is that offered to a passing stranger, when there can be no expectation of reward.”

– Melete the Stern, Atalante philosopher

Hanno did not feel as if he had come to a city, though the Gigantes called it such.

Hemera was nothing like what he had known, the cramped and organized streets of Arwad. The airy halls of the Gigantes were scattered across the mountain and sown as if by whim, each a small kingdom carved to the preference of its king: some were slender spires of stone, others singing mazes of glass and one built entirely of flowing water frozen in time. Pale roads of stone led them to one another, shifting with the mood of the ancient giants, and only a few were not so ephemeral. It was those that Hanno learned to follow, for they led him from the house he had been given to the heart of Hemera itself: the Proskenion.

The air was light and sunny today, the White Knight found as he rose with the dawn and began his walk down the pale road. It would remain so as long as enough of the Gigantes preferred the climate, for in Hemera the weather itself bent to the will of the giants. It stayed to their liking, following their moods. Hanno had seen both great lightning storms ravage the mountains with never a drop of rain touching a roof and pounding sun that would have turned stone to hot plates spare the most delicate blades of grass. Today the ancients had chosen the breeze and a gentle, glowing morning. Hanno smiled, his breath and the sound of his boots on the stone the only breaks in the quiet.

He liked morning like these best.

One did not tire walking the pale roads and always found where they were meant to go, but the White Knight had learned a trick to it. When you emptied themselves of desire, took a step back and sunk into the calm the Seraphim had shown him, you could follow the length of the road like running a finger down a spine. And from there you could navigate a detour like the one he’d chosen to take: past the pale stairs to the east, under the House of Ceyx and its winding emerald columns. It was the path that allowed him to see all of the Proskenion splayed out below, and live every time he’d come here the sight of the citadel of marble and air stole the breath out of him.

It was a wonder of hanging gardens and stone skene, beautiful halls where the giants gathered. Rivers and waterfalls had been sculpted as intricately as the stone while light was invigorated or dimmed so that every artful touch drew the eye while the imperfections faded. There was nowhere like the Proskenion anywhere else in the world, the Gigantes said, and Hanno believed them. Sometimes he could hardly believe his own eyes.

Yet for all that the beauty was moving, it was also deeply... different. Alien. Gigantes did not live as men did, keeping common houses or making families. They were solitary creatures at heart, coming together only for purpose or pleasure, and the Proskenion had been built to that truth. The mountainside citadel was where the giants came to debate their kind or display their works for the eyes of others, entire branches of it filling or emptying without visible rhyme or reason. Telekles, who was guide to Hanno whenever he cared to be, had said that it was also here the giants gathered to choose their chiefs – though this was rare, and the White Knight had never seen it. Allowing himself a moment to enjoy the sight in the morning sun, Hanno began to descend towards his chosen entrance: a strange garden whose many flowers were made entirely out of coloured stones. Which grew and mixed as if they were living things.

This day would make it a full month since had had come to Hemera, and Telekles had promised that with the turn of the moon there would be an answer to his request. The Chamber of Borrowed Lives had been built by spellsingers, in ancient days the Gigantes called ‘the Glory’, and with the Titan Seats forever broken now only spellsingers could allow entrance to it. Yet those elusive souls were not easily moved to haste, or even interest. Hanno suspected that if the touch of Judgement did not yet burn in him his request would not have been entertained as more than an amusing anecdote. Yet it had been, and Telekles had spoke of meeting at Sioemeros, the giant’s preferred skene.

Telekles had never mentioned a time, not particularly inclined to keep track of hours in a way common to his immortal kind, and so Hanno would come with dawn and wait until his guide arrived.

Thrice the White Knight was passed by the long stride of Gigantes as he made his way through the Proskenion, pausing to signify deference and gratitude by lowering his head and keeping his hands behind his back. His understanding of the nuances of the giants’ half-silent tongue was yet weak, so when they replied they kept to the broad strokes: acknowledgement, curiosity, and in the case of the third irritation. The last Gigantes stood still and Hanno had to remain in the uncomfortable pose, cold eyes on him until the bearded giant tired of exerting his right and strode away. Not all Gigantes had been pleased a human had been allowed into Hemera.

Some yet remembered the days when Hanno’s kind had come here only as slaves, labourers and servants for their Gigantes masters.

Siomeros was not difficult to find. Unlike many skene it was not elaborately built, instead little more than a circle of columns crowned by a plain frieze. Within a few stone seats, larger than some houses Hanno had known, had been carelessly strewn. The wonder hidden in here was only felt when one crossed into the circle, instantly felt: silence. Complete, utter silence. It was as if Siomeros was a realm apart from the rest of Creation, untouched by its vagaries. It was oddly restful, Hanno decided as he passed by a great column. Brown eyes scanned about for Telekles, whose silhouette might have been hidden by one thing or another, but the Gigantes was not there.

Someone was, though, and the White Knight froze at the sight: it was another human.

A girl clad in robes of coarse brown cloth, tanned with long dark tresses going down her back. She was sitting with her eyes closed atop what would have been a seat for a giant but was a perch for her, brow creased with concentration. Hanno hesitated, lingering at the bottom of the stone seat. He was burningly curious, but she did not seem inclined to talk.

“I can feel you staring,” the girl said. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

She did not open her eyes and her tone was mild, but the way she flicked her head implied dismissiveness. It was a subtle enough gesture Hanno almost missed it. She speaks their tongue better than I do , he thought.

“I do not,” Hanno replied in tradertalk, frowning as he realized he was uncertain what language she’d spoken to him in. “I am to wait here for another.”

The girl sighed, opening green eyes.

“I was told to come here because it is a fine place to meditate without distractions,” she peevishly said. “You are proving otherwise.”

“I apologize,” the White Knight replied. “I will find somewhere else to stand if you prefer. It’s only...”

She narrowed her eyes at him, like a gargoyle glaring down from above. Gigantes couldn’t do that, he thought. The muscles in their face didn’t allow them to do it.

“Only what?” she asked.

“We are the only two humans in all of Hemera, as far as I know,” Hanno said. “Are you not even sightly curious why I am here? I am certainly curious about you.”

“It’s human business, so it has nothing to do with me,” the girl said. “I’ve left all that behind.”

“It seems to have followed you here,” Hanno drily said. “May I ask for a name, at least?”

The girl rolled her eyes at him.

“I am Antigone,” she said. “Now go away.”

The White Knight smiled, offered a bow.

“Hanno,” he said.

“I didn’t ask,” Antigone called back.

He went away, leaving her to her meditations as he had offered. Telekles arrived past noon, by the look of the sun, but Hanno was left smiling anyway for his guide brought the answer he’d wished for: the Chamber of Borrowed Lives would be opened to him.

—

The second time Hanno of Arwad met Antigone she set him on fire.

Not on purpose, mind you, but his eyebrow was still scorched right off. He’d been heading to the paths after a long day in the Chamber when the column of flame fell down from the sky, and though he managed to call on the Light he was just a little too slow. The same girl as before leapt down from a jade rooftop, frowning at him as he hastily patted out the last of the flames on his clothes. Antigone looked highly displeased and Hanno dimly wondered if he should be reaching for his sword.

“Why were you in the middle of the road?” Antigone asked.

“Why were you setting the road on fire?” Hanno incredulously shot back.

“It wasn’t about the road, you idiot, I was finally hearing the-”

Halfway through the first sentence of what promised to be a furious chewing out, the dark-haired girl closed her mouth. She breathed in and out, and instead of continuing to speak raised her chin high. Contempt. She then flicked her head to the side twice, exaggerated dismissal, and let her shoulders slump.

“I have no idea what the shoulders mean,” the White Knight noted.

Antigone’s frustration visibly mounted and she touched her left shoulder with her right hand. Flat palm, fingers tight. Unfortunately for her, he had no idea what that meant either.

“Is there a reason you cannot speak to me out loud?” Hanno asked.

She sighed.

“My teachers say that I should unlearn the need to talk,” Antigone said. “That is a deficient human habit and hinders listening to the world.”

Hanno stared at her blankly.

“Teachers?” he slowly repeated. “As in plural ?”

She cocked an eyebrow, then started and made herself smooth her face. Gigantes faces, he remembered, were not expressive. Nuance was expressed by gesture.

“Yes,” she said. “What of it?”

“I barely even have one,” the White Knight told her.

Telekles did not consider him a charge, Hanno thought, so much as a recurring obligation. Like painting a wall or scraping the barnacles off a ship’s bottom. The giant had time for him only occasionally and was not interested in a closer tie.

“You must be deaf, then,” Antigone shrugged.

He did not quite catch the meaning of that, but the undertone was even more dismissive the head flicks.

“And you are being taught by multiple Gigantes,” Hanno said, still astonished. “What is it you have done to attract their interest?”

It was her time to seem startled.

“Kreios told them to,” she said.

Ah, that would explain it.

“So you know someone,” he hummed. “May I ask who? I did not know any of the giants still cared for events beyond the Titanomachy.”

She looked at him as if he were a particularly dim gnat.

“I just told you who,” Antigone said.

He frowned.

“The expression actually goes ‘Kronia told them to’,” Hanno informed her. “At least, that is the way the sailors from Levante say it. I was asking who among the Gigantes it was that has spoken for you, specifically.”

Her frustration visibly ticked up. Hanno was not sure why, she’d just used a common saying for ‘orders from above’. It was only natural he’d wonder as to who that above was.

“Kreios told them to,” Antigone repeated, slowly enunciating every syllable.

A pause.

“A dead Titan told the Gigantes to teach you magic,” Hanno repeated.

He met her eyes.

“How long have you been out in the sun?” he gently asked.

The second time she set him on fire, it was very much on purpose.

—

The third time Hanno of Arwad met Antigone she was wearing a mask.

It was made of clay and painted over in bold strokes of colour, covering her face entirely. With the hood of her robes pulled down and the long sleeves covering her hands, there was not a visible inch of skin for anyone to see. It was not him that had found her this time, for the White Knight had been in Siomeros for hours now. Leaning atop a great seat of stone, looking up at the night sky. Cloudy, tonight, so that the moon’s beam could stand out starkly. It was soothing after a day in the Chamber to lie there and watch, to do and hear nothing. His limbs were not tired, but his mind was. Drifting away into the nothing was the closest to peace he could find.

Sleep was no longer restful, these days. His exhaustion was not the kind that closing his eyes could mend.

Antigone had climbed up the side of the stone, which could not be coincidence. There were other, further places for her to sit should she wish to meditate. All that set this one apart from the others was his presence. Still, Hanno did not spare her more than the first glance. The stone was cool under his him and the sky above was all smoke and moonlight. He let the sensations soothe him, ignoring her even as he heard her move. He was not in the mood to discern the nuances of the Gigantes tongue in the hands of someone much his superior in that lore. She lost patience, eventually.

“You are the White Knight,” Antigone said.

Accused, almost.

“I am,” Hanno said.

“You never said,” she replied, definitely accusing.

“What does it matter?” he shrugged.

Antigone scoffed.

“What is it you are doing here, White Knight?” she asked. “The Patient Craft did not say, only that it was a duty of angels and should not be meddled in.”

The Patient Craft, Hanno recalled from the lessons of his friends in the Luminous Echo, was the smallest of the choruses in the Titanomachy. Yet it counted the most spellsingers, most of the time, so it was held in great respect. It concerned itself largely with the practicalities in the work of maintaining the greatest works of the Gigantes but also spoke broadly in favour of isolation and mandatory children-making. That Antigone’s teachers were so respected spoke to the truth of what he had first disbelieved: a Titan had spoken for her. The Riddle-Maker himself, the last of his kind.

“I am here to learn,” Hanno finally said.

The girls stood there awkwardly, shuffling on her feet.

“That is commendable,” Antigone said.

And he had so much still to learn, Hanno thought. The Chamber of Borrowed Lived seared that knowledge in him, broke into his bones and forced him to swallow it down, but it always seemed as if there was more to do. To see. Another lesson, another battle, another choice. Every day he left the stone coffin aching from every pore of his body, limping, but it was not enough. He was not yet prepared for what lay ahead. The Tribunal meant him to be the sword that would slay a great Evil, and even when his body bent in pain they did not believe him ready.

“You have impressed with your ability to withstand the Chamber,” Antigone tried, when it became clear he would not answer. “It has been commented upon.”

“I have withstood harsher glare than what burns in there,” Hanno quietly replied.

The girl sighed.

“I am trying to say,” Antigone said, “that I am like you.”

That was enough to have him glance at her again, for never had that seemed less true: under moonlight in those hooded green robes, with her masked face, she looked more a spectre than a girl.

“I am the Witch of the Woods,” she told him.

Ah , he thought, breathing out. That had been what he felt, scratching at the edge of his senses. Keeping his curiosity alight. The sensation was dimmer these days, like everything else, but he didn’t mind that so much. Everything was easier to see clearly when the calm was on him. Still, Hanno found himself smiling.

“Perhaps I should have asked for a Name instead of a name, when we first met,” the White Knight said.

“Maybe,” Antigone said, body moving to imply doubt.

Then, to his utter surprise, she sat by his side.

“What is it like, seeing a Choir?” she asked.

Hanno felt the cold stone beneath, saw the cold light of the moon above. The nothing he had been drifting into felt far away now, out of reach. But he answered, and quietly they spoke under the night sky. The sound of her voice, the White Knight found, kept him tethered here and now.

The following morning, he woke up rested for the first time in a year.

—

The night under the cloudy moon had been as an opened gate: the two of them sought each other out now. Not frequently, for both had been brought to Hemera by higher callings, but whenever the time could be spared they met in the Siomeros. It was a balm to him, speaking with another after the hours in the Chamber. It... grounded his thoughts, kept them in the here and now. He drifted less and less into the nothing, and though his body still ached it was a different sort. He was learning, growing. Staying in himself. Else who would he be, when he spoke with Antigone?

She, too, was changing. Her teachers loomed tall in her words. They had taught her secrets and sorcery, but they pressed more into her hands. Silence, a face that was made of clay and a disdain for what lay in the lands beyond the Titanomachy. Human business, she’d called it, as if it was something to be purged out of her. A weakness standing in her way before she could become like the Gigantes, perhaps even be one of them. Hanno asked of her parents, but she had never known them. Antigone had been raised by a creature that had once called itself a god, deep in the woods.

“Hunters came sometimes, looking for the shrine,” she told him. “To loot and steal. And sometimes the desperate tried their hand at chasing rumours, thinking I would end all their troubles with a wish.”

“There is more to people that what you saw,” Hanno replied.

“It doesn’t matter,” Antigone said. “What do I share with them, or they me?”

Hanno studied her.

“Is it your words I hear,” the White Knight asked, “or those of the Patient Craft?”

She did not answer and avoided him for a sennight after. Neither apologized, but they began spending time together again regardless. Antigone led him into the wilds below the mountain, where she introduced him to a great wolf she had known all her life. Lykaia, her name was, and she was large as a house. The White Knight was carefully polite and did not lose his hand when he offered it to be smelled, which he considered a fine outcome. Lykaia later offered him a strip of raw deer that evening, which Antigone assured him was a mark of approval.

The weeks passed, then months and years. Changes came with them. They grew into the mantles, she under starlight and he lay in a coffin of stone. It was his third aspect, the one that was not the Sword of Judgement or the White Knight’s, that nearly broke him. It was the realization that he would never truly leave the Chamber of Borrowed Lives, that it would stay in him until he died. Once he grasped the truth of that it swelled in him like a river, bursting out as a single word: Recall . He was his own Chamber now, forever echoing other songs.

He retreated into himself, hiding away in the mountains. Barely eating or drinking. It was Antigone who found him, made him bathe and sleep in a bed. She stayed with him for days, rarely leaving the room. Eventually he spoke, though not once did she ask.

“I am not sure,” Hanno confessed, “how much of myself is me.”

Green eyes watched him unblinking.

“The make more of it,” Antigone said, and leaned forward.

Her lips were soft against him. It was not his first kiss, but his first in many years, and neither stopped. Not even when hands wandered and clothes were thrown aside. Afterwards, they lay together and he felt her breath against his neck, the warmth of her skin against his. She’d been right, he thought. This was him and no one else. He could not become lost so long as he followed his own path.

“Thank you,” he murmured against her ear.

He felt her smile back. Neither of them spoke of it again or returned to that bed, for the night had not been meant as a promise. Antigone cared more for stars than sex, and Hanno... he was not certain he had it on him, to be with another. Not since he had become the White Knight. There would be parts of him he would never be able to share, callings that would supersede any other, and it would have been a half-hearted affection to pretend that could be enough. But he did not forget, and neither did Antigone. It was a sort of love too, what they had done.

And one that would not ask either of them to bend who they were, so he counted himself lucky for having it.

—

Hanno held the artefact in his hands, reverent.

The gift from the Luminous Echo looked like a sword, but that was a passing thing. Under his fingers, following his will, it changed into a spear in a moment and then into a warhammer. He had told the giants he was not worthy of the gift, but they had refused the answer. The chorus he had befriended was friend to the Choirs in turn, and they had disdained the thought of letting the Sword of Judgement leave these lands empty-handed. For the White Knight was leaving, after all this time. An acquaintance in the Sublime Auspice had brought word to him from the broader world: the League of Free Cities had erupted into civil war.

Foretelling by the spellsingers spoke of Evil coming down from the north, down the river, and great slaughters to come. Hanno could wait no longer. He had learned what he could from the Chamber and the learning had changed him. He would carry it with him until he died, an aspect carved into his soul. Now there was only the duty that lay ahead, and that duty awaited in the Free Cities. He had requested of the Sublime Auspice, who of all Gigantes kept closer ties outside the Titanomachy, to arrange for him a ship. One would soon sail towards the coast, a galley from Levante that would bring him to Nicae. All that was left here for him was goodbyes.

He found Antigone where they always met, in the heart of the Siomeros. How many mornings, how many evenings had they spent together in the silence of these tall columns? Too many to count. Antigone stood alone atop a seat, her mask at her belt and her hood down. The sun was dipping down across the horizon, the clouds framing the descent perfectly symmetrical on both sides of the burning redness. He climbed to stand by her side, their arms just closed enough to brush against each other.

“How long?” Antigone asked.

“I leave with dawn,” Hanno said. “The ship will only wait for a few days at the coast and there are no roads for me to travel.”

She nodded, silent.

“We will meet again,” Hanno gently said.

He would return to Hemera, one day. He could feel it in his bones. Antigone’s jaw tightened.

“Yes,” she murmured.

Her back straightened.

“Yes,” Antigone said, tone grown firm. “We will. I will find you, Hanno, when my learning is done.”

He went still, not hiding his surprise.

“There will always be more to learn,” the White Knight said.

“Creation is large,” the Witch of the Woods conceded. “And I have seen little of it.”

“It will be human business, out there,” Hanno warned her.

A long silence. Her eyes met his.

“That, too, I will learn,” Antigone said. “You did not lessen yourself in Hemera, Hanno. Did not carve away at who you are.”

She looked up at the burning red sun in the distance.

“Neither will I.”

Chapter 37: Bygone

“The past is best yearned for with one eye closed.”

– Free Cities saying

“I didn’t leave Wolof meaning to become Warlord,” Hakram said.

The pig on the spit between us crackled as the woodsmoke rose, sometimes veiling parts of his face. Light moved across his skin and steel in spots, the branches above swaying to let the sun pass at the whims of a lazy breeze. This felt, I thought, like a conversation best had at night. In a dimmer place, where the dark would smooth sharp edges and the stars would give only the kindest of lights. Not on a sunny afternoon, where I could read every slight expression. Where I risked learning things I would not be able to unlearn. But that was not what the roll of the dice had given me, and I knew I could not put this off even if part of me craved to.

In the back of my mind the coin was still spinning, and tonight Hanno of Arwad was making his move. It was sunlight or nothing, and nothing may cost more than just me.

“I didn’t think you did,” I replied. “I’m just not sure if that makes it better or worse.”

That he’d planned it and not told me, that would have gouged deep. But in a way that all our years together would be tossed away on, what, a fucking whim? My fingers clenched down on the spit until the knuckles turned white and I reminded myself that I wasn’t being fair. That I was just getting angry because it was easier that way. Anger was an old friend, and it was a lot more pleasant than feeling betrayed .

“I say it not to excuse but to make it clear that I was not deceiving you, before I left,” Hakram evenly said. “That it was not false.”

My hand twitched. I released the spit, stepping back and playing it off as if I were getting away from the smoke and heat.

“Just because you weren’t lying doesn’t mean it wasn’t false,” I harshly replied. “It just means you weren’t admitting things to yourself. And maybe that I wasn’t either.”

He watched me through the smoke, then his jaw tightened.

“Say it out loud,” Hakram gravelled. “It’s already stuck in your fangs, don’t choke on it.”

How like him to not even leave me my grievances to chew on.

“You wouldn’t have made this decision,” I said, “before the Arsenal.”

And there it was, the plain truth that I knew deep in my bones. I’d spent him too sorely that day, crossed a line, and it had changed things for good. Maybe he didn’t regret it, like he’d insisted since, but we’d both had a good look at what it actually meant for us to be as we had been. That there were costs, that it might get him killed . We’d seen in practice how someone giving unconditionally, trusting without reservation, would end. At least when the other half of it was me. He’d die, one piece at a time, until I’d spent every last limb of him.

“You didn’t listen then,” Hakram harshly said, “and you’re not listening now. It’s about what put me in the chair. It’s about how you treated me when I was in it.”

“Like I didn’t fucking want you to die?” I incredulously replied.

I’d have bitten back on that answer, before, been careful. Given ground because I was afraid to lose him. But he was good as lost anyway now, wasn’t he? He couldn’t just turn around and become the Adjutant again, call the whole Warlord thing a lark. So this time I didn’t bite my tongue.

“You lost an arm and a leg,” I said, “and you wanted me to just send you back into the melee like nothing happened. Like it was just... cosmetic.”

I spat in the fire.

“But it really did happen, Hakram,” I bit out. “And if I let you keep on pretending it hadn’t you were going to lose your head instead of a limb.”

“You lost trust in me,” he growled. “An aspect was withering like a sick plant because I put my soul in your hands and then you dropped it. Can you imagine what it felt like, to bind so much of yourself to someone else and then feel them turn away ?”

The orc scoffed.

“You can’t,” Hakram said, flashing fangs. “Because you don’t do that, Catherine. When you’re afraid it’s going to end, you look away first so it ends on your terms. Like you did with Kilian.”

My stomach clenched. It had just enough truth to it to sting. The kind of barb only someone who knew me would know to throw.

“I’m not without fault,” I said. “Hells, I’m mostly faults. But you know what I did, Hakram?”

I gestured around us, at us.

“I fought for this,” I said. “You were unhappy and I tried to understand why. To fix it. So I don’t want to hear a sermon from the man whose idea of mending the gap was putting me to secret tests in the middle of the most brutal campaign of either our lives.”

I’d not forgotten those evenings in Hainaut when I’d agonized over the bad plan to deal with the Clans he’d pushed for me to read. How many hours I’d wrestled over it, trying to find a saving grace, only to learn that it’d been a test the whole time. That he was finding out whether I’d take bad advice from him out of guilt. And I understood why he’d done that, I did.

It hadn’t made it any less hard to be on the other side of.

“You didn’t fight,” I harshly said. “You stood back to see if I would. And maybe you needed to see that I really would, that it did more to help than anything I said.”

I leaned forward, eye hard.

“But it also means I’m not going to take shit from you about turning away first, Hakram,” I said. “I still had both eyes back then, and you wouldn’t meet either.”

I was panting, my muscles clenched tight. Smoke wafted up, the crackling fat of the roasting pig. The thick green skin of his face was taut around his lips, like he was fighting the urge to growl and shout.

“I didn’t come here to fight,” Hakram finally said.

“Maybe we ought anyway,” I grunted.

Dark eyes mulled that over, with that usual careful thoroughness.

“Maybe we ought,” he acknowledged.

I hid my surprise, but he knew me well enough he caught it anyway.

“Even when we reconciled,” Hakram said, “it was half-done. The wound was bandaged but neither of us would speak of the sword.”

I rolled my shoulder, easing the muscle that had begun to cramp.

“And what sword is that?” I asked.

I knew better than to think he meant the Severance, though it was the blade that’d cut him.

“You and me,” he said. “The Woe. We let rot set in.”

I almost flinched back. There were precious few havens left in my life, places where I could feel safe and at rest, but the Woe were one. That I might get that stripped away from me now felt like too ruinous of a cost for this sunny little afternoon.

“It’s in your teeth,” I said, echoing him from earlier. “Get it out before you choke.”

His jaw clenched.

“I remember a night in Laure,” Hakram said, “when Vivienne almost died. Where it took a knife through my wrist to wake her up from the terrified decisions she was about to make.”

I’d never got the full story of what had happened in Laure from either of them. Hakram had called it an investment in the future, she’d called it a debt. What I knew was that when I’d returned from the Everdark they had been friends instead of foes and Hakram had lost a second hand.

“Part of it was my fault,” the orc said. “Mistakes I made. But the source of it is that you don’t take advice, Catherine”

I glared.

“Hell of a thing to say, coming from someone whose advice I took for years,” I bit out.

“You take it on lesser matters,” Hakram said. “Details. But when the crossroads come, it’s always a decision you make alone. By the time we’re all at the table talking, the choice is already made in your head. It’s dress-up.”

I tried to answer but he rode over my voice without hesitation.

“It was like that when we turned against the Tower after the Doom,” he said. “When we headed for Keter. When you decided to go to the Everdark. When you decided to make peace with the Grand Alliance.”

A pause.

“I’m sure it was the same when you decided to have Masego cut up the Intercessor to steal her power,” Hakram said. “Another decision that affected millions. Maybe you heard some people out, Catherine, let them move around a few pieces on the mosaic, but you make these calls alone . There is no question of you being swayed.”

My fingers tightened.

“Are we getting to a point?” I said.

“You made Vivienne your conscience,” Hakram said, “then like your actual conscience you browbeat and ignored her. I put some of the fear in the woman I saw that night in Laure, but not the most. What did you think was going to happen when you gave her a role only to immediately make it worthless?”

“I did not think that,” I hissed. “Because apparently I’m not perfect, Hakram, who fucking knew – except goddamn everybody !”

The more I spoke, the more furious I became.

“You drag up things that happened years ago and parade them up like they were acts of deliberate cruelty,” I said. “Like I don’t make mistakes. Of course I made fucking mistakes, and of all people you ought to know: you were standing to my right while I made most of them.”

I smiled thinly.

“Where was this cutting insight then?” I asked. “I don’t recall ever hearing it.”

I let out a scoff, stepping away from a curl of smoke.

“And maybe I don’t get swayed easy,” I said. “I’m hard-headed, that’s on me. But I don’t recall ever forbidding anyone to try. Did I ever close the door on any of those decisions, forbid someone to argue against them?”

His face was calm, but I knew him. I could see the anger in the cast of it, in the careful way he moved – as if he were afraid that going too quickly would see him lose control of his temper.

“I don’t stick a course when someone shows me I’m wrong,” I challenged. “If I didn’t get convinced, it’s not because I’m some sort of fucking legendary mule: I simply didn’t get convinced .”

“Because we can’t,” Hakram said.

I glared at him, gesturing for him to get on with it.

“We cannot disagree with you, not past a certain line,” he said. “That is the unspoken law of the Woe. Crossing that line gets you cut off, left behind.”

“You’re the one who told me I should act like was in charge of the band, on our way to Keter,” I said. “And now you’re complaining that I did?”

He hesitated.

“Gods, to hear you talk I was poison in the blood,” I said. “Still am. And I’ll not deny there were times I stumbled, but Burning Hells – who is it that could live up to your idol of the Perfect Catherine?”

My stomach clenched.

“Not me,” I thickly said. “And you should have known better. I’ve never pretended to be more than what I am.”

And if that’d never been enough, then burn him.

“You did things right too,” Hakram gravelled. “That’s not...”

He looked angry.

“You pull people in,” he said. “And you take care of them, as much as you can, and they don’t want to leave. But you pull them into your wake, not at your side.”

“You had a place there,” I coldly replied. “You’re the one who walked away.”

So you could go play saviour , I bit down on adding.

“But I wasn’t at your side,” Hakram frustratedly said. “That’s what you refuse to see. I was under you.”

I glared.

“Just because-”

“ Listen ,” he growled. “Maybe you don’t want to admit you think that way, but you do. You can love us, but you could never be in love with any of us. The way you are with Akua Sahelian. Because, unlike her, we are not your equals .”

I rocked back, like he’d slapped me.

“This mad plan you built up around her laid it out plain,” Hakram said as he slowly rose to his feet. “Even when she was a powerless prisoner, you treated her as more of a peer than us.”

“Fuck you,” I hissed. “For even thinking that-”

“You would have killed her for any of us,” he said. “But that’s not the same thing. And I’m not going to be Scribe, Catherine, not even for you. I still remember what a single aspect withering was like. What the Carrion Lord did to her, after decades together...”

I’m not him , I wanted to scream. I would never have set you aside. He shook his head.

“No,” the Warlord said. “I learned her lesson. My own inheritance from a Calamity.”

And that more, than the rest, had rage burn in my blood.

“You goddamn coward,” I spat. “I scraped my hands raw trying to find ways we could stay together, ways to live with the changes, but what was any of it worth? I’m the one who can’t be fucking swayed, Hakram? Me ?”

Smoke billowed, as if conjured by my rising tone.

“Who is it that ran away across half the Empire before making his choice?” I said. “Who is it that sat on all of this until he left instead of just telling me ?”

I could have fought this, fixed it. If I’d known. But instead he’d held his peace and here we were: beyond taking any of it back. Too late.

“And what should I have done?” Hakram challenged. “Asked you to change who you are?”

“ YES ,” I shouted.

He stepped back at the vehemence of my voice.

“I would have done that, for you,” I cursed. “I gave you the right to ask.”

For the first time since we’d begun to talk, I saw him genuinely taken aback.

“It doesn’t have to...” he hesitantly tried. “I cannot be the Adjutant, but-”

The anger went out of me at the sight. Dead in a moment, like a fire stripped of air. It was beginning to sink in, at last, that this was finished. That the page had turned.

“You were supposed to be the one who stayed,” I tiredly said. “The one I’d journey on with. It’s dead, Hakram.”

And now they were all going to leave. Indrani to her horizons, Masego to his research, Vivienne to her kingdom and Hakram to his people. I would end this journey as I had begun it, that night my father had found me in the alley. Standing alone.

Silence hung. I was not the one to break it.

“They need me,” the Warlord quietly said.

“I needed you too,” I replied, knowing it was unfair. “And maybe it’s the right choice you made. The principled one, whatever that’s worth.”

I breathed out.

“But it was still a choice,” I said. “And those have prices.”

“Aye,” he quietly said, “they do.”

His fangs clicked together.

“It doesn’t have to be the end of us,” Hakram said.

I felt my pulse quicken. That was it, I thought. The pus had been lanced, the ugliness dragged into the light of day so it might burn and turn to smoke. And still he offered a hand. Not quite in forgiveness, but at least in understanding. In willingness to keep on sharing a road. It would be the easiest thing in the world, I thought, to just take that offered hand and let it drag me into the current. I could see it in my mind’s eye, clear as day: we would sit and talk and eat and laugh. It would be not quite like old times, but it would have the sweetness of them. An old friendship changing shape. And I craved it down to the marrow of my bone, because I could barely remember who I’d even been before Hakram had come into my life. I just recalled a lot of fear and anger, fingers tight on the grip of my sword as I watched the world from behind a blade. I’d become who I was with him at my side.

The thought of losing that for good made me nauseous.

But he’d not been wrong, to talk of rot. Of things left unsaid and how they had come back to haunt us. And worst of all was that, if I held my tongue now, I would make him right when he’d said I did not think of them as equals. As people capable of handling he bitter sting of truth. How many times , I thought, can you build a tower on the same quicksand before it is called madness? Once had been too much already, I thought. There were only so many times I was willing to bleed myself dry. That left only one path forward, I knew that, and yet my mouth would not move. My arms were trembling. I bit the inside of my cheek until it burned. I’d called him a coward, was I going to be the one living up to the word?

I slowly straightened my back and met his gaze head on.

“In Ater,” I plainly said, “I made the choice to murder you.”

His face closed. He’d known that already, I thought, but it was another thing to hear it voiced out loud.

“I had a choice between your life, my father’s life, and what I thought would win us the war,” I said. “And you’d avoided me, cornered me until there was no middle way. Either I took up the knife or the Intercessor won.”

I smiled thinly.

“So I took up the knife,” I said.

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“I only ended up killing one of you that night,” I said. “But I made the choice anyway.”

His dark eyes were unblinking.

“I’m not saying this to be cruel,” I told him. “I’m saying this because you need to know that I still see that choice every time I look at your face.”

I almost turned away there but stubbornness saw me through.

“And I don’t regret it,” I quietly said. “I didn’t work as we thought it would, but it did work. And it might yet win us this war. So I don’t regret it, and I’d make the same choice again.”

I breathed out, slowly.

“And that’s how we got here, isn’t it?” I said. “Me making the choices. So I guess it’s your turn now.”

I looked away at last.

“I told you all I have to say,” I said. “Now it’s in your hands.”

I searched his face but saw no answers. I might as well have been looking at stone.

“You know where I am,” I said.

I limped out of the woods, leaving him behind with the roasting pig, and he did not stop me.

—

My mind felt restless for the rest of the afternoon, twisting this way and that. It was obvious enough Vivienne commented on it after we held council, though she was graceful enough not to ask how my conversation with Hakram had gone. I told her anyway.

“It’s in his hands now,” I said. “I don’t get to decide how it ends.”

She slowly nodded, visibly hesitating. She was curious but didn’t want to push too far. I almost flinched at the sight. We are not your equals , Hakram had said. Had he been right? I led the Woe, it’d been like that from the start, but I was not their queen. I’d always thought of it as a company, not a kingdom. And while they did things for me when I asked, they were not beholden. Only it hadn’t been anything as clear cut as my wearing a crown that he’d been talking about, had it?

“Vivienne,” I said, “did you ever...”

Blue-grey eyes watched me patiently as I trailed off and an uncomfortable silence took hold. I wasn’t sure why I’d started to speak. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to ask.

“Are we friends?” I artlessly asked.

She frowned.

“Gods,” she said. “It really did a number on you, didn’t it?”

“That’s not an answer,” I said.

Vivienne sighed.

“Of course we’re friends,” she said. “You’re one of the most important people in my life, Cat. In some ways the most. You can’t use you and Hakram as a measuring stick for everyone else.”

I leaned back into my seat.

“And why’s that?” I asked.

She looked at me for a long time.

“He’s first person you ever really trusted, isn’t he?” Vivienne quietly asked.

My fingers clenched. I did not answer.

“Maybe the only person you ever trusted, at least that deeply,” she said. “It always cuts deeper when it’s closer to home, Catherine.”

“He said things,” I admitted, “that I’m not sure are wrong.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Vivienne said. “The one blind spot he’s had as long as I’ve known him is his relationship with you.”

Maybe you’re right , I thought, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. I shook myself. The coin was still spinning. There were greater concerns to speak of.

“I don’t like that we’re not sure what the First Prince is planning,” I said, changing the subject.

Vivienne tactfully went along with it.

“I think she knows she loses if she does nothing so she’s rolling the dice,” the Princess said. “It explains why the Jacks have seen her reach out to princes. She’ll be going to the hero council in force, with her backing there to impress.”

I wasn’t sure how much having the princes behind her would impress heroes, but having the armies those few represented supporting her might sway some. Enough to beat Hanno on his own stage?

“I don’t think that’s enough for her to win,” I said. “Or even tie. And that begs the question that we’ve avoided voicing out loud so far.”

Vivienne grimaced.

“What does the First Prince do if she sees she’s lost?” she asked.

I had a great deal of respect for Cordelia Hasenbach, but I was not blind to her occasional bouts of ruthlessness. On the contrary, they were part of why I respected her. The problem was what that ruthlessness might lead her to do, if she thought Hanno was about to become Warden of the West and doom us all. I liked to think that the Lycaonese princess would be careful of avoiding doing anything that might destroy our chances at taking Keter, but she was desperate. Cornered. That was not when people made their finest decisions, claimants especially. I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“I can’t just show up and tell them to play nice,” I said. “I almost want to, Viv, but it’d be too direct an intervention. I’d get a rap on the knuckles from Above for sure and my lot isn’t in any position to ensure that love tap doesn’t disintegrate my entire arm.”

“It might be out of our hands, Catherine,” Vivienne said. “I know you don’t like the thought, and to be honest I don’t either, but-”

“-it might be a situation where acting has worse consequences than not acting,” I completed. “Yeah, the thought’s occurred.”

We talked a while longer after that, but there were only so many words to say. My problem was that the two of them had moved quicker than I thought but I couldn’t actually do anything about it. And I’d yet to reconcile with Hanno, which as Indrani had pointed out might turn to be a problem if he became Warden of the West tonight. And I’m not sure I liked the idea of going after Keter with unfulfilled oaths . Seemed like the kind of mistake Neshamah would use to bury me. We sent out spies and feelers and tried to get a grasp on what was happening as I struggled to find a way out of the mess, but I couldn’t find one. The well of ideas was dry and my mind was... slow, today.

By the time the sun began to dip the tension in my shoulders had metamorphosed into a knot of dread in my stomach. I’d not felt this powerless in a while and it was never a feeling I’d enjoyed. Which was, naturally, when Akua chose that moment to reappear. I’d not seen her in two days. She came and went as she wished, and I had no call on her hours. She might be one of my advisors once more, but I knew better than to try to ask too much of her. It might just give her the reason to leave I suspected she was still looking for.

The balcony where I’d been wracking my brain overlooked a small statuary garden where servants had already lit lanterns, though I’d come out her more for the fresh air than the view. Akua drifted in through the room behind me with the same gliding grace she’d had as a shade, bringing with her two glasses of wine. She pressed one into my hand and came to lean against the stone railing, sipping at her own. No jewelry, I saw. Not that she needed any: even in the simple red and gold gown she wore, Akua Sahelian had the presence of a queen.

“It promises to be a beautiful night,” she said.

I sipped at the wine. Red and full-mouthed, a little too bitter for me. From Cantal, maybe? There were so many damned wines in Procer that I could spend a lifetime learning and still miss a few.

“I can’t afford to savour it,” I said. “There’s trouble in the distance.”

“I heard,” Akua languidly replied. “The Sword and the Princess rushing their conclusion, is it?”

I nodded.

“And I’m sure the Bard has her fingers in it too,” I grunted. “Not put there recently, I don’t think she can do much except mute Below’s stories right now, but this has her scent all over it.”

“The spoiled liquor stench is rather distinctive,” Akua noted.

I snorted, but the amusement passed quickly.

“I’m no sure what I can do,” I admitted.

“It is their choice to hurry the confrontation,” Akua said. “A mistake I would expect of Hasenbach, but less so of the Sword of Judgement. He should know that power left to ripen is all the fuller for it.”

“They both think the other will fuck it up,” I sighed. “So they’re pushing hard. And I’m starting to think this one is just a loss.”

Golden eyes turned to me, curious.

“I think I might be able to nudge it one way or another,” I said. “I have just the right leverage for it. So what’s left is picking whoever I think is the better candidate.”

“Yet you consider that a defeat,” Akua said.

“Because the Bard gets what she wants,” I replied. “We lose something. The Warden of the West is weaker, maybe it screws us against Keter down the line. Why the Intercessor would want that I can only guess, but I hate giving it to her anyway.”

“I have come to believe,” Akua murmured, “that the Intercessor’s designs are best grasped by who she chooses to move.”

I flicked her an interested glance.

“You were only moved against when you became a threat,” the golden-eyed sorceress said. “So you can safely be considered to be inconsequential to her actual plan. As far as I can see, her actions cluster around three souls: Kairos Theodosian, Hanno of Arwad and Cordelia Hasenbach.”

One dead, two now claimants and at odds.

“So you think this conflict is larger,” I said.

“I am not yet sure,” Akua gracefully shrugged. “But ultimately it is irrelevant.”

“There’s a bold take,” I drily said. “How’s that?”

“Because,” Akua calmly said, “this is beneath you.”

I raised my glass.

“Evidently not,” I said, “else I wouldn’t be here.”

“This... fatalism,” she said. “The pretence that you are bound to let your enemy’s scheme succeed. It is beneath you.”

“I can’t intervene, Akua,” I bit out. “If I could-”

“So find another way,” Akua said. “Has that not been your favourite trick since the very beginning?”

She waved amusedly.

“Cornered is when you are most dangerous, dearest,” she said. “When they have you surrounded by dead ends. The pit has always been, Catherine, where you shine.”

I looked away.

“Well’s run dry,” I said, oddly ashamed. “I have nothing.”

“I don’t believe that’s true.”

Irritated, I turned to glare but was caught by a soft smile instead.

“You have been burned,” Akua said. “And now you hesitate. Discard this.”

She circled the rim of her glass with a finger.

“Let the fear fall away and you will find an answer,” Akua said. “You always do.”

I breathed out shallowly.

“Why are you helping?”

I’d been the one, I realized, to ask the question. Golden eyes studied me.

“Do you know,” Akua asked me, “the difference between a knot and a noose?”

“There isn’t,” I said. “A noose is a knot.”

“Only,” she smilingly said, “if there is a corpse.”

I blinked in confusion. I was missing something here, a kernel that would allow me to understand.

“I will choose what it is I do,” Akua said. “Not you. Not her. Not my mother’s shade. Me .”

She leaned in closer, and warm lips were pressed against the side of my neck. I shivered.

“Now go, Catherine,” she said. “Go out there and win.”

She left and took the warmth she had brought with her. I stayed out there on the balcony, alone with my silence. Thinking for the Gods only knew how long.

Huh.

Maybe I did have an idea, after all.

—

Three hours later the sky opened as the wind howled around me. High Lady Abreha had been accommodating when I’d decided to use one of the assets brought from Ater early, not even asking why. As the clouds parted and light danced across the sky, I sat on the throne atop the great tower as it began crashing towards the ground north of the capital. The air screamed around us and the night crackled with thunder, sorcery lashing out around us in great flares. It wasn’t quite a flying fortress, those would come with the second wave, but the sight of this cutting across the night sky certainly ought to catch people’s attention.

And when had heroes ever been able to resist poking at a beehive?

Chapter 38: Salvo

“It’s a matter of principle for me never to have railings built on anything, Chancellor. It saves on both construction costs and retirement pensions.”

– Dread Emperor Inimical, the Miser

The flying tower hit the ground with a thunderous sound, earth rippling and breaking under the impact as we ‘landed’.

It was like an old god had just had a slugging match with the earth, and it sure as Hells wasn’t the earth winning. The foundations of the tower stolen from the broken remnants of Ater groaned, their reinforcing enchantments struggling with the load, but in the end they held. Not that you could tell there’d been doubts, from my comfortable throne under the stars. The viewing platform was so heavily warded not even a gnat could come through without permission and not so much as a shake had made it to my seat. I leaned back against the cushion, sipping at the Vale summer wine I’d sent for. Iridescent strands of magic still skittered across the sky, announcing our presence to anyone who cared to look.

Well, that and the massive amount of Night I’d been accumulating for the better part of an hour now. I figured even onlooking angels had to be a mite worried about that, given that there was now so much of the power roiling around me that the tower itself was beginning to be wreathed in shadow. I figured it’d make for a nice touch, you know, when the heroes showed up: dying lights above, a desolate empty plain around us and a lone tower swallowed by writhing, malicious darkness. The war had killed or seasoned all our greenhorns, but I figured that a few of the younger ones ought to balk at least. I finished my glass and set it down a pearl-encrusted table.

“If I were a maniacal laughter kind of girl,” I noted, “that would have been a good time for it.”

“Wow,” Archer said, sounding impressed. “The power is going straight to your head.”

I cocked an eyebrow at her.

“It’s kind of hot,” she admitted. “It’s a Praesi flying tower, you know, so I’m sure if we look there’s gotta be a least one revealing dress to-”

I raised a hand at the height of my chest.

“This is where you are right now,” I said, then waited a beat. “And this is the expendable asset zone.”

She squinted at me.

“You didn’t move your hand,” she pointed out.

“No, I did not,” I pleasantly smiled. “So are you sure that downwards is the direction you want to keep digging?”

I’d never gotten to throw anyone down a tower before. I felt like doing it at least the once would allow me to better understand the people that I represented as Warden of the East, which was definitely the main reason I wanted to do that and not because it seemed like everyone else had gotten to. Just in case I began eyeing the rampart and working out the angles.

“Message received,” Archer cheerfully replied.

She then knelt and made a melodramatically sombre face, because she’d always been a wench and always would be.

“What are your orders, Your Dark Mistrajesty?” she sinisterly asked.

Wait, had she just pushed together mistress and maj- no, Catherine, don’t let yourself be sucked into her pace.

“I need you to go to the edge of the rampart and look at how long we’ve got before they show up,” I said, then paused. “Also, send for a refill. My glass is empty.”

Indrani eyed me skeptically.

“And you can’t walk the like ten feet to the edge of the wall to look yourself, because...” she trailed off.

My lips thinned.

“Disloyalty is severely punished in this outfit, wench,” I warned her.

She studied me for a long moment, then suddenly grinned.

“You can’t get up, can you?” Indrani said.

Shit.

“Of course I can,” I lied.

“Do it,” she challenged. “Just for two heartbeats. Do it and I’ll speak entirely in rhyme for an entire month.”

I shifted in my seat.

“Look,” I defensively said, “it’s not my fault the mages built this damn thing so that all the channelling arteries end up right under the throne. If I stop touching it-”

“You lose control of a bunch of the power you’ve gathered,” Archer said grin, widening. “Oh Gods, you’re literally stuck in that seat until they show up aren’t you?”

“How far are they?” I whined. “The back of my knee itches and I don’t want to have to take off the armour bending around on the chair.”

“You’re a tragedy,” Indrani amusedly told me.

She went to have a look, though, so I let it pass without censure.

“So?”

“We’ve got a dozen riding hard our way,” Archer said. “And that cloak is pretty hard to mistake: Shiny Boots is in the lead.”

I hummed.

“Is the Witch of the Woods with them?” I asked.

“I would have mentioned the giant monster wolf, Cat,” she snorted.

Good. We’d been pretty sure she wouldn’t be there, since she was supposed to be fixing a breach in the wards up north, but it was hard to be sure with her. The Witch avoided cities and even towns like the plague whenever she could, so it was even more difficult to keep track of her than your average Named. I’d had a backup plan in case she did end up being there, but I was happier not having to use it. Since Cordelia had taken to using the ealamal like a goddamn party trick the boundary with Arcadia had damned hard to breach in the region. Tabula rasa , Masego called the effect. Pissing angel light all over the land fixed the accumulated damage in the fabric of Creation.

Two breaches in a single evening would have taken more out of me than I’d like.

“The First Prince?” I pressed.

“Nowhere in sight,” Indrani said. “Told you it was long odds.”

I waved a hand.

“She’s not the one I want to talk to anyway,” I said. “And I’ve already gotten most of what I want.”

“Breaking up a party,” Indrani solemnly said. “Shame on you, Cat. You used to be fun.”

“It was a Good party,” I argued. “They would have all drunk responsibly and there’d have been no brawling.”

Except for the Levantines, I mentally corrected. They definitely would have drunk too much and brawled. Indrani snorted, then her eyes turned serious even as the smile remained.

“You think it’ll be enough?” she asked. “It’s not even half of them riding here.”

I suspected that probably had more to do with the number of horses fit for a hard ride they’d had on hand than interest, but that hadn’t been the thrust of her thought.

“Hanno left,” I said. “That kills his plan as well as whatever Hasenbach was cooking up to match him.”

“He could just do it tomorrow morning,” Indrani said.

I’ll have gotten my licks in before then , I thought. I still answered, because it would have been arrogance to assume what I intended was guaranteed to work.

“A repeat?” I dismissively shrugged. “He’s free to try. Won’t have the same weight, though. I stole that by slapping down a gauntlet through the clouds and daring him to pick it up. My bet is he’ll push it back a day or two, trying to gather momentum again, but by then it’ll be a different game.”

“It’s coming close to supporting Hasenbach,” Archer said.

I smiled, cold and lean.

“If she gets something out of tonight, good for her,” I said. “But I’m not doing it on her behalf. When I laid down the gauntlet, I was completely serious.”

Archer slowly nodded.

“You’d really do it?” she asked.

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“I will, ‘Drani,” I said. “If Hanno doesn’t give me a good reason not to, I’ll eat the Book of Some Things.”

I’d not gathered all this Night on a lark. Indrani hummed.

“At this rate,” she told me, “Shiny Boots and attendants will be there in two hours.”

I cursed in Mthethwa.

“You’re going to have to help me out of my armour,” I told her. “And send for the damn bottle, would you?”

—

A warband of heroes approached my tower on half-dead horses.

Picking out the faces and Names, they’d come ready for a fight. They had the steel: Vagrant Spear, Mirror Knight, Myrmidon, Bloody Sword and Valiant Champion. A balance of Light and magic for their backline: Forsworn Healer, Blessed Artificer, Apprentice and the Wise Astrologer. Then a pair of specialists, the Bitter Blacksmith and the Painted Knife, with Hanno himself the last of the lot. Exactly twelve in all. The rode across the yellow grass towards the tower’s gate, their silhouettes cast in moonlight as shadows roiled before them.

Twelve heroes to the seven villains lying in wait. Most of them of better calibre too. It was a good thing I had no intention of picking a fair right.

I was watching them all through eyes of Night I’d seeded into the writhing darkness embracing the tower, using it as cover. At a long distance I’d been forced to rely on Indrani’s eyes, but up close these would do just fine. Hanno was leading them to the gate, in front with the Astrologer and the Champion, but aside from that they were pretty loosely arranged. Most of the Levantines were clustered in the back, talking excitedly in one of their languages as they pointed at the tower. The Sword of Judgement rode ahead of his two companions, white cloak trailing behind him as he stared up with hard eyes.

“Warden of the East,” he called out, “open your gates. You owe explanation.”

I snorted, up on my throne, as I began to mould the Night within the tower. Yeah, like that was going to work. I still couldn’t leave my seat, but thankfully I had assigned a gatekeeper. He’d gotten his latest orders from Indrani, who had proclaimed herself my herald safe in the knowledge that I couldn’t get up to contradict her. Given even that minute amount of authority she had immediately become a hedonistic tyrant, as everyone even remotely knowing her had seen coming. Still, I did wonder how Ishaq was going interpret ‘slow them down, without fighting if possible’.

“To pass this gate,” a ghastly voice answered from an arrowslit above the gate, “you must answer my riddles three.”

Goddamnit, Ishaq. The Barrow Sword had been handed an enchanted necklace that’d lace his voice with horror, an old Praesi favourite, but that wasn’t going to be enough to carry this. There was a pregnant pause from the heroic side. Getting the Night in place was taking longer than I’d thought it would, even with the tower mostly emptied so I wouldn’t have to worry about collateral damage. He better keep them busy for a while still or this wasn’t going to work.

“We won’t be doing that,” Hanno politely replied. “Stop trying to buy time and open the gate.”

“ Lord ,” the Vagrant Spear cut in, sounding appalled.

All the Levantines except the Painted Knife, who was rolling her eyes, seemed to agree. Sidonia looked up at the arrowslit.

“Speak your riddles, gatekeeper,” the Vagrant Spear called out.

... I took it back, Ishaq had at least a vague idea of what he was doing. He began to give them his first riddle and I kept half an eye on the situation as I continued moulding the Night, layering it carefully, and noticed that the Wise Astrologer was quietly talking with the Apprentice. Who looked a little uncomfortable as he nodded. Ugh, the Astrologer. She was barely even a mage, I was pretty sure at least half a fraud, and I didn’t care that – the older Ashuran heroine pointed her finger, the Apprentice’s magic flashed in fire and I lost one of the Night eyes I’d hidden. I lost another four in quick succession, almost half the ones I’d seeded. My flesh eye narrowed.

“Dicer,” I spoke into the Night. “Hit the Astrologer.”

The Pilfering Dicer was a rather minor villain I’d assigned to the First Prince’s service after having disciplined him for bad behaviour. He had, you see, stolen luck from my soldiers. That was his trick, stealing luck from others. And tonight, with no story hanging above our heads to punish us for overstepping, I had no hesitation in using him against heroes. I got a hesitant nod from the young man in reply and he dipped into his Name a moment later. Three heartbeats later, the Astrologer’s horse saw something move in the grass it got spooked. She got shaken right off the saddle, landing on her back with strength enough it would bruise.

I coldly smiled.

“Well done,” I praised through the Night, even as Hanno’s face hardened.

“That was an attack,” he called out at the gate. “I felt it. Enough of these games.”

Even as the Levantines protested he bared his sword, but he was just a little too slow. The Mirror Knight had already dismounted, and with a few quick strides he stood before the steel-barded gates of the tower. Sighing, he took a sharp step forward and slammed his helmeted head into the gate. It groaned. Another and it cracked. A third and it broke. On the fourth, the steel bars keeping it closed snapped and the gate flew open. The human-shaped battering ram took a step back, brushing away wooden shards.

“There,” Christophe de Pavanie said. “Shall we get on with it?”

That was a little impressive, but the Barrow Sword had done exactly what I’d asked of him: he’d bought me enough time to finish my preparations.

“Cursed are you who broke the pact of entrance,” Ishaq told them in that horrifying voice. “You will know no rest in this world or the next.”

Now that was just dedication to the job, I approvingly thought. Even better, some of the Levantines looked like they were taking him seriously.

“Astrologer?” Hanno asked.

“I’ve never seen so much Night in one place before,” the Ashuran told him, grimacing. “It is difficult to tell what it is meant for.”

“Then we press on,” Hanno grimly replied.

“I could hammer at the tower,” the Blessed Artificer offered, “I have prepared-”

“Warning shot,” I ordered through the Night.

The black arrow streaked down, landing less than a hair’s breadth away from the end of Adanna of Smyrna’s left foot. She wore good leather boots, but not so good they’d stop an arrow fired by Archer. She yelped and flinched away, but it wasn’t her I’d been looking at. Hanno’s eyes narrowed. A message received, then. I was only going to play nice so long as they did. The moment the gloves came off for them, I stopped holding back.

“We press on,” Hanno repeated, voice firmer. “Prepare yourselves, we are awaited.”

They must have talked tactics on the ride over, because they got into a formation without much jostling. Hanno and the Mirror Knight in front, Champion and Myrmidon out back, their strikers distributed according to range and their most vulnerable Named safely encircled by steel. It was pretty well thought out, I noted as they passed the threshold of the broken gates and entered the bottom floor of the tower. It’d be difficult to crack in a fight, especially considering the small number of villains I’d judged safe to bring into this. A shame for them it wouldn’t matter. Within a heartbeat of the entire warband having ventured into the dark, I pressed down with all my might and the Night I’d been moulding obeyed.

There floor under their feet broke and all of them were dropped into Arcadia. Separated.

And best of all, I could finally get up from the throne.

—

I’d not known for sure how many would come, so ten cells had seemed a safe bet.

Not that I meant ‘cells’ in the sense of iron bars, of course, since throwing a hero in a dungeon was a recipe to have them rampaging all over your fortress before the day was done. I had instead made sure that they ended up in different, distant parts of Arcadia. The difficulty was that I needed to move them towards one destination or another while they were transitioning, and naturally the opiniated little bastards fought me over it. Fine, it wouldn’t be a perfect spread then. I’d still mostly get my way.

I dropped the Myrmidon and the Bloody Sword on a sunny island in the middle of a deep lake, keeping a single eye on them from the shadow of the trees. Neither was hurt, and I could now consider them pretty much out of the game: both of them were a whirlwind of pain when you let them get in lose, but they had no mobility trick and no deep experience with Arcadia. Let them swim their way to the shore and wander around, it’d take them hours and even providence couldn’t magically bring them to another hero able to guide them.

I tossed the Painted Knife into a swamp near a fae tower, betting that she’d get curious and waste her time there. If allowed to wander she had the potential to be a pain, as a stealthy Named, but between the mud and the distraction she should keep out of my hair. The Blessed Artificer would need careful handling, so I dropped her into a natural well. It was a deep stone shaft with even deeper water at the bottom, in a mountain valley, so while she was in no real danger she’d have to be careful about blowing her way out if she didn’t want to bring half a mountain down on her head. Most likely she’d burn through a bunch of her smaller Light trinkets to carve steps, which I had no issue with. While it might be the massive workings that made her a real threat, in practice she only had a handful of those to call on. Disarming her of the rest would do much to box her in.

The Forsworn Healer was the first to fight me off successfully. I’d meant to dump him in the middle of an open and empty plain, let him wander around, but my nudge was slapped aside and he clung to the Valiant Champion instead. That wasn’t great, I thought, but neither was it horrible. I’d sent her into the broken echo of an old battle, the massacre of some Alamans tribe by what had to be Triumphant’s ancient Legions of Terror, and while the ghosts wouldn’t be able to hurt them getting out of a shard like that could be tricky. The Healer might be able to guide them out, though, so the Champion would be back in play sooner than I would have liked.

That could be dealt with.

“Harrowed Witch,” I called out.

The answer came promptly through the Night.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Draw fae to the battlefield shard,” I ordered. “That hunting party out in the woods ought to do nicely.”

Only one noble there, Indrani had told me, and not a powerful one. Even if one of them did end up wounded, well, they had a healer along. Hopefully they’d enjoy tangling with a pack of fae in the middle of what was essentially a violent illusory field, I thought with just a drop of viciousness. I did manage to split the Astrologer and the Apprentice, putting my back into it, but the fucking Astrologer managed to wiggle her way into falling along with the Vagrant Spear. I’d chosen for them low hills that looked like Twilight, banking on confusion, but that wouldn’t work. And the Astrologer pointed at my eyes within moments, the Spear killing them in bursts of Light.

I’d lost sight on them, which was potentially problematic.

The Apprentice I nudged towards a beautiful golden apple orchard, since she was a good kid and she’d looked a little hungry. She, uh, fell through a bunch of branches on her way down which I’d not meant her to but she seemed to walk off with only bruises. I’d known from the start that moving the Mirror Knight would be like trying to punch a rock barehanded, so him I just let fall straight down. He landed on an old raised stone, which he cracked bouncing off, and got his footing almost immediately. Already he’d be able to see my tower’s Arcadian reflection in the distance, but I had plans to slow him down.

A heartbeat after him the Bitter Blacksmith followed him down, landing in the grass with a thump. The Mirror Knight would be able to run full tilt the whole way to the tower in full plate, he was that kind of ridiculous, but the Blacksmith definitely could not. She was built like one of her trade: for effort, not long runs. Christophe wouldn’t abandon her alone in Arcadia, so they’d be moving at her pace instead of his. It wasn’t perfect, but it bought me time. And time was what I needed, I thought as I angled Hanno for his own fall. Light flared for a moment as he burned away the Night, but a heartbeat later he realized I was sending him exactly where he wanted to go and stopped.

Like a falling star, white cloak trailing behind him, the Sword of Judgement fell before the roiling darkness of my tower. Knees bending as he landed in crouch, he rose smoothly with his sword in hand and did not bat an eye before beginning to advance. Best get the reception ready, else he’d be on me before I’d finished the last of my preparations.

“Barrow Sword,” I spoke into the Night. “Entertain our guest.”

“Of course,” Ishaq lightly agreed. “Rules?”

“Nothing permanent,” I said. “Withdraw if it gets too heated.”

“Understood.”

I moved my will through the Night, finding another villain.

“Hunted Magician,” I said.

“You have my attention, Warden,” the man easily replied.

“The Barrow Sword and our favourite guest are about to fight in the gatehouse,” I said. “Be a dear and shoot the White Knight in the back while he’s busy, would you?”

I got a delighted laugh back.

“Your Excellency,” the Hunted Magician replied, “it will be my very great pleasure.”

I didn’t even bother to tell him to keep it nonlethal. The Magician was a predictable sort of a creature: he’d not want to risk the backlash of killing Hanno even if I had given him such an order. That ought to keep Shiny Boots busy for a while, even if it’d definitely not turn him away. Opening my eye, I ripped off the globe of Night I’d burrowed my head in and dispersed it. The strands of darkness slithered around my skin, going down below my seat where the channel would lead them to the heart of the tower. The preliminaries were finished, all the forces in movement and accounted for. I could begin my ritual with a degree of assurance that I wouldn’t be jumped.

Finally, I rose from my throne. Reaching out with my hand without looking, I found my staff of yew waiting. Rolling my shoulders, I adjusted the Mantle of Woe and began limping my way to the stairs. Barely three steps in, there was a tug at the Night. I flicked my wrist and circle of Night appeared by my head as I kept moving.

“Archer,” I said. “I’m listening.”

“Painted Knife is loose,” Indrani said. “She captured the fae tower keeper and cut off fingers until he gave her directions. She’s headed straight for the tower.”

Well, that’d gotten out of hand impressively quick.

“She’s still in the swamps, right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Indrani replied. “I’m keeping an eye on her from a distance.”

“I’ll handle it,” I said. “Astrologer and Vagrant Spear are in the hills and they killed my eyes, I want you to look in on them.”

“Gotcha.”

I’d put the Painted Knife near the edge of the swamp not only because that was where the tower was. It was also because there was a little spot of trouble deeper in. I moved my will through the Night and found the villain I was looking for.

“Dicer,” I said.

“Ma’am,” he replied, sounding wary.

No doubt he’d been hoping that after stepping in once he’d be able to stay out of it. The little bastard wasn’t that lucky, though. At least not yet.

“Steal the Painted Knife’s luck,” I ordered. “As much of it as you can.”

“Is it, er, all right if I run away afterwards?” the Pilfering Dicer.

“I’d actually prefer it,” I honestly replied.

With a sigh of relief on his part, the conversation ended. The Dicer’s little trick ought to compensate for providence enough that the house-sized and very territorial heron in the swamps would pick up on the sudden scent of blood in its territory. That ought to keep the Painted Knife busy for a while longer. I’d barely taken another three steps before Archer was tugging at the Night again.

“Cat,” she said the moment the circle formed next to my head. “You sent a hunting party after the Champion and the Healer, right?”

“Asked the Witch to lure one in, yes,” I corrected. “And?”

“Half of the fae are dead, they stole two horses and now they’re riding out of the battle echo at a gallop,” Indrani bluntly said.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. Fine. Fucking fae, and to think they’d been so reliably awful when I started out. Those two were a genuine problem if they got to Hanno, they’d be able to support him well enough he’d blow straight to the chamber where I was keeping the Book. Worse, I realized as I closed my eye and visualized the path they’d be taking, they’d be coming through the plains where the Mirror Knight and the Blacksmith were walking. If they gave a horse to the Mirror Knight, this was going to head downhill real quick. Although, wait, technically to the east of them...

“Hold on a moment,” I said, plunging my head into the circle of Night.

I found the eye I was looking for, the one in the swamp where the Painted Knife had landed. While I couldn’t see either her or the Pilfering Dicer, I could see the very large and very angry red heron storming through the swamp. Yeah, that could work. I withdrew my head from the circle.

“I’m going to have the Witch light up the swamp, it’ll draw their attention to a fight brewing there,” I said. “Should delay them long enough.”

Then I paused.

“How good at flying are herons, do you know?” I asked.

“Average, I’d think?” Indrani replied.

Yeah, I wasn’t taking the chance.

“See the giant red bird?” I asked.

A moment passed.

“Found it,” she replied.

“Shoot one of the wings,” I said. “Something the Forsworn Healer won’t be able to heal. And I still want you on the Astrologer and Sidonia when you have a moment, so keep moving.”

“I hear ya, Your Dreadsome Majority.”

I rolled my eye at her, even knowing she wouldn’t be able to see it. Taking a wing would make it an easier fight for them, but I wasn’t going to have this end in the three heroes riding the giant bird to the tower. It was easy enough to call on the Harrowed Witch and have her cast a lightshow around the swamps, which had the added benefit of making the heron significantly angrier. I got to the bottom of the stairs, at least, before the next set of bad news. From the Royal Conjurer, this time, whom I’d been hoping to keep back until the last moment.

“Your Excellency,” the old man said. “The Blessed Artificer is drowning.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“She tried to blow her way out through the fucking mountain, didn’t she?” I guessed.

“That appears to be the case,” the Royal Conjurer agreed.

Goddamn Adanna. She was actually going to be the first one to take someone on my side off the board by sheer virtue of having put herself into such a bad situation. I’d kept the Conjurer near the valley as a precaution in case she got out too early, not thinking she’d get herself killed.

“Get her out,” I sighed. “You won’t make it back in time for the reception, but it can’t be helped.”

Leaving her to die would push this further than I was willing to take it. Even if it weakened my second line of defence more than I’d like. Aspasie will have to do instead.

“And should she attack me after she’s been rescued?” the old man mildly asked.

I snorted.

“I said get her out,” I replied. “Never said anything about her being conscious. Our charity has limits.”

“Indeed,” the Royal Conjurer lightly replied, and I would have bet good money he was smirking.

That did some to improve my mood, at least until Archer tugged at the Night again.

“Let me guess,” I sighed, “they seduced the goddamn King of Arcadia and he’s giving them a ride to the tower on his personal flying chariot?”

“Good news or bad news?” Archer asked.

“Good news,” I said.

Could so with some of those.

“The Astrologer helped Sidonia to some strange Light trick and she shot up a pillar in the sky as a signal,” Indrani said. “I’m pretty sure only two people saw it, though, the Mirror Knight and the Bitter Blacksmith. They’re trying to link up, but looking at it Sidonia and the Ashuran are going the wrong way entirely.”

Which would slow down the heroic battering ram even more. The hills were to the east of the region where I’d dispersed the heroes, it was very much going off-road for the pair that’d been in a straight line to the tower since the start.

“The bad news?” I asked.

“Only the Blacksmith is headed that way,” Indrani cheerfully said. “The Mirror Knight is now running after the tower like it stole his glistening codpiece.”

I swore. So when they’d figured there were other heroes close by good ol’ Christophe had felt comfortable pawning off the Blacksmith in their general direction. That was a problem.

“Pull back to the tower,” I said. “We’re starting early.”

“You got something in mind for handling Polished Ponce?” Archer curiously asked.

“He’s shit with illusions,” I said. “I’m going to have to tie down the Harrowed Witch keeping him out, but it’s a worthwhile trade.”

And there went my backup for the second line of defence, not that the woman in question seemed to mind. If anything, Aspasie seemed relieved when I gave the order. She’d be sitting out the rest of this, after all: her only duty would be hiding herself and making the Mirror Knight believe the tower was in another direction entirely. It was a good bet that sooner or later a comrade would run into him and help him out of the illusion, but that’d take a while. Not as long as I’d like, but that was why plans had to be kept flexible. And mine was, in a manner of speaking. See, since I knew that the heroes had kept their stories but my side didn’t it was much easier to predict how events would unfold.

Like if I were to say, begin a ritual to eat the Book of Some Things?

Everyone would converge on the tower immediately and Hanno would begin smashing whoever was in his way at the time. I could have put everyone on fighting him from the start, sure, but it would have been a mistake. It would all be a single ‘fight’ that he’d blow through when I began the ritual and providence put a finger to the scale so he could stop me in time. And if I didn’t begin the ritual, then providence would begin nudging every hero to get there to reinforce him in time – which was still a loss condition for me. No, much as it ran against my instinct to disperse my forces what I needed was a second line of defence after he got his. Fortunately, she was already on her way back to the tower. I would have liked for the Royal Conjurer or t least the Harrowed Witch to back Archer up, but we’d have to do without.

The butt of my staff rapped against the stone floor as I entered the chamber where all the writhing strands of Night converged, stone walls covered with carvings and runes humming with power. On a pedestal awaited an unimpressive leather-bound book. There was nothing special about it, until you noticed that no shadow seemed to be able to come within precisely seven inches of it. Mind you, for anything with a shred of a sense for power the Book of Some Things felt like a storm shoved into a teacup.

“You know,” I told the Book, “there’s usually rules about this. Like, don’t eat unknown magic or you’ll blow up. Don’t double-cross devils for kicks or try to cannibalize gods.”

Wood on stone, a gentle rap as I limped forward.

“Only they’re not rules so much as stories,” I said. “And those are out of the game, at the moment. So it’s still a risk, just between you me, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But it’s a risk and not a risk , you get me?”

I leaned forward.

“So I’ll admit that I’m a little curious,” I murmured. “I know my teeth are sharp, but are they that sharp?”

I smiled, drawing back, and reached out. Strands of Night began to flow from the walls to my hand, returning to me. By my ear, I felt bare fangs as an old friend grinned her approval. I sank into the shadows one last time, and saw through my eyes on the tower. In the distance, I glimpsed riders. Coming closer. Not many, but not few. At their head rode the Kingfisher Prince, but their leading banner was not his: it was a mountain crowned in bronze on a field dark blue. The heraldry of Rhenia, the First Prince’s banner . So you’re going to show up as well, Cordelia , I smiled. Good. It’s better this way. My eye opened and I looked down at the stolen stories of Good made into an artefact.

“Let’s find out,” I grinned, and the Night howled.

Interlude: Occidental I

“Seventy-five: you should never be too friendly or too hostile to a rival. Too friendly means you cannot put aside your rivalry to defeat a common foe; too hostile may drive them to join that very foe.”

-“Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

Hanno had already learned better than to receive that blade with a full parry: he had no intention of allowing a second notch onto the edge of his sword. Instead he nudged the blow aside, quickening his movement with Light, and stepped in close as he pivoted. His armoured elbow caught the enemy’s helmeted cheek from the left, but the villain took the blow without batting an eye. Hanno danced back before a bronze-clad boot could smash into his knee, leaning back an inch to let that wicked blade pass just before his eyes. The dark-skinned hero withdrew even further, making space as his brow furrowed.

The fight was lasting longer than he’d wanted, in no small part because the Barrow Sword was proving significantly harder to handle than he’d expected. Not that the villain had announced himself, or even talked since that debacle with the riddles.

But the hellish landscape that Night had made of this tower had not been enough to obscure the identity of the man facing him, and neither had been the black paint half-heartedly slapped over a very distinct set of bronze armour. Still, Hanno would admit that the shadows were... disquieting. The way they moved just at the corner of your eye, hinting at faces and fanged maws, flapping wings and unblinking eyes. Looking at them too long was disorienting, the movements invited belief into depth and angles that did not exist – rooms seemed smaller or lager, crooked where they should be straight or flat when they were sloped.

And through the dark the Warden of the East watched them all, her intentions still inscrutable. Hanno flexed the stumps of his crippled hands, watching his opponent’s loose stance. The Barrow Sword was not aiming to win, he decided, but to delay.

“This does not have to end in violence,” Hanno said. “Take me to her, Barrow Sword. I will go with my sword sheathed, not to fight but to treat in good faith.”

The other man watched him through the slits of the bronze helm, face impassive for a long moment until it split into a broad grin. The kind some might have called nasty.

“What if we want to fight, hero?”

The voice was distorted, laced with sorcery. It made the air shiver, though focus let him ignore the pull at his mind.

“I do not believe you do,” Hanno evenly said. “So far your side has acted with restr-”

It was only instinct that led him to take a step to the side instead of backwards, which made the difference between life and death. The thrust of that eerie bronze sword – it felt Ligurian to his senses, but deeper somehow – cut the edge of his cheek, drawing blood from a thin wound. If he’d moved too slowly, or backwards, it would have punctured his throat.

“Your side keeps talking,” the Barrow Sword snorted. “Speeches and schemes, like all that strutting about isn’t what made you a load in the first place. Even now you’re trying to get one over the Rhenian, like this is the world’s saddest pissing match.”

The villain flicked his wrist, blood slapping down against cool stone.

“Well, congratulations,” the Barrow Sword grinned. “You kept at it long enough the Warden lost her temper. Get in line, Ashuran, or get stepped on.”

Hanno’s eyes narrowed. Light pulsed under his skin. Perhaps this was more serious a situation that he’d thought. He needed to finish this fight quickly, so he should set out bait.

“There are limits to what I will tolerate,” he warned, “no matter the intentions.”

The man laughed in his face, loudly and scathingly.

“Tolerate?” the Barrow Sword mocked. “You can’t even get past me . What claim have you got on higher honour?”

That ought to do it, Hanno thought. Light flared as his back foot hit the floor, lending him an explosive start. Three steps in the blink of an eye, the villain belatedly raising his sword to strike. Parrying would be a mistake, so he did not. He bent low instead, caught the kick aimed to sweep him to the side and sent it back. The Barrow Sword’s footing stumbled and Hanno smoothly rose, catching the arm holding the sword before it could properly swing back and pivoting sharply. The throw he’d learned through one of the Sages of the West flowed smoothly, the villain’s armoured back slamming against the stone. Best to break the wrist of his sword arm, Hanno decided. He’d be less of a threat without the enchanted blade.

His knee was already rising when he felt magic flare behind him. It was an awkward moment, leaving him little room to maneuver. The mark of a skilled opponent. The dark-haired hero threw himself to the side, but he was too slow by a hair: the ice spike caught the side of his leg, in the weakness of the armour, and he felt sorcery spreading through his blood. A curse. Breathing out sharply, Hanno ran Light through his veins. It was an unpleasant sensation, like skin stayed close to an open flame too long, but he would not take a risk with curses. Landing in a pained crouch, he swept through the spike with a sword stroke and parried a second as he turned to watch his fresh opponent.

A man in rich dark robes, his face obscured by a spell. Too tall to be the Royal Conjurer, though too short to be the Hierophant. Hunted Magician , Hanno thought. That meant old magic, heavy on curses and enchantments, with some fae learning. Behind him the Barrow Sword was getting back up.

“I will ask the same of you as I asked of him,” Hanno said to the Magician. “Take me to the Warden of the East and this can still end peacefully.”

“It can end right now, that is true,” the Magician easily agreed. “All that’s required is your surrender.”

Hanno almost sighed. Was he truly going to have to fight his way to the summit of the tower before he could speak with the Warden, as if this were a Dread Empress’ lair being cracked open? He opened his mouth to reply with one last offer of diplomacy but the words never came out: the air had just shivered . Great power was being used above him, a staggering amount of Night. And it was being used to smother something, he found, eyes narrowing. Forcefully put out a light. Instinct tugged at him urgently, insistently. Whatever it was Catherine Foundling had just begun, it could not be allowed to finish. Hanno slowly raised his sword.

“Change of plans,” the Sword of Judgement told the villains. “I can no longer afford to hold back.”

“Tough talk,” the Barrow Sword scoffed, “but-”

Hanno moved, and there was no longer time for anyone to talk.

—

The Kingfisher Prince laid a hand on the Mirror Knight’s shoulder, face taut with concentration. A moment passed and then Cordelia dimly felt it: a ripple on the pond. A murmur of water against her hand. Mere months ago, she thought, she would have felt nothing at all. Even being a claimant, she had found, was as if a veil had been lifted on some part of Creation. Like she’d been allowed to peek behind the stage and see the pierced bucket used to make the rain, the mage on a ladder making lightning. Withdrawing his hand, Frederic Goethal smiled.

“He’s coming back,” the Prince of Brus said. “Any moment now.”

Cordelia slowly nodded.

“An aspect was used,” the First Prince said. “ Aid , you called it?”

The fair-haired man nodded.

“Most of the time it is little more than an instinct taking me where I most need to be,” Prince Frederic said, “but it has some other minor uses.”

More than just that, Cordelia thought. Not once since Frederic had become Chosen had soldiers he fought alongside with been routed. His mere presence seemed to be enough to turn even the greenest of levies into stubborn, tenacious veterans. Otto, in his letters, had described it as his friend being ‘a nail keeping our line in place wherever he stands’. The Prince of Bremen, ever plain in speech, had a way of turning almost poetic when it came to the Prince of Brus. The close friendship between those two had been one of the few lights brought about by this war, in Cordelia’s opinion.

Were Frederic a woman, she suspected they would already be wed.

She set aside the idle thoughts as the Mirror Knight came to, his blank eyes focusing on his surroundings as he took in the sight of the riders and the starlit plain.

“Hallowed,” Christophe de Pavanie cursed. “I was bespelled, wasn’t I?”

“We believe so,” Cordelia calmly said, her voice immediately commanding his attention. “Though we did not find the caster responsible for it.”

The green-eyed Chosen grimaced.

“These are the Black Queen’s picked grounds, Your Highness,” he said. “We won’t fight anything she doesn’t want us to find. I thank you for freeing me nonetheless.”

“It was my pleasure,” Prince Frederic dismissed.

Christophe de Pavanie quite willingly gave out every detail of how he had gotten where he stood and why, including the number of Chosen that the Sword of Judgement had led into this mess. He did not, however, speak of what she most wanted to know. Accordingly, she took the matter in hand.

“As you can see,” Cordelia said, “we come late to the evening. Can you tell us what happened to rouse the Warden of the East to such anger?”

Though it would make a great many things easier if it were a blunder by Hanno of Arwad responsible, she did not truly hope for that to be the case. The consequences of a strong falling out there would send fracture lines through the Grand Alliance. She has too many allies, too many followers , the Lycaonese princess thought. The Blood had already expressed in private their doubts that the war could be won without her, and if the Circle of Thorns was to be believed the League of Free Cities was treating her as the main negotiating partner in the Grand Alliance.

A great many things would fall apart in a matter of days, Cordelia well knew, if the unstinting support from the most dreaded figure of their age came to an end.

“She’s not angry,” the Mirror Knight replied.

Cordelia hid her doubt behind a smile.

“Have you grasped something, Lord Christophe?” she asked.

The man looked frustrated, fiddling with the dark locks that his helmet kept pressed against his forehead.

“I understand I’m no friend of hers,” the Mirror Knight said, “and that my judgement is held in poor esteem.”

Cordelia’s eyes narrowed the slightest bit. That was more awareness than she’d expected of a man of his reputation. Had his time under the Grey Pilgrim truly tempered him? When the punishment had been doled out she’d thought it nonsense, just another example of the White Knight letting off his charges with a slap on the wrist after they behaved atrociously – Christophe de Pavanie had accused the Queen of Callow of cooperating with the Dead King before mutilating a high officer of the Grand Alliance – but perhaps there had been some use to it.

“But,” Cordelia prompted.

“If she really were angry, Your Highness,” the younger man said, “that fortress would have landed on us .”

She blinked in surprise.

“And while we were broken and dying,” the Mirror Knight bluntly said, “she’d have sailed it back up in the clouds, where we can’t reach it.”

“We’d have found a way to reach up there,” Frederic said, tone calm and utterly certain. “There’s always a way.”

“Maybe,” the Mirror Knight replied, “but we haven’t had to, Kingfisher. Because she landed the tower in the middle of a plain where everyone can see it, bold as you please.”

“You believe this is a challenge,” Cordelia stated.

His head bobbed up and down.

“If it’s not a war,” Christophe de Pavanie said, “it’s a spar.”

A look at Frederic, who was frowning thoughtfully and not disagreeing, told her he was coming around to the thought. Cordelia’s gaze moved to the tall tower in the distance, the writhing streak of darkness jutting out of the starlit grass. What is Catherine meant to accomplish with all this? And there would be a purpose, she thought. Under the thuggish swagger and the affected drawl lay a clever, calculating mind. You forced a fight , Cordelia thought. With him, and perhaps with me as well. Was it as simple as forcing them to stand together against her?

No, it would not be. There had to be a victor, that much could not be worked around. Cordelia had combed through every historical archive she could reach when looking for possible compromises, and the only recorded instances of a Name being shared were siblings. Even the Bitter Blacksmiths, while one Chosen and the other Damned, were brother and sister. There could only be one Warden of the West, which meant that any cooperation between them – even against a common foe – could only be temporary. There must be a deeper purpose, one Cordelia could not yet suss out.

“We will not learn the answer standing here,” she finally said. “We must ride to the tower.”

“There’s no telling what will be waiting for us there, Your Highness,” the Mirror Knight said. “It would be safer for you to stay behind with your soldiers. The Kingfisher Prince and I-”

“Will be escorting me to the tower,” Cordelia pleasantly smiled.

The green-eyed hero turned to object, but then he caught her gaze and slowly closed his mouth. A moment passed as she watched him, unblinking, and thought of how very tired she was of having to herd Chosen instead of the man who should have been doing it all this time. His mouth stayed closed.

“Let us proceed, then,” the blonde princess amicably said. “One of my retinue will cede a horse to you, Lord Christophe.”

He hesitantly nodded. Her gaze turned to Frederic.

“You mentioned,” Cordelia said, “that your aspect tells you where you are most needed.”

The Kingfisher Prince, looking faintly amused, nodded.

“It is not always clear-cut, especially in complicated situations, but it does grant me such a sense,” the Prince of Brus said.

“And where does it tell you to be now?” she asked.

He cocked his head to the side.

“South,” the Kingfisher Prince said after a moment. “North to the tower pulls at well, but not as strongly.”

“I saw lights south before I was bespelled,” the Mirror Knight offered. “Sorcery. There might be a fight.”

Cordelia took a step back from the immediate, trying to understand the broader pattern. The Chosen had been split up by Catherine as they crossed into Arcadia, likely because they were too strong a threat together. Which implied her defences were inferior to the force of heroes gathered. So what she wants is not something that can be obtained by force. If it were, she would have gathered more force. Should Cordelia then ignore the obvious step of gathering the separated Chosen to march on the tower together? If force was not to be the deciding factor, it would be a waste of time to...

No, that was a flawed approach. Though Catherine did not seem intent on using force to achieve her end, she had acted to prevent force being used against her. Which meant that Cordelia could obtain leverage by gathering the Chosen. It would come at the cost of time, ever the scarcest of resources in a time of crisis, but the blonde princess was likely being bought time at this very moment: no one had caught sight of Hanno of Arwad, which meant the odds were good he had already reached the tower. She planned for that , Cordelia thought. She believes she can drive back or capture the Sword of Judgement.

Yet, for all that Cordelia Hasenbach deeply disliked the man, she would not deny he was an exception fighter. Handling him would take time. Time enough, perhaps, for her to gather the Chosen and prepare her own attempt to resolve the situation. Eyes still on the distant tower, Cordelia breathed out shallowly. This was not so different, she thought, from the schemes of the Highest Assembly. The rules and the pieces were different, but Cordelia had not been born knowing the rules of the Ebb and Flow. She had learned them, as she would learn the rules of Named.

“Then let us ride south,” Cordelia Hasenbach smiled, “and lend our comrades a hand.”

—

The stairs were hungry.

Or at least the Night slithering atop them. Something was coiled and ready to strike at his back just out of his sight, a sense of hostility like an itch between his shoulder blades. Hanno rose carefully, sword in hand and eyes ever moving. He had defeated the gatekeepers, which meant even deeper peril now awaited him. Either the Warden’s own right hand or some kind of bound creature. Most likely the former, as Catherine Foundling had never known to use any monster save the ones she rode. Either the Hierophant or the Archer, Hanno believed. Vivienne Dartwick was not a villain or the kind of woman to lend her hand to this, and would be a lesser threat even she were.

The Princess was not as skilled a combatant as the rest of the Woe, and likely never would be. If that sort of confrontation had been in her nature, she would never have become the Thief. Besides, she was to be Queen of Callow one day. Catherine would not use her as sorely as she had used the two downstairs. They would live, Hanno knew. The Barrow Sword’s leg could be reattached with a spell before he bled out, and the Hunted Magician would be able to cast when he finished swallowing his teeth. Hanno had broken his fingers, not his wrists, it should be enough for the man to be capable of basic healing.

Hanno’s boots scuffed the stone as he passed the threshold to the second level, finding it to be a single large hall. Ornate reliefs of stone depicting devils slaying each other dripped with liquid shadow, though he saw that the shadow dripped up as well as down. There was an open gate on the other side of the hall and not a sign of anything here aside from the Night. The dark-skinned hero paused.

“This is a trap,” Hanno plainly said.

“Trap,” a voice behind him agreed, just as the arrow went through his back.

Biting down on a hiss of pain, he turned even as he considered the angle the arrow had punched through the plate at. Not just behind, but – Archer’s boots hit his face as she finished leaping down from above the gate he’d entered through, sending him tumbling in a pained tangle of limbs. A detonation of Light against his side slowed the spin, allowing him to land in a controlled skid, but it also pushed the arrow deeper. Archer landed gracefully, coat fluttering as she nocked and loosed another arrow in the span of a single breath. His body was already moving, but he corrected in time with another burst of Light. Not a single arrow but too, the second fired just as he began to move to swat away the first.

He angled himself so the first would miss and he could parry the second, narrowly. Archer sighed.

“You’re too quick in a small room,” she said. “A bow won’t work.”

“If I had not adjusted,” Hanno evenly said, “that second shot would have gone through my eye.”

“I aimed for the one opposite Cat’s,” Archer cheerfully informed him. “You know, to fit the whole opposite Wardens thing.”

A short pause, a brazen grin.

“You’re welcome.”

Of all the Woe, Hanno had always disliked the Archer the most. Even the Adjutant, for all his moral void and bland antipathy, was no match for the casual cruelty Archer delighted in. That she could be charming when she wished to be only made it worse, as it drew the eye away from the viciousness of her words and deeds. People, even those who should know better, forgave much of a witty woman in good humour. Hanno would not have made that mistake even if he did not have an arrow jutting out of his back. It went through plate like butter and made not a sound. Dangerous. He broke the arrow’s shaft but left the head in the flesh. He could fight through the pain, it was better to wait for proper healing.

“This has gone on for long enough,” Hanno curtly said. “Whatever grievance the Warden of the East has, there were better ways to handle it. If this does not end now, it will have consequences.”

The Archer casually tossed away her bow and loosed her quiver’s strap. There was something wrong, something off. His eyes followed her, trying to find a match for what his instincts screamed.

“Consequences, huh,” the Archer said. “You know, Shiny Boots, I argued you’d make the finer Warden but the more you talk the more I think this was the right idea.”

“This is sheer stupidity,” he harshly retorted. “The-”

“Nah, this is just a slap across the face,” the Archer cut in, amused. “You’re not meant to like it. Sheer stupidity, now, that’d be trying to dig up a dwarven gate on the sly.”

He went still in surprise.

“Of course we know, Hanno,” Archer smiled. “We’re the fucking Woe . Always assume we know.”

They’d been seen through, then, despite their best efforts. Did the First Prince know as well? It had been her he meant to fool.

“So that’s why,” Hanno said, almost relieved. “Then this is a misunderstanding. I never int-”

“Eh,” Archer shrugged, unsheathing her longknives and idly spinning them. “I don’t really care.”

His jaw tightened. She was baiting him.

“Then there is no more point in speaking to you,” Hanno said. “This is my last warning, Archer: get out of my way.”

“Shiny Boots,” she patiently said, “you must be confused. Do I look like someone who gives a shit about-”

Evil’s stories might be silenced, but a gloater was a gloater. He burst into movement while she was jeering, but he saw from the lack of surprise in her eyes that he’d not taken her aback. Unfortunate. He wouldn’t be able to end this quickly. He struck first, high and to the side, not committing to the blow. She gave ground lightly, circling him, and continued to give it the more he pressed forward. Hanno took a step towards the gate, testing her, but she did not get in the way. She wouldn’t force herself to engage on his terms even if he feigned the intention of going up without first putting her down. Archer was the most seasoned villain he’d fought since the Black Knight, and promised to be just as much of a headache.

Fine. He’d strike properly, then. His boot hit the floor and Light flared as he shot forward, feinting low and to the side to draw her blades. One did sweep down, lazily, but as he moved into his true blow – a deep thrust at belly height – she darted towards him. One moment her stance had been entirely loose, the heartbeat after her entire body was moving. Sensing the danger he hastily moved to the side, a razor-sharp blade harmless skidding against the side of his plate instead of plunging through his armpit, and shifted his footing so he could swing at her back. He’d expected her to dodge by rolling forward, using her momentum, but instead she dropped down.

The edge of his sword whispered just above her hair as she tried to sweep his legs. She was strong and the angle bade for him, so he took a step back just in time for her to rise into a blow at his throat. An opening, she’d overcommitted: he slammed his pommel onto her hand, forcing her to drop the longknife and was about to break her jaw on the second blow when he saw the glint of steel from the corner of his eye. He leaned back, the blade slicing through his cheek and lip, and before he could kick her in the stomach she darted back. But not, he saw, without first snatching up her dropped knife. Hanno’s hand came up to touch the side of his face, coming away red.

He could feel the blood going down his cheek, dripping down onto his armour. Over the white cloak.

“Those reflexes are a little much, Shiny Boots,” Archer complained. “That little mistake should have cost you an eye.”

She was a skilled combatant, Hanno thought, but not this skilled. She’d exploited his propensity to close distance so he could use Light to quickly end a fight to very nearly land a crippling blow two exchanges into their fight. That had not been improvised.

“You’ve trained to kill me,” Hanno calmly said.

“Figured I might have to, one of these days,” she casually shrugged. “If you ever got ideas about Cat being more trouble than she’s worth.”

Even that, though, should not be enough. She was good, but those instincts were- Hanno’s eyes narrowed as he studied her once more. The ease she handled those two longknives with, the way they just seemed to fit . Those instincts were not an Archer’s instincts.

“You’re becoming the Ranger,” Hanno said.

“Claimant,” Archer grinned, “but it’s early days yet. But enough yapping, yeah? We gonna do this or-”

It did not take him by surprise when she darted forward, any more than it had taken her. He knew better than to lower his guard against Indrani the Archer. Four steps forward, quick as an arrow, and when he raised his sword she smiled. Footing switching, she suddenly drew back and if Hanno had been striking her it would have gone wide. But he was not. Instead he was taking a step forward, closing the distance, and her weight was headed the wrong way. She kept drawing away, to make distance, and it was true that by simple physical ability she was slightly faster than him. Hanno, though, did not rely on his body alone.

A burst of Light behind his left foot pushed him forward, lengthening his stride, and though it shot his footing he adjusted with another burst of Light just under his right shoulder blade. The thrust ripped through her coat at shoulder height and broke chain mail, but delivered nothing more than bruises. Archer had reacted quickly, dropping down towards the floor, but Hanno was not finished. His steel-clad boot caught her in stomach, slamming her against the stone with a pained gasp. He heard one of the lower ribs break. She wore no gauntlets, the Sword of Judgement thought as his sword rose. Cutting through both wrists should end this.

Instead he had to duck back, a longknife spinning through where his face had been a heartbeat earlier, and she rolled back into a crouch. He pressed a step forward, ignoring the knife still in the air, but she darted back before he could close the distance. Her eyes weren’t even on his sword, he noticed, but on his footing. She’s watching for the Light. The acceleration trick would not take her by surprise twice. Still, the exchange had cost her a broken rib and half her longknives – which he heard clatter against the stone behind him. This was not going to end quickly, as he had feared, so he’d used Light to melt the knife she had thrown. It should tip the balance in his favour.

It would be close, Hanno thought, but he would get to the Warden of the East in time. He could feel it in his – a wet, red gasp passed through his lips. Pain in his back. He’d been struck through his armour? No, the arrow. Something used the opening. Gritting his teeth, he flared Light at his back only for it to be swallowed. Devoured. Blood turning cold, Hanno turned even as he felt the spike impaling his back beginning to raise him off the ground.

Catherine Foundling, one-eyed and smiling, met his gaze.

“Did you really think you’d just get to fight your way up to me one brawl at a time?” she said. “Really, Hanno, I’m insulted .”

There was a swell of power, of Night, and after a wave of pain all Hanno knew was darkness.

Interlude: Occidental II

“Intelligence, Chancellor, is understanding that alligator moats never work against heroes. Cleverness is paying an alchemist for water-coloured acid instead.”

– Dread Emperor Venal

The world was upside down.

Hanno could not recall ever waking up hanging from his feet before, at least not in his own body. It would have been disorienting even if the strands of solid shadow binding his feet weren’t slowly turning, spinning his body with them. His wrists were behind his back and, he found out after flexing his muscles, tightly secured. Two layers of steel manacles and one of Night, if he was feeling it right. How characteristically thorough of Catherine. He was also, to his mild discomfort, naked from the belt up.

The room was chillier than he would like.

“Hey, look who’s up,” Archer’s voice cheerfully called out.

Now that the spinning was allowing to see more than a screen of Night and glimpses of the stone floor, Hanno found to his mild bemusement that he was being held in what looked like a dungeon. Like spider legs on glass, he felt an instinct skitter across his mind. A wrongness. Hanno cocked his head to the side.

“Is that an iron maiden?” he asked, genuinely curious.

Archer shrugged, seated on top of the open iron cabinet full of spikes. Her legs were wrapped around the head of a screaming ghost, keeping her in place.

“Came with the tower,” she told him. “You know Praesi.”

Hanno did not, save through memories not truly his own. Perhaps he was lucky, considering what he was looking at. A dozen torture racks, manacles to hang people up against the wall at twisted angles and some sort of... wheel with ropes? He spent a moment trying to work out where the person would go on the device, coming away with the conclusion that no matter where that was the exercise would be deeply painful. He pulled at his bindings again, but the steel did not give in the slightest. He then reached for Light, but while he could sense it Hanno could not seem to move it.

It was as if a deep and dark pit lay between his will and the gift of Above, not forbidding contact so much as keeping out of reach. It was, he thought, a much harder restraint to break than a simple forbidding would have been. Focusing, he tried to seize the smallest possible sliver of Light.

“I have been healed,” Hanno said, as silence would make his work obvious.

The absence of pain on his cheek and back had been noticeable enough, though he could not look to see if the wounds were closed.

“Some,” Archer said, wagging a finger in direction. “Mostly we kept it from getting worse, so don’t you go getting ideas.”

It worked. Hanno felt a well of satisfaction as a mote of Light moved just as he’d willed it. The binding is not perfec t, he thought. At a guess, there was a lower bound to the quantity of Light he could be prevented from seizing. It was a common enough weakness in workings, given that most human minds had difficulty grasping the level of precision that was the given of the divine. Carefully, Hanno moved his mote slightly to the side before releasing it. It did not move.

The turning hid his pleased smile, and it was gone by the time he was facing his captor again.

“It is traditional for one to escape when held in a torture dungeon,” he reminded Archer.

“I could hamstring you if you want,” she offered with a sharp smile. “It’d take care of those pesky traditions for you.”

It was difficult, careful work. Hanno’s forehead beaded with sweat as, one mote at a time, he wove the Light into a chord. One that was stretching out, slowly but surely, towards him.

“You haven’t, though,” he mused. “Why, Archer? If the Warden truly intends to devour the Book of Some Things, as you said, why would she not take all possible measures to ensure I could not get in her way?”

Catherine Foundling was giving him, Hanno thought, a shot at stopping her. A pause. No, he thought, perhaps not him alone: he would be surprised if the First Prince were not already on her way to the tower. She had the spies to learn of this and Frederic would no doubt help her.

“Do I strike you as the woman with the plan, Shiny Boots?” Archer drawled. “I’m just obeying orders.”

He doubted that, but there was no point in pushing for answers she would not give. The chord lengthened and lengthened, his back shining with sweat from the work. It had been some time since he’d had to maintain so minute a focus for so long. These days his manipulations of Light tended for the large, not the small. A lesson to be learned, Hanno considered. Growing in power had caused him to lean towards the ram instead of the key when presented with a closed gate, but that might be a mistake.

A lesson , Hanno considered, brow creasing as he rotated away from his captor. Was that the entire purpose of this theatrical tantrum? To teach them a lesson? Spider legs pattered across the glass, the wrongness still crawling all over his mind. He was missing something.

“It won’t work,” he said. “Giving us a common enemy. Forcing us to work together.”

“Shit,” Indrani sighed. “You twat, I had ten silvers riding on you not figuring it out until Cordy showed up.”

It should have been beneath Hanno to derive even a crumb of satisfaction from having made the smug villainess lose something, but he was only human.

“Unfortunate,” Hanno lied, moving on immediately. “This is short-sighted of her, Archer. My differences with Hasenbach are not going to be ended by an evening of making common cause. We already have a common cause.”

The Grand Alliance, and beyond that Good. Cordelia Hasenbach, however, intended to suborn heroes to laws and crowns after having spent the last few years repeatedly demonstrating that both failed to serve their stated purpose even when the stakes were the highest possible ones. Hanno simply could not understand how someone could look at the behaviour of the Highest Assembly during and before the war then conclude that the likes of them should be given more power over heroes. There needed to be changes, that was true, but what was truly needed was an intermediary between Above’s champions and earthly powers.

Someone who could steer away from conflicts between them, not serve as some crown-appointed governor of heroes. It simply would not work, and it should not: heroes often found their Names fighting against corrupt authority, it was absurd that an entire system should be built around punishing them should they do this. Absurd and doomed to failure. Named would not bend to those laws, it would run against their nature. All it would accomplish was make heroes into outlaws so that another pack of vultures could feel a little safer plotting in their palaces.

The chord was stretching ever close to him, to his will, providence’s nudge making the efforts just a little easier. He must be approaching the close of his conversation with Archer, which would end with his breaking out of his bindings.

“I do not believe she is evil, Archer,” Hanno said. “But we disagree fundamentally on how the world should be. That is not something over which there can be compromise and it cannot be papered over by an evening of fighting side by side.”

“Well, you got us right pegged,” Archer mourned. “Guess we’ll just lose then.”

The chord connected even as she finished the last word, Light flooding through Hanno’s veins, and in the instant that followed the illusion shattered. Like a pane of glass being smashed.

Hanno was not in a dungeon and Archer was not sitting atop an iron maiden.

She was perched on a raised stone covered by runes and glyphs, an arrow loosely nocked to the bow on her knee, but it was not her the illusion had been meant to veil. It was their surroundings. They were in the great room that was the heart of the tower, the nexus where all the power converged, and here shadow dwelled like a living thing. Currents of Night flowed from channels in the walls and floor, rivers crossing the air, and everywhere copper gutters sprawled in esoteric patterns that stung his eyes. Glyphs covered every inch of stone, pulsing with something unseen that moved the tendrils of Night streaming down as if some great beast was breathing in and out.

Now that he was no longer blinded by the illusion, Hanno found the sheer amount of power flowing through the room suffocating. How was Archer unaffected? The darkness swirled lazily around her like smoke, almost playfully, and she gave no sign of feeling ill. His eyes moved past her, following the gutters inevitably leading towards the centre of the room. There lay a raised dais, on which a pedestal had been raised. And on that pedestal a simple leather book had been set down, one that would have seemed a simple manuscript if not for the way Hanno’s soul sang whenever he gazed at it. And in front of the artefact stood the third person in the tower heart.

The Warden of the East, leaning against her staff on the dais and wreathed in so much Night she seemed entirely made of it, cast a disgruntled glance in his direction and snapped her fingers. The darkness he’d woven the Light chord through deepened, grew longer, and the chord shattered in a thousand small motes. Utter surprise stilled him. That should not have been possible, Hanno knew. Night always broke when matched with Light. He’d thought his memory of it being devoured when he was captured was mistaken, that there’d been a misunderstanding on his part – an artefact had been used, perhaps.

“The fucking Sisters made that Light trap,” Catherine Foundling said, sounding both admiring and disgusted. “And you figured a way through in, what, eighty heartbeats at most? While hanging upside down and talking the whole time.”

She shook her head, muttering something that sounded like fucking heroes under her breath.

“We were at the good part,” Archer smiled at him. “Go on, Shiny Boots, tell us more about how you’ve figured all this out.”

He was still frozen, dripping with sweat and struggling with the surprise. Was it a trick, another illusion? It should not have been possible for Night to do this .

“What have you done, Warden?” Hanno harshly asked. “What is this?”

It was more than simply his own Light being suppressed, he realized. The Book he now saw, was fighting darkness encroaching from all sides. He’d not seen it at first because of the gloom, but there were thin strands of Night coming down from the ceiling and walls and trying to touch the holy artefact. They were being kept back by a presence that came in the form of an invisible globe – six, seven inches wide – but Hanno could feel the pressure against it. It was as if the entire tower and all its Night was bearing down on the Book through the tendrils, its weight slowly crushing the artefact. Snuffing out the Light within.

Night, he thought once more, should not have been able to do that. It should have dispersed, vanished, given ground.

“Are you,” Catherine Foundling idly asked, “asking me to tell you all about my Evil plan?”

It would not be a deal with a devil, she saw those as beneath her. Had Below itself blessed her with strength? Hanno’s stomach clenched. It was unlike the Hellgods to act so blatantly, but these were the end times. Rules grew weaker in the eyes of men and gods alike.

“How many patrons can a single lifetime fit, Catherine?” Hanno asked, hoping pricking her pride would loosen her tongue. “After this one, how many more do you have waiting in the wings?”

He got an amused glance back.

“That would absolutely have worked on me when I was seventeen,” the Warden admitted.

Archer loudly cleared her throat.

“Fine,” she corrected. “Maybe for a little while after too.”

He was not learning anything, but even a delay was worth buying. Soon the First Prince and others would – Hanno’s stomach clenched. Even as she had been speaking with him, he realized she had kept the ritual going. How? He found that sole eye watching him, amused. His thoughts must have been plain on his face.

“The first thing I did when this began,” the Warden of the East told him, “was figure out a ritual that I’d be able to walk away from before it ends. Made this whole affair longer than it had to be, all bludgeon and no finesse, but that way it accounted for you crashing the party. A worthwhile trade-off, yeah?”

Good, if he could get her talking...

“If you knew I would act stop you,” Hanno said, “then, on some level, you know this shouldn’t be done. You can still stop, Catherine. There have been no deaths and-”

“And I’m not breaking any laws,” she replied, tone mild. “Landing the tower was impolite, I suppose, but that’s not why you’re really here. What claim do you realistically have on the Book of Some Things, Hanno? You didn’t make it and it was ripped out of the Bard, not one of your charges. It has nothing to do with you.”

It was not happenstance, that Catherine Foundling had ensured she was both the Queen of Callow and the Warden of the East. It was her favourite tactic to use one title as cover for actions she took as the other: shaking Callowan swords and Grand Alliance laws at him now even as this room held more Night than he’d ever seen gathered in a single place. Bandying words with her would be pointless, Hanno thought, she could talk in circles until the Last Dusk. Directness was the only way through, stripping the fig leaf.

“It belongs,” he plainly said, “to the Warden of the West. Good’s stories in Good hands.”

The light of the room dimmed, shadows roiling as the invisible globe around the Book groaned.

“That’s nice,” the Warden of the East praised. “Good turn of phrase, very heroic.”

She leaned forward, the movement casting her sharp cheekbones even more harshly. One eye under a cloth as dark as Night, the other eerily knowing. Shadows melded into the long dark hair, threaded themselves around the forlorn staff of dead yew. There was not a man or woman of Calernia that would have seen her in that moment and not known her to be Below’s favourite daughter.

“Now tell me, Hanno of Arwad,” Catherine curiously asked, “what exactly is it that compels me to obey you?”

He blinked, honestly taken aback.

“You would destroy the Accords by denying this,” he slowly said. “Accords that you have-”

“No,” the Warden cut in. “They’ll still all sign, the nations, and they’re the part that matters. Even if the heroes balk – and a lot of them won’t – then most of what I want will be achieved. Try again.”

Gods Above, what was this?

“You would play these games when we prepare to march on the Crown of the Dead?” he asked, incredulous.

It might be that some would sign the Liesse Accords nonetheless, as she’d said, but they could not truly succeed without the support of the heroes. If too many refused the rules, they meant nothing. What was the point of this petty posturing when Calernia teetered on the brink of annihilation? The Dead King was loose.

“Yeah, we are about to do that aren’t we?” Archer drawled. “Cat, you must have forgot.”

Hanno himself had forgot she was there. Archer was someone who called attention to herself, but she was a candle to Catherine Foundling’s bonfire.

“Got distracted, I guess. Maybe it was all the concerned diplomats knocking at my door,” the Warden sharply smiled. “You know, so they could tell me their worries about the pissing match between Prince White and the First Prince sinking the Grand Alliance before it even began to march.”

Archer let out an overdone noise of understanding, all the while smiling like a cat playing with a crippled bird.

“Sorry, Shiny Boots, I interrupted,” Archer solicitously said. “You were saying something about games, the siege of Keter coming up?”

His jaw tightened. Catherine could have been lying about the diplomats, but he doubted it. It was usually her preference to use the truth as her knife. The implied reproach was not without merit if his rivalry with the First Prince was shaking the confidence of allies to such an extent.

“How many?” Hanno asked.

“Even if it had been only one,” the Warden of the East said, “it would have been too many.”

That was, he considered, true. He had not been wrong to step forward and act, but he had not tended to the situation as well as he should have. Authority was trust made action, and he had been wasting trust. All involved lost from this.

“I have been at fault,” Hanno frankly replied. “My error must me mended and will be.”

He then flicked a hard look around him.

“But my faults, whatever they might be, excuse none of this.”

“Excuse?” the Warden of the East laughed. “You seem to be misunderstanding something, Hanno. I have no need to excuse anything.”

The Night in the room billowed, like cloth in the wind, as if answering its mistress’s harsh laughter.

“Who is it that’s going to call me to account tomorrow?” she asked. “ You ?”

She looked him up and down, dismissive.

“How’s that working out?”

Then she gestured dismissively at the distance.

“Cordelia?” she continued. “She’s so badly in my debt she’d break an entire wagon of shovels digging her way back to daylight. Besides, neither of you actually commands a damned thing.”

Yet another reason the First Prince could not be the Warden of the West. She was too tightly bound to Procer and the debts of gratitude it would Callow – and that kingdom’s Black Queen, even after her abdication. The one-eyed priestess shrugged.

“You’ve split up Procer with your Prince White business,” the Warden said. “And she’s got her own loyalists in the heroes. You’re coming to me with threats and warnings, Hanno, while your fucking house is on fire.”

A fire that would be put out the moment he became Warden of the West. The First Prince would know better than to try to exploit heroes for political gains the way she had when he had been the White Knight. A Warden, unlike a Knight, would be able to refuse her when she next tried to mutilate a young girl’s corpse to appease the unappeasable. Besides, the dark-skinned hero was still a high officer of the Grand Alliance. She could not capture him like this without breaking the treaties she had signed.

“Unless you intend to keep me imprisoned until the end of this war,” Hanno flatly replied, “there will be consequences to this.”

It was only his own inclination to end this peacefully that would keep her from being scraped raw for this, and he was steadily losing it.

“No,” she bluntly said, “there won’t be.”

He stared at her in disbelief. Did she think herself invincible because Below’s stories had been silenced?

“You both need me too badly to pick that fight,” the Warden said. “See, if you actually do go after me it’s not going to be kept quiet. It’s going to come out, word’s going to spread. And what exactly do you think’s going to happen when people learn you’re coming after me to steal an artefact that was already in my possession?”

Hanno’s blood ran cold as he genuinely considered it. Even if he was the Warden by then, the amount of damage that conflict would cause just as they prepared to march on Keter...

“You would kill this entire continent for your pride?” he challenged.

“See, now we get to it,” Catherine Foundling mused. “You’re holding Calernia hostage, pretending you can’t bend but I should. She does the same, in her own way. And that’s the part that actually pisses me off, you know? That you’re both taking charity from me, depending on my goodwill, and then I for some godforsaken reason I have to pretend one of you is my equal .”

There was a cold, burning indignation in that dark eye that Hanno knew was too blistering to be feigned.

“You have not earned it,” Catherine Foundling said, smiling thin and sharp, “and this offends me.”

A blade-like smile, he thought. He’d seen it before on another face and liked it no better then.

“This is not,” Hanno slowly said, “posturing, is it?”

He’d seen from the start that Catherine was playing a game, that she was enforcing rules and preventing deaths. He had thought it to mean that she was not serious, but it was beginning to sink in that he’d been wrong.

It might be a game she was playing, but the Warden was deadly serious.

“I’ve played nice with you fine folk,” Catherine nonchalantly said. “But it looks like you need the same wake up call Tariq did.”

Night surged, swelled, the shapes of thousands of crows flapping their wings filling every surface. Cruel beaks and talons reached out for flesh to slice.

“My help is a decision ,” the Warden of the East said. “It is not a right or a given. And the moment you begin to delude yourself otherwise, I will bury you in a shallow fucking grave.”

Hanno breathed out, sought his calm. The situation had deteriorated far beyond what he’d thought possible, but all was not lost. She was still talking and he was still alive. This was not yet over.

“Yet you have not,” he said. “So this is still a negotiation.”

Her haze hardened, and immediately he knew he had made a mistake.

“You’re not learning the lesson, Hanno,” Catherine Foundling mildly said. “See, for one you still think that you got me to monologue. That I was trying to hide any of this.”

The Book of Some Things screamed, pinpricks of Night beginning to slither through cracks in the globe. Tendrils of darkness were stretching out towards the artefact, hungry and foul. It was like hearing a child be beaten, a painting get ripped: ugly and impossible to take back.

“I didn’t need to bargain to eat the Book,” the one-eyed priestess said. “Or to shackle you. The difference between you and I, Hanno of Arwad, is that I’m the Warden of the East.”

She raised a hand, strands of Night coalescing around it as if they were eager.

“I murdered my own father for that Name,” the Warden said. “I’ve mutilated people I love, scarred my own flesh. That’s what I wield every time I call on Night, that’s the foundation of my authority.”

Darkness pulsed across the room, the breath of some gargantuan beast.

“And you think that your half-assed claim is equal to that?” she scorned. “What is it you’ve given up, Hanno, that you’ve sacrificed ?”

“You have known tragedies,” Hanno acknowledged. “But how many of them were of your own making, Catherine?”

He met her eye.

“You think they are something to boast of?”

As pain raised one above others, made them worthy. It was the philosophy of the whip, both the master’s and the flagellant’s. Nothing more. Being hurt didn’t make you better. It just made you hurt.

“They’re something,” the Warden said. “They’re weight. Was it you put up against them, Hanno, what’s your foundation?”

She snorted.

“No longer having your hand held by angels,” she said. “Giving up the pretense you’re above petty mortal disputes. You’re standing where everyone else started and calling it a journey.”

Hanno’s fists clenched. How small his doubts and troubles seemed, made into a single turn of phrase. The globe cracked, groaned.

“You’ve never believed in anything but your right to climb,” Hanno harshly said. “I am not surprised you cannot grasp what faith means or what it costs but talk of it coming from you is like a fish speaking of flight.”

She smiled unpleasantly.

“Hey, maybe you’re right,” the Warden said. “Let’s find out. Which is stronger, between Light and Night?”

He stilled. Glimpsing what she was about to say before she said it.

“Light, huh,” the Warden said. “I wonder why I can shackle you then.”

Her eye burned cold.

“Between my authority and yours, Hanno of Arwad, there is no contest. Talk about faith all you want: it will keep ringing hollow as long as you hang up there.”

It fell into place. It was not some fresh power that had let her do this but the mantle she had claimed in the East. His mind spun, considering the enormity of that, but soon he realized she was not so strong as she pretended. There was a reason the Warden had chosen to ride a tower, to draw him into it: here, they were under her roof. A place under her authority, her power. And under that roof the Warden of the East could bend the rules her way, decree that Night would triumph over Light. He found his calm, the quiet place at the heart of him.

It was further away than he remembered, and smaller.

“You embraced your mantle first, that is all it means,” Hanno said. “Anything more is wishful paint over your regrets.”

“And Gods know I have a great many of those,” the Warden of the East said. “An army’s worth of ghosts. I have learned my failures, if only because they so lovingly haunt me. You, though?”

She shrugged casually, cuttingly.

“Hells, Hanno,” the Warden said, “now you’re telling me you want the Warden to guide to heroes the way you did as the White Knight. Can you even hear yourself talking? We’ve been down this road before.”

The one-eyed priestess raised her free hand, wiggling it mockingly.

“How many fingers is the next Mirror Knight going to cost you?” she said.

“Fingers for a life are not a trade I regret,” Hanno evenly replied. “Or ever will.”

“Then you’ll run out of those long before I run out of eyes,” the Warden replied. “Of course, it’ll all implode far quicker than that. Your house of cards comes down the moment you run into another Red Axe.”

His jaw clenched.

“Should I dig her up so she can be cut a third time?” Hanno bit out. “Maybe you can use the spectacle to buy back a deserter prince for a moon’s turn. And why stop there? We can dig up a whole graveyard of heroes to shame the full Highest Assembly into showing up the once. They can vote to leave and return to their palaces.”

The words were acid on his tongue, acid in his belly, but out they came anyway. He felt no cleaner for it, not relieved in the slightest. Spite lessened both the speaker and listener.

“There it is,” the Warden of the East smiled. “They’re heroes so they’re Good, and that means even their mistakes are always well intended. They shouldn’t be strangled with petty mortal laws, just helped out of their messes and allowed to waddle on into the next one. That’s the take you bring to the table, isn’t it? Or at least what it comes down to, when all the pretty words are stripped off.”

“It is one of your worst habits,” Hanno evenly replied, “to poison every well you do not own.”

He forced himself to be calm, to be steady. To not lean into the anger that burned in his belly.

“You pretend that villains and heroes are the same, that their difference is a simple matter of... abstract philosophy,” he said, “but it is not. Even the most vicious of us are trying to end evil, not spread it. You stand instead for rapists, cannibals and callous murderers. Our exceptions are your rule . You are indignant that I would free heroes to act because it would harm villains – but villains are only harmed by those actions because they choose to do evil .”

It was almost a relief to simply say it out loud. To do away with the pretence that there was something laudable about protecting Evil, that it was anything more than a compromise to allow it.

“The second chances you scorn are given, Catherine, because there is a difference between recklessness and malice,” Hanno said. “Heroes are not always right, always good. But they all can be, if they’re given help.”

The claps he received were openly mocking.

“Pretty speech,” the Warden of the East said. “Heroes would love it, I’m sure.”

A pause.

“But how about everybody else?”

He started in surprise.

“You cann-”

“What do you think the difference is for someone between getting killed by a cannibal murderer or the Saint of Swords?” the one-eyed priestess interrupted. “Nothing, Hanno. They’re still dead. And that’s the part you refuse to understand. They’re sick of my side, and right to be. But they’re sick of your side too .”

She leaned forward, eye cold.

“Do you think claimants grow on trees, Hanno?” she said. “That Cordelia just lucked into having a shot at being the Warden of the West? It’s almost like not everyone agrees with that little speech. The fucking arrogance of it, from you who’s never ruled so much as a village or had to do anything in a war but fight. The choices don’t stay nice and clean when you have to think about more than a hundred people at a time. How very convenient that you’ve limited how many you need to care about to that number.”

He barely heard the latter half of the tirade. She was right, Hanno thought with muted dismay. Not about what she thought, but she was right. In some way, he’d thought that Cordelia Hasenbach had become a claimant because she was the First Prince. Because she was powerful and prominent and one of the titles adorning her crown was ‘Warden of the West’. It had been a comfortable thought, one that fit with his opinion of the woman. It was also not how Names worked. That silent realization stilled his tongue. He could not speak until he’d swallowed it, as if it’d filled his throat.

“Ah,” the Warden smiled. “There we are. Catching up at last.”

“I-” Hanno started, then hesitated.

“You want the Book but you don’t have the law on your side,” Catherine Foundling said. “You don’t have the story either, and if you’re going to try to take it anyway what does that leave?”

A hard, cold smile.

“Just violence,” the Warden of the East said. “And I’m better at it than you.”

She looked him up and down, then shook her head.

“Throw him out of the tower, Archer,” she said.

“Cat?” Archer said, sounding surprised.

The Warden of the East met his eyes with her own.

“There’s nothing left to beat,” Catherine Foundling calmly said. “We’re done here.”

The words stung more than being tossed out into the grass, though Archer tried her best. Hanno was not surprised.

They had the ring of truth to them.

Interlude: Occidental III

“In the Free Cities a general has more to fear from victory than defeat.”

– Aretha the Raven, Nicaean general

Cordelia was not certain which part struck her as more absurd: that house-sized herons dwelled in Arcadia or that the Valiant Champion had apparently tamed one.

“Is mine now,” the Champion insisted. “Called Wizard.”

“Having inspected it, I can tell you thatshe is in fact female,” the Forsworn Healer note, his faint Atalante accent thickening the drawl. “Perhaps Witch would be more fitting.”

How ? she wondered. Is part of your Name to have magical bird taming powers? Is it an aspect? You cannot have been in the presence of that heron for more than an hour. The same heron that must weigh as much as a company of infantry and was nipping at the Levantine’s shoulder lovingly.

“Wizard is genderless noun,” the Valiant Champion smugly said. “You ignorant.”

Cordelia’s brow slightly creased before she remembered to smooth it away. The heroine put up a good front, but when she’d spoken the words there had been a glint in her eyes. Sadness, Cordelia decided, or perhaps regret. The Lycaonese princess had long wondered how much of that cheerful brutishness was a mask. Rafaella of Alava often acted like a lout, but it had not made Cordelia forget that she was both one of the longest-serving heroes and a survivor of several disastrous engagements. The Healer narrowed his eyes at the Levantine heroine, visibly irritated, and the princess stepped in before bickering could ensue.

“We need to get moving,” Cordelia cut in. “I understand that five is the preferred number for a band of -Named and now we have five heroes gathered here. The tower awaits.”

The Kingfisher Prince, the Valiant Champion, the Forsworn Healer, the Painted Knife and the Mirror Knight. It would have to do. Hopefully Cordelia had changed Chosen for Named quickly enough that no one had noticed the stumbling of her tongue. Though her people’s terms of Chosen and Damned were not wrong, in her opinion, they were used solely by her countrymen. There was no need to remind foreign heroes that she was a ruling princess of Procer, a fact that already did much to damage her standing among them.

“There is no leader to our band,” the Mirror Knight said. “It won’t work.”

She saw him wince a moment later, both at the implied insult to her rank – which she suspected he cared more about than any other Chosen here – and the blunt dismissal of her opinion. He tacked on a mortified ‘Your Highness’ afterwards, trying to make up for it. She smiled gently at him to show no offence had been taken, patiently setting aside her irritation, but the damage had already been done. The door to objections had been opened and half of authority was people not knowing they could disagree.

“Agreed,” the Forsworn Healer said. “We should gather the others, aim for overwhelming might instead. I saw Apprentice land in an orchard to the southwest, I think.”

“I sent Helmgard east to join up with Sidonia and the Astrologer,” the Mirror Knight said. “That’s three of us, so perhaps we should start there.”

“The First Prince is right,” the Painted Knife flatly disagreed. “The tower is what matters. The mightiest army in the world will still lose the battle if it does not show up to fight.”

Frederic glanced at Cordelia sideways, as if hesitating, then joined his voice when her face remained without expression.

“The Warden of the East laid down a gauntlet through her tower,” the Kingfisher Prince agreed. “Refusing to pick it up can only end in our loss.”

She would have to take him aside and remind him not to balk this way again, she thought. In this company he did not owe her the deference the Prince of Brus would owe the First Prince of Procer. They were here as Chosen and claimant. On the contrary, it would be to their common disadvantage should he obey her without reason: it would create the appearance of Cordelia trying to merge together the office of First Prince and the Name of Warden of the West. The fair-haired woman knew well that the backlash to even the semblance of this would be harsh and swift.

“So both of you go with her,” the Healer suggested. “Meanwhile Christophe and I can head east into the hills. The Vagrant Spear and I can use Light to mark our positions.”

The priest from Atalante kept a dark eye on her as he spoke. Watching for her reactions. He has been trained , Cordelia decided. The man was said to have earned his Name by swearing away a great fortune and position in the city-state to become a wandering healer, which would explain it. Was he a foe? It was too early to tell.

“Separating would be a mistake,” Cordelia said.

A few surprised looks went her way. Not, she thought, at her opinion so much as the fact she was voicing one at all. As if she had no right to. Named business , she thought scornfully, and so only Named should decide it. In their eyes her claim mattered less than her title as First Prince. She hid the sharp spike of anger.

“Lord Christophe tells me that the Myrmidon and the Blood Sword fell into a lake,” she continued. “The only one we have seen is far out west, so they are unlikely to join us in time. I have already sent riders with spare horses to make the attempt, but there is little more to do.”

The Painted Knife let out a hum, face considering.

“The Warden could have sent any of us that far out instead,” Kallia of Levante said. “If she chose those two, it was for a reason.”

“Akatha and Gernot strong but no quick,” the Valiant Champion said, petting her giant heron’s head. “Swim slows them. Out of battle, like First Prince said.”

Though what she’d said was true, Cordelia thought, that had not been the Painted Knife’s train of thought. She was asking why Catherine Foundling had chosen these two Named of all those that could be sent furthest. And in her eyes, there was one obvious common thread between the two.

“Both are warriors,” Cordelia pointed out. “She might lack fighters of her own and so seek to limit the length our shield wall.”

“There are plenty of Bestowed in her service than can match us in a brawl,” the Painted Knife skeptically said, then snuck a sideways look at the Mirror Knight. “Most of us anyway.”

Cordelia hid a smile. The heroine had not refused her turn of phrase. ‘Our shield wall’. One stone after another, she would lay her foundation.

“You’ve never had to share a front with them, Kallia, wandering around as you have,” the Forsworn Healer said. “I’d bet the First Prince is right. If the Warden wants to keep this conflict amicable few of them would be fit for it. I cannot imagine the Red Knight or the Headhunter showing restraint in a duel.”

The Painted Knife frowned, then conceded with a sharp nod.

“Her strength must be indirect,” Cordelia said. “Mages and tricksters.”

Which meant a swift, direct assault might just yield success.

“She will have handpicked those with a fight in mind,” Frederic cautioned. “It would be dangerous to assume weakness.”

It would be even more dangerous to linger, in her mind. Christophe de Pavanie turned to her, mien serious.

“He’s right, Your Highness,” the Mirror Knight said. “The tower itself will be hard to breach regardless of defenders. We were baited in last time but now the Warden will truly defend it. I won’t claim we need every Chosen we brought, but we should at least find Adanna.”

The Blessed Artificer’s name, a woman whose mastery of Light would admittedly be a boon when facing Night. It was a fair point.

“Do we know where the Artificer is?” Cordelia asked.

No one had seen her since the drop, but Lady Kallia had a guess.

“One of the mountains beyond the hills collapsed,” the Painted Knife said. “I saw it happen from atop the lighthouse. If it wasn’t the Mirror Knight responsible, it can only be her.”

The man looked embarrassed but did not deny the conclusion.

“Then this will take time,” the Forsworn Healer said. “Perhaps we should split up, at least temporarily. I am told you have a knack for finding those in need of aid, Kingfisher Prince?”

His eye was on her again. A foe, then , Cordelia thought. He was not simply attempting to read her, he had intentions she was being measured for.

“You might say that,” Frederic smiled, brushing back his curls.

The Painted Knife stared at him, manifestly distracted by the sight. Cordelia sympathized. Frederic Goethal had long mastered the art of artless distraction and his disinclination to marry had been the despair of many a highborn lady over the years. Frederic did not elaborate and no one pressed. Cordelia had learned that inquiring in detail about another’s aspects was considered exceedingly rude.

“Then you should ride out to find Adanna,” the Healer suggested. “Kallia is a tracker of great skill, she can follow you into the hills and find the Vagrant Spear while there.”

Cordelia’s eyes imperceptibly narrowed. She knew the look in the man’s eyes, the too-casual tone. She had dealt with the likes of it before. Frederic was a strong supporter and the Painted Knife had agreed with her on every broad stroke so far. She was also respected among Chosen, a captain of their kind. The Forsworn Healer was trying to send away individuals who shared her opinions. This is a trap , the princess considered. The man had offered himself undertaking that same task earlier in a manner that would be quicker. But it would split him from the group, which he would not want.

So unless he was a fool, this was a trap. Cordelia, unfortunately, could not grasp the nature of said snare. She still knew too little of namelore. Then I must flush you out , she thought.

“Your earlier suggestion of using Light as a beacon would be even faster than tracking,” Cordelia idly said.

Triumph, not as well hid as he thought. She had read him correctly.

“I might be needed to heal comrades rejoining us,” the dark-haired hero said. “But you are right that Light might be quicker, Your Highness. Christophe, can you still flare your plate bright enough to be seen from far away?”

“I can,” the Mirror Knight said, almost eager as he looked at her. “It would be my pleasure, Your Highness.”

He was after Christophe from the start , Cordelia thought. Aiming to send away to the two Proceran heroes present. It was a crude ploy but not senseless. Yet it was too small a prize for the effort he had put into the intrigue, she decided. What patterns of namelore did she know? Numbers, mostly. He means to send three Chosen in the hills and mountains, where three more await . Therefore not a ‘band of five’, which had been her guess. She was yet missing a detail.Cordeliadid not know enough about the Chosen, what they could or could not do. She’d read reports and even spoken with some, but always as the First Prince of Procer.

She did not know them, had never been one of them. That was Hanno’s strength and her weakness.

“No good to fight tower then,” the Valiant Champion bluntly spoke up. “Archer there. Will fuck us up the bootocks if Mirror Knight not there to take arrows.”

There was a general air at dismay at the prospect of fighting Indrani the Archer, even from the Levantines. Catherine Foundling’s s lieutenant had earned the wary respect of everyone who’d ever seen her fight.

“Perhaps the time would be better spent fetching the Apprentice, then,” the Forsworn Healer mildly said. “Kallia, the First Prince and I could ride out to get her. Perhaps even the Bloody Sword and the Myrmidon, as we ought to be close by then. The five of us can serve as another wedge of attack when they return.”

So that had been the angle, Cordelia thought. The man did not think they would return from the trip in time and that was the entire point. He was trying to keep her out of the fight, away from the tower. He is buying time for the Sword of Judgement . His game was plainly revealed: he was a loyalist, backing his preferred candidate as best he could. The Painted Knife immediately disagreed with the proposal, arguing she was the only here capable of scaling the tower if need be, and when others jumped in every inch of progress that had been made towards a decision since the conversation began soon collapsed. The Healer did not look displeased by the turn, not that Cordelia had expected him to.

The hero believed that Hanno would win, given long enough, and so preventing a decision from being reached here was already a victory. Unfortunately for the Forsworn Healer, however, she was not a wet-behind-the-ear debutante. She would not fall apart after the first setback, and he had handed her the very key to outplaying him.

“Lady Kallia, you mentioned that a mountain collapsed,” Cordelia said, cutting into the chaos. “Is this not true?”

“It is,” the Painted Knife frowned.

“Then the Blessed Artificer might be in danger as we speak,” the blonde princess seriously said. “For all her power, she is hardly immune to falling rocks. She could be in dire need of a healer.”

The Atalantian priest stiffened.

“Is true,” the Valiant Champion frowned. “Douka, you need to help.”

So that was the Forsworn Healer’s name? Interesting. Now for the further nail.

“And therefore is no need to further split our numbers,” Cordelia smiled. “Our friend the Healer can signal the Vagrant Spear and the Astrologer as he sets out for the mountains.”

“Five Bestowed,” the Painted Knife appreciatively said. “A knife held back should we falter. A fine plan.”

Cordelia received a respectful nod, which she returned. The Healer’s calm soured.

“Arcadia can be dangerous,” he said. “Perhaps an escort would be in order when I set out.”

“It will not be more dangerous than trying the Black Queen’s lair,” the Mirror Knight frankly said. “And your going alone weakens us least.”

Christophe stiffened.

“Not that I would call you weak,” the Knight hastily tacked on. “But this way only one of us goes.”

The Champion was still on the fence, Cordelia saw. In need of a nudge to tip her over the edge.

“If you have worries, I can lend you an escort of riders,” she kindly offered. “Twenty should be enough, I would think.”

It was a done thing after that. The Forsworn Healer glared at her darkly, cornered and unable to extricate himself from the snare he’d laid. His opposition to her did not come from malice. Cordelia reminded herself of that, every time she felt her stomach clench in irritation. Yet while power had swelled in the distance, the great tower of darkness pulsing as Named bickered in circles, Cordelia had not been able to help but think that this was everything she despised about heroes. The disorder, the aimlessness, the arrogance . The Forsworn Healer was perfectly willing to risk the darkness to the north getting its way simply because he believed that the Sword of Judgement would win.

Because he would not consider otherwise. Try as she might, Cordelia was seeing no thought given to making a contingency should Hanno of Arwad fail. The priest had simply decided to bet it all on the Sword of Judgement’s success. Showing no hesitation in making alone a decision that might affect the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

Catherine Foundling did not play for anything but keeps.

“Let us set out promptly,” Cordelia said. “The tower still awaits.”

—

The Painted Knife was the first to approach her as they rode. The younger woman was not a comfortable rider, another reminder that though Kallia of Levante was nobility in name in practice she was no such thing. Coming into a Name had raised her to the higher echelons of Levant’s hierarchy, but that ascension was largely decorative. All her power was personal.

“You have heard of the gathering that was to take place in Carrouges,” the Painted Knife said.

It was not a question.

“I have,” Cordelia replied.

She had enough eyes on the heroes and around them that there had been no question of hiding it from her. She did not believe the Sword of Judgement had even tried. Frantically setting aside the research that might yet save Calernia to prepare for such an assembly had left a bitter taste in her mouth. She’d thought to circumvent the matter entirely by going to Catherine directly, but the Warden of the East had proved reluctant. It had been frustrating, but Cordelia understood the reasons for the tacit refusal. Respected them, even.

But it had left her with only desperate measures to take, until Catherine Foundling’s eye-catching entrance had rendered them all unnecessary.

“I was there when the tower parted the sky and the talks ended before they could begin,” Kallia of Levante said. “And I will say this: in that swamp lay a dug-up dwarven gate.”

Cordelia’s breath stilled. Of course, she darkly thought. How had she dared to hope that the soldier would deign to live diplomacy to the trained diplomats? He was Prince White, beloved of people and Chosen, surely that was enough to give him the right to speak for the Grand Alliance and succeed where those who had practised diplomacy their entire lives had been stymied. The Sword of Judgement had not only summoned the heroes to crown himself Warden of the West, he’d been seeking their support to open talks with the Kingdom Under behind the back of the Grand Alliance.

Surprise had turned to cold, deep fury but Cordelia smoothed out her emotions.

“Knowledge most welcome,” the fair-haired princess replied. “Though I wonder as to why you brought it to me.”

The Painted Knife glanced in front of them, where the Valiant Champion rode to the side of the Mirror Knight.

“The Blood takes no side,” Kallia of Levante said. “One of us stands by the Sword of Judgement’s side, so balances must be struck even.”

Hedging their bets, Cordelia thought, as well as keeping to a tortured line of honour. She thanked the other woman with a nod and the heroine peeled away, leaving the princess to her thoughts. Would Hanno of Arwad truly do this, Cordelia wondered? Risk everything and everyone so recklessly? She was not unaware that her growing dislike for the man was tainting her opinion, but even careful consideration led to the same conclusion: he would.

He would do it because it was right, Cordelia thought. Because he was following his principles. Because in the eyes of so many heroes, doing right was enough to give you the right. And that was the conceit that Cordelia could not stomach, because even the highest of Procer did not dare claim so high a perch. She came from a land where even royalty could be put on trial. Not easily and often not as fairly as it should be, but even the mightiest of princes could be put to trial. But who was it that called the Chosen to account, when they abused the powers the Gods had granted them?

Nobody.

When the second Levantine of their party came to ride by her side, Cordelia was not surprised. Rafaella of Alava was very much a partisan of the Sword of Judgement, one of his oldest comrades. It had only been a matter of time until one of those approached her on his behalf. Better her than the Witch of the Woods, whose importance to the defences of Salia made complicated to deal with.

“First Prince.”

“Valiant Champion.”

The heroine’s long braid swung back and forth across her back, freed by the snarling badger helmet she held in her hands.

“I be blunt,” the Champion said. “Will not work. You can-not be Warden of the West.”

“A bold claim to make to a claimant,” Cordelia mildly replied.

“You sneaky,” the Champion said. “And clever, like fox. But you have no steel. So you can-not be Warden of the West.”

“There is more to victory than swords,” she evenly replied.

“Maybe,” the Valiant Champion said, then flicked a look at the tower in the distance. “But Warden of the East is clever and has sword. Against her, you lose.”

“Even if that were true,” Cordelia said, “what makes your man better?”

“Hanno can learn sneaky,” the Champion said. “You cannot learn sword. Not perfect man, but best there is. Peregrine would have been better.”

“I disagree,” Cordelia replied, tone cooling even further.

“Ashen Gods agree, is what matters,” Rafaella shrugged. “Can’t fight the sea, is why we make boats.”

The princess’s eyes narrowed. That was a Levantine proverb paraphrased: ‘if you cannot fight the sea, build a boat’. It meant that one should make accommodations with the inevitable, make the best of what could not be changed.

“You want me to strike a deal with him,” she said. “To exact terms in exchange for withdrawing my claim.”

The other woman sharply nodded.

“No one is happy, everyone gets something,” the Valiant Champion said. “Is politics.”

“And if I were disciplined from striking such a bargain?” Cordelia calmly asked

“Should,” the Champion said. “Mistake not to. Even if you clever way to Warden, won’t work. Some refuse to obey after.”

The dark-haired heroine eyed her frankly.

“I may be one,” Rafaella of Alava told her. “So make your boat, First Prince.”

Neither of them bothered with the pretence of a courteous goodbye. It was as if the world was hammering the nails in one after another, Cordelia thought. First the arrogance, and now the other side of the coin: heroes did not believe in rules. Even villains bent easier to law! After all, for most it had been a given all their lives that should they behave heinously there would be someone punishing them: the heroes. The servants of the Hellgods were often cruel and almost always selfish, but they were also governable. They were used to be governed, however indirectly, used to there being an authority above them – even if that authority was simple force.

Heroes were not. They followed their belief to the end, bolstered by the accolades that were Light and Name. Why should they doubt, when the Gods Above themselves gave them what they saw as a tacit nod of approval?

But you are not better , Cordelia sharply thought. Not really. You make mistakes too. She ought to know, having spent the last few years cleaning them up. It had been when Prince Gaspard’s plot came out that she saw the heart of the trouble. The Prince of Cleves had tried to make the Mirror Knight into his puppet son-in-law, to use the hero’s fame and power as fuel for his ambitions. In the wake of the affair being outed Cordelia had mended the break as best she could, and still the Firstborn had marched out of Cleves. Gaspard was forced to abdicate the moment she had the influence to see it done, but there lay the problem: while she handled the prince, the Mirror Knight was neither taught nor punished.

He was just... left to keep on going as he would.

The White Knight was meant to lead the heroes, had claimed that duty before Gods and men when he became a high officer of the Grand Alliance, but he had never taken them in hand. Cordelia could punish princes who schemed with heroes all she wished, had done so several times, but what was the point when no one punished the heroes who schemed with earthly powers? Again and again, a hundred small justices – proud, personal principles – had eaten away at the laws of the Grand Alliance from the inside as the White Knight simply watched.

The Red Axe had tried to unravel the Truce and Terms, to murder a prince of the blood, and some of the Chosen had actually agreed with her actions. The Mirror Knight had – him again! – mutilated a high officer of the Grand Alliance and was then let off with a slap on the wrist. The Peregrine had murdered an entire village of Procerans in his hunt of the Black Knight, and he had been influential enough that Cordelia had never been able to so much as chide him for it. Hanging the old monster, as he deserved to be, would have started a war. And the Saint of Swords, the first madwoman of the lot, had been the worst of them.

She’d been willing for all of Procer to burn, if the pyre might take the Dead King with it.

Cordelia had bled herself dry trying to keep the wall that stood behind Calernia and annihilation from breaking while the White Knight let his charges rip out stones without saying a word. Heroes hid behind their Light by claiming that holy duty set them apart from mortal laws and then, after rubbing elbows with those same mundane powers to disastrous effect, retreated behind that protection when consequences came knocking. One law for them, one for everyone else. And Hanno of Arwad did not believe that heroes could be called to account by anyone but the Gods, he had proven that much through his actions,

Cordelia had had enough. If no one else discharged the duty properly, then she would. And if the likes of the Forsworn Healer and the Valiant Champion insisted on getting in her way, she would sweep them aside. The was no compromise to be had with duty. Emerging from the boiling thoughts with her mind clear, sharpened, Cordelia’s gaze found the tower had neared. They were close, nearly there.

“And now,” the blue-eyed princess murmured, “violence.”

They slowed when standing in the tower’s shade, below the dark monolith whose darkness stood out even in the dark of night.

Cordelia knew better than to try to direct a fight between Named. Not yet. Instead it was Frederic who took the lead, sending the Painted Knife up the walls and assaulting the bottom of the tower. Even steel-barded wood could not long resist the strength of the Mirror Knight, and so after a shattering blow the three Chosen stepped into the dark. Cordelia would follow but not immediately. In the thick of the fight she would only be a hindrance, a potential hostage. She would be of use when it came to talking, not while the blades were out. Until then she would wait out in the plains, the moon high above and the roiling shadows all around her. It was a beautiful night, she thought, for such a dangerous one.

The noise of combat came from the inside, but curses and shouts and the sound of steel clashing, but as time passed it came from further and further away. The tower swallowed noise just as it swallowed light, Cordelia thought. The very nature of Night was taking, and more of that dark power had been gathered here than the princess had ever seen before. It hinted at the scope of the Warden of the East’s ambitions. It has to be the Book of Some Things , she thought. It was the threat guaranteed to get the two claimants to the wardenship of the West knocking at her door and no small prize should it be taken, devoured? She was not sure of the method that would be employed, but the Black Queen of Callow was infamous for her skill at stealing the power of others and making it her own. Even her fearsome armies had first been taken from the Legions of Terror.

“Yet you do not believe in forcing choices where you can lose,” Cordelia murmured, looking at the tower. “So what is that you gain here, should you not eat the Book?”

She would have a reason for beginning all this. Catherine was reckless, but it was a calculated sort of recklessness: leashed to her purposes, not allowed to run loose. Cordelia had first thought this was an exercise to make herself and the Sword of Judgement allies of fortune, but the longer she stood here the more she doubted it. Something was coming to an end tonight, she could feel it in her bones. Lost in her thoughts as she was, she did not notice it at first. The movement. And even when the tall grass moved, she thought it to be the wind.

It was only when the first rider fell and his horse panicked that Cordelia realized they were under attack. The riders spread out as swords were bared, two of her retinue immediately covering her sides with shields, but there was nothing around for them to fight. Only strands of shadow, of Night, rearing up from the grass to take men by their limbs and tie them to the ground. They could not win.

“Inside,” Cordelia yelled out. “Send word that the Warden is attacking from the back.”

Two riders tried, but the shadows caught them. Tripped the horses and bound the men. One by one her escort was disappearing into the grass, as if swallowed whole by coffins of green.

“Your Highness,” her captain said with forced calm, “we need to leave. Now .”

He was right. Fleeing was better than allowing herself to be taken prisoner. She nodded her agreement and pulled at her reins. East, they must head east. There were allies there. A heartbeat later a tendril of Night covered the captain’s mouth, silencing the scream as he was ripped off his horse. There were so few of them left, Cordelia saw, only a handful.

“Retreat,” the First Prince shouted. “East, get the other Chos-”

Darkness.

Interlude: Occidental IV

“It is not enough to win. If you do not destroy the very foundation on which your enemy stood, all you have done is change the face of the man who will kill you.”

– Dread Emperor Benevolent

Cordelia woke up looking at the moon.

The sky spread out above her, a river of darkness with glistening jewels for stars and brightest among them the crown jewel of night. The midnight eye , she thought. She was not manacled, the fair-haired princess found, but she was chained. Someone had set her down on a throne of stone from which twisting chords of Night slithered out, forming into shackles around her hands and feet. Trying to rise up, Cordelia found her legs wobbly and half-fell back into the seat. She groaned as she bruised the back of her knees against the stone, forcing aside the pain to look around. She must be atop the tower, she thought. The view could come from nowhere else.

And there was only one person who could have brought her here.

“I do not believe,” Cordelia said, “that you would abduct me only to then ignore my presence. Shall we dispense with the theatrics, Catherine?”

A long moment passed and she wondered if she had not just made a fool of herself, but from behind her came the sound of a match being struck. Though she felt the urge to twist around on the seat and look back, Cordelia forced herself not to. Appearances mattered even more when you were at a disadvantage. Instead the acrid smell of wakeleaf drifted to her, lazily carried by the breeze, and she heard that familiar limp drag itself across the stone. A soft step and then the sharp rap of the staff on stone, all a fabricated display of weakness. The Warden of the East could still move as swiftly and gracefully as a cat when she needed to.

Catherine Foundling limped into sight from her left, moonlight lapping at her back like the tide at the shore. Even the jarring colours of the Mantle of Woe were drowned in strands of Night, as if she wore a cloak woven from it, and only the cherry-red burn of the pipe allowed Cordelia to see anything at all under the dark of the hood. One piercing brown eye set in a face carved by hatchet, all sharp angles and severity. It was only those ever-expressive lips that broke from the blade edges: always smiling and smirking, grinning and baring teeth.

The Warden drew back the pipe to blow a long stream of smoke, veiling her face in darkness for a moment, and Cordelia was left without a window to gaze through. When the red burn returned, it was to an amused little quirk of the lips. Like she knew a joke no one else did.

“Hanno would have seen the trap coming,” the Warden of the East lightly said. “You do know that, right?”

Cordelia let the barb pass through her. This was a negotiation, diplomacy. Allowing the woman on the other side of the table to irritate her was handing her further advantage when she already had many.

“It is decent manners to offer refreshments when entertaining a guest,” Cordelia calmly replied. “I believe a tart red is the traditional kind vintage for stargazing. A bottle from lakeside Aequitan if you have one.”

Unlike the rest of the principality the large cities near the coast had never truly become Arlesite even after the Aquitanii were conquered, so the ancient tart grapes were still used in the vineyards. Aequitan reds from the south were unpleasantly sweet, Cordelia had found, best drunk with small game or not at all.

“How fortunate, then, that you are not a guest,” the Warden drawled. “If you insist on wine, Hasenbach, there should be a bottle by the seat. You can pour for yourself.”

Cordelia did grope around, finding to her relief that her legs were steadying, and hid her dismay when she saw that it was half-empty bottle of Vale summer wine that rested on a low table. She could have used a drink that did not taste like it had been mixed with cider to settle her nerves. The Queen of Callow’s hopelessly provincial taste in wine had been speculated by some to be a clever way to display Callowan pride, given the famously poor reputation of those vintages, but Cordelia had sadly learned better. She took a deep drink of the glass she’d poured, much more than was polite.

Awful.

“You’ll be able to stand before long, if that’s what you were trying to do,” Catherine idly said. “The binding was just a little rougher than I meant it to be.”

She had little practice with bindings, Cordelia thought, because she so rarely took prisoners. Had the sideways reminder been on purpose?

“Duly noted,” she replied. “As we have now both found a vice to nurse, given the circumstances I believe it would be forgivable to do way with the usual courtesies.”

The face disappeared into the dark, a cloud of smoke flowing out.

“Indeed?” the Warden amusedly said.

“Indeed,” Cordelia confirmed. “I imagine that your plans for the Book of Some Things are nearing their end, which invites urgency in our talks.

For a moment she thought she saw the other woman wince at the mention of the artefact, but it might have been a trick of the light. A single fleck of red cast just as many shadows as it did their opposite.

“We’ll be ending this soon,” Catherine Foundling casually agreed. “The attack on the tower is going south in a hurry and-”

She suddenly paused, then sighed and snapped her fingers. There was a flare of Night and a curse from someone else’s mouth. Cordelia rose to her feet just in time to see a shape being tossed over the edge of the tower. The one-eyed queen limped there, then cast an irritated look downwards.

“I can see in the dark , Kallia,” the Warden peevishly called out, “and I’ve traded the one eye for a hundred. Try that again when you’re actually invisible, not just quiet.”

There was a loud thump and a snap, then a hoarse shout.

“Crows,” Catherine Foundling muttered, shaking her head. “If she doesn’t stay down with the second leg broken I’m going to need to have a talk with that girl. There’s a difference between determined and goddamn stubborn.”

Cordelia glanced down at her glass, allowed herself a grimace and then polished off a third in a single swallow. It seemed that there would be no rescuers coming to free her, which was unfortunate. Buying time for them to come had been in the back of her mind, but she would have to negotiate without that card up her sleeve. Adjusting her angle accordingly, the blonde princess discarded any thought of a bargain from even relative strength. The only way she would pass through this victorious was by discovering what it was that Catherine Foundling truly wanted and how it could be leveraged into a compromise.

Cordelia took a few steps around the stone seat, finding that her Night chains followed without restraining her, and laid her elbows against the back of the throne. She felt Catherine’s eye back on her even as the wink of red was taken away, replaced by a plume of smoke that drifted up to the cloudless sky.

“I was given to understand that the Book of Some Things is a manifestation of Good stories,” Cordelia calmly said. “Though I do not believe there is precedent for such an act, one might assume that destroying such an artefact would have dire consequences.”

The Warden of the East smiled.

“Assume,” she repeated. “That’s been a problem lately hasn’t it, Cordelia? How often you’re forced to assume .”

The wrong approach, the princess acknowledged without missing a beat. That had not been a personal attack made because the one-eyed queen was feeling defensive, it had been a barb made out of derision . I misread signs and was mocked for it. She did not mind. That, too, was actionable information. The Book was not the keystone then, either destroying or ingesting it. There was another motive underlying all this chaos. What? If she found this, she found the key to it all.

“Then disabuse me, Catherine, by all means,” she pleasantly said. “If I have made an error let us resolve it.”

Even from a change of subject she should be able to glean a hint. The Warden’s smiled turned sharp and Cordelia’s heart sunk. She had mistepped again. I will lose every time until I learn what game it is we are playing , she darkly thought.

“Have you ever wondered why it is that you’re held in high esteem by so many rulers,” Catherine Foundling nonchalantly said, “but when heroes look at you, deep down most of them believe you’re a failure?”

Cordelia straightened, elbows leaving the back of the throne as she set down her cup on it.

“Only a handful of Named alive have ever ruled,” she replied. “Or even held high office. Few understand what those responsibilities entail or what the limitations of a crown are.”

Heroes, in particular, grew strong through uncompromising conviction. It encouraged the belief that simple solutions would suffice no matter the situation, which was wildly untrue. Strength grew into ever more complicated a word the higher you came to stand.

“That’s true,” the Warden amiably replied. “It’s not what most of them are built for, even if they don’t want to admit it. But then they’re hardly alone in that, since you’re only looking at the half of the truth that you like.”

An idle step forward, even as Cordelia warily took her cup in hand.

“They see you as a failure,” the Warden of the East said, “because you did fail.”

The tall princess’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly, the first genuine stirring of anger of this conversation rearing up its ugly head until she smoothed it away.

“That’s the gap in perspective, Cordelia, that you’re not seeing,” the one-eyed queen continued. “A lady, a king, they look at what you did and applaud. It was an impossible task but you moved mountains and held up the sky, compliments galore. But heroes?”

The Damned shrugged.

“What they see is that Cordelia Hasenbach took up an impossible task and then she failed,” the Warden said, “when victory against impossible odds is the very foundation of what a hero is .”

It was a moment of cold, cutting clarity that followed the words. The pieces fit, suddenly and cruelly. The sneers she had found buried deep in the gaze of so many Chosen, that simple marrow-deep disbelief that she had not been able to fix everything and prevent the inevitable. The ugly assumption not so much as whispered but ever present that somehow, she had chosen Procer should fall.

Impossible was not a word any of them genuinely believed in.

“Bearing a Name would not have made keeping the Principate together easier,” Cordelia evenly said. “Given the Truce and Terms, it would have instead significantly complicated my efforts.”

She would have been both above and under the White Knight in authority, the boundaries of jurisdiction so blurred as to be useless. Cordelia entertained the thought, briefly, but could only see a disaster in the making.

“And that would matter if Procer was your wheelhouse,” Catherine said, rapping her staff against the side of the throne.

The sound almost made her flinch. It was like rattling the cage of a songbird that’d sung out of tune.

“But that’s not the duty you’re after, is it?” she continued. “You’ve thrown your hat in the ring to be Warden of the West and that’s a very different creature.”

And there, Cordelia thought, her line of argument collapsed. She drank from the cup, the too-rich taste filling her palate, and set down it down again on the stone to a neat little note.

“You speak as if not having been Named is a mistake crippling my ambition, that I cannot see the world the way many heroes do,” the blue-eyed princess said, “but you are wrong.”

She stepped back, chains following so lightly she would have thought them made of feathers if not for the shackles.

“That distance, Catherine, that estrangement? They are the very foundation of my claim,” Cordelia said. “I have seen heroes as someone who is not one of them. Witnessed their flaws as only someone who stood outside of their circle can. I can learn namelore, aspects and tricks. All Named do.”

All heroes had to learn their nature, the unseen rules of their trade, and not all received the help of a mentor. There was no shame in this, or in her remaining lack. She was a quick study.

“What cannot be learned is the understanding of where heroes falter,” she told the Warden, meeting the dark eye lit in red. “Where they step beyond the bounds of duty and do more harm than good.”

She never would have sought to be Warden of the West without it, so the princess thought it almost absurd to count it a weakness. It was not unlike chastising a bird for having wings.

“Our gap in perspective can and will be bridged,” Cordelia plainly told her. “I am not unaware of its costs. But I count it a worthwhile trade for having removed the scales from my eyes.”

“You’re not listening,” Catherine said. “What is it that you’ve used to push your claim, Cordelia?”

The other woman limped around the throne, leaning her back against it. It was not a restful stance, for all that it was motionless. Cordelia took in the silhouette and could only think of a snake drawing back to strike.

“Armies,” the Warden of the East said, enunciating every syllable. “Nobles. Treaties. Everything except people you’d actually be leading. A First Prince in everything but Name.”

The princess’s lips thinned.

“I do not yet have the sup-”

“ You’re not listening ,” Catherine Foundling interrupted in a hiss. “Your claim is a test, and you are failing it.”

She pushed off cloak of shadows sweeping behind her as she limped forward and Cordelia stepped back.

“You can learn namelore,” the Warden said. “Of course you can. Just like he can learn politics. But that’s not what a Name is, what a Role is. It’s not asking you if you’re going to be the right person in five years, it’s asking if you are right now . Are you?”

Cordelia’s eyes hardened. No more steps back. Any fruit grew beyond reach if you raised the branch high enough and kept raising it as soon as the hand neared.

“And wereyou a perfect fit, Catherine, when you became the Squire?” she challenged. “Was Tariq Isbili, when he became the Grey Pilgrim? I imagine most Named were not, and so it seems to me that the requirements to wardenship rise every time you are at risk of having an equal.”

The last touch had been a barb and an investigation both, trying to find what lay behind this tirade, but the princess immediately knew she had not drawn blood. The words washed over the other woman like water over a duck’s back.

“That’s the thing, Cordelia,” the Warden smiled. “You’re not my equal. And if that’s hard to swallow, you only have yourself to blame: you had months, years to learn namelore on your own.”

Cordelia scoffed. Quite the simplification.

“Would you have taught me, Catherine, if I had asked?” she mocked. “Are tutors in the art so easy to find? For some skills time is the only teacher.”

It was not as if she had not sought instruction. But namelore was not committed to books, its rules were often obscure and there was only so far reading stories would get Cordelia when she had to deal with heroes from all over Calernia. The few heroes she had been in a position to interrogate were usually new and shallow in learning: even Frederic, perhaps the most seasoned hero on her side, freely admitted that he still had much to learn.

“I’m a villain, there would have been no point,” the Warden dismissed. “Which you might have known if you’d asked me. Or if you’d asked any hero but those few you trust – that is, those who already obey you.”

“Is having allies a black mark as well, now?” Cordelia said. “An interesting development.”

The insinuation that she only trusted through control was particularly rich, coming from the Black Queen. The same woman who had put a knife to the throat of every living being on Calernia to force her enshrinement into the Grand Alliance.

“Not a large one,” Catherine scorned. “How many heroes would even back you in an election, First Prince of the Chosen?”

A pregnant pause.

“Ten, fifteen?” she ventured.

The number was roughly accurate, in all likeliness. That the vast majority of these were Proceran was another bitter pill to swallow. It was a weakness, but one she had not had great opportunity to mend. Nearly all Chosen had been on the fronts, far from Salia, and private correspondence with any would justly have been seen by the Highest Assembly as a political act. In a cut of irony, now that the heroes were nearly all in Salia it was even more complicated to approach any of them in private.

The perception that she intended to become Warden through a coup would have... grave consequences, she had grasped.

“Not even a third of the heroes, the very people you’re supposed to lead,” the Warden of the East said, shaking her head.

“I have not yet made my case to them,” Cordelia said, maintaining an even tone. “I would prefer to make it from a stronger position, it is true, but do not mistake timing for inability.”

“So confident they’ll bend your away after a speech,” the Warden chuckled. “How the Hells would you know if that’ll work, Cordelia? You’ve spent years seething about heroes do wrong, but have you actually ever learned what makes them tick? Why do they act the way they do?”

A litany of variations on ‘I believed it was right’ and ‘I followed instinct’ had been her answer when she asked, usually.

“The reason is not as important as the result,” Cordelia replied instead.

The Warden squinted at her.

“Is that you, Tariq?” she said, grinning nastily. “You’re looking good, for a dead man.”

The blue-eyed princess kept the twitch of fury the barb had caused away from her face, instead dismissing the rejoinder with a curt gesture.

“That the Grey Pilgrim committed atrocities does not mean his every act and word was wrong,” Cordelia said, heat bleeding into her tone. “Only that he committed atrocities and was the kind of man who would.”

Calm, she must be calm as the surface of a pond. Catherine thrived in chaos, in the heat of argument. Cordelia would win by keeping her head and grasping why this conversation seemed to have no end point.

“And that is my very point, Warden,” she pressed. “Why Tariq Fleetfoot murdered a town full of innocents does not matter. His reasons, his reasoning, they do not matter: only that he did. I do not need to understand his every thought to condemn his actions.”

Centering herself, smoothing away the last of the anger, she leaned into the opening.

“Besides, for all your harping on about understanding heroes how many of them agree on anything of note?” Cordelia continued. “You pretend there is some sort of common heroic mindset, but half of them would be at each other’s throats without a greater threat looming over them. You reproach me the lack of something that, by and large, does not exist.”

That rejoinder bought her a moment to think. There is no gain for you through this conversation , Cordelia thought. Berating me into dropping my claim is a waste of time when you have half a dozen more direct tools to ensure I lose. And she’d had the impression that Catherine favoured her claim, besides. Was this a favour, then, an attempt to help Cordelia sharpen her claim? It seemed unlikely. So what is it that you are attempting to accomplish, Catherine?

The Warden scoffed.

“Now you’re being naïve,” Catherine said. “Do you think Hanno is popular with heroes because he’s pleasant and good with a sword? He understands what they want, knows what lines they’ll fight him over, and navigates that terrain. You, on the other hand?”

Even in the faint red glow, the outline of a sneer could be seen.

“You’re a diplomat who never learned the language of the other side of the table. You can get by, sure, but in every conversation how much do you miss?”

Which was not untrue in principle, she thought, but stood an empty objection in practice.

“Hypotheticals,” Cordelia calmly replied, circling the throne as she spoke. “Generalities. You stick to those because there are no true examples to draw in, Catherine. Those that you could, you agreed with my answer. Sometimes even supported it.”

The Warden of the East stood behind the throne, the princess before it, and she took back the cup she had left on the stone. The wine was still terrible, but to a parched throat it would be better than nothing.

“You have no practicals, Cordelia,” Catherine harshly said. “That’s the entire fucking point of what I’m saying: your record with heroes is line after line of nothings. It’s not enough to avoid most mistakes. It’s not something that lands in your lap if you’re the least wrong, you have to win it.”

She snorted, face disappearing as a stream of smoke spewed out.

“But here’s a practical, since you like them so much,” the Warden of the East said. “You want to be a leader of heroes, Cordelia, when you know so little of them it would barely fill a thimble and most of them wouldn’t trust you to empty a chamber pot.”

Trust could be won. It was not an auspicious beginning, she would concede, but beginnings were what you made of them.

“But bad as that is,” Catherine continued, “worse is that you never considered making the sacrifices that would have made up for your lack. You know who might have filled you in on namelore, done it eagerly even?”

The smiled turned sharp.

“Hanno of Arwad.”

“A rival claimant,” Cordelia replied. “This is nonsense.”

“Would he be your rival right now, if you’d asked him a year ago?” Catherine retorted. “If you’d reached out after the Arsenal, tried to understand the heroes instead of sitting on your anger and pride?”

Yes , Cordelia’s mind whispered, but she was not as certain as she would have liked. She was not without faults. If she were, the last words she had spoken to her uncle would not have been in anger.

“Much can be changed if one shuffles around the past,” Cordelia said. “And regrets are easily found. Or are you still proud of your journey to Keter?”

“It was a fruitful disaster,” the Warden easily replied.

Unashamed even now.

“You have known many of those,” she mildly said. “From the Liesse Rebellion to the bloody end of the Dread Empire. Are you so certain you want to revisit old mistakes?”

She drank from the cup, more to wet her lips and win breathing room than to drink . You are going to shrug it off again , Cordelia thought. Because this is not a match in your eyes, is it? You do not win by getting the better part of the argument.

“We’d be here all night, but I’m game,” the Warden laughed. “It’s not my time that’s running out.”

The Lycaonese princess stilled in surprise.

“Now now, Cordelia,” Catherine chided. “Surely you didn’t think keeping me talking would delay the ritual, did you? It can keep going without my hand guiding it.”

It made no sense, she angrily thought. If all that Catherine wanted was to consume the Book of Some Things, then there was no need for all this theatre. Cordelia was a valuable hostage, she could have been kept in a cell and left to rot. Instead she was here, circling an empty throne and talking with the person whose time was most valuable in all this affair. The Warden was getting something out of this conversation, otherwise she would not be having it, but Cordelia simply could not tell what .

“What happened to the Sword of Judgement when he came to the tower?” Cordelia asked.

“We had a pleasant talk,” Catherine easily replied. “And he was tossed back out.”

You cannot beat us through this , Cordelia thought. No, that was untrue. In every way that matters you have already beaten us, so why is it that you are still playing? Even if some feline impulse of cruelty had taken her, the Warden did not have the time to torment the defeated. It made no sense. Why would she keep playing a game she had already won? The princess drank the last of the wine, washed it down. And as she set it down hastily, almost dropping it, she froze. Remembered another time she had stood across a very dangerous woman and heard a cup topple down.

You kept playing a game, Cordelia thought, when you had not yet won. And simply because she was defeated, because Hanno of Arwad was defeated, did not mean Catherine Foundling had won. She found the Warden of the East’s dark eye, glimmering red. It was never us you were playing against, was it? Her pulse thrummed, she straightened her back. She had found the thread, now she only needed to follow it down to the end.

“And how many sins did you hang around dear Hanno’s neck?” Cordelia too lightly asked.

“Enough,” she laughed. “You know, I actually think that all this enmity between you two goes back to a single moment.”

“Do you now?”

The Warden breathed in deep, face veiled by the dark, and answered through a wreath of smoke.

“The first time you saw each other,” Catherine said. “When he entered that Chamber, spun that coin and you caught it. You each thought you understood the other, for a moment. And you’ve paid the price for that ever since.”

She ran a hand atop the back of the throne, as if amused.

“He thought he was looking at someone who was Good enough to be heroine,” the Warden told her, “and so your every compromise since has been a disappointment. You, on the other hand?”

“By all means,” Cordelia pleasantly smiled, “do deign to inform me of what I believe.”

The one-eyed queen wagged a finger at her.

“You, Cordelia, saw that he respected your stepping in,” the Warden of the East said. “And you thought that meant he respected law, respected how Procer is run. That made him the good hero, the trustworthy one.”

Cordelia’s belly clenched, for that had the faintest ring of truth to it.

“Only he didn’t actually care for either of those things,” Catherine said. “He accepted it as a courtesy, from Named to Named. Because the way you saw it, you might not have the power but you have the conviction – and that’s the part that matters, anyway.”

“You revisit the past so often one might believe you would rather live there,” Cordelia sharply replied.

“It’s an interesting night, that’s all,” the one-eyed queen said, elbow against the throne and chin on her hand. “Plenty there to ponder about. Like the way that you turned down a Name that night, Cordelia.”

“It would not have made anything better,” the princess replied, and meant every word.

“I don’t entirely disagree,” Catherine said. “It was a wise decision in some ways, but it also speaks to the one sin I’ll hang around your neck that outweighs all of Hanno’s: you don’t actually want to be Named.”

A sliver of incredulous laughter escaped her lips before she could smother it.

“Then pray tell, what exactly has all this been in the service of?” Cordelia said, gesturing at the night around them.

“Not wanting it,” the Warden smiled. “You’re doing it because you think it’s your responsibility, your duty, but fight all you like under that flaking coat of paint I still see the same woman that was on the floor of the Highest Assembly that night.”

Cordelia took a step back, jaw clenching.

“The one who snatched Judgement’s verdict out of the air and swore mortal laws for mortal men.”

“It is not that simple,” she bit out.

“It never is,” the Warden said. “And I think you’re right about a lot of things, Cordelia. Heroes should have someone calling them to account. But it’s not enough to be right. To be clever or to be wise. You also have to win it. Because know who else believes that just being right is enough?

She saw the end of that sentence before it came, but that did nothing to dull the sting.

“The same lot you say you’re going to make toe the line.”

“It is not the same thing ,” Cordelia snarled.

The calm, the calm failed her. How dare she?

“A Name isn’t a crown,” the Warden of the East said. “You don’t just get to have it because it fits your head, Cordelia. And the way I see it, you’re not Good enough to be anointed or strong enough to be a tyrant so what’s left? Inheritance ?”

The one-eyed queen leaned closer, as if to whisper a confidence.

“Whose death is going to give you your power this time, Cordelia?” she gently asked. “Even if you spend the Augur down to the last inch, you’ll run out of kin long before you stand my equal.”

And as the words slid between her ribs like a knife, the cruelty of it opened her eye. It was not an accident, so barbed a phrase. And yet it won nothing. So the cruelty is the point. The Warden of the East had come for her certainties, her belief, with methodical brutality. One after another, sparing nothing. And that is the point. That is what you gain.

Inflicting that before she was tossed out of the tower to land at Hanno’s side in the grass.

“Are you truly so eager,” Cordelia Hasenbach quietly said, “to make yourself the villain?”

“It’s habit by now,” Catherine Foundling confessed, sounding just a touch too grieved to be lying. “But there’s power in it, always has been. So ask yourself, Cordelia, before you make yourself into a heroine” what is that you want that power for?”

She rose as she spoke, hand knocking over the cup that had been left there, and as Cordelia saw it tumbling down she felt a whisper.

Darkness.

—

She woke up in the grass, a man standing over her. Cordelia Hasenbach met Hanno of Arwad’s eyes and a long moment passed.

“Rough night?” the Sword of Judgement drily asked.

Interlude: Occidental V

“Adversity tempers, power tests.”

– Helikean saying

It was as if all the world had been cut down to three sights: the night sky above, the pale plains below and the tall tower bridging them. The dark was quiet, and there was not another soul to be found for miles around them.

“We are returned to Creation,” Hanno said, offering his hand to the prone princess.

Cordelia Hasenbach looked at it as it were a snake, then something like contempt flickered across her face. Jaw squared, she took the hand and he helped her rise from the grass. Her legs were unsteady but the First Prince was a stubborn woman: she toughed it out until her stance firmed.

“Do you know how much time has passed?” the princess asked.

“Since you were taken? I can only guess,” he replied. “But between my arrival here and yours, barely time enough for a kettle of water to boil. Arcadia makes sport of any who would measure its time.”

Had it been hours for those in the realm of the fae, moments? More the former than the latter, he guessed, but guesses were all he had to give. Hanno waited as Hasenbach gathered her bearings, taking in the utter emptiness of the plain around them before her gaze moved to the tower. The gate that Christophe had smashed open still lay sagging on its hinges, almost an invitation.

“I suspect,” Cordelia Hasenbach said, “that passing the threshold unprepared would be a costly mistake.”

“It ends soon,” Hanno quietly agreed. “Have your instincts grown enough to feel it?”

Cool blue eyes considered him. No answer came.

“It is in the air,” Hanno told her. “The roads grow short for the lack of ground left to tread.”

It was like a shortness of breath or unease in the limbs. The sensation that the story would soon reach its conclusion and that he was not ready. Here and now, the two of them alone under the sky, was the last chance to turn it around.

“Like an edge,” the princess finally said. “It feels like the moment before defeat, when the wheels and cogs are already moving but just before they snap into place.”

Hanno nodded. It was impressive, he thought, that even as a claimant she would have so sharp an impression. But then the First Prince had always been an impressive woman, hadn’t she? That had never been the trouble with her.

“The threshold is the point of no return,” the dark-skinned man pensively said. “But we have time before that, all the room that can be found in the boundary between Arcadia and Creation.”

That was what the world whispered to him, the current his crippled hand could almost feel. Time was undefined now, made... malleable by the gap between the two realms. But the story would lock into place the moment they crossed the threshold, leaving only the closure.

“Of course we do,” the First Prince said, sounding disgusted. “How many steps ahead did she plan this?”

Hanno’s lips thinned.

“Too many,” he said.

Blues eyes left the tower, returning to him.

“Then this conversation,” Cordelia Hasenbach calmly said, “is what determines victory and defeat.”

Victory and defeat, huh. Loaded words, on a night like this one: whose meaning for them was to be taken as gospel? His, the First Prince’s, Catherine’s? Or maybe that was the point of it all, he thought. Choosing whose lines in the sand determined the nature of the game.

“I am beginning to believe,” Hanno said, “that thinking in those terms is the first mistake. In a fight, someone must lose.”

“And what would you call this instead?” the First Prince of Procer said, gesturing around them.

Grass painted pale by moonlight, the depthless dark above and in between the tower that belonged to neither. Like stairs joining the heavens and the dirt. Going up or going down? Not something you could know, Hanno thought, before your foot first touched the stone.

“A journey, perhaps,” the Sword of Judgement finally replied.

Something with a beginning and an end, but not a battle. Not without struggle, for so few things were, but not something defined by struggle.

“A journey,” Cordelia Hasenbach repeated, tone musing.

The princess’s hand rose, fingers extended, as below them both the grass shivered from the breeze. Like she was trying to catch the wind.

“Maybe,” the fair-haired woman said. “But I am not so certain you and I are on the same one, Hanno of Arwad.”

A reply came to mind silver-quick, from the old law-riddles of Arishot’s Ruminations. Can strangers ever be on the same journey? He’d loved those scrolls as a young court scribe in Arwad, the way they forced you to think. Arishot had not written to make laws but instead lawmakers, asking questions that bent one’s understanding until flaws were revealed. That riddle warned against common blame, Hanno had thought, against faulting a rower and a captain the same way for a crime. But which of us is the rower, Cordelia Hasenbach, and the captain?

“I had thought,” Hanno admitted, “that this would end by the ascription of fault.”

The First Prince studied him, gaze composed.

“But no longer?”

Hanno snorted, suddenly tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.

“What does it matter,” he said, “if the pool one of us drowns in is a few feet deeper than the other’s?”

Hasenbach looked away as if burned by the sight of him.

“She took you to task as well,” the First Prince said.

“With method and great enthusiasm,” Hanno replied.

Some of that he knew she must have sat on for years. Too much of that had felt like a valve being opened, a sac of venom being drained.

“I as well,” the First Prince said, then hesitated.

Hanno patiently waited.

“She is convincing, I know,” the princess said. “That does not mean she is right.”

“I spent most of my time on the grass,” he admitted, “finishing the argument in my mind. Speaking the retorts I could not place, that escaped me in the moment.”

He could see now, looking back, that she had angered him on purpose. He would have spoken better calm, seen more clearly. He could have pointed it out it was absurd to pretend that the Saint or the Pilgrim to killing innocents in the pursuit of ending an evil was equivalent to a villain simply killing for evil. That her sacrifices, the weight they had given her Name, did not make her worthy . Just strong. That Hanno himself had made mistakes, but that if those disqualified him from wardenship then her own would make her the last woman allowed anywhere her title.

Like a fencing match, he had played it again and again in his mind. Every time swatting away more of her points, scoring more of his own. But one had never budged no matter what he cast against it.

“Did it change anything?” Hasenbach asked.

He breathed out slowly.

“Nothing that matters,” he admitted.

That was the difference between a fencing match and a duel, when it came down to it. One was won on points, the other ended when the opponent was killed. A thousand small cuts mattered nothing in the face of that single blow going through the heart. Do you think claimants grow on trees, Hann o? And no matter how much he turned around the words in his palm, looking for the fault, he had found none. Cool blue eyes were studying him again, looking for something in the cast of his face.

“What is it that she said that shook you so?” the First Prince asked.

An unpleasant truth , the dark-skinned hero thought. That I never stopped to consider that you might be right and I might be wrong. That your claim could be the equal to mine instead of an obstacle to overcome.

“That I should have asked you a question years ago,” Hanno replied. “W-

—

“-hat is it that you want, Cordelia Hasenbach?”

His tone was as serious as it was earnest, and still Cordelia almost laughed. She looked away so he might not notice, eyes finding the vast stretch of the plains. The sea of grass where strands of shadow and light interwove, under the starlit ink of the endless sky above them. Two seeming eternities pressing down on the stark silhouette of the tower, a stubborn nail refusing to be hammered in. But nothing could fight forever, Cordelia knew. Instead you were used up grain by grain until not a speck was left, the defeat so quiet and creeping you did not know of it before it embraced you.

What did she want?

For her uncle to be alive, her family with him. That the realm she had spent half her life healing had not become a wasteland ruin, that she could have kept everyone alive. That she had won more and lost less, that she had been the kind of woman who could have saved Procer instead of being the custodian of its death throes. That Calernia might know one long and lasting summer, a golden peace and time of plenty. That she was not carrying with her so many ugly choices, so many bitter compromises. And maybe, beneath it all, that she was still the same woman than before all the sacrifices she had made.

But that was looking back, and not even the Gods could return the arrow of time to the quiver. So instead Cordelia looked forward and sought her answer, shaving away the dross one cut at a time until there was only the bone of it left. It was even simpler than she had thought.

“I want my successor to be able to hang the Peregrine,” the princess said, then frowned.

That was not quite it. The arrow missed by a thumb.

“No, I speak untrue.”

She breathed out, groping at the truth, and finally the words came to her,

“I want a world where it is a given the Peregrine will hang,” Cordelia Hasenbach said. “Where there is no doubt that someone, anyone , who murders an entire town of innocents will die for it. That there will be no excuse, no protection, no talk of a Choir giving absolution or a greater good hiding behind the mountain of corpses.”

Catherine had talked about so many heroes, about that night in the Chamber of Assembly and the crossroads of the Arsenal, but these were not the source from which it all flowed. It was that brutal campaign through the heartlands, the Black Knight burning granaries and villages to kill thousands in starvation. It was the Grey Pilgrim condemning hundreds of innocents to a painful death to catch his foe, only to then keep him alive . It had been the seed of the realization that rules, laws, did not really apply to them. That only Named were entitled to dole out justice to Named, that whatever the first colour of the cloak it always ended up red.

The Sword of Judgement took a step back, turning to face her instead of standing side by side, and Cordelia knew it had begun.

“Princes can destroy towns as well,” the Sword of Judgement said, tone even. “Many have. How many were brought to justice by law?”

I fought the Great War as girl , Cordelia thought. Do you truly think you have anything at all to teach me about the cruelties of princes? She had not led her people south as an army because peace somehow did not occur to her. No one raised in the shadow of the Crown and the Plague could be ignorant of the costs of wars, even the most necessary ones.

“How many were brought to justice by heroes?” Cordelia replied.

Before the man could reply she pushed on.

“And I do not mean in the last decade,” the blue-eyed princess said. “That is the scale of the immediate, the short precedent. It is not an honest examination of the past. Since the Principate was founded, Hanno of Arwad, how many princes and princesses have deservedly been slain by heroes?”

The brown-eyed man frowned.

“Given a few hours I would be able to give you a precise answer,” Hanno said, “but at the moment I cannot.”

Cordelia waved that away. She was not trying to ambush him, pretend that lacking an exact number would mean she somehow won the argument.

“Imprecise would be enough,” she replied. “Thirty, forty, a hundred?”

He mulled that, eyes going distant for a few heartbeats. The air pulsed faintly with power. Aspect , she thought.

“Less than eighty,” he finally said. “More than thirty.”

And more than she had expected, but not enough to prove her wrong.

“It is a drop in the bucket,” Cordelia told him. “There have been thousands of princes since the founding of Procer. Hundreds of them must have been genuinely vile and malicious. Some lived out their lives keeping their throne, I have no doubt, but most of them did not.”

A crown was not power absolute and uncontested. Chosen struggled with understanding that when it came to doing Good, but even more when it came to the other side of the coin: no royalty on Calernia would be able to be truly, genuinely evil without consequence even if there were not a single hero in existence. People did not enjoy being ruled by tyrants, even skillful ones. And in the end, a ruler only had power so long as people followed them.

“Some were tried before the Highest Assembly, but I would wager not so many more than heroes have slain,” she continued. “It is not a common procedure. Most were removed by their families, by the outrage of the people, by blades or poison.”

Hanno shook his head.

“You think of heroes as wandering forces,” he said, “but that is true of very few.”

Cordelia hid her irritation. That was not at all what they had been discussing.

“For every Pilgrim and Saint there are dozens who became Named seeking to end an injustice and would then not stray far from that mandate,” he said. “When finished they will beat the sword back into a ploughshare, return the enchanted ring to the old woman in the woods.”

“We stray from the topic,” she told him.

“We do not,” Hanno calmly replied. “Named are not born out of the Gods waving a hand: those that killed princes were, in all likeliness, brutalized by those same princes. All those means to unseat tyrants you lay out failed for so long and in the face of so great a cruelty that a champion was empowered by Above to end that evil.”

The blonde princess paused, genuinely taken aback. It had not occurred to her, truly, that most of the Chosen who had killed Procerans princes would be Procerans as well. In the back of her mind she had always thought of it as a foreign intervention. An outside force meddling. It was jarring to realize there was no solid reason to believe that was true.

“That such heroes existed at all,” Hanno of Arwad continued, “is the mark of the utter failure of the means you defend.”

He shook his head.

“You even defend the poison and blades of others while condemning the same tools in a hero’s hands,” he said. “I will not force on you my belief that becoming a hero means one seeks to do Good, but are you truly going to argue that it makes people less worthy?”

He was not wrong, Cordelia thought, to chide her for having let her gaze shy away from part of the truth. But that did not mean he was right. His blinders were no smaller than her own.

“It does not,” the tall princess replied, “but neither does becoming Named take someone beyond laws. It is true, I cannot deny, that you have spoken the truth: the Highest Assembly, the natural means, they fail. Have failed and will fail again.”

This was not a revelation for her. Cordelia had spent years convincing, arm-twisting and sometimes outright bribing the Assembly into backing what she believed to be necessary reforms. She had no illusions about the average character of royalty.

“Yet that does not mean decisions about the lives of thousands – sometimes even millions! – should be blindly entrusted to whoever first arbitrarily received power from Above,” she retorted. “Good intentions are not enough : principle will not make up for a bad tax policy or lopsided trade rights.”

Christophe de Pavanie was the man she thought of then. Well-meaning in so many ways, but even now still of narrow perspective and limited in judgement. Paired with power as a Named that could make him rise among the most influential of an empire, it was a recipe for disaster. At best he would be a puppet, at worse a stone around the neck of the people he had taken upon himself to rule.

“Ruling, making the decisions of a ruler, is a skill,” Cordelia said. “One that requires a lifetime of training and that very few Chosen have cultivated. A bad decision by a good man will inflict a great deal more suffering than a good decision by a bad man.”

A deep breath, steadying herself after the long tirade.

“You are right, the... order of things is imperfect,” the princess said. “But that does not mean heroes should be allowed to do as they wish, it means the order must be fixed .”

“Then fix it,” the Sword of Judgement bluntly replied. “Why would any of us oppose the world being bettered?”

“You do not have to oppose it,” Cordelia harshly said. “You make it unnecessary by being who you are. Why should there be significant reform to anything at all, when no matter how dire the situation becomes a hero will emerge to save the day?”

“You are arguing in the favour of disaster,” Hanno slowly said, incredulous. “That lives should not have been saved?”

“I am arguing,” she said, “that heroes have been killing villains and wicked princes since the founding of the Principate and it has fixed nothing. That Chosen excise tumours but do not, cannot heal the sickness that causes them.”

And because of that, Cordelia realized in a moment of clarity, she had come to think of them as being part of the trouble. One of the reasons for it. But that was unfair of her. A suspicion born of the souring experiences she had had with Chosen. Blaming them for existing was like blaming a man for not allowing his throat to be cut. About that much the Sword of Judgement was right and she had been wrong.

“And that does not mean they should not exist,” Cordelia said, “but it means that so long as Chosen remain the final arbiters of what is good, we cannot grow . So long as we leave the decision of what can be allowed and what must be refused in the hands of a handful smiled on by the Gods Above, nothing can change.”

And that was what the Liesse Accords were, deep down, the reason that the Lycaonese princess had fought tooth and nail over provisions and sections but never once doubted she would sign it when the negotiations ended. It was a treaty that let mortals dictate rules to Named.

“That world cannot be built so long as laws do not apply to everyone,” Cordelia said. “Until it is Calernia, not the Chosen few, that decide what the lines in the sand are.”

The dark-haired man had gone still as stone, looking at her as if he had never seen her before.

“They gave us a choice, Hanno of Arwad, the only one that really matters,” she quietly said. “Let us make it.”

—

The irony, Hanno thought, was that in many ways Cordelia Hasenbach was like the very people she distrusted. The ironclad conviction that made up her spine, that he had not grasped was at the heart of all she did, was the very trait that led people to become Named. It was something Creation reacted to, embraced. And though Hasenbach might despise him for the comparison, as she spoke she had reminded him of no one so much as Tariq Isbili. The Pilgrim’s own iron law had been different – the alleviation of suffering, no matter the cost – but looking at the First Prince of Procer he saw in her the same alloy of idealism and brutal pragmatism that had been the Peregrine’s signature.

It was an unsettling thought.

“The changes you speak of,” Hanno said, “the world would be better off for them.”

The princess’s lips quirked into a smile that did not reach her eyes.

“But,” Cordelia Hasenbach said.

“So long as the first step to them is making heroes obey corrupt authorities,” he told her, “there is no chance of them ever coming to pass.”

If the foundation of her reform was to make Named bow to the very evil they had risen to defeat, then the ideal was nothing but fool’s gold.

“Then let them obey something else,” she said. “Rules that crowns had a hand in making but do not belong to the crowns.”

He was not a fool, to need every word spelled out to him.

“The Liesse Accords,” Hanno said.

Catherine Foundling’s dream, the justification for her every atrocity: a muzzle on every atrocity that would come after her. As was so often the way of the Warden of the East, it was the finest of intentions raised atop a mountain of corpses. Hanno believed in their worth, but not that way that Catherine did. The rules would do good for Calernia, curb excesses, but in time they would become a tool for oppression as well. He had no illusions about their permanence, that their ability to better the world would be more than temporary.

“They can accomplish what queens and princesses cannot,” the First Prince said. “A set of rules all will abide by. A first step heroes will accept.”

“And for that you would become Warden of the West,” Hanno thoughtfully said. “To ensure that heroes follow the rules.”

The blonde princess looked faintly embarrassed as she nodded.

“I am not unaware of my weaknesses as a claimant,” Cordelia said. “I lack knowledge of namelore and have not cultivated many close relationships with heroes.”

Hanno hummed.

“But for what you envision the Warden of the West to be, even with those weaknesses you remain the better candidate,” he plainly stated.

What she described might be best described as the heroes of Calernia being made into a guild and Cordelia Hasenbach as the head of that guild. It was not a position that would require skill at arms or even a great deal of personal power: her function would be that of an administrator and a diplomat, not a captain. It was also a position that would require her to abdicate all power in Procer, Hanno knew, a sacrifice that would earn her some respect. That she was willing to make that sacrifice did not surprise him as much as it would have an hour ago.

Tariq had never taken the Tattered Throne.

“I was expecting more of an argument from you,” the First Prince delicately said.

“I do not agree with your vision,” Hanno clarified. “But I do understand that from your perspective pressing your claim is the most sensible answer.”

“Yet you disagree,” the princess said.

“Not with your intentions,” he replied. “There have been enough misunderstandings between us, so I will speak plainly: you do not need to be Warden of the West to achieve this.”

It would help her, certainly, but it was not necessary. And it was turning the Role to a direction that it did not need to be turned – or should, considering that a guildmistress would not be what Above’s champions would need in the wake of the war on Keter. Coolness returned to the blue eyes considering him.

“Indeed?”

“Cardinal will be the seat of the Accords,” Hanno said. “And your interest lies in them more than in Named themselves. Taking up a position there as a high officer and a diplomat will place you in a position to shape laws and curb abuses exactly as you wish.”

And it would not force her into the position of leader of the heroes, a position she would not enjoy or be particularly skilled at.

“If your worry is lack of influence over Named, then change the Accords to reflect what you believe is necessary,” he told her. “I would support this. And as Warden, I would have no difficulty working with you.”

She studied him for a long moment, then slowly nodded.

“To my own surprise,” the blue-eye princess said, “I find myself believing you would try.”

Hanno grimaced.

“But,” he echoed.

“The question has been long in coming from my side as well,” Cordelia said. “What is it that you want, Hanno of Arwad?”

For all the gravity of the situation, Hanno thought, it felt as if they were children declaiming a play at each other. Taking turns, trading tirades. They were, in a way. Fate was heavy around them, like the air before a storm, and so far in the journey every word mattered. They had run out of room to maneuver. So Hanno considered his answer carefully even though the words came easy, looking for the heart of it. It was too late for grievances to matter, for might-have-beens to be worth bringing up. Instead he looked for the source, the kernel moment of why he had come to stand here.

It was not the Arsenal, he realized to his faint surprise. The disappointments of that fortnight had been long in the coming, more flower than root.

“I want a world,” Hanno said, “where you could not have called the Tenth Crusade.”

The First Prince flinched. She had reason to. It all went back to that first mistake, didn’t it? The moment where the woman in front of him had decided to raise Above’s banner without understanding what that decision meant. Where she had put the lives of tens of thousands, of most heroes on the continent, on the line because of terribly mundane reasons. Because Procer had been plagued by disaffected mercenaries, because it had been wary of a resurgent and hostile Callow on its flank. The real reasons for the Tenth Crusade had nothing to do with the Black Queen or the Doom of Liesse: the groundwork for it being called had begun being laid years before.

“I do not believe heroes should rule,” Hanno said. “We are forged for a reason, to combat an evil, and that defines what we should be: exceptional power granted to fight an exceptional evil. Come and gone in a few moons, like fireflies.”

How many Grey Pilgrims and Saints of Swords were there, really? Sometimes not even a single one in a generation. Hanno believed that a dozen heroes fighting under the Grand Alliance would no longer be Named by now if they had not been drafted into the war against Keter. Their foe and mandate had been clear, stretched into the present only by the great threat looming over all the living.

“But we no longer live in a world where that is possible,” he told her. “Calernia is not the same place it was even a century ago: the kingdoms are more powerful, the cities larger, the borders push ever further into the wilds. It is no longer a place where someone can simply disappear .”

A century ago, the thought of something like the Truce and Terms would have been laughable. Named were too hard to find, too spread out, and who could even enforce these rules even should they be set down? Now half the younger heroes took them for granted and even the older ones expected that when a great Evil next came to Calernia the same bargain would be struck with villains.

“It is no longer possible to take up the sword and retire into obscurity after having hung it back above the mantle,” Hanno said. “Heroes are sought, followed, drawn out by mortal powers. And then they are used for purposes beyond what they were meant for. From that, evil flows.”

Like Christophe, whose power and candour had driven the House of Langevin to try to entrap him into some plot. The Mirror Knight should have never so much as spoken to a Langevin: he had come into his Name to protect the Elfin Dames, to face the Wicked Enchantress that would come to destroy them. If not for the Dead King’s march, he might never have left the lakeside town of his birth. Hanno had not been offended to learn that the Langevins had sunk hooks into him. Why would he be, when the plain truth of the matter was that unscrupulous souls had taken advantage of the vulnerability a good man had risk to save every living being on Calernia?

And it would keep happening again and again, the corrupt and powerful twisting power meant to do Good, so long as there was no one standing between heroes and earthly crowns. Someone who could free their hands to do Good and steer them away from being used.

“There is some truth in that,” the fair-haired princess finally said. “I did not understand what I was unleashing, when I called the Tenth Crusade. I erred and many paid for it.”

He slowly nodded. It was only the shallowest layer of what he had said, but it was the beginning of an understanding.

“But your words are not entirely true, are they?” the First Prince said. “Heroes seek crowns as well, ‘Prince White’.”

The disdain for the title was palpable but Hanno was not offended. How could he be when he agreed?

“Yes,” he enthused. “ Exactly . I should not be holding the authority that I took up.”

For the first time since he had met her, he saw the First Prince of Procer visibly taken aback.

“I have had to because Named and kingdoms have become so intertwined as to be indistinguishable,” Hanno said, “which is not a state of affairs that should exist.”

It was not as if he had wanted to seize the reins. But what other choice had there been, when failing to do so might doom all of Calernia? If Hanno did not become the Warden of the West, did not lead Good’s forces against the walls of Keter, he foresaw no victory. The First Prince was fit to rule, but for all that it needed a foundation of authority the Name was not about ruling.

“I have not deluded myself into thinking I am a fit ruler, Cordelia Hasenbach,” Hanno told her. “I have to bear a crown, let it be a firefly’s crown: gone in a few moons, when the darkness abates. And after the need has passed-”

“You would set it down and stand as Warden of the West,” the First Prince calmly said. “Spending your days ensuring that heroes stay true to their purpose by keeping them apart from earthly powers, stand as the intercessor between them.”

“It is not that the world is corrupt and heroes without fault,” he said. “Above’s blessing does not make Named more than men, beyond pettiness or cruelty. But that power comes in recognition of a need to do Good, to make the world a little better.”

And maybe the princess was right and one day the world would have no need for heroes, but that day had not come. Perhaps Calernia had changed, but heroes could as well: they could meet the Age of Order on their feet instead of being overtaken by it.

“All the world needs to do is let them,” Hanno pleaded.

The night air had stillness to it in the wake of his words, the First Prince’s face a bland mask as she studied him in silence.

“I can see it now, I think,” Cordelia Hasenbach finally said, tone eerily calm. “The trap.”

Hanno frowned.

“The Warden’s?” he asked.

“The Intercessor’s,” the First Prince replied, shaking her head. “Because whoever wins, Hanno, whichever of us steps forward, something breaks .”

“Something is lost when a claimant wins over another,” Hanno slowly said. “That is only natural.”

The blue-eyed princess half-smiled but did not explain.

“You do not need to be Warden of the West to achieve what you spoke of,” she said instead.

“It is perhaps the only way to achieve it,” Hanno replied, shaking his head.

“It was pointed out to me tonight on several occasions,” the princess said, “that what Named do not follow laws or titles but the individual. It is power personal, not institutional, and that is the very thing you seek to preserve. Your successors, Hanno will not command the same respect.”

“That can be trained,” he replied.

“Can it?” she said, tone doubtful. “Even if that is the case, it will not change the bone of the matter: the respect will come again from the individual, not the Name. In other words, the Name does not matter .”

Hanno stilled. Looked for a reply, a rejoinder, a way to disagree.

“You can do all of this as the White Knight,” the First Prince said. “You were already the shield of the heroes, Hanno, and you have little interest in the Accords themselves or the ministry of kingdoms. So why do you need to be the Warden of the West to do all this?”

He groped for his answer, feeling lost in a way he had not since the Light returned to him. And he found that he did not have one. That all the thoughts he had put together, building back the wall broken by the silence of the Tribunal, were built on a foundation that did not exist. It was true, all of it, but it was built on thin air. As if from the very moment he had heard- his stomach clenched. And there it was. The root of the mistake.

“Because,” Hanno quietly said, “there is a Warden of the East.”

—

Clarity, Cordelia thought, could be such a cruel thing.

“We are not claimants,” she said. “We are the bears in the pit.”

And no matter who won, the bears always lost. The hero’s face drew tight but, tellingly, he did not disagree.

“You believe the Intercessor is behind this,” Hanno said. “How?”

“Gods, who knows?” the blonde princess tiredly said. “Perhaps she pulled strings at the Arsenal, or on the night we faced each other in Salia. It could be a hundred other little moments where a push or a pull made a difference and we would never know.”

Her smile was bitter.

“Has anyone aside from the Black Queen ever been able to untangle her plots?”

The hero jerked back as if he had been slapped. That was answer enough, Cordelia thought.

“And so we damage Good, whoever becomes Warden,” Hanno of Arwad said, sounding appalled.

“We already have,” Cordelia said. “To add weight to my claim, I promised by abdication as First Prince to Rozala Malanza and her allies in exchange for their support. There is no going back.”

“And I have let myself be crowned prince in all but name,” Hanno quietly replied. “The divisions will no go away no matter who becomes Warden of the West.”

It was worse than that, she thought. Thinking in the scale of the immediate it was a danger, but there was something else awaiting just beyond the horizon.

“Neither of us would have all of Good behind us,” Cordelia said. “Neither of us would be her equal. And on that hobbled leg-”

“-we would venture out to fight the Hidden Horror,” Hanno finished through gritted teeth. “That is...”

Cordelia’s understanding of namelore was still a shallow thing, but even she could see that it would be a catastrophe for two Wardens to face the Dead King without the full weight of what they claimed to stand for behind them. It would be going to war with a gap in your chainmail.

“Why would the Intercessor ever want this?” the Sword of Judgement asked. “She the Dead King’s enemy as much as our own.”

“She wants us to lose I think,” the princess said. “So that when the darkest hour comes she can save us. Entirely on her terms.”

The Wandering Bard had burned too many bridges to get her way otherwise. She could only dictate terms now if the only choice left was between her and annihilation.

“So she poisons the chalice long before we can think to drink,” Hanno grimaced. “That fits her unpleasantly well. Foresight is two thirds of what makes her fearsome.”

And Catherine Foundling was the one who had caught her out. Again.

“We would have torn each other to pieces until only one was left standing, if she had not done all this,” Cordelia admitted.

If she had not come after their every preconception with a knife and dropped them here in the grass, like misbehaving children in need of making up. The dark-skinned hero peered at her closely.

“We have been wrong,” Hanno of Arwad conceded. “That does not make her right.”

“Bears in the pit, Hanno,” Cordelia softly said. “You saw it before I did.”

A long moment passed, silence hanging between them. The breeze caressed the grass.

“Journeys, not a battle,” the Sword of Judgement murmured. “Yours. Mine. Hers.”

Blue eyes met brown, an understanding. They could still end this right.

She did not know who took the first step, but they passed the threshold together.

Chapter 39: Name (Redux)

“Carry with you my blessing and my curse: may you ever get what you deserve.”

– Extract from the ‘Tenets Under Night’, Firstborn religious text

The fabric of Arcadia cracked around me and I grinned. I was so very, very close.

The Book of Some Things struggled furiously against the relentless onslaught of Night, but it had begun a slow descent into loss from the moment the first tendril slithered through a fracture. The artefact’s power was constrained in a way that was literally inhuman, the precision impossible by mortal hands, but no matter how hard the nut if you hammered at it long enough you’d get something to show for it. Brute force all the way through would have take days, maybe even an entire week, but that’d never been the plan. All the Night I could channel into relentless pressure without needing to guide the ritual had just been meant to create those fractures.

The precision work came after, widening the cracks and pulling apart the defences around the Book shard by shard. I could dip out for a bit and let brute force fall down again, but I’d been embellishing the truth when I’d told people that the ritual could end without me. It was technically true, but if I wanted it finished tonight then I’d need to be personally involved. It why I’d rustled up my band of valiant villainous defenders in the first place: one I got my licks in with Hanno and Cordelia, I’d need people to cover for me while I did the labour of smothering the divine Light of hope. You know, metaphorically speaking.

... probably. It would have taken more power than this if I was literally killing hope, I reassured myself.

And the thing was that, deep down, I’d not actually expected this to work. I went against everything I’d been taught: I had cackled atop a flying tower, begun a massive ungainly ritual to destroy something Good while there were heroes in riding distance and just generally monologued at people who might be construed as my rivals should you squint a bit. I had, in other words, behaved in a way that would have made my father roll in his graves if he’d not been given to a pyre. Only now I was standing alone in a room so deeply drenched in shadows it might as well be the night sky, prying apart the shell of the Book as it shone like a furious star, and I was winning .

The Book burned, for a moment washing away even the slightest of shadows, but I snorted.

“Shouldn’t have done that,” I informed it. “Sure, as far as I can tell your source of power is pretty much inexhaustible, but your outflow ...”

The burning Light suddenly flickered, and in the moment of weakness Night swallowed all it had lost and more. The Book struggled, burning bright twice more, but every time it burned shorter and ceded more ground afterwards.

“Like I thought, you have a fixed outflow,” I told the Book. “Like veins, yeah? So when you come at me with all that fire, trying to chase me out of the room, you’re cramming a lot more blood in those veins than there’s supposed to be. Making them burst.”

The Book pulsed, shadows shivering around it.

“You damaged yourself,” I tutted disapprovingly.

And it opened the veins wider for me to slither through, not that I’d give it warning over that. I was still unsure exactly how intelligent the artefact was. Not sentient, as far as I could tell, but it was far from inert. There was a will in there, dumb and blind as it might be.

Leaning forward, I pulled at the Night. Picking through later after layer would have taken too long, especially the tighter shell nearer to the Book itself, but I’d been going deep instead of wide: I only needed to get to the artefact to finish this, not strip it naked. My flesh eye was half-closed, blinded by the Light, but under my eyecloth Night roiled and let me see through a hundred more. It was easier that way to pick my angle, slide between two jagged shards – invisible even to my weaves, only outlined by the press of Night against them – and slip into a crack. Not deep enough I thought, but I had a way around that.

“Hooks,” I ordered, frowning.

Like a thousand little mandibles the Night slipped into the crack bit into the shard, anchoring itself to the power. Like a fishing line I spun out chords of Night from it and hung them behind me, into the great currents of darkness, before rolling a shoulder. Now I just had to put my back into it. All my eyes closed, I breathed out shallowly and emptied my mind. Distractions fell away one after another, swallowed up by the dark, until all that was left was a simple thought: pull . I sunk into it, made it fill me up to the brim for what must have been a hundred years.

A loud crack jolted me out of the state, the sound rippling across the fabric of Arcadia. A long, thin shard broke away and flew up from the massive pressure, disappearing into the currents of Night. I could feel the tapestry of Arcadia wane around me, like a tapestry used as a cutting board. Creation would have been more solid, but I’d chosen Arcadia because rules were looser here in the first place. It’d last long enough anyway, I thought as I learned forward even further. Now there was only a small, smooth shell no broader than my thumb keeping me from getting to the Book.

One more good hit and I was in. I sent out my will, Night rippling around me, and found Archer.

“Report,” I ordered.

“Band of heroes coming from the hills,” Indrani said. “Captured the Royal Conjurer, by the looks of it, but they’re having a hard time with horses on the hill paths. The rest of our guests are contained.”

There were only so many bands of five I had it in me to swat away tonight, so it’d be best to finish this as soon as possible. I’d given the would-be wardens every chance I had to spare. If they couldn’t pull through now, it was on them.

“Do what you can to slow them down,” I said.

There was beat.

“Cat, what’s wrong?” Indrani asked.

“Nothing,” I lied, and cut the tie.

Looking down, I saw that my hands were trembling. From the exertion, I told myself. Not from what I was about to do: attempt to steal Above’s power and devour it whole. I clenched my hands.

“It’s the best of the bad solutions,” I told the Book. “My foundations will be weak, sure, but I’ll have the power to take on the Dead King.”

Just not, I thought, the power to survive him. When two peerless monsters entered the ring, only ruin ensued. I wasn’t sure, couldn’t be, but that was my gut said and these days it was so rarely wrong. I’d be fragile strength I took into the fight and the Hidden Horror would make me pay for that. Maybe I’d make it out anyway, merely crawl out broken, but the odds would be leaning the other way. I stared down my hands until they stopped shaking.

I was a few graveyards past a happy ending.

“So let’s take a swing,” I murmured, “and see where it gets me.”

The power came easy: Night loved a winning battle. The Book’s power felt smooth as an eggshell, without flaw, but I had broken through that before. The battering ram came down, the mangled globe creaking under the weight as I wielded the power in the most simple, brutal way it could be wielded. I waited and watched through a hundred eyes and one, following the shape of the power as it distended under the pressure. And, eventually, fissured. A small break, more along the curve of the last shell than inside it, but there was a slight indent.

I flexed my will, turning pressure to liquid as Night poured down through the slight opening before it could close. It would do. It was weak leverage, but when you had enough strength to wield that could be enough. I wove hook after hook, tightened the weave and raised my arm. I took the deep currents in hand, closed my eyes and pulled . Was I in the dark, or was I the dark? It was hard to tell where the border was. My own heartbeat felt distant, as if I’d been submerged, but I had a lifeline. The chords of Night in my hand, pulling at me as I had pulled at them.

I came back to the world to a splintering sound that echoed of a scream, the shell cracking and breaking as I breathed out and Night tendrils pulled and picked and ripped it all apart. All that effort, I thought as my eyes opened, to expose no more than a thumb’s worth of the Book of Some Things. But exposed it was, and I reached out for the leather-bound book with my hand. Light burned, a sun howling in indignation that I dare to darken it, but I had veiled greater suns than this.

“Fall,” I ordered, and Night obeyed.

The Light did not give an inch even as I drowned it in darkness, but the dark was patient. Like a candle starved of air I watched it burn and burn and burn until there was nothing left to consume but itself, and then that pride ate itself hollow. Until there was but a speck left, an ember, and the light dimmed. I had won.

Damn me, I had won.

My fingertips found the leather cold to the touch. Blindly angry, I ripped out the ember from the book and watched it wilt. I held the speck of Light in the palm of my hand and looked through the Night, to the threshold of my tower in this realm and another. The moonlight was blinding, a curtain of pale, but through it cut two stark silhouettes. The First Prince and the Sword of Judgement, crossing the threshold together.

“Good,” I said. “ Good . Now we end this.”

—

They climbed the stairs unhindered, I saw to that.

The dark parted for them, like a tide receding, and I heard the sound of their steps on the stone long before they passed through the gate into the tower’s heart. Neither of them hurried, neither of them slow: it was a pace like the beat of a drum. It had the taste of the inexorable to it. And when they came at last, entering a sea of Night broken only by the glow of the ember in my palm, the play of shadows cut the figure of them to the bone. As if only the crux of them was being shined upon, the rest of it claimed by the dark.

Hanno of Arwad, the tall knight with a workman’s calloused hands. The sword at his side was little more than a line, his eyes a single streak of calm. Cordelia Hasenbach, the princess with the arrow-straight back. A raised chin and blue eyes burning cold.

Neither of them flinched away from the dark.

“You’re late,” I said.

My voice echoed across the Night, the only thing it did not swallow. No, instead the words reverberated across the room until the very last note faded, somehow faintly sounding of the cawing of crows. I felt talons digging into my shoulders, the presence of Sve Noc a tangible weight. I had the attention of my patronesses.

“But not too late,” he replied.

His movement drew shape from light, the cut of his jaw and the length of the sword still in the sheath.

“Not so sure about that,” I said. “Though at least the both of you made it here.”

“Bears in the pit,” she evenly said. “We saw. There is blinkered and there is blind.”

A slash of pale gold across her brow, the whisper of long skirts against the stone.

“And what is it you see?” I scoffed.

“The lady of long strings, pulling at them still,” he said. “Poisoning the chalice we are all to drink from.”

Lips firmly set, the dull shine of a belt buckle.

“Too little,” I said. “And much, much too late. If all you hold is what I hand you...”

My fingers closed around the ember of light, shadows like ribs cast on my face. I did not finish, crush it entirely and eat it whole, but the warning was plain. Better tyranny than a lackluster opposite. That mistake, at least, most of Calernia would live through.

“And what would closing that grip make you, I wonder?” she asked.

Curls like a river going down brocade, a tooth digging into skin to the very edge of piercing.

“The necessary evil,” I smiled, all teeth under the hood. “You ought to be used to it by now.”

“You are,” he replied, blunt. “It is why you reach even when you should not.”

Hair cut short I could make out the skin under, cloth hanging loose on his arm.

“What else is there?” I challenged. “I gave you warning. I bet you might live up to the boasts of your Gods, share a victory, but I see none of that before me.”

“You see nothing,” she said. “Because you are still in the pit.”

A cheekbone like a crossguard, a blue sleeve hiding a hand. I almost laughed in Cordelia’s face. Of course I was still in the pit. I’d started there, bleeding for silver, and odds were I’d die in there as well. Just because the pit got bigger and the toughs tougher didn’t mean anything had changed.

“You’ve failed,” I said, the regret in my voice honest. “Neither of you will stand. There is only one way left now.”

Through , I thought.

“That is true,” he acknowledged. “If you act alone.”

The entire relief of him, for the briefest moment as he passed between two ribs: bruised but not beaten. A bearing of a fragile certainty. They were not yet done. I narrowed my eye at them, staring them down from all sides, but they were half shadows themselves in the depths of the dark.

“So I ask again,” I said. “What else is there?”

“Bargain, Warden of the East,” she said. “Do you not have the West before you?”

Half of her stood in the light, like she had been split in half: gold and winter and blue, for a heartbeat shone upon.

“Bargain instead of taking.”

And she was gone, dress trailing a flutter behind her as she returned to the dark. My fingers, the ones still holding the Night, clenched. Knots formed around them. She was serious, I thought, and Hanno was not contradicting her. They were mad.

“Half the world?” I mused. “That will have a hefty price.”

“Is that an excuse for stealing instead?” he asked.

The good hand on the Good sword, a shoulder pulling tight.

“I’ll bite,” I languidly shrugged. “What is it that you want for your half?”

“Give up power,” Cordelia Hasenbach challenged. “Your hands should only hold so much: another must lead the Damned.”

A glimpse of light, but all I saw was the eyes: cold and blue and hard as the iron her people had once named kings for. You want me to step away , I thought. To become the sole keeper of the Accords and bind my hands with my own rules. There would be captains for Above and Below but I would not be one of them, instead an arbiter between. My fingers clenched even further. Did she even begin to understand how much power she was asking me to throw away? Already I was abdicating my throne, was I to burn every last scrap of influence I held along with it? What she described, it would leave me no authority save through the Accords. While they kept their followings intact, giving up empty claims in exchange for the root of my own power.

“And while I cut my own legs the two of you will keep your seats, of course,” I replied.

I shook my head, darkly amused.

“You people can never really lose , can you?” I said, smiling my father’s smile.

“Can you ?” Hanno of Arwad retorted.

All I saw in the light was his hand, the fingers cut to the phalange. Hanno’s own bargain.

“On the cusp of your oldest trick, another ruin of a victory,” he said, “do you have it in you to compromise anyway, Catherine Foundling?”

Night roiled with my anger. Another hero coming out of the cold asking me to meet them halfway after having stepped an inch to my mile. Another fairweather friend demanding my cloak. My fingers closed further around the ember, the shadow ribs pulling closer.

“Compromise takes from both sides,” I bit out. “What is it that you’re giving up?”

The two of them stood at the edge of the light, little more than silhouettes. The three of us around the heart of the Book, like three strangers huddled around a fire.

“I will abdicate all power in Procer,” Cordelia said. “And spend the rest of my life in Cardinal serving the Accords.”

“Their laws will have to be enforced on Named,” Hanno said. “I will pledge my sword to the duty, under your authority.”

I took half a step back. Lose everything , they’d demanded of me. And now they were offering everything in return. A simple solution, but the intricacies spun out along with my thoughts. She’d build Cardinal as a city and the skeleton of the Accords applied, the schools and the bureaucracy. And he’d make himself into the enforcer of the laws all Named must abide, the one sent into the breach when horror got loose. The both of them would grant legitimacy that I simply did not have, warlord that I was. And they would also be a noose around my neck: I could not ask dark deeds of that enforcer, I could not plot conquest past that chancellor.

Wings and an anchor at the same time. An elegant, balanced solution.

It just required me to be willing to give up every speck of authority I held beyond treaties that were still nothing more than ink on parchment. To let slip from my grasp every single thing I’d fought for since the night I had almost been strangled to death in an alley. Talons dug into my shoulders. My goddesses were watching, waiting. Wanting to hear my answer. I looked at the two silhouettes in the waning light, feeling the weight of their gazes and silence, wondering. Had the Sisters had felt like this that night in the Everdark, when I had offered Winter and asked for salvation in return?

I got no answer from them but expected nothing else. After all, it was my turn on their side of the altar.

“Crabs in the bucket,” I murmured. “It always comes back to that in the end, doesn’t it?”

Having to trust that the others wanted to leave the bucket too, that they didn’t just want to drag you back down. The leap of faith. And I still remembered what it was like, kneeling before silver eyes and asking the only thing you really could. Help me. Please .

“It might fail,” I told them.

They waited, silent. I clenched my fingers and unclenched them.

“But that’s we always say, isn’t it?”

My father had never understood, to the end, that sometimes it wasn’t about winning. It’d gotten him killed. And maybe, I thought, this would get me killed too.

But it was the only way out of the pit, and what else could I do but try?

I released the Night, the knots around my hand unmaking themselves. The sea withdrawing around all three of us until the last ember of the Book shone like a firefly cradled in my hand.

“Half the world,” I quietly said. “Bargain struck.”

Cordelia stepped forward first, reaching out and gently unclasping my fingers. The ember burned against my palm, free. Hanno met my eye, leaning forward over the altar and smiling.

He blew out the Light.

Darkness swallowed whole the room, then it swallowed me too.

—

I woke up standing on ashes.

In the distance the wind howled, kicking up great clouds of ash and dust, and my leg was throbbing. My sword was at my hip, my staff in my hand. Both were cold to the touch. I pulled my cloak tight around me, shivering, and looked ahead. There was a great stone ramp there, leading to a broken city. It had been built in a tall plateau, which lay shattered as ash rained down from the sky and the wind whipped at hollowed out husks. I’d been here before, I knew. I’d fought to defend this city and lost.

“Hainaut,” I murmured.

The wind gave no answer. The sky above was an endless stretch of storm clouds, red lightning crackling above and making itself known through the flashes of light. The whole world seemed coated in bleak grey light. I sighed,

“At least it isn’t Liesse,” I muttered. “We have haunted each other long enough.”

Around us was a vast plain of as, so there was only one way to go: forward, into the city. My leg felt like nails were being driven into it, but I pulled my hood down and limped towards the ramp. With every excruciating step, I could not help but think I had been here before. Not Hainaut, but the rest. This plain of ash. But I could not tell when or how, no more than I remembered how I had come here. All I knew was that my answers lay ahead.

The journey was long. The sky began to darken as the hours passed, shadows lengthening around me. But I reached the bottom of the slope, and there at last it all fell into place. Half-buried in the ash, revealed by a careless twist of wind, I found a corpse. A legionary, one of mine. Just some boy who couldn’t have been older than eighteen, his skull split open and his eyes unseeing.

Come to a foreign field to die for strangers.

“Name dream,” I said, then shook my head scornfully.

I glanced up at the sky.

“Death did not shake me when I was barely more than a girl,” I told it, “and I’ve waded through oceans of it since. What did you expect?”

“For you to learn .”

It had been many years since I’d last dreamt one of these dreams, but the woman who’d called out to me still felt like I’d seen her yesterday. Why shouldn’t she, when she was wearing my face? Older than me, her hair cut short and her robes pure white, but we were still twins. At her hip a long and slender sword hung from her belt, pure silver, but that wasn’t what drew my attention. She was holding some sort of case with a cloth draped over it.

“Added to your arsenal, I see,” I amiably replied.

The doppelganger glared at me.

“And you still avoid the reproaches to which you have no answer,” my twin said.

“I’ve learned a lot of things,” I told her, half-smiling. “Just not the sort you like.”

“Not the sort anyone should like,” my twin said. “How many cities’ worth of dead now trail in our wake, Catherine? Enough of them it might make up a kingdom. Your very own graveyard crown.”

“Better my graveyard than the Dead King’s,” I flatly replied. “Mine, at least, will sleep in peace.”

“They should have drowned us at birth,” she said. “Evil as the act would have been, it would still have been better than the plague of a woman we turned into. Again and again you were given the choice to turn away, to do better, and where did that lead you?”

She gestured up at broken Hainaut.

“Ruin heaped on ruin,” my twin said. “You are the worst of what we were as a girl, honed to a fine edge.”

“You never learned how to compromise either, did you?” I asked. “You still think it’s better to accomplish nothing than to do bad things.”

“Look around you, Catherine,” she gently said. “What is you’ve accomplished?

My fingers clenched around my staff.

“You were wrong then,” I replied, “and you’re wrong now. Doing nothing is worse than being Evil. It’s just going along with everything that’s wrong with the world.”

“And is it a better world you’ve made?” she asked me.

I breathed out, looking up at the sky. I could have been flippant, have made a joke of it, but it would have felt wrong. This is the last time I’m ever going to see you, isn’t it? If I was to face my doubts manifest, I would face them honestly.

“Ask me when the war’s over,” I finally said. “When I’m no longer holding my sword.”

Face unreadable, she slowly nodded.

“What now?” I asked her.

“I guide you into the city,” my twin replied.

She pulled away the cloth, dropping it into the ash and revealing the wooden lantern below. There was no flame inside, I saw. It was an ember of Light, the same I’d seen Hanno blow out. Around us, night fell over the world.

“Follow me closely,” she said. “The way is treacherous.”

She was not lying. The streets were cracked, houses and towers falling apart as the wind mournfully twisted past them. The rain of ash blinded the view of the sky, the rare lightning and distant starlight crowning the clouds. Hainaut had been turned into a monument to ruin and death, corpses dangling from every edge and crammed in every nook and cranny. Under the lantern’s light I glimpsed faces I had known, soldiers I’d once laughed with or ridden by. Once I thought I saw Nauk’s face, scarred with Summer fire, but it was too far to be sure.

I made certain never to look too closely at any goblin’s face.

“Usually I meet the other one first,” I said, following her into the deeper city.

“Evil has always come easier to your hand,” my twin curtly replied.

“But not tonight?” I asked.

“It was not it that bought you entry,” she said.

Her tone made it clear the conversation was over and she ignored my other attempts to talk. I followed her in silence through the tomb of a maze, recognizing where we were headed: the heart of the city, where there had once been a reservoir of water. It’d been broken during the battle, the plateau split by sorcery and the wrath of the Firstborn. We found the other one there, sitting on a broken pillar by the edge of the drop as she ran a whetting stone along the edge of her blade. The clouds parted as we padded across the dust-covered stone, moonlight peeking through and wreathing her silhouette.

The other twin still had that pink scar across her nose, her long hair kept in a braid reaching down to her coat of mail. Regular’s armour. She had a mangled look about her, worn down from war, but for once I was more worn than her. She wore a blood-specked tabard over the mail and a knife at her hip that I recognized even sheathed.

I would not soon forget the knife I’d used to kill my father.

“Ah, Cat,” the Evil twin grinned. “Welcome back, my girl.”

“’evening,” I drawled. “You look in a fine mood.”

The Good twin stepped to the side, silent and glaring.

“Shit, why wouldn’t I be?” the scarred twin laughed. “It’s been a long few years, Catherine, but look at us now.”

She waved around the sword, enthused.

“We’re basically Queen Bitch of Calernia,” the Evil twin said. “Sure, it took a damned lot of killing to get there but that’s why we’ve got a Hell of a throne to lounge on.”

Ugh, a pun. There was a reason I’d killed her half the times we’d met. She leaned forward.

“And just between you and me, my girl?” she said. “It makes our legs look good .”

“I don’t do a lot of lounging these days,” I noted. “It’s actually pretty painful on the leg.”

She rolled her eyes at me.

“Yeah, that’s the one part I’ve some issues with,” she said. “You need to cut that out. Fix your leg, put on your big girl pants and properly take this continent in hand.”

“Should we now,” I flatly said.

“You know we could,” the Evil twin grinned. “It wouldn’t even be that hard. A few clever choices while we pull down Keter on Neshamah’s head and there’ll be no one left who could stop us. Besides, we both know they’re all going to be so pathetically grateful once we pull them out of the fire again.”

“So the bargain I just made,” I said, “I ought to discard it.”

She smiled at me.

“Do you why I sit here?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“The view?” I guessed.

“That’s one word for it,” she said. “Come closer.”

I limped forward, the lantern’s light burning behind me and the moon above, until I stood at the edge of the drop. The plateau had been shattered, I knew, but down there I saw not a single loose stone. There might be some at the bottom, but how could I tell when a kingdom’s worth of mangles corpses had been piled over it? I’d seen a lot of death, since I became the Squire and in the years since, but that sight still gave me pause. How many thousands were down there?

“Who are they?” I quietly asked.

“The city’s the people who got us here,” the twin said. “Those, they’re the people we’ve killed. With wars, with choices, because it would have cost too much to save them.”

My fingers clenched. They should have drowned us at birth , the other spirit had said.

“And that’s the view you chose?”

“It’s what we are, Cat,” the spirit smiled. “The girl who did that. I just want you to stop fucking around and own it.”

I looked down at the dead, unblinking.

“You never learned to lose,” I finally said. “That’s your mistake.”

The spirit eyed me, unimpressed.

“Why would I want to?”

“Because when you look at these you see victories,” I said. “It’s the only way you know how to live: going from one fight to another, hoping that one more battle will fix it all.”

I shook my head.

“It’s prayer,” I said. “Below’s favourite kind. All in every time, until inevitably you lose it all.”

“We haven’t lost yet,” the twin said. “I’ll take those odds.”

“They’ll take you,” I replied. “It’s a rigged game. It’s how they’ve always gotten us.”

I looked back at the other spirit, who stood watching us with her lantern in hand. I stepped away from the edge.

“The first time I met you two,” I said, “I killed you both.”

“Good times,” Evil twin grinned.

“The second time,” I continued, “I left you behind.”

“And the demon broke you,” the other spirit replied.

Mistakes, I thought. Both times it’d been mistakes. And I’d never seen them with the Beast.

“It’s the end of the road, you know,” I quietly said. “There won’t be another one after this.”

Neither of them answered. Their gazes were on me.

“It’s the third time,” I said. “Let’s make it count.”

I breathed out, looking up at the moon through the parted clouds, and let myself loosen. Stopped trying to trick my way out of this, to win it, to use it as a tool. It was a journey, nothing more and nothing less. A hand gripped my right shoulder.

“Do better,” she whispered into my ear. “Remember the girl who wanted to save her home. She was always the best of you.”

A hand gripped my left shoulder.

“Don’t flinch,” she whispered into my ear. “Remember the girl who wanted to be the storm. She’s the one who got you here.”

We stood the three of us under the moon, in the heart of broken Hainaut, as below us the corpses began moved. Not as a horde but as one, a behemoth of a creature rising from the cradle of death made of a hundred thousand corpses. It stood tall and terrible, blotting out the sky, watching me through a sea of dead faces.

“Hello, old friend,” I softly greeted the Beast.

It opened a gaping maw, baring fangs made of broken swords and spears and banners. It was a beast, I thought, fit to swallow the world whole. West and East, what did it matter? It would devour it all.

“I once told you I wasn’t afraid of you,” I smiled. “But it was a lie. Did you know?”

It laughed, the sound a thing of horror.

“Let me tell you again, then,” I said. “ I’m not afraid of you .”

The behemoth of corpses climbed out of the pit, standing over me. An entire world of death enveloped me on all sides. I cocked my head to the side.

“Is it a lie now?” I asked it.

Its massive head lowered and it watched me, suddenly snapping out. I did not flinch.

“You know what we are now,” I told it. “Who we are.”

I looked up into its eyes.

“The Warden,” I claimed, and the world shivered with the truth of it.

The Beast roared in approval. Time to wake up , I thought, and the great maw of death opened wide.

I never felt it close around me.

Hunt

“We fear Evil as we fear the wave that drowns us, but it rests atop an ocean of smaller evils.”

– Extract from the transcript of the ‘Sermon of the Shores’, as spoken by Sister Salienta

Of all the ships in her father’s fleet, Hye Su loved the Venerable Tortoise the most.

It wasn’t like the others because it’d come from across the Tyrian Sea, from Asadal: the faraway land where her father had been born. Most of the ships he’d led when he went into exile had sunk in the crossing so there weren’t many left, and of those that remained the Venerable Tortoise was by far the largest. It had four masts and two decks, squat but swift because it’d been built as a warship to fight the Yan Tei. It wasn’t because of that Hye called it her favourite though: the Tortoise was the first home she’d ever known. The earliest thing remembered was the sound of wood groaning as the keel cut through the waves.

Hye had been born a sailor, everyone said so. She had her own table on the forecastle, where if she was good she was allowed to work on her letters and numbers instead of in her father’s cabin, and today she’d been diligent even if Asadal formal characters were just the worst. She loved the days out at sea, so it was a little sad that the Tortoise was headed back to Relic Reef. Although, by the look on her father’s face as he looked into the Baalite eye, maybe they wouldn’t be heading there quite just yet.

“Is it a merchant ship?” Hye eagerly asked.

Iseul Su, Admiral-in-Exile of the Southern Fleet, was a tall man with a thick build and a rounded belly. Hye’s father was tanned to leather from sun and salt and his feathered hat was raggedy around the edges, but his long beard and mustache were always immaculately groomed. Mother said that it was because he was his own true love so he took best care of himself but Dad always insisted that it was just his duty to be well-groomed as an admiral of the Asadal navy, which was the finest in Creation. Her fathers set down the longview and patted her head.

“Ashuran, my little petrel,” Admiral Iseul said. “A trader with belly full of goods by the way she drags water, headed south for Penthes.”

It must be coming back from Thalassina, Hye thought.

“You always say Ashurans are thieves and swindlers,” she said.

“As is only natural,” her father solemnly replied, “since they are descended from the Baalite Hegemony, who are the greatest swindlers and thieves to ever live.”

“So they’re going to be strong if we try to take the ship?” Hye asked. “Tae says the Hegemony was a great empire, so they must have been conquerors once.”

“The Hegemony would never do anything so impolite as conquering , petrel,” Admiral Iseul replied, amused. “They only colonize land that other people mistakenly believed was theirs, then defend it most vigorously.”

That sounded like a lot more effort than just stabbing people for their things.

“So we can take the Ashurans then,” she sagely said. “’cause they’re weak.”

Her father grinned, patted her head again.

“I believe we will,” he said. “We’ve the time to spare before we sail for the Reef. Be a good girl and find Tae, yes?”

She nodded even as he peeled away and began bellowing orders in Koryo, his native tongue, the crew cheering. Hye hadn’t even put away her scrolls and ink yet when Tae found her instead of the other way around, the tall and grizzled sailor nodding approvingly at her efforts. Tae was nice, especially when he drank and said too much, but Hye was oathsworn to resent him because he was her designated keeper. She was already debating spilling ink on his boots, which he definitely noticed by the warning look he gave her.

“If you clean up well and quickly, I’ll let you sit in the crow’s nest with your bow,” Tae told her.

He always spoke in tradertongue when her father wasn’t around. There were still some crew from Asadal who thought that their admiral would one day lead them back across the Tyrian Sea, but Tae wasn’t one of them.

“Fine,” Hye loudly sighed, trying to hide her eagerness.

And failing, from the way he grinned at her through his drooping moustache. Pursuing the Ashurans took hours, the other ship trying to slip them and ride the wind to League waters in the hopes that a patrol might bail them out, but their hull was full and the Venerable Tortoise more of a hare when the wind was at her back. True to his word, Tae took her up in the crow’s nest with the grown-up bow her mother had given her last year and a quiver full of arrows.

“Only shoot if they don’t surrender,” Tae reminded her.

Hye shot him an offended look.

“I’m a pirate too,” she replied, indignant.

Were people ever going to stop ruffling her hair? Ugh. The Ashurans struck their sail when it became clear they weren’t going to get away and allowed the Tortoise to approach. Her father shouted back and forth with their captain a while, promising to spare the crew if there was no fight, and it looked like this was going to get done the nice way until a hard-eyed woman on the Ashuran ship screamed out something in High Tyrian and Dasom’s torso exploded in a whirl of wind.

“Ship mage,” Tae cursed. “Their pride always gets crew killed.”

It was a bloody fight after that, but the Ashurans did most the bleeding. The Tortoise’s crew was twice as large and they’d all been fighters for years, so the merchant ship’s deck was swept in half an hour and the last survivors holed up in the hull surrendered not long after. Hye shot three arrows and wanted to kill the ship mage but Tae stopped her firing at the woman.

“Don’t draw her attention,” he warned.

She came down when it was all over but her father wasn’t back yet. He’d gone over with the boarders, in the first wave, and now he was talking with some of the survivors to see if they wanted to join his fleet. The merchant ship hadn’t even been damaged much, so maybe they’d get keep it! Hye went to get arrows out of bodies, starting with her own, and that was when her father found her. He was covered in blood and in a fine mood.

“Petrel,” he grinned, sweeping her up as she shrieked in joy and dismay. “I saw you up there with the bow. Did you get anyone?”

“I killed twelve,” Hye lied.

He cocked any eyebrow at her, then shot a glance at Tae.

“One,” the traitor said. “Clean, right through the throat. Two wounded.”

“If you’d said two I would have believed you,” her father told her. “Tailor the lie to the believable, daughter.”

She pouted. Hye was totally capable of killing twelve men, she just hadn’t gotten into the swing of it yet.

“The day’s young and we’ll be moving around the cargo for hours yet,” he continued. “Be a dear and return to your table, yes? You’re not done with your letters.”

“But I want to see the loot,” Hye whined. “And there’s too many characters, anyway, I’ll never use them all.”

“You are nine already, petrel,” Iseul Su firmly said. “Before you are ten you must either be an educated and graceful lady knowing all her characters or have slain one hundred men. I will tolerate nothing less from my daughter.”

Ugh, that was so unfair. She was never going to fight enough people to get out of learning the characters, actually killing people with arrows was hard . Her father tweaked her nose.

“There’s a word for people who stop learning, petrel,” he said.

“Corpse,” she dutifully finished.

“Good girl,” he smiled, and was about to speak when a shout came from above.

It was Haneul up in the crow’s nest and she’d called out a word in Koryo that Hye didn’t know. Father cocked an eyebrow, then stroked his beard.

“Tae,” he said, “get the good tea out and a kettle boiling while I get changed.”

The grizzled man nodded. Hye frowned at her father as Tae left.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because Haneul is seeing someone running on the water towards us,” he said. “Either your mother’s returned, petrel, or an Emerald Sword caught us on the open water.”

He laughed.

“Either way, it deserves tea and a fresh shirt.”

—

It was Mother.

She’d been running on the sea for three days, half of it through a storm, and she’d wrecked her sword again. Which she blamed Father for, but when he poured her a cup of that disgusting yellow tea she decided to forgive him and kissed the side of his neck. The crew had been happy to hear she was on her way, calling out that ‘Lady Borean’ was returning as soon as Mother’s long red coat became visible on the horizon. Hye sat in her chair with her hands in her lap, back straight, and waited for her mother to finish shedding off her coat and setting aside her bow.

Her mother’s people didn’t really have last names the way humans did, but when Hye had been small Mother had once told her that her family had once titled her Borean Longsorrow. She was tall and slender, her hair was black like Hye’s but her skin pale and smooth, and her eyes dark eyes larger than any human’s. Tae said that Mother moved like a blade, carving through life, and sometimes Hye thought she knew what he meant. It was in the way she moved, like the world had to get out of the way or else it would get cut.

The girl had gotten lost in her thoughts, a little bored waiting, so when her mother flicked her forehead she nearly fell from her chair.

“I see how it is,” her mother said. “I leave for a month and suddenly my own daughter ignores me.”

“Tea is stupid,” Hye told her. “So it’s your fault.”

Mom laughed while her father glared at her from the corner of his eye. He took tea pretty seriously.

“You’re growing quickly, Hye,” her mother said. “Every time I leave you seem to have shot up another inch.”

“I’m going to be taller than you,” she swore.

“We’ll see,” Borean smiled. “Have you been practising with your bow?”

“I’m getting better,” Hye said, then turned sly. “But it’d be quicker if you were there to give me exercises.”

Her father snorted.

“Is that so?” Mother lightly said.

“Maybe you should live with us on the Tortoise again,” Hye innocently suggested. “Like when I was little.”

Mother shot a look at Father, who looked very amused.

“We can talk about it after this year’s festival,” her mother said.

“You’ve been on so many trips lately though, and for so long,” Hye whined. “You never did that when I was a kid, you never even left the ship without Father.”

“It is only natural that a young couple’s heart should be as one,” her father drawled. “Alas, time passes. But perhaps your mother will not tire of me entirely for a few years yet.”

“Or maybe this will be the year, Iseul,” Mother smiled, then sipped at her tea.

Hye could tell when a conversation was over, so she asked about the trip instead.

“Did you find the ship you wanted?” she asked.

“Caught up to it in the middle of the storm,” Mother told her. “It was already sinking, I had to drag out the missionary to interrogate him.”

Some Yan Tei priest, Hye knew, from across the sea. Sometimes they came to Calernia, probably because they were tired of losing battles to the Asadal.

“Interesting news of home?” Father asked.

“The House Wars are still raging and have grown even bloodier since last century,” Mother smiled, lean and mean. “The massacres are dragging in the ancestor families on all sides, so now elves are fighting each other as well.”

She sounded deeply satisfied. Mother had not left the other elves on good terms, Hye hadn’t need to be told that to figure it out.

“We warned them that reckless breeding would cost us dearly,” Mother said. “But did they listen? No. Let them reap what they have sown.”

Father rolled his eyes. He always did that when they talked about elves, because he didn’t take them very seriously. Said it was a good thing they’d burned their fleet after coming to Calernia, because the ships had been fit only for firewood.

“Anything of Asadal?” he asked.

“The Yan Tei attempted invasion and were turned back at the Mountain Gate,” Mother said. “The Western Fleet sacked a few coastal cities in retaliation. That and the usual games in the Closed Sea.”

That put her father in a good mood, he always liked to hear about the Yan Tei losing at war, so after they finished the tea talking about little things. Father left after a bit to ensure their ship would set sail while the wind was at their back, leaving Hye to talk with her mother. Which was fine, because a question had been burning at her throat for an hour now.

“Mothe,” the girl said. “You know that thing you do when you walk on water?”

“Assertion,” her mother stated. “What about it?”

“Will I be able to do that too when I’m older?” Hye asked.

“No,” Mom bluntly replied. “You are only a halfblood.”

“You said there’s a bunch of other half-elves across the sea, though,” Hye pressed. “Not one of them could do it?”

“Perhaps if one lived long enough they might succeed,” her mother mused, “but I’ve known few to last longer than a millennium. It is not done.”

“There has to be a trick to it,” Hye pouted. “I’ll figure it out one day.”

“It’s not a trick, Hye, those come from outside,” Mother said. “Assertion, the act of asserting yourself on the fabric of Creation, it is...”

She trailed off.

“It is to perfect an aspect of yourself in a way that not even the world can resist,” she finished.

That didn’t help at all, but Hye nodded to pretend it had. Mother asked about her lessons after, because she never liked talking about elf stuff much.

“Tae’s been on my back a lot lately,” Hye said. “I think he’s practising.”

“For what?” Mother asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“His wife is pregnant again,” Hye said. “He says it’s going to be a boy.”

“How many does that make now?” she snickered.

“Five,” Hye said. “You know, some of the old crew say that Father should have more kids too. That it shows favour from the Gods when a man has many children.”

“You have at least a dozen half-siblings across the sea, daughter,” Mother reminded her. “Though as far as I know you are the only issue he ever personally raised.”

“It’s not the same though,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I think I’d like a little brother. Sometimes I have to carry too much stuff around.”

“Family is complicated, petrel,” Mother lightly said. “And I have never done well with siblings.”

“You left ‘cause you argued with yours,” the girl slyly said.

Mother looked surprised so Hye grinned. She’d overhead the crew talking, but she hadn’t known if it was true until now.

“Close enough, I suppose,” her mother said. “I killed all seven of my sisters.”

Hye gasped. That wasn’t what she’d heard at all.

“Was that in the war?” she asked.

“The first I slew in a duel,” Mother said. “I believed that we needed strict laws, Hye, to prevent disaster. That elves should have no more than three children with humans and any who went over that number should lose the right and have all mixed descendance removed from Creation. My eldest sister had already founded five families and she took my beliefs personally. We settled it with blades.”

“Then the rest got angry ‘cause you won,” Hye guessed, frowning.

Sore losers.

“There was only one side left for me in the war after that and it was not theirs,” Mother shrugged. “They sought me out on the battlefield and fell short until none were left. If I had not sailed with the Wise King my mother likely would have sought to kill me as well. That match I would not have won.”

Hye solemnly nodded. Her grandmother had taught her mother the sword, like her mother would one day teach her.

“I’m your only kid, though,” the girl pointed out. “So you could still have two more.”

“One is enough for me,” Mother smiled, ruffling her hair. “Any more and I fear the King would take personal offence.”

“He sounds like a prick,” Hye opined.

Her mother snorted.

“He is ancient and powerful,” Mother said. “His grandmother woke with the First Dawn, and even more dangerous than his magic is his foresight. He knew we would lose the war long before we did, it is why we had the ships to cross the sea.”

“Still sounds like a prick,” Hye honestly replied.

Mother laughed, and that was that.

—

Relic Reef was deep in the Tideless Isles, and it was the secret port where Admiral Iseul’s fleet made its home. There was a large hidden island behind the maze of reefs and the strange stone pillars that the waves sometimes revealed, and a small town on it. Hye’s mother said that the pillars were a wonder of magic, the reason while the tides around here were so strange.

“Titan’s work,” Mother had said. “Not power to trifle with.”

Every year the entire fleet came back here for a week, all the crews and ships spreading across the beaches to celebrate what they called the Festival of the Hunt. Hye had been told by some it was about the ships taken during the year, the captains boasting about their prizes, but Tae always avoided answering when she asked him so there must be more to it. Besides, her parents did that strange ceremony every year after everyone got drunk where they stood on a beach and it looked like they were about to duel but never did.

A lot of the wives and husbands who lived on the Reef all year long thought it was romantic, like a sort of pirate wedding, but older sailors said it wasn’t that. They’d been doing it for nineteen years – twenty this year – and Hye was only nine. She knew her parents hadn’t always liked each other before she was born, so it wouldn’t be that. This year the festival seemed larger than ever, probably ‘cause the fleet was the largest it’d ever been: twenty-nine ships if you counted the Ashuran trader that’d been dragged in by the Tortoise, and Hye thought you should.

There were hundreds of people on the beach, from all over Calernia, and even more in the town that’d been carved out from the island rocks. Hye’s father would be out with his captains until late and her mother didn’t like crowds, so it was Tae who took care of her after spending some time with his family. He took her to the beach games, but a few times they took a detour so he could buy a bottle of strongwine. He was getting very drunk, Hye thought, and very quickly.

“Are you sure it’s safe if you drink this much?” she asked him.

He’d never done that before even when he drank.

“Tonight, child, you’re the only safe person on this island,” Tae said.

She frowned at him. Part of why she needed a keeper was in case someone tried to get at her father through her.

“I don’t get it,” Hye admitted.

“The seal was supposed to last fifty years, but Lady Borean is powerful as any sage,” Tae sighed. “She’s been going further away and for longer. She’ll break it tonight, I’m sure.”

“What seal?” she asked.

“Two hearts as one,” Tae laughed. “She was going to pluck us out for news like that poor Yan Tei fuck in the storm, but the Admiral tricked her. One dies, so does the other. And if she touched any of us he’d trigger the seal.”

“You’re lying,” Hye hissed. “They’re in love.”

Tae smiled sadly.

“We’ll know by the end of the night, girl,” he replied.

He was a filthy liar, so she kicked him and ran away. He was too drunk to catch her when she went into the crowd, so Hye went off on her own and hid. It was a lie, had to be. It was getting darker out though, and she knew what that meant. The ceremony on the beach. She snuck in with the crowd when it began to gather, keeping away from the people looking for her. Her parents were on the beach already, facing each other. They both had swords in hand. They frowned, looking at each other, until finally there was some sort of snap . Hye felt it and the crowd did too, murmuring uneasily. It’d never happened before.

“Twenty years to the day,” Father said, smiling. “I had not thought that possible.”

“You might have stretched it out if you had a sage around,” Mother replied.

Their eyes met.

“And now?” Father asked.

“Now we balance the score,” Mother replied.

She struck, moving faster than Hye had ever seen anyone move and Father parried the blow just a little too late. There was a long cut across his cheek. Hye froze in terror and grief as Father received one wound after another, never landing so much as a blow. One, two, five, eight – and then, after she slashed across his torso shallowly and scored her eleventh wound, Mother took a step back. Father watched her, face unreadable.

“And the nine left?”

“Those I liked,” Mother easily said. “So it is now a done thing.”

She flicked away the blood and sheathed her blade. There was still a lot of confusion in the crowd but it looked like it was over and no one was dead, so when someone started cheering soon after everyone was. A lot of the older crew looked pathetically relieved. Hye ran out of the crowd to her parents, hovering around her wounded father but afraid to hug him, and he lightly patted her head.

“No need to cry, petrel,” Father smiled. “I knew she wouldn’t be able to resist keeping me around.”

Mother rolled her eyes at him, but she did not say otherwise.

—

After all the excitement Hye had gone to bed exhausted, but she woke up in her bed in the middle of the night. There was something wrong. Somehow she could feel it, there was something wrong. Throwing aside her covers she dragged on her boots and left the house, the full moon’s light shining down like a lantern. None of the crew were guarding the house, that was the wrongness she picked up on. There was always someone around the house, especially if she was in it. So she took the streets, and there the stench had her emptying her stomach on the stones. Blood, so much blood. And there were bodies everywhere . Every house, every street, and when she ran down to the beach it was like a sea of corpses. Even the ships were drenched in red, like someone had moved inch by inch across Relic Reef and taken every life.

Hye never saw the blade until it was slapped away from her neck.

Without so much as a whisper of warning Mother was standing in front of her, and four people in cloaks faced her. Mother had a sword in hand and her shoulders were tight.

“Try that again, Dusk, and I’ll cross the sea to butcher every single kin you have left after I’m done with you,” Mother coldly said.

“Abomination,” one of the strangers spat. “He sends us to bring you home and we find you have waded in filth .”

“Run back to the Golden Bloom, Dawn, before I decide you’re in need of a refresher in manners,” Mother retorted. “You should remember how the last one went.”

“Mother,” Hye whispered, “who are they?”

“Old students of mine,” she replied. “Who forget I named the Emerald Blades because they are still so very green .”

“You cannot defend both her and your... pet,” a stranger said.

“No,” Mother agreed. “But if you take either of their lives, I’ll kill all four of you afterwards.”

Hye hid behind her mother, gripping at the red coat. Silence stretched out.

“We will return,” the Emerald Sword said. “All of us.”

“Tell him the Wise King tonight counts as my resignation,” Mother replied, unimpressed. “He can find himself another champion.”

And then they were gone, just as suddenly as they had appeared. Almost like it’d all been a dream, except that the stench around them would not let Hye believe that even a moment. Mother stood there for a long time, then sighed. Her shoulders loosened and she lightly rested her hand on her daughter’s head.

“Come, Hye,” she tiredly said. “If I know your father, he’s found us a ship to sail off this island by now.”

—

She’d been right.

It was not a nice ship. It was small and dinky and it stank of old fish. But they would be able to sail it with only three people and take some things with them. Hye took her bow and her arrows, nothing else. What would be the point, when all it took was a blink of an eye for it to be gone? Everyone she knew was dead .

“Where to?” Mother asked, pushing their boat into the water.

“Well,” Father hummed, pulling at the sail, “I stole some Praesi state secrets two years back. They should buy us refuge in Ashur for a time.”

Just for a time, she thought. Was it going to happen again, tonight? Was she going to find another world and one night wake up to find it had been slaughtered?

“And after that?” Hye asked.

“After that,” Mother softly replied, “the hunt continues.”

Chapter 40: Resolutions

“An empire is a barrel with a hole: you must never cease filling it, lest it spill out at your feet.”

– Queen Elizabeth Alban of Callow

I’d expected to wake up aching, but it was the opposite: it was like I’d had my best night of sleep in years. Maybe in all my life, I thought as my eyes fluttered open. It was like every ounce of me was sated with rest, a start from a blank state. But, as I found out moving under my covers, there were limits to the magic of that. My bad leg still throbbed like it was going to burst. A look around told me two things: I’d been brought to my rooms in the guest palace, and someone had been keeping watch on my sleep from the other side of the bed.

Seated in a chair wide enough it must have been brought just for him, Hakram met my gaze.

“You look tired,” I said, the words escaping my mouth before I could think about it twice.

The tall orc shifted in his seat, the steel of his prosthetic hand brushing loudly against the cushions.

“I am,” the Warlord replied. “Long days and short nights. You know how it is.”

“Always too few hours in the day,” I agreed, then hesitated.

We had been apart for long, but he could still read me better than anyone.

“You’ve been asleep for three days,” Hakram gravelled. “They brought you to Archer in the tower, saying that eating the Book made you fall unconscious.”

“It wasn’t the Book, I don’t think,” I muttered. “More the transition itself.”

He studied me carefully.

“I can believe that,” the Warlord said. “I could feel the pull of your Name from outside the room even when you were unconscious and it is stronger now. More focused.”

He wasn’t joking, I saw. And the more my gaze lingered the more I saw. Not from my good eye but from the one the Hawk had taken, the hollow socket. I could... It was like the stars I had seen in the void as Warden of the East, but the perception had been refined. His Name was like a translucent fire raging over him, when I focused, and I could make out beating hearts. Only one had solidified. He has only one aspect , I thought. And it went further than that. The more I watched the silhouette, the secret fire, the more I saw that it was connected. Chords spun out, stories I felt I might be able to follow by running my finger along the connection.

I should be able to see more, some bone-deep instinct told me, but I was being hobbled. The Warlord was a villain, and half of my eye was still in my enemy’s hands.

“I became the Warden,” I said.

His brow creased in surprise.

“Not of something,” Hakram slowly said. “Just Warden.”

“I suppose there’s no need to specify,” I replied, “if I’m Warden of everything.”

The air shivered in the room. He felt it too. And yet I was still a villain, I thought. Night still came when I called. Transitioning had not changed who or what I was, only amplified it. It would be the same after me: a hero could hold this Name as well. The Role of standing above Named, at the top of the Accords, it did not belong to either Above or Below. It would be what we made of it, because it was us who’d made the Liesse Accords. For good or ill, it was in our hands.

Hakram was still watching me, face unreadable.

“All of the Woe have gone through two Names,” he said, “save you. It took you three to settle.”

I hummed, pensive. That was one way to see it.

“There’s always a cost,” I said.

I’d given up much to come into this Name, at least in the way that I had. Would I have been a simpler sort of villain, if I’d taken the Book by force instead of taking it with the blessing of the two claimants to the West? My gut said yes. Still a Warden, maybe, but more a Warden of the East bloated for having devoured the other side’s strength than the more... balanced mantle I now wore.

Hakram suddenly grimaced, looking away.

“I was not fair, when we spoke in the thicket,” he said.

I frowned.

“What’s bringing this on?”

“Until I found Archer, I did not know whether you were dead or alive,” Hakram said. “I trusted, Catherine, but I could not be sure. And so I thought of our last conversation again, that it might be the last words we ever spoke.”

“Lancing a wound is never pretty,” I said.

“Aye,” Hakram said, “but while it was not only you I was angry with, you still received both helpings of blame.”

I made to speak, not sure what I should, but he raised a hand to ask me to let him speak. My teeth clicked shut. Fine.

“Did I ever tell you,” he asked, “what the Tyrant saw when he used his perception aspect on me?”

I shook my head. I’d always assumed that Hakram was even keeled enough Kairos had simply seen nothing to use against him.

“Nothing,” Hakram quietly said.

My breath caught. That was, well... I took a moment to digest that. What it meant, that he’d had so little in his life except for me and the Woe.

“I used to think it was a virtue,” the Warlord said. “That I could step away and see clearly because of it. But that was fear, looking back. It was easier to want the things you did, dream your dreams, than have my own. And maybe if things had gone differently, I would have spent a life satisfied with that.”

I breathed in sharply. I could see where this was going.

“But then you saw Scribe,” I said.

“I saw too much of myself in her,” Hakram said. “And did not like what I saw.”

I sighed.

“And what does that mean, Hakram?” I pushed back. “I get it – you thought I might one day do to you what my father did to her. Cut her adrift after a lifetime. But why are you telling me this?”

We’d already tread those grounds, revisiting them would do no good.

“I stand behind much of what I said that day,” he said, “but you did not deserve all the anger you received. For that I owe apology.”

He paused, reluctant.

“And you were right about one thing.”

His jaw clenched.

“I could have come to you with it,” Hakram gravelled. “I did not. I do not regret becoming the Warlord, Catherine, but I mislike the thought that part of what drove me was fear – that deep down I thought it easier to return bearing the Name than to speak to you as the Adjutant.”

I studied his face for a long time, the craggy green leather of it, and found only calm there. Slowly, I gave a nod. But I did not speak after, because the conversation was not over and it was not for me to finish it. We’d parted on my words, last time. If there was to be an ending it would be of his own ushering, whatever it might be. The silence lengthened.

“You told me it was all in my hands, last time,” Hakram finally said.

“And meant it.”

He did not hurry to words, which I was not sure whether to curse or appreciate. If it was to be the knife, then let him be quick with it. I’d need the time to lick my wounds.

“I never thought you would ever turn a knife on me,” the tall orc admitted. “Leave me behind, maybe, but never steel.”

His clenched his fingers of bone into a fist.

“I saw it in your eyes that night,” Hakram said. “But I don’t think I believed it until you spoke the words out loud.”

Part of me felt the urge to apologize, to bury the hatchet at any cost, but I took it by the neck and squeezed . I was who I was. Maybe I still had some change left in me, but not so much as that: in the end, if the stakes were high enough I had run out of lines I wasn’t willing to cross to win. Suddenly, he snorted.

“It is a crooked thing,” he said, “but in a way it reassures me. You didn’t just see the Adjutant that night, you saw me.”

“I saw you,” I evenly replied, “and raised a knife.”

He shook his head.

“I came as the Warlord,” Hakram said, “and stood against you. I cannot leave your shadow and in the same breath demand its protection.”

I studied him quietly.

“And now?”

“I don’t know,” he quietly laughed. “It is new ground for me as well.”

I bit my lip.

“It can’t be the way it was before,” I said.

“I don’t want it to be,” Hakram honestly said. “Do you?”

Yes , part of me whispered. But could I really ask that when I now knew what’d it cost him?

“No,” I replied, and found I largely meant it. “But now I’m at a loss. I’ve never-”

Lost someone I love to anything but the grave , I thought. I don’t even understand how I got your friendship the first time, how could I possibly know what to do now?

“- I’ve never,” I weakly finished.

He laughed at me, the prick.

“Eloquent,” he teased, smiling at my rude gesture.

The mirth passed, though never quite entirely left.

“We start from the beginning,” Hakram said, leaning forward and offering his arm.

When we’d first met in the valley all those years ago, I remembered, I’d been the one to offer. Lips quirking, I clasped the arm in a legionary’s salute. It was steel I felt under my fingers now, and his own found the cloth that these days I wore more often than mail, but it was better this way. We weren’t the same kids we’d been in Spite Valley, playing war games in the Tower’s shadow. It wasn’t the same two people meeting. We parted after a moment and he drew back, rising to his feet.

“There may not be much time, in the coming days,” he said.

To meet, he meant. To try to forge the scraps of what we used to be into something else.

“So we’ll have to make it,” I firmly replied.

He nodded, hesitation coming to his face.

“In Keter,” Hakram said, “there will come a time beyond armies. When Named will venture ahead.”

I nodded. We both knew the Dead King wouldn’t die to anything as mundane as armies.

“When that time comes,” he quietly said, “I would like to fight with the Woe.”

My heart clenched. To that, at least, I had an answer.

“If the Woe are fighting,” I simply replied, “where else would you be?”

I saw a weight leave his shoulders, and some part of me wanted to weep. When had it come to this? Lancing a wound is never pretty , I reminded myself. But it was necessary, if the limb was to heal instead of fester. Hakram stiffly nodded at me, and a heartbeat later he was gone. Out the door and into the palace, leaving behind him an absence that felt almost physical. I leaned back into my pillows. Soon enough someone else would enter the room and Creation would come calling, responsibilities dragging me back, but for now I just closed my eyes and listened to the sound of my own breathing. It was a faint thing, barely more than a wisp, but I remembered what hope felt like.

And for the first time in months, I held hope that the pieces of who we’d been might not stop the people we’d become from finding a way to fit together.

—

Proceran palaces grew salons like caves grew mushroom, but one of the upsides of that cultural sickness was that you could send for a drink anywhere. I was not surprised in the slightest that Cordelia’s personal steward not only knew that I drank an herbal concoction for pain but the exact mix as well. Aisha ought to be flattered that her old family recipe had become subject to foreign espionage, I figured, and it really was quite convenient. I finished the mug – served at the perfect temperature to drink, because of course it was – and set it down on a pretty little glass table, trying to tell the Sword of Judgment through my eyes that his hovering was getting on my nerves.

“Another day of rest might be forgiven, given the circumstances,” Hanno said.

Evidently, I needed to work on my glares.

“Time’s the one thing we can’t spare,” I replied. “Besides, I’m fine.”

I was not, in fact, fine. I was still a little slow on my feet and... unsteady. Sometimes it felt like I didn’t fit in my own skin anymore, that I was moving with limbs there weren’t my body’s. From the steady look the dark-skinned man fixed me with, he was well aware of the lie and debating whether or not he should call me out it. Fortunately, I had a secret weapon.

“I will not venture an opinion as to Her Excellency’s health,” Cordelia Hasenbach mildly said, “but she does seem fit for light duties such as discussion.”

That Excellency business was going to get old fast, I could already feel it. And it was probably half the reason she was sticking so closely to the title, because underneath all that courtesy Cordelia did have a streak of bitingly polite pettiness.

“See,” I smiled, “we’re just talking. And we’ve got a lot of grounds to cover, so let’s be about it.”

Hanno dared to roll his eyes at me as he took a seat, the absolute ass, and I was not sure whether to be pleased or insulted. It’d taken only moments in the same room to realize that in the aftermath of our little tiff in Arcadia he’d considerably warmed to me. Being willing to take a step back and meet them halfway had not quite restored our relationship to the easy friendship of the early days, but it was a damn sight better than the cool distance that’d followed the Arsenal. I’d had a few looks at him through my dead eye, the one that saw much, and found him covered in burning pale flames. He did not quite have a Name, but it was not far.

I tried to have a look ahead, see what he was moving towards, but it was too tricky when I had to maintain a conversation at the same time.

“There are urgent matters,” Cordelia agreed. “Negotiations with the Kingdom Under must be carried out to a finish before we march on Keter, which I consider the priority of the Grand Alliance’s foreign diplomacy, but there are internal matters to settle.”

She, on the other hand, did not have so much as a fleck of power gathering around her. Cordelia Hasenbach had fallen on the side of being true to the woman she had been on the floor of the Chamber of Assembly: mortal to the bitter end.

“The compromise between the Blood and the Bestowed,” I said.

“To begin,” Cordelia agreed. “Though on grounds more esoteric, I believe there is question in need of an answer as well.”

She slid a look at Hanno when she said ‘esoteric’, getting a nod out of him.

“The Severance needs a wielder,” he plainly said. “The decision must be made before we set out north.”

I hummed, leaning back into the plushy seat.

“All of that starts second place,” I finally said. “Before anything else, we need to properly enforce the arrangement we made in Arcadia.”

Cordelia’s eyes narrowed slightly.

“Settling the representatives under the Truce and Terms,” she said. “You mean to step down immediately.”

“From that position,” I agreed. “I’ll still be Queen of Callow until we finish things in Keter, at least in principle. In practice I’ll begin passing authority to Vivienne as of today.”

I didn’t even foresee friction there for the rest of the war. Viv wasn’t much of a general and knew it, while I’d made a career off of handing off the ruling parts to someone else why I went about the business of being a warlord. It was only fitting that my last war would end my reign with it.

“I am glad,” Hanno said. “Princess Vivienne is respected, but your legions would not fight for another queen as they do for you.”

I waved that away, though I was a little flattered. It was true, I knew that regardless of him, but hearing it from someone like Hanno added a certain something.

“We’ve been through a lot of mud together,” I said. “But back to the selection: the first thing to settle is whether or not you’ll be standing to represent the heroes.”

If he did not it would be a race, I figured, but as I saw it there was little chance of anyone else filling the shoes if he wanted to keep them on.

“That is my wish,” Hanno said. “Until the fall of Keter I would keep the office, setting it aside when I swear myself to enforce the Accords.”

I had no trouble with that, to be honest. I would have accepted it even before our relations thawed, so my approval was only growing. There was one potential source of objections, though, sitting pretty in her seat as she delicately sipped at lemon water. Cordelia noticed my inquisitive glance, which I hadn’t tried to make subtle in the slightest.

“It is not my place to argue for or against,” the First Prince evenly said. “When we struck a bargain, Your Excellency, I accepted your authority over certain matters. I will not go back on my word.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“And if were to ask for your opinion?” I pressed.

She did not look pleased, but neither did she fight me.

“It is the natural choice,” Cordelia admitted. “And it will ease the tradition from the Truce and Terms into the Liesse Accords.”

She still didn’t like him much, I thought. The esteem they’d once had for each other had been eroded down by years of speaking past each other and it would just as many years for it to be restored. If it ever was. But she was willing to work with him and not the kind of woman to blind herself to someone’s virtues because of a personal animosity.

“I’ll look forward to you taking your seat again, then,” I said, nodding at Hanno.

Then I sighed.

“The selection on my side of the fence is going to be a little more complicated, unfortunately,” I admitted.

Of the Woe, both Archer and Hierophant had the strength to be able to claim the seat as well as strong ties to me that’d help them keep it. The trouble was that neither of them would want to get anywhere near that seat given a choice and this wasn’t the kind of position to take half-heartedly. Not even just until the end of the war. Keter was going to be vice tightening around Named and we’d need steady hands at the helm if we were going to keep all these very dangerous people from cracking under the pressure.

“You have been grooming the Barrow Sword as a captain for almost two years now,” Hanno noted. “Do you not think him fit?”

“There’s going to be a brawl,” I frankly said. “And I’m not sure he can take the Red Knight, who will absolutely throw her hat into the ring.”

And she was strong enough she’d be able to chew through most Named in a fight, but she’d be a fucking disaster as a representative. For one, at least nine tenths of everyone who ever met her couldn’t stand her. If she were just awful as a person it’d be one thing, but from the reports I’d read she was unfit to command even a band of five. Hanno grimaced.

“Even Christophe is wary of her,” he said. “And he is not a man to scare easily.”

It was her aspects that made her a threat. By simple ability she was a very skilled fighter but hardly impossible to handle. When you threw in Devour , though, she became a headache to handle. If there was anything that aspect couldn’t take a bite out of, we’d yet to encounter it.

“I believe you once sent the Archer to discipline her, after a brawl with other villains,” Cordelia noted.

“I’d bet on Indrani over her,” I agreed. “But Indrani won’t want anything to do with those responsibilities.”

She’d made it very clear to me that command of a roving warband was the most she was interested in taking up.

“You misunderstand me,” the First Prince said. “I mean to point out that you, the appointed representative for Below, saw it fit to use her as your champion.”

Ah , I thought. Clever. Archer wouldn’t want the seat, but she would absolutely be willing to fight as Ishaq’s champion should he be challenged – and I’d set precedents for that over my own tenure to no objection from my charges. Trust Cordelia Hasenbach to find the loophole no matter the game.

“That might work,” I acknowledged. “I’ll need to speak with the both of them first.”

Hanno politely cleared his throat.

“Have you considered,” he asked, “the possibility of the Warlord laying his own claim?”

“He won’t,” I said, certain. “He’s got too much on his plate already, herding the Clans and hammering out the aftermath of the peace in Praes.”

I’d had to juggle the duties of a queen and a representative before and I’d found the amount of work crushing even with the likes of Hakram and Scribe supporting me. And that was ruling Callow, leading professional armies. The Clans would need much more personal a touch than my people ever had.

“But if he does?” Hanno pressed.

“Then I won’t stand against or for it,” I replied.

He’d left me to stand on his own two feet. I would not disrespect that by propping him up should he reach for more. That settled the talk of selection, at least for a moment, so I let Cordelia gently guide the conversation back to other matters.

“The talks with the Blood can be ended promptly,” she said, “and it would set a good tone to act swiftly. For a Warden to settle what was before a matter of debate will begin to prove the worth of the office.”

Going unsaid was that a lot of heroes would find it hard to swallow no matter what the Sword of Judgment said, even when they felt the pull of my Name against them. Being decisive from the start would do a lot to convince people it was worth ceding authority to me. It occurred to me, after a moment, that I’d never told either of them what my Name now was. And yet the both of them had been referring to it freely since we met. I almost shivered.

Sometimes fate’s hand was less discreet than others.

“You’re not going to like what I have to say,” I bluntly told her. “The entire point of having a Warden is to have someone who can settle disputes involving Named. Sometimes that will mean having power over signatory nations even if you don’t like it. A very narrow sort of power, relating only to Named, but it’ll still be there.”

She visibly did not like what I had to say.

“You have already heard my arguments,” the First Prince said. “I believe it a poor precedent to set that a decision of Levant’s ruling council might be overturned by Named on account of Named.”

She paused, mastering herself.

“Yet that is not my decision to make,” Cordelia conceded. “That is the bargain I struck with you. And the existence of a single office instead of rival ones does put to rest certain fears of partisanship I had previously held.”

I considered her for a moment, honestly a little doubtful she’d given in so easily. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, I eventually thought. She’d been the First Prince, not a queen, and that wasn’t the same thing. Especially not the kind of queen that I’d been, inheriting a culled nobility and direct authority over most of the largest cities in Callow as well as the only standing army. I had a lot more power than most Fairfaxes ever did. Cordelia Hasenbach, though, had been wrestling with the Highest Assembly all her reign. She’d had to give ground before, I thought, suffer defeats on matters she very much cared about.

She would exercise the power she could to the letter of the law and no further, taking the defeats when they came and living to fight the battle another day. That was her way.

“Good,” I muttered, flicking a glance at Hanno. “And you?”

“I have no more objections now than I did before,” the dark-skinned hero shrugged.

Fair enough.

“Then it’s settled,” I said. “I’ll sit down with the Blood tonight and get the terms put to ink.”

With that out of the way, Hanno himself brought up the next decision in need of being made.

“Have you given thought to the Severance?” he asked.

I clenched my fingers, unclenched them. Give and take, that was what’d brought us here. I had not come out ahead by listening to the tyrant’s whisper in the back of my head.

“Only a hero can wield it,” I said, “so that takes it out of my hand. Should you be chosen as representative for Above again, I’ll leave the decision in your hands.”

My gut said either him or the Mirror Knight, but it was hard to be sure. Hanno watched me with those calm, patient eyes.

“You will want the final word,” he stated.

I did want that. Very much. My instincts demanded it, a precaution in case the heroes fucked up again and some unfit idiot ended up wielding the single most important artefact of this war. But it couldn’t be that way.

“This only works if I trust your judgement,” I made myself say. “So I’ll trust your judgement, Hanno.”

The translucent flames around him I could see, if I concentrated hard enough, only had a single solid heart within them – and it tasted of memory. Recall , had to be. He’d lost the aspect he had once called on every time he flipped that coin of his, likely forever. It was Hanno of Arwad’s judgement I was betting on, not the Tribunal’s, and trust didn’t mean anything if it was offered on the cheap. He did not hide his surprise, or the strange emotion that flickered through his eyes after.

“Thank you,” he finally said. “I will keep you informed.”

I nodded, uncomfortable, and was dimly grateful when Cordelia nudged the conversation towards what she most cared about. Hanno went along just as easily, which was only natural considering he’d also put quite a bit of his back into dealing with the dwarves.

“A united front when meeting them again would improve our position,” Cordelia said. “The three of us, certainly, and perhaps the representative for Below as well.”

“Sure,” I said, “but that’s posturing, not substance. We need something to come at them with. I don’t suppose you’d care to share what it is you’ve been digging up in the Salian archives all this time?”

“Ah,” the First Prince faintly smiled, “then it was you.”

I cocked an eyebrow, admitting nothing.

“Or Princess Vivienne perhaps,” Cordelia said. “Thieves of her skill are passingly rare.”

“She’s a princess now, you know,” I chided. “She doesn’t steal anymore.

I let a beat pass.

“When a princess steals from foreigners, it’s called diplomacy.”

The only born royal out of the three of us was less than amused, but I caught Hanno’s lips twitching. Yeah, of course that one would agree. I doubted the fucker had paid taxes to anyone since age sixteen, ascetic vagrant that he was.

“So?” I pressed.

“It occurred to me after our talks with the Herald of the Deeps that we were missing the forest for the trees,” Cordelia said. “We thought of the cities and why he wanted them, but did not consider how they would be held.”

“Strength, presumably,” I said. “Assuming they get to cram their terms down our throats.”

“Strength would involve dwarven arms,” the First Prince pointed out.

Well, yes. It wasn’t like they were lacking in either manpower or armaments. They’d just seeded colonies across the northern third of Calernia while simultaneously providing arms for large armies across several fronts.

“I don’t see your point,” I admitted.

“It would mean dwarves on the surface,” Hanno said. “Thousands for every city, come to live under the sun permanently.”

I blinked. Shit, they were right. I was so used to thinking in terms of the Kingdom Under just being another empire to deal with that I’d forgotten this demand was breaking a long-term policy of isolation from the surface. The most dwarves Calernians usually saw were mercenaries hired through Mercantis.

“That’s a lot of people away from their usual centres of power,” I muttered. “At a time where their population’s being spread out up north.”

Was there even a precedent for dwarves ever sharing a city with someone? I couldn’t recall one offhand.

“I imagine the Kingdom Under sees it as installing an armed ruling caste,” Cordelia said. “They chose cities instead of empty land for a reason. But in practice, the Herald is achieving something else entirely.”

“Three city-states sitting atop massively profitable trade routes to the underground,” I finished, “and little to no real oversight. Outrageously wealthy pocket kingdoms for him to rule over.”

The First Prince nodded.

“I attempted to discern the worth of the trade involved and acquire an idea of the Kingdom Under’s wealth,” she said. “While you were asleep, I finished the work as much as it will ever be.”

I cocked my head to the side.

“And?”

“For at least the next two centuries, the cities would represent more wealth than the entire Fourteenth and Fifteenth Expansion put together,” Cordelia said, “while involving less of a tenth of the people involved in these.”

So small, rich kingdoms living under the protection of the prominent military power of Calernia.

“Sounds like a golden retirement to me,” I frankly said. “With just enough challenges to tackle he won’t ever get bored.”

“My thoughts exactly,” the First Prince coldly smiled.

“You’re wrong.”

I’d almost forgotten Hanno was there. I turned an eye to him, skeptical.

“There’s speculation,” I conceded, “but the foundations are solid.”

“You are also taking the most uncharitable interpretation as fact,” he pointed out. “Not unreasonably, given the Herald’s behaviour, but it blinds you to a truth.”

“And what would that be?” Cordelia asked, tone cutting.

“I do not know what the Role of a Herald of the Deeps is,” Hanno said, “but if he was seeking to leave that life behind his Name would be weakening.”

He met my gaze.

“Having been in the same room as him, did you sense such a thing?”

I chewed my lip.

“No,” I admitted. “And if it’d been there, I would have sensed it.”

My sense of Names had become unusually keen after I became Warden of the East. The dwarven Name had felt odd to my senses, but in no way broken or fading. Which meant Hanno was right.

“So he’s trying to fulfill his Role still,” I noted. “That’s interesting. How would pocket kingdoms help the Kingdom Under?”

“A queen’s perspective,” Hanno admonished.

I narrowed my eye, mentally taking a step back and looking at it another way.

“He’s a hero, so he’s trying to help part of the kingdom,” I corrected. “The downtrodden. Not the whole realm, and certainly not in a ruling sense. The gains their empire make through this are just how he sells it back home. The city-states are what he’s actually after, not the profits.”

“They would earn him the support of the expansionist faction,” Cordelia said. “Which he had suspected to be his backers within the Kingdom Under.”

Fuck , I thought, that actually made a great deal of sense. Even if the expansionist were assholes, the ones who wanted to make gains at the expense of the people of the surface, the Herald would have nowhere else to go. I could see the pattern now: two leading philosophies underground, one of isolation and one of expansion. Even if there was a dusting of evil or even Evil in the expansionists, the Herald would make common cause with them. He had to, because he wanted to reform his people and the only other game in town saw dwarven society as a closed circle.

“It fits with where I first met him,” I admitted. “Leading the Fourteenth Expansion, on the very outskirts of dwarven territory. He’s trying to get out from under the thumb of people in power by going into the wilds.”

The First Prince considered that, then slowly nodded.

“Form the perspective of attempting to reform custom, the city-states described would be an ideal garden,” Cordelia said. “Small populations of like-minded dwarves, large wealth based on trade instead of labour and more numerous foreign peoples around them to erode the old ways. It is a well-crafted plan.”

One that the Herald had rushed the encirclement of the Dead King to sell to his people, immediately knocking at our door afterwards. The details really did fit, Crows. I could sympathize with the intention if it was really this, even admire it a bit, but none of it changed that all those pretty things would literally be built on our backs. That the Herald was willing to let thousands and thousands die, gamble with the fate of Calernia and blackmail desperate nations to get his reforms. That was... Fuck me , I thought. Yeah, not exactly an unfamiliar situation. Just not the way I was used to it.

So this was what it felt like, facing me across a table.

“So we know what he’s after,” I said. “Now we’re in a position to fight back.”

“It has been brought to my attention that a dwarven gate was recently unearthed,” Cordelia said, the look she flicked Hanno’s way rather cool. “We can make use of it to reach out to the isolationists and out his plot.”

“Must we?”

I frowned at Hanno. He trusted heroes more than I thought wise, even now, but he wasn’t a fool. He wouldn’t argue for the cession of three cities – one of which was part of the League, not even the Grand Alliance! – to the Herald because he was trying to accomplish something Good through dubious means. I suspected that, if anything, ye ol’ Sword of Judgment would think worse of the Herald’s methods than we did. Unlike Cordelia and I, he expected better of heroes.

“What the Herald seeks it not evil or harmful to the rest of Calernia,” Hanno elaborated. “It is his approach that is objectionable. If he can get his way without it being at our expense, would it not be better to attempt that bargain?”

“Is there a way for him to get his way save at our expense?” Cordelia skeptically replied.

“If it is a city and the riches of a land the Herald seeks,” Hanno said, “there is one we can offer.”

It took me a moment to realize what he was getting at.

“Keter,” I disbelievingly said. “You mean the Crown of the Dead.”

“It is a great city, surrounded by lands that were once rich,” he said. “And unlike the cities demanded it will stand empty once the war ends.”

“Keter is part of the land that was promised to the Firstborn for their participation in this war,” I said. “How many homes are the dwarves going to steal from them?”

“Would the drow truly want the city?” he honestly asked. “I was given to understand they made their own in the Duskwood.”

“That’s twice now powers have tried to go back on that bargain,” I coldly warned. “Alliances have been broken over less.”

He shook his head.

“I do not mean for a treaty to be breached,” Hanno said. “Let them trade the claim, by all means. There must something in the Herald’s hands worth more than a claim over a city they might never inhabit.”

I hummed. That was, well, more acceptable. Given the losses the Firstborn had taken in the war with Keter, I honestly wasn’t sure they could colonize all of the lands that were now the Kingdom of the Dead. They might genuinely be amenable to a trade, if the dwarves offered up something worth the exchange. The problem with that, though, was...

“Nearly all of what makes the demanded cities attractive to both the Herald and the expansionists is absent in Keter,” Cordelia said. “It is far from trade and there are no humans within that might be used for labour. They will not accept that bargain.”

Yeah, that.

“His backers would not,” Hanno said, “but the Herald himself might. We are trying to work past him when we should be working with him.”

We were going around the bastard because he was willing let a third of Procer be blighted to get his way, not because we just felt like being poor sports , but I forced myself to consider his words anyway. Hanno, for all his flaws, understood heroes better than I did – the way they thought, the way they moved. I closed my eye and opened the other. Not looking at Hanno himself but beyond, fingers running down the strings of story. Was he right, was there a path?

Was there a lever to move the Herald of the Deeps?

I felt myself drift, following the chords until I found something at the other end. A force, a will, a Name. An entity that I could only dimly make out, this far from it, but I could see something. Three hearts, all solid, but there was something... deeper. A glimpse at the strings that would move him, the way they tasted. Love, I saw. The Herald was driven by love. Made greater, projected to many, but at its source intensely personal. And personal was a creature that could be moved by more than just stick and carrot. I breathed out deeply, closing one eye and opening another.

Both of them were staring at me.

“Catherine?” Hanno cautiously said.

“I was having a look at our friend,” I replied, tone steady. “I saw enough to think your method has merit.”

Cordelia looked rather skeptical.

“He’s doing this out of love,” I told her. “That much I’m certain of. Romantic and personal, everything else grows from there.”

“Love,” the First Prince of Procer said, “is not a sound political strategy.”

Hanno looked about to disagree and I wanted no part of that debate so I cut in.

“I agree,” I said. “But we lose nothing by attempting to move him first. Prepare the appeal to the opposition in the Kingdom Under, and if the talks with the Herald fail we can proceed with that plan immediately.”

“It would be best to negotiate entirely in good faith,” Hanno protested.

“So far he hasn’t,” I pointed out. “I see no need to reward that with trust he has done nothing to earn.”

He did not look pleased and neither did the First Prince, but neither of them stormed out of the room. That was something.

“Another compromise,” Cordelia said. “You seem to have acquired a taste for those.”

“If I have on redeeming quality, Your Highness, it’s that I never hesitate to steal the methods other people beat me through,” I smiled.

I did not get a laugh, which was only sensible since I’d not truly been joking. With an agreement in principle, we hammered out a few more of the details and split off to see to our parts. It would all have to wait until the representatives were chosen, anyhow, so there was still time.

Too little of it, but wasn’t that always the way?

—

I had the talks with the Blood settled by nightfall and a treaty after dinner. By tomorrow the rest of the Grand Alliance would be informed, as even though it was an internal matter of Levant it involved the Liesse Accords. That part, as the First Prince had predicted, benefitted from decisive action. It was the other talks of the two following days that had me itching. The most frustrating part about the representatives being chosen was that I couldn’t be directly involved. As the Warden I stood apart, so I would not even have a seat in the council of villains past explaining why it was now needed.

All I could do was stack the deck behind closed doors and hope.

Hanno was chosen on the morning of second day, by a wide margin. It took until Midnight Bell for the villains to finish and the Pilfering Dicer almost died – accused by the Red Knight of having interfered in her duel with Archer. But we got our way, in the end. The Barrow Sword was chosen as the representative, narrowly, after Indrani managed an equally narrow draw against the Red Knight. His position was still weak, but Ishaq was no fool: he’d move to consolidate, aware he had my blessing to take everything in hand.

I doubted Below’s lot would be as firmly in hand as when my reputation had been making people think twice, but it would serve. Gods, it would have to. Soon the League and the second wave of Praesi troops would be arriving, and when they did the march north would begin shortly after. There were only a few matters left to settle.

—

Hierophant had told me he needed five days to prove whether the Rogue Sorcerer’s theory had been right, and he was punctual to a fault: at noon on the fifth day, I sat before a mirror through which we faced each other.

“Roland was correct,” Masego told me. “We were looking for a source of power that might shatter the Intercessor’s grip on stories, and we have found one.”

I was too early to be relieved, I warned myself.

“So what is it, exactly?” I asked.

“Night,” Hierophant replied.

I blinked. Was it really going to be that easy?

“More precisely, Night as it was first granted to Sve Noc by the Gods Below,” Hierophant specified.

Ah, and there was the pinch.

“I shouldn’t need to tell you that pretty much all Night has passed from some Firstborn body at some point,” I pointed out.

The drow had been very ardent proponents for centuries of murdering each other for that power.

“Some, yes, but not all,” Masego said. “The Sisters have administered the resource since the beginning, Catherine. They still hold the power they used to create their shared godhead, which was bestowed directly by Below.”

“So the Crows could do it,” I said.

“They could be used to channel Night against the Intercessor, whom you’ve informed me had a hand in granting it to them in the first place,” Hierophant corrected. “They could not do it themselves, by my estimation. At the very least you – or someone of equivalent strength in Night – and myself would need to guide the ritual.”

I grimaced.

“You want me to head north just as the armies begin to march on Keter,” I said. “That’s not a small ask, Masego.”

“Nor is breaking the hold of the goddess of stories on her domain,” Hierophant bluntly replied. “You asked me for a solution and you have it. There is nothing more I can do.”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“Can we really spare you?” I asked. “The crown of Autumn-”

“Has been carved into what we sought,” Masego interrupted. “It will be the cursed gift to the Dead King that we planned. And while I would prefer to be there when it is used, should the necessity strike my presence is not required. Roland and the Blessed Artificer would both be capable of using it without me.”

And both would be with the armies. I rubbed the bridge of my nose. I didn’t like it, to be honest, and it went against the grain for me to leave all the preparations behind. But it couldn’t be denied that if we didn’t get back Evil’s stories, the Dead King would snap us over his knee. Much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, I didn’t really have a choice.

“Well then, pack up and join me in Salia,” I said. “Look like we’re headed to Serolen.”

I had a week until he was there, so I had better spend it well: after that, there would be no going back.

Chapter 41: Passing

“Forty-four: never refuse a companion come to join your journey at the last moment. Whether true or traitor, they represent a necessary opportunity.”

– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

The heroes had come together in one of their little councils and a verdict emerged: when all marched on Keter, the Mirror Knight would wield the Severance.

I’d hoped it would be Hanno instead, but I would make my peace with the decision. It wasn’t like he’d be keeping the sword after the war anyway – it had been made in the Arsenal, so by treaty it would be going into a vault under Cardinal as soon as one was built. It would see the light of day again if a Warden saw a threat emerge that it should be wielded against, but I had my doubts there would be another of those in my lifetime. Vivienne had the Jacks keep an eye on Christophe de Pavanie afterwards and they noted he did not seem to feel particularly happy about the choice.

Rumour had it he’d argued against his own candidature, though even my friends among the heroes remained tight-lipped. Knowing their kind, trying to refuse the charge had probably swayed a few more in favour of him taking up the sword. Still, important as the decision had been as the days passed it felt like little more than an afterthought. A much greater test was looming just ahead, after all: word had been sent to the Herald, and we were now prepared for the final talks with the envoy of the Kingdom Under. Even the most eminent of swords was a small thing, compared to the conversation that would make or break our attack on Keter.

We took Cordelia’s suggested line, at least superficially. The Barrow Sword would sit in as the representative for Below and the First Prince had reached out to the Kingdom Under through the dwarven gate to find an interlocutor should the talks with the Herald fail. We’d kept it deniable and strictly Proceran so far, talking about the trade the gate being dug up might represent while Cordelia’s envoys sought to get in touch with an isolationist dignitary. It wasn’t that subtle, of course, and wasn’t meant to be – our best shot at getting in touch with such a person was them finding us, not the other way around, so rumours were to our advantage.

And if this blew back on us, then the Grand Alliance could say it’d all been the Principate and that Cordelia Hasenbach would abdicate because of this debacle, because she totally hadn’t been planning on doing that anyway.

We got tentative feelers back from a dwarf whose title was something like ‘home-lord’ in dwarven, but she got frustrated when our envoys got noncommittal and that boded well. Knowing our time was running out, we rushed the meeting a day early. The Herald of the Deeps and Seeker Balasi were once again the whole sum of the Kingdom Under’s delegation, which in retrospect looked a little suspicious. Arrogant as dwarves were, they had to know that sending fewer people than the number of fucking cities you were asking for was a bit much – this was the Herald’s choice, I figured, cutting other people out of the room so word couldn’t get out to his opponents back home.

It boded well for our bargaining position that he couldn’t even be sure of everyone in his delegation.

“You have been given sufficient time to grasp the terms,” Balasi bluntly said. “Have you deliberated your answer?”

They didn’t waste time on courtesies and this time Cordelia didn’t pull out the perfect hostess routine, which I felt was rather more honest a way to do this. Hanno might be inclined to see the best in the Herald, but I had yet to find any reason to.

“A sort of answer, certainly: it has come to our attention that you have not been negotiating in good faith,” Cordelia Hasenbach coldly replied.

I reached for my wakeleaf and began stuffing my pipe, letting the hero and the diplomat have at it. I was here to look imposing and wave my Night stick, not pull strings they were my better at pulling.

“This is an insult,” the Herald calmly said. “Withdraw it and apologize or these negotiations are at an end.”

Mistake, I thought. The green-eyed dwarf wasn’t a diplomat and it showed. Never give that kind of an ultimatum unless you were sure you wouldn’t be called on it or you were willing to go through with the threat. The First Prince matched his gaze, unblinking.

“The door is behind you.”

Balasi rose to his feet.

“Salia will be sunk into the ground for this,” the deed-seeker hissed. “You insult envoys of the King Under-”

“ Silence ,” I Spoke.

His mouth closed shut and he stared at me as if I’d gone mad.

He might think so, but it had been a tactical choice. It meant the Herald would have to speak for himself at all times and I was looking for something else besides. Still, I cocked my head to the side. That’d resonated more strongly than it should have. It was like I’d thought in Praes, the aspect was so close to emerging it would only need a single halfway solid pivot to solidify. As I considered that I kept my dead eye on the Herald, who under the calm façade was furious. Personally so. But is it him you’re in love with, or is this just a close friendship? I could not tell, I wasn’t good enough at this yet.

There were a lot of revenge stories around the Herald that began by Balasi dying, but that didn’t precisely confirm it either. The death of family or a childhood friend was just as common a catalyst as a lover’s to begin a journey of revenge.

“Now,” Cordelia said, leaning forward, “do you intend to leave?”

I knew her well enough to tell that the glint in her eye was a vicious little twist of satisfaction. Couldn’t blame her, given how these two had tried to use the threat of extinction at the hand of a common foe to extort us out of three cities.

“It appears there has been a misunderstanding,” the Herald evenly said. “We will depart once it has been resolved and you have understood the depth of your mistake.”

“Your intentions were understood,” Hanno said. “You are attempting to create realms on the surface where you can change the ways of your people.”

It was calculated that he would be the one to speak. If it turned out we’d been wrong in our conclusions, then he could take a step back after Cordelia ‘chided’ him and remain silent like Ishaq – who was looking faintly amused as he beheld all this and was not inclined in the slightest to get involved. He was a man who knew his limitations, the Barrow Sword. He was still a few years away from having earned a seat at this sort of table in his own right.

“You assume much, angel-child,” the Herald replied.

“It is a laudable undertaking,” Hanno continued, “but your means are wrong. You cannot build the foundations of a better world by setting the stones on the back of those who live in it.”

The Named dwarf’s face tightened, the first sign of anger obvious enough I was able to catch it.

“You know nothing, White Knight,” the Herald of Deeps said. “Of what is needful or needed. The weight of your ignorance is crushing.”

The air in the room thickened, but I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth.

“None of that, now,” I lazily said. “Else I’m going to start doing it too, and you won’t like where that leads.”

“Threats and insults,” the Herald scorned. “All of you will pay for this insolence.”

He stopped massing power, but only because he rose to his feet as well. He strode out of the room, Balasi following after throwing me a glare I rolled my eye at. They two of them left silence in their wake until the Barrow Sword broke it.

“I take it negotiations with these fine fellows are at an end,” Ishaq said, stroking his beard.

I cast a look at Cordelia, who looked thoughtful, and then Hanno.

“No,” the Sword of Judgment said.

“No,” the First Prince agreed. “They will be back.”

Two bells later, they were proved right.

—

Dusk was approaching when the two of them returned. They were ushered back into the same room after being made to wait while we gathered up again. This time there were no theatrics: they knew that while they still had a blade at our throat now we had one at theirs. Not the Kingdom Under’s, that was a lost cause, but them specifically. Cordelia’s fondness for cards as a chosen metaphor for diplomacy was proving accurate: we’d played the opponents instead of the cards, and now we were getting results. Interestingly, I noticed that while my command had faded in Basali there was a lingering echo. If I gave the same order, it would come down much more harshly the second time – and my instinct was that three might lead to permanence.

That might prove more than a little useful, if the aspect was meant for what I thought it was.

Hanno took the lead this time, as Cordelia had already pulled the rug out from under them. It was about the soft glove now, not the steel underneath.

“You accused me ignorance,” he said. “Help rid me of it.”

It shouldn’t have worked, I thought. But I knew it would. Because underneath the calm I could see that the Named was just itching to talk. To lay it all out to someone who’d understand, who’d agree. It was the same reason villains gloated, only instead of getting them friends it got them killed.

“The Kingdom Under,” the Herald of the Deeps began, “has grown calcified.”

He spun us a tale, after that. Reading through the lines and navigating an unfortunate number of words in dwarven that I had no idea how to pronounce, it looked like the heartlands of the Kingdom Under had grown into pretty much a caste system. People lived and died in their little bubbles according to tortured rules, only the rungs on the caste ladder were quite literal here: the commons lived crammed in the deepest pits, the respectable in the nicer cities that had been emptied as the expansions continued.

The Herald was from one of the wealthiest families in the great city that was broadly below Orne, a place called Maradar, but he had seen the evils in the way the commons were used because... there he gave a look to Balasi that put to rest any notion it was just friendship between them. Deed-seekers, as I recalled, were dwarves who sought to commit great deeds to their status would be raised in dwarven society. The pieces fit rather neatly together.

“After I became the Herald,” he said, “I attempted reforms. It... did not go well.”

“There was war,” Balasi frankly said. “He was accused of stepping beyond his Burden.”

“So you compromised by heading the Fourteenth Expansion,” Hanno said.

Only that too had failed. While the largely bloodless victory I’d delivered to them over the Firstborn had seen the Herald lauded, it had also made the pioneering safe . His opponents from back home, seeing massive gains to be made at little risk, had immediately begun getting their hands all over the colonies. To get him out of the way they’d tossed him leadership of the Fifteenth Expansion, an unprecedented honour, but those first waves would be mostly soldiers and those had other loyalties. If he wanted to make a haven for the trod upon, then he would need somewhere else to bring them.

So, as we’d surmised, he’d cut a deal with the same people who had been chasing him off after every victory.

“Securing cities for support would have been so resounding a victory we would have been untouchable for at least a century,” the Herald said. “Time to grow, to make alliances.”

“A fair turn given to an ugly act,” Cordelia said, unimpressed.

“You would already have gone beyond us if you did not want to cut a deal,” Balasi replied. “So offer your terms, First Prince.”

“Keter,” she replied.

“A wasteland infested with the dead,” the Herald frowned.

“A great city among once-rich lands,” Hanno replied. “An outpost with roads to the Kingdom Under, a natural capital to the Fifteenth Expansion.”

“Even if all the dead are broken,” Balasi slowly said, “there would be no trade, or humans to work under us.”

“Are you seeking change,” the Sword of Judgment quietly replied, “or just to add a rung below you on the ladder?”

Both dwarves flinched. There was talk back and forth after that, about boundaries of land and trade concessions and the massive sum of gold that they both wanted – I now suspected to make a garden out of Keter, if they were stuck there – but I could tell that it was Hanno’s retort that had done it. Every time it looked like they were getting angry, they felt the bite of the bladelike sentence slide below a rib.

“It is not the bargain I was expected to make,” the Herald told us when the negotiations wound down. “I may not have the support to make it law.”

“I am willing for Procer to take the debt immediately if supplies for the siege of Keter are promised,” Cordelia told him.

“I cannot promise them,” the green-eyed dwarf admitted. “I do not have the authority to move such quantities by my word alone. The land-kings will have their say.”

“But you can help,” Hanno pressed.

“I have struck a bargain with Sve Noc through an envoy before,” the Herald said, glancing at me. “This power none can deny me, so these talks do not worry me. All I can offer for the land-kings is an oath on my staff that I will fight for these terms with all my might.”

So not a sure thing, I thought with a grimace. It wasn’t the agreement we’d wanted, and the Sisters had yet to agree to the terms – which involved them ceding a great deal of territory theoretically theirs – but it was something. And if we tried to go pas them, reach out to their opponents in the Kingdom Under, we ran risks too. The talks might be killed entirely, or the terms grow worse. And even if it worked out just fine, it would take time. What would better terms matter, if they were accepted when we were all dead? No all the decisions we could make carried risks. The real question was which of them was the best risk to take.

My gut said this was the one.

Hanno had gotten to Herald, I’d seen it, and that would work for us. It was a better bet than a complete unknown. I met Cordelia’s eyes and nodded my assent.

“Then speak to the land-kings, Herald,” the First Prince said. “This is the bargain we seek.”

Drinks were brought in, we emptied them and the Herald of the Deeps swore his oath. I saw Creation eddy from the strength of it. It will not be broken without consequence , I thought. That night, as I lay in bed I found that sleep eluded me. The assault on Keter had always been going to be a gamble, a roll of the dice that would lead to either victory or extinction, but it was even more so now. We had enough supplies for the march and a few weeks once we set camp around the Crown of the Dead – a little under two months, barring a disaster, but even two months wouldn’t be enough to crack open Keter.

If the Herald failed, we failed with him.

I was not surprised that I slept little, and fitfully.

—

It was actually quite hard to take anyone by surprise through the Twilight Ways, at least when you got to the scale of armies. A cavalry contingent of a handful of Named could be slipped in to devastating effect, that was true, but an entire army? Getting it through the gates could take more than a day sometimes, not unlike marching a host through a narrow mountain pass, and it was even worse when you were leading a coalition force – half a dozen languages, people yelling about who was in charge and too many different baggage trains. Having led such a force on the Hainaut front for almost two years, I figured I had my finger on the pulse of the kind of troubles it entailed.

As always, though, the League of Free Cities found a way to surprise me. After a day and a half they had most of the Helikean army through and that was pretty much it. Everyone else had landed small forces, squabbling over who should go through, and apparently Bellerophon’s citizen militia was debating just staying in the Twilight Ways the whole time.

There would, I was informed, be a vote.

Still, by the afternoon of the second day there was no longer any delaying the official ‘arrival’ of the League: people had seen the troops crossing into Creation, word was reaching Salia and there might be a panic if the situation was left unattended. The people of Procer’s capital had gotten much twitchier about armies since the shine off the myth of the Principate’s invincibility had worn off. For that and diplomatic reasons, theatre was made of the whole affair. It suited all parties, since the League cities wanted to salvage their reputation after sitting out most of the war while Procer was in desperate need of good news to trumpet about.

All of the cities picked two hundred of their shiniest soldiers – Bellerophon drew the names by lot instead – and a parade was welcomed into the city to raucous cheers. Cordelia cracked open the foodstuff reserves to throw street banquets and newly minted Empress Basilia sent out crates of salted fish, dried mutton and dates as an elegant gesture of goodwill. If she made sure that the generosity was traced back to her by having her own officers distribute what was technically League stores, well, that was just how those games were played. She’d not gotten her hat by missing opportunities.

The city’s spirits were lifted, the doom just beyond the horizon forgotten for a night, and why wouldn’t the people cheer? Not even the First Crusade had boasted an array of soldiers from so many parts of Calernia: this time all the nations of the continent stood on the right side of horror.

I did not take long for Basilia Katopodis to seek me out after the formalities were done. She came alone, keeping the pretence of a visit between old friends instead of state affairs, but we both knew better. I received her in the same bar I’d received Nestor Ikaroi in when he came on her behalf, standing behind the counter. The Protector of the League had good taste in drinks: she asked for a Wasteland mule, which was a finger of aragh in pale beer. It was an old Legion favourite I remembered from the War College, beloved of students for being a cheaper drunk than either beer or aragh and of innkeepers for being really easy to cut with water without affecting the taste.

“I wondered if Ikaroi was boasting,” Basilia amusedly said as I handed her the mug, “but it seems not.”

“It’s a little nostalgic,” I admitted.

“I wonder if there are any boys in Laure who now boasts of having had their ale poured by a queen,” she mused.

I snorted.

“There’s a few who could boast of getting more than that, if they put the details together,” I told her, wagging my eyebrows suggestively.

She choked on her drink, spraying mist on Cordelia’s nice carpets as she coughed. Ah, the costs of diplomacy. The Empress of Aenia, a realm that covered almost half the territory of the League, was a tall brown-haired woman with a rather plain face and the build of someone who’d spent most of their life on horseback wearing heavy armour. No one would call her pretty, but she was fit and fierce – interesting to the eye the same way a tiger would be. She’d once been believed a man, I’d heard, but I would not have guessed at a glance.

“There are tales about Callowan serving girls,” the Empress admitted, grinning.

“All lies, except for the ones that are true,” I drawled.

She’d not come for idle talk, of course, but I saw worth in keeping the loosely friendly relationship we’d had so far. I had been Basilia’s informal patron during her rise in power, providing support from afar while she fought Malicia’s allies in the League. I’d even tugged at Cordelia’s sleeve once or twice to get her to toss the then-general a bone. We both knew she’d risen far beyond what I had ever intended and that a relation that’d once had a clear superior had grown rather more muddled, but that was not enough to warrant hostility. She was still the closest thing I had to a reliable friend in the League.

I just had to tread more carefully when asking things of her and expect to be asked the odd favour in return.

“That’s always the trouble with tales,” Basilia said. “It can be hard to pick out the true ones, especially when it comes to Named.”

It was my turn to send her an amused glance. There was no need to go fishing when I was ready to just toss her the fish.

“That one’s true,” I said. “I stand as the Warden now. The office will be written into the Accords, with all accordant powers and responsibilities. There is no longer a need for the League to worry about infighting within the Grand Alliance – all our efforts are turned against Keter.”

She let out a low whistle.

“You do keep landing on your feet, don’t you?” Basilia said.

“Coming from you, Empress ,” I smiled, “that’s a little rich.”

We traded toothy, savage smiles.

“The message I sent through Ikaroi still stands,” she told me. “The League can’t sign onto the Accords unless we get back the Hierarch.”

“He did not strike me as a man who would sign them if you did get him back,” I frankly replied.

She shrugged.

“Regardless, there’s way around it,” she said. “The cities have already adopted laws that follow along the same lines, so the holdout is you.”

Meaning the office of Warden, which could not be expected to have authority over the Named of the Free Cities when the League had not signed onto the Accords.

“And you have an offer?” I asked.

“What falls under the authority of a Protector of the League is vague,” she told me. “Largely on purpose. So Named could be swept under that aegis, if the bone is gnawed at some.”

I almost smiled at the audacity.

“You want a deal between the office of Warden and the hereditary title of Protector,” I mused. “Your authority over the League’s Named recognized in exchange for enforcing the Accords on them.”

She wanted for her and her descendants to be the natural and legal lieutenants of the Wardens in the Free Cities. More power gathered to her title in exchange for me getting my way past the labyrinth complexities of negotiating any treaty with the League.

“I could stomach that arrangement,” I said, “so long as it’s contingent to the League not having signed onto the Accords yet. Once it does, it will be no different from any other signatory.”

I might not be in a position to take a hard line at the moment – we needed the Free Cities if we were going to take Keter – I had no intention of sundering the Warden’s authority by allowing private Named fiefdoms under the office. Basilia narrowed her eyes at me, recognizing my answer for what it was: a concession that I could accept this temporarily, but that I’d be putting my full weight behind getting the League into the Accords properly the moment we were done with Keter. It wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear, but like me she knew that pushing too far would bite her in the ass.

So, as I had expected, she went after another concession.

“They made for interesting reading, your Accords,” the Empress said. “Particularly the parts about Cardinal and this school you intend to build there.”

I’d originally meant it for Named, but in practice it would likely see only a few of these attending – young and transitional types, before they headed out into the world. The guild I intended to raise there for villains, and perhaps even heroes if Hanno was so inclined, would draw more interest than the halls of learning. But the school itself would draw mages and nobles from all over Calernia, especially if a few Named mages could be talked into teaching. There would be a lot of influence to be traded there, so I cocked the eyebrow over my dead eye at the empress.

“What about it?” I idly asked.

“The League would be late to join that effort, and our divisions may lead others to edge us out,” Basilia evenly said. “A pledge might allay those fears.”

I got what she practically wanted out of her before long: guaranteed seats. For students, but also for teachers. And there was the clever part: those were not to be promised to the League itself, since indeed that would be illegal and infringing on the authority of a Hierarch. They were to belong to the Protectors of the League, so that the Empress and her successors could use them for bribes and influence. Well, she didn’t lack for audacity. I bargained her down to one teacher and ten students, which I suspected was actually what she’d been after from the start, and with that little concession I got the Empress of Aenia in line.

She’d still fight me tooth and nail to keep the League out of the Accords so she could maintain her authority over Named, but this way she wouldn’t actually go to war over the matter . Good luck with that , I thought, smiling prettily at her. The eastern half of the League’s terrified of you gobbling them up and it’s Cordelia fucking Hasenbach I’ll be sending to talk them into signing. She smiled back just as prettily, no doubt already planning half a dozen ways to brutally smash any fingers that dared creep anywhere near her backyard.

“To alliances,” I toasted, raising my cup.

“Long may they last,” Basilia Katopodis replied.

And to the sound of metal against metal, the League of Free Cities entered the war.

—

The day before Masego was set to arrive in Salia, the people of the capital filled the streets. Rumours had been swirling around the city for days, no small amount of them seeded by Cordelia’s spies, so it was with expectation more than glee that the people gathered. I was not to stand in the crowd but instead in a great raised gallery by the side of the platform where a First Prince would abdicate and another be elected. I’d had forewarning, of course. From the Procerans themselves, but also through the Jacks: the two princesses had gone through every legality they could given the circumstances, and that meant a vote in the Highest Assembly.

There was no way to hide that from Vivienne’s people, who might not be the Eyes or the Circle but were nothing to be underestimated.

It was without an invitation that I went to see Rozala Malanza, but these days my name was invitation enough. The guards, swarming the place like vigilant hornets, let me through and an attendant guided me to a small room up two sets of stairs. There the Princess of Aequitan was having a cup of sweet cider as she looked through a great window at the crowd still gathering below. Louis Rohanon, her husband and secretary who’d abdicated rule of Creusens at the Graveyard, was fussing over her as she allowed his attentions with a fond gaze. I was almost reluctant to clear my throat.

Louis stepped back immediately, looking mildly embarrassed.

“Your Excellency,” he said. “A pleasant surprise.”

“Louis Rohanon,” I said. “Or should that be prince consort?”

He smiled ruefully.

“Simply consort,” the dark-haired man replied. “After consultation with the Rogue Sorcerer, it was decided it would be best for me to be removed from anything princely.”

I hummed in approval. The ‘crown’ he’d surrendered in Iserre had been more than a chunk of metal, it had been the story of his right to rule. It was perhaps not necessary for him to have refused a largely ceremonial title, but the prudence spoke well of him. Rozala was not without taste.

“And to what do we owe the visit, Warden?” the Princess of Aequitan asked.

I flicked a glance at her husband, who took the hint with good grace and made his excuses. As he left the room I took in the sight of Rozala Malanza as she had chosen to dress for her coronation: a warrior-princess. Over a red dress with a yellow stripe down the centre – her heraldry’s colours inverted – she wore a polished breastplate, vambraces on her arms and greaves over soft leather boots. The thick belt at her waist, touched with gold, bore a sheathed sword. The princess’ dark curls had been pulled back, freeing bangs as a loose braid went down her back, and she had been made into the very ideal of an Arlesite princess of war.

It suited her, I thought. It was not without reason I considered Rozala the toughest Proceran general I’d faced: if we’d fought the Camps to the finish instead of making a truce, it would have been an army-shattering hour for both sides.

“Now that my husband was chased off and you’ve looked your fill,” Rozala drily said, “will you deign to speak freely?

I took the time to pick my words carefully.

“Yours is an election come out of the war,” I said, “but Gods willing, it will last long past it.”

“Ah,” the dark-eyed princess smiled. “I had wondered if I would warrant such a visit.”

There wasn’t a lot of joy in that quirk of the lips.

“You have spent much coin and effort keeping Procer from failing,” she said. “So you look for assurances that our gratitude will not be short-lived.”

“You took an oath after the Graveyard,” I said, “when you put that sword in the ground. I don’t believe you the kind of woman to go back on it.”

“But,” Rozala replied.

“We will have business, you and I, when I sit in Cardinal and you in Salia,” I said.

And I did not have the kind of rapport with Rozala Malanza that I did with Cordelia Hasenbach – who, for all that we had faced off for years, had become someone I trusted in our own way. Considering that Procer would be pivotal to the survival of the Accords one way or another, it meant I needed to have a second look at the dark-haired beauty before me: not as Cordelia’s general and rival, but instead as a First Princess in her own right. Rozala narrowed her eyes at me.

“Let me speak plainly, then,” the princess said. “We will never be friends, Catherine Foundling.”

Her jaw clenched.

“I believe you cruel and cavalier with lives as well as deeply conceited,” Rozala Malanza harshly said. “That the Gods have seen fit to reward you for this is the misfortune of our age.”

I did not blink, waiting for her to finish.

“But you keep your word,” the Princess of Aequitan reluctantly added. “And treaties made with you can be trusted. Procer will stand behind the Accords, even if arms must be twisted.”

“I have heard promises before,” I warned, “and they died stillborn on the floor of the Assembly.”

Rozala’s face hardened.

“Procer,” she said, “will not be what it was. It cannot be.”

She rested a hand on her belly.

“I will not bring my daughter into the world I knew as a girl,” Rozala Malanza swore. “The chaos, the petty wars and the knives. Hasenbach had the right of that: there is rot in the Principate and it must be burned out.”

My eye narrowed.

“And what will you do about it?” I asked.

“Open your ears,” Rozala said, “after the crown is set on my brow.”

I left, as she’d tacitly told me to, and an hour later found myself leaning against the gallery railing while the people of Salia shouted themselves hoarse. After the criers and resonance spells had made known Cordelia’s abdication there had been cries of dismay, for though her reign had not been without troubles and riots she was a comfortingly steady hand. They had turned to cheers soon enough, though, when Rozala’s election was announced. She was a popular woman, her victories in the north well known while the black marks on her record were long forgotten.

Cordelia Hasenbach herself set the crown of white gold on her successor’s head, the two of them matching gazes as she did.

When the First Princess of Procer stepped forward afterwards, to the edge of the platform, I felt spells bloom all around us. Scrying mirrors, I realized after catching sight of one of them from the glint of the sun reflected, though where they led I could not be sure. Rozala had a good speaking voice and the promises she gave out were the kind a beleaguered people could cheer at: driving out the dead, restoring order and peace to Procer. After that, though, things took a turn and I found myself leaning forward in interest.

“- and so as we begin our march on Keter I ask: where are the princes and princesses of the south?”

Murmurs, unease.

“Again and again,” Rozala Malanza called out, “we have sown the seeds of our own defeat. Schemes and grasping hands, betrayals and cowardice Shame at every turn.. Even as the Hidden Horror closes his grip on Procer, these parasites hide in their palaces and leave the rest of us to burn.”

A shiver went through the crowd. Like she’d touched a finger to the pulse of the fury just under the surface.

“No longer,” the First Princess said. “I give you this oath now: those who call themselves princes and do not march to save Procer are princes no longer. All their families I attaint, all their holdings I declare forfeit. When the moon turns, all who will not hold a sword to save the Principate will be cast out of it until Last Dusk.”

The city went wild, the clamour of shouts and stamping feet shaking the walls. And now I knew where those scrying mirrors went: the First Princess had, on the day of her coronation, thrown a gauntlet to every crown in Procer.

Pick it up , Rozala Malanza had said, or I will drag you off your thrones by the hair.

“Yeah,” I murmured, smiling down at her from the gallery. “You’ll do.”

—

Hierophant arrived in Salia early, late on the night of the coronation instead of early in the morning. I offered to delay our departure so he could have a night’s sleep in a proper bed, but he would have none of it.

“It makes no difference to me,” Masego told me. “And time is of the essence, you have been telling me.”

“You just want to get your grubby fingers on the godhead of the Crows as quickly as possible,” I accused.

“That too,” he shamelessly agreed.

He did want to spend a few hours with Indrani before leaving, though, as she wouldn’t be coming with us despite her protests to the contrary. I wanted her keeping an eye on the Barrow Sword, whose seat as representative was still too fresh to be anywhere near secure. I encouraged him to, as much because I loved them both as because I needed some time to get the last of my affairs in order. I sent word that I would be leaving tonight instead of tomorrow to all those who needed to know, then talked Vivienne into a late supper with me. Hakram was out of the city, settling a dispute between two clans out east, so a message would have to do.

After my pack and goodbyes were done, I went to find the third companion that would come north with me. Akua was not far, having been amusing herself over the last few days by turning the flying tower where I’d become the Warden into what she called ‘a proper throne’ in between going into the slums of Salia to offer healing against the diseases that kept sprouting up in the crowded hovels. Some of them could not be wiped out entirely by Light.

“Did you know, darling, that most villains only ever encounter a single godhead in their lives?” she told me. “You are something of an overachiever in that regard.”

“It’s the Crows again, so it doesn’t count as a new one,” I argued.

Though it was novel for her to actually need supplies now – as well as clothes, since she could no longer a shade who could change her wardrobe with a thought – she’d had most of them set aside already. If anything, she had seemed eager to head out to Serolen. When I asked, she turned thoughtful.

“I’ve always felt the business to be unfinished,” Akua said. “It is good to settle all of one’s affairs properly.”

Yeah, I felt it too. It was time to bring to a close the journey that’d begun in the outskirts of the Everdark. We were nearly ready to leave, horses saddled – well, Zombie for me – and our route out of the capital picked out when there was a commotion just out the palace. I looked through the Night, one of my hundred dead eyes, and cocked an eyebrow. Moments later, Cordelia Hasenbach rode in atop one of those sturdy horses the Lycaonese favoured. She had saddlebags and she was dressed to travel.

“Going somewhere?” I idly asked.

“I believe she means to come with us, Catherine,” Masego told me.

He sounded a little surprised I hadn’t caught on to that. Mercifully, Cordelia was not one of the Woe so she did not take the golden opportunity to mock me as one of them would have.

“I thought it best to make my offer for Keter directly to Sve Noc,” the Lycaonese princess said.

She was still Prince of Rhenia and Princess of Hannoven, at least for now. The papers to pass on the crowns to Otto Redcrown and turn him into the sole ruler of the Lycaonese were already ready and signed, I’d been told. They were only waiting so it wouldn’t look like Rozala was stripping her predecessor of the titles.

“That could be done by scrying mirror,” I replied, unimpressed. “The First Princess wants you out of the capital, I take it.”

“We are in agreement that my looking over her shoulder as she begins her reign would benefit neither of us,” Cordelia replied.

“And how does that lead to your riding with us?” I pressed.

“I thought you might be in favour of my presence,” the princess mildly said, “since it will allow you to keep an eye on this.”

Reaching inside her cloak, she presented a baton of sculpted ivory. It was beautifully made, but aside from that there was – no, not quite right. There was something at the heart of it, I thought, dead eye seeing a glimpse of something like Light. I shot her an inquisitive look.

“It is,” Cordelia Hasenbach told me, “the device that triggers the ealamal.”

I smothered a grimace. Yeah, she had me there. I wasn’t letting that out of my sight if I could help it. I’d already figured there must be an artefact serving the purpose but the Jacks had not unearthed anything when they looked into it.

“I don’t suppose I could talk you into breaking that,” I said.

“No,” she pleasantly replied.

“Welcome to our little band, then,” I sighed.

“It is,” Cordelia victoriously smiled, “my great pleasure.”

Chapter 42: Journey

“A journey is one of those magical events that are turned into either an eternity or a heartbeat by the quality of one’s companions.”

– Aldred Alban of Callow, the Prince Errant

It was pretty clear that Cordelia had not been on a day-long ride in years, but to her honour even as she became pained she did not let out so much as a single complaint. Masego filled in the gap in whining, having always despised horse riding with a vengeance and not grown to like it in the slightest over the years, but of all people Akua came to the rescue.

“My own body is not yet fully accustomed to riding,” she told him. “As I’ve only had it for a few months.”

“It is very nice,” Masego told her, looking her up and down shamelessly.

There’d been about as much sexual tension in that look as in a visit to a healer’s tent to get your boils treated, not that it stopped Cordelia’s eyes from slightly widening. I sighed.

“He’s talking about the homunculus nature of the body,” I whispered at her.

It was made with magic, which made probably would make this the first pair of tits he’d actually be interested in looking at. In all fairness, if you had to pick one pair in all of Creation you could do much worse than Akua Sahelian.

“How sweet of you,” Akua replied, not batting an eye. “But it still needs breaking in, which is why I have been using a spell to ease my time in the saddle.”

Huh. Hadn’t known that. Hadn’t felt it either, but that was not entirely a surprise: a mage of Akua’s calibre was capable of hiding smaller workings from my senses if they did it on purpose. She offered to teach him the spell and he eagerly agreed, then took pity on Cordelia and offered to cast it for her as well.

“So that you might gauge the difference,” Akua smiling offered.

I saw the Prince of Rhenia seriously consider refusing her out of principle, but saddle-sore was saddle-sore. The spell was applied and we quickened our pace again, riding north through the Twilight Ways. It was hard to tell how good a time we were making: from a distance, the starlit compass was vaguer. I could only tell we were progressing, not at what rate. Not yet anyway.

Though the company we’d assembled was unusual – ‘the Black Queen, the First Prince, the Hierophant and the Doom of Liesse walk into a bar’, there was a premise – the travelling itself was smooth. I sometimes took Zombie on flights ahead, as much to bag some game as to cure her restlessness, and the addition of quail and rabbit to the cookpot was welcome. It was our custom to rotate the chore, which led to occasional bouts of the surreal. Sending the former First Prince of Procer out to gather firewood while the Doom of Liesse made biryani chicken for four felt like some sort of deranged waking dream.

Masego seemed entirely nonplussed, not that I’d expected anything else. I doubted Zeze would bat an eye even if the entire Choir of Judgment made him morning eggs, so long as they weren’t over-salted.

Three days in, as Akua went to gather firewood and Masego went about skinning the pair of rabbits I’d caught with a disturbing amount of skill – much easier than people , he’d told me with a horrifyingly well-meaning smile when I’d commented on it – I found my eyes following Cordelia’s hand. Or, more specifically, the ivory baton they were holding. The command rod for the ealamal. I knew it was real. I’d asked Masego, and there was no fake anyone in her service would have been able to make that’d fool his eye.

“You stare at it whenever it is near my hand,” Cordelia said.

“And that surprises you?” I replied. “It’s a lot of power bound to a pretty small object.”

She settled herself more comfortably against the fallen log, adjusting so it wouldn’t dig into her back.

“Not so much more than you could bring to bear, given time to prepare,” she said.

I snorted.

“Yeah, no,” I told her. “That’s not comparable, Hasenbach. Maybe with the Crows personally guiding my hand I could bring down something vaguely in the same league, but it’d kill me for sure.”

“You veiled the sun itself in Iserre,” Cordelia skeptically replied.

“I mimicked the effect of an eclipse, temporarily, for a small part of Iserre,” I corrected. “And that wasn’t me waving around a staff, it took months of preparations and an artefact that a once-in-a-century mage made.”

I paused.

“And I didn’t even do the deed,” I noted. “I’m the one who put in the power over the months, sure, but it was Akua and Sve Noc who called down the fake eclipse.”

“If you believe that to be reassuring,” Cordelia mildly replied, “you are sadly mistaken.”

I rolled my eye at her, then put up my palms in a gesture of appeasement.

“Look, at the end of the day we can quibble about precedents and equivalents all we want but you’re holding in your hands the control rod to one of the few artefacts in existence that can just kill me,” I said. “No ifs or maybes – I’m in the range of the ealamal when you use that thing, and I’m dead .”

I snapped my fingers.

“Just like that,” I said.

I wasn’t sure what the boundary conditions for not being killed by the wave of Light even though there’d been tests – it looked like maybe the standards on Judgment deciding to kill you were as low as they could get, but that was just informed guesswork by Roland – yet the odds that I wouldn’t be one of those picked off were so low as to be nonexistent: Warden or not, I was still a villain. In some ways I felt like I was a girl again, walking around with the knowledge that my life was only my own so long as no one decided to snatch it.

It’d not missed the feeling, but the years of war against Keter had done wonders for my tolerance to looming doom.

“So you’ll have to forgive me the staring,” I bluntly said. “It’s not going anywhere.”

Blue eyes studied me, maybe assessing how much of the agitation in my tone had been genuine. She decided it had been.

“I meant no offence either,” Cordelia said.

I shrugged, having taken none. I’d certainly encouraged the perception of my being an unstoppable force over the years, it very much had its uses. But it had led to people overestimating what I could actually do – or survive – sometimes.

“I’ll confess to some curiosity as to how you even have it,” I said, trailing off.

I wasn’t going to push if I hit a wall, but I was more than a little interested. I didn’t know Rozala Malanza all that well, but she didn’t seem like the kind of woman who just handed out doomsday weapons to recent political opponents.

“It was part of the negotiated terms for my abdication,” Cordelia admitted.

Huh. It was true that Cordelia had been in a decent bargaining position when she’d negotiated her abdication. Support for Hanno had been growing, but it’d not been support for him to rule all of Procer and it certainly hadn’t been support for Rozala Malanza to do the same instead. After the war would have been a toss-up, there was no telling whether Cordelia would have ended up an untouchable saviour or the woman blamed for the horrors, but at the time of the deal her throne had been solid. She’d lost most of Procer, sure but the parts that had stayed were still largely behind her.

“Didn’t quite trust her with the doomsday weapon, huh,” I said.

Couldn’t entirely blame her. If I’d built something that stupidly dangerous I would want to keep it under my thumb too.

“Trust,” Cordelia replied, “can be a very complicated word.”

“I’m not casting stones,” I shrugged. “If anything I can sympathize.”

Cool blue eyes studied me.

“Can you?” she said.

“I’ve had issues with giving up power even when it was my decision to,” I frankly said. “I like to think of those times as growing pains, but it’s not quite that clear-cut.”

I’d been an ass to Vivienne for some time, when it’d sunk in what my abdication would actually mean. An abdication she’d in no way forced on me, any more than my choice of her as my successor. It wasn’t the same with Hasenbach and Rozala Malanza, but there was enough in common I could feel pangs of sympathy.

“Have you considered,” Cordelia said, “that perhaps the decision was as much about you as Princess Rozala?”

I blinked at her, taken aback.

“How’s that?” I asked.

Her lips quirked mirthlessly.

“You have a history of only listening when the interlocutor also has a knife at your throat, Catherine,” Cordelia Hasenbach said. “I took the precaution when I believed I was to be Warden of the West, but I stand by it.”

I bit the inside of my cheek, trying to decide whether I should be insulted by that or not. Wasn’t sure yet.

“A complicated word, is it?” I mildly said.

“I took oaths,” Cordelia simply said. “To you, I do not deny it, but I yet heed older ones. If we lose, if the Dead King triumphs and the land teeters on the brink of extinction, I will make the hard choice.”

My jaw tightened.

“If we lost in Keter,” I slowly said, “you want to blast the ealamal. As strong as you can.”

“More than nine in ten should survive the Light,” Cordelia quietly said. “Should nothing go wrong.”

“You don’t know that it won’t,” I flatly said. “You’ve never fired that thing at the kind of strength you’re talking about. The furthest you’ve gone is the borders of Salia.”

“I cannot,” Cordelia grimly agreed. “Yet what can I do but make that choice anyhow, if the other choice is death for all? Even should nine in ten die instead, it would be better than annihilation.”

“And if it goes worse than that,” I pressed. “If everyone dies?”

Her lips thinned.

“Then when a ship next crosses the Tyrian Sea, its captain will not find all of Calernia a realm of the dead,” the blue-eyed princess said. “A cold comfort, but then I am Lycaonese: we are winter’s get.”

I leaned back. I recognized the cast to her face, it was the one she always had whenever I’d brought up the angel corpse over the years. She wasn’t going to be moved on this. And I could even see the grim sort of sense in it: like she’d said, even the most horrific of results was a better end than extinction and become soldiers in Keter’s service. On the other hand, she had to know that absolutely no one who had a decent chance of dying should that weapon be used – a number including every villain alive – would find this acceptable or be willing to tolerate her keeping the baton should they find out.

I held no illusions about the people who’d been my charges until recently: if the worst came to pass in Keter, they would be legging it through the Twilight Ways towards the closest port where Baalite ships docked. Learning that instead they were going to get an angel knife in the back might genuinely make a few of them desert and I wasn’t sure I blamed them. It would not be too hard a thing, I thought, to sweep this under my authority as Warden. Odds were Hanno would back me, and Ishaq doubtlessly would. Hells, I could just take the damn thing from her and it wasn’t like she had the strength to stop me.

It’d be a lie to say I was not tempted.

Silence hung between us. It might yet come to force , I thought, meeting those blue eyes. You have to know that. But for all that her holding that ivory length was putting a knife to my throat Cordelia had also extended trust, hadn’t she? She’d told me what she intended without being forced, pretty much admitting that she saw her duty to Calernia as something that came before even the oaths she’d sworn to me as Warden. One step forward and one step back, only it didn’t feel like we’d stayed still.

A noose was just a knot, until you’d killed someone with it.

“A complicated word,” I slowly repeated.

And left it at that.

For now.

—

The journey was restful in some ways, but in others it was not to be. That much became clear as the days passed.

I’d never particularly enjoyed cooking: it was a lot of tedious little chores followed by equally tedious looking over fires and ending up in a plate that never seemed to be quite as good as when made by others. Still, it would be shabby of me not to pull my weight so I’d learned to be solid with at least few recipes. Of those I liked hunter’s stew the best, since it was about as simple as cooking got, and I’d become a fair hand at it. There would be the usual bickering from the gallery about spices when time came to fill the bowls, I had no doubt, but that was part of the draw by now. Indrani sneering down on Callowan tastes and Vivienne going for her throat in retaliation was always good for a laugh.

Hells, back in the day even Akua got into it once or twice. Like most Praesi, she seemed convinced that any plate without a fistful of goddamned cumin sprinkled over it was unforgivingly bland.

I checked on the pot, finding the stew simmering, and stirred it a few times with the ladle before closing it again. I looked through the smoke as Masego sat across from me, long legs folding as he tried and failed to make himself comfortable perched atop a stone much too small for that. I thought of a praying mantis for a moment, looking at the long limbs, and almost laughed. To think he’d been pudgy when we first met. I could hardly even remember what that was like: he’d melted in the months leading up to the Tenth Crusade and never gained back the weight. Long robes and the black eye cloth, a golden glimmer beneath it, were what I saw in my mind’s eye when I thought of Masego nowadays.

“Won’t be ready for at least another hour,” I told him. “So if you were hoping for an early bowl-”

“I was not,” Zeze calmly replied. “I came to speak with you.”

I narrowed my eye at him. That sounded serious. I wiped the steel ladle on a cloth and set it down.

“I’m listening,” I told him.

He didn’t speak, at first, as if surprised I’d agreed so easily or unsure what he’d wanted to say.

“We have come a long way since the day we first met in Summerholm,” Masego said.

I half-smiled. By some counts, Apprentice could be said to be the first Named to join what was yet to become the Woe. He’d already been a master of his mantle when Hakram had only just begun to come into his.

“You’ve taken to chasing larger creatures than winged pigs,” I drawled.

He quietly laughed.

“Too many still breathe fire,” Zeze replied.

He paused, looking for words, and I gave him the space to think. There was rarely any gain to be had in rushing his mind.

“We have all changed,” Hierophant finally said, gold shining beneath cloth. “You do not seek the same ends you did back then, and you seek them differently.”

“Yeah,” I murmured. “I’ve been seeing that too. We’ve...”

Moved on , I refused to say, because if they were gone from my life what did I have left?

“It is inevitable,” Masego said. “The man who raised me is not the same who stood at Uncle Amadeus’ side during the Conquest. In overcoming circumstance we grow – or are buried, overcome by it.”

“I’d argue they were the same man,” I said. “Just standing in two different places, at two different times.”

Hardship and pleasure bent people in many ways but ultimately they were just colour on the canvas. They did not, could not define what the work was painted on. To my surprise, he smiled.

“I knew you would disagree,” he said. “You still believe in the line in the sand, the difference between right and wrong. I have grown to like that about you, Catherine.”

I cocked an eyebrow at him.

“Have you?” I drily asked.

He nodded.

“You try to make people stay on one side of the line,” Masego said. “And, more often than not, we are better off for it. It doesn’t always work, but I like that you try.”

I cleared my throat, looked away. He’d always been at his most dangerous when he was painfully earnest.

“But you don’t believe in that,” I said.

“I believed that we should try,” Masego honestly said. “You have shown me the value of that. But we’ve had this conversation once before, years ago. In the end-”

“- Creation ends,” I quietly finished. “So it’s not wrong to care about it, but it’s missing the point. We should be looking beyond the bars, not rearranging the inside of the cell.”

He looked pleased.

“So you do remember,” Masego said.

“This,” I said, “is about apotheosis, isn’t it?”

“You have all found purposes,” Hierophant said. “Hakram heals the people he once saw as a lost cause, Vivienne has traded the rooftop for the throne, Indrani has decided that instead of being Ranger she wants to be better than her. And you...”

He mulled over his words.

“You have decided to pull down the curtain on the Age of Wonders and usher what comes after with your own two hands,” Masego finally said.

“Everyone’s changed,” I slowly said, “except you. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I will break the shackles I was born bearing around my wrists,” Hierophant simply said. “I will open my mind to the secret of existence and burn with the truth of the godhead.”

I almost shivered. It was a nice evening out, warm with bright starlight and the merry gurgle of a stream right around the bend of the hill. And still I almost shivered, for though there had been no threat in my friend’s words neither had there been so much as a speck of doubt. Masego had become the Hierophant by peeking at the truths behind the curtain, laws mortals were not meant to understand, and he had been unwavering in his sole ambition ever since: he would become as a god, and then step beyond even that. I studied him, fingers clenching and unclenching.

“I feel,” I finally said, “as though I am being warned.”

“The Dead King awaits in Keter,” Hierophant evenly said. “And when I face him once more, Catherine, I will even the scales between us.”

“You want revenge for your magic,” I said.

“Revenge is not the right word,” he mused. “It is the bargain of an eye for an eye, and that is not a rule I abide by.”

Through the smoke, I saw Masego’s eye burn bright gold through the cloth.

“I will ruin him,” Hierophant said, his calm like that of a deep, dark lake. “I will make of Autumn’s crown a noose around his neck and make him watch as I tear out of him everything of worth.”

The fire crackled. Motes of gold danced on the smoke, as if traced by some luminous finger.

“I will use the sum of his works as a step for my own,” Hierophant told me, “and let him rot like a bloated carcass as I reach horizons he never so much as glimpsed.”

The dark-skinned man leaned forward, long braids sliding off his shoulder.

“That is what I promise Trismegistus King, and only then will I count us even for what passed between us,” Masego said.

I swallowed. These were not idle words, I knew. He wasn’t the kind of man to speak those. Masego genuinely meant to rip out the power of Neshamah and use it as part of his own apotheosis.

“Why tell me this?” I asked. “Why now ?”

The glass eye’s light ebbed low, now little more than glimmers again.

“You made room for everyone else in the world you’re building, Catherine,” Masego said, then smiled.

He drew back and just like that there was no trace of the Hierophant left in him, none of the intensity that’d filled the air around likes a physical thing. As if it’d only ever been a trick of the light and the illusion had been broken the moment he moved.

“Remember to make room for me as well,” he asked.

I loved the man like a brother, and he loved me the same, but I knew a warning when I heard one. When the moment came for him to even the scales, if I stood in the way it would not be a small thing. That was what he’d been telling me.

If it came down to choosing between my dream and his own, his choice was already made.

—

I’d gotten used to my laundering being done for me.

Both the Army of Callow and the Legions had it as an assigned duty, but I’d never served at a rank where I might end up needing to kneel by the river shore and rub the dirt out of my clothes – or other people’s. I wasn’t unfamiliar with the chore, it was one of those we traded around when the Woe travelled together. Usually it was Vivienne who traded for it, she didn’t mind getting her hands bone cold, but she wasn’t along this time. So instead I found myself kneeling in the sand by Akua Sahelian, washing clothes in the stream. It was hard work, and rough on the hands, but there was only so much to wash and when it came to drying afterwards we cheated with magic.

The aftermath found us sitting on flat rocks by the river as we waited on the spell to finish getting the water out of the blankets. Akua had insisted on using a slower one, since apparently it didn’t damage the fabric.

“How do you even know that?” I asked. “If you tell me you’ve ever had to do your own laundry, I’m going to call you’re a liar.”

She rolled her eyes at me, the simple red and yellow robes she wore somehow managing to look tailored instead of plain.

“It is originally a spell meant to rid oneself out of contact poisons,” Akua said. “There’s nothing worse than a botched assassination attempt ruining your favourite dress.”

“Of course,” I drily replied. “How dare I ever think otherwise.”

“It is the common birth, I assume,” Akua kindly informed me. “I have reliably been informed that lowborn children are born with inferior minds.”

I glanced at her.

“Please tell me that’s not actually something one of your ancestors believed,” I pleaded.

Akua smiled beautifully.

“Not at all, dearest,” she said.

A pause.

“It was his Mirembe wife,” she told me. “There was a most fascinating treatise on the subject in the family library. Did you know that Callowans are also born naturally subservient? While I’ll admit I’ve yet to encounter such a specimen, very convincing experiments were executed to prove this.”

“I’m going to strangle you,” I cheerfully told her.

“Irrational anger in the face of one’s divinely ordained superior,” Akua noted. “I was warned it might happen.”

I tossed a stone in her direction, though she got a shield and a smug look up in time. My lips were quirking, though, and so were hers.

“So what’s your take on our guest?” I asked her.

She slid me a glance.

“Catherine Foundling,” Akua said, “are you soliciting me for gossip ?”

“Indrani’s not there,” I complained. “And Masego doesn’t get the point. He always tries to be nice.”

She was grinning, now.

“She snores like a bear, did you notice?” the golden-eyed sorceress said.

“It was horrifying,” I admitted. “I couldn’t believe it was her at first, she’s always so dainty about everything. I’m impressed at how good she is with a bow, though.”

Cordelia had bagged us a pair of rabbits a few days back, which had been a pleasant addition to the cooking pot as well as a surprise.

“Lycaonese nobles are expected to hunt, I believe,” Akua said. “Not unlike Praesi, though presumably with fewer assassinations attached.”

“In my experience, that’s always a safe assumption when Praes is involved,” I said.

She snorted at me. It was light talk, nothing of politics or Keter or the many dooms ahead, and it made knots in my shoulders loosen. It was so rare, these days, that I could afford to just sit with someone by a river and talk. We must have spoken for an hour, far longer than the spell needed to finish, but I sensed she was as reluctant as I to acknowledge that and put an end to it. Eventually, though, it became harder to ignore that we would be awaited in camp. I sighed. Her expression immediately went blank, the highborn mask falling down over the lovely face. What had I done? I hesitated, but dimly I could sense that prodding at her now I was likely to lose a finger.

I kept to the silence instead, until humanity bled back into her face and she broke it herself.

“It would be easy,” Akua said, “to simply fall into your orbit again. I forget that, every time we are parted.”

She smiled at me, fondly but without amusement.

“Somehow I always forget that that it is not some subtle manipulation that you entrapped me with,” Akua said. “That you truly enjoy my company, and that is what makes it so very easy for you to win.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do,” I said.

“It’s always what you’re trying to do, Catherine,” she replied with a strange gentleness. “It’s in your bone, the disease you inherited from the father you chose.”

My fingers clenched into a fist. That wound was still fresh. I wasn’t convinced it could ever be any other way.

“I’m not sure what it is you’re saying,” I said.

“I have had enough of cages,” Akua told me. “And choices being made for me.”

“You’re talking in circles,” I replied.

“If I choose to serve as the jailor of the King of Death,” she said, “it will not be at anyone else’s behest.”

“I’ve asked nothing,” I replied.

It had taken years for me to make it so I wouldn’t have to. It had gone wrong in Ater, all the small steps I’d taken. The moment they should have led up to never came to pass. There’d been too much going, and the Bard had put her fingers to the scale. Had the pivot passed, had I failed? Looking at her, seeing her looking at me, I had to consider the possibility that I had.

“Nor should you,” Akua said, gracefully rising to her feet. “Of all the debts I owe, the one I owe you is far from the heaviest.”

She began to gather the clothes, a clear sign the conversation was finished. And it left me wondering a question I would rather not have to entertain at all.

If I had failed, what then?

—

On our thirteenth night on the road we found the guide Sve Noc had sent us for the latter half of our journey to Serolen, waiting seated by a shallow river. The colours of my sigil painted on its face, Ivah of the Losara offered me a smile as it rose to its feet.

“First Under the Night,” Ivah said, bowing low, “it has been too long.”

Chapter 43: Serolen

“Silent then stood the great city,
whose mighty had called in vanity
the great wroth that passed.

And found they who had laughed
that their power might be vast,
but Dobrogost laughed last.”

– Extract from the ‘Dobrogost Veste’, a Firstborn traditional epic

“Trouble has come to Serolen,” Ivah of the Losara said.

“Has it ever not?” I replied.

We travelled quicker now than we had before. Ivah had bargained for the Secret of the Half Road, and though it might not be as instantaneous as the Shadow Stride the Longstride Cabal had once boasted of it still lengthened our steps. We had to ride in a narrow line, over a stripe of Night barely larger than the horses, but so long as we rode there we were possessed of a great celerity. It did not prevent the horses from getting tired, but they covered easily thrice as much ground before needing a rest. One the second of those interludes, as the rest of our company had their mounts drink in a shallow pond, I sat with Ivah to speak of what awaited us to the north.

“This is true,” Ivah acknowledged. “But there have never been troubles such as this. It is... unsettling.”

My brow rose. Not a word it would use lightly. Ivah had once been a rylleh in a sigil in good standing, about as high as it was possible to rise without holding the sigil yourself, and in the nights since fought under me through campaigns above and below. The drow was not a sort to unsettle easily.

“Have the lines collapsed?” I bluntly asked.

“We have lost the southern woods,” the purple-painted drow said. “The Gloom was pierced through with great roads of steel that were kept alight with strange lanterns.”

I grimaced.

“And they didn’t pull back the Gloom forty miles to start over?”

Ivah hesitated. It had no reason to watch its words around me. As its sigil-holder, I was the only person it could be said to answer to and I’d never been one to mind blunt honesty. Only there was someone even above me, wasn’t there? Sve Noc.

“Shit,” I quietly said. “It’s not that they didn’t want to, they couldn’t .”

It must have been deeply distressing, I thought, for Ivah to admit that the goddesses it had worshipped all its life had limitations. That they were not all-powerful or beyond failing.

“It broke into shards when an attempt was made,” Ivah said. “A third was recovered, but Sve Noc says cannot be forged anew into a lesser Gloom. They have been used as weapons to win battles since.”

My eye narrowed.

“You’re keeping something back,” I stated.

“Mighty Kurosiv has stolen two of the shards,” it admitted. “They have claimed it is proof of their divinity and taken the name of Loc Ynan.”

Fate-giver , it meant. But it was the formal version of giver – maybe closer to ‘gifter’ – and the implication there was that the gift was given to an inferior. Kurosiv was effectively claiming to be the entity that would ‘give’ all of the Firstborn their fates. A naked challenge to Sve Noc’s authority.

Even this far away from Serolen, I could catch the scent of civil war in the air.

“Last I heard Kurosiv was playing god-king in the northeast, with an eye to returning to the mountains above the Everdark,” I said. “What changed?”

“They tell a tale of having wagered the fate of the Firstborn in a verse-game with the Dead King,” Ivah scorned. “That they triumphed over it and won from Death a reprieve for nine years. They now come to gift us a new fate, leading us east and across the water to a land of endless riches.”

Oh did I not like the sound of that.

“I’m assuming by water they don’t mean the Chalice,” I said.

The painted drow shook its head.

“The salt-water,” Ivah said. “We are to sail on great ships that will bring us to a glorious kingdom without light.”

My fingers clenched.

“They made a deal with the Dead King,” I bluntly said. “Pull out of the war and the Firstborn get nine years to get the Hells off Calernia while Neshamah thoroughly wipes out the rest of us.”

“That is also the belief of Sve Noc,” Ivah agreed.

Would the Dead King keep to that deal? I wasn’t sure, but in all honesty it shouldn’t matter. He’d finish killing us off long before nine years had passed and I had my doubts about the success of a Firstborn exodus across the Tyrian Sea anyway. They’d lived underground as long as they’d been a civilization, they were neither shipwrights nor sailors. Although with Kurosiv holding the reins, they might just hit one of our port cities and devour enough they can raise a decent fleet. More worrying was a question I did not have the answer to: was this Kurosiv’s plan or was Neshamah now using diplomacy to finish collapsing us?

Because if it was the latter, we were in deep shit. There weren’t really any human nations that’d cut a deal with him, at least not unless we suffered a catastrophic defeat in Keter first, but the same was not true of others. The Golden Bloom was unlikely to actively help him, but the elves might take a deal so they could cut and run unhindered. The Gigantes had sit out the war since their sacrifice in keeping the Hellgates closed, so they might be tempted for the right prize, and worse of all was the Kingdom Under. We still hadn’t signed a new treaty with the dwarves, so if the Dead King came in with a better offer? Fuck, that could get bad .

There was no way we would take Keter without the Kingdom Under supplying the besieging armies. If they pulled out of the war, we were done.

“How bad has it gotten?” I asked, tone gone grim.

It did not play coy, which I appreciated.

“Most of the remaining Ten Generals still follow Sve Noc,” Ivah said, “but two have gone over and brought their sigils with them. We still have the greater part of the strength, but that strength is bound holding the lines to the south: Kurosiv and their traitors now hold much of Serolen.”

It grimaced.

“The strife has grown along lines it never had before,” Ivah said. “The tenets that you taught us in Iserre have divided the Firstborn.”

Fuck, I thought. I’d never seriously considered that might be a possibility, back when I had spoken out. I was the mouthpiece of living goddesses who held in their grip the source of power of all Firstborn, it wasn’t exactly a kind of position that got you questioned . But the Sisters weren’t the only source of power now, were they? They’d admitted to me months ago that they couldn’t even try to kill Kurosiv anymore without pretty much destroying an already-ruined Night and it sounded like the usurper had only grown in strength since.

“How?” I got out.

“Many sigils despise them,” Ivah frankly said. “That Mighty can no longer take and kill freely is loathed and the authority of the Losara over the new oaths even more so. Sigil-holders remember times when they were not bound by promises and their authority could not be challenged by vote.”

I studied its face.

“It’s the protection oath that fucks them, isn’t it,” I stated.

It was the foundation of the reform I’d laid at the heart of the Firstborn: violence could not be used to keep a drow in a sigil or punish them for leaving it. It was what gave the votes power, why the new ways had teeth. Sigil-holders who continued to treat their followers like cattle would find that their sigils shrunk while those who treated their followers well would find their ranks swelling. A straightforward incentive for sigil-holders to begin treating the powerless decently.

“Nisi and dzulu have been leaving harsh sigils in droves,” Ivah agreed. “That this could not be curtailed by spear or Night has left Mighty furious. It goes, they say, against the true Tenets of Night.”

“And let me guess,” I coldly smiled. “Kurosiv welcomes the malcontents with open arms. They offer the old ways again, maybe even worse.”

“It is said that the nisi are sorely used in the territory of the traitors,” Ivah hesitantly said. “The tenets of Iserre are not observed among the sigils following the usurper.”

And how genuinely awful did treatment have to get, before even the Firstborn thought it was too much? And bad as that was, it wasn’t even what worried me the most from the situation.

“You told me we have the most sigils,” I said, “but Kurosiv poached a large chunk of the Mighty, didn’t they?”

Reluctantly, Ivah nodded. I rubbed the bridge of my nose. Of course they had. The tenets I’d introduced gave power to the powerless over the few individuals that’d ruled over more than nine tenths of the Firstborn as uncontested tyrants for more than a millennium. Some of the Mighty would take it in stride, but some of them would simply look at the fact that now nisi – a word that literally meant cattle! – had some power over them and be offended to their very core. Lesser Mighty wouldn’t mind so much, I decided, because they didn’t actually lose a lot in practice and they might even gain in the exchange. But those few whose strength had allowed every right, rylleh and sigil-holders? They would be furious at the reforms.

And now another god had come, one that promised them a return to the old ways. All the most poisonous of the Mighty, those who knew they couldn’t cut under the reforms, would hear it a siren song. If we were dealing with humans I’d call it good riddance, but these were drow: being a murderous cancer likely meant they’d been among the strongest of their sigils.

“Fuck,” I feelingly said.

That civil war was still looming just beyond the horizon, but worse than that was the realization that my side might actually lose it.

—

It took us another week and a half to get to Serolen, a short span that felt like forever. Every day we spent here could not be spent with the armies that must already be marching on Keter. How much more of the Principate had been destroyed, while we rode down a shadowed road? How many more thousands had died to blades and devils? There’s been a restful tinge to the travels at first, since so little was demanded of me save that I ride north, but that had faded. Urgency whipped at my back, reproaching every breath not spent making haste to Duskwood.

The others felt it too. Cordelia grew more somber as the days passed, still cordial but ever more distant, and Masego even began setting aside his book to ride in earnest. Akua, as though the talk by the shore had never taken place, stuck to me as a second shadow. She spoke more to Ivah than myself, asking it about old acquaintances and the state of affairs in the Empire Ever Dark. But her presence was not unpleasant. I tended to withdraw less into myself when there was a conversation going, and it was less demanding to listen than to have to keep it going myself.

It sometimes frightened me how well she had come to know me, perhaps better than anyone alive save Hakram.

We could tell the moment was passed the remnants of the Gloom, even in the Ways. The shadows got deeper, the stars more distant, and Ivahs’ road grew noticeably more effective. From there, our last few days were consumed with haste. There was a calamity in the making, I knew it deep in my bone.

“Is it your Name?” Akua asked me quietly, one night by the fire.

“Maybe,” I murmured. “More senses than aspect, yeah? It’s like I can feel a current with my fingers.”

“Fate,” the golden-eyed sorceress said. “A convergence of events.”

I nodded.

“Something big is coming,” I said. “A great pivot.”

For my patron goddesses, or for all the Firstborn? It was too early to tell. All I knew was that coming too late would bring down a disaster on all our heads. So we picked up the pace, running each other ragged as we rode through a dry and sandy riverbed until I could sense the end of our path ahead. Our mounts milled about the sand as I reined in Zombie and the horses followed, Ivah coming to stand at my side without so much as a whisper of warning. Not without reason had I once named it my Lord of Silent Steps.

“We’re here,” I called out. “Get ready for the crossing.”

I got a tired, cranky grunt out of Masego and more vocal acknowledgement from the other two. I barely paid attention, though, catching Ivah’s stare from the corner of my eye.

“You told me parts of Serolen are in Kurosiv’s hands,” I said. “What are the odds that there are enemies waiting on the other side?”

“We will emerge within the Shrine of Tears, Losara Queen,” it said. “It is a stronghold of those loyal to Sve Noc.”

“So not very,” I summed up.

“It is so,” Ivah agreed.

I sighed, then glanced back.

“Arm up,” I ordered. “We’re going into trouble.”

Ivah sent me a wounded look, but it ought to know better by now. Even if there hadn’t been a bevy of gods at work in Serolen, convergences of fate made the unlikely common. I would have bet on a fight even if there wasn’t a good change of enemy action. I took the lead, Ivah at my left and Masego behind me. Akua stayed in the back with Cordelia, as much to shield the calm-faced princess as because she tended to benefit from having longer to cast. She wasn’t the war mage that Masego had been before he lost his magic, or truthfully even now. I unsheathed my sword, Zombie keening eagerly at the sound, and breathed out.

My staff came down, opening a gate out of the Twilight Ways, and I rode through.

The air was warm and humid, that was my first thought. I blinked it away, but my eye went wide as I took in the sight around me. The Shrine of Tears was massive, larger than any Proceran palace I had ever seen and taller than even the Alban Cathedral in Laure. It was disorienting to stand inside, because the shrine pretended it was otherwise: though there was a tall ceiling of curved stone high above, it was hidden by thick fog all the way to the corners of the roof – which came down in walls that were long curtains of rain.

Through the uneven curtains I glimpsed at the lake the shrine had been raised on, but it was not what drew the eye as I rode further onto a causeway of wet stones. Under the roof the great Shrine a hundred smaller shrines had been built, made of painted tiles in vivid colours: red and yellow and blue. Few were larger than a house and everywhere tall painted poles stood, bound to each other and the sharp roofs of the shrines by thick woven ropes from which hung strands of coloured cloth and shining trinkets.

Across it all rain fell in gentle drops, sliding down the vivid tiles and down deep furrows in the ground that led to shallow canals. It was as if under the great roof a hundred beautiful islands had been laid to rest among rivers of stone, each laden with prayers and offerings. It was, I thought even as I pulled up my hood, a place of startling beauty. Behind me I heard Cordelia gasp and smiled. She’d never known the Firstborn as anything but violent killers and skulking spies, but this should begin to teach her differently. They were the ruin of a people, but even now there was more to them than Night.

We emerged on the island at the heart of it all, on the causeway leading to the ornate shrine behind us while knotted ropes crisscrossed above our heads. And as the gate out of Twilight died with a gentle breath, I saw movement ahead. Silhouettes moving through the faint mist of islands.

“There should be a sigil awaiting us,” Ivah said.

Its eyes had followed my own, picking out the number. Seven, eight, nine – no, eight, they were using raider’s walk to make their warband look larger than it was.

“Looks like there’s one,” I coldly smiled.

I shrugged.

“At least it’s not one of the Ten Generals,” I said.

I would have felt one of them coming. This was, by their strength in the Night – oddly muted to my senses, enough that I couldn’t just pick out their numbers through it as I once would have – a sigil-holder and a cadre of rylleh come to kill us.

“What insolence, to dare come to this holy place as servants of a false god,” Ivah said.

Its shoulder had tightened, its muscles coiled. All in anticipation of the violence to come.

“Zeze,” I called out, “sow confusion.”

He cleared his throat.

“Can I have the bodies afterwards?” he politely asked.

I turned to fix him with a steady look.

“I have been very interested in how a race not born to the use of Night could grow so innately adept at wielding it,” he defended.

“Fine,” I sighed. “Just don’t get, you know...”

I gestured vaguely.

“I do not,” he admitted.

“Don’t get all Warlock about it,” I elaborated.

I ignored Akua’s choked laugh and Cordelia’s murmur of ‘should I even ask?’.

“I will not be the Warlock,” Masego assured me.

“Not what I asked,” I sighed, “but I guess it’ll have to do.”

I patted Zombie’s neck, stroking her feathers and nodded at Ivah. It did not need instructions, not after the months we’d spent fighting together in the Everdark. It knew exactly what I wanted of it. I rolled my shoulder to limber it, then cracked my neck to the side.

“Well,” I cheerfully said. “Let’s solve us a religious dispute. Chno Sve Noc!”

I spurred Zombie to a gallop, and moments later we were aflight.

—

They shot first.

It was the first time I’d fought Firstborn since the Night was ruined, and the difference was plain to see: the three streaks of darkness that howled towards me took a moment to form and they... weak. The Secret could no longer be used the way it once had been. I didn’t even bother to weave a defensive working, my knees guiding Zombie into a short dive that saw all three projectiles go wide. Three of the rylleh ran at me down the causeway on the other side of the river, power blooming around them as they aimed to leap at me when the dive went lowest, but I grinned and pulled deep.

Gods, the Night came easy here. It was so much stronger than in the south.

The air exploded, paving stones flying everywhere as the rylleh scattered into thin lines of Night along the ground, and my staff touched one of those strands of shadow before Zombie banked upwards. That was all it took. I disrupted the Night before it could form into flesh and the rylleh lost control, reappearing like a burst balloon filled with black blood. It never even got off a scream and I pressed low against Zombie’s neck as another volley of Night streaks howled just past my air. Amateurs. If they’d gone for centre of mass instead of my head, they would have at least forced me to defend.

Still, they were not unskilled. While three ran across the causeway and another three continued to fire from the back, the last rylleh had been pulling on a larger working. The kind that took time and shouldn’t be interrupted. Coming out of its body in strands of Night, a hulking shape with a massive maw – it was little more than teeth set in a round and eyeless head – formed and shot out towards me. It didn’t make it far. Two heartbeats and the world rippled, the rylleh’s face turning to utter surprise as the Night beast turned around and bit its head off before blowing up in streaks of black flame.

Hierophant could do all manners of nasty things, using Wrest.

The flames scattered the rylleh shooting projectiles, as they’d been standing too close for comfort, and that was my opening. I slapped aside the spear one of the runners from earlier tried to toss at my back, then sent out my will and picked up the black flames that were guttering out. I fed them life and they roared out in a blaze, spreading in thick tendrils that swallowed up two of the rylleh in the blink of an eye. One of them walked out of his own flesh with a wet squelch as it began to burn, but Hierophant broke the working halfway through and instead of being skin deep half the meat stayed on the bones. Gods but that was an ugly way to die.

Four out of eight dead, all rylleh. Where was the sigil holder, it hadn’t made a move yet? Ah, out back. Atop one of the shrines, gathering Night to itself to form some sort of carapace armour. I’d seen Mighty Jindrich do something similar once, but the shape stayed humanoid here. I suspected I’d not enjoy it should the armour be finished. A whisper against the back of my mind and I turned without batting an eye, following the instinct. My staff slapped down a spear, then twirled to parry the spear of Night that had been hidden in its shadow. I’d not moved in moments, and in a fight that was too long.

“Go,” I whispered at Zombie, and guided her with my knees.

We fell into a curved glide, circling around the island-shrine where I had caught up to the warband. Two of the surviving rylleh fell back to their sigil holder, but one slipped behind me and leapt across the canal – to be caught in the throat by a bolt of sickly green light. The drow went straight through the spell, looking triumphant, but that passed. The moment its feet touched the stone on the other side, they began to turn to dust. Someone was getting fancy. Akua always did like her curses. I had more pressing matters, though.

I flicked an orb of black flame at the sigil holder gathering his carapace, but the two rylleh besides it formed a spinning wheel of Night and scattered it. Yeah, they were going to keep covering their captain until it got that done. Unfortunately for them, I had a way around that.

“The carapace, Zeze,” I shouted.

The world rippled again, and in the heartbeat that followed it all went wrong. I could feel Masego’s will wresting away the Night, began to rip out the carapace, but then another will fought him. Not the drow’s, it had tried and failed already. Something bigger . Hierophant let out a hoarse shout of pain and I clenched my jaw in anger, lashing out with howling flame. Again the rylleh summoned their wheel, but the Night was all askew around them and as my working impacted theirs the fabric of Creation rippled out angrily. I pushed my will, fed my working, and there was loud crack before the shrine burst into a rain of melted, broken tiles.

A plume of smoke hid the results from my sight, but I could still feel Night in there. At least one was still alive. I risked a glanced back, finding Masego was leaning on Akua and bleeding from his empty eye socket. Golden eyes met mine from a distance and she shook her head. In no danger of death, then. Good, I could put my full attention on this. Kurosiv had taken offence to someone wresting Night from their faithful, but it was not the last injury it would suffer today.

When the smoke scattered I found the sigil holder still standing, garbed in black carapace from head to toe. It was segmented, like armour, and it had taken up a long spear of obsidian covered in glyphs. I saw the mark of its sigil written on the side of its carapace helm, a pale wriggling snake pierced by an arrow. Eterin , it meant, and so it was Mighty Eterin I now faced. The armour drow leapt up, landing with unearthly grace atop one of the wooden poles. Eterin flourished its spear at me almost mockingly, and my eye narrowed. I guided Zombie’s glide to the side, watching the timing and throwing myself off.

I landed atop a pole of my own, leg throbbing with pain, and return the flourish with my sword.

“In the name of Loc Ynan, I order your submission,” Mighty Eterin called out.

Its voice was reedy, but its eyes were sharp.

“As First Under the Night, I offer you a chance to return to convert back before your summary execution,” I mildly said. “Which I feel is rather generous, consisdering.”

It laughed.

“Va Ynan Yn,” Mighty Eterin replied, and broke out in a run.

The gift is given , it meant. Eh, ours sounded better. With unnatural grace it ran atop the rope tying our poles together, but I did not move to meet it. I called Night to me instead, weaving it into spinning blades above its head. My eye narrowed as the air current failed to suck Eterin upwards, snapping the working into an explosion instead. That got it to react, but not as I wished: it swayed on the rope for a moment, but the armour was not so much as dented.

“Tricky, tricky,” I muttered. “You don’t get the mobility, but this is stronger than Jindrich’s Secret.”

And Jindrich had been the second strongest sigil holder in Great Strycht. It wasn’t the expendables I was getting sent at me. I began gathering Night again as Mighty Eterin crossed the last of the distance separating us, laughing as it raised its spear, and grinned back toothily. Tendrils of shadows rose from the bottom of the pole, twining around my limbs, and I focused my Name: with he strength of both behind me I met Eterin’s blow, my staff catching the side of the spear.

It should have been blow straight off or lost the spear but instead spun, impossibly still on the rope, and when I tried to slide my sword into its belly the steel slid harmless against the carapace. I hastily put my guard as Eterin finished its spin, turning it into a blow from the back of the spear towards my ribs, and though the angle was wrong for both it was worse for me. My blade went down, the obsidian shaft struck my rib hard and I swallowed a groan. But I was close, and with a free hand. I laid my fingers against its chest and my will pulled .

It was easy as ripping a page out of a book. For the first heartbeat, as least, and then I felt it too. The thing that called itself Loc Ynan, Mighty Kurosiv. The great leech that had survived even the wrath of the Crows. It was like the whole sea coming down at me through a narrow channel and I rocked back, shaken, but I saw something beyond my vicious blooming headache. This was a power, but it was not beyond me. Kurosiv was not a god, for all that they put on airs. And I had ended stronger storms than this, crushed them in the palm of my hand.

“I am the Warden, you upstart thing,” I hissed, “and if you dare raise your voice against me, I will Silence it.”

The Night in Mighty Eterin died . It was snuffed out like a candle between fingers, Kurosiv’s will cut just before I felt from it a towering rage. The sigil-holder moaned out in pain, his carapace crumbling into nothing, and my hand rose to catch its throat.

“You should have picked a better god,” I told it, and squeezed .

My Name flared, the Beast laughing in my ear, and Mighty Eterin died as I pulped flesh and shattered bone. Urgh, now it was all over my hand. I leapt down, using the tendrils to easy my descent, and dismissed them as my boots touched stone. I tossed the corpse away and wiped my hand on my breastplate, limping away to pick up my sword and sheath it. And as the last of the bodies began to cool, a hush fell upon the Shrine of Tears. A dimness blanketed the world, the sound of my own breath distant to my ears and the soft patter of the rain gone silent. I did not need to look to know they had come, sensing their looming shapes in the Night like leviathans swimming through the water.

They perched behind me atop the tallest shrines, the silhouettes of great crows large as houses casting long shadows past me. Sve Noc had come to the victorious field.

“ Now you show up,” I drawled, glancing back at my patronesses. “A little late to the evening, are we?”

They were hard to look at with the naked eye, even for me. Their very feathers seemed woven out of inky blackness, and here in this place of power I could dimly sense the endless void that lay beyond the surface. Like the emptiness behind stars, the absence of anything at all. Someone might go mad, looking too deep and too long at that. Ivah was already kneeling, but neither Akua nor Masego – recovered but his face still touched with blood – seemed impressed. They looked at the goddesses with the unruffled assurance of people who had been raised to see gods as meat on the block, not anything worthy of awe.

But that was only to be expected, while Cordelia staying astride her horse had me nodding in approval. It was her first time standing before the likes of Sve Noc, as far as I knew, and though her hands were bone-white around the reins she sat straight-backed in the saddle. There was steel in that spine. The Sisters did not answer me – indeed they rarely spoke outside mind or shared dreams – but there was no need for them to. They had brought a herald with them, an old acquaintance.

The Tomb-maker was still the oldest drow I had ever seen. Its back bent, its skin creased and its thick black veins visible through it. Its tunic of obsidian rings was belted tight at the waist and it wore no arms, never having done so as long as we’d known each other. Silver-blue eyes were set in a face bearing in paint a blooming ochre sunflower in ochre and its long white hair went down its crooked back. Mighty Rumena had not aged a day since I last stood in its presence.

“Losara Queen,” the old drow greeted me. “You have already shed blood on the grounds of Serolen.”

“A good omen,” I agreed.

“There are few better,” Rumena chuckled.

It cast a look around, lingering on distant gates that stood across the shrines.

“My sigil will hold the Shrine of Tears until the Kasedan arrive,” the Tomb-maker told me. “Let us leave for the temple-fortress. We stand too close to the skirmish lines for council to go unheard.”

“Doing a lot of walking, are you?” I smiled. “I suppose I’ve already handled the fighting for you.”

It smiled at me, glancing at the dead bodies.

“Indeed,” Rumena said. “You may now boast strength equal to a rat trap, First Under the Night.”

Fuck, no comeback came to mind. Not again , goddamnit. Komena cawed in amusement. She always played favourites, the bitch. The Secret of Scathing Retorts remained enthroned.

“Ugh, just take us to the whatever temple,” I sneered.

It took to victory with a mocking grin. Masego cleared his throat.

“And send the corpses after us,” I added. “The Hierophant has laid claim to them.”

If there was one upside to dealing with the Firstborn, it was that no one so much as batted an eye when Zeze asked for a pile of corpses.

Silver linings, eh?

—

Serolen was a city that had been built out of a hundred cities, and there was no other like it on Calernia. The finest monuments and architectural wonders of a nation millennia old had been stolen and regurgitated wherever it pleased Sve Noc, a haphazard nightmare of great beauty. Towers carved out of stalagmites jutted out of the forest floor along with elaborate painted pyramids and what looked like an entire city district on a mile-wide plate of stone. Small houses of stone and wood had risen up between the great works, streets being burned into the ground with Night along the sprawling canals that Andronike had insisted on.

The temple-fortress was not one of the ornate and beautiful places, but instead exactly what it had been named as: a square of heavy obsidian walls surrounding a squat fortress of stone and bone topped by an airy temple without doors where Sve Noc liked to nest. Our rooms were at the heart of the fortress, deep in the belly behind half a dozen heavily armed sigils. I sent Zombie up to the temple, knowing she’d enjoy the place and the Sisters wouldn’t mind, and dropped my affairs in the luxurious rooms that’d been designated as mine before immediately heading for the war council, where Rumena and Mighty Ysengral would be waiting. Ivah had left to attend to the Losara and prepare them for my return, while Akua and Cordelia both indicated interest in attending the council. Masego, not so much.

“I want to dissect the bodies while they’re still fresh,” Zeze informed me. “My interest lies in the intersection between Night and the physical body, which requires that there still be wisps of it yet to fade.”

Well, it wasn’t like he was actually going to pay attention if I forced him to come.

“Don’t get too deep in a new study,” I warned. “We might need to go on war footing soon.”

He scowled at me but did not argue. Good enough. I picked up Cordelia and Akua, both of which were drawing stares wherever we went. All three of us were human, but unlike them I could be felt to have power in the Night – with my hood down and no skin showing, I might be taken for a short Firstborn if not for the depths of my strength revealing me as Sve Noc’s chosen herald. In a nostalgic turn, the war council room that I found was much like the one I had seen in Great Lotow long ago: thrones set against the walls and an empty stone floor at the heart. Neither Rumena nor Mighty Ysengral were seated when I entered, an implicit mark of respect.

I’d seen Ysengral in dreams before. It was the best defensive commander of the Firstborn in my opinion, only the eighth of the Ten Generals but having proved utterly lethal to Keter’s forces by relying heavily on traps and artillery. It had earned the sobriquet ‘Cradle of Steel’ the hard way. It was no more impressive in person than it had been through the visions, a skinny drow with short white hair and a slight overbite revealing half-broken teeth. It wore black half-plate made of an alloy forged through Night over steel ringmail, and a single-edged sword was sheathed at its hip.

Both it and Rumena offered me a respectful nod as I swept in, Akua and Cordelia behind me.

“Mighty Ysengral,” I smiled. “Our meeting is a long-awaited pleasure.”

“Shared, Losara Queen,” the drow replied. “I ate memories of the campaigns in Hainaut with great pleasure.”

A toss-up whether the poor bastard whose memories had been eaten still lived. Just because Ysengral was competent didn’t mean it was any less vicious than the rest of the Firstborn when it wanted something.

“I bring with me Prince Cordelia Hasenbach, of the Lycaonese,” I told it, “and the one who was once a shade in the Night, Akua Sahelian.”

Ysengral flicked a silvery glance at Akua.

“I have heard of your works, Mighty Shade,” it nodded.

Cordelia did not rank the same courtesy. If she was offended, she did not show it. It wouldn’t be the last insult she swallowed today anyway, as I’d told her. For one neither she nor Akua would get to sit here, as it would imply they were equals to the two Mighty – something neither of them was likely to tolerate even if I interceded. It was easy enough to find which was my throne: one of them was twice as large as the others, about the right height for me and positively dripping with sculpted crows. I sat down with relief and they followed suit. Cordelia came to stand by my right, Akua following suit to my left with an amused quirk of the lips.

“Mighty Ivah told me of the state of Serolen, but the talk seems to have been out of date,” I said. “Where do we stand?”

It was Ysengral that fielded the question, flicking a wrist as it called on Night. An illusion that resembled Serolen as seen from above spread across the stone floor. Nails of pale light began to coalesce over much of the eastern half of the city and a chunk of the centre where the canals converged

“The traitor sigils have seized nearly half the city,” Ysengral said. “The traitor Ishabog’s attempt to seize the heart of the canals was ended by Mighty Rumena, but the traitor Moren has broken the back of two of our own offensives.”

Ishabog the Adversary, the Fourth General. One whose sigil was small and made of only the strongest Mighty, numbering not a single nisi and dzulu. Its defection to Kurosiv was not unexpected. Moren Bleakwomb was an even harsher loss, having been the Third General. It knew Secrets that granted it power over ice and snow, an arsenal that had only grown more deadly after Sve Noc devoured Winter. In a straight fight it was probably weaker than Rumena, but it didn’t give straight fights and anybody trying to kill it was going to die in a permanent blizzard long before catching sight of it.

One of its favourite tactics was to use its dzulu and lesser Mighty to bait an enemy sigil onto grounds it could encase in ice, killing both in a stroke, so I could see why Kurosiv’s ways would be of greater appeal to it than the reforms.

“And what have they been doing since Ishabog got whipped?” I asked.

“Skirmishes across all boundaries,” Rumena said. “They push strongest for the temples in the city heart, but there have been attacks everywhere.”

“Moren placed sigils at the border and gave them lead to raid as they wish,” Ysengral told me. “Ishabog and its riders join the raids as they pleased, abducting duzu and slaughtering all others.”

I frowned.

“So they’ve stopped with major pushes?” I asked.

“I believe Ishabog is joining raids to find a weakness in our defences,” Ysengral said. “It looks for a killing stroke.”

I looked at Rumena.

“They are provoking us to attack,” Rumena disagreed. “Only I could match Ishabog on the field and it follows no strategy, so they hoped to bait us into another offensive so that we might try to force its presence.”

The old drow grimaced.

“It is a trap,” the Tomb-maker said, “we have seen that Kurosiv’s traitors are raising towers of obsidian in many places across the city.”

I did not like the sound of that at all.

“Do we know why?” I asked.

“They might be meant to empower Moren’s winter,” Ysengral suggested. “We have dammed it on their side of the canals with Secrets, but if forced through our defences it could overturn the preparations of my sigil.”

“I do not believe it Moren’s work,” Rumena disagreed. “It has always preferred raw strength to ritual, and Ishabog even more so. There is only one other mind that can have conceived of such a thing.”

Kurosiv themselves. Yeah, the more I heard about that the less I liked it.

“Then we need to have a look at one of those towers,” I said. “We need to know what they’re for. What kind of defences are we looking at?”

“Significant,” Mighty Ysengral replied. “Sigils defend them and sometimes more than one. No less than an offensive will let us reach even the closest.”

I clenched my fingers and unclenched them.

“Then that’s what-”

I felt Andronike brush against my mind, the refusal deep. They did not want us to go on the attack. Why? I had fallen silent, turning to look at the temple above us through the ceiling, but no one asked why. The answer my patronesses conveyed was complicated enough it took me some time to decipher. They were afraid the deaths would feed the towers, I got, only the fear was not just in abstract. You don’t believe those towers are about the fighting on the ground, do you? You think they’re a weapon forged to kill you. I mulled over that, biting my lip. I could see where the suspicions came from.

Rumena was convinced they were baiting an attack from us and Ysengral had noted that Ishabog was abducting dzulu when it raided. Were those meant as workers to raise the tower, or sacrifices to feed them? Maybe both. Either way, it hinted that the towers needed people to be on the other side of the canal for them to be of us. An offensive was playing right into that. But doing nothing was not an answer either, we all knew that. The longer we waited the longer the enemy had to advance their plans.

“That’s a problem,” I admitted. “How would either of you rank the chances of a small cabal making it to one of the towers hidden?”

Neither of the Might looked convinced.

“Moren knows all that tread its winter,” Ysengral said.

“There are ways around every power,” I said.

“They’ll have seer Secrets everywhere around the towers,” Rumena replied more bluntly. “Without the cover of an offensive and the chaos of war, there will be no success.”

“The deaths of an offensive across the canals might be turned against us,” I said. “We will not make such an attempt.

The once-First Prince of Procer stirred at my right. I turned to look at her.

“Cordelia?” I asked. “Speak.”

“Am I to understand, Losara Queen, that it is the deaths of our soldiers that are the reason such an attempt cannot be made?”

Eh, maybe not in an absolute sense but in practice yes. Kurosiv might be able to sacrifice its own sigils to try to kill Sve Noc, but it would be a bloody gamble – and if it lost, it would have nothing left. Much better to spread out the deaths between two sides, even them out by making it a war.

“More or less,” I agreed.

“Then I may have a way,” Cordelia Hasenbach said.

The drow seemed skeptical, but I knew better.

“What do you need?”

“One day,” she replied, “and every Firstborn chronicler you can spare.”

Well now, I thought, that ought to get interesting.

Chapter 44: Antecedents

“If you cannot be good, be just. If you cannot be just, be mindful. If you cannot even be that, then be slain by a better man.”

– Clément Merovins, fourth First Prince of Procer

I was too restless to sleep, after the council, and so I sought company instead.

Masego barely slept any more than I did, so it was at the... well, he’d probably call it a laboratory but it was really more a charnel yard that the Firstborn provided him. He was cutting open a rylleh’s skull with a silver knife when I entered, from the top of the head to the strange almost beak-like nose bone that drow had where humans had cartilage. While there were more bones there were less muscles on their species’ face compared to humans and they were placed differently. It was one of the reasons the drow were considered less expressive.

I dropped into a rough stone seat, watching him work. As a girl I’d found the sight gruesome, but these days I’d made enough corpses that their sight evoked little in me.

“Learned anything useful?”

Hierophant did not immediately answer, waiting until he’d finished cutting through the bone properly and revealed the black sausage-like brain under.

“Useful?” he mused. “I do not know. Yet certainly interesting.”

We tended to have somewhat different ideas about what that word meant, but what the Hells. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do.

“Like what?” I asked.

He looked surprised, eyeing me suspiciously.

“You do not usually express much interest in my dissections,” Masego said.

He sounded, I thought, a tad reproachful.

“It’s drow corpses and I am First Under the Night,” I shrugged. “You might say it’s in my wheelhouse.”

He mulled over that, then nodded in agreement.

“What do you know about the nature of the Gift?” he asked me.

I hummed.

“I read the Natura Virtutis by Warlock Shatha,” I said. “The ability to do magic has two components: one his physical, the body must be born with the talent, while the second is metaphysical and necessitates a soul.”

“Shatha’s work is incomplete, never explaining how the likes of devils and fae can use a form of sorcery,” Masego noted. “I would recommend you read Magister Cressida’s Theologos, which skillfully revises and completes the theory. Still, it serves as a base.”

He paused.

“The metaphysical aspect is the most essential of the two,” Masego said. “It is why Akua was able to practice magic after seizing a new body while it would be pointless of me to attempt the same: the Saint of Sword severed the part of my soul that interconnects with the physical, allowing the use of magic. Changing the body would mean nothing.”

“I’m following so far,” I said. “How does that lead to the Firstborn?”

He tapped the side of his knife on the open drow brains.

“There have been Firstborn mages in the past,” Masego said. “We know this as a fact. So why none since the creation of Night?”

I hummed. That was a pretty good question, actually.

“Did the Sisters kill the capacity?” I asked.

“It would be more apt to say that they replaced it,” Hierophant said. “As far as I can tell, the same part of the soul that was cut in me – that allows the use of magic – is used for the manipulation of Night.”

“Every drow uses Night, to some extent,” I pointed out. “They can’t all be capable of magic.”

He beamed at me.

“My wonder exact,” Masego said. “I can think of only two existing manner of creatures that can all use a manner of sorcery, fae and devils. Species whose sentience is a complex matter.”

Considering fae were living stories and devils grew more intelligent the older they got, on top of both having a sort of immortality, I could see his point. The Firstborn weren’t really like either.

“Every Firstborn is born with some Night, supposedly,” I mused. “It’s only those Mighty that have been alive since its creation that lived without it.”

And there were precious few of those. Not even all of the Ten Generals had been born before the fall of the Empire Ever Dark.

“That is because your patronesses have changed the souls of the drow,” Masego said, sounding impressed by the Crows for what might be the first time.

I felt their weight of their attention suddenly in the back of my mind, the two of them listening through my ears. Masego’s golden eye lingered on me, and I wondered if he could see them. I wouldn’t be surprised. Either way it didn’t stop him.

“It is very crude work,” Hierophant opined. “Metaphysically speaking, it is the equivalent of hammering a nail through the forehead to serve as a connection. In those born capable of magic – as one of he rylleh you provided me was – it appears to destroy that capacity.”

Komena felt irritated, I could tell because the emotion was strong, but underneath that cover I could sense that Andronike was worried . Gods. How many people in all their years had ever found this out? It couldn’t be many.

“In those born without it, however,” he continued, “it appears to serve as a prosthetic of sorts. An appendage that functions as the connection between soul and body they do not have.”

My eye narrowed.

“Let me guess,” I said. “That nail, it’s the piece of Night that every Firstborn is born with.”

“More likely there is additional Night as well, gifted by Sve Noc through the nail so that its functionality is confirmed,” Masego said. “I imagine that when Night ‘fades’ after a death, it is returned to your patronesses through that very appendage – destroying itself in the process.”

He leaned forward over the corpse-covered table.

“Did I miss anything?” Hierophant coldly smiled, asking the goddesses lurking in my soul.

They went away, silent, and he chuckled.

“I didn’t think so,” Masego said.

I rolled my eye at him.

“Always glad to see you making friends,” I chided.

“I admire the inventiveness of their original work, do not misunderstand me,” he said. “It is their ramshackle attempt at apotheosis that offends. Unlike you, who stumbled to the result accidentally, they have no excuse for their sloppiness.”

Nice of him to excuse me, but I couldn’t actually argue with the way he’d put it so I did not risk sarcasm.

“It was a desperate decision made to save their people, Zeze,” I reminded him. “Not a master plan.”

“I will not laud a hollow doll as a god, Catherine,” Masego shrugged. “If they claimed themselves to be less I would keep silent, but so long as they claim divinity I will offer the very scorn that claim deserves.”

Yeah, I did not foresee a great friendship between Zeze and the Crows. A civil tongue was probably the best I could hope for, to be honest, so best to change the subject before they started listening in again.

“So, do you think Kurosiv made their own nails?” I asked.

That got his interest.

“I do not think they can,” Hierophant admitted.

“Huh,” I said. “How’s that?”

“The ‘miracle’ of Night that creates these nails, Catherine, is not something any of the Mighty could do,” he told me. “We came here, you might remember, for the original Night. The power that was bestowed onto Sve Noc by the Gods Below and makes up the heart of their godhead.”

“You think the nails are made of that,” I guessed.

He nodded.

“Kurosiv is bestowed and not bestower,” Masego said. “They cannot create nails because only the original Night can shape souls.”

“So they’re just usurping where the nails go,” I mused. “Taking over part of the spider web, so to speak.”

“You forget,” Hierophant said, “that the nails are part of Sve Noc. It is more accurate to say that Kurosiv is attempting to devour their godhead one piece at a time, that they might become a god in the place of the Sisters.”

I clenched my fingers. Like a tug of war that only ended when one side held all the rope and strangled the enemy with it.

“It’s to the death, then,” I said.

Masego looked at me, eye glimmering gold.

“Oh yes,” he smiled. “Very much to the death.”

Well, wouldn’t that make for sweet dreams.

—

I was up before dawn, breaking my fast when Cordelia was brought to me by an ispe of the Losara. My sigil had smoothly slid into the role of my attendants and escorts since my arrival, treating me as if I had never left, and it would be a lie to say that I did not enjoy it. The former First Prince sat across the low table, eyeing the spread of food laid out for us.

“Don’t eat the mushrooms,” I told her. “They make humans laugh uncontrollably whenever we drink water.”

The blonde princess looked appalled.

“You have a plate full of them,” Cordelia said.

“I can burn out the effect,” I said, “and they are tasty as Hells .”

I popped another one in my mouth, chewing on the savoury flesh. I could eat all sorts of terrible stuff again now that I could use my Name to burn out ‘poison’ again, it was pretty great. She stuck to the bread and what she probably assumed to be honey and not the blood of gem-eating snake crystallized and then melted into a brew. Tasted pretty similar, though, so might be best not to break it to her. We polished off our food and then got to business, Ivah arriving at the precise moment I needed of it. It bowed and sat at Cordelia’s side under her curious gaze.

“Ivah is my second among the Losara,” I said. “And it speaks fluent Chantant and Lower Miezan, as you know, so it’ll be your guide and translator. The highest Mighty usually speak a few human languages, but those historians you asked for won’t.”

It would also be her escort, since Cordelia was full of knowledge and eminently killable. Having the effective head of the Losara at her side would it clear she wasn’t to get her throat cut so some jawor could learn to speak Reitz.

“You have gathered them, then,” Cordelia said.

“I have,” I replied. “Though there’s no such thing as a Firstborn historian in the sense you mean. There are Mighty, though, who through Secrets or because of personal interests have gathered histories of their people both ancient and recent.”

“That is what I need,” she nodded. “May I call on your war council for information as to the enemy’s situation across the river?”

I nodded, seeing no issue.

“Ivah will handle it,” I said. “Practically speaking, you can ask for pretty much anything you need.”

I offered her a sharp smile.

“One might say your work is divinely blessed.”

She looked rather torn at that. Sve Noc were horrors, hard to get around that, but it was useful to have gods in one’s corner.

“I look forward to working with you, then, Ivah of the Losara,” Cordelia said, offering it a nod.

“And I you,” Ivah replied, perhaps more politely than honestly.

Eh, it’d work out. Ivah would prefer to go wade in the blood of our enemies at my side, sure, but its skills were better employed elsewhere at the moment. Besides, if I was reading the Sisters right it would be good for it to have a history of working with Proceran royalty. My tenure as First Under the Night would end before long and my replacement would need to deal with humans whether they liked it or not. I took my leave from them, having something like an appointment to head to. It had been long since I last communed with my patronesses, and I’d yet to have a proper look at the temple where they roosted. N my way to the aerie, though, I came across an unexpected sight.

Akua was leaning against a windowsill in one of the high corridors overlooking the ramparts, hair loose and eyes distant. My limping gait was easy enough to recognize but she did not turn when I approach, eyes staying on the distant shapes of the great monuments the Sisters had stolen from their ruin of an empire to adorn their capital with. Not unlike, I thought, magpies making a nest. I came to stand by her, leaning on my staff instead of the stone.

“Copper for your thoughts?” I offered.

She did not answer immediately, tucking back an errant strand behind her ear. Her red riding dress was form-fitting, but I followed her gaze instead of letting mine linger. She did not seem in that kind of a mood in the slightest.

“I was thinking,” Akua said, “of Praes.”

I hummed.

“What of it?”

Her jaw tightened.

“I killed it, you know,” Akua said. “The Dread Empire. It might be your father that handed me the match, Catherine, but he couldn’t have done it in my place. It was my decision. I saw...”

She shook her head.

“Too much, I suppose,” Akua said. “Too much I could no longer ignore.”

I did not interject.

“And so I burned an empire I could have ruled,” the golden-eyed sorceress said.

I leaned against my staff of dead yew, letting it bear my weight and carefully not looking at her.

“Do you regret it?” I asked.

A long moment of silence.

“Yes,” she finally said.

My heart clenched. A golden gaze turned to me, darkly amused.

“There is no need for anguish, dearest,” Akua said. “You did not fail. It is not the throne I regret but what it might have meant.”

“And what’s that?” I warily asked.

“Making a difference,” she said. “I could have made things better, Catherine. Mended wounds.”

She shrugged.

“Here, at your side again, I am not that woman,” she said. “I trail in your wake. Not unpleasantly so, but when I remember those who looked at me with hope in their eyes it does not seem enough.”

I studied her, silently, from the corner of my eye. She looked at the horizon still.

“So what is it you want?” I asked, too casually.

She rose from the windowsill, all fluid grace, and offered me a lovely smile.

“I do not know,” Akua said. “But is it closer to the woman that struck the match than the one who stood silent in the war council last night.”

She left, brushing her hand against my arm as she passed, and I said nothing. I thought, standing there as she left, of that moment when you flip a coin. After it reaches the apex and begins to come down, just before it hits your palm.

Just before you know what face will come up.

—

I called Zombie to me instead of taking the stairs all the way to the summit of the temple-fortress.

It didn’t end up mattering, because before I could reach my patronesses they reached me. The touch of the Sisters against my mind was light, but the images they offered up burned bright: I was needed elsewhere. The enemy had come, and I pulled at Zombie’s reins as our destination changed. Yesterday, we’d won a victory at the Shrine of Tears and I’d personally slapped Kurosiv in the place. It looked like the Fate-Giver was a sore loser, because the Shrine was where it was picking a fight today. And while I’d been expecting Ishabog the Adversary, the opposition’s designated raider, to make an appearance what I got was altogether worse: Moren Bleakwomb had come out to play, and the Third General was in no mood for half-measures.

What had been sheets of rain yesterday was now frozen solid, holes smashed through where the raiders attacked. Mighty Kasedan and its sigil had been assigned to hold the Shrine after we retook it, but I could feel not a single survivor of the Kasedan within. All the Firstborn that remained were of that Other Night, the one I could not read as deeply. Besides, I only had need of eyes to be able to tell there would be no survivors: a blizzard was howling behind the ice walls, the mark of Moren Bleakwomb letting loose. It was not the Losara that I led into battle, as it was no longer their role: they were oathkeepers and priests now, no longer warrior-Mighty.

Instead it was the Rumena at my back and the Tomb-maker itself at my side. Standing before one of the holes, I watched the blizzard and cocked my head.

“That’s stronger than I was led to expect,” I noted. “In sheer power, Bleakwomb’s a notch above even you.”

General Rumena did not disagree, which spoke volumes.

“Moren has grown in strength,” the Tomb-maker evenly said. “More than it should have. This was not taken from another Mighty. It was given .”

The scorn in the word was thick. The worthy rose, the worthy took: they were not handed gifts. So Kurosiv had begun to strengthen their lieutenant, huh. I supposed there was nothing keeping them bound to play by Sve Noc’s rules anymore.

“How does it compare to Radigast?” I asked.

“Close,” Rumena somberly said.

I let out a low whistle. Radigast the Guest, the First General, was powerful enough that even when it possessed the bodies of other Firstborn – the Secret that saw it earn its sobriquet – it could usually bat other Generals around. It and the Gloom-shards was pretty much the reason southern Serolen had yet to turn into a rout, since its sigil was spread out all over and so it could move from one battle to another in the bat of an eye. I rolled my shoulder.

“Well, Rumena,” I said, “let’s knock before we enter. It’s only polite.”

I pulled down my hood as the Tomb-maker took a wary step away from me, breathing in and sinking deep in the Night. Blackflame was nothing to sneer at, when you concentrated it, and I’d long learned that trick. I smashed the sheet of ice before us, the sea of black fire I slammed into it sublimating the frozen water and the gust of air making the blizzard within disperse for a moment. Near the gate, anyway. I flicked a glance at Rumena.

“Don’t dawdle,” I chided. “We’ve a traitor to discipline.”

I stepped into the howling winds, immediately feeling the cold eating at my flesh. Night flared in my veins, burning it away, but I was still reluctantly impressed. That’d been quick. A hundred eyes bloomed to replace my dead one, all buried in wind and snow, but I was feeling out the currents. There was an eye to the storm, a place without wind or frost. Moren and its sigil were there, not in this lethal storm. Behind me I felt Rumena’s presence burn in the Night, the ground moving as it raised out of solid stone a path for its sigil to take. Good, that took care of that. I could go straight for Bleakwomb.

It must have thought much the same, because even as I began weaving a bubble of Night against me – a sphere of stillness that would kill the winds – I felt the great presence in the Other Night move towards me. The winds picked up in strength, ice began to spread over the snow and reach for my boots.

“None of that,” I sharply said, smashing down the butt of my staff.

Tongues of fire shot out against the ground, revealing bare stone again, and I finished that bubble of stillness just in time for Moren to strike its first blow: high above us, I began to hear cracks .

“You fucking loon,” I said, half-admiring. “You’re bringing down the ceiling on us, aren’t you?”

Only it was worse than that. Wasting no time, I pulled at Night and filled my bubble of stillness with spinning winds – not as strong as Moren’s, but strong enough to turn aside anything falling on me. Only it’d not just been me that Bleakwomb was aiming at. When it’d brought down the ceiling, it’d filled a massive storm with hundreds of large pieces of stone . Rumena’s hall was ripped apart in moments and I cursed, ordering it to withdraw in the Night. This wasn’t a fight, it was a fucking rat trap – and this time we were the rats. The Tomb-maker balked. Its sigil should retreat, it agreed, but itself... We both paused when a dreamlike vision shivered through our minds.

Andronike’s hand, but the memory had been taken by Komena: a lookout from the Ysengral had just seen Mighty Ishabog and its sigil moving to cut our retreat.

“Go,” I snarled at Rumena through the Night. “Clear them out.”

There was no argument this time. I turned my attention back to Moren Bleakwomb, whose gaze I could feel on me through the storms. I could see through its own works, I thought. So that was why even though it was far from a brawler it’d made it up to Third General: it always had the advantage of home territory, because it brought the territory with it. Unless I dispersed that blizzard I was fighting uphill and dispersing that thing would blow through most of my strength in the Night. Attrition and aggression with the same single Secret. We’d underestimated our opponent, I thought. Not expected that Kurosiv would empower its lieutenant.

I was not prepared to win this fight.

“Still,” I told the blizzard, “there’s appearances to maintain. You can’t just stroll in, wipe out a sigil and then stay put in a temple that used to be ours. That’d be bad for morale.”

I moved around my footing, placed a second hand on my staff and squared my shoulders. I smiled, Night flooding through my veins. Fighting Moren’s Secret would just exhaust me, so I did the very opposite. I attuned my Night to its own and fed the working, filled its belly to bursting until the winds howled so loudly that the scream shook the very walls and the pillars holding up the roof began to crack. Ropes snapped, painted shrines shattered and even the frozen waters were ripped out of the canals. I could feel Moren struggle to keep control of the over-mighty working.

“Yeah, you’re recent to that kind of power aren’t you?” I smiled. “You’re not real good at handling it yet, not after so many centuries of stagnating around the same strength.”

Then I’d added my own strength and that had made it significantly worse. I’d thought it would. I was no stranger to biting off more than I could chew, so I had a grip on the difficulties involved in your strength increasing so suddenly. The two of us stood in the storm, untouched, as the world broke around us. To my displeasure Moren had control enough to spare its own sigil, maintain the eye of calm, but that was all it could save. The Shrine of Tears broke , everything shattered and ripped apart until no two stones stood atop one another and the beautiful place I had seen yesterday was but a dream.

The winds died, leaving only a flat empty expanse of snow and a ring of rubble around us. I met the eyes of the silhouette across the field, Maren Bleakwomb’s staring back unblinking. A tall and skeletally thin drow, haggard in their stringy blue and green clothes – looking half-drowned – and covered in masses of round beads as if attempting to make up for the severity of its figure. I offered the traitor-general a mocking bow, gesturing at the nothingness around us.

“It’s all yours,” I said.

The Mighty did not answer. I limped away, feeling it gaze biting at my back.

We both knew this was not going to be our last fight.

—

It was nightfall by the time the borders were secure again and I’d spent most the day fighting.

But a day had been spent, and so I went to reap the harvest that had been sown. I found Cordelia Hasenbach in what had been someone’s bedchamber but was not covered in papers and tables, the blonde princess animatedly speaking with Ivah and the two dozen other Firstborn on the room as a dzulu of the Losara took notes on what looked like a great map. I squinted at it as I entered, finding mostly sigil names and red lines linking them to other names. The drow bowed as I entered, which I dismissed, and I turned towards Cordelia.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“I am pleased to see you as well, Your Majesty,” she mildly replied.

“I’m about six hours and nine hundred corpses past courtesies right now,” I tiredly replied. “What am I looking at, Hasenbach?”

“War,” Ivah replied in her stead, sounding enthused.

I took a longer look at the map, then scanned the papers. Most of it was poetry, records of duels between Mighty and the found of sig- oh, oh .

“Kurosiv’s entire philosophy is being hands off,” I slowly said. “It’s said multiple times that Sve Noc’s edict ending fighting between sigils under Keter breaks is a betrayal of the Tenets. So even if its sigils start attacking each other instead of us...”

“It will not intervene,” Cordelia said. “At least not immediately.”

“So you figured out which of those sigils hated each other in the Everdark,” I said. “The feuds and wars.”

“Of which there were many,” the princess drily said. “And to think I once believes Alamans quarrelsome.”

“The worthy take,” Ivah agreed.

“If they’re fighting each other instead of looking at us, we have a decent shot at getting to one of the towers,” I smiled. “That is a solution.”

Then I threw her a look.

“If you can get those sigils fighting,” I added. “How do you intend to do that?”

“Last night,” Cordelia said, “I inferred from context that though some of the greatest Mighty have abilities to detect intruders this is not perfect. That these ‘seers’ are concentrated around the towers.”

I narrowed my eye.

“False attacks,” I said. “You want us to paint raiders in other sigil’s colours and spill blood so the feuds start up again.”

“They are not so different as princes, these sigil-holders,” Cordelia quietly said. “And Malicia once taught me the truth of them: they want to fight. All they need is the means and an excuse.”

The latter of which we would provide. My gaze turned to Ivah.

“Lord of Silent Steps,” I said, “your opinion. Does this have the shape of victory to you?”

It mulled over its words before answering.

“There will be war,” Ivah said. “I know not how much, but that there will be war I believe.”

I slowly nodded.

“Then let’s do it,” I ordered.

—

By nightfall the following day, forty-seven sigils under Kurosiv were openly at war with one another and I’d had to refuse eight requests to add Cordelia Hasenbach to the Night.

She’d bought us our shot with her cleverness, now all that was left was to take it.

—

I was out of practice sneaking around without using Night.

Probably should start practicing that again. I’d never been so much as a shade of what Vivienne could do in her prime as a Thief, but for a Squire I’d been pretty decent at getting the drop on people. With the years and the bad leg, though, it’d become more practical to just veil myself and limp right past watchers. That wasn’t a possibility tonight: if someone as powerful in the Night as I was started using it on Kurosiv’s side of the canals, they were sure to notice. The Sisters had been pretty firm about that. An argument could be made that it might be best if I didn’t come along, but my answer had been blunt.

Akua and Masego could probably handle any Firstborn that were not one of the Ten Generals, but that was in a duel. If they got caught and swarmed by a dozen sigil-holders, they were good as dead: Zeze could only Wrest the power one person at a time and Akua’s magic was no Night-proof. Someone was going to have a trick that’d get through her shields, and she just couldn’t compete with the mobility that any Mighty worth their salt brought to the table. No, if this went bad – and in my experience, little jaunts like this tended to – they would need me to slap the opposition in the face hard enough it bought time for us to leg it.

Some people thought there was more to it, of course.

“I see you cannot suffer the thought of our going on an adventure without you, dearest,” Akua amusedly. “How charmingly transparent.”

Masego looked at her in surprise.

“I thought it was impolite to point out when she did that,” he said.

“Less so when it is done flirtatiously,” Akua informed him.

I saw unfoldingly nakedly on Masego’s face the struggle between the thought of being able to be ruder to be people and having to be flirtatious. He sighed, turning to look at me.

“Not worth it,” he said.

“ Hey ,” I weakly replied, unsure whether I ought to be offended or not.

It was not an entirely inauspicious beginning, considering that a great many of the Woe’s successes had been preceded by my so-called friends ragging on me. I supposed that, mathematically speaking, they would have to be.

The half of Serolen our side held was wound up tighter than a coiled spring, but so far the violence had been mostly contained to Kurosiv’s sigils with only a few raids attempted over the canals. They’d run into Mighty Ysengral’s prepared defences and been brutally slaughtered to the last, which had rather discouraged repeat attempts. Well, that and the baskets full of severed heads the Ysengral had catapulted back over the canal as a taunt. The Cradle of Steel’s sigil had knack for the unnecessarily vicious that never failed to amuse.

After speaking with Rumena, we’d picked the tower that had been raised inside the Relic Grove as the one to hit. It was in the northeast of Serolen, past two sigils that had a reputation as nasty customers – the bigger of the two, the Yeshala, had been the effective rulers of one of the Everdark’s cities before the exodus – and deep in a part of the city widely considered a death trap. The Relic Grove had taken a little too well to the surface, the way I heard it.

“The Rozhan tended to the Grove as their sacred duty once and now lend assistance to the cabal protecting the tower,” Rumena said, “but they have been drawn into the war between the Yeshala and the Orobog. Patrols will be thinned.”

Which would mean nothing if either Moren or Ishabog went prowling around looking for us, but we had a plan for that: Mighty Rumena was going raiding. In principle, the target was a camp near the Singing Rings where dzulu taken from us in raids were being kept penned up.

“How likely are you to draw both?” I asked.

Rumena hacked out a laugh.

“I ripped out Ishabog’s ear a sennight ago,” the Tomb-maker replied. “It will come for my head if the opportunity arises, I am sure of it, and Moren will act the moment I get too close to the tower in Rings.”

I grunted, not entirely convinced but knowing it was our best shot. The Relic Grove wasn’t the easiest target by a long shot, we’d been careful not to be too easy to predict in case someone on the other side figured us out, but I disliked plans that relied too much on enemy error. But we’re not exactly swimming in other courses, are we? The civil war that Cordelia had effectively started in Kurosiv’s camp would not last forever: the leech might preach that it let its sigils do as they wished, but they would definitely step in if the fighting lasted too long. They couldn’t afford to erode their military strength by too much, not with the balance of power in Serolen so narrow.

“Try to get the other ear,” I told Rumena. “I want a matching set for my hat when we’ll have talks with their lot.”

It blinked, then let out a startled bark of laughter.

“Your will be done, First Under the Night,” the Tomb-maker replied.

Funny how it only ever called me that when I was telling it to do violence, wasn’t it? Firstborn, what could you do. The timing was carefully arranged so that the three of us got to the canal before Rumena’s raid began, looking over the placid waters at the low hills where the Yeshala had lain their line of defence. Most drow disdained fortifications – which I could understand, given what most Mighty could do to a set of field fortifications in the span of a breath – but the Yeshala Sigil had made an effort, perhaps spurred on by the example of the Ysengral on our side of the canal.

There was a rough spiked wooden palisade set atop a low earthen wall at the bottom of the hills, maybe ten feet away from their end of the canal, and a dozen raised stones reaching higher than the spikes dotting the length of the fortification. Mighty were perched atop the stones, keeping watch on the sigil guarding our shore, and they would be the first obstacle in our way. Akua, standing by my side, had her eyes on the enemy sentinels.

“Strength?” she asked.

“Pravnat,” I said. “Maybe one jawor? Hard to tell without them pulling on Night.”

Pravnat were just promising ispe, the lowest of the Mighty, and jawor squarely a middle rank among that same distinguished number. I would have expected at least one rylleh around to keep an eye on things, but there was none I could see or sense. Either the Yeshala had committed to the hilt to their war with the Orobog, or the sigil’s defence strategy considered these watchers an expendable alarm. Given the usual callousness of Firstborn strategists, it really could go either way.

“Favourable terms,” Akua murmured.

I nodded, silently appreciating she’d refrained from calling it luck. Two villains and the Doom of Liesse talking about getting lucky was just asking for fate to rap our knuckles.

“Hierophant,” I said, “get us started.”

Masego nodded, wresting away the magic in the trinkets he’d taken to carrying everywhere since losing his magic. We’d found that his doing that was harder to sense for Mighty than a mage casting the traditional way, since it was a manipulation of already extant power instead of something forming, so it would be him that wove the enchantment around us. He murmured for some time in the mage tongue, Summer-lit eye sweeping over our forms from under the cloth, and after he snapped his wrist I felt a sensation like warm mist sweep up from my toes to the crown of my head.

“Ibrahim’s Mirror,” Akua murmured. “Your appreciation for the classics never fails to charm, Hierophant.”

“It’s a fine spell,” Masego told her. “Even Father couldn’t find a way to improve the formula.”

The conversation was a little surreal to hear, considering that I could now no longer see either of the people speaking. It wasn’t true invisibility, which was rare and exceedingly difficult to maintain, but instead a sort of reactive illusion forming a cone around each of us. Ibrahim’s Mirror effectively made everything in the cone ‘transparent’, the enchantment reproducing the sight almost perfectly. The were two weakness: one was a slight shimmer, like light on a mirror, whenever the cone first enveloped an outside object. The other was that anyone standing inside the cone was unaffected by the illusion. I cleared my throat.

“Let’s get a move on,” I said. “We only have so long before General Rumena strikes.”

Crossing the canal itself was not particularly difficult. At this time of the day the water was shallow, barely more than waist-high, as a series of lock chambers upstream directed the overflow to channels feeding cisterns in Serolen’s central districts. Water did not register as an object to Ibrahim’s Mirror, so it was unseen that we got to the opposite shore. Akua climbed first, staying close so we would remain visible to each other, then helped up Masego and myself. We were careful to move quickly towards the earthen wall, dripping water on earth instead of stone as much as possible, where it would not remain noticeable.

We were between two ‘watchtowers’, neither of the Mighty perched atop the raised stones seeming to have noticed our crossing. Now, though, came the tricky part. There was no way for us to climb the palisade atop the earthen wall quietly enough drow senses wouldn’t hear us, which meant we’d have to get inventive. So we huddled close, cones overlapping, while Akua knelt by the bottom of the wall. She laid an elegant hand on the packed earth and began to murmur, trailing off into silence after repeating the same incantation ever more quietly the third time. Even standing behind her, I could barely feel the spell magic she used.

It was barely more than a spark, the same petty curse used again and again. The spell was a Wolofite creation, meant to soften an inch of someone’s scalp so it was easier to rip out their hair. Fortunately, it could also be used to soften earth . Akua withdrew her hand after a moment, then began to dig. It was like digging into a garden’s black earth, not an effort in the slightest, and she stopped after hitting hard earth again while Masego and I scattered the earth about. It took six instances before we had a path, then another three until it was widened enough we could crawl and wiggle our way through.

We hurried up the hills as I kept an eye on the Yashala sentinels, who seemed blessedly unaware of what had gone on under their nose. It wouldn’t last forever, sadly. One of them would find the hole or notice the irregularities in the earth and then an alarm would be sounded. Hopefully, though, we’d be past the territory of the Yahsala Sigil by then. Let them arm up and go on war footing all they wanted, we weren’t going back by their territory anyway. Under the cover of a copse of trees we stopped, patting ourselves free of the clinging earth, and huddled close to negate the cones.

“Everyone fine?” I murmured.

Nods. We’d agreed to speak as little as possible.

“Then we take the Soaring Stairs,” I spoke with a grimace. “Let’s go.”

Alas, they were the fastest way through. They weren’t difficult to find, though as in many parts of Serolen I found the sudden transition from thick woods to monument a little jarring. Slowly sloping stone stairs two wagons wide began at the end of a beaten dirt path leading to the canal, rising for what had to be the better part of a mile. Beginning at the bottom, steps had been painted in vivid colours over which Crepuscular glyphs were inscribed in pure white. Each was the name of a Mighty that had attempted to reproduce the famous deed for which the monument was named: begin at the top of the stairs as an ispe and slay enough foes by the time you’d reached to bottom to have become a rylleh. The Cabal of the Soaring Stairs had gathered ispe by the thousands every ten years to attempt it in some sort of grisly ritual festival, but as far as I knew none had ever succeeded after the first.

They were an exquisite sight, cutting through a few more hills and then the beginning of an inhabited district with houses and temples and makeshift streets, but they were also fucking stairs. Near deserted at this time of the day, at least, but since I couldn’t use Night to dull the pain I had to rely on the herbs I’d taken earlier. They were working for now, but I already feared what the trip back would feel like when their effect went away. The three of us moved in silence, hurrying as much as we could. Masego was less than athletic and I limped, so admittedly we were not the fastest infiltrators Calernia had ever seen.

On both sides of us the territory of the Yashala was splayed out, the serpentine streets slithering around knots of houses and towers. Firstborn liked to cluster houses together, build them to have common roofs. It felt more like the roof of a cavern that way, and less like the sky of the Burning Lands where they had come. It made for strange streets, knots of houses and shops and temples popping up like mushroom patches as trees grew through everything and paths winded around in every direction. I let my gaze wander a bit, but not too much. We were not here to sightsee.

“Catherine,” Masego murmured, just loud enough for me to hear, “we have a problem.”

I paused halfway through a step.

“I’m listening,” I said. “What-”

Behind us Night flared, streaks of light touching the sky. It was coming from near the canal. An alarm, sent up by the Mighty.

“That,” Masego said, coming close enough I could see him point ahead.

I looked up at the top of the Soaring Stairs, where a warband was massing. A few dzulu, taking the front, even began sweeping down the stairs. Fuck . They’d found us out too early.

“Change of plans,” I said.

“Indeed?” Akua murmured.

“Follow me,” I said.

And I leapt down into the streets to the side, the two of them following after a beat. I swallowed as scream as my bad leg throbbed, then adjusted my cloak on my shoulders.

It looked like we’d be doing this the hard way.

Chapter 45: Kernel (Redux)

“Understand this: divinity is an act of murder. A god can have no beginning or end; both must be slain without hesitation.”

– Translation of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness, widely attributed to the young Dead King

I thought I’d gotten a sense of the Yeshala territory, but I’d been wrong.

The streets weren’t empty the way it’d seemed from up on the Soaring Stairs. Sure, it wasn’t exactly a market fair out here but neither was it a ghost city with a few terrified souls shivering behind closed doors. The three of us had barely turned our first corner before we nearly stumbled over a handful of nisi sitting in an alcove and chatting about a recent game of inic cin as they wove reed baskets. None of them noticed the edge of our illusions glimmering against the wall, but we quickened our pace anyway. They were the first drow we encountered, but hardly the last.

We found a sort of half-hidden trading where dzulu were bartering meat and greens for small wooden beads and sharpened obsidian – well shaped, fit to serve as knife blades – and mere streets later drow were sneaking to the side a run-down temple painted entirely in shades of yellow to hang small white ribbons from hooks on a wall. The ribbons were simple cloth, but I could see that there were glyphs on the hooks. Prayers for luck and good health, for the misfortune of your enemies. Life still breathed in Yeshala lands, it just kept out of sight. Like rats hiding from the light.

Never once did we see a Mighty anywhere, though perhaps that should not have been a surprise. There were so very few of them compared to the numbers of the Firstborn, not even one in ten, and none of what we’d seen would be if interest to them. Nisi were expected to do all this, the labour of keeping cities standing, because it was the work fit for them. Real drow, real people, pursued only the accumulation of Night. Nothing else was worthy of one’s time. Still, it was evident the Yeshala had seen better days.

That so much of the territory was run down or broken meant the Mighty were using dzulu and nisi for war labour, not abandoning them to their affairs, and the consequences of that were obvious. They wouldn’t have been, in the Everdark, but deep down that was why I believed that Kurosiv’s philosophies – which would survive them, I had no doubt of that – were doomed to lose. See, when the Firstborn had been living in grand old ruins sigils had been able to fight over who got the nicest part and it’d reinforced the order of things: fight well, gain Night, live better.

Now, though, it wasn’t so simple. Serolen was a trove of stolen treasures, but large parts of it had been built over the last few years. And those quarters had been unquestionably superior for nisi and dzulu, who’d never got to taste comfort anyway since the niceties were reserved for Mighty. Nine out of ten Firstborn had been force-fed the realization that they didn’t actually need Mighty to make their lives better. And whenever sigils turned to the old favourites, raiding all the neighbours and slaughtering on a whim, now Firstborn were actually losing something. Their comfortable lives were being infringed on.

One of the first things my father ever taught me was that the tool tyrants needed to maintain their grip on power was not fear but apathy . And just like Mazus squeezing the blood out of Laure until there was the scent of revolt in the air, the Mighty here were chipping away at that apathy one inconvenience at a time.

Even if you’d only risen an inch from the bottom of the barrel, no one liked losing that inch. Mighty who kept too close to the old ways, Kurosiv’s gospel, made things worse for the bulk of the Firstborn. In Procer or Callow that’d end with the nobles knifed and changes made, but of course it wasn’t that simple here. It took more than sleep and a knife in the back to kill a sigil-holder. But the wind was turning against the old ways, because the old ways were fucking awful for everyone except the strongest Mighty and now there was a visible, known alternative.

So the Mighty would find their cattle growing less and less obedient, apt to lashing out through the means the tenets of Iserre had given them, and the clever ones would learn to go with the wind. They’d use it to increase their power at the expense of their rivals, throwing a few concessions at nisi and dzulu as the price of prosperity, until it became common sense that it was the better practice. And then, one day, the cattle would grow mutinous again. Maybe they’d look at other kingdoms and see their lives could be better, or because the Mighty got too hungry again and their subject suffered for it.

The reason didn’t matter so much as what would happen: all of this, once more. The same cycle, over and over again. All the Kurosivs of the world lost eventually, because they weren’t the natural order of a single goddamn thing – they were parasites.

And no matter how tight the saddle, you could only ride a tiger for so long before it remembered it wasn’t a horse.

We ghosted through the streets, avoiding people as much as we could and heading straight north. We’d have to take one of the winding paths around the hills to get to the Relic Grove, but the wasted time taking the streets had cost us was worth it. The Soaring Stairs and the other large avenues would be crawling with Mighty by now and there were bound to be a few with a Secret that’d see through Ibrahim’s Mirror. Our gamble was that by the time they’d realized this was an infiltration instead of the prelude to an attack and begin sweeping through the territory, we’d be long gone.

I was not fool enough to call it a success yet, but these were odds I’d roll dice on.

We took a long, diagonal street leading to the northwest because it was completely empty but the longer that lasted the more uneasy I felt. Akua clearly felt the same, as she gestured for us to stick closer together. We found out why the street – and all those around it – were empty after we got to the end of it, finding a marketplace stripped bare. At the heart of it, hammered into the paving stones, a large iron pillar covered in number glyphs stood. To it were bound what had to be at least three hundred dzulu, thick chains to which drow were shackled on both sides radiating out of the pillar like spokes of a wheel.

The paint on many of their faces was faded or cracked, but there was no mistaking that these people came from at least a dozen different sigils. At least half, though, were Yeshala. Bile began to rise in my throat as I took steps closer, shaking off Akua’s warning touch on my arm. It was the pillar I looked at, the count being kept. Numbers, but also a few words. Not just these dzulu but also a dozen ‘batches’ before them. Mighty had carved into the iron pillar how many were to be kept and for how long, the number glyphs ominously slashed through when the time had passed.

“They man the pillars with their own people when they don’t take enough of ours,” I murmured, genuinely appalled. “Mighty Yeshala was the one who sent its dzulu here.”

It was one thing to know that even dzulu were considered barely better than animals in the eyes of Mighty, another to see them chained here like cattle awaiting the abattoir. Akua stood at my side, golden eyes hooded as she studied the pillar.

“They are meant for the tower in the Relic Grove,” she murmured. “It is why the pillar is so close to Rozhan territory without needing defence: these lives are claimed by a higher power.”

My fingers clenched. I’d known they were taking dzulu from our side of the canals, Rumena had told me as much in the war council, but it hadn’t been sure whether it was as work slaves or sacrifice. I should have known , I thought. If they wanted pairs of hands, they would have taken nisi as well. They want dzulu because there’s a few Secrets’ worth of Night in them. Masego was the only one of us who could not fluently speak and read Crepuscular, so he shot us a curious look.

“When are they meant to be moved?” he asked. “Knowing the frequency of the sacrifices will be of some use.”

“Two days,” I grimly replied.

If this didn’t end in two days, the drow I was looking at were all dead. Or worse . And I don’t think I can end this in two days. Akua met my gaze from the corner of hers, visibly sharing in the thought. She looked away after a beat.

“Other Firstborn seem to be avoiding the area,” Masego noted. “We should continue down this street, it will quicken our pace and lessen the risks.”

Throat tight, I nodded. Grim as the logic was, it wasn’t untrue. But before we could move, there was an interruption.

“We need,” Akua Sahelian quietly said, “to free them.”

I felt the weight of those golden eyes on me without needing to turn. My heart clenched. The calculus was plain to see, as it so often was at times like this. If we freed them, the enemy would know we’d been here. Maybe not immediately, but sooner than otherwise. And if we got caught, were forced to retreat or fight our way out before getting to the tower, it might be a lot more than three hundred drow that died for it. And on the other side of the balance was a hard truth: if we did not save these people, they were dead. And we would condemn them to that fate simply because of a risk, a potential danger. Not a certain consequence.

I knew the choice I would have made if I’d come alone. Knew it deeply, instantly. And some part of me recoiled at the thought of how very comfortable with sacrifices I had become.

“Masego?” I asked.

“So long as the spell is not too powerful, I can maintain the Mirrors through it,” Hierophant said.

He did not seem particularly concerned with the moral question to wrestle with, I thought. Indifference, or was he simply trusting me to wrestle with it for him? Sometimes it was hard to tell.

“I have had enough of shackles, Catherine,” Akua murmured. “Especially those made of iron.”

I studied her face. She had already made her decision, I realized. She would free the dzulu whatever I said. And so I shivered, knowing in that moment that I had both succeeded beyond my wildest hopes and entirely lost control of the situation. So I said the only thing I could say.

“We must be quick,” I replied, “and then cut through the Rozhan territory in a straight line.”

It wasn’t even that difficult, when it came down to it. The shackles had been made to resist Night, not sorcery, and so Akua sent a spell shivering down the nine chains one after another that simply popped the shackles open. The dzulu milled about uncertainly, some even fearfully. Thinking it might be a trap. But when one of them hesitantly tried to leave and nothing struck it down, there were excited shouts and within moments they were scattering in every direction. We waited until our path was clear, then ran for the Rozhan grounds to the east.

I could not see Akua’s face, but somehow I knew she was smiling.

—

The Rozhan were a smaller sigil than the Yashala, having taken up a territory that was a thick half-circle around the east of the Relic Grove. Theirs were poor lands, most of them still woods, and their inhabited holdings were essentially knots of houses and temples closely clustered together in clearings. The rest was tall trees split only by a few paths, used for hunting and patrolled by Mighty but otherwise abandoned. Cutting through wasn’t all that difficult. The Rozhan were on war footing as well, though, so we did have to duck two patrols that we might not have known were coming if not for my ties to the Night.

Just because I couldn’t tell how many there were or how strong didn’t mean I couldn’t feel them coming at all. Kurosiv was yet a usurper.

Before long we reached the end of a shallow dirt path and found ourselves standing at the edge of our destination: the Relic Grove. Only a threshold made of four arm bones lined up between two twisting oaks announced the end of Rozhan territory, but all three of us could sense it. There was power in the air, and the fog we could see up ahead was not of natural make.

“I have been looking forward to this,” Masego cheerful admitted. “The Firstborn usually shy away from anything that could be considered necromancy, it is an interesting change of pace.”

“The Twilight Sages left scars,” I said, “but this isn’t necromancy, not exactly. Technically Mighty Kavian is still alive.”

“But not truly sentient,” Akua noted. “Ego death is still a manner of death.”

Masego nodded in approval.

“We’re not getting into that debate here,” I said, sensing tricky grounds. “We have work to do. Do you remember the rules?”

“We must always be in contact,” Masego said, sounding displeased.

“Do not touch the grave-trees,” Akua dutifully added.

“Good,” I grunted. “I’ll go in front, Zeze behind me. Let’s try not to wake up Kavian, yeah?”

Settling into a single file line, Akua taking my cloak and Masego hers, we passed the threshold of bones. To the power-blind the Relic Grove would have seen like nothing more than misty old woods, the trees tall and twisted and its grounds covered with dead leaves no matter the season, but the illusion lasted only as long as it took us to encounter the first grave-tree. In the side of large, thick ash tree whose branches were spreading out like the fingers of a hand, there lay a small stone stele to which a drow skeleton had been nailed.

The part that had Masego’s hand twitching at my back, though was that the Night in it had yet to fade.

“No relic,” Akua murmured, sounding a little disappointed.

“There’s probably a Secret or two in there that Mighty would value a great deal more than a fancy spear,” I said.

“One cannot make an earring of a Secret, darling,” she replied.

I rolled my eye, pulling us forward. One of the dangers of this place was that the Secret behind the mist would actively try to get us lost and make us stumble on graves, but there was no chance of that so long as I could feel the beacon of power that was the obsidian tower in the distance. Mostly getting through was slow, tedious limping forward on a forest path that was barely distinguishable from the rest of the ground.

“How long have Mighty been trying to harvest Kavian?” Zeze asked.

“Seven hundred years and change,” I said. “The days where entire sigils disappeared in there are long past, but they still get a few fools every year.”

Akua let out an interested noise.

“Did you ask Sve Noc what Secret it is that allowed it to remain for so long?” she asked.

I snorted.

“Are you asking me, Sahelian,” I drily said, “to reveal the secrets of my communion with dark goddesses simply so that your petty curiosity might be satisfied?”

There was a beat of silence.

“I am,” Masego brightly replied.

I heard a half-choked laugh coming from the back. Fine, be that way.

“It’s the Secret of Recurrent Echoes,” I said, “only it’s not actually supposed to last this long. Just a handful times, opportunities for the holder to murder some other drow and take their body.”

And Mighty Kavian had spent the last few centuries methodically doing the latter, but never the former. Andronike figured something had gone wrong with the part of the Secret that maintained sapience, probably because Kavian had tried to make it repeat much more at the expense of mental stability. The end result was that a Night-presence of the old monster popped out whenever someone disturbed the Relic Grove, murdering everyone involved and shackling their Night before disappearing again. The whole thing was like fucking honey for Mighty: a fight against a legend and a massive payoff in Night if they won? It’d taken literal centuries before cocky sigil-holders stopped feeding their sigils into the place.

The Rozhan Sigil had come into existence out of scavenger crews that’d figured out how to get their hands on some of the lesser morsels from the outskirts without bringing down Kavian’s wrath on their heads. They took care of the graves in exchange, apparently, and had some Secrets entirely about the matter. Back in the Everdark the Relic Grove had been a maze of stone and lichen buried at the bottom of a city that’d been shattered by a dwarven incursion, but it had taken very well to being moved to Serolen. Kavian’s blank consciousness had grown to permeate all the fucking trees around here, like some sort of sickness, and now there was...

“Stop,” I whispered, and immediately they did.

The grave-tree before us was larger than the last, a massive willow that had grown around three steles, but that wasn’t what had given me pause. There was a shape crouched on the branches, a slender drow whose eyes were scanning the mists. It passed over us twice without seeing us, my shoulders tensing as it did. See, the old Relic Grove had been stone and lichen. But this new one, moved into the woods? It’d had old, strong life to work with. Trees that’d been around for centuries, if not longer. And with Kavian’s consciousness spread out, it had caused... echoes. The Mighty whose Night and belongings were the relic of the name drew from the life of the trees, forming these... things.

Little more than shadows, but wielding Night and completely unkillable. Even if they got repeatedly smashed into nothingness, all it would do was cause the shade to dwell into the tree until enough life accumulated again for it to manifest. It was possible to end the phenomenon by destroying the tree, of course, but anyone who did that instead got to deal with Mighty Kavian itself. None of us moved, even our breaths growing more quiet, but the shadow was still looking at the mist.

“It knows something is here,” I murmured.

I got a shake from Masego at my back, agreement. Fuck, we weren’t going to pass with it looking for us. And it was smart enough to notice the light from Ibrahim’s Mirror when we got too close to something, those things were known to attack Mighty who used Secrets of stealth.

“Akua,” I said. “Distract it.”

A heartbeat of silence, then a quiet incantation. From the corner of my eye I saw a ghostly light bloom to our right, behind the thick leaves of an alder tree, and the shadow saw it too. Without hesitating it leaped in that direction, chasing the spell, and I tugged urgently for them to follow me. I put aside the pain in my leg, making haste, and I could see that the shadow was hacking away at the tree now – and the light further running away. A splendid choice of spell. Now we just needed to-

To come across another grave-tree, a twisted elm with two skeleton-adorned steles, before which stood a shadow wielding a long spear of crystal. And it’d definitely just see the light from Ibrahim’s Mirror on the branches. Fuck. So that was why the mist had been trying to push us here. It was just smart and malicious enough for something like this.

“Keep touching,” I said, “and run .”

It didn’t know where we were under the illusions, but that didn’t matter: it came at us in a burst of Night, shattering all three spells in a singe thrust. I wrestled down my instinct to turn around and fight, knowing that I was the only one who could guide us through the mist. Instead I ran as fast as I could, every stumble having me curse how fucking unnecessarily long their legs were compared to mine. No longer maintaining the Mirrors, Masego was freed to fight as well and I felt bursts of magic erupt behind me as I guided us through a thick knot of branches that whipped at my face.

Akua cursed and a pine shattered to our left as the faint pop of a shielding spell broke. I took us off the path and through bushes, ignoring the thorns as they tore at my cloak. Masego grunted and I felt the ripple of his aspect unleashed, something catching flame far behind. Eye ahead , Catherine, I reminded myself. I couldn’t be sure how long we ran like that, weaving between trees and stones and winding forest paths, but my heart was pounding in my throat when we finally stopped. My back was drenched in sweat, but we’d finally shaken off the shadow.

“We are too far for it to follow,” Hierophant panted.

He was even worse off than I was, I saw with a twinge of satisfaction. Akua, on the other hand, didn’t even look like she was sweating. Urgh. Couldn’t she be bad at more things? It was starting to get irritating. We caught our breath together, then Masego wove a new set of Mirrors.

“We’re close,” I told them. “It’s up ahead.”

We took our time with the last stretch, knowing it to be the most dangerous. The dead leaves covering the forest floor thinned, revealing smooth stone beneath. The trees here rooted through it, shattering stone and spreading rubble, and it seemed like every ten feet we came across one of the tree-graves. It took us almost as long for that last stretch as it’d taken us for the rest: I was in no mood for another run, so I had us circling whenever I caught sight of a shadow instead of risking being caught. But we got there, at long last, and from the mists rose the silhouette of a great obsidian tower.

Although it wasn’t actually that great, I noticed when we got a little closer – stopping at the edge of the trees, wary of being seen by the Mighty that’d be guarding this place. The tower was maybe sixty feet wide and thrice as tall, nothing to sneer about but not exactly gargantuan. Made sense, if Kurosiv has set their minions to build several. It was pure obsidian, though, fitted not in blocks but like the polished pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The precision of that was impressive. Concerningly, though, I could see a fucking door.

A quick look told me there were windows at the very summit, large ones facing every cardinal direction, but were the people assigned here really forced to climb every time they wanted to enter?

“Can either of you see a way in?” I whispered.

Akua shook her head, but Masego was staring at the wall with his Summer-forged eye.

“There are hidden mechanisms in the pieces, bound to Night,” Hierophant told us. “Releasing the workings would seem to free a slab to be pushed in.”

“A secret door,” Akua enthusiastically said. “Well done, Hierophant.”

She was, I thought, enjoying this little jaunt a little too much.

“Can you Wrest it open?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said after a moment. “But there are people within.”

“The place is too thick with Night,” I admitted, “I can’t actually feel out drow. It’s like smaller flames hidden in a bonfire.”

“I can see four at the bottom of the tower,” Hierophant said. “And some shapes at the summit, near the windows, but they are veiled.”

It wasn’t just anything that his eye would be unable to see through, so that smacked of Kurosiv weaving a little something. Best to avoid there entirely.

“Are the two parts of the tower connected?”

“They are. There is a middle chamber as well,” Masego added. “The sacrificial altar.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“How do you know?”

“There are gutters for the blood,” he said.

I swallowed a grimace. Shouldn’t have asked. This was going to get tricky, I thought. There was bound to be at least one strong Mighty among the defenders, which meant I’d likely have to pull out Night and that would give away the game. We’ll have to crush them fast, get a look at the ritual and run , I thought. There was no helping it. I turned towards them and-

“We need to move,” Masego said. “They are coming out.”

I blinked in surprise but did not argue. There had been nine drow in the tower, and every single one of the seven that left had been rylleh. There were, I gauged when they left and I could tell them apart from the ambient Night, not one but two sigil-holders among them. All of them went due west, leaving only two at the bottom. Once they had passed I voiced the question that had been on my mind the whole time.

“What are they going after?” I muttered. “There shouldn’t be-”

I took a look at the eastern horizon for the first time, having a good angle at last, and paused. There was a large plume of smoke going up.

“Masego,” I evenly said. “Did you set the Relic Grove in fire?”

“The shadow set the Relic Grove on fire,” he corrected. “I only redirected the flame.”

“Ah,” Akua smiled, “so that is why they are leaving. They need to put out the flames before Mighty Kavian goes berserk.”

“I’m going to get blamed for that one too, aren’t I?” I sadly said.

“Well,” Masego said, “you did bring me here. So in a sense, it is your fault.”

That little shit. If I’d actually had the time to take him to task for that I would have, but we needed to get in and get gone before the enemy returned.

“Get us in,” I ordered. “Akua, you and I hit them fast and hard.”

We took our position smoothly, Akua already beginning to incant. I couldn’t, since the moment I pulled on Night I’d be outed. Masego had neglected to mention that the slab of obsidian freed was ten feet tall, but he used the Night from the mechanisms to do so anyways. Which revealed two very surprised rylleh, both in Yeshara colours, baring their spears at us. I pulled on Night, quick and deep, and began to form a wedge of blackflame when... it unravelled? Akua’s shrivelling curse took one of them in the chest, dropping it, but the other one shot through the door towards me as Night slipped through my fingers.

What the fuck ?

I might actually have gotten a spear through the chest if Masego didn’t Wrest again, killing the Secret it used to speed forward. It stumbled, and abandoning the thought of Night I instead focused my Name and struck: my sword cleared the scabbard in a heartbeat, cutting through the wrist that came up to defend the rylleh’s neck. Akua hit it with a small curse that made it spasm, though, and I smoothly drew back my blade and feinted – it moved to dodge to the left, and the edge of my blade went right into its skull. It spasmed again, Night gathering, but Masego killed whatever Secret that was before it could get anyway.

“Catherine,” Akua said, “what happened?”

My teeth clenched.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted.

But whatever it was, it’d nearly gotten me killed. We hurried inside, all of us aware our time was already beginning to run out, and took in the sight of the circular obsidian chamber. Every surface save for the carved stairs leading up to the central chamber was covered in glyphs, each carved into the precious stone and then filled with molten silver. It was striking sight, though that was not why my two mages paused. Masego took a few steps forward and then went still, eye moving without pause, while Akua took a slow turn around the chamber before kneeling in front of the wall facing the door.

I left them to that, instead limping to the nearest wall and rapping my knuckles against it once. Solid. I focused my Name and struck at it with my staff, the dead yew bouncing off. Yeah, that was fortified with Night. The impact wasn’t the same as if it was simple obsidian. Probably the whole damned tower had been built using it and it was running through like veins, which was why I’d had so hard a time picking out the drow inside. Destroying this place with Night would take me a long time, it’d be much easier with pure physical strength – and I didn’t have nearly enough of that on hand.

There’d be no breaking the tower tonight, and having Masego try to Wrest the threads running through was just asking for Kurosiv to get involved. This would stay a scouting trip, so we’d best make the most of it.

“So what are we looking at?” I asked.

Masego was in his trance, lost in thought, so it was my other mage I was speaking to. Akua frowned, still kneeling before the wall of silver glyphs.

“These towers are altars,” she said. “That much is certain.”

“Charnel pits to feed Kurosiv,” I said, not hiding my disgust.

The Sisters had made their entire race into an ever-red altar hidden behind the Gloom, once, but it had not been for their own benefit. This was simple, ugly greed.

“Indeed,” the dark-skinned sorceress said, “but while this has been their function so far it does not appear to be their primary use.”

“Ominous,” I muttered. “So what is ?”

Akua looked like she’d bit into a lemon as she rose back to her feet.

“I cannot tell,” she admitted. “These are not structured like any glyphs I’ve seen before. Night-workings have a... syntax to them, Catherine, but it is entirely absent here.”

“Because this is not a Firstborn ritual,” Hierophant’s calm voice cut through.

My fingers clenched.

“Tell me Kurosiv was not fucking fool enough to borrow a ritual from the Hidden Horror,” I begged.

Masego took a step closer to Akua, ignoring me, and after demanding her attention without a word he raised his hand to point at a line of silver glyphs.

“There,” he said. “And now two lines below, the closing half. You should recognize this.”

Golden eyes followed his instructions, then narrowed.

“I cannot believe I missed that,” Akua murmured.

“You have flesh eyes,” Masego dismissed. “You cannot look at the entire pattern at once the way I can. It was only a matter of time before you recognize it.”

I loudly cleared my throat, which finally got their attention.

“Someone,” I said slowly, enunciating every syllable, “please tell me that Kurosiv was not fucking fool enough to borrow a ritual from the Hidden Horror .”

The looks on their faces were not promising.

“It is not just a ritual,” Akua told me.

“You’ve seen the original with your own eyes,” Masego continued.

I froze.

“Wait, you’re telling me...”

“This appears,” Hierophant said, “to be an adjusted rendition of the ritual that destroyed the Kingdom of Sephirah and made Trismegistus into a god.”

Fuck, I decided, was not quite strong enough a word for how bad things had just gotten.

—

Getting out of enemy territory was more long than difficult.

We just legged it north as far as we could, then circled until we reached one of the canals that fed Serolen’s and took a boat back down. It was refreshingly uneventful, leaving me with a long while to digest what we’d found out. I was silent most of the trip, lost in my thoughts. Had the Dead King genuinely given out his oldest trick to a would-be rival, or was there a trap laid at the heart of the ritual? We couldn’t know, not having seen only one of the towers, and I was beginning to think it wouldn’t matter.

Either way, the Firstborn would end. Whether it was that Kurosiv devoured their kind and then Sve Noc or that Neshamah finished ripping out the Night as he’d attempted at the Battle of Hainaut, it would be a disaster that might lose us the war. The Dead King gaining Night would be significantly worse, but even if Kurosiv got their way without a hidden price then the young god would walk away and free all the armies assaulting Serolen to reinforce Keter just as it was getting besieged.

When we returned to the fortress I left my companions behind, heading directly to the airy temple at the summit where the Sisters roosted. It was a simple enough place from the outside, a rough square of stone whose roof was tiered and walls were entirely arches, but the inside was raw, untamed Night. Not even when I had tried to eat the Book of Some Things had the feel of it been so strong. I could no longer see or feel anything save an endless black expanse in ever direction, and it was in that void that the Sisters came to me.

Gods, even lesser gods, were beyond tiredness. Yet somehow I thought, looking at the two of them, that they seemed exhausted.

“We wane,” Komena said, her eyes hard. “The tide has turned against us.

And I knew she was speaking the truth, for the mantle of divinity was feeble on their shoulders. Her voice had not echoed with things dimly understood, her very presence did not send a shiver down my back. Night had been made to suffer Ruin, and then been wounded further by Kurosiv’s betrayal. They were goddesses still, but of a great deal less than before.

“Kurosiv is not stronger than you,” I said. “I could still drive them out of their followers.”

“Not yet,” Andronike quietly agreed.

“It’s why we need to fight them now,” Komena said. “You know it’s true, heart of my heart. If we wait until their strength surpasses ours, only defeat can ensue.”

“They won’t come out to fight you this easily,” I said. “Their entire strategy is based on holding their ground, daring you to take a swing.”

That was the conclusion I’d come to, on the way back. I’d thought that Kurosiv’s strategy was oddly defensive, at first, considering the Dead King was pushing north towards Serolen and there were no iron cast guaranteed when dealing with Neshamah. How long could they truly afford to wait to become sole god of the Firstborn? Except I’d misread what they were actually after. It didn’t give a shit what happened the drow, it was only after apotheosis. They’d gladly devour their own kind and walk away. So now it fell into place.

If we attacked their side of the river, the blood flowed to the towers and Kurosiv was strengthened while our numbers waned. If we waited this out, Kurosiv would finish its ritual and devour all its followed before taking a swing at Sve Noc.

“We would not be the victor in that strife,” Andronike told me, having followed my thoughts. “We hold great power, but much of it is dispersed in others. It would be our lesser still, but...”

“Concentrated,” I finished with a grimace.

Selfishness had its strengths. Still, it also had weaknesses.

“The defensive stance only works if their sigils stick with them,” I said. “And I expect that, hardliners or not, few of those Mighty are going to be eager at the thought of being eaten. We need to arrange talks and out the truth.”

If enough of them believed us, enough defected back, it might not even come to a fight between deities. We could just take back the towers by force and smash them before the bloodshed fed Kurosiv.

“Is it your right to attempt this,” Andronike acknowledged.

I eyed them both with a frown. They weren’t going to stop me, but neither was buying this as a solution. Why?

“You are First Under the Night,” Komena curtly said. “You were appointed to attempt what we would not.”

I decided to let it go. Their reasons were their own more often than not, why would this be any different? Besides, I had a more urgent worry.

“I tried to use the Night, when we were out at the tower, but it failed,” I told them.

“That is known to us,” Andronike said.

I rolled my eye.

“Then do you also know an answer to the question I shouldn’t have to voice?” I asked. “What the Hells happened?”

Komena grimaced.

“The Night is coming apart,” she said. “Your Hierophant took it to the brink of destruction and it has been pulled in too many directions since.”

I winced.

“How bad?”

“The power itself is still functional, the trouble is that it is invested,” Andronike said. “In Mighty, in workings, in Kurosiv’s hoard. If it could be all returned to our hands and redistributed it could be mended, but as it is...”

“We will have to begin eating old workings soon,” Komena said. “Else what you experienced will repeat.”

“It is difficult to predict where the lack will happen,” Andronike admitted. “There are too many wills involved.”

So Night was finite, and it too many people took chunks of it up to wield there might not be enough left for whoever was trying to – even if they should be able to. That sounded, I thought, uncomfortably like the fate the Sisters had bargained to avoid: the Twilight Sages borrowing more than they could repay.

“We are not unaware,” Andronike coldly said, “of the resemblance.”

I raised a hand in appeasement.

“If we slice open Kurosiv our books are out of red, right?” I asked.

“Broadly so,” Komena said.

“Then we start with that,” I grimly said. “And fix the mess once we have their head on a pike.”

The Crows hadn’t picked me as their herald without reason: all I could feel from them at that plan was unyielding agreement.

—

Even Firstborn, whose concept of peace was closer to truce, had ways to hold talks.

Usually drow diplomacy was along the lines of threatening annihilation if immediate surrender was not given, sometimes a dash of exile or surrendering Mighty for harvesting, but that was between sigils. There wasn’t really a precedent for the scale of the talks we’d asked for since the fall of the Empire Ever Dark, because until the exodus the drow had been united under Sve Noc. Well, divided under Sve Noc really but the supreme authority had been uncontested. So now that there were sigils under Kurosiv and sigils under us, the situation grew a little more complicated.

We settled on ten Mighty for either side, since keeping any more than twenty of that quarrelsome brood in close proximity was bound to result in fighting. The three of the Ten Generals in the city – Ysengral for us, Ishabog and Moren for them – were a given, as was Rumena. It might not have a rank in the Ten, having instead served as the commander of the Southern Expedition under me, but it was comparable or outright superior to many on the list. After that the ranks were filled with powerful sigil-holders, in case a fight did break out, and also me.

We met in the city centre, contested grounds, in a beautiful old temple called the Empty Shore. It was entirely made of wood, a rarity before the exodus, and though the outside was all vivid colours the inside had painted with impossible skill into the illusion of being the shore of a lake under the dark of night. And not a night from the Everdark, for there were even distant stars above. It was exceptionally beautiful, and though no ground was truly sacred to Firstborn most Mighty would hesitate before beginning strife that might destroy this place.

It was us that’d called the talks, so after the usual rounds of posturing – I refrained, knowing that my mastery of Crepuscular was too shallow to risk dipping my toe into the fast-paced trading of taunts – we were expected to state why everyone had been gathered here. I spoke up then.

“Tomb-maker,” I ordered.

Night flared, Mighty tensing at the sensation, and behind me an obsidian wall covered in silvery glyphs. The very same we’d found at the heart of the tower. There was some shuffling on the side of our opponents, but neither of the Generals were surprised. They’d already figured out what last night had been about.

“I will speak plainly,” I said. “This is not the work of the entity that titles itself Loc Ynan. It is a ritual of the Dead King’s make, whose purpose is to make a god from the death of an entire people.”

A pause on the other side.

“Not only us,” I bluntly said, “but you as well. You will be the first to die when the Fate-Giver reveals what fate they truly have in mind for the Firstborn.”

I’d expected a range of reactions to that revelation. Denial, dismay, maybe even violence. It wasn’t even out of question that Kurosiv would decide the game was up and try to devour its followers immediately. But what I got, instead, was laughter .

“See,” Moren Bleakwomb mockingly smiled, “it is as was foretold. Now that they fail against our might, they resort to the cheapest of tricks.”

My fingers clenched.

“This is not a trick,” I flatly said. “I am willing to-”

“It does not matter even if your false gods have tricked you, human ,” Moren said, using the world as one would filth. “We know the truth. Sve Noc tried to devour us once, and you think sweet whispers will let us do away with our protection?”

It all went downhill from there.

We got out without a fight, in the end, but we’d lost face and was quietly furious as we returned. The Sisters had hidden something from me, something that’d made all of this a fool’s errand, and I confronted them with the petty mistake. They were neither of them cowed by my anger, but they did deign to provide explanation.

“When sigils began to defect, we took measures,” Komena said.

My lips thinned.

“You tried to drain the Night out of the traitors,” I said. “Like they claimed.”

“It failed,” Andronike plainly said. “There were some who were made nisi, but the leech was ready for us. It usurped mastery of what you call the ‘nails’, severing us from the traitors.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. Of course, the existence of the nails was a secret that only a few knew. So when Kurosiv had told their faithful that it took towers to keep Sve Noc at bay, they’d had no reason to disbelieve it. And if I were an ambitious god, I’d even fake a few drains to remind my subject of why keeping the altars wet is so important. And I realized, suddenly, why it was that the Sisters had let me walk into those talks without telling me. Weakness. It was the same reason they’d used Ivah to tell me about the collapse of the Gloom instead of using dreams. They were ashamed of looking weak in front of me.

Neither of them addressed the thought, and not for lack of seeing it. I took it for the tacit admission that it was. No quite enough for me to forgive the way they’d let me make a fool of myself, but enough that I was willing to change the subject.

“We’ve been outplayed,” I said. “There’s no reason for the defector sigils to believe us and every reason for them not to.”

Kurosiv had been planning this for even longer than I’d thought, and planning it smart .

“We must prepare for war,” Komena said. “It will come down to the fangs, Catherine Foundling.”

A war of gods, she meant. Kurosiv and the Crows, savaging each other for rule of the Night and likely destroying most of their race in the process. My goddesses didn’t want to slaughter their own, but they’d still choose that above getting swallowed up by the usurper. I clenched my fingers then unclenched them.

“No,” I finally said. “We still have one card left to play.”

This was a game of deicide, now, and I just happened to have brought to Serolen the finest expert of that art in all of Calernia.

—

It wasn’t exactly hard to find Masego. He was in his laboratory again, dissecting another corpse. How he was being kept supplied in fresh bodies was a question I’d decided not to ask. I plopped down in the chair I was pretty sure he was leaving there mostly for my visits, then groaned as I stretched out my tired limbs. He didn’t turn, but I felt his eye glance at me through the back of his head before returning to the corpse.

“We can’t stop the ritual from happening,” I informed him.

Masego paused in his study, leaving the ribcage of the drow whose internal organs he’d been looking at kept open by steel contraption.

“I thought that might be the case,” Hierophant replied. “It is a clever conundrum they present us with. Making war to destroy the towers might strengthen Kurosiv enough it can slay Sve Noc, while leaving our foe to their devices ensures they will devour much of the remaining Night and then your patronesses afterwards.”

I was entirely unsurprised he’d caught on to that. Masego might be utterly uninterested in war as a rule, but deicide was an exception. To him this would be a genuinely interesting puzzle to figure out, or maybe something more along the lines of fencing.

“Diplomacy has failed,” I said. “We tried to warn Kurosiv’s sigils, but they got their story out long before we even knew it needed contradicting.”

He cocked an eyebrow.

“And their excuse?”

“Sve Noc tried to drain the rebels out of Night when the first raised their flags,” I said. “They’ve been claiming the towers are tools to ensure that can never happen.”

The rebel Mighty probably figured that Kurosiv was skimming off the top, but that we’d come out trying to get them to pull down the towers had instead probably cemented in their minds that they needed to stay up at all costs. The talks had come across like an attempt to land a killing stroke now that we were losing, not us trying to save their damned hides. Masego let out an amused noise.

“And so the few Mighty capable of deciphering parts of the glyph array recognize the parts related to draining and believe them,” he said. “Perhaps we should consider backing this Kurosiv instead, Catherine. They certainly seem to be the more skillful of these would-be gods.”

“That’s not in the cards,” I firmly said.

Even if it were possible to convince Kurosiv to turn on the Dead King and refrain from devouring their race, they were chronically untrustworthy and their ideals were repellent to me. On top of that, in the long term I’d just be saddling Procer with another kind of enemy looming to its north. No, there was no bargain to be made there. Besides the Sisters might be a pair of murderous, thieving crows but they were my murderous and thieving crows. We’d entered the nightmare together and we would leave it just the same.

“Unfortunate,” Masego shrugged. “So what is it to be our plan?”

“If we can’t stop the ritual,” I said, “then that leaves us only one choice.”

He leaned forward, face brightening.

“Usurping it,” Hierophant said, sounding pleased. “A most interesting idea.”

“We came here to gather the original Night anyway,” I pointed out. “We can kill two birds with one stone. When Kurosiv tries to eat the Firstborn, instead we return all the Night to Sve Noc and wipe the slate clean. We shake off the Bard, get our affairs in order and move to join the fight in Keter.”

“That should be possible,” Masego mused.

“Good,” I grinned. “We can return with an army of refreshed drow at our back, which sh-”

“Ah, you misunderstand me,” Zeze absent-mindedly interrupted. “It is possible if, like Kurosiv, you are willing to kill every living drow in the process.”

The grin went away.

“Start from the premise that I’m not willing to do that,” I said.

“Then you expect too much of me,” he honestly replied. “I am not familiar enough with Night or soul work to do this to the level of precision you require.”

He paused.

“I could perhaps lower the casualties to somewhere between two thirds and four fifths,” Masego finally added. “Anything more than that would require Akua’s help.”

It was a life raft, and I boarded it eagerly.

“But with her help you could do better,” I said.

“Presumably,” he said. “She has experience harnessing the power of lesser gods into fixed systems that I lack, and her arrays in Liesse were precise to a degree I had believed unfeasible. As for soul work, we’ve explored different branches of the discipline – it is conceivable that she would know a method to remove the nails safely that I would not.”

“Then we’re putting the two of you on this,” I said. “Everything else is kicked down the ladder, Zeze. Anything you two need you get it, and even if the Dead King comes knocking at the gates I want you to keep working on our usurpation ritual.”

He didn’t look all that happy about being interrupted in his study of Firstborn physiology, but the kind of work I’d asked would not be unpleasant to him. If he’d not already been getting into his own project, I suspected that he’d be outright eager.

“I’ll inform her myself,” I continued. “In the immediate, do you need anything to get started?”

The glimmering eye swivelled towards me, visible under the cloth.

“Live test subjects,” Hierophant said. “Expect deaths. Our first attempt to remove the nails are unlikely to be anything less than traumatic.”

My stomach clenched, but I slowly nodded. I’d ask for volunteers, people knowing the risks. But if I couldn’t get enough?

Well, I guessed we’d see how far I was willing to go when extinction was on the line.

Chapter 46: Penultimate

“So spoke Maleficent: ‘To sit this throne is to be debtor and indebted: I owe and am owed, tethered by the oath that raised me. Let this empire forget not it took myriad hands to raise the Tower.’”

– Extract from the Scroll of Chains, first of the Secret Histories of Praes

I sometimes felt like the shepherd from the stories, stumbling on the half-buried lamp and rubbing it so I might ask the djinn for wishes.

Though there were two wonder-makers in Serolen and neither were bound to anything as dingy as a lamp, it was still betting it all on their ability to make my wish come true: usurp Kurosiv’s apotheosis ritual without killing thousands, if not millions, of Firstborn. Sve Noc had allowed me time to find a solution, a way other than them rolling up their sleeves and getting into a death match with their would-be devourer, but what was the point if the medicine was as brutal to the drow as the disease?

If the deaths were inevitable the Sisters would choose their talons over faith in Hierophant’s works, whom they neither liked nor trusted. They’d been clear about that much. I had been given much authority as First Under the Night, but ultimately I was not a queen here for all that they called me one. I was a councillor and it was not my place to decide how they were to defend their godhead, or what fate they would countenance for their people. It was frustrating to have my hands tied, but I knew that to be unfair.

I had kept myself in check in Praes because there was still so much about that land I did not understand, too much to have the right to make the decisions I wanted to, and every bit of that was a hundred times as true in Serolen. It still left me restless. Ysengral and Rumena did not need me to fight their defence against the traitors for them, a kind of warfare I had little experience in besides, and unless either of the Traitor Generals came out to fight I wasn’t needed for muscle either.

It left me in the uncomfortable position of being the highest-placed person in Serolen after Sve Noc in principle, but having very little to do in practice. Instead of going around chewing at my nails I turned to the Losara, the sigil I had founded in the Everdark and charged with the duty of priesthood and oathkeeping. The numbers of it had increased tenfold under Ivah’s careful stewardship, but unlike any other sigil inexistence its numbers were spread out all over Firstborn territory – there weren’t that many of them in Serolen, but then they weren’t supposed to be fighting anyway.

It was not unlike holding court back in Laure, handling petitions to the crown. My Lord of Silent Steps had affairs in hand, not unexpectedly, so it was the matters related to my title of First Under the Night that were asked of. Which left me sitting with a bearded old drow who looked about to keel over. Its wheezing was not to enough to deceive me into thinking it weak, though: its presence in the Night burned, powerful among the rylleh of the Losara.

“This one would not dare question the designs of one so high,” Mighty Trokel said, “yet it is not time, Losara Queen, for your words to be set down?”

“You want a book out of me,” I said, almost amused.

Their fate of their entire race was in the balance and yet they wanted a holy book out of me. Mighty Trokel inclined its head in agreement, another Mighty – a younger one called Solvobod, my purple paint not covering only its face but instead its entire bare torso – picking up the thread.

“It is known that the First Under the Night has no time to spare for setting down its sayings,” Mighty Solvobod said, “and this is only sensible.”

“Of course,” I drily agreed. “And?”

Much hemming and hawing as they tried to figure out how not to offend me with their request, until I got it out of them: they wanted to assign me a scribe, someone to set down my words and ask me questions whenever I had the moment. A tortured compliment about my being a skilled speaker of riddles was unravelled down to the blunter bone of them being aware that I usually only taught through conversation, so they figured the only way they’d get a book out of me was someone actually following me around and doing that.

I wasn’t exactly eager at the prospect and made it clear that certain conversations would be barred, which they fell over each other to agree, but they weren’t wrong to ask this of me. I’d been named First not because the Crows thought I had a knack for religion but because I was well placed to serve as a herald and advisor, someone who could help them fit the Firstborn in the complicated tapestry of the Burning Lands, but I was their high priestess. I could not leave only silence behind me.

“And I suppose you’ve already a scribe in mind for that?” I asked.

“This one offers itself to the purpose,” Mighty Trokel replied, stopping to wheeze halfway through.

I mulled over that. It was rylleh, so it could be counted on to get out of the way without dying pointlessly when fights came. I glanced at Ivah.

“Mighty Trokel has some renown as a chronicler,” my Lord of Silent Steps noted.

An endorsement, in other words, but I was not satisfied.

“How old are you, Trokel?” I asked.

The old drow looked surprised. While it was nowhere as aged in looks as Rumena it lacked the bland agelessness of most its kind, so I’d bet a couple of centuries at least.

“This will be my six hundred and thirty-third year, Losara Queen,” Mighty Trokel said. “I once thought to die an ispe, but had a stroke of fortune in war.”

Meaning it’d gotten to harvest a motherlode of Night and found its lifespan significantly expanded, but gotten stuck looking older and never bothered to change the look. Six hundred and thirty-three years, I thought, the vast majority of which it would have spent as rylleh or close. The highest of the Mighty, save for those who ruled over even Mighty.

“Ivah,” I said, “who is the youngest among the Losara?”

“I am uncertain,” the silver-eyed drow admitted. “But I can know the answer in an hour’s span, Losara.”

It paused.

“Nisi, almost certainly,” Ivah added.

Yeah, I’d figured it would be one of them. It was why I’d asked.

“Find out,” I ordered. “I want called to me the youngest Losara who knows their glyphs.”

Surprise, and not just from my steward among the Losara. They’d caught on quick.

“You mean to make them your scribe,” Ivah said.

Trokel, I noted, had not dared to do the same. Perhaps fearing I would take it as insubordination and rip the life out of it.

“I will have two,” I said. “Trokel, old and rylleh. And the other, young and nisi.”

I met the old drow’s eyes, saw how it looked like it was itching for a pen, and for a moment I was improbably reminded of Nestor Ikaroi.

“You stand high, Trokel,” I said. “Sometimes that’s the worst place to look at history from.”

My Name thrummed in approval, pleased, and it warmed my veins. They bowed. I told them Trokel would begin following me as soon as the other scribe was found and that was the end of the petition, though I cut short entertaining another: word came through a runner that one of my wonder-makers had left the room where they’d been holed up in half a day.

It was time for me to have a talk with Akua Sahelian.

—

Akua had taken to wearing black since we’d come to Serolen, I’d noticed.

It wasn’t enough to make her blend in with the Firstborn – that would have been difficult, when she had curves enough for a dozen of them – but it did make her stand out less than, say, Cordelia Hasenbach and her colourful riding dresses. Tonight it was a loose, long dress with faint accents of gold swirling up the ribs she’d chosen to wear, paired with a cloak of the same cloth and a gauzy black veil that cascaded halfway down to her back. The veil was kept in place by a slender carved band of gold, one of the few pieces of jewelry she still wore nowadays.

It was far from the most alluring dress she’d ever put on, but there was something attractive about how obviously comfortable she was in the clothes. This was, I dimly realized, as dressed down as she’d probably been allowed to be back in Wolof. It would never do for a Sahelian to be too casual in their clothes, yeah?

“ Now you stare,” Akua said, sounding genuinely exasperated. “Should I just have put on a mutton’s pelt a few years ago and called it a day, Catherine?”

Her wearing only a pelt actually sounded like something I wouldn’t mind seeing in the slightest, but I decided that lying shamelessly was the best part of valour.

“Of course not,” I lied. “I was just wondering where you’ve been keeping all these dresses.”

“Pocket realms,” she archly replied. “I forged one while in Praes and a second on the way to Salia.”

I really should start using Night to do that, I noted, I had the capacity.

“Good to know,” I said, then invited her to sit.

She did, still eyeing me with some irritation. Unlike me, who had to fold like a praying mantis, she somehow made sitting at the low tables the drow preferred a graceful thing. How she managed that with legs longer than mine I’d never be sure, but it was probably dark magic of some sort. I worked out a kink in my shoulder, then caught her eye.

“So,” I said, “what’s the verdict?”

“It is theoretically possible,” Akua said, and I did not hide my relief.

“Casualties?”

“From taking back the Night?” she replied. “None.”

“Masego was worried taking out the nails would kill them,” I said.

“Masego has not powered rituals with sacrificed fae before,” she retorted without batting an eye. “Winter’s mark is still deep in the Night, Catherine, which resulted in some useful secondary properties. Ripping out the nail would certainly result in death, but dissolvin g it is possible without killing the host.”

I slowly nodded.

“And in the moments they’re all left without Night,” I began, then trailed off in invitation.

“If dawn comes to pass without it being restored, I imagine nearly all Firstborn save for dzulu and nisi would die,” Akua mused. “Night is what extends their lifespan.”

“So we’ll be flipping the hourglass the moment we begin this,” I muttered.

Which was a risk, but not an unacceptable one. I felt Sve Noc brush against my thoughts and cocked my head to the side, silently asking the question. A soft brush back, pregnant with intent. No, it wasn’t a dealbreaker. Good.

“We’ve got divine blessing so far,” I said, leaning forward. “So what do you need to get it done?”

There she grimaced.

“Living drow willing to let their nail be dissolved so we can find a method that will not have grave consequences,” Akua said.

I nodded.

“We’ve sent out for volunteers and you already have a hundred,” I said.

“We’ll need Mighty, Catherine,” she gently said. “They have a deeper connection to the power, it will react differently.”

I clenched my fingers.

“They might have to be prisoners,” I admitted. “We have some lined up for when it’s been tried, but none want to be the first.”

Sve Noc had so far declined to make it an order to one of their Mighty to lay down on the slab. I was both relieved and indignant that’d been their decision. On one hand, did they know what the stakes were? On the other, Gods, let there be at least one side in this nightmare that halfway deserved to win.

“The point of the procedure will not be to kill,” Akua finally said, “but is a fine line, Catherine.”

I grimaced.

“But no so fine,” I said, “you won’t walk it.”

I was right and we both knew it. She looked away.

“What choice is there?” she asked.

“Always less than we’d like,” I murmured, “and yet we go on.”

The silence that hung between us was not restful. She was not happy, and I could not quite shake the metaphorical pebble in my boot.

“How many rituals is it that you’ve asked me now?” Akua idly asked, golden eyes returning to me.

There was an expression in them I found hard to read.

“Depends on how you count them,” I hedged.

“You always dole out power and trust so freely,” the dark-skinned sorceress. “I once believed that your great flaw, you know.”

“Not anymore?”

Her lips faintly quirked.

“This ritual you ask, it will put in our hands a gift of the Gods Below themselves,” Akua said. “How can you be certain neither of us will be tempted to claim it?”

“I can’t,” I admitted.

She leaned forward.

“How can you be certain it will truly do what we tell you it will?” she asked.

“I can’t,” I repeated. “Anymore than I can be sure Vivienne didn’t spend the last few years undermining me as Queen of Callow, or that Hakram didn’t use me to become the Warlord. It’s impossible to know for sure, Akua. Some things you take on faith.”

Her lips pursed. Not an answer that satisfied. I was, I suspected, being tested somehow. For what I could not know, but it behooved me to tread carefully.

“And should I decide that simply being handed trust and power to wield at your order is not enough?” Akua quietly asked. “That I, too, want to decide?”

My fingers clenched and slowly unclenched. A test, I thought, but a lie here would be a mistake. I met that golden gaze with my mismatched own, the eye I’d been born to and the one I’d lost, and breathed out. A year ago, I was not sure what I’d have answered. But today? I still remembered that moment in the streets, looking at the dzulu in chains, and who it was that’d not been willing to walk away. Some things, I’d told her, you took on faith. But there was more to it than that, and that was the question that lay hidden behind those golden eyes. Am I a prisoner on a longer leash , Akua was asking, or am I what you say I am? One of us.

“Then I trust your judgement,” I quietly replied.

Her face went blank. She nodded, curtly, and rose to her feet. Back to work, not that she even made the excuse, and as I watched her leave my stomach clenched. Pivot , I thought. Faint enough I’d not sense it. A personal one.

And it was too early to tell whether or not I’d regret the answer I’d just given.

—

I’d expected Cordelia to keep busy, given that she was not a woman prone to idleness, but I was surprised when the Losara watchers I’d put on her told me exactly how busy she’d been. Apparently her every waking hour was spent either meeting with sigil-holders or historians, her translators stuck as close to her as shadows. I caught her after a meeting with one of the rylleh of the Ysengral – no matter her old rank or recent exploits, she did not warrant the time of one of the Ten Generals – and got her to sit down long enough for a drink and a meal. Neither were of the kind of quality she must have been used to, but I did notice she dug into the pheasant with relish.

“I enjoy the taste of game,” Cordelia admitted, “but I had to refrain in Salia. A noticeable preference for hunted birds would have drawn comment.”

“Ah,” I hummed. “The Lycaonese savage enjoying hunting too much would have been a bad look.”

I received a thin smile that pretty much confirmed my guess. During the years where Cordelia was an outright foe, I’d never considered how fragile her position truly was. She’d pretty much won the Great War, that much was true, but the years of peace afterwards had been extremely dangerous to her. She was a Lycaonese ruling southern peoples who tended to dislike and dismiss her kind, walking a tightrope even when her victory had still been fresh. It was no wonder she’d had to be so careful with the perception of her, when you looked at what her reliable supporters had been.

The core of her backers were damn far from Salia on top of being the poorest, least populated and least influential of the principalities. The Lycaonese had proved in the wars then and since that their armies were the finest in Procer and punched well above their weight, but she couldn’t actually bring that strength to bear: most of it had to remain pointed north, keeping back either the Chain of Hunger or the Dead King. She’d built a bloc of southern supporters, sure but her majority in the Highest Assembly had never been large or solid.

It’d been only cleverness and her initial reserve of goodwill from winning the Great War that’d allowed her to push through her early reforms. Well, that and skillfully getting the people on her side. For a foreign savage come to the capital as a conqueror, however gentle of one, Cordelia Hasenbach had been impressively well-loved by the people of Salia.

“I was always surprised,” I said, “that you never got the House of Light on your side. Gods know I would have had a priest standing at my side at every session of the court, if I could have found one willing.”

I hadn’t, or rather there’d been plenty willing to attend but none as my open backer. It’d been enough of a headache to find someone in good standing willing to anoint me as Queen of Callow, and I was still half-convinced that I’d only found takers because it’d been an open secret at that point that Praes and Procer were looking at the borders with hands on their swords.

“They courted me early in my reign,” Cordelia admitted, “but what they wanted of me I was unwilling to give.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“The seat in the Assembly the lost after the Liturgical Wars?”

Seemed like the likeliest prize. It’d been part of the bait that Scribe had used to get Holies to back the coup against Cordelia, a promise of restoring it made in Rozala Malanza’s name.

“They were not so bold,” the fair-haired princess chuckled. “They wanted me to exert my influence to make an exception to the foundational possession laws for the House.”

I squinted at her, trying to remember what those were. I’d actually heard about those, Pickler had praised them in a report because of how easy they made it to build defensive bastions.

“Right, Lycaonese princes have different rights,” I said. “No one can own land in your principalities except for the royal line, everyone else is renting.”

“It is a little more nuanced than that,” Cordelia said. “Some lands have been held in the trust of certain families for centuries, with written treaties between our royal lines and theirs that prevent revocation without certain conditions.”

“So the priests were pissy about having to pay rent for their temples,” I said, amused. “And you told them to stow it and keep paying.”

A less generous woman than I might have called the expression she made at that a moue.

“The Holies wanted the right to hold lands and raise sovereign monasteries, as they do in southern principalities,” Cordelia said. “I explained to them that the refusal to parcel royal rights goes back to the rule of the Iron Kings and is considered sacrosanct, but the frustration at being unable to secure a northern foothold is an old one.”

She elegantly shrugged.

“Our relationship significantly cooled after that, though it was never outright hostile until events boiled over during the coup,” the princess finished.

I grinned.

“And for that little piece of work you got to rip their fangs out,” I said.

Vivienne had watched with attention and more than a little relish as the wealth and land of the Proceran House was methodically dismantled in the wake of that mess, noting that they priests even had to pretend to be grateful since she wasn’t coming down on the actual people – it was the riches, the properties and the trades, that Cordelia had confiscated for the good of the war effort. In the years to come, the House of Light across the Whitecaps would find that it had a lot less coin to throw around when it wanted to get its way.

Like Vivs, I was already looking forward to the furious shrieking.

“It was only a matter of time until another First Prince did the same,” Cordelia demurred. “Besides, your own religious adventures are rather more interesting.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“The House Insurgent is all you too, Hasenbach,” I drily said. “I wouldn’t have gotten so many firebrands on my side without the Tenth Crusade knocking at the gate.”

“I meant a different sort of religion, First Under the Night,” the princess amiably said.

“Eh,” I shrugged. “The Crows and I came to agreement, that’s all.”

“There has been a great deal of speculation as to how you became high priestess of Night,” Cordelia delicately hinted.

I rolled my eye at her.

“You can just go fishing openly, you know,” I told her. “You’ve already made your oaths.”

Hesitation. How rare for her to wear it so openly.

“Even though,” Cordelia carefully said, “I yet hold the key to the ealamal?”

“Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I really wish you’d smash that thing over your knee. But yeah, holding that doesn’t mean you don’t get your seat. In case you hadn’t noticed, people having held – or holding – knives at my throat doesn’t really disqualify them from sitting in my council.”

“The Doom of Liesse’s continued existence does indicate a degree of flexibility on your part,” she conceded.

Sure , I thought, flexibility. Let’s go with that.

“So what is it that you’re actually curious about?” I asked, changing the tack.

“Much,” she drily said, “but most as to how you successfully convinced Sve Noc to appoint you their high priestess. Rumours run wild, from your having triumphed over them to your souls having been melded.”

The last one was actually not entirely untrue, which was a little disconcerting to consider.

“I headed for the Everdark after the talks went south in Keter,” I said. “By then it was clear that Malicia and the Dead King intended war, which weakened your position, but my armies were battered and I was without allies. The Firstborn were the only Evil polity left, which made them pretty much the only candidates for getting help.”

“So you did not intend priesthood from the start,” Cordelia said.

I snorted.

“I thought I’d make a bargain with the Priestess of Night, not even knowing she was actually a they and not Named in the slightest,” I said. “Only that went out the window almost immediately. Firstborn don’t really negotiate with humans, and the Sisters were a lot more interested in Winter than anything I had to say. Besides, the Everdark was falling apart even without the dwarven invasion I arrived just ahead of. It was a fucking mess , Cordelia.”

“Not the worst position to bargain from,” she mentioned.

I grimaced.

“Winter,” I admitted, “kept me frozen in the aftermath of one of the worst days of my life. I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I could have. So after I realized I could make my own sigil and bestow fae titles, I struck a bargain with the Herald of the Deeps for the destruction of Sve Noc in exchange for the right to bring any drow following me to the surface as an army.”

Utter surprise, though smoothed away quickly.

“You fought them?” Cordelia asked, leaning forward.

“I did,” I said, “and they gutted me like a fish. I lay down on the ground to die, down there in Great Strycht, and only survived because they needed me to finish eating Winter. If Akua hadn’t saved me then, Sve Noc would have slurped me up like tepid gruel.”

I did enjoy the faint look of disgust she made at that lovely image.

“We had a shot at turning it around on them, after, but I’d had Winter ripped out of me by then,” I said. “And I felt... freer for it. It’d broadened my perspective. So instead of continuing to fight like bears in the pit, I asked for their help.”

I grimaced.

“Begged, really, when it came down to it,” I admitted. “Because it was the only way out that wouldn’t irreparably fuck one of us: someone being willing to lose, willing to bet on trust before it’d been earned.”

She studied in silence, for a long time, and I felt uncomfortably naked under her gaze.

“Trust,” she softly repeated. “It always comes back to that, does it not?”

“They repaid it in full,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of things I regret over the years, Hasenbach, but that night in the deeps will never be one of them.”

Blue eyes considered me.

“You call me both Hasenbach and Cordelia,” the princess said. “Do choose one, Catherine, the irregularity grows irksome.”

“That an invitation?” I teasingly said, cocking an eyebrow.

She met my eyes.

“It is,” Cordelia frankly said.

I cleared my throat, surprised and a little embarrassed.

“All right,” I croaked. “Cordelia.”

Shit, I’d called her that before so why was using the name now making me feel like blushing? A change of subject was in order.

“I’m told you’re sitting down with a lot of sigils,” I said, perhaps a tad gracelessly.

She looked faintly amused but let it pass without comment.

“I have been trying to discern,” she said as she tucked back her braid, “what lies ahead for the Firstborn.”

My gaze sharpened.

“You want to know what kind of a neighbour Procer will be getting,” I said.

“I love the Principate and always will,” she admitted, “but in this I must embrace a broader perspective. When the war ends, Calernia will not be the same land it was when it began. What is it that the Firstborn seek as people, what are their needs and hatreds? I would understand, before negotiating the treaty with Sve Noc, what the place of the drow is to be in the coming centuries.”

She was, I thought, probably the only ruler in the west that was actually pursuing that line of thought. There was a reason she’d made for a dangerous foe.

“And what did you find out?” I idly asked.

“You do not rule these people,” Cordelia replied, blunter than was usual for her. “You are considered a manner of prophet, a religious symbol, but power is in the hands of the Ten Generals and the most powerful sigils – under the vigilant gaze of Sve Noc.”

“My place as First Under the Night is temporary,” I acknowledged. “I was appointed to guide the Firstborn in their settlement on the surface and serve as a vessel for necessary reforms, but I’m not meant to stay in the seat. I’ll be surrendering the title at the end of the war, like all the others.”

All except the last, the one that lived under my skin.

“You have steered them to a strong diplomatic position,” Cordelia acknowledged, “but I fear that situation cannot last.”

“You think they’ll make themselves into a problem after the war,” I said.

“The most troubling issue is that drow do not trade,” she replied. “There is some barter, admittedly, but no coinage and no merchant class. Their society is turned towards subsistence and war, with few other pursuits.”

“So Procer’s stuck with a neighbour that’s more interested in the Night gained through raids than anything that could be had in peace,” I summed up.

“Building Serolen has already begun changing them,” Cordelia noted. “That much is clear. Though Mighty keep to strict sigil divisions, nisi and dzulu living side by side wane in that perspective. I expect the tendency will end in larger sigils founding their own cities and sigil loyalties turning into city-state loyalties. By then, the needs inherent to feeding a city will ensure the development of some sort of internal trade – and thus a form of coinage and industry.”

I hummed, not disagreeing. I doubted it’d be anywhere as clear-cut as what she was describing, but I didn’t disagree with the thrust of the prediction. She underestimated, though, how much Night mattered to drow. War would always be a central part of who they were so long as the prize was there for them to fight over, no matter the other pressures.

“That form of the Firstborn state should prove a welcome trade partner to Procer,” Cordelia said, “and so change the balance of power on Calernia indirectly – with less pressure form the north and northern principalities growing wealthier from the change, the Principate’s energies will likely turn towards the Free Cities.”

“Basilia will have,” I mildly said, “very little tolerance for that.”

“There will be war,” Cordelia frankly said. “Not in our generation or the one after that, but in time it will happen. My hope is that the framework of the Grand Alliance will keep that war local and contained.”

Optimism, I thought, but then I thought it was much too early to make predictions about what after the war would look like.

“So,” I said, “your issue isn’t with the drow in the long term. It’s how they’ll be during the...”

“Growing pains,” she delicately suggested.

I snorted, but if the shoe fit...

“You’re afraid they’ll burn bridges before settling down,” I pressed.

“It is the nature of the beast,” Cordelia grimly said. “Before there can be city-building and trade, there needs to be an accumulation of wealth and food. Since you’ve taken measures to restrict the strength of the Mighty-”

I gave her a very innocent look that she did not buy in the slightest.

“- then it will not be achieved by a sigil accumulating an overlarge amount of nisi and working them as effective slaves,” the blonde princess said. “Given that the one resource the drow will have in abundance is skilled warriors, that leaves acquisition by force as their path forward.”

And the Firstborn weren’t fools, we both knew. They’d not keep raiding each other when the real wealth was south and still recovering, poorly defended.

“You can get ahead of that,” I said.

“I will recommend that First Princess Rozala do so,” Cordelia frankly said. “Lending the expertise of our merchants and farmers after some guarantees of safety would only be common sense. But that is, ultimately, a bandage wrapped around a slit throat.”

That was, I suspected with an undercurrent of amusement, a Lycaonese expression translated into Chantant.

“There’s another way for those warriors to gain wealth,” I idly said.

She stared at me with piercing blue eyes.

“So you did foresee it,” Cordelia said. “I thought you might have, when you backed the Praesi request to have those orc mercenary companies recognized under the Accords.”

“You need them,” I pointed out. “Even when we’ve dealt with Neshamah the undead will remain – they’ll just be leaderless, roving bands instead of an army. And you have the manpower to take back the south and most the heartlands, but beyond that? Your armies are the worst off in the Grand Alliance.”

“So you would have us hire mercenaries,” Cordelia said, tone thick with distaste.

“It’s your way out,” I said, “and they’ll need to be foreign. Procer’s blown through its fantassins these last few wars and you won’t have the people to spare to fill those ranks again because there’ll be a massive amount of land to reclaim.”

“And so we hire drow and orcs to claw back our lands,” she said, “further strengthening their image as allies and not monsters out of legend while filling the coffers of their fledgling nations.”

I smiled at her, though I couldn’t lay claim to much praise over this. I had, after all, stolen Hakram’s plan wholesale and fitted it to the Firstborn.

“And the goblins?” Cordelia pressed. “Princess Vivienne has already announced that Callow will open its borders to them, which I believe to be your work.”

“Don’t undersell her,” I mildly replied.

She’d not needed any convincing at all, even though we’d both known it would make the Matrons livid.

“There were attempts to poach my sappers, during the fight for Twilight’s Pass,” I noted. “I expect that now Callow has opened the gates, some of the attempts to bring in tribes will grow more serious.”

“You want to make a world where they have roots everywhere,” Cordelia quietly said, watching me. “Orcs, goblins, drow. You would drag them out of our bedside stories and give them places at our hearths.”

I met her gaze.

“When I was nothing,” I calmly said, “they backed me. Not the Matrons, not the Clans, but them . The greenskins, the rank and file. And when my back was against the wall, when I was lost and grasping for allies, I went into the dark and returned to Iserre at the head of an army of the Empire Ever Dark.”

My jaw clenched.

“I owe them a lot, Cordelia,” I said. “And I will pay every drop of that debt back, come Hells or high water.”

If I needed to cut out parts of Calernia so the drow fit it better, I would. And I’d do the same for Robber’s people, for Nauk’s. Hakram and Pickler had found paths and if they needed them seared into the ground, well, it just so happened I was a deft hand with fire. In this, at least, I was yet my father’s daughter.

“You have,” Cordelia said, “one of the most vicious conceptions of loyalty I have ever known.”

I cocked an eyebrow at her.

“And?”

“I do not entirely dislike it,” the princess admitted.

She finished the last of her dessert – a sort of pudding whose main ingredient was, I believed, a kind of fermented algae – and set aside the silver spoon.

“You have my thanks, Catherine,” she said.

“What for?” I asked.

“I believe,” Cordelia smiled, “that I now know the bargain Sve Noc will accept.”

—

Two days later, in the depths of the temple-fortress, a Mighty lost their Night without dying.

Now it was all over except for the violence.

Challengers

“To be good?

An empty boast.

To be good at!

There is the glory,
even in devilry.”

– Extract from the play “I, Triumphant”, author unknown, banned by decree of the Tower under Terribilis II

Rosalind hadn’t been a Fairfax until there were no Fairfaxes left. She still remembered the knight that’d taken her away and brought her to the monastery, grim and silent and hidden by the visor. She’d grown to love it there, growing up in the gardens with the Brothers and Sisters, but she would not forget that she had been an embarrassment . That it would have been scandalous if Good King’s Robert own cousin was known to have fathered a bastard, so Rosalind must be spirited away in a small monastery in the southern reaches of Callow where she wouldn’t get in anyone’s way.

Much as she still resented that, it had likely saved her life.

Lord William, his wife and their two children were all dead. The Calamities had butchered even the four-year old boy, when they took Laure. But no one had known that Rosalind existed, so no black-clad killers had ever come knocking at the gates of the monastery in the middle of the night. Not, Brother Harlan had told her, that she would have been given up if they had. Lord William had chosen for her upbringing a monastery where more than a few knights had retired, perhaps intending to throw a knighthood her way when she reached the right age.

They would have fought for her, Brother Harlan said, not only because she was now the rightful Queen of Callow but because she was as much their daughter as anyone of their blood. And their conviction had sunk in her, Rosalind thought, for someone needed to save kingdom. The Praesi were still taking tallies and establishing taxes, for now, but it was only a matter of time until their ‘imperial governors’ revealed themselves as cruel tyrants. Rosalind must stop them before it was too late, and that meant rising in rebellion.

And for that, when Harlan – once Ser Harlan, Grandmaster of the Sleeping Lions – had laid the blade on her shoulders she had not risen to her feet a simple knight but instead the Rebel Knight. Eleanor Fairfax’s own Name, she had been told. Her fate was to be one of resurrection, bringing back Callow into a golden age as her ancestor had long ago. Resurrection apparently began with a lot of riding around, though, because that was what she’d been doing since leaving the monastery.

“You’re sure that Countess Elizabeth will help us?” Rosalind asked.

Brother Harlan stroked his beard, which though white had lost none of its luster – much like the man himself had lost little vigor or muscles even though he was in his sixties.

“The Countess Marchford is ambitious but she loves this country,” Harlan told her. “She might insist that you be betrothed to one of her family – I believe her nephew is her heir and the ages are close enough – but she will rise for a Fairfax. Of that I have no doubt.”

And the Countess was wealthy, Rosalind had been told, because of the silver mines in the hills she ruled. Coin would be needed, if the Rebel Knight was to begin raising an army. That was what had the five of them riding north at night, Rosalind and her mentor and the companions she’d found since leaving the monastery. Jack and Jane, the ever-smiling twins from Liesse that always seemed to know more than they should and showed wicked skill with knives, and Lucian. A stuck-up ass of a squire, who though unseasonably handsome kept picking at every decision Rosalind made.

She was pretty sure he was some noble’s son, even if he insisted otherwise, because he kept being surprised at all sorts of common things.

And, surprise of surprises, he rode up to her side the moment Harlan stopped talking. It’d been pretty obvious he was eavesdropping the whole time, as he often did. The pretty boy offered her a smirk.

“Do not worry, Rosalind,” Lucian said. “I have been to Marchford before. When your etiquette fails, you can rely on me to avoid disaster.”

“That’ll be the day,” Rosalind replied, rolling her eyes.

Gods Above, if the squire would just shut up and be pretty this journey would be so much more enjoyable. Harlan looked disapprovingly at the two of them, at him for his presumption and at her for the rudeness, but then he froze and pulled hard at his reins. His mount stopped, and so did the rest of the company’s.

“Harlan?” the Rebel Knight asked.

“We’ve just entered a ward,” Harlan grimly said. “Everyone, scatter .”

Rosalind had been obeying him in the training yard for years, she moved without hesitation. Lucian did not, and a heartbeat later there was a plume of ash where he’d been standing. Rosalind’s heart caught in her throat as she galloped away. Gods, was he dead? Just like that, dead ? Light bloomed in the night, and a streak of red flame died against a shining shield. Harlan grunted with effort.

“To me,” he bellowed. “We have to pull back to-”

Rosalind deftly obeyed, as did the wide-eyed twins a moment later, but there was a blur of motion as one of them and their horse were bowled over. A massive wolf ripped out the twin’s hair, the horse screaming as it convulsed with broken legs.

“Jane,” the survivor screamed, anguished.

The Rebel Knight could see, now what the purpose of the ward had been. It had broken, perhaps because of the Light, and now a large mounted company of armoured riders could be seen spreading out around them. The Blackguards. And at their head, riding by the side of a tall Soninke in red robes that must be the Sovereign of Red Skies himself, was a man in plain plate. The Carrion Lord himself, Rosalind realized with a shiver. Harlan moved between the two of them, Light burning in his gaze.

“Ser Harlan,” the Black Knight calmly greeted him. “It appears your retirement has come to an end.”

“Had me watched, did you?” her mentor growled.

“We have people in Marchford,” the Carrion Lord replied. “Making contact revealed you.”

To their side the Blackguards were still fanning out and Rosalind felt fear creeping up her spine. If they got surrounded...

“Run, child,” Harlan quietly said.

Rosalind rocked back as if he’d slapped her.

“Harlan, no ,” she insisted. “I can’t leave you-”

“I can hold them back long enough,” Harlan said, back straightening. “It will be my last gift to you, Rosalind.”

She choked up. He’d taught her since she could wall, taken care of her through every tantrum and skinned knee, every... He was more her father than some dead Fairfax could ever claim to be. Jack put his hand on her shoulder, pulling her back.

“We need to go ,” he said, voice raw with grief.

Around them the riders were still spreading out, moving methodically. Harlan turned to her, smiling through his white beard.

“Farewell, Rosalind,” the old knight said. “Rule well.”

And she ran, Gods damn her. Followed his last order even as Light bloomed like a midnight sun.

“Come on, Carrion Lord,” Grandmaster Harlan of the Sleeping Lions laughed, “let’s have the fight that should have ended you on the Fields.”

A pause.

“All crossbows fire at will,” the Black Knight mildly said. “Delay pursuit, it’s pointless now – Wekesa, track her.”

Whatever happened after that, Rosalind was too far to hear it. She rode her horse hard, Jack sticking close to her. But these were flatlands, and when enough time had passed that she could look behind without tears in her eyes she saw the Blackguards had resumed pursuit.

“There’s a village to the east,” Jack shouted at her. “Off the road. We need to hide there.”

She nodded, not trusting her voice. Something was burning her belly, a rage she’d not known before. It had been a duty, driving out the Praesi, but now it was something more. It was personal . They took Jack’s advice, the Blackguards pursuing in the distance, and before long found the village he’d mentioned. A nowhere place, wide asleep. There was nowhere in sight.

“I’ll find us fresh horses to steal,” Jack told her, pulling ahead. “Keep an eye on-”

The crossbow bolt took him the throat. The Rebel Knight threw herself to the ground before another could take her in the chest, but her horse was not so lucky.

“No,” she wept, but Jack was already dead.

What could she do but run ? The village was swarming with goblins in Legion armour, suddenly, and if she stopped moving she was dead.

She was exhausted when the enemy caught up to her. Rosalind was fast, but not so fast she could outrun horses. She turned around, sword in hand, to meet her enemy.

“Come fight me, coward,” the Rebel Knight shouted.

The Carrion Lord studied her through his visor in silence, then simply raised his hand and lowered it. Rosalind was already running, but there was no avoiding that many crossbows. One bolt after another punched through her chain mail, every step becoming harder until she collapsed. She had not, she realized, gotten even half of the way there. The monster dismounted, a dozen soldiers following him as he approached her with his sword bare.

Rosalind tried to raise her arm, strike at him, but she was too weak .

“Three years,” the Black Knight said, shaking his head in disgust. “Even Scribe thought we’d get six before the first of you popped out.”

“I won’t be the last,” Rosalind gurgled out. “Damn you, I won’t be the last .”

Eerily pale green eyes met hers.

“No,” the Carrion Lord softly agreed. “In every sense, child, you will not be the last.”

It was mercifully quick.

—

The Scholar had heard what the monsters did to heroes in these parts, and he wasn’t going to meet that fate. That was why he was drinking in a dingy tavern, sipping at stale beer, instead of trying to hook up with one of the dozen would-be rebel groups that dwelled in Vale. Julian was Callowan too, just as much as any of them, but he’d been abroad. He’d been studying in Atalante when the Conquest happened, so he had... perspective that the people who’d never left lacked. These villains weren’t like the ones from the old stories, they’d take longer to drive out. Coming at them plain wouldn’t work. So instead of adding his corpse to the growing pile, Julian Evers was going to do the smart thing.

He’d learn everything he could about them, all their tricks, and give that information to every hero on Calernia. Time would do the rest for him.

Still, he had to wonder if it was the occupation that’d made the beer so watery. Surely an honest Callowan tavern-keeper wouldn’t cut their drinks if they had any other choice, right? The brown-haired man shot a suspicious look at the man behind the counter. He’d already used Examine on the tavern-keeper to make sure he did not have the tattoo that marked Eyes of the Empire, so he knew the fair-haired man was at least marginally trustworthy. He leaned around one of the candles on the counter, avoiding the uncomfortable wafting heat.

“I’ve a question,” Julian said, “if you have a moment.”

“Maybe if you order another beer,” the tavern-keeper mildly replied. “You’ve been nursing that tankard all evening.”

Fair enough , the Scholar thought with a sigh. He ordered again, setting aside his old tankard and sipping at the new one in a gesture of goodwill. It was significantly better, he noticed, and took a deeper swallow.

“Do you cut your beer, by any chance?” Julian asked, stroking a finger against Examine .

The blond man puffed up, looking offended.

“Of course not,” he replied.

A lie, Julian saw. His aspect wasn’t entirely foolproof, it tended to get caught up in details, but it saw clearly through most situations. Besides, particular attention to detail was only natural for someone who’d studied in Atalante: the philosopher-priests had quite literally invented the discipline of semantics.

“So yes,” Julian drily said, “but not this one.”

The tavern-keeper glared.

“Fine, there might have been water in the first,” he admitted. “But not your second.”

Truth , Examine told him. Julian took another swallow.

“What do you want, stranger?” the tavern-keeper asked.

“Your advice,” the Scholar said, smiling at the knowledge he now held the advantage. “I have been thinking of heading to Summerholm, but I hear the place is swarming with Praesi.”

“Largest garrison in Callow,” the other man agreed. “What about it?”

“I can deal with soldiers,” Julian shrugged, “but is it true that the Calamities often go there?”

He hoped so. Finding employment, laying low for a year or two and then begin quietly gathering information was his plan but it would only work if he could find a place where at least some of the villains regularly spent time. The Black Knight had not taken up a city as the capital of the occupation, unfortunately, which made the business tricky.

“Way I hear it, the Black Knight blows through every few months,” the tavern-keeper said. “And the Captains’ supposed to stick to him like glue, yeah? Don’t know about the others.”

The Scholar hummed. One tavern-keeper was not a certainty, but it was a start. He’d moved around, ask in other places after having changed his appearance like he’d done in Dormer. He offered the blond man his smile and thanks, then set about finishing the rest of the tankard out of politeness. Best not to be rude, it risked making him into a story to be peddled. Only when he was halfway through, he felt a sudden and vicious cramp. Julian looked down. His limbs were trembling, he saw, and he dropped to the floor.

He had, he realized with horror, been poisoned.

Distantly, he heard a few screams and people running out of the hall. Footsteps too, large, but his eyes were on the candle on the counter. Burning, he thought. Destroying impurity. And what poison, if not that? He focused, feeling the life leak out of him, and thought of a flame. Of it scouring his veins, destroying all evil. A hulking shape leaned over him. Not a woman, he dimly thought, for what woman could possibly be so large ?

“Did you just learn to burn out poison on the fly?” the Captain said, sounding impressed. “It’s not even that common a trick.”

“I,” the Scholar gurgled out, “you won’t get away with-”

“You certainly didn’t,” the Captain said, raising a great hammer. “We lost you after Dormer, Scholar, but if you keep using dives for information then it’s just a waiting game.”

The hammer came down.

—

It’d all begun when a wolf king had come out of the Waning Woods and begun to raid farms. It’d not exactly caused a panic, since it or something like it happened every few decades. The tale was well-worn: some fae lord came into Creation, played court with some animals enchanted to talk and then when they got bored and abandoned the whole affair. Leaving the territory closest to the woods, the Barony of Dormer, to deal with the aftermath. The wolf kings were the worst of the lot, what with the way they gathered large packs and went after cattle single-mindedly, but it was nothing that Baroness Anne’s knights wouldn’t be able to ride down.

Only this time the fae had decided to go for broke, and horse-sized fox that spoke in rhyme had attacked the knights’ camp as they slept, tearing through them while they were unarmoured. The fox – a vixen, to be precise – had all the while been telling them that she was truly a princess and that the only way to be free of her curse was to slay as many men as there were days the enchantment was meant to last, but the good people of Dormer took that one with a grain of salt. Everyone’s grandmother had a story about some frog-prince who’d ended up being a badger with delusions of grandeur or a cousin who’d freed a buck only to find the promised treasure was a pile of acorns painted gold.

The survivors from the attack had sent for reinforcements and gathered the dispossessed farmers in a small town called Strawthorn, walling up there until the baroness’ troops could arrive. Blake had gone out to help, of course he had. He might have left behind his life as a Brother to marry Sawyer, but he was still a healer at heart. So long as he could wield Light, he’d pitch in when Evil came calling in one form or another. Sawyer hadn’t argued, one of a hundred daily reminders of how he’d made the right decision upending his life to be with her, and instead hung her apron to belt on her sword.

That nasty business with her father had ensured that Sawyer Halcroft would never be a knight, but her years abroad as a mercenary had taught her entirely more practical skills.

They were a month in Strawhtorn, Blake to heal the sick as he ignored the sideye from the priests and Sawyer spending her days training the town’s fledgling militia under the disapproving gaze of the Dormer knights. His wife was teaching them Free Cities spear tactics, not a proper Callowan shield wall, which while more likely to save their lives was apparently lacking in patriotism on her part.

“Never mind that a shield wall that green will melt away like summer snow the moment wolves run at it,” Sawyer groused at him in private.

Just as they began to get restless, however, word came from Dormer: another force had been assembled and was on its way. Darker news came too, to everyone’s dismay: rumour had it the Carrion Lord had taken an interest and might be headed this way. Hopefully it was really just be a rumour.

“It probably is,” Sawyer reassured him. “If you listen to gossip, the man’s bloody everywhere.”

“I won’t mind that,” Blake said, “so long as it’s everywhere but here.”

The Calamities might not have been the kind of tyrants he’d expected them to be, but they were harsher in doling out punishment than the Fairfaxes had ever been. Best not to draw their attention at all if you could, that was just plain sense. The two of them made plans to leave Strawthorn when the reinforcements arrived, deciding it was best to get gone before they could get caught up in the inevitable pissing match between the Dormer soldiers and the Praesi.

Only they didn’t get to, because the wolf king came straight at the town. No one had expected it, because the creatures never did that. It might have a crown seared onto its head, but it was still a wolf: those didn’t attack towns, or even most villages, unless hunger made them desperate . The knights were caught with their pants down again, although even half-dressed their core of veterans made a bloody fight of it, but things were looking bad .

“I need to form up the militia,” Sawyer hissed at him. “Can you-”

Blake kissed her.

“Go,” he said, and she did.

He should have gone with the priests, readied himself to heal the wounded, but a doubt was niggling away at him. Why would the wolf king act this way? Following a faint instinct, he headed for the House of Light and there found his answer: the great fox, trying to force open the gates. Around her neck hung the limp and bleeding body of a she-wolf.

“You took the wolf king’s consort to draw him here,” Blake said, fingers clenching around his staff. “Why?”

The fox turned to look at him, smirking as much as an animal could.

“Poor priest, blinded and crossed

Knowing not what was buried and lost

I came here cunning, and will have my bite

Of that old treasure made of Light.”

Blake stared her down.

“Your metre’s terrible and your rhymes second rate,” he told the monster.

It did not take kindly to that. But even though he was no longer a Brother, he was still a wielder of Light and standing near the threshold of a House. When he called it to him it came strong and easy, burning at the great fox’s fur until it yelped and ran away. The vixen was a coward at heart, it was why she’d gotten the wolf king to do her dirty work, and in the haste of her flight she abandoned her unconscious prisoner. In the distance Blake still heard the screams and howls of battle, the wolf king still attacking desperately to claim back his consort, and the healer hesitated.

The fox had revealed that some manner of artefact lay underneath the floor of the House, something powerful enough the creature had desired to devour it for power. If he claimed it, he could drive away the wolf king. But though Blake was no longer a priest, he had not forgotten the lessons of the Book. If the choice is between lighting a candle and a pyre, ever choose the candle: to save is a greater act than to destroy. So instead Blake knelt by the she-wolf and laid a gentle hand on her side, Light blooming around her pelt. Her breath steadied, and she woke. Too-clever eyes met his and he smiled.

“Let us end this,” the healer said.

And they did. The fight went out of the wolves the moment the two of them arrived, and Sawyer ordered the wall of spears to part so they could pass. The two wolves reunited, lovingly rubbing their cheeks together, and Blake’s heart clenched. He glanced at his wife, who was looking back with a small, secret smiled. The wolf king took a few steps towards him, nervous townsfolk raising their spears, but the crowned wolf did not attack: it bowed its head down in thanks before rising again, eyes expectant. Blake knew his stories, like all good Dormer boys. He was being offered a boon.

“I ask,” he said, “that you no longer attack humans and their cattle, Your Majesty.”

The wolf king stared him down with amber eyes, then curtly nodded and trotted away. The large pack, nearly sixty wolves even after all the deaths, followed in his wake. Blake slumped, the wind gone out of him now the danger was passing, and might have collapsed if Sawyer had not come to help him up. It was over, finally. The townsfolk cheered themselves hoarse, and that night a feast was thrown. The couple stayed two more days, long enough that Blake could be satisfied there would be no one who died from their wounds, and as they did they felt a... change.

The townsfolk and even the knights had begun calling Blake a wise healer, and the words were beginning to have weight . Almost like a title. And Sawyer, who’d been offered by the town elders to stay on as captain of their militia, had begged off by telling them that though a mercenary she was now retired. The words stuck to her too, the way she got called the retired mercenary. The both of them feared the change, and decided it was time to get gone. They could ride this out at the bakery, piece together what was happening.

Just to be safe they did not wait until morning to leave, riding out in the night and finding a roadside inn to stay at. The rooms were full so they had to sleep in the stables, but neither of them minded. It wasn’t their first night roughing it, and they settled together in the hay.

The woke up to a bright light being shined into their faces.

Sawyer was on her feet in a heartbeat, sword clearing the scabbard, but it was caught by another blade. As Blake struggled to get up, reaching for his staff, he saw his wife getting headbutted by a man in plain plate, the crunch of the steel helmet on her forehead a wound to his heart. She reared back in pain as Blake called on the Light, letting loose a bolt, but the man moved out of the way with a dancer’s grace. Sawyer struck again, but the stranger was so fast – he slapped aside the thrust and his gauntleted fist struck her in the mouth, smashing her back down into the hay and breaking teeth.

“Robbers,” Blake shouted, drawing on Light. “You fools, even if the baroness doesn’t get you the Legions w-”

And then froze, because the man had not come alone. The stables were full of soldiers in plate but no heraldic markings, and there was only one company in all of Callow that wore such armour: the Blackguards. The Carrion Lord’s personal retinue.

“No,” Blake got out. “ Why ? We haven’t done anything.”

Under the visor he saw pale green eyes studying him, the violence pausing. Gods, let them be able to talk their way out of this.

“We don’t want to fight you,” Blake desperately said. “I swear. We want only to leave, to return to our bakery. We’re not rebels .”

“I know,” the Black Knight said, and he sounded sounding genuinely sorry. “But that is only in the immediate. Should I leave you alone now, fate’s wheels begin spinning.”

“We have no quarrel with the Empire,” Sawyer croaked, down in the hay.

“Not today,” the monster said. “But eventually an imperial governor will wrong you, or a legionary’s carelessness, and when that anger reaches a boil another hero will show up.”

The man sounded vaguely irritated.

“Someone young and strong, with potential but little experience, who would need companions like a wise healer and a retired mercenary to reach the fullness of their power,” the Carrion Lord said. “By then, it will be too late. This is best nipped in the bud before the band of five begins gathering.”

“You’re mad ,” Sawyer hissed through her broken teeth. “This is all nonsense, you’ve just gone rabid and-”

A sense of immediate danger blared across Blake’s mind, but the Carrion Lord was not moving so what could possible be the cause of it. Oh, Merciful Gods , the Wise Healer realized. He wasn’t really talking to us, it was just a distraction so the Warlock could-

The last thing Blake ever felt was the scent of burning brimstone.

Chapter 47: Hollow; Hallow

“And so the First Under the Night asked them this: do you know how to kill a god?”

– Extract from the ‘Parables of the Lost and Found’, disputed Firstborn religious text

Trokel and Fania made for an odd pair.

The rylleh was wrinkled and wheezing, deceptively slow to the eye but moving with the measured grace of an old killer. The nisi was chubby-cheeked and painfully young, always offering up half-smiles of crooked teeth. It had been very honoured to be chosen as one of my scribes and told me often enough I could repeat the words back with the exact cadence in Crepuscular, accent and all. The dislike between them had been instant, though it was scholarly in nature and not personal. Trokel saw its duty as that of an apostle, squeezing out of my words and actions wisdom for all who partook in Night to follow. Fania was not interested in wisdom so much as stories, on the other hand, and did not write down near as much.

I’d grown, almost against my will, rather fond of their constant bickering. It made me a little homesick, but sometimes a touch of homesickness was good for the soul.

“They can’t really be called heretics,” Fania insisted, “as they do not deny the divinity of Sve Noc. They simply believe that Loc Ynan is the superior deity.”

“That is heresy,” Trokel informed it, glaring through rheumy silver eyes.

“Not until they’ve lost,” Fania lightly replied. “They have not yet been proved wrong.”

“You should have been used for mushroom-feed at birth,” Trokel muttered.

“I’m just waiting for you to keel over and die, Old One,” Fania grinned. “From nisi to rylleh in a breath, just imagine the songs.”

It was almost like I’d been trained to look fondly on a mouthy, playful soul pulling at the pigtails of an opiniated scholarly sort. Gods, I missed Indrani. She had a knack for pulling me out of my thoughts when I got stuck in them, making it all lighter. And Masego missed her too, because I couldn’t think of another reason he’d have brough a frankly terrible wooden sculpture of a duck to Serolen. But he had his work and I had mine, so we soldiered on. Now that the spell formula for the ritual had been created and the groundwork to use begun, we had gone on war footing: it was only a matter of time until strife erupted across the canals, and both sides were moving their forces in place.

Unfortunately for us, we had more than just Kurosiv and their schemes to worry about.

Ivah was seated when I entered the room it used as an office, holed up behind an elegant little Proceran bureau that was painted in bright enough colours that your average Alamans craftsman would have rather hanged themselves than be associated with it. Procerans tended to leave bold colours to banners and clothes, finding them rather gauche on furniture. I waved it down as it began to rise, scribes following behind and bowing almost as low as they did for me, but it insisted on getting up and holding out my chair for me. It had cushions, I noted with pleasure, and given the general drow disregard for those they’d likely been added just for me.

It was the little things, sometimes, but sadly we didn’t have time for idle chatting.

“You’ve got news, I’m told,” I said.

The Sisters had already given me vague impressions, but we were in agreement that unless they’d looked at something with their own eyes a report usually better served the purpose of keeping me informed.

“It is so, Losara Queen,” Ivah agreed. “From both the southern front and the realm of Procer.”

Ah, bad and worse.

“Start with Procer,” I said. “At least that one’s a disaster I’m used to.”

“Arans and Lange have fallen,” the Lord of Silent Steps said. “While Aisne buckles under the weight of the enemy, despite a worthy defence and reinforcements from Salia.”

And that was only a short respite. The moment the dead digested their gains and raised them as fresh armies, the heartlands would collapse. We’d been aware from the start that the siege of Keter would be as much a race against time as it was a fight against the Dead King himself.

“And the force that laid waste to Segovia?” I asked.

It was the army most worrying me, at the moment. It’d been bogged down by harassment at Segovian hands – they were apt sailors, as a people, and the Kingdom of the Dead was impotent at sea – but that was never going to last/

“It has burned a swath through Orense but ignored the south of that land,” Ivah said. “Now it marches east.”

Towards Aequitan, I saw after a moment to place the map of Procer in my head. We’d been afraid that the Dead King would just keep pushing south and hit Levant in an attempt to try forcing Dominion forces to return and defend their homes, but I was once more reminded that petty mortal politics were not something Neshamah cared for. Because I could see what he was actually doing, with the Principate’s span laid out in my mind, and it was a fundamentallu different way of thinking. That southern army wasn’t there to win ground, it was there to sweep the south clean of every city of more than ten thousand souls.

That was why he’d ignored the south of Orense, which was sparsely populated because of constant skirmishes with the Dominion.

I could see the trajectory in my mind’s eye. That army would go through Aequitan, then dip south for Valencis and resume east into Salamans. You’ll even ignore Tenerife at first, won’t you? It’ll be there for you to pick up when you move on the League. He’d just march the army north, afterwards, into densely populated Iserre, and by then two thirds of Procer would be undead. Neshamah didn’t think of this as war, not really, but though I’d already known that I had never felt it quite as keenly as when I saw traced out in my mind the extermination of Procer.

He was just getting rid of the vermin, sweeping the Principate clean of life before getting to Levant and the Free Cities.

“I took two generations of Callow and garbed them in steel, taking them to die on foreign fields,” I mildly said. “And still we’ll come out of this war the lucky ones. It’s easy to forget that, sometimes.”

I shook my head, clearing it of the dark thoughts. We were not yet done.

“And our front?” I asked Ivah.

The Lord of Silent Steps looked grim.

“There as well the Hidden Horror looms tall,” it told me. “General Radegast caught an army within a Gloom-shard last night and destroyed it to the last, but we lost General Radosa to a pair of demons on another field.”

Fuck , I thought. And the Hushed Dread had always been so good at getting out in time. At this point the Ten Generals was turning into a boast of a title: there were barely any left, and too many of those traitors for comfort.

“Are we still losing ground?” I asked.

In other words, was the city itself at risk? Ivah equivocated with a wiggle of the palm, looking troubled.

“In truth, General Radegast has been going from victory to victory,” the Lord of Silent Steps said. “The dead come at us in hordes, relentless but blunt and disorganized. Though we cannot afford to pull back forces, the Guest reports that we have a decisive advantage and a counterattack might drive the enemy out of Serolen entirely.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. That canny undead fucker , I thought.

“You see it too,” I stated. “That’s why you’re not smiling.”

“I have suspicions,” Ivah admitted.

“Then let me lay them to rest,” I replied. “Radegast is being baited. The Dead King has been throwing his troops at us so sloppily because he doesn’t care about winning the battles. He’s keeping the First General stuck south so it cannot intervene here in Serolen.”

Because Serolen was how Neshamah handled the drow, not the battlefield. Even if the capital was lost, so long as Sve Noc survived they had the skills to make the snuffing out of the Firstborn a painful, drawn-out affair. Night was exceptionally well suited to irregular warfare, after all. No, the Hidden Horror wanted that messed settled cleanly instead of lingering: either Kurosiv ate their entire race or the infighting between lesser deities broke Night, turning those same reckless attacks into a sudden killing stroke. It was one thing for Radegast to defend with Night, but without it?

It would be sheer butchery, an instant rout.

“Spending the dead,” Ivah darkly said, “is ever the Dead King’s favoured trick.”

I grunted in agreement, but my attention was elsewhere. There was something off here, I thought. Instinct had been digging at me ever since we found that tower in the depths of the Relic Grove, but I’d never been able to name it more than restlessness. Unease. Now, though, I was beginning to feel out the shape of something. The Dead King had given out, in one form or another, what was perhaps his most precious secret: the ritual that’d made him. Sure, people who’d studied him or the Kabbalis Book of Darkness – or gone traipsing through Arcadian echoes, like we did – might be able to piece much of the work together, but Neshamah had given out the real thing . For what, a shot at settling the drow more quickly? It’d be a feather in his rotting cap to clean that up early, but that wasn’t how the Hidden Horror worked.

Above all things he was patient, and risking giving us a look at the very heart of his godhead wasn’t worth the trade. Neshamah always lessened the risks to himself, knowing that every personal loss was a permanent one.

“It’s not enough,” I murmured. “He paid too much, so he bought something I’m not seeing.”

“My queen?” Ivah asked.

I bit my lip.

“He’s tried to steal Night before,” I noted. “It could be as simple as that.”

How hard could it be, for him to ride Kurosiv’s mind as he had once ridden Masego’s?

“As in Hainaut,” Ivah slowly said, trying to follow the tidbits I was speaking out loud. “You believe he may one more seek to take the Night from Sve Noc?”

But why? Why do you even care about Night, Neshamah? At Hainaut, when Masego had ruined the Night to prevent the Dead King taking it – the Sisters hiding away the rest within Ivah, tying themselves to it in a manner that made the Lord of Silent Steps my natural successor – I’d believed that the Dead King had wanted the Night as ritual fodder. To get some ritual going. Only he’d proved in the aftermath of that battle that he didn’t need the power in the slightest, when he’d opened three Hellgates as retribution to Tariq’s sacrifice. So what was it about Night that he cared about?

I knew why I’d come to Serolen, but what did he want badly enough that-

“Oh, shit ,” I croaked out.

Had the Hidden Horror really been that farsighted? As early as Hainaut, when the rest of us were still all stumbling in the dark?

“We are warred upon,” Ivah said, and it was not a question.

“I know what the Dead King wants,” I grimly said. “It’s the same thing I do, just for the opposite reason.”

I had come to Serolen so that me might break the Intercessor’s hold on Below’s stories, breathed life into them. And for that, Hierophant had told me I needed the true Night. I had come north to find a sword to slay the King of Death with and found him already here, looking for the same blade.

Not to wield it but to lock it away forever.

I rose to my feet, seat scraping against the stone and my staff of dead yew under my hand before I even thought to reach for it. Under the worried gaze of the three Firstborn I paced, my limp full of sudden nervous energy.

“No,” I told them, “this is good, actually. It was the missing piece. We know all the pieces in play now. There’s just more of them than we thought. Besides, t’s still Kurosiv’s game when it comes down to it.”

“Forever schemed against, we,” Ivah sighed, lips thinning.

“Could grow fat off enmity,” Trokel finished, looking approving.

It liked its classics, Trokel, and even I had learned a few parts of the Songs of Dust.

“Queen of Lost and Found,” Fania said, “may I ask for elucidation?”

I flicked it a one-eyed glance, baring a smile full of teeth.

“Do you know how to kill a god, Fania?” I asked.

The young drow stilled, then stiffly shook its head.

“You make another,” I muttered, fingers drumming against the side of my staff.

Yes, it would do. It had the right beats to it, I thought as I stared at Ivah, and a fitting pair of hands.

“Now we can win,” I told them. “And when we win, we take it all.”

Iva’s eyes narrowed.

“The counterattack,” it said.

I nodded approvingly.

“We get Night settled properly, focus our forces, and Radegast will have it right,” I said. “We can sweep the dead out of Serolen on the counterstroke, with forces to spare.”

Enough that I’d be able to take a Firstborn contingent with me to Keter for the siege, which would be a great help. No one did night warfare quite like the drow, and when fighting the dead sieges did not quiet down after dusk. Ivah looked pleased at the thought of such a resounding victory, but it had never been one to get too excited.

“First we must prevail here in Serolen,” my Lord of Silent Steps said. “I trust in your wiles, Losara Queen, but Kurosiv

“Yeah,” I agreed, “and we can’t afford to wait any longer. Neshamah’s a spendthrift in bones, but he’s not that wasteful. If the attacks stepped up, Kurosiv is nearly ready. We have to go on the offensive right now.”

Ivah blinked in surprise.

“ Tonight ?” it asked.

“It’s that or giving Kurosiv the first blow,” I replied, eye and tone distant. “I just need to figure out the where.”

Now that I knew what to look for, I could feel out the thread. The beasts in the pit, the kingdom of Night as the prize with scavengers looming in the shadows, and the story had sharpened. I’d figured out more, so I was seeing more. The pit was there, it wasn’t just an abstract anymore. But where? I cocked my head to the side, groping about. It was faint, but it had been decided. Somewhere in the heart of the city, but any fool off the street could have told me that. There was a veil preventing me from seeing more. Come on , I thought, gritting my teeth. I can feel the echo, there’s a tie to me . Something personal. I heard indistinct voices but ignored them, clawing at the veil with my will.

It was like swimming against the current, but I’d done that all my life and I wasn’t going to let it stop me now. The Beast leaned over my shoulder, huffing out a laugh like a hundred wails, and as I grinned I felt claws settling over my hand – we pulled down, together, and through the tears glimpsed at the truth.

Stone islets in a lake, nestled against a canal, all covered in sculptures and greenery that glowed in the night. Pleasure ships had sailed there once, passing by enchanted metalwork that sang when touched by the breeze. The Flowing Gardens, it was called, and I knew all this at a glance because I had been there before. I had shed blood there. We withdrew our hand, though not quite quick enough the backlash did not smash right into my face. The Beast was gone in an instant and I was drawn to the here and now by the painful sensation of tumbling on bare stone with a half-broken nose, bleeding from the face.

All three drow had risen in alarm, but as I turned with a groan I began to laugh through the trails of blood.

“That cheeky little shit of a would-be god,” I wheezed. “ There , really?”

I gestured curtly for them to sit back down, pushing myself up.

“Losara Queen,” Ivah said. “Have you been attacked?”

“I tugged at fate’s tail,” I smiled, “and it didn’t like that in the slightest.”

It only looked more alarmed at that, which only went to prove Ivah of the Losara was no fool.

“It’s fine, Ivah,” I said. “I know what we need to do now. I know how we end this.”

I met its eyes with my own, grinning.

“We’re going back to Great Strycht, you and I,” I said. “Where we killed and made a god.”

And this time, I thought, we’d make it stick.

“The Flowing Gardens,” Ivah said, ever quick on the uptake.

“It’s where it all ends,” I said. “And I know how to get Kurosiv there tonight.”

“They will be wary,” my Lord of Silent Steps warned.

I chuckled.

“You ever fished, Ivah?” I asked.

“I have not,” it replied, looking suddenly reassured for some reason.

“I was born in a city by the Silver Lake,” I said, “and in those waters there’s a kind of fish called the Laure silverscale.”

“Named after the lake?” Ivah asked.

“And the shiny scales,” I drily replied. “See, the thing about the silverscale is that it’s got a touch of magic to it – eat the flesh not too cooked and it’ll grow back your hair even if you went bald. So a lot of old nobles want it, and since there’s not a lot of them even a single catch is worth a fortune.”

I limped back to my seat, wiped the blood off my face and slumped back down onto the cushions.

“Easy coin, you’d think, but there’s trouble,” I said. “That touch of magic also makes them smart . Wary as all Hells. They never take bait and they go deep the moment there’s a hint of a net.”

“So none are caught?” Ivah asked.

“Oh, we get them,” I said. “You just have to be patient. If you can’t catch them yourself, you let the tide do it for you. They love to nibble at water milfoil, so some clever Laure lad planted a lot near the shore and set a few stones in place before leaving.”

Milfoil only grew near Southpool, usually, but then the silverscale itself was believed not to be a native species. Callowan scholars had usually called them a divine blessing on the Fairfaxes since their appearance a few centuries back, but Praesi historians instead noted that they’d only appeared after a failed attempt to take Laure with an army of orcs with gills that’d ended with a lot of alchemy-filled corpses dumped into the Silver Lake.

“So the silverscales swim close, see there’s nothing waiting and have themselves a meal,” I continued. “And they stay, because there’s a lot of it and no one comes. Only when they’ve got full bellies and they try to leave, they find the tide’s come down and suddenly the rocks they swam over earlier are higher than the water.”

It was an old trick, that one, older than the kingdoms. It’d just fallen out of favour when nobles had started minding commoners mucking about their shorelines.

“And so the fisherman comes back and scoops them up,” I said, “because there’s nowhere left for them to go. It’s called a weir, and silverscales stopped falling for it but for a while it made our fishermen rich.”

“You mean to entrap Kurosiv,” Ivah said, meeting my gaze.

“They’re hungry,” I smiled. “So close to victory they can taste it. So we’re going to give them exactly what they want: they’re going to win .”

Until they didn’t, but by then it would be far, far too late.

“And Ivah?”

The Lord of Silent Steps met my eye, unflinching.

“Find a yew tree and take a long branch from it,” I said. “Bring it to me. And most importantly, do it with your own two hands.”

—

I sat on the stone bench, a long branch of yew across my lap and the knife that’d killed my father in my hand. I sat there, alone save for the divine, and carved as the ship drifted down the current.

“You once told me,” Andronike said, “that the yew is the tree of death.”

Her voice was like a hundred whispers woven, and she a ghost in the night. Her cloak was half a veil, trailing in a wind that wasn’t, and the ornate iron mask at her hip the last of long-buried evil. Her silver-blue eyes burned in the dark.

“I will not recount to you,” I said, “what I scheme. What would be the point? I hide nothing, and you see much.”

“What you ask,” Komena said, “goes beyond faith.”

Ah, the ring of iron and screams. The spray of blood in the air, full-throated wrath. Steel mail from neck to knee, a sheathless sword at her hip that gleamed blue. Every time I beheld her from the corner of my eye her dark face became a long-fanged skull, gone when my gaze returned.

“Faith, huh,” I mused, whittling away at the yew. “Funny thing. Chase it and you’ll never find it, have it and you might not even know.”

A god on my right, and god on my left. Neither behind me. Not yet.

“Before Kurosiv was known as the All-Knowing, it bore another name,” Andronike said. “It was called the Leech .”

“They will drink the blood of us to their fill,” Komena darkly said, the chorus of rage echoing. “This I do not doubt. It is their nature.”

“So let them drink,” I said.

“We cannot ,” Andronike harshly replied, voice like a lie ruining a life.

“You know you’re not truly gods,” I said, almost gently. “Not anymore. Too much was ruined. It used to be I heard the echoes in your words because of who you were. Now, though?”

The knife that’d killed my father – that I would see red, forever red, no matter how clean the steel – shaved off another sliver, down to the point. I did not look at them, or need to. They were in me, had been since they made me their herald. It was a tie difficult to explain, one perhaps only Ivah would be able to understand. It had, that night in Hainaut, borne their weight for an hour. Such a thing left marks that never entirely faded.

“You’re putting it on, aren’t you?” I asked. “It’s an effort.”

That was what they’d been hiding from me. Why it was Ivah that’d been sent to tell me the failures, why they’d sent me to negotiate with Kurosiv’s sigils blind to avoid admitting to another. Ruin and rebellion had hollowed them out, and their godhead was breaking apart. Night itself was, like when I’d reached for it at the bottom of the tower only to find nothing. No wonder Hierophant had been so scornful of their apotheosis.

“It is still us,” Komena said, voice tired. “No matter how lessened, Catherine Foundling, it is still us.”

I might have thought that an empty boast, a claim that even now they were still divine in every way that mattered, but for the tone. The exhaustion of it. No, she meant something else entirely: it’s all that’s left of us, and I fear to lose it.

“It is not fear,” Andronike bit out. “It is concern. You scheme recklessness.”

“That is,” I replied, “my nature.”

“Where is your eloquence now, Queen of Lost and Found?” Komena harshly laughed. “Your silver tongue has yet to appear.”

I breathed out, looking at the darkened sky.

“Do you ever think,” I asked, “about that night down in the depths? About the choices we made.”

Silence.

“Do you regret it?”

My question reverberated across the water, like a mockery of itself.

“No,” Andronike said. “I do not regret naming you First Under the Night.”

“In this,” Komena softly said, “we are yet content.”

“I’m glad,” I admitted. “We’re not...”

I trailed off, the words hard to find.

“You can’t be friends with your own gods, I suppose,” I crookedly smiled. “But I remember what I saw of you, before I gave up my crown. How you became who you are. And I still see much of myself in you.”

Some of the best and some the worst.

“It’s not unlike faith,” I said. “Because you gave me a gift, that night, that was greater than power.”

I thought of that moment in shadowed room, Cordelia and Hanno standing before me. The choice, always the choice.

“You taught me to lose,” I said. “And that might be the most valuable thing anyone ever taught me.”

The blade paused on the length of yew.

“So please,” I quietly said, “let me return that gift to you.”

I felt them meet each other’s gaze over my head. I did not look, for it was not a moment meant for my eye.

“Heart of my heart,” Komena gently said.

“Even now?” Andronike asked, more fragile than I had ever heard her.

“It began with us,” her sister said, “it ends the same.”

I carved away at the yew, wrist snapping, and left them at it until they fell silent. Only then did they turn to me, leaning over my shoulders. We looked, the three of us, down at what I had made: a spear, a killing point made of death’s own wood brought to me by Ivah’s hands.

They both stood behind me, now, and no more need be said of it.

“Let’s make it,” I murmured. “A night worth singing about, you and I.”

Their fingers dug into my shoulders, feeling like talons, and my dead eye bloomed anew. Power poured into me, a sea made to fit into a woman’s shape, and I saw the Night. All of it. They rode me as the Dead King had once ridden Masego’s mind, all of their power at our hands.

Sve Noc whispered, and all across Serolen spears were raised. War, they had ordered.

And we sat on the ship, watching, as violence spread like ink in the water. Our sigils had been waiting, and so had Kurosiv’s. The Ysengral smashed through the defences on the riverside, pushing through, but they were drowned in bodies until even the steel walls they had brought were overtaken by the mounds of the dead. To the south our attack was stopped cold, caught in a clever trap and butchered, before Kurosiv’s warriors crossed the water to kill and burn. The heart of the city was an orgy of death, the fighting in the maze of ancient wonders so tumultuous that sigils no longer recognized allies from enemies.

We were losing, and all over the city towers of obsidian gleamed. We were losing, and Kurosiv was glutting on our defeat.

So much death, so quickly. The air was shivering with it, Night wafting up like smoke. And as the hour passed, another and another and another, we sat on the slow ship and watched blood trail across stone millennia old. Until Ysengral’s beleaguered offensive, forced to a halt, suddenly punched through. The warriors ran for the tower they had been sent after, the reason they had been told they must do or die, and though they ran into entrenched resistance they were still gaining. Loc Ynan after all, had recalled its Traitor Generals.

The offensive on our side of the canal faltered, what had seemed like a promised victory faltering, as a great ice storm bloomed in the heart of the Flowing Gardens. We saw its birth, the scream that reached up to the sky, for our ship had sailed slowly but with purpose. The slender wooden prow touched the shore and I rose, shadows trailing behind me like a procession of shades. It had been a ship like a knife, a single piece of black wood exquisitely carved, and it had brought me to my destination without need for haste or steering.

I took a limping step on the islet of stone, before me a great blizzard and frost creeping across every part the Flowing Garden. I leaned on my staff, my other hand holding the spear of yew, and on the edge of the white death I found Ivah of the Losara waiting, my two scribes at its side. Tall and thin, hair long and pale, but it was the mark on its face that drew the eye: silver on purple, a tree bearing the fruit of two circles incomplete. Losara, it meant. Lost and found . The first of the Firstborn to have sworn to me, the first to have seen something worth taking in my words.

But do I really know you, even now? The Lord of Silent Steps was as the Firstborn themselves, cast in exile in a new world, and I had to wonder – had the drow changed, or only their circumstances? Who are you, Ivah of the Losara, when all the noise falls away?

“A nice night, isn’t it?” I idly asked.

Ivah bowed low.

“Losara Queen,” the Lord of Silent Steps murmured, then bowed even lower. “Sve Noc.”

I cocked my head to the side.

“I have need of you, Ivah of the Losara,” I said.

“I serve,” it solemnly replied.

I held out the spear of yew, end first.

“Take it,” I said.

It did.

“You’ll know,” I murmured, “when to use it. Until then...”

I smiled.

“Be my shadow,” I asked, “one more time.”

Ivah softly laughed.

“Always, Lately Queen,” it swore.

And I took a limping step forward, then other, until I had passed the Lord of Silent Steps and it was swallowed by the procession of shades. The two scribes watched me with the sort of religious awe that was, deep down, at least half fear.

“Moren Bleakwomb stands within the storm,” Trokel said. “Are you to fight it, First Under the Night?”

I shrugged, nonchalant. There was a lot worse than Moren at the heart of that blizzard.

“I’m just going to ask a question,” I said.

“A riddle?” Fania asked.

“Oh, nothing so convoluted,” I mused. “The simplest thing in the world, really.”

One step at a time, I reached the edge of the storm. The cold, Gods, the cold . It was sinking into me already, like apathy eating away at my insides. Whispering about how easy it would be to lie down and die, to finally rest.

“Already tried that,” I told the storm. “Fate dragged its feet.”

Komena laughed in my ear, sounding delighted. My back straightened and I looked ahead into the blizzard, seeing nothing but somehow knowing that Moren was looking back.

“All you who hear me,” I said, meaning every word, “are you worthy?”

Sa vrede . The words rang out even in the storm, but no reply came. They were waiting, biding their time. I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth.

“If you’ll not give your answer,” I said, pulling down my hood, “I’ll have to come and take it.”

I stepped into the storm, batted about by the howling winds before I could so much as blink my eye, but a hand held my shoulder and kept me anchored to the ground,

“Let us,” Andronike said, “not stumble at so late an hour.”

One step after another, fighting against the headwind. It was coming for me, frosting even the Mantle of Woe, but the weight of my victories was not so easily toppled. The storm raged, ate at my warmth and my mind, but my soul burned like a black flame. It would take more than this to stop me. And so Kurosiv sent out more, footsteps soundless on the snow and a hunter’s eye. Ishabog the Adversary tread the blizzard as easily as fish would swim water, untouched and unhindered, and came at me from behind. It was an exquisite blow, I saw through Andronike’s eyes, the perfect amalgamation of the strength of a Might and centuries of skill.

The obsidian tip of the spear stopped a hair’s breadth before it could touch the back of my neck, caught by a hand.

“Too slow, Ishabog,” the Tomb-maker said, shaking its head. “Always a little too slow. You never learn.”

“Rumena,” I said, voice echoing with Komena’s.

“I listen, Sve Noc,” the old drow said.

“ Make an example .”

Ishabog struggled to draw back the obsidian spear, but the Tomb-maker held it in place. It laughed, the stone under the snow beginning to shift under out feet.

“I obey,” the Tomb-maker replied, and then glanced at me. “Losara?”

I glanced in acknowledgement.

“When you find the Leech,” Rumena said, “tell it this from me: this makes eight .”

The Sisters thrummed with vicious amusement, so I accepted the trust with a nod.

“Arrogance,” Ishabog spat.

“True,” Rumena said. “Why else would anyone believe they can kill me?”

A scream of fury was its answer, but as the ground rumbled and Night flared I left the Mighty behind. The blizzard barred my path, no longer a blind thing but instead a living malice, and I found my steps slowing. Moren Bleakwomb was narrowing its power, strengthening it where I stood. Stone shattered, the air bit at my throat and my hair threaded with ice. Even the flame of Night burning beneath my skin felt the touch of that. I stopped.

“Enough,” I said, and raised my arm.

Fingers extended, I reached for the wind and felt it filter through my fingers. Only it was something deeper I was looking for, and the thousand eyes I bloomed in the Night I found it. Threads of power, threads of Night, pulling at the strings of this city-breaking calamity.

“It’s just a Secret, Moren,” I said, and my fingers closed around a thread. “And no matter how bleak your storm, my hand can Silence it.”

I was the fucking Warden, who did it think it was? My blood sang and like a sickness in the blood my aspect seeped into the thread of power, tainting it. From string to string it moved, until it had contaminated the entire maelstrom, and I bared my teeth as Andronike’s gentle fingers on my chin turned me to face an unseen silhouette behind curtains of white. I drew back my hand and slowly, mockingly, snapped my fingers.

The storm died.

The winds were snuffed out, the power gone, and a sudden and terrible silence fell over the Flowing Gardens. All around us, as far as the eye could see, snow began to fall with almost sacrilegious gentleness. The softest of powders, and through that tender rain I met the silver eyes of Moren Bleakwomb. I took a step forward and the tall, haggard scarecrow of a Mighty stared at me, something like terror in its eyes. Another step and it flinched. A third and it backed away. A fourth and it reached for the Night, only to spasm and let out a scream. Every drop of power was gone, vanished like smoke.

Kurosiv was cutting their losses, unwilling to let me harvest their strongest Mighty.

I limped through the carpet of snow, boots crunching, as Moren spasmed violently on the ground. It only ceased when I was mere feet away and wormed around to stare at me with abject fear. Legs still shaking, it began to crawl away. The butt of my staff touched the middle of its back, and it went still as a stone. I leaned forward, Komena demanding death in my ear.

“Do you really think,” I quietly said, “there’s anywhere in the world that would be far enough?”

“Finish it, cattle ,” Moren rasped back.

I caught it by its bedraggled hair, dragging it until it was looking up at the falling snow. Its breath caught it its throat at the sight.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes,” it rasped, voice raw with a grief too ancient for me to understand.

And as the eerie beauty filled the eyes still, I killed Moren Bleakwomb. That was the most mercy I had it in me to offer the ancient drow. Neck broken, it dropped into the carpet of white it had sown and I turned away. The dead would keep. Before us, at the heart of the storm I had silenced, a would-be god awaited my coming. It would not do to keep them waiting, and so I answered the invitation hanging in the air. Limping through the trails of pale falling from the sky, I reached a small islet upon which a throne had been raised. Whatever else might have adorned the stone was gone, ripped away, leaving only the sight of Kurosiv the All-Knowing, they who called themselves Loc Ynan, to greet us.

I reached for the pocket sown inside my cloak, frosted fingers closing around my pipe, and found a packet of wakeleaf as Andronike sniggered against my neck. Under the unblinking gaze of the monster that would devour their entire race, I stuffed my dragonbone pipe and lit it with a pass of my palm. I breathed in deep, venting the acrid smoke through my nose, and let out a little sigh of pleasure. Why be mortal, if not for the little pleasures?

“I have to say,” I mused, “all stuff aside, I’ve gotta give it to you that you look like a proper fucking villain.”

The All-Knowing was taller and larger than any Firstborn I had ever seen, and for all that the impression was of slenderness for the good proportions their limbs were easily thick as two of mine and their neck a forest of black veins. They wore a tunic of sculpted obsidian from neck to thigh, with pauldrons shaped like dragons biting down on mouthful of emeralds, and their ribs had been traced in molten gold – dripping down as if it’d been paint. Their legs were covered in slender trousers of dark cloth, covered by greaves of bone and gold whose emerald settings had been carved into the likeness of a hundred eyes.

Yet none of it was as striking as the face, which the darkest I had ever seen of any drow and set with pure silver eyes. The sigil of the Kurosiv, two straight vertical lines and above them a crescent moon facing upwards, had been set in molten gold instead of facepaint. The lines begun under the eyes, the moon above black brows. Their dark hair, long and smooth and gathered into a long braid down their, ended wrapped around an egg-sized emerald. Across its lap a single-edged sword of obsidian waited unsheathed, a wicked shard without even a guard.

“Catherine Foundling,” Kurosiv All-Knowing replied, their Lower Miezan in a pleasant Laure drawl. “You come to me bearing gifts in my moment of triumph.”

I breathed in deep and spewed out a stream of smoke.

“Is that,” I calmly said, “what you think this is?”

“I have waited so very long,” Kurosiv gently said, “to take from the failures riding your shoulder. More years than a creature of your kind could hope to understand.”

“Hey, just for me,” I drawled, “could you maybe say that this is all going just as you planned?”

“None of that, Warden,” Kurosiv smiled, revealing sharp filed teeth. “I was warned about you. No games, not now. I even set out Moren for you to use your aspect on.”

I know , I thought. That’s what the entire point of that raid on the Shrine of Tears was, isn’t it? It’s not like the victory really won you anything. You just put Moren in my way so I’d fixate on it as my opponent.

“Damn,” I grinned, spitting out smoke that wreathed my face. “You got me.”

“I get everything , Catherine,” Kurosiv said. “That is my fate.”

And in a heartbeat, they struck. A sea of Night came down on my head, an eternity of power turned into some mutable, ever-shifting horror – a million tricks stolen from a million corpses, all of them jaws snapping down at me. I breathed in, smoke filling my lungs, and we struck back. Millennia of desperate deals in the dark, every scrap of knowledge and power the Sisters had gathered in their desperate bid for salvation and ascension. The sea against the sea, enormities colliding.

My bad leg throbbed. That was when it began going badly.

I coughed out smoke, struggling to stay up, and as my knee began to bend Komena’s arm slipped under my armpit to hold me up. Kurosiv laughed, still seated on their throne.

“Even now, you might have won,” Loc Ynan said in Crepuscular. “I recognize this. Though half-hearted, you are yet mighty. But you always make this mistake, the two of you.”

Their eyes burned silver. My knee buckled and Andronike had to slip under my arm to keep me standing.

“You invest yourselves,” Loc Ynan continued. “You lessen yourselves. And in the end, where does that bring you?”

The sea came down and I hit the floor, the Sisters coming down with me.

“There it is,” Loc Ynan almost lovingly said. “On your knees.”

My hand went for my sword as I rose, but they were quicker . The point of the obsidian blade went through my breastplate and came out my back, the impalement a wave of horrid pain. I let out a wet gasp as Loc Ynan’s hand took my shoulder from behind, holding me up.

“Before they called me All-Knowing,” the god whispered, “they called me the Leech. And oh, how I have hungered .”

Night began to pour out of us and into them. Trickles, at first, then rivers. The Sisters fought it and my clouded mind struggled to turn this around, take from Loc Ynan instead, but my feeble attempts were batted away contemptuously. Drop after drop, the Night came to Loc Ynan, and all over the city towers came alive. It was not only Sve Noc’s power coming home, but ever scrap of it the Firstborn had ever held. And it was inevitable, what would happen then. I could already feel the malicious god savouring the sight. The Sisters were Night, they had left all else behind. They no longer had bodies.

And so they died, one drop at a time.

Komena leaned close to me, fingers digging into my arm as if she were afraid to let go. She went first. Andronike’s anguish rippled out and she let out a wail of grief, but she never finished it. The god’s face split into an impossible broad smile.

“The worthy rise,” Loc Ynan said. “Is that not our rule?”

They laughed. All that was left was ripping out the nails, the last of the meal, and it was all over.

“And so, at last, the Firstborn have made a god.”

Blood flecking my lips, I leaned forward into the embrace until my lips were by their ear.

“Mistake,” I whispered.

And on the other side of the canals, our towers came alive.

The god went still.

“No,” they said.

The flow shifted. The rivers that had fed the apotheosis emptied it.

“ No ,” Loc Ynan snarled. “You insignificant-”

Night gathered, and I could see where. I could follow the threads. An elegant, dark-skinned hand raised its palm up as an orb of darkness gathered atop it. Akua Sahelian, golden eyes smiling, stole the godhead piece by piece. Loc Ynan tried to move, but my hands were tight around them. The sword in my guts kept them close, and we stood there with trembling limbs. What was a god without a godhead? Nothing much, we both knew, and as Night drifted out of our grasp we both fell to our knees. Together, intertwined in my blood.

They were coming. Not only Akua, but Masego as well. I could feel it.

“They couldn’t fix it,” I told Kurosiv as they let out laboured breaths against my neck. “The Night. They couldn’t because their godhead was broken from the start. Even feeding it Winter was just filling a broken barrel.”

“It was never power meant for sharing,” Kurosiv rasped. “How could you not see that? A single god perfect and eternal, not a million failed ones.”

“Do you know how to kill a god, Kurosiv?” I smiled.

They pushed me away and I tumbled into the snow, groaning in pain. I was, once more, dying. But so was Kurosiv, I saw plain as I finally glimpsed their body. It looked ravaged, like it’s been hollowed out from the inside. Skin hung loose and the melted gold fell of in flecks, they were drenched in sweat and their breath came and went.

“You fail,” Kurosiv laughed. “You still fail, Queen of Lost and Found. You cannot hold the power forever, I can feel it fighting. How long – an hymn, an hourglass? And when it leaves it can only go to me. There is no one else left .”

“Ah,” I smiled, blood bubbling up my throat. “That’s not – ah – that’s not exactly true.”

Neither of us heard it coming. Why would we? Not without reason had it been named the Lord of Silent Steps. Ivah of the Losara, thrown out of my shadow when Night was taken from me, padded silently across the snow. The would-be god’s gaze took in the purple-and-silver paint and flinched, only to stutter down to the size of the spear of yew Ivah held and go utterly still.

“Kurosiv,” I gurgled. “Hey, Kurosiv .”

They flicked a glance my way.

“The Tomb-maker tells you that makes eight,” I grinned, all teeth and blood.

They went ashen with rage, but a flicker of movement caught their gaze as Ivah moved – the thrust was perfect, smooth in that way it only ever really was in stories. And the would-be god died, their heart’s blood dyeing the length of spear of yew, and as I continued to bleed out I watched Ivah. Watched it kneel, reach at the cooling corpse and draw out the faintest whisper of darkness. The Lord of Silent Steps was a drow, and it had killed.

It held Night, the first of a godhead yet to be.

It held the Night and stood there, knowing it could snatch divinity itself.

So who are you, Ivah of the Losara, when all the noise falls away? I had wondered that, in my silence, but there was a question I had asked of it. All you who hear me , I’d called out before entering the storm, are you worthy? And Ivah had heard me, dwelling deep in my shadow. But words were just words, and what could they matter when apotheosis was at hand? It was tempted, I could tell. It was the desire of all Mighty, deep down, to become the deity they had served. Silver-blue eyes found mine. My blood was pounding in my ears, drowning everything out, but I still heard every word.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Ivah replied.

And it raised its hand above its head, holding up the wisp of Night to the sky, and offered the oldest and deepest prayer of the Firstborn.

“Chno Sve Noc,” Ivah of the Losara whispered.

A ripple. Faint, but it was there. The Lord of Silent Steps had borne Night once, borne the weight of gods on its shoulder. It was tied to them still. And in that wisp of Night held up to the starry, snowy sky I glimpsed sisters. Hello, old friends , I thought, but my vision was swimming. Darkness was not far away. It was kept at bay, though, by long fingers taking up my cheek.

“Oh, Catherine,” a voice soft as silk murmured. “Have you ever won a single thing without bleeding yourself for it?”

I choked on my answer, blood thick in my throat, but I felt lips press against my burning forehead and magic shivered through me. I was not... When had someone taken the sword out of me? Akua helped me up, the softness of her lips burning even more harshly than the fever, and I spewed out blood and bile onto the snow. I felt weak, I thought as I hacked out another gob of blood. Good enough to stand, but not much more than that. She passed me my staff to lean on, but stayed there for me to lean on. Neither of us spoke a word of it.

Masego stood before Ivah, before the wisp of Night, and in his hands he held the stolen godhead.

“This time,” Hierophant said, “we do it properly.”

The towers burned in the distance, obsidian melting, and the Hierophant made a god. Days of glyph-carving disappeared into smoke in a heartbeat, Masego guiding the Night through the ritual Akua had made, and as the Night fed into that first wisp it grew. Grew until my patronesses stood before me once, more decked in cloak and armour, but there was more to it than that. The simple weight of their presence was crushing, Ivah falling to its knees until Andronike affectionately raised it up. But there was... The two Sisters suddenly turned to look at Masego, whose face had gone blank, and then at Akua.

Hierophant was looking at her like he’d never seen her before. She was smiling.

“You did something,” I croaked.

“So I did,” Akua murmured. “I made a decision. A nudge, righting a wrong left to fester.”

She paused, meeting my gaze.

“What now, Catherine?”

Am I a prisoner on a longer leash , those golden eyes for the second time, or am I what you say I am? I breathed out shallowly. I’d made the decision already, I realized. I’d made it years ago.

“Then I trust your judgement,” I said.

Was it grief I saw in there, or love? Or perhaps what I was most afraid of – that, when it came to the two of us, there might not be much of a difference between the two. I looked away. The question burned, but this was not the hour for it.

“It is done,” Andronike said, sounding almost disbelieving. “It is truly done. We are returned.”

I left Akua’s warmth behind, limping forward leaning on my staff.

“All will be Night,” I said.

“Aye,” Komena said, smiling a hard smile. “And so now we turn to the paying of debts.”

They’d gotten Night back, all of it. And they had a proper godhead to bring it to bear. So they did, Creation groaning at the weight of their will.

The Intercessor dropped into the snow like a wriggling worm.

I knew that face. It was the one she’d worn in Praes, Yara of Nowhere. And cursing, gasping, the Wandering Bard twisted around until she was on her back – and saw me cast aside my staff, limping towards her.

“You idiot,” the Intercessor screamed. “You fucking idiots.”

She backed away but I followed, slowing only to bend down and take up what she had left behind.

“Don’t you get it?” Yara of Nowhere shouted, eyes wild. “He’s going to kill you all. If you do this, you give the game to him and he’s going to-”

I swung, and the lute shattered against her jaw with the most satisfying sound I had ever heard. Strings went flying and she yelped, so I fucking did it again. I hit her until her face was bloody and the lute broken beyond repair, kneeling down in the snow as she moaned in pain.

“You’re not even taking my place,” the Intercessor spat. “All this, and you’re not even taking my place.”

“You took my father, Yara,” I said calmly, almost conversationally. “Did it with my own hand. So I’m going to take every single thing from you, except what you most want to give me.”

I drove my hand into her chest, through the flesh, and reached deeper. It had taken an artefact, last time, but I was further down along the path now. I was the Warden. With a hoarse shout that came as much out of her lips as mine, I ripped my hand clear of her. I left no wound behind, not even rustled clothes, but in my hand I held a sword. Above had been a book, but Below?

I held in my hand the sword that was the stories of Below and smiled down ad the Intercessor.

“Run, Yara,” I said. “I’ll be waiting for you at the end of the road.”

I struck down, but the sword cleaved only snow. Panting out my breath, I rose to my feet. The Wandering Bard was gone. It was over.

Or so he wanted us to think.

I turned towards Kurosiv’s corpse.

“Did you think,” I said, “that I’d forgotten about you?”

Silence.

“Come now, Neshamah,” I said. “Do you really think I’m going to fall for that? I know exactly why you’re here.”

Kurosiv’s body jerked upright, still impaled through the heart. Their eyes had gone red.

“You have grown, Catherine,” the Dead King spoke through the corpse’s mouth.

I limped forward, sword in hand, but almost stumbled. Masego caught me on one side, Akua the other, and together we went.

“You haven’t,” I replied. “I saw you coming, Neshamah. You came for the stories because you’re afraid of what we might do with them.”

“Too little,” the Dead King said, “and too late. That is what you hold in your hand. You have grown, Catherine, but you have not grown enough .”

I laughed in his face.

“You were hoping to wait until dawn and steal the Night like a thief,” I said. “Going through Kurosiv, who’s the foundation.”

Or wait longer, if Kurosiv won. Death would see the Night pass to him and he had all the time in the world to wait for it.

“You failed, Neshamah,” I said. “Tonight, you lose.”

Another step forward.

“There will be no peace,” I told the Dead King. “There will be no truce – only the shiver before the blade claims your neck. You will fight and you will rage and you will weep, but in the end there can only ever be one end to this.”

And I stepped back, because this was for another to end. When my gaze turned to Masego, however, I froze. Hierophant, I saw as he pushed up the cloth, had his eye back. One was still of glass but the other was flesh and blood, the same brown I’d once known him to have. He leaned forward, smiling.

“We come for you, King of Death,” Hierophant finished, relishing every word.

He snapped down his wrist, speaking a single word, and hellflame devoured Kurosiv’s corpse whole. And so I saw the second miracle that Akua had stolen away from the godhead, along with the eye. True Night could change souls, it was how the nails had been made. And Hierophant had lost sorcery because the Saint had severed the part of his soul that connected his body to the power, allowing him to wield it. Akua had healed his soul.

Masego had his magic back.

Chapter 48: Root

“Summer’s friend, winter’s stranger; winter’s friend, stays forever.”

– Lycaonese saying

The Flowing Gardens would never be called that again.

The old enchantments here had unravelled, unmade by the greater powers that had run wild across islets and canals. What had been left behind was beautiful in the eeriest of ways. Moren’s final winter lingered, the luminescent trees and flowers trapped in ice – forever perfect, forever blooming. A pale carpet of snow that no footsteps could mar remained, sparing only the frozen canals. There the last echo of the ancient songs of the Garden remained, for under a layer of cracked ice water flowed and so the canals groaned out strange hymns that made the heart shiver. And at the heart of it all stood a broken throne, before which we had killed a god by raising another.

Loc Ynan’s corpse, scoured clean of the Dead King’s soul shard, remained there with a spear of yew through the heart.

It was a hallowed placed, for good or ill, and its beauty was not unlike that of the Firstborn: strange and terrible and keening like a broken heart. I stood among the paleness with an old friend at my side, his eyes – one mortal, one anything but – alight with wonder as he watched the wind thread through his fingers.

“It will snow,” Masego said, “every time the moon is full. I can see the echo.”

I hummed in agreement. I could feel it too, how tonight would return to this place again and again.

And it was not yet over, for all that we were all bone-tired, keep on our feet only by the strange febrile energy that came of victory and feeling it all coming together. That tonic would fade before long, but we still had a little while in us still. So the two of us, together, watched as Sve Noc embraced the divinity that the Hierophant had forged for them. The night thrummed, as if defiant of the dawn yet to come, and wind like a warm breath rippled across Serolen. I couldn’t see it the way Masego could, his eye laying bare the truths of the world, but I trailed down my finger down the string of the story and smiled. The Sisters, at long last, were slipping the noose.

“Light and Night, huh,” I murmured. “Symmetry in all things.”

“Their godhead was flawed,” Hierophant mused. “Split from the start. What they received they gave out, keeping part for themselves, but that was making a single broken god and a million godlings. The godhead is a trick of perspective, Catherine – it can be shared, but it cannot be divided .”

So they’d fixed it, he and Akua. Gathered it all together again, dissolving the nails that bound all Firstborn to the Night, and handed it back to Sve Noc to put together into a true godhead. And now Sve Noc, the Sisters and the Crows and a hundred names more, were giving their gift away once more – but not in the same way they once had, oh no. Firstborn no longer held Night, no more than humans held Light: it was outside them, borrowed. Granted by a higher power.

“They won’t like it,” I quietly said. “Not at first. But they’ll get used to it.”

The worthy would still take and rise. Night could no longer be taken the old way, because now to harvest it from drow or others grew the Night as a whole instead of a Mighty’s personal hoard, but there were still gains. No one had ever quite figured out what defined how much Light individuals were capable of wielding, answers varying from a birth talent to the depth of faith or strength of the body. There would be no such doubt over Night: the more one added to it, the more of it one could wield. As one’s power grew, their body would change along the same lines holding much Night had once caused: indifference to age and silver eyes.

Sve Noc would not shortchange those who had fought for them, their loyal Mighty not suddenly faced with decrepitude.

I knew exactly what those changes would feel like because I’d already gone through them. My eye was not silver – not yet – but the rest? There were none, save perhaps Radegast the Guest, who could come close to wielding as much Night as I could. And as for age... I’d once told the Dead King the years would kill me and the old monster had just smiled, before answering – ah, but how many years would it take? Many, I knew. Enough that spending eleven years of my life to snuff out the Saint of Swords had not left a visible mark. I was not sure how to feel about having been the precursor to what Night would now grant, the first draft of the work.

“It won’t matter,” Masego said, openly pleased. “The Sisters have faith, now.”

I almost smiled. Someone who did not know Hierophant might have taken that as a spurt of religiosity, but I knew better. He was being quite literal, because when he’d mended Night and guided Sve Noc into rebuilding it he’d done more than just smooth away a few hard edges. He’d fixed it, the flaw. Now it wasn’t just a shoddy mantle of power that the Sisters bore and that... changed things. I raised my hand, a mirror to his, but it was not the wind I was grasping. It was threads, millions of them blooming. Night had been born finite, parceled from its very first breath, but that had changed. It was no longer something that could be counted or measured.

I watched the faith, the earnest belief of millions of drow swelling the godhead of Sve Noc, and let out a convulsive laugh. After all these years, all the sacrifices and the despair and the darkness, the two sisters had found the end of their winding road: they’d slipped the noose. The debt of the Firstborn would be wiped clean, the destruction they’d staved off with a loan and then Winter’s flesh at last gone for food. They were no longer finite, their godhead a living and breathing truth, and so what did a few measly years mean for them to pay? Faith fed Night, fed its twin goddesses, and like a beacon in the dark their power filled the sky above us.

Sve Noc paid the old debt of the Twilight Sages, returned the years borrowed, and for them it was no different than a sigh. Time meant nothing to the immortal.

“How does it feel?” I asked.

Masego turned to look at me with his mortal eye.

“What does?”

“How does it feel,” I smiled, “to be first man in Creation to ever make a Choir?”

Because that was what he and Akua had done, when it came down to it. In Night instead of Light, but that was a shallow difference when it came down to it. Should I call my patronesses angels of thievery and murder instead of gods, what would it change? And that, more than the rest, made it plain the scope of what he’d achieved to night. Because Choirs did not choose a single nation, and single people, and remain bound to them. They were not so... limited. And come morning, neither would Sve Noc be.

I gave it a month before the first goblin was blessed with Night.

Masego considered my words, face pensive.

“Do you remember,” he finally said, “what the Queen of Summer said to me, when I tried to throw off her binding in Arcadia?”

After the Battle of Five Armies and One, I recalled, and it took me but a moment to recall the words.

“If you’d had a few years, Masego,” I quoted. “You have not seen enough.”

He smiled, closing his fingers around the wind.

“If I met her tomorrow,” Hierophant simply said, “she would be wrong.”

Nothing more need be said.

The two of us stood there, in companiable silence, until dawn came and pulled the final curtain over it all.

—

The First General gilded its patronesses new crown with fresh victories.

Three battles won in a day, Gloom-shards keeping the day’s bite away from the Firstborn, and now the dead were on the backfoot. It was a matter of weeks until they were driven out entirely. General Ysengral used the time to purge Serolen of the most egregious traitors – an easy enough task, given that Sve Noc now refused them the wielding of Night – and consolidating our hold on the city. There was no organized resistance to the effort, the second apotheosis of the Crows and Kurosiv’s murder having snuffed out any thought of rebellion in even the most hardline of the opposition. It was one thing to deny a god when you had the protection of another, but without that?

Only fools and the mad kept holding their spears, and those were made short work of.

I myself had another duty. I sat in what drow now called Verde Zyebog, the Garden of Dead Gods, and told the scribes of the Losara of what had happened. Not all, for some truths were better left buried, but enough. We sat among the snow whose cold never seemed to reach my bones and spoke, until day turned to night and day chased it away. I left the Garden exhausted, leaning on my staff, but there was more yet. My presence was required, for Cordelia Hasenbach had finally sought her audience with the Crows. The deal she had come to Serolen to strike was to be unveiled at last.

I limped my way to the temple-fortress, returning to the depths, and stopped by my quarters loon enough to wash. It was with fresh clothes and wet hair, still half-combed, that I made my way to the war council room where the princess would be allowed to make her case. I was, I found with mild amusement when I entered, the last to arrive. Two crows were perched on the back of my throne, so even the goddesses had gotten here before I did. Declining to apologize, I limped across the room and settled into my seat. On my left was Ysengral, and on my right Rumena – neither of which looked particularly interested in what Cordelia Hasenbach, standing before us straight-backed, had to say. She had won some respect by fostering the civil war among Kurosiv’s sigil, but in the wake of our more recent victory that counted for less than before.

“Princess Cordelia,” I said. “As First Under the Night, I grant you audience in this hall.”

The fair-haired woman bowed, as was the etiquette. My words were pretty much a formality, given that though I had the highest status of the mortals in this room in practice it was Rumena and Ysengral that ran Serolen – and the Sisters who had the final say on agreements with Procer. I suspected that Sve Noc would take a step back as the years passed, distancing themselves from earthly affairs, but it would wait until the storm had passed. I felt a flicker of approval from Andronike.

“I thank you for the privilege,” Cordelia calmly replied, straightening. “I come on behalf of First Princess Rozala and the Grand Alliance to offer treaties to the Empire Ever Dark.”

If this were a Proceran court that’d be the part where we moved to a more comfortable setting, but that wasn’t the way of things in Serolen. She’d be standing through it all while we sat, which I felt bad about but not enough to start standing on my bad leg. I flicked a look at Ysengral and gestured it could start speaking, letting the negotiations begin. In Chantant, since Hasen- Cordelia spoke no more than a few sentences of Crepuscular. The start of it was nothing unexpected, reaffirmation of the alliance against Keter and Rozala ‘expressing her firm belief in the importance of our friendship’ through her envoy, but then we got to the parts that mattered.

The promise to balance: Keter had been promised to the Herald of the Deeps for his support and to the Firstborn for theirs. It could not be held by both.

“You are not asked to cede lands that were promised to you,” Cordelia plainly spoke. “The Kingdom of the Dead remains yours, whatever else is said today, and our talks concern only the acquisition from your empire of the Crown of the Dead as well as surroundings.”

A map had been drawn and was now brought forward, one I’d seen before – it was the one the Herald had agreed with. The city of Keter and a significant but not particularly large amount of land around it were marked out. Enough farmland that the city could be fed without needing imports, that had been the calculation made. After we got all the poison out of the ground, anyway. Pretty phrasing on Cordelia’s part, I thought, casting this as the Grand Alliance buying a claim from an ally instead of offering it to someone else. The Sisters were not so easily swayed, but presentation mattered if you wanted to keep trust.

“And why,” General Rumena bluntly said, “should we care to cede a single thing to Procer? We have bled for every inch of that claim.”

And now the moment of truth came, as I had genuinely no idea what Cordelia would bring forward. She’d been having trouble finding a price, I’d known that, but our last conversation had seen her declare she’d found it. She started out predictably enough, offering on behalf of Procer things the Firstborn would need after the war: seeds for fields, cattle to begin herds and goods made in Proceran cities. Neither Rumena nor Ysengral were sold, I could tell from their presence in the Night. They knew they could get all those things without needing to cede territory. But that had been the prologue, and then she got to the meat of the offer.

“You have been asked to bleed for the west,” Cordelia acknowledged, eyes sliding to me for a moment before looking away. “To make sacrifices for human kingdoms few of you have ever seen. And none have ever paid you back for the losses, save in promises now bargained over.”

“How can the word of humans be worth?” Ysengral scorned.

It did not bother to exclude me from that, but I didn’t take offence. Mighty Ysengral was one of the Firstborn who believed that my being First Under the Night meant I wasn’t human, not in the ways that mattered. Maybe not drow either, but far from cattle.

“I do not blame you for the mistrust,” Cordelia said. “It was earned. And yet we need the Kingdom Under if we are to win against the Dead King, so sacrifices must be made.”

Neither of the generals were pleased to hear that, and truthfully neither was I.

“So let Procer pay its share,” the blue-eyed princess said. “We ask of you to cede territory, and so we offer to cede the Empire Ever Dark territory in turn.”

I hid my surprise, feeling that of the others. Even Sve Noc. The map she brought forward this time marked the territory she proposed Procer was to cede and the sight of it had my eyebrows rising. It was a third of the Principality of Cleves, namely the northern third. Coastlands and rocks, little land good for farming, but if we won the war? The city of Cleves was in there, a natural harbour near the crossroads of the Grave, the Tomb and Lake Pavin. A natural harbour at the end of well-kept roads going south. It’s going to be one of the trade centres of Calernia in the coming decades , I thought. One of the richest cities on the continent.

And there lay Cordelia’s cleverness. Because she was giving away something hugely valuable, but for it to be valuable there needed to be trade between the Empire Ever Dark and Procer. And trade meant relations, meant a measure of peace. And that meant First Princess Rozala would sign the treaty, because peace with the Firstborn would be worth so much more to her than lands she did not hold and were infested with undead.

“A worthy offer,” Mighty Rumena conceded.

“You are owed more,” Cordelia frankly replied. “The Firstborn have stood by Procer in its darkest hour, dying by the thousands so that our realm might survive. And so I would return that pledge.”

I leaned forward.

“On behalf of the Grand Alliance, I would offer this treaty and oath,” the blonde princess said. “So long as the Grand Alliance and the Empire Ever Dark stand, I pledge that the full might of the Grand Alliance will be mustered in the defence of your empire in the face of any attack by the Kingdom Under and its vassals.”

Ah , I smiled. So that’s what you figured out. Loyalty. From our talk, she had decided that what the Empire Ever Dark really wanted – really needed – was a guarantee that never again would they be forced into another exodus. That never again would they stand against the dwarves without allies, without an alliance spanning half of Calernia and willing to make a fucking ruckus on their behalf. Cordelia kept talking, delicately making it known that the pledge would be written to stand even if members of the Grand Alliance had been suffering raids, but I was already leaning back in my seat with a pleased sigh.

I already knew how this would end.

—

I had not slept in too long when I found her.

It added a haze to all I saw, as if the edges of the world were blurred. Her, though, I saw clear as day. Akua was seated on a worn old paving stone that must’ve been ripped out of the street, looking at an altar that could not be more than a day or two old: a simple tile of ceramic, on which two crows had been painted in black. It was faint, but I could feel the power in there. Honest faith had been offered up to that tile, the kind that left ripples behind. And Akua Sahelian’s golden eyes watched the altar with a distant look, the long skirt of her black dress draped about her seat. Cloth-of-silver drew the eye to her waist and only a single small pin kept her hair in place.

She was a vision, I thought, though of what I could not quite find the word for.

“Thinking of converting?” I asked.

An amused glanced was flicked my way.

“Are the perks worth it?” she lightly asked.

“Eh,” I shrugged. “I’ve seen better.”

I felt the Komena’s indignation echo from a distance, which only improved my mood. Akua chuckled, running her fingers gently across the dried paint.

“It is not a small thing that we did,” she said. “In some ways, it might be the most consequential action we ever undertake.”

“Ending Keter will beat that,” I said. “Hard for Night to matter if there’s no one left to use it.”

She conceded the point with a nod but did not look entirely convinced. She wasn’t entirely wrong, either. Keter had been beaten back before, but what we’d done here with the Night? It didn’t really have a precedent, as far as I knew. It was just that this war with the Dead King wasn’t like the others, even if it was hard to understand. Neshamah was laying it all on the line, this time, knowing it was the best shot at winning he’d ever get.

“How did dear Cordelia’s talks go?” Akua idly asked.

I hummed.

“She’s convinced them,” I said. “Now all that’s left is shaking hands with the dwarves.”

“A most convincing woman, Cordelia Hasenbach,” she mildly said.

I cocked an eyebrow. That hadn’t entirely sounded like a compliment.

“That something you mind now?” I asked.

An assessing look, then she for some reason she looked satisfied.

“Not so long as she doesn’t overstep,” Akua vaguely replied, then offered me a smile.

I frowned at her, unsure what exactly that was supposed to mean. She thumbed the painted crows one last time, then withdrew her hand.

“Are we to depart from Serolen soon, my heart?” she asked.

“Two days at most,” I said. “I am to... speak, before we go, but we will be marching on Keter with reinforcements after.”

By now, the siege should have begun. And there were only a few days left before the Hellgates opened, not that I was too worried about that. Amadeus of the Green Stretch had, once more proving his mind was a steel trap, found a way out of that horror that was more than simply closing the gate. I’d ordered his legacy to be seen through to the end, and it would be. Akua nodded, eyes lingering on me.

“You did not come to tell me this,” she stated, as if she knew it to be a fact.

I grimaced. Sometimes it still surprised me how well she could read me. It had snuck up on me, the way she’d become one of my closest friends. It might be a nightmarishly complicated thing, this relationship, but it was no less deep for that.

“I wanted to see how you are,” I admitted. “Now that it’s done.”

She’d held a godhead in the palm of her hand, for a moment. And bent it to her will. But when she chose to use that power, what she’d done with it... I’d known Masego was her favourite of the Woe, but I’d not seen what she did coming. And even now, it did not feel entirely like a personal decision.

“How lightly you have learned to tiptoe in your old age, dearest,” Akua drawled.

I grunted in displeasure.

“Fine,” I said, eye turning to the crow-adorned tile. “You made a decision, that night.”

Healing a friend over godhood. Once more lending her hand to a ritual that would change the world.

“Do you still stand by it?”

It was one thing to choose in the heat of the moment. But night’s veil had passed and been replaced by the cold light of day. Akua did not answer at first. I snuck a glance at her and found she was staring at where I’d stopped: the crows on the tile.

“You told me once,” Akua said, “that nothing could ever even the balance for the Folly.”

I nodded, but she didn’t see.

“Yes,” I got out.

“I didn’t really understand, then,” Akua admitted. “I saw one hundred thousand lives and thought it was a heavy debt, but not beyond settling.”

She breathed out.

“I learned differently in Praes,” she murmured. “I saw...”

She fell silent.

“It ripples out,” I murmured.

Those full lips stretched mirthlessly.

“It ripples out,” Akua softly agreed. “More was lost than lives that day.”

She looked down at her hand, clenching her fingers.

“It is not a debt I can repay,” she said. “Not even should the rest of my days be spent on the labour. And so, for a time, I thought to do away with the thought entirely.”

“And now?”

She hesitated.

“I like him,” Akua confessed. “Masego. He reminds me of my father in a way that doesn’t sting.”

“So you wanted to help him,” I said.

“All it took was a nudge,” she mused. “I had the knowledge for it, and I was in the right place – at the right time. I felt so easy that the real question was why I shouldn’t do it. And that was when I saw it, Catherine.”

Golden eyes turned to me.

“It’s not about whether the debt is repaid, is it?” she asked. “It never was.”

She laughed, a little bleakly, and my heart clenched at the sound of it.

“It’s about whether you’re the sort of person who’ll try,” Akua said.

I licked my lips.

“Are you?”

“I don’t know,” Akua Sahelian admitted. “But sometimes, I want to be.”

—

Fifteen thousand. That was the sum of the reinforcements that Sve Noc had agreed to send south to the siege of Keter, though more might follow if Radegast’s victories continued to rack up. I was grateful they could rustle up that many to spare, after the rough year Serolen had suffered, and did not hide it from my patrons. Even more of a boon was the Might meant to lead the expedition.

“I swore in Iserre, Losara Queen,” Mighty Rumena reminded me.

“Before nine years have passed,” I muttered.

“Keter’s gates will lie broken,” the old drow finished. “I will keep not break my oath.”

“It wouldn’t be the same without you,” I honestly replied.

The sincerity seemed to take it aback, which was rare enough I rather enjoyed it. Beyond the mustered sigils, though, there was another duty left to me in Serolen. Much had happened in the city since I came, and though in time the words set down my scribes – which would follow me south, as part of the Losara contingent under Ivah – would spread among the people, there was a need for a more settled conclusion. An end to the journey that had begun on the outskirts of the Gloom and taken us all the way here to Serolen, the entwining of my fate with the Firstborn’s coming to the end of the road. All we had left now was Keter, but I owed more than that before my mantle was passed to another.

And so the Firstborn gathered to the Garden of Dead Gods.

A tide of grey flesh as far as the eye could see, from the lowest of nisi to the heights of the Ten Generals. One hundred thousand, two? I could not tell, and the Sisters whispered in my ear that it didn’t matter. I was First Under the Night: sooner or later, all drow heard my words. I had not needed to carry word north of the reforms of Iserre for them to bear fruit. So I stood before a people not mine – sometimes close, but never quite – and leaned on my staff. The eyes on me were not only those of the few, the Mighty, but of all who dwelled in Serolen. How many of these nisi and dzulu had never so much as caught a glimpse of the First Under the Night before today?

It was not my place to fix these people, to mend their broken pieces. I did not understand them enough for that, and even if I did would they want the meddling of my hand? No, I had been chosen as the herald of the Crows because I was the stranger. The dark mirror through which they could look at themselves, the asker of questions. And that was what I had to offer them, today.

“In the depths of Twilight,” I said, “I asked you something.”

A pause.

“Are you worthy?”

Sa vrede . And that harsh question I had once castigated the Mighty through was no longer simply that. It was a ritual now, now, something that they owned more than me. And Ivah, oh Ivah had made something true of it. Something worth believing in. Sa vrede , I asked them. Cera aine , the Firstborn answered, as they once had in Twilight.

Maybe tomorrow.

“You have come,” I said, “a long way. But a long way yet lies ahead of you.”

I looked at the ocean of faces, the shining eyes and those that Night had not yet silvered.

“So I must ask you,” I said. “Who do you want to be, children of the Ever Dark?”

I looked behind me, at the god slain with a spear.

“Will you reach for the Heavens with hungry hands?” I asked. “There is glory in the Old War, let none tell you otherwise. In defiance against the tyranny of the sun.”

I looked at the blue sky above, the endless expanse that held so much promise.

“Or perhaps you would take the winding path,” I said. “Make accords, raise stones. There, too, there is glory – in casting aside the old empire to make one greater. To conquer peace as you have conquered war.”

My one-eyed gaze swept them.

“I ask you again, children of the Ever Dark,” I said, voice echoing. “ Who do you want to be ?”

Some answered, words or curses or oaths, but they were few and one answer was louder than all the rest: silence.

“That, too, is an answer,” I gently told them.

And not a bad one. Ignorance was a blank slate.

“The choices are yours,” I told them, warned them. “So hear me now-”

I extended my arms, encompassing all the world around us.

“These are no longer the Burning Lands,” I said. “Do not look back, for there is no path there to be found. Your home is here, and so you receive the greatest of gifts: in this strange land, your fate is your own.”

I leaned forward, smiling toothily.

“Struggle and rise,” I told them. “Struggle and fall. But, above all, struggle .”

I struck the ground with my staff and the earth shivered,

“Today,” I told them, “you have nothing.”

Or so little, I thought, that there was hardly a difference.

“But tomorrow? Tomorrow is an empire there for your taking.”

They were an old people, the Firstborn, but made young again. Let them not waste that chance.

“So go out into the world, children of the Night, and carry with you my blessing and my curse.”

I laughed, and thousands shivered.

“May you ever get what you deserve.”

Interlude: End Times II

“Dread Emperor Heinous led the Legions into the seventy-ninth Hell, and once the devils gathered an army in the face of his incursion he laughed and addressed his soldiers thus: ‘Fear not disaster, sons and daughters of Praes, for of all the peoples of Creation it is our birthright alone to ride it as a steed.’”

– Extract from the Scroll of Vainglory, thirty-ninth of the Secret Histories of Praes (destroyed by order of Dread Empress Maleficent II, only partial texts remain)

It was tradition that a flying fortress not be named.

Dread Emperor Sorcerous had later made it into a law that no tyrant had since seen fit to repeal, but the tradition itself was as old as the first large rocks that Soninke sorcerers had raised into floating altars for their people to worship at. To give the constructs names, Alaya had been told, tended to make them... temperamental. Inimical’s Boot was the example mages tended to quote at her, which after being given the name had begun accidentally crushing people the emperor disliked with alarming frequency and an even more alarming dearth of explanations about why it was doing that.

And so the fortress that Chancellor Alaya of the Confederation of Praes – a name yet to be officially ratified, but now that the Tribes had given ground she knew where the votes lay – rode had not been granted a name, though it didn’t stop soldiers and servants from calling it the Limping Sister when they thought no one was listening. The sobriquet was apt enough: the construct was smaller than the three behemoths known as the Old Mothers that’d followed Catherine Foundling west, and of the smaller ‘sisters’ this one was by far the slowest.

“An imperfection in the central ritual array,” High Lord Sargon had told her. “Too much bleed, it lets wind buffet the shields and slow us down.”

“And the lights at night?” Alaya had asked, morbidly curious.

“Not ghosts, Your Grace, that is mere superstition,” the High Lord of Wolof had been quick to assure her.

Perhaps a little too quick, she’d thought, and the muttered ‘ probably ’ she was fairly certain he’d added under his breath had done nothing to reassure her. The uncertainty left her to consider whether being haunted by the giant spiders used to raise the fortresses would be better or worse than being haunted by humans, which sadly was not even the most outlandish question Alaya had been forced to ponder over her many years of rule. That still remained whether or not devils, some of which considered souls a form of currency, should be made to pay taxes over any such gains made within the borders of Praes – and more specifically what the monetary value of a soul should be.

There had been spirited debated over the matter, some of her advisor even noting that if devils paid taxes they might be considered to be citizens of the Empire in some ways, and purely to piss her off Amadeus had returned to Ater with an entire treatise about- Alaya’s stomach clenched. She heard the sound of the knife sinking into flesh, the small gasp as the stood there helpless, and the orc across the table paused in his sentence.

“Your Grace,” General Grem One-Eye said, “is something the matter?”

I think you’d understand, One-Eye , Alaya thought. Better than most, for you loved him too. But she was not looking for understanding, much less comfort. Life had been breathed back into the husk she’d become so that she might serve a purpose, to serve as the bridge between the old Praes and the new, but Alaya of Satus knew better than to call it a second chance. There was too much blood on her hands for that, too many sins for her to answer for – and at the end of her road, the Warden would be waiting with a sword in hand. So what did it matter, that sometimes she came across a familiar turn of phrase in a report and she choked on a sob? She was not meant to escape the shadow she had cast, and so there could be no use at all in confiding in anyone.

Not even someone who’d understand.

“No,” Alaya replied, tone smoothed into calm. “Please continue, general.”

Grem One-Eye slowly nodded, then resumed his report on the estimated timing of the Praesi forces marching to reinforce the Grand Alliance’s siege of Keter. Though in principle the private armies of the High Lords had all been disbanded when the soon-Confederation of Praes was founded in Ater, in practice that had not been feasible. Breaking up the armies and reorganizing them under the command of the Black Knight, High Marshal Nim, would take months that they simply could not spare. Instead the commanders of those armies had been temporarily drafted into the Legions as auxiliaries with their forces under them.

The sheer amount of supply trains that had involved was staggering, given that the armies of the High Lords were themselves made up of the armies of lesser lords, and it had been one of the reasons that Praes’ armies had been staggered into three waves as they began marching west. Some of the house troops were acclimating to the changes better than others and General Grem was not shy in pointing out those that trailed behind: Takisha’s lot were the worst offenders, the High Lady of Kahtan’s already loose grip on her many vassals having further weakened since the Fall. Not that the need to acclimate was in short supply, these days.

Grem One-Eye had taken with good grace his demotion from being the senior military commander of the Empire to being a general under High Marshal Nim for the Confederation, but he could not quite hide the lost look that sometimes flickered across his rough face. While he’d been a prisoner the fate of Praes had passed him by, leaving him to emerge into a strange new world where he was not quite certain where he fit.

Alaya could sympathize.

“Warlord Hakram tells us that the Grand Alliance’s main host will be arriving on the outskirts of Keter within the week,” General Grem concluded, “which puts us in the area of fourteen days behind.”

“Evidently it was the right decision to send the bulk of our sappers with Marshal Nim,” High Lord Sargon said, offering up a boyishly crooked smile. “It is best that the siege works be in full swing when we arrive.”

He’d grown, Alaya thought, into quite a dangerous young man now that his soul was no longer held in a box. Thought outwardly the High Lord of Wolof was dedicating himself to the campaign against Keter with great enthusiasm, Ime had already picked up on his longer game. He meant to gain acclaim from being instrumental to Praes’ contributions to the war: most of the flying fortresses had been raised by Sargon and his cadres of Wolofite mages, or according to Sahelian rituals he’d handed out. Circulating said rituals outside Wolof had been a great gift, and earned him personal regard among mages and highborn beyond the broader gain of having his name associated to every single such fortress.

What he meant to do with the acclaim was still unclear but given the offers he’d already floated to help with the reconstruction of Ater she suspected he was already beginning to position himself as her successor. The people of the capital had long memories and would not soon forget High Lord Sargon Sahelian putting roofs over their heads again. If he bartered his marriage well and remained liked in Ater, well, it was only a matter of courting enough of the greenskin vote for Sargon to serve as the Chancellor after her.

Alaya was not yet sure whether she should help or hinder him. One of many decisions that would have to be taken after the war.

“We have our part to play before lending our aid in the reduction of Keter,” Alaya said. “One just as important as securing the foothold, in some ways.”

Grim nods all around. Procer was falling apart behind them, but the Hellgates opening would turn what was a slow descent into annihilation into a heedless tumble down the cliff.

“Speaking of,” Chancellor Alaya idly said, eyes turning to the last person at the table. “Are we still making good time, Lady Nahiza?”

Nahiza Serrif was not, strictly speaking, a lady – though highborn, she had never been in line for a title. But as one of the most brilliant mages of Praes’ last generation, once a rival to Wekesa and Dumisai of Aksum, she was usually granted the title out of courtesy. Not that the sullen, sour-faced old woman had ever cared. She was infamous for two things. The first was her reluctance to ever leave the mage tower she’d won by killing the Necromancer and making his ghoul army eat itself as well.

The second was her genuinely foul temper.

“Do I look like a ship captain, Chancellor?” Nahiza grunted. “Find a window and look out, if you’re that curious.”

High Lord Sargon cleared his throat.

“I’m told we are on track to arrive in time,” he contributed.

“Cribbed your cousin’s notes to figure that out too, did you?” Lady Nahiza peevishly said.

Sargon was visibly angered by the comment, cheeks reddening, which rather impressed Alaya. It was hard to get under his skin these days.

“Your insinuations,” Sargon bit out, “do you-”

“We’ll get there in time, don’t you worry about it,” Nahiza interrupted, addressing the Chancellor. “With a few hours to spare, I’d say. The sister’s limp is not so crippling when you figure out how to talk to her, no matter how many meddling boys botch their numbers.”

The High Lord of Wolof’s expression further darkened, to Alaya’s private amusement. The old mage was not the most helpful of this informal council, but she did have a way of making even the most tedious meetings entertaining. Still, better to end this before it got out of hand.

“Then I believe the day’s business is at an end and we may adjourn,” Alaya pleasantly said. “I will see you all tomorrow.”

There was some shuffling around the table as they rose and offered the bow mandated by the new modes of etiquette, save for Lady Nahiza who walked out of the room without acknowledging anyone else. The only time General Grem had commented on it, she’d chewed him out for making fun of an old woman’s shrinking bladder and no one had quite dared to call her out on what was most likely – but not certainly – a brazen lie. Alaya did not linger, instead taking to the luxurious halls of the flying fortress at a brisk pace with her personal bodyguards following behind.

Even before it had been known that she would travel on this particular construct it had been one of the most comfortable, the entire central bastion having been salvaged from the ruin of one of the fortresses that Dread Empress Regalia the Second had raised for her invasion of Callow. It had been meant as her personal vessel, but never been used – it’d been sabotaged by the High Lord of Kahtan, as Regalia’s popularity early in her reign had worried many of the High Seats. They’d wanted to blacken her name a little, unaware that the once-promising empress would be largely remembered for starting the Sixty Years War in the centuries to follow.

It’d since served as a sort of fortified mansion outside Ater for whoever held the Tower and been further touched up for comfort, which had made it a natural pick when the Wasteland was scoured for potential fortresses after the Fall. The suite that Alaya had inherited was almost as comfortable as her old accommodations and near as thoroughly warded, which had been a pleasant surprise when she made her home there. Still, it was not why she had chosen this fortress out of all the others. The reason for that was just ahead of her, past a door that opened at her bodyguard’s knock and revealed a dedicated scrying room.

The mirrors and pools were without the frills and ornaments that their equivalents from the Tower had accumulated over the centuries, but no less functional for them. In truth, given that the Grand Alliance – by which she meant Catherine Foundling, staring down the crowns west of the Whitecaps – had shared some of the improvements on the old scrying rituals that’d been made in the Arsenal. It was not the scrying room Alaya had come for, however, but instead the smaller one attached to it. A glorified cupboard crammed with shelves of scrolls and a desk groaning under piles of parchment, with a single seat held out for visitors.

There Ime sat, hair drawn back into a loose braid and wearing a pair of ivory-framed spectacles. She’d always hated reading in magelight without them, and there was no other lighting in her packed archive room. Alaya turned to dismiss her guards with a glance and a smile, stepping into the room and closing the door before sliding into the seat.

“Chancellor,” her spymistress greeted her.

“Ime,” Alaya replied.

It was... not the same as it once had been, between the two of them. Ime had betrayed her. Betrayed her to the only person in all of Praes willing to do anything to keep her alive, but it had still been a betrayal. That changed things. Alaya was not one prone to unconditional trust, but there had been few people alive she trusted as much as the woman on the other side of the desk. That the trust had been shown warranted and not with the same act added shades to the act that the dark-skinned woman was not yet sure how to parse. It did not help she could no longer read her spymistress through the means she once had.

Connect , like her Name and all her aspects, was gone. Never to come back, if the age lines now touching her once perfectly smooth skin was any indication.

“You have news for me?” Alaya asked.

“Word from Duskwood,” Ime agreed. “The Warden has crushed a plot of the Dead King’s to steal the Night, dealt with the rebellion within the drow and now marches on Keter with reinforcements.”

“How many?”

“Fifteen thousand,” she replied. “Many of them Mighty.”

A considerable force, especially after nightfall, though these days thousands of soldiers felt like nothing more than drops in a pond. There were only so many battles that could be fought – won or lost – before the numbers began to feel... unreal. Disconnected from the brutal realities of the war on Keter.

“She wasted no time,” Alaya finally said. “She can’t have been there longer than three weeks.”

“Probably less,” Ime ruefully said, “but then she’s become rather formidable, hasn’t she? Little Catherine Foundling, who would have thought.”

Amadeus did . But then Alaya doubted even he had suspected that his apprentice was to become one of the leading figures of their era – arguably the leading figure. There were others just as powerful or as influential, but none who had their fingers in quite as many pies as the Black Queen.

“I never thought she’d make it this far,” Alaya admitted. “Even when she returned from the Everdark at the head of an army out of legend, I expected her to stumble in Procer.”

“She still lacks polish,” Ime frankly said. “She’s just very skilled at putting herself in situations where it doesn’t matter – and she’ll run out of those, come times of peace.”

Alaya was not so sure. Of all the traits Catherine Foundling had inherited from the man she’d called her father just in time to murder him, perhaps the one that mattered most was the knack to find talent and bind it to her. What will it matter that she lacks polish, when her foremost diplomat is Cordelia Hasenbach? It did not get more polished than the former First Prince, who unlike Alaya had given up her crown with dignity and elegance that could only be envied.

“We’ll see,” Alaya said, then looked away.

The collection of scrolls was not particularly fascinating, but it allowed her the time go gather her thoughts.

“All that’s left is Keter,” she finally said. “It will be our crucible.”

“If the siege fails, the continent is lost,” Ime quietly agreed. “And we’ve begun building ships in Nok, but it won’t be enough even if we hold the Whitecaps for years afterwards. We just don’t have the resources or the sailors to get more than a third of Praes across the sea.”

If that, Alaya thought, and that was if Callow and the Legions volunteered to die to the lost to delay the advance of the dead. She had seen the numbers, though, and she agreed with Marshal Juniper’s opinion: if Procer was lost, so was Calernia. The population of the Principate was simply too large for any army to have a hope of holding against it once the Dead King armed it and sent it after his enemies. Her lips thinned. She had begun it all, she knew. A desperate bargain made with Keter had given the Hidden Horror his opening to come out of his lair.

It would have happened without her, she knew, for the old monster was a deft hand at convincing others to call on him. But it could not be denied that the pact had been her own, and so she had a share of responsibility in all the deaths that had followed from it. It was a dizzying thought, too large for guilt to truly reach her over it – it was simply too enormous a concept for it to be able to feel personal enough for guilt to follow. Oh, and it was a complicated chain besides. Would Alaya have ever struck the bargain, without the Tenth Crusade marching on Praes?

No, and yet how much of Hasenbach’s eagerness for that march had come from her own meddling in Procer? Which itself had come out of fear of Proceran meddling in their affairs, and on and on it went without end. There could be no beginning or end to human affairs, save the First Dawn and the Last Dusk. Everything else flowed from those threads, an unbroken tapestry. Yet Alaya had made a decision and now Calernia teetered on the brink.

That was not nothing.

“We must prepare what we can to flee,” Alaya said, “but I cannot disagree – there would be no mitigating the death blow that would be defeat in Keter.”

“We’re sending the largest coalition army in the history of Calernia after the city, at least,” Ime noted. “There’s never been that large an alliance facing a common foe.”

“It only speaks to the truth that we are all desperate,” the chancellor grimly replied. “Empress Basilia committed the League because she knows she will be unable the win the war by the time it reaches her doorstep.”

She breathed out.

“Lets us not pretend that this is anything but a gamble, Ime,” Alaya said. “We roll the dice on Keter because at least with a roll there is a chance of victory.”

In a more traditional war, there no longer was. That ship had sailed the moment the Proceran fronts collapsed and the dead poured into the heartlands. The odds might be against the Grand Alliance when it besieged the Crown of the Dead, but at least defeat was not writ in stone – and it was the only real chance the nations of the living had to defeat the Dead King.

Unfortunately for them all, the Hidden Horror knew that as well.

“He’ll be waiting for us,” Ime said, echoing her own thoughts. “With all the nastiest tricks he still has up his sleeve.”

And that was the stuff of nightmares, though Alaya’s own would burn green for years to come.

“He always defends Keter most fiercely during crusades,” the chancellor quietly said. “It is the only ground he has never ceded.”

“It’s the only ground no crusade has ever taken,” Ime darkly said.

And so that was their last hope: taking a city that had not fallen in several millennia from the immortal lich that had spent all that time devising fresh blasphemies to defend it.

“This is not a crusade,” Alaya said, injecting confidence into her voice. “And Keter has never faced us .”

The other woman slowly nodded.

“I suppose it hasn’t,” Ime murmured.

Silence filled the room, neither of them pressed to break it. Alaya leaned back into her seat, closing her eyes, and for the first time today allowed herself to feel how fucking exhausted she was. Like string pulled so taut it was beginning to fray. There was always so much to do and she could not afford to rest, not when Maddie had died so she’d get this shot fixing their mess. And she was not sure whether it made her want to sob or laugh, that she could only allow herself this speck of sincerity when shut in this room with a woman who’d betrayed her. A woman she had kept as her spymistress and closest advisor, for all that, because who the Hells else was left ?

Alaya had not been one of the Calamities in life, and in death they’d left her behind again.

But there was work to be done, an oath to keep, so piece by piece Alaya of Satus put herself back together again. Her eyes opened and she rose to her feet, meeting Ime’s gaze.

“Tonight,” the Chancellor of Praes said. “Tonight you’ll see why this one is different.”

You and all the Grand Alliance , Alaya thought.

—

Though the wind whipped wildly at the walls, she did not feel so much as a breeze.

Alaya’s hands gripped the arms of her throne as she sat ramrod straight, her stomach clenching as the fortress plunged through the sky. Lady Nahiza was gigging almost girlishly, sorcery swirling around her in strands so thick they were visible to the naked eye – the old woman kept guiding the construct down, through the clouds that fled under them until there was a hole in night’s roof and moonlight plunged down after them. The city of Sauvion had been levelled by Keter’s Due when the Hellgate was opened mere miles to the north of it, leaving behind only husks that looked like charred bones under the moon’s eye.

The gate itself stood above a bed of ashes, perfect and round and sealed by the sorcery of the Gigantes. Behind some howling Hell waited to be unleashed, the runes burned onto the sides of the gate awaiting to bind the infernal host to the Hidden Horror’s will. An army of tireless monsters, awaiting only the end of the ‘Riddle of the Lock’ to be unleashed.

The fortress shuddered as it hit the ground, force rippling out in a shockwave. Alaya, seated at the very top of the highest tower, saw every detail of it. The clouds of ash and dust that kicked up, the rolling wave of earth and stone the impact sent outwards. The flying fortress landed on the ground of the Principality of Cleves like a hammer’s blow, the few undead that had been close enough to contest the arrival of Alaya’s force crushed and scattered. Coming out of the Twilight Ways high in the sky had given the Original Abomination no warning, and now it was too late.

Lady Nahiza turned towards her, grey eyes wild with warlock’s flee and tanned cheeks flush with pleasure. In her hand, she held a stone orb covered in runes.

“Your permission, Chancellor?” the sorcerers asked.

Alaya’s eyes moved to the Hellgate, staring down the smooth surface.

“Begin,” she ordered.

Sorcery flared, the orb burning bright as the sister-runes in the depths of the fortress sent the signal to the mage cabals that had been preparing the ritual for hours. Alaya had, when she felt the noose tightening around her neck, tried to bargain with a way out for the Grand Alliance: her finest diabolists had agreed that a Greater Breach could not be closed, save perhaps through the wrath of a Choir, but that it could be... added to. Seven days a year, that had been the lock Alaya proposed to add. Devils would only be able to cross during those seven days and nights, buying the Grand Alliance at least another year to deal with the Dead King.

Alaya of Satus, who had once been Malicia, watched the gate as below her sorcery bloomed. The Dead King’s gate, the end of the mistake she’d made that had begun it all. That had cost her almost everyone she loved. But there was one last gesture she could make in the face of that, for while she had been seeking the words of mages Amadeus had been doing the same. Only it was Nahiza Serrif he had sought, asking her entirely different questions.

“So tonight, King of Death,” Alaya said, “listen closely, for you hear our last song. My part and his – half from the grave as is ever your due.”

And magic filled the night as the Riddle of the Lock died, the first step of the ritual coalescing into burning shackles around the Hellgate. Seven nights and seven days, beginning now. Alaya’s refrain, fitted to the song. In the breath that followed the first devil crossed, a hulking shape covered in spikes, but the sorcery was not yet finished. The second step, brazenly mad, began with half a ton of coal was set alight. Smoke billowed out in thick trails through vents, the heat feeding into arrays whose powers mirrored that of the gate. Thousands of aurelii’s worth of the most expensive magical reagents known to man were being expended every thirty breaths, cabals of mages at the beginning of constant rotations spending themselves raw.

The diabolists were stealing the leash on the devils beginning to pour out of the gate, and the sound of it was Amadeus’ refrain.

It would keep going for seven night and seven days, until the gate closed for a year and Alaya sent the thousands of devils that had been stolen north with one order only: make war on the dead. The two of them had shaken the world once upon a time, when they’d been young and the worst of them had not yet caught up to the best.

“One last time, Maddie,” Allie softly said. “You and me against the world.”

Thunder rumbled, but what did she have to fear? She was the one who’d brought it.

Chapter 49: Arrival

“There is no more one last war than there is one last tide. Perhaps even less, for the moon will change before men do.”

– King Jehan the Wise of Callow

The last campfire before the plunge, I felt, ought to have been more momentous than this. Instead it was strikingly mundane, the rabbits Cordelia had shot during the day’s travelling ending up roasted by Masego over the open flame as I went to pick up firewood and Akua groomed the horses. I’d actually thought I’d get out of firewood duty by catching a few birds, but Zombie had gobbled the first up – purely out of spite, the damned bird didn’t eve need to eat – and screeched so loudly the rest had scattered, so down into the brush I went. I tied her to the tree furthest from the fire, informing she had been a Bad Girl and She Needed To Learn Her Lesson. She cawed at me rather skeptically, which I did not take to be a good sign.

I blamed the Sisters, they were a bad influence.

I got back with the last batch of dry wood in time to get my skewer fresh off the fire, Cordelia doing a decent job of hiding her horror as Masego told her why it wasn’t actually a good idea to cook with hellflame even though the temperature was more stable.

“The taste of brimstone is quite overwhelming,” Zeze sagely told her. “My experiments were conclusive.”

“By that he means that Indrani talked him into scrapping our entire meal twice,” I drily said, swallowing a groan as I lowered myself into sitting on the ground.

It was a nice little clearing that we’d chosen as our camp site for the night, surrounded by just thick enough a thicket that it gave us the illusion of privacy even as we sat in the midst of a host of fifteen thousand Firstborn. I’d set down a boundary line in Night that added some genuine privacy to the appearance of it, but getting the drow to actually keep their distance had been more difficult. Upon learning that I intended to eat fresh meat nineteen sigil-holders had volunteered their sigils to hunt game in my name, and they’d been halfway through talking themselves into duels over the privilege when I put my foot down.

Amusing as the thought of five thousand Firstborn scouring the countryside of the Ways clean of every living creature larger than a mouse was, Cordelia’s rabbits would be quite enough.

“I am not sure whether that is technically blasphemy,” the fair-haired princess noted, “but I cannot help but feel that it should be.”

“It sometimes shows that you have never been hosted in Praes, darling,” Akua told, strolling out of the woods. “Dinner canmost definitely be blasphemous.”

Cordelia, feet not going over the side of the blanket she’d laid on the ground by so much as a hair and hands folded primly over her lap, offered the other woman a flat stare as she sat to my left.

“It sometimes worries me,” she said, “that when you speak of Praes, it is hard to discern what is a jest and not.”

“And if you think that’s a joke, I’ve eaten what she thinks is appropriately seasoned chicken,” I muttered at Cordelia under my breath. “It’d make you wish for the goddamn brimstone.”

“Your national dish is stew, Catherine,” Akua retorted, unimpressed.

“Stew’s good,” I protested. “We eat it all the time.”

There was a choked noise that sounded suspiciously like suppressed laughter coming from my right. I narrowed my eye at now suspiciously expressionless princess.

“Out with it,” I sighed.

“I once asked the palace’s head cook to make traditional Callowan beef stew for Princess Vivienne,” Cordelia admitted, “and she offered me her resignation.”

An indelicate snort from my left, followed by the two of them letting out quiet peals of laughter. Typical, I grimly thought. Like the country of my birth, I was plagued by base treachery out of Praes and Procer. Fucking nobles the both of them too, I glowered. I wasn’t sure how that played into it yet, but give me long enough to think and it absolutely would. A skewer was pressed into my hands and I looked up to Masego’s smiling face.

“Eat your rabbit,” he said. “It’s getting cold.”

I bit down on the juicy flesh, still glowering.

“Fine,” I told him as I chewed. “But just because it’s you asking, Zeze.”

I polished off the rest of my rabbit skewer and was hungry enough to dip into the bag of dried berries afterwards, though it wasn’t long before we moved on to the kind of dessert I actually enjoyed: a bottle of aragh, which Akua had been keeping in her pocket space for the entire trip like a complete hog. She hadn’t opened it yet, though, so as I did I informed her of my forgiveness.

“How generous of you,” Akua replied, impressively enough without so much as a hint of sarcasm.

“Sometimes, when she wants ours things, she says it’s taxes and takes them,” Masego told Cordelia.

The recently retired First Prince of Procer fixed me with a stare that could best be described as soulful disappointment.

“Eh,” I shrugged. “Why even be a tyrant if you can’t steal booze from your subjects?”

It was a pretty good stare, I’d give her that, but I’d had to deal with the Grey Pilgrim for years. No one did disappointment like Good’s communally mandated grandfather, may the old bastard rest in peace. I poured a cup and pressed into Masego’s hand as he rolled his eyes – it was somehow even more distressing a sight now that only one of them rolled all the way around the socket – and grabbed the cups for the rest.

“I always did find it unusual how few creature comforts you’ve claimed over the years, given your repeatedly professed desire for them,” Akua languidly said.

She was sprawled over her blanket like it was a reclining couch and some oiled-up manservant was about to start fanning her. If anyone thought it was coincidence that the position ended up pressingly her riding dress flatteringly around her, I had a real nice house in Keter I wanted to sell them. She lightly took up the cup when I offered it.

“I guess I ended up more the iron military rule kind of tyrant, huh,” I mused.

“By far the most boring sort,” Akua opined.

She was, sadly, pretty much right. Should have gotten known for a spot of decadence before I started going around in plate and a black cloak everywhere, now I was stuck with the reputation and it was too late to change it. After the war , I promised myself. Pastel dresses for a year. Still, let it not be said I’d allow myself to be cornered without a sortie.

“Besides, Your Highness,” I said to Cordelia, “don’t try to sell me you’ve never pulled at the bounds a bit – no one sits on top of a shitshow like Highest Assembly for years without allowing themselves some way to let out the steam.”

The put-upon innocence that appeared on the princess’ face was believably good, which was impressive because those pretty blue eyes could only do so much for compensate for the warrior’s shoulders on her. Akua jeered at her and Masego was sipping at his drink, looking like he was gauging whether he could get away with discreetly dumping some in the fire – I glared at him to signify he would not, to his chagrin – so she gave ground.

“I did once have a banquet served for Amadis Milenan where every single of the nine services tasted of oranges,” Cordelia conceded.

I cocked an eyebrow. Didn’t sound like much of anything.

“He is,” the blonde princess mildly explained, “deathly allergic.”

Akua actually smiled.

“Ah,” she said. “He could say nothing, because accusing you of trying to poison him would have been an act of treason, if then proved untrue.”

“Oh yes,” Cordelia said, her savagely pleasant smile never wavering. “The near mutiny from the cooks when they were asked to bake bread that would taste of oranges for the cheese platter was worth seeing him squirm in his seat through every single service of a formal state dinner.”

I sipped at my drink, hiding a grin. I’d always known there was a petty streak hidden under the manners, but it was nice to have it confirmed for posterity. I let myself relax into the blanket as the cups emptied and the bottle was passed around, letting the warmth of the fire seep into my bones as Masego was drawn into a conversation about the benefits of a mage guild’s existence – I knew better than to believe Cordelia had laid the breadcrumb leading to that by happenstance – and though Akua occasionally interjected I was happy to let them have at it.

The good feeling was lingering in my limbs, sweet and heavy enough it was hard to tell apart from sleepiness.

“- without standardized magical education, it is impossible for any society to have artefacts on a more than local scale,” Masego said. “If there no common principles a mage cannot undertake the upkeep of the artefact another made, so the knowledge end up kept by apprenticeship lines.”

“Which are vulnerable to being ended by happenstance,” Cordelia acknowledged.

She had it right. Callow had suffered from the weakness over the years, and after the Conquest the Dread Empire had pretty much snuffed out organized Callowan sorcery by interrupting the master-to-apprentice passage of knowledge: only a gutted Guild of Hedges had survived, and all the talent there had been pushed into the Legions.

“Exactly,” he enthused. “Learning should never be so unsafe. Every secret that dies with its holder is a loss for all of Creation.”

I felt Akua’s gaze move to me.

“They’ll be at this for a while,” she noted, faintly amused.

“I can’t tell if she’s humouring him or genuinely interested,” I said.

Akua rolled her eyes at me.

“She seeks a closer relationship with him,” she chided, as if it were obvious. “Our dear princess already has her eye on Cardinal, my heart. She foresees his presence there in the coming years, and catches a second bird with the stone by obtaining his thoughts on the matter of organized sorcery under a central authority.”

Which would inevitably ensue, considering the school that would be at the heart of the city yet to be built. It would draw mages like flies to honey, and you couldn’t just let loose a few hundred mages – or more – in any city without supervision. They’d have to be organized, and the ruling council of Cardinal would be the natural authority for them to be under. Cordelia had a history of endorsing that sort of thing, too, having created the first mage order since before the Liturgical Wars during her reign. The Order of the Red Lion, effectively a guild of scrying-capable mages. I grimaced.

“Thought I’d get at least a year after the war before that sort of thing started up,” I admitted.

Akua flicked my shoulder, which surprised me enough I had to bite down on yelp.

“Poor Catherine,” the golden-eyed sorcerers gently mocked. “She only wants to build the most important and influential city on Calernia, but somehow this has drawn attention and intrigue.”

A pause.

“Who could have possibly foreseen this state of affairs?” Akua mourned, laying a hand over her heart.

“Ouch,” I muttered. “I mean you’re not wrong, but still ouch.”

“You’ll survive,” she retorted, merciless. “Do get out of your head, dearest. It will have been a waste of my bottle otherwise.”

I snorted at that. Fair enough. I dragged myself up, brushing my hand against her shoulder, and cracked my back with a little sigh.

“Fire’s making me fall asleep,” I told them all, having drawn the others’ curious stares. “I’ll go for a bit of a walk, get the blood flowing.”

The ring of forest around us wasn’t all that deep, but the branches and leaves were thick enough that limping to the edge got me the treat of breaking through to a starry sky. Under it the Firstborn had made camp, the absence of fires still strange to my eyes after all these years. They were used for cooking, but no longer than that, and by now had long been snuffed out. The fifteen thousand that Sve Noc had sent south with me had still raised their tents along sigil lines, a far cry from the professional lines and avenues of a Legion camp, but the campaigns had taught the drow the virtues of order.

There was a cross of broad avenues going through the camp now that no Firstborn army would have bothered with five years ago, as well as designated latrine pits and supply tents.

“How many centuries has it been since the Empire Ever Dark fielded armies?” I asked.

I had felt its presence even through the dark and silence. Night hid little from me, these days.

“None have been sent to war since the years after the Gloom descended,” Ivah of the Losara replied.

“So more than a thousand years,” I murmured. “You’re adapting dreadfully quick, Ivah.”

It wasn’t empty praise. There were modern armies that simply hadn’t caught up to the methods introduced by the Legions of Terror during the Conquest, be they the combined arms or the professional ways of making war, and it wasn’t because they’d lacked coin or time to. The Great War hadn’t refined Procer war-making, it’d scrapped armies and beggared thousands into being disaffected mercenaries. And the Dominion was, in a lot of ways, just as tribal as the Firstborn: Ten Generals instead of the great lines of the Blood, captains and companies instead of Mighty and sigils.

The drow, though, were taking well to war on our scale. Tactics were still specialized instead of standardized – the Ysengral for fortifications, the Jindrich for heavy infantry – but I could already seen the bare bones of Firstborn armies emerging and they’d make fearsome beasts to wrestle with. Heavy skirmisher contingents like no one else still fielded, startingly quick massed spear infantry and Mighty as replacements for either cavalry or mage cabals. It was only a matter of time until sigils began to turn into professional soldiery, and when that began the Firstborn would be well on their way to having respectable standing armies.

“Of all our talents, strife has ever been our favourite,” Ivah mused. “Our blessing and our curse, one might say.”

The echo of my words made me turn. I found my successor as the sigil-holder of the Losara – and likely First Under the Night – leaning against a hollow tree. The shadows of the branches reached across its painted face, the silver tree-on-purple cut through like claw marks. Ivah rarely bothered with more than the lightest of armours, my Lord of Silent Steps preferring long coats with wide sleeves paired with intricately woven scarves, and it might have been taken for simple traveller if not for the way its presence burned in the Night. In a way, after what it’d done in Serolen it deserved my title more than me: it had made the first of the new Night, when it slew Kurosiv.

It was connected to it even more deeply than I, for while it’d been my scheme Ivah had been the one to bloody its hands with a spear of yew.

“You’re displeased?” I asked.

“We are what we are, Losara Queen,” the Lord of Silent Steps replied. “I fear not the seeking of Night, only that in embracing the spear we might forget how to hold all other tools.”

That becoming too good at war would see the Firstborn lose interest in the less exciting labours of building a home in the Burning Lands, it meant.

“It’ll be on you,” I quietly said, “to teach them better.”

The Sisters had chosen me for the exile, for the war, but it was coming to an end. They would not leave me afterwards, I thought, for I had spent too long as their herald to be severed from them after. But I would be a priestess among many, no longer the towering figure in the Night I now stood as. That was fine by me. I had been Sovereign of Winter and Squire once, and learned from it that one power always grew over the other. To be Warden was more than the old coat I’d once worn as a girl, but to be First Under the Night was not a small thing either.

Better to make it cleaner, so that fate’s course ran without hidden eddies.

“It will be,” Ivah just as quietly replied, looking up at the sky.

It was the first time it acknowledged what the both of us had known for years: that it had served as the sigil-holder of the Losara while being groomed for my role as high priestess for years, chosen by Sve Noc themselves. Each of the Sisters had their favourites among the Mighty, but neither had thought to elevate one as the greatest of the Firstborn under them.

“Afraid?” I asked.

A long silence.

“Yes,” Ivah murmured.

Its jaw clenched.

“It is one thing to kill a god, another to grow a garden from its bones.”

And the flowers born of blood were lovely, I had learned, but ever poisonous. I had tricked Winter into death and devoured it only for it to rot me from the inside. Yet in the end, was that too not an answer of sorts?

“How do you kill a god, Ivah?” I asked.

Silver eyes on mine.

“You make another,” it replied, thoughtful.

If you don’t like the altar the Firstborn worship at, I thought, make another. We stood there under the starlit sky of the Twilight Ways for a long moment, the two of us leaning against threes in companiable silence.

“I wish,” Ivah murmured, “that you did not have to leave. That we would keep you.”

My heart clenched, but I would not answer the sentiment with a lie. It offered me a wisp of a smile.

“We borrowed you for our purposes,” the Lord of Silent Steps said, “and you borrowed us for yours. It was a fair bargain, the faith doled out repaid threefold.”

“The Firstborn,” I acknowledged, “have never failed me.”

And I found that I meant every word of it. Baffled, disappointed and sometimes angered but never failed . From beginning to end, they had kept their oath like a knight’s pride and a devil’s due.

“We have long memories, Losara,” Ivah said. “We will not forget Callow’s Queen or the soldiers we bled in the mud with. That affection, I think, may just survive us both.”

I looked down at my hands, those worn old things that’d never quite wash out the red.

“Wouldn’t that be something?” I smiled, daring to hope.

It softly laughed.

“It would,” Ivah murmured. “It is a long road ahead, and we could all do with a few more friends on it.”

“Then do not be afraid, Ivah of the Losara,” I gently said. “For we’ll be walking it both, and I count you as one.”

The drow stiffened at the words, like a cat afraid of scalding, but as the moments passed it unwound.

“And you,” Ivah brusquely spoke into the silence, as if afraid to get the words out.

I did not smile, afraid it’d shame it, and instead let silence linger. The embarrassment only thickened, though, and I need only glance at the cast of its shoulder to know it felt like squirming. Taking pity on it, I cleared my throat.

“You sought me out for a reason?”

Ivah nodded in acknowledgement.

“Words has arrived from Creation,” the Lord of Silent Steps said. “We will be the last to arrive in the hinterlands Keter. The Praesi fortresses arrived last morn.”

I half-smiled.

“The last to the party, huh,” I murmured. “Best make our presence count, if we’ve made them wait.”

Ivah pushed off from the tree and offered me a bow, shallower than it had been before Serolen.

“Good night to you, Losara Queen,” it said.

“Good night to you, Lord of Silent Steps,” I replied.

It left the same way it had come, through the dark, and I returned to the warmth of the fire and company. There would be precious few moments like those, in the coming days, so it would not do to waste even a single one of them.

—

We crossed back into Creation a little before Noon Bell.

Riding ahead on Zombie, taking to the sky, I noticed two things in quick succession: first, once you got high enough the clouds of poison thinned enough you didn’t even need to breathe through cloth. Two, even as the first sigil set foot in the dust of the Kingdom of the Dead a battle was being fought about a mile to the north of us. Much as I my instinct was to spur on Zombie and get into the thick of it, I held myself back and took in the situation from the sky. The Crown of the Dead was a dozen miles to the west, the great fortress-city jutting out of a chasm miles deep and a spire of black stone rising even higher, and around it in a loose circle I could see the encamped armies of the Grand Alliance.

Fortified camps, too. Pickler had been busy, because though the angle wasn’t right for me to see everything it looked like the Grand Alliance had encircled Keter with ramparts of its own. It had then gone further and built a ring of walls behind the camps, something called contravallation. Sensible, I thought, given that the Dead King still had armies out in the field that’d be headed our way. We’d be fighting as much from the back as the front while the siege continued, we’d known that form the start, but I was still impressed Pickler had gotten so much done so quickly. She has Legion sappers now as well , I reminded myself.

Zombie circled slowly up in the sky, the wind batting as my face as I returned my attention to the battle up north. By the look of the banners and the massed cavalry being used, it was Rozala Malanza and the army that’d held Cleves out there in the field. On the other side I saw mostly a mass of bones, with only a few necromantic constructs – the dead had numbers, maybe twenty thousand to First Princess Rozala’s ten, but it wasn’t helping them much. The Proceran shield wall held, Light burning away the poison in the air and tearing through the skeletons in thick rivers to disrupt their formation. And by how quickly the constructs were going down, I’d guess there were Named on the field.

A victory in the making. At guess, Neshamah had sent out some expendables to hinder the crossing of the Firstborn and Malanza had caught it flatfooted. Tied them down with the cavalry, did you? I mused. She’d always had a knack for cavalry tactics, even back during the Tenth Crusade. It had been her tacit threat to send cavalry south into Callow and hit the Vales from behind that’d forced Juniper and I to give her a fight at the Battle of the Camps.

I waited until the first two sigils had crossed and a vanguard had been established for the Firstborn before going out to return the favour. Night came clean and crisp when I pulled, flowing better than it had since Hainaut – and even better than before, at least when the sun was out. I unleashed trail of black flame through the heart of the enemy formation, torching Bones by the hundreds as Procerans cheered. It had a charming element of novelty to it, the Principate’s soldiers being glad of the sight of me. The battle had already been won before I arrived, and my contribution just helped turn it into a rout.

I passed twice more, dropping trails of fire, and noted approvingly that First Princes Rozala was moving to encircle the dead. It’d be a mistake against a living army, since cornered soldiers fought like devils, but undead didn’t rout so there was no point in leaving them a way out. Bones just got stupid and disorganized when you killed enough of the Binds leading them, some of the bands wandering off as the cohesion of the army broke down. The forward ranks of skeletons kept breaking themselves on the Proceran shield wall, increasingly less skilled in that assault, while fantassin companies swept the flanks and the cavalry began riding down the bands of skeletons that broke away from the host.

Already over, and it was looking like light casualties for the Procerans. Now we just needed to win the next hundred of these, all the while besieging the single most powerful fortress in all of Calernia.

I left First Princess Rozala to her moment of glory, knowing that after Cleves her soldiers could likely use a battle having gone cleanly their way, and rode Zombie back to the beachhead. Sigils had begun to spread out during the hour I’d spent north, the Firstborn assembling into a marching column headed for the camps to the west, and seeing that General Rumena had it well in hand I saw no need to stick my oar in. It’d been herding sigils around since before the city I was born in was founded, it didn’t need me breathing down its neck.

Impatient at the pace of the advance even though I knew in the back of my mind that the drow were quick on the march as far as armies went, I landed long enough to have word sent to my companions that I’d be heading out to the camps in advance and took to the sky again. Zombie was in a good mood, I noted, having puffed her feathers vainly at the cheering earlier and remained convinced she’d been the star of the battle ever since. I saw no need to disabuse her.

The flight west was longer, the winds turning strange and quarrelsome the closer we got to Keter, but we made good time. I watched with thinned lips as the hulking shape of the Crown of the Dead rose ever higher, that island of stone connected to the land around it only by four great bridges. I’d tread one of these on foot, once upon a time, and before this was over I would again. A look back and a flex of Night told me that the Firstborn were mostly done crossing by the time I reached the camps, the column snaking west along with First Princess Rozala’s victorious army.

It was with a sense of vindication that I led Zombie into a slow circling glide above our camps, taking in the sight of the armies that’d been gathered. There’d never been a coalition like it in the history of Calernia: Praes and Callow, Procer and Levant, the League and the Empire Ever Dark. All the greatest armies left among the living had been marched here for our great siege of Keter, and though I knew that was no guarantee of victory the sight of it was deeply satisfying. We’d done it. Through Hells and high water, we’d mustered all that was left to muster. Now we simply need-

Power bloomed, deep in the heart of Keter, and my blood ran cold. Sorcery rose from the camps, but it wasn’t us the Dead King was aiming at. As a torrent of magic shot up in the sky, past the great spire and the green clouds, Creation shivered.

Then the sky began to fall, one panel at time.

I thought it an attack at first, when shards of northing hit the ground and kicked up great clouds of dust, but the few that hit the camp broke harmlessly against the defensive wards. I had seen this before, I realized in a moment of eerie clarity. Just not from this angle. I looked back, to the drow and saw that the last few sigils had been dropped down from a height. Like the Army of Callow was, when Akua shattered the Twilight Ways under us.

“Gods,” I croaked out, as destruction spread as far as my eye could see.

Miles in every direction, one break at a time, like a ripple on the surface of a pond. We’d brought the great muster of Calernia here to besiege Keter, I thought, so the Dead King had broken the Twilight Ways. How much of them I couldn’t know – miles, a third, maybe even enough that the realm itself would begin break down. In the end, it didn’t really matter. Neshamah had let us in and then tightened the noose: now there could be no retreat.

We would take Keter before supplies ran out, or we would all die.

Chapter 50: Clouds

“O Fiona, would you weep,
of your old bargain now?

Queen to not, a price steep
that they now disavow

–

A just king was promised,
just a king’s what we got
and our coin’s still honest,
but it heads south to rot

–

Deliver us, o knight of Dunloch,

Your honour fierce and proud

Singing of the kingdom lost

Whose banner is now a shroud

–

Faith kept is faith earned

But when oaths lie forgot

No king can call it treason

To speak true of our lot

–

So one night I may leave,

Abandon home and hearth,
choose the sword and believe
in getting an oath’s worth

–

But it will not be tonight,
the step is cold with rime.

But under the dying light,

I’ll sing it one last time –

–

Deliver us, o knight of Dunloch,

Your honour fierce and proud

Singing of the kingdom lost

Whose banner is now a shroud.”

– “O Knight of Dunloch”, Callowan rebel song from the northern baronies

The arrival of the last army to join the siege of Keter should have been an uplifting moment, like the beginning of the end for the Crown of the Dead, but instead the coming of the Firstborn had been drowned in the shadow of Neshamah’s counterblow. I landed in the Third Army’s camp to cheers that rang a little hollow and didn’t bother to make a spectacle out of it: posturing would not remove the sight of the sky falling from the minds of my soldiers, and it’d look all the more laughable for trying. I handed off my reins to a stout Vale boy and let myself be guided to the command tent, informed by one of the phalanges that Juniper was already waiting for me.

More than just her, as it turned out. All four of the Army of Callow’s generals were there, as well as the expected old hands – Aisha and Pickler. So was Kilian, to my surprise, but I kept the sentiment off my face. It made sense, given that these days she was the longest serving of our Senior Mages. Our surviving ones, anyway. I took Juniper’s offered arm with a wan smile, clasping it in a legionary’s salute before turning to the others.

General Bagram, the oldest veteran in the room, had visibly aged since I last him. The orc’s fangs had yellowed and his eyes grown sunken, even if his back was still straight. Zola Osei looked better rested, and more confident for her solid performance during the Praesi campaign. She’d not be shy before, but not that assurance was less of a performance. Lady Abigail – of House Tanner, nowadays – still looked like she’d bot out of the tent given a halfway decent excuse, her eyes a little too wide kind of like a panicking horse, but her Third Army’s reputation towered above that of all the others.

The last and freshest addition was an old man with a crooked nose and blue hair, still built like a bull for all that his hair had turned white. General Jeremiah Holt, formerly of the Thirteenth Legion and now instead of the Fifth Army. The First and Second, merged after the heavy losses at Hainaut, would remain that way for the rest of the war. It was better for Vivienne for them to start their own legacy, anyway. She’d get to grant them a cognomen herself and cement the close tie, like I had with the Third. Besides, it would have left a bad taste in the mouth to hand this strange Hune’s old rank.

“Where’s Princess Vivienne?” I asked after the round of greetings.

I’d forgotten how very red Kilian’s hair was, I’d admit. It was still as striking a feature as I’d found it at seventeen, even more so now that she wore it a little longer.

“The White Knight sent for her,” Juniper told me. “There’s been correspondence from the Kingdom Under.”

I sucked in a breath.

“Good news?” I asked.

The tall orc looked at me with irritation.

“If we already knew,” Marshal Juniper growled, “she’d be here, wouldn’t she?”

I grinned, which startled her and so the grin only grew. I patted her arm, to her bafflement.

“Missed you too, Hellhound,” I fondly said.

She cleared her throat.

“Yes, well, we have military business,” Juniper stiffly replied.

She was already getting enough amused looks at her expense that I decided to spare her further teasing. I invited everyone to sit, helping myself to the cup of water that Aisha had poured me. I noted the taste of lemon, which I’d grown to like in Praes, and shot the Taghreb beauty her an appreciative look. I got a wink back. Ah, Aisha. She was still tempting even with Juniper at the table and a fresh reminder of the dangers of sharing a bed with a subordinate squeezed in between Pickler and Zola.

“So,” I said, setting down my cup with a sharp rap. “Fill me in.”

Given that this was a siege, who was to report first was evident enough no order need be given.

“We’ll be finished surrounding Keter by tomorrow evening,” Sapper-General Pickler said. “We started by making gate-fortes in front of the bridges, but we’re planning a full encirclement.”

She paused.

“Both circumvallation and contravallation,” Pickler specified.

I could think of a few reasons why the Grand Alliance would bother to wall up our side of the ‘moat’ that was a chasm miles deep, but one in particular came to mind.

“They’ve been shooting at us, I take it,” I stated.

“Ballistae and sorcery,” Juniper said. “At night especially, though they change the hour to keep us on our toes.”

“And we’re handling the magic?” I asked.

Juniper slid a look Kilian’s way, who brushed back a strand of red hair in a way that brought a faint pang of nostalgia before she cleared her throat and spoke up.

“Our wards are sufficient to handle the swarms,” Senior Mage Kilian informed me, “and ritual attacks have been going sharply in our favour, at least on the defence.”

I breathed in sharply.

“The Praesi made that much of a difference?” I incredulously asked.

“We estimate we might have as many as twice the number of mages as there are within Keter now that we have both the cabals and the Magisterium,” Kilian replied. “It’s still hard to guarantee that we can surpass the enemy in any single place when they concentrate their forces, but alongside Lady Nahiza Seriff we’ve set up proactive defences to get around that.”

I cocked an eyebrow at the vagueness.

“We hit their rituals with ours before they can hit our troops,” Kilian summed up, tone dry.

I swallowed a smile.

“Well done,” I praised, meaning it.

Wouldn’t work forever, since our mages got tired while Neshamah’s didn’t, but while we finished our siege works it was a solid defensive measure. When we went on the offensive, however, we’d have to pull mages off the defence and then things would get nasty. But they’ll get even worse than that if we don’t have cadres of diabolists waiting for the demons we’re sure to get dropped on us.

“Siege preparations?” I asked the table at large.

“Bombardment of the southern and western gates has already begun,” Juniper replied, “but we’re having a hard time getting through the wards in the stone. We’re holding off until we have a way to crack them.”

“I’ll put Akua on it,” I absent-mindedly said.

Masego was better at wards, which was only natural given that his father had been the undisputed master of them in this lifetime, but I’d need him for something else. I needed to know how badly the Twilight Ways had been hit. It should just be a temporary shattering in the Kingdom of the Dead, I thought, but if it wasn’t... I’d planned to imprison the Dead King in the Ways, after forcing on him the poisoned Crown of Autumn. I’d even picked out his keeper, someone I could trust to keep him forever contained. I grit my teeth. The latter part of that scheme was already in doubt, but if even the premise was buried I was in the deeps.

Had he known? Was that why he’d hit the Ways like this, even though he had to know that cornering heroes was putting the wind at their back? I had yet to break the sword I had ripped out of the Intercessor to restore Below’s stories, keeping that blow as a card up my sleeve, but he had to know that when I did that counterstroke would cost him. It smelled of a mistake to me, and we were too late in the game for the King of Death to be making this kind of mistake. Something was up. What’s the angle here, Neshamah? What is it you’re after? I drifted back to the present, noticing that most the table was looking at me expectantly.

I’d probably been asked a question, I realized with faint embarrassment. Not acute enough for me to stop, though.

“Have there been any sorties?” I asked.

“Not since we’ve finished raising the gate forts,” General Jeremiah replied, frowning. “Your Majesty, if you would-”

I raised my hand to silence him.

“Not one ?” I insisted.

“No,” General Bagram told me, leaning forward with clear interest. “All the fighting’s been at our backs. The devils are chewing up the dead in the south, but every other skeleton’s headed our way. We’ve been chasing off armies led by Scourges.”

I drummed my fingers against the table.

“The earlier sorties,” I slowly said. “Were any of them led by a Scourge?”

Blinks of surprise. Aisha was the first to answer.

“None,” the Staff Tribune said. “There were other Revenants, but none of that calibre were reported.”

Only Neshamah wouldn’t send out all his best Revenants out in the field, he had to know he needed assets to handle the hero death squads we’d be throwing at him. Meaning he’s keeping them back on purpose , I thought. Trying to prevent our Named from catching one of them and putting them down early? No, he wouldn’t be thinking that way at this point. Trading a single Scourge for ten Named was the kind of bargain he’d take with a smile, because there would be no more Named reinforcements. Every Named he killed was one less story, one less aspect we could use against him. If anything, he should be eager to bleed our numbers dry.

It didn’t make military sense for him to hold back the Scourges, which meant he was moving according to another set of rules. And one I knew that, his intent was not so obscure after all. I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“This is,” I muttered, “a goddamn mud trap.”

Neshamah had no intention at all of fighting us in a desperate last battle. He was just keeping us here for the two, three months he needed for his armies to finish destroying Procer and raising it. That was the real way Calernia lost, when he devoured the Principate and fielded an amount of undead beyond our capacity to beat. He’d keep throwing expendable armies at our back to prevent us from mounting a proper assault on Keter, but I suspected that if it came down to it he might actually cede his capital. Did he really need the Hellgate and the Serenity behind it, if he already had the rest of Calernia on a silver platter? They were conqueror’s tools, and the conquest was already halfway done.

And beyond even that, a sudden fear assaulted me. We’d bet it all on ending the Dead King here to end his armies, but was he even here? No, I told myself, I was overcorrecting. I could still feel the thick knot of stories coming together in Keter, as if it were just out of my sight, and that couldn’t be anyone else. He wouldn’t have risked it , I decided. Providence would have pointed us at him anyway, and there’s nowhere he has better defences at than Keter. And yet... I pushed back my chair, brusquely getting to my feet. The eyes of the highest-ranking military officers in Callow were all on me, showing varied scales of curiosity and wariness, so I kept my face calm.

I needed to talk with Hanno and soon. I had to be sure. The heroes must have a way to check if the Hidden Horror’s in the city , I thought. Before that, though, we needed to adjust our basic strategy.

“Begin preparing for assaults as soon as tomorrow,” I ordered. “Our timeline has changed.”

Juniper’s eyes met mine.

“Warlord?”

“The Dead King’s trying to run out the hourglass on us, Juniper,” I darkly said. “So let’s remind him why he should know better than to take us so lightly.”

—

The council Vivienne had gone to was done by the time I got there, but I got lucky. She’d stayed behind to have a drink and a talk with Hanno – Callowan diplomacy at its finest – which allowed me to catch the both of them together. The first thing I noticed when I laid eyes on them was that Vivienne was looking great. A little taller than when I’d last seen her, which smacked of Name given that it was late for her to get a growth spurt, and she’d gained some muscle too. Wearing armour and going around carrying a sword had added tone to her arms. I swept her into a hug before we even greeted each other, and if the way she tightly returned it was any indication she’d missed me too.

“Princess,” I smiled, drawing back.

“Warden,” she smiled back.

Only then did I turn my attention to Hanno, who’d be looking at us with tolerant amusement. He’d not changed much in the time since we’d last seen each other, at least not physically. But the power I could sense him, however tightly constrained, gave away that he’d gotten something back since our talks in Salia.

“You’re Named again,” I said.

“Not yet,” Hanno of Arwad serenely replied, “but I believe it imminent.”

“I’m happy for you,” I told him, a little surprised to find I meant it.

He’d be a lot more useful to me as enforce of the Accords as a hero, of course, but it went further than that. If Hanno had gone through the doubts and all the reproaches I’d crammed down his throat when he tried to become Warden of the West, then he’d end up better off for it. He’d been struggling with hesitation and his own sense of what was just ever since the Seraphim had gone quiet, so if he’d found a measure of peace with his situation I could only be glad.

Besides, with serenity came strength and we’d need heroes of his calibre to take Keter.

Vivienne set aside the abominable brandy they’d been drinking to pour me a cup of wine, further reinforcing that she was the right choice for my successor, and I joined them at the collection of folding tables they’d been using as a single larger one. I raised an eyebrow at the high number of chairs, which Vivi caught.

“We had to give the Free Cities five seats,” she explained, “since the Blood has five as well and giving less would have been an insult.”

“So Procer got five as well,” I said, rolling my eye. “Please tell me you didn’t make a scene for us as well.”

Hanno snorted.

“Two of those seats are empty in your name,” he said. “One for the Warden, the other for the Queen of Callow.”

I sent Vivienne an aggrieved look. She well knew my opinion on having too many people sitting in council – it was an inconvenience at best, trouble at worst. A conference was one thing, but a council needed to actually be able to hear itself talk.

“It does wonder for my leg room,” the Princess told me, entirely unrepentant.

“I always knew the power would go to your head,” I sighed. “I should have seen the signs, just look at the kind of people you’ve been rubbing elbows with.”

Hanno shot me an interested look.

“She plays dice with Indrani,” I told him. “No one of decent repute would ever subject themselves to that.”

“Sidonia once told me she cheats most relentlessly,” he noted.

“Eh,” Vivienne said. “Her sleight of hand could use some work.”

I smiled into my cup, drinking of the wine – some Proceran pale that’d likely get rare in the coming years, given that the undead had not been great for vineyards – and letting the warmth of it soothe my throat. I set it down with a dull thud, the sound getting their attention. They’d both known me long enough to recognize it as a signal for us turning to business.

“Got a question for you,” I told Hanno. “I don’t suppose there’s a heroic Name trick that can be used to confirm the Dead King is in the city?”

He looked surprise, the plain but honest face slowly developing a frown.

“You’re afraid he’s abandoned his capital in favour of Procer,” the dark-skinned hero said.

“It shouldn’t be the case,” I replied. “But we’re not in a place where maybes are something to tolerate.”

He nodded in understanding.

“There is no such trick,” he said. “Providence can sometimes be bent to the purpose, but it is unfortunately unreliable when it comes to the Hidden Horror.”

I grimaced. So much for that.

“However,” Hanno continued, “I have reason to believe he is in Keter as of today. Antigone’s opinion is that the ritual used against the Twilight Ways earlier was directed by his own hand.”

Vivienne stirred.

“One of the Scourges is a mage,” she pointed out.

“Not sure the Tumult could handle a ritual like this,” I noted. “It’s a gestalt soul, not a practitioner capable of this quality of magic.”

“That is still,” she said, “a maybe.”

I grimaced. She wasn’t wrong, I conceded as worried my lip.

“I’ll see if Masego can find out,” I said, reluctant as I was to heap more on his plate. “A godhead, at the very least, shouldn’t be possible to hide.”

Which also meant Neshamah knew we had the Crown of Autumn in our camp, but he couldn’t know what we meant it for . With that matter as settled as it could be in the moment, I pivoted to the greater consideration.

“So,” I said, “I hear we’ve got word from the Kingdom Under.”

Both their faces were grim, a sight that had my stomach clenching.

“Two letters,” Vivienne said. “A personal one from the Herald, carried by Seeker Balasi, and a formal one from the negotiator for the King Under the Mountain.”

She’d phrased the letters as coming from two different people, which had a worrying implication.

“The Herald’s no longer in charge of negotiations,” I stated, and it was not a question.

“He has been replaced,” Hanno said, “by a Lady Sybella. Who informs us that any promises he might have made were done so without the backing of the Kingdom Under.”

“ Fuck ,” I feelingly said.

I leaned back into the chair, closing my eye and tilting my head back. That wasn’t quite the worst outcome for us, but it wasn’t far either. The amount of soldiers we’d gathered for the siege of Keter was the single largest army – of the living, anyway – in the history of Calernia. Numbers were a little vague given the many moving parts and lack of records in some armies, but we should be somewhere between two hundred and two hundred fifty thousand souls in all. Cordelia had pulled off fucking miracles getting enough supplies to feed an army that size on the march from a crumbling Procer, and gone even further by getting enough to feed us for part of the siege, but it wouldn’t last .

“How long do we have before we’re out?” I asked.

“For water, two months,” Vivienne said. “We’ve already started rationing food, and at this rate we have three to four weeks left.”

“If the Dead King does not hit our supplies,” Hanno reminded me.

We needed the dwarves. We had around two months before Procer was done and Calernia with it, but we wouldn’t even last that long if the Kingdom Under didn’t bring us food. I breathed out, forcing calm, and opened my eye.

“All right,” I said. “Hit me with it. What does Lady Sybella want?”

“The original terms the Herald proposed,” Hanno said. “With the addition of the city of Keter.”

I thinly smiled.

“Does she also want Laure while she’s at it?” I bit out.

“The phrasing of her missive was... strong, Cat,” Vivienne said. “She’s not interested in negotiating terms with us. We take it or leave it.”

My fingers clenched. One of these days, we’d have to get around to teach the Kingdom Under a modicum of humility. They were the great empire of Calernia, but their hegemony had always relied on keeping out of surface affairs and playing nations against each other. Now that they were putting a knife at our common throat to extort us while the Dead King tried to kill us all, they’d outed themselves for the bandits they were. If we survived this fucking war, I expected that diplomatic efforts to squeeze the dwarves out of our affairs would find fertile grounds.

But first we had to survive.

“She has to know at least half of us would rather tell the dwarves to bite it and take our chances with Keter,” I finally said. “And that was before she further upped the price. She’s overplaying her hand. Why?”

“The Herald’s letter shed some light on the matter,” Hanno said, jaw locked tight. “He tells us that the Kingdom Under has learned of the ealamal’s existence.”

I blinked. Yeah, hard to keep that under wraps when it was getting brought here for the siege. What would that change – no, he couldn’t possibly mean that.

“You can’t be serious,” I quietly said. “They actually want us to use it?”

“The mathematics are simple, from where they’re standing,” Vivienne ruefully said. “Either we give them everything they want and they lend a hand, or we blow them off and lose to the dead without them. Then, in our despair...”

“They think we’ll blow ourselves to the Hells and the Dead King with us,” I completed.

“Not so much to the Hells,” Hanno said, “but that is the essence of it. They expect the ealamal to empty large swaths of western Calernia, leaving the lands ripe for the taking.”

Why bother negotiating with the humans, I thought, when they might do you the courtesy of emptying their own lands so you could take them? And since the ealamal was unlikely to reach as far as southern Procer, they could still take the cities they’d asked for by force with the populations intact afterwards. Gods, with the continent so ravaged some might even be grateful for the protection.

“That’s one of the vilest plans I’ve ever heard,” I said. “And I have heard vile plans, Hanno, even speaking a few myself.”

“It is unconscionable,” the dark-skinned man agreed. “The Herald of the Deeps agrees, hence his warning. He also reiterates his promise that he will do all he can.”

I almost rolled my eye at that, refraining only for Hanno’s sake. So far all the Herald had done was try to roll us when we were vulnerable and then fail to be of any use when turning his cloak. I’d spare a speck of gratitude for the warning, but wasn’t putting a lot of hope in the dwarf. He’d done nothing to warrant it and much to do otherwise. The room fell silent and I began drumming my fingers against the table, lost in thought. Eventually, though, I had to speak up.

“I don’t see a way out of this,” I quietly admitted. “Our bet was that the Herald would come through, and it appears we’ve lost it.”

“With the rationing we still have three weeks,” Vivienne said, but we both knew otherwise.

It would hardly be a victory to take Keter within that time, because our armies would likely be fucked anyways: we couldn’t forage in the Kingdom of the Dead, which mean that to eat we’d have to march back . To Procer or Serolen, but both were weeks away. Weeks where hundreds of thousands of soldiers would be expected to march with empty stomach. They’d die, we all knew. They’d die in droves, and darks things would be done as we grew desperate to survive. Even if we won, I realized, even if we got the Dead King, we might still lose. Not because of Gods or sorcery or a story, but because we were too far out in enemy territory without a supply line and our diplomatic efforts had failed.

“The cause is not lost,” Hanno said, unruffled. “Being cornered with everything on the line lends us strength enough to overcome the impossible.”

He paused, brown eyes moving to me.

“And that sword at your hip is not a sword at all, Catherine, unless I’m gravely mistaken.”

People didn’t actually tend to notice the sword at all unless it was pointed out to them, even Named, but then Hanno’s name hadn’t been picked out of a hat when he became the Sword of Judgement. But Vivienne, from the half-hidden startlement on her face, had not noticed it until just now. I unclasped the sheath from my belt, a beautiful wooden piece carved and painted by an artisan of the Ysengral Sigil that displayed the northern constellations on moonless night, and slid out the blade. It didn’t look like much, really. Just a smooth steel arming sword that lacked a crossguard, its edge wickedly sharp to even a casual eye but otherwise unremarkable.

It was only fitting, I supposed, that Below’s stories would take the form of a double-edged blade without a guard. Sometime my Gods had a halfway decent sense of humour

“No,” I agreed, “it’s a little more than that.”

“You can free the stories at any time, then,” Hanno said. “And it might not be as simple as sealing his doom in a single stroke, but...”

“It’ll tip the balance,” I finished.

It’d hurt him. That was the reason behind the strategy I’d begun sniffing out today, after all: Neshamah was afraid of the stories coming back. That was why the only armies fighting the Grand Alliance were coming from outside the city, why they were led by Scourges and why he was hiding behind his walls. It was even why he’d shattered the Twilight Ways only after the Firstborn had crossed: he was religiously avoiding direct confrontation. Because he knew the moment it was him against us, everything on the line, I’d break the sword and the result would not be a finger on the balance so much as a hand around his throat.

We were in deeps, I wouldn’t deny that, but so was he . And that meant we were still in this war.

“Masego called it the Book of Some Things, the other one,” Vivienne said.

“Not my choice,” I defended. “He insisted that since he’d made the artefact he should get to name it.”

“I thought the name rather charming, actually,” Hanno smiled.

Ugh, he would. I shared a look with the other Callowan in the room.

“So what are you calling this one, then?” Vivienne asked.

I raised up the blade, noticing it did not gleam even under candlelight – as if it refused to reflect light entirely – and studied it, then smiled. It’d be a shame not to keep to the naming scheme now that Hierophant had started it, since it was too late to take back anyway.

“I’m rather partial,” I replied, “to the ‘Sword of the Rest’.”

Chapter 51: Arsenal

“Thirty-three: it doesn’t matter how good the sword is, if it talks put it back where you found it. Yes, even if it lets you beat your nemesis. They probably thought their talking sword was a good idea too and look where that got them.”

– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

Indrani was carving away at the table when I found her, sprawled under it.

“I may have to call the guards,” I mused out loud, taking off my riding gloves, “there appears to be some kind of table goblin in my tent.”

I got a scoff in answer and she popped out her head long enough to roll her eyes at me.

“Please,” Archer replied. “I’m at least the height of two table goblins.”

She retreated under the table, steel rasping against wood as she shaved away at a detail, and when she spoke up again I could hear the goddamn grin in her voice.

“Unlike some,” she airily added.

“That’s treason, it is,” I gravely replied.

“This is why we call you Sanguinia behind your back, you know,” Indrani informed me.

“She was a visionary ahead of her time,” I defended.

Dread Empress Sanguinia II had outlawed being taller than her in the final – relatively more – despotic years of reign, which was a sensible enough decree. She’d also outlawed cats for some reason, which I honestly I could take or leave. I unclasped my sheath, set it on the table and leaned against it to dip under and at least have a look at her face. What I got instead was pulled by the collar followed by warm lips against mine, with a hungry little nip at the end that had me lingering for more. Must have stayed there a while, because I was still enjoying myself when someone cleared their throat behind me. I dipped back out, a little out of breath, and found Vivienne eyeing me impatiently.

“Vivs,” Indrani drawled, still under the table, “I know you want in on this real bad, but wait for your turn.”

The Princess’s blue-grey eyes considered me, then moved to Indrani’s half-visible body.

“I could do better,” Vivienne shrugged.

“Who’s she talking about?” ‘Drani asked from under the table.

“Both,” she replied in my stead, not hesitating for a moment.

“Hey,” I protested. “I got stabbed in Serolen and it still kind of stung less than that.”

“You should probably stop making plans that have a step where you get stabbed, you know,” Indrani advised me. “I’m no expert, but it does seem like a flaw in your plan-making process.”

“You can’t ask her that, Indrani,” Vivienne chided. “You know it’s what she always uses when she’s missing a step. Like, don’t know how to convince that princess?”

“Get stabbed,” Archer chortled, the filthy traitor. “Don’t know how to beat that hero?”

“Get stabbed,” Vivienne completed, meeting my eye with a look of smug satisfaction.

I glared back. We both knew Indrani was going to worry that joke like a fucking bone for at least a year now, which Vivienne had inflicted on me purely as her long price for forcing her to see what she’d walked in on.

“Why did I even miss you people?” I asked.

My eye narrowed.

“And it’s my goddamn tent you know,” I told Vivienne. “Don’t think I won’t find Arthur some nice noble boy and crown his ass instead, Dartwick.”

“I have no idea what you might be referring to,” the Princess smilingly lied. “I only came to inform you that we’ve talks to wrap up with Prince Otto at Evening Bell.”

I blinked in surprise.

“About...” I leadingly said.

“Yes,” she confirmed.

“I didn’t think you’d get it done this quickly, given the circumstances,” I admitted. “Well done.”

“Do not overpraise me,” she demurred, lips quirking anyway. “Reitzenberg proved a remarkably straightforward man to deal with even before Prince Frederic joined his name to the venture.”

The Kingfisher Prince was in as well? No, of course he was. That’d always been the most admirable thing about Frederic Goethal: he always tried to do what he thought was right, whether or not it was convenient for everyone else. I’d cursed him for that at the Arsenal, when he’d refused to give Cordelia and I our easy way out of the situation with the Red Axe, but it wouldn’t do to forget that most of time it was a boon that the Prince of Brus went out of his way to be a good man.

“I’ll be there,” I said, then paused. “And get Pickler to come as well, would you?”

I was fixed with a steady look.

“As is she fond of telling me,” Vivienne said, “she is busy enough for five of her, which sadly Masego has not yet figured out how to make because as usual sorcery is useless.”

“Make her come anyway,” I said, and it was not a suggestion this time.

She nodded. Good. I’d meant it, when in Serolen I’d told Cordelia I intended to repay every drop of my debt to the people that’d raised me up. And Pickler had been in that room, the first time I strayed from Black and Malicia’s plan to make something of my own. The first time I committed treason to their cause for fidelity to my own. She’d argued, she’d been afraid, but in the end she had sworn.

And I had not forgotten.

“I’ve got correspondence that could use your attention, if you have the time,” Vivienne said.

Barely two hours into camp and already I had a dozen duties pulling me in different directions. Serolen, for all the dangers there, had been strikingly less demanding in that regard. A reminder that I was not a figurehead or a symbol here, that I had made myself an integral part of the Grand Alliance and its policies.

“Can’t,” I replied. “Hanno suggested I have a look at something the Blessed Artificer has been cooking up.”

I’d had a look at it back in Salia and been impressed by the power of what she’d created, but when the Sword of Judgment called something ‘significantly dangerous’ we were dealing with another league. Adanna of Smyrna had been eager to tell me that Masego wasn’t the only one who improved his craft through conflict, and though I couldn’t think of an enemy she’d have fought in my absence that would kick her up a notch she had been in charge of guarding the Crown of Autumn.

“I’m not certain where she is,” Vivienne said, heading off my question before I asked it. “I’ll put the phalanges on finding out.”

I nodded in thanks, rolling my shoulder.

“Might go have a talk with the Mirror Knight first, then,” I said. “They can reach me there.”

That had been Hanno’s other suggestion, as it happened. Christophe de Pavanie had been chosen to be the Severance’s bearer, and though I didn’t believe for a moment that the sword we’d made out of Saint’s aspect would be enough to do in the Dead King there was no denying he’d play a key role in how we’d pull down Keter’s roof on his head. To have a look at him as the Warden, feel out the stories he was bound to, was only sensible.

“Won’t need to,” Indrani said, dragging herself out from under the table.

She set down her knife on the carved wood, but now that I had my first good look at her since returning my eye was looking beyond flesh. I went still, sharpening my focus. There’d been the faintest trace of the story before I left, but it had since set in stone. My Name pulsed in my veins as I followed the thread, trying to make out the timing but finding it too elusive to narrow down beyond ‘soon’. Still, there was no denying it: she’d be getting a visit. And following that chord I could get a glimpse at the knot to come, the makings of the fight, and that gave me a look at the people who’d be fighting. Some of which I’d not been sure would be involved. So you’ll come, after all , I thought with satisfaction.

Good. It meant I still had one card up my sleeve that not even Neshamah would see coming.

“Cat?” Indrani asked.

I shook my head.

“Looking at your Name,” I told her. “Nothing to worry about.”

She must already suspect, I thought, that though she was still the Archer she was now reaching for another Name entirely. Indrani shrugged.

“Sure,” she dismissed. “Like I was saying, I know where the Artificer is. She’s at the Bitter Blacksmith’s forge, out in the Proceran camp.”

“Huh,” I replied. “What for?”

“Making a sword with her,” Indrani said. “At least that’s the word around the camps.

I’d start there, then, I mused. Definitely not because I was putting off talking with the Mirror Knight as long as I could.

“Intriguing,” I mused. “I’ll have a look, then.”

“And don’t stay to drink after your talks for too long,” Archer instructed me.

I cocked an eyebrow.

“You’re putting Masego to work already, so you’ll be busy making it up to me,” Indrani informed me.

I knew that glimmer in her eyes well, and it usually heralded a good time. I cleared my throat.

“Seems only fair,” I conceded.

She leaned in to kiss me again, but I did notice that in the moment before that she shot a smug grin at Vivienne. Indrani, I could not help to notice before I got pleasantly distracted, still had a knack for coming out of a conversation the only winner and at everyone else’s expense.

—

Of the two Bitter Blacksmiths, I was understandably more familiar with the villain. I did know a few things, though, from reports and the short few conversations we’d had in person. Helmgard Bauerlein, elder of the estranged siblings, was not a mage. And unlike her brother she did not work enchantments into steel, or even Light for that matter. What she had was a supernatural knack for handling exotic materials, which was why of the two she’d been the one chosen to head to the Arsenal and work on the creation of the Severance. She’d also slept with the Hunted Magician while there, which while amusing gossip didn’t do much to tell me about the kind of woman she was.

Aside from one with poor taste in lovers.

Pulling at her threads as I approached her smithy, I got a much closer look at the stories that drove the heart of her. Her chords were all intertwined with her brother’s, dozens of knots ahead where they’d end up killing each other but a short length away, and it all went back to a pair of moments. A teacher – parent also, maybe, but it was hard to tell – had given them a lesson that’d marked them. Something along the lines of ‘the smith makes the blade’, which they had understood very differently. Something they’d done had then led to the death of their teacher, which they bitterly blame each other for.

It’d hardened their differences into philosophies I could make out pretty clearly. Helmut Bauerlein, the brother, now made ‘blades only he could make’. His Name allowed him to craft superbly nuanced enchantments, sorcery-wrought steel like the Lycaonese had not seen in generations. Helmgard, instead, had learned that a smith could ‘make a blade out of anything’. Her path was pure mundane skill, her Name simply allowing her to make blades out of anything in Creation.

It had me curious as to why the Bitter Blacksmith would want or need the Blessed Artificer’s help in making a sword, though the first answer I got when I finally found the smithy had no relation to either woman. Outside the small stone house whose chimney was letting out column of white smoke, a young man was sitting around with all the awkward restlessness so common in those of that age. Arthur Foundling, lately the Knight Errant, was trying to look casual leaning against the wall when he very clearly felt like pacing. I hummed, limping in his direction, and looked deeper.

There was a chord here, binding him to someone inside the smithy. Or some thing , maybe. Wasn’t good enough at reading the differences to tell yet.

The Knight Errant straightened up out of his slouch the moment he noticed me, blue eyes widening in surprise. He had what almost looked like a spasm when he couldn’t seem to decide whether he should salute or bow, settling into a gesture that tried to be both and fell short of either.

“Arthur,” I greeted him. “Or should that be Sir Arthur, these days?”

“I have not been knighted as one of the Broken Bells,” the dark-haired boys seriously replied.

I almost snorted. It was true I’d never taken back my order to Brandon Talbot that nobody was to knight him, but you might say someone had gone above my head for that. Ugh, pun not intended.

“And Hanno’s not a lord,” I said. “Yet people went as far as calling him a prince, not so long ago.”

For that matter, I seriously doubted Hanno of Arwad had actually ever been formally knighted by anyone. Well, anyone mortal anyway. I wasn’t sure I wanted to recognize the Choir of Judgment’s ability to make knights, which made it all the more fortunate I had someone in my corner arguing the matter. As far as I knew, Anaxares the Diplomat was still up there making a racket. Gods bless the madman, at least as many as cursed him.

“I am not Hanno of Arwad,” the Knight Errant firmly said. “And I’ll not deny my Name, but neither will I claim a title I do not hold.”

I found myself smiling. What a brat , I thought, not entirely without fondness. I’d have to see about getting him knighted properly, then: we’d look like right fools if he went around having Knight in his Name with no mundane title matching it.

“I’m sure something must be in the works,” I replied, remaining vague.

I shot a glance at the closed door of the smithy, the faint sound of metal being hammered coming from the inside.

“I take it it’s your sword getting forged in there?” I asked.

He looked faintly embarrassed.

“I was gifted star metal by a friend for my transition from Squire and asked the Blacksmith to make a blade of it,” Arthur admitted. “It proved to be more difficult an undertaking than I’d expected.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“Must be,” I said, “if the Blessed Artificer was pulled in for it.”

He nodded, seeming unsurprised I knew of that.

“They-”

He was interested by a shiver in the air and a flash of Light searing at the threshold under the door. Gods, I would have felt that even without my Name senses. The smoke billowing out the chimney turned even paler, as if ivory had been made into wisps and released towards the sky. And now I knew why Adanna of Smyrna was here.

“She’s heating the furnace with Light,” I stated.

“The Blade of Mercy volunteered for the work,” Arthur said, “but the Blacksmith says the quantity must be perfectly even throughout and only the Artificer’s artefacts can easily accomplish that for long enough.”

I let out a low whistle.

“That’s not the kind of star metal you can buy in markets,” I said. “I’ve seen blades made of the stuff before and they don’t need anywhere near that much work to be made.”

They were popular with nobles for their beauty and lightness relative to average steel, but there was nothing particularly special about them otherwise – just that the ore had fallen from the sky. Some old legends insisted they were a bane to devils and demons, but then there were old legends about like a hundred different materials doing that. In my experiences with their kind, the stabbing tended to be more than important than what you stabbed them with .

“It isn’t,” the Knight Errant confessed. “The Page says it was taken from the stars that fell over Hainaut, sold to him by a fantassin that near burned his hand off taking the stone.”

I went still.

“That,” I slowly said, “is one Hell of a gift.”

A piece of Tariq’s last act, the pilgrim’s star called down on the Enemy. My eye returned to the pale smoke drifting up. No wonder it had taken Light to be forged. When the Grey Pilgrim had cast it down, it had burned so bright in the sky it’d been blinding.

“It is,” Arthur quietly replied. “Gaetan is... perplexing.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“He’s an intolerable arse most of the time,” the Knight Errant elaborated at my unspoken prompting, “but sometimes he just has these surges of gallantry. He’ll take the lash for someone else or toss away riches like they’re nothing. It’d hard to square together.”

“The first time I met Archer, she sucker-punched me when I could barely walk and after she strutted about like she’d won a prize,” I drily told him. “There’s hardly anyone I trust more now, though.”

“I wish he was more like Lady Archer,” Arthur muttered, which was honestly one of the harshest things I’d heard said about someone in quite a while.

“The good doesn’t wash out the bad,” I told him. “No more than the bad washes out the good. It’s on you to decide what part matters most.”

He sighed.

“Jury’s still out,” the dark-haired boy decided. “But it really was a princely gift.”

“No lack of princes, on this side of the Whitecaps,” I easily replied.

That got a smile out of him, as digs at Procer tended to with my countrymen, but the amusement was soon gone and replaced by something more complex. Wariness, guilt? Something else, too.

“You’re sitting on something,” I noted.

He hesitated, though when I cocked an eyebrow he gave in.

“I thought you’d be angry,” the Errant Knight said.

“About?”

He squared his shoulders, and his courage along with it.

“In the Tower, I fought against your plot,” Arthur said. “The one to kill the Empress.”

There was an implicit accusation I didn’t even bother to deny. I had very much been after Malicia’s head that day. And though she was only Alaya these days, I’d not forgotten or forgiven the Night of Knives and all that came afterwards.

One day the time my father had bought her would run out, and I would come to collect.

“You weren’t brought in on the plan,” I said. “You disobeyed no orders by fighting it.”

“I would have anyway,” the hero said, sounding more like a boy confession than a defiant champion of Above.

I studied him, leaning on my staff of yew.

“I would have anyway,” Arthur repeated, “and so part of me feels like I should apologize.”

I cocked my head to the side.

“Did you think on the consequences, before you acted?”

He sharply nodded.

“Do you regret the decision you made?”

“I don’t,” the Knight Errant replied, and this time there was an ember of defiance.

“Then don’t apologize,” I said. “It’s a waste of words.”

I could no longer hear hammering from inside, even when I pricked my ear, only the hiss of vapour. Quenching the blade, were they? Nearly done. My eye found the boy’s.

“The first lesson my father ever taught me,” I said, “was a question.”

My fingers clenched around the haft of dead wood, thinking of the knife I still had strapped against my arm.

“Do you know,” I asked, “what sets apart people who have a Role from people who don’t?”

Arthur shook his head.

“Will,” I echoed. “The belief, deep down, that you know what’s right and that you’ll see it done.”

I met his eyes.

“Do you believe you’ve done the right thing, Arthur Foundling?”

His jaw clenched.

“Yes,” the Knight Errant replied.

“Never apologize for that,” I told him. “When all’s said and done, it’s the only thing you get to keep.”

And I hardly needed to look, to see the chord binding us. Not a teacher and an apprentice, but not entirely like it either. You could learn from people without being seconded to them. I’d learned from Tariq, as both a foe and a friend. I could do worse as a role to play than the Grey Pilgrim, only with more of the grey and less of the pilgrim. The moment hung between us, fragile, and when the door to the smithy creaked open it ended. I glanced at Helmgard Bauerleins’ surprised face and smiled.

“Blacksmith,” I said.

“Lady Warden,” she replied, her Alamans heavily accented. “This is a surprise.”

She looked wary. Wondering if I’d come to paw at her work, perhaps.

“I came looking for the Blessed Artificer,” I said. “Found a little more than that.”

“And finding’s half of your queenship, allegedly,” Adanna of Smyrna cut in, peeking out the door.

The golden eyes behind those spectacles were as startling as ever, that shade so rarely seen outside the Wasteland. The two women were heavily garbed in leather, as was only sensible in a forge.

“We are done, Arthur,” the Bitter Blacksmith said, addressing him directly. “Come have a look.”

She paused, hesitated.

“You as well, Your Excellency, if you wish,” she added.

Not exactly enthusiastic, I noted, but she was staying polite. I was curious enough to enter anyway. There was a strange scent in the air when I entered after Arthur, almost like incense, but I paid it little mind. As the three heroes crowded around the anvil where the blade had been placed I hung back, leaning against the wall, though for all my discretion I availed myself plenty of looking. It was, I’d admit, one of the most exquisite swords I had ever seen. It wasn’t finished yet, neither the guard nor the pommel mounted, but the simple length was strikingly beautiful already.

I’d never seen the like of that metal before: it seemed as if it’d been made of pale smoke, the turns of it fuming down the edge. When you looked at it from the corner of your eye, it gave the illusion that the smoke was still billowing. I knew better than to touch it, cooled or not, and so stayed back as the Errant Knight ran his finger down the length.

“It’s gorgeous,” Arthur quietly said, sounding choked up. “Thank you.”

The Bitter Blacksmith gently smiled, a strange sight on such a rough face.

“You brought me the materials,” Helmgard Bauerlein said. “All I gave you is time and skill, and for a hero I’ll always offer those freely.”

Somehow I doubted her brother would be quite so generous with Below’s champions, I silently noted. Or even that he’d sell them much of anything, when instead he could spend the rest of his life making legacy swords for wealthy nobles and charging them through the nose for it.

“It’s good work,” the Blesser Artificer said, almost grudging.

She paused.

“No, it’s a masterwork,” she continued, shaking her head. “That is no simple blade, Arthur. It will seek out deeds, and before it begins that journey it deserves a name.”

The invitation was clear, but Arthur hesitated. I could understand why: it was a choice that’d likely have consequences rippling out beyond his lifetime. At the heart of that blade, of this moment, I could feel a nascent story. Adanna had told it true: it was blade that would seek deeds.

“A sword like that,” the Knight Errant said, “we call it a legacy blade, back home. The kind you pass down a family line.”

The dark-haired boy smiled, more in sorrow than joy.

“Only I’m an orphan, see,” Arthur Foundling told them. “Just one from a house of a thousand foundlings, all of them my brothers and sisters. And this blade is to be ours, our legacy of foundlings, then it’s not mine to name.”

Blue eyes turned to me.

“There’s already a head to our house,” the orphan quietly said.

My throat caught. The face of both heroines grew cold as they looked at me, but I didn’t care for them at all. It was the other Foundling I looked at, and his gaze was unwavering. His decision had been made and he would not take it back. I pushed off the wall, Mantle of Woe whispering on the floor behind me as my staff rapped against the wood. Feeling the air thicken with Creation’s attention, I leaned over the blade and dared to touch it. It was nearly burning to touch, already no friend of mine, but it awaited a name nonetheless.

I had been given the right, or perhaps the burden.

I looked at the metal like smoke and thought of that night far to the south, when an old man had given everything up as a prayer to a better tomorrow. I’d not loved Tariq Fleetfoot, but I had come to respect in him a way I respected very few people. And now this piece of the star he called down to save us all, the Pilgrim’s Star he had put out of the sky, had come to be forged into a blade. There could only be, I thought, one name for this.

“Peregrine,” I quietly said. “Its name is Peregrine .”

Creation sighed, as if letting out a breath it’d held in, and all the weight that had been pressing down on us faded. I withdrew my fingers before they could be burned, somehow knowing it was about to bite. I found the faces of the three of them hard to read, but it did not matter. I was done here, and Adanna felt as much.

“You asked for me, Warden?” she said.

“Hanno tells me I should have a look at your work,” I said.

She nodded, visibly pleased.

“I will show you to my workshop, then,” Adanna said.

I nodded my goodbye to the Blacksmith, who returned it, and only slowed on my way out when I passed by Arthur – who was still staring at the sword, fascinated.

“Tariq Fleetfoot spent his life trying to make a better world,” I said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “If you’re going to wield a piece of his light, then do him proud.”

Withdrawing my hand, I stepped out of the warm smithy and left silence behind me.

—

The Blessed Artificer’s workshop was cramped and overfull, like she’d crammed two wagons’ worth of goods in a single stall. There were two dozen different lengths of wood I could hardly tell apart, stones ranging from pebbles to emeralds and enough tools to arm three generations of masons and carpenters. Maybe the only place in there that didn’t look like it was waiting on the excuse of a stiff wind to fall on me was the large carving table in the middle, which by the looks of the dirty plates and half-full glasses was also where Adanna ate most days.

She tried to put those away discreetly, and in an act of mercy I pretended not to notice.

What lay on that table, though, commanded my attention and refused to release it. It recognized the bare bones of the artefact, because I’d once seen in Salia: a wooden pillar half a foot wide and seven long, crisscrossed by rods of copper. The carvings on the surface had been sanded off, replaced instead by twisting sequences of glyphs that burned my eye to look at, and something... more had been added. Inside, maybe? I limped closer to the pillar, ignoring the discomfort of standing so near something that gave off Light like it was some kind of preachy handmade sun, and had a look at the bottom.

I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. There was a copper sheath, but it did not cover the sight of the bottom of a stone sculpture that’d been inserted inside the pillar. She must have hollowed it out, carefully enough she didn’t touch the copper rods all the while, and even more carefully inserted the sculpture. I tried to grasp the nature of that sculpture with my Name’s senses, but immediately stepped back with a hiss of pain.

“Fucking Hells,” I quietly said.

“It has been improved, as you can see,” the Blessed Artificer smugly said.

“ Improved ?” I disbelievingly replied. “That thing is a...”

I grimaced.

“Well, not quite a godhead but a passing imitation at least,” I said. “But no, that’s not what you were actually trying to make is it?”

I paused, golden eyes familiar and yet not fixed on me.

“You made an angel,” I said. “A one-heartbeat angel.”

It’d last only for that heartbeat and then be spent, but that was about the strength I could feel in that thing. Ad considering it was giving me a headache to feel it out I wasn’t even sure whether or I was going too low.

“Not an inapt way to put it,” Adanna mused. “Though I have been calling it the Ram.”

My eye narrowed.

“You want to knock down Keter’s gates with it.”

“That is my very intent,” she smiled, baring pale teeth.

“Can you make more?”

She looked away.

“It was a moment on inspiration,” the Artificer admitted. “I have not been able to enter the right mindset since.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. She could call that inspiration if she wanted, but I knew better. Above’s putting a finger on the scales. And part of me was relieved, for Gods – Above and Below – knew we could use the help, but it wasn’t that simple. Looking at the Ram I was not thinking of the breach in Keter’s walls it might become, but instead asking a bleaker question.

How bad was it going to get, for the Heavens to start helping before we’d even begun?

Chapter 52: Mass

“And so the Black Knight, having survived the battle, knelt before Dread Emperor Irritant and addressed him in despair: ‘Your Dreadful Majesty, our cause is lost. What can we do in the face of such utter defeat?’. To this the Emperor answered: ‘Naturally, we must make more enemies.’”

– Extract from Volume IX of the Official Imperial Chronicles

Christophe de Pavanie was training alone.

I wasn’t familiar with the particular drill, but I’d gone through enough of the same sort to recognize what it was for: I’d been a sword and board kind of girl too, back in the day. Might still be, if not for my bad leg and how it made taking on hits a real bad idea. The Mirror Knight was moving in full armour, footwork smoothly moving back and forth as he timed the thrust of the blade to go through throat-height in a fluid killing blow. Then pivots to the side, taking a phantom hit on the shield and cutting the side, only to pivot back and begin the sequence all over again.

There were tracks in the dirt, noticeable enough he must have been at this for hours.

The training grounds were empty except for him and the whole place felt like an island of calm in the sea of the Proceran camps – I could barely even hear soldiers around their cooking fires further out. Though the man’s senses were sharp enough he must have heard my limping gait nearing, he did not stop in his exercises. I was in no great hurry, so instead of interrupting I hoisted myself atop the wooden fence delineating the grounds and waited him out. Another thirteen sequences and finally he stopped, sheathing his sword as he turned towards me.

“Most Named don’t keep up drills,” I called out, curious. “The argument’s that you get more out of spars.”

The Mirror Knight took off the polished silver helm, revealing sweat-soaked light brown hair and a serious face.

“Sidonia offered,” Christophe de Pavanie said, “but I need the drills.”

I cocked my head to the side, considering.

“Because you keep getting stronger,” I guessed.

He nodded.

“If I do not regularly drill my fundamentals, I begin to make mistakes,” the Mirror Knight admitted.

I hadn’t actually thought of that. Supposedly the man got a little tougher and stronger every morning, but my reaction to that rumour had been more one of general disgruntlement at the unfairness of such an aspect more than the practical realities of constantly changing. No wonder he drilled regularly, if he had to adapt to a different grip every three months or so.

“Most of my swordsmanship was taught to me after I got my Name,” I told him. “And my teacher taught it consequently. I notice you’re not using any of the better-known Proceran styles, though.”

“It was an inheritance from my teacher,” the Mirror Knight said.

“One of the duellist schools?” I asked, curious.

Arlesite duellists were famous, though I’d never heard of any who used shields. The green-eyed man snorted.

“Nothing so high-brow, Warden,” Christophe said. “It was my predecessor as the Mirror Knight who taught me when preparing me to take up her duties.”

Huh, I thought, surprised.

“I hadn’t heard of another Mirror Knight in our lifetime,” I said.

“You would not have heard of me either, if not for the Tenth Crusade,” he ruefully replied. “Our charge is to defend the Elfin Dames and it does not involve much travelling about. The Enemy always comes to us, not the other way around.”

“That does tend to be the way,” I sighed, then studied his face. “Were you close?”

His face turned thoughtful.

“I understood her,” Christophe de Pavanie finally said, “perhaps better than I have ever understood anyone. That is not always a kind thing.”

I nodded, understanding perhaps better than he knew. I’d also had a mentor who was a reflection of the ugly as well as the rest.

“I miss her,” he said, with a sincerity that struck. “But her time was finished from the moment I was chosen to succeed her. It’d be ungrateful of me to begrudge her peace.”

I hardly even needed to reach out to lay a finger on the chord, old and faded as it was. Chosen champions, each fighting an opponent and wining. Each fading away in the years that followed, until the Elfin Dames chose a successor and the mantle was passed. I wondered what it was that the lake spirits sat on that needed such protection. Some old horror, no doubt, or one of those wonders that were just as terrible.

“Do you miss it?” I idly asked.

He looked away.

“It was a simpler world,” the Mirror Knight said. “Oaths, duty, an enemy. The paths were straightforward, both the good and the evil.”

“Would that it were always so simple,” I wanly smiled.

“The Grey Pilgrim once chided me for saying the same thing,” Christophe quietly replied. “That making the world black and white was to give away half of Creation to the dark.”

He paused.

“That we could do better.”

“And you agree?”

He looked sad.

“I don’t know,” the Mirror Knight confessed. “In the end, Warden, he was such a sad man.”

My breath caught.

“He was not proud of his work,” Christophe de Pavanie disbelievingly said, shaking his head. “Him, the Peregrine ! All those evils laid to rest, and still he held himself with such sorrow.”

“There are costs to victory,” I said, “and Tariq Fleetfoot was the great victor of his time.”

“It was the look in his eyes that I have grown to fear,” the Mirror Knight said. “The tiredness . And I am slow of thought, Warden, but on that look I have thought for long.”

I balanced my leg against the wooden plank, studying him in the gloom of the spreading dusk.

“And what did you decide?”

“That I do not want to ever have that look,” the man bleakly laughed. “And that mayhaps the first step down that road is to admit that I cannot go back.”

He looked down at his armoured gauntlet, clenching the fingers.

“I have seen too much to be able to fit in that small, simple world again,” the Mirror Knight sadly said. “Sometimes there is no going home.”

“But leaving it,” I replied, “is the only way you get to see beyond the horizon.”

He did not disagree, pushing back a sweaty lock of hair.

“May I ask why you have come, Warden?”

“Curiosity,” I said, fingers closing around my staff.

As to why Hanno would advise me to go and see you.

“And is it sated?” he asked.

I smiled.

“You’ve grown, Mirror Knight,” I said.

And I understood what Hanno saw in him that made him want to trust the Severance to his hand. The man I had faced in the Arsenal had been tempered by the passage of time, by the fires he’d gone through. I could still see the flaws in him, but they no longer threatened to devour him whole.

“Is it really growth,” the man tiredly said, “to simply earn fresh scars?”

“Sometimes, Christophe, I think it’s the only thing there is to earn,” I confessed.

He did not look relieved to hear it, but then he wasn’t meant to. I slid down the fence, landing in the dust, and began to limp out of the training grounds.

“Was that truly all you wanted, Warden?” he called out.

I turned and met his gaze, then inclined my head the slightest bit.

“I look forward to working with you, Mirror Knight,” I told him.

And I found, as I turned my back on him, that I might actually mean the words.

—

Prince Otto Reitzenberg was something of a rising man these days.

He’d begun the Tenth Crusade as the third in line for the Principality of Bremen but over the same bloody evening that’d seen him earn the sobriquet of ‘Redcrown’ he’d shot up the line of succession all the way to princeship. And now he was in line to inherit a great deal more, as Cordelia had not hidden her intention to pass him the crowns of Rhenia and Hannoven when she left to settle in Cardinal. Considering Mathilda Greensteel of Neustria had left no close heirs, Otto Redcrown was most likely going to end up as prince of all Lycaonese when the war ended.

Prince of broken lands in the hands of the dead and a people made penniless refugees, but it would not stay that way forever. The northerners would return home, in time, and do so with both swords and ploughshares strapped to their backs. And they won’t spread out too much at the start, they’ll clear out a few cities and territories, which is why Cordelia’s scheme might just work. After a generation or two of building and fighting together, even if the Lycaonese spread outwards would they still think of themselves as Neustrians or Bremenites? Cordelia had bet that they wouldn’t, that her people would come out of it with the boundaries between them erased.

The dour man didn’t particularly look like a prince set to rule over lands that’d make up about a fifth of the territory of the Principate, though. His dark hair was cut rough and short, his clothes plain. And not the kind of plain that was a subtle boast, precisely tailored and woven: it was badly died woolen shirt he wore, a little too broad around his shoulders, and his hide trousers were worn enough that the seams going down the sides were loosening. He was not handsome, his nose large and almost hooked, but dark eyes and thick eyebrows made him look rather intense.

It was a face naturally made for brooding, I reflected, which seemed like fate as work given his known propensity for it.

Frederic Goethal could not have been more different, from the fair curls to the sunny demeanour, which made their evident closeness all the more eye-catching. The Kingfisher Prince had come decked out in enough silk to compensate for the other royal’s plain clothes twice over, all in the blue and red of his house. They were pretty tight on his body, which was worth a second look I wasn’t too shy about taking. After all I knew from... personal experience he didn’t exactly mind. Vivienne looked like she wanted to elbow me when she noticed, but thankfully we were in front of royals so she had to hold back.

I offered her a pleasant smile that was not smug in the slightest before turning my attention back to the other two. They’d gotten here a little early so Pickler wasn’t there yet – it would have been a feat worthy of a Name to drag her away from the siege preparations a breath earlier than was necessary – so we’d been making light conversation over drinks, but I couldn’t help to notice something a little off about the both of them.

“If you don’t mind my saying,” I began, “the two of you look to be in a rather fine mood.”

Better than I’d expected, given that they should both be aware of the answer we’d gotten from the Kingdom Under.

“It is the news from the north,” Prince Otto said, his Chantant somehow always sounding a little curt.

He was visibly pleased, though. I cocked an eyebrow.

“News?” I asked, flicking a glance at Vivienne.

She shook her head, as much in the dark as I was.

“Before the Ways were shattered, we received word through Salia,” Frederic smiled. “Rhenia yet stands.”

Not the principality, obviously, since it’d pretty much collapsed the moment the undead forced the Rhenian Gates. He meant the capital city of the same name, Cordelia’s seat.

“I’d heard it was under siege,” I ventured.

“It’s Rhenia,” Otto Reitzenberg said, lips twitching. “It fears sieges like a fish fears water.”

“There is fortress dug inside the mountain,” Frederic explained. “The people retreated when the walls were lost.”

“They lost it since,” Otto informed us, “but there’s tunnels that lead to the cavern-keeps.”

“The cavern-keeps,” Vivienne slowly repeated.

“Lost those too, so they collapsed them on top of the Enemy,” Frederic cheerfully said. “Then they retreated to the Old Chasm while the undead dug up the tunnels.”

“The giants used to mine there for ore,” Prince Otto told us. “The stories say the Chasm used to go all the way down to lava, until some of the cliffs fell. The Rhenians burned the bridges behind them and dug in.”

“And they’re still holding?” I asked.

“There’s a secret passage from the Old Chasm to the mountaintop,” Frederic said. “They sent a messenger up there and towards Salia three months ago.”

“They’ll hold,” Otto said, not a speck of doubt in his voice. “They’re Rhenians . By the time the Enemy takes the Old Chasm they’ll have built a fortress atop the mountain.”

I’d often heard that Rhenia was the strongest fortress raised on Calernia by mortal hands, greater even than Hannoven’s famous seven walls and Summerholm’s brutal street-by-street slaughterhouse, but it was only now I was genuinely starting to believe it.

“A stubborn lot these Rhenians, I take it,” I said, cocking an eyebrow.

Otto Redcrown, his mood still the finest I had ever seen of him, went as far as venturing a few bars from a song I did not know. The Kingfisher Prince was the one to add words to the chorus, though.

“I broke your wall, said Old Bones,

So Rhenia built another ,” Frederic Goethal grinned.

The Prince of Bremen joined his voice to the rest, lips twitching.

“I took your keep, said the Rat,

So Rhenia built it higher!

And we’ll never run out of stone,
so you’ll have to try harder!”

I traded an amused glance with Vivienne, which did not go unnoticed. The Lycaonese looked abashed, but Frederic utterly unrepentant.

“Drinking song?” I idly asked.

“An old favourite,” Prince Otto admitted. “Even outside Rhenia only Turn the Season is sung more often.”

I was curious enough to ask about that, always in the market for a good drinking song, but that was when my legionaries announced Pickler. She was sent in without wait, the Sapper-General of Callow eyeing me with mild irritation that turned to confusion as she took in who Viv and I were entertaining. No one rose to greet her, she was by far of the lowest rank in the tent, but she got a round of greetings – she’d worked out in Twilight’s Pass with the two princes for over a year and there seemed to be genuine amity there.

“Take a seat,” I invited. “We were about to begin.”

Pickler slowly nodded.

“The phalanges weren’t clear on what this is about,” she said.

“You’re here to listen,” I simply said.

She looked like she was swallowing a sharp retort at that, but she sat anyway. I glanced at Vivienne, who got the conversation started. As well she should, having handled most of the negotiations for this.

“I was glad to hear of your response to the amended terms,” the Princess said. “I would not press you to formally sign a treaty while we are besieging the Crown of the Dead, but I believe an agreement in principle would be pleasing to all parties.”

“I am ready to sign the formal treaty whenever it is presented writ to me,” Prince Otto bluntly replied. “There is no difference between principle and ink.”

I found myself believing him, to my surprise.

“I appreciate the intended courtesy, Princess Vivienne,” Frederic replied with a smile, “but it is not bending our arm to see this inked. Our word has been given.”

“Then I will see it arranged at the earliest convenience,” Vivienne calmly said. “And tonight we can simply end the talks with a drink.”

“The very best way,” the Kingfisher Prince approved.

I snorted. So did Otto, so I winked at him. He actually looked amused.

“Congratulations are in order,” I said. “Bremen are Brus will be the first crowns west of the Whitecaps to officially invite goblin tribes to settle in their territory.”

At my side, Pickler went still as a stone.

“If only more would come,” Prince Otto groused. “Six will hardly be enough to settle the entire Kaltwend.”

“You should have offered better tax incentives,” Frederic sagely said. “It is how I convinced my tribe to settle in the marshes. Gods know they’ll be rooting out undead for years.”

“All I can fill my treasury with is iron,” Otto Redcrown sourly said.

A sentence that had no business sounding as arresting as it did, I noted. As the talk continued about where the seven tribes that had accepted the offers extended to settle in their lands through the intermediaries of the crown of Callow and the matron-attendants of the Snake Eater Tribe – our own Callowan goblins – I felt Pickler’s breath slow as she listened to the words. It was a comprehensive treaty, for all that Vivienne was refraining from boasts. The goblins were formally recognized as subjects with all attendant rights, the tribes guaranteed certain territories and tax exemptions in exchange for duties agreed-upon.

Mostly taking up arms against the ratlings, mine mountains and work on the Lycaonese great fortresses. Frederic instead wanted his tribe to work on roads as well as the Bruseni mines, which was why he’d also offered generous terms to any former sappers that might want to settle in Brus. He was rather canny for a hero, one of his more attractive qualities.

The talks tonight had been a formality, an end to the negotiations where I’d be present to make it clear that I was endorsing the treaty, so they did not stretch out overlong. After a few drinks the princes took their leave and Vivienne, ever discreet, took a single look at Pickler and I before excusing herself. It left the two of us alone in the tent, Pickler of the High Ridge Tribe’s face unreadable. Those large amber eyes did not blink as she stared at me, her once-smooth skin now creased with wrinkles. Goblins, even those of Matron lines like her, aged so much quicker than humans.

“You did this,” Pickler finally said.

“Vivienne handled most of it,” I said.

“But it was possible,” she said, “because you put your weight behind it.”

I did not deny it, since it was true, but she was putting too much on my shoulders. The Lycaonese had already been interested, it’d just been a question of getting the practicalities of it done. And getting Rozala Malanza to approve, though strictly speaking her approval wasn’t actually needed since princes were free to handle such a matter as they wished. It’d helped, though, and would prevent trouble from the Highest Assembly down the line. The way Vivienne told it, Rozala hadn’t been eager but she’d been disinclined to fight the matter. I expected if there hadn’t been clauses about no goblin munitions being made in Procer she would have been more enthusiastic, but I could only push Praes so far before Chancellor Alaya was forced to fight me.

“When Vivienne had it announced that goblins were free to settle in Callow,” Pickler quietly said, “I though that was the end of it. That it was as far as it would go.”

She grimaced.

“It was already no small thing,” she admitted.

But it wouldn’t have been enough, we both knew. To just open the door in name and then do nothing more with it. To let it end there. To tell the goblins they could go elsewhere but then let the Matrons make sure they never saw it. So it wasn’t what we’d done, because I still remembered that night in the tent the plea she’d made on her knees. They kill us for sport , she’d said, echoing the words of someone we both missed like a limb. Please , she’d asked. If not you, then who?

“You told me,” I quietly said, “that there are fifty thousand more like him in the Eyries. Boys that never got out.”

“And every day,” Pickler murmured, “they die choking in the dark.”

“It’s a box, Pickler,” I told her. “And it only works so long as the Matrons can keep it closed. But after the war, oh after the war...”

No longer. Too many tribes had taken the offer to leave, to settle abroad. It would be impossible for the Matrons to keep it quiet, and from now on every time they raised the whip it would be with the knowledge that now goblins could leave . That the choice was no longer the Matrons or the grave. And I saw that knowledge sink into Pickler, down the marrow of her bones. Saw it burn bright like a candle.

“I cannot repay you for this,” she finally said. “I do not have the years. But anything-”

“You told me,” I said, “that your people don’t believe in debt.”

She smiled, baring teeth like needles.

“For this, Catherine,” Pickler replied, “I wouldlearn.”

“There’s nothing to pay back,” I gently said. “Even if it weren’t the right thing to do, even if there was nothing to gain, I would still have done it.”

I met her eyes.

“Because I do believe in debts,” I said. “Because you’re one of mine, Pickler, and you asked .”

Goblins didn’t really touch others, not unless they were either trying to kill each other or sleep with each other. But her small, spindly fingers found their way into my own and squeezed. I squeezed back. We sat there in silence for a long time, the only sound in the tent our breaths.

“Do you think,” she murmured, “he would be proud?”

I swallowed, finding my throat dry.

“Yeah,” I murmured back. “Yeah, I think he’d be.”

And we sat a little longer still, the two of us and the ghost we hadn’t named, until I had to leave.

There was still one conversation ahead of me tonight.

—

Even now that she was no longer First Prince or Princess of Salia, Cordelia’s tent was heavily guarded. Fortunately my name was among those that were to be ushered in when they arrived, and I wasted no time taking advantage of that.

I was surprised when I saw the drinks on the table – mead – but less so when I recognized the other woman sitting with Cordelia. The resemblance wasn’t strong, but it was there: Agnes Hasenbach shared the clear blue eyes and blond hair of her royal cousin. The Augur always looked a little lost, I’d thought, with those big blue eyes and short bob of hair, but I knew better than to think her foolish or harmless. Oracles were always a little odd, it came with the territory. Besides, tonight she was smiling and more... present than I could ever remember seeing her before. They both rose when I entered the tent, though Agnes needed to be reminded.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” I said.

“It’s all right,” the Augur said. “I saw you coming.”

I eyed her warily.

“Prophecy?”

“The window hole,” Agnes solemnly replied.

Had I just gotten had by Cordelia’s unearthly waif cousin? It was, I grimly thought, certainly looking that way. And the other Hasenbach’s amused quirk of the lips, which we both knew she was allowing to show entirely on purpose , wasn’t helping things.

“Your Excellency,” Cordelia greeted me. “A pleasure.”

“Not an unexpected one, apparently,” I drily said.

Agnes enthusiastically nodded, which honestly made it hard to stay miffed at her.

“I’ll just borrow your cousin for a bit, if you don’t mind,” I told her.

“So long as you put her back when you’re done,” the Augur said.

“Agreeable terms,” I replied, so we shook on it.

Cordelia’s eyes were soft as she followed me to the back of the tent, behind a flap and near to what appeared to be a bathtub and some very nice sleeping robes. Silk and fur, huh. I cocked an eyebrow at her, but she strategically refused to meet my eye. Feeling rather more even than I had until then, I cleared my throat.

“She seems to be doing well,” I said, jerking my head towards the flap.

“She ceased pushing herself after the march on Keter began,” Cordelia said, sounding relieved. “There is no point in the exertion when the Dead King’s power clouds all auguries regarding him.”

Good on her, I thought. We could use the edge, in truth, but I’d heard some stories about what happened to soothsayers that looked a little too close at the Dead King. It didn’t tend to end prettily.

“Glad news,” I said. “Not the only ones for House Hasenbach today, I hear.”

Cordelia’s backed straightened, as if reminded she was yet Prince of Rhenia.

“I expected no less of the capitals,” the blue-eyed princess said. “I saw to it that enough of my subjects too refuge south that we were not gambling it all on Rhenia’s walls, but I have no doubt they will hold until the end.”

“No doubt,” I affably agreed. “I’ve been told Rhenians are a stubborn lot.”

Narrowed eyes.

“If we must,” Cordelia Hasenbach very mildly replied.

I raised my hands in peace, which sadly did seem to entirely appease her. A bloodthirsty lot, these Lycaonese.

“And how did your talks with Prince Otto go?” she asked.

“Like you don’t already know,” I snorted.

“It is polite to pretend,” she serenely replied.

“Treaties were signed,” I said, rolling my eye. “I’ve already leaned on Chancellor Alaya, so it’s pretty much a given that tribes will be settling up north. Who exactly will depend on recruitment after the war, but I wouldn’t surprised if you did end up nabbing some of my sappers after all.”

Vivienne would be settling another three tribes in Callow after the war – Kegan had thrown a fit, I was told, but had bent to the argument that we needed sappers and couldn’t exactly keep bringing them in from Praes – but across the Wasaliti was still a little too close to the Eyries for some. Those that went would do so with my blessing and a bag of coin to help them get started.

I had to spend the Sahelian treasury on something .

“Congratulations,” Cordelia said, sounding honest. “From what I have seen of goblins, they will take well to the spring wars with the ratlings.”

“It’ll be like they never left home,” I drily replied.

Only better, because the rats weren’t anywhere as clever as rival goblin tribes. Given the sheer amount of territory Lycaonese needed to reclaim, their fortresses needing to be rebuilt and their borders in need of skirmishers this was pretty much a match made in the Hells.

“A diplomatic success is heartening, given our other... difficulties in this area,” Cordelia added.

I grimaced. So she’d been told about the dwarves.

“Wasn’t sure you’d been told about that,” I said. “Making sure you were was half the reason I came.”

“The gesture is appreciated,” she assured me, eyes calculating. “And if I were to inquire as to the other half?”

Do you still think we can win , I did not ask, or should I be worrying about the ealamal lighting up tonight? Only it wasn’t fair to ask, or entirely true, so I didn’t. Cordelia didn’t look like she despairing, I thought, but she was so tightly controlled a woman I wasn’t sure I would be able to tell if she were. She wouldn’t pull the trigger early, though, I knew. She wasn’t the impulsive sort. Even if that’s the decision she’ll make, she’ll let us try and fail first.

“I’ll be pushing for an attack tomorrow,” I told her instead, pretending it was that. “We need to take a swing at Keter so we know the kind of opposition we’ll be facing.”

Her face tightened slightly. Hadn’t bought that, huh?

“How bad is it, Catherine?” she quietly asked.

I began to answer, but she raised her hand.

“Not the answer you would give a general or a subordinate,” the fair-haired princess said. “What you truly think.”

I exhaled, passing a hand through my hair.

“We’re cornered,” I admitted. “On parchment we have three weeks, but in my opinion we’ll know within eight days at most whether it’s feasible to take the city with our forces. Past that crest, our strength will be going downhill.”

“But it is not,” Cordelia slowly said, “impossible?”

“No,” I told her, and honestly. “It’ll be damned bloody work, mark my words, but we have a few nasty surprises for him that no army’s ever brought to his gates before. That, and there’s still a ball I tossed up.”

She stared at me flatly, which after coughing into my fist I took as an invitation to elaborate.

“It’s something the Tyrant once said to Hakram,” I said. “A classic heroic trick: when you’re juggling stories, you make sure that when they come to a head the ball you want falling down at just the right moment is the one you threw.”

At the Graveyard, the Grey Pilgrim had sent all the horse of the Grand Alliance into Arcadia under the guidance of the Rogue Sorcerer. He’d been keeping a heroic, overwhelming charge up his sleeve the entire time we’d bee fighting. Sadly for him, Kairos and I had both seen it coming.

“You still have a story up in the air, then,” Cordelia said, following the thread.

More than one, really, but there was no need to lay it out just yet.

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat, let’s leave it at that,” I replied.

Blue eyes studied me.

“You are keeping your cards close to your chest,” she finally said.

“That’s the way this game’s played,” I replied.

She was not pleased, those fair eyebrows creasing, but she’d been in my boots often enough as First Prince not to argue.

“So it is,” Cordelia replied, inclining her head.

I hesitated for a moment, then clapped her shoulder. She looked as surprised as I felt.

“We’ve still got arrows in the quiver,” I said. “Spend time with your cousin while you still can, yeah? Tomorrow it starts and there will be no time for comfort.” A slow, hesitant nod and I drew back. Agnes was emptying some of her cousin’s mead into her own cup, trying to be discreet about it, and I offered an approving grin she guiltily returned. I left the last of the Hasenbachs to their drinks, striding out into the night, and went to a reunion of my own.

Indrani would be waiting, and I wasn’t above taking the advice I’d given Cordelia.

Chapter 53: Motion

“Greatness is a chariot pulled by ghosts: it goes nowhere without deaths, but too many will tear it apart.”

– Argea Theodosian, Sacker of Cities, Tyrant of Helike

It was the bloody middle of the night, so if they didn’t have a good reason for waking me we were going to have a brisk round of hangings.

“I’ll eat their livers,” ‘Drani groaned, pulling the pillow over her head. “Won’t even season it, yue bashtards.”

She was usually better at waking up than me but she’d, uh, put her back into it tonight. We were still both pleasurably sore and exhausted. I blinked away the light from the candle borne by legionary behind the partition in the pavilion, sliding on a robe, and limped out without bothering to hide my irritation. The large orc on the other side coughed, visibly embarrassed and unsure where to look, which was mildly amusing considering that while I was showing skin it wasn’t like I had anything an orc would care to look at. My teeth were sadly herbivorous, I’d been told, and my skin thin as paper.

“There’s a situation, ma’am,” the legionary got out.

“I’d guessed,” I bluntly said. “What kind?”

“Urgent?” he ventured, carefully staring at the quill sharpener on my desk.

I sighed.

“What’s the urgent situation about , sergeant?” I impatiently asked.

“There’s trouble with the drow,” he hastily said. “The Firstborn, I mean. And soldiers.”

My eye narrowed.

“Which Firstborn?”

“The Lord of Silent Steps, ma’am,” he replied. “And another two that are supposed to be scribes.”

It took me a moment to shake out the rest of the sleep, but once I had it fell into place immediately. It’d finally happened, then.

“Send word I’m on my way,” I told the orc.

He could not get out of the tent fast enough. Indrani was somewhat more awake when I returned, though when I told her I needed to go out she decided to gather all the covers to her like a cocoon and pout instead of helping me dress.

“Might not be too long,” I told her as I pulled on my last boot.

She snorted, kissing my clothed shoulder affectionately.

“Yeah, like I’d buy that,” Indrani said. “Take too long and I’m helping myself to your liquor stash, fair warning.”

“Pest,” I fondly replied.

I left her to it, closing the claps on the Mantle of Woe and finding my staff waiting for my hand. The night was oddly pleasant – weather around Keter was largely unchanging, knowing neither winter nor summer – and I took a deep breath as I limped out. With wards to filter the air, there was no need to worry about the poison mists in the camps. Two legionaries were waiting to escort me to the ‘situation’, saluting as I approached, but it was not to them my eye turned. A dark shape moved against the dark sky, lazily gliding until it took a dive towards me. Soldiers cursed and reached for their swords, but I raised a hand to stop them.

Andronike landed on my shoulder, light as a feather, and dug her talons into the cloth of the Mantle.

“Heavy-handed of you to come in person,” I commented.

“The time for subtlety is passed,” the crow replied.

I snorted.

“Sounds like something your sister would say,” I teased. “Where is she, anyway?”

“Bringing to life your little notion,” Andronike said.

Huh. Taking that long?’

“Mastery has proved laborious,” the Eldest Night conceded.

“Worth the investment,” I replied. “We need all the nasty surprises we can get.”

“So Komena said,” the crow sourly replied.

I brushed my mind against the goddess’s, intrigued, and got half a thought in answer. Andronike was convinced her sister was so enthusiastic because she wanted to be able to step on people, which I honestly thought she might be right about. Not that the elder sister was in any position to throw stones.

“Like you don’t also hunt rabbits for sport,” I replied, rolling my eye.

The legionaries had been careful not to stare as I bickered with the massive god-crow made of malevolent shadows, but I saw in my peripheral vision that the two oldest ones – a Soninke captain and his Callowan lieutenant – seemed genuinely indifferent. I glanced at their hips, finding goblin steel blades in the sheaths, and swallowed a smile. Old hands, these two, probably from as far back as Arcadian Campaign. They’d seen me argue with so many unspeakable eldritch abominations it didn’t warrant much interest anymore. My lips twitched.

“All right,” I said, rolling my shoulder and getting an offended squawk from Andronike when I didn’t spare the one she was on, “let’s go have a look. It’s a damned ungodly hour to be at.”

“Ma’am,” the Soninke captain replied, saluting with an amused glint in his eye.

It wasn’t a long walk, or rather it was a shorter walk than it would be in any other part of the ring of camps. Juniper had begun planning out the layout of the siege encampments for the Army of Callow before we even left for Praes, so the ease of movement was only to be expected. High Marshal Nim’s sappers might have matched us if they hadn’t been saddled with the Wasteland’s noble armies with a coat fresh paint slapped on them, but they’d had to wrestle with that headache so we’d come out ahead. Pickler, I suspected, would have gotten quite smug about that.

She’d not taken well how our sappers had gotten regularly outdone by those of the Legions at the Battle of Kala and since grown enthusiastic about getting one over the ‘cousins’.

The soldiers at the heart of the incident weren’t under arrest, having done nothing wrong, but they had been brought to an empty drilling ground surrounded by a few lines of legionaries keeping curious eyes away. The six of them seemed less unsettled by that than the presence of the Firstborn, though. Ivah was seated cross-legged atop a training dummy, silver eyes smiling as it looked down at them, while behind it my scribes stood with watchful eyes: Trokel looked uncertain about all this, but Fania was openly fascinated.

The officer on the scene, a tall Duni captain with a long scar across the throat, was only too happy to turn over the whole mess to me. As she promptly withdrew and pulled back the lines with her, I was left with three Firstborn and six legionaries of the Army of Callow. Andronike shuffled on my shoulder proudly, like a cat dragging back a dead mou- ouch , those fucking talons. I resisted the urge to glare at the Eldest Sister in front of everyone, but it was a narrow thing. Still, looking at my soldiers I had to say the Sisters had been pretty blunt in making their point.

Two humans, two orcs and two goblins would make up the first people outside the Firstborn who could use the Night.

“At ease,” I said, having seen tension rise as the silence lingered. “None of you are up for discipline.”

The highest up was a sergeant, a Callowan woman with the Summerholm look about her.

“Pleased to hear that, ma’am,” she crisply said, glancing at the others. “Am I to understand that everyone here can...”

She trailed off and I cocked an eyebrow.

“Any of you have a reliable trick yet?” I curiously asked.

It was a goblin who stepped forward, hesitant. Small, even by goblin standards, and with the wrinkles that began to accrue past fifteen – nearly halfway through their lifespan, for all but those of Matron lines. He put up his hand and I felt the pull on the Night a heartbeat before a small, flickering ball of black flame erupted above his open palm.

“I was out of matches,” the goblin admitted. “So I cursed and then asked for...”

He glanced at Andronike, pressing a reverent knuckle to his forehead.

“Take and rise,” he fervently said. “The Crows provide.”

How many years did you gain just by becoming able to use the Night? Not so many by a human’s reckoning, I thought, but for him the difference it would make was beyond words. One of the two orcs cleared his throat, the burn marks going down the left side of his face striking even though the helm covered part of them.

“Can’t show it,” he said, “but I see better in the dark now, Warlord. Almost like it’s day.”

I reached out through the Night and found his mark, the small but steady trickle being drawn from the sea. None of the others volunteered anything. Both humans were women and orcs men orcs were half-and-half, but I could not help but notice both goblins were male. Some part of me smile coldly at that, the Beast laughing deep in my bones. Soon enough the Matrons would hear about that, and I could only look forward at how the fear would be keeping them up at night. Night wouldn’t care about their little matriarchal racket. I looked at the two goblins, one aging and the other who couldn’t be older than nine, and the wonder I saw in those yellow eyes felt to me like a sound.

The one a sharper’s fuse made, just after you lit it.

“A good start,” I approved. “You will not be able to do much, at first, but the power can be grown.”

“It can?”

The other human was the one to speak, a young dark-eyed Taghreb who then blushed at having spoken out of turn. I smiled.

“That is the foundational virtue of Night,” I told her. “To prove yourself worthy is to rise.”

I could see the burning curiosity in them at my words – and the deep hunger , in the yet silent female orc and the aging goblin – but I would not hold their hands through this. That was the other side of the coin: Night demanded that you win your own victories. Tossing the first few outside the Firstborn to gain the power into the deep end was not a great notion either, admittedly, but I didn’t have the time to take on pupils. Not six and even less the greater number that would follow in the coming days. Fortunately, as the aging goblin had said ‘the Crows provide’. I glanced at Ivah, who leaped down from the dummy and landed in the dust without a sound.

“This,” I said, “is Ivah of the Losara, the Lord of Silent Steps.”

A shuffle and salutes ensued, with varying degrees of crispness.

“There is no finer Mighty among the Firstborn,” I said, “or any I trust more deeply. It is the duty of the Losara Sigil to keep oaths and hold stewardship of the Night – a duty that now extends to all of you.”

I met its eyes and it offered a shallow bow.

“Honour was given,” Ivah said.

“It was meant,” I honestly said, and the soldiers looked a little lost so I clarified. “Ivah will see to your education in the Night. Orders will be given to your superior officers so you are removed from several of your regular duties so you might take lessons instead.”

A sharp sensation of approval from Andronike, and of satisfaction as well. At my words, but also at me. It’s only fair , I thought at her. They had chosen me as First Under the Night, a stranger to the Firstborn who had changed the ways of their people. Now it was their turn: let Ivah be the stranger bringing about change, working through the first apostles of the Night among the peoples of Calernia. It wasn’t just lessons I was giving Ivah with that assignment: it was getting to shape traditions in the use of Night for all these people, traditions that would echo for decades and perhaps centuries to come. It was a lot of power to give someone, but how could I not trust Ivah? Maybe tomorrow, the Lord of Silent Steps had said as a god was slain and another made anew.

There were some deeds that made distrust seem obscene.

All seemed pleased at the news, not that an order coming from the Queen of Callow was something that left a lot room to refuse, but a closer look told me that the sergeant who’d been the first to break the silence was hesitating. I gestured for her to speak up.

“I don’t want to overstep, Your Majesty,” she carefully said, “but is it really alright? The House of Light...”

“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” I firmly told her.

She looked skeptical, though unwilling to contradict her own queen.

“The age is coming to an end, sergeant,” I told her, the crow on my shoulder spreading her wings. “There is room enough on Calernia for both Light and Night. And if there isn’t...”

Andronike took flight, cawing as the soldiers flinched away.

“I’ll make it,” I said, and spoke the words with cold certainty.

None of them seemed inclined to doubt me after that. I’d meant every word, anyhow. The House Insurgent already tolerated crows being painted on the Army of Callow’s banners, and they would make their peace with Night so long as it was sworn to respectable purposes. As for the priests back home, the so-called House Constant, they’d fall in line. I saw none of them here, with the world on the edge of the knife, and earned them precious little patience from me.

Or from any of the soldiers that’d be coming back home, I’d wager.

I left them in Ivah’s safe hands, limping away from the grounds, and as my escort fell in behind me I considered whether or not I should wake Vivienne to tell her immediately when I was shaken out of my thoughts.

“Your Majesty, if I could have a word?”

I turned and the pin told me what the girl was at a glance, if not who: the painted skeletal hand of the adjunct secretariat. Too young to be anything more than a messenger, I thought, which her chubby cheeks and blond locks at least an inch past what regulations allowed. The secretariat wasn’t part of the Army of Callow, though. Once upon a time they’d been under Hakram alone, though his departure had seen them passed off to Vivienne. She’d left Hakram’s right hand man in command and intervened only to smooth differences between the phalanges and the Jacks – the spies sometimes got in each other’s way – which I considered wise of her.

Much like me, the least thing she needed was more on her plate.

“Message?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Lord Hierophant asks that you attend him immediately,” the girl said. “He is under the threefold wards.”

I stared flatly at the messenger, who blushed under the scrutiny. It wasn’t her fault, Masego had been the one to send her, but now I was morbidly curious.

“Assuming I’d been asleep at this hour like any halfway reasonable person would be,” I said, “what would you have done?”

“Kicked this up to my lieutenant,” the girl honestly replied.

I clapped her shoulder.

“You will go far in life,” I told her just as honestly, which turned the blush incandescent.

The blond hair and faint accent painted a particular picture, thou

“Liessen?” I asked, taking back the hand.

“From Paltridge,” she replied. “It’s a little town near the border with Vale. But I had family in Liesse.”

Her and half of Callow. It’d been the second-largest city in the kingdom and one of the wealthiest.

“Is that how you ended up with that bit of ironwork on?” I asked, glancing at the iron pin.

“I enrolled just before you led the army into the Wasteland,” she proudly said, then deflated. “I, uh, didn’t do well at the Laure training camp but I know Chantant and I’m good with numbers so the adjunct secretariat reached out.”

She paused, a little breathless.

“I wanted to fight Praesi, not run messages,” she admitted, “but it was better than going back to scribe work while the world’s going to shit.”

To my amusement, the blush returned with a vengeance when she realized that she’d just cursed in front of the Queen of Callow. Yeah, she was definitely new to this. Most of the phalanges that served as my guards were former legionaries, and all of them knew I could curse in twice as many languages and thrice as filthily as any of them. I cocked my head to the side, studying her.

“No regrets?”

“It hasn’t been like I thought it’d be,” she admitted. “We fought Praesi but not for long, and now they’re on our side.”

“There’s been Praesi on our side from the start,” I reminded her. “I first raised the Army from the Legions of Terror.”

She shot me a surprised look.

“Those aren’t Praesi ,” the girl told me. “They fight under the Sword and Crown. Everyone knows it’s the High Lords we need to hang, Your Majesty.”

When I was your age , I thought, saying that would have gotten you called a traitor in half the kingdom’s taverns. I looked at the fair-haired girl who couldn’t be older than seventeen, one of the children raised in the shadow of the battles I’d fought since becoming the Squire, and saw in her a seed of what Callow would become. A seed I’d washed Calernian fields in blood to water, that my father had died to grow. I smiled. Can you hear her talk, Father? It might have been just an inch, but we moved the world. We changed the story.

“Maybe one day,” I said. “First we find out if the Confederation of Praes makes for a better neighbour than the Dread Empire did.”

“I’ll buy that when pigs fly,” the girl muttered.

“You’d be surprised what wings can grow on,” I drily replied, thinking of the first time I’d ever met Masego. “Thank you for the message...”

She straightened.

“Alice, Your Majesty,” she told me.

“I might as well go see what my favourite madman wants, since I’m already up,” I said. “You have a good night, Alice.”

She saluted, the angle of it off by large enough a margin I pitied whoever had been her drill instructor, and I left her to her duties. The threefold wards mentioned in the message told me exactly where Zeze was at, since there was only one such set in the entire ring of camps. We’d ripped out the anchor stones from the Arsenal when we shut it down and Roland had led a team to spend almost five months repurposing them into the strongest movable defensive wards in the entire Grand Alliance. We kept all sorts of important assets in there, but the two that stood out were the Severance and the Autumn Crown.

Considering Masego had begun losing interest in the Severance not long after it was forged while Quartered Seasons had been his baby from the start, I could give a good guess as to which the two he’d be at.

Even in the middle of the night the place was heavily guarded, mostly Lycaonese foot with goblins spotters, but I didn’t have to wait long before being escorted past the first layer of wards. I was both known and expected. The Autumn Crown was held in the deepest part of the depository, past the other two layers of wards – I felt my connection to Night weaken, and if the wards were actively turned on me I suspected it might be outright silenced – but the chamber in which it was kept wasn’t all that impressive to look at. From the outside, it was just a large steel cube with seven rings of painted Mavian script wrapping around it.

The door was opened for me by a grizzled old Lycaonese warrior – Neustrian, by the look of the tabard – and I stepped through a threshold, the air pushing back against my movement as if were water. I blinked away the unpleasant sensation as the door closed behind me, leaving me to look at the glowing insides of the cube. Trismegistan runes I was more familiar with burned on what seemed like every spare inch of steel, from ceiling to floor, carved cleanly so that stepping on them would change nothing. The light they let out reminded me of embers, though the colours of it was... colder. Hierophant was standing deeper in, before the Autumn Crown itself.

It was a pretty piece, as fae crowns tended to be. All copper and bronze, worked to look like a circle of roots, but those roots grew small branches and dead leaves that looked incredibly lifelike. Because they were, I realized after a moment. At some point, impossible for my eye to perceive, the metal turned to flora. We’d changed that crown, though, and it showed. Long, thin nails of iron had been hammered into it and jutted out like needles while a closer look revealed precise cuts into the roots and leaves. About a scalpel’s length. A vivisector of miracles, Hierophant had called himself when he first came into his Name.

He’d lived up to the boast.

“Checking in on your work?”

Masego half-turned to look at me, as unsettling a change as the way he now wore his eye cloth: like me, covering only one eye. His own was not dead, still bright with the light of Summer’s sun, but it felt as though we were mirroring each other. If enough of us take wounds, we’ll have half a dozen mirrors to go around.

“Roland assured me it was all secured, but I wanted to see for myself,” Hierophant said.

I hummed, limping closer. The sound of my staff against the steel uncomfortably like a blow.

“So is it?” I asked.

He nodded.

“It will work,” Masego said. “When the Dead King is made to wear it, he will lose all power over the dead.”

“Some might call that a fair trade, given what he’ll get in exchange,” I mused.

“He won’t,” Hierophant said, coldly satisfied.

For the Autumn Crown to be a gift – something that was not an attack, that could not be refused – it needed to be a boon. A boon with a price was allowed, but the gift still had to give Neshamah something. We didn’t want to empower him, of course, but to an extent we had to so there’d been a fine line to walk. The conclusion had been that we should give him something he already held, as much as possible: immortality. The Autumn Crown, after Hierophant’s cuts, now served the purpose of making whoever bore it a fixed point in Creation. He’d known how to do it because he’d spent about a year studying that very thing, back in the day.

I’d been a fixed point as Sovereign of Winter, after all, though most people had simply believed it to be regeneration. In practice, my shape had been fixed and Winter’s power simply filled the mould anew whenever part was damaged.

The Dead King would gain much the same benefit, though for him the real prize would be that we were pretty sure his soul would receive much the same treatment. Should it cut or damaged or anything else at all it would form anew, whole again. Given that the Hidden Horror’s great fear had always been the way he was finite, that every personal loss for him was permanent, the property would make the Autumn Crown enough of a gift that it could not simply be fought off like a curse. Even if the boon came at the price of losing all power over the dead, ending his control over all his armies.

We’d wanted to kill his magic entirely – Masego most of all, for obvious reasons – but we’d been unable to get that right in time. This would have to do. Besides, even if he still had most of his magic we could imprison him in the Twilight Ways if the right person watched over him. Unless, of course, the Ways were broken for good and all my plans were ashes. He didn’t seem interested in volunteering answers and it took me a moment to get the stomach to ask, but I got it out.

“What did you find?” I asked, licking my lips.

“The Ways were destroyed over the surface broadly corresponding to the Kingdom of the Dead,” he said.

“That’s... good, relatively speaking,” I ventured. “Is the break temporary or-”

“Permanent,” Masego bluntly said. “He was... thorough.”

“So the Ways will be dead over the Kingdom of the Dead,” I mused. “Yeah, there’s enough symmetry there I could see fate lending a hand to make it stick.”

“It’s not that simple, Catherine,” he said. “Mortal hands created Twilight, it is imperfect in ways a realm like Arcadia is not. More than that, it is young .”

“Fragile,” I quietly said. “You meant it’s fragile.”

He nodded. I grit my teeth.

“How bad?”

“I cannot be sure,” Hierophant, “not without further study, but I believe the destruction will ripple out. Like cracks on a sheet of ice.”

“Stop dancing around it,” I said. “What are we losing?”

He hesitated.

“Most of it,” Masego said. “Between seven to nine tenths.”

I sucked in a breath.

“You’re sure?” I asked.

“Not immediately,” he specified. “But over the next decade, I believe most of the Twilight Ways will collapse. Only anchored points and their surroundings will be wholly unaffected.”

My eye narrowed.

“The gates,” I said.

“And Liesse, which is the heart of the realm,” he added. “It seems likely there will be other stable pockets I do not know of, spared collapse by happenstance or other reasons, but the only reliable travel through what will remain of Twilight will be from gate to gate.”

I breathed out, feeling out his words with my Name. There was a shape there, I saw with dread. Twilight broken, like its crown, ruined shards of it intertwining with Creation wherever they fell. There would still be other paths than the gates, but few save Named would ever find them and they would be terrifyingly dangerous to tread. For all others who would travel under the twilit sky, there would only be the roads between gates. I passed a hand through my hair, frustrated. That a fucking ritual could undo Tariq’s-

“Ah,” I muttered, the piece falling into place.

Masego cocked an eyebrow.

“We did this to ourselves,” I sighed. “At least in part.”

“It does seem likely the Dead King imitated Akua’s ritual out in the Wasteland, after he knew it possible,” the dark-skinned mage agreed.

“Sure,” I shrugged, “but that’s not the part I mean. When we first made the Twilight Ways, the Grey Pilgrim scarified himself to make them. That’s a heavy weight, Zeze. It’d take more than just a ritual, however good, to undo that.”

“But you resurrected him,” Masego hazarded, looking genuinely interested. “Which changes the balance of the phenomenon.”

“That weakened it, but it might have stuck anyway,” I mused. “He thought he was going to die for good and that matters. He killed the Saint for it, too, and she was probably his closest friend. That’s more weight. No, what actually fucked us was Hainaut.”

“Where he sacrificed himself again,” Masego noted.

“Fate is blind, but also fair in her own way,” I told him. “She doesn’t play favourites: we don’t get to make Tariq’s sacrifice count twice .”

The moment he’d called down that star, the Ways had become fragile. The Dead King wasn’t all powerful, of course, and it seemed like he’d had to rely on second order effects to do most of the heavy lifting when wrecking the realm. Wouldn’t be perfect or instantaneous either. But it’d only become possible at all because of Hainaut and the second time the Peregrine spent his life for the greater good. I grimaced. No good deed went unpunished, huh?

“It hurts us,” I admitted, “but we’re not knocked out of the war. We’ll start to feel the larger consequences after either we’ve won or we’re all dead.”

“It should still be possible to retreat through Arcadia after the siege is ended,” Masego nodded.

Only we can’t drink the water from Arcadia the way we could Twilight’s , I thought, and lack of water would kill us even faster than starvation. There was no need to burden him with that knowledge right now, though. It was not in his power to solve.

“I am sorry I could not offer better news,” he said.

“I’d rather thank you for them not being worse,” I replied, “but either way it’s no fault of yours.”

He studied me for a moment.

“You look tired,” Zeze said. “Get some sleep.”

“Back at you,” I snorted.

I turned away from the crown, making for the door.

“Come on,” I called out. “I bet Indrani’s still up. She’ll want to switch tents if you’re going to bed, so you might as well pick her up on the way.”

I put on a smile that was a tad forced, feeling tired in ways that had little to do with the hour. Maybe it’d all look a little less bleak with a few more hours of sleep into me, I thought, but then maybe it wouldn’t.

Gods knew I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Chapter 54: Animus

“Men should always make grand plans. What better way is there to please the Gods than to make them laugh?”

– Louis Merovins, seventh First Prince of Procer

Ater had been deeply wounded by the siege that brought about the fall of the Tower.

Praes’ capital had not been sacked – though the Clans had cheerfully helped themselves to all the riches in the camps of the High Lords outside the city – but the battle within its walls had arguably been more brutal than your average sack was. The destructive brawls between Named and harsh street-to-street fighting between Praesi defenders and my Army of Callow had been damaging enough, but then my father had unleashed the giant spiders and the High Lords had answered by emptying their arsenal of horrors to turn the tide. When I left Ater for Salia, the number floating around was about a quarter of the citizenry dead and large part of the city uninhabitable.

It wasn’t a bad a butcher’s bill as the Doom or the end of Thalassina, but it had still been a cruel day for innocents.

Still, like most of the many Praesi tragedies it had not come without attendant opportunities. Corpses were raised to lend a hand to the rebuilding, devils summoned to clear out the last spider nests, spellfire unleashed to clear the streets. That’d been only the small part, though, because the finest mages in the once-Empire had been tasked with raising flying fortresses for the war on Keter and given the forbidding of human sacrifice they’d gotten... inventive. With a clear path into the caverns under Ater, the Praesi had gone in and hemmed in the spiders with wards before sacrificing them by the thousands. It wasn’t as good as humans would be, I was told, but quantity had a quality of its own.

The first wave of ‘fortresses’ had been chunks of Ater ripped from the ground, mostly towers and gatehouses. After that it’d gotten trickier, the mages having to gather the sacrificial power before moving it out of the city for a second ritual. There were, to my absolute lack of surprise, a bunch of mostly empty fortresses around Ater whose purpose was largely to wait around until someone would set them aflight. The War College had used them for war games occasionally, though most of the time they’d simply been used as fortified storehouses for whatever Dread Emperors had wanted to keep outside the city.

All in all, there were thirteen flying fortresses that the newly minted Confederation of Praes had brought to the siege. The three largest, the ‘Old Mothers’, were essentially massive flying castles with full garrisons and mage contingents. After that we got the three the rank-and-file had called the ‘Sisters’, smaller castles with strong curtain walls that’d been built explicitly to be raised as flying fortresses. The last seven were nameless, cobbled together from the ruins of Ater. I’d used one in Salia when having my... polite disagreement with Cordelia and the heroes, and two more had been along, but the last four had been slower to follow.

That was because High Marshal Nim and the now-reinstated General Sacker had gotten together to think about the siege of Keter before beginning their march, and they’d come to a realization: about nine tenths of the traditional Legion arsenal was going to be useless when attacking the city.

The Crown of the Dead had a moat in the form of the gaping chasm, but that bloody thing was miles deep at least. Unlike a river moat or a pit a few feet deep, there was no way we could fill it. We weren’t going to be starving out undead , either, which left siege weaponry as the way forward. Only those walls were thicker than any other city’s on Calernia, because the Dead King had nothing but hands and time and enemies to prepare against, so while chipping away at them with catapults and trebuchets was technically possible it would be... difficult.

We had the range, it was true, but even regular city walls took long to crack even under concentrated fire. It would take months of bombardment, if it worked at all, and we didn’t have months to spare. That was without bringing sorcery into the mix, since those walls were all warded to the Hells and they’d be defended by dead mages. No, if we wanted to take the Crown of the Dead before doom came calling then we’d need to storm the walls. More precisely, the gates: the four stone bridges across the chasm were the only ways in and out of Keter.

They were also, naturally, the most heavily defended parts of the ramparts.

Nim and Sacker had considered what an attack on those gates through four funnels with overlapping siege weaponry positions and waiting mage nests would be like and I’d felt their wince all the way from Salia. It’d be a fucking slaughter, exactly the kind of killing floor that Neshamah could use to erode our army into nothing. Their solution to that, instead of finding a way to force the gates quickly, had been to broaden the assault. Which was how I’d come to stand looking at the four constructs the Jacks told me legionaries had taken to calling the ‘Ugly Cousins’.

When not in flight the things looked like some sort of botched stone corridor, but when they began to rise their purpose was suddenly clear: they were siege towers, the kind only Praesi could make. Only since the moat was so wide and deep, they’d ended up looking like some sort of oblique, upwards-sloping hallway. I laid my palm against the stone of the one I stood close to, feeling the sorcery pulsing within even when it was grounded.

“I am told they take almost an hour to get up in the sky.”

I’d heard Chancellor Alaya coming. I’d even heard her dismiss her guards when she got close, though it was only now that she’d addressed me directly I was bothering to turn and face her. She’d gotten older, that was the first thing I noticed. Her once perfect skin had gained some crow’s feet, but it was more than that. Malicia had always been immaculate, perfectly put together even when it was absurd she should be, but that’d been the Name. Alaya of Satus, who was Chancellor of Praes but not Named, was just as mortal as the rest of us.

That meant dust stuck to her clothes now, that light didn’t always offer her the most flattering of angles and the tailored green dress she wore was just that. Tailored. Not cut for her by the very hand of fate. She was still one of the most strikingly beautiful women I had ever met – more beautiful than Akua, even, honestly compelled me to admit – but it was no longer supernatural. She was beauty, now, not the beauty.

“We still have to keep them grounded until the assault,” I replied. “We’ve got the power to spare to keep them in the sky, sure, but up there they wouldn’t be under the protection of our wards.”

And I had no doubt whatsoever that the Dead King would begin taking shots at them the moment he could.

“So they remain asleep until tomorrow,” Chancellor Alaya said.

I grunted, agreeing but displeased about it. I’d told ordered Juniper yesterday to prepare for an assault today, and she had, but that was the Army of Callow. The Legions were able to prepare quickly enough to follow suit, but most other armies were not. For once it wasn’t even Procer that was the worst foot dragger, since the despite Empress Basilia’s best efforts the League armies were still a fucking mess. Their command structure was unified in name only, and apparently Bellerophon’s generals took to instructions like cats to water. Tomorrow morning that was what I’d gotten back.

Frustrating, but going in half-cocked against Neshamah would cost us more than just time.

“So they will,” I said. “I hear the Confederation will be taking the lead on the storming of the walls.”

“We have the assets to make the attempt and High Marshal Nim believes it is sound tactics,” she replied. “Besides, to be the first to bleed will wipe away some of the blemishes on our reputation.”

Blemishes you put , I almost said, but bit my tongue. It was true, but what point was there in saying it?

“You don’t think the assault will succeed,” I noted.

An eyebrow was cocked at me.

“Do you?” she challenged.

“No,” I admitted. “And it’ll be a costly butcher’s bill for the first to poke their head in.”

“So my generals agreed,” the chancellor said. “But someone must take that first step regardless.”

I considered her from the corner of my eye.

“And I’m sure that it’ll be just a coincidence that your auxiliaries take the front,” I said.

The former private armies of the High Lords still had very dubious loyalty to the new regime, for all that their owners had agreed to the dissolution of the Dread Empire and the birth of the Confederation. Even if they were brought into the fold of the Legions of Terror, their loyalties would never be certain enough for the chancellor’s tastes. Bloodying them by making them the first to try Keter’s defences would thin their numbers to something easier for Alaya of Satus to handle.

“Unexpected talk, coming from the woman who brought back forlorn hopes to Callow,” the dark-eyed woman mildly replied.

My jaw clenched.

“You wanted to talk,” I said. “Not show me the fortresses, however impressive. So talk.”

I was pretty sure I knew what this was about, but I saw no need to make it easy on her. The chancellor sighed.

“Your talks with the Procerans have the Council of Matrons up in arms,” she said. “And they are not yet aware that treaties were signed: the talks alone were enough for them to threaten civil war.”

Good on the Jacks for catching that, I thought approvingly. In the report I read while eating breakfast there’d been a note that observers from the Matrons had been hounding the chancellor for meetings over the last week.

“Tragic,” I replied, entirely unsympathetic.

Her face tightened and I got a sliver of satisfaction from having gotten under her skin.

“It is not an empty threat, Your Excellency,” Alaya said. “When tribes begin to migrate, they will fight to preserve their power.”

“And they’ll lose,” I bluntly replied. “Which will only accelerate their decline. The smart ones will realize that and stay out of it, find other ways to keep their tribes under their thumb.”

My bet was isolation. The tribes that lived in the Grey Eyries would close their borders and clamp down on internal trade to prevent word from spreading. It would only work in the short term, though. Sooner or later the seal would break, and then the Matrons would be facing the same dilemma: be less fucking awful or have the people they’re awful to run out on them. Truly the thorniest moral conundrum of our age, with no obvious and easy solution.

“They will not begin with civil war,” the chancellor warned. “First they will send out the Preservers.”

“Right, their little killing squads,” I snorted. “Good luck with that.”

“They will begin by stirring incidents between the settled tribes and the locals, Your Excellency,” Alaya said, “not attempting wholesale slaughter.”

“And when we catch the first lot, Vivienne will have them drawn and quartered in a Laure public square before sending word of it to every ruler on Calernia,” I patiently replied. “What you don’t seem to understand, Chancellor, is that I’m not fucking afraid of the Matrons. Neither are Vivienne and a hardened soldier princes who live on the other side of the continent from the Eyries.”

My gaze hardened as I met hers.

“If they step out of line,” I coldly said, “they will be stepped on .”

If the Council of Matrons needed me to bring down a mountain or two on the heads before the lesson sunk in that they did not own their entire race, then I’d bring down a three just to be sure the message was crystal clear.

“How lightly you think of civil war, when it will not be yours to settle,” Alaya bitterly replied.

“Coming from you ,” I pleasantly replied, “that’s a little rich.”

And then I scoffed, because now she’d gotten me good and angry and for all her flaws the Chancellor of Praes was not a stupid woman. She wouldn’t do it by accident.

“Now tell me what it is you actually want,” I continued, “and figured that riling me up first would help you get.”

Her face went blank, like a mask of clay, and I almost laughed. I wasn’t seventeen anymore and she wasn’t the only schemer I’d ever had to deal with. Cordelia had also made it a point of angering me when we first started talking, since it made me more impulsive. Akua had been the one to pick up on it first, but I’d not forgotten.

“A concession,” Chancellor Alaya said. “So that I might split them in half before conflict erupts.”

“I already threw you a bone,” I replied. “No munitions to be made in Procer, it’s in the treaties.”

“Which as, Princess Vivienne pointed out, will allow Praes and the Tribes to keep control of these goods,” the dark-eyed woman said, then paused. “Or it would, if a workshop was not being built where Liesse once stood whose purpose is to make goblin munitions.”

I kept the grimace off my face. Even after the purges they’d suffered in Callow, the Eyes remained uncomfortably good at their jobs. While the knowledge of how to make munitions was strictly keep within the Grey Eyries and we hadn’t gotten our hands on it, we had sappers that believed they were on the track of how to make them. They wouldn’t be the first, since Akua had once told me the Sahelians were pretty sure devils were one of the ingredients, and Vivienne had agreed that this was very much worth funding. The Army of Callow would lose bite without the munitions and it was a bad position to be dependent on Praes for the providing of them.

Besides, if we did crack the recipe we would crack a monopoly along with it. Callow could make pretty coin, selling the stuff to Procer for use against the ratlings and the dead.

“That would break no treaty,” I said.

“It corners the Matrons enough that they will likely attempt secession again,” Chancellor Alaya said. “And though you have no sympathy for me, Your Excellency, it is not only my legacy that such a thing would threaten.”

My fingers clenched.

“I’m getting tired of repeating myself,” I bit out. “What do you want?”

“Are you familiar,” she said, “with the term ‘cartel’?”

I frowned.

“It’s what you call it when merchants band together to fix the price for something,” I said. “A consortium, only with full control on the goods they’re selling.”

“I would ask that all sales of goblin munitions beyond the Legions of Terror and the Army of Callow be handled entirely by a common trade company,” Chancellor Alaya said, “whose profits would be shared among the owners.”

So that was her angle, I thought. She’d throw parts of the ownerships at a few of the strongest Matrons so they’d get rich and continue backing her against other tribes, turning the goblins against each other instead of all the Tribes against her. A classic Malicia play, especially the part where her office would be one of the owners and would rake in gold as well with very little effort needed to be put in. And the worst part was, it was a good deal for Callow as well. Not only did it help stabilize Praes while it was trying to reform, if the only two existing sources of munitions agreed on a price when selling outside then we couldn’t be played against one another. And with both the chancellorship of Praes and the crown of Callow having a direct stake in the company, even other nations would be wary of trying to strong-arm the company.

It’d make the trade even more profitable than we’d anticipated.

“I’ll consider it,” I said. “Vivienne will be handling that long after I abdicate, so she would need to agree as well.”

But she would, I thought, and from the glint of triumph in Malicia’s eyes – Alaya, I reminded myself, Alaya – she knew it as well. I was only refraining from telling her as much because I still hated her to the bone.

“You know,” I said, “I’d wondered if anything would change when I saw you in person again.”

If I’d hate you less or more , I meant . If I could still look at you and see anything but the reason he got himself killed.

“Did it?” Alaya asked, her indifference too airy to be true.

“No,” I admitted with a soft laugh. “Not a goddamn thing. It’s like we’re still standing on those fucking steps with the Tower burning behind us.”

I clenched my fingers around my staff until the knuckles turned white.

“It’ll always be like that, I think,” I said. “Some hatreds don’t burn out.”

The dark-skinned woman met my eye unflinchingly.

“Oh,” she softly said, “but I understand exactly what you mean. It took two of us to kill him, after all.”

And I wanted to break these perfect white teeth, so rip out her heart and let it fry under the sun, but I still remembered what it had felt like when the knife sunk into him. It was her that’d paved the road to that moment, I would believe that until the day I died, but I wouldn’t deny that in the end it was my hand that’d held the blade. Even if she owned every step that had led us to that murder, it was my hand stained in red.

We were done here, I decided.

“I’ll see you around, Alaya,” I said, eye cold. “Don’t die before I come to collect.”

—

I’d voiced my opinion on war councils that got too large more than once and it seemed that others shared it, since there were relatively few of us around the table. Two for each power, more or less. Lord Yannu and Aquiline Osena for the Dominion, Rozala Malanza and Prince Otto for Procer, Empress Basilia and Nestor Ikaroi for the League, Chancellor Alaya and Hakram for Praes, General Rumena and Ivah for the Empire Ever Dark, myself and the Hellhound for Callow. Twelve people were a lot when you were trying to fit a group to a table in a tavern, but it was positively austere for the war council of a continental alliance. Once upon a time Hanno and Ishaq would have gotten seats as well, but that era was over. I was the Warden, now. There was no need of another voice to speak for Named.

It was a colourful assembly, fit for the stories that would one day be told of this siege. Almost like a painting, I thought.

Careful Yannu Marave looming tall and broad over slender, deadly Aquiline as dour-faced Otto sat excruciatingly careful not to even brush against First Princess Rozala’s swelling pregnant belly regardless of the steel breastplate fitted to it. Empress Basilia and Secretary Nestor leaning close as if scheming, a plain-faced woman of warrior’s build that had carved out an empire and the old, tattooed scholar trying to trap her inside it. Ever-beautiful Alaya of Satus, soberly dressed in green, and the Warlord at her side: a hand of steel and a hand of bone, neither half as dangerous as the mind behind Hakram Deadhand’s calm eyes.

Ivah, a cold flame in the Night whose face was silver on purple, and stooped old Rumena in his obsidian ringmail who’d be able to kill most people in this room without even using a Secret. And to finish it all Juniper and I, the tall marshal in her Army’s plain armour while I kept the Mantle of Woe pulled tight around me.

It was as worthy a company as any, I thought, to chart the course that would either save or bury Calernia. I was not the only one to feel the weight of that on our shoulders, and so there was none of the politicking and pleasantries that would usually accompany the presence of so many influential people in a room. Instead we sat in sparse silence, drinks of cool water being passed, and once everyone was ready the talks began. Rozala spoke up first.

“Reports from our outriders paint what we believe to be a picture of the Dead King’s plans for this campaign,” the First Princess of Procer said. “In every direction undead are gathering streams from the outskirts of the Kingdom of the Dead, forming into massed armies.”

She paused.

“At the moment we have counted four such armies in the process of assembly,” First Princess Rozala said. “One, to our northwest, is a mere forty miles away.”

“Numbers?” I asked.

“Somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand,” Prince Otto briskly replied. “A true army, not the rabble that was routed yesterday.”

“They are gathering around a Crab,” Rozala added. “Perhaps the only one left in the entire Kingdom of the Dead.”

An uplifting thing to hear, until one realized that just meant all the rest were with the armies ravaging Procer. The massive fortress-constructs were rare and we’d thinned out the numbers over the course of the war, but not anywhere near a wipeout.

“I have something in mind to handle the Crab,” I said, earning raised eyebrows. “Our trouble is that those armies need to be pinned down while we take a swing at Keter.”

The Dead King’s plan, as the First Princess had said, was hardly impossible to figure out. Neshamah was going to keep tossing those armies at our camp whenever we tried an assault on Keter and otherwise stay back. Why should he even try to kill us when he could wait us out instead? Every passing day got him closer to victory, as another mile of Procer was devoured and our army’s strength waned from tiredness and growing hunger.

“The other three armies,” Empress Basilia said, “are they fighting fit?”

“Not for days yet, perhaps as much as ten for the largest force,” Rozala replied. “More importantly, all of them are at least two days of march away.”

Considering undead did not need to rest and could walk through the night, closer to one in practice. It was still a significant distance in the sense that none of them could realistically arrive in time to reinforce another if it gave battle near our camp. As a general some part of me was hungry at the potential defeat in detail that the position represented, but that was thinking about this wrong. Sure we might clear them out through a series of pitched battles, but to accomplish that we’d have to abandon the protection of our camp for several days and weaken our forces for only a minor gain.

Beating those armies meant nothing, after all. The only thing that mattered was taking Keter itself and those undead hosts were just expendable distractions.

“So part of our force gives battle,” Basilia said, “while the rest storms the walls.”

Like most Helikean commanders, the empress had an aggressive bent to her tactics. It came from Helike usually being assured of having the better army when fighting with the League or Procer, which made it tempting for its generals to seek decisive battles so the war might be won hard and fast. It was the way she’d waged war to cow her enemies in the south and it’d worked out well for her, though if she tried the same tactics against professional soldiers like the Army or the Legions she was likely to get her teeth kicked in instead. It was not a coincidence that she’d preferred to make a deal with Stygia than try to beat the Spears on the field.

In this case, though, her instincts were spot on.

“Agreed,” I said. “We should take the initiative to catch them in the field instead of letting them come to the camp.”

“The camps are fortified,” Prince Otto pointed out. “With walls and siege artillery positions.”

“We can’t afford to let the Crab get too close,” Lord Yannu replied, shaking his head. “Its presence has the reek of a trap.”

I grunted in approval, receiving a nod of appreciation from the Lord of Alava and returning it. Lord Yannu was a cold customer, but he probably the finest general in the Dominion. Juniper had considered him as much of a headache as Rozala Malanza, when the two of them had been pursuing her in Iserre.

“There’s a reason the Dead King left that particular Crab behind,” I added. “It can’t be needed for army upkeep, not with Keter and its forges so close.”

“It’ll be meant for war,” Hakram agreed, bone fingers clenching. “Best to break it before it gets anywhere near our wards. You have that in hand, then?”

I nodded.

“I’ve been keeping some surprises up my sleeves,” I idly said.

I was a little flattered by the number of wary looks that got me.

“Then we must only choose the forces to send out into the field,” Lady Aquiline said. “I would claim that honour for Levant.”

The other Blood flicked a glance at her, then nodded.

“Our skirmishers will be of no use forcing a wall,” Careful Yannu said. “The Dominion would best serve in battle.”

“Levant’s captains alone will not be enough to face fifty thousand,” Prince Otto said.

Which was the upper bound of what our scouts believed to be gathering to the northwest, but it was not senseless to plan for the worst case. Lycaonese had been taught the hard way to never count on luck tangling with the Hidden Horror.

“Then the Clans will march with them,” Hakram gravelled. “The Confederation’s forces will be key to the assault, but my warriors will be of no use until the city’s cracked open. I would take a third of number lead them out with the Dominion.”

The Clans had sent a little over seventy thousand warriors, all of them fine if somewhat undisciplined foot, so he was proposing to add twenty-three thousand or some to the Dominion’s remaining twenty-seven. About a match in numbers, I noted, though too light on cavalry for my tastes. Basilia seemed to agree.

“I would offer the kataphraktoi to round out the force,” the Empress of Aenia said. “General Pallas has experience working with most of you, she can have the command.”

And she’d officially returned to the fold of Helike, now that Basilia had caught up to her. There was a round of agreement around the table, from Rozala most of all. Between serving as outriders and yesterday’s battle, her own horse was being run ragged. General Rumena caught my eye, but I shook my head.

“We want to keep the surprises up our sleeves as long as possible,” I told it in Crepuscular.

Besides, if the assault went south we were likely to be hit hard in retaliation during the night. If that came to pass we would need the Firstborn at full strength to defend the camps. I received a nod and that was the end of that. The talks continued for another hour, details and plans being laid out, but the bare bones were there.

Tomorrow, the steel came out.

—

Happenstance had offered me one more night than I’d planned for, one last evening before I plunged into war, and I would not waste it. I had given my word and meant to keep it. There was never time, so it would have to be made. I got my hand on a couple of rabbits and put them to roast, sent one of the phalanges to get their hands on few bottles of aragh – not the good stuff but the rough, throat-burning fare that the rank and file drank. Then I sat in the dark and waited, until I heard a gait almost as odd as my own coming close. Hakram came out of the gloom and into the fire’s light, slowly coming to sit by my side. I took out a spit, the rabbit still half raw and entirely without spices, and offered it up. He took it.

Silence hung in the air, thick enough to choke.

“So I hear you’ve fought another god in Serolen,” Hakram suddenly said. “And here I thought you’d finally kicked the habit.”

And just like that, the silence was dead. My shoulders loosened.

“If we’re going to talk about that shitshow,” I said, “you’re cracking open the bottle first.”

He laughed, taking a bite of his rabbit before groping blindly for the aragh.

“So hear me out,” I began, “say you’re a drow looking to become a god instead of your current gods, then the Dead King comes to offer you a hand. You know, just because he’s such a good friend. What do you answer?”

The Warlord mulled on that.

“Pull the other one,” he sagely answered.

“That sort of answer is why you ran out of hands, Hakram,” I reproached. “But hey, at least you’re smarter than someone who called themselves the fucking All-Knowing .”

I got a laugh, a brutal crack about how he hoped they’d taught me how to dodge so I wouldn’t run out of eyes like he had hands, and just like that I knew it was going to be a good night.

—

I went to bed smiling, even knowing what was ahead of me.

Tomb

“Hatred is more reliable than love for even good men may become ingrates but few will renounce a grudge. To make hatred for the sake of being loved is to trade iron for tin.”

– Extract from the treatise “On Rule”, author unknown (widely believed to be Prince Bastien of Arans)

General Rumena’ivedran’ikole had always hated Great Perun.

It was a pustule of a city, once a hole in the floor but later grown fat off tunnel tolls to Holy Tvarigu. And fattened it had, until spilled out of its first cavern to fill three more. Like a greedy worm it devoured stone and soiled the walls, spilling out ever more murals and poetry and shrines and backstabbing ladar that killed each other over possession of said murals, poetry and shrines. Worst of them all were the Kurosiv, the jaklavar who ruled over the snakes and had since their ancestor had the wisdom to kneel to the Twilight Sages when they began the great work of binding together the Firstborn as one.

Kurosiv fancied himself a warrior, though he had never served in any of the Empire’s armies, and Rumena would admit he was fitter for violence than most the snakes. He was also more poisonous than most if his breed, which made it all the more unpleasant than Rumena needed something of him. Jaklavar Kurosiv had insisted on drinks and a game of inic cin as they spoke, as if they were scholar-swords trading flatteries before trading blood, but that was only to be expected from a vain fool that wore family paint as if it was still the Bleakness. Gold and water-black, painted as carefully as if his face were a shrine to the Veiled Gods.

Rumena slapped down his Crow tile by the dark river, though he had neither the Sister nor the Cadaver to give it worth.

“You play impatiently, General Rumena,” Jalkavar Kurosiv said. “Are you in such a great hurry to pass through Perun?”

The Maw tile was slid down by the Flowers he had placed earlier, a strange choice. Even if Kurosiv won the entire quadrant, the Flowers made it worth only a third of the points.

“I am,” General Rumena plainly said. “As I have told you-”

“You are summoned to Tvarigu, yes,” Kurosiv idly said. “Only the Sages have not called for your army as well, have they?”

“They have,” Rumena lied. “It is to be dissolved and used for parts.”

“I would not blame the Sages for such a decision, after the string of defeats in Lidera,” Kurosiv mused. “The first of the colonies, lost to the nerezim! A hard shame to bear, I am sure.”

“A burden I am eager to put down,” General Rumena curtly replied.

The Waters tile propped up the Crow by the dark river. He drew another, the Stone, and hummed. Lucky, it was the strongest tile that did not change.

“As are the Twilight Sages,” Kurosiv smiled. “I am told they have decided to slay you so a more trustworthy general may be granted your soul and learn from your mistakes. Who interesting, knowing this, that you insist your army must follow you to Holy Tvarigu.”

A pause, the smile widened.

“Even more so that the Sages have sent order that your army should pass the walls of Great Perun under no circumstances,” the jaklavar added.

Rumena tensed, but no soldiers flooded the room. Instead the other drow placed the Fire by the Flowers, another worthless tile. The pattern in the quadrant was almost finished.

“You are not powerful enough to oust the Sages alone,” Jalklavar Kurosiv said. “Who is it you stand under, general?”

Ah , the general thought. A snake to the end, loyal to no one but himself.

“Does it matter?” Rumena replied. “If I cannot pass, I must storm Perun. Even if we do not win, you can only lose.”

The Stone went down under the tip of the dragon’s tail, ending and winning the quadrant.

“I have no interest in losses,” Kurosiv said. “Only gains. And what is it that you and your friends offer for my help, General Rumena?”

“Opportunity,” Rumena said.

The jaklavar waited, but no more came. The general did not trust himself to lie and not be seen through. There would be no more empire, after the Sisters were through in Holy Tavrigu. Rumena would not make promises that would not be kept.

“Interesting,” Kurosiv murmured. “You mean to kill them all, then.”

The general’s shoulders tightened again.

“You may pass,” the jaklavar suddenly said.

His surprise must have shown, for the other drow laughed.

“You would undo the great work,” Kurosiv said amusedly. “Return us to the nights of the Bleakness. So why should I stand in your way?”

The painted jaklavar held a tile in his hands, flipping it between his fingers.

“Great Perun is a mighty city,” he said. “Its territories have wealth and armies and food. It will grow even mightier, when the wars of the Bleakness begin again. It seems I gain from your plans, after all.”

But there was a glint in Kurosiv’s eyes, a glint Rumena recognized from officers that wanted to rise quickly and at any cost. The other spoke of might, but he sought more than that. You think to make yourself emperor , Rumena thought. A conceit, but a useful one.

“Then I take my leave,” General Rumena said. “There is a long march ahead. Shall we end the game here?”

“It is already over,” Kurosiv smiled.

He placed down a tile between the Maw and the Fire, still by the Flowers, and Rumena frowned. The Izmej? It was a middle tile, no worth much outside of some obscure pairings and tripartites.

“It the rule in Perun that the Izmej, when touched by Fire and Flowers, makes the dark river worth no points,” Kurosiv said. “It appears there are no longer enough tiles for you to be able to win, general.”

“I know the of half the cities in the empire,” Rumena said, “and never have I seen this one before.”

Kurosiv smiled at the Izmej tiled, then at the general.

“Why would I care,” he asked, “to play by anyone else’s rules?”

—

After the Night fell, madness spread across the Ever Dark.

The Gloom kept the nerezim out but all that meant was that the Firstborn were trapped with themselves. Angry, afraid, lost. And as the word spread that Night could be taken from others, that killing allowed one to rise, drow turned on drow. This Sve Noc – who all saw in their dreams, knew to be the deities of the nightmare – did not intervene against. It was the... ambitious they sent their captains against, Rumena among them.

When Cedna tried to devour all the people of Great Ilisiv, Rumena was sent to wade through the rivers of blood and put her down. The fools were not grateful for it. Mighty Cedna , they wept for her . She whose might would have saved us all. When they threw rocks General Rumena ignored it, but when knives came out there was no choice. A fresh river of blood flowed, and Night flowed into him. Sometimes he saw himself reflected on water and was surprised.

In Arov he slew three kings and their queen, ending in the cradle the empire they claimed they would raise. In Jenen he buried three hundred who had once been mages and now called themselves priests of the Veiled Gods, claiming Sve Noc to be nothing but devils. Their followers were few, but rabid. In Taslawa he smashed the Victorious Honoured Northern Army, whose general he had once called a friend. She had emptied too many cities to be forgiven. And with every victory General Rumena grew, swelled with Night even as the army turned to dust.

Soldiers grew old and died in their armour, snuffed out by time between victories, but Rumena did not age. They stayed the same.

Komena spoke in their dreams, and on they went. To follow the plan, to ensure the survival of the Firstborn. To keep the bargain with the Veiled Gods. It was twenty years and nine, until they saw Kurosiv again. Mighty Kurosiv, they were now called, for all the mighty of the Bleakness come again wore their might as the greatest of all titles. King of Perun and Korodor, but to reach for Ratia as well had been too much greed. Rumena caught their army in the back before it could rout the Ratians and drove it into Ratian spears without mercy. Slaughter to the last, to end the kingdom, until the last was Kurosiv themselves.

They lay broken on the ground, their kingdom broken around them, and rasped out breaths. They wore jewelry of emeralds and gold, so much and so thick it was almost armour of its own. Silver eyes fluttered open as Rumena approached.

“Ah, the Youngest Night’s favourite,” Kurosiv laughed. “An honour, that she would send you after me.”

“You overstepped,” Rumena said, shaking their head.

“Because some petty witches say I did?” Kurosiv scorned. “They are not gods of mine.”

“Yet you use their Night,” the general said.

“Not theirs,” Kurosiv said. “This, of all things, I know. Their secrets are not as guarded as they think.”

Komena murmured anger. Death, but first an example. Rumena did not disagree. It had been a fierce battle, fierce enough that their army might not ever recover. They reached for the crown, for the necklaces and rings and jewels, and Night flared. Gold dripped on Kurosiv and they screamed, screamed as the paint they had worn long before the customs of the Bleakness returned was painted anew in molten gold. Only when it had begun to cool did Rumena’s blade rise.

“They’ll use you until you break, you pathetic fool,” Kurosiv rasped.

“What worth are the words of the dead?” Rumena shrugged.

“I won’t die,” Mighty Kurosiv laughed. “I am the izmej the heart of the tiles, general . I am not so easy to end.”

“You are an eight year snake,” General Rumena replied. “And if you return, I will slay you until you stay dead.”

—

It was a hundred years before Rumena saw Kurosiv again.

It had learned patience and with it discretion, but none could escape the gazes of Sve Noc. Neither were the same when they met again. Rumena was general no longer: a sigil was not an army, even if it kept the old ranks like children playing. And Kurosiv was no king, no jaklavar. It was a scavenger, a carrion thing, and its sigil little better. They skulked through the Outer Rings, devouring weak sigils and killing each other when none were there to fight. Rumena did not question the orders of Sve Noc, but it had not understood why it had been sent to slay Kurosiv until it saw the Secret.

A handful of Kurosiv had been caught in a tunnel, brought to camp, and when they told all they knew they were slain. Only not all of the Night stayed to be harvested. A portion... disappeared. Like a bird flying home. Kurosiv had branded its sigil with a Secret, given them power, but when they perished that power returned to it and more.

“Leech,” Rumena accused when it caught up to the Kurosiv Sigil, cornered them near Loklava. “You are nothing but a leech.”

“I am the inheritor of the Empire Ever Dark,” Kurosiv the Leech laughed, fighting better than it ever had as its sigil was slaughtered around it.

But not good enough. Once more Rumena stood over a broken body, the two of them surrounded by corpses, and it raised a blade.

“How many tombs will you make me, Rumena?” Kurosiv asked, sounding nothing more than bored.

“As many as it takes,” Rumena replied, and the sword came down.

—

A century and a half passed, somehow in the blink of an eye.

The nights, the years, they no longer mattered. Rumena could hardly remember the names of its sigil, most of the time. They came and went so quickly. Only those who lasted for decades were worth the efforts. The Rumena Sigil was a bitter thing for it, but a pale shadow of the army it had once commanded. But there were no more armies in the Ever Dark. Not enough food, not enough forges – some madman was trying to kill all smiths to hoard the Secret – not enough trust. It was rare that one of the rylleh tried to kill it, but it had happened.

Rumena yet remembered a time where the title had been a rank, where to raise a hand at a superior officer would have seen you drowned in tar.

Yet it still marched, for it had sworn and though this was the work of the damned Sve Noc were a salvation, however harsh. Better the remnant of a remnant than nothing at all – and one day, they would know enough to end it. To slip the noose the Veiled Gods had slid around their necks, naming it a favour. Until that day had come, Rumena would not rest. The familiar faces that remained were few and most of them enemies, but there was a strange comfort in that. Rumena was almost pleased, when Kurosiv emerged again.

Its army was little more than rabble of nisi, but it was a great rabble. Thousands died against the walls of Great Perun, routing and returning to the slaughter in waves, but the city held. The Leech would not care, Rumena knew. It grew from every defeat, swelled from the blood whoever’s it might be. Perun’s sigils buckled under the numbers – and treachery, for the cabal made in defence of the city was rent with hatreds – but Rumena thought it might not fallen even if it had not come. For the second time, Rumena’s warriors caught Kurosiv’s army from behind and broke them on another force.

The Leech was waiting, and the fight closer than the last. Rumena’s ring mail would have to be knitted anew and it had been forced to grow back an arm. Still, in the end Kurosiv lay broken on the ground surrounded by corpses and shattered hopes.

“I had not thought you would return here,” Rumena said.

“Call it sentimentality,” Kurosiv croaked out, for it was missing half its lungs. “If I was to take a prize, why not where it all began?”

“You will be hunted wherever you go,” Rumena said, “until you renounce the Secret you hold.”

“Secrets have kept me alive,” the Leech said. “Despite the will of your broken idols. I will survive them.”

“No,” Rumena replied, “you won’t.”

And the sword came down.

—

The fourth time Kurosiv’s sigil had grown large enough to take a city in the Outer Rings, Great Veroky.

The Kurosiv had destroyed or suborned all other sigils for days around the city, then seeded traps all over the tunnels that led to it. Rumena led its sigil through, fighting constant ambushes from the rear and sides while losing dozens a day to traps of the like it had not seen in centuries. Several times rylleh tried to kill it in its sleep to end the campaign, for the sigil was not glad of the fight. There was little Night to gain, and too many had died already.

Fighting to take great Veroky was even harsher. Entire swaths of the city were burned or collapsed to thin out Rumena’s sigil, Kurosiv spending nisi and dzulu like a spendthrift to make corpses. The Mighty awaiting in the inner sanctum were more powerful than expected, especially the rylleh, and Rumena had to settle the fight itself before facing Kurosiv alone. The Leech had waited on a throne, amused, as it all happened. It only rose when Rumena approached.

“You have learned,” the once-general said.

“That is the greatness of Night,” the Leech said. “One can learn anything at all. And I will learn it all, Rumena, however long it might take.”

They fought. They had gained in Secrets since their last conflict, and Rumena learned the Secret of Stone. If it had not, it may well have lost. Kurosiv still had little skill that was not borrowed, but it had gained in strength. Great Veroky shattered around them, but in the end once more Kurosiv lay broken among a sea of corpses.

“Do you not tire of this?” Kurosiv rasped.

“I no longer tire, Kurosiv,” Rumena admitted. “I am simply tired.”

How could one tire without having been rested? It had been a long time since Rumena knew rest.

“One day we will share a tomb, I think,” Kurosiv mused.

“We already do,” Rumena replied. “What is the Everdark, if not that?”

And the sword came down.

—

It was only fifty years before the Kurosiv returned, and only then did Rumena understand the trap it had fallen for in Great Veroky.

Its sigil had been gutted taking the city, almost broken, but the Leech did not need years to assemble a sigil again. It only needed a mob to empower and spend. The Rumena Sigil was too weak and too few, so Rumena attacked another sigil and slew the sigil holder to claim it. The Mighty that had knelt were treacherous and unruly, however, and when Kurosiv’s sigil appeared in Great Iskal the battle went bad. Some fled, others turned traitor, and in the end Rumena had to tear through the sigil along after its own ended. And at the end of that harrowing battle Kurosiv waited, smiling.

Rumena lost an arm and a leg, but these could be grown again. The sword that Kurosiv shattered with its own would not. They both fell, bodies broken and bloodied, but Rumena made itself crawl. Kurosiv could not, all its limbs having been ripped off by hand.

“Four times you have slain me, general,” Kurosiv said. “Are you not yet tired of trying? It won’t be enough.”

“You are right,” Rumena replied. “Four times was not nearly enough.”

A fist went through the Leech’s throat, and it was five.

—

The sixth time they fought, drow no longer called Kurosiv ‘the Leech’.

The All-Knowing, they now praised it, for it knew Secrets other Firstborn had not even dreamed of. Rumena had taken its time, assembled a sigil that was not cobbled together like the last, but it was not enough. Kurosiv gained power too quickly, grew too fast and deep to be checked. The fight was lost, faster and more starkly than last time. Rumena was forced to use the Secret of Stone to bury the Kurosiv Sigil and half of Great Zorwan with it. Kurosiv came out to fight with a Secret of its own, but Rumena had been waiting for it.

It collapsed the entire cavern atop Kurosiv and Great Zorwan, then sealed it deep.

It was dead again, Rumena stayed long enough to make sure, but this time a city of the Ever Dark had been lost.

There might not be a seventh time.

—

The seventh time it was Kurosiv All-Knowing and its sigil that came for it, not the other way around.

Rumena’s sigil numbered four hundred and eleven, which it decided to spend a few decades to train to fight Kurosiv as a single force before expanding the sigil into a strike force. Kurosiv brought a mob that it threw at the Rumena Sigils in waves until they had all drowned. All them were dead before an hour passed.

“Did you know,” Kurosiv said after, “that they’ve taken to calling you the Tomb-Maker, since Great Zorwan?”

“It does not matter,” Rumena said.

“It does,” Kurosiv smiled. “You killed a city, Rumena. Even those sigils that were not fighting you. Now all these Mighty shiver to think they share the same fate. There are many ways to cheat fire and poison, general, but burial? Oh, all of them fear that .”

The once-general saw the trap that it had, once more, fallen into.

“You founded a cabal against me,” Rumena said.

“All will hunt you, if you remain in the Inner Ring,” Kurosiv laughed. “There is only death and exile ahead.”

“It will not save you,” Rumena said. “Not here, not today.”

“Try me,” Kurosiv the All-Knowing said.

It lasted a day, the fight. Three hours in they were the only Firstborn alive in the cavern, but neither slowed. Rumena spent every Secret it had learned since the Fall of Night, even those it had kept for moments of despair, but it was not enough. Kurosiv had learned too many tricks, too many outs. So Rumena did the only thing it still could. It pulled down the cavern on the both of them, Kurosiv triumphantly laughing all the while.

“There,” the Leech happily said. “Have your seventh tomb, Rumena. There will not be another.”

Perhaps not, Rumena thought. For now a cabal that spanned the most dangerous of the Inner Ring would begin hunting it. It could not afford another such fight with Kurosiv, for even if it won the other Mighty would slay it in the aftermath.

“You are still only a snake, Kurosiv,” the Tomb-Maker replied, shaking its head. “And when I have my eight, you will not rise from it.”

Darkness swallowed them both, the cavern falling.

—

The day after, Rumena began to walk towards the Outer Rings as hunters hurried in is trail. Great Strycht, it recalled, had once been a jewel of the empire. Perhaps it was time to see if any of the beauty yet remained and the Tomb-Maker might, at last, know some measure of rest.

Until Sve Noc called again.

Interlude: Reputation

“Reputation is in the hand of others, but honour only in yours.”

– Levantine saying

Moro Ifriqui squinted through the Baalite eye at the horizon, then put it down to pat the neck of his Segovian shortmane. A beautiful beast, though he had never named her, and from a breed that the Brigand’s Blood had been riding for more than a century. The Segovians were Procerans, but they were also old allies against the princes Orense. They had long traded fine horses and steel to Vaccei at generous prices so that their common enemy would continue to suffer raids at the southern border.

“Anything?” Siraj asked.

Moro’s younger brother looked wary, as he often did these days. It had not yet strayed into cowardice so he had not spoken of it, but he would have to if the men noticed. The heir to Vaccei felt for his brother, who only wanted to return to his wife and daughters, but the Brigand’s Blood could not show weakness. Theirs were a hard people, and those who ruled over them must be harder still.

“Not yet,” Moro said. “The dead send no vanguard.”

None that he could see, anyhow. The poison clouds obscured much of the view.

“Would that Yannu Marave did the same,” Siraj sighed.

Moro sent his brother a sharp look and the younger man – only by two years, but younger still – hurriedly straightened. None of the riders come with them had been close enough to hear, but it had been a risk.

“There will be honour to be found in the shield wall, vanguard or not,” Moro evenly said.

“I await it eagerly,” Siraj replied just as evenly. “Mayhaps I will even take a Revenant’s head, tug honour my way instead of yours for once.”

Moro nodded, satisfied, and guided his horse closer to his brother’s.

“Mother will have you commanding the archers,” he murmured. “You will hold them in your arms again, Siraj.”

The younger man grimaced, twisting his face paint: umber brown and basil green, the Vengeful Brigand’s own colours.

“It is not the dead that worry me,” Siraj said, leaning closer and lowering his voice. “What Mother plans...”

Moro’s jaw tightened.

“It is too late to hesitate,” he replied. “The order has already been given.”

A small cut and a quick poison. In the chaos of the fight neither be noticed. It is necessary , Moro reminded himself. For our Blood, for our family. It was a grim business, but grim was the business of the Brigand’s Blood. Doing anything it took was how they’d survived without bending to Tartessos or Malaga when both were stronger. Poison, night ambushes, killings without honour. Sometimes even bargains with dark powers. Mother had never admitted outright, but she’d hinted enough he was sure the rumours about having paid the Marauder to kill Aquiline Osena’s older brother were true.

“If we’re caught, it is the end of us,” Siraj murmured.

“If we do nothing,” Moro tiredly said, “it is the end of us as well. Or do you think the Osena will end our blood feud after they claim the Tattered Throne with the Tanja?”

Siraj grimaced again, a silent concession. Razin Tanja was no enemy, but neither was he a friend. And with him so obviously taken with his betrothed, the old Ifriqui game of playing Malaga against Tartessos would find no purchase.

“Stay out of it and keep your silence, brother,” Moro said, leaning close. “I’ll do what needs to be done so you can go home to your family.”

“You’re my family too, Moro,” Siraj softly replied.

Part of him ached to pull his brother close, to let him know it would be all right, but he knew he could not. Eyes were watching. Eyes like poison, heart like stone , the Anthem of Smoke went. By his hand a thousand graves sown. Honour to the Blood, Moro reminded himself. He was a son of Vaccei, and there weakness was death.

“Then listen to me,” he replied.

Shaking his head, he carefully returned the Baalite eye to its leather sheath before glancing at his brother.

“Return to Mother,” Moro ordered. “Tell her the dead advance without vanguard and I am riding to report this to Lord Marave personally as a courtesy.”

She would know what it meant. He was, after all, following Itima Ifriqui’s plan.

—

Yannu hated the smell here.

Even after the Lanterns burned the poison out of the air, even through the cloth mask, the Lord of Alava could smell a residual stench in the air. One not unlike the smell near the hill mines, the kind that stayed against the roof of your mouth and tasted of blood. He glanced at Rima, seeing that under the cloth she was scowling as well. Of all his cousins he had long liked Rima best, ever since they were children playing together in the grass. Though a Marave in name she was too far from the main line to be considered as his successor, but he had brought her up as much as he could when he came lord of Alava. She was the captain of his sworn swords, now, and the many scars she’d taken guarding his back had proved his trust to be without error.

“Do you remember,” the Lord of Alava said, “the first time we ever saw the mines?”

Rima’s scowl deepened, pulling at the scar that went through her left eyebrow. The red of it was just a shade different than the red of the Marave colours, though she was careful never to paint the ashen stipes close so it would not stand out.

“I remember thinking they were foul as Below’s asshole,” Rima said, “and that only a devil would send anyone in those pits.”

“That makes me a devil, then,” Yannu grunted.

“We are what we are,” Rima shrugged, unconcerned.

He’d hated those mines too, as a boy. The sight of men and women going down into the pits to break their bodies breaking stone so ore could be ripped out of the earth had disgusted him. Yannu had never thought to inherit Alava as a boy, for though his great-aunt Sintra had named his father heir he had an older sister. But he had thought that when she became Lady of Alava he might speak to her of the mines and quarries. Of closing them, perhaps. Then a wound gone bad during an honour war with Malaga had taken her a year before his father fell to old age and Yannu Marava, Lord of Alava, had learned a bitter lesson.

His lands were known for orchards and cattle, but they alone were not enough for Alava to stand. Malaga had cattle herds as well and Levante’s orchards almost as fine. It was the wealth hidden in the hills, the ores and the stone, that kept Alava’s warriors in steel and the people fed through cattle-fevers and lean seasons. Mines and quarries were his blood’s backbone, and to close them would be as breaking his own back. He had done what he could, sending prisoners to work instead of men of honour, but never closed a single one. The memory of that added an intimacy to his distaste for the scent, though the smell was not the only thing lately that had left a foul taste in the mouth.

He glanced to the east, where the banners of Tartessos and Malaga were raised together. The eastern flank of the column was shared by the warriors of the Slayer and Binder’s blood. Rima followed his gaze without difficulty – she was even taller than him, though slimmer in build.

“The banners are nothing,” his cousin said. “A gesture. It’s the shield wall that worries me, Yannu. No one else has blended companies in our lifetime.”

“They do the same with their skirmishers,” Yannu grimly said.

Before going east into Praes, the betrothed pair had kept their captains separate. Malaga’s warriors under Malagan captains, Tartessos’ under their own. No longer. Warriors of both lands served under captains of either. Though Razin Tanja had claimed the measure had come from the losses in the Wasteland, that it had been simpler to blend companies than be forced to disband some by insistence on keeping sworn warriors separate, Yannu knew it to be an excuse. The two youngbloods were tightening their alliance, getting their warriors used to fighting as one host.

And so those banners raised together to the east were one of the most dangerous things Yannu Marave had ever seen.

“You could have split them,” Rima said. “You have the right.”

He did. Lord Yannu Marave held command over all captains of the Dominion in this battle, twenty-seven thousand warriors marching in a loose column across the great dusty plains around Keter. Land that men called the Ossuary, after the many armies had had died here only to rise again as a host of bones.

“It would have been a mistake,” Careful Yannu said. “I do not hold the only command on the field, Rima. The Warlord and General Pallas would have seen through my reasons and word spread. That is more dangerous to us than leaving them together.”

Too many people already had eyes on the Dominion. Yannu had been pleased of Rozala Malanza’s coronation as First Princess, for their years of sharing a front had ensured he was closest to her of the Blood much as Itima Ifriqui had once been closest to First Prince Cordelia, but it was clear she had no intention to involve Procer in Levant’s affairs after the war. It was the League that troubled him, for Empress Basilia was already making advances. She wanted the League of Free Cities to fill the void the Thalassocracy had left as the Dominion’s closest ally and sign defence pacts against the Principate.

For such pacts to be signed there needed to be someone seated on the Tattered Throne, and that meant Basilia Katopodis had to gain in securing a quick succession should she be given an opening – and it would not be the Champion’s Blood she backed, if it came to that.

Yannu would have liked to bargain with Callow, but he could not. The Black Queen was said to be fond of Razin and Aquiline, even rumoured to call them ‘her lordlings’ in council. She had even ensured they stood for Levant at the talks with the Dread Empire, an honour that had once belonged only to those of the Pilgrim’s Blood. If she was brought in, where her favour would lie was clear as springwater. No, Yannu must keep other powers out of the matter at all costs: the only one likely to aid his cause had no hunger for getting involved. And that meant giving no excuse for the rest to involved themselves.

An excuse like weakening the Dominion’s fighting strength because of internal matters.

“They did not fight me when I sought the command, Rima,” Yannu continued. “That says much.”

It meant neither Razin Tanja nor Aquiline had thought it worth a quarrel to have either of their names attached to a great battle against the dead instead of his. Worse, Yannu found he did not disagree with their decision.

The two of them had accolades enough to their name they did not need to take risks to earn more. They’d fought well before and during the great offensive in Hainaut, ending in the battle at the capital where Lord Razin – the weakest reputation of the two – was said to have faced a Scourge and lived. Since then the Black Queen had dragged them east into her campaign to settle Praes, where it was said they had fought with distinction at the Battle of Kala. After they had stood for Levant at the Tower’s fall and the talks that followed, speaking for all of the Dominion as neither the Champion’s or the Brigand’s Blood ever had.

Most unsettling, though, was the distant amiability with the Barrow Sword. They’d pushed hard for the Bestowed to be given a chance to earn a place in the Rolls in the service of the Dominion, which looked to Careful Yannu like an alliance in the making.

“They’re looking past the battles here,” Rima grunted in agreement. “The boy, that. Aquiline’s a fine killer but she thinks in blood and prize heads. Tanja’s as clever as his father was.”

And nowhere as proud, Yannu thought, which made him more dangerous. As Rima had grasped, they were preparing for the days after Keter, he understood, for what would come after the war. When the captains and their warriors returned home and the truce birthed by Cordelia Hasenbach came at an end. There would be blood, that much was certain, for the Tattered Throne stood without any Isbili left to claim it for the first time since the founding of the Dominion, coming with it the prize of rule over Levante: the largest, wealthiest city in all of Levant. Yannu knew it would come to war, for the heads of two great lines of the Blood were set to wed and with the Isbili dust there could be no better bid for the Tattered Throne than such an alliance.

And he had no intention of letting them make of the Dominion their kingdom.

There was noise behind him, so Yannu reined in his horse and glanced at Rima. She snorted and went to have a look, leaving the Lord of Alava to stare at the western flank of the marching column. There his own warriors and Vaccei’s marched, distanced and under their own captains. Further west the great glittering snake that was the Clans under the Warlord was keeping up with his own host, while the thick of cataphracts under General Pallas screened the sides of both armies as they advanced. Rima returned quick enough he did not have time to grow bored by the sight.

“Moro Ifriqui’s back from the scouting trip,” she said. “Coming to report in person.”

“Not necessary,” Yannu frowned.

“The report, the man or the entire lot of them?” Rima drily replied.

He did not answer. Like most Alavans his cousin cared little for the Ifriqui, even less so now that his talks with them had come to nothing. His attempts to bind the Champion’s Blood to the Brigand’s in answer had been frustratingly unsuccessful. Yannu himself kept only to men, a preference shared by none of Itima’s sons – the oldest of which, Moro, was over a decade younger than him anyhow – and though both lines had other kin the ages did not align. Itima’s eldest granddaughter was three years old too young for any of his nephews, and though her youngest son was still unwed he was in his twenties while Yannu’s oldest niece was twelve.

Matches further from the main line could be made, but to what purpose? They could not bind an alliance or hope to eclipse the prestige of a wedding between the Lady of Tartessos and the Lord of Malaga. That left their alliance one of circumstance, held together only by common enemies.

“They are allies still,” the Lord of Alava finally said. “And have reason to remain so.”

Itima and Aquiline hated each other like poison over the matter of the deaths of the Osena’s brothers, so the Lady of Vaccei had much to fear from her enemy’s ascension. Yannu himself had slain Akil Tanja in an honour duel, which would make Razin his enemy until death, though that was not the reason he opposed the youths.

“They’re Ifriqui,” Rima scathingly said. “They have no cause, not like you do. It’s not hunger or fear that sets you against the married banners.”

Yannu had no intention of seeking the Tattered Throne for himself or the Champion’s Blood. He would prefer it if neither Itima nor her sons sat it either, though he might not get that choice. His preference would be for the Painted Knife or the Valiant Champion to be raised to rule of Levante as a reward, though he knew Rafaella would not be a popular choice. Though the Valiant Champion had gone as far as eschewing face paint to distance herself from the Marave even after Yannu had executed everyone involved in the betrayal, she was still a Champion. It would be seen by other lines as Yannu reaching for the Tattered Throne through a cheap trick. In truth, Yannu did not much care who sat the throne so long as it was neither of the betrothed.

They would be too strong, that was made their claim unacceptable. Malaga was second in wealth only to Levante due to its canal while Tartessos controlled the access to the Brocelian Forest and its treasures. If they gained Levante and through it mastery of the Gulf trade, they would hold the entire Dominion by the throat.

It was even worse than it looked, he had realized over the year of war. Alava traded the ore and stone of its hills to Levante for grain from its fertile fields, while Vaccei traditionally imported cattle and steel from Malaga and Levante. If the Tattered Throne fell into the hands of the betrothed, they would not need war to bring the rest of Levant to heel whenever they wished: they could simply close their doors and let their foes wither on the vine. The Majilis would grow meaningless, no longer a council of equals guided by the Holy Seljun but instead a court with a king and queen ruling over it. It would be the end of the Dominion, the dream sung of in the Anthem of Smoke.

Let neither queen nor prince rule over our dominion , the Grey Pilgrim’s daughter and successor had pleaded, and for that plea Yannu would go to war. He was not certain, however, that he could win that war.

Though the alliance of Tartessos and Malaga was surrounded, to the north by Vaccei and to the south by his own Alava, it had strong bones. Malaga was wealthy and the home of the binders while Tartessos strengthened its forces with free captains and adventurers that tried their luck in the Brocelian. Even if Itima Ifriqui could be counted on to stand against them – which she could not, the Brigand’s Blood were snakes and Itima the most cold-blooded of the nest – it promised to be a long, brutal slog of a war. The kind that broke realms. Better to kill one of the betrothed and snuff out the alliance before it took flight, Yannu had thought, and Itima had unsurprisingly agreed when he brought her into the plot. She’d already killed enough Osena not to balk at one more.

But, after Moro was brought forward and discarded the excuse of the report to carry a message from his mother, Yannu’s heart clenched with the cold fear that he might have made a mistake.

“This is drivel,” the Lord of Alava flatly said.

Moro Ifriqui, eldest child to Lady Itima and heir to Vaccei, had a hard face that life had seen fit to further scar. The redness of them was striking against his brown and green face paint, as another stripe of colour.

“We must act now, Lord Yannu,” Moro said, speaking his mother’s words with his own mouth. “They will wed when Keter falls and killing them when victory is won will only draw more attention.”

They were not yet married, Yannu thought, precisely to discourage knives being sent after them. Aquiline likely meant it a deed of honour, not beginning the fight when the Grand Alliance bound them all still, but Lord Akil’s son had grown canny as his father. He had done it so that any attack on them would be seen as so thoroughly unprovoked it would draw the ire from all the world. And that was the very trap Itima was stepping into now.

“Neither can be killed while we war against the dead,” Yannu said. “There will be trouble when we kill Tanja after the victory, but it will only be a stain on our reputation. To kill him now would be betraying the Grand Alliance.”

“Only,” Moro Ifriqui said, “if we get caught. We have men who-”

“Enough,” the Lord of Alava harshly replied. “I have refused, Moro. There will be no arrow loosed.”

The heir to Vaccei shrugged.

“That choice is no longer in your hands,” he said.

Yannu considered killing him, then and there. The Ifriqui had come with only a small escort of riders and Yannu’s own sworn swords were closer and better armed. None were close enough to overhear them speaking, which meant none would be close enough to stop him from slaying the other man should he strike first. It would cause much trouble and solve little, the Lord of Alava decided after a moment. Anger was not enough of a reason to kill.

“Should I warn them,” Lord Yannu said, “your entire line could be ended today.”

“You won’t,” Moro replied, appearing unworried. “If you try to bury us, we’ll drag you into the grave with us. And it won’t even matter if it’s true: they’ll use it to get rid of you regardless.”

That was, the lord grimly thought, likely true. He had slain Akil Tanja in an honour duel, and though his son had forsworn vengeance that did not mean there was no enmity between them.

“We’re in the same boat, Lord Yannu,” Moro smiled. “So let’s not fight, else we’ll both end up in the water.”

“This is not what we agreed,” Yannu insisted.

And, to his shame, his eyes drifted to the side. Past the column of warriors, up in the sky where a lone silhouette flew in lazy circles. The Warden, on her black-feathered mount.

“She has greater worries than us,” Moro said, following his gaze.

“Pray that she does,” he replied.

It was a dismissal and the younger man heeded it. Too many risks, Careful Yannu thought, as he watched Moro’s back and Rima returned to his side.

He would have to act.

—

Map of the Kingdom of the Dead had remained largely the same over the last three centuries, though few of them extended far to the north of Keter itself. The most comprehensive extended all the way to the shores of the lake some called the Chalice and the outskirts of what was now known as the Duskwood, but rare were the maps that went any further. Mostly Ashuran ones, as the Thalassocracy’s sailing ships sometimes circled the north of Calernia and their captains were particular about chart-making. The heartlands of the Kingdom of the Dead, though, were as much known territory as any land that was death on all who tread it could be.

It was why Hakram had several fine maps of the large plains surrounding Keter, the so-called ‘Ossuary’, coming from different nations.

He had halted to consult them atop a low hill, in particular an Arlesite map from the Ninth Crusade that bucked the reputation of Proceran maps being horribly unreliable by proving to be by far the most accurate of the lot. An hour past they’d marched across a long-dry riverbed that had been marked on it and no other parchment, which had only reinforced Hakram’s trust in the mapmaker’s work. The northwest of Keter had been fertile lands, once upon a time, and there were still traces of that. Dry riverbeds now only ever filled by rain were one, but there’d been more than grass and fields here during the days of Sephirah.

“That,” the Warlord muttered, “could be trouble.”

Sigvin leaned over his shoulder, peering at the parchment. She wore good chain mail that went up to her neck, hiding her ritual scars, and there was an axe at her hip. Unlike a warrior, though she had no shield. As a shaman, she was not to join the shield wall.

“What does the symbol mean?” she asked.

“Ruins,” Hakram said. “The remnants of a city.”

She looked understandably skeptical. Poison clouds obscured sight over long distances on the Ossuary, but a city so close to Keter would have been noticed. Troke Snaketooth, standing to the side of them and listening closely, looked as if he had an inkling.

“How old?” the chief of the Blackspears asked.

“Old enough there’s no one left that speaks the language,” Hakram replied. “There’s almost nothing left and what remains is largely buried. I doubt anyone who notice the ruins without walking over them.”

“And yet they are to be trouble,” Oghuz the Lame said, frowning.

The chief of the Red Shields had come out in warrior’s mail, though he was unlikely to fight in the shield wall. Juniper’s father was yet an able champion, though, and might choose a worthy fight to step into so that his clan would continue to hold his name in high regard.

“General Pallas sent word the dead are marching our way,” the Warlord said. “At our current pace, in two hours we will clash over the ruins or close.”

Hakram spat to the side, into the dust.

“The Hidden Horror does not deal in coincidences,” he told them

Word would have to be sent. General Pallas and Lord Yannu should be told, he thought, but his eyes moved to the sky to the third in need of telling. A cloud of green hid away Catherine’s distant silhouette but she was out there. Had been since dawn when they set out to march. The ruins were not from any of the thirteen great cities of ancient Sephirah, Hakram knew as much from their walk through the shards in Arcadia, but there had been other cities and towns in the kingdom – and there was no telling what the Dead King might have hidden in their ruins, buried under ash and dust.

And what the Warlord could not sniff out, the Warden might.

It would take more than a shout to reach her, but fortunately, Hakram had the means at hand. His gaze swept down the hill, where his warband had halted to wait for him while the rest of the warriors continued in the column led by Dag Clawtoe. A ring had formed, warriors leaning close as two people struggled, and the Warlord almost sighed. Hidir Bearkiller, a champion nearly seven feet tall with muscles like tree trunks whose favourite thing to do while drunk was be thrown into a pit with a steppe razor bear and kill it with his bare hands, yelped in pain cursed as Archer caught his thumb and began to bend it back. He gave in after there was an ominous crack, to the cheers of half the onlookers as Indrani beat her fourth consecutive challenger to the finger-game.

None of them had believed a human would have the strength to beat an orc at it, Named or not, which was why Hakram was now owed several bottles of Sleeping Bonesaragh no younger than five years.

“She is a menace,” Oghuz complimented.

Juniper’s father looked genuinely impressed. It was only a game, but the sight of Indrani twisting the arms of warriors with at least a foot on her repeatedly had made an impression.

“So far only to my champions,” the Warlord drily replied.

He had assembled a warband of champions from all the clans as his retinue, since it would have been an insult to keep relying on the Howling Wolves and the Red Shields forever – if not to them, then to all his other followers. They were not as well trained as a Howling Wolves warband, even after regular drills, but the warriors had markedly improved. The heavy armour bought from Praes and reforged by clan blacksmiths had only made his warband of a thousand fiercer, though apparently only so that Archer might better maul them.

The devil in question was headed his way, strutting triumphantly after having clapped Hidir’s back with affection, and Hakram rolled his eyes at her.

“Aren’t you supposed to be with the Levantines?” he asked.

All the Blood had retinues to protect them, but there were enemies sworn swords could little again. Worry had been that the Hawk might try to bag one of the great lords of Levant during or after the battle, Archer had been brought along as much to keep the Blood alive as to face the Scourge. Losing any of them would be a hard blow to the Dominion morale, on top of a headache to sort out – neither Razin Tanja nor Aquiline Osena had clear successors to their title.

“They’re all over anyways, except for the lovebirds,” Indrani easily replied. “Better to be out here where I can watch over the entire lot at once.”

There was some sense in that. There was no telling when or from where the Hawk would loose its arrow, so taking the Scourge out before it shot was unlikely. Better for Archer to take a defensive posture and aim for the arrow instead of the Revenant. It was still, Hakram thought, a decision she would never have thought to make a few years ago. You’re changing , he thought. It was a bittersweet thing, for it to happen only after he had left. The Warlord cut through the thought.

“I need you to send a message,” Hakram said.

Indrani pointed upwards, cocking an eyebrow. He nodded.

“You know I’m always game for an excuse to shoot at Cat,” Archer cheerfully said. “What do you need to say?”

Sigvin shot her a warm look, charmed by the romance of it. The mage from the Split Tree Clan had not met enough humans to know that violence did not usually take much of a role in their courting. Mind you, Hakram was not entirely sure she was wrong in this case.

“I’ll write it down,” the Warlord replied. “Wait for me.”

“Sure, sure,” Indrani dismissed, then slid a sly look at Sigvin. “So, Siggy, I hear tell you’ve been riding the Deadhand.”

“I have,” Sigvin nodded, then flashed a grin. “There are worse ways to pass the time.”

Indrani laughed. He should, Hakram only now realized, never have allowed those two to meet. A tactical mistake of some weight had been made. One obvious enough even Troke shot him a sympathetic look.

“So is he any good?” Archer asked. “’cause Tordis said so back in Callow, but she was sweet on him I think and when a girl’s sweet she-”

Hakram tactically retreated in search of ink and parchment before he could hear more. The quicker he was rid of Archer the better.

—

General Pallas whistled loudly, her escort smoothly coming to a halt around her as they joined with the riders that had been awaiting her. The word from the outriders had been interesting enough that she had decided to come in person even as word was sent to the other commanders. Her kataphraktoi had told it true, she saw with her own eyes. The dead had ceased their march. Across the plains an army of the dead stood in silence, arrayed in a firm battle line with a reserve at the back and constructs to the side where a living host would place cavalry.

Behind them all, looming tall as a mountain, the Crab belched out smoke that filled the sky,

“They do not advance when provoked?” Pallas asked, turning towards Captain Dion.

The young man led the outriders, and had been the one to first send word.

“Not even when we enter bow range,” Captain Dion confirmed.

It seemed, General Pallas thought, that the dead had chosen where they would give battle. In the distance behind her, she saw the trail of dust from the advancing columns of the orcs and the Levantines. Less than an hour away now. The Warlord had not mentioned what the ancient city said to be buried near here was called, if Deadhand knew at all.

“A simple name, then,” Pallas mused. “The Battle of the Ruins should do nicely.”

Interlude: Honour

“It is indeed true, Chancellor, that the greatest possible victory is over yourself. My magical doubles proved to be the worthiest of my opponents by far.”

– Dread Empress Gemini (possibly Gemini II, never conclusively proved not one of the doubles)

Razin Tanja watched the distant line of the horizon, sitting the saddle, and wondered about the nature of change. How it was embraced and how it was fought, how it was cursed and how it was sought. It was not, he had come to think, a matter of people being good or bad. Sometimes bad men fought for good causes, necessary causes. Sometimes good women did terrible things, because they did not think of them as being terrible at all.

It was, Razin thought, like standing in a tower. If the inside of it was all you had ever known, the world was divided by the levels of it. You’d think in terms of top and bottom, of stairs and doors, and never consider there could be anything else at all. Only if you’d stepped outside of it, even once, suddenly it would all seem so silly. What did a level or another matter, when you had seen a mountain or the sea?

But then who could conceive of a mountain or the sea, when all they had ever seen was the inside of a tower?

No, it was not about good and bad. It was about whether you had gotten a glimpse of the world outside the tower or not, and what that glimpse did to you. For Razin that journey had begun a bridge outside the city of Sarcella, when the great monster of their age had told him to learn from his mistakes or die in a ditch. It had ended when he’d looked at a woman he’d already been half in love with about to fight Yannu Marave to the death in his honour and seen nothing but futility.

A shameful, ugly waste that somehow everyone around him insisted was honour.

“But it was just blood,” Razin murmured.

But that was Levant, wasn’t it? Blood and honour, two sides of the same coin. The glory and the slaughter, so deeply intertwined they might as well be the same thing. And so Razin would not think in terms of good and bad, today. That was not the bone of it, the vein. It was about the tower, and how many people had stepped outside of it. Been dragged outside of it by this war.

About how far people would be willing to go, to go back in and close the door behind them.

—

There was a trap here, Hakram Deadhand thought, even if he was yet blind to it.

The Warlord was not a general in the way of others he knew and had known, more Nauk than Juniper, but he was a graduate of the War College and had fought in campaigns that would be studied for centuries to come. To his practiced eye the battle line of the enemy was a recipe for a rout, or at least severe defeat since the dead did not flee even when beaten. Keter’s centre was weak a weak half circle, only six lines of skeletons deep, and the sheer weight of a charge from Levantine heavy foot – Alava’s was particularly strong, entire companies heavily armed with plate and hammers – should plow right through.

The enemy had thickened its flanks instead, as much as thirty of the forty-five thousand it numbered split between the two. The rest, four thousand or some, was held in reserve behind the curved centre. Hakram was not as well-read as some in matters of tactics, but the formation smacked to him of the tactics of the Iron Prince at the Battle of Aisne, the overwhelming Lycaonese victory that had won Cordelia Hasenbach the throne. On that field Klaus Papenheim had drawn in a larger coalition of southerners deep past his flanks by letting his centre give ground before halting the retreat and falling around the flanks for an encirclement.

When he told Troke as much, the chief of the Blackspears spat to the side with a skeptical look.

“Won’t work here,” Troke Snaketooth replied. “The Dominion will keep charging and even if the undead send in their reserve it’ll be torn through.”

Which would leave the two strong flanks of the enemy army split and prone to being encircled in turn, a defeat in the making.

“So it’s bait,” the Warlord gravelled.

Hakram was not surprised. He had asked General Pallas to take a closer look at the grounds near the enemy and her riders had found that behind the battle line there were hints of the long-buried city that had once stood here. The thick of the ruins behind the curve of the enemy formation, within the hollow of the half circle. The general the Dead King had sent to command here must want their own centre to collapse, Hakram thought, for the Levantines to continue charging forward right into some sort of nasty trap that would shatter them and turn the battle around in a single stroke.

He’d written as much to Catherine, which was why he had been baffled when he had learned that she’d sensed a few undead under the ground where the city would be but no gathered power whatsoever. As far as she could tell, there weren’t even any constructs: just a handful of Bones. Hakram began trading messengers back and forth with Lord Yannu and General Pallas in the wake of that, their armies slowed to a halt far enough the enemy would not be able to steal a march on them. Not that they seemed willing to leave the ‘defensive’ position they’d taken.

“If we march away,” General Pallas suggested, “they might follow us away from their position.”

It was a sensible enough thought and the Grand Alliance attempted it, but the enemy did not move to follow. It only made the trap more obvious, but the enemy general knew the same thing they did: they could not afford to leave without fighting that army. If they pulled back too far there would be nothing to stop the dead from going around them and striking at the camps from behind while they were trying to storm the walls of Keter, a recipe for slaughter. And there was no doubt at all that the dead would march faster, because unlike the living they did not tire and standing in the sun wearing armour for hours would not exhaust them.

So the army turned back, taking its old position after having burned a little over an hour.

“Our purpose is to keep their army here,” Hakram told the others. “We can achieve it simply by standing here and facing them without actually waging a battle.”

Only, as Careful Yannu sent back in message, it wasn’t that simple. If they stayed too late, they would be stuck out in the Ossuary away from reinforcements in the dark, having no idea about the state of the coalition army that’d tried to storm Keter. Given that Proceran outriders had made it clear that there were still other armies of the dead gathering out in the plains, they would be running the risk of Keter throwing all those half-assembled forces at them from the sides while the army in front of them attacked them in the dark. That was potentially disastrous.

“We fight,” Lord Yannu sent.

“We fight,” General Pallas agreed.

“We fight,” the Warlord conceded.

There was no other way but to give battle, so all that was left was to find a way to do it without giving the Dead King what he wanted.

—

The wait was getting to them all.

Ishaq had chosen his band with care, knowing that he might never get an opportunity like this again, and he was still pleased with the plan he had decided on. It was a simple thing, as most functional plans tended to be. The Grave Binder to find the Scourge and reach them, the Vagrant Spear to close the distance, the Stained Sister to hold them down, himself for the killing blow and the Harrowed Witch to handle their retreat. Lord Hanno had been generous in releasing the two heroines to his service for the battle, seemingly uncaring that the deed of killing a Scourge today would see Ishaq added to the Rolls. The once-Knight appeared interested only in the end of one of the Dead King’s finest Revenants, indifferent to all other consequences.

A hard man to grasp, Hanno of Arwad. He acted weak where he should be strong, acted strongly where he should give. The Barrow Sword had refined his understanding in Salia, when he’d crossed swords with the Ashuran, but even now he was often unsure whether the hero was being clever or not. This band, for one. Ishaq had fought at the side of Sidonia and Aspasie before, facing the Drake together in Hainaut, and knew them well enough. So he’d anticipated that Sidonia would hold the Grave Binder in contempt, for the man in tattered robes was visibly rotting from a barrow-curse. A contempt that would be returned in kind, as Idris saw her as a hound of the Blood.

But he had not thought, however, that the Stained Sister would be as oil and water with the Harrowed Witch. Both Procerans were survivors of the Dead King’s advance, but neither cared for the way the other had survived. Aspasie had only disdain for the Sister staying among the living only because she had been buried among so many corpses the dead had forgot her, while the old heroine had not been shy in castigating the Witch over the sacrifice of her own brother to power an illusion that would let her flee unseen. Ishaq had twice been forced to demand silence as the bickering escalated towards thrown hands, wondering all the while if somewhere Hanno of Arwad might not be laughing at him.

Now all stood in sullen silence among the throng of Alavan armsmen, their faces hidden by simple soldier’s cloaks. Warriors gave them a wide berth, as much out of respect for Bestowed as the stink that came from Idris’ rotting flesh. It really was an awful smell, Ishaq thought to himself. The Grave Binder had told him that being ever dying deepened his hold over death, but even Idris admitted that the barrow had exacted from him a deep price for the rings that taught him his learning.

“I hope people will stop marching all around soon,” the Harrowed Witch muttered, breaking half an hour of silence. “I’m getting a headache watching them.”

“How little it takes to-” the Stained Sister began, hands folding into the sleeves her red-stained garments, but Ishaq’s hard look put a stop to that.

Like children, sometimes. As if just standing in the vicinity of each other was enough to drive each other mad.

“The hosts are getting in formation,” Sidonia told them, sounding distracted as she spoke.

The Vagrant Spear was looking at the same ‘marching around’ that Aspasie had complained of. Ishaq was no captain of warbands himself, but he too could see that Careful Yannu and the Warlord had been moving around their armies in preparation of the battle. The Clans had split in two, taking the flanks, while Levant tightened the centre. Why he was not sure, and it was not his trouble to bother with. The Barrow Sword had come here to hunt.

“Movement?” he asked Idris.

The Grave Binder was picking at his wrist, gazing off in the distance, but when addressed returned to the present. The Bestowed’s fingers went to the glittering bronze rings on his left hand, a small shiver of power touching the air.

“Four Revenants in the army,” Idris said. “In pairs. And the two out in the field haven’t moved for the last hour.”

“Could be the Hawk and an escort,” Sidonia facing Ishaq directly and refusing to acknowledge the other man’s existence.

It was a grim source of amusement to the Barrow Sword that though he too had stolen from a barrow, a few hard fights back-to-back had seen this offence to honour forgiven while Idris would be scorned to the grave and likely even beyond. Sidonia was not from a noble line, not having any of the Spear’s blood even though she had inherited the Bestowal, but she had been welcomed warmly by the greats of the Dominion and so eagerly adopted their hypocrisies. Idris had done little that those of the Brigand’s Blood had not surpassed in horror a dozen times over, but a darkened Bestowal and enmity with the Binder’s Blood meant he must be deserving of death.

That would change, after the war. Ishaq would see to it. And that change would begin with his being the first villain to ever added to the Rolls.

“It could also be bait,” the Barrow Sword replied. “We wait.”

Some dissatisfaction at that, but none challenged him. He was representative for the champions of Below, though the title in his hands did not command the same respect as it had in the Black Queen’s. No matter. Soon the Scourges would reveal themselves, trying to snatch some great name’s life, and then his time would come.

Like all Bestowed before him, Ishaq would write his entry in the Rolls blood-red.

—

Aquiline Osena shaded her eyes with her hand, peering at the enemy as the sun pounded down on her helm.

By habit she glanced through the ranks for a head worth taking, some great captain or Revenant, but much as she hated to admit it the days where she could wade into the thick of the slaughter were past. She was only twenty-two, young enough that there should still be many years for her to slay great names and bring back their skulls to the Silent Shrine, but as Razin kept saying if either of them died then all hope of change for the Dominion would die with them. It was still frustrating to hear, and if he had not been clever enough to save that kind of talk for when they were naked and sated she might have quarrelled with him for it.

The Grim Binder’s Blood made for canny men, it was known.

No, now her eyes were meant for different prizes. As the years passed she had become the leading captain of their host, her betrothed taking a step back and to instead hold command of reserves or the camp. Razin was not without talent as war captain, Aquiline believed, but she would not deny he did not have the knack for it that some were born with – like Abigail the Fox or Rozala Malanza. Yet in the Dominion none were held as Yannu Marave’s equal when it came to leading warriors, which was part of why Razin had stepped back. If it comes to war , Razin had said, it will be you that leads our captains . Best you and they get used to it.

He really was sweet, Aquiline thought, still pleased at the memory. She toyed with a strand of hair, smiling, but was brought out of the reverie by a cleared throat. Captain Elvera was looking at her, worn face pulling into a cheeky grin.

“Not even wed and already losing your head,” the old captain said, shaking her head. “What would your father say?”

“That at least I had the sense never to fuck a Proceran,” Aquiline replied, entirely unashamed.

“I just taught him how to handle an axe,” Elvera lied.

The Lady of Tartessos still found it wildly entertaining that Elvera had slept with one of spymasters of Procer back when they were young. She’d also been relieved it wasn’t the dead traitor or the one that looked like a skeleton with dry skin hung on it, since it would have called her old teacher’s tastes into question. In the distance a deep horn sounded – deeper even than those of the Army of Callow, which Aquiline knew well – and the sound called them back to order. Her eyes returned to the enemy’s ranks, still find the same conclusion laying there to be found.

“If we charged we’d tear right through them,” Aquiline Osena stated. “Their centre is thin and thin on shields.”

“Which their captain wants of us,” Elvera agreed. “That formation is too odd for it to be otherwise.”

By the count of the outriders, the dead numbered over forty thousand. Likely closer to forty-five, the kataphraktoi had claimed, but they could not be sure given the way the enemy kept some of its troops hidden at the back. That meant the numbers of the Grand Alliance were higher: fifty-three thousand had set out with down and marched to this field, all in all. Twenty-seven thousand for the Dominion, twenty-three thousand orcs and three thousand kataphraktoi under General Pallas. It was rare for the dead to fight when their numbers were the lesser, given that Bones were hardly better than even Proceran levies as soldiers, but rarer still for the dead to stand on the defence.

And that was what Aquiline’s eyes were telling her: the dead were still preparing to defend, not attack.

“I can’t see the sense in it,” Aquiline admitted.

“A trap of some sort,” Elvera replied. “It’s why Careful Yannu sent orders that we are to hold the centre but not break through.”

“He didn’t thin our numbers, though,” the Lady of Tartessos replied, frowning. “Which he means he’s worried about them breaking through us .”

There could not be many reasons for that. Both their gazes moved to the Crab as their thoughts flowed down the same path. The monster was gargantuan, as were all of its kind, but this one was not like the others Aquiline had glimpsed. It was not a city on great spindly legs, workshops and smithies and dens of sorcery protected by walls, but instead entirely a creature of war. The mountain of death belched trails of smoke from great bonfires that looked like a thousand eyes, the air wavering from the heat around it, and from all sides extruded paired and massive folded tusks of steel. Aquiline could see in her mind’s eye how they would unfold, turning into cutting lines that would carve through a man’s height across the length of half a mile as the monster advanced.

“We have our own monster, my lady,” Elvera finally said, nodding upwards. “And if it comes to a scrap, I’ll bet on ours.”

Aquiline refrained from looking up, looking for the silhouette of the crow and her rider. It would have felt childish, like a child tugging at her mother’s skirt. A feeling she resented all the more for knowing the Warden was not much older than her. Not that one would know, from the way she carried herself: halfway between a sage and a lunatic, but ever a step ahead of her foes.

“She said she would handle it, so she will,” Aquiline simply said.

Her worries had to be on the ground, where steel would clash. The orders had come from Careful Yannu and the Grand Alliance army had at last finished taking a formation of its own. The captains of the Dominion had taken the centre, Aquiline’s own armsmen and those of Malaga in the middle while Alava stood on one side and Vaccei the other. The Clans had agreed to hold the flanks, Warlord Hakram taking the left flank while an orc by the name of Troke Snaketooth took the right. General Pallas’ kataphraktoi were being kept in reserve at the back, along with eight thousand mixed foot from the Clans and the Dominion – the four thousand Levantines there under Razin’s command, while Oghuz the Lame held it the orcs.

It was a large reserve, but Aquiline approved of the caution. There was something afoot. In the distance the deep horns of the Clans sounded once more, soon after answered by the beat of Levantine war-drums. Aquiline breathed out, rolling her shoulders, and straightened her back. Her sword left the sheath easy as a breath and she raised the steel until it gleamed in the sun’s light.

“ Forward ,” Aquiline Osena shouted, and across the dusty plain warriors began to march.

—

The Warlord was not in the thick of it when the lines collided.

For now he was still of more use behind, watching the greater currents of the battle. Time for the axe-song would come soon enough. Instead he watched as the shield wall of his flank collided with that of the dead, his warriors smashing through the dead with axe and sword. Orc were larger than human, heavier, and found it easier to land the kind of blows that shattered skeletons. The other side of that, which became visible soon enough, was that the Clans lacked the discipline of the Army of Callow. The line became uneven in moments, finer warriors digging deeper into enemy lines, and the disorders gave room for the dead to bite.

They would kill more of the enemy, Hakram thought, but more would die as well.

“The centre’s doing well,” Sigvin opined. “The Levantines aren’t pushing further than they should.”

They had pushed back the enemy some, the Warlord saw, but not much and their captains were holding back the men. It had blunted the head of the half circle but little more than that. Lord Yannu’s plan had been simple enough: since they were certain that what the dead had planned laid in the ruins, then to avoid the trap all they must do was avoid taking those grounds. The enemy centre would shatter itself on the Grand Alliance’s, and then the majority of the Dominion army could swing around to take from the side the flanks that Hakram’s warriors would have nailed down. And, in case a mistake had been made, a large reserve was being kept back.

Mitigated risk, Hakram had thought when he first heard it. A plan worthy of a man called Careful Yannu.

Movement drew his attention to the side. He and Troke had ordered their shield walls to be ten men deep, to stretch the line and prevent easy encirclement by the larger undead flanks, but it wasn’t the Bones that were worrying him. Against these, Hakram would send his warriors all day without a second thought. It was the constructs, which had been waiting patiently to the sides as the shield walls impacted and the troops committed to the clash. And now, the Warlord saw, they were beginning to move.

“Fuck,” Sigvin whispered, “but ghouls are quick.”

“Keter uses them as replacement for cavalry,” Hakram replied, eyes following the same curve as hers.

Thousands of flesh abominations ran on four legs, circling around the orcish shield wall to hit it from the side, but Hakram’s chiefs had been warned. They back lines pulled away and formed another shield wall facing the ghouls. It was the larger constructs that drew his eye, though. Beorns and Tusks, great bears with bellyfuls of dead and boar-like abominations instead filled with rocks . The enemy seemed to lack drakes, save for a few circling above as watchers, and there had been no swarm unleashed. There were no insects to kill and raise, out in the Ossuary: all life had been snuffed out centuries ago.

“There they go,” the Warlord grimly said as the larger constructs began to move.

The enemy’s plan became obvious soon enough. The ghouls were keeping the new, thin shield wall pinned while Beorns circled around towards it. Though Hakram’s warriors were holding the ghouls at bay handily, returning the favour in kind when throats were torn out by fang, the line was not steady. The Beorns would blow holes into it and then pour out skeletons in the holes. As for the Tusks, they slowly began to advance but their destination was not yet clear.

“Are you sure we can trust them?” Sigvin suddenly asked.

“Against the dead? Always,” the Warlord replied.

On Troke’s flank, the assembled shamans of the Clans unleashed their sorceries onto the approaching Beorns. Waves of fire and frost, withering curses that turned flesh to stone or exploded in waves of bronze sorcery. But there were only so many mages among Hakram’s kind, not enough for both flanks. So the Warlord had bargained for reinforcements: as the great abominations approached the line, small bands darted out of the orcish shield wall. A heartbeat later blinding flares burst as the lodges of Lanterns did what they did best: savage giant monsters with the most warlike applications of Light on all of Calernia.

Blinding beams and pale fire, spears and axes and javelins. The priests of Levant, singing the same war hymns they had for centuries, tore wildly into the Dead King’s monsters.

“Good priests,” Sigvin reluctantly conceded.

Hakram did not answer, eyes on the Tusks. They had yet to charge, still moving around without clear purpose. Held back for now? It would make sense. There were no better constructs in the arsenal of Keter to shatter shield walls, best to use them when they would strike the hardest. But that meant his use as a watcher had come to an end. The tall orc reached for his helm, pulling down on his head and tightening the clasp. The shamaness sent him a bright look.

“Into the fight?” she eagerly asked.

“It’s time,” the Warlord agreed. “I’ll lead my warband to-”

Hakram did not finish the sentence and came close to never finish anything ever again. The arrow had fallen down in utter silence, grey and unseen, only for the middle of the shaft to be hit by another arrow five feet away from his throat. He went very still, for a moment, but no other arrow came.

“I owe Indrani a drink,” Hakram Deadhand said, and reached for his axe.

—

There was no hiding where the arrow had come from.

“I have them,” the Grave Binder said.

Ishaq drew Pinon, the blade keening eagerly.

“We move,” he ordered.

Sidonia laughed, Aspasie moaned and the Stained Sister’s face hardened. With the collision of the lines they had been forced back behind the Alavan shield wall, but now the passed through it and into the thick of the dead. Ishaq and Sidonia took the lead, the Barrow Sword smashing through the shield raised in his way while the Vagrant Spear deftly leapt over another and scattered the dead into bones with a burst of Light. The two of them kept making room, clearing the dead in a storm as the rest of their band crossed the shield wall and it closed behind them. They had been quick, but they were fighting a sea and within moments the dead were pressing against them.

“ Idris ,” Ishaq called out.

“Eyes, ears, tongue,” the Grave Binder hurriedly chanted in Lunara. “I who hold dominion over the dead claim my tax: let none with eyes behold me.”

There were many among Bestowed who thought Idris worthy of mockery, for like other sorcerers of the Dominion his magic could not destroy swaths of foes like that of Praesi and Callowan mages. He was a maker of curses and a necromancer, which had only earned him further mockery as his skill proved inferior to the Dead King’s and he failed to steal control of undead from the Hidden Horror. That was missing, Ishaq had found, the true strength of his Bestowal. His mastery over death was not simple necromancy, it was a deeper power – and that truth was expressed by the way Idris, alone of all the sorcerers of Calernia, could wave curses that affected even undead.

Such as hiding from their eyes a band of five Bestowed as they snuck through an entire army of the dead.

The Barrow Sword had known from the beginning that fighting his way to the Scourges when they hid in the middle of an army would see his band spent by the time the clash began, so he’d ensured they wouldn’t need to fight at all. The Bestowed wove their way through the packed ranks of the enemy, elbowing skeletons and ducking the shadow of great abominations as they heeded Ishaq’s order not to destroy even a single one – lest the Dead King be able to find them through the destruction. They hurried as much as they could, the sensation of moving unseen oddly empowering after the Barrow Sword grew used to the vulnerability, and the Grave Binder guided them straight to the Revenants.

“The three Revenants are clustered together,” Idris whispered.

“What happened to the fourth?” Ishaq frowned.

“Suddenly destroyed while it was trying to join the others,” the Grave Binder replied.

The Barrow Sword traded a look with Sidonia.

“The Lady’s in fine form today,” she cheerfully said, openly pleased.

Was she ever not? Ishaq still remembered her methodically taking the Red Knight apart with knives, making a show of a woman capable of cracking stone walls with her bare hands. He knew well he would have lost that fight in her place, one of the many reasons it paid to remain on good terms with the Woe. The Warden required so little of her allies that Ishaq was frequently baffled she did not have more villains in her service – refraining from excesses was a cheap price for her friendship. Keeping to her rules had seen a cordial truced brokered between him and the rising force in Levant as reward.

The Black Queen hadn’t been subtle about making them work together, but then why bother when she had the authority to do as she wished? He’d have that too, one day. The power to give an order going against centuries of custom and rightly expected to be obeyed. Some mornings he woke up so hungry for it his belly ached.

“There,” Idris suddenly said. “Behind the beorn. Get ready.”

“Sidonia,” Ishaq called out.

“Honour the Blood,” the Vagrant Spear shouted back, leaping atop the massive bear.

She was gone in a moment as the Barrow Sword went around, Aspasie and the Stained Sister following closely. The Grave Binder was further behind, already whispering his next spell. Idris’ curses could not fool Revenants, who the Dead King empowered beyond his ability to trick, but he would keep all other undead away from them for as long as he could. They had until the Grave Binder faltered to make their kill and ready themselves for retreat. Ishaq turned the corner a moment later, watching as Sidonia struck at their enemies in the flash of Light, and counted three.

In the back, the Hawk was fleeing.

In front of them, two identical silhouettes in armour stood. Iron from head to toe, the helms shaped like the heads of wolfhounds. The Wolfhound, then, and a fake. The strongest defence of the Scourges, covering the Hawk’s retreat. Ishaq rolled his shoulder, Pinon singing as she cut through the air. The Hawk was for the Archer to handle anyhow, he would make do with this one.

“Honour to me ,” Ishaq the Barrow Sword grinned, and stepped into the fight.

—

Yannu had taken the time to consider how he would do it, if he were Itima Ifriqui, and decided it would be a man from Tartessos.

Though the Lady of Vaccei was taking a black gamble by attempting Razin Tanja’s assassination during a battle, she was a fool. She was, he had mused, simply used to getting her way. How many dozens of times had she rid herself of foes using the cover an honour war or a hunting day? How many had she poisoned and ordered slain in the night? Itima Ifriqui had killed Blood before and gotten away with it. Her failure was that she had not grasped the danger courted by breaking the treaties of the Grand Alliance. Razin’s death would not be pursued by a few spies or a single Bestowed: the Warden herself would look into such a killing.

And there was no telling how far Catherine Foundling was able to reach for answers.

Still, Itima would know that if she were blamed for Lord Razin’s death she would be facing the bitter vengeance of a widowed Aquiline Osena and a furious Binder’s Blood, whose armies would both come for Vaccei to scour it as harshly as the Principate once had. So Itima must set Tartessos against Malaga in the aftermath, and there was opportunity for that. Several captains in Osena service had been bitterly disappointed by Aquiline’s betrothal, having hoped to win her hand through honour, and there were even more who had lost kin fighting against the Malagans over the rich lands between the two cities. A grudge would not be too difficult to forge as a reason for the killing.

As the two betrothed kept their warriors in blended companies, finding a hand to do the deed was as easy as finding a Tartessos warrior foolish enough to think they might get away with it and greedy enough to believe the riches promised would be given. No doubt Itima had given out some gold as proof she would pay the whole, using the coin to tie the killer to whichever Tartessos man she wanted blamed for the deed. Yannu’s first trouble was that there could be no telling who it was that the Bandit’s Blood had bent to their purpose. It could be any of hundreds, and Razin’s command in the reserves meant he was near too many warriors to count.

Yannu’s second trouble was that he did not want Itima Ifriqui to be caught.

The Lord of Malaga had no doubt she would follow through on the threat Moro had carried, that she would drag him down as well if she was to be killed. And even if she was not, recklessly as she was acting Itima was still his only ally in checking the rise of his enemies. She must then be stopped without being outed, else it all come down on both their heads. Fortunately, though there could be many assassins there was only one life they were after. There lay Yannu’s opportunity, and the way he could yet turn this to his advantage.

“I need you by Razin Tanja’s side,” Yannu told his cousin.

Rima blinked in dismay.

“Now?” she replied. “Yannu, we’re fighting a battle.”

Only half true. The two of them were well behind the lines, with his sworn swords, and not likely to fight until the enemy centre was broken and the Clans were to be reinforced.

“Now,” he agreed. “Itima’s being rash. She wants to kill Razin Tanja.”

His cousin let out a low whistle.

“That’s going to get a lot of people killed,” Rima said, sounding impressed in the worst way.

“Too many,” Yannu agreed. “So I’m sending you to him, as a veteran to help him decide when to send in the reserves.”

“But not to kill him,” she tried.

“Keep him alive at all costs,” the Lord of Alava replied. “I believe Itima’ll be using a Tartessos man to do the deed, so watch them closely.”

“So I’m to constantly keep my hand on my sword for an hour or two around a gaggle of jumpy Tanja armsmen,” Rima grimaced. “There’s a pleasant fucking time in the making.”

“Yes,” Yannu said, unapologetic. “But most important is that when the assassin is revealed, youmust seem them killed.”

Silencing the hand being used was crucial. With no tongue left to wag and no dead Tanja to prompt a deeper look by the likes of the Warden, the only trail left to follow would be the one Itima was sure to have laid pointing towards Tartessos. Rima might even win the Champion’s Blood some honour by saving Razin’s life, if she was quick enough.

“And when the armsmen ask why I looked at every Tartessos man twice all afternoon just before an assassin tried his luck?” Rima asked.

“I will settle that,” the Lord of Alava said. “Simply tell them I had heard there might be an attempt and sent you to make sure he would live.”

He’d have to create a believable way as to how he might have caught out a treacherous Tartessos captain, but it should not be impossible. Especially with Lady Itima’s help, which she would be forced to give him if she did not want to get caught out having had a hand in any of this. Rima slowly nodded.

“You’re sure?” she quietly asked.

“We still need the Brigand’s Blood,” Yannu admitted. “If we lose Vaccei, it is finished.”

Alava could not win alone. It could fight, and might even follow him into that fight to the bitter end, but that the end would be bitter there was no doubt. That meant Itima Ifriqui must live through her blunder, even if he had to cross her to see it done.

“Then it’s done,” Rima said, clasping his arm.

Yannu clasped it back, pulling her close before releasing her. He was not pleased to send her away, but there was no one else he would trust this two. She had trained her right hand to serve as captain of his sworn swords in her absence, should it come to a fight, knowing she might be sent away on duties such as this. As she left his sight, vanishing into the crowd of armed men, the Lord of Alava turned back to the unfolding battle. It was, to his eye, going well. The enemy centre was teetering on the brink of collapse, having spent itself on his people’s shield wall, and though the dead were mounting among the Clans they were holding strong.

The shield wall on the right flank was bending after having been thinned by the Beorns that had survived the sorcery of the orcs, but it looked in no danger of collapse. On both sides the ghouls were being thinned and it looked as if the Warlord had rallied warriors to go on the attack against them. He’s to curve around the shield wall after , Yannu saw. Using on the dead the very same manoeuvre they had wanted to use on him. The Bestowed’s very presence seemed to light a flame in the orcs, he saw, and not only the well-armoured ones he used as his sworn swords.

Wherever the Warlord stood vigor seemed to bleed back into tiring warriors, and they chewed up the dead like a closing maw.

It was worth keeping in- Yannu threw himself down from his horse, his armsmen closing around him with shields raised, but as he landed in the dust and his mount whinnied he saw there had been no need. The arrow he had glimpsed mere feet away from him had been shot out by another, taken in flight.

“Archer,” one of his sworn swords said, and there were murmurs of agreement.

That and respect. The shot that might have killed Yannu had been madness, but it was madder still to have shot it . The Lord of Alava declined help to climb back the saddle, more bruised in pride than body, and returned to watching the battle. The centre was slightly further forward than he would prefer, but it had been too much to expect a fighting line to be too strictly observed. He was more concerned by the Tusks that still waited behind the enemy’s flanks, not yet engaged even though on both sides the orcs were no longer losing grounds. When were they to strike, if not now? An instinct born of long experience had his eyes straying back to the centre, and there he saw it.

Just a moment too late.

The ground collapsed. The entire hollow he had been so wary of, the ruins under ground, had been nothing but a great sand trap. As the handful of dead the Warden had senses below brought down some pillar or another the entire cavern collapsed, turning into a massive pit. A few hundred of the warriors too far forward fell along with the entire enemy centre, though unlike the undead they would not be getting back up from that fall. And now he understood the trap the Enemy had laid, at long last. It’d been too obvious from the start, but that had been the trick: Yannu had never been meant to walk into the collapsing grounds.

He had been meant to keep his army in the wring place because of it.

Already he saw it laid out before him. Two flanks, the orcs holding but slowly losing to the dead on both. His centre, the Dominion forces, had been meant to reinforce the Clans by attacking the flanks once the enemy centre was broken. They would have gone both through the freed centre and through the back, preparing to encircle with the orc warriors as the anchor. Only now half the path was a pit Yannu’s warriors could not march through, and the back path meant circling all the way around the orc shield lines while most of the Dominion army was facing the wrong way.

And he couldn’t even do that, Yannu Marave realized, because behind him the reserves had yet to be committed and they were still in the way.

On the other side of the pit, the enemy reserve – which had stood right outside the edge of the fall – began to advance. On the flanks the Tusks turned as one, facing the shield walls of the Clans, and began to charge.

And over the entire army, for the first time since the battle had begun the Crab took a step forward.

—

“Hold,” Aquiline Osena shouted. “ Hold .”

The shield wall wavered despite her screams, despite the way she had left the saddle and gone to stand with her warriors. And though Aquiline kept a face of calm, she was glad that the paint she wore from head to toe hid the sheen of her sweat. The fear that was seizing the shield wall was in her blood too, ice pooling in the belly. What else was she to feel, watching the Crab walking towards them one sickening step at a time? The great abomination’s spindly legs, as repulsive as the scuttling legs of some vermin for all that they were taller than towers, crossed the great pit with ease. All over the carapace of stone and bone the fire-eyes burned, spewing out ever-longer tongues of flame that kept burning on the ground after falling in droplets.

When the Crab got close enough, dozens would be incinerated in a heartbeat with every plume of liquid fire.

Yet it was not the fire that had her warriors inching back, bending away from the sharply inclined pit where hundreds of their comrades had fallen to their death mere moments ago. It was the husks of steel, the strident grinding sound they made as they unfolded and slammed down. The Crab was only hallway through the pit, but already the razor-length hung in the air before the shield wall. At head-height. What shield could possibly hope to turn back such a massive blade? It would pass through the shield wall like a knife through butter, making mist of men. Three hundred feet. Two hundred feet. One hundred feet.

“Hold,” Aquiline shouted again, but her voice wavered.

Her weight was leaning back as well, her body eager to flee even if her heart still hesitated. What had once been the enemy’s centre was digging itself out of the ash and dust, the dead crawling out as they began to climb the slope towards her warriors, but worse than them was the enemy’s reserve. It was proceeding down the slope of the pit in good order, staying in formation as it moved. The broken centre to hold us, the reserve to break us , she thought. All the while the dead tried to break the flanks and collapse the entire army. Dread seized her heart. A defeat, it would be a catastrophic- the sun was botted out by the beat of great wings.

Her shield wall split, like fish around a shark, and a form leapt down from her mount. The crow-horse let out an eerie cry before flying away, leaving the Warden standing alone in an empty circle of warriors. The Mantle of Woe flapped at her back, the many colours of the foes defeated by the Black Queen of Callow a warning against any who would defy her, while her dreadful staff of dead wood dimmed the sight of any who beheld it – as if stealing the light of the world from your eyes. Catherine Foundling cracked her neck, and the Lady of Tartessos did not begrudge the three dozen warriors who widened the circle by taking a wary step back.

But Aquiline Osena was Blood, and Blood did not flinch. She stepped into the circle, coming to stand by the Black Queen as no other dared. A coolly amused brown eye found her before flicking away.

“Aquiline,” the Warden greeted her. “Clever little plan Keter cooked up against us, isn’t it?”

“The Enemy’s wiles run deep,” the Lady of Tartessos replied, forcing calm.

Catherine Foundling was dangerous as a sword was dangerous: not to be feared, save when turned against you. Aquiline had learned much from her and the Army of Callow, enough to be grateful even knowing it was a boon the Grey Pilgrim had bargained for. But the fear would never entirely go away. The Warden was a graveyard made into a woman, her ghosts so many a second kingdom could be made of them for her to rule.

“Ours too,” Catherine Foundling grinned, all teeth and malice. “And the Dead King will need to do better than this if he wants to get the drop on me.”

The air cooled, the sun’s warmth chased away, and Aquiline realized with a start that behind them the Black Queen’s shadow had grown. Lengthened, broadened, until it was as a sea. Her warriors fled the spread of it, and not a moment too soon. From the shadow a massive hairy leg began to emerge, then another, as if some gargantuan creature was climbing out of the darkness.

“Ashen Gods,” Aquiline croaked. “What is this?”

“An old tyrant,” the Warden said, “ridden by a new god.”

Roiling darkness in a gargantuan spider’s shape, dripping rivulets of Night, rose to cast a shadow over them both.

“Keep your shield wall steady, Aquiline Osena,” the smiling madwoman ordered. “I’ll handle the rest.”

—

The Tusk passed through the shield wall like it wasn’t even there, turning orcs and steel alike to crumpled paste without even slowing. Light lashed out at the thick hide in a hook but though it burned through the flesh it scrabbled harmlessly against the stones below. They were just bloody stones, Hakram irritably thought. Nothing for Above to take offence to, so Light was about as useful against it as it would be against a real rock: not at all, unless a great deal of it was used. Skeletons in bronze and iron poured in the gap the Tusk had torn as it shook, turning around for another pass, but there would be none of that.

“Spear s ,” the Warlord shouted.

They were moving before he even gave the order, Lead pulsing with his heartbeat and whispering through their veins. It kept his warriors up, quickened them, strengthened them. And it left them exhausted to the point of collapse when he left. Nothing was without a price. Two dozen spears tore into the Tusk from the sides, scraping against stone as they found purchase and the screaming monster tried to shake them off. It would not. Hakram’s axe bit in the back of the beast and he used it to hoist himself up on its back, crawling through filth and rotten leather.

“I broke the gates of Okoro,” Hakram Deadhand recited.

He struck. The beast screamed.

“My name echoing three rivers,” he said.

And he struck. The beast’s knees bent.

“And though I died an age ago,” he sang through bared fangs.

And hestruck again, through bone and flesh, until his axe touched stone and stone cracked.

“ I live still through your shivers ,” the Warlord snarled, striking one last time with the might of his name in his hand

The stone split under his axe like dead wood, the Tusk’s hoarse scream ending abruptly as half its body was carved straight through. Hoarse shouts of approvals, almost howls, and Hakram slid down from the felled beast. He raised his hand in an unspoken order and Dag saw to it, leading champions into the breach to close it and restore the shield wall. It was like holding together a dike, the Warlord thought. Every holed he plugged was followed by another erupting. And still his flank was doing better than Troke’s, which had been so close to collapse that General Pallas had led all her kataphraktoi into a charge to stem the disaster.

Razin Tanja and Oghuz had led the foot behind them, as much because Troke needed the reinforcements as to get out of the way of the troops Yannu was shifting to support Hakram’s shield wall. Already the right edge of the wall was bolstered with Alava armsmen, but the rest would be here late. So fucking late . Hakram’s warriors were fighting like devils, but even with his aspect burning in his belly like a piece of coal he was not sure it would be enough. At least, though he was not the only one buried neck deep in a nightmare.

In the depths of the pit, Night warred with liquid fire and howling sorceries. Tenebrous, stolen from the ruins of Ater and granted to a lesser god as a mount, was fighting against the Crab as Catherine flew on her mount’s back and hammered at the great monster’s back with burning black flames. The heat of the fires was so great he could feel it on the wind even from a mile away and bursts of lightning blinded the unwary, but the smaller spider had cracked open the carapace of the larger Crab and it looked like it was trying to devour what its mandibles tore into.

Hakram was not sure what struck more horror in him: the chorus of screams that came from the Crab, or the demented screeches – which somehow echoed of a crow’s caws – coming from Tenebrous. Either way, he did not envy the Dominion shield wall left behind to hold the centre. They were close enough that eardrums must be bursting from the noise.

Setting aside the thought, the Warlord returned to the fray. His battle was here, holding back the sea lapping as his wall of shields, and he had no time to spare for anyone else. It was all a whirlwind of blood and screams, steel flashing as the dead ripped out shields and threw themselves at warriors. The crawled under, ripping at flesh, ghouls leapt above shields and tore into formations. The Warlord went where the line broke, where strength sagged, and breach by breach his warband dwindled to nothing. Dead or sent to plug holes, none of the faces around him the same he had begun fighting with.

But his mind was cool, clear. His body was dripping with sweat, muscles aching and his limbs itching where they had been cut, but so long as his mind knew clarity he could make himself move. Another cut, another backhand breaking a skull, another ghouls taken by the neck and crushed . There were always more enemies, and it was with utter surprise that Hakram suddenly stood with no one before him. He turned, seeing only awe in the eyes of the warriors behind him, and found he stood alone in a ring of death.

“Report,” Hakram Deadhand croaked, his voice raw from songs he did not remember singing.

“The Dominion has come, Warlord,” a woman with the colours of the Graven Bones on her mangled shield said. “We stand.”

The Warlord looked around. How many had died? Too many , he thought. Thousands on his flank alone. But wherever his gaze went he saw the dead losing ground, fresh Levantine armsmen tearing into them.

“Let Levant handle the rest,” he said. “Pull back in good order.”

The Clans had done enough bleeding for the day. From the corner of his eye he noted that the shield wall left to hold the edge of the pit had pulled back and sneered. They had not even held back that paltry amount of dead, while his own faced the sea and won?

“What happened in the centre?” he asked.

“Aquiline Osena was hit by an arrow,” the same woman told him. “They say she had to be pulled back and may die.”

Hakram grimaced. Well, she wouldn’t be the only one today.

—

Merciless Gods but the Wolfhound could take a beating.

The other Revenant had died in moments, fending off Sidonia’s assault but falling to a single blow of the Stained Sister. Barehanded, she crumpled the helmet and the head behind it. Pinon did not like the taste of her in the air, Ishaq had noticed, which meant it was likely true the Choir of Endurance had taken an interest. Regardless, that aspect of the Sisters’ that lent her such brute strength was proving well worth her attitude. If only the Scourge had proved as easy a prey as the other.

A simple iron shield should not have been able to take a blow from the Barrow Sword’s blade without a scar, but not a single one of them had yet to leave a mark on anything the Wolfhound wore. Ishaq had been told that the Scourge had the finest defence of all in the Dead King’s service, but he had not expected to be dealing with the Keter’s answer to the fucking Mirror Knight. At least, unlike Christophe de Pavanie, the Wolfhound did not strike as hard as he defended. That would have made this fight impossible instead of merely unlikely.

And Ishaq always trusted his luck to get him through unlikely, for good or ill.

“ Pierce ,” the Vagrant Spear snarled, lunging forward.

Slower than before, though. It was her third time using the aspect, and like the last two it skidded across the side of the iron shield. Ishaq had stepped to the side as Sidonia struck and he moved to flank the Wolfhound, but the Scourge calmly took a step back and kept his sword high. Ready for a parry. The both of them continued circling each other as Sidonia panted loudly, the Stained Sister coming up to take her place. The old woman in the stained priestess garb moved like the wind and leap, but not so quick that her attempt to smash down the shield with both hands was not taken on instead. Ishaq risked a strike, a quick lunge near the neck – he was getting frustrated at never having pierced deep enough for Pinon to drink of the soul – but the parry was waiting.

The surprise came when he saw the Harrowed Witch sent her brother’s ghost trailing behind the Sister and the specter threw himself at the Wolfhound’s legs.

“ Go ,” the Barrow Sword hissed. “Everyone.”

The Grave Binder was looking unsteady on his feet, which meant they were running out of time to finish this. From the corner of his eye Ishaq saw movement, an arrow, but the Archer once more shot it out of the air before it could get anywhere close. Three more shots followed in quick succession, the Hawk being forced on the run by her opponent for what had to be the fifth time since the fight had begun. Ishaq put it out of his mind, trusting the Archer to cover him, and struck at the Wolfhound’s back. The iron armour held but the blow broke the Scourge’s poise, allowing Sidonia to slap away his shield and the Sister to land a hard blow on his helmet. It bent, ever so slightly, but the Wolfhound himself was slammed down into the dust.

The Barrow Sword, eyes wild, stabbed through the eye and to his triumph felt flesh.

“ Drink ,” he snarled.

Pinon was every thirsty, but with his aspect behind her pull it was more than soft pulls taken from the soul. The Revenant imprisoned soul ebbed, pulled into his sword, but Ishaq’s eyes widened in utter surprise when he felt the slightest ripple. An aspect . A moment later he was flying, blown off his feet, and Sidonia had a cut across her face that bled red trails down her face paint. He landed on his back, letting out a pained gasp. Pinon did not leave his hand. She never did, unless he made the decision let her go.

Ishaq rose to his feet in time to see the Stained Sister take a shield smash in the face, breaking her nose. For all her strength, she was not a trained warrior. Not like he and Sidonia were. The Vagrant Spear quickly made the Mark of Mercy and struck, bare feet padding across the dust as she used her spear to vault herself above the Wolfhound and strike at his neck form the back. But the shield was in the way, once more, as the Scourge calmly pivoted.

“Ishaq,” the Grave Binder croaked out. “Not long now. Hurry .”

It was slipping out of his fingers, the Barrow Sword realized. It was all so very close, and he was going to end up with nothing because his aspects were a poor match for the Scourge’s. Because too many of his band had been brought for the talent that would get them out or in the fight instead of help during . The rage, the indignation, burned in his belly like acid.

“No,” he hissed, even as Sidonia burned another aspect to move quickly enough to avoid being skewered.

He took a step forward, then two.

“No,” Ishaq repeated, even as the halo of Light forming around the Sainted Sister was snuffed out by mere closeness to the iron armour.

Close now, close enough the Wolfhound was keeping him in sight.

“No,” the Barrow Sword bit out, as Aspasie’s brother was carved through and dispersed.

The spectre would reform, but not for some time. It did not matter, because now Ishaq was on his enemy and there would be no quarter. He took the shield bash on the face head on, his helm of bronze ringing, and though his nose broke he grinned through the blood and caught the Wolfhound’s shield arm. The Scourge began pulling away, its strength implacable, but Ishaq smashed his bloody head int the Revenant’s helm and broke the effort. He smashed Pinon’s pommel into the faceplate of the helm, rocking back his foe, and in the heartbeat that followed felt a blade slide into his guts.

“No,” the Barrow Sword spat into the Scourge’s face, spit red, and slammed his blade through the eyehole again.

Drink , he thought again, with all his greed and rage. The aspect bit deep, bit hard, and for a glorious instant the soul came loose. Only then there was that fucking ripple, and it was all going to – Ishaq felt a faint touch on his shoulder, light as feather. He could not look, could not move in this frozen moment, but if he turned he somehow knew he would see a crow.

The offer went unsaid, but it might as well have been screamed.

“I have sold more of me for lesser prizes,” Ishaq laughed, and saw in his mind’s eye a pair cold smiles under silver eyes. “Take all you want.”

Night flooded through his veins, blazing ice, and he tossed it blindly at the Scourge’s soul. The heartbeat passed, the ripple finished, and the Barrow Sword was once more thrown off his feet. He landed roughly, bleeding ad pained and well on his way to death, but he was laughing. Because the Wolfhound took a staggering step, then another, and then on the third that fucking helmet blew up in a burst of black flames . Still laughing wildly, Ishaq pulled himself up.

“How does it go again?” he said, wiping tears. “Ah, yes.”

The Barrow Sword raised his blade to the sky in a salute.

“Chno Sve Noc, my darlings,” Ishaq grinned though his bloodied beard.

Behind them, in the distance, one colossal monster finished ripping apart another. A great Crab reputed in a storm of flame that blotted out the sky, glassing the ground, while a gargantuan spider wreathed in Night let out victorious screeches.

“Best we get out of the army before the Warden starts stepping on it,” the Barrow Sword noted, smiling back in the face of the wary looks from the heroines. “Aspasie?”

“Oh Gods I would have left like an hour ago,” the Harrow Witch replied, and her sorcery snapped into place.

The same trick that had let her survive the dead, Ishaq thought with satisfaction, should be enough to get the five of them out of the army unseen before he finished bleeding out. It would be a poor end to his first deed in the Rolls, the Barrow Sword mused, to die.

Even if he got back up afterwards.

—

Lady Itima Ifriqui blinked at the messenger.

“You’re certain?” she carefully asked.

“Hundreds saw it, my lady,” the man replied. “It was too deep a wound for it to be cauterized by a Lantern, she had to pull back to get a healer.”

Itima’s mind raced. Was this Yannu’s doing? Cleaning up the other threat now that the battle was turning into a victory? It was not her that had given the order. It was Razin she had in her sights, having laid a trail to have a jealous Tartessos captain who wanted Aquiline’s hand blamed for it, but it should not yet have been carried out. Perhaps it was the Enemy’s work and not that of the Lord of Alava, she decided. The two of them slain in a single battle would be too obvious, certain to have the Warden taking a closer look at the matter. The Gods were having a laugh at their expense, it seemed.

“Will she live?” the Lady of Vaccei bluntly asked.

The messenger hesitated, coming closer, and Itima frowned as she leant in. There were only armsmen around her, trusted Ifriqui men, but it paid to be careful. Still, it felt like theatre to – the knife moved in a blur but Itima was of the Brigand’s Blood. She caught the wrist before it did more than scrape her cheek and she had a dagger sliding in the man’s belly before a heartbeat had passed, twisting to make the assassin gasp in pain.

“You fool,” she hissed. “You think you’re the first to try? I’ll keep you alive for days before you get the mercy of death.”

“Honour,” the man gasped, “to the Blood.”

Her stomach tightened and she dropped the assassin, taking a step back and touching her cheek. A single cut. Poison .

“Healer,” Lady Itima barked at her armsmen. “Get me a healer now .”

Thirty men and women stood around her, the tabards over their coats of mail in the colours of the Vengeful Brigand’s Blood. Loyal warriors, the finest in the service of the Ifriqui.

Not one of them moved.

Itima Ifriqui beheld the circle of steel around her which she had thought a shield a heartbeat ago but now recognized as a cage. She did not ask who, because there was only one man they would have betrayed her to: another Ifriqui. A spasm shuddered across her body, bringing her to her knees. A quick poison, Itima dimly thought. And almost painless.

Within thirty heartbeats she was dead.

—

The messenger whispered into Moro’s ear and Razin watched as the man’s scarred face convulsed with grief.

“Sad news?” the Lord of Malaga asked.

“It appears that my mother’s heart gave, Lord Razin,” Moro Ifriqui sadly said. “They think it was the hours in the heat wearing armour. Her health has been getting worse for years, but she insisted on taking the field today.”

The way he said it, it almost sounded true. The woman who had murdered three of Aquiline’s brothers was dead, the Lord of Malaga thought. A feud would be buried with her.

“She will have passed seeing us victorious, at least,” Razin gently said. “Take comfort in that.”

“There is no comfort to take in any of this, I think,” Moro said, tone too raw to be a lie.

It was not, Razin reminded himself, about good and bad.

“Then why?” he asked.

Why come to me, why take my deal, why refuse to return to the tower and close the door behind you .

“I told my brother,” Moro Ifriqui softly said, “that I get him home to his family.”

Razin met the other man’s eyes.

“We all want to go home, Razin Tanja,” the man who was to be Lord of Vaccei said. “And not to fight another fucking war. So I’ll do whatever’s needed to get us there.”

“Eyes like poison, heart like stone,” Razin softly quoted.

Moro finished the verse from the Anthem of Smoke, changing only a word.

“By my hand a thousand graves sown,” the Ifriqui murmured.

Silence held between them. Soon enough, a man that Itima Ifriqui had paid to kill Razin would try to do so. Rima Marave would silence him before he could speak. And when the coin was followed, it would be revealed that Careful Yannu had been the one to pay the assassin, that he had planned to kill an ally in the midst of a battle against the Dead King himself. But Razin would keep the secret, keep the Lord of Alava from being called a traitor by all of Calernia and the Valiant Champion’s Blood from being dishonoured beyond repair.

He would do this so long as, when they all returned to Levant, Yannu Marave did not take up arms.

Razin Tanja watched the distant line of horizon, sitting the saddle, and wondered about the nature of change.

Chapter 55: Hail

“Nineteen: always help the treacherous lieutenant to kill your nemesis when asked. Even if it’s a plot they’ll likely stick the knife if it looks like you’re winning.”

– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

Tenebrous smashed the last of the dead with unsettling glee, stomping about the undead army until there was no group larger than a dozen moving from the battlefield.

The dead did not rout, but the Dead King had decided to cut his losses and save some of the skeletons for battles to come and so the last two or three thousand scattered in every direction. The sight of it had the army cheering, the signs of victory become unarguable, but for all that that burst of enthusiasm there would be no pursuit. There was no cavalry left in any fit state to run down the enemy, and though Komena wanted to pursue the retreating bands I advised against it. There was no telling what manner of nastiness the Dead King might have waiting for her out there.

So Tenebrous returned to my shadow and the Battle of the Ruins, as General Pallas had suggested it be named, came to an end. It was a victory, but a costly one. From the first charge to the lines of the dead collapsing completely the battle had lasted barely three hours yet it was still one of the bloodier ones I’d fought over the last year.

Part of that was the nature of the armies involved. Orcs and Levantines tended to have inferior equipment to the Army of Callow, with its standard issue armour and weapons. Levantines were armed according to the wealth of the captain who led them in battle, an irregular arrangement, and the Clans were even worse. Equipment and training both varied wildly from clan to clan, though the larger ones all fielded a core of well-armed veterans as their main fighting force. On both sides, though, the average soldier didn’t usually have a full suit of mail and plate was fairly rare. In a bloody, graceless brawl like the one fought today that meant casualties had begun to rack up as time passed.

The other side of the coin was Keter’s forces, who in this case had boasted equipment parity at best but had the one advantage that undead could never lose: they weren’t alive. Sure, the averages Bones was barely better than a Proceran levy in a fight but unlike that levy it would not tire or rout. It made Keteran armies a fucking pain to actually break, because they wouldn’t run if they began to lose and they had an advantage the longer the battle continued. However unimpressive a skeleton wielding a bronze sword might be, when it was facing soldiers too tired to put up their shields in time it was going to start landing blows.

The Clans had been taught that hard lesson today. Holding the flanks against onslaughts all afternoon until Lord Yannu was able to swing around his forces to reinforce had been a bloody business and only gotten bloodier as the hours passed. Though Hakram had not yet put together a system to count casualties like the Army of Callow’s, the rough estimate he’d gotten was that out of the twenty-three thousand warriors that’d sallied out only about fourteen thousand would be coming back. Almost ten thousand dead, a rough day for the orcs. The Levantines had walked away much more lightly wounded, down about four thousand warriors out of their twenty-seven. The worse off were still General Pallas’ kataphraktoi, who’d had gotten themselves mauled keeping the right flank from collapsing. They’d almost half of their three thousand in furious charges,

It would be hours yet before we knew the real count of the butcher’s bill, but there was no time to spend grieving. We needed to get moving, lest we be caught out in the plains come dark. First came the grim labour of taking care of the dead, warriors stripping their fallen comrades of arms and armour – we could not afford to waste any – before dragging them to make great piles. Mages and priests torched those until there was nothing left for the Dead King to use, mounds of bodies crackling bright as the afternoon crawled forward. We then left the field with what some might have called unseemly haste, but it would have been a mistake to linger.

There were still other armies out there, and the last thing we needed was to get stuck fighting them in the dark.

While I could have left the returning army in the dust, flying far ahead on Zombie’s back, I led her into a landing instead and rode to speak with the victors of the day. Most cheerful of them all was the Barrow Sword, who had slain the Wolfhound and so fulfilled his end of the bargain with the Blood. He had earned a place in the Rolls. He’d also picked up another trick along the way.

“Night, huh,” I mused, cocking my heat to the side.

“So you can tell at a glance,” Ishaq replied, stroking a beard matted with blood and dirt. “Useful.”

“I’m still First Under the Night,” I simply said.

That the Barrow Sword had taken the offer did not surprise me in the least, as Ishaq was brutally pragmatic even by Levantine standards, but that Sve Noc had extended it in the first place did. It had only been a matter of time before they began approaching villains, of course, but beginning with the representative for Below under the Truce and Terms was a bold statement. Maybe even more than that, I thought. The most powerful heroes all tended to have use of the Light, so granting Night to the most visible of the villains on Calernia – Neshamah and myself, anyway – was as good as slapping down a gauntlet. There was another merchant of miracles at the market, and this one a lot less squeamish than the Choirs.

If we were not at war and Calernia on the brink of annihilation, I suspected quite a few heroes would have answered that challenge sword in hand.

“I count myself in the finest company, then,” the Barrow Sword grinned.

I snorted. He was in a gloatingly fine mood and I couldn’t get myself to smack his fingers for it. Taking care of the Wolfhound had been solid work on his part: by itself the Revenant wasn’t much trouble for our finer Named, but it was never by itself. It was always a meatshield for another altogether more dangerous Scourge, turning difficult opponents into outright lethal ones. It would have been even better if he’d gotten the Mantle, pain that she was for me to deal with, but I wouldn’t look a dead Scourge in the mouth. I’d praised him enough during the report, though, so instead of reiterating and swelling his head I changed the subject.

“I hear there was a scuffle with the Blood during the battle,” I idly said.

Curious dark eyes studied me.

“If Itima Ifriqui truly died of old age,” the Barrow Sword said, “I will shave my beard and enter a monastery.”

Yeah, hadn’t bought that either. Someone had killed the old viper, though it was hard to tell who. None of the other Blood were kicking up a fuss though, not even her sons, so I was inclined to let sleeping dogs lie for now. It might be worth squeezing some answers out my ducklings later, but I wasn’t inclined to get too involved if the boat wasn’t rocking. Moro Ifriqui, though one-armed since the Graveyard, was popular with the Vaccei captains and on much better terms with the rest of the Blood. As far as I was concerned, Levant had traded up when he got put in charge – informally for now, until his kin Levant pushed through the same procedural trick that’d allowed Razin to become Lord of Malaga without returning there to be acclaimed.

“Not too much to be gained from digging,” I mused. “The army’s holding up well, which is the important part at the moment.”

Ishaq was no fool, so he nodded in acknowledgement of my unspoken warning. He could have a look if he was curious, I’d tacitly told him, but only so far as it didn’t endanger the readiness of the Dominion armies.

“I imagine my duties will be keeping me busy,” the Barrow Sword replied.

“Good man,” I pleasantly smiled.

I stayed long enough to get the tale of the fight told to me by the entire band of five, expanding on the simple report, and handed congratulations where they were deserved. Ishaq, cleverly enough, was unstinting in his praise of the Vagrant Spear and the Harrowed Witch. By doing so he was sharing the glory with a heroine in good odour with the Blood and by far the least threatening of the villains under the Terms, both strikes useful to him in the long term. He was shaping up nicely as my successor for representative, I decided. He’d been the right pick, for all that Indrani had needed to get her hands dirty to put him in place.

Speaking of Indrani, I found she was not in so fine a mood as the Barrow Sword.

“Couldn’t land an arrow on the bastard,” she told me, speaking of the Hawk. “It’s unpleasantly good at running.”

“You kept anyone important from getting shot,” I reassured her. “Which was what I asked you, ‘Drani, not a scalp.”

“Aquiline got shot,” she pointed out.

I rolled my eye.

“Not by the Hawk,” I said. “That girl needs to start using a fucking shield or get better at ducking. If she gets killed by a skeleton, I may not be able to stop from laughing at her wake.”

Which my finely-honed diplomatic instincts led me to suspect at least some Levantines might take offence to.

“You’re all heart, Cat,” Archer drily replied.

I shrugged. Aquiline would survive, the arrow had missed her lungs and they’d gotten her to a healer in time. The light armour preferred by the Slayer’s Blood had its uses, I wouldn’t argue otherwise after witnessing firsthand the skill of Levantine skirmishers during my Wasteland campaign, but it was ill-suited to the kind of battles the Dead King gave. She should order some good plate and get it over with before she picked up enough scars it’d ruin her paints. Gods knew today’s wound was certain to leave one, mage healing or not. I left Indrani to her mood, which at least seemed to be inspiring her to scheme ways to handle the Hawk when they next met.

Hakram was easy enough to find, and though his chiefs were in a festive mood – a victory had been won today and everyone knew the Clans had done the heavy lifting – I knew that look on his face. It was the kind of calm deliberation he put on when he was trying not to openly disgruntled. I’d seen him put on shades of it more than once after Vivienne beat him at shatranj, though the shade of it today was rather more serious than that. I traded congratulations with a few chiefs, meeting Juniper’s father for the first time in the process. Oghuz the Lame was an impressive sort, all the more for being chief of a clan as powerful as the Red Shields when he needed a cane to walk.

Most orcs saw cripples as barely better than children, so he must still be a deft hand at duelling despite his age.

“I think she has your cheekbones,” I told him.

“She does, the poor child,” Oghuz mourned on behalf of his daughter. “At least she mostly inherited Istrid’s looks aside from that.”

“They make you look friendlier,” I said, patting his shoulder. “Hakram’s might as well be a razor blade.”

The older orc looked rather charmed at that, to my surprise. I chatted with him longest of the chiefs, but he still left with the others when their Warlord implied he needed to speak with me privately. Then outright stated it, when the slower sorts failed to catch on. Eventually it was only the two of us, Hakram’s face slumping into exhaustion as he met my gaze.

“Come to see how I’m holding up, I take it,” the Warlord said.

The tone was a little pointed but was tired enough to fall short of being accusing.

“Something like that,” I acknowledged.

I wouldn’t deny that I had come as the Warden as much as I had come as a friend. Rare were the situations these days where I could afford to be only one of the two. He didn’t look pleased by the reply, but I suspected he’d appreciated I had not tried to pretty it up.

“I will not falter, Catherine,” Hakram said. “But will you begrudge me that I am bitter it was my people who bore the weight of the slaughter today?”

“It’s why you agreed to take the flanks,” I evenly replied. “Levant’s twenty-seven thousand are all that’s left of their armies. You have numbers they do not.”

He’d brought almost thrice their number in warriors, and that hadn’t even been the entire army he’d marched south to Ater. Mind you, orcs fielded a lot more warriors than most other nations since most of a clan except the young and the elderly would take up arms when there was plunder to be had. Considering how many women there were in orc warbands and their age – between twenty to forty – if the force brought to Keter was wiped out the consequences for the Steppes would be disastrous. Much worse than if the Dominion lost the entire army they’d sent to the Grand Alliance

“More died than was necessary,” the Warlord growled. “We fell for the trap. I did not gainsay Yannu then and that is my guilt, but I will not forget we were left to stand alone for most of the battle.”

“That’s fair,” I honestly replied. “I imagine General Pallas feels much the same. The course of the fight ended up going badly for both of you, so you have good reason to resent him.”

So long as they didn’t end up blaming Careful Yannu for malice that did not exist instead of a tactical mistake, I had no issue with some resentment existing. The Lord of Alava was a skilled general, but in this instance he’d not particularly impressed. To be honest, if it had been the Army of Callow dying on the flanks I’d likely be a great deal less gracious about this than Hakram was being.

“Pallas bled her men for us,” Hakram conceded. “It was worth gratitude.”

“She bled her men because if Troke’s flank collapsed we were going to lose the battle,” I said. “Pallas isn’t exactly a bleeding heart.”

She was, however, a talented tactician. She’d even correctly identified that with the Warlord holding the other flank together, it was Troke’s that was in dire need of aid.

“Her reasons matter less than her actions,” Hakram replied.

I shrugged. I wasn’t going to argue the point if he wanted to toss thanks General Pallas’ way, honestly. She was back under Helike and Empress Basilia these days, but I hadn’t forgotten that Pallas and her soldiers had fought up north with the Grand Alliance years before anyone else from the League gave us the time of the day. Instead of arguing, I hummed and took a look at his Name to confirm the subtle difference I’d felt in him from the start.

“I see you picked up an aspect while you were at it,” I said.

There he looked pleased.

“The traces of it were there, but it came together during the battle,” Hakram said. “You can discern the word?”

“My sight’s not that precise,” I admitted. “Not right now, at least. I tend to see more deeply around pivots, when fate is thicker. But I can tell what it’s about, more or less.”

Active authority, in a local and direct sense. Not surprising for a career officer and my former right hand to pick up, especially after he’d stepped into large boots of his own by becoming the Warlord.

“ Lead ,” Hakram said, not hesitating a moment.

I felt something in me unclench at the offered trust. For Named, aspects were cards best kept up your sleeves: keeping them hidden until they could be used to devastating effect was often the difference between winning or losing a fight.

“Try to use it,” I suggested. “Let’s see if I can help you feel out the limits.”

It would have been a more politic use of my time to ride with the Blood instead for the rest of the way back, but part of me refused to think of that as the better use. We marched together the rest of way back, others flitting in and out but the two of us staying side by side until the camp was in sight.

—

“ Fuck me ,” I said. “What the Hells happened to the floating siege towers?”

Vivienne looked grim. Given the wreckage I was looking at, she had good reason to. Keter was an island of stone surrounded by a deep chasm that was broken by only four bridges, which were the natural path to take when trying to take the city. Because we weren’t raging idiots, we expected that the Dead King would use them to funnel our armies into narrow killing zones for as long as possible and then collapse them the moment there was a risk of us actually taking one of the gates. We’d prepared for that eventuality – it was not happenstance that none of the three most powerful mages in the Grand Alliance had left the camp – but it’d always been understood that the gates were unlikely to fall to us.

That was why Praes had turned floating structures into great siege towers, so that we might broaden our assault.

“Two were sunk,” the Princess replied.

I grimaced, but to be blunt I was not surprised.

“There’s a reason we didn’t fill them with troops from the start,” I said.

Only enough to secure a beachhead on the walls, no more. Otherwise we risked pissing away a few thousand soldiers to exactly no gain whatsoever.

“Two touched the walls,” Vivienne continued. “Masego kept most of Keter’s counter-magic off them for long enough.”

“That’s impressive,” I said, “but since I’m not looking at a wall flying our banners, I’m going to assume that something went horribly wrong.”

“We still have one tower,” she sighed, brushing back a strand of brown hair.

“I hope to Below you don’t mean that one, Vivi,” I replied, pointing forward.

The outer rampart of Keter had been, in a manner of speaking, breached. Someone had seen fit to smash the floating siege tower into said wall, hard enough that it had gotten embed into said wall. It looked, I thought, a little like a knife dropped into a bloc of butter and jutting out. Except for the part where it was all stone on both sides and several tons of it were involved. The ‘bottom’ of the tower was extending far enough out of the wall that it really should have snapped off or dragged the whole thing into the chasm by now, which meant the enchantments keeping the structure aloft still partially worked. It was an oddly disturbing sight.

Princess sighed again.

“The assault went well at first,” she told me. “We pushed across two of the four bridges, and though Keter spared neither arrows nor sorcery we reached the gates. The siege towers were torched before they could cross, but the ladders and the rams got through.”

“So when we started knocking at the gates, Keter dropped the bridges,” I predicted.

She nodded.

“We sent heroes under the bridges first, to try to prevent that, but Pickler believes that there is no outside mechanism. The bridges were built from the start with foundations under the city of Keter that could be brought down,” Vivienne said. “It was old work, regardless, and played out differently on the two bridges.”

I could see one of the two from where we stood, the fortified camp surrounding Keter as a ring of flame from all the torches and bonfires lit in the night. The arch of stone was missing its forward half, leaving the gate of Keter to stand over a sheer cliff.

“The Witch should have been able to handle that,” I said, nodding there.

“She did,” Princess replied. “She held the stones aloft long enough for our forces to retreat through them. And on the other side Sahelian negated the Enemy’s work.”

I cocked a curious eyebrow.

“Only a section in the middle collapsed,” Vivienne said, “splitting the army in two and stranding the vanguard. She filled the gap with ice.”

I sniffed in disdain. Someone was cribbing from my tactics. I’d started that whole ice thing in Dormer, long before anyone else got famous for it.

“So we kept up one of the bridge assaults and landed two towers,” I mused. “Still a solid enough offensive. I take it that’s when it started going wrong?”

“The Tumult came out to duel Hierophant to keep him from protecting the towers,” she replied. “And Keter counter-attacked with wyrms.”

I blinked. Those were great snake-constructs that’d only rarely seen use out of Twilight’s Pass, being the Dead King’s equivalent of our Praesi floating siege towers. The massive snakes were armoured and had ladders inside, which the dead could climb after the wyrms hooked themselves to the edge of the wall with steel and bone. What use could they have-

“He crammed his siege towers into our siege towers, like a snake forced into the maw of a larger one,” I breathed out, putting it together.

It was both utterly wasteful of manpower, I thought, and brilliant in a twisted way.

“It kept us from landing a beachhead on the walls,” Vivienne said, “and once he had us pinned, the Seelie came out.”

Masego insisted that what that Scourge did was ‘fascination’, a form of enchantment, but it was pretty much mind control whatever he wanted to call it. So the Dead King had kept us contained to small tunnels with no real room to manoeuvre than then unleased the fucking mind control fairy on the people inside. Yeah, I can see that turning nasty. Just for a bit, though. After that, it’d be sure to summon...

“The Blade of Mercy and Daring Pyromancer ran into her,” Vivienne continued. “The Seelie got the Pyromancer, but the Blade cut the spell out of him and they set fire to the wyrm. It made her retreat, but ended up being something of a tactical mistake.”

Setting fire to tightly enclosed spaces full of people who couldn’t easily get out tended to be that.

“How bad?” I grimaced.

“Almost two thousand dead, more from the stampede and the smoke than the fire,” Vivienne said, “and the dead got to the heart of the tower in the chaos.”

“So that’s how it got crashed,” I frowned.

“No,” Princess shook her head. “They tried to make them crash into each other .”

Her description of what came after that was nightmarish. The Praesi mages controlling the other tower had seen the threat coming and tried to withdraw, but the wyrm inside had fought the movement. The soldiers inside panicked as the dead kept pouring in, meanwhile the other tower rose higher could it could be smashed down like a child banging rock down at another. Fortunately, the Black Knight had led a band through daring strike into the grounded tower to remove the wyrm using some acidic creation of the Concocter’s that would dissolve it from the inside. It would have still failed, if Hanno and his own band had not stepped in to settle the other tower.

“How did they even get into it?” I frowned. “It should have been fully in flight by then.”

“The Mirror Knight,” Vivienne said.

“Sure, throwing him is the traditional opening gambit,” I acknowledged. “But after he landed – wait, are serious ?”

She nodded, lips twitching.

“They bound themselves to the Mirror Knight and had him thrown by a trebuchet, using him to pierce through the siege tower’s walls,” Princess said.

I paused.

“I know it’s in poor taste to complain when they’re on our side,” I said, “but sometimes I do get a little irritated at how they keep getting away with this shit.”

After that they’d fought their way through the dead and taken back control of the tower, holding it up long enough that the other one was able to get away. The turnaround was not to last, though, since the Tumult slipped past Masego and crippled the enchantments keeping the tower up. It began to crash.

“How’d they get out?” I asked, morbidly curious.

“For a very brief moment the falling tower and the one withdrawing were aligned, with only a gap of a dozen feet between where one ended and the other began,” Vivienne said. “So they...”

“They jumped,” I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “They jumped out the falling tower into the other one, like assholes.”

Vivienne’s blue-grey eyes betrayed some amusement at my expense.

“He’s not even really Named anymore, he’s transitioning,” I complained.

“I’ll be sure to bring the matter up at the next war council,” Princess replied, serenely smiling.

My lips twitched, and the two of us stood there in silence for a while. Staring at the dark silhouette of Keter in the distance. The humour slowly melted away.

“How many?” I asked.

“At least sixteen thousand dead,” Vivienne softly replied. “And I hear your battle was closer than anticipated.”

“Fourteen thousand dead or thereabouts,” I said. “The enemy got clever with a sand trap and mauled our flanks. The Clans soaked up the worst of it.”

At least thirty thousand dead between the battle and the storm, huh. I stood there and let myself grasp that, the sheer number of soldiers we’d gotten killed in a day. I had fought entire campaigns where I had lost fewer men than died today. And it was only going to get worse. None of us had truly expected this assault on the walls to work, deep down. It was a first probe, to see how heavily defended the Crown of the Dead was. Almost two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers had come here to break the end times before they could break us. Nine more attacks like this and we’d run out of men.

We hadn’t even managed to set foot inside the fucking city.

“It’ll look better tomorrow,” Vivienne finally said.

“No it won’t,” I murmured.

A moment.

“No it won’t,” my friend admitted.

So we stood there in silence, sharing company, until fear had dulled enough we could crawl into our beds to sleep.

Chapter 56: Brink

“Note: while curiosity did kill the cat, the effect only ensued when it was so strongly imprinted in the mind as to overwrite motor functions. Human experiments reproduced the results, leaving what would set cats apart unclear.”

– Extract from the journal of Dread Emperor Malignant II

The Grand Alliance taken a swing in the face, but we’d get over it. That was the way these things went, really. You rolled with the black eye, threw sand in the other guy’s face come next round and stabbed them good in the belly while they were blinded. I told Vivienne as much when we discussed what should follow our ‘victories’ over breakfast. Her milkmaid braid was undone, falling down her back, and she started blearily at me over porridge she insisted on touching up with honey for some godforsaken reason.

“Have you considered,” Princess said, “that the unreasonable number of brawls you’ve been in might be making your metaphors baffling to anyone remotely normal?”

Indrani, seated between us, finished scarfing down her sausage and licked her fingers before shaking her head at Vivienne.

“Nah, her stuff is always easy to get,” Archer said. “You’re off on that one.”

My successor cocked an eyebrow at me as I winced. Ah, ‘Drani. Even when trying to help, she ended up verbally socking me in the stomach like usual. It was a fair point that if Archer and I were on the same wavelength, there might be a little too much brawl in my metaphors.

“No, Vivienne is entirely correct,” Hierophant absent-mindedly said. “When Catherine gets started it sometimes turns into rather mystifying jargon.”

I grinned, cocking an eyebrow at Princess, whose turn it was to wince. Yeah, Masego was agreeing with her. I wasn’t the only one with a would-be helper tying stones around my feet. Hierophant’s notion of commonly understandable conversation was about three years if magical study removed from any halfway reasonable expectation. Draw , Vivienne mouthed at me, and I inclined my head. I could have tried for the win, but if Indrani caught on to what I was doing she was most definitely enough of a wench to go out of her way to sink my chances.

“Look, my perfectly serviceable metaphors aside the situation’s not that bad,” I said, allowing myself more frankness than I would in a war council. “The hourglass is emptying when it comes to supply, sure, but none of us actually expected our first shot at the walls to win us Keter.”

“I did expect us to land on the walls, however,” Masego noted. “Which we did not.”

I sighed, not arguing the point because he wasn’t wrong. Sixteen thousand dead without a single foot being set atop the walls of Keter was not great for morale. The reports from the phalanges and the Jacks I’d read over while drinking my tea had been pretty clear about that: even the Army of Callow’s spirit had been bruised by yesterday’s battles. It was unsurprisingly worst of all the Grand Alliance in the Proceran forces, which still sported a number of levies. The conscripts had been hardened by the years of fighting, but they’d never be as steady as career soldiers.

“Like I said, we took a swing in the face,” I told him. “But we have a better idea of Keter’s defences now and the next assault we’ll mount will punch through the defences.”

While the Confederation of Praes did not have a Warlock it did have an informal leading mage, Lady Nahiza Serrif. She’d been set to the task of overseeing the Praesi mages during the battle, backing up Masego’s defensive spellcasting to shut down Keteran ritual, but she’d had another duty and she’d discharged it successfully: we now had an estimate of what Legion doctrine called the ‘spellfire volume’ of the Dead King’s forces. As laid out by now-general Grem One-Eye’s Considerations , spellfire volume was the total amount of sorcery than an opposing force was capable of mustering at once.

It didn’t necessarily translate into superior strength in practice, since for example a smaller cadre of casters capable of High Arcana might well overpower a significantly larger group of less-trained mages that could technically deploy more sorcery. What it did give us, though, was an estimate of the enemy’s maximum strike capacity and how much of our own mages we should keep in reserve to defend. In this case, the answer was looking to be a little over two thirds of our casters. That was still a lot of strength loose for us to deploy, which meant a lot of the plans we’d been keeping back were now looking to e viable.

Committing the greater Praesi fortresses, for one, but also Chancellor Alaya’s battlefield applications of Still Water. And since we could deploy these with an expectation that we wouldn’t just be throwing away irreplaceable assets, it meant we could start using our trump cards to make openings for them. No, yesterday had been a black eye but it’d not been a total loss.

“And when’s that going to be?” Indrani asked, curious. “We’re going to be with the besieging force this time, yeah?”

“We are,” I confirmed. “We’ll have to discuss in council who takes their turn sallying out to keep our back clean, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the League with some Proceran reinforcements.”

Even after the Principate had spent years being ravaged, it still had by far the largest cavalry contingent of all the nations of the Grand Alliance. After the casualties her cataphracts had taken at the Battle of the Ruins to keep Chief Troke’s flank from collapsing, Basilia was sure to want to use someone else’s cavalry on the field.

“Nice,” Archer said. “Been talking with Alexis about a trick we could use on a Scourge, it’d be interesting to try out. Doesn’t tell me when we’re taking our crack at it, though.”

“I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “Not for a few days at least. We need to see to our wounded and let the soldiers rest for a bit.”

Much as I disliked waiting, given the dire state of our supplies, you couldn’t repeatedly send armies into the meat grinders and expect them not to break. We’d prepare for the assault and get it going as soon as morale had solidified.

“Good,” Masego said. “I have begun studying the damage the fallen tower made to Keter’s wards when it fell through the wall, but it is a difficult matter and enemy interference complicates it further. Time will help.”

“Doesn’t it always?” I easily replied.

It was the most precious resource, when making war, and always the scarcest. I left that breakfast in a better mood, some of the gloom for last night shed now that I some sleep in my body and a semblance of a path forward. I spent two days conferring with Named and generals, laying out the skeleton of the assault to come, and Hierophant even tossed some good news our way. The fallen tower, while it might not have destroyed the wards that made it unfeasible to reduce the walls of Keter by sorcery, had weakened several sections of them. That knowledge allowed me to add some flesh to the bones of the plan, Juniper further refining it.

And then we had trouble.

—

It had now been five days since the Battle of the Ruins, and it’d gotten bad enough that we’d had to call a war council over it. It drew raised eyebrows when I brought General Abigail instead of Juniper as my second, but everyone there had concerns great enough it didn’t even end up warranting a spoken question.

“If we were not stranded,” First Princess Rozala Malanza frankly said, “half my army would have deserted by now.”

I winced. The Jacks had told me it was bad, but not quite that bad.

“I’ve had conversations with the Stygians and the Penthesians that bordered on threats to walk,” Empress Basilia admitted. “And if they do walk, others will follow.”

“It’s not the nobles we have to worry about, it’s the rank and file,” I flatly stated. “We can hang a few aristocrats and the rest will fall in line, but we can’t hang an army into being fighting fit.”

“Threat of death will do little,” Chancellor Alaya agreed, “when most of the Grand Alliance’s soldiery is now convinced it is going to die anyway.”

Which they were, and Gods forgive me but I couldn’t even blame them. Our supply situation had been known for some time by select officers – inevitable, since we were already rationing and there were now about two weeks of food left – but we’d kept a lid on the real sucker punch: the dwarves weren’t going to be supplying us with anything. The deal with the Herald of the Deeps had fallen through and his replacement, Lady Sybella, was perfectly willing to leave us to die until we bent to the even steeper terms she’d offered. Soldiers weren’t always the most learned of people, but most of them could do simple mathematics.

There were two weeks of food left, none more around or coming, and it had taken more than two weeks to get to Keter through the Twilight Ways. Which were, anyhow, shattered.

The realization that even if by some miracle Keter was taken quickly enough everyone the Grand Alliance had brought north was likely to starve to death in the aftermath had been a knockout blow in the wake of the black eye caused by our first failed offensive. Morale had cratered, and even in the Army of Callow some soldiers had refused to leave their tents and attend their duties. We’d come down hard on those, hard enough that it’d not spread, but it was all balancing on a knife’s edge. The Legions had held up about the same, but the less disciplined armies had not. Most of Procer’s fantassins were no longer taking orders and Hakram was so busy cracking heads to keep the Clans in line he almost hadn’t been able to come today.

Of all forces only the Lycaonese had been unaffected, instead throwing a feast they’d called a ‘wake’ where they got drunk and spoke each other’s eulogies before declaring themselves already dead and sworn to fight Keter to the last. Even Cordelia had gotten proper sloshed, I’d heard, which I was rather sad to have missed.

“Our captains are petitioning to know of the terms the Kingdom Under asked and why they have been refused,” Lord Yannu told us. “That part, at least, appears to remain unknown.”

“Have any of you learned where the leak came from?” Rozala asked.

I grimaced.

“I have,” I admitted. “The phalanges found the source.”

That had the entire room’s eyes swivelling towards me, save for one pair. General Abigail Tanner stood like a woman headed for gallows with her name written on the rope, the perpetual dark rings around her eyes standing out even more starkly for her bleak expression. With those watery blue eyes and that frazzled hair she looked like she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a year, which might well be the truth. I flicked a glance at her, nodding. She cleared her throat.

“It was the Third Army,” General Abigail said. “I have standing orders for my Supply Tribune to underreport our stocks in food and goblin munitions, which made it stand out more obviously when it was on record we were a week away from running empty and we still didn’t get sent anything.”

It was very much against regulations to do what she’d just described, the underreporting so the Third would be sent extra stocks, but she wasn’t the only one who worked her numbers along those lines. The adjunct secretariat had dug deep and found she and her officers weren’t skimming, just using the extra stocks as a reserve in case supply was shaken, so she’d gotten off light. Some docked pay, a reduction of her pension and Juniper had pretty brutally chewed out. She’d blushed red enough at the screaming it had shown even on those sunburnt cheek, but the pension reduction had actually brought tears to her eyes.

That was the internal discipline of the Army of Callow, though. The problem that’d begun in her backyard had ended up much larger than that.

“How did it spread from there, general?” Razin evenly asked.

I replied in her stead.

“Her Supply Tribune’s subordinates began asking questions and they found out that no space had been cleared in our camps for the arrival of fresh supplies,” I said. “It was a small leap from there, and the shock of the realization was enough that several got drunk and loosened their tongues. From there, it was the simple spread of soldier’s gossip.”

It was unsurprising it’d spread across camps. The Grand Alliance armies were encamped close to one another and shared common walls, turning the fortified ring into something like a city of tents. With soldiers having little to do but gossip given the general idleness of a siege between assaults, the moment rumours began to spread it was a given they’d take like wildfire.

“It was my officers, so it’s my fault,” General Abigail said. “Can’t take that back, but I offer you my apologies and my resignation.”

Her tone had gotten, I thought, slightly hopeful by the end of the sentence. Though I would have liked to simply refuse her offer, it wasn’t that simple. I didn’t entirely have the leverage to make that decision alone, not when it was the Army of Callow that’d leaked the secret that got us into this mess. If the rest of the Grand Alliance wanted her resignation, I’d have to give it.

“It would change nothing,” First Princess Rozala said. “The cat is already out of the bag.”

“It might make things worse, truly” Empress Basilia noted. “Turn her into a figurehead for the resentment to gather behind.”

Yannu was less convinced.

“Is she to escape punishment, then?” he pushed.

Razin shot me a shrew look.

“Has the Army of Callow already dealt out discipline?” the Lord of Malaga asked.

“It has,” I said. “No demotion, but docked pay and pension as well as some other disciplinary measures.”

An argument could be made that under some regulations she should be whipped, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there. It’d make the Third Army boiling mad if Abigail the Fox was whipped in front of our assembled soldiery.

“She should be punished for failure of command, not the mistakes of her men,” Prince Otto bluntly said. “That is her crime. Going any further would be unjust.”

The general’s face fell and I suppressed a smile. You’re not getting out of command that easily, Tanner. Yannu Marave remained displeased and Rozala actually seemed like she was leaning his way in practice, whatever her words, so I threw them a bone by having her added to the latrine-digging duty rotation for a week. Neither of them were actually out of blood so they were satisfied with the light humiliation, though they really should have figured out that it would only make her more popular with her men. Soldiers liked seeing generals get their hands dirty. Being born a noble came with some blind spots, I mused.

It wasn’t like a brewer’s daughter would be all that concerned with her lordly dignity.

Crestfallen, General Abigail retreated behind me and we moved on to the thick of the meeting. What the Hells were meant to do about any of this.

“We should make the price asked by the dwarves public,” Empress Basilia suggested. “The anger should turn sentiment around.”

“That’s a risk,” I grunted.

Rozala agreed.

“If despair wins over anger, we might well be forced to agreed to the terms of the Kingdom Under by our own armies,” the First Princess said.

Yannu and Razin backed her on that, the Lord of Alava frankly stating that most the Dominion captains would not hesitate to clamour for the bargain to be struck since Levant was ceding no territory.

“Should part of our army agree while another does not, the discord could get out of hand,” Chancellor Alaya said. “We cannot afford to be fighting each other instead of the dead.”

The problem was that no one really had a solution. Our soldiers were rebellious because, well, we were in a fucking terrible situation. If the dwarves hung us out to dry, we were all going to die whether or not we took Keter. Or even worse, some of the most powerful nobles would make it out while everyone else died. That thought would be like tossing a lit match at oil, if it spread widely enough.

“We need to secure our supplies with reliable soldiers,” Hakram said. “Else we risk of deserters attempting to grab food and take their chances with the Ossuary.”

“Wise,” Empress Basilia said. “Though that is only a temporary salve. We need a way to turn morale around.”

And there were some ideas, so we broke up and set about trying them. First was Rozala’s own notion of spreading rumours of our own to flip sentiment: namely that we intended to invade the Serenity once Keter was taken, which was farmland bearing plentiful food. It worked some, but it was an obvious ploy and our soldiers weren’t dumb. There was no guarantee the Serenity would have reserves, that we would be able to reach it and to be honest a lot of the rank and file were wary at the prospect of eating anything that’d been grown in a Hell. It wasn’t enough. Another day passed and the mutters of mutiny only grew.

Mali – Chancellor Alaya’s suggestion was slyer and ended up more successful. A production was made of supplies being brought into the camp from outside even as word was spread that an accord might have been reached with the Kingdom Under. It was pure sleight of hand, the supplies in question coming from one of the larger flying fortresses and having been smuggled out during the night so they could be brought back when everybody was watching. It wouldn’t tide us over forever, I thought, but it might be enough to muster our armies for another assault. Or it would have been, if the news did not then come from further south.

The devils were gone.

The Praesi had seized and suborned the gates before unleashing seven days’ worth of devils on the dead, the main reason we were not drowning in armies as we besieged Keter, but the Dead King had not sat idle. The bindings on the devils had somehow been twisted and they were made to turn on each other, destroying themselves in an orgy of violence. They’d still emptied the southern Kingdom of the Dead of troops so it seemed like only a minor defeat, until one realized what it meant: there was no army left in the way of any deserters wanting to run south to Procer.

That night there were five attempts made on the supply stores, and though none succeeded it soured sentiment. We hanged all who attempted it publicly – two Proceran fantassin crews, a Levantine captain, Penthesians and to my distaste a tenth of legionaries from my own First Army – but however necessary the gesture it only darkened the mood further. We held council again, and this time when Basilia pushed to have the terms of the dwarven deal made public most of the people around the table were in agreement. It was Alaya and I who were the standouts again, sharing the same fear: it was going to give a lot of angry people a reason to get angry at each other.

To Basilia’s honour, she was right about the League’s reaction. Outrage at the demand of Penthes being ceded to the Kingdom Under was so great that there were demands made that the Grand Alliance declare war on the dwarves as well – never mind that the League was not part of the Grand Alliance, or that if the dwarves didn’t feed us we were all going to fucking die. I was even forced to admit that I’d been wrong to fear the worst, at least in the immediate, since it didn’t lead armies to brawl. What it did do, though, was give a halfway decent excuse for everyone wanting to sit out the battles to do it.

Proceran fantassins and levies did it by the hundreds, refusing to take up arms until the terms were accepted, while both the Blood and Chancellor Alaya began to receive petitions to accept the terms even if the rest of their allies did not. Some of the High Lords began to imply that the Praesi auxiliaries, which had until recently been household troops, might be inclined to start following their lead again should the Chancellor not do what was necessary to get them out of this mess. Tensions began to slowly rise across the camps and another council was urgently called.

“We lean on priests and heroes to shame the disobedient into line,” I flatly told them. “As for the High Lords, I’ll take care of it.”

I retreated into my tent and slipped into the dreams of those Alaya had said were most aggressive, inflicting on them terrifying nightmares. Fear did its work: the next morning, much chastened nobles came to reiterate their absolute support for the Chancellor and her wise reign. The other half of that, unfortunately, did not work as well. Some of the priests balked at being given orders by earthly powers, outright refusing to preach as they were told, and though Hanno convinced half the mercenaries to live up to their contract the rest chased him out. It was similarly mixed results with the levies.

The Brabantines that’d wanted to make him into a price rose up, but some of those conscripts had never so much as seen his face until Salia and they were not willing to put blind trust into a stranger. Not even one who was the Sword of Judgement.

“A successful assault on the walls would turn sentiment around,” the Warlord said.

“If we could talk them into that, we wouldn’t be struggling so hard in the first place,” I bit out.

Even the Army of Callow was balking, which was like a thorn in my throat: every time I tried to swallow, it bit a little deeper.

“Hard measures have become necessary,” Empress Basilia said.

And we all knew what she meant by that. All of us had still-reliable troops, soldiers that would obey the order to purge the disobedient if it was given. It would be a death blow to morale to bloody our soldiers into lining up for an assault, but with morale already fucked it was starting to look like the least lethal of the poisons to drink to go through with it. Reluctant agreement began to bloom across the table, but the thorn in my throat had not stung so keenly that I’d accept this. Not against soldiers that’d followed me since I was a girl, that had served unflinching through one nightmare after another until we reached the walls of Keter. I did not agree, and brusquely left the council. Juniper followed closely behind, and when we were out of the tent she took my arm. We stood there a moment, our gazes meeting as her hand stayed on me, and a knot of emotions seized her face. Shame and gratitude, anger and pride.

“Warlord,” she finally said, tone thick.

Gratitude won out. We both knew it was the same soldiers whose butchery had been discussed that had put me on the throne and kept me there, and I was almost insulted that she had thought I would forget it. That I would meekly bend my neck to this.

“They won’t do it without me,” I tiredly replied, passing a hand through my hair. “But we can’t do nothing, Juniper. Time is running out.”

It had not been eight days since the Battle of the Ruins, and we both knew that the closer we got to empty stores the more violently desperate our soldiers would become.

“An assault means losses,” Juniper murmured. “That means our stores last longer.”

We both knew that an assault where the entire force did not participate was just throwing lives away, but that was exactly what she was proposing: getting people killed. I pulled away, feeling my bad leg throbbing. I needed to be alone. I worried at the thought like a dog gnawing at a bone, but I saw no way out. So I sat in my tent alone, a bottle of aragh open as I leaned back in my seat with my eye closed. Trying to think of something, anything, that wasn’t just some variation of a butcher’s knife.

The soft sound of someone entering my tent reached my ears, but I did not open my eye.

“I’m not in the mood,” I called out.

“You are in one,” Hakram gravelled. “Which is why you’re drinking alone.”

“I don’t want to talk,” I told him, leaning forward as my eye fluttered open. “There’s been enough of that.”

He looked, I saw, about as tired as I felt. Ignoring me, he sat on the other side of my desk and grabbed the bottle. He poured himself a cup so full it nearly overflowed before draining it all in one swallow.

“I don’t feel much like talking either,” the Warlord admitted. “It’s why I’m here. For the silence.”

I stared at him, unblinking, for a long time. Then I nodded. We had known a great many comfortable silences, the two of us. This would not be one of them, given the dark bent of our thoughts, but maybe it’d me more comfortable here with each other than it would have been alone. So we stayed there and we drank, an hour passing and then another. It was me who spoke, when the bottle was empty and my belly too warm.

“I thought I was done with hard measures,” I murmured. “Past them. But we’re never really done with horror, are we?”

Hakram did not answer for a long while.

“I used to wonder,” he said, “if it was something we stepped into, or something we brought with us.”

And now we know , I thought. We parted ways come dark, but I could not sleep. I felt restless, for all that there was nothing to spend my energies against. So instead I found my steps leading me to the tallest watchtower of our camp, watching over the campfires spread all around me. I stood at the edge of the drop, alone and veiled by Night, and waited. The streak of ice was still there, the old fear that would never suffer to be entirely mastered. Fear of the drop, of the fall. An old friend.

I hated it.

“I’ve been fighting you since I was a girl,” I told the night. “Gods, how many times did I face you?”

I had sought rooftop after rooftop, trying to scour the fear out of me, and yet here it was still.

“Even after all I’ve done, how far I’ve gone, you’re still here,” I said. “Still a part of me. You can be bound and blinded, kept in the cellar, but you’ve never been gone .”

And how hateful was it, that even this small thing I had spent all my life trying to rid myself of could not be changed? I leaned forward, boot beginning to give against the wood, and though I knew the fall would not kill me still my stomach clenched. It was how I knew I wasn’t dreaming: when I fell, in my dreams, there was never any fear. I just tumbled into the darkness, not making a sound, and I was swallowed whole. My bad leg throbbed with pain, a reminder this was anything but a dream.

“Is that the lesson?” I asked. “That it’s not about getting rid of you, it’s about continuing the fight?”

I thought of the night I had become the Warden, the dream of it. The faces I had worn, their warnings. Do better , one had whispered. Don’t flinch , the other had ordered. And beyond them, the Beast that had waited. That I felt coil around me now, warm breath against my neck as it opened its maw.

“I don’t believe that,” I murmured. “Maybe there’s never really an end like we want, like you get in the stories – a clean cut, a last light – but we do get to win, sometimes. If we bleed for it, if we’re clever and brave and we don’t bend with the current of the world.”

My fingers clenched, then slowly unclenched.

“This isn’t good enough,” I told Creation. “This place, this end, this taste of ash in my mouth that I know too fucking well. It’s not enough .”

And something like indignation burned in my belly, because deep down I had always wanted the world to be fair – for fairness, for good to be baked into its bones – but it wasn’t. It was blind and brutal, and the only lights you found down there in the dark were the ones you’d lit.

“Maybe you don’t care,” I said. “Maybe it’s a game to you, always was. Fine . But a game has rules, and I swear to anything out there listening that in the space between those I will carve a semblance of fairness. And if you won’t help me, then get the Hells out of my way.”

I had told the Beast I no longer feared it and meant every word. So I closed my eye, breathing out, and left my staff.

Then I took a step forward and let myself fall.

The Beast laughed, laughed loud enough for the world to quake and to drown out the scream of my fear. But it held me tight, warmed me and lent me its strength. My Name burned bright, chasing away the dark, and finally I was able to See . There was an above and a below, and below me I saw them all laid out. A never-ending sprawl of objects in motion, stars in the void. All the stories, the possibilities of them, and though the enormity of it threatened to snuff out my mind like a candle the Beast kept me together. And as I fell, as the enormity came ever closer and hurried towards me, I saw what I was looking for.

An object in motion.

I opened my eye, back cold with sweat, but I was not falling. I was still on the edge of the tower, a step away from the fall and fear coiling cold in my gut. Maybe it’d always be like that. Not the fight, because there would always be a fight – if not this one, then another. Maybe it was about the victories you could steal from fear, the lights you lit. I looked up, breathing raggedly, and above me I saw the clouds of poison had parted. The night sky was a river of stars, breathtaking and depthless. I might never have thought to look up, if not for all this.

Dawn found me sleeping there, swaddled in the Mantle of Woe.

—

“Two days,” I told the war council. “Give me two days.”

“What have you learned, Black Queen?” Rozala Malanza asked with a frown.

“That the world is always larger than we think,” I replied. “So give me two days, and I will give you a miracle.”

They did. They watched me like a hawk all the while, spies and envoys dogging my every footstep and growing impatient as I did nothing more than prepare for a battle they did not think would be fought, but on the dawn of the third day an alarm was rung. An army had appeared south, its trail of dust piercing past the cover of the poison clouds. I sent a single messenger and waited at the edge of the camp while it woke up like a hive, ramparts being manned and officers sent for. But the dust parted, the army approached, and worry turned to surprise.

These were not the dead. It was an army of dwarves, thousands strong. I had seen true, then. Today would be a pivot, for us and for them.

The greats of the Grand Alliance trickled towards me, a war council forming, but I already knew what it would be about. Who was to go speak with the dwarves, they would say. And that I would go was a certainty, but there would be bickering about the rest. Too many could, while few must be sent. So I had sent a messenger for a diplomat enough of them would trust. The conversation died, smothered in the cradle, as Cordelia Hasenbach rode up to our side atop a warhorse.

“Warden,” she greeted me, blue eyes sweeping over the others.

“There,” I smiled at the others. “Does this compromise suffice?”

It did.

—

The Herald of the Deeps received us formally in his tent.

Not in a stiff manner, I meant, but in the same way he had once received me deep below in the Everdark: after a few courtesies were traded, small wooden bowls were brought out. Relics whose grain was left rough, without varnish or polish. Seeker Balasi himself came into the tent with an opaque glass bottle in hand, pouring half a cup’s worth of sudra in each bowl before taking a step back. The liquor looked like wine, but its surface trailed vapour and it looked on the verge of boiling. The Herald had once told me no bottle of the drink, which dwarves used only on important talks, had ever left the Kingdom Under. The Named’s green large green eyes sought out mine and he offered a respectful – though not deferential – nod.

I noticed that the staff he usually took everywhere, crooked wood adorned with metal chimes, was nowhere in sight.

“Warden,” the Herald of Deeps said, “I greet you in peace.”

“Herald,” I replied, returning the nod. “Your arrival is an unexpected pleasure.”

“Creations holds us all prisoner to its whims,” he said, then turned to acknowledge my companion’s presence. “Princess Cordelia.”

“Herald,” she calmly replied, then glanced at the bowls. “You honour us with this service.”

Balasi didn’t sit at the table with us, this time. He’d not approached again after taking that step back, instead standing behind the Herald with a face that might as well have been carved out of stone. It caught Cordelia’s eyes just as it did mine. The Herald had always preferred to let the deed-seeker do most the talking when it was possible. Something had changed.

“If these talks are not to be called of import,” the green-eyed Named said, “I know not which deserve the word.”

A pause.

“I come to fulfill our bargain, Warden.”

My brow rose.

“Has Lady Sybella been recalled as negotiator for the Kingdom Under?” I asked. “I’d thought you replaced.”

For a long moment, the Herald neither moved nor answered. Not so much as a blink of those luminous eyes.

“A sennight ago,” the Herald of the Deeps finally said, “I entered the Hall of Hearths and sought the King Under the Mountain as he sat the Diluvian Throne before the great land-kings of our kind. I demanded of him to summon all dwarves to war and strike bargain with the Grand Alliance, so that we might end the Dead King once and for all.”

My throat caught. A calmer presence in the back of my mind noted a detail: a week ago. Either this Hall of Hearths was close to here, or the dwarves had a way of travelling long distances quickly.

“And did he accept?” Cordelia quietly asked.

The green-eyed dwarf twitched in what I thought might be dismay.

“He refused,” the Herald said. “And in his anger at my presumption, cast me into exile.”

An exile that’d come here with an army, I thought, but my stomach was sinking even as I kept my face calm. So the Herald of the Deeps had come here with his loyalists to lend a hand to the fight. I would not turn away the help, but it was not the help we’d needed. Food was to be our saving grace, not more swords.

“But I gave an oath on my staff to fight for the terms I accepted with all my might,” the dwarf quietly said. “So I did.”

Cordelia stilled as I leaned forward. Power burned in the dwarf’s green eyes, old and deep and without the slightest semblance of humanity to it.

“I slew the king on his throne,” the Herald of the Deeps said, “and declared all of his line to be without burden or purpose. Unfit to rule.”

I let out a sharp breath. Burden and purpose were the words dwarves used for Role and Name, I knew, but I had heard Balasi use them in a more religious context before. They seemed as much philosophy as namelore.

“And you got out of there alive?” I said, incredulous.

“Snapping my staff of office released the many spirits I have bound over the years all at once,” the Herald said, sounding darkly satisfied. “The soldiers of the land-kings had greater concerns than to hunt me.”

I felt like reaching for the drink even though it wasn’t done cooling. That was, I thought, one hell of a way to resign. Still, for all that the Herald’s act of defiance was impressive I was having some difficult parsing the implications of it. Fortunately, I had brought Cordelia Hasenbach with me.

“You have not come,” Cordelia mildly said, “as a representative of the Kingdom Under.”

The Herald grimly chuckled.

“Princess, there no longer is a Kingdom Under,” he said. “It has been a thousand years since the Kings Under the Mountain truly ruled, but the dignity of their blood kept the land-kings as part of the same realm in name.”

He bared his teeth.

“I murdered that last restraint,” the Herald said. “Twice over, when I declared the bloodline unfit: no brother or sister can be ushered into the seat to serve as a fresh figurehead. Instead every land-king now claims himself the true owner of the Diluvian Throne.”

“Civil war,” Cordelia said.

“Not one of them but thirty,” the green-eyed dwarf replied. “A hundred, even. All of the old wars let loose again, without the King Under the Mountain to call for peace when a side wishes to surrender. It will be to the death, Princess Cordelia, until the Diluvian Throne is filled once more or the empire shatters all the way through.”

I honestly wasn’t sure whether that was better or worse than the Herald coming here with only an army of exiles. It was now a certainty we wouldn’t be getting reinforcements from the Kingdom Under, because its armies certainly sounded like they would be busy for the immediate future. Fuck, I’d hoped- wait, no. Not all the armies were busy, were they?

“It got the impression,” I said, “that neither the lands of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Expansion were under a land-king.”

From context I’d put together that they were under the authority of the King Under the Mountain, at least in principle, though in practice they’d been under the Herald himself. If their throne was empty, though, who did they now answer to?

“Clever,” the Herald smiled. “It is true. Balasi and I rode the Deep River to return there ahead of even the furthest land-kings. They soldiers have answered my call.”

My heart skipped a beat. That was beginning to sound rather more like what I’d hoped to get. The Fifteenth Expansion was the underground of the Kingdom of the Dead, which was filled with fortresses and soldiers. The Fourteenth was the Everdark, which was being colonized with both civilians and soldiers. Together, the regions represented a large number of soldiers. Cordelia narrowed in on another detail, though.

“This Deep River,” the fair-haired princess said, “could it be used by humans?”

My eyes widened. That was a way out our mess, I considered. If our armies could use the Deep River to retreat from Keter after the fall of the Crown of the Dead, extreme rationing might be able to get us back to Procer without killing too many from starvation. We should be able to buy supplies from the Herald as well. Nowhere enough to feed an army our size for long, and I doubted he’d empty his stores for us entirely, but maybe long enough to be able to manage the trip back south without too many dead if we took Keter quickly enough. There would be enough in the Everdark for all of us, but without the Twilight Ways to get them to us there’s no way they’ll arrive in time. From the corner of my eye, I saw that Balasi looked amused.

“It would be death,” the Herald politely replied. “The Deep River is sailed by ship, but it is not water. It is...”

A frown, a look at the deed-seeker.

“Lava,” Seeker Balasi provided.

The Herald nodded, turning back to us.

“Lava. The ships are sailed empty between cities, using currents made by runes,” he told us. “I could protect myself and Balasi riding one, but more would be beyond my capacity.”

I sighed. Yeah, that’d been a little too good to be true. So we were back at the start, supply-wise.

“Your help in fighting Keter would be most welcome,” Cordelia said, “but I must confess our armies have grown troubled. Being stranded far from home without supplies has hurt our readiness to fight.”

“It would,” the Herald acknowledged. “I will not apologize, for the deeds of the Kingdom Under are no longer mine to bear as burden, but I would make restitution as a sign of good will. We will surrender Lady Sybella to your hands.”

I blinked.

“You captured her,” I said. “Where?”

“She was a mere two days away, waiting for you to bend to her terms,” the Herald replied.

My heart beat wildly and I shared a look with Cordelia, whose eyes had lit up.

“She must,” I slowly said, “have been keeping the supplies close, then.”

“Atop a confluence of tunnels, near the shores of the lake you call the Tomb,” he nodded.

Which was far, but even if they hadn’t moved them – which I doubted – it wasn’t that far. We could most definitely trade for supplies with the Herald to keep our soldiers until they arrived.

“They are in your possession,” Cordelia stated.

“They are,” the Herald of the Deeps said. “And though I am not the Kingdom Under, I come to fulfill the terms of the bargain.”

The supplies and his help against the city of Keter and attendant lands. A cession of claim that Cordelia had already convinced the Sisters to accept. It’s better than if he was still part of the Kingdom Under , I thought. The Herald could make a kingdom of his own out here while the rest of his kind fought it out for the throne, which would ensure his fragile beginnings were not simply annexed by whoever ruled close. And it creates a state that has an interest in keep the Kingdom Under split so it never turns around to gobble them up, which is even better. There was no real way for humans to meddle in that mess, but the Herald and his successors would be a different story.

Some of the drow might push for taking back their homeland when the enemy was still weak, I decided, but that trouble was years down the line and not impossible to navigate besides. I glanced at Cordelia, whose face was calm. She gave me a slight nod of agreement, also thinking it the right decision. So I reached for the bowl and took it in hand, raising it.

“Then I greet you in war, Herald of the Deeps,” I said.

They matched me and we all drank deep, the sudra smooth all the way down and leaving that faint taste of copper behind.

We drank, and it felt like a light being lit.

Interlude: Calls

“Mind your sentiments, for they have a mind of their own.”

– Proceran saying

It was a sultry night, as Keter’s tended to be.

The heat was poisonous and unease thrummed through the camps like a pulsing vein. The arrival of the dwarves – a story heavily curated before it was released to the soldiers, though Akua had heard the full of it from the source – had given the Grand Alliance hope of victory once more, but all still remembered the last assault on Keter’s walls. Much death had achieved nothing, and none were eager to be the tip of the spear when tomorrow came. It was certain death, all agreed, and even the ever-loyal Army of Callow was balking at the thought of being thrown into the grinder headfirst. None of that, though, was truly Akua’s concern.

Perhaps if she had made different choices she would be leading the Dread Empire into the breach come dawn, or unleashing some horrible sorcery serving as Malicia’s own treacherous Warlock, but it was not to be. Fingers tightened around her cup – a golden goblet set with opals, one of the few gifts she’d received as empress-claimant that she had liked – and she drank deep of the Cantal red. It was about to become a much rarer find, Akua thought. Procer would have better use for good land than vineyards in the coming decades, and that meant many vintages were on the verge of disappearance.

Perhaps for good. The world, these days, seemed set on changing.

“So best enjoy it while I still can, yes?” Akua murmured.

Fingers tightened around the cup again, her lips wet but far from sated. She did not regret making the choice she had in the heart of the Tower, not even now. Her eyes closed, thinking of the sound the match had made as she scratched it against stone, all Akua Sahelian felt was guilty relief. That she had not been trapped on that chair, chained to that fate. Made to go through a lifetime of empty motions, screaming inside. And yet as the days passed, she found that frustration had begun nipping at her heels. She traced the golden rim of the cup with her thumb, absent-minded.

“Vanity,” she told the night, neither quite asking nor stating.

There was no one else in the tent for her to speak to, after all. The Army of Callow, while it tolerated her presence and many rumours had come from her departure and return to Catherine’s side – some expected, like that it had been a scheme from the two of them from the start, others rather more amusing like Akua having found the Black Queen a better lover than the Empress and so turned her cloak again – would never be comfortable with her tent being too deep in its camp. She had never felt threatened, of course. Dartwick had ensured none would lay had on her few possessions, ever dutiful, and Masego had kindly wards around her tent on her behalf until she gained her own magic back.

But she would never be welcome there, in the beating heart of Catherine’s kingdom of soldiers, and though she was not one to shy from hatred she had found she preferred setting her tent near the edges of the camp. In Keter that was not so far out, given the nature of the siege walls, but it had been far enough that she had been able to obtain a view of the Crown of the Dead looming in the distance.

“And if there was ever a reason to drink,” she snorted, toasting the tall walls and the horrors still lying in wait behind them.

She drank, but it settled the restlessness in her belly no more than the other sips had. Vanity, she’d hazarded, but she was not so sure it was true. Akua was one of the great spellcasters of this siege, treated with the same awe as the Witch of the Woods or the Hierophant without having a Name of her own, but months ago she had been the fulcrum of an ancient empire’s fate. She had been... more than she now was. That night in Serolen had not scratched the itch, only drawing attention to it. There had been a moment where it was all in her hands once more, and she had been able to decide .

It had felt good, returning to Masego what had been unjustly denied him. Of all the Named she had known, only Hierophant had never wavered from that bright, impossibly clear moment that defined your Name. He had, from the beginning to the end, stayed true to himself. If such sincerity was not worthy of a good turn, what possibly could?

But the days had passed and Serolen now felt like a world behind. So now Akua Sahelian sat alone in the dark, drinking wine soon to be as much of a relic and looking at the heart of the darkness in the distance. The Dead King’s subtle, creeping malevolence – so incredibly banal, until the pit of despair swallowed you up. She drank and wondered if it was vanity, to think she should be more than simply a spellhand in this war. Perhaps it was. Before she could be moved to decide whether that answer would be found at the bottom of a fourth cup of Cantal red, there was a whisper in the back of her mind.

Her wards had been set off. Curious, and not feeling particularly threatened, she lowers the threshold to allow for the entrance of they who would enter her tent. The flap was parted and a man’s silhouette – ah, was that the slightest shiver of disappointment she felt? – entered, straightening before sniffing the air.

“Wine in the dark on the eve of a battle?” Kendi Akaze scorned, lighting a magelight with the flick of his wrist. “How very maudlin, Sahelian.”

Akua was not sure what was worse. That he had come, or that some part of her was dimly pleased for it. Kendi was tall man, with a sculpted beard and the pale brown eyes of a mfuasa. Hatred of her never left them, which had learned to find a reassuring weight. It had been the one thing whose sincerity she did not need to doubt.

“That was my very aim,” Akua easily replied. “How kind of you to compliment me so.”

He took a seat across from her, not asking permission, and helped himself to her wine.

“You are growing comfortable again,” Kendi said.

“Is that why you’re here?” she asked.

The dark-skinned man eyed her with distaste.

“Why else would I be in your presence?”

Akua had spent several months being taught how best to use her looks, when she had been younger, and the lessons had not left her. It was the easiest thing in the world to shift in her seat so that her dress would call attention to the curve of her breasts, that the line of her legs would be put in display.

“I wonder,” Akua replied, tone languid. “Can you truly think of nothing else?”

His eyes did not dip and he hardly seemed enticed. Hatred truly was a most useful thing.

“You are wrong, as it happens,” Akua continued, shifting back into a more comfortable pose. “Comfort escapes me.”

It was foolish to tell him as much, she knew. She was no longer as she had been in Ater, dazed and despairing. She ought to know better. And yet, looking at the man whose sister she had gotten killed for... what? She could hardly even tell, now. Looking at that brown-eyed man, she still saw the same thing she had when she had first spared him: her past made into a man. A voice speaking for the long line of sisters and daughters she had led to their deaths and never given a second thought to. No, it was only natural that it was not Catherine who had come to visit her tonight.

This one was an older ghost, with a deeper claim.

“Does it?” Kendi said. “You are returned to the Warden’s side. Again in her service and confidence. What doors are to be closed to you, after this war?”

Akua drank.

“There is no after this war,” she said, setting down the goblet. “She loves me more than she hates me, I think, but that is not forgiveness. Never will be.”

Kendi Akaze smiled.

“Ah, Callowans,” he said. “They do have their virtues.”

“Are you satisfied?” Akua asked.

“No,” he replied.

Her jaw clenched.

“I will have no part of Cardinal,” she said. “That is certain. Or of the Confederation of Praes. And there will be no place for me in the lands of the Grand Alliance. Even if I survive I...”

There would be nowhere to go, she realized, perhaps for the first time. She had known it, deep down, but never spoken the truth out loud and made herself face it. Ashur always took Praesi exiles and it should not be difficult to live in the League, but what kind of a life would those be? An exile, sometimes called upon when of use but otherwise kept in the darkest hole they could find. A shameful secret, kept around only in case she was needed. Everything she was growing to hate about where she now stood, only a thousand times more so. I would have once been satisfied with this , she thought. Seen it as a victory, living to begin another rise to prominence .

Now all the prospect made her feel was exhausted.

“You will not be anything but you,” Kendi softly said. “And I can conceive few curses worse than that, Akua Sahelian.”

“So that is your purpose,” she said, tone mocking. “You come here to remind me that I should live so that your tortured sense of vengeance might be satisfied?”

“I don’t care whether you keep breathing, Sahelian,” Kendi said, sounding honest. “I want the vicious, empty thing that killed so many of us and lit the world aflame to suffer . Whether you are to serve as her prison or her coffin is not so important.”

“So why save my life in Ater?” Akua harshly replied. “If you had not removed Malicia’s killing-”

“She would have snuffed you out like a candle,” Kendi acknowledged. “And what right did she have to that, after all she has done? It took more than a single pair of hands to craft the Folly. It would have been disgusting, for the Empress to pretend to pass judgement over you when all know she helped the deed along.”

“So only you can judge me?” she laughed. “How highly you think of yourself, Kendi.”

“It’s not me either,” the man smiled. “I would just burn you, Sahelian. End it, look for peace among the ashes of you. But my sister’s shade demands better. So I will usher you through this journey until you reach your end.”

“I don’t understand what you want from me,” she snarled. “That I open my own throat? That I leap into a chasm? Would it truly mean that much more to you if I did the deed myself?”

“Is that,” Kendi evenly asked, “what you think would even the scales?”

“There’s no evening those scales,” Akua tiredly replied. “Even a fool would see that.”

He watched her in silence

“Even should I live forever and save a life every morning, it would change nothing,” she continued. “It’s not as simple as lives lost.”

She had seen that in Ater, the cascade of suffering her atrocity had begun. The Folly had been an enormity, the amount of death it represented, but that had only been the tree above the ground. There were even greater roots below, out of sight, and how could those even be tallied for? Made up for? Redemption by number was an empty exercise, meaningful only in the abstract.

“So you do nothing?” he asked.

“I am to be jailor to the Dead King,” Akua said. “Bound forever to keep him imprisoned.”

There were still enough of the Twilight Ways for this to be possible. Liesse, it seemed, was not a city she would ever leave behind. He cocked his head to the side.

“And you chose this?”

She did not answer. It would have been a lie to say that she had, though it would have been another to say she had not. He shook his head, disgusted.

“Then it means nothing,” Kendi said. “Will forever mean nothing.”

He rose to his feet, leaving behind a cup of wine almost entirely untouched.

“Just another fate picked out for you.”

Her heart clenched and she turned away, failing to keep her face calm. The mfuasa snorted, killing the light with a flick of the wrist and making to leave. Akua looked out at the walls of Keter, knowing she should keep silent. She did not.

“What was her name?” she asked.

Kendi’s steps stuttered.

“Do you care?” he asked.

Akua looked down at her hands.

“Enough to ask,” she finally replied.

“Sura. Her name was Sura.”

The name echoed in the silence he left in his wake. Akua’s fingers reach for her neck, finding only warm skin for all that she had imagined otherwise. She had felt as if she would find something, as if her fingers would have been able to tell her which it was.

A noose or a knot.

—

There were not many Rhenians with the army.

Cordelia had only summoned south a quarter of Rhenia’s army at the beginning of the war, leaving the rest to hold the Rhenian Gates and her capital, and of those thousands now only a few hundred were left. The rest were long dead, their lives spent defending people they loved little so very far from home. Cordelia did all in her power to ensure the survivors were all comfortable and provided before she allowed herself to rest. Prince Otto had not neglected them, but the princess felt better for having put a hand to the labour – however scarce the necessity of it.

In truth, if one was to speak of neglect the word should be laid at her feet. How very little she had done for her people, not only Rhenians but all Lycaonese, since the war had begun. That no grudge seemed to be held by her soldiers over the fact she’d not so much as stepped foot in Rhenia during the entire war only worsened the guilt. Gods, sometimes she saw the pride in the eyes of her countrymen and it burned .

“You bargained everything to keep us alive,” Otto Reitzenberg solemnly told her when they drank at the wake. “Even your throne. What more could we ask of you, Hasenbach?”

Coming from the man who had so bitterly fought to keep Twilight’s Pass from falling, it had felt like a slap in the face. All the more for the way she knew he had meant every word, for Otto Redcrown was not what one would call a skilled liar. It was like none of them could see she had abandoned them, named them the sacrifice needed to keep Procer breathing through the first black months of the war. Are we truly so used to doing the dying , she thought, that it no longer matters? It was a dark thought, though far from the darkest she had been left to wrestle with.

Worst of all was the increasingly possible way they were about to lose the war.

Cordelia no longer sat in the war councils. She still had the status to, as a princess, but Malanza would rather bite off her own thumb than sit besides her and had instead taken to bringing Prince Otto to keep the Lycaonese bound to her. Wise, considering how estranged her people had grown from most of Procer during the war. It was not impossible for large swaths of the northwest to secede from the Principate, if the aftermath of the war was poorly handled. If there was an aftermath at all, anyhow. For though Cordelia no longer sat the councils, she still had access to several of those who sat them and to the formal supply documents besides. The picture both painted, when placed together, was a dark one. With the arrival of the dwarves starvation was no longer at risk, but that was no promised victory.

They Grand Alliance was, by Cordelia’s estimation, two failed assaults away from collapse.

It was a broad estimate, relying on a number of casualties equal or greater to those of the first attempt – counting both the field battle and the storm – but she knew it to be correct. Another sixty thousand dead would only lessen the army’s numbers around to half of what had first been brought north, but all the forces here were not equal. Or, for that matter, united. Every nation had its own host, but it was worse than that. The League alone fielded multiple different armies, and Procer still divided itself into the hosts under First Princess Rozala and Otto Redcrown. That was not without sense, but it meant that casualties could not be counted as if the force were a single army.

One of the principles of war her uncle had taught her as a girl had been that an army became unable to fight long before all its soldiers were dead. A host was an intricate machine, needing many different parts to keep functioning: horsemen and skirmishers, regulars and outriders. Losing any of those parts – or even too large a portion of one – could be an army’s doom. That principle, when applied to the Grand Alliance forces, became a curse. Which armies would start collapsing into uselessness first, when casualties kept racking up? Cordelia believed it would be League’s, whose individual armies were smallest and so most vulnerable to this, but she could not be sure.

The war had taught her that when a battle went bad levies died like flies, and Procer’s forces still had an uncomfortably large amount of them.

Two defeats, she thought, and the Grand Alliance would have broken enough of its component armies that it would be impossible to take Keter. That was what her investigations had revealed, the ugly truth behind the coming acts of valour: valour alone would not be enough. Even if the broken armies were thrown into the grinder as expendables, it would not suffice. The coalition would fail and when it did Calernia’s days would be numbered. Procer would fall, dragging with it the rest of the continent. Too many undead, no one left to stop them. And that would leave Cordelia with a hard choice, perhaps the hardest she’d ever had to make.

Bet it all on hope, some unforeseen salvation, or kill many to save the rest.

A mug was pressed into her hand and Cordelia almost started. Agnes was smiling at her sideways, the two of them alone in her tent. The Augur patted her arm.

“You think too much about what you see,” Agnes chided.

Cordelia considered herself a tolerant woman, but the irony in that sentence was too thick for even her to swallow.

“You cannot-” she began, then her eyes narrowed. “You did that on purpose. You are teasing me.”

Agnes looked inordinately proud, nodding as she brushed back her hair. The once-short bob had grown a little longer over the last few months, one of the first changes to her cousin’s appearance since she had become Chosen.

“They always said I’m the funny Hasenbach,” she noted.

Cordelia almost winced. ‘They’ had not meant that nicely as Agnes was understanding it. Being from even a branch line of the House of Hasenbach had ensured that none would dare to harass her cousin even when she had still been known as only a young girl overly fond of birdwatching, but it had not kept her safe from rumours. Or being ignored with varying degrees of politeness. Chasing off the memories, she took Agnes’ hand in her own.

“You are getting better,” Cordelia happily said. “For months now you have been growing into the present.”

Away from the past and visions of what might be.

“It’s a little confining,” Agnes admitted. “Things only have one meaning and I have to listen when people talk.”

“The grand curse of civil society,” she drily replied. “You will get used to it in time.”

“Maybe,” the Augur said, wrinkling her nose, then smiled. “But mead is good. I don’t know why they wouldn’t let me drink at feasts.”

Because your father disappeared down the bottle when your mother died , Cordelia thought, and none of us wanted you to follow him down that hole.

“I cannot imagine why,” she lied.

Agnes shot her a suspicious look, which moved Cordelia halfway to tears. For years now she’d been watching her cousin – the last of her blood, now – wasting away, devoured from the inside by her Choosing. Before she’d left Salia, Agnes would not have been able to read a room enough to be suspicious. Much less express it so openly. Guilt followed, as it so often did these days. I asked so much of you , Cordelia thought. Advice to avoid disaster or steer enemies into it. Only now do I begin to grasp how much it truly took from you. Too much. She would never again ask for augury.

Sometimes it felt like Cordelia had lived all her life taking from others, like some dragon from an old tale gathering all the gold of the world at her feet so she might make a kingdom of her greed.

“Boo,” Agnes muttered. “Boo, Cordelia, booo.”

She swallowed a smile.

“Now you are just going with the fashion, Agnes,” the princess replied. “For shame.”

They both smiled. It had been most of a year now, Cordelia thought, since the two of them only had each other left. Since Uncle Klaus had died, striding out of his life and straight into the legends of the Iron Prince’s last charge. There were still Hasenbachs alive of course, she’d made sure the line would continue. Two distant cousins of hers were in Salia and one more in Rhenia itself, but Cordelia had never known any of them more than passingly. They were not family in the way that Agnes was and her uncle had been.

“Your mood is falling again,” Agnes said.

“I fear I might not be very good company tonight,” Cordelia admitted.

“You’re the one I chose,” Agnes shrugged. “What had you looking so sad?”

“I was thinking of family,” she vaguely replied.

The other woman hummed.

“Prince Klaus, then,” she said.

The two of them had never been close, Cordelia knew. There was no shared blood, Agnes found violence repellant and Uncle Klaus had been uncomfortable around powers he did not understand. It had not been a recipe for deep fondness, for all that the two of them had spent years at her side.

“Death leaves so much unfinished,” Cordelia replied.

She had never reconciled with the man who had been something between a father and a grandfather to her while being neither by blood.

“That’s the wrong way to look at it,” Agnes said. “It’s life where you don’t finish things. Death is always complete.”

The fair-haired princess cocked her head to the side.

“I do not follow,” she admitted.

“Death’s a closed circle,” Agnes said. “A single act. Sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s never...”

She grimaced, groping for words.

“Continuous,” Agnes finished, satisfied. “It’s why you can make something so large of a moment so small: you can’t undo it after by acting the other way. The circle is closed.”

“Is that something you saw?” Cordelia asked. “I thought that these last few months...”

“It’s not the Gods,” Agnes said, shaking her head. “And I haven’t seen much since I left Salia. They understand that sometimes to have to save your strength.”

“Do they?” Cordelia asked, almost accusing.

It had been a long few months, a long few years. Perhaps even a long life. The Augur hummed again.

“I don’t think they understand much, actually,” Agnes mused. “Not like people do. It’s why there’s Good and Evil, so there’s rules, because they do understand rules.”

“Good is not an immovable absolute,” Cordelia said. “Above was once worshipped by those who kept slaves, Agnes.”

“The rules change,” her cousin agreed. “But I think that’s part of what they want too.”

“Many have gone mad trying to understand the Gods,” the princess warned.

“I’ll be all right,” Agnes reassured her. “Since I was already like that.”

The utterly inappropriate laugh that got out of her ripped itself out of her throat as her cousin sat smiling and pleased.

“You need to laugh more,” Agnes told her. “It will do you good. Maybe find a lover.”

Cordelia almost rolled her eyes. As if now was the time for such diversions.

“If we are to speak of lovers,” she said, “perhaps I should be drinking more.”

“ My mug is already empty,” Agnes informed her, then batted her eyes.

Cordelia would have refused her, but it had been the better part of a decade since she’d seen her cousin act so much like the girl she’d once been. She did not have the heart to tell her no, rising to her feet and going into the back of the tent – where she did keep a few bottles of wine for guests, and mead for family. At the rate Agnes was going through them, she would run out of the mead before the siege – or the world – ended. The blue-eyed princess chose one of the older bottles and straightened, though she froze when she heard a rattling gasp coming from the other side of the tent.

She hurried back to find her cousin leaning over the table, writing on parchment with a shaky hand.

“Agnes?” she called out.

Her cousin did not reply. She set down the mead on the table and knelt by her cousin’s side, finding the other woman utterly absorbed in her writing – and hiding it from prying eyes. She finished writing after a moment, blew on the ink to dry it, and the folded the piece of parchment. Only then did she take her eyes off it and sag into her seat, breath irregular. Her skin had paled and was beaded with sweat.

“Agnes,” Cordelia quietly said, “what have you done?”

The Augur sought out her hand, threaded their fingers together and squeezed it.

“I saved my strength but it wasn’t enough,” Agnes croaked. “I’m sorry.”

She forced her tone to be even.

“Are you healthy?” Cordelia asked. “Should I call for a healer?”

“I couldn’t see everything,” Agnes said. “Just glimpses. But it doesn’t matter.”

The Augur’s eyes began bleeding and it was no longer a question worth asking. Cordelia shouted for a healer, for help.

“If it’s a bet,” Agnes murmured, “then I always make the same.”

“Agnes,” Cordelia urgently said, “stay awake. I don’t-”

“Don’t read what I wrote until you need to,” the Augur told her. “You’ll know when.”

“Agnes,” Cordelia hissed, cold terror in her gut. “ Don’t leave me .”

“I’m sorry,” she replied, smiling and bloody and heart-breakingly pale. “I wish we could have gone home.”

A shiver.

“Don’t follow too quickly.”

By the time the healers ran into the tent, Cordelia Hasenbach was holding the hand of a corpse.

Announcement

So, some of you might remember that a while back I had a very bad cold that I thought might be Covid and forced me to take some time off. Well, as it happens life has a sense of irony so it turns out that what I believed until this evening to be a very mild cold is in in fact Covid. I’m fully vaccinated so it shouldn’t be much too worry about, and as as I’ve mentioned my symptoms are quite mild at the moment.

That said, I hear the disease can worsen rather quickly so I thought I’d drop a warning in advance in case I do end up bedridden. As of this moment there’s no change to the update schedule, though, and I’ll put up another announcement should there be.

E.E.

Chapter 57: Dawn

“Only two things can get a soldier through war: courage or good legs.”

-Queen Elizabeth Alban of Callow

An hour before dawn the camp would begin to stir, but I woke up even before that.

It was almost a mercy. My sleep was rarely anything but fitful – always returning to that night of green flames and red hands – and there were only so many times I could wake up soaked in sweat before I lost taste for turning over and burying my head under a pillow. In the dark before the dawn I found a fire, my still sleepy guards spread out around me, and overcooked a pair of eggs. The bacon rashers were fine, though, and boiling water was transmuted into tea by the twin magics of patience and costly foreign imports. I wolfed down the meal and warmed my hands against the mug, sipping it at it while it was still hot enough to scald my tongue.

My duties had yet to wake up and I wasn’t going to be squeezing into my battle armour any sooner than I needed to, so after I polished off the last of tea I got up so stretch my limbs. A walk around camp would do the trick, and though my guards seemed intent on following I dismissed them. I was now entirely awake, and so I could feel a string of fate pulled taut across the air. Not the battle’s, it was too small for that, but not a small matter either. Best to have a look before someone got around to plucking it, I figured.

My limp was unhurried, as I knew I would not be late. I tread the broad avenues of the Army of Callow’s camp, then the narrower alleys of the Dominion’s all the way into the messy sprawl of Procer’s sea of tents. Past a company of fantassins sleeping in the rough like corpses abandoned on a field, I found a half-broken watchtower – laid low by shoddy workmanship, not the Enemy’s blows – and a silhouette atop stairs. A man’s, leaning against the low shattered wall as if it were a balustrade, and though the cloak was a faded brown I recognized the build well enough. He did not turn as I went up to join him, though he would have heard me coming.

He was, I saw, staring at the dark and distant shape of the Crown of the Dead.

I squeezed myself in at the edge of the wall, leaning my staff against it and my shoulders against the irregular stone. In the gloom before day began to glow, Keter was difficult to make out even to my Night-blessed eyes. It was as some large beast curled up on an island of nothingness, unmoving but far from asleep. No one could look at the Dead King’s capital for long without getting the impression that it was somehow looking back at you.

“How did you find me?” Hanno of Arwad asked.

I glanced his way, having to twist to do so with my flesh and blood eye – the angle was bad. He’d always been a tall a broad sort, Hanno, with a working man’s frame and a working man’s hands. It suited the plain but honest face, which, while not so serene as it had been when he still served Judgement had kept a sense of calm to it. He was not easy to ruffle. Yet this morning, before daylight and other’s eyes caught up to us, he was allowing unease to reach his face.

“I followed a string,” I said. “It’s a thing I do now and then.”

“Mysterious,” he replied, appreciative. “Another ten years of this and you will drive young Named utterly mad.”

“Hey, if I actually make it to old age it’s my goddamn right to mess with the young,” I shrugged. “It’s not like Evil offers a pension or anything. They’re a stingy lot.”

He snorted.

“I cannot tell whether that’s blasphemy or not,” the dark-skinned man admitted.

“I’m getting that a lot these days,” I mused, “which seems unfair, given that I’m the high priestess of an entire religion.”

“One centred,” Hanno said, “largely around theft and murder.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“And?”

“There’s a saying about birds of a feather that seems appropriate,” he serenely replied, “but I believe you’d never forgive me the pun.”

“You do know me,” I conceded.

I let the silence fall comfortably, settle in a bit. Then I struck with my usual finesse.

“So, glaring at Keter,” I said.

He stirred at my side.

“A roundabout question?”

“If you came here for the view,” I shrugged, “waiting after dawn might have worked better.”

I’d not drag it out of him with a hook and rope, if he did not want to talk, but I suspected that if that were true my feet would not have led me here. I’d been on the other end of this kind of conversation often enough not to mistake reluctance with refusal.

“I never sleep well before battles,” Hanno reminded me.

I didn’t reply. We both knew not sleeping and coming out here weren’t the same thing.

“I find myself irritated,” he finally said.

Huh. Never heard that one out of him before. I cocked my head to the side.

“With?”

“Too many people,” he tiredly said. “Which serves to tell me the troubles does not lie with them.”

“Ah,” I said.

He moved, craning his neck to look at me.

“Ah?” he asked.

“Ah,” I confirmed.

He rolled his eyes at me.

“What you mean, ‘ah’?” he pressed.

“That I’m not surprised,” I said. “You’re close enough to being Named that you can use an aspect and ride providence, but you haven’t claimed one openly. Talking from experience, it’s not a pleasant position to stay in.”

My Name of Squire had died a long death in the throes of Winter, a span of time I’d spent fighting some of the most dangerous heroes on the continent and trifling with lesser gods. I remembered well what it had been like to have the Role without the rest.

“Even a saint with get tetchy,” I elaborated, “if he keeps sitting on a spiked seat for too long.”

“I do not claim sainthood,” Hanno evenly said.

Never stopped anyone from tossing it at your feet , I thought, but true as that was it would be of no help at all.

“Can’t blame you,” I drawled instead. “Laurence was enough to put me off it too.”

He wasn’t quite amused – he remembered the Saint of Swords far more fondly than I did – but the growing tension in his shoulders loosened. Keeping an eye on him, I decided not to prod him any further. He had the look of a man chewing on his own thoughts. If the taste was foul enough he’d spit them back out anyways, yeah? And to think they’d said I would never learn patience.

I’d been patient enough to outlive most the fuckers, so how about that.

“There is a Name there for the taking,” Hanno finally said. “All I would need to do was reach out.”

“But you haven’t,” I observed.

Obvious, but it’d keep him talking.

“I have turned away from it twice now,” he confessed, passing a hand through his close-cropped hair.

My brow rose and I had to repress the urge to let out a low whistle. No wonder he was feeling antsy. He was fighting off his own transition. When he’d become a claimant to Warden of the West he’d ceased being the White Knight, though at least one of his old aspects had lingered. In the wake of renouncing that claim and my rising to fill the Role, what exactly Hanno of Arwad was had remained up in the air. By the sound of it, he’d been struggling with that question just as much as the rest of us.

I didn’t bother to ask what the Name he was shying away from was. I had my suspicions, but in truth it didn’t particularly matter. A Name was just the crystallization of what you were supposed to be, what you were supposed to do. The red, the life of it was in the Role. It was what we struggled with, far more than whether a Champion should be Valiant or Unconquered. So the ‘what’ was an afterthought, really, in face of the question that did matter.

“Why?”

The word had him scowling. It was a rare sight and I almost found myself staring at it: it was, well... human. Not that Hanno had ever been alien in the way that some other Named could become, all cold and power stripped of everything else, but there’d always been something a little aloof about him. The calm, the serenity on his face and in his eyes, it was fitting for a White Knight. Expected almost. But it was something to admire, not to understand, because who could ever really understand certainty that absolute? And now he was scowling, almost childishly. I smiled.

“And what has you so amused?” Hanno challenged.

“When I was a kid,” I said, “I sometimes felt like the world was caught in amber. Maybe not every part, but those that mattered at least. That nothing important ever really changed .”

I traced the edge of the rough stone with my fingers.

“But we did change it,” I said, almost disbelieving. “It didn’t really feel like it was what we were doing at the time, but we did . And now that I know how to look for it...”

All those years of swimming against the tide, of blood and mud and tears, they’d given birth to the first tremors of a new age. Still fragile, uncertain, but the signs were there. In the way that the Dominion was starting to circle around Razin and Aquiline like they were the sun of Levant, in the way that goblins drew on Night and planned to raise halls as far as the Morgentor, in that the empress of my youth was now a chancellor and a girl I’d once thought was now the heiress to my crown. Gods, these days I counted Procer as a halfway steady ally and looked forward to spending time with Cordelia Hasenbach . Somehow, along the way, we’d changed the world without even noticing.

But now that I could see it-

“... it’s everywhere,” Hanno quietly finished, eyes returning to the Crown of the Dead.

Calloused hands pulled closed, as if he was trying to catch something eluding his grasp. He let out a long, shuddering breath.

“Except me,” Hanno of Arwad said. “It’s everywhere except me, Catherine.”

So my instinct had been right.

“You can be the White Knight again,” I said.

“The same Name,” he said, “that I walked away from.”

I hummed.

“Aspects?” I asked, tone gone professional.

A trick that’d always served me well. Sound like you have a right to ask a question and most people will answer before they realize you’re there to buy fish and there’s really no reason you should be told about how much getting their horse shoed cost at Billy King’s smithy. Too much had been the answer. Brother Desmond had been right, the old bastard had been a swindler.

“One stayed,” Hanno said. “Two faded.”

I grimaced. That poor man. For an aspect to stick through a Name being lost and then being reclaimed, it’d have to be so intrinsic to who he was that it was more about Hanno of Arwad than whatever else he ended up being. I didn’t know what Hanno had gone through for Recall of all powers to end up qualifying for that, but I doubted it must have been singularly unpleasant.

“Then it’s not really the same Name, is it?” I pointed out.

“You were the Squire twice,” he said, with the blithe assurance of someone who’d peered at many of my secrets through dead men’s eyes. “Did you think it a different Name simply for having different aspect?”

“I was a different person,” I replied. “It’s why I didn’t get Learn or Struggle. I didn’t feel like I was so out of my depth anymore.”

In the wake of First Liesse, I had been a victor: over Akua, over the High Lords, in some ways even over the Empire. My plan to claw back some sort of local rule over Callow had been a success and I’d been granted lands by Malicia herself. I’d not felt like I was one misstep away from death at all times anymore, and my Name had reflected that confidence.

“But it was the same Name ,” Hanno insisted. “Meant for the same purposes. Changing the horses on carriage does not make it a different carriage.”

“There’s an argument to be made that it does,” I drily replied. “Since you never step in the same river twice and all, but I’ll leave that bit of philosophy to the Atalantians. Why are you so keen on a Name always being meant for the same purposes, anyway? Even if it were true, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.”

“You have to ask?” he tiredly said. “You are the one who forced me to look that mistake in the eye.”

I blinked at him.

“ You’re standing where everyone else started and calling it a journey ,” Hanno quoted.

My own words, I realized after a heartbeat. From that night in Salia, when I’d had him at my mercy and savaged him with every hard truth I could find.

“I’d thought that rolled right off you,” I admitted. “Like most of what I said that night.”

“Even if you had been entirely my enemy,” he replied, “I would have thought on the words after. It is a dangerous thing to fear self-examination.”

Sounded a lot like ‘the innocent have nothing to fear’ to me, a sentence generally spoken by people who should not be trusted with even butter knives, but I’d sit on that opinion instead of sharing it. He had a right to his own beliefs, and there were more than a few reasons I’d not ended up dressing in white.

“All right, so you self-examined,” I said, distantly glad Indrani was not there to make a filthy joke of that. “How’d that end up with you here and staring down stone walls?”

“Because I fear that you might not have been wrong,” Hanno said. “It was... I struggled with the decision to act, Catherine. To sunder myself from providence and the Tribunal, however silent, and take matters into my own hands. But I did, and I began to act.”

His jaw clenched.

“And now I am to be the White Knight again?” he said. “To return where I began and sweep away al the doubts I wrestled with, the decisions I made, like fallen trinkets fit only for trash.”

He angrily laughed.

“It was not a journey at all,” Hanno told me. “I just walked in a circle so I could put on the same old cloak. All that grief, all these dangers and struggles and deaths, and what do I have to show for it?”

So that was it, huh. He’d thought he was becoming someone else, that he’d learned something. It must have been a bitter pill to swallow, the Creation itself seemed to think otherwise. At least in his eyes, anyway.

“Two aspects,” I said.

He turned to me, frowning.

“You want to use a Name as measure of who you are, like Creation’s some sort of fair judge?” I challenged. “I can’t agree, but fair enough. You’ll have to follow through, though: Creation judged you different enough from who you used to be that two out of three aspects faded.”

“It’s the same carriage,” Hanno flatly said, echoing his earlier words.

“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s not the same horses pulling it, or the same man riding it – so why does it have to be headed to the same place?”

He looked way. Not convinced, huh. I wasn’t fool enough to be disappointed.

“Perhaps it would be for the best if it did,” he finally said. “For all that I chose to act, I have few gains to show for it. The Gigantes have not come, and the claim I troubled the Grand Alliance to press was a trap.”

I hid my surprise. It was the first time I’d heard he’d reached out to the Titanomachy, though that was actually something I halfway appreciated. Cordelia had gotten some goodies out of dealing with the giants, but however skilled a diplomat she was being Proceran had ensured all paths would turn into dead ends. Both Hanno and the Witch of the Woods were said to have deep ties to the Gigantes, though, and a personal connection might have yielded results where formal talks had not. A shame it hadn’t. Mind, you all of this was babbling nonsense.

“Yeah, you didn’t produce enough results to turn around the literal end times in, like, eight months of trying your hand at it tops,” I drily said. “Just terrible, Hanno. Soon children will begin stoning you in the streets.”

He sent me a long-suffering look.

“Must you?”

“Sure, when you’re being an idiot,” I easily replied. “You tried, Hanno. Maybe you didn’t pull miracles out of thin air – more like not enough of them – but that doesn’t mean you were wrong to act. You made some things better and some things worse.”

I snorted.

“That’s better than I fucking managed to pull off, some years.”

Or Cordelia, for that matter. He mulled on that, silent, and I did not interrupt. Instead I looked to the distance, where on the edge of the horizon light was fast approaching. The gift of the Sisters told me dawn was soon to come.

“The world was never simple,” Hanno murmured. “But I do miss them sometimes, the days when my role in it could be.”

“Enough to go back?” I asked.

He did not answer. I stayed by his side, the two of us keeping in a strangely comfortable silence, until dawn rose to find us.

—

The silence was deafening.

Almost two hundred thousand soldiers stood around Keter, a fortified camp encircling that island of stone and death surrounded by nothingness, yet I could hear every cough. Empress Basilia had left with the Proceran cavalry, marching to the plains of the Ossuary to fight the battle that would keep our back clear as we stormed Keter. The rest of us – Levant, Callow, Procer and Praes – were mustered for war, for the slaughter about to begin. I sat Zombie’s back in full armour, perched atop a now-empty watchtower, and below me the ranks of the Army of Callow were splayed out. It was not the last two bridges they were readied for, not this time.

Across the lines of legionaries cut massive, segmented steel bridges. Pickler’s creations. Not long enough to reach across the chasm to the top of the rampart, for the amount of steel needed for it would have been prodigious, but long enough for our purposes. There was a glint of light at my side, which bloomed into a circle when I granted it a glance. Masego’s face appeared within.

“We are ready,” Hierophant said. “When does it begin?”

“On the hour,” I said, “though it will be First Princess Rozala that-”

“FORWARD!”

The air shuddered from the force of the call, which would have been fit to burst eardrums near the source. Still, the Proceran mages we’d trained at the Arsenal had done what they needed to: Rozala Malanza’s voice had been heard by every soul in the Grand Alliance army. Not that the order applied to all of them.

“Understood,” Hierophant said, and cut the spell.

My soldiers did not move, standing there as the wind picked up and the ozone scent of magic filled the air. Across the last two bridges, Proceran and Levantine soldiers began their advance on the enemy bastions. Streaks of roiling darkness shot up past the tall walls of Keter, the first wave of the enemy’s rituals – curses so powerful they were sickening even for me to look upon – howling at our advancing forces. Our answer was well-oiled. Our own rituals shot up: the eerie dust-ghosts of binders, great spears of lightning from the Army of Callow and curses just as vile from the Praesi. Magic collided against magic, power spent to no gain but the stalemate we had been aiming for.

“Now,” I murmured. “ Now , Artificer.”

Obeying my order without ever having heard it, the Blessed Artificer at least unleashed the wonder she had crafted in Salia and refined over the months since: the Ram. It was impossible for me to miss it. The wooden pillar sheathed in copper caught the morning sun as it was dragged onto the platform we’d raised for it, then aimed at the wall before us. Adanna of Smyrna laid a hand on her creation, and for the first heartbeat nothing happened. Or rather nothing visible. It felt, to my senses, as if the entire world was breathing in.

And in the heartbeat that followed, as Light began to shoot out from the sides in wild spurts, the world breathed out.

She was knocked of her feet, as were the two soldiers helping her, and the Ram shot out like an arrow swatted by some unseen titan’s hand. The Light roiled, screamed, and as a sudden burst of power came from behind the walls of Keter I felt the Hierophan’s name shiver. Wrest killed their defence in the egg as the Ram flew, right at the heart of the wall before us. The same one where a Praesi siege tower had crashed into the stone, weakening the wards holding the rampart together. Spinning and screaming, the Ram hit Keter’s wall like the very wrath of the Heavens. Light flared, blinding and burning as the Ram fought to pierced into the rampart, and I caught sight of spurts of stone flying like drops of water before I was forced to look away.

Just in time, for the explosion that followed was powerful enough its breath sent tents flying behind us.

Shielding my eye with my palm more by habit than need, I risked a look at the rampart and let out a shocked breath.

“Merciless Gods,” I whispered.

The wall had been savaged. Miles of stone had been slagged down to the foundation, the melted remains trickling down the edge of the cliff and into the drop. The streets behind the wall had been ravaged by broken and heated chunks of stone, looking as if a rain of sharpers had been dropped across them, and though I could see soldiers swarming the sheer amount of damage was staggering. Just as we had hoped, the Blessed Artificer had blown us a path open into Keter. One that would not be the enemy’s narrow killing zones on the bridges, nowhere as heavily defended. And they’ll have to keep defending those while we strike here, else we’ll punch through.

A heartbeat later the Dead King collapsed both bridges, but I smiled against the strap of my helmet. We’d been waiting for that: sorcery bloomed, Akua and the Witch keeping the broken bridges aloft and usable. We’d learned from our first defeat. I laughed, unsheathing my sword and raising high, as all around me the Army of Callow cheered loudly enough to echo across the sky. Keter’s impregnable wall, reduced in a moment. My soldiers felt fires in their belly again.

“ Begin ,” I shouted, and it rippled out.

The melted stone was not yet cooled, but we did not have time to waste. The longer the Dead King got to prepare against our landing, the more brutal securing that beachhead was going to get. Zombie let out a loud cry, wings spreading as I spurred her on to take flight. I glided over the Army of Callow as the First, Third and Fourth brought forward their bridges. They rose up in their air like poles, carefully aimed to the calculations of the sappers overseeing the effort, and then after a push gravity took its toll. They toppled forward, falling all in a row. Not that Keter was to let us land so easily. Magic bloomed ahead, but those I left to Masego. When I guided Zombie into a glide, staff in hand as I called on Night, it was to meet another threat: the great wyrm that was tearing through houses and streets to get to the breach. The great abomination of bone and leathery skin screeched, but I shouted back.

“Crows take you,” I snarled, “and burn .”

Black fire erupted form the tip of my staff, growing from a trickle to a torrent to a burning river as it struck the massive snake construct in the side. Magic whizzed around me, but none came close: all that would have hit suddenly changed trajectory, Hierophant slapping them away with Wrest. I grit my teeth and kept letting the Night flow through me even as my veins cooled and sweat beaded my brow, Zombie’s long wings taking us into a smooth circling glide. I finally killed the working and lowered my staff, just in time to take my mount into a dive as Keter’s first ballistas were brought into position and began firing on me.

I got a look at the wyrm first, though, and grinned fiercely: it wouldn’t going anywhere.

Even with all the power I’d pumped through I’d only incinerated half of the construct, but it was quite beyond moving. It pissed me off a little that it’d still managed to accomplish part of its’ objective – wedge its body between the falling bridges and the ground – but barely a third of our crossings had been blocked with the move.

“Priests will clean up the rest of it,” I told Zombie, leaning against her neck. “Come one, we’re going with the first wave.”

Some brave souls from all three commands in the Army of Callow had begun the daunting work set out before them: crossing the chasm atop the steel bridges. We’d aimed for a wideness of three soldiers to be able to pass through each bridge at a time, for a total of ninety-nine legionaries at a time across all bridges. Much as Juniper would have preferred more, the amount of steel this had taken was already astronomical. Zombie’s took us under the bridges, layering stripes of shadow and light against the cliffs surrounding me on both sides, and after passing the last I guided my mount into taking us up. What I saw as I turned to look at our assault gave me pause.

It was a massacre.

My soldiers had made it halfway through the bridges before enemy fire began to fall on them, but now that it had... Arrows and scorpion bolts shot out in hails, stones from scorpions and streaks of sorcery smashing through shields like they were made of paper. I wasted no time, spurring Zombie back into the fight, and began striking at the enemy – siege engines first, they were hardest to replace. It wasn’t going great.

“Fuck,” I snarled, dropping low to avoid another curse.

Already a full archer’s volley was falling on my position, the impossibly precise coordination between the dead setting up the sequence perfectly. Zombie was already diving but we had to spin to avoid twin ballista bolts – one skidded off the edge of my armour, another took a few feathers off her side – and we were forced to take refuge under the bridges for the second time before flying back up the other side. I’d torched two ballistas and an archer’s nest, but the enemy was using its mages to shield against my Night workings. I guided Zombie back up and flew through a hail of arrows, swatting them aside with a burst of Night, and hammered at a ballista jutting out from some half-broken temple. The black flames washed over the shield, but a heartbeat later Hierophant wrested the defence away and I let out a snarl of triumph.

Without Masego covering me, though, the swarm of curses had me forced to drop below again.

I rose on the opposite side for another pass, but when we tried the same trick I found the that the flames still didn’t go through: the undead mages had layered the shields into two different spells. Fuck. They’d figured out the weakness of the aspect, then. Hierophant could take from more than one source of magic, but that meant splitting focus. On an artefact that was fine, but when there were other wills fighting him? They’d shut down our trick. I had to drop again, a glance telling me that our assault had stalled hallway through the chasm: soldiers were dying too fast to get further.

Another pass, and I went at it differently: I attacked the grounds around the ballista instead, shattering stone with entropy. Mixed results: knocked the ballista down but it wasn’t destroyed, and Masego had to cover me from a mass of enemy magic as Zombie dove. On the next pass, the dead got even more clever on us. They began holding back the release of their rituals, letting them loose when I attacked so that Masego was forced to handle them instead of help me. I almost let out a scream of frustration.

“This is going nowhere,” I breathed out, forcing myself to calm down.

And it had gotten there, by the looks of it: the bridges were almost clear, the last legionaries still on them try to get off.

Not a single man had gotten to the other side, and my soldiers were no longer trying to pass.

Chapter 58: Mud

“Invading Callow is like stepping on a porcupine: do it long enough and it shall be crushed, but one should expect to lose the foot.”

– First Princess Clarisse Merovins

Juniper looked like she wanted to bite someone’s head off, and it was not impossible she would before the day ended.

“They were already retreating,” my marshal admitted. “I called the retreat myself so it would be in order instead of a rout.”

So mostly to save face, I thought with a grimace. All attempts to cross the bridges had ceased, a sight that had my stomach clenching in fear and unease. The longer we let the Dead King dig in on the other side, the worse this would get. I thought it pretty telling that no serious attempt had been made to destroy our bridges yet. Sorcery was still traded back and forth, filling the sky with streaks of colour and eerie shrieks, but so far the enemy had not even tried turning their ballistae on our forces this side of the chasm.

“We need to punch through,” I bluntly said. “If we don’t the battle’s good as lost.”

The attacks through the last two stone bridges were going to get shredded if we didn’t draw enemy forces with our own push and the Praesi had orders not to commit their forces before we had a beachhead inside Keter’s walls.

“I know that, Catherine,” the Hellhound growled. “You think I don’t? But I also know that if I give the order it won’t be obeyed.”

I grit my teeth.

“I know casualties are-”

“We’ve lost almost two thousand already,” Juniper evenly said.

The number gave me pause. Gods. That many?

“It hasn’t even been an hour,” I numbly said.

“Those bridges are pure murder,” the Marshal of Callow replied. “I ordered a push with mages putting up shields and all it did was draw ballista fire. The only saving grace is that the bodies fall instead of block the way.”

It obscured how many we’d lost, too. At least to some extent. Men who’d been three companies back when the battle started were going to notice they were now the frontline because everyone in front was dead.

“We need to commit Named,” Juniper said. “Can Hierophant cover our advance?”

Still feeling numb, I clumsily undid the clasp of my helmet. My face was covered in sweat and dirt, too-warm locks of hair falling over it when I took off the helm.

“Not without fucking over another front,” I said. “If he protects our advance, he’s not countering enemy rituals.”

I spat to the side, fruitlessly trying to get the taste of iron out of my mouth.

“How’s the Blessed Artificer?” I asked.

“Back on her feet, it was just a bump,” Juniper said. “You think she can run interference for us?”

“I think she’s the only heavy hitter left that’s not already committed,” I said, “so it’s her or no one.”

“I’ll send for her,” Juniper replied, then hesitated.

“Speak your mind,” I said.

The tall orc looked uncomfortable.

“It won’t be enough to get them to take the bridges again,” she said. “Not after the slaughter they just went through.”

Brushing sweaty hair off my dead eye – my ponytail was fraying – I turned to the Army of Callow. Juniper’s command tent was well situated, overlooking the offensive while boasting both a solid set of wards and room for me to land Zombie. She was still back there, tied to a post. An army, I had thought more than once, was like a large beast. It had a breath to it, lungs and veins and blood. It could be angered or wounded, made brave or craven. And though I did not have it in me to call any of these men and women who had followed me halfway across the world cowards, I watched those shifting ranks and saw the fight had just been beaten out of them.

Twice now every assault on the walls of Keter had failed and now they were asking themselves an ugly question: could they be breached at all?

They weren’t sure, not anymore, and in a battle like this that was as bad as thinking it couldn’t be done. Once you doubted, the whistle of every arrow was a dirge and the glint on the enemy’s blade as the promise of death. Like a worm in an apple, the doubt was eating my army alive.

“My fault,” I quietly said.

Juniper turned to glare at me.

“I don’t know what you’ve gotten in your head but-”

“My fault,” I repeated, in a tone that brooked no contradiction. “I’ve been fighting this battle mounted, Hellhound. That’s not what it takes to win a slog like this.”

I clenched my armoured fist.

“Blood and mud,” I said. “It always comes down to the blood and mud, doesn’t it?”

I pulled my helmet back down on my head. Juniper glared at me.

“Recklessness won’t bring us victory,” she said.

I secured the clasp, pulled at it to make sure it’d stay in place. The gesture was familiar, almost comforting. How many times had I done this before? Gods, how long had I begun to? I smiled at her, unable to help it.

“Do you remember the first war game we ever had, you and I?” I asked.

She snorted.

“Ratface and I had a war game,” Juniper corrected. “You were just some bum with a sword that took command after I beat him.”

My smile widened into a grin.

“I still remember how godawful furious you were, when I used my Name to leap over that log trap,” I said. “You snarled ‘what the Hells was that?’ and-”

“And you replied: ‘me, winning’,” Juniper finished, almost smiling. “I remember.”

I looked at the broken walls of the Crown of the Dead, the empire of horrors that still awaited beyond it.

“Come a long way, haven’t we?” I softly said.

“All the way to the end of the world,” the Hellhound replied, baring her fangs.

She had that look in her eye that’d made me want her from the start, even when we’d just been kids playing at war in the Tower’s shadow. The one that was all flint and iron, that said the soul behind it would rather snap then bend. I raised my arm, offered it, and after a heartbeat if hesitation she took it. An old legionary’s salute.

“The army’s yours,” I said. “You know the plans.”

Her face tightened, emotions flickering across it too quickly for me to read. Her grip tightened around my arm.

“It’s a fool thing, what you do,” Juniper of the Red Shields said, voice hoarse. “It’s a damned fool thing, and I can’t even shout at you for it.”

She released my arm as if the armour had burned it.

“Warlord,” Juniper said.

My staff I raised, then slammed it down. Though it was only dead yew and beneath it was stone, it parted for the wood like water. It was stuck in the stone and would stay there until I took it up again.

“Hellhound,” I replied.

And without another word, I went down into the crowd. Into the ranks. My eye wandered, looking for something, and found it. A boy, about my height, and as I opened my mouth I recognized with a start that I knew him.

“Edgar, isn’t it?”

“Ma’am, yes,” the boy – no, it’d been years, the young man now – hastily saluted. “And I’m a sergeant now, ma’am.”

“So I see,” I replied, glancing at the stripes.

He swelled at the words.

“I need another favour of you, Sergeant Edgar,” I said. “I must borrow a shield.”

He did not hesitate, I saw with something that was neither quite pride nor grief, for a moment. Without batting an eye he offered it, even helping me slide in my arm.

“Won’t do no good on your monster crow, though,” Sergeant Edgar noted. “It’s a footman’s shield, ma’am.”

“Then it’s exactly what I need,” I replied.

He paused, and others did around us. Neither of us were trying to stay quiet, and the press of soldiers was close. Murmurs rippled out.

“Get another before you go in,” I said, clapping his shoulder with affection. “Fortune be with you, Sergeant Edgar.”

“Hells,” the young man grinned, “that’d be a first.”

Hard, satisfied laughter followed. I let it carry me forward. One limping step after another, I crossed the sea of legionaries. Eyes followed me as if I were a falling star, hands reaching out shyly to touch my shield or the hem of my cloak as I passed. And I felt it move with me. Something like a shiver, a physical tremor going through the great beast that was my army. I was there, among them. Word of it passed from lip to ear, moving so quickly that before long the soldiers ahead me were already looking my way. I did not hurry my limp, because hurrying would do no good. When I reached the edge of the camp, the edge of the cliff, when I rose the steps to the beginning of the bride and turned, I found a sea of faces awaiting me.

Above us a clouded, hellish sky lit up with the eerie lights of war sorcery. The distant eruptions of power were like a broken breeze, just enough to have the banners moving. First Army. Fourth Army. And, standing before me, the Third. The vanguard of my every victory, which I had named Dauntless for that unflinching bravery.

“I won’t lie to you,” I told them, Name strengthening my voice for all to hear. “There’s death ahead.”

None were surprised. They had seen too many of their friends killed to be.

“They’ll come for us with fire and storm,” I said. “With every horrible trick they’ve been waiting to unleash. The moment it looks like we might win, they’ll unleash the Hells until the broken gates are left swinging in the wind.”

I breathed out.

“And still I ask it of you,” I said. “To march. To bleed. To die, until we’ve crossed the deep and rammed death back down the Dead King’s throat.”

There were no cheers at that. It was not a boast I’d offered them, something to laugh about. They all knew what it would cost to get there.

“I won’t blame you if you run,” I told them, “even though there’s nowhere left to run. We’re all a long way from home.”

I looked at them, and I saw in their eyes that they did not want to fight. They loved me, I thought, but still they did not want to fight.

“But if we don’t win here we’ll bring down the world with us,” I said, “so I’ll be crossing that bridge.”

Murmurs bloomed, low and urgent. The shield on my arm was hard to miss.

“And I know it’s more than a queen can ask,” I called out, “but I ask it anyway.”

My fingers clenched, then slowly unclenched.

“You trusted me through Dormer and the Camps, through Maillac’s Boot and Four Armies,” I said, “through Arcadia and the Wasteland and every misbegotten bit a land a soldier’s ever died on.”

Gods, where had I not dragged them? They had even bled beyond Creation, as if Calernia was too small a field for them to die on.

“Trust me once more,” I asked. “Follow me into the breach, through dark and ruin until we come out on the other side.”

Maybe one day they’d call me a soldier queen, but the truth of it was simpler: I was queen of soldiers. I’d spent more time in the saddle than on my throne, pawning off the intricacies of rules to one regent after another as I went off to scatter Callow’s enemies. They might have crowned me in Laure, anointed me and said the words, but my real kingdom stood before me: banners and steel.

The Army of Callow.

“You and I against the rest of the fucking world, one last time.”

In the distance lightning crackles, exploded in a burst of light, and as ash fell from the sky like rain I stood before a sea of soldiers that would not look me in the eye. Silence hung in the air like pestilence, and the longer it lasted the harder my stomach clenched. It would not be broken, I realized. They would not gather their courage, raise the banners and follow me again. All my life I had wondered – feared, hoped for – the moment where I would finally ask too much of my soldiers. When they would at last balk, hold back the loyalty that had kept me on my feet long before I’d begun using a staff. So here it was, I thought, at long last. You lasted until the end, I thought, looking at them. There is no shame in this.

But I had a duty, and I had sworn an oath: whether they be gods or kings or all the armies of Creation.So I unsheathed my sword, slowly, and raised it to them in a salute.

“Be proud,” I told them, meaning every word. “You reached the edge of the world.”

And I turned my back to them. One limping step down the bridge after another, the steel clanging against my boots. Three, five, ten. In the distance a pair of ballistae were aimed, and I saw the flicker of movement. Gritting my teeth, I pulled on Night and let it loose through my veins. I slashed at the air, darkness trailing in my sword’s wake as a streak of Night slapped aside the stones that would have torn right through my body. I squared my shield, straightened my back and began moving again. Simple, I thought, I just had to keep it simple. There was only the enemy ahead, nothing else in all of Creation.

One more step. Always one more step, until I made it all the way to the other side.

“DAUNTLESS!”

My steps stuttered, but I could not let myself be distracted. Far ahead, a nest of mages loosed in my direction a ritual that was as a crawling wave of grey. I pulled on Night again, smashing a pillar of pure black into the spell and twisting my will. The working sucked in the magic before detonating, breaking the spell formula with it.

“DAUNTLESS!”

The shout came again, and this time more voices picked it up. I limped forward, shield up, as the world narrowed in front of me. I walked a span of steel three men wide, without railings or anything that would stop a single misstep from seeing you fall to your death. Lines of it stretched to my right and left, like teeth cutting at the void below us. Sorcery bloomed ahead, cabals of mages that were little more than bones and burning green sorcery shaping mounds of curses or frost. Gods, the numbers were overwhelming and I hadn’t even reached arrow range yet.

“Sve Noc,” I prayed in Crepuscular. “My enemies are many and their wrath is great: grant me ruin, that I may deal it out to them in your name.”

I twitched, Night bubbling up my veins, and let out a hoarse shout as shadows ripped themselves out of my back, fleeing the cover of my cloaks in flocks. Crows that were as shards of darkness took flight by the hundreds, spreading out in a wave that flew heedless into the enemy’s sorcery. My lip tasted of blood and I wiped it with the back of my gauntlet, spitting the rest into the chasm. One more step, I reminded myself. In the distance, the crows plunged into the spells and faded like morning mist – tainting every spell they touched, eating away at them from the inside. How many more of those did I have in me? Enough, I told myself. I would have enough.

My fingers were slick with sweat, my aketon soaked under the plate. Flakes of ash stuck to my face, to the wet cloth covering my dead eye, but still I advanced. My bad leg burned, throbbed with every step, but the pain was an old friend.

The ballistae had been silent, and now I saw why: they had been repositioned, awaiting the moment to fire a full volley. Only it wasn’t on me that the stones and bolts were fired. The machines spat out death at my bridge, but at others too. And I could not resist the glance, even knowing it would shatter my calm. Behind me, the Third Army’s banner flew in the wind and legionaries advanced. Tight ranks, shields up and faces grim. But they had come, marching down the lines of steel that were as a road straight to death, and my heart clenched at the sight of it. Always the Third, dauntless to the end. I would not let that trust go betrayed.

I thrust up my sword, Night already welling up inside me.

“I bring the word of the two-faced goddess,” I said.

Night swirled above me, sweeping up into the sky as a raging wind, and like a blade piercing the Heavens my working pierced the clouds. Arm trembling from the effort, I pulled down my sword and the rest of the sky with it.

“And that word is no ,” I hissed.

Wind and clouds raged, a river drawn across the bridges like a stroke of paint, and the projectiles were swallowed whole. I released the working, panting as shivers of exhaustion went down my spine. I’d ripped a hole in the clouds, and through it the light of day shone. The sunlight found the rain of ashes, bathing in pale, and I might almost have thought it was snowing. In the distance I heard hoarse cheers, but there was a closer noise. Boots on steel. Legionaries catching up to me. And with them, on the too-warm wind, came one last sound drifting up to my ears.

“The knights will get the glory

The king will keep his throne.”

I was not sure whether to laugh or weep, so instead I kept my eyes ahead. One more step, I swore, and limped forward.

“We won’t be in the story

Our names will not be known.”

Sorcery swelled ahead, but the sky screamed out and streaks of pale lightning struck down at the enemy mages. No, not lightning – Light. The Blessed Artificer had come out to fight. Cheers sounded again. One more step, I prayed, and through the raining ash advanced.

“So pick up your sword, boy

Here they come again

And down here in the mud-”

“It’s us who holds the line,” I whispered.

One more step and all the Hells opened: arrow range. I was halfway through. They had massed archers and crossbowmen while we waited, crammed every skeleton upright and able to aim in thick lines covering every bit of stone they had to spare. They released all at once, with impossibly perfect timing, and death flew out in a swarm. I pulled deep on Night, blade wreathed in darkness, and slashed away. Behind us a great javelin of Light flew out, and as captains screamed out orders the Army of Callow loosed a wave of massed fireballs.

It wasn’t enough.

I hacked away at the arrows in front of us, even covering the bridges to my sides, but others flew in arcs above and there were simply too many to cover. Steel punctured shields, ripped into flesh, toppled soldiers screaming into the void.

“The Princes take the Vales

The Tyrant is at the Gate

Our crops wither and fail,

The enemy’s host is great.”

The line wavered, I could feel it buckling. But I kept advancing so they did too – voices rising defiantly to add to the song. The storm of arrows was not the danger of a single breath. It was a doom in three beats, as again and again the enemy went through the same movements: nock, pull, loose. The dead did not tire or hesitate, only missing a shot when a string strapped and needed to be replaced. And so death came for us in waves, relentless. A shot skittered off the side of my shield, another grazed my cheek and I could barely move quickly enough to gather Night to me.

“Mages, forward,” went up the cry, and soon shields bloomed in front of us, but like before they attracted attention.

Ballistae concentrated fire on the visible targets that were the translucent panes of magic, shattering them were arrows failed. The line was buckling again, and even for me to take a single step forward was like wading against a river’s current. We were failing again. I was already tired, more than I should be, but what point is there in hoarding power when we were about to lose? I took a step forward, almost swallowing my tongue for the burning pain of my leg, and clumsily ripped at the straps keeping my shield on my arm. Arrows fell, but I had a guardian of my own: a ball of blue flame formed in front of me, spinning and expanding to swallow all the projectiles before it burned out. Masego was protecting me

Then it was on me to protect everyone else.

I threw away the shield, hearing it rattle against the edge of the bridge and vanish into the dark, and I breathed out deeply. In and out, steady. Seizing too much Night when I was exhausted could make me throw up otherwise.

“So pick up your sword, boy

Here they come again

And down here in the mud

It’s us who holds the line.”

I dug deep. Until my breath came out mist for the cold inside my veins, until light began to hurt my eyes and I could hear my heart beating like a drum against my ears. I’d done many a powerful working of Night, in my time, but this one would be different. It was not the First Under the Night walking down that bridge, the highest priestess of Night. I was the Warden, come to bring order to the madness, and so it was not black flame or curses I was calling on. Keter thought to cowing me by unleashing one monster after another, by sowing a field of death.

But I’d brought my own, made of every death I owned.

“Rise,” I snarled, hand pulling up, and for a moment there was nothing at all.

Then the shadows beneath the bridges, the dark nestled beneath the cliffs, began to boil over. Strands of darkness shot out, thick tendrils of Night, and they gathered like a river to the sea. Above my head a shape began to form, and though Keter unleashed storms of sorcery to shatter it the Hierophant allowed not a speck of magic to pass. Watching it was seeing an artist at work: curses turned into flame, which burned acid into smoke, which coiled into tendrils choking out green light. A single will cascaded down a line of spells, breaking them with the same exquisite grace of a duellist’s perfect killing stroke. Again and again, the man who had once been the Apprentice got the best of them. And with every moment he bought me, every ballista the Blessed Artificer shattered in a burst of Light, the shape above me grew. Swelled, until it stood so tall it blocked out the sun.

A river of arrows was fired into the dark, disappearing as if they’d been dropped in a well.

And when the storms of sorcery broke, the smoke scattered and the ash-wind broke, facing the enemy was a behemoth of a monster. Mine, my Beast. It was shaped as a wolf would be, if shadows cast on a wall by a scared child: too sinuous, its impossible large maw bristling with teeth. It was my old companion, the breath of the back of my neck and the laughter in my ear. The monster I’d built out of a hundred thousand corpses, sown across battlefields from the east to the west. I’d built on my throne atop a mountain of dead soldiers but today, just this once, the throne would give back. Monstrous maw opening wide, the great beast of Night breathed in the air of Creation like it was savouring it. Behind me my men had halted, but I turned back and offered them a wild grin.

“FORWARD,” I shouted. “FORWARD AND FOLLOW ME!”

The Beast began to laugh, and Gods though it was a terrible the terror was on our side. I limped forward, breaking into a pained run, and ahead of me the monster charged.

“Man the walls,” my legionaries sang as they followed, “bare the steel.”

Sorcery screamed, ballistae fired and a howling volley of arrows disappeared into the Beast’s body. I quickened my steps, a hoarse shout ripping itself clear of my lungs – as much pain as glee.

“Hoist the banner, raise the shield.”

The Beast tumbled into the enemy, crushing undead with every step and laughing as it swallowed whole a siege engine. We ran, ran as fast as we could, knowing that the opportunity would not knock twice. Two thirds through, and then more. We were so close.

“A free death they cannot steal.”

Rituals bloomed again, and enemy archers began took aim at us again instead of wasting their arrows on my monster – which was tearing them apart with tooth and claw, ravaging their tightly packed lines. Steel broadheads began to fall on us again, taking blood and lives, but the run had taken on momentum. It did not slow even when bodies began to drop.

“When we meet them on the field.”

I felt Masego try to West the enemy’s rituals but there were just too many. Great thorns of sickly green magic were shot in the Beast’s belly, and though it screamed and clawed at all around it I could feel something hollowing out my working from the inside. I was not the only one on the field who knew how to make use of ruin. The Beast began to fall apart piece by piece, howling and clawing at the enemy as it did, and as my boots hit the bridge the heart of it faded into mist. A heartbeat later I took another step, and instead of steel I touched stone.

I had crossed, and my army was mere feet behind me.

“So pick up your sword, boy

Here they come again

And down here in the mud

It’s us who holds the line.”

And as the song died, the Army of Callow followed me into dark and ruin. I laughed and slammed into a skeleton, cutting through bow and string and neck. It collapsed like a stringless puppet. The enemy had been waiting for us, but we’d caught them flatfooted and the Beast had put them in disarray. They’d not had time to redeploy, so as I tore into a line of archers sword in hand I felt the heavies of the Third Army crack those lines like an egg. Heeding unseen orders the skeletons tried to retreat, scampering up slopes and through broken houses, but we swept through them like a tide.

“Mages,” I shouted, parrying a blow and returning a vicious riposte.

The skeleton’s head broke under the pommel, shattering clean and killing it.

“Mages, fire on the ballistae,” I shouted again.

They obeyed and fire burned bright, the enemy’s engines finally silenced. A wave of steel swelled behind me and we smashed our way through archers and crossbowmen until there were none left to smash. Behind there were proper fighters, skeletons in armour with swords and axes and shields, but even charging uphill the momentum was with us. We’d break through, past this breach and into Keter. That was why I could already feel the coming, I thought. The Scourges. But it wouldn’t matter, not a whit, because we weren’t done either. As Keter mustered its horrors and my men drove back the dead, pushing forth the beachhead, long shadows fell on us all. Between us and the sun flew great fortresses, bristling with soldiers and mages.

The last gasps of the Dread Empire of Praes had come to make war.

Chapter 59: Steel

“War is the greatest of alchemies. It takes men as can be found in any town in the world and makes them into heroes and monsters.”

– Extract from the prologue of the first volume of the “Annals of the League of Free Cities”, by famed historian Shapash the Ashuran

The skeleton was decked in bronze, the scales of the armour pristine and the strange horned helmet it sported was freshly polished – as well as open faced. I closed the distance so the swing of its axe would pass behind me, rasping down the Mantle of Woe without even cutting cloth, and smashed the pommel of my sword into the skull. One blow shattered the jaw, a second the nose and the third ripped the head right off the spine.

“Form up,” I shouted. “Seventh Company, do I need to gently hold your fucking hand before you put those shields locked?”

“Yes please,” a woman’s voice shouted back.

I snorted, getting a glimpse of a tall Soninke flashing pale teeth at me before her lieutenant slapped the back of her helm. The seventh company heeded my order, though, echoed as it was by the shouts of a dozen angry sergeants. With the seventh, the twelfth and the fourth forming up on our left flank we should be good to push further up. Their shield walls blocked the streets on that side, though at the moment they didn’t have anyone to face down. My hand was still smoking from my last use of Night collapsing a row of the houses between those streets, helped along by every mage we could scrape together. We’d wanted to leave them up, use them to keep the dead herded when they showed up, but it’d been too much of a risk.

After the fourth time a supposedly clear house was revealed to have had ghouls hidden somewhere in hit that then leapt from the roof straight at a mage to die tearing the throat out, I’d decided to stay on the safe side. The houses had been almost absurdly easy to bring down, we’d found, which had the back of my neck pricking. That did not strike me as an accident. Satisfied with the seventh company’s formation, I tore my gaze away from them and turned to the tall orc lieutenant that’d been waiting patiently on me as I shouted.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“Ma’am,” he began, “we-”

He was interrupted by a horrific scream as a hellish burst of red light bled all over the clouds above us, a distorted ring of magic burning with runes flickering open a dozen blocks ahead of us. A misshapen horror dropped through, too-small wings looking like rotted bone slowing the descent of a creature with distended scaled belly with too-long arms ending in massive claws. The horror dropped down out of sight, still letting out those soul-rending shrieks. The lieutenant drily swallowed. I clapped his shoulder.

“Cheer up, lieutenant,” I said. “Sure, that was one of the foulest abominations either of us has ever seen but for once the damned fucking thing’s one our side.”

The flying fortress hovering above that part of the city, raining down spells and stones, made that pretty clear. The Praesi were tossing devils into the mess ahead of my army like a fool trying to buy a wish at a fountain, which was both encouraging and not: much as I was happy they were softening up the opposition, I did have to wonder how bad it must be for this to be the seventh time they were burning a greater devil contract.

“Hungry Gods,” the orc got out, “I guess that’s something to be thankful for. Fuck of a day if-”

His face turned anguished, pulling a fresh cut on the side of his nose, when he realized who he’d just been cursing with.

“-ma’am,” he hastily added, then saluted for good measure. “The front is stalling, ma’am, Commander Spitter requests that you come help break the stalemate.”

I nodded.

“Tell him I’m on my way,” I said. “The flanks are set up, we need to begin pushing into the city.”

The avenue we so badly needed to get to was straight ahead, by memory, and I’d spent so many hours looking at maps of Keter that I could see the layout of the city when I closed my eyes.

It had been millennia since the fall of Sephirah and the living ceased to stay within the walls – save for a few hundred servants deep in the heart of the city – but though the Dead King had had worked his horror on all that lay within the walls there were still traces of the city that once was. I’d seen in the Arcadian echoes that Keter had been raised on a pair of hills by a river, and though the water was long gone the city still echoed of it. The Crown of the Dead was built upwards, the bottom of it beginning at the foot of its forty-yards high walls and rolling up to the raised plateau where the two hills had once stood.

There the five palaces of Keter awaited us, and the Hellgate whose taking would be our victory.

The inside of the city was a maze whose layout changed according to the Dead King’s whims, streets and ‘houses’ – most of them empty, used only to store the dead and their arms away from weather so they would not rust and decay – raised and demolished according to arcane designs, but a handful of parts had remained unmoving through all the crusades. Most important of them was a set of six large avenues crisscrossing the city, the largest of which went through north to south and had been built over the now-dry riverbed of the river that had attracted people to live here long ago. For our push into the city to have a change of getting anywhere, we needed to get onto one of those avenues.

The rest of Keter was a playground of death, and though those avenues were sure to be trapped and heavily defended at the end of the day they were the one part of the city that Neshamah couldn’t actually destroy while defending his capital: he needed the damned avenues to move his soldiers around. He could use the smaller streets, sure, but them being a maze was a double-edged sword and they also happened to be narrow . Meaning not a lot of soldiers could squeeze through and given that the Dead King’s great advantage was numbers that was a harsh handicap when tangling with the Army of Callow. We’d earned our reputation as the finest foot on Calernia the hard way.

Soldiers were milling about in a semblance of good order, lines and companies shifting to anchor our flanks or press at the front while we expanded on all sides to make room for the troops continuing to cross. I winced as I saw a ballista bolt from somewhere to the northwest scythe through a few of my soldiers, killing or toppling them to a more horrible death. Neshamah was beginning to move siege engines in position at the top of the still-standing walls on both our flanks, which was going to be a problem. We’d either need to take the walls to silence them, spreading out further than I’d like, or keep our mages lines focused on the defence until the soldiers had crossed. Juniper’s problem, I reminded myself. She’d figure something out. I shook myself out of the thoughts and followed a line of regulars towards the front, through melted stone gone cool and buildings shredded by the Ram.

Beyond the grounds glassed by the Light the shattered buildings rose into a ragged slope of collapsed walls and loose stones, which we climbed in haste as arrows fell in sparse rain from a long distance. Arcing shots, likely fired blindly from behind enemy lines at a place they knew would force us to lower shields for balance. Let it not be said that the Dead King’s commanders were unskilled, however empty and brutally efficient a kind of skill it might be. Climbing down the slow onto a paved street, I saw exactly what Commander Spitter had needed me for. After crossing the bridges we’d swept through the enemy defences and then another three city blocks beyond that as the dead tried to put together a shield wall to check our advance, but it’d not been enough.

Keter had recovered from the surprise two blocks further in, though. A barricade was encircling our position, as I blinked in astonishment at the sight of it – it’d not existed a quarter hour ago – I realized exactly why those houses on our flanks had been so easy to collapse.

“ Shit ,” I muttered.

Keter was possible to fortify in a way that no other city in the world was, when it came down to it. Even the great fortresses of Calernia had to make concessions to habitability, but what did the Crown of the Dead care for that? There were no living souls within the walls and so the city made solely to be held against invaders, massive armies led by heroes. And though we’d avoided the worst of the defences by collapsing a wall instead of taking one of the gates, we’d known that was not a state of affairs that was going to last. Nor had it. That impossible barricade that had encircled our vanguard, leaving only one way through in a narrow street, had not been assembled – it had been collapsed . Undead had smashed the houses, collapsing them in a way that blocked streets as well.

I threw up an eye of Night as high as I could and cursed again at what I saw. Like industrious ants, skeletons were going around collapsing houses all around our beachhead to encircle it in a loose ring. And where a later of barricade had already been made, they went about adding a second. They’re hemming us in , I thought. If we don’t break through quick enough, they’ll just bottle us here and shoot us like fish in a barrel. And like all the finest trap did, they’d left us with a visible way out so we’d commit: that narrow street in front of our vanguard, packed so tightly with undead they could barely move. A funnel for us to charge down and die in. I began elbowing my way forward, though after the first few times my soldiers saw who I was and parted their ranks instead.

“Shield wall,” I shouted. “Get those fucking shields up before you all get shot!”

Officers echoed me across the army, our lines grown ragged from the breakthrough steadying just as the first undead crossbows and javelinmen began lining up atop the barricade. We’d taken the Dead King aback with our charge, but now he’d forcefully stabilized his line with the collapsed houses and he was setting up another killing field: if those barricades weren’t about to be sprouting a forest’s worth of range troops, I’d eat my crown. I particularly did not like the look of the javelins: those went right through shields and plate when thrown right, which the skeletons were sure to. It wasn’t the thought that we couldn’t smash our way through that had me worried, mind you. We could and goddamn would. It was the other ninety times we’d have to do it before we got anywhere near a victory. Was the Dead King already ordering a second ring of barricades to be collapsed around us, or was he going to wait a bit more?

Either way, I grimly thought, the only way we weren’t going to be drowned in street-by-street fighting was by moving too quickly for him to be able to keep us bottled up. And the only way for that was to break through another fourteen blocks straight ahead, to reach one of the five central avenues of Keter. I knew better than to think every step in direction wasn’t going to sprout a fresh nightmare in need of putting down. Thankfully, I was due the presence of some people who knew a thing or two about doing that. I swung my sword at a knot of skeleton crossbowmen, blowing them off the rampart as air exploded in front of them, and ran a hand down the chord of a story. One was almost there.

I felt out the outcome a heartbeat before the sequence of it could begin, and immediately pulled on Night. A large beorn came into sight, having climbed a large tower to the east, and after a roar it leapt. I could see the trajectory before it had even begun to move. A smooth arc down, straight into the company of heavies from the Third that was hammering at the enemy shield wall trying to keep us pinned in the avenue. And it might have landed, if not for the silhouette that ran up a half-collapsed house without breaking stride before leaping up, shining with blindingly bright Light. I caught a glimpse of a greatsword being swung as the beorn was carved through from head to toe and somewhere behind me I felt the twin shiver of an aspect being used and magic blooming: a gale of wind caught the halves of the beorn and the roiling skeletons within, tossing them back into the enemy ranks.

A heartbeat later the Blade of Mercy landed on his feet and the Rogue Sorcerer ended his spell. A heartbeat after that, what looked like a horse-sized worm made entirely out of muscles and fingerbones popped out from behind a tower to the west and spat a cloud of poison at that same company of heavies.

Fear, relief, horror returned. The Dead King’s favourite play.

“None of that,” I said, clicking my tongue, and released the Night.

A spinning sphere swallowed the cloud before contracting and exploding into a ball of poisonous flame, which a flick of my wrist sent right back at the bloody horror. It slithered into the tower for cover but not quite quick enough, its bottom half incinerated as the roof of the building collapsed atop it. Since Roland and the Blade of Mercy were here, she should be somewhere – I frowned, then turned around and hit the space right behind me with the flat of my sword. The Painted Knife let out a yelp, cold steel slapping her cheek, and I spared a glare as she backpedalled.

“How many times am I going to have to tell you you’re not bloody invisible, Kallia?” I said.

“At least you didn’t drop me down a tower this time,” the Painted Knife reproachfully replied.

“Day’s young,” I grunted, “and if you keep trying to sneak up on me during battle I might reconsider.”

I was completely serious, which the heroine seemed to pick up on.

“I hear your words, Black Queen,” she assured me.

I hummed, entirely unconvinced. I was pretty sure this had turned into one of those headache-inducing Levant honour things for her, which meant I was going to have to keep breaking her legs until she decided not even the bragging rights were worth that amount of pain.

“Your last two?” I asked.

“They should be-”

There was a great cracking sound to my left and I immediately turned, eye going straight to the unusual sight of someone single-handedly smashing their way through a barricade that was almost entirely stone with little more than a war hammer. A woman in bright red plate – Gods, the sight of it had every inch of me offended, that was just asking to get shot – with a helmet forged to look like a grinning devil and weapons strapped on her back was pulverising chunks of stone with every swing. And though she was almost seven feet tall and broad as a barn door, it wasn’t muscles alone that let the Red Knight shatter stone like it was overripe cantaloupes.

She wasn’t good at much aside from breaking shit, but that much she was really good that.

The villainess might still have taken a few javelins in the neck for her troubles courtesy of the undead above, though, if not for the fact that they were currently occupied with an enthusiastically murderous wolf the size of a small barn. Where the Hells the Skinchanger had actually found a wolf that large in Lycaonese lands was a mystery to me, much less killed and skinned it for use, but I wasn’t going to argue with the shapes the woman had chosen to take up: they were a pretty repertoire of clawed and fanged nightmares, even the fucking birds. I didn’t know why the eagle-thing she sometimes turned into had horns, of all things, but apparently they were both amour-piercing and poisonous so why the Hells not?

A someone who had ridden a flying horse for several years, I had a healthy appreciation for aerial impalements.

“There,” I completed for the Painted Knife. “So I see.”

She looked faintly embarrassed. So she hadn’t actually ordered the Red Knight to make that breach, huh. I sympathized. Even I found the villainess difficult to deal with, and unlike Kallia my authority was bolstered by the fact that I’d once brought down a four-story tower on the Red Knight’s head just to make a point. Hadn’t actually done much to her, which was why to this day I was pretty sure to kill her I’d need a pool of acid of some sort. Fortunately, she was so infuriatingly terrible a person I was also pretty sure I could get the Concocter to brew said acid for free.

“A second breach will hasten our advance,” I continued. “But you need to get your band ready after we punch through.”

A steady stare met mine.

“The Scourges are coming,” the Painted Knife said.

“At least one,” I agreed. “And it’ll be coming with lesser Revenants to use as meat shields.”

The Dead King wasn’t going to commit his finest remaining blades to fights to the – second – death so early in the battle, but he’d be looking to pick up a few kills among our Named if he could. Thin the herd, so to speak, and throw Revenant bodies in the way to get his Scourges out if we got too close to taking a scalp. I had every intention of snuffing out one of his last heavy hitters if the occasion arose, mind you, and Hanno should be fighting at one of the gates with the same intention. The trouble, we both knew, was that invaders past a certain point there was no choice but to fight on the Hidden Horror’s terms.

Not something that tended to go well for us, as a rule.

“We will be ready,” the Painted Knife swore, then hesitated.

I cocked an eyebrow.

“Might you keep the Rogue Sorcerer by your side?” she asked. “Skilled as he is, we move quicker without him and he is most useful from the back.”

“I’ll drag him along,” I agreed.

Roland was one of those eminently reasonable mages that actually wore armour, so I had no issue bringing him into a battlefield. Besides, for a spellcaster the Alamans was actually ridiculously difficult to kill: the amount of protective artifacts he wore on him at all times was impressive paranoid even by Wasteland standards.

“Good hunting,” I said, offering my arm.

“And you, Warden,” the Painted Knife replied, clasping it.

I waited for Roland, and gentlemen that he was he didn’t make it long. Some part of me was always surprised that the Rogue Sorcerer wasn’t taller, I thought. It must have been the long leather coat over the chain mail, covered with pockets full of artefacts. Though the dark-haired man usually went without a helmet, this once he’d made an exception and put on a plaint bassinet that pressed his curls against his head. He had a short wand painted blue in hand, which to my senses reeked of the fae. Huh, I’d never seen him with that one before.

“Catherine,” he greeted me, glancing at the melee ahead. “I’m grieved we only came so late.”

“Named wouldn’t have been useful on the bridges,” I admitted. “It would have been handing Revenants to the opposition.”

Not entirely true, but the few Named that would have made a difference had been needed elsewhere. I was already here, after all, and insisting the Army of Callow should also have the services of the Witch of the Woods on top of mine would have been a hard sell.

“Then we’ll make up for the absence it now,” Roland firmly said. “Where do you need me?”

I couldn’t help but smile. He’d been one of the first heroes to grow on me for a reason.

“You’re with me,” I said, “and we’re going into the thick of it.”

“Ah, certain death,” he drily replied. “How I missed working with you, Warden.”

“Don’t be so gloomy,” I chided. “It’s only mostly certain death.”

“That would be our finest odds in quite a while, then,” he snorted.

He gallantly offered me his arm to walk, which was a nice thought but still got him elbowed in the ribs. It was a battlefield, not a garden stroll. Alamans , Merciless Gods. Even at the bloody end of the world. The closest we got to the front, the harder it got to move: the press of soldiers tightened, kept on tightening until it squeezed into the sole street that had been the sole way out of the barricades. Now there was another opening, I thought, but the pressure would not be relieved for some time yet. Maybe thirty feet ahead of us I saw the shield walls hammering at each other, the dead packed tight as my heavies tried to break through them. I leaned closer to Roland.

“Can you clear that?” I asked, gesturing in the melee’s direction.

“Given time to cast,” the Rogue Sorcerer replied. “Why?”

“Because unless I’m mistaken,” I murmured, “we’re about to ambushed. I need you to draw attention.”

He sent me a pained look. I stared back, unmoved, until he conceded with a sigh.

“Bait it is,” Roland said. “Is Kallia near?”

I nodded. The Painted Knife, for all that her team had some rather straightforward brawlers, was still an assassin at heart. She was waiting too. The Rogue Sorcerer rolled his shoulder.

“Then let’s get to it,” the hero said.

I took a step back, pulling on Night, and let if fall over me like a veil. I tore out a sliver and shaped it into an eye, tossing it up in the sky, and as I closed my eye of flesh I saw through the other. The Red Knight’s breach had let the companies there turn the tables. Climbing through the mess was hard and there were corpses all over the slope, but now my legionaries had climbed atop the barricade and were tearing into the crossbowmen and javelineers. Ahead of me I looked past the brutal melee in the street, seeing how skeletons were pouring in from all adjoining streets to pack this one so tight they could barely move. Yet it was the houses I looked at closest, the tiled stone roofs. I couldn’t see a Revenant yet, but that hardly meant there were none.

Ahead of me, the Rogue Sorcerer let out a hoarse shout and pointed an ornate casting road at the sky: flames poured out like a flock of birds, bright and of many colours.

I could not spare a longer look than that, because the enemy were moving. Three Revenants on a rooftop that’d been empty until an arrow went flying – my heart clenched for a moment but the archer was in bright green leathers, so not the Hawk – and an illusion broke. I kept my eye on them even as what must be a mage Revenant, given that otherwise the swirling colours of those robes would be some sort of a crime, raised an ornate golden staff and pulled an illusion on them again. I’d had a heartbeat to look at the third, finding good plate and a large shield that did not belong to any of the Scourge. Whichever was there they were still lying in wait, so I held back as well.

Around me soldiers began to press forward, parting around my position without knowing why, and I made a note that whatever it was Roland had used it had seemingly worked.

The three Revenants were under illusion again but now that I knew what to look for I could taste the subtle power in the air and follow their position. The Painted Knife’s band went about it another way: a heartbeat later a hawk dropped down on the rooftop, turning into a large hound as it landed, and immediately began sniffing the air. Knowing their position was blown, the Revenants engaged: the illusion went down, an arrow was loosed at the Skinchanger – which she turned into a bear to shrug off – and the sword and board undead doubled back to attack our scout Named. A tactical mistake, I thought as the Painted Knife appeared behind their mage and hacked through the hand holding the staff. A heartbeat later the Blade of Mercy was there as well, landing in a flash of Light that tore a hole through the roof and forced him to roll forward so he wouldn’t drop through.

It wasn’t a done deal, I thought as I watched them. The mage Revenant’s hand kept wielding the staff even when cut off and the Blade of Mercy backed off in surprise when the sword and board undead took on his greatsword without batting an eye, but the band of Named had the advantage. Which meant we were soon due... Darkness fell over the roof and I cursed. I’d been too much to hope that being buried under most of Hainaut had been enough to kill off the Mantle, I supposed. At least I got to find out where she was, which happened to be a rooftop far to my left. Standing besides what had to be the sloppiest Revenant I’d ever seen: barely more than ragged skin and bones, with floppy hair and loose farmers’ clothes. Not a weapon in sight and he looked pretty confused.

He couldn’t have been more obviously dangerous if the word had been branded on his fucking forehead.

“All right,” I grunted. “My turn.”

The setup ought to work. I released the Night hiding me and shaped it into solid shadows instead, coiling around me and then exploding outwards in tendrils that I used like great legs. Shouts of surprise came from my legionaries below as I stepped over them and over the barricade, skeletons hacking away at the shadow limbs harmlessly. A streak of magic whizzed my way but I adjusted my position absent-mindedly to let it go wide, eye still on the Mantle. She pointed her great steel mace towards me, her armoured silhouette cast in the half-light allow through by the clouds, and the world shivered from the strength of the curse that shot out. She had, unfortunately for her, fallen prey to the story I’d prepared.

A woman decked in red steel leapt up in the way of the curse, laughing, and the world shivered again.

I’m not the fifth in their band , I thought, you struck too early . I smiled down at the Scourge even as I guided myself to land on the rooftop closest to the Mantle’s. The Red Knight joined me up there, her armour glimmering deeper red from the curse she had been able to Devour . She spat to the side, reaching at her back and taking up a broadsword.

“Weak,” the Red Knight sneered. “Your hatred is weak . I’ll show you what a real Named is like, you petty armoured bitch.”

I rolled my shoulder, limping up to her side as the Mantle pivoted to face us and the Revenant at her side looked at us with befuddlement. I reached out with my Name, tried to get a read on what he could do, but all I got was a vague sense of bad luck. And yet I smiled, as I felt a ripple behind me and to our side the Mantle’s darkness suddenly vanished. Roland’s Confiscate worked on the Mantle’s curses, then. Good to know.

“Keep her busy,” I told the Red Knight, preparing to leap to the other roof. “But don’t take risks. We can afford to wait until the others are-”

Instinct pulled at me and I obeyed, taking a step to the side. It saved my life. I felt a raging current of power suddenly unleashed from below and the world exploded. I tumbled down through heated shards of what had been tiles a moment ago, shielding my eyes, as a curse passed close enough to rustle the Mantle of Woe. I hit the ground a moment after, swallowing a scream as I landed on my bad leg, but I stood through the pain to face a simple oaken staff being pointed towards me. A ragged figure in faded grey robes, eyes lifeless and long black hair tumbling down his back, stood before me inside a circle of wards. The Tumult, greatest spellcaster in the Dead King’s service, began to incant. Instinct pulled at me again, the warning of certain death, but before I could heed it and move a cacophonous noise drowned out everything else and the ground shuddered.

The wall blew up a heartbeat later, spraying shards everywhere as the flying fortress crushed three city blocks and I had to pull Night to be just so the shockwave wouldn’t splatter me all over the walls. The Tumult was not so lucky, his wards allowing through no harm but just enough wind that he was smacked flat against his own magic shield. Breathing out raggedly I released the Night, wiping dust out of my eyes, and found laughter bubbling out of my throat as someone floated down to the ground to stand between me and the Scourge. Akua Sahelian, armoured from head to toe and somehow still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, stared down the undead mage

“This one you can leave to me, darling,” she drawled. “We never did finish our little chat in Hainaut.”

In the distance I heard hooves, followed by war cries in Mthethwa, and finally I let the laugh free.

Time to collect some scalps.

Chapter 60: Blood

“When the gathered princes of the Alamans demanded to know by what right she asked them to swear obeisance, Triumphant laughed and replied: ‘To be Dread Empress of Praes is to be a question asked of all Creation: will you kneel, or be made to?’”

– Extract from the Scroll of Dominion, twenty-fourth of the Secret Histories of Praes

I’d never seen her wear that armour before.

A plumed conical helm of steel worked with gold engravings led to a sheet of mail covering her throat, all of it above a beautifully worked set of red chain mail covered in parts by segmented plate – pauldrons sculpted like lionheads, an ornate breastplate with a crimson sash for belt and skirted panels that covered both her legs down to her knees. It was all red and gold, save for the sword sheathed her hip. That was pure steel except for the egg-sized ruby set into the pommel. The entire set shone with subtle engravings that reeked of magic. Protective enchantments, I guessed. I made myself stop staring, though not quite quickly to avoid an amused quirk of those full lips.

“You sure you’ve got him?” I asked, gesturing at the Tumult.

He was rising to his feet, magic already ticking around his hands.

“My heart,” Akua drawled, “if I had him any more, I would already have spent him.”

“A yes would have sufficed,” I informed her, pulling at Night.

“Ah,” she smiled, “but where would the fun in that be?”

Tendrils of shadow tossed me up a moment later, even as I smelled a scent like ozone and heard Akua say something in Mthethwa that sounded a lot like ‘how pedestrian’. Well, if she could afford to be that condescending I figured she’d be all right. I landed with a hiss of pain atop the tiled roof just in time to watch the Red Knight lose a few teeth. Even most Named I knew would have died when taking a hit of the Mantle’s mace on the side of the face, but instead the villainess was thrown like a rag doll and spat out a few bloody teeth. The Mantle did not pause to rejoice, instead turning to me without batting an eye as I looked for the other Revenant that’d been there and found him missing. I was not sure whether to be glad of that or not.

I pulled on Night and released most of it, tossing a handful of black flame her way, but just as I’d thought she immediately pulled her favourite trick: the world went black as she drenched the area in darkness. For me, anyway. The worst part of that trick had always been how it didn’t affect her at all.

Fortunately, she’d used it often enough I was not in the least surprised. And, more importantly, I sunk the last of the Night into the tiles of the roof. A heartbeat later I felt one resonate as a step was taken on it, so without hesitation I flicked my wrist and agitated the Night in the tile: it blew up. The darkness faded, revealing the hole the Mantle had just fallen through, and I smiled. The Scourge was twice my size and encased in the heaviest armour I’d ever seen, but those strengths came with costs. Like, you know, weighing enough that you’d fall right through any weakened rooftop instantly. I limped to the side, a cursed turning to powder the tile I’d been standing on a moment earlier, and through that opening tossed another handful of black flame at the Mantle. I’d used the fire on her often enough to know it wouldn’t do shit to that armour, but there was one thing it was quite good at: blinding the Revenant senses that she used instead of her eyes.

So while she put out the fire I’d just thrown in her face, I continued limping away and let the Night rage through my veins. I wove strands quickly, doubling back to strengthen them, and I had just finished the second layer when I felt the Mantle lose her temper. Or so I assumed, because she’d put enough strength into that curse there was goosebumps all over my skin. I kept backing away, but it came to nothing when the entire roof turned into smoke beneath me. That’s a problem , I idly noted as I began to fall. The way she waiting for me below, already beginning the swing that would smash my ribs and rupture my guts, was also something of a problem.

Fortunately for her, I had a secret weapon.

“ Know your place ,” the Red Knight snarled, and smashed her war hammer into the back of the Mantle’s head.

There was a satisfying sound as the back of the Revenant’s helmet crumpled, but to the villainess’ surprise her blow went no deeper. The real win was my insides staying on the inside, though, as the Mantle had to kill her swing long enough to backhand the Red Knight through a wall. That was two wins, really, when you thought about it. My Name tugged at me and I did not resist, angling my fall. My bad leg gave when I landed, to my swallowed moan of pain, but the way I dropped down ended up ensuring that a boiling curse didn’t end up cooking my brain so luck me. Wincing as I rose, I stepped out of the way of a mace swing. I wasn’t worried up close, at least.

The Mantle had been a priestess in life, not a warrior. Her danger up close came from strength and size, not skill, and I was a few years past being scared of something just for those.

“You know,” I said, “I’ve never heard you talk.”

The swing shattered the wall behind me but a half-step took me out of the arc, and she wasn’t quite quick enough with the follow-up curse: I tossed a handful of black flames at her wrist before she loosed it, scrapping her aim. It went through the open door and melted stone in the street. Nasty , I thought.

“I can’t tell if you’re one of those Neshamah had to cut up the soul of badly so they’d obey,” I said, “or if it’s because there’s just no mouth to speak with under that helm.”

It was an impressive piece, admittedly, covering her entire face in lengths of steel save for two downwards eye slits. The spikes that went past the crown of her head almost evoked the shape of a crown. The floor trembled as the blow meant to rip down through my shoulder hit nothing but air and stone while I twisted my will, keeping an eye on her as I took the working I’d crafted earlier in hand. Almost ready, I just needed her distracted. A heartbeat later what looked like a wave of pure heat melted through half the room we were in, forcing her to hastily backpedal away while in the distance I heard Akua call the Tumult a clumsy debutante in Mthethwa. That’ll do , I mused, and pulled.

The string of Night twanged over my head, pulled tight by one of the pulleys I’d formed out of sight, and it caught the Mantle in the chest. The force of the pull slammed her into the wall, where she immediately began to struggle to get out. I took a limping step forward, raising my hand.

“That’s the problem with being so large,” I told her. “Makes you an easier target, and you need so much room to move.”

Another chord passed over my head with a twanging sound, tightening her against the wall. And I didn’t need to bend because she was so tall, not because I was fucking short. I was a goddamn queen, so implying otherwise was treason. The Mantle changed tactics, moving to smash the wall she was being pinned against instead, bit I flicked my wrist and another chord bound her while she was trying to move it. No room, no swing. She could be as strong as she wanted, without space to move it meant nothing. I bound her twice more as I approached, closing in.

“I couldn’t help but notice you usually move when using a curse,” I told her. “Not everyone needs that, but then you weren’t born a priestess of curses were you? While you breathed it was Light you used. It’s not your speciality.”

And undead, for all their strengths in some regards, could not truly learn. If it had been a limit for her while she lived, she would not overcome it no matter how long she existed. I raised my sword, pulling on Night, and dipped into my Name to See what lay ahead. I paused in surprise, which almost cost me my life. When her mace exploded with power, a blind curse of wrath shattering the wall the Mantle was bound to, I froze for a moment as I returned to the here and now. Tearing through the chords of Night she swung down with all her strength, but in the moment that I beheld the present I saw it. An opening. A half step to the left as the mace came down, inclining my head even further and angling my body so that the diagonal downwards swing missed be by a hair’s breadth.

She pivoted, other hand coming to slam a curse into my belly even as she broke the floor with her mace but I pivoted and smoothly, almost gently, thrust upwards. I’d barely even taken two steps, I thought as the point of my sword slid into the eyehole, but then that was the difference between strength and skill wasn’t it?

“ Silence ,” I said, aspect burning down my blade.

Her power winked out and her limps dropped as I felt steel cut into bone. As I’d thought, she couldn’t actually move around that mass of steel she was encased in without the help of something like an enchantment. I knew deep in my bones that the aspect would only silence the Mantle’s power for a moment, but a moment was all I needed. I pulled on Night as I raised my free hand, moving to slam it onto the pommel of my sword to incinerate everything inside the armour, but before I could sorcery bloomed above my head. Gods, I thought as I glanced up, above everyone ’s head.

Storm clouds roiled, but that wasn’t half as worrisome as the lightning I could see rippling inside them.

I hastily threw up the Night I’d been pulling in into a shield instead of a killing stroke, feeling it shudder as lightning struck at it. And then twice more. I backed away, half expecting a mace to be swung at my head, but after I took cover under an arch what I saw was that the Mantle had been blasted as well. She’d dropped her mace. Unlike me, though she was able to walk a lightning strike off. Something she proved by hastily leaving the house we’d been brawling in, turning the corner and out of sight. Fuck . I took a step forward, wanting to pursue, but lightning began to fall again and I had to put up a shield of Night. Cursing, I doubled back to where I’d left Akua only to find her already headed my way.

“That’s the Tumult, right?” I said, pointing upwards.

“It is,” she admitted. “I took off both his arms but he fled and threw that up behind him to cover his retreat.”

“The Mantle’s as well,” I grunted. “Can you end it?”

She shook her head.

“Magic was used to make the storm and is still being used to guide strikes, but the lightning storm itself is not magical,” Akua said. “Unless I-”

Lightning struck, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. It was the way it curved back up, then hit another lightning bolt. What in the Hells , I thought, as slowly every speck of lightning within the clouds was gathered into a single sphere. I felt an aspect at work there, but it wasn’t the Tumult’s. I was sure of that.

“Gods behold,” Akua grinned, almost girlish. “It is Masego.”

“Lightning’s not a form of power, though,” I said. “He shouldn’t be able to control it.”

“Unless,” she said, “he copied the Tumult’s guiding spell from looking at it, cast it as well and then wrested that .”

Lightning came down in a blinding wave ahead of us, forcing me to cover my eye and serving as helpful reminder that Masego was still one of the most terrifying people I’d ever met. I was reminded twice over when we linked back up with my legionaries, finding then that the lighting had ended up clearing most of the enemy ahead while essentially razing three city blocks as a collateral. Fucking Hells, Zeze. You’re not pulling your punches today. As I’d expected, Kallia’s band of five had come out ahead in the struggle. I got to hear as much from her, as well as something else I’d spared a moment to wonder about.

“The wizard Revenant retreated with the ragged one,” the Painted Knife told me.

I grimaced. So Neshamah had decided they were useful enough to keep for the rematch that no doubt awaited us deeper in. Good to know.

“Stay with the Army of Callow,” I ordered her. “I need you to cover them from Named. Akua Sahelian and I will go with the vanguard.”

“As you say, Warden,” Kallia replied.

The push to the avenue was staggeringly fast, what with Hierophant having essentially vaporized our opposition. We pushed forward and the moment I set foot on the pavement stones I sent a runner back. We were, at long last, past the first hurdle.

Keter’s avenues were massive things, all of them at least forty feet wide and paved with massive slabs of granite that went deep into the earth. It was needed for constructs to be able to move about the capital without constantly wrecking everything – no matter how careful a giant death snake was being, it did not stop being a giant death snake. The rain of ash made it hard for men to see too far ahead, but my dead eye had become a thousand one of Night instead. I saw far and gave a hard smile at what I found: we’d caught the enemy out of position. The avenue went up in an angled slope all the way to the inner-city wall, a ring of stout bastions bristling with soldiers and war machines, and though there were enemies by the thousands gathering along the length of it there was no cohesive force.

It was half a dozen packs of undead being thrown in the way, not a proper army.

“Secure our position,” I shouted. “I want those alleys blocked off and a vanguard readied for a push.”

Absent-mindedly I pulled on Night and tossed out a ball of black flame, incinerating the head of the beorn that’d risked popping out of cover ahead of my men. The legionaries cheered and got to work with tired professionalism, moving out as the sergeants and lieutenants barked out their orders. Though we’d broken through the Dead King’s barricades, our advance put us in a precarious position. We were like an iron spike driven into a block of ice: all the streets around the grounds we’d taken there were still thick with undead. Right now we were suffering only small probes, but that was because they would be gathering in bands led by Binds so that they could mass enough numbers to be a threat when attacking our position instead of blade fodder.

The relative steadiness of our advance was an illusion whose end was fast approaching. If this were another sort of siege it would have been worth it to try to clear the lower city of Keter before we assault the inner wall, but here it would be suicide: we’d wreck our armies beyond repair doing that. Instead we had to push through and roll the dice, driving deep towards the Hellgate so we might take it and the Dead King with it. I grabbed the shoulder of the closest captain – a dusky-skinned Taghreb with chubby cheeks – and leaned in closer.

“Where has Lady Akua gone?” I asked, lowering my voice.

“She has gone to rifle through dead bodies, Your Majesty,” the captain replied.

There was not a hint of the distaste in his voice that I would have found in a Callowan reporting the same thing. I almost asked him ‘what for’, but I was doubtful he knew and it’d mean admitting that I didn’t. Instead I sagely nodded and released his shoulder after reminding him to send Commander Spitter’s runner my way the moment they arrived. I needed word from the rest of the fight for Keter as soon as possible before deciding whether we should commit to a push up the avenue. The opportunity was there, and soon to fade, but if we were going at it alone it’d be nothing but an elaborate suicide charge. Thankfully, I did not have to wait long.

Though I had expected one, it was not a legionary that returned bearing news and I cocked an eyebrow when an unexpected pair approached instead. One I was familiar with, a girl in dusty mages robes with a bony face and a scowl bearing Masego’s old Name: Sapan of Ashur, the Apprentice. The second I did not know as well, save through the words of others. The Page was not all that tall, though his slenderness gave the impression he was, and his chestnut hair was a riot of enviable curls. His armour was too light for my tastes, a cuirass and leather instead of proper plate or mail, but it was still better than the rapier he’d somehow been tricked into thinking was an acceptable battlefield weapon.

“Should I take it there’s no need to wait for an officer?” I asked.

“Commander Issawi decided it would be simpler to send us directly to you, Your Excellency,” Sapan said, offering a short bow.

The Proceran mirrored her perfectly but I barely paid attention to him. Issawi, she’d said, and not Spitter. The old commander was probably dead, I grimly realized, and if I remembered the ranks right his senior tribune was another Callowan so she was probably dead too. Our senior officers were dropping like flies, which smacked of Keter targeting them. Fucking Neshamah, he’d figured out our weakness compared to the Legions of Terror: the comparative lack of experienced officers.

“Then speak,” I said. “How go the other offensives?”

“Lord Hanno had taken his gate and is pushing towards the inner city, Your Excellency,” the Page proudly told me.

Meaning the Lycaonese had once more lived up to their reputation and pushed unflinchingly through the slaughter it’d take to get boots atop a gatehouse of Keter. Good. We’d gambled that they might, sending Hanno and the Kingfisher Prince there on top of a heroic band of five and the Witch of the Woods for magical muscle.

“The other gate?” I asked.

“The Dominion and the Clans were forced to retreat,” Sapan told me. “The Warlord decided casualties were too high and their foothold on the gatehouse too fragile to keep up the storm.”

Fuck , I thought. That meant there was only us coming from the southwest and the Procerans coming from the east of the city. We’d hoped that my army’s push would draw enough dead that Hakram and the Blood would be able to take the eastern gate, but that might have been too ambitious. It might be why we weren’t as badly drowned in soldiers as I thought we’d be , I mused. Neshamah might have decided to focus on keeping the third army out of his city instead of focusing on either us or the Proceran. If that was true, all those reinforcements were about to begin hammering at the Army of Callow’s positions soon. I forced myself to set the speculation aside.

Whether it was true or not didn’t matter, since the choice I had to make hadn’t changed: we were committing to an attack on the inner wall or not?

“How recent are your news about the Lycaonese offensive?” I asked.

“Half an hour, Your Excellency,” the Page told me. “I fought with mercenaries before being sent as a messenger.”

However learned his courtesies, he did not quite manage to hide the resentment in his tone. Would have preferred to stay with the push, huh. The Apprentice did not seem so burdened, I could not help but noticed, as befitting of someone who’d gone through the gruelling campaign in the Wasteland under my commands.

“Half an hour,” I muttered, drumming my fingers against the side of my leg. “And you say they were pushing deep?”

“They were storming barricades up the avenue when I left,” the young hero agreed.

That was the advantage of taking a gate instead of a breach like my army had: the Procerans had been on an avenue from the start. If it went well, I assessed, it was likely that Hanno and the Lycaonese would take a swing at the inner-city wall before my people did. That thought clinched the decision, because the same reason I was hesitating to commit to an attack – fear of attacking the inner wall alone and getting my teeth kicked in – was now also a reason to commit to that very same attack. It’d be the Procerans getting their teeth kicked in, if I left them to hang high and dry.

“Then there’s no room left for hesitation,” I said. “I need you two to carry word back to Prince Otto, assuming he still holds command of the Proceran van.”

“He does, Your Excellency,” Sapan assured me.

“Then tell him I’m taking a run at the inner wall,” I said, “and committing all my reserves to the push. I’ll see him when we’re both through.”

The Page looked split between irritation – at being made a messenger again, no doubt – and eagerness at being able to return to fight with his countrymen, but as far as I was concerned he was just the escort. The Apprentice nodded and I clapped her shoulder amicably before sending them both off. I didn’t offer them an escort. That was the point of using Named as messengers, after all: they could get through the undead-infested city without one. It felt like absurd luxury to used champions of the Gods as messenger pigeons, but if there was one place on Calernia that warranted the absurdity it was the Crown of the Dead. I sought more mundane messengers as well, to send word to Commander Issawi that she was to prepare for a push.

That, and to send for my personal standard and the people bearing it.

Akua returned not long after, what she’d been up to during her absence quite evident. She was riding what could generously be called a horse, at least in shape. It was a necromantic construct, made out of stripped parts from ghouls and larger monsters. Sloppy in some ways, I mused, since some muscles had clearly been melted together – a brute force method – and the sections that’d been sown together sported shining thread. An enchantment, not real thread, and so vulnerable to being dispelled. Still, I could only be impressed that she’d put together what looked like a leathery horse-shaped golem in what could only be half an hour. It was moving pretty well, too, its bone hooves clacking light against the stone.

“Expecting to need a horse?” I idly asked.

She cocked an eyebrow at me.

“The enemy up the avenue are in disarray,” Akua said. “Knowing you, you will want to strike while the iron is hot.”

She did know me, I thought with the usual mixture of pleasure and dread. Enough that a glance at what lay ahead had been enough to figure out what I intended, apparently.

“Can you reach the flying fortresses?” I asked. “I need to send word.”

“I already have,” she said, “but another was ahead of me.”

I blinked in surprise.

“Marshal Juniper has ordered the Old Mothers to move to support the push towards the inner wall and the rest to protect the Army of Callow’s flanks,” Akua amusedly said. “It seems I am not the only one who can see through you, dearest.”

Gods, Hellhound , I thought, still awed after all these years. Any report you get should be at least half an hour behind me and confused, on top of having a lesser read than I on what’s going on at the front. And still she’d been a step ahead of me. I closed my eye, sinking into Night to find Zombie and have a look through her senses, only to find that below the hippocorvid two banners flew. I jostled back into my own body, lips twitching as I corrected my estimate to Juniper of the Red Shields having been two steps ahead of me. I turned to glanced behind me, Zombie large black wings folding as she plunged down through the sky and landed on the stone behind me at a run, circling around me as legionaries hastily got out of her way. Further back, more of my soldiers were moving.

Parting to make way for the same people I’d sent for now knowing my marshal had already sent them out: banners high, the Order of Broken Bells came forth.

Cracked bronze bells on black flew by the Sword and Crown, under them the first order of knights raised since the Conquest advancing in good order. Horses and men barded in steel carved with hymns to the Heavens as my people had done for centuries, killing lances raised not yet lowered for the charge. There was not a man or woman among them whose armour was not scuffed and dented, who’d not had at least a horse killed under them. Grandmaster Brandon Talbot rode at their head, the raised visor revealing his strong jaw and neat black beard. The once-heir to Marchford had gone from my prisoner to one of the few nobles I actually liked – if not trusted – over the years and led his knights through many a battlefield in my name.

Too many, perhaps. The Order of Broken Bells now numbered eighteen hundred, a respectable number given the losses in the Wasteland and on the plains of the Ossuary, but that was a fragile thing. When the siege of Keter had begun, I’d given a permission to Talbot that I had denied him throughout my entire reign: he was to knight his squires as he wished, without regard to age or training. The Broken Bells fielded eighteen hundred knights because there were no longer squires in the order, and barely any spare horses left for that matter. The strength mustered today was the last they had to wield, and should it perish the riders of Vivienne’s own knightly order would be the last cavalry left in the kingdom.

The Army of Callow had fought too many battles, too many wars. Even after draining my kingdom dry of manpower as fee queens before me had dared, we were running out of war bodies to put in suits of armour – much less the likes of knight, costly to arm and train as they were.

“We come as called, Your Majesty,” Brandon Talbot greeted me.

I held out my hand and Zombie nuzzled it, rubbing her feathered cheeks against the gauntlet. I patted her until she purred, only then moving to hoist myself onto the saddle.

“I have work for you,” I said.

He glanced at the avenue, the dead gathering there in throngs of thousands and beginning to raise barricades. The nobleman spared a look for Akua as well before returning his gaze to me.

“To ride into the jaws of death,” Sir Brandon said, sounding rather pleased.

There was, I thought, such a lovely madness to my people sometimes. I rolled my shoulder, limbering my sword arm. I was getting cramps, the costs of not spending enough time on the training field these days.

“Momentum’s still on our side,” I said, “but we need to prevent the enemy from consolidating before the Third Army can begin its push. That means trampling...”

I trailed off, flicking a glance at the gathering horde.

“All of that, more or less,” I idly finished.

“An afternoon’s work,” one of the knights called out.

There was grim, satisfied laughter. I indulged them with a smile, because if they hadn’t earned the right to a few harsh boasts then who on Creation had? I caught Grandmaster Talbot’s eye.

“Do you remember the first time we met, Brandon?” I asked.

The bearded man smiled.

“I could forget my name, Your Majesty, and still remember that,” he said.

“You thought I was too young,” I teased.

“The world’s gotten older,” Brandon Talbot simply said. “So have we.”

True enough. Flakes of ash crusted at the edge of the banner first raised from a cell, the cracked bells on imperial black that I had chosen as much as a warning as an emblem. I felt the warm breath of the Beast against my cheek, just as I had that day.

“Do you regret it?” I suddenly asked. “That you knelt that day, struck your bargain.”

The brown-eyed man studied me for a long moment, his face grown hard to read.

“There were times I did,” the grandmaster admitted. “Lows and long nights, when the bodies piled too high.”

I did not dare interrupt, breath caught still in my throat.

“But here we are,” Brandon Talbot softly said, gesturing at the horror around us. “The end of our road, Catherine Foundling. Perhaps of all our roads.”

The knight smiled.

“It has been a long ride,” he said, “but I regret nothing, Queen of Callow.”

The breath I’d been choking on left my lips, ragged, and I offered a stilted nod back. Sometimes you didn’t know you’d wanted to hear something until after you’d heard it.

“Then come on,” I said, voice steadying as it rose. “All of you. It has been too long since the Dead King last heard the horns of the knights of Callow.”

My sword cleared the scabbard, rising to catch a glint of sunlight.

“Let us remind the Enemy,” I said, “why so many learned to fear the sound.”

I guided Zombie with my knees, leading her forward into the avenue. Talons scraped against the stone, her wings folded close to her side, as behind me men began to move. The banners flew high, catching wind that shook off the ash, and the knights of Callow sounded the old defiance. The horns sounded once, twice, thrice.

All knights charge , the call went, and charge we did.

—

It was like a clap of thunder, the sound of a wedge of heavy cavalry going through a shield wall.

I hacked down half-blindly, smashing open an iron helm as Zombie barreled through the undead and all around me heavy lances tore punched through shields and corpses alike. I hacked and hacked, like a farmer reaping wheat, until suddenly there was nothing but stone pavement before me and my mount let out a cacophonous caw. I led her forward, only slowing when knights began to catch up. Half of them had discarded broken lances, unsheathing swords to replace them.

“REDEMPTION IN STEEL,” Grandmaster Talbot shouted.

A hard cheer echoed him, and we gathered into a wedge again. Ahead of us, another shield wall was forming even as behind us the shattered remains of the thousand skeletons we’d just trampled into dust fled the avenue. The Third Army’s banner was on the move, I saw. The push was beginning, we needed to clear the way for it. The horns sounded again, and we began to advance at a trot. Akua pulled close to me, her necromantic mount keeping pace as she held her sword like someone who’d not used one in too long. The enemy brought a few spears out in front of the shield wall, maybe half a hundred, but it was not them my eye sought.

I felt sorcery at work, and soon found it: cabals of robed mages, skeletons with burning green eyes and not a speck of flesh left, stood at the back of the shield wall shaping eerie cubes of what looked like smoke.

“ Akua ,” I shouted.

I heard her snarl out an incantation even as the Order of Broken Bells quickened, going from trot to gallop. We began to close the distance, the smoke cubes rising in the air even as Akua’s fingers traced runes in the air and tore through them, but it was not to be so simple. On the streets that flanked us on both sides I saw movement, creatures looking like pale white – the pale of foul flesh, of creatures from deep water all wet and shining – hounds rising from crouches to break into a run. There were hundreds of them, and with an angry hiss I pulled on Night. I scorched our left flank, the abominations fleeing the black fire, but those to the right got through.

They leap with unnatural agility, baring half a dozen mouths full of curved teeth, but that was not the nastiest turn. Those that were cut or pierced took the blows like butter, staying stuck. It was fat, I realized with dim horror. The fat of corpses, riddled with teeth and unleashed like hounds. Men and horses tumbled down where the abominations caught them, biting into our wedge, but moments later I could spare no more thought for it: thunder clapped as I slapped away a spear and Zombie trampled the shield wall, tearing into the enemy. I hacked and hacked, arms burning from the toil as my Name steadied my hand and whispered lovingly in my ear. We would win, it promised. We would get to the end.

The cubes of smoke were brought down on us, exploding into clouds that smelled of death, but though a handful of knights choked to death in their armour the worst of it was blown away by the burst of wind that Akua smashed into the enemy, blowing away soldiers as much as the smoke. The hole it made relieved pressure enough for the Order to finish breaking through, barrelling through the undead and continuing down the avenue. We slowed, formed up into a wedge again as I tossed fire behind us to keep the fat hounds away – they were vulnerable, a spark was all they needed to light up – and our eyes moved ahead. There the enemy had gathered up, dragging up chunks of wall to make a barricade as archers and javelinmen massed behind thick lines of skeletons.

And beyond them, I saw, it was worse. Three more large knots of enemy, getting larger and better dug in. Half a dozen smaller ones at least. How many knights were dead already? Too many, I thought, and it would only get worse as we tired and began to slow.

“REDEMPTION IN STEEL,” Grandmaster Talbot shouted.

They shouted it back and we broke into a trot, advancing unflinchingly. Curses shot out from the enemy formation but the knights laughed, the sorcery sliding off their armour like water off a duck’s back. Akua screamed an incantation, throwing at the enemy a swirling ball of darkness that exploded into drops. All of the undead they touched twitched and began to turn on each other, hacking away. The Order of Broken Bells cheered, cheered the deed of a woman they had hated an hour ago and would hate again an hour from now. There were hardly any lances left, all of them left in broken bodies, but the handful remaining were lowered as we broken into a gallop.

I watched the flanks, and my vigilance was not for naught: I caught the movement first. Ghouls that had crouched atop rooftops suddenly rose, leaping down and running towards us with howls, as something altogether more sinister rose behind them. They looked like great worms of bone, though the tail ended looking like a lizard’s and under their ‘neck’ two leathery, spindly arms ending in claws jutted out. It was the lungs that drew the eye, though, two bulging great sacks like a bullfrog’s stomach with the appearance of muscle that were pumping in air and swelling. Using the clawed arms to drag themselves into position atop the roofs, the creatures all turned to face us and unhinged their ‘heads’ to reveal teethless maws.

The spat clouds of some foul black gas at us, filling the air.

Akua incanted again as we tore through the ghouls in our way, hacking at the flesh, but they’d not been meant to win, only to slow us. Volleys of arrows fell in a thick rain, the gas drifted towards us on a lazy wind and the enemy mages began their rituals. I pulled deep on Night, ignoring the gas – Akua would have to take care of it – as Brand Talbot shouted for the knight to form up, to prepare a charge anew at the enemy ranks. It was turning sour on us, I realized, and... and a shadow was cast over us all. Wind screamed as the flying fortress approached and lightning began to fall in the enemy’s ranks. A heartbeat later, the bottom of the fortress let out a burning light that tore through half a dozen houses in a heartbeat.

And then ladders were lowered.

“Forward,” I shouted, “forward!”

We cut through the last of the ghouls as Akua blew black the gas, tightening ranks as we broke into a gallop again. An arrow slid off the side of my helm and another sunk into Zombie’s skull, which annoyed her more than anything else. The Order smoothly split into two wings, one for each opening in the enemy barricade, and we thundered through. I screamed myself hoarse, hacking away at a sea of skulls and rotten faces, hands and blades coming at me from all sides. From the corner of my eye I saw a scythe hit Akua’s armoured wrist, slapping her sword out of her fingers, and with a shout of anger I torched the Bind that’d dared. We pushed at the ranks of the enemy, the momentum of our aborted charge now gone, and knights began to drop.

But even as legionaries began to land on our side I found that the undead before me no longer bore swords, only bows and javelins and crossbows. I had reached the back.

“Almost through,” I shouted.

“Callow,” the shout came back. “Callow and the broken bells!”

But we were slowing, dying and I had begun to pull on Night again when a spell hit the middle of the enemy formation and crushed half a dozen soldiers with a projectile. No, I realized a heartbeat later, not a spell. High Marshal Nim, the Black Knight of Praes, rose from her crouch and swung her warhammer with a great cry.

Undead were scattered likes leaves in a storm.

And just like that, it began to turn around. I could feel it in my bones. The sky filled with thousands of tons of stone and arrogance and they gathered again, my ragged Order of Broken Bells. Spells fell on the dead like summer rain. Fire and lightning and frost, acid and darkness and smoke that moved and swallowed men. Wind blew up in geysers, sand heated almost to glass was thrown in sheets half a mile wide. And curses, curses of the likes Calernia had learned to fear: iron rusted and bent, flesh melted and bone turned to powder. Souls were ripped out of Binds and turned into streaks of weeping flame, skeletons exploded into shards. And worse, curses even Keter stood in fear of.

And as the mfuasa unleashed a millennium of learning on the enemy, the lords of ladies and Praes came down to fight.

The Legions of Terror were forming, steel ranks spreading out in every direction with my father’s cold ghost smiling through their eyes. Legion mages torched ghouls with methodical and concentrated volleys, sappers disappeared entire ranks of the enemy with sharpers. The heavies smashed through the enemy ranks like they were made of paste, regulars following behind: orcs locking shields with Taghreb and Soninke and Duni, the shadow of an empire dogging their footsteps. And yet it was not them I my eye was called to as the Order formed up again. It was the splendid few, the beautiful monsters in armours glittering of gold and jewel who stood out among drab and smoky Keter like a flock of birds of paradise in a gutter.

The nobles of the Wasteland, household troops standing around them like a fortress of steel, reminded the world why the Dread Empire of Praes had ruled Calernia from sea to sea.

Devils filled the sky, winged and shouting in the darktongue, as an empire’s worth of hidden vaults was emptied at the hosts of Keter. The air filled with fire and blood dripped from the sky, the wind itself turning red as the High Lord of Okoro rode it on a chariot and sowed burning seeds of fire like a farmer on the field. Storms roared in wrath as the High Lady of Kahtan unleashed the old spirits bound by her house, colossal things of ruin and wind striding the field. Ghouls fled before the unleashed bestiary of Aksum like whipped dogs, tides of fouled water swept hundreds as the High Lord of Nok commanded the waves and at the heart of them all Sargon Sahelian was laughing, baring his crooked smile like fangs.

He wielded thirteen pillars of stone large as towers, crushing enemies beneath them like a child hammering down at ants with a pestle.

But beyond them all, behind them all, the woman who had once been Dread Empress Malicia struck deeper still. For with the falling ash from the sky now fell paler motes, spread about by the fortresses. Still Waters, refined and turned into even more terrifying a weapon. Wherever legionaries fell, now they rose again with empty eyes as eights. Unflinching, obedient, unrelenting. And the enemy buckled as well, for the ritual lighting up within the fortresses were not only for the Praesi dead: they were also for Keter’s. Stealing dead from the King of Death was perhaps too much, but to shatter his hold? Oh, that they could do. Wherever enough of the compound fell, the dead went wild.

Turning on each other, maddened by wrath and despair as the behest of the last empress of Praes.

And we sat the saddle at the heart of it all, the worn survivors of the Order of Broken Bells. Redemption in steel , the cry went up, and we charged. We went through bone and ash, a ray of fire from a fortress opening a path. We cut through towering abominations that looked like the bones of giants trailing ribbons of flesh, shattering knees as the rope-like flesh tore men off horses and ripped them apart. We carved through apes of rotting flesh and the wriggling worms of spoiled blood they burst into, faceless horrors of sown flesh that oozed sickness.

The further we got the harsher the fight, skeletons bearing shells full of burning oil throwing themselves at us as broken bones rose together into drakes mad of soldiers’ remains and acid began to fall from the sky, burning at armour and searing flesh. But we got through, Merciless Gods. We smashed and hacked and died, until before us stood the heights of the inner wall and the iron gate barring the way past it. Enemies bristled atop the walls but Grandmaster Talbot shot forward, hammering at the gate thrice with the pommel of his sword, and I laughed myself hoarse. We’d fucking done it. Behind us, flanks covered by the Legions, the ranks of the Army of Callow approached.

We’d gotten them to the wall.

Chapter 61: Break

“If victory were not sweet, we would not drink its poison so deeply.”

– Dread Empress Terribilia

We came at the wall in waves.

Thirty feet of stone, topped by an army’s worth of dead. Bastions that rose even higher to make room for the siege engines to fire, bristling with catapults and ballistae. Wards crackled with power as the first ladders were laid against the wall, cracking the steel-capped wood, and out of sight dead mages stood in circles to weave rituals that would turn men to screams and dust. I sent away Zombie after the second time she was shot under me, back on my feet with a sword in hand. Legionaries – mine and Praes’, in the smoke and ash it was hard to tell them apart – put up their shields above their heads as the dead shots bows and threw chunks of masonry.

I saw an orc’s head turn to pulp as rock the size of a table went through his shield, the corpse toppling to the ground with it. Javelins punch through plate, sorcery tore burning holes in the shield walls and above us the clouds were turning dark again. I tossed around Night heedlessly, feeling the coolness in my veins begin to turn raw – like sandpaper was being dragged around my insides – and shattered a parapet just in time for a young legionary to land her ladder into the rubble. A heartbeat later a skeleton wielding a hooked pole tried to push it back, but Akua’s hand shoved me aside as she yelled out an incantation in the mage tongue.

A ball of translucent sorcery formed around the top of the ladder, expanding into a shield that blew the skeleton off the rampart.

“Forward,” I shouted, ducking low to avoid a whistling arrow. “It’s the last wall!”

Half a lie. The palaces would have walls of their own and the Dead King’s lair as well, but it was true there were no ramparts left lying ahead. Behind the heights of stone stood the inner city of Keter, the central third leading to the ancient hills turned plateau the city had been built around. It would be the hardest fight yet, I knew, but my blood still sang at the knowledge that we were there . We’d nearly made to the heart of Keter, past all the horror and madness. We were so close to the last struggle I could almost feel it on my tongue. The girl who’d landed her ladder began to climb, but three rungs up she dropped with an arrow in the throat. Her body fell to the side, rising a wight, and a large orc began his climb.

I hurried there, elbowing soldiers as I went and Akua following in my wake. Legionaries kept taking the ladder and they kept dying, the dead intent on snuffing out the first ladder landed, but concentrating their fire cost them. Other ladders began to stay up, and as the twentieth body died to rise undead my own boot touched the bottom of the ladder.

“Catherine-” Akua began.

“Keep them off me,” I interrupted, and sword in hand began the climb.

My bad leg throbbed. It’d been too long since I’d last put on full plate as I now wore and I wasn’t used to the weight anymore. But climbing up the ladder wouldn’t require me to dance around, just to keep going. Akua cursed profusely, but even as arrows began to fall on me from both sides roiling winds shot up to blanket me. A rung, then another, and as I rose a legionary stepped in to follow. A javelin came from above and I had to press myself against the wall, the wood of the rung digging into my throat, and though it passed me the man behind me took it in the eye. Another rung. There was a shout from below and I looked to my left, drawn by instinct, only to find a blur of movement.

I pulled on Night and threw black flame at it, the heat and power of the impact forcing the ballista bolt off course. Gods, that would have gone right through my ribs.

I hurried up and I was two-thirds through when the shield Akua had bespelled to protect the top of the ladder shattered under a stream of curses, breaking into shards that soon faded. Even as I desperately dragged myself up I saw a pair of skeletons with hooked poles catch the side rails and begin to push. There were soldiers beneath, enough that the ladder weighed too heavy to easily push, but it moved backwards half an inch and my heart leapt up in my throat. I climbed another rung as Akua blew one of the skeletons way, but it was replaced in a heartbeat and more began to put their hands to the pole to push. Fuck , I thought as I went up another rung and saw I wouldn’t make in time.

The ladder was pushed back another inch, and it was so close to the angle that’d topple us that I hissed. I threw Night in clumps but the skeletons I shattered were replaced, and as I went up another rung the ladder began to topple – until I snarled, sending Night racing down the edge of my blade, and hacked at the hook of the closest pole pushing us back. The strike went right through, the headless pole dipping down and getting stuck between rungs as the weight shifted. Half the ladder was against the wall again, and with a triumphant cry I went up another rung. Close enough to hack at the legs of the skeletons, though I had to duck back under to avoid getting impaled by a spear.

I tossed a ball of black flame over the edge as I did, and a heartbeat later I was atop the wall.

It was a bloody whirl after that. I couldn’t even tell how many of them I was fighting – they were coming from all sides, with swords and axes and spears. I ripped a dagger out of one’s hand after blowing through his head with Night, taking it as parrying blade, but Gods I wished I had a shield. Legionaries followed behind me and we were pushed back-to-back, forced to keep our foothold on the wall open with the clash of steel. I parried and struck with the strength of my Name, shattering arm bones and cracking skulls, until I felt Akua behind me again and suddenly the wall to our left was a frozen block of ice. I moved to cover her while she stood back panting, face trickling with sweat, and took off another skeleton’s head after turning his blade aside with the dagger.

Legionaries kept coming up, wights among them, and I took a few steps back from the melee to catch my breath. It allowed me a look at the fighting on the wall beyond us, which was a grim sight. We were landing ladders more easily now that we’d forced the dead to fight us up close as well, but soldiers were dropping like flies. Would I even still have an army come nightfall? If the Praesi hadn’t come we would all be dead , I thought.

Akua’s ice broke as curses struck it from below, exploding into a shower of shards – I felt some cut up my cheeks and the side of my nose, blood flowing free – but a ladder was being landed past it and I moved that way, sword high as I called for soldiers to follow. The push was aborted, though, when arrows of bright red flame tore through the enemy and there was the howl of wind. A heartbeat later the Rogue Sorcerer landed with a fluttering coat among wisps of flame, footing uncertain from the wind magic he’d used to aid his lip.

“Clear the wall,” I shouted, pointing my sword at the enemy laying beyond him.

Legionaries charged, sweeping past him and colliding with thick ranks of skeletons. I didn’t go with them, instead moving towards my friend as soldiers began to come up the ladder to our side.

“Where the Hells are the Procerans?” I asked him, shouting to be heard over the din. “We’re getting butchered out there, Roland.”

“They got bogged down,” he shouted back. “Ran into the Grey Legion.”

I spat to the side, spit sticking to lips and flecking my cheek. Yeah, I couldn’t blame them for slowing in the face of those monsters. I’d been hoping the Dead King would hold them back like an honour guard, but apparently they were worth committing to keep Procer off his back while the inner wall was fought over.

“Is the Prince of Bones leading them?” I asked.

“No, he isn’t,” the Rogue Sorcerer said. “Catherine, something’s wrong. There’s word from the League, the Hawk isn’t at the battle out in the Ossuary. Hanno says he fought the Seelie and a pack of Revenants but-”

A crack of thunder drowned out his last words. I got the gist anyway. The Scourges that’d fought had been held back from serious engagements, the Prince of Bones and the Hawk had yet to make an appearance and it all stank to the high Heavens. I went to look for a story, and though I couldn’t quite feel out what it was about my stomach sunk when I was faced with tangible proof that there was a story. One about the last remaining Scourges, who numbered five. About them fighting as a single band. Indrani went out with the army , I thought. We have no one who can check the Hawk except for... I grabbed Roland by the collar and dragged him close.

“Get the Silver Huntress here,” I ordered. “As quick as you can. Send the Painted Knife to get her if you have to, otherwise we’re-”

If Akua hadn’t slammed a shield in place a heartbeat later, I would have died. The arrow would have gone right through my neck, instead of slowing as it punched through the panel of sorcery and letting me move just quick enough it bit at the side of my helmet instead. I backed away hastily, once more cursing my lack of a shield, which ended up saving my life for the second time in two heartbeats. I heard the crunch even as I felt the air against my face. It was, I realized, a rock. Someone had thrown a rock the size of a small house my way, and it’d come close enough to me I’d felt like a whisper on my skin. It tumbled past the wall, earning screams and then a wet crushing sound, and for a heartbeat terror seized my throat.

Akua was alive, I saw. She’d been moving between me and the edge of the rampart, so she’d been out of the way. The knot in my guts loosened, but only so much. I turned to Roland, who was gaping, and my hand went back to his collar.

“You still have that wind magic?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Why do you-”

“Get me the Silver Huntress,” I cut through, and threw him off the rampart.

It was only thirty feet. Wouldn’t kill a hero even if he didn’t get his artefact out in time – which he did, ending up rolling across rooftop tiles like a human tumbleweed. By the time I turned, Akua had stepped back from the rampart’s edge and closer to me. Her free hand was low, magic dancing across her fingers in subtle shifts of light.

“That was the Prince of Bones,” the golden-eyed sorceress told me. “And it won’t be the last stone he throws.”

“We’re fucked if we stay here on the wall,” I said. “Almost all of them are nasty customers from a distance and we’re out in the open. We need to-”

It was prettily done, I appreciated that deep down. First the stone – large as the last, and this time I saw where in the streets it came from – drew my eye and I pulled on Night by reflex, spinning rope around it to swing it around like a sling to throw back. But it had been meant to get caught, and in its wake came an arrow. Akua caught that, belted out a spell that had steel shivering all around us and froze the arrowhead in the air. Then the both of us took the Mantle’s curse right on, as we’d been meant to all along. I dropped my working on the stone, abandoning it to gravity, but the Night I tried to throw up in the way was just a shade too slow. I was blown off my feet, blinded as I felt myself fall through dust. Stone , she broke the stone.

Akua screamed, as much in rage as fear, and the two of us fell down in the street below. I felt blades scrape at my armour and one cut across my face as I abandoned my flesh eye and looked through Night instead. We’d fallen into a knot of enemy soldiers, Akua missing a chunk of her left pauldron and the shoulder beneath it. I glimpsed bone even as she laid a hand on it and flesh formed anew with a hiss. I slashed through a head, then was driven back by a warhammer I awkwardly stopped by hitting the handle but still bounced off my shoulder plate. Snarling, I leaned forward and pulled on Night: I spat out a stream of black flame, incinerating the undead before me. But they’d lasted long enough to slow us, damn them.

I helped Akua back to her feet, hacking away at a spear that came a little too close, the two of us finding out backs to a powder-covered wall.

“We need to get to stairs,” she said. “Get back to your troops.”

“We need to survive,” I grimly replied, looking ahead. “They’re here.”

The Prince of Bones was hard to miss, hulking shape of steel that he was. Like half a dozen armours had swallowed slightly smaller ones, leaving only a monstrous golem with the outline of a man. His face was a mask of steel, frowning sternly with eyes that were sculpted. Not a hole anywhere on him, only shifting layers of steel and the large greatsword he held in a single hand as he marched towards us. The Mantle was but a step behind him, mace hoisted on her shoulder, but of the Hawk and the Tumult I found no trace. They would remain hidden until they struck, I thought. As for the Seelie...

“Steel yourself,” I warned.

A heartbeat later, it struck us like a wave. Love me. You love me, love me most of all the things in the world. You love me, so obey. Rip her apart . In the back of my mind Komena sneered and the force broke into smoke, but at my side Akua went stiff. I was already striking by the time the mane of red hair appeared in front of her, but as I opened the throat of a voluptuous redhead in a ballroom gown it faded without my steel touching anything solid. An illusion. The tricky pest always –

“Fuck,” I snarled as I felt a knife slide between my ribs.

The Seelie’s impossibly beautiful face leaned towards mine, smiling as she went for a kiss, but I grabbed her by the throat and drew on my Name to toss her up. She flew for a moment, then shattered into rose petals as I put a hand to my side. My armour was unmarked. A real wound or another illusion? I’d never fought the Scourge up close before. I shifted under my armour, but the wet I felt could be sweat as well as blood. The pain, though, that was real. Akua was back to herself just in time to throw up that magnetism spell again, though she put her back into it this time: not only did it catch the Hawk’s arrow but it also crumpled the three closest ranks of skeletons into balls of metal.

“That,” Akua bit out, “was most unpleasant.”

“Tell me about it,” I grunted. “Never been good with redheads.”

My flesh eye had been working for some time, but it was still with the others I looked around.

“Stairs to the left,” I said. “It’s our best chance.”

“Depressingly true,” Akua noted, which I took as agreement.

We made a break for it. If there was one weakness to the Prince and the Mantle, it was that their bulk made them slow – especially in broken terrain like the ruined street full of undead soldiers we were fighting our way through. The enemy wasted no time in trying to stop us. Rain began to fall in front of us, a ball of clouds gathering and being milked dry of water that is spat out as a torrent of water filling the street. Undead were knocked aside, and though there wasn’t enough flow to topple us the street ran wet and our footing slowed. I evaporated the could ball with a blast of blackflame, in time for Akua to send a spike of sinuous darkness right into the heart of a sizzling curse – it broke apart instantly.

Undead converged on us from all asides and I could not torch them as fast as they appeared, not without slowing too much. I parried and hacked and tried to push forward but that fucking water got everywhere and when I was forced to make an awkward parry I slipped. Akua blasted off the Bind’s head but my back still hit the floor, water seeping into my armour by the neck, and I swallowed a scream as my side throbbed. Yeah, the Seelie had definitely stabbed me. I was dragged back to my feet, slashing blindly at a ghouls coming close, but froze when I saw that above us a hundred spear of sizzling lightning were forming. Gods, we were both drenched. It wouldn’t even need to hit us , just...

I pulled on Night and Akua released me to raise her hand and incant, but the Hawk shot again and I had to spin a sphere of darkness that sucked in the arrow that’d have killed her. From the corner of my eye I saw a flicker of movement – red hair and that fucking smug smile again – as love me, love only me pounded away at my mind. Akua shifted her incantation halfway through, flicking her hand and melting the Seelie’s face to the bone, but it’d been an illusion. Above us the lightning spears came down as she Scourge reappeared to my side, knife already halfway to my lung, but the Beast laughed into my ear. A boot tore into the Seelie’s cheek, her face betraying utter surprise as Hanno of Arwad landed on it feet first.

Above us, the spears had stopped midair. The went an inch down and then back up, as if two wills were fighting for control of the spell. Masego , I thought, you prince among sorcerers. Forty feet away I saw the Prince of Bones stop to casually rip out a wall and throw it our way, but before I could pull on Night the scent of ozone filled the air. The wall crumbled into dust and through I night I saw a silhouette standing atop the wall, a woman in a painted stone mask and a long green cloak. The Witch of the Woods had come, I realized with a pulse of excitement.

“Apologies,” Hanno calmly said, getting back to his feet from the crouch he’d landed in. “I must admit I got lost on my way.”

The Seelie had faded into golden smoke as she fell under him, though not before receiving a cut across the face for her troubles.

“Fighting back against Ashuran stereotypes, I see,” I croaked out, because ‘thank you’ would have been too much.

It got a snort out of Akua, at least. Wait, should I be worried the Doom of Liesse was the only one who’d laughed?

“I try,” Hanno said. “Reinforcements are headed our way, Warden. I called on all we could spare.”

I cracked my neck, wiping away some of the blood still seeping down my cheek mixed with sweat.

“Let’s see what the Scourges of made of, then,” I said, spitting to the side.

Above us the lightning spears suddenly faded. The Tumult, I suspected, had decided it was better to try another spell than to keep pitting his will against Masego’s.

“Let’s,” Hanno agreed, raising his sword with a smile.

The Prince of Bones moved first and I tensed, but to my utter surprise he did not attack. Instead, he turned his back and ran .

“Bold,” Akua murmured, appreciative.

“Fuck,” I feelingly said. “Pursue, go .”

The Hawk tried to put an arrow in Hanno’s eye, who plucked it out of the air with a vaguely irritated look – come on , part of me complained, he’s not even Named right now! – as Akua and I shot forward. The Dead King would have none of it, though. All the undead across four city blocks went still for a moment, and then they began to throw themselves at us. I shouted and let loose streaks of blackflame as I cut through a torrent of soldiers who didn’t even try to kill me, just throw themselves in my way, but even when Akua blew them away with a gust of wind it was too late: darkness came down over us, the Mantle covering the retreat of the Scourges with her favourite trick.

It didn’t last long with Hanno around, Light coming out in a torrent that shattered the curse, but it was enough. The Witch tossed a few houses at them as they retreated but we caught none and I felt frustration bubble up my throat. The Dead King was denying us a scrap, had been doing it all day. Was he trying to tire us out or simply keeping the Scourges as his last trump card? Either way, dragging Named here would just be wasting them at the moment.

“Hanno,” I shouted. “Go help on the wall. Can the Witch help get the Procerans through the Grey Legion?”

“We’ll do what we can,” he shouted back.

I nodded him thanks and he offered back the sketch of a bow. The cheeky bastard. I felt Akua’s eyes on my back and turned.

“To the stairs,” I told her, looking back up at the rampart.

The Legions of Terror and Army of Callow had secured more than a dozen footholds, it was time to turn that into a push. The Dead King wanted to play coy? I’d force his fucking hand.

“I’m with you,” Akua promised, which I enjoyed hearing more than was wise.

We went back up, scything through the dead, and I found a captain to bark orders for me. We took two companies into the closest gatehouse, clearing out the ghouls and the beorn inside, and then forced the gates open. The steel jaws opened below our feet, soldiers pouring through, and I grinned. Now we had the initiative again. Roland should be back with the Silver Huntress soon, but I wanted us to gobble up a few blocks to hold first. We fought our way back down, arms tired and short of breath, to take the lead of the companies that’d gone through the gate. With a shout I took them to the last dead on the avenue, smashing our way through, and we pushed into the inner city.

Resistance, to my rising discomfort, was sparse. The dead were disorganized, coming at us in disjointed bands, and the push I’d meant to take a few blocks with kept ripping forward through the ranks of the dead. I only began to slow when we were past at least ten blocks, and when I found a great granite gargoyle at a street corner I frowned. I knew this place I realized. This corner. I had once been carried past here on a litter as a guest of the Dead King, dead royalty bearing me to the Silent Palace where I was to be hosted. We weren’t just past the inner wall, we were halfway to the heart of Keter. To victory. My heartbeat thundered against my ears and my steps slowed, my legionaries slowing with me.

“Catherine?” Akua asked.

“We’re getting close to the five palaces,” I said. “We need the arrows in our quiver readied before we go further.”

I kept my words vague, since you never knew who might be listening in this city, but she knew what I meant: the Mirror Knight and the Severance, Hierophant and the Crown of Autumn. Going after the King of Death without either would be madness. Neshamah was the most powerful sorcerer Calernia had ever known and likely ever would, fighting him head on in his seat of power would only get us killed. Not even the Sisters would be able to help me when we got to the hall where the Greater Breach lay and the monster that’d made it would be waiting for us.

“I’ll send the signal,” the golden-eyed sorceress agreed.

The spell was simple enough, a variation on the signal lights that the Legions and the Army had been using for years. Akua flicked her wrist at the sky, incanting brusquely, and three streaks of blue shot out. After rising high they exploded into a broad circle, one large enough that there would be no missing it even through the poison clouds and the ashen rain.

“Thanks,” I said.

Then I turned to the company at my side, its soldiers and officers having ceased to advance when I did.

“We’re in deep now, ladies and gentlemen,” I told them. “Maybe half an hour’s walk ahead are the palace we’re going for, and before we can send in Named to end this we’re going to need to secure this corner. First we-”

Everyone felt it, when the sorcery lit up. Even the most power-blind of my legionaries felt their bones shake, their soul flinch. My hand shot up, Night already raging throughs my veins, and Akua was already halfway through a shield spell before we both stopped. The magic wasn’t coming from ahead of us but from below . Far under our feet.

“Akua?” I asked.

She did not answer, golden eyes gone wide. Instead she knelt down on the ash-streaked ground, ripping off her helmet and pressing her cheek against the stone.

“Akua,” I said again, tone sharper.

“The ritual is below,” she said, palm against the floor. “Far enough not even Hierophant can trouble it. But there is something more, Catherine. It is an array, a large one, and-”

The pulse washed over us in the heartbeat that followed. It felt like nothing at all, I thought, but then Sven Noc was howling in rage within my soul and Night boiled out without my having even called it. Akua had gotten to her feet, I saw, and was panicking as she shouted an incantation and traced glowing runes in the air. Over the three heartbeats it took her to finish the spell, I saw her face under the helmet change. Lines deepened, the arc of her brow grew more pronounced. My stomach dropped as I turned towards my soldiers. Their helmets were open-faced, hiding nothing: faces aged, skin growing thick with lines and hair turning white.

Before ten heartbeats had passed every single one of my legionaries dropped dead of old age.

“Gods,” I croaked, staggering back.

I looked further back at the others who’d followed me past the wall, and saw that behind me lay a trail of corpses that’d fallen down as gently as leaves dropping from a tree. Not a single one of them taken by sword or spear, they’d just... died. The trail of corpses went all the way back to the inner wall, atop which some of my legionaries were shouting in horror. It ends at the wall , I thought. Ice seizing my heart I turned to Akua, who was shimmering with pale green light but was, to my immense relief, alive and no longer aging. She panted softly, sweat trickling down her brow.

“That,” Akua Sahelian softly said, “aged me at least a decade.”

“This isn’t time magic,” I numbly said. “There’s no such thing as time in Trismegistan magic. What the Hells is this, Akua?”

“Not a spell,” she said, straightening. “It is Keter’s Due.”

My fingers clenched.

“You meant he pulled off what you did at the Doom,” I said. “Sucked in the magic of the Due into other arrays and-”

“He was not quite so skilled,” Akua interrupted me. “As I said, Catherine, this is not a spell.”

She shot a look at the stone under out feet.

“I believe that somewhere under our feet are buried artefacts that were empowered by the wasted magic of the Due,” she continued. “Thousands of them, whose only purpose is to tint that emanated magic with a specific kind of entropy.”

My eye narrowed. Night raged in my veins, the blessing of the Sisters keeping death from touching me.

“Aging,” I said.

“Specifically flesh, I think,” Akua said. “Or perhaps living flesh?”

“But that means,” I slowly said, “that this isn’t even the ritual from below. Then what is that fucking magic for ?”

Fate handed me the answer, bitch that she was, when in the distance there was an ear-splitting rumble. It was so loud as to drown out even screams, but I saw enough. Over the inner wall I could see the top of some towers, and they were moving . The outer city was rotating, Gods save us all. And it got worse, because when the city ceased turning instead it moved another direction: pushed up by some invisible force, entire districts of the city shot up. Though I could not see it, from the way some towers disappeared I guessed that some districts were going down as well. Like some sort of demented jigsaw puzzle, the outer city of Keter had just turned itself into a series of plateaus and chasms.

“Gods preserve us,” Akua murmured.

She saw it too, then. This was death, the death of every living soldier in the city. Maybe not immediately, but that single stroke had ensured there was now not even a single army inside the walls: all our forces had been moved away from the breaches they’d come in through and then split into smaller pieces, left alone on platforms with whatever enemy forces had been in the district when it was raised or lowered. We’d win some of those fights, for sure. But it wouldn’t matter a fucking bit, because now all those soldiers were stuckand the dead would go around extinguishing them one force at a time. There could be no reinforcements, no manoeuvring, and undead could climb goddamn cliffs – or leap down them, if need be. Living people could not .

“I’ve killed us all,” I faintly said. “Weeping Heavens, I’ve killed us all.”

The city was as much an army-killer as the dead within it, and I’d driven us deep into its embrace. There would be no recovering from this.

“The battle is not yet over,” Akua said. “We can still recover. Retreat, perhaps, if-”

Behind us, dead soldiers began to twitch. And I heard the sound of boots coming from ahead. More undead, soldiers that’d care nothing for this curse of entropy.

“Catherine, we need to go,” she urgently said.

I stood there dazed until she pulled at my arm, allowing myself to be tugged away. It was over, I realized. We ran through the rising soldiers I’d just led to their deaths and I felt myself blast those who came too close with Night as if someone else were doing it – Akua could do nothing, all her concentration maintaining the shield that kept her alive – and we ran for the wall, for the gate where some my soldiers still stood and fought. We climbed the stairs, black flames burning behind us, and as Akua finally released her spell I stumbled to the edge of the rampart. There I saw it all, the madhouse that Keter had become. Raised heights of and deep drops, both moved by some mechanism built deep under the bedrock of the capital.

And as the magic below our feet kept burning, the outer city began to move again.

It span, only what had been a mere imposition was now brutally lethal: houses broke, soldiers and undead fell off the edge of those cliffs as the centrifugal force caught them. And for those below, they found those same broken houses dropped atop their heads by the force of the spin. Shields of sorcery and Light bloomed, trying to mitigate the damage and staying there until at last the spinning stopped, but I knew it wouldn’t be enough. The Dead King would just keep spinning his city again and again until the ritual burned out, long after the last of our mages and priests had fallen to exhaustion. And none of this, I realized, not a single part of this was actually aimed at anyone. It was all indirect, distant. The kind of danger that no hero would rise against, that no story would help destroy.

“We lost,” I murmured.

The exhaustion of the day caught up to me all at once and my leg gave, tearing a pained gasped out of my throat as I half-fell and had to catch myself against the crenellation. There were shouts of surprise and a moment later Akua was holding me up, arm under my shoulder as she asked a question I didn’t hear. Gods, I was so tired. I’d burned myself out on Night, and now that the strength of my Name – the hope of victory – was fading, the edges of my vision were going dark. And I was seeing thing, too, because suddenly light got harsher. I blinked dumbly, looking up at a sky that was suddenly cloudless.

“What’s happening?” I croaked out.

Akua said something, but it was as if she was speaking through water. I saw them then. Only a few hundred, standing in the ruins of the gate Hanno had broken, but they were impossible to miss: never before had I seen so many giants. And among the Gigantes one stood taller than all the rest, a flame burning within him that hurt my eye to behold.

“Blood loss,” Akua said, talking to someone else. “The fucking fool, she’s going into sho-”

“ Young King ,” Kreios the Riddle-Maker called out, “ let me remind you who is it that you dare ape with your works .”

When darkness came to swallow me whole, I did not fight it.

Disinter

“You don’t want to be the best sword on Calernia, kids. That’s the one everyone’s always trying to kill. No, if you want to make a career of this aim to be the fifth finest sword – high enough they pay you well, low enough no one would really gain by offing you. Maybe it’s not the dream, kids, but unlike the dream it’s a living.”

– Transcribed lecture of the duellist Saint Armand the Old to the School of Swallows

The first rule about going into the Brocelian Forest was to trust no one and Ishaq was no fool. Before it all began, he met a man and gave him a ring.

“And yours?” the man said, sliding it down his finger.

“Here,” Ishaq said, before doing the same.

—

In truth, though, it had begun three months earlier when Ishaq went to the Sudden Death to sell the innkeep bundles of firewood. Old Dina bought them at higher a price than most of the inns on the outskirts of Tartessos wood, a concession to their years of knowing each other. She was, she said, willing to pay more for a reliable man. As was his habit, Ishaq took her up on the offer to sit in the common room with an ale afterwards. He’d learned that pricking his ear as he sipped his drink could yield coin for a halfway clever man, which he liked to think he was. Like most cheap inns, the Sudden Death was thick with would-be Brocelian bands and all of them needed something. Sometimes it was even a good axe hand they were looking for, something he was willing to provide for a cut of the goods.

That night, though, he found himself staring at a sad drunk instead.

A woman, older than him by a decade and deep enough into a bottle of liquor she no longer noticed that she spat out spittle as she talked – though others did and gave her a wide berth. It was the colours painted on her cheek that first drew his eye, swirls of blue and brown with a single stroke cutting through. He knew that paint, had been told of it by his late and unlamented father: it belonged to the Spear’s Blood. The woman was far from home, since their line was said to be sworn to the Champion’s Blood in faraway Alava. Ishaq finished his ale, shelled out coppers to order another two and sat across the sad drunk.

“Who the fuck ‘re you?” she belligerently said, staring down her crooked nose.

“The man who just bought you a drink,” Ishaq said, pushing the ale her way.

He’d just made a friend, at least until the drink ran out. Samira of the Fearless Spear’s Blood was all too eager to spill out her life so long as her cup was full, telling him of her woes. Her uncle, the head of her Blood, had sent her on the road.

“Sent all of us out,” Samira sneered. “Even his kids and grandkids. All of us on the road, because he thinks he’s going to get a Bestowed out of it.”

The Spear’s Blood was a laughingstock, having only ever raised two Bestowed since the founding of Levant, and so Esmail of the Spear’s Blood was resorting to drastic measures to make another. A widower, he had wed a beautiful but wicked woman and allowed her to mistreat his children but lost patience when the tale of their first Fearless Spear did not come to life again. Uncle Esmail, Samira told him, had then decided to send his kin into deathly peril until glory ensued. It seemed a waste of time and coppers to indulge her talk – Samira did give him the eye after a while, but Ishaq had a lover already and the drunk stank to the Dark and back – but there was something to this that’d drawn his eye so he kept the ale pouring. Altogether too much drink later, he finally wheedled out of her why she had gone to Tartessos of all places.

“Sure, I got some old story about a treasure deep in the Brocelian but how am I supposed to get it?” Samira mourned. “No band will take me.”

Because taking on a drunk in the forest is suicide , Ishaq thought, but instead of showing his thought he instead smiled at Samira through his beard.

“My friend,” Ishaq said, leaning closer, “I believe we can help each other.”

—

Zaray fiddled with the bronze bracelets on her wrist, which told him she was nervous even though her face might as well have been carved out of stone. The dark-haired beauty wore a green short-sleeved tunic that showed off her muscled arms, though in concession to the threat of the people they were to meet she had brought her hooked sword. Ishaq tended to find the tell endearing, but it was obvious enough he would prefer his lover settled before the others arrived.

“You have concerns,” he said, tone even.

She grimaced at him.

“Several of them will be veterans,” Zaray said. “They will know you are not one of them.”

It was his turn to grimace. It was true that Ishaq could not truly be called an adventurer, for it was not venturing into the Brocelian that kept a roof over his head but woodcutting. He had gone out with bands for kills or treasure, but it was not the occupation of all his days.

“It is in hand,” Ishaq assured her.

She touched his arm fondly, but did not seem reassured.

“Maram has led bands before and has a good reputation,” Zaray told him. “I worry that he might try to become captain of this band in your stead.”

He likely would, Ishaq knew, but his good reputation had brought in some of the others so it had been worth the risk.

“I tell you,” Ishaq said, returning the gesture, “it is in hand.”

Zaray still seemed unconvinced, but she stopped toying with her bracelets. His lover was an adventurer, a veteran of bands skilled in the use of hooked sword and spear, and like most of her trade she tended to underestimate those who did not dedicate their life to expeditions. It was the first time he had been on the wrong end of the that doubt in their year together, though, and Ishaq found he misliked it. Before he could linger on the thought, however, the others began to arrive. There would be eight of them. He and Zaray, and of course Samira of the Spear’s Blood. These were certain. After that, Ishaq had recruited by need.

First came Maram Brightblade, an adventurer of good repute known for his use of the sword and axe. His enchanted blade had earned the sobriquet He was a darkly handsome man with a scar on his cheek to whom smiles came easy and boasts even easier. He had been needed so that Ishaq could talk some of the others into the venture. As a woodsman they had a one-handed man of middle age called Rasul, a former slayer who knew paths deep into the woods. For magic they had the ragged young woman Thana the Limper, a binder washout from Malaga, and for... particular needs they had a couple. Those two were the last to arrive, ferret-faced Faris in his dark robes immediately eclipsed by his gorgeous wife Alisanne – fair of hair and blue of eye.

A round of drinks was had and bread broken, but as soon as plates were clear the challenge Ishaq had expected came.

“I’ve never head of you as a captain,” Thana the Limper bluntly said. “And if this is as great an artefact as Samira’s said, this should not be led by a greenhorn.”

Samira, though she had relied on him to arrange all this, spoke not a word. As a rule, he had found she was about as loyal as she was sober. That was noticed, particularly by Maram and Faris.

“You were invited,” Ishaq replied equally as bluntly, “but you are not needed. If you have objections, the door is behind you.”

Thana snorted, rising to her feet to call what she obviously thought to be a bluff. She did not find the support she might have expected, though. Rasul laid his wrist stump on the table and sneered at her.

“Keep moving, girl,” he said, “or shut the fuck up.”

Embarrassed, the young failed binder stepped away out of pride before admitting to herself that no one seemed inclined to follow. She bent her pride and sat back down, looking at everywhere but Ishaq. Rasul’s word counted for much, at the moment: he was an experienced woodsman and would be difficult to replace.

“We gather tomorrow at dawn,” Ishaq told them. “Be punctual or you will be left behind.”

There was some idle talk, but no second round of drinks was ordered and they band broke up. Thana was the first to leave. After Ishaq waved away Zaray, telling her to leave ahead of him as he finished his drink, she returned to the room. The mage stood before him, then cocked an eyebrow silently. Grinning, Ishaq flipped her a silver and she snatched it out of the air.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Thana the Limper grinned back.

Ishaq might not have won a fight with Maram when it came to leadership, as his lover had worried. So he’d paid for another, which he could .

—

The Brocelian Forest was beautiful, at least until it got you killed. Within an hour of stepping past the first tree, Ishaq’s band had been twice attacked by barrow wolves and once by a snake king. Maram Brightblade unsheathed that pretty sword of his for the latter fight, slashing at the knot of furious snakes and after a flash of light carving a burning wound through the creature’s heart without having ever touched it. He fell in at Ishaq’s side after even as Zaray took the lead, spear in hand.

“We are making good pace,” Maram idly said, sheathing the blade.

“So we are,” Ishaq idly replied, hand on the handle of his axe.

The handsome killer smiled at him, which pulled appealingly at his scarred cheek.

“I get the impression,” Maram said, “that you might be wary of me, Ishaq.”

“You’re a dangerous man, Maram,” Ishaq smiled. “Why would I not be?”

“Flatterer,” the other warrior chuckled. “But there is nothing to be wary of. You are leading well, though I’ll confess curiosity.”

“About?”

“I know of Faris,” Maram admitted. “He is said to have many artefacts.”

Ishaq inclined his head to the side, inviting the clean-shaven man to continue.

“But why bring in his wife?” Maram asked. “She gets a cut, same as the rest of us, but I do not see her bearing a weapon.”

“He doesn’t join bands without her,” Ishaq replied.

The other man hummed, seemingly unconvinced even though that was the truth. They made small talk for a while more until Maram drifted away, Ishaq recognizing the conversation for what it was: the first battle line being drawn. All of them were to have equal shares of the coin when the artefact was brought back and sold to the Lord of Tartessos, but as often the way with bands of strangers already those part of it were looking to fill their pockets a little more. And what better, simpler way than to cut through a few of the people owed a cut? The first rule of going into the Brocelian was to trust no one. Rasul led them near a river which they followed until noon, when they paused to eat and drink.

Samira dropped, sweating and exhausted, and he had to ask Zaray to make sure she’d be able to march when their break ended. As he sated himself with water, ferret-faced Faris approached in his now sweaty dark robes. The other man, older and thin, wore gaudy makeshift jewelry whose centerpiece was broken stones. Shards of wardstones, Ishaq had guessed.

“The Spear’s Blood will slow us down,” Faris quietly said. “It isn’t water she’s been sneaking sips of all day.”

“Only she knows the story and the map,” Ishaq mildly replied.

“Knowledge is never as safe as one thinks,” Faris nastily smiled. “Should you give me leave, I have a little box that will-”

“I do not give you leave,” Ishaq said.

The other man was taken aback, like it was unthinkable they should not plot to murder Samira after ripping anything of use out of her memories.

“Another might,” Faris warned.

Ishaq leaned forward, hand coming to rest on handle of his axe.

“Are you sure,” he asked, “that you want to play this game?”

Faris swallowed.

“I meant nothing by it,” the ferret-faced man hastily said.

Ishaq only smiled and Faris could not leave quickly enough. In his wake, his beautiful wife – whose practical leather tunic somehow seemed to be pretty as a tailored dress – arrived, offering a smile.

“You refused him,” Alisanne smiled. “I hoped you might. I’m glad that you are the man I thought-”

Ishaq raised a finger and her words halted.

“No,” he said.

She blinked, those big blue eyes betraying confusion.

“Pardon?”

“No,” Ishaq repeated. “We won’t be playing this game either. Walk way.”

She looked more than a little offended, but their conversation had drawn eyes and she seemed disinclined to make a scene. She flounced away, and though Ishaq’s gaze remained on her it was not to dip down at her swaying hips. Calmly, he wondered whether he should kill her now. She hadn’t done enough to earn it, he knew, but by the time she had she’d be difficult to get to. Reluctantly, he had to admit that he’d be turned against should he strike and abandon the thought. He tore his eyes away, finding Zaray wiping her sleeve free of Samira’s vomit as she shot him a dark glance. The nod he gave her was apologetic, but no more than that.

He could not show weakness, not in front of this pack of wolves.

—

Their journey was to take nine days to get there and another nine to return. Ishaq had never been so deep into the Brocelian before, but he knew the greatest of treasures were even further. The four of the Thirteen Cities that had been in what was now the Brocelian Forest were deep within the perilous land, their remains the death of nearly all who beheld those ancient walls. Gigantes had dwelled in those places along with men and the shadow of their might still lingered, less than fond of looters. Their own journey was to a lesser shrine, not as dangerous, but then the journey itself was to walk with death. And yet, Ishaq found that he was not disturbed.

Not when a flock wyverns pursued them for half a day, letting up only when Thara faked their deaths with an illusion. Not when a flicker-beast nearly killed Faris, ripping through some sort of yellow mist to almost close its mandibles around his neck until Alisanne stabbed it with a slender knife, or even when a large field of mushrooms turned into a pack of gibbering small creatures whose bite Maram told them was certain death. It made men rot from the inside, Brightblade told them as they fled east and crossed water to lose the relentless little shits. Ishaq had expected to have to master fear, but there was little of that. It felt more like a chore, like the labour of cutting wood. Over the three days it took them to get to the marker, Faris took to approaching him at meals.

“Are you sure we can trust Rasul?” the weasel-faced man asked.

When Ishaq laughed him off, he tried the same trick about Maram instead. The artefact-wielder went around their camp trying the same trick. Zaray, in their shared tent on the third night, lay her head on his chest and whispered a confession.

“He has a point about Samira,” she said. “She is slowing us down, and to be slow in the Brocelian is to be dead.”

“I would rather the knowledge be in Samira’s head,” Ishaq replied, “than in Faris’ hands.”

“We might not have a choice,” Zaray murmured. “I’ve seen him talking with Maram when they think no one else is looking.”

“We still need him,” the bearded man replied.

“Who?”

Ishaq did not say, and she did not ask again.

—

On the fourth day they reached the marker, and as they stood over the stele of stone covered in writings none of them knew Faris swaggered forward.

“As agreed,” the weasel pompously said, “you may now have my services.”

He put on a broken bit of glass set in a leather strap over his eye, then pawed at the writing and hummed as he brought out a bronze table. There was a bend in the middle of the second artefact, and Faris then produced two little pointed stones – one white and one black – that he carefully pressed against specific glyphs on the stele before putting them in the bronze bend. When they began to move and Faris grinned, Ishaq let out a noise of understanding. It was a compass. Maram seemed impressed, leaning over the other man’s shoulder.

“So now you use it to get us to the second marker?” Brightblade asked.

“Of course,” Faris said. “Child’s play, for a man of my talents. Our pet binder will have to earn her keep there, but until then-”

The movement was so smooth, so easy, that Ishaq did not realized what was happening before Faris’ throat was open and the man was gurgling on his knees. Maram lightly took the compass from him, and pointed his blade as Alisanne – who’d moved even faster, silvery knife in hand and halfway to the adventurer’s throat.

“Will we have a problem, Alisanne?” Maram Brightblade asked with a smile.

Blue eyes moved to Faris, who breathed his last and slumped headfirst into the grass. Red spread around him.

“I was sold into marriage,” beautiful Alisanne finally said. “I will survive – and I can use his artefacts.”

“Anyone can,” Maram countered. “He was not a mage, I made well sure of that.”

“You also killed one of our band,” Ishaq coldly said.

The handsome killer offered him an insolent smile.

“Is there anyone here the bastard did not approach to arrange a betrayal of the others?” Maram asked.

The answering silence was telling. Ishaq’s jaw tightened. If it came to a challenge now-

“I do not claim captaincy of our band, Ishaq,” Maram easily said. “I simply ended a threat before it could be turned on us.”

He did not like it, but a look around told him he would not win if he pushed the matter. Faris had made no friends and several enemies.

“His artefacts go to Alisanne, as his widow,” Ishaq said. “Save for the compass. I will handle it.”

Maram cast a look around of his own, then offered that damned smile again.

“As you say,” the killer conceded.

They left before the body was cool. Afterwards, Rasul came to his side.

“He is trying to take captaincy,” the woodsman bluntly said.

Ishaq hummed. That was not, in truth, his read of the situation. Maram wanted coin and he wanted a voice, but to lead? No, Ishaq did not believe he was after that. The man wanted to his second, to have a voice without the responsibilities. He wanted another thing as well, Ishaq was fairly sure, but that was a different sort of want.

“I know,” he lied. “It will be handled.”

Rasul nodded once, satisfied, and to the second marker they went. Faris’ compass served as well as the man himself would have.

—

It went wrong an hour before they got to the second marker. Two days of gruelling journey had gotten them there, but in avoiding a nest of hunter-wasps they crossed into the hunting grounds of a manticore. Several of them had fought the like before, but halfway through the fight Rasul took a swipe to the face and was sent tumbling into the brush. Without his spear to keep the manticore grounded it flew up, snapping her Thana in its jaws as it fled deeper into the woods. The failed binder screamed twice, but then where was harsh crack and she screamed no more. Ishaq’s eyes were not on her, though, when it all ended. They were on Rasul, who should not have been struck by that swipe.

Ah , Ishaq thought, eyes moving to another. So that’s how it is. He went though his pack and found the packets of salt from the Titan’s Pond. There should be enough.

“What now?” Ziray asked. “Thana was to unleash the second marker for us. Is the hunt lost?”

“There might be another way,” Alisanne told them. “But it would require the breaking of an artefact.”

Her eyes moved to the compass in Ishaq’s hands. The eyes of the others were on him, expectant.

“Whatever gets us there,” he agreeably replied.

When they got to the second stele, Alisanne ended up breaking three artefacts before the glyphs lit up – to her visible irritation. She then cut herself with a shard of bronze, laid it against a glyph and turned to them with a smile.

“So long as we are headed the way of the shrine, it will pull slightly at my fingers,” Alisanne told them with an angelic smile. “The journey continues.”

They made it to the ninth day. They were close now, all could feel it in their bones. And the urgency manifested itself in many ways, when camp was made and they retreated for the night. Rasul and Alisanne both disappeared, though a turn of the wind carrying noise made it clear what the pair was up to. Zaray glared in the direction, to Ishaq’s cocked eyebrow.

“Our two guides in bed?” she said. “Bad for us, lover.”

She went to bed early, in a dark mood. Samira was already snoring, exhausted by her drink as much as the day’s march, and so Ishaq went to sit with Maram Brightblade. The man was polishing his enchanted sword, sitting in a corner with his back to a stone.

“I would have thought you inclined to follow our friend Rasul’s lead in recreation,” Maram lightly said.

“Who says I’m not?” Ishq said, leaning back against the stone.

“Your lover went to bed scowling,” the handsome killer snorted. “If you can turn that around, I will offer a bow.”

“Wasn’t Zaray I was speaking of,” Ishaq idly said, meeting the other man’s eyes.

Maram stilled.

“Your looks are subtle,” he said, “but not that subtle.”

The other man slowly relaxed, then smiled than insolent smile again.

“It is the beard,” Maram confessed. “I have a weakness.”

“Then indulge yourself,” Ishaq smiled, and turned to straddle the other.

They did.

—

The shrine was broken when they got there.

It had been a circle of stones atop a hill once, but half were collapsed and the altar at the heart of the circle lay shattered. They went around, careful not to touch the stones, and found only grass and rock. Nothing of value.

“The story says it is here,” Samira of the Spear’s Blood whined. “It does , I swear.”

Angry eyes were turned on her, but Ishaq was not one of them. He had figured it out already, and suspected others had. They were keeping silent for the same reason as he was: this was about to end. He dropped his bag on the grass and, as Zaray began to argue with Samira, used the distraction to take out the satchel of salt and slide it into his pocket.

“Two of us died getting here,” Rasul growled. “If there is no treasure-”

“I’ll not be talked down to by a cripple,” Samira sneered, reaching for her spear, and there was no taking that back.

The fight was quick, and its end unexpected. Rasul was a skilled fighter, for all that he had lost a hand, but drunk and stinking Samira still slapped him down as if disciplining a dog. The Spear’s Blood expected excellence of its own. It did not save her from Zaray ramming her sword through the other woman’s back. Ishaq breathed out, grieved for a moment, but all things passed. His was not a land for sentiment. So he stepped forwards as his lover ripped out her sword, eyes still wild, and took Samira’s corpse by its greasy hair. He threw it on the broken altar, blood dripping all over the stone, and a heartbeat later all of them felt a shiver in the air.

The altar was whole again, a blood-red gem resting on it surrounded by leaves a gold. Further back, at the edge of the raised stones, a pit had opened. Ishaq glimpsed bone as the bottom and hummed. As he’d suspected, the place had been built over a barrow.

“A sanguine stone,” Maram breathed out. “The drunk wasn’t lying.”

“Enough for all of us to live comfortably,” Ishaq agreed, smiling as he went around the altar.

He pushed off Samira’s corpse, leaving a bloody trail on the stone, and as he did discreetly palmed the salt satchel. Hidden by the altar, he began to trace a trail on the grass and pricked his ear. Silence hung in the air between all of them, heavy with tension, and it was Maram Brightblade who broke it.

“Four cuts,” he idly said. “Enough for profit.”

Zaray looked uneasy, standing on the other side of the altar with a Rasul who’d gotten back to his feet with a groan – his face battered but otherwise not particularly for the worse – as Maram moved nearer to a raised stone to the left and Alisanne stayed back. Silent and unmoving. Ishaq had been waiting for the sound, and so he caught in in time. Taking a hasty step back, he threw the last of the salt on the back even as an angry scream sounded. Blue-eye, beautiful Alisanne appeared at his side. She glowed with anger and something altogether more eldritch, hitting at an invisible wall.

“A circle of salt on barrow grounds will keep a fae imprisoned,” Ishaq mildly said. “Not forever, but long enough to be rid of you I’d think.”

Zaray let out a bark of laughter, circling the altar to stand to his left.

“Knew she was fishy,” Zaray sneered. “No one has hair that nice after nine days in the woods.”

Ishaq had known it was coming since last night, planned for it, but part of him was still surprised when she tried to knife him. He caught her wrist, and a wide-eyed Maram struck to part her head from her neck. What he got, instead, was Rasul’s axe in the back of the head. Maram Brightblade slowly fell to his knees, and a heartbeat later died baffled. Rasul left the axe in there and took out his knife.

“I wish it didn’t have to be me,” Zaray told him. “I am fond of you, Ishaq. But I am already wed.”

“You picked me because of how much I overhear at the Sudden Death,” he mused.

“And because you’re so fucking clever,” she smiled. “I always knew you’d find something good one day.”

“Well,” he mused, “at least you were good in bed.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“You’re too calm,” she said.

“The first rule of going into the Brocelian,” Ishaq said, “is to trust no one. But Rasul won’t betray me, your husband or not. He can’t .”

The bearded man raised his free hand, drawing her eye to the ring he wore on it.

“No more than I can betray him,” he said. “We wear oath rings.”

Zaray paled.

“Goodbye,” Ishaq said, reaching for the knife at his hip.

It opened her throat and he stepped back, looking away as she fell. He did not spare her a second look.A noise then drew his attention. A soft sound, with a soft clang. On the altar besides him a finger had been dropped. It still bore an oath ring on it.

“I thank you for the fae wife and arranging my divorce,” Rasul said from behind him. “But you should have sprung for a necklace.”

And then all Ishaq knew was darkness.

—

Ishaq woke up in the dark, bleeding out from half a dozen wounds and surrounded by death. He was dying on a pile of skulls, a fresher corpse at his side. Samira , he dimply realized. They threw the both of us in the barrow pit. Gasping, he crawled forward. There might be a way up, a way for him to do anything but fucking bleed out in a hole not having been as clever as he thought he was. Bones were digging at him, at his wounds, but he let out a ragged gasp when suddenly his hands were on stone. There was a room down here. A circle of stone on the ground surrounded by masses of dead. Already half-blind, Ishaq felt bronze under his fingers and realized there was a fresco set in the stone.

A story.

A giant raising a city, people kneeling to it. Another giant with an army, and they were worth with each other. The giants sat together at a table and beneath them a pair champions fought. They parted in peace. More of that, champions, winning, but the giant that made the city... mourned? His champion had died and the one that followed was slain. So the giant... made something. A sword, armour. And the champion began to win again, until he lost. But when he did, Ishaq felt out with a gasp, he got back up. From death . Desperately, Ishaq clawed at the bronze and stone. There was another piece ahead of him, a circle set in the stone, and he bled all over it.

Breathing ragged, he got the bronze circle out. Below, he felt out what he’d been looking for: more bronze. A sword and armour. Bleeding, dying, Ishaq clutched at the sword.

“Please,” he rasped. “Please, you whoreson. I’ll do anything.”

The sword shivered in his hand, like a cat waking up. Curiosity. There was something inside of it, Ishaq felt. Power, but an ugly kind. Just a little bit left, and as the sword drank of his blood it gave him something. His breath steadied, his wounds stopped bleeding. His senses came back. It was night, he realized, and moonlight fell through the mouth of the pit. There was a fire above and two voices speaking.

“You can’t do more?” he asked.

The sword sang it sadly.

“How?” he said. “How can you heal me whole?”

A whisper of an image. A man being cut, the sword drinking of something deep in him. His soul, Ishaq realized. And then he saw wounds closing.

“You’re not treasure,” he softly laughed. “You’re a barrow curse.”

Ishaq slowly got to his feet, the bronze sword in hand, and listened to the voices above. Rasul should have made sure he was dead, he thought as he began to put on the armour.

Ishaq would be certain not to make that mistake.

Chapter 62: Finish

“There should be no second chances. To think your days on Creation as a test, as something that can be won or lost, is a mistake. The peculiar delusion to believe that you are alone and all others are rivals. No lone soul can bear the weight of the world: come Last Dusk, we will rise or fall as a whole. So do not be stinting in kindness, in offering chances without counting them. Come the end, we may find that saving one soul saved all the world.”

– King Edmund of Callow, the Inkhand

-my sword cleared the scabbard, rising to catch a glint of sunlight.

“Let us remind the Enemy,” I said, and then stilled.

More words were on the tip of my tongue, defiance and pride, but my vision was swimming and suddenly I felt like emptying my stomach all over the avenue. Something had just happened. I’d just been... Choppily moving around on Zombie’s back, I saw the dead gathering in bands down the paving stones that would lead us all the way to the inner wall. Nausea clogged up my throat and I retched drily, pawing at my sweaty face. Tears were trailing down my face, like I’d looked into the sun for too long, but when I turned I saw enough. My knights were going through the same thing, several of them vomiting on the floor while others had been thrown off by panicked horses. This isn’t what happened , I thought. My blood was pounding away at my temples.

“Akua?” I rasped out.

My eye went to her and found her bent over her necromantic horse, breathing panicked as she tried and fail to say still.

“Sorcery,” she got out. “Something...”

She used a word in Mthethwa I’d never head before, maybe from one of the northern dialects.

“I died.”

I shifted in my saddle again, feeling like a raft going down rapids as bile rose up my throat. It had been Brandon Talbot who spoke. His face was haggard.

“I remember dying,” the bearded knight continued. “Thrown off the edge, the way my skull broke when I landed.”

The Sisters were talking in the back of my mind, their voices like the scream of a migraine, and I couldn’t even make out what they were saying. It was fast and angry and worried. But I remembered it, just a bit. Charging up that avenue with the Broken Bells behind me, Praes coming to our aid. Storming the wall, setting foot in the Dead King’s last redoubt and then... I let out a hoarse scream, clutching my helm as warm nails were driven into my brain. The pain, Gods the pain . Someone laid their soft hand on me, whispering an incantation, but it was dim. Distant. The memories were not. I led us straight into a trap , I remembered with dread. There had been no way to know how many had died when Keter had turned into a lethal jigsaw puzzle, but I could hazard guesses.

Armies had been broken, mine worst of all.

“The Riddle-Maker did this,” I guessed, forehead burning with fever.

The last thing I remembered hearing was his challenge to the Dead King, though the precise words escaped me. Most the knights seemed all right by now – shaken, but no more than that – but I was still feeling shaky. Had I gotten it worse than most? Why did... no, I could wonder at that later. We had been sent back by an hour, maybe a little more, and now we knew that Keter itself was a death trap meant to shatter our armies. My eye turned to Akua, who looked a little green bit otherwise fine.

“I can’t feel the ritual getting started,” I said. “Can you? If he got sent back an hour as well, he should be striking immediately knowing we won’t fall for it twice.”

“A ritual on that scale cannot be done by snapping one’s fingers, Catherine,” the sorceress peevishly replied. “We saw the end, not the preparations. The first steps are likely being taken below our feet as we speak.”

Unless the Dead King hadn’t gotten sent back – or his memories sent back, or whatever the Hells this was. That would be too lucky , I grimly thought. I have to assume he went back as well. The only person who could tell me what this all was would be Kreios the Riddle-Maker himself, who was... actually where was he right now?

“Talbot, Akua,” I said. “Hold, do not charge.”

Both opened their mouths, but before they could ask me anything I’d spurred on Zombie and she took a few bounding steps before leaping into flight. Streaks of sorcery whizzed past us and arrows were fired, though they fell far short, as I the hippocorvid beat her wings hastily and circled ever higher. The smoke was thick up here and ash stuck to my drying sweat in clumps, but I looked with my fleshless eyes and saw where I needed to. The gate that the Procerans had taken not so long ago was full of fantassins and conscripts, but there was not a hint of the Gigantes I had glimpsed there before passing out.

“Are you not here yet?” I murmured.

Gods, I thought. I knew that, like teleportation, ‘time’ magic was theoretically possible. Not under the Trismegistan theory, sure, but what would a Titan care about that? The sheer amount of power it would need, though, was somewhere between mind-boggling and outright divine. I hadn’t thought even an ancient old monster like Kreios the Riddle-Maker would have that in him. Because we know fuck all about him in the first place , I thought, except that he’s to Gigantes what Sve Noc are to drow. Regardless, I had my answer: the Titanomachy was not here, had yet to arrive, and that meant in every way that mattered we were still fucked.

We couldn’t stop the Dead King’s ritual puppetry of his city and we had nothing prepared to take armies through the field of entropy magic that lay beyond the inner walls. Even if we made better time than our last swing at this, went in better prepared, we would lose. And I had my doubts we’d do better, now that the Dead King had no reason to hold back since his trap had already been revealed. He’d come for us with all he had. I cursed under my breath, knees guiding Zombie into a dive. She screeched, displeased she’d done all this flying without getting to kill anything, but obeyed. I was in no better mood. I’d put it all on the line and it had not been enough, so there was only one thing left to do.

Call the retreat.

We landed back with the Order of Broken Bells, which had formed into a wedge in my absence but obeyed the orders. Akua looked better, I thought after glancing her way. Almost back to normal. My knights were even better, except for a few whose faces were still sickly. Those who died , I guessed. Talbot saluted when turned to him, face grim.

“We pull back,” I told him. “We can’t take the inner city and if we can’t do that then we’re just throwing lives away.”

“It will be butchery getting out,” the grandmaster evenly said.

“I know,” I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “But it’ll be a lot worse than that if we stay.”

In his eyes I saw he did not agree, and I was not sure whether that was irritating me or making me proud. Maybe a little of both.

“Send riders to the commanders on the ground,” I ordered him. “We need to move quickly.”

“As you say, Your Majesty,” Brandon Talbot replied, fist over heart.

My gaze turned to Akua, who already had a cocked eyebrow.

“I’ll reach out to the flying fortresses,” she said. “Ask them to cover our retreat instead of our advance.”

“Everything they can,” I quietly said, eye moving to the dead gathering on the avenue. “This is going to get messy.”

I’d been taught an army was never so vulnerable as when it was retreating, and that’d been talking of some field or city. This was Keter.

It was going to get bad.

—

I charged twice with the Order of Broken Bells, to disrupt the dead before they could mass enough to overwhelm our position at the avenue. It was a brisk, shattering business that left skeletons in pieces after which we withdrew. Above us the flying fortresses were pulling back as well, but not before High Marshal Nim gave Keter her goodbyes. A trail of barrels fell in the wake of the retreating fortresses, smashing into the ground to a familiar sight: green flame. The Black Knight unloaded her stocks like a spendthrift, drowning the Crown of the Dead in death all around the Army of Callow’s dug in positions. The ogre was not willing to sacrifice the Legions to cover our retreat, but she was willing to do the next best thing.

Word was sent to the Levantines and the Procerans that we were beginning the retreat, though I had no doubt they were doing the same already, and my army closed ranks as it began to cede ground. We’d have to cross the same steel bridges that had brought us here under fire once more, which would be costly, but we’d survive taking a licking like that. The same could not be said of staying in the city. Besides, with the goblinfire surrounding our position we shouldn’t be too badly pressed. I sent the Order back, since knights would be of no use in narrow streets packed increasingly tight with our soldiers, and gave Grandmaster Talbot orders to expediate the first bridge crossings.

On my way back to the hill we’d bled so much to take, I found the Painted Knife’s band waiting for me. Roland still looked sick, I noticed, but the others were fine. More sensitive to power? Didn’t matter and I didn’t ask. They had news for me and that took precedence.

“All armies are retreating,” Kallia told me. “Just heard it from the Page, Warden. The Grey Legion is hammering at the Procerans and my people are on the verge of collapse.”

“Why is the Dominion folding?” I frowned.

They hadn’t been that badly off last time.

“I do not know,” the Painted Knife unhappily admitted. “Neither did the Page. All I can say is that there is a fighting retreat on all sides.”

“It’s the best we can hope for,” I grunted. “At least we-”

I didn’t even have time to tempt Fate, it took the lead. Before I could finish my sentence I felt the fabric of Creation begin to bend and scream, as atop the tower in the depths of the inner city a burning glare turned its attention to us.

“Demons,” I quietly said. “ Fuck .”

The Dead King had decided to stop pulling punches, and it went downhill from there. One of the abominations bent the very floor of Keter, wiping away the goblinfire and turning it into a surreal sculpture as undead poured into the breach. To the east instead a two-legged creature without legs whose very silhouette hurt my eye to behold began to eat the green flames, finally answering the old question of whether goblinfire worked on demons. Only some of them, it seemed. What had been an orderly retreat went to shit in moments.

“Akua-”

“I won’t be enough,” she interrupted me. “We need diabolists, Catherine. We need the High Lords.”

She was right, and if the demons weren’t contained then it was more than just the Army of Callow that was at risk. They might sweep through right into the camp.

“Fuck,” I cursed again, and drew my sword. “Get them down here. On my authority.”

In some ways, what followed was worse than Maillac’s Boot. There we had picked our grounds, prepared and weighed the risks. Here it was madness on all sides, my soldiers never in the right place while the enemy struck from everywhere. I fought in the whirlwind of the melee, never staying in place, always going where the shield wall was collapsing or the monster had broken through. I emptied myself of Night, torching ranks of Binds and almost broke my arm dragging a soldier out of a collapsing house. Moments later I had to bring down another on top of my own legionaries as a swarm of ghouls overwhelmed them, biting the scream on the tip of my tongue.

The Praesi came, but there was no clean victory to be had here. One of the Old Mothers topped down, the enchantments that kept it aflight twisted by a demon of Corruption, and as I saw that great fortress topple behind enemy lines I knew every soul inside was dead. The High Lords and their retinues came down, joining the desperate fight, and sorcery lit up the dusty sky. Demons were bound, driven back, and at the heart of it all Akua led them sword in hand. A hand touched my shoulder and I near leapt out my skin, already halfway through a swing when I realized it was Roland. The Rogue Sorcerer was covered in soot, his boyish face drawn and tired.

“The Blade of Mercy’s dead,” he told me. “And the Skinchanger lost an arm. We were ambushed by the Prince of Bones and the Seelie.”

My grip tightened around my sword.

“Pull your band back,” I said. “Every Named corpse will be Revenant by tomorrow.”

“Kallia already gave the order,” Roland said. “The Blessed Artificer was wounded, but she’s still covering the retreat across the bridges. We need to get out now , Catherine.”

“I’m not leaving my soldiers behind,” I harshly said.

“Then lead them out of here quickly,” he replied. “The Procerans are mostly out of the city now. We’re about to have all the Scourges after us, not just two.”

That the Hawk had not shot at me or any of mine even once remained a private source of dread. If he hadn’t been after us, then who was it he’d been shooting at? I spat to the side, into a thick carpet of ash. Much as I disliked it, Roland was right: if we kept retreating with a measure of control, we’d get killed anyway. I was going to have to tell my soldiers to run, knowing they’d get shot in the back all the while. But it’ll be worse if we’re the last people in Keter , I thought. That’s suicide.

“I’ll give the orders,” I said. “Go tell Akua we need to get a move on.”

He nodded. I got hold of a captain, then worked my way up the chain to a tribune before I found no one higher. Everyone else was dead. My word was enough to get them moving, and it was exactly as brutal as I’d feared. The dead spilled forth uncontrollably with no shield wall to contain them, and as everyone made a run for the bridges panic began to spread. I made my way to the hill where I’d sent Roland and last seen Akua, but they were further ahead. Behind a half-collapsed house, arguing about something.

“I can still save-”

“Yourself,” the Rogue Sorcerer bit out. “Come on, we need to get-”

I saw the glint of the sun on metal, but neither of them did. I shouted in warning even as I pulled on Night, tossing it blindly, but the arrow went through the power like a knife through butter. Akua fell to her knees, a dark-feathered shaft having sprouted in her throat and gone through the sheet of mail.

“ No ,” I shouted, throwing up an illusion to hide them.

Another arrow fell blindly, missing both as Akua clawed at her throat and gasped. Roland put his hand on the arrow and met her eyes. She nodded. I did not have the heart to look, only hearing a wet gurgle. I almost tripped on the stones, falling to my knees next to her as I ripped away the mail and laid a hand on her bloody skin. Her throat had been shredded, now a red mess. I stopped the bleeding with a pulse of Night, but I could not heal. She could, though. Tracing runes in the air, eyes fluttering, she began to close the skin of her own throat. Then I felt the illusion being ripped through. Roland threw out a shimmering shield as I helped Akua up, drawing her close.

She still couldn’t talk, she’d lost some vocal cords.

“We run,” I said, pulling on Night and throwing another illusion.

Roland suddenly twitched, reaching behind me, and his arm lit up with half a dozen shades of green light shaped like leaves. I ducked, but it would have been too late if he’d not stepped in: the arrow that should have gone through the back of my neck was instead caught in the leaves, punching through them and the mail below to cut the side of his arm.

“Let’s,” the Rogue Sorcerer fervently agreed.

We legged it. Behind us I saw a flicker of movement and tossed black flame at it without breaking stride, forcing the Seelie to duck away, and we ran for my army and the relative safety of the press of the crowd. Curses broke houses to our sides as we moved, the Mantle revealing she’d not been far behind, and I forced back a whimper of pain as I kept running despite my bad leg. Akua gently pushed off my arm, fine running on her own, and my stomach loosened when finally we reached my soldiers. They parted way for us some, even as everyone tried to hurry onto the bridges even as the ramparts in the distance shot at my crossing men.

Roland stumbled and I caught him, glaring at the man who’d just elbowed him, but that was when I noticed how pale he’d gone. When he dropped to his knees, he didn’t get back up. My stomach dropped and I laid a hand on his neck.

“Roland?” I asked. “What is-”

“Poison,” he rasped. “Must be.”

I found it a moment later and went still. I knew this poison, I’d seen it before. It had been in Hune’s blood after the Varlet struck her, and the moment it’d touched Night it had turned into acid and killed her instantly.

“Akua,” I shouted, turning around, “I need you to-”

She was already at my side, magic wreathing her hand yellow, but her face was somber. I got up, yelling for a priest, but there were none. They’d already crossed, we were with the last of the rearguard. Roland had gone even paler and his breath was slowing.

“No,” I begged, kneeling back down. “ Please .”

He smiled at me, grasping my hand.

“Charlatans run out of tricks,” Roland whispered. “Nothing to it.”

“You won’t,” I said. “We’ll-”

I looked at Akua, but she wouldn’t meet my eye. The breath went out of me.

“I don’t regret it,” Roland told me. “I don’t. Get them all home, Catherine.”

For the first time in years, I let out a sob. He drew me close.

“Beaumarais,” he murmured into my ear. “Bury me in Beaumarais. There’s a girl...”

He trailed off. His breath was difficult.

“I will,” I swore, because what else could I do?

“We did good,” Roland whispered, eyes closing. “We did...”

He did not breathe in again. It was over, all because of that small cut on his wrist. A single moment of inattention on my part, that was all it’d taken. I crossed the bridge in silence carrying his body on my back, Akua trailing behind me, swatting stones out of the sky. I went all the way through and up the hill, back to the camp and the tent I had come from. There I found my staff, stuck in the ground, and ripped it free. Eye closed, I sagged against it.

The battle was over.

—

It would take hours before we could count how many soldiers had died – at least twenty-five thousand, by the most conservative of reckonings – but some casualties were easier to count. Names began to filter in with the reports. Prince Rodrigo Trastanes of Orense had died in battle against the Grey Legion, keeping them off routing conscripts long enough to prevent collapse of the Proceran flank. The captain of Hakram’s retinue, Dag Clawtoe of the Howling Wolves, took the Hawk’s killing arrow for his Warlord. High Lady Takisha of Kahtan blew her own brains out rather than be taken by a demon of Corruption and High Lord Jaheem of Okoro incinerated himself along with three city blocks when he found himself surrounded.

Not all deaths were worth a story. The princess of Creusens was trampled to death by her own panicked horse, Red Ella – Aquiline’s second – was pushed off the wall and broke her neck. The senior legate of the Fourth Army was torched by mage fire from his own troops, which had misheard the order of their captain in the mayhem. War was one third heroism, one third horror and tone third the simple cruelty of luck.

Some losses were more keenly felt than others. Levant lost its steadiest hand when Careful Yannu was taken by the Prince of Bones, leaving it in disarray as it retreated from its failed assault. The First Army lost General Zola to a ritual bombardment that’d gotten past Hierophant and two layers of wards. It’d been a nasty curse and an even nastier way to die, taking half of the First’s senior staff with her. We were so lacking in officers there was talk that Aisha might need to take command, as one of the few old hands left.

When it came to Named, the amount of death was staggering. The Scourges had focused on them rather than racking up crowned scalps and it showed. We’d lost the Royal Conjurer, the Marauder, the Swaggering Duellist, the Balladeer, the Forlorn Paladin, the Blade of Mercy, the Anchorite, the Bloody Sword and the Pilfering Dicer. The Skinchanger had lost an arm, the Myrmidon a leg and the Stone Carver had been struck blind. I’d known few of them in any depth, so my grief was kept back for the one I had counted a friend.

But I swallowed my grief, got myself patched up and changed my clothes before downing as much herbal painkiller as I could. My day wasn’t done: the Gigantes were on their way, and that meant there were talks to be had before I could collapse into a bed and weep.

—

It felt more like a town assembly than a war council.

My preference for fewer people in the room was forcefully set aside by circumstance. Twice over, given that not only did we need a crowd’s worth of people but we did not have a room that could fit the Gigantes. The gathering took place outside in an abandoned drilling field, the fate of Calernia to be determined over beaten earth besides training dummies. Chairs were dragged in, wards layered one after another by half a dozen different mages under Hierophant’s watching eye and then we sent for everyone that wasn’t already there.

Every Proceran prince left had dragged their hides there, led by First Prince Rozala Malanza and the unofficial second most powerful man left in the Principate: Otto Redcrown. Frederic sat there wearing a pristine doublet in his family colours, with him a few familiar faces. Beatrice of Hainaut and Arsene of Bayeux. Others I did not know as well: the rulers of Aisne, Orne, Arans, Lyonis and Segovia. The absence of Procer’s southeast boded badly for Rozala’s later reign, the four principalities that had effectively abandoned the rest of Calernia forming a territory as large as Levant and significantly richer. Adding to the crowd were the most prominent fantassins captains, most of them having fallen behind the most powerful among them: Captain-General Catalina Ferreiro of the Liga Bandera, a handsome scarred woman I’d fought with at the Battle of Hainaut.

In the back of their gathering, still a princess in name, Cordelia Hasenbach sat. Her face was calm, but those blue eyes troubled. They had good reason to be, I conceded with a grimace.

The League of Free Cities gathered around Empress Basilia of Aenia like a pack of birds huddling for warmth, save for the exhausted-looking general from Bellerophon and the aggressively unremarkable minder stand behind him. Hopefully the kanenas wouldn’t execute the woman, things were tense enough as it was. First Magister – for life – Zoe Ixioni and Princess Zenobia Vasilakis, Basilia’s vassals and closest allies, sat to her sides. The philosopher-priest from Atalante, a short man with a wildly unkempt beard, instead stuck closer to Secretary Nestor and the newly-elected Exarch of Penthes, a nervously skinny young man by the name of Leontios Notaris. They were in the finest mood here, however grim that height: their victory out on the Ossuary with dwarven support had been a crushing one.

The Levantines had brought captains as well as Blood, but that’d not been entirely the choice of the last remaining lords and lady of Levant. Lord Yannu Marave had no issue and his designated successor was in Levant. The most influential captains of Alava had come in the stead of their fallen lord, forcing the lordlings and Lord Moro of the Brigand’s Blood to follow suit. They were a brawny and bearded lot, fierce of appearance and decked in colourful paint, but Careful Yannu’s empty seat seemed to swallow up space at the heart of them. Even Aquiline and Razin seemed a little lost at his absence: they’d been foes in some way, but Yannu Marave had been the Dominion’s leading commander for most of the war against Keter.

The Confederation of Praes, artfully arranged around Malicia, had brought not only the Black Knight in her function as High Marshal but also Lady Nahiza Serrif as the ranking mage and the surviving gaggle of High Lords. Leering old Abreha Mirembe had it made it, as had Sargon Sahelian and venomous old Whither, but the High Lady of Kahtan and the High Lord of Okoro left empty seats. The High Lord of Nok was wounded but alive and had sent his daughter to sit in his stead. Their like was still glittering with gold and jewels, but the rest of the Praesi were anything but. The Warlord had brought with him the chiefs of his most powerful clans, which Hakram was turning into an informal council. Oghuz the Lame of the Red Shields and Troke Snaketooth for the Blackspears, Hegvor Allspeak for the Split Trees and Arban Twelve-Fingers for the Graven Bones.

My own lot were not so numerous in comparison, though we did have some famous names among us. Marshal Juniper and all my generals were the core of it, with Masego and Akua requested to be present to lend their knowledge. Vivienne was here as my successor, Indrani because she was certain to face the Hawk and though Hanno and Ishaq could not really be considered of ‘mine’ they sat with me as befitting captains of Above and Below subordinate to my office of Warden. I stood in the back of my delegation, draped in the Mantle of Woe and with two great crows on my shoulders.

The Firstborn did not send anyone but General Rumena and my two scribes. They did not need to: as the defence force of the camps, they had yet to try the walls. Their losses had been the lightest of us all, though that would not last. We had been saving them up for the last push, and that was fast approaching. The dwarves had earned the right to have a seat at the table with the foodstuffs promised, then earned it again by fighting alongside the League on the field today. Yet they preferred keeping their distance, sending only the Herald of the Deeps and Seeker Balasi flanked by a pair of armoured guards in heavy plate that covered their faces.

The last, but not the least, was a single man. Kreios the Riddle-Maker was taller than any of the Gigantes I had seen by a dozen feet, his thick skin a pale brown and his hair long. Unlike what I had seen of his kind, he had long brown locks but shaved his face – though not recently, by the looks of the stubble. His eyes were what drew the attention, large pools of a grey so pale it almost seemed white. They were steady and unblinking, as if there was nothing in the world that could possibly concern him. Given that the Titan sat higher than some towers, even seated with folded legs, I could believe it. Though he did not move and had not spoken since the Witch of the Woods came to stand at his side, it still felt like he was looming over us all.

First Prince Rozala rose to her feet, not even the generous cut of her tunic enough to hide how close to giving birth she was getting.

“I will begin by giving formal thanks to the Titanomachy,” Rozala Malanza said, and then to the surprise of some offered a bow to Kreios. “If you had not lent your aid, we might not now be alive to thank you.”

Some of her countrymen looked aghast at a First Prince bowing to a giant, but others were openly approving. The Titan studied her, then bowed his head back.

“Worthy causes ever find friends,” the old gold rumbled.

He didn’t mean to sound so deep, I decided, to have the sound of his voice resonating in our bones. But then did humans mean to breathe strong enough to move flies?

“An honourable sentiment,” Rozala replied, sounding sincere. “In its spirit, may I ask what manner of spell was used to move us through time?”

Kreios glanced at the Witch, whose face of painted stone looked sternly at us all.

“It was not movement in the sense you mean,” the Witch of the Woods told us. “A moment was severed from the flow and, once separate, made to begin anew. It was then joined anew to the flow.”

Hierophant leaned forward.

“You mean that we lost an hour compared to the rest of Creation,” Masego said. “Instead we repeated the same hour twice.”

Kreios watched him.

“You have good eyes, Cutter,” the god praised, “and witness much.”

“There is so much to see,” Hierophant smiled.

They might have gotten started on the magic talk if left to it, I figured, but we couldn’t spare the time for that.

“Can you do it again?” I bluntly asked.

It was the Witch that answered me.

“Not without erasing most of the Kingdom of the Dead,” Antigone said. “It will be centuries before severing causality here should be considered again.”

Mhm, I’d figured it would be something like that. Power that useful never came without a price. An hour for a few centuries of silence, huh. Creation was more fragile than I’d thought, or perhaps more hard-handed in erasing mistakes. I’d moved the conversation back to practicalities, which had been my objective, so I didn’t step into it again. Aquiline was the one who first put the cards on the table.

“Though we have taken great casualties,” the Lady of Tartessos said, “I believe we all know the truth: if we do not strike tomorrow, we will lose this war.”

There were grim nods of agreement, and then the inevitable hesitation. People wanted to wait longer, to let the men rest and finish healing the wounded. To make new plans to invest the city. It was Hakram that put an end to it.

“We learned the lay of the Dead King’s defences today,” the Warlord growled, “at great cost to many of us. If we wait, we throw those lives away: every hour that passes, the dead build new dangers to ruin us. We cannot wait .”

There was a hear, hear from Otto Reitzenberg that had a few Procerans cheering, Levantines loudly voicing their own approval. Eyes went to me, but I kept silent. It was Juniper who spoke for the Army of Callow, voicing her agreement.

“We can’t wait,” the Hellhound grunted, “but let’s not kid ourselves about our chances either. If we don’t have anything for the shifting city and that death trap in the inner city, then there’s no point in attacking.”

There the dwarves stirred.

“I believe I know where the ritual lies,” the Herald of the Deeps said. “Though I cannot stop it from beginning, I would lead my soldiers underground to end it.”

There were some nods of appreciation.

“Keter’s Due will begin to be fed into the secondary arrays long before the city begins to move,” Akua said. “We need a way to deal with it first.”

“The leading issue is the entropy trap,” Chancellor Alaya agreed. “We cannot take the Hellgate and reach the Dead King without being able to push past the second wall.”

“I will silence the power,” Kreios the Riddle-Maker stated. “When soldiers reach this wall, I will go with them and keep this trap dormant.”

There was a moment of silence, none quite daring to speak up after that. I cleared my throat.

“Then we have the bare bones of a plan,” I said. “We will assault the city again, with Lord Kreios allowing us to push past the inner wall while the Herald and his army strike at the Dead King’s ritual.”

“That still means we have to take Keter again,” Lord Moro of the Brigand’s Blood grimaced. “The Enemy will await us, and there are no bridges left. We will depend entirely on sorcery to cross.”

“No,” General Rumena mildly said. “This is to be the last battle, yes? Then the Firstborn will lead the charge. All can follow in our wake.”

It was enough of a boast that it had to explain after, but fewer questions were asked than one might assume. It had not gone unnoticed that I had not contradicted the drow general. An hour and change passed as tactics were argued and then the attribution of Named. The greatest change was that there would be no army sent out to do battle on the Ossuary: there would be no other chance of winning after this. We were all in, do or die. Remaining in my seat, I closed my eye and sunk into my Name. Let it wash over me, hands reaching into the void as I exerted my will to See . And I found it, exactly what I was looking for. It was right under my hand, almost eager to be taken up.

The last stories were falling into place, huh. Even Fate believed it would all come down to tomorrow.

When I opened my eye I found the Riddle-Maker staring at me. Hierophant had, Gods bless his soul, stepped between us in a gesture that could be taken as protective. The Titan wished me no harm, though. I knew exactly what it was that’d drawn his attention.

“You have stolen an eye from the Intercessor,” the Titan said.

Silence fell, all other conversation dying. I reached for my pipe and took it in hand, stuffing it full of wakeleaf with well-practiced movements. I passed my palm over the mouth and pulled on a shard of Night, lighting it, and pulled deep. I let the burn linger in my lungs, the acrid pleasure of it, and spewed out the pale smoke. I was even nice enough not to do it on the back of Juniper’s neck, merciful queen that I was.

“Taken,” I corrected in a drawl. “It’s been a habit since I was a girl, I’ll confess.”

The old god seemed unmoved by my words.

“And what did you find?” he asked.

“We’re about to have a visitor,” I smiled.

I wasn’t tied into the wards, but I knew the mages that were: and each and every one of them shivered. A heartbeat later a silhouette stood in the middle of the circle. Tall and slim and androgynous, they had a spellwood sword at their hip and a long green cloak. Smoothly the unsheathed the sword, and though half the crowd reached for weapons I did not move. I pulled at my pipe, eye unblinking as the Emerald Sword plunged it into the earth. It met my gaze, face expressionless.

“We acknowledge the debt of the prince and the tower, Warden,” the elf said. “We will honour the bargain struck.”

I spat out smoke, making them wrinkle their nose, and inclined my head in a nod. They had better. I’d opened them a gate into Twilight from the room in the Tower they’d been stuck in, surrounded by goblinfire on all sides, at a price. When the time came for the Dead King to be brought at an end, the Emerald Swords would lend their swords to the cause. It’d taken me long enough to get them to acknowledge I had a right to be bargained with that I had gotten late to the bottom of the Tower and the tragedies it had in store for me, but it had been worth it. I had seen the might of the Emerald Swords, in Ater.

They would make a difference.

“I expected no less,” I replied.

They didn’t bother to answer me, or even address anyone else here. In a blink of an eye they were gone, the only proof they’d ever been there the dozen blades that’d been pulled and the length of spellwood that had been thrust into the ground. Eyes were still on me, but all I offered was a friendly smile. Always one more trick, that was the way. And I wasn’t even finished pulling on that particular thread. I rose to my feet, then stretched and cracked my bones.

“I believe this war council can come at an end,” I said.

“Do you have somewhere else to be, Your Excellency?” Ishaq drily asked.

“I’m going to start a cooking fire and find a stiff drink,” I frankly replied, then cast a look at the rest of them.

Thoughtful looks, some amused ones and a few offended.

“Tomorrow’s our wager with Fate,” I said. “Make sure you’re ready to face it.”

As for me, I knew exactly who I wanted to spend my last few hours before the plunge with.

Chapter 63: Farewell

“A life without friends is a banquet without food.”

– Proceran saying

It was on a whim I took up a shovel and began to dig the firepit, but once the steel bit into the ground it felt right. Like I was doing something I could pour all of my mind into, enough to forget the blood-soaked day I’d waded through to get here. I’d not thought twice about where I began to dig, simply choosing somewhere relatively out of the way since I well knew there could be no hiding place in a military camp, and instead busied myself with the labour of it. Mantle of Woe tossed aside into the dirt, sleeves pulled up and hair held in bun, I shovelled clumps of dusty earth.

Vivienne was the first to come.

I didn’t hear her approach – Princess or not, she was almost as light footed as when she had been the Thief – but I felt eyes on my back and turned to find her standing at the edge of the pit. She looked as tired as I felt, her pale green tunic hanging limp on that slim frame. There was still a sense of regality to her, though. She was not wearing the circlet that had become her right after she was raised a princess of Callow, but the loops of the milkmaid’s braid gave the same feeling. Her face, though still sharp, had matured enough that her blue-grey eyes no longer seemed almost too large for it.

She looked like a queen in the making, a princess forged in the crucibles of the long wars we had spent half our lives fighting. There were days where looking Princess in the eye still drew complicated feelings out of me, but this was not one of them. Sweaty hand resting on the handle of my shovel, I found that today I found only pride. We made it to the end, the two of us , I thought. Caring about anything else just seemed unforgivably petty.

“You know,” Vivienne Dartwick said, “even back when we were enemies, Catherine, that was the thing I admired about you.”

I cocked an eyebrow, leaning my weight against the shovel.

“What’s that?”

“You never balk at being the one in the pit,” the Princess said, eyes unreadable, “getting your hands dirty.”

I brushed a bang out of my eye, unsure how to respond, but in a blink of my eye she’d gone. Not for long, though. The Princess of Callow came back with a shovel of her own, that standard-issue tool of wood and steel of the Army of Callow we’d taken the Legion pattern for. She leapt down into the hole, brushing her arm against mine, and took up a place at my back. Neither of us felt the need to talk, reluctant to break the comfortable silence of people who’d learned each other deeply enough not to feel the need to fill every void. Instead we dug together. It was easier work with two pairs of hand on it, one of those simple little truths that cast a broader shadow than they should.

Indrani came second.

“Wait, I have something for this,” Archer mused, looking down at us from the edge of the pit.

“I feel as if am I about to be disappointed in many ways,” Vivienne noted.

“Something something royals holding big shafts?” Indrani tried. “No, wait-”

She chortled.

“Royally shafted,” Archer triumphantly exclaimed.

“Huh,” I said, then flicked a glance to my side. “I might have to start calling you Prophet instead of Princess, Vivi.”

“You barely even call me that,” she muttered.

“I know,” I sagely replied. “Won’t even take much effort.”

We might have kept at that for a while if a pile of dust hadn’t been kicked in our faces. I covered my eyes – both of them, out of habit – even as Vivienne began to cough and spit out the bits she’d swallowed. When I looked up, I found the afternoon sun shining at Indrani’s back as she scowled at us and wagged a finger.

“Don’t flirt when I’m trying to annoy you,” she chided us. “It’s rude.”

“I feel like no one ever taught you how to flirt and we’ve all been paying for it ever since,” Vivienne told her.

Wow , I thought, sending her an admiring glance. That’d been a little savage.

“’Cause you’re known as a great mistress of the subtleties of seduction, Dartwick,” Indrani skeptically replied.

Vivienne cocked an eyebrow, then turned towards me. She leaned close hand coming to hold my neck from the back, and even as she pulled me close she dipped me down. This was, I mused, embarrassingly close to a daydream I’d entertained once or twice back in the day.

“Catherine,” Vivienne gravely said. “Let’s slay your enemies in battle, drink too much table wine and then ignore important paperwork to have a tryst on your desk instead.”

I blinked, then turned to shoot at a look at a befuddled Indrani.

“She’s hitting all the right notes,” I admitted. “Damn, maybe you should learn from her.”

Indrani scowled and kicked dirt into our faces again, which alas had the mistress of seduction dropping me unceremoniously so she wouldn’t be made to eat dirt quite literally for the second time. Though this was a foul betrayal I recovered from the disappointment and got back to my feet, just in time to see Vivienne smugly smiling at Archer – who seemed unable to decide whether she was irritated or amused. It was a good look on her, brightening the hazelnut eyes her darker skin and green scarf already made pop out. Indrani had always been beautiful in moments, those stolen heartbeats where she was so incandescently alive , and between the sun and the smirk pulling at her lips this was one of them.

It passed, and I reclaimed my wits.

“So what’d you come here for?” I asked. “It better not be kicking earth back into our firepit, ‘Drani, or I’ll be cross.”

“Been going around getting my hands on bottles since you got the ball rolling,” she said, “but they’re running out and no one wants to sell theirs anymore. I need your seal to crack open you army’s last crates.”

I grunted, not entirely surprised that I wasn’t the only one intending to drink myself insensate tonight. It’d been a dark day and tomorrow didn’t look much brighter, plan or not.

“Take whatever you need,” I shrugged.

“Already tried that,” Indrani idly said, “but you changed the lock. Tell your phalanges to help, would you?”

Wasn’t hard to find one of the adjunct secretariat’s officers looming around – there was always one kicking about wherever I ended up, a habit Hakram had instilled them – and I got that sorted, sending Indrani back on her way. By the time I returned, Pickler had shown up. She was pacing around our pit, muttering under her breath, and almost ran into me. Her head would have reached higher on my body than I cared to admit.

“Have you started talking to yourself?” I asked. “Because they don’t let you get away with that without there being talk until you’re a priestess, in my experience.”

“Yes, yes, all hail the Crows,” Pickler dismissively replied. “May the Matrons perish trying to bite a chunk out of them, preferably after I’ve gotten good seats to watch the whole thing.”

“Your faith is touching, Sapper-General,” I drily replied. “I’ll pass the word along.”

“You do that,” Pickler told me, then poked my chest with an accusing finger. “Did you know your pit’s half a foot too deep and nowhere near large enough? We’re cooking pigs, not digging a tunnel.”

“We’re not finished yet,” I defensively.

“I was just following orders,” Vivienne called out from below, the treacherous weasel.

“You should have taken the engineering classes at the War College instead of that useless stuff you picked up instead,” Pickler told me.

My brow rose.

“Tactics and Strategy?” I drily asked.

“Yes, those,” the goblin told me, undaunted. “Haven’t tactiqued or strategized your way into digging a proper firepit yet, have you Foundling?”

I opened my mouth to object, then closed it. I raised a finger, tried again, then my teeth clicked closed under Pickler’s satisfied yellow gaze.

“Just tells us how to dig,” I finally sighed.

“An hour late, but there’s only so much you can expect out of humans,” my Sapper-General allowed.

“I’m going to write you up for discrimination, High Ridge, see if I don’t,” I muttered under my breath.

We were nearly done making something to Pickler’s satisfaction when Aisha showed up, legionaries carrying cart of firewood following in her wake. I took the opportunity to drag myself out of the pit, wipe my face with a cloth and guzzle down water from a skin. I was even generous enough to pass it to Vivienne afterwards, though not so generous I didn’t do that by throwing it at the back of her head. The noise it made hitting her was most satisfying. Aisha watched me with laughing eyes, her lovely heart-shaped face pulling into the hint of a smile.

“Juniper’s gone to pick out the pigs herself,” she told me. “She’d having fun dickering with the Fourth’s quartermaster for Vale hogs.”

Famously the fattest meat in Callow, which had me salivating already.

“Archer’s handling drinks,” I said, “but have we got anything except the meat on the way?”

Dark eyes moved to study me with sudden intensity.

“Kilian,” Aisha said with deliberate nonchalance, “offered to get a cauldron of dirty rice going.”

Rice mixed with oil, onions, tomatoes and up to half a dozen other ingredients depending on where in Praes the recipe came from – apparently Wolofites added bananas while Aksumites swore by ginger. Mind you, it was the dish that had her looking at me like I might be on the verge of biting her nose off. Kilian hadn’t been at one of these since we’d parted ways, at first because she’d declined invitations and later because I’d stopped asking. I honestly wasn’t sure how I felt about her trying to get a foot back in now, but I didn’t have the heart to refuse her. Not tonight of all nights.

“That’ll do,” I nodded. “Remind her to get the cauldron here early. You know how territorial Juniper gets when the pigs are on spits.”

“It’s rather endearing,” Aisha agreed with a fond smile.

Not exactly what I’d been getting at, but uh – good for her? I finished the pit to Pickler’s exacting specifications and then left her to haranguing legionaries into putting the firewood in the right sort of stacks, helping Vivienne out with a hand that she’d didn’t particularly need.

“We could probably use a wash,” she said, taking a sniff at the both of us.

I wiggled my eyebrows.

“Trying to impress anyone?” I teased. “Thought you were one of those chaste maiden kind of princesses, Dartwick.”

“I’ve thought about it,” she admitted. “There are some men I could see myself taking to bed with an assurance of discretion.”

“Might be our last night,” I quietly told her. “We have a chance, Vivienne, but there’s nothing certain about this. Take your comforts where we can.”

She smiled at me.

“If it is my last night,” Vivienne said, “then I would rather spend it with the lot of you then with a stranger. It’d be a greater comfort than a lay, however pleasurable.”

“You say sweet things, sometimes,” I smiled back.

“You really need to bathe,” Princess then told me, wrinkling her nose.

I sighed. I couldn’t even blame her for that entirely. I’d trained this into all of the Woe, because... I blanked. There must have been a reason at someone point, I reassured myself. Surely . I was still desperately trying to recall what it might be when I took my friend’s advice and began to limp towards my tent, where I was due a wash and a nap.

—

I woke half an hour before dusk, pleasantly refreshed. I splashed my face with tepid water to finish clearing out the last dregs of sleep, then pulled on a clean black tunic and took the time to sit and massage my bad leg for a while. It wasn’t throbbing as badly as I’d thought it might after the battle I’d been through. It could have been-

Get them all home, Catherine.

My stomach clenched. My throat was dry. And a heartbeat later I dropped my leg with a hiss of pain, the marks on the skin where my fingers had dug in red and visible. I’d forgot, just for a moment, why it was I’d gone to dig a pit. My friend was dead. Roland had been taken by an arrow that had been meant to kill me. Why else the poison that reacted to Night, the very power I would have called on to lessen my wound? Akua had been shot too, and there had been no poison in her. With the Varlet destroyed last year and the aspect that had made this thus lost, it was likely too rare to be used any way other than sparingly. Neshamah had meant to kill me and come so very close. I need to be better , I thought, fingers clenching. More careful. To see the next one coming.

Or else more friends than Roland de Beaumarais would get killed trying to keep me alive.

I put on the Mantle of Woe, more for the comfort of its weight than a need for the warmth, and slipped out of my tent. It was a childish thing, to flee the place where the dark thoughts had come, but I indulged them impulse anyway. I didn’t feel like talking with the two phalanges that began to walk behind me, or with anyone at all, so I briskly turned a corner and pulled down a veil of Night to cover me. I shook them off, limping deeper into the Army of Callow’s camp, and let the noise of my soldiers wash over me.

There was a frenetic energy to the camp. It wasn’t quite despair – we’d taken a licking today, but we’d still gotten deep into the city before retreating – but it was a cousin of sorts. Every last of my soldiers knew they could die tomorrow. Some of them remembered dying today, saved only by a Titan’s will. No one wanted to be alone tonight, or leave things undone they might never get the chance to finish. Stashes of liquor and smokes were being blown through, grudges being settled or set aside and then the opposite of grudges: more than a few of my soldiers had snuck off into dark corners to fuck with someone who’d caught their eye, or even simply someone that was there. It felt like the aftermath of a summer fair, only without the good singing voices.

There was some theatre though, I found.

Some bold souls had decided to spend their last night in Keter’s shadow putting on a trick play, which had drawn a large crowd of legionaries in varying degrees of inebriation. The Barber and Edward play was putting them in a fine mood, and it was loud laughter that’d drawn me there in the first place. I stood at the edge of the crowd, listening in, and found the premise hadn’t changed. It was still about the cunning goblin sergeant Barber, whose beauty drew suitors like moths to the flame, and the grim squire Edward whose strokes of good luck always ended unmade by his need to get even with his enemies. As was customary, between the two of them they got in a lot of mockery and dead foreigners which was exactly the kind of play my soldiers were in the mood for.

I was still taken aback by the sheer fucking audacity of it when I saw a goblin with bones glued on try to get to Barber to read her poetry only to get his head cut off by Edward – only for another bone-wearing goblin to pop up at the edge of the stage and try again. Those were, I realized with a shocked grin, the fucking Dead King .

“I would love you forever, beauteous star without a rival,” the goblin Dead King crooned.

“Not even if I were dead,” Barber scathingly replied.

Edward cut off Neshamah’s head again, wiping his brow exaggeratedly afterwards.

“We’ve been at this all afternoon,” the squire complained. “Maybe you should reconsider the suit, Queen Barber has a ring to it.”

Barber, who had not known the Dead King had a kingdom before, then hatched the plan to marry him and immediately bump him off so she could inherit Keter. It devolved quickly into slapstick humour as a bunch of heroes tried to crash the wedding only for their attempts to kill the Dead King to get in each other’s way and prevent Barber from speaking the vows. I was halfway to leaving when I noticed that the priest that had been about to officiate the wedding was suddenly dragged off stage, replaced by someone with a fake beard. Someone with a staff and a tattered cloak of many colours. The goblin Dead King peered at ‘me’.

“Have I met you before?” he asked. “You seem familiar.”

“Never,” the Black Queen replied. “Unrelated, but do you have any particular weaknesses someone might use to kill you for good?”

The Dead King’s yellow eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s part of the traditional Callowan wedding ceremony,” the Black Queen lied.

Two goblins dressed in black popped in behind her, cawing their hearts out as they flapped the wings of large wooden crows that they made perch on the Black Queen’s shoulders. She batted them away in a panic.

“Coincidence,” the Black Queen assured the betrothed. “I must have had some seeds on my cloak.”

The crows kept coming back, though, forcing her to make increasingly tortured explanations, and with a grin I pulled on Night. The next time the crows flew off, I replaced them with two feathered apparitions I’d woven out. The Black Queen actress stiffened and the crowd stilled.

“Nothing to see here,” I made one of the crows say.

“We have invitations,” the other one insisted.

The sound was so sudden it was like a sharper had just blown: the roars of laughter approval drowned out everything else, a quarter of the crowd looking around to see if they might find me. I was gone before anyone got too enterprising, though, disappearing into the avenues.

I had a fire waiting for me.

—

Most of them were already there when I arrived.

Juniper was turning her spitted pigs and loudly arguing with Vivienne about whether ‘catapults’ could ever be legitimately be an item in a royal budget, though I couldn’t help but notice that unlike the way it would have been a few years ago the two of them were smiling. Aisha and Masego were playing shatranj as they sipped glasses of wine, Indrani draped over his shoulder and giving him terrible advice he was duly ignoring, and Pickler was halfway through a mug of ale larger than her head as informed the lot of them that goblins had a game like shatranj, only the rules changed and you could get stabbed if you lost. Indrani looked worryingly interested.

The sight that had me shuffling in discomfort, though, was Kilian of Mashamba leaning over her cauldron of dirty rice with a long spoon in hand as she calmly spoke with Akua Sahelian. I’d never seen them together before, and hadn’t quite grasped how much taller than her Akua was – Kilian was barely taller than me, after all. I slipped in close before I could get noticed and got to eavesdrop a bit on the conversation.

“- and Ratface used to put saffron in it by the handful, which was odious ,” Kilian was saying. “He was a deft hand with chicken dishes, but not a man you wanted anywhere near rice.”

“We have a family recipe with fried peppers in it,” Akua told her. “A few generations back, one of my kin actually had another assassinated over-”

Golden eyes found me, and I forced nonchalance as I approached them. Kilian looked hesitant when she noticed I was there, her fair face closing, so I limped closer to lean over the cauldron and breathe in the vapour.

“Smells good,” I said, clapping her shoulder.

I would have lied if it didn’t, but I hadn’t had to.

“Rat Company recipe,” Kilian replied with a relieved smile. “They used to teach us in our first year.”

I blinked in surprise.

“I never was never taught it,” I pointed out.

“I would surmise you also never had to cook, darling,” Akua amusedly said. “Did you not become company captain within days of first joining?”

“It was Ratface’s idea,” I pointed out, perhaps a tad defensively.

“Of course it was,” Akua easily smiled.

I narrowed my eye at her, only then noticing the startled look that Kilian was giving the both of us. It left me feeling strangely naked, so I excused myself to grab a drink instead of lingering. The strangeness quickly faded, leaving me instead to sink into the warmth of the company I was keeping. I spent most of my time bickering with Indrani about whether or not some poet I’d never head of should be considered a classic – absolutely nod, I’d never heard of them – and stealing pieces from the shatranj game that Pickler had insisted she would beat Aisha at since she’d beaten Zeze. Since the good lady Aisha Bishara ensured my glass stayed full, in an act of brazen quid pro quo I ensured that her pawns never stayed more than two turns off the board when they were taken.

It got bad enough Masego started to cheat against her, which naturally drew Indrani into it and therefore utter chaos.

I was grinning up to my ears by the time Juniper declared the pigs were ready, a signal that the traditional ritual was about to begin. We all gathered with our plates as the Hellhound began making her cuts, as usual beginning with the naked favouritism that was Aisha getting the first place the best pieces. Masego cocked his head to the side.

“Why is it that she always goes first?” he curiously asked.

Juniper turned a gimlet eye on him.

“She’s the only one of you lot that removes headaches from my life instead of adding them,” the Marshal of Callow growled.

“Oh, that seems fair then,” Zeze plainly agreed.

As usual, the use of Masego’s most dangerous weapon – sincerity – disarmed his opponent without contest. Not so much that she didn’t slap Indrani’s hand away when she tried to carve out a piece from the side of the pig, though. Still, looking at them all I could not help but feel something was slightly wrong. The last time we’d done this, in Hainaut, there’d been... Ah , I thought. There’d been Hakram. He had been invited, Gods of course he’d been, but he was also the Warlord and our camp was not the only one lit up tonight.

“Ah, just in time.”

I turned and coming out of the cold were two silhouettes. One I did not recognize, an orc with long fangs and scarred-up shoulders bared by the leather tunic she had on. Big girl, shorter than Juniper but noticeably broader. The other one, though, was a prayer I’d not voiced answered. Hakram stood easily on his prosthetic leg, a loose coat fur over his tunic, and offered me a smile.

“I don’t suppose you have two more plates?” the tall orc asked.

“I think we’ll find some lying around,” I smiled back.

“Sigvin!” Indrani called out. “Though he might drag you here. Come on, sit with me.”

Ah, so that was who. Sigvin of the Split Tree Clan was, if Archer was to be believed, the closest thing Hakram had had to a lover in the time we’d known him. They didn’t keep to each other’s bed only, she said, but she was sticking around and he didn’t seem to mind at all. Bet it had something to do about the scars, I mused. I still remembered how wild orc girls had gone over his after he scrapped with Vivienne and the Lone Swordsman. Sigvin’s face betrayed no nervousness, but there was something of it in her stance. There were, I supposed, a lot of famous names gathered here tonight. She stepped forward, though, and after offering me a curt bow pressed two bottles into my hands.

“Aragh, Warden,” she said. “A gift for your fire.”

I met her eyes solemnly.

“Where have you been all my life, Sigvin?” I asked.

That got Indrani laughing, and Aisha as well, which bled some of the tension out. Hakram shot me a knowing look as he passed me by, gently brushing his shoulder against mine in unspoken thanks. I sat with him, Akua by complete coincidence happening to sit on my other side as Juniper finished doling out her cuts and we settled down to eat. With full bellies and plenty to drink, we settled down around the fire and the conversation remained lively. I let myself be drawn into a debate by Vivienne about whether or not the Exiled Prince would have been able to beat the Barrow Sword in a fight-

“Absolutely not,” I firmly said. “Ishaq’s ridiculously hard to kill and he can even use Night now.”

-but afterwards I took step back for a bit, pulling up my pipe to indulge in wakeleaf as I watched them. It was a balm of the heart to see them like this. Masego idly playing with Indrani’s hair as she rested her head on his lap, Pickler drawing something in the dirt that Aisha and Sigvin were look rather skeptically at, Juniper looking appalled as Akua told her about secret Tower histories and both gestured animatedly in the firelight. Vivienne was chatting with Kilian by the pigs, the redhead tracing a few symbols of light in the air that the Princess was shaking her head at. Slowly, I felt something loosen in my gut as I pulled at my pipe and blew out a stream of smoke.

“I missed these,” Hakram quietly said.

I’d heard him coming, but we had kept silent until now as I watched and smoked. There was no sense of hurry to the air.

“I’m glad we got to do it before the end,” I murmured. “It wouldn’t be the same, going into the dark without first having sat by the fire.”

He slowly nodded. I was seated and he standing, the two of us apart from the rest. It was a familiar feeling, though somewhat bittersweet.

“Tomorrow,” he began, then trailed off.

“There’ll be the battle,” I said. “And then after. When that time comes...”

“I’ll find you,” the Warlord said. “I can still feel it, you know.”

I glanced at him, found his face pulled tight.

“The pull,” he elaborated when I said nothing.

My lips quirked.

“And this surprises you?”

He did not answer, which was as good as an admission it did.

“I told you, Hakram Deadhand,” I said. “When the Woe will fight, where would you be if not with us?”

I meant it, I did not speak out loud. You’re still one of us. He stayed silent for a long time.

“I will not be the Warlord forever,” he suddenly said.

“You’ll need to step down eventually,” I agreed. “Else they won’t know how to be without you in charge.”

He nodded.

“When that day comes,” Hakram gravelled. “I-”

I raised a hand, interrupted him.

“Don’t feel like you have to make that promise,” I said. “Wasn’t that the point of all this?”

“You should have let me finish,” he snorted, baring fangs in amusement. “I could think of worse places to retire to than Cardinal.”

It wasn’t quite an offer, I thought, or a promise. But it was something. There was a lump in my throat I couldn’t quite swallow, so instead I took his hand. The dead one, the skeletal fingers that he’d come into fighting for me. I squeezed them and he squeezed them back. I sighed, closing my eye, and for a moment allowed myself to lean my head against his side and rest. It wasn’t the same it used to be, I thought.

But that didn’t mean it couldn’t be good.

—

When it all wound down, when everyone was drunk and began to fall asleep around the dying fire, after Hakram and Sigvin had gone, I still sat wide awake. Vivienne was snoring under a blanket and drooling on a log, Pickler draped over her and somehow not awoken by the racket. Juniper and Aisha were whispering softly in a corner, Indrani had gone off to get water for an unusually dead drunk Masego to drink before he fell asleep and I found myself with Kilian of Masham standing before me. She had not grown any less beautiful in the years since we’d parted ways, I thought as I watched the paleness of the moon caress her skin and light up the green of her eyes.

“Thank you,” Kilian softly said. “For saying yes.”

I could have pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about, but it would have been unworthy of the both of us.

“They’re your friends too,” I said. “I wouldn’t keep you from them on a night like this.”

Her lips quirked in a rueful smile I knew well.

“And us, Catherine?” she asked. “Are we friends?”

I could have told her that I’d once offered her that and she had turned it away, but the bitterness of that would have left a poor taste in the mouth. It was a done business, done long ago at that.

“No,” I honestly said. “But that’s the choices that were made.”

She nodded, and I found her face hard to read.

“I suppose we aren’t,” Kilian agreed, then glanced at the others. “It’ll get cooler out, later on.”

I cocked my head to the sight. Her eyes found mine, steady.

“It would be warmer in my tent,” she offered, and I stilled.

We both knew what she was truly offering, and it would have been a lie to say I wasn’t at least a little tempted. She had, after all, not stopped being beautiful. And I had fond memories of her behind closed doors, for all that had come after. But it was only a passing thing, soon gone. It was, as I had just thought, a done business. Pretending otherwise would be sweet, for a time, but it would be a sickly sort of sweetness.

“I’ve gotten used to the cold,” I gently replied.

To my surprise, she smiled.

“I didn’t think you’d say yes,” she admitted.

I cocked my head to the side.

“Then why offer?”

“The terror of an entire continent,” Kilian teasingly said, “and still some things about you are the same as when you were fresh out of Laure.”

I was still in too good a mood to get irritated, but she was headed in that direction.

“For old time’s sake,” Kilian said, “I’ll tell you one thing, Catherine.”

She paused, then looked away.

“You never looked at me the way you look at the Sahelian,” the redhead told me. “Do yourself a favour and own it.”

She raised her hand to touch my shoulder, but she must have seen something on my face and she aborted the gesture. With one last faint smile, she took her leave and left the cast of the fire’s light to vanish into the camp. I sat there, resting my cheek on the palm of my hand, and sighed.

“Eavesdropping?” I said.

A moment of silence, then a smooth gait on the dirt until she came to sit by my side. Close enough to touch, yet not touching. Years made into a sentence, that.

“You started it,” Akua replied.

I rolled my eye but did not argue. We were both had bad habits in that regard. The silence that lingered after was not tense, but neither was it easy. It felt like the moment before a blade was drawn. And in the end, it was not me who cleared the scabbard first.

“Will you?” she asked.

“Will I?” I replied.

Golden eyes found mine.

“Do yourself a favour,” Akua said.

My fingers clenched, then slowly unclenched. I did not answer.

“No,” Akua murmured. “I don’t think you will. There’s too much of who you are invested in holding that last redoubt.”

I did not look away.

“So you won’t,” Akua slowly said, “but neither will you stop me.”

Her hand cupped my cheek, tenderly, and she leaned forward. I closed my eye, felt her lips move against mine. It was soft but the softness kindled a hunger, and I would have bitten her lip and leaned in had I not held on to that last redoubt. But I did, she leaned back. Her breath was soft against my lips.

“I am not sure,” Akua whispered, “whether that was love or cruelty.”

My eye still closed, I felt her rise to her feet. She brushed her hand against my neck, my shoulder, and then suddenly the warmth of them was gone.

“Neither am I,” I admitted.

She was gone when I opened my eye.

I stayed there for a long time, sitting there in my silence.

—

Though it was late and the night was at its deepest, I did not crawl into my tent to sleep. Instead I rose and slipped past the sleeping bodies on the floor, past the people I loved most in the world, and headed deeper into the shadow. Past the last fires to be lit, the last watching eyes that a twist of Night ensured slid past me without seeing anything. I did not have a destination held firmly in my mind, instead trusting my feet to get me where I needed to be. One of the old Fairfax kings had once said that the evening before a battle was like an entire nation breathing in, and I felt the truth to the words. For all that the camp had gone still and silent, there was palpable sense of something in the air.

But we were still in the moment before the end began, and so there was room enough for one last conversation to be had.

I found her waiting in the shadow of a watchtower, leaning against the side as a slice of moonlight cut across her face. The Ranger had been beautiful once, and perhaps still was, but that beauty had been marred. She still held the burn scars of Summer flame on the side of her face, but also fresher ones. Still red and raw, three cuts: one across the nose and two down her cheeks. The parting gift of her last pupils, the children of Refuge that had risen against their terror and teacher. They’d left her broken on the floor of the Tower as goblinfire burned behind, her fate entirely in her own hands. We’d all known, deep down, that it would take more than that to kill her.

I limped forward, Mantle trailing behind me as the moonlight shone down on my hair, and the half-elf’s dark eyes flicked to me even through the veil I had yet to cast down. It was no longer needed, though, so with a flick of the wrist I abandoned the working.

“I’ve been expecting you, Hye Su,” I calmly said.

“I did not,” the hard-eyed woman said, “give you leave to use my name.”

I hummed, unmoved, and cocked my head to the side.

“ “But the Name you want me to use instead,” I said, “isn’t it feeling a little loose in your grasp, nowadays?”

I felt it then, the will to kill me. An intention so strong it felt like Creation would bend to it, just like the first time I’d met this monster when I’d been a girl who didn’t known better. I did now, though. And I was no longer that girl. I leaned forward, smiling, and pit my will against her own. For a moment it was as if two ships were colliding, but then in the heartbeat that followed there was a crack . And it was not me that’d given. Ranger drew back into herself before it could turn worse, face giving away nothing, but her body was not so silent. She was, I found with amusement, wary.

How long had it been since she’d come out the loser in a game like this?

“Better,” I mildly said. “Now make your offer. It’s why you came for, isn’t it?”

She pushed off the side of the watchtower, the slice of moonlight expanding to swallow half her face. How very unfair it was, I thought, that she was beautiful enough the cut on her cheek seemed more like a tattoo than a blemish.

“I want a trade, Warden,” Hye Su said. “An oath out of you.”

“And what manner of oath would it be?” I asked.

I already knew the answer, but it needed to be said.

“A duel,” she said. “You and me. Ten years from now.”

I thinly smiled.

“Am I to rejoice,” I asked, “that I have become worth hunting?”

Her face tightened with sudden, poisonous anger. It startled me.

“No,” Hye Sue coldly said. “Not that. Never that, for you. This isn’t Ranger business.”

Ah , I softly realized. It wasn’t the Named that had come tonight, the legend. It was the woman.

“You want to kill me,” I said.

“If you die now Calernia might break,” she said. “And if it’s just after the war, it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth. So I want an oath that, ten years from now, you will come to me for a duel to the death.”

I breathed out a laugh.

“Indrani didn’t think you’d take revenge,” I told her.

“He did it to himself as much as you did,” she said. “I know that. And that it’s not a good fate in the making, killing you. It’ll bring too much down on my head.”

“But you don’t care,” I slowly said.

I was, I would admit, fascinated by the cold flame I saw in the other woman’s eyes.

“But I don’t care,” Hye Sue repeated, the quiet of her voice a deep grief. “I loved him, Warden, in a way that can’t be replaced. That time won’t change. I loved him and you killed him. So in ten years, one of us will die.”

Looking at her, at the gaunt cast of her face, I believed it at last. That in her own strange and twisted way, Hye Su had loved Amadeus of the Green Stretch just as deeply as he’d loved her. Enough that she was breaking the rules that’d kept her alive through centuries of fighting Named and monsters, enough that she was willing to risk being hunted by entire kingdoms. This might just be, I realized, the first time I had ever liked the Ranger since first meeting her. I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“You said this was a trade,” I reminded her. “Should I take this oath, what would you offer in exchange?”

She met my eye, unflinching.

“I know,” Hye Sue, “a secret way into Keter. Take the oath and I’ll show it to you.”

And there it was, the last piece that’d been needed before it all fell into place. Before we brought an end to this endless war. I stood before her, our silhouettes draped in moonlight, and after a long moment I offered my hand. She took it, fingers digging into my wrist, and we shook on it.

I gave her the oath and she gave me a way past the impassable.

Interlude: Legends I

“Thus they gave oath;

To war ‘til the ends of the earth

Relenting not to love, dread or hearth

To league of hosts or pious chant

Until dominion returned to Levant.”

– Extract from the ‘Anthem of Smoke’, widely considered the founding epic of the Dominion of Levant

It was time.

Yara of Nowhere could still feel that much even after that vicious child had torn away her eyes. The ragged eyeholes of what she had once been – all the stories she had been able to Narrate – still remained, like a drunk groping for a bottle in the dark. So she went to one of those places that were not really places, where no feet could take you, and beheld the lunacy of a single man tying the hands of an entire Choir. A faceless, implacable sea held back by a stubborn dam denying it the right to pass. Forbidding the fish to swim, judgement to judge. Was there anything in the lay of Creation more impossible to break than pure, genuine conviction?

The Tribunal saw her, for she was not hidden. The Hierarch, little more than a burning swath of will and indignation, could see nothing at all. A stroke of luck, for in this state the merest trace of his attention would force her to Wander away – that nasty little authority of his would make her open her own throat otherwise, going through with the sentence the League of Free Cities had passed on her. That she was no longer of Aoede if Nicae didn’t seem to matter in the slightest to the authority’s boundaries, even though the right to pass judgement over her had been bound to the face. The Hierarch had always been a fucking headache of a man.

Yara would have reached for her flask if she could in this empty and too-bright place.

“Thought I’d come help you out of your spot of trouble,” Yara told them.

Agreement. Impatience. Curiosity. Why had she not come sooner? It was her purpose.

“All in due time, my darlings,” she told the Tribunal. “Besides, you can’t kill him.”

Dismay. Anger. The Seraphim felt shallowly but broadly, like an ocean three feet deep. Even after several millennia she was not sure why they had been made to feel at all. There was a time she’d thought they might once have been like her, learning just a little too much about the underpinnings of Creation to be allowed to muck about by the Gods, but she’d since stumbled over proof they had been created. Her best guess was that even limited emotional capacity improved their ability to learn and adapt to the ever-changing mores of mortals. Compassion had once been Reverence, after all. Like Role and Name, the essence could not change but the manifestation must adapt.

Yara wagged a finger at the angels.

“You know the rules,” she said. “You’re no longer being called and he’s not exactly attacking you – keeping you locked up’s not the same thing. I can’t just put my finger on your side of the scale and let you turn him into dust.”

Reluctant agreement. Yara could, but she had been lying to angels since before men knew how to forge iron.

“Of course,” Yara grinned at them fondly, “it doesn’t mean I can’t play favourites. I’ve got a way for you to get rid of our little friend here without stepping over the lines.”

Elbow in the side, a nudge and a wink. Stern disapproval from the Tribunal. They really were such bores, one of the many reasons she’d never gotten along with them. Their heroes tended to be fascinating, but the old birds themselves? Terribly tedious.

“Now now,” she mused. “Don’t give me that guff. I’m here to help, yes? Now, our old buddy-”

She did not speak either name or Name. She knew better.

“- can’t be bumped off, but you can do the opposite,” Yara told them.

Caution. Confusion.

“You can resurrect him,” she said.

Immediate anger. A reward, a prize, when the man was undeserving? Not fond of the idea at all, which was no surprise when it ran contrary to their nature. That was fine. She’d talked so many ancient monsters into their deaths she’d forgotten most of them.

“You’re insisting on thinking of it as a reward,” Yara of Nowhere said, clicking her tongue, “but does it have to be? Think of it not as bringing him back but as moving him.”

Caution again, but they were listening.

“Exile,” she smiled. “That’s a punishment, isn’t it?”

Reluctant agreement. And the trick here, was that they were going to have to rely on her. Because the Tribunal only did one sentence – yes or no, the flip of the coin – so for nuance they needed a mortal anchor. And with theirs out of their reach, no longer the White Knight and changing in his convictions, they couldn’t afford to be too picky. And Yara, for all her... imperfections, was here.

“We’ll send him somewhere out of the way,” she told them, smile broadening. “A Hell, yeah? Let him do Above some good dying.”

Caution remaining, the thought more nuanced than most they possessed.

“Sure, it wipes you out for a day,” Yara shrugged. “But you melted his body, it’s on you to make it again. And what’s better for Creation: silence for one day before you return in full, or remaining silent until the Last Dusk?”

It was no choice at all. Choirs could tolerate idleness for long, it ran against the fundamental purpose. Playing them wasn’t like manipulating someone with a soul, it was more like a jigsaw puzzle: move the pieces around the right way and it’d all click into place as inevitably as the rising of the sun.

Agreement, the Tribunal expressed.

Yara of Nowhere grinned, laying hand on the essence of them.

“Let me take care of that for you,” she said.

Guide , her soul sang, the authority seizing the underpinnings of Creation. One nudge to get the angels free past, one nudge to keep his eyes away from her and one last nudge to ensure he’d end up where she needed him to be. That was the most terrible of her powers, in truth.

Knowing the right place and the right time.

—

He landed in the grass.

It was soft against his bare feet, and though there was no sun in the sky above there was no lack of light. The breeze had him pulling his frayed diplomat’s robes close on his haggard frame, eyes blinking numbly as he realized he was seeing again. With his own eyes. He was breathing with lungs, shivering with skin. There was the scent of dung on the wind, and somewhere ahead a long field of barley. Beyond it, at the edge of the horizon, he glimpsed the sloping silhouettes of a village. People. His mind was open, never to be closed again, and so he could not help but Receive the sight of them.

He had seen this place before. Green land stretching in every direction, an endless expanse of villages and fields and rivers. Men and women and children that never went far from the place of their birth, taught that they were to be content and peaceful with mother’s milk. There were no dangers, no dooms, nothing to fear in the Serenity. Only one beautiful day after another, until one day you breathed your last and the Fair King called your mortal coil to the Lands Beyond. Some would have called it a paradise, a place without sickness or war.

Anaxares the Diplomat called it a lie.

The middle-aged man raised his hand, felt the breeze slip through his fingers and slide through the last of his sparse and greying hair. It was baked into the bones of this place, the insolent will that claimed itself supreme master of all that dwelled under the empty sky. He could feel it pressing down on all that dwelled here like an unseen sun, a tyranny so subtle and ancient it was no longer known as anything of the sort. But Anaxares was a son of Bellerophon, born under the stele, and he knew tyranny. It was not in his nature to suffer it silently.

The fingers closed around the breeze. His Name roused, groggily opening an eye.

“All are free, or none,” the Hierarch told the empty heavens. “I will suffer no compromise in this.”

His aspect lit up, and like ink in water began to spread. Spreading through the grass and the wind, the morning dew and the dim light of nowhere at all. Indict , the Hierarch had ordered, and the command burned away at the will holding this realm in thrall like acid. Breathing out, the old diplomat pulled at his loose robes and took a tentative step forward. The grass was wet against the sole of his feet, but it was no unpleasant. He still remembered walking well, he’d done much of it... before. So Anaxares took a second step, towards the fields and the village beyond them, feeling his aspect seep into the ground beneath his feet.

And where the Hierarch tread, serenity shattered.

—

Dawn rose over Keter, silent. Like a breath sucked in. Banners rose, armies moved and horrors stirred. Thousands knew, deep in their bones, that this was the last pass.

And so the Warden broke the Sword of the Rest over her knee, freeing Below’s stories at last.

—

The Firstborn had not begun at the forefront of this siege.

In some ways, General Rumena was thankful for it. The First Under the Night was showing consideration for the losses at Serolen and the great war for its borders, restraining her expectation and preserving their strength. It was a kindness. But part of it had been displeased, even as the Firstborn were relegated to guarding the camps under cover of dark and protecting the wardstones during the day. They had not fought, had not bled as the armies of the humans had. The war of the Firstborn had been waged very far away, far from the eyes of cattle, and their might doubted because of it.

This morn, as the sun rose over the Burning Lands, Rumena the Tomb-maker would put those doubts to rest.

Mighty clustered around it, those with the strength to see and to shield, and as the first rays of light scoured the sky the old general sat surrounded by a ring of obsidian and steel. It sunk deep into itself, into the embrace of Night. Deep enough that darkness swallowed it whole, as if it had stepped into the abyss. It breathed until it no longer felt the need to, the faint and distant sounds of thundering sorcery colliding against Night slowly fading away. Its will sunk into the ground, like the roots of an ancient tree, and as it breathed out it unleashed the Secret of Stone. Not as it had in Hainaut, fighting in the tunnels, or as it had in Serolen when fighting under the sky.

Instead it gripped the tides of the earth and moved with it.

Power flowed through its veins, raw and urgent, but Rumena gave a crooked smile as it opened its eyes. Even as it rose to its feet the ground shifted under them. It did not need to look to feel the movement, the bridges the Hidden Horror had broken sprouting anew. Stone and earth jutted out, charging across the chasm that made Keter an island even as spells fruitlessly tried to stop the assault. A bridge formed, then two. Three, four, five – Rumena stopped only at then, still keeping the Night clutched tight against its breast as it began to march forwards.

The Enemy came for its life with reckless hate. Storms of sorcery, arrows and bolts and every nasty trick the Pale King had learned over its many years of darkness. But what did that matter, when the finest of Mighty stood at the Tomb-maker’s side? Magic died in the dark, like a candle guttering out. Arrows were swallowed like delicacies, stones plucked out of the air like toys. Sigils burned around the general, Mighty laughing at the Enemy’s impotent wrath. And so it came that Rumena stood before the last gate of Keter, a mass of steel and sorcery set in great towers of stone.

It laid a hand against the steel, feeling the enchantments within try to bite at its skin.

“A strong gate,” Rumena praised, looking up. “Crafted cleverly, its magics mighty.”

The old general laughed, revealing crooked teeth.

“But it is set in stone, Dead King,” the Tomb-maker said, “and I hold in my hands the secret to it.”

It struck out, knuckles hitting the steel. The might rippled across steel, the sound of it like a gong struck, and twice more Rumena the Tomb-maker knocked at death’s door.

On the third strike, the gates fell.

The stone it was set it crumbled to pieces, dust in the wind, and the enchanted mass of steel fell on the dead behind it with a loud thump. Dust kicked up and General Rumena met the eyes of the horde waiting behind.

“ Before nine years have passed,
Keter’s gates will lie broken
as trembles Death’s holdfast. ”

It had taken an oath in the lands of Procer, sworn the sigil of the Rumena upon it. At last it stood fulfilled. It took a step forward, the ground shuddering under its feet, and around it the Mighty leaned forwards like wolves hungry to fall upon the fold.

“Chno Sve Noc,” the last general of the Empire Ever Dark laughed.

“Chno Sve Noc,” the Mighty shouted back, and Night sang with them.

The Firstborn had not begun at the forefront of this siege, but they would end there.

—

The Mirror Knight moved quickly, for a man his size in heavy plate, but as Named reckoned it he was slow. Hanno had learned to match his pace to the other man’s, as it would not do to leave him behind. He was, after all, serving as Christophe de Pavanie’s bodyguard. The Dead King had to know of the Severance by now, of the blade meant to slay him. And while the Hidden Horror might know better than to try to destroy something fated to slay him with his own hand, there was another way to ensure the blade never reached him.

Killing its wielder.

“It rankles,” Christophe suddenly said.

Hanno slowed in his step, falling by the other man’s side as they halted beneath a half-crumbled wall. A row of houses had been brought down into a makeshift barricade here, eventually collapsing into a ragged hill of rubble. From here, they could see the fierce melee ahead. The Lycaonese vanguard was tangling with skeletons, shouting war cries in Reitz as they tried to swiftly shatter the enemy’s ranks. The Proceran thrust into the city through the same gate as yesterday was to be entirely about speed: like an arrow loosed or a spear thrust, all the way to the inner wall.

“What does?” Hanno asked.

“That we do not fight with them,” the Mirror Knight said. “We could save lines, Hanno.”

The dark-skinned hero grimaced. That was true. But it was not the plan for a reason.

“We won’t win the battle in the city,” Hanno frankly said. “We cannot. Everything we do is to get to the Dead King and end this. That means-”

“That the Severance and its wielder must reach him,” Christophe curtly said. “I know.”

The Mirror Knight sighed, fingers going for the sword at his hip that was a mundane blade – at least compared to the one forged out of the Saint’s aspect in the Arsenal.

“But it rankles,” he repeated. “It feels like we’re abandoning them.”

Christophe was not the only one who felt that way. Named had not been entirely pulled out of the armies, but they had very much been thinned. Most of them had been placed in bands, roving to put down Revenants and find the Scourges, while a few others had undertaken particular tasks. The Warden herself had taken a band for such a purpose without giving an explanation except for a knowing smile. Catherine Foundling, Hanno had thought, was becoming unpleasantly fond of vagueness.

“Once we reach the inner wall we’ll have fights of our own,” Hanno said. “Most of us after the Dead King, but there will be other duties as well.”

“There is no chance of either of us returning to the battle,” Christophe bluntly said. “You must know this.”

Hanno did not disagree. They were both too useful to be spared for any purpose but the destruction of the King of Death.

“I know,” Hanno quietly said.

And it rankled, but what else could he do?

They began moving again, shadowing the Proceran advance, and the man who had once been the White Knight could only pray there would be anyone left alive in Keter by the time the Dead King ended.

—

Basilia had stormed the walls of Keter once before, but the horror of that day was a candle to the bonfire before her: though they were not even an hour into the battle, there was no longer a Penthesian army.

The Empress of Aenia watched the ragged remains of the soldiers and mercenaries the Exarch had scraped together for the campaign flee down the avenue, the undead leisurely loosing arrows at their back, and felt her heart clench with fear. Her forces had pushed past the Tombmaker’s bridge and the shattered gates in good order, clearing a foothold in the lower city, but that had been as far as the armies of the League got. What should have been a hard push into the enemy’s capital was instead turning into a desperate holding action, the enemy pushing in on all sides with frenetic intensity.

Basilia had claimed a tower as her forward headquarters, deciding the higher vantage point was worth the risks of attack as long as she had mages to protect the place, and looking down at her offensive she could already see the first signs of collapse. On her right flank the Delosi were already buckling under the pressure, the citizen levy and mercenaries losing ground as the flood of undeath came at them relentlessly. There were spurts of flame and poison whenever the krixilia threw themselves, the swollen ghouls full of burning oil and foul alchemies scrabbling as deep into the Delosi ranks as they could before exploding.

On her left flank the Stygians were holding, as much because the Spears of Stygia were as unflinching as any dead as because the Seventeen Schools of Atalante had finally taken the field. The priest-philosophers, a bunch of ragged and quarrelsome fools at the best of times, wielded Light as a painter would a brush: it curled and twisted, forming into arcs and elegant sweeps as it cut a burning swath through the dead. The Atalantians would tire, though. And when they did, the dead would again prove that a phalanx could hold them back but not beat them. That was the source of most her troubles, in truth. She spat through the window, seeing the faces of her generals were as grim as hers.

“If we are kept bottled up any longer,” Empress Basilia bluntly said, “we’ve lost.”

Grunts of agreement.

“Those small streets are murder on the mercenaries,” General Pallas said. “Their equipment’s too irregular to be able to hold proper formations.”

A problem that afflicted some of the cities more than others. Delos and Atalante had always heavily relied on mercenary armies to prop up their own mediocre hosts, and though Penthes usually boasted a decent force under professional generals that army had been melted into scraps during the conflicts that had afflicted the League since the beginning of the Uncivil Wars. Even Nicae, whose armies had checked Helikean and Stygian conquerors for centuries, had been forced to bolster its ranks with sold swords after the... war of succession that had dethroned the Trakas.

“We need to push further up avenue before they rout,” Basilia said. “Once we have, it, we can sweep around and cut off the flow of reinforcements that’s keeping us penned in.”

“The Penthesians just tried that, Your Majesty,” General Alexios flatly said. “It was no great success.”

An understatement. The Dead King’s commanders had barred the way up the avenue only irregularly, leaving room for the League to advance if it could break through the barricades, but that was because they’d turned the ground into a slaughterhouse. Houses had been collapsed along the length to turn the avenue into a funnel, and then further back collapsed again to turn into platforms for archers and catapults. The strategy at work was simple enough, after that. Keter had scraped together thousands of dead in armour wielding spears and arrayed them in heavy blocks.

And when the Penthesians had charged, trying to break through, the undead had begun firing mass volleys. They didn’t care about hitting their own soldiers, just about filling the air with arrows and stones. The Penthesians had bravely fought, breaking through two squares even through heavy fire, but they had dropped like flies. Fed into the meat grinder, they had been spit back out as bloody bones. Ad now, even as the last of them fled to the safety of allied ranks, the two blocks of spearmen they’d chewed through were replaced as armoured undead smoothly advanced.

They stayed there, silent and waiting.

“If we do not break through,” Basilia darkly replied, “the Proceran offensive will be at risk of being enveloped.”

And they could not afford that. Though the Grand Alliance was pushing into Keter from every direction, only two pushes were meant to make it to the inner wall: Rozala Malanza’s and High Marshal Nim’s. The other offensives were meant to cover their flanks and allow them to deliver the assets that would keep the Dead King from killing them all with this nightmare city and the sorcery that moved it. The Titan Kreios was with the Procerans, which meant their push could not be allowed to stall. The ancient Gigantes might be able to go at it alone, she knew, but it would be a risk. If he were to be slain then they would all follow.

There was something different about today, Basilia thought as her generals began to bicker over ploys that might take them up the avenue. The Hidden Horror had always been a fearsome opponent, but the tactics he employed today were... aggressive. He was no longer aiming at victory but instead at extermination. The Empress chewed her lip. He fights like a cornered man . What happened?

“- of course we need someone to march up the avenue, but there’s no army that can ,” Alexios harshly said. “That much sustained fire is a guaranteed rout. We need to-”

“- a swift thrust forward is the only way, getting stuck is death. We should-”

It was Basilia’s wandering eye that saw the first sign of it in the troops below. The shift of the Nicaean back ranks, pressing closer to the beleaguered Delosi. A commander was making room for troops to press forward. Who? Though she had noticed from up here, officers closer to the ground must have as well. Basilia turned as a young man in standard scale burst into the room, paling at the sight of his empress and a gaggle of generals. He knelt, his bushy hair flopping around as he did.

“You have a message,” Basilia stated.

It was not a question.

“Captain Calista reports that the Republic is on the move,” the young man replied. “She sent a runner to demand an explanation and was charged with passing an answer the Protector of the League.”

Bellerophon. What were the madmen up to?

“Speak it,” she ordered.

The young man nervously cleared his throat.

“By a majority of seven thousand four hundred and fifty-nine to three thousand one hundred and sixty-four, as well as eight abstentions and three invalid votes, the Republic of Bellerophon has voted to serve as vanguard of the League. The Protector may proceed at her leisure.”

There were some laughs behind her, but Basilia did not share the mirth. She stilled instead, eye turning to the moving soldiers below.

“Ready all our forces,” the Empress of Aenia said. “I want our foot ready to follow behind them.”

“You must be jesting, Your Majesty,” General Myrine frowned. “The rabble will taste a volley and rout. They-”

“They voted on it,” Basilia cut through curtly. “They voted on it, general. It doesn’t matter if a hundred or a thousand of them die on the first salvo. So long as they have legs, they will keep walking forward .”

She barked out her orders. The Nicaeans were to reinforce the Delosi, keep the flank from bending too much, but Helike’s full must was to prepare for the push. And, ignoring the protests of her generals, Basilia Katopodis put on her helmet. She would not leave her men to fight alone. Sweeping down from the tower as her retinue trailed behind, she found her horse and mounted quickly. Already, ahead of her, she saw the Nicaeans moving out of the way for the advancing ranks of the Bellerophans. They were, she thought, so very close to being a mob.

The equipment was old, the manuals obsolete and most the officers drawn by lot. Some spears were tipped in iron or bronze instead of steel, the armour was a simple tunic of mail and their shields were of an oval shape no one had used in a few centuries. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to who had been added to the levy. Some of them stooped from old age while others couldn’t be older than thirteen, tall and short, limping and hale. None of them were soldiers, not really. It was a sea of farmers and bakers and masons that’d put on armour, none of them really trained. And as the frontline approached the killing grounds where the Dead King, they halted.

“Shields up,” officers called out. “Spears down.”

The citizens of the Republic of Bellerophon obeyed in disorder, almost laughably so, half of them beginning with the spear instead of the shield. And then, unhesitating, they began to march up the avenue.

Death answered.

Basilia’s knuckles turned white as she clutched her reins tight, seeing the score of deaths the first volley caused. Ballistae and catapults ran red furrows down the lines, arrows fell like rain and even a few streaks of sorcery burned through men like smoke.

The Bellerophans slowed, closed ranks, and resumed their advance.

It was madness, Basilia thought. The Republic’s army smashed into the first block of skeleton spearmen gracelessly, its own soldiers barely more skilled than the dead, and burst through even as catapults crushed entire knots of men with ever stone and smoke was blown into their faces.

After the third block of spearmen was shattered, stones were rolled down into their ranks from the heights on both sides. The wake of the great stones looked like bloody clawmarks from where Basilia stood, as if a monster had slashed through the ranks, but without flinching the Bellerophans did the same as they had from the start: they slowed, closed ranks, and resumed their advance.

Through hail and storm and smoke, through arrows and crossbows and javelins, through screaming ghouls and snakes with the faces of men, the Republic of Bellerophon advanced unflinching. It plodded forward like a donkey pulling a plough, steady and so terribly unhurried. A hush had fallen over the battle at the sight of it, even war cries petering out at the sight of such atrocious bravery.

Close to eleven thousand Bellerophans had begun the march up the avenue. When the army reached the last barricade and clumsy hacked it down, barely two thousand were left. And when they were done, when their walk through ruin ended and they finished what they had set out to do, the citizens of the Republic did not shout in triumph or scream boasts at the sky. Instead they offered the hordes of the Dead King the casual contempt of utter silence as they simply turned around and began their march back.

They’d achieved what they had set out to, after all. What else was there to do?

Empress Basilia watched them, that battered host of indifferent lunatics, and a laugh bubbled out of her throat. In their eyes she saw a light she had seen before, in those of a man she had never liked but had learned to respect.

“They still do you proud, Diplomat,” she murmured. “Wherever you are, know that.”

And now it was time for the Empress of Aenia to do her part. The Bellerophans had cleared the way, and behind Basilia stood Helike’s finest ready to dance with death. Not so much as a single slinking ghoul would reach the Proceran flank, if she had anything to say about.

Unfortunately for the Dead King, she did.

“HELIKE,” the Empress shouted, raising her sword, “WITH ME!”

—

Akua was becoming used to being handed godheads, a sentence that she would have been skeptical of even at the age of seventeen when she’d genuinely thought the world was hers for the taking. It was sadly typical of Catherine to keep tossing her the keys to divinity like they were loose change from her pocket. Also as usual, the unthinking display of trust had Akua at war between feeling tenderness and fury.

It was quite vexing.

“Hells, Hakram’s in a mood today,” Archer grunted.

The golden-eyed sorcerers cast a look at the fighting in the distance, where a torrent of orcish warriors was tearing through dug-in defences as if they were sandcastles. At their head the unmistakeable silhouette of the Warlord in his scorched plate was leading the charge, crushing everything in his way in a display of pure rage that reminded Akua of the reason her Soninke ancestors had learned to build enchanted city walls.

“His assault with the Levantines failed yesterday,” Akua replied. “He has something to prove now.”

Indrani grimaced.

“He’s not the only one who has things to make up for,” she said.

Akua laid a light hand on her companion’s arm, but as she had expected Archer was not hungry for comfort. Though the sorcerers found it absurd that Indrani blamed herself for not being in Keter to check the Hawk yesterday – she’d been with the League armies out in the Ossuary, as the Scourge had fought there until then – the Woe tended to embrace unearned guilt that they simply refused to be talked out of. It was endearing in the way that a three-legged cat might be. Somewhat charming, but likely to get them killed one of these days.

More unfortunate was that Akua had begun to dislike the prospect of them getting killed, which did her no favours.

Archer shook her head, shaking off whatever thoughts she’d been contemplating to cast a wary look around them. Akua had been keeping them under illusion as they moved from rooftop to rooftop as much as they could, only dipping down to the streets when they must, but there was no telling if the spell was enough to trick the Dead King’s many watching eyes. It was why they were staying relatively close to the offensive of the Clans, and near the avenue where the Praesi push under the Black Knight would take place. The chaos should keep attention off them.

The Autumn Crown that Akua carried strapped to her back in an enchanted container was risky to carry with only her and Archer for escort, but it would have been even riskier to keep it with an army. The Dead King was bound to be looking for the weapons forged to destroy him.

“Come on,” Archer said. “We need to keep moving.”

Akua nodded, adjusting the straps going down her back to ensure she wasn’t going to drop a godhead on the ground , and follower her friend.

—

As a child, Sargon Isaru had seen the face of Greed.

The Isaru had not been land-kings in centuries, their city swallowed by Istar’s ever-expanding borders and turned into a district of the capital, but the family was powerful still. Vast wealth and closeness to the Hall of Hearths had made them more influential than many who could raise armies with a stomp of their feet. There were some who would have been satisfied with this. The Isaru had not been, hungry for wealth and power and praise. For anything that might raise them above their rivals for the King Under the Mountain’s favour.

So they had sought to build a Great Forge, and why not? Their ancestors had been famed smiths once, known for clever devices, it was in their blood. And owning the thirteenth of the Great Forges would bring great prestige to the Isaru, as well as great profit when they began selling arms to the most belligerent of the land-kings. As for royal favour, Sargon’s mother had decided on a bold stroke: to dedicate the Forge to the god that within the king even before he passed and freed that divinity to stand with his divine kin. It was heretical flattery, but the man was not known for his humility.

Greed, Sargon had thought even as a child, it was all Greed. That deep and unrelenting longing that lay coiled in the heart of all dwarves, moving them to take and keep. A disease if left unchecked, but also if too tightly held back: you could go mad by denying your Greed entirely. Turn into a feverish animal that knew no reason, eating flesh and murdering for colourful pebbles. Noble families, good blood, must master their Greed. It was a sign of poor breeding, poor character to do otherwise. But Sargon had thought, hearing the older folk talk, that there was nothing mastered about this Greed. It was quiet and subtle, like a poison, and they had all drunk deep of it.

When the crust of the earth was punctured and the magma poured out, the Soul of Fire that angrily rose up was older than any had suspected. One of the old leviathans come close to the border between stone and fire. Sargon was there with the family when it rampaged, tearing through bindings as if they were clay and slaughtering thousands before it was driven away. A disaster that turned all the greedy hopes of the Isaru to ash in a single stroke as swaths of their district burned and dwarves choked to death in smoke-filled tunnels. Sargon learned a lesson about Greed that day, but not only that of others.

For in the moment where the Soul of Fire emerged, the silhouette of fire and smoke from the burning depths of the Deepest Sea, his mind could think of only one word: beautiful . The spirit was beautiful and he had wanted it, craved it in a way he would never crave anything or anyone save for Balasi. That awakening of his Greed, he often thought, had been the first step on his road to become the Herald of the Deeps.

“Delein,” Balasi whispered. “We are there.”

Sargon’s hand left his beard, which he had been stroking lost in thought. His lover – husband, soon, for who was left to stop them? – had the right of it. They had dug through the night, cracking open one of the old tunnels sealed with molten steel in the earliest efforts to contain the Dead King, and then pushed through tunnels until the reached the edge of the gap. Over the centuries, Keter had dug so deep in search of metals for its armies that what had once been a tunnel at the bottom was now halfway up to the surface. The Herald of the Deeps eyed the smooth stone across the gap, still dimly feeling the pulse of power lying within.

“It is the right place,” Sargon said. “Beyond that stone lies the chamber where the magic comes from.”

“Our bridges are ready,” Balasi told him, “but it would be suicide to begin mining our way through.”

He watched his lover curiously, enjoying the sight of the skulls against the other man’s beards, and followed Balasi when he was led to the edge of the gap. Following the other man’s eyes below, he saw the source of the doubts. An army , Sargon thought. How many thousands of dead were down here, spread out among tunnels and depths? That and dark creatures, great white worms large as towns and flocks of cavern-bats turned into... something else. The Dead King had been waiting for them.

“We can’t hold the bridge,” Balasi quietly said. “Even if we take part of the army down to hit them as a distraction.”

“If we do not snuff out the ritual,” Sargon said, “the battle is lost.”

And perhaps Calernia with it.

“A blind pickaxe is no one’s friend,” Balasi grunted.

The old saying was open castigation, though mitigated by Sargon’s faintly amused knowledge that neither of them had spent so much as an hour of their lives swinging a pickaxe.

“I will act,” Sargon said.

Balasi’s face creased with worry.

“Without your staff-”

“It is my Burden, delein,” Sargon gently said, laying a hand on his arm.

Balasi pulled him close, into a soft kiss, and after they stayed close with the foreheads against each other.

“I know,” the seeker-of-deeds murmured. “I know. But you’re not as strong now and he’ll be coming for you.”

Sargon looked away.

“I am not sure,” he said.

Balasi uncomprehending eyes found his own.

“Was it truly a loss, breaking my staff?” Sargon quietly asked.

His lover seemed about to say as much, but he bit his tongue. Sargon shook his head.

“We strike,” the Herald of the Deeps said. “Tell the men.”

Balasi sought his eyes, then slowly nodded. His fist rang against his armour in salute before he hurried away. Sargon stood at the edge of the tunnel, looking down. So many, he thought. And so deep. There might be opportunity there, the Herald thought, but he was not strong enough to take it. He knew this, objectively, by the ways he had been taught. Without the staff and the bound spirits within, Sargon could not tear open the earth. Only... Are you seeking change, or just to add a rung below you on the ladder? Nothing words from a child reeking of angels, he had been ready to dismiss, but then Sargon had looked in the White Knight’s eyes and seen faith.

It had burned then and it burned now.

“So I wonder,” Sargon murmured, “have I made the mistakes of my mother, of the Isaru?”

Had he thought himself the master of his Greed, only for it to poison him unseen? It had all begun in that moment, he often thought, when the Spirit of Fire burst through the ground. And oh, how Sargon had wanted it.

“How many of you did I take?” he said. “Dozens. I called you and bound you, hung you from my staff like ornaments.”

And now that he no longer had the strength, now that he thought of those clear eyes and burned with shame, Sargon wondered if he’d ever mastered anything at all. He breathed out and his Words unfurled, resonating with Creation, and he felt the call to the Deeps being heard. As a child, Sargon Isaru had seen the face of Greed.

Perhaps he had been a child still all these years, to be facing it only now.

“Please,” the Herald of the Deeps said. “I cannot bind you, cannot master you.”

His fist clenched. And he never would again. He would not keep making rungs below his own.

“I can only ask,” Sargon whispered. “So please – help us.”

His words sunk into the Deepest Sea, below the burning waves, leaving only ripples. Sargon waited, watching and hoping. The depths remained dark.

And then they shook.

Like an anthill kicked, the dead began to swarm. The ground below them cracked, split, the earthquake shattering the stone. And light came, of light came when magma erupted in a fountain. Dead burst into flame, ran, as the Spirit of Fire roared its wrath. A small one, young, and still Sargon felt his throat tighten with shame and joy. It had come. He had not deserved it, but it had come. His Words rang again, and the Spirit of Fire sang back.

“Yes,” Sargon said with a smile. “Together. Let us teach them who the deeps bel-”

The depths shook again. He froze. And again, and again, and again, until the darkness below Keter burned red as the ancient scream of Spirits of Fire shattered stone. Small and large, old and young, they had come. Not one but dozens. And as magma swallowed hundreds of dead, as the air filled with twisting heat, the burning waves shivered. Something was swimming below. An old one, the leviathans of the Deepest Sea. And when it burst free, turning stone into flowing rivers, Sargon stilled. For he had seen it before, this Spirit of Fire. Long ago, when he took the first step down a road.

“Beginning,” the Herald of the Deeps softly said, “to the end. Were you with me all along?”

A song, a harmony more beautiful than anything he had ever heard. And when Sargon Isaru looked at the ancient spirit, he saw beauty again – but nothing more. The Greed was gone, and the Herald wept. The Spirit sang, comforting, and he laughed through his tears.

“No,” Sargon told it. “They are good tears.”

We can learn , he thought. We can do better.

“Then let us,” the Herald of the Deeps smiled, and his Burden unfurled like a flower under the sun.

His hands rose and the Deepest Sea rose with them, devouring armies whole.

—

It had not been difficult to find people who would help her.

Though the fortified camps surrounding Keter were slowly emptying of soldiers for the last, desperate assault on Keter it was impossible to truly empty a war camp. So Cordelia had discreetly reached out for those soldiers she knew were most likely to stay behind, had convinced them of the necessity of what she was to do, and now the moment had come. The guards around the angel corpse, the ealamal, were already hers. That had been part of the terms of her abdication to Rozala Malanza. Now their ranks were swelled with Lycaonese and Alamans veterans – most Salians and Rhenians – as dug in positions were raised around the weapon.

Other soldiers were cleared out, a clean line of fire for crossbows established by pulling down any tents and shacks that might serve as cover, and Cordelia Hasenbach stood in silence as the few mages she’d secured began putting up the heaviest wards they could. She had not reached out to Named, even knowing some might be sympathetic, because it was sure to get to Catherine. The Warden was as a bloodhound for this sort of thing when it involved her charges, but there were simply too many soldiers for even Catherine Foundling to be able to keep an eye on all of them.

“It will smack of betrayal to some,” Simon de Gorgeault quietly told her.

She did not turn to look at the man who had once been one of her spymasters, then her Lord Inquisitor, and was not the last of her lieutenants. Brother Simon had no intention of leading the Holy Society once more, Cordelia had known that for some time, but he was still burning a bridge by standing with her today. First Princess Rozala would not forget it, or others more distantly worrisome.

“We will not step a foot beyond the ward lines,” Cordelia evenly replied.

“Even so,” Brother Simon told her.

He was right, she knew. But she would not take the risk. The fair-haired princess had the artefact that could command the ealamal, an angel corpse swelled with so much Light it purified the air around it just by existing, but that would not matter if the ealamal itself was seized. So she would ensure it was not, even if it had the look of betrayal to some. In truth, Cordelia would admit to herself, they were not entirely wrong to see it as such. She was taking on an authority today that had not been bestowed to her by anyone, because there simply wasn’t anyone who had that right.

“Then I will answer for this,” Cordelia Hasenbach said, “if we all live through the day.”

Her duty had not changed. She would keep her eyes open and her hand at the ready, because for all the valour of the Grand Alliance there was no certainty of victory today. And if the siege of Keter was lost, if the Dead King’s armies triumphed, then she would do what she must before the dead overran the camp and seized the ealamal. Before anyone, living or dead, could stop her.

If she must burn half of Calernia to save the rest, Gods forgive her but she would.

Interlude: Legends II

“The army of Tenerife encamped by the banks of the Blue Ribbon, making fires, and the sight of their multitude troubled Theodosius’ captains. Daphne of Penthes, most respected among them, argued that they should seek aid from Nicae rather than give battle. ‘They are as many Procerans as there are grains of sand,’ she said. Theodosius refused. ‘Then like so much sand we will scatter them before us,’ he replied.”

– Extract from ‘The Banquet of Follies, or, A Comprehensive History of the First League War’ by Prince Alexandre of Lyonis

The Warlord charged, and all that stood before him shattered.

His shoulder hit a shield wall bristling with pikes and blades and he broke straight through, a tide of warriors pouring in behind him as the dead were swept away by the wrath of the Clans. He did not slow. Ghouls burst out of the ground, buried under the rock, but his footing was sure and they were all frail. His axe swung and flesh gave, blood spurted, screams filled the air. Hakram felt his blood thundering in his ears like the beat of a drum. Felt the rhythm echo in the fifty thousand souls trailing in his wake as he roared, leaping up to smash a beorn’s leering maw with his shield. The beast fell and he hacked at its flesh, discarding the shield when it took too many arrows and roaring again as his axe split the beorn’s skull and the creature fell.

Great stones had been pulled into the way as chunks of wall to stop their charge up the avenue, monsters in the shape of massive corpse-fat snails released swarms of poisonous flies from their bone shells and skeletons the height of then men scythed through ranks with massive hammers, but it was not enough. The drow that had broken the gates for him, still shadowing his armies on the sides, filled the air with fire and curses that ate away the swarms. The Warlord’s steel fist hit the stone in front of him once, twice, thrice – and on the third the stone shattered in two. They clawed and pushed their way through, tearing into the dead as swarming the great skeletons until they were toppled down and taken apart on the ground like wounded beasts.

Yesterday he had failed to take the gate, left Catherine and the Procerans to hang, but today the Clans would remind Calernia why it had once trembled at the coming of a Horde.

The world was slowly turning red. The Warlord saw only in bursts, as if he was flitting in and out of consciousness, his Name carrying him like a river. Lead , it sang, and so the warriors of the Clans thundered down the avenue with him. A Revenant stood before him but he shoved his dead hand down the throat and ripped off the head from the inside, its fangs clattering uselessly on his scorched plate. Magic came down from above in curtains but he charged through it, sorcery dripping on armour like rain, and once through he barrelled into the enemy’s retreating ranks. A wyrm spasmed across the avenue, swarmed by the silhouettes of Mighty, as the Warlord and his warriors pulled it down with ropes and harpoons.

Then it was a hulking shape of steel, a great armour held together by the dead remains of a Name. The Prince of Bones shattered the tiles under them with a stomp, but the Warlord only roared as his axe dented the sternly frowning mask covering the Scourge’s face. It was strong as a monster was strong, the sweeps of its broadsword whistling through the air but still too slow. The Warlord stepped around the blows and struck, hacking away at the layers of steel until his axe was little more than scrap, and after that he caught the Scourge’s arm to take its own greatsword. Only when it came to strength he was outmatched, the Revenant unmoving as the Warlord’s feet were pushed back through broken tiles. The Warlord roared again, but from the corner of his eye he saw the Scourge’s free hand moving. A slap, he thought, that would be enough to spill his brains all over the stone.

Until it was caught, a stooped old drow shivered into existence and grabbing a single finger.

“My turn,” Rumena the Tomb-maker said, and struck with its free hand.

The Warlord grunted with effort, holding the Prince of Bones in place so he could not avoid the blow, and there was a great scream of metal before a wet crunch. The orc watched with muted disbelief as the Scourge’s head, a ball of metal, toppled to the ground. But there is no bone , the Warlord saw. The head was a decoy. A heartbeat later a mass of lightning came down on their heads, the Tumult’s hatred unleashed, and even as Rumena formed a sphere of Night around them the Warlord felt the Prince of Bones slipping away. He struggled to hold the Scourge in place but the Prince’s might was implacable and his fingers scrabbled down the steel, until at last they found purchase.

When the storm of lightning ended and the Tomb-maker ended its working there was no trace of the Prince of Bones, but Hakram Deadhand held in his grasp the Scourge’s own greastword as a prize. Dead fingers closing around it, the Warlord began to feel the red bleeding out of him. His breath slowed, and he began to feel the collection of wounds that covered his body.

“They retreated to the inner wall,” Rumena said.

“We’re close,” Hakram replied, and was surprised to find that true.

They had pushed two thirds of the way up the avenue, far faster than he’d believed they would.

“Can your sigils take the rampart, Deadhand?” the drow general asked.

“No,” he admitted with a grimace. “We don’t have the siege for it. Once we hit the inner city we’ll head north, try to link up with the Praesi.”

“I will leave sigils behind,” Rumena nodded.

“And you?” Hakram asked.

The creased old Firstborn grinned, the ochre and gold on its lips pulling up.

“I hunt,” the Tomb-maker replied.

—

General Abigail Tanner had been looking for the way out since she’d come in and it had been a little disheartening when she’d realized all the possibilities were literal dead ends. With her luck the bloody Dead King would get her, too, and unlike the Black Queen didn’t even have the decency to pay his officers. Stuck fighting forever without even a retirement fund? She’d rather die.

In, uh, a different way.

This whole Keter business had been awful, really. Not only were the soldiers in between her and Revenants dying at a frankly alarming rate, but for some reason the Third Army kept getting into the worst of it. It was like being forcefully saddled to a horse that kept looking for cliffs to leap down from. Even Boots, her perfidious old ass of a horse, didn’t intend to go down with her when it tried to shake her off to her death.

Abigail couldn’t even blame him for that. The horse had correctly figured out she was the reason he kept getting into situations where people shot at him, so in a sense she did have it coming. The part of this mess that absolutely did drive her up the wall, though, was she’d somehow ended up leading the vanguard of the Army of Callow again. How, when? She’d tricked General Holt into taking the lead this time and somehow she was still at the tip of the spear again .

“It must be a curse,” she muttered. “I know I haven’t gone to a sermon in a while, but isn’t that why you bribe the Crows?”

“You said something, ma’am?” Staff Tribune Krolem asked.

The bulky orc looked at her expectantly.

“I was asking about the word from Marshal Juniper,” Abigail hurriedly replied.

“She commends you on the initiative and gives you free rein to lead the Third forward as you please,” Krolem proudly said, flashing his fangs.

Fucking Hellhound , the dark-haired woman uncharitably thought, hanging her a length of rope and surely it was a coincidence she was already standing next to gallows. Abigail had long been aware that the world was unfair – come on, you only had to see how well Ellie Bilkers had married while being such a witch to know that – but it was a little much to find out that even now the world wasn’t unfair in her favour . She was a noble now! Lady Abigail Tanner, even if the name was one she’d come up with in a panic when she’d realized she’d procrastinated until she was due to give an answer to the adjunct secretariat. Not only some noble but a general on top of it too!

She should be going around in goddamn palanquins all the time while people threw themselves at arrows to bring glory to her name. Instead she was stuck going around on a miserable old horse, under a banner like she was just asking to get shot, and-

Panes of magic flared into existence, glowing blue, and caught the three crossbow bolts that would have punched through her skull.

Abigail wished she could say it was even just the tenth time the dead had tried that today. At this rate she’d die a porcupine and they’d bury her as bloody Lady Arrowcatch. Krolem, Gods bless his soul, began shouting and growling until mages blew up the rooftop she’d been shot at from in a volley of fireballs.

“I think it was as a Revenant this time, ma’am,” the orc said with disturbing eagerness. “Think it might have been the Hawk?”

Abigail figured not, on account of her distinct lack of arrow in the head, but she figured she’d let him have his fun.

“Could be,” she grunted. “Now, Tribune, what was it you were telling me about the League’s push again?”

The Grand Alliance strategy for the assault was straightforward, looked at on a large scale. There were four gates, one for every cardinal direction – wait, was that why the Black Queen was naming her mad city out in the mountains Cardinal? Shit, she’d just got that, why had no old told her before? – and there would be four thrusts at the inner city through them. Thrown on top of that was the breach in the southwestern wall that the Ram had built, which was the way through for the Army of Callow to do their own push.

Most of those attacks weren’t actually meant to reach the heart of Keter, in practice. The Procerans through the south gate and the Praesi through the north one were the ‘lucky’ winners that needed to get there, the rest of the attacks elaborate manoeuvres to get the pressure off their flanks. The orcs and the drow were coming in from the west, the League from the east, and the Dominion was to follow after the Praesi and serve as their rear guard.

The Army of Callow’s role was pretty simple: die over the same grounds as yesterday long enough that the Proceran left flank couldn’t get smashed by there.

“They were delayed, general,” Staff Tribune Krolem replied. “They ran into an entrenched position and were stalemated until the Bellerophans cleared it.”

The Bellerophans had cleared it, Abigail skeptically thought. Well, she supposed if you had to throw corpses at corpses you might as well go with the folk that voted on chamber pot schedules.

“So they’re staggered a bit, is what I’m hearing,” she muttered. “It happens. The Warlord’s pissing all over the opposition on the other side of the city, so I reckon it evens ou-”

Abigail’s mouth closed. Beneath her, Boots began to edge closer to the wall hoping she was distracted. She pulled at the reins to disabuse the treacherous beast of the notion. Please, he’d tried to throw her at one headfirst already. Like she’d forget. My memory is at least twice as good as a horses’, you fucker , she smugly thought. Yet the warm glow of her triumph retreated in the face of the ice that was welling up in her stomach as she tried to look at what the assault on Keter would look like from above.

She had no idea how well the Praesi were doing, but most their fortresses were still in the air so presumably not too badly. The Procerans had been doing pretty well too, their Lycaonese vanguard taking the hits for the rest of the army stoically so the conscripts wouldn’t start routing too early. But if the League had been delayed on the Proceran right flank and the Army of Callow was getting stalled short of the avenue on its left, then something was up. And now that Abigail thought about it, weren’t the orcs actually doing a little too well?

“Shit,” Abigail cursed.

The Procerans were getting baited to pull ahead of the protection on their flanks. There was room enough to hide an army in the space between the League thrust and the Proceran one, if you kept the League out of the avenues for long enough, and the little voice that had kept Abigail alive through too many hellholes to count was quietly asking a question: if the Warlord’s been doing so good ‘cause he’s smashing only half an army, then where’s the other half?

Now, if Abigail had been trying to kill all of the Procerans she’d do it like this: bait them up, encircle them, then throw a bunch of expendables in the way of the forces that could relieve them. After that it was just a matter of hammering at the Principate’s back for long enough that the levies routed and their formation went to shit. Considering the League was still far and the Army of Callow closest, that meant... The general went over the positions in her head, jaw tightening.

The Fifth under General Holt was trying to breach the barricades around the avenue head on while the First under General Bishara was going around by the west to flank the position, which meant the flanking force that’d pulled ahead to the east to begin flanking the barricades that way was the one that’d get those expendables thrown at.

“Krolem,” Abigail said with calm that she did not feel. “Have goblins scale the houses to the east. I want to know if there’s a force headed our way.”

There was already fighting there, of course, but those were loose bands of dead. The Staff Tribune hurried off as Abigail leaned over to pretend she was patting Boots’ mane, when in fact she was reaching for her saddlebag and getting out a flask she quickly took a few deep swallows from before putting it away. The brandy burned down her throat, even as panes of magic flared into existence again. Five arrows this time, huh. She was going to find out whatever mage it was that’d made this ward after the war and thrown gold at them until they made one she could carry everywhere at all times.

Krolem came back grinning, a sight that had been the herald of many a misery in Abigail Tanner’s life.

“Battalions of heavily armoured skeletons and some mage cabals,” the Staff Tribune announced. “They’re moving to hold our right flank.”

No, Abigail grimly thought, they were moving to prevent the Army of Callow from intervening when the Procerans got surrounded and butchered to the last. Like pigs in a pen, only fancier because Procer. Wine, maybe. Almost certainly cheese.

“I need someone to get to the Fourth Army,” Abigail said. “General-”

Only, she realized with dawning horror, though the Fourth was behind her Third to serve as a reserve and so it’d only be right they take this on instead of her, they were too far behind. And though they were technically closer to the avenue that went from north to south across Keter, that wasn’t where the reinforcements would need to be. They’d need someone covering their left so they could pivot their entire army to face the enemy coming from the right. Which meant the Third. Which meant her. And she couldn’t even try to pass this off to someone else, because the Hellhound had just granted her permission to ‘lead the Third forward as she would’.

Balls, she realized. If the Procerans all died and she could have intervened, she’d probably get court-martialed for it. Which meant losing her pension, and Abigail of Summerholm had not come out all the way to fucking Keter to lose her general’s pension .

“Krolem,” General Abigail sternly said.

The orc straightened up.

“Ma’am?”

“We’re pushing east,” she told him. “Our entire force. Someone tell the Fourth, we’ve got a greater good to pursue.”

“Saving the battle?” the orc breathlessly asked.

A mansion in Laure and to be drunk every day until I die , Abigail mentally corrected.

“Yes,” she lied.

—

“Bottoms up,” Catherine said, and after clinking her vial with the Huntress’ gulped it down whole.

The Concocter followed suit without the theatrics, rolling her yellow eyes at them instead, and the Range was already lying on the ‘ground’ that Masego had forged. They lay down, tossing away the vials, and within ten heartbeats Hierophant was surrounded by the corpses of four women. It was a somewhat awkward situation, he decided, even as he reached for the withered stalks of ground set down before him and closed his mortal eye, beginning to murmur his incantation.

He’d met the Silver Huntress and the Concocter in a professional capacity several times, and even once in a personal one when Indrani introduced him as her partner. Alexis had kindly offered him protection if he was being blackmailed into the relationship – which had, bafflingly enough, irritated Indrani – then looked rather irked herself when he’d assured her he was very fond of Archer and not being forced into anything. The Concocter had been much less mercurial, and charmingly learned in matters of alchemy. She’d even read the works of Lykourgos the Transmuter, which almost no one had! The man had unleashed several plagues that turned people into rabid animals, it was true, but that was no reason to ban his very well-written studies on transitive material properties.

Hierophant had not been worried in the slightest when he’d learned he was to be in a band with them, and they had proved to be just as capable as he’d expected. It was the last addition to the band that Catherine was leading that had nudged the situation into awkwardness: the Ranger, Hye Su. Looking at her temporarily dead form, Hierophant’s mortal eye narrowed as he considered whether or not he should murder her.

Practically speaking, she was no longer necessary. She had some worth as a guide in the realm to which they were travelling but she was not needed . The Ranger had already given the necessary artefact, the stalks of grass, and served her purpose as a guide. It would be bad form and Catherine would be cross with him, but practicalities did not forbid him from killing Hye Su. No particular affection was holding his hand either, his fathers having always been clear that Ranger was not like Aunt Sabah and Aunt Eudokia: she was dangerous and not to be trusted, even if Uncle Amadeus loved her. Masego had only met her a few times, and never taken to her.

He drummed his fingers against his leg thoughtfully, the incantation continuing unabated.

Hye Su was a threat, of this he was sure. Catherine had been very vague as to how she’d convinced the other woman to help, which he knew from experience meant she was hiding something she believed they would disapprove of. Usually an unnecessary personal risk she was taking. Ripping out Ranger’s soul while she was unconscious and casting it into a Hell before burning her body would see to that neatly. Killing out of fear, though, was wrong. People had to give you a reason, not just something you decided yourself. If the Ranger ended up being a threat, he could always kill her later.

Which forced Masego to confront why he was still itching to kill the woman: she had hurt someone he cared for. Indrani still spoke admiringly of Ranger to this day, but as far as Hierophant was concerned she had been unfit as a teacher and a guardian. That would not be enough to deserve death – both arms, perhaps – but Indrani’s claim to the Name of Ranger was. There would be conflict there, possibly combat. And Indrani was not replaceable. His life would be less without her in it, which was a sufficient reason to incinerate Hye Su so thoroughly there were not even ashes left. And still he hesitated, not moving to kill until he finished the first incantation and grimaced.

“She would be angry with me if I did,” Masego said. “Rightfully so. It is her conflict to resolve and it would be an insult to do so for her.”

Which meant the Ranger would live. For now. Besides, he had other concerns at the moment. His task was not an easy one.

Keter was, after all, fortified against extra-dimensional intrusions in ways that no other place on Calernia was. It was not only a matter of wards, though those defending the Crown of the Dead had been cleverly made and were nearly impossible to break. The wards themselves were a sphere that enveloped the city but they fed into a root-like system of escapements that meant overloading them would require so much power as to be effectively impossible. Trismegistus had then taken an additional precaution by having the physical anchors for them deep underground, to the extent that Masego believed them to be surrounded by magma.

Yet not even that had been enough for the lich, who had at some point decided to methodically annihilate every speck of Keter’s mirror in Arcadia. Not only was access barred, there was nowhere to cross from . Masego was unfortunately unsure quite how this had been accomplished – demons were his best guess – but instead of a crossing point in Arcadia all that could be found was interstitial void, an empty liminal space. It was how Masego knew for certain this had been done by the Dead King, as he had fought against the Spellblade inside a liminal space of fundamentally similar principles when he’d last come to Keter.

Accessing the void would normally have required setting foot within Keter, but Catherine said that would have been ‘giving away the game’ and instead they had passed through the broken shards of the Twilight Ways, requiring the Ranger’s guidance to move from shard to shard while avoiding the collapsing ones or those with edges. Remaining forever trapped inside a pocket realm or being cut into several dying but forever aware parts would have been fairly likely otherwise, much as he disliked admitting that relying on Hye Su had been necessary.

Masego hummed, pulling his magic close and feeling out the edges of the Creation with his will. From there it was only a matter of following the outlines and seeing where they connected so that he might find where the Hells – and the Heavens – were adjoined. These were the very basics of diabolism as a practice, because in practice finding a Hell was not particularly difficult. Finding a useful one, or even more difficult a specific one, to open a gate into was another matter entirely. Unless you had several advantages, it was a fool’s errand. Advantages such as, for example, casting from an adjoining liminal space where boundaries were thinned and having in your possession an object from the Hell you were seeking.

The dried stalks of grass in Hierophant’s hand had grown in the Serenity, their connection to the Hell by the law of sympathy running deep and wide.

Masego began to murmur a second incantation, tracing runes in the air to shape the effect of his will – movement, transition, stability – but even as he began his attempt to cut a hole into the Hell he frowned as the resistance to his sorcery strengthened. As the Ranger had intimated, the Dead King had hardened the borders of the Serenity. However sharp Hierophant’s will, a single mage – even Named – did not have the power to carve open a gate. A cabal led in a ritual might, but there would be nothing subtle or quiet about. But that was thinking of the crossing in the wrong way, as Hye Su had grasped.

When confronted with a wall a sorcerer could increase their strength to break it, but there was another way through: lessening the wall’s resistance to you. And the very means the Dead King had used to harden the boundary of the Serenity, millennia of necromancy, provided the way through.

They simply needed to be dead.

It was why all the others were lying on the ground around him, having drunk of the Concocter’s elixir of temporary death – save for Ranger, who simply stopped her heartbeat for a fixed amount of time – so that by creational law they would qualify as being ‘dead’. Masego himself would drink of the potion vial he had in his robes as soon as the spell was near being finished, trusting the formula he had crafted to convey the five of them across into the Serenity. It was not long before he reached that point, diabolism being more a matter of precision and power than skill or inventiveness, and without ceremony he drank the substance. It tasted faintly of mint, he appreciated.

Even as his mind began to swim he felt the swirls of magic intensify, casting his will beyond them. He felt out the boundaries one last time, to make sure nothing had been wrong, which was when he noticed the oddity.

There was something wrong with the Heavens. Or at least a part of them intricately bound to the nearby part of Creation in several ways and also... the Serenity itself? It was a Choir, Hierophant realized. There was a similarity to what he was Witnessing and a spell he had crafted with Tariq Isbili’s help. The smiting miracle, as some had taken to calling it. The Choir had been silenced, he saw, and though its power remained intact – angels could not be diminished – it was temporarily unable to be properly expressed. It was, essentially, a pot of paint without a colour. If called forth the Choir’s power would do nothing, he thought, unless additional properties were imposed on it by a third party.

If someone chose a colour for the paint, to continue the metaphor.

Of course, there shouldn’t be anyone able to do such a thing. Even Named would – only there was , he remembered. A band of five had been sent to follow the Dead King’s hint in the depths of Levant and found a fascinating story. The first Grey Pilgrim had once been smote by a Choir, only to survive entirely unharmed. The Intercessor could influence angels. And so Hierophant felt an inkling of dread as he slipped into the shallow end of death.

Because if the Hierarch was still holding back the Choir of Judgement, why was he now able to feel its existence again?

—

Otto Redcrown took the blow on his shield with a grunt, the undead’s blade sliding across the Reitzenberg sigil even as he shattered its head with a measured blow of his mace. His mount whinnied, hooves sending another corpse flying, and he had to pull her at her reins so she wouldn’t go wild.

“Steady,” he shouted, as much for his horse as his soldiers. “Don’t let them bait you.”

Those of his riders that’d began to pursue the retreating undead pulled back at the call, joining the thick of his men as they finished clearing out stragglers from the holdfast they’d driven the Enemy out of. It was not particularly dangerous work once the Binds were but down, the Bones reverting to the intelligence of mere dogs and lashing out blindly without regard for arms or armour, but the riders went about it with methodical carefulness. They all knew it would take only one mistake, and this close to finally ending the King of Death all their lives must be hoarded until the moment where they could best be spent.

Behind the horsemen his infantry had followed and was already breaking down the barricades to make room for the southern foot to pass, rolling away stones and tossing bodies aside. It had been a brutal slog to get here, but Prince Otto allowed himself an ember of pride as he saw the heights of Keter’s inner wall up above. They were close now, even though every devilry they’d beaten yesterday had been replaced by a fresh horror as they charged up the avenue as they had before the Titan Kreios’ sorcery had undone the battle. Far ahead of what he’d expected, and though his numbers were melting away like summer snow they were but a mile away from the rampart. There, at least, he would pull back let First Princess Rozala lead the assault.

The battle looked promising. Though the League had stalled early, Frederic had led two thousand horse to relieve them and word has since come back that Empress Basilia had broken through enemy resistance and resumed her advance. With the League screening her flank on one side and the unbreakable Army of Callow holding the other, Rozala Malanza would have the opening she needed to pierce through the wall. And once she did, the looming shape at the heart of the Alamans conscripts would do his part. The Titan would snuff out the Hidden Horror’s ritual and victory would no longer be beyond their grasp.

“Your Grace! Your Grace, they’ve come!”

Otto’s captain had shouted loudly enough half the army must have heard him, but the prince did not take her to ask for it aside from a dour look. Instead he followed the woman’s pointing hand and what he saw had his teeth clenching.

“You dragged your feet today, Grey Legion,” Otto Redcrown muttered. “I expected you an hour ago.”

Hainaut had mauled their numbers, for not even the fearsome Grey Legion could simply shrug off having a star and a city pulled down on their heads, but enough remained to be a threat. Two thousand and some, by the latest count. At tide of steel advancing with deceiving slowness, but Otto would not be fooled. He had seen them pass through strong shield walls like they were nothing but mist, each hulking shape a battering ram on the move.

“Form up,” the prince shouted. “Form up!”

He drove his mount forward to join his horsemen, but had to pull his reins when trumpets began to sound behind him. What was Malanza doing? It was still too early for her to join him out- the thought froze in in his mind as he saw that in the distance the banners of the rearguard were turning. The army was being attacked from behind. Trumpets to the east, trumpets to the west. Oh , Otto dimly realized. So that was the truth of it. They had danced to the Enemy’s tune, and now they were surrounded. Their path of retreat had been cut and neither the Callowans nor the League would get there in time. Prince Otto Reitzenberg breathed out, finding his calm did not waver in the face of certain death.

It surprised him, though perhaps it should not have. Some days when he closed his eyes he found himself back at miserable afternoon, watching his father and his sisters died until the reddened crown was brought form him to wear. The least of the Reitzenberg had survived that day, he’d often thought, but perhaps he hadn’t. Not really. Enough of him had stayed behind that he felt little fear at the sight of the steadily advancing Grey Legion. No, not even a little. It was only trepidation, the nervousness that came with finishing something your started long ago. Otto breathed in, looking at the darkened cloud. Ash was falling, but the sun shone through.

Before him there was a road, an enemy and a wall. He’d fought this battle before, as the last in line. Today he would be the first instead and there was fairness in that.

“Unravellers at the ready,” Otto Redcrown called out, voice steady.

The horsemen reached for the sheaths at their sides, sliding out the weapons. The artefacts made in the Arsenal before it ended were as wooden lances, though shorter and partly hollow. They would shatter on impact, but that mattered nothing: they were artefacts, not killing lances, and their purpose was not to punch through armour but to unravel the sorcery keeping undead bound in servitude. A simple touch was not guaranteed to do this, not against the Grey Legion, but landing a blow in the right place had a halfway decent chance of destroying the undead. It was starkly better odds than any other weapon had ever offered.

They would die, Otto Reitzenberg thought as the riders lined up without a word. They would die in droves, screaming and clawing at the dark, and perhaps those deaths would allow the rest of the army to make it to the wall. That was the last gift they had to give. The last prince of the Lycaonese held his unraveller tight and straightened his back, eyes fixed ahead. His sisters would have known what to say to comfort the soldiers now, he thought. His father would not have needed to say anything, beloved as he had been.

But all Otto Redcrown had to offer his people was silence and the spear in his hand, and so that was what he gave them.

“Oh mother, I held your sword.”

It was a boy who sang out. The voice was too young, too light, for him to be a man grown. The prince’s heart ached of it, as much sorrow as pride. Grief for another boy too young to die. Pride for the boy staring death in the eye and finding it in him to sing.

“Oh mother, I held your sword,” the boy sang again, and voices joined him.

He’s one of mine , Otto realized. The Farewell Sword was a song from Bremen, and though it was known beyond its borders it was his people who love it most. It was not like hard-eyed Hannoven pride, like the desolate boasts of the Neustrians or even the famously dark humour of Rhenians. It was a sad song, the Farewell Sword, for Otto’s people had an old sadness in their bones. How strange, that to hear it sung would feel a comfort now.

“Oh mother, I held your sword,” voices rose, Otto’s among them.

He reached for his mace, pointed it forward and without a word needed the riders began to advance.

“As I rode north to settle score

And bade farewell to the stone.”

The thunder of hooves on pavement almost drowned out the song as the trot turned into a gallop.

“Oh mother, there is no lord

To bring back the blade I wore

For I went and died all alone.”

The distance, so long when they had begun, was now so small. Swallowed in an instant until Otto could see dents and scrapes on the armour of the Grey Legion’s steel-clad dead. Unravellers were lowered, wood whistling in the air.

“Oh mother, I held your sword.”

For a heartbeat the world hung still, the fragile wooden length snaking forward as he leaned against his mount’s neck and the enemy moved to knock it aside. Too slow, he thought.

“ And I come now to return it ,” Otto Redcrown screamed.

The unraveller shattered even as it hit the undead’s shoulder, screaming against the steel and digging in. Not deep enough, though, as the mass of steel kept moving and swept through the legs of Otto’s horse in a single blow. The horse screamed in pain, bones shattering, and the prince was thrown against the stone. He tasted blood in his mouth and his knees were throbbing, but he rolled to the side before his ribs could be caved in by a hulking step. He rose, moving behind the undead so he could strike at the knee joint with a two-handed blow of his mace. It dented the steel, enough that it crumpled inwards and began grinding against itself when the soldier moved.

He stepped back, but not quickly enough to avoid the blow entirely. The hammer clipped his shoulder, smashing through his pauldron as he was tossed to the grown like a ragdoll. All around him horses and men were dying, a thin wedge of riders passing through the Grey Legion’s ranks but most of them dying. Before the momentum had entirely passed the infantry joined them, half a dozen different accents in Reitz screaming themselves hoarse as they hurled themselves at the steel-clad monsters. Otto got back to his feet, jostled by men passing him, and dragged his armour back in place while swallowing a scream. He could have pulled back, he knew. Called for a change of armour.

He was a Reitzenberg: he would fight until the Enemy broke, or he did.

“In Iron Forged,” he shouted, and returned to the fray.

They charged the monsters and they died. Otto helped a bearded man smash the back of one’s knee and laughed in triumph with him when they brought the soldier down, a fair-haired girl that could be no older than fifteen smashing a hammer into the neck joint until the head rolled away and it stopped moving. A heartbeat later the bearded man was bloody mist and Otto pulled the girl out of the way, the two of them going back in as rider shattered a lance in the monster’s face and an opening was made. There was always another steel-clad monstrosity no matter how many were brought down, and as his people died around him Otto felt rage well up in his throat.

They wouldn’t even get through, he saw. They wouldn’t even clear the way for the others. They’d just die.

He screamed himself ragged as he smashed his mace into a steel soldier’s face, avoiding the swing of its sword but taking a backhand to the torso. He fell down, feet slipping against a pavement made slick by the blood of his people, and even as the sword rose above him in a blow there would be no avoiding, he grit his teeth and swung his mace as the sun shone down into his eyes. One last gesture of defiance. The steel soldier’s knee gave, but the sword was still coming down and-

“ Audace ,” someone screamed in Chantant, and the tip of lance nudged the sword aside with impossible precision.

The sun blinded him still, but he knew that voice. Struggling to stand in the blood, Otto forced himself up in time to see the Kingfisher Prince plunge a sword burning with Light into the steel-clad undead’s neck. Prince Frederic Goethal of Brus laughed, his blond ringlets shaking as he ripped his sword clear of the falling soldier’s body, and raised his sword to the sun. All around them, Otto realized, the horsemen that’d gone to relieve the League were smashing into the side of the Grey Legion with their own unravellers.

“ Audace ,” the Bruseni madmen called out, cheering as they drove deep into the enemy’s flank.

Throat dry, Otto reached out for his friend.

“Frederic,” he rasped as he caught the other man’s knee. “Leave us. You have to open the way for Malanza, else they will-”

“Peace, Otto,” the Kingfisher Prince gently said, catching his hand. “If there is a field where you die, my friend, I will not be far behind you.”

“We have to save them,” he croaked. “I can’t let them die again. I can’t , Fred.”

“And you won’t,” the Prince of Brus promised. “Look east, Otto. See what you missed when keeping us all alive.”

And he saw, then what it was Frederic meant. On the army’s left flank, where before there had been fighting, now instead there were fresh banners. Blue with silver Miezan numerals, a three. And with them, another banner he knew well: the Crown and Sword. The Black Queen’s arms. Reinforcements had come. The Third Army was here.

“How?” he finally asked.

“The Dead King might have tricked us, Otto,” Frederic grinned, “but he didn’t trick the Fox.”

—

Hanno’s steps stuttered to a halt.

“We’re here,” Christophe said, and immediately winced.

Likely castigating himself for having stated the obvious. The two of them had gone around the Proceran vanguard’s brutal fight with the Grey Legion, the Mirror Knight’s gaining turning more reluctant every time he had a look at the Lycaonese losses. Christophe had proved once that he could hold back the tide when fighting that same host, and now every time it fought without him being there to face it he thought himself responsible for the deaths. Hanno had sometimes been questioned for his defence of Christophe de Pavanie since the man took his fingers, but he could not think of a better or simpler defence than that.

Before them stood the second wall of Keter, the rampart that the armies would have to breach to reach the inner city and reach the Dead King himself. Though Hanno could not know how the Praesi were doing in their thrust from the northern gate, he could see how the Procerans had done and they were nearly there. It would not even take half an hour before First Princess Rozala began storming the walls and the Riddle-Maker could begin the spell that would silence the entropy traps. Once that was done, Named were to converge towards the palace where they would assemble in bands before going after the remaining Revenants and Scourges so that the way could be cleared for the Crown of Autumn and the Severance. Catherine, meanwhile, was supposed to be striking at the enemy from the back.

“Do we stay hidden until Her Serene Grace strikes at the walls?” the Mirror Knight quietly asked. “We’re here, Hanno. We could help them with the last of the Grey Legion.”

He had been debating the same. Though they were meant to remain hidden so that Christophe could not be targeted by the Scourges, would they really be able to converge here in time if they lent a hand? Hanno had his doubts. On the other hand, revealing the Mirror Knight’s position early was almost certain to warrant the Dead King’s attention: Christophe was, after all, carrying one of the means to kill the Hidden Horror. It was hard to justify anything to posed a risk to the Severance getting to that throne room. Before Hanno could consider the matter more, footsteps on a rooftop behind them had both heroes reaching for their swords.

But it was the Knight Errant who leapt down past them, that strange sword of his in hand, turning only at the sound of Hanno sheathing his own blade. The younger man looked surprised but pleased.

“Ah, I thought we’d have to look for you two for longer,” Arthur smiled. “Lucky us.”

The meaning of ‘we’ was swiftly expanded upon when the rest of the band followed suit and came down from the roof. Hanno’s brow rose when he saw there were only two more instead of four: the Painted Knife and the Harrowed Witch, the latter of which took her time to shimmy down the side of the house rather than leap. Kallia, leader of the band, offered him a grimace.

“We lost the Poisoner to the Hawk while the Prince of Bones distracted us,” she told him.

“And the Myrmidon?”

“We’re not sure she’s dead,” Kallia said. “She fell into a trap while killing a Revenant and the Tumult dropped about a ton of rock over her, but we never saw a body.”

“We haven’t seen a single Revenant on our way here,” Christophe told her, “much less a Scourge.”

The Levantine eyed him with distaste. Though the Mirror Knight had made efforts to mend bridges him, the Painted Knife was not of a forgiving nature and it was not in Christophe’s nature to keep his feet out of his mouth for too long.

“The Dead King is going after bands,” Hanno said. “He’s trying to thin us out as much as possible before we reach his palaces.”

“We figured,” Kallia told him. “I heard through Apprentice that Sidonia’s band got hit as well. I haven’t gotten word about deaths, though, only that there was fighting.”

Hanno’s stomach clenched.

“Did they get to the crown?”

“That would require taking the Archer by surprise,” the Painted Knife snorted, “and good luck to anyone who tries.”

Hanno was not anywhere as convinced, but he let it go. Neither of them could know for certain, arguing was pointless.

“Shall we go reinforce the Procerans?” the Knight Errant asked. “They could use the help, and the sooner we get the Titan to the wall the sooner we can seek out the Dead King.”

It was a simple enough question. And yet Hanno stilled to hear it. He knew what he was supposed to answer: they were all to wait until the Proceran assault on the wall began and only then intervene. That was what the plan called for. Getting the Severity to the Dead King was the most important thing, and though Hanno rankled at the thought he recognized the sense in it. Saving even a thousand lives out here on the battlefield would mean nothing if the Dead King won and everyone on Calernia died for it. And Hanno, looking at the same man who he was to protect at all costs, could not help but think back of the Arsenal.

They’d argued, there, about right and wrong. And though Christophe had been wrong about many things that day, he had been right about others. What single thing can we not be made to swallow, when it is put to contrast with the end of days , the Mirror Knight had challenged. What as a principle, if you did not keep to it in the dark? What’s a principle, when keeping to it kills everyone , a voice that sounded uncomfortably like Catherine’s argued back. Hanno found himself reaching for an old comfort, for the coin the Seraphim had once given him. Justice at the tip of his fingers. He missed that still, sometimes. Not having to rely on his own blind eyes to parse it all.

His fingers closed around the silver coin, the feel of its edges rough against his skin.

“Lord Hanno?” the Knight Errant said, tone hesitant.

Part of him wanted to tell them to do as they wished, but that was an abdication of responsibility. He had put himself forward to remain representative of Above under the Truce and Terms. He was to be the enforcer of the laws of the Liesse Accords under the Warden. To tell them they could do as they wished would be moral cowardice. In the end, he realized, it came down to a choice. Was it irresponsible to take the risk, or was it cowardice not to? Lives could be saved if he acted, but lives could be lost as well. Possibly much more than were saved. But was that really a reason not to act?

What had he cast away his own Name for, his place as the Sword of Judgement, if not to do something ?

Hanno breathed out, looking at the sky, and felt a calm settle upon him. He rolled the coin between his fingers, and with a deft flicked of his thumb flipped it. It arced upwards, silver shining in the sun, and looking at it Hanno knew which side he wanted it to land on.

And so he knew what to do.

“Follow the plan,” Hanno told them. “Stay hidden and protecting Christophe until the assault on the wall has begun.”

Mutinous looks answered. The Knight Errant was the one who answered.

“We could-”

“I will settle it,” the dark-skinned hero simply said, “so follow the plan.”

He felt Creation quicken around him at the words. It had been waiting, hadn’t it? For his resolve to take shape. And now it had: if it was a risk to do the right thing, what you should be doing, then you simply had to be powerful enough it was no longer a risk. Hanno of Arwad slowly unsheathed his sword, feeling the first motes of his Name begin to coalesce. It was not there yet, he thought. But it would be by this battle’s end.

“Go,” he said, his voice echoing in a way that had them shivering.

Not even the young knight argued with that. They went, disappearing into the maze of houses, and the hero slowly turned his gaze south. He had work to do, he thought, and began to walk. Hanno did not look on what side the coin had fallen, leaving it down there in the ash.

He no longer had a use for it.

Interlude: Legends III

“Not two sentiments are more deeply intertwined than hope and fear: the deeper one, the starker the other.”

– Magister Haides the Elder of Stygia

First Princess Rozala Malanza sat her saddle, fingers clenched around the handle of her sword, and watched as her people died like flies.

Conscripts, fantassins and the remains of the armies of Procer stormed the last wall of Keter with ladders. Not for her soldiers, the siege towers and ballistae of the easterners: they made do with courage and catapults, the carpet of corpses beneath their fit so thick it was as if a snowstorm of cadaver had blown through. A ram was hammering at the gate below, enchanted by her finest mages, but it was like trying to smash a stone with an egg. However skilled her wizards, they were no match for the Hidden Horror’s arcane mastery.

Yesterday, in that world that was taken back, Rozala and her host had not made it this far. They might not have this time, either, had the Fox not shattered the encirclement they’d charged into and anchored her left flank as she pivoted her lines to the right to face the onslaught. It had been a hard fight but she had won it, driving back the dead and shattering the houses in their wake to make barricades just as the Dead King had done against them as they’d advanced. A third of the Grey Legion had retreated through the gates into the inner city, Rozala having to twice order Prince Otto back so he would not pursue.

The northerners had been pulled back, moved to the rearguard where healers were trying to keep as many of their wounded alive as possible. The First Princess knew the weight of the debt she owed: the Lycaonese had served as her vanguard all the way to the rampart, shattering themselves on every barricade and elite guard so that the rest of the army would arrive in good state. It had been a cold choice for her to make, but a necessary one. If her soldiers were to die by the score with every heartbeat as they tried the inner wall, she would rather send the conscript into that storm than the Lycaonese.

Procer still had plenty of men, for all its horrendous losses, but few of the calibre of the Lycaonese. They were a resource to he carefully spent, not carelessly thrown into the slaughterhouse.

However ugly the thought, it was the price of being in command to have to think it. Rozala’s role on this dark day was not to keep soldiers alive but to win, for defeat now would be the end of them all. And still the princess of Aequitan – and Salia, now that she sat the high throne – felt her gauntleted hand grind against the grip of her sword. Everywhere she looked, men died. They shouted and screamed and fought with desperate strength to take the wall, but the strength of the Enemy was not waning. She was forced to look away from the butchery when her personal guard parted to allow a mounted man through.

“Your Highness,” Prince Arsene greeted her, bowing as much as he could when armoured and ahorse.

“Your Grace,” Rozala simply replied.

She did not ask him why he had come, letting silence do the speaking for her.

“Captain-General Ferreiro has swept the wall,” the Prince of Bayeux informed her. “She has a foothold and requests reinforcements so that she might expand on it.”

The First Princess took a moment to recall where the fantassin captain was fighting – further east, close to Beatrice of Hainaut’s forces – before decisively nodding.

“Then we commit the reserves to her breach,” Rozala said. “The gatehouse still holds strong, we may not have another opportunity.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Prince Arsene smiled.

Even odds whether or not he was lying. The Prince of Bayeux had spent most of the war trying to keep his soldiers out of the fighting as much as possible, but he was not unskilled in military matters. For all that he was averse to risk in battle, he might well realize that Rozala meant every word when she said that this might be the only opportunity for a breakthrough they would get today. Desperation on your part did not mean weakness on the enemy’s, the First Princess knew. She had learned that lesson during the Great War, long before she sat a throne.

“Pass on my compliments to Captain-General Ferreiro,” Rozala added. “I believe the Ligera Bandera might well be the first to take the wall today. A boast worth adding to the histories of their company.”

Should they all survive, she did not add. It was the dark cloud that haunted every sentence spoken these days, like some pettily malevolent ghost. Prince Arsene bowed again, offering three flowery compliments about her beauty before taking his leave. Alamans , she thought, turning her head so that no one would see her roll her eyes. Most of Rozala’s captains were out there, leading the Aequitan troops in assault their section of the wall, but she had kept a few with her under the salamander banner of the Malanzas to serve as councillors and command her retinue.

Captain Salvador had served her house for half a century, first her mother and then her. He’d once saved her life at the Sack of Lullefeuille. So when the hatched-faced man with the great mustache came to her with a grim look, Rozala straightened. Salvador was past sixty now, but there were few men she trusted more.

“There is trouble,” he quietly told her. “Our path back to camp is being cut off.”

Rozala’s stomach clenched.

“The dead are moving in behind us?” she asked.

“Princess Beatrice sends words that her outriders caught companies of Bones circling around her position instead of hitting her flank,” Captain Salvador said.

“Then they’re moving to hit us from the back,” Rozala grimaced.

Which was a potential disaster. When launching her assaults on the walls, she had been forced to cycle her wounded to the back of her formation so that fresh troops could lead the storm. There were fresh Orense men there also, of course, she was not the kind of fool to leave her back unguarded. But it was the most fragile part of her army and the Dead King’s general seemed to have sniffed out the weakness.

“What can we spare?” she asked.

“Not much, unless the reserve is recalled from the storm,” the older man told her.

Which she could not. Not only had she just sent them out, if they were pulled away then the Ligera Bandera’s foothold would be lost and their assault might entirely fail. But if the rear of the army collapsed, then... Fear is what the Enemy wants , the First Princess reminded herself. It is what he seeks with this manoeuvre . Rozala found her calm, laying a hand on the curved breastplate her late pregnancy was forcing her to wear. She knew what must be done.

“Scrape together everything you can,” Rozala ordered. “And raise the banner.”

“Your Highness?” Captain Salvador asked.

“We fight, sir,” the First Princess of Procer said. “I will lead the defence myself.”

—

Yara of Nowhere did not exist, then she did.

She was the edge of a roof, a handful of Revenants moving below her. There was a loose tile under her foot. She had never been able to feel Neshamah’s little puppets as well as true Named, but the echoes of their authorities gave her just a bit of a hook. It didn’t amount to much, since he could take control of them whenever he wished, but sometimes all you needed was a pebble to start the avalanche. Yara hummed, fingers tapping against the side of her leg, and waited for the right time. It was easy enough to know it even with her sight ripped out, for to Narrate a story was to know how to incite incident. Like, say, by nudging a loose tile forward. It dropped, shattering in the street, and the noise drew the attention of the last of the moving puppets.

The Revenant turned and saw in the distance the glint of the sun on steel.

“That’ll do it,” Yara mused, reaching for her flask.

Sahelian was hard to read, close to Named but not, and that made it difficult to follow her story past a certain point. For this much, though, what Yara could see would be enough. That pretty little trick the Hierophant had cooked up with the Crown of Autumn was not to stay in the game. It was a defeat Nessie might be willing to suffer, being shackled with that, and there would be none of that. The Grand Alliance was going to fight a cornered rat with nothing to lose, not a becalmed King of Death thinking there was still a way out of this. He was losing the Serenity, his great defensive ritual was being cracked open but the dwarves and now armies were about to hit the last of his walls.

“Didn’t I tell you, Neshamah?” Yara said, raising her flak in a toast. “Eat the fucking baby.”

—

Akua first knew it was going wrong when she saw the corpses.

Two of them, laying abandoned on the ground. The Grizzled Fantassin had been stabbed in the throat repeatedly until there was nothing left there but red meat, and she would not have recognized the Hunted Magician if not for his rich enchanted robes. The Proceran mage’s corpses was shrivelled beyond recognition, a dried-out husk.

“Shit,” Archer whispered. “There go our reinforcements.”

“Only two dead out of the band,” Akua said.

“Sidonia led them,” Indrani said, her tone too casual. “She’s not the kind of woman that’d leave the dead bodies of her people behind if she’s in any state to take them.”

The Vagrant Spear had spent some time under Archer when she led a band of her own, the sorceress recalled. There might have been genuine fondness there, though this was not the time for comfort and Indrani hardly cared to receive that sort of thing anyway. Not from her, at least. Only Catherine and Masego had managed to wedge themselves between the porcupine’s thorns so they would not prick their hand when extending it. Akua instead threw up shields without voicing an incantation even as her Archer nocked an arrow, only then approaching the bodies. There was no telling whether it was a Revenant, a Scourge or even simple dead that’d done this.

The Hunted Magician had been killed by a curse but those were not unique to the Mantle, and there seemed to be nothing magical about the Grizzled Fantassin’s ruined throat.

“So?” Archer asked.

“No telling whose work it was,” Akua admitted. “But I still believe we should change our path.”

“To where?” Indrani replied. “We can’t go east to the Proceran push, the whole point of riding in the shadow of Hakram’s assault was making sure our eggs weren’t all in one basket. We could try to go north to see of the Praesi are getting through, but there’s nothing certain about it.”

“I do not believe Bones did this,” the golden-eyed mage said, pointing at the bodies. “Which means it is also a certainty we will face Revenants, if we continue our path to the inner wall.”

“We can handle Revenants,” Archer dismissed, but Akua’s eyes narrowed.

Ah , she thought. Indrani was hoping to destroy whatever undead had assaulted the Vagrant Spear’s band in order to avenge a woman she’d been fond of.

“Whether or not we can beat them is irrelevant,” Akua replied. “Revenants are not like other dead, a part of Trismegistus’ attention rides with them always. The moment we fight even one, he will know where we are.”

Indrani’s face tightened with displeasure. Akua began to muster her arguments – using Catherine tended to be useful but only in small doses, since Archer would rebel at the thought of being ‘tame’ – when the other woman suddenly sighed and spat to the side.

“You’re right, Former Phantom,” Indrani conceded. “We need to make it quietly to the wall. Past Hakram’s lines and north to the Praesi, then?”

“It seems our best bet,” Akua agreed. “We-”

Sudden warmth against her skin as one of the enchanted rubies beneath her armour suddenly heated told her an enchantment was being directed at her, which saved her life. By reflex, she detonated her shields and the burst of it kicked up ash, coating the invisible Seelie’s side with it even as an illusion pretended to stab Akua in the throat. Archer kicked the Scourge in the side, getting a grunt out of her, and Akua hissed out an incantation. She threw a fireball at the Revenant’s head which the illusionist contemptuously cut through only to trigger the second part of the formula, a vicious burst of frost that shattered the blade.

The redheaded Scourged in her vulgar gown snarled, her passably attractive face turning monstrous and sinister, and barked out a word in something that sounded like Chantant.

“Time to run,” Archer grunted, idly putting an arrow in the eye of what turned out to be an illusion.

The Seelie was gone again, no doubt looking for an opening.

“Agreed,” Akua fervently said. “It’s only a matter of time until-”

A wave of pressure pushed at her magic as a ward came down. Containment , the sorceress idly assessed. We are being kept inside a circle .

“That,” she finished with a sigh.

“Cage?” Indrani asked, nocking an arrow as she spoke.

Akua nodded, beginning a trailing cant – the shared beginning of several spells of very different effects, which would let her adapt to the situation as it unfolded instead of being forced to start anew if taken by surprise.

“Bummer,” Archer drily said.

As if summoned by the word, silhouettes crested at the edge of rooftops and walked out into the streets surrounding them. Not a horde this, only a dozen individuals or so, but that was not a good sign. A horde of skeletons, Akua could have scattered easily.

The dozen Revenants converging on them would be harder to deal with.

—

The Dead King was not holding back, Rozala thought.

The Enemy had assembled a force meant to break her army’s rearguard with poisonous haste since the defeat inflicted on its attempted encirclement. The fangs were first bared before the First Princess arrived with her reinforcements, an attack in two strokes. First a stream of pale slug-like creatures made of corpse fat had swarmed all over the broken gate of Keter, devouring the soldiers there and then allowing themselves to be lit aflame by some undead mage. They burned merrily, cutting off Rozala’s army from the camp and filling the air with poisonous clouds that the wind was blowing her way. The second stroke came when ghouls began pouring out of what she was assured had been an empty house, overrunning three positions before a shield wall could be assembled.

“We faced the same trap yesterday,” the First Princess told the still-befuddled Orense general. “Deep basements were dug under some of the houses and kept sealed after being filled to the brim with undead. The enemy were there all along, waiting for the Dead King’s order.”

At least it wasn’t a maze of tunnels under the city they were dealing with, only sporadic hidden basements – though Rozala suspected that had more to do with a strong mage being able to collapse tunnels than lack of interest on the Dead King’s part. He’d always liked his underground tricks, the old monster. There was a reason Rozala still had to sleep with an ear to the ground no matter how many wards she intellectually knew were keeping the dead from digging underneath the camp.

“I am shamed to have been caught by it,” the dark-haired general replied. “We will earn back our honour with blood, Your Highness. Our shield wall will hold.”

No it won’t , Rozala thought, looking at the clash. Not only was Keter flooding their backlines with every spare undead they had to throw at it but a force had also clearly been assembled to crack their shield wall. It was the only reason the First Princess could think of there being so many ‘mantises’ here. Unlike beorns and tusks, who were meant to shatter shield walls with sheer power, that particular breed of monsters worked in precision. At first look they could pass for strange, carapaced horses but once they closed distance the mantises revealed the reason for their name: long, segmented legs ending in hooked bones blades unfolded.

They went over the shields of shield walls, tearing through soldiers from the back to shred them in moments.

She could see at least four dozen of those mixed in the horde the Orense soldiery was holding back as her retinue came to prop the up, though they had not yet struck. The moment they did, the entire shield wall would collapse in a matter of moments. Rozala’s mind spun, looking for a way through. What mages she had were already busy keeping vultures away, lest the flying pests begin going for the wounded and attack the healers, and though she’d been able to pull away a few priests it would not be enough to hold back the enemy when they pushed. Their defence would not hold, she realized as she went through every trick and tactic she’d learned since she had first taken up command.

There was nothing she knew that would keep the dead from tearing past them and overrunning the infirmaries, sweeping over priests and wounded before consuming the entire Proceran army from the inside.

Then the banner caught her eye. The scarlet salamander on flaxen bed with the Malanza words beneath: Through Peril, Rise. Yes , Rozala thought, laying a hand over the armour beneath which her daughter yet to be born slumbered. I should not have forgot. She could not hold the defences of the rearguard, not with the forces at hand, so she ought not to defend at all. She gave her instructions, sent for the priests and the horsemen, and then reached for her banner to take it up. Rozala spurred her horse forward, heading for the shield wall, and once there shouted the order.

“STRIKE,” the First Princess of Procer screamed. “We were the first wall of Calernia and we will not fail it today, so STRIKE!”

There were not enough priests to make a great wall of yellow Light, the kind that had been first used at the Battle of Camps and one many fighting says since, but that wasn’t what Rozala had been after. Instead she had told them to create oblique lines through the enemy ranks, crackling Light burning the dead whenever they touched it. Their formation suddenly crisscrossed by lines of Light, the undead fell into disarray even as the Proceran foot surged forward. Rozala surged with them, a ring of guards around her as to the sides the last of her cavalry poured into the breach. It was working, the First Princess realized with numb relief. The mantises had come out but they were a precision tool, not much better than any other construct in a wild melee, and as the dead were driven back the priests ended their lines of Light to create fresh ones deeper in.

But the attack was slowing down, ground to a half by the sheer thickness of the ranks of the dead, and Rozala knew her duty.

She went into the press of it, sword in hand and banner in the other. It was a wild thing, the melee, and though she swung through skulls and shattered shields a ghoul slipped past her guards and under her horse, eviscerating her. The undead was pinned by a spear a moment later but Rozala fell off, desperately leaning on the banner so she wouldn’t land on her belly. It was in an awkward crouch she landed, both hands on the banner’s shaft as she had dropped her sword. She groped for it and heard roars around her as she rose, the soldiers burning at the sight of the First Princess fighting in the ranks. Malanza swords all around her, Rozala raised her banner.

“Procer,” she shouted. “For Procer, and every land we lost!”

They charged, Light and sorcery crackling on all sides as steel clashed with steel. The dead were breaking, Rozala could feel it. And soon there would be reinforcements – the Fox was sure to see that there was heavy fighting at the rearguard and move to support them. The enemy lines gave, like gasping lips, but even as triumph swelled in her heart Rozala Malanza saw the Revenant. A tall and armoured form, its rusted plate weeping red as it strode forward and calmly cut through men. Its great two-handed broadsword shattered shields and smashed helms, unerringly cutting down anyone who approached. And the Revenant was coming, inexorably, for her.

“Priests,” Rozala shouted, but none answered.

It would be steel, then. She surged forward with her retinue, unwilling to give the enemy the choice of how to engage. They would flood it with numbers. Only the Revenant kept advancing, cutting through one soldier after another and ignoring the blows that ripped at its rusted plate only to reveal only weeping redness beneath it. Rozala screamed as Captain Salvador’s head went flying past her, thrusting her blade into the Revenant’s visor, but she felt no flesh beneath the steel. Only bones and wetness. The Revenant cut at her, sending her flying back as her pauldron came off from the strength of the blow and her bones creaked.

Leaning on the banner she got back to her feet as the Revenant kept calmly advancing. All around her the charge was faltering, fear spreading through her soldiers, and Rozala Malanza breathed out. It was clear, in her mind’s eye, what must be done. One last death to stiffen their spine and save the army from collapse. I’m sorry, Louis , she thought. We’ll both wait for you halfway there, that we might meet the Gods Above together. The First Princess of Procer lowered her banner like a spear, pointing at the Revenant, and shook her hair free of her helm. She took a step forward, seeing the rising arc of the enemy’s blade and her death waiting within in.

“Forward,” Rozala Malanza shouted, charging forward. “And fear not-”

Before the banner could spear the Revenant’s throat, before its blade could take her head, a star fell. Or so it felt like, for the blinding Light seared her eyes as she glimpsed a man rip out the dead Name’s sword arm and wetness gush out. Rozala stepped back, shading her eyes, and when the brightness faded she saw Hanno of Arwad drive his sword deep in the Revenant’s guts. Light boiled, roiled, and red vapour wafted upwards as the creature let out a silent scream. The hero turned to her, face calm as glimmers of Light turned his eyes gold in the shade of the falling ash, and smiled.

“And fear not death,” Hanno of Arwad smiled. “Not while I am here.”

The hero cocked his head to the side, as if listening to a voice only he could heard, and then he was gone in a burst of movement. Leaving the First Princess of Procer to look forward at the collapsing ranks of the dead before her, and the victory she had somehow not needed to die to achieve.

—

The Mirror Knight took the blow on his shield, the beorn driving him three step backs into a swarm of skeletons that hit away at his armour fruitlessly. Even when they found his skin, their blades bounced off. Gritting his teeth, Christophe de Pavanie pulled at the power within himself. Reflect . The beorn’s belly was ripped open as the strength it had struck with was thrown back at it, the hero taking a measured step forward to cut all the way through the side with his blade to make sure it wouldn’t be getting up. He shook off the skeletons, smashing them every which way, and checked that the Severance was still safely loosened to his back. It was.

A Bind had tried to take it earlier only to be cut all the way through without Christophe lifting a finger to achieve this, but this would not be the Dead King’s last attempt. He was out in the open now, it was only a matter of time until harder foes than skeletons and beorns came forward. Absent-mindedly sweeping through a company of skeletons to make it back to the Ligera’s position, the Mirror Knight found most the others had gone further down the rampart to help the fantassins in their bid to reach the gatehouse and wrest open the doors. Attempting to go down into the inner city through the stairs had only served to revealed that the ‘entropy fields’ were already awake.

Only the Knight Errant remained at the foothold, the boy in fair armour wielding a sword that looked like smoke turned into a blade.

“Sir Mirror,” Arthur Foundling called out. “You’ve returned. The beorn?”

“Done,” Christophe said. “There were also a pair of tusks so I cleaned them up while I was there.”

They might have been difficult for the fantassins to deal with, if he’d not been there to take the charge on their behalf.

“You just-” the boy began, then shook his head. “Never mind, I should have expected no less.”

Was the Knight Errant doubting his word? It was an insult, but Christophe supposed he’d been the only one to see the tusks. He would not take it personally. Callowans were not well inclined to him as a rule.

“Have you spoken with Captain-General Ferreiro?” he asked.

“No,” Arthur Foundling said, “but she sent an officer. She’s focusing on the push towards the gatehouse to try to let in the rest of the army, but she’s warned us that-”

A shadow was cast over the two of them and the soldiers all around, for a tall shape had come to stand between them and the sun. The Titan Kreios strode over houses carefully, taking pains to avoid stepping on Proceran soldiers, but he was tall enough even a careful stride was like the wind. Christophe had never quite realized how tall the Riddle-Maker was, taller even than the towering Gigantes. The ancient mage used no ladder to climb the rampart, climbing it as one would a garden fence. He crushed a few hundred dead rising to his feet, standing taller now than all of Keter save for the tower deep at the heart of the Crown of the Dead.

“That the Titan is headed our way,” the Knight Errant faintly said.

“Thank you for the warning,” Christophe politely said.

Which had the boy glaring at him for some reason. Callowans, he ruefully thought. So prickly. The eyes of the Titan found them both, sliding over to the Severance and lingering there for a moment.

“Children,” Kreios Riddle-Maker said. “Prepare yourselves. I will now silence the enemy’s trick.”

The Knight Errant saluted with his sword, but Christophe simply nodded. Satisfied of the acknowledgements, the Titan stepped down into the fields of time that should have wasted him away like a man sliding into a pond. The old god only laughed at the magic lapped at his body.

“A hundred million droplets can be an ocean, Young King, but they can also be nothing more than rain. Your learning is yet shallow.”

The Titan raised his hands, and magic began to pour out of the ground like tendrils.

“Kronia will forgive me, this once, for borrowing her sickle.”

The Mirror Knight watched silent as magic burned, igniting the air, and stone began to turn to dust.

—

Akua flicked her wrist, a burst of nail-shaped curses flying out and hitting the Revenant’s face.

They punched through the skin and he began to scream as his senses melted, the sorceress hastily backing away as a burst of flame exploded where she had stood a heartbeat before. Tracing a rune in the air, she smothered the smoldering sparks before they could turn into an animated shape again and broke into a run before the javelins began to fall. She turned a corner even as the sound of them crashing through stone tiles sounded behind her, murmuring a curse of thinning as she trailed a finger across the wall she was passing by. A heartbeat later a long-haired winged Revenant in armour dropped behind Akua, her iron spear already halfway into a strike.

Just in time for the wall to collapse on top of her armoured form.

Akua tossed back a minor jinx of slipperiness on the pile of stones to slow her down, knowing that the formula was highly responsive to separate surfaces, and lengthened the strides of her run. Archer was meant to be covering her, but... The thought was interrupted by a familiar silhouetted being thrown through a bronze grid a mere ten paces before her, Indrani let out a curse as she tumbled into old dust and landed in a sprawl. The golden-eyed Soninke dipped into her magic again, crafting a quick and loose illusion of the two of them running away as she ducked into the house and dragged Archer out of sight.

“Hey, Akua,” Indrani groaned. “You found that ward anchor yet?”

Until it was destroyed, neither of them was getting out of the glowing circle in which they were being forced to fight. They’d tried, and while people and objects seemed able to come in nothing seemed able to come out – not even dust, which was coating the side of an invisible half-sphere instead.

“I believe I have,” she replied, “but you won’t like it.”

“It’s under that fucker in the golden armour, isn’t it?” Archer sighed.

“I narrowed it down to a city block and within it there is a house whose entrances were all sealed by magic,” Akua said.

“The one with the golden fucker on it,” Indrani pressed.

She nodded in agreement, offering a sympathetic grimace.

“At least it’s not a second Scourge,” Archer said. “That’d be a little much even for me.”

Which was, naturally, when lightning struck the roof above them and the Tumult made his entrance into the battle. Akua cursed, throwing up a shield as the two of them made for the door under collapsing stone, only to find two Revenants bearing swords and shields already there. The Twins, Akua had taken to calling them in her mind. Neither of them were all that difficult to deal with, but so long as one stood the other would keep repairing itself. They were not a great concern, but if they were here... Archer grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, throwing the both of them to the side as javelins began to fall like rain. They were simple bronze rods, but each hit with the strength of a ballista’s bolt.

That Revenant only had one trick, but it was a decent one.

Akua landed on her back, Indrani’s elbow digging into her face, and as the other woman got up longknives in hand she idly bespelled a cloud of smoke to blow into the face of the Twins. Knees aching, she began to rise. If she lingered, javelins would follow.

“I’ll take Ugly and Ugles,” Archer said. “Can you blow open that closed house?”

“I can,” Akua agreed, but her eyes strayed above.

Storm clouds were gathering above their head. The Tumult had learned better than to fight her face to face, but its ability to so easily serve as magical artillery remained a thorn in Akua’s side. If she’d not been looking that way already, the sorceress would never have seen the roof tile bend. As if there had been weight on it. She began to trace a shield, but even as Indrani turned at her alarmed shout and the Seelie flooded both their sights with illusions, Akua knew the Scourge’s knife would strike true. The timing had been too good.

Or so she believed, until the Seelie came back into sight as her knife-wielding arm was snatched out of the air and she was smashed into the ground.

“You move loudly,” the Lord of Silent Steps chided the undead.

Akua’s heart soared at the sight. Ivah of the Losara was a powerful ally, for all that it usually disdained head-on fights.

“Ivah,” Archer grinned. “You took your time.”

“Apologies, Mighty Archer,” Ivah idly replied. “I had to shepherd children.”

“HONOUR TO THE BLOOD!”

Akua blinked away the burn of the Light as the Vagrant Spear tore into the side of one of the Twins, deftly kicking the other in the face as she pierced through the other’s stomach. Akua flicked a spell of binding at the feet of the one getting kicked, ensuring he fell, and Indrani shoved a knife through the throat of what should have been the Seelie but was instead a bed of wilted flower petals. Twice now the Scourge had pulled that trick and it wasn’t getting any less annoying. The sorceress smoothly transitioned into the incantation for a triple-layered shield that would be able to withstand the javelins soon to follow, but it ended up unnecessary.

A spectre leapt out to devour them as they howled through the air, the Harrowed Witch recalling her brother’s bound shade to her side afterwards.

“The third?” Akua asked the Lord of Silent Steps.

“Listen for the shouting,” the Firstborn drily replied.

There was a blind scream of rage somewhere ahead, followed by a house collapsing and the storm clouds above their heads calling down lightning there instead. One the torrent of lethal magic had passed and smoke began to rise, mocking laughter came from that direction.

“Should have put your back into it, Tumult,” the Red Knight taunted. “I’ve had worse from Cleven weather.”

Well, Akua thought as she rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck – a terribly uncouth habit, but exactly as satisfying as she’d thought it would feel when she had first seen Catherine indulge – now this ought to be a rather more even fight. She adjusted the box holding the Crown of Autumn on her back and reached for her magic.

“Let’s begin this properly, then,” the Doom of Liesse said, her smiled showing all too many teeth.

—

Cordelia had always hated battles.

An ironic thing, considering that for all her politicking it was victorious battles that had enthroned her as First Prince of Procer, but no less true for it. One of her predecessors, First Princess Eugénie of Lange, had once called diplomacy ‘war without all the clumsiness’. For all that Cordelia was inclined to think well of the woman’s record otherwise – most of her reign had been spent repairing Procer after the wounds inflicted by the Dominion throwing out its occupiers – in that particular matter she disagreed. Diplomacy was simply not as arbitrary as war, where an empire could be doomed because it had been a misty morning or the wind was blowing the wrong way.

Under the intellectual disliked, though, the fair-haired princess knew that her hatred came from the source of helplessness. All her life she had sent other people to make war on her behalf, sitting miles away behind tall walls and fighting the urge to bite at her fingernails until she could knew whether the day’s horror was to be the mother of victory or defeat. She was hardly the only royal, even among Lycaonese, who did not take to the field themselves. Yet she had always felt it as a manner of failure on her part. Her mother had fought in the ranks, sword in hand. She’d died there too, though, leaving Cordelia to rule Rhenia alone all too soon. It still reeked of sending people to die in her name, a feeling she guiltily despised all the more for the way it held a grain of truth.

And now here, at the edge of the world, she still sat behind wards and walls as she waited for news of the battle unfolding inside the Crown of the Dead.

She had done her best to ensure that she could get swift word. At each gatehouse she had a group of messengers and a loose net of them through the entire ring camp that would serve as a relay to get developments to her quickly. It was how she’d learned that the League’s offensive had stalled, only for Basilia to break the stalemate after heavy losses for the Bellerophans. She had learned of it too late for her tastes, though, and the further the armies got into the city the less she heard. Marshal Juniper had allowed an observer in her command tent as what Cordelia would like to take as a gesture of goodwill but was most likely Catherine’s order, which helped, but only so much.

Messengers now had to venture into Keter, following the armies through besieged lines and dangers. Half of them never returned and those that came back did not always have much more information to share than what their eyes could gather: officers on the ground had more important duties to handle than speaking to her messengers and Cordelia was no longer First Prince. She could be ignored, now, dismissed. Her displeasure no longer had the old sting to it.

What she did learn came in waves. There had been an attempt to encircle and destroy Principate forces that’d been beaten back with General Abigail’s timely help. The Clans had broken through all opposition coming in from the west and reached the walls. The Dominion, serving as the Black Knight’s rear guard, had seen some heavy fighting. The last word she’d gotten was that the Titan had reached the walls, though she had no real notion of whether or not the ancient mage had silence the Dead King’s magical defences as he had promised to. Still, in at least one regard Cordelia had learned in advance of generals and officers instead of the other way around.

Out in the Ossuary the dwarves had sent up the first of two agreed-upon signals: the Herald of the Deeps had reached the ritual site below the city. The second signal, which would signify the site had been destroyed, had yet to follow. No doubt the Enemy had fortified the position thoroughly, so it could be some time yet before it fell – the very reason Kreios’ presence was necessary, since the ‘entropy fields’ were certain to activate before then.

Cordelia could only imagine, the very reason she was sitting at the table with sheaths of papers before her and trying very hard to think of anything except the possibility that the Grand Alliance would lose. Armies had made it to the inner wall, she knew, and even broken through. But the fighting would only get harder from there, with little room for retreat as the dead still in the outer city tore through the rearguards. Yet she had not wanted to spend the entire battle reminding herself she had been better raised than to bite her nails, which was why she’d brought out a quill and inkwell so she might lay out proposals for the tax system of Cardinal one it was built.

The attendant territory of the city, after all, would be much too small to sustain it should the seat of the Accords grow to the expected size. The princess had been considering the respective merits of tariffs and whether quarries might be a possible source of revenue for some time, but even as she tried to make herself look at the papers she found her attention straying. In the margin of a section on the dangers of imposing punitive tariffs when a trace crossroads was just beginning, she’d found that her hand was tallying losses. How many soldiers dead, how bad were the odds getting? Cordelia’s attention was failing, the only saving grace being that Brother Simon had been too polite to comment on it.

She sighed, giving it up for a lost cause, and set down the quill.

“The waiting is always the worst part,” Simon de Gorgeault quietly said.

“I sometimes feel I have done nothing else all my life,” Cordelia tiredly admitted. “Just years and years of waiting in between a few days of haste.”

The once-spymaster sympathetically nodded.

“I have found prayer a comfort in moments like these,” Simon said, “but I suspect you’d not share the inclination.”

“I like the Gods to stay in their Heavens,” Cordelia smiled. “The Highest Assembly’s floor is crowded enough without them taking up seats.”

“Blasphemy,” the lay brother said, though his tone was amused.

It was not that the princess did not believe in the virtue of the Gods Above and the worth of their teachings, but rather that she’d never thought of miracles as a solution. Miracles were passing things, beautiful but ephemeral, and you could not build on such a foundation. Prayer was good and worthy thing, but Lycaonese knew better than to rely on it when spring arrived and the Chain of Hunger came calling. Or perhaps that was only a conceit, Cordelia Hasenbach thought as she touched the bracelet of ratling teeth digging into her wrist under her sleeve, as she felt a folded parchment burning against the warmth of her breast.

Perhaps it was just a different kind of prayer, to wear the last gifts of those she had loved and hope they would see her through the storm. Friedrich Papenheim’s small act of kindness had stayed with her since she was fourteen, and now Agnes Hasenbach’s last words were to remain against her skin until she knew it was time to read them. One last augury from another cousin she had loved, another kin devoured by this black war. Deep down, Cordelia was relieved she would be abdicating Rhenia and Hannoven to Otto Reitzenberg. She feared returning north and seeing only a land of empty seats and silences, the expression of everything and everyone she had lost.

“They will breach the inner city soon, if they have not already,” Brother Simon told her, looking past the entrance of the tent and into the emptied camp around them. “The first inklings of victory will soon arrive.”

Or defeat, she thought, but the former spy was a hopeful man at heart. Cordelia rose to her feet, moving towards the carafe of water at the other end of the table, and cocked a questioning eyebrow at her companion. He shook his head so she poured a cup only for herself, debating whether or not she should force herself to attempt working again, when the sound began. It was a small thing, at first, like a faint chirp. Only it swelled and grew, turning from whisper to word to scream, and the princess abandoned a half-empty cup to walk out of the tent. In the distance, past the edge of the camp, she saw only the heavy smoke rising from the chasm.

It had been this way for hours, the magics of the dwarves lighting up the foul emanations as if an entire Hell had been unleashed far below. Yet Cordelia’s cool blue eyes narrowed as she realized that it was not only smoke she was looking at now. There was movement there, half-hidden by the obscuring curtains.

The first to come out was a bird, a simple sparrow that flew out of the smoke, but the sight of it had dread pooling in her stomach.

A wave followed, dead birds and insects pouring out of the depths of the chasm like a tidal wave that swept over the camp. It was so thick it cast a shadow, hiding away the sun, and hulking shapes began to swim in the sea of death like great whales. Winged wyrms and flocks of vultures, but also creatures shaped like boxes of bone kept aflight by balloon-like breathing lungs. And not so much as a single fly moved towards Keter, towards the fighting in the city and the armies coming for the Dead King’s head. They all converged in one direction. Cordelia Hasenbach breathed out as the Enemy’s hordes came for the weapon she had kept as a knife to his throat.

“Bring up the battle wards,” the princess ordered, voice eerily calm. “And get into position.”

Fear had frozen her soldiers at the sight of what was headed for them, despair at numbers they knew they could not beat, but her voice woke them. There were salutes and captains began to shout orders, sorcery flaring as mages put up every layer of defence they still could. The Hidden Horror feared the ealamal, Cordelia thought. He was coming to destroy it. Even if her life had not been in the balance, it would have been as fine a reason as any to fight to the last defending it. Her fingers reached for her heart and the parchment folded against it, but the fair-haired Lycaonese forced herself to pull away. It was not yet time. She tore her eyes away from the swarm, turning to Brother Simon.

A brave man, the spy, who was looking at the tide of death much as one might look at inclement weather.

“I will have to trouble you, Simon,” she said.

“What for, my lady?” he asked, sounding surprised.

“A sword,” Cordelia Hasenbach grimly said.

If the ealamal was overrun and the battle about to be lost, she may well have no choice but to pull the trigger. But she would not let fear own her, not when she bore on her the last wills of her cousins. She was, for all her years in the south, still Lycaonese.

She’d fight until the end of the world.

Interlude: Legends IV

“One hundred ninety-nine: this list began with the simplest of axioms, the first. In the years since others like you have added to or taken away from it, a chain that goes back further than any of us know, changing and twisting as it grows. In time no two list will be the same, save always in this one regard: there is no two hundredth axiom. That place remains empty, so that once you learn something worth passing down you may fill it yourself. Look forward, as we once did, and let those who come after you learn from our mistakes. What greater gift can there be?”

– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

It would be a balancing act in two parts.

The first was the war without, the battle against the Dead King. The Black Knight had learned from yesterday’s fighting, undone as it had come, but so had the enemy. Still Waters had been revealed, its strength against the Dead King’s armies laid bare, and even as High Marshal Nim had adjusted her tactics so had the ancient lich. Though he could not stop her dead soldiers from rising as wights, the trails of alchemy once dropped over enemy formations to turn them wild had lost effect: the skeletons and ghouls simply dropped once touched by the compound. A Wolofite mage by the name of Kendi Akaze had theorized the effect was automated, added to sorcery that had raised the undead, and Lady Seriff had confirmed it after a few experiments.

It made the weapon more lethal, true, but took away from it the most useful property: being able to turn Keter’s numbers against it. Akaze, who must have impressed the cantankerous old mage, had been drafted as her assistant while she tried to find a way to exploit the Dead King’s most recent spellwork. It had smacked of an apprenticeship in the making to all witnesses. The Black Knight hoped for their success, as she could use the help: Keter had learned how turn the advance up the avenue leading to the inner wall into a murderous slog. Nearly half the undead mages in the city had been concentrated in the path of their offensive, hitting away at the flying fortresses with rituals to keep them away so they couldn’t lend support, and worse still was the engines.

The last third of the avenue was a road no more, a space of collapsed houses three miles wide and two long having been created, and the reason why was clear: batteries of siege engines were bristling on the inner wall, waiting to hammer away at any soldiers that began to walk across the open, broken grounds before the rampart.

The second was the war within, the struggle for the Praes that was to be. There were parts of the land that did not even yet know the Dread Empire was now the Confederation and the Black Knight knew well how fragile the bargains struck in the Tower’s dying light still was. It stood only so long as the Warden loomed tall over all the schemers hungry for more, so long as the Legions of Terror remained the greatest army in the land. Else when they all came home, the High Lords might look at a weakened force under Nim and the chancellor and decide that perhaps they wanted to be Dread Emperor after all. That supreme rule was worth the risks of a war. They had all agreed to disband all armies save the Legions, but how much was their word really worth?

So the Black Knight must make sure none of them thought they’d be able to win that war, when temptation came calling. That meant spending their house troops, their levies, and preserving the strength of her legions. Only it could not be obvious, or wasteful, for otherwise they would be well within their rights to rebel at such treatment – for all that the private armies were now officially auxiliaries under the Legions, the way their noble commanders still led them proved how thin a pretence that truly was. So Nim must balance need and dues, all the while keeping her eye on what must be done to win the battle without lest the battle within ruin it.

It was a difficult exercise, but the Black Knight had found that she was equal to it. Her Name burned at the challenge, alive in a way it had never been when Amadeus still lived and his shadow was still cast over all who would wear his old mantle. It was one decision after another, another puzzle to move around until all the pieces fit the right way.

“The Fourteenth is getting mauled,” her Staff Tribune told her. “Their mages are being tied down by hexenghouls so buzzards can land behind the ranks. They’re too far out on the flank, ma’am, it could turn south on us.”

The flying constructs would open their belly when they laded, spewing out the cargo of undead they’d carried and so effectively cutting off the Fourteen from the rest of Nim’s forces. Or at least potentially so, if they were allowed to build up numbers long enough. Best to take care of that quickly.

“Inform High Lord Dakarai that he is to commit the wavemen,” the Black Knight said. “Free use of enchanted arrows is allowed.”

Nok’s archers, the finest in all of Praes, should be able to clear out the enemy with concentrated volleys if they had permission to dip into fire arrows. Her Staff Tribune nodded, committing the words to memory.

“And send word to the Old Mothers,” she calmly added. “When the dead turn their rituals on the wavemen, I want the fortresses to unleash their full spellfire volume at the enemy cabals while they’re open.”

It happened as she had foreseen, and even as the Black Knight’s Name smiled coldly and smoke rose from the ranks of the wavemen, her vanguard – Aksum’s forces, nearly half of which were wights by now due to attrition – pushed forward three blocks during the lull in enemy spells.

“The grounds were trapped ahead of the vanguard,” her Staff Tribune told her. “Pit traps and caltrops. Beorns are hitting Aksum over them while the ranks are in disarray.”

Pit traps that the wights would fall into blindly, caltrops that would tear through the too-light foot armour of the Aksum levies when they tread on them. Beorns, massive distended bear constructs that they were, would be able to ignore both and spit out the dead they carried straight into the wavering Aksumite ranks.

“Send word to High Lady Abreha to withdraw,” Nim said.

“The beorns will trample all over her retreat,” her Staff Tribune noted. “Casualties will be steep.”

“They’ll rout before long anyway,” the Black Knight said. “But while her levies are being rampaged over, tell General Sacker she is free to fire with her ballistae while the Ninth replaces the vanguard. Unravellers included, after a round of ranging shots.”

The unravellers would quickly end the constructs, and the Ninth was still heavy on sappers compared to most legions: there was no better force at her command to get rid of the traps and unearth further ones. A high number of goblins, though, would mean a degree of fragility.

“Have one of the fortresses pass over the streets in front of the traps,” she added, frowning. “Still Water the area.”

That should allow Sacker long enough to clear the mess before being hammered. It went better than the Black Knight had thought it would: Abreha unleashed beasts she had been keeping in reserve to protect her retreat, slinking panthers made of shadow whose claws rent constricts asunder as they moved across the battlefield like ghosts. The beorns began lashing out blindly, leaving them easy prey for the ballistae, and the Ninth struck fast in the wake of the flying fortress’ path. The army pushed up another four blocks, and now High Marshal was so close to the open grounds she could taste it.

“The Levantines report movement at our back,” her Staff Tribune said. “Lady Osena requests instructions.”

“Tell her to dig in behind us,” Nim grunted. “We’ll need them to handle the rearguard while we storm the inner wall.”

The tall ogre cast a frown at the battlefield, watching as the Ninth clawed its way up another block and General Wheeler’s Eighth gained ground on the left flank. Too much, she thought. Keter was folding too quickly, though on the ground it must have looked only like a successful push. The Eighth’s cognomen was not ‘Trailblazers’ without reason, however, and given ground to take they would take it all too fast. Someone on the other side had read Wheeler just right. The order for the goblin general to pull back was on the tip of her tongue, but then she thought twice.

“Tell Wheeler to push...” she trailed off, gauging the distance with her eye, “half a mile forward, then lean on his sappers to blow through the houses and turn straight south instead.”

That way the Eighth would hit the position the Ninth was about to ruin itself on from the side, enough to relieve the pressure and allow Sacker to break through without ruining herself. More importantly, the half mile forward would make room for another maneuver.

“And inform High Lord Sargon that Wolof is to fill the gap when the Eighth swings south,” the Black Knight smiled. “He is free to use sorcery as he wills so long as he pushes no further.”

And if the High Marshal was reading the timing right Wheeler would get out of the trap just before its jaws closed, just in time for Sargon Sahelian to be left holding the bag instead. Wolof would react to the assault with massed sorcery, as they always did, which in turn would clear masses of skeletons quickly enough that the Eighth would be pivoting into surprised enemies whose reinforcements would be delayed.

“I’ll see it done, Lady Black,” her Staff Tribune swore.

On this last one, Black Knight saw, she had been a little off. The Eighth did get out in time, but it was actually too early: the first moments of the pivot, as sappers blasted through houses so that ranks of regular could advance through the rubble, were severely punished by the enemy. The sappers took a beating. But when Wolof moved into place and the enemy trap was sprung – shallow tunnels were revealed in a loose circle around the Wolofite position, a horde emerging in moments – the ensuring storm of sorcery did as she had foreseen. With the pressure alleviated, Wheeler broke through and struck hard at the enemy flank while Sacker pushed up the avenue.

Five blocks in half an hour, and as the Black Knight watched with a cold smile her vanguard finally reached the open grounds under the siege engines that the dead had prepared to break her army. It was time, then. Nim Mardottir’s fingers closed around the haft of her war hammer and she rose to her feet. She would lead from the front, now, lead the assault on the wall. But before that, she would show Keter why it was that she had kept her flying fortresses back the entire battle.

“Staff Tribune,” the Black Knight said, “pass my order to all fortresses.”

“Ma’am?”

“Sunset,” she said. “Begin immediately.”

And as the order went up, the massive floating castles began to move. Forward, at first, but then downwards . Streaks of magic shot up from the ground, Keter’s rituals pounding away at the stone and protective enchantments. They tore out chunks, blew through walls and burned hundreds alive. Even crashed one of the smaller towers. Yet most of them kept moving, kept coming down, and as the Black Knight rested her hammer against her shoulder she watched the massive piles of stone land with such thundering crashes they would never rise again. The first of the Old Mothers landed in front of the inner wall’s gatehouse, the fortress gate facing the Dead King’s own, and the rest of the castles fell like a curtain behind the enemy wall.

To cut it off from reinforcements just before the Praesi assault began.

The Black Knight of Praes raised her war hammer, and half a hundred thousand voices screamed themselves hoarse. Forward they went, to find one of the two fates the Wasteland taught its children: victory and death.

—

Hanno could not save everyone.

The world was not so simple that strength alone would be enough to ends all its ills, chase pain and misery out of Creation like spring leaning. He could not even save everyone in front of him, he was forced to admit as he moved from struggle to struggle across this cursed city of the dead and dying. For every man he arrived in time to keep from the enemy’s blades another died, be it to arrow or poison or the fangs of some howling ghoul. It was like trying to put out a forest fire with a cup of water. But still he tried, grasping tight that moment of clarity he had found when he cast aside the coin. Even if it was hard, even if it was thankless, he would act. He would not be able to save everyone, but that was never an excuse not to try.

So Hanno of Arwad picked up his cup and fought the blaze, undaunted, until Creation saw fit to acknowledge his conviction: Save , his soul sang out.

It was as if he’d opened his eyes for the first time. All around him he felt the war between doom and hope, the balance of victory and defeat between them, and for all that all of Keter was balance on the precipice of catastrophe he had never seen anything so beautiful. Hundreds of thousands from all over Calernia had come to this place, this day, and in the face of the darkness they fought tooth and nail to turn back the tide. It was like watching a sea of candles warring on the night.

And when Hanno saw the balance moved towards doom, his body began to move before his mind had even come to the decision. He cut through the streets and across rooftops, snatching life back from death where he could, until he found the battle to be won. Rozala Malanza, hard-eyed and defiant as she faced a Revenant with nothing more than banner and bravery, was to give her life to save Procer. And it might succeed, Hanno knew, for a time. But the world would darken for her passing and he could stop it, so he did. It felt natural to step in, to break the Revenant’s arm and boil its inside in a flash of Light. Never before had the Light come so easy to his call or his body been so light. The aspect, he decided. It was not simple sight.

Within moments of the Revenant ending, Hanno saw the tide begin to turn again to the north. Doom was clawing back the day, so the hero moved again. Save , his soul sang, and he raced against the dark. Hadn’t he all his life?

It was not a straight path. Again and again he went to the side, cradling another flame against his palms so it would not blow out. A handful of conscripts surrounded in a ditch, fighting under a dipping banner. A lone fantassin in a garish striped vest of orange and green, drowning in their own blood as a Revenant speared their limbs – and coming into a Name as Hanno cauterized their wound with Light, gasping out in pain. A company of Nicaeans being trampled by a tusk, a pair of Helikeans desperately fighting to bring back the unconscious body of a woman in general’s armour. Delosi mercenaries grimly protecting a stripe-cheeked corpse from an onslaught of ghouls. Each a candle, an inch of Creation reclaimed from the dark.

Doom was approaching, strengthening, so Hanno lengthened his stride. He did not even break it when he smashed through a pack of hexenghouls, pulling one off a richly armoured Taghreb girl just before it sank its fangs into her throat. Even as she called out in relief and surprise he kept moving, ignoring her shouts and that of be beleaguered retinue to duck under an arch just before it fell and blocked the way across the street. He grabbed a loose stone jutting out from a wall, using it to drag himself up on the roof just in time to see a bearded man and an old woman in robes dissecting a corpse atop rooftiles turned to glass. Their cries of triumph turned into dismay when miasma came pouring out, Hanno loosing a spear of Light into the cloud without batting an eye.

It dispersed and leapt down the roof before they could even see his face, landing on a beorn’s back and carving through the construct’s head. It collapsed forward, sliding down the sloped street and bringing him right before the ragged ranks of a warband of painted Levantines. They parted ranks as he jumped past them and sped up, feeling the call to be so very close now. He turned the corner fast enough his boot slid in the ash, eyes already on the fight ahead of him. The two of them fought back-to-back. Aquiline Osena moving in a sinuous blur of green and bronze, hooked sword blunt from having hewn too many heads open. Razin Tanja in grey and crimson, patient and measured as he killed in sharp strikes. The dead were swarming them, a battered warband collapsing around the lovers as skeletons climbed over the corpses of hundreds of Levantines.

An ambush had been sprung here, the Dead King come to take the lives of the Blood. One of you could live , Hanno thought, if they ran for it. But you never even thought of it, did you?

His aspect pounding inside of him like a marching drum, Hanno charged in. It was a blur as he moved with Light shivering down his legs, darting forward between blows as he smashed his way through the ranks of the dead. They began to throw themselves at him, to slow him down and tangle his legs, but Hanno let out a grunt and flared Light. His veins burned but the undead fled the pain, leaving him just enough room to push through and then... three steps and he swung, arm outstretched as the very tip of his sword brushed the arrow’s side. Enough to foul it, enough that it went wide instead of going through Razin Tanja’s open mouth. Hanno laughed, triumphant, for the tide was turning against doom.

He had saved candles, today, but these two felt like a torch.

“Retreat,” Hanno told them.

“Lord White,” Lady Aquiline said, “I give honour to your deed, but there are too many for-”

“There could be a thousand more,” Hanno of Arwad said, “and today it would not be enough. Retreat, my lady of Tartessos. They will not pass by me.”

He turned towards the tide, smiling, and flicked his sword to batter a javelin aside as the dead surged forward. Hanno returned to the fight, like a sword returning to the anvil, and in the back of his mind the song began again. Save , it prayed.

The day was not over, and neither was the labour of his hands.

—

When so many Named fought, it was near impossible to keep track of everything.

Akua had only added near because the Carrion Lord had been famous for doing exactly that and Catherine was slowly reaching those heights herself. She herself did not have that capacity, to her displeasure, so instead of frittering away her focus the sorcerers kept to her objective: collapsing the defences around the ward anchor. The house where she believed that the stone would be held had no entrance, large stones having been dragged to cover all of them, and there Akua believed she had found a weakness. Walls and even roof tiles could be enchanted defensively with some degree of strength, but a slab of stone? Not anywhere as well.

Knowing she would not twice get an opening, Akua waited for her moment. The Vagrant Spear was keeping the Twins busy, killing them almost fast as they came back to life as her spear blurred too swiftly for the naked eye to follow, and the Red Knight had barreled into the pack of Revenants that had chased Indrani and Akua for half an hour before this: all of them armed with spears and bedecked in bronze armour, they moved with eerie coordination. The sorcerers suspected only one of them had actually been Named but that an aspect was being used to share their strength, not that it seemed to matter to the Red Knight.

“ Devour ,” she snarled, ripping out a chunk of the necromancy keep the undead moving.

The strength she’d stolen healed the gut wound she’d taken from a spear and with scornful laughter the villainess began hammering into the Revenants again. Rooftops to Akua’s left kept shattering as the Lord of Silent Steps chased a wary Seelie, keeping her out of the fight as Archer and the Harrowed Witch tried their luck with the war anchor’s guardian: a broad woman in gaudy golden plate wielding an equally golden armour, her open-faced helmet adorned with a red feather. Indrani was being thrown off the roof again, but the Harrowed Witch moved her spectre in the way to catch her and toss her back into the fight. It was, Akua decided, as good an opening as she was likely to get.

Though it felt uninspired and somewhat pedestrian to use an entropy curse when the Dead King had displayed a greater work along the same lines in this very city, it was the best tool Akua had to remove the stone slab before the door. She did not speak the incantation, remaining hidden as she cast. It struck suddenly, withering first the magic the stone had been filled with in order to harden it and only then beginning to hollow out the slab from the inside. This, naturally, drew attention. The golden Revenant, ignoring Indrani’s knife as it scraped harmlessly against her armour, leapt down from the roof and ran towards her.

“A source detection array, I see,” Akua noted. “Unfortunate.”

She raised her wrists, speaking three words of power, and flicked them at the golden nuisance. The Revenant ducked into an empty house, but Akua hardly minded as he true target – the hollowed out stone – exploded in a burst of shard.

“Ivah,” Akua shouted. “The anchor.”

The golden Revenant then burst through the wall to her left, which Akua would admit to surprising her a tad, but Indrani had it in hand. Archer, thrown by the Witch’s spectre, landed on the Revenant’s back. She began stabbing at the golden wretch’s helmet, and for once the Revenant bothered to defend herself. Her hands were covering her head and Akua’s eyes narrowed even as Indrani was tossed through a doorway on the other side of the street, ferociously cursing all the way. The golden-armoured halberdier lowered her weapon at Akua, who had yet to move so much as an inch.

“Proceran, were you?” the golden-eyed sorceress drawled.

The golden Revenant charged, batting aside a spectre and in the same swing an arrow Archer had shot at her. Akua, instead of panicking as the distance closed, raised two hands and began to incant a simple fire cantrip even as her other hand traced a High Arcana rune. She unleashed the strong spell first, a burst of force that the halberdier took head on. It slowed the Revenant just enough for the second spell to land even as the halberd pierced forward towards Akua. A small flame caught the red feather, which turned to ash in a heartbeat. And in the heartbeat after that, the golden halberd and golden plate also turned to ash.

“You must have been,” Akua mused, “for only a Jaquinite wizard would have added such a painfully obvious unravelling clause to an artefact. Gods Below, I’ve seen greater subtlety from Callowan nobles – and their idea of trickery is a massive cavalry charge from the back instead of the front.”

Admittedly it was somewhat embarrassing how often that trick had defeated Praesi armies, but that was neither here nor there. The half-globe of forced revealed by traces of dust suddenly flickered and died as Ivah finished what she had requested of him, the ward collapsing without its anchor, and the Dead King proved to be a sore loser when the Tumult dropped another column of lightning atop that house. Ivah would survive, she had not doubt. Mighty of its strength were exceptionally difficult to kill by conventional means. The once-golden Revenant was still charging at her, but Akua raised her wrists again and she threw herself to the side – never noticing that Akua had never actually called on magic before Archer leapt into the whole to return the beatings she’d had doled out to her earlier in the fight. Throwing out a set of transparent shields around herself out of caution, Akua began to walk down the street.

Helping the Vagrant Spear out should end this faster, she mused, and then they could get out of here before more Scourges showed up. She dismissed half her shield, beginning the incantation for a curse of withering, and then one of the enchanted gems under her armour shattered as a protective spell tool the strike that should have severed her spine. Akua spun wildly, tossing a ball of flame in the Seelie’s face, but all it did was break an illusion. A strike that should have slipped between her ribs killed another gem, her last before she began bleeding, and there she landed a spell that blew a stream of heated ashes in the Scourge’s face. Only the Seelie hadn’t ducked because she doing something else: cutting off one of the straps keeping the box on Akua’s back.

“ No ,” she hissed, sword clearing the scabbard as she wildly swung the box rattled at her back.

The Crown of Autumn would not break, but if they got to the box... Archer burst out of the house, blades out, and Akua saw it all unfold with clarity. The Seelie ripped the box off her back as Akua slashed across her face, the metal contained landing on the street. There was a whistling sound as the missiles of the javelineer Revenant, which she’d thought destroyed by the Red Knight earlier, began to fall. And even as Akua screamed out an incantation, the Seelie’s knife whipped about and slid past her guard. It would open her throat. Archer stilled for a moment, halfway there, as they both saw the same thing: a javelin would hit the box. The crown. And Indrani could not be at two places at once.

Akua breathed out, closing her eyes.

Only she did not die. Instead as she sucked in a desperate breath the Seelie was tossed aside like a rag doll, Indrani getting in between the two of them, and with utter horror Akua watched as a javelin puncture the metal box. Went straight through, as if it were parchment, and these were not the javelins from earlier. This one was black stone, like the steles the Dead King sometimes used, and as Akua watched with dread as it craved through the crown itself. Cut it cleanly in half, two ornate half-circles of bronze. She went still as a stone even as there were shouts of surprise, Revenants withdrawing from the fight all over. They fled, leaving the two of them looking down at a disaster that might well kill every soul on Calernia.

Archer was the one who broke the silence.

“I don’t regret it,” she said, almost defiant.

“My life was not worth this,” Akua said, throat tight. “Indrani, Gods. It could not have been worth this .”

“I’d do it again,” her friend said.

And for once in her life, Akua Sahelian believed every word of what she had been told.

—

There were few places on a battlefield more dangerous to be than inside a siege tower.

The finest engineers of the Legions had spent decades trying to make them less of a death trap, experimenting with materials and protections and spell shielding, but in the end the essence of what a siege tower was wouldn’t change: a slow, tight box advancing in the direction of enemies with the means to shoot holes into it. The entire tower rattled as yet another spell hit it in the belly, the Black Knight’s fingers tightening around her hammer as she heard wood crack and screams erupt. The enemy had cracked the shell. Nim kept her dismay off her face so that her retinue would not see it, chewing the inside of her cheek and prayed that the tower had made it close enough to the rampart the enemy would not have enough time to topple it.

Another shudder beneath her feet as hoarse shouts filled the air and magic crackled, the dead and that of the Legion mages. Nim could smell smoke, which had her stomach clenching. The wood of the tower had been made proof to conventional fire, but that was not what Keter was wielding. If the flames caught... She would have trust in her mages and sappers to be able to put it out. As if to reward the thought, a moment later there was a shout from upstairs.

“READY!”

The Black Knight allowed herself a smile, steadying her footing as the ogres around her did the same. A heartbeat later, there were to metallic clangs in quick succession. The first came as the wall before her fell down, turning into a bridge that led straight into a rampart filled with undead. The second came as a pair of hooks slammed down onto the top of the wall, anchoring the siege tower to it. Further down there would be steel spikes jutting out to the same purpose, enchanted so they would be able to sink into even warded stone, but the High Marshal did not wait to hear their song. Instead she strode forward, hammer in hand, and brushed past her soldiers to charge into the midst of the enemy.

To fight the likes of these was as reaping wheat.

Every swing of her hammer shattered a handful, and as her personal guard charged in her wake the enemy ranks vanished like mist. Nim barely even drew on her Name, relying on simple strength and training, but like so many before them the dead crumbled under ogres’ hammers. It could not have taken longer than thirty heartbeats for them to clear out a foothold, and the Black Knight felt oddly cheated: she could not have swung her weapon more than a dozen times. She cast a look further down the rampart, seeing three of the five other siege towers had made it to the wall. The other two were wrecks, one afire and spilling out corpses.

“Secure the wall,” the Black Knight roared. “Hammers, with me! We take the gatehouse.”

The fighting there was fiercer, she could tell already. The stone was shaking from the impact of the enchanted ram hammering at the gate through the crashed fortress’ entrance, but atop the crenelled gatehouse a furious melee had burst out. Even the waves of fire and lighting from atop the crashed fortress were not enough for the Taghreb household troops to gain the advantage, matched as they were by withering curses and a monstrous new kind of ghoul. Even as the Black Knight hurried into the fight, she grimaced at the sight of a flesh-red ghoul devouring a corpse and soon after beginning to vomit out another ghoul.

It wasn’t those the High Marshal sought, though, as her guard smashed into the enemy’s flank and shattered the shield wall hastily raised in their path. Leading the enemy ranks was a tall silhouette, a Revenant in garish blue scale mail wielding a long barbed spear. He was kept snatching the lives of Taghreb officers, spreading panic so their ranks wouldn’t form up, and the Black Knight would have no more of it. A ghoul snapped at her heels but she batted it away with the back of her hand, tramping skeletons beneath her feet as she charged. The Revenant turned even as she raised her war hammer, spear darting out, but Nim kicked a skeleton into the way – and, while the bones blocked the Revenant’s sight, smashed it from the side.

It took the blow in the shoulder, but to her surprise did not crumple. That blue armour must be enchanted, and though the Revenant was tossed a dozen feet back it landed on its feet and was back on the move in a heartbeat.

“Fine,” the Black Knight growled. “The hard way, then.”

It feinted high but Nim had fought spearmen before and saw the thrust coming for her knee. Humans always through ogres were slow with their limbs, because of the weight, but that was only half true. The Black Knight might not move as quick, but she covered a lot more ground: a flick of the wrist had her hammer’s shaft swatting aside the spear. She added a second hand to the length of wood and turned the movement into a twirl that came down right on the Revenant’s head, hammering it onto the floor. Its knees bent, but that helm must have been enchanted too for it did not break. It didn’t matter. That heartbeat where it was as a hammered nail had been all she needed: she dropped her weapon, instead grabbing it by the throat.

The Revenant stabbed away at her but the angle was all wrong, the barbed spear sliding off the side of her plate as the Black Knight grunted with exertion. One hand on the throat and the other on the body she pulled, pulled until there was a wet cracking sound. The Revenant screamed, its spear rending deep scars into her armour, but Nim let out a roar of triumph as finally she ripped the undead apart: the head went off like a rag doll’s, the bones having broken where the armour would not. She held up the body as a banner, her guard roaring back and the fervour spreading into the beleaguered Taghreb ranks. At this rate, she thought, the gatehouse would be theirs in half an hour. After that all that was left was to push into the inner city and...

It was a pull at her hand that save her land, an instinct that had her moving before her body could know it should. She got the blue-armoured corpse in the way, the greatsword shattering the scales and still managing to knock her off her feet through it. She fell, crushing a skeleton and a Taghreb levy under her as she reached for her hammer and swung wildly at the silhouette standing over her. The Prince of Bones contemptuously took the blow on the side of his massive blade and swung back a riposte that ripped Nim’s helm off her head along with a chunk of her brow. A blast of fire rocked the Scourge as she swallowed a hiss of pain and scrabbled back to her feet.

The Prince of Bones. How the Hells had she missed the largest of the Revenants sneaking up on her? Illusion, had to be. Which meant she was fighting two dangerous foes instead of one.

“Rituals on my position,” the Black Knight shouted, trusting in her subordinates to carry the word.

The Scourge swept forward through its own soldiers, heedless of what it broke, and Nim warily stepped back as she wiped away the trails of blood getting into her eye. The Prince of Bones’ sword rose, but behind her magic crackled and the Black Knight grunted in satisfaction: waves of fire slammed down on their position, not doing much to either of them as it incinerated skeletons left and right. But as the smoke and ash billowed outwards, the outline of a cloaked figure behind the Scourge was revealed. The illusionist. Wasting no time, Nim circled around the looming Prince and made straight for the other Revenant.

It was backpedalling in a hurry, throwing at her spells that burned searing lights into her eyes and filled her ears with cacophonous noise, but the Black Knight grit her teeth and barreled through. Batting aside the ghouls in the way with a flick of her hammer, she pivoted into a downwards swing – in time for the instinct to pull at her again. She threw herself back, abandoning the hammer, and through the pack of ghouls already swarming her exposed head saw that large greatsword swinging through where she’d just stood. The ritual exposed nothing , she realized. It was an illusion all along. She’d been played. Tearing off the ghouls nipping at her face, their fangs tearing up her thick skin, she rolled to the side as the Prince of Bones struck powerfully enough to shatter the stone beneath the blow. But how could she trust her eyes? Any moment now there could be a killing stroke, a-

A burst of blinding Light darkened her vision for a moment, but through her squint she saw a man tear into the enemy’s side, ignoring ghouls to strike at a particular skeleton. And as Hanno of Arwad’s blade sent the hidden Revenant’s head tumbling, all illusions shattered and Nim realized she was again about to die. The blow took her in the shoulder, black plate crumbling as the blade’s edge failed to cut but still hit with crushing strength. The Black Knight screamed hoarsely and grabbed the Scourge’s sword hand as it pulled back, knowing another blow would be the end of her. The Prince shifted his footing but Nim often sparred with other ogres. She knew what it meant in an opponent her size.

She half-rolled out of the way of the punch and used the opening to catch the throat rim of the Prince of Bones’ armour – and its head, she thought, somehow seemed made of newer steel than the rest – to drag herself up. Pitting strength against strength she wrestled down its limbs, but it was a losing fight. The Scourge was heavier than her and implacable: her arms burned, her legs trembled, and inch by inch she was being forced back.

“Do it,” the Black Knight screamed. “ Do it now .”

The hero’s sword struck the Prince from the back even as she finished the last word, Light roiling and letting out screams as the blade melted its way through layers of steel. Nim’s arms gave, the Scourge’s arms enveloping her almost intimately before the strength turned crushing. She screamed, ribs snapping like twigs, and spat out blood and phlegm as all four of her lungs were pressed on. But she’d live long enough, she thought even as the Prince tried to turn to shake off the hero and failed – the dark-skinned human turned with it. Enough that the Scourge would die, and then she could get herself healed.

If she still wore her helmet, she would not have seen it. She almost didn’t anyway because of the blood blinding on of her eyes, but as she gasped in pain the Black Knight saw the glint of the sun on metal. An arrow. Close, too close for her to avoid and- Commission .

—

Hanno could not save everyone.

He had known it from the start, thought he had made his peace with the inevitable. And still a shout ripped itself clear of his throat as the Hawk’s arrow took the Black Knight’s life. The shaft sunk halfway into the skull, an instant death. He was forced to cease pouring Light into the Prince of Bones’ armour as he had been doing, melting layer after layer, to rip out his sword and cut through the arrow that would have gone through the back of his neck. The towering Scourge backed away, swinging his blade more to force distance than strike, but Hanno would have none of it. The edge of his sword flaring with Light he carved through the steel, craning his neck to the side to avoid another killing arrow.

A dart forward had him closing the distance, the Prince of Bones tossing the broken sword in his face. He ducked low, dropping into a roll to avoid another arrow – the Hawk must be close – and slashing across the Scourge’s face. The pristine steel mask was scarred, metal melting down from the mark. A leg, Hanno decided. The Prince of Bones was heavy enough that without both legs there would be no escaping. Clouds roiled above his head, magic flaring, but Hanno pressed on. A half-step let the Prince’s fist slide past him and he slid under, hacking at the side of the Revenant’s leg even as lightning began pouring on them both from above. Hanno grit his teeth, throwing up a burst of Light that dispersed the sorcery over his head as he carved deep into the Prince’s leg.

Not deep enough, he thought as he rose behind the Scourge’s back. Another arrow swatted aside, but it had been a distraction: darkness fell over him. Hanno grit his teeth, flaring Light through his heated veins enough that the Mantle’s curse shattered. Just in time to see the Prince’s foot about to hit his stomach. He threw himself below it, a screaming curse shattering the stone he’d been standing on, and as he rose behind the Prince again he listened to the call of instinct and struck out with his hand – catching the Seelie’s knife as it was about to thrust through his throat. Letting out an irritated grunt, he bent the Scourge’s arm and rested the flat of his blade against he neck.

It was not a mercy: using it as lever, he pushed the Seelie’s head into the hole of molten metal he’d left in the Prince of Bones’ back.

An arrow hammered into his shoulder, going straight through the plate, and with a pained grunt Hanno let out a burst of Light through the wound to get it out. He’d still lost his opening for a killing blow on the Seelie, who had turned into a bed of dead flowers. Magic was rising again but Hanno had to step out of the way when the Prince snatched up a skeleton and swung it at him like a club, the arc of it covering the Mantle’s shivering curse until it was right on him – he desperately pivoted to the side, smashing the pommel of his sword into the Seelie’s half-melted face when she reappeared trying to drive her knife into his side. The curse shaved away at his pauldron, rusting the metal to powder, and the Seelie ducked the swing that would have hewn open her skull.

Then the storm hit, and it was all Hanno could do not to be blown right off the wall.

Soldiers behind him were not so lucky, and the dead were scattered by hurricane winds – turned into trebuchet stones as they hammered into Praesi ranks – but Hanno pushed forward, Light burning in his belly. He saw the Prince of Bones retreating, the silhouette fading out of sight, and with a scream of frustration he shaped a spear out of Light and tossed it at the Scourge’s back. It missed the mark by a foot, and even as he grit his teeth the Scourges disappeared into the inner city. A full retreat. The Black Knight was dead and he hadn’t even taken one of them for it. When the storm ended, leaving shocked Praesi as the victors of the battle for the gatehouse, Hanno trudged back to the ogre’s great corpse.

The arrow was still in her skull, the sight of it leaving a bitter taste in his mouth.

“If I had struck from the front, I could have reached it with my arm,” Hanno murmured. “If I’d continued to listen to Save instead of buried myself in the use of the Light...”

Mistakes, though they had not seemed like it at the time. But then they never did, did they? That was why Hanno had one chosen to follow the Seraphim, heeded their answer to the Riddle of Fault. To be mortal was to fail, to make mistakes. The dark-skinned hero knelt by the Black Knight’s corpse, jaw clenched, and wondered how many more mistakes still lay ahead of him. Creation quickened around him, looking for resolve or its end, but Hanno did not embrace the bitterness. He had the strength to take the risk of doing the right thing, but that strength was not an absolute. He was but a mortal man, with all the limits that carried. He would not shy away from the truth of what he had chosen: he would fail. He had today, for all the other victories, and would again.

Hanno did not regret trying.

He ripped out the Hawk’s arrow, but after he did his hand lingered on the Black Knight’s bloodied face. His face fell into a pensive frown. Creation grew heavy. If it wasn’t about victory, if it was about doing all the good that you could, then could he really say he was finished? There was one more thing to attempt. Breathing out, the hero let the Light flow through him and into the villain’s corpse. He had seen Tariq Isbili used Forgive more than once, and there had been great priests could resurrect without the need of a Name or aspect. As his skin grew warm and he began to sweat, Hanno held a tight hand over the Light he was unleashing. It was about will, about intent – and if he slipped, he would burn the corpse instead of bringing it back to life.

Only, in a moment of clarity, Hanno realized that it was not truly resurrection he sought. It was something simpler, almost childish, but in a way perhaps less shallow. He had made a mistake. She had made a mistake. Perhaps all of Creation had made a mistake.

And Hanno of Award would Undo it.

He felt something infinitely larger than him brush against his soul, greater than even the Choir of Judgement, and the aspect lit up inside him. His hand against the Black Knight’s body serving as a conduit, he looked for ties to the soul so it might be called back and found... nothing? Light began guttering out even as Hanno heard footsteps behind him, a shadow being cast over his kneeling form. He turned, looking into an ogre’s rough face, and was about to speak when he suddenly closed his mouth. Through the fast-fading clarity the aspect had leant him, he saw in that body two souls.

“Black Knight,” Hanno evenly said.

“Lord Hanno,” she replied. “There will be no need for what I believe you are attempting. Though I will be weakened as I ride my soldier’s body, it will serve until my corpse can be made usable again.”

It was possession, he thought, but not in the way that he had seen it before. It was not a wraith stealing a body, this had been consented to. Explicitly or implicitly he could not tell, but the mark was there. This is not necromancy, not really. The principle behind it is different. Like a... chain of command, with replaceable faces. He suspected the Black Knight would not be able to ride a body that was not one of her soldiers. Inside Hanno’s belly the heat began to fade, Undo simmering down, and as it did he felt out the edge of the aspect’s limits. Once a day, a death or calamity could be undone. How the time was parsed he did yet know, but the limit of use was certain.

All that, he thought, and it had not been needed at all. Hand resting on his wearied brow, Hanno let out a snicker that turned into a quiet laugh.

“I was not needed, after all,” he mused.

And maybe that was the lesson he should have been learning all along, he thought. All this time, he had been trying to do it all himself. To keep the heroes one the right path, to keep Calernia from falling. Even before that, from the moment in Ashur where he had first become the White Knight. It had been him and the Seraphim who were to be concerned with the doling out of judgement, but no one else. Even with angels at his shoulder, he had walked alone. Only that wasn’t really true, was it? He’d been running around Keter trying to keep doom from claiming the day, trusting in his sword and the aspect he had come into, but that was not the whole of it – just the whole of him. They were all trying to hold up the sky today, and in the end all that Hanno of Arwad could claim to be was a pair of hands. Was it not the worst kind of arrogance, to think that it was on him for everyone to win or lose? Like a child he had decided that he would be strong enough to be able to do the right thing, as if his will was the only one in the world. He was not alone in this. He never had been.

Maybe it was time he acted like it.

“I agonized,” Hanno softly told the Black Knight, “over whether or not it was right for me to become the White Knight again. Whether it was going in circles, or nowhere at all.”

The ogre did not answer, her eyes wary and her silence thick.

“How very pointless that was,” Hanno mused, slowly rising to his feet.

There was no perfect Name that would save everyone, end all the ills of the world. He was just a man and Creation was larger than he would ever know. But he wasn’t alone. He didn’t have to do everything. He just needed to return the trust that had been placed in him. And while the Warden fought today to save the world, then Hanno could fight to save the people in it. To do as much good as he could, knowing that Catherine Foundling would be there to hold out a hand when he failed. Hanno looked around at the last of the dead on the rampart and the gatehouse that would let the Praesi into the inner city when it was opened.

The end was nigh.

“Let’s finish this,” the White Knight said. “The Dead King awaits.”

—

Akua Sahelian had been entrusted with the fate of Calernia and she had failed it.

Beyond all the excuses that were already springing up in the back of her mind, the justifications and the blame-shifting, that was the stark truth of it. She held in her hand the two pieces of the Crown of Autumn, the entrapping gift that had been meant to relieve the Dead King of his mastery over the dead and end the war in a single stroke. It was broken, irremediably cleaved in two. Only Masego’s cleverness in his surgery of the crown had prevented the cleaving from resulting in a wild release of power that would have torn a hole in the city and killed everyone involved in the crown’s failed defence.

But as Akua looked upon Hierophant’s work split asunder, a thought occurred. A mad thought, impossible, but in the face of extinction that was a meaningless word. And deep down, for all that it was laughable and ludicrous of her, she thought it could be done. That she could do it. So instead of falling to her knees, the golden-eyed sorceress turned to her friend. To achieve the impossible would have to be done like eating a whale: one bite at a time, until nothing was left.

“I need you to find me two needles in a haystack, Archer,” Akua said. “One that is currently on fire and full of undead.”

“My favourite kind,” Indrani agreeably replied. “What’s your poison, Saucy Siren?”

Beneath the flippancy she sounded relieved. For all that she had defiantly claimed not to regret the decision to save Akua’s life over going for the crown, the consequences of that choice loomed tall.

“First, find me a forge,” Akua said.

There were hundreds of these across the city, as though Keter’s great foundries were in the depths beneath the capital the equipment of the great army encamped within the walls must be seen to regularly lest it rust and break. Most were little more than glorified smithies, but it would be sufficient for her purposes.

“Gotcha,” Archer said. “And your other needle?”

“I will tell you after,” she replied. “Go.”

Indrani made a point of waddling slowly for the first few steps, but as soon as she turned the corner she disappeared in haste. The urgency was not lost on her. Akua, meanwhile, was left to handle another sort of trouble. The remains of the Vagrant Spear’s band were standing around the heroine, speaking with Ivah of the Losara.

“- been striking at bands, hit and run,” Sidonia told the drow. “Last I heard he got the Astrologer and clipped the Stained Sister.”

“It has not yet taken aim at Mighty,” the Lord of Silent Steps noted.

Only one name came to mind when the death of Named was so casually brought up: the Hawk. Akua stepped into the talks.

“That is because the Dead King believes he can brush aside the Night if he must,” she told them. “He used the Grey Legion to develop protective enchantments against it during the Hainaut offensive.”

“Mighty Sahelian,” Ivah politely greeted her, inkling its head.

No doubt Sargon would be highly insulted at the implication that Akua was considered the sigil-holder for her family should he ever be made aware of it, a twist of amusement that slightly brightened her mood. The reception from the other three was rather less warm. The Vagrant Spear offered a curt nod, the Red Knight a sneer and the Harrowed Witch looked like she was trying to figure out a way to excuse herself as soon as possible.

“Are any of you in need of healing?” she asked.

An empty question, when she saw that Sidonia was heavily wounded on the side for all that Light had half-cauterized the cuts. The Vagrant Spear eyed her consideringly.

“Can you leave the scars?”

Akua smiled and agreed that she would, laying a hand over the ruined flesh after the Vagrant Spear consented and whispering the incantation.

“Relying on another’s skill is weakness,” the Red Knight pointedly said.

“Fascinating,” Akua charmingly replied, all smiles. “You will have to tell me how you forged your sword, then. And whenever did you get the time to farm the wheat that went into every piece of bread you’ve eaten?”

The other woman’s mouth closed. The Vagrant Spear didn’t even bother to hide her grin, which meant it was time to spring her request.

“I will be in need of your help and that of your band, Lady Sidonia,” she said.

The heroine tensed, but she could not move away. Not when Akua had carefully ensured she was not done healing.

“What for?” she asked. “The artefact is broken. You must have heard the horns, too, Sahelian. We must gather for the muster in the inner city so we might join the assault on the Dead King.”

“ An artefact is broken,” Akua corrected. “Leaving behind shards and exceptional materials. I have sent Archer to find me a forge so that the defeat we were inflicted might be undone.”

“A worthy cause,” the Vagrant Spear reluctantly conceded. “Do you need Aspasie’s services, then? I could lend her.”

Aspasie looked like she would have whimpered if it did not risk drawing attention to her, but that was besides the point. Akua was passingly familiar with the Harrowed Witch’s skills, and the other mage’s talents were entirely unsuited to what she had in mind. Illusions, blood rituals and necromancy with a spiritual speciality were not what she needed, especially in the hands of a woman whose very Name came with a saboteur attached. Akua would need stability and control most of all. Precision would be everything.

“I need all of you to guard me as I work,” Akua replied, shaking her head. “Even the most minute interruption would ruin everything and the Dead King is sure to come for us the moment he grasps what we are attempting.”

Lady Sidonia was hesitating, both disinclined to do the Doom of Liesse any favours and hungry to be part of the glorious fight against the Dead King yet recognizing that what Akua was suggesting was of great import. So to tip the balance, the sorceress glanced at Ivah of the Losara. Its face betrayed the barest flicker of amusement before it was smoothed away.

“I will lend my spear to this labour,” the Lord of Silent Steps said. “And call for other Mighty to stand vigil.”

“We will as well,” the Vagrant Spear immediately replied, face hardening.

Pride was such a useful lever to move people with, Akua considered as she allowed the healing sorcery to ebb away. She smiled at Lady Sidonia.

“All finished,” she said.

Archer was back before long, having found a forge half a dozen blocks to the east. They all set out that way as Indrani paced around restlessly.

“Your second ask?” Archer pressed.

“I need a Named mage,” Akua said.

“You’ve got the Witch,” Indrani pointed out.

“She is unsuited to my needs,” she replied. “You must find me another. I can begin the work without them, but I will need them to finish it.”

A pause.

“Nahiza Serrif would serve as well, if you can find her,” Akua conceded.

Archer chewed the inside of her cheek thoughtfully.

“I’ll see who I can rustle up,” she promised, and heartbeats later she was gone.

Akua did not allow her thoughts to linger on it. Instead she hurried to the forge, finding the rundown stone house to be dirty and derelict but functional for her purposes. There was still charcoal for the forge in a bag that had been cut, spilling all over the floor, and she used it to light the hearth. A focused wind cantrip blew the dirt and ash off the anvil as she went looking through the tools, thankfully finding them to be steel. Even the hammer’s shaft, which made it a little heavy for her hand, but that could be seen to. She needed to enchant them to withstand greater heat anyway, she’d slip in a mild lightening enchantment for the hammer. It was quick and dirty work, burning the runes into the side, but she did not need the tools to last forever – or even to the day’s end.

By the time the fire was burning and the tools ready, the enemy had begun attacking.

Akua forced herself to ignore the sounds of fighting. It was not out there she would redeem her mistake but in here. Instead she placed the two prices of the Autumn Crown in the fire, using the bellow to stoke the flames even higher as she kept feeding it charcoal. Though she had once spent a month learning the essentials of smithing as part of being taught enchanting – enchanted swords made without understanding how simpler swords were forged had a tendency to shatter – she was not a trained smith, but then she did not need to be. Akua was not trying to make a functional object, not in the physical sense anyway.

She was changing the appearance of the crown to make it easier to affect its metaphysical nature, using the process of ‘being forged anew’ as channel to facilitate the work. Simply cutting away at the crown would do nothing. Not only did Akua understand the purpose of barely half of what Masego had done to the fae crown, even broken the artefact remained one of great power and weight. To try to change it without first unmaking it would be the difference between trying to shape stone and clay.

Thrust into the flames, the crown began to bend. The roots in copper and bronze began to twist, the sculpted leaves wilting as their edges thickened. Nothing was melting, not yet and perhaps ever, but it was softening. Hierophant had hammered dozens of iron nails into the crown, and reaching for the tongs Akua began to remove them. It was difficult work, even with the fire making them easier to rip out, and the heat in her face had her sweating as her muscles burned from the effort. She left only two nails in each half, her magic already feeling out the shards and finding the slumbering power inside was slowly waking up. Soon now.

The noise outside began to reach her ears again as she emerged from her trance, but there was a new note to it. It soon ended, another lull before the storm lapped at their gates again, and the door was thrown open when Archer strolled in. Behind her a young woman followed, dark-haired and tanned in padded battle robes. Of Ashuran make, these, but Akua would have recognized Sapan the Apprentice even without that. Her stomach dropped at the sight of the younger woman. Such a young practitioner with a transitional Name would not have the control she needed in her assistant.

“You getting there?” Archer asked. “It’s getting crazy out here. No Scourges yet, but he’s throwing Revenants at us by the baker’s dozen.”

Akua’s throat clenched as she wondered how she would have to tell Indrani that they had failed again, that the Apprentice would not be enough, when the young woman walked closer to the fire. Her eyes were curious and Akua stilled at the sight of her. There was something different about her. A certainty that had not been in the girl that trailed behind Hierophant in the hopes of peeking at his notes.

“You are no longer the Apprentice,” Akua said.

“I am,” Sapan thinly smiled, “the Mage.”

Only ‘Mage’, without anything preceding it. Oh my, Akua thought. Ashurans traditionally had three Names bound to spellcasting: Red Mage, Blue Mage and Silver Mage. The destroyer, the navigator and the healer. Only young Sapan was eschewing the label and the limits that would come with it. Simple as the Name sounded, it was a bold claim that would echo across all rungs of the Ashuran tier system. A year with Masego , the sorceress ruefully thought, was all it took to turn you into something that will rock the foundations of your home. Hierophant likely hadn’t even meant to do it. And the Mage would be a herald of great changes, Akua had no doubt about, because when the other woman had spoken her Name she’d heard smaller note to it.

It was still a transitional Name, a step on the way to a higher peak.

“Good,” Akua smiled, allowing a touch of savagery to show. “Come, Mage, for now the true work begins.”

Archer returned to the fighting outside, grounds she was more at home on, while the two of them took to the forge. Sapan’s control, Akua thought, was exquisite. The girl had once trained to be healer. The Soninke sorceress took out the first half from the flames with the tongs and laid it on the anvil, reaching for the hammer even as she instructed her helper.

“Keep it at this exact temperature,” Akua ordered. “It must be even throughout all the while.”

“To keep it at the point of transition,” Sapan thoughtfully murmured.

What a genuine terror that girl would become, in a decade or two. Akua was no proper smith, so her strikes were uneven as held down the half of the crown and hammered away at it. The shape would need to change, else the artefact could only ever be a broken shard of what Hierophant had made. Feeling out the enchantments, the lines drawn in the power slumbering within, Akua broke down the beautiful fae crown. Leaves turned into flat lumps, ornate roots into rough and uneven chords, even as she grasped at the edges of the enchantments. Much of what Masego had done, the beauty and elegance of his work, had to be discarded.

Akua went for simplicity instead, breaking down the parts that would have bound the concepts of ‘mastery’ and ‘death’ into mere ‘power’. A broad concept, which meant it would have shallow draw if left this way – the artefact would try to do too much at once when having finite strength, resulting in it doing a lot of very little. Which was why Akua, even as she turned the half-crown into a rough bracelet ring of copper and bronze, turned her attention to the two iron nails she had left. Before she hammered them into the ring, with shaky breath she branded them with the whole of her magic. This was High Arcana, not a simple exercise of power and knowledge. It must come from something deeper, something personal.

So Akua let herself remember the absolute nothingness of the void, the maddening nothing that had surrounded her as she half-slumbered a prisoner of the Mantle of Woe.

She bled it into the iron nails, pouring out all the terror and despair of it, and hammered them into the ring until there was no trace of the iron save for two faint circles on the side. The golden-eyed sorceress shuddered, feeling the concept that she had branded into the nails: chain . Exhaustion set her limbs to tremble, but Akua had no time for it. She quenched the bronze ring in water, letting it simmer there, and took the other half of the crown from the flames. Her magic was growing sluggish, but the Mage had learned from the first effort. She helped keep the enchantments in place as Akua wove them anew, hammering the other half of the crown into a matching ring. And again two nails of iron were hammered into circles, singing of ‘chain’ as the others had.

Into the water the second ring went, and once they were taken out to be laid on the anvil Akua Sahelian beheld her work.

Her metalwork had been without art to it, but even broken the Autumn Crown was one of the great mantles of the fae. Its nature asserted itself anew, what had been plain and bumpy bracelet rings turning into something altogether more beautiful. The roots and leaves she had hammered out had returned, engraving themselves so flawlessly that one might have thought the artefacts made of real ones. The bronze and copper had not melded, the copper instead turning into delicate filigree laying out the veins of leaves or the contour of branches and roots. And on the side of each bracelet ring, each large enough to be slipped around a wrist, two dots of iron remained. Only they had changed, melted by the head into the happenstance of two clasping hands.

A fitting emblem, Akua thought. For she had turned the Hierophant’s beautiful work into fetters, making of a gift that would grant immortality at the price of master over death something brutally simple. The rings bound the ‘power’ of any who bore one, chaining it to the other ring. No power could be used without the consent of whoever held the other end of the chain. It was not a leash, for no ring was master over the other, but instead something altogether uglier.

A prison, large enough for two.

“They are beautiful,” the Mage whispered. “Perhaps the greatest work of our age.”

“They are the ugliest thing I have ever made,” Akua Sahelian quietly replied, “or ever will.”

And still she took them in hand, feeling the lingering warmth of them against her skin. She left the smithy, the oppressing heat of it, and returned to the smoky skies of Keter. There Archer awaited, standing over a carpet of corpses dead twice over as Firstborn and Named held the streets.

“Finished?” Indrani asked.

“I am,” Akua said.

“Good,” Archer sharply nodded. “You’ll have to take it from here. I need to go .”

She was shifting her weight even as she spoke, Akua noticed, so restless she could not stop moving. How odd, the sorceress thought, and then breathed out in wonder. Ah, my heart , she fondly thought. Always a plan within the plan with you. Catherine had gone with the Ranger, the survivors of Refuge and the man Indrani loved. All essential elements for Indrani to transition out of her increasingly ill-fitting Name of Archer. In a single stroke you tell me that you are fighting and ensure reinforcements are on your way. The pull of fate on Indrani at the moment must be like getting dragged by the hair.

“Go,” Akua said.

Archer hesitated.

“You’re sure you’ll be fine on your own?”

“You chose my life over the crown, Indrani,” Akua Sahelian gently said. “I swear to any Gods listening that I will not make you regret that choice, so go .”

The other woman’s hazelnut eyes met her own, and after a moment whatever she was looking for she found. She sharply nodded, coat swirling behind her as she turned to leave without a goodbye. She watched Indrani vanish into the city to seek out her fate, leaving her to find her own.

Akua’s thumb stroke the side of the ring in her hand, wondering if she was holding a noose or a knot.

Chapter 64: Gehenna

“In war you must avoid fighting strength and instead attack weakness. Therefore, an army evenly mediocre cannot be attacked.”

– Isabella the Mad, Proceran general

“You know,” I said, “given that the first part of this plan was literally going to Hell, I kind of figured that the trouble we’d run into would actually be Hell-related.”

Masego cocked his head to the side.

“Technically speaking,” he began, and I spared him a glare.

“Don’t you fucking start,” I warned him. “Not when I’m looking at what appears to be a hanged skeleton .”

The five of us were standing in a village, which would have had me rather curious if it weren’t currently abandoned and on fire. Once you’d seen one burning village you’d seen all of them, really. Still, worrying as it was that we’d been in the Serenity for nearly a quarter hour now and the only sign of life we’d seen was an empty village set ablaze, I was rather more concerned by the other thing we’d found. There was a nice old oak in the middle of town, one I was looking at, and someone had seen fit to tie a noose to the tallest branch and hang a skeleton from it.

“Perhaps it committed a crime,” Masego suggested.

“She, by the looks of those hips,” the Concocter noted from my left.

I narrowed my eye, poking the skeleton with the tip of my staff. She rattled a little, but remained defiantly not undead.

“You told me the dead always rise in the Serenity,” I called out to Ranger.

It was one of the many ways the Hidden Horror had turned the Hell into his personal fiefdom, Hye Su had explained. The afterlife here was service in Keter’s armies, marching through the gate into Creation. Not all souls remained in the Dead King’s grasp, but many did. It was his most regular source of Binds, the ensouled undead used as officers for his armies.

“They should,” she replied. “Something must have happened.”

“She used to be undead,” Hierophant said. “It’s why the bones are still holding together, the necromancy fused them.”

“But she wasn’t destroyed,” the Silver Huntress grunted. “There’s nothing broken enough to break the spell.”

Which was the part that actually worried me, I mused. Any idiot could hang a skeleton, particularly if it wasn’t moving at the time. When you did it and it appeared to work , though, that was a different story. Something eldritch was afoot and this was a bad place to face it. The Hells were not the same as Creation, rules were not as firm here. And when you were powerful enough they could even be changed: how else would even a powerful mage like Dead King have been able to rule a Hell for so long? Which meant that somewhere in the Serenity an entity was loose that was capable of bending those rules. Possibly even when Neshamah was fighting them, which was a mite unsettling. Who or what would be able to fight the Dead King like this in his own private kingdom? Considering this place didn’t look like it’d been burning for more than an hour, we might just be close enough to learn the answer to that.

Joy.

“We’re not going to learn more from this place,” I finally said. “Fire’s burnt through too much. Ranger, have you figured out where we are?”

“About an hour south of the nine-hundredth stele,” she replied. “We crossed through further west than we should have.”

She paused, glancing at Masego.

“Wekesa would not have made that mistake.”

“If only he were still with us,” Masego agreed. “If only you had helped make it so in any way.”

Ranger’s face tightened. She was not, I suspected, used to being spoken to like that even when she loosed her little barbs – not from people she didn’t consider equals. Only Hierophant had not lied or insulted her in any way, for all the tacit contempt behind his words, so she was struggling to find a reason to be offended. She wasn’t used to dealing with Zeze at all, I thought. Not the way Sabah and Scribe had been. She’d not stayed with the Calamities long enough to be. Much as I would have enjoyed continuing to listen at Ranger continuing to fail at winning a battle Masego was unaware he was fighting, the sight around us was making it clear we needed to get a move on.

There were things going on in the Serenity I’d not anticipated, so I was in need of answers.

“So which is the closest gate?” I asked.

While there was only one Hellgate in Keter, it was not a simple tunnel through. The Dead King had, over millennia, tied the portal to several gates spread across the Serenity. Though the other end in Creation could only be tied to one Serenity gate at a time, there were at least nine of these spread across the Hell that Ranger knew of.

“It’s the Writhing Palace,” Ranger said. “The Banquet Hall is a lot less defended but it’s at least an hour more: there’s woods and a river in the way.”

Fuck . I’d heard that name once before, when I came to Keter for the talks, and thought it was not somewhere I ever wanted to visit. I should have known better than to tempt the Gods that way, I brooded.

“I don’t suppose anybody’s got a drink?” I glumly said. “I’m going to need one if we’re going to a place called the godddamn Writhing Palace .”

“I do, actually,” the Concocter surprised, going rifling through her haversack.

She got out a small crystal flask with something that looked like water in it, though after she handed it to me when I took out the cork the smell of strong liquor assaulted my nostrils. I took a pull and almost choked, eyes watering.

“Is that moonshine?” I croaked out.

“It is,” Cocky proudly smiled. “I made it myself.”

I took another pull from the flask, having gotten used to the strong taste.

“You’re a delight,” I told her, “and now my favourite person in this band of five.”

Ranger took a step closer, reaching for the flask, but I moved it away from her hand.

“We ask,” I chided, “before we take.”

“No,” the Concocter immediately said, smiling beatifically.

When I turned to have a look at Ranger’s face, though it wasn’t irritation I found. She looked like she’d been slapped in the face, I thought, or perhaps had seen a ghost. And it was on me that her eyes rested, not her former pupil. She withdrew as if burned, striding ahead of us.

“Come on,” Hye Su gruffly said. “Let’s get this over with.”

I corked the flask again, handing it back to Cocky with a murmur of thanks, and settled into a thoughtful frown. If it was a ghost she’d been looking for, well, there was only the one we shared.

And I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about Ranger seeing my father in me.

—

Deep down part of me had expected something about the Serenity to be fantastical and disturbing, but by all indications the Hell was one of the single most boring places to ever exist.

It was all fields and forests, with occasional river or dirt road passing through. I barely saw any animals, but there had to be a few around else the people here wouldn’t be able to clothe themselves. In a way, it was the pinnacle of the Dead King’s achievements that his personal Hell was something so violently unremarkable. It was a land without dangers or excitements, a seemingly endless sprawl of pretty little villages without fear or famine. And it was only villages. Not a town to be seen, much less a city, and the two villages we’d passed through had shown only a few different trades. The Serenity had been carefully crafted to remain forever pleasant and stagnant, not a soul from it ever interested in leaving.

If we’d had more time, I would have studied this place with fascination. What had it taken for Neshamah to turn a Hell full of devils into this pastoral dream? How had he shaped his people into being so utterly content, growing and pruning them over centuries as an immortal gardener would a tree? Though horror lurked behind what the Dead King had done here, I itched to learn the methods. There’d never been a ruler like Neshamah before, not really, and likely there never would again. That was something to be fervently sought, but when he passed the Dead King would take with him a unique mind. One that had learned secrets deeps and strange, for all its malevolence.

The boredom ceased about the moment we found the first corpse by the road.

“Those bones have been exposed to the elements for decades,” Masego said. “This used to be undead.”

And now the skeleton by the dirt path was, by all appearances, laid to rest. Once more without a mark on it to explain how that had come to be. Even Light would leave traces , I thought. Did something dispel the necromancy keeping it moving?

“It’s too close to the road for it to have been coincidence,” the Silver Huntress said.

“Agreed,” I grunted. “Whatever’s responsible for it collapsing was going up the road.”

Which Ranger had said led to the Writhing Palace. The entity responsible for this would likely beat us to the place, which while simplifying getting to the bottom of this was just a bit unsettling. We still had no idea what had caused any of this or why. We kept going up the road, finding at first another few lone corpses and then soon entire companies of them. All prone, all without marks.

“Someone was sending troops after whoever walked up that road,” I frowned.

And it’d been more than one person doing that, as it turned out.

“There’s tracks all over the fields,” Ranger told me. “At least a hundred people heading towards the palace, not all at the same time.”

“Ominous,” I noted.

We hurried, for lack of anything else to do, and followed the path at a pace just short of a run. I found it more difficult to tell time here – the Serenity had no true dawn or dusk I could measure myself against – but it could not have been an hour by the time it began. It was a pulse I felt. Steady like a heartbeat, rippling through the air like a drum. It battered away at all of us, and though goddesses riding my mind for years had hardened me I was not the only one here. Masego and Ranger seemed more irritated than truly affected, but the other two were looking dazed.

“Shit,” I muttered.

“Warden?” Ranger asked.

“I’ve felt this before,” I said. “I know who it is.”

“Who?” Alexis said, tone disbelieving.

“The Hierarch,” I told them. “Though his aspect didn’t reach quite this far last time I encountered it.”

In Rochelant I’d need to reach the plaza where he was before it was this strong. Now we couldn’t even see him yet and it was like a tide in the air. That was a small thing, though, compared to the revelation that Anaxares the Diplomat was for some fucking godforsaken reason in the Serenity . How? Last I’d heard he should have been wrestling the Choir of Judgement, and stubborn as the madman was I didn’t see him winning that tussle. He hadn’t at the start, and unlike him the angels could not tire. How could he have- no, that didn’t matter. Not really. The particular method was irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. What mattered was why he was here.

We were to late in the game for it to be an accident.

“I had thought him imprisoned by the Choir of Judgement for his blasphemy,” the Silver Huntress slowly said.

“More like imprisoning with,” the Concocter replied, sounding amused, “but you’re not wrong.”

“How kind of you to say so,” Alexis acidly said.

“It’s an interesting trick,” Ranger mused. “Something like projecting an abstract kind of domain, if I had to guess. It’ll be tiresome to deal with inside a place like the Serenity.”

I tuned them out, closing my eye and forcing myself to think. An obvious answer was there to the second question I’d asked myself, but I forced myself to consider others. And yet as I went through one possibility after another, discarding the impossible and the unlikely, I found that only one remained standing. The Intercessor had done this. She’d done it because she had a use for the Hierarch’s presence here, even though I could not be sure what it was yet. It had to be the Wandering Bard, because it wasn’t anyone one my side that’d done this and there was no one left that could screw with angels and wasn’t aside from Yara of Nowhere.

What was the play here? Obviously Hierarch was poison to a place like the Serenity, so it might be the Intercessor was trying to poison the Dead King’s bolthole should he lose on Creation. On the other hand, in one of the conversations I’d had with her she had pretty convincingly sold me on the Dead King being stuck in the Serenity as him being defeated. ‘Sealed Evil in a box’ wasn’t a story that ended well for the Evil in question in the long term, she’d not been lying about that. She could have been lying in a broader sense, sure, but that was a rabbit hole not worth going down.

If the Intercessor meant to cut off the Dead King’s retreat and believed there was nothing he could to against such a stroke, then she could have done this years ago. She hadn’t. Which meant she was after something else. Aside from cutting his retreat, what was she- oh. Oh, fuck.

“It’s actually that simple, isn’t it?” I murmured, rubbing the bridge of my nose.

There was nothing aside from cutting off the Dead King’s retreat, because that was the whole fucking point. She was making sure Neshamah knew that if he didn’t win in Creation, he was done. No way out, no path of retreat. The Intercessor wanted us to be fighting against a cornered animal with nothing left to lose. Someone capable of anything so long as it bought him even a heartbeat more of survival.

“Catherine?” Masego asked. “You’re talking to yourself again. Are we still headed to the Writhing Palace?”

I grimaced. It was the closest gate, and I needed to get a finger on the pulse on what the Hierarch was after. Occasionally violent madman the Bellerophan might be, he wasn’t necessarily an enemy. Not unless his remarkably even pissing match with the Seraphim had changed him too much.

“We are,” I answered. “Prepare your minds, it’ll get worse the more we approach.”

At least, I mused, I finally knew what had happened to the undead we’d been finding. Necromancy keeping soldiers fighting in a war that hadn’t been voted on in the service of a tyrant? The Hierarch would see that as so furiously intolerable they’d drop down the moment they entered his aspect’s reach.

And so for once, I smiled, someone had popped up that was scarier for the Dead King than me.

—

The Writhing Palace was a ruin.

I could see the bones of what it had been meant to be, a boast as to the power of the man who’d made it. Curved pillars of ivory rose like rib bones from the grass, their shadows cutting across the green. Their shape drew the eye, outlining the belly of a great beast ending in a head that was a now-shattered throne room. No single stone was left unbroken, as if someone had wanted to take a hammer to the very principle of royalty, and among the ruin someone had started a fire. Anaxares the Diplomat, a too-thin man in tattered beggar’s robes, roasted a slab of meat over an open flame in the wreckage of the Dead King’s throne room. He used a snapped gold scepter as a spike and sat on the shattered back of the throne, his burning grey eyes wreathed in smoke.

He looked like the death of crowns, feasting over their demise.

Yet what gave us pause when we approached was not the sight of him but instead what lay around. The Writhing Palace had not had walls of stone, Ranger had told me. It was a boast, after all. Between the ribs and the throne room of pure white marble, it had been a great palace made entirely of devils. Thousands and thousands of them, of all shapes and sizes, each interlocked and forever writhing as they remained frozen in place by the unbroken will of Trismegistus King. Or so it had been. Now the Hierarch had come, the Republic’s howling anger made into a man, and the spell had broken. The devils had broken into courts, some huddling around fires and others assembling into mobs as other stood above them and gave speeches in the dark tongue.

Some of them, I gathered from a closer look, were attempting to organize elections.

The others pulled closer to me as we approached, save for Ranger – whose pride lay in indifference. There were humans in the throng, I eventually saw. There were so few of them compared to the devils that I had not noticed. They sat with the Hell’s first inhabitants, speaking animatedly as they shared fires. No mobs were howling for blood, but I knew why already: we’d walked past a forest turned into gallows as we approached, humans and devils swinging from branches. The anger of the people had been sated, at least for now. I could feel the song of the Hierarch’s madness turned into an aspect, the low and deep thrum that slithered down your veins. It would wake again in time, hungry for further ropes and necks.

None sat with the Hierarch or stood in our way as we approached him. We got a few curious looks from devils, those that had eyes anyhow, but our presence seemed of little interest to the throng. We weren’t even worth curiosity. As I limped over broken marble, the light of the fire flickering ahead of me, I paused to glance at the rest.

“I’ll handle him,” I said.

Ranger and the Huntress both looked as if they wanted to argue, but I turned my back before they could. Neither dared to cross me by following anyway. I slipped past the shattered throne, fingers trailing what had once been beautiful white marble and was now jagged remains, and reached the fire’s warmth. The Hierarch’s eyes rose to me, the man looking neither surprised nor unsurprised. Should I wait for his invitation I would still be standing come Last Dusk, so I found a jutting shard of the broken dais and sat, staff leaning against my shoulder as I warmed my hands against the fire. The Hierarch’s madness battered away at my mind like a tide. Rolling in, rolling out.

“Catherine Foundling,” Anaxares the Diplomat greeted me.

He did not name me a queen. I had not expected him to.

“Hierarch,” I replied. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Tyranny Knows No Borders, For They Are False Inventions,” the Hierarch informed me. “May Any Who Would Constrain The People Be Devoured By Bees.”

“That’d take a lot of bees,” I noted.

Those had mouths, I figured. Probably. It seemed like the kind of thing they would have, though I had never made a deep study of the creatures.

“Or a lot of time,” the Bellerophan thinly smiled, “and it comes easier than bees.”

I snorted, feeling his aspect filling the air. With every breath I felt as if I were drinking it in, the heady brew of revolt and rebellion. The thrown torch and the howl, the snap of broken chains and the flinch of the tyrant. There was a reason I’d never quite managed to hate the Hierarch, for all that he was ruin on near all he touched. Some part of me had never been convinced he was wrong .

“Yet we never seem to have enough of it,” I shrugged.

I glanced at the slab of meat he was over-roasting. Sheep, by the looks of it.

“You going to share?” I asked.

“Are you yet a tyrant?” he replied.

“I’ll abdicate before the year is out,” I informed him. “Or die.”

“Either is an acceptable outcome,” the Hierarch conceded.

And yet he did not, I could not help but notice, offer me a piece. Republicans , I amusedly thought. I was still wearing a crown, after all. Why would he offer me anything at all?

“Thought you’d still be having words with Judgement,” I idly said. “Are you done with the Seraphim?”

He frowned.

“They have escaped their sentencing for now,” the Hierarch told me. “The peddler leant a hand.”

My eye narrowed.

“The Wandering Bard,” I said.

He shrugged.

“It has many names, all but one a lie,” the Hierarch said. “I care not for the masks it wears – all that’s left true is the duty.”

“To keep the Game of the Gods going,” I frowned.

“To keep the animals in the cage,” Anaxares said, baring his teeth. “To rattle the cage when we get rowdy, until we remember how to kneel.”

“She’s doing a lot more than that, these days,” I told him. “There’s a war outside, Hierarch. One the League is fighting in, even your Republic. I don’t know what it is she wants, but it’s not for us to win again Keter.”

“There’s only one war, Catherine Foundling,” the Bellerophan replied. “The lash and the back. Everything else is noise.”

I leaned forward, smoke licking at my face.

“And which is she?”

“A queen’s question,” Anaxares the Diplomat scorned. “You think those wielding the lash are freer because they deal out the suffering. That’s the trap, Catherine Foundling. The promise that you get to hold the whip instead of feel it, that there is no fairness but you can be on the right side of the unfair.”

Grey eyes met mine, unblinking.

“But it’s slavery too, to spend your live lashing backs,” the Hierarch said. “Just a different kind, and you can’t escape it any more than they can.”

My fingers clenched, the unclenched. What would it be like, I wondered, to be the Intercessor for a hundred years? To never be quite for Above or Below, to always be sent to put your finger on the scale whenever a great Good or a great Evil was to be born. I forced myself to think of that, and then turn a hundred years into a thousand. Two, three, ten . What would it do to someone, to hold that Role? When I’d been young, barely the Squire, I had fought in the ranks at the Battle of Three Hills. I’d gone through Helikean mercenaries that day as if I were a sickle reaping wheat, until the killing didn’t even feel like killing anymore. It had just been motion, a limbs moving to accomplish a chore. So what would it be like, to lash backs for ten thousand years?

It wouldn’t be anything anymore, I thought. Not a lash, not backs, not people or pain. All that would be left was motion and the tiredness of the hand.

Still warming my hands by the fire, I shivered. A long silence stretched out, the Bellerophan disinclined to break it.

“That war outside,” I said, “they could use you. You’re still Hierarch of the Free Cities, they haven’t tried to take it. You could go to them.”

And if he did, his mere presence would tip the war. It wouldn’t be as powerful on Creation as in here, his aspect, but oh it would still be something to be feared. Bones dropping dead for the second time, Binds revolting against the chains. And Revenants I could only guess, but it was the kind of guessing that brought a wolfish smile to my face.

“I did not choose it,” Anaxares the Diplomat said.

“ They chose you,” I retorted.

Elected, even. That was something even he was bound to respect.

“I thought that, one,” the Hierarch faintly smiled. “That I had been forced into the prison, that I was forced to hold the lash even if fought never to wield it.”

“But?”

“It is only a word,” Anaxares the Diplomat softly said. “In the end, for all that men call it a title and a Name it is only a word.”

Gold dripping into the grass, the thin man took the broken scepter out of the flame and the slab of lamb with it, blowing on the roasted meant before he took a bite out of it. The juicy fat streamed down his chin in rivulets as he chewed, swallowing and only then offering me a hard smile.

“They can call me Hierarch all they want,” he said, “but I will make of it what I want, and that path does not lead be back to the League of Free Cities.”

I leaned back from the fire, the warmth on my hands having turned scalding.

“So where does it lead you?” I asked.

He laughed in my face.

“There is only one war, Catherine Foundling,” Anaxares the Diplomat said. “And I will fight it wherever it is to be found. Here, there, everywhere.”

He leaned in, the grey smoke the very same shade as his eyes. As if he were it, or it him.

“ We are all of us free, or none. I will suffer no compromise in this .”

And I Saw it, in that moment, what he was to become. Like a trail of fire, a spirit of fury and revolt that would bloom where chains were tightened until men choked. He would walk and ashes would follow in his wake, but tyrants would fall and even Choirs would flinch in the face of the Hierarch’s indignation. A madman to the end, until a death as bloody as it was inevitable found him. There was, I thought, a terrible kind of beauty to it. To burning yourself at the stake of your own ideals. It was not something I could admire, not truly, but perhaps it was something I could respect. I reached for my staff and rose slowly, leaning against it.

“Good luck, Hierarch,” I told him, and found I meant it.

There was nothing pleasant about a fire sweeping through a forest, but sometimes it was necessary nonetheless.

“All tyrants,” the Hierarch told me, “have their day of reckoning. Even you.”

I smiled.

“But not today,” I said.

“But not today,” he agreed.

It was as much of goodbye as I’d get from him, so I left it at that.

—

For all the unsettling sight that the Writhing Palace had turned into, leaving it proved almost laughably easy. The gate was unattended, a circle of stone left untouched amidst the ivory pillars, and we barely got any looks thrown our way when Masego woke it up. With no one contesting our connection to the other end in Creation, it was only a matter of stepping through.

And just like that, I stood in the Hall of the Dead.

The same great gall where the Dead King had hosted me for meals and talks when we negotiated before the beginning of our war. There was no sight of the elaborate decorations of that day in the great hall, every part of it having been stripped bare. It was no longer a throne room now, instead serving as a gateway and nothing else for all that in many ways it was the heart of the Dead King’s power. Once we had all crossed and the five of us stood alone in the cavernous hall, the Hellgate quieted and Hierophant’s eyes turned to it.

“Will it work?” I asked.

“Father proved that it could,” Masego replied.

We couldn’t close the Hellgate. Only an angel’s fury could do that, the tabula rasa effect undoing the cut in Creation that was a Greater Breach, but there were other ways. Akua had once opened a Greater Breach in the heartlands of Callow, and it wasn’t an angel that’d fixed the mess. It had been the Warlock, who had redirected the gate from the inside: instead of leading from a Hell to Creation, he had warped it so instead it would lead from a Hell to another Hell. When I’d asked of Hierophant a way to cut the Dead King off from the Serenity, he’d offered me a solution based on the same principles as his father’s work.

We all gave him a wide breath as he began to cast, beginning with words but quickly slipping into the traced runes of High Arcana. Even Ranger looked spellbound as she watched him work. See, as best as I understood it Wekesa the Warlock had been able to pull some truly ridiculous shit because he had an aspect that allowed him to sift through the Hells to find whatever he might need. It was the kind of trick that would allow a mage to, say, link two Hells by sorcery without the use of an artefact. Masego did not have that. What did have, though, was the convergence of three things.

First he had spent about a year of his life ruling over a severed shard of Arcadia made into a pocket realm. Second, he had Witnessed the Grey Pilgrim miraculously bring down a star on Hainaut in a way that defied Creational laws about how distance worked. And third, this very day he had brought us into the Serenity from a broken place at the junctions of Creation, the shattered Twilight Ways and the Hells. So as Masego’s voice rose, speaking words in the mage tongue, he proved one more to be one of the greatest mages of the age by threading all three of those things together.

The Hellgate into the Serenity still led there. The Dead King himself had added a step to the crossing by linking it to several exit gates, though, and Hierophant modified that step. Instead of a simple nothing, the step was made into a place: the very same nothing we had used to cross into the Serenity. Which also happened to be an endless void, unless you’d made something to stand on. Which you couldn’t in the moment before crossing the gate and being in that void. It was a dead end which wasn’t technically a dead end, a nasty trick played on one of the Hidden Horror’s greatest works.

And by the satisfied on Masego’s smile as he finished the last syllable of the spell, this was just the beginning of him getting even with the Dead King.

—

The spire would be where it all ended.

We’d returned to Creation through the gate in the Hall of the Dead, itself built out of the crypts beneath the towering structure, but it would not be in that throne room we’d find him. Besides, we’d not actually gone through Serenity to take a swing at Neshamah: that was what the crown and the sword were for. Leading a band of five like mine against the Hidden Horror wasn’t going to accomplish anything except corpses – which wouldn’t even have the decency to stay still for long. I had set rather more practical aims for our little venture, deciding instead to go for a different sort of prize.

This entire spire was, after all, the Dead King’s last redoubt. Out there in the inner city, armies and Named would be fighting desperately through streets and palaces to reach this place and deliver the knockout blow to the armies of the dead. Only it wasn’t going to be that easy, because we weren’t really going to win the battle for Keter. I had no doubt in my mind that troops and Named would reach the black spire, but the battle itself? We weren’t even trying to win it, not really. All our offensives had been about getting enough people at the end of the line that we could destroy the Hidden Horror and end this war. In other words, our defeat was certain if the battle went for long enough. It was, in the end, simple mathematics.

We had neither the numbers nor the strength to really pull out a win in Keter. It was always going to be about Neshamah himself. Which he knew, of course, and would have prepared for. From his perspective, all he needed to do to win was survive until everyone else was dead. Which meant the black spire was going to be an unbreachable den of horrors, the kind of pit of despair that even Named despaired in the face of, but that wasn’t even the first hurdle to actually getting to Neshamah.

That would be the wards.

The Dead King had fuck all to win by actually fighting us, after all. Sure, an old monster like him would scythe through Named and men like they were wheat but why take the risk that one of those lucky kids would have that one aspect that’d ruin his day? He was only hours away from winning, but since I’d returned Below’s stories that was one of the single most dangerous places for a villain to be. So his first move wasn’t going to be bringing down the sky on our heads or twisting time so we all died of fever as babies or sending out a demon riding on another demon’s shoulders. It was going to be the most comprehensive set of wards that Creation had ever seen, fired up at their strongest and closed so tight not even a fly could sneak through.

If he could, Neshamah would stay behind a kingdom’s worth of closed gates and magical barriers until there wasn’t a living soul left in Keter. That was the kind of villain the Dead King was, when you cut off all the dross and the pageantry: most terrifyingly practical coward in the history of Calernia.

Now, while we couldn’t sure that throwing enough heroes at these wards would result in way through it was actually a pretty decent bet. No matter how clever Neshamah was, Creation would nudge things so that the fight for the existence of Calernia didn’t end with increasingly desperate knocks on a closed door. The price, though, would be atrocious . Names worked on weight, I had learned over the years, and sometimes that was a double-edged sword. Almost every Named on the continent was united in fighting the Dead King, which while a powerful story also meant that by fate’s unspoken rules the Dead King had equal weight to a continent’s worth of Named.

Overcoming that kind of opponent’s foolproof defence just wouldn’t be done without massive casualties, no matter how heavily providence put its finger to the scale. And the hard truth was that we just couldn’t afford that many deaths when there were sure to be even harsher defences waiting further inside. That meant we needed another way to get those wards down, and that was where my little band came in. We had a way in through the back, and instead of using it on a futile swing at Neshamah’s neck I had decided to spend our surprise on letting everyone else into the spire. We were going to destroy those ward anchors to collapse them, preferably in a way that didn’t end up blowing us up.

Our plan had had admittedly been somewhat more complicated by the fact that none of us, not even Ranger, had any idea where those ward anchors were. Thankfully, there was a solution for that: wait long enough that the Dead King would be firing up that magic as strongly as he could to keep the pests out of his house. That wouldn’t help any for most people, but we weren’t most people. I had brought Hierophant along and he still had one glass eye that, while most famous for the light of the Summer sun still shining in it, would be of use because of the artefact it’d come from instead: a pair of spectacles that could see magic.

We didn’t need to know where the Dead King’s war anchors were because Masego would just follow the flow of magic back to them.

“Down,” Hierophant told me.

“We’re already in the crypts,” I told him. “There’s nothing beneath this.”

He met my eye squarely.

“Down,” Hierophant firmly repeated.

I sighed and conceded with a nod. That was going to be fun. Unlike the last time I’d come to the Hall of the Dead its antechamber wasn’t filled with an honour guard of Revenants, which were most probably out there killing people instead. Grim as the thought was, I was still thankful that we didn’t need to fight every step out of the way after leaving the throne room.

“I don’t care how good of a mage the Dead King was,” I said, “war anchors need upkeep and replacement. If they’re under us then there’s bound to be a way to get to them.”

It wasn’t like Neshamah was going to do that kind of drudgework himself, so there was bound to be an access for whatever undead and Revenants ended up tasked with it.

“It’ll go faster if we split to look around,” Ranger said.

“It’s certainly a faster way to get at least one of us killed,” I affably agreed. “Counter-argument: Concocter, I know you’ve gone ruin raiding in the Brocelian at least once. Do you have something to find secret passages?”

“I do,” she warily agreed, “but only the one bottle.”

“Then Masego will need to get us as close to above those anchors as he can,” I said. “It’s our best shot.”

Hierophant nodded absent-mindedly, looking through a wall as he did. He began walking away without a word but we didn’t get far. I’d been pleasantly surprised that the Hall of the Dead and its antechamber had been deserted, but it looked like there’d been a reason for that: the entrance to the antechamber was sealed. The great bronze gates were so heavily enchanted I could feel the weight of the magic in the air.

“I can break the enchantments keeping the gates closed,” Hierophant told me, “but they are tied to what appears to be an alarm ward.”

“Of course they are,” I muttered.

The Silver Huntress cleared her throat, eyeing Masego with that same kindly wonder all of the Refuge kids other than Indrani seemed to treat him with.

“The wall besides it,” she said. “Is it also tied into the wards?”

“Not entirely,” Hierophant replied after a heartbeat. “It is a grid pattern.”

I hummed, realizing what Alexis was getting at and throwing her an approving look.

“Is a square in the grid large enough for a person to crawl through?” I asked.

“With some care, yes,” Masego nodded. “It needed to be so that with the other magics did not saturate the stone.”

The wall was stone and had other wards laid in it, but none that’d trip the alarm should they be punched through. The Silver Huntress handled the first layers by shooting Light into the square that Hierophant traced, breaking the protective enchantments, and the Concocter carefully rid us of the stone itself with careful use of an acid whose ever drop seemed to eat through inches of rock. It wasn’t exactly dignified, but as soon as Cocky gave us the go-ahead we wriggled through the hole like worms and dropped unceremoniously on the other side. The hallway was empty but torches were lit there, which Masego revealed to be a trap the moment he had a look at them.

“Living flesh in the light they cast will turn the flames blue and feed into another enchantment,” he told me.

Which was unfortunate, considering that pretty much the entire corridor was covered by their light. And rubies to piglets the moment one of those turns blue a trap is triggered.

“I can Wrest the magic, but we will have to stay together,” Zeze added.

I nodded and we awkwardly clumped together to walk through the corridor so we’d stay in the light of a single torch at a time: Hierophant could only use his aspect on a single source of power at a time. There weren’t any more torches in either of the corridors the spread out in a fork from here, but there were patrols of undead. Ranger had heard them coming, her hearing being ridiculously sharp even by Named standards.

“This deep there will be no Bones, only Binds,” Hye Su said. “And he likes to use lesser Revenants as captains.”

“We destroy even one of them and he’ll know we’re here instantly,” I grimaced. “He’s not the kind to get arrogant and think his fortress is unbreachable – he’ll be actively looking for the rats that snuck past his walls, not denying they exist.”

“Most illusions do not work on the dead,” Hierophant said. “They do not see in a conventional sense.”

“But you could fool patrols,” I pressed.

He’d hidden us from the sight of undead before.

“I cannot answer as to Revenants, but certainly lesser dead,” he conceded.

“Then we try that,” I ordered.

And when it inevitably went wrong, hopefully we’d have enough of a head start that we got to bring down the wards before we had to fight our way out. Sometimes I wished my silver linings didn’t all have streaks of blood on them, but arguably I was a few grisly murders past the right to complain about that. We ventured deeper into the enemy’s belly, pressing against the wall as patrols passed by us on the way to the unseen place Masego was leading us to. It ended up being a locked and heavily warded room about a quarter hour away from the Hall of the Dead, its door hidden by an illusion that made it looked like the wall continued. I chewed my lip and eyed the apparent patch of stone.

“Magic lock, you said?”

“Enchanted,” Masego specified. “Almost every part of that door and wall are connected to the alarm wards. There are few secondary wards so the density is much higher than the antechamber’s walls.”

“So no crawling through this time,” Ranger said, sounding amused.

I cocked my head to the side.

“A door’s a door,” I said, “but what about the floor?”

“Grid again,” Zeze told me.

“So we make a tunnel,” I said. “Go under the gate. Concocter, would you have enough acid?”

“No, but it is not difficult to make,” she noted. “I have the means, though the variant will let out foul-smelling smoke.”

Undead didn’t usually have a sense of smell, so that wasn’t a deal breaker.

“We try,” I decided.

All things considered, it went well. We had to pick a spot near the wall to begin going through, since otherwise a patrol might walk into the hole even if it was veiled with an illusion, but aside from a tense moment when a dozen undead walked past us and a Revenant in armour lingered we got off fine. Ranger went in through, both because she volunteered and I wouldn’t be all that sorry if she died. I was third, behind the Silver Huntress, and once I finished crawling out of the tight tunnel with aching shoulders I found I was standing in a bare stone room. Cocky came after me and a glance was enough to signify now was her time to shine.

She produced a bottle of what looked like golden powder, she emptied in the air – where it hovered! -before blowing on it. Fascinatingly, the powder dispersed on all sides. It whirled about the room like a scintillating storm before it began to gather in a handful of places. Streaks in the air followed what looked like air currents coming out of the hole we’d dug, which I supposed made sense since the room was otherwise sealed airtight. They also clustered on the ground, though, tracing footsteps leading to the right corner of the room but stopping shy of the corner itself. I grinned even as Masego dragged himself out of the tunnel, moaning all the while.

That’d teach him to be do damn tall, I haughtily thought.

“Looks like a hidden mechanism,” I said. “Ranger?”

“I’ll find it,” she replied with indifferent certainty.

In her honour, after only some moving around she did. There was a faint, oily click and a stone at the junction of the walls dipped into the ground. Gears spun out of sight, the stone floor moving to open a pit going below and an iron ladder going into the dark.

“Catherine,” Hierophant said.

“No, you can’t stay up here,” I absent-mindedly replied. “Alexis, down the hole first?”

“Shit space to use a spear, but I have a knife,” the Silver Huntress conceded.

“ Catherine ,” Masego repeated.

I turned to him irritated.

“What?”

“The lines of sorcery don’t go deep enough below for this to be the war anchors,” he said.

I froze. Wait, if this wasn’t the place for the ward anchors then... The air suddenly thickened and the door leading out of the room burned around the edges. The hinges, I realized, were fusing with stone.

“Water,” Ranger announced. “Water’s coming up.”

And above us small holes opened in the ceiling, the air shifting as what I guessed to be an invisible gas began to be released into the room. Of course , I grimly thought. Of course the fucking Dead King had made a fake ward anchor room to specifically trick people who could see magic. He’d had literal millennia to indulge every spark of paranoia that ever occurred to him.

“We need to get the Hells out of here,” I growled. “Concocter out first. Yell if you see undead.”

I saw from the corner of my eye that Ranger was just holding her breath, apparently unmoved at the idea of no longer having to breathe, while Masego was weaving a spell around his nose. I did the same with Night, the Silver Huntress instead pulling up cloth from under her armour. I was to be the last out, so I had a look at the trap pit and got hit with a blast of foul odour. Gods , I thought with a small degree of awe. What a prick the Dead King was: not only was this trap meant to drown us in a sealed room if the poison gas didn’t get us first, but to add insult to injury the ancient fucker was using sewage water. It was a degree of assholishness that verged into elegance.

Ranger followed the Concocter through, the Huntress next in line, and I stood by Masego as he stared through the wall with his flesh eye closed.

“I think I’ve found the path to the real anchor,” he murmured. “I thought it was a bleed array, but it does seem to headed downwards in small lines. There would have to be reservoirs elsewhere in the array structure that I have not seen, but...”

“I trust you,” I frankly said. “Where?”

“Close to the Hall of the Dead,” Masego said. “In between the fork of corridors were first found.”

I got the distinct sense that I was just now being let in on a bad joke that the Dead King had been laughing alone at for a few thousand years, which was the best sign we were on the right track I’d had all day.

“Then we double back,” I said.

It wasn’t that easy. I crawled out ahead of the sewage and the poison, but it was to the sight of butchered corpses strewn all over the corridor. Ranger and the Huntress had seen to the patrol handily, but we were most definitely caught. This whole thing was about to head downhill in a hurry.

“Good news,” I said, “we think we know the real path to the anchors.”

“Bad news?” Ranger probed.

It wasn’t her first band of five.

“It’s back near the Hellgate,” I said.

“Which will be swarming with undead by now,” the Silver Huntress grimly said.

“Look on the bright side,” I said.

“Which is?” the Concocter asked.

A moment of awkward silence passed.

“I was,” I admitted, “hoping one of you would have something.”

—

I let loose a blast of Night that hit the ranks of the skeletons like a trebuchet stone, crushing armour and sending bones flying. Within a heartbeat the corridor was filled up again, the sea of undead pushing forward. They were packed so tight they were actually getting in each other’s way, but for all that apparent stupidity I knew full well that if they ever managed to close the distance we were in a world of trouble. It’d be like standing in front of the whole in a dam.

“Zeze?” I called out. “Tell me you’re getting somewhere.”

I could hear Ranger and the Huntress covering the other corridor, the once-Calamity rather enjoying herself by the sounds of it. I’d yet to see her feel threatened since the beginning of our jaunt into Keter, as if at no point she had believed she was in a mess she could not fight her way out of. Considering she’d broken into the Crown of the Dead alone several times, I wasn’t even sure she was wrong.

“It is a frustrating puzzle,” Masego admitted. “The solution keeps changing.”

I grit my teeth and let loose another blast of Night only to find that a Revenant with a shield took the brunt of the blow. Eye narrowing, I drowned the hallway in black flame. That ought to buy me a but of time.

“So brute force it,” I shouted. “Don’t play the game.”

“We’ve tried, Warden,” the Concocter shouted back. “It started to melt the lock.”

I was really starting to hate this place. I had before, of course, but only in a general principle kind of way. Now it was starting to get personal. I sent a blast of Night through the guttering flames, hitting blindly at the enemy, and risked a few step backs. Masego and Cocky were staring at rows of burning runes that had appeared on stone, a series of which needed to be picked to open the hidden door. What I knew about High Arcana – which this clearly was – would fill just about a parchment, if you wrote small enough, so I didn’t try to tell Masego how to mage. Instead I told him how to be a thug, a subject in which my expertise knew few rivals.

It was a natural talent, humility compelled me to admit.

“We don’t care about the lock,” I said, “we care about the door. We’ll melt the whole fucking thing if you have to. Cocky, use every drop of acid you have left. Or can make.”

It wasn’t like we’d ever need it more than now. I was forced to go blow up the corridor again as they got to it, but before long there were noises of triumph from the Concocter – and a sigh from Masego, who probably figured he could have beat the lock given long enough – and I retreated that way, calling for the other two to do the same. What was revealed was a set of stairs sloping downwards, large enough only for one person to pass at a time. Naturally, I put Ranger in front. Our method to get in there paid off rather quickly, as within moments of the five us beginning to make our way down there was a grind of stone against stone as the broken door behind us tried to close and the walls began to suck out the air.

It didn’t do anything, since we’d blow open a hole behind us, but if this place had been sealed up it would have been lethal.

I’d figured the way down would not be long but I was wrong. After a rather straight way down at first, the stairs turned into a downwards spiral. The Silver Huntress, who held our rearguard, began to loose arrows at the pursuing undead which thankfully were as limited as us by the narrowness of the stairs. Tension would have made it hard to tell how long we made our way down if not for the gift of the Sisters which told me the distance from dawn and dusk and allowed me to tell it was about half an hour. When we reached the bottom of the stairs in a pitch black room Masego tossed up a ball of light, revealing we stood in an antechamber.

Every surface was covered by tiles of bronze that each bore a glyph, sorcery pulsing thick in the air. Yeah , I thought, this is the right place. Gates stood in our way to the room beyond but Masego seemed in a good mood.

“The anchors are on the other side,” he told me. “Not all of them, but the most important ones.”

“And if we break them it’ll bring down the defensive wards?” I pressed.

“The most power-intensive ones,” Hierophant noted. “Others will remain. I will admit that Trismegistus’ defences were made with a thorough eye for redundancy.”

It would have to be good enough. I left the Silver Huntress to handle the stairs and keep the dead off our backs, helping Masego to smash our way through the gates. The time for subtlety was past. Though the Dead King’s defensive wards were impressive and apparently the gates had recently been changed to resist Night, they had a weakness: parts of them relied on active sorcery, and that could be compromised by Wrest. Sweat beaded the back of my neck by the time we were done, but after another quarter hour of exertions the half-melted bronze gates fell down and revealed the greater room beyond.

It was, I immediately thought, like looking at the heart of a Praes flying fortress.

Stones and gems were replaced instead by engraved steles of black stone of different heights that formed a complicated arcane pattern, but the sight of bare stone walls covered in glyphs was most familiar. I should not have been surprised: Trismegistan sorcery came from the works of the very man whose work this was. There was a pool of what might have looked like water at the heart of the room, whose high arched ceilings crackled with shivering power, but there was a luminous sheen to it that betrayed it was no such thing.

“Pure magic,” Hierophant breathed, looking at it too. “I have no notion as to how it was made physically stable.”

“That’s fine, since we need the opposite,” I bluntly said. “Wreck this place, Masego. In a way that won’t kill us.”

“It will take some time,” he said, and sounded almost reluctant.

I supposed to someone who loved sorcery as much as he did this was much like a lover of horses butchering a herd of Liessen purebreds. Still, he nodded and I left him to it. He’d call for me if he had a need of Night. Instead I wandered about the room carefully, wary of hidden defences, and found that while Concocter stuck close to Masego I was not alone in my explorations. Ranger was doing the same, circling the broadly circular room from the other way. The dome above us ended in a thin well leading upwards, but that wasn’t what drew my eye or hers. There was another set of stairs on the other side of the room.

“Shit,” I muttered. “That can’t be good. Ranger, with me.”

I called out to Masego that we were headed down, getting only a half-hearted wave in answer, and went down into the dark. These stairs were not like the ones we’d taken down: they were much broader, and the corridor they fed into had almost as high a ceiling as the ward anchor room. Ranger, whose eyes lingered on the ceiling, frowned.

“Something scraped against those,” she said. “Metal or bone, I can’t tell.”

My stomach clenched. That ceiling was taller than most Gigantes. The stairs we took curved smoothly and led towards a room that was beneath the one holding the anchors. There were no gates leading into it, only a tall arch of stone, and when we crossed the threshold with wary steps it was to the sight of a gentle slope going down. Like a hill of bare stone the room slid downwards into what looked like a massive cavern, most of which was taken up by an equally massive well. I couldn’t tell how deep it went from where we stood, but as the two of us slid down the slope my eye found something else to stare at. There were two shapes seated on each side of the wall, sitting cross-legged, and both wore an armour of painted ceramic tiles in purple and silver.

They were also massive, each large as a tower, and through the open faces of their helmets I saw no flesh: only leering skulls, with green flame burning where there should be eyes. Neither of them reacted to our approach, still staring down in the well.

“Those aren’t Gigantes,” I quietly said. “They’re too large.”

For the first time today, I saw Ranger tense.

“Titans,” Hye Su murmured. “These are the corpses of Titans.”

And yet they hadn’t been fighting all this time, I thought. We’d seen no sign of them throughout the siege, when even the animated remains of such entities were sure to wield fearsome power. And, most worryingly of all, even as we left the slope and approached the well they did not so much as twitch. They just kept looking down into the depths, unmoving, and the closer we got the more I felt the eldrith power permeating the room. It wasn’t anything as simple as magic either. I was not sure Masego’s eye would be able to see it.

We were but a dozen steps away from the rim of the well when one of the dead Titans moved. Only its head twitched, turning towards me, and it offered a leering grin.

“Mistake,” the Dead King said in Ashkaran.

A strong sensation of release washed over me, the dead Titans releasing whatever it was they had been holding, and from the depths of the well there was a deep breath followed by a deafening roar. It would have burst my ears, if I’d not reached for Night in time. All I could think of in that heady moment before all the Hells come loose would begin chasing me was of a conversation I’d once had with a man now dead. The ghost the two living people in this pit had in common. When you assault the stronghold of a villain , Amadeus of the Green Stretch had said, there are three things to watch out for: the monster, the trial and the pivot.

By the looks of it, we’d just found the first of the three.

Chapter 65: Monster

“When it passed that King Angelika of Rhenia was slain on the Hocheben Heights by the Prince of Bones, the Dead King sent an envoy to return her sword to the heir Prince Emil. ‘But it is only a loan, prince,’ the envoy told him, ‘for in time she will come to retrieve it.’”

– Extract from ‘Crowned In Iron’, a compendium of Lycaonese histories assembled by Prince Alexandre of Lyonis

Ears ringing, I watched as great claws of bone – each tall as a man – caught the edge of the well. The creature within, a hulking shape wreathed in shadows that my hundred eyes could not pierce, began to drag itself out of the pit even as the sitting Titans rose to their feet. Above our heads the ceiling of the cavern began to crack, the beast’s roar having been enough to shatter the stone.

Well, I mused, this had all taken an unfortunate turn.

“Say, Ranger,” I muttered. “I don’t suppose you’d happen to know what that thing is?”

“Pray I do not, Warden,” Hye Su quietly replied.

In other circumstances that undead had been made of not one but two Titans would have been the main source of my alarm, but because this was Keter the fact that I saw them moving from the corner of my eye ranked only rising concern. Outright alarm was reserved for the thing emerging from the well, claws gouging the stone as if it were mud. The sharp lengths of bones led into what I thought to be tendrils of some sort, until I realized they were large chords of sinew. They wove themselves into long, squirming limbs as the behemoth rose from the pit, revealing to my eye a head twisted draconic head that flowed into a mane-like length of sinews going down its neck.

It eyes were as a mass of burning coals hidden beneath the writhing tendons, burning in the light yet casting no shadow.

“That felt like a yes,” I noted. “So what am I looking at? Because I’ve seen dragons, and I’m no draconologist but I’m willing to firmly state this isn’t one.”

“This is one of the drakoi, the ancient foes of the Gigantes,” Ranger grimly said. “They are to dragons what we are to insects.”

That was less than promising, I mentally noted. Even a glory hound monster-fighting lunatic like Hye Su didn’t sound eager to fight one of those creatures, a sure sign they were nothing to trifle with. This was, after all, the same woman who’d picked a fight with a Queen of Summer in her own territory. On the other hand, even if apparently Neshamah had decided that now was as good a moment to start throwing dead gods – and how I missed the days where I didn’t have to deal with even the singular of that, much less the plural – at his problems I could tell with a look that this was a necromantic construct.

It was made of bone and tendons, and though some sort of eldritch power coursed through it like veins it was most definitely dead. Which meant someone had already killed this thing once already, that it wasn’t impossible. Just almost impossible, and that was the kind of wiggle room I’d been betting my life on for years now.

Mind you, I’d died a few times.

“Time for a tactical withdrawal,” I decided.

“Agreed,” Ranger said.

As one we turned clean pairs of heels to the enemy, though of course it wasn’t that easy. The drakon hit the ceiling as it rose to what I was pretty sure wasn’t even its full height, the cracks from earlier widening and stones began to fall. Wasn’t as much of problem as the two dead Titans having gotten a move on, though. The power that screamed against the air was sorcery, but like none I’d ever felt before. Where other spells felt like they stole the reins from Creation, imposed a will on it, this was... It felt barbed, cutting, like it hurt all around it just by existing. Whatever the Hells it was, it sunk into the slope of stone we were running up and seize it whole. A heartbeat later the rocked turned liquid, Ranger cursing as she leapt and I pulled on Night.

I wove tendrils around me and hooked them at the ceiling, forced to further crack it and dangerously vulnerable as I made sure I wouldn’t be swept by the tide the stone had turned into. Ranger went about it another way. She had a sword in hand, and with a grunt of effort she cut at the liquid. Wind billowed as the strength of the cut opened a path through the liquid stone and she landed on dry ground. Reluctantly impressed, I took half a heartbeat to appreciate how quickly she’d managed that before my attention moved back behind us. Where the drakon was halfway out of the well and filling the cavern with its hulking, writhing shape but also something... subtler. The air in the cavern felt different now.

Tainted somehow.

The second Titan had just finished their spell, a sphere of burning sunlight forming in front of them, and I wasn’t even going to try to protect that – I wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, but there was enough power wafting from it that the air was warping. And since the bloody ceiling was falling anyway... I exerted my will, the tendrils of Night hooked into the stone above me spreading like roots before I seized the chord holding me up with my hand and pulled . The ceiling came down behind me, tons of rock falling like rain as Ranger cut her way through the tide again.

I landed with a pained grunt from the ache in my bad leg, brushing off liquid stone from the edge of my cloak before following Ranger into her race out of the room.

I didn’t look back but I still felt sizzling winds blowing at my back and a horrid keening sound as stone was vaporized, discarding hopes this had so much as scuffed one of the monsters. Getting out of the cavern alive would have to be enough. Ranger got onto the stairs first, her stride swift without looking hurried, and I was but a dozen steps behind. I risked a glance back as I turned the corner and felt a swell of dread when I saw that the drakon was digging through the broken ceiling. Going straight up towards the room with the ward anchors. Fuck. All the more reason to hurry, but that moment of dallying had cost me.

The wall I’d ducked behind was ripped off by an unseen hand, the power of the dead Titans screaming in my ears, and I threw myself to the ground just a little too slow – three rays of sunlight had shot out like burning lances, and the third caught my shoulder. It went through the Mantle of Woe where so may magics had failed, melting part of my pauldron into worthless slag. I cursed and pulled on Night to cool the molten metal before it got to my flesh, crawling out of the way even as the wall that’d been ripped out was thrown back in pieces. Right at me. I was pulling on Night even as a small voice in the back of my mind reminded that staying still was death, that the next rays of light would kill me, but what else could I do? The stones would kill me just the same. Only a hand grabbed me by the collar and Ranger dragged me up, just in time for me to toss a veil of darkness over us as we ran. A wave of pure sunlight incinerated where we had been standing a heartbeat earlier, but we’d gotten out in time.

We legged it up the stairs, back to the ward room, and I calmed my breath even as I felt the floor shake beneath our feet. Cracks were spreading all over, enchanted tiles breaking like mud left out too long in the sun. Puffs of magic came out with ever break, filling the air with aimless power.

“Thanks,” I got out.

“Might still need you,” Ranger frankly replied.

Fair enough, I conceded. The Concocter had left the floor and headed to the bottom of the stairs and the Huntress was still fighting up those, by the sounds of it. Masego was still among the garden of steles, though now he was kneeling by the pool of pure magic at the heart of it all.

“Hierophant, end it,” I shouted. “We need to go .”

“Nearly there,” Masego faintly replied, his flesh eye closed.

I hurried across the cracking floor, feeling massive claws scrape at it from beneath.

“How long?” I asked.

“Would you worry,” Hierophant said, “have anything to do with the half dead god beneath our feet?”

My jaw clenched.

“ Half dead?” I repeated.

“The body is a necromantic construct,” Hierophant said, “but the entity itself is not. It seems to be a piece of godhead contained in an undead body.”

So that was how he’d done it. Powerful as the Dead King was, the Riddle-Maker had made it pretty clear that at his peak the Titans could have wiped the floor with him and his buddies had supposedly been slapped around by the drakoi. Grave robbing Titans and raising their bones I could buy, but controlling the remains of an elder dragon had been harder to swallow. Only he hadn’t done that, by the sounds of it. He’d poured god’s blood into a corpse he’d made sure he could control and still found the resulting monster hard enough to control it’d been kept sealed in a well beneath Keter.

“It’s a drakon,” I told him.

Masego’s eye flow open. He stared at me for a heartbeat.

“I will hurry,” he conceded, as if doing me some great favour.

“I hope you will, because there’s dead Titans not far behind us,” I grunted.

I left Ranger to keep an eye on the stairs behind us, instead going to the set that’d lead us back above. I told Cocky to run up and tell the Silver Huntress so start clearing our way out, because we needed to get the Hells out of here in a hurry. I still had a knife up my sleeve, one that might bite deep here, but I’d rather keep it back a little longer. If we could get the drakon to rampage around the spire after the wards came down, it’d draw Named like flies. By the time I returned Ranger had her bow out and an arrow nocked, eyes on the threshold of the stairs, and Masego had gone still kneeling besides a stele.

“Hierophant?”

He did not answer, not for a few heartbeats. Then he took his hand off the stele and rose to his feet, smiling. I could already feel the wards fading in the distance. Names that had felt a world away were now at the tip of my fingers. There were, I grimly though, less of those left than I’d thought. The Dead King was having himself a massacre. Zeze cleared his throat.

“I believe that-”

Ranger loosed an arrow, but I didn’t even end up looking at what because the floor broke . A writhing, gaping maw tore through the stone and closed its fangs around steles and the pool of magic.

“Run,” I hissed.

No one argued. The fucking collapsing floor should have held up the Titans but instead a path made itself out of falling stone as we ran for the stairs – Cocky, showing wisdom, was already gone – and the two giants began to cross unhurriedly as the drakon continued guzzling up the room. It’s eating too much , I thought. Even steles that hadn’t been disappeared between the great jaws. Was the Dead King’s leash truly so loose or was there another reason for this? Ranger went in first, taller than me and in better shape than Hierophant, and my effort to slow down the enemy by tossing a spear of blackflame the way of the Titans died without making a dent.

Sunlight blazed in the Titan’s hand and suddenly the Night flames were just gone .

That one, I grimly thought, wasn’t a good match up for me at all. I’d have to pass him on to someone else. We hurried up the cramped, narrow stairs even as they shattered behind us – the Titans were opening a path for themselves – and I found that the Silver Huntress had delivered on the task I’d given her: she was already at the very entrance, holding back the tireless horde with a short spear wreathed in Light. Behind us stone was shattering like glass, but we’d make it in time. The Dead King’s monsters were large and the same protections he’d built to keep people out were now serving to keep his abominations in.

“Hierophant,” I said, “can you help with the dead?”

“I can-”

Masego kept talking, but I did not hear the words. My blood turned to ice, for the herald of misfortunate had made itself known: someone was tuning a lute. I did not see her, was not certain it was my ears I was hearing her through, but I recognized the sounds. Drunken fingers tuning the Intercessor’s lute with surprising deftness, plucking at it until every string was just right.

“-rine, Catherine,” Hierophant called out, sounding irritated. “Are you listening?”

“Can you hear that?” I asked.

My eye turned to Ranger when I found no trace of understanding on Masego’s face, and she slowly nodded.

“Music,” Hye Su said. “Faint, but I hear it.”

Faint? No, that made sense. Ranger was an old and powerful Named on top of the more exotic talents that came with being of elven blood, but it was me who’d effectively ripped out two chunks of the Bard’s aspect and then eaten them. I’d be able to hear her better than anyone else alive.

“The Intercessor’s taking an interest,” I said, “and that’s never good. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

We swept out of the stairs like a whirlwind, Masego dropping half a hundred undead with a spell that went after the one animating them while Ranger and the Silver Huntress charged into the opening. We went down the right corridor, opposite of the one we’d taken last time, since it was the way out of the crypts. The ranks of the dead were thick and reinforcements pouring in like a flood but the momentum was on our side. I let loose blast of black flame to keep the enemy off our back, sometimes, but in truth my mind was barely on the fight. I’d left an eye of Night behind to check on the progress of the Titans and the drakon but nothing came out of the stairs, which I realized with a grimaced made sense.

Instead of having the giants and the fucking horror dragon wreck these too-small corridors pursuing us, they were probably going to keep heading straight up to catch us in one of the large rooms above. I tried to remember as much as I could of the layout from the time I’d come here to negotiate, since I’d seen a little of the spire when I had, but I just couldn’t seem to fucking concentrate. Not when the idle tuning had turned into strumming, and then into the beginning of a slow and sad song. The Bard usually pretended to be a poor musician, for she liked to play the fool, but she hadn’t that night in Ater and it seemed she would not today either.

My head wasn’t in the fight but it hardly mattered: the Dead King hardly threw anything worth a second look our way. Masses of lesser undead and a few Revenants barely worth a second look. With Ranger as our vanguard, it was the equivalent of throwing wheat at a sickle. We smashed our way through the corridors, leaving only broken bodies behind us as we hurried out of the crypts. I vaguely remembered the path from the last time, which served us well enough as we fought our way to the bottom of a set of wide stairs. As the Huntress took off the head of the last Bind there, I glanced back at the receding tide of undead behind us. I threw a few clumps of black flame to make sure we wouldn’t be followed, but in truth they didn’t look eager to.

Not a good sign, I admitted to myself as we went up.

Last time I’d been here, I’d thought it was a beautiful place. The hall was a dome of arches, grey stone rising to support a gallery above, yet the most striking part of it was the ceiling. It was curved, held up by elegant beams of stone, but everything in between was coloured glass. The pieces shone from the light of a sun that did not truly exist, painting stretches of colour on the tiled grey floor. The five of us stumbled out of the side hall panting, all of us scuffed but none wounded, but there would be no relief: just as I’d predicted, the enemy had arrived ahead of us. The hall’s floor had been ripped open, crushed tiles flying everywhere like feathers falling, and out of the deeps the drakon had come.

It was waiting for us, nesting among the broken stone. A forest of sinewy tendrils sprouting from its back had been folded over the spine like wings and a thick, long tail was curving against the crushed statue of some ancient conqueror. The coal-like eyes did not turn towards us, but the weight of the creature’s attention was as a weight on our shoulders – the Concocter buckled and would have fallen to her knees if not for Alexis catching her arm. My eye narrowed as I took it the shape of it. It felt larger than before, I thought. And more... defined. As if it had somehow grown. More than that, the same subtle power I had felt tainting the air below was back.

It felt humid, like it was pressing against your skin in the most disgusting of ways. Like a droplet of water going down your spine, only deep down you knew it was an insect. The drakon was doing something to its surroundings, I thought. Not even going out of its way to do it: existing was enough. And though I couldn’t quite tell what it was doing yet, I doubted it would be anything we’d enjoy. I cracked my neck, leaning on my staff, and breathed out.

“Well,” I said, “it looks like we’ll be having that fight after all. Hierophant?”

“Catherine?”

“Cast,” I said. “We’ll buy you as long as we can.”

He opened his mouth to answer by unfortunately it seemed that this was as much leeway as the ancient horror was willing to allow us. It began rising on its feet, body writing and sprouting smaller half-aborted limbs before as it did. It swallowed most of them back up into its body, but not all.

“Move,” I hissed, Ranger drawing her sword as I did.

The Concocter stuck with Masego, since in a fight like this she was near useless, but the rest of us spread out. The Silver Huntress shot towards the stairs that’d lead up to the gallery, a good shooting nest, and Ranger unhurriedly stepped into the open grounds of the hall. As for me, I breathed out and pulled deep on the Night. Sve Noc answered with unstinting hand, coolness raging through my veins and overflowing. It raced down my body, weaving shadow through the Mantle of Woe as I pulled down the hood. I breathed out mist, fingers closing around my staff of dead yew, and let the shadows wreath me whole.

Unsheathing my sword, I stepped into the fight.

The Ranger, huntress of gods and monster, was the first to strike. She moved like a ghost across the broken floor, disturbing not so much as a mote of dust, but the drakon struck just as swiftly. It batted away at her, and when she leapt above the blow snapped forward to swallow her whole – only for the Ranger to carve through its head instead, blowing though the tendrils of sinew like a great wind. There were no bones or brains inside, I realized as Ranger’s strike revealed nothing at all. No head to take, and the drakon seemed indifferent to a blow that would have killed most creatures of Creation. It did not even pause in its assault, wings fluttering as it tried to slap down Ranger.

Too slow, for I wove a tendril of shadow to drag her out of the way and the Silver Huntress loosed an arrow of Light from the upper gallery that burned halfway through the limb. Dropping Ranger when she was two dozen feet above the ground – she landed in a smooth crouch – I went on the offensive. Probing its defences, I tossed a few balls of blackflame at is sides. Half were blown out by the wings as the drakon turned towards me, but a few landed and I frowned as I looked through eyes of Night at the results. The black flames were ‘burning’ without actually consuming anything, and soon guttered out without having done much of anything.

That disgusting humid sensation grew stronger, pressing at me from all sides.

Did it get stronger against power it had been attacked with? I couldn’t tell from just this and didn’t have the time to spare for another try: I’d drawn the creature’s attention. It moved like the wind, crossing the floor in moments and disdaining the use of claws for its gaping maw. Teeth formed out of bone as the writhing nothing opened, looming above me, and I released the Night I had gathered around myself. Three other Catherine Foundlings legged it in different directions as I backed away under cover of a veil, but the abomination ignored the illusions. Fuck , I eloquently thought as I reached for my sword.

Instead the side of the drakon’s head was split open by a sword blow, the Ranger attacking from the side even as the Huntress loosed a Light arrow into the head from the other side. They’d not just struck to save my ass, though – I could see from the angle that Alexis had placed her arrow after Ranger struck in an attempt to burn out part of the drakon’s head. I backed away behind the pillars as the writhing, hollowed head withdrew, jaws snapping at nothing, and saw that a handful of cut-through sinew tendrils had dropped down on the stone. Like the other two I kept an eye on the drakon as I moved, grimacing as I saw that the head was full again in moments.

There would be no shaving away at the monster piece by piece, then. Back to regular violence. Hiding in the shade of the pillars I began to weave a curse, wondering if those might not work better than outright destruction, when I saw someone dash out into the open grounds. The Concocter, I realized as I swore and loosed my curse early. The lash of Night hit the drakon’s side, and to my pleasant surprise did exactly what I’d wanted it to: writhing tendrils went still, locked into place. The Dead King , I realized even as the Silver Huntress peppered the drakon’s limbs with arrows so it would not splatter Cocky over the ground. The Dead King’s work is the weak point.

The shard of divinity that gave consciousness to this monster wasn’t something I could snuff out without preparations, but it was stuck in the contained Neshamah had made for it. And that I could affect. The Concocter ran back in cover, though not before I got a look at what she’d been doing: she’d cut out a piece of sinew and shoved it into a bottle. Huh. Whether or not that’d end up useful, the Huntress had caught the drakoi’s attention with that last volley: it roared, forcing a wince out of me as panes of painted glass shattered above us. The colourful shards weren’t just falling, though. As if moved by an invisible hand, they gathered into a ring of hovering glyphs.

I watched, open-mouthed, as the same wards that Hierophant had killed below came back to life around the drakon.

So that was why it’d eaten so many of the ward anchors, I realized. It didn’t just get stronger against things that had attacked it, it got strong from what it ate . Which was, if I understood correctly the disgusting humid feeling still pressing tight around the Night veiling me, anything around it for long enough. The longer we fought the drakon, the harder it would be for us to harm it. Given long enough, even the strongest workings of Night would barely rate a scratch. It was an absurd thing to contemplate, something like that. Invisibility in the making, if used by even a halfway clever soul. Which is why the Dead King used only a shard of you, imprisoned in a body he controls. Neshamah would keeping it stupid enough it wouldn’t be able to break free of its binding, and even then it was a fucking nightmare to deal with.

We couldn’t beat this thing, I admitted to myself. Not right now, not with the tools at hand. And stubbornly continuing to fight it would make it harder to put down when we did have the right people there. We need to retreat the moment Masego lands his spell , I thought, looking through an eye at Hierophant. He was still murmuring, one eye closed and the other burning. The Concocter was close by, hidden behind a pillar as she rifled through her bags for something and stared at the piece of the drakon she’d snatched. There was no telling when he’d be done incanting, I thought, but it had to be soon. Best I prepare for it.

As the drakon began to methodically ravage the upper gallery, tearing through it with a cat’s cruel laziness, I stepped out in the open and levelled my staff at the abomination.

“We’re going to retreat,” I called out, “the moment the spell is done.”

That was when it all went wrong. Was it intelligent enough to understand words? I’d not thought so, but immediately the drakon stopped trying to flush out the Huntress and instead turned towards where Masego still stood. I swore and shaped a pair of curses before tossing them at the creature. The first was a mixed bag, the sinewy tendrils I’d meant to knot up instead melding together and reforming, but the second was an outright loss: the limb I’d meant to freeze was barely slowed. It was adapting to Night tricks. I broke into a run even as the drakon slithered towards Hierophant.

“Cover,” I screamed. “ Cover him, Merciless Gods!”

The Huntress leapt off the edge of the gallery, spear lighting up like a falling star as she cleaved through the drakon’s wing, but a leg burst out of the abomination’s side and caught her in the belly. The sound of metal crumpling was heard and she went flying. I cursed again, drawing on my Name to quicken my stride. My leg was throbbing but I grit my teeth and let the pain pass through, getting there about the same time as Ranger did. The Concocter popped out to throw a vial of some liquid that turned to flame on impact but the drakon hardly noticed, smashing the pillar she’d been hiding behind and breaking her arm. As well as revealing Masego.

I stood between death and Hierophant, screaming as I called on Night with my sword raised, and Ranger’s blade cut through the beast’s neck – though it formed back anew past the cut. I unleashed torrents of black flame into the drakon’s face, aiming for those buried red eyes, and though I calcinated tendrils I could feel the resistance growing ever stronger until suddenly sorcery bloomed behind me. Through the Night I saw Hierophant’s eye open and his lips mouth a single word.

“Rot.”

The drakon shuddered, maw opening, and began to scream . The dead flesh it was made of began to decay and come apart in clumps, and though the abomination grew them back it was writhing in pain as the rot refused to leave its body. Masego slumped, half falling to his knees, and I sheathed my sword to hold him up. The drakon was distracted for now, so we needed to get the Hells out. Only we couldn’t, not quickly. The Concocter was trying to get up, cradling her broken bones, and the Huntress was still on the other side of the hall. There were cracks on the pillar where she’d landed and she was splayed below, either dead or unconscious. I’d need Ranger to-

I found Hye Su already looking at me, face a blank mask, and my stomach clenched. She’d been looking at the same things I did, and had come to the same conclusions. Only she wasn’t me, so the decision that followed was different.

“It is a battle lost,” Ranger said, shaking her head. “Survive if you can: I am still owed.”

And without another word, she turned her back on us. She was going to leave, to get out while the spell held. I had to push down the urge to set her on fire as she made to leave – it wouldn’t help – and held up Masego as I saw the way the rot was slowing in the abomination’s body. It was getting used to the spell, we didn’t have long left.

“Get the Concocter out,” I ordered Hierophant. “I’ll pick up the Huntress.”

Only the drakon roared again, and as I covered my ears the rotting parts of it were shed to the ground. Ember-red eyes turned towards us and my stomach clenched as I reached for the Night. I wouldn’t be able to get everyone out. It struck and I-

“That’s a lot more tentacles than anyone should be comfortable with.”

And I felt my shoulder loosen as the limb that should have swept through all three of us was instead split in half, Indrani sliding down its length and landing on her feet. She took a few steps back, looking almost drunk, then spat to the side as the drakon put itself back together.

“You’re late,” I said.

Indrani snorted.

“Had to take the long way around,” she replied. “Shiny Boots was already knocking at the front doors.”

Another roar shook the hall, the drakon furious at the continued interruptions.

“I’ll forgive you this time,” I conceded.

She hummed, twirling her longknives thoughtfully.

“The Lady bailed on you, yeah?”

“Just about,” I grunted back.

We’d bargained for her to lead us into Keter by the secret way, not fight by our side, so in truth she hadn’t broken our agreement. But she’d abandoned us nonetheless.

“Isn’t that something,” Indrani murmured.

I could See it, through my dead eye. The way the weight shifted, the story moved. Two claims had been competing, and while one had been stronger than the other it was also not there – and the story still wanted a Role to be played.

“It was mine to have anyway,” Indrani decided. “My friends to keep alive. My family to protect.”

And with that last step in the journey, it all fell into place perfectly. The Ranger fought monsters, but the Ranger had fled and monsters were still being fought.

“If she throws away the fight, then it’s mine to pick up,” Indrani said. “So how does the line go again? Ah, yes.”

She straightened, meeting the drakon’s burning ember eyes.

“I am the Ranger,” she said, and made it true. “I hunt those worth hunting. Tremble, for you qualify.”

And in a blur of movement she was gone. I nudged Masego towards the Concocter – he could set the bone and heal it – and went to circle around the broken hall as Indrani fought toe to toe with a horror out of legend. She moved like the wind, never where the drakon struck as it tore through the hall in growing frustration. The Ranger carved through sinew and bone, shattered claws and laughed as the drakon roared its impotent wrath. Like a bull trying to swat a hornet, it missed again and again as she stung from every direction.

I reached the Silver Huntress and found to my relief that she was not dead. Unconscious and her skull had been rattled, but it took more than that to kill a Named. I dragged her back into consciousness and stopped the bleeding out of her forehead wound but her eyes were still unfocused as she got on her feet. To get her back fighting fit we’d need a priest, much as I hated to admit it. My eye went back to Indrani, who was impossibly holding her own against the abomination. A Name’s never stronger than when it comes into being , I reminded myself.

I watched as she laughed and toyed with a dead god, knowing that it was beautiful but it could not last. That first burst of strength would fade, and when it did the situation would turn against us. We needed to get out while we still could, I thought as I guided Alexis across the room. Towards the same threshold that Hye Su had left through. As if to crown my worries, the drakon finally landed a blow on Indrani. She’d blocked it, so it snapped one of her blades instead of her bones. It still tossed her back, sliding along the ground until she stood near where Masego and Cocky had gotten to.

“Indrani,” I shouted, “we need to leave. Move the fight elsewhere.”

She didn’t look happy, but she didn’t argue. I could See how her Name was pulling at her to finish the fight, to pursue the moment it had coalesced through to the end, but she was a stubborn soul and she knew her limits. She’d fight off the influence. And now that she and Hye Su had played out their parts of the story that left only...

“I’ll handle the rearguard,” the Ranger shouted. “You go on-”

The drakon went still. A heartbeat later, its wings slid to the floor. I almost laughed at the absurdity of the sight.

“ Go ,” I shouted back. “It’s handled.”

She spat angrily to the side, but did not refuse the order. She dragged Masego and Cocky along, heading for the door. I pushed on the Silver Huntress as well, who while still dazed was still fast on her feet, and within moments I was the only human left in the hall. The drakon’s gaze slowly swept the hall, coming to rest on me, and when the full weight of its attention solidified I had to let out a breath. My knees were shaking.

Then the drakon’s head rolled on the floor.

It decated to nothing as another grew back, but now before the towering monster a lone silhouette stood. It was tall and thin, holding in its hand a sword of made of wood. The drakon reared up, roar filling the air, and then its head rolled on the floor again. And its limbs, and its tail. They sprouted back, the abomination’s entire body writhing angrily, but it looked taken aback. As suddenly as a match lit nine of the Emerald Swords surrounded it in a loose ring, silent as the grave. The disgusting miasma in the air slid off them like water off a duck’s back.

“It won’t work,” I croaked out. “You can’t kill it for good with swords.”

Then someone was standing next to me, the elf’s eyes contemptuous.

“We are,” they said, “the Emerald Swords.”

It was said like a simple truth, like a sentence passed.

“If it cannot be slain for good,” the elf told me, “then we will keep slaying it until the Last Dusk.”

The words were said without so much as a speck of doubt. In the distance, the drakon’s head and limbs dropped again.

“Leave, Warden,” the elf said. “Our debt must be repaid.”

I hesitated for a moment, wondering if perhaps the monster could be put down for good, but then I recognized that for the vanity it was. Wounded pride my plans had not been enough to stop the Dead King’s own. So instead I inclined my head, as much in thanks as acknowledgement, and broke into a run to catch up with the others. Named were dying ahead of us, my own had told me. The fight to end all this awaited.

And as I passed the threshold, the Intercessor began to sing.

Scriven

“Beware the gap between the lesson taught and the lesson learned.”

– Delosi saying

Eudokia mostly remembered being hungry.

She wasn’t sure how she had ended up on the street, but then most of the others didn’t either. They begged by the thoroughfare with worn bowls, getting coppers or scraps when they weren’t being chased off by the guards, and it was a rare turn of the moon where one of them did not disappear. Sometimes they died in their sleep, the good way to go. Sometimes it was the cough or the bubbles, which were bad, but worse yet was people. Corrin had spent half a day drowning in his own blood after that guard roughed him up. It didn’t get better, even when priests out in the streets said it would. They said that Delos sent coin to the city, that it would get the little beggars into houses, but it never did. Eudokia was young, but already she knew better than to believe it ever would.

The Secretariat’s money always went to the walls and the nobles. No one else ever saw so much as a silver of it.

When the men came, she’d been sleeping. Hadn’t had anything to eat in two days, she could barely stand. But the noise of it woke her up and she headed to the abandoned temple on the other side of the street, where a handful of men dressed like merchants were talking. She slipped in and saw they were smiling, but not the kids. The strangers were offering to take them away, to bring them to a school where they would learn a trade and become scholars.

“Three meals a day,” the smiling man promised. “And a roof over your head.”

The smaller kids were eager for it, but the older ones knew better. Sometimes neatly dressed men came from the nicer parts of the city, offering bargains like this one – when they bothered to ask at all – but the kids that went never came back. You learned not to ask questions and to keep with other kids when night fell, even though they might steal from you. It was better than disappearing.

“Where would we go?” a kid asked. “Where would you take us?”

“Delos, child,” the smiling man said. “Far from these dirty streets.”

And it was a trap, had to be, but some of the little kids went for it. Ignored the older ones that tried to hold them back. After that it was the desperate who went, and Eudokia bit her lip. Two days, since she’d last eaten. She didn’t have anyone who’d share if she asked and she was starting to sleep a lot. She’d seen it happen before, how it was the beginning of wasting away. They might kill her, she thought, but it might be quick. Better than going slow, the empty belly hollowing you from the inside.

“I’ll go,” Eudokia said, and the man smiled at her.

—

They hadn’t been chained up when they travelled by wagon, and the merchants hadn’t lied when they said there would be three meals a day. Good signs, but how long would that last? Still, Eudokia couldn’t remember ever eating so well and neither could any of the others. Meat and greens, sometimes with fresh olives and warm milk after. Like most kids she couldn’t remember a life before the street, and there was enough hope in her that she didn’t even argue when the merchants stopped the wagons by a river and told them all to go out and wash. They used soap that smelled like flowers and got to sleep in clean blankets after. One of the older boys had eavesdropped on the merchants at night and he said they were all really headed to Delos, to the great city where they said Secretariat ruled for the good of all.

A lot of them spent parts of the day sleeping, not used to eating so much or feeling so safe, and Eudokia would admit she was one. It was why she didn’t see them enter Delos, she’d been napping in the back. She only woke when they were near the place where they would live and the other kids got rowdy, nervous the good times would end and taking it out on each other. The smiling man was still smiling when he told them to cut it out, that they would soon be at their new home. That, at least, Eudokia was awake for. She filed out the wagons with the others and stared curiously at her new home. It looked like a temple, she thought, but also a little like a school. It was large, though, larger than any building she’d ever seen: long and wide, with three stories and other dwellings attached.

There were walls around it, which she didn’t like, but through the open gates she could see people in robes going around – some were cleaning with brooms, others carrying scrolls and there were even kids not much older than her running around playing.

“This is the School of Gulls, children,” the smiling man told them. “You will live here until you are grown, learning your trade.”

And part of her still thought that it was a trap, but when they were ushered in no one hit them and the people inside didn’t glare. They weren’t brought into the large temple-like place, instead to the smaller houses on the side, but Eudokia didn’t mind. The merchants, who told them they were to be called Scholars now that everyone was part of the school, said it was because the large building was used for lessons and the dormitories of the older students. Deep down Eudokia was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but as the weeks passed it didn’t. They were fed and clothed, given beds in the small houses and brought to classrooms to be taught letters and numbers by smiling Scholars. Eudokia made friends with some of the others, though most with Cassandra.

She was a little older, but no luckier like Eudokia she’d been starving before she came here. She had curly hair and now that her cheeks weren’t hollow they were red like apples. She talked and laughed a lot, too, which Eudokia liked. She was quiet, so it felt nice to have someone that’d fill the silences.

“We never have lessons with the older kids, did you notice?” Cassandra said one day as they sat in the courtyard for their midday meal.

“They read scrolls in their classes,” Eudokia pointed out. “We can’t read yet.”

“Maybe,” the other girl mused. “Still, it’s strange we see so little of them. And there’s two kinds of robes they wear, did you notice?”

“I asked about that,” she replied. “The blue robes are from outside, students who paid to study here. The brown robes are street kids like us, taken in.”

Cassandra frowned.

“So why is it that the brown robes try so hard to avoid us?”

Eudokia didn’t answer, but she figured she knew. It must be embarrassing for the students, now that they’d learned all those lessons, to be put next to ignorant kids like them when the blue robes were looking. Like being told you were the same as the kid who pissed his pants all the time. She didn’t tell Cassandra, though, because then she’d smile less and she liked Cassandra’s smiles. And though Eudokia let the conversation die, the curiosity did stick a little. Enough that she approached one of the blue robes after the day’s lessons were over, asking the older girl if she could maybe answer a few questions. The blue robe passed a hand through her hair, sighing.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “but explaining anything to you might end up a waste of time for me.”

Eudokia flinched, which had the older girl’s eyes widening.

“I don’t mean that being an orphan makes you less,” the blue robe hurried to assure her. “Family can’t get you through the askretis examinations if you don’t have talent. It’s just that you haven’t gone through the threshing yet.”

“The threshing?” Eudokia warily asked.

“When six months have passed, they send the slower children to one of the branch schools and keep the sharpest here,” the older girl said. “About half of you will be leaving.”

Not unkindly, the blue robe patted her shoulder.

“Come see me if you stick around, yeah?” she said. “I’ll help you find your way in the library.”

She shared what she’d learned with Cassandra that night, and the two of them only grew more determined. They’d study twice as hard and be part of the ones that stayed.

“Together,” Cassandra promised. “We’ll make it together.”

“We will,” Eudokia promised back.

—

By the time the sixth month since their arrival came at an end, all of the orphans knew what was coming. Word had gotten around, and Eudokia suspected she might not even have been the first to learn of it – the others had just kept quiet so there’d be less competition. So when one morning the entire class, all thirty of them, was taken to one of the examination halls in the back of the school everyone knew what it was about. Scholar Linos, a cheerful fat man that everyone liked, was the one who greeted them inside.

“Good morning, students,” Linos smiled. “I imagine you’ve pieced together why you’re here.”

There were scattered answers, a few of them mentioning the word ‘threshing’ outright. Eudokia kept her silence, seated on the desk by Cassandra’s.

“It is nothing to worry about,” Scholar Linos assured them. “All children learn at different paces, and it may be that the School of Gulls is not the best place for you to learn. It does not mean we will abandon you.”

Not a single child in the room really believed that, deep down. When the test was given – slate and chalk had been given out where answers were to be written to the questions that Scholar Linos asked out loud – all went at it aggressively, Eudokia tracing the words and numbers with methodical care. Cassandra looked like she might be struggling with additions, so she waited until Linos was looking elsewhere and showed her friend her slate. They’d make it together. When it was done they all had to set down their chalk and two other scholars came in to help Linos pick up their slates. They left, leaving the smiling fat man behind, but then someone else came. A bent old woman in brown robes, though hers were belted with cloth of gold. The door was locked behind her.

She spoke not a word, only looking at them curiously, but even if Scholar Linos hadn’t bowed at her entry the kid would have gone quiet. She felt serious, important.

“Children,” the old woman said. “You may call me Crone.”

Linos cleared his throat, gesturing significantly, and they all greeted her.

“I am an elder in the School of Gulls,” Crone said, “here to greet you today as you truly enter it. There is one last test for you to pass, as I once did and others will after you.”

Everyone leaned forward, worry and hope fighting for the reins.

“Get in pairs and stand up, children,” Scholar Linos gently ordered. “You can choose your own.”

They didn’t hesitate: Eudokia and Cassandra shared a look and immediately rose. A few others did too, until there were only a few hesitant kids left that paired with each other reluctantly. Scholar Linos showed them all an hourglass, which he set on the desk at the front of the examination room and flipped. The sand began to pour down.

“Children,” Crone said. “You have until the hourglass runs out to kill who you paired with. Anyone who does not will be killed when the sand runs out.”

Disbelief rippled. Some tried to laugh, but the two adults were perfectly unsmiling. Some screamed, then and a boy made for the door. It was still locked and wouldn’t move. A pair of girls moved closer to Crone, screaming to let them out, but the old woman simply backhanded the taller of the two hard enough blood flew. Jolly, fat Scholar Linos sighed and revealed a knife.

“Do not try that again,” Linos warned.

Eudokia felt the shift in the air then. She took a step back, towards the corner of the room, and Cassandra – oh, to her relief Cassandra looked just as terrified and the two of them backed away, holding each other tight. It was a scarred boy that threw the first hit, striking a smaller one in the face, and it was like a dam broke. Not for everyone, there were some who backed away like Eudokia and Cassandra, but so many. More than half. After six months of steady meals and exercise, they’d all gotten stronger and so instead of petty flailing it turned murderous. Blow and strangling, kids smashing each other against desks or stepping on each other’s throats.

The hourglass began to run out, and some of those that’d held back turned. Afraid of getting killed like Crone had said. Eudokia was even more scared of doing anything at all, and when the last bit of sand fell she held Cassandra close and closed her eyes.

“Eleven blooded,” Crone mildly said. “A good batch.”

“The streets always make them sharper than orphanages, Crone,” Scholar Linos replied. “Harder lessons. Our holdouts?”

“You know our way,” Crone simply said.

Eudokia’s stomach clenched and at the sound of the door opening she opened her eyes. Only instead of rescue or relief it was two Scholars who came in, and they called out strange words before waving their hands.

Darkness claimed her.

—

She woke up in a cell.

It was cold and wet and she was lying on stone, but there was a bundle of warmth at her side. Cassandra, she realized. Who was still sleeping. Eudokia looked around, trying to figure out where she was, it was just a cell of bare stone leading into iron bars. Pressing her face against those she tried to have a look outside, but all she saw was a glimpse of a corridor and what might be other cells. No light. At least not until she heard footsteps coming from a distance and torchlight flickered against the walls. Eudokia hurriedly shook Cassandra awake, who opened her eyes even if she looked dazed. The steps were unhurried, so the two of them got to their feet before the Crone appeared on the other side of the bars.

“Children,” the old woman greeted them.

“You’re evil ,” Cassandra hissed. “All of you.”

Crone shook her head.

“I am sinless, child,” she said. “As either of you would have been, had you killed the other.”

“Killing is a sin,” Eudokia quietly said.

“It is the sin of the hand, Eudokia,” Crone smiled. “Not of the tool. And this is what we are, here in the School of the Gull: tools. We are no more sinful than a sword or a knife.”

“The Secretariat’ll stop you,” Cassandra defiantly said.

“They know of nothing to stop,” Crone said. “Those of your class that bloodied their hands will be assigned an older brown robe to follow, and keep secret under pain of death for both. The dead will never be seen again, sent away to schools that do not exist.”

“And us?” Eudokia asked.

“Your test is not finished,” Crone simply said. “So it will continue.”

“Fuck you,” Cassandra bit out. “We won’t do it. We won’t kill each other.”

“Not at first,” the old woman agreed. “But you will receive no food until you do – and only enough water to live.”

Eudokia shivered.

“Those with will, like you two, make the finest assassins,” Crone smiled. “I look forward to teaching you as a true student under the School of Gulls.”

And she walked away, torch going with her and leaving them to stand alone in the dark.

—

Time was hard to tell, in this place, but again Eudokia knew hunger. The two of them whispered in their cells, making plans to escape they both knew would come to nothing. They paced and slept and sometimes cried. Twice Eudokia was unnerved enough to vomit in the same pot where they relieved themselves. And time slowly crawled forward, hunger gnawing ever deeper in Eudokia’s belly. She began sleeping much again. Cassandra moved more, and drank most of the water, while Eudokia’s long silences turned empty. She was jealous of her friend, who still thought they would live through this. She knew better.

When her limbs began to tremble and weaken, Eudokia knew the end approached. She pulled Cassandra close against her, their shivering forms giving each other some warmth, and closed her eyes to sleep. Perhaps she would wake from this one, but it would be one of the last. Only Eudokia did wake, in the end.

With Cassandra’s trembling hands around her throat.

“I’m sorry,” her friend wept. “I’m so sorry, Eudokia.”

She fought back, tried to claw back the hands, but Cassandra was stronger and as her vision swam she wondered if it might not be better this way. If one of them got out, at least. So she stopped fighting back, her hands coming to rest on Cassandra’s shoulders, and she closed her eyes. When the end came for her, she did not fight it.

—

The first thing she felt when she woke up was pain.

She’d just been thrown on something and it had jarred her awake. Her breath rasped out, her throat burning and feeling clogged. Her nose ran and her body ached. Then she remembered to feel faint surprised, at the fact she had woken up at all. Groping around she felt at what she was on, for she could not tell, and when her fingers closed around hair her blood went cold. Corpses. It was a pile of corpses she had been thrown on. And when Eudokia opened her eyes it was to torchlight, the night sky tall above her head and Crone’s wizened face looking down at her with curiosity.

“Survived, did you,” Crone mused. “She waited until her grip was too weak to finish it.”

A man in Scholar’s robes approached, spear in hand, and stood at Crone’s back.

“Shall I finish it?” he asked.

Crone looked down, thoughtful, and Eudokia met her eyes. A long moment passed.

“No,” the old woman said. “Luck is a skill too. She will not be one of us, but we have a use for her.”

—

It was as if nothing had happened at all, in some ways.

Mere days later, after a sorcerer had healed her throat of the bruises, Eudokia was attending classes again. Sitting with children, some she had come to the school with but also older ones now. Cassandra was in only a few, but would not meet her eyes. Eudokia did not try to speak with her. Alone of all the brown robes she was not sent to shadow an older student. Instead Crone sent her to the front of the school, to sit with an old man in plain grey robes at a large desk.

“Scribe,” the old man said. “That is my name.”

“Eudokia,” she hesitantly replied.

He clicked his tongue, shaking his head.

“That is a person’s name, girl,” Scribe said. “And neither of us are that. We are tools in the hands of others. Choose a better name, or I will choose it for you.”

She hesitated. Then she thought of the pit they had plucked her out of, the pile of dead children they had thought to bury her with. The grave she had stepped out of.

“Graven,” she said.

Of the grave, she had learned it meant in these very halls. Scribe peered at her, revealing startling blue eyes.

“So they haven’t choked it out of you,” the old man said.

Then he sighed.

“It would be safter to be broken,” Scribe said. “But I will not demand it of you. Come, girl, you have much to learn.”

The School of the Gull, Scribe taught her, had existed in one form or another for nearly five hundred years. It had been born in Nicae, not Delos, but after having been implicated in the death of a Basilea they had been purged from the city and fled under the rule of the Secretariat. There they had flourished, occasionally changing name or disappearing for a decade whenever they drew too much attention from the askretis – who believed they had destroyed the School three times, each under a different name.

“Assassins, they are,” Scribe told her. “They call themselves Scholars but the trade is poison and the bloody knife.”

“They,” Graven said. “Not us?”

“You will not learn their little lessons, girl,” the old man said. “You only get mine, and my trade is simpler.”

Scribe was exactly what his name claimed he was. It was only that he wrote for more than a school: he was also a keeper of contracts. Clients, nameless, reached out through his place at the front of the school to inquire as to the death of others. They would then be given a price, which they would have to pay up front if they wanted to but the death. In exchange, even if the first attempt ended in failure the contract would remain ongoing until the bought death was delivered.

“You could destroy them,” Eudokia said. “Give everything you have to the Secretariat.”

“It would not be enough,” Scribe said. “There is little proof. When the askretis will send investigators, the School will just sacrifice a few expendables to make it seem as if the matter is at an end. It has been attempted before, girl.”

So Graven learned her lessons. And yet she could not forget the night she had woken up in a grave. Or the hands around her throat, though after a year passed that itch was scratched. One night she woke up as the door to her room – barely larger than a cupboard, she was a servant and not a student – opened, and as she groped for a cutting knife she saw a familiar face staring back at her. Cassandra closed to the door, and a moment of silence hung between them. Graven clutched her knife tight, and then the other girl fell to her knees.

“I’m sorry,” she wept, as she had in the cell. “Eudokia, you have to believe me, I never meant to-”

And she babbled and cried, on her knees, until Eudokia pulled her into an embrace. Stroked her hair and soothed her, but her eyes stayed open and without a single tear.

“I should let you kill me,” Cassandra mumbled. “It’d be fair. I don’t deserve to-”

You won’t , Eudokia thought. You just don’t want to feel guilty. So Eudokia denied the offer and comforted her until late in the night, Cassandra creeping away shamefaced as she admitted if she remained any longer her absence would be noticed.

“Anything you want,” Cassandra swore. “I know I can’t earn forgiveness, but I’ll do anything you want.”

She left, and Eudokia sat in the dark holding her knife. Anything she wanted, huh. Never before in her life had she been offered such a thing, and it forced her to think about what she might want. Food, a roof over her head. What else? Safety, she decided. And after that her thoughts trailed off. Yet a moment kept retuning to the forefront of her mind, and though it was not a want she found she could not set it aside. That instant where she had opened her eyes to the night sky, laid atop a pile of corpses. And perhaps that was an answer, in a way. So the next day she snuck off to find Cassandra and told the other girl what it was she wanted.

“Teach me,” Eudokia said, “all that they teach you.”

—

“You are,” Scribe said, “playing a game.”

“I have learned shatranj,” Graven replied. “I find it soothing.”

The old man scowled at her. The two of them sat at the entrance of the school, having moved into the sun as it did good for Scribe’s joints come autumn. He liked to be close to the courtyard trees even if there was a large anthill beneath the olive tree, large black ants swarming around the stones. Graven had been learning from him for three years and was slowly leaving childhood to come into girlhood.

“That brown robe girl,” Scribe said. “She’s the one who threshed you.”

“I have forgiven her,” Eudokia lied.

The old man grinned, revealing broken yellow teeth.

“It’s not something you forgive,” Scribe told her. “I would know.”

She had seen her teacher leaving the bath, once, and on his chest there was a small scar that had yet to face. About a knife’s width, just above his heart. In some ways she envied that. There was no trace left of the bruises around her throat, no proof it had been anything but a dream in the dark.

“I have a curious nature,” Graven shrugged.

He clicked his tongue.

“You’re using her to learn Scholar lessons,” Scribed said. “Why?”

“Is it not the trade of this school?” Graven replied.

He hummed, looking unconvinced, but did not purse the matter further. She did.

“I’m told Crone’s lessons are never blade or poison,” Graven said. “That they are... philosophy, almost.”

“That we are sinless,” the old man scoffed. “That we are tools.”

“You don’t believe it?” she asked.

“When the little scholars reach sixteen,” Scribe told her, “they are given another test before they can begin taking contracts.”

The wind stirred the trees in the courtyard, cooling the warmth of the lazy afternoon.

“They must take a life,” the old man said, “with as unusual a tool as they can. Be it a goblet or kicking horse or even a silken nightgown. Most of the Scholars see it as a test if inventiveness, to see if they can use means other than blade or poison, but Crone seeks to teach them a different lesson.”

His jaw clenched.

“That everything under the sun is a tool to deliver death,” Scribe said. “That to take a life cannot be a sin any more than a river flowing can be a sin. There can be no good or evil in following the currents of Creation.”

Graven stayed silent even as he looked away, up into the sunny blue sky.

“I had a cough, you see,” Scribe finally said. “So I might have died anyway. By embracing those teachings, she gets to think of it as embracing the inevitable when she slid the knife in me.”

He smiled.

“Even if she is my sister.”

Graven stayed silent, listening to the wind in the leaves as her teacher remained lost in memories long past. Everything under the sun is a tool to deliver death , she mused. The words, they echoed to her of something like the truth. But Creation was not a river, not a current flowing one way, it was not so simple. How many smaller, hidden decisions had it taken for Cassandra to decide to kill her? Dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands if one went back far enough. Creation was not a river, it was... her eyes fell to the anthill beneath the tree. All those hundreds of insects moving around, going about their purpose never knowing that there was a larger world around them. That someone’s whim could be their salvation or their demise without them ever realizing it.

Eudokia smiled, because at last she knew what she wanted to do. And today she was thirteen, so she had only three years left.

—

Graven took to visiting the anthill every day.

She brought the ants dollops of honey or spoiled fruit, watching them swarm over it as the months passed and she considered how it might be done. The School of the Gull was not so different from the swarm of insects, when closely observed, and Graven had been watching them for years now. Patiently, silently enough most hardly even remembered she was there. And like the ants following their favourite paths, looking for food to scavenge and enemies to fight, the assassins had routines of their own. Graven knew them line no one else in this school save her teacher could, for she knew what contracts came and who took them. She knew who went out and when, where the coin came from and where it went.

It all came across her ledger, in the same words and numbers that the School of the Gull had taught her years ago. So Graven went looking for her tools.

Scholar Myron was a test, for was this school not fond of them? It was a simple enough matter, to ensure that he got the contracts for killing in the merchant quarters. The man was rash and unpleasant so he was often given night watch – and since Scholars were given right to peruse contracts that arrived under their watch, all Graven had to do was delay receiving the contract until night watch came. That Myron would take the contract was certain, for merchant killings paid well. Only Myron had been from such a family once, before it knew ruin and he was taken by the school, so whenever he went back there he drank and gambled to cope with the unease. He was not a skilled gambler, even when he did not drink.

It took three months for him to be in such deep debt that he tried to steal from the school, at which point he was caught. He was, after all, rash and disliked. Myron disappeared one night, never to return, and so Graven had killed a man without so much as touching a knife. And yet the truer test had not been for Myron, it had been for another. Scribe had seen it all. He was old now and his joints ached so Graven was given more and more of the work, but he had still ever step of the murder Graven had committed. The old man could have, at any moment, put an end to it.

He had not.

Instead Scribe sat with her in the courtyard as autumn turned to winter and told her stories. Rambling, one might think, about nonsense and old glories. Only those stories were always about Scholars, but their lives and things they had done and things they wanted. About who held power in the School of the Gull and who they had taken it from . Friends and enemies and lovers. And the two of them, Scribe and Graven, sat in the grave they’d survived as they watched the small ants and talked of the large ones moving around them. In the warmth of the winter sun, she found herself smiling.

“Do you like my stories so, girl?” Scribe teased.

“I like,” Eudokia honestly said, “that we share something.”

Scribe chuckled and tossed a slice of orange skin atop the anthill. The insects swarmed it furiously ripping it apart.

—

Nine months before she was sixteen by the reckoning of the School of the Gull, Scribe died.

It was not surprising or unexpected. He had been bedridden for a week, and sickly before. He could barely walk some days, until the day came where he could not. Graven went to him, on that last morning, for she had been sent for. On her way there she found Crone leaving the room, face unreadable, and the old woman brushed past her without a word. Graven entered, nose wrinkling at the smell of death. Scribe did not notice, for he could barely see now, but he recognized it was her.

“Girl,” he breathed out.

Graven did not answer, simply sitting by his bedside. He reached out with his hand and tangled his fingers in hers, clutching them tight.

“She wanted,” Scribe breathlessly said, “for me to speak her words. To absolve her.”

“Did you?” she asked.

The old man laughed.

“I did,” he said. “I told her-”

He broke into a cough, starting again when it passed.

“- that you taught me to embrace it,” Scribe said.

Graven stilled, unsure what to say.

“My last gift,” the old man wheezed. “She won’t see you, now. Her eyes will only see what she wants to see.”

She breathed out in shock.

“Finish it, girl,” Scribe whispered. “Gods, finish it. Close our grave.”

He lasted only a few heartbeats more. In the thick silence of the room, Eudokia closed her eyes and wept. When she opened them, Graven began her work.

—

The School of the Gull died because of three sacks of flour gone bad.

It began there, at least. As the graduation of the children she had arrived with approached and with it their last test, so did Eudokia begin her own. As Crone wanted of the other orphans that had ridden the wagons, she would take a life with as unusual a tool as she could.

The sacks of flour themselves were not of particular importance, except in that they had gone bad. This should not have been possible, for they were freshly bought so that the bread baked would be of good quality when served to the paying students in blue robes that believed the place a simple school. The kitchen was immediately suspected of a common enough trick, which was selling back the fresh flour and buying older one at cost while pocketing the difference. The cooks had not, as it happened. Graven had simply poured some water at the bottom of the bags so they would be humid and go bad. Yet when Scholars were tasked to look into the matter by Crone, another of the elders gainsaid her.

It was only flour, Elder Lack said. No need for a Proceran inquisition.

It was so blatantly suspicious that a third elder, Silk, ordered a covert investigation, which unearthed what the second had tried to hide: there was corruption in the kitchen, simply of a different kind. Lack had placed a dozen of his kinsmen among the staff under fake names, which a deeper look into the families revealed, and they’d ensured that it was their family shops that many of the goods were bought from. That would have been scandal enough, until it was noticed that one of these kinsmen handled some of the private meals for the elders and hadn’t one of them died of bad shellfish a few years back? Perhaps that was not a coincidence after all. And suddenly it was a little more than a scandal.

Lack, his life now on the line, tried to drag in as many allies as he could. There were only nine elders in the School of the Gull, but now half of them were at each other’s throats and through Crone tried to calm the waters she ran into an obstacle. With the kitchens disrupted it had been necessary to hire new staff while those implicated were arrested, and before the matter was ended it had been judged prudent to buy the food from outside the school. Only when Crone had gone about this, she had found fewer funds in the treasury than she should. Some of the school’s cuts from contracts paid had been entered on parchment but not in truth.

Records were sought and Graven furnished them without argument, knowing exactly what three Scholars they would point to. They had done no such thing, of course. It had taken Eudokia two years to accomplish the deception: one gold coin a night, all hidden in the same place. All matched to a set of specific contracts that would jump out to an attentive eye when the ledgers were looked at. All three Scholars were loose allies of Elder Silk, which fanned the flames to new heights as Crone was accused of trying to cover for Lack. Perhaps they had been in bed all along, trying to cover it up.

That was when the killings began.

Crone’s teachings had been deeply embraced by some of the Scholars, after all. And Graven had ensured they would be out on contracts when this all began, to come back just as the School of the Gull seemed to betray all the teachings they loved and Crone was unfairly accused. They reacted as they were taught to: by taking lives. There were three drownings and a swiftly fatal ‘sickness’ that followed a meal within a day of them having returned. And once the knives were out, all restraint evaporated. Murder came nightly, the blue robes were sent home for a week under pretext and of the nine elders there now remained six.

One of them, by the name of Shore, was to be the death knell of the school. She was the youngest of the elders and the most ambitious, she and her allies aiming only for the most lucrative of contracts and openly disdaining Crone’s teachings. Graven had taken particular pains to ensure she would not be implicated in any of the troubles, knowing what would follow: Shore attempted to take control of the School of the Gull. By diplomacy at first, presenting herself as the foremost untouched by scandal, but when that did not work she resorted to violence in the night. It might even have worked, had Graven not warned Crone the night before it happened.

It was still a close-fought thing. Many had gone Shore’s way, including several of the Scholar mages, and the stones of the school ran red with blood. Crone only won by dragging in the students yet to graduate, which tipped the balance even as they died in droves. In the end, when dawn rose over the beleaguered school, only two elders remained: Crone and Dour. Graven had known Dour as Scholar Linos once, the cheerful fat man who had watched as children murdered each other in his examination room. He’d only grown fatter since. The School of the Gull was already a shadow of itself, two thirds of its Scholars dead and half of the students either slain or crippled.

Excuses would have to be made for that before the school opened again but Graven was sent for because of another reason entirely. During the months where it all happened, the Scholars had almost entirely ceased taking contracts. Several were still ongoing, unfinished, and with the rising costs of repairs and bribes to cover all this up the treasury was nearly empty. Graven was not allowed to sit before the two elders, only to stand and present her ledgers when ordered to. Neither of the elders liked what they saw. Crone was the one to address her as more than breathing furniture.

“Come summer there is usually a rash of easy contracts related to affairs,” Crone said. “Across the years you have seen, how much would you say the sums they represent amount to?”

Graven dutifully quoted it, prompting the other two to grimace. They now realized they must cut costs if they were to avoid bankruptcy before the blue robe students could return and serve as steady income again.

“We rid ourselves of some expense and rush graduation,” Dour said. “It’s the only way.”

“We have gained expenses, not lost them,” Crone said, sounding irritated. “What would you even suggest we cut?”

Graven, remembered the lessons on movement that Cassandra had taught her, moved just enough to draw the eye. Her face was already schooled into an expression of hesitation. Dour picked up on it, leaning forward.

“You have something to suggest, Graven?” he said.

She mutely nodded, waiting for his invitation to speak.

“Communal meals, until the paying students return,” Eudokia shyly said. “The students can cook together for everyone.”

And, without even needing to look, she knew she had Dour. It would appeal to him, the simplicity of getting rid of all the kitchen staff. All the troubles had begun with corruption there, it was not only getting rid of salaries but also a way of cleaning house. It also put students to work, which would lessen the load on the few Scholars left: with fewer needed teaching, more could take contracts. But Crone’s eyes watched Graven, unblinking, and for a moment she thought she’d been seen through. That the old killer had glimpsed the hatred under the mask. But she couldn’t, could she? Oh, it would cost her too much to see it. So in the end Crone only nodded and smiled, praising Graven for the notion.

For if Graven was a traitor, then her brother had died despising her to the last breath.

—

Graven had never taken a single class on the subject of poison, so how could she be suspected? Why would anyone at all be suspected, when at last all their troubles were over?

It was madness, besides, to poison a cauldron soup ever single member of the School of the Gull would eat from. Unless you had the antidote at hand. Graven had been careful, still. She’d made sure there were enough onions in the broth to cover the taste of the douce morte and that it would be taken at supper. No one died because it was a slow poison, instead heading back to their dormitories and rooms as night fell. Graven drank her antidote and rid herself of the vial, then headed out to the courtyard under moonlight and sat by the anthill. She’d not been in weeks, so when she dropped the orange peel the ants swarmed it eagerly.

And they ate, ate, ate it up even though it had been dipped in poison. It was their habit, and they were so very hungry.

As Graven sat in the dark, the last of the School of the Gull died. The douce morte was a gentle way to go, more than they deserved. After a few hours paralysis would set in and they would fall asleep, never to wake. All except for one. She rose to her feet, passing the rooms of the dying, until she found Cassandra. Paralysis had already set in so she had to force open the other girl’s mouth and pour the antidote in before massaging the throat so she’d swallow. Not a full dose of antidote, though. Just enough to delay the death and undo some of the paralysis, not save her life. Cassandra woke as Graven helped her on her feet, taking her outside. She was only able to speak when they reached one of the gardens, seemingly confused.

“Eudokia,” she croaked. “What’s happening?”

“I want,” Graven said, “to show you something.”

She set the other girl down against a tree and took a few steps forward, finding the shovel she had left there. And she began to dig under the grass and the flowers, shovelful by shovelful, until the moon shone down on pale bone and Cassandra let out a gasp.

“It’s where they buried us,” Graven quietly told her. “It’s where I woke up, once upon a time, looking at the sky.”

She kept digging, moving the bones aside, until the pale light revealed something else entirely. Gold. Every piece of it she had stolen from the treasury, buried in a place even the most cold-hearted of the Scholars avoided like the plague. Cassandra saw it too.

“You,” she got out. “It was you .”

“It was,” Graven admitted, setting her shovel aside and rising from the hole.

“Why?” Cassandra moaned. “Why do it?”

“Because I am the last graduate of the School of the Gull,” Eudokia smiled. “Behold my last test: I have slain the school, wielding its own hands.”

She grabbed Cassandra by the collar, feeling her breath grow panicky.

“And now I finish the work,” Eudokia said, throwing her into the grave.

She filled it back up over Cassandra, shovelful by shovelful, as the other girl screamed so much her voice broke. When it was done, Eudokia stood over the grave and closed her eyes, breathing out. She’d thought she would feel something, at the end. Pleasure, joy, even simple satisfaction. Only all she found, when she looked inside herself, was a vague sense of relief.

Like she’d finished evening out a ledger.

She picked up her things, robbing what was left of the treasury on her way out, and overfed the kitchen fire after tearing down the grid. It would all catch fire soon enough, erasing the last traces of the School of the Gull. There were still Scholars our there, some branches out in other places, but the school was done. It was dead and bankrupt. Eudokia, walking out through the courtyard, stopped by the desk at the front. There she opened the ledger a slid a single piece of parchment, one with an address written in it.

Then she walked away and never looked back.

—

It took a fortnight before the first one came to the little house she had bought on the outskirts of Delos, at the address she had written. The man looked hesitant even as she welcomed him in, invited him to sit and served tea. And though he danced around the subject, he had come for exactly the same reason men had once come to the School of the Gull: to buy a death.

It would not be the same as before, Eudokia thought. It would be her hand that chose the tools that would do the killing for her. She would make killers of her own, bind them to her with ink and learning. And always she would remain out of sight as the work continued, merely the woman holding the ledger than no one looked at twice. It did not feel right, not exactly, but something close to it.

Like clothes tailored for her.

“And what should I call you?” the man asked, looking nervous.

A name, she mused. She must bear one again and no longer would she use Graven. She had, at last, left behind the grave they had ripped her from. So what should she use? Eudokia thought, then, of startlingly blue eyes. Of the rough kindness of the man who had taught her, of the long vengeance they had shared. Then she smiled, for the answer was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Scribe,” she said. “You may call me Scribe.”

Chapter 66: The Empty Grave

“Needing a second blow to take a head is an unforgivable sin for two professions: butcher and king.”

– Dread Emperor Terribilis II

It was a sad song that Yara of Nowhere sang us. Slow and meandering, like a stroll in a graveyard. The words should have been happy, but they dripped of grief.

“O Tiferet, raised where the river sings

You of gardens merry and nights so bright.”

It was a fitting tune for the sight sprawled out beneath us, I thought. Our feet had devoured an empty hallway until we turned a corner and were faced with a decision: hurry on towards the gates or take a narrow set of stairs up into the galleries. We’d gone up, after brief hesitation, and now I hid in the shadows and leaned against the balustrade as I watched a battle unfold. The halls beyond the great one we’d escaped were lesser but numerous, a maze of roofless rooms overlooked by great galleries that hugged the ceiling – one of which I stood on. The small halls were fed into by the corridors leading to the spire’s great gates, and as Named and soldiers spilled into the labyrinth I finally understood why the Dead King had made this place.

It was a slaughterhouse.

Every inch of it was trapped. I watched a company of bright-clothed fantassins blunder into a room whose sides were a pit trap covered by an illusion, gathering in the middle in time for holes to open in the walls and undead wedged inside them to begin unloading crossbows into the thick formation. Doors exploded, tar-covered floors were set aflame and swarms of poisonous insects poured out of hidden panels. I saw a doorknob turn into a leering devil that bit off the hand of the legionary that’d tried to open it, fangs crunching through steel, and even as she began screaming clouds of acid were blown into the room through small holes in the floor. All the while bows were fired into the labyrinth from the gallery above, arrows falling like rain. Death everywhere, and that wasn’t even the worst of it.

I had wondered why so few Revenants had fought us when we fought our way out of the Hall of the Dead, and now I had my answer: they were here. Dozensof then, maybe as much as a hundred. They tore into the troops like wild animals, armoured battering rams and storms of sorcery that went through even heavy companies like butter. As the loud melees took place lighter Revenants, soft-footed and quiet, slunk atop the tall roofless walls and snatched the lives of officers to sow chaos in the ranks. Named fought them where they could – I glimpsed the Valiant Champion decapitating a tall Revenant in white plate and the Skinchanger ripping out a lich’s throat – but the maze was working against them. It forced them to split up, take different paths and run into traps.

Meanwhile, the Revenants moved according to the orders of their all-seeing eye in the sky: the Dead King himself, wielding his creations with fatal precision. He wasn’t here, but then he didn’t have to be. All it’d take was one Revenant up in the gallery to serve as his eyes.

“The city that forever blooms in spring,

Beloved of singers and delight.”

“The Scourges are here,” Indrani quietly said.

There was no sign of them, but she was right and we both knew it. The chord was there for me to pull on, and it was not slack but taut – tense, ready to snap. The Scourges would come out soon, and I knew exactly why it was that Neshamah was holding them back. His bloody work below told me the answer to that, with the way he was so carefully splitting up Named and trying to overwhelm them with lesser Revenants.

“He’s trying to figure out what band of five he’ll be facing,” I agreed. “The moment he does, the full strength of the Scourge will fall on whoever he decides is the most important part of it.”

It was what I’d do, in his place. Set up the meat grinder below us to kill off Named weak or not yet matured, throwing traps and disposables as he most powerful of our lot until he had a decent idea of what our strengths and weaknesses were. And then, when he’d figured out who was supposed to kill him, he’d break that band before it ever formed. It was his favourited tactic, always had been. He didn’t want to face the Severance or the Crown before having broken the band behind them.

“No sight of Hanno or the Mirror Knight,” I frowned, “but Akua shouldn’t be far behind. We’ll need to cover her and the Autumn Crown when they arrive.”

Indrani shuffled and my stomach dropped. Ranger was not meeting my eye.

“What happened?” I said.

“It wasn’t anybody’s fault,” she said. “We got ambushed.”

No, I furiously thought. No, she could not possibly have fucked this up. I’d trusted her, trusted the both of them. I grabbed her by the scarf, pushing her back, and she only grimaced.

“ What happened ?” I coldly hissed.

“Catherine,” Masego said from behind me.

His tone was a warning and I forced myself to heed it. I released Indrani, taking a step back and mastering my fury. It had yet to wane.

“The Seelie cut the crown in two,” Ranger admitted.

It was like a punch in the stomach. I staggered back, eye closing as I struggled to find another angle. Another way out of this mess. If we had no way to deal with the Dead King except destruction, then he had nothing left to lose. No need to think in the long term. No reason to hold back whatever horrifying surprise I knew bone-deep he would have stored away to make the consequences of destroying him unthinkable. And now I knew for sure why the Intercessor had nudged the Hierarch into appearing in the Serenity. Neshamah’s back was up against the wall, with no way to retreat.

It was do or die, for the Dead King, and he was the kind of person that’d kill all of Creation to earn a single breath more.

“What does she want?” I moaned out loud, fingers rubbing the bridge of my nose. “What can she possibly get from things going to shit for us? With Hierarch back the ealamal’s back on Judgement, which is not great but shouldn’t-”

“It is not,” Hierophant interrupted me.

My eye flow open, meeting his own.

“Explain,” I evenly said.

“I noticed when we crossed into the Serenity,” he told me, “that the Choir of Judgement appears to have been silenced by the effort of freeing itself from the Hierarch.”

My jaw tightened.

“So what the Hells does the ealamal do if Judgement doesn’t guide it?” I ask. “Is it a dud?”

“It would express only inherent properties, like the tabula rasa effect,” Hierophant said, “unless otherwise guided. Which-”

“- which the Bard can,” I finished in a whisper, blood going cold.

So that was the game. Corner the Dead King so that he became the nastiest of animals, emptying his vault of all horrors on our armies, and then when it all went bad on us then Cordelia would fire up the ealamal and the Intercessor would get to decide what happened. What would it do, I wondered? Answers came to me by the dozens. She could rid herself of the Dead King and then kill everyone who knew about her, I thought, allowing herself to start building anew all the bridges she’d burned with our generation. Or she could kill all of us here, a warning as to what happened when she wasn’t listened to. She could even make it do nothing at all, let us die and try to win the war with the rest of Calernia on the back of that weight.

There were so many ways for her to get back in the game, to snatch back her crown, and yet all I could think of was the conversation I’d had over a fire in the ruins of a palace once proud. But it’s slavery too, to spend your live lashing backs , the Hierarch had said, grey eyes burning. Just a different kind, and you can’t escape it any more than they can. And so the thought occurred to me, perhaps the most terrifying of them all, that I should be asking myself a different question.

Was Yara of Nowhere still trying to win at all?

“It’s not finished, Cat,” Indrani stiffly told me. “Akua, she forged something out of the crown.”

That earned back my full attention. It was on the tip of my tongue to dismiss the possibility, the absurdity that someone could just forge something out of a broken crown of the fae in the middle of battle, but it never passed my lips.

If anyone could, it was Akua Sahelian.

“What did she make?”

“Shackles,” Ranger said. “The kind that bind power both ways.”

A crude thing, I thought, made on the bedrock of Masego’s work. Yet it was as much a miracle as Hierophant’s labour that she had been able to do even this much. I studied Indrani closer, eye narrowing.

“There’s more,” I said, and it was not a question.

Indrani grimaced again.

“She didn’t say it, but I’m sure it’s not the kind of shackles you get to take off after they’re put on,” she told me.

I closed my eye. Of course they wouldn’t. They’d been made from the Autumn Crown, which we’d not intended Neshamah to ever take off. Whoever held back the Dead King would never be relieved from that vigil. Yet someone would have to, before this was over, and that left a burning question: who . I had meant Akua to take up that role as queen over the Twilight Ways, when this all began, but the Ways were broken and now the Autumn Crown as well. Were we going to have to bet it all on the Severance? No, I decided, the shackles could work. They should be able to strip the Dead King of his mastery over undead, or close enough. We hadn’t lost yet, it was just that instead of offering a gift that could not be refused we’d have to beat the Hidden Horror to shackle him.

And someone was going to have to be shackled to him.

“Fuck,” I swore.

Should it be me? I wasn’t sure that was feasible, not if it was to be the Warden and one of the rulers of Cardinal. I couldn’t afford to be either gone or powerless. Who else, though? Akua might have served as the queen of a broken throne, but she’d made these shackles. I was not sure she could also wear them, that the story would flow. It would be a heroine’s sacrifice, and though I was more than half in love with her she was not a heroine. Not even now.

“Warden.”

Alexis’ voice brought me out of my thoughts again, a reminder that all around us people were dying and I didn’t have the time to spare to figure it all out in my head. The Silver Huntress was pointing something out for me over the balustrade and I leaned over to see. Fresh waves of warriors were entering the slaughterhouse, at their forefront warbands of heavily armoured orcs. At their head a towering man in scorched plate brandished a greatsword, the Warlord roaring as they entered the fray. Hakram had arrived.

“Appreciated,” I told Alexis, “but he can take care of him-”

I caught sight of the killing arrow as it passed me, eyes widening as I reached for Night, but Indrani was faster. Her bow was already strung and her hands blurred as she moved, nocking and releasing her own arrow. It ended up being a close thing. I watched with a thumping heart, relieved for a moment when I saw Hakram had not been the one aimed at – only for the relief to fade when I realized soldiers of the Army of Callow had arrived with the fresh wave, and Vivienne was leading them. Ranger’s arrow caught the Hawk’s less than a foot away from Vivienne, the two of them hitting a legionary in the shoulder instead. She let out a shout of alarm and ducked, although too late.

The cold voice in the back of my mind, the part that wasn’t frozen fear and rage at how close Princess had just come to dying, wondered why the Dead King would believe Vivienne Dartwick crucial to his defeat. Worth committing the Scourges for. I realized, in the heartbeat that followed, that she wasn’t. But she was one of the Woe, and we’d come out swinging for her – taking out into the open people he was genuinely wary of. It was a simple and straightforward ploy, a kind villains had been using on their opponents for millennia. And they’d kept using it because it fucking worked , I grimly though.

“Ranger,” I said.

“Yeah, I’ve got the Hawk,” Indrani said with deceptive mildness.

Were I a better woman I might have spared some pity for what lay ahead of the Scourge.

“Hierophant with me,” I said, then turned to the remaining two. “As for you-”

“I want to get the piece of the drakon to the Witch of the Woods,” Cocky interrupted me. “And I will need an escort for that.”

I mulled that, then nodded.

“If you can’t reach her,” I said, “then find the Riddle-Maker.”

Kreios would likely be better for the fight if we were aiming at a second round with the drakon, but the Witch was a lot more likely to be free. She should have been pounding at the front gate with Hanno, serving as a magical battering ram, and those should be open by now. Still, it had not escaped me I had found no trace of either those two. The battle there might not actually be won yet. Later Catherine’s problem , I decided. She was plucky lass, she could handle it. I caught Masego’s eye and waited for his nod, only then pushing through the butterflies in my belly to take a few steps back. I broke into a run and, using my staff, vaulted myself over the edge of the balustrade.

“O Tiferet, home of my true love

A maiden fairer than the full moon.”

I gathered Night to me as I fell, Mantle of Woe flapping around me, and did not even turn when an arrow was shot at my back. Indrani would take care of it. I wrapped myself in shadows, swallowing whole the volley that fell on me from the galleries above, and wove tendrils below to catch my fall. They caught the edge of a wall, turning the drop into a smooth lowering atop the wall even as the labyrinth came alive around me. I watched, unimpressed, as the undead in that maze of rooms turned towards me as one. Komena laughed in my ear, delighted, and together we raised my hand as Night coalesced between my fingers.

“Take a swing,” I challenged. “See where it gets you.”

A storm answered. Arrows and javelin and spells, swarms of dead insects and clouds of poison. Ghouls scrambled up the wall and skeletons thrust long spears at my feet. It would not be enough. In my hand I held a sphere of darkness, and as I opened my palm it was revealed for a heartbeat – until I closed my fingers to crush it. The air shook, for a moment, and as I grinned the sphere exploded into a shower of black pinpricks. They flew out, growing and swelling into beams as they did. Komena’s eyes told friend from foe where I could not, held back by the limitations of my flesh, and everything else turned to smoke.

Night sliced through stone and steel and dead, the rays of the dark sun I had shattered taking a remorseless bite out of Creation.

The storm died, swallowed whole save for broken remnants that did not even reach my feet, and I let out a misty breath as Night swam thick through my veins. Behind me Hierophant landed atop the wall, his descent wavering like a feather’s. He had lowered his own weight to take the edge of the fall, but within moments it was restored and he stood at my back.

“An ugly place,” Masego mildly said. “I do not like it.”

“Then lighten up, Zeze,” I smiled, “because the two of us are going to burn it down.”

It was an elegant, intricate plan to kill Named and men that Neshamah had crafted here. So instead of trying to defeat him in kind, beat him at his own game, I was going to take a fucking hammer to his clever little schemes.

“You have a plan, then?” Hierophant asked.

He sounded, I thought with a smile, so utterly unconcerned by the sea of enemies around us. I pointed my staff behind us.

“See that?”

“I do,” he drily replied.

“It’s the furthest any of our allies have gotten,” I said. “So anything past it goes.”

“Simple,” he praised.

“That’s me,” I humbly replied, then winced when I realized what I’d just said.

It was too much to hope the Dead King hadn’t heard that, wasn’t it? Goddamnit. Well, time to drown my embarrassment in a copious amount of fire.

“I’ll defend,” I said. “ Attack .”

“It is in your hands,” Masego agreed.

In the heartbeat that followed translucent shields bloomed in a bubble around him, arrows pinging off the panels, and he began to speak in the mage tongue. He was out of it for now, so it was time for me to get to work. Now, we were surrounded by undead crawling over walls to come at us as arrows rained from above and Revenants converged on our very visible raised location. We were in hostile territory, which was why tactics dictated that my first move should be to spread that disadvantage around. I loosened my wrist and rolled my shoulder.

“All right,” I muttered. “Let’s see if this time I can make it hot enough it goes straight to bone ash.”

A javelin flew up, shot from the dead angle of my dead eye, but I followed the nudge of my Name and slapped it aside with my staff. Breathing out, I raised the staff of dead yew I had received in the depths of newborn Twilight and stirred the air with it. Slowly, carefully tracing the circle as Night gathered and the air began to heat. The Hawk came for me, but I had Ranger on my side. I didn’t glance at the black arrow before hearing it shot out. And as strings of black flame began to linger in the air in the wake of my staff, I shaped my will. Below me a ghoul clawed its way up the wall, baring its fangs at my boots, and I bared my teeth back.

“ Run or burn ,” I hissed, slamming my staff down.

It did not, I saw, run quickly enough. Like a knot of snakes come loose, ribbons of blackflame erupted from where my staff had struck the top of the wall. They slithered in every direction, leaving behind burning trails as they ate through flesh and slid inside armour to devour the dead inside. I watched through a hundred eyes as the working spread out around me like a blooming flower, black flames consuming everything as they hungrily advanced. It would do, I decided. I’d not destroyed everything in that radius, as much because I was trying to avoid killing Grand Alliance forces as because some of the undead were hard to put down, but it was all on fire. It’d serve as a wall for most everything except Revenants.

“Abyss and firmament. I take the shape of the star and the depth of the pit, borrowing laws high and low.”

“Oh dear,” I muttered, glancing at Masego. “Is that really usable inside ?”

It really was quite worrying how often I was the person in my inner circle that most responsibly handled unspeakable eldritch power. Although that was, I supposed, not unlike being the drunk with the smallest bottle. Still, now that I’d rid myself of the chaff it was about time for the real contenders to come out. The first one to pop his head out was a Revenant mage that rose in through a dignified levitation spell, his colourful embroidered robes fluttering in nonexistent wind as he pointed a gnarled staff my way and began an incantation that echoed across the ceiling. Frowning, I pointed a finger and gathered Night in a needle before it shot out. It blew through his skull as I began to look who that’d been a distraction for , finding that tricky little tart the Seelie climbing up the wall to get as Masego’s back.

I tossed a ball of blackflame at her, breaking the illusion, and enjoyed the look on her face when the fire then circled around instead of dispersing and blew her off the wall before she could eviscerate Hierophant. Really, like I wasn’t going to learn when she kept using the same trick? More worrying than the sneak, though, was the way that all the poison clouds across the maze were beginning to gather in a ball under the ceiling. That was the fucking Tumult at work, mark my words, because of course now that I’d set this place on fire and Masego was going to smite it what we needed was a fucking poison storm on top of everything. Much as I would have liked to get rid of that, though, I had more pressing matters at hand.

Like the Mantle turning the wall I was standing on to dust.

I cursed, stepping back as the tall Scourge swung her mace at my retreating form. The parts of the wall that hadn’t crumbled cracked from the blow even as I tossed a curse at the Mantle’s head, which she took head on. Her helm warped, but she pit her power against mine and while if it’d kept up she would have lost I didn’t have the time – through a Night eye I saw the Seelie throwing a knife at Masego’s head, hastily withdrawing my will from the Mantle to form streaks of darkness around Hierophant’s shield. The knife wasn’t where I’d seen it, but I went wide enough I caught it anyway. Only for, you know, the Mantle to finish turning the wall under me to dust. Fuck, I thought as I fell, and I raised my staff to try to slap aside the mace blow but it was going to be tricky and-

And three hundred pounds of orcish fury smashed into the Mantle, Hakram Deadhand snarling as he tackled her through a door so hard splinters went flying. I landed on my knees, leaning against my staff, and let out a sigh of relief. Reinforcements had arrived.

“I have woven curses into hymn, stuffed a heart with straw. That which is hollow I have raised onto the dais, revered as glorious under three skies and revered by nine corners.”

I hadn’t seen the Prince of Bones yet but he was bound to be close, so I couldn’t leave Hakram alone for too long. I couldn’t leave Masego along for long either, though, because the fucking Seelie was around and he wasn’t moving. She’d gotten past my armour like it wasn’t there with that knife of hers, once, so I wouldn’t bet on a spell shield doing better. I wove a tendril to get me back up on the chunk of the wall where he was standing, landing in front of him, but there was no sign of the enemy. I took a few limping steps forward, frowning, then thrust my staff down at the burning room: a gust of wind picked up ash and tossed it everywhere, but still the Seelie remained hidden. Where was she?

My Name nudged me and I heard the sound of steel ripping into flesh, turning to see a throwing knife stuck in the Seelie’s wrist as she flew on translucent red wings to stick Masego from the back. She shattered into pieces but almost immediately reappeared a foot below the broken illusion as another throwing knife thumped into her back, ripping her ballroom gown as she turned with an inhuman snarl. The Princess, sword in hand, flicked her other wrist and palmed a third throwing knife.

“The Varlet did it better,” Vivienne Dartwick told her. “So what would that make you – a quarter rate Named?”

Ah, trash talk. That most hallowed of Callowan traditions.

“Can you cover Masego?” I called out.

“Run along, Black Queen,” my successor smiled. “I’m finding stabbing fae to be satisfying in a very soulful sort of way.”

And who was I to argue with that? The same tendrils that’d raised me up threw me in the direction Hakram had disappeared in, and as Indrani shot out an attempt of the Hawk’s to kill Warlord I found the duelling Named and guided my descent very precisely: my boots landed on the back of the Mantle’s head as she tried to wrestle Hakram’s great sword out of his grasp, my staff following a moment later and sliding in the space between the helm and the plate.

“My turn with the curses,” I grinned even as I unleashed Night.

It’d be hard to cook her from the inside, but I could so something simpler. No matter how much armour and steel there was in there, it was the bones that moved the Mantle. And affecting those was a lot easier that wrecking all that steel. Night sunk into them like poison, and even as the Scourge shook me off and sent me flying into a pile of stone I exerted a twist of will to get the working moving. A heartbeat later her limbs began shaking uncontrollably, and with a roar Warlord smashed her into the ground. He ripped his greatsword out of her grasp even as she twisted on the ground and I rose to my feet. His arm rose to deliver a crippling blow, but before he could the wall to his left burst open in a shower of shards as the Prince of Bones tore through.

“Shit,” I hissed, and slid Night along the ground before the Prince.

I covered the stone with greasy, oily Night but to my unpleasant surprise it did nothing. The fucking Prince must have either enchanted boots or nails under the soles. Hakram took a greastword blow with his own, steel grinding on steel, and I realized with a start that the blades were almost identical. Had Hakram stolen the Prince of Bones’ sword at some point? I loosed a burst of raw Night in the Mantle’s belly as she tried to get up, knocking her back down, but that wouldn’t last. This wasn’t a good place for us to fight, not with limited space and two enemies so heavily armoured.

“We pull back,” I shouted.

“Agreed,” Warlord growled, taking a step back.

Even as we began our retreat, though, the tide turned again.

“Behold,” Hierophant called out, “all ye with eyes, for I have made a god of clay and it is an idol of WRATH.”

I shielded my eyes from the cold, alien light just as it came down. The clamour of the battle went silent as a grave, as if Hierophant’s miracle had killed noised itself. When I took my hand off my eye it was to the sight of both Scourges withdrawing, which after hesitation I allowed. After all, where they were headed I’d find it difficult to pursue: the latter half of the great room that I had pointed out to Masego was now a plain of red, glowing glass.

Nothing else was left.

The front half of the labyrinth, having come into Grand Alliance hands through hard fighting while Zeze and I made a spectacle, burst into cheers. The dead there were good as routed, and through our advance was stopped until the glass cooled it was now open grounds to the great stairs at the back of what had once been a maze. The surviving Revenants fled that way, ignoring spells and arrows, and when I glanced up at the ceiling where the poison clouds had been gathering I found with some amusement it had been glassed as well. The heat had dispersed whatever the Tumult was up to, sparing us a spot of trouble on top of all the rest.

“Her smile gentler than the wings of doves,

Her laugh worth a thousand tunes!”

And the Intercessor was still singing, great. Because that was always a good sign. I went shoulder to shoulder with Hakram as we returned – well, shoulder to arm anyways – and bumped my armour against his.

“You got there right in time,” I said.

“One of my better habits,” Warlord smirked.

“I suppose you do need something to make up for all the sleeping around.”

As he spluttered my eye sought the source of the voice and found that Vivienne’s face was cut, but it was just a shallow slice under her eye. Masego, following behind, was entirely unharmed and looked to be in a rather fine mood. I supposed I’d be too, if I had gotten to blow up half the labyrinth of someone I despised.

“You’re being pretty savage today,” I told her. “It’s been great.”

“Well, it is the end of the world,” Princess snorted.

“Speaking of that, Catherine,” Hakram said, “there’s trouble at the gates.”

Wait, hadn’t I figured something out for that? Shit, no I hadn’t. Earlier Catherine had passed me the sharper because she couldn’t be bothered to. Earlier Catherine, what a bitch , I uncharitably thought. She just kept screwing me over.

“Lay it on me,” I sighed.

“The Titans are brawling,” Vivienne bluntly said.

A small sentence that encompassing a large amount of collateral damage, I figured. Anyhow, the mystery of where the dead Titans had disappeared to appeared to be solved. Neshamah must have figured they were worth spending on keeping the Riddle-Maker out of his hair, and I couldn’t fault the decision. The last of the living Titans would have been damned useful when facing down the Hidden Horror. We kept moving deeper into the maze, avoiding corpses and traps as we moved through the crowd of cheering soldiers.

“Is Kreios winning?” I asked with a grimace.

“No one can tell,” Hakram admitted. “It was still going when we broke through.”

“Broke through,” I repeated with a frown. “Explain.”

“We haven’t won the battle for the inner city,” Warlord continued. “The Procerans seized one of the avenues and we’ve been funneling troops into the spire through it, but the palaces are still in enemy hands and we keep losing the plaza.”

Which was why it was such a haphazard mix of Grand Alliance troops that’d spilled into the maze. Whenever a push crested past enemy defences there was another wave of soldiers, but we didn’t actually hold the great plaza. It made a rough sort of sense, I thought. It was where all the great avenues led to, so it would be the easiest place in all of Keter for Neshamah to reinforce.

“It has been some time since we crossed,” Vivienne reminded me. “The battle could have tipped one way or another by now.”

I slowly nodded.

“Do you know where Hanno and the Witch are?”

“Keeping the gates open,” Warlord said.

And the enemy army off our backs, it went unsaid.

“I need a word with them,” I said. “The rest of you should prepare for the offensive.”

I paused.

“Zeze, can you get Indrani down here?” I asked. “I want us with her when we strike.”

“I’ll see to it,” Hierophant promised.

I clapped his shoulder, nodded at the others and went on my way. The hallways that fed into the maze room were relatively straightforward, opulently decorated with few visible defences laid in save for wards. They were grounds the Dead King was prepared to lose, after all: their purpose was to guide invaders in the killing grounds. I passed through knots of soldiers and makeshift infirmaries where priests and mages saw to the wounded – or burned the dead. The Forsworn Healer was there, but I did not stop to speak with him. Soon l I stood before the great open gates of the spire, at the top of wide stairs that have me a wide view of the city, and my stomach clenched at what I saw.

We were losing.

The Grand Alliance’s armies had broken into the inner city, overwhelming the ramparts and seizing two gates, but then they’d been pushed behind those walls like rats sealed in a casket. Our hosts had seized wide swaths of Keter’s centre and dug in, but relentless tides of undead smashed at their defences even as companies desperately charged into the central plaza to make it past the enemy and into the black spire. It was a battle of attrition now, I saw, and one we could only lose. An hour, two at most, and our armies would break. Before half of that passed they’d grow too feeble to keep mounting offensives into the plaza, cutting off the flow of reinforcements.

We’d have to do with the people we had and whoever arrived in the next quarter hour. If we didn’t take our swing at the Dead King soon we were finished. Breathing out shakily, I swept out the gates to find a few makeshift barricades had been raised at the bottom of the stairs and were being manned by hodgepodge mix of soldiers. Legionaries – mine and Nims’ both – side by side with Proceran conscripts and League mercenaries. Two pikes that must belong to Spears of Stygia rose high, a woman in magister’s robes with them, as Levantines painted in the colours of the Brigand’s Blood locked shields with orcs of the Blackspear Clan.

In front of them, swaggering, was the Red Knight. More surprising to me was the presence of the Silver Huntress and the Concocter, who’d evidently made it past the enemy to find the Witch. Still, I saw no sign of either her or Hanno. Or Kreios, for that matter, who should-

To the east a sun lit up the sky, burning through stone houses and towers and hundreds of dead even as air turned so thick and liquid that it seemed as if a curtain had fallen over an entire city bloc. In the heart of it I saw the two robed silhouettes of the dead Titans, bearing livery in Keter’s colours of purple and silver. A sight that seemed to enrage the third giant facing them, who pulled down the sky on their heads and let out a shout that echoed across the Crown of the Dead. I glimpsed the sun expanding and turning red, then exploding white for a heartbeat before it contracted and blackened, swallowing everything up before the magic exploded in strings of raw power.

None of the Titans flinched, magic rearing up again as they continued their terrifying clash.

Well Kreios seemed to, uh, have that in hand? A little hard to tell, like Hakram had said, but if I stuck my finger in there I didn’t think it’d achieve much except losing me a finger. Best to leave them to it. My gaze shied away, looking instead for Hanno and the Witch. They still weren’t with the barricades, but the soldiers there were pointing at something and following that I found them. There’d been a push to retake the plaza that had failed, but through the ranks of the dead a small band was running for the spire gates and the two of them had gone out to meet them. There were five – no, six – people sprinting as the dead howled after them.

The Witch of the Woods tossed a spell into the horde, a ball of transparent force that crushed all it rolled over, but it wouldn’t be enough. A handful of Revenants had sped ahead of the rest of the undead, the fasted of them an armoured man with a great sword who... My fingers clenched when I realized I was looking at the Blade of Mercy. We hadn’t been fast enough to burn his corpse. Most of our dead Named had been recovered and burned, but sometimes it’d been impossible to retrieve the bodies. The runners were Named as well, I recognized. The Mirror Knight was easy to pick out by his armour, as were the Myrmidon and the Kingfisher Prince. The Grave Binder and Affable Burglar took a second look, but my breath caught when I recognized the person at the back of the pack.

That was Akua’s armour.

Hanno caught the Blade of Mercy’s blow a heartbeat before it struck her back, having sped up massively over his last few steps, and the truth of him was plain to See. The White Knight walked among us again, sword in hand. Hanno’s blade blazed with Light as he drove back the Revenant, parrying a spear thrust from another who’d caught up and holding the rearguard until the Witch struck down with a mass of water than she froze in the heartbeat that followed. A wasteland of ice behind him, the White Knight leisurely retreated while covering the runners the rest of the way. I was down the stairs in moments, on them as they arrived.

“Warden,” Hanno smiled.

“White Knight,” I returned, clasping his arm when he offered it.

He made a face that, on a prettier man, might have been called a pout.

“That eye of yours does take some pleasure out of things,” he complained.

“Not for me,” I snorted.

And I was, after all, a villain. I swept through the others, offering nods and claps where I should until I reached Akua. She looked tired, I thought, but far from resigned. My eye dipped do a pouch at her side and she replied with a nod.

“I still have them,” she said.

“Did you choose a name?” I asked.

Her smile was sharp enough to cut.

“Fetters,” Akua said. “I call them the Fetters.”

“It’ll do,” I said, and gently touched her elbow.

As much to greet her as reassure myself she was there. The Red Knight snorted contemptuously and I addressed her without turning.

“It might do you some good to remember that you don’t, strictly speaking, need your tongue to fight for me,” I mildly said.

I saw the smile in Akua’s eyes she did not allow to touch her face, and when I turned to glance at the Red Knight she looked uncertain. Taken aback by how casually I’d just threatened to rip out her tongue in front of half a dozen heroes. Hanno did look disapproving, but though it was hard to tell with the mask I was pretty the Witch of the Woods was grinning.

“We’ll soon be able to push deeper into the spire,” I said. “The glass will have cooled.”

“The glass?” the Mirror Knight asked, sounding confused.

“Hierophant was in a mood,” I shrugged.

It said a lot about the kind of reputation Masego had grown into that not a single person here misunderstood my meaning after that.

“There won’t be anyone more Named coming,” Prince Frederic told me. “It has been most of an hour since I last spoke with First Princess Rozala, but I believe all we are the last. Everyone else is crippled or dead.”

I kept a wince off my face. I’d not counted how many Named there had been in the maze, but it couldn’t be more than thirty. More than half the people who’d signed the Truce and Terms were now either dead or out of the fight.

“Then we press on with what we have,” I told them. “The Scourges still block our path, but-”

We all went silent. Even the least sensitive of the Named, even those soldiers without a speck of magic to them, felt it . Like a fetid warm wind out of a swamp, licking at our skin. It came from where half the maze still stood. The drakon , I thought. But how? The Emerald Swords should be keeping it contained.

“Either the Emerald Sword are dead,” I grimly said, “or they were tricked.”

Heavy silence followed.

“I think,” the Concocter hesitantly said, “I think that I know what happened.”

My eye went to her, a silent order to keep talking.

“The body it just a corpse,” Cocky said. “It’s the essence of the drakon that matters. So it might be that the elves are still cutting up a regenerating body but that the essence slipped away.”

My breath caught.

“You’re saying it’s building itself another body,” I said. “In there.”

Out of corpses, steel and stone , I thought. I

“The Dead King’s leash on such a thing would be loose,” Antigone flatly said. “This may well be the seed of a drakon reborn.”

I shivered at that, I wasn’t too proud to admit it. I wasn’t alone in that either. Few of the people here knew what a drakon even was and yet dread hung heavy in the air. Had the Dead King’s monster gotten free? I concentrated, dipped into the darkness of See , and the story was there to be found. Strong, the riverbed of it deep and wide. It had been near a certainty from the moment Below’s stories returned and the monster was revealed. Which means he knew it would happen , I thought. It was Neshamah, he’d seen that story play out a thousand times before. Which meant it was part of his plan, and when I stopped to consider what a drakon reborn might mean I understood exactly what it was.

He was raising another Evil we needed to stop. We couldn’t just fucking ignore this and pass it by as we went to take his head, we’d need to deal with it else Calernia was just as fucked as before: we might not be in a state to stop it after we dealt with the Dead King. The one person who did have a story to lean into against the creature was already busy, stuck in the grooves a story just as strong: the last Titan putting to rest the stolen corpses of his old comrades. Fuck , I thought again. We were getting played, had gotten played, and it was skillful enough that even if I knew there was no other choice than to pay up on the price.

“Concocter, you still have that piece of the drakon?” I asked.

“I do,” she agreed.

“Then you and the Witch need to figure out a way to put it down,” I frankly said. “Take whoever you need to get it done. The rest of us go for the Dead King.”

“I will finish it,” the Witch of the Woods promised me.

“There might not be a way,” the Mirror Knight cautioned her.

“Then I will make one,” she replied without hesitation. “Whatever the cost.”

I nodded, comforted by her determination if nothing else.

“Make your picks quickly,” I ordered her. “We’re running out of time.”

—

“O Tiferet, ruled by lords fair and just

Your sages celebrated far and wide.”

It was a horror.

I had seen dark and ugly things over my years as a villain, but not even the worst of the madness to be found in the Wasteland rivaled the seed of a drakon taking root. Out of the glass it had grown, swallowing up corpses and stone and armour like a tar pit, until a twisted abomination took shape. It had a dragon’s long neck and body, but the wings were ragged and full of holes – their patterns hurting the eye – and while a spiked tailed slithered down there were no feet beneath. Only writhing tentacles of corpse-flesh and eerie, insect-like scuttling legs. It was the mouth that had me nauseous, though. The jaw split four ways, revealing dripping jowls and a sea of teeth that were as glistening knives. Every part of it writhed, moved, faces and armour and limbs looking as if they were trying to wriggle out of the abomination.

To stand in its presence was to feel it biting away at you, eating everything that you were piece by piece. It was not something humans were meant to face, and yet we must. There was no other choice, for it was rampaging all over remains of the maze. With a cruel intelligence it had lacked earlier it snatched up soldiers and trampled banners, leaving some half dead and bleeding out so they might scream out their suffering as they died. The only relief to be had here was that there was not a single Scourge here: the Dead King would not risk them when he was losing control of his monster.

“Go,” the Witch of the Woods shouted. “I will draw its attention.”

As her sorcery roared, we ran for it. The Woe came to me as we ran through the maze, avoiding swipes of the drakon’s limbs that shattered rooms while the Witch struck at it with great icy winds. It was fewer Named than I would have liked who would come with us. The Kingfisher Prince would hold the rearguard with the soldiers and the Red Knight was to stay with him, one meant for leading men and the other killing foes. Then the Witch had taken the Mage – Apprentice had transitioned, fancy that, and she wasn’t even done if I saw that right – the Knight Errant, the Myrmidon, the Painted Knife and the Affable Burglar. The Stalwart Apostle was to stay back and heal, with the Stained Sister to keep her alive. And the Concocter, of course.

Hanno and I would get the rest. The Woe, of course. Then the Valiant Champion, the Mirror Knight, the Forsworn Healer, the Daring Pyromancer, the Silver Huntress, the Vagrant Spear, the Page, the Skinchanger and the Grave Binder. Akua as well, of course, though she was not properly named. Sixteen of us to end the King of Death.

It felt like too few, but there was no other choice.

The kept running, squeezing through the smoking halls, and the cloying humidity pressed ever stronger as we approached the drakon’s side. It noticed us, even through the winds, and would have swiped if not for the madwoman who leapt on its back and began tearing out its back.

“ Honour to the Blood ,” the Painted Knife shouted.

A heartbeat later she was sent flying, the drakon screaming in irritation, as I heard bones break. Kallia, I realized, might well just have died. But she’d bought us a moment. We reached the open grounds of glass, marred by the abomination that’d emerged from them, and though it turned its back on the maze to chase us the Witch of the Woods ripped out a chunk of the ceiling and collapsed it on the monster’s head. It wouldn’t hurt it, we all knew that, but it won us the rest of the way to the stairs. Across smooth black glass we ran, until our feet reached stone and the drakon’s fury sounded behind us.

“Don’t stop,” I shouted. “Keep going. We lose if we slow.”

We couldn’t know where in the spire the Dead King waited, but it didn’t matter. We had enough heroes assembled that providence would lead us there in time and even though we’d played most of the cards we had to play so had Neshamah. He didn’t have a lot of defences or defenders left that could stop the crew of sixteen we’d assembled. Only the one, really, and he didn’t make us wait long for it. We stumbled out of the stairs into a cavernous great hall, a forest of tall pillars under a curved ceiling so tall I could barely make it out. There were no torches here, no magelights, and yet a dim green light hung about the hall. Our boots found wet tiles as we entered, shallow waters covering swaths of the hall as they looked like emerald mirrors.

Among the pillars at the heart of the room, the Prince of Bones stood waiting.

“They’re here,” I quietly said. “All of them.”

“Then we strike hard from the start,” Hanno said.

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them. No, that too was a trap. Sixteen against five with the strong Named we had, we were certain to beat them. But the story would be diluted. Too many of us moving in different directions. What would win out was the simplest one of all: ‘the Scourges can kill Named’. We’d win, but our losses would be catastrophic. Like the Maddened Fields, it would be a victory that lost us the war.

“No,” I said. “The rest of you go on ahead. This if for the Woe to handle.”

The White Knight turned to me, startled, but I raised a hand.

“Don’t argue,” I ordered. “We don’t have the time. We’ll engage them, take the opening and go .”

He was unhappy, I could see it writ plain on that plain face. But he would not turn his back on the decision we had made at the heart of the tower, when I had devoured the first of the Intercessor’s eyes: I was the Warden and so he would obey.

“I’ll be waiting for you at the end of the line, Catherine,” Hanno of Arwad finally said.

“We began the Truce and Terms together,” I smiled. “We’ll end them together as well, Hanno.”

A curt nod, and he moved. Named followed in his wake, headed to the side of the room and I found golden eyes looking for mine. There was something like grief on Akua’s face, and she seemed startled with the intensity of it. Enough that she looked awat.

The Woe gathered around me and I let out a long breath, eye falling on the waiting Prince of Bones.

“By their golden wisdom without rust,

A hundred times did you earn your pride!”

So that was it, then. The last dance of the Woe. We’d go different ways after the war, should there be an after the war, but we sill had today before it came to an end.

“Quite the fight you’ve picked us,” Princess drawled.

“Eh, that’s always been the way,” Ranger said. “We always find the meanest fucker in the room and throw a drink in his face, it’s kind of our thing at this point.”

“We have grudges to settle, besides,” Warlord grunted. “They’ve gotten away too many times already.”

I rolled my shoulder, limbering it, and slowly unsheathed my sword.

“Let’s buy them passage to the Dead King, then,” I said.

I took a limping step forward, but Masego suddenly cleared his throat. I stalled and looked back, finding him staring at me disapprovingly.

“You haven’t said the words,” he complained.

I blinked.

“What words?”

“Our motto,” he slowly said, as if addressing a dimwit.

Indrani got it first, letting out a hyena’s cackle, and I got what he meant a moment latter in utter disbelief.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” I warned. “Not a single one of you.”

“Together,” Hierophant enthusiastically said, raising his hand.

Filthy traitors that they were, the others all joined in.

“LIES AND VIOLENCE!”

A moment of silence passed as the Prince of Bones slowly cocked his head to the side. Yeah, that really happened , I commiserated.

“I hate you all,” I said, meaning every word but one.

This time when I stepped forward, they followed.

My gait was lazy, unhurried, because I could feel it one more. The same sensation that had come upon me in Dormer, when the five of us had been the first into the last breach. Like a rhythm, a second heartbeat that had always been there but never heard.

Ranger, as always, opened the dance.

The unraveller flew, a killing stroke for any Revenant’s flesh it found. The Prince of Bones did not move, the Hawk’s black arrow shattering the artefact in flight, but the song was in our ears and our feet followed. Hakram tore forward, a roar in his throat as he raised the greatsword, and the water beneath our feet stirred as the Tumult’s sorcery woke.

“No,” Hierophant mildly said, and Wrested the spell.

With perfect coordination the magic was shaped into frost and tossed onto the pillar to Hakram’s side, catching the Seelie’s side as she flickered into existence. I hummed, Night thrumming in my veins as I sunk tendrils into the stone and pulled the pillar down on her head. A curse shivered past the spine of the pillar as it fell, the Mantle’s armoured form wading out of deep water. Vivienne’s half-step to the side, light-footed as when she had been the Thief, took her out of the path just long enough for her to ram her sword through the Seelie’s throat.

She exploded into a storm of fading flower petals and the Princess frowned. Something inside of her grew, sharpened. Not quite there yet, but soon.

Indrani shot the Hawk’s arrow before it could take the Vagrant Spear in the eye on the very same heartbeat where Warlord’s sword met the Prince of Bones’. Steel rang against steel, both monstrous blades scrapping the other’s edge, but Hakram would lose out in strength. It didn’t matter, because as I slowly limped forward I had been spreading Night in the water. I thumped the butt of my staff against the stone and tendrils of water rose, tugging at the Prince’s feet. He was too heavy to fall that easily, but the Mantle had to throw a curse at the water and to free him and that gave Vivienne an opportunity to disappear in the dark between the pillars. Princess or not, she remained a sneak at heart. Ranger shot the Mantle in the back of the head, the Hawk’s arrow just a shade too slow to catch it, but it slid against the metal. The angle had been a little off.

On the other side of the room I saw the last of them, the Grave Binder, get onto the stairs. They were through, and now we could get serious.

I breathed out, forming eyes of Night all around me. One, a dozen, a hundred – a thousand. After all, I knew exactly what was coming. A heartbeat later the Mantle called down darkness over the heart of the hall, where she and Hakram and the Prince were fighting. Through my dead eye I gauged the distances, gathering Nigh tot my hand, and let loose a spear of Night. It streaked forward into the dark, clipping the side of the Mantle’s shoulder and disrupting her hold on the curse. All was revealed, just in time for me to see Warlord being forced a step back by the Prince, sword slammed into the ground as the armoured behemoth slammed their heads.

Hakram took a step back, dazed, but Ranger’s arrow hit the Mantle in the articulation of her armour’s wrist. It released Light when snapped – the Blessed Artificer’s work, had to be – which stepped the Scourge cold before she could break Warlord’s neck with her mace. The song quickened, four streaks of lightning forming near the ceiling. A halfway clever way to get around the limitation of Wrest, which could only seize one magical source at a time. Only Hierophant ripped out one of the streaks before it finished forming, striking at the others with it even as I drew on Night and closed the distance with the melee.

The last of the lightning shattered a pillar, guided by Hierophant’s hand, and a heartbeat later there was the sound of someone falling into water. The Hawk, I saw through eyes of Night. Masego had found her, and her ragged cloak splashed as she rose from the puddles. I’d have to leave that to Indrani, since I – in the blind spot of my eye the Seelie flicked into being, aiming at my spine, but I swept wide with my staff. As I struck nothing, I realized with dim surprise that she’d tricked me: this once, the first blow had not been an illusion. I threw myself to the side, already knowing it’d be too slow, but then a sword rammed into the Seelie’s back.

“Eighth-rate,” Princess said, tone cold as she ripped the blade free.

The Scourge crumbled into a bed of flowers, to my anger, but at the sight of it the bundle of power inside her took shape and set. Coming into her aspect, Vivienne Dartwick let out a sharp breath.

“So that’s it,” she murmured. “You’ve just been tricking us.”

A glance at me.

“Catherine, burn .”

I did not question it, turning to drown the flowers in black flame even as behind me the Prince of Bones swung at my head – only to be stopped by Hakram’s parry, blades slamming into the ground as Masego Wrested the Mantle’s cursed and smashed it into the Prince’s side. The flowers lit up like kindling and with hoarse scream gathered back together, turning into the Seelie once more. Oh, I thought. This entire time, the petals had never faded during any of our fights. She’d just used an illusion to make it looked like they did while she put herself back together out of sight. The Scourge screamed, wings erupting out of her back, but I swung with the strength of my Name behind me: the slash opened her throat, cutting into the bone yet but not hard enough to go through. Vivienne, swift as a viper, put a dagger through the Seelie’s eye and dug deep. She knelt, grabbing my sword even as I pivoted to slap away a curse of the Mantle’s with my staff and reply with burst of raw power that she had to block with her mace, and Princess leaned on her own Name strength to finish the cut all the way through.

The Seelie went still, and in the same heartbeat that Vivienne cut off her head the Scourge rammed her dagger into my successor’s throat.

A scream welled up in my throat, too raw to be a word, and then the Princess exploded into a shower of fragrant flowers. She formed back a moment later, on her feet and smiling icily.

“I can Trick people too, you know,” Princess said. “It’s not that hard.”

See through tricks , I glimpsed in her, and mimic them. The learning wouldn’t stay in her long, that was the limitation, but some part of Vivienne Dartwick had decided she would no longer fall for the same trick twice with such utter determination that Creation itself had answered. It was fitting I thought, for of all of us she had had grown into the one most resolute to learn from her mistakes. One down and four to go. The song swelled in agreement, the chorus whispering in my ear as the five of us moved as one. As Vivienne faded into the shadow of the pillars behind me, I turned back to the fight and joined Hakram’s side.

The Prince of Bones and the Mantle towered over us, masses of steel wielding more of the same, but I was not afraid. Hakram Deadhand had stood at my side since the beginning of this, and he’d stand there still when we ended it.

The Prince struck and Warlord met him, muscles tearing at the contest of strength while I slipped behind the giant’s back to avoid the Mantle’s shivering curse. Above us magic warred against itself, the Tumult having lost patience and now trying to overwhelm Hierophant with brute strength and numbers, but across the green-mirrored water Hakram and I danced. The might of the titans broke stone and howled through the air but we were ever one step ahead, wind rustling over the water as we avoided death by a hair’s breadth and struck back. I struck the Mantle’s knee from the back and Hakram took off her hand, the two of us stepping out of the Prince’s blow as Ranger killed the Hawk’s arrow.

The Prince rushed me and I withdrew, leg throbbing, as Hakram smashed the Mantle’s side and my staff trailed along the water. A trail of Night slithered until my back was to a pillar and the Prince of Bones’ hulking shape was mere feet away, not even bothering to use the sword to crush me. Instead I smiled and turned the Night solid, the nooses I’d attached around his feet solidifying around a pillar to his back. He ripped through it with his weight and momentum even though I’d tied it at the base, but I still got what I wanted: he toppled forward even as I took a measured step to the side, helmeted head smashing into the pillar in front of him.

“O Sve Noc,” I prayed as I raised my blade, “I ask you not salvation but grant me spite .”

The Sisters smiled against my neck, talons digging into my shoulders, and the edge of my sword shone black as I carved into the Prince’s neck. Going through layer after layer of steel until my momentum was gone and my sword stuck, I ripped it clean at angle that sliced even deeper. All the way through. A kick sent the Prince of Bones’ head tumbling into the water, but the Scourge still leaned on his sword to get back on his feet. Unmoved.

That was when I heard the scream and the music stalled.

I looked through Night, seeing Vivienne crumple to the ground behind the Hawk as spikes of rim tore through her back. She turned to flowers, but the Hawk turned and shot a black arrow into them. She turned back into her true form, writhing and with an arrow through the stomach. I ran, leaving the Prince to rise behind me, and ducked under the Mantle’s swing as Warlord finally hacked through her arm. The limb and weapon dropped, but she touched his burnt plate and it shrivelled as he let out a roar of pain. I could see Indrani firing at her so I kept running past them, my dead eye watching as an unraveller went right in the stump and the Mantle lit up before dropping like a stringless puppet.

The Hawk nocked another arrow as Vivienne tried to get back on her feet, bleeding badly, and I tossed a ball of hast spear of blackflame at the Scourge. It moved only just enough to get out of the way and I had to close my eye as a burst of lightning fell on my head – only to veer off at the last moment and smash into the Hawk’s side. She dropped twitching in the water as Vivienne ripped the arrow clean and staggered to her feet, leaning against the pillar. Only Hakram screamed behind me, because the Tumult had prepared two spells. A whirlwind of ice and water swallowed him whole, throwing him at the ceiling even as I got to Vivienne a laid my hand on her side. Masego would have to catch him, I was busy.

Night stemmed the bleeding, but I couldn’t heal . I couldn’t get her through this. No poison, though, I realized with a sliver of relief.

“Hide,” I ordered. “And get to Masego.”

She nodded, shivering. Movement at the edge of my vision caught my eye but it wasn’t the Hawk getting out. It was, I realized with horror as a streak of sleekness broke the surface, an arrow. Somehow the Scourge had been able to use a bow from underwater. I froze, seeing how it would punch into my stomach, but knowing that if I moved it would kill Vivienne for sure. That wasn’t even a choice. I pulled on Night, knowing it’d be too slow. It might save my life, if it wasn’t poisoned and- scarf trailing behind her, Ranger’s longknife shone green as she cut through the arrow. If she were still the Archer, I dimly thought, she wouldn’t have made it in time. The arrow shattered and I shaped the Night I’d gathered into raw heat, throwing at the water.

It turned into trails of vapour, revealing a scalded Hawk, and in a heartbeat Indrani was on the Scourge.

At a distance, bow in hand, they were a match for each other. But the Hawk avoided fighting up close for a reason, and Indrani was no longer the Archer. The first blow cut through the bow, the second took three fingers and an eye. The Hawk stepped back, trying to make distance, but Ranger moved smooth as silk: a step turned into a beautiful thrust, the longknife piercing the Scourge’s throat. All the way through. It wriggled, still moving, but with a simple pivot she struck with her second blade and the Hawk’s hooded head went flying. It was a victory, one she had craved for years now, but there was no time to celebrate.

“Get the Tumult,” I ordered.

I let Vivienne stand on her feet, waiting a moment to see whether she’d collapsed before moving away. Hakram was duelling the Prince of Bones again, and their blades were so swift they were a blur to the eye. He should have folded, crumpled under the Scourge’s strength, but I could See it in him. A rising tide of red, the heat and anger he had only learned to taste after he embraced the people he’d never thought of himself as part of. Rage , his soul sang, the aspect bolstering strength and limbs. It would not fail him so long as he remained in the throes of the red, ever rising until it burned itself out. I went for the Prince’s back, gathering Night, when there was a crackle of lightning and Ranger let out a scream. I looked through eye and saw she’d struck at the Tumult only to hit a shield of lightning, a trap already laid.

Masego ripped it down and I focused my Night again, but in that heartbeat of distraction the other fight turned: the Prince’s sword came down and Hakram’s leg was cut clean through. It was steel, though, prosthetic, and even as he fell Warlord lunged for his enemy’s throat. I shouted and dragged back the Scourge’s sword arm with tendrils of Night. Yet even as Hakram began tearing inside the Prince’s armour with his hands, death and steel on death and steel, the other hand picked him up by the neck and smashed him into the floor.

There was a loud, horrifying crack.

His spine. That’d been his spine. Warlord twitched on the ground as the Prince of Bones ripped out his arm, the steel limb and a great boot rose. I unleashed a torrent of Night at its back, beginning to topple it but not nearly quickly enough.

“ No ,” I screamed.

“ Ruin ,” Hierophant hissed, face red with fury.

The aspect he had meant to keep for the Dead King rippled through the air and struck the Scourge like a hammer blow. The giant mass of steel creaked, then metal screamed as it began to crumple like cheap tin. The Prince of Bones fell apart, limb by limb, until the all the layers slid off and all that was left was a pile of naked, twisted bone. It moved feebly, twitching, and the Warlord’s dead hand, the only part of him that was not trembling, closed around his neck. He dragged it close, roaring as the last of his Rage burned and the orc’s fangs tore through the Scourge’s spine. It stopped moving. He did not, still twitching uncontrollably.

I pulled Night to me, the air cold and clear, and watched through an eye as once more Indrani tripped a defensive spell and was thrown back. The Tumult, the sleeves of its robes ripped off and the bones of it fresher than the rest, went still for a moment. Its eyes burned red, then it poured all it had left into a streak of three spells. Masego killed the first, unhesitating. I drowned the second, a rain of ice shards, in a well of darkness. The third was a sharp gust of wind meant to kill Hakram on the ground, and Hierophant flicked his wrist to make a shield in the way. And the wind stopped, but a small dot of darkness went right through. A curse. The Dead King had leant a hand.

I loosed a burst of Night at Hakram to push him out of the way but it only clipped his shoulder. It didn’t move him enough. And none of us were close enough, Indrani’s arrow was too far, and as the dot of darkness hit his scalp it was caught. Half of it, I saw with excruciating precision through eyes of Night, was caught by pale fingers as Vivienne Dartwick threw herself forward. Both of them seized up, but where he went utterly still she burst into a storm of flowers. Blood red, like the song, and they fell all over him. He was, I saw, still breathing. My eyes, all of them, turned to the Tumult and in that moment I Saw the truth of it.

It was stitched together from the souls of many mages, but one of those souls had been the foundation. It was released at Hainaut but traces of it remained, like sutures for the Scourge, and they were everything. They were how the Dead King had made this creature in the first place. It’d been a necromancer, one, someone that could steal knowledge from the dead and use it. Those aspects were now the beating heart of the Revenant, what allowed it to exist. I raised a hand, gathering Night, and a streak of shadow formed above the Tumult. It was just an aspect, I thought. Gods, I’d been a fool.

“ Silence ,” I harshly said.

And just like that the sutures disappeared. The souls began to pull every which way, the magic that’d been gathering breaking apart, and the Scourge stared blindly as the shadow deepened, expanded. Dread Empress Tenebrous massive leg shot through, crushing the Tumult like an egg with one of the most satisfying sounds I’d ever heard. I slumped to my knees as the leg withdrew, shadows fading behind it, and stayed there panting for a long moment. It was over. We’d won.

The song began to fade, exhaustion replacing it.

Sheathing my sword, I leaned on my staff to get back to my feet. Vivienne had taken human shape again and Masego was healing her, Indrani catching up to me as we limped to their side.

“What was it?” I croaked out. “The curse.”

“I don’t know,” Princess admitted, face pale. “I just knew it’d destroy me if I remained me.”

She was sweating and shivering. Too much blood loss, and despite Masego’s best efforts that arrow wound refused to close completely. The Hawk’s aspect at work, I guessed. The wound was fighting to be lethal. My eye moved to Masego for answers.

“It was a mind-killer,” Hierophant said.

My jaw clenched as I forced myself to look at Hakram. He’d stopped twitching after being hit with the curse and would have looked like he was sleeping, were he not missing two limbs and his face swollen.

“How much of him remains?” I asked, voice choking up.

“I’ve contained the curse,” Hierophant said, “and Vivienne took on half of it. If he wakes, he will have lost some memories but retain his faculties.”

“If?” Indrani asked.

“I cannot promise he will,” Masego admitted. “A healer in Light might do better, but I cannot.”

Then he flicked a look at Vivienne, whose breath was laboured. Sweat poured down her face.

“You need one as well,” he said. “You still have even odds of dying otherwise.”

Ad the healers, we all knew, were behind us. While neither were in a state to move on their own. I clenched my fingers. Now that one song had faded, I heard, another returned in its stead.

“O Tiferet, where have you gone now,

Where went the song the river gave?”

I breathed out, all my eyes but one fading as I looked around us. This ruin of a room where only desperation and use of an aspect we had meant for the Dead King had kept two of the Woe form dying. And they might yet find their doom among these beautiful green mirrors, I knew, if I made the wrong choice. The cold part of me knew what should be done: whatever helped our chances of beating the Dead King. But I wasn’t the girl I’d been at seventeen, savagely ruthless in defence of what I saw as a greater good. Indrani had once told me that in offering the Woe a hearth I had turned wild beats into tamed ones, but that sword cut both ways.

I wasn’t willing to give the order anymore, not the one I should.

“Indrani,” I said.

She looked like I’d slapped her, hazelnut eyes blazing with anger.

“You can’t be serious,” she said, “not when you’re heading into a fight with-”

“It has to be you,” I softly interrupted. “You know that. You’re the one who’ll get her there before she dies.”

“I can’t leave you to fight the Hidden Horror alone,” Indrani pleaded. “What if...”

She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. Masego limped to her side, laying a gentle hand on her wrist.

“She won’t be alone, Indrani,” he said. “I go with her.”

“That’s worse,” she whispered. “I won’t be able to protect either of you.”

She set her jaw then looked away, drawing back from her touch. The look she gave me was unhappy but resigned.

“I swore to myself I wouldn’t get like this,” Indrani said. “I guess I’m not better than that, after all.”

“I wouldn’t be able to keep going if it wasn’t you taking care of them,” I told her.

“Liar,” she ruefully smiled. “That’s once today, Catherine Foundling. Don’t disappoint me again by dying without me.”

She helped up Vivienne and knelt, slinging Hakram’s unconscious body over her shoulder. After one last lingering look she turned her back, heading for the stairs. I took a moment to steady my breath, Masego’s solid presence at my side a comfort as I looked at the emerald grave where we had buried the Scourges.

“O Tiferet, where I gave love my vow,

Why have you become an empty grave?”

We shared a look and I nodded. Nothing more needed to be said: Hierophant and I hurried down the empty hallway, our footsteps echoing as we ran. We would get there in time, I could feel it. We’d be there for the end of the Dead King’s story.

“ Oh why have you become ,” Yara of Nowhere sadly sang, “ an empty grave?”

Chapter 67: And Justice For All (Redux)

“Learn this: all is finite, all ends. The only worthy act in existence is to seek the breaking of that fundamental truth.”

– Translation of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness, widely attributed to the young Dead King

And up the spire we went, seeking the King of Death.

This was his last redoubt, the fortresses where he would find either end or victory, and so even though his greatest forces were all spent it was far from empty. Room after room stood filled with traps and troops, guarded by Revenants and closed by wards older than any living memory but the Riddle-Maker’s. Yet none of troubled Hierophant and I as we climbed the spire, for the White Knight had led a company of Named through them and in their wake they left only utter ruin.

Traps lay ripped open, the bones of armies were strewn all over the floor and the keening remnants of wards torn through sang their dirge over the broken remains of the Revenants that had fought that unflinching warband. They’d gone through, I Saw as I trailed fingers down the chord if them, like a hot knife through butter. Taking hits but never hard enough to be knocked down, trampling the Dead King’s defences through a simple difference in weight. The heroes, after all, must reach the end of the story. They had to face the tyrant. Anything that stood in the way of that would be swept away like a stone fighting the current.

Yet as our feet hastened across the wrecks of defences that would have given even the finest soldiers of Calernia pause, I realized that one more Neshamah had played a trick on us. We had found the monster beneath the spire and then fought it at its bottom. The Scourges had waited for us after a mere flight of stairs, awaiting our deathmatch within the emerald grave. We’d stayed there, fighting and planning and hoping – thinking victory was in our grasp. And in doing so we’d been carefree in spending the one thing we were running out: time.

We were, at most, two hours away from annihilation. And that was if our armies held by some miracle, the finest of outcomes. In practice I expected we had half of that at most. The Dead King had filled his spire with traps and dead and sorceries, but they weren’t truly his line of defence. That was, as it’d been since the start of this, time . It was the simplest thing in the world, so simple we’d overlooked it.

He would be waiting for us at the top of the spire, and it’d take time to get there.

I could see in the lay of battlefields when it had occurred to Hanno what was happening, the way he and the Vagrant Spear had started to strike forward aggressively. They had to be taking hits out of that, some wounds even, but with the Forsworn Healer among them they’d be able to stay in the fight. Ruin by ruin I saw as worry turned to haste and then impatience, the wrecks now reeking of Light as the heroes began to brute force their way through. It’s what he wants, Hanno , I thought. To exhaust us before we get to him. Look at the defences he’s built.

Traps that had to be dodged or broken, troops unimpressive but in large numbers, Revenants that’d need Light or aspects to slay quickly. Wards that were possible to break and overpower, but only if Named put their back into it. None of it was meant to stop them cold, the Dead King knew better than that. They couldn’t be, he’d be fighting the story when trying. So instead he was grinding them down into exhaustion, flushing out all their tricks before they made it to his last throne room. The reigning king of attrition was up to his favourite game once more, ending his war the same way he had begun it. There was something almost admirable about that, I thought. There was no lie in Neshamah, no compromise.

The Dead King was true to his nature, horror that it was.

Halfway up the spire, I saw when the others made their decision. One of the walls was melted through, what had to be the Pyromancer’s work and no small amount of effort. Through the opening I saw Keter sprawled out below. There were some traces of fighting further ahead, we saw, but it ended at a set of wards. Undead milled on the other side, looking confused. None of them tried to cross it.

“Not the Dead King’s work, these,” I muttered.

“The Grave Binder,” Hierophant told me, looking fascinated. “Clever work. It prevents the dead from passing, but also from noticing it exists at all.”

Which told me they’d not gone through here. Hanno had made the right call: they needed to fly up. Most likely they’d ridden the Skinchanger, she had flying shapes large enough to carry most of them at once. Might have been two trips, but with a strong enough vanguard it wouldn’t matter. Fortunately, though we lacked a shapeshifter we were not without means to catch up. I limped over to the edge, letting out a sharp whistled as I stared into the falling ash, but she’d already been on her way. Zombie was a good girl, after all. She’d felt the need even before I did.

Great crow’s wings scattered the rain of ash as glided through the air, casually evading a ballista bolt from far below as she turned and made straight for the hole in the wall. I hastily backed away, running into Masego, who saw the approaching hippocorvid over my head. We tripped backwards in a sprawl, Zombie landing in a faint clutter of hooves and slowing until she stood over the both of us with a faintly smug look. I was reluctantly impressed she could manage that with a beak.

“We’ll talk about his later,” I promised her.

She let out an unimpressed caw as Masego and I dragged ourselves back to our feet, dusting off. I sat the saddle without difficulty but Zeze was rather more wary.

“It is a necromantic construct,” he reminded himself in a mutter. “Much more reliable than a horse.”

Well, whatever helped him not throw up on my back. He slipped behind me awkwardly – the saddle wasn’t really made for two – and closed his arms around my shoulders, though I did notice he stopped to stick himself to the saddle with a spell. Fancy.

“Why do these people keep building these enormous fucking towers,” I complained. “One, just once, I would like a nice ground floor lair. No drops at all, just solid architecture without all the goddamn hubris.”

On that cheerful note, I spurred Zombie onwards and she charged out into the emptiness. An old scream tried to bubble up my throat but I stubbornly kept my lips closed as my mount glided forward, falling into wide arc before she began batting her wings to gain height. We went around the spire, circling ever higher, until I suddenly pulled on the reins. Zombie went into a glid, cawing with confusion, and Masego stiffened behind me. I ignored both, my eye on the camp laid out below. It had not occurred to me, in the moment, what it meant that our armies were stranded in the inner city. They were cut off from our fortified camp, now but the opposite was also true and the armies of the dead were swarming our defences. In multiple places they had breached the palisades, the small forces left behind giving ground where they were not outright swept away.

And nowhere was the swarm thicker than around the ealamal, where I could see soldiers mounting a desperate defence from behind heavy wards.

Cordelia , I thought. In worry for her, but also of her. If her position was overwhelmed, if she thought the weapon was about to fall into enemy hands... No, I told myself. It wouldn’t come to that. She would not pull the trigger until there was no other choice left, and it was my role to ensure she had one. I knew Cordelia Hasenbach. I’d known her as my opponent and then as my ally, and now I thought I might be coming to know her as a friend. And the woman who’d sat across me in Serolen, who’d called me vicious but meant it as a compliment, I trusted her. Either too much or not enough, I thought, but still I trusted her.

She would not fail me if I did not fail her.

I loosened my grip on the reins, leaving Zombie to begin circling upwards again. It wasn’t all that hard to find where they’d gotten back into the tower: on level near the top was a ring of tainted glass windows and a few of them had been broken. There was no sign of fighting, but layers of wards had been broken through recently enough the shattered sorcery had not entirely collapsed. Exotic effects – swirls of colours, airless currents and some sort of golden translucence – lingered as Zombie plunged through the broken windows, trampling shards of glass.

I dismounted, helping Masego down and send off Zombie with an affectioned slap on the rump. Best she did not stick around when the greatest necromancer Calernia had ever known was so close. Like the forest of columns where we had fought the Scourges, the entire level was but a single room. It was all bare stone made into something eerie by the light filtering through the coloured glass, only the stretch where Hanno had smashed through forcing a slice of the world outside. There was a... stillness to this place that was uncomfortable to me, and even Masego seemed wary.

At the end of the room a set of elegant ivory stairs rose, leading at what could only be the spire’s very summit.

I breathed out, settled my beating heart. While I could not hear any fighting from above, there was no doubt in my mind it had already begun. All that was left was for us to join it.

“Ready?” I asked, as much for him as to settle the last of my nerves.

“I have been waiting years now,” Masego softly said, “to even these scales. To take... how is that your people call it, Catherine?”

“A long price,” I murmured.

“Yes,” the dark-skinned mage smiled, not a speck of friendliness to it. “A long price, and long have I waited to exact it.”

Hierophant’s Name settled on his shoulders like a cloak, rising to answer the will of the man who bore it.

“Today will be the day,” Masego simply said.

There was no need for a boast, not when the words were spoken with such chilling certainty. Our footsteps feeling so loud against the stone, we crossed the room and climbed the pale stairs. Every inch of the ivory was sculpted, I saw, the work so fine and subtle I had missed it from across the hall. Each was a battle, a host of crusaders coming to take the head of the King of Death.

We stepped on their corpses on our way to his throne room.

After all the beauty and horror we had found within the Dead King’s spire, I had expected to find a gripping sight awaiting us. Instead the immortal seat of Neshamah Be-Iakim was a bleak, barren place. A great hall of old stone, curved pillars rising from the stone tiles like ribs to hold up an unadorned ceiling. From tall rafters hung two rows of banners, none twice the same. I found the Fairfax bells and the Papenheim wall, Stygia’s cranes and Praes’ tower. Near every royal line of Procer, most of the great cities of Callow and even Ashur’s crowned ships. Each the banner of a great house, a great host, and now all of them hung limp from rafters. Never to know wind again.

They all led to the end of the hall, the end of this spire and the Crown of the Dead itself. There sat the King of Death, atop a dais of four steps. It was a simple thing, his throne. The same black stone he had raised steles and towers in, the seat’s back rising high until it ended in a crescent around the heraldry of the banner behind it. Ten silver stars set in a circle around a pale crown, all on deep purple cloth plunging down from the ceiling. It did not quite cover what lay behind banner and throne, a great gate of silver filigree depicting the lay of Creation and all surrounded it. All in never-ending movement, Arcadia and Heavens and Hells forever spinning around us in the void.

And under it waited the Hidden Horror, wearing the same body he has before he became either hidden or horror. Neshamah Be-Iakim had been pale in life, like one who saw too little of sun, and kept the tone in death. His hair was dark and short, his eyebrows bushy and his lips full. Neither tall nor short, he had a scholar’s build and would have passed for one if not for his light brown eyes. In the dim of the room they seemed golden, as if to make up for the slim circle of bone he wore as a crown. His robes were simple, purple and pale, and as Masego and I set foot in his hall he raised a hand.

In a flutter a movement, a bird landed on his fingers. A sparrow, I saw. Long dead, for all that its feathers and lost none of their luster.

“Warden,” the Dead King greeted me, then glanced to my right. “Masego.”

Hierophant’s jaw clenched. Feeling my boot touch roughness beneath it, my gaze dipped and I found that the stone tile beneath it was inscribed with a name. Prince Estienne Barthen , it read. My gaze swept the room, finding hundreds of tiles, thousands. Near every one with a name, but some kept empty. Waiting to be filled. We stood atop a graveyard of the braves who’d thought they could beat death, I realized. If we died today, would our names be engraved with the rest?

And where, in the name of the Gods Above and Below, were the others?

“Neshamah,” I replied. “I’ve gotta say, your hospitality’s taken a turn for the worse lately.”

“Has it?” the old horror mused. “I had though my reception most fitting for the manner of guests you’ve been.”

At my side Masego’s glass eye was moving wildly under the eye cloth, the reason I was buying time with this idle talk in the first place. That the Dead King was letting me, was not a good sign. My friend stiffened, and I knew it’d be bad news before he even opened his mouth.

“Most of this hall is not in Creation,” Hierophant evenly said. “It a hundred different realms, carved out of Arcadia.”

Keter itself, I knew, had no mirror in Arcadia. No crossing point. We had thought that was because it had been annihilated, but now I was guessing otherwise. Masego, when possessed by the Dead King, had taken Liesse into a stolen shard of Arcadia that’d been severed from the greater realm. He used the same trick here , I thought, or something close to it. That was why we couldn’t see any of the others, too. They were all in shards.

“So we can’t get to you without passing your crucible,” I mused.

The monster, the crucible and the pivot. I’d now found the second of the three. The old horror raised his hand and the sparrow flew away.

“You will find, Catherine,” the Dead King said, “that there are adversaries beyond the teachings you so desperately clutch to even at his late, late hour.”

“Might be,” I smiled back. “But you know me, Neshamah: I’ve always been a little slow to learn my lessons.”

The air shivered, and thirty feet in front of us a corpse dropped. A man, I saw in robes of gold and red. His trimmed beard and long hair were drenched with water, as was the rest of him, and the corpse looked swollen. Waterlogged. The Daring Pyromancer’s cadaver stayed there on the tiles, rivulets of water slowly spreading.

“It does not matter,” the Dead King replied, “for I am a patient man.”

There could be no more waiting, I knew, lest bodies continue to drop. I turned to Masego, getting a nod, and without another word took a single step forward.

—

All I found was darkness.

I had grown used to night and Night over the years, but what awaited me inside the shard was not the same. It was not anything natural, not even the kind of darkness you found in the depths of the Everdark. Even there you could find something... real about it, a tangibility. A reassurance that you were in Creation. There was not a speck of that in here. It was not just an absence of light but of everything, not a single sensation to be found save for solid ground beneath my feet. No foe came for me, no blade was swung or curse woven. I had stepped into a shard of nothing, and as I wandered I learned the nature of the trap: there had been a way in, but I knew of no way out.

I could wander this place for an eternity and never find one.

How long did I waste, walking forward? It was hard to tell. Time was nothing here, far enough from Creation that even the gift of the Sisters had gone silent. I spread Night around me but found no boundaries, no limits, even though I knew that the shard must have them. Frustration mounting at how the very first shard I’d found was stumping me, I stopped and forced myself to calm. There was a way out, it was the way traps like this worked. It was just being kept away from me somehow.

“This has got to be the single most boring trap ever made, right ?”

A voice I should not have been able to hear, not under the rules of this place, reached my ear. Even if I’d not known what Yara of Nowhere sounded like, I would have known who was speaking. Who else could reach me in a place like this? I spread Night around in thin tendrils, trying to find her, but the Intercessor remained frustratingly out of reach.

“That’s not going to work,” the Wandering Bard amusedly told me. “Besides, there’s no need for it. I’m here to help you, Catherine.”

I tried to tell her to fuck off, but no matter how much I moved my mouth no sounds came out.

“There’s no need to be rude,” Yara scolded me. “You’re the one who ate my eyes, Cat, not the other way around. Surely we can have a civilized conversation.”

It was not possible for Night to burn in this place either, I discovered to my mounting displeasure.

“Well, maybe not quite yet,” the Intercessor admitted. “But we’ll get there, don’t you worry about it.”

A soft, rueful laugh.

“We’ve got until the end of the world,” she said. “That’s plenty of time, as these things go.”

She was gone a moment later, the faint traces of her presence vanished, and I forced myself to calm down. Whatever her game was now, letting her upset me could only help it. And, whatever she’d come here for, she had shown me it was possible to come and go from this shard. I still didn’t entirely know how the Bard got around, save that it was bound to an aspect and dependent on Named, but that was something I could use. She was not the only one who’d learned to See stories. Opening my dead eye, I found the stars in the void that were the Named around me. Even the Dead King himself, at the end of the hall. From there, it was simply a matter of walking towards him.

The ground was shifting, I realized after only a few steps. Or maybe the shard itself did, because leaving Night hanging in the air hadn’t tipped me off about the direction changes. The trap kept you contained by making sure you were never able to reach the edge. Something that couldn’t keep me, not when I had a morning star in the distance to follow. It wasn’t long before I found the boundary, laying a hand against it and feeling another shard pulsing on the other side. I worried my lip, pausing for a heartbeat. Did she put me on the path to figuring this out? No, I reminded myself, it didn’t matter. The Intercessor had been so careful to obscure everything about what she really wanted that playing guessing games could only end in a loss.

I crossed into the next shard, blinking in discomfort at the intensity of a soft ambient light. It felt like the sun itself, after the last shard. I was standing in a cube, I saw, about a hundred feet long in every direction. The ground was featureless and the boundaries I felt ahead gave off a... hardened feeling compared to the last. Like I’d have to pry it open instead of cross. The only warning I got was the movement of air, for there was not a sound. I warily glanced up and though I was looking at a mirror until I realized it was water. A mass of it, falling down on my head.

“Fuck,” I swore, pulling on Night.

My shadow lengthened, spread and swelled as I hastily guided it above my head. The water poured through into the nothing there, but it wasn’t wide enough and on the sides the tide clapped down as I poured Night into the shadow to spread it even further. I was swept off my feet by the rebounding waters, armour and cloak and fighting me as I forced myself back on my knees while the tide reached my shoulders. With a grunt I finished it, turning my shadow into a veil that went from side to side of the cube and ate the mass of water that should be crushing and drowning me. Panting and drenched, I got myself back to my feet and waded through the water to the border of the cube. It’d be tricky, I knew.

There would be a moment between my shadow withdrawing and my crossing the hardened border where I’d be vulnerable. Taking a deep breath, I flattened myself at the bottom of the water for a semblance of protection and released the Night.

The boundary fought me, resisting the crossing, and something like a titan’s hammer blow struck me from above. Before I could pass out, though, I got through with a scream of triumph. Which turned into a simple scream, when I was yanked forward into the other shard. Thousands of clawed limbs tore at my armour from every direction, looking for weaknesses as writhing bodies pressed against me. Horrifying screams and gibbering laughter filled my ears as I felt claws rip into my flesh even as I huddled together and drew on Night. There was no room to do more than wriggle: the shard had been entirely filled with thousands of devils, crammed so there was barely even room to breathe.

“ Have it back ,” I snarled, and opened my shadow.

The tide I had just devoured poured out below me, the pressure crushing the devils like overripe melons as I scrabbled for the boundary I could feel ahead. It was a small shard, was meant to be. I’d only have moments until the water became my doom, reached and drowned me, but as devils pulled at the Mantle of Woe I crawled forward until my hand found the border. There were Named on the other side, I could See it, and so it was with a hoarse shout that I battered my way out. I fell through on my knees, bleeding from the cheeks and elbows where claws had found room in the plate, and landed wild-eyed in the middle of a fight.

The Vagrant Spear ducked under a spout of bright-red flame, the Daring Pyromancer risen a Revenant watching her with swollen bloodshot eyes as he guided his magic to continue hounding her. There was power in the fresh Revenant, pulsing still, and it could not escape my eye when it had burned so bright. Raise , the power had claimed. It was the source of his power to make Revenants, I thought, but it was... rough here. Used in haste, a cruder form of his usual method. And already I could see the trace of the first aspect fading as another replaced it, though it was not yet clear. It related to rule, I thought, or perhaps sovereignty.

Rising to my feet, leaning on my staff, I saw that we stood halfway through the hall and that Sidonia and I were not the only one to have reached here. The Mirror Knight stood hunched behind his shield, and it was a mark of how unsettled I’d been after the last shard that I had not noticed until now. He was, after all, being drowned in magic. At the bottom of the Dead King’s dais four robed skeletons were standing as they unleashed torrents of sorcery at Christophe de Pavanie. Red lightning crackled against the shield, turning to steam frost that kept burning before it could creep past the edge of it, and what appeared to be a blow of curses simply slid off like rain.

The only sorcery appearing to find purchase was rippling, transparent kinetic force trying to rip the shield out of his grasp and forcing the Mirror Knight to stand hunched as he fought the magic with brute strength.

“I do appreciate,” I croaked out, “that you don’t stop being fucking ridiculous even when we’re on the same side, Christophe.”

Reaching out with a tendril of Night, I slipped past him and grabbed the boundary of the shard he’d need to enter before getting any further. From the corner of my eye I saw the Pyromancer body swivel my way as he let out a shout in a language that rang in my ears, a snake of white flame erupting from his outstretched hand, but the Vagrant Spear moved in a blur and cut through it with her Light-wreathed spear. Focus never wavering, I pulled open the shard and to my mild amusement a storm of fire came exploding out. It smashed through the streams of magic and into the Mirror Knight, who stoically bore it and was merely knocked a few feet back. His stance never even wavered.

The magics were interrupted, though, and when the White Knight burst out of thin air with his armour smoking I knew the tide was tipping in our favour. Save , his soul sang out. Not the last aspect he’d come into, but he was leaning hard into it still. Enough that it obscured the other some, though not entirely to my lone eye. Recall had never gone anywhere, but the latest addition had my brow rising. Undo ? It felt like the Grey Pilgrim’s own Forgive , but there were... nuances. Not necessarily resurrection, it could be other things, and there was a limitation that Tariq hadn’t had. Something particular to Hanno. Justice , I decided. He needs to be undoing something he believes unjust.

Still, what a goddamn terror of an aspect.

The Dead King apparently agreed the situation was beyond salvageable, as the Pyromancer let himself be impaled by Sidonia without batting an eye so he might finish casting a spell that shot out a small arrow of red flame. I wove Night and Hanno moved, the both of us intervening as the Grave Binder tumbled out bleeding from a shard. I pulled the villain down the ground, to his startled shout, and Hanno cut through the red arrow. It burst into small beads of red flame as it did, and while the White Knight drowned most of them in Light as I dragged away the Binder two survived. They exploded outwards, one catching the Levantine’s right foot and turning it to ash in a heartbeat.

The Vagrant Spear sent the Revenant’s head flying in the moment that followed, ending it.

Grim as the thought was, I could not help but think it’d hadn’t been too bad a trade. The Pyromancer might have done a lot more damage if he’d been allowed to keep going. The fire shard I’d opened stopped pouring out flame as the boundary closed again, but smoke was still obscured out sight of the rest of the hall like a curtain. The four dead hadn’t begun using magic again, though, which was something.

“Warden,” Hanno called out. “Have we lost anyone else?”

I cocked my head to the side, turning and drawing on See.

“The Page is going in circles,” I finally said, then looked forward.

My brow rose.

“And the Valiant Champion’s already ahead,” I said. “No one else died.”

“Luck,” the Grave Binder roughly said, hand aglow as he closed his rotting flesh around the foot he’d lost. “The shards ahead will-”

He was interrupted by the boundary to a shard bursting open, devils flowing out. We gathered together, the Levantine villain, hastily crawling our way, but the horde of twisted creatures flowed around us. Boundaries began popping one after another, tides of devils pouring out of them in mangled states, and even as beleaguered Named began to come out an honour guard of what looked like walin-falme formed. They bowed deep as Akua Sahelian walked out, her armour pristine, with Hierophant at her side. She stole the devils , I realized. She’d been caught in the same shard I did, or one similar, only she’d stolen them from the Dead King’s grasp. And then she’d found Masego, using his eye to pick up more devil shards and navigate the maze to help out the others.

Of the thirteen people that had come to end the King of Death, the remaining ten now stood halfway through his hall. Only the Page was yet lost and the Champion still ahead.

“Apologies for the lateness,” Akua drawled. “I was distracted by the appallingly bad taste in decorations.”

“Also the shards trying to kill us,” Masego hopefully added.

There was a moment of stupefied silence.

“See,” the Forsworn Healer muttered at the Silver Huntress, “I told you it was awful. The colours of the banners clash.”

I snorted.

“I don’t suppose you could send your little friends forward to clear us a way?” I asked.

“I’m sure something can be arranged, darling,” Akua smiled.

She idly waved and the chittering tide burst forth, flowing into the shards. I cracked the side of my neck.

“All right,” I said. “Forsworn, can you do something about the Grave Binder’s foot?”

The man eyed the missing limb carefully.

“I can,” he said. “There is still ash on the ground.”

“Good,” I grunted. “The rest of us will pair up and go forward together.”

I glanced at Akua. Much as I disliked admitting it, Masego was the most fitting partner for her going forward. As long as she had his glass eye, she could guide her devils through the shards to some degree.

“White Knight,” I said, “you’re with me. The rest of you decide on your pairs yourselves, and do it quick.”

I caught Hanno’s eye and he nodded. Even as the smoke began to clear, the two of us slipped past the boundary of the shard I’d picked out: the one that should lead us towards the Valiant Champion. Devils had gone ahead of us, but when we passed we found them floating impotently. I realized after a heartbeat that not only were we weightless but there was no air in here. Hanno kicked off the side of the sphere, looking to get through, as the both of us held our breaths. It was too large a shard, though, I thought. Fortunately, there was something at hand for me to use. Night answered my will, thin tendrils of it shooting out to pierce through the devils that Akua’s will kept from resitting.

Not all of them had lungs, but most of them had bellies and that was enough. I sucked the air out of them, bringing it to my mouth with another tendril and offering the same to Hanno. Though grimacing in distaste he accepted, and I used that same tendril to let him drag me to the other side with his momentum. He waited for me there and we crossed together into pain . He formed a shield of Light but my limbs were still trembling from the lightning that’s truck me. Fuck. If I hadn’t become the Warden, that would have had me down for the count. Even with my Name I could feel pain lighting up my every nerve. When the whiteness left my eye I saw we were in little more than a tube filled with lightning, which at least made it easy to reach the boundary. His armour was smoking again, but otherwise he looked rather unfairly fine.

It was easier with his help, even though unlike others we’d gotten ahead of the devils. The defence had not been built with two Named in mind, designed to isolate and stagger us. Akua had, with her devil trick, upended the Dead King’s entire defensive strategy. We went through a shard that was a sphere full of blades and spinning – into my shadow they went – and then through another that appeared to be a pit where we endless fell but Hanno revealed through Light to be a ring of warped space simply pretending to be the same. From that we crossed into a box of crushing gravity, the closest either of us came to dying, but Name strength was narrowly enough to let us reach the other side crawling on our bellies.

I ripped my way through, landing on stone tiles as my bloody chin bruised, and barely had the time to see the ray of rippling frost burst my way. I rolled hastily to the side, knocking my staff onto the floor so Night would rippled out and disrupt the spell before it could hit me. It still iced the floor to my side and I slipped as I got up, landing on my knees and gathering the Mantle of Woe onto me just before the curse hit my chest. The magic slid off and I rolled to the side before the returning frost could catch me, rising to my feet even as Hanno crossed out of the shard. We were, I saw with mute surprise, near the bottom of the Dead King’s dais. The Hidden Horror still sat his throne, watching us with something like boredom, but the Valiant Champion had already engaged what looked like his last line of defence.

She was wrestling with a massive silhouette that I thought, for a moment, to be the Prince of Bones. The shape... and yet it was not a Revenant, I realized. Stronger and larger than undead should be, but... it had not been Named while alive, and though it had the hint of it now it was because of the power burning inside it. I could see it clearly now, what I’d glimpsed in the Pyromancer. Reign , that was the aspect. Kingship over death, over undead. And as the word sunk into me I Saw the depth of it, what it meant. For a heartbeat Neshamah disappeared, turned into nothing more than a vague shape by the sheer number of strings that came out of him. Every single one binding him to undead, reigning over them.

A kingdom of one.

Someone uncorked a flask next to me and I stiffened, just in time for the Intercessor to offer me a grin.

“The third one’s the real trouble,” she told me. “Also, you should duck.”

I threw myself to the side, for my instincts had been agreeing with her, and red lightning poured through where I’d just standing as I landed in a painful roll. The Bard was already gone, naturally. Out of my Name trance, I actually took in the full lay of the opposition. The four mage bodies from earlier were there and there was a second hulking silhouette resembling the Prince of Bones, which Hanno had engaged before it could flank the Valiant Champion. All the mages but one were looking my way, which wasn’t a bad situation. If we could keep this up until the other started crossing, our odds weren’t too bad. Mind you, the Dead King had yet to take the field himself. He knew, as I did, that he’d never be more powerful against us that in the moment he got up from that throne. It was to his advantage to delay that as long as possible.

“All right,” I called out at the mages, rolling my shoulder as I drew deep on Night. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

I wove Night and they came for my life. It was simple sorcery, what they used. The kind that every undead mage I’d faced in this war used – only brought to its pinnacle. The Dead King wielded them like a master painter playing with coloured chalk, a man at the pinnace of his trade having a lark with children’s toys. Red lightning curved as I tore through it with sickles of raw Night, looping and darting at me from every direction. I turned frost to steam only for it to explode in cutting shards, unwove curses only to find that like poisonous flowers blooming they every part turned out to have teeth. I gave ground, often and quickly, as the three dead mages methodically cornered me.

Red lightning turned into a spear blew a hole straight through the Mantle of Woe, hitting the side of my leg, but even as I fell and screamed the Skinchanger and the Vagrant Spear burst out of thin air along with a tide of devils. I felt the weight of Reign shift as I killed the pain in my body with a twist of Night, and in a heartbeat the devils changed sides again. The Skinchanger turned into some sort of large pale cat, leaping out of the way, and Sidonia’s spear lit up again as she was forced to tear into her allies. I backed way, swallowing a burst of lightning into a circle of Night, and greased the floor under the devils to nudge thing the Vagrant Spear’s way.

Her footing remained flawless even as they began falling, turning the struggle into a one-sided massacre.

The tide was turning again, I thought. Curses flew again, this time after Sidonia, but I stuck close to her and slammed burst of raw Night into the Dead King’s elegant work. On the other side I saw the Champion’s axe carve through one of the massive undead’s arm, Hanno covering her side from the other. A heartbeat later the Skinchanger landed on the foe’s back, turning into some kind of black tentacled creature that entangled its limbs. With a swell of triumph I saw the Silver Huntress and the Forsworn Healer cross, raising my staff to turn to shatter the lance of frost thrown their way. It exploded in shards that my lance of Night sucked in – I’d not fall for that trick twice – but then from the corner of my eye I caught something.

The Dead King was rising from his throne.

I went still in utter surprise. It made no sense, neither the Severance nor the Fetters were here yet and-

“Turn to dust,” the King of Death ordered in Ashkaran, voice ringing out as he flicked his wrist.

The Forsworn Healer did. The spell had been little more than a grey sphere, and the moment it touched the hero he collapsed into flakes of dust.

“Honour to the Blood,” the Vagrant Spear shouted, tone gone hot with fury, and she leapt.

I stood numb for half a heartbeat more, uncomprehending at how badly I’d somehow miscalculated – or he had. I might well have gotten my ribs crushed by a battering ram of rippling kinetic might had Masego not burst into sigh and Wrested away the spell, smashing it back into the undead mage’s face and sending him flying. I drew on Night, sword in hand a running forward as Hanno abandoned Rafaella to face the two great dead alone – she was smashed to the ground but I saw nothing more – even as Sidonia leapt at the Dead King with her spear high. He caught her by the throat, effortlessly crushing it, but she appeared in a flicker behind him and-

And red lightning caught her in the side, just in time for the Mirror Knight to come out of a shard and catch sight of it.

He let out a hoarse scream even as the Grave Binder pushed him forward, rushing forward. Fuck, I thought. If he got himself killed... No, we had an opening. Hakram had once told me Christophe and Sidonia had some odd thing going on, and she’d just been hurt at the Dead King’s hand without dying. He’d gotten up too early, too, and while more of us would die we could win this. He’d made a mistake, I told myself, even as a voice in the back of my mind reminded me that when a skilled enemy made an obvious mistake it was no such thing. Still I charged forward, ducking under a spike of ice and carving through the mage that did it as I kept running.

The Dead King didn’t even bother to turn towards Sidonia, who was still wreathed in lightning, and instead he pointed a finger at Christopher. A thin, pale filament shot out. Roaring, the Mirror Knight kept on charging at the Hidden Horror with his shield raised but it was not him the spell had been aimed at. The filament punctured the Grave Binder’s neck, sinking entirely into the flesh, and a heartbeat later he collapsed into a thousand small cubes of rotten flesh. I heard Akua shout and a shield erupted between the lightning and the Vagrant Spear even as Hanno and I went for Neshamah’s sides.

I struck at a translucent shield, shattering it, even as the White Knight did the same – only for him to be grabbed by the neck and tossed to the side, while I struck at the Dead King’s chest wit my staff and slithered Night into his body.

“Arrogance,” Neshamah chided.

The Night tore back out, striking me in the face and tossing me on my back. It’d turned cutting , somehow, tearing up my skin and ripping the eye cloth off my dead eye. I got back up in time to see three things happen in quick succession: the Mirror Knight unsheathe the Severance and strike in a choppy gesture, the Silver Huntress loose a Light-wreathed arrow and the Vagrant Spear strike at the Dead King’s back. My heart leapt to my throat as the spear took him in the back of the knee and the arrow went through his hand, shattering the spell that’d formed there. The Severance shone, its swing perfectly arced toward the Dead King’s neck as I met his eyes.

They were calm, considering. Not afraid in the slightest.

Right before the Saint of Sword’s conviction made into a blade caught his neck, he turned and touched Sidonia’s forehead with two fingers. Her own skull compressed, crushing her head from the inside, and she died even as the Severance took the Dead King’s head. It went tumbling to the ground, the body collapsing, and surprised triumph stole all our breaths. Except I knew better, deep down. The dead hadn’t stopped moving, and as Akua matched a burst of red lightning aimed at me with a pale mirror I watched the Dead King’s twice-corpse twitch. The world shivered as Hierophant Witnessed the truth of it, but a wind blew from behind as something passed us by. Dimly I felt the shards of Arcadia being drawn between us the dais where Neshamah’s remains were writhing, but that was not what drew my eye. The Dead King’s last aspect was burning, lighting up to my own like a bonfire in the night.

Return , the Dead King laughed, and he did.

I closed my eye, realizing then what it was that the Hidden Horror was. Not just what Neshamah Be-Iakim had been when he became undead, but the story he had since become. A maker of armies and Revenants, he how Raised the dead. The sovereign of the Kingdom of the Dead, he who Reigned over death. And finally the unending menace that had been seared into the memory of Calernia, the great doom that would Return no matter how many crusades battered its gates. He wouldn’t die, I grasped, because deep down most of Calernia didn’t believe that he could. It wouldn’t be that simple, in practice, there would be weaknesses and nuances.

But that was the story at the heart of it, and a story was a powerful thing.

When I opened my eye, we stood at the beginning of the hall again and the Dead King sat on his throne, a dead sparrow on his hand. The shards had pushed us back, returned us where we’d begun. Of the thirteen who had come to this last hall, now eight stood dazed around me. The Page, who had never left the shard where he was imprisoned, remained there.

“I don’t understand,” Christophe said, voice anguished. “You told me it would kill him.”

He was looking down at the sword in his hand, the Severance laid bare. The sword was wavy to my eye, as if it cut the very air around it.

“Why does he still live?” the Mirror Knight demanded, eyes going to me. “ What did Sidonia die for ?”

And I didn’t have the answer, but someone else did. My eye went to him.

“Hierophant?”

Masego stood there, frowning, and I had to clear my throat before he returned to us.

“The Severance did what it was meant to,” Hierophant said. “It cut both his body and his soul.”

“Then why did he not end?” Hanno asked.

“His soul did not disperse or move on to the otherworld,” Masego said, “because it is otherwise bound.”

Akua’s twitch betrayed her surprise.

“He has made a phylactery,” she said. “A soul receptacle.”

My fingers clenched.

“His throne?” the White Knight asked.

“No,” I murmured. “That’s not the kind of man we’re dealing with.”

“Keter,” Hierophant said.

“ Where in Keter, Masego?” the Silver Huntress patiently asked.

I felt my stomach drop.

“Keter is where, isn’t it?” I quietly asked. “It’s the entire fucking city.”

He nodded.

“After all,” Masego said, “it is the Crown of the Dead. The name was more fitting than we ever knew.”

“So he keep coming back until we destroy city,” the Valiant Champion said.

Another nod.

“Then what does the Severance even do?” the Mirror Knight harshly said.

“It destroyed him,” Hierophant informed him. “You did sufficient damage to disperse his soul. Only instead of moving on his soul remained bound to its anchor, and then something-”

“An aspect,” I elaborated. “Return.”

“An aspect,” Hierophant adjusted, “ensured that it formed anew. The scar the Severance left is still there, the damage done was permanent.”

“So the only way to destroy him is to destroy every single fragment of his soul with the Severance,” the White Knight evenly said.

Which, he did not need to say, did not seem in the cards. Not only did we need to get to him through the shards again, but we were fewer, wounded and tired. And it occurred to me, in that moment, that he had risen from his throne the very moment the Forsworn Healer reached him. Immediately, without hesitation, and that his first blow had been aimed at the man.

The Dead King had never stopped fighting his war of attrition.

“We don’t have the time for that,” I said. “Even if we could, our armies will break first.”

My eye slid to Akua.

“It will have to be the Fetters,” I said.

Hanno grimaced, but did not argue. He knew as well as I did that we were out of options. I’d ordered Akua to tell them all of the Fetters on their way up, knowing it might come in necessary, and was now glad I had.

“I will take the other end,” the White Knight said, volunteering for an eternity without hesitation. “Who will shackle him with the other?”

“Let me,” Christophe de Pavanie quietly said.

Hanno blinked at him.

“Perhaps someone faster on their-”

“Let me hold up the other end of the leash,” the Mirror Knight cut through. “Enduring, Hanno, has been my sole virtue from the start. Let me make something worthy of it.”

The White Knight’s face closed, as he hesitated, so Christophe sought my eye instead. I was, after all the Warden. I studied his face, the grief still on it, and decided that though grief over Sidonia had formed the decision it was not the sum whole of it. It was the consequence of the man he’d become, the one I had spoken with in the shadow of Keter before the end of this war began. And that man was, for better or worse, someone I would trust with imprisoning the Dead King.

“Give him the Fetter,” I said. “I’ll hold the other.”

Hanno began to argue but I held up my hand. There was no argument to be had. That was the nature of sacrifice, wasn’t it? Selfless and selfish all at once.

“Thank you,” the Mirror Knight quietly said, meeting my eye.

“There are things for which I deserve thanks, Christophe,” I replied quietly, “but this is not one of them.”

I turned away when Akua pressed the ring of bronze and copper into my hand, pretty piece of torment that it was. She was looking at me, I thought, like she’d never seen me before. Did you think I would force it on you? I thought. It wouldn’t mean anything, if it wasn’t your choice. In the end she said nothing, leave me to give Christophe the second Fetter. I breathed out.

“We cross again,” I said. “Prepare yourselves.”

“It will not be the same,” Hierophant warned. “He blended the shards before putting them back into place. There are fewer but they have grown in danger.”

“Danger’s our trade,” I replied. “And he’s not the only one with surprises left.”

I sent Hanno to fetch the Page alone, but the rest of us went in pairs again. I took the Skinchanger with me, accepting her suggestion that I should carry her as a mouse. It was lethal from the start, with the first shard we stepped into a blend of the falling water and the lightning tube. If I’d not still had water from the first go we might well have died electrocuted, but crashing water on water bought us just long enough to crush. In my haste, though, I did not notice that the crossing separated us. I had no idea where she ended up, but I’d stumbled into a pitch black furnace. The fire was not difficult to deal with, simply requiring that I wreath myself in a coat of Night, but the darkness was.

Last time I’d used the Dead King as my compass, but this time he felt obscured to my eye. I found it difficult to See him, as of something was obscuring my sight. I’d have to wait for another Named to get ahead of me before I could figured out which way to go.

It was only inevitable, I supposed, that she’d come back then.

“Told you the third was the trouble,” the Intercessor said. “Did you really think you lot were the first to ever get to him? Please, I nudged three crusades that way before giving it up as a lost cause.”

The first dark shard had been a void where I could not even speak, but this one was different. It had been blended with a shard of fire, and so needed to be able to burn – the threat had changed from simply being lost or being on fire to my running out of strength in Night as I waited out both. It did mean, though, that now I could speak.

“I know what you’re after,” I sneered. “We’ve figured it out. Judgement gone silent and the ealamal just waiting for that hour of need. I know you’re trying to make us lose, Yara.”

I heard her drink from the flask, not just a small mouthful but a long swallow.

“That’s one of the things I’m trying to do, Catherine,” the Bard said. “It’s not that I really want to kill everyone, you know, it’s that they gave me no other choice. Except, of course, you taking my place.”

“That failed in the Arsenal,” I said. “You’re too late.”

“No,” the Intercessor quietly laughed, “I don’t think I am. You still have an aspect left undefined, and most importantly you have a crucible.”

I rolled my eye.

“I’ve known a few of those in my time,” I said.

“No,” she said. “You haven’t. Not the kind you need to become me. Do you want to know what it took, to become?”

I actually did, I found to my own distaste. It was information too valuable to be turned aside, even if she was likely to be playing me.

“What?” I asked, giving her what she wanted.

“The impossible,” the Intercessor said. “You have to do the impossible, even if only the once.”

I opened my mouth to answer but she tutted me.

“No,” she said, “you haven’t. You’ve done the improbable, and admittedly with some skill, but not the impossible . You haven’t broken fundamental rules to win.”

“And you have?” I asked.

She ruefully laughed.

“Creation was easier back then,” the Intercessor said. “There were fewer of us, more unseen spaces to work in. I’m not sure I’d be able to pull it off now, but I did when I was young.”

She drank, and after I could hear her smile.

“I convinced Creation that I was made of stories,” the Wandering Bard told me. “That I could wield them, shape them, live through them.”

“ How ?”

“First I made myself into a song,” she said. “Then I made myself into a story. Then I tricked gods into singing one and telling the other.”

She sounded almost fond.

“Of course, then I got exactly what I asked for,” the Intercessor. “Thought I’d gotten the better of the Gods, for the first few centuries.”

She laughed, and it was bitter enough I could almost taste it.

“Then a few centuries more passed, and I got who that joke was really on,” Yara of Nowhere said. “It’s never them, Catherine. If you learn anything from me, learn that.”

“And you think I can do the same as you?” I frowned. “Trick gods?”

“Gods no,” the Intercessor snorted. “You’re a blunt fucking instrument, child, even when you’re being subtle. But you can do the impossible, the table’s set for it.”

When she spoke again she felt close, as if whispering straight into my ear.

“You can’t beat him,” Yara said. “The pieces aren’t there, Catherine. But if you beat him, anyway, well...”

“Then I take your place,” I finished.

“Good odds you do,” the Intercessor jovially. “It’ll be a fucking forever of a curse, but then you’re a pretty terrible person. And if you fail, well, I still get my way. Cordelia will do what Lycaonese do and I still get to put it down.”

I convinced Creation I was made of stories , she’d told me.

“You’re not just getting rid of people who know of you,” I quietly said. “You’re trying to kill everyone on Calernia. No more stories, no more you.”

It was how she got out of the cage she’d made for herself.

“Not everyone , Cat,” she chided me. “It’s still Judgement doing it, after all. I’ll just make their standards stringent enough that, say, maybe forty people on the continent are able to meet them. That’ll do the trick. In a few decades people will die out soft, and I can spare a few decades.”

I felt her smile again.

“Those go by,” she softly said, “in the blink of an eye.”

Ahead of me, I Saw another Named pull ahead. I had my path through.

“You won’t beat him with that thing Sahelian’s cobbled together, whatever it does,” Yara told me. “It won’t stick through a death, Catherine, and that’s his favourite trick: he’ll die to get out, if he has to.”

I’d been about to walk through the fire, but I paused at that. It made, I realized, a horrible amount of sense. The Autumn Crown had been supposed to make the Dead King indestructible in exchange for undoing his mastery of the dead, but the Fetters were a simpler creation. If the Dead King let himself die after he was bound in them, could he slip the noose? The Fetters would be closed around his soul, and his soul could be carved up and dispersed. Christophe had already done it one today, it just hadn’t stuck. It wouldn’t stick, I suspected, even if there was not so much as a speck of intelligence left in that scarred up soul. He’d just come back mindless and hungry until the soul was utterly destroyed.

There was a decent chance, I realized, that even our most desperate plan wouldn’t work .

“There it is,” the Intercessor murmured, sounding pleased. “You see the wall, the impossible. Now you just have to find the determination to break it .”

“What do you want of me, Yara?” I spoke through clenched teeth.

And I knew the danger, I did, so I touched the Night for the slightest bit. Set a weave to unmake.

“You’re the Warden,” she said. “Not as catchy as-” and there she said a word in a language I had never heard, “but we can work with that. You’re still a user of stories, of Names. So use them to win.”

A hand touched my shoulder and I let her, closing my eye to See what she wanted to show me. Her own glimpse of Creation. It was not objects in motions, chords and stories and the lay of possibilities. It was, I decided, like a living tapestry. All interwoven and ever-moving. But she wasn’t looking at the whole of it, only at the small part that was here and now. Today, in this spire, facing the Dead King. The Named that had pulled ahead of me, heading for their foe.

“That’s what we’re working with,” Yara said. “That set of stories. Some are unfinished, and those tend to be the most useful, but we’re not going to win this with a third aspect or the Page transitioning. It’s fucking Neshamah, he’s been the collective nightmare of Calernia for longer than we’ve been pissing in pots. Your winner is here.”

Grey thread in the tapestry, I saw, not empty but that she could not see. Not yet come into colour.

“Akua,” I said.

“That’s your victory right there,” the Intercessor agreed. “She’s got weight in spades and personal ties to you on top of it. It always works best when it costs something, yeah? Nudge our girl into the right Name at the right moment and you can, just for that one fucking moment, do the impossible.”

“You can’t control what Name people get,” I flatly said.

“Maybe not out there, but in here?” Yara smiled. “Hells, you’ve got her all ready for a dozen redemption stories and all the other moving parts in here are Named. This is your board, Catherine . You just have to sit down and play.”

And the thing was that, even now that her own vision was fading I could See what she meant. Akua wasn’t one of the stars, she was not Named, but I could feel a course of stories she might come into. And the others, well, the practicals of their fights against Neshamah might be beyond me to predict but they didn’t really matter. I looked at them going through the shards and it was the simplest thing in the world to reach out. The White Knight was having trouble reaching the Page, so I gave them a little nudge. Flicked the Page’s aspect of Incise , making him remember there was more to it than combat. It was sharpness and precision, not killing, and those applied to more than just fighting.

He cut into the darkness, enough for Hanno to see, and Light followed.

Now the Silver Huntress was going to charge ahead, because she had always envied Archer and now Archer had become the Ranger. So one nudge to hurry to the left instead of the right and she stumbled into an airless shard of powerful gravity, the Mirror Knight hurrying behind her and falling. He hit the bottom of the shard with the weight of years of accumulated Dawn , blowing right through. They fell into a shard of devils and blind rage, but they were right next to Hierophant and he tore open the boundary with the shard he shared with Akua. The devils flooded into the frost, dying in moments, and in his rage the Mirror Knight shattered the walls both shards.

They all made it to the middle of the room, much sooner than they should have.

“That’s the push and the pull,” Yara said approvingly. “It’s the fundamentals of the game, how you get people moving. You’re going to need a little more than that, if you want to shape stories.”

I hummed, because she was right. The Valiant Champion, I Saw, carried with her a great guilt. She had too often been the last one standing, and she treasured the White Knight all the more for being one of the rare survivors of bands she had joined. She wanted to be the first into danger, so it wouldn’t be others paying the price, and that was easy enough to arrange. She was already behind the four who’d reached the centre of the room and gone on ahead towards the Dead King, so she’d hurry after them. That would drive her to take risks, enough she came through first again. Then someone... mhm, it’d have to be heroine she wouldn’t care for anyone remotely villainous. The Silver Huntress would do.

A nudge that got the Silver Huntress wounded by one of the dead mages would do the trick, pushing her to use her domain and wiped out all of the Dead King’s defences in one swoop. It would open space for the Mirror Knight to strike, and... what if she died instead of got wounded though? Oh, the Champion would go after the Dead King directly then. Better results, he wouldn’t be able to pull some trick I wasn’t able to see that fucked everyone over and the defences still got wiped by the others while the Dead King was stuck in the domain. Probably worth the Silver Huntress, since she was the likeliest to die of the Dead King got to pull his trick.

“You might need a third go,” Yara noted, having followed every nudge. “Focus on getting Sahelian there and damage his defences. You only need the one miracle, everything else is about getting it there.”

And it sounded cruel, I thought, but it was true. Hadn’t it been what this entire battle was about? Thousands were dying out there in the inner city so that a handful of people in here could slay the Dead King and end it. If I was cruel, it was because I played a cruel game. And what was the life of a handful of people, against all of Calernia? I’d known the answer to that at sixteen, and the years had done nothing to change it.

“The White Knight’s a dead end,” I muttered with a frown. “I can’t even use him properly.”

“ Save ’s a real bitch,” Yara sympathetically said. “Tariq used to pull the same shit by asking Mercy for tips, though at least I could get around that. Your boy’s a lot more of pain to deal with.”

In most stories he sacrificed himself for others, stepping in to save them if they got nudged into a path that got them killed. It was like he was pathologically incapable of seeing the larger picture. The Mirror Knight, at least, could be relied on to go in a blaze of glory to avenge the Vagrant Spear. That’d turned out to be a fortunate death, leverage-wise. I watched as Silver Huntress and the Mirror Knight reached the Dead King first, beginning the fight as he sat his throne. They wouldn’t be enough.

“I can’t get to Akua,” I finally said. “Not strong enough.”

Even if I stepped in myself, it wasn’t enough to nudge her into a name. Love was not enough. It had to be her decision and I didn’t have a good enough angle to move that.

“Yes you can,” Yara whispered into my ear. “You’re not looking at all the angles, Catherine. When a nudge isn’t enough sometimes you have to Guide things down the right path.”

And oh, it was so very simple when finally my eyes were open. See hadn’t been enough, it could only observe. To be able to Guide , though, as Yara could? That was looking at the endings of a story and choosing the one that would happen. It seemed a little thing and it was, it really was, when you thought only of a single story. But when it was five, twenty, a hundred? Then it was like being able to forge your own puzzle pieces. Silver Huntress died trying to be what she wanted Ranger to be and Archer to admire, which led into the Valiant Champion containing the Dead King. The rest of the board was cleared and then, when she died and he came back, the Page tried to transition and died if the White Knight didn’t get in the way, which he would. Leaving who the Dead King really wanted to kill, the Hierophant, wide open. Akua would be too slow and not forgive herself.

So she’d reach for something beyond her, a Name, and that I could Guide into what I needed.

She would destroy him. We would. It would all be over.

“It’s not my aspect, though,” I murmured.

“Hierophant’s right,” Yara assured me. “The godhead’s just a trick of perspective. Use mine for a bit and you’ll pick it up.”

“They both die,” I finally said. “Almost all of them do.”

“And that’s a tragedy,” she agreed. “It’s always a tragedy, Catherine. No matter how tired you get, that doesn’t change. There’s always a William to make you weep. But if you don’t play the games, if you don’t get your hands in the red, then how many more die?”

She squeezed my shoulder comfortingly.

“You always got that part,” Yara said. “That the deaths don’t matter more because they matter to you. You’ll get to keep that, I think. It’ll make you better than I was in some ways.”

“Because I can do what needs to be done,” I quietly said.

I felt her nod. And she was right, I knew. What a paltry fucking cost the handful of people in this spire were, if it kept the rest of Calernia breathing. The easiest of bargains. And maybe it’d wound me, but my life had been a collection of wounds. What was one more? I was a villain, in the end.

Mine was not the fate of happy endings.

I breathed out and watched it in my mind’s eye, measuring angle and timing. It would be close, but Yara was wrong. I wouldn’t need a third go, just slightly bloodier hand. It would just need to- the weave undid itself and pain returned to my body. My leg, my bad leg throbbed with pain.

Do not forget , it whispered. That this is not a game. That you make mistakes.

I wanted to argue, to struggle, but the pain took my breath away.

Do not forget , it whispered, that there must be more than ruin.

“Catherine?” the Intercessor slowly said.

I shook off her hand.

“If you’d said I needed to kill Akua, I might have believed you,” I quietly said. “But Masego, Yara? Masego ?”

The one who’d never left me, never asked anything of me. The one who’d promised to stay by my side when this all ended, even as everybody left. The one who’d forgiven me for killing my father.

“They say we only get one choice that matters,” I told her. “And maybe that’s true. So here’s my choice: I will not be a crab in your fucking bucket .”

She was gone in an instant, and as I stepped out of the shard I breathed Creation’s air once more. A pivot, I thought. It had been a pivot. The others were fighting the Dead King, I Saw, and they were losing. I watched it unfold, the desperate gamble. Alexis wounded and the Valiant Champion using her domain to whisk away the dead defending Neshamah. I passed through another shard, barely feeling the swirling acid as it roiled against a wreath of Night. Then the Dead King revealed why it was he had slain the Grave Binder, calling on Revenants buried beneath the tiles bearing their names. They tore through, swarming my companions. Neshamah had, as always played it so very careful.

He’d gotten rid of the healer to ensure our wounded would not return. He’d slain Sidonia so that love could not be turned against him twice. And then he’d killed the Grave Binder so that no one could hinder his raising of Revenants.

Only, I thought as I stepped through a swarm of poisonous insects that multiplied by the moment, he had made a mistake. Because Return wasn’t perfect, he’d showed me that. He needed his anchor it was why he’d done a grand gesture like making all of Keter his phylactery. The Mirror Knight had killed him one today and if the anchor hadn’t made sure that his soul stayed in Creation, that it didn’t disperse, then the Severance’s cut would have been the end of him. Return wasn’t an absolute, because no matter how powerful a story there was always a weakness. And I’d learned his, I realized, entirely by accident. Years ago, in a fight that had nothing to do with him at all.

See, I’d once wanted to steal Akua Sahelian’s soul to get around an oath not to shed her blood but she’d already taken it out and put it in a phylactery. Masego had called it a manner of lichdom, back then, and been mightily impressed. He was not someone easily impressed, which had gotten me curious. What was it that Akua had done that was so unusual? A real lich was undead, I’d learned. That seemed a small detail but was why they were able to take out their soul and why Akua’s trick of taking it out while she lived was such an achievement: the soul was removed during the ritual that turned the mage into a lich. The Dead King, then had removed his soul when he became undead through the ritual that destroyed Sephirah when he effectively died.

So if his death was undone, it’d come back .

When I crossed the last shard, striding through entropy that stole another meaningless decade from me, I came out onto a scene of triumph. And not ours.

The Valiant Champion was on her knees, most of her torso turned into bone. The Silver Huntress’ bow had been snapped and she was losing a fight with a Revenant spearman, giving ground, while the Skinchanger had turned into a spotted cat to avoid the howling sorcery of a robed mage. The Mirror Knight was being sat on by a massive distorted Revenant bearing a crow’s mask, though the undead’s attempts to break Christophe’s neck were running into the issue of the neck being harder than the behemoth’s gauntleted fists. The White Knight was fighting half a dozen Revenant swordsmen and holding, but he was not winning. The Page was doing the best of us all, savaging what looked like an Arlesite duellist dripping with gold suns.

Akua and Masego were locked in a struggle of raw power with the Dead King, sorcery against sorcery, and they were losing .

I breathed out, sharpening my mind as I pulled on Night and stepped forward. The Dead King laughed, seeming genuinely delighted. There was a ripple and the two Soninke mages were blown away, sent flying, as the King of Death turned to me.

“I knew you would not fall for her tricks,” Neshamah smiled. “You lack the perspective, Warden, but you still understand the essence of it. We are all prisoners .”

I’d heard this before, I thought, from Masego. Who’d been raised in a shard of Arcadia as a boy and seen it end, wondering then how long it would take until the Gods did the same to Creation. The Game of the Gods would have an end, after all. Someone had to win.

“And you want to get out before Last Dusk,” I said.

“When the Gods end it all, Catherine Foundling,” Neshamah Be-Iakim said, “when the last soul passes and the last of Creation is unmade, then I will stride alone into a sky of cold and distant stars.”

He leaned forward.

“And in that empty void between worlds, moving to no purpose but mine, I will at last know the taste of freedom.”

And he meant it, I knew with ironclad certainty. Every word of that. All he’d ever wanted was to get out. And maybe part of what he’d become was on Yara of Nowhere, who had hounded on behalf of the masters he wanted to rid himself of, but it wasn’t on her head alone. He was still the same man who had destroyed Sephirah for his madness, who had taken a sickle to Calernia through the millennia as a reaper of lives. He was not excused. He was the face of everything I wanted the Liesse Accords to kill, the black madness that broke nations and swallowed whole cities. A single man whose lunacy was enough to break the world.

And Gods, hadn’t we all had enough of that?

“From them,” I said. “You’ll be free from them, Neshamah. But you forget that you are yet in the pit with the rest of us. And down here, we are all mud.”

“Am I to monologue for you, Warden?” he smiled. “I will not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

It was a gesture of respect, I grasped, when he called me respect. For my Role, for how far I had come. He had meant it when he called me a peer.

“You don’t need to,” I said. “You’ve already given me enough.”

“It would be worse to kill me, you know,” Neshamah idly said. “I have prepared for it.”

“You’d make it worse,” I acknowledged.

I’d long seen it coming. He seemed, I noted, a little cheated by how easily I accepted that.

“You have seen the shape of my sovereignty,” the Dead King said.

“I have,” I agreed.

A million strings, a million dead, all to make a kingdom of one.

“Should I end,” the Hidden Horror said, “it will pass to another. One Creation should fear even more than I.”

It took me a moment to understand what he meant. When I did, I almost refused to believe it.

“Weeping Heavens,” I said. “You don’t even control the drakon when it’s just a drop of essence. You’d give all you hold?”

“I had a friend once,” he smiled, “who was a woman of remarkable clarity. She once asked: if Creation is not mine, what need is there to be a Creation at all?”

I cocked my head to the side. I shouldn’t, I knew, but in some ways I would forever be my father’s daughter.

“Quoting Triumphant,” I told him, “is the last refuge of the uninspired.”

And I beheld him then, standing proud and unbent in the face of all Creation. The oldest of tyrants, the King of Death himself who had worn his pale crown through the millennia to war upon the world. The first and greatest of the old breed, the one they all fell short of becoming. The last relic of the Age of Wonders. And I knew, in that moment, that he was mine to judge. That I had taken on the Role, the responsibility. I was the Warden, the usherer of the Age of Order, and it fell on me to close the curtain on the times that had come before it. The Mirror Knight had one feared I would make myself a ruler over Named, and he was not so far as that. I’d always been about authority, just never about wearing a crown.

I was to be a judge.

“Neshamah Be-Iakim,” I said, “you have devoured cities and shattered realms, waged war upon all the world and sown ruin wherever reached your hand. You are the high priest of desolation, the tyrant undying.”

He felt it, I saw, same as I. The shiver in the air. His Role and mine, testing the other’s weight. His hand

“By my Name of Warden,” I said, “I Sentence you to die.”

He came for us, then, without a speck of holding back. It came as a swarm of buzzing curses, a tide of a million deaths, but the charge of my last aspect had sunk into him. The Sentence would stay in him, my authority – my madness – carved into Creation. His fate was writ as death, and now the lay of world would fight to ensure it.

I had, at last, a providence of my own.

The Silver Huntress’s wrist was touched by a curse and she withered to bones in a heartbeat even as I swallowed a shout of dismay. The Page exploded into ash, the Skinchanger screamed as she unravelled from the inside. I raised my staff, drawing as deep on Nigh as I ever had. It would not be enough, I knew, but so long as Hanno could – the Valiant Champion interrupted the thought, leaping forward with her axe high, and as she looked death in the face she smiled.

“ Exalt ,” Rafaella of Alava said.

And then she was gone, the Dead King’s great doom and his Revenants with her. In the heartbeat that followed were moving. The Mirror Knight first and swiftest, Hanno and I tearing forward even as Hierophant and Akua’s magic rose.

“Hanno,” I shouted.

His eyes met mine.

“Bring him back,” I said. “Make him alive .”

Three spells went flying. Masego’s hit the Dead King in the chest, burning through robes and sending him stumbling back. Akua’s and Neshamah’s collide, one giving and a heartbeat later Akua Sahelian screamed . Christophe de Pavanie, smiling, dropped his shield and swung the Severance at the Dead King’s neck two-handed. Bit his wrist, oh his wrist was caught. And Neshamah’s other hand was laid on his neck, a curse leaving the fingertips and spreading black across the Mirror Knight’s skin. He smiled still.

“ Reflect ,” the Mirror Knight whispered.

And the Dead King screamed, rot spreading across his dead limbs as the Mirror Knight slumped. Breathing his last he twisted, twisting around the Severance, and handle of it fell into Hanno’s outstretched hand. The one missing fingers. He caught it. I struck out, the staff of deadwood I’d ripped from Liesse after refusing the old victories and defeats writhing with the power of the goddesses that had made me as much as I’d made them. The hit caught Neshamah in the neck, even as his magic sharpened, a pulse of Night disrupted the spell. Hanno of Arward’s hand touch the Dead King’s forehead, that rough workman’s palm covering it.

“ Undo ,” the White Knight said.

And as Creation screamed, life roared back into the Dead King’s corpse. Millennia of weight fought the White Knight’s fresh aspect, an oak tree to a dandelion, but a finger had already been laid on the balance. I had Sentenced Neshamah to die, and for that he must first live. So colour flushed back into his cheeks, those pale brown eyes widening as his magic rose again. A killing spell, and end for the both of us.

“ Silence ,” I ordered, and it died.

And Hanno struck, the Severance biting into the Hidden Horror’s neck for the second time that day. It cleaved through flesh and bone, red blood spurting as death followed in the wake of life. Neshamah Be-Iakim’s head fell, its eyes golden in death, and the two of us stood by the dropping corpse in disbelief. Movement behind me, and I turned sword in hand but it was Hierophant – who darted forward, hand snatching a sparrow as it erupted from the Dead King’s last corpse. It was, I Saw with surprise, a soul. His soul.

“I told you, King of Death,” Hierophant smiled, “that I would come for you.”

And he bit off the sparrow’s head, teeth crunching as he swallowed and began to devour the Dead King’s soul, making its knowledge his own. The foundation, I knew, of a godhead to be. We’d won, I realized. We’d just killed him. And though he had threatened us with the drakon, if the Antigone came through then... A sigh sounded, and I turned to see Yara of Nowhere standing among the ruins of the highest hall of Keter.

“Why,” she asked, “does it always have to be the hard way with you lot?”

Interlude: Legends V

“One: first, do good.”

-“Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

The wards shuddered.

The great battering rams of the dead were cracking them apart blow by blow, the beleaguered defenders conceding one barricade after another to the horde. Swarms of undead birds flew so thick above them all that it seemed as if night had fallen, the creatures snatching up any soldier that left the protection of the sorcery and tearing them apart so that limbs rained down. How many more layers were left the wards? Cordelia was not certain, but it could not be more than a handful. Inch by inch they had given ground to the Enemy, the Dead King’s tireless teeth devouring them one soldier at a time. They might just, she thought, run out of men before they ran out of ground.

She’d begun with almost two thousand, but that longer had long dwindled into the hundreds.

The princess sat with her back to the all-too-thin palisade that Hannoven men had raised with calm competence, now standing behind it with halberds and hammers as the horde continued to hammer at the wards. What a small thing this length of wood was, in the face of the monsters that awaited. What would it do a against a rampaging beorn or the venom of a wyrm? It might as well be parchment. And still she sat there, among the crowd of grim-faced soldiers calmly awaiting the death coming for them one bite at a time. Cordelia’s gauntleted hand brushed back her mud-streaked hair, careful to avoid the cuts on her face.

She’d been offered healing, but she would not die from torn cheeks and every wasted speck of Light was a soldier the priests could not send back into the fight. Standing by her, Simon de Gorgeault looked over the top of the palisade and let out a thoughtful hum.

“Goods news, Simon?” she drily asked.

“It appears that the Dead King is a fine diplomat indeed, Your Grace,” the lay brother easily replied. “I do believe I am spying the High Lady of Kahtan fighting side by side with the Prince of Orense.”

It took Cordelia a moment to recall that both of them were dead, though she would have been clued in by the raucous laughter from the Hannoven soldiers anyhow. It was exactly the kind of black humour they loved. A shade lighter than what Bremenites preferred, but then most Lycaonese agreed that they only laughed because they’d never learned how to cry.

“It figures,” the once-First Prince mourned, “that they would only start getting along after I abdicated.”

Laughter again, and though exhausted Cordelia forced herself to rise to her feet. Over the palisade she found what Simon had, a contingent of Praesi dead in colourful armour methodically levelling the broken palisades the dead had already taken so that the horsemen died in Rodrigo Trastanes’ honourable last charge would be able to ride through the smoking grounds. What a small thing a palisade was, she thought again. So easily done away with, for all that it was the only wall standing between them and death. A remembrance brushed against her mind, then, and to her surprise Cordelia found herself thinking of her mother with a faint smile.

“Good news, Your Grace?” Simon lightly echoed.

She shook her head.

“I was merely thinking,” Cordelia said, “that sometimes the story you hear is not the one you are being told.”

“I don’t follow, I’m afraid,” the lay brother said.

“When I was a girl, my mother once told me the tale of the Three Cousins,” the fair-haired princess said. “Do you know of it?”

It was an old story known among all Lycaonese and even some of the northern Alamans, though the tale changed with the telling.

“I do not,” Simon admitted.

It was simple, as the most beloved stories tend to be, and Cordelia remembered her mother telling it with characteristic brusqueness. It’d been her way, the choppy burst of emotions. Anger and laughter, come then gone in a moment like Hannoven’s capricious summer rains.

“I can tell it, if you would like,” she lightly offered.

What else was there to do, as they waited for the rams to break the wards? There were no more tricks, no more walls, no more desperate gambles. Only the brutal trade of time for lives and ground. The white-haired man laughed.

“As good a time as any, I would think,” he cheerfully agreed.

There were, she thought, worst men to face the end of the world with than Simon de Gorgeault.

“An old king,” Cordelia said, “died without sons and daughters. His line died with him and another rose to take the seat, but laws are laws.”

The lay brother rested his elbows on the edge of the palisade, resting his chin on his palm as he listened with bright eyes.

“His wealth of iron was split in three parts,” Cordelia told him, “and given over to his last three kinsmen: three cousins, who went north to seek their fortunes as men do. They journeyed long, longer than men ever had before them, but in time they found a rich, green land by the banks of a great river. They decided to settle there and raise their halls.”

A broad-shouldered redhead in plate down the palisade, her solid matron’s face split by a smile, hummed out the first few notes of O Blessed Hannoven – that sardonic hymn boasting of every horror plaguing the land as if each were a blessing to thank Above for, be it spring floods or the armies of the dead. Cordelia had also picked up on the resemblance, as a child. Hannoven bordered lakes and rivers, and though far north counted some of the finest farmland in Lycaonese hands.

“Only,” Cordelia said, “as they began to build, they learned too late that the river was the Last River and that on the other side of it dwelled Death.”

She shrugged.

“But they no longer knew the way back, so they raised their halls anyway.”

“Stubborn folk,” Brother Simon said, the fond twist of his lips making it a compliment.

“The first cousin, the oldest, was a lord bold and brave,” the princess said. “He built his hall in stone and fashioned his iron into a gate that none could break, raising a tall banner over it.”

Cordelia has thought him the wisest when she was first told the story.

“The second cousin, the youngest, was a hunter clever and sly. He raised his hall atop a tree in the woods, hidden in leaves, and fashioned his iron into arrowheads aplenty.”

There was no disdain in her tone, but it was there to be found in the faces of some who listened. Her people were a pragmatic sort, they’d had to be to survive, but they believed in honour still. There was little honour to be found in hiding in the woods as your kin perished around you, clever or not.

“The last cousin, neither young nor old, was a warrior neither bold nor clever,” Cordelia smiled. “He raised his hall from wood, fashioning his iron into a sword and helm. And for a long summer and winter the three ruled over their halls, until spring came and Death with it.”

In the distance the boom of the rams against the wards sounded, followed by a loud crack . The first fault line. It was only a matter of time now.

“The spirits of the dead came charging out of Below,” she said, “a great army that laid siege to the bold cousin’s stone hall. And though they were many and furious, the iron gate did not break.”

But this was not a southern tale. Victories did not keep on shining like stars in the sky. They passed, as all things did.

“Yet the siege did not end,” Cordelia said, “and as the moon turned the oldest of the three cousins grew hungry. Behind his strong gate he remained a prisoner, until his hunger slew him behind stone walls and he rose anew to unbar his gate of iron for Death.”

Simon looked stricken, but there were grunts of approval from the soldiers around them. Most of them would know the story already, but even those that did not would approve of the lesson her mother had tried to teach her: no walls were ever strong enough to keep death out forever.

“Onwards the spirits of the dead marched, into the woods where the youngest cousin had raised his hall,” she told the lay brother. “And the clever cousin laughed, for the spirits stumbled about as he remained hidden in the leaves and slew them with his arrows of iron.”

There were few tricksters, in her people’s stories, and she thought for good reason. Tricks meant little against the Chain of Hunger, and it was a rare trickster indeed that could get the better of the King of Death. More often, the sly got a lot of people killed trying to prove their cleverness.

“Only the dead are endless,” Cordelia shrugged, “and though they could not find him they devoured the forest tree by tree. The youngest cousin killed many, but arrows always run out.”

The end had been writ from the start.

“The tree was toppled, his hall with it, and he was swallowed whole.”

Simon de Gorgeault’s face had slowly changed from engrossed to grim. Lycaonese tales, she mused, did tend to have that effect on southerners.

“And the last?” he asked.

“The last cousin, the warrior, had no tall walls or hiding place,” Cordelia said. “His hall was wood and easily torn down by a hundred hungry hands, but as they did her strode out wearing his helm and bearing his sword.”

“And he fought,” the lay brother quietly said.

“And he fought, neither winning nor losing, until spring turned to summer and the dead returned to Below,” the blue-eyed princess said.

“So he was victorious,” Simon said, sounding surprised.

He was startled by the hard laughter from the soldiers around them, but Cordelia was not.

“As the dead left, he set down his sword and helm to raise against his wooden hall,” she told him. “And as he sat in it, the warmth of summer reaching his face, the last cousin knew this: Death would return with spring.”

That had been the lesson her mother was trying to teach her, she’d thought as a child. You couldn’t ever really beat Evil, not like in the pretty stories ending with a wedding and an endless summer’s peace. You fought, until you died and someone else took your place. It was a fate that couldn’t be turned back by a strong gate, couldn’t be hidden from in the leaves. Either you faced Evil down or it devoured you whole.

In the distance, the wards cracked.

“A hard lesson,” Simon de Gorgeault finally said, frowning as he gazed upon the dead. “Perhaps the Principate would not be facing ruin, had more of its people learned it.”

She smiled.

“Years later,” she told him, “I learned that it was only the way the tale was told in Hannoven.”

In Rhenia, the story was about the halls. The first cousin was lazy, made a large iron crown and built a hall of river’s mud. The second was clever, made an axe and a smaller crown then built his hall from the forest’s wood. The third built only a pickaxe, spending all summer and winter to make his hall out of mountain stone. All fell but the last, the third cousin then using the remains of their broken halls to mend the wounds in his own. Pride is worth nothing , the story taught. Survival belongs to those who labour for it. In Neustria the cousins forged either a sword, a shield or armour out of their iron. The armoured cousin took up the arms from his fallen kin to survive.

In Bremen the story went the same as in Neustria, save that the dead did not retreat with summer and all three cousins died. But when Death took the fallen cousins Below to celebrate, the iron got stuck in the passageway and blocked off the dead until the got the iron was chewed through, come next spring.

“Is it so different elsewhere?” Simon asked.

“Not so much,” Cordelia admitted. “But I remembered, then when it was my mother told me the tale. I was young, you see, and had just wept that she was never home.”

And so Mother, brusque and blunt but never quite able to admit when she was sorry, had tried to explain why she was always out there leading solders. Evil had to be fought on the field, she’d been trying to say, else it would reach their gates. She was trying to keep Cordelia safe, to buy them another spring. It hadn’t been a lesson at all, just her mother giving the closest thing to an apology as she had it in her to give.

“Sometimes the story you hear,” Cordelia softly repeated, “is not the one you are being told.”

It’d been the failing palisades that had hooked the thought, the wrongly learned lesson that walls always failed in the face of Death, but now she wondered. Time was running out. The last word she’d had of the fighting inside Keter had been that the inner city was breached, but since then there’d been no word and the Grand Alliance camp was being overrun. Had been overrun, she admitted to herself. Most of it was in the hands of the dead now, the few remaining pockets in the hands of the living either forts built around supplies or the heavily warded Praesi grounds where hodgepodge survivors had fled to as the rest of the camp collapsed.

Cordelia Hasenbach had sworn that she would wait until the very last moment but that moment was approaching, step by step. Inevitable as the coming of spring.

It was her duty to do what must be done. The responsibility she must bear for the weight of her sins, the niggling questions of whether any of this would have happened at all, if she had not called the Tenth Crusade. If she had not made mortal wars into the affair of Above and Below, raised her hall on the shore of the Last River. And still she could not help but wonder: was it really the sword and helm she had chosen? The fight, to hold dawn in her hands and not fail it? It felt like an invincible gate, the certainty that she could end it all at any moment. It felt like a bowstring pulled back among the leaves, the fading mirage of victory. Was the story she was telling herself really the one she was living in?

She reached for the slip of parchment under her breastplate, fingers closing.

The wards shuddered one last time and then they broke.

—

“It’s not a dragon,” Sapan firmly said.

“It’s got scales and wings,” Arthur Foundling replied, “and it breathes fire. Sort of.”

It was transparent, not like any fire he’d ever seen, and instead of burning seemed to simply disappear everything it touched. Not ideal, given that it narrowed down the Knight Errant’s options in facing the beast from the already sparse ‘shield’ and ‘dodge’ to merely ‘dodge’. Which, given that the dragon kept growing, was becoming more difficult by the moment. It was a most inconsiderate sort of beast.

“It has commonalities with a dragon,” Mage reluctantly conceded. “But so do a seagull and a wyvern.”

“Don’t those have tails with stingers?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“A seagull,” Sapan slowly said, as if addressing a complete idiot. “Have you really never seen one before?”

There was a moment of stillness between them, then they both broke out laughing until they were out of breath.

“Had me going there for a moment,” Arthur admitted, still wheezing.

“It’ll be a few years until I can be match Lord Hierophant,” she told him, sounding admiring. “He can say anything with a straight face, it baffles even the Warden.”

The levity had released something in the both of them, but not even her clutching at happier memories was enough to make up for the horror before them. Their breather was at an end and they would be returning to the nightmare, leaving their hiding place behind a broken pillar tall as a tower. His limbs fighting him, something like fear pulling the other way, the Knight Errant peeked out around the rough stone edge. The ‘drakon’, that breed of Evil dragon, was cruelly enjoying itself at the expense of the brave men that died failing to give it pause.

The fourth charge faltered of the hour as the armsmen in Hainaut livery broke, either fleeing or breaking ranks to try to drag back Princess Beatrice. The beast had killed her horse under her, tossing her down with broken legs, and was now popping the heads of those who came to help her with hateful glee. It left her crawling, only plucking out the lives of the most loyal as it ignored another volley from the Praesi scorpions. Packs of goblins had dragged in the engines only to find the bolts sinking into the flesh to no effect, made part of its body. Even unravellers did nothing, and though copperstone munitions had burned bright on its hide the bite had not been deep.

Useless as anything but a distraction.

Arthur’s jaw clenched as he watched another soldier being pressed into the ground by a massive finger as Beatrice Volignac screamed in anguish. From the corner of his eye he saw light-footed Levantines move in with ropes and hooked swords, Tartessos slayers, but he held little hope. A flicker of movement among the ruins caught his attention, the Affable Burglar smoothly advancing through broken stone. Towards Princess Beatrice?

“Gods help you,” the Knight Errant whispered, and he meant both kinds.

They needed all the help.

“Arthur,” Sapan called out.

He took it as a reminder not to stay out in the open too long and ducked back behind the stone, resting his too-warm forehead against the fallen pillar. This room, as great as the heart of the Alban Cathedral itself, felt like a boiling cauldron. It was hot and humid, in a way that licked disgustingly at your skin. The longer they stayed in here, the harder it was to think. Sapan’s hand on his arm jolted him out of his thoughts. It’d not been a reminder, after all, but to call his attention to something. A young man in legionary’s armour, Liessen blond hair peeking through the helm, had come to fetch them. A sergeant, by the single red stripe on his shoulder.

“Lady Antigone wants you,” the sergeant told them.

They nodded back tiredly, the other man not waiting to escort them. He’d only been a messenger. The Witch of the Woods was not far, huddled with the Concocter over what looked like a makeshift alchemist’s kit. Or a brewer’s, really. Two small barrels, tubes of glass bubbling over an open flame and a hermetic vase. Lady Antigone had fought with the first two charges, helping them with her great spells, but after they broke retreated here to consort with the silver-haired Concocter. Arthur knew little of what they were up to, save that it was meant to destroy the elder dragon, but Sapan had been told of it in greater detail.

If they had assumed he was unlikely to understand the technicalities of alchemy and magic, they’d been entirely correct.

“We are nearly done,” the masked Witch flatly told them.

“Almost,” the Concocter murmured, laying a palm against the hermetic vase. “It’s begun to sublimate properly.”

Arthur sent a helpless glance at Sapan, who sighed.

“Lady Concocter stole a sliver of the drakon’s body while it was still contained in the corpse where the Dead King imprisoned it,” she told him.

“I knew that ,” the Knight Errant grunted. “But it’s not in that body anymore so why would it help?”

“Because that thing is eating away at everything it touches, even us,” the Concocter said, turning to meet his eye. “Except it didn’t eat at the corpse it began within in the slightest.”

He slowly nodded.

“So we are stealing the Dead King’s work,” he tried.

“I might be able to slay the drakon,” the Witch plainly said, “if an artefact imbued with the property is sunk into its body.”

Because otherwise it would simply be eaten, presumably, Arthur followed.

“Good news,” he said, meaning it. “How are we to help?”

“I kept back the Affable Burglar because she’s our only thief,” the Witch said. “She will bring the artefact in the drakon. From you, Knight Errant, I need a wound.”

He breathed in sharply.

“You want me to break its skin,” he realized, “so that you might have an opening to push the artefact through.”

A mute nod.

“It may well kill you,” the Concocter frankly admitted.

“I’ll do it,” Arthur Foundling replied without missing a beat.

Fear tried to make his lips stiff, take back the words, but he had moved quicker. The Concocter’s eerie orange eyes blinked in surprise.

“I have sent for help,” the Witch of the Woods told him. “But I know not if they will come. You are our last chance.”

It was either him or the Stained Sister, now that the Myrmidon guts were strewn across the gallery above their heads, and the Sister was protecting their only Named healer. Twice already the elder dragon had shattered a hall where the Stalwart Apostle plied her powers, only quick escape saving her life when a stream of transparent fire came for it.

“I am a knight of Callow, Lady Antigone,” Arthur Foundling replied. “Our causes are always lost.”

He shrugged.

“And still we prevail.”

At his hip the Peregrine burned, and it felt like a smile.

—

A wave of undead hammered into the palisade, toppling it like a sandcastle failing in the face of the tide.

Cordelia kicked the skeletal hand that slipped through two stakes, shattering its wrist, then backed away hastily when a spear jutted out. She hacked at the wooden shaft but her angle was wrong and her sword got stuck, she and the dead on the other side pulling at each other to get free. The princess set a boot against the palisade to put her back into it, the sword suddenly ripped clear as she stumbled backwards. She went back to pressing against the stakes a heartbeat later as arrows began to fall in a ragged rain, taking a step back only when a bearded man in Reitzenberg colours raised his shields above their head. He was chewing at the inside of his cheek, eyes calm, and peeked over the palisade’s edge.

“We’re about to go down, I’d say,” he told her in Reitz. “We move back to the next, let the mages torch everything.”

Cordelia’s eyes sought Simon, but he was further down helping up a soldier with an arrow sticking out of her shoulder. The lay brother could take care of himself, she decided.

“Let us go,” the fair-haired princess agreed.

A heartbeat later she was blind, thrown off her feet as wooden shards exploded and one bit deep into her brow. Gritting her teeth, she scrabbled for the sword she’d dropped as the massive undead boar that’d smashed through the palisade shook off a few soldiers, carving through with its tusks. The soldier that’d shielded her was on a bed of ash and dirt, his spine bent at a straight angle. Fingers shaking, Cordelia worked off the straps of his shield and snatched it up. Undead were pouring through the breach, ghouls running on four legs and leaping at soldiers, but the thunder of hooves approaching told her who was to come. The Prince of Orense’s horsemen now served the Enemy, and a way had been opened for them.

“Simon,” she shouted, eyes searching. “We must-”

The older man, she saw, was on the ground. Wrestling with a ghoul, the soldier he’d been helping running away. Cordelia ran, and though she knew she should be following the other it was to the lay brother she went. With a wild scream she hacked into the back of the ghoul’s head, parting flesh and bone. It took two blows before the creature scrabbled away, crawling on its belly as it twitched, and Brother Simon – his throat scratched raw and his scalp scarred – took its head with a swing right through the neck.

“Come on,” Cordelia croaked, voice raw.

She offered him the pommel of her sword to drag him up, his chest brushing against the dead man’s shield she now bore, and though the warmth of having kept at least one person she cared for breathing was yet in her belly when they turned it was to the sight of doom. The boar collapsed, a Hannoven spear through the brain even as the soldier who’d leapt on its back was dragged up screaming into the sky by vultures, but a beorn’s great head leered over the broke palisade as it climbed over it. It was close, too close for them to be able to run in time and- and an armoured silhouette landed on the abomination’s back, splitting its head open with a single blow. They leapt down even as the beorn collapsed on the palisade, landing smoothly and flicking their sword free of gore.

“Honour to the Blood,” the Barrow Sword drily said, offering her a salute.

Cordelia recovered from her surprise first, blessed by extensive diplomatic experience in pretending nothing ever took her aback.

“Lord Ishaq,” she greeted him. “My thanks. If I may request that you escort us to-”

He raised a hand to interrupt her, which was highly rude but she’d allow to pass without comment given the present circumstances.

“There is cavalry coming, Barrow Sword,” Brother Simon bluntly said.

“Give it about three more heartbeats and,” the villain began, then trailed off.

He was off one heartbeat, Cordelia pettily noted even as the sky lit up. A great pillar of burning Light tore through the clouds, smashing into the ground so powerfully it shook. A wind laden with the smell of burned flesh and molten metal washed over them, poisonously warm.

“There was cavalry coming, priest,” Ishaq Deathless grinned through his beard.

He had, Cordelia thought, never more looked like one of the Damned. She mastered her discomfort.

“That was the work of the Blessed Artificer, I take it?” she calmly asked.

The Barrow Sword nodded.

“The Hierophant got to blow up a maze, the way we hear it, so I believe she’s getting a mite competitive,” he said.

Even with the relief that the column of Light had earned them the dead were continuing to pour through breaches and more than half the palisade was now on the ground, being trampled over. Soldiers were already retreating to the safety of the next layer of wards, the thin last shells, and by unspoken accord the three of them began a retreat that way as well.

“Is she coming our way?” Brother Simon asked, sounding worried. “I understand she was wounded yesterday, and to fight alone through such a horde...”

Cordelia shared his fear but chose to look upon the hope instead. If Adanna of Smyrna joined their defence, a rout may yet be avoided. The faint yellow glow in the air above them told her that the ward keeping the vultures from falling upon them was still mostly standing, but there was precious little else left. The last two palisades had boundary wards that would keep the dead from passing them, but weaker ones than those that had already been cracked. They would collapse before a quarter hour had passed, if the black stone rams were brought to bear against them. Should the Blessed Artificer bring down a wall of Light, however?

Oh, they might yet hold.

“Arrangements were made, priest, worry not,” the Barrow Sword said. “Besides, you do not yet stand alone.”

“Your presence is a relief,” Cordelia assured him.

“As it should be,” Ishaq Deathless laughed, “but it is not me I speak of. Your plight did not go unseen, Cordelia Hasenbach. Help has come.”

And as if summoned by his words – perhaps not ‘if’, should Catherine be believed – a wave of suffocating power washed over them all. The ground shook beneath their feet and Cordelia would have fallen had Simon not gallantly caught her elbow. She steadied and turned in time to see the ground below the broken palisade rise, the earth itself rising into a rough wall. Stunned, she followed the Barrow Sword as he made for the wall cutting through a few remaining ghouls and climbed up the slope, shield hanging limp on her wrist. Up there, standing tall, she saw them coming.

There could not have been more than three hundred of the Gigantes, and yet they marched through a sea of undead as if taking a stroll.

Skeletons raised arms only to find their skulls crumpling, ghouls were turned into wet red smears before they could even leap and even arrows melted in midair. A beorn roared and charged only to begin unraveling, its great clawed paw tumbling forward but never even reaching a Gigantes’ foot. Swarms of birds dropped like rocks, shattering on the head of the dead. When a tall Revenant in yellow robes bearing a long spear pointed it at them, it then twitched jerkily and rammed it seven times into its own eye before collapsing like a stringless puppet.

“Gods,” Cordelia hoarsely whispered.

“That, Your Grace, is every last remaining spellsinger come to make war,” the Barrow Sword quietly said. “Burn the sight your eyes, because Creation will never witness such a thing again.”

They withdrew from the wall, but not far. With this unnatural rampart having risen from nothing, taller and stronger than any barricade might hope to be, soldiers rushed back to defend it. Cordelia went deeper behind the wards to make sure that Simon’s throat would be seen to properly – the bite of some ghouls carried poison – then returned to share the watch. Skeletons and ghouls climbed the wall, needing beating back even under swarm of arrows, but the tusks and beorns that tried their hand at shattering the earth instead broke their own skulls. They could hold, Cordelia thought with renewed vigor, until the Gigantes arrived. It was tense, dangerous work and twice arrows thumped into her shield but she ripped them out and the wall held. The Barrow Sword kept the defence alive, moving like a prowling cat across the rampart and beating back whatever foothold the dead gained.

The Gigantes finished the march with the same air of indifferent inevitability they had begun it with, part of the earthen wall opening as a door for them before they spread out. The fair-haired princess had learned everything there was to know of their people in Proceran archives and bought Levantine secrets at great expense, but even so she could not interpret a single of the ‘words’ that the giants shared with each other. Not one was spoken, subtle shifts in gesture and sorcery expressing all the Gigantes cared to share before they parted ways, nearly of all them spreading out alone along the rampart. Only two remained together, and their approach had Cordelia straightening her back.

She had little experience speaking with Gigantes, and so she was faintly grateful when the Barrow Sword emerged from a band of halberd-wielding Neustrians to join her. The two giants stood more than thirty feet tall, both shaved and one bearded. Though their people’s necks were short and their legs long, it was the face that spoke of their inhumanity to Cordelia. Those large eyes paler than any human’s could be, those strange ridges of cartilage that stood in place of ears. The Gigantes without the beard considered them with milk-white eyes, offering a nod to the Barrow Sword.

“Bahal,” they said, voice rumbling. “You earn your charge.”

“Great Elder, your praise brings me honour,” the Levantine replied, offering a bow.

Those pale eyes moved to her then.

“Princess Hasenbach,” they said. “You are known to us.”

It was tempting to appropriate the villain’s use of ‘Great Elder’, but risky without knowing the context. A safer answer was in order.

“This brings me honour,” Cordelia replied, and Gigantes seemed satisfied.

The bearded one spoke up then.

“We come here at the word of the Living God, the Maker of Riddles, and bring this knowledge: the Young King is cornered.”

Cordelia went still as a stone.

“Though the corpses of gods were profaned and the shadow of the old enemy brought back,” the bearded giant continued, “the Warden and the White Knight storm the spire. Victory is at hand.”

Or defeat , the princess thought, but did not dare speak it. The knowledge that Catherine would do whatever it took to win was reassuring, but Cordelia knew the difference between arrogance and faith. Sometimes there was no victory to be had, no matter how bold or clever or worthy you were. Sometimes all that you could hope for was for the iron of your fight to be hard enough to swallow that the Enemy would have to wait until spring to march again. She would hope, she would have faith, but she would not delude herself.

“We thank you for the knowledge brought,” the Barrow Sword said, tone a little stilted.

He bowed, and Cordelia had been expecting him to so she smoothly imitated the gesture. The Gigantes eyed them for a moment more, then nodded with exaggerated slowness – as if to make sure they would see it – before striding away. No more explanation was given for any of this. The villain sagged when they were out of sight, perhaps the most human gesture she’d ever seen out of him.

“Bahal?” she lightly asked, masking the depth of her curiosity.

“The manner of my Bestowal accidentally made me part of the ancient Gigantes courts of justice,” the Barrow Sword admitted.

His hand rested on the pommel of the bronze sword she had never seen him without, not any more than the bronze scale that seemed to weather ever blow of the dead without breaking. She cocked a brow.

“And what part would that be?” she asked out of honest curiosity.

“The death matches,” Ishaq Deathless grimly said. “I have good reason to be glad that none of the Eighteen Cities still call themselves such.”

Fascinating as that was, and Cordelia had always been intrigued by the old stories of Gigantes living among the humans of the Eighteen Cities as rulers and guides of a sort, sadly they were yet at the end of the world. Fighting to keep from reaching that last fateful fall. Cordelia raised her shield, grip strengthening around her now ragged sword, and had opened her mouth to speak when suddenly she went still. So did the Barrow Sword, and many a soldier, for a ripple had gone through Creation that even the most blind of them could feel. The dead, to the last, went still.

Atop the tall black spire that stood above all of Keter, a sphere of fire winked out.

“Gods,” Cordelia Hasenbach whispered, tears coming to her eyes. “Oh, Merciful Gods. She did it. She killed him .”

The undead began to move again but it was chaos, nothing at all like an army. They broke up into bands around Binds, hacking at each other as much as they tried to climb the walls, and it sunk into the princess’ soul that they had done it. They had destroyed the King of Death and now his armies would – there was another rippled, and Cordelia shivered. It passed over her like a humid wind, tasting her skin, and the Barrow Sword let out a soft curse.

Below them, the dead stirred again.

With feverish hatred, they fell on each other and all they saw. Broken teeth swallowed flesh and metal, tore into walls as if they were parchment and devoured all they reached. What had been an army become something altogether more terrible. Like a river of hunger the horde turned into a great horror that ate all it could touch, all it could reach. Moving like a single massive, writhing abomination Cordelia could not even begin to see the heart of. But she knew, oh she knew with iron certainty that the mind behind it lay deep inside the Crown of the Dead.

“What is this madness?” she asked, revulsion tuning her voice raw.

“They call the Riddle-Maker the Living God,” the Barrow Sword said.

She turned to him, found his tanned face gone pale.

“No one’s sure what he fought, to become the last of the Titans,” Ishaq quietly said, “but if I had to bet I’d say it’s something like this.”

“Then it should be dead,” the princess said.

“This isn’t a city where graves stay filled, Cordelia Hasenbach,” he replied.

And as they stood there, below them a god clawed its way back to life. Slowly, she reached for the parchment pressed against her heart.

—

The Knight Errant stepped out of the ruined maze, his sword in hand.

The Peregrine burned like a star to his Name, bearing no enchantment save a clarity of purpose. It was to make a better world as the Grey Pilgrim once had, by removing evil from it. By the cutting edge, if needs must. Arthur advanced alone, even though the lack of comrades at his side was fearful, for he knew his Name preferred it. Not for him the comradery of the Woe, not when his every instinct pulled him towards being the lone knight on the bridge, the challenger. The test or the savior, but neither leader nor led.

The hymns on his armour humming, he marched out while the dragon finished tormenting a company of goblin legionaries: it was stepping on whichever was on the edge of either side, making them swerve in panic one way or another as it toyed with them like a cat might with a mouse. Arthur was not sure it was a thinking creature, not like a person, but it was intelligent enough to be cruel. It knew what fear was, and despair. It seemed, he thought, hungry for them. Word from the rearguard was that it seemed to have seized control of the dead there, and though the Kingfisher Prince was holding he was losing ground.

Whether or not the Dead King had been ended, as some hope, they were still running out of time.

He hurried. Ugly as the thought was, the picking apart of the legionaries was covering his approach. Arthur was not so proud that he would refuse being given the first blow on such a foe, even if the price of it was the life of comrades. If he could have done anything to save them he would have, but... The Knight Errant had been raised in a war that taught hard lessons, and one of them was not to waste the chance to save most because you wanted to save all. So he hurried, stride lengthening, as goblins screamed and sweat tricked down his back.

He was half a hundred feet away from the dragon’s back when it suddenly turned.

A leg jutted out of its shoulder, tearing through the glass floor, but the Knight Errant had already moved. Burnt shards trickled against his side and he struck at the twisted limb, the Peregrine humming as it tore into the side of leg. Flesh parted, burning, but there was so much of it and Arthur was almost disarmed when the leg was pulled back into the creature. He’d made a scar, but would it still be there if the leg was spat back out? He was not so sure. The dragon turned its full attention on him, screaming as it swiped and its claws ripped up the ground.

He ran through the trails of death, Sapan’s magic roared to life and hitting the dragon’s head with spikes of light not unlike the one that had turned half the maze to glass. The beast roared in pain and Arthur rolled past a claw that would have torn him in half, feeling it graze his back and leaving him with grateful relief Callowan knights did not wear capes. The elder beast’s side spat out small limbs, human limbs, only made out of writhing metal and stone as tormented faces moaned out and the horror tried to snatch his side. The Knight Errant hacked into the madness, but though the burning scars he left tore screams from the faces they were soon gone, pulled into the monster. He was doing nothing, no matter how fine his sword.

And the dragon was laughing as it struck, ignoring streaks of fire and lightning from mages as well as Sapan’s strange spikes returned, shaking them off where it had disregarded the rest. Arthur knelt under a great paw the claws closed in on him. He tried to slip in between but they headed him off, closing quicker, leaving him to realize that the drakon could have killed him already. It wanted him to fear , to fall apart. Instead the Knight Errant straightened his back, gritting his teeth and swinging at the coming death. Bone gave and -and the entire limb toppled forward, the cage around him falling with it.

Arthur had a glimpse or a rail-thin silhouette under a cloak and a single-edged sword of wood, a narrow face granting him a nod.

As he watched the elder dragon began to be rent asunder by cuts from every direction, the rest of the Emerald Swords walking the creature’s skin unimpeded to carve through limbs and even its neck. The monster at its own flesh, growing it back, but it was an opening and Arthur took it. Swallowing his fear, he reached for the dragon’s fleshy side and began to climb it. Hands pawed at him, reaching for his belt and his limbs to pull him inside the beast, but he shook them off with Name strength to continue his rise. He would rise, and he would wound the Evil thing as Lady Antigone had asked of him.

Halfway up the flank something ripped under him and he shouted with alarm as a limb exploded out of the flesh where he’d been, a long stretch of bone that bled out a thin membrane looking like an insect wing’s. Desperately clutching at the limb as it drove him sky high, the Knight Errant fought the hands trying to drag him in. He was slashing at the bone but it was doing nothing, only scars, and what were those worth when they disappeared in a moment? Arthur’s frustration mounted, a lifetime of wrongs he’d been forced to just watch laughing at him.

It was like there was a wall, like the Gods had decided he could do good but no further than this line and every effort he’d make past it would come to vain. He’d thought he’d gotten past it in the Tower, when he had chosen right over wrong and all the rest, but here he was again: flailing at the dark, accomplishing nothing. What had Dustin even died for, if Arthur was just going to keep failing to save people who needed him? He refused that repellent, disgusting thought. That were some things, some entities beyond reckoning. That some walls couldn’t be broken.

That there was anything in this world that the Knight Errant could not Wound .

An Emerald Sword cut the wing bone but Arthur pulled himself on it, Name flowing through his veins like fire, and even as it fell ran down the length. It was too quick a fall, too long a length, but still he ran – and even as he came short, just before he began to fall he leapt up with both hands on the Peregrine. Hanging in the air for the barest of moments he struck, the edge of the blade forged from the Grey Pilgrim’s death and named by the Black Queen striking the elder dragon’s flesh. Wound , everything that Arthur Foundling was screamed. And in that moment there was nothing in Creation that was beyond his reckoning, so the drakon’s side was split open as if a titan’s axe had fallen upon it.

And the wound did not close.

Arthur fell down as the drakon screamed, the ground hitting him mercilessly. His head rang and his limbs ached, the breath snatched out of him replaced by fire. He rolled to the side, trying and failing to get up, and saw Emerald Sword cut through the limb that would have turned him to paste. There was more, he saw as he caught a flicker of movement. The Affable Burglar was running across the open grounds, almost impossible to see even as she moved through open grounds. She was clutching something in her hand, though Arthur saw nothing more than a splash of colours The dragon saw more, a forest of limbs erupting at the villainess, but a massive wolf bounded in the way and took the blow for the Burglar. The animal died, body crushed, as the villainess slithered through the promised deaths.

The Knight Errant gasped, spitting out blood as he leaned on the Peregrine to get back on his feet. He could cover the last of the way, he thought, but his limbs would not stop shaking. He only got on his knees. How many feet were left before she reached the wound? A hundred, maybe less. Only before the Burglar could get there the ground under her began to hollow, a tentacle of flesh destroying her footing, and though she ran across the collapsing space it was when the dragon blew its flames. The transparent death filled the air and the Affable Burglar would have been swallowed whole – if someone hadn’t thrown themselves in the way.

The Painted Knife’s mangled body, limbs broken and twisted, rippled for a heartbeat as an aspect lit up.

A heartbeat later the flames were gone and the elder dragon’s head with them, as if it had annihilated itself, while Kallia the Painted Knife collapsed to the ground and the Affable Burglar raced through the last few feet. As her hand rose, at last Arthur saw what it was she held: a painted mask of clay.

The Knight Errant saw it disappeared into the wound, and only then did he let himself pass out.

—

For the second time that day, Cordelia’s fingers shied away from the last words Agnes had left her.

Not because she thought there may yet be a darker moment, but because her attention was grabbed by a most unexpected sight: a flying fortress was coming to them. One of the great behemoths the Praesi called the Old Mothers, which she’d been told were all grounded. And it did seem that the magical castle had been wounded, for a third of it was missing and the insides were bare. Swarms of vultures were coming at it relentlessly, dying against translucent shields as they ate away at them, but it was slow going and Cordelia parsed out what would happen before it did.

The great fortress crashed before their walls before the shields broke, ground rippling and dead dying in droves.

The Gigantes, though troubled and wary of the sudden turn of the dead, opened a gate for the hundred or so Praesi that ran out of their broken fortress. Most of them seemed to be legionaries, but there were also richly dressed mages and two that stood out from the rest. Alaya of Satus, once the Dread Empress of Praes and now the appointed chancellor of the confederation that’d emerged from that empire’s ashes, would have been noticeable in any crowd. Cordelia was more inclined to men than women and generally inclined to despise this woman in particular, but she would not deny she was one of the most beautiful people she’d ever seen.

The other was not a great beauty, but she was the Barrow Sword’s promised fulfilled: Adanna of Smyrna, the Blessed Artificer, was running along side the once-empress.

It was instinct when Cordelia retreated deeper towards the ealamal, into the tent where she had restlessly sat before taking up the sword. An attempt to reassert control in the face of the unexpected, to hold the rod that commanded the dead angel in her hands. It was Brother Simon who introduced Chancellor Alaya when she arrived, though the Blessed Artificer burst in without waiting for the same.

“Princess Cordelia,” Lady Adanna said. “How is the weapon?”

Cordelia only knew so much about the technicalities of the ealamal, besides the fact that it had been filled to the very brim and remained able to be commanded. She saw no need to admit that, however.

“You may have a look yourself,” she suggested, “so long as you do not attempt to affect it.”

“I wouldn’t, princess,” Lady Adanna assured her, perhaps a tad condescendingly.

Cordelia wondered if the other woman would have dared while she was still First Prince, then set aside the thought as unworthy of either the women it involved. More burning still was Chancellor Alaya’s sympathetic gaze when the Blessed Artificer wandered off to do as suggested. The Soninke did not go as far as saying ‘Named, huh’ as if commonly mourning, but the cocked eyebrow had much the same implication.

“Princess Cordelia,” Chancellor Alaya greeted her instead.

“Chancellor Alaya,” Cordelia politely greeted the woman who’d tried to have her assassinated on twenty-nine separate occasions.

Thirty, if you counted the poison in her favourite fish soup and the lemon water as different attempts.

“May I take a seat?” the other woman smiled. “I’m afraid I will be of little use out there.”

The fair-haired princess conceded with a nod and Alaya claimed a chair with sinuous grace that seemed almost absurd when paired with the rickety wooden furniture. Like a pearl tossed into offal. Simon looked askance at Cordelia, who discreetly shook her head back. The lay brother left the tent.

“I expect you have little more news of the fighting in the city than we do,” Cordelia leadingly said.

“My mages believed the Dead King to have perished,” Chancellor Alaya replied, “but there is some debate as to what seized control of the dead after.”

“Some sort of ancient dragon god, if my sources are to be believed,” she said.

The former empress took that with the unflinching aplomb of someone who’d ruled over the Wasteland for many years.

“Unfortunate,” Chancellor Alaya noted. “Two of my finest mages were looking into a way to undo the Dead King’s mastery over death, however, and though they did not succeed it seems they have learned something that might be of import.”

“And that would be?”

“If Lady Nahiza and her assistant are correct, then this... draconic usurper only commands the dead in Keter for now,” the dark-skinned chancellor told her. “Its mastery grows by the moment, and in time it will command them all, but the Dead King’s reins were as a great kingdom and it yet holds only this very city.”

Cordelia’s fingers tightened around the ivory baton she held in her lap.

“Would you,” she said with forced calm, “have any notion of how quickly that mastery will spread?”

It was a polite, dispassionate way to ask how long the Principate had before some evil god mastered the dead destroying it and ate everything alive . Cordelia did not know whether or not this risen dragon would be as much a terror as the Dead King had been, but in truth it hardly mattered. So long as the dead did not collapse into warband, then Procer was buried and the rest of Calernia with it. Even if the Principate was not made into a great army of undead, the strange powers the dragon god lent to the dead seemed just as fearful. It was still defeat, the end of it all.

“My experts are uncertain,” Chancellor Alaya admitted. “It could be an hour, a day or a week. They cannot tell if the dead in Keter were usurped because of proximity or ease of spread.”

Which tells me nothing , Cordelia thought, even as she felt the wards shiver. She rose to her feet, marching past her guest with lack of manners that sat ill even at the end of the world to peek outside. The golden hue in the air was gone and the vultures were swarming. The wall seemed on the edge of falling, even with the desperate efforts of the soldiers and the Gigantes. Feigning calm, Cordelia returned to her seat across from the woman who had once been called Malicia.

“A ward collapsed,” the chancellor mildly said.

“One of the boundaries,” Cordelia said, then added in a moment of harsh honesty, “and the most important. Now the vultures will begin devouring men.”

“It is a matter of time until the defences break, then,” Chancellor Alaya noted.

Cordelia wondered if the other woman’s calm was as put on as hers. It must be, she thought. Not even Praesi could face their own death and Calernia’s with such blitheness, surely.

“A quarter hour, perhaps as much as half,” she forced herself to reply.

And under the dark-eyed woman’s unblinking gaze, she set down the ivory baton on the table. Malicia – and that name was more honest than the others, for deep down Cordelia still thought of her as that – stared at it for a long moment but did not ask a question. No doubt the Eyes of the Empire had told her exactly what the artefact commanded the ealamal looked like. They matched gazes, neither allowing emotion to reach their faces. To Cordelia’s faint surprise, it was the once-empress that looked away first.

“I do understand, you know,” Alaya quietly said. “The comfort of holding it in your hand.”

Cordelia’s face tightened.

“Holding what?” she asked.

The other woman considered that, for a moment.

“Your fate,” Alaya finally said. “Made simple and savage, perhaps, but still your fate.”

She faintly smiled.

“I knew it was making it all crooked, when I sought the Sahelian gate-maker,” the once-empress confessed. “That I was breaking faith with Amadeus, with the tale we told ourselves of a world where the two of us were enough to win.”

“So why did you?” Cordelia quietly asked.

“I ask myself that question every day,” Alaya of Satus said, sounding tired. “And the answer changes. I have so many reasons, so many excuses, but in the end I suspect there is a single truth buried beneath them. Like a corpse in a grave.”

The blue-eyed princess did not interrupt, waiting patiently as she watched the other woman’s face.

“I didn’t believe we could win,” Alaya said. “Not truly, not the way he did. I believe we might have gains, that we might manage our defeats, but I never thought that if we took on the world it would end in anything but tears.”

Cordelia, who had spent years and a fortune in silver learning all she could of the Dread Empress of Praes, knew enough about what had brought the dark-skinned beauty to the Tower to feel a sliver of pity. But no more than that, for being handed tragedy was never an excuse for handing it to others. Silence hung above their heads like a waiting sword, growing thicker even as the distant sounds of battle closed in.

“They might win,” Cordelia said. “There are Named and armies yet fighting. They might win and slay this... dragon god.”

“They might,” Alaya agreed, “or the Dead King’s last revenge might yet devour all of Calernia. There is no way to tell.”

The screams and the clash of steel were so close they might have been mere feet away from the tent. It meant, Cordelia knew, that there was only one barricade left. If even that. All else had fallen. She swallowed thickly, fingers so tight around the baton that her bloodless knuckled matched the ivory’s paleness. And it was all coming apart, all coming to an end, and Cordelia just felt so fucking tired.

“Is it too much to ask,” she asked Alaya, “that we be allowed to face the end of the world without a mask on?”

The Soninke beauty looked as if she’d been slapped.

“Sometimes,” Chancellor Alaya said, “the mask is all you have left.”

And Cordelia understood that, she truly did, but then...

“I just want,” she murmured, “to be able to weep honest tears before I die. Only once.”

“We might not die,” Alaya said, then her face tightened. “Well, perhaps not you. I do not believe your ealamal will spare the likes of me.”

“I don’t know if it will spare anyone,” Cordelia admitted. “Or even how far it will reach. It is a blind sword to swing, one that save half the world or kill it. I cannot know before I swing it .”

“And the world,” Alaya smiled, “it’s yours to save?”

“I am a Hasenbach,” Cordelia simply said. “I have a duty.”

And she would not compromise on that, not even in the face of the end times. A scream sounded, then the sound of flesh being ripped into. It must be right outside the tent to be heard so clearly, she knew. There were no lines of defence left. She reached for the ivory rod. It was not a complicated sequence to trigger the ealamal’s release, just one impossible to reach by accident. Cordelia rotated the baton’s sculpted lionhead and extended the length, beginning the works and reaching all but the very last. All it would take, now, was to snap it closed.

“I think it might be the pride of the young to demand hard truths even at the end,” Alaya of Satus said, breaking the silence, “but I strive to be the sort of woman who settles all her debts.”

And there was, they both knew, a kingdom’s worth of corpses due between them.

“So I will tell you this,” the dark-skinned woman murmured, “though I would rather not speak it, or even think it.”

The once-empress smiled, and it was the most heartbreakingly sad thing Cordelia Hasenbach had ever seen.

“I see my death now,” Alaya said, “how I will end, and I regret it.”

Her fingers closed into fists.

“I wish I had trusted him,” Dread Empress Malicia said. “It would have been a better end, the two of us against the world.”

And Cordelia knew what she meant, down to the marrow of her bone. Because she knew trust as well, remembered sitting with a woman she’d once hated in the heart of city that should have been a horror but she had found instead to be a wonder. She remembered looking at Catherine Foundling and seeing underneath the warlord the girl who just wanted to help people who’d helped her. Who wanted to make a fairer, kinder world for orcs and goblins and all the lost that’d carried her to the throne. The realization that she was not facing a plague made woman but a dragon of the old tales, fearsome and vicious in defending her hoard but not genuinely evil .

Cordelia wanted to see the city they might make together and the world around it.

But in the end, she thought, what did want matter? Like the three cousins of the tale, she was fighting Death – whether it wore the Dead King’s face or some other horror’s as a mask mattered little. It was the same spring, the same inevitability. Cordelia had hoped that the sword and helm would be enough to get her through the horror, but now she had to face the truth. They were losing, lost, and moments away from even the ealamal being in the enemy’s hand. Evil had won the last laugh.

The best she could hope was for her iron to stick in the Enemy’s throat.

A ghoul tore into the tent flap, ripping it up and swallowing a chunk, only for a pair of skeleton to burst past it. Chancellor Alaya drew a knife, rising to her feet, but Cordelia’s hands were on the baton. Until she recalled her last gift, and her fingers reached for the parchment against her breast. On the third time they closed, and as the fair-haired princess took up the wisp of parchment she unfolded it to find her cousin’s words. Guidance, she prayed, or a secret to pass through the dark. Her cousin’s death made into one last blade pointed at the enemy. Instead, what she found was a single sentence hastily scrawled.

No matter where, no matter when , Agnes wrote, I will always bet on Cordelia Hasenbach.

She reared back, as if struck, even as dead poured screaming into the tent. Too many to defeat, too many to hold the ealamal against even with Named. But all she could think of was the tears in Agnes’ eyes on that cold day where the soldiers had brought her to Rhenia, after her mother’s death. How lost she’d looked, how she’d burst out weeping when Cordelia pulled her close. A bet, huh. Trust from beyond the grave. And here Cordelia had been, making pride out of something she’d dared to call duty. The shame burned at her. The tent began to fall, pegs falling as the dead charged, and Cordelia Hasenbach took the ivory baton in hand. Cordelia had wanted to see the world the two of them might make.

But she was, she found, willing to die for it too.

With a scream, Cordelia Hasenbach broke the ivory baton as she made a bet of her own.

—

The Witch of the Woods stood alone on a plain of glass as the drakon turned and she slowly lowered her hood.

Antigone had never borne a surname, for the only man she might have called a father did not have one. Humans sometimes took a husband’s or a wife’s, she knew, but though she cared for Hanno they had never wed or cared to and so her name remained as it was, both beginning and end. She liked it better that way, in truth, for it was not just a word: it was a gift. She did not remember who she had been before Kreios found her, and so all that she was had begun with the name have gave her. Antigone . After the Titan he’d held higher in his esteem than any other, dead long before mankind’s age began.

She too, her father had once told her, had once stood alone.

The Titans had been given a choice once, after the end of the Long War where they triumphed over the drakoi. The last of them debated whether to seek old glories, the undoing of their losses, or to instead offer a hand to the lesser peoples that had come to be as they fought their great struggle. Seven, she’d been told as a child, had come to decide to clap their lessers – children, they called them – in chains and put them to work until glories of the Gigantes could be restored. Only one had refused, and Antigone instead went west to found eighteen cities that’d outlast all the rest.

Yet when the price of hubris, of trying to unmake the costs paid to Creation for victory, had come calling it was not the seven that perished. Only the Riddle-Maker remained, the last of the Titans, forever shamed that instead of bringing back the lost his great work had instead killed all of them save for him. And even he was broken, lessened. It was why Antigone had never once thought today that she could simply wait out the storm, that if she stood alone long enough her father would make all the trouble go away. Kreios’ divinity had been made fragile, finite.

And he had spent it piece by piece since he came to Keter, matching the Dead King blow for blow. Given himself away to save the lives of the children he had fought to put in chains, putting out a star to keep fireflies alight. He had begun with a great work and hardly ceased since, holding nothing back once the Dead King revealed that he had stolen the corpses of two Titans fallen in the Long War. Fighting two of his old comrades come back undead would bring him to the brink, she knew. However lessened and incomplete they were still Titans.

There would be no god standing at the end, no matter who the victor, and so it was in Antigone’s hands.

She missed the painted clay mask, the first face the kind giants of Hemera had given her as a girl. Yet even without its protection the Witch of the Woods barely even felt the wind against her skin, her body a stranger to itself. It had a price, to slay even the shadow of a drakon. It was the monster of an age long past, meant to be fought by folk that loomed too tall for even the last gasps of the Age of Wonders. But Antigone had stood in great shadows all her life, known only boots too large for her to fill ever since she first heard the song of Creation. Ever since she was a girl she’d fought to be more, to be complete, and fallen short.

She was the Witch of the Woods, belonging neither to the airy spires of the Gigantes or the crowded cities of mankind. Her home was in the in-between, the antechamber of greatness. Even her Name only allowed her to be a shadow of what Titans had once been, of what Gigantes aspired to be. Antigone, eyes blinking into the too-bright light of the hall, looked upon the drakon that screamed out unending rage. Warped Creation around it simply by existing. Only it wasn’t truly a drakon, was it? Not yet, anyway.

“I am a shadow,” Antigone said, “but you are one as well. Shall we see which runs deeper?”

The weight of the awakening god was turned on her, her power rising to fight as the air itself began to eat her, but it didn’t matter. The body was just a shell, eyes to see. She had already put all of herself in her mask, her face, and the Burglar had delivered it onto the beast. It had sunk deep, as deep as it would, and coated in the Dead King’s finest trick it remained whole.

As did Antigone’s soul within it.

“ Gather ,” she whispered.

Only it was not moonlight and the power of the land she called to her this time, but blood and sinew and bone. The red writ of the drakon.

“ Cradle .”

With open hands she brought all she had gathered into her grasp, giving a reverence unearned. But it came into her embrace, joined with her, as the magics she had learned did. Closed against her she held the wriggling essence of the dead god, trying to slip her grasp.

“ Sing .”

To be one with the world, to see the manifold paths of consequence: the stone that became the avalanche, the droplet that became the tide. It had been a pure thing, all that Antigone aspired to be. It had let her see what the Gigantes saw, for the barest of moments, and wield the greatest of their works as her own. Only it was not her father’s song she sang today, the lessons she loved. Instead she sang the red and the hunger, the doom-made-intellect that was the drakon. And in that perfect moment she understood it, as perfectly as she was allowed to understand Creation.

And so she was a god, a circle full and complete, the crowned essence of the act to eat .

“It was mine,” Antigone smiled, and closed her eyes.

And even as her body fell apart, she took her first and last act as a god: she ate herself, until nothing was left.

Not even a shadow.

—

In the ashes of a broken city, Kreios Maker-of-Riddles fell to his knees and wept, for as the last of what he had been passed he had felt his only daughter die.

Chapter 68: Hallow; Hollow

“And though her schemes lay broken around her, the Intercessor only laughed and said: ‘When one defeats the inevitable, the word for it is not victory but delay.’”

– Extract from the ‘Parables of the Lost and Found’, disputed Firstborn religious text

Yara of Nowhere sat on the Dead King’s throne with legs crossed, smiling as I Saw from atop the spire the way the stories fell into place.

The Dead King’s last act of spite threatening to swallow us all, the desperate fighting below us to keep the drakon from waking. And intertwined with it, the story Yara of Nowhere wanted to cut out throats with: Cordelia and her ealamal. I couldn’t See Cordelia herself, she wasn’t Named, but everything happening around her was a strong enough trajectory I could just barely make her out – like tracing someone out of shadows. It’d be the same for the Bard, I figured. How fucked would we be, if Cordelia had taken up a Name that night in Salia and Yara had gotten an open invitation to be in her head? We might well already be dead if not for the Augur.

The stories raced, threading with each other into what I already knew was meant to be our noose. We got our miracles, the Barrow Sword and the Blessed Artificer and the Gigantes, but we’d gotten them too early. And though I could See the drakon’s end in the course of the Witch of the Woods – at a cost that had my heart clenching in pain for Hanno – it would be too late. The defence of the ealamal would first collapse, the shadow of Cordelia Hasenbach moving and then... light, blinding Light until there was nothing at all. A hint of Hanno living through it, but it would be as the Intercessor had said. He’d be one of half a hundred across all of Calernia, a continent slowly gasping out its death rattle.

A quarter-hour, I realized, would be all it took for the Intercessor to slaughter Calernia with: the span between the fall of the ealamal’s defences and Antigone saving us all. How small a thing to kill a continent with.

Then the both of us went still, because the current shifted. One last hidden string, a single grain of sand left in the midst of the machinations of the Intercessor. The Augur, I realized. She’d left something of herself behind, something small. Couldn’t be more than a sentence else it would be too much, too large. The Intercessor would have seen it, and perhaps I as well. Only neither of us had, because the Augur had died and given the last of herself into the hand of a woman without a Name. Like an arrow loosed in a dead angle, the words had flown unseen until they hit and now it was too late. The Light-to-be went dark.

From beyond the grave, Agnes Hasenbach took us all for a ride one last time.

And just like that, I thought, we’d won. I did not know if Cordelia was alive or anyone with her, but the ealamal was out of play. I saw no story where Named hands lit the bonfire meant to swallow us all. I breathed out shakily as below us the Witch of the Woods’ last march began, watching the way the Intercessor’s face tightened.

“You always did see a little too far for your own good,” she said, “didn’t you, Agnes?”

“Catherine?”

Hanno’s voice was tinted with worry, but I did not turn. The Intercessor was still here and I did not dare look away from her sitting form. Not yet, even though she was beaten.

“We live,” I said. “The ealamal sleeps. And I’m sorry, Hanno, but-”

“I know,” the White Knight quietly cut through. “I can’t get there in time to Save her.”

“You get to keep Kreios,” the Intercessor shrugged, “though there’s nothing much left there. Your own doing, Catherine: you’ve leaned so hard into the changing of the age all the relics are getting buried with its turn.”

I breathed in, pulling on Night, but the Bard did not seem worried. She brushed back long fair hair, pawing at her side until she found her silver flask. Knowing that striking at her now would achieve nothing save giving her a way out, I instead wove myself eyes. The moment I saw through them I looked at Masego, who was kneeling by Akua’s side. She was prone and her breathing heavy, but the calm on Hierophant’s face brought out the same in me. He liked her enough that if she was at risk of dying from her wounds he’d be showing worry. And wounded she was, I found now that I took the time for a second look.

I could see where the Dead King’s spell had hit her. It wasn’t as obvious a killing stroke some of the others he’d used, but the edges of her right hand were warped and there was something about the skin... It was dead, I realized. Her entire arm was a cadaver’s, every part of it dead. It hid beneath her armour, but I saw the faint stiffness creeping up the side neck. How much of her had been killed with that single stroke: half, a third? My fingers clenched. I was not sure even Light would be able to heal that, but at least she was still living. And the yellow strands of sorcery around Masego’s hands seemed to be easing her breathing.

“Hierophant?” I called out, my sole flesh eye still on the Bard.

“There is no danger of death,” he said. “She should be able to speak again soon.”

I breathed in sharply. I’d not even realized she couldn’t, so I took a third look even as other eyes saw Hanno walk up to my side with a grim face. Only my gaze strayed from Akua, as though I was worried there was something else I’d just Seen.

“You are forming a godhead,” I evenly said.

He smiled.

“I have not yet digested all I gained from the Dead King,” Hierophant said, “but when I have I expect my perspective will be... broadened.”

And that’d be enough, we both knew. The godhead was just a trick of perspective, he’d once said, and even an old monster like the Intercessor agreed. He’d have the power and the understanding, and that’d be enough.

“So that’s why you’re still here,” I softly said, matching the Bard’s gaze.

She drank deep of her flask, grimacing after her first swallow. Something reeking of strong liquor and oranges reached my nostrils.

“It would have been cleaner if you let me do it through Cordelia,” Yara of Nowhere said, voice rough from the drink. “One stroke, nobody suffers. But I’ve already told you: if you demand the hard way, it’s what you’ll get.”

And I believed her, or at least believed she believed it, only I could see an angle she might use for – a whisper spread across the world, the first use of Guide I’d ever caught her in. And in that moment that followed, I saw as she cleared her failed story off the board and dragged in another.

“It is already finished, Bard,” the White Knight calmly told her. “Spite can only-”

I raised my hand to silence him, and though he looked somewhat annoyed he stopped talking.

“Say nothing without choosing your words carefully,” I said, voice echoing across the Dead King’s hall. “We are now a single wrong sentence away from dying.”

Yara smiled, Hanno stiffened and my fingers closed to tightly around my staff that the knuckles turned white. I could See the story she was going to ride now. I should have realized from the start that it was fucking arrogance to think we’d gotten her. The Augur had broken her plan, sure, but the Intercessor wasn’t a blood-drunk villain on her first rampage. She’d laid foundations for this and none of them were gone.

“You said,” Hanno murmured, “that the ealamal sleeps.”

“And Cordelia Hasenbach won’t wake it, if she lives,” I said, sliding a glance Yara’s way.

She tossed an affable smile my way, but no answers. It was a halfway good sign she hadn’t taken the opportunity to gloat, but it might just be she wanted to keep her cards close to the chest.

“But the Seraphim are still silenced,” I said, “and the ealamal still filled to the brim with Light. She doesn’t need Cordelia , she just needs anyone at all to light the fire.”

“No one will,” the White Knight confidently said.

Far below our feet the drakon died, as if the Heavens themselves were echoing the word of their favourite son. The Bard looked untroubled, which had Hanno on edge. As it should be, because with the drakon gone, devouring every dead it had come to reign over in its death throes – though that sovereignty had not spread far beyond Keter, and the rest of the dead still stood – the battle on the ground was won. There was no reason for someone to use the ealamal, as Hanno had so confidently asserted. However horrendous the costs, we had won.

By the mortal way of looking at it, anyway.

“Not a hero or a villain,” I quietly agreed. “But she’s not me, Hanno. She works with more than just Named.”

“The Seraphim,” he softly said. “You believe... no, it doesn’t matter. We need the Hierophant to-”

Two sounds from behind us. First Masego’s soft gasp as he rose to his feet, then Akua’s rasping cough as she gained back her voice. I watched as Hierophant took a few stumbling steps, then went still as sorcery coiled around him in tight rings. Hanno drew his sword, but I laid my hand on his arm. It wasn’t an attack, it was his own magic. He’d finished eating the Dead King and so his perspective was undergoing an adjustment. He’d be out of the rest of this conversation, as much because of the terrible efforts as because providence would ensure he was not there. He couldn’t be, because he was part of the story as the opposite of the Seraphim.

“Do nothing,” I said. “The path it goes down if we interrupt him is... unpleasant.”

Enlightenment stopped halfway through was just madness, and that was a dangerous thing to afflict a man was powerful as Masego with.

“What is he doing?” Hanno bluntly asked.

“He is forging a godhead of his own,” Akua rasped out as she rose to her feet, “as one of Below’s. An Evil god. What will your Seraphim say to that, White Knight?”

“They’ll aim to kill it,” the White Knight said. “Before it can darken Creation. But they cannot reach out in such a way. They are yet silenced.”

“No, not anymore,” I told him. “Just gone quiet for a while more, thanks to our friend.”

“That’s me,” Yara helpfully told him.

She was, I realized, starting to have fun.

“Then they should still be unable to-” Hanno began, then his jaw clenched. “The ealamal. Gods forgive us, it is a Seraphim’s corpse.”

“And filled to the brim with enough Light to scour half of Calernia,” I flatly said. “She just needs to draw their eye there so they can throw their genocidal tantrum.”

I expect he would have argued with that characterization of the Choir of Judgement – fair enough, it wasn’t the most flattering interpretation – but Akua interrupted. She’d moved stiffly as she approached my side, her right leg likely affected by the spell even if it’d not been entirely killed, but she was breathing fine and both her eyes seemed to be working. A knot I’d not known was in my belly began to loosen.

“Yet she has not,” the golden-eyed sorceress said. “As demonstrated by the fact that Catherine and I still breathed. She still needs something from us.”

Yara toasted her.

“If you’d been half that clever a girl,” the Intercessor smiled, “you might have had a chance at knowing what real love feels like before you die.”

I’d known Akua for years. As an enemy, a prisoner, a companion and one more thing since. I’d made a study of her, and so though her face changed little I could see how that little sentence slid right between her ribs. It had stung, and so she retaliated.

“Babble however you wish, Intercessor,” she coldly replied, “but you are running out of luck.”

Shit , I thought, getting what would happen just before it did. Yara of Nowhere grinned at us, blue eyes bright in the dim light of the Dead King’s hall.

“I am luck, girl,” the Intercessor said. “Providence made flesh. This isn’t a fight, it’s a game – and we’ll play as many times as it takes before I win.”

Akua had been baited. ‘I am providence’, that was Yara’s story. Not a Named, not an enemy, just a force of nature. We could no more be her foe than we could be the enemy of a river or a mountain. And Akua had given her the opportunity to get it out there and get it out first, without even restoring to something like a monologue. But my eye narrowed, because this wasn’t the sort of game where you steal an advance without giving something in return. As many times as it takes , Yara had said. Which meant she had more strings to her bow than Masego’s apotheosis. Figuring what those were, I thought, would let me steal a step of my own.

But first I needed to get our own story out.

I went rifling through my tattered cloak, getting out the long dragonbone pipe that Masego had given me when we were barely more than children. I got out a packet of wakeleaf as Akua sighed and Hanno shot me an incredulous look, stuffing the bowl before I pulled on Night. Fire bloomed, lighting the leaf, but it also shivered across the ground. Slithering over the corpse of the Mirror Knight, finding what I was looking for. I breathed in deep of the wakeleaf, savouring the burn in my lungs as I stole back the Fetter that Christophe had carried. The Intercessor smiled.

“What is it that the three of you always say?” she mused. “Ah, right – mistake .”

She cocked her head to the side, drumming her fingers against the silver flask.

“I can see why you all do it, it’s strangely satisfying,” Yara of Nowhere told me. “Shall I explain your fuckup, Catherine? It feels like the courteous thing.”

“I made them equal,” I said. “Is that what you’re going to say?”

She hid her surprise, but not quite well enough. Yeah, I’d figured it would work like that. See, the reason we weren’t currently all dead was because the Intercessor needed a story behind her to get the Seraphim to pitch a fit and immolate Keter, if not all of Calernia. She was manoeuvring to get that through our conversation here, though I wasn’t sure exactly what she needed out of us. That was her story, her play. By going for the Fetters I’d made them our story, our equivalent, and that was where she though I’d made a mistake. Creation ran on symmetry: a Black Knight for every White Knight, an aspect of Protect for every aspect of Destroy.

Yara’s path to victory needed a story, so by making the Fetters ours I’d made it so they would need a story behind them to work on her.

I’d known it would have that cost from the start, though, and it was worth it. Akua had made the Fetters without being Named, even if Named had helped. It meant, and Bard had admitted it herself, that she didn’t actually know how they worked or what they did. She’d called them shackles not as a potshot but because she didn’t know they were called the Fetters or what exactly they would do to her. We might not know exactly what the Intercessor wanted out of us here up here, but she was also in the dark about Akua’s creation. That was worth the price of attaching a story to them.

“She’s delaying,” Hanno evenly said. “Waiting it out until the Hierophant finishes apotheosis.”

“Was it worth it?” Yara asked him curiously. “You’ve gotta realize that even two days ago you would have been able to end this in a moment.”

She snapped her fingers, smiled.

“But you just had to go your own way, leave the Seraphim behind,” the Intercessor said. “So now the ties are cut and you can’t guide them. So I ask again – was it worth it, the sense of satisfaction that carried you up this spire?”

Hanno took half a step back, looking like he’d been slapped. Had she planned that, I wondered? That if he became the White Knight again it would be without a tie to Judgement. Our struggle in the Arsenal had been years ago and I still kept unearthing deeper layers to her schemes even now. I pulled at my pipe, closing my eye, and found my first opening. She’d gone after both Akua and Hanno personally, but it was only Hanno who was being treated as a threat. Yara had tried to hurt Akua, but Hanno was being disgraced . He’s the only one of two she sees as a threat, I realized. Because of his Name? No, shouldn’t be. The Fetters would need a story but not a Name.

It was about the story. Which meant she thought Hanno had a story that might allow him to hold one of the Fetters but not Akua. Why? I studied the golden-eyed sorceress through eyes of Night, Seeing no nascent Name in her. She was wounded but not at risk of dying and her beauty was barely marred so... Ah , I thought. There it is. You don’t think Akua can take up a Fetter unless she’s dying. And the damning thing was that she was most likely right. It wasn’t even about character, at least not in the moral sense. Akua’s journey had been one of fighting free from prisons within and without. She would not enter another cage, not after refusing the Tower’s.

Even if she forced herself, the story would be weak. It might not work.

It looked bad, I thought, but once more by pressing forward Yara had given me something. She was attacking us but not trying to establish a story of her own. That told me more than she’d meant it to. I opened my eye.

“Hanno’s right,” I calmly said. “You’re waiting us out. You don’t actually need anything from us , do you Yara? Hierophant’s already undergoing apotheosis, and that’s all you needed to get the Seraphim there. You just can’t get them to move before he’s actually a god.”

They’d refuse, I decided, and she couldn’t force them. There were still a lot of heroes in Keter, enough that as long as there was even the possibility of Masego being stopped the Seraphim wouldn’t just burn the city to cinders. The moment he came through on the other side, though, the calculations changed. It was no longer the possibility of Hierophant forging a godhead against the destruction of the Grand Alliance, it was a risen god sworn to Below against the destruction of a handful of Named and earthly armies. To a Choir, it would be choice that basically made itself. She was attacking us for the same reason she’d boasted that she was providence: she had nothing to defend.

Yara reached behind the Dead King’s throne, fishing out her ragged old lute, and set it across her lap. Then she gave me the most vicious grin.

“I guess you’re right,” she mused. “If one of you killed Zeze, it’d sure stop my evil plan.”

My pipe clattered against the stone, spilling ash and smoke. I didn’t remember sheathing my sword, but it was out in my hand in a heartbeat. Part of me was ready to apologize if I was wrong, but I wasn’t. Hanno’s eyes were calm as he held the Severance, taking a single step forward. Akua brushed against my side, a comforting presence I dimly realized I’d expected. Not even for me but because she cared for Masego herself. She’d called it a nudge, righting a wrong left to fester, and she’d not lied. But it’d been more than that too.

“Hanno,” I said, “this is exactly what she wants.”

“I am aware,” the White Knight evenly replied. “But you have confirmed yourself, Catherine, that should the Hierophant finish his apotheosis it will bring about mass slaughter.”

“We don’t beat her like this,” I hissed. “Not if we let her-”

“Kill me after, if it makes you feel better,” Hanno of Arwad tiredly said. “Two lives for hundreds of thousands? That is not a choice, it is a duty .”

“Or you could die in the attempt,” Akua said. “Stripping us of your strength, just as the Intercessor wishes.”

The White Knight considered us for a long moment, then shook his head.

“I probably will,” he said. “But he’ll die too. A fair bargain.”

I had nothing to threaten him with, I realized. He’d already decided he had a duty and he was dead. I’d once given Tariq pause by threatening to murder the Grand Alliance and wield its remains against Keter should it cross me, but that wouldn’t work here. The cause was spent, the battle ended, and I had given too much of myself to Calernia for Hanno to believe me if I swore calamity over this. He knew me too well.

He was, in some ways, my friend.

“I wish it could be otherwise,” the White Knight told me, and I believed him. “But it is Catherine Foundling who would fight me over this, not the Warden.”

The echo of Akua’s words returned to haunt me, the wants of the woman and the needs of the queen. The tall hero straightened, blade rising.

“We’ll all lose friends today,” Hanno said. “I’m sorry it had to be by my hand, Catherine.”

And was that to be it? I’d kill him or he killed Masego and maybe I’d lose both anyway. The Intercessor had grabbed me by the hair and dragged me back on the Tower’s steps, my bloody knife in hand. What life was I to take this time, how many was I to bury?

“You’ll have to hold him back,” Akua murmured, “before I can land a curse. I believe I have something that can hold him down, though I know not all the strings to his bow.”

And I breathed in sharply, because I had my way out. The Intercessor herself had given it to me earlier.

“It won’t work,” I said, and Hanno stilled.

His eyes were on me, his gaze steady as he looked for the lie.

“She has other stories lying in wait,” I said. “Killing Hierophant only makes her change to them.”

“Other stories,” the White Knight slowly said. “Such as?”

And I’d not known then, but it seemed so obvious now that I’d felt out her schemes. No matter how skilled her hand, Yara wouldn’t have been able to be sure that Masego would forge a godhead. Her story, though, was that of the Choir of Judgement striking down an Evil god. And it so happened there was one of these certain to be at hand.

“It’s Sve Noc,” I said. “We mended Night, made it better, and raised them anew. They’re more dangerous now and they won’t burn out. Judgement will want to end them and they can try it through me.”

I wasn’t sure if they’d win, but it wouldn’t matter. The struggle would kill the people the Bard wanted dead anyway and that was the whole point. I watched Hanno game it through, wonder if everyone could be Saved by killing me as well, but even if he could do it there was no guarantee the Intercessor didn’t have a third string lying in wait. It would be just like her, I thought as my eye went to the woman still sprawled on the Dead King’s throne, to get us to kill each other until no one was left and victory landed bloody in her lap.

“You’re right,” the White Knight finally said.

And it was a load off my shoulders.

“We can’t win by beating her here,” I said. “She can’t die and even if we drive her away she’ll keep at this. Find a way to sow ruin while we try to recover after the war, push us over the edge.”

“She has to be bound,” Akua softly said.

And I held both Fetters in my hands, the rings of copper and bronze that would be put on once and never taken off. The Intercessor idly strummed her lute, still tuned from her song earlier, and smiled at me.

“Ah, and now we get to the good part,” she said. “Are you coming to be bind me, Catherine?”

“You’re the last relic left, Yara,” I told her, stepping forward. “It’s time for you to be buried with the rest.”

A flash of rage distorted that pretty tanned face, turning it ugly, but it was gone in an instant. I waked past corpses fresh and old, past broken stone and the Dead King’s remains.

“And that’s for you to decide?” she asked.

“I am the Warden,” I simply replied, and Creation echoed of the word.

She only smiled.

“Not the right kind,” she told me. “We made sure of that.”

“ Silence ,” I ordered, stepping forward.

And then the Intercessor laughed.

“Try the other one, your third,” she told me. “The one we made sure you’d come into before this moment. See what happens .”

And dread seized me, because in that moment I understood what she’d done. I had my three aspects, one formed to bring about the end of the Dead King himself. My Role was settled, seared into Creation as loudly as triumphantly as a Role ever had been. And it was not the Role of a jailer, for all that my Name could hold the meaning.

“Yeah,” Yara gently said, “you lost before you even started.”

I’d fallen for the oldest trap: you put two choices in front of someone and forced them to choose so that they might never realize there was a third. If I’d had an aspect to spare, if there had still been room for my Role to settle... Instead I’d chosen between Guide and Sentence , as it’d never occurred to me I could refuse to choose at all. No, that’s arrogance , I told myself. We wouldn’t have killed the Dead King without my last aspect. If I’d chosen nothing we would have lost, and the Bard gotten her way again.

“I win,” Yara of Nowhere smiled, “or I win, or I win. That’s the only kind of game worth playing, Catherine.”

If I used the Fetters on her, they wouldn’t work. I knew that with sudden, ironclad certainty. I didn’t have the right weight behind me. It couldn’t be me, and I’d not made much of a case for Hanno. He could and would offer, I knew that, but in the end he was below me. My subordinate. It was an ill-fitting match, and I could try to fit it in the story of an unkillable Evil being imprisoned by a hero through worthy sacrifice, but Yara had headed me off there already. I am providence made flesh, she’d claimed, and I had not contested it.

I was at a loss.

Wind brushed past me and a streak of darkness hit the Bard’s arm as she let out a yelp of pain, burrowing through the stained leather and sinking into the flesh. I glanced back to see Akua approaching, a cold look on her face, and Hanno looking at her with disapproval. It was easy to see why, since one of Yara’s arms had withered dry. It looked like a mummified husk, though the Intercessor looked more amused than anything.

“Well, you made sure not to kill me,” she drawled. “Feeling better, oh mighty Sahelian?”

Akua brushed past me, armour whispering against mine, and cocked her head to the side.

“Slightly,” she said. “But I am not finished.”

“Enough,” Hanno said, drawing my eye to him. “Torture will accomplish nothing and is unworthy of-”

There was no longer a sheath at his hip, I idly noticed. He must have lost it at some point in the fighting, though it hardly mattered since the Severance would not have fit it. It cut too deeply to... I clenched my fingers then unclenched them. The Saint of Swords and once cut my aspect domain, using Sever. The same aspect we’d made into the blade. So it still should be capable of that, with the right guidance. The first time I’d reached for my third aspect, Masego was forced to cut it out of me. The second time it mixed with Winter, became a domain that was not entirely mine. I had a precedent, a pattern forming, and most of all a story to ride.

I had never been above mutilating myself to win.

“Hanno,” I said, cutting through whatever he’d been saying. “I need you to do something for me.”

“Catherine?” he asked.

I paused a moment, choosing my words so I could ask him to cut my third aspect out of me in a way he would not refuse. It was the mutilation of my soul, but it was also a way out of the trap I had fallen into. Like the fox in the trap, I would eat through my leg rather than perish. Without Sentence, my Name was once more incomplete. It’d be damaged, my legitimacy in my Role diminished. I’d be misaligned. And though I would make myself into a bastard thing, it would be a bastard thing that might just be able to fetter the Intercessor. That was how you killed a god, wasn’t it? By making another.

And I would destroy who I was until I became what was needed to win.

My mouth opened to speak, but Akua interrupted me with a sigh.

“You’re bleeding yourself again, aren’t you?” she asked.

I refused to meet her eyes, the accusing gold.

“I used to admire that in you, darling, did you know?” Akua told me. “Your willingness to destroy yourself to win.”

“It’s not pretty,” I said, “but it works.”

I forced myself to look at her then, truly look at her. We were no longer the girls we’d been at seventeen, worn down by war and grief and the scars of the lessons we’d learned, but I could look at Akua Sahelian today and see in her the shade of the girl I’d first glimpsed sitting across my father in a tent. The same tall hourglass figure, sharp aristocratic cheekbones and deep golden eyes. Changed by time, all of them, but the roots were unchanged. I’d thought her stunning before I learned to hate her, and I still though it now that I’d learned not to. She was in armour, her face touched with grime and the lingering stiffness of the Dead King’s curse, and yet I could still understand why as a girl I’d thought her the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.

“I have learned,” Akua Sahelian gently smiled, “not to settle for that.”

And the circlet of copper and bronze she had stolen from me sunk into her wrist, the first of the Fetters bound. An exclamation of dismay ripped itself free of my throat, scraping it raw. I reached for her but she shook me off, and the words I was chewing on were drowned out by the Intercessor’s mocking laughter.

“ You ?” she guffawed. “Come on, Doom of Liesse. My dearest folly. You think taking the fall for Catherine because you love her will be enough? Love’s never enough, child.”

She leaned forward in her throne, blue eyes burning.

“Stop wasting our time,” Yara of Nowhere said. “You still keep to Below, and just because you’ve learned that other people are people doesn’t make you redeemed.”

A wide, nasty smile greeted Akua’s unflinching approach. She held, I saw, the second Fetter in her hand. I jerked forward, a spasm of the heart, but before I could finish the step Hanno’s hand caught my arm. His eyes were kind, but they were also firm. I turned away, chewing on my lip.

“You’re not dying either, I made sure of that,” the Intercessor said. “It’s not a way out for you, you don’t get anything out of it.”

“You are,” Akua Sahelian idly said, “a liar.”

Yara blinked.

“I assure you, you’re not dy-”

“You called yourself luck,” Akua said, “but that is a lie, Intercessor. You are not a blind roll of the dice. You take sides .”

“I’ve helped both sides of the Game,” the Intercessor dismissed, “I-”

“You help Good,” Akua said. “When you have the choice, that is the truth of you. Providence made flesh is the truth of you, Yara of Nowhere, because you are the golden luck of heroes.”

“You’re quibbling,” Yara snorted. “You’d bind me with a complaint?”

“Not to you ,” Akua Sahelian smiled. “To your masters, for all that you know so do they. And through you I give grievance, for your game is unfair . How can it be a true wager, when your own Intercessor favours a side?”

The Intercessor went very, very still.

“You don’t know what you’re doing, girl,” she hoarsely whispered. “If you had any idea-”

And we felt it all, then. The weight. The attention . Akua Sahelian had called on the Gods, and the Gods listened.

“Fortune and misfortune,” she said. “Providence and calamity. It takes two to make it even.”

She leaned forward and the Intercessor scrabbled back on the throne, lute dropping on the ground and snapping a string as the silver flask toppled over the edge and began spilling liquor all over the floor. Dark red, like blood. But there was nowhere to run, and the Fetter slid around her wrist.

Its lettering burned bright, for the barest of moments, and then it sank beneath her skin.

“No,” Yara shouted. “ NO . You can’t-”

Akua struck her across the mouth, shattering teeth as the Intercessor fell on the tiles. She spasmed there, crawling and going away.

“I simply cannot abide screaming,” Akua told her. “You will have to learn that if we are to be colleagues.”

Yara kept crawling away, bleeding from the mouth, and as Hanno finally released my arm I rushed forward. Gods but my leg hurt. Akua only half-turned towards me, but it was enough. I swept her in my arms, her armour rough against mine, and though I had to dip her backwards I found her mouth. It should have been hard and wanting, after too many years of denial, but it wasn’t. It was... soft. And yet the yearning would not leave me, or her, and it felt unbearable to part even when I had to suck in a trembling breath.

“Ah,” Akua faintly said. “So that’s what it feels like.”

“I was,” I began, but then choked on the words. “I couldn’t...”

“I know,” she murmured against my cheek. “I know. We are who we are.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you to,” I admitted.

“I wouldn’t have, if you did,” Akua said. “It’s my choice, Catherine. I saw what I could be, and though it is not a penance...”

She half-smiled.

“I have learned lessons,” she said. “And instead of letting them join me in the grave made of Liesse, I would teach them with the villains that will follow in my wake.”

My heart clenched.

“She might not let you,” I whispered. “Neither of you can nudge if the other doesn’t allow it.”

“So we will have to bargain,” Akua softly laughed. “Else we will be nothing at all.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Hanno kneeling by Yara’s side, Light glowing around his hand, and I realized that he was healing her. She’d just tried to kill us all, to kill all of Calernia, and yet Hanno of Arwad knelt besides the woman in pain and tried to help her.

It was, I thought, the essence of the man.

Akua drew away and though I resisted I did not force her to stay. She took a step back, watching my face, and something like grief flicked across her face.

“Finish it,” she quietly asked.

Cold dread filled my stomach.

“You can’t really be asking me that,” I said.

“We will only know for certain it has worked after,” Akua said.

“That’s not what I meant,” I replied.

“I know,” she smiled. “But for our parting, my love, perhaps it is my turn to be allowed to wield the cruelty.”

I could have argued. I could have screamed and railed and refused, but all it would have done was mar this. A moment neither of us would get back. So instead I paid my dues, my long price, and drew the knife that’d killed my father.

“I love you,” I said.

It had never admitted it to her before. I likely never would again.

“And I you, my heart,” Akua said, eyes golden like the sun. “Farewell.”

And I killed her, like she’d asked me. Plunged the knife into her heart, parting flesh, until she leaned forward to gently kiss me and let out a soft gasp against my lips. She died, and in the instant she did she was gone. So was the Intercessor, the other side of that now forever spinning coin. Hanno rose to his feet, face solemn, as behind us Masego let out a loud gasp. Sorcery billowed out, light filling the hall and rising through the tower like a shining star as the Hierophant finished forging his godhead. It was over, I thought, touching my cheek and finding tears there. I closed my eye and leaned against my staff, feeling the last of my strength leave me.

We’d won.

We’d lost.

So began the Age of Order.

Epilogue I

“Why did the Black Queen invade Keter?

She’d run out of living to tax.”

– Overheard in a Laure tavern

Cordelia was dying.

Every ragged, rasping breathed told her of that truth. Too much of her throat was gone, devoured by a ghoul even as she killed it. Distantly she heard the buzz of Light coming down, feeling a sliver of cold satisfaction that the Blessed Artificer’s wall had kept the dead away from the ealamal until the end. Her pride had not slain Calernia. Was Alaya alive? She did not know, and her mind was slipping. Darkness crept in from the edges, closing in on all sides. Her breath rattled out, a groan, and the last of the princess’ life began to leave her. A good death , she thought.

Soft fingers were laid against her forehead. There was a shiver and her life stalled, as if caught in her throat.

“Am I too early or too late, I wonder?” Ivah of the Losara mused. “Many will grieve that you are not to be brought into the Night.”

She tried to move, to raise her hand, but it would not move.

“We see you, Cordelia Hasenbach,” the Lord of Silent Steps said, its voice echoing with two others. “You who offered peace to the Firstborn and meant it, who would welcome us into these Burning Lands as an ally.”

Coolness, fresh and pure and so intense as to be almost painful, flooded her veins as her body was wracked with spasms.

“We are the children of the Ever Dark,” the silver-eyed drow told her, “but we have learned our lessons. Steel shall be answered with steel, but you who offered good faith will see it returned in kind.”

Cordelia let out a hoarse shout, hands rising as she convulsed upwards and caught the Firstborn’s shoulder. The cold was fading, and though she was not healed neither was she dying .

“It is done,” Ivah of the Losara murmured. “Death will not have you today.”

The princess breathed out, leaning her head on its shoulder. Exhausted even though she had done nothing.

“Maybe,” Cordelia panted out, “tomorrow.”

And like a seizure, a banner flown in the face of grief, twin laughter sounded in the tent.

—

Night had fallen over Keter but even past midnight the dark was yet kept at bay.

Thousands of torches and bonfires burned across the Crown of the Dead, the great army that now stood mistress of it gone wild with victory. Casks of beer and liquor rolled down the streets, singing filled the winding streets and it was as if the very seat of horror had turned into a summer fair. Everywhere soldiers shouted and laughed and bickered in a dozen different tongues, old feuds forgotten for a night as all celebrated the end of the Dead King. It was a sight like none other: Alamans nobles sharing Levantine liquor with Soninke mfuasa, orc and Firstborn poets trading tirades with Arlesites over prizes of Callowan ale. Lycaonese and Levantines belting our ribald songs, Taghreb – even the new High Lady of Kahtan herself! – joining the impromptu Barber and Edward play mounted by Callowans and goblins.

There might never be a night like this again, they all knew deep down, and so they roared all the louder for it.

In the shadow of broken flying fortresses the great pyre for the dead was burning low, eclipsed by the bonfires of the living on the great avenues where cattle roasted and a thousand cooks from all over Calernia filled plates for whoever put them on the table. It was a night for life winning over death so it was no surprise that a thousand couples were born in dark corners. For a night, a few or even years to come. Wise heads opened the stocks of tangleroot brew for any who wanted it, intending to avoid accidents, but some bellies were bound to swell in coming months anyway. It was a night for rash decisions, the release of years and hopelessness – revelry sublimating all the horror of the war against Keter into a life without the Dead King’s shadow hanging over them all.

In the heart of the city, though, a handful gathered in a small room inside the black spire as the clamour of the festivities echoed from a distance. It was a distinguished company, the kind whose absence might have been noticed had merry chaos not seized the city outside. The Warden and the White Knight, two pillars of the age to come. Dented from the struggles of the day but yet standing. With them came three that would have seemed mismatched, if not for the clear ease between them: Vivienne Dartwick, the Princess, Indrani the Ranger and the Hierophant himself. Who did not seem so different, at first glance, for all that he was said to have reached apotheosis. Still tall and thin, long braids woven with trinkets going down his back, and his eyes were yet one of flesh and the other of glass.

Only now it was not the fires of Summer that glinted beneath the eye cloth but something else, a vision of miracles and revelations whose very sight would madden the unready. And there was something else, in the way the world moved around him. It was as if he moved free of the current, only faintly touched by Creation’s laws – the way his robes sometimes moved when there was no wind and went still when there was, the lack of footsteps on ash and the way no dust ever seemed to cling to him.

Before all five of them an orc lay on a bed, his breathing laboured

Hakram Deadhand, born to the Howling Wolves Clan. Once the Adjutant, now the Warlord. Though victory had been won, or the so the clamour outside claimed, two evils yet lay in him. One was horror in the mundane, the spine cracked by the Prince of Bones’ hand that now stilled his limbs. Light healing had made the wound livable, but little more. Sorcerous healing of so fine a thing was beyond the ken of any on Calernia save perhaps the finest mage-doctors of Ashur. None were here. And so instead the Warden had sent for another.

“It was a wound taken defeating the Prince of Bones,” Hanno of Arwad quietly said. “It is a tragedy, Warden, but I do not know if it is...”

“Unjust?” Catherine Foundling finished, fingers clenching.

It was a powerful boon, Undo. The stuff legends were made of. But like all legends, it had been dealt into hands that would not abuse it: the White Knight could not unmake what he did not see as unjust, and he was a rare kind of man. The kind that dying so others might not, the bloody pyre of heroism. Many of the Named that had died in Keter, most of them, would remain in the grave. It was not unjust to die willingly for something greater than yourself.

“He didn’t die,” the Warden said. “Instead they hurt him, White Knight, and did it where it’d cut deepest. He only just got out of that chair and now they put him back into it. For good.”

The dark-skinned man met her gaze, his face a calm contrast to her stormy one.

“He’s done so much to keep this continent standing that no one but a handful of scholars will ever know about,” she told him. “We both know how the world works, Hanno. In the books he’ll be the Warlord like it’s all he ever was, because that story fits. It’s cleaner. The rest will get swept under the rug, and they’ll just remember him as a footnote – the first Warlord in ages, broken in Keter. End of the tale.”

Her face clenched with fury and grief.

“ He deserves better .”

Hanno of Arwad did not answer, though he was brave enough not to shy from her burning gaze. The White Knight was not a man whose convictions were easily moved. And yet he stepped back, when instead of trying tirade or persuasion the Black Queen of Callow got down on her knee. Catherine Foundling was a proud woman, it was known. She had held to the bone of that pride ever since, as a girl, her father had taken into the heart of an empire and the mighty had knelt around them he had told her of a way to live: we do not kneel . Her father’s truth, one he had lived and died by. Refusing compromise even in the face of death, unbending for anything or anyone.

But Catherine went down on her knee, because she was more than her father’s daughter and Hakram Deadhand mattered more to her than pride.

“Please,” she asked. “I know there are others as deserving, that you only get once day.”

Her fingers clenched.

“And still,” she said. “ Please .”

And Hanno of Arwad let conviction move him, offering a hand then another. The first to bring her back to her feet, shamed she had ever knelt before him, and the second laid on the Warlord’s side. Undo . Creation shivered, then the White Knight let out a small breath as he stepped away. The Hierophant replaced him, weaving an incantation, and after his eye ceased moving around he pulled back to give the others a nod.

“His body is in perfect condition save for the limbs cut by the Severance,” he said.

The Warden and the White Knight matched gazes for a long moment, Catherine Foundling dipping her head into a nod that said much without need for words. Hanno returned it.

“I’ll see you outside,” he said.

“Might be you will,” she agreed.

And with a mute goodbye at the Princess, Hanno of Arwad left the small room where he had brought a miracle. He was not one of the Woe, and the last evil that lay in Hakram Deadhand’s body was not the kind to be beheld by outsiders. The orc began to stir awake as the White Knight closed the door behind him, Hierophant still standing by his bedside. Hakram woke feverish and befuddled, as if did not recognize where he was. His vision swam into focus, coming to Catherine, and tension left him.

“Cat,” he gravelled. “Where are we?”

Her jaw clenched.

“Keter,” she told him, hoping.

The Dead King’s curse had been a mind-killer, but only half of it had reached him. Vivienne had caught the other. The confusion on the tall orc’s face deepened, to the horror of the others.

“What is the last thing you remember?” Masego briskly asked.

“Heading for the Arsenal,” Hakram told them. “Would someone get me out of these bindings, they-”

And the horror on his face when he saw the limbs lost to the Severance was like a blow to the stomach for them all. He fought to master his face, but the anguish was too deep and sudden to be smoothed away.

“I,” he began, then his voice broke. “How much did I lose?”

“Two years,” Indrani said.

“There might be more,” Masego said. “It is too early to tell.”

“It should have been less,” Vivienne bit out. “I caught the spell, it-”

Her words caught his eye, and the way he stiffened did not go unseen by any of them.

“You don’t remember who I am, do you?” Vivienne Dartwick softly asked.

Hakram shook his head, the hint of shame on his face burning the rest of them like acid. The Princess swallowed thickly, blue-grey eyes turning to Hierophant.

“There has to be a way,” she said. “You told us the curse is still in him, why can’t you purge it?”

“It is,” Hierophant simply said, “the Dead King’s work.”

Even from the grave, Trismegistus King’s will was not to be easily overwrit.

“There’s always a way, with curses,” Catherine Foundling said. “You taught me that. The magic fails if there’s not a way out.”

“It has a price,” Hierophant said. “And it will not bring everything back.”

“But most,” Catherine pressed.

“Most,” he conceded.

And the Warden stepped forward, but a hand was laid on her arm and she found Vivienne Dartwick’s gaze had turned to steel.

“No,” Princess said. “Not this time. Let me.”

Neither woman gave, but eventually the Warden was the one to look away. Vivienne knelt by the bed, Masego’s hand on her shoulder, and faced a hesitant Hakram.

“You don’t remember me, right now,” she told him, “but I haven’t forgotten. There’s a debt between us, Hakram Deadhand.”

“I cannot call on it,” he replied.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

And Hierophant’s other hand came to rest atop the orc’s head, his flesh eye finding Princess’ own to seek one last confirmation. A simple nod and magic billowed out like the wind. Currents of it, thick and visible to the naked eye as faint blue trails, as Hierophant bound them all together. It was not a spell, not in the way he had been taught as a boy, but something simpler. Will exercised on the world, the purest manifestation of what he had hoped to become. And through that binding, he drew out the curse as one would a poison. It fought and wriggled and tried to sink its hooks deep, but inch by inch it was drawn out of Hakram Deadhand and into the only place it could be.

Vivienne Dartwick let out a shuddering breath, accepting it whole as she closed her eyes.

The magic ebbed low, then guttered out entirely. Hierophant’s hand retreated and Hakram suddenly clutched his forehead as he let out a roar of pain. Fangs drawing blood from his own lips, he shook wildly until the fit passed and a light returned to his gaze that had been gone. It lit up the room, reflected in the others around him as their hopes soared and he let out a wounded noise at the sight of the Princess.

“Vivienne,” he said. “Gods, Vivienne, what have you-”

The Princess of Callow let out a rasping laugh, eyes opening as the curse’s foul magic flared.

“My turn,” she said. “The choice came, Hakram.”

The curse boiled out, Vivienne Dartwick’s left hand turning to ash until there was not even bone left above her wrist.

“And I judge you well worth a hand,” she finished.

Looking more fragile than anyone had ever seen him, Hakram let out a grieving curse and drew her into his arms. It was as if a dam had broken, all of them coming together onto the sickbed in a pile of limbs clutching the others tight. The Warden rested her chin atop Indrani’s head and breathed in raggedly. For the first time since she had left the Dead King’s all, it felt over. Finally over.

“Alive,” Catherine Foundling whispered.

Crippled and lost, a parade of the mangled, but they had gone through the storm and all five of them come out the other side breathing.

When she finally let herself weep in relief, she was not alone.

—

There’d been talk of having the ceremony at dawn but when faced with the very real possibility that most of the Grand Alliance would be too hungover to show up common sense prevailed.

It would be held at noon instead, which still ended up requiring the shepherding of a great many nobles and soldiers still quite drunk. The Plaza of Five Palaces, a soldier’s sobriquet given during the dark hours of fighting at the foot of the black spire since the Keteran name for it was anyone’s guess, remained beautiful even after the previous night’s festivities. It had to be cleared out and cleaned but there was no lack of willing hands for the work, for who didn’t love a wedding? Besides, Razin Tanja and Aquiline Osena had become beloved figures beyond even Levant as much for their war record as their open affection for one another.

Guests began arriving an hour before the ceremony, and some soon realized this was to be the most highly attended wedding in the history of Levant. Though the Champion’s Blood had no one sitting for them, foreign guests were the most prestigious of perhaps any wedding on Calernia. The First Princess of Procer and every last remaining – recognized – royal of that realm, the queen and princess of Callow, the Empress of Aenia and representatives from every single city of the League, the chancellor of the Confederation of Praes and even the first Warlord of the Clans in several hundred years.

A dash of the exotic was added by the presence of General Rumena and a handful of sigil-holders as well as the Herald of the Deeps and his generals, then a dash of the legendary through the presence of Kreios Riddle-Maker and the last living spellsingers. Had the elves not disappeared without a word, every realm of Calernia would have had someone in attendance.

The Dominion’s ways were not as elaborate as those of some other realms, but no less eye-catching for it. Razin Tanja and Aquiline Osena arrived not in dresses or fine clothes but naked from the waist up, painted entirely in the colours of their Blood: red and grey for the Binder’s Blood, green and bronze for the Slayer’s. The paints were a work of art, the most skillful hands in Levant having helped shape the elaborate patterns even though it was the betrothed who had themselves applied it as was tradition. The two of them were a sight, black-haired and handsome Lord Razin smiling softly at slender, lethal Lady Aquiline.

The crowd, made up mostly of guests and Levantines but swelled with thousands of curious soldiers from every stripe and banner, went wild at the sight of them. It felt like spitting on the Dead King’s grave, for the young couple to come to stand before the black spire and exchanged their elaborate wedding knifes. A tall and bearded Lantern bound their hands together with hemp rope and they cut their way out with the knives, emerging from the common trial wed in the eyes of Gods and men. The two of them kissed with enthusiasm that had the crowd roaring once more, and it was a done thing. Many of them, in some way, knew they were looking at more than just a wedding.

Razin and Aquiline embraced each other under a sunny sky, in the heart of Keter, and it was the first step towards the end of the Dominion. It was the first step towards what would come after, for good or ill, but with the sun so bright and the sky so blue no one thought much of the ill.

—

On the night of the wedding, after the banquet was over and the festivities had ignited all over the city again, a somber few assembled in the palace known as the Garden of Crowns. A great sprawl of greenery and stone, it had been chosen for its silence and beauty. The Revenant that had guarded it was long gone, so in the stillness of the Garden graves had been dug. For all that the day had been the domain of life clawed back from death, with dusk came death’s dues.

And there were many of them to pay.

Named were lowered into graves, some who had in life been loved and others hated but who were now all honoured in death. The pillars of the Truce and Terms, Ishaq Deathless and Hanno of Arwad, did not intrude into private the private griefs of the Named assembled before them but they spoke of the commonality binding them all.

“In the face of the end of times,” the White Knight said, “we came together. We made accord, where never before had there been so great an accord between Named sworn to Above and Below.”

“We’re past the storm,” the Barrow Sword said. “We lived through it, and now that we have what kept us together will fade. The Liesse Accords will not be the same rules that bound us through this war.”

Struggle between Named would begin anew, the Game of the Gods returned. Rules of engagement would bind it as they had not before, but steel would come out once more.

“But those who died here died for more than just Calernia’s survival,” the White Knight said. “They proved that, when the storm comes, we can stand together. That there is a line between doom and the world, that we all stand on the same side of it.”

Eyes went to the Warden, who stood silent by the Ranger’s side along with Hierophant and the Warlord, but she said nothing. She had not been the captains of these Named, at the end, and so it was not her place to speak. Hers would be the world that came after, not the funeral of the old one.

“It might be that call won’t come again in our lifetime,” the Barrow Sword said. “And perhaps we’ll never see the likes of this war again. But if the time comes, if horror rises again...”

“There will be a truce,” the White Knight said.

“There will be terms,” the Barrow Sword continued.

“And when we beat back that storm, the victory of that day will have been bought by those we bury here.”

A murmur of agreement, like a shiver in the air. Respected men, both of them, but there was more to it than that. For all the grief that clung strongly to the air in this Garden of Crowns, there was a hard sort of pride as well. They had beaten death, in the end. They stood over the sacrifices, of which there had been too many because there were always too many, but they had won.

And so the world changed.

The crowd broke up, coming apart into half a hundred small burials. Some gathered many grieving, Alexis the Silver Huntress’ not only bringing the last two survivors of Refuge but also many who had liked her or fought at her side. Others were small things, like the Hunted Magician’s who only earned a single faded flower from the Artificer and the Blacksmith each before he was put to the ground. Sobs filled the night, away from the laughter and merriment that still held much of the city around them, and quietly the lost were given their dues until there was only one left. In a silent corner, standing far from all save Hanno of Arwad, Kreios the Riddle-Maker buried his daughter.

He looked old, and his grief was the grief of all the world.

—

They celebrated the victory for five days and nights.

The festivities lost their edge of desperation as time went on, the disbelieving tinge that came with having survived the end times becoming a sort of jubilant savagery instead. There could be no corralling soldiers finally releasing all the tension and terror of the war on Keter, especially not when the sergeants and captains that might have tried were part of the hollering crowds. Wisely, no such order was given as the leaders of the Grand Alliance and its allies – historians had already begun to wrestle with the turn of phrase, looking to avoid the repetition and make a name form themselves by picking the one that’d stick – instead rode out the wave. By the sixth morning ale rations had run out and the stashes of contraceptive herbs were running dangerously low, which wound down the merrymaking more efficiently than a thousand shouting sergeants might have.

Armies began to put themselves together again, staggering back to the parts of the city where their banners had been raised. It was slow-going, and though it was rumoured that High Marshal Nim had wanted to hurry it along by sounding the gathering horns and threatening the lash for those who dragged their feet it was also said that Chancellor Alaya had intervened against it. Instead it was stretched out for another day, though soon there were enough soldiers back in the ranks that the work of preparing the departures could begin. Though with continued dwarven support there was no risk of running out of supplies and indeed the Herald of the Deeps invited the hosts to remain as long as they wished – a pretty gesture that some, perhaps cynically, suggested might not be unrelated to the fact that most the Kingdom of the Dead outside Keter and its outskirts remained swarming with undead – for some of them the war was not yet over.

The Principate of Procer had been saved from utter annihilation, but it was still a broken realm of which large swaths were yet occupied by roving corpses.

That knowledge was enough to sour the Proceran forces, often the rowdiest, on the thought of agitating to rest longer in Keter before marching away. With so many officers dead, the camps ravaged and some soldiers still missing even the most disciplined of the armies found it impossible to leave in good time, so compromise was reached. The hosts would leave through Arcadia in waves, the first of which would leave on the morrow: the eighth day since the fall of Keter. Which brought one last matter to the fore, an old promise it was time to fulfill. Though summons were only sent to the Army of Callow and a few of the kingdom’s allies, once word trickled out into the ranks there was no stopping the tide. It was, after all, to be a historic event. The kind you got to boast to your grandchildren of having been at.

Some of the nobles thought it a strange choice, to choose the ashen ruin of a breach over a more majestic site like the Dead King’s black spire or the Plaza of Five Palaces where the great Levantine wedding had taken place, but none who knew either of the two women. No matter how high Callow’s red-handed goddess of victory had risen, she had never quite gotten the mud off her boots – and oh, how her soldiers loved her for it. Even now, even still, for what else could you offer the woman who had led you to triumph against the King of Death himself? And Vivienne Dartwick, though crowned and heroine twice over, had never shaken the old urge to take to rooftops at night. Princess she might be, but she had once been a thief and not since learned squeamishness.

Besides, the both of them faintly understood something. That the moment where the Army of Callow had crossed the chasm, threw its defiance in the Enemy’s teeth and shattered the hold of the dark, had been the end of a tale. One Callow told itself about itself, a tale of bloody victories and long prices and a kingdom earning back the pride it had lost in the Conquest. And just as faintly, they understood – had for years, one way or another – that this tale could not last forever. Must not, lest Callow break itself upon the world again and again, just as surely as Praes once had and still might. And so they would honour that tale, but they would also bury it.

Near a hundred thousand were crammed in the streets and houses, atop rooftops and through ruins. A platform had been raised and greats of the era stood besides it, Named and rulers alike. The hallowed survivors of the war on Keter were resplendent in their armour and finery, but it was not to be their day. It belonged only to the two women on the heights, who had not even sent for a priest.

Princess Vivienne Dartwick stood resplendent in a long dress of Fairfax blue, pale accents evoking the rays of a sun radiating from the neckline. Her missing hand was replaced with a wooden one covered by a white glove. She wore little jewelry save for a silver bracelet, her hair made up in the same milkmaid’s braid that had become her signature, but as thousands beheld her none of them would have thought her born as anything but royalty. Behind her stood two veiled banners, held up by knights of the Order of the Stolen Crown.

Queen Catherine Foundling wore black and steel. A soldier queen she had been and would be, wearing scarred plate over a black tunic. The eye she had lost to the Hawk was covered by black eye cloth, down her back went the famous Mantle of Woe and in her hand she held a dreadful staff of dead yew. The sole jewelry she wore was the crown she had been anointed with in Laure, when she stole a kingdom back from Praes after the Folly. She needed nothing else.

The ceremony was, in the end, a simple enough thing. The Black Queen stood before her soldiers, the rest of the world behind them, and told them true.

“I took my crown,” Catherine Foundling said, “to fight a war.”

Boots on stone, shields and swords rattling. Not only from her own but also from the rest of this grand army, for love or hate none would deny that the Black Queen had brought them to this day.

“It took us far and wide, that war,” she said. “East and west, north and south, until we reached the edge of the world and brought doom to the King of Death himself.”

Cheers and shouts, the sky itself rattling from the noise of it. She waited until it wound down, letting it wash over her.

“We won it,” the Black Queen said. “Keter has fallen and with it we brought an end to the Age of Wonders.”

The crowd roared again. It passed.

“I took my crown to fight a war,” Catherine Foundling repeated, “and that war is over.”

Slowly, almost regretfully, she reached for the crown on her head. It was as if a spell had been cast over all the city, for a pin could have been heard dropping and none dared to move. None save one: as the Black Queen removed her crown, Vivienne Dartwick stepped forward.

“We’ll have peace now,” the Warden promised the world. “And I have been war’s queen. Peace will need another.”

And a roar answered, for though never had Catherine Foundling been more beloved of her people than after this last victory, they loved peace even more and Vivienne Dartwick stood for that. The roar drowned out the entire world, as the princess of Callow smoothly knelt and her queen crowned her. Vivienne rose a queen, and Creation whispered in a quickening perhaps in time a Queen, as the tale of the Black Queen of Callow came to an end. The Warden stepped back, from the kingdom and the stage, leaving both in Queen Vivienne’s hands. The queen’s face was calm and bright, smiling patiently until the shouting ebbed low, and only then did she speak.

“It would be easier,” Queen Vivienne said, “to look only forward. To chase the sun and leave the grim years we fought through behind us.”

She shook her head.

“It would be easier,” she told the world, “but we have not come so far by choosing what it easy.”

She stood tall under the sun in a way that had nothing to do with height, blue and pale and every inch a queen.

“I will not forget that the crown I now bear was forged in mud and blood,” Vivienne Dartwick said, voice high and clear, “that tomorrow we will get to stand the warmth of the sun because of the hard decisions made in yesterday’s darkness.”

And behind her, the woman who had crowned her went still as stone.

“We made mistakes. Great and small, tragic and laughable. Ours was a long, hard road and more than once we lost our way.”

They did not look at each other, but it was a conversation between the two anyhow.

“But I will not deny that road. I will not forget it, try to bury it out of sight,” Vivienne said, and there she finally met her friend’s eye. “I may regret the mistakes but not the journey.”

Something passed between them, too intricate to be simply called love but no less shining for it.

“For that, I feel only pride.”

The queen turned back to the other woman’s red-rimmed eye.

“It was an orphan, a Foundling, that led us to the edge of the world and brought us back. I’ll not let another name steal that deed.”

The crowd breathed in.

“House Foundling will rule Callow,” Queen Vivienne said. “I will bear the name, as will those who come after me, and we will not forget .”

The crowd breathed out, its roaring approval a wall of sound that seemed like it beat back even the wind.

A gesture from the queen and the knights revealed the two banners. The queen’s personal arms were unchanged, a white sun on Fairfax blue. But the royal standard, the Sword and Crown, had changed. A silver sword and crown had once been held in balance on it, the sword weighing heavier. Beneath them an old claim had still been writ, justifications only matter to the just . No longer. The sword and crown stood even, one no greater than the other, and the words had been cut short.

Only to the just , it simply claimed, as in the Book of All Things.

“We lived through the end times,” Queen Vivienne smiled, bright as sun above her. “Now what comes after is ours to make.”

Epilogue II

“At the end, there will be more than the Gods.

With the Last Dusk will come the passing of Creation, discording turning to concord as the wager of Fate is resolved. Yet it shall not be the end of everything, for though all came of the emptiness of Void to create is to make something from nothing. That is our gift, and so the sum of the choices we have made will echo beyond the bounds of time.

In the end, we are told, they will all have mattered.”

– Last page of the Book of All Things

The valley, they told Catherine, was called the Knightsgrave.

It was a pretty sight, tall grass split by a burbling mountain spring whose banks grew thick with red flowers. That was not unusual, in the Red Flower Vales – which in these parts the native Procerans called the Vermillion Valleys – but the mage tower surrounded by a few cottages was. Half a dozen wizard families and twice that in simple students had made their home in the Knightsgrave, a small hidden school of wizardry in the mountains. The temple built by the cottages made it plain that the House of Light was keeping on them, but both the brother there and the magistrate in nearby Beaumarais knew and approved of the school.

Neither recognized that they were being visited by the Warden and the White Knight until they were told, and quickly acceded to silence when it was asked of them. Borders were still being drawn, after all, but Beaumarais might well be part of the lands ceded to Cardinal before the year was out.

The burial of the Rogue Sorcerer, Roland de Beaumarais, attracted something of a crowd. Magistrate Alisanne handled the early arrangements, but then turned the affair over to Brother Albert. Catherine Foundling had known many a shade of grief over her years, both hers and that of others, so she did not ask why the beautiful grey-eyed woman could not stand to look at the coffin. Roland had said there would be a woman in Beaumarais and there was no need to ask who she might be.

It was a simple but heartfelt service. Brother Albert did not take up too much of the talking, ceding the place instead to Roland’s father – his last living parent, after his mother’s death two years past from the green fever – who spoke of the light there had been in his son since he’d been a child, of how proud he was that he had gone out into the world to chase the murderer of his brother Olivier. Roland the Beaumarais, it seemed, was something of a local hero. He’d fought off an evil wizard as a teenager, rumoured to be a Praesi warlock, and founded the small wizard school.

Magistrate Alisanne’s eyes were hard as flint all through the service. Eyes turned to her several times, expectant, but she never spoke a word.

Hanno spoke instead, of the good he had seen Roland do and the love others yet bore for him. The eyes of the young wizards shone, when they heard of the company a man who’d once been a boy here had risen to keep. Of the people he had helped, the evils he had defeated. Catherine Foundling, when her turn came, spoke only two sentences.

“He took an arrow meant for me,” she quietly said. “The debt I owe him is greater than words can convey.”

Roland was buried by the banks of the spring among a bed of red flowers. A stele of stone was left to remember him by, simply reading: Roland de Beaumarais, the Rogue Sorcerer . A life spent for another is never wasted. As dusk approached the crowd dispersed, heading back into town for the funerary banquet. The White Knight took a single look at the magistrate and the once-queen standing among red flowers before taking his leave with them, leaving them to the privacy of their grief.

“None of the people who came knew him,” Magistrate Alisanne quietly said. “Most came to Beaumarais after he left, attracted by rumours of the school.”

“Not even his father?” the Warden asked.

A bitter smile answered.

“Especially not him,” the magistrate replied.

Catherine Foundling was the keeper of many secrets, and so she did not ask why the other woman had insisted on a closed casket funeral when the body was well-preserved and had allowed none to gaze at the body. Roland had been a friend, one of the finest she’d ever had. She would not pry at his secrets while standing over his grave.

“I meant it,” the Warden said, “when I said I owed him a debt. He spoke of you while dying.”

The grey-eyed woman’s face twisted with grief before she mastered herself. Only then did she answer the implicit offer.

“The rumours say that Cardinal grows by the day,” she said.

“We’re still laying the foundations,” the Warden admitted. “Though houses have been raised for workers and officials.”

It had been a year and a half since the fall of Keter, but work had only begun six months past. The Principate was dragging its feet recognizing the borders despite Cordelia’s best efforts, though she had assured Catherine that it was not malfeasance. Part of the lands currently belonged to Orne, who had effectively declared independence during the Principate’s collapse and had only loosely been brought back into the fold. First Princess Rozala could have pushed harder on the matter, but she already had too many demands on her time between the campaigns to recover the north and the negotiations with the secessionists in the south. Cardinal was at no risk of pulling blades and so very much down the list.

“Then perhaps I should go north,” Magistrate Alisanne mused. “Our prince has called for officials to join the resettling of Brabant now that the verdant companies drove the dead from it.”

“If that is your choice, I can put in a word for you,” the Warden said. “Princess Beatrice is an old acquaintance; she would do me a small favour without thinking twice.”

Princess Beatrice Volignac, who had formally abdicated all claim over Hainaut and pledged her army to the reconquest in exchange for the Highest Assembly granting her the principality of Brabant, was also in dire need of skilled officials. The ruling line of Brabant and its capital had both been wiped out, leaving the land in such brutal anarchy that the commoners were begging the orc mercenaries who’d driven back the dead to stay and settle in empty villages. Some were accepting, the Silver Letters had sent in their latest report to Cardinal, and there was already talk in Beatrice’s court of inviting a goblin tribe to try to cut down on the costs of reconstructions. The roaring success of that gamble in Brus under the Kingfisher Princes was inviting imitation.

“And Iserre?” the magistrate idly said, tone gone teasing.

“Rozala Malanza’s less likely to do me favours freely,” the Warden drily replied, “but I could arrange something there too. I wouldn’t advise heading there unless you want to see some fighting, though.”

The grey-eyed woman’s brow rose in surprise.

“Would it truly come to war so soon after the last?”

“Salamans is backing their own Milenan to contest Malanza’s and they’re not backing down,” Catherine Foundling said. “They’ll want to avoid open war with the Highest Assembly, but they want to use a civil war Iserre to break its southern ambitions.”

Much of the south yet refuse to recognize Rozala Malanza as the legitimate First Princess, alleging in a fit of irony that she had usurped the good and rightful ruler of Procer – First Prince Cordelia Hasenbach. Using that pretext they were resisting being brough back into the Principate, though the real reasons were rather more pragmatic. Not only had the First Princess sworn to unseat every royal who had not sent armies to Keter but the Arlesite principalities had been the least hurt by the war and would be the first to recover. Few of them were enthusiastic at the prospect of being heavily taxed for the next fifty tears to pay for the recovery of Procer’s heartlands, the same Alamans princes that had been their rivals for power in Salia for centuries.

Only the swing of public opinion in favour of the First Princess since the victory in Keter had stopped war from erupting, but that would not last. Rozala Malanza was not as skilled a diplomat as her predecessor, for all that she was significantly more beloved of the people of Procer.

“I’ve never had a taste for war,” Magistrate Alisanne finally said. “And that was before I lost him to it.”

The grey-eyed woman shook her head, smiling at the grave.

“I should see, I think, what dream it is that he gave his life for,” she decided. “Let it be Cardinal.”

—

The opening of Cardinal College drew the greats of all Calernia.

Even after four years and fortunes spent Cardinal still looked like it was only half-done, but what had been done was spectacular. At the narrowing of the pass between Procer and Callow there had once been a fortress called the Bloody Twins, but the fighting of the Tenth Crusade – the duel between two dead legends, the Sovereign of Red Skies and Antigone Drakonslayer – had broken it and masses of stone been dropped from a Hell. Using the old fortress as a foundation and the fallen stone as materials, an army of stonemasons from the signatories to the Liesse Accords had begun to build the city.

Now two great square towers of grey stone rose as tall as the mountain they ate into, a great plaza passing between though they connected by a massive arched bridge – Concord Bridge, it was called – that stood half a league above the ground. From a distance the entire College looked like a gargantuan arch curving towards the clouds, and radiating outwards from it the bones of a city had been raised. Large avenues split the grounds like the lines on a sundial, districts swallowing the northern and southern valleys as tunnels were being carved through the mountains to bind the mountain-city together. Great swaths were still empty, but already a trading town on the Callowan side that heavy grain imports had driven demand had been founded and the districts around the College filled up.

The rest was yet as villages dotting the empty belly of a great city, workers come from abroad and migrants drawn by rumours of work taking up residence in clumps, but in time the city would fill itself. It might never be as large as Salia or Ater, the mountains would forbid such heedless growth, but in time it might become one of the great cities of Calernia regardless. Finishing to would be the work of decades yet, but already Cardinal had begun to pay for itself in part by collecting taxes in coin and food from its territories on both sides of the Whitecaps. It was a long way from no longer needing foreign coin to continue growing, but it would be provided for some years yet.

Besides, Chancellor Alaya and Empress Basilia had proved willing to sink a great deal more gold into the city than the Accords mandated. Not without concessions to show for it, of course, but negotiations with the seneschal of the city had not yielded as much as they might have hoped. Lady Cordelia was yet one of the finest diplomats on the continent.

Guests had begun arriving a month before the ceremony was due, but the grand names only in the sennight before. The incoming tide of crowned heads excited even the already infamously blithe Cardinalians, who had seen so many great works of magic used to mundane building purposes that very little could yet shock them. Formal reception only took place when the last of the delegations arrived, in the grand plaza between the two towers of the College. It was a long, ceremonious affair where the delegations marched up the avenue one after another to be welcomed and only made less dull to behold for the crowds by how richly dressed the delegations were.

The Warden, head of the still mostly empty ruling council of Cardinal, gave out those welcomes with the other three sitting members. Lady Cordelia Hasenbach, seneschal of the city, who had also taken on diplomatic and judicial duties that would in time be beyond the office’s remit when they could be distinguished from the administrative ones. Lady Pickler, intendant of works, who had already fallen into the habit of rarely attending any meeting that did not involve allocation of funds. And lastly General Grem One-Eye, the famous Praesi general who had quietly retired at the end of the War on Keter and taken the offer of commanding Cardinal’s fledgling army.

The Lord Hierophant having adamantly refused the office of Rector of Cardinal College in favour of remaining a permanent Senior Lecturer, he had gotten out of attending. First Princess Rozala and her consort Louis Rohanon were welcomed first, a panoply of princes trailing behind them.

“They tell she might be pregnant with a second,” the Warden muttered.

“It was only a matter of time,” Lady Cordelia replied in a murmur. “She was trying as early as last year.”

Catherine Foundling let out a low whistle.

“During that mess in Salamans?” she said. “Bold.”

It had been a tense time, and if not for their intervention the situation might well have devolved into open war between the League and the Principate. In the wake of the First Princess’ decisive victories in Iserre, Salamans had broken into civil war only for its south to be invaded by the Prince of Tenerife in a lightning march. He had then formally applied to join the League of Free Cities, throwing lit matches into tinder. Valencis had immediately pulled out of its negotiations with the Highest Assembly, making a marriage alliance with Tenerife instead, and when the First Princess had directly intervened in Salamans she’d run into Tenerifan forces in the south that refused to cede the ground. An accidental skirmish turned into battle then drew Empress Basilia into the conflict, for though Tenerife could not be welcomed into the League in the Hierarch’s absence it had status enough as an applicant to ask help of the Protector of the League.

With League armies camped a mere ten miles away from the Principate’s in southern Salamans, there had been the scent of steel in the air.

The Warden’s arbitration and a great deal of bargaining behind closed doors had helped tensions return to a simmer, but the miracle that put it to rest came in the form of Anaxares the Hierarch. Emerging from the Hells in the city of Orense, which even after being returned to the Proceran fold was holding out, he collapsed the siege and led the citizenry into declaring the independent Republic of Orense before the White Knight chased him off. With another fire in her backyard as the insurrection spread across the principality, the First Princess agreed to a partition of Salamans, ceding the northern half the Principate kept between Iserre and her own Aequitan.

In return she received an open guarantee that Valencis would never receive help from Tenerife or be allowed to apply to join the League, a diplomatic coup that forced the rulers of Valencis to return to the negotiating table with a much weaker hand and a ruined reputation.

“If her south didn’t keep setting itself on fire, she’d have most of the north back by now,” General Grem opined in a growl.

Brabant and southern Lyonis had been reclaimed, but beyond that little else. Prince Otto Redcrown had led the return of the Lycaonese exodus, helping in the reconquest of Brus as he went, but though Neustria had been reclaimed and Rhenia relieved the rest remained in the hands of the dead. A push had seized the Morgentor and closed Twilight’s Pass, but otherwise the great prince of the north seemed content to slowly reclaim old Lycaonese lands by pushing a little further every summer. He had done this with little help from any southerner save the Kingfisher Prince, who himself had been forced to essentially occupy southern Lyonis so the dead would not spill back through it into Brus after royal forces withdrew.

There was talk of a marriage with Sophie Louvroy, abdicated princess of Lyonis and last survivor of the main branch of the House of Louvroy, to formalize the arrangement.

After the Procerans came and went the rulers of Levant replaced them, riding with their lords of the Blood. King Razin and Queen Aquiline advanced under the star-studded banner of the Thuraya, the name they had adopted upon being crowned by the Majilis. The young queen’s obvious pregnancy drew even more eyes than the appearance of the rather famous Lord Ishaq Rabia, first of the Barrow’s Blood, whose town on the southern edge of the Brocelian was said to be growing fast.

“That succession is going to be a headache even if they have a kid,” the Warden grunted. “Mark my words.”

“The Circle of Thorns believe they want three children,” Lady Cordelia noted. “One to inherit Levante and the crown after them, the other two for Malaga and Tartessos.”

“The Majilis isn’t toothless enough to allow that,” Catherine Foundling replied. “They surrendered veto power, but it doesn’t make them pushovers.”

“Vaccei and Alava will threaten revolt, I agree,” Lady Cordelia mused. “They will have to water their wine, pass the cities to kinsmen. It is doing them a favour in the long term, I would think.”

“Three royal branches all with their own cities?” Lady Pickler snorted. “Because that’s not a civil war in thirty years. I thought you said they were smart kids, Cat.”

“They’re still Blood,” the Warden sighed, “it comes with some blinders. They’ve done well otherwise.”

With the Levantines come and gone, the Callowan royal procession approached. Queen Vivienne of Callow led it, her recent husband prince-consort Cathal Iarsmai close behind. Though rumours had spread that marrying Grand Duchess Kegan’s eldest grandson had been her price to keep Daoine in the Kingdom of Callow, the couple seemed happy enough. Cathal was only some years younger than the queen, after all, and handsome in the Deoraithe way.

“How much younger is he?” Lady Pickler asked.

“Just turned twenty,” the Warden said.

“And divorced last year,” Lady Cordelia said, sounding like she enjoyed the scandal. “A stroke of luck for Kegan, that, the second closest grandson is still twelve.”

“If she’d been willing to settle for a nephew it could have been done years ago,” the Warden noted, “but she wanted her own blood in the royal line.”

House Foundling would inherit the same as any other, in the end, save that if it turned unworthy there would be a great many orphans ready to restore dignity to the crown. The decision had been contentious in the early years, but Queen Vivienne’s reign had been peaceful and prosperous. Plenty had a way of silencing doubts, and the kingdom’s rising trade guilds paired with the resettling of Liesse had occupied energies that might otherwise have turned to mischief.

After Callow came the League of Free Cities, Empress Basilia her vassal rulers of Nicae and Stygia arriving first. Formal diplomats from the other cities followed, as though Anaxares the Hierarch had kept his Name he had spurned invitations to return to the League when invited during his reappearance in Orense. It had been considered a surrender of the title, even by Bellerophon, which had allowed the League cities to resume foreign affairs and vote on joining the Liesse Accords.

“They’ll have another Hierarch within the decade,” the Warden said. “Basilia’s getting too powerful, they’ll want something to balance her influence.”

And should she refuse, it might well come to civil war within the League. Which she could not afford, given that she was still trying to get Tenerife accepted as a member-state.

“She will pare down the powers of the office and get Tenerife brought into the fold as a trade,” Lady Cordelia predicted.

“Don’t say that in front of Ikaroi,” Genera Grem grunted in amusement. “He’ll send it home.”

The head archivist of Cardinal College, Nestor Ikaroi, was not longer formally of the Secretariat but was still rather openly and amiably spying for Delos. He was so useful none of them particularly minded. The humour that had touched them at that retreated when the following delegation arrived.

Chancellor Alaya did not come in person, which only strengthened the rumours she was not far from stepping down – and that the Warden would kill her should they meet in person – but both High Marshal Nim and one of Lord Councillors had been sent, a strong showing. Especially so considering that Lord Councillor Sargon Sahelian being increasingly charged with foreign diplomacy was speculated to be a sign that the chancellor wanted him to succeed her.

“Queen Vivienne will be miffed,” Cordelia predicted. “She would prefer High Lady Abreha to be in his place.”

“Of course she would,” Catherine Foundling snorted, “the old fox’s promised to sell Callow the Blessed Isle if she’s elected chancellor.”

The border between the Confederation of Praes and the Kingdom of Callow had been a matter of some debate after the end of the War on Keter. The Blessed Isle was in Praesi hands and the Fields of Streges in Callowan ones, but the land had never been formally ceded and there had never been a declaration of war between either realms since the secession of Callow. Chancellor Alaya had traded the disarmament of the Isle to the Callowan crown in exchange for a lasting treaty that allowed the Confederation to buy a fixed quantity of grain at a fixed price every year, bolstering her position and securing food for Ater, but the borders had yet to be formally fixed.

“Sargon Sahelian’s trade policies are sounder,” Cordelia firmly said. “And his support for Cardinal College significantly stronger.”

“You just want to edge Mercantis entirely out of the spice trade, you cutthroat bitch,” the Warden fondly said. “At least own it.”

“Their position as the perennial middleman is a loss to all of Calernia,” Lady Cordelia righteously replied, but her lips twitched.

The northern realms came in swift succession. First the Herald of the Deeps, formally recognized as king of Kishar when he’d signed the Accords two years past, who’d come with a small retinue whose splendid armour was still eclipsed by the colourful parade of fire spirits that flocked to him like birds.

“Good call renaming Keter something that starts with a K,” Lady Pickler said. “It’ll make it stick sooner.”

“I am sure that is the only reason the name was chosen,” Lady Cordelia drawled. “Well spotted, my lady.”

“I’m not taking that lip from someone who giggles at being called Cordy when she’s drunk,” the goblin bit back.

Following the dwarves came the representatives from burgeoning Zemebreg, the Firstborn colony that dwelled in the city once called Cleves. Mighty Rumena itself led it accompanied by a pack of the wandering riddle-priests endemic to its city that had become famous in the Principate. With them came the envoys from Serolen itself, eldest and greatest of the spreading drow cities, came greater names. Mighty Radegast led the group, now famous for the terrifying mercenary army it had led in Nesutria and Rhenia on Prince Otto’s behalf. Then Ivah of the Losara, First Under the Night and Lord of Silent Steps. The priest was perhaps the best-known of the Firstborn, nowadays, for it had spent several years in the Principate after the end of the War on Keter. The bargains it had struck with the First Princess for mercenary sigils had been instrumental in clawing back control of the western coast, allowing Segovian shipping to resume to Prince Otto’s realm.

“I’m glad Malanza didn’t bring any of the Most Holy or we’d have a brawl on our hands,” the Warden said, and it was not entirely a jest.

There were many names for the worship of Sve Noc, these days. The Tenets of Night remained most common, but the Faith of Crows and the House of Night were spreading as well. In Callow mostly through the Army, and aside from a scuffle over an order of knights that had insisted on being allowed anointment in Night to outrage from the House Constant there had been little trouble. It was seen as a soldier’s cult, little more. In Procer and the Grey Eyries, however, things had taken a different turn. The Matrons had banned the worship, only for the measure to be backfire by spreading word and then be overturned by Chancellor Alaya besides, and now they were said to be wrestling with a great deal of unrest.

In Procer it had grown beyond that, however. Night was simply too tempting a power for a realm where banditry and roving bands of undead were still a real threat even all these years later. The House of Light’s campaign of words to denounce the heresy had taken strong root in the south, but it had rung hollow north in the heartlands and north where drow sigils and wandering riddle-priests looking for worthy foes had saved many a life. Though yet frowned upon, the Faith of Crows was spreading and the Liesse Accords prevented the Highest Assembly from making this illegal. Hostility between the Proceran House and the Losara – considered a priest-caste in the Principate, and not without reason – in particular had risen to dangerous heights.

“Be glad we did not invite Tenerife,” Lady Cordelia grimly replied. “They gave back their House the right to raise troops.”

The last delegation to arrive, and not by happenstance, was that from Thalassocracy of Ashur. It was the last realm of Calernia not to have signed the Liesse Accords, and its envoys were the reason so many great names had come to the opening of Cardinal College. It would have been an important moment on its own, but the last signatory joining the Accord added great weight. Seven years after the fall of Keter, the Ashuran civil war had finally been brough to an end and the results had been expected by few. Instead of the Hadast claimant pushed by Arwad or Smyrna’s insistence a Tyrian from overseas must be sent for, a fourth-tier citizen from Smyrna by the name of Baltsar Aderbal had taken control.

He’d been a middle-aged man with few allies when he’d declared the Committee of Government with the backing of only citizens of lower tiers tired of the fighting, but the reason he was now ruler of Ashur was the same two people standing behind he as he approached: the Blessed Artificer and the Archmage. Sapan the Apprentice had become Sapan the Mage and reportedly lost her temper when returning to Ashur after the war. After crushing the Blue Mage and half a school’s worth of practitioners in a spectacular blowout when the other Named backed the Hadast claimant and attempted assassination of Baltsar Aderbal, she had transitioned into the Archmage and ended the civil war through sheer fear of angering her further.

She had, after all, blown up most of a mountain.

“Baltsar isn’t the real power there,” Lady Pickler said. “I don’t care if he’s called the head of their governing committee, either of those women could take his seat in a moment.”

“Not Lady Adanna,” Cordelia said. “She was born there but her looks are Soninke. Smyrnan elites rose up over having to back a Hadast relative married to a Levantine, they would go quite mad over her.”

“Sapan’s like Masego in some ways,” the Warden said. “She wants to pursue her studies more than mingle. Mind you, she’s a little more involved than Zeze’s ever been.”

“The decision to sever ties with the Baalite Hegemony is entirely hers,” Cordelia agreed. “As has been reaching out to Praes in friendship to balance a resurgent League.”

“Malicia’s old dream come true,” Catherine Foundling smiled, just a little too tightly.

“Boring,” Pickler frankly said. “Can’t believe I have to be here and Hanno got out of it. He’s Ashuran, he should be here more than me.”

“His having a look up north is more important,” the Warden said. “If the word Hakram has sent is true, we have reason to be worried.”

“There are records of elves being active outside the Bloom, if ancient ones,” Cordelia said. “It is this talk of ratlings wandering the steppes that worry me. They could not have reached there without the Forever King’s tacit allow.”

The Warlord had been called in by far clans only loosely under his banner, tales of entire clans disappearing reaching his court, and duly informed Cardinal even as he moved north to investigate. The White Knight had gone alone, as the finest sword the Warden had to wield. General Grem cleared his throat.

“The Ashurans are getting close,” he said. “They’ll hear.”

They fell into silence, the Warden allowing her gaze to fall onto the last delegation. The last great realm of the surface that had yet to sign the Liesse Accords, come here on the day where the great school she had dreamed with Hakram would open its gates to students. The sky above them was an endless sunny blue, cut only by the great towers of Cardinal College, and she let the warmth of the sun seep into her bones.

It was a good day, she thought, and there were better ones yet ahead.

—

The lecture hall was a large spread of stone with comfortable seats behind writing desks, built to easily fit a hundred, and it had been filled to the brim. Cardinal College allowed students to enroll in elective classes from their second year onwards, after the basics had been taught, and now that the first batch had reached the milestone near every mage in attendance had hurried to sign up for General Theory of Magic. Some had learned Lower Miezan specifically to be able to attend this particular set of lectures out of the three of, for they would be given by the most famous mage of the age. Without warning the door burst open and the Lord Hierophant strode into the hall and it went quiet as a grave, save for the tinkle of the trinkets woven into his hair. He looked, many noted, in a foul mood.

A flick of the wrist had chalk rising and writing General Theory of Magic on the large grey slate, the odd-eyed man turning to face the silent class.

“Before the month is over,” he said, “half or you will be gone.”

Several students swallowed.

“No dead,” the Hierophant clarified. “The College has rules about that.”

The words were not as reassuring as he had clearly meant them to be.

“You will be expected to take notes and study on your own,” he continued, “and I will not slow the pace for the slower students. Should you struggle, you are free to attend the Senior Lecturer Beaumont’s lectures instead – they are also given in Lower Miezan.”

A pause, waiting for volunteers. There were none.

“Then we proceed,” the Hierophant said. “Before we begin, I have been informed I am to give you the opportunity to ask questions. Raise your hand if you wish to do so, you will be called on.”

A dark-skinned young woman in elaborate red and black robes was the first to raise her hand and so the first to earn the right to speak.

“You,” Hierophant said.

“My lord,” she said, “may I ask why you are giving what could be considered an introductory lecture instead of something more befitting your talents?”

The Hierophant’s flesh eye narrowed.

“Sahelian, are you?” he asked.

She proudly nodded.

“I am-”

“Not interested,” the Hierophant noted. “I knew Akua Sahelian, still consider her a friend. Lesser variants are of little interest. As for your question, it’s because the contents of my Deicide and Applied Blasphemy lecture are currently locked into a vault after eating the soul of the warlock that tried to steal them.”

A great many students breathed in sharply. Some second thoughts were had.

“And Hasenbach insists I have to teach something if I want my funding for the experiment,” he continued. “Which is ridiculous, given the obvious benefits.”

Though it had taken barely two years for Masego to accept Cordelia’s invitation to refer to her by her first name, monthly funding debates saw her inevitably relegated to be being ‘Hasenbach’ for a few days. A boy in the front, blond-haired and blue-eyed with stocky Callowan look, was the next called on.

“What’s your experiment?” he eagerly asked.

“The technicalities are beyond any of you,” Hierophant said, “but on the submission scroll I summed it up as ‘forcing apotheosis onto a pig’.”

Half the students paled. About a dozen leaned forward eagerly. Another boy, Ashuran by the looks of him, was next.

“Is it true you taught the Archmage?” he excitedly asked.

“Sapan learned from me,” the Hierophant noted, “but I cannot claim to have taught her.”

A pause.

“If you believe attending my lectures will turn you into her, abandon the idea,” he cautioned. “She is a once in a generation talent and I have no reason to believe ant of you are.”

Several winces but few arguments. Even in the College, where already two Named were in attendance, few had the arrogance to compare themselves to the Archmage of Ashur. Next was a dark-haired girl, Arlesite in looks, and her accent was thick when she spoke up.

“Why should we attend your lectures instead of the others?” she asked. “What do they bring us?”

The Hierophant beamed.

“The first good question today,” he praised.

The girl looked surprised, perhaps having expected irritation out of the infamously impatient mage. He glanced at her a second time, finding that she was young to be here. Eight, nine years old at most? And vaguely reminiscent of someone he likely should have paid more attention to at some point, an unfortunately broad list.

“The other Senior Lecturers,” he told the class, “will teach you general theory with an accent on the manner of magic they practice themselves. I will not.”

Under the eye cloth, an orb of glass shone with the light of miracles crafted and stolen both.

“I will be teaching you of the rules,” the Hierophant smiled, “only to best explain how to break them .”

Half the class was gone by the moon’s turn, as he had predicted. The rest signed up to every single lecture the Lord Hierophant gave at Cardinal College.

—

Ater had recovered from the Battle of the Spiders.

It had been years since then, almost nine, and in the wake of the War on Keter the newly founded Confederation of Praes had thrived. With a willing if wary Callow as a trading partner, Chancellor Alaya had gathered a like-minded few to her council and undertaken reforms. Taxation of territories was reorganized to be handled directly by Ater, cutting out the middleman collector of the the High Seats. It tripled the revenue of the chancellorship over the span of a year while she appeased the same great with exemptions tailored to ensure they would remain the wealthiest of the aristocracy. With the ardent support of the High Lady of Kahtan, a young woman of strong reformist bent whose life had once been saved by the White Knight in Keter, the Taghreb aristocracy Hungering Sands made bereft of an overlord by the end of Thalassina and goblin rule in Foramen were reorganized into districts patterned on the past imperial governorships of Callow.

High Lady Rana Muraqib’s rumoured marriage proposal to the White Knight in the wake of this was the subject of excited gossip for years.

Meticulously negotiated treaties with the Warlord solidified the vassal state status of the Clans and the rights of all greenskins in Praes, including confirming the cession of the fortress of Chagoro and attendant territories. Hakram Deadhand set his court there and began raising his capital, deepening trade ties as orc mercenary companies – verdant companies, they were called in Procer – were sent west to fight under Procer to bleed out the old urge to raid. Besides, the northern clans were occupied with the growing ratling infestation in the Lesser Steppes. There was plenty of war and meat to go around these days.

But only outside, for within there was order. Permanent Legions of Terror fortresses in all regions to ensure order did not collapse in the wake of the disbanding of the old armies. Negotiations with the rebels of the Green Stretch ended in the region being assigned a governor by Ater but receiving an electoral vote in return.

Only in the Grey Eyries did peace wane, as the Tribes had eaten themselves alive over the matter of Night. After a panicked ban of worship that ended in disaster the Matrons attempted to pivot into priesthood but found Sve Noc lukewarm to the approaches. Several tribes collapsed into infighting, males or lesser females using Night to overthrow their superiors, but wiser Matrons instead raised the status of those who could use Night as being above those others. Even the males. It avoided widespread civil war, but with every season as more left for the greener pastures of Foramen, Callow and Procer their authority ebbed. Perhaps in time it would shatter entirely.

And as the years had passed, as peace kept and Praes entered an age of prosperity, Catherine Foundling counted the days. Until one night, just before dawn, the Warden slipped into a palace at the heart of Ater. It was not Tower, not mountain of horror and hubris, but it was opulent nonetheless. Nestled at the heart was a great garden with the stars for a roof, kept pristine by gardeners and enchantments both. At this hour of the night, with dawn approaching, there was no one there.

No one save for Alaya of Satus and the Warden who’d come for her.

The chancellor sat alone in a copper garden chair, leaning back into silk cushions and looking at the starlit sky as she sipped a cup of wine. The bottle was on the table, empty. It was of rough make, cheap glass for a cheap wine that some might have said tasted of mud. The dark-skinned beauty was pleasantly drunk, by the look of her, but even so her face betrayed no surprise when the Warden slid out of shadow as if she had come into being from nothing at all. Alaya only smiled and invited Catherine Foundling to sit.

“Warden,” she said.

“Chancellor,” the other replied.

“Congratulations are in order, I believe,” Alaya said. “The ealamal was successfully put to use.”

“Adanna does good work,” the Warden agreed. “The poison clouds are already dispersing and it will reverse the blight on the Kingdom of the Dead fully over the next thirteen months. Or so the latest word out of Kishar goes.”

“The Herald will be pleased,” the chancellor mused. “He has been chafing to expand on the surface as he has been doing below.”

The collapse of the Kingdom Under into half a hundred squabbling fiefdoms had only continued, allowing the Herald of the Deeps to seize the lands beneath most of what had once been the Kingdom of the Dead. There were few cities and farms there, however, mostly fortresses and forges. Farmland would be a blessing for an expanding realm swelling with refugees from the brutal strife of the dwarven heartlands.

“The Archmage’s theorem was impressive work,” Catherine Foundling said. “Even Masego was impressed.”

“A rising name as well as a rising Name,” Alaya commented. “Her proposal of lending Baalite mages to help ours create irrigation canals in the Hungering Sands is the talk of Praes. I believe my successor will take her up on it.”

“And you know who that’ll be?” the Warden idly asked.

The chancellor smiled.

“Sargon Sahelian, unless I am much mistaken,” she said. “I have allowed him to expand his influence unchecked, far beyond the gains I conceded to Abreha.”

“Hakram tells me he’s popular with the Clans,” the other woman agreed. “The help he offered in Chagoro – Hagaz now, sorry – went over well with the chiefs.”

“He can be quite charming,” Alaya said, “and his utter disinterest in territorial expansion is exactly what we need. He would much rather spend the treasury on rebuilding Praes than consider adventures abroad.”

The Warden slowly nodded.

“You will leave him a Confederation on the rise,” she acknowledged. “Ater has been rebuilt, trade with Callow is the highest it has ever been and all of Praes is on the path to recovery from the Uncivil Wars.”

She paused.

“I walked the city, before coming here,” the Warden said. “They love you again, the people in the streets.”

“Mobs have short memories,” the chancellor sighed.

“Maybe,” Catherine Foundling said. “But they’re not wrong either. I gave you eight years, and you have used them to rule ably and justly.”

The dark-skinned beauty smiled.

“Sentiment, Catherine?” she drawled. “So late in the game?”

“I’ve been known to indulge,” the Warden shrugged.

She was no longer a young woman, to be offended by something she had long made peace with.

“Is that why you have been sending casual letters to Marshal Juniper and her wife?” Alaya smiled.

“Aisha’s the Governess-General, that’s as high a position as Marshal,” the other chided. “And I’m being practical with that too. Grem has been talking about retiring down the line, living out his last years in the Steppes, and I’ll need someone to command Cardinal’s forces then.”

Queen Vivienne would stringently object at losing Aisha and Juniper would not relish leaving the Army of Callow behind, but the Warden suspected the two of them would bet swayed by the prospect of living in the same city enough to accept after Grem retired.

“A large army, for a young city-state,” the chancellor said. “However important is has grown to be.”

“If we were just handling the defence of our territory, suppressing banditry and the like, it’d be too large,” the Warden freely conceded. “But the Black Legion is meant to be used against Named running wild and other threats to the Accords.”

A moment of silence between them.

“He would have enjoyed the name, I think,” Alaya quietly said. “He was always a little vainer than he allowed himself to believe he was.”

“I figured,” Catherine Foundling quietly replied. “Besides, it’s his tactics we’re teaching them.”

Their gazes moved away, drawn by the night sky that did not yet betray the coming of dawn.

“How was it?”

“Eight years of choking down ash and dust,” Alaya honestly said. “But it is done, Catherine. I laid both our sins to rest. I made Praes into what we wanted it to be.”

The other woman considered that, for a moment.

“I’m glad,” she said, and found she meant it.

Neither of them broke the silence for a long time. And as dawn approached, Catherine Foundling rose to her feet.

“It won’t be painful,” the Warden said.

That had never been the point. The chancellor of Praes drained the last of her cup, setting it down, and smiled the smile of a woman who had spent most of her life one step ahead of everyone else in the room.

“It wasn’t,” Alaya of Satus softly agreed, “when I drank the poison an hour ago.”

She would die as she had lived, holding her fate in her own hands. Her body was cold when dawn found it, sitting alone in her beautiful garden and staring at the sky through dead eyes.

So passed Alaya of Satus, once known as Dread Empress Malicia and last of that dreadful line.

—

It had been ten years from the fall of Keter and a debt was owed.

Hye Su waited in the clearing where Refuge had once stood, greenery having since clawed back the grounds. She was sitting on a stone, honing the edge of her blades with a whetting stone. When the Warden arrived, near the coming of dusk, she displayed no surprise.

“So you came alone,” Hye Su said, tone giving faint praise. “I wondered if you’d try to drag one of your little leagues into it.”

It had not been so long since the Guild and the Society were founded, but Hye Su had kept her ear to the ground. The founding of both had led to a great deal of talk, for it was not everyday that companies of Named. The differences were not so great, even though the Guild stood for Below and the Society for Above. Behind all the details, the essence was the same: they were both ways for Named to make enforced bargains with one another and other entities. Be they with kingdoms or vagrants, the deals brokered by Guild and Society were made with the strength of Cardinal behind them. All at the simple price of those who joined the ranks agreeing to simple rules of conduct.

Named flocked to Cardinal for a reason.

“It’s not what they’re for,” the Warden shrugged.

The other woman laughed.

“I suppose not,” she conceded. “They’re to corral the herd you let loose.”

The Warden cocked her head to the side.

“So you noticed it,” she said. “I wondered how obvious it was to those without our resources.”

“Names are popping up like weeds,” Hye Su said. “You don’t need spies to see it. It used to be that there was one every few years, Foundling, but now?”

She snorted.

“I hear there’s three Apprentices running around and your Knight Errant has already picked up a Squire,” she said. “It’s only been ten years since Keter and you’ve already made back every Name you lost and change.”

“Too many people know stories, know about how Names work,” the Warden said. “There’d never been so many Named in the same place as there were in the Arsenal or Keter, or a place like Cardinal. We made it easier for them to come into being.”

“Made them weaker, too,” Hye Su scathingly said. “Power spread around is thinned.”

“It makes for a better world, I think,” the Warden said.

“You would say that,” Hye Su replied, “having made it.”

She rose to her feet, blades in hand, and though she was one of the most dangerous women alive Catherine Foundling was not worried. She had learned tricks from friends and foes over the last decade, but her certainty did not come from them. She had made the world of today, her enemy had said, and there was truth to that. And it was just as true that Hye Su had been left behind by that world. It has passed her by.

And so this could only end one way.

—

There were only four students in the circular hall, which was deep below the College and so heavily warded the magic could be tasted in the air. Torchlight did not light up every shadowed stretch, but the sculpted ritual circle in the middle glowed faintly red and tinged even the dark. Many would have balked at such a sight, but these nine wore the silver stripe on their robes that denoted students in their last year who had distinguished themselves enough to be allowed into restricted classes.

“Welcome,” the Lord Hierophant said, “to Nature of Divinity and Practical Applications.”

There was a snort from a dark-skinned girl. Taiwo Sahelian cocked an eyebrow.

“Sir, you do know every still calls it Deicide and Applied Blasphemy right?” she said.

“As they should,” Hierophant muttered, “it is a much better name.”

“Seneschal Hasenbach is threatening to cut the lunacy fund again, isn’t she?” fair-haired Anthony Fletcher grinned.

“It’s Catherine this time,” Hierophant sighed. “She says that feeding the Swine King to the fae wasn’t enough to get the House of Light to drop the matter so we need to ‘tread carefully for a bit’.”

“It wasn’t even a real god,” Isabel Malanza complained. “We only got halfway there.”

Occasionally First Princess Rozala’s eldest daughter showed her age, the lowest of them all at twelve. None of them had dared to underestimate her since the time she’d made the Apprentice float atop Concord Bridge for half a day after the Taghreb condescended to her about Olowe’s Theorem. Rumour had it the Warden had ordered to leave him up there as an object lesson.

“It was the village that did it, I think,” Hiram of Arwad mildly said. “Upright pigs tilling the land and building houses was a mite disturbing, I’ll admit.”

Hiram was not the most talented of them, and by far, but solid common sense and a facility with language meant he had already been approached to serve as a Junior Lecturer after graduation.

“No matter,” Hierophant dismissed. “Now, all of you should have read on Dumisai’s Theorem over the last week.”

A chorus of agreements.

“Good,” Masego grinned. “Now the interesting part. If fae are fundamentally the stuff of Arcadia given form, then what happens if that stuff is used to try to make a devil?”

The circle glowed ominously as the four students leaned in eagerly.

—

It was fifteen years after the fall of Keter that the first true challenge to the Liesse Accords came.

“You know,” the Warden said, “I really did think it would be the ratlings that made the other shoe drop.”

“It’s only a matter of time until the elves find a Horned Lord,” the White Knight said. “But you know my thoughts on that already.”

“And you mine,” the Warden replied. “The Golden Bloom’s not an Accords signatory and no one wants to try invading that wasp’s nest when the elves aren’t directly acting.”

It had not been proved that the Forever King was using the shards of the Twilight Ways to ferry the Chain of Hunger east, though the leading mages of Calernia all agreed it was the most likely explanation. There were already suspicions that the same was being done to the Brocelian and the Waning Woods, the elves seeking to break apart human realms as a prelude for resuming expansion. The success of the Spring Crown ritual had ignited in them a thirst for intervention beyond their borders that had not been heard of in millennia.

“Passivity now will cost us in years to come,” Hanno said.

“I don’t disagree,” Catherine grunted. “I just don’t see a solution. Besides, let’s start by putting out the fire in front of us.”

Atalante was on fire. The Preacher’s seizure of power through a coup had not been a breach of the Accords, no matter how heated the man’s rhetoric, but after transitioning into the Philosopher King he’d ceased all pretence that he intended to respect the rules. Prescription of the worship of Night and execution of all suspected sympathizers of Below had been only the beginning of the bloodshed, but it was the King’s use of angelic influence to raise an army of fanatics out of towns and villages that’d guaranteed there would be war.

The armies under Empress Basilia were facing the Host of Light and its fearsome general further south, but riots in Atalante had proved an opening for the Black Legion to risk a decapitating strike on the tyrant himself. The Archmage had blown open the gates and now black-armoured soldiers were putting down the Philosopher King’s fanatic soldiers, and now the man himself was holed up in the Temple of Manifold Truths.

And he was, by the looks of the distant glow lighting up the night sky, calling on a Choir once more.

“Let us end it before more died needlessly,” the White Knight agreed.

The two of them tore through the Philosopher King’s personal guard like a storm. Numbers meant little to the likes of them, at the summit of their power, and it was not long before they entered the chamber where the Philosopher King himself awaited. The ragged, wild-eyed man sat in his pale robes and clutched the many prayer beads on his wrists and neck as he hollered his prayers.

“You’re too late,” the Philosopher King laughed, “Contrition comes and-”

“ Silence ,” the Warden said.

Catherine Foundling, it was said, had defied angels many a time. And won more often than not. The story held true that night, Contrition’s light winking out.

“Cassander of Atalante,” the White Knight said. “For breach of the Liesse Accords on counts of unfair proscription, malicious use of non-creational influence and mass murder by means of Name you are to receive judgement by the Warden.”

“Never,” the Philosopher King hissed. “Don’t you see, Knight, how Below is winning? Spreading everywhere, villains growing like weeds to strangle all the world? They must be stopped now, purged while we still can and-”

“Cassander of Atalante,” the Warden said, “I Sentence you to die.”

And though angels screamed, though Light flared like a sun and the Philosopher King unleashed the last of his power, the White Knight’s sword found his neck. As if it had been fated to be cut. The two of them stood over the cooling corpse, tired.

“He’s only the first,” the White Knight said. “There will be others.”

“Below will unleash the next,” the Warden softly agreed. “It’ll get uglier, before it gets better.”

“Isn’t that always the way?” the other man smiled.

It was rare for them to take the field together, these days, but whenever they did the easy complicity of their youth always returned.

“I’ll leave the corpse to you,” the White Knight said. “General Grem might yet need aid securing the city.”

She nodded. He had taken a wound today, an arrow to the belly, and though his life was in no danger she suspected it would only hurry the old orc’s retirement. Aisha had been making noise in their letters about wanting more time to spend on finishing her memoirs. A hint that, now that Juniper was satisfied with General Abigail as successor, she might consider leaving the Army of Callow behind. Said Lady Abigail Tanner had retired thrice already, but the flooding of her first mansion and then going bankrupt twice had returned her to service every time. It was a fond tale in Callow that she could not be out of the army for longer than three months without calamity striking.

The Gods themselves wanted Abigail Tanner to be Marshal of Callow one day.

The Warden felt the presence before she heard it. The way Creation shivered as someone who had not been came to be. And when she turned, her breath caught in her throat as she beheld Akua Sahelian. Lovely beyond words in a splendid red dress, golden eyes smiling as she touched the copper bracelet at her wrist. The cuffs of her dress were ornate lace, hearts woven into the pattern. Her two marks were these: red and a heart. No matter what she wore Calamity had a splash of red on it, and always a heart was hidden somewhere in it. Time had little changed her, the Warden saw.

Such a thing as time held much of a grip on either of them, she supposed. The gift of the Sister for one and eternity bound for the other kept age at bay.

“Catherine,” Akua smiled.

“Akua,” Catherine softly replied.

The wounds suffered in Keter were gone. As were Providence’s, rumour had it, whose flask and lute had returned along with her arm. The faces of Yara of Nowhere and Akua Sahelian also remained, neither changing through the years.

“I though you might show up,” the Warden said. “Your stars are out tonight.”

Two bright shards of light in the sea of darkness. Fortune and Misfortune, some had taken to calling them. Providence and Calamity, others used instead.

“We bargained,” Akua said. “She will get her way in Levant for the night, but I have the freedom of my own.”

“And what,” Catherine Foundling croaked, “would you do with it?”

Akua Sahelian took a hesitant step forward. It had been fifteen years since they saw each other last. It might be that long, or even longer before they saw each other again. Yet she still reached out to the other woman, fingers brushing against hers, a question asked. Neither of them were sure which reached out, not until they were kissing ardently and stumbling away from the throne and the corpse that lay on it.

They had only until dawn, so they must make the most of the time

—

Cordelia Hasenbach was drinking.

This was not as rare an occasion as when she had ruled Procer, but that it would venture past the first bottle of wine was. She was in a maudlin mood, however, and took no pains to hide it. Catherine found her in one of the private salons atop what Cardinalians had taken to calling the Warden’s Tower, the northern of the two great towers that made up Cardinal College and the ruling seat of the city.

“I see you’ve heard,” the Warden said.

“I have,” Cordelia said, and poured her companion a drink without asking.

Catherine cocked a brow but sat, taking the implicit invitation and the cup with it.

“A lot of it stays,” the Warden says. “Most of the trade clauses and part of the alliance.”

“The Grand Alliance had ended,” Cordelia calmly said. “You need not coddle me over it.”

Procer and Callow still held a defensive alliance, but Levant had ended their own given the rising tensions at the border with the vassal Republic of Orense. Keeping the treaties alive had been increasingly unpopular, given that few still saw a need for it. Some argued such stringent alliances were more likely to create war than prevent it, these days.

“It was made to foster peace,” Catherine said. “And it worked, Cordelia.”

There had not been major strife since the Philosopher’s War, and though skirmishes at borders were hardly uncommon the balance of Calernia was holding.

“I achieved what I set out to,” Cordelia Hasenbach agreed. “But the great work of my life has still ended. I am, I think, allowed sentiment over that. And a drink.”

The Warden drank of her cup.

“I can’t argue with that,” she said.

The other woman sent her sly look.

“I would expect not,” she said, “given what happened last time I opened a second bottle.”

News of Prince Otto’s wedding to a Neustrian noblewoman a few years back had sent her into a fit of nostalgia. Not regret, but perhaps wonder at the life she might have lived. After all Otto Reitzenberg, born the third son of a friendly royal line, had once been considered as a potential consort for Prince Cordelia of Rhenia. Catherine Foundling coughed, cheeks flushing in a way that still amused the other woman even after nearly two decades of acquaintance.

“I thought we didn’t talk about that,” Catherine said, tone careful.

“It seemed an unnecessary complication at the time,” Cordelia said. “Besides, you are something of a cad.”

“Hey now,” Catherine weakly protested.

The once-princess idly traced the rim of her cup with a finger.

“Not only do you have a lover in Indrani whenever she visits,” Cordelia said, “but you have taken others to bed.”

“When the mood took me,” she replied. “And not that many.”

Which was true. The Ranger, who returned to Cardinal every year between the adventures across Calernia that made her the stuff of legends all over the continent, made up most of the dalliances. Cordelia had never felt jealous, not when Indrani was still so very obviously in love with Masego. Who reciprocated, she had seen, in his own way. Besides, the Ranger only blew in for a fortnight or so and the blew back out with a handful of Named students in two for one of her infamous ‘field classes’. As a way to earn silver stripes of distinction, they had proved most useful.

“That is not untrue,” Cordelia conceded.

“Then what?” Catherine frowned.

The former princess decided on honesty.

“I did not want to become involved with someone who was still in love with another,” Cordelia admitted. “Akua Sahelian’s shadow is yet cast on all your affections, I think.”

The Warden drank deep of her cup, then set it down.

“I think I’ll always be a little in love with her,” Catherine Foundling admitted. “And I’m not sure I want to surrender that part of me. It shaped who I’ve become.”

Cordelia waited. The but , though unspoken, had resonated loudly.

“It’s not something that eats me day to day, though,” Catherine said. “I don’t go to sleep thinking of what might have been. It’s just something about me, like the colour of my hair or the lines on my face.”

Not that she had anywhere as many of those as Cordelia. The Warden still looked in her late twenties, and likely would for centuries yet.

“Sometimes you do have a touch of romance about you,” Cordelia mused, “though it seems largely accidental.”

“I am who I am,” Catherine Foundling half-smiled. “I don’t pretend otherwise.”

And that was, Cordelia admitted to herself, true. In these affairs, the other woman was an open book. And though it still felt like there was too much of an encroachment, too much of Catherine already shared, looking upon that open book she found that she liked what she saw.

“Mhm,” Cordelia said. “You truly do have luck with wine, my dear.”

Catherine’s eye sharpened.

“Do I?” she said, leaning back into her seat. “I wonder what that might mean.”

The fair-haired woman drained her cup, then rose to her feet.

“It means,” Cordelia Hasenbach gracefully smiled, “that we will get to find out how long you might keep my interest, Catherine.”

She got no argument. She had not expected one.

—

Common Thaumaturgic Theory had existed in research scrolls and private correspondences for the better part of a decade now, but its formal unveiling was still something of a ceremony.

Though the Lord Hierophant’s involvement made it a subject of interest to even rulers, it was ultimately a matter of scholarship and so none attended in person save for Chancellor Sargon – whose unflagging support for Cardinal College and the magical wing of it in particular was well-known. Even the growing commercial rivalry between the city and the Confederation over the artefact trade had done nothing to cool the relations.

Diplomats only politely listened to the impatient explanation given by the infamous Senior Lecturer, some of them disappointed by the plain speech given. Last year’s juicy scandal of the man being revealed as the deity of an Ashuran love cult he had been a member of for many years had raised hopes for some scurrilousness. The scholars that accompanied the diplomats, however, were riveted. In the wake of the speech ending, Lecturer Hiram stepped forward to handle the divide between the learned and the uninitiated.

“Though it may seem abstract that the existence of a universally common most basic denominator has been proven, there are practical applications,” he explained. “It might be best to think of it as the basic building block of all magic having been discovered.”

He paused for effect.

“To accomplish this, it was necessary to be able to measure such a thing,” Lecturer Hiram continued. “We have created artefacts capable of this, and in doing so created the necessity for a new unit of measurement that shall be named the ‘thaum’.”

The cleverest of the diplomats grasped the implications, but the young man spelled out the implications for the rest.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Lecturer Hiram said, “we have made magic quantifiable for all existing branches of sorcery. Enchantment and artefact crafting will now be no more difficult than smithing or weaving. A new age of sorcery has come upon us.”

Cordelia Hasenbach, standing in the back, smiled as she considered how foreign sales of the measuring artefacts – certain to continue until national mages figured out how to reproduce them – would be yet another source of coin for Cardinal’s treasury. Common Thaumaturgic Theory would remain the formal name, in the years to come, but as these things always went a shorter name stuck.

The Masegan theory of magic.

—

Twenty-four years after the fall of Keter, Lady Intendant Pickler died.

The Intendant of Works did not die young, as far as goblins counted things, but neither did she die as old as some of Matron lines did. Years of hard living and a collection of wounds had taken their toll, hastening her passing. Her funeral was well-attended by some of the great names of the continent, though not as part of any diplomatic effort. She has simply been loved by many of them. That evening twin stars shone in the sky, and the Warden stayed alone on Concord Bridge to overlook the great city sprawled below.

Providence and Calamity came calling, as she had thought they might.

“I thought you two only came at turning points,” the Warden idly said, leaning against the balustrade.

Enchantments prevented the wind from crossing the threshold, leaving only a beautiful view.

“We do,” Yara of Nowhere shrugged. “But then you’re thinking of retiring, aren’t you?”

The Warden did not deny it. The lack of a clear successor was a mark against the idea, but Cardinal and the Accords could be run without a Warden. It was the reason its ruling council existed, as there was no guarantee the Name would always be held.

“It’s too early,” Akua Sahelian said. “None of those might succeed you are ready.”

“I’m not sure that’s an argument against it,” the Warden admitted.

“The Accords have to be able to hold without her holding their hands,” Providence agreed. “Otherwise they’re not really rules – just her authority made manifest.”

“The Accords are not yet worn deep enough,” Calamity disagreed. “A generation was raised knowing them but they are still fresh to Calernia’s memory. She must stay until they are a bedrock.”

The Warden almost laughed.

“The angel and the devil on my shoulder,” she said. “Only you’re neither and a little bit of both.”

And she made her choice, looking down at the city she had seen grow from nothing. A little further yet, she thought. It was still too early to rest. When she turned they were both still there and her eyes found the woman she had once known as the Intercessor.

“You seem better,” the Warden said.

“It has proved more interesting than I’d thought,” Yara of Nowhere admitted. “Having someone else changes things.”

“But you don’t think it’ll last,” Catherine Foundling said.

“It will,” Providence said. “For decades or centuries or a millennium. But it won’t last, Catherine. Nothing is forever.”

“Then take heart, Yara,” the Warden said. “You are not nothing.”

Providence’s answering smile was mocking, a hatchet that would never be more than half buried. But when she vanished, Akua remained behind. That could not have been done without agreement, for that was the nature of the Fetters.

“Seven years,” Akua Sahelian said.

“Felt like more than that,” Catherine admitted.

“I understand,” the golden-eyed woman said, “that you have taken a lover.”

“Listening to rumours?” the Warden half-smiled.

She did not deny it. Neither did Akua.

“I still have evenings with Indrani sometimes, when she visits,” Catherine said. “Not as often but still. We have an understanding over that.”

Lycaonese mores were not flexible, but Cordelia had spent many a year among Alamans and in private their ways allowed much. Her lover had permission of her own, though she rarely used it. The lack of jealousy had been refreshing.

“And if I were to tell you I have bargained for a night?” Akua slowly said.

“I would tell you I bargained for one as well,” Catherine smiled.

The tension in the air thickened even though neither of them had moved.

“It might be the last time we see each other,” Akua said. “The opportunities are... rare.”

“I figured,” Catherine softly replied. “So let me say goodbye properly.”

It was a long night but still felt all too short.

—

Thirty years after the fall of Keter, Hakram Deadhand came to Cardinal.

It was no longer the half-finished creature of its infancy, now turned into a rising city-state whose place at the crossroads of Calernia drew throngs of hopeful to. Already near twenty thousand dwelled there, and the number would only grow. He had changed no less than the city, for it was Hakram who had come to Cardinal and not the Warlord. He was no longer that, having passed down the mantle to his successor Anker Bluemane. Troke’s daughter would do well as Warlord, having turned her clan’s reputation around and tightened the alliance with the Red Shields and the Howling Wolves.

For all that he was thousands of miles away from the Steppes, in some ways going to Cardinal felt like coming home. It was, he thought, the people that waited for him there. Aisha and Juniper, settled there a decade ago with their pair of adopted boys – one Taghreb, the other an orc. Masego, the perennial Senior Lecturer whose longstanding relationship with the famous wandering Ranger was scandalously scandalous. And Catherine Foundling most of all, who welcomed him with a warm embrace.

“Finally decided to retire, have you?” she teased.

“I could use something to keep my hands busy,” Hakram admitted.

“I’m sure Cordelia will find something,” the Warden amusedly replied. “She has a way with that.”

“I’m sure,” he gravelled, cocking an eyebrow suggestively.

Speculation of the true nature of the relationship between the Warden and her seneschal had been ongoing for many a year now, varying from simply very affectionate to them being secretly wed. Lady Cordelia seemed, if anything, to enjoying encouraging wildly different rumours.

“I don’t want to hear that from you,” she snorted. “How many kids have you got now?”

“Seventeen,” Hakram shrugged.

He had raised few of them himself, as many had been born to strengthen alliances and not out of any particular affection. His three by the only lover he had never ended his time with were the only ones he was truly close to.

“My youngest by Sigvin’s a student at the College,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to look in on him.”

“You’ll have the time, I imagine,” his friend smiled.

“Nothing but, Catherine,” Hakram Deadhand smiled back.

—

Forty-three years after the fall of Keter, Hanno of Arwad died.

The Eater had risen, the ancient Horned Lord leading the Chain of Hunger through shard of Twilight to ravage the Free Cities even as Anaxares the Hierarch appeared in Nok and stirred rebellion against its hard-handed High Lord. The horde of ratlings overran the great walls of Delos, but for the second time in his life the White Knight came to the city’s defence. He died slaying the Horned Lord, saving the better part of a hundred thousand people from certain death.

Hanno of Arwad died smiling, regretting little of the life he had lived.

His passing was mourned by as many souls as there were grains of sand.

—

Forty-eight years after the fall of Keter, Queen Vivienne Foundling’s funeral was held.

It was, all agreed, the end of an era. The greats of Calernia gathered in Laure to pay their respect, even old Chancellor Sargon who was finishing up his second mandate. Vivienne the Wise had been the last survivor of the Woe, most agreed, though some insisted that since no new Ranger had risen Lady Indrani was still out there somewhere. Whatever the truth of that, the passing of the queen felt to many like the end of the revered generation that had won the War on Keter. The crown prince of Callow, Edmund Foundling, had insisted on his mother receiving full honours before his own coronation and so remained a prince as he welcomed the dignitaries.

It did nothing to weaken his authority, to the displeasure of the northern barons. Marshal Abigail, returned from her ninth retirement after her vineyard was burned down by an unseasonable lightning storm, stood firmly behind him and the Army of Callow behind her. Neither could there be question of disloyalty from the two great Callowan orders, not when the prince had served for years in the Broken Bells under old Grandmaster Talbot. And should that not have been enough, or even the enduring popularity of House Foundling across the kingdom, then the Knight Errant’s presence as his former page’s side would have even the most ambitious too wary to try anything.

Arthur Foundling, perhaps the most famous knight since Hanno of Arwad, rarely returned home but word of his deeds regularly trickled back. The Order Errant’s acceptance of orcs into its ranks in the wake of the campaigns against the Half-Horn Lord in the marches had enraged some, but who could argue with the triumphs of the knights that had slain the three Necromancer Princes of Hainaut and crushed the riders of the Brocelian’s infamous Fae Chevalier?

The procession carrying the queen’s bier passed through the streets on the way to the palace, the people of Laure coming in droves to bid their farewell to the only ruler most of them could remember. Only Foundlings, royals and orphans both, held up the bier save for a single exception. The Warden herself, Sapan the Archmage. The queen was said to have been fond of Catherine Foundling’s successor, in their few shared years as rulers. Prince Edmund’s eulogy was heard by half the city, royal mages trained in Cardinal spreading his voice through clever spellwork.

“My mother,” Edmund Foundling said, “will cast a long shadow.”

He sadly laughed.

“The Woe all did, in their own way, but it is my mother’s all of Callow will live in for centuries to come.”

He was a skilled speaker, Edmund, but it was the sincerity of it that reached the people.

“There are few left who remember the days before the Black Queen, when we lived under Praes – now our closest ally, for all our squabbles over trade.”

Laughter, some jostling, and none denying something that would have sounded sheer madness half a century ago.

“More remember the days after it, when a kingdom had to be rustled up out of thin air as enemies beset us all on our sides.”

Old soldier gave grim nods, the elders of wars now passed into legend. How quickly the world moved on.

“Yet it is the days that came after the wars that made us who we are today. The peace, the struggle to stand in the world as more than an army and a cause. To rebuild villages burned, to uphold fair laws and punish the unjust. To bring prosperity to all, not only nobles.”

The prince’s voice grew quiet.

“It was those days of peace that decided our place in Calernia, and my mother was queen’s own peace.”

He shook himself, as if gathering strength.

“Today we come to bury Vivienne Foundling, but she goes to rest knowing our place was found. That we stand as proudly in peace as we did in war, that Callow is a land who need envy none other.”

Edmund Foundling swallowed.

“There is much I could say of the woman who raised me, but that is a son’s grief and it is a prince that speaks to you today. So instead I will bury a great queen, and hope that wherever she is she can hear me when I say this-”

The prince smiled.

“It is our turn carry your torch,” he said. “And I promise you it will burn even brighter when we pass it to our children.

Laure filled with the sound of cheers and weeping, as Callow marked the death of a queen and the rise of a king. And as the noise crested, in a dingy old tavern Dockside a barkeep who’d closed her tavern for the afternoon let out a low whistle.

“He’s a pretty good speaker, your boy,” Catherine Foundling admired.

“Audrey’s better, but she gets too clever sometimes,” Vivienne Foundling replied. “I’m glad he was born first.”

Her back ached. Even with Hierophant arranging a corpse that would pass for hers she’d had to sneak out of the palace, and these days she was an old woman. More so than Catherine bloody Foundling, who barely looked forty even that because she’d spread her gift around.

“Fill my tankard, wench,” the former Queen of Callow ordered. “The beer is terrible, but what else should I expect from a dive like this?”

“Eh, get it yourself,” the other former Queen of Callow replied. “And this is a respectable establishment, I’ll have you know. The drinks are imported.”

“From where, a mud pit?” Vivienne skeptically replied.

“Well, the Green Stretch so you’re not actually that far off,” Catherine admitted.

She was saved from a further verbal flaying by the arrival of the others. Indrani had barely changed over the years, only her face and figure maturing, and Masego had not changed at all since Keter. The one that stood out, though, was Hakram. Who had begun to age after putting down the Name of Warlord, enough that he had been as old as her until he ‘died’, but now looked much as he had in his prime.

“Are we drinking?” Indrani grinned.

“We are Dockside,” Masego flatly said. “I refuse to sit down.”

“The beer is bad enough I’m surprised she was able to sell this place,” Hakram gravelled.

And the familiarity of it had her tearing up, silly old woman that she’d become. Catherine her took her hand gently.

“It’ll be all right, Viv,” she said. “If you’re not ready to go...”

“I am,” Vivienne said. “It’s not that. My children are grown and my husband dead. Edmund doesn’t need me looking over his shoulder as he grows into a king. It just...”

“Feels like coming home,” Hakram softly said.

Even after all these years, the depth of their understanding still surprised her.

“That’s because you are,” Catherine Foundling smiled, and Night roiled.

A gift had been given Catherine once by goddesses that had, in their own way, grown to lover her. A Mighty’s lifespan, centuries ahead of her and more. And after many years of studying the Night, she had learned to share that gift. Night flowed into Vivienne’s veins, cool but pleasant, and she felt herself change. Years return to her, time’s ravages turning back until she was in her prime again. As Hakram had been, when Catherine shared a third of her gift with him.

“There,” her friend smiled, like it was nothing.

Like she’d not just given back her youth, thrown away a third of her lifespan so that Vivienne might live it out instead. When the tears came this time she did not fight them. None mocked her, though, and instead she found arms going around her as the Woe reunited at last.

It was good to be home.

—

They bought a boat in Arwad and first boarded it in the early hours after dawn, which naturally was the moment it all went awry: in other words, at the very beginning. As the years had proved, this was a sadly typical turn of events.

“It’s a ship,” Masego heatedly objected. “A ship , not a boat.”

Papers signed by the shipwright attesting to that, legal property and the name of the Heady Wind being changed to the Inevitable Doom were waved in the face of the others. A sudden but comprehensive bout of blindness preventing anyone from acknowledging this in any way.

“It floats,” Indrani insisted. “It’s a boat.”

“The words do rhyme,” Vivienne noted. “It checks out.”

Motherhood had not softened Vivienne Dartwick. It had, if anything, added some spikes.

“I feel like I ought to have asked before getting on,” Hakram gravelled, “but one of us knows how to sail this boat, right?”

“I know you did that on purpose, Hakram,” Masego bit out.

He gestured sharply at the sky, wind gutting out and stranding them less than thirty feet away from Arwad’s foreign docks. Not a single one of them paid attention to the increasingly angry people on said docks gesturing at them.

“I’m sure Cat could offer us a wise ruling over it,” Indrani slyly suggested.

She then tugged at her collar to reveal her collarbone and offered the woman in question an exaggerated wink. Nearly five decades of occasionally sleeping with Catherine had changed Indrani from a terrible seductress to a proficiently terrible seductress, something only people with appalling taste could possibly enjoy. Catherine Foundling was such a creature, sadly, but in this case her friend’s highly shoddy feminine wiles were to be of no avail.

“I don’t do rulings anymore,” Catherine informed them. “I’m retired, let go of the reins and all that.”

Four skeptical gazes were turned onto her.

“Is that so?” Vivienne doubtfully said.

“Don’t give me that tone,” Catherine said, wagging a finger at her. “You know what? Wherever we go, I don’t even want to be in charge. Someone else can do it this time.”

The others conferred.

“She’ll crack before the day is out,” Indrani said. “I’ll put coin on it.”

“The day ?” Vivienne snorted. “She won’t last all the way out the harbour. Ten ducals on that.”

“I’ll take that,” Hakram mused. “Pride will make her stick it out at least that long.”

“I can hear you, you know,” Catherine peevishly said.

“Five denarii she becomes captain before nightfall,” Indrani offered.

“I will take that bet,” Masego proudly said. “It is my name on the papers, you have been had.”

“Mutiny has been the doom of many a boat, Zeze,” Hakram told him.

Masego’s flesh eye narrowed.

“Have you forgotten I can make your own hand hit you?” he said.

“They used to call it tyranny when I said things like that,” Vivienne said, sounding happy. “Now I get to threaten people again. I’ve been looking forward to that.”

“ Come on ,” Catherine loudly complained. “You’re all sure I’ll go mad with power but she says stuff like that and no one bats an eye?”

On the docks behind them a company of armed guards arrived on the dock, escorting a bearded mage. The Ashuran gestured at the boat, but whatever the spell had been meant to accomplish it ended up setting his beard on fire instead. Masego turned and fixed the mage with a steady look. He began to back away slowly.

“Catherine’s insatiable hunger for power aside,” Hakram idly said, “I have to ask again because I am getting somewhat worried by the lack of answer. Someone does know how to sail the boat, right?”

His bone hand started slapping him on the back of the head, making the tall orc yelp and as he tried to wrestle it down.

“As captain of this ship,” Masego proudly said, “I order you to your stations.”

Indrani raised her hand.

“Question,” she said.

“Yes,” Masego allowed.

“Do we have assigned bunks?” Indrani asked.

“Yes,” he happily told them. “And designated seats for meals. I have also brought assigned readings. Most of them are things you should know but are inexplicably still ignorant about, but I understand that is not always enough.”

He gave them all a confident look that the students attending General Theory of Magic had learned to live in terror of and those few who took Deicide & Applied Blasphemy had learned to look forward to. It was most commonly known as ‘Lord Hierophant Trying To Help’.

“So I have obtained recreational books,” Masego said. “Which I will also be expecting reports about.”

There was pause.

“Some of them,” he confided, “are of nautical theme. I thought it would fit our journey thematically.”

There was another pause. In the distance behind them, a squad of mages in blue robes formed up on the docks. Archers were lined up behind them and a guard officer was shouting at the boat, not that it made a difference for anyone on it.

“I’m sorry, Masego,” Catherine sighed. “I’m going to have to usurp the captaincy of this ship.”

“ Yes ,” Vivienne cheered. “That’s ten ducals for me.”

Masego pouted.

“I should have known your insatiable hunger for power would get the best of you,” he sadly said.

A tone that would have had greater effect had he not spent the last several decades using it whenever he was denied a funding increase or permission to make the laws of Creation wince.

“We can still do the assigned readings,” she told him, and he perked up.

“Really?”

“Vivienne can,” Catherine specified. “Because she fucking crossed me.”

“Hey,” Vivienne protested. “Do you think I’ll just-”

“Indrani,” Catherine called out, “if you bully Vivienne into obeying me, I’ll pay you five ducals.”

She fully intended to get these out of ten that had been bet against her. The long acquaintance of Cordelia Hasenbach had added a touch of biting irony to natural Callowan spite.

“I’ve done worse for less,” Indrani cheerfully agreed.

“-agree you should be in charge?” Vivienne adjusted without batting an eye. “Because I do. Good to have you back, Catherine.”

That left only the one. Hakram was still struggling not to his own head, as Masego had forgot to end the spell, so Catherine laid a gentle hand on his arm.

“I’ll make it stop,” she said.

“Please do,” he grunted, wrestling down his wrist.

“I’ll make it stop,” she continued, “if you stop pretending you don’t know how to sail this boat.”

A pause.

“I was pulling Indrani’s chain,” Hakram said. “She wasn’t sure whether she was the one supposed to learn or not because she spilled beer over her letter.”

“Hakram, you gossipy bitch,” Indrani protested. “I told you that in coincidence.”

“You’d think they would have learned by now,” he mused.

Catherine, magnanimous in victory, got Masego to end the spell and Hakram to move the steering wheel. The wind was released not long after, Indrani climbing up the rigging to the crow’s nest, beginning an inevitable countdown before she got bored and shot a seagull under the thing pretence of acquiring fresh meat. Vivienne disappeared under the deck to hide her assigned readings before she could be made to read them, while Masego chased away the blue-robed mages on the docks by bespelling them to start kicking each other whenever they tried to use magic. Years of exposure to Indrani had, sadly, eroded his sense of humour into a strange and violent creature.

Hakram and Catherine moved to the back of the quarterdeck. Hakram too the steering wheel while she stood back, finding wakeleaf to fill her pipe with. Moments later she was puffing away at it, the acrid smoke rising up in curls.

“We’re a little late for the tide,” Hakram noted. “We might not make it out of harbour before it turns.”

“Oh,” Catherine Foundling smiled, looking at the sky where a star lay unseen, “I think luck might end up on our side.”

It had been many years since she had last seen Akua Sahelian, but never so many as to forget.

“I suppose we’re due some,” Hakram chuckled.

Wind picked up, a warm breeze carrying the salty taste of the sea with it. It tasted like a promise long overdue.

“So where to?” Hakram asked, hand on the steering wheel.

Catherine considered that for a moment. They would cross the Tyrian Sea in time, on that they had all agreed. But there was no need to hurry, was there? They had earned a little time before they sailed away into the unknown. So as she leaned back against the side of the ship, Catherine Foundling offered her oldest friend a smile.

“Surprise me,” she asked, and into the rising sun they sailed.

Ending Announcements

Hey!

First off, the last book’s over and so all the Patreon-exclusive extra chapters are now up. They’re in the extra chapters tab, it starts with Beatification I. Hope you’ll enjoy them!

Moving on, whew. The series is over and the shock of that is only beginning to hit me. I’ve spent nearly seven years of my life on the Guide to some extent or another – and began doodling with the concepts even before that – so it feels like the end of an era.

I still remember starting with one chapter a week on Book I, back when I started this whole project to motivate myself to write with public deadlines. It’s more than a little humbling that over the years I got to move from that to full-time writing and make a living out of my work.

I owe that to all of you, and I can only give genuine thanks for it. I’ve been getting an outpouring of messages from people who’ve been reading the series and tell me of when they began and how the work came into their lives, which I’ll admit has brought a tear to my eye on occasion.

I guess Catherine’s not the only one who got sentimental as she got older.

As for all of you whose lives were touched by the Guide, no matter how small the way, well I can only say I’m glad. It’s certainly changed mine. I said as much yesterday in the comments, but it’s been a hell of a ride and I’m you got to take it with me.

So, last two announcements. Most of you should be aware that my next project, Pale Lights, already has the first two chapters up as a teaser. I’ll be taking a longer break than usual before chapters start, however – more precisely, six months. The 26th of August will be when it starts again and I’ll be putting my Patreon in vacation mode until then.

As for the last bit, while I can’t get into details at the moment there’s been things in the works so don’t be surprised if there’s another announcement made here in the coming months. While I’m aware this is frustratingly vague, I’m sure it’ll end up being a pleasant surprise.

Hoping to see you in six months,

E.E.

Table of Contents

Front Matter
Prologue
Chapter 1: Knife
Chapter 2: Invitation
Chapter 3: Party
Chapter 4: Name
Chapter 5: Role
Chapter 6: Aspect
Chapter 7: Sword
Chapter 8: Introduction
Chapter 9: Claimant
Chapter 10: Menace
Chapter 11: Sucker Punch
Chapter 12: Squire
Chapter 13: Order
Chapter 14: Villain
Chapter 15: Company
Chapter 16: Game
Chapter 17: Set
Chapter 18: Match
Chapter 19: Pivot
Chapter 20: Rise
Chapter 21: Fall
Chapter 22: All According To
Chapter 23: Morok’s Plan
Chapter 24: Aisha’s Plan
Chapter 25: Snatcher’s Plan
Chapter 26: Juniper’s Plan
Chapter 27: Callow’s Plan
Chapter 28: Win Condition
Epilogue
Prologue
Chapter 1: Supply
Chapter 2: Demand
Chapter 3: Cost
Heroic Interlude: Balestra
Chapter 4: Return
Chapter 5: Recognition
Chapter 6: Rapport
Chapter 7: Reception
Chapter 8: Reversal
Chapter 9: Rematch
Chapter 10: Release
Chapter 11: Report
Chapter 12: Reproval
Heroic Interlude: Riposte
Villainous Interlude: Coulisse
Chapter 13: Fireside
Chapter 14: Situation
Chapter 15: Council
Chapter 16: Trust
Chapter 17: Aplomb
Chapter 18: Tinder
Chapter 19: Flame
Chapter 20: Ashes
Chapter 21: Marchford
Villainous Interlude: Coup de Théatre
Heroic Interlude: Attaque au Fer
Chapter 22: Rescue
Chapter 23: Defeat
Chapter 24: Archer
Chapter 25: Wake
Chapter 26: Seek
Chapter 27: Cut
Chapter 28: Prelude
Interlude: Greenskins
Chapter 29: Stand
Chapter 30: Deliver
Chapter 31: Sleight
Chapter 32: Draw
Chapter 33: Clean-up
Chapter 34: Lesson
Chapter 35: Spur
Chapter 36: Madman
Interlude: Nemeses
Chapter 37: Apprentice
Conspiracy I
Chapter 38: Juncture
Villainous Interlude: Impresario
Interlude: Rats
Chapter 39: Countdown
Conspiracy II
Heroic Interlude – Prise au Fer
Chapter 40: Knock
Chapter 41: Retrieve
Chapter 42: Flaw
Red Skies
Chapter 43: Truce
Chapter 44: Victory
Chapter 45: Corpses
Chapter 46: Squire (Redux)
Beast
Chapter 47: And Justice For All
Chapter 48: Threes
Chapter 49: Triumph
Interlude – Precipitation
Epilogue
Regard
Reign
Prologue
Chapter 1: Right
Chapter 2: Might
Interlude: Gate
Crowned
Heroic Interlude: Arraignment
Chapter 3: Demesne
Chapter 4: Developments
Chapter 5: Beachhead
Chapter 6: Backlash
Usurpation
Chapter 7: Elaboration
Villainous Interlude: Chiaroscuro
Heroic Interlude: Appellant
Chapter 8: Lies
Warden I
Chapter 9: More Lies
Chapter 10: Entrance
Chapter 11: Swerve
Chapter 12: Double Down
Warden II
Chapter 13: Forgery
Chapter 14: Trick
Chapter 15: Bestowal
Villainous Interlude: Proscenium
Raid
Villainous Interlude: Stormfront
Chapter 16: Shambles
Chapter 17: Allegiance
Chapter 18: Crack
Chapter 19: Order (Redux)
Chapter 20: Skew
Chapter 21: Example
Chapter 22: Govern
Chapter 23: Reassessment
Interlude – Apprentice
Deadhand
Villainous Interlude: Exeunt
Villainous Interlude: Decorum
Heroic Interlude: Injunction
Chapter 24: Vanguard
Chapter 25: Intent
Chapter 26: Advance
Chapter 27: Expedition
Interlude: Commanders
Chapter 28: Gambits
Closure
Chapter 29: Scale
Chapter 30: Riot
Chapter 31: High Noon
Chapter 32: Close
Villainous Interlude: Cadenza
Villainous Interlude: Thunder
Villainous Interlude: Calamity I
Dues
Villainous Interlude: Calamity II
Villainous Interlude: Calamity III
Chapter 33: Promises
Chapter 34: Talks
Chapter 35: Questions
Chapter 36: Malice
Chapter 37: Procedures
Chapter 38: Host
Chapter 39: Exposition
Background
Chapter 40: Rising Action
Chapter 41: Turning Point
Chapter 42: Plateau
Chapter 43: Cliff
Chapter 44: Drop
Chapter 45: Falling Action
Chapter 46: Denouement
Chapter 47: Offers
Chapter 48: Interrogation
Fletched
Chapter 49: Hearsay
Chapter 50: Preparation
Chapter 51: Overlooked
Chapter 52: Tensile
Chapter 53: Manoeuvring
Interlude: Skirmish I
Interlude: Skirmish II
Chapter 54: Wake
Prodigy
Chapter 55: Reunion
Chapter 56: Recess
Chapter 57: Revolve
Chapter 58: Hard Measures
Chapter 59: Anacrusis
Villainous Interlude: Crescendo
Chapter 60: Opening
Chapter 61: Tempo
Chapter 62: Verse
Interlude: Liesse I
Hierarchy
Interlude: Liesse II
Interlude: Liesse III
Interlude: Liesse IV
Chapter 63: Bridge
Chapter 64: Solo
Chapter 65: Elision
Chapter 66: Refrain
Chapter 67: Middle Eight
Chapter 68: Coda
Chapter 69: Swan Song
Chapter 70: Reverb
Prosecution I
Chapter 71: Reprise
Chapter 72: Curtains
Epilogue
Prosecution II
Prologue
Interlude: Stairway
Chapter 1: Observatory
Chapter 2: Alarm
Chapter 3: Chat
Chapter 4: Warpath
Chapter 5: Interests
Chapter 6: Hedges
Chapter 7: Snares
Chapter 8: Dialogue
Court I
Interlude: Crusaders
Chapter 9: Grand Pas
Chapter 10: Allegro
Chapter 11: Ballon
Chapter 12: Cambré
Chapter 13: Élevé
Chapter 14: Arabesque
Chapter 15: Bravura
Chapter 16: Pirouette
Interlude: Kaleidoscope
Interlude: Kaleidoscope II
Interlude: Kaleidoscope III
Interlude: Kaleidoscope IV
Court II
Interlude: Kaleidoscope V
Interlude: Kaleidoscope VI
Chapter 17: Contingent
Chapter 18: Cradle
Chapter 19: Recovery
Chapter 20: Onset
Chapter 21: Tug-of-War
Chapter 22: Trip
Interlude: Red The Flowers
Interlude: Sing We Of Rage
Interlude: Lest Dawn Fail
Chapter 23: Recoup
Chapter 24: Invitation (Redux)
Court III
Chapter 25: Edge
Chapter 26: Plunge
Chapter 27: Into Dusk
Chapter 28: Archaic
Chapter 29: Sixth
Chapter 30: Witness
Chapter 31: Spectation
Chapter 32: Kernel
Chapter 33: Keter
Chapter 34: Abyss
Chapter 35: Stroll
Chapter 36: Enchère
Chapter 37: Offing
Fatalism I
Chapter 38: All According To (Redux)
Chapter 39: Hakram’s Plan
Chapter 40: Vivienne’s Plan
Chapter 41: Akua’s Plan
Chapter 42: The Skein’s Plan
Chapter 43: Masego’s Plan
Chapter 44: Catherine’s Plan
Chapter 45: Ambush
Chapter 46: Possibly A Plan
Chapter 47: Culmination
Interlude: Empires
Chapter 48: Shadows
Chapter 49: Wrangle
Chapter 50: Partings
Fatalism II
Chapter 51: First Impressions
Chapter 52: Finesse
Chapter 53: Gloom
Chapter 54: Scavenger
Chapter 55: Outskirts
Chapter 56: Knock Knock
Chapter 57: Betwixt
Chapter 58: Quiet
Chapter 59: Audience
Chapter 60: Profiteers
Chapter 61: Remonstration
Interlude: Queen’s Gambit, Offered
Fatalism III
Interlude: Zwischenzug
Interlude: Giuoco Pianissimo
Interlude: Zwischenzug II
Interlude: Giuoco Pianissimio II
Interlude: Queen’s Gambit, Declined
Chapter 62: Impulse
Chapter 63: Initiation
Chapter 64: Momentum
Chapter 65: Impact
Chapter 66: Tremors
Chapter 67: Breakthrough
Interlude: Heretics
Interlude: Dreadful
Interlude: Apostates
Interlude: Apogee
Ye Mighty
Interlude: Inheritance
Chapter 68: Poised
Chapter 69: Peerage
Chapter 70: The Calm Before
Chapter 71: Ozone
Chapter 72: Outflow
Chapter 73: Feeder Bands
Chapter 74: Eyewall
Chapter 75: The Eye
Chapter 76: Storm Surge
Chapter 77: What Goes Around
Chapter 78: Comes Around
Chapter 79: As Above
Chapter 80: So Below
Chapter 81: Only To The Just
Chapter 82: Thrice Dead
Interlude: Triptych
Epilogue
Peregrine II
Prologue
Chapter 1: Visitation
Chapter 2: Stirrings
Chapter 3: Orison
Chapter 4: Reconnoiter
Chapter 5: Consult
Chapter 6: Furor
Chapter 7: Fellowship
Chapter 8: Veracity
Peregrine III
Chapter 9: Patient Knives
Chapter 10: Capture
Chapter 11: Forced March
Chapter 12: Relief
Interlude: Beheld I
Interlude: Beheld II
Chapter 13: Following
Chapter 14: Expedience
Chapter 15: Bereavement
Chapter 16: Adverse
Chapter 17: Cloaks
Interlude: Congregation I
Peregrine IV
Some Recent Changes
March Updates
Interlude: Congregation II
Interlude: Congregation III
Chapter 18: Fable
Chapter 19: Precedent
Chapter 20: Bearings
Chapter 21: Intervention
Chapter 22: Standoffs
Chapter 23: Readjustment
Chapter 24: Theft
Chapter 25: Dead Ends
Chapter 26: Civility
Chapter 27: Overtures
Chapter 28: Acts
Inexorable
Chapter 29: Retrospect
Chapter 30: Weaver; Woven
Chapter 31: Fall or Flight
Interlude: West, Ever Pursuing
Interlude: Graves We Have Yet To Fill
Interlude: Trust Is The Wager
Interlude: Death They Cannot Steal
Interlude: And Pay Your Toll
Interlude: When Iron Rests
Interlude: So We Shot Him
Chapter 32: Woven; Weaver
Chapter 33: Concord
Chapter 34: Seven
Peers
Chapter 35: Colloquy
Chapter 36: Bid
Chapter 37: Accessory
Chapter 38: Pinnacle
Chapter 39: Looting
Chapter 40: Entreaty
Chapter 41: Ante
Chapter 42: Twined
Chapter 43: Treachery
Chapter 44: Small Slights
Chapter 45: Long Prices
Interlude: Repudiation
Interlude: Renunciation
Interlude: Repurpose
Miraculous
Interlude: Reckoning
Interlude: Reverberation
Chapter 46: Abdication
Chapter 47: Tenet
Chapter 48: Swan Song (Redux)
Chapter 49: Cracked
Chapter 50: Sunset
Chapter 51: Twilight
Interlude: Concourse I
Interlude: Concourse II
Interlude: Concourse III
Interlude: Concourse IV
Seed I
Interlude: Concourse V
Chapter 52: Recovery
Chapter 53: Avowed
Chapter 54: Lustrate
Chapter 55: Renewal
Chapter 56: Reflections
Chapter 57: Hearing
Chapter 58: Prolong
Chapter 59: Review
Chapter 60: Melancholy
Chapter 61: Reformation
Chapter 62: Pledged
Chapter 63: Draft
Chapter 64: Breathe
Seed II
Chapter 65: Convivial
Chapter 66: Silvered
Chapter 67: Starlight
Chapter 68: Apropos
Chapter 69: Repute
Chapter 70: Dawning
Chapter 71: Verge
Interlude: Iron
Interlude: Rope
Interlude: Candle
Interlude: Harp
Interlude: Bone
Site Hack
Interlude: Mirror
Winter I
Interlude: And Yet We Stand
Chapter 72: Rumours
Chapter 73: Discerning
Chapter 74: Partial
Chapter 75: Analog
Chapter 76: Procession
Chapter 77: Artless
Chapter 78: Trenchant
Chapter 79: Hitch
Chapter 80: Descant
Chapter 81: Devotional
Chapter 82: Delegations
Chapter 83: A Mould Unbroken
Winter II
Interlude: Rise, Rise
Interlude: All Ye Villains
Interlude: So Smile, Tyrants
Interlude: And So Let Us Be
Interlude: Wicked
Interlude: Suffer No Compromise In This
Interlude: A Hundred Battles
Chapter 84: Declaration
Chapter 85: When It Rains
Chapter 86: It Pours
Chapter 87: Connive
Chapter 88: Testament
Chapter 89: Sing We Of Ruin
Winter III
Epilogue
Update Schedule (Book VI)
Winter IV
Prologue
Chapter 1: Recommence
Chapter 2: Enlistment
Chapter 3: Standard
Chapter 4: Shadowed
Chapter 5: Expired
Chapter 6: Equivalent
Chapter 7: Approach
Chapter 8: Stanchion
Kingfisher I
Chapter 9: Acceleration
Chapter 10: Reflections
Chapter 11: Veer
Chapter 12: Contest
Interlude: Truce
Interlude: Terms
Chapter 13: Ingress
Chapter 14: Audience
Kingfisher II
Chapter 15: Machinations
Chapter 16: Divine
Chapter 17: Felonious
Chapter 18: Clout
Chapter 19: Spectral
Chapter 20: Hook
Chapter 21: Line
Chapter 22: Sinker
Interlude: Rogue
Charlatan I
Interlude: Archer
Interlude: Deadhand
Interlude: Concert
Interlude: Threads
Interlude: Set Them Up
Interlude: Knock Them Down
Chapter 23: Repercussions
Charlatan II
Chapter 24: Like A Hanging Sword
Chapter 25: Sanitize
Chapter 26: Palaver
Chapter 27: Nigh
Chapter 28: Contend
Chapter 29: Conviction
Chapter 30: Quarters
Chapter 31: Pursuits
Chapter 32: Convened
Chapter 33: Convenience
Charlatan III
Interlude: Paragons
Interlude: Epitomes
Chapter 34: Quickening
Chapter 35: Portents
Chapter 36: Trepidation
Chapter 37: Trying
Chapter 38: Tantamount
Chapter 39: Transliteration
Chapter 40: Campaign
Charlatan IV
Chapter 41: Coterie
Chapter 42: Castigation
Chapter 43: Conclusions
Interlude: Ebb
Chapter 44: Cliff
Chapter 45: Progress
Chapter 46: Vestibule
Interlude: Reprobates
Chapter 47: Methods
Five Stories
Chapter 48: Hilltop
Chapter 49: Association
Chapter 50: Mores
Chapter 51: Endwise
Chapter 52: Sortie
Chapter 53: Joust
Chapter 54: King’s Fianchetto
Chapter 55: Queen’s Pawn
Malanza
Chapter 56: Repertoires
Chapter 57: Battery
Chapter 58: Prophylaxis
Interlude: Old Dogs
Interlude: New Tricks
Chapter 59: Materialism
Chapter 60: Zwischenschach
Chapter 61: Adouber
Chapter 62: Adjournment
Disjunction
Interlude: Theism
Interlude: Ietsism
Chapter 63: Dynamism
Chapter 64: Candidate Moves
Chapter 65: Cross-Check
Chapter 66: Blind Pigs
Chapter 67: Isolani
Chapter 68: Opposition
Chapter 69: Book Draw
Colossal I
Chapter 70: Solved Game
Chapter 71: Eschatology
Chapter 72: Omen
Chapter 73: Signs
Chapter 74: Herald
Chapter 75: Desolation
Chapter 76: Rapt
Chapter 77: Tribulation
Colossal II
Interlude: Blood
Interlude: Song
Interlude: Woeful
Interlude: Sigil
Interlude: Kingdom
Interlude: Lost & Found
Chapter 78: Keter’s Due
Grand
Interlude: Flow
Epilogue
Prologue
Announcements
Chapter 1: Debut
Chapter 2: Perplex
Chapter 3: Wage
Chapter 4: Stock
Chapter 5: Incursion
Chapter 6: Retaliation
Chapter 7: Expatriate
Chapter 8: Access
Beatification I
Chapter 9: Vault
Chapter 10: Parley
Chapter 11: Descent
Interlude: West I
Interlude: East I
Chapter 12: String
Chapter 13: Footing
Chapter 14: Nock
Chapter 15: Pull
Beatification II
Interlude: North I
Interlude: East II
Chapter 16: Anchor
Chapter 17: Aim
Chapter 18: Release
Chapter 19: Vivienne’s Plan (Redux)
Chapter 20: Malicia’s Plan
Interlude: Juniper’s Plan (Redux)
Chapter 21: Amadeus’ Plan
Refuge
Interlude: South
Interlude: North II
Interlude: North III
Interlude: West II
Interlude: East III
Chapter 22: Advent
Chapter 23: Sung; Singer
Chapter 24: Bequeathal
Chapter 25: Fool
Refuge II
Interlude: A Tower No One Could Claim
Interlude: Burn Away What You Once Were
Interlude: The Hanged All Crooning
Interlude: Kiss Of The Knife
Interlude: Strangest And Most Solemn
Interlude: A Girl Without A Name
Chapter 26: Singer; Sung
Interlude: End Times
Chapter 27: Recoil
Fettered
Chapter 28: Grieved
Chapter 29: Foundation
Chapter 30: Salute
Chapter 31: Premises
Chapter 32: Claimant (Redux)
Chapter 33: Claimant (Repeat)
Chapter 34: Movements
Chapter 35: Catch
Chapter 36: Reiterate
Strangers
Chapter 37: Bygone
Chapter 38: Salvo
Interlude: Occidental I
Interlude: Occidental II
Interlude: Occidental III
Interlude: Occidental IV
Interlude: Occidental V
Chapter 39: Name (Redux)
Hunt
Chapter 40: Resolutions
Chapter 41: Passing
Chapter 42: Journey
Chapter 43: Serolen
Chapter 44: Antecedents
Chapter 45: Kernel (Redux)
Chapter 46: Penultimate
Challengers
Chapter 47: Hollow; Hallow
Chapter 48: Root
Interlude: End Times II
Chapter 49: Arrival
Chapter 50: Clouds
Chapter 51: Arsenal
Chapter 52: Mass
Chapter 53: Motion
Chapter 54: Animus
Tomb
Interlude: Reputation
Interlude: Honour
Chapter 55: Hail
Chapter 56: Brink
Interlude: Calls
Announcement
Chapter 57: Dawn
Chapter 58: Mud
Chapter 59: Steel
Chapter 60: Blood
Chapter 61: Break
Disinter
Chapter 62: Finish
Chapter 63: Farewell
Interlude: Legends I
Interlude: Legends II
Interlude: Legends III
Interlude: Legends IV
Chapter 64: Gehenna
Chapter 65: Monster
Scriven
Chapter 66: The Empty Grave
Chapter 67: And Justice For All (Redux)
Interlude: Legends V
Chapter 68: Hallow; Hollow
Epilogue I
Epilogue II
Ending Announcements